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Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

nostr.net

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Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#131
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's way harder to argue that the millions of people who follow those celebrities shouldn't be allowed to hear what they have to say, even if they want to. Nobody is making that argument. The actual argument is that a private company should not be compelled to provide free hosting for them. They can and have used other hosting services but many of their followers apparently prefer not to use those alternatives.

> Nobody is making that argument. This is untrue. Not only are people making that argument explicitly, but there have been any number of orchestrated attacks on private companies in order to force them to remove content. And if they refuse, attacks on their vendors and distributors (such as app stores), including by the federal government and congresspeople openly demanding that they be banned, surrounded with comple…

If you read more carefully, consider the distinction between a mainstream platform being asked to remove people who violated their terms of service and saying that those people should not be allowed to use platforms which cater to extremists. The former is what actually happens for otherwise legal content — and the reason is obvious once you think about it: private companies can’t be forced to provide services for anything other than legally protected categories, but they are sensitive to what advertisers want and what will attract the type of users they’re looking for. Twitter was previously trying to be more mainstream, which is why extremists trying to recruit wanted to be there instead of alternatives like Parler or Truth Social which only had people who were already converted.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NIP-04 I noticed that DMs can be encrypted using AES-CBC. IIUC, this is not a very robust mode for using AES. Seems surprising for a greenfield project.

What's wrong with CBC? I think the bigger problem is the symmetric keys are not using a key derivation function and are therefore not uniformly random: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/72

> What's wrong with CBC?

It’s not tamper proof, ie signed, unlike GCM

> Some modern modes of operation combine confidentiality and authenticity in an efficient way, and are known as authenticated encryption modes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operati...

I’d also add: CBC requires padding and GCM does not. Minor convenience.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who are de-platformed are almost always people who others WANT to hear. Think of all the famous people deplatformed from big tech social media...10s of millions of followers each. It wasn't that "no one" wanted to hear them, but that the people that controlled the platform didn't want others to be able to hear them. They have platforms they could go to. Parler, Rumble, Truth Social, their own blogs/websites,…

> Twitter was a giant public pool. For the most part everyone was chill. And then the trolls arrived and started shitting and peeing in the pool. Have you ever looked at the replies to a Trump tweet, an Ilhan Omar tweet, a J.K. Rowling tweet, or a Briahna Joy Gray tweet? The degree of bullying, invective, and threats coming from people who support deplatforming is intense.

But are they wrong?

Anti-Trump responses make sense. He's the most polarizing US President in recent history and almost everything he's done has been bad for the US (ok of course this is arguable but hold on while I make my point). Him leaving the platform was good for Twitter and for democracy. If he comes back as a candidate then he'll likely come back to Twitter, his account has already been reinstated.

Omar, if she breaks Twitter rules, can, and should, have her personal account suspended. As a sitting congresswoman she is entitled to her official handle. Unlikely to get deplatformed, so not an issue.

J.K. Rowling's takes on the transgender community is not even something I want to touch. It's too toxic and complicated to do so. That being said if -- see a pattern here? -- she runs afoul of the Twitter rules (whatever they may be) her personal account can be suspended or banned.

Briahna Joy Gray -- of course there are extremists on the left -- but if they don't oh I dunno -- incite a violent riot to overturn an election -- then I doubt she'll be deplatformed, though if she calls for violence or ... which would run afoul of rules ... see I am starting to see how the pool analogy really does work.

I know my stance on censorship is not a popular one. I have struggled with it myself. But I think it is self-consistent and I stand by it: let the wierdos, racists, nazis, hate filled folks scream into the void of their own making on servers they own to others that subscribe to their bullshit. As for me and the rest of the civilized world we'll continue to swim in clear, shit and pee-free water. ;-)

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#134
After reading the page for a bit I don't really understand the fundamental difference to other decentralized systems except for the global public key based identity.

Nostr's relays are simply servers that push and receive structured data. So it's a sort of an email or http like protocol that's by default cryptographically signed? I don't really see the magic that makes it censorship resistant or particularly decentralized. The same networking and economic laws that consolidate internet traffic or mastodon servers are at work here too. Relays get popular, produce a lot of traffic, this spawns "nostr as a service" for economic reasons, and that's about it.

If people want to ban you they'll just blacklist your public key across popular instances just like someone on the fediverse does, companies won't host your stuff, and so on. If anything tying everything to a single global identity makes it more trivial to blacklist anyone.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#135

Does Nostr have a Wikipedia page? I'm wondering how old is it, the people behind it, some stories?

Not that old, I believe the initial spec was put together last year? Written by a developer named fiatjaf who is also a bitcoin contributor.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#136
post #130
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AUTH Nostr Implementation Possibility is not mandatory. You can choose to use it or not, it's not all or nothing. Every single NIP except for NIP-01 is optional.

I wonder what the XMPP camp is up to these days

I sense there was probably some irony in your post. Nevertheless, I'll bite :)

The "XMPP camp" is doing well and very busy: https://xmpp.org/newsletter/

We're lacking a nostr bridge if anyone wants to work on that...

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#137
I'm seeing a lot of people not quite understanding what nostr is. I know it can be hard considering this is a crowd focused on products and frameworks and paradigms and what not.

It's not a "twitter alternative", it's not "federated like mastodon", it's not even social networking. It's just a spec for a signed message format and a relay server, that's it. It's very, very simple, you generate a key, sign a message, send it to whichever relays you want, it serves them to requestors or not, depending on what it wants to do. That is literally all it is.

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#138
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not tie into Bitcoin. It's just a very very simple protocol of clients sending and subscribing to pieces of data, and relays that dumbly (i.e. with little processing) send data across connected and subscribed clients. It's like a very minimal version of ActivityPub. It takes an hour to go through the whole spec and addenda. Then Jack Dorsey got interested, gave the project a big grant (in BTC), and a lot of c…

The relationship to bitcoin besides being created by bitcoiners is that it uses Schnorr Signatures for the secp256k1 curve - the same curve as bitcoin. https://bips.xyz/340 A Nostr account is identified by a public key, you follow accounts by following public keys and the ability to post as an account is controlled by the corresponding private key.

Does this mean I could use a bitcoin hardware wallet to store my nostr keys and sign my posts?

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#139

I'm seeing a lot of people not quite understanding what nostr is. I know it can be hard considering this is a crowd focused on products and frameworks and paradigms and what not. It's not a "twitter alternative", it's not "federated like mastodon", it's not even social networking. It's just a spec for a signed message format and a relay server, that's it. It's very, very simple, you generate a key, sign a message, se…

Funny how similar this sounds to wireguard, the trending yet simple open source VPN technology. Basically the messages are IP packets there ;-)

Re: Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the US has "section 230" that absolves services providers of liability for content their users post.

Section 230 doesn't apply to CSAM, since SESTA/FOSTA

If your software encrypts user data with a user owned key that you never touch, i.e. everything is encrypted at rest, can you still be liable if it's later proven to be CSAM?
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