mircea_popescu: how is giving the bum EVERYTHING lowering him in any sense ?
asciilifeform: (and gain continuity thereby)
asciilifeform: did i misunderstand, or did you say earlier that it would be a good thing if the street bomzh could not use pgp ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the tidbit that escapes me is how you came upon the idea that default-signed would empower, rather than lower into pederasty, the 'anonymous derp'
mircea_popescu: you have his key in the initfile, and so on.
mircea_popescu: thereby doing it all automatically.
asciilifeform: and what is the intended mechanism for propagating a message which -does- make this claim ?
mircea_popescu: in fact, it speciically says they are not.
mircea_popescu: that, it does. but it makes no representation they are from me.
mircea_popescu: it is merely passing them along.
mircea_popescu: it is not signing them, no.
asciilifeform: in the scheme as presently described, your client is also signing (for the record of the hypothetical nsa goon, among others) a fairly arbitrary set of messages.
asciilifeform: i'm concerned only in the particular corner case that he is actually my friend, who has been reduced to that condition by malefactors, but still remains in possession of his key.
asciilifeform: how does a bomzh, stinking in the street, who happens to have generated a pgp key, 'matter' ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform because whythe fuck do you care what some people you doin't know say on any topic ?
mircea_popescu: quite exceptional walk through the very points involved.
asciilifeform: until the magic dawn when the last idiot is strangled with the guts of the last scammer, there will be ones who believe the crap.
mircea_popescu: not even then.
mircea_popescu: what the clueless "believe" can not ever be your concern.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu does not like the notion of nsa goon having a non-deniable tape of anything he catches. (i don't much, either...) asciilifeform does not like that it is generally customary to speak unsigned, and thereby nsa goon can put words into his mouth, and a certain number of people will believe them
asciilifeform sees the genuine dilemma here. but sees it as a dilemma, not an open-and-shut case in favour of soft-anonymity
mircea_popescu: (more generally, of the state)
mircea_popescu: rather than some conveniently diddled , horrible implementation designed for the needs of the nsa
asciilifeform: is this the intended shape ?
mircea_popescu: i don't see much has improved since the recording machine era. do you ?
asciilifeform: fact is, they do
asciilifeform: but, carrying on with the analogy, recording machines exist.
mircea_popescu: none of their fuckinbg business. if they weren't invited to participate they can not RELY on the discussion.
mircea_popescu: artifexd i do. it's the equivalent of making a weirdo reality where anyone who eavesdrops also has a recording device.
artifexd: it allows third parties to construct undeniable chatlogs << while true, I don't see the issue with it
mircea_popescu: not their option. yours.
mircea_popescu: before that , they are ephemereal.
mircea_popescu: artifexd it is not up to them. it is up to you.
artifexd: No. It is continuity. I assign weight to what they say by my judgement. They assign continuity to what they say by signing it.
mircea_popescu: THEY have no power,
mircea_popescu: the existence of unknowns should be entirely at the mercy of the knowns. no exceptions and no way out.
artifexd: It doesn't give weight to unknowns. It gives continuity do unknowns should they desire it.
asciilifeform: one can have 'anonymity' or 'deniability' or whatnot, as commonly imagined, at the same time as signed-everything
mircea_popescu: anmd there's plenty more, but srsly... how much is needed.
mircea_popescu: this harms because : it gives unknowns a weight they should not have ; it removes the incentive for users to police at their local level ; it allows third parties to construct undeniable chatlogs that they had no business in.
mircea_popescu: what you propose : 1. friend to friend and unknown to unknown relations are the same thing.
mircea_popescu: currently : 1. friend to friend relations are entirely cryptographically secured. 2. unknown-to-unknown relations are not secured, and must proceed through a friend of either party to even happen.
mircea_popescu: ok, let me try and make the whole story.
artifexd: Other than some extra bytes, how is it clunk? How does it harm or hinder?
asciilifeform: how is message-is-standalong-quantum-that-traverses-the-net-on-its-authors-signatures-merits added clunk ?
asciilifeform: it seems to fly in the face of better-living-through-crypto
asciilifeform: just not really grasping why we need the 'deniability' thing.
mircea_popescu: but you disagree with the implementation of ewxactly this ?
mircea_popescu: anyone can police the 200 people he himself knows.
asciilifeform: in mircea_popescu's current scheme, they still are signed, i'll point out. but ad-hoc, by the next hop node
asciilifeform: not so much 'attacks', but i for one was hoping to see this experiment as a beginning of the 'wot internet'
mircea_popescu: i dun see how any of these are serious avenues to attack gossipd.
asciilifeform: or, what if herr pankkake had made things more difficult by slowly doing... his thing, rather than swapping uniforms in one fell swoop
asciilifeform: aha but walked off rather than killfiled
asciilifeform: merely examples of people who took weeks, rather than days
mircea_popescu: i wouldn't mind seeing either of those.
mircea_popescu: now, why shouldn't this be the situation to everyone ?
mircea_popescu: as far as i recall, for as far as my own chatlog is concerned, it took them exactly an hour longer than it took me to decide it's enough.
asciilifeform: just recalling various guests in #b-a, and how long it took each to work his (often her) way out of the alimentary canal
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform then you piss me off, i frown at your friend, you're out.
asciilifeform: as it is, you're relying on the next hop node's operator to sign your words.
asciilifeform: just strikes me as a peculiar retreat from the whole 'let's bring an end to eternal september' thing
artifexd: The torrents that I have run get 15-20 connections
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: is it merely my puny brain, but i still don't grasp the 'signed-default is bad because preet can steal a key.' if preet gets a hold of my key, he may as well have put a bullet through my hide, stuffed the corpse, and proceeded to live on as it
asciilifeform: there is the added difficulty of everyone and anyone in usg-dom being 'a paedo' retroactively on the mere request of a preet.
asciilifeform: (it being, they get 'annointed' by handlers specifically for being thus malleable)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: earlier link concerned my working hypothesis as to why.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform actual pedo irl yes. among the online scum that makes up a good chunk of the "bitcoin community" on places like forums etc, common enough.
asciilifeform laboured under an impression that 'actual paedo' is a rather uncommon thing, and hence their over-representation in sc4mz0rd0m is something in need of a logical explanation
mircea_popescu: seems to me on the contrary, it's just "random redneck doing various shit online like scams and pedophilia got nicked"
asciilifeform: but parsimonious hypothesis, imho, is that he was a chained, leashed paedo.
assbot: Logged on 09-07-2014 00:04:59; asciilifeform: pierce << ideal example of the animal described on one of mircea_popescu's essays - he could be packed into prison for life, any time, based on what's in his file. so he does as instructed.
scoopbot: New post on Qntra.net by cazalla: http://qntra.net/2015/01/devianttwo-aka-robert-christophers-december-arrest-flies-under-the-radar/
mircea_popescu: artifexd the roland freisler of our times, preet bharara. crown's prosecutor for southern ny / rico conspiracy lynchpin.
mircea_popescu: like in the case of rg ?
mircea_popescu: perhaps this is what irks, such a clear statement of that inconvenient (but nevertheless true) fact
asciilifeform: will be believed by sufficiently many otherwise-clueful folks
artifexd: I think you're accused of being other people more often than you are impersonated.
asciilifeform: i, for one, would much prefer to have there be not the slightest chance that a fuckwit claiming to speak as me, but sans my key, can be believed
mircea_popescu: i am impersonated all the time, on all sorts of venues.
mircea_popescu: what's the big deal ?
asciilifeform: who among those present, other than mircea_popescu, wishes to be impersonateable (deniable) by default ?
artifexd: I start up my little process, it makes a connection to one or eight other people and it just works through the magic of maths.
mircea_popescu: currently therte's 140 people here.
artifexd: I had imagined #b-a but where everyone is ident'd all the time. No impersonating anyone else is remotely possible.
assbot: Logged on 07-01-2015 01:22:05; asciilifeform: with udp, you can make the 'friend or foe?' decision upon receipt of a single (!) packet.
asciilifeform: artifexd: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=07-01-2015#967274 << basic summary of the thing i was mainly on about.
mircea_popescu: artifexd so how is it different from the project you thouight it was ?
artifexd: Sign whatever you want. As long as the timestamp is recent.
asciilifeform will, likely, happily play with whatever apparatus you folks come up with, but wishes that the choice be an informed one on the part of the implementers, rather than happenstance.
mircea_popescu: the helo as it is contains some signed material.
mircea_popescu: so you're going to have to carry the shoe horn yourself.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform then put it in a pastebin
artifexd: I add the ip address to the key so when I start up, I have a place (or places) to look for you.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: when i sign my 'hello' i will have no idea where it will enter the network.
artifexd: Sure. Then the handshake doesn't go both ways, but the information shared is the same. I know you have the key you say you have. You know I have the key I say I have.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform it touches the network somewhere.
mircea_popescu: spec was simpler on the assumption that since the helo package is keyed to the supposed key of the server, there's no need to challenge
asciilifeform: what is my 'ip address' then ?
artifexd: As a currently running gossipd, if I get a connection request with "I'm bob. Here's proof", then I accept the connection and add that ip address to my list for that key. (For later connecting to him)
artifexd: cool. Keep the connection. If not, dump it.
artifexd: I would think that instead of a list of ip addresses you would have a list of pubkeys and each pubkey has one (or more) ip addresses assigned to it. When you start up gossipd, it calls out to all the ip addresses in the lists and says "I'm bob, proven by this signature. Prove you are alice, with cryptoproof". If the answering box responds appropriately,
mircea_popescu: i don;'t see what in the spec would prevent anyone from so doing.
asciilifeform: at the very least, one ought to have the option of (unobtrusively!) signing every line
mircea_popescu: and admitting everyone known is known to the same, high degree to warrant a connection.
asciilifeform still can't escape the feeling that hypothetical apparatus is a weapon, at least for the time being, that must be sharp enough to penetrate a particular tough grizzly hide if it is to carry on to being whatever it was meant to be...
mircea_popescu: admitting everyone's awake at the same time.
asciilifeform: naggum had a piece where he confessed to thinking of 'open source' as a weapon, purpose-built for the destruction of a particular evil (microshit)
mircea_popescu: ie, the police state only exists now and again, when the state of technology is poor enough.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that's a subplot i dun wanna enter into now - this is complex enough as it is - but suffice to say i am persuaded such situations are thermodynamiocally bound to narrow timespaces.
asciilifeform rather thinks that this is a military matter, where adversary can afford to ransack and search 100 houses but not 100,000, and hence his gathering bits of info - matters
asciilifeform gets a distinct impression that mircea_popescu is still thinking of the adversary as being bound by laws, courts, procedures of evidence-gathering.
artifexd: How many connections to other servers do you imagine that you will have? You as in you mircea_popescu.
mircea_popescu: "get something substantial and bother me again"
asciilifeform: that's what 'deniability' means, unless i catastrophically misunderstand the concept
mircea_popescu: but i also have little interest in fighting the narrowing down. that's not really a good use of time.
asciilifeform: to how many possible pubkeys (and presumably, but not automagically, people) can he narrow down the 'brezhnev sucks' ?
mircea_popescu: not with the spec as given, imo.
mircea_popescu: which is exactly how speech has functioned, since the dawn of time, to create what is known as the free world.
mircea_popescu: i want exactly what chat is : absolute deniability to the entire world, save your friends.
asciilifeform: as i reckon, same degree as the unsigned-message scenario
mircea_popescu: artifexd suppose you don't reg your name, and someone comes in as artifexd and says things. should you be forced somehow to say if this is the case or not ?
asciilifeform: we thus have a degree of deniability, about the same as in the case of no messages carrying signatures
asciilifeform: say mircea_popescu wishes to deniably utter the words 'brezhnev sucks'. he then asks me to utter, 'my friend, who wishes to stay unmarked, wishes to inform the ladies and gentlemen of this network that brezhnev sucks'
asciilifeform: the ears - can choose to believe, or not, naturally
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: consider: a subclass of private message where you ask a friend to pass along, to the 'room', some words.
artifexd: Hmmm.... this is not the project that I thought it was.
mircea_popescu: "and then you said so and so" "um how you know this ?" "from node C" "well it lied to you"
asciilifeform: the only possible solution to preet signing as asciilifeform, or mircea_popescu, or whoever, is to pull the pin when he comes uninvited.
mircea_popescu: there is no such thing as "sign for friends" outside of the model detailed in my spec.
mircea_popescu: which is why this is an ircd fork rather than whatever, just apt-get it.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i think you misrepresent the importance of this. currently, I can tell. *I*. Because i'm me, specifically. if you signed, so could preet.
asciilifeform: hence the 'adverse identity' thing
asciilifeform: when i grunt on the impalement pole, i will probably not be able to deny these words either, to the inquisitor, for the same reason
asciilifeform: how many of the folks present are ready to believe that this 'asciilifeform' is the same animal they are accustomed to enduring the company of in #b-a ?
asciilifeform: i am not presently authenticated via 'gribble'
artifexd: The system would, without your interference, label the things I say and the things your artifex say as said by seperate entities.
artifexd: But *you* have to make the choice to be confusing.
artifexd: Sure. If you have two keys in your wot and you want to give them both the same name. Knock yourself out.
mircea_popescu: kakobrekla you know on reflection i'm the other way around ? i wouldn't irc with anyone i put my penis into
artifexd: Nothing I, as artifexd with my key, say will ever show up as said by the same entity as whatever you say with your artifex key.
mircea_popescu: it's exactly the scenario you're proposing.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform lives in a submarine and never connects to you or your friends. i give him my own version of the "Artifex" key. he signs it.
artifexd: I have a fingerprint. Or a public key. I give that fingerprint or key a name. Anything not that key or fingerprint won't match to the name.
mircea_popescu: if i get a fake key of you and sign it... it's good as far as the computer is concerned.
mircea_popescu: artifexd the computer wouldn't know.
mircea_popescu: for that matter, if we keep the A B C D ; X Y Z K convention, then A can impersonate K to Y only provided B isn't linked to C that is linked to D.
artifexd: That's why the fingerprint and the alias, right? Let the computer notice that the numbers don't match the the numbers that I identify as mircea.
mircea_popescu: so what if it's the wrong numbers ?
mircea_popescu: but it'll look like obama[via lampelina] to kako. who can then go gtfo wtf you smokin beich ?!
artifexd: You have to beg for a chance to demonstrate the ability to be interesting before you get a chance to get judged.
mircea_popescu: if she starts doing evil shit like forwarding messages from obama, it'll look like obama: hey dudes, i smoke the c0k! to us,
mircea_popescu: artifexd either that, or otherwise getting into a relationship with one of the people in
artifexd: After the thing is up and running for 6 months. How does some insightful dude off the street get in? Look for a public (and thus completely untrusted) access ircd that will let him connect and hope to build an identity to the point that you say "hey insightful_dude_from_the_street", what's your ip address? I'll let you connect to me because you say useful
artifexd: Is that the start?
mircea_popescu: they even say this, the various random guys the wind blows in. "who are you ?" "nobody in particular".
mircea_popescu: in the case at hand, i'd know you are you, but i wouldn't know dddddd is anyone in particular.
mircea_popescu: it does, if the sender is in your list.
artifexd: The key in the wot has no relation AT ALL to the message I just received with a fingerprint.
mircea_popescu: it does, and that's exactly what;s happening, in the proper model. people chat. on that chat they build contracts. their contract history is fixed in a wot.
artifexd: Take away the ability to build an identity and what's left?
artifexd: As you have preached in the past, the identity built over time, secured by wot, has value.
mircea_popescu: this is pointedly against the purpose of chat.
mircea_popescu: but more's the point : signed messages allow the world to build an adversative identity of someone.
mircea_popescu: sure, they do.
artifexd: I mean as in trust the message
mircea_popescu: the reason this is even specced is to provide some sanity while everyone wastes their life in that ai quest.
mircea_popescu: i am aware the inept consensus today is to think that technology can solve trust.
asciilifeform did not imagine that there were.
mircea_popescu: just like there are no mechanically generated random numbers.
mircea_popescu: with or without a key. there is no mechanical solution to trust
artifexd: Part of the trust is that you can handle a key.
asciilifeform: let's put it this way - if i wish for my words to successfully relay beyond my own node, i have to sign them with an ephemeral key
mircea_popescu: you can call bullshit in the gossipd as well.
mircea_popescu: i mean, i understand, "it's how it's done". we're here because the current paradigm is - quite fundamentally - broken.
mircea_popescu: artifexd explain why you WOULD sign them.
artifexd: Other than the argument that a signed "no" could be used for something malicious. Uh... It just means that you said no. It doesn't imply what you said no in response to. Just that you said no.
artifexd: I still haven't processed the wot part of the spec. I'm still trying to understand why you wouldn't sign the messages. It seems to be asking for evil actors.
asciilifeform: in the end, you end up with a poor reimplementation of 'blockchain' anyway
asciilifeform: (i.e., just as their own live wotgraph behaves)
asciilifeform: let's say that a fair number of node operators wish to cache. now they are stuck retaining (and transmitting, regularly!) a vast number of duplicate copies of many wotgraphs
mircea_popescu: so anyone's free to implement all the caching one wants.
asciilifeform: well, in a sense they are; but we're really surrendering to entropy here far more than, imho, is necessary
mircea_popescu: are you sure those aren't simply the resuilts of "no more central server" ?
asciilifeform: to create temporary warps in the fabric of wot.
mircea_popescu: i still don't see there's a difference.
asciilifeform: the 'dynamicity' of new-wot (vs classical wot) creates some very strong incentives for hooligans of all stripes
asciilifeform: where the change propagates.
mircea_popescu: that's why if right now i change a rating, the old one's gone.
asciilifeform: or adjust his own graph-weights? (that would somewhat defeat the purpose of a wot, loses information)
asciilifeform: there are obvious wins to this approach. but opens the question of what, e.g., my brother, is to do with my wotgraph once my ship goes down.
mircea_popescu: leave the earth to better, later men.
mircea_popescu: exactly like indicated. will exists for as long as the hand lives to enforce it
asciilifeform: this is actually an ancient debate in the maths-of-p2p-nets world
asciilifeform: a copy of my wotgraph kept around as a message in a bottle under nitrogen in my brother's house, say, will not really carry out its function as a live reflection of my wot-will.
asciilifeform: probably quite a few folks. but the thing that distinguishes fermat from wot is that wot needs to be at least quasi-'hot' to really work as intended, imho.
asciilifeform: let's ask - how many folks reading this have archived, e.g., the works of fermat ?
mircea_popescu: i don't think you will find the computerized means to ensure immutability.
mircea_popescu: anyone can archive them!
mircea_popescu: permanence is to be ensured by other means
mircea_popescu: by the same mechanism anything of anyone's kept around in the world : your friends have copies.
mircea_popescu: anything ? they're signed by you. they're, until anyone hears better, your position.
asciilifeform: and what can they do with this copy?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform anyone who saw the old ones has a copy!
asciilifeform: the fact that my wot actions disappear when my node loses net
artifexd: So what is the value of this vice a private stock ircd with a gribble?
mircea_popescu: i still can't possibly see what flaw you perceive with the wot part of gossipd
asciilifeform: wot, i'd say, falls somewhere between (or floating far in the state-space) from currency or mere words
asciilifeform: ('the same' topologically! not mechanically, clearly)
asciilifeform: hawala is more or less the same, but implemented in the informal, mouth-to-ear way contemplated above.
asciilifeform: think of the advantage bitcoin has over hawala.
mircea_popescu: for all you know it can even came in the shape of regular bitcoin txn.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and then we get medieval-style rediscoveries of 'the latter gospel of mircea'
asciilifeform: that is an ad-hoc, bug-ridden reimplementation of the blockchain!
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform no, but you can sign it with yours, if you wish. which correctly reflects the situation. "here are the words of great X i attest to"