How much of the global disk will be alloted for spam?

Marketing
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Here is a potential reason to make sure you never allow ads in Project SAFE. Just recently a researcher working on a system to replace the TCP opined that he thought communication was storage, which sounds like Project SAFE. A Project SAFE staffer opined he thought the system would be initially slow to begin with.

Question- how much trust and good will will the target user have toward life and death anonymity in the system when they realize its being slowed by spam and their system is being used to store spam when that was never the case prior. Question, if you can put a limit on the amount of spam can that limit not be zero and why isn’t it zero? If you can’t put a limit on it how is the system supposed to work?

Maybe the new system that the ad industry wants us to have where will have it that even on wired internet ads don’t eat into arbitrary and increasingly limited and expensive caps. Would that help? It won’t stop it from using our space and cycles to push spam?

It seems Obama has figured out he will go down as the President who killed the net if the FCC allows that- which would be like Citizen v United but much worse meaning his party will go down for the count. One of the MIT Media Lab founders Nick Negroponte has apparently recently suggested that maybe streaming should be illegal- at least that’s how some have interpreted it. That kind of bizarre chatter suggests the stakes are so high that prominent people are being black mailed to the point of career and legacy loss over converting the net to save spam. Either we have spam and go back to the pre-public internet era or we again start moving toward a free and open society. I think the spam society and the pro spam arguments about spam not being so bad and neutrality being a gimmick are at a tipping point. Amazingly its technically possible to do spam on Project SAFE as has been pointed out: Streaming large video files with a distributed network - #8 by russell - Development - Safe Network Forum Out of charity and deference it might be too soon to get the pro spam order focusing its full might on Project SAFE a few weeks prior to launch- so placate them?

From what I can see Project SAFE, based on maths or not, is a planned economy so how much for spam and why not zero? And in that planning if we measure outcomes, its only after the fact that I know how much something is worth and can value it, can that not play into equation?

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I don’t think what is considered spam is universally agreed - one man’s spam is another man’s useful data link - therefore the inputs are not quantifiable - so your question is unanswerable. Basically, everything on the menu contains Spam…Spam and Chips, Spam on toast …Spammy Spam…wonderful Spam…

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Your line of thought needs to end right there. Your whole position on “spam,” advertising, and anything that will “draw your attention” is getting old.

The whole purpose of SAFE is so that you can never be told that you cant store something, publish something, say something. Ever. EVER. Your self entitled war on “coercion,” “wasted time,” “spam,” and commercials goes against everything this project was started for. You are infringing on other peoples rights to say, do, and be as they wish (until it infringes on someone else’s rights). Not only that, (because those ARE the rights of the people) you do NOT have a right to tell someone they may not have a sponsor (funding in return for using their advice/product/making ‘x’ change). You do NOT have a right to disallow someone else to take money in exchange for exposure (advertising).

Please stop filling the community’s forum with this non-deserved-entitlement nonsense. I understand we can’t make you, but I’m trying to ask as nicely as I can while still getting the strength of my frustration across. What you keep promoting is censorship…

EDIT:
I want to be clear that I’m not a huge fan of the status quo right now either, however, it frustrates me to no end to keep seeing the only presented solution is “don’t allow ‘x’ on the network.” Lets work towards making ‘x’ less desirable, sure. Make a better solution. However, under no circumstance should we ever say “don’t allow ‘x’.”

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There is only one way to achieve this, to develop models that work better for content providers.

We have no control over who puts what on the network, over who develops apps and what those apps do, and nor should we. This is a network for everyone.

I share your dislike of ads as you know, but I don’t see where you are going with this. As I say, all we can do is come up with better alternatives.

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Perfect summation, well from my perspective anyway. I think there will be advertising and people will have a choice to accept it or not (I don’t), but its true we cannot stop people through rules, but we can through better business models. A huge thing safe does is provide incredible resources for almost zero cost. I am positive app builders will make amazing products that do not require you to accept anything but good services.

There will even be privacy leaking apps and all sorts of behaviour, its up to everyone to spread education and truth to allow people to realise they are no longer locked into anything.

The better alternatives is the key. Advertising / spam/ viruses etc. is going to happen with rogue (in my view :slight_smile: ) app developers, we just find better systems. Things like the community pods may help validate and stick a badge on apps (this is a huge area with loads of issues itself, so ignoring all that for now) or some similar mechanism.

One thing we are investing in at the moment is a pretty extensive continuous integration suite over hopefully hundreds of machines and OS’s with a code review process tied in. I feel this could be a neat give to the community. If devs want to test and run their apps through this, then they will get extensive testing and perhaps community code review or at least the ability to look and see what is being committed in small chunks would help everyone.

This code perfection adventure is often ignored by folks who want ‘a app for that in a few hours’ mentality. I feel we can do much better with quality of apps and at the same time allow lots of eyes to confirm nothing weird or sneaky gets into the code bases. It is way to hard to look at a huge code base and spot errors and backdoors, look at truecrypt, openssl, openssh, tor and all those OSS projects. We need to do significantly better and we will.

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@Al_Kafir yes and you know I prefer the expanded definition.

@wes In line with what you were expressing is the idea that we don’t want another system controlled by money or bribery or spam which is an attempt to get adults and children to act generally against their own interests. But the initial attention grabber does that. A pays B to exploit C’s attention. That has to stop. Paying someone else to interrupt someone will more and more make as much sense as allowing people to be paid to slap other people.

What happens when its revealed that 60% of what’s on people’s drives in the MaidSafe net is spam, that has a huge cost. Over spam and the ability to turn a loud speaker on us to drown out the current internet is in mortal danger. That is ridiculous. Tmobile and Verizon are pushing a spam is free everything else costs you money model. But spam is not free, your time, attention and interruption aggravation have an additive opportunity cost. We can’t continue to have this fraud in the center The point of sponsorship and spam is not sales but info enclosure and censorship. They select the range of candidates and they spend to select the actual candidates.

Maybe the core architecture isn’t the most important place to start with that but I think we need to be confident that it works, that if its slow it won’t be replicating 60% spam. If I don’t want to see ads I should be able to shut that, it should be the default option, not an opt out situation. But more to the point, your sense of the destructiveness of sponsorship is in my opinion misguided. We may never be able to delegate much of our personal power but you will not have states or government that work for your benefit or are even tolerable for long if you allow sponsorship. It means that your interests and needs are locked out and media exists only to exploit you for its true customers- the sponsors.

Earlier US supreme courts understood this. They knew there was a hierarchy of speech and did not want speech dilution therefore commercial speech was relegated to the back of the line. The current regime thinks commercial speech is the only kind there is and that society exists for the sake of business. That has to end, we have survival challenges that need attention and we need the noise out of legitimate communication.

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I agree wholeheartedly with you on this. What I don’t understand is what you are arguing for - it sounds like you want the network or apps to be constrained in some way, which I don’t think is feasible technically (this is an autonomous network).

The area that I personally have been hopeful about is the idea of reputation systems. Just as some of us have changed our behaviour in response to the intrusions of facebook and Google on both our privacy and our attention, reputation systems allow us to band together to create the kinds of environment we want, and for others to join the groups which they feel most at home with, or set up their own. This possibility arises out of the empowerment provided by SAFE, because anyone can now put stuff together that scales indefinitely without the start up costs that give those with money so much influence over what makes it and what doesn’t.

So I am putting my faith in the democratisation of business that SAFE will create, rather than us devising some scheme that enable SAFE to fix the broken feedback loops that currently exist to keep the human collective marching towards disaster.

If SAFE has a lot of “spam”, so be it - the spammers will be paying for it. What matters to me, is that I can choose whether to look at sources that have a reputation for spam, or a reputation that I choose to give my attention to. I see this in my use of twitter. It is the customised information feed that so many people envisaged (including Google) when a few years ago we were inundated with customisable portal/home pages, but which no-one liked. Twitter works better, I think, because we customise it in a more natural way - as we might socially - by connecting with people we like, arguing with those we don’t, following and unfollowing piecemeal and in the moment. We don’t have to go search for content, select it from a menu, move it around on a customisable home page. We do it as part of the interaction.

So there are some hints for any SAFE app builders who want to create a killer app to superseded twitter and facebook :slight_smile:

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It may be late in the design cycle or it may require a fork, but I sense strongly that (even as an outsider) critical design decisions can be made to influence the uses of the network for the greater good. And that this doesn’t imply too much meddling or require insight equal to or greater to the SAFE team’s on tech, ethics or what is desirable or possible.

Censorship is the only thing we would censor. The police and society can do the rest. You see spam, or an attempt to coerce attention is an attempt to censor what you are currently looking at or would look at. In aggregate it has an immense opportunity cost. That needs to end. Its pieces of content and sites that need reps not end users- bot non bot is all that is needed on the end user side and that’s not a rep- rep is an attempt reboot Equivfax/Experian/Transworld. This is supposed to be a system that serves end users. It a conflict of interest to consider more of a stake holder model- that will invariably turn supply side. This should be an end user fixated model. Serve the end users needs best and app developers and needs will also be served but the tail shouldn’t wag the dog. As for content pushers- filter that stuff its noise.

Some Specifics:
Total end user control of any and all Project SAFE app interfaces. If there is a way to lock this down in the core system it must be done. These are going to sound browser specific and I realize the browser as a format may not be for ever- still its worth getting the start right.

No ability for devs to manipulate scrolling or back/forward, no ability to foist a modal window or modal event of any sort. Use of open source like HTML 5 with quick fast forward to defeat any modal ad attempt, and quick one tap type de-listing votes for any content that tries to put modal elements in. Any attempt at coercing attention would get the content up voted for delisting from honest ad and sponsor free search and trending. Would need some mechanism to verify the delisting but it would be like a much deeper prohibition of coerced attention built into the core system and the core apps including browser, search and trending. Delisting and other features could be turned off but only by the end user with community- hopefully with some informed consent reminder If it worked sponsors would be trying to pay to get people to turn those elements off. Word of mouth and efficient search and trending (categorical trending would be opt in, but the search would likely be based on trending) is enough to move products in a level playing field honest environment.

Retort is that Project SAFE cannot control what apps are most popular on the system. Well, Project SAFE can make its wishes are clear, promote education almost like system etiquette and system hygiene to keep the system healthy and it can make sure internal options for everything is default set to opt in with no penalty for not opting in. It can make sure in every way possible its not a system that supports the abuse of money and attention. The group behind Project SAFE is in a difficult situation. It should only be taking money from its legitimate end users. Now its worked to check those conflicts of interest, but its real end users are not app developers (not sure its clear on that) but individual people as end users of the internet. That is the interest base it should be representing exclusively. If app developers, or app pushers have a grip, their interests can be considered through the lens of them as an individual end users.

I am in agreement about the tremendous potential of direct horizontal speech like Twitter. I agree we need a Project SAFE versions that are ad free, sponsor free a privacy mining free to trounce Twitter and FaceBook. To me ad hoc spontaneous horizontal communication is possibly the most powerful force to turn down the volume on corporate and state propaganda and their demands. The best way possibly to make a less coercive world. But do tell me how it would be the spammers, short of us finding away that would work for almost everyone to filter out noise and spam and sponsorship that would pay for the storage and the hit to the network? I think the things I am suggesting above would be noise filters that could help tremendously.

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Heeh! And when I become president, the first thing I will do is make an executive order making executive orders illegal.

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If A wants to pay B to ASSASSINATE someone that’s their ******* business and A should be free to do it and B should be free to choose to do it. If A wants to advertise and B wants to accept said advertisement then so be it. You’re missing the whole point of a voluntary system. It’s no business of yours what people store on their accounts and hard drives. It’s no business of yours to enforce your morality on anyone. You can pursuade them to do otherwise, you can offer them alternatives but the moment you try to force them to do otherwise you are crossing a line and infringing on their freedom. No it doesn’t HAVE to stop unless they CHOOSE to stop. That is the part you are not getting.

What happens when we discover 90% of the internet is porn? Who cares! If they choose to utilize their accounts with advertising that’s their choice. It will be met with my mighty spam blocker of doom! Splat! Ignored and no sales for you! Hence epic waste of time and money on their part. You seem to forget that designing advertising costs money. Distributing advertising costs money. Runnng a computer costs money. Updating advertising costs money. So if a company is spamming people they are spending money and if they aren’t making profit on that investment they are LOSING MONEY! Therefore to inhibit this behavior all one has to do is IGNORE THEM and not buy their product! It’s basic economics dude you don’t need to outlaw spam you just need to not buy products from people that spam you and do everything you can to make sure it costs more to spam you than the profit they receive from spamming you.

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This might step on C’s freedoms a bit though…lol

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Lol yes and this raises the fundamental question: Should you be free to do harm (slap) by proxie (payment) or not. Yes you should, and yes if you pay someone to do something you are responsible for doing that. Just as they are responsible for taking the job. Paying money isn’t any different than paying a good or service and neither party is alleviated from responsibility in said exchange. However that being said one should still be free to engage in said exchange.

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Now that is the whole point. It needs to become impractical so that voluntary behavior including consumption of spam if that’s what someone wants is more possible. There is nothing lock down, but the defaults would all be opt in, not opt out. And the systems would be set up to prevent hijacking of honest communication, which is what spam does, its the point, commerce is not the point of spam, its medium capture. And again I see a revolution in the alignment of buyer and seller interests and a potential huge leap in product quality, value and trust when we have honest search and trending that doesn’t run on spam isn’t calibrated by spam as Google has done recently with sponsors being able to bid to adjust SEO in their favor or as they see fit. Sponsored search, ick.

As for assassination, if its a right and true asshole, and its the only practical way to save mass misery- well that the A-B-C in that case seems like honest communication. But Ahimsa too. I think what is missing is the understanding that cutting out spam (censorship) is not cutting into freedom of expression, quite the opposite, its turning down the noise so people can hear each other and think or meditate or do what ever is necessary. Epidemic of diabetes, average highschool kid in the US projected to graduate with diabetes? Spam is the answer. Doesn’t seem like they just had the choice to ignore it. Turning down the volume on all the way on all of that doesn’t set us back it just gives us a chance at avoiding a problem we can live without.

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@Warren So you would like to get rid of the practice of cold calling, emailing potential customers about products you think they might be interested in, and other forms of proactive advertising? I’d be interested in how you’d model a business. Also isn’t putting such restrictions in place restricting one’s business freedom?

(Incidently I’d a side note I’d really like a phone that can screen out those annoying telemarketer calls.)

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Yes, I think it would be terribly complicated to satisfy the demand to build an app that filters spam. It would be infinitely easier to just make the assassination app…then the demand might just erm…drop…lol.

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This is not technically possible within the network protocol. It requires complete control of the user’s computer, which means SAFE OS, and would divide the network for app builders: those who build apps that only run on SAFE OS, and those who build for any SAFE connected device. Ergo, it won’t work! 99.9% of apps will be of the latter kind, no-one would use SAFE OS.

I share your desire to change this, but coercion is coercion and ends up being repressive whether you believe you are one of the good coercers or one of the bad coercers.

We can though as David suggested provide guidance to the community through the PODS and other means. But the best guidance will emerge in the community itself, which is why I am hopeful reputation systems that empower users and can’t be disrupted or bought (by the techniques you and I see as so damaging). That is where I think we should put our intellectual effort - into designing reputation systems that work for end users. If we achieve that, they will use them and this will provide a natural pressure that resists control by coercion.

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This was stated as being one of the hardest problems to solve according to that Vitalik (Etherium guy). It’s widely commented that this guy is some sort of genius too…and you’re thinking along same lines…hmmmm…don’t go reading too much into this ok…lol

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@Al_kafir I think it relates to that Monetas decentralisation video. The success of twitter in this, and the approach of the StackExchange guys (who re-frame the issue of feedback in terms of a game), make me think that good solutions may be found without the things normally associated with reputation. In small society (cf. Monetas) reputation was simply each individual’s natural memory of good and bad experiences with other - not a badge earned for good behaviour and worn for all to see - but a reputation spread amongst the population, which could be consulted when someone needed reassurance before proceeding. Maybe your WoW and Second Life thinking can come into this too? :slight_smile:

Genius is very difficult to judge in our contemporaries - its too susceptible to the cult of celebrity. Much easier to judge in those from ages past. Those lights stand brightly then, although we still tend to colour this by our contemporary judgements (e.g. intellect over heart for example, or spirit ;-)).

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Something I left out from the above. End users should be able to nix any auto micro payment to an ad or site for a reasonable period after the fact. Also at set up whether there is auto micro payment or whether that accrues for the end users to award should be up to the end users. An issue here is that end users could find a way to pay themselves with that stream, but that risk is better than perfect ad subsidy. No one should get paid for access to my time, attention, frustration, opportunity cost, good will, local system resources, bandwidth, endless suggestion a kind of brainwashing overhead etc when I haven’t accepted that. That shouldn’t even be available unless I choose it and I am paid for its value and not tricked to forfeit that value. Otherwise its theft and it leads to enclosure and medium capture.

@Blindsite2k I think honest (ad, sponsors free search) search and trending (opt in for the trending, but the search would be based on it) is enough. High quality product info is one thing but with search tech we don’t need shotgun or even pin point ads, its obsolete. Honest search and trending in conjunction with word of mouth are enough. Firms can give away product to seed markets through word of mouth backed up by honest search and trending. If someone wants to opt in for a system that has access to their data black boxed (or even not black boxed) so that automatic shopping is enabled where the system just orders stuff it knows they want and novelties it thinks they’d appreciate on a buffer account and that stuff just shows up at the door. They like it, they take it in. I am fine with that.

Business freedom is sometimes a super loud video bill board that isn’t denoting a fixed location helping people get off the road and reducing accidents and traffic. Rather its causes deaths, traffic and property damage. But perverse law wont even let the victims bring the civil and criminal charges instead they are faulted for a rear ending. Where is the line. Line was at no bill board, its a conflict to distract drivers while drivers. Dangerous hypocrisy to allow the bill boards but restrict cell use while driving. Saw an insurance add that put the letters upside down said if you can read this you probably just had an accident. Someone is going to buy their insurance after that? What about clowns that do full blown video board of kids running into freeway traffic in a way meant to deceive drivers. That’s probably a hack that should happen to such thefts to get them taken down.

As the head of the Pirate Party said recently and which I’ve found my self saying, there is no right to profit. I don’t prioritize business, I prioritize working society and society for the sake of business is something that needs to be put out of its misery as it is something taking livable societies place. No supply side society goes down the same path as full monarchy.

Just imagine the next Assange or Snowden thinking they can trust their life to Project SAFE and not being able to stop a shotgun McDonalds ad from seeming to follow them. They the do check of the system that estimates spam and see that 90% of the resource they are sharing to use Project SAFE is being used up by spam and that Project SAFE is slow. The won’t have their message subsidizing advertising and they certainly wont’ trust their life too it.

That’s a problem and it should be addressed. Any computer that doesn’t do what the end user expects it do isn’t going to considered trust worthy. Having the silly browser ad bloc arms race going on implies a very insecure system. But the idea that I am in anyway supporting coercion doesn’t hold water. I simply want end users, which we all, are and at which point we are most vulnerable to have the simple tools and good design in place to resist coercion if we so choose. And as above its sites and content that should have the reputation. But is reputation the right concept?. Who cares what the crowds opinion of an offering is, that is to restrictive. It should more be aimed at whether its spam or a coercive situation or its got puffing.

@happybeing I think we are in agreement that “reputation” is possibly too blunt and restrictive of a term. Some one one pointed to one of David Irvine’s @dirvine pieces elsewhere from months back where he was talking about how to account for value and all arbitrary layers of fluff that get added in to that estimate. Conclusion was we measure at the point of outcome. Any time an end user in good faith gets less than they bargained its a sign of coercion simply up vote for delisting as its spam.

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Wow… Think about what you’ve just said. “The only thing we should keep from happening is exactly what I’m demanding happen.” In that case, we’re on the same page.

You are not censoring censorship here, you are trying to tell devs how they can go about their work… What if they want a new window when you click on something in their app? You’re telling them they cant…

Where are you getting this from? You cant “do a check,” nor tell what the content of the network is. You’re making crap up to make a (not even valid) point. More content on the network doesn’t slow it down either.

Or the end user had expectations way outside the realms of reality. Or, in good faith, misunderstood what he was being offered. Or any number of other things. It doesn’t make it “spam.” Based on YOU’RE definition, your posts are spam to me. They draw my attention from what I want to be reading, other peoples thoughts. How do I de-rank you? You’re comments are significantly worse than an ad placed on the site because I can simply glance at an ad and know if I’m interested in what it’s offering. I must read through, what I believe is, loads of spam text to get to the few logical nuggets that are produced as well as understand what others who respond are talking about.

tl;dr: @Warren, please stop coercing my attention. I don’t want to read your posts because they are spam but must to follow the conversation. By your own definition, you should not be allowed to post. Please stop spamming me.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If you’ve gotten here, you hopefully read the above. Do you see how silly this argument is? Please stop your censorship push. It can’t work.

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