This is a message for @David that is about the forum and of interest to every member of this community.
Firstly I want to say that @David you are doing a great job IMO. Your way seems to be to stay in the background but at the same time be very present, and have a great “touch” to your communications that is felt and appreciated very much by me at least.
I also have a concern which may have been addressed behind the scenes, but I don’t remember any discussion and can’t find anything about it.
As a community we are all contributing to a great resource, not just in terms of the connections and what they generate, but also the accumulation of thoughts and ideas into this forum. It is already a very useful reference and obviously set to continue, so it is important for us to protect it and ensure it can continue.
So has this been thought through and dealt with? What if @David were run over by a bus, or is really NSA, or…? What other single points of failure are there: who owns/controls the domain, the Disquorse accounts etc. Do we have anyone with legal or password access etc. etc.
For the moment I assume @David owns and controls both domain and relevant accounts, but I don’t know that, so first thing is I’d like this clarified. Then I’d like us to consider whether this is acceptable or if there are risks we need to consider such as those I mention, and need to guard against. And finally what might we do about it if anything.
I want to add that I have no reason to distrust @David, or anyone else on this forum for that matter, although I have been accused of being CIA or NSA myself (can’t recall which)! :-). We should assume that there will be disingenuous and even hostile actors here at some point if not already, and the best way to deal with them is I think to be open and discuss risks, threats and so on and to deal as best we can with them.
Quite premature, but someday we will probably want to import all these conversations into a SAFE Network app as well if discourse doesn’t have a SAFE Network port already (I hope we can make this easy to do). Not too early to start thinking about it anyway.
Yes I agree, as a slightly paranoid aside I know there is a lot of talk of how bad actors can bring down the safe network after launch, but is it not more likely if they wanted to do this it would be done prior to launch. Is anybody checking the Irn Bru for Polonium and taste testing the deep fried Mars Bars?
(Intended as Anglo/Scottish banter btw, not Racism…lol - hope I haven’t just created some more “Yes” votes for Alex Salmond!!! )
The NSA is allready making a backup of this forum for us “rightnow” as we speak/type and the CIA is guarding David, because they crave for a network like this, to do what they do.
No happybeing = CIA or NSA
I suspect your an astronaut happybeing because I C NASA
There is no single point of failure (REMEMBER FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION), their is Reddit & Github even more powerful the IDEA MAIDSAFE.
All the foolishness aside does a simple forum really matter… we all know our job (Me I will promote Maidsafe once it’s up and running) and actually we should leave David alone to do his coding. @happybeing Maidsafe is not about keeping people out, all is welcome even if with bad intentions it will only improve the system.
If there are CIA or NSA here, “Hi have a nice day and thanks for keeping the world save, you guys ROCK”
[quote=“happybeing, post:1, topic:887”]
For the moment I assume @David owns and controls both domain and relevant accounts, but I don’t know that, so first thing is I’d like this clarified.[/quote]
Yes, this is correct. Also, the forum is hosted by discoursehosting.com so that’s a 3rd party that we have to trust (we can handle it if they disappear but we trust them not to alter the installation or the database etc.). I’ll consider switching to the hosting solution provided by discourse.org once they have that up and running.
Anyway, a simple first step to protect against me being hit by a bus would be for me to appoint one more forum admin. That person could download backups regularly so that the site can be restored if I disappear.
Yeah, kind of hard to prove that I’m not I guess. If there is something you guys want me to do that would increase trust just let me know. If someone is in Sweden I’m happy to meet IRL.
Lol…we’ll probably lose the footy anyway. I’ve got a bet on with my son that Scotland will get further than England in next world cup. I don’t really follow football though - probably why he was rubbing his hands together.
What a humongous mistake, but I can explain it’s all @chadrickm fault he asked what gets people exited about Maidsafe and when I’m asked that, I get totally disorientated.
Hmmmmm sorry @happybeing and @David (how could I forget the Site admin? I just didn’t see you for a long time, good to see you again @David )
Sorry @nicklambert, didn’t mean to offend, let’s change the subject… rugby, ahh, no maybe not. I hear Shetland has an exceptional swimming coach… erm, are you a boater by any chance? :-/
@ioptio is now an admin, so one little step towards making the forum david-being-hit-by-bus-safe. I chose someone that I think the community can trust and that is also in a completely different time zone which might come in handy if admin help is needed when I’m asleep.
I dont think there is a time too early to worry about the nsa and the like. There are videos of them talking about how they manipulate open source communities, so we should certainly operate under the assumption that there are hostile actors, some of whom are possibly well trusted.
More stuff to make sure nothing catastrophic happens to the forum: Backups are now created daily and automatically uploaded to Amazon’s cloud storage. This means that we have one set of backups on the forum servers (managed by discoursehosting.com) and another on Amazon’s servers. So if DiscourseHosting suddenly disappears we can make a new forum installation somewhere else and restore the backup from Amazon. If I would disappear @ioptio also has access to the backups.
If there is something you guys want me to do that would increase trust just let me know. If someone is in Sweden I’m happy to meet IRL.
