that’s crazy, with MaidSafe, I think, someone please correct me if I’m wrong though;
As I am able to write a software to deal with commerce of SafeCoins for example, then this also means that I can make programmatic inputs for dealing with those coins also and an interface. Therefore, I can make a contract in c++ or python if I felt like even in C# essentially, everything to do with this smart contract concept going around; well I think it’s available with this networks’ infrastructure.
Therefore, the apps ontop of the network can be used to create personalized escrow for example. You can code out your terms and be sure they will always proceed the same.
I’m not saying it’s fair or right if governments take that approach but that it’s the threat of that approach which will keep the vast majority of regular people from using SAFE Network even if they fit into many of the positive use cases where they would require something like SAFE Network.
If you don’t opt into a contract which could distinguish yourself from Al Qaeda for instance then you’ll just have to accept the possible consequences for not choosing to distinguish yourself.
Each person should have the right to determine for themselves how they interact with SAFE Network. Each person should be capable of using it in a way which is beneficial to themselves and which serves their self interest as long as they aren’t harming the network for anyone else.
For example if you don’t want to be involved with illegal stuff, or “terrorist activity” then it should be something you could specify in your contract with SAFE Network and others who also don’t want to be associated with that stuff should be grouped into your tribal order because their contracts will be compatible with yours.
Users should have freedom of association and should not be forced to associate with groups they don’t want to associate with. They should not be forced to fit into a box which makes them appear to be “bad actors” if we can give them the flexibility to distinguish themselves as one of the good actors.
So SAFE Network is just a tool. It’s all about how you use it which determines it’s utility to you. If you’re a journalist you probably aren’t going to be using it in the same way that a drug dealer from Silk Road would want to use it but you should not be forced to be lumped in with drug dealers in order to use SAFE Network.
Programmable privacy, contracts (social contracts and smart contracts). These are the tools we have to work with, and we should make full use of them. We aren’t going to be able to stop witch hunts but we can make them less effective by expanding positive use cases and allowing users to interact with the network precisely how they deem is necessary. If you don’t want to be caught up in a conspiracy or witch hunt then you should limit your risk exposure in your contracts with SAFE Network.
That is correct. We own the source code now and if we want we can define ourselves on the application layer using personalized contracts.
There will be some sort of order which forms from the process of people abiding by compatible contracts. If someone doesn’t accept your contract or have a compatible contract then they will not be able to interact with you if you set it up like that.
The way you don’t associate with terrorists or dark markets is that you don’t use the websites or applications that have that content. Its your damn choice to choose what content you want to tune into.
We had the same discussion about how parents can protect children from SAFE Network content. Parents could define their contract in a way so that access to certain kinds of sites are restricted.
But I see no reason to limit power and flexibility of the user or to give that power to SAFE Network developers to determine how individuals interact with SAFE Network.
For example if you don’t want to be anonymous and want social networking with reputation features then you should have it. Your contract could be set up so that you’ll only interact with other people who have it. You have every right to do that as a user.
It’s not about websites because now you’re assuming SAFE Network will somehow be restricted to websites or that everyone will want to have to interact with every kind of website. It goes deeper than that.
Some websites will be run by trusted individuals with reputations. These individuals will be of a closer social proximity. That social proximity could be determined through contractual compatibility.
If you do it that way then the user would have greater control. The current plan for SAFE Network hasn’t mentioned anything about having Turing complete scripting languages, contracts, etc.
This puts Ethereum in the position to be what people will use to define how they’ll interact with SAFE Network. Ethereum does have contracts, decentralized law, and believe it or not it will be a feature the vast majority of people want. Very few people are going to want to directly interact with SAFE Network for obvious reasons but they may want to store their data on it.
I would prefer if SAFE Network had scripting so that we could do programmable privacy without having people interface with Ethereum but it is much more likely that due to crowd funding difficulties SAFE Network developers have had to choose a set of priorities. So people will be able to handle their reputations, social networking, decentralized law and privacy contracts on Ethereum while the data itself can be stored on SAFE Network without the users having to even know what SAFE Network is.
I think there’s something you’re forgetting about in all this: perspective. One person’s “bad” actor is another person’s “good” actor. One person’s villan is another person’s hero. Also I’d like to point out the obvious that none of these contractual agreements or predefined terms should be publically visible. Therefore from a public perspective no one could tell who was who. Also I want to point out another obvious fact that with your system what’s to stop the government from passing a law stating that everyone must give the government full access to their data and if they don’t they get arrested. Boom, maidsafe is useless.
That’s a nice try but you’re missing the point here.
I would want my contracts to be publically visible as a way to enhance my reputation, distinguish myself from others, and allow people to determine how to interact with me.
Think of it like your ethics, morality, or codes of conduct. What good is having it if it’s not visible to others? How would you interact with anyone if your codes, rules and conditions are not visible? So it starts with a decentralized social network app which requires you to abide by a compatible contract or you cannot interact with it and once you’re on that app then your reputation, tribe, contractual preferences, all become visible.
Flags, badges, emblems, insignia. Any of these mechanisms can allow users to express their values, their tribe, etc. So when you say it wouldn’t be public there is no reason why it should be private any more than the language you speak is private.
If you’re doing business with anyone then you’ll want to know their reputation and their tribal values. You’re not going to do business with people who are completely anonymous so what reason would you have to interact with completely anonymous people?
You see this is by and large where you and I differ. I would not want to display it as it’s largely none of their concern nor is their morality and contracts any of mine. Think of it this way: When you go to the baker to buy a loaf of bread do you care he’s deeply into bdsm and has a certain ethos surrounding that, has ties to the mafia and is a buddist? No! You’re just there to buy you’re freaking bread! You might care if his baking is of quality so his reputation as a baker and a businessman might be applicable but beyond that any “badges” or “contracts” are irrellavant and too much information. Now if you met him at a BDSM munch it might be different, then you might not care he baked bread at all and very much care about his BDSM ethos but that’s my point. Declaring all your contracts is way too much information. We don’t interact that way, not even in meatspace. We give selected badges to selected people as circumstances apply, and even then only as trust develops. And remember you’re talking about contracts here not about identification badges.
Moreover wouldn’t your proposed system of contracts undermine the very reason for having anonymity in the first place? So that you don’t get asked what your values are and discriminated against and shunned because of them? On the net we have all types, all religions, all backgrounds, all political belief structures, all discussing and interacting together. Say we had your social network that filtered out contracts, and the contract they filtered out was gays, or people of a particular political or religious leaning, and suddenly you’ve got bigoted social media popping up everywhere. Moreover you don’t need to display your contracts for that kind of system to work. You just need a lock and key approach, the app has a lock, the contract requirements, and your contract is the key. Either you have the specified contract or you don’t, no need to make it publically visible any more than it’s nessisary to declare to the world you secretly can speak Japanese. Again it’s none of their business.
When I buy a loaf of bread I want to know that he cares about the quality of the ingredients he puts in the bread. I want to know that he has one of the best reputations.
Do you really want to eat bread from a person you know nothing about in terms of their reputation, their character, their values?
Do you trust random people like that? I never said anything about sexual preferences. I’m talking about important shit which would truly influence whether or not I’d want to do business with them.
Then don’t declare it. Hide in anonymity if you like. But certain people are going to want to set their experience up so that they only deal with people who have reasonably good reputations and similar values. People will tend to want to deal with people of a similar social proximity to themselves. People tend to trust people within their own tribe and part of being in a tribe is you follow a similar ruleset.
And as I stated in my post his reputation as a baker and businessman might be relevant but his personal life or the rest of his beliefs are not. This is a classic example of keeping one’s personal and professional life separate.
Actually I do that on a regular basis every time I go to the store and deal with some random clerk to buy my groceries. I do that whenever I buy a product online. I do that quite often in fact. Do I care about someone’s “character and values” not beyond how it affects their business relationship with me and how it partains to the product I am buying (in the context of a professional relationship). Yes if I’m buying organic food I’d want to know how it was produced and perhaps some of one’s background in the context of food. But even then I wouldn’t be concerned with the rest of the person’s life.
And if I want to get to know someone I can just talk to them. You know, the novel approach of asking questions and carrying on a friendly conversation.
You seem to be forgetting the part where you said that ALL of one’s contracts would be visible, all their identification and tribal badges if you will. People are members of many tribes but not all of them are compatible with one another and need to be kept seperate from one another, that’s what privacy is for. I believe Diaspora made this point quite clear in it’s conception what with all the aspects. You say you said nothing about sexual preferences but in point of fact you did when you stated that all contracts would be visible (unless I am misunderstanding you). If all your contracts are visible then people will know all the tribes you are a part of. Your professionally coleegues will have equal acess to all your personal badges as well as your professional ones as well. In short people don’t want others to know ALL the tribes they are in, some tribes yes but not all. We’re actually quite selective about what social groups we advertise. You want some people to know in some specific circumstances some of the tribes you are in and some other people in other circumstances other specific tribes you are in but you don’t want to declare to everyone all the tribes you are in. Does a kid want his parents to know he’s hanging out with that less than reputable juvinile delinquant, or maybe getting lucky with that hot girl even tho they don’t think he’s ready to date? Does a kinkster want their boss to know the details of their sex lives and get fired? Does someone with a really religious Christian family want them to know they’re considering another faith? Does that girl having an affair want her boyfriend to know? We keep secrets all the time. If everything is declared then there is no freedom. Which is exactly my point.
Yes and do you know how you find all that shit out without declaring everything about yourself? You talk to people. You communicate. You ask questions and have discussions. How do you think reputations are developed in the first place? Such things have been around long before the internet.
Rep in a sense my be an interesting way to filter, but as blindsight said why not get to know people through more anonymous communication first. Why try to recreate persistent identity on top of anonymity for end users. I could see it for groups, but not individual end users.
To me the greatest value to the world will be in true and absolute anonymity or as close to it as we can get and staying as close to it as practical as a general practice or default. The things we need to say don’t get said out of fear. Recreating all the sunk cost reputation stuff seems like dis-empowerment. Its like trying to create a model for FaceBook to stay alive when it needs to go under. I don’t want courts to have the ability to track and engage certain things. Rather than having some testimony show up as “you as “Waco,” said this” it would be better to have Anon said x, and everyone else in the room was Anon. Give them nothing.
Pseudo-anonymity has a place but its is no replacement for trustless systems which paradoxically should build trust. And all these merit badges etc. really shouldn’t inspire too much trust, not even a casual amount of trust. They are embarrassing, like bumper stickers and they are also handles by which people can be abused. I think the place of pseudoanonymity may simply be in making plausible deniability the norm so firms don’t think they can collect data for blackmail or get paid to delete. The tag next to Andrew Wiener’s stuff should not even have been nic but just Anon.
Its a deep subject, and maybe I am not tracking, sorry if that’s the case.
People aren’t worth the risk in my opinion to even attempt completely anonymous interactions. It’s likely they are either a terrorist or undercover cop and I would not want to associate with either.
You abide by old values which fit into an old world. This is fine and you’re free to interact with others who share your values.
But the separation of professional and personal life is not always clear. It’s subjective as to what is personal and what is professional.
It also depends on what you’re doing. So really that is something for you to define in your contract but there will certainly be people who will not interact with you if you don’t share everything. There are people who believe in radical transparency and their contracts might be so radical that even their sex lives are public.
So to people like that you’d be a very shady secret keeping individual and your contract might not be compatible with theirs.
Not everyone is interested in doing things the old fashioned way. If you’d like to then you can set up your contracts that way but people are moving away from that. Everything is moving into the public and behaviors which used to be sacred or personal are now public.
I’m not endorsing that trend but if I wanted to interact with the people who live their lives in public then I would have to live in public along with them. If I don’t then I shouldn’t expect to be interacting with public people.
If someone is completely anonymous I really have no interest in interacting with them. It’s probably an extortionist, terrorist, undercover cop, and I don’t see why a normal person wants any experience with these sorts of people. Just interacting with them can corrupt and contaminate your social sphere and it’s not worth it in my opinion.
Right now we don’t have a choice in the matter because our options is be owned by Facebook or deal with anonymous trolls. I don’t like Facebook because it doesn’t even have reputation on it and is pretty much useless for that but it gives Facebook.com information to sell. Facebook could be useful someday if they get graph search working and actually tracked the reputations of people.
Reputation is extremely important. We don’t have time to get to know everyone. We meet thousands of people a year, we’ll be lucky to really know just a few of them just by talking. I don’t really have the time to waste on “bad actors” with bad intentions so I would prefer to limited my interaction with toxic people.
I can understand if you think differently and you have a right to. This is why we need contracts to define how each of us intend to interact with the network because we aren’t all the same and shouldn’t have to be. I should not have to join the SAFE Network cult to use the application because it’s not a belief system or religion but just a tool which should make my life easier.
Pseudo-anonymity is the only kind of anonymity which matters in my opinion. Why would I want to interact with someone who doesn’t have any reputation to track, who could very well be undercover law enforcement or just a troll pretending to be female when actually they are male?
What is the value in having complete anonymity except to spit out propaganda, troll people, extort people, or set people up in stings?
Interacting with truly anonymous people who have no reputation will just get you extorted or set up. Anything you say can be used against you. Pseudo-anonymity at least you’d know the people you’re interacting with are not dishonest individuals.
I think people on this forum somehow assume the kind of people who will take to anonymous SAFE Network interactions will be like them. The people who tend to want to be totally anonymous typically have a mission or duty and why would you want to be involved with them if you can avoid?
Screen names with reputation are pseudo-anonymous which is really all most people will ever need. No one is demanding complete anonymity except for “bad actors”. The extortionist requires total anonymity just as the terrorist does because that is how they can threaten people.
I do see where you are coming from. I really do. However, I still think full and true anonymity is absolutely crucial as without it some things that need to be said will never be said because the risk of death is too high.
I don’t think we get the sunshine payoff or institutional transparency and flattening of oppressive hierarchy unless we can filter/search through an ocean of what may be admittedly absolute crap for the diamonds that will be real. When searching we will start with hunches and guesses and we will deal with people who are deadly serious about confusing our search but we will find diamonds. And it will be on us to verify those diamonds.
Now these won’t necessarily be full blown conversations, or anything you’'d otherwise want to trust. It might just be raw data. And in a sense data is the lowest of the low bordering on noise or being unusable until processed and contextualized but its info that would be impractical to attain in other ways.
Also, if you want to interact with whoever provided the material it might or might not be possible but with true anonymity they don’t have to know who you are either. And you are free to use insight with people you know and trust personally from years of experience. And even in that case we have to remember, people change- could be a knock on the head or a tumor or a fight or misunderstanding or some such thing.
If you doubt the value of this, remember that it appears to already have a fantastic track record under with stuff that is more like pseudoanonymity and is presently limited because its not more like true anonymity. Think of Wikileaks and Snowden. Think of Anonymous. Think of the price some people have paid because they only had pseudo anonymity or their anonymity became only near anonymity. Whatever you want may appear- who killed Kennedy etc. Might be less possible to do nonsense like false flags without it. No 911 to invade Iraq again or the first time, no point in the 50k federal court gag orders issued right after 911 apparently most aimed at Federal employees. A lot less of that kind of bs.
No more stupid national security letters issued from people you didn’t elect and want standing trial at the ICC. And come to think of it tips here could make courts actually work better.
Do I care? I do not require their approval. Nor would I want to interact with them if they required me to disclose everything.
You see here I can understand you. Yeah it’s good to have options if you want them. But people judge you as much by what you are as what you aren’t much as you do in your next statement.
See that’s a stereotypical judgement. They could just be a very private person that doesn’t want to share their personal information. I’d likely appear as an anonymous user on the maidsafe network because quite frankly my contracts are none of your or anyone else’s affair. Moreover your whole philosophy is based on fear of privacy.
If you’re anonymous too and careful not to give out the wrong information why do you care who they are? What does it matter if they’re a cop or terrorist? You could have a lovely conversation with them and then part ways no harm done. That’s the beauty of anonymity. You meet all kinds of interesting people, interact with them, exchange ideas, even do buisness with them, and they could be anyone, and it doesn’t matter. If you’re talking about food why does they’re being a cop or a terrorist matter?
As for the male pretending to be female if you never meet them or see them then why is it relevant? Even more so if you don’t have sex with them. Why is their portrayed gender relevant? If you perceive them as female what does it matter if they are really male? So you had a moment of cyber transgenderism, what of it?
The only thing that would make any of this matter is if emotional bonds or trust was invested. Then you’re building a relationship. But we’ve been handling those kinds of issues for quite some time now. Use some internet sense. Get them to send you pics and videos, meet someplace offline, verify what they’re telling you somehow. This is not rocket science.
You don’t need complete anonymity to have freedom of speech. No one can know your physical identity from a pseudonym. The pseudonym combined with reputation allows people to know your virtual identity and build a trust relationship over time.
Why would anyone care what you have to say if we don’t know your reputation? You could be a paid propagandist for all we know.
The only way to value what people have to say is to gauge whether or not they are telling the truth. People who say lies, propaganda, conspiracy theorists, are used as part in psy-ops but are not spreading truth. If we could have reputations then you can have community intelligence with built in incentives for truthful reporters because if someone is always lying then their reports might be lies.
It’s not at all that simple. You would think that but if you look at things in practice then just have a look at what happened to Silk Road. Normal conversations can get you set up for a conviction for a crime you never even committed but since you said something that is really all the evidence they need.
If it’s a terrorist then suppose they know all about you and are trying to extort you? What do you gain by communicating with them anonymously? I just don’t see how you could gain from interacting with these sorts of people.
They might be a person but with no reputation so how do you know they are worth the time?
If you have some reason to interact with possible undercover cops, terrorists, organized crime, then it might make sense to hang out in an anonymous fashion. Most people don’t have a reason and are actually afraid of these sorts of people. Everyone I know would shriek at the idea of interacting with these sorts of people even anonymously because any interaction at all leaks information about you to potential “bad actors”.
So while an innocent conversation seems alright the more you talk to them the more they learn about you and the less alright it is. It’s playing Russian roullette without a reason (you haven’t given me a good reason why you would want to).
I could reverse it and say your whole philosophy is based on fear of transparency.
Privacy isn’t improving your security if you’re the one being extorted at the time and the exortionist defends their right to their kind of privacy to protect their business of extorting. Everyone has to customize their privacy so that it is a kind of privacy which increases their security. While people are free to be anonymous it doesn’t mean the anonymous stranger sending you a message is usually something you would want to hear.
My views are not based on fears, my views are based on statistics. Since we have had anonymous cryptocurrencies the risk of extortion has increased as measured by the frequency of occurrence and the potential impact. If you’re a Bitcoin whale then they are coming for your coins and extortion is a way to get the Bitcoins.
I know you don’t understand the risks right now but extortion is going to become a huge very profitable industry. The main risk of dealing with anonymous entities or people connected to that is extortion. If you don’t mind doing business with the people who make a living from extortion that is cool but the majority of people don’t like it, and don’t like scammers very much either.
But none of that rules out how vital having true anonymous speech to increase efforts like wikileaks. And it seems pseudoanonymity as above happens in completer privacy which is almost like true anonymity. Bad actors will screen. Also new actors would be in the position of bad actors almost by default.
There is something else. There are no authorities that can be taken at face value.
Wikileaks and community intelligence isn’t “anonymous” speech. It’s pseudo-anonymous. Reporters have identities with reputations which is how we can distinguish between truthful reports and lies. We rate the quality of the information received and reporters with better reputations would have higher reliability ratings on their reports than reporters who lie.
If you just accept any testimony without reputation then how do you know the information you receive isn’t a lie? Anyone can feed you false information if you don’t have reputation to try to make sure the quality of the sources is high.
You can never take info at face value. Wikileaks to work or gather info needed a true anonymous medium just to gather its info. It didnt have one and people got hurt. If its info from the mainstream media we can assume its false due to the paid mono message. The notion of testamonials and to some extent expert has to leave us. I see the point you are making with having such a layer but I think that layer is secondary and not likely to last without a true anonymity layer where needed.