Oh the age old call for “certification”. I’ll answer you that. YOU DO RESEARCH! You check multiple sources. You don’t rely on one source for your information. It’s stupid. It’s stupid to rely on one source and one person’s reputation for your information, even if it’s a good reputation it’s stupid, because that person could only have a limited perspective, or a biased perspective, or limited information. You always, always, ALWAYS want to do your own research and get information from multiple sources and in doing so reputation becomes less of an issue because you are making your own decisions based on what info coincides and what facts add up. You also mix in your own experiences and experimentation into the mix. So it doesn’t matter if an anonymous source gives you info on a new treatment or a new recipie or tells you about some new plant you never heard about before if you then take that info and do further research yourself, try the recipie/treatment or compare with testimony from other people and see how it works. It’s called critical thinking man.
Also Warren has a point
A new anon would be treated like a bad actor until they developed reputation, that is to say until they started interacting with people. And that’s my point you really can’t not have a reputation of some description while interacting with people. It just depends how broad that reputation to be and with whom you want to share it. To use one of your examples if you were an outstanding undercover cop you’d want to share that reputation with the fine members of the police force but NOT with the criminal underworld with whom you were targeting. Likewise if you were a member of some organized crime syndicate you would want to share that with other (perhaps select) criminal elements but NOT with the police. If you were an exotic dancer or prostitute you might not want your family finding out about that shit, but perhaps would want to advertise it to potential employers and/or clients. Yes reputation is important but it’s also a double edged sword and it’s perceived differently by different people, that’s why we have privacy.
Now if you could “hang” various contracts or identification badges off different identities then I’d be cool with that. In fact that would be very much in line with how the maidsafe personas are designed to work, different identities for different areas of one’s life. So you’d have an activist persona, yuor private persona, your work persona, your personal persona, whatever.
The problem with Wikileaks and I identified it early on was centralization. It centralized itself around one man and that is the problem with it.
As far as the leaks are concerned I think the quality of the leaks in the beginning when Wikileaks first got started was higher than it has been since it got caught up trying to take on governments directly.
What happened to that leak they had with the banks? That went no where but that might have been more relevant than the stuff going on with governments. Ultimately it depends on what you’re interested in but I do understand the purpose behind community intelligence while also understanding that intelligence infrastructure and capabilities can be abused.
Reputation is how we can prevent it from being abused.
Warren does have a point and so do you. I might disagree with you on certain details but you have good points.
My point is that reputation is the only way to prevent abuse of power. If you create a community intelligence infrastructure where anyone can report anything anonymously then what is to stop a group of people from colluding to make you look like a rapist?
Anonymous reports are too easily abused. Reputations should be on the line so when people make accusations they have something to lose if their accusations are false. Anonymous reporting allows people to make false accusations and collude with others to target specific people. That is not something which we want and the only want to prevent that kind of stuff is to have every reporter be pseudo-anonymous, have a reputation, and no I don’t say you should trust a source.
But I do say you should rate the reliability of sources. Some sources have a history of reliability and when you receive information from multiple sources all the time there will be your most reliable sources and then there will be sources who have no credibility. This has to be tracked over time so that you can study information in the proper context.
I’m not saying anonymous sources are useless nor am I saying reliable sources shouldn’t have their information checked out and verified. I’m saying if you rate the reliability of sources then you can manage your time better and filter out junk.
makes sense to have community rate sites and services and content but not short of a spam or bot filter not to rate individual people as that is credit agency gossip its delusion
For research on how the “Dark Web” picture is developing and might affect SAFE, we might take a peek at this:
Inside the Dark Web Not currently available on BBC iPlayer 2014-2015 Episode 4 of 13 Duration: 1 hour Twenty-five
years after the world wide web was created, it is now caught in the
greatest controversy of its existence: surveillance. With many
concerned that governments and corporations can monitor our every move,
Horizon meets the hackers and scientists whose technology is fighting
back. It is a controversial technology, and some law enforcement
officers believe it is leading to ‘risk-free crime’ on the ‘dark web’ - a
place where almost anything can be bought, from guns and drugs to
credit card details. Featuring interviews with the inventor of
the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and the co-founder of
WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Horizon delves inside the ‘dark web’.
I first learned of SAFE earlier today, so what I have to say is far from informed as to the specifics of the system, but I hope it’s useful anyway. My mind raced around speculating on uses for SAFE, but as I’m sure it does with many I quickly got to the question of bad actors. I very much buy into the idea that SAFE is or should be agnostic to what people are using it for, just like any infrastructure technology. People print horrible things but the office supply store doesn’t ask me what I’m going to use a ream of paper for. Audio and videotapes had ugly and confusing wrangling behind the scenes about copyright implications that caused extra cost and inconvenience to consumers, but in essence they weren’t in danger of being damned by the inevitability of misuse. Internet access itself faced these issues. Bitcoin and Bittorrent would be examples of technologies that have particular PR problems due to bad actor early adopters but aren’t evil by nature. I do believe, however, that the nature of disruptive technology is often that it’s picked up early on by “bad actors”, if only because society already knows how to make things difficult for them using existing technologies.
To me the question is one of demonstrating the positive potential of SAFE when the negative potential is obviously going to be demonstrated with no intervention from the SAFE community at large. I’ve often thought that bittorrent would have benefited greatly if there had been a concerted effort early on to demonstrate its potential for unambiguously positive use. SAFE has a chance to learn take a lesson from that opportunity lost.
My idea is this: The community could set up, as early as possible, a collection of as much clearly non-pirated, uncontroversial, clearly publicly useful data as possible. Data sets from the US government and others that release their work directly to public domain. Creative commons works, works out of copyright, etc. Backing up wikipedia, project Gutenberg, and whatever else would certainly be a part of it, but the main point would be to share large file media that is impractical to get via the web. Show one meat-and-potatoes way the world needs decentralized storage. I suspect the nature of SAFE makes this a much easier task than it would have been for, say, bittorrent, but I can’t put my finger on why I think that.
I would imagine that many early adopters would be eager to donate some safecoins to any visible consensus effort to prove the platform’s worth for legitimate use to the larger public. I’m obviously not familiar enough with the SAFE community to suggest specifics of who would be trusted with it, but I imagine some organization and curation would be needed to have the collection be an unambiguous PR win, especially at first.
tldr; Bad actors are inevitable and will likely be overrepresented among early adopters. There needs to be an organized, concrete initiative to point to and say “But look at the good this enables!” An easily searched archive of clearly legal, useful files too large to be practically shared via previous technology should be a community priority for that purpose.
Welcome @dana. I agree with all you say here and have been thinking the same about collecting examples of SAFE for GOOD, as well as community thoughts on how to respond to Dark Web accusations.
(@David is the any prospect of discourse providing a way to collate posts - I bookmark things I like, but it would be great if I could tag them for later reference. Such as #AppIdea#SAFEforGOOD#SAFEfeature etc.)
I watched the Horizon programme last night (which I posted about above). Nothing new, but a really good balanced piece which explained the origins of internet surveillance, the downsides of that (Bruce Schneier was good as usual, with Assange and Appelbaum chipping in), the legitimate responses to that (failed email encryption, WikiLeaks - showed the Iraq murder video footage! and explained a bit about Chelsea Manning). It only got to the Dark Web aspect in the last 15mins of 60 so was not specializing, and not really exploring the arguments beyond that, or documenting the kind of negative propaganda we may see eventually. I think they had only two speakers for oppression:
The cop heading up EU cyber crime unit who moaned about falling detection rates.
Eugene Kaspersky who advocated anonymity for personal communications and passive browsing, but digital passports for personal banking, shopping etc.
So let’s start keeping our own lists of SAFEforGOOD items, both real and potential.
This is amazing, essentially my PGP public key is like my passport ID number;
Yet I issue it, I choose when, I choose who I share it with, and I also choose to rescind it. This is the point I think; That it is opt-in like MaidSafe. Digital footprints could be obvious after a while, even obfuscation methods; patterns are always forming, and a bad actor could usually be exposed because these things.
I know there have been a number of discussions on meta.discourse.org about tagging but I don’t know of any plans. There are some plugins available I think - I’ll try to look into this a bit more in a few weeks.