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| author | Owen Jacobson <owen@grimoire.ca> | 2020-01-28 20:49:17 -0500 |
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| committer | Owen Jacobson <owen@grimoire.ca> | 2020-01-28 23:23:18 -0500 |
| commit | 0d6f58c54a7af6c8b4e6cd98663eb36ec4e3accc (patch) | |
| tree | a2af4dc93f09a920b0ca375c1adde6d8f64eb6be /docs/gossamer/mistakes.md | |
| parent | acf6f5d3bfa748e2f8810ab0fe807f82efcf3eb6 (diff) | |
Editorial pass & migration to mkdocs.
There's a lot in grimoire.ca that I either no longer stand behind or feel pretty weird about having out there.
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| -rw-r--r-- | docs/gossamer/mistakes.md | 81 |
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diff --git a/docs/gossamer/mistakes.md b/docs/gossamer/mistakes.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..23b731b --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/gossamer/mistakes.md @@ -0,0 +1,81 @@ +# Design Mistakes + +## Is Gossamer Up? + +[@megtastique](https://twitter.com/megtastique) points out that two factors +doom the whole design: + +1. There's no way to remove content from Gossamer once it's published, and + +2. Gossamer can anonymously share images. + +Combined, these make Gossamer the _perfect_ vehicle for revenge porn and +other gendered, sexually-loaded network abuse. + +This alone is enough to doom the design, as written: even restricting the +size of messages to the single kilobyte range still makes it trivial to +irrevocably disseminate _links_ to similar content. + +## Protected Feeds? Who Needs Those? + +Gossamer's design does not carry forward an important Twitter feature: the +protected feed. In brief, protected feeds allow people to be choosy about who +reads their status updates, without necessarily having to pick and choose who +gets to read them on a message by message basis. + +This is an important privacy control for people who wish to engage with +people they know without necessarily disclosing their whereabouts and +activities to the world at large. In particular, it's important to vulnerable +people because it allows them to create their own safe spaces. + +Protected feeds are not mere technology, either. Protected feeds carry with +them social expectations: Twitter clients often either refuse to copy text +from a protected feed, or present a warning when the user tries to copy text, +which acts as a very cheap and, apparently, quite effective brake on the +casual re-sharing that Twitter encourages for public feeds. + +## DDOS As A Service + +Gossamer's network protocol converges towards a total graph, where every node +knows how to connect to every other node, and new information (new posts) +rapidly push out to every single node. + +If you've ever been privy to the Twitter “firehose” feed, you'll understand +why this is a drastic mistake. Even a moderately successful social network +sees on the order of millions of messages a day. Delivering _all_ of this +directly to _every_ node _all_ of the time would rapidly drown users in +bandwidth charges and render their internet connections completely unusable. + +Gossamer's design also has no concept of “quiet” periods: every fifteen to +thirty seconds, rain or shine, every node is supposed to wake up and exchange +data with some other node, regardless of how long it's been since either node +in the exchange has seen new data. This very effectively ensures that +Gossamer will continue to flood nodes with traffic at all times; the only way +to halt the flood is to shut off the Gossamer client. + +## Passive Nodes Matter + +It's impractical to run an inbound data service on a mobile device. Mobile +devices are, by and large, not addressable or reachable by the internet at +large. + +Mobile devices also provide a huge proportion of Twitter's content: the +ability to rapidly post photos, location tags, and short text while away from +desks, laptops, and formal internet connections is a huge boon for ad-hoc +social organization. You can invite someone to the pub from your phone, from +in front of the pub. + +(This interacts ... poorly with the DDOS point, above.) + +## Traffic Analysis + +When a user enters a new status update or sends a new private message, their +Gossamer node immediately forwards it to at least one other node to inject it +into the network. This makes unencrypted Gossamer relatively vulnerable to +traffic analysis for correlating Gossamer identities with human beings. + +Someone at a network “pinch point” -- an ISP, or a coffee shop wifi router -- +can monitor Gossamer traffic entering and exiting nodes on their network and +easily identify which nodes originated which messages, and thus which nodes +have access to which identities. This seriously compromises the effectiveness +of Gossamer's decentralized, self-certifying identities. |
