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diff --git a/.html/gossamer/mistakes.html b/.html/gossamer/mistakes.html deleted file mode 100644 index d7632f7..0000000 --- a/.html/gossamer/mistakes.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,154 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE html> -<html> -<head> - <title> - The Codex » - Design Mistakes - </title> - - <link - rel='stylesheet' - type='text/css' - href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Buenard:400,700&subset=latin,latin-ext'> - <link - rel="stylesheet" - type="text/css" - href="../media/css/reset.css"> - <link - rel="stylesheet" - type="text/css" - href="../media/css/grimoire.css"> -</head> -<body> - -<div id="shell"> - - <ol id="breadcrumbs"> - - <li class="crumb-0 not-last"> - - <a href="../">index</a> - - </li> - - <li class="crumb-1 not-last"> - - <a href="./">gossamer</a> - - </li> - - <li class="crumb-2 last"> - - mistakes - - </li> - - </ol> - - - - <div id="article"> - <h1 id="design-mistakes">Design Mistakes</h1> -<h2 id="is-gossamer-up">Is Gossamer Up?</h2> -<p><a href="https://twitter.com/megtastique">@megtastique</a> points out that two factors -doom the whole design:</p> -<ol> -<li> -<p>There's no way to remove content from Gossamer once it's published, and</p> -</li> -<li> -<p>Gossamer can anonymously share images.</p> -</li> -</ol> -<p>Combined, these make Gossamer the <em>perfect</em> vehicle for revenge porn and -other gendered, sexually-loaded network abuse.</p> -<p>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 <em>links</em> to similar content.</p> -<h2 id="protected-feeds-who-needs-those">Protected Feeds? Who Needs Those?</h2> -<p>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.</p> -<p>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.</p> -<p>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.</p> -<h2 id="ddos-as-a-service">DDOS As A Service</h2> -<p>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.</p> -<p>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 <em>all</em> of this -directly to <em>every</em> node <em>all</em> of the time would rapidly drown users in -bandwidth charges and render their internet connections completely unusable.</p> -<p>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.</p> -<h2 id="passive-nodes-matter">Passive Nodes Matter</h2> -<p>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.</p> -<p>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.</p> -<p>(This interacts ... poorly with the DDOS point, above.)</p> -<h2 id="traffic-analysis">Traffic Analysis</h2> -<p>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.</p> -<p>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.</p> - </div> - - - -<div id="comments"> -<div id="disqus_thread"></div> -<script type="text/javascript"> - /* * * CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT BEFORE PASTING INTO YOUR WEBPAGE * * */ - var disqus_shortname = 'grimoire'; // required: replace example with your forum shortname - - /* * * DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE * * */ - (function() { - var dsq = document.createElement('script'); dsq.type = 'text/javascript'; dsq.async = true; - dsq.src = 'http://' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js'; - (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq); - })(); -</script> -<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href="http://disqus.com/?ref_noscript">comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript> -<a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a> -</div> - - - - <div id="footer"> - <p> - - The Codex — - - Powered by <a href="http://markdoc.org/">Markdoc</a>. - -<a href="https://bitbucket.org/ojacobson/grimoire.ca/src/master/wiki/gossamer/mistakes.md">See this page on Bitbucket</a> (<a href="https://bitbucket.org/ojacobson/grimoire.ca/history-node/master/wiki/gossamer/mistakes.md">history</a>). - - </p> - </div> - -</div> -</body> -</html>
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