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Distributed Balance

daeken.com

38 pointspmg10 comments

I'm glad to see this here, as I think that now -- while things are in the earliest stages of design -- is the time for us to make changes and adapt. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to voice them here or in #distributedbalance on Freenode; this project needs communities like this to work.

How do you plan to reconcile the web of trust with the potential harm that can come to people who leak data?

I think the real issue is verifying the legitimacy of a leak. If you can verify something, you don't have to trust the person who posted it and they can remain safe and anonymous.

Also, are you familiar with http://globaleaks.org/ ?

> How do you plan to reconcile the web of trust with the potential harm that can come to people who leak data?

So, the web of trust doesn't apply to individuals, just nodes in the network. Thus, each node can handle incoming leaks however they want to, or not at all. In fact, if this is designed properly then there might be some sort of plausible deniability in terms of who got a leak first.

> I think the real issue is verifying the legitimacy of a leak. If you can verify something, you don't have to trust the person who posted it and they can remain safe and anonymous.

Verifying the legitimacy of leaks is more of a social than a technical issue; the web of trust is there primarily to prevent propagation of damage, not to ensure propagation of the truth.

> Also, are you familiar with http://globaleaks.org/ ?

Yeah, it's a nice project, but the lack of a federated protocol makes it vulnerable to the same thing as Wikileaks and friends.

That's pretty interesting. For one because there is a good person behind it, second because it deals with the 'single point of failure' of wikileaks in the form of a figurehead.

Are you going to be accepting donations to develop this?

I will certainly donate to this.

Thanks for the kind words! I won't be accepting donations of any kind with this, just time from people working on it; donations make things far more complex, and it's not hard to fund it out of pocket.

Sharing music, video and/or porn on the network will be mostly inevitable. But on the other hand, the web of trust should limit the impact of this alot. If you consider that people interested in curating/helping with the leaks and documents would distrust peers putting porn/music/video up, there will likely be 2 or more networks with little trust between one another.

You didn't mention anything about anonymization of the nodes/peers. I am guessing you're thinking of putting this behind Tor?

> You didn't mention anything about anonymization of the nodes/peers. I am guessing you're thinking of putting this behind Tor?

You'll be able to do so, but I imagine that most people will run this outside of Tor. 1) It makes it easier for people to access, and 2) In theory, there will be so many nodes that the risk to any one operator will be low.

The link https://github.com/daeken/DistributedBalance

says "There is nothing to see here yet. Move on"

There's not any useful code yet. The Github repo is primarily to be used for issue tracking and all that, but 99% of design is happening on IRC right now.

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