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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 05 2015, @08:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the i-wonder-if-they-run-rehash dept.

Stumbled upon this (disclaimer, I'm not affiliated and don't hold any special interest):

Aether is an app you install to your computer to connect to Aether network. This network is made of different boards (forums) where people post and discuss things. On the surface, it's fairly similar to Slashdot, Metafilter, Reddit, or any other community site on the Internet.

The different thing about Aether is that it doesn't have a server somewhere. The only thing the app does is that it finds and connects to other people using Aether. In other words, it's a distributed, peer-to-peer network.

This makes it impossible to censor, and renders its users anonymous. It's useful for people concerned about privacy, or pretty much anyone who doesn't want to be watched and catalogued for every word they write on the Internet (so, pretty much everybody).

It's also temporary. Whatever you post disappears after six months. It's designed to be an ephemeral space, and it's focused on now, rather than the past. Other people can still keep copies of what you wrote, but it won't last forever in the network itself. They also won't know who you are.

Community moderated, distributed and anonymous. Almost to good to be true, but... how do you know it is actually _gewg that's posting?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Monday July 06 2015, @05:48AM

    by VortexCortex (4067) on Monday July 06 2015, @05:48AM (#205499)

    how do you know it is actually _gewg that's posting?

    The problem with anonymous forums is that they're easily infested with shills who leverage underhanded tactics to control the conversation, like consensus cracking, false flagging, demotivation, distraction, opinion "nudging" such as arguing two extremes while a 3rd shill presents a "moderate" yet propagandized response, etc. [digitalnewsasia.com]

    Having seen the underbelly of the beast where a trolling industry has sprang up that allows everyone from governments to political parties, from to corporations to "non profit" organizations, to pay for shills to shape online discourse I recognize that the value of a purely anonymous system is very low, especially when it doesn't actually provide anonymity -- network analysis will tell you who posted what. Since Tor still has a hard time providing anonymity [thestack.com] then I don't hold out much hope that TFA's offering isn't worse. It's useful to be able to pick a pseudonym, perhaps just temporarily. Fortunately, so long as you're not ridiculously limited in message length then a client-side solution can be provided by simply integrating a PGP signature with each post. Unfortunately, there's a middle ground where one would like a verifiable pseudonym (see: tripcodes [name / fingerprint] on message boards like 2chan, et. al.), but without trusted signatories (or a centralized site) it's hard to provide such features (trust graph doesn't cut it for per-conversation verifiable poster ID -- centralized sites can just provide a topicID HMAC'd with poster IP address).

    Due to a lack of moderation a purely anonymous posting forum does not scale well. As soon as it gets popular it's turned to shit. This is because the guarantee of anonymity creates a headache for self-moderation, i.e., spammers, shills and griefers can easily flood a conversation without adequate filtering being possible. On most centralized online forums a moderator team essentially provides a default filter you can not opt out of. With a decentralized approach the end users must be given adequate tools to apply their own filter -- Sharing (and merging) filter rules thus makes moderation opt-in: Users can crowdsource and select a "view" that is tailored to fit their desired discretion; Don't like the "moderation" then select a different moderator filter, or create your own filter (or drop them all to see completely uncensored mayhem with a side of spam). Being able to even temporarily filter all but signed posts is thus very useful -- so useful that any distributed anonymous message platform really should have a filter such as this. Come on now, let's learn from IRC's +v (voice) +m (mute) and etc. options rather than rediscover this particular wheel. Without moderators each filter is simply applied client side. Instead of moderators (or their bots) giving people they recognize or like a "voice", the client can maintain such a list and apply it to the unfiltered hive of messages on their own machine -- but that only works if pseudonyms or message signatures are also allowed instead of pure anonymity.

    Nothing I'm saying here is new or unknown. Any modern anonymous messaging system that doesn't have such facilities is a decade sized step in the wrong direction. See also: TOX. [tox.im] Which is a great decentralized messaging platform that is also unfortunately missing many features. You'd think in today's day and age we could have at least just update usenet + PGP with some ephemeral IRC features and a better decentralization strategy... but we apparently can't since everyone wants to make us re-roll the whole party's character-sheets. Fortunately, some of us realize that it's the damn centralized Web's fault we don't have privacy online and are doing something about it by baking in decentralized data distribution (NDN) [named-data.net] With NDN baked in, a "reddit" implementation (along with damn near everything else) would have TFA's "anonymity" built in, but also support many more features like optional persistence. All the past decentralized / distributed data systems are just hacky kludges; Named Data Networking is the solution we need, i.e., the Internet itself needs to help out with decentralization rather than inefficiently putting all of the burden on the endpoints.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=2, Informative=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
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    Total Score:   5