patrick.net
An Antidote to Corporate Media
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1
Patrick
2018 Nov 2, 7:17pm
Patrick
2018 Nov 2, 7:17pm
Patrick says
Heard a good tip today that might solve the spam problem: "registration" could be a Bitcoin transaction, paying a tiny amount of money and including a message on the blockchain that defines the user name and public key. Spammers generally won't pay anything at all. And since the blockchain is unique and immutable, we can be sure that username collisions would be avoided as well, for a bonus.
Still haven't figured out how to create a url to get to the content no matter which clone was taken down.
The biggest problems I haven't figured out yet:
* How to create a url that would automatically hit one the clones, and move on if that clone fell victim to the censors.
* How to deal with spam. The elimination of censorship is similar to the elimination of spam filters. But since all comments are signed, it might be possible distribute a blacklist of bad users to all the clones.
Heard a good tip today that might solve the spam problem: "registration" could be a Bitcoin transaction, paying a tiny amount of money and including a message on the blockchain that defines the user name and public key. Spammers generally won't pay anything at all. And since the blockchain is unique and immutable, we can be sure that username collisions would be avoided as well, for a bonus.
Still haven't figured out how to create a url to get to the content no matter which clone was taken down.
3
Patrick
2018 Nov 2, 7:25pm
Patrick
2018 Nov 2, 7:25pm
Don't worry, all accounts will not only still exist, they will become uncensorable. Immortal in a way, if this works.
I'll personally make sure all the existing accounts, posts, and comments carry over.
I'll personally make sure all the existing accounts, posts, and comments carry over.
4
Patrick
2018 Nov 3, 12:51pm
Patrick
2018 Nov 3, 12:51pm
Aphroman says
I was listening to a talk on the radio about how Google has found AI to be insufficient to find and censor "hate speech", but what they didn't mention is that "hate speech" is simply thin cover for censoring anything that is politically out of favor by the Left at the moment. This is why AI can never work. AI will inevitably diverge from the desired result of censoring one's political enemies no matter what position they take.
@Aphroman :
1. if the site is dead, how could we be talking on it?
2. please give an example of any point you'd like to make that was censored
Insulting other users or the site itself is not a point, just an insult.
How to account for political bias that leads to censorship is the biggest problem
I was listening to a talk on the radio about how Google has found AI to be insufficient to find and censor "hate speech", but what they didn't mention is that "hate speech" is simply thin cover for censoring anything that is politically out of favor by the Left at the moment. This is why AI can never work. AI will inevitably diverge from the desired result of censoring one's political enemies no matter what position they take.
@Aphroman :
1. if the site is dead, how could we be talking on it?
2. please give an example of any point you'd like to make that was censored
Insulting other users or the site itself is not a point, just an insult.
5
Hircus
2018 Nov 4, 6:20pm
Hircus
2018 Nov 4, 6:20pm
Patrick says
Very few sites are enticing enough to grow their user base while making the user go through a non-trivial registration process.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if many sites charged a nickle or w/e for registration or other stuff where weeding people out make sense. But, it's needs to be convenient. I personally just can't be bothered to register for most sites unless its really easy.
Heard a good tip today that might solve the spam problem: "registration" could be a Bitcoin transaction, paying a tiny amount of money and including a message on the blockchain that defines the user name and public key. Spammers generally won't pay anything at all.
Very few sites are enticing enough to grow their user base while making the user go through a non-trivial registration process.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if many sites charged a nickle or w/e for registration or other stuff where weeding people out make sense. But, it's needs to be convenient. I personally just can't be bothered to register for most sites unless its really easy.
6
LastMan
2018 Nov 4, 6:32pm
You're overestimating the importance of this site. All you have is a relatively small number of posters who decided to stick around as the site transitioned from housing to politics. Even Smaulgold seems to have moved on.
It will be interesting to see if this gets banned as "insulting the site".
It will be interesting to see if this gets banned as "insulting the site".
7
FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut
2018 Nov 4, 7:29pm
FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut
2018 Nov 4, 7:29pm
login is already complicated. i kind of wish it was simpler actually. because on mobile i dont know my random password, and I can't change it either. :(
lost my old one.
lost my old one.
8
Patrick
2018 Nov 5, 7:29am
Patrick
2018 Nov 5, 7:29am
@FortWayneIndiana Can't you get email on your phone?
What would make things simpler?
What would make things simpler?
10
FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut
2018 Nov 5, 8:53pm
FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut
2018 Nov 5, 8:53pm
Patrick says
I think being able to change or pick password would make it much easier. On a mobile phone it's not easy to login if I don't remember the password, it's going back and forth between safari tabs.
@FortWayneIndiana Can't you get email on your phone?
What would make things simpler?
I think being able to change or pick password would make it much easier. On a mobile phone it's not easy to login if I don't remember the password, it's going back and forth between safari tabs.
11
Patrick
2018 Nov 6, 8:16am
Patrick
2018 Nov 6, 8:16am
I literally do not have time to moderate all the comments. I have a job.
So what is it that you are trying to say but cannot?
So what is it that you are trying to say but cannot?
12
Patrick
2018 Nov 10, 4:37pm
Patrick
2018 Nov 10, 4:37pm
One of the three main points of corporate/government control over what we are allowed to read is DNS. (The other two being SSL certificates and allocation of IP addresses, and maybe search engines.)
So how can you replace DNS so that people in China, say, can still find clones of a site even if the Chinese government and their evil servant Google does not want them to? People are experimenting with using cryptocurrencies for this kind of thing. You can write messages into the various blockchains. For Bitcoin, you'd make a payment to a non-existent account, using the "to" account simply as data. The non-existent account would be permanently and uncensorably in the blockchain forever, just as data. Let's say the "to" account encodes this:
realtalksite:1:24.39.299.2
realtalksite:2:15.27.232.9
Another nice feature: the fact that it costs some minimum to do a blockchain transaction, maybe 50 cents, would really cut down on spammers and flooding attacks. The money would simply be lost. A registration fee paid to no one.
Then you could make /etc/hosts into a "named pipe" or something similar, such that when the browser asked for, say, the ip address of "realtalksite", it would actually go out and query the blockchain for that data, then try a GET on each one until it got one that looked alive.
So your browser would work as normal, but you could have a url like http://realtalksite/
As long as people keep replicating realtalksite to new ip addresses, I don't see how the government or corporations could effectively censor it.
All the pieces are kind of there already, except that some software would have to be installed to map from /etc/hosts to the blockchain. Can anyone think of a simpler way to get censorship-resistant DNS? I'd really like to avoid the need to install any new software at all, so that even granny could easily find things which the government does not want her to read.
So how can you replace DNS so that people in China, say, can still find clones of a site even if the Chinese government and their evil servant Google does not want them to? People are experimenting with using cryptocurrencies for this kind of thing. You can write messages into the various blockchains. For Bitcoin, you'd make a payment to a non-existent account, using the "to" account simply as data. The non-existent account would be permanently and uncensorably in the blockchain forever, just as data. Let's say the "to" account encodes this:
realtalksite:1:24.39.299.2
realtalksite:2:15.27.232.9
Another nice feature: the fact that it costs some minimum to do a blockchain transaction, maybe 50 cents, would really cut down on spammers and flooding attacks. The money would simply be lost. A registration fee paid to no one.
Then you could make /etc/hosts into a "named pipe" or something similar, such that when the browser asked for, say, the ip address of "realtalksite", it would actually go out and query the blockchain for that data, then try a GET on each one until it got one that looked alive.
So your browser would work as normal, but you could have a url like http://realtalksite/
As long as people keep replicating realtalksite to new ip addresses, I don't see how the government or corporations could effectively censor it.
All the pieces are kind of there already, except that some software would have to be installed to map from /etc/hosts to the blockchain. Can anyone think of a simpler way to get censorship-resistant DNS? I'd really like to avoid the need to install any new software at all, so that even granny could easily find things which the government does not want her to read.
First, replace logins with an RSA keypair. So to post a new comment, you'd digitally sign the comment in the browser via javascript downloaded from p.net and then send the comment. The comment would appear with an attribution to that key, and would be stored in the browser in LocalStorage. So the browser would become the authoritative location for a comment, and servers would simply be caches of comments.
Once passwords are no longer in the database (and after removing all email addresses from the database), then the database could be shared to other clone sites without any loss of security.
SSL would also no longer be needed because no passwords or email addrs would be going over the network. So that's one avenue of censorship evaded. (SSL certs)
Every page would then include an encouragement to run your own clone of the site, with a very simple "curl | bash" type install script for those who have their own virtual server somewhere and enough tech experience to run a few commands in a Linux terminal.
Every clone would report back its IP address and that would propagate to all the clones. So now there would be a set of servers in various places, all with complete copies of the database. You could read or post to any one of them and it would be equivalent.
The biggest problems I haven't figured out yet:
* How to create a url that would automatically hit one the clones, and move on if that clone fell victim to the censors.
* How to deal with spam. The elimination of censorship is similar to the elimination of spam filters. But since all comments are signed, it might be possible distribute a blacklist of bad users to all the clones.