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Let's just focus on one thing that many people are used to: the news feed. Say I want to find out what all my friends are up to lately. Since this information

by jschuur 16y ago

Let's just focus on one thing that many people are used to: the news feed. Say I want to find out what all my friends are up to lately. Since this information doesn't live in a (more or less) central place any more like it used to on Facebook, I need to go out and contact each node (in an encrypted, secure way) that my friends run/pay to host on an ISP and ask them, what they're up to lately. That information then gets merged by my local node (that I presumably access to view a news stream) and displayed to me. Isn't that more than a bit inefficient? Hundreds of friends, means hundreds of connections going out, to grab friend updates, each with encryption overhead. And all those nodes have to be up and running of course. OK, so let's assume your own node is smart enough to cache these updates. Maybe it even gets updates pushed to it when my friends update, so it's not constantly polling all of them in search for updates. That means if my friend withdraws permission to see their updates, I still have access to their cached info local to my own node. So perhaps there's also a push update system that handles revocation. You remove permissions and send another message to those affected to forget your info. But what if I run a modified node that chooses to ignore this information? The whole thing is open source and anyone can tinker with their node code. Say I friend a malicious entity, decide I don't like them anymore, and take back their access. It could be too late. See, this is the kind of technical detail I was hoping for. Real life examples and a vague outline of how they're going to tackle them.

sorbus 16y ago
Well, that's the problem with having friends. Whenever you let someone get near to you, they could be carrying a hidden microphone and a video camera. And, even if you explicitly tell them that you don't want to be friends with them any more, they'll still remember everything you've told them. The same issue crops up with email, letters ... hell, every way we've communicated for hundreds or thousands of years: there is no way to revoke access to information once granted, even if access to new information is withheld. You might as well complain that someone could take screenshots of everything you say that shows up in their news feed.
tcdent 16y ago
It seems inneficcient if you think of it in an HTTP way, but technologies like BitTorrent are built on exactly this. I see no reason to cache locally and create the additional privacy issues raised in other threads on this page.

by jschuur 16y ago

sorbus 16y ago

Well, that's the problem with having friends. Whenever you let someone get near to you, they could be carrying a hidden microphone and a video camera. And, even if you explicitly tell them that you don't want to be friends with them any more, they'll still remember everything you've told them. The same issue crops up with email, letters ... hell, every way we've communicated for hundreds or thousands of years: there is no way to revoke access to information once granted, even if access to new information is withheld. You might as well complain that someone could take screenshots of everything you say that shows up in their news feed.

tcdent 16y ago

It seems inneficcient if you think of it in an HTTP way, but technologies like BitTorrent are built on exactly this. I see no reason to cache locally and create the additional privacy issues raised in other threads on this page.