3 ms·

I can not see a single thing on there that would raise any eyebrows.

southerntofu 5y ago
> determine whether information they come across online is trustworthy or not Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not? Is it a central authority, or a WoT? The former is a very dangerous tool of social control, the latter does not usually address concerns of misinformation, as the WoT forms information bubbles with their confirmation biases. > the project will allow users to vote on content trustworthiness. The number of votes appears as an indicator that may assist others in assessing trustworthiness How are these votes stored? Are they part of the ActivityPub protocol, or a third-party centralized layer, or some kind of blockchain/DHT? Do you get to see the votes of your contacts, or the overall votes? How do you prevent misinformation campaign to try and hijack the votes? If they are stored in a WoT/blockchain, what kind of measures can you take to protect the social graph? More from the website: > a unique peer-to-peer and blockchain infrastructure > EUNOMIA users can see the modifications of online information in between different users' posts, in an information cascade > This may include indicators of bot activity, such as the ratio of followers to following I don't know about you, but these sentences make me raise eyebrows.
- q3k 5y ago
  > Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not? > How are these votes stored? From what I can tell, this is literally a research project attempting to answer these questions. Look at the results tab, then under 'Demonstrators, pilots, prototypes' to see what they have come up with so far.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Yes, i understand that's a research project. I'm just skeptical of a publicly-funded software research project with millions of euros of funding (most researchers i know don't have access budgets like that) and with seemingly some ties to the surveillance/military apparatus. Also i did some digging, and despite a paywall and some articles without links at all, their publications raise more questions than they answer about the actual trust/governance model and privacy implications (see my other comments quoting some bits). Moreover, the sentiment/subjectivity analysis via ML leaves me dubious. I have a hard time believing AI can understand human discourse and/or help solve human problems, see also James Mickens USENIX talk "Why do keynote speakers keep suggesting we can improve security?" Finally, let me put on my paranoid hat: if i were to build a large-scale surveillance network to expose the social graph and flow of information (think XKEYSCORE) for decentralized social media, it would look a lot like EUNOMIA! On the contrary, if i were to build a reputation protocole for decentralized social media, it would be much simpler than the EUNOMIA project, and would probably be based on some kind of Web of Trust / Fog of Trust (since it's aimed at classifying/auditing public data, where the social graph is already, at least partially, exposed).
- user-the-name 5y ago
  You are knee-jerk reacting to keywords you have been taught to hate, instead of actually reading and comprehending what is being said. You need to work on that, first of all.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > You are knee-jerk reacting to keywords you have been taught to hate Quite the contrary, my french culture and education has taught me to have great respect for authority and for startup nation bullshit newspeak. But since then, i have developed some form of critical thinking. > You need to work on that, first of all. I tried. In their publications section, out of 7 items, there are: 2 that don't have a link; 1 about text/image similarity analysis; 1 about sentiment analysis; 1 about situated knowledge and the "user-researcher"; 1 that's behind a paywall (the one describing the EUNOMIA project); 1 that's not even a scientific paper but an "information hygiene" guide In their "Deliverables" section we find more information. I find it strange that documents are labeled "Dissemination Level: Public", or "Type of deliverable PUBLIC" which suggests acquaintance with the surveillance/military industrial complex, as originally exposed in the critique linked in the article i was mentioning: https://hub.libranet.de/wiki/paulfree14/The(20)critical(20)EUnomia(20)FAQ/Home#Who_funded_EUnomia_and_for_what_amount_ https://hub.libranet.de/wiki/paulfree14/The(20)critical(20)E... From these documents, a few quotes which may raise eyebrows: - the [blockchain] framework offers embedded mechanisms for preserving privacy with the use of digital signatures and cryptographic hashes - each information element that it is stored in the P2P distributed file storage a specific token will be generated by the Storage Serve - The AAA Server is responsible for the authentication, authorization and accounting. Any entity that wishes to connect to the EUNOMIA infrastructure needs to communicate with this server. - The Discovery Server provides means to allow the discovery of other services and corresponding metadata, including their public keys - deleted posts will be removed from associated cascades, P2P databases and the EUNOMIA Blockchain ledger

> determine whether information they come across online is trustworthy or not Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not? Is it a central authority, or a WoT? The former is a very dangerous tool of social control, the latter does not usually address concerns of misinformation, as the WoT forms information bubbles with their confirmation biases. > the project will allow users to vote on content trustworthiness. The number of votes appears as an indicator that may assist others in assessing trustworthiness How are these votes stored? Are they part of the ActivityPub protocol, or a third-party centralized layer, or some kind of blockchain/DHT? Do you get to see the votes of your contacts, or the overall votes? How do you prevent misinformation campaign to try and hijack the votes? If they are stored in a WoT/blockchain, what kind of measures can you take to protect the social graph? More from the website: > a unique peer-to-peer and blockchain infrastructure > EUNOMIA users can see the modifications of online information in between different users' posts, in an information cascade > This may include indicators of bot activity, such as the ratio of followers to following I don't know about you, but these sentences make me raise eyebrows.

q3k 5y ago
> Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not? > How are these votes stored? From what I can tell, this is literally a research project attempting to answer these questions. Look at the results tab, then under 'Demonstrators, pilots, prototypes' to see what they have come up with so far.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Yes, i understand that's a research project. I'm just skeptical of a publicly-funded software research project with millions of euros of funding (most researchers i know don't have access budgets like that) and with seemingly some ties to the surveillance/military apparatus. Also i did some digging, and despite a paywall and some articles without links at all, their publications raise more questions than they answer about the actual trust/governance model and privacy implications (see my other comments quoting some bits). Moreover, the sentiment/subjectivity analysis via ML leaves me dubious. I have a hard time believing AI can understand human discourse and/or help solve human problems, see also James Mickens USENIX talk "Why do keynote speakers keep suggesting we can improve security?" Finally, let me put on my paranoid hat: if i were to build a large-scale surveillance network to expose the social graph and flow of information (think XKEYSCORE) for decentralized social media, it would look a lot like EUNOMIA! On the contrary, if i were to build a reputation protocole for decentralized social media, it would be much simpler than the EUNOMIA project, and would probably be based on some kind of Web of Trust / Fog of Trust (since it's aimed at classifying/auditing public data, where the social graph is already, at least partially, exposed).
user-the-name 5y ago
You are knee-jerk reacting to keywords you have been taught to hate, instead of actually reading and comprehending what is being said. You need to work on that, first of all.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > You are knee-jerk reacting to keywords you have been taught to hate Quite the contrary, my french culture and education has taught me to have great respect for authority and for startup nation bullshit newspeak. But since then, i have developed some form of critical thinking. > You need to work on that, first of all. I tried. In their publications section, out of 7 items, there are: 2 that don't have a link; 1 about text/image similarity analysis; 1 about sentiment analysis; 1 about situated knowledge and the "user-researcher"; 1 that's behind a paywall (the one describing the EUNOMIA project); 1 that's not even a scientific paper but an "information hygiene" guide In their "Deliverables" section we find more information. I find it strange that documents are labeled "Dissemination Level: Public", or "Type of deliverable PUBLIC" which suggests acquaintance with the surveillance/military industrial complex, as originally exposed in the critique linked in the article i was mentioning: https://hub.libranet.de/wiki/paulfree14/The(20)critical(20)EUnomia(20)FAQ/Home#Who_funded_EUnomia_and_for_what_amount_ https://hub.libranet.de/wiki/paulfree14/The(20)critical(20)E... From these documents, a few quotes which may raise eyebrows: - the [blockchain] framework offers embedded mechanisms for preserving privacy with the use of digital signatures and cryptographic hashes - each information element that it is stored in the P2P distributed file storage a specific token will be generated by the Storage Serve - The AAA Server is responsible for the authentication, authorization and accounting. Any entity that wishes to connect to the EUNOMIA infrastructure needs to communicate with this server. - The Discovery Server provides means to allow the discovery of other services and corresponding metadata, including their public keys - deleted posts will be removed from associated cascades, P2P databases and the EUNOMIA Blockchain ledger