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Email and SMS are very much distributed systems. There are many mail servers, and many telephone companies, cell phone companies and VoIP providers that can se
by bcrl 4y ago
Email and SMS are very much distributed systems. There are many mail servers, and many telephone companies, cell phone companies and VoIP providers that can send SMS messages. With SMS messages the problem is quite similar to e-mail in that the protocol the network is built on (SS7) was designed in a time when all carriers that had access to the phone network were trusted.
You've fallen into the naive assumption that spammers use the same identity for each piece of spam being sent out, which is simply not true. I get plenty of spam phone calls with fake phone numbers despite the fact that STIR/SHAKEN has supposedly been implemented. Forged digital identities are cheap. And if forged identities are cheap, there's no trust mechanism that can work.
Presumably you'll counter by saying that you can simply assign a negative trust to unknown identities. In the real world there are plenty of us that have to communicate with people we haven't communicated with before (my business can't afford to turn away customers I don't already know), so we can't simply drop unknown identities.
The spam problem is hard because identities are hard, and digital identities are doubly so. Time and time again has proven that simple hand wavey solutions do not work.
- impossiblefork 4y agoNo, I haven't. A message from an entity which has not yet sent a spam message does indeed have the save priorization characteristics as one from any other entity withour connections to anything, but presumably a new user is invited by someone. Furthermore, a new user could presumably say things on the spam-filled rubbish subforums, until he gets an upvote from someone who is trusted by somebody, and then after a while he becomes a participant. The readon you see problems is, I think, that you imagine a system of private, individual, communication, while I imagine an enormous public forum.
- bcrl 4y agoYou are failing to address a use-case that matters. As a result, your solution can't be adopted by everyone, and will therefore fail. You need to consider privacy concerns, as not everyone in the world wants to see their web of associations made public. Look at privacy laws in Europe and other countries to get a better idea of what is required. Writing code is dead easy if you remove all the requirements from users.
- impossiblefork 4y agoYes, but I am interested in forums-- things resembling slashdot, or reddit or flashback. Furthermore, among high-trust users PMs can be permitted even on such systems; and I csn actually give a superb procedure for dealing with spam in PMs among moderately trusted users: by letting a receiving user move a PM into the public flow of the sender.
- bcrl 4y agoForums still have individual to individual conversations. Forums also have instances where individuals have an excellent reputation on one group but post what is considered to be spam in other groups. Take reddit and /r/theDonald. Reputation management is non-trivial, and trivial designs fail in the real world. Plus you still have the problem of how to treat an individual that is a first time poster. On many forums I never bothered creating an account until I felt I had something useful to contribute. In your system, how do you distinguish between the first time poster making a beneficial addition to the conversation versus a first time spammer? I feel you're hand waving this really hard problem away.
- impossiblefork 4y agoYes, and this is why this one-graph-for-everyone makes so much sense for forums. The Donald was genuinely popular. Some people didn't want it to be, but it was. I believe that this contributed more to its banning than any incidents relating to it. The problem you're bringing up isn't really a solvable problem unless you have a human secretary as intelligent as yourself, and then it would be as appropriate for you to be the secretary for the person you'd have as a secretary. Curation by some entity is going to involve being manipulated, which is very dangerous.
- lukasyuy5 4y ago
- lukasyuy5 4y ago