6 ms·

Yay! I don't think they get it yet, but this is badly needed. They key is that the trust must always be subjective. You trust specific people and you should ad

by comboy 4y ago

Yay! I don't think they get it yet, but this is badly needed. They key is that the trust must always be subjective. You trust specific people and you should adjust that trust over time. Those people trust other people, you have just a few hops to anybody on the planet thanks to small world effect. I've spent a good time thinking about it and I believe trust evaluation function should also be up to the user, all we need is a protocol.

wyldfire 4y ago
All I can see is a dystopia where it's illegal to try and connect to one of these networks with a device that doesn't have a government-signed bootloader and illegal to portray yourself on these networks as anyone other than your real legal identity. Yay Sybil attacks are harder but general purpose computing [1] is well and truly dead. [1] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
- Aunche 4y ago
  I don't see why it would be problematic to require the real identities of those who want to act as authorities of information. That's how it has always worked. Ideas are trustworthy because people who they are endorsed by people who you deem as trustworthy.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Same reason why we still don't know who deep throat is.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      Deep throat is Mark Felt. "On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair reported that Felt, then aged 91, claimed to be the man once known as "Deep Throat".[23] Later that day, Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee released a statement through The Washington Post confirming that the story was true"
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        So why did he wait 40 years then?
        themitigating 4y ago
        I don't know, I was just relaying information. Why does it matter?
    - Aunche 4y ago
      Deep Throat wasn't anonymous to Woodward though, and the general public trusted Woodward.
  - least 4y ago
    That isn't how it works, actually. Anonymity is in fact quite often an essential component to relaying the truth.
- comboy 4y ago
  All you need is to have secure communication channels between people. Yes, one could argue it is already not really possible if your adivesary is the gov, but it seems to be much broader problem than the topic at hand.
tdeck 4y ago
Why would trust be transitive? I don't trust people 3 degrees of connection away from me. Why would I? If someone X I know and trust directly introduces me to source Y, that's already only a slight endorsement. Somebody I know clicking a button 3 years ago saying they trust person A who liked some article means pretty much nothing.
- comboy 4y ago
  Trust is transitive but it is not binary. It is very important that it is not binary (multiply weights along the path) You would have multiple paths to any node and you need to aggregate that.
unethicist 4y ago
Yes, I've also been thinking about this a lot, and reached similar conclusions. One of the main issues I can't think my way around is privacy. I don't want my full and true trust network to be publicly available, although I might provide a more detailed map to my trusted peers. I might also "lie" about a given weight depending on who asks, for diplomatic purposes (perhaps you have a close friend who also happens to be rather gullible). A working system is going to take a lot of effort on behalf of each user to correctly and accurately annotate their own trust graphs, on an ongoing basis - perhaps this just too impractical. I performed a slightly unethical experiment many years ago, In which I created an entirely fake Facebook account (back when people actually used Facebook), and slowly sent out friend requests to personal acquaintances. All it takes is one or two to get started, and every subsequent person sees "n mutual friends" and is more likely to accept the random request. It snowballed from there, and eventually I had "infiltrated" a non-trivial portion of my own social network with an entirely fictional persona. (Ethics note: I only sent friend requests to people I was already friends with on my real account - so I wasn't obtaining any new private information I wouldn't otherwise have had access to - and I didn't perform any interactions beyond sending friend requests) Any kind of trust network is going to need to deal with this sort of infiltration - and I'm not sure how. And another thing - trust is bought and sold all the time. Social media influencers sell a small fragment of their trust level every time they do a paid endorsement. If there's some kind of explicit trust network, people will pay others to obtain a higher trust level. Is there anything we can do about that?
- comboy 4y ago
  Yeah, we went the same places. Usability, bootstrapping and privacy - the biggest problems as I see it ordered by difficulty (yup). Privacy - make queries require some trust from you. Your software may decide what is allowed based on your needs, e.g. low trust have lots of limiting and global limits while letting close friends ask as much as they want, you could also take into account who are you replying to. Some other privacy issues could perhaps be solved with having a wallet of identities. Usability - very hard, I think it must be weighted and I think it should be weighted in a way that's not algorithmic. It should be you explicit trust to somebody - that's a rock foundation that if you tell me you trust some person 80% I know it's you saying that and not what some algorithm computed. We have a really good idea about our social network trust in hour heads and we keep updating it, but it seems hard to transfer to a device or even verbalize. Assigning weights to each trusted person is just too much to ask even from the most engaged users. Some app could perhaps ask you whether you ask more person A or B from time to time after asking for a short list of your most trusted peers or something like that, but it is a hard problem which I see no clear solution to yet. Adjusting is also not obvious, if you got high trust result to say some mechanic and he turned out to be terrible you'd like to see which person did it come from and perhaps lower trust your trust to them. Because they could be compromised. That's another problem. If it becomes what it can, billions will be spent to try to affect results. People can be compromised and have no idea. I think FB and such faced such problem already but it is easier to counter as a centralized entity. Social consequences would be huge but it does not fix the world completely. E.g. there still would be stupid hubs. That is, many people are going to trust some celebrity and that celebrity is going to sell trust abuse power etc. But that's those people choice. In short it just lets you query trust, but the way people assign it seems more like an education system problem. Part of my how much I trust somebody is how good is he at assigning trust. Some people I dont trust much not because I think they are malicious but because I know they can be influenced easily or are not careful about assesing their trust. In my experience despite the Internet and all that comes with it, asking trusted people remains the best way to learn about many things. They just point me to something and I know its worth my time. Would be nice if it could scale and not waste time on both sides.

by comboy 4y ago

wyldfire 4y ago

All I can see is a dystopia where it's illegal to try and connect to one of these networks with a device that doesn't have a government-signed bootloader and illegal to portray yourself on these networks as anyone other than your real legal identity. Yay Sybil attacks are harder but general purpose computing [1] is well and truly dead. [1] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

Aunche 4y ago
I don't see why it would be problematic to require the real identities of those who want to act as authorities of information. That's how it has always worked. Ideas are trustworthy because people who they are endorsed by people who you deem as trustworthy.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Same reason why we still don't know who deep throat is.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Deep throat is Mark Felt. "On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair reported that Felt, then aged 91, claimed to be the man once known as "Deep Throat".[23] Later that day, Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee released a statement through The Washington Post confirming that the story was true"
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      So why did he wait 40 years then?
      - themitigating 4y ago
        I don't know, I was just relaying information. Why does it matter?
  - Aunche 4y ago
    Deep Throat wasn't anonymous to Woodward though, and the general public trusted Woodward.
- least 4y ago
  That isn't how it works, actually. Anonymity is in fact quite often an essential component to relaying the truth.
comboy 4y ago
All you need is to have secure communication channels between people. Yes, one could argue it is already not really possible if your adivesary is the gov, but it seems to be much broader problem than the topic at hand.

tdeck 4y ago

Why would trust be transitive? I don't trust people 3 degrees of connection away from me. Why would I? If someone X I know and trust directly introduces me to source Y, that's already only a slight endorsement. Somebody I know clicking a button 3 years ago saying they trust person A who liked some article means pretty much nothing.

comboy 4y ago
Trust is transitive but it is not binary. It is very important that it is not binary (multiply weights along the path) You would have multiple paths to any node and you need to aggregate that.

unethicist 4y ago

Yes, I've also been thinking about this a lot, and reached similar conclusions. One of the main issues I can't think my way around is privacy. I don't want my full and true trust network to be publicly available, although I might provide a more detailed map to my trusted peers. I might also "lie" about a given weight depending on who asks, for diplomatic purposes (perhaps you have a close friend who also happens to be rather gullible). A working system is going to take a lot of effort on behalf of each user to correctly and accurately annotate their own trust graphs, on an ongoing basis - perhaps this just too impractical. I performed a slightly unethical experiment many years ago, In which I created an entirely fake Facebook account (back when people actually used Facebook), and slowly sent out friend requests to personal acquaintances. All it takes is one or two to get started, and every subsequent person sees "n mutual friends" and is more likely to accept the random request. It snowballed from there, and eventually I had "infiltrated" a non-trivial portion of my own social network with an entirely fictional persona. (Ethics note: I only sent friend requests to people I was already friends with on my real account - so I wasn't obtaining any new private information I wouldn't otherwise have had access to - and I didn't perform any interactions beyond sending friend requests) Any kind of trust network is going to need to deal with this sort of infiltration - and I'm not sure how. And another thing - trust is bought and sold all the time. Social media influencers sell a small fragment of their trust level every time they do a paid endorsement. If there's some kind of explicit trust network, people will pay others to obtain a higher trust level. Is there anything we can do about that?

comboy 4y ago
Yeah, we went the same places. Usability, bootstrapping and privacy - the biggest problems as I see it ordered by difficulty (yup). Privacy - make queries require some trust from you. Your software may decide what is allowed based on your needs, e.g. low trust have lots of limiting and global limits while letting close friends ask as much as they want, you could also take into account who are you replying to. Some other privacy issues could perhaps be solved with having a wallet of identities. Usability - very hard, I think it must be weighted and I think it should be weighted in a way that's not algorithmic. It should be you explicit trust to somebody - that's a rock foundation that if you tell me you trust some person 80% I know it's you saying that and not what some algorithm computed. We have a really good idea about our social network trust in hour heads and we keep updating it, but it seems hard to transfer to a device or even verbalize. Assigning weights to each trusted person is just too much to ask even from the most engaged users. Some app could perhaps ask you whether you ask more person A or B from time to time after asking for a short list of your most trusted peers or something like that, but it is a hard problem which I see no clear solution to yet. Adjusting is also not obvious, if you got high trust result to say some mechanic and he turned out to be terrible you'd like to see which person did it come from and perhaps lower trust your trust to them. Because they could be compromised. That's another problem. If it becomes what it can, billions will be spent to try to affect results. People can be compromised and have no idea. I think FB and such faced such problem already but it is easier to counter as a centralized entity. Social consequences would be huge but it does not fix the world completely. E.g. there still would be stupid hubs. That is, many people are going to trust some celebrity and that celebrity is going to sell trust abuse power etc. But that's those people choice. In short it just lets you query trust, but the way people assign it seems more like an education system problem. Part of my how much I trust somebody is how good is he at assigning trust. Some people I dont trust much not because I think they are malicious but because I know they can be influenced easily or are not careful about assesing their trust. In my experience despite the Internet and all that comes with it, asking trusted people remains the best way to learn about many things. They just point me to something and I know its worth my time. Would be nice if it could scale and not waste time on both sides.