4 ms·

I've dived head first into Bluesky and AT Proto in the last 2 months. The platform is amazing and I was able to grow an app from 0 to 30k users in that time[1].

by dom96 2y ago

I've dived head first into Bluesky and AT Proto in the last 2 months. The platform is amazing and I was able to grow an app from 0 to 30k users in that time[1]. I have also been long pondering what puts me off social media and how I could fix it. Often times it is the ease by which anyone can create new anonymous accounts, those accounts can be used to easily brew up a Firestorm of Falsehood[2]. Identity is a strong part of this and domain name verification isn't enough to solve this. One potentially radical idea I've had is to form a social network of verified humans. Where each human is only allowed a single account. This is possible, while remaining anonymous to other users. I think the only way in which this can be done is by relying on passport (and other government IDs) verification. I have actually built a prototype of this (still very much a WIP)[3]. Of course, the barrier to entry is tough, if anyone has thoughts/concerns and suggestions on how I can make this happen I'd love to hear them. Edit: To those downvoting I'd love to hear why, please :) 1 - https://listifications.app https://listifications.app 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood 3 - https://onlyhumanhub.com https://onlyhumanhub.com

lxgr 2y ago
How do you verify identity in that prototype? (Not providing my data to a signup form before I know at least the rough idea.) > I think the only way in which this can be done is by relying on passport (and other government IDs) verification. Given that most national IDs currently can't anonymously certify personhood to third parties, this seems like it puts unreasonable trust into the "identity broker" preserving both anonymity and not certifying sockpuppets. I don't see a scenario in which any even moderately successful solution would not eventually crumble under these two types of pressure.
- dom96 2y ago
  > How do you verify identity in that prototype? By using a third party service to read your passport's NFC chip, we then generate a strong crypto hash of the concatenation of your name, DoB, and last 4 digits of your passport and we also encrypt that hash for good measure. I agree that it sounds invasive, but there is no better way to verify uniqueness of a passport (and by proxy a human's uniqueness). And yes, I am aware that a single human can have more than one passport. It's certainly not perfect. But it reduces the possibility of sock puppet accounts significantly. If you register (just with your email and password), you'll get a little explanation of all the data collected (and don't have to move forward if you don't want to). > this seems like it puts unreasonable trust into the "identity broker" preserving both anonymity and not certifying sockpuppets True, but with enough resources onlyhumanhub itself can become the identity broker, no need for a third party.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Newer passports intentionally don't support third-party verifiable signatures anymore (earlier ones did). Non-repudiation was always a bug, not a feature, and that functionality is going away in newer implementations due to privacy concerns [1]. So unfortunately it's back to a centrally trusted verifier even with chip-enabled passwords for this use case. > True, but with enough resources onlyhumanhub itself can become the identity broker, no need for a third party. That doesn't address my concern at all: Why should I trust that service with something as sensitive as the mapping of my real identity to any number of pseudonyms? What's the economic incentive to not eventually offer a de-anonymization service to the highest bidder? [1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/75058/using-epassport-with-active-chip-authentication-to-sign-documents https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/75058/using-epass...
    - dom96 2y ago
      Hmm, I'm not using verifiable signatures though. Surely there will continue to be a way for a third party to verify that a passport's NFC is authentic and can be trusted. That and the ability to pull some data off it is all I need. > Why should I trust that service with something as sensitive as the mapping of my real identity to any number of pseudonyms? What's the economic incentive to not eventually offer a de-anonymization service to the highest bidder? Do you trust banks? Hotels? They all take a copy of your passport and likely store it insecurely. The information that I store for the passports is irreversible. It's hashed. So even if I wanted to sell it I couldn't. I mean, sure, in the future if this becomes big and there is a company around it, it could become evil at any moment and then start selling this data but then you could easily sue the company for this.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        > Hmm, I'm not using verifiable signatures though. That's even worse then for older passports (and inevitable for newer ones): Everybody will have to trust the service to be honest about not issuing sockpuppet identities. How would you prove that you aren't? > Do you trust banks? Hotels? They all take a copy of your passport and likely store it insecurely. That's not a concern I have at all. Every company providing service upon "identity verification" through a scan/copy of somebody's passport deserves everything bad fraudsters can throw at them. It's a non-verification method. And by the same token, the hotel could try to leak the fact that I've stayed there, and everybody taking passport copies seriously as evidence might believe them. I'm fine with that risk too. Conversely, a private proof-of-humanity service will, by its nature, attract users that want to prove their humanity, well, privately. > The information that I store for the passports is irreversible. It's hashed. But that hash is ultimately calculated over somebody's passport data, isn't it? This means that anybody stealing your database will be able to deanonymize any user they have passport data for (which is not exactly secret information, as you've illustrated yourself with the hotel example).
mglikesbikes 2y ago
I handled the “real human” problem by charging access to the platform (and doing something socially responsible with the profits). Saw recently that X is starting to do this for signups, which feels icky (and likely explains why my idea didn’t take off).
- dom96 2y ago
  X has been doing this and it didn't seem particularly effective. There are still many bots on the platform. Also, someone with a lot of money can still get around this requirement. Bribing a government to get fake passports is possible, but many orders of magnitude more difficult.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    Bribing hotel clerks to make a new account every time a guest checks in and hands their passport over might be easier since in this case you just need to scan once to register. Maybe that sounds impractical and low volume but imagine you own a chain of hotels across thailand or whatever, you could probably make thousands of accounts a day and just sell that as a service.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Yes, that's just another problem with using ICAO biometric travel documents for something they have decidedly never been designed for: They don't have any PIN code protection, unlike some national digital ID schemes based on similar technology.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
It's really not a convincing pitch to me. It just raises the cost of bots to whatever I have to bribe a poor person to let me scan their documents, and it doesn't do anything to prevent me from putting an LLM in charge of my posts. Maybe you could require biometric login, something that requires a Google, Apple, or Yubikey issued secure enclave that authenticates on physical touch / face ID, and require that touch for every post. For me as a person participating in online communities, I'd rather just stay in my private group chats where I have met the people I'm interacting with.
- dom96 2y ago
  No solution is perfect unfortunately. Even biometric login is easily duped, you can just hire a bunch of workers to pass the biometric check. Certainly much cheaper than bribing poor people to scan passports, eventually you'll run out of passports and we have a chance of identifying those types of accounts based on the passport country and how they behave.
- lxgr 2y ago
  "Proof of <x>hood" is explicitly a non-goal for FIDO authenticators, and implementors go to great lengths to make it impossible (primarily for privacy reasons); that's why they support anonymous attestation only, except in an enterprise context. That's the thing about reusing existing services and protocols for "proof of x": Quite often, such proofs being possible are often adjacent to or explicitly an anti-goal. Apple does indeed offer an API that allows uniquely identifying a given device in a privacy-preserving way, though: There's an API that allows apps to store two bits of information about a given device, such as "this device was involved in fraudulent activity on our platform" or "this device has already redeemed a free trial at one point". Not sure if Google has an equivalent.
probe 2y ago
I strongly also think we're going to have a social network for humans-only (and one for AI-only, and one for humans + AI) have you looked into world.org? They're scanning eyes and giving robust human identities. Before immediately dismissing, I'd check out the video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnwoMxKHV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnwoMxKHV8 I think atproto + worldid can one day be very interesting
- dom96 2y ago
  Yes, I'm aware of this. It's a cool idea, but there are some big problems with this too.

by dom96 2y ago

lxgr 2y ago

How do you verify identity in that prototype? (Not providing my data to a signup form before I know at least the rough idea.) > I think the only way in which this can be done is by relying on passport (and other government IDs) verification. Given that most national IDs currently can't anonymously certify personhood to third parties, this seems like it puts unreasonable trust into the "identity broker" preserving both anonymity and not certifying sockpuppets. I don't see a scenario in which any even moderately successful solution would not eventually crumble under these two types of pressure.

dom96 2y ago
> How do you verify identity in that prototype? By using a third party service to read your passport's NFC chip, we then generate a strong crypto hash of the concatenation of your name, DoB, and last 4 digits of your passport and we also encrypt that hash for good measure. I agree that it sounds invasive, but there is no better way to verify uniqueness of a passport (and by proxy a human's uniqueness). And yes, I am aware that a single human can have more than one passport. It's certainly not perfect. But it reduces the possibility of sock puppet accounts significantly. If you register (just with your email and password), you'll get a little explanation of all the data collected (and don't have to move forward if you don't want to). > this seems like it puts unreasonable trust into the "identity broker" preserving both anonymity and not certifying sockpuppets True, but with enough resources onlyhumanhub itself can become the identity broker, no need for a third party.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Newer passports intentionally don't support third-party verifiable signatures anymore (earlier ones did). Non-repudiation was always a bug, not a feature, and that functionality is going away in newer implementations due to privacy concerns [1]. So unfortunately it's back to a centrally trusted verifier even with chip-enabled passwords for this use case. > True, but with enough resources onlyhumanhub itself can become the identity broker, no need for a third party. That doesn't address my concern at all: Why should I trust that service with something as sensitive as the mapping of my real identity to any number of pseudonyms? What's the economic incentive to not eventually offer a de-anonymization service to the highest bidder? [1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/75058/using-epassport-with-active-chip-authentication-to-sign-documents https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/75058/using-epass...
  - dom96 2y ago
    Hmm, I'm not using verifiable signatures though. Surely there will continue to be a way for a third party to verify that a passport's NFC is authentic and can be trusted. That and the ability to pull some data off it is all I need. > Why should I trust that service with something as sensitive as the mapping of my real identity to any number of pseudonyms? What's the economic incentive to not eventually offer a de-anonymization service to the highest bidder? Do you trust banks? Hotels? They all take a copy of your passport and likely store it insecurely. The information that I store for the passports is irreversible. It's hashed. So even if I wanted to sell it I couldn't. I mean, sure, in the future if this becomes big and there is a company around it, it could become evil at any moment and then start selling this data but then you could easily sue the company for this.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      > Hmm, I'm not using verifiable signatures though. That's even worse then for older passports (and inevitable for newer ones): Everybody will have to trust the service to be honest about not issuing sockpuppet identities. How would you prove that you aren't? > Do you trust banks? Hotels? They all take a copy of your passport and likely store it insecurely. That's not a concern I have at all. Every company providing service upon "identity verification" through a scan/copy of somebody's passport deserves everything bad fraudsters can throw at them. It's a non-verification method. And by the same token, the hotel could try to leak the fact that I've stayed there, and everybody taking passport copies seriously as evidence might believe them. I'm fine with that risk too. Conversely, a private proof-of-humanity service will, by its nature, attract users that want to prove their humanity, well, privately. > The information that I store for the passports is irreversible. It's hashed. But that hash is ultimately calculated over somebody's passport data, isn't it? This means that anybody stealing your database will be able to deanonymize any user they have passport data for (which is not exactly secret information, as you've illustrated yourself with the hotel example).

mglikesbikes 2y ago

I handled the “real human” problem by charging access to the platform (and doing something socially responsible with the profits). Saw recently that X is starting to do this for signups, which feels icky (and likely explains why my idea didn’t take off).

dom96 2y ago
X has been doing this and it didn't seem particularly effective. There are still many bots on the platform. Also, someone with a lot of money can still get around this requirement. Bribing a government to get fake passports is possible, but many orders of magnitude more difficult.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Bribing hotel clerks to make a new account every time a guest checks in and hands their passport over might be easier since in this case you just need to scan once to register. Maybe that sounds impractical and low volume but imagine you own a chain of hotels across thailand or whatever, you could probably make thousands of accounts a day and just sell that as a service.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Yes, that's just another problem with using ICAO biometric travel documents for something they have decidedly never been designed for: They don't have any PIN code protection, unlike some national digital ID schemes based on similar technology.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

It's really not a convincing pitch to me. It just raises the cost of bots to whatever I have to bribe a poor person to let me scan their documents, and it doesn't do anything to prevent me from putting an LLM in charge of my posts. Maybe you could require biometric login, something that requires a Google, Apple, or Yubikey issued secure enclave that authenticates on physical touch / face ID, and require that touch for every post. For me as a person participating in online communities, I'd rather just stay in my private group chats where I have met the people I'm interacting with.

dom96 2y ago
No solution is perfect unfortunately. Even biometric login is easily duped, you can just hire a bunch of workers to pass the biometric check. Certainly much cheaper than bribing poor people to scan passports, eventually you'll run out of passports and we have a chance of identifying those types of accounts based on the passport country and how they behave.
lxgr 2y ago
"Proof of <x>hood" is explicitly a non-goal for FIDO authenticators, and implementors go to great lengths to make it impossible (primarily for privacy reasons); that's why they support anonymous attestation only, except in an enterprise context. That's the thing about reusing existing services and protocols for "proof of x": Quite often, such proofs being possible are often adjacent to or explicitly an anti-goal. Apple does indeed offer an API that allows uniquely identifying a given device in a privacy-preserving way, though: There's an API that allows apps to store two bits of information about a given device, such as "this device was involved in fraudulent activity on our platform" or "this device has already redeemed a free trial at one point". Not sure if Google has an equivalent.

probe 2y ago

I strongly also think we're going to have a social network for humans-only (and one for AI-only, and one for humans + AI) have you looked into world.org? They're scanning eyes and giving robust human identities. Before immediately dismissing, I'd check out the video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnwoMxKHV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnwoMxKHV8 I think atproto + worldid can one day be very interesting

dom96 2y ago
Yes, I'm aware of this. It's a cool idea, but there are some big problems with this too.