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We (speaking as a netizen) need Usenet 2.0; eg: something that can fulfill the role of reddit that is decentralized/distributed. Perhaps reddit can even transit

We (speaking as a netizen) need Usenet 2.0; eg: something that can fulfill the role of reddit that is decentralized/distributed. Perhaps reddit can even transition into being a reader (a la google reader) for people that don't want to set up their own node. I'm not saying that drug discussion is the quintessential act that deserves to be protected, but I am worried that the government has such an easy avenue to get this information. What happens when it's something far more political? What happens when they serve a gag order alongside their subpoena? What happens when the people talking aren't technically inclined, and don't use Tor? (By the way, I would bet these people were using Tor and this subpoena is useless.)

maxerickson 12y ago
The way one of them vaporized their reddit presence (from what I could tell from a few minutes looking at the time), they didn't feel very safe about the information they may have leaked.
dogecoinbase 12y ago
(By the way, I would bet these people were using Tor and this subpoena is useless.) Based on how poor the opsec of previous darknet admins has been, I see no reason to assume theirs was any better.
- atmosx 12y ago
  You can't register via Tor on HN. I wonder if you can do that on reddit. Then there's always the email account thing, but if you were careful from day one, you could get away with it. Hosting AMAs is both stupid and provocative IMHO when you're a drug dealer.
  - ethbro 12y ago
    > Hosting AMAs is both stupid and provocative IMHO when you're a drug dealer. Unless your endgame, as would seem entirely reasonable as a logical illicit dealer, is pump sales and dump the entire business as quickly as possible. In which case the additional attention and growth might offset the additional risk over short time horizons.
  - Leynos 12y ago
    Reddit doesn't require an email address to create an account.
mmcru 12y ago
i agree. recently i desired to create an online community for a small game that probably wouldn't have many users or posts. subreddits are fantastic for that type of thing, and i like the ease of use and PRAW, however, handing over all of the community's data to conde nast isn't something i'm interested in. what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities, which would consist of a message board with upvotes/downvotes, user profiles, and perhaps a small chat system, with good mobile integration. as you said, it should be decentralized. it should also be as secure as possible without requiring non-standard software like TOR.
- mirimir 12y ago
  See https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/list-of-the-best-encrypted-chatroom-services.374700/ https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/list-of-the-best-enc...
  - mmcru 12y ago
    interesting, hadn't heard of virtually all of these, thanks ;-)
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    I'm amused that this pops up two scary security warnings in Chrome, presumably due to the fact that it's a self-signed cert and is using what Chrome says is outdated crypto.
    - mirimir 12y ago
      Yes, it's a self-signed cert. But hey, can we really trust cert authorities? Other than that, SSL Labs gives it an A rating <https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=wilderssecurity.com&latest> https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=wilderssecuri.... I wouldn't know about Chrome. Don't trust it ;)
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  > * what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities* vBulletin has support for all of this, as does WordPress, and probably a hundred other pieces of software. The downside, as always, is that you become a sysadmin and moderator and hacker and on-call technician.
dsr_ 12y ago
Usenet 3; Usenet 2 has already been done.
dublinben 12y ago
Have you checked out Freenet recently? There are a few plugins for message boards, mail, and following feeds. It's highly decentralized, censorship resistant, and can be very anonymous.
- nickysielicki 12y ago
  Thank you for posting this!
jkot 12y ago
Usenet 2.0 is Facebook :-)
pjc50 12y ago
Well, Usenet 1.0 was decentralised, and people need to think about the disadvantages. In the early 2000s well over 50% of the traffic was spam cancels. An forum without an "owner" who can delete posts and effectively ban spammers and "abuse" will promptly be filled with spam and abuse. The issue of "abuse" which is harmful to people other than users of the forum should also be considered carefully.
- im2w1l 12y ago
  Web of trust-based spam filtering takes some effort to use, but is a workable solution.
  - teraflop 12y ago
    That's a nice theory, but has it been demonstrated to work in any real systems? Is it known to be a workable solution at the scale of Usenet/Reddit?
    - im2w1l 12y ago
      That's a very high bar to set :) No it hasn't been validated for that use case for that large a system. Some examples where it has been used: PGP uses web of trust to validate keys. Freenet boards used web of trust to succesfully stave off spam attack. They are a lot smaller than reddit of course.
      - schoen 12y ago
        It's not clear that the PGP web of trust will survive well under an attack, at least in terms of most users not being fooled. Someone made a fake PGP for me several years ago, and many people have chosen that over my genuine key when e-mailing me, just because the fake key is newer, even though my genuine key has lots of signatures and the fake key has none at all. (It was probably Enigmail helping them make the choice rather than a clearly informed decision.) Meanwhile, there is already a complete clone of the strong set with colliding key IDs. That is, people have spent the computing time needed to make a fake version of every single public key, with the same name and key ID and signatures as the real one, just with a different fingerprint. (There's one at https://evil32.com/ https://evil32.com/, but I think at least one other group has done the same thing!) If someone uploaded those to the keyservers, there would be a fake copy of each PGP public key with the same key ID and the same signature structure (of course signed by other fake keys rather than by other real keys). At that point you would always have a 50% chance of getting a fake key every time you tried to use PGP to contact a new person, unless you consciously manually used an out-of-band fingerprint verification mechanism to bootstrap your selection of what key to use. You would never be safe in just guessing because you "found a key out there" for someone and it "looked right" and "had a bunch of signatures"!. I'm willing to be more charitable toward the web of trust than someone like Moxie is -- I think more users could be taught to be more cautious, and software could help automate key exchange better -- but my own experiences with having a fake key out there in my name don't make me very optimistic about the way the web of trust is being used today. It's also sad to ponder, as Moxie has, that it seems PGP isn't even being used widely enough to make it worthwhile for attackers to try to DoS the web of trust, let alone to try to trick people into using the wrong keys on a large scale. (That is, PGP hasn't even reached Gandhi's "then they fight you" stage in the mass market.) This isn't to deny that PGP has provided major communications security benefits to smaller communities and groups that have consciously adopted it and use it carefully.
fit2rule 12y ago
Take a look at ipfs: http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ This is pretty close to being what you describe, in that it will function as a transport layer - now all that is needed is a standardized protocol for how to put information onto it that can be easily found.
RexRollman 12y ago
It's a good idea but spammers and trolls ruin everything. It's the reason why many places are tightening down on Tor users.
imaginenore 12y ago
http://twister.net.co/ http://twister.net.co/
natrius 12y ago
If you're interested in decentralized applications, you need to be paying attention to Ethereum, Whisper, Swarm, and IPFS. The building blocks for what you're describing are being built. It will happen.
- lurkinggrue 12y ago
  https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - uxp 12y ago
    Implementations are not standards.
  - natrius 12y ago
    Of the four projects I listed, only Swarm and IPFS overlap in functionality. Ethereum is a decentralized, consensus-driven data store and execution environment. Whisper is a decentralized messaging protocol, which you'd use for data that doesn't require consensus. Consensus is expensive and relatively slow, but communication between parties doesn't require it. Swarm and IPFS are content-addressable, decentralized file transfer systems. You'd use one of these to store the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that implement an application on top of the other decentralized systems. Or just to store arbitrary static files. It's hard to shut down a system that lives on thousands of computers and can be accessed by typing the name of the site into a web browser. That's the experience that's motivating people to build these systems, and they're going to change the way the world works.
- TheDong 12y ago
  Let me throw tent.io into the mix: https://tent.io/ https://tent.io/
higherpurpose 12y ago
Someone actually started an "anonymous Reddit" app about two years ago. But the sole developer was then hired by Google, I think. I don't remember the name of the app, but it was kind of alpha mode and pretty slow.
pain 12y ago
http://getaether.net http://getaether.net is "reddit without servers" a "community moderated, distributed, and anonymous" tool great for the great repression.
FireBeyond 12y ago
"but I am worried that the government has such an easy avenue to get this information" This is a public forum. Hell, one of the users even VOLUNTEERED himself to be interviewed by the users of one of the most popular websites in the world under the topic of what amounts to "I run or help run a drug smuggling/selling marketplace". What reasonable expectation should this user have to privacy? You can't do all these things in public and then say "well, the government shouldn't be able to look at me for it" - I'd think what he did met the very definition of probable cause.
- themgt 12y ago
  Yes, and the parent was arguing that the internet should have communication systems whereby people can speak in public without the government being able to look at them for it.
  - FireBeyond 12y ago
    Things aren't special "because ... Internet!". If something is done in public, it's done in public. If you'd face consequences for it on the street, why shouldn't you online? I can't see any particular level of logic than "we should be able to get away with shit online". Note, for emphasis, that this is entirely an aside to the subject of legalization, as I'm actually much more pro-legalization than anything else.
    - wmf 12y ago
      The Federalist Papers were published pseudonymously in 1787. I don't think people are asking for special privileges for the Internet.
      - Steko 12y ago
        We're the Federalist Papers advocating/admitting to illegal activity?
        undersuit 12y ago
InclinedPlane 12y ago
I'm not sure that usenet 2.0 is even possible, just merely due to scale, although it would be nice if it did. I was very active on usenet back in the early to mid 1990s and I would say that it was an enormously valuable experience. I interacted with a lot of smart people, I got to explore a lot of exciting areas of interest, and I spent a lot of time improving my writing abilities. It makes me sad to think that there are lots of people who well never benefit from that experience. At their best HN and parts of reddit can be excellent, but there's still a lot that they're missing.
- deftnerd 12y ago
  USENET 2.0 could be set up so only headers are transferred. Then third party groups could publish moderation whitelists that the USENET provider to subscribe to. If a moderated whitelist approves some content, then the server would download it via DHT so its locally available. If a user requests something in a header that hasn't been filled yet because it's not moderated by an approved whitelist, it would download it and then serve it to the user. This would make it so content that's purely spam wouldn't be pulled to all the USENET servers. If a moderation provider started vouching for a lot of spam, it would quickly be removed by providers.

maxerickson 12y ago

The way one of them vaporized their reddit presence (from what I could tell from a few minutes looking at the time), they didn't feel very safe about the information they may have leaked.

dogecoinbase 12y ago

(By the way, I would bet these people were using Tor and this subpoena is useless.) Based on how poor the opsec of previous darknet admins has been, I see no reason to assume theirs was any better.

atmosx 12y ago
You can't register via Tor on HN. I wonder if you can do that on reddit. Then there's always the email account thing, but if you were careful from day one, you could get away with it. Hosting AMAs is both stupid and provocative IMHO when you're a drug dealer.
- ethbro 12y ago
  > Hosting AMAs is both stupid and provocative IMHO when you're a drug dealer. Unless your endgame, as would seem entirely reasonable as a logical illicit dealer, is pump sales and dump the entire business as quickly as possible. In which case the additional attention and growth might offset the additional risk over short time horizons.
- Leynos 12y ago
  Reddit doesn't require an email address to create an account.

mmcru 12y ago

i agree. recently i desired to create an online community for a small game that probably wouldn't have many users or posts. subreddits are fantastic for that type of thing, and i like the ease of use and PRAW, however, handing over all of the community's data to conde nast isn't something i'm interested in. what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities, which would consist of a message board with upvotes/downvotes, user profiles, and perhaps a small chat system, with good mobile integration. as you said, it should be decentralized. it should also be as secure as possible without requiring non-standard software like TOR.

mirimir 12y ago
See https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/list-of-the-best-encrypted-chatroom-services.374700/ https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/list-of-the-best-enc...
- mmcru 12y ago
  interesting, hadn't heard of virtually all of these, thanks ;-)
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  I'm amused that this pops up two scary security warnings in Chrome, presumably due to the fact that it's a self-signed cert and is using what Chrome says is outdated crypto.
  - mirimir 12y ago
    Yes, it's a self-signed cert. But hey, can we really trust cert authorities? Other than that, SSL Labs gives it an A rating <https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=wilderssecurity.com&latest> https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=wilderssecuri.... I wouldn't know about Chrome. Don't trust it ;)
pavel_lishin 12y ago
> * what i'd like is a tool with which to create online communities* vBulletin has support for all of this, as does WordPress, and probably a hundred other pieces of software. The downside, as always, is that you become a sysadmin and moderator and hacker and on-call technician.

dsr_ 12y ago

Usenet 3; Usenet 2 has already been done.

dublinben 12y ago

Have you checked out Freenet recently? There are a few plugins for message boards, mail, and following feeds. It's highly decentralized, censorship resistant, and can be very anonymous.

nickysielicki 12y ago
Thank you for posting this!

jkot 12y ago

Usenet 2.0 is Facebook :-)

pjc50 12y ago

Well, Usenet 1.0 was decentralised, and people need to think about the disadvantages. In the early 2000s well over 50% of the traffic was spam cancels. An forum without an "owner" who can delete posts and effectively ban spammers and "abuse" will promptly be filled with spam and abuse. The issue of "abuse" which is harmful to people other than users of the forum should also be considered carefully.

im2w1l 12y ago
Web of trust-based spam filtering takes some effort to use, but is a workable solution.
- teraflop 12y ago
  That's a nice theory, but has it been demonstrated to work in any real systems? Is it known to be a workable solution at the scale of Usenet/Reddit?
  - im2w1l 12y ago
    That's a very high bar to set :) No it hasn't been validated for that use case for that large a system. Some examples where it has been used: PGP uses web of trust to validate keys. Freenet boards used web of trust to succesfully stave off spam attack. They are a lot smaller than reddit of course.
    - schoen 12y ago
      It's not clear that the PGP web of trust will survive well under an attack, at least in terms of most users not being fooled. Someone made a fake PGP for me several years ago, and many people have chosen that over my genuine key when e-mailing me, just because the fake key is newer, even though my genuine key has lots of signatures and the fake key has none at all. (It was probably Enigmail helping them make the choice rather than a clearly informed decision.) Meanwhile, there is already a complete clone of the strong set with colliding key IDs. That is, people have spent the computing time needed to make a fake version of every single public key, with the same name and key ID and signatures as the real one, just with a different fingerprint. (There's one at https://evil32.com/ https://evil32.com/, but I think at least one other group has done the same thing!) If someone uploaded those to the keyservers, there would be a fake copy of each PGP public key with the same key ID and the same signature structure (of course signed by other fake keys rather than by other real keys). At that point you would always have a 50% chance of getting a fake key every time you tried to use PGP to contact a new person, unless you consciously manually used an out-of-band fingerprint verification mechanism to bootstrap your selection of what key to use. You would never be safe in just guessing because you "found a key out there" for someone and it "looked right" and "had a bunch of signatures"!. I'm willing to be more charitable toward the web of trust than someone like Moxie is -- I think more users could be taught to be more cautious, and software could help automate key exchange better -- but my own experiences with having a fake key out there in my name don't make me very optimistic about the way the web of trust is being used today. It's also sad to ponder, as Moxie has, that it seems PGP isn't even being used widely enough to make it worthwhile for attackers to try to DoS the web of trust, let alone to try to trick people into using the wrong keys on a large scale. (That is, PGP hasn't even reached Gandhi's "then they fight you" stage in the mass market.) This isn't to deny that PGP has provided major communications security benefits to smaller communities and groups that have consciously adopted it and use it carefully.

fit2rule 12y ago

Take a look at ipfs: http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ This is pretty close to being what you describe, in that it will function as a transport layer - now all that is needed is a standardized protocol for how to put information onto it that can be easily found.

RexRollman 12y ago

It's a good idea but spammers and trolls ruin everything. It's the reason why many places are tightening down on Tor users.

imaginenore 12y ago

http://twister.net.co/ http://twister.net.co/

natrius 12y ago

If you're interested in decentralized applications, you need to be paying attention to Ethereum, Whisper, Swarm, and IPFS. The building blocks for what you're describing are being built. It will happen.

lurkinggrue 12y ago
https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- uxp 12y ago
  Implementations are not standards.
- natrius 12y ago
  Of the four projects I listed, only Swarm and IPFS overlap in functionality. Ethereum is a decentralized, consensus-driven data store and execution environment. Whisper is a decentralized messaging protocol, which you'd use for data that doesn't require consensus. Consensus is expensive and relatively slow, but communication between parties doesn't require it. Swarm and IPFS are content-addressable, decentralized file transfer systems. You'd use one of these to store the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that implement an application on top of the other decentralized systems. Or just to store arbitrary static files. It's hard to shut down a system that lives on thousands of computers and can be accessed by typing the name of the site into a web browser. That's the experience that's motivating people to build these systems, and they're going to change the way the world works.
TheDong 12y ago
Let me throw tent.io into the mix: https://tent.io/ https://tent.io/

higherpurpose 12y ago

Someone actually started an "anonymous Reddit" app about two years ago. But the sole developer was then hired by Google, I think. I don't remember the name of the app, but it was kind of alpha mode and pretty slow.

pain 12y ago

http://getaether.net http://getaether.net is "reddit without servers" a "community moderated, distributed, and anonymous" tool great for the great repression.

FireBeyond 12y ago

"but I am worried that the government has such an easy avenue to get this information" This is a public forum. Hell, one of the users even VOLUNTEERED himself to be interviewed by the users of one of the most popular websites in the world under the topic of what amounts to "I run or help run a drug smuggling/selling marketplace". What reasonable expectation should this user have to privacy? You can't do all these things in public and then say "well, the government shouldn't be able to look at me for it" - I'd think what he did met the very definition of probable cause.

themgt 12y ago
Yes, and the parent was arguing that the internet should have communication systems whereby people can speak in public without the government being able to look at them for it.
- FireBeyond 12y ago
  Things aren't special "because ... Internet!". If something is done in public, it's done in public. If you'd face consequences for it on the street, why shouldn't you online? I can't see any particular level of logic than "we should be able to get away with shit online". Note, for emphasis, that this is entirely an aside to the subject of legalization, as I'm actually much more pro-legalization than anything else.
  - wmf 12y ago
    The Federalist Papers were published pseudonymously in 1787. I don't think people are asking for special privileges for the Internet.
    - Steko 12y ago
      We're the Federalist Papers advocating/admitting to illegal activity?
      - undersuit 12y ago

InclinedPlane 12y ago

I'm not sure that usenet 2.0 is even possible, just merely due to scale, although it would be nice if it did. I was very active on usenet back in the early to mid 1990s and I would say that it was an enormously valuable experience. I interacted with a lot of smart people, I got to explore a lot of exciting areas of interest, and I spent a lot of time improving my writing abilities. It makes me sad to think that there are lots of people who well never benefit from that experience. At their best HN and parts of reddit can be excellent, but there's still a lot that they're missing.

deftnerd 12y ago
USENET 2.0 could be set up so only headers are transferred. Then third party groups could publish moderation whitelists that the USENET provider to subscribe to. If a moderated whitelist approves some content, then the server would download it via DHT so its locally available. If a user requests something in a header that hasn't been filled yet because it's not moderated by an approved whitelist, it would download it and then serve it to the user. This would make it so content that's purely spam wouldn't be pulled to all the USENET servers. If a moderation provider started vouching for a lot of spam, it would quickly be removed by providers.