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A day that passed in walks and thinking about the social network…

After writing version 5, I went to the network security lecture, and on the way an stupid problem occurred to me, one that I should’ve thought about – a group of determined people can evict anyone they want using signatures with negative level of trust, and their reasons can’t be easily verified (e.g. a ‘mob rule’). I have an idea how this can be fixed, but it’s not in the document right now, because I’m not really sure about it, and I’m publishing it here and in orkut, to see some comments.

4.6) Eviction/disconnected sets, dealing with spam
(if not noted otherwise, the following paragraphs are strictly
about users’ keys)
It’s something normal (although not very good) for a community to have
different sets within it, sometimes disconnected. This network is no
exception, and there’s the possibility to have no way to send messages
between two groups, if some signatures are revoked, or levels of trust
lowered, based on someone’s actions. This is possible if the group that’s
connected to the offending subnetwork revokes or lowers it’s trust for
all it’s members. This way you can establish a subnet, that can receive
read/check requests from the network, but won’t have anything accepted
(except revocations).
This creates a way to easily deal with spam, with isolating the
offending members. When the users understand the significance of their
recommendations/signatures, the problem will be even lower, because
it’ll be hard or impossible to get an offender to be trusted again.

Keys can still be validated through trackers’ keys, to ensure that
a request will be sent to the right person, that’s not in your subnet
of signatures. The decision about accepting such messages is left to
the user.

Another interesting event was receiving a question from an user from orkut about my blog, and about my RSS feed not working. I got that fixed some days ago, and still haven’t fixed the main page, but adding ?lang=en to the URL makes the RSS feed to be in English. There is another problem with the comments in the english version, which I’ll fixt in the next few days, when I get some time.

Today’s stats: 530 mails, 424 legal, and 106 identified as spam. I remember deleting about 2 or 3 spams manually. I like the result :)
(and the stupid russian spam isn’t going away …)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2004 at 00:47 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.