Re: [GNU/consensus] [SH] Re: GNU Consensus Manifesto -- Comments

[Rich Hilliard]

What actions can be taken on pseudonyms? 
E.g. can I follow/subscribe to a user knowing her pseudonym? 
Can I forward/repost something posted by a pseudonym?
Can I forward/repost something containing someone's pseudonym?
Does pseudonym's owner have control over what actions are available on use of 
this identity?

It seems to me these are interesting cases to consider for 
distributed/federated identity.
If all this has been worked out, please point me to that. I'd be interested.

 -- Rich


On Jan 11, 2013, at 2:13 PM, Michael Rogers wrote:

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> On 11/01/13 14:17, Mikael Nordfeldth wrote:
>> Hm, I guess I could read up on this, but how is somethig like a
>> group chat constructed if none of the participants have no
>> knowledge of who is who in a non-local namespace?
> 
> The participants in a discussion group can't relate the pseudonyms
> used in the group to personal identities, and that's intentional - "in
> a discussion group, nobody knows you're a dog".
> 
> The reason that's desirable is that any participant in a group can
> invite other participants to join the group, who may not be trusted by
> all the existing participants. So participants in group discussions
> can either use pseudonyms or remain anonymous.
> 
> Of course, if you don't mind being identified, your pseudonym can be
> your real name.
> 
>> (I think OTR folks is struggling incredibly hard with getting this
>> to work somewhat properly?)
> 
> Multi-party OTR has a different goal - participants in a group chat
> should be able to prove who's taking part, until the chat ends, when
> nobody should be able to prove who took part. As you say, hard. :-)
> 
>> Yes, the ideas may perhaps be well suited for, say, private
>> messaging parts of a protocol. When not even the servers should
>> know contents of messages or relations between contacts.
> 
> Pond (https://github.com/agl/pond) has an interesting technique based
> on group signatures for concealing the relations between contacts from
> servers. We haven't yet worked out the corresponding part of the Briar
> protocol, but there might be some ideas in Pond that we could use.
> 
> Cheers,
> Michael
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