Re: [GNU/consensus] [SocialSwarm-D] Consensus on the aims of this group

[Nick Jennings]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Andreas Kuckartz <address@hidden> wrote:

carlo von lynX:

> It is no longer clear if people in here are Social Swarm, GNU consensus
> or something else currently using the name #youbroketheinternet. The
> latter just seemed to be the most appropriate name since we can't get
> social off the ground without fixing the Internet first.
>
> In the past we worked out http://libreplanet.org/wiki/GNU/consensus/berlin-2013
> and reached a consensus on at least these points:
>
>       - End-to-end encryption
>       - Perfect Forward Secrecy
>       - Social graph and transmission pattern obfuscation
>       - Self determined data storage

I unfortunately did not participate in that meeting but I probably would
have agreed with these items as goals. (I had seen the invitation but
considered most of the projects which were originally mentioned as being
mostly irrelevant.)

But it is unlikely that I would have agreed that improvements of subsets
of this set of items are out of scope.

> These four requirements make it such that any discussion of "improvements" of
> the general situation that does not fulfil them should be seen as out of
> scope for this group of people.

I wonder if all the participants agree with _that_ interpretation. I
guess that I would have been surprised by it...

I did participate in the meeting in Berlin in August as part of the unhosted movement, specifically Sockethub and remoteStorage. Although we did agree on those 4 points listed, there was no consensus on the conclusion being "throw it all out and start over". Although I think what Carlo is doing is interesting and has a lot of potential, I think there are still many things to be done to improve privacy and improve or create new paradigms for the responsibility of developing for the web, and expectations of users.

I think GNUnet is a huge undertaking and, like Melvin, wonder whether it's a realistic expectation to redesign everything and implement it with what I believe is only a couple developers (?). We discussed the possibility that somewhere down the road a lot of the work we're doing with remoteStorage and Sockethub might be applied to the app-level infrastructure of GNUnet, which is an interesting idea and one way to offload a bit of the work of starting over and re-implementing everything from scratch.

 

> Feel free to put some band aids around SMTP, XMPP and other established apps,
> but don't discuss it here - especially not as a solution to our list of basic
> requirements. Let us work on solutions that fulfil OUR basic requirements for privacy.
> This is the only thing that differentiates us from dozens of other similar groups.

That meeting decided what is in scope for the GNU/consensus and the
Social Swarm mailing lists? Really?

I am definitely not opposed to making decisions about requirements and
things which are out-of-scope in a discussion or for a working group.
Such decisions sometimes are necessary. But I doubt that these
out-of-scope decisions have really been made.

And I am beginning to wonder if what I see here is representative for
the CCC...

Cheers,
Andreas

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