July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[tahoe-dev] General questions about TAHOE-LAFS, local filesystems and P2P.
by Martin Baldan 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hello, I'm basically just a curious potential end user of this awesome technology. I've read a couple of posts that got me thinking: [Freedombox-discuss] Tahoe-LAFS is not a filesystem http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-November/0… [tahoe-dev] "BitTorrent for storage" is a bad idea -- [p2p-hackers] P2P file storage systems https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-February/006150.html This is a little example of what I think a nice user experience could be like, realistically (ie, assuming files and applications as currently understood are still relevant): I create a document, let's say a LibreOffice presentation. I save it. I modify it and save it again. I right-click on it (or similar procedure) and I can see that a copy is stored locally, another copy is stored in an online server I pay for (fully encrypted), and a third copy is stored in my laptop (or smartphone). They are all synced, unobstrusively (I don't experience any latency, syncing just works in the background). Now, let's say I want to share this document with a friend. I open a menu on the file (right click or whatever), select "share", select friend (like in Google docs). Now he will have a notification that I shared a document with him. My friend right-clicks on this document and he selects "follow this document". Now If I delete my document later, my friend will still be able to see all the snapshots up to the time I deleted it. My friend likes the document, so he recommends that I publish it. So I simply share it with a some popular swarm of peers. My question is, where does Tahoe fit in this picture, if at all? I mean, what would be the best way to merge local storage, single-user distributed storage, F2F (like Tahoe seems to be) and full-scale P2P, at the lowest level possible and in a transparent, but configurable, way? Since Tahoe is not intended to fill all those roles, how could it be combined with other services in order to produce a seamless user experience? Should Tahoe be the manager and delegate to other filesystems, should it be the other way around, should they coexist and be managed by some upper layer? And how does Tahoe relate right now with other projects such as XtreemFS (very similar to Tahoe) , Camlistore (more emphasis on metadata, less on duplication logistics), OneSwarm (privacy-preserving P2P), Tribler (a trackerless Bittorrent), to name a few? I would say XtreemFS is a direct competitor (but there could also be cooperation). As for the others, maybe they could be somehow combined with Tahoe to build an awesome user experience. What do you think? Best, -Martin _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org http://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[liberationtech] Technocracy Now event, August 23
by Steve Weis 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I saw a blurb about this "Technocracy Now" event on another list and thought it might be of interest to liberationtech. It shows a deep and nuanced appreciation of irony to include Palantir on a panel about government transparency and democracy. Case in point: http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf -------------- Technocracy Now http://technocracynow.eventbrite.com/ Tuesday, August 23, 2011 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (PDT) Mountain View, CA A discussion about how technology is changing government transparency and decision making with Ari Gesher (Palantir), Abhi Nemani (Code for America), Matt Monahan (Inflection) and more. A great event if you are interested in the civic space. -------------- _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[liberationtech] Technocracy Now event, August 23
by Steve Weis 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I saw a blurb about this "Technocracy Now" event on another list and thought it might be of interest to liberationtech. It shows a deep and nuanced appreciation of irony to include Palantir on a panel about government transparency and democracy. Case in point: http://wikileaks.ch/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf -------------- Technocracy Now http://technocracynow.eventbrite.com/ Tuesday, August 23, 2011 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (PDT) Mountain View, CA A discussion about how technology is changing government transparency and decision making with Ari Gesher (Palantir), Abhi Nemani (Code for America), Matt Monahan (Inflection) and more. A great event if you are interested in the civic space. -------------- _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [ZS] ZS reboot seed
by Bryce Lynch 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Dirk Bruere <dirk.bruere(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Given that you know vastly more about it than most of us, including > me, could you put together some suggestions as to how we proceed, with > recommendations? I'll take a crack at it: A lot of the Zero State notes and docs are online in Google Pages. That's pretty much a wiki. The usual wiki software (MediaWiki, Trac, MoinMoin, et cetera) is nice, but not distributed. One server, one database, one wiki. While it's possible to cluster the databases not all software plays nicely that way, and in fact a lot of database software we're likely to get hold of has serious hardcoded limitations on the number of nodes (MySQL, I'm looking at you). There are alternative wiki implementations that do the same thing but make it possible to share the whole shebang across arbitrary numbers of nodes, potentially more one per member of the Zero State, potentially more than one per member. The first thing that comes to mind is Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki (https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki) It's a web application (Ruby/Sinatra/JavaScript) which runs on a machine and is accessible through a web browser. It's designed such that multiple instances of the server can connect to one another over a network and synch up, so it's really one wiki spread across lots of machines at the same time. Multiple people can browse the wiki, create and edit pages. I dont' see why we can't have instances communicating over a darknet. The one that I keep coming back to (and not just because I suck at Ruby apps) is called Fossil (https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki) which is a distributed revision control system, bug/ticket tracker, blog, and wiki. It uses many of the same techniques as (and in fact is compatible with) the revision control system Git (http://git-scm.org/) Again, it's accessed with a web browser, everything is versioned, and multiple instances can synch up with one another in a by-any-means-necessary approach. Revision control is good for more than just source code - a lot of us use it to help manage our configuration files as well as things we write. We can check stuff we're working on into revision control if we wanted to. We could definitely use the wiki and blog. The ticket tracker could be used to assign and keep track of tasks (ticket #31337: Create Friendly AGI) that we're working on. Fossil can automatically synch off of a single server, or instances can synch off of each other and merge the data. It's cross platform. And, if something does happen, all it takes is a single instance of Fossil to re-bootstrap because every node has... well.. everything. We could import everything important into one of these systems and others could set up and synch their own copies of the whole Zero State superstructure. Chat isn't particularly difficult: While we could set up our own servers we could also just as easily take advantage of any and all XMPP services out there. There are skillions of them, and most of them can cross-chat between one another. I do that a lot with friends aorund the world: My jabber.ccc.de account can talk to the endno.de folks, the Blackbird folks, and so on. If we really wanted to we could set up our own XMPP servers. But there are other ways. Lately I've been experimenting with Litter (https://github.com/ptony82/litter) a distributed microblogging system written in Python. Unpack it, run it, and it does pretty much what you'd expect of Twitter.. save that it automatically seeks out and finds other instances of Litter on the network using IP multicasting and exchanges messages with them. It's pretty nifty and very lightweight. I haven't tested it with Tor or I2P yet, though. Torchat (https://github.com/prof7bit/TorChat) is actually implemented in a number of languages, but they all do pretty much the same thing: If you're running Tor on your laptop or workstation it'll set up a hidden service that is uniquely yours. Other Torchat users can, if they know the address, add you as a friend and you can IM over the Tor network. It's a pretty nice IM client. Tahoe-LAFS (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs) is a massively distributed file storage and sharing grid. The idea is that you install it and join a grid, and you donate a portion of your disk space to the grid that people can use to share and back up files. If some number of members built a grid we could put Zero State related materials into it for us to access - Fossil trees, documents, videos, audio recordings, whatever we needed to replicate and make available, we could. The next question is how to network all this stuff together. Tor (https://torproject.org/) is the first thing that comes to mind because it's the most popoular and heavily worked on right now. There isn't a whole lot that we couldn't set up so that it's available only to Zero State members through the Tor network who know the .onion addresses. If we wanted to go about it another way, we could use something like SocialVPN (https://socialvpn.wordpress.com/) It's written in C# but designed to be Mono-compatible, and it's a peer to peer VPN that connects users over... XMPP. Rather than hunting for IP addresses of other nodes to connect to, the addresses are usernames of some people you probably already have in your IM friends list. As I recall, their primary test transport for this project is GChat. However, my concern is that it implicitly exposes your socnet because the usernames and addresses of your IM friends/VPN nodes might be in the clear. I'm not sure yet, I haven't looked into it. It also hasn't shown a lot of development in the past year. For whatever software development we do in the long run, we'll need someplace to put it all. If we go with Fossil we'll have a very useful hosting environment already. However, there are some alternatives which should be explored (though they're not as distributed-friendly as Fossil). Gitlab (http://gitlabhq.com/) does pretty much what Github (https://github.com/) is, though it's F/OSS, meaning we can set up as many instances of it as we like, anywhere we like. It does project management, Git repository hosting and management, bug tracking, fork and merge management, it has a wiki... It's written with Ruby On Rails. We can also clone Github with Redmine (http://xdissent.com/2010/05/04/github-clone-with-redmine/) I have personal reservations about Redmine (because I suck at Ruby and have been fighting with it at work for most of a year now) but if someone here is good with it, feel free to consider it as an option. So, how do we search all this stuff? I've been running a YaCy (http://yacy.de/) node for over a year as part of their grid and I'm quite pleased with how well it works as a search engine. It's basically a distributed search engine that you can either proxy your traffic through (and it'll index everything you browse through it - it's privacy aware, too), or it can be fed links that it'll index, follow, index, follow... It can be run as part of a private search grid (Crusoe Mode), so we could set up a private YaCy network (and run the traffic over Tor) to index all of our resources. It's written in Java but installs pretty easily, though the indices are pretty big so disk space will be necessary. I'm long overdue to add a couple of terabytes to my YaCy box. -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ "I am everywhere." -- -- Zero State mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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by Trei, Peter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the > weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. > All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts > nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as > bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass > grow. Hey, I saw one of these in Switzerland, too, so it's not an "american only" thing. Mark

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by Trei, Peter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the > weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. > All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts > nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as > bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass > grow. Hey, I saw one of these in Switzerland, too, so it's not an "american only" thing. Mark

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by Trei, Peter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the > weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. > All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts > nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as > bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass > grow. Hey, I saw one of these in Switzerland, too, so it's not an "american only" thing. Mark

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None
by Trei, Peter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the > weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. > All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts > nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as > bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass > grow. Hey, I saw one of these in Switzerland, too, so it's not an "american only" thing. Mark

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None
by Trei, Peter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the > weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. > All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts > nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as > bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass > grow. Hey, I saw one of these in Switzerland, too, so it's not an "american only" thing. Mark

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None
by Trei, Peter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Americans, on the other hand, MEAN IT when they talk about the > weather. They sit up and pay attention when forecasts appear. > All US cable systems carry a channel which broadcasts > nothing except weather reports, 24x7 - a notion which seems as > bizarre to Europeans as would a channel for watching the grass > grow. Hey, I saw one of these in Switzerland, too, so it's not an "american only" thing. Mark

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