ORBS sucked into a black hole! (And digging out...)

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Tue Jun 12 00:05:58 PDT 2001


ORBS *was* a reputation server - as with any real instance of such,
the reputations it publishes are the opinions of the publisher,
and the rest of the users of the higher-level reputation system
have to decide how much creedence to give those opinions.
In this case, a sufficiently large number of people rate ORBS
the way Mac, Choate, and measl do, i.e. varying degrees of dislike,
that they're now toast (and good riddance to them.)


On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 11:19:29PM -0500, Mac Norton wrote:
 > Whoa. commie privacy leftie punks? what was ORBS?
 > And we don't have to talk about holding guns to
 > heads. We're talking about holding a boycott
 > to heads.  Sounds pretty commie leftie to me.
 > Talk about sheeple, jeez.

Boycotting a boycott organizer, plus boycotting a boycott
organizer who's boycotting another boycott organizer.
While Declan's comment about Choate was a bit offtopic,
you could draw analogies between ORBS and the McCarthyite Red Baiters.
"I have a list here of 200 Spammunists, and if you don't trust my list,
YOU must be a Spammunist Dupe and we'll put you on the list too!"

Unlike Vixie's MAPS, which was mostly well-behaved and reasonable,
ORBS was a loose cannon blasting around at random,
and to continue the Anti-Commie analogy,
they _did_ go busting into places hunting suspected Spammies,
and harassing anybody who objected like FBI agents
harassing anybody who insisted on seeing a warrant.


A real reputation system needs to deal with extremes like this,
including small, loud agitators, big quiet ones Disneyfying the culture
or Moral Majoritarians, ranting Detweilers with axes to grind
(who gave us invaluable practice before the spam floods hit)
and all sorts of other problems.

ORBS was a good learning experience.  So is the trouble that people like
John Gilmore (and to a lesser extent, me) are having with
spam-blocker technology (mainly closed relays) blocking legitimate email.

The 802.11 wireless LAN technology and the risks of drive-by spammers
balanced with the desire for open access give us some more opportunities
to find a good balance of openness vs. ease of abuse.
Anybody want to build a hashcash-enabled SMTP relay for wireless?
Or for that matter, a hashcash-enabled SMTP proxy for general use?






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