CDRv2 discussion (was: Re: Al-qaeda.net deprecated)

[Riad S. Wahby]

coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
> keep it simple: NO FILTERING
> 
> if you can read this you are tall enough to filter/tag/label your own self.

I'm not sure if you mean on the backend (between nodes) or on the
frontend (local delivery to node subscribers).

In the former case, I agree: it makes sense to just have a blanket
policy that peered nodes are expected to forward everything they receive
at their ingress address (allowing other nodes to apply their own local
filtering policies).

If you mean the latter, I disagree that zero filtering is a good
approach to running a node (but the whole point is that we can make both
available and let the users choose). In practice, I'm quite certain that
readership on the present cypherpunks envisagement would drop
precipitously if I turned off sender whitelisting. There's a difference
between "I can do this" and "I will do this because it is worth my
time." The fact is, once the cost of being a subscriber exceeds its
utility, a rational person will unsubscribe; a node with sender
whitelisting (with explicit whitelisting for anonymous remailers)
achieves a balance that, empirically, is worthwhile for most people:
recall the rush to LNE.com when Eric introduced this. More to the point,
the willingness of a person to sink time into wading through list
detritus is no indication of his or her value as a contributor.

Fundamentally, subscriber lists are a good metric by which to judge
whether a particular message should or should not be delivered; it is
therefore useful to build the notion of cross-node sender whitelisting
into CDRv2 in a way that cannot be trivially abused. Of course, all
sender whitelisting leaks *some* information about subscribers; the goal
is just to do no worse than a monolithic list.

> > This goes beyond fault tolerance towards attempting to solve the
> > problem of enforcing peering contracts with untrusted CDRv2 nodes,
> > which is clearly a more... intersting one.
> 
> this is not simple, and not recommended.

No doubt about it; I'm certainly not volunteering to do any such thing!

-=rsw