[Freedombox-discuss] Establishing Communication between Freedomboxes

[Ted Smith]

On Mon, 2011-07-04 at 15:52 -0400, ian at churchkey.org wrote:
> I think it is important to consider that people want a mechanism for
> enforcing community standards of SPAM and abuse. Everything from forums
> to online dating sites rely on having a mechanism for filtering out
> communications and members that push against the community norms. Even
> bittorrent trackers establish rules about the kind of materials that can
> be posted and shared on the system. If we do not want an intermediary
> with power to enforce some of these community norms, we need to think
> very carefully about how to accomplish the same thing at the distributed
> ends of our network because those kind of social norms are at the center
> of people communicate. 

None of those systems have solved the spam problem significantly better
than email -- it doesn't seem like being centralized gives spam-fighters
an advantage.

Email is a fully distributed/federated system, and while there is
certainly a _lot_ of spam, it doesn't really effect users terribly
often. This isn't even an area where the only solution is "throw
Google's computing power at identifying spam," either -- I use
riseup.net as my email provider, and rarely see spam, and I know they
use only free software (certainly on the level of spam filtering, at
least). So it should be possible for the FreedomBox to create
decentralized/federated or fully distributed systems that block spam
just as effectively.

For comparison: I have other email accounts that do not use a
server-side spam filtering system of any kind. My mail client,
Evolution, handles all spam filtering, with a system that is NOT the
most sophisticated, even. And I still don't see spam more than maybe
once a month. So clearly, spam detection is within the computing power
limits of commodity hardware.

As such, I don't see why a fully distributed system, where each node
detects spam and does not relay it, wouldn't suffice in any case. There
is no reason for the power of deciding which messages are malicious and
which aren't to be concentrated in one central place -- it can be
returned to its source, the people, with no ill effect.

This is, of course, a purely effects-centric argument -- personally, as
someone who sometimes falls outside of the community norms, I don't want
to see anyone or anything empowered to "enforce" said norms more than
they already are. As Richard Stallman says, freedom is the most
important feature, and a centralized system can be rejected just because
it is centralized. I'd gladly pay for my freedom in a few unwanted
messages that consume 30 seconds of my daily time.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20110707/dd54b6bf/attachment.pgp>