[Freedombox-discuss] Establishing Communication between Freedomboxes

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 07/09/2011 10:13 AM, bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org wrote:
> Well, in the GnuPG scenario I quickly explained, handling of "disruptive
> behaviors", being abuses of a community policy or spam would be handled
> collectively by the community I guess.

Yes; it's the details of the mechanism for doing this that need to be
hammered out.

> If such a case happens, people
> would just have to revoke their signature of the offending peer, thus
> getting him outside of their WOT.

I'm not sure this is the right approach.  It seems to mix identity
certification ("this is the key that belongs to person A") with policy
certification ("this keyholder abides by the community principles laid
out in document Z").

I've already written a bit about why i think mixing these two senses of
certification are problematic.  For one thing, it makes the act of
certification much more complicated, which tends to reduce the
likelihood of identity certification, making it harder to communicate
securely without having met in person (because the WoT of certifications
is much more sparse, so key-identification is more difficult).  For
another, it leaks more social information into the public than people
may want leaked (that is, "I think that person A properly abides by
manifesto Z" is a lot closer to "person A and i share some common
values" or "person A is my friend" than "This key belongs to person A").

I'd suggest that distributed approaches to community membership (and its
flip side, distributed approaches to community ostracism) are topics
worthy of research and experimentation, particularly with
anti-surveillance goals in mind.

> Where possible, I believe communities
> should be in charge of their own policy rather than giving too much power
> in the hands of a central authority.

Agreed :)

	--dkg

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