There has been a fair amount of effort on UCAN (User Controlled Authorization Networks), and other types of ‘decentralized credentials’ over the last couple years. These efforts perpetuate the same control structures that exist today, with delegated trees of hierarchical control. This is in contrast to a personal or ‘decentralized’ trust we might hope for… Continue reading On Trust
Category: Post
The City
Earlier this week I visited The City with a group of friends. It’s an interesting place, and I’m glad I took the time to experience it, as it provided a unique context to reflect on a set of more abstract ideas. The claim to fame of the city is that it is the largest art… Continue reading The City
Retrieval Constraints
A couple months ago I wrote up some of the edges that I’ve encountered in thinking about how to structure decentralized data transfer systems. These are an extension of the limitations that were initially encountered in bittorrent style tit-for-tat exchanges, and have now matured into a much more extensive field looking at incentives and other… Continue reading Retrieval Constraints
Coordination, or Attention
A current meme is that one of the major points of limitation in our ability to execute is coordination systems. The claim, which is somewhat enticing, is that our communities are already incredibly powerful, but we lack the coordination systems to reliably be productive together, or to scale up the types of systems we can… Continue reading Coordination, or Attention
Private Retrieval
It’s very exciting to have a public face to the thoughts around how to enable effective private access to data. Research Announcement The basic hypothesis here is that there’s a high-leverage opportunity to attract thought around scaling the range of anonymous database or data transfer techniques to reach something with better properties that the systems… Continue reading Private Retrieval
Building Decentralization
I talked earlier this week on some of the current problems in decentralization at the rc3 event. It’s easy to be pessimistic about the current silo’d technological landscape, but decentralized platforms are continuing to make progress and there’s reason to be hopeful. At the same time, there’s a green field of many more decentralized protocols… Continue reading Building Decentralization
Unlocking North Korean Karaoke
I recently got the opportunity to understand what was going on with a Tianchi android KTV console with north korean content loaded on it. A description of the encryption and evolution of DRM protections associated with the device is published on the North Korea Tech blog.
What's Left for private Messaging
I had the privilege to address the annual Chaos Communication Congress (36C3) in Leipzig last week about the state and remaining issues in private communications. The recording of the video has been made available by the CCC, and I have also posted the slides. The TL;DR for me is that many of the trade-offs are… Continue reading What's Left for private Messaging
Email Security Checklist
There are a lot of various standards and protocols in play around SMTP that are being used today to validate email. when setting up self hosting, recently, I found it useful to refer to the following checklist of the following validations that I should be configuring. For a server receiving email on behalf of a… Continue reading Email Security Checklist
Ethics of Censorship Measurement
I gave a talk this past summer at DEFCON on the ethical quandary that continues to play a role in the academic discussion of network censorship measurement. Over the course of my phd studies, there was a significant arc of time where the community yielded to caution as the issues around ethics were better understood.… Continue reading Ethics of Censorship Measurement