Re: [Blocks-development] Authentication and Ratings

[Troy D. S. <ts...@sa...>]

Hmm, but what if Lars and Company decided that they wanted to start marking
every Metallica file that they found as SPAM?

It seems to me that there should be some sort of check to make sure that the
person downloaded the file completely before they could rate it. This could
be some kind of hash that is reported back to the node holding the file to
verify that the content they have matches the content of the node.

This validates that they downloaded the whole file and that the file they
have matches the file on the node, preventing them from claiming that it's
corrupted on the node when it's actually their copy that's corrupted (or is
this already handled in some form or another?)

Another issue is the face that anyone can be running more than one server at
a time. What's to stop someone from rating a file from another node running
under their control?

Of course this exposes another level of trust issues - do you trust the
person(s) that are rating the file?

... then again maybe I'm confused.


- Troy Strum
ts...@sa... *change of address*
Technical Operations, Salter New Media
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
"To err is human, to moo bovine."


> On 31 Jul 2000, at 14:12, Paul Kalupnieks wrote:
>
> > But who would want to download the contents of a whole file if the
> > quality is unknown? I know I wouldn't want to sit on a 56K modem,
> > download a 10MB file and only find out it's bogus. The rating couldn't
> > be generated by the party who added it in the 1st place, since, if
> > they're creating bogus data, the file could be marked, in the same
> > way, as being just fine.
>
> You receive announcements from every node that stores the file. In
> your local index, the metadata would be joined and displayed when
> searching for the file. e.g.:
>
> Metallica.mp3
> |- Flaggovic rates this file as: SPAM, stops at 2:32
> |- Lars rates this file as: TOP, our latest album
> |- Gnome rates this file as: CORRUPTED
>
> Regards,
> Erik
> --
> Scientific Reviewer, Freelancer, Humanist -- Berlin/Germany
> Phone: +49-30-45491008 - Web: <http://www.humanist.de/erik>
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