Re: [briar-devel] Gnunet
Brought to you by:
akwizgran
|
From: Greg T. <gd...@le...> - 2017-08-18 15:57:33
|
Michael Rogers <mi...@br...> writes: >> How does briar do multicast in a forum? > > Each forum starts out with one subscriber, the user who created it. Any > subscriber can share the forum with chosen contacts, so the forum > spreads through the social graph and the subscribers form a subgraph of > the social graph. We say that two users are syncing the forum if there's > an edge between them in the subgraph. In other words they both > subscribe, and one of them shared the forum with the other, and the > other accepted. (It's possible that they both subscribe but they're not > syncing the forum, ie there's no edge between them in the subgraph.) > > Whenever a subscriber receives a new forum post - either one that she > wrote herself or one that she received from a contact - she offers it to > any contacts she's syncing the forum with. If they haven't already seen > it, they request it and she sends it. So the post is flooded through the > subgraph without sending any redundant copies. > > Blogs use the same mechanism, except that posts have to be signed by the > blog's author, so any subscriber can share the blog, but only the author > can create posts that the subscribers will accept and propagate. > > Private groups are also similar to forums, except the creator is the > only subscriber who's allowed to share the group. Each subscriber's > messages must be rooted in a join message co-signed by the creator, so > nobody else can create messages that the subscribers will accept and > propagate. Thanks for the clear explanation. I had wondered about that, and not really understood from reading the user manual. In particular I did not realize that users other than blog originator should invite to the blog. So a blog is really just a 1-author forum, which makes sense for popular people reaching an audience without noise. A further point is that the notion that only the originator can control access to a private group is enforced in software, and there is no way to prevent bad behvavior by contacts you share with. Perhaps that's really obvious, but there's a big difference between "cryptographically can't" and "briar norms say you can't and the current software respects those norms". Presumably all these things have timeouts/lifetimes. Or perhaps Briar hasn't been in use long enough for that to be clearly necessary. Sort of getting off topic, but I wonder about a way to have briar nodes convey private messages sometimes (in the e2e-encrypted form of course). I realize you don't want to flood this to all nodes or untrusted nodes, for scaling and to avoid enabling traffic analysis. In a region without Internet, it would be nice to have messages flow via opportunistic couriers, so that if A has addressed a message to C, meets and syncs with B, and later B syncs with C, C will get the message. I wonder about some sort of private group that either has a "flood unicast messages among members" option, or is a different flavor of private group, or something else. |