Re: [freehaven-dev] Announcing O'Reilly Chapter, Outline

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2000 at 02:40:44PM -0400, Michael J Freedman wrote:
>    D. Judging behavior v. intent
>       1. The importance of differentiating these
>          two aspects: do we only care if data is
>          present / protocol has been followed
>          properly, or is it important to differentiate
>          those who maliciously break protocol?
>       2. The need for automated decision-making,
>          and the difficulties that entails (hard
>          to judge "intent")

The Free Haven approach to this issue is that we really don't care
'why' they're doing a certain thing. Rather, if they are behaving in a
manner which we don't want, then we want to be able to realize that
(and stop trading with them, etc). What sorts of situations would we
want to differentiate between malicious intent and just being unreliable?

I guess thinking in a bigger picture, we might want to be able to identify
people who are trying to 'break' the system, and people who simply have
slow or intermittent network connections. We might want to bring legal
proceedings against them, etc -- an activity normally outside the scope
of what we think about for things like Free Haven.

If our goal is simply to excise them from the system, though (something
which seems like it would be within the scope of what we think about),
I think we shouldn't complicate matters. Our reaction would be the same
in either case (if they're malicious, quit using them; if they suck,
quit using them). So there's really no point in distinguishing (except
maybe for the curiosity of the node admin, in his logs. This may be
very relevant too.)

Agree/disagree?

--Roger