Re: Hello directly from Jimbo at Wikipedia

[Paul Syverson <syverson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Steven,

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 12:27:51AM +0100, Steven J. Murdoch wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 05:48:59PM -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > All I'm saying is that Tor could segregate users easily enough into two
> > clouds: "We sorta trust these ones, more or less, a little bit, but no
> > guarantees" -- "We don't trust these ones, we don't know them".
> 
> This would be very difficult to do using the existing Tor design as it
> doesn't know anything about users or sessions. It lives at the TCP
> layer and all it does is shift packets from one IP address to another,
> giving some privacy to both ends. Adding higher layer functionality to
> Tor increases the chance that it will do neither job well, so here is
> a proposal which I think does what you want, but avoids this problem.
> 

I agree with you about it being a bad idea to add such things to Tor.
I don't see how your proposal solves the Wikipedia problem as I
understand it. Jimbo, please correct if I'm wrong, but I get the
feeling that people are abusing by defacing certain entries that they
don't like. My guess is that it would not be hard for them to gather
at least a couple of puzzle server accounts per day. If not it is
probably too onerous for honest users wanting to post through
Tor. Then when bad guys want to abuse some entry, they can deface it at
least up to the number of accounts they've accumulated. Admittedly
this proposal raises the bar a bit and requires the abuser to do some
planning and limits his rate of abuse. Maybe that's enough to deter
the abusers, but I'm dubious. Please let me know if I've missed
something.

aloha,
Paul