Given the physical geographic constraints in a hyperlocal context, couldn't we issue public keys for a persistent identity at Sudo Room authenticated by an in-person registration. Isn't this what a Cryptoparty is about, basically?
By organizing a concentrated initiative available at convenient times and with sufficient guidance to make it accessible by the Sudo Room community and the general public, it could be the foundation for lots of things. Here's a few I've been recently thinking about:
- Voting. a unique authenticated online identity for the purpose of voting remotely in a variety of collective decision-making contexts.
- Privacy. a persistent pseudonymous identity throughout Sudo Room.
- Recommendations. confirmed authenticity of an actual human being related to comments and publicly made comments
- Safety. the use of dangerous and complex tools that require significant instruction could be restricted only to authorized users.
- Payment. financial transactions from peer Sudo member to peer Sudo member in addition to membership dues payment and dividend collection from Sudo Fund
- Cash. anonymous financial transactions with some kind of Sudo bit-coin
Quick note, it is probably better to say the IRC channel is not KNOWN to be logged. Tons of people log IRC privately for later perusal or other reasons, and there's no way for any other IRC user to know if an inactive user is a logging bot. In fact, I know plenty of people who interact with IRC through a logging system of some kind, so the difference between a human user and a logger isn't even distinct.
Someone's comment of, if you want it to be private, don't put it on the Internet, is reasonable. Even email goes through any number of servers on its way to its intended recipient, and you have no idea which of these is keeping copies. Unless you are rigorous about using encryption, *and* really know what you're doing (I don't, that shit's hard), expect any electronic communication you make to be possibly readable by some entity you don't know about, including governments, your ISP's help staff, hackers, grad students, botnet operators, your mom (she doesn't mean to snoop but you never TELL her anything).
Of course, even Google is gonna have an extraordinarily hard time identifying, finding and collating it all; I do not want to sound too alarmist here. The needle/haystack issue, which any attempt to track an individual will run into, is also a *really* difficult one.
Rachel M
On 4/11/13 3:36 PM, Paul Ivanov wrote:
Hey everyone,
Jenny Ryan, on 2013-04-11 14:57, wrote:
Rabbit: the IRC channel is not logged and never has been
I think this is missing the point. Just because you don't know of
a bot logging the IRC channel, it does not mean it isn't being logged.
The same goes for an email list you're on: regardless of
"official" policy, *any* subscriber to the list can archive *all*
of the conversations on it.
I'm sympathetic to stripping email addresses, but not to removing
postings themselves. Given the minimum barrier for joining the
list, and that 'nym rights' is part of this thread's title,
anyone is welcome to create (and possibly share) an email
account, resender, or proxy intended for anonymity.
If we want to stay inclusive, and allow anyone to join the list,
then we *have* to assume that anything sent to the list is public
(because there's no filtering for who gets to be on the list, and
no protection for what they might do with that information after
they get it).
best,
--
Paul Ivanov
http://pirsquared.org | GPG/PGP key id: 0x0F3E28F7
On 4/11/13 2:57 PM, Jenny Ryan wrote:
Great discussion this has started. Anon195714, my apologies for getting
defensive and blaming you for not being aware.
The default Mailman messages are indeed unclear. I need to focus on
prior commitments today, but I encourage folks to suggest rewordings
themselves: http://lists.sudoroom.org. Same goes for scrubbing email
addresses and creating a robots.txt file. If anyone would like to
volunteer to hack on this, I volunteer as a point of contact for server
access and implementation.
Rabbit: the IRC channel is not logged and never has been, although we
have discussed a bot that would bookmark / record a point in the
conversation with another user's prompt.
Jenny
http://jennyryan.net <http://jennyryan.net/>
http://thepyre.org <http://thepyre.org/>
http://thevirtualcampfire.org <http://thevirtualcampfire.org/>
http://technomadic.tumblr.com <http://technomadic.tumblr.com/>
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