[GNUnet-developers] iOS victims being late at the GNUnet party

[carlo von lynX]

Jeff, thanks for great feedback and the great news that you
are working on GNS for Tor. I had a long debate on social
networking over Tor early this year where the discussion
led us to theorizing using more GNUnet routing in the
hidden service backend, possibly including multicast for
scalability, thus enabling social networking.

Ed wrote:
> > But if the attitude is to try to build a network that helps people that 
> > don't yet care--or that don't care enough to abandon their comfortable 
> > computing environment--then you're going to have to build tools for those 
> > platforms.

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 10:46:37AM +0200, Jeff Burdges wrote:
> No.  Revolutions are never about appealing to everyone.  

Indeed, Ed. People who favor convenience will not be interested in
a distributed social network anyway if they already have a broad
choice of apparent alternatives to Facebook that come with fancy
apps that make a true libre alternative hard to stand out.

They way to get these folks could be completely different: We
build a momentum of people who do care and organize strong
enough that a distributed social network is a fully integrated
natural experience on all libre platforms. That makes millions
of people happily enjoying a degree of privacy no-one would hope 
for today. Then the iPhone peeps will get the feeling they are 
missing a trend.. THAT IS WHAT HURTS.. BEING LATE TO A PARTY!!1
So they will suddenly be interested in a single practical package
that jailbreaks the phone and installs gnunet/secushare on it,
and even feel cool about having done something naughty.

Should that prove wrong we still have option two: mandating a
libre distributed social network by law since whatever is out
there today is anti-constitutional. In that case Apple will have
to comply if it intends to continue selling iPhones in those
countries that adopt such a law.

In either case it is a losing strategy to try to play by the
rules of the market and the market owners, putting libre users
at risk (one iPhone friend could be enough to expose your privacy)
for the gain of hardly catching the attention of the distracted
average Apple consumer.

> We should instead worry that people to actually enjoy using our tools.
> I suppose this means eventually moving towards the TextSecure
> development ideology :
> https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/blob/master/contributing.md

    Truths which we believe to be self-evident:

         1. The answer is not more options. If you feel compelled to add a 
preference that's exposed to the user, it's very possible you've made a wrong 
turn somewhere.
         2. The user doesn't know what a key is. We need to minimize the points 
at which a user is exposed to this sort of terminology as extremely as possible.
         3. There are no power users. The idea that some users "understand" 
concepts better than others has proven to be, for the most part, false. If 
anything, "power users" are more dangerous than the rest, and we should avoid 
exposing dangerous functionality to them.
         4. If it's "like PGP," it's wrong. PGP is our guide for what not to do.
         5. It's an asynchronous world. Be wary of anything that is 
anti-asynchronous: ACKs, protocol confirmations, or any protocol-level 
"advisory" message.
         6. There is no such thing as time. Protocol ideas that require 
synchronized clocks are doomed to failure.

Sounds all familiar and reasonable to me...
In the area 1-3 gnunet needs some work but
I think it is doing good on 4-6.


-- 
  E-mail is public! Talk to me in private using encryption:
         http://loupsycedyglgamf.onion/LynX/
          irc://loupsycedyglgamf.onion:67/lynX
         https://psyced.org:34443/LynX/