Re: [cdin] Re: Distributed Data

Jason Dufair (funne nospam at iquest.net)
Wed, 10 Mar 1999 09:35:00 -0500

I would still contend that there is no need for a submitter's email
whatsoever. What need does it meet? Even if there were a need to contact
someone, that person would not necessarily be the authoritative source on
that particular CD. I suppose if there were a question about an entry,
that entry could be flagged and then that person's player would notice that
one of their entries was flagged and ask them to double check it. If this
is indeed a need (and I'm skeptical), then we should definitely hash the
email.

I continue to suggest we should use a simple majority rules to determine
the correctness. Justin did say:

>>But, also remember, what is popular is not always right, and what is
right is not always popular.

In this case, "right" can be subjective, and so I'd suggest that popular ==
right.

How would this fit into the DNS-based system (which is appearing to be the
most technically sound and efficient distributed solution thus far)?

At 08:45 AM 3/10/99 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
>>
>> Rather than try to legislate compliance (how many spammers are going to
>> abide by our terms?), simply don't collect e-mail addresses at all. If
>> we want to notify someone of an improperly formatted entry, build an
>> error response into the protocol and give the user notification that way.
>> If we have a need for tracking entries, make it voluntary and allow the
>> user to choose a handle and password via a web form (or build that
>> into the protocol as well).
>
>Old solved privacy problem. Take a hash of the users email address. MD5
>is fine. Store that. Even publish it. Its useless to a spammer but its
>wildly improbable you get a hash collision. You can now tie together
>submissions but you can't get an email addr out of them without brute
>force testing it. At which point you know the addr anyway
>
>Also the person who knows the email (ie the submitter) can prove they
>submitted the entry so long as MD5 remains a secure hash
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>cdin maillist - cdin nospam at cdin.org
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>
>
>

-----
Jason Dufair
funne nospam at iquest.net
http://www.iquest.net/~funne
http://www.iquest.net/~funne/jdufair.asc for PGP public key.
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Where the questions are all 'why' and the answers are all 'because'"
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