[tor-bugs] #7520 [BridgeDB]: Design and implement a social distributor for BridgeDB

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#7520: Design and implement a social distributor for BridgeDB
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 Reporter:  aagbsn       |          Owner:     
     Type:  enhancement  |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:     
Component:  BridgeDB     |        Version:     
 Keywords:  SponsorL     |         Parent:     
   Points:               |   Actualpoints:     
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Comment(by aagbsn):

 Replying to [comment:2 phw]:
 > I feel like we need to provide incentives for people to actually give
 bridges to friends. From an egoistic point of view: why would they do
 that? Distributing bridges to other people increases the probability of
 the bridge getting blocked and the system classifying you as a "bad user"
 (I'm a pessimist).

 I suppose that a user could just redeem an invite themself for additional
 bridges without sharing, and there's not much we could do about that.

 I do think people like helping their friends (hey, I'm a pessimist too,
 but I still have friends ;-)), and think the fact that sharing an invite
 with a bad user could (slightly, depending on the total numbmer of bridges
 available) increase the chance that your bridges are blocked is in fact
 good -- it should prevent users from giving bridges out to people who they
 don't trust to some degree. Isn't that the point of a social distributor?
 To me, that's exactly the behavior we want. The incentive here is that
 people who have invites posess something that other people want, gifting
 things is something only people who "have" can do, and each act of gifting
 strokes the ego.

 >
 > Another problem might be the first node in the invitation graph: the
 users who receive bridges first. If we only have a small set of trusted
 people, the entire system might be ineffective. If we have some automated
 way to handle this, then we can expect large-scale sybil attacks like the
 bridges.tpo crawling.

 This is a good point. We should think about what the intial invitation
 size should be, and who should get an invite. I think it's OK to
 experiment with a small initial pool (and a corresponding small initial
 allocation of bridges) and see what happens. In fact, maybe we would like
 to split the social distributor into several pools - give out invites to
 people who "seem legit" on irc, twitter, and email and again, observe what
 happens.

 >
 > Some papers which thought about models for this problem:
 > http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#proximax11
 > http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/censorbib/#Mahdian2010
 > http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/censorbib/#Sovran2008

 Thanks! I'll read these now.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7520#comment:4>
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