[tor-talk] Thoughts on Tor-based social networking?

[Bill Cox]

On 10/27/2013 6:41 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> Hi Bill, Check out 
> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-August/thread.html#2558 
> including my response at the end 
> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-August/002575.html 
> for the latest version of this answer. As for "Tor based secret 
> identities that can accrue reputation", check out Nymble: 
> http://cgi.soic.indiana.edu/~kapadia/nymble/ (and there are several 
> other research groups with similar ideas). But nobody has deployed a 
> Nymble-like service in a usable way, and also it's not clear that it 
> would solve the types of problems you describe. --Roger 

Thanks for the links, Roger.  On the first thread, I agree with you that 
exit nodes should not be expected to analyze the unencrypted traffic to 
determine if behavior is acceptable.  That's what NSA exit nodes are for 
:-p  However, OpenDNS style filtering should be acceptable, IMO.  It'd 
be a simple set of flags that each exit node says it supports or blocks, 
so it could be fairly simple for Tor users to route to an acceptable 
exit node.  I would want the same flags for relay nodes as well.  That 
would block some sites people don't want to redirect, such as porn sites 
- not that I have issues with porn.  I just don't want to waste my 
bandwidth routing it.

However, that wont stop griefers.  Nymble sounds like a step in the 
right direction to me.  I would prefer to add a social networking 
component with reputations and a web-of-trust.  That would allow 
anonymous users to have public secret identities, and I suspect that 
people would behave better in general if they needed to earn their 
peers' trust.  Nymble would give servers a way to black-list Tor users, 
but that's only useful after griefers have struck.  Requiring a specific 
trust or reputation threshold to allow Tor users access to a service 
might stop griefers before they strike.  Users could have multiple 
secret identities in case they have different kinds of things they like 
to do on the Internet.

Bill