These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don’t understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it’s not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn’t mean it’s not a threat. It’s one step closer totalitarianism, and what’s stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.
This is well beyond my sysadmin capabilities unfortunately. This is more a proof-of-concept and would need some tweaking to be run at that kind of scale.
I won’t mention here as I don’t want this post to come across as promoting cryptocurrency, but this script was originally written to protect a faucet for a cryptocurrency that does exactly this (and has been since 2012). This cryptocurrency records user contribution to various computational projects (BOINC, Folding at home, etc) and can also be used for torrent seeding or other forms of contribution. So it could be used in this manner to verify a user has contributed X amount of computation over Y time periods.
The faucet handed out coins but the problem is that users want all the free coins right? But we only want to give a few free coins to each user. So we make them do the “work” and make sure the cost of work is > value of coins, so they have no motivation to hit the faucet multiple times. This is the original purpose of the script.
Yes, most projects implement validation of some sort as even well-intentioned BOINC users will occasionally submit invalid workunits due to computation errors, random memory bits flipping, etc. Validation schemes range from simple to complex but suffice to say yes they nearly universally have some sort of validation mechanism. People have attempted to cheat BOINC before simply in pursuit of a “high score” compared to other users, so the BOINC ecosystem is well acquainted with proper defenses for such behavior. There are even cross-project competitions people can participate in, people join teams etc, so the competition can be quite fierce.
My memory isn’t perfect, it would be nice to have a second set of eyes, and I could describe things to it aside from knowing the exact words. “What was that website I visited within the last six months where I played an online game that was like snake but different?” or “What was that cryptocurrency i was researching which was touting it had perfect forward secrecy?” “Who was I emailing about the football game” etc.
Still some of those, as with any social media platform. I have come across a few objectionable things, I just blocked and moved on. But you pick who you follow so you pick who shows up in your feeds. Each relay has their own moderation policies, so (like Lemmy), you can pick relays which suit your moderation preferences (which effect the “trending notes”/public square section). Most nostr apps by default upon install will ask you if you want to automatically filter out crypto/nsfw/foul language/etc. I picked at random and didn’t enable many of the filters.
Okey, so relays can pass message to other relay? Didn’t know that, so thanks.
Relays currently don’t talk to each other. But users are typically connected to multiple relays and publish simultaneously to multiple relays. Likewise, a user pulls in data (tweets etc) from multiple relays. My client is connected to ten. So to give you a more accurate answer to your question, to DM another user, you and that other user need to share a relay. If you are crossing networks (such as clearnet->tor), this means one of those relays needs to talk to both networks. If you want to follow a particular person but aren’t normally connected to a relay they are on, your client can connect to a relay just to get content from that particular person. All of this is handled automatically, of course.
But then, why not use network like Yggdrasil? Which would be basically like Nostr, but can relay any TCP/IP packet for any app, instead of just Nostr notes.
Taking a cursory look at this, it sounds more like a general routing protocol not something that is specifically designed to relay message content or other formatted data (ie you build your apps on top of it, it’s just a protocol for packet delivery). Nostr could conceivably run on any base routing protocol like Tor, I2P, or Yggdrasil though I don’t know of any specific implementations either way. As long as the relay has a way to resolve addresses and send data to them over TCP it should be fine. Hadn’t heard of Yggdrasil yet thanks for letting me know about that I’ll do some more reading later.
To store message content. To hold message content if you send a message to an offline contact and vice versa. To handle getting things across networks (clearnet to Tor and back if you only are connected to one). To work around NAT etc. To moderate “public square” type features (ie trending posts). Many reasons.
What if one relay is on clearnet and the other one is on Tor?
No problem, relays can communicate cross-network. They relay things between each other so traffic will find a way through as long as one node speaks to both networks.
What if relays I use are not rechable by my contact, that lives in censored country like China and can only connect to relays in there?
As long as there is a relay path between you and your contact, there is no issue. Relays can be run through Tor and other anonymity networks which are very difficult to distinguish from other forms of encrypted traffic.