[plt-scheme] Forum

Andrew Reilly wrote:

> Have you correlated your ideas against Google's "wave"? 

***YES***

...

okay, not to be inflammatory or anything; I have looked into the various
other ways people are working on it. The closest model to my idea is
FMS+Freenet. You could, technically, implement everything I said with
that. The trouble is it has so much other baggage. I just wanted to
focus it down to a file format, and let the network design or methods of
transport remain open to the different situations people have. Plus FMS
doesn't let you post images, lol.

Google Wave seems like it would be similar to what I'm talking about,
but unless I miss my guess, that is more propaganda than actual truth.
The fact is that Google Wave doesn't have secure signing, doesn't have
private end-to-end encryption, and doesn't have a way to refer to other
messages and attachments simply by their content hash key. As far as I
can tell it's a glorified email program that relies on blind trust in
the server authorities to allow you to have an identity at all. The
ability to compose messages is somewhat enhanced due to a semi-smart XML
format instead of (ugh) MIME, but the average user won't even so much as
be asked if they want to sign their messages, much less be led through a
sensible system that will ensure all breaches of privacy are their own
damn fault and not just ignorance.

Thanks for asking, truly, but Google Wave doesn't solve any of the
problems I'm concerned with. They even specify the network protocol
(XMPP) instead of making a solidly decoupled standard for accessing
cataloging and verifying files. I hope that this forum can be
transported over Google Wave one day. But it should also work over
email, or by hand delivered letters. The only trick is the destination
has to decode it in the same manner that the source encodes it, but in
between it can pass through many channels, and many untrusted sources,
and the absolute worst that could happen is simply failure of delivery.

Given the Gnutella network and a PGP program I could manually implement
this forum I'm thinking of. It is quite do-able by hand, but I feel that
the process of splitting up messages into pieces and generating the tree
of signing and encryption necessary to protect the original message, is
an ideal task for computers to perform. So I wanted to make a system
that is well defined, in terms a computer can understand, to allow us to
make use of such practices as secure signing, maximum piece size limits,
hash verification, and encryption, with nothing more complicated than
the push of a button.