On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 01:17:08AM +0300, Andriy G. Tereshchenko wrote:
Somebody, possibly Mark C. Langston wrote (possibly on Monday, August 16,
2004 9:42 PM) possibly this message:
I'm confused. To which reputation system are you referring?
If it's GOSSiP, it doesn't use certificates at all.
I refer to this:
http://spf.pobox.com/aspen.html
Quotes:
"[they] should be happy to sign up with Bonded Sender or something like it"
"Is there a business model?"
"As a clearinghouse, the reputation service should pay its input feeds"
"Money should flow from the consumers of reputation to producers of
reputation"
Feel free to correct me if I understand something wrong.
But this is clear that somebody is trying to make a business out of
reputation services.
That's fine. If someone wants to try to make money from a reputation
service, they're free to do so.
GOSSiP isn't a money-making effort. It's designed to be free. I'm sure
someone somewhere will try to set up a for-pay GOSSiP node. With
GOSSiP, you're not only free to use or not use that node, but you're
able to determine how accurately that node's opinions match your own
experience. Any for-pay node that isn't extremely representative of all
its customers' opinions of what is and is not spam is going to quickly
find itself without customers. And personally, I think trying to do so
(i.e., trying to eliminate false positives with such a diverse user
base) is a very hard one. That's why GOSSiP nodes have an emergent
social network -- the nodes evolve into clusters representative of
userbases with similar opinions on spam, thus minimizing local false
positives.
Of course, if you try to deploy a for-profit node, you either accept
this behavior and have low false positives but a small customer base, or
a large customer base with high false positives, and the chance that a
lot of your customers will start ignoring your data. Once that occurs,
they'd just drop your service.
Even GOSSiP "free" system can start to collect money from all users.
For example a tiny press release from author with title like this
"After 3 years of GOSSiP usage we found that we can not live without your
money.
Give us your money and we will save you from spammers.
We will use your money to cover costs of development and administration.
As well we will finally solve problem with housing for all currently
home-less GOSSiP developers ;-)"
GOSSiP is massively distributed, not centralized. It's something I do
in my spare time to satisfy my curiosity and interest in such a system.
It's also licensed such that, if I ever do that, you're free to take the
code and fork it, and run your own free GOSSiP spin-off.
But I won't. It's a hobby, not a thinly-veiled start-up. But if you
really fear that, you're free not to use it.
Of course, if people really like it and appreciate the effort once it's
deployed, I won't turn down contributions. But I don't expect ever
having to ask for them. I've got a paying job I'm quite happy with, and
it's very stable.
--
Mark C. Langston GOSSiP Project Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark(_at_)bitshift(_dot_)org http://sufficiently-advanced.net
mark(_at_)seti(_dot_)org
Systems & Network Admin Distributed SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org E-mail Reputation http://www.seti.org