Oddbean new post about | logout
 Yeah, I've thought a lot about it. In theory, there's nothing you can really do to keep private data private once it's published — someone can always take a screenshot of your note. There are a variety of techniques that can help in practice though:

- Use AUTH to implement read access
- Use NIP 70 to ask other relays not to store your events
- Strip signatures (this is the nuclear option, it basically breaks nostr, but could be used in specific situations)
- Encrypt your content
- Use clients that are smart about replicating stuff
- Include relay urls in events and have both relays and clients validate that the event came from the designated relay (this isn't done anywhere, but I may use it for flotilla). 
 strip signatures is an interesting one

the farcaster protocol has a signature system whereby the signature is delegated via the hub you post to, you can't verify it unless you can get the hub's pubkey directory and find the key

i dunno if it really changes anything except making the event questionable...

ah yes, and repudiation has a benefit here, if the key were revoked before the date of the event it could be surmised that a compromise has occurred 
 Interesting 🤔. 

Who's revoking what key in that last part? The user, his key? 
 oh i thought of another one... certificate chains, like DNS certificates

your client can demand such attestation about the software and if it doesn't provide one then it can refuse to send the event to it

certification organisations are a very important part of decentralised governance

governments are shit at it because it's not voluntary 
 hm that one is a hard one though... since the only way to verify source code is to hash the binary, and what is the process for how to sign the binary as it's running exactly

that's a good question... it's on my mind because i've been inspecting the CosmWasm architecture this last week and one of the things they have in there is a verification that ensures that a source code and a binary version are linked, this thing is a big issue in smart contract engineering - how to ensure that things are deterministic, and it kinda matters with source code too

there's a lot more to but how exactly can you be sure a server is running the software version it says it is, and not some altered version? you can't! at least not trivially 
 this question of identifying the software being run on the other side of a network connection is a bit of a difficult one and one that i can see there being problems with snooping tyrants enforcing software development licensure and preventing broad access to software that is either in-development or outlawed

uncle bob had a good speech on that one and this train of thought has got me wondering

ultimately it doesn't matter, does it? right?

the relay has some database, doesn't mean it's the same as another relay, doesn't mean the same code is running, any protocol decision based on such things probably is doomed to be useless ultimately because you can probably not enforce this for real without an inordinate amount of resources spent because of the bazillion ways that it can probably be worked around

but... well, government... this would be a sign of the latest stage of a technocratic system though, software licensing... it's been a theme in cyberpunk for decades

nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqnyqqft6tz9g9pyaqjvp0s4a4tvcfvj6gkke7mddvmj86w68uwe0qqsg75la9mtrcy49fg9r9a8maae6nmjwuf752lq2y9xpe30gnq4glucjawvm3 
 there's too many moving parts to ever make it practical to certify what you are connecting to

Don't Trust, Verify

this is not just the mantra of #bitcoin but it is the mantra of the internet

we now have AIs that probably can produce reasonable fingerprints of server code that can be used as identifiers

they are not deterministic because the code is one thing, and the data is another, and the interplay between them can be unexpected and random

certificate chains on deterministically produced software can exist and have a purpose but they only are of use to those actually executing the code and gathering state in their application that interacts with that code, as well as the inputs from the outside

ultimately, it is a great black void you connect to, and everything that comes back from it is untrustworthy by default, unless you can verify it

nostr makes it so the users themselves create the authentication on their content and after having dealt with the schemes of Bluesky and Farcaster, neither of which have a direct signature on events, i can say that the epic vulnerabilities this could create cannot be underestimated

if bluesky or farcaster ever have a large enough economy tied to them the profitability of violating their consensus system will be very high

you simply can't do that with nostr... all events are only authorized by the users, the data the relay handles is intrinsically untrustworthy, exactly the same as the relay software itself 
 Delete content possible by user inside flotilla ? any plans for content delete feature? 
 Delete already exists, it would just be up to the relays to support it 
 ah thanks means relay .env either allow all or explicitly need to enable "event kind 5" NIP-09 
github .com/nostr-protocol/nips/
i am trying easiest relay and been fooling around with few so far
kind_whitelist:
  enabled: true
  kinds: [10209,209,0,1,3,4,5,7,9,10,11,13,14,28934,10001,10003,9735]
still got 😭 or another one try - open all then put filter slowly
 https://image.nostr.build/0ab2b367002083cac59170d80f144c403a89fa9ad5fe23c91b8a115e2e589d45.png 
 does flotilla support NIP-42 auth same like coracle? if enable at relay then only WL can enter 
 Yep, AUTH is a key part of the plan 
 wondering how to delete
i could find delete button in each list of chat-  - like we see in telegram example
backend test relay all kinds enabled -- kinds = [[0, 40000]] 
 Delete isn't implemented in flotilla yet, it's on the roadmap