Lightweight Anonymous Distributed Shitposting - Distributed forum possiblities sperg zone

[JSC]

So let me ask a more specific question: is it viable that you could have reasonable anonymity in a model where a small crypto payment is made to join? If so, that solves our captcha issue entirely and also goes a long way to retard frivolous sign-ups.

"Retarding frivolous sign-ups" is among the worst things you could do. It's extremely difficult to get people to donate crypto to this forum, imagine how much harder it'd be for a forum nobody uses.

A much better model is to be allowed in if at least one other user vouches for you. It's then left up to the individual users what criteria to use:

• CAPTCHA
• Email verification
• Phone verification
• I know them IRL
• Account on a different forum
• etc

If you vouch for people who spam, you lose the ability to vouch for others.

Separately, I put my words into action and did some preliminary research into how we could handle the childporn et al. issues. So there are services that let you submit media / hashes of media and get a response back on if it's flagged as child porn.

There is a much simpler solution: ban anyone who posts CP, ban the user who vouched for them, and don't store the media posted by banned users.

I strongly encourage you to check out FMS - it solved this problem more than 10 years ago.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101201014818/http://blog.locut.us/2008/05/11/fms-spam-proof-anonymous-message-boards-on-freenet/

 

[TurdFondler]

I really like the FMS model.

 

[Kosher Dill]

A much better model is to be allowed in if at least one other user vouches for you.

How would that work? I don't tell anyone from outside this site that I post on KF, and I don't recommend that anyone does.

I strongly encourage you to check out FMS - it solved this problem more than 10 years ago.

Where's the source code? There's very little documentation out there so it's hard to say just how this system actually works. Has it actually stood up to the kind of attacks we're anticipating or is this just security by obscurity?
The part about solving CAPTCHAs is worth checking out either way, apparently they've figured out some way to do it.

So let me ask a more specific question: is it viable that you could have reasonable anonymity in a model where a small crypto payment is made to join?

You could probably do something like require a Monero transaction with your unique forum account ID in the comment field. But it would probably limit our audience massively to require this. Crypto is still a pain.

Separately, I put my words into action and did some preliminary research into how we could handle the childporn et al. issues. So there are services that let you submit media / hashes of media and get a response back on if it's flagged as child porn.

Found what you're talking about:
https://developer.microsoftmoderato...ec4c9f4c3/operations/57c7426f27037407c8cc69e6
It looks like it'd help somewhat, though it only verifies image files, and only of a certain size.

 

[Coleslaw]

LADS already exists and it's called Usenet.

 

[Kosher Dill]

LADS already exists and it's called Usenet.

Who exactly is going to carry alt.kiwi.farms? Or are you expecting us all to run our own NNTP servers?

 

[Never Scored]

Who exactly is going to carry alt.kiwi.farms? Or are you expecting us all to run our own NNTP servers?

Free.homesteading.kiwis was set up some time ago specifically for Kiwifarms expats in the event of the site getting yanked down and is already carried on multiple NNTP servers. Nobody gives a shit. Usenet is full of islamophobic shit and filez and nbombs. People only give a shit when pearl clutching retards can type an address into their browser and see someone call someone else a nigger.

 

[Coolio55]

The problem with usenet is that you have to explicitly pay extra for it and some ISPs are gay and blanket block alt*.
(Except maybe for aioe but I've never tried it)

Another solution I like is somebody just setting up a shitty BBS and we all post there. It too utilizes the "normies, (((journalists))) and the static will never be able to figure out how to use it so they can get offended" defence.

 

[Never Scored]

The problem with usenet is that you have to explicitly pay extra for it and some ISPs are gay and blanket block alt*.
(Except maybe for aioe but I've never tried it)

Another solution I like is somebody just setting up a shitty BBS and we all post there. It too utilizes the "normies, (((journalists))) and the static will never be able to figure out how to use it so they can get offended" defence.

The problem with most BBS software packages is they operate over Telnet and so are not encrypted.

There are a few free news servers though. aioe requires no account, but has a daily posting limit of 25 or so I think? Eternal September requires the creation of an account and is also free, and allows users to send control messages to create free.* groups. These services generally allow messages only, you need to pay for binary access. I know both these services specifically carry free.homesteading.kiwis because I've looked myself. Besides the fact that the free.* hierarchy is specially anti-moderation and pro freedom of speech by design, between binaries, spam and legit use there are hundreds of millions of Usenet posts made a day so it's not hard for twenty posts about DSP in your shitty little free.darkside.phil newsgroup to fly under the radar. Anyone running a free usenet server in 2020 is a sperg for free speech. I guarantee it.

 

[robobobo]

All righty, guess we're back to FIDOnet then! Let's do this. I actually preferred the BBS days to the current web; BBSes had smaller and usually local communities where you were more likely to get to know other posters, and many had gateways to FIDOnet or Usenet if you wanted access to more distant groups.

But speaking more seriously, if you're looking to set up a web of trust for a decentralized KF successor, the best thing to do is establish it before KF goes down so current users can more easily get themselves on board. If you wait until after Null pulls the plug, it's going to be considerably harder to know who's who, given the fairly anonymous nature of the userbase.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

If you want to be full anon (like chans), that's almost impossible (short of some crazy research projects, which really deserve another post). If you're fine being psuedonymous (like this forum), however, the technology has existed for more than a decade.

Look up FMS (Freenet Messaging System). It's a completely decentralized forum, with no spam or egregious CP problems. People decide for themselves what jannies they want to trust and how intense the filtering should be. Filesharing is handled by Freenet.

My problem with Freenet is that if the internet is, as someone said, 'for porn'.. Freenet is 'for child porn'. As a user you have no control over what's being hosted by your node and stored on your hard drive.

Unlike other peer-to-peer networks, you as a user have little or no control over what is stored in your datastore. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are. This allows Freenet to be censorship-resistant. There is no "delete file" operation.

It is hard, but not impossible, to determine what the encrypted file pieces stored in your local Freenet datastore are part of. This allows plausible deniability.

https://freenetproject.org/pages/documentation.html

Now, this is all very well if you're an above-board advocate of freedom of speech and you have absolutely no concerns about being targeted by police for your unorthodox views- say, for example, there's a grotesque tranny that you make fun of on KiwiFarms and you live in England- but if there's any chance at all that you're targeted for persecution it seems very unwise to use it, especially with the datastore on a volume that isn't encrypted if you're AFK.

Some of these risks should be minimizable if you only connect to peers you know, but who really does that...

 

[TurdFondler]

I'm going to check out the usenet shit this weekend. I think since we are on possibly limited time we migrate to usenet and then move on from there. I've always wanted a reason to post on usenet, this is a pretty good one.

I don't know enough about telnet but setting up an honest to God BBS would own bones. What's stopping you from encrypting the posts before they go over telnet? Also, would it matter, it's fucking telnet.

 

[Never Scored]

Also, would it matter, it's fucking telnet.

Good point. I got really into LORD during the lockdown and people on the BBS I was playing it on were clearly just posting whatever the fuck they wanted. This is open source and still actively maintained. You could probably use the code to build something closer to an internet forum that works over telnet if you really wanted to.

 

[robobobo]

I was running Synchronet back in the dialup days, switched to it from WWIV. It was pretty solid, but that was twenty-five years ago now, so no idea how it's progressed since then.

 

[TurdFondler]

How do you even get on telnet? Do you need a phone line and modem or does it use internet infrastructure now?

 

[robobobo]

It goes over IP. You can even install a telnet client native to Windows through the add/remove Windows features dialog on the control panel.

 

[Never Scored]

I use a linux terminal. Say you wanted to log onto this BBS. You'd just open a terminal and enter "telnet 162.225.218.37". The default font is generally pretty incompatible and garbles a lot of the ascii art. I've found the font IBM Western or something like that much better.

 

[TurdFondler]

I've always wanted to set up a BBS. I'll start dicking around and if it goes well I might set up a local server. I know it solves literally none of the problems but I think it's fucking hilarious

Smol brain time:
Using a BBS to keep track of lolcow threads on usenet

 

[Coleslaw]

Will PuTTY work?

 

[JSC]

How would that work? I don't tell anyone from outside this site that I post on KF, and I don't recommend that anyone does.

Schematically, you would tell someone who is already a registered user that you are the user "Kosher Dill" on Kiwi Farms, or alternatively just fill out a CAPTCHA.

Where's the source code? There's very little documentation out there so it's hard to say just how this system actually works. Has it actually stood up to the kind of attacks we're anticipating or is this just security by obscurity?
The part about solving CAPTCHAs is worth checking out either way, apparently they've figured out some way to do it.

Source of reference implementation and official website (on Freenet)
Source of reference implementation and official website (clearnet mirror)
jfms, a much nicer implementation (on Freenet)
The Unofficial Guide to FMS (on Freenet)

CAPTCHAs are just normal old-school text captchas. If one is cracked by a spambot, the identity issuing vulnerable CAPTCHAs will get their trust list negrated by others. If all extant CAPTCHA systems crack, then registration will just be blocked, until someone comes up with a system like "send me a PM on forum X and I'll trust you". Such a compromise won't affect already registered users, because they have positive trust from other users that doesn't come from CAPTCHAs.

DoS attacks are handled by it being a pull-based system: you have to request all messages, which means creating a billion junk messages won't do any harm if nobody cares to request them.

FMS was created as a response to the previous system (Frost) being absolutely riddled with spam/flooding. Frost still gets spam and FMS doesn't.

Freenet itself is pretty secure. You can tell because pedophiles use it to share CP. If it weren't secure, they would all be in prison.

What other attacks are you thinking of?

LADS already exists and it's called Usenet.

Usenet is good stuff.

My problem with Freenet is that if the internet is, as someone said, 'for porn'.. Freenet is 'for child porn'. As a user you have no control over what's being hosted by your node and stored on your hard drive.

That's true, but neither do you have any knowledge of it. Nobody, not even known pedophiles, has been sentenced over Freenet "storing" illegal materials.

https://freenetproject.org/pages/documentation.html

Now, this is all very well if you're an above-board advocate of freedom of speech and you have absolutely no concerns about being targeted by police for your unorthodox views- say, for example, there's a grotesque tranny that you make fun of on KiwiFarms and you live in England- but if there's any chance at all that you're targeted for persecution it seems very unwise to use it, especially with the datastore on a volume that isn't encrypted if you're AFK.

The datastore is always encrypted. There is no way to tell what material you're storing, unless you already have its key. Nobody has been sentenced or charged with any crimes for running a Freenet node. It's like Tor in that regard, where it's completely legal to run an exit node, but illegal to deal in child pornography.

Will PuTTY work?

Should be fine, yes

 

[Kosher Dill]

Source of reference implementation and official website (clearnet mirror)

For the love of God, they won't even let you see the source code from the supposed clearnet mirror without getting on Freenet. I'm not feeling much trust in a system that says "Just trust us and run our code if you want to read our code".