centralized components, was Re: Webmention writeup in The Register

On 02/18/2016 05:47 PM, Ben Werdmüller wrote:
>
> Question I don't know the answer to: is it ever acceptable to attach 
> to a centralized system (eg Akismet) to provide services like spam 
> prevention? Or should our goal always be complete decentralization? If 
> the latter is the case, can complete decentralization ever capture 
> network-wide discovery?
>

To me, personally, decentralization is a means to an end.  The goal is 
healthy competition, which feels a lot like freedom and fairness.  The 
enemy is lock-in.

So centralized search engines for the Web are fine, as long as there's 
healthy competition among them.   When one of them, or a cabal of them, 
comes to dominate the market, that's anti-competitive and is likely to 
result in several bad things happening.   (At some point, the political 
system tends to notice and get involved, but I'd rather intervene before 
serious harm is done.)

It's the same with centralized anti-spam.   As long as there's a healthy 
competition among anti-spam providers, I think that's okay.

It's not as cool as decentralization, though.

(Decentralization has some other potential benefits, like it might 
result in systems that scale better, or it might result in better 
political independence, but those aren't what motivate me, personally.)

      -- Sandro

> ben
>
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 1:41 PM, hhalpin <hhalpin@w3.org 
> <mailto:hhalpin@w3.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 2016-02-18 14:03, Ben Werdmüller wrote:
>
>
>
>     I'm super-happy to see WebMention get some good press. However,
>     there is a point that the article makes rather correctly re spam,
>     and it applies not only to WebMention but any federated system.
>
>     While unforunately W3C/ERCIM didn't renew my D-CENT contract,
>     we're booting up a new research project at INRIA and University
>     College London to look at this problem called NEXTLEAP. The same
>     researchers behind it are the folks who discovered the TLS attacks
>     and statistical disclosure attacks on Tor, so expect some good
>     work in this space to be fed to the W3C shortly. I'm sure its a
>     solvable problem.
>
>     -- 
>
>     Harry Halpin (W3C/MIT) harry@w3.org <mailto:harry@w3.org>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> *Ben Werdmuller*
> CEO & co-founder, Known
> withknown.com <http://withknown.com> | werd.io <http://werd.io>
> +1 (312) 488-9373
>
> Known, Inc | 421 Bryant St | San Francisco, CA 94107