Fujitsu and Japanese Uni propose 'endorsement layer' to make internet trustable

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/14/trustable_internet_endorsement_layer/

by walterbell • 4 years ago

34 58 4 years ago

I wonder how decentralized this could be. As described, it seems like there may be a decentralized version of this and that was unexpected (for me at least)

phnofive• 4 years ago

No idea if it still exists, but there used to be a plugin/extension called WOT (web of trust) that crowdsourced ratings on sites from its users for display to future visitors. This is less a layer and more AR, but I guess this is a similar idea. Any decentralized effort is still going to have federation keys.

happyopossum• 4 years ago

Wouldn’t a decentralized and uncontrolled endorsement layer eventually just get gamed the same way the news layer does? At some point you AJ e to decide who to trust, wether they’re endorsers, reporters, or trolls.

I have seen zero evidence that people will change their beleifs when presented with evidence.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

"The proposal imagines the endorsement layer would not rely on a single sensor or information source, but instead offer users the chance to add data to the endorsement layer. The result would theoretically be "an endorsement graph with a data structure expressing the connection between additional information linked to the data."

This is essentially the semantic web, no? I've always liked the idea but the problem is still trust at the end of the day. You can look to metadata to see whether your actual data is trustworthy or not, but then you'll have to trust that your metadata is correct, and if you do it as the article hints at crowdsourced, that's a tough sell in particular for real-time events.

dudeinjapan• 4 years ago

We need to learn to stop worrying and love the disinformation. Human should be skeptical of everything they read/see/hear, be it internet/TV/radio, including this post.

themitigating14• 4 years ago

What does disinformation have to do with being skeptical.

Disinformation is false information. Being skeptical is an approach to information.

least2• 4 years ago

Being skeptical is all well and good but pragmatically speaking, people do not have enough time in the day to verify all the information coming their way, so they must be selective about what they are skeptical about and figure out how to establish trust with authorities to remove some of that burden from themself.

daveoc64• 4 years ago

But people aren't skeptical.

I have seen too many fake social media posts that re-use footage from old natural disasters, protests, political rallies, terrorist attacks and even movies - all to forward some kind of false political viewpoint.

These spread quickly due to outrage, but disproving them is hard.

hilyen• 4 years ago

So whomever is majority gets to decide what information is trustworthy? I understand it's supposed to utilize sensors and all sorts of criteria to come up with a logical & reasonable trustworthiness check. But what if one of your majority voting blocs doesn't believe in science? It's humans doing the verification, which can be corrupted.

coverband2• 4 years ago

It's irrelevant if there will be people who refuse to trust these sources, as long as they can establish a pedigree by continuously providing accurate information. If info from one node can be invalidated by other trusted sources after its original reporting (by publishing the facts after the dust cloud clears), the node will have the incentive to stick to the truth.

JamesianP4• 4 years ago

Any group that holds to principles and establishes a strong reputation would tend to become a target for activists to take over and push their agenda. At least this seems to be how things work out in the US.

eurasiantiger• 4 years ago

It’s bitcoin all over again. Doublespend, doublethink.

themitigating14• 4 years ago

No solution is perfect and disinformation is dangerous.

I don't get responses where people point out that a proposal to solve a problem won't be 100% effective.

Hamuko• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if it's going to be effective at all. How do you even know that an authorative data source is actually authorative and correct?

It's also kind of funny that this idea comes from Japan, where school history textbooks, an authorative data source of sorts, have had a rather optimistic view on the world during 1937–1945.

coverband2• 4 years ago

That's actually a pretty helpful idea, and I think a number of creative solutions can be tried to determine which one of them would stick. I'm thinking it could even fund itself and finance investigative or scientific work (at some future adoption point).

lisper• 4 years ago

When I first read this headline I thought it was talking about sea urchin. :-)

kybernetyk• 4 years ago

The Japanese government is very trustworthy and would never ever lie. Same goes for every other government. This “ministry of truth” OSI layer sounds like a fantastic idea!

raverbashing• 4 years ago

Every IP packet is going to be personally stamped by a government worker, I don't see the problem

comboy5• 4 years ago

Yay! I don't think they get it yet, but this is badly needed.

They key is that the trust must always be subjective. You trust specific people and you should adjust that trust over time.

Those people trust other people, you have just a few hops to anybody on the planet thanks to small world effect.

I've spent a good time thinking about it and I believe trust evaluation function should also be up to the user, all we need is a protocol.

wyldfire• 4 years ago

All I can see is a dystopia where it's illegal to try and connect to one of these networks with a device that doesn't have a government-signed bootloader and illegal to portray yourself on these networks as anyone other than your real legal identity. Yay Sybil attacks are harder but general purpose computing [1] is well and truly dead.

[1] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

Aunche2• 4 years ago

I don't see why it would be problematic to require the real identities of those who want to act as authorities of information. That's how it has always worked. Ideas are trustworthy because people who they are endorsed by people who you deem as trustworthy.

comboy5• 4 years ago

All you need is to have secure communication channels between people.

Yes, one could argue it is already not really possible if your adivesary is the gov, but it seems to be much broader problem than the topic at hand.

tdeck• 4 years ago

Why would trust be transitive? I don't trust people 3 degrees of connection away from me. Why would I? If someone X I know and trust directly introduces me to source Y, that's already only a slight endorsement. Somebody I know clicking a button 3 years ago saying they trust person A who liked some article means pretty much nothing.

comboy5• 4 years ago

Trust is transitive but it is not binary. It is very important that it is not binary (multiply weights along the path)

You would have multiple paths to any node and you need to aggregate that.

unethicist2• 4 years ago

Yes, I've also been thinking about this a lot, and reached similar conclusions.

One of the main issues I can't think my way around is privacy. I don't want my full and true trust network to be publicly available, although I might provide a more detailed map to my trusted peers. I might also "lie" about a given weight depending on who asks, for diplomatic purposes (perhaps you have a close friend who also happens to be rather gullible).

A working system is going to take a lot of effort on behalf of each user to correctly and accurately annotate their own trust graphs, on an ongoing basis - perhaps this just too impractical.

I performed a slightly unethical experiment many years ago, In which I created an entirely fake Facebook account (back when people actually used Facebook), and slowly sent out friend requests to personal acquaintances. All it takes is one or two to get started, and every subsequent person sees "n mutual friends" and is more likely to accept the random request. It snowballed from there, and eventually I had "infiltrated" a non-trivial portion of my own social network with an entirely fictional persona.

(Ethics note: I only sent friend requests to people I was already friends with on my real account - so I wasn't obtaining any new private information I wouldn't otherwise have had access to - and I didn't perform any interactions beyond sending friend requests)

Any kind of trust network is going to need to deal with this sort of infiltration - and I'm not sure how.

And another thing - trust is bought and sold all the time. Social media influencers sell a small fragment of their trust level every time they do a paid endorsement. If there's some kind of explicit trust network, people will pay others to obtain a higher trust level. Is there anything we can do about that?

comboy5• 4 years ago

Yeah, we went the same places.

Usability, bootstrapping and privacy - the biggest problems as I see it ordered by difficulty (yup).

Privacy - make queries require some trust from you. Your software may decide what is allowed based on your needs, e.g. low trust have lots of limiting and global limits while letting close friends ask as much as they want, you could also take into account who are you replying to. Some other privacy issues could perhaps be solved with having a wallet of identities.

Usability - very hard, I think it must be weighted and I think it should be weighted in a way that's not algorithmic. It should be you explicit trust to somebody - that's a rock foundation that if you tell me you trust some person 80% I know it's you saying that and not what some algorithm computed. We have a really good idea about our social network trust in hour heads and we keep updating it, but it seems hard to transfer to a device or even verbalize. Assigning weights to each trusted person is just too much to ask even from the most engaged users. Some app could perhaps ask you whether you ask more person A or B from time to time after asking for a short list of your most trusted peers or something like that, but it is a hard problem which I see no clear solution to yet. Adjusting is also not obvious, if you got high trust result to say some mechanic and he turned out to be terrible you'd like to see which person did it come from and perhaps lower trust your trust to them.

Because they could be compromised. That's another problem. If it becomes what it can, billions will be spent to try to affect results. People can be compromised and have no idea. I think FB and such faced such problem already but it is easier to counter as a centralized entity.

Social consequences would be huge but it does not fix the world completely. E.g. there still would be stupid hubs. That is, many people are going to trust some celebrity and that celebrity is going to sell trust abuse power etc. But that's those people choice.

In short it just lets you query trust, but the way people assign it seems more like an education system problem. Part of my how much I trust somebody is how good is he at assigning trust. Some people I dont trust much not because I think they are malicious but because I know they can be influenced easily or are not careful about assesing their trust.

In my experience despite the Internet and all that comes with it, asking trusted people remains the best way to learn about many things. They just point me to something and I know its worth my time.

Would be nice if it could scale and not waste time on both sides.

olah_1• 4 years ago

An endorsement layer could actually be pretty cool.

If I could choose which endorsement agency to trust and then drop them for a competitor if they break my trust. Not bad.

porknubbins2• 4 years ago

Interesting but I am a little skeptical of any internet protocols coming out of Japan. Large parts of their internet discriminate against traffic from outside Japan by blocking foreign traffic/transactions entirely or giving low priority.

coolandsmartrr• 4 years ago

In the spirit of the submission, could you provide a source to verify that?

themitigating14• 4 years ago

I wonder if he's referring to their low bandwidth often crowded international connections. I don't know if this is still the case though, was a few years ago

porknubbins2• 4 years ago

Its just something I have observed over the years. Its like a different internet with a good vpn. Recent examples that come to mind- Starbucks.jp blocks logins from non Japanese ip addresses, I had to use a vpn to buy some merchandise even with local address and card. And space ALC the translation site runs super slowly outside Japan (like way beyond pacific ocean latency).

azinman2• 4 years ago

You can’t solve social problems technically.

themitigating14• 4 years ago

You can try and have some success. It's not an all or nothing situation when you try to fix large issues like this

sirmike_• 4 years ago

Sounds like an ad.

nathias• 4 years ago

Interesting how everyone screaming about trusting an expert has never trusted an expert regarding epistemology. The problem isn't that the criteria are subjective, but that they get appropriated by politics if this is not institutionally prevented.

Fujitsu and Japanese Uni propose 'endorsement layer' to make internet trustable

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