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LOAF - Distributed Social Networking Over Email
FamousLongAgo writes "LOAF (List Of All Friends) is an extension to email that lets you send out address book data without compromising your privacy. LOAF appends a hash-like data structure to each outgoing email, and collects similar attachments from the people who write to you. These files can be queried to see if they contain a given email address, but they can't be reverse-engineered to reveal the list of addresses used to construct them. LOAF lets you check whether someone emailing you for the first time is a complete stranger, or appears in the address books of some of your trusted correspondents. And as a decentralized application, LOAF offers an interesting alternative to current social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster."
Ok, I've had it with Friendster, Tribe, and all this social networking crap. Go to a bar, go to a park, hell go to a freaking CHURCH or something but if you want to make friends then for the love of Augusta Jane Chapin STEP AWAY FROM THE BLOODY COMPUTER. People are better grokked in person, and this virtual hooey is way overrated and ultimately unsatisfactory. If you're fat and ugly, go hang out with other fat and ugly people. Whatever you are comfortable with. But you just can NOT get the same social dynamics online as you do in the real world.
Why do you think people are such assholes online? You know, like me. Because the social dynamics are different and don't match reality. People don't have to be polite online, and you don't get to practice communications skills that make you successful in the real world.
And since the eventual goal is to get laid the physical verbal interactions are kind of important.
Having said that, this seems like an interesting technology, and doesn't seem as inherently annoying as Friendster. When the FAQ has stuff like this in it:
The false positive rate for Bloom filters is determined by the number of hashing functions, the size of the filter, and the number of entries in the filter, given by the approximate formula:
( 1 - e^(kn/m) )^k
It makes me go all warm and fuzzy.You don't need to reverse it if you can brute force it.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
All you need to do is join a few mailing lists with people on it that use this. Then, you run you CD of email address through it, looking for hits. This gives you a much smaller list, but they're all confirmed, known good addresses. The cool thing, from the spammer's perspective is that you don't have to go out and harvest, people go out of their way to give you their friend's email addresses.
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It doesn't seem like it'd be hard to have a worm write an arbitrary address into your address book.
Then LOAF would propogate that address to your friends, and then spammers could use the address programmed into the worm as the from address.
On the whole though this seems like a really nice addition to existing spam blocking systems.
Unfortunately the cases where i recieve email from a friend of a friend are relatively rare - but that's just me.
It also does have some privacy issues - since it'd essentially enable me to check if one of my friends happens to have my wife in his address book...
As an anti-spam technology, I don't see it. Quite often one gets legit email from perfect strangers.
Apart from that... I still don't really see it. You can only check for two levels of separation.
I like the general idea of decentralized social networking, though. The semantic web seems more hopeful than email.
LOAF lets you check whether someone emailing you for the first time is a complete stranger, or appears in the address books of some of your trusted correspondents.
What's the difference? Some of my most trusted confidants have systems riddled with spyware and viri. They're great people but Horrible users. I rarely give out my real email address for that very reason.
Michalangelo Progr
Being online give you freedom. Manners, grammar and spelling aren't eliminated, they become a choice. And as a choice, they can become something to be proud of.
Interacting with other people online has allowed me to get to know people from other countries and cultures, instead of being limited to a west Michigan culture where it's sometimes hard to find other people interested in the same things I am.
Finally, things like email and online forums allow me to communicate and cooperate with people in other time zones. I don't have to be awake for my message to reach my buddy in Mexico. Or my friends in Africa, Europe or Asia.
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You generally reverse engineer it because there is fundamental information loss in the hashing process. However, there are caveats.
For example, lets consider a really primitive hashing function: we add up the ascii values of all the letters in the the email address and that is the hash value. However, foo@bar.com and bar@foo.com obviously have the same hash in this case, so knowing that the sum is 1234, you can't determine which the address is.
Now if the hash is long and very good at avoiding collisions, you may actually be in more trouble than when using a weak hash, because the very rarity of hash collisions reduces the information loss (maybe there's only one string that includes an @ sign and is shorter than 40 characters that hashes to that value!) So, if we have some way of generating a string, fitting a specific template, that evaluates to a particular hash (and so far, the found SHA-0 collision is nothing of this sort), we can just generate all short strings that match that hash and look for one that could be an email address. However, a weaker hash would result in many plausible email addersses hashing to the value, which would increase false positives, but reduce the risk of finding the original addresses.
DVD encryption was reverse engineered because all the information was preserved. As long as the hashing function looses enough information, there is no way to recover the original email.
nope. i would hope your friends and friends friends who you speak to are already on your white list.
the spam filters' biggest challenge is letting legitimate emails from people you have NO connection with through. this doesn't solve this, so we are just taking a step sideways.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Can't use this for business. The last thing I want is my customers (or anyone else for that matter) being able to query to see if I have other specific emails in my list. Even worse, a competitor gets their hands on it, and just hammers emails at it, looking for positives.
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I don't like the idea of being able to reach someone at any time or to be reached at any time. Obviously, this becomes a necesity for some jobs, but when I am home, I don't necesarily want to be able to 'always' be reached. I think the limit of these things is they go from being useful to pervasive.
My other computer is a Jacquard loom.
If they release a worm, we'll finally know which ones of our friends were dumb enough to open attatchments :p
And what you would call "advantages" many would call "limiting". I for one don't tend to like meeting random people, I want to meet highly intelligent, thoughtful people. There tends to be a limited number of those per geographic area. Those limitations are removed online. And meeting them online at least has an automatic intelligence filter- if they can't type english, they can be ignored as morons (or foreigners, but if they can't use english I won't be able to communicate with them in person either).
Like I said- both have advantages and disadcantages. Thats why both exist. Use the one you want, or both of them. But don't insult someone else for prefering one over the other.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You don't need to extract every email in it to break it...
For example, if your employer got their hands on your list, they could check if you've been in contact with people at your competitors.
It's even worse if they try and get a false positive!
While IM was never mentioned in the article, my fear is that something like this is more likely aimed at IM users than others; quite an oximoron for an application designed to promote privacy and security. Also, since it seems to be based on a friend-of-friend approach, it would have to support the address book format of every friend that I excahange e-mail with, would it not? This all seems to be ignored in the article.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You know who hangs out at bars? Drunks. I don't want a social circle of drunks.
It's also a hell of a lot harder to make friends without a huge common ground. If you are in college and at a bar in town you run into someone around your age in that bar, they most likely go to school and you can talk about that. When everyone works different jobs with different lives and families are scattered it's really freakin' hard to meet new people. My wife and I are dealing with this right now and it's not a minor issue.
I've thought about trying the Friendster thing... but usually shit like that ends up being used to arrange hookups for wannabe swingers and gay men, regular people seem to be getting results, though.
"Elitist" is the word.
If you wouldn't "lower" yourself to speaking to anything but the-best-and-the-brightest, you're not going to learn appropriate social skills for dealing with "regular" people, which are what you're normally going to deal with in the physical world. Also, there are many places to meet "intelligent, thoughtful people"; try a bookstore, coffee shop, etc. instead of a bar, and you might find different sorts of people.
G
Trust me, they're more bored by you then you by them.
"Elitist" is the word.
Sorry, wrong. It's just a simple reailty.
You can't just walk into a coffee shop and find someone to talk to about digital FIR filters, for example. There just aren't people like that everywhere.
It's not that I won't talk to normal people about normal things, but when you want to talk find out about adjusting your sway bar end-links for zero preload, most people just nod and smile.
One of the great things about the internet is to make it easy to find people to talk to about these things. Maybe there are only 100 people who know much about the ECU in an Mazda RX-7, but chances are, you be able to find some of them online and have a real, meaningful conversation on the subject, rather than some idiot going "Wow! That's like in 2F2F!"
It's not elitist, to not want to waste your time and someone else's time having a one-sided discussion they won't understand. Some people just aren't that interesting to certain other people. That's just the way it is. It not because the other person considers them to be a less person, IT'S BECAUSE THE HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON, NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT.
Life is too short to proofread.
My oh my.
I hope you never get a flat tire. You'll be bored to death by the nice 'ordinary' guy who helps fix it.
Naw, you'd probably nail him with your stun gun while waiting for the truck you ordered on your cellphone to arrive.
resigned
Get one of those "1 million email adresses" CDs they keep emailing me about, and check each one to see if it's in the list.
What is the expected benefit of "These files can be queried to see if they contain a given email address, but they can't be reverse-engineered to reveal the list of addresses used to construct them. " again?
Sigh.
I work with a couple of people like you!
I can't stand them.
I am a "highly intelligent" person (don't ask me, ask the people I know, who also happen to be "highly intelligent").
A lack of diversity can almost be directly equated to a lack of knowledge. I fail to see how your approach to so-called "stupid people" is any different than a racist bias.
Who defines intelligence? At least racists made it clear who they hated - but you provide nothing more than a loophole which you can manipulate to your will.
"I don't like him; he must be an idiot".
Heck, if you wanted to say you didn't like hanging out with uninteresting people, that would make sense. Heck, I'm not fond of uninteresting people either, but my definition of uninteresting is different than yours.
But trying to plant your statement as objective when it's obviously subjective is some kind of logical fallacy (and if it isn't, I'll be taking my nobel prize now), one which I can't remember at this time.
What's funny, is that most of the job skills that I apply today that really make me stand out (other than my technical skills), are the skills I learned working jobs for shit pay like being a clerk at a convenience store or *gasp* working at McDonalds.
Some of the smartest people I know are engineers. They are also spend 90% of their time trying to avoid work, never apply themselves to their fullest potential and occasionally outright refuse to work with team or accept team members' ideas.
Nothing requires you to learn these skills when your technical knowledge and ideas are put on a pedestal. On the flipside, everyone knows how to flip a burger or work a cash register - you are competing for something significantly more real (like your cash flow) and might actually learn a thing or two.
P.S, did you know that there are Truck Drivers that are in MENSA? Don't believe me? Look at their Web Site, here's the quote:
As far as occupations, the range is staggering. Mensa has professors and truck drivers, scientists and firefighters, computer programmers and farmers, artists, military people, musicians, laborers, police officers, glassblowers--the diverse list goes on and on. There are famous Mensans and prize-winning Mensans, but there are many whose names you wouldn't know.
Get real.
For awhile I had the same outlook as you, if people couldn't talk about "deep" matters, well then, screw 'em. Then I realized that I was actually a snob.
Everyone has something in common, the only barriers are linguistic. If you don't talk to common man, you loose social skills, and become disconected from the reality that most of the world lives in. Plus, it is always good to get new views on things, even if you find them ignorant, or against your own.
Thats one thing I have against cell-phone culture, everyone is talking to someone they know, and thus never meet different people, with varying POVs. A democracy thrives on interaction.
There are some very interesting people out there, who don't know a lick about tech, but know a great deal about things you don't, like farming, waiting tables, living in a card board box.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I'm not sure if anyone else has posted this idea yet, 'cause I'm way too lazy and tired to read the whole discussion, so I'm just throwing this out there....
It seems kind of sad and pathetic that we need something that "checks incoming mail against the address books of your friends" in an effort to get rid of email from complete strangers....
The internet was supposed to, among a thousand other things that are now long forgotten, get strangers together who shared common bonds of interest or study. Hobbies, ideas, whatever...
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Wow, how much you've unintentionally revealed about yourself by listing your criteria for accomplishment. Yes, the parent is elitist, but your so-called 'notable accomplishments' are laughable and revealing of a shallow, spoon-fed conception of success. Real-life accomplished people do more interesting things than graduate from an Ivy or score 99th percentile on some standardized test.
I don't think your behavior is elitist as much as it is limiting. You assume the only interesting people you'll ever meet are those who are at an intellectual level comparable to yours. I think this is a mistake. In my opinion, you should pat yourself less on the back and start having more fun. But to each his own...
I am a Brasilian, and as you probably have heard we had invaded orkut. :-) We do love social networks, we are very social, even the most nerd ones here do go out and meet people in bars (ok Brasil is very big, and my experience is most with Rio).
We also love the internet and every new gadget or service. This does not stop us from meeting in bars and in person, just the oposite, I've seen Orkut making people more social and meet more people in person in a few months then in years I have known them. I myself have been put in contact with people I barely seen before, in a way that we can get out more.
All that said is just to show that the problem you're ranting about, witch I do believe it is a real problem, is not the fault of social networks or intenet chats that help people meet on-line, but really more of a cultural or even a personal problem (some people simply are afraid of meeting other people).
Ps. I hate orkut, it is buggy as hell and almost useless. The only good thing it has is the mass of people they have. Otherwise it is a really crap, almost aways out of service.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq