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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."
You don't need to reverse it if you can brute force it.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
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(http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdo wd.com/msg02554.html
Send this email to your LOAF within 3 minutes or suffer a tragic loss next week!
If you think
If you don't like them, don't use them. I don't myself. That being said, I know a lot of ways they're superior to real life:
*Ability to talk to people at any time. If my friend isn't at the bar, I can't talk to him. The chance he's near his computer is much higher
*Ability to hold multiple conversations. I can hold 4 or 5 simultaneous text conversations, only 1 oral one.
*Ability to talk asynchronousl. I can post something, he can read it later. A bar doesn't do that
*Ability to talk to people when on the road
*Ability to talk to people whatever the distance
Thats a few of the advantages. Real life has its own set of advantages. Neither is obviously better than the other. Nor is either exclusive- you're allowed to do both.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
LOAF sounds wonderful until someone creates a LOAF-exploiting virus. If a friend becomes infected, their 0wned machine can send virus messages (with the friend's LOAF signature) that have a very high chance of being read and thus spreading through a LOAF network.
The challenge with any computer-based social network is not the "do I trust my friend" question but the issue of "do I trust my friend's computer that is sending me this message"? Perhaps all computers need a tamperproof hash that encodes their OS patch/AV update/spyware/firewall defense state. That way the message recipient can assess the trustworthyness of the sending machine.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
And since the eventual goal is to get laid the physical verbal interactions are kind of important.
I think that pretty much says everything we needed to know about you.
I don't go in for these sites either, but to say that personal relationships online are any less valid than personal relationships in any other setting is ludicrous. Just because your only goal in life is to get laid doesn't mean that's the case with everyone else on the planet. Sometimes, we like to talk to people because we find them interesting, not because we think we might be able to score with them.
You're right that the social dynamics online are different, but you can't completely dismiss a manner of human interaction because it's different than what you're used to. But then, if all you're after is picking up drunk women in bars, then you can go ahead and spend your life doing that. You would have to be pretty shallow to consider that kind of lifestyle anything but "ultimately unsatisfactory" though.
Of course, there's a certain irony in your comment coming from a Slashdot subscriber.
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 know who hangs out at bars? Drunks. I don't want a social circle of drunks.
That's OK. We don't want you either.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Gee...hasn't anyone else noticed what else we get with LOAF? Longer shit on emails!
Unless the application (which it might, I haven't checked) filters the LOAF signature, we'll have a nice influx of three-word emails with 25 lines of crap at the end of each, plus headers, plus the 50-line signature that I flamed you about last week, plus your cutsey signoff, plus the last 14 messages you've quoted in the discussion thread because you were too fucking lazy to edit them off, plus a poorly-rendered ASCII-art picture of Britney Spears showing her hot grits, plus...
Well. You get the picture. I can't wait until I can be on mailing lists that have 95 LOAF signatures at the end of each email because they were running Outlook and it couldn't filter them out.
Any way to stick those babies in a header? At least they can be hidden, then. The bandwidth is just a victim anyway.
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"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
Hmmm... Mail Expurgated Against Tenative List Of All Friends - MEATLOAF!!!
MEATLOAF - the Anti-SPAM!
Yech. Time to go home.
Soko
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