Re: [GNUnet-developers] Reverse resolution of VPN/GNS

[Christian Grothoff]

First of all, please, could everyone reign in their discussion style a
bit, this is not tor-talk ;-).  I think the real issue is that the two
of you are talking past each other, and we really need to get the
emotion out of this.

My view from the sideline:

Carlo is arguing from the perspective of GNUnet for the people. He is
correctly arguing that we need to consider the social implications of
what we do, and the kinds of interactions we like to see if we design
applications for people. He might be right that for the SecuShare OSN,
there is no need for global reverse lookup, and we can debate whether
this would be a good or a bad feature.

Martin is looking at solutions that in my view relate to more corporate
use cases with access control, credential management, etc.  This is a
very different application domain, but the Internet has many
applications and let's not forget that corporations are people too. Eh,
scratch that, I mean that our corporate masters also use the Internet
and we shall serve them. At least for the occasions where they may have
seemingly legitimate needs.


At a higher level, my view is that we should really avoid this silver
bullet idea (which for Carlo is SecuShare's design): GNUnet is about
providing a broad toolchest of (quality) solutions to common problems
when building secure (decentralised) network applications.  In this
context, Martin has an idea for reverse lookup, and I fully support him
exploring it. Maybe we'll find it useful, maybe not. For me, it is now
clear that Carlo has a different need, and it'll require a different
solution. There is nothing wrong about doing both, they are orthogonal
and not fundamentally incompatible.


So what we can debate (without accusations please) is whether
Martin-style "global" reverse lookups is socially/technically useful for
SecuShare.  Maybe Carlo is right and it is not. However, GNS is more
than a PKI for SecuShare, and it is flexible enough to allow us to do
both, without one feature compromising the
efficiency/usability/security/privacy of the other.


On 11/05/2016 07:12 PM, Martin Schanzenbach wrote:
> Where is that coming from? 

(indeed)

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