LOAF - Distributed Social Networking Over Email 273
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."
Please go outside (Score:4, Insightful)
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.Re:Please go outside (Score:5, Insightful)
*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.
Limits (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Limits (Score:2)
I've made friends online, I've made friends in the real world, I've made friends at school, and I've made them at work. All methods have pluses and minuses. All are useful. If you prefer the real world method, go for it. Just realise that prefering another option is just as valid.
Re:Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Limits (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Limits (Score:3, Insightful)
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,
Re:Limits (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Limits (Score:2)
Re:Limits (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Limits (Score:3, Informative)
Elitism:
1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources. 2a. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class. b. Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class.
(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edit
Re:Limits (Score:2)
You are definitely falling into elitism however. You are pinning negative social status on people who prefer computer based means. Thats sounds like textbook elitism to me.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Limits (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Limits (Score:5, Funny)
1580 SAT
34 ACT
National AP Scholar (requires completing 8 full semester equivalent AP tests while in high school, and getting a minimum score of 4/5 on all of them. A 4 is equivalent to an A in a college course)
National Merit Finalist
ACM Member of the Year, UIUC branch. Awarded for my work on the tutoring program
2nd place biology and 5th place computers JETS Illinois State championship
3rd place biology and 5th place computers WYSE Illinois State Championship (they renamed it my second year)
Job outsourced to India: Priceless...
number of sexual encounters... (Score:3, Funny)
further proof that the higher the intelligence, the lower the reproductive potential.
Re:Limits (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Limits (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Limits (Score:2, Insightful)
I hear that a lot (Score:2)
This is a constant complaint given to cell phones -- usually from random people but even sometimes from my friends. And the thing is, I still don't get it. I understand the sentiment of not wanting to be reachable 24x7; what I don't get is how having a cell phone makes you so reachable.
You can always turn your cell phone to vibrate mode, or simply turn it off. Bingo, you are now unreachable, yet you maintain the ability to connect with people
Re:Please go outside (Score:2)
You know about this thing called "phone", right?
Re:Please go outside (Score:2)
Re:Please go outside (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Please go outside (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Please go outside (Score:2)
"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.
Which is what, exactly?
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.
I don't. But I do think that some are better than others. When comparing Friendster to the real world, the real world wins hands down. Is t
Re:Please go outside (Score:2)
that was your first mistake. your second was not having enough out-of-box brains to see what social networking is about.
here's some help:
it's not MEANT to replace the real world. it's meant to make it BETTER.
here's another hint to help you:
like a TELEPHONE does, like a yellow pages does.
think of friendster as being an insanely detailed and annotated grouping of all your friend's Rolodex's, and you're halfway there.
Come on, don't be afraid....connect the do
Oh, come on. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Please go outside (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's the point. Maybe some people don't WANT the same social dynamics you get in the real world.
Not necessarily more polite in person (Score:2)
Yes, get out into the real world, but don't socialize with just other computer types, role players, math geeks, gamers, or any single stereotype.
Re:Not necessarily more polite in person (Score:2)
A particular offender at a coffee house that I frequent is about
Re:Please go outside (Score:2)
But, at base, I couldn't care less if someone has exchanged email with my parents, the President or the Pope -- they're still strangers to me, so this has no value for the stated purpose.
Re:Please go outside (Score:5, Informative)
These days, in my spare time, I'm writing a p2p program -- think of it as a swarm-download system, like BitTorrent, on an overlay network topology, like eMule (only eMule uses Kademlia, [psu.edu] and I'm using Pastry [microsoft.com]). It has been shown, here [duke.edu] and here [mit.edu], that Bloom Filters can drastically reduce the traffic generated when searching peer to peer networks. I recently coded a Java implementation of a Bloom Filter for my p2p program, and it works great in testing. (But the p2p program isn't anywhere near done, so don't ask about it
Furthermore, Bloom Filters can be compressed -- see Michael Mitzenmacher's work here [harvard.edu]. The idea that you can compress a Bloom Filter is a little counter-intuitive, because the size of the bit vector and the number of hash functions are derived using calculus to maximize the compactness of the set, for a given false positive rate -- thus, in this state, it is non-compressable (it is "already compressed" by simply being an optimal Bloom Filter). To compress a bloom filter, you must choose a large bit vector, and a non-optimal number of hash functions, then apply the compression algorithm (typically arithmetic coding). Because the bit vector is so large, it is sparsely populated -- and so compression works.
Often you can save 10% and 20% on the size of your bloom filter, while having a lower false positive rate. Score!
A very nice, very interesting survey of all the applications of Bloom Filters can be found here [psu.edu].
- sm
Re:Please go outside (Score:2)
for example, let's compare something like finding a roomate to share an apartment with.
In real life, or without social networking, it's like this:
-have to bother all of your friends, over email, on the phone, at a party, etc. to spread the word. that means *requiring* your friends/family to keep an ear out for you, which they might not remember.
-go thru craigslist and spend days interviewing freaky random people who might not turn out to be good roomate ma
Re:Please go outside (Score:4, Funny)
(Tends to screaming kid.)
Well I guess I could hire a sitter. (No sweety, not the iBook!!!!) a;dfogadlogjs;ldug wsorutspritgsagu9o uapouigfa oczvj zfj jozdo zdzolaeroprasjo; jgd oj j drg
About social networks (Re:Please go outside) (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Please go outside (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say that depends on where you hang out online. There's a forum I frequent where members make an effort to periodically get together in real life. I've met some really neat people that way, and made friends in places that I might not normally visit. Now if I ever have to go to Greenville or Newfoundland or Israel, I know I've got friends there.
Of course, the purpose of this forum is to discuss a
Bad timing today. (Score:3, Funny)
Or so they thought, untill they heard about the sha vulnerability.
Re:Bad timing today. (Score:2)
Re:Bad timing today. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Spam blocking uses? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, how would something like this hold up in a spam blocking function? How easy would it be to get onto the LOAF list? And if the contents can't be listed, how are you to know that it's not chalk full of the bad stuff? How do you know that you aren't emailing to people whom you don't wish to receive your mails?
Re:Spam blocking uses? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Spam blocking uses? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Spam blocking uses? (Score:2)
That's the first thing I though when I read this too.
This would be a GREAT antispam tool.
The implementation would take a little thought I bet if you were to combine a tool like this with a bayesian filter, one could an order of magnitude reduction in the spam that make it past the filter.
Some of the detail though would require a weighting mechanism for "people". This would be necessary to deal with people smart enough to us
Re:Spam blocking uses? (Score:2)
Ultimately, not all that well: if everyone could go to a perfect whitelist, with user-transparent verifications and all that hoohah, all that would happen would be that spammers would start forging the addresses of real people onto their spams.
You'd have to start combining that with SPF and perhaps some even more restrictive confirmations to really make it effective.
(And BTW, as long as I'm already replying: the phrase you wante
Spam filter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that it would solve anything, but it could be useful...
Re:Spam filter? (Score:2)
Re:Spam filter? (Score:5, Funny)
MEATLOAF - the Anti-SPAM!
Yech. Time to go home.
Soko
LOAF (Score:3, Funny)
Re:LOAF (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, I did. And I can't understand WTF all those "get a life" posts mean. I DO have a life, and it's Linux and the like. Why should some other form of life, e.g. interacting with the local drunks at the local bar or church or club, be any superior to the life we, Linux hobbyists, have?
Dictionary attack? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need to reverse it if you can brute force it.
Re:Dictionary attack? (Score:5, Informative)
They've included a nice analysis of the types of attacks including the Ex-Girlfriend attack, Marc Canter attack, and Dictionary Attacks in the writeup
The configurable false positive rate can make Bloom filters resistant to dictionary attack, but it also renders them less useful. Given a false positive rate of c, and a dictionary with k elements, a dictionary attack will result in ck false hits. This rate goes down if you can collect multiple filters from the same user that are either 1) of different length, or 2) use different hash functions (salts, in our implementation). False positives in either case will be different, so for n filters the false positive rate will drop to c^n.
This implies that the truly paranoid should use a presized filter large enough to contain as many correspondents as they ever expect to have on record, and an invariant set of salts. Under those conditions, collecting multiple filters will not change the false positive rate. A mostly empty large filter might have an unacceptably low false positive rate, so you would want to pad the list of real emails out with random data, to maintain a constant ratio of on/off bits as well.
The tradeoff with a high false positive rate is that the filter will be less useful to legitimate recipients. An intriguing possibility is that of sending out very inaccurate filters that are updated on a regular basis (for example weekly) so that a user has to accumulate a certain number of the filters in order to run queries with a good degree of certitude. This spreads private information over several filters and ensures that an eavesdropper who intercepts only one file will find it of very limited value.
And most importantly they say: Of course, the truly paranoid would be crazy to use LOAF.
Re:Dictionary attack? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that with email addresses being around 15 characters, with around 40 different letters, that's only 40^15 different emails to try.
That's 1 million million million million combinations.
Shouldn't take too long to try.
Re:Dictionary attack? (Score:2)
Re:Dictionary attack? (Score:2)
You do realise that this isn't going to make the list of possible email addresses any bigger right?
just hope your name isn't (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdo wd.com/msg02554.html [mail-archive.com]
What about people who don't use address books? (Score:2)
Re:What about people who don't use address books? (Score:2)
Re:What about people who don't use address books? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, back in my day we didn't have fancy electronic address books.
We only had paper address books. If I ran into a stranger, I would take my address book and smear it across his face one page at a time. If the ink rubbed off, then I knew they were a friend of one of my friends, and I could trust 'em.
And then we could drink beer together. But we didn't have carbonation back then so we used straws to blow bubbles. There wasn't any plastic back then neither, so we had to find a swamp and cut some reeds...
Re:Open ya EYES! (Score:2)
FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD: LOAF ! (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe I'm Skeptical/Paranoid/Cynical... (Score:2)
It's a spammer's dream. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a spammer's dream. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's much faster to just send out to a plasuable set of addresses than to actually try to check for them actually being "good". So they generally don't wory about that sort of thing.
They, of course, still claim that their lists are good addresses who have "opted in" to their list. But that's just salesmanship.
Re:It's a spammer's dream. (Score:2)
Re:It's a spammer's dream. (Score:2, Informative)
Virii and worms (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
But.... (Score:3, Insightful)
not much use against spam so what's it for? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
You clicked/deleted WHAT?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
0wned Machines & LOAF-OKed viruses (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:0wned Machines & LOAF-OKed viruses (Score:2)
This isn't a replacement for Sender-ID or SPF or whatever. It's just a relatively safe way to see which of your acquaintances know each other.
Oh Great (Score:3, Funny)
Linux On A Floppy (Score:4, Funny)
Guess not.
Something similar for AIM? (Score:2, Interesting)
No good for business (Score:2, Insightful)
but, what if.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:but, what if.. (Score:2)
(you know, a very small loaf. laugh, it's funny.)
Mail worms (Score:2)
Not that strong... (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
what mail client(s) is this talking about? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:what mail client(s) is this talking about? (Score:3, Informative)
Right now there is a reference implementation for Pine/procmail, we are hoping for help with implementations for Outlook, Mail.app, and other clients.
heh (Score:2)
Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not just salt the SHA1 function with the filter owners email address? That way somebody could never take my filter and claim it as their own, since the bloom filter won't match anything when the hash values are produced with their email address as the salt.
Am I missing something?
Re:Hmm... (Score:2)
List Of All Foes (Score:2)
Oh Boy, Longer Emails! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Oh Boy, Longer Emails! (Score:3, Funny)
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
SPAM Application (Score:3, Interesting)
Thunderbird extension (Score:3, Interesting)
I would try it myself when/if someone writes a Thunderbird/Mozilla extension for it.
(Before you ask. No, it's not interesting enough for ME to write a thunderbird extension myself)
Just what we need (Score:2)
It will work for a while - degrees of seperation (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps limit it to a couple of steps away.
Sad state of the Interweb.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
[internetisshit.org]
Re:Yeah, right.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, right.. (Score:3, Informative)
Bloom filters [wikipedia.org] have been around since 1970 [acm.org] (link to acm digital library - you probably need a subscription to get in), and can be based on any crytographic hash function, such as sha-1 [wikipedia.org].
Bloom filters tell you if something is (probably) a member of a set. If you know an email address, you can ask "is this email address in this address book?", but you can't ask "what are all the email addresses in this address book?" without guessing every address. Essentially, if a spammer already has you email addrees, h
Re:Yeah, right.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Can't is such a strong word (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Can't is such a strong word (Score:3, Informative)
An (bad) example would be that the "encoding" function is the ascii values for the first and third character before the @ and the first character after the @ - those bits of a 128 bit Bloom filter are "lit up" for your address, so that means:
all map to the same bits being lit up in the bloom filter, there is no real way to "reverse engineer" it and since i
Re:Can't is such a strong word (Score:3, Informative)