I'm Shocked, Shocked To Find Collusion Going On

The security of a permissionless peer-to-peer system generally depends upon the assumption of uncoordinated choice, the idea that each peer acts independently upon its own view of the system's state. Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, wrote in The Meaning of Decentralization:

In the case of blockchain protocols, the mathematical and economic reasoning behind the safety of the consensus often relies crucially on the uncoordinated choice model, or the assumption that the game consists of many small actors that make decisions independently.

Another way of saying this is that the system isn't secure if enough peers collude with each other. Below the fold, I look at why this is a big problem.

Click On The Llama

There was lots of great stuff at the Internet Archive's Annual Bash. But for those of us who can remember the days before PCs played music, the highlight was right at the end of the presentations when the awesome Jason Scott introduced the port of 1997's WinAmp to the Web. Two years earlier:

WinPlay3 was the first real-time MP3 audio player for PCs running Windows, both 16-bit (Windows 3.1) and 32-bit (Windows 95). Prior to this, audio compressed with MP3 had to be decompressed prior to listening.

Source

WinPlay3 was the first, but it was bare-bones.It was WinAmp that really got people to realize that the PC was a media device. But the best part was that WinAmp was mod-able. It unleashed a wave of creativity (Debbie does WinAmp, anyone?), now preserved in the Archive's collection of over 5,000 WinAmp skins!

Jason has the details in his blog post Don't Click on the Llama:

Thanks to Jordan Eldredge and the Webamp programming community for this new and strange periscope into the 1990s internet past.

When I first clicked on the llama on The Swiss Family Robinson on my Ubuntu desktop the sound ceased. It turns out that the codec selection mechanism is different between the regular player and WinAmp, and it needed a codec I didn't have installed. The fix was:

sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Source

I should also note that the Archive's amazing collection of emulations now includes the Commodore 64 (Jason's introduction is here), and 1,100 additional arcade machines.

I Don't Really Want To Stop The Show

But I thought you might like to know,
...
It was twenty years ago today that Vicky Reich and I walked into Mike Keller's office in the Stanford Library and got the go-ahead to start the LOCKSS Program. I told the story of its birth five years ago.

Over the last couple of years, as we retired, the program has migrated from being an independent operation under the umbrella of the Stanford Library, to being one of the programs run by the Library's main IT operation, Tom Cramer's DLSS. The transition will shortly be symbolized by a redesigned website (its predecessor looked like this).

Now we are retired, on my blog there are lists of Vicky's and my publications from 1981 on (the LOCKSS ones start in 2000), and talks from 2006 on.

Thanks again to the NSF, Sun Microsystems, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the funding that allowed us to develop the system. Many thanks to the steadfast support of the libraries of the LOCKSS Alliance, and the libraries and publishers of the CLOCKSS Archive, that has sustained it in production. Special thanks to Don Waters for facilitating the program's evolution off grant funding, and to Margaret Kim for the original tortoise logo.

PS - Google is just one week older.  Vicky was the librarian on the Stanford Digital Library Project with Larry Page and Sergey Brin that led to Google.

Brief Talk At Internet Archive Event

Vicky Reich gave a brief talk at the Building A Better Web: The Internet Archive’s Annual Bash. She followed Jefferson Bailey's talk, which reported that the Internet Archive's efforts to preserve the journals have already accumulated full text and metadata of nearly 8.7M articles, of which nearly 1.5M are from "at-risk" small journals. This is around 10% of the entire academic literature.

Below the fold, an edited text of Vicky's talk with links to the sources.

Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree

Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree (also here) by Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark starts:

If you've read about bitcoin in the press and have some familiarity with academic research in the field of cryptography, you might reasonably come away with the following impression: Several decades' worth of research on digital cash, beginning with David Chaum, did not lead to commercial success because it required a centralized, banklike server controlling the system, and no banks wanted to sign on. Along came bitcoin, a radically different proposal for a decentralized cryptocurrency that didn't need the banks, and digital cash finally succeeded. Its inventor, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, was an academic outsider, and bitcoin bears no resemblance to earlier academic proposals.

They comprehensively debunk this view, showing that each of the techniques Nakamoto used had been developed over the preceding three decades of academic research, and that Nakamoto's brilliant contribution was:

the specific, complex way in which the underlying components are put together.

Below the fold, details on the specific techniques.

Web Archives As Evidence

In Blockchain Solves Preservation! I critiqued John Collomosse et al's ARCHANGEL: Trusted Archives of Digital Public Documents. They argue that
integrity validation via hashes is needed because:

Document integrity is fundamental to public trust in archives. Yet currently that trust is built upon institutional reputation — trust at face value in a centralised authority, like a national government archive or University.

But they also write that:

acceptance of content evidence might eventually become similar to acceptance of DNA evidence in court, but that establishing that level of confidence would require strong public engaged to explain Blockchain in an accessible manner particularly explaining why one could trust the cryptographic assurances inherent in a DLT solution.

At least as far as courts are concerned, they're wrong about both "face value" and how trust is established. Below the fold, an explanation.

Vint Cerf on Traceability

Vint Cerf's Traceability addresses a significant problem:

how to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet while protecting against the harmful behaviors that have emerged in this global medium. That this is a significant challenge cannot be overstated. The bad behaviors range from social network bullying and misinformation to email spam, distributed denial of service attacks, direct cyberattacks against infrastructure, malware propagation, identity theft, and a host of other ills

Cerf's proposed solution is:

differential traceability. The ability to trace bad actors to bring them to justice seems to me an important goal in a civilized society. The tension with privacy protection leads to the idea that only under appropriate conditions can privacy be violated. By way of example, consider license plates on cars. They are usually arbitrary identifiers and special authority is needed to match them with the car owners ... This is an example of differential traceability; the police department has the authority to demand ownership information from the Department of Motor Vehicles that issues the license plates. Ordinary citizens do not have this authority.

Below the fold I examine this proposal and one of the responses.