[liberationtech] Have any of you ever used Scuttlebot?

[John Ohno]

Sorting the keys is absolutely a component of the solution, but doing so
makes the format functionally not standard JSON, & also means that code
needs to be injected into third party JSON libraries. JSON, as specified,
does not define key order, which makes any variation of JSON that cares
about, exposes, or allows you to control key order not really JSON.
Libraries aren't required to expose this, & so to the extent that they do
(ex., the JSONSimple library in java) it's a side effect of an abstraction
leak (like preserving insertion order) & can't be relied upon not to change
in some future release -- which adds maintenance headaches, since a change
in a third party library can break your implementation.

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 11:49 AM Steve Phillips <steve at tryingtobeawesome.com>
wrote:

> > Fully independent implementations are under development, but they're
> difficult because the protocol as defined involves cryptographically
> signing sections of regular JSON -- which, of course, has no defined order
> for objects. This means that in practice, the SSB protocol is not standard
> JSON plus signatures, but the entire set of nodejs JSON serialization
> quirks.
>
> SSB doesn't sort the keys first to ensure the JSON serialization is simple
> and deterministic?
>
> --Steve
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 9:40 PM John Ohno <john.ohno at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I have used scuttlebutt for a few years. Unfortunately, in the past month
>> or two, I've found the clients a lot less reliable, so I haven't been on
>> very much.
>>
>> SSB has an interesting culture. The developers are very concerned with
>> the social ramifications of offline-first & truly-peer-to-peer
>> communication, and are seriously discussing (and making technical decisions
>> about) the kinds of media theory issues that get only idly discussed on the
>> fediverse (and almost not at all in centralized social networks). For
>> instance, SSB functionally has transitive blocking, & this lowers the
>> moderation load on individuals, who are simply inaccessible if the number
>> of hops between connections is too high.
>>
>> I don't know how good SSB's *privacy* features are. From what I can tell,
>> they aren't very concerned with that, as compared to anti-falsification
>> (which is functionally just necessarily for good p2p in an offline-first
>> setting). There are private message systems, but I haven't used them (let
>> alone security-audited them).
>>
>> Fully independent implementations are under development, but they're
>> difficult because the protocol as defined involves cryptographically
>> signing sections of regular JSON -- which, of course, has no defined order
>> for objects. This means that in practice, the SSB protocol is not standard
>> JSON plus signatures, but the entire set of nodejs JSON serialization
>> quirks. In order to implement it in another language, you have to duplicate
>> exactly the ordering produced by nodejs, or else old messages will not be
>> interpreted as valid by your implementation and the messages produced by
>> your implementation will not be interpreted as valid by competing
>> implementations. Ultimately, this means that if you want a full-featured
>> SSB client, you're stuck with an electron app (with all the attendant bloat
>> and memory leaks).
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 2:52 AM Daniel Bosk <dbosk at kth.se> wrote:
>>
>>> No:
>>>
>>>   https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6197506
>>>
>>> One must design it carefully. But if done right, it's really nice.
>>>
>>>         Daniel
>>>
>>> On Sun 19 Apr 2020 01:24:02 GMT, Yosem Companys wrote:
>>> > P.S. Is P2P inherently more or less secure than the alternative?
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>
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