Moving away from heavyweight blogs

I admit I've been dormant on blogs. Instead I've been active on Twitter and Tumblr; you can be reactive and posting short messages on those so-called microblogging systems. Time is the most scarce resource for me, and I want something with smaller overhead to write.

I will not entirely remove the contents of this blog, but I will not post a new article here, without further notice.

FYI, the pointers for my microblogging URLs:
(Note: the tumblr sites have been deleted by July 2009)

• jj1bdx: quote of technology
  
• Cyberperiscope Reviews (in Japanese)
  
• Twitter: jj1bdx (in Japanese)
• Twitter: kenji_rikitake (in English)
• Concurrently Chaotic (in English)
  

Chain of distrust

Communication is a collection of trust between the involving parties. Unfortunately, the trust is eroding in Internet, or in the society itself; and I see the emerging chains of distrust.

An idea called Chain of trust is a practical implementation of authentication.   Let me put it in this way; when Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Carol, then Alice assumes Carol is trustable.  In this way, Alice doesn't have to directly authenticate Carol.  Internet is another good example of chain of trust; each router assumes the peer routers will forward the packets originated from itself. 

But the chain of trust is not what should be taken as it is, in the real world.  In the Alice-Bob-Carol case of the previous paragraph, the peer-to-peer trust relationship between Alice and Carol is not necessarily established; the existence of distrust between Alice and Carol is even possible, and they may don't want to talk to each other.  Communication through a proxy is in fact quite common between the distrusting two parties. Should I call this a chain of trust?  I should rather call this a chain of distrust.

The current Internet is full of chains of distrust. Maybe I should rephrase it for accuracy; the chains of limited trust. For example, your employer will not unconditionally trust you to protect the employer's privacy, so you have to communicate outside the employer's network through a firewall, usually made of packet filters and proxy servers.  Your employer gives you a limited trust for the external communication.  This sort of limitation may cause your distrust to your employer, but the employer usually considers this is a security feature to protect the relationship with you.  The difference of interpretation to the situation of limited trust can be a source of distrust.

In a set of trusted parties with a limited size, each party does not have to spend time on authenticating each other for every packet they communicate with each other. The trust is proven through the physical connection and perimeters.  Internet's packet forwarding system extends this idea of physical connection to the chains of trust by reliable communication with discrete packet deliveries, and the idea has worked well in a limited community where the people are trustable with each other. The end-to-end principle [1] has worked so effectively that the engineers of Internet firmly believe in it.

The reality we are facing, however, is that the people are no longer trustable with each other and rather distrusting one another. People are seeking for a safe haven by creating a chain of distrust, which is apparently a false sense of security, considering that the chain of distrust is easily broken if the proxy between the distrusting two has a malicious intent.

We are heading into the very difficult times, where the security engineers ought to secure the chains of distrust as well as the chains of trust.

Reference:
[1] Blumenthal, M. S. and Clark, D. D. 2001. Rethinking the design of the Internet: the end-to-end arguments vs. the brave new world. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 1, 1 (Aug. 2001), 70-109. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/383034.383037

Accountability of an SNS user

In a major Japanese SNS mixi, I feel I have been always exposed to a strong peer pressure, which I find common in Japanese society, that you should not argue with others unless you really want to break up with those people. This sort of fuzzy feelings covers over the whole society of Japan, including that on the Internet.

I really don't like the fuzzy Japanese social atmosphere, though I don't favor the hostile and negative environment which I always find in anonymous and open bulletin boards and blogs in Japan nowadays either. I always want to have a creative discussion with a constructive criticism. People tend to go the opposite way, however, in most of the times. This is what I've learned both from the real and Internet communications.

One of my friends claimed to me that the warm fuzziness surrounded him in 1980s in the Japanese online community of bulletin boards was something completely different from that after the popularization of Internet in Japan. He told me the fuzziness which I don't like actually helped the self-governance of the users. I asked him why.

He told me that the bulletin board operators could individually locate and even persecute each account holder, by exchanging the written agreement in paper, and charging access fee individually from each user's bank account, automatically drawn each month. He said he had many anonymous or pseudonymous friends there, because he could trust those people even without knowing the real names, by the guarantee of financial and social accountabilities for each users that the BBS operator provided. In other words, the participants were supposed to behave nicely online, and the participants could prevent each other from the extreme cases of disputes.

The friend and I agreed, however, that you could no longer expect such a high degree of individual responsibility on the current SNSes and other Internet communities. Many people belong to many different systems, and those systems are usually supposed to keep the personal information undisclosed except for a legal request for the authorities. This means all disputes between Internet participants have to become legal issues, or lawsuits.

And even if you win a legal battle, you can't really collect the compensation justified by the law, unless the law enforcement officers really pursue the defendant to do so. The legally-responsible individual of one of the largest anonymous BBSes in Japan keeps refusing paying the money he has been requested from the court, though he loses on multiple lawsuits, and he is actually winning the battle by not adhering to the legal requests, because those lawsuits are all civil law issues and not the criminal ones. This is a good example of the limitation of depending resolution of individual disputes over Internet on the legal procedures. Forcing people to use "real" names will not solve this problem at all.

How can an SNS user be held accountable, for his/her legal and social activities? This is not a direct technology issue, but technology can and must help the issue to be resolved. And I think tagging individuals and restricting online identifiers do not necessarily effectively work on this issue.