The Elephant in the Roomor

Why people don't trust Geeks bearing Gifts

Jon Crowcroft, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22http://sns.socialnetconf.com/

April 13th in Paris

Who am I & What do I do

http://www.social-nets.eu/ Who has met me here(Paris), in Cambridge, or London before today?

Who has tx/rx email with me? SMS?phone? Who is FB friend? Linkedin? Who’s co-authored paper?

What is the correlation between those answers?What is the causal ordering in the changes to answers over time?Why?

That’s what we’re doing in socialnets :-)

Inter-disciplinary Duties

We do CS(systems), Social Science and Complex Systems research We need real world data Social Scientists do heavy lifting -

doesn’t scale but is rich CS can do measurement studies of existing systems

Scales, but is superficial Or we can build new systems….

To try and scale and gather rich data But the big problem everyone has with new systems is….

The Elephant in the room is…

How come users….

trust blatantly bad sites& software?

& don’t trust us (researchers)?

What did we do wrong (or right)?

Is it coz we is too clever?

G®eeks Bearing G®ifts…

This is not a new story

Same thing with P2P Same thing with Manet/Mesh Same thing with…

What did work?

What didn’t work (not really)

DHT MANET DTN

What did work

Gnutella Mesh Kiosk/Zebra/Same

But also SMS, Twitter, Facebook…

See http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/

What is weird is who people trust

Its like people prefer unsafe sex! I mean you can see why people trust Physical Banks

With personal financial info Physical Supermarkets

With shopping preferences

But who are facebook, twitter? Why would you trust them with anything?

Would you buy s/w from this guy?

Would you buy any from these?

Or these?

Let’s not talk about Buzz…

Bittyrant Network Coordinates in the Wild Drafting behind Akamai

Being parasitic, and being “unethical”

Ethics:- what is the social norm ? :-)

I propose unethical socialwork

Skunks Integrate with dodgeware (tor, torrent)

Concentrate on use not algorithm Incentives

Fear (uncertainty, doubt, debt, etc) Greed Fun (virtual fleas…)

Parasitic research

How The Pursuit of Truth Led Me To Selling Viagra, V.Paxson, 18th USENIX Security Botnet researcher as spammer

Bittyrant Everything will be better with this version

MPI/LIP6 Broadband measurement How bad is your ISP (& your friend’s)

Twitter tracking how on message MPs are Geo-mine how close each MP Is to UK partyline

Stealth Logging considered ok

All the above offer a function For no price except trace/log of use So the banks and supermarkets don’t

But google, fb, twitter, youtube,flicr do

So why can’t we?

I propose we build Immoralife2.0

It’s a dark world where everyone is out to get you (imagine fb/google were actually evil :)1. Your most private details will be broadcast - to

stop this, you must use all the tools (crypto but also controlling visibility of your life even to “friends”, and keeping track of who knows - even using multiple pseudanonymous identities?

2. You want to survive deletion attacks - use redundency over multiple servers (p2p?)?

3. You’ like your and others recommendations to be respected and not subject to sybil inflation - what is your “real” weight of identity?

4. You’d like to be able to “unfriend” people just by ageing them off your list - how do you stop people “hanging on” just by “tickling” your relationship with spam?

Two other little ideas

mFleas - simple game of catching “fleas” on your mobile device, and getting rid of them

iSpace - A badge with wireless which anyone can write data to, to be displayed

For example, people wanting to meet at a conf could display name of person they want to meet as well as their own - or “follow me to the next bar”:)

Could put advertising on the space and charge money for it (adwords for your lapel)

Profs could display how much funding you have from google to attract the best PhD students :)

Questions…

You tell me The truth is out there…if you only look: Log it Analyze it Tell it from the rooftops (only after:)

Duck and cover… … …