Recently, I’ve started to work on the problem of sybil attacks in mobile nets, and I came across this old discussion on identities in the Internet. The Snakes of Medusa and Cyberspace: Internet identity subversion.
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Archive for the ‘identity’ Category
Internet Identity and Conspiracy 101
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009Netflix Prize dataset de-anonymised
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007Two researchers at the University of Texas have de-anonymised (re-nymised? nymified?) the Netflix Prize dataset.
Online Identity
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007I was reading this interesting article on comment trolling on blogs. It breaks down people who comment on blogs into three categories; those who read and comment with something useful to say, those who “spam”-comment, hoping to generate traffic for their own web sites, and the trolls: those who comment to criticise/put down both the content and the authors (luckily (?) it seems that mobblog has very few of the first category and no trolls!). The interesting thing about the article was the pointer to this other one, which explains that this destructive behaviour may be explained by the lack of online identiy. Here is a quote from the article: (more…)
Portable Reputations
Friday, January 19th, 2007In UTIFORO (a new research project), we may explore how sellers may “port” their reputation from eBay to informal markets. That might relate to this:
Last year I mentioned eBay’s Feedback system and said it was arguably their biggest asset. Even with its flaws, I said, it is one the biggest drivers of trust between two people buying and selling who’ve never met and never will. But it’s a closed system, usable only within eBay and only for eBay transactions.
We needed an internet-wide identity and feedback system that any reputable application can tap into, both pulling and pushing data.
At the time we had taken a look at iKarma, but they seemed to have missed the boat by ignoring the portability aspect of reputation.
Rapleaf launched in April. And while it’s still quite early, it does exactly what we need it to do – provide a good off-ebay reputation system. eBay banned Rapleaf in May (They learned their lesson with PayPal it seems), but the company is still chugging along.