Episode: 3065
Title: HPR3065: The case for the unattributed message
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3065/hpr3065.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:06:46

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,065 for Friday 1 May 2020.
Today's show is entitled The Case for the Unattributed Message
and is part of the series' social media. It is hosted by Ahuka
and is about 16 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is
anonymity can cause problems, trolls
but also can be necessary.
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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio
and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series about the activity pub conference of 2019
and I want to tell you a little bit about a talk called The Case
for the Unattributed Message.
This is a talk by Caleb James DeLyle
and you can get a link to it from the show notes.
So, Unattributed Messages. He starts off by noting that his topic is a bit provocative
and by design.
As Frank Zappel once said, without deviation from the norm progress is not possible
and Caleb is clearly in that camp.
As he says, to find something no one else is studying,
just look for something everyone else finds repulsive.
Well, a provocative start certainly.
He starts by looking at free speech as enshrined in the first amendment to the US Constitution
and notes that it has become something a lot of people like.
But then he talks about 8chan and how the person who created it
now thinks it should be shut down since it does no one any good
and in his view is even a complete negative to the users there,
though he says they don't know it.
Interesting point of view, I guess.
Now, there have been many experiments in the realm of free speech on the Internet.
So, this is not anything that is new to us.
IRC was originally one single network,
but then got into trouble when some users set up servers to sabotage other users or servers.
This led to a splinter called the Aris Free Network.
Now, Aris in case you weren't up on your Greek gods is the goddess of discord and strife.
So, the Aris Free Network will be a network free of discord and strife presumably.
And then the remaining part of IRC became a net, the anarchy network,
which actually didn't last all that long.
Then the Aris Free Network split into American and European networks
and the finally an open source group split off to form free node,
which is the one that I am most used to using.
And one constant through all of this was attacks against servers and users.
And there were, you know, peer-to-peer stuff, Napster and Nutella, for instance,
which eventually gave way to the relatively more centralized BitTorrent.
All of them, of course, are attacked by the people who claim their rights of intellectual property are being violated.
FreeNet is a peer-to-peer platform for communication that resists censorship, promotes free speech,
and provides strong anonymity protection.
And I've got a link in the show, there's a number of links in the show now.
It's quite a few of them for this particular episode, just a lot of things get mentioned.
Then there's I2P Cindy, which is a tool for anonymous communication on cross-platform distributed forums,
and something called ZeroNet, a decentralized network of peer-to-peer users that utilizes Bitcoin addresses instead of IP addresses.
So Caleb then brings in the concept of what he calls pseudo anonymity, which can happen when your precise identity is not known, but you have a reputation.
The thing that came to my mind was, you know, back when Silk Road was a big thing, and there was the dread pirate robber.
Now, the problem is, if your precise identity is not known, you can be impersonated.
But, you know, there are certainly anonymous people who have something of a reputation on the internet.
Another example, he says, that cryptocurrencies can be pseudo anonymous as well.
Now, the thing about pseudo anonymity is that one breach basically wrecks the whole thing.
If your real name is linked to the pseudo anonymous identity you've created, it is kind of game over.
And that's why a lot of cases, people very energetically are trying to pierce that veil and figure out who these people are.
Caleb then brings up the unattributed message, and he says, that's not quite the same as anonymity.
It's not quite free speech the way we normally think about it, but he thinks it has an important role to play.
So what defines an unattributed message?
Well, first, the message is divorced from the identity and ego of the center.
We don't know who it is, and it is not because it's unattributed.
It's not the same as, well, say, Dred Pirate, Robert or whatever.
I mean, there's no pseudonym attached to it. It is literally unattributed.
So there isn't no way of knowing who sent it or building a reputation or any of that stuff.
There's no follower count, no personal game from boosts or retweets.
Now, you have to be careful about that.
No personal game because there's no person associated with it.
However, things like propaganda, it can be very useful.
And I think we've seen a lot of that recently in the Brexit situation in the UK and the election of 2016 in the United States,
where a lot of unattributed messages or pseudonymous messages were floating around.
In a case like that, as long as other people pick it up and amplify it, your objective is served.
Okay, an unattributed message has no personal brand associated with it.
And so there's no audience expectations.
You can say something and no one is going to say, oh, that's so unlike you.
They have no idea what you're like.
There's no personality associated with it.
Another thing that unattributed messages allow for is something called strong opinions weekly held.
Now, this is a framework created by a reasonably well-known futurist named Paul Sappho.
And he describes this as allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect.
This is the strong opinion part.
Then, and this is the weekly held part, prove yourself wrong.
Engage and create a doubt.
Look for information that doesn't fit, or indicators that are pointing in an entirely different direction.
Eventually, your intuition will kick in, and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble,
ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again.
You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.
Well, this is a guy who makes a living out of forecasting the future and seems to be doing fairly well at it.
So, it's an interesting approach.
Now, in many ways, this is easier to do when your identity is not connected in any way.
So, you can make a claim, and then if the claim is disproved, you can drop it.
And you're not going to have people charging you with changing your mind, like that some sort of terrible thing.
Particularly in politics, something that just drives me crazy certainly happens in the United States.
I assume it happens in lots of other places as well, that if you change your mind about something,
your enemies will say you're a flip-flopper, and you lack convictions and stuff like that.
Which is stupid, because if you get new information, shouldn't you change your opinion?
That's called intelligent thinking.
So, as you can tell, it does drive me nuts.
And I remember once the economist, John Maynard Keynes, was accused of that and said,
Sir, when I get new information, I change my mind. What do you do with new information?
So, anyway, when the identity is removed, the meme, the thought expressed is what becomes the center stage.
So, you can focus on the idea and not the person presenting it.
Now, it's not all rainbows and unicorns here, consider where memes come from.
Now, most of them come from message boards, and frequently the original poster is someone either unknown,
or at least they're unknown to most of us.
We just sort of pick up on it at some point. A good example is Rick Rolling.
I don't know who decided that tricking people into clicking on a video of Rick Astley singing,
I'm never going to give you up, was a great idea, but we've done it.
We've all done it at some point, right? There's problems, of course.
The propaganda thing, we know that Russia is very busy using these techniques to influence voters in various places,
and try and create chaos.
Furthermore, these attacks can be amplified by using bots.
There is also a moderation problem.
Does the community have a consensus view on what is acceptable speech?
Too little, and you start encouraging bullies, but too much, and you start encouraging what he terms false grievances.
I think we've seen examples of that as well, that people who just attack anyone who says anything,
and it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense.
Now, Caleb argues that federation is practiced by the Fediverse is the best answer to the moderation program.
As we've discussed before, every instance has its own policy.
We discussed this originally looking at mastodon, and took a look at some detail as to what some of those policies are.
You join one that matches your choices in the matter, and this becomes a kind of a self-regulating kind of thing.
Instances which are too open, and just allow anything to happen, end up getting blocked.
They can still stay in their own little sandbox, but other instances are going to decide,
we don't need to see your stuff anymore.
On the other hand, if you've got an extremely restrictive set of policies as to what you will allow,
you end up, in essence, isolating yourself because you'll block everyone else out there.
In essence, what we have here is a market for moderation, where each individual can make their own choice among the options available.
Caleb proposes a model for what he calls Fedachan, an interesting name.
In this model, messages can be unattributed, that is to say they would show their instance of origin and a per user per thread temporary identity.
Abuse reports work as normal.
The moderator of the instance on which this message originated can see the account which sent the message and ban it if need be.
It's not 100% anonymous, the moderator knows who sent it.
If that message violates the policies of that instance, then it's up to the moderator.
Do you give him a warning and then a banishment, or however you, your policies specify you're going to handle it?
He also suggests that there be a provision in the protocol for hidden hashtags that would allow messages to be categorized into boards.
This touches on, we talked about some of the hashtag issues in a previous program.
Describing to hashtags is one way to participate in discussions that might be of interest to you.
The wrinkle here is that they might be hidden in some way.
I don't quite know how hidden, presumably they have to be in the message somewhere for software to work on it, but it's an interesting approach.
Anyway, this has been the case for the unattributed message and this is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off and reminding you as always to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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