Brainstorm!

[maradydd]

Prompted by a discussion with bunnykitteh, who's good at prompting these kinds of things:

Imagine a Facebook and/or MySpace application aimed at organising flash mobs for political action (e.g., the kind of thing Anonymous might use to quickly notify members of imminent $cientology activity in a particular location). What features should it have? (Twitter gateway?)

(Note that with Facebook, especially, there are all kinds of interesting concerns with respect to privacy...)

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I think this is the part where enochsmiles or ephermata or allonymist or sjmurdoch or tshb hits us over the head with papers that I, at least, should have read already.

(You have an excuse, you're a topologist. I came at security from formal language theory, that's my problem.)

[michiexile]

I used to be a salaried cryptographer. One major reason I'm throwing myself into this debate and dropping buzzwords as I go.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh. Well then. We should formalize what the actual problem is. It looks to me like a zero-knowledge proof of legitimate usership -- which, as enochsmiles pointed out, has the zeroth-step problem of who constitutes a legitimate user to start with.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Agreed that the actual problem is not yet specified. Stronger, even: we haven't yet specified the users' requirements (from which we will derive the problems that need to be solved, etc.).

That is: there's a whole thread here which seems to be suggesting that there will be privacy guarantees and possibly identity verification measures...but nothing specific.

(Which is fine, this started out as you asking for possible features; I'm just suggesting that we may want to back up a bit.)