On 24 Sep 2015, at 23:10, Thomas White thomaswhite@riseup.net wrote:
Signed PGP part Could we perhaps expand the contact information field in some way? One thing I was pondering a while ago was a social contact, not just an email address. I raised a very brief point about this with Virgil in Paris last year, but I think I made it very poorly at the time as I just come up with it on the spot.
To assign an email address is good for email communications and using PGP and so forth, but also allowing another handle such as a Twitter username would be a way to create further credibility of diversity. For example, my following on Twitter is quite diverse and it would be hard to argue I was a government proxy or so on. If many operators have Twitter handles where the information and identity is public anyway, having a second option to tie into those social parameters would be more transparent in the people running those relays if they chose to be. For example, I have no problem in being open on some of the projects I am working on, and I'm sure moving into a social sphere could have a positive effect on Tor in general in terms of trust.
For example, let's say the contact box lacks an email, we could see if there was a way for reaching out to people via Twitter to let them know a relay is outdated instead of private email reminders.
Anyway I am rambling on a bit there, but my point is getting people to use not just email, but also tie into a twitter account or something of that nature would make it clearer that Tor is not run almost exclusively by the military or whatever, since that kind of open data with aliases and Twitter feeds connected to the relay ownership is researchable if people, like Transparency Toolkit, wanted to "check us out" so to speak. To verify the data, we could make Roster have a small verification step, just a "tweet this code to verify this is your account" and then Roster can store the URL to this tweet to maintain an independent proof that alias controls which relay, similar to how Keybase does it.
It would be great to do this in a way that’s independent of social media platform.
Many social media platforms have been invented and gone under in the time the Tor Network has been running.
Tim
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
teor2345 at gmail dot com PGP 968F094B
teor at blah dot im OTR CAD08081 9755866D 89E2A06F E3558B7F B5A9D14F