Proposal for network of links between people who know and trust each other,
with automatic path-finding between any two connected people.
If you want this to be part of
NewEco, vote for it:
Portl1 -> temporary link
-> [create account if not already done]
-> log in -> missing-word question (to get more than 6 seconds
credit on your account, to qualify for:)
-> Surveys -> Meta-survey -> Features -> RLlink.
SKIP
Steps to build this system:
- Personal page showing your own name and photo(s), with appx. date listed
for each photo, plus any additional
information by which people might publicly know or respect you, such as
link to your resume or company WebSite.
- Add name+photo(s) of each person you know in RealLife.
Indicate whether each photo is recent, thus how the person looks now,
or from very long ago, useful for tracking people you remember from
long ago, such as actor when he/she was much younger and more easily
recognized, or person you knew in high school.
Include any well-known
information about each person. Link only to photos etc. under
your control. Make your own copy of their photo if necessary.
- Use a trusted communication channel, such as face-to-face or
already-estalished e-mail etc., to ask each other person (listed above)
to create a copy of your page, but each person substituting their own photo
(under each their own control) at the top,
and their own copies of photos of you and everyone else each-they know
in RL. Make sure their name+photoCopy of you has a link back to
your page. Then he/she should use a trusted channel to tell you where
to find that Web page they made here.
- Follow the URL they sent you to verify his/her personal page, including
your name and their copy of your photo (or other photo they have of
you already) and their link back to your page, then
link to that page, from yours. These links to their RLLink pages
are the
only links from your RLLink page to any other pages
that you don't personally control.
- Affirm, under penalty of perjury, that all info you supply about
yourself is correct, that all directly-supplied information about people
you know is strongly believed to be true, and that you've personally verified
directly with each other person the URL and ownership of their pages to
which you linked.
- System-algorithm to find paths from one personal page to another using
those two-way links, in particular a path between you and somebody
else you don't know directly in Real-Life.
SKIP
Note that "friend" links on social-networking sites such as MySpace
FaceBook and Twitter, or even on professional networking sites
such as LinkedIn, are not sufficient for this purpose, because
many people
link to total strangers they've never met in real-life and
have no assurance the name+photo on their "friend"'s profile is at all the same
as the face name etc. of the person actually using that account. Many
profiles on such Web sites are totally fake, either some random person
pretending to be a famous person, such as
Ellen Muth
(confused discussion),
or an adult sexual preditor and/or pedophile pretending to be a youth in
order to make "friends" with children pre-teens and teens to
convince them to secretly meet somewhere without knowledge of their parents.
.
Even Twitter's Verified Account
badge is pretty-much worthless because it just links to a generic
documentation page that does't say who is really supposed
to own this account. For example,
@Alyssa_Milano
has such a badge, but does it mean the name of the account owner
is "Alyssa Milano" or what? It in no way claims whether the
account owner is the actress who starred in "Who's the Boss" and
"Charmed", or somebody else by the same exact name. Looking at the drivel
posted there,
and public info bearing no relationship to the acting career of
the "Charmed" actress, I can't believe that the owner of that Twitter
account is really the "Charmed" actress.
SKIP
Good uses for this kind of system:
- For an online dating service: Verify the photo is correct, that
you aren't corresponding with a fake persona. Get third-party information
about the person you think you like. When it comes time to meet
in person, easily arrange a chain of chaperoned meetings.
- If you see somebody on Twitter or other social-networking site
claiming to be some
famous person, such as Alyssa Milano (of "Charmed") or Steve Jobs (of Apple
Computer Corp.),
a trust-chain from you to that person on RLLink,
combined with a bi-directional link between that person's Twitter and
RLLink accounts, will prove (to you) that that particular
Twitter account
really does belong to that particular famous person.
- For reports of newsworthy events, such as video of rioting in
Iran, certify each report as to who is claiming it to be truthful,
with others testifying as to honesty of reporter.
- When somebody is "disappeared" by the government, such as by Iran,
people who knew that person can testify as to the person being missing,
and if those witnesses are then "disappeared" in retaliation for their
reporting, there'll be
even more witnesses to those people being missing. Thus "disappearing"
somebody will be counter-productive.
- To get introduced to somebody you've heard of in the media,
arrange a chain of introductions from you to that person, where each
person in chain either introduces you forward or gives you a straight
reason why not.
- If you've been talking with somebody online, but they stop
answering your messages so you don't know whether they are shunning
you or aren't seeing your messages, you can find somebody they know who will
either try to re-connect you or explain why you've been cut off.
- People (over 18) certify which people they know are over 18 (for viewing pornography) or over 13 (for commenting in blogs), or within narrow age range (for allowing teens or pre-teens to talk to age-appropriate penpals), which info can then be used for filtering such access.
- For contact with somebody who is too busy for any more direct
contacts, paths to the busy person can be used to guide the building
of a reverse tree to that person.
SKIP
There are two ways to join RLLink:
- Create a regular Web page, as described above, open for
anyone to see, containing your personal profile with links to your
real-life acquaintances.
Sample
of such a page, created earlier for a different purpose, not exactly
conforming to the specs here, but might actually be good enough
to re-use for this purpose with only minor changes.
- Wait until RLLink is installed as a feature inside NewEco and then
just follow the instructions there
to create a confidential profile which can be seen *only* by your
immediate neighbors, and where path-finding can be performed only between
two people who are path-connected.
SKIP
There are advantages and disadvantages
to each method, as listed below:
- Openly: Make a Web page, for your individual profile, immediately.
- Advantages:
- You don't need to wait until software is written for covert-join.
- You don't need to ever join NewEco to join RLLink.
- If you want, you can manually browse the links from your own node
without waiting for NewEco RLLink to find paths automatically,
and without needing to be connected (by path) to the master user.
- Disadvantages:
- Your profile is available for spammers and enemies to harvest.
- You must very carefully edit your template, not make any mistakes
in the HTML organization.
- If you want NewEco RLLink software to be able to automatically parse
your profile and incorporate it into the main database, in order to
automatically find paths and compute statistics, you have to wait until
the master user has created a sample template which you can then copy
and edit, then you have to be very careful not to mess up the
organization to be different from the sample template.
But note: Even if your profile is badly organized, you may still be able
to manually explore from your profile to others which are path-connected
to you. Also, once you have all the info in your profile, it's not
much work to later copy that info into a copy of the sample template in
order to create a parsable template for automatic parsing and calculations.
- You need your own Web space to put your HTML profile.
- Unless you write your own graph traverser, you can't get statistics
of how many people are connected to you and/or the master user.
- Covertly: Wait until RLLink is installed in NewEco, then just follow
instructions there.
- Advantages:
- Easy as pie, just follow instructions and it'll work!
- No need for your own Web space for your profile. It's in NewEco space.
- Disadvantages:
- You must wait until all the following have happened:
- Enough users have joined NewEco and voted for "Features"
in meta-survey.
- NewEco admin has written code to allow answers to meta-survey
to be promoted to survey questions in their own right.
- NewEco admin has promoted "Features" to a fullfledged survey.
- Somebody has nominated RLLink as a desired feature in NewEco.
- Enough NewEco users have voted for RLLink as feature they want.
- NewEco admin has written code to implement RLLink.
- You can't see whom you're connected to until after you're connected
to the master user.
SKIP
My suggestion: If you aren't paranoid about strangers
learning who your friends are, go ahead and try to create a
HTML profile right now, and later modify it to be in the
same format as the sample template. But if you *really* want
to be sure nobody is able to manually explore who your
friends are, if you want path finding one step at a time
from the stranger *towards* you but not all the way without
introductions along the way, then join NewEco immediately
and vote for "Features", and when that's available as a
fullfledged survey then vote for RLLink, and when that's
available as a feature *then* follow instructions to add
your profile to RLLink.
Update 2011.Sep.12: I've clarified the overall person-identification process,
which falls into two cases:
direct /
indirect
.
If you are willing to be identified as a known RealLife person:
- Step 1: Identify, by name and a set of facts, the person you claim to be. For example:
- Barack Obama, President of the USA starting in 2009.
- Ellen Muth, actress who starred in TV series "Dead like Me".
- Les Earnest, Executive officer of the Stanford's Artificial Intelligence lab during many years around 1969.
- Robert Maas, placed top five in Putnam contest while attending the University of Santa Clara.
- Step 2: Present conclusive evidence that you, this person in control of this particular online account, are in fact that real-life-known person whom you claim to be. For example:
- The President of the USA could announce on nationwide TV that a certain Web site belongs to him, then from that Web site he could identify his Twitter and FaceBook accounts, then from those accounts he could certify various
e-mail servers that are used to send e-mail that really is from him.
- Ellen Muth could be interviewed on a TV program such as Access Hollywood, wherein she states clearly which of the two Twitter accounts is fake and which is really hers.
- Someone not so publicly recognized, who doesn't have such access
to the public media, would be certified as "that person as claimed" by
a chain of introductions, from a public-identified person, or from anyone
also in the RLlink system who wishes to be sure whom he/she is talking to.
Thus in this case there must be a chain of trust-links between
the person under test and either a known public figure or the person who
is asking.
.
If you have never done anything famous enough that you in Real Life can
be easily identified, or if you aren't willing to reveal exactly who
in Real Life you are and hence provide information that a stalker could
use to find you, then you can instead be identified as somebody known
via a single link or a chain of such links from such a well-defined person. In that case,
after the well-defined person has been linked to an online account,
then a third step links the not-well-defined person (you) to the
well-defined person:
- Step 3: Build a chain of trusted links between you and that well-defined
person.
Update 2011.Sep.29-30: I've clarified a tentative overall plan for building per-person nodes with RL-acquaintance links between them:
- Step 1: Using online public-available information, identify individual people by name (with ambiguity for the moment), by
declarative statements
about them (with clustering to resolve same-name ambiguity), and by photos (with look-alike links without regard to ID, and age progression for known same-person). Assign unique node-IDs to each
NNDB
or
IMDB
or
WikiPedia
node or
well-defined cluster.
- Step 2: Collect online public-available evidence of who knows whom in Real Life, and thus build tentative RL links between nodes.
- Step 3: When enough tentative links are present to form long chains, follow chains from NewEco/RLlink master to solicit people to formally join by testifying for themselves and their RL-neighbors, thus certifying whichever of the tentative links were correct and discarding those which were mistaken or are denied and adding new links not previously known to third parties.
Update 2012.Apr.01: I've clarified my way to classify people per Internet
notoriety:
- People listed in NNDB.Com, such as:
- People not listed above, but listed in IMDB.Com, such as:
- People not listed above, but who are the topic of a single-person WikiPedia page, such as:
- People not listed above, but who are officially mentionned in the official Web site for a well-recogized company or organization which has its own Internet domain, such as:
- People not listed above, but mentionned by name and described on any other Web site, not necessarily to be trusted, such as:
- People who are not described anywhere on the Web.
(no examples listed here for an obvious reason)
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