[GuiA]

Urbit is a weird thing that feels like it comes from a parallel universe of computing. It's a bit hard to wrap your head around it at first, but it has some neat ideas.

I like this article which introduces it:

Urbit is perhaps how you'd do computing in a post-singularity world, where computational speed and bandwidth are infinite, and what's valuable is security, trust, creativity, and collaboration. It's essentially a combination of a programming language, OS, virtual machine, social network, and digital identity platform.

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2013/12/a-brief-int...

[walterbell]

"Despite messages between ships being encrypted, the founders state that they've purposely designed the network to make it as easy as possible for governments to regulate and control. It's not entirely clear why this is supposed to be a good thing."

[urbit]

I definitely wouldn't endorse this description - it's a bit secondhand.

What I'd say is that Urbit is not designed to be a darknet. It is not Tor and it's not Bitcoin. Also, it is not designed for external governments, or even its mysterious and sketchy founders, to govern - it is designed to govern itself. (Through user-level reputation mechanisms which have yet to be built, but are relatively easy to build - because the limited supply of identities controls Sybil attacks.)

In particular, Urbit should be quite good at enabling anonymous free speech beyond the reach of governments. A self-hosted node in your closet is quite practical and effective. There is no anonymization / onion routing (and you can't trivially route Urbit over Tor, because Urbit uses UDP), but someone could build that.

Although I don't want them to. I want to enable anonymous, or better yet pseudonymous, free speech. I don't want to help people buy drug$ or childpron through the mail. Fortunately or unfortunately, there are already much better tools for that.

[Quequau]

My take on that is that this design choice arrises from the anti-democratic authoritarian sentiments which (at least one of) the developers apparently hold. At least they have repeatedly expressed these sorts of sentiments in their rather long winded blog(s).

[yebyen]

Have you considered that democracy is not actually immune to authority, and it's really a reflection of this, rather than a window into the designs of one crazy person? (hi Curtis)

Maybe every system that comes along and says "impossible to be subverted by centralized governments" in reality is just saying "come and try to stop me, Federales". Do you think that is that what we all should be doing instead?

[Quequau]

Actually, I have. I understand that there is complex tension between fundamental human rights (like freedom of expression, freedom of association, & privacy) and realities of the intrusion & abridgment of these rights carried out by various state security agencies and corporations.

I agree that any project which claims "impossible to be subverted by centralized governments" is just saying "come and try to stop me, Federales". Moreover, I feel that such claims are extremely difficult to substantiate (and so not particularly credible) and for the most part made by groups I'm not really motivated to associate myself with.

Speaking in a very general sense (having kept up with the news & goings on related to technology, privacy, corporate activities, and state security activities for the past few decades); it's my opinion that this tension is not only not in an ethically defensible or sustainable state, it's not in the state that most of the people in the western capitalist nations believe & expect it is.

So I find assertions like: "Despite messages between ships being encrypted, the founders state that they've purposely designed the network to make it as easy as possible for governments to regulate and control. It's not entirely clear why this is supposed to be a good thing." to be similarly worthy of skepticism and disconcerting as the "impossible to be subverted by centralized governments" claims. My feeling is that this statement translates fairly directly into "all user data is available to any corporate entity or state security agency for any purpose" and that this includes purposes like backchannel monetization through data aggregation and industrial scale warrantless surveillance & data collection.

It's pretty obvious to me that you are pretty invested in this project and I've only spent a few hours perusing the various docs, repositories, and blogs. So I'm fairly hesitant to make any sweeping statements or claims of certainty. So, with those qualifications in mind, my conclusion after my perusal is that this architectural design choice is unlikely to be a reflection of some sort of pragmatic policy coming from a non-ideological position of social responsibility that's striving to minimize any intrusion & abridgment of rights while still allowing for the realistic needs of businesses and state security agencies.

Frankly spoken, I personally find a number of the abstract concepts and architectural design choices in Urbit project to be fascinating and compelling. I've spent far too much time dredging around the information that is currently publicly available... Time I honestly can't afford. So it's really disappointing to me to find that there is a pervasive toxicity which is deeply intertwined with the project. My conclusion is that this toxicity makes the project broadly unusable (seriously) & and possibly even unfixable.

Elsewhere in this thread I saw someone claim that there were big things coming in a few months. If this is accurate I look forward to it. Perhaps there will be changes and new developments which will demonstrate my current assessment inaccurate. Honestly, that would make me pretty happy... but from what I've seen so far, I suspect that's really, really unlikely.

[loqi]

> My feeling is that this statement translates fairly directly into "all user data is available to any corporate entity or state security agency for any purpose"

Speaking as a semi-informed bystander who's been following Urbit for a while now, it certainly seems like one of the problems it's trying to solve is the typical notion of "user data" as something controlled by third parties. Eg [1]:

> Where is Joe's financial data in mint.com? In, well, mint.com. Suppose Joe wants to move his financial data to taxbrain.com? Suppose Joe decides he doesn't like taxbrain.com, and wants to go back to mint.com? With all his data perfectly intact? [...] Imagine the restfulness of 2020 Joe when he finds that he can have just one computer in the sky, and he is the one who controls all its data and all of its code.

[1]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/10/persona...

That said, the current implementation has been explicitly called out (in past incarnations of the docs, at least) as not-remotely-trustworthy with sensitive private data.

[yebyen]

I know you said you are out of time, but that mention from above about "the founders state" was actually responded to by the founder, and he said he didn't agree (it actually sounded more like "I never said that" to my reading.)

I don't claim to know everything about how Urbit works. I do think that superficially, Urbit is more able to respond positively to a demand from a state that sounds like "we think your network is being used to recruit radicals and a subversive element that threatens the nation is using it to communicate operational details and plan their attacks. can you shut it down" than say, BitTorrent...

I mean, it's a centralized network where the leader is able to push out updates to the software, and in a future version you may not even need to ask for them to be downloaded or approve them before they replace your running kernel. This will be considered a feature by anyone who comes from at least a managed Windows domain.

So, it has the potential to carry out a "poisoned updates" type attack, like Apple could do to an iPhone. And the more that I think about it the more ways I can imagine that ~zod can fuck you up. It's true I am interested in this project, more than passively, I am a kind of stakeholder who owns a large part of the namespace. The only thing that keeps my ownership safe is a line of text in the git repository under ames.hoon where my public key is stored, generated by an app called :pope and interpreted by a crypto suite that I cannot audit, simply for lack of time and understanding.

So, if I've led you down the wrong path or led you to believe something about the code that simply isn't true, I apologize! I feel I have to admit this is possible, I may have grave misunderstandings or mischaracterizations about the current state of the software, and to add to it, things are also always still changing now. It's in active development, pre-alpha, not yet sure who the customers are. YMMV, take with a grain of salt.

[DennisP]

Darn. Most of my interest in it just evaporated.

[agumonkey]

My thoughts exactly. Have you seen their previous video ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6439329

if no, you're gonna experience even weirder things