pancake

After some investigation and benchmarking, it looks like the best PIR protocol for this use case is YPIR+SP (from February). On a single compute- and network-constrained server, with users on constrained (and possibly metered) networks, this would amount to providing service to up to 1000 users while keeping latencies reasonable; by (quadratically) scaling the server(s) enough, that could become up to 100,000. That means this method of message routing could definitely work, although I look every day in case new protocols are published.

I have been thinking about implementing this for quite some time, but I would like some feedback from people more knowledgeable than me on the matter.

There's been some great progress in the field of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocols. Recently, in a 2022 article, Lin et al. describe an "updateable DEPIR", with both read and write times that can be made sublinear to database size.

I wonder if one couldn't use a combination of this technique and regular public-key cryptography to provide fully anonymous message routing. One could write outgoing messages to a fixed address and issue private reads to their contacts' addresses, with the messages themselves being encrypted with the receiver's public key.

The benefit of this would be a messaging protocol wherein the server wouldn't just be oblivious to the content of all messages, but also the social graph itself, plus all message-sending operations becoming deniable as a side effect.

1 more year has passed, and I'm still tracking these numbers, albeit now posting with a different username. The upward tendency has not just continued, but even increased; now Linux is nearing 4 % market share globally and over 2 % on Steam.

Ok, so I was reading about solarpunk and circular economy and such, and came across this. Seems pretty reasonable, but also very vaguely worded, both by Wikipedia and the Capital Institute. I don't yet understand what they actually advocate for in terms of economic power dynamics, and I was wondering if any of you have heard of this concept before and think it's worth reading more into it.

Ps. if you think it's some sort of lunatic pseudo-science please let me know, that can help me keep myself safe.