In an OWm2 storage engine admins propose a solution, but they cannot impose it... hmmm, it sounds like a dangerous thing, doesn't it? It actually only means that there is an endless number of aboslute powers that cannot overlap each other. It means good fences, not chaos.

So this is no security leak, if you come to think about it. It's true that a malicious attacker can start a new independent region and include all sort of weird content in it. So what? He is not damaging any of the existing content of other regions, and it's only up to end-users to decide whether this new region is worth downloading or not.

Spammers may be annoying, but they are not stupid. Even the least sophisticated spammer will not want to spam his own self to death in the absence of public. He will want to spam an existing region, something people read and use. This happens to be quite difficult, though. All new nodes are born greylisted, which means that what they post never gets automatically pulled into the distribution engine, until someone has verified that "this is human". So yes, there are billions of ways in which a malicious hacker can inject content into its OWN node, but this content is only going to reach a public repository.

If the region admins will so decide, the node will become whitelisted, if the situation is unclear it may remain greylisted, or it can be blacklisted for good. Once blacklisted, all it's sending to the region will be automatically thrashed. How the admins will decide to keep or thrash things is only up to them. They manage their own region and set policies as they please. One can pretty much decide to open a read-only region, whit one and only one authorized editor.

So, before fooling anyone, a spammer has to work for a while to produce content that will please the local human testers. After that he will get the greenlight to insert without checking. Yet the system will greylist him again automatically if he suddenly exceeds his usual input rate. One cannot just do a bit of casual work and happily flood a whole nation right after that. If he wants to send out like 100 spam profiles a day he first has to regularly produce an equivalent frequency in good profiles, and he must keep his useful activity up for days.

Now, isn't this censorship, isn't this an open road to "mob rule", to local communities deciding whatever they want and forcing their decisions on minorities and individuals??? The answer is a big capital YES. As we already said, we use Freenet technolgy but we are not Freenet. There is NO common policy about what is spam and what is not. Regions are 100% free to set their own standards, and anyone who doesn't like the standard is free to open another region with a totally opposite set of rules. Nobody needs anyone's approval for this.

To have good chances to remain unseen a malicious attacker needs to hide an amount of litter in the middle of a majority of good material. Such an attack vector forces admins to carefully examine things. The result is worth the effort anyway, because when they thrash the litter they are still left with the good content the spammer used as a shield. So many regions may welcome at least smart spammers, after all.

Does this mean that no anonimous contributions are allowed? No. It means we don't need to deal with floating IPs etc. Nobody can tell who you are when you run an OWm2 node, but your node UUID is fixed. If you add content twice it will twice bear the same signature. You can reinstall the node from scratch and get a new UUID, but then you start from being greylisted again...

Power and how we cook it

Admins have decisional power over THEIR region, and that's all they rule. The OWm2 storage engine has no central server to which one must be "admitted" in order to be hosted. There cannot be any "overall community", council, foundation or company in charge to decide whether to host a project or not. Even if such entity appeared out of thin air our software would not allow its decisions. So if one doesn't like the way a region is administered, all he has to do is to open his own. Nobody here gets more censorship than he is willing to accept.

Needless saying, freedom has a price. A new region will need content, users and anti-spam administration, i.e. hard work, marketing and the infinite boredom of revising incoming stuff. One could default whitelist access to all newcomers, but spammers never sleep, and his content would soon be so littered that most people wouldn't be interested in it. Let's be very clear: we offer freedom and independence, we don't serve free lunches. Users don't pay any money for hosting (at least not to us), but it's fully up to them to provide and organize all the labour it takes to keep their stuff running.

A small case of study

Now let's abandon the theoretical field to take a dive into the real world. Say user X joined region Y and found out that a voice in the dictionary is (according to his point of view) downright wrong. He immediately corrects it and drops in "some basic common sense". He feels a happy man.

Too bad that after just a few hours his work is gone and the voice bears exactly the same wording that offended him in the first place. Together with this unpleasant refusal he finds out he has been blacklisted. Pretty rude, sure, but it may well happen. Admins are people, and people sometimes are downright rude.

At first user X refuses the admins' decision and keeps his content on his node. Later on he realizes that he is simply speaking aloud in an empty room while others carry on what can only be labeled as a blatant case of mass disinformation. So he bravely decides to open a new region.

He imports region Y's contents  into his new creature and starts editing all he does not agree with. Will his edits reach the masses? Mind you, no, they certainly won't. His new region doesn't own that content, so whatever he does is still thrashed away as blacklisted. His edits still happen in region Y!

Blind alley? No, a simple filter against stupid edit wars. What his new region can do is to add headless information to region Y's objects. Other expressions, definitions, classifications and relations. Alternative stuff, that is. This new content will belong to HIS region, in which he and his friends rule.

Did he reach the masses this time? Well... Reaching the masses is hard work, once the content is in place one still needs to market it. He will need to tell people about this new region, and only his success in the process will determine the size of the masses he will reach.

Do we mean there is no such thing as ''the truth"?

The reader may wonder what's the point in having a knowledge base that says everything and the opposite of everything. How can we publish things that simply exclude each other, like Darwinism and Creationism? Shouldn't we guarantee some form of "objective information"? No, we shouldn't. No big philosophical issues here, our strategy is purely marketing driven:

1. we guarantee freedom and an adaptive approach that can offer content to just ANY culture, religion or point of view,
2. we offer to professional translators the widest possible pick of definitions.

Translating things does not require sympathizing with the text. A faithful translation is based on a deep understanding of the source, though. So the more different (even clashing) points of view are represented and translated, the better for a dictionary. We repeat it and underline it: we make a DICTIONARY here, not an encyclopaedia, so no POV/NPOV for our system.

Besides, users get as many regions as they choose. If one doesn't want to read material inspired by sect XY all he has to do is to avoid subscribing to the Church of XY region. Yet, pretty often one may have good professional reasons to need stuff he actually hates.

Think about it: a scientist may question a definition in chemistry that stems from some weird alchemy books. Yet, editors who publish alchemy books exist, and they all pay translators who need specialized dictionaries that give them "the proper language for the subject". Sometimes they need it with a serious tinge for expensive editions, sometimes they work at an instant book... There is no limit to what can be useful for a translator. This is the main "commercial" reason for us to favour the birth of openly "confessional" regions. They may be born as "confessional", but they are eventually useful as "specialized".

In short

Everyone is welcome to start a region that accepts only what they rate to be the truth, the best infomation level, the one and only sane approach to reality. Actually most regions will do exactly that, because this is what our system has been designed to do. It is up to each individual end-user to decide who is sane and who is not, the system will never hint a ready-made solution to such a question.

Everyone is also welcome to open a region that will finally state "the truth about OWm2", to properly inform the audience about all the things we deliberately (or not) hid from their attention. When this will happen we will rate it as our best success.