Centralization Strikes Again - January 2022 Edition
“Seize the memes of production.” — @punk6529
Apologies for missing the last two editions. Let’s get back at ‘em 💪
Timeline
Jan 3 - Illinois judge declines Amazon’s motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit over alleged incursions on employee privacy via biometric scanning for COVID-19 wellness checks. Source
Jan 5 - Public Health Agency of Canada is revealed to have surveilled the location data of 33 million Canadians as part of a COVID-19 study. Source
Jan 6 - Google and Facebook receive record fines by France’s privacy watchdog over cookies and online tracking practices. Source
Jan 6 - Jack Butcher — founder of Visualize Value — gets banned from LinkedIn after changing his profile picture to a CryptoPunk. Source
Jan 11 - YouTube drops the ban hammer on Bitcoin Magazine’s YouTube channel during a live stream. Source
Jan 12 - Substack assumes control over the subdomain ‘go.substack.com’ for its writer incentive program, leaving Griffin Owens — the former owner of the subdomain — with the much less catchy ‘go123.substack.com’. And… shit, we’re on Substack. 🤔🧐😵💫Source
Jan 12 - Dapper Labs’ popular sports NFT platform NBA Top Shot bans user with a ‘FreeHongKong’ handle. Source
Jan 18 - California judge denies Facebook’s motion to dismiss claims that it exploited user data to thwart industry competitors. Source
Jan 20 - In a precedent setting case, a lawsuit filed against the Indian state of Telengana challenges CCTV facial recognition as unconstitutional. Source
Jan 20 - Twitter unironically bases its Twitter Blue NFT profile picture verification on OpenSea’s API, which means when OpenSea goes down, so too does Twitter verified NFT profile pictures. Source
Jan 23 - Hayden Adams, founder of decentralized exchange Uniswap, reports having his JPMogan-Chase bank account closed in a purported shadow de-banking of cryto by the Fed. Source
Jan 23 - Podcaster Alina Utrata downloads and uncovers all of the data Amazon records of her, including all of her voice interactions with Alexa as well as reading, purchase, and location data. Source Source2
Jan 25 - A 2021 Annual Data Breach Report published by the Identity Theft Resource Center shows data breaches reaching an all-time high in 2021. Source
Jan 26 - Popular communications app Discord experiences widespread API outage. Source
Jan 26 - Twitter receives record number of government requests to remove content from its platform, with 95% of the demand coming from Japan, Russia, Turkey, India, and South Korea. Source
Jan 26 - Ghana has moved to integrate telecommunications, banking, and mobile money platforms under the newly instated Ghana Card — a biometrically enforced personal identification system — in an effort to fight financial fraud by way of extensive transaction tracking. Source
Jan 31 - New research shows that GPU’s can be exploited for ‘browser fingerprinting’ to help ad firms track users over the web. Source
Op-Ed
The following post is an *extremely* truncated version of a blog post written by ChainSafe’s Colin Adams on “Client Diversity in Decentralized Networks”. If you are interested in contributing to this OpEd, please reach out on Twitter @haochizzle, Telegram @haochizzle, or email tim.ho@chainsafe.io. We’d love to hear from you!
Client Diversity in Decentralized Networks
One of the most fundamental ways a system can be decentralized is by creating diversity in the implementation of blockchain protocols. Indeed, in blockchain terms, a diverse node-set is essential in promoting network health. Let’s unpack why that’s the case.
Distributing influence
One of the core benefits of client diversity is that it safeguards a network against the pooling of power or control. A “healthy” decentralized network is one where it’s difficult or impossible for a single person or entity to gain influence. Whereas an “unhealthy” one could be characterized as being overly reliant on a single piece of software or outdated technology, thus increasing the chance the network could be hijacked, misdirected, or otherwise compromised.
It’s worth highlighting that this is a risk regardless of whether intentional or unintentional actions are taken — and in this sense, accidents pose as big a threat as bad actors. But both present an obvious problem in systems that aim to eliminate single points of failure or live up to the standard of credible neutrality.
The bottom line is that when you’re using someone else’s software, you become dependent on them and the updates they provide. And suppose a decentralized system relies too much on a single implementation. In that case, that system becomes reliant on an individual or small group of individuals, which invites all of the same issues that plague legacy systems.
Building resilience
The second benefit of client diversity is that it makes a network less vulnerable to undiscovered bugs and exploits. This is because if one implementation were to fail, the issue is often contained to that software, and node operators can fall back on a client with a different codebase. Conversely, a lack of diversity runs the risk of amplifying the effect of bugs — which in severe cases, can bring down an entire network, such as in the recent cases of Solana.
Most blockchains have to deal with an overdependence on one node implementation. Indeed, Ethereum still needs greater client distribution if the coming merge is to be safely executed. As Lighthouse core developer Michael Sproul recently commented, “68.1% figure for Prysm’s validator share is likely accurate… putting us in super-majority apocalypse territory.”
Given Prysm’s current dominance, in the case of an unchecked consensus bug, the inactivity leak could, as Ben Edgington of ConsenSys points out, “lead to the beacon chain becoming irrecoverably partitioned as each side of the fork independently regains finality.” This is why every blockchain should strive to have as many production-grade clients on mainnet as possible, and encourage their use.
Source: ChainSafe recently launched Nodewatch to give users insight into the clients running ETH2 consensus, diversity metrics, and more!
Supporting growth
Anyone building a network must think carefully about how to capture developer attention. While client diversity helps eliminate single points of failure, it’s also crucial for growth. And having different implementations increases the number of languages available to potentially interested builders.
As Ethereum researcher Danny Ryan put it, “the foundation of a client in a particular language opens and invites experimentation and innovation in that language. The base tooling around the client often snowballs into a robust ecosystem of tools and contributors in that language.”
A knock-on benefit is that having multiple clients means independent developers are in friendly competition. This competition fuels innovation and collaboration, creating solutions oriented toward diverse design goals. These can be targets like performance, security, scaling, user interfaces, etc. And over time, this brings more people into the tent — increasing the range of users and applications within a given ecosystem.
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