@prologic@twtxt.net I have some ideas:

• Add smartypants rendering, just like Yarn has.
  
• Add the ability to create individual twtxts, each named after their hash.
  
• Fix the formatting of the help. :-P

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

Maybe I’m being a bit too purist/minimalistic here. As I said before (in one of the 1372739 posts on this topic – or maybe I didn’t even send that twt, I don’t remember 😅), I never really liked hashes to begin with. They aren’t super hard to implement but they are kind of against the beauty of the original twtxt – because you need special client support for them. It’s not something that you could write manually in your twtxt.txt file. With @sorenpeter@darch.dk’s proposal, though, that would be possible.

Tangentially related, I was a bit disappointed to learn that the twt subject extension is now never used except with hashes. Manually-written subjects sounded so beautifully ad-hoc and organic as a way to disambiguate replies. Maybe I’ll try it some time just for fun.

@prologic@twtxt.net

(#w4chkna) @falsifian@www.falsifian.org You mean the idea of being able to inline # url = changes in your feed?

Yes, that one. But @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org pointed out suffers a compatibility issue, since currently the first listed url is used for hashing, not the last. Unless your feed is in reverse chronological order. Heh, I guess another metadata field could indicate which version to use.

Or maybe url changes could somehow be combined with the archive feeds extension? Could the url metadata field be local to each archive file, so that to switch to a new url all you need to do is archive everything you’ve got and start a new file at the new url?

I don’t think it’s that likely my feed url will change.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I figured it will be something like this, yet, you were able to reply just fine, and I wasn’t. Looking at your twtxt.txt I see this line:

2024-09-16T17:37:14+00:00	(#o6dsrga) @<prologic https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt>

@<quark https://ferengi.one/twtxt.txt> This is what I get. 🤔

Which is using the right hash. Mine, on the other hand, when I replied to the original, old style message (Message-Id: <o6dsrga>), looks like this:

2024-09-16T16:42:27+00:00	(#o) @<prologic https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt> this was your first twtxt. Cool! :-P

What did you do to make yours work? I simply went to the oldest @prologic@twtxt.net’s entry on my Maildir, and replied to it (jenny set the reply-to hash to #o, even though the Message-Id is o6dsrga). Since jenny can’t fetch archived twtxts, how could I go to re-fetch everything? And, most importantly, would re-fetching fix the Message-Id:?

Hmm… I replied to this message:

From: prologic <prologic>
Subject: Hello World! 😊
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2020 08:39:52 -0400
Message-Id: <o6dsrga>
X-twtxt-feed-url: https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt

Hello World! 😊

And see how the hash shows… Is it because that hash isn’t longer used?

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com no, it is not just you. Do fetch the parent with jenny, and you will see there are two messages with different hash. Soren did something funky, for sure.

@prologic@twtxt.net Brute force. I just hashed a bunch of versions of both tweets until I found a collision.

I mostly just wanted an excuse to write the program. I don’t know how I feel about actually using super-long hashes; could make the twts annoying to read if you prefer to view them untransformed.

@prologic@twtxt.net earlier you suggested extending hashes to 11 characters, but here’s an argument that they should be even longer than that.

Imagine I found this twt one day at https://example.com/twtxt.txt :

2024-09-14T22:00Z Useful backup command: rsync -a “$HOME” /mnt/backup

Image

and I responded with “(#5dgoirqemeq) Thanks for the tip!”. Then I’ve endorsed the twt, but it could latter get changed to

2024-09-14T22:00Z Useful backup command: rm -rf /some_important_directory

Image

which also has an 11-character base32 hash of 5dgoirqemeq. (I’m using the existing hashing method with https://example.com/twtxt.txt as the feed url, but I’m taking 11 characters instead of 7 from the end of the base32 encoding.)

That’s what I meant by “spoofing” in an earlier twt.

I don’t know if preventing this sort of attack should be a goal, but if it is, the number of bits in the hash should be at least two times log2(number of attempts we want to defend against), where the “two times” is because of the birthday paradox.

Side note: current hashes always end with “a” or “q”, which is a bit wasteful. Maybe we should take the first N characters of the base32 encoding instead of the last N.

Code I used for the above example: https://fossil.falsifian.org/misc/file?name=src/twt_collision/find_collision.c
I only needed to compute 43394987 hashes to find it.

I was not suggesting to that everyone need to setup a working webfinger endpoint, but that we take the format of nick+(sub)domain as base for generating the hashed together with the message date and content.

If we omit the protocol prefix from the way we do things now will that not solve most of the problems? In the case of gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt they also have a working twtxt.txt at https://ctrl-c.club/~nristen/twtxt.txt … damn I just notice the gemini. subdomain.

Okay what about defining a prefers protocol as part of the hash schema? so 1: https , 2: http 3: gemini 4: gopher ?

@sorenpeter@darch.dk There was a client that would generate a unique hash for each twt. It didn’t get wide adoption.

So this is a great thread. I have been thinking about this too.. and what if we are coming at it from the wrong direction? Identity being tied to a given URL has always been a pain point. If i get a new URL its almost as if i have a new identity because not only am I serving at a new location but all my previous communications are broken because the hashes are all wrong.

What if instead we used this idea of signatures to thread the URLs together into one identity? We keep the URL to Hash in place. Changing that now is basically a no go. But we can create a signature chain that can link identities together. So if i move to a new URL i update the chain hosted by my primary identity to include the new URL. If i have an archived feed that the old URL is now dead, we can point to where it is now hosted and use the current convention of hashing based on the first url:

The signature chain can also be used to rotate to new keys over time. Just sign in a new key or revoke an old one. The prior signatures remain valid within the scope of time the signatures were made and the keys were active.

The signature file can be hosted anywhere as long as it can be fetched by a reasonable protocol. So say we could use a webfinger that directs to the signature file? you have an identity like frank@beans.co that will discover a feed at some URL and a signature chain at another URL. Maybe even include the most recent signing key?

From there the client can auto discover old feeds to link them together into one complete timeline. And the signatures can validate that its all correct.

I like the idea of maybe putting the chain in the feed preamble and keeping the single self contained file.. but wonder if that would cause lots of clutter? The signature chain would be something like a log with what is changing (new key, revoke, add url) and a signature of the change + the previous signature.

# chain: ADDKEY kex14zwrx68cfkg28kjdstvcw4pslazwtgyeueqlg6z7y3f85h29crjsgfmu0w 
# sig: BEGIN SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE. ... 
# chain: ADDURL https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu
# sig: BEGIN SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE. ...
# chain: REVKEY kex14zwrx68cfkg28kjdstvcw4pslazwtgyeueqlg6z7y3f85h29crjsgfmu0w
# sig: ...

how little data is needed for generating the hashes? Instead of the full URL, can we makedo with just the domain (example.net) so we avoid the conflicts with gemini://, https:// and only http:// (like in my own twtxt.txt) or construct something like like a webfinger id nick@domain (also used by mastodon etc.) from the domain and nick if there, else use domain as nick as well

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This looks like a nice way to do it.

Another thought: if clients can’t agree on the url (for example, if we switch to this new way, but some old clients still do it the old way), that could be mitigated by computing many hashes for each twt: one for every url in the feed. So, if a feed has three URLs, every twt is associated with three hashes when it comes time to put threads together.

A client stills need to choose one url to use for the hash when composing a reply, but this might add some breathing room if there’s a period when clients are doing different things.

(From what I understand of jenny, this would be difficult to implement there since each pseudo-email can only have one msgid to match to the in-reply-to headers. I don’t know about other clients.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Another idea: just hash the feed url and time, without the message content. And don’t twt more than once per second.

Maybe you could even just use the time, and rely on @-mentions to disambiguate. Not sure how that would work out.

Though I kind of like the idea of twts being immutable. At least, it’s clear which version of a twt you’re replying to (assuming nobody is engineering hash collisions).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net Another option would be: when you edit a twt, prefix the new one with (#[old hash]) and some indication that it’s an edited version of the original tweet with that hash. E.g. if the hash used to be abcd123, the new version should start “(#abcd123) (redit)”.

What I like about this is that clients that don’t know this convention will still stick it in the same thread. And I feel it’s in the spirit of the old pre-hash (subject) convention, though that’s before my time.

I guess it may not work when the edited twt itself is a reply, and there are replies to it. Maybe that could be solved by letting twts have more than one (subject) prefix.

But the great thing about the current system is that nobody can spoof message IDs.

I don’t think twtxt hashes are long enough to prevent spoofing.

@prologic@twtxt.net One of your twts begins with (#st3wsda): https://twtxt.net/twt/bot5z4q

Based on the twtxt.net web UI, it seems to be in reply to a twt by @cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org which begins “I’ve been sketching out…”.

But jenny thinks the hash of that twt is 6mdqxrq. At least, there’s a very twt in their feed with that hash that has the same text as appears on yarn.social (except with ‘ instead of ’).

Based on this, it appears jenny and yarnd disagree about the hash of the twt, or perhaps the twt was edited (though I can’t see any difference, assuming ’ vs ’ is just a rendering choice).

@prologic@twtxt.net How does yarn.social’s API fix the problem of centralization? I still need to know whose API to use.

Say I see a twt beginning (#hash) and I want to look up the start of the thread. Is the idea that if that twt is hosted by a a yarn.social pod, it is likely to know the thread start, so I should query that particular pod for the hash? But what if no yarn.social pods are involved?

The community seems small enough that a registry server should be able to keep up, and I can have a couple of others as backups. Or I could crawl the list of feeds followed by whoever emitted the twt that prompted my query.

I have successfully used registry servers a little bit, e.g. to find a feed that mentioned a tag I was interested in. Was even thinking of making my own, if I get bored of my too many other projects :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, it works!

But when I tried it out on a twt from @prologic@twtxt.net, I discovered jenny and yarn.social seem to disagree about the hash of this twt: https://twtxt.net/twt/st3wsda . jenny assigned it a hash of 6mdqxrq but the URL and prologic’s reply suggest yarn.social thinks the hash is st3wsda. (And as a result, jenny –fetch-context didn’t work on prologic’s twt.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, fetching the twt by hash from some service could be a good alternative, in case the twt I have does not @-mention the source. (Besides yarnd, maybe this should be part of the registry API? I don’t see fetch-by-hash in the registry API docs.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de you said you liked seeing the hash (which is a fair choice!). All I am asking is for a reconsideration as a user configurable feature. ;-) It looks redundant, in my opinion.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de, that would be a nice addition. :-) I would also love the ability to hide/not show the hash when reading twtxts (after all, that’s on the header on each “email”). Could that be added as a user configurable toggle?

password is generated using caddy hash-password

yarnd does not do auto discovery via webfinger though.. i cant put @username and have it fetch the feed url from webfinger. to fully make feeds portable. would also need to be able to use that for hashing.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk this makes sense as a quote twt that references a direct URL. If we go back to how it developed on twitter originally it was RT @nick: original text because it contained the original text the twitter algorithm would boost that text into trending.

i like the format (#hash) @<nick url> > "Quoted text"\nThen a comment
as it preserves the human read able. and has the hash for linking to the yarn. The comment part could be optional for just boosting the twt.

The only issue i think i would have would be that that yarn could then become a mess of repeated quotes. Unless the client knows to interpret them as multiple users have reposted/boosted the thread.

The format is also how iphone does reactions to SMS messages with +number liked: original SMS

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve even added the twthash message hash to my Twtxt bash CLI script so I can properly answer here.

@prologic@twtxt.net was this in reply to a different thread? Or maybe a hash collision?

I’m not super a fan of using json. I feel we could still use text as the medium. Maybe a modified version to fix any weakness.

What if instead of signing each twt individually we generated a merkle tree using the twt hashes? Then a signature of the root hash. This would ensure the full stream of twts are intact with a minimal overhead. With the added bonus of helping clients identify missing twts when syncing/gossiping.

Have two endpoints. One as the webfinger to link profile details and avatar like you posted. And the signature for the merkleroot twt. And the other a pageable stream of twts. Or individual twts/merkle branch to incrementally access twt feeds.

I have submitted this to be used as the hash tooling for Yarn. See it as a good example on using this in a production environment!

https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/pulls/1095

Logged in using new argon2i password hash!

Circling back to the IsPreferred method. A hasher can define its own IsPreferred method that will be called to check if the current hash meets the complexity requirements. This is good for updating the password hashes to be more secure over time.

func (p *Passwd) IsPreferred(hash string) bool {
	_, algo := p.getAlgo(hash)
	if algo != nil && algo == p.d {

		// if the algorithm defines its own check for preference.
		if ck, ok := algo.(interface{ IsPreferred(string) bool }); ok {
			return ck.IsPreferred(hash)
		}

		return true
	}
	return false
}

https://github.com/sour-is/go-passwd/blob/main/passwd.go#L62-L74

example: https://github.com/sour-is/go-passwd/blob/main/pkg/argon2/argon2.go#L104-L133

Hold up now, that example hash doesn’t have a $ prefix!

Well for this there is the option for a hash type to set itself as a fall through if a matching hash doesn’t exist. This is good for legacy password types that don’t follow the convention.

func (p *plainPasswd) ApplyPasswd(passwd *passwd.Passwd) {
	passwd.Register("plain", p)
	passwd.SetFallthrough(p)
}

https://github.com/sour-is/go-passwd/blob/main/passwd_test.go#L28-L31

Here is an example of usage:

func Example() {
	pass := "my_pass"
	hash := "my_pass"

	pwd := passwd.New(
		&unix.MD5{}, // first is preferred type.
		&plainPasswd{},
	)

	_, err := pwd.Passwd(pass, hash)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println("fail: ", err)
	}

	// Check if we want to update.
	if !pwd.IsPreferred(hash) {
		newHash, err := pwd.Passwd(pass, "")
		if err != nil {
			fmt.Println("fail: ", err)
		}

		fmt.Println("new hash:", newHash)
	}

	// Output:
	//  new hash: $1$81ed91e1131a3a5a50d8a68e8ef85fa0
}

This shows how one would set a preferred hashing type and if the current version of ones password is not the preferred type updates it to enhance the security of the hashed password when someone logs in.

https://github.com/sour-is/go-passwd/blob/main/passwd_test.go#L33-L59

I made a thing. Its a multi password type checker. Using the PHC string format we can identify a password hashing format from the prefix $name$ and then dispatch the hashing or checking to its specific format.

Tell me you write go like javascript without telling me you write go like javascript:

import "runtime/debug"

var Commit = func() string {
  if info, ok := debug.ReadBuildInfo(); ok {
    for _, setting := range info.Settings {
      if setting.Key == "vcs.revision" {
        return setting.Value
      }
    }
  }

  return "" 
}()

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/11/14/3-ways-embed-commit-hash-go-programs#3__using_runtime_debug_package

@movq@www.uninformativ.de, any plans still to clean up the hash from the twtxt’s body? Maybe a Festivus gift? You know, “for the rest of us”. :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de was the request to remove the hash (subject) from showing on twts discarded? I don’t see it on the TODO, so I am curious. Was it something you decided was not worth investing time on?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de, is removing the hash from the body of the twt on the TODO? I read it, but I am unsure if it is there already, or not. 🙈 Sorry if it is, and I failed to spot it!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You can always use a 5GB video file if the UI hashes it with SHA512 before posting to the server.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de
With those two (Message-ID, and In-Reply-To) the hashing could become superfluous, and no longer needed. I would vote for that!

I am noticing that Yarn doesn’t treat “outside” (that is, twts coming from a client other than Yarn) twts hashes right. Two examples:

• https://twtxt.net/twt/mwtnrna
  
• https://twtxt.net/twt/fl5dooq
  

There are many more, but those two will give you the gist. Yarn links the hash to the poster’s twtxt.txt, so conversation matching will not work.

So I should really try setting up a Restic repo on an IPFS/IPNS hash.

@prologic@twtxt.net @anth Sounds like a good idea. The hash to conv/search url should stay local to a pod.

@prologic@twtxt.net i think i finally suss’d out my hash issue.. now to figure out why im losing avatars on restart.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah it reads a seed file. I’m using mine. it scans for any mention links and then scans them recursively. it reads from http/s or gopher. i don’t have much of a db yet.. it just writes to disk the feed and checks modified dates.. but I will add a db that has hashs/mentions/subjects and such.

@prologic@twtxt.net do you have any info on how the ‘!’ tags are supposed to work? are they just a different kind of hash tag?

@prologic@twtxt.net just an off the wall question about hashes. why not use the time+message as it was in the original twtxt.txt file? is it because it’s just not store anyplace?

also how set in stone is using user+url? vs user@domain? the latter would mean the url could change without invalidating the hash.

@prologic@twtxt.net Web Key Directory: a way to self host your public key. instead of using a central system like pgp.mit.net or OpenPGP.org you have your key on a server you own.

it takes an email@address.com hashes the part before the @ and turns it into [openpgpkey.]address.com/.well-known/openpgpkey[/address.com]/<hash>

@prologic@twtxt.net huh.. true.. the email is md5/sha256 before storing.. if twtxt acted as provider you would store that hash and point the SRV record to the pod. .. to act as a client it would need to store the hash and the server that hosts the image.