↳ In-reply-to » Another thing: At the moment, anyone could claim that some feed contained a certain message which was then removed again by just creating the hash over the fake message in said feed and invented timestamp themselves. Nobody can ever verify that this was never the case in the first place and completely made up. So, our twt hashes have to be taken with a grain of salt.

@prologic@twtxt.net Let me try:

Invent anything you want, say feed A writes message text B at timestamp C. You simply create the hash D for it and reply to precisely that D as subject in your own feed E with your message text F at timestamp G. This gets hashed to H.

Now then, some a client J fetches your feed E. It sees your response from time G with text F where in the subject you reference hash D. Since client J does not know about hash D, it simply asks some peers about it. If it happens to query your yarnd for it, you could happily serve it your invention: “You wanna know about hash D? Oh, that’s easy, feed A wrote B at time C.”

The client J then verifies it and since everthing lines up, it looks legitimate and puts this record in its cache or displays it to the user or whatever. It does not even matter, if the client J follows feed A or not. The message text B at C with hash D could have just deleted or edited in the meantime.

Congrats, you successfully spread rumors. :-D