The Rebirth of Steemit's Curation Trails???

in Italy3 years ago (edited)

Intelligence agencies and law enforcement often have a need to file multiple charges against suspected criminals. This is necessary to allow for a wider range of investigation. Uncomfortable questions need to be asked; suspects and potential accomplices need to be provoked; and all stones need to be overturned in order to gather as much useful data as possible, which then is presented to a judge and jury. Usually, some charges are dropped, but the case goes forward with the evidence that supports a justified prosecution.

Some people may be offended or upset with my style of investigating an issue, but I concern myself with getting results which bring me closer to the truth. And for this I have no regrets, nor do I feel the need to apologize.

Although I am here to push further for the freezing of the @steemauto.app account, it would be a lack of manners if I did not show my gratitude to our Consensus Witnesses for having taken the time to look into this serious security threat. In particular, I would like to thank Consensus Witness @future.witness for beginning the important process of informing and warning as many Steemians as possible of the risk to the security of their accounts.

future.JPG

Regarding the latest information and development of Steemauto, we would like to advise and remind you to check for your account authorities and remove @steemauto.app; or your account safety could be compromised. Follow any of these links to revoke @steemauto.app authorities from your account.
https://steemlogin.com/revoke/steemauto.app ||
https://steemworld.org/account-authorities

I would also like to thank Consensus Witness @symbionts for publishing the following post, warning Steemians of this security issue:

Symbiont{s} | Public Service Announcement | SteemAuto & @steem-supporter

I do not know what other measures will be taken, but I trust that our Consensus Witnesses have understood the severity of this threat, and will do whatever they can to safeguard the accounts of all Steem Stakeholders.

I know that the freezing of accounts is an unpopular topic, but my request was and is based on the precedent that the current Hard-Fork set last year. This is something that can be done, and in my opinion should be done, but that is only my opinion. I would in no way judge negatively our Consensus Witnesses if they decided, or have already decided, that it is not a good idea.

However, I must express my concern for the potential risk that leaving such a scammer free to continue to openly abuse the system can have on the future. For a person with no ethics, morals, principles, values or scruples, it would be easy to coldly move forward with the manipulation of our voting system. @steem-supporter at this point is falling from grace, and falling fast and hard! He will soon have nothing to lose; and when a person losses everything and has nothing left to lose... they lose it! And we don't know what he will be capable of! Left unchecked, he could create a massive Curation Trail which would only support him and his cronies.

That said, I humbly request, again with great displeasure, that the @steemauto.app account be frozen, preventing it from executing any further upvotes. Alternatively, if possible, to protect those Steem Stakeholders who at the moment are not active, our Consensus Witnesses could revoke all posting and active authorizations granted to the account in question, and those who wish to continue trusting the @steemauto.app can reactivate those authorizations at their own risk.

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The Rebirth of Steemit's Curation Trails???

We are now left with many Steemians wondering what the future holds for Steemit's Curation Trails and auto-upvotes, which for many users are important functions that help them better manage their accounts. The @italygame Witness has been working on Steem Fanbase, which offers many of the same features as Steemauto. But for the following reasons, I will not endorse this app until these issues are resolved:

  1. As of the writing of this post, the developer has decided that the app will not be open-source
  2. The developer has confirmed that the app contains the same risks as the present Steemauto
  3. The developer, although he is working on solutions to eliminate the risk, has not yet found any

Suggestion for a Possible Solution

I do not know much about coding, or the inner workings of the Steem blockchain, but I think I know enough developers' vocabulary to offer up an idea. Since the problem arises from the storage of the voting rules on the developer's app, I am curious to know if it is possible to store those rules on the Steem blockchain?

From my understanding of how the Steem blockchain works, information - other than financial transactions - can be stored in categories through Custom-JSONs. This information can then be retrieved by an app, that then uses that information to perform certain functions, like upvoting, following, upvote weight, upvote time, etc. So the only thing the app has to do is, broadcast the data to the blockchain, then get the data from the blockchian and execute the command. In this way, the only way you can alter the voting rules is if the account owner authorizes the transaction. The app owner does not store, edit, create or delete anything. The app's sole function is to automatically execute the Steemian's voting rules, which are store indelibly on the blockchain. If this is possible, I would overlook the issue of the app not being open-source.

Thank you always for taking the time to consider my ideas, and thank you for supporting @famigliacurione

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Steemauto Drama 2021

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Hi Tino,
you're right, we haven't solved the problem, when you authorize an app to post, vote and so on you must trust that who manage that account do not use this authorization for something that you do not want.
Now I'm hard working on the solution and have no time for this, when I have some time I try to check if is possible to develop a solution that, instead of using a local db, uses jsons directly written on the steem blockchain.
I think that this solution is too slow and too steem api demanding to be functional, but we can get it a try and see if all can work properly.
Another problem that is related to this solution is that write a custom json can be done using posting key, so who has your authorization, also another app, not only steem-fanbase, can also write a custom json for you and the fact that in the blockchain there is such a configuration does not mean for sure that you have personally set it up.
This way you have to trust steem-fanbase and ALSO all other app you eventually have authorized, this spread the problem instead of solve it.
In the first version of steem-fanbase I try to have a better confidence that you are you using this trick: when you want to make some changes you have to send 0.001 steem, that the app immediately send you back, to activate the modification process.
This way to modify your configuration on steem-fanbase you have to demonstrate to have the active key.
This solution was too tricky, many errors come during this process, some haven't back their 0.001 steem, and I finally resolve to eliminate this check.
In the meantime I try to mitigate the problem with transparency.
I will add asap the functionality of downloading a csv file with all actions that steem-fanbase had taken in your behalf, I know that is not the perfect solution, but is a simple way you can check what the app do for you and all the changes that have been done on your configuration parameters.

Thank you, Max! I did imagine that there were things that I could not factor into my idea because I'm not a developer, and do not know a lot about how the blockchain works. What's important is that the Steemit Community knows that you are looking for a solution. For now, we just have to hope that Steemians are willing to trust this new app, and that we keep them informed of any problems or updates. I believe we will eventually find a positive solution for everyone. Thank you for sharing these explanations!

I have added the Activity Report function:

image.png

Good, this way users can stay informed on any changes. I will begin studying the app more deeply in the coming days. Good work, Max!

you are a great STEEMIT user

Thank you! That's very kind of you to say that!

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