Anyone who wants to take you down will only need (1) a detector that can point out your boxes and (2) a small caliber rifle.
Errrrr. Hadn't thought of that. Placement will be a major factor, I beleieve.
Since the cost to find and destroy is much less than the cost to make and deploy, a covert network of this sort wouldn't last long. An _overt_ network, perhaps a commercial entity that networks an entire city, would be an interesting prospect.
Depends how you place them. If you put them _on top_ of things, you'd need a helicopter to shoot 'em.
Someone walking around a city shooting a rifle is likely to attract a lot more attention than a secret network would. Secondly, the transmitter doesn't necessarily have to be exposed, it could be kept hidden and only the antenna would need to be exposed. You'd have to be a damn good shot to hit a wire antenna. Plus the antenna would be easy to disguise or hide in many places.
The techniques for maintaining location information on actual machines connected to the net, and for updating them as they move, are actually quite simple and well understood (cellular telephones are a simple, dumb version of the technology). The trick is to find out a way that the network can know where you are but not give that information out (even to the owners of the network), without unacceptable overheads.
This is true. But if we make the things in thick boxes (well, slightly bullet-proof, anyway), and put them in places where theyare hard to shoot at, then we should be right. We would only need a few each suburb.
Well, you may know that you can reach a certain person thru site #127, and that stie #127 can be reached thru site 35 or site 68, and so on...which gives you a sort of virtual-space map, which would reveal nothing about actual phyical location of the sites or the person you are contacting. Suppose you were connected to site #1 and you were communicating with site #3 thru site #2. Site #3 could be 50 meters away, or 2 km, and you would never know the difference because you didn't have any way to directly contact site #3. Hence we have achieved our objective - you know how to contact site #3 in netspace - it has a cybernetic location relative to other sites, but that tells you nothing about it's actual physical location.