At 3:29 PM -0700 8/3/01, mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
Ray Dillinger wrote:
On Fri, 3 Aug 2001 mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
I like the idea of making a remailer part of a worm but it might be just as well to make it an inherent part of a product since people will attempt to eradicate a worm.
And succeed. How many copies of "melissa" have you seen lately?
Coding a remailer, *and* coding a worm, for just one week's worth of play before they stomp it, is not worthwhile.
Bear
I think the "well behaved worm" prescribed by Tim might live longer since I read that as unobtrusive and generally benign but for some tolerable amount of bandwidth. Still, it would fall short of the effect you'd get if it were in a product that every teenager on the planet wanted to run.
I wasn't the one to suggest a worm in this recent debate. Someone else did. I included worms in the general list of ways remailers and mixes may be more ubiquitously spread: wireless, piggbacked on corporate networks, throwaway boxes, etc. (I'm steering clear of the weirder approaches: boxes hidden on the roofs of corporations and communicating with 802.11b, cards added to multiprocessor racks, etc. One weird approach that I discussed many years ago for a data haven approach some friends of mine were trying to get rolling, pre-Cypherpunks, is now much more feasible: imagine a simple Apple Airport (802.11 and variants) set up in San Diego, near the border with Tijuana. In fact, the cities run together, separated by a fence. An Airport- or Wavelan-equipped computer in San Diego is on the same local area network as one in an apartment building a few hundred feet away in TJ. Bounce packets back and forth, confusing jurisdictional issues with each hop EVEN IF LOGS are kept and court orders are issued. Of course, can do the same thing at the Canadian border, at other borders. I don't advocate that wireless methods be the backbone, as ordinary bouncing of packets around the world to many jurisdictions already does this, but it sure does make the point graphically about how hard it is to control the flow of bits.) Other wireless technologies include Bluetooth, packet radio, cellphone dial-ups, FRS radio, Ricochet (now defunct, alas), and of course various satellite links. (Most of these wireless links look a lot like ordinary machine to machine links...but the wireless transmission adds a bit to understanding how a "broadcast" mechanism doesn't have to know who is receiving. An important issue for alleged traceability issues.) By the way, broadcast mechanisms are much more than just physical RF or photon broadcasts. Usenet is a broadcast system. I called this the "Democracy Wall" approach in my 1990 presentation at the Hackers Conference. All of these things are easy to imagine (see my 1988 Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, for example) once the fundamental operation of remailer networks is grokked. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns