On Fri, 6 Jan 1995, Wei Dai wrote:
In article <199501052231.OAA11745@netcom5.netcom.com>, tcmay@netcom.com
There was some recent talk about network agent technology on this list. Vinge mentions almost in passing how an entire planet (or maybe planets) was taken over by an "intelligent net packet". Makes me rather nervous about things like Magic Cap...
does anynoe have any information about intelligent agents? I mean I know about filter and stuff, but they arent intelligent agents. I assume one would be something like the WWW worm and other searching scripts that have a database of information to cross-reference their finds and decide what to send back to you. the WWWWorm is a good centralized illustration of this, with a searchable index of HTML pages. Or is there osmethign else that makes upa "intelligent agent"
One more thing that's marginally related to cypherpunks (hey I really like this book so I'll take any chance I can to talk about it ;-) is the idea that the efficiency of distributed computation (and distributed intelligence) depends on high bandwidth and low latency of the communication medium. Since anonymity seems to have rather high costs in terms of bandwidth and latency (compare anonymous e-mail with internet video conferencing or even with normal e-mail), this implies that an organization of anonymous agents will not work as efficiently as a similar orginzation whose members are not concerned about anonymity.
i disagree storngly. anonimity with almost no increase in latency or decrease in bandwidth is easily viable. Especially if it was a group of coleagues planning to get together, I mean the remailers and stuff are a different thing altogehter, but ytalk or another confrencing system with untracable features is no problem, hell just a conference call dialing up from payphones, ora favorite hacker trick of running a conference of a COCOT. etc.... i want to know everything http://www.mcs.com/~nesta/home.html i want to be everywhere Nesta's Home Page i want to fuck everyone in the world & i want to do something that matters /-/ a s t e zine