Re: (eternity) autonomous agents
Ross Anderson wrote:
A virtual datahaven could be constructed eaily provided you knew how to index controversial matter.
Publish the rude things about the Prophet Mohammed on a server in Israel, the anti-Serb rants in Croatia, the kiddyporn in Sweden, the violence in America, the Nazi hate speech in Syria and the anti-scientology stuff in Germany.
I suspect you will still run into things which are illegal anywhere; national-security stuff can be handled provided you've got a complete list of pairs of unfriendly nations, but I don't think (eg) the more extreme sort of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*. Tom
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tom Womack wrote:
Ross Anderson wrote:
A virtual datahaven could be constructed eaily provided you knew how to index controversial matter.
Publish the rude things about the Prophet Mohammed on a server in Israel, the anti-Serb rants in Croatia, the kiddyporn in Sweden, the violence in America, the Nazi hate speech in Syria and the anti-scientology stuff in Germany.
I suspect you will still run into things which are illegal anywhere; national-security stuff can be handled provided you've got a complete list of pairs of unfriendly nations, but I don't think (eg) the more extreme sort of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*.
Tom
Additionally, you could have the Fahd family annoyed by this stuff in Israel, post the names of all the Mossad agents to the same server, and have the server have an accident. You would need to go beyond "indexing" to "enforcement" if you wanted to make it safe for people to run open datahavens. True, you could still do this regulatory arbitrage thing by having datahaven owners look at the data, see if they can store it, then price it based on how safe it would be for them to store it -- that's the kind of thing a market-based Eternity service would include (as well as people with different levels of risk tolerance being willing to take more dangerous data, ephermeal servers, etc.). A market-based system can overcome just about everything -- it will take into account the regulatory climate, political connections, size of the site, etc. The problem is that if you encrypt everything such that server operators don't know what it is, you're "selling them a bill of goods", so they don't really have the chance to correctly price their data. Plus, they have no way of knowing even if the data is unencrypted that your list of the sins of the prophet do not include a steganographically-encoded list of Mossad agents. You can't assume people in the system will "play fairly" unless there are market reasons for them to do so. Perhaps persistent identities for those committing files? Basically, in the age old contest between arms and armor, arms win every time. BTW, I don't really like the overly negative names for Eternity, like "inferno", or whatever. I like to think my data is *good* data, deserving of a better fate. Elysium, perhaps? Or just use "eternity" in place of "eternityspace" (a word I never should have used, since it means the same thing), as in "upload these files to eternity", "the collection of files currently stored in eternity", etc. Little danger of confusion with pedestrian meanings of the word eternity, too, I think, and there is no real reason to draw a distinction between eternity the location for documents and eternity the overall system for creating such a space. - -- Ryan Lackey rdl@mit.edu http://mit.edu/rdl/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNLuNb6wefxtEUY69AQE/Xgf8C/y82HnErTwi5UniP6oIW/4nVnlxfGyM BJZeKPb7vwK8AOdzynI+6Mj5Acrr/Ojlo9OiaBzBavVAPqvA9VcEeKeB45erhQEQ SxXwKDQL2/EBxlIM/pJkmUuggg3/7HJ1UugO6qtKIq2cKgsdLZhqKlyWpxVSdEwa JN4eC3cz3iFeUUZmeDG0Rpk4YWcXDmeKP31l0EfU6SQ2uIiOAmlX7PLdRh6rgTIW 4GbyYZRPEuQRUJ3RAqIRFExMgEXvZ1CsYsvrolJCDxcF5sluZpOCM8WolGhwpCBj HI4Zl1QofMEOojoLhEZ4jV4/uTf9VrKisYSeEEGBewnm3DOAuu1PyA== =AvF+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Ryan Lackey wrote:
BTW, I don't really like the overly negative names for Eternity, like "inferno", or whatever. I like to think my data is *good* data, deserving of a better fate. Elysium, perhaps? Or just use "eternity" in place of "eternityspace" (a word I never should have used, since it means the same thing), as in "upload these files to eternity", "the collection of files currently stored in eternity", etc. Little danger of confusion with pedestrian meanings of the word eternity, too, I think, and there is no real reason to draw a distinction between eternity the location for documents and eternity the overall system for creating such a space.
How about "perpetuity"? Nice and neutral. "Stored in perpetuity" is a concept everyone understands, too. :-) Cheers, Ben. -- Ben Laurie |Phone: +44 (181) 735 0686|Apache Group member Freelance Consultant |Fax: +44 (181) 735 0689|http://www.apache.org and Technical Director|Email: ben@algroup.co.uk |Apache-SSL author A.L. Digital Ltd, |http://www.algroup.co.uk/Apache-SSL London, England. |"Apache: TDG" http://www.ora.com/catalog/apache
Thomas Womack wrote: | I suspect you will still run into things which are illegal anywhere; | national-security stuff can be handled provided you've got a complete list National security stuff has to be source controlled. You can't expect the New York Times to not publish the Pentagon papers once they've leaked. The responsibility is on the owner of the data to keep it secret, not on the whole world to help once he's screwed up. There are times when the people who get the data may choose not to redistribute it, but the decision to redistribute has been made before it gets to the eternity server. The Times did not steal the Pentagon papers. | of pairs of unfriendly nations, but I don't think (eg) the more extreme sort | of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*. Somalia? Go places where the government is either non-existant or otherwise pre-occupied, and pay to drop IP in. The locals get communication infrastructure as long as they leave you alone, but if the linux box that has the web server goes down, so do the phone lines. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume
On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Adam Shostack wrote:
Thomas Womack wrote:
| of pairs of unfriendly nations, but I don't think (eg) the more | extreme sort of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*.
Somalia? Go places where the government is either non-existant or otherwise pre-occupied, and pay to drop IP in. The locals get communication infrastructure as long as they leave you alone, but if the linux box that has the web server goes down, so do the phone lines.
Well as far as countries that have governments that don't really exist there is always Liberia, But I personally would like my own militia included with their business development package. If I remember Black Unicorn's posts some months back about the Seychelles, The Rene government will protect you from extradition from any country with their military for what? $6 million? Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country willing on hosting data havens. And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just give you one just to be rid of future liability. Cheers! William Knowles erehwon@dis.org == The information standard is more draconian than the gold standard, because the government has lost control of the marketplace. -- Walter Wriston == http://www.dis.org/erehwon/
At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:
If I remember Black Unicorn's posts some months back about the Seychelles, The Rene government will protect you from extradition from any country with their military for what? $6 million?
Or until a higher bid comes in.... Really, there is no security in meatspace. Not compared to the security mathematics provides. Whether floating offshore barges or abandoned oil rigs or compliant Third World dictatorships, no "data haven" with an identifiable nexus in meatspace will last for long, at least not serving all types of materials. When I read Sterling's "Islands in the Net," in 1988, I was initially upset that he'd "discovered" my own developing ideas about data havens (though I called it crypto anarchy), but then pleased to see how he he'd missed the boat on the role cyberspace and strong crypto would inevitably play. But the legacy of "data havens" is that people get the wrong idea, by thinking of a data haven as a "place." In actuality, what's important are the retrieval mechanisms, not the place things are possibly stored. Hence approaches like Blacknet. (The parallels with the international money system are obvious...it is less important each year that passes just "where" the underlying store of value is physically stored. There are some important issues and differences, though.) --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:
Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country willing on hosting data havens.
Oh yeah? It's been a while since we talked about this (at least on the Cypherpunks list), but a couple of years ago there was much discusson on the CP list about just what items would be allowable in Anguilla. Vince Cate gave his assessment, which I found fairly nebulous, in that it appeared the Ruling Families would allow what they would allow, and not allow what they would not allow---there seemed to be a lot of ad hoc rulings. (Given that copies of "Penthouse" are illegal in Anguilla, if I recall this correctly, and given that gun are illegal, and drugs are illegal, I rather doubt that Anguilla would happily host "The Aryan Nations Bomb Site," or "Pedophile Heaven," or "Gun Smuggler's Digest. " Or the even juicier stuff any "data haven" with any claim to really being a data haven will surely have.)
And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just give you one just to be rid of future liability.
Given the willingness of the French to have SDECE sink Greenpeace ships in neutral ports, how long before a couple of kilos of Semtex are applied to the underside of these oil rigs? Given what happened with "pirate broadcast tankers," the future is not bright. When the first "oil rig data haven" is found to have kiddie porn, bomb-making info, and (shudder) material doubting the historicity of the Holocaust, the U.N. will cluck and the public will cheer when it is boarded and seized, or simply sunk. As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Tim May wrote:
At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:
Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country willing on hosting data havens.
Oh yeah?
It's been a while since we talked about this (at least on the Cypherpunks list), but a couple of years ago there was much discusson on the CP list about just what items would be allowable in Anguilla. Vince Cate gave his assessment, which I found fairly nebulous, in that it appeared the Ruling Families would allow what they would allow, and not allow what they would not allow---there seemed to be a lot of ad hoc rulings.
If memory serves me right it was because Vince bounced off the Taxbomber site because it offered second passports, camouflage passports, and other products that was considered a fraud, Which to me sounds odd since there is some other company selling most everthing and then some from an .ai domain which Vince's company has the monopoly on handing out .ai domains http://www.ultramec.com.ai
(Given that copies of "Penthouse" are illegal in Anguilla, if I recall this correctly, and given that gun are illegal, and drugs are illegal, I rather doubt that Anguilla would happily host "The Aryan Nations Bomb Site," or "Pedophile Heaven," or "Gun Smuggler's Digest. " Or the even juicier stuff any "data haven" with any claim to really being a data haven will surely have.)
You also have to wonder how far in the future it will be before the special forces of some banana republic drops in on Vince to blow-up his operation for as he advertises publishing censored information on ones ex-president on the Internet, or for that matter I have yet to see abortion information coming from his servers. What has happened in Anguilla proves that there will be a need for different flavors of datahavens, Different degrees libility that datahaven owners will want to store information on their servers. I would love to open a XXX WWW site in Anguilla pulling in the industry average of $5-10K a month and not pay any taxes there, But it won't happen in Anguilla with the present adminstration!
And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just give you one just to be rid of future liability.
Given the willingness of the French to have SDECE sink Greenpeace ships in neutral ports, how long before a couple of kilos of Semtex are applied to the underside of these oil rigs?
Given what happened with "pirate broadcast tankers," the future is not bright.
Isn't there a microstate off the coast of England called 'Sealand' run from a former oil rig/gun battery for the last 20 years?
When the first "oil rig data haven" is found to have kiddie porn, bomb-making info, and (shudder) material doubting the historicity of the Holocaust, the U.N. will cluck and the public will cheer when it is boarded and seized, or simply sunk.
As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics.
--Tim May
I agree completely, But there is still room for massively distrubted datahavens on oil rigs, barges, gun batteries, island nations or hiding in Norm's LAN in Cicero IL. All the harder to supress that information. William Knowles erehwon@dis.org == The information standard is more draconian than the gold standard, because the government has lost control of the marketplace. -- Walter Wriston == http://www.dis.org/erehwon/
On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, William Knowles wrote:
Isn't there a microstate off the coast of England called 'Sealand' run from a former oil rig/gun battery for the last 20 years?
Sealand, about which I wrote about on this list before, was an example that should be studied by the offshore advocates. Based in an old oilrig housing platform, some unlucky investors attempted to establish their own country. They began issuing stamps and passports for their "country". As any reasonable person should have expected, nobody would move their mail and nobody recognized their passports. They went bankrupt. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred
William Knowles <erehwon@dis.org> writes:
If memory serves me right it was because Vince bounced off the Taxbomber site because it offered second passports, camouflage passports, and other products that was considered a fraud, Which to me sounds odd since there is some other company selling most everthing and then some from an .ai domain which Vince's company has the monopoly on handing out .ai domains
But that company was written about by some journalist, so Vince pulled its plug to avoid bad publicity. Vince also indicated (in response to my query) that he wouldn't support content that provoked denial-of-service attacks (such as the Spanish attack on the pro- basque independence web page0
As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics.
--Tim May
I agree completely, But there is still room for massively distrubted datahavens on oil rigs, barges, gun batteries, island nations or hiding in Norm's LAN in Cicero IL. All the harder to supress that information.
Is it possible to make it cryptographically hard to determine where the data is stored? --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
At 09:30 PM 1/13/98 EST, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Is it possible to make it cryptographically hard to determine where the data is stored?
Eternity. Look it up. ------------------------------------------------------------ David Honig Orbit Technology honig@otc.net Intaanetto Jigyoubu "How do you know you are not being deceived?" ---A Compendium of Analytic TradeCraft Notes, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA http://www.jya.com/cia-notes.htm
At 3:51 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:
Isn't there a microstate off the coast of England called 'Sealand' run from a former oil rig/gun battery for the last 20 years?
What Lucky said. (And read up on the scam ^H^H^H^H scheme called "Oceania," the floating libertarian non-state. And Minerva, and so on.) ....
I agree completely, But there is still room for massively distrubted datahavens on oil rigs, barges, gun batteries, island nations or hiding in Norm's LAN in Cicero IL. All the harder to supress that information.
"Room for," certainly. "Economic incentive for," apparently not. Look, if you can wave a magic want and give us "massively distributed data havens on oil rigs, barges,....," I'll be the first to cheer. But the factors I described, and Lucky described, are why it would be a foolish investment for anyone to build even the first one, let alone the numbers you are contemplating. Wishing won't make it so. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Thomas Womack wrote:
I suspect you will still run into things which are illegal anywhere;
For eggample? Rembour, alot illegality is about cultural hangups and tabbos. Which change when thay are in diffrent contexts. [...]
I don't think (eg) the more extreme sort of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*.
I beleave that there are places where the distrabution of child porn is legal even if its production isn't. - -- Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep. ex-net.scum and proud You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For Themselves? --Terry Pratchett. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBNLwOBaQK0ynCmdStAQFbCQQAhi+blZZvPbAPjvUSLaQdH9bmyPnfwEn1 ePTcGdHR80qv9j7P9o+WfsvaSWYnKY9pW2HttHbfa5aq09VCS245Q3wwD5e4zGU2 rrqNLT9bP9pimqKsyjcjVS8PoFwXCJPdspjgCDL3zDBhoRwhGyvpljt8ufE4yHsC 3ZO5IKwhVcY= =+4iF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (10)
-
? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} -
Adam Shostack -
Ben Laurie -
David Honig -
dlv＠bwalk.dm.com -
Lucky Green -
Ryan Lackey -
Thomas Womack -
Tim May -
William Knowles