From marc@GZA.COM Tue Jun 1 15:44:15 1993

But if you don't give me the password, the guy holding the phone has some very unpleasant looking surgical equipment

Alarm systems use duress codes for this that trigger a silent alarm when the password is entered. I'm not sure the proposed system here (a capability system) could have an extra channel that the bad guys don't know about. Using a hierarchy of escrow agents would be interesting--then by calling me up for part of the key would require me to get back to you after I called up the person at the next level. (Note that a hierarchy is a special case of a general graph, so the webs of trust idea is important here (could provide some redundancy).) Now, back to Steve's actual question,

From: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)

given that you SEEM to be inside a secure system, how can you know that you are not inside a simulation

Ultimately, there is no proof you are not currently a simulation on a big computer. Why is time travel is not possible? It's too expensive on the current platform. (E.g, if SimEarth inhabitants could time travel, you would have a hard time keeping track of what they did and your machine would slow down considerably). On an upload, how many people can be in the same room? Can you make arbitrary video phone calls? Anything that stretches the compute resources could potentially make the bad guys impatient and blow their trojan horse universe. Paul E. Baclace peb@procase.com