Phillip M. Hallam-Baker wrote:

jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com> wrote in article <5ch9f2$cuu@life.ai.mit.edu>...

...

Look, I've proposed what I consider to be a remarkably consistent method to prevent the kind of political tyranny that you criticize, and I don't see any recognition of this fact.

Thats because its a whacko solution that has no credibility or consistency.

If anyone tried to set up such a market and a price went out on any of the heads of state fantasized about Mr Bell would be dead as a doornail in a week.

But, if Jim writes the bot well, puts it in an unknown place (remember, all communications are done through remailers), he could die, but the assassination bot would still work. It may be an interesting problem: what steps are necessary to take to provide for the bot maintainers' sudden death in such a way that the bot would survive for a long time (at least 10 years) w/o any maintenance? Several things need to be done, such as running several versions of the bot so that they could all communicate and work as hot standbys in case one of the instances stops communicating; change their anonymous address from time to time to deal with shut down remailers; probably slowly propagate as virii, so that killing them all would be hard; what else? It could be done akin to Thompson's famous backdoor in /bin/login, as a perpetual trojan horse. How to prevent the bot's detection by sysadmins? - Igor.