(eternity) autonomous agents
Adam Back:
If the participant in the CPU resource market is not expected to be able to vet all source code he runs, this gives the would be eternity operator a chance to distribute his risk.
It's even better than this - your PC becomes a common carrier and you are no longer liable :-) If this doesn't happen, then the advocates of Java need a whole new security infrastructure to assure users that the applets they download aren't defamatory, pornographic, seditious or in breach of copyright! Tim May:
Another science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, popularized "data havens"
At one time, Malta was thinking seriously about becoming just such a data haven, and I expect one will appear sooner or later. After all, what's left of the British Empire is funded by money laundering and tax evasion - pardon me, Sir Humphrey, `offshore financial services'. Once the online world becomes a significant part of the global economy, small countries that wish to achieve the high living standards of Bermuda, Gibraltar and Jersey will be able to get there by cashing in on `offshore data services'. Countries like Tonga already sell domain names, but a full offshore data service would need some way of resisting pressure from the EU and the US government. Most of the tax havens do this by being under a colonial umbrella. Is there an alternative? Can we create virtual colonies in cyberspace? Can we set up a gateway to Eternity in some country like Liberia or Somalia, which is too dangerous even for the US Marines? Or do we have to cut a deal with Sir Humphrey? Hiding stuff inside usenet is actually a bit like hiding behind the skirts of Empire, isn't it? The same goes for hiding stuff on open access web sites, or in spam. Given the rate at which spam is growing these days, maybe that's where to put it. If the only way for Authority to cut mortals off from Eternity was to pass effective laws against spam, and the only way to stop spam was to have a global non-escrowed public key infrastructure so that all mortals could be strongly authenticated, then ... Ross
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Ross Anderson:
Adam Back:
If the participant in the CPU resource market is not expected to be able to vet all source code he runs, this gives the would be eternity operator a chance to distribute his risk.
It's even better than this - your PC becomes a common carrier and you are no longer liable :-)
You would be expected to comply with efforts to stamp out illegal activities. Laws may be passed (e.g. CDA) which would require technical measures to prevent illegal activity even if you are a common carrier. Legal protection is fundamentally weak if the government does not like you. Worst case, a government or other criminal organization could employ technical twrrorist tactics to take out the entire eternity network, if possible, even if no illegal activity is taking place. I agree that building a sufficiently large "eternity network" such that the 1% or so of traffic which is illegal is impossible to censor without affecting the other 99%. I believe the web or the internet as a whole are now large and important enough to Joe Sixpack that shutting them off to stop illegal activity is infeasible -- I do not agree that USENET is. I think 2 weeks of press in the US about "USENET, the network used by kiddie porn photographers to trade photos, must be shut down" would be enough to shut usenet in the US down.
Tim May:
Another science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, popularized "data havens"
data service would need some way of resisting pressure from the EU and the US government. Most of the tax havens do this by being under a colonial umbrella. Is there an alternative? Can we create virtual colonies in cyberspace? Can we set up a gateway to Eternity in some country like Liberia or Somalia, which is too dangerous even for the US Marines? Or do we have to cut a deal with Sir Humphrey?
I believe that the US+UK together could shut off nearly all communications into or out of Libya or Somalia or Liberia or any other small country. They already put a fair amount of pressure on the Seychelles (my current pick for favorite portential datahaven country outside of colonial reach), and money laundering can survive with less of an established communications infrastructure than high speed internet communications, at least from what I know of money laundering. A "datahaven country" would have to be immune to such tactics -- either having its own strong military (China as datahaven) to defend its national interests, political connections (Israel?), or enough trade with the US that shutting off data commo would be impossible for economic reasons (Singapore?). If it comes to actual violence in meatspace, I don't think there's anything a major power couldn't do to a small cypherpunk project. One approach would be quickly allying with interests capable of defending themselves against such threats -- organized crime, money laundering, arms trading, etc. -- but even they for the most part could not stand up to a concerted attack by a government -- they exist through secrecy and connections.
Given the rate at which spam is growing these days, maybe that's where to put it. If the only way for Authority to cut mortals off from Eternity was to pass effective laws against spam, and the only way to stop spam was to have a global non-escrowed public key infrastructure so that all mortals could be strongly authenticated, then ...
My bet is on the web. Billing "Eternity DDS" as a sophisticated fault tolerant web server, which has market-based protocols for exchanging data futures. And also designing the protocol to support "financial services" conducted through eternity dds futures trading. Get enough kosher data into it and you can protect yourself from TA, from wholesale shutting down of the system, etc. The same techniques which protect you from a government shutting down the service protect you from an enemy of someone storing data in the system shutting down the system. The single best thing I've seen recently was Ross Anderson's comment about 90% of cypherpunks work being on secrecy/etc. and 90% of the commercial IT money going to fault tolerance. I believe, at least for an eternity service, one provides the other, and that's how it can be "sold" to enough users to make it safe for unpopular users. (Steganographic File System sounds very interesting -- will the paper be available online?) - -- Ryan Lackey rdl@mit.edu http://mit.edu/rdl/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNLthpawefxtEUY69AQHtdQgAkzJx1Hp6LR2mBRuiRnH4QGl+OfHGL0mS 2PfzZCT31dE2ZrrbR/VEHVQEHWsP+eI0aOemVUsiFYMMyEjLtor12Fp+tWndJd++ bAVBpcpdj7liq2wYvyvTwEuJ/PeyHahHgh7rYLY3HNMzWVyjtZHg4hwRIFRPg4ic FIkc+a+obCmBnjYTUKb8mjkmZGdNKe107+l7J3k0wPvEE1GE5cKmxEOd2xmfzt/r L0VbRR/6SxDQ3Kp/dEbEVcEBAdUuyLykQnkWHqR9q8mO5dT8Uq/SmyKtWyVYAKir X8m6hDAzvXbMAKKU3N3GC4pGRO8LsCUTdqhi1/HGAQ+4sJW5ar05Pg== =ANh3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Ryan Lackey <rdl@mit.edu> writes:
You would be expected to comply with efforts to stamp out illegal activities. Laws may be passed (e.g. CDA) which would require technical measures to prevent illegal activity even if you are a common carrier.
Governments are always trying to coerce people into complying with technical measures designed by the likes of GCHQ, NSA, and various government sell-outs. Spammers have surived so far because spam is so hard to stop; stopping SPAM is an inherently hard problem, mostly because of open access SMTP relays which is basically a historic accident, and also because spammers make use of accounts that it pays them to treat as disposable. (I like to think hashcash, http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/ is a viable solution for spam, though it too must be widely deployed before it would be practical). We can perhaps learn something from the services and environments which allow spammers to flourish, we could emulate the lack of authentication, and identification in SMTP protocols and implementations, to design attractive new services which are hard to police by design. This is the advantage of the internet protocol designer. Distributed web services as Ryan is prototyping is one attractive new service. The challenge is deployment. Adam
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Ryan Lackey wrote:
I believe the web or the internet as a whole are now large and important enough to Joe Sixpack that shutting them off to stop illegal activity is infeasible -- I do not agree that USENET is. I think 2 weeks of press in the US about "USENET, the network used by kiddie porn photographers to trade photos, must be shut down" would be enough to shut usenet in the US down.
I beleave that this is quite unlikely. Usenet is infact bigger then the internet as a whole. Shutting down usenet would be a difficalt task, how are you going to convinvince all thouse peaple who like usenet to give it up. In fact how are you going to convinve copernise like zippo and altoba who are dedcated to providing usenet connectiverty to give up there primery money sorce. - -- 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 iQCVAwUBNLwLyqQK0ynCmdStAQFOuwP+LpitV9bYaMMSvcMN7PkLX+UfpsPnoCwH mNGueb3UV2Nf4h692SFcwy+bYrLhQRU0pZMuk3INNpUuVQ2CERBa29aSNfas9OiD e7u8LHziHH6c9wuwLpTf4ZbZ3cxvhkXHnWSaM/IPJ+pdlvJBd5koiFHyqmxLsLwF uok0uXOGkaQ= =C5IV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (4)
-
? the Platypus {aka David Formosa} -
Adam Back -
Ross Anderson -
Ryan Lackey