From: peb@PROCASE.COM
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 16:42:52 PDT
To: marc@GZA.COM
Subject: Re: Verifying Privacy as an Upload/AI?
Message-ID: <9306020020.AA17715@banff.procase.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>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