From: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
Date: Sat, 7 Jan 95 10:08:06 PST
To: weidai@eskimo.com (Wei Dai)
Subject: Re: A Fire Upon the Deep
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950106190639.16522B-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <199501071808.NAA09510@bwh.harvard.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



	Anonymous mail has bandwidth costs that are only slightly
higher than regular mail.  You could hide quite a bit in most video
packets.  The latency is a reflection of the lack of volume, because
volume is needed for reordering.  If your favorite remailer gets more
mail, the latency will drop.

	Also, on the book trend, Neal Stephenson's new book, The
Diamond Age (Bantam Spectra, 1995) has a brilliant hacker dump
information he comes across becuase its encrypted, and he knows he'll
never manage to break the encryption scheme.  I haven't finished it,
but its quite good about 1/3 of the way through.

Adam


Wei Dai wrote:

| One more thing that's marginally related to cypherpunks (hey I really
| like this book so I'll take any chance I can to talk about it ;-) is
| the idea that the efficiency of distributed computation (and distributed 
| intelligence) depends on high bandwidth and low latency of the communication
| medium.  Since anonymity seems to have rather high costs in terms of
| bandwidth and latency (compare anonymous e-mail with internet video
| conferencing or even with normal e-mail), this implies that
| an organization of anonymous agents will not work as efficiently as
| a similar orginzation whose members are not concerned about
| anonymity.


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
						       -Hume