From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 06:57:30 +0800
To: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Why TCM thinks BlackNet *IS* a Data Haven
In-Reply-To: <ae3cf6e603021004c004@[205.199.118.202]>
Message-ID: <199608191838.LAA11887@netcom2.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


1st: apologies to Jim Bell for misquoting him. I think I meant
Jim Mccoy.

>Without splitting too many semantic hairs about the precise definition of
>"data haven," let me examine some ways in which BlackNet behaves
>identically to a conventional data haven.

naw, let's split some semantic hairs. <g>

I am willing to agree in principle that blacknet is *similar* to
a data haven, as I wrote in my response. 
it involves similar ideas. however, in your *original*
Blacknet announcement it was explicitly portrayed to be essentially
an *intelligence*service*.  I agree that you could have modified
this announcement to pretend that you are also providing
"data haven" type services, but you didn't focus on this angle,
and I object to you going back and claiming you had some priority on this
idea via Blacknet (at least that's what you seem to be doing)
when you really did not. of course you have been
discussing data haven ideas for about as long as anybody here, and
may even have some degree of precedence in inventing aspects of the
idea, but I don't think it's fully legitimate to suggest that
your blacknet gedanken promoted the concept of a data haven,
or even contained it.

you neglect key points that I and others are raising.
raw data is not the same as intelligence-- it is far different.
with raw data you want a mechanism that has the reliability/fidelity
and access time of a hard drive, essentially. you want something
that doesn't alter or reformulate data-- something the Blacknet announcement
never promised at all, and in fact it was clearly implying that
the service would be involved in sorting out what data to sell to
whom and presumably repackaging it, so to speak. 

sending requests
to blacknet, "can you please send me a copy of [x]" does not
fit my idea of a hard drive type request. a data haven and
a blacknet intelligence operation share some *similarities* but
in principle there would be some vastly different
implementation issues for one or the other.

again, *in*theory* you could use blacknet for a data haven type
arrangement. a company that provided both would make a lot of
sense as far as consolodating similar functions. however to
claim that you were promoting the idea of a data haven with
the initial announcement of blacknet, that's just not correct
imho. I'd call that Blacknet II: the Sequel which you recently
cooked up.

>I call this at least as functional as a "physical data haven," where
>someone might physically travel to Anguilla, say, to buy a copy of the
>Necronomicon...

again, your original blacknet service made no guarantee whatsoever about
providing data back to someone who sent it in, in unaltered form, something
that would be key to a data haven. in fact it implied that the people
who sent in the data wouldn't be interested in getting it back--they
would only want the cash for its informational value to other buyers. you do
however point out that data havens in which material sent in by some people
and retrieved by others would tend to be another application. (when I 
think of data haven I think of person [x] submitting material in secret,
and then person [x] downloading it or making it available to others
based on his own decision. blacknet was explicitly making the decision
of availability on its own)

in fact this is a very important attribute you are glossing over
with your rather slippery exposition. let's say I submit some
secret data to Blacknet, and I want a guarantee they are not going to
sell it to other people, even if it is encrypted by me.  (otherwise they
might sell it to someone who wants to break it.)  the original 
blacknet announcement involved the antithesis of this confidentiality
arrangement-- it explicitly suggested that you would use the service
only to sell data that others might want. presumably they would have
no use for an encrypted file they could not decrypt and might just
throw it away.  

again, the original announcement made *no*guarantee* that Blacknet
would even save your data. they could throw it away. that is your
idea of a data haven? if it said, "we will also guarantee we will
reliably store your data for a fee which you can retrieve"-- just
that sentence and I would agree with you that the original blacknet
was also a data haven. but lacking that, I disagree. notice that this
is quite different than the original announcement, which implied
that only the people who wanted to buy the data would submit fees
to the service, not those who submit the information (who would
in fact be paid by blacknet for the semantic content value)

>It's a data haven.

it is, after you revise it as you are doing in your recent essays.
again your original announcement did not approach the data haven
angle you are now emphasizing whatsoever and in some ways as I 
enumerate was in direct conflict with it.