From: ichudov@algebra.com
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 18:41:02 -0800 (PST)
To: "Phillip M. Hallam-Baker" <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: Fighting the cybercensor
Message-ID: <199701290241.SAA14333@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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.