From: Ryan Lackey <rdl@mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 23:56:18 +0800
To: Thomas Womack <thomas.womack@merton.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: (eternity) autonomous agents
In-Reply-To: <01bd2037$68046310$409001a3@mc64.merton.ox.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <199801131551.KAA23584@the-great-machine.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Tom Womack wrote:
> Ross Anderson wrote:
> 
> >A virtual datahaven could be constructed eaily provided you knew how to
> >index controversial matter.
> >
> >Publish the rude things about the Prophet Mohammed on a server in Israel,
> >the anti-Serb rants in Croatia, the kiddyporn in Sweden, the violence in
> >America, the Nazi hate speech in Syria and the anti-scientology stuff in
> >Germany.
> 
> I suspect you will still run into things which are illegal anywhere;
> national-security stuff can be handled provided you've got a complete list
> of pairs of unfriendly nations, but I don't think (eg) the more extreme sort
> of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*.
> 
> Tom
> 

Additionally, you could have the Fahd family annoyed by this stuff in Israel,
post the names of all the Mossad agents to the same server, and have
the server have an accident.

You would need to go beyond "indexing" to "enforcement" if you wanted to
make it safe for people to run open datahavens.  True, you could still
do this regulatory arbitrage thing by having datahaven owners look at
the data, see if they can store it, then price it based on how safe it would
be for them to store it -- that's the kind of thing a market-based
Eternity service would include (as well as people with different levels
of risk tolerance being willing to take more dangerous data, ephermeal
servers, etc.).  A market-based system can overcome just about everything --
it will take into account the regulatory climate, political connections,
size of the site, etc.

The problem is that if you encrypt everything such that server operators
don't know what it is, you're "selling them a bill of goods", so they don't
really have the chance to correctly price their data.  Plus, they have
no way of knowing even if the data is unencrypted that your list of
the sins of the prophet do not include a steganographically-encoded
list of Mossad agents.

You can't assume people in the system will "play fairly" unless there
are market reasons for them to do so.  Perhaps persistent identities for
those committing files?

Basically, in the age old contest between arms and armor, arms win every time.

BTW, I don't really like the overly negative names for Eternity, like
"inferno", or whatever.  I like to think my data is *good* data, deserving
of a better fate.  Elysium, perhaps?   Or just use "eternity" 
in place of "eternityspace" (a word I never should have used, since it means
the same thing), as in "upload these files to eternity", "the collection
of files currently stored in eternity", etc.  Little danger of confusion 
with pedestrian meanings of the word eternity, too, I think, and there
is no real reason to draw a distinction between eternity the location for
documents and eternity the overall system for creating such a space.
- -- 
Ryan Lackey
rdl@mit.edu
http://mit.edu/rdl/		



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