From: David Honig <honig@otc.net>
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 02:22:39 +0800
To: Ryan Lackey <honig@otc.net>
Subject: Re: Jim Bell... lives... on... in... Hollywood!
In-Reply-To: <David Honig's message of Thu, 08 Jan 1998 09:21:08 -0800>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980109094914.007b36b0@206.40.207.40>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 08:28 AM 1/9/98 -0500, Ryan Lackey wrote:
><daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU> (David Honig) writes:
>
>> 
>> I agree, but "contribute to death" needs to be operationalized.  Here's a
>> proposal:
>> If a homicide suspect is arrested within N months, they will be isolated
>> from the net
>> and the owner of the winning ID will have to perform a challenge-response.
>> Since
>> the suspect couldn't have replied, they are different; if a pair
>> collaborated, well,
>> when a hit man is caught, his payoff matrix will usually make him turn in
>> the client.
>
>Given strong cryptography and something like my current Eternity DDS
>almost prototype (a reliable distributed way of selling 
>storage-compute-bandwidth being the relevant part), why couldn't the 
>incarcerated person have left an agent out on the net to handle the 
>challenge for him, and hold the money in anonymous trust for him until
>he gets out?  I can't think of any anonymity-preserving system which 
>contains an "is-a-person" predicate -- even if you asked an AI-hard
>question, you could blind the question and post it to usenet or CNN
>or something and quote one of those responses (which would be wise to
>do anyway for styleometry prevention).
>
>The other option is having a non-anonymous system, or one that is
>anonymous until someone tries to collect the prize, but in that case,
>it's not all that interesting a problem.
>
>Ryan the Nightshifted
>-- 
>Ryan Lackey
>rdl@mit.edu
>http://mit.edu/rdl/		
>

I think this gets into legal issues.  Consider fraudelent insurance and
gambling schemes
involving collaboration -illegal, but hard to detect unless someone turns.
Consider a hit man who takes the fall for the boss, so that his family 
is taken care of.  

In these cases and in an AP scheme, the law can't prove much if 
certain parties collaborate.  Maybe the winner of the
"BATF agents blown up in 97" bet *is* John Doe III; but since
the investigation claims no such person, and the winner is not
in jail now, the winner has fairly earned their reward
via their skill in actuarial matters.




------------------------------------------------------------
      David Honig                   Orbit Technology
     honig@otc.net                  Intaanetto Jigyoubu

	"How do you know you are not being deceived?" 
	---A Compendium of Analytic TradeCraft Notes, 
	Directorate of Intelligence, CIA