Re: (eternity) autonomous agents

Ryan Lackey:

>                     A "datahaven country" would have
> to be immune to such tactics -- either having its own strong military 
> (China as datahaven) to defend its national interests, political
> connections (Israel?), or enough trade with the US that shutting off
> data commo would be impossible for economic reasons (Singapore?).  

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.

If someone wants to curse and swear at the whole world at once, then 
there is this amazing new invention called hypertext ...

Ross

>Ryan Lackey:
>>                     A "datahaven country" would have
>> to be immune to such tactics -- either having its own strong military 
>> (China as datahaven) to defend its national interests, political
>> connections (Israel?), or enough trade with the US that shutting off
>> data commo would be impossible for economic reasons (Singapore?).  

China _is_ currently a data haven, and the US trade talks have been
focussed on getting them to stop it.  It's not using the Internet,
just CDROMs and snailmail, but it's a huge market...

At 03:16 PM 1/13/98 +0000, 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.

But to do that you've got to know what's on your server,
and data havens strongly depend on deniability and scalability,
so you don't sell those bits on the chips implanted in your head.
You could manage your storage in a way that lets users specify where
they _don't_ want a given opaque file to be, so they can keep
the anti-Foobarian speech out of Foobar, but if you let them
specify where they do want it, it's too easy to plant stuff.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639