Re: (eternity) autonomous agents

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

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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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Ryan Lackey wrote:
> 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.

How about "perpetuity"? Nice and neutral. "Stored in perpetuity" is a
concept everyone understands, too. :-)

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
Ben Laurie            |Phone: +44 (181) 735 0686|Apache Group member
Freelance Consultant  |Fax:   +44 (181) 735 0689|http://www.apache.org
and Technical Director|Email: ben@algroup.co.uk |Apache-SSL author
A.L. Digital Ltd,     |http://www.algroup.co.uk/Apache-SSL
London, England.      |"Apache: TDG" http://www.ora.com/catalog/apache

Thomas Womack wrote:

| 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

National security stuff has to be source controlled.  You can't expect
the New York Times to not publish the Pentagon papers once they've
leaked.  The responsibility is on the owner of the data to keep it
secret, not on the whole world to help once he's screwed up.  There
are times when the people who get the data may choose not to
redistribute it, but the decision to redistribute has been made before
it gets to the eternity server.  The Times did not steal the Pentagon
papers.

| of pairs of unfriendly nations, but I don't think (eg) the more extreme sort
| of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*.

Somalia? Go places where the government is either non-existant or
otherwise pre-occupied, and pay to drop IP in.  The locals get
communication infrastructure as long as they leave you alone, but if
the linux box that has the web server goes down, so do the phone
lines.

Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume

On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Adam Shostack wrote:
> Thomas Womack wrote:
>  
> | of pairs of unfriendly nations, but I don't think (eg) the more 
> | extreme sort of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*.
> 
> Somalia? Go places where the government is either non-existant or
> otherwise pre-occupied, and pay to drop IP in.  The locals get
> communication infrastructure as long as they leave you alone, but if
> the linux box that has the web server goes down, so do the phone
> lines.

Well as far as countries that have governments that don't really
exist there is always Liberia, But I personally would like my
own militia included with their business development package.

If I remember Black Unicorn's posts some months back about the
Seychelles, The Rene government will protect you from extradition
from any country with their military for what? $6 million?

Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country
willing on hosting data havens.
  
And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking 
for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling
rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just
give you one just to be rid of future liability.

Cheers!

William Knowles
erehwon@dis.org


==
The information standard is more draconian than the gold
standard, because the government has lost control of the
marketplace.  --  Walter Wriston 
==
http://www.dis.org/erehwon/

At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:

>If I remember Black Unicorn's posts some months back about the
>Seychelles, The Rene government will protect you from extradition
>from any country with their military for what? $6 million?

Or until a higher bid comes in....

Really, there is no security in meatspace. Not compared to the security
mathematics provides.

Whether floating offshore barges or abandoned oil rigs or compliant Third
World dictatorships, no "data haven" with an identifiable nexus in
meatspace will last for long, at least not serving all types of materials.

When I read Sterling's "Islands in the Net," in 1988, I was initially upset
that he'd "discovered" my own developing ideas about data havens (though I
called it crypto anarchy), but then pleased to see how he he'd missed the
boat on the role cyberspace and strong crypto would inevitably play.

But the legacy of "data havens" is that people get the wrong idea, by
thinking of a data haven as a "place." In actuality, what's important are
the retrieval mechanisms, not the place things are possibly stored.

Hence approaches like Blacknet.

(The parallels with the international money system are obvious...it is less
important each year that passes just "where" the underlying store of value
is physically stored. There are some important issues and differences,
though.)


--Tim May

The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:

>Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country
>willing on hosting data havens.

Oh yeah?

It's been a while since we talked about this (at least on the Cypherpunks
list), but a couple of years ago there was much discusson on the CP list
about just what items would be allowable in Anguilla. Vince Cate gave his
assessment, which I found fairly nebulous, in that it appeared the Ruling
Families would allow what they would allow, and not allow what they would
not allow---there seemed to be a lot of ad hoc rulings.

(Given that copies of "Penthouse" are illegal in Anguilla, if I recall this
correctly, and given that gun are illegal, and drugs are illegal, I rather
doubt that Anguilla would happily host "The Aryan Nations Bomb Site," or
"Pedophile Heaven," or "Gun Smuggler's Digest. " Or the even juicier stuff
any "data haven" with any claim to really being a data haven will surely
have.)

>And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking
>for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling
>rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just
>give you one just to be rid of future liability.

Given the willingness of the French to have SDECE sink Greenpeace ships in
neutral ports, how long before a couple of kilos of Semtex are applied to
the underside of these oil rigs?

Given what happened with "pirate broadcast tankers," the future is not bright.

When the first "oil rig data haven" is found to have kiddie porn,
bomb-making info, and (shudder) material doubting the historicity of the
Holocaust, the U.N. will cluck and the public will cheer when it is boarded
and seized, or simply sunk.

As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in
meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics.

--Tim May

The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Tim May wrote:

> At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:
> 
> >Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country
> >willing on hosting data havens.
> 
> Oh yeah?
> 
> It's been a while since we talked about this (at least on the Cypherpunks
> list), but a couple of years ago there was much discusson on the CP list
> about just what items would be allowable in Anguilla. Vince Cate gave his
> assessment, which I found fairly nebulous, in that it appeared the Ruling
> Families would allow what they would allow, and not allow what they would
> not allow---there seemed to be a lot of ad hoc rulings.

If memory serves me right it was because Vince bounced off the Taxbomber
site because it offered second passports, camouflage passports, and other
products that was considered a fraud, Which to me sounds odd since there
is some other company selling most everthing and then some from an .ai
domain which Vince's company has the monopoly on handing out .ai domains

http://www.ultramec.com.ai
 
> (Given that copies of "Penthouse" are illegal in Anguilla, if I recall this
> correctly, and given that gun are illegal, and drugs are illegal, I rather
> doubt that Anguilla would happily host "The Aryan Nations Bomb Site," or
> "Pedophile Heaven," or "Gun Smuggler's Digest. " Or the even juicier stuff
> any "data haven" with any claim to really being a data haven will surely
> have.)

You also have to wonder how far in the future it will be before the
special forces of some banana republic drops in on Vince to blow-up
his operation for as he advertises publishing censored information 
on ones ex-president on the Internet, or for that matter I have
yet to see abortion information coming from his servers. 

What has happened in Anguilla proves that there will be a need for 
different flavors of datahavens, Different degrees libility that
datahaven owners will want to store information on their servers.  
I would love to open a XXX WWW site in Anguilla pulling in the 
industry average of $5-10K a month and not pay any taxes there, 
But it won't happen in Anguilla with the present adminstration!

> >And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking
> >for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling
> >rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just
> >give you one just to be rid of future liability.
> 
> Given the willingness of the French to have SDECE sink Greenpeace ships in
> neutral ports, how long before a couple of kilos of Semtex are applied to
> the underside of these oil rigs?
>
> Given what happened with "pirate broadcast tankers," the future is not bright.

Isn't there a microstate off the coast of England called 'Sealand' run
from a former oil rig/gun battery for the last 20 years?  
 
> When the first "oil rig data haven" is found to have kiddie porn,
> bomb-making info, and (shudder) material doubting the historicity of the
> Holocaust, the U.N. will cluck and the public will cheer when it is boarded
> and seized, or simply sunk.
>
> As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in
> meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics.
> 
> --Tim May

I agree completely, But there is still room for massively distrubted
datahavens on oil rigs, barges, gun batteries, island nations or
hiding in Norm's LAN in Cicero IL.  All the harder to supress that
information.


William Knowles
erehwon@dis.org 

==
The information standard is more draconian than the gold
standard, because the government has lost control of the
marketplace.  --  Walter Wriston 
==
http://www.dis.org/erehwon/

At 09:30 PM 1/13/98 EST, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
>
>Is it possible to make it cryptographically hard to determine where
>the data is stored?
>

Eternity.  Look it up.



------------------------------------------------------------
      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
	     http://www.jya.com/cia-notes.htm

On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, William Knowles wrote:
> Isn't there a microstate off the coast of England called 'Sealand' run
> from a former oil rig/gun battery for the last 20 years?  

Sealand, about which I wrote about on this list before, was an example 
that should be studied by the offshore advocates. Based in an old 
oilrig housing platform, some unlucky investors attempted to establish 
their own country. They began issuing stamps and passports for their 
"country". As any reasonable person should have expected, nobody would 
move their mail and nobody recognized their passports.

They went bankrupt.

-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred

William Knowles <erehwon@dis.org> writes:
> If memory serves me right it was because Vince bounced off the Taxbomber
> site because it offered second passports, camouflage passports, and other
> products that was considered a fraud, Which to me sounds odd since there
> is some other company selling most everthing and then some from an .ai
> domain which Vince's company has the monopoly on handing out .ai domains

But that company was written about by some journalist, so Vince pulled
its plug to avoid bad publicity.

Vince also indicated (in response to my query) that he wouldn't support
content that provoked denial-of-service attacks (such as the Spanish
attack on the pro- basque independence web page0

> > As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in
> > meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics.
> >
> > --Tim May
>
> I agree completely, But there is still room for massively distrubted
> datahavens on oil rigs, barges, gun batteries, island nations or
> hiding in Norm's LAN in Cicero IL.  All the harder to supress that
> information.

Is it possible to make it cryptographically hard to determine where
the data is stored?

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

At 3:51 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:

>Isn't there a microstate off the coast of England called 'Sealand' run
>from a former oil rig/gun battery for the last 20 years?

What Lucky said.

(And read up on the scam ^H^H^H^H scheme called "Oceania," the floating
libertarian non-state. And Minerva, and so on.)

....
>I agree completely, But there is still room for massively distrubted
>datahavens on oil rigs, barges, gun batteries, island nations or
>hiding in Norm's LAN in Cicero IL.  All the harder to supress that
>information.

"Room for," certainly. "Economic incentive for," apparently not.

Look, if you can wave a magic want and give us "massively distributed data
havens on oil rigs, barges,....," I'll be the first to cheer.

But the factors I described, and Lucky described, are why it would be a
foolish investment for anyone to build even the first one, let alone the
numbers you are contemplating.

Wishing won't make it so.

--Tim May

The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Thomas Womack wrote:

> I suspect you will still run into things which are illegal anywhere;

For eggample?  Rembour, alot illegality is about cultural hangups and
tabbos.  Which change when thay are in diffrent contexts.

[...]

>I don't think (eg) the more extreme sort
> of kiddyporn is legal *anywhere*.

I beleave that there are places where the distrabution of child porn
is legal even if its production isn't.

- -- 
Please excuse my spelling as I suffer from agraphia see the url in my header. 
Never trust a country with more peaple then sheep.  ex-net.scum and proud
You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For
Themselves? --Terry Pratchett.

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