17.5.1. "What role, if any, will MUDs, MOOs, and Virtual Realities
play?"
- "True Names," "Snow Crash," "Shockwave Rider"
- Habitat, online services
+ the interaction is far beyond just the canonical "text
messages" that systems like Digital Telephony are designed
to cope with
- where is the nexus of the message?
- what about conferences scattered around the world, in
multiple jurisdictions?
- crypto = glue, mortar, building blocks
- "rooms" = private places; issues of access control
- Unless cops are put into these various "rooms," via a
technology we can barely imagine today (agents?), it will
be essentially impossible to control what happens in these
rooms and places. Too many degrees of freedom, too many
avenues for exchange.
- cyberspaces, MUDs, virtual communities, private law,
untouchable by physical governments
17.5.2. keyword-based
- can be spoofed by including dictionaries
17.5.3. dig sig based (reputation-based)
17.5.4. pools and anonymous areas may be explicitly supported
17.5.5. better newsreaders, screens, filters
17.5.6. Switches
- "switching fabrics"
- ATM
- Intel's flexible mesh interconnects, iWARP, etc.
- all of these will make for an exponential increase in
degrees of freedom for remailer networks (labyrinths). On-
chip remailing is esentially what is needed for Chaum's
mixes. ATM quanta (packets) are the next likely target for
remailers.
17.5.7. "What limits on the Net are being proposed?"
- NII
+ Holding carriers liable for content
- e.g., suing Compuserve or Netcom
- often done with bulletin boards
- "We have to do something!"
+ Newspapers are complaining about the Four Horsemen of the
Infocalypse:
- terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money
launderers
+ The "L.A. Times" opines:
- "Designers of the new Information Age were inspired by
noble dreams of free-flowing data as a global
liberating force, a true democratizing agent. Sadly,
the crooks and creeps have also climbed aboard. The
time has come for much tighter computer security.
After all, banks learned to put locks on their vaults."
["L.A. Times," editorial, 1994-07-13]
By Tim May, see README
HTML by Jonathan Rochkind