At 09:32 PM 6/10/00 -0400, Tim May wrote:
>I'm still at a loss as to just what you actually mean by saying
>"crypto makes it all invisible.' The devil is in the details.
>Handwaving about crypto making things invisible just won't cut it,
>not when a specific model (Sealand) is being looked at.
By 'crypto makes it all invisible' I mean that who you are, who you
talk to, and what you do with your money can be private. If the black
bits are kept in the same library as the white, and neither the
librarian nor other eavesdroppers knows which is which, you have
to blow up (or padlock) the whole library to purge the nasty bits.
Equivalent to shutting down all of Usenet, in your scheme, because some
fraction of its traffic is 'nasty', but you can't tell (or filter) which
(eg, thanks to stego).
My suggestion is that disk farms like Sealand must make themselves too
useful to nuke, and must mix the useful (shielding) stuff unseparably from
the rest. Because sovereignty/rifle-shot-across-the-bow games won't last, but
<some fascist jihad> won't be allowed to nuke (or disconnect) NASDAQ's
computers to close a kiddy prawn|DeCSS|Shayler|Satanic Verses site...
A distributed system is certainly harder to nuke but may not be
so useful to businesses. That may be Havenco's strategy?
It will be interesting to see how Havenco differentiates itself
from the missile-bunker folks... their only edge wrt hardened locations is
sovereignty, and judicial flatulence being what it is...
