At 1:40 PM -0400 6/9/00, Sunder wrote:
>Tim May wrote:
>
>> If files are not traceable back to Sealand, then Sealand is not
>> needed. The file servers could be in Sunnyvale or London.
>>
>> If files are traceable back to Sealand, then Sealand will have to
>> deal with Interpol, Islamic fatwahs, etc.
>>
>> I wish them well, but it all looks like a short-lived gimmick. Good
>> for P.R., not good as a long-term business.
>
>Yup, and I don't see much of a way around it. Say they use gnutella as
>a distro model, or eternity. The fact that their physical location is
>being advertised is enough to invite the jihads.
>
>GNUtella might just be the right way to pull something like this off,
>but with a wide enough scope of network traffic analysis you can catch
>everyone in the chain. What the UK is proposing will catch all in the
>UK using it. I suppose Echelon will catch the rest...
>
>So the question is how does one build a system to get around extereme
>traffic analysis at every node? Onion is one way, but if you connect
>to it, you're a suspect, etc.
Ray is touching on a very important subject: how we are actually
going _backward_ in our approaches to these things.
In the heyday of the physical Cypherpunks meetings, circa 1993-5,
things like this actually got discussed in detail. Ditto for the list.
(I should note that I have only gone to about 2-3 physical meetings
per year in recent years. Many are now in San Francisco, 100 miles
away from me. Most seem to have corporate P.R. people making pitches
about their products. Just not worth it to me to drive that far to
snooze through talks on Digiwhackomatic's new DES variant. I'm
oversimplifying, and I appreciate the work that Bill and Dave put
into putting together agendas, but the flavor of the earlier years is
missing--some obvious folks from earlier years are also not attending
very often, if at all. Hell, one of the biggest problems, which I see
no solution for, is that of the 25-40 people I have seen at each of
the last couple of Cypherpunks meetings, I only recognized a few. And
obviously most of these 25-40 people are not contributing to the
Cypherpunks list. Maybe they're on other lists. They're not here, and
so there's no cross-fertilization between the list and the meetings.
Like I said, the physical meetings I have been to (and I see the
agendas of the ones I don't go to, of course) are no longer focused
on the really interesting topics. Interesting to me, of course. No
doubt the 30 or so folks who show up on Saturdays to hear about
Digiwhackomatic's latest firewall or the Institute for Digital
Policy's proposal to regulate Napster are apparently interested or
they wouldn't keep attending.)
Back to Sealand. It's a step backwards toward the physical data haven
notions of the past. "It's _so_ 70s," as GenXers might say.
As I keep saying, I do wish them well. Their success would help us
all. But I have to call them as I see them: Sealand cannot physically
host data haven materials without some predictable repercussions.
--Tim May
--
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Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.