Truth Machines and Open Networks

Yak Wax (yakwax@yahoo.com)
Mon, 16 Mar 1998 13:12:37 -0800 (PST)


John K Clark wrote:

> Seems to me it has exactly the same
> problems as Brin's. You could never
> obtain absolute truth from your One
> True Open Network (OTON) because if
> the entire world's operation is based
> on it's information then people would
> have enormous incentive to shape that
> information and change "the truth" to
> their liking.

The wonders of hyperlinking and massive abstraction make that
impossible, every bit of information is tide to every other bit of
information. Change one piece of history and you've got to change it
all. Besides, this is an autonomous meta network, everything you do
creates additional data.

> Since everything is open I know exactly
> how OTON works and all about its
> security, I can hack in and alter
> records and make history be anything
> I want.

Well you can't hack in because it has nothing to hack into (it's open,
remember?). You can't change history for the reasons above. You
could try and destroy the data but it's completely distributed, which
makes things very hard to find. You could try to orgainise somekind
of anti-openess conspiracy, but the majority of people have more to
gain from openess than from privacy (i.e. losers.)

> It does no good to make an
> exception to the total openness policy
> for OTON itself because that's by far
> the most important thing in the world
> and if that's not open nothing is,
> besides, although you might reduce the
> risk from hackers you'd vastly increase
> the meddling of the truth from world
> leaders, that is, from the network
> administrators.

There's are no network administrators, it's completely distributed
autonomous anarchy.

> A good one key encryption algorithm,
> the sort you'd use to store information
> on a hard disk, slows things down by
> very little. Public key encryption is
> a little slower but still not bad and
> machines are getting so fast you'll
> soon never notice the slowdown.

But the data must be machine-readable.

For the sake of argument, let's say you managed secret communication.
Who would you send communicate with? What would you say? Do you
think you can organise people against the network? What are you going
to stop? What can you steal from an open society? How can you bribe
an open society? What have you got that they haven't?

> >Anyway, what are you hiding?
>
> If I told you I'd have to kill you.
> (:>)

Try :-]

--Wax
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