From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 06:22:33 MDT
On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 11:31:07AM -0700, Robbie Lindauer wrote:
> I suggest a simple empirical test.
>
> I'll make a mail-bot that sends keywords to a remote computer. We'll
> have a control-list and a "bad word" list. We'll vary the density of
> bad-words in the mail to see if it makes any difference in their
> transmit times.
I think this is a good idea. Ideally we have a few different
recipient hosts in different places to make unusual delays more
noticeable. With a grid of emailers one could even make a crude
map of unusual delays ("A political censorship front is moving
across Central Europe, with serious delays expected in
Switzerland and Bosnia. Meanwhile the anti-porn system across
the United States is weakening and moving towards Canada" :-)
I did a simple study by hand, sending email to myself through
some other account. The Patriot act took 6 seconds, a rot13
version 25 s and a file listing of the same length 10 s. No
evidence there, but it also showed the importance of making sure
that the clocks of the different senders and receivers are
synchronized or have a known time differences.
> Does anyone have a mail-account at a well-known, likely to be monitored
> SMTP server that's willing to serve as recipient to a few thousand
> "easy to filter" emails?
I would like to participate, although my email system might be a
bit strange. My suggestion is that we really should look at
accounts at the big ISPs like AOL, which make natural choke
points. It would also be fun to use some account at a
"rebel-friendly" ISP or site.
> I'm really interested in this question.
Me too. I would be very surprised if we found anything, but just
like SETI the payoff of even an unlikely positive result would
be great enough to motivate it.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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