From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Apr 09 2003 - 16:49:54 MDT
Good post, Hal.
I guess the real fear should rather be about who owns the operating
system rather than the TC system. The one who owns the OS owns the
contents ("Yes, Microsoft is allowed to delete you - didn't you read the
EULA before clicking?").
The problem with the TC infrastructure is lock-in and lock-out
situations. If software relies on TC, it might be unable to interoperate
or transfer to systems with other TC systems or newer TCs - imagine what
happens when TC V1.0 (4096 bit keys) is shown to be insecure and it is
time to migrate to TC V2.0 (16384 bit keys), and people can't transfer
their files because the software won't let them move to the safer (but
from the software's point of view, untrustworthy) system. This suggests
that backwards compatibility will be extremely important, and that may
lead to lock in effects too ("Yes children, once upon a time there were
two standards of a little chip. And that is why the galaxy now is
divided into the Solarian and the Macrostar empires and we can't
communicate with each other").
The second problem is that untrusted software will have a disadvantage
within formal institutions such as companies, governments etc against
trusted software. It makes a lot of sense to only trust TC systems and
handle outside systems much more carefully or not at all. But it is
within the untrusted environment the creative commons lie, it is here
where much of the bottom up ideas emerge. One can of course take the
best of this and turn them into trusted systems (I guess a TC linux is
quite doable, it is just that any changes in the code will not be
trusted, even if they are entirely allowable), but that will require a
costly (in time, effort, trust building) code review that will act both
as a limiting threshold and cause it to leave the creative common.
To me, these problems doesn't seem insurmountable. They are messy
legal-engineering-social-philosophical problems, but they can likely be
solved. Or rather, there are probably sufficiently good solutions that
we can live with them. The great risk right now is that we get trapped
into a premature brittle solution that is suboptimal or has a strong
lock in factor. We need limited prototypes of this to play with and find
what really can work, not wholesale standards enforced by law or
monopolies.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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