out of the box
If we are talking of building cyberspace, we should talk of some of the things that should be done with it. Right now I think people think of games. I think of something a little different. Sort of a game. An everything bagel game. Let's assume we can build a geographically distibuted server with each nation, city or village, down to the plants in my back yard (growing), with a jump to where they came from (an OPTIONAL layer). That would be nodes layed on on a sphere and connected to nearest neighbors, with some long links. You know we can do this. It's not so hard with the right group of people. Each physical place has its own piece in the simulation; infinite subdivision subject to the rules of the space above it, with provisions for autonomous zones. In our diverse cultures, different rules apply in different locations. A lot of the differences we have occur when we butt up against each other and the ways that we are. A lack of understanding, a lack of common language hold us back. You don't need a language for people to play with each other. And I don't mean running around in corridoors, either. That's an adolesecent trip whos time is done. I mean Roger Rabbit's interactive math adventure. So, why not fix our little sickness through simulation ? It's a time honored technique for optimising and prototyping solutions to hard problems. Let the Israelis and the Palestinians have a go at building something in cyberspace first, but let the people do it. They have to live with it. In cyberspace, you get to visit another country, act like an asshole, and the locals choose what to do with you, in the nicest possible way, or in a way they'd be too nice to do RL. A full learning experience. It's like puppy training for humans, but without any of the unpleasant effects that a real-life version may have. A happy, loving place. Not a dark unpleasant place filled with pain and pursuit. Cyberspace here is not an escape from the real world, but a reflection of it. Someone in Uruguay should be able to visit virtual watts and see how well the tomatoes are doing. And, talk about it. Swap notes. Complain about the weather. Email was nice .. but .. really In Sweeden basic emotional education for all cuts social problems down to a minscule amount. And we don't need words to make a programming language with components what the whole world will be able to use to make real behaviors, so the world can internationalise basic applications itself.. There should be a basic science and mathematics curriculum for all, surpassing all languages, based on the manipulation of objects and the pure rules of mathematics we know. To start with, all the stuff which does not need english. It should be safe for children to play and learn with each other from one side of the planet to the other using secure cryptographic identities on the code they control, using crypted communications on which mom can snoop. When I say crypto, I mean strong crypto. Instead of fucking with the government, or whoever, lets think about using this stuff to develop deep cross-planet relationships - one of the things that will make us whole and solve this escalating 2000 year war problem we have going on. I for one am sick of it. It's a distraction from the real business at hand, which is getting the planet healthy and ready to participate at a galactic level. And, after all, locking someone out is very similar to locking someone in. You make sure you can that too. That's a temporary autonomous zone, for adults. A bubble in hyperspace. It's all just compositional crypto objects traversing a big graph. The stuff is developed symetrically, to account for the posibility of a con (ie, we're nice now, but get nasty later). There should be mollecular biology in shared space, tools for the design and visualisation of our sick little planet, environmental applications, layer apon layer apon layer. Infinite drill down. And you should be able to stand infront of the damn thing like a regular human being. Obsoleting the keyboard is possible with some of the things talked of here. I love my chair, but, enough. This is something for the world. What you get out of life is what you put in. And yeah, its a vision. But it can be done. M
RE: IWAR Threat Model
On Sun, 2002-03-31 at 10:57, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > At 10:52 AM 3/31/2002 -0600, Aimee Farr wrote: > >Coincidentally, I think "Michael Wilson" was the name of the guy who wrote > the movie script to Lawrence Of Arabia. That Michael Wilson was blacklisted, > and never received credit for what many viewed as one of the greatest > scripts of all time. > > You're correct. IMDB does show him as originally uncredited. He didn't work much >after that. > http://us.imdb.com/Credits?0056172 What an ignominious end to a promising career. > > Hollywood can be a star chamber. They effectively ended his career and livelihood >by fiat. > I certainly would not have taken that lying down. A bullet in the head of a few >studio > execs would have given them something else to think about besides what > others thought of the Red Scare or what was for lunch at the > commissary. Depends on how he looked at it. Either it's destruction, or an education, and he let it go. But there were quite a few ways to control a guy like in olden hollywood days - blacklisting is just one : If I were doing cyber film-noire today, I'd use : (1) Blacklisting : He's denied access to the studio machine - the production and distribution mechanisms. But today, cheap hardware and a free os eliminate that. No story. No motive. (2) Death : you can only kill so many people, and the car off the mountain road is too obvious. You'd have to use a slow poison instead. Boring, unbelievable. (3) Hassle. Hassle the shit out of the hero. Use bizzare seemingly connected events. Think like Hakim Bey, only backwards. Un-plot-like. (4) Frame-up. The classic. Everything else fails and the guy is stuck up with something he did not do and then locked up for life. Now we're talkin ! (5) Seductress. This is of course the most desirable option, yeilding a productive individual, who will do exactly what you want, when you want. Sexy ! Combine 4 and 5 for a good plot. And the elevator pitch : "So ... the kooks get him to buy a mail-in AIDs test kit somehow. Maybe it was by a combination of targeted spam and a girl, just like the guy liked, y'know, a real sweetie. Type y'd marry. Young. Make him want to test. Or maybe she asks him to. Something like that." "So they intercept the return blood sample in the mail, get his DNA, contaminate the weapon that supposedly fired the bullets. Get his lawyer, too. Bitch. You know she likes death row cases. Sweet" "I'm sorry Mr Roberts. That's a little too far out for us today. We only make family ractives here" NEXT Roberts
Re: network topology
there is research from all sorts of people in this area. It falls under the term "Ad-hoc networking". Google "Ad-hoc mobile network" and perhaps add in "routing" for more specificity. You have a different cost metric for the communications between nodes than the mobile people do - and they have all sorts of other things like device power and such to worry about. But here's a nodal point : http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/G.Aggelou/MANET_PUBLICATIONS.html I seem to remember that efficient routing for cluster sizes of up to 1000 nodes was well proven (this was research from AT&T). Some sort of group effort in this direction would be interesting. I would help. ~m On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 13:08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I've been thinking a little lately about network topologies > and peer-to-peer. What reading I've done seems to indicate that > most networks either have no organizational structure to them > at all or have some sort of dictated hierarchy. But it's > possible to have quite a lot of organization without anything like > a hierarchy. > > Here's a simple example of what I'm talking about: > > I've got a network of 1 million nodes, each of which has > an address 0-99. For now, we won't ask how one goes about > attaining an address. The network is divided into "clusters" > of 100 and "superclusters" of 10,000. I'm assuming there aren't > any persistent connections. Imagine my nodes address is 123456. > Imagine I wanted to query all the nodes in the network. > I would directly query all the nodes in my cluster > (all those with addresses 1234xx), one node in each cluster in my > supercluster (for example, I'd query all nodes with addresses of the > form 12xx56) and one node in each supercluster other than my > own (for example, all nodes of the form xx3456). > So I'd query 300 nodes directly (297 for the persnickety), > the 100 nodes in the other cluster would each have to make 100 > second generation queries, and the 100 nodes I contact in the > other superclusters would each have to make 100 second generation > queries > leading to third generation queries. > > Of course in practice I would have to make a lot more queries, > because some of the nodes would be unavailable. But the point is, > assuming all the nodes which are running forward queries properly, > I should only have to actually talk to 300 nodes as described > above and, more importantly, none of the nodes should ever be > subjected to a dupliacte query from me. > > Note that there's no hierarchy here, all nodes are treated equally. > Node 129956 is sort of acting as a "gateway" for me to > cluster 1299xx, but only for me (and 1 other people). > > Of course, this kind of structure could be made with any number of > "levels" of clustering. > > I don't recall ever having read of this type of structure before, > but it seems so obvious that I'm sure it's been discussed before. > So is there a name for it? Does anyone use it? has it been > shown to be utterly worthless? > > Thanks, > George
Re: network topology
there is research from all sorts of people in this area. It falls under the term "Ad-hoc networking". Google "Ad-hoc mobile network" and perhaps add in "routing" for more specificity. Many efficient schemes have been devised in theory. You have a different cost metric for the communications between nodes than the mobilew people do - they have all sorts of other things like device power and such to worry about. But here's a nodal point : http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/G.Aggelou/MANET_PUBLICATIONS.html I seem to remember that efficient routing for cluster sizes of up to 1000 nodes was well proven (this was from AT&T). IMO peer-peer could use a lot of this stuff. ~m On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 13:08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I've been thinking a little lately about network topologies > and peer-to-peer. What reading I've done seems to indicate that > most networks either have no organizational structure to them > at all or have some sort of dictated hierarchy. But it's > possible to have quite a lot of organization without anything like > a hierarchy. > > Here's a simple example of what I'm talking about: > > I've got a network of 1 million nodes, each of which has > an address 0-99. For now, we won't ask how one goes about > attaining an address. The network is divided into "clusters" > of 100 and "superclusters" of 10,000. I'm assuming there aren't > any persistent connections. Imagine my nodes address is 123456. > Imagine I wanted to query all the nodes in the network. > I would directly query all the nodes in my cluster > (all those with addresses 1234xx), one node in each cluster in my > supercluster (for example, I'd query all nodes with addresses of the > form 12xx56) and one node in each supercluster other than my > own (for example, all nodes of the form xx3456). > So I'd query 300 nodes directly (297 for the persnickety), > the 100 nodes in the other cluster would each have to make 100 > second generation queries, and the 100 nodes I contact in the > other superclusters would each have to make 100 second generation > queries > leading to third generation queries. > > Of course in practice I would have to make a lot more queries, > because some of the nodes would be unavailable. But the point is, > assuming all the nodes which are running forward queries properly, > I should only have to actually talk to 300 nodes as described > above and, more importantly, none of the nodes should ever be > subjected to a dupliacte query from me. > > Note that there's no hierarchy here, all nodes are treated equally. > Node 129956 is sort of acting as a "gateway" for me to > cluster 1299xx, but only for me (and 1 other people). > > Of course, this kind of structure could be made with any number of > "levels" of clustering. > > I don't recall ever having read of this type of structure before, > but it seems so obvious that I'm sure it's been discussed before. > So is there a name for it? Does anyone use it? has it been > shown to be utterly worthless? > > Thanks, > George
