Re: DNA

[Mats Bergstrom <matsb@sos.sll.se>]

Duncan Frissell wrote about software agents out of government control:

> I know it will be possible to force these agents to be linked to humans 
> but that would only be at birth.  No control is possible over who has the 
> codes to control the software agents of the future.

Unless we completely lose the war for privacy and will have to show our
retinas to a scanner to be able to access any net (with an identification
attached to all our communications) you are right, I hope. But flesh
agents need privacy too. Imagine Singapore collecting DNA imprints of
all their citizens (and all visitors at custom control) then sweeping
the streets for saliva every morning at 3am and whipping the flesh of all
offenders.

In my country we are all issued a unique software agent at birth i the
format: YYMMDDxxxy where y is a check for authenticity (to make it
harder faking a number I guess) in the following way: YYMMDDxxx are
alternately multiplied by 2 or 1 such as 2xY,1xY,2xX,... A result of
10 or more is treated like 1+0 to get a number not higher than 9. Then
all the results are added and the sum is subtracted from the nearest
higher power of 10 to get y (if the sum is an even power of 10 you get
10 transforming to 1+0=0). xxx are chosen so as to identify a male by
y=even and a female by y=odd (y=0 identifies...eh, I forgot, not a
hermaphrodite though). Hope this helps if you would ever like to use
a 'personal' agent in this jurisdiction! Take care not to use one which
is already occupied since that could cause great trouble for the original
holder (or make him rich?). Plenty of clercs have access to some
database where this can be checked though, no problem, but I don't
know how long it would take for a particular database to find out
that your agent has no former history. Disregarding the trivial task
of faking another true identity the system is not easy to beat on this
level. So I look forward to making my transactions in digicash over
a phantom node on the net, through a free anonymous agent. For reasons
of privacy.

//mb