Re: On the LAM--Local Area Mixes

[bill.stewart@pobox.com]

Wiring houses/business/etc. together simply for the purpose of mixes
is difficult enough that it won't happen enough to be significant.
On the other hand, cable modems keep claiming that they'll be widely
deployed Real Soon Now, and at least some of the cable modem versions
seem to support communications between users on the same cable or
same chunk of the cable network, and may provide a useful medium,
especially if broadcasts/multicasts are available.  On a smaller scale,
there are increasing numbers of office buildings that come with
internet access, and the occasional Palo Alto apartment building is
cooperatively wired.

At 01:48 AM 1/21/98 +-5-30, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote:
>besides, if such technology becomes widespread in, say, the US,
>then it's inevitable that the authorities will tend towards more 
>_real_ tyrannical behaviour, diluting search/seizure protections and 
>taking you closer to china. a weak vaccine
> _strengthens_ the microbe it is supposed to kill. 

We've certainly seen that in the Drug Wars, with no-knock searches
and similar attacks.  On the other hand, use of search warrants in the US
has always been honored more in the breach than the observance -
the year before the Supreme Court issued the Exclusionary Rule,
the New York City police didn't bother getting any search warrants,
because the Constitutional requirement that they do so didn't have
any real enforcement mechanism.

However, LAMs and similar technology have the value that the police
may not notice all the users in a cluster, especially passive lurkers,
and the disappearance of multiple nodes allows the non-seized systems
to get their data out to another data haven and clean up. 
Lurkers may be passive on the LAM, but forward data received from it
out to other media.  Running network protocols without ACKs takes
a bit of work to get right, but you can run the ACKs in some outside
channel to make sure you get everything; much of the work on
multicast protocols can be used to implement it.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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