Re: A Fire Upon the Deep

[Nesta Stubbs <nesta@nesta.pr.mcs.net>]

On Fri, 6 Jan 1995, Wei Dai wrote:

> In article <199501052231.OAA11745@netcom5.netcom.com>, tcmay@netcom.com 
>  
> There was some recent talk about network agent technology on this list.
> Vinge mentions almost in passing how an entire planet (or maybe planets)
> was taken over by an "intelligent net packet".  Makes me rather nervous
> about things like Magic Cap...
>
does anynoe have any information about intelligent agents?  I mean I know 
about filter and stuff, but they arent intelligent agents.  I assume one 
would be something like the WWW worm and other searching scripts that 
have a database of information to cross-reference their finds and decide 
what to send back to you.  the WWWWorm is a good centralized illustration 
of this, with a searchable index of HTML pages.  Or is there osmethign 
else that makes upa  "intelligent agent"
  
> One more thing that's marginally related to cypherpunks (hey I really
> like this book so I'll take any chance I can to talk about it ;-) is
> the idea that the efficiency of distributed computation (and distributed 
> intelligence) depends on high bandwidth and low latency of the communication
> medium.  Since anonymity seems to have rather high costs in terms of
> bandwidth and latency (compare anonymous e-mail with internet video
> conferencing or even with normal e-mail), this implies that
> an organization of anonymous agents will not work as efficiently as
> a similar orginzation whose members are not concerned about
> anonymity.

i disagree storngly.  anonimity with almost no increase in latency or 
decrease in bandwidth is easily viable.  Especially if it was a group of 
coleagues planning to get together, I mean the remailers and stuff are a 
different thing altogehter, but ytalk or another confrencing system with 
untracable features is no problem, hell just a conference call dialing up 
from payphones, ora favorite hacker trick of running a conference of a 
COCOT.  etc....

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