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Re: [dvd-discuss] The power of a click



On 2001-12-03 06:10, Scott A Crosby wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Steve Stearns wrote:
> > theater.  The legislature has realized that prosecuting everybody
> > who shares a file on Gnutella is completely beyond their
> > capabilities.  The
>
> Oh, I don't know if I'd say this...
>
> In 1997, there were about 700,000 marijuana arrests in the United
> States.[1]
>
> Gnutella may have more than 700,000 users, but marijuana is merely
> one drug. I'd say tha the courts probably are up to dealing with a
> potential of a million possible cases/year. Also throw in [2], which
> shows that if you remove about 5% of the hosts in a gnutella network,
> 2/3 of what they consider their problem goes away.
>
> The belief that the internet is whack-a-mole doesn't seem to be
> supported by the statistics accrured by the war on drugs.
>
> Governments have historically done amazing things to millions of
> their own population; the last 50 years are full of examples. Look at
> Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, or Hitler's Holocaust.

Okay, here's a completely hypothetical rebuttal.

Drugs aren't bits and drug distribution systems don't work the same way 
as the Internet. For one thing, it's easy to make an Internet 
distribution model scale past the capabilities of the law enforcement 
system. For another, the Internet can completely ignore borders. Drugs 
can, too, but the rate of packet loss might be unacceptably high for 
some applications.

Now take freenet. It already has an element of plausible deniability 
built into it, in that the operator of a server doesn't know what's on 
the server. Then look at the way it scales. The more freenet servers on 
the network, the faster everything runs.

This provides some very strong incentive to write a trojan/virus that 
propogates a freenet server. Not only can it increase the overall 
performance of the freenet system, but provides another layer of 
deniability for freenet users.

The effect on the legal system would be similar to a large drug cartel 
breaking into hundreds of thousands of vehicles and planting some 
marijuana butts (or whatever) in the ashtrays.

c.

-- 
Christophe Beauregard
Informatics Specialist, Software
ADS Trenton
Environment Canada
(613) 965-2762