Subject: Re: interception proxies

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 21:48:28 -0600 (MDT)

] From: "Dick St.Peters" <[email-masked]>

] ...
] Actually, I've always thought that the first recorded-route address
] was the original source address so the route would indeed be
] reversible, but I'll admit to never having actually seen a recorded
] route. ...

Try `ping -R` between reasonable UNIX boxes on a private network,
and either use something like dbx or gdb to look at the bits that
`ping` gets or use tcpdump or similar to see the bits on the wire.

  ........

> From: Salvador Vidal <[email-masked]>

> ...
> >> There are also good uses for interception, I think that ONGs, churchs, and
> >> other organizations and people will want to become Internet trusters soon,

> ...
> I'm not talking about the computers inside a organization, but people
> computers anywhere that trust in these organizations or persons to do
> censor, ranking to do their purchases decisions or whatever they want!, and
> probabily some people want to have more than one truster and balance them.

> ...
> So please, which will be the right tool for a truster service?

Please read the two WREC drafts to discover the technical meaning
of "interception proxy."  Interception proxies are useless in the
circumstances you care about.  An interception proxy can affect
only traffic directed to it by a router in the path between IP
peers (e.g. HTTP client and server).  Your "computers anywhere"
won't be using the very few routers that would intercept traffic
for your trustors and send it to your trustees.
I'm reminded of statements during the wiretapping dicussions that
imagined the Internet as a big phone system using a single CO in a room
somewhere in the The Netherlands.  That seems to be like the problem here.

An explicit proxy is the right tool for part of your goal.  Simply build
proxies that filters according to your taste, and then configure the HTTP
browsers of trusting people to use your proxies.  That solution has a
characteristic that is either a fatal flaw or an enormous virtue, depending
on your philosphy.  It is that using or ignoring your proxy would be the
choice of the people in charge of the client computers instead of those
in charge of the proxies.

For the rest of your goal, the parts that involve balancing evaluations
and choosing whom to trust, interception proxies are tools for the opposite
notions.  They are tools for authoritarian censoring, and that is
intrinsically opposed to people making their choices in trust, ranking,
balancing and so forth.  I also think you need to give up the idea of
having computers make value judgements, but maybe that's just my lack of
imagination.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 00:21:10 -0400

> for your trustors and send it to your trustees.

Well.. as long as you are very careful to define "computers anywhere"
to specifically not be co-located at MAE-East or other similar
peering location where they'd be on a whoe LOT of paths between IP peers.

				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

---

From: Salvador Vidal <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 18:28:39 +0200

Hello Vernon,

At 21:48 12/04/00 -0600, you wrote:

>I also think you need to give up the idea of

Sure that computers will improve doing judgements, but don´t lost the main
force on Interenet, there are hundres of millons of human brains here able
to do judgements, and for me, the most important Internet goal is how to
get this incredible power running in an usefull way?

For the information that you see the first time before anybodi else you
only have computers for the jugement, but also the computers jugements can
use the people past jugements i.e. about the information font... 

Some questions about people feedback are:

How to feedback? It is required a way to feedback not only to the owner of
the information but to the comunity, about the information that you see,
it´s  requiered to invistigate what atributes want the people to use to
select the information in each categorie, then to ask the people that see
this information before about any of this atributes when they are getting
this information.

Why to feedback? Most people will never feedback unless they don´t get a
reward for it, feedback must be paid, but I don´t agree to: please reply
this question about this information and you get 1$, because people will
reply anything, feedback must be competitive in a feedback game, in the way
that people that are more usefull to other people with their information
will get the greats rewards.

How to organize the feedback to be usefull? with feedback happens that is
as important the jugement as who did this jugement, that´s why I think
trusters can be a usefull way to organize this knowlege, because the people
that join the same trusters seems to have similar values and so similar
jugements.
...

Not only values also e-comerce need people feedback, with the current
Internet stuff mainly comercial brouchures, people will not able to do good
decisions because everyting is gorgeous, wonderfull,..., to been able to
take decisions people need real information not comercial garbage!, it
doesn´t matter how much inteligence you put on people desktop, If you
remove the garbage it will remain garbage, information that comes from
independent people is not so wonderfull about everything because is real
information usefull to do decions, so to impulse the e-comerce.

So yes, we must improve computers jugement but much more people one!

Salva