[109257] in Cypherpunks
Re: clique surveillance: what can you learn?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Osama Bin Laden)
Mon Mar 15 12:02:40 1999
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:42:57 +0200 (EET)
From: Osama Bin Laden <waste@zor.hut.fi>
To: Josh Richards <jrichard@freedom.gen.ca.us>
cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.990314152940.30885B-100000@datahaven.freedom.gen.ca.us>
Reply-To: Osama Bin Laden <waste@zor.hut.fi>
On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Josh Richards wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Mar 1999, Anonymous wrote:
>
> > Has anyone thought about building a bot that built
> > associations between identities (email addresses,
> > links between personal pages, common phrases) looking for
> > cliques or subcultures?
I believe there are already some systems that track and create
friendship networks on the basis of phone calls and e-mails, etc.
> I don't think this is what you had in mind, but you reminded me of
> something. I was recently thinking about how possible it would be to
> develop a sort of "intellectual networker" which worked on the premise of
> a web based questionnaire (free form? multiple choice? both? AI? Who
> knows..). Anyhow, taking it and opening it up to the net. Basically the
> idea is that if you could attract the numbers of people like a Yahoo or
> EBay pulls in, it would become an ever involving database, which would
> allow people to "network" on a MUCH larger scale and in a much more useful
> manner then possible in the real world (of business, hobbies, whatever).
>
> Personal matchmaker for intellectuals? It's not like it's really that
> different. There is just no (required) sexual overtone to it. Obviously
> privacy issues come into play, but that is not the point, since if you are
> interested in networking with people you are going to have to divulge
> _something_ (and there is no reason why it has to be really personal, the
> data entered wouldn't have to divulge anymore then you might by posting to
> this list and others...it only consists of your idea and interests, not
> your life history).
You might want to use Self Organizing Map systems.
All in all an interesting idea. I've often thought myself that it
would be nice to use something like that to find likeminded people
for some interesting project. Of course, it would be best if this
matchmaker allowed complete anonymity.
But what information would you give it? Objectivity is very
hard to achieve, and people constantly deceive when online.
A Self Organizing personality profiler...
Credit card usage, insurances, banking & shopping
information, health records, etc, would be nice.
> > It would be an interesting project. You'd want
> > to exclude Mr. Anonymous since he has so many
> > postings, so few friends :-)
>
> Or, IMO, include him since it would be an interesting test of how feasible
> it would be to develop an app that could compile anonymous postings and
> try tying them to potential "real" identities, based on the contents of
> other posts... Instead of having to disguise your voice, now you'll have
> to disguise your spelling and sentence structure as well through a "smart"
> remailer..
A really interesting point. How can you avoid giving indentifying
information, yet keep the content of your messages the same. I guess
the only way is to minimize all information and communication.
BTW, has anyone thought about creating an optimal language for
human communication purposes?
Not for speaking, but for informational messages. Something that could
be used to automatically translated to any language, for the purpose
of giving maximal amount of information in an easily translatable way.
Say, you wanted to write a novel in this language-code, and you could
see several different translations of it simultaneously. Babelfish
already has nice automated translators online, so the math should
nearly be there.
Possibly something like the geek-codes that some people use to give
lots of personal information in their signature files. Programming
languages already have great design behind them. Why not apply the
same principles to invent a new human language?
I believe Iain M. Banks has something like it in some of his sci-fi
novels.
