impengo's Journal: Internet regulation as a concept

My purpose in journaling this is to start a discussion that exposes my mistakes and makes use of my best ideas, rather than trying to define all terms of a debate such that I cannot lose. 1. Procedural justice suggests using fines where applicable such that deliberate malfeasance (malicious computing) would occur often in the individuals for whom we wish to regulate the behavior, and rarely in those accidental individuals who commit malicious computing accidentally. The cost of doing business would become punitive, with prison time for aggregious and deliberate cases. 2. This makes mp3 distribution fall into line. Do it a few times, and the fine is multiplied by that number, but do it millions of times, and the fine is punitive. What would this do to peer to peer torrents? Would it still curb a pyramid scheme to deliberately defraud a music artist for example? Pyramid schemes are illegal for other reasons. It would curb the behavior of distributing content free to many individuals, by a few hyper-active individuals. 3. How should asymmetric key v Diffie Hellman key be used to curb malicious acts like terrorism? Diffie Hellman is already in use in SSL, and supports the principle of a warrant, by making an IP address under investigation subject to the "man in the middle" attack. Asymmetric keys on a book distribution system would defend freedom of expression, inasmuch as your library collection could be private, with each book facing a less stringent editorial process. 4. We accept driver's licenses and fishing licenses, because we can drive and fish without a license if necessary. Can we devise a computing license that allows us to compute without a license if necessary? Would a private key for each OS serve this purpose? How would it then be private? The purpose of a license is to identify a person. If a key is private, maybe a hash of it could be used as an identifier. The police could ask to see the hash of my private key if they had a certain key they were interested in, without compromising my security. That would be a warrant in the truest sense of the word. Could people be forced to reformat a computer on a bot-net if we had a licensing system? What level of training would be appropriate to obtain the license in question? Would all saved data be encrypted then? NO because otherwise personal data could not be transferred from my computer to my friend's. Example: Pictures taken with my digital camera, or videos made with my digital video recorder. Data vaults exist. Should purchased content be stored in a data vault on my HDD? I could personally augment this encryption against snoopers if I chose, without making p2p possible. Privacy would not be defeated. 5. Distributed computing makes the public's computers available for LOTS of CPU cycles in time of war if necessary. Centralized computing allows big business to charge for CPU cycles, without preserving electricity or anything. 6. Net Neutrality also would preserve the infrastructure against too much efficiency and charging by the KB. Charging by the KB would not resolve the nightmare scenario of "Untraceable," because people accustomed to paying by the KB would simply accept the charges as the cost of doing business. Meanwhile YouTube and online distribution systems WOULD suffer. Remember we were thinking of distributing books online above, as well as all manner of software packages. Pornography would become an expensive hobby, but so would other legitimate undertakings. Businesses that transmit large amounts of data should not be subject to a special deal for which the general public is not eligible. 7. 1024 bit encryption is falling. As such there is due to be plenty of key space in 2048 bit encryption. Would we stop at 1024+512? There would still be plenty of key space. 8. The power of distributed computing in obtaining the private key for a warrant of someone's computer is this: It marks the "by and large" CONSENT of a large number of people to the activity. Governments derive their just powers by the consent of the governed.