[extropy-chat] Recipe for disinformation was Recipe for Destruction - Joy/Kurzweil NYTimes Op-Ed]

[justin corwin]

On 10/19/05, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is a different approach, however - massive disinformation.

This reminds me of a fictional Group that Vinge includes in his recent
stories, The Friends of Privacy. This (offscreen) group is kind of
like an offshoot of the cypherpunks, who use legitimate and
illegitimate access and abilities to inject lies into every public
database, which means that public records become increasingly
unreliable the older they are(and the higher probability of compromise
by FOP). This creates kind of an increasing protective haze into the
past, where everyone has a kind of historical privacy gained by no one
really knowing what records are true or false.

This offends my sensibilities as an idealist, but it's certainly not
inconcievable that if a culture of high-karma forum and database
folk(mixed with hackers) got it into their heads to spend any amount
of time minorly obfuscating, it would be influential out of proportion
to the number of records that were actually modified.

It would require a subculture, but they have been created with less
merit or stimulus.

--
Justin Corwin
outlawpoet at hell.com
http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com
http://www.adaptiveai.com