[Air-l] networks

[Christian Nelson]

Steve Jones wrote:

> At the risk of taking this somewhat off-topic, I'd wonder whether operating
> in this fashion would, in fact, make an organization more vulnerable to
> discovery. The notion of distribution via Internetworking, to my knowledge,
> involves concepts like store-and-forward, copies of information shared at all
> nodes, etc.

Certainly, my notion of "distributed network," as applied to an organization's
personnel, didn't presume what was just described. But it seems like people do
use the term "distributed network," at times, to refer just to networked
computers which are simply interconnected in such a way that there is no
centralized site of control--i.e., a network that can't go down simply because
one site goes down. And it seems that this is, or has often been claimed to be,
the raison d'etre of the Internet (or at least its predecessor, Arpanet).
Perhaps the meaning of the term "distributed network" has evolved, or perhaps
the term has just developed more than one sense.

>  One of the problems with "early" (in quotes because it wasn't that long ago)
> forms of Internet legislation in the U.S. was that it wasn't clear whether
> all of the nodes through which a pornographic image, for example, were
> equally liable under the law, because all of them would, by virtue of having
> a copy of the image, be "responsible" for its distribution. Would it be
> desirable for a group seeking secrecy to operate in such a fashion? It seems
> to me to run counter to the level of secrecy one would want, and that it
> would be better to have nodes that were actually independent of one another,
> or at least not very well informed of the others, so that if one _is_ taken
> down the others to which it might in some way be connected are not so easily
> discovered.

I'd agree.

> As to organizations like the ones housed in the WTC, Christian makes an
> interesting comment. I suspect most of the ones that were using computer
> databases had multiple backups, some of which were well beyond the WTC,
> possibly even in other countries. Why not similarly distribute personnel?

In fact, I was just talking to someone whose company, Mass Mutual, took up a
fair amount of space in the WTC. He says that that office downloaded all their
stuff off-site at the end of every day.

> And if I may be allowed a bit of tongue-in-cheek, perhaps "distance learning"
> could in this way come to mean sending faculty to teach from Hawaii while
> their students remain in Chicago.

While this is tongue-in-cheek it does point to a problem with the potential
trend of organizational distribution of personnel--more and more folks, freed
from geographical constraint, will head toward the most scenic areas of the
world and despoil them by overrunning them.

--Christian Nelson