BitTorrent is a protocol which allows for the efficient, decentralized sharing of huge amounts of information among large groups of small, personal computers. Originally, torrents required a centralized “tracker” to organize specific information dispersal, but that function has been successfully decentralized with the creation of Decentralized Hash Tables.
Why are .torrent files, the references and keys to the BitTorrent parties, distributed with centralized sources like the Pirate Bay? How hard would it be to contain many millions of living .torrent files within a completely decentralized MetaTorrent? Essentially, all you’d need is a very robust client that could sift through many millions of .torrent files referenced from a single .torrent, a MetaTorrent. This means adding a simple filing system and search to the innards of the client, like the one provided externally by Pirate Bay. One magnet link to a MetaTorrent, and the whole project is forever cut loose from big, vulnerable, centralized servers and domains.
Seedbanks
Seedbanks are crucial because without them MetaTorrents would be populated with dead .torrents, much like the centralized .torrent sources are now. A Seedbank is just a very robust kind of BitTorrent node with many Terabytes of data to draw from. Whereas the Pirate Bay hosts only references and keys to the torrent party, the .torrents, the Seedbank is all of that as well as a source for the data itself. Instead of torrenting information piecemeal, one might copy an entire Seedbank, a process that would pay off not only with further decentralization, but also with greatly liquefied access to libraries of data.
has the nightmare paranoia done set in? am i gone mad. i feel like I’m just seconds away from a tidal storm that’s about to destroy the very fabric of my existence. I am the hyperglade, and I spin the universe.
Figure 1–All user interface qualities are quantified in this graph arbitrarily. The curve represents immanence rather than limits.
User Interface, or any mediation between a human and a computer, may show an inverse relation between intuitive and flexible qualities. In computer jargon, ‘intuitive’ describes the quality of common accessibility. The ‘flexible’ quality here represents explicitness. The most explicit computer language provides the human with fundamental access to the workings of the machine. In the realm of mechanical logic gates, precise statements translate into coercive power over the machine and by extension power over the Machine. The great collective of interconnected small ‘m’ machines form the meta-machine, the big ‘M’ Machine. The Machine is the mechanized aspect of Inglip.
Cory Doctorow has spoken of the “Death of Generalized Computing,” correctly predicting the hegemony’s strong preference for intuitive interface. For those who don’t know, ‘hegemony’ is just a word that means “almost everyone, but more specifically the people who know how to give almost everyone exactly what they want.” Maximally intuitive interface is just good business practice, and I can’t think of a much more banal observation.
Assembly language is a poor mediator because it is the machine’s operant language. Vast but microscopic arrays of logic gates operate on superficially incomprehensible ones and zeros signifying electrical pulses. Higher languages, like C++, mediate this mess with recognizable signifiers which may represent many hundreds or thousands of Assembly commands. These languages are often a bizarro over-punctuated combination of math and English, where the English expressions are more precise than the math.
William Gibson envisioned a level of flexibility beyond Assembly wherein crackers broke into computers “directly” with their brain, visualizing the interaction with amorphous three dimensional geometric objects–‘ICE’. The fictional brain-to-computer interface, the cyberspace ‘deck’, operated on a level so fundamental that encounters with ICE were potentially fatal. Such spatial representations are, paradoxically, a kind of superlative intuitive interface.
Exploits, or cracks, take advantage of weaknesses inherent in these more intuitive but less specific languages. The flexibility of the more fundamental language can subvert, corrupt, and reroute less explicit language.
Writing a real-life exploit is a subversive speech act in Assembly and might be badly characterized as a high-level war fought with spatial abstractions like ICE.* Rather, a crack is a single precise act of deconstruction, derailing the target computer’s process and inserting substitute code. A fundamental error is found in the more general language by scrutinizing it with more specific language. Abusing this kind of error, or ‘hole’, allows new instructions to be substituted. The cracker gains control of the system.
An advanced intuitive interface may very well be represented with some geometric Minecraft-like ICE, but that must be built on top of fundamental Assembly language. This is the true crux of the TransHumanist’s interface dilemma. With more impressive and intuitive interface comes less flexibility for the user. The users become more alienated from the very specific underlying language making up cyberspace in this TransHuman imagining. Those fluent in machine language are the true Hegemonic TransHumans, bonded to the computers as intimately as if the computers were external organs. For them, the computer acts as an extension of pure will. The smartphone addict appears to share this same kind of organic bond with technology, and it is not completely superficial. In the smartphone, though, the artificial organ is completely trapped by hegemony and more of the Machine than of the subject.
*Exploits may be arrived at and implemented algorithmically, so it is wrong to say that more intuitive computer interfaces are not used to detect and exploit security holes. However, this kind of alogirthm is written only with a complete working knowledge of explicit machine code and cannot exist solely within the confines of the intuitive language it must short-circuit.
Why no MetaTorrents?
