Pro Grams

Talking of programs: it may have stricken you that this whole Xin/Kama business that is the backbone of the proposed society will heavily rely on computers and programs. Now if you happen to have used a computer, since uncle Zuse heard the first tell tale clicking of his darling Z1, you may have concluded that computers are not to be trusted. Let me just mention fully digital, networked voting machines. Hear any alarm bells? When the shivers that sent down your spine, abated sufficiently for you to continue reading, consider what a meltdown of the Internet would do to the proposed society.

Yes, what indeed? It would send that society back to the caves until the network is recovered ... just as it would our current society. If the communication networks stopped working today, money and with it the lives we used to know would vanish. Europe would break apart for lag of communication and maybe so would bigger nation states - which would become hard to govern with fast communication gone and anarchy breaking loose everywhere. And the revolution that is the Internet is only 30 to 40 years old if you count it's earliest beginnings, fifteen if you only count the mass phenomenon. We become more dependent on the network with every day at an amazing speed.

That doesn't help at all with the voting machines though. Voting machines are relatively few, presumably uniform, and meddling with them has a relatively huge impact. The machines running the Xin would have to be everywhere (e.g. everybody's mobile), very heterogeneous and redundantly mirroring each other. That makes attacks harder and limits their scope. Still the Xin system would have to be more secure than today's commonly used networked devices.

Did you hear that they developed quantum cryptography to the point of large scale deployment? That provides one technological cornerstone for a secure Xin system: rock solid meddle safe communication. A safeness that is guaranteed by nothing less than the laws of nature - laws that will not be talked into submission by hackers and won't fall before ... before ... ugh ... they get that damn LHC thingy running again. Next topic.