[FRIAM] privacy games

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

> The "holographic" principle of [non]privacy: All valid questions about one's inner world can be properly asked as questions about one's interaction with the outer world. (Or for those triggered by "inside" and "outside": All valid questions about processes beyond a boundary can be properly asked as questions about the surface of the boundary.)
>
> 1st order privacy: There's a combinatorial explosion of possible ways to decode the surface.
> 2nd order privacy: The map from encoder to decoder is many-to-many.
>
> Feel free to continue to criticize [†] those. In the meantime, I'll just keep plugging along. >8^D My candidate for 3rd order privacy is *gaming*.

Let me first acknowledge that previious my questions about the choice of
"holographic principle" as a term were mostly a tangent.  Your own
criticism that (wide use of?) metaphor risks excess meaning was in
evidence...   I wanted to help *trim* that excess meaning while
*possibly* teasing out the useful extrapolations/interpolations within
the metaphorical source domain of holography as an art/science for the
target domain of privacy.    I'm pretty sure I can let that go here,
though I *do* think there is inspiration to be found in holography for
the purpose of obfuscation.   But all that for another thread, if I can
muster the focus to give you a proper steelmannable strawman to start with.

I also want to acknowledge (and thank you for) the explication of the
way you prefer to use the term criticism [†] in this context, I think it
improves the quality of discourse here.

On to the meat of the matter:

1st order)   When we encounter a signal (use text stream as a familiar
example) we may or may not recognize that there is obfuscated meaning in
that stream.  In the common example, of course, the stream usually looks
like pure gibberish...  having an *apparent* high entropy.   Attempts to
decode the stream usually involve seeking transforms which yield a low
entropy or high information content.   Ideally, yielding a very
specific, highly unambiguous text stream which is not only recognizeable
to the decoder but possibly directly meaningful.   In the classic
imagined examples, we have spies and counter spies attempting to pass
messages and intercept/decode those messages, etc.    This is where the
specific technical term /Steganography/ takes on interest and I think
alludes to or defines your 3rd order?  I'm not trying to impute specific
meaning that you didn't intend, just looking to tease out the language
you are seeking to use and align it with existing lexicons which may or
may not be fully apt for what you are getting at.

2nd order)  I am literally not clear on what the implications of
many-to-many are here.   1st order... one-to-many would seem to imply
that the *decoder* is searching through the space of possible decodings
(combinatoric) for the presumed singular encoder, but it also implies
that the *encoder*  is choosing from a similarly large number of
*encodings*.   Perhaps you are alluding to the case where some encodings
can be decoded by more than one decoder or in some cases, multiple
encoders can be decoded by the same decoder?  I'm not sure what you are
getting at, though I *am* confident that you are getting at somethings
specific that I'm simply missing (so far).

3rd order and beyond)  I don't know the technical implications in
cryptography for iterated encodings by different means.  My own
preferred examples have multiple encodings being very different in
quality... and in particular semantic and socio-cultural encodings of a
message as implied by your reference to Moorcock/Joyce and poetry in
general.

FWIW, I would like to suggest that not all obfuscation is adversarial in
the strong sense.   Dense as well as broadly imagistic writing may be
obfuscated to the casual reader for a variety of reasons and in my
experience good prose and poetry can have many layers of
meaning/implication.  My own recent re-reading of Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance is a good example, where I derived a very
different message from that book than I did when I read it at 20ish
(whilst being deeply embedded in my own brand of Motorcycle Cult(ure)). 
I'm not sure if Pirsig necessarily considered all of the interpretations
I might have drawn at different times of my life with different
experiences under my belt, but in fact the message I received at 20ish
still seems valid and not a subset of the one received in my 60s?    Is
this a tangent from your intended discussion?

- Steve

[†] By "criticism", I(glen) mean(s) the type of playing along, steelmanning, empathetic listening, constructive criticism to which I've (glen) tried to allude ... not sophist nit-picking about jargonal definitions of words, or appeals to authority... 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200526/6a1abb15/attachment.html>