Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

Meetings

Mar 01

Early discussions on how we would define justice:

• what are the components of justice?
• should justice involve preventative measure or should it be strictly reactive?

How would evidence be collected and logged?

Discussions on what "punishment" means when referring to computers:

• What can we do to punish or penalize computers?
• Does it make sense to punish computers?

Discussions on how human penal systems work:

• do we want computer justice to be used to dissuade deviant behaviour or should it be used to punish those who have committed "bad" acts?
• should we implement a system that catches/punishes all bad acts or just punish reported acts?
• how will we classify deviant behaviour?
  • by the act itself
  • by the results of the act

Discussed how there would need to be some sort of hierarchical justice system with figure heads who manage justice activities for their specific region:

• collective internet justice: Justice Web or JLA (Justice Link Assessment)
• each region patrolled by a justice managing unit:
  • Internet Batman (Gotham), Internet Superman (Metropolis), etc.

Divided the task of finding research papers into 3 sections:

• current ways to "punish" computers (Matthew)
• ways to collect, log, categorize evidence of inappropriate behaviour (Thomas)
• human methods of justice, various penal systems in our current and historical societies (Mike)

Mar 03

Initial discussions focused on how we were having difficulty finding papers related to the concept of justice in computers, so we focused on trying to determine exactly what justice should be in the realm of distributed computing:

• punishing computers is difficult as computers do not care what task they are given, they just complete computations.
• punishing people is not really the focus we need as that is what human laws are for.
• if there is some way to punish a computer, does it make sense to punish computers that are being used for "bad" actions if the owner of the computer is unaware of this activity.
  • does this punishment really have a greater effect on the owner of the computer than the computer itself?

Our new focus is to try and narrow down if the concept of justice actually has a place in distributed computing:

• determine what purpose justice would serve...why would we have it?
  • if we decide justice is a necessary concept, the focus will become what is a "fair" way to apply punishment for "bad" actions.
  • if justice does not have a useful purpose then we must detail the reason that it is not beneficial.

Mar 08

• Definition of Justice - Can we separate the computer punishment from the user punishment?
• Transparency - keeping "rap sheets" on what systems are doing/have done. If you were wrongfully accused for participating in a malicious attack, this can be clarified
• Punishment - Computational puzzles for fighting unsolicited inbound traffic.
• Morality rating - Systems get a "moral rating" that can go up or down. Based on this rating, more or less trust can be given to that system.

Capital punishment? Financial sanction or imprisonment are our current way of punishment. they're expensive (maintain databases, keeping state, paying for prisons).

bodily harm - limited time to perform. the fact that they've been punished is visible. losing hands, losing eyes, people can see that. information propagates because the authorities make an example of someone.

maybe the solution is to restrict protocols if you have a low morality rating. for e.g., you can restrict encryption and compression, which means anything you do will be publicly visible.

Research Documentation

Virtual Punishment

I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. link --Mchou2 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Responsible Computers?

Theory of Justice

Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 2003. PDF (preview copy)

• This book provides a view of Justice that may serve the purpose of distributed computing. Rawls describes justice as serving two primary functions;

      1. Assign rights and duties for the basic institutions of society.
      2. Describe the best way to distribute the benefits and burdens of society.

• If we take this view of justice, as opposed to a penalty-centric view, then justice may have a place in distributed computing. For our purposes, justice could be the basic guidelines to which all members of a distributed society must conform in order for the system to be stable and efficient. Obviously this view is an "all-in" type approach and may be more difficult to describe in terms of being incrementally deployable.

The Birth of Prison

Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York, 1995. PDF (preview copy)

• Foucault's book focuses on how punishment evolved from medevil methods "draw and quarter" to modern prison methods. These two methods of justiceare differentiated by the way in which punishment is carried out. For medevil, or "Monarchical Punishment", the population is discouraged from doing bad acts by the public, and brutal, way that punishment is exacted. The punishments included torture and executions. On the other hand, Foucault discusses "Disciplinary Punishment" where there are people deemed as experts who have power over the perpetrator of a "bad" act and handle the punishment of the individual. An example of this is a prison guard who determines how long a prisoner stays in jail.
• For a distributed computing system, this provides a couple of ways that justice could be enforced. If we think of the general distributed system as a free zone in which computers can act how they wish but there are laws in place to describe "bad" acts. If a computer is caught and convicted of doing something against the described laws, then the computer could be tortured (forced to provide more resources to other computers), executed (completly removed from the system) or potentially placed under the care of a supervisor computer who will allow the "bad" computer to continue to participate in certain, restricted actions until the professional (supervisor) computer approves of releasing the "bad" computer back to the general system. The supervisor computer may actually be controlled by a human who is trying to resolve the issue on the offending computer.
• Another concept worth investigating is that of Foucault's "Panopticon" which is a prison in which everything can be seen. This can also be extended from the strictly prison sense to the level of daily interactions between people and the idea of shame. Most rules are followed because of the knowledge that those around you will see what you have done and their view of you will change, you will have a social stygma. If this is adopted by the computers, through some reputation mechanism, then maybe distributed computing relationships could be formed and altered based on the actions conducted by individual computers.

Ecce Homo & The Anarchist

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo & The Anarchist translated by Thomas Wayne, New York, 2004. PDF (preview copy)

• If we were going to add shame/stygma to computers, there would need to be some mechanism to manage what is good and what is bad. Nietzsche's work could provide a basis for this computer moral code as he describes two different forms of morality based on two different social position: "master-morality" and "slave-morality".
  • Master-morality is split based on good vs. bad, for example, good would be things like wealth, strength, health, and power, while bad is associated terms like poor, weak, sick, and pathetic.
  • Slave-morality is split on good vs. evil, for example, good would be terms like charity, piety, restraint, meekness, submission, while evil terms are worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive.
• Although some of these terms make no sense in the realm of computers, others certainly could work as a basis for computer morality. For example, if there were measure of strength, health, wealth based on network and data concepts like bandwidth, latency, data integrity, etc. than certain computers could be more "good" than others. Similarly, if computers were acting selfishly, cruelly or aggressively (say DoS or spam) then those computers would be considered as morally "bad". Based on these moral evaluations, computers could have relationships created or destroyed. Moreover, relationship parameters could be given to computers so that if you don't care how something gets accomplished (whether it is morally good or not) then you could tell your computer to allow less moral interactions to occur.
• If this morality was tied to the reputation component, then all computers would be able to know how other computers "socially" behave. This would further allow punishment methods, as described in the above Foucault section, to be handed out based on how "bad" a computer is and the affending computer can only be released when it's morality is deemed appropriate by the supervising (professional) computer.

Proof-of-Work

There has been a lot of research done in the area of computational puzzles to fight spam. The idea is that there is currently very little cost associated with sending spam (much less than .01c per email), so we want to make it a bit more "expensive" for spammers to achieve their goal. One solution is to have any email-sending computer perform some type of computational puzzle every time an email is sent. The result of the computation is appended to the email and can be verified by the recipient. One example is to find a string that when hashed gives a result smaller or larger than a specific value. You can statistically predict how long such a computation would take, and you could tweak it to be some particular value (10s, 1m, etc).

I see this as being related to justice, because each self-governing entity can set up these proof-of-work requirements and adjust the difficulty for "trusted" entities and "untrusted" ones. The difficulty can also be increased for entities that misbehave, resulting in a kind of punishment. These punished systems would have to do more computation (e.g., 10m, 1hr) before they're allowed to communicate with someone else.

I have some ideas on how you could technically do this, which we can discuss in class. And now some links:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx

Gathering Evidence

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4489680&tag=1

Above is a paper that proposes using statistical data to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate traffic during a DDoS attack. While the paper proposes the statistics to be used for blocking bad traffic, the same logic can be applied to gathering evidence against the attackers of a DDoS. It gets pretty heavy into the statistical analysis, so it'd probably be better to read the paper than me attempting to explain it. Basically, it's meant to detect a DDoS that is purposefully disguised as a traffic flood. This means that Justice can be properly served to malicious computers as opposed to too many computers wanting your resources.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01219052

Above is a paper that discusses the idea of computer forensics, and what is needed in order to gather and manage evidence. Although it is meant to be applied to a human level of judgement, computers may be capable of processing this evidence effectively. Logs maintained by routers and local devices may be used as evidence, provided that there be a way to encrypt the data in a way that preserves the original form. It also discusses the challenge of presenting computer related evidence to non-technical jurors, but this is not a concern for computer level management. All that is required for computer forensics to work is additional software being run on select computers to process and preserve any evidence gathered.