The middle eastern sage and folk hero Nasruddin came to the market one day and asked: "People, do you know what I want to tell you?"
"No," they answered, "how could we know?"
"Then we have no common ground for discussion," Nasruddin replied, and went home.
The next day Nasruddin returned and asked the same question. The people said, "Yes, we know what you want to tell."
"Then there is no need for me to talk," Nasruddin said, and went home.
On the third day the people answered, "Some of us know, and some do not."
"Well, let those who know tell those who don't," said Nasruddin. Then he went home.
That tale was brought to mind by the struggle over distributed, "peer-to-peer" networks such as Napster, the music-swapping service now appealing a court order that would effectively shut it down. It seems that the era of centralized Web servers - the current hub-and-spoke topography of the Internet, with many individual computers connecting to a few information sources - is giving way to the Nasruddin model, in which knowledge spreads through the market (or across the Web) person by person (or computer by computer).
The new distributed networks Publius and Freenet epitomize this trend [See "We've Only Just Begun"]. Like Napster, they diffuse information across many computers, where those who wish to block its flow - dictators, bureaucrats, angry record moguls - can't corral it. On Publius, the information is in fragments, but the whole can be reassembled from only a few parts.
To paraphrase the dictum attributed to Stewart Brand: Information doesn't just want to be free; it wants to multiply.
First, human knowledge found its way to the printed page, but printing presses were affordable by only a few, and easily destroyed. Then it went digital, but Web servers are equally expensive and almost as easy to control. Now information is diffusing, fragmenting - going underground.
Distributed networks look familiar to any student of political history. Revolutionaries have always organized in self-contained cells so that the arrest or assassination of one leader could not decapitate the organization. Publius creator Avi Rubin points out that 70 percent of the Web can be wiped out, and his network will still stand.
That means whole concepts of network security are falling like so many Berlin Walls. In his forthcoming book Secrets and Lies, security expert Bruce Schneier shows that corporate firewalls are vestiges of a time when local-area networks were like castles surrounded by moats. Now, such closed models - proprietary encryption, closed source code, firewalls - suddenly seem anachronistic. Any castle can be stormed, any network compromised. If the treasure - the information - resides in every home in the land, it is always safe.
For the new economy, this is welcome - if unsettling - news. Companies and governments have spent billions of dollars on supposedly impregnable networks and allegedly invincible copyright lawyers. Now the fortifications are toppling and the moats are drying up. Let those who know tell those who don't.
