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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| PURDAH | ||
| A method of ensuring that a given text was created by its putative author, while masking the identity of the author. |
PURDAH is a clever acronym, standing for "Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography".
| “And all anonymous, untraceable, et cetera.”
“Well, we use PURDAH.” Corvallis sighed. “I’ll bite. What is PURDAH?” Pluto was delighted that he had asked. “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.” Corvallis leaned back and thought about it for a bit. Some parts of it were obvious, others less so. “How does holography enter into it? That’s a way of making three-dimensional pictures, right?” “That’s the modern usage. It’s a very old word. Academically, ‘holograph’ means a manuscript written entirely in one hand.” “One hand?” “Manu. Script. Hand. Writing,” Pluto said, incredulous at his slowness. “How can you tell if an ancient manuscript was written entirely by one person? The handwriting is the same all the way through, that’s how. The author’s name might not be known, but you can identify them, in a sense, by their handwriting—with greater certainty than could ever be conferred by their name alone.” “I’ll give you that much,” Corvallis said. “Writing a name on a title page is easy. Forging a whole document written in a consistent hand is hard.” “It is damn near unforgeable evidence that one specific person wrote the whole manuscript. That’s what a holograph is—it’s what the word denoted before it came to be used to mean three-D image technology.” “So ‘holography’—the H in ‘PURDAH’—is shorthand for ‘creating documents that are provably traceable to a given author.’” “Documents or any other kind of digital activity,” Pluto corrected him. “And just like a holograph doesn’t need the author’s name on the title page—” “Anonymous Holography,” Pluto reminded him, with a satisfied nod. “Run the whole thing by me again?” “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.” “It’s just an anonymous ID,” Corvallis said, “dressed up with a fancy name.” “Well, yes and no. Anonymous IDs aren’t registered anywhere. PURDAHs are registered using a distributed ledger, so their veracity can be checked anytime, by anyone. ‘Unseverable’ means that no one can take it away from you, as long as you take reasonable precautions.” “And Personal?” “Just there to make the acronym work out, I guess,” Pluto said. “But each PURDAH is linked to a ‘person’ in the legal sense of that term, meaning a human being, or a legal person like a corporation.” “So anyway,” Corvallis guessed, “all of the people involved in this Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking are talking to each other and posting documents using some kind of PURDAH system.” “It’s not very systematic. Really clunky to use. We could use some help from an investor to clean it up, put a UI on it.” “Pluto, you just told me a few hours ago that you have nineteen times as much money as I do, why don’t you fucking invest in it?” “It’s not in my wheelhouse.” Corvallis sighed. “Here’s what I’m getting at, Pluto. This thing that just happened? The Moab hoax? It was really well done. Like, eerily well pulled off. I mean, maybe when we’re done sifting through the wreckage we’ll find a place where they put a foot wrong, but overall, it was a masterpiece. I’m wondering who is smart and well organized enough to do something like that.” “I already told you it wasn’t me.” “And I believe you. But I wonder if you know the perpetrator. Not personally but through their PURDAH. I’m wondering if they are part of your loose ENSU network.” Pluto shrugged. “There’s a lot of interest in the topic of distributed organizations. Which means, a network of PURDAHs that operates by an agreed-on set of rules just like a normal company, but with no identifiable center.” |
| Technovelgy from Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by William Morrow in 2019 Additional resources -
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'If you're one of those rarities who haven't attended a rocket-polo "carnage", let me tell you it's a colorful affair.'
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'...a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man.'
