Broadcatch Technologies

Overview

What It Is

A broadcatch-enabled system blends human intelligence and desires into a genetic broker/agent pool, with a series of tools that facilitate the discovery of fitness functions / concordances of interest and an agoric, service-based economy that makes it worth their while to refine and publish their findings. Strong public-key cryptography is used throughout to authenticate entities, protect identities, provide smart contract capabilities that enable negotiation and transactions, and allow the formation and use of reputations.

More specifically, Broadcatch supplies mechanisms for users to:

• create and manage a set of authenticatable pseudonyms through which the user may perform information-level transactions while protecting hir true identity (note that digital cash can be attached to a pseudonym),
• create and manage a web of trust (as originally described by Philip Zimmermann in describing uses of PGP),
• authenticate sources of information,
• create and incrementally update a profile (analogous to a GP fitness function) that may indicate their likes, dislikes and levels of trust as they view information,
• publish & advertise (openly or conditionally) selected portions of the user's profile,
• employ broker agents to compare the user's personal profile with available information sources, as well as with others profiles, utilizing criteria that may include authenticated source (author & reputation), subject matter (topic), date published, cost, etc.
• negotiate (if desired and/or necessary) access rights to the information, and
• display (perhaps as in a browser) and/or perform actions triggered by fitness views driven by discovered data so that the user (or agents acting on behalf of the user) may choose appropriate action.

Who Benefits

A Broadcatch-enabled system provides increasingly accurate and fine grained secure, authenticated profile information to and about users over time. This profile information can be used by:

• user to better find and/or filter information sources and content,
• broker agents (infomediaries) that have user-defined visibility into the user's profile and thus are able to provide e.g. new services which the agent intuits the user will desire,
• direct marketers, who will be able to define and potentially reach (once directed by the user's infomediary) precise market segments.

Authenticatable Pseudonyms have Reputations

In this age of information, maintaining one's personal privacy is becoming ever more difficult. People need to be able to locate, browse, collect, publish and even buy information without fear of reprisal. This suggests anonymity, and while a Broadcatch system supports such transactions, there is a powerful case to be made for the use of a fairly small number of reusable authenticatable pseudonyms to provide continuity and which cannot be subverted by others providing security from discovery of one's true name.

Reuse is a key feature, in that the (for example) the browsing habits of a pseudonym can be used by agents in their work to filter and better gather information of interest to the pseudonym's profile. Further, anything that the pseudonym publishes (including its profile) gains value as its reputation grows - such growth occurring over time and activity.

Multiple Profiles

The average person will benefit the greatest with a small number of profiles, probably between two and five. More than this number would tend to prevent deep development of one or more of the profiles; less would connect areas of one's life together that they might rather remain separate.

Profiles may be created for, say, one or more of the following activities & interests (of course, exactly how profiles are defined and used is up to each individual person; some might further split -- or join -- these broad categories):

• Home and family activities
• Work related resources
• Sports and fitness
• General local and world news collection
• Perhaps some "underground" activity, possibly dealing with sex or drugs

Note that a profile consultant agent might be employed to help one determine the most suitable categories for their lifestyle.

Broker Agents & Negotiation

Broadcatch supports multiple mechanisms to get the right information to the right person at the right time -- some automated, some human -- but all via agents with authenticatable pseudonyms and verifiable reputations.

Fitness Functions & Views

(The term "fitness" is borrowed from Genetic Programming as created by John R. Koza in 1992.)

A broker can implement a fitness function that watches for a defined set of conditions and trigger actions when these are met. This function is continuosly evolved through historical performance and user-contributed inputs. Note that the fitness measure can be tailored to include aspects such as cost and complexity as well as the extent of the agreement with known data.

Conditional Publishing (a form of Social Advertising)

Users and brokers both maintain data stores of profile information, and each has interests and values that make them at once unique and valuable. The coice to share some of this information - perhaps protected behind the veil of a cryptographically secure pseudonym - enables the anonymous digital marketplace. Precisely who gets what information is governed by trust metrics and entity reputations.

Conditional publishing facillitates these capabilities, and social advertising enables the process of connecting information sources with those that have registered interest in (perhaps an inferred) associated field.

The "Web of Trust"

(The term Web of Trust was first used by Phil Zimmerman to describe the key management mechanism he suggested for early versions of PGP.)

Notification Mechanisms & Indicators

• Active, real-time "thermometer"
• Pop-up, floating notification window
• Script-level execution of foreground application program, or
• background process, such as accumulation into a log for batch viewing

Economics

As our broker works to make her clients richer, her clients may choose to attach signed (by their profile) praise in exchange for additional services. This payment miht come in direct proportion to the reputation of the client's profile, that reputation being built with its longevity, it's interest and participation in related fields, or through personal contact with one's inner circle of friends (who may actually know each other's true names).

the more you participate & share -- publish -- information, the greater benefits you receive. Also mention: authentication servers, access, sterling's attention quote, payment mechanisms as varied as the net, etc.

Footnotes:

Yet

The best definition of "intelligence" with respect to computers that I have ever heard is Intelligence is what computers can't do, yet.