Are we thinking of the problem incorrectly? Math may actually be our enemy here. (Egads!) So yes, for a fixed problem domain, the information transversing it r

Are we thinking of the problem incorrectly? Math may actually be our enemy here. (Egads!) So yes, for a fixed problem domain, the information transversing it requires topological constraints. Or another words, the fact that the data is structured requires the network to be traversible. So how about this? We remove the structured requirement from the data. My device "knows" several other devices. Each device has some biometric identifying data to show who is using it currently. Those devices send my device unstructured data and app code from time to time. Each device decides who and what to share things with and whether and how much to trust incoming material. The data and the app are linked through a cataloging system provided by the sender. The trick is this: each device really only makes one decision: how much do I trust the other devices? If trust is established, the app and code can continue to propagate. So we're sort of making viruses a good thing! Now your data has no structure, so there's nothing to coordinate. If some of the initial apps helped folks communicate, then you could communicate to those you trusted. I could imagine some "master" data types that all devices could use: URL, IPv6, Text, HTML, JSON, XML, email, IM, etc. You could even have some master device types. The beauty of this is that you start building security at the same time you're doing anything else -- because if you don't, somebody's going to own your machine, and rather quickly. Each device has no knowledge of the whole, but it has to quickly evolve a very complex and nuanced understanding of what it's willing to store and do for other devices. I don't think the math would work on this at all, but I think it's a workable system - much the same as a cocktail party is a terrible place to interview people, yet lots of folks end up with jobs because of conversations held around cocktail parties. (Do people still have cocktail parties?)