Alicornutopia

Ooooh, I know! The plane of Gold is some sort of forfeit for losing a bet :)

With my eavesdropping suggestion, I was assuming nerves-or-equivalent (it's quite likely many demons could cone up with something better than nerves given the ease of experimenting) all along the plane. That should work, if there's some sort of signal booster occasionally. The others might not discover small non-gold bits of the plane.

Whatever the origin of the plane and its flatness, has anybody checked out the other side (according to my potentially-wrong calculations about three-quarters of a mile away)? Does it have civilization also?

EDIT: Fixed the calculation link; apparently the parameter shouldn't be quoted. The relevant details are below.

Width = 1 g / (2πG * density of gold). This is works by Gauss's Law (which works for gravity just ass well for electricity). Both G (universal gravitational constant) and the density of gold were taken from Wikipedia.

I'm not sure why your link isn't working; possibly the software doesn't like the https.

I'd be surprised if the other side had civilization, since there are strong network effects. On the other hand it's possible that new demons that started after the plane existed might show up on the wrong side, depending on the details of of the "close-ish to other demons" rule.

There is habitation on both sides of the plane of gold and also not-on the plane of gold.

"I also can't decrypt things that have only ever been set to material record in encrypted format."

So... what counts as "set to material record" out of curiosity, then? I assume you mean "saved to disk" as opposed to "stored temporarily in RAM", right? Why and how does this distinction exist? Or is it just a metaphysical "intent to be saved" thing?

If you write a note on a piece of scratch paper, then crumple it and throw it in the trash, does that count as "material record" or not?

Basically, I am confused as to where the distinction between material record or not lies, here, and why. If people are forced to come up with their messages and do all the encrypting in their heads, well, then such codes as humans can implement in their heads are easily crackable. And if scratch paper doesn't count as material record but a letter someone sends does, or being in RAM doesn't count but being saved to disk does... then other than a metaphysical distinction I'm not sure where the difference lies.

Also, I still don't think this is sufficient to prevent a demon from cracking any piece of ciphertext they find. Even if they can't get at the decrypted text they can still ask "give me the code that was used to encrypt/generate this", right? And then say "give me the corresponding code that will decrypt it". Both of those need to be stored in the material record somewhere, so they should be obtainable. And from there they just need to make a computer to run the code, and they'll get the result. Right? Or am I crazy?

Sorry if I keep poking at this, I'm just having trouble believing/understanding how any amount of data security at all is possible when demons are involved. But I could be wrong.

I don't know how RAM works, but if you write something down and then shred it or burn the paper, it has been set to material record, and a demon with enough information to specify the piece of paper can make a new copy.

"The code that was used to encrypt this" strikes me as just shy of what a demon would need to get a thing, if they don't know anything else about it.

So basically you need security by obscurity and transmission without recording on either end.

RAM works by capacitor-transistor latches. The specifics vary, but the unit of one bit is the temporary state of whether a specific capacitor is charged or not. It's volatile, since there needs to be power flow in order to maintain the charge; loss of power empties the RAM. I'm inclined to think that that's probably too volatile for demonic power, but it might not be.

As an example, if you fog up a window with your breath, and then 'write' a message by wiping away strategic bits with your finger, is that something a demon can reproduce (x window, in the state it was only in for a few seconds at such-and-such a time)? If so, then a demon should also be able to reproduce "Mr. X's computer, in the exact physical state it was in at the exact time he was sending this message." That last would have a copy of the message stored in RAM, which could be cleverly extracted in various ways. If demons can't reproduce things exactly as they were under very temporary conditions, though, that particular trick doesn't work.

I'm wobbly about demon ability to produce things as they are at extremely specific timestamps. I don't seem to be able to firmly settle on a decision either way about the fogged window...

Well, even if it IS possible for demons to recall items in momentary states, there's still information-based ways of confusing things; you just need to build in some hardware-level obfuscation, such that the entire message is never available at any given time. It'd be somewhat difficult to arrange, but by tinkering with various momentary states and constantly overwriting your work, you could arrange streaming encryption schemes via which only tiny fractions of a message are available to be claimed at any given time. Cracking that would require you to create and analyze millions of sub-millisecond-different copies of a given computer, to dig the (probably audio) message out of the stream of random-ish data, under a framework specifically designed to maximize physical-layer obfuscation. Maybe not entirely impossible, with the kind of physical access worst-case-scenario demons could have, but it'd take an absurd amount of time and patience.

Depending on how paranoid Daevinity intelligence agencies are about the information-retrieval powers of demons, they may already be doing this.

Yeah, that sounds about right, making it really bloody inconvenient to get ahold of the message in sequence or in large chunks or both. It helps that they have demons available on all sides; they just have to design the thing, not build it from parts, to get it up and running. Also, any daeva that stably works for you that you're willing to trust can be summoned, told things, dismissed, and summoned elsewhere; then the things are never recorded in material format. Doesn't work for really long messages, of course.