December 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

PayPal for buying ecash
by Nomen Nescio 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

PayPal is a possible funding source for ecash/estamps/remailer-tokens or whatever. With a PayPal account you can receive funds and pay people, two elementary steps for a cash-based system. It is easy to set up web software to receive payment via PayPal, and many people are already in the system (it is the most widely used payment system for eBay). Payments either go through the credit card clearing houses or via PayPal itself, but merchants don't have to be aware of the difference, except for the danger of reversed transactions. There are plenty of horror stories on the web about PayPal, from such sites as www.paypalsucks.com and www.paypalwarning.com. Probably some fraction of these are from pissed off scammers who got caught. There appears to be a specific problem in the PayPal terms of service: 13. No Cash Advances. You agree not to engage in behavior that could reasonably be construed as providing yourself a cash advance from your credit card, and agree not to assist Users who engage in behavior that could reasonably be construed as providing themselves a cash advance from their credit cards. Such behavior includes, but is not limited to, a User paying someone with a credit card-funded payment through the Service, then receiving the funds back from the original Recipient and attempting to withdraw the funds from their account. PayPal reserves the right to reverse all such transactions and to terminate any accounts that are associated with such behavior. This kind of transaction could easily happen with an ecash-selling service, if the ecash can be redeemed via PayPal. Someone buys some ecash with a credit card, cashes in the ecash for funds in his PayPal account, and then withdraws the funds. This would be an express violation of the PayPal terms of service. Besides this problem, there is the danger of reversed transactions. Someone who buys ecash with a credit card can cancel the transaction for any of several reasons, such as claiming that it was done via a stolen credit card. In that case PayPal makes the merchant (the ecash bank) take the loss. A competing service from Citibank is www.c2it.com. It is relatively new and does not have all of the conditions and limitations that PayPal does. The terms of service appear to be relatively generous. Citibank is a big company so one might hope that they have gone over the bases. Still it is possible that if C2It catches on that Citibank will eventually be forced to put in the same kinds of limitations that PayPal has. C2It also seems to be more oriented towards email and may not have the shopping cart software that PayPal provides. That could make it harder to interface to C2It from a script. Buying ecash will require at least one data exchange for supplying blinded data and receiving coins, independent of how the ecash is paid for. If that data exchange is separate from the email-based C2It payment transaction then there has to be some key to link them together. That will complicate the process and introduce new possibilities for error.

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Liability, economic realities and self delusion in ecash developers. Or: Why not "just write ecash" (again).
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Dear Ryan,Should you need a hudsucker proxy on another island,Im so cheap,Im free. On the question of legal proceedings,never plead guilty,(horace Rumpole.)Plead defence of necessity and ultra vires. Also Insanity by reason of excess alcohol,twinkies,prozac,etc consumption.Blame Kanada. Economic realities may be safely handled by issuing more transparent e-cash until break even.Collapse of govts is assured by the rapid exponential growth of hawala style service.Should you be nuked the end should be quick and painless. The authorities probably wont hassle you as they would be fearful of publicizing such a potent threat to their very existence. Should sandline threaten you just threaten them back with APster.Remember nelson mandelas words at his trial. I should like to live for a world where remailers save the world for freedom,this is cause that I should struggle to live for and if necessary will die for.The whole wired worlds watching.Yours in solidarity and crypto-anarchy,mattd aka proffr1. Everyone a remailer,everyone a mint,everyone an APster.

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US neglects to include Saudi responsibility in 'translation' of OBL tape
by Khoder bin Hakkin 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

A new ABCNEWS translation of the Osama bin Laden videotape released last week reveals information that may be embarrassing to Saudi Arabia, a very important U.S. ally. Bin Laden Hunt Strains U.S-Saudi Relations Excerpts of the Bin Laden Video Weigh In Poll: Americans Believe Toughest Battles Ahead When the videotape of Osama bin Laden talking about the Sept. 11 terror attacks was released by the United States government on Dec. 13, administration officials spoke at length about the extensive effort to achieve a full and accurate transcript. The translation commissioned by ABCNEWS, however, reveals new elements that raise questions about what the government left out of the official version and why. The new translation uncovers statements that could be embarrassing to the government of Saudi Arabia, a very important U.S. ally. Bin Laden's visitor, Khalid al Harbi, a Saudi dissident, claims that he was smuggled into Afghanistan by a member of Saudi Arabia's religious police. He also tells bin Laden that in Saudi Arabia, several prominent clerics some with connections to the Saudi government made speeches supporting the attacks on America. "Right at the time of the strike on America, he gave a very moving speech, Sheikh Abdulah al Baraak," bin Laden said on the tape. "And he deserves thanks for that." Sheikh al Baraak, to whom the visitor refers, is a professor at a government university and a member of an influential council on religious law. "It shows that bin Laden's support is not limited to the radical side of Islam but also among the Saudi religious establishment," says Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College. "And that is bad news for Saudi Arabia." ..... US protecting foreign tyrants, but hey, gas is cheap, and it only cost a spook, a marine's foot, a few thou newyorkers (and some of them were traders ferchrissakes, like NYPD corpses they're divine payback) and look at how the flag industry stimulated the economy and enhanced trade with WTO-China Inc another great bunch of freedom loving folks

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Re: Tim May on the end of a rope.
by mattd 23 Dec '01

23 Dec '01

>>Is it a lie to neglect to mention that Adolf Hitler was kind to dogs? Or that Stalin was courageous and did well in school? Or that there were lots of women that Jeffrey Dahmer did not torture, kill, and eat?<< True,everyone has some good points.even you,measl and timothy"Dahmer"May. >>It is certainly true that all sorts of nice people had all sorts of good intentions in Catalonia, but when they attempted to implement those good intentions, they mostly found themselves using the old familiar methods of recently existent socialism,<< The popularly elected govt was under attack from a falangist,military coup,Its worth close study from the beginning and to get the clearest picture read widely."Objectivity and liberal scholarship's",a good place to start.Also "homage to Catalonia"by george Orwell.There were some exciting developments and they weren't "implemented"so much as arose spontaneously.The stalinists found themselves using old familiar methods.The libertarian socialists kicked butt. >>and when they did not use those methods, socialism did not work. That is the important truth about Catalonia, << Libertarian socialism did work,see Gaston Leval,Bookchin,Paz,Chomsky and even H.Thomas.Stalinism,or authoritarian socialism did not work.The important truth about Catalonia is Libertarian socialism did work and will again,shortly,work. >>and all the other truths, the truths that some people were sincere, the truths that some people had good intentions, are irrelevant. I do mention those truths, briefly. Unlike the sources you prefer I do not go into lengthy spiels describing those wonderful good intentions while ignoring the actual outcome. << I'm not attracted to libertarian socialism by sincere and good intentions.I'm attracted to it because it holds the best hope of maximizing my freedom and limiting violence.The intentions and sincerity of any political movement are secondary concerns.I simply want to know what's in it for me.The close study of what real people do in real revolutionary periods is very revealing.You should try it sometime.Chomsky and Orwell are quite brief and to the point.I trust them on Spain.

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Agent Faustines list
by mattd 23 Dec '01

23 Dec '01

We are grateful to agent faustine for her list of collaborators,copies of "assassination politics' and possibly(not by me) anthrax/plutonium/unabombs will be in the post,soon,real soon.Females working in these places may have their heads shaved.The males will all die.Have a very carlyle christmas.Santa's INSLAW way.I PROMIS you.Halliburton new year. "Direct action_ is what it's all about. Undermining the state through the spread of espionage networks, through undermining faith in the tax system, through even more direct applications of the right tools at the right times. When Cypherpunks are called "terrorists," we will have done our jobs.TM. Font: Daschle-Anthrax-Bold

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Re: Hillary style health plan to save US
by mattd 23 Dec '01

23 Dec '01

>>I'm boosting 2 things here that on > the surface may seem anathema to anarchists.IDs for all and socialized > medicine.Am I wrong to? You sure as hell are. This is the source of the power of the State: popular demand for its services. << Thanks for clearing that up.I thought it was the enormous militarized systems of oppression/repression.And theres a demand for ID's?I had no idea. >>AP all the politicians and bureaucrats, and it would be those like yourself who assert entitlement to government benefits who would be stumbling over each other to erect new politicians and bureaucrats in order to provide those services.<< Actually Id be down to the selfmanaged metalstorm factory to work and studying flying part-time.(Im not supposed to fly a plane at the moment) Its nice someone else here believes in APster,thanks. >>AP all the self-righteous claimants to entitlements, like yourself, and the State would dry up and blow away.<< True,jim seems to anticipate this with the car thieves scenario.No reason it couldn't apply to welfare Queens.The state needs to be shown that its powerless against APster.Im volunteering to die,just be careful that I'm really dead.Sandy Sandfort see's a way to rip off the APsters here.I think he should be APped.

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Deconstructing Timothy.
by mattd 23 Dec '01

23 Dec '01

>>I'd rather see a company starting on a shoestring, with surplus desks from Repo Depot, with crowded offices, and with no money wasted on frivolities. Especially if I'm an investor!<< And you'd probably be wasting your money cos good code needs quiet private reasonably pleasant surroundings.Not digbert cubicles run by simon legree. >>(I faced a similar choice in 1974: some of the places I was considering were known for their lavish expense accounts, their nice offices. Other places were more spartan (that's a good word to think about). I chose one of the spartan places, Intel. A lot of those other companies I could have gone to went nowhere.)<< Yes we all know how much you prefer Sparta to Athens.Arbeit macht frei. >>This applies to marketdroids as well. Startup companies get larded-up with marketing departments when there is little to market. The huges staffs of some of the companies we all know about is an example. (Just as bad: the hiring of ex-government officials, regulators, etc. But I digress.) << >YAWN< >>I agree and disagree. I agree that the core crypto is sort of established. However, how many examples of it do we see? Few. How many of the programmers here on this list (there must be a few dozen who call themselves programmers, professionally) have ever implemented anything remotely similar to digital cash? (I don't call myself a programmer, but I fool around. The closest I have come to the above is when about 10 years ago I wrote a simple RSA implementation in Mathematica, just to make sure I had all the "Euler totient function" kind of crapola down straight.) << More drivel,Tim getting senile? The ronnie raygun of the cypherpunk pantheon? >>PayPal took off pretty fast. So did VISA and MasterCard in their day. I think and hope someone will cut through all of the b.s. and do something that takes off. As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the reasons we wanted to have a session on "implementing digital money" was to brainstorm these issues. Maybe we should try again. By the way, if "lots of people can turn the algorithm into reliable code," where _are_ the implementations? I see bits and pieces. << I see dead people.Especially people like timmy. >>I don't think things happen because of "evangelists." Evangelists didn't give us the transistor, the IC, the microprocessor, the early personal computers, or even the Mac (where Apple was famous for hiring "evangelists," e.g., Guy Kawasaki). Discussing this would require a longer article here than I'm interested in writing. To be sure, advertising BankAmericard (VISA) and other credit cards was and is a big business. People have to know a technology exists and then want to use it. Evangelizing digital cash, when no real digital cash implementation exists, is getting things backwards. << Bollocks and stale to boot.Not the 1st time tims got things ass about though.(can provide examples on request.) >>Lucky can tell us what the real level of technology was. My impression is that it was a cleaned-up version of Chaum's earlier code (or the code of his early 90s programmers, that is) and did "uninteresting" things. And since it wasn't payee-untraceable, interesting uses for trading banned materials were not possible. (My recollection, though I could be wrong, was that Mark Twain Bank also had the usual ISP-like junk about acceptable uses and how accounts could be cancelled for "inappropriate uses.") A lot of these applications are just "toy uses." Not even the True Believers, most of us, << Ahem,True believers? The next steps,evangelists.Shurley some mishtake. >>would waste our time and money opening a Mark Twain Bank account so we could flash our account cards, or whatever, at local parties and meetings. I don't know of anyone, besides Lucky, who ever used the system. It is true, and we've talked about it many times, that most people don't care about anonymity and untraceability.<< They are even taking the "let it all hang out' road with APster! and flashing more than account cards! >>They don't care that their "Fast Pass" turnpike passes can (and sometimes are) be used to track their movements, to find out when they were on the New Jersey Turnpike and which exit they got off at. 99.9984% of them figure no one will bother to check. So the market for Chaumian ecash for car passes never materialized. A big part of the problem is the lack of evolutionary learning. << Is that when you learn the meaning of the basic words you use,like 'anarchy',ferinstance? >>This is a problem with our patent system, especially for software. A number of years ago I wrote an article about how patents for hardware work because the produced good "meters" the patent: no one cared what uses were made of the microprocessor because every sale was a sale, thus paying for all of the various R&D and patents and so for the chip companies. With software (*), there is much concern about what uses are made. Because of replicability of the product. (* I don't mean a software product like Microsoft Office. It is true that no one cares what use is made of a copy of Office, provided it was legitimately bought. I mean software like "RSA," where sale of a general license has to be very carefully planned.) Because Chaum wished to make money (not an ignoble goal), he limited access to the core of his system. (Whatever you want to call it, the algorithms, the implementations, the ability of others to build products, etc.) There were a series of "future by design" projects, but little evolutionary learning. (Contrast to the aircraft or chip businesses, where hundreds of companies failed, planes crashed, new designs were tried, patents were cross-licensed or bought, companies rose and fell, products proliferated...) It's not easy to build a company around an algorithm.<< Or a reputation on blithering blather,Its like cypherpunk elevator muzak isnt it? RSA succeeded, but it faced years of shoestring operation troubles (I visited their crowded offices in Redwood Shores, circa 1990-1). And it had arguably the most important patent portfolio of all. (Levy's "Crypto" details the history, and the almost out of business experiences.) I see way too many Cypherpunks jabbering about "raising money." Most don't.<< I dont see enough cypherpunks raising money to have this embarrassment put down,but its early days. >> It's time for a return to the older models. > << Like Operation soft drill,BUMs and K.I.S.S ferfucksake. > >Getting the real thing working requires real marketing skills <>See above. I doubt a marketing group makes a hill of beans' worth of difference. << Tims opinions are definitely worth a large hill o'beans. >>> and being in the right place at the right time; occasionally <True enough. << Look up at that full moon tim. >>> you can hit it off, like the kid who wrote WinAmp and was pressured > by his parents into making it Shareware and not just freeware, > or the Hotmail folks causing the free-web-based-email wave > (and catalyzing many of the appallingly stupid Dot-Com Business Plans.) < We saw a lot of appallingly-stupid Cypherpunks Business Plans, too. << And the appallingly stupid adoption of crypto-anarchy instead of cyber-liberty.Whoops. >>"And then at this point the world adopts the use of Bearer Bucks (TM) and we get 2% of every transaction!" > Anarcho-capitalism would never encourage such lunacy,right timmy? >>> Perhaps one advantage of the dot-com crash is that people starting > businesses today are much more likely to do the solid business planning > and the initial technical decisions before they get enough > funding to leave the garage and hire the 200 programmers that > it takes to prevent any real work from being done while you're > having meetings to coordinate development of the hot-tub-scheduling > website. Yep. Premature commercialization, mythical man-month, burn rates, and all that. << Wisdom from on high,take notes,cypherpunks.Tim may not be with us forever.(It just seems like it sometimes) >>> But if you're not going to use the marketdroids, you have to find > some really solid alternative to get the stuff widely used. I'll say it again: the best commercialization is done for stolen products. << And words,see mattd's posts on how I stole the word "anarchy."I'm TM master Thief! >>(Or, to head off frivolous charges that I am libeling Sun or Cisco, below, products which were basically already developed and faced a ready market.) The Stanford University Network (SUN) machines were largely ready to go when the founders of Sun (gee, where'd they get that name?) sought permission (and investment) from Stanford to commercialize them. Ditto for Len and Sandy's work at Stanford on routers. This is how Sun and Cisco were able to "hit the ground running." They didn't squander precious startup dollars on roof-top jacuzzis and meeting rooms for researchers to sit around trying to develop a product. Investment money went into production facilities, wire-wrap guns, etc. Even RSA was basically just commercializing an already-extant thing. Intel was making and selling actual products within 6 months of its formation. (It did _not_ get funding and then sit around in opulent surroundings thinking about future directions. In a way, it also "stole" its technology, in that its founders had worked on silicon-gate MOS at Fairchild and knew how to get rolling quickly. I'm not accusing Intel of stealing in any prosecutable sense, but in the sense that this is the way evolutionary learning happens:<< May I interject some Proudon at this point: "Property is Theft" >>the children of successes create more successes.) By contrast, I've watched dozens of companies (some of them started and staffed by my friends) raise some seed capital and _then_ begin their research and development! Bad move. For lots of reasons I could write about for hours. (Xanadu and AMIX were examples, several Cypherpunks startups are other examples.) (Nutshell: research proceeds unevenly. Breakthroughs. Evolutionary learning. Dead-ends. << Anarcho-capitalism,racism,fascism,ayn Rand,robert Heinlein,Gun nuts and militia wackos,sexism,Libertianism,etc.Yep. Redirections. "Exploitation of rich veins of ore," punctuated equilibrium, time value of money. When a company gets investment money, it _must_ begin to use that money _immediately_. Ideally, for production facilities, for actual product advertising, for _immediate_ uses. The time value of money dictates this. It _cannot_ use its money to hire people to sit around and think about future research directions. If there is not a _real_ business plan (I don't mean a "spreadsheet business plan") with a real revenue stream beginning _soon_, why form a company?<< Why indeed,become a true anarchist name.Corporations wont last 5 minutes without the state to back them up. >>A lot of naive people seem to think the capital markets exist to help them fund their dreams, their vague ideas about becoming the next Bill Gates. Maybe the recent dot com collapse has changed things.) There _is_ a place for "service businesses." ISPs, for example. (The founders of ZKS made their initial money by setting up a successful ISP in Canada and then selling it when the great wave of ISP consolidations was cresting. Interestingly, some of the early remailer operators in Holland did something very similar, selling their ISP business. Looks like this was the real way to make some money. No exotic cutting-edge technology, just paying customers.) There's a saying that "the best is the enemy of the good." This is part of the long debate in computer science between "doing the right thing" and "doing what works." The "Right Thing" is the elegant, the crystalline, the pure. "What Works" is the crufty, the cobbled-together. LISP versus Perl, perhaps. Richard Gabriel has some fun essays along the lines of "Worst is Best" (use Google to find them), discussing why the workstation and language market developed in the way it did. In our community (and related orbiting communities), "the cool is the enemy of the good." Hence we see multi-year efforts to the really cool implementation of hypertext developed, thus running out of money and missing the boat on the Web. (Xanadu.) Ditto for digital cash, as comparatively low-tech and uncool products like PayPal move in to take the low-hanging fruit. Paying people to sit around and dream about rilly, rilly cool products is the kiss of death. << Oh death! Where is thy sting? Why is this bore still breathing?Will no one rid me of this turgid capitalist priest? >>Lastly, the focus on commercialization has been very weird these past several years. Nearly everyone jabbers about how to make money off of remailers, or data havens, or digital money. But little in the way of new ideas are being discussed here. << Anarcho-capitalism had nothing to with this and neither did I,Im TM crypto-anarchist. >>Our last Cypherpunks meeting was refreshing in that we had a couple of good talks on real things and very little of the "lawyer" and "startup evangelizing" junk. And we ended with a heated discussion of remailers and such, which Len and Steve and others have been writing about. << Len and Steve may still have something new to say,Im sucking wind and have been for years. >>Even more lastly, you folks out there thinking about how to do a startup or make money should be thinking about what I said, and which I am certain is basically correct: start up companies are not the place to do basic R&D. That's the place for universities and for established companies (with the companies either spinning-off divisions or selling the products themselves or losing their staff who "steal" the work). The cost of money is just too high for anyone to fund blue sky dreamers. Except as charity. (I can't resist: Look at Interval Research. Paul Allen, who has almost as much money as Bill Gates, decided to try to replicate the success of Xerox PARC and funded Interval Research some years ago (around '92-'93, IIRC). He gave it a wad of money, they set up shop, they hired Brenda Laurel and Lee Felsenstein and all kinds of other bright thinkers and dreamers. What came out of it? Nothing. Nada. Nil.) --Tim May << You folks,you anarch-capitalists should listen to me.The cost of money is to high.Milton Friedmans probably to blame. >>"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself." -- David Friedman << Tim,(and david) don't even believe their own arguments.See.http://world.std.com/~mhuben/leftlib.html And...http://world.std.com/~mhuben/ddfr.html I guess Tim still loves capitalism to death,He just has to bash her sometimes.

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Coderpunks down?
by Nomen Nescio 23 Dec '01

23 Dec '01

www.mail-archive.com has no messages from coderpunks(a)toad.com since December 7. Ryan Lackey posted a message to cypherpunks and coderpunks on Friday December 22 but it has not appeared on coderpunks. Is that list down? Who is the administrator?

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Re: A poll for remailer operators
by A. Melon 23 Dec '01

23 Dec '01

> There is a HUGE unknown about the actual number of remailer users. Many > otherwis e intelligent discussions hinge on this number being small > or big. > > Unreliable as it will be, could you please provide an estimate of monthly > number of human-generated messages that enter your system (excluding > those from other remailers.) Good question. Maybe another way to get at it would be, how many distinct email addresses send a message to the remailer over the course of a month? Presumably no more than about 20 or 30 of these are remailers and pingers. If there are only 40 distinct email addresses, then we remailer users are in trouble. If there are 100000, we are in good shape. Probably the answer is something in between, but it sure would be good to know.

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A poll for remailer operators
by AARG! Anonymous 23 Dec '01

23 Dec '01

This is simple. There is a HUGE unknown about the actual number of remailer users. Many otherwise intelligent discussions hinge on this number being small or big. Unreliable as it will be, could you please provide an estimate of monthly number of human-generated messages that enter your system (excluding those from other remailers.)

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