December 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel
by Mike Rosing 09 Dec '02

09 Dec '02

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Anonymous wrote: > > It already has. And the hell with the horses -- tie the other end of the rope > to a fast car. That would give a new meaning to "drawn and quartered". There's a lot of bureaucrats who need that performed on them. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike

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Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!
by Sunder 09 Dec '02

09 Dec '02

On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Tim May wrote: > Siliness, compounded. Show me a law about "obligatory cameras in > cybercafes." It's silly now. A few years back, the spook said that the NSA doesn't spy on US citizens and won't because that was not its charter.

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Re: Akamai
by Greg Pelcak 09 Dec '02

09 Dec '02

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 08:52 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote: > Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also > akamaitechnologies.com)? Most of the experience I have with Akamai is with them hosting high-traffic websites with geographically distributed servers. I thought they had mostly gone bust, but it's possible they're still doing it. A lot of websites a couple years ago talked about being "akamaized", meaning that they had their site hosted by akamai to allow for good server response time all around the country.

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Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel
by Tyler Durden 09 Dec '02

09 Dec '02

"Frankly, millions of these fascists need a simple solution: a tree, a horse, and a rope." Damn. If it gets to the point where I'm a terrorist because some local warlord doesn't like me (or thinks I disrespect his authority), then "might makes right" is all that will be left. In a way, the potential and impending truth of Tim May's statement is for a me a motivator to continue to promote strong crypto, ubiquitous Wi-Fi, "BlackNet", and so on. Hopefully it won't come down to the above. _________________________________________________________________ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

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"Drug czar" McCaffrey cashes in as homeland-security lobbyist
by Declan McCullagh 09 Dec '02

09 Dec '02

http://www.rollcall.com/pages/columns/hoh/ Seeing Green. The latest person to take the well-traveled path from Capitol Hill to greater riches on K Street is Dan Turton, floor assistant for outgoing House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D- Mo.). Turton has singed up with Timmons & Co., which has also snapped up Alan Hoffman, chief of staff to Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.). At a grave time for the airline industry, meanwhile, American Airlines has tapped Daniel Elwell to serve as managing director of international and governmental affairs. Taking a more unconventional path to the lobbying industry, Elwell is a veteran company pilot. That led to the inevitable quip in a company press release that he is "equally at ease navigating a bill through Congress as he is a 767 across the country." Fleishman-Hillard, meanwhile, has signed up the former drug czar, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, to launch a new homeland security practice at the public relations behemoth. Three members of the firm's international advisory board - former Defense Secretary William Cohen, ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and former Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan - will provide "strategic counsel"to the new practice. And Thomas Wheeler, president and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, has been elected president of the board of directors of the Foundation for the National Archives.

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Re: DBCs now issued by DMT
by R. A. Hettinga 09 Dec '02

09 Dec '02

At 4:06 PM -0800 on 12/3/02, Somebody wrote: > I forgot to ask: who the hell is DMT? Nobody I ever heard of... > How are they marketing this > stuff - on a website with only an IP address... :-). > or, who have they gotten to use it thus far? Nobody I ever heard of... However, that old volcano's giving off some tasty beta-waves, dontcha think? Cheers, RAH [Sounds like a low "C" to me...] -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Re: Money is about expected future value....nothing more, nothing less
by Tim May 09 Dec '02

09 Dec '02

On Sunday, December 8, 2002, at 09:26 AM, Steve Schear wrote: > At 06:19 PM 12/8/2002 +0200, you wrote: >> Errata: "companies are forbidden from accepting them as payment" is, >> of >> course, "companies are REQUIRED TO accept them as payment". >> >> Sorry. >> >> Mark >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Marcel Popescu" <mdpopescu(a)subdimension.com> >> >> > The reason the IOUs emitted by the Bank of England were *initially* >> accepted >> > was that they were redeemable in gold or silver. *One* reason they >> are now >> > accepted is that they are legal tender - you can pay your taxes >> with them, >> > and companies are forbidden from accepting them as payment. > > I seem to recall there are still provisions in the statutes for > contracts to be fulfilled by whatever therms are spelled out. For > example, if a contract requires that you deliver pork bellies, you > cannot merely substitute the cash value of the porkers. Mark cited the Bank of England, not U.S. law. I don't know what British law is in this regard. But I will tell you that the notion that U.S. dollars must be accepted as "payment" in the U.S. (using the variant that corrects Mark's typographical error above) is false. The language is along the lines of "this note good for all debts public and private." This does not stop parties from agreeing to transfers in yak brains, or houses, or gold, or tantalum. It says that if Alice agrees to pay Bob 50 dollars ($50), with no special payment instructions agreed to, and Alice at some point gives Bob a $50 piece of U.S. currency, she has fulfilled her debt obligation under U.S. law. I surmise, but have not verified, that this sort of language was added to banknotes to better ensure that people accepted the banknotes as being equivalent to specie (gold and silver). --Tim May "Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity." --Robert A. Heinlein

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Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel
by Mark Renouf 09 Dec '02

09 Dec '02

jet wrote: > At 20:48 -0500 2002/12/07, Myers W. Carpenter wrote: > >>http://www.2600.com/news/display/display.shtml?id=1441 >> >>PHOTOGRAPHER ARRESTED FOR TAKING PICTURES OF VICE PRESIDENT'S HOTEL >>Posted 5 Dec 2002 06:03:48 UTC One major issue is these days, the laws have become so incredibly complicated that the average citizen isn't confident in their knowledge of the law, let alone most that enforce it. They know that the average citizen is going to want to 'do the right thing' and comply with any requests, whether or not any laws were broken. And let's face it, even if you or I know our rights to the letter it doesn't make a bit of difference until after the fact in a courtoom. Police generally won't sit and debate with you about it on the spot.

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Re: DBCs now issued by DMT
by Tyler Durden 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

I too admit of having done some imbibing (Belgian ale I'm afraid). I was thinking about this on the heels of your last lubricated missive, and a very similar thing occurred to me. Actually, something far less ambitious (in the short run)... First of all, I see no deep reason why some bank acount (or, more likely, a whole bunch of 'em) can't be auto-administered like a simple mini bank. It would be auto-administered via the votes of its "owners", who have never met, and who are unaware of the real names of the other owners. Owners vote to lend money out of this account to whomever. As for the administration, well that's 'obviously' handled by a proxy program somewhere, that translates the votes into actual decisions about the account (including loan amount, interest rate, debt-to-liquidity ratio and so on). Needless to say, since this account is tied to one or more denominations, it could eventually be shutdown through the concerted actions of various governments. But the mechanisms of such a "bank" are (I think) independent of the possibility of reliability of a future digital currency. (And of course, there's a lot such a "bank" could do before getting shut down.) The tough thing (or perhaps not..someone here must surely know) is the possibility of lending money to persons who are unidentified in "meatspace". (But then again, even in the non-Cyber world, 'meatspace' is very rarely an issue when lending money...it all boils down to credit records anyway...) > >But do we need a bank? I'd guess we need an issuer, but why can't it be a >distributed issuer without central control (or even distributed control?)? >Can't the protocol deal with the problem of issue? > >(We'd have to write a damn good one, of course) > >-- >Peter Fairbrother > >bear wrote: > > > > > > > On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Peter Fairbrother wrote: > > > >> OK, suppose we've got a bank that issues bearer "money". > >> > >> Who owns the bank? It should be owned by bearer shares, of course. > >> > >> Can any clever person here devise such a protocol? > > > > I thought about this problem for several months. > > > > The problem I kept running into and had no way around is that if the > > holders are truly anonymous, then there is no way for them to seek > > redress for fraudulent issue or fraudulent transactions. If the > > banker goes broke, people want to be able to make a claim against the > > banker's future earnings for whatever worthless currency they were > > holding when it happened, and they cannot do that from a position of > > anonymity. People want a faithless banker punished, meaning jail time > > or hard labor, not just burning a nym. > > > > The sole method for any truly anonymous currency to acquire value is > > for the banker to promise to redeem it for something that has > > value. So the banker, if it's to have a prayer of acceptance, cannot > > be anonymous. > > > > And the minute the banker's not anonymous, the whole system is handed > > on a platter to the civil authorities and banking laws and so on, and > > then no part of the system can be reliably anonymous because the > > entire infrastructure of our legal system requires identity. > > > > Look at the possibilities for conflict resolution. How can the > > anonymous holder of an issued currency prove that he's the beneficiary > > to the issuer's promise to redeem, without the banker's cooperation > > and without compromising his/her anonymity? And if s/he succeeded in > > proving it, who could force an anonymous banker to pay up? And if you > > succeeded in making the banker pay up, how could the banker prove > > without the cooperation of the payee that the payment was made and > > made to the correct payee? > > > > We use a long-accepted fiat currency, so we're not used to thinking > > about the nitty-gritty details that money as an infrastructure > > requires. It is hidden from us because our currency infrastructure has > > not broken down in living memory. We shifted from privately issued > > currency to government-issued currency largely without destabilizing > > the economy. Then once people were accustomed to not thinking of a > > promise to redeem as being the source of value, we went off the gold > > standard. Our economy hasn't broken yet, but you have to realize that > > this situation is a little bizarre from the point of view of currency > > issue. We're not thinking anymore about the promise to redeem > > currency for something of value, and the implications of failure to > > honor that promise, because we live in a sheltered and mildly bizarre > > moment in history where those things haven't been relevant for a long > > time to the currency we use most. But any new currency would have to > > have a good solid solution for that issue. > > > > The only way I found to decentralize the system, at all, was the model > > where all the actors are pseudonymous rather than anonymous, each user > > has the power to issue currency, and different issued currencies were > > allowed to fluctuate in value against each other depending on the > > degree of trust or value of the underlying redemption commodity. > > Money becomes a protocol and a commodity and labor exchange in raw > > form, rather than a simple sum - it's back to the barter system. > > > >> I'd guess that all the Bank's finances should be available to anyone >who > >> asks. That should include an accounting of all the "money" issued. And >not > >> be reliant on one computer to keep the records. > > > > An interesting idea, but it more or less prohibits offline > > transactions involving a currency issue. It also means the entire > > market must be finite and closed. > > > >> Or the propounders wanting to: make a profit/control the bank? > > > > I do not think that there are profits to be made as an issuer of > > anonymous or hard-pseudonymous money. That's one of the reasons I > > advocate the "everyone is potentially a mint" model -- the expenses of > > issue, and the cost of doing business uphill against trust until one's > > issue is trusted, should be shared in something like equal proportions > > by people who undertake it voluntarily. > > > > Bear _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL YOURSELF???
by Liver Warning 08 Dec '02

08 Dec '02

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