December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Valid MacPGP??
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Wed, 4 May 1994, Harry S. Hawk wrote: > Is MagPGP signed? > > If so how do I check and/or where do I look? > > Next question: Who has signed it? > > /hawk > And I am trying to distribute MACPGP copies (on DOS disks). What is the best version of MACPGP to hand out. (Give me the full MAC name.) Thanks DCF <- Mr. Hawk: Which version do you have? Mr. Frissell: The most recent version is MacPGP2.3.hqx.cpt Do NOT distribute MacPGP2.3 V1.1 as the source code is not "out there." I will be happy to send you a copy if you like. -uni- (Dark)

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Re: PC-Expo
by rarachel＠prism.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> If it looks like you're really going to do this, I'll send you some $ or > some disks if you promise to use them for this project. I've had enough folks volunteer for this in NYC that there's no way I'd back out. If you want to send me something I'd rather you send me disks because I don't have any time to buy them. Just as many 3.5" HD's as you can... I'll accept money if you'd rather do it that way, but I want to make sure it gets used up 100% for the disks. (I'll be taking a $20 loss in disks and about $100 in taking the day off, if my boss decides not to pay me for the day off...) > Sandy Sanfort (I think) said a few weeks ago that he's writing an article > for Soldier of Fortune about PGP and privacy; perhaps he'd give you > permission to use that. That would be most cool. Sandy, is you reading this? > I wrote up a short (~ 2 pages, I think) article a few months ago for > someone who wanted to hand out something printed; I'll poke around and > see if I can dig it up. It wasn't anything special, or anything that anyone > else who's been on the list > 3 months couldn't have written. Please, anything you can scrounge together or revise. Also I'd reccomend that you quote from current magazine articles and mention them. This way they can seem more offical media-looking... > You might see if there are pieces you could steal from the PGP docs; they > did a fair job of explaining lots of the issues, as I remember it. I won't include any extra docs or source code. No room on one disk :-( > Like someone on the list suggested, you might think about handing out > Mac disks, too - I'm not familiar enough with PC Expo to know if they > mean "IBM PC" when they say "PC". If that's the case, there may not > be much demand for Mac stuff. :) I may do this if I have the time. I have a Mac, but not much time on my hands anymore... Maybe I'll bring a few Mac disks just incase.... > With respect to copyright, remember that everything* created is born > copyrighted; net-news postings, E-mail, newspaper articles, and everything > else. An author must take affirmative steps to make it public domain. > You're probably safest if you stick to articles explicitly written > for this project, or ones where you have permission to reprint. I > wouldn't be surprised if sympathetic folks/organizations (Wired, John > Perry Barlow, Whole Earth Review) will grant permission if you ask. > > (* where "everything" == original works of authorship fixed in a > tangible medium of expression) The Wired JackBoots article is freely distributable, so that will go on there. :-)

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money server up and running
by Matt Thomlinson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

digital coins are flowing! newly minted GhostMarks (tm) now available. GhostMarks are minted in 5 & 10 type denominations, as I felt the efficient binary system wasn't quite as intuitive. I'm offering 20 GhostMarks to the person who most correctly predicts the outcome of the Seattle Supersonics/Denver Nuggets basketball game tomorrow night; deadline is 3pm, 5/4/94. Please include a winner and a point spread. Also, in my next few posts I'll be offering GhostMarks to get my currency established. What follows is worth 10 GhostMarks to whomever redeems them first. -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: 2.2 owEBBQH6/okAlQIFAC3HMbJkhnxaNc7AOQEBOyMEALQGtexjmAY/L2eoLETJ3WNh XQjmFTNmKmqhOBTg0L0LiaJp9gDbYxHABce9Wtej0mtCpQ6QaNcfyAWDVVLn4yP5 MyvXmlhNLcAmmDjPOnCJD91jt7ShYGpOzsHtOqb62mWAPznp/PfHlDi1SiJtkqar IlpLcpSxVBPvmIGWuR0JrGtiDS9tb25leS8xMC5kYXQAAAAAwJSuQj1K3n/cvbzM DI7to7cAEQEACQH7B2KV0HcziU3pxSA6B+Yjse6hqJqLilt2ofZpVemIGONamPmm nCc5Txfyh8GacaDxS+rfekH7JenBO9lcU3j87g== =iEij -----END PGP MESSAGE----- mt Matt Thomlinson University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. phone: (206) 548-9804 Check my home page -- ftp://ftp.u.washington.edu/public/phantom/home.html PGP 2.2 key available via email, or finger phantom(a)hardy.u.washington.edu

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Why Digital Cash is Not Being Used
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal Finney asks us to think about and comment on the important issue of why digital cash, in its myriad forms, is not in wider use. Especially on this list, where the Magic Money/Tacky Tokens experiment has not (yet at least) produced widespread use. This question also goes to the heart of several related questions: 1. Why aren't crypto protocols other than simple encryption, digital signatures (both implemented in PGP as the de facto standard in our community), and remailings (implemented in Julf's anon.penet.fi remailer and in the various Cypherpunks remailers) being *used*? Why no DC-Nets, no data havens, no digital timestamping, etc.? 2. What *incentives* are there for creative programmers to devise and/or implement new crypto protocols if essentially everything for the past year and a half (since the fall of 1992, which is when PGP 2.0 and remailers became widely available) has languished? 3. What are the "killer apps" of crypto? 4. What platforms and user environments should would-be developers target? What machines? What networks? What languages? (An ongoing interest of mine. Objects, scripts, Visual Basic (!) VBX tools, TCL, perl, many platforms, etc. A tower of Babel of confusion is upon us.) Here is my first-cut analysis of the digital cash situation. I. Why is Magic Money/Tack Tokens, in particular, not being more widely used? - Nothing of significance on the List to buy, hence no incentive to learn how MM works. (Just because someone announces that their new article is available for 10 Tacky Tokens doesn't a demand make!) - Semantic gap. I confess to not having the foggiest ideas of how to go about acquiring Tacky Tokens, how to send them to other people, how to redeem them (and for what), etc. Having nothing to buy (no need), and plenty of things to occupy my time, I've had no interest in looking at MM. When I buy items like t-shirts from people on this list, I simply write them a check and send it. Very simple. The banks handle the complexities. And writing a check is a "prototype" (or script) that is learned early by most of us. Not so with any of the various digital cash schemes. In 10 or 20 years, sure, but not now. This is not to take away from the excellent work--I gather from comments by others--that ProductCypher put into MM. His greatest achievement may turn out to bring this issue to the fore, to wit, what will cause people to bridge this semantic gap (understanding) and actually begin to *use* these new constructs? - as others have noted recently (and this is a well-known issue), alternative currencies must offer some advantage over existing currencies, or at least be roughly on a par with them. For example, the airlines have their own currency, "frequent flier miles," which they pass out as an inducement for customer loyalty (repeat business)....it is generally not advantageous for them to allow exchange. (And really it's a kind of bribe, a transfer from the corporations which pay for the plane tickets, with the frequent flier miles accruing--despite futile attempts to halt this--to the individual passengers....this gives "ffm"s a built-in advantage.) (The proposal recently that vendors of products, like t-shirts, give a discount for MM payments is of course unworkable. This is asking real people to give up real dollars for an ideological cause of marginally little significance to them. The advantages of MM must be real, not phony.) II. Other Experiences with Digital Cash in Some Form - On the Extropians list a while back (I've since left that list), there was an interesting experiment involving reputations of posters and "shares" in their reputations. Brian Hawthorne introduced is "Hawthorne Exchange," HeX, with eventually a few hundred or so reputations trading. The unit of exchange was the "Thorne," with each new list member given 10,000 Thornes to trade with. Trading was very sparse, with most people apparently never bothering to learn to trade (a la my own experiences with Magic Money). I downloaded the docs one night, tried a few trial trades, and then proceeded to make dozens of trades, trying to buy cheap and sell dear. Between my trades, the reputation attached to my posts (and to my "nom du humor," Klaus! von Future Prime) I amassed a sizable fortune in Thornes. I even offered to exchange real dollars (checks) for Thornes, the better to amass a fortune (for reasons I won't go into here). Edgar Swank offered to sell me his Thornes for $20, I think it was, and I sent him a check immediately. (No one else did.) But I think the system was ultimately a failure. Nothing interesting was for sale, and Thornes had a ridiculously low value (reflecting of course their "toy" nature...my $20 bought 20,000 Thornes, as I recall). By "low value" I mean that the number of Thornes given to each participant (Hint: "given" is the important word) was worth nominally $100 (by Brian's sales price--probably none were ever sold at this price), worth $10 to me and others (by my offer of $1 per 1000 Thornes), and probably worth much _less_ as the HeX market languished and, probably, ultimately folded. (Does anybody on the Extropians list know if it is still operating? And what happened to by shares when I left the list?) - Similar barter schemes have been described elsewhere. "Mother Jones" had an interesting article last summer about a barter scheme in New England, and other folks have mentioned here the articles in "Utne Reader" and so forth. III. What Markets Might Make Use of Digital Cash - phone cards, subway cards, parking garage cards...all are examples. But these are mainly to reduce the need for customers to carry coins and bills, to reduce the dangers of theft of coins and bills (and the need to collect them frequently from payment points), and to speed up processing by not having customers fumble for change, etc. - toll roads...this is a market that Chaum's DigiCash company has been targeting for several years now. Privacy is a concern (don't want Big Brother tracking your movements), and the infrastructure may allow considerable investments in remote sensing of IDs and pseudonymous IDs, online clearing, etc. Read the Chaum stuff for details on this. - illegal markets, for transferring wealth in fairly large amounts. Not at all clear how this will happen, and it sure won't happen with some fly-by-night hackers and/or students offering a new service. (I didn't mention that one of the persistent concerns about learning new crypto protocols here on this list is the epiphenomenality (transience) of it all...remailers appear and then vanish when the students go away or lose their accounts, features added make past learning useless, and so on. Life is too short to spend it learning crufty details that will go away in a matter of months. I'd hate to buy $300 worth of TackyTokens and then find that their value went away when J.Random User graduated!) - betting markets, the "Internet Casino in Cyberspace," etc. Nick Szabo was once championing this, and I think it could be an interesting, and very real, market. Lots of issues here. - Digital Postage. This remains my favorite. There's a _need_ for untraceable payments (else why use a remailer?). I've written about this extensively, as have others. If remailers offered robust (see above point about crufty, flaky, hobby remailers) services that they operated as _businesses_, with reasonable attention to reliability, interconnectivity to other remailers, overall robustness, and carefully articulated policies about logging, privacy, etc., then MM or something similar could have a real value. IV. Is there Any Hope for Cypherpunks Software Use? The remailers (of Hughes and Finney, with other contributions) came in the first few _weeks_ of existence of the Cypherpunks group. Julf's system already existed. Remailers were the "low-hanging fruit" that got plucked fairly easily (not taking anything away from Eric, but he himself says he learned enough Perl in one day to write the first, crude remailer the _next_ day!). Later protocols have not fared as well. Why this is so is of great importance. That's a topic unto itself, and one which I hope to write about soon. Lots of important questions and interesting issues. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Nalbandian's email address
by rustman＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:44 AM 5/7/94 -0400, wcs(a)anchor.ho.att.com (bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510 wrote: >Jim Nalbandian, who's recently been posting to cypherpunks, >has a signature line that contains a couple of *severely* non-portable >addresses; I have no way to tell whether my email to him worked >on the netcomish address. Don't know about his spelling errors, >but his addressing errors distinctly *are* international.... ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I don't understand what you mean by the above. I think the correct address would be just jim%lassie(a)netcom.com, which is a UUCP connection to netcom. Connected to netcomsv. Escape character is '^]'. 220-netcomsv.netcom.com Sendmail 8.6.4/SMI-4.1 ready at Sat, 7 May 1994 03:05:00 220 ESMTP spoken here 250 <test(a)netcomsv.netcom.com> expn netcomsv!nonexisting!addr #test a bogus addr to see error message 501 netcomsv!nonexisting!addr... nonexisting is an unknown UUCP connection expn netcomsv!lassie!jim%lassie(a)netcom.com 250 <jim%lassie(a)netcomsv.netcom.com> >I got an interesting bouncegram from Namibia when I tried using >the N7SZS(a)K7BUC.AZ.US.NA address - it's some sort of Amateur packet radio >address, which has a syntax similar to Internet addresses but >rips off the .na namespace The Hams have implemented TCP/IP over the air, using the airwaves as a sort of ethernet (albiet slowly). Works quite well. However, these addresses are not internet addresses, and the Ham network has very important FCC-mandated restrictions on message content. (No encrypting, no commercial traffic, no explicit or oobscene stuff). Don't confuse this with the UUCP city.state.us domains. If you see a user or site name such as [KN]*[1-9]* (e.g. N7SZS or K7BUC), recognize that as a ham call sign and assume that it is a tcp/ip packet network. -- Rusty Hodge <rustman(a)netcom.com>

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Re: Nalbandian's email address
by snyderra＠dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:50 AM 5/7/94 -1000, NetSurfer wrote: >> From:wcs@anchor.ho.att.com >> To: jim%lassie(a)netcom.com, lassie!jim%lassie(a)netcom.com, >> >> I got an interesting bouncegram from Namibia when I tried using >> the N7SZS(a)K7BUC.AZ.US.NA address - it's some sort of Amateur packet radio >> >> Could one of the administrators at Netcom please help him >> put a useable return address in his .signature? > >Aren't radio licenses registered and names associated with them available >by FOIA? The address N7SZS(a)K7BUC.AZ.US.NA is Packet Radio address. Few ways of getting it mail from the internet, in it would be read for violations of FCC rules before it went out anyway. Amateur Radio operator's addresses are available in various callbooks, including a few online. Check the Yandroff(sp?) Services list for addresses. (I'm doing mail offline, or I'd do it and include it with the message), No FOIA is required (although I suspect a FOIA would be honored for it) Bob -- Bob Snyder N2KGO MIME, RIPEM mail accepted snyderra(a)dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu finger for RIPEM public key When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

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Re: iPower card info from NatSemi
by Matt Blaze 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>iPower: The Card That Ate Your Privacy > >I got a "Technology Fact Sheet" on the National Semiconductor iPower >(Tessera) card today. It's pretty grim. They have big plans for this >little monster, which go way beyond just tapping the telephones of a >few Mafiosi. It's too long to key in the whole thing - if you want one, >call them at 1-800-272-9959. They are very helpful. Here are a few >interesting excerpts: My understanding is that NSC plans to release a Tessera version for the federal market and a DES version for the rest of us. This is probably reasonable - the federal (defense message system) Tessera market is pretty big. I don't know if they actually got the federal contract; I seem to recal hearing last week that the DoD contract for Tessera cards went to someone else, but I don't remember who. BTW, I've been playing with a prototype Tessera card for the last couple of weeks; cute little thing. Comments to follow shortly... -matt

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No Subject
by Matt Thomlinson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have no idea why jim insists on sending 20 copies of my bounce back to the list. I've contacted netcom and am hoping they'll clear up this abuse of their user agreement. I'm not sure what jim expects to accomplish; his original rants were, well, rants. For a person trying to get crypto to the masses, he's doing a good job of trying to kill all crypto development. Good thinking, jim. His posts now have no apparent reason behind them other than to simply be an anti-social irritation to members of the list. Unless something else happens, this is the last you'll see me write about it on the list. I'm just going to install a filter so I can read cpunks around jim. I hope you all will do the same so we don't have to discuss him. mt Matt Thomlinson University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. phone: (206) 548-9804 Check my home page -- ftp://ftp.u.washington.edu/public/phantom/home.html PGP 2.2 key available via email, or finger phantom(a)hardy.u.washington.edu

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Refused Mail
by lassie!jim%lassie＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

FORWARDED MAIL ------- From: netcomsv.netcom.com!krypton.mankato.msus.edu!hayden ("Robert A. Hayden") Date: 07 May 94 Originally To: Jim Nalbandian <netcomsv!lassie!jim%lassie> Is there some reason why you are bouncing your 'refused mail' back to the list? If there is, I would, as would other, appreciate it if you could tell us. If you don't have a reason, or are doing it simply to get attention, then STOP IT! ____ Robert A. Hayden <=> hayden(a)krypton.mankato.msus.edu \ /__ -=-=-=-=- <=> -=-=-=-=- \/ / Finger for Geek Code Info <=> Political Correctness is \/ Finger for PGP 2.3a Public Key <=> P.C. for "Thought Police" -=-=-=-=-=-=-=- (GEEK CODE 1.0.1) GAT d- -p+(---) c++(++++) l++ u++ e+/* m++(*)@ s-/++ n-(---) h+(*) f+ g+ w++ t++ r++ y+(*) -- * Spelling errors are intentional and international * Jim Nalbandian netcomsv!lassie!jim%lassie(a)netcom.com Tempe, Arizona, USA N7SZS(a)K7BUC.AZ.US.NA No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain there right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. <-------- Thomas Jefferson --

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Re: some animals are more equal than others
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > On Sat, 7 May 1994, Chris Knight wrote: > > > Due to the tremendous effort of the "War On Drugs" propiganda pimps, a > > law was passed there that allows the police to pull you over and search > > your car WITHOUT PROBABLE CAUSE. > > > > This was late '91, anyone ever know if it got challenged in court? > > Interesting, since this so-called "law" seems to be in direct violation > of the Carroll Doctrine. >

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