December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

going in anarchic circles
by tmp＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Grand Epopt Feotus <68954(a)brahms.udel.edu> > I comprehend my own brand of crypto/cyber-anarchy. I > personally do not go for any of the regulations or > "protections" that have been proposed so far. IMO, if > you want to put your machine on the net, take your > chances. It's getting very cheap to set up a node now, > and if I choose to do so I would not take kindly to any > restrictions upon my activity, be it legal, or illegal > even. ok, suppose that every internet company decided that they would install `fingerprint keyboards' and require use of them by users. these keyboards sense your fingerprints as you type on the keyboard and can be used to reject users not authorized to use a given account. they simply tell people who do not want to use the system, `tough luck'. in a sense, this is something like how our social security system and drivers licensing works today. there are few (legal) alternatives to them. so, how do you get a connection to this net? you are probably going to propose `starting a new net without these draconian restrictions'. but what you have done is propose a new set of rules -- `we don't need no stinkin rules'. how is your system going to deal with sites that corrupt passed mail? that harbor hackers and crackers? it really amazes me guys, but if you think the internet is some kind of anarchy right now,you are completely mistaken. you agree to a set of rules when you join the net. those rules are set by your provider. you agree not to corrupt mail you forward, don't mailbomb usenet, etc. currently there are many `unspoken rules' -- but it makes sense for them to be codified so that everyone understands what they can expect of each other. there is no guarantee of your access to the current net. doesn't that seem kind of fragile? you think you don't have to have any faith? it seems you have a lot of faith you will always be able to get a connection to the internet. why not try to set up a system or organization that is committed to formalizing the rights and expectations of users on the net and specifying what constitutes `basic access'? > Myself, I would much rather take the lumps of some > abuse, rather than have ANY regualtion put on my usage of > my personal node, or interaction between connected nodes. ok, so i set up a node that randomly corrupts all the mail that i pass through my site. i mailbomb the cypherpunks list and all the remailers. how do you deal with it? you send shrieking mail to all my upstream site providers asking them to yank me. what if i have bribed them all very lucratively? what if they decide that you don't pay enough, so they are going to yank you instead? (not worth the hassle of your insults, after all) what if i have dozens of accounts on different public domain sites? i seem to be going in circles here. > This makes room for alot of abuse, I admit that, but I > just don't see how all these Bill-O-CyberRights stuff, > and CyberKommunity will work when your dealing with a > space that has no boundary. This is a metric space, whos > distances are measured in connectivity, there are no real > boundaries as the are easily breached and morphed. excuse me, mr. idealist, but you live in a world that no one would recognize as their own. cyberspace exists only because people have constructed it. you cannot escape that interaction of a community. no man is an island. what guarantees you will have a connection to the network today? absolutely nothing. it is just your faith in the great cybergods. cyberspace is nothing but crystallized human interaction. how do you deal with the `pathological' cases of human behavior such as harassment, terrorism, censorship, etc? > How the hell are you going to evict > me if I break one of the laws? There is no way you can > develop a fool-proof system to control use, I even > seriously doubt you can install a shitty system even. unix passwords represent a reasonable amount of security. they prevent me from hijacking your account. more sophisticated levels exist. look, you are evicted from your apartment if you don't pay your rent. it is just as simple to evict someone from their cyberspatial connection, and throw out all their furniture on the street!! believe me, it has happened to me twice!! > Basically if I want to do something, it will get done. > The whole concept of a police force controlling > cyberspace is a leap back about a billion evolution > cycles. You can't patrol an amorphous blob. don't think of it as `us vs. them'. think of it as `us' erecting our own framework of self-regulation. it would allow `us' to get rid of the detweilers of the world in our community. cyberspace is not an amorphous Gibsonian blob!! it is a physical infrastructure policed by humans as simply as our physical roads are!! the police already exist, they are called `system administrators', except they have no uniform code of conduct today, except `if something pisses me off, disconnect it'. > If they dont like what my node is doing, than cut > connections to my node. what if you wake up one day and find that all the people you want to talk to, and you thought were your friends, all on a separate network, and you are isolated with Detweiler, Depew, Morris, and Mitnick on the AnarchyNet? > I would > actually prefer the possibility to Detwielering so to > speak,than to allow someone to try and control this. If hee, hee, suit yourself.... > You are unable to hold someone > accountable for their own deeds in a space like > kyberspace where psuedonyms are part of the fabric of the > space. cyberspace is what we make it. if no name is ever connected to a human, it can be constructed that way. if identity is important (as most of human history seems to imply) we can translate it into the new realm. but you are continuously mixing up what is possible with what you want. if you don't want something that is possible, then it's possibility is irrelevant. why don't you just preface your remarks by saying `i only want a version of cyberspace where no one is responsible for their actions!!' and i'd just leave it alone. as it stands you argue that cyberspace = anarchy by definition. i cannot agree. this dialogue appears to be at the point of arguing two different religions, so it is not very fruitful for any of us, but if grand epopt feotus represents the basic cypherpunk views, then i find it all very fascinating. you guys realize that you have a very unusual culture that is highly distinct from virtually any other culture ... at least that i am aware of. you do seem to have some parallels to the russian nihilists, some of the libertarians, some of the anarchists, but you have a very distinct blend of it .... anyway, it is all kind of bizarrely alien to me, so maybe i will check out that cyberwonk group or whatever that eli brandt mentioned and see if anyone there is on the same wavelength. pseudonymously yours, --tmp

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In the latest IEEE Spectrum
by Matt Thomlinson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For personal use only -- posted without permission "Classified algorithm for encryption" IEEE Spectrum, April 1994. Federal policy makers should reconsider the Clipper/Skipjack cryptography scheme, which employs a classified algorithm and Government-held keys as the basis of a new encryption standard, according to a six-page statement by IEEE-United States Activities. "Federal cryptography policy should not fight technological progress by attempting to retain outdated techniques of surveillance at the cost of the reliability and the security of the American information infrastructure," the statement concluded. The reasons given for issuing the statement included IEEE-USA's concerns that classified algorithms "cannot be proven secure," that individuals seeking to avoid detection would simply choose another cryptography method that can be downloaded from the Internet, and that law enforcement agencies can use other new methods--from vibration-sensing lasers on windows to keyboard-trapping programs. For more information, contact IEEE-USA at (202)785-0017. 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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Re: Economic assumptions
by rjc＠gnu.ai.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric Hughes: >Let's take remailers as an example. One current suggestion is to add >some sort of money system to the remailers as a condition of use. >This is exactly the wrong priority at the current time. The remailers >are already hard enough to use, and adding a payment system on top of >that will make them used even less. Making a system harder to use >increases the transaction cost. > >The current priorities should be to lower these costs. When the >remailer system begins to be overloaded, then adding some restriction >on use, perhaps by means of payment or a payment analogue, will be >warranted, because it will lower overall transaction costs, trading >off ease of use for throughput and reliability. > >What are some of these costs that should be lowered? > >-- Finding out that remailers exist and what they do. build a remailer "who" server into each remailer >-- Finding a remailer to use. ditto >-- Deciding what remailer to use. ditto (remailer server should list remailer properties like keylength, private?, delay length, chaining?, mixing?, padding?, encryption required? etc) >-- Figuring out how to use a particular remailer. standardize remailer help system, standard remailer command format (but not neccessaily the commands themselves) Sorta like an SGML for remailers >-- Formatting a message for a remailer. see above >-- Receiving mail through a remailer. Get/Creating a nice client. At the moment, 100% of the mail in my mailbox is encrypted. I wrote a script called "deliver" which encrypts incoming mail, then pipes it through procmail/slocal. I modified morepgp and made it a lot more user friendly (and recursive). Reducing complexity cost: All of this could be lowered by creating an easy-to-use remailer client which is compiled (or perl/tcl interpreted) and installed with every unix out there so it becomes ubiquitous. If someone's machine doesn't have a client, they can telnet to a machine where one is set up (just like gopher, archie, www) by some generous cryptoaltruist. The current remailer solution of putting all of the remailer system complexity on the server side can't make remailers too easy to use. My Extropians list software attempted to make it easy to use by allowing commands to be contained in-band with messages to be posted. It's still too complex for the user who wants hot-key style operation. (which is why I will eventually write a client for it) Once you write a generalized client that can communicate with standardized remailers, you can easily include digicash/postage in the system. >There much more need for improving the ease of use of remailers than >for paying for them. Are you objecting to paying for remailers on a philosophical grounds (anti-property/money)? No one has proposed paying real money for remailer use (although that is a future possibility). There needs to be some way to authenticate remailer users and limit use in a "free" sense (instead of top-down rationing) The best way to do this is to use some form of monetary system. >The less expensive privacy is, the more privacy there will be. >Privacy has non-linear benefit; the more that people are private, the >better any individual's privacy actually is. Every standard is enhanced by more people using it. However, this alone can't be a justification for making services into public goods which are free to everyone. If the Detweilers of the world take advantage of totally free remailers, they could end up limiting the privacy for all. The same "free" philosophy has killed many a porno/music/book site (or created absolutely long user queues reminiscent of food lines in the xUSSR) Spamming/Spoofing attacks on remailers must be dealt with. The situation is not helped by either-or logic. We need both ease-of-use and some notion of postage. -Ray -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- rjc(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu | politics is the implementation of faith. --

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Re: This List--Public, Private, or Other? (fwd)
by rjc＠gnu.ai.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal writes: > Because of these considerations, I think cyberspace is not really subject to > the kinds of ownership and control that we associate with private property. > Look at the Extropians list as an example. They try to say that the list > is private property and feel free to kick people off. But sometimes people > get disgusted with their autocratic practices and leave. The list ends up > losing value. The more they tighten their iron fist of ownership the more > individuals slip out of their grasp, to paraphrase noted cyberspace pundit > Princess Leia. (I say this not to disparage members of that list, which has > a lot of talented people, but because to me it is a good example of the mis- > application of the idea of private property.) > On the other hand, the list also tries to perform a useful function for many people which is to filter down the enormous amount of chatter conversation out there to make it easier to read. It's interesting to note that the people who left the list were not leaving because of our tight copyright rules but because they disliked the code-of-conduct rules with respect to politeness and the enforcement of them. Code of conduct is a form of property control which won't disappear even in a "free" cyberspace. People will still form electronic country clubs excluding the non-elite or the non-polite from their ranks. The Extropian's list copyright rules are mainly e-cultural politeness. Just as it is considered bad netiquette to forward private e-mail to a public newsgroup, the Extropian's list administration considers it inappropriate to forward private exchanges to public lists without prior permission from the author. Such a rule would likely be in place on "women only space" e-lists or abuse recovery lists. Although the cypherpunks membership list is public, I bet many cypherpunks would consider it inappropriate to sell or give away this list to direct electronic marketing agencies. The extropians list has its copyright rule also to create a safe-zone. One where you can speak your mind without worrying about someone publishing your words in a "usenet cd-rom archive" where your boss could see it. Until pseudonymity is easier to use, restrictions will have to stay in place. I see electronic copyright as mainly just good manners. > My model of the ultimate future of cyberspace emphasizes selectivity > and filtering of a huge corpus of messages, articles, essays, debates, > etc. The hard part is going to be picking out what is interesting to > you, and making your contributions in such a way that interested people > see them. I really don't think our current infrastructure of mailing > lists and usenet does a very good job of this, and I hope that in the > future better approaches will be possible. It's not clear what role > ownership will play in that system. I think mailing lists do a much better job of filtering than usenet where membership to a discussion group can not be moderated or limited. (it doesn't work in practice. it usually kills the group or e-sociopaths just bypass the insecurity of the system) I like AOL's "auditorium" model. In the future, people will still want to pay others for locating information, filtering, and formating it in the oceans of information out there. Lexus/Nexus, IQuest, and some of the financial report natural-language filters out there are good examples. Information itself would probably be relatively free, but useless because *finding it* would be the hard part. Electronic Consultants would make their money by hooking you up with the right database or search software, or sell you their personal time over an electronic market. -Ray -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- rjc(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu | politics is the implementation of faith. --

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Re: THOUGHT: Internation
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Jamie Lawrence: "Well, I guess we concieve of the meaning of the phrase "'right' to a job" somewhat differently. I see it as meaning everyone has the oppurtunity to earn a living." Except that you didn't say that, you said 'right to a job'. To me that means that there is a job in existence to which I have a right, or that one should be created for me so that I may be the beneficiary of it. "I also don't know that I think my job has anything to do with my purpose in life- If someone can find that to be the case, great, but otherwise it is just a way to stay alive while they are looking for the real thing, so to speak." Your basic purpose in life could be simply to maintain it while you or someone else figures out what it's for. Maintaining a life requires work, which is what a job is and does. The reference to a 'right' to a job is usually intended to mean that it should be provided, not just that the opportunity should exist. But in fact, no one is required to maintain another's particular existence; especially if they impress as being a purposeless being with no particular reason for being assisted in the maintenance of their purposeless life (i.e. there being no reason to be even *moved* to provide them with a job). It has been pointed out in my readings, that the Constitution makes a case for the *pursuit* of one's interest, to emphasize that it should not be hampered or prevented, but that it makes no case for the provision of that particular thing which one would pursue (like a house or a job). "I suppose I look at the alternative- that people don't have the right to earn a living, that doing so is a priviledge. How easy is it to get by without a job in this country? It can be done, but it sucks." People don't really have a right to do anything, yet they have the given means and a whole world & beyond, with which to do most of what they can imagine or anything they can manage. It's easy, when you know how. Blanc

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Burn 2.0 file deletion
by dwomack＠runner.utsa.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My Apologies! Mia Culpa! I've come across a really great freeware program called burn2.o for the Mac. I offered to send it to anyone who was interested... two people responded...and I promptly lost the e-mail addresses. Please e-mail me and I'll do better...this is a great little program! Regards Dave

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RE: rights in cyberspace <warning: long commentary>
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tmp: The point of the nation's bill of rights was to deal with the fear that the federal governing body would not understand sufficiently the principles in the Constitution, if these were not more precisely spelled out. The philosophically capable founders & writers of the Constitution & nation were able to think in terms of wide principles, but this was not expected so much from those who would follow after them. The intent of trying to codify guarantees was to try to present to their more limited successors the definite, specific crucial elements of the freedom to action which otherwise would be ignored. They were aimed at the government, because it was being created and because it was new & different, and because the people at that time were very familiar with what it meant to be insignificantly considered by a ruling class. They were trying to uphold their dignity as individuals whose manifested existence they thought should not be overlooked or easily mistreated by those to whom so much power had been entrusted. They were looking to a government to both be a tool for upholding and preventing the destruction of the values which they all were aiming for. They were looking to the government because that is all that they had at the time to think about, in terms of a means to achieve their goals. But that was a long time ago, and since then everyone has learned much about what is possible to the individual, as well as what is possible to a 'free' government and to a collective body of any group of people. Many concepts have been clarified, developed, refined. Some people have developed other ideas of how to live which do not require the use of an elected class to guard things which they (the elected) do not themselves actually value or know how to defend. We have many more tools now by which to exist more independently than ever, and some of us are prepared to use the opportunity to advance in that direction. You might have noticed that the 'cypherpunk ideology' has much to do with tools. I can't speak for the others on this list, especially those who set it up, but this is what I think: 'Tis a better thing to use a tool than to use another person. It permits of a different kind of association; it opens pu the possibility of conceiving another person more in terms of friendship and similar interests, compared to what exists in a community where people will gather for comfort against fear, or primarily for the utilitarian benefits the group can provide. There develops a change of proportion in what the 'community' represents to those who consort with each other. Considering how successful the bill of rights has been so far at creating a more perfect government, it is difficult to accept that another set of commandments would accomplish anymore than they ever have. Success does not depend solely upon what has been stated, but upon what has been understood; nay, further, upon the ability to understand the statement; and better yet, upon the ability to act in regard of it. To have to wait for recognition or for permission is too dependent upon the mercy of another. It is better to move forward into efficacy than to wait for the generosity of strangers, especially when it is for your own benefit. Where was the access to the internet before there were private companies? Where was the internet before it was constructed? What if no one had conceived of the idea at this time yet? We would all be effectively censored from cyberspace simply from the absence of a place to go! How does the existence of a government and a codified community relate to the existence of an electronic means to commune? I wouldn't expect that a bunch of, say, poets, just milling around, would result spontaneously in a network made up of wires and cables and hardware and software and . . . . things that make up what comprises the net, just from having the freedom to speak and assemble. Yet once each of these things had been created, and once the idea to use them in this speciallized way had occurred to some bright person, it is expected by many that they suddenly should have the right to use that system, as though they owned these strangers who happened to have a practical idea, and had therefore the right to use the results of their creativity. Codified behavior is useful to people when they are not prepared to make their own decisions about what they will do or in what manner they will carry out those actions to success. It is not useful to those who are venturing out into new territories or who wish to be creative and self-composed. It is not agreeable to those who wish to act from their own authority and take up the responsibility for their actions, because coding does not require thought, it only requires obedience; it doesn't require understanding, it only requires following, accomplishable simply by imitation; it doesn't require conscious & studied agreement, it only requires complicity. Codified behavior assures minimum expectations, but it does necessarily allow for enlarged perspective or insight. I personally would not want to fall into the category of those who need codified behavior in order to meet a minimum standard of normal social interaction. I would not wish to be a part of such a 'community', as I would be operating in a realm far beyond their expectations and ability to deal with. Individuals who go out into the sunless world of cyberspace should realize that it is an abstract atmosphere, where often little more than heat (vs light) is to be expected. How much can you care about digital data, how seriously can you consider it, how much will you allow it to affect you or push you out of shape? It could be more the money, the expense vs the reward, which could be anything to really worry about. Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh, My! You could do a little cost/benefit analysis of your involvements on the net and calculate that you might be more free by staying off than by staying involved or hanging on. But if you *are* so interested in the subject of codified rights, you should enter into a conversation with Dorothy Denning, as she also pursues the same vision of rights and laws as yourself. She would probably not only agree with you, but perhaps offer additional ideas as well. Blanc

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Re: REMAIL: Ray's improved anonymous remailer
by rjc＠gnu.ai.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal writes: >These mostly sound like great features. The virtual addresses are something >we have needed for a long time. The idea of keeping records of which remailers >are responding should help with the use of the network, too. The one problem >with this is that it might be tempting for the users to just trust the >remailers to choose their chain paths. It would be much better for the user's >own software to hook up, find out which remailers are operating, then choose >a chain. Ray's software will allow this, but this function could be split >off from the remailers to a specialized server, perhaps. Good idea. The remailer assumes a few things. 1) if you don't give an explicit chaining path, and chaining is turned on, the remailer automatically picks the remailers with the heaviest usage for chaining. 2) if you give an explicit path, do not override it unless a remailer in the path doesn't respond A better idea might be a sort of "domain remailer naming service" which locates users on a remailer network (instead of explicitly giving out the remailer that your virtual address is located on) This DrNS would have to be trusted and secure, but it does cut down the number of trust entities since you only have it to trust, not every remailer on the network which has a copy of where your virtual address is located. Julf's APS is sorta like this already. I like the decentralized approach best. Let's say you don't want any plaintext associated with your real e-mail address. Simply set up two virtual addresses as follows: Remailer1: foo -> rjc(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu Remailer2: AnonymousRay -> foo#remailer1 Now when a plaintext arrives at remailer2, it is encrypted for remailer1, and with *your* public key (associated with "AnonymousRay") if one is present. So one remailer sees (plaintext, foo#remailer1), the other one sees (ciphertext, rjc(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu) but neither sees (plaintext, rjc(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu) Of course, collaboration is a problem, but you can always increase the chain length to take care of that. You can include SASE standard cypherpunk remailer blocks too if you want to further confuse the issue. >I'm not sure about the advantages of remailers signing and encrypting messages >between themselves. It seems to me that the network should work even without >this. Ideally we don't want the remailer network to be too centralized and >close-knit. It's better for them to be strangers to each other since if they >coordinate their efforts they can defeat anonymity. Ah, I didn't explain this. Originally, I planned to implement some remailer network level commands such as "add/change my stats in your list of remailers", "put a link to this virtual user in your networking map", "change my public key", etc. To do this, I assumed that only *trusted* remailers would be added to your remailer network list so that only trusted entities could do network level commands (by signing them) and only trusted remailers could introduce other remailers to the network. Now I think I'll require the operator to do this stuff manually so if you change the parameters of your remailer, you have to manually notify others on the network and they have to update the configuration files manually. Encrypting messages between remailers is useful because you want to make sure there is no correlation between incoming requests and outgoing ciphertexts. You not only want to encrypt them, you want to alter the sizes of them. I didn't think it was wise to pad a 1,000 byte message out to a 100,000 byte message if both were in the "mix" Instead, I opted to "packetize" the messages and quantize the packet lengths to an operator configurable length. Each packet is encrypted separately and I'm investigating the feasibility of sending them through separate chains. The problem is, all the pieces must end up at some remailer where they are reassembled. This situation would be alleviated if there was a standardized remailer client operating on the receiving/user side. Even cooler, a telescript/postscript like language for splicing and dicing incoming mail streams. Sort of a PGP/Mail scripting language that can't do any damage executing scripts embedded in incoming mail. >>p.p.s. e-mail commands are of the same form as the extropian's mailing >>list, backwards compatibility with the cypherpunks pasting token is not >>supported. Why? All headers in the message are ignored (and in socket-mode, >>there is no header anyway) and the prefered mode of operation is to encrypt >>the body and the commands so no outside eyes can see the remail request >>destination nor the message subject. >This was one reason I suggested supporting both old-style CP and the >extropians-style syntax ("::Anon-To"). As Ray suggests, in some cases we >might not have message headers in the RFC822 sense. I think it is simpler >to think about a message which has remailer commands at the top. It was an easier implementation issue for me to just handle commands in the body vs. header and body. Putting commands in unencrypted headers seems to be a bad idea (especially if you are giving the remailer an explicit chain. You want to defeat traffic analysis, not help it) >> Socket mode provides a more secure form of operation by bypassing the >>standard sendmail delivery mechanism allowing a message to be >>piped directly to the remailer. In addition, the socket mode remailer >>functions as an information server allowing clients to request >>a publically networked list of public keys and up-to-date list of >>\rem servers. The port number can be anything but I'm suggesting we all >>agree to use port 2258. >The number of sites which allow users to run socket servers is far smaller >than the number which allow mail filters, so not many people will be able >to use this feature. OTOH the mail-only sites are generally of low security >and an owned-and-operated system should be able to use this feature. So it >is definately a plus for those who can use it. This works already. The remailer is written such that it doesn't care whether the data is coming from a sendmail STDIN stream, or a socket. All it does is redirect the socket to STDIN once the "DATA" command is given. Then, the same routine which processes the mail side of the server works on the socket data. The socket-mode is pretty much a 'free' feature (didn't take any special logic in the command processor). The software can run without it, but it works better for internet users. >Ray had mentioned above that these user handles can also map to encrypted >remailer strings. This way users don't have to trust any one remailer op- >erator to keep their identity secret. This need for trust is one reason >I am not enthusiastic about user#remailer1#remailer2#remailer3 as an >address, although it is admirably concise and easy to use. The problem is Karl Barrus suggested that I use the usenet style FIFO format as in, remailer1#remailer2#remailer3#user (like foo!bar!user) I'm not sure which is more intuitive, but I would like some feedback on this. I agree that one must trust a remailer operator, but I think there's already too much trust in the single non-networked remailer currently used. (operator logging easily catches any anonymity) >that it exposes the path to the first remailer in the chain. I really feel >that paths must use nested encryption to be of much value. Similarly, the >darkmodem#*#*#deepanon requires the user to really trust the first remailer >in the chain. Perhaps it deserves such trust, but I feel that a system which >does not require such trust would be superior. (Again, Ray's proposal is >broad enough that it will allow non-trust modes of operation, as I understand >it; my main concern is that these other options are so easy that they will >tempt people to be lazy and slip into modes where they are vulnerable to >unscrupulous remailer operators.) I agree completely. This is always the danger which is why I think remailers should have ratings, flags, and comments in the list of remailers, and that remailer operators should only include those that they trust. I also feel that virtual addresses should always be many levels deep. (user -> foo#remailer1 -> bar#remailer2 -> baz#remailer3 which is an encrypted Eric Hughes style cypherpunk remailer block. The only problem is that since Eric's software isn't part of the notification net, the software has no idea whether the remailer is up and running or not) Some security through obscurity will be needed. >I am really looking forward to seeing Ray's software. It sounds like a >good package of functions. Thanks. I still have a lot of work to do on it. I got side tracked for the last two weeks and my undertaking was a little too ambituous. When I announced it, most of the library I/O functions were done, but the major network logic still needs to be written. It should be beta testing in the next few weeks. Make any requests/suggestions now. ;-) Thanks for the comments, -Ray -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- rjc(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu | politics is the implementation of faith. --

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RE: Cyberspace, Crypto Anarchy, and Pushing Limits
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Timothy C. May: "And we'll be moving our trade, our entertainment, and much of our lives into cyberspace a whole lot faster than we'll be slowly moving into low Earth orbit and beyond. In fact, I consider that I'm already half-way in. In a few years, with Mosaic-like one-touch connectivity, with a plethora of network choices, with secure remailers and similar tools to anonymize my transactions, I'll be so far in there'll be [no] turning back." Reach over quietly and s l o w l y *push* the 'Esc' button. Actually, some of us could become quite bored and decide to go to the beach, instead. Sometime, someday (when you least expect it), you'll have to come out and do some 3-dimensional living. Blanc

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SecureDrive
by oriole＠world.std.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, I am interested in finding out about a package called SecureDrive. Any information about it would be gratefully received. Thanks in advance. Alan Poulter oriole(a)world.std.com

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