December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: SSL trouble
by droelke＠rdxsunhost.aud.alcatel.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >PS3: I'd like to get the raw date in brloop (a sh script). In perl I'd just > > use "time", and I can't see a way to get "date +" to yield the raw time. > > I could use "date=`perl -e 'print time'`" but that seems OTT, and perl > > may not be on teh users PATH. Any suggestions ? > > "date '+%s'" does it under BSDI, but I'm not sure how portable it is. > That doesn't work under SunOS 4.1.x, but this does: date "+%S %M 60 * + %H 3600 * + %j 86400 * + %y 31536000 * + p" | dc This assumes 365 days/year, so if you jump from a leap year to a non-leap year it won't work right. Hey - a 1/1460 failure rate is better than most Windoze programs I've used ;-) It also isn't the "absolute" time, (as given by time()), but gives a number of seconds that constantly increases. With a little more work you should be able to adjust this to be close to time() functionality. Dan ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan Oelke Alcatel Network Systems droelke(a)aud.alcatel.com Richardson, TX

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e$: Carts, horses, other dromedaries, and the needle's eye of economics...
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: rah(a)mail.shipwright.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 11:05:54 -0400 To: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com From: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: e$: Carts, horses, other dromedaries, and the needle's eye of economics... Sender: <e$(a)vmeng.com> Precedence: Bulk List-Software: LetterRip 2.0 by Fog City Software, Inc. List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:requests@vmeng.com?subject=unsubscribe%20e$> List-Subscribe: <mailto:requests@vmeng.com?subject=subscribe%20e$> At 5:51 pm -0400 on 8/9/97, Somebody wrote: > I couldn't imagine more depressing news. The linking of > internet + banking + fraud + organized-crime + offshore is precisely the kind > of negative publicity which will set back e$ <...> horribly. I > desperately wanna cry "Say it ain't so, Joe!" Oh, well. We move on. All > the more reason to find some topflight Swiss, Belgian, Brit or German bankers > to play. But, this will make _them_ doubly shy, too. Agreed, but this Russia/Antigua thing is *really* not a big deal. Expatriation of assets is a completely orthogonal issue to the adoption of digital commerce and financial cryptography. That's because financial cryptography is about vastly improving the financial system, and not at all about killing the nation state to save our freedom. (I knew I'd get your attention with that one... :-)) Personally, I believe that the use of strong financial cryptography is the way that the internet will bring about the death of the nation-state, and I'll be extremely happy when that happens, just like a lot of industrialists rejoiced in the decline and fall of the aristocracy. However, the nation state will adopt financial cryptography and digital bearer settlement because it *has* to, economically, the same way that aristocracy adopted industrialism of its own economic necessity, an act which ushered in the nation-state and their own political demise. Like all technological progress, strong financial cryptography should enable you to do better transactions much cheaper. Technological progress cannot be commanded or stopped with a political decision, as any student of the Spanish inquisition, or Stalin, or Mao, will attest. Clearly, politics may be why you try to invent things in the first place. Diffie invented public key cryptography and Chaum invented blind signatures for political reasons, obviously, but their technologies themselves are value neutral. They're just facts, not political opinions. Remember what happened to government mandated technologies of the past, like synthetic fuel subsidies and the 'alternative' energy debacle -- or Lysenko. Paradoxically, even though people may invent things because of their politics, the unpredictablity of invention's outcome is such that it is in fact science -- reality -- that creates politics, and not the other way around. The political cart cannot be put before the economic and technological horse. So, at the risk of using a "utilitarian" argument ;-), discussions about the "politics" -- even the constitutionality -- of technology is a waste of time. This is particularly the case in discussions about the politics of financial cryptography, and, I daresay, all cryptography. It's the economics of the technology that matters, and since financial cryptography is by its very definition an economic technology, appeals to politics are even more irrelevant in discussing it. Cypherpunks knew this a long time ago, by resisting attempts to herd them into some kind of political action committee or another. "Cypherpunks write code", and all that. Of course, it doesn't keep us all from political kibbitzing -- or writing the occasional screed. :-). Just like any successful technology, if a politician gets in the way of financial cryptography, economic progress should eventually make so much money that it simply buys him out of the way. If it can't afford to to do that, then financial cryptography on public networks won't be adopted. Cynical it may be, it's still that simple. So, to my mind, the whole question of going offshore is now pretty much immaterial. We understand now how to do the trustee/boundry-layer work at any institional trustee bank. We're pretty much at the stage where we can walk right into the front door as a customer of giant institutional banks like State Street, or Banker's Trust, or Morgan Guarantee -- or even the Fed itself. Any bank who wants to hold reserve accounts in trust and to handle the funds transfer work on behalf of digital bearer cash users on the net, which any of these kinds of banks will do now already for clients like investment banks and mutual funds. We understand things well enough now to plug the net right into the existing financial system, on simple terms that it understands completely, without any legal problems whatsoever. And, because of this, we can also turn right around and do all the things we want to do on the net completely legally: blind signatures, anonymous transactions, and all. And, frankly, we'll be cheered by the financial and business community when we do, because we'll probably reduce the cost of cash transactions by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, or more, not to mention creating *profitable* transaction sizes, from picodollar to teradollar, never before seen in the financial community. That's because the reason for adopting blind signature technology is not that you will pay extra to use anonymous bearer certificates, absolutely not. It's that because of their very anonymity, which enables you to trust someone who you can never know, digital bearer certificates will probably be much cheaper to use than non-anonymous digital cash or book-entry settlement methods, just like cash would be cheaper to handle if it weren't physical. Which is, of course, the point of blind signatures in the first place. So, if people who sell pornography, or have illegal businesses, want to get their money onto the net under newer bearer certificate market models like trustee/underwriter, they should be able to use their own banks to do so, like everyone else would. All criminals of any real stature have banks who know them and love having them as customers anyway. In addition, people will figure out other non-bank ways to get money onto the net if they want to, especially if there's something to do with it when the money gets there. I expect that there will be lots of net.smurfs who will continually find new and better ways to convert meatcash into digital cash, and law enforcement will have to use the same methods they use now, probably at the same success rates they now have, to stop that activity. Frankly, there's no difference between all that and the status quo anyway, so I really don't anticpate the market for forensic accountants to crash anytime soon. It doesn't matter anyway. All of this concern for potential illegal uses of e$ is in fact peripheral to the main chance, the central economic fact that strong financial cryptography on geodesic public networks, anonymity and all, is going to revolutionize finance and it thus *will* end up legal in its own right, whether it is or not today in your particular jurisdiction. The potential for criminal use of financial cryptography is simply noise compared to the techtonic economic benefit derived from having a ubiquitous geodesic economy, and frankly, most people in the central bank and economic strategy business know this. Ironically, these denizens of large central bureaucracies are turning into some of the biggest behind the scenes cheerleaders of the technology of financial cryptography. They understand that a nation state which makes the mistake of criminalizing or even controlling financial cryptography (and thus any strong cryptography at all) will go the way of all the nations which ignored the very industrialism which made them the powers they are now. Just like the inquisition killed Spain as a world power when it killed science (and thus literacy) in the name of religeon, effectively exiling it's entire intellegencia to Amsterdam and London and Geneva, so too will any nation state kill itself if it ignores internet bearer settlement. Except that the "country" the money goes to will not be someplace like Antigua, but the very net itself, which is everywhere and nowhere, all at once. Fortunately, we don't even have waste our breath making that argument. We just need to develop the technology on the critical path, which means that our business as developers and sellers of financial cryptography products is to create the ability for people to spend money on the net with as little concern as possible for who they are, biometrically. The cheapest way to do that right now is to use a certificate purchaser's existing bank to authenticate them, coupled with some combination of back-channel, and eventually internet-tunneled, automatic teller network and ACH/Fedwire transactions, all of which gets meatspace money in and out of a trustee's reserve account. This will solve all our authentication issues and make the user's money convertable into digital bearer certificates, all with no great mental leaps from the banking -- or regulatory -- communities. All the underwriter sees is an authorization from the trustee to issue certificates, and then anonymous certificate exchanges after that. All the trustee sees is authorization and a promise from the purchaser's bank to wire funds to cover what for all intents and purposes is an ATM withdrawl. All the purchaser's bank sees is a request from an account holder equivalent to an ATM withdrawl or deposit. All the buyers and sellers see is money and goods. :-). Nobody knows who does what to whom, anymore than they do with handling and accounting for cash in meatspace, and every's happy. And, ironically, everyone's accountable enough to the regulatory authorities for the time being. If we let the existing banking system handle the authentication at the meat/net boundry layer in this fashion, all the feared jurisdictional and regulatory problems for digital cash and digital bearer certificate finance are instantly defined out of existance. Even FinCEN itself knows it can't police cyberspace if book entries are economically impossible there. They also know that they can do their jobs just fine for the time being by tracing money up to the net, and watching for it to come out somewhere else. Detective work will never go out of style. Fortunately for cryptoanarchists everywhere, financial assets will someday just stay on the net, because the net is where the information that feeds markets for financial assets will be in the first place, just like industrial assets ended up in cities because that's where the information to manuplate them was. The millenium will have arrived. To continue in the millenial vein, we can continue to render unto Caesar all the financial information he can force out of us in meatspace, because the "kingdom" of net is where all the real money will eventually be, and he can never go there. To beat our aforementioned and, only-apparently-defunct wagon-pulling dromedary anology with a rather large ironic stick, it will be easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than it will be maintain a nation-state in a net economy. Even more fun, economic necessity dictates that the camel, or whatever other, say asinine, dromedary you have in mind, will have to build the needle's eye the rest of us will walk through, or they'll go out of business. Cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info(a)hyperion.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------- Like e$? Help pay for it! See <http://www.shipwright.com/beg.html> Or, for e$/e$pam sponsorship, <mailto:rah@shipwright.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 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 e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Re: Florida Drivers Permits
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:55 AM 8/29/95 +1000, you wrote: >>>Better would be to figure out the encoding scheme and post it here. >>I like this, myself. It'd be nice to be able to have the picture of my >>choosing instead of a digitized thumbprint... > >I think the officer arresting you would frown if your license dumped a nudie >picture of Cindy Crawford instead of your identification details. Yeah, but your basic thumb-shaped black smudge might look believable... #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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Re: Florida Drivers Permits and a Hello
by Jonathan Zamick 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:55 PM 8/28/95, Mark wrote: >>>Better would be to figure out the encoding scheme and post it here. >> >>I like this, myself. It'd be nice to be able to have the picture of my >>choosing instead of a digitized thumbprint... > >I think the officer arresting you would frown if your license dumped a nudie >picture of Cindy Crawford instead of your identification details. > >Sounds like a great way to smuggle nuclear secrets out of a country tho :) What is the capacity of the mag strips. Do they carry much more than some ID code for computer reference? It seems unlikely that there is enough storage for a thumbprint. Some vitals perhaps, but again it would most likely simply be a speedier way of referencing the card holder's supposed True Name. (After all they'd have to be checking driving record information as well.) Still decrypting the cards would be amusing, just to aggravate those who become to used to the convienience. 'Oh.. sorry Governor Wilson... my but you look different up close'. Being in California, I've avoided getting a Cali license due in large part to the use of thumbprints. Perhaps I'm being silly, but I find it difficult to give up such vitals. Its the sheeplike way the majority of the population happily gives up its remnants and shreds of privacy which makes this such an important area. As for the Hello mentioned in the subject line... A few of you may know me already. I work for Consensus Development. We're going to be able to license out RSARef commercial use quite soon. Some of the people I've talked to have asked me to jump on Cypherpunks, so I've been going over the archives on the Cypherpunk list, and while rather large, I'm quite pleased to see the high content/noise ratio here. Anyway, my task is to get in gear as the Knowledge Officer for RSARef, and I am currently putting together the new RSARef discussion lists. Since I don't have the constitution (or obligation) to be a salesperson I'll leave the RSARef stuff at that. If you do have questions, or want to be put on the RSARef announcement list, drop me an email. Jonathan Zamick (Off to play with PGPFone.... how happy am I? :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ..Jonathan Zamick Consensus Development Corporation.. ..<JonathanZ(a)consensus.com> 1563 Solano Ave, #355.. .. Berkeley, CA 94707-2116.. .. o510/559-1500 f510/559-1505.. ..Mosaic/WWW Home Page: .. .. Consensus Home Page ..

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Re: Using Hotmail as an exit remailer
by last deliverer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Looks like hotmail is double spacing the output. Easily fixed, change $msg = &escapetext(join("\r\n", <STDIN>)); to $msg = &escapetext(join("", <STDIN>)); ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

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Re: Bet e$ on how long it will take for PGPFone to make it overseas!
by Alex de Joode 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Censored Girls Anonymous sez: : I thought I saw a version over at ftp.hacktic.nl already. : I tawt I taw a puddy tat. I did, I did taw a puddy tat! : And it's been in the incoming directory for all weekend too! It's now relocated to ftp.hacktic.nl:/pub/pgp/pgpfone Also aussie SSL and SSLapps have been made available at /pub/crypto/SSL /pub/crypto/SSLapps A dir has been added for Crypto Libraries (Wei Dei, RSAREF and DES) /pub/crypto/LIBS Also a dir has been added for Crypto apps (CFS, SSH CTCP etc) /pub/crypto/CRYPTOapps Enjoy ! -- Alex de Joode Replay Communication and Internet Services usura(a)replay.com Inet Consulting, Web Authoring, Trademark http://www.replay.com and Copyright Consultancy.

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Re: SSL trouble
by Will French 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Scott Brickner writes: > Then what do you care about the group's procedures? It > doesn't "prevent you from participating" --- you *aren't* > participating. You're attempting to solve the problem on your > own. This distinction is valid in the current series of academic exercises. However, if we were actually trying to break something important, anything that might accelerate the crack would be a form of participation. And as Nathan Loofbourrow has pointed out, the random method is much more secure against real-world retaliation. It's also the only method that will work for me; I use a shell account, and I never know in advance when I will get time on the computers at work (which aren't on the net at all). I _don't_ care about the procedures, as long as I can get the information I need to go my own way. Will French <wfrench(a)interport.net>

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A peculiar notion
by Steve Schear 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For those who think that a convenient liberal interpretation of our Constituton, a 'la Justice Brenan, is a relatively recent phenomenon, I offer: --------------- Rethinking Lincoln and his peculiar notion By Joseph Sobran War usually isn't worth the price, even when you win. A new collection of essays, "The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories," edited by John V. Denson (published by Transaction), takes a new look at our wars without the mythology that portrays them as not only worthwhile but gloriOUB. The contributors to this stimulating collection agree that most of our wars have had the ultimate effect of strengthening government at the expense of liberty and the rule of law. One of the most provocative essays in the volume is the historian Richard Gamble's essay "Rethinking Lincoln." Today Lincoln is a demigod to nearly everyone, with intellectual celebrants on both the Left (Gerry Wills) and the Right (Harry V. Jaffa). We seldom ask whether he was justified in making war on the seceding states. Yet in his own time, this was the crucial queation. The Southern states declared their independence in emulation of the original 13 Colonies, and many Northerners recognized their right to do ao. On what grounda did Lincoln deny that right? On grounds that these states permitted slavery? No, because that would have invalidated the 1776 Declaration, which Lincoln, like most Americans, held sacred. Some other reason had to be found. So Lincoln chose to call secession "rebellion" and "insurrection" - an uprising against the sovereign Union. He managed thus, Mr. Gamble points out, by subtituting for the actual early history of the Union his own version of the American founding." Lincoln offered the. peculiar notion that the Union had somehow pre-existed the Constition, the Articles of Conderation, and even the Declaration of Independence, and that no state, therefore, could withdraw from it. The Union is older than the states," Lincoln argued; "and, in fact, it created them as states." But, as Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, pointed out, the Constitution had been "a compact between independent states." The powers given to the federal government had been "delegated," and whatever is delegated can be withdrawn. In fact, several states had ratified the Cosstitution on the express condition that they could reclaim the delegated powers and secede at any time. Since the right of secession had been stipulated without challenge in 1789, either the states had retained it or their ratifications had been invalid. Lincoln simply ignored this dilemma. His argument implied that the states had had no choice but to ratify the Censtitution, since they belonged to a Union from which there was no exit. "In Lincoln's mind," Mr. Gamble observes, "the Union was not only perpetual, antecedent to the Constitution, and the creator of the very states that now sought to leave, it was also a spiritual entity, the mystical expression of a People." A superb lawyer, logician and rhetorician, Lincoln must have known how feeble his argument was. Before becoming president, he had several times affirmed the right of any people, sufficiently numerous for national independence, to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose." This was sound Jeffersonian doctrine, and his later sophistical attempts to wriggle out of it must have embarrassed him. In his prosecution of the war against the Confederacy, he claimed, with similar sophistry, powers that, under the Constitution, properly belonged to Congress, including the powers to raise an army and navy and to suspend habeas corpus. He just)fied himself on grounds that Congress would have done these things had it been in session-which Mr. Gamble calls a peculiar defense of his behavior that conceded his guilt." By Lincoln's wartime logic, no state can ever have the right to secede, no matter how flagrantly the Constition is violated by the federal government. The Civil War, waged in the name of the Declaration actually resulted in the practical abrogation of its principle that any just government must have "the consent of the governed." Lincoln insisted that he was violating parts of the Constitution only to save the whole; but the war ultimately left the interpretation of the Constitution at the mercy of the government it is supposed to restrain. In short, the Constitution itself was a casualty of Lincoln's war. A Pyrrhic victory indeed.

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e$: A CALL FOR FOUNDERS: The Boston Society for Digital Commerce
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A CALL FOR FOUNDERS The Boston Society for Digital Commerce A few weeks ago, before my San Francisco trip, I had a great lunch with Peter Cassidy, a contract writer and industrial analyst. Cassidy writes stuff on digital commerce and other net.things for the Economist, Wired and a number of other drier trade rags and authors the occassional market research piece for industrial research firms around Boston. As disparate our backgrounds and life experiences may be, our luncheon was reminiscent of the original AA meeting. We gibbered at each other for two hours about strong crytography and the enormous potential of Web-mediated commerce and the effects of both on life, the universe, and everything. It was marvelous for two informed parties to share thoughts on the substance of the revolution at hand, undistracted by hype and hyperbole that too often haunts these subjects. I went on to hang out that night with a couple of pals from my school days at Chicago and they had *no* idea what I was talking about, though they could tell it had me pretty animated. Both Peter and I figured we needed to have a regular fix of this, and we both figured that there are others in Boston who would benefit from the same experience. People in Boston who have someunderstanding of the financial markets, the internet, strong cryptography and the consequences of mixing the three: digital certificates, the potential for absolute anonymity, and geodesic markets for everything from financial instruments to software to professional services. People in Boston who would like to meet once a month or so in a function room somewhere downtown, have lunch, and listen to a speaker or see a net.demo, or just hang out and gab on some aspect of digital commerce. So, to quote Andy Hardy, "I've got a barn! Let's have a show!". I've made some calls, and I can get a meeting room for a couple of hours and a nice lunch for 20 people in downtown Boston for about $25 a head as a starting point, subject to demand and scalability. I figure the agenda of the first meeting will be an introduction of everybody, and organizing some kind of structure for further meetings: programming and anything else we need to do to get the next meeting(s) organized, including picking a name. The imposing name "Boston Society for Digital Commerce" is just prima facie, subject to change at the first meeting. At the moment, I'm looking at a meeting date of Tuesday, October 3rd, and at a location to be named later for lunch, say from 12:00 to 2. I'll give you a hint: it's a 30th floor room overlooking the Charles from downtown , and, yes, you need a coat and tie. I figure I'll collect checks payable to the place where we have lunch, with, say, a registration cutoff of 2 days prior to the event, so I can get the room paid for in advance, and so we can bootstrap this financially until we come up with a better method for doing things. How to Sign Up: Reply to this message if you're interested in helping this get started, or if you just want have lunch and talk shop with people who'll actually understand what you're saying, and I'll give you all the details. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Test
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

test

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