December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

e$: Seven Days
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- 12/15/95 Boston, MA Interesting things happened during seven days last week, which I spent mostly on the road. The focus of the trip was almost entirely on e$ and geodesic markets, so I thought I'd do a reprise of the "24 hours" post here for fun. Tuesday Woke up at about 6 and thrashed the e-mail pile for about an hour. I'm finding that I get up, do e-mail and then take a shower. Could trollhood be far behind? Usually, I have at least 100 messages in the mailbox first thing in the morning. Almost all of this is not for me, about 95% is e$pam fodder, of which 10% makes the cut. About 80% of the total is still cypherpunks -- so, what else is new? The NetGAK fight dominates all, and I get flamed by one of my subscribers about pumping so much of it onto e$pam. I ask him to send the flame to the list, but nothing ever happens. I figure that the more cogent NetGAK arguments deserve e$pamming because of my oft-debated contention that digital commerce is finanicial cryptography, and financial cryptography is a subset of strong cryptography, and attempts by nation-states to regulate commerce, and thus strong cryptography, are usually entertaining when they're not dangerous. These days, I suppose Duncan Frisell would call GAK-attempts entertaining, and Tim May would call it dangerous, and I fall in between somewhere. Sometimes, all of this reminds me of Barr Rosenburg, the popular 70's analyst-of- stock- analysts who made a whole lot of mutual fund managers feel much better about themselves and the efficient market hypothesis. His point was that if they didn't try to beat the market every day of their lives, there wouldn't be a market to beat. The best fund managers did beat the market on a regular basis, just barely, and that was the incentive for all the rest to try their hand at it. We all benefit as a result. We can buy a mutual fund, or just buy an index fund, and for the most part, we can be sure that the market will go up a reasonable annual amount on some long term average. I see progress against government interference in the net.market the same way. Just one of us can't really do it, but if all of us chip away at it, some of us more than others, then those "profits at the margin" begin to add up to a trend of government cluefulness about economic reality as far as geodesic markets on the net are concerned. One of the biggest clues of all is that strong cryptography is the lynchpin technology for any real peer-to-peer cash-settlement economy. They just don't get that yet. They will. The market is efficient. I get cleaned up, pack (always at the last minute, and always in a hurry) call a cab and go down to the Harvard Club on Federal Street to moderate the Digital Commerce Society of Boston luncheon. We had about 30 people and 3 no-shows, which is about par after three months of doing this. We also had about 10 new people, which is also par. Among them was a sizable contingent from the financial community, which is good, because I put the meeting in the middle of Boston's financial district on purpose. We had people from State Street Bank's bond room, some people from Fidelity Systems' advanced technology bunch, one guy from Mellon Bank's advanced technology group, and someone from Lehman, who I believe was another bond trader. Rich Salz, from OSF, was the speaker, and he talked about financial middleware for the internet. When I listen to someone like Rich, I'm always reminded of just how much I *don't* know. Among other things, Rich told the story about how someone had to fight tooth and nail to keep people from putting URLs into Super Bowl ads, because the net.infrastructure wouldn't pass the smoke test. Something about too much demand if they advertised Madonna's langerie for sale... DCSB is growing nicely, I think. We've got speakers booked out until next June, running the gamut from FSTC to Perry Metzger, we're keeping our Harvard Club bill paid, and everyone looks happy to meet someone else whose eyes don't glaze over when they talk about digital commerce technology and its consequences. The plane flight is boring, and I keep forgetting to get some kind of battery brick for shipwright.com, my PowerBook 180. To top it off, I've had it more or less plugged into the wall for a year, so the battery's gone. So, I read Forbes, and then the Atlantic, and then after a plane change in Chicago, I sleep until I get to San Jose, where Vinnie, a friend of mine from Apple, and my equivalent of Hunter Thompson's Samoan attorney, picks me up. I go crash on a futon in his living room, and wake up way too early. Wednesday. After waking up at 4:30, downloading e-mail and thrashing it all into food for Thumper, our ailing mail-server, I forestall trollhood one more time and get cleaned up to go outside. This time, it's to go hang out for three days at the Apple OpenDoc Cyberdog Coding Retreat, or "Kitchen", as they say at Apple. First, Vinnie takes me to his office at Apple Developer Technical Support (DTS), by way of a triple esspresso dumped into a large coffee (Vinnie's version of a weightlifter's ephidrine stack, I suppose) and a rather large cholestorol-festival breakfast at the Apple cafeteria. At Vinnie's office, I meet several of his workmates, including his shooting buddy Jeff, who, along with Vinnie, takes failed hard drives out to the shooting range periodically for durability testing. Jeff says there's something satisfying about the sound of AK-47 fire ricocheting off of the pride of Conner, Seagate or Quantum in the early evening after a hard day's bug-hunting. Vinnie, who got started messing around with computers when he was about 13, at MIT's AI lab in the early 70's, is also an ex-marine black-belt who teaches handgun safety and marksmanship. He has one of those humaniform target sheets pasted on his office window with tidy groupings over the middle chest and forehead, the result of a field trip that folks in DTS took one day to the range. After much arm-twisting, they persuaded Vinnie to take a few shots himself, and he squeezed off the above Glock magazine in about 8 seconds or so. That, the break-out picture of the AK-47 on his wall, the business card that says "DTS Sniper. One shot, One kill", and the Glock t-shirt with the rolled up sleeves over a few too many muscles under hair that's buzz-cut a little bit short, makes most liberals and other statists a little nevous. The small oval Oakley reflective sunglasses, don't hurt, I suppose. I have to say that someone actually pointed out all this out to me, a little later in the week. I'd never noticed it, really. I've known Vinnie for about 5 years now, and I think about Vinnie the same way that someone talked about Dick Butkus once. "Kind of a teddy bear with muscles." A very *smart* teddy bear with muscles. After taking the tour of DTS and meeting mostly normal people with the exception of Vinnie and Jeff, well, mostly normal people, anyway, we jumped into Vinnie's Toyota 4X4 with the firearm, punk band and right-wing bumper stickers all over the rear window and went over to Apple's City Center campus and the Cyberdog Kitchen. We were greeted by Jim Black, who was running the Kitchen for Apple, which consists primarily of 60 (for this kitchen, anyway, because of CyberDog; normally it's about 20) people with Macs in front of them trying to develop code in new environments for the first time. They do this over the course of 3 days, from 8 in the morning to midnight or later, punctuated by the occasional meal or presentation. Jim was the guy who flew me out here, so I figure I have to pay attention to him. Vinnie and John say relax, so I start paying attention to the kitchen itself, including fooling around with the various Cyberdog "parts", or objects. Cyberdog itself is a really cool idea. Effectively, it's an implementation of IBM's SOM object model for the internet. With Cyberdog, you can encapsulate any function in a part, kind of like a very small application on steroids. You can make parts like web-browsers, or mailers, or ftp-parts. In other words, parts for all the stuff you do on the net. My, uh, part-icular interest in this was the concept of OpenDoc and especially Cyberdog as "Geodesic" software, which was the topic of another rant, which turned into an article, which got me here at the Cyberdog kitchen. More to the point, my interest in parts comes from the ease with which one could do financial cryptography, and how developers of cyberdog parts could sell them on the net, preferably on a direct-to-the-customer basis, and for cash -- anonymous, of course;-). I had managed to get a "seat", a Mac, in other words, so that someone who actually was crypto-code-clueful could come in, and at least get up to speed on Cyberdog, and go play with it elsewhere. "Elsewhere", because of the ITARs of course. It seems that there were foriegn nationals in the room, Apple legal was more than a little bit concerned that something would be misconstrued somewhere in the bowels of Blair House. Also, there's the interesting problem of crypto-hooks as tanamount to crypto itself. I talked to more than one developer who thought he had skirted the ITAR issue all together, just by leaving crypto APIs there for other people to use. We had fun telling them all about just how hard their tax dollars were working *against* them in this regard. Anyway, all this "elsewhere" stuff was just fine, because the person I *could* get on such short notice, who was both crypto and OpenDoc capable, was Dave Del Torto, who could only show up for one day. However, in Dave I got cluefulness personified. Dave has done work for Qualcomm on Eudora, Digicash on ecash, and was under NDA to Apple for OpenDoc and Cyberdog already, and in addition, going to try to walk in with what there was of the PGP 3.0 code. Also, there were at least two well-respected Mac.Cypherpunks there working on code for their respective employers, not to mention several crypto/e$ people from Apple, all of whom were personally interested, and who will remain nameless. I was pumped. Playing around with the demo internet parts that Apple provided for Cyberdog was fun. Rather than a monolithic application like Netscape loading up when you start up a cyberdog part, you start up the part itself, and nothing else. When your browser needs mail it calls your mail part. When your newsreader needs to browse it calls your browser part. Of course, they can all call crypto or e$ parts as they need to. There's a history part that records where you were and what you did in URLs, and there's a notebook part you can stick URLs into if you want to keep them. The coolest ah, part, about all of this is that every one of these parts can be interchanged. It's also easy to see that if something gets popular like web-browsing, and people keep adding features to browsers, someone can come along and sell parts that do those features better than the browser itself can do, like bookmark management, for instance, and sell them separately. Feature creap dies in its tracks. This process is exactly the kind of "surfactant" effect that I had observed with the internet, which dissolves information into more and more dispersed pieces, and which had gotten me into all this trouble in the first place with the rant and the InfoWorld article. Couple this with the potential for geodesic markets on the net with e$, particularly with digital cash an micropayment schemes, and I thought I had something to say to these folks, which is why I was brought here to speak here in the first place. In an auditorium. With cameras and lights and videotape. And an audience with 200 people in it. As I had never actually done this before, I was feeling a little like Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man": "V-E-R-N, Vern..." So, along about noon, we jump back into Vinnie's assault vehicle (by granola-land standards, anyway) and we go to said auditorium, called "Town Hall". There, I spoke about, according to my notes, <big intake of breath> the books "Out of Control", and "Applied Cryptography", The rise of the pyramid paradigm, Bucky (Fuller) and Pete (Huber), The net as a geodesic and information surfactant, OpenDoc as geodesic software and code surfactant, cypherpunks, strong cryptography, anonymity,the four hoursemen, digital cash and digital bearer certificates, chaotic capital, Financial Cryptography for Dogs (Teaching Cyberdog to send you money in the mail), and of couse, Dissolving the entire status quo into a cloud of self organized chaos. <exhale...> All of which took 45 minutes of the hour and a half I was allotted. Fortunately, about 15 minutes into the Q&A period, I was rescued by Eric Hughes, who showed up with black cowboy hat (which is how you identify those "black hat" cryptographers, I'm told), to answer all the hard stuff. I was greatly pleased, not only to get bailed out, but also to meet Eric, who I'd only talked to on the net until a week before, when we had had an actual phone call to get his appearance here arranged. Probably the most interesting thing for me was watching Eric handle the guilty titters the audience got when he talked about the profit one gets from money laundering. "It's immensely liberating when thinking about this stuff to think like an illegal operative", he said. Meaning to me, of course, that you're not trying to break the law, but that you're trying to think about how markets work in their, er, extra-legal, unregulated form. Since a very large part of financial cryptography is about how to prevent being cheated in an on-line transaction without recourse to the law and eventually physical force, Eric's spot-on about this. Another thing he said that got me to thinking was that the "foregone alternative", or opportunity cost of removing advertizing is equivalent to the amount someone spends on sending you advertising. If, for instance, an advertiser spends $1 to spam your mailbox, it's probably going to have to be worth at least 1$ for you to block him. After my talk, Eric, Sameer (also in a black hat) and I were asked into a what turned to be a brainstorming session with several people from Apple and other places, who pumped us (mostly Eric, of course) about how best to implement digital signatures as quickly and securely as possible in the Mac OS, given that Apple's RSA-signatures-in-Powertalk idea isn't getting very far. Maybe something will come of it, maybe not. Hope so. After that, I went back to the Cyberdog Kitchen with Vinnie, where we met Dave Del Torto. Dave and Vinnie thrashed Cyberdog, and I schmoozed people and thrashed e$pam until dinner. After dinner, I went home to Vinnie's and crashed at the ungodly hour of 8:30. Thursday I wake up at 6:30 this time, and, checking the bank, find out that a wire from one of my sponsors for the e$ lists has arrived. Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy. That makes two, and I'm looking for 2 more for the time being, so send me e-mail, if you're interested, or check the web page at http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ for more details. Speaking of poor thumper, we upgraded the web software to WebStar, but the problem now is the list server, running on some freeware called MacJordomo, which works for normal applications, but was giving us fits, and crashing the server with annoying regularity. Vinnie got it rebooted, and we made an appointment to go see thumper for some surgery on Sunday afternoon up in Walnut Creek. Vinnie and I pile into his truck, almost accidentally monster-truck ourselves over someone with a no-fur vanity plate whose Tercel stops too suddenly, and went to his office so he could get caught up a little bit, after the obligatory triple espresso caffiene stack and vegetarian's worst nightmare for breakfast. Vinnie says something about this being an anabolic diet that weightlifters use. Actually, I started this about a month ago, and it works so far. I've lost about 25 lbs, and have only 165 to go... Vinnie, in his role as "Bob-handler", has negotiated a slot on the speaking schedule at the Cyberdog kitchen so I can rant at the people I came here to pay attention to in the first place, the people coding dog-parts... Yes, there's a joke, and I'll tell it later. So, I give a more Cyberdog-specific version of yesterday's talk for those who missed it. I got assisted from the aforementioned Cyberdog cypherpunks (Cypherdogs?... Nah...) on the uh, hard parts... The most important thing I tried to get across was the idea of parts paying their authors by mail. A part asks for money to be sent to the author, who sends the part a signed operating certificate, which enables the part to run. After lunch, Vinnie and I get on the road for San Francisco, stopping first for a pair of Lee Oskar harmonicas, in the key of A. I decide it's time to teach Vinnie how to play cross-harp. So I teach him how to bend a few notes while telling him about how I used to walk home from Fidelity in Boston wearing my blue suit, red tie, white shirt, and wingtips, walking into the sun, so I needed sunglasses, smoking a 45 minute Macanudo baseball bat, because I had enough time to smoke it, and playing blues harp, because I could, and the walk was boring... We're going to see a friend, who will also remain nameless for the time being, and who has just set up shop on Market street. After swearing me to secrecy, and swearing Vinnie to enforce my secrecy (good move that, swear Vinnie to anything, and it happens), they tell all about what they're up to, and it's big. Very big. The more I think about it, the bigger it gets, until fiinally I force myself to look out of the eighth floor conference-room window, and down Market Street. Sure enough, lumbering up from the waterfront is the Sta-Puff Marshmallow Man, straight out of Ghost Busters. I shake my head, and it goes away... So our friend and some of his friends go to a hotel lobby, where Vinnie gets to smoke a Cohiba for the first time, and then on to "Stars" for dinner, and then home to sleep in Vinnie's living room. Bizzarre dreams about the Marshmallow Man, drinking triple-espresso-in-black-coffee... Friday The last day of the CyberDog Kitchen. People are rushing around to finish their demo Cyberdog parts before show and tell this afternoon. I thrash e$pam some more, and meet with Stephen Humphrey, a contractor to Apple from Salt Lake City, who's writing a book on OpenDoc, and who seemed to be Apple's front-line code resource person at the kitchen. We talked about possible payment APIs for Cyberdog, and his forthcoming book, which I'm writing the preface for, for which he's going to pay me a few bucks in Mark Twain Bank's ecash, just so we can say we did it. I also talked Steven Roussey, of PartMerchant. He's developing a server which will sell OpenDoc parts on the net directly to Cyberdog users as they need them, and he's going to settle his transactions in ecash, among other things. It turns out, he *is* writing a payment API for Cyberdog, so that a part can hold the user up for money at periodic intervals and send it to the developer, through PartMerchant initially, but certainly in the long run, developers with permanent net presences can use this same API to collect their revenues directly. To me, that means a rather interesting scenario where copyrights and patents matter much less because developers get paid for the code which is being *used*, eventually maybe at runtime, and certainly at periodic intervals, or at a flat rate, or whatever the market will bear. I thanked him for all his efforts. Effusively. After lunch, it was time to do a "show-and-tell" of the Cyberdog parts that people had built in the past three days. People had done all sorts of stuff, including various tweaks on the reference Cyberdog parts to see if it could be done. The most important thing for me was seeing Java run in an OpenDoc part. This meant several things to me. The first is that I keep getting people telling me that Java and OpenDoc are competitors. Quite obviously, that is not the case. Java can run in any container, including OpenDoc containers. It also means that if competition for Java comes along, OpenDoc can run that, too. This also means that the need for monolithic applications to run Java, like Netscape, or any wild fantasy of Microsoft, is nonexistant. This becomes important because Macromind has a Java-equivalent, and it proves that others will follow. Just download a part on the fly from the PartMerchant, and you can run those scripting languages too. To me, the whole idea of economies of scale gets turned on its head in this kind of "geodesic" environment. If someone likes Java, they can write something better, and someone else will write a Cyberdog part to handle it. If someone likes that part, they can write a better one, and so on. This Darwinian, er, dog-eat-dog world can only lower software prices, and make better software. The people who benefit are the small developers, because they move, and can get paid, faster. I look at Apple like the US in the early 19th century, letting people homestead on the land by giving it to the people who develop it. Lincoln had to do nothing but give away rights of way to the railroads to make a transcontinental line a reality. Apple licences OpenDoc to developers as cheaply as possible, maybe giving it away as much as possible, and all these developers make Macs the platform of choice on the net, selling more Macs and Mac-clones in the process, just like the homesteaders made the land they moved onto more valuable, and eventually taxable. Only this time, there is no pristine wilderness or native americans to abuse. Cool. Finally the dog-part joke. Someone, riffing on the BBEdit "It doesn't suck" slogan said, "Cyberdog doesn't suck..." and someone in the crowd finished the sentence with "...it licks!", and someone else said, "Because it can!". And then there was a massive "EEEEWWWWWWW" from everyone else... Now *that* was disgusting... Oh, well, they'd been working from 8 AM to midnight plus for 2 days... After the show and tell was over, the kitchen was over, but Vinnie and I hung around for a while as people were packing up all the Macs Apple provided for the kitchen. While chatting with some of the OpenDoc evangelists, we talked about how OpenDoc, just like the net, was just like this vast unexplored territory. I said that Lincoln built the transcontinental rail road with -- and the woman who was the division head for all the OpenDoc evangelists finished my sentence and said "land grants!" with the strangest smile on her face. I think I connected there... After that, Vinnie and I packed up and went over to his office, hung out there while Vinnie did some of his own work, and then went out for dinner with a bunch of DTS people. Saturday I wake up at a normal time. Vinnie and I go out to Gold's gym and thrash weights with his buddy Ray from DTS, who's been working for Apple for 14 years and is, pound for pound, about the strongest guy I've ever seen. After breakfast, the purchase of two boxes of Macanudo "Prince Phillip" cigars, a visit to Rochester Big & Tall, and renting a tux for Vinnie for the Apple Christmas party, we pick up Cynthia, who's Vinnie's friend, and who, in addition to building the Apple OpenDoc website, helped Vinnie clang trashcan lids together to get people into the audience for my talk on Wednesday, not to mention asking pertainent NetGAK questions of Eric during the talk itself. Vinnie, Cynthia and I pile into her car and head out to a cypherpunks party somewhere in the hills near Los Gatos. After missing the turnoff twice in both directions, we finally arrive at a geodesic dome. Not missing the irony of this, having just given a talk at Apple on "Geodesic Software and Financial Cryptography for Dogs" I have to laugh a bit. This is an honest-to-goodness, straight out of the Whole-Earth Domebook, back to the land, llamas-and-all geodesic dome, complete with naked hippies in the hot tub. I come to the conclusion that this is going to be a great party, even if I only know people from what they've written on cypherpunks. I saw Sameer and Sandy Sandfort, who I had met earlier in the week, and Eric, of course, who was holding court with Roger Schlafly about patent esoterica when I came in. I saw Raph Levien, and the guy (sorry, can't remember all names) who was working on PGP3, who had a single paper copy of the PGP3 API to pass around, and Eric peppered him uncomfortably with interface call questions, ending most of Mr. PGP3's answers with "Oh, well, we'll wait until it's released, and then we'll deal with it", that is until someone let it be known that the hot tub was in fact open for business. At that, Eric fairly scampered out of there for the back porch, where the tub was. A little later on, after I was introduced to "the guy who wrote the game Gorp", who did something much more important later but I can't remember what, I had fun just sitting there in a denim bean-bag chair, looking up at the dome's ceiling, listening to people rant crypto for a while, with Cynthia noticed that, besides broad-brimmed black hats, cryptographers all have these Tolkein-wizard pointy goatees. Made me glad my attempts at facial fur had been constantly interrupted by the need to "clean up for company", me not being a real cryptographer and all... One of the people I met was Mr. Weinstein from Netscape. We chatted for a while, and I told him that he had probably won this year's Black Rhino Ammunition Inc. "Mr. Kevlar" award for his service in the cause of cypherpunkdom. He laughed. I didn't tell him that Black Rhino Ammunition was a fictional company dreamed up by the gun lobby to get a rise out of the Clinton administration, and that the Clinton administration had risen so much that they had banned the fictional company's fictional Kevlar-penetrating bullets... That, of course, was off-topic. ;-). Vinnie broke out one of the boxes of baseball-bat-sized Macanudos, and we proceeded to hang out on the back porch ourselves, killing insects and gagging llamas with tobacco fumes. I offered some to the naked hippies in the hot-tub, but they had better things to do than to stand wet and naked on a cold back porch smoking cigars. Eventually Vinnie and I were joined by three or four others, and their various frowning spousal and virtual-spousal units. A good time was had by all, albeit a little on the cold side, until Vinnie looks at my watch (Vinnie doesn't wear a watch) and says "Oops. Time for the next party", and I went in to get my Mac from behind the chair Eric was sitting in before he cornered Mr. PGP3 and then galloped off to the hot tub. This chair now had another guy sitting in it, and, as I had been doing all evening, I introduced myself, by way of retrieving my Powerbook. It was Tim May. I laughed, and shook his hand goodbye, which must have puzzled him a bit, got my Mac from behind him, and split. Tim May looks much different in person than he does on the net. On the net, he's this short, skinny-but-muscular, pushy guy with no beard who looks too young for his age. In person, he's exactly the opposite on all counts. Gooo figure. We headed into San Jose and the house of one of three people at Apple with the title of "Scientist". The guy who answered the door looked like a biker. Actually, he was a biker, colors and all. He was also the "Scientist", who had just achieved that apellation by working up through the ranks from Vinnie's department, Developer Technical Support. A very smart guy with an amazing collection of CDs (including the entire DiMeola canon), early 60's Dodges and Ramblers, guitars (including a 1959 Stratocaster), and, of course, Harleys. He also had a very hairy persian cat, named Freddy, and whose full name wouldn't surprise me if it was "Fat Freddy" of Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers fame... So, after the birthday party's birthday person opened all her gifts, Vinnie and Cynthia and I took off, leaving the remaining Macanudos behind for our esteemed host. We expect his outside smoke breaks on the Apple campus to take on the order of 45 minutes, while the cigars last, anyway... Sunday Today's mission was to go to Walnut Creek, where both my in-laws and the beleagered e$ server thumper lives. After we had breakfast with Jeff, of hard-drive durability test fame, who gave me all his old PowerBook 100-series batteries and chargers, Vinnie and I went up to Walnut Creek. We had lunch with my brother-in-law and nephew, who gave me warm regards from most of my other in-laws, who all came down with the flu that week, ;-), exchanged Christmas gifts right there in the Buttercup Diner, and then went on to the AG Group, where thumper lives. The AG group makes network monitoring software like Etherpeek and Skyline, and one of Vinnie's friends, a founder there, had let us hang thumper off of their internet feed. After thanking him for letting us in, and for putting thumper up for the duration, and hearing *him* thank his lucky stars he wasn't parasailing on Mt. Diablo this afternoon -- where the winds had just piped up to 70 mph -- we went into AG Group's machine room and began to perform brain surgery on thumper. Thumper, who started life as a Quadra 950 running httpd and Macjordomo, is now a PowerMac 8100 running WebStar and, soon, ListStar. We munge around on it remotely with Timbuktu, and, since we were having so much trouble between AIMS and MacJordomo, we're going to drop in AutoBoot so we won't have to have someone manually restart it for us. We brought up ListStar, and, deciding that it was way too much work to do that afternoon, brought it back down to prototype the e$ lists remotely and then upload them later. So now, we're waiting for a break in schedule so that we can do just that, sometime this week. I hope. So, we went back to Vinnie's house, by way of Fry's to pick up a battery brick, and Warehouse, to get the videos "The Decline of Western Civilization", and "Dazed and Confused". It seems that Vinnie wanted to relive his lost youth on both counts. Cynthia came over, and she, Jim (who's Vinnie's roomate), Vinnie and I ate pizza and watch Vinnie fast-forward through most of "Decline", except for watching the "Fear" segment twice, and then we actually watched all of "Dazed", which put a lump in my throat, seeing as I was Lafayette HS, '77, and in Vinnie's too, as he was Boston Latin '78. It seems this movie has cult status. Has nostalgia arrived for 70's dopers and acid casualties? It seems to have happened... After that, I thrashed e$pam and went to bed. Monday Vinnie had to help with the Open Transport kitchen. I hung with Cynthia for a while, and then we went down to the cafeteria, and met Guy Kawasaki getting his breakfast. Cynthia introduced me to him, and he gave me a "why should I know you?" look, but I did get to shake the man's hand, which means now I never have to wash it. Ewwwwwww. Finally, we went back to the Open Transport kitchen where Vinnie was working, said bye to Vinnie, and Cynthia took me to the airport, put me on the plane, and, as soon as we leveled off, I started writing this on shipwright.com. The battery brick works great. When I got home, I asked my wife how church was that morning. She said, "Bob, it's Monday." Oh. Right. It's Monday... Cheers, Bob Hettinga -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMNIti/gyLN8bw6ZVAQHzxwP/V1qCuwb5XAkyKxr3Tdkafwd/WcBhAKAb NVXryVnChBa1DmmL6UA24ZVIeO3ELZkkYc5N+4e5qsG5zE0gIt00ZP0NXEpr8Xxl AioYwTIvKt5sJKLzBb/uNxnivKuIU9zLwqJiJ4NwIzZDvfzUi9EdhPWV9Y42bQ5J +rnQpWEMtpA= =PXfA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Re: The Elevator Problem
by wlkngowl＠unix.asb.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Tue, 12 Dec 1995 09:11:45 -0600, David E. Smith wrote: [..] >The way I understand the system, in order for Alice to have Bob's key (and >vice versa) they each have to transmit a considerable amount of data about >their keys. Even if those data are in the form of "twenty questions," neither >knows anything about the other's key at the start. Is there something >painfully obvious that I'm missing? Oddly enough, I saw this posted the same night I saw the timing-attack against RSA announced. Is there a connection here? If we assume a hypothetical future where the current families of public key encryption can be easily broken, anyhow... --Mutant Rob

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Status of Apple proposal for wireless NII Band
by tkalil＠ARPA.MIL 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Administration sent a letter to the FCC asking that they move forward on the Apple and WinForum petitions. The Administration's reasons for supporting the allocation are given below. The full filing is on the NTIA server at http://www.ntia.doc.gov >> >> >> November 2, 1995 >> >> The Honorable Reed Hundt >> Chairman >> Federal Communications Commission >> 1919 M Street, N.W. >> Washington, D.C. 20554 >> >> Re: RM 8648, RM 8653 >> >> Dear Chairman Hundt: >> >> This letter addresses the petitions for rulemaking filed >> before the Commission in May 1995 by the Wireless Information >> Networks Forum (WINForum) and Apple Computer Company, Inc.[1] >> Those petitions request the allocation of certain spectrum in the >> 5 GHz band and the adoption of service rules for shared >> nonlicensed personal radio network devices. Both the WINForum >> Shared Unlicensed Personal Radio Network (SUPERnet) devices and >> the Apple National Information Infrastructure (NII) Band devices >> would allow operation of nonlicensed, high-speed, wireless >> networks with multimedia capabilities. NTIA believes that these >> new wireless technologies have the potential to enhance education >> and other community services. Implementation of these networks >> and the feasibility of spectrum sharing between the proposed >> devices and Federal users should thus be fully explored by the >> Commission. We therefore recommend that the Commission proceed >> with a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) so that the policy >> and technical issues raised by the petitions may be addressed. >> >> NTIA serves as the principal adviser to the President on >> telecommunications and information issues, including the >> Administration's NII and Global Information Infrastructure >> initiatives. In addition, as Federal spectrum manager, NTIA >> shares with the Commission jurisdiction over the frequency bands >> under discussion in the petitions. NTIA believes that the >> proposed WINForum and Apple devices could provide an important >> means of nonlicensed wireless access to the NII. Wireless >> networks can be more affordable than wired networks. Schools, >> hospitals, businesses, and others would thus have convenient >> access to communications networks with voice, video, data, and >> graphics capabilities without the expense and disruption that >> installing wired systems would require. >> >> As you know, the President and Vice President have launched >> an important initiative to connect all of our classrooms, >> libraries, hospitals, and clinics to the NII by the year 2000. >> This initiative, which promotes expanded access to computers, >> teacher training, and the development of compelling educational >> applications, has the potential to revolutionize our educational >> system, changing the way teachers teach and students learn. >> Students will be able to collaborate with their peers around the >> world, search digital libraries, use remote scientific >> instruments, and take "field trips" to on-line museums. As >> President Clinton said in a recent speech, "[e]very child in >> America deserves the chance to get the high-tech know-how to >> unlock the promises of the 21st Century." >> >> For this reason, the Administration strongly supports >> spectrum policies that will promote affordable, high-bandwidth >> wireless computer networks. Wireless networks, and nonlicensed >> networks in particular, can be a cost-effective approach for the >> countless schools in our Nation that need connections to the NII >> to enhance learning opportunities and provide young Americans >> with the skills they will need in the future. Wireless networks >> may be an important option for schools because they often face >> limited budgets and are prevented from entering the Information >> Age by inadequate wiring. Furthermore, the proposed devices >> could allow more students to have network access directly at >> their desks in their classrooms instead of in computer labs in >> other rooms. >> >> Other users will benefit from nonlicensed wireless networks >> as well. Small businesses that lack adequate wiring and that >> cannot afford access to wired networks could have affordable, >> convenient wireless access to multimedia networks. Such access >> could enhance productivity and efficiency. Health care providers >> would have the ability to transmit patient data, such as x-rays >> and MRI images, video recordings, medical charts, and other >> records, which would dramatically improve the efficiency of >> medical staff and ease the group diagnosis of medical cases. >> Moreover, NTIA believes nonlicensed wireless components of the >> NII will provide significant opportunities for innovators and >> small companies to make contributions to the overall mix of >> products and services available through the NII.[2] >> > ********************************************************************* Thomas Kalil Director to the National Economic Council The White House Washington, DC 20500 (p) (202) 456-2802 (f) (202) 456-2223 "What do we want? Bandwidth! When do we want it? Now!" *********************************************************************

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RES_ist
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

12-15-95. NYPaper, crypto-bizarrely: "Extremist Army Group at War With U.S. Policy." It is not known how large the underground group is but the Special Forces acknowledge the group's existence and says that it was not in violation of any regulations. Its newsletter, The Resister, available on the Internet, said it favored "strict constitutionalism, isolationism, laissez-faire capitalism, individual rights, limited government and republicanism," and opposed "statism, liberalism, tribalism, socialism, collectivism, internationalism, democracy, altruism, pull politics and the New World Order." RES_ist (10 kb)

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Re: NIST GAK meeting writeup, LONG part 3 of 3
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:22 PM 12/13/95 -0600, you wrote: >> The term "voluntary" implies (!) that people don't have to do >> something, right? If that's really the case, then the escrow agent >> should have no obligation to do what is called "voluntary." > >Voluntary GAK means the system is voluntary for the USERS, not for the ESCROW >AGENTS. What is the point of certifying escrow agents if they can still >thumb their noses at the LEAs? I disagree. The issue is one that might be called "standing." Who, exactly, is responsible to whom in such an arrangement. Let's suppose key escrow (for keys for non-exported encryption devices) is REALLY VOLUNTARY. In that case, the escrow agent's only legal responsibility is to the owner of the encryption device. The government isn't a party to this voluntary arrangement, and thus hasn't a complaint if the escrow agent refuses to comply. I could, for example, enter into a voluntary arrangement with an escrow agent so that he would be obligated to erase the key no more nor less than 5 days after he received it. If he did so 1 day after, and I needed the key, he would have breached his obligation to ME, but not to the government. Likewise, if he failed to erase the key, he would likewise be breaching his agreement with me. Unfortunately, I think you've fallen into the too-common trap of assuming that the government can insist, unilaterally, on people's behavior even absent laws which specifically require or prohibit specific performance. > The proposal is talking about throwing >CERTIFIED ESCROW AGENTS in jail for not complying with the authorities and >has absolutely nothing to do with users like you. But you haven't established that an "escrow agent" has any duty to the government. > I don't see how a system >where you don't have to register your keys but the escrow agents can be >imprisoned for not releasing a key in their possession is any less voluntary >to you. It _is_ less voluntary, because it interferes with my right to escrow my key with an organization that is willing to take the dispute to arbitrary levels of uncooperativeness with the government. I might insist, for example, that the organization only store the key outside the country (beyond the reach of US Courts) and require MY PERMISSION for them to release it to the government. I might also insist that they further encode the key so that only an independent foreign organization (out of reach of US courts) could provide the key to decrypt it. If key escrow is REALLY REALLY REALLY "voluntary", then such arbitrary restrictions should be do-able. >Certainly the whole escrow thing is a sham and it couldn't possibly work if >it were really voluntary (witness the documents FOIA'ed from the FBI...). Yes but... > We >all know that but there isn't anything sinister in the escrow agent >requirement for releasing keys under penalty of law Yes, there is. I STILL refuse to accept the idea that a "key escrow agent" (if he's keeping a VOLUNTARILY escrowed key, one not for export) must automatically be considered to be subject to the whim of government orders. > Believe me, if we continue to have >voluntary GAK with no escrow agent requirements or certification when (if?) >Mandatory GAK comes down the escrow agent certification and penalties will >most definitely be part of the deal. So I wouldn't worry about quibbling >over the voluntaryness just because of the proposed escrow agent >requirements. Here's why you're wrong. The government wants us to accept an arrangement they've described as "voluntary." (Naturally, we will refuse.) It is better to be able to show that we're refusing BECAUSE THEY'RE LYING about the "voluntaryness" of the system, because that makes us appear reasonable (which we are) and them appear unreasonable (which they are.) Playing along with their their assertion that the system is "voluntary" would make it look like it is we who are being unreasonable. So the position I'll take is this: "You claim you are willing to accept that the system be 'voluntary.' Okay, the only thing I'll tolerate is one which has the maximum number of 'voluntary' aspects. Anything less and you're lying." I'd insist, for example, on the unfettered ability to turn off the key escrow "feature" on the telephone (with a switch on the side, labelled "Good encryption vs. Big Brother's listening". I'd insist on its ability to talk to other telephones which have to corresponsing key escrow. Etc, etc, etc. If they resist, we can then say, "Oh, you must have been LYING about this system being voluntary! SO what else are you lying about?!? I think you're being unreasonable, so I have no intention of complying with ANY of your requests, however reasonable they may appear to be on the surface, because I cannot trust you!" And _THAT_ would obviously be a reasonable position. The key, however, is that we must expose the lying, and to do that we must use whatever inconsistencies we can. This is not "quibbling": It is establishing the credibility (or lack of it) of THE ENEMY.

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Java scripts to caputure remote timing info?
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I don't enough about Java to know if it is possible, but it's something to think about. Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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Re: e$: Seven Days
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:32 AM 12/16/95, Robert Hettinga wrote: [much elided] >This is an honest-to-goodness, straight out of the Whole-Earth Domebook, >back to the land, llamas-and-all geodesic dome, complete with naked >hippies in the hot tub. I come to the conclusion that this is going to I was one of the "naked hippies in the hot tub," for a couple of hours or so. >This chair now had another guy sitting in it, and, as I had been doing >all evening, I introduced myself, by way of retrieving my Powerbook. It >was Tim May. > >I laughed, and shook his hand goodbye, which must have puzzled him a >bit, got my Mac from behind him, and split. Tim May looks much >different in person than he does on the net. On the net, he's this >short, skinny-but-muscular, pushy guy with no beard who looks too young >for his age. In person, he's exactly the opposite on all counts. Gooo >figure. ??? Yes, I was surprised it was Bob, as I hadn't heard he was there. But, then, I had been in the hot tub and was in a state of torpor even afterwards. Also, I tend to sit and not partake of the frenzied shmoozing which so often occurs at these parties. I probably would've encountered Bob earlier if people were doing what I urge them to do at my parties: wear name tags. (I have a pile of name tags and suggest to people that wearing them is completely "voluntary" in the true sense--not the Newspeak GAK sense--and that they can of course choose to remain unknown to others. This helps greatly in recognizing and remembering names, and it's too bad name tags have been tagged as "uncool" by so many.) I guess to an outsider this party at the geodesic dome in the Santa Cruz mountains must've seemed like the canonical California experience, complete with hot tubs, redwoods, programmers, writers, etc. To us, it's just normal. By the way, in honor of the "geodesic network" and "geodesic payment systems," and the geodesic dome the party was in, I propose we rename "e$" with a more fitting name: "buckybucks." Or just "buckys" for short. ("Did you remember to replenish the buckybits?") --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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The Elevator Problem & Groucho's Duck
by tallpaul＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Dec 14, 1995 04:44:12, 'futplex(a)pseudonym.com (Futplex)' was kind enough to respond to my post on the elevator problem. I thought his response was insightful and appropriate but that the description of the problem had changed a bit since the problem was first posed. Thus this post. I've been thinking of the old game show hosted by Groucho Marx. You would "say the secret word and win $100." Getting the $100 was easy. The duck would drop down on a string with the money in its beak and you'd just pluck it out. Saying the secret word was also an easy problem to hack. You could just read the dictionary. Of course this hack didn't work in real time because the show only lasted 30 minutes, Groucho did most of the talking, and you had to say the secret word in normal conversation. All of this rather "limited the bandwidth." The elevator problem remains somewhat undefined as a problem. Several parameters are boundaries within which the basic problem must be solved. Two parameters are the length of time Alice and Bob will spend coupled against the desired level of security. Highly specific solutions are effectively impossible until these parameters are defined (or at least approximated). However ... My original solution involved a variation of Merkle's non-patented puzzles. Futplex stated, correctly, that this took a goodly amount of time to generate and transmit the puzzles and the security was "not so hot." My mind still returns to Merkle and the idea of solving the original elevator problem that could be geometric for Alice and Bob while being exponential for the other people on the elevator. The more I tried to focus on this aspect of the problem the more I just repeated the problem in my own mind. I felt that I was trapped in a "maze of twisty little passages, all the same." At this point, this holiday season, I had an image of Merkle sitting by the tree putting an infinite number of prime numbers in an infinite number of boxes. (In the real world I've been fighting with my landlord and suddenly thought of Cantor's first description of the landlord's dilema where a landlord has an infinite number of rooms, all full, when another guest shows up and wants a room.) At this point, I suddenly had an image of Cantor sitting on the floor next to Merkle. Merkle would pack an infinite number of boxes and hand each box to Cantor who would proceed to wrap each box in an infinite number of sheets of wrapping paper. Suddenly, I saw that my first suggested solution put all of the major work on Alice. She had to generate 10^6 prime pairs and send them all to Bob then brute force an average of (10^6)/2 attempts to discover the one pair Bob picked ot factor. This process *might* be speeded up if Bob would, Cantor-like, help out. In other words, have Alice generate and transmit 10^3 prime pairs and have Bob do the same. This cuts transmission time by 5*(10^5), a considerable savings. Then Alice and Bob each have to brute force an average of 5*(10^2) attempts to discover each others primes, for a similar savings. However, you still need a nonpatented algorythm that lets them use the four primes to encypher their message(s) while forcing the others on the elevator to factor an average of (10^3^2)/2 products instead of 2*((10^3)/2). This is still very far from a solution to the elevator problem as re-posed by Futplex but creates at least one way of *potetentially* shortening the prime generation and transmission time issue he was kind enough to point out. I now feel that I am only "trapped in a maze of twisty little passages, all different." Comment, Futplex? --tallpaul

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Algorithims ?
by john.ellis＠wmcmail.wmc.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Were can i get a set of the most popular algorithims from for encryption, and does any one have and info on the algorithim used in the second WW by the germans, (The Enigma system) any info would be greatfully recieved Cheers John

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DEC Alta Vista
by Joel McNamara 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Check out Digital's new Web and newsgroup search engine at: http://www.altavista.digital.com/ Makes OpenText, Lycos, etc. look like turtles. Crypto-relevance: The spider they used appears to have fully indexed the HTML Cypherpunk list archive. Extremely fast searches on your favorite topics... Joel

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