December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Recipients get the postage
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:05 AM 6/19/96, Hal wrote: >I was reading old threads on remailers, where various ideas were >suggested to reduce abuse. One was to charge postage, in order to >discourage spam and somewhat discourage nastygrams, as well as to >compensate the remailer operator for his risks. A variant was to tell >the recipient that he had anonymous mail waiting, and possibly charge him >to receive it. > >I had a different idea, which has probably been suggested before: make >the sender of the anonymous mail pay, but pass the money to the >recipient. An interesting variant; I would certainly like to see _any_ of the various digital postage ideas tried. Alas, none have (save for Sameer's option for charging for remailings). However, I can see some problems which I think would arise with Hal's "recipient gets postage" scheme. * in an ecology of several types of remailers, some not charging postage, some charging postage (with subcategories of some giving the postage to the recipient and some keeping the postage for themselves), who would use the postage variant? (This is a recurring situation where some services are free and some are not. I fully realize that some paid services prosper (duh!, as we still have thriving economies) even where free alternatives exist. That the various newspapers continue to sell, or that premium t.v. channels on cable thrive, when "free" alternatives exist is just one example. How paid remailers would compete with free remailers is a topic we've written much about.) * the "cost" of remailing is not borne by the recipient, in the current situation, so why should a "remailer gets postage" system have advantages? * a recipient may "demand" payment for remailed messages, e.g., by adopting a policy of saying "Unless I find 37 digicents per 10KB of size, I will dump the message...so if you want to reach me, pay me." This "works" by the simple expedient of being a demand that is adhered to. (In this case, the recipient of a message is "selling" a commodity: access to him. The senders of messages can either accept his terms or reject them.) [Note: Current e-mail systems are not very market-based. Metering is almost nonexistent, and it's as if anyone could mail a ton or two of horse manure to anyone for no cost. I expect this to eventually change, and one way it could change is for mail clients to refuse to accept delivery unless certain conditions were met (who the sender is, how much payment is attached, etc.). The ontology of physical package and mail delivery systems has some lessons, though not all translate easily into the Internet domain.] * but it seems to make little sense for a remailer, absent such a demanded price, to give up his postage fee to a recipient! I'm not saying such a system could not work, only that I would not expect a free market ecology of remailers to evolve this as a stable evolutionary strategy. I would expect a more likely future stable strategy to include some combination of payments demanded by remailers and some payment or the like demanded by terminal recipients. >All my complaints come from people who have received mail, never from >people who have sent it. So obviously the steps we take need to make >recipients happier. Paying them is one way to do it. Not to be flippant, but the job of making recipients happier is probably not ours. We don't know whether a digital dime will make them happier for receiving a threat, or a flame, or a 10 MB coredump file. This is why it is up to the recipient to set policies, prices, etc. (Ditto for the remailers, as only they know how much it is worth to them to remail a given message, depending on packet size, perceived risk to them, etc.) Again, I always enjoy gedankenexperiments about digital postage. But I am chagrinned that nearly four years after the first remailers we are still operating in thought experiment mode for the most part. I believe this is because there really is very little market at this time for anonymous remailings. Those who mostly use remailers appear to be willing to use casual-grade remailers, with few of the real Chaumian protections. And they are not very concerned about reliablity, cover traffic, etc. Digital postage would be a bothersome wrinkle and would be routed-around by most. Ergo, no commercial-grade remailers, no insistence on robustness and reliability, no digital postage, and no interest by Microsoft! --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Federal Key Registration Agency
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:20 PM 6/20/96 -0400, Michael Froomkin wrote: >I have seen the text of the speech. The wire service accounts wildly, >wildly exaggerate. This is a non-story...except for AG Reno's assertion >that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a >"supercomputer". She presumably believes this. We know the number for >known plaintext attacks, but assuming you don't have a known plaintext, >what's a more reasonable assumption? If done in parallel, on a dedicated, 200 MHz custom chip, my WAG says that such a chip could try, and statistically analyze the results of 10 million DES codes per second. (it would do the decrypts on a number of parallel DES blocks, and look for typical ASCII code pattern probabilities, again all in parallel.) A typical cracking system might have 100 boards of 100 such chips, or perhaps a 100 billion such decrypts per second. Checking the keyspace would require 2**19 seconds, or about a half million seconds, or 6 days. Average decrypt, of course, in 3 days. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: NWLibs> Stop Cross-Copying (Re: Take the money, Harry, re.)
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:21 AM 6/21/96, jim bell wrote: >The subject was the use of digital cash for accepting Federal matching >funds. I cross-posted ONE message. It was appropriately on-topic in both >areas. > >Okay? No, not okay. The resulting torrent of messages from and to Tonie Nathan, and about Tonie Nathan, had no connection to anything related to the CP list. I didn't single you out as the instigator of the cross-copying, as I had no idea of who it was.... (but now that I know it was you, I can't really say I'm surprised). When messages are cross-copied, warning should be included saying that the message is going to more than one mailing list, and perhaps why this was deemed necessary. And most importantly, urging follow-up posts to carefull consider which groups are appropriate. (Many people don't even bother to edit the To: and Cc: fields, resulting in a pile-up of copied names. I try to excise out all recipients except "cypherpunks(a)toad.com," figuring anyone not reading the list is not worth sending a separate copy to.) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Bashing "Wired"
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:08 PM 6/17/96, Mike McNally wrote: >That reminds me. As someone who hasn't yet given up on WiReD in disgust >(instead, I get it and read it faithfully in disgust), I was particularly >pissed-off at the latest "Kids Net Rights" issue. Jonathan Katz >huffs and puffs about how "nobody in the digital world" protests the >idea of rating schemes to keep non-adults away from information, and >indeed claims that "the digerati" (grrr) are pushing rating schemes with >great gusto to save themselves from censorship. > >I guess by "nobody", he probably means "nobody who hangs out in the same >trendy espresso bars as the WiReD trendmeisters". I've seen plenty of >invective directed at the concept of rating systems in general, from >a variety of people including Tim May and li'l ol' me. That's been here >and on some various newsgroups. Indeed, I have not only written _against_ such mandatory rating and age-declaration schemes, I have also written about how such schemes may be used counter to the intended purposes (e.g., the way LolitaWatch helps connoisseurs of young girls locate targets). I happened to pick up that issue of "Wired" today and skimmed it at the bookstore. The same old points of view recycled, refried, retreaded, and ready to be retired. I suspect that author didn't know about our criticisms because we're not published in "Wired," nor in "Netly News" and other such travesties. Most importantly, we're not journalists, "online activists," or moonlighting science fiction writers, and so we don't count. Nearly every issue of "Wired" has the usual columnists, the usual feature writers, and the usual focus on _personalities_ over substance. (Who the fuck cares that on a long drive through the desert Jean Louis Gassee opined to a budding Hunter S. Thompson that "that makes my nipples hard"? I stopped reading that issue of "Wired" when this shit bubbled up out of the sewer.) (I'd go back exclusively to "Scientific American," except they now charge $4.95 for a much-thinner magazine than the old thick and meaty issues of the 60s and 70s, where an issue sold for 60 cents, then 75 cents, then $1.00, etc. Also, the old article format has been replaced by shorter, flashier, more personality-oriented pieces. Still, better than the fluff of "Wired," which is "tired.") And notice that increasingly the "journalists" are the quoted thinkers and strategists in important areas? Someone majors in English, starts writing for "Netizen" or "HotWired," and the next thing you know they're debating crypto policy with Conrad Burns and Dorothy Denning. We're in an age where the medium truly is the message. I do think "Wired" has a few good items, buried deeply in the muck. I dislike their typography and color styles (but then, who doesn't?), but mostly I dislike their hipper-than-thou techno-freneticism. The hundreds of little sound bytes about technolog, what's hot and what's not (wired--tired), the focus on ephemeral personalities (a la "People," it's true inspiration), well, it all makes me glad to never spend more than 15 minutes flipping through it at the newstand. Someone told me recently that "Wired" is either already public, or is about to go public (stock-wise), with an estimated market capitalization of $400 million. (I guess some of those journalists are suddenly very rich....) Caveat emptor. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: NWLibs> Stop Cross-Copying (Re: Take the money, Harry, re.)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:14 PM 6/20/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >At 5:19 PM 6/20/96, RogErick(a)aol.com wrote: > >> I agree with you, Tonie, as usual. >> I struggled with this, for years, until I had a dream. I was on a >>battlefield, pinned down by enemy fire, and I was out of ammunition. >.... > > >Hey, folks, I'm a libertarian, and even voted for John Hospers in 1972. But >the Cypherpunks mailing list has over 1200 subscribers, and cross-copying >to it for these debates is not a good idea. I presume the same is true >about cross-copying Cypherpunks stuff onto "nwlibertarians(a)teleport.co," >but I can't say for sure. > >What I know is that wide cross-posting (or cross-copying) is the bane of >lists these days. There are so many lists, so much overlap, that the >temptation is great to cc: any conceivably-related list. > >Hey, no one speaks for Cypherpunks, least of all me, but I think >cross-copying between libertarian, or digital commerce, or Wobbly, or >International Socialist Women of Color, or Unabomber Brigade mailing lists >to the Cypherpunks list is inappropriate. The subject was the use of digital cash for accepting Federal matching funds. I cross-posted ONE message. It was appropriately on-topic in both areas. Okay? Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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HotWired -- The Tenth Justice (6/20/96)
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Check out today's HotWired at http://www.hotwired.com/ for the full article. -Declan -------------- http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/96/25/campaign_dispatch4a.html HotWired: The Netizen The Tenth Justice by Brock N. Meeks (brock(a)well.com) and Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) Washington, DC, 20 June 1996 Little known and unheralded outside judicial circles, U.S. Solicitor General Drew Days will soon play a key role in the continuing saga of the Communications Decency Act: it's now up to Days to vote thumbs up or down on sending the case to the Supreme Court. Days's decision carries enormous weight with the Supreme Court justices. "The solicitor general is known as the tenth justice," says Llew Gibbons, Temple University law fellow. "He has that much power before the court. It's a level of credibility nobody else has." Although the solicitor general - the No. 3 spot in the Department of Justice - is a political appointee, the job has historically been above politics; as Gibbons says, the solicitor general's real client is the Constitution. At the same time, it's a coveted position widely seen as a steppingstone to a seat on the Supreme Court, as it was for Thurgood Marshall. In addition, the job's independence allows the solicitor general to rule according to his understanding of constitutional law, not party allegiance - which is why Days's decision on the CDA will carry so much weight with the high court. Nonetheless, as independent and influential as Days may be, should he decide not to send the case on, he could still be overruled by Attorney General Janet Reno. Days has traveled this road before. Shortly after he took office in 1993, he wrote a decision arguing that the Bush administration had screwed up in sending a controversial child pornography case to the Supreme Court. The court, having already decided to take the case, reversed itself and, on the strength of Days's argument, sent it back to the appeals court. [...]

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Sen. Specter and Kerry move to delay crypto legislation
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Two things: 1. The letter was copied to Mark Heilbrun, and a phone number is helpfully provided below. 2. D'Amato was copied to encourage him to claim jurisdiction over part of this legislation, yank it into the banking committee, and delay, delay, delay. -Declan declan(a)well.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence June 7, 1996 SSCI #96-2219B The Honorable Patrick J. Leahy United States Senator Senate Russell Building, Room 433 Washington, D.C. 20510-4502 Dear Pat: We write to express our concerns about legislation you have sponsored which would impact directly upon federal encryption policy, including export control policy. Recognizing that American innovation in encryption technology is unequaled, we appreciate the need to balance US economic competitiveness with the need to safeguard national security interests. As such, it is our belief that this legislation requires careful study and reflection and that the Senate and the Congress as a whole should proceed with caution until all of the implications of such an initiative are fully discerned. Along these lines, it is our understanding that industry representatives are currently meeting with the Administration to discuss new policy initiatives to address this issue. Also, both the Congress and the Administration have undertaken to conduct a thorough analysis of a two-year congressionally-mandated study on federal encryption policy that was facilitated by the National Research Council. We therefore feel that your legislation initiative at this time is premature. We appreciate your efforts to bring some needed clarity to United States policy in this area and wish to keep the lines open for discussion and debate on this important issue. The staff point of contact on this issue is our Committee Counsel, Mark Heilbrun, who can be reached at 224-1700. Sincerely, Arlen Specter J. Robert Kerrey Chairman Vice-Chairman cc: The Honorable Alfonse D'Amato Chairman, Senate Committee on Banking --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Recipients get the postage
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 22:27 6/20/96, Timothy C. May wrote: >Again, I always enjoy gedankenexperiments about digital postage. But I am >chagrinned that nearly four years after the first remailers we are still >operating in thought experiment mode for the most part. > >I believe this is because there really is very little market at this time >for anonymous remailings. Those who mostly use remailers appear to be >willing to use casual-grade remailers, with few of the real Chaumian >protections. And they are not very concerned about reliablity, cover >traffic, etc. While it is true that there is a relatively small market for remailers and therefore insufficient incentive to spend great efforts on developing for-pay remailers, there is a relatively simple technical modification to Ecash that might lower the development barrier to a level at which for-pay remailers may be deployed. Clearly, the task of designing a new remailer architecture as well as a payment system suitable for use in such an architecture is prohibitive at the current market size. If currently deployed remailer and payment systems could be modified to interoperate, developing for-pay remailers would be considerably easier. Unfortunately, there are technical reasons that have kept the two main contenders for building such a hybrid system, Mixmaster and Ecash, from interoperating in a smooth fashion. Mixmaster has certain constraints on the maximum number of bytes a potential payment sting can have. [Note: the constraint is in the Mixmaster header, it has nothing to do with total message size]. To stay within that limit, the client used to access the Ecash wallet would have to be able to specify the exact denominations of coins to be used to make a payment of a given amount. Neither DigiCash's current Ecash client, nor the recently released official Ecash API allow for this level of control over the composition of a payment. When there is a fully working implementation of Ecash that allows the detailed control required to create payment messages that Mixmaster can incorporate in its messages, implementing for-pay remailers should be trivial. It is difficult to predict at this time if such out of the box for-pay remailer will be commercially viable -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. Disclaimer: My opinions are my own.

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FW: Bashing "Wired"
by geeman＠best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- From: Timothy C. May[SMTP:tcmay@got.net] Sent: Thursday, June 20, 1996 11:19 PM To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Bashing "Wired" ..... elided... And notice that increasingly the "journalists" are the quoted thinkers and strategists in important areas? Someone majors in English, starts writing for "Netizen" or "HotWired," and the next thing you know they're debating crypto policy with Conrad Burns and Dorothy Denning. We're in an age where the medium truly is the message thanks for the deconstruction on 'WiReD' - --- your last comment reminds me of Cliff Stoll's position that the Web fosters what he calls 'cacocracy' --- a community of yakking posturers with nothing to say. I recommend his "Silicon Snake Oil" to all. Cheers.

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Re: Current status of RSA patent... (fwd)
by attila 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Addressed to: Paul S. Penrod <furballs(a)netcom.com> Cypherpunks <cypherpunks(a)toad.com> ** Reply to note from Paul S. Penrod <furballs(a)netcom.com> 06/19/96 10:14am -0700 I think most of the basics were covered in the list response, except each had a piece or two to say, part of which was usually incorrect, and none caught the scope of the issue in its fullness. Until a patent is sucessfully challenged _and_ "destroyed," it is resumed valid in the country of issue, regardless of the source of a competing product which may have been manufactured in a country where patents mean little, if anything. --e.g. any country other than the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe. GOOD patents, with claims which are both narrow enough to define what is patentable and broad enough to cover "work-arounds," are expensive to obtain: >$10,000 domestic plus foreign costs. there are arcane rules as to the time of filing for foreign patents if they are to be valid, often requiring separate efforts, and different claims, in each jurisdiction. smaller companies are obviously at a disadvantage since resources, particularly in development houses, are small. development companies tend to recover their expenses with immediate product (much smarter than waiting for the patent office to declare you King Kong) thereby also avoiding being beaten in the market window by an also-ran product. An alternative theory is to pray that a Fortune 100 releases product which violates your patents. Caveat: it is still your responsibility to "protect" your product and not lose your rights by default. This is expensive and further requires that you reduce your theory to practice -- you do reduce the theory to practice, you are in a very weak position --again, unless you are IBM, AT&T, etc. who practice law by intimidation and burying the opposition in excessive and frivolous paperwork. Then there is the problem of the capital required to litigate an interloper. When I attempted to litigate the Fortune #1 company 10 years ago --the MINIMUM advance fee requested by every lawyer (even ones I have previously consider fiends) was $2 MILLION; which, although still less than the contractual royalty claim, was not exactly in my bank account! --and, the greedy bastards also wanted 10-15 years to collect and 33-50% of the recovery plus expenses. So, I litigated the claim myself (9 months), and won in Federal District Court. I was lucky, with a never-used-in-the-US law degree; the five other companies in the same bag received nothing on their claims: they could not afford the legal expenses. I did not like lawyers as a breed prior to this incident, and I like them significantly less now. we will not discuss the issue of respect or their value as a food substitute (really.., they taste just like chicken). patents are further cluttered by the fact it averages 3 years to obtain a patent, and technology moves far too fast. then, even with fundamental patents such as RSA is holding one of, there are the legal challenges as to both the validity and whether or not it expresses claims which are both original and non-obvious. non-obvious is a key factor --you can not patent the "fact:" "a chunk of sodium tossed into a toilet ball often destroys the toilet...." lastly, particulary in software, there is the challenge: "...all knowledge should be _free_!" Well, that is fine and good, but how do you pay researchers? have them pump gas all week and donate research time on the weekends? very few researchers have the piece of mind to be creative when their children are starving. --oh, well, we still have the unmarried nerds who require only space to sleep (standing up), BigMacs and chips.... from my perspective, the patent system is absurd --not because of the protection it purports to provide, but that it is a) ridiculously slow and arcane, dominated by how a lawyer who has no clue, writes _claims_, in words, defining what is unique; and b) it is insufficient to deal with _intellectual_ property rights which can not always be reduced to a simple mechanical/hydraulic drawing and some words _claiming_ its uniqueness. The real rub in patents is that _words_, not the technical definitions and diagrams, or even the "experts" in trial, that wins patent litigation. The circuit diagram or the mathematical equation is noting more than a sidebar note. Therefore, patents have become a weapon, a weapon of the established to intimidate the new kid on the block. what are the chances for meaningful patent reform? slim to none. why? it will offend the lawyers, and their $10,000 words! any of you have been involved in patent litigation must realize the absurdity of a Federal jury deciding the validity of high-tech patents. and, if you, the developer, take the product to market, you run the risk of a major company patenting _your_ idea and litigating you! but "I have prior art you scream!" --yes, and they will have notebooks with a paper trail and you will have none. what does the legal system require? paper trail. personally, I think RSA has been most generous in their licensing: a personal use license of the basic algorithm is free. How do you suppose PGP really exists? it's free! RSA has done more to advance cryptography with this policy than any other in many years. the political and public relations benefits to our rights to cryptography and the public relations bonanza for public awareness is not even estimable, let alone measurable. The Federal persecution of Phil Zimmerman was a PR bonanza and a rallying cry. on the other hand, the Free Software group, despite the tremendous value to those of us who develop, does nothing to protect our basic freedoms, and place the issue before the U.S. (and world) forum. whether or not we like like RSA's "charismatic" leader, give credit where credit is due. if you are creating a commercial product, you pay royalties. remember, patents and patent royalties are a trade-off in the system. would you not expect royalties for your patent? I know I do; have collected many; and, hope to be able to continue to collect same, despite by dislike of the current U.S. Patent Office. that's all, folks! -- Fuck off, Uncle Sam. Cyberspace is where democracy lives!

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