December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: 'what cypherpunks is about'
by Hard Media 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Oh Oh. I said bad things about Americans...in trouble now. Anyways. Here are some figures: "In the 20 year period between 1970 and 1989, the external debt of developing nations grew from $68.4 billion to $1 283 billion, an increase of 1846 per cent. Debt service payments increased by 1400 per cent and were in excess of $160 billion by the end of the 80s." by the way most of this debt is concentrated in South American. Zaid

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mbanx - 128 bit SSL transactions
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Can you say, "regulatory arbitrage"? I knew you could... Cheers, Bob Hettinga --- begin forwarded text Sender: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com Reply-To: "networks(a)vir.com" <networks(a)vir.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Precedence: Bulk Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 11:02:33 -0500 From: "networks(a)vir.com" <networks(a)vir.com> To: Multiple recipients of <e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: mbanx - 128 bit SSL transactions I just finished reading about mbanx www.mbanx.com They're a new bank (owned by the Bank of Montreal) which offers services including bill payment and account transfers using the Internet. One of the most interesting things about their service is that they only permit transactions using Netscape with 128 bit SSL. When I heard that I immediately assumed that I had to go out and buy it, but apparently they will supply it to me for free if I don't already have it (so they said when I talked to them on the phone anyway). Unfortunately, they seem to have a $13.00 a month fee, so it's no wonder they aren't worried about giving you 128 bit Netscape. It's a shame that despite the fact that branchless banking is probably saving them a lot of money on infrastructure, they still feel it's necessary to charge a premium. However, I must add that, in the information I have, it is unclear whether the $13.00 fee is standard or whether it is an option to replace transaction charges. I've got more information coming in the mail so I'll try and keep everyone posted. Alan Majer networks(a)vir.com --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "The cost of anything is the foregone alternative" -- Walter Johnson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

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sorry I'm late...
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sorry I'm about two weeks late getting the new cryptography mailing list in place. Sameer Parekh volunteered his machines at C2, and as soon as a couple of residual majordomo issues are resolved the list will be announced and go on line. I thank you all for your patience. Perry

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Stanford Patents
by Kent Briggs 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has anyone heard anything from the Schlafly vs PKP case? There were supposed to be patent validity hearings on Wednesday. I don't know if they are still going on, Roger hasn't updated his web page yet. Kent Briggs

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ITAR restricts Financial Cryptography
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just in case anyone still thinks that the ITAR doesn't interfere with the use of cryptography to protect financial systems from fraud, here is a data point. >From Robert Hettinga's e$pam list quoting the set-discuss list: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Lewis, Tony" <tlewis(a)visa.com> To: "'set-announce'" <set-announce(a)commerce.net>, "'set-discuss'" <set-discuss(a)commerce.net> Subject: Reference code availability update Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 21:06:34 -0800 Encoding: 14 TEXT Sender: owner-set-talk(a)commerce.NET Precedence: bulk +----------------------------------------------------+ Addressed to: set-discuss(a)commerce.net +----------------------------------------------------+ At the SET Open Vendor Meeting, MasterCard and Visa announced that a SET reference implementation would be made available. Unfortunately, producing the reference code has taken longer than we planned. Our current plan is to have it ready by the end of November, 1996. Because of U.S. export regulations, it will not be possible for us to post the reference code for download. Individuals and companies that want a copy of the reference code will need to request it. The procedures for making such a request will be announced here in approximately one week. _________________________________________________________________ Tony Lewis (tlewis(a)visa.com) Chief Systems Architect, Internet Commerce Visa International Service Association ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This message was sent by set-discuss(a)commerce.net. For a complete listing of available commands, please send mail to 'majordomo(a)commerce.net' with 'help' (no quotations) contained within the body of your message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | Tired of Dole/Clinton? | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | Vote 3rd party. I'm | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | Voting for Harry Browne | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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RE: tcmay in favour of redistribution of wealth?
by Hard Media 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 10:15:35 -0800 tcmay wrote: > While I won't get started again here, understand that my views are much > more than just "justifiable apathy" about the people of the world. Justifiable? I dunno bout that. (Sorry couldn't resist.) > > My point? I feel more strongly about the death of one of my pets than I do > about hearing that some natural catastrophe in Bangla Desh has killed > 100,000. And I think all honest persons will admit that this is a natural > reaction. The "Hamming distance" matters, and people I have never met on > the opposite side of the earth simply are _abstract numbers_ to me, as I am > to them. Natural. "Natural" is a dangerous word to use. I hadn't met any of the people involved in the Oklahoma bombing, nor had most of the world, yet there was worldwide condemnation of the event. I hadn't met any of Hitler's concentration camp victims but I'm still outraged at these events. There are tangents and there are skew lines. Oh yeah why people think I'm making an attack on Tim's character, his looks, or whatever I don't understand, all I'm doing is criticising something he wrote. Where Walter Wriston/Third World debt is concerned the events are not natural, we'r not talking about a flood, which is a "natural" event but the actions of a man, or if you prefer an organisation. There is nothing "natural" about these. A country in debt to the IMF/World Bank or Citibank must accept "Stabilisation Policies" : "stabilisation policies are often viewed as measures designed primarily to maintain poverty and dependency of Third World nations while preserving the global market structure for the industrialised nations." - "Economics for a Developing World", M P Todaro. this is also known as "debt slavery". Not so good eh? Zaid

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Development of an Open and Flexible Payment System
by Gary Howland 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Information on our payment system is now available: Development of an Open and Flexible Payment System Abstract: The Internet is in need of a simple, open, flexible and secure payment system. Many payment systems that currently exist are either proprietary, insecure, inflexible or all three. This paper examines the types of payment system in use today, the payment system requirements of Systemics Ltd., an overview of the Systemics Open Transaction (SOX(tm)) payments system that was developed, and a summary of how this system met the requirements. The SOX payment system is currently in live use for a bond trading system, and a reference implementation will shortly be made available on the Internet. http://www.systemics.com/docs/sox/overview.html

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NSA Report on Anonymous E-Cash
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We've put the NSA report, "How To Make A Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash, June, 1996" at: http://jya.com/nsamint.htm (84 kb) It argues the dangers of anonymous cash and how to combat it. Thanks to the authors, Laurie Law, Susan Sabett and Jerry Solinas, NSA; Thomas Vartanian, Fried, Frank; and anonymous others.

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Montgolfiering Spoof
by nobody＠replay.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:47 AM -0500 10/31/96, Rabid Wombat wrote: >On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Bill Frantz wrote: > >> Gee, I put that post in the same place I carefully keep my back issues of >> the Cypherpunks Enquirer. >> > >Bill, you must be humor-impaired. That piece was a great send-up of >Woods. I was laughing 'til tears spilled down an shorted out my keyboard. >I dunno who posted that, but I'm in awe. Thanks. I know the author rather well, and he assures me he dashed off this satirical piece in about as much time as he takes to write his normal articles. He tells me that once he had "grokked" the inimitable (not) style of Don Wood, it was easy to write a screed that echoed Wood's wackiness. Of course, for people who read satire on this list, the initials at the end are a clue. But don't publish who you think it is, as KVFP doesn't want a lawsuit from Wood for hurting Wood's feelings. --KVFP -- --

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Discrete logs 1
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Even adders can multiply using log tables..." PGP is moving to discrete log based cryptography. It will still support RSA, but people will be encouraged to generate discrete log keys. It will use RSA to encrypt to people with RSA keys, and discrete log crypto to encrypt to people with discrete log keys. Many discrete log cryptosystems will be patent free after next year. It may be that they will become more popular over the next few years for that reason. RSA has several more years before its patents expire. Most people are not as familiar with the math behind discrete logs as they are with RSA. The general idea of the difficulty of factoring is pretty easy to understand. It's much easier to multiply two large primes together than to figure out what the primes were just by looking at the result. Discrete logs require a little more explanation. First I am going to write a little bit about the lore of logarithms. I think today a lot of people don't know what they are. When I was a boy, in the 1960's, computers and even calculators were not widely available. Yet engineers in many fields needed to perform calculations. Reaction rates, material strengths, friction, current flow, all such calculations require multiplication and division of numbers with several significant digits. The choices were basically to multiply it out the long way, which was slow, error-prone, and wasteful because it generates twice as many digits as you need; use a slide rule, which usually only gets you two or three digits of accuracy; or to use log tables, which could get you four or five, or sometimes even more, accurate digits. The logarithm of a number is the power that you have to raise some specified base (usually 10 for these purposes) to in order to get that number. The logarithm of 100 base 10 is 2 because 10**2 = 100. The log of 1000 is 3. For numbers not powers of 10, the logarithm has fractional parts. The logarithm of 20 is about 1.3, for example. To multiply two numbers, you find their logs and add them, and then turn the result back into a number. To divide, subtract the logs. So most of the work is just in looking up what the logs are using published tables. Actually we do use logs in a crude form in much of cryptography. Any time you say that the product of two 512 bit numbers is 1024 bits what you mean is that the log base two of the smaller numbers is about 512, and so the log base two of their product is 512+512 or 1024. By the time I was in high school calculators were becoming fairly widespread, but we still learned how to use log tables to do multiplication and division. Whole books were published containing nothing but tables of the logarithms of numbers. You can still find these sometimes in used book stores. There were lots of tricks to using these tables which we had to learn. Logarithms of numbers less than 1 are negative, but the trick was to treat them as the sum of a positive fractional part and a negative integer, so for example the log of .2 was treated as +.3 - 1. This made it easier to look up the values. And there were special sub-tables within the tables to help with interpolating, looking up log values between the entries in the table. Using these you could get more accuracy in your answers. All this was part of the craft of working engineers and scientists of the time. It's hard for people today, raised on throwaway and even virtual calculators, to understand the sense of power that came from using logs for calculations. Until we learned these advanced techniques the only accurate alternatives were the terribly tedious hand methods. Being able to get results by adding up a few numbers from a book was an amazing improvement. The discrete logs used in crypto have very different mathematical properties than regular logarithms, but I thought this bit of history would spark some memories in old-timers and give a new perspective for younger people. Hal

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