December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: relevance to Hayek research?
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 11:21:28 -0400 To: Gregransom(a)aol.com From: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: Re: relevance to Hayek research? Cc: austrianecon(a)agoric.com, VPostrel(a)aol.com Bcc: X-Attachments: Greg Ransom just set my subscription to Hayek-L to "review" because of the DCSB announcement I sent both there and to AustrianEcon. Since I figure that this posting probably won't see the light of day on Hayek-L, I'll just send it here to AustrianEcon instead. :-). Of course, I'm not complaining, really. Greg can do anything he wants with Hayek-L. I mean, he owns it; the internet being alloidial, and all. But, I thought I'd clear the air here a little bit about why I thought the June DCSB meeting would be useful to people both on AustrianEcon, and, even :-), Hayek-L. At 7:29 pm -0400 on 5/17/97, Gregransom(a)aol.com wrote: > Can you motivate this posting to the Hayek-L list for > me? Wow. I feel like a method actor or something. Say hello to Mr. Stanislawski for me, would you, Greg? > It is important that all posting to the > Hayek-L list be relevant to Hayek and his work, appropriate for the research > community, and not overly promotional or commercial in nature, nor in the > vein of advertising. Yeah. Anything that smacks the least bit of capitalism should be strictly avoided in such an academic setting. Hey, even *I* understand that one. ;-). If it's any consolation, DCSB really *is* just a bunch of people who get together to have lunch on first Tuesday of the month. It's not like I'm leveraging the old Harvard Club membership to create a massive personal fortune, or something. :-). I do confess that I sent the announcement to both place, and mostly on impulse, because I thought people in the Austrian economics trade would want to hear about a relatively unique economic phenomenon on the net, particularly as it reveals interesting things about how the net's decreasing the "latency" of money changes, or at least better defines, all kinds of transaction processes, and, maybe, the underlying economics of same. Not only do the type of instantaneous, continuous, digital cash-settled recursive auctions that Fred Hapgood is going to talk about at the June 3rd DCSB meeting have the potential to remove any need for copyright law on the internet, which I'll get to in a moment, but they're the tip of the iceberg for something waaay bigger. The technology behind the digital cash these recursive auctions will eventually use is all by itself a nation-state killer. In the long run, anyway. <and now, for a few blatantly commercial messages...> Since the strongest form of David Chaum's "ecash" <http://www.digicash.com/> digital bearer certificate transaction settlement protocol doesn't require book-entries, it doesn't require the force monopoly of a nation-state to backstop its transaction clearing process. There's a quote which might be useful here. It's from FC97, the first conference on Financial Cryptography, which we held in Anguilla this February and (plug, plug) a conference I had the good fortune think up ;-) <http://www.offshore.com.ai/fc97>. Doug Barnes, a fellow cypherpunk and now the Marketing VP for C2Net, a pioneering financial cryptography company in Berkeley <http://www.c2.net/>, said, during the legal session, "It's a bad idea when your internet payment protocol, in one of its terminating steps, says, 'and then you go to jail'". See my web page, <http://www.shipwright.com/>, for more details about this kind of stuff if you're interested. Also, see the debate I had in March with someone from the American Banking Association about the subject of digital bearer certificate technology. It's on HotWired's Brain Tennis site, <http://www.braintennis.com/>. Remember that, due to to the structure of the debate, he got in the last word, though. :-). <we now return you to the heresy trial, currently in progress> Now you can see why the war cry for most of my cypherpunk crypto-anarchist financial cryptography developer friends is "write software, not laws." That sounds pretty Hayekian, I'd say. Last September I was on the law enforcement panel, of all things, at the Institute, nee Office (go, Newt!), of Technology Assessment's "Symposium on the Regulation of Digital Cash". This thing was held in a conference room deep in the bowels of the Capitol Building. Yech. Talk about the lion's den. Anyway, they had me speaking, dead last in the whole symposium, immediately after the Justice Department's brand-new, wet-behind-the-ears and freshly-lobbied-for-by-the-EFF Assistant Attorney General for "computer crime", whatever that is. And, before him, and more to the point for our discussion here, spoke the Assistant Director of FinCEN. FinCEN stands for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a truly amazing government agency which has the ability to tell anyone with a credit card or checking account not only what his current bank balance is, but, through perfectly legal "administrative requests" to his bank, what his, say, total clothing and grocery expenditures were last year, categorized by store. Couple that with those wonderfully subpoenable scanner cards at your supermarket, and I would say that Orwell almost has his revenge with us, eaten very cold indeed, for being so far behind schedule with '1984'. Anyway, there I was, at ground zero, in the very belly of the beast, and, if I do say so myself, I was a wonder to behold. I scared them so bad that the everyone's eyes actually bugged out. Their jaws really bounced on the floor a few times in true Tex Avery fashion. Proving, once again, that cartoon physics really is the only kind of science they allow inside the Washington Beltway. I told the assembled unholy host of legislative aides, beltway bandits, and various other corridor-crawling symbionts to Le Infame Moderne that David Chaum's blind signature patent created fully anonymous digital cash (issued by private free banks, mind you), something they vaguely knew already and were gathered there to try to stop. But, even more frightening to statists everywhere, it was quite a simple matter, really, to use the same cryptographic protocol to create anonymously held digital *bearer* forms of any negotiable instrument you could care to imagine: bonds, stocks, futures, or any derivative thereof. I told them Perry Metzger's joke about "Gold Denominated Burmese Opium Futures". That was good for a titter or two of nervous laughter... Remember, of course, that, and increasingly so, most assets are financial, and thus completely convertable to digital bearer form if the transaction protocol for them turns out to be significantly cheaper than the book-entry settlement methods of the status quo. After all, it wasn't too long ago in financial history that paper bearer certificates were the norm. There's a lot of cultural memory still there. The word "coupon" as a synonym for bond interest is a perfect case in point. Then came the real bombshell. The guy from FinCEN absolutely agreed that if the transaction costs of digital bearer certificates proved to be an order of magnitude (or, say, three) lower than book entries, which I claim they will be (without proof, of course, just yet ;-)), FinCEN would be pretty much out of business. The whole "crime" of money laundering would become the equivalent of a "legislated" value for Pi. An example which, I might add, proves Avery's Laws of Cartoon Physics, um, reigns, in legislative bodies the world over, and not just inside the Beltway. "Actually, it's worse than that, ladies and gentlemen," I said, quoting myself. "Virtually *all* of the current tax infrastructure is based upon book-entries and the necessity of audit trails to verify tax compliance: capital gains, income and sales taxes, even import duties. Those audit trails are there primarily to prevent non-repudiation in the execution of a transaction protocol, that is, all the double-entry bookeeping between the buyer and the seller and the financial intermediary(ies) underwriting the trade. Those audit trails are *not* there to enforce taxes, believe it or not." They didn't get the point, so I drove it home. I said, "Without the requirement to prevent non-repudiation (and, I ask you, when was the last time you had a cash transaction fail to clear?), the marginal cost of tax compliance will become unsustainable over time. Uncle, and his relations elsewhere, are all going to have to figure out something else to tax, in other words. Now, *what*, exactly, do you need all that money for?" I had all the right people standing up and yelling at me at question time, so I knew I was on to something. :-). So, somewhere, Greg, I think Dr. Hayek must be laughing out loud. That's why this kind of stuff might be important to your readership. Oh. Yeah. I forgot. The actual topic of this missive. What's a "recursive auction"? Jason Cronk, who subscribes to AustrianEcon, by the way, did a talk on them at the rump-session of, you guessed it, FC97 in Anguilla. Ian Grigg, a major free banking fan, and also a subscriber, presented an idea which is exactly the obverse(?) for *his* paper, which was accepted for the main conference session. Ian's paper dealt with a way to organize the "buy" side of the same process. Springer Verlag will be publishing the conference proceedings sometime this summer, and I'll announce that here, if there's interest. Anyway, a recursive auction market, for lack of a better analogy, is kind of like institutionalized software piracy. I create something new and digital. I go on the net, and I sell the first copy to the highest bidder. Then I sell the next copy to the next bid, which, of course, is probably lower than the first. I keep on doing this until people stop bidding. Of course, everyone who buys what I'm selling can turn right around and sell it to someone else in turn, probably at a lower price than they bought it from me. This is the only instance I can think of where buying high and selling low makes you money. ;-). Well, on an item-price basis, anyway. Obviously, the total return is higher on the sell side than the buy side, or nobody would be foolish enough to buy anything from you for resale. Just by forgetting the whole quasimystical issue of "rights" to electronic intellectual property (which, like the current "intellectual capital" craze, is, at best, a polite regulatory fiction), timeliness of content is rewarded, as is novelty, which keeps people who create new stuff right on cranking it out. A person who's invested in a big switch and bandwidth, or who has the most valuable use of any other kind, can afford to pay more for earlier, "fresher", copies of something than someone without the same net.resources. Because, for instance, in the case of the person with all the bandwidth, he can resell copies faster than anyone else. A person who doesn't need something badly can wait a while and pick it up at a lower price after the initial feeding frenzy's over. Finally, the person who continually invents something new gets paid as soon as something he makes becomes usable to anybody at all. The things which get sold can be anything from a jotted down brainstorm, to the first draft of a novel, to more perishible "content", like an hour of teleoperated surgery, say. So, for works of art, whatever that means, copyright law becomes superfluous. More to the point, given sufficient attention to such matters, *all* parties in recursive auction transactions can be completely anonymous, and everything still works. I mean, when was the last time you had to produce identification for a cash transaction? Okay, besides at the bank, and even then for deposits greater than $10k. That's the very exception which proves the rule, obviously. Cartoon physics comes to banking. Remember, again, book-entries cause book-entry taxation and regulations, not vice versa. Anyway, whether at the increasingly hysterical legislative cartoons, or because of the now sandy foundations of the nation state, again, Hayek, somewhere, *must* be laughing, Greg. Cheers, Bob Hettinga Moderator, The Digital Commerce Society of Boston (among other things...) --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

2 1

GAK
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

May Timothy Maypole's forgeries get stuck up his ass so he'll have to shit through his filthy mouth for the rest of its miserable life. .::7777::-. /:'////' `::>/|/ .', |||| `/( e\ Timothy Maypole -==~-'`-Xm````-mr' `-_\

2 1

Crypto Disputes
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For full versions of the stories below: http://jya.com/kinkey.txt ---------- For two years, the IETF Security Group has labored to hammer out the IP Security (IPSec) protocol, a standard way that businesses can open up an encrypted link to a trading partner's network. The link is encrypted after authentication by means of an X.509 digital certificate at an IPSec-based firewall or gateway. But an unresolved, bitter dispute over the technique for automatically swapping keys over the 'Net - referred to as key management - has resulted in two incompatible schemes in the IPSec specification. In this battle of the acronyms, the debate centers on the Simple Key Management for IP (SKIP), developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc., and the Internet Secure Association Key Management Protocol (ISAKMP), developed by the National Security Agency. ---------- Responding to Sun's announcement that it would license 128-bit encryption algorithms from Elvis+Co., a Russian company, the White House announced that it would look into Sun's actions. "Sun's strategy is another brick from a wall that is coming down," said Jim Bidzos, president and CEO of RSA Data Security. "And it highlights that something is wrong with the U.S. policy." Sun has approximately a 10 percent equity stake in Elvis+, whose product is based on Sun's publicly available protocol, Simple Key Management for IP (SKIP). The 10 percent interest is thought to be key to keeping other companies from licensing and reselling the same technology. The government's resolve, however, may be breaking down. Just last week, Sybase Inc. won approval to export database and server products with 56-bit DES encryption, even though the Emeryville, Calif., company has no model for key recovery. ---------- SKIP, which stands for Simple Key management for Internet Protocols, was submitted by Sun to the Internet Engineering Task Force as an Internet standard. Included in SKIP E+ are algorithms for 56-bit DES, two- and three-key triple DES, and 64- and 128-bit ciphers for encrypting network traffic and keys. The security software was developed by Elvis+, a company of former Soviet space scientists with offices near Moscow. Sun bought a 10 percent interest in the company in 1993, but does not take an active role, said Steven Hunziker, chief operating officer of Russia Communications Research Inc., Los Gatos, Calif. RCR represents Elvis+'s products in the U.S. "RCR is really small - me and an accountant and two lawyers - and they watch the law like hawks," Hunziker said. "Elvis+ has kept a very careful distance from Sun, and those guys don't need anything from Sun to create the technology they're creating. The FBI and the CIA are just lazy, which is why they object." "We've developed key recovery technology and gotten government approval, so we can export without having to resort to what they did," said Ken Mendelson, corporate counsel for Trusted Information Systems Inc., Glenwood, Md. ---------- VeriFone today announced that its Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) -based product suite has received export approval from the US Department of Commerce, marking the first announcement of a SET-based, end-to-end Internet commerce solution containing full strength encryption technology to be approved for international export. VeriFone's vGATE, vPOS and vWALLET software employ the SET encryption protocol for transactions over the Internet, utilizing 1024 bit key size for public key encryption and digital signatures, and 64 bit DES for bulk encryption. This approval enables VeriFone to offer a higher level of end-to-end encryption than was previously available from U.S. corporations to international customers without special permission from the U.S. government. ---------- IBM last week took the first steps to help software vendors comply with federal encryption export rules, with the release into beta of a new security tool kit. ----------

2 1

Re: Continuing spam from vulis
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(I've removed 9 of the addresses from this response.) At 12:42 PM -0700 5/30/97, Jeff Burchell wrote: >I have previously talked with the operator of the cypherpunks list (this >was about 2 months ago when someone else was abusing the remailer to post And just who is "the operator of the cypherpunks list"? If this was about 2 months ago, it would've been well after the Cypherdiaspora, so there would be even less of a concept of the "operator" than there was before. And why would he or she or they have anything to say about blocking remailers? >trash to that list). At that time, I offered the standard good will >gesture that remailer operators can offer: "Would you like me to block the >list, so this remailer won't send anything to it". Because of the nature >of anonymous remailers, this is about the extent of the action that I can >take. > >To this, I recieved a very firm "no!" (cypherpunks is of course a list >where people do have good reasons to use remailers). Because of that, I >_WON'T_ block cypherpunks, until I am instructed to by May, Gilmore, >Hughes, et.al. Period. This holds true for all mailing lists. I need to >have authorization from the list maintainer to block the list. Neither May nor Gilmore nor Hughes have any say over blocking remailers, blocking use of remailers, etc. >-Jeff >Operator... Huge.cajones.com > >P.S. Besides... aren't ad hominum attacks on Tim May a Cypherpunks > tradition? I mean no disrespect to Jeff, but even getting involved in the slightest way in debates about remailer traffic and what should/should not be blocked is what can only be called a "conceptual error." Ideal mixes, which today's remailers are of course only an approximation of, do not pass and reject messages based on content, or even on sources and destinations. The ideal mix is a soulless black box executing certain protocols. (Practicality may dictate that a remailer place certain minimal, and hopefully publicized, constraints on the process, e.g., no sending to whitehouse.gov, no sending to hundreds of addresses, whatever.) --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- 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, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

2 1

Re: Continuing spam from vulis
by Jeff Burchell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 30 May 1997, Paul Pomes wrote: > The wider circulation is due to the complete lack of response from > remailer-admin(a)cajones.com. Be careful when you say "Complete lack of response". You've got no idea what I did and didn't do once I got your message. I have previously talked with the operator of the cypherpunks list (this was about 2 months ago when someone else was abusing the remailer to post trash to that list). At that time, I offered the standard good will gesture that remailer operators can offer: "Would you like me to block the list, so this remailer won't send anything to it". Because of the nature of anonymous remailers, this is about the extent of the action that I can take. To this, I recieved a very firm "no!" (cypherpunks is of course a list where people do have good reasons to use remailers). Because of that, I _WON'T_ block cypherpunks, until I am instructed to by May, Gilmore, Hughes, et.al. Period. This holds true for all mailing lists. I need to have authorization from the list maintainer to block the list. I have added your address to my block list, this remailer won't send anything directly to you in the future. If you don't want to read anything from this mailer that comes across lists, then you should either manually delete anonymous messages before reading them (the headers and return address make it obvious when a message has come through a remailer), or turn on some client-side mail filters. Your own company makes a product with adaquate functionality to do this. -Jeff Operator... Huge.cajones.com P.S. Besides... aren't ad hominum attacks on Tim May a Cypherpunks tradition? P.P.S. Isn't there a non-flames moderated cypherpunks? Perhaps you want to be on that list instead of the free-for-all. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When they came for the 2nd Amendment, I said nothing, for I owned no gun Then the sixth was next to go, and I remained silent, as I was not on trial They took away the fourth, and I said nothing, as I had nothing to hide And then they came for the First, and I could say nothing."

2 1

Re: The Bible Code
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

John Young wrote: > > Published today with great fanfare, "The Bible Code" > describes the fruits of three Israeli mathematicians in > decrypting hidden messages in the Bible by textual > analysis algorithms. Blurbs claim that the work passed > peer review for publication in a math journal a few > years back, was confirmed by "a US Defense Department > code-breaker" and predicted the assassinations of > JFK, RFK, Sadat and Rabin. ... > Better, is this book the first of many to come to celebrate the > cook-ups of codes and cyphers and algorithmic chefs? Is a > film in the works, or, best, a Seinfeld of 0s and 1s? I will shortly be releasing my new book, "The ASCII Code" which outlines the predictions made based on decrypting the hidden messages in the ASCII artwork sent to the cypherpunks list. Since none of the predictions have proven accurate, my book speculates that perhaps Tim May isn't a cocksucker, after all. All proceeds from the book will be converted to eca$h and used to wager on the predicted date of death for Graham-John Bullers on the AP Bot at: http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/carljohn/AP/AP.htm DeathMonger

2 1

There's something wrong...
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Friday, May 30, 1997 - 21:07:32 MET > A major nail in the coffin of Justice for any accused in the U.S. > > was when the justice system promoted the concept of guilt by virtue > > of "circumstantial" evidence to the point where people can now be > > convicted as a result of speculation rather than evidence. Prosecutors > > now seem to need only to convince the sheeple that it was "possible" > > for the defendant to have commited the crime and that circumstantial > > evidence points *only* to the accused. Actually we are well passed that point. Jim Bell's arrest and pending prosecution amounts to thought crime. Its not "possible they commited a crime" now its possible that they "may" commit a crime. At Waco, dozens of innocents were killed, burned alive on national television in their home and church from an unwarranted, excessive use of force in order to serve a search warrant on David Koresh for what they "may" have been doing. No one was under indictment, under arrest or accused of an actual crime, yet through media manipulation that branded koresh and his followers Kooks, the nation watched another act of Statist-TV-Terrorism. The message through the medium this time?, "We don't need no stinking charges." Mandatory sentencing (a legislative and executive end run that usurps judiaciary power by eliminating judicial discretion) Terroristic Speech (a euphemism for 'thought crime' in many cases) are two examples of end runs around citizens contitutionaly protected rights that are being used daily to commit violent attacks on individual citizens civil rights.

2 1

Janus (now called LPWA) ready for pre-testing)
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 13:31:25 -0400 From: alain(a)research.bell-labs.com (Alain Mayer) To: rah(a)shipwright.com Subject: Janus (now called LPWA) ready for pre-testing) Cc: alain(a)research.bell-labs.com Hi Robert, the Janus system I presented at FC97 is now running on a proxy at Bell Labs, accessible to everyone. Maybe you can send the announcement below to the fc97 mailing list? Many thanks and I hope everything is fine with you, -- Alain ======================================== Hi, Janus (now called the Lucent Personalized Web Assistant, LPWA) is now pre-testing. Its main goal is to increase convenience, security, and privacy for browsing the web, especially with sites that require registration (and hence user names, passwords and e-mail addresses). We hope that you will use it for a while and give us some feedback on what you like and what kind of things are annoying. Note, that you can only participate if you are able to configure your browser to directly connect to our proxy. Some of you might be behind a firewall or ISP where a particular proxy is required. Instructions can be found at http://lpwa.com:8000. More on the project is located at http://www.bell-labs.com/project/lpwa/ An arbitrary list of (free) sites which require registration can be found at http://www.bell-labs.com/projects/lpwa/extended_summary_tmp.html#account Please note that this project has not yet been publicy announced and that documentation and code are currently being revised. Also, the current set-up, where you have to connect to LPWA/Janus over an insecure connection is not "optimal" (to say the least, but all in all much better than if you browse the "usual way"). Hence, we are really looking for "friendly users" at this time whose feedback might help us to make improvements. Regards, -- Alain --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

1 0

Seismic Data Authenticator
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bill Payne has provided his 1992 Sandia report: "Data Authenticator for the Deployable Seismic Verification System" Marked "For Official Use Only." The 185-page paper describes in fine detail the design, data security and fabrication (with photos and technical drawings) of the third generation authentification device for verfiying seismic data in connection with the nuclear weapons control-START treaties with the USSR. The paper also cites deficient cryptographic algorithms provided by NSA for the device. http://jya.com/da/whpda.htm (98K)

1 0

No Subject
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www.datafellows.com/gallery/ F-Secure SSH 1.0 Windows Client pc_ssh.com - removes time-limit. Copy into SSH-directory and execute. pc_ssh.com in ASCII: -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: 2.6.2 owFbczSJqyA5vrg4Qy85P5cBCPYlML6wZ9hiu4FpVwjjWcUihcUxjFucNjB0y8Uw 7joTsJOB4aziFoedTAy74oDSr7kn7OtlfMHHsMXnrOK+5YwvWMCsLhG3hl8MJWxb mIBKPh0ODvbQc41wBZr+uvSfgptucGpyaVGqAlBYocxQz0DBuSgxOVtBV1ehKrMo OT9PQV+hINnSnJeL4Z+Ca1FRfpGCf0FqXmZeugLUILCMc35uQU5qSaoikAcA =KINJ -----END PGP MESSAGE----- WarezMonger

1 0