October 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Patriot Act redux?
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Oct '04

22 Oct '04

<http://news.com.com/2102-1071_3-5414087.html?tag=st.util.print> Patriot Act redux? By Declan McCullagh http://news.com.com/Patriot+Act+redux/2010-1071_3-5414087.html Story last modified October 18, 2004, 4:00 AM PDT With Election Day fast approaching, it was only a matter of time before the usual congressional shenanigans that typically punctuate the political season. This time, politicians appear to have seized on what could be called the Patriot Act strategy, drafting antiterrorism legislation in secret and then ramming it through the Senate and House of Representatives with minimal debate. Then it's back to the home districts to boast how they protected voters from the bad guys. The vehicles chosen for this strategy are two bills described as being inspired by the 9/11 Commission's report, a politically potent text that's become a best-selling book. The Senate and House have approved their own versions of the legislation, and negotiators are now meeting privately to decide on the final draft. Early indications are not promising. While portions of the massive legislation are no doubt praiseworthy, other important sections--especially those envisioning stuffing more information into government databases--deserve special scrutiny from privacy hawks. Both the House and Senate bills coerce state governments into creating what critics are calling a national ID card. Because the House version is nearly three times as long, its authors had more room to promote private agendas. One section anticipates storing the "lifetime travel history of each foreign national or United States citizen" into a database for the convenience of government officials. It mentions passports, but there's nothing that would preclude recording the details of trips that Americans take inside the United States. President Bush would be required to create a "secure information sharing" network to exchange data among law enforcement, military and spy agencies. Aside from a bland assurance that "civil liberties" will be protected, there are zero details on what databases will be vacuumed in or what oversight will take place. A second network would be created by the first person to get the new job of national intelligence director. That network must "provide immediate access to information in databases of federal law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community that is necessary to identify terrorists." It hardly needs to be said that snaring terrorists is what our government should be doing. But it's not clear that the House bill is a step in the right direction. Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, hopes that the aides negotiating the final bill end up adopting the Senate language instead. It also would create an information-sharing network--while requiring that Congress receive semiannual reports on how the network is being used. "There are dozens if not hundreds of government programs under way to do just that (already)," Dempsey warns. "They are fragmented; they are overlapping. They are occurring outside of any framework of oversight." Still, the Senate bill is no prize. A last-minute amendment added by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would require the Department of Homeland Security to create an "integrated screening system" inside the United States. McCain envisions erecting physical checkpoints, dubbed "screening points," near subways, airports, bus stations, train stations, federal buildings, telephone companies, Internet hubs and any other "critical infrastructure" facility deemed vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Secretary Tom Ridge would appear to be authorized to issue new federal IDs--with biometric identifiers--that Americans could be required to show at checkpoints. Both the House and Senate bills coerce state governments into creating what critics are calling a national ID card. Under the proposals, federal agencies will accept only licenses and state ID cards that comply with specific to-be-established standards--a requirement that would affect anyone who wants to get a U.S. passport, obtain Social Security benefits, or even wander into a federal courthouse. That's why Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, is no fan of either bill. "They say that if we just put appropriate rules and restrictions in place, everything will be fine," Harper said. "But of course those rules and restrictions will drop away over the years or if there are new terrorist attacks. They say, 'Of course lion-taming is safe. They're our friends.' But then one day the lion grabs you by the neck and drags you off the stage." A few other courageous Washingtonians have raised similar concerns. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, warned last week that the House bill "will not make America safer (but will definitely) make us less free." And 25 former senior officials from the FBI, CIA and military have sent a letter to Congress indicating that the 9/11 Commission's recommendations are flawed because the report whitewashed what went wrong on Sept. 11, 2001. Unfortunately, with only 15 days left before the election, politicians will be tempted to place expedience over sober analysis of what's permitted by the U.S. Constitution. That's what happened in October 2001 with the mad scramble to enact the Patriot Act, and history is about to repeat itself. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 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'

1 0

Poll: Antiterror tech plans are flawed
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Oct '04

22 Oct '04

<http://news.com.com/2102-1009_3-5401058.html?tag=st.util.print> CNET News Poll: Antiterror tech plans are flawed By Charles Cooper http://news.com.com/Poll+Antiterror+tech+plans+are+flawed/2100-1009_3-54010… Story last modified October 18, 2004, 4:00 AM PDT Americans don't believe the government is doing enough with technology to improve homeland security, according to a national survey conducted jointly by CNET News.com and Harris Interactive. Drawn from a poll of 1,133 people in late August, the results portray a nation eager to embrace technology to reduce security threats but unsure how best to proceed. Only 15 percent of those polled believe they are safer today than they were a year ago, and just 20 percent predict that they will be safer in the future. Despite widespread confidence in technology itself, only 45 percent agreed that the government's current technology initiatives are working, according to the survey. The results reflect concerns raised by taxpayer organizations and other government watchdog groups. Such groups have been critical of technology spending and related operations since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. "From the beginning, we were concerned that this reorganization had gone the way of the Department of Energy--bigger bureaucracy and few results to show for it," said Pete Sepp, vice president of the nonprofit National Taxpayer Union. "The picture isn't complete, but the brush strokes we've seen so far are pretty ugly." The survey indicates that the issue could be a pivotal factor in the elections next month. About 92 percent of the poll's respondents said a presidential candidate's position on security would affect their vote, and 62 percent said they would support a tax increase to pay for new security measures. The support for security is so strong that the survey's respondents were apparently willing to back measures that have been sharply criticized by civil libertarians as too intrusive. About 53 percent of respondents expressed at least some willingness to repeal certain privacy laws, while 70 percent favored the legalization of more aggressive interrogation methods. More than 80 percent of respondents indicated a willingness to carry some type of national ID card, and about 70 percent said such a card would be a useful tool to improve security. The poll also revealed support for the greater use of cameras and advanced surveillance technologies in public places, including hand and eye scanners. Some technology experts attributed the response at least partly to a limited knowledge of technology and what it can accomplish. "People are putting too much faith in technology," said Bruce Schneier, founder of Counterpane Internet Security. "They don't understand how eye scanners work or how authentication fits into security. They don't understand what a national ID card means or haven't read any of the studies about the effectiveness of security cameras. They're giving opinions based on superstition, not real facts." Nevertheless, the poll's results seem to reflect a general erosion of public confidence in the federal government, a trend that began decades ago. For homeland security in particular, nearly 53 percent of respondents said the government could do more with the technology it already has. Zoe Baird, co-chair of the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, said the lack of faith in the government's ability to use technology was understandable, until recently. But she said recent changes in Washington have made her more optimistic. "Over the last year, the government, at very senior levels, has finally come to terms with how technology can make us safer," Baird said. "I hope that over the course of the next year, the public's faith in government to use technology to make us safer will increase." Party affiliations of respondents to the CNET News.com-Harris Interactive Poll spanned the political spectrum. About 32 percent said they were Democrats, and roughly 35 percent identified themselves as Republicans. Another 11 percent were registered as independents, and the rest gave no party affiliation. Other findings in the poll: * 80 percent expressed varying degrees of support for a closed-border policy. * 69 percent believe that more security at home would improve the nation's diplomacy. * 55 percent say press reports exaggerate the threat of terrorism to their security. This survey was conducted online within the United States between Aug. 25 and Sept. 1 among a nationwide cross-section of 1,133 adults of voting age, all of whom have Internet access. The results carry a statistical sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 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'

1 0

Re: Seld-defeating US foreign policy
by Tyler Durden 22 Oct '04

22 Oct '04

Will Morton wrote... > In addition, the whole of Indochina was (and is) a clusterfuck of >rivalries and feuds going back centuries. The (relatively) sudden >appearance of a bunch of new regimes, all with revolutionary mindsets >through which to apply their old vendettas, probably made the bloodshed >inevitable - although US intervention undoubtedly made it worse. Basically the way I see it. I've felt for a long time that the US (even while pursuing it's questionable goals) should have jumped all over the chance to buddy-up with China after the Sino-Soviet split, and knowing Mao's practicality I'd bet he could have been pursuaded (hell, not long after it was Mao and Zhou who initated contact with the US). Relations with Vietnam and Cambodia could have proceeded very differently in that environment. Would the cultural revolution still have happened? Probably. Would the Khmers have gotten into power...possibly but I actually doubt it. But of course, we were still in the middle of McCarthy-ism, so way too ideologically blind to see the obvious. As a result we continued to mindlessly pursue ideology rather than practicality and so ended really making things worse in SE Asia, in a place where Marxism was really a useful but temporary veneer over local politics (again we were too blind to see that Marxism was a western transplant that wasn't going to do too well in Asia). And we're doing it again...(eg, we had some chances with Iran recently that we passed up...that was really stupid, and the Iranians seem to know it). -TD _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

3 7

Are new passports [an] identity-theft risk?
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Oct '04

22 Oct '04

<http://worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41030> WorldNetDaily Thursday, October 21, 2004 YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE Are new passports identity-theft risk? Privacy advocates warn data chips can be 'seen' by anyone with reader Posted: October 21, 2004 5:00 p.m. Eastern While the U.S. State Department prepares to switch over to passports that include embedded data chips, privacy experts worry the new technology will open Americans to identity theft and fraud. New passports will be fitted with chips using RFID, or radio frequency identification, technology. Reader devices at borders and customs checkpoints will be able to read the information stored on the chip, including the person's name, address and digital photo. Kelly Shannon is a spokesperson for the State Department. She told Wired News: "The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more secure. It's yet another layer beyond the security features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was issued the passport originally." RFID technology has been used for tracking everything from store inventory to family members visiting an amusement park. It is also used in the Digital Angel human implant that recently was approved by the FDA for storing medical information. Wired reports civil libertarians and some technologists say the passport chips are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person's biographical information and photo from several feet away. "Even if they wanted to store this info in a chip, why have a chip that can be read remotely?" Barry Steinhardt, who directs the American Civil Liberty Union's Technology and Liberty program, asked Wired. "Why not require the passport be brought in contact with a reader so that the passport holder would know it had been captured? Americans in the know will be wrapping their passports in aluminum foil." Last week, the government contracted with four companies to develop the chips and readers for the program. The report stated diplomats and State Department employees will be issued the new passports as early as January, while others applying for new passports will receive the new version starting in the spring. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien told Wired RFID chips in passports are a "privacy horror" and would be even if the data were encrypted, which it isn't. "If 180 countries have access to the technology for reading this thing, whether or not it is encrypted, from a security standpoint, that is a very leaky system," Tien said. "Strictly from a technology standpoint, any reader system, even with security, that was so widely deployed and accessible to so many people worldwide will be subject to some very interesting compromises." An engineer and RFID expert with Intel claims there is little danger of unauthorized people reading the new passports. Roy Want told the newssite: "It is actually quite hard to read RFID at a distance," saying a person's keys, bag and body interfere with the radio waves. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 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'

2 1

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on the Election
by Bill Stewart 22 Oct '04

22 Oct '04

A lot of columnists are trying to look fair and balanced in their election coverage, expressing their biases opinions while claiming to be reasonable; I'm most recently mad at Safire for this. So it's nice to be able to recommend a column by someone who's making no pretense of balance, the good Doctor himself: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6562575?rnd=1098436549411&h… ---- Bill Stewart bill.stewart(a)pobox.com

1 0

echelon hardware
by Eugen Leitl 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2430 15 October 2004 Want to know the hardware behind Echelon? Uncle Sam using Texas' SAM. By Chris Mellor, Techworld You've probably heard about Echelon, the vast listening system run by the US, UK, Canada and Australia that scans the world's voice traffic looking for key words and phrases. Aside from using the system for industrial espionage and bypassing international and national laws to listen in on people, it is also used to listen out for people like Osama bin Laden and assorted terrorists in the hope of preventing attacks. All this is out in the relative open thanks to investigative journalists and a European Commission report into the system, concerned and annoyed that the Brits and Yanks has got there first. It works like this: The calls are recorded by geo-stationary spy satellites and listening stations, such as the UK's Menworth Hill, which combine satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts and forward them on to centres, such as the US' Fort Meade, where supercomputers work on the recordings in real time. But what, you ask, can deal with that overwhelming mass of data that helps our government spy on the world? And how does it work? Well, a Texas Memory Systems SAM product - a combined solid-state disk (SSD) and DSP (digital signal processor). Woody Hutsell, an executive VP at TMS, said: "Fifty percent of our revenue this year will come from DSP systems, more than last year. The systems are a combination of SSD with DSP ASICs." ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits - chips dedicated to a specific purpose. TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information. A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed. A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second. Echelon is a global surveillance network set up in Cold War days to provide the US goverment with intelligence data about Russia. One of the main contractors is Raytheon. Lockheed Martin has been involved in writing software for it. Since then it has expanded into a general listening facility, an electronic vacuum cleaner, sucking up the world's telephone conversations. Information about it's existence has been reluctantly revealed, prompted by scandals such as the recordings of Princess Diana's telephone calls by the NSA. Recorded signals are fed into the TMS SAM systems where the DSPs filter out the noise to produce much clearer signals that software can work on to detect individual voices, perform voice recognition, and listen out for keywords, such as, for example, "Semtex". Decryption of encrypted calls is also a likely activity. Hutsell says the SAM systems, "are supplied to intelligence agencies and the military though system integrators like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Zeta. It's an intelligence community application involving data from various sources. This is loaded into RAM and then real-time analysis is carried out on it. Step one is to filter out the noise and our DSP chips are used for that. Then they look into patterns using other tools - images or voice. It's very high-speed." TMS has supplied its RAMsan high-speed SSD technology to several US government agencies. Hutsell said, "We have recently sold another terabyte system to a federal agency. It's installed in the DC [District of Columbia] area via our partner Vion. There's another in a government data centre with Oracle indices that needed to be accelerated." TMS has had 40 percent year on year growth for three years. It has no debt and is privately-owned. Hutsell said: "This year is the healthiest year ever." Half the company's revenue comes from the government sector. Fast, very fast, database and recorded signal access is the name of this game. The US government wants to know what you and I are talking about. Spy in the sky satellites listen in to what we say and look at what we do. Then solid state disk keeps the real time analysis of these calls and images operating at full speed. The world's fastest storage system is used in the world's most sophisticated spying operation. Impressive and scary at the same time. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

1 0

WiMax Operator's Manual: Building 802.16 Wireless (fwd from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org)
by Eugen Leitl 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

----- Forwarded message from brian-slashdotnews(a)hyperreal.org -----

1 0

Re: Seld-defeating US foreign policy
by Tyler Durden 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

Uh...wha? I said... > > The US was in Vietnam trying to fight their way up. So it > > would have been pretty evident to anyone watching that the US > > was trying to undermine the PRC. > And you said... >You live in a world of delusion. Your dates are all wrong, >your events are all fiction. So there was no Vietnam war? The US was not involved? It didn't occur in the 60s? Are you saying that the cultural revolution didn't begin in approximately 1966? That the Sino-Soviet split didn't occur in the late 1950s? >The US never followed an aggressive policy towards the PRC. Like I said: Uh...wha? Let's put it this way: Mao and China clearly interpreted US involvement around China (ie, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc...) as having a lot to do with containing the 'communist meanace' and restoring the Chiang regime to power (we had funded Chiang and the incredibly corrupt Soongs with billions of $ during the 30s and 40s). Whether you agree with this actually constituting "aggression" or not is almost irrelevant. Clearly, our involvement in all of those areas (along with the rhetoric along with MacArthur's words which got him fired) could easily be interpreted as such. But let's sidestep this and point out that it's the US that did this then and is doing this in the middle east. Almost no other countires can be said to be involved in a meaningful way. So is it your belief that the US is somehow more moral/courageous/godfearing than all the other countries in the world? Why is it always us (and not other countries) meddling in foreign affairs? Doesn't that strike you as odd? Is it merely a coincidence that we continue to be the focus of lots of international hostility? -TD _________________________________________________________________ Get ready for school! Find articles, homework help and more in the Back to School Guide! http://special.msn.com/network/04backtoschool.armx

2 1

Do you know anyone looking for a Cryptography position?
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

I guess the bubble's over officially, now... :-). Cheers, RAH --- begin forwarded text

1 0

Re: e-gold
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Oct '04

21 Oct '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 10:17 AM -0400 10/21/04, Somebody wrote: >"R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> writes: >> So, what kind of problems are you having? > >I can't seem to figure out how one deposits or removes gold from >e-gold. They got out of the business of exchanging other forms of money into e-gold a long time ago. Think of them more as an on-line book-entry central securities depository, ala DTC <http://www.dtc.org/dtcpublic/html/>, CREST <http://www.crestco.co.uk> (now apparently part of Euroclear <http://euroclear.com>), etc. The minute they got out of the business and spun their own exchange department off into its own firm, literally tens of companies, if not hundreds since, popped up and started competing. As far as E-Gold was concerned, it was a hell of a lot better than taking in people's Kruggerands etc., and turning it into debits and credits into a database, and the size of their reserves went up accordingly. Imagine being an individual investor in the US, going to DTC and trying to figure out what they do or whether you can do business with them. Same problem with E-Gold, anymore. Actually, CREST *does*, last time I looked at them, have retail accounts, so maybe they're more applicable than the strictly-institutional DTC. The companies that do the in/out exchange (for a fee) are now called "exchange providers". There are lots of them, and they range from professional, like IceGold <http://www.icegold.com>, who I talked about, to, well, anyone who'll take your check in the mail, wait for it to clear, and then click you some gold to your e-gold account. The big ones do more different kinds of money from wires to credit cards etc., but not PayPal, because it's against the PayPal user agreement to buy and sell securities. PayPal freezes exchange provider accounts whenever they show up. In the meantime, expect to wait for the money you send them to completely and irrevocably clear before you see an increase in the account at E-Gold. > They post no information on that at all, and when I've asked >them, they've more or less evaded the question. An operation like >this, if it was on the up and up, would have to be taking bailments >and permitting removals of gold on a frequent basis, but they're >apparently set up to do nothing of the kind. See above. They're taking large wholesale in/out orders only, mostly from the aforementioned exchange providers, who then click you retail amounts of E-Gold for a fee, sometimes less than E-Gold would on a hypothetical retail rate, sometimes less, depending on how they gold's moving that day. >Their online examiner shows exactly the same amount of gold in the >system over a very extended period of time -- call it $25M worth -- >and shows perhaps $1.5M a day in transactions. That transaction >level is surprisingly high given that no gold comes into or out of >the >system at all so far as I can tell. See above. The transaction level is surprisingly high given the transaction costs as well, but remember what I said about storing gold, etc., and, of course, the fact that they're doing book-entry transactions and their attendant, non-repudiation, auditing, etc., costs. >Overall, I'm wondering a lot about whether there is funny business >of some sort going on -- but I can't tell what the nature of the >funny >business might be. I don't think so. If you count up all the fees, they're making enough money on the throughput, storage, in/out exchange fees, and so on. Since they're only handling the depository management function anymore, they don't have nearly as much overhead as you would think. The larger and better firms in this business, like E-Gold and Goldmoney, have sufficiently complicated arrangements with their storage firms, governments where they're domiciled, and so on, that there is probably sufficient oversight for all this. They are doing book-entry trades, remember. They have to call the cops for enforcement themselves if someone rips *them* off somewhere. E-Gold and Goldmoney's officers are US citizens residing and working, for the most part, on US soil. Everyone knows who they are and where they are. We're a long way from TCMay's Cryptopia here, um, Toto. Obviously, caveat emptor, and all that. There's always lots of risk in any kind of financial intermediary business, up to, and including the risk that the entrepreneurs dodging off with the reserve assets, and all you have in terms of risk prediction -- in the absence of financial controls -- is what David Hume called "constant conjunction": they are honest today, were honest yesterday, and every other day so far, so we can, in theory, expect them to be honest tomorrow. As for the lack of growth of the reserve pool, after bursting internet bubbles, terrorism attacks, and wars on same, the bloom is certainly off the rose. We're way past the whizzy, "holy cow, we can do *gold* transactions, on the *internet*, isn't that *kewl*" stage, and the business is now cruising along on the people who actually find it useful, and/or profitable, to do business that way, and less on enthusiasts, privacy, theological, political, financial, or otherwise. Jesus didn't come, or he wasn't pissed, or the date didn't quake, or the state didn't collapse, or whatever. It's just a business now. For a while there were lots of scamsters getting paid in digital gold currencies, exploiting the "gee-whiz" factor for the rubes, but that seems to have died down a bit, between the efforts of various federales, the just-plain mundane ubiquity of the internet increasing the pervasivity of net.clues, and, I expect, the judicious expulsion from the system by an operator or two. Being more financial gold-bugs than um, apocalyptic eschatologists (libertarian, anacharcapitalist, or otherwise -- okay, a gold-bug, by definition, is a *financial* apocalyptic eschatologist, sue me :-)) Goldmoney is particular about the know-your-customer stuff, and about kicking potential scamsters off their system than e-gold is, but e-gold isn't about to lose their shirts by associating themselves with scamsters either, modulo an early investment in them by a cryptofundamentalist disaster-maven who ended up by the feds and/or in their custody, and, IIRC, much of whose investment in E-Gold has since been returned to the people who were originally scammed. Live and learn, and all that. Speaking of that, I think, in e-gold's case, at least, they have been more e-sheep than e-goat, certainly at the hands of various cypherpunks and fellow travellers, who saw them coming, proposed yet-another-crypto-currency, :-), managing to score some seriously nice temporary villa-digs in erst-Crypto-Paradise in the process, resulting in one now famous c-punk bailing out (persona-no-grata in hand on the ferry leaving Blowing Point) in the pure horror at the sheer complexity of the algorithm involved, and the rest literally suing each other off the island and into several other subsequent jurisdictions. Learning occurs, as I said before. So, sure, after more than a decade in business, E-Gold is, and has been, legitimate. Goldmoney's legitimate, too, though a little younger, and for the same reason. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't be careful, and, for the most part, you shouldn't be using *any* internet transaction method, including credit cards over SSL, unless you have an excellent business case for doing so. The cost of anything is the foregone alternative, and all that. Getting paid in E-Gold costs money for the seller and they buyer of the good or service traded for it, especially if your customer converts to E-Gold to pay you, and you immediately convert out of E-Gold to get actual dollars to buy stuff with. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQXgXRcPxH8jf3ohaEQK6hwCfaYTqUCd6E5updBR7XueAcM/RbOIAoJ0d 8jzb8WbGQnc2eKhfIWIn9eWQ =eQAI -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 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'

1 0