February 2005 - cypherpunks-legacy

Why Felons Deserve the Right to Vote
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/opinion/7mon3.html?th=&pagewanted=print&p…> The New York Times February 7, 2005 EDITORIAL Why Felons Deserve the Right to Vote n a watershed moment for the debate over whether convicted felons should be allowed to vote, the American Correctional Association has issued a welcome statement calling on states to end the practice of withholding voting rights from parolees and people who have completed their prison terms. Noting that society expects people to become responsible members of society once they are released from prison, the organization, which represents corrections officials, also called on states to cut through the confusing thicket of disenfranchisement laws by explaining clearly to inmates how they get their rights back after completing their sentences. Some five million Americans are barred from the polls by a bewildering patchwork of state laws that strip convicted felons of the right to vote, often temporarily, but sometimes for life. These laws serve no correctional purpose - and may actually contribute to recidivism by keeping ex-offenders and their families disengaged from the civic mainstream. This notion is clearly supported by data showing that former offenders who vote are less likely to return to jail. This lesson has long since been absorbed by democracies abroad, some valuing the franchise so much that they take ballot boxes right to the prisons. Several states are now reconsidering laws barring convicted felons from voting. In Maryland, for instance, the legislature is considering a bill that would eliminate a lifetime ban that remains in place for some offenders. The Maryland bill should pass. And other states should follow suit. -- ----------------- 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'

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[fc-announce] Transportation, Taxes, and Conference Events
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

--- begin forwarded text User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.1.0.040913 From: "Stuart E. Schechter" <ses(a)ll.mit.edu> To: "fc-announce(a)ifca.ai" <fc-announce(a)ifca.ai> Subject: [fc-announce] Transportation, Taxes, and Conference Events Sender: fc-announce-admin(a)ifca.ai Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 15:12:11 -0500 IMPORTANT NOTES FOR THOSE ATTENDING FC05 Transportation ============== We would like to accommodate attendees with discounted transportation to and from the airport. Please fill out the following survey if you would like to arrange for discounted transportation or give your opinion on conference activities. We need your answers this week. http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB2244SFRHAFQ Dominica departure tax ====================== Please note that there is a departure tax of approximately EC$50/US$22 payable at the airport on you way out of Dominica. You'll be reminded of the exact figure at the conference. New York Times article ====================== Dominica was recently featured in Saturday's New York times. (Ignore the red herring of their reference to the Dominican Republic early in the article.) It's a great read to get yourself in the mood for your upcoming trip. http://nytimes.com/2005/02/06/travel/06dominica.html?pagewanted=all [Learn to] Scuba dive ===================== Please contact me at stuart.schechter(a)gmail.com if you are interested in a discover-scuba social on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, if you are interested in getting a full open water certification on Dominica, or if you are already certified and want to dive with other attendees. Registration ============ With three weeks to go before the conference registration has already exceeded our totals from last year by more than 10%. We're glad to see you're as excited as we are and we're looking forward to a great conference. Best regards Stuart Schechter General Chair Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2005 _______________________________________________ fc-announce mailing list fc-announce(a)ifca.ai http://mail.ifca.ai/mailman/listinfo/fc-announce --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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'

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CodeCon Reminder
by Len Sassaman 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

e'd like to remind those of you planning to attend this year's event that CodeCon is fast approaching. CodeCon is the premier event in 2005 for application developer community. It is a workshop for developers of real-world applications with working code and active development projects. Past presentations at CodeCon have included the file distribution software BitTorrent; the Peek-A-Booty anti-censorship application; the email encryption system PGP Universal; and Audacity, a powerful audio editing tool. Some of this year's highlights include Off-The-Record Messaging, a privacy-enhancing encryption protocol for instant-message systems; SciTools, a web-based toolkit for genetic design and analysis; and Incoherence, a novel stereo sound visualization tool. CodeCon registration is discounted this year: $80 for cash at the door registrations. Registration will be available every day of the conference, though ticket are limited, and attendees are encouraged to register on the first day to secure admission. CodeCon will be held February 11-13, noon-6pm, at Club NV (525 Howard Street) in San Francisco. For more information, please visit http://www.codecon.org.

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[IP] Hacking Fingerprint Readers (fwd from dave@farber.net)
by Eugen Leitl 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> -----

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Riggs Sale to PNC Is Called Off
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110779147630847722,00.html> The Wall Street Journal February 7, 2005 12:19 p.m. EST MARKETS Riggs Sale to PNC Is Called Off By MITCHELL PACELLE and NIKHIL DEOGUN Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL February 7, 2005 12:19 p.m. WASHINGTON -- The sale of beleaguered Riggs National Corp. to PNC Financial Services Group has been called off. The board of Riggs unanimously rejected PNC's demands to alter the terms of the agreement, the company said in a news release. In addition, Riggs is suing PNC in Superior Court for the District of Columbia saying it has been damaged by PNC's decisions not to proceed with the merger after Riggs had devoted the past six months to preparing for the merger and taking various actions at PNC's behest. Riggs's banking subsidiary has been embroiled in a massive money-laundering scandal for the past several months and recently pleaded guilty to a criminal count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act. Investors had hoped that the guilty plea, part of a settlement of a Justice Department investigation that also included a $16 million fine, would clear the way for PNC to complete its acquisition of Riggs, a venerable financial institution in the nation's capital. PNC struck its deal to buy Riggs last July -- in a transaction valued at the time at $779 million in cash and stock -- just as the Riggs scandal was starting to reverberate. However, in recent weeks PNC has balked at going ahead with the deal at the agreed-to price, saying the business has undergone "material" deterioration. In what appears to be a pre-emptive strike, Riggs is making the first legal move, saying PNC isn't living up to the terms of the agreement. PNC had been proposing a revised tentative agreement that would offer Riggs shareholders $19.32 a share and a contingent security of 83 cents a share, according to the news release. But this proposal, in addition to being well below the earlier offer, would possibly have been subject to further revision and was contingent on other factors as well. PNC officials couldn't be reached for immediate comment. Like most merger agreements, PNC's deal with Riggs includes a "material adverse change clause" that entitles it to walk away should there be a dramatic change in the business. However, recent legal history has shown that it is difficult for a buyer to back out of a deal by invoking a "MAC" clause. In 2001, a Delaware Chancery Court ruled that Tyson Foods Inc. couldn't terminate its planned acquisition of IBP Inc. because of a decline in IBP's earnings and accounting irregularities at an IBP unit. To avoid a costly legal battle, companies end up renegotiating transactions if there is a significant deterioration in a seller's business. After settling the Justice Department's criminal investigation on Jan. 27, Riggs, which is controlled by the Allbritton family, said that it expected to make an announcement about the "status" of the agreement on or about Feb. 4. That date passed without any statement. Now Riggs is likely to try to drum up interest from other bidders. Riggs had been prohibited from entering into discussions with other parties under terms of the agreement with PNC. It is now, however, sending a letter to the board saying it now believes it can enter into merger discussions with other banks. Separately, Riggs said it expects to report a loss for the fourth quarter and for 2004 and plans to shut its London branch as it focuses on domestic banking. -- ----------------- 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'

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Quantum crypto firm charts way to mainstream
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://news.zdnet.com/2102-1009_22-5564288.html?tag=printthis> Quantum crypto firm charts way to mainstream By Michael Kanellos URL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5564288.html Magiq Technologies is creating a new line of products this year that it says could help make quantum encryption--theoretically impossible to crack--more palatable to mainstream customers. The New York-based company said it has signed a deal with Cavium Networks, under which Cavium's network security chips will be included inside Magiq's servers and networking boards. Magiq and Cavium will also create reference designs for networking boards and cards, with all of the necessary silicon to create a quantum encryption system. These will be marketed to networking gear makers, which, Magiq hopes, will include the boards inside future boxes. "We have operability tests going on with major vendors," said Andy Hammond, vice president of marketing at Magiq. "Our goal in life is to increase the adoption rate of this technology." By the fall, Magiq expects to be able to provide functioning beta, or test, products that include its quantum encryption boards. Volume sales to manufacturers are scheduled to begin in 2006. Quantum encryption involves sending data by way of photons, the smallest unit of light. The photons are polarized, or oriented, in different directions. Eavesdroppers cause detectable changes in the orientation, which in turn prevents them from getting secret information, as dictated by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says you can't observe something without changing it. For added measure, the data is encrypted before sending. "There is no cracking it. This is like the apple falling down," said Audrius Berzanskis, Magiq's vice president of security engineering, meaning that it was like one of Sir Isaac Newton's natural laws. This doesn't mean quantum encryption systems are unconditionally foolproof, he added. Hypothetically, radio transmitters or some other technology could intercept signals before they are sent. Still, these are computer architecture issues: Unlike traditional encryption systems, applying brute-force calculations to a message encrypted using quantum methods will not eventually yield its contents to an unauthorized party. However, quantum encryption systems are pricey. The two-box system Magiq sells goes for $70,000. Academic institutions and government agencies have been the primary customers, the company said. Whether demand will go mainstream is still a matter of debate. Nearly foolproof encryption has its obvious attractions. Various security experts have stated, however, that the strength of today's cryptography is the least of the security world's worries. "Security is a chain; it's only as strong as the weakest link. Currently encryption is the strongest link we have. Everything else is worse: software, networks, people. There's absolutely no value in taking the strongest link and making it even stronger," Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security, wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com on quantum cryptography in general. "It's like putting a huge stake in the ground and hoping the enemy runs right into it," he noted. Speed also has been a problem for quantum encryption. The deal with Cavium will ideally boost the performance of the Magiq products and lower the costs by standardizing some of the engineering. Cavium's chips, for instance, will assume encryption tasks now performed in software. Reference designs also allow potential customers to skirt some independent design tasks. -- ----------------- 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'

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MD5 comes in for further criticism
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=3081&Page=1&pagePos=…> Techworld.com 07 February 2005 More experts warn of CAS arrays risks MD5 comes in for further criticism By Lucas Mearian, Computerworld (US) More security experts are warning against the use of the flawed hashing algorithm, MD5, for digital signatures on content addressed storage (CAS) systems. Last August, a Chinese researcher, Xiaoyun Wang, unveiled detailsof the flaw. Other security experts are now chipping in. An official at the National Institute of Standards and Technology said IT managers have good reason to be concerned about security flaws in MD5. "It's pretty well known right now that it's just not up to what you need," said Elaine Barker, head of NIST's computer security division. Barker said NIST has no plans to certify or recommend the MD5 algorithm for government use. The warnings come as more vendors unveil CAS systems to meet the need for disk-based backup of fixed data such as e-mail and medical images. Experts say that under specific circumstances, hackers could create files containing malicious data that could cause data loss or the dissemination of bad data. Of the four major vendors of CAS storage, two of them - EMC and Archivas - use the MD5 algorithm. The other two, Permabit and Avamar Technologies do not. Archivas said it provides the option of using another method of indexing, called the Secure Hash Algorithm-1. Users of EMC and Archivas systems say they aren't concerned about the warnings. "I believe that the possibility of a (problem) is so unlikely that it does not bother me," said John Halamka, CIO at Boston-based CareGroup, a hospital management company. "Thus far, we've been working with (the) Centera (array) for more than a year without a single issue." Curt Tilmes, a systems engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has been beta-testing an Archivas Cluster CAS system for archiving satellite data about the earth's atmosphere for more than a year. He said he feels it's secure because it's on a private network with firewalls. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt [to use a more secure algorithm], but for my application, it wouldn't have an effect," Tilmes said. Meanwhile, Sun's long-awaited CAS system, code-named Honeycomb, won't use the MD5 algorithm because of security concerns, said Chris Woods, chief technology officer for Sun's storage practice. Woods would not say which algorithm the company will use to index stored objects. "It really is time for [the industry] to stop using MD5," said Dan Kaminsky, a security consultant at Avaya. "MD5 has been a deprecated hashing algorithm for almost a decade. The industry has clung to the algorithm, partially out of inertia, partially out of scarcity of computer power." In a report last month, Kaminsky pointed out that an attack could be used to create two files with the same MD5 hash, one with "safe" data and one with "malicious" data. If both files were saved to the same system, a so-called collision could result, leading to data loss or the dissemination of bad data, he said. Mike Kilian, CTO at EMC's Centera division, contended that MD5 flaws don't apply to Centera arrays because once a piece of content is stored, a company can't change it. "Centera from almost Day 1 has had multiple addressing schemes available to applications," Kilian said. Kaminsky disagreed. "Cryptography tends to be a 'garbage algorithm in, garbage security out' discipline," he said. "Let's say they were appending custom metadata to the end of their files. Conceivably, the attack would not care, as once two files have the same hash, you can append the same [identical] metadata to both of them and they'll still possess the same hash." Archivas officials noted that its CAS device does not use the MD5 hash key to name the file in the archive, the way EMC's product does. -- ----------------- 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'

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NIST moves to stronger hashing
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.fcw.com/print.asp> Federal Computer Week Monday, February 7, 2005 NIST moves to stronger hashing BY Florence Olsen Published on Feb. 7, 2005 Federal agencies have been put on notice that National Institute of Standards and Technology officials plan to phase out a widely used cryptographic hash function known as SHA-1 in favor of larger and stronger hash functions such as SHA-256 and SHA-512. The change will affect many federal cryptographic functions that incorporate hashes, particularly digital signatures, said William Burr, manager of NIST's security technology group, which advises federal agencies on electronic security standards. "There's really no emergency here," Burr said. "But you should be planning how you're going to transition - whether you're a vendor or a user - so that you can do better cryptography by the next decade." Hashing is used to prevent tampering with electronic messages. A hash is a numerical code generated from a string of text when a message is sent. The receiving system checks it against a hash it creates from the same text, and if they match, the message was sent intact. Speaking at a recent meeting of the federal Public Key Infrastructure Technical Working Group at NIST, Burr said some critics have questioned the security of the government-developed SHA-1 after some researchers managed to break a variant of the SHA-1 hash function last year. But Burr said no complete implementation of the SHA-1 function has been successfully attacked. "SHA-1 is not broken," he said, "and there is not much reason to suspect that it will be soon." But advances in computer processing capability make it prudent to phase out SHA-1 by 2010, he said. Burr said other widely used hash functions such as MD5 are vulnerable to attack and their use should be discontinued. "If by some chance you are still using MD5 in certificates or for digital signatures, you should stop," he said. -- ----------------- 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'

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Iraq passport racket highlights lapses in security
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.theage.com.au/news/Iraq/Iraqi-passport-racket-highlights-securit…> Welcome to The Age Online. Passport racket highlights lapses in security By Paul McGeough Baghdad February 8, 2005 The passport details the bearer's Arab background but has Paul McGeough's picture. For a few hundred dollars, anyone can buy their way through most checkpoints and across borders. While officials in Baghdad and Washington berate Iraq's neighbours for failing to block insurgency movements across their borders, one of the most dangerous security lapses thrives in Baghdad's heart - a trade in illicit Iraqi passports. In a secretive exchange at a suburban gambling den, across the road from a heavily fortified government ministry that is an insurgency target, it costs only $US200 ($A250) for a pass through most of the security checkpoints in a city at war. The ease with which this deal was conducted is a chilling window on the easy movement of terrorists in and out of the country. The security blanket in the capital can be numbing - some wait for hours in snail's-pace queues for access to military, government, political and private establishments. Passing through the maze of blast walls and razor wire that isolates the Green Zone, within which top US and Iraqi officials are bunkered on the banks of the Tigris River, requires checks at four heavily armed posts only 150 metres apart. All bags are searched and visitors are frisked, physically and electronically, at two of them. At a ministry as mundane as Displacement and Migration there is a twist: personal IDs are held at the first check; and a special pale blue pass is issued that must be swapped for a darker blue tag at a second checkpoint closer to the building. Journalists reporting on the January 30 election had to carry three separately issued passes, each of which took half a day or more to be issued: one from the US-run Combined Press Information Centre; another from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior; and the third from the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. But the starting point for any pass is a valid passport. And in the absence of most of the fancy laminated picture passes, a passport, or any other picture ID, say a driver's licence, are likely to get the bearer through most checkpoints. But take the Iraqi passport pictured above. It gives the name of the bearer's Arab mother and it describes him as a Baghdad businessman - but it has a picture of me. It was acquired through a former Iraqi policeman who replied cryptically when asked what his business was: "I'm retired." This is not a backstreet counterfeit, it is said to be real. It was to cost $US100 and could have been turned around in a couple of hours, but it was ordered during the weekend and had to be delivered 48 hours later. In the best opportunist tradition, the price suddenly doubled at the point of collection. The passport racket emerged last week in interviews with insurgency and criminal elements in Baghdad. They said Sabah al-Baldawi, one of the insurgency's top financiers and the man they say is behind most of the kidnapping in the city, moves freely between Baghdad and Damascus using up to 20 false passports. One said false Iraqi documents were used to spirit Saad al-Kharki, an insurgency leader in Baghdad, out of Iraq when he needed to hide in Cairo after a televised alert that authorities were hunting him. -- ----------------- 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'

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Security's inseparable couple
by R.A. Hettinga 07 Feb '05

07 Feb '05

<http://www.itworldcanada.com:80/Mobile/ViewArticle.aspx?id=idgml-257f41ee-4…> Network World Security's inseparable couple By: Bob Brown Network World (US) (07 Feb 2005) The most familiar names in network security are neither vendors nor geeks: Try Alice and Bob. Since Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman - the R, S and A in RSA Security Inc. - introduced Alice and Bob in their seminal public-key cryptosystem paper in 1978, the couple has become the subject of countless security-related papers, test questions, speeches and even, ahem, jokes. Alice and Bob were the names given to fictitious characters used to explain how the RSA encryption method worked, with the thinking being that using names instead of letters like A and B would make a complex subject easier to grasp. They are so commonly used that most security experts don't even give a second thought to reaching for them. "They're like old friends," says Charles Kolodgy, research director for security products at IDC. "I use them the same way everyone else does. 'So the sender, Alice, is trying to message Bob. . . .'" "I use them conversationally. Sometimes I use them in documents, as well," says James Cupps, information security officer at Sappi Fine Paper North America in Portland, Maine. "I often use them in training because they are easier than Machine A and Machine B." Over the years, the Alice and Bob story line has become more complicated, something of a high-tech reality show. Not only are Alice and Bob trying to share a secret, say a Valentine's Day poem, but Carol and Dave want in and Eve is trying to eavesdrop. A whole cast of characters has been introduced to explain everything from micropayments to SSL to quantum cryptography. "Cryptography is the one area of mathematics where there are people, not just numbers," says Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. and author of Applied Cryptography, a book first published in 1994 that includes a table of "dramatis personae" headed by Alice and Bob (see graphic). "Alice and Bob are the links between the mathematical variables and the people." Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s chief security officer and co-author of the Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol, says there is seemingly no end to this modern day Dick and Jane's adventures. "(They have) appeared in fanciful circumstances in numerous papers carrying on their stormy relationship entirely over unprotected communication media and against the plots of their exes, the secret police.," he says. One gossipy headline in a trade journal teased: "Alice and Bob grow apart." Some suspect the names stem from the swinging 1960s movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." RSA co-founder Rivest, who is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, says he came up with Alice and Bob to be able to use "A" and "B" for notation, and that by having one male and one female, the pronouns "he" and "she" could be used in descriptions. Rivest says it is possible that Alice came to mind because he is something of an Alice in Wonderland buff. Never did he expect the names to take on lives of their own. "Nor did I imagine that our proposed cryptosystem would be so widely used," he says. Ask those in the know about Alice and Bob and you'll inevitably be pointed to an after-dinner speech delivered at a technology seminar in Zurich, Switzerland in 1984 by data security expert John Gordon. In his "Story of Alice and Bob," Gordon refers to the speech as perhaps "the first time a definitive biography of Alice and Bob has been given." From the speech we learn that "Bob is a subversive stockbroker and Alice is a two-timing speculator" and that they've never actually met one another. Gordon, who runs a consultancy in the U.K., sums up their story like this: "Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle (with) her tax returns and to organize a coup d'tat, while at the same time minimizing the cost of the phone call." Gordon, who has been in cryptography since 1976, says over the years he has taken the text of the speech off his company's Web site, only to put it back on because of reader demand. "Today, nobody remembers I invented Strong Primes (special numbers used in cryptography), but everyone knows me as the guy who wrote the story of Alice and Bob," he says. Gordon estimates the speech gets viewed about 1,000 times a month. Security experts say Alice and Bob likely aren't going anywhere soon. Other names, such as Lucy and Desi, have been used, but without a following. "I suspect that (Alice and Bob) will be around almost forever," says Joel Snyder, a senior partner with consulting firm Opus One. "In our business, we tend to live by very long and ugly traditions, and people are using terms now that were invented by MIT and Cal Tech undergrads in the 1970s -- mostly without knowing why or what. Consider 'hacker' for example." Barry Stiefel, CTO for consulting and training company Information Engine and founder of the Check Point User Group, says he still gets "a wry little smile" whenever he hears or uses the names Alice and Bob. "As soon as you say those names, everybody's already 5 minutes into the story's exposition and excited to hear where the plot will take us," he says. -- ----------------- 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'

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