- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

RATINGS: say what?
by Panzer Boy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ok a few things. To help me, and possibly others, understand this. (Replace the word "YOU", with your name if you think you understand the rating system...) You want two lists: (of sorts) 1. Current list, as is, anything in -> everyone out. 2. Rated List, anything in -> filtering/rating -> out. Now my question is, who's going to spend the time dealing with this. And how are you going to disallow stuffing the ballot, as we all know about spoofing. And who's actually going to spend the time wading through all the Cypherpunk mail, and rating it all? Are you planning on letter the general readers of "list 1" rate articles, and then people who subscribe to "list 2" will get anything that passes a certain "rating level" (or other criteria)? Are we looking for something that you run the articles through, and it will spit out a "reading level" like most PC word-processors. Then you could ask for just the articles that have <15 misspellings, and a reading level above 11th grade... Pardon me if this isn't quite what some people seem to have in mind, but this just looks like electronic version of filling out forms in triplicate. -Matt (panzer(a)dhp.com) "That which can never be enforced should not be prohibited."

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Re: REAL WORLD ENCRYPTION
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There are several factors that are probably leading people to ask about how digicash is valued. WHile digicash is basically a transaction technology, there are different categories of transactions it can support. One way for it to acquire value is the method that checks and bank notes use - somebody deposits real money in a bank, and writes requests to move it around. Since you're talkign about starting a bank, the obvious question is whether the accounts will be in dollars, yen, gold/silver, rubles, etc.; while much of the business may be in dollars or Swiss francs, supporting more than one currency increases your workload a good bit, and each additional currency adds a certain amount of work. The other way digicash is likely to acquire value is for it to represent requests for certain amounts of service, e.g. digital postage stamps, highway tolls, etc, where it's basically service-provider scrip. For some systems, this may be free and used just for resource allocation, or testing, or whatever. Bill

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Digsig in Germany for RX?
by Alan (Miburi-san) Wexelblat 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[I snarfed this from Phil Agre's RRE list; I know nothing else about this... --AW] Date: Fri, 18 Feb 94 15:33:43 +0000 From: G.Joly(a)cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly) Subject: MICE Seminar for February 22 at 14:00 GMT. Newsgroups: dec.mail.lists.rem-conf You are invited to the next MICE International Seminar which will take place next week. Please limit traffic for two hours from 14:00 GMT on Tuesday, February 22. This seminar will be transmitted on the usual multicast addresses (please see the sd entry), and will be advertised in sd from Tuesday morning. Further information of this and future seminars is kept in the URL http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/seminars.html Bruno Struif (GMD) speaking from Darmstadt, Germany will give a presentation on: "The Privacy Enhanced Electronic Prescription". Abstract -------- In Germany, more than 500 millions prescriptions are issued per year. Normally, the patient receives the prescription in the doctor's practice and takes it to a pharmacy where he gets his medicaments. From the pharmacy, the prescription is physically transported to a pharmacy computer center where it will be processed in different ways. Finally the patient health insurance gets this prescription with listings containing the result of the processing in the pharmacy computer center. Since the prescription is a paper document, the processing is difficult, time-consuming and cost-intensive. The introduction of the health insurance card in Germany will improve the technological environment in the doctor's practices.The prescriptions will be produced in the future by using the health insurance card, a personal computer and a printer. The model presented shows that the electronic presentation of the prescription produced in the doctor's PC can be maintained so that the difficult and expensive way of processing paper prescriptions in the pharmacy, the pharmacy's computer center and finally by the health insurance can be avoided. The solution described and already implemented at GMD is - to sign the electronic prescription by the doctor with its physician smartcard capable to compute digital signatures - to write the electronic prescription in the patient's smartcard - to prove the authorization of a pharmacist for the access to the patient's smartcard by using a pharmacist smartcard - to electronically transmit the electronic prescription together with pharmacy information (name of the pharmacy, prescription cost etc) to the pharmacy computer center or the health insurance computing center where it can be automatically processed. The patient gets therefore two representation forms of the prescription, the electronic form and the paper form. The paper form is still necessary in the relationship doctor/patient/pharmacist, since - the patient has a right to look on the issued prescription, - in case of malfunction of the patient's smartcard in the pharmacy the delivery of the medicaments has still to be possible and - the assembly of the medicaments is easier with a paper form in the hand. In the new release of the electronic prescription model a step in the direction of data privacy has been made. The personal data of the patient and the doctor are replaced by digital pseudonyms in a way that the pharmacy computing center and the health insurance can verify only certain characteristics, e.g. that the prescription has been issued by a registered doctor and that the related patient is a member of the respective health insurance. In special cases, a re-identification of the doctor or the patient is possible by using re-identification smartcards. Gordon Joly Phone +44 71 380 7934 FAX +44 71 387 1397 Email: G.Joly(a)cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ...!{uunet,uknet}!ucl-cs!G.Joly Comp Sci, University College, London, Gower Street, LONDON WC1E 6BT WWW WWW WWW http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/gjoly.html WWW WWW WWW

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Re: RATINGS: Subject tags
by Alexander Chislenko 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For quite a while now, I have been advocating a rating system based on *calculating correlations* of people's interests in each topic domain. This allows to: - give personalized ratings to each user; - filter out any number of "evil tentacles" recommending you junk; - suggest incentives to each user to rate articles; - introduce digicash payments for all messages and ratings; - implicitly use quality criteria that are difficult to formalize; - find like-minded people, even if you never post anything In short, it works like this: you read stuff, if you like it, you pay for it as much as you want; what you pay is considered your rating of the article; the System calculates correlations of your ratings with everybody else's; you can select articles that people with your interests in the given area liked most; so it makes sense for you to pay and be sincere - otherwise the system may not work for you, and you will read too much junk. Also, people whose ratings helped you choose it, can get some share of your payment - another incentive to read early and carefully, and be fair (you can actually earn credits as a critic). Authors can establish minimal payments for their texts, but it will be not their advertizing headers, but the opinions of like-minded with *you* people that will help you choose texts. I have a more or less detailed development proposal for such a system and would be happy to share it if anybody is interested. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | Alexander Chislenko | sasha(a)cs.umb.edu | Cambridge, MA | (617) 864-3382 | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Disinformation
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

How will the development of the Clipper hamper the info-supe-hi? And what is the info-super-hiway anyway, eh? I'll leave out the buzzwords -- but Clipper will definitely hamper the deployment of good networks. Encryption is a vital tool for network management and authentication, even apart from privacy considerations. But Clipper is of necessity hardware-only, which means that most current platforms will never support it, and few future ones will actually have it, whether they're capable of it or not. And on many important boxes -- routers, for example -- just leaving room for Clipper on the boards will be expensive. We have the following dilemma: DES isn't exportable, Clipper isn't suitable, and lots of foreign governments won't allow it in anyway, I suspect. How is one supposed to do authentication on a global Internet? --Steve Bellovin

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Re: Mac encryption
by dmandl＠lehman.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Ron Davis <rondavis(a)datawatch.com> > > >> What is everyones opinion of the best encryption software forthe Mac? > >> Frederic Halper > >> fhalper(a)pilot.njin.net > > > >MacPGP, available by anonymous ftp from the soda.berkeley.edu site, is > >the only one I know of using public key methods, and hence the only > >one of real interest to Cypherpunks. > > I find this to be a strange statement. Do we have no interest > in non-public key methods? Seems the Cypherpunks should have > an interest in all forms of crypto. Most users don't currently > use public key becuase they just want to keep thier boss from > sitting down at thier computer and reading the resumes they wrote > for other companies. This can be accomplished with symetrical > crypto just as well, if not faster than PGP. Cypherpunks do have an interest in all forms of crypto, but there are very good reasons why public key is more desirable than symmetric for "our purposes." This is at the very root of the crypto revolution and the cypherpunk ethos. Have you done the basic reading? (That's a serious question, not sarcasm.) PGP _does_ symmetric crypto. > >Commerical products (like the various "Kent Marsh" products) are > >mostly DES-or-weaker and are oriented toward local file protection. > >(MacPGP will do that, too, of course). > > Cryptomatic does come with Triple DES which is still a very > strong method. And MacPGP comes with IDEA, which is at least as strong (as far as we know). And of course, it does all the public-key encryption and key-management as well. A pretty incredible package, considering its size and cost. > Unfortunatly MacPGP's biggest draw back is that its interface > is poor and it is hard to use. I disagree. > Can't stop without mentioning that my company make a product > called Citadel which does DES encryption. Hmmm... --Dave.

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Re: Mac encryption
by Ron Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Cypherpunks do have an interest in all forms of crypto, but there are >very good reasons why public key is more desirable than symmetric for "our >purposes." This is at the very root of the crypto revolution and the >cypherpunk ethos. Have you done the basic reading? (That's a serious >question, not sarcasm.) Depends on what the required reading list for this group is. I thought that our purposes were to promote the privacy of individuals through the use of cryptography. This can be done in the contexts I talked about with symmetric as well as PK crypto. Maybe I have the wrong idea about "our purposes", please correct me if I'm wrong. >PGP _does_ symmetric crypto. >And MacPGP comes with IDEA, which is at least as strong (as far as we know). Rumor has it that Kent Marsh is working on an IDEA module for thier products as well. >And of course, it does all the public-key encryption and key-management as >well. A pretty incredible package, considering its size and cost. You're right its free. If something is free you can't really complain about it. If it does anything its a bargan. > >> Unfortunatly MacPGP's biggest draw back is that its interface >> is poor and it is hard to use. > >I disagree. I can live with disagreement. Of course hopefully you would admit that Cryptomactics ability to select a file in the finder, pull down a menu and Boom encrypted file is easier than PGP's methods. ___________________________________________________________________________ "I want to know God's thoughts...the rest are details." -- Albert Einstein _________________________________________ Ron Davis rondavis(a)datawatch.com Datawatch, Research Triangle Park, NC (919)549-0711

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Disinformation
by fhalper＠pilot.njin.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Miller wrote: The idea of a disinformation campaign to oppose Clipper really bothers me. Isn't the true about Clipper damning enough? Lying about Clipper seems like moral and ethical surrender. I agree that lying can produce favorable results, but I'm not willing to stoop to that level. If the anti-Clipper people (and I count myself one of them) can't defeat Clipper with the truth, this tells me the world is so fucked up it deserves Clipper and Capstone in every machine on. I feel that in the present situation with the Clipper chip, the ends justifies t he means. If Clipper is widely implemented it will affect the development of th e "Information Super Highway" for years to come. What Jim Miller sayts about ly ing about Clipper is true. But, what if that is the only way to open peoples eyes? Any means neccesary is the ONLY way to a victory in this case. you can't truly believe that the government is inly going to implement Clipper on a "voluntary" basis? Reuben Halper -Anger is a gift- Rage against the machine/Freedom P.S. Did anyone read the article in Covert action a couple months back on Clipper, it was very well done.

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Disinformation
by fhalper＠pilot.njin.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Net is growing rapidly. As it grows it will become more signifigant in our world(transaction of digital cash, etc.) Security will become more of a neccesi ty(lets face it MOST people don't need encryption) If Clipper is widely impleme nted (be it voluntary or forced) people will be looking over their shoulders and righ tfully so. Also, i feel that the structure of the Internet is likely to change( It's present structure is not a good base to build on) when the cahnge occurs do n't you think Clipper is going to become the "standard." Reuben Halper -anger is a gift- rage against the machine/freedom

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Re: Why only public-key crypto?
by collins＠newton.apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>I find this to be a strange statement. Do we have no interest >in non-public key methods? Seems the Cypherpunks should have >an interest in all forms of crypto. It's not so strange. Cypherpunks are trying to bring about social changes, not primarily technological ones. Crypto is here, and we want to change our culture in a way where, through strong crypto, privacy becomes the norm rather than the exception. With this goal in mind, public-key systems are vastly more interesting because they are the `social' solutions. Scott Collins | "That's not fair!" -- Sarah | "You say that so often. I wonder what your basis 408.862.0540 | for comparison is." -- Goblin King ................|.................................................... BUSINESS. fax:974.6094 R254(IL5-2N) collins(a)newton.apple.com Apple Computer, Inc. 5 Infinite Loop, MS 305-2D Cupertino, CA 95014 ..................................................................... PERSONAL. 408.257.1746 1024:669687 catalyst(a)netcom.com

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