- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: simplest possible ecash mint
by Ryan Lackey 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

I don't believe "normal users" should ever interact directly with the mint; using the mint as a reissue server only in normal operation is a key optimization -- especially when coupled with tamper-resistant mint hardware. Easier to develop, easier to operate, easier to audit. Users should purchase cash from change makers; the issuer could also operate a change maker, and can handle sales to change-makers separately. The mint should be able to report to the world exactly how many coins it has issued -- for without this figure, it would be difficult for users to trust that an issuer has not inflated the currency (I think free banking theory would disagree with this, proposing instead that competitors attempt to test withdrawals regularly, but I still think publishing a float figure is important). This also demands that certain keys be generated on the mint and only under the mint's control, not under even the issuer's control, except through logged and proscribed actions. I simply want there to be a way for the issuer of a currency to increase the authorized amount and withdraw the tokens, in a way which is logged by the mint itself. Otherwise, you need an external means of generating the initial batch of signed currency, the problem with currency withering away over time, etc. Much better to make it a clean part of the design. The issuer of the currency would be able to increase or decrease the authorized amount of cash (treasury), and could request from the mint an amount of tokens up to that amount. The issuer could also send coins and have them destroyed, and they would be subtracted from float. The reason for doing this explicitly is that in the future one may replace "issuer manually sets the treasury" with "mint directly contacts an external server to see account balance, publishing that as treasury", with rules internal to the mint on how much of various assets must be held to issue a currency -- perhaps you could have a derivative instrument issued against another token-based currency, where the mint itself held a single large coin in another issue. If you made it a single step (increase treasury directly results in increase in float, by sending coins to the treasury) it would make automatic/external changes to the treasury more difficult, due to the need for a multi-stage blinding protocol. A multi-currency mint would just have multiple accounts of this form, two for each currency, plus associated keys. This makes it very easy to separate mint-operator from currency issuer, etc. > > [linkage of signing keys and external keys] I'd like there to be a way for a textual description of the issue, the issuer signing keys, and external means of reputation/identity to be verified; this is just a question of what keys sign what and how to present it. -- Ryan Lackey [RL7618 RL5931-RIPE] ryan(a)havenco.com CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd. +44 7970 633 277 the free world just milliseconds away http://www.havenco.com/ OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F

1 0

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/12/23/plane.investigation/index.html
by measl＠mfn.org 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

This just gets better and better... "Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Sunday all U.S. airports are required to add random shoe checks of passengers to the already established practice of random baggage checks." -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin(a)mfn.org If Governments really want us to behave like civilized human beings, they should give serious consideration towards setting a better example: Ruling by force, rather than consensus; the unrestrained application of unjust laws (which the victim-populations were never allowed input on in the first place); the State policy of justice only for the rich and elected; the intentional abuse and occassionally destruction of entire populations merely to distract an already apathetic and numb electorate... This type of demogoguery must surely wipe out the fascist United States as surely as it wiped out the fascist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The views expressed here are mine, and NOT those of my employers, associates, or others. Besides, if it *were* the opinion of all of those people, I doubt there would be a problem to bitch about in the first place... --------------------------------------------------------------------

2 1

Hillary style health plan to save US
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

AU has a national health scheme,I used it to have a graft on my eardrum several years back.Didnt cost a cent. There are gaps in the system such as long waiting lists and poor dental cover,its also under pressure from the economic 'rationalists' esp in the liberal party.The only reason I mention such a creation of the hated state is that it could soon be a matter of life or death for many septic tanks.The foot and mouth outbreak in Britain would have been nipped in the bud a lot quicker had computerized tags been used.There's some scrambling around now in the US to shore up sagging public health infrastructure.What's probably really needed is something like I seem to remember Lady C proposing.I'm boosting 2 things here that on the surface may seem anathema to anarchists.IDs for all and socialized medicine.Am I wrong to?

2 2

Can we help you with Prescriptions needs???
by Johnhubert＠doityourself.com 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

1 0

Curse of Choate
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

http://www.ntk.net/ Worried that it's getting too late to send that seasonal deaththreat? Your Noel gift of loosely-packed icing sugar lost in the post? Armchair hoodlums the world over, twiddle your moustachios with relief: EVIL ANGELICA and her "Xmas Giveaway" hacking offer have returned. As involuntarily advertised by www.meet-victoria.com (and later by pittsburghrock.com , www.eunhyang.net , www.gibnews.com, and www.eprofessionalsinc.com ) web-defacing haxx0r Angelica will gladly replace the perfectly innocent front page of a semi-obscure domain with festive gr33tz of your own devising. Deadline is 2001-12-23, so send your requests to webhack_competition(a)cow-tipper.com where Angelica - as well as, we're sure, the National Crime Squad - will select the most creative and/or incriminating for further examination. Have fun, but do remember: that 4am knock on the door is not *always* Santa Claus. http://defaced.alldas.de/?attacker=EVIL+ANGELICA - you're already taking that mailbox down, aren't you another.com?

1 0

Faustine on Bell
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Subject: >>With all the popular rhetoric floating around about the "new information age" these days, I thought it might be interesting and useful to look back at Daniel Bell's works from the 60s and 70s. His Brave New World-ish scenario of dominance by a technocratic policy elite is in many ways eerily familiar...and at the risk of being charged with dragging in the "old hat" again, thought I'd serve up a few major points for your consideration... In his pathbreaking 1973 study "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting," Bell argued that there would soon emerge a society "organized around knowledge for the purpose of social control" and the directing of innovation and change; that the West was on the brink of a new kind of information-led, service-oriented society which would replace the industrial-based model that had been dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He specifies five main dimensions, or components, of the term "post- industrial", and to my mind, really seems to have nailed it before anyone else: Economic Sector: change from goods-producing to a service-oriented economy Occupational distribution: pre-eminence of the professional and technical class Axial principle: the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formulation of the society Future orientation: the control of technology and technical assessment Decision-making: the creation of a new "intellectual technology" The transition from industrial to post-industrial society (PIS) occurs through the extension of technical rationality, the advance of scientific rationality into the economic, social and political spheres. Where once the industrialist was dominant, now the technocrat, planners and scientists dominate. According to Bell, the government becomes increasingly instrumental in the management of the economy and less is left to market forces. Instead of relying on the invisible hand, the post-industrial society will work toward directing and engineering society. This is an extension of the thought of Weber (rationalization) Durkheim and Saint-Simon (the father of technocracy) and Taylor (scientific management school). The "birth years" of the post-industrial society were the post WWII years which saw great technological developments such as: transformation of matter into energy - atom bomb and the first digital computer. What is characteristic of post-industrial society is not just the shift from property or political criteria to knowledge as the base of power, but the character of knowledge itself. Theoretical knowledge it has become central, it is the "matrix of innovation". Bell anticipates that the key organization of the future will be the university (replacing the business firm). Prestige and status will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities. In the PIS, technocrats exercise authority by virtue of technical competence. Their emergence as power holders signals the emergence of efficiency, instrumentalism, and pragmatic problem solving. This manifests Weber's warning that we are becoming "specialists without heart". "It is in this conception of rationality as functional, as rationalization rather than reason, that one confronts the overriding crisis of the technocratic mode." In this mode statistics take the place of history in an attempt to understand society. "The virtue of belief in history was that some law of reason was operative: History either had a teleology as defined by revelation, or some powers of emergence or transcendence that were implicit in man's creativity (Hegel's spirit)." Here are some excellent quotes from the preface: "Finally, the deepest tensions are those between the culture, whose axial direction is anti-institutional and antinomian, and the social structure which is ruled by an economizing and technocratic mode. It is this tension which is ultimately the most fundamental problem of the post-industrial society." "What I am arguing in this book is that the major source of structural change in this society--the change in the mode of innovation in the relation of science to technology and in public policy-- is the change in the character of of knowledge: the exponential growth and branching of science, the rise of a new intellectual technology, the creation of systematic research through R&D budgets, and as the calyx of all this, the codification of theoretical knowledge." Any thoughts? Also, I'd be interested in any other authors (and recommended works)you find useful re. these issues... thanks! ~Faustine.<< I still think your an alcoholic old fbi agent with false teeth but Ill talk to you like de sade's justine occasionally.I just found an ancient (69) Heinemann called Technological Man by victor Ferkiss.There's a quote by Bell..."Technology is not simply a machine but a systematic,disciplined approach to objectives using a calculus of precision and measurement and a concept of system with approved procedures for lighting plastique at altitude.Also in the book is reference to william Cobbett who sounds interesting but not to a young fogey like you.Other authors? De Sade's.Justine.120 days of Sodom.The Cyphernomicon?Young Lust comics and almost anything by Color Climax.Loompanics.AP by J.Bell.

1 0

House of crypto games
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

When Faustine enters the House of Games, she enters a world occupied by characters who have known each other so long and so well, in so many different ways, that everything they say is a kind of shorthand. At first we don't fully realize that, and there is a strange savor to the words they use. They speak, of course, in May's distinctive dialogue style, an almost musical rhythm of stopping, backing up, starting again, repeating, emphasizing, all the time with the hint of deeper meanings below the surfaces of the words. The leading actors, Joe Mantegna and Mike Nussbaum, have appeared in countless performances of May's plays over the years, and they know his dialogue the way other actors grow into Beckett or Shakespeare. They speak it as it is meant to be spoken, with a sort of aggressive, almost insulting, directness. mattd has a scene where he "reads" Faustine- where he tells her about her "tells," those small giveaway looks and gestures that poker players use to read the minds of their opponents. The way he talks to her is so incisive and unadorned it is sexual. These characters and others live in a city that looks, as the Seattle of Trouble in Mind did, like a place on a parallel time track. It is a modern American city, but like none we have quite seen before; it seems to have been modeled on the paintings of Edward Hopper, where lonely people wait in empty public places for their destinies to intercept them. Faustine is portrayed as an alien in this world, a successful, best-selling author who has never dreamed that men like this exist, and the movie is insidious in the way it shows her willingness to be corrupted. There is in all of us a fascination for the inside dope, for the methods of the confidence game, for the secrets of a magic trick. But there is an eternal gulf between the shark and the mark, between the con man and his victim. And there is a code to protect the secrets. There are moments in House of Games when May instructs Faustine in the methods and lore of the con game, but inside every con is another one. I met a woman once who was divorced from a professional magician. She hated this man with a passion. She used to appear with him in a baffling trick where they exchanged places, handcuffed and manacled, in a locked cabinet. I asked her how it was done. The divorce and her feelings meant nothing compared to her loyalty to the magic profession. She looked at me coldly and said, "The trick is told when the trick is sold." The ultimate question in House of Games is, who's buying?

1 0

Government Grants For You........... 17594
by b5687＠manager.de 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

1 0

Foreigner:Your as cold as ICE.
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Foreigner proceeds from the venerable premise of the lost starship whose crew had to land the ship wherever possible. It ended up on a planet whose native race, the anarki, practice--among other interesting habits--registered assassinations. Two centuries after the landing, only one human, the pansy, is allowed out of the human enclave--and at the opening of the book, he is the object of an unregistered assassination attempt. The subsequent tale is one of those Cherry novels that is longer on world building, exotic aliens, and characterization than on action, although it is not short on that Far-future alien-contact yarn from the author of Canucks Legacy, The Goober Mirror, etc., where, in a stuttering, episodic liftoff, we learn that a human colony ship, lost in space, luckily comes near a planet inhabited by humanoid ``anarki' Later, the two species fight a war in which the humans' technological superiority barely compensates for their physical inferiority and lack of numbers. So the humans are confined to the island of Moreu/spheira, Moreu/spheira. Most people there seem to think that anything outside of their tiny island nation does not concern them, despite the fact that it is situated in the middle of an alien planet. (Amerika, anyone?) The underlying plot of the book is how do we deal with other nations? How do we deal with nations that are less advanced technically than us? How do we view them? We are asked to believe that Cameron Ford is the most skilled diplomat of his culture. If so, they're in trouble. He's passive, obtuse, and ineffectual. He whines a lot (in internal monologue), usually about things he doesn't have the power to change. He goes on at length about not understanding his alien hosts, although they're actually no more alien than some Earth cultures. He doesn't take their good advice. He makes the same mistakes over and over. When he does finally act, he's *stupid*--potentially getting the only people who can save him *and his entire culture* killed in an ambush. Cherry repeatedly rubs our nose in how much bigger, stronger, better, faster, more competent, and more potent the anarki are. It's well done--Cherry is certainly a good enough writer to make it credible--but why in the world does she want to do it? Compare this novel to Bujold's _Blitherer_, with which it shares a number of interesting similarities: a warlike but less-advanced culture jerked into the modern world by contact with space, an individual protagonist alone in that culture, individual relationships superseding the of law, betrayal, politics, fleeing on whorseback. _Blitherer_ succeeds because Cordelia is interesting, active, and credible (even when she makes mistakes).Cameron is none of the above.

1 0

simplest possible ecash mint
by Ryan Lackey 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Actually, I think to be practical you want something only slightly more complex; 3x as much work, but 100x as useful. Implemented in tamper-resistant hardware (a dedicated box or process could substitute, but hardware is easier, and I have plenty): stage 1: * Some protocol for external communication (direct sockets is easiest, but message-based protocols are far better, and allow a front end processor to handle communications details) * Reissue operation (powers of two coins; so you can pay with 1 x 2 coin and get 2 x 1 coins back) * A clock (decent rate RNG or PRNG is useful too, obviously) * A double spending database maintained internally * Two account counters maintained internally: treasury and float * "Signed float": tell anyone who asks exactly how much has been issued, signed as the mint. * A means of increasing or decreasing the treasury value, after authentication, and ideally an internal log of these changes (which could be published as well, signed) * Key management functionality (signing keys generated onboard; some kind of hierarchy so non-coins can be linked to coins) * Ability to publish a description of some sort of the coins * Power switch This is great for a single currency on a single mint managed by a single person. There are several other refinements which can be added over time which are meaningful: * Seamlessly supporting multiple currencies on a single issuer, with separate keys and managers * Replication/distribution, for reliability and performance (obvious techniques) * Means of programmatically linking treasury and float -- the box opens its own remote account of some sort, or holds other electronic instruments, and issues only up to that amount. * Multi-user management interface to the mint, so a large company can authorize a day manager to make small transactions, larger changes requiring seniority or multiple users. * Backup/recovery methods * Scheduled key rollovers * Misc. transports (handled by a front end processor and load balancer; initially I'm using sockets, but I want to use email before releasing stage 1) There really is NOT a huge amount of complexity. I've done 3 separate "stage 1" systems to about 80%, but using the chaum protocol. To be interesting, you would probably want agility on the underlying cryptographic basis, including brands, wagner, chaum, client-side blinding variants, unblinded when there are no variants, trivial non-blinded non-crypto, and any other systems. Writing a mint to stage 1 is maybe a month worth of work. The complexity is in developing a client library, library API, UI, and integration into applications. The easiest way I see to solve that is something I call a "hosted wallet" -- a multiuser wallet, communicating with the user over SSL, and using the ecash protocols to interact with the mint. Any user *could* run a hosted wallet server, but there is no client software which MUST be installed. Thus satisfying both security and ease of use. This is also vastly easier to develop than a client-side wallet, at least for me -- html UI, much much easier than any of the unix or windows widget sets, inherently crossplatform, etc. I hope to have a mint and a wallet to demo at codecon in mid-feb in sf, stage 1. (which is why it was scheduled then, anyway) I need about 60-120 more hours of actual productive work to do so. (I'd like to have at least two ecash protocols implemented, although at present I have "non-blinded dumb tokens" for testing, and some non-integrated blinded code) Ideally, I'd like it to be as easy to use as web-based mail; indeed, integrating into a web-based mail UI might make sense for some demo person to person payments. This is really useful for absolutely nothing but testing. All practical applications require a much greater level of integration with clients. All interesting applications require multiple currencies and a market. Any level of interest at all from the public will require an easy way to buy into the system using one or more existing payment methods, which is something I've looked into with high priority for the past 3 months, primarily from a gaming background, but there's nothing to prevent people from playing with the system itself before then. Might as well start from day 1 with real separation of roles, at least in name. (one might note there are worthwhile conferences every 1-2 months from now until september...) -- Ryan Lackey [RL7618 RL5931-RIPE] ryan(a)havenco.com CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd. +44 7970 633 277 the free world just milliseconds away http://www.havenco.com/ OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F

1 0