- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Technology and the Electronic Economy
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We've put the IEEE Spectrum special issue on Technology and the Electronic Economy, with 13 articles previously listed here, at: http://jya.com/tee.htm

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crypto restrictions
by anand abhyankar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

hi guys, i am a bit confused. what exactly are the us govt crypto regulations. what i mean is that : 1) is it illegal to develop an encryption tool (s/w) in the US which uses > 40 bit size session keys and then export that s/w outside of the US. 2) is it illegal to encrypt some data inside the us with a key > 40 bit in size and then send that data outside the US. thanx. anand....

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Re: (2)Excerpt on SPAM from Edupage, 11 February 1997
by Ross Wright 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On or About 13 Feb 97 at 5:00, Attila T. Hun wrote: > > I don't like the regulatory agencies either, but at least they > are not Judge Roy Bean, Law West of the Pecos. > > unfortunately, until the irresponsible tone down their greed, we > need the regulation to protect ourselves from the predators. Attila: I am shocked that you would make this statement. What makes you think that the 'regulators' would go away, once the greedy spammers "toned down their greed"? Spammers as Predators? Are you being sarcastic? Are you seriously saying that spammers are preying on the weak? I am one-thousand % AGAINST regulation of any sort. > > in other words, I agree with you in my heart, but our society > refuses to cooperate. If cooperation means regulation, count me out. Ross =-=-=-=-=-=- Ross Wright King Media: Bulk Sales of Software Media and Duplication Services http://www.slip.net/~cdr/kingmedia Voice: 415-206-9906

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crypto restrictions
by anand abhyankar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

hi guys, i am a bit confused. what exactly are the us govt crypto regulations. what i mean is that : 1) is it illegal to develop an encryption tool (s/w) in the US which uses > 40 bit size session keys and then export that s/w outside of the US. 2) is it illegal to encrypt some data inside the us with a key > 40 bit in size and then send that data outside the US. thanx. anand....

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Re: Recommendation: Creation of "alt.cypherpunks"
by Leonard Janke 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: > [...] > Given that _political_ discussions of crypto are now encouraged in > _talk_.politics.crypto (emphasis added) rather than sci.crypt, do you think > political and social essays dealing with crypto anarchy, offshore > databases, undermining governments, etc., will be welcome in the "comp" > hierarchy? > > I rather doubt it. And I would bet that if comp.org.cypherpunks is ever > approved, those who dislike crypto anarchy and sociopolitical chatter will > use the "comp" name to try to suppress such discussions. > [...] I think that the statement of our desire to create a new group should clearly indicate that the discussion group is of a special nature due to the tight integration of technical and political discussions. Cypherpunks are trying to achieve political goals through technological means, so it is difficult, and not regarded as desirable to produce a false dichotomy for discussions. As an example, we could cite the Linux newsgroups like comp.os.linux.misc. Linux is a piece of software written to help achieve a political goal, and, thus, in the Linux groups it is not considered off-topic to philosophize about these goals or the future as and after Linux knocks Microsoft out of the market. :) talk.politics.crypto and sci.crypt can, then, easily be argued against since the discussions there are much more restricted than what we desire. > [...] You really think whoever is spamming the list with ASCII art and > broke into Paul's account to post hundreds of "John Gilmore is a > cocksucker" posts will back off because of the "dedication" of some? To the > perverse personality, this is merely a greater challenge and temptation. > [...] Given that you have been on the list a great deal longer than I, I do respect that you may have deeper insights into the mind of the "perverse personality" than I do. I, however, am not aware of evidence that the person or persons behind the disruptions since the middle of last year would try to interrupt a democratic USENET creation vote. My recollection of the history is that the initial attacks were directed at you personally. Dr. Vulis was blamed for them and thus, apparently, became the target of nasty e-mailings to his site. He responded to this by spamming the list with rather large articles on Armenian war crimes and forwardings of the messages. At that point Gilmore booted Vulis. Gilmore then became a target of attack and, it seems that many (presumably) innocent bystanders were unwittingly subscribed to the list in an effort to cause more work, and, hence, annoyance to Gilmore when they complained about the unwanted mail. At this point many new personalities seemed to materialize out of nowhere bent on doing nothing more than fueling flame wars. Then the "moderation experiment" (fiasco)... I do not see in this evidence, however, that any of the disruptors would target the process of the creating a new group USENET group. At first, the the disruptor could easily have rationalized that anonymous, personal attacks were fair play, since anarachists favour no explicit rules with regards to speech. After Vulis was removed by Gilmore the disruptor could then rationalize that "anything goes" since list had then passed from a state of anarchy to one with Gilmore trying to decide who could or not be on the list. (I do not think that these conjectued rationalizations are valid myself, but am just trying to give an my thoughts on the psychology of the "perverse personality".) USENET nesgroup creation is whole new ball game, however. There are explicitly defined rules and the process is intended to be democratic. If my guess as to the identity of the person masterminding the attacks is correct, that person seems to have democratic sympathies or, at least, be strongly opposed to even hints of censorship, so I do not think he would attempt to disrupt the process of deciding if a new group is created or not since that would both be inferring in a democratic process and an attempt to prevent a group of people from creating a discussion group, and thus, himself, becoming a censor. (This makes me think that given that the process is intended to be democratic, it may be more fitting that a more anarchisticly method is used to create an "alt.*" group for cyphepunks than the democratic one used to create a "comp.*" one.) In any case, if you have deeper insights than mine into the mind of the disruptor, or evidence that he or she or them would try to disrupt a comp.* newsgroup creation proces, I would be eager to hear them. Leonard

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[Declan McCullagh: "A List Goes Down In Flames," from Netly]
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 21:24:37 -0800 (PST) From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu The Netly News Network http://netlynews.com/ A List Goes Down In Flames by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) February 12, 1997 The plan for the cypherpunks mailing list was simple. It was to be an online gathering place, an intellectual mosh pit, dedicated to the free flow of ideas and personal privacy through encryption. Of course it caught on. From its modest beginnings connecting a few friends who lived in Northern California, it quickly grew into one of the most rowdy, volatile lists on the Net: Cypherpunks typically piped more than 100 messages a day into the mailboxes of nearly 2,000 subscribers. And the list became a kind of crypto-anarchist utopia. Populated by pseudonymous posters with names like Black Unicorn, it was a corner of cyberspace where PGP signatures and digital cash were the norm -- and there were no rules. Then yesterday came the news: The list was being evicted and faced imminent shutdown. In an e-mail seen 'round the Net, John Gilmore, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder and list maintainer, announced that he was no longer willing to provide a virtual home for the cypherpunks. In a post entitled "Put Up or Shut Up," he described how his efforts to improve the list through moderation were condemned, how technical problems were consuming more of his time, how pranksters had tried to subscribe the entire U.S. Congress to the list. How this experiment in crypto-anarchy had failed. He gave the cypherpunks 10 days to find new lodgings. "The last straw for me was seeing the reaction of the list to every attempt to improve it. It was to carp, to cut it down, to say you're doing everything wrong," Gilmore told me yesterday night. One of the first employees of Sun, Gilmore quit after eight years -- a millionaire more interested in pursuing ideas than dollars. But his experiment with the list has left him weary. "If everything I'm doing is wrong, I'm clearly not the right person to host the list," he said. "I would like to see some other structure in which the positive interactions on the list could continue. I'm not trying to create that structure anymore," he added. Instead, he would try the only true crypto-anarchist solution: "I'm handing it over to members to do what they wish with it." The cypherpunks first pierced the public's consciousness when Wired magazine splashed them across the cover of the second issue. The Whole Earth Review and the Village Voice followed soon after. The name "cypherpunk" came to be synonymous with a brash young breed of digerati who were intent on derailing the White House's encryption policies and conquering cyberspace. This was crypto with an attitude. Gilmore was typical of the breed. Monthly Bay Area meetings of the 'punks were held in the offices of Cygnus, a company he started to provide support for the free Unix alternative, GNU. But the veteran cypherpunk came under heavy fire in November 1996, when a loudmouthed flamer flooded the list with flame bait and ad hominem attacks on various members. Finally, Gilmore, ironically, gave him the boot -- and incited an all-consuming debate over what the concept of censorship means in a forum devoted to opposing it. In a society of crypto-anarchists, who should make the rules? The mailing list melted down. By last month, it seemed, more messages complained about censorship than discussed crypto. Indeed, for months Gilmore seemed unable to do anything right. He tried moderation, which proved to be even more contentious, raising the question of empowering one cypherpunk to decide what was appropriate for others to read. One member of the group, in effect, would be more equal than the rest. And why would members take the time to write elaborate, thoughtful articles on crypto-politics if their treatises might not make it past the moderator's keyboard? After the expulsion, some of the longtime list denizens left angrily, joining the 700 subscribers who had departed since the controversy began. One of those was Tim C. May, a crusty former Intel engineer who prides himself as the organizer of the first cypherpunk meeting in September 1992. In an essay summarizing the reasons for his departure, he wrote: "The proper solution to bad speech is more speech, not censorship. Censorship just makes opponents of 'speech anarchy' happy -- it affirms their basic belief that censors are needed." After all, May pointed out, the list ended up on Gilmore's toad.com machine only by happenstance -- it almost was housed on a workstation at the University of California at Berkeley. Ownership of the computer with the database of subscribers did not mean that Gilmore owned the cypherpunks. "Whatever our group once was, or still is, is not dependent on having a particular mailing list running on someone's home machine... and it cannot be claimed that any person 'owns' the cypherpunks group," May wrote. The cypherpunks have responded to Gilmore's eviction notice. List participants generally have halted the incessant attacks on Gilmore, and now the discussion has turned to how to continue this experiment in online anarchy -- while preventing one person from ever again having absolute control of the List. Within hours of Gilmore's announcement, posters were tossing around ideas of a distributed network of mailing lists that would carry the cypherpunk name, and other 'punks likely will migrate to the more tightly controlled coderpunks and cryptography lists. But for the true believers in crypto-anarchy, only one solution is adequate: Usenet. "There is no 'nexus' of control, no chokepoint, no precedent... for halting distribution of Usenet newsgroups," Tim May wrote. That, in the end, is what defines a cypherpunk. ###

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

17 Dec '03

Tim C[rook] May digs into his cesspool of a mind for his mailing list fertilizer. o \ o / _ o __| \ / |__ o _ \ o / o /|\ | /\ ___\o \o | o/ o/__ /\ | /|\ Tim C[rook] May / \ / \ | \ /) | ( \ /o\ / ) | (\ / | / \ / \

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Technology and the Electronic Economy
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We've put the IEEE Spectrum special issue on Technology and the Electronic Economy, with 13 articles previously listed here, at: http://jya.com/tee.htm

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Re: crypto restrictions
by Derek Atkins 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

anand abhyankar <anand(a)querisoft.com> writes: > 1) is it illegal to develop an encryption tool (s/w) outside the US > which uses > 40 bit size session keys and then import that s/w inside of > the US. Not currently. -derek -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL N1NWH warlord(a)MIT.EDU PGP key available

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Re: Recommendation: Creation of "alt.cypherpunks"
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:17 PM -0800 2/13/97, Leonard Janke wrote: >That being said, I fully support the idea of a comp.* newgroup, >over an alt.* group. The important advantages are the greater >propogation many have described, and the reduction in "outsider" >noise. I also think that people interested in computing >in general might be more likely to stumble onto the newsgroup, >since the comp.* hierachy is so much smaller than the alt.* >hierachy. Given that _political_ discussions of crypto are now encouraged in _talk_.politics.crypto (emphasis added) rather than sci.crypt, do you think political and social essays dealing with crypto anarchy, offshore databases, undermining governments, etc., will be welcome in the "comp" hierarchy? I rather doubt it. And I would bet that if comp.org.cypherpunks is ever approved, those who dislike crypto anarchy and sociopolitical chatter will use the "comp" name to try to suppress such discussions. And thus comp.org.cypherpunks will be mostly a duplicate of sci.crypt and other such groups. >To be fair, though, I doubt that anyone would seriously try to >disrupt the creation, given the dedication I am seeing people putting >into finding a new home (or homes!) for the list, and that there does not >seem to be anyone dedicated to distrupting that process as John Gilmore >worried there would be. (And I am on the unedited list, too!) Sorry, Leonard, but this is one of the most naive statements I've ever heard. You really think whoever is spamming the list with ASCII art and broke into Paul's account to post hundreds of "John Gilmore is a cocksucker" posts will back off because of the "dedication" of some? To the perverse personality, this is merely a greater challenge and temptation. --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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