- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: A distribution solution! (fwd)
by lassie!jim%lassie＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> The EFF infobot for Adam Gaffin's Big Dummies Guide is ><bdguide(a)eff.org>. It contains instructions on how to anonymous >ftp. An up to date list of sites to fpt PGP from is available in >the crypto section. > We made PGP 2.3a available at the Armory and even have the docs >for those who need them. This may be true, but the average computer user does not use Internet, know what an FTP is, know what a BOT is or know that PGP is even Available. For that mater they do not usualy use BBS's. For the use to spread they must be made aware by mediums that they are familiar with, namely the newspaper and then word of mouth. Nothing high tech there. -- * Spelling errors are intentional and international * Jim Nalbandian netcomsv!lassie!jim%lassie(a)netcom.com Tempe, Arizona, USA N7SZS(a)K7BUC.AZ.US.NA No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain there right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. <-------- Thomas Jefferson --

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A message to decision-makers
by Johan Helsingius 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have been contacted by somebody editing a book about how telecommunications are changing the world and our society. To give an example of the kind of stuff they are going to have in the book, there's going to be something by Ross Perot on teledemocracy etc... They asked me to help them in getting "messages from young people around the world, messages directed to the decision-makers, containing views about the significance of telecommunications and the change in perspective that telecommunications cause". So, if you want to have your point of view presented in the book, please send me a shortish note (in English), along with your name (or pseudonym), age and state/country. The deadline is Friday morning. Julf

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Re: Digital Cash
by rah＠TIAC.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>Anybody else out there with less draconian advantages to digital cash? > >Immediate and final clearing. > >Eric I think I see that... If your accounting systems were tightly coupled enough, (and you were completely cash based) you could get your pro formas on 12:01 am the day after the quarter ended. Of course you wouldn't have a chance to back-pedal the results so well, either. . Your comment about clearing reminds me of something else, though. I know that options are settled much faster (Next-day, if I remember. It's been too long since I was in a cage.) than equity and fixed-income (5 days) securities. Is it possible to see instantaneous settlement happen in the financial markets with digital cash? I keep remembering that Edison made his first real pile by inventing the stock ticker, though I'm not sure how crypto-anarchist libertarians (syntax-error?) would make theirs here. ;-) OTOH, would "immediate and final clearing" in a peer-to-peer clearing mechanism be a useful enough benefit that a market's participants would pay to use it? -Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02313 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Rucker on "Cryps"
by Arthur Chandler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There is an unflattering picture of crackers and anti-crackers (and crypto-heads?) in Rudy Rucker's new novel, *The Hacker and the Ants*. Here's a sample: * * * * * * * * * * In the valley these days, phreaks were youths who cobbled together their own approximation of a decent cyberspace deck and afterward used it for weird cyberspace pranks. Cryps were phreaks who'd turned professional and gone into the employ of companies involved in industrial espionage. If you broke into some company's machines often enough, they were likely to hire you as a cryp to break into other companies, or they might use you as a security consultant to keep out the other cryps. It was a vicious circle -- the cryps' security-cracking escapades created a demand for the services they could provide. (*The Hacker and the Ants*, page 90)

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Re: Virtual Cash
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >[...] but noone (as far as I've seen) > >has come up with an "economic model" within which they could use them. > > Denominate digital money in dollars in a demand deposit account in a > US bank. > Why reinvent the wheel, or, in this case, the unit of value? The two common models are either to denominate private currency in some convertable currency, like dollars or rubles (useful for providers of financial services trying to add digicash to their services), or for a service provider to denominate digicash in some unit of their service, e.g. subway trips, road tolls, phone calls, email shuffles. The latter approach is easier to bootstrap (the service provider can just do it, there's no problem with learning banking laws, etc.), but it's less convertible unless lots of people want the service, so it tends to be localized use.

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Virtual Cash
by PMARKS＠VAX1.UMKC.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal and Blanc have started an intesting thread on the concept of "digital money" or "Tacky Tokens." I'm not sure what they are talking about, exactly. But it sounds like "vitual money." I would like to see a description of the model for this. Sounds like a form of barter-script. I'd like to see more on this. Bud

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Chimerically Misquoted
by Jeff Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- From: "Jim Sewell" <jims(a)Central.KeyWest.MPGN.COM> The term Cypherpunks is amorphous, thus subject to use and abuse by the masses. When people like Jeff Davis and Phill Zimmermann say "The cypherpunks are generally opposed to Clipper" it makes us an "organization" which, like it or not, does have representatives and agendas. Unfortunately, perception defines reality. If we I've never said this in any forum, public or private. The only Zimmerman quote on cypherpunks I've ever seen was in the WSJ. He stated he was not a cypherpunk, he wore a suit when he contacted clients. In responding to this, I've opened myself to another spew by Perry, but what the fuck. If one has to take a cheap shot, one is already whipped. And I'm not here to win a popularity contest either. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLcXKAl/ScHuGXWgVAQFq9gP+MP1BlrWA5IMO6SMOBsB6UBaIxJQ33Dtv vwc37mUc3YoueFpoQJVDPEfYHzsVThJI1gJNGOV4ELtN/YYaQx9jDpyV+dsQfEtC F7g2Wyx6mlo6AP7E2PYomBgAQD54liHgCUQJPmxEQMW8fdTEoMQsg4GpLvejeQo4 mCh8x0pXGjM= =aJDt -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- PGP PUBLIC KEY via finger! JAFEFFM Speaking & Thinking For Myself! * eagle(a)deeptht.armory.com email info(a)eff.org * *** O U T L A W S On The E L E C T R O N I C F R O N T I E R **** ***** Committed to Free Public Internet Access for World Peace *****

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Re: Digital Cash
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Black Unicorn <unicorn(a)access.digex.net> writes: > So has anyone tried to solve the problem of double spending and > the online requirement of digital cash? > Is there any way to take cash offline? Or is this merely the copy > protection problem rehashed? Double spending is one of the main problems digicash systems try to solve, since digicash can obviously be copied easily. Online systems make the double-spending relatively easy to prevent, but, besides inconveniences, the online transaction has a transaction cost that may make the system unusable (e.g. a 5 cent telephone message unit costs too much for a newspaper, though it may be fine for paying for contraband tobacco at $5/pack.) There are two main approaches to off-line systems that I've seen: - making the hardware expensive or contractually limited (e.g. subway farecards, phone cards, postage meters) (It's intellectually unexciting, but works fine economically for small transactions.) - using tamperproof trusted hardware that embeds enough information about its identity in each digicoin that double-spending reveals the identity, or multiple spending reveals the identity with increasing probability. Much of this work has been done by Chaum's folks in the Netherlands, using "observer" smartcards; somebody posted a paper about it on sci.crypt recently. It's harder to use these approaches for applications like emailing credit card numbers, but they're ok for tollbooths. I worry somewhat about the privacy issues - in order for revealing a cheating userid to be effective, either the bank needs to have a registry of who the user is, which is a privacy problem for people who really want anonymous money, or else there needs to be some system for distributing bad userids, analagous to the inconvenient books of bad credit-card numbers that small shops used to use before phone verification became widespread. (Obviously they'd be digital, but I'd rather not have to carry a CDROM drive or gigabyte hard disk in my wallet...

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

17 Dec '03

Online systems are also guaranteed anonymous. Well, maybe, though traffic analysis may be a problem. I did hear of an interesting case of people paying for privacy in the real world. In Hong Kong, the Aberdeen tunnel has drive-through smart card readers for tolls. The problem is, these cards don't use a privacy- protecting protocol. And many folks there are worried about what will happen come 1997. So there's now a resale market -- stores buy toll cards in quantity, and resell them over the counter, for cash. This underscores what I've said in the past about anonymous digital cash: it's not going to go anywhere unless folks are willing to pay a premium for privacy. There are too many sound reasons for keeping audit trails (debugging, fraud detection, marketing analysis, etc. -- and note that the first is an issue even for folks with the best intentions in the word; note how many remailer operators have kept logs, at least for a while); unless there's a profit motive in doing otherwise, most folks won't. In Hong Kong, the threat is not just real and imminent, it's *perceived* as such. Whether or not there is a real threat in, say, the U.S. (let's please not debate that!), there's much less perception of one.

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Re: list active?
by Brian D Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Thanks to Paul Ferguson, smb(a)research.att.com,Harry Bartholomew, and Norman Hardy for replying. >From bart(a)netcom.com Tue May 3 09:13:27 1994 >From: bart(a)netcom.com (Harry Bartholomew) >Subject: Re: list active? >To: talon57(a)well.sf.ca.us (Brian D Williams) >Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 09:14:25 -0700 (PDT) >MIME-Version: 1.0 >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >Content-Length: 132 > Yes same as normal. And majordomo says you're still on the list, >so NSA is gobbling your messages specifically, en route! Hmmmm, I guess someone is doing something, cause I'm still not getting any traffic today, any other WELL-beings having a problem? ...---... ...---... ...---... ...---... ...---... ...---... Brian Williams Extropian Cypherpatriot "Cryptocosmology: Sufficently advanced comunication is indistinguishable from noise." --Steve Witham "Have you ever had your phones tapped by the government? YOU WILL and the company that'll bring it to you.... AT&T" --James Speth -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLcacytCcBnAsu2t1AQGDUQQAjZ9r8V2Af1Aw7HZmJCGUlRHz1RmSC7dO qM3g7PZNh+DkkOolR90E6A66DA3usDjDIIUFZI1wIbP47xD37HDzJKEJCNRgLhTj dCNBdpIWgdyZKQDKSjMqQaJB4kYO50TLWAUo4g73J2gVycBlDnPPjeydGt6HrQZt 7sEKOBmAYuI= =KTZj -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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