- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

17 Dec '03

I'm curious about the legality of NetBank in the context of our earlier discussions about demand deposits and Chaum cash. These people will take your money and give you electronic tokens, and they will take the tokens and give you cash (minus 20%). Does this sound legal? Are they a bank? I wonder what their tax liabilities are. Sales tax on selling the tokens? Is this a barter system? If so, they're supposed to get SS#'s and such. Maybe you have to give that information if you sign up as a vendor, but legally I'd think ordinary users would have to be reported to the IRS as well, and it doesn't sound like they're doing that. This whole thing sounds pretty questionable legally. It will be interesting to see how it comes out. Hal

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e$: NetBank
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There's an outfit called NetBank, which is selling e-cash-like *certificate numbers*, through a dial-up BBS on a 900 line, in any denomination you want, which you can e-mail to vendors to buy stuff with. In fact all the interactions with the bank (deposits, breaking "bills" into smaller denominations, etc.) are done with switch codes in e-mail. It's extremely ungainly, and it looks userous too, to the extent that they charge 20% (each way?) to cash you in and out. I hoovered out all the stuff in their infobot (netbank-info(a)agents.com) and I really haven't plowed through it all yet. If you folks are interested I'll summarize it for the group and/or redirect my dumpster-divings on the subject to you individually in e-mail. Just let me know. 'Course you're welcome to play with their infobot yourselves, I suppose ;-). It looks like someone did some serious work on this, folks. That's just a philosophy major from Missouri talking, of course. I wonder who they are? I heard some discussion about them here, but I can't seem to find the thread in my e$ article stash.... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Re: My anonymous remailer
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

: From: Hal <hfinney(a)shell.portal.com> : service it's hard to know what features to provide. In particular, if : cleartext output is prevented, how much does that impair the usefulness of : the network? My instinct is that it hurts a lot, although it would be nice : for the operators since it would eliminate most sources of complaints. I said in my previous post that that wasn't what I had meant, but thinking about it, it's worth considering. After all, if anyone really missed the functionality of anon posting to news, people could set up news gateways that accepted encrypted articles for posting, decrypted them, and injected them. Again, whoever did that would be taking direct responsibility for what was injected, and it would cleanly decouple the posting function from the anon remail function for those who didn't want to do both. G

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Re: Det./tmp/Nym on Netcom
by tim werner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: whitaker(a)dpair.csd.sgi.com (Russell Whitaker) >Date: Mon, 25 Jul 1994 12:05:04 -0700 > > nym(a)netcom.com > tmp(a)netcom.com > >Bryant was >at liberty to say that the user accounts "tmp" and "nym" were the same >person. I noticed that both tmp and nym mentioned in one of their early posts that they had read up about cypherpunks in the archives at soda, or some such, and that it was ok to launch right into the discussion, since he/she was up to date with the issues. This was followed, of course, by the usual long and boring happy horseshit. I also noticed a common net phenomenon: since Sue D. Nym appeared from his/her name to be female, some men were more likely to come to his/her defense when he/she was flamed. This reminded me of the blurb I read in Wired (bad magazine, I've since stopped subjecting my eyes to the green print on red background) about men using names like "Janet" trying to sweet-talk lesbians on IRC and eventually finding out that "Karen" was also a man. tw

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Re:
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:48 AM 7/24/94 -0400, tim werner wrote: >>From: tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) >>Date: Sat, 23 Jul 1994 11:40:19 -0700 (PDT) > >>But I do like the explicit emphasis of the connection between >>encyption and free speech; this is the line I use with people. To wit, >>"Nobody can tell me what language I have to write or speak in." > >This is a neat way of expressing a good idea, but I wouldn't count on it. >A language can probably be construed as something that can be understood by >anyone who learns it. Even though I speak PGP, I still can't understand >what you say without a key. SophistMode(on) Hate to pick nits here, but isn't the acquisition and use of a public key "teaching" your machine to read Tim's "language"? Holmes and Blackstone are probably spinning in their graves (in counterrotation, to boot). Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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CYPHERPUNKS TO THE RESCUE
by Sandy Sandfort 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C'punks, On the noon news in San Francisco, there was an item of crypto interest. It was about something I think they called the "Code Grabber." It is a device which receives and records the coded RF signals used to remotely unlock car and garage doors. The hand-held unit is a little larger than a paperback book. It has a half dozen switches on it. After you intercept someone's code, you can play it back anytime to control that person's car lock or garage door. It's kind of like a TV universal remote. Some politicos have already started talking about banning it, but I think just the publicity will guarantee a healthy black market in such devices. The public will be clamoring for a solution. Enter the Cypherpunks. How can this nifty burglary tool be outsmarted? How about a replacement system that uses strong crypto? The Code Grabber represents a great opportunity for an inventive Cypherpunk to make some money AND promote crypto awareness. The questions are: Could standard auto and garage door openers easily be retrofitted? Could a "crypto remote" with its own CPU be made small enough to fit into a hand-held unit? Could such a system be made for a reasonable cost? S a n d y P.S. I bet there are some other interesting uses to which such a device could put. Any ideas? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Hotel locks (was:Radio-activated locks, RESCUE...)
by baum＠apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I understand the >electronic lock folks (card locks, hotels, etc.) have crypto expertise >of varying extents (and bluntly, probably more than most of us have) >and they certainly have the expertise in other areas. I've been told that the way that hotel locks work is simple LFSR type technology. The chip recognizes some key pattern, and generates a sucessor key. If a card is inserted that doesn't match the primary key, it checks the sucessor key. If that matches, the successor becomes the primary, and a new successor is generated. The machine at the front desk knows where in the sequence the a particular lock is, and simply generates a sucessor whenever a new key is asked for. So, there doesn't need to be any communication between the desk and the lock when a new key is generated. Note that after you get a new key, the old one will still work until the new key is used. Note that there is more than one primary key; there are 'master' keys for the staff, and presumably that can be used to reset the key if the sequence gets lost. Of course, who knows what happens if the master sequence get lost to a battery burp- maybe a separate ID number/lock? (as opposed to the huge back door of a permanent, single, masterkey...) Clever little system, yes? ************************************************** * Allen J. Baum tel. (408)974-3385 * * Apple Computer, MS/305-3B * * 1 Infinite Loop * * Cupertino, CA 95014 baum(a)apple.com * **************************************************

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Re: Steve Winter Declares War in Cyberspace
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:02 AM 7/26/94 -0400, Arsen Ray Arachelian wrote: uh, Ray?... You just sent mail, cc'd to cypherpunks, so he knows where we are for spamming purposes, to what appears to be king-hell spammer of the universe... The original posting seems to be from someone who was warning us about him, and included it as a public service for reference purposes, though I'm not sure what it has to do with the cypherpunks' charter... Sending a reply to that vitriol back to the list probably won't do any harm (you may get ribbed for not reading the headers in the message, maybe), but sending it to *him* with a "cc:cypherpunks@toad.com" on the message might have been a bad idea, yes? Pissfights with Detweiller about the central purposes of this list were bad enough, but a fundamentalist jihad we probably don't want. Be careful with that "reply to all" function... Cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Re: GUT and P=NP
by Patrick Juola 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

nzook(a)fireant.ma.utexas.edu writes: > Let f be a function from the integers to [0,1]. Note that the > Turing tape has precisely one space for each integer, so this > function cooresponds to your idea. m5(a)vail.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) responds Can you (without being an asshole) explain why exactly each tape position may contain only a simple integer? It's perfectly reasonable to define the tape alphabet to be an arbitrary set; can the set not be uncountably infinite? If not, why not? Well, the "standard" in all the language stuff precludes infinite alphabets just as it precludes infinite-length programs. In fact, it's fairly easy to demonstrate an equivalence betweeen the two. I've been working off-and-on (mostly off) for the past ten years or so trying to rewrite Hopcroft and Ullman for the case of infinite alphabets of various sizes, and in general, *none* of the theorems hold for problems describably in a single input symbol. >From a practical standpoint, of course, it's even harder to build an infinite tape with an uncountable alphabet than to build an infinite binary tape. More generally, the problems of *programming* such a machine are immense -- there are some very important real world continuity/expressability properties about what sort of symbols can be transformed into what other symbols. Without highly discontinuous and chaotic transformations that are informationally incompressible, you don't get any more computational power than a standard TM. - kitten

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Re: crime and snitches
by pjm＠gasco.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Berzerk writes: >>> ABSOLUTELY! The fact is if you can't get someone to snitch, IT IS NOT A >>> CRIME (morally)! I dare anyone to come up with a counterexample. >> If you were limiting your assertion to crime over the net, I >> suggest that the long, interesting history of confidence men is a >> refutation. Done correctly, in many cases the victim doesn't even >> know he has been conned. > Then have they? Can you give an example? I recently moved to Portland, OR (any cypherpunks up here?), and haven't yet unpacked all my books, but from memory one variation used in the movie "Grifters" is: - Convince the mark that you have an undetectable method to make money from the stock market that, while technically illegal, "won't hurt anyone". - Get seed money from the mark to run the scam. - Stage a bust by the police and allow the mark to escape. - The mark feels lucky to have gotten away, the front man and faux police split the money. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with ways of doing this on the net, given ecash and the rest of the infrastructure. Regards, Patrick May pjm(a)gasco.com

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