- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Walk away from your troubles
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

solman(a)MIT.EDU (Jason W Solinsky): > True enough. Most of our rules have been bundled together. Either you accept > all of them or you walk away. So Tim, if you don't like the FBI monitoring > all of your communications and requiring you to give them copies of all > your secret keys, why don't you just leave? [or are you planing to do that?] And when all countries follow the lead of The World's Only Superpower in this great New World Order, what then? "Stop the Earth, I wanna get of!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in take stone from stone and wash them..." Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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re: geodesic -- FPGAs
by Ryan Lackey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

FPGAs lack in dynamic reconfigurability. However, a friend of mine from the institute (now graduated and off in california) developed a bloody-fast reprogrammable chip (I think it can be arbitrarily reprogrammed in a clock cycle or so). Needless to say, this is a really wonderful toy -- they seem to want to use them for "communications processors", like modem control chips and stuff, but I can think of many more uses for them. I think they're talking about being able to ship them in a couple years -- I know I'm going to try to use whatever influence I have to get at least a development kit. Think about the potential for iteratively-improved static designs, if not for truly dynamic designs. (there is some cs theory in the area of real-time reconfigurable processors, but it's hard, not all that well explored) As well, you could always use something like this in a traditional massively-parallel codebreaking device, perhaps stepping through keys in silicon rather than in memory. Very cool toys. I want one.

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Digicash and loose change
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

rah(a)shipwright.com: > I'll try to to come at this from another tack. Cryptography gives > anonymity. Anononymity reduces the overhead. The reduced overhead should > make digital cash more economically efficient than on-line systems like > NetBank, or credit-cards or much of anything else, at the moment. The If someone did an operation count of Brands' digicash protocol, I wouldn't be surprised if it showed much more processing than, for instance, the simple public (or even secret) key encrypt-a-credit-card-number scheme. The latter has the overhead of transaction management - but the table lookup of databases is much simpler than modular exponentiation. Then there's the 'loose change' problem - one I haven't seen discussed too much. It seems that Bob will have to total up whatever he received from Alice and anyone else, then have notes _reissued_ from the bank in his chosen denominations - otherwise Bob could double-spend _Alice_'s cash, exposing her identity and getting away scot-free himself. The loose change is in choosing the note denominations - you don't have to go to a bank to change a 100 in 'real life'. Compare this with paper money. Cash has to be printed. Granted this is cheap, particularly with US Dollars, probably the easiest currency to forge. (Even Indian Rupees are gravure printed in multiple colours and textures. I was really laughing at the discussion here a while ago on how easy it is to pull out the metal strip from dollars - Rupees have metal woven in to the paper, which reflects light at an angle and is opaque, black, when seen through). Then there's the overhead of distribution, the 'loose change' - how many suitcase-fulls to buy a Boeing? Cheques (drafts, cards) are much simpler. There is a one-time overhead of customer verification when you get your account. Transaction-time verification is relatively simple. The additional overhead of transaction record management is easily implemented even in existing electronic systems. If it weren't for Cypherpunks, anonymous cash would die a natural death as money gets wired. Anon cash _is_ value added. And I don't see why there shouldn't be a market. We have least 700 already ;-) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in take stone from stone and wash them..." Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Interesting Question..
by David D.W. Downey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here is an interesting question. The U.S government has classified encryption software as a munitions under the U.S ITAR regulations, which will limit the export of same. They rarely if ever approve an export unless they have thoroughly inspected it and have been given certain shall we say assurances. Next they develop a number of different chips that rely on a classified algorythm, which incidently they developed. They say that they want the entire population of the U.S to use these chips, going so far as to use their market power to put additional pressure on enterprises to manufacture and use these chips. Next the FBI howls thatt they need a law to ban domestic non-escrowed encryption. Then we have the Congress trying to pass stricter laws regarding encryption while screaming that they have to protect the children from all this nasty stuff on the web. This they scream even though they can't pass a balanced budget or manage to find enough money to educate those self same kids. Next we have us, the general public, who are worried that the government will abuse this proposed system. The government says they won't, which we are supposed to believe even though their track record shows that we can't trust them past the first money trough that comes their way. That leaves one final question. How long until they stop asking and pleading and start demanding we use this system of theirs. How long until we become criminals by enacting our right not to use it? Interesting, don't you think?

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CDT's Berman Opposes Online Anonymity
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION WASHINGTON OFFICE 122 Maryland Avenue, NE November 1, 1985 Washington, DC 20002 -------------------- National Headquarters Mr. David Chaum 132 West 43rd Street Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science New York. NY 10036 P.O. Box 4079 (212) 944-9800 19O9 AB Amsterdam Norman Dorsen President Dear Mr. Chaum: Ira Glasser Executive Director Eleanor Holmes Norton CHAIR National Advisory Council Thank you for sending me a most interesting article. A society of individuals and organizations that would expend the time and resources to use a series of 'digital pseudonyms' to avoid data linkage does not in my opinion make big brother obsolete but acts on the assumption that big brother is ever present. I view your system as a form of societal paranoia. As a matter of principle, we are working to enact formal legal protections for individual privacy rather than relying on technical solutions. We want to assume a society of law which respects legal limits rather than a society that will disobey the law, requiring citizens to depend on technical solutions. e.g. require a judical warrant for government interception of data communications rather than encrypt all messages on the assumption that regardless of the lawt the government will abuse its power and invade privacy. As a matter of practicality, I do not think your system offers much hope for privacy. First, the trend toward universal identifiers is as much a movement generated by government or industry's desire to keep track of all citizens as it is by citizens seeking simplicity and convenience in all transactions. At best, your system would benefit the sophisticated and most would opt for simplicity. The poor and the undereducated would never use or benefit from it. Finally where there's a will, there's a way. If government wants to link data bases, it will, by law, require the disclosure of various individual pseudonyms used by citizens or prohibit it for data bases which the government wants to link. Since corporations make money by trading commercial lists with one another, they will never adopt the system or if it is adopted, will use "fine printn contracts to permit selling various codes used by their customers to other firms. The solution remains law, policy, and consensus about limits on government or corporate intrusion into areas of individual autonomy. Technique can be used to enforce that consensus or to override it. It cannot be used as a substitute for such consensus. Sincerely Yours, /Sig/ Jerry J. Berman Chief Legislative Counsel & Direrector ACLU Privacy Technology Project cc: John Shattuck

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geodesic -- FPGAs
by decius＠ninja.techwood.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've been reading the Geodesic systems thread with much interest... I've been playing around with FPGAs recently, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, which list members should be familiar with due to discussions concerning cheap hardware crypto. Why not replace your entire architecture with reconfigurable hardware? This is sort of like Java turned upside down. Instead of having generalized code running on a specialized "virtual machine." (Which is inefficient as hell) Why not ship the architecture your program runs on along with the program. Liquid architecture. If the FPGA's are standardized (not likely, but..) you could run whatever kind of software you wanted and the architecture would automatically reconfigure to run the code and would be optimized for your application. There are some challenges with muti-tasking but I think you could manage the gate-space like you do memory. Web searches on FGPAs will bring you to research being done on this sort of thing... -- */^\* Tom Cross AKA Decius 615 AKA The White Ninja */^\* Decius(a)ninja.techwood.org "If the economic, social and political conditions... do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security... powerful tendencies arise to escape from freedom into submission." -- Erich Fromm

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Crypto implants
by Steve Schear 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[I could find no instance in the cypherpunks archives of this thread. Forgive me if I've erred.] As single chip crypto devices are now available (e.g., smart cards) it is not unreasonable to ask how the implantation of advanced bio-chips may challenge current notions of civil liberties. A key US legal assumption of privacy is that one has an unlimited right to one's thoughts but limited rights to ones ideas reduced to tangible form and to communications. (The threads regarding the ability of the courts to cause the a witness to disgorge a crypto key are closely related.) Another civil liberty is the assumption that one owns and controls one's body (unless arrested/imprisoned) and the government may not alter or injure your body. Most citizens and hopefully the courts would find invasion of this most sacrosanct part of one's being are repugnant. An implied aspects of the privacy-crypto debate is that mechanical/electronic devices outside of one's body are required for use of crypto. But what happens if a person's body is augmented for various purposes, including data storage, crypto and communications? Unless a proven crime were committed via these devices, is it feasible that a person could be forced to submit to removal of an implant or to disgorge their data contents? --Steve PGP mail preferred, see http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear (N7ZEZ) | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com 7075 West Gowan Road | Voice: 1-702-658-2654 Suite 2148 | Fax: 1-702-658-2673 Las Vegas, NV 89129 | --------------------------------------------------------------------- God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things I can; The weapons that make the difference; And the wisdom to hide the bodies of the people that got in my way;-) "Surveilence is ultimately just another form of media, and thus, potential entertainment." --G. Beato "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Dr. Robert Silensky

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Re: In Search of Genuine DigiCash
by Pierre Uszynski 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Linn Stanton <lstanton(a)sten.lehman.com> writes: > > hughes(a)ah.com (Eric Hughes) writes: > > [I read somewhere] ~"The cost of compliance in a typical USA > > bank is 14% of operating costs."~ > > The real figure we need is not the US cost of compliance, > but the difference between US costs and costs in other major banking > markets. Well... not if we compare to an unregulated cypherbank. What WE (cypherpunks) need to know is also how much of our taxes go to the government side of this regulatory activity. I'm not sure cypherpunks are ready to wait for deregulation to happen :-) >From the customer's point of view, if not the bank's point of view, there is the cost of creating and maintaining all these laws, agencies, and regulations. So not only the bank customers end up somehow paying the bank's cost of compliance (as typically the individual customers may be less susceptible to foreign bank competition than the shareholders who may be more easily convinced to invest in foreign banks), but the tax payers (be they customers or shareholders) end up paying the government side of this regulatory activity. Complete the picture by figuring in there the taxes paid by the bank to maintain the regulations ;-). Perpetual Travellers who bank in cypherspace and run cypherbusinesses for fun and profit end up winning several ways. Their banks can afford to pay better interest and charge less per transaction. They are not taxed to fund regulatory efforts, and they have a competitive advantage over regulated businesses. (In the short term, though, they have a major reputation (or lack thereof) or tradition problem to overcome.) They also take risks (testing unproven markets, trusting unproven business and crypto protocols, losing money to penultimate transaction cheaters...) Pierre. pierre(a)shell.portal.com

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Re: Bad govt represents bad people?
by Rachel_P._Kovner＠gorgias.ilt.columbia.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>... the problem is more than just people in government. >>I was just contradicting the idea that (as Tim May says) people get the >>government they deserve. Certainly not all people, maybe not most "deserve" >>this deal. It was once said that (and I quote -very- loosely) "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance", therefore, 'bad government' is probably not a result of some kind of evil or malicious people, but just people who do not guard their rights. Obviously, there will be people in a society who will do their best to protect their rights, but I speak of "people" as a society as a whole, and therefore, if the isolated persons who stand up for their rights are unable to make an impression on society at large, they will also be subject to this 'bad government'. Government will continually encroach upon its citizens' rights if the people do not stand up for their liberties - therefore, if the citizens do not protect their liberties, the liberties will be lost, and the people will be responsible for this loss of liberty. ---------------------------------------------- Delivered by the NLTL Internet Gateway

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Re: Bad govt represents bad people?
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)imsi.com> writes: > > Not to denegrate either of those individuals, but the "original" work > on public choice economics was worth a Nobel Prize some years ago to > Buchannan (sp?). Its only been recently that the ideas have been James Buchanan is at GMU, clearly one of the brightest stars on the faculty. > popularized by others. The concepts are more or less inherent in the > work of the Austrian school economists as well, so I suppose one > should credit Mises, Hayek, and the rest... Required reading, of course. Spontaneous order of markets and all that. Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)cs.gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>

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