- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Chaum patent prices
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim wrote in his (to me) spot on article (cypherpunks list) about patents wrecking technolgical progress, and hindering all important experimentation, and exploration of technology: > [...] for example, can't use the Chaumian blinding protocols > without hiring lawyers, paying Chaum his up-front fee, and laying > out his designs and business plans (which he very probably doesn't > even have!). from Marcel's post: > I just want to make a quick comment on the prices that have been > floating around on this list ($150K +10%). No doubt this is what > David asked at some point to some individual but it is NOT the > 'list price' -- there is no such thing as a list price. It all ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > depends on the application, business potential etc. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ie laying your plans out up front, plans which don't exist! Business potential is not predictable, even obtaining appropriate status, and banking licenses would presumably be doubtful unless a concerted, organised effort were put together. Requiring business plans rules out experimenting. The freeware mosaic browsers growth while being developed by academia, and the WWW in general seems to be a model which works rather well for the internet, if the netscape success story is anything to go by. Internet payment is rather harder to set up as a small experimental operation due to the legal and political implications, but a *real* example by Digicash would be nice. As in: if no licensing banks for digicash can be found, perhaps it would be a good approach for digicash to do it themselves, and support an offical exchange mechanism, if such a mechanism took off, banks might be interested to buy into an existing client base. On the $150k + 10% figures, my apologies, I picked them up from earlier posts on ecm I think, and had assumed incorrectly that this was a fixed price. > The up-front patent price should never be an obstacle for setting up > business. If you wanna do serious business, I suggest to give David > Chaum a call, or call Dan Eldridge. Phone numbers and email addresses > can be found on our web pages. You might be surprised. I am tempted to say: "how about free for a good cause :-)" And it might (theoretically) be nice as an analogue of the relationship between PGP and RSA with PGPs current free non-commercial use license from RSA, that seems to have helped RSA quite a lot. RSA are fond of quoting statistics about the world wide usage of their algorithms, one rather suspects that PGP is included and a major contributer to their figures :-) However, being realistic, I expect the answer to be no. I can understand this, but IMO it is still not a good situation from the point of view of advancing technology. My point however, is lets see a digicash payment system with a real exchange and soon! I don't care who does it so long as it gets done! > And may I remind you that the patent price that is quoted is just a > tiny drop in the bucket compared to the kind of money spent on > marketing budgets for systems like Mondex!!! You are really talking > about a non-issue here, IMHO. True enough. The 10% is likely more of a sticking point tho, but as you say this is all negotiable. But hey, I don't have a high powered business plan, I'm just a little cypherpunk be-moaning the fact that there are no digicash licensing banks which I can use to take advantage of Chaum's privacy technology, and instant on-line buying. Just think how much hassle could be saved when buying the perl rsa T-shirts even (no, I promise no more shirts arguments, I'm talking of payment!), all the foreign cheques, the hugely exhorbitant charges banks charge for writing small value foreign currency cheques, the risks (and dubious technical legality in some places) of posting paper cash in the mail, and the odd postal order which the bank would like to charge more than the face value to cash (I kid you not, I asked a few people to send different payment forms). "Click here to buy" would be infinitely better. The market is impatient, and inferiour, non-privacy preserving payment forms are in danger of soon becoming entrenched as standard internet payment methods. Digicash has or soon will have MSN money systems to compete with. Digicash now! Adam -- #!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL $m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa 2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n)&~1)/2)

1 0

Re: Noise: anyone experience with brain waves input devices (IBVA,...)
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <9510080007.AA01951(a)hplyot.obspm.fr>, dl(a)hplyot.obspm.fr (Laurent Demailly) wrote: > I'd like to know if anyone have first hand experience with brain wave > and other (hyped) input devices like IBVA or others and/or pointers to > informations ? The pioneering work in this field was done by Andrew Junker, formerly Air Force labs. He now uses his system to sail his boat. At Rand Mac Millan Air Force Base, they have a simulator that is controlled by brain waves alone. Note that all the brain wave interfaces only allow a simple left/right type of control. Right turn is easy, but left turn is rather hard to learn. Anything bejond that, as well as direct input of data into the brain requires a direct link to neurons that can only be achieved by surgical means. See Brindley G S et al and the work done by Normann R A at U of Utah for the studies that defined the field. I have developed a design that solves the notorious problem of connecting the silicon matrix to individual neurons, but really can't elaborate on it until I get around to file a patent for it. Also take a look at the breakthroughs reported in PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 236: August 7, 1995 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein available at http://www.hep.net/documents/newsletters/pnu/1995/pnu-236.html Have fun, - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMHg4gSoZzwIn1bdtAQFpWAF9HQg2f8myEyI4HrHY/5ZCnB/nLG+AzZXo rA8zMPMo0l5t24i74tlTBJnaZYS4zkSW =Hq/0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

[NOISE] Caution! Netscape 2.0 and Linux
by Christopher J. Shaulis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi all. Just a warning to steer clear of Netscape 2.0 on Linux. It can't resolve FQDNs, its distributed as a staticly linked a.out binary *AGAIN*, and I'm hearing lots of reports sitting here on IRC that it locks up R6 versions of XFree solid on a random basis. Not to mention that there is no java support yet for Linux, and the Java support in the Sun/Windows version of netscape is based on the new (and imcompatible with earlier versions) beta version of Java which sun pimped out to Netscape and won't release the source code too. The part about not resolving FQDNs might be an undocumented feature. The most secure transaction is one that doesn't take place at all. ;) Have fun, Christopher

3 3

Re: Netscape 2.0 beta
by Raph Levien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just got Netscape 2.0 beta for DEC Alpha. Here are my initial impressions: * Still no Java support (for DEC Alpha) :-(. * I saw no hints of S/MIME support. Did I miss something? Do the binaries for other platforms support S/MIME? I have access to HP, and will probably demand a Sun account from the powers that be here, just so I can run Java. I _really_ want to test S/MIME. * The mail reader facility looks pretty good. The smooth integration of MIME and HTML objects is really quite nice. On the other hand, there are a few UI quirks that will no doubt get ironed out over the coming months. * The .mailcap parser _still_ doesn't recognize %{variable} style entries. Thus, I wasn't able to test Michael Elkins' PGP/MIME format for compatibility with Netscape. The %{} syntax is in the spec (RFC 1524), guys. * To send mail, Netscape apparently connects to the SMTP server running on localhost. I haven't confirmed this. Thus, I don't see any way to integrate Netscape and premail :-(. Guess I'll just have to wait for Netscape script (from what I've seen so far, it's not possible in pure Java). * No user-defined headers from mail :-(. Thus, I couldn't put an "In-Reply-To: " header in this followup. * News is also not bad, but I find I can't zip through tons of low S/N newsgroups the way I can with trn. I tend to rate newsreaders in number of messages deleted per second. I think with a bit more tweaking on the UI, it could really sing. * One slick feature of news is its ability to decode binary postings, apparently in both MIME and uuencode formats. However, I wasn't able to figure out how to decode multiparts. * The UI render code has a number of cosmetic defects (possibly related to the DECness of my machine). One new one is that drag-and-drops leave the Bookmarks window in an inconsistent state, leading one to want to press ctrl-L :-). Overall, nicely done. Mozilla will clearly remain the standard in Web browsers, for the next few months anyway. Raph

1 0

The Ultimate GUK[TM] (Globally Unique Key) Biotech Racket
by Nahum.Goldmann＠ARRAYdev.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam Shostack writes: >... For keys to be >really global, there needs to be a mechanism in place for insuring >that key ids are very probably unique. ___________________________________________________________________ And Hal <hfinney(a)shell.portal.com> >... The fact is, we live in a world populated by >people and companies and we use names to identify them. I will grant >that there are problems with uniqueness but... ___________________________________________________________________ No problem. The ultimate way to ensure that keys are globally unique is to link them to the person's own genetic code. Fingers they might cut, but... Just imagine, in 1999+ every department store and a mall in the land will provide a service of a quick DNA scan and key mapping. Most likely they will put the small scanning machine in the shoe repair section, to substitute for the metal key cutting business. You put your hair in and -- voila! -- the thing will insert your unique key in your own smart card. For corporations they might require to keep in perpetuity a piece of a founding CEO in a cookie jar. The U.S. Government will have to unearth again poor Ulysses S. Grant, this time with a far more valid reason. Or perhaps Mr. Clinton would volunteer a donation in kind. With so much of happy progress, one might like to puke... Except, there is too much genetic material there to incriminate you far beyond the reasonable doubt. Unless, of course, you can afford Mr. Cochrane as your attorney. Being a Goldmann, the last thought really scares me. Very best to all and sundry. ___________________________________________________________________ P.S. Scott Brickner <sjb(a)universe.digex.net> said: >... Remembering >that we're talking about a world that's sufficiently changed as to >permit anonyms at all... Right on! Nahum Goldmann, ARRAY Development Inc., Ottawa, Canada Phone 613-733-0399, FAX 613-733-5691, email: Nahum.Goldmann(a)ARRAYdev.com> Homepage: http://www.ARRAYdev.com/ N. Goldmann, Online Information Hunting - the first book for the end-user!

3 2

Java
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As long as people are mentioning Java, I just want to make the prediction, one more time, that at some point someone is going to find some devistating security holes in HotJava. In order for HotJava to be completely safe, the Java security model needs to be perfect (and it is way too complex to prove correct), you need a perfect implementation of this perfect security model, no code in the Java implementation outside the security code can adversely impact the function of the security code, and there has to be no way that a bug in the code outside the Java implementation can screw with the internals of the Java implementation in such a way as to get it to drop its security. I don't believe that humans can produce something that satisfies all four criteria given our current state of technology. Java is just too complex a language for me to believe that it can have been perfectly specified and implemented. Enormous risk -- I really mean ENORMOUS risk -- is being taken in order to add a little convenience in making web applications pretty. Someday, there is going to be big trouble from this. *BIG* trouble. You heard it from me first. You might ask "Perry, what could possibly satisfy your perfectionistic criteria?" Well, a language that didn't have any I/O or similar "dangerous" capabilities in it at all, rather than one in which such capabilities were selectively "restricted", would be one I would feel much more comfortable trusting. If written in a fairly safe language where it is hard to pull buffer overflow tricks, the interpreter for such a language would be very hard to pervert into doing untoward things. Java isn't like that, though. Its got the full power and glory of any other language, and the only thing sitting between a HotJava app and some really nasty viral effect is a paper thin shield -- the security model. A couple of bits twiddled in the right place and the shield is gone. The best things about Java could probably have been achieved without giving it so much power. Its too late now, though. The bandwagon is too far along. As a security consultant, I'm of course in a position to profit from the wreckage, but frankly I don't like that any more than an aircraft disaster expert wants to see more aircraft accidents. Perry

5 6

Re: subjective names and MITM
by patrick＠Verity.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Scott Brickner <sjb(a)universe.digex.net> > > Patrick Horgan writes: > >Given the difficulty of finding primes, how likely do you think it is that > >given one of the well known methods and finding the first 1024 bit prime > >that pops out would give you an effective attack? > > I'm not an expert here, but I understand the "well-known methods" to > essentially use some formula that "tends" to generate prime numbers from > uniformly distributed numbers, feed it a "good" random number, and then > check to see if it's really prime. If it's not, pick another "good" > random number and try again. The entropy in the prime is the same > as in the random number generator. > Can someone give me pointers to literature on this? Books prefered. Patrick _______________________________________________________________________ / These opinions are mine, and not Verity's (except by coincidence;). \ | (\ | | Patrick J. Horgan Verity Inc. \\ Have | | patrick(a)verity.com 1550 Plymouth Street \\ _ Sword | | Phone : (415)960-7600 Mountain View \\/ Will | | FAX : (415)960-7750 California 94303 _/\\ Travel | \___________________________________________________________\)__________/

1 0

Re: cypherpunks digicash bank?
by cman＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Douglas Barnes <cman(a)communities.com> writes on cypherpunks: >> I'm afraid you may have somewhat misunderstood the motivation behind >> the Identity Agnostic paper. In no way is it intended as a way of >> not facing the music wrt regulators in the country(s) where such an >> institution has offices. The IA approach is intended as an possible >> alternative for an institution that might otherwise license from >> Chaum. > >So it's intended for avoiding patent issues only? Yes, and not really so much because of price. I'm not the only person who has found David hard to work with -- he has apparently decided to only license "respectable" organizations that will not, in his eyes, make his technology look "bad". I can tell you from painful, expensive experience that a band of cypherpunks does not qualify as "respectable" in his eyes. Alas for David, his technology is fundamentally cypherpunk -- there is little motivation for a "respectable" institution to be the first penguin on this stuff. So, if you're a bank, licensing from David is cheap and relatively painless, but there are powerful disincentives to deployment. Also, assessing demand is problematic. For a small cypherpunk startup, the demand is obvious, there are powerful incentives, but the cost of licensing and David's reluctance to license a slightly wild-eyed startup act as a barrier. There is certainly a middle ground, but nobody seems to be stepping forward. My understanding was that we were exploring the idea of a much smaller, non-bank organization going into the digital cash business. Note that while this is theoretically interesting to me, the fact that I'm talking openly about this stuff is largely due to my decision _not_ to get personally involved in this kind of venture except as a sidelines cheerleader, or as an absolute last resort if nobody deploys. Given that we're talking about a small, cypherpunk-motivated NBFI, I think the IA stuff will work fine. It should be presented to the regulators as if it were a fully-blinded system, since there won't be any guarantee that blinding isn't occurring. You raise the issue of using software not supplied by the "bank" -- if we're talking about a c'punks project, I'd assume you'd make the full source code of the system available. The change of a client from non-blinding to blinding would be about two lines of code. You've also discussed the issue of commercial uptake -- as I see it, one of the primary goals of a project like this would be to provide incentive to deploy to the allegedly numerous Chaum licensees that have not implemented a damned thing so far. And, with a nice interface -- or at least the sort of generic GUI interface you can get with Java -- it might do surprisingly well on its own merits. Realistically, as soon as someone large comes along, you're likely to get squashed. But it would be an interesting ride, and you might just end up getting bought out instead of squashed. As for a limit on transaction size, my understanding is that Mondex is using $300 initially as a transaction limit. This certainly seems reasonable, and it skates in underneath a lot of magic numbers.

1 0

anonymous cash without blinding
by Clifford Neuman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Date: Sun, 8 Oct 1995 14:20:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Wei Dai <weidai(a)eskimo.com> Now if the bank allows this exchange of old coins for new coins to be done over an anonymous network (e.g., a remailer-net), then the system is anonymous as long as you don't move physical money in or out of the system. Maintaining anonymity when moving physical money in and out of the system is what blinding helps you to do, but this will be less useful in a fully digital economy where such movement will be infrequent. See: Gennady Medvinsky and B. Clifford Neuman. NetCash: A design for practical electronic currency on the Internet. In Proceedings of 1st the ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security November 1993. For a discussion of the tradeoffs for this weaker form of anonymity. You can find postscript for this paper as: ftp://prospero.isi.edu/pub/papers/security/netcash-cccs93.ps

1 0

Crypto's Role in Evil?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Surely most of you know of my interest in enhancing liberty and freedom through strong crypto. (The many newcomers to the list in the wake of the Netscape news may not, but take my word for it...) And I have clearly indicated that many of the implications of strong crypto, anonymous remailers, untraceable digital money, data havens, and so on, will severely undermine many programs that some people think are useful and good. We avoid discussing these issues so as to avoid ideological flame wars, but the effects are still there. In the view of some of us, strong crypto and the swirl of ideas called "crypto anarchy" will mean that the transactions people enter into are the ones they wish to enter into. No more "affirmative action," no more transfer payments to the indigent and lazy (or to anyone else, except by personal choice), no more quotas, no more workplace rules (at least in cyberspace). Transnationalism, regulatory arbitrage, etc. (Granted, this Cyper-Millenium may not arrive by the time the real millenium arrives, and the precise form is unclear. But there is little doubt that the strong crypto most of us advocate will strongly advance the "libertarian" agenda, and will have very negative effects on "traditional liberalism" and law-based "social justice" policies. My personal view is that an ever-shrinking elite (20%, then 10%, then 2%, ...) will dominate high-value transactions, with the mass of humanity offering little or nothing worth buying. Just my view.) But Lucky Green has touched on some items I feel dutybound to comment on: At 8:19 PM 10/8/95, Lucky Green wrote: >Let me illustrate this with an example. During my visit to Dachau >Concentration Camp, I saw original lab notebooks of experiments designed >to increase the survial rate of pilots downed above the cold waters of the >North Sea. A noble cause. > >The notebooks contained pages upon pages of tables listing survial times >vs. water temperature, the data gained by dropping subjects into a tub >containing water of a defined temperature. There are places and countries which are attempting to outlaw the _use_ of these Nazi medical experiments. The implication: Nazi medical data will be one of the first sorts of information to go into Cypherpunk data havens. Maybe not put there by Lucky, maybe not even by me (though I see nothing wrong with using the data...the Jews are dead, and not using the data does not bring them back, so....). People need to at least think about what our anonymous remailers and data havens are likely to involve. Consider some entries: - results of Japanese medical research on Chinese captives in Manchuria (apparently the experiments were extensive, and American doctors gained access after the war...the experiments gave us our first lead on biological warfare, as the Japanese had exposed a lot of captives to various toxins and biological agents) - results of experiments on live subjects in Third World nations (right now it is "uneconomical" to do much of this, because of the lack of a market for the data) - data on RU-486 abortifacients and similar drugs, and at least _some_ people think abortion is murder. (I hold to the notion that a child can be killed up to the time he is christened, or given a name. This gives from several days to several weeks (or even longer, in some cultures) to decide if the newly-born organism is actually human or not. This has no crypto relevance, except to indicate that many of us hold views considered extreme to others....we're not all just "Pro Choice" in the liberal sense.) - better methods of killing people (not just the pseudo-science in the "How to Kill People" sorts of books that Loompanics and Paladin sell, but a real "information market") - "How to Make Anthrax Bacillus in Your Basement," "Nuclear Triggers," etc. In the next 10 years, expect a couple of "controversial" documents to appear on anonymous sites. In the next 10 years after that, expect an explosion of information. (I could be wrong...I'm trying not to sound optimistic about it happening too soon.) >I them saw more tables of the effects of various methods investigated to >revive hypothermia victims who were near death. One of the treatments >under investigation was dropping the patient into boiling water. Surely >this type of research falls under the category of evil. Does anyone have a URL for these results? >Ponder this, Indeed. And crypto anarchy will make this information liquid and widely available, perhaps even stimulating the production of even more such data by various means. ("Evil Hypothetical": The mostly-doomed orphaned street urchins of Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City are grabbed off the street, subjected to various experiments, and the results sold on anonymous information markets....I could even make a kind of argument that since they're going to die anyone, why not get some useful data out of them. And why not subject prisoners facing execution to various experiments? Yes, both paths have problems. Doesn't mean someone won't meet market needs this way, though.) Oh, and did I mention the markets for organ transplants? Anonymous matching of recipient needs could be done, with the only real world contact being the arrangement for the patient to fly to a hospital in Burma or Singapore. The harvesting of organs from the ultra-poor? (The topic of organ-legging has been well-covered by dystopian SF, including works by Niven. Information markets add a new and intriguing dimension.) --Tim May, who will pay $35,000 for accurate mortality studies on at least 20 subjects of Iboviroxinase-D. Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

2 1