As is mentioned in tims' latest Rant(tm), I've been working on ideas for creating other cypherpunk services that would be possible to deply to the net. I've come up with a few, but they are of dubious quality. I'm hoping that by posting ideas I know are flawed/of little use that followup disscussion might refine them. We saw a use for remailers -- to gain a certain anonymity not present in cyberspace. How about information drops? How about digital cash drops (alt.cash.drop anyone?) I know digicash isn't the rage, and such a group would probably do zero good for some time, but I'd like to start talking about the ideas. With payments in digicash, you could supply a public key (newly created, of course). After the cash is generated/remitted by the other party, it would be encrypted and posted to the group. Noone could use the cash as it sat there, since they can't unwrap the cash. (I like to think of it as dropping the cash in a sealed envelope). I'm trying to think of both uses and problems this exhibits. Lots of extra "session keys" is the only drawback I see. Other possible net services: random number services, which don't keep logs of the numbers it produces -- have it spit a statistically-correct random stream each time a port is opened? Would this be that useful? Also, one could set up a hashing/signing service, more akin to a time stamp service. Mail would be sent to your service, which would attach the output of 'date' to the bottom of the msg and then +clearsig it. I'm thinking that chains of two or maybe three reliable machines should be used, since all it takes to break this is to change the clock on the machine you're signing with. With a few (>1) machines, it becomes very clear that the message was sent at a certain time. Perhaps this could be used in the future for "Registered Mail" type exchanges, or perhaps as part of a "Digital Notary" system? As for our media coverage, I'm happy with it so far. I'm willing to bet digicash that we'll see _television_ coverage re: clipper in the next few months. EFF, among others, should be working on that; we've already been able to get the word out via newspapers/magazines and radio. I wouldn't be at all suprised to see a blip on 20/20 or maybe a 15-second spot by Tom Jennings & co. before July. And projects! I'm currently in the middle of finals, but I'm looking forward to getting back to work on the things that _really_ matter. I was wondering what people were thinking about putting together a page for WWW? Would it be useful? Would people browsing around look at it and would it be a medium to disseminate info? Maybe divide it up... RSA, DES, IDEA, 3-DES, etc. Clipper, Capstone, Skipjack, Tessera PGP, stego programs available, RIPEM, etc. EFF, CPSR, Cypherpunks---- |media coverage |remailers |stego |voice pgp |clipper projects-FOIAs, bigbro inside, etc. other sources of info: sci.crypt, alt.pgp, alt.whistleblowers, alt. privacy, alt.security. Ideas and suggestions appreciated. mt Matt Thomlinson Say no to the Wiretap Chip! University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. Internet: phantom@u.washington.edu phone: (206) 548-9804 PGP 2.2 key available via email or finger phantom@hardy.u.washington.edu