At 2:29 PM -0700 6/3/97, Hallam-Baker wrote:
There is absolutely nothing that the anti-government ranters contribute to the pro-cryptography movement. They are a liability at best. Stuart Baker is even now probably peddling his Clipper chip initiative in Europe holding up one of Jim Bell's rants as "proof" of his case.
Nothing except motivation. Anti-government ranters founded this list, invented remailers, and did a lot of other good work.
Actually remailers were invented by a lass called Stephi whose hobbies appeared to include being tied up for fun. The original remailer operating out of wizvax was a script that allowed anonymous posts into alt.sex.bondage. Then it was expanded to support a couple of other newsgroups such as alt.abuse. When Stephi ran out of cash to keep wizvax running (I have a suspicion it was something expensive power wise) Julf took over the code and the scripts.
While I didn't make the claim that remailers were invented by us, I think I understand Duncan's point to refer to "true" remailers, not the Kleinpaste/Julf form used in anon.penet.fi. And even these were not "invented" by us, but rather were implementations, initially by Eric Hughes and Hal Finney, then by several others (the refinements, by Matt Ghio and Lance Cottrell, and the "premail" scripts of Raph Levien, and others), of David Chaum's 1981 "digital mixes." The Kleinpaste/Julf "remailer" lacks basic security provisions, and is more properly called an "anonymizing service," in my opinion. (I'm not familiar with the "Stephi" story, but I know Kleinpaste wrote up a simple anonymizing service, which he claims he did in one evening, and decided not to support it; he transferred the code to Julf, who supported and (I presume) enhanced it, and the rest is history). The Julf anonymizing service was of course vulnerable to legal attacks, and several were mounted. Julf shut the system down at about the time two of them were causing him great trouble, the Scientologist suit, and the front page article in a British tabloid saying his site helped child pornographers (which is undeniably true, of course).
I'll accept that the ranting faction do some good work but I've not seen anything usefull out of either Bell or Vulis unless that is you are an FBI agent looking to get a promotion from Freeh.
This member of the "ranting faction" is happy with what he is done. I am not a C++ programmer and have no interest in spending my life worrying about malloc and buffer overruns. I am of course glad that some folks do make this their life's work. At the first Cypherpunks physical meeting I spent a couple of hours educating people on how Chaumian mixes work, and why they are important for free speech and the colonization of cyberspace. I set up a paper game, beforehand, which we played as a simulation to directly demonstrate the important features of mixes, including message posting areas (later dubbed "message pools" by Miron Cuperman, one of the earliest hosts of a remailer), remailer chaining (something the Kleinpaste/Julf service cannot offer), digital postage (which we explicitly simulated with play money included in the envelopes), and, of course, encryption at each stage. (Encryption was easily simulated with paper envelopes. Chained encryption was envelopes within envelopes. Etc.) This was in September of 1992, at the meeting organized by Eric Hughes and myself, and attended by about 25 of the best hackers we knew in the Bay Area, drawn from those we knew from the Hackers Conference, the Crypto Conference, and the usual Bay Area overlapping circles (Xanadu, AMIX, VPL, etc.). The very next day, Sunday, Hugh Daniel, Eric Hughes, and I were reflecting on the previous day's 12-hour meeting/dinner. The two of them--I can never remember which one exactly--opinined that some hacks of sendmail could allow such remailers to be built. So one weekend Eric spent two days working on this, the first day learning enough Perl to proceed, and the next day coding up such a hack of sendmail. He released it, and the first crude "remailer" of the "strip headers off and resend" sort was launched. Within a month or less, Hal Finney had added PGP encryption features. Within a few months, about a dozen remailers existed. Chaining a message back and forth through subsets of these remailers, encrypted at each stage, and even going through the same remailer multiple times, was now possible. The "mix entropy" of this routing is quite large, and is certainly vastly more robust than Julf's anonymizer service. (A law enforcement officer of some country might be able to find the exit point of a message, but would then have to get "backward collusion" through the system, into various countries. Such collusion is unlikely. Further, some of the remailer operators have a "no logs kept" policy, so back collusion is almost impossible. And one can always route messages through one's self as a remailer--assuming one operates a remailer--and destroy all records automatically and then claim completel innocence and ignorance to the narc who shows up demanding to see message logs. By the way, in America at least it is very difficult to get blanket warrants to search all e-mail.) And so this was very probably what Duncan meant when he said some of the ranting faction were the inventors of remailers. (Both Eric and Hugh are known to rant, or at least have done so at various times. Eric had some memorable rants at the 1995 CFP when he loudly declared to the National Research Council fact-finding committee, "I am a crypto anarchist.") So, Phill, we members of the "ranting faction" have had some impact. Frankly, I don't think the world would be better served if I went back to school to study number theory and became another Odzylko or Shamir, even if my genetics allowed it. Nor do I think becoming a Perl hacker is my calling. I'm satisfied with my contributions, even if you think the ranters are doing nothing to help the causes you apparently support. As they say in your country, tally ho! --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."