On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 12:31:05PM +0200, Eugene Leitl wrote:
The most cypherpunk-relevant bits of my article: Syverson said that the U.S. government was awarded patent number 6,266,704 for Onion Routing on July 24. That announcement prompted an angry reaction from Usenix attendees, many of whom are programmers, security consultants and system administrators who aren't big fans of software patents -- especially in the area of anonymous communications, where there's been so much prior work before the Navy ever got involved. Mathematician David Chaum, for instance, wrote an article titled "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses and Digital Pseudonyms" for Communications of the ACM as far back as 1981. Lance Cottrell, who now runs anonymizer.com, wrote part of the mixmaster system in the early 1990s, and similar techniques were discussed on the cypherpunks mailing list even earlier. Syverson, who is listed on the patent with co-inventors Michael Reed and David Goldschlag, defended the government's move. "It is a necessary step for those of us working for the government to bring technology to the public," Syverson said. The patent describes Onion Routing, which has been the subject of analysis at previous security conferences, as providing "an electronic communication path between an initiator and a responder on a packet-switching network comprising an onion routing network that safeguards against traffic analysis and eavesdropping by other users of the packet switching network" such as the Internet. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6,266,704'.WKU.&OS=PN/6,266,704&RS=PN/6,266,704 -Declan