Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@nsb.fv.com> writes on cpunks:

The relationship is a completely open and friendly one,

Not intending to infer otherwise (indeed I think I said this).

without any strings attached that I'm aware of. [...] So, FV has been a friend of Phil's for a long time. We launched the Yellow Ribbon campaign and the FV-based fundraising drive in that spirit, though clearly it doesn't exactly hurt us if people sign up for FV in order to donate to Phil. That really wasn't our motivation, however, and we sought to underscore that fact by making a donation to Phil's defense fund every time people sign up for a new account expressly in order to donate to ZLDF. In other words, if you are a Zimmerman supporter and you were thinking it might be nice to have an FV account anyway, you can help Phil even more by signing up and paying your $2 fee through the ZLDF pages.

Okay so far so good. Sounds good for Phil Z which sounds cool to me.

Well, only on the cypherpunks list would you be likely to find general agreement that PGP'ed credit card numbers are "easier" than First Virtual. Many thousands of extremely naive net citizens are now happy FV customers, and I seriously doubt that most of them could master PGP without a full-day tutorial. (We're not talking about rocket scientists here, folks.)

I dunno you know... sci.crypt, alt.security.pgp, alt.privacy,anon-server, etc, etc. are I think the most common people to be using the yellow-ribbon sig, and hence the places they post to (mainly the same) are likely to be the people who see, it and are hence likely to contribute. The URL being used is http://www.netresponse.com/zldf, and nowhere does it mention using PGP and CC #'s. Most people who can't use PGP aren't going to be interested I would have thought. When I read the URL I thought, hmm, okay, got fired up and thought I'd donate something right then... but when it came to it, I had to sign up for a fv account. I cooled. It has to be instant, for best effect.

There are two web sites basically because they are taking care of the informational aspects and we're concentrating (pro bono) on the online fundraising aspects.

If www.netresponse.com is someone else (although you did say you started the Yello Ribbon campaign), I guess the comments are directed to them rather than you, as if your link is just "the FV method to donate to the PZLDF", then fair enough. Maybe I should try target at the zldf@clark.net email. (I think there is a human one if I remember rightly. Also note that this was _not_ an attack on FV, but rather a plea to improve the amount of money the yellow ribbon campaign draws for the PZLDF, by providing alternatives which will suit some people better for a one-off, instant payment).

If we've overly stressed FV as a collection mechanism, I apologize, but you must bear in mind that we've been living and breathing the FV payment system for 18 months now, and it would be kind of hard for us not to even *mention* it. :-)

Okay, now separate issue, really talking about FV now. For me, the main thing holding me back from using it is that I'm not in the US, and don't have a US bank account to open a FV seller acct. (I would have liked to use it as one of the few net payment systems actually up and running, as a payment method for the RSA T-shirts, it would have been a nice system, allowing me to effectively accept VISA payments which I have otherwise been unable to do.) Any news on this front? Last I looked on your WWW page, you were investigating this and payments in other currencies. US$ would be fine though, as long as it was possible for the seller to create a US account, or have it paid to a non-US account (would it not be possible to pay to non-US account?). Adam -- HAVE *YOU* EXPORTED RSA TODAY? --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ --rsa--------------------------8<------------------------------- #!/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) -------------------------------8<------------------------------- TRY: rsa -k=3 -n=7537d365 < msg | rsa -d -k=4e243e33 -n=7537d365