Hi Hal & others, this is Strata, author of the Virtual City (tm) Network "faq" (which raises more questions than it answers, rev 1.1 will be more customarily faq-like.) Someone forwarded me your posting re the faq and I thought I would take a moment to reply. Please direct any correspondence to me directly, I am only on cypherpunks-announce and not the list itself. I had a misunderstanding about the PGP key servers, not realizing they existed to register your keys with and not to generate them. I have planned from the beginning to include serious privacy technology in the Virtual City, up to and including objects in the master database which can only be decrypted at runtime by those who have keys for them. I have been talking with Hugh Daniel about making his ideas on NYM's an integral part of the infrastructure and plan to include Digital Cash as soon as a version is ready to go. I was at today's Cypherpunks meeting to get more info on PGP and discuss details of the infrastructure with folks. I will be posting a slightly revised 1.0.1 faq which corrects some minor mistakes and also gives correct info about PGP key generation in detail. I will be writing up details of how I am thinking of implementing some of the privacy structure mentioned in the faq and above and posting it here for people to shoot at. I am very interested in doing this "right". In the last 48 hours since I posted the faq a number of messages from folks asking how they can get a public key, so I want to head them in the right direction. If I were to admit something seditious in public, which I never do, I might say that one of my many goals for the Virtual City (tm) Network was to get Joe & Jane Undergrad or Salaryperson casually using privacy tech in a matter of fact way-- they'll use it to protect their identity and privacy in the VC environment and to perform commercial transactions online. I think that people are not using the privacy tech that's out there simply because they feel they have no compelling reason to do so. If people start needing to use it to get at things they think are interesting or cool they will become familiar with the use of the tech and begin to use it casually elsewhere. That would seem to be the Right Thing. To spread usage out beyond Virtual City (tm) Network, I've also been thinking that later on when the service is established I should start an encrypted "vcn" news hierarchy. This will get randoms using PGP to read the news feed. I'm not familiar enough with the most recent news control mechanisms to feel certain that I can somehow "bounce" cleartext posts to these groups, I might have to make it unidirectional and gatewayed solely through a hacked mail filter that requires encrypted text. My worry is that sites that do satellite feeds might balk at carrying it, thinking it might violate some FCC regs about non-cleartext data over public airwaves. They might be right, I need to learn more about possible legal ramifications before doing that. Cheerfully educable, _Strata PS- I will support folks choosing their own encryption on data envelopes, but after seeing Arthur's presentation today I think I'd better make it abundantly clear that we can in no way be held liable if they insist on DES M. Strata Rose Unix & Network Consultant, SysAdmin & Internet Information Virtual City (TM) Network strata@virtual.net | strata@hybrid.com | strata@fenchurch.mit.edu