Fellow Cypherpunks, Here's a trip report I just sent to another mailing list I'm active on, the "Extropians" list. That's why I "introduce" Tom Jennings, John Gilmore, and Eric Hughes...clearly they need no introduction to readers of _this_ list (although a lot of new folks have signed up recently, I hear). By the way, I just picked up the latest "Mondo 2000." Our own Jude Milhon's article, "The Cypherpunk Movement," is on pp. 36-37 (Issue #8). The address "cypherpunks@toad.com" is mentioned, so we may get even more new folks. Also some good stuff on MindVOX, phreaking, etc. --Tim HACKERS CONFERENCE REPORT I just returned from Hackers 8.0, held 6-8 November in Lake Tahoe, California. Approximately 170 attendees this year. Some Highlights: * Our crypto session went extremely well. The talks were on PGP and FidoNet, Diffie-Hellman key exchange for rlogin, digital time-stamping, and anonymous remailers. More comments later. * Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) spoke on the developing conflict between personal privacy and law enforcement, including comments on the "key registration" trial balloon I posted about earlier. (Godwin told me he believes the Denning proposal is deadly serious, that the Department of Justice has put a high priority on limiting the use of cryptography.) * Hacking was well represented. Besides our crypto panel, sessions on cellular phone phreaking and illegal mods to telecom equipment drew large crowds (a "how to" talk on reprogramming the 8051 micro in the Oki 900 cellphone was especially useful). * Eric Drexler gave a talk on nanotechnology (surprise!), with an emphasis on needed work in the next couple of years. Drexler argued that proto-assemblers could be built in as short as 16 years, though there was some skepticism expressed. He also presented a calculation that the "cost" of delaying nanotech is $25 billion a _day_. (I suggested we all skip dinner that night and instead put in another hour in the labs!) * Marvin Minsky answered questions, saying he rarely prepares in advance. AI, robotics, gene expression in embryos, and software were all covered. * Allan Huang of AT&T gave an energetic 90 minute talk on optical computing, going from optical deconvolvers to "computer origami" to optical switches to Sagnac fibers that can store light pulses 6 femtoseconds long! Definitely the most stimulating talk. * Demos in the machine room were better than ever. The "Reality Engine" from Silicon Graphics displayed photorealistic simulations. Lots of Suns, NeXTs, and Macs. Films of SIGGRAPH papers, chaos and fractals, and artificial life were shown at night. Rudy Rucker's session on cellular automata went well. MORE ON CRYPTO Since cryptology and the activities of the "cypherpunks" mailing list are of central concern to me, I'll concentrate on those topics. Our panel was in "prime time," mid-Saturday afternoon, with about 100 in attendance, including a couple of journalists (notably John Markoff of the "New York Times"...if anybody sees an article on this by him, please send me a note about it, OK?). The audience had been prepped for crypto by the comments Friday night by Mike Godwin of the EFF and by a 3 hour rump session on "Digital Cash" from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m on Saturday (remember "hacker hours"). Tom Jennings, one of the chief forces behind FidoNet, an "anarchic" net made up of PCs talking to other PCs, spoke on efforts to spread PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to as many FidoNet users as possible. It looks like its happening and this will be another avenue to ensure that the "crypto genie" gets safely out of the bottle. John Gilmore, an early UNIX/Sun pioneer and current principal at Cygnus Support, amongst other things, spoke on increasing security against Internet eavesdroppers by using the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol for rlogin (for example). This is something we can do fairly soon. Stu Haber and Scott Stornetta of Bellcore (formerly part of Bell Labs) reported on their digital time-stamping system. Some document to be "notarized" is hashed to produce a fairly short number which is hard to forge (i.e., it is very hard to find another document which hashes to the same value). This hash value is then published in, say, a widely read newspaper. If a dispute arises about the time a document was written, the published has value is persuasive. Bellcore actually operates such a service (check the legal notices in the Sunday "New York Times"). Eric Hughes, a mathematician who worked briefly for David Chaum's "DigiCash" outfit, described anonymous remailers implemented in Perl and now running. He also mentioned Hal Finney's version which embeds PGP in the remailer, allowing more security. This generated a lot of excitement, as the ideas of "crypto anarchy" became apparent to all. (John Little, owner and operator of the "Portal Communications Company," a Bay Area-based Internet access service, got excited and offered to run the remailers on his system! The genie is further out of the bottle. Now if we can only get GEnie to do the same!) The spirit of contributing to the larger cause of using crypto to _directly_ protect privacy was exhilarating. More people spoke of actual code they plan to write (as with Russell Whittaker's offer a few weeks ago to help with ProComm mods). There was a real sense that Things Had Changed. With PGP 2.0 arriving a few months ago (and still spreading), with the onset of the "Cypherpunks" group (which got a somehat cryptic write-up by Jude Milhon in the just-published Issue #8 of "Mondo 2000"...but since she coined the term "cypherpunks" to describe us, her article can afford to be cryptic, no?), and with the "Hacker Crackdown" all around us (Sun Devil, Legion of Doom, S.266 attempt to ban encryption, FBI's "Digital Telephony Bill," and the latest "trial balloon" to register keys), the time is right. In the next several months I expect the media, via more articles in magazines like "Mondo 2000" and by articles on crypto policy, to focus in on this issue. Even the "Village Voice" is interested in crypto issues (theme: crypto privacy vs. Big Brother). These are exciting times. If I'm ever busted for sedition, money laundering conspiracy, violation of the Munitions Act, RICO Act violations, or just plain old political incorrectness, carry on the fight. The stakes are high. --Tim -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version. -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version. -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version.