Re: Cypherpunks HyperArchive
There is another archive at http://sof.mit.edu/cypherpunks, ironically the machine that hosts it is not up at the moment
The machine suffered either disk controller or HDD problems as I was logged into it. It is located in Boston, MA. I do not currently have a way of getting to the machine to repair it, and this will likely continue to be true, so until I can get one of the people I know at the site where the machine is located to fix it, the archives will be offline. If the machine cannot be fixed, I will put the archive up elsewhere. I believe hugh@toad.com copied the entire archive at some point, so that might be helpful. Sorry about this -- replicated servers are always a good idea. -- Ryan Lackey rdl@mit.edu http://sof.mit.edu/rdl/
At 8:41 AM -0700 9/7/98, Ryan Lackey wrote:
The machine suffered either disk controller or HDD problems as I was logged into it. It is located in Boston, MA. I do not currently have a way of getting to the machine to repair it, and this will likely continue to be true, so until I can get one of the people I know at the site where the machine is located to fix it, the archives will be offline. If the machine cannot be fixed, I will put the archive up elsewhere. I believe hugh@toad.com copied the entire archive at some point, so that might be helpful.
Sorry about this -- replicated servers are always a good idea.
Indeed, weren't you developing some kind of distributed eternity server? So much for eternity, I guess. Ryan, could you tell us what you are working on, and what has taken you out of the country? --Tim May "The tree of liberty must be watered periodically with the blood of tyrants...." ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments.
Indeed, weren't you developing some kind of distributed eternity server? So much for eternity, I guess.
I believe Eternity depends upon a viable electronic cash system. I put Eternity DDS on hold until one existed, and switched to working on HINDE, a project with Ian Goldberg, to create a workable electronic cash system. Creating a workable electronic cash system became...complicated (e.g. given that I was recently at Bob Hettinga's electronic cash conference in Boston giving a technical presentation, and it turns out the new CEO of DigiCash was i the audience as "an interested investor"...perhaps it was impolitic of me to continually bash DigiCash and David Chaum in a group of people who I did not all definitely know to not be DigiCash employees...) Ian's gone on to do Zero-Knowledge Systems, and I'm now working on what follows in this email, so HINDE, the defined as the cypherpunkish protest against DigiCash, is probably quiescent. Don't read anything into that, though. For backing up the Cypherpunks Archives, I could have done just as well by setting up two identical machines with rsync mirroring the drives. I do this kind of thing with real data, but didn't feel the 1gb of archive data was high enough importance to mirror. It appears the machine will be up in a week or so, and if the drive is broken, I will send it off to a drive recovery place for recovery, so the archives will be up, minus the most recent month or two, in a month, at the outside.
Ryan, could you tell us what you are working on, and what has taken you out of the country?
The two answers are related, but distinct. I am working on an interesting project with an interesting organization to develop interesting applications for interesting clients. I would provide more detail here now if I could, and will in the future. I have left the US for many reasons. One, because I can, at least now. I left about a month ago. I'm increasingly concerned about y2k issues, and my situation in Boston (living about 0.25 miles from the exact center of Boston) was not at all compatible with the kind of preparation I believe in. I am concerned not so much with the primary/prompt effects of y2k as I am of societal panic and the government's response, perhaps proactive, to that panic. I left because the crypto policies of the US were getting increasingly obnoxious, although I am a US citizen, and am not violating any EAR restrictions. (I'm actually probably obeying US law even more totally here than I did when I lived in the US -- in Cambridge, MA, it is a crime to "interdigitate", that is, to hold hands with someone of the opposite sex. I think I was actually a potential felon before I left too, as I had an unpaid library fine at the Boston Public Library which I paid the day before I left, and I believe having outstanding fines for greater than a year is a felony in MA, a holdover from colonial times.) I left because I wanted to be doing more, and plotting/scheming about what I could be doing if I were not in the US less. I left because the US is just not the best place for me to live at the current time, given that my primary goal right now is to accomplish the "interesting projects". I left because in a time of uncertainty about the future, it is nice to be far away from both soft targets and fundamentally self-serving organizations with large amounts of power and no constraints upon their use of such. Given that I haven't actually broken any laws in coming here, and am being scrupulous to avoid breaking any while I'm here, it wasn't really that big a change. I sold my stereo and long-term-loaned my larger computers and monitors to one of my former housemates, but if things didn't work out, I could very easily move back to the US. However, I can't imagine any situations where this is a worthwhile choice. I was thinking about the things in the US I could conceivably miss -- some heavy industrial things, the Grand Canyon, and MAE-East, and all of them can be substituted with other things elsewhere. So, leaving was somewhat supported by what I'm working on, but neither really required the other -- they were independent choices which made sense independently and made even more sense together. I'd encourage anyone interested in leaving the US for a few years to seriously consider doing so ASAP, before 1 January 1999 if at all possible. It takes some time to get set up in a new place, and you want this all sorted out before any potential uncertainty becomes reality. If I had the money and time to set myself up in the US with a reasonable plot of land far away from any nearby targets or attackers, I would have considered it more than I did, but I don't yet have investment income to live from, so I needed a place where I could make a reasonable amount of money, and Montana wasn't quite it. For those who can, or who were lucky enough to find themselves in that position before the y2k uncertainty became a pressing issue, staying in place may easily make more sense. Anguilla is actually a pretty reasonable choice as far as a place to spend a few years away from the US -- 7 000 people, many with a strong libertarian bent because they've always owned their own land, reasonable comms, no taxes, accessible through a neighboring island's jet airport but not really a place with a lot of through-traffic itself, etc. If you stockpile a bit of food and supplies, you're probably all set -- security is nowhere near as big an issue here as it would be in most of the US. I was objectively evaluating my situation in Boston, and it would have required more than a reinforced brigade to provide any reasonable security there. The cost of that buys an awful lot of canned/nitrogen-packed food... I'm sure there are other places in the world which are reasonable, but I've only really looked at Anguilla, due to fc99, and I knew people here already.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 3:38 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Robert Hettinga wrote about Ryan Lackey's whereabouts, on cypherpunks:
If I told you, I would have to kill you?
Whew. Glad Ryan has now said something publically now about his and Ian's bit of extraterritorial subtrifuge (though Ian doesn't qualify, of course). I mean, I just *hate* keeping secrets... ;-). Frankly, I *really* have a hard time with all this man-without-a-first-world-country, crypto-expat stuff. I think making the technology not eonomically optional is the way to change things, and no amount of romantic, jurisdiction-shopping "regulatory arbitrage" is going to alter reality all that much. But, I guess, Anguilla's as nice a place to have this affliction as any I can think of. And, I wish Vince -- and now, apparently, Ryan -- good luck, whatever happens. Yet, for some reason, memories of Vietnam-era draft-dodgers keep coming to mind. For what it cost them all personally, not much good came of it, I'd say, for them or anyone else. The people who protested the war and "fought the good fight" to end it stayed here to do it, after all. The most potent anti-war activists were Vietnam vets themselves, for that matter. And, of course, Ridgeway told Eisenhower at the outset that Vietnam was a multi-million-man war, and Eisenhower stayed out accordingly, throwing a few marginal people on the ground to shut Lodge up. It took Testosterone Jack to get a Special-Forces hard-on. Eventually he and Desktop Lyndon ended up screwing a pooch instead of the commies. Do people out there really think somebody like Gore's going to do a crypto-amnesty someday? I didn't think so. Ashcroft, maybe, but don't hold your breath, there, either. It'll be decades, I bet, and our "boys over there" will have grey hair long before they do come back home on this one. Political inertia is probably going to keep a few people we know outside the fence, looking in, for an awful long time after the issue's utterly dead. I expect people who do this crypto-expat stuff are going to get their new passports refused at the U.S. border when they visit, and I think that things are going to get worse for them for a long time before they get better. Of course, there's a fair argument to be made that if they do get refused, it's probably time to leave, anyway, but I'll let someone else gnaw that bone. And, frankly, I *do* expect that the FBI will attempt domestic crypto controls, just like they've been been trying to do for some time now. But, unlike a lot of people, I think that the marketplace will steamroller all such silliness into yet another roadtop attraction, before or after its legislation. Anyway, as the old "excrable" e$yllogism goes, Digital commerce is financial cryptography. Financial cryptography is strong cryptography. Therefore, if there's no strong cryptography, there's no digital commerce. So, call me an optimist. Like I've said before, I've heard the end of life and liberty as we know it predicted over and over again -- hell, I've even believed so myself, once or twice -- but, like the Gibbon quote in my .sig goes, "however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity", I ain't seen it happen yet. Cheers, Bob Hettinga -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.5.5 iQEVAwUBNfRQJMUCGwxmWcHhAQHb7gf+ImnoGG28coDgde4cDgnwHyQatO78nY4B 9bMfB9bE1FCqAIZNKfrPzqhJpZzCbYEDYQexXe8bRsl32M7FnIye7w4r7kxeXxns LbLWY83juOAJNgMhPxPhFVcXb8NqwOQzCnYjLdfKSuJ6/lZuNGvsVohHwYuhNxc9 WlOW1WsqeSl3KyzpdDyZU1jAUvNEJQU9JoeeEvlwFNM7zMW3ZoIQB5SSVLf2HYzX vtpnZiRsOeSXt0sWmlXHiZ+DeB+79z1z157cg/AOn/qAGBLBgZuDp+dbRH7B4ynR ngB6XS+irSzNnMWQrVdNYPuRPRRQ+h/eV+US2Cmjc3uuFcnR/+tnNg== =0UKh -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
(Note: my original message was posted to Cypherpunks, which I consider to be substantially different than DBS: had I been posting to DBS, I would have included different details...list differentiation is kin of useful, it's why the different lists were created in the first place)
At 3:38 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Robert Hettinga wrote about Ryan Lackey's whereabouts, on cypherpunks:
If I told you, I would have to kill you?
I never said this. If you'd like to fabricate/summarize/editorialize, please make it clear that that's what you're doing, by using the traditionally accepted editorial convention of square brackets, or some other convention. I prefer Chicago Manual of Style, but I'm sure the AP Stylebook is acceptable.
Whew. Glad Ryan has now said something publically now about his and Ian's bit of extraterritorial subtrifuge (though Ian doesn't qualify, of course). I mean, I just *hate* keeping secrets... ;-).
Ian Goldberg isn't involved -- he's working on Zero Knowledge Systems, AFAIK, and I wish him luck, but I haven't really spoken to him in months. He's a Canadian, anyway. I haven't mentioned working with anyone else anywhere, other than that I'm working for "interesting" clients. If you know otherwise, it isn't particularly public knowledge at this point.
Frankly, I *really* have a hard time with all this man-without-a-first-world-country, crypto-expat stuff. I think making the technology not eonomically optional is the way to change things, and no amount of romantic, jurisdiction-shopping "regulatory arbitrage" is going to alter reality all that much.
I'm not breaking US law. I'm a US citizen. I pay my taxes, respect US law, etc. It's just that I'm choosing to work on something somewhere other than the US, for a variety of reasons.
And, I wish Vince -- and now, apparently, Ryan -- good luck, whatever happens.
Vince formally renounced his citizenship, becoming a citizen of a small african country, and intends to remain in Anguilla. I left the US for a while to work on stuff, and to get away from a major US city for a while. I think there's a huge difference here. What I have done is fundamentally no different than going to Montana to write code for a while, other than that it was cheaper and more convenient for me to come to Anguilla. (Of course, Vince seems to be doing quite well...) I just happen to not want to go back to the US right now, it's not that I can't if I decide I want to at some point. Thanks, Ryan (who generally does not provide confidential information to people who do not like keeping secrets, out of kindness for them)
Bob Hettinga wrote: : Anyway, as the old "excrable" e$yllogism goes, : : Digital commerce is financial cryptography. : Financial cryptography is strong cryptography. : Therefore, if there's no strong cryptography, there's no : digital commerce. ................................................................ It could justify becoming an exile, to develop the strong crypto needed for digital commerce. The conditions are right for it. .. Blanc
At 3:38 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Robert Hettinga wrote about Ryan Lackey's whereabouts, on cypherpunks:
If I told you, I would have to kill you?
Whew. Glad Ryan has now said something publically now about his and Ian's bit of extraterritorial subtrifuge (though Ian doesn't qualify, of course). I mean, I just *hate* keeping secrets... ;-).
As secrets go, this was not a big one... The main thing that is meant to be confidential was the nature and names of our clients, and under normal business practice, they hold the option(s) on PR. I don't think anyone should need to die to protect that, as even then, their main issue is (probably) not revealing a relationship with a product until it did what they wanted.
Frankly, I *really* have a hard time with all this man-without-a-first-world-country, crypto-expat stuff.
Well, it's not *quite* like that. The US was seriously considered, but Ryan's offer of a fraternity bedroom/office, T1 or no T1, was not as attractive as some time in the sun. After all, FC came to Anguilla for good reasons. Also, there are other sites under long term consideration, not in the US, but in other cool places. The main reason for considering these sites is that they make business sense; and they are definately cool. Maybe we'll keep the details to ourselves until they are vapour-compliant. It should be mentioned that the contagion properties of renouncement are somewhat less than epidemic. Vince decided to "do the deed," but others are not exactly leaping for their passports and Lonely Planet guides. In fact, most of the at-risk group here are still swearing by the bible and running up the flag every morning, just in case anybody gets the wrong idea. Or at least that's what it seems like to those of us immunised at birth. iang
Time for a little air clearing, here... At 6:22 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Ryan Lackey wrote:
(Note: my original message was posted to Cypherpunks, which I consider to be substantially different than DBS: had I been posting to DBS, I would have included different details...list differentiation is kin of useful, it's why the different lists were created in the first place)
Perils of the internet, Ryan, everything is everywhere forever. :-). That's okay, you didn't sound that much different than you do anywhere else. That was not perjorative, by the way...
I never said this. If you'd like to fabricate/summarize/editorialize, please make it clear that that's what you're doing, by using the traditionally accepted editorial convention of square brackets, or some other convention. I prefer Chicago Manual of Style, but I'm sure the AP Stylebook is acceptable.
Actually, I was quoting *myself*, talking about something you discussed later, and which crossed paths with the post in question. It might help to go back and reread the original, in the thread about the cypherpunk hyperarchive, but, you're excused in the meantime. :-).
Ian Goldberg isn't involved -- he's working on Zero Knowledge Systems, AFAIK, and I wish him luck, but I haven't really spoken to him in months. He's a Canadian, anyway.
I wasn't talking about *that* Ian. :-). As it is, Ian Grigg has outed himself on another list already, but he's not the one making expatriate noise, seeing as he's Australian, and all...
I haven't mentioned working with anyone else anywhere, other than that I'm working for "interesting" clients. If you know otherwise, it isn't particularly public knowledge at this point.
Um, yes. And I haven't said anything besides what's publically known. Certainly *who* you're working for hasn't been revealed yet, and I haven't done that. Even as much as I hate secrets. :-).
I'm not breaking US law. I'm a US citizen. I pay my taxes, respect US law, etc. It's just that I'm choosing to work on something somewhere other than the US, for a variety of reasons.
That's nice to know. Good to hear. See ya when you get back. At least you haven't made that trip to Antigua or Barbados, or wherever, yet. That, in my opinion, would be rather silly.
And, I wish Vince -- and now, apparently, Ryan -- good luck, whatever happens.
Vince formally renounced his citizenship, becoming a citizen of a small african country, and intends to remain in Anguilla. I left the US for a while to work on stuff, and to get away from a major US city for a while. I think there's a huge difference here.
Again, marvellous.
What I have done is fundamentally no different than going to Montana to write code for a while, other than that it was cheaper and more convenient for me to come to Anguilla.
Splendid. At the moment, I'd just barely prefer Anguilla to the North Fork of the Flathead River myself, but my opinion on the subject is changing...
(Of course, Vince seems to be doing quite well...) I just happen to not want to go back to the US right now, it's not that I can't if I decide I want to at some point.
Again, marvellous. I would just be careful you don't fall in with the wrong element while you're down there in the World's Best Place for Financial Cryptography (tm). ;-).
(who generally does not provide confidential information to people who do not like keeping secrets, out of kindness for them)
And, I might add, *you* didn't. :-). Any information I've revealed on this is public. However, I'm in an agressively public business, these days, yes? You don't put "Evangelism" in your business name and expect to hide your light under a bushel basket... Frankly, I'm only *really* obligated to keep secrets I'm paid to keep, anymore. Word to the wise, for anyone else out there who wants call me up and spill the beans. Past obligations will still be honored, of course, but the rent's gotta be paid, same as it ever was. This includes "keep this quiet, but..." in email, encrypted or otherwise, followed by This Week's Business Plan. Frankly, I don't want to hear that stuff anymore unless there's some remuneration behind it. Game over. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
:: Anon-To: Ryan Lackey <ryan@arianrhod.systemics.ai>, Tim May <tcmay@got.net> At 03:27 PM 9/7/98 -0400, Ryan Lackey wrote:
Anguilla is actually a pretty reasonable choice as far as a place to spend a few years away from the US -- 7 000 people, many with a strong
Jul 7 1999 The US today launched a cruise missile strike against Anguilla, where Osama bin "Blowback" Laden was known, according to US National Security officials, to be investing in an online gambling casino. --Count of Monte Carlo
At 12:17 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Tim May trolled:
Ryan, could you tell us what you are working on, and what has taken you out of the country?
If I told you, I would have to kill you? Seriously, Ryan and Ian were both moderators the Philodox Symposium on Digital Bearer Transaction Settlement, held this July at the Harvard Club in Boston. During the Symposium, they had several dinner conversations with a couple of Symposium participants from a company which will remain nameless, and they're currently putting together a digital bearer transaction settlement system for those folks. Somewhere. :-). Also there at the Symposium was Scott Loftesness, who's now the new president of DigiCash, though the rest of us didn't know that at the time. I was hoping someone from DigiCash would show up. I just didn't know exactly how successful I was going to be in that until about two weeks ago. Of course, a good time was had by all, including the likes of Dan Geer, John Muller, some fairly serious financial people from Citicorp and VISA and EGold, and several other interesting folks from various walks of crypto, finance, and law. Had a great time, wish you were there, and all that. Yup, that financial technology evangelism stuff's just a waste of time. Never gonna amount to much. :-). For my next trick (besides some road-show DBTS seminars I'd like to do, some speeches at upcoming electronic commerce/trading conferences in places like Boston and London, the DBTS series I'm doing for Duncan Goldie-Scott's online edition of the Financial Times, a white paper I'm doing for a credit card company, some other fee-and-referral-commission consulting contracts, and a few threatend projects from book editors <whew!>:-)) is a chinese-wall, peer-reviewed legal conference on digital bearer settlement, hopefully next summer. I'm recruiting the program chair now, and have several people you've probably heard of in mind for the program committee, though ultimately that's the committee chairman's decision. Having some fun, *now*, as those SNL wild and crazy guys used to say... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
I have ~100 MB from 4/97 to present archived in mbox form. I can FTP it or make it available to anyone who might need it to restore the archive. -Declan On 7 Sep 1998, Ryan Lackey wrote:
There is another archive at http://sof.mit.edu/cypherpunks, ironically the machine that hosts it is not up at the moment
The machine suffered either disk controller or HDD problems as I was logged into it. It is located in Boston, MA. I do not currently have a way of getting to the machine to repair it, and this will likely continue to be true, so until I can get one of the people I know at the site where the machine is located to fix it, the archives will be offline. If the machine cannot be fixed, I will put the archive up elsewhere. I believe hugh@toad.com copied the entire archive at some point, so that might be helpful.
Sorry about this -- replicated servers are always a good idea. -- Ryan Lackey rdl@mit.edu http://sof.mit.edu/rdl/
I did not get a chance to download the great archive Ryan did, lets hope it's on the disk there still, otherwise it has to be rebuilt by someone. ||ugh hugh@toad.com
participants (10)
-
Blanc -
David Honig -
Declan McCullagh -
Hugh Daniel -
Ian Grigg -
Robert Hettinga -
Ryan Lackey -
Ryan Lackey -
Ryan Lackey -
Tim May