Availability of ACM papers on Net ?

[Timothy C. May]

> 
> Are any of Chaum's papers on untraceable mail and digital cash
> available on the Net?  Advise and thanks.
> 
>           Jeff

Chaum's paper on the "Dining Cryptographers Problem," which appeared
in Vol. 1, No. 1 of the "Journal of Cryptology," was posted to the
list by the ILF (Information Liberation Front). It has appeared a
couple of times, so check the Cypherpunks archives.

The earlier CACM (the 1981 paper on "mixes," the seminal 1985 paper on
untraceable cash) papers are not likely to appear, I would guess.
First, these journals are widely available. Chaum's article in
"Scientific American" last summer is easy to find. Second, the many
diagrams and equations make ASCII presentation problematic. (Chaum's
DC-Net paper was mostly text, with no diagrams, so ASCII versions were
faithful.) Third, it takes a lot fo work ot scan and OCR a paper, even
one without equations and diagrams, and the payback just isn't there.

I will repeat here what I have said before: Anyone serious about this
stuff should take the few hours it will take to find a decent-sized
library and make copies of these and other important papers. ASCII
versions are not adequate.

The "crypto" section of libraries also will expose the visitor to the
whole universe of crypto--the journals, the Proceedings, the various
books. 

And Xeroxes of specific papers are cheap--a lot cheaper than having
someone spend several hours scanning and OCRing a paper, correcting
the many flaws, figuring out an ASCII representation of equations and
diagrams, etc. (Non-OCRed images are of course prohibitively large,
and I doubt my friends in the ILF are interested in this avenue.)

This is not a flame directed at Jeff, just a call for people to do
things the old-fashioned way, namely, to read the sources.


-Tim May

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