At 4:44 PM -0700 4/24/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Ken Brown wrote:
>
>
>>You want maybe a recipe? An instruction book for helping the state
>>wither away? Try the Communist Manifesto, it's good.
>
>I've read it already.
>
>And no, I don't want a recipe for helping the state wither away
>or change form. That's a several-centuries process, and I haven't
>the attention span for it.
Frankly, I doubt that you have read "The Communist Manifesto." For
multiple reasons, including its length and boringness.
But mainly because I have decided you are likely a liar. You said you
"thanked me" for my Reading List, just about 4 days after it was
published here. Then you said you hadn't found the books useful. One
possibility is that you had already read all or most of the books,
including Benson, Axelrod, Hayek, etc., and concluded retrospectively
that my recommending them meant that my list was not of much use. The
other main possibility is that you were implying you had located
these books, either via Amazon or via a well-equipped library, and
had read them and found them wanting. Frankly, I consider both
possibilities unlikely in the extreme.
But I am willing to give you a chance: Just how many of the books on
my list had you either already read or did you locate and read in the
days between when my list was published and when you announced that
they were not very useful?
If you actually read Rand, Hayek, Benson, Axelrod, Vinge, Friedman,
etc. in those several days, I am impressed with your reading speed.
If you either just read summaries on Amazon of the books, or flipped
the pages at high speed in a Borders or Barnes and Noble then I am
not impressed at all. (And I am quite certain that no extant Borders
will have even half of the books listed.)
If you ordered the books by Amazon--including the out of print
editions--and then read them in the day after they all
arrived...well, we'll talk about that later.
>
>
>What I wanted, when I showed up here looking, was evaluation of
>specific protocols for doing specific things. For example, how
>does an election protocol with cryptographic ballots work?
Read Schneier. Read the oft-cited (certainly cited many times in the
years since you claim to have been here, i.e., since when Detweiler
was here) Proceedings of the Crypto Conferences (Springer-Verlag,
every year)/
>How
>do Alice and Bob exchange keys?
Schneier or any other of the N basic crypto texts. Diffie-Hellman,
for example. Blacknet, for another example. This is really basic,
basic stuff.
>What are the ways in which
>different types of digital cash protect the identity of the
>buyer or seller, and how does each work?
Chaum, Brands, Schneier, etc. A vast number of articles.
>Are there ways to
>distribute "shares" of identity so that groups of people can
>participate in another protocol as though they were one person,
>and if so how does that work?
N-out-of-M protocols, Shamir's secret-sharing. Again, basic crypto stuff.
>What types of authentication can
>happen without trusted servers and how does each work?
"Trusted servers" are a highly misleading, and security-fucked,
approach. Webs of trust, interstellar communication, Blacknet,
reputations.
>
>I've gotten maybe three scraps of help on such questions
>from this list, and they were minimal -- pointers to offlist
>and off-net resources.
Because you have shown a stubborn unwillingness to even learn the
basics....and yet you claim the reading list I put out was useless to
you, implying you had read and absorbed and evaluate those
books...which I doubt.
> In order to get that, I've put up with
>a lot of sneers, condescencion, posing, and political rants
>with no underpinning of reality, which I personally find
>distasteful.
Your questions mark you as profoundly ignorant of even the basics,
and, more importantly, of being willing to spend some time reading
even the most basic, core texts. Asking about how keys are exchanged,
how things work without "trusted servers," etc., marks you as a
complete newbie.
You claim you have been reading the list since Detweiler was active,
which means since about 1995-96.
This means you are uneducable. Or lying. Or both.
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
