At 9:43 PM -0500 4/28/01, Aimee Farr wrote:
>Tim said:
>
> > * Keith Henson chose to post under his own name, to appear in person
>> at COS offices and recruiting centers, to picket, and so on. He was
>> not trying to be anonymous or pseudonymous, so your proposal above
>> would be pointless in his case. Likewise, I choose to post under my
>> own name for most of my posts.
>
>Yes.
>
>> (And, BTW, as you are new, Keith was on our list for a while. I've
>> known Keith since 1976, and he's in the same Bay Area circles that
>> overlap so often.)
>
>Hm.
Hm, indeed. The Church of Scientology case is a good example to look at.
First, I am not a COS critic. Yeah, I've known since I was knee high
to a hobbit that Dianetics, er, Scientology was a crock. That is,
since I first read up on it in about 1967 (a "Life" magazine article,
IIRC.) I followed the crapola about the engrams and the clams and
Xenu for the next 30 years or so. When my friend Keith Henson decided
to make war on the Church of Scientology, I said to him "Why bother?
They're no worse than Catholics who practice ritual cannibalism and
induce gullible peasants to help build their churches of ivory and
gold."
Keith got a rush out of fighting the war. Me, I hate lawyers, I hate
the term "pro se," and I have seen too many of my friends wading out
into the Big Muddy of the law.
Also, I _despise_ the enthusiasm I see in the anti-COS movement
toward moves by fascist states like France and Germany to declare
Scientology an "illegal religion." And I despise the calls for
revocation of their tax status, etc. What's good enough for the
Baptists and Rastafarians and Fribtertarians ought to be good enough
for the Scientologists.
Nevertheless, I remain a friend of Keith Henson.
However, there are interesting links between the COS issue and
Cypherpunks. Turns out that the war really started when "someone"
posted the "NOTS" secret Church doctrines on alt.religion.scientology
using Julf Helsingius' "PENET" mailing service. The Church flipped
out, this was in early 1995, and launched a court battle to force
Julf to reveal who the author was. The Julf mailing service was based
on the work of an American, Karl Kleinpaste. It was not a true
Cypherpunks-style remailer (based on the ideas of David Chaum,
myself, Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, and others).
Eventually the Finnish courts forced Julf to reveal the mapping.
_Then_ it traced back to a Cypherpunks remailer chain, to a nym
account at C2.net. That is, to more remailers. The trail stopped cold.
(C2Net was run by our own Sameer Parekh and several other list
members, including Doug Barnes and Sandy Sandfort. When C2Net changed
its business model, most of its nym services transferred to Lance
Cottrell, who still runs various services.)
Is this too much history? Perhaps. But it shows the deep links
between topics some so glibly comment on and what we've been working
on for more than a decade.
Much of this is covered in my Cyphernomicon. I urge you to get
yourself up to speed, or to leave the list. Your "provocative"
quarrels have grown tiresome.
>
>> * Lots of ways exist to disassociate articles and comments from True
>> Names. Remailers, nym servers, Hotmail, MyDeja, throwaway accounts,
>> Web-to-mail, etc. Not having looked at the "quicktopic" thing you
>> recommend, I can't say whether it's better or worse than most of
>> these other methods.
>
>Look it up. It's easy, 20 seconds. Sheeple food. Again, I was thinking about
>a crypto-savvy offlinking solution. Obviously, this is a dumb idea for some
>reason, or not doable.
I specifically didn't say it was "dumb"--that's your chick insecurity
thing showing.
What I pointed out is that such forms of "weak nyms" have been common
for half a dozen years.
>
>> * Interestingly, most of the recent publicity over courts being asked
> > to force names to be revealed has involved services like Silicon
> > Investor, Raging Bull, and Yahoo fora, which DO support pseudonyms.
> > In some cases the services have refused to reveal the true names
> > associated with nyms on their boards.
>
>I know this.
But you were the one who suggested a solution to the linkability
problem...when in fact your solution is no stronger than what Silicon
Investor and Raging Bull already have as the default.
>
>> None of the non-cryptographic methods are very resistant to legal,
>> technical, sniffing, and black bag attacks. And only multiply-chained
>> encrypted-at-each-stage messages, a la remailers, are adequate for
>> high-value messages.
>
>Well, I was thinking.... obviously something dumb.
There's that chick thing again.
>
>> If you plan to stay on this list, I think it's long past time that
>> you spend several hours reviewing past developments in these areas.
>
>I think it's long past time that you spent several hours kissing my ass. I
>too, suffer from delusional fantasies. :)
I suggest that you spend a few hours or tens of hours "catching up"
and your response is some kind of 8th-grade schoolgirl joke.
--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
