Re: Your source code, for sale
- Original Message - From: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 05, 2004 7:01 AM Tyler Durden writes: So my newbie-style question is, is there an eGold that can be verified, but not accessed, until a 'release' code is sent? In other words, say I'm buying some hacker-ed code and pay in egold. I don't want them to be able to 'cash' the gold until I have the code. Meanwhile, they will want to see that the gold is at least there, even if they can't cash it yet. Is there a way to send a 'release' to an eGold (or other) payment? Better yet, a double simultaneous release feature makes thing even more interesting. In the world of international trade, where mutual distrust between buyer and seller is often the rule and there is no central authority to enforce the law, this is traditionally achieved by interposing not less than three trusted third parties: the shipping line, the opening bank and the negotiating bank. First, the buyer asks his bank to open an irrevocable letter of credit (L/C), which is a letter sent to the seller's bank instructing it to pay the seller once the latter presents a given set of documents: these usually include the bill of lading (B/L), issued by the shipping line to declare that the desired cargo was indeed loaded on board. The seller gets the letter of gredit from his bank and is now sure that he will be paid by the latter (which he trusts); so he purchases or manufactures the goods, delivers them to the shipping line getting the B/L, passes it together with the other documents to his bank, and draws the payment. The seller's bank sends by mail the documents to the buyer's bank (which it trusts due to long-standing business relationships), knowing that it will eventually receive the settlement money. The buyer's bank receives the documents, debits the buyer's account, remits the monies to the seller's bank, and delivers the documents to the buyer. When the ship arrives to the buye's seaport, the buyer goes to the shipping line, presents to it the B/L and in exchange gets the cargo (in sea shipments, the B/L represents title to the goods). I've been thinking about how to do this kind of thing with ecash. That's way trickier because there are no trusted third parties, not even e-gold Ltd. / GSR, Inc. The trust chain with the L/C works well because delegation of trust is unnecessary: every link in the chain bears responsibility only to its adjacent links. [...] In the case of your problem there is the issue of whether the source code you are buying is legitimate. Only once you have inspected it and satisfied yourself that it will suit your needs would you be willing to pay. But attaining that assurance will require examing the code in such detail that maybe you will decide that you don't need to pay. Interestingly, with L/C's this problem is addressed by involving yet another third party: an internationally-recognized inspection company (e.g., the Swiss SGS) that issues a document certifying that the cargo is indeed what the buyer expects and not, i.e., bricks. Banks and shipping lines don't want to get involved in these issues; the seller's bank will only check all the documents requested by the L/C (possibly including the inspection certificate). You could imagine a trusted third party who would inspect the code and certify it, saying the source code with hash XXX appears to be legitimate Cisco source code. Then they could send you the code bit by bit and incrementally show that it matches the specified hash, using a crypto protocol for gradual release of secrets. You could simultaneously do a gradual release of some payment information in the other direction. But it's hard to assess the value of partially-released code. If the gradual transfer bits-against-cents is aborted, what is left to the buyer is likely to be unusable, whereas the partial payment still represents good value. A more general issue is that source code is not a commodity, and intellectual property is not real property: so the traditional cash on delivery paradigm just doesn't work, and looking for protocols implementing it kind of moot. If the code is treated as trade secret, rather than licensed, an anonymous buyer may make copies and resell them on the black market more than recovering his initial cost, at the same time undercutting your legitimate sales (see e.g. the cases of RC4 and RC2). This can cause losses order of magnitude larger than refusing to pay for his copy. Enzo
Re: Finding Galt's Gulch (fwd)
On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 08:05:34PM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote: Where does one go today, if they are unwilling to participate in the Failed Experiment? (BTW: No, Lichtenstein does not accept immigrants, and yes, I have reverified this recently). Go East. Fortunes are made there. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpJvcNr67xhO.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Your source code, for sale
Tyler Durden wrote: Hum. So my newbie-style question is, is there an eGold that can be verified, but not accessed, until a 'release' code is sent? proof-of-delivery protocols might help (but they're patented, as I discovered when I reinvented them a few years back). In other words, say I'm buying some hacker-ed code and pay in egold. I don't want them to be able to 'cash' the gold until I have the code. Meanwhile, they will want to see that the gold is at least there, even if they can't cash it yet. Is there a way to send a 'release' to an eGold (or other) payment? Better yet, a double simultaneous release feature makes thing even more interesting. Simultaneous release is (provably?) impossible without a trusted third party. I think this is one of the interesting applications of capabilities. Using them, you can have a TTP who is ignorant of what is running - you and your vendor agree some code that the TTP will run, using capability based code. In your case, this code would verify the eGold payment and the code (difficult to do this part with certainty, of course) and release them when both were correct. Because of the capabilities, the TTP could run the code without fear, and you would both know that it performed the desired function, but neither of you could subvert it. Cheers, Ben. -- ApacheCon! 13-17 November! http://www.apachecon.com/ http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff
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RE: Your source code, for sale
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Finney, Hal (CR) [SNIP discussion on ripping cash] The problem is that if the source code you are purchasing is bogus, or if the other side doesn't come through, you're screwed because you've lost the value of the torn cash. The other side doesn't gain anything by this fraud, but they harm you, and if they are malicious that might be enough. Quick fix for seller incentive: the seller rips some amount of their own cash in such a way that they cannot recover it unless the buyer provides the remainder of the buyer's ripped cash. -Michael Heyman
Cryptography: Beginning with a Simple Communication Game
Click the link to see various formulae. Cheers, RAH --- http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=342039 InformIT Cryptography: Beginning with a Simple Communication Game Date: Nov 5, 2004 By Wenbo Mao. Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall PTR. In this introductory chapter from his book, Wenbo Mao uses a simple game to demonstrate the complexity of cryptography, and its utility for your business. We begin this book with a simple example of applying cryptography to solve a simple problem. This example of cryptographic application serves three purposes from which we will unfold the topics of this book: * To provide an initial demonstration on the effectiveness and practicality of using cryptography for solving subtle problems in applications * To suggest an initial hint on the foundation of cryptography * To begin our process of establishing a required mindset for conducting the development of cryptographic systems for information security To begin with, we shall pose a trivially simple problem and then solve it with an equally simple solution. The solution is a two-party game which is very familiar to all of us. However, we will realize that our simple game soon becomes troublesome when our game-playing parties are physically remote from each other. The physical separation of the game-playing parties eliminates the basis for the game to be played fairly. The trouble then is, the game-playing parties cannot trust the other side to play the game fairly. The need for a fair playing of the game for remote players will inspire us to strengthen our simple game by protecting it with a shield of armor. Our strengthening method follows the long established idea for protecting communications over open networks: hiding information using cryptography. After having applied cryptography and reached a quality solution to our first security problem, we shall conduct a series of discussions on the quality criteria for cryptographic systems (§1.2). The discussions will serve as a background and cultural introduction to the areas in which we research and develop technologies for protecting sensitive information. 1.1 A Communication Game Here is a simple problem. Two friends, Alice and Boba, want to spend an evening out together, but they cannot decide whether to go to the cinema or the opera. Nevertheless, they reach an agreement to let a coin decide: playing a coin tossing game which is very familiar to all of us. Alice holds a coin and says to Bob, You pick a side then I will toss the coin. Bob does so and then Alice tosses the coin in the air. Then they both look to see which side of the coin landed on top. If Bob's choice is on top, Bob may decide where they go; if the other side of the coin lands on top, Alice makes the decision. In the study of communication procedures, a multi-party-played game like this one can be given a scientific sounding name: protocol. A protocol is a well-defined procedure running among a plural number of participating entities. We should note the importance of the plurality of the game participants; if a procedure is executed entirely by one entity only then it is a procedure and cannot be called a protocol. 1.1.1 Our First Application of Cryptography Now imagine that the two friends are trying to run this protocol over the telephone. Alice offers Bob, You pick a side. Then I will toss the coin and tell you whether or not you have won. Of course Bob will not agree, because he cannot verify the outcome of the coin toss. However we can add a little bit of cryptography to this protocol and turn it into a version workable over the phone. The result will become a cryptographic protocol, our first cryptographic protocol in this book! For the time being, let us just consider our cryptography as a mathematical function f(x) which maps over the integers and has the following magic properties: Property 1.1: Magic Function f I. For every integer x, it is easy to compute f(x) from x, while given any value f(x) it is impossible to find any information about a pre-image x, e.g., whether x is an odd or even number. Protocol 1.1: Coin Flipping Over Telephone PREMISE Alice and Bob have agreed: i. a magic function f with properties specified in Property 1.1 ii. an even number x in f(x) represents HEADS and the other case represents TAILS (* Caution: due to (ii), this protocol has a weakness, see Exercise 1.2 *) 1. Alice picks a large random integer x and computes f(x); she reads f(x) to Bob over the phone; 2. Bob tells Alice his guess of x as even or odd; 3. Alice reads x to Bob; 4. Bob verifies f(x) and sees the correctness/incorrectness of his guess. II. It impossible to find a pair of integers (x, y) satisfying x y and f(x) = f(y). In Property 1.1, the adjectives easy and impossible have meanings which need further
Cryptography Research Takes Aim at Content Pirates
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041105/sff023_1.html?printer=1 Yahoo! Finance Source: Cryptography Research, Inc. Cryptography Research VP Benjamin Jun Takes Aim at Content Pirates Friday November 5, 6:02 am ET Discusses Technology Trends and Responses at Upcoming RSA Conference Europe 2004 SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Despite piracy's high public profile as a threat to intellectual property owners, surprisingly little has been done to understand the range of technical solutions that are feasible, according to security expert Benjamin Jun. With piracy plaguing deployments of pay TV, optical media, console video games and other content, Jun, vice president of engineering at Cryptography Research, Inc., believes content publishers facing these issues have a number of tools and technologies at their disposal to take aim at the pirates, and will discuss solutions and the findings of his recent research on piracy in his seminar on Friday, November 5 at the RSA Conference Europe 2004 being held in Barcelona, Spain. According to Jun, pirates will grow bolder and more effective with advances in CPU processing power, Internet bandwidth and hard drive storage. Although piracy cannot be stopped completely, Jun believes a combination of proactive and reactive security approaches can mitigate the risk and reduce losses to survivable levels. Content publishers facing piracy can apply methods for high-assurance design that anticipate attacks and employ architectures that enable a response after attacks happen. Jun's talk discusses recent piracy trends, describes industry techniques and presents current research in content security. Although numerous products and technologies have been advertised as solutions to the problem of piracy, most commercial security systems fail catastrophically once an implementation is compromised, making them inappropriate solutions for deployment as part of a major standard, said Jun. Piracy, like credit card fraud and computer virus security, is a problem that cannot be solved completely, and requires a flexible solution that combines programmable security and 'smart content' with risk management techniques such as forensic marking and attack response capabilities. Proactive security combines tamper resistance with high-assurance design to combat known security vulnerabilities. Reactive systems provide effective tools for responding to piracy after a problem develops. These results are findings of the Cryptography Research Content Security Initiative, a CRI-sponsored, multi-year research effort focusing on understanding and controlling piracy, technology trends in consumer electronics and next-generation applied techniques for high-assurance security. Content providers must face next-generation pirates by selecting technology that avoids a repeat of painful past lessons, said Carter Laren, senior security architect at Cryptography Research. We are proud that results from our Content Security Research Initiative are helping leading companies secure their most valuable content. Benjamin Jun's talk, Piracy: Technology Trends and Responses, part of the Implementers Educational Track at the RSA Conference Europe 2004, will be presented on Friday, November 5, at 11:00 a.m. at the Princesa Sofia Hotel in Barcelona, Spain. Benjamin Jun is a vice president of engineering at Cryptography Research, where he heads the consulting practice and the company's Content Security Research Initiative. He leads engineering groups in the design, evaluation and repair of high-assurance security modules for software, ASIC and embedded systems. Ben holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University, where he is a Mayfield Entrepreneurship Fellow. About Cryptography Research, Inc. Cryptography Research, Inc. provides consulting services and technology to solve complex security problems. In addition to security evaluation and applied engineering work, CRI is actively involved in long-term research in areas including tamper resistance, content protection, network security and financial services. The company has a broad portfolio of patents covering countermeasures to differential power analysis and other vulnerabilities, and is committed to helping companies produce secure smart cards and other tamper-resistant devices. Security systems designed by Cryptography Research engineers annually protect more than $60 billion of commerce for wireless, telecommunications, financial, digital television and Internet industries. For additional information or to arrange a consultation with a member of the technical staff, please contact Jen Craft at 415-397-0123, ext. 329 or visit www.cryptography.com. Source: Cryptography Research, Inc. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the
Arafat's Swiss Bank Account
http://www.meforum.org/article/645 ? - Middle East Quarterly - Fall 2004 FALL 2004 * VOLUME XI: NUMBER 4 Arafat's Swiss Bank Account by Issam Abu Issa Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are known internationally for the violence between Israelis and Palestinians. As ruinous as that violence has been, another cancer permeates Arafat's administration; its name is corruption. From firsthand experience, I understand just how deep it is. Here is what I know. From Optimism to Dismay On July 1, 1994, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman, Yasir Arafat, arrived triumphant in the Gaza Strip, watched by millions on television across the world. I was already in Ramallah, having traveled there from my family's exile in Qatar in the weeks after Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and President Bill Clinton had signed the Oslo accords in September 1993. Between 1994 and 1996, I and fellow Palestinian businessmen and intellectuals spent many days brainstorming to see what contributions we could make to a Palestinian state. My family was originally from Haifa, and I hoped to witness an Israeli withdrawal of forces and the birth of a democratic Palestinian state. It was a time of optimism among Palestinians. I gathered with friends and business partners around the television in Ramallah and watched Arafat's arrival in the Gaza Strip. In 1996, I founded the Palestine International Bank (PIB). Thousands of Palestinians in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the diaspora supported me financially or morally. My investors and I hoped to build a thriving economy in the newly autonomous PA areas. The PIB was truly Palestinian. Headquartered in Ramallah, it used mostly Palestinian capital, although it did receive support from other Arabs. All its reserves were kept inside Palestinian areas, and our shares traded actively on the Palestinian stock exchange. From nothing, we expanded our customer base to more than 15,500. Among those licensed by the newly established Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA), we were the largest bank in the Palestinian territories. I first met Arafat in April 1995 while trying to secure a banking license for the PIB. This meeting at his Gaza office, though brief, was cordial and encouraging. I thought things would go smoothly. But, as the PIB grew more popular, Arafat's inner circle and, specifically, Muhammad Rashid, a PA official, also known as Khalid Salam and often described as an economic advisor to Arafat and manager of a small percentage of PIB stocks, made it difficult for us to branch out and move forward.[1] The PA, which strictly controls Palestinian media, launched a negative media blitz against us in a bid to suppress our growth. The systematic effort to undermine PIB came after I refused to cede power to Muhammad Rashid.[2] Over the course of fifteen meetings, I became better acquainted with Arafat and grew increasingly concerned with his leadership style. Arafat and top PA officials did not respect the rule of law; many were corrupt. Arafat believed neither in separation of powers nor in checks and balances. His animosity toward accountability thwarted efforts to establish a responsible leadership. By 1996, Palestinians in the PA were saying they had traded one occupation for two, the one by Israel and the one by Arafat and his cronies. Rather than use donor funds for their intended purposes, Arafat regularly diverted money to his own accounts. It is amazing that some U.S. officials still see the Palestinian Authority as a partner even after U.S. congressional records revealed authenticated PLO papers signed by Arafat in which he instructed his staff to divert donors' money to projects benefiting himself, his family, and his associates.[3] How did Arafat's inner circle benefit? In 1994, he instructed the Palestinian Authority official in charge of finances, Muhammad Nashashibi, to fund secretly-to the tune of $50,000 per month-a Jerusalem publicity center for Raymonda Tawil, Arafat's mother-in-law, and Ibrahim Qar'in, an associate of Arafat's family.[4] He also ordered the investment in the computer companies of 'Ali and Mazzan Sha'ath, sons of Nabil Sha'ath, the PA's key negotiator in talks with Israel. Amin Haddad, Arafat's designated governor of the Palestine Monetary Authority, established several import-export companies acting as the front man for Arafat. The Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction financed these activities.[5] Thus, an organization meant to channel funds from donor countries like France and Germany became a mechanism by which to enrich Arafat. Arafat's men flagrantly displayed corruption. Arriving penniless in Gaza and the West Bank from exile in Tunisia, many PLO members amassed wealth, built villas in Gaza, Ramallah, Amman, and other places, and sent their children to the best schools in the United Kingdom and the United States. Hisham Makki, former head of the Palestine Broadcasting Services,
A Gangster With Politics
A prince is a bandit who doesn't move. --Mancur Olsen Cheers, RAH http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB109962052189665752,00.html The Wall Street Journal November 5, 2004 COMMENTARY A Gangster With Politics By BRET STEPHENS November 5, 2004; Page A12 In 1993, the British National Criminal Intelligence Service commissioned a report on the sources of funding of the Palestine Liberation Organization. For years, it had been Chairman Yasser Arafat's claim that he'd made a fortune in construction as a young engineer in Kuwait in the 1950s, and that it was this seed money, along with a 5% levy on the Palestinian workers in Arab League countries, which kept the PLO solvent. But British investigators took a different view: The PLO, they concluded, maintained sidelines in extortion, payoffs, illegal arms-dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud, bringing its estimated fortune to $14 billion. In retrospect, it would seem amazing that 1993 was also the year in which the head of this criminal enterprise would be feted on the White House lawn for agreeing peace with Israel. But then, so much about the 1990s was amazing, which is perhaps why Arafat, of all people, thrived in that time. The ra'is, as he is commonly spoken of among Palestinians, may basically have been a gangster with politics, but he was also one of the 20th century's great political illusionists. He conjured a persona, a cause, and indeed a people virtually ex nihilo, then rallied much of the world to his side. Now that he is dead, or nearly so -- news reports vary as of this writing -- it will be interesting to see what becomes of his legacy. Who was Yasser Arafat? For starters, he was not a native Palestinian, although his parents were and he variously claimed to have been born in Gaza or Jerusalem. In fact, he was born and schooled in Cairo, spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent, and took no part in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Nakba (catastrophe) which Palestinians regard as their formative national experience. Nor did Arafat take part in the Suez War, again despite later claims to the contrary. But this was the period of Third World ferment -- of the anti-colonialist Bandung politics of Indonesia's Sukarno, Algeria's Ben Bela, Cuba's Fidel and Egypt's Nasser -- and at the University of Cairo Arafat became a student activist and head of the Palestine Student Union. He also began developing the Arafat persona -- kaffiyah, uniform, half-beard and later the holstered pistol -- to compensate for his short stature and pudginess. The result, as his astute biographers Judith and Barry Rubin write, was his embodiment of a combination of roles: fighter, traditional patriarch, and typical Palestinian. Around 1960, Arafat co-founded Fatah, or conquest, the political movement that would later come to be the dominant faction of the PLO. Aside from its aim to obliterate Israel, the group had no particular political vision: Islamists, nationalists, Communists and pan-Arabists were equally welcome. Instead, the emphasis was on violence: People aren't attracted to speeches but to bullets, Arafat liked to say. In 1964, Fatah began training guerrillas in Syria and Algeria; in 1965, they launched their first attack within Israel, on a pumping station. But the bomb didn't detonate, and most of the other Fatah raids were also duds. From this experience, Arafat took the lesson to focus on softer targets, like civilians. So began the era of modern terrorism: the 1972 Munich massacre, the 1973 murder of American diplomats in Khartoum, the 1974 massacre of schoolchildren at Ma'alot, and so on. Yet as the atrocities multiplied, Arafat's political star rose. Partly this had to do with European cravenness in the face of the implied threat; partly with the Left's secret love affair with the authentic man of violence. Whatever the case, by 1980 Europe had recognized the PLO, with Arafat as its leader, as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The U.S. held out for another decade, but eventually it too caved in to international pressure under the first Bush administration. For the Palestinians themselves, however, this was not such a good development. If Arafat's violence against Jews and Israelis was shocking, his violence against fellow Palestinians was still worse. In the manner of other would-be national liberators, he did not look kindly on dissenters within his ranks. In 1987, for instance, Palestinian cartoonist Ali Naji Adhami was murdered on a London street; his crime was to have insinuated in a drawing that the ra'is was having an affair with a married woman. Once in power in Ramallah, the abuses became much worse. Critics of his government were routinely imprisoned and often tortured. In 1999, Muawiya Al-Masri, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, gave an interview to a Jordanian newspaper denouncing Arafat's corruption. He was later attacked by a gang of masked men and shot three times.
Arafat: Where's his money?
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_10.html Mrs. Arafat keeps husband on life support Where's his money? Special to World Tribune.com GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT.COMThursday, November 4, 2004 RAMALLAH - Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat has died. He was 75 years old. Israeli and Palestinian officials said Arafat died on Thursday in a military hospital in Paris. They said Arafat was deemed clinically dead, but is still attached to life support systems on the insistence of his wife, Suha. Palestinan Authority's Yasser Arafat: Abbas and Qurei sought to acquire his power to allocate money as the PA chairman departed for Paris. But as he boarded a Jordanian Air Force helicopter, Arafat refused. I'm still alive, thank God, so don't worry, Arafat was quoted as saying. Reuters/Loay Abu Haykel He is dead, but neither Arafat's wife nor the Palestinian leadership is ready to announce this, a PA official said. The announcement could take place on Friday. The problem is that Arafat is still the only Palestinian official who can pay the bills. And it is unclear who, if anyone, has access to the estimated $2-3 billion in his personal Swiss bank accounts, according to a report in the current edition of Geostrategy-Direct.com. Even his wife is said to be unaware of how to access the funds. Arafat continues to hold the purse strings to the Palestinian finances. For the last decade, he has been the final, and often only word on payment to everybody from the suicide bomber to the janitor. Not a dime was paid without Arafat's okay. Before he left for Paris, Arafat approved a three-member emergency committee to operate the PA and PLO in his absence. Officials said Ahmed Qurei was meant to run the PA's daily affairs while Mahmoud Abbas was appointed acting chairman of the PLO. Palestine National Council chairman Salim Zaanoun, the third member of the committee, was said to be a symbolic figure. Abbas and Qurei sought to acquire Arafat's power to allocate money during the absence of the PA chairman. But as he boarded a Jordanian Air Force helicopter for Amman, Arafat refused. I'm still alive, thank God, so don't worry, Arafat was quoted as saying. Israeli officials confirmed that Arafat died on Thursday, Middle East Newsline reported. They said Arafat was termed brain dead and physicians have stopped attending to him. For Palestinians, the main question is where is Arafat's money? Issam Abu Issa knows how Arafat appropriated and concealed money. Abu Issa was the founder and chairman of the Palestine International Bank from 1996 until he fled to Qatar in 2000. Rather than use donor funds for their intended purposes, Arafat regularly diverted money to his own accounts, Abu Issa said in a report for Middle East Quarterly. It is amazing that some U.S. officials still see the Palestinian Authority as a partner even after U.S. congressional records revealed authenticated PLO papers signed by Arafat in which he instructed his staff to divert donors' money to projects benefiting himself, his family and his associates. Arafat controls billions of dollars meant for the Palestinian people. In a word, he stole it, intelligence sources said, according to the Geostrategy-Direct report. His personal fortune has been estimated at between $2 and $3 billion, most of it in Swiss bank accounts. In 1997, the PA auditor's office said in its financial report that $326 million, or 43 percent of the annual budget, was missing. The United States has been supporting former PA security chief Mohammed Dahlan as Arafat's successor. To his friends in the Bush administration, Dahlan, 43, has all the qualities for Arab leadership: a smooth talker and brutal cop. Arafat asked Dahlan to accompany him to Paris in a move designed to keep him out of the Gaza Strip and any coup plot. Another challenger has been Fatah Secretary-general Marwan Barghouti, sentenced to life in prison for a series of terrorist attacks. Barghouti, 44, has followers in the West Bank but does not appear to have the iron will necessary to face Arafat loyalists. Neither Israeli nor PA officials have been told much about Arafat's condition, and the only one authorized to issue information from his hospital bedside is the chairman's wife, Suha. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Blue Democrats Lost Red America
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB109962033700165749,00.html The Wall Street Journal November 5, 2004 WONDER LAND By DANIEL HENNINGER Blue Democrats Lost Red America Back in 1965 November 5, 2004; Page A12 And you tell me over, and over, and over again my friend Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction. --Vietnam War Protest Song, 1965 How did the 2004 election map of the United States come to look like a color-field painting by Barnett Newman? In fact, if you adjust the map's colors for votes by county (as at the Web sites for CNN and USA Today), even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely red. This didn't happen last Tuesday. The color-coding of the 2004 election began around 1965 in the politics of the Vietnam era. The Democratic Party today is the product of a generational shift that began in those years. The formative years of the northern wing of the Democratic Old Guard go back to World War II. It included political figures like Tip O'Neill, Pat Moynihan and Lane Kirkland. It was men such as these whose experiences, both political and personal, informed and shaped the Democrats before the mid-'60s. Over time the party passed into the hands of a generation, now in their 50s and early 60s, whose broad view of America and its politics was formed as young men and women opposing the Vietnam War. That would include the party's current leading lights -- John Kerry, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi. And its most influential strategists, such as Bob Shrum, Mary Beth Cahill and James Carville. The old industrial unions, whose members went over to Ronald Reagan, gave way to the more dependable public-employee unions run by John Sweeney and Gerald McEntee. These Baby Boomers -- the generation of John Kerry, Al Gore and Bill and Hillary Clinton -- transformed the world view of the Democrats, on everything from foreign policy to cultural issues. This new ethos -- instinctively oppositional, aggressively secular -- sank its roots deep on the East and West coasts, but it never really spread into the rest of the country, then or now. Early on, the military became a focus. Democrats belonging to the World War II generation believed that one served. There was a nonpartisan pact of reverence for the services. After Vietnam, Democratic partisans worked hard, and successfully, to eradicate ROTC from elite, coastal campuses and to adopt an ethos that no longer revered the services, but held them suspect of doing harm. Bill Clinton's relations with the military were strained. John Kerry tried to use his service biography to erase the Vietnam-era legacy of Democratic opposition to things military. It didn't work. Expressed emotion matters greatly for this generation. The most notable phenomenon of the 2004 election was widespread liberal hatred of George Bush. Many wondered what sleeping volcano brought this lava to the surface. It came from the style of protest politics born in the 1960s. A famous liberal political phrase then was the personal is political. Letting oneself become emotionally unhinged during a protest, as at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley, became a litmus of authenticity. It became the norm, and it still is. But again, only for people who scream themselves blue. Another phrase heard often in the campaign just ended was, I'm frightened. Admiration for childlike fears in politics received approval in 1970 from Charles Reich's bestseller The Greening of America, a paean to youth and a new and liberated individual. Reich's book, by the way, also popularized the notion then that something called the Corporate State was blotting out the Aquarian sunshine. This is the mindset that just produced the Democrats' weird obsession with Halliburton, as if anyone would care beyond the people who were long ago baptized into the blue faith. But the politics of the Vietnam generation wasn't just about Vietnam. It was about changing everything, most notably the culture. This generation really opened up the culture. The old pre-Vietnam strictures on behavior and comportment -- Tip O'Neill's old Boston Catholic world of Mass on Sunday and at least a working if not functioning knowledge of the Baltimore catechism -- got hammered down till the moral landscape became flat and fast. Now you can drive anything at all into theaters, music or movies. This post-Vietnam culture of non-restraint, now almost 40 years old, produced Whoopi Goldberg's double-entendre jokes about George Bush's name at Radio City Music Hall, the Massachusetts Supreme Court's sudden decision on gay marriage, and hard-to-defend support for partial-birth abortion. George Bush, age 58, was a reproach. He personifies everything they have fought since they drove LBJ and Richard Nixon out of politics. And this week they are trying to discover why most of the people who live
Re: Cryptography Research Takes Aim at Content Pirates
R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041105/sff023_1.html?printer=1 Yahoo! Finance Source: Cryptography Research, Inc. Cryptography Research VP Benjamin Jun Takes Aim at Content Pirates Friday November 5, 6:02 am ET Discusses Technology Trends and Responses at Upcoming RSA Conference Europe 2004 snip Yes, we can protect you from those vil commie pirates. Our product is a flexible solution that combines programmable security and 'smart content' with risk management techniques such as forensic marking and attack response capabilities. And yes, the icon comes in cornflower blue. Meanwhile, Bittorrent now takes up 35% of global bandwidth (http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html) and 4Mb DSL lines are now available in the UK mass market (http://www.bulldogbroadband.com/general/landing.asp) for £40 ($73) per month with TCs that scream 'P2P-OK'. Good luck with those 'attack response capabilities'. W
Re: Blue Democrats Lost Red America
A shallow, stale spin, unduly sanctimonious, and highly presumptive of the legitimacy of election reports. Same vapid shit to fill news void would have been written if Kerry squeaked by.
Re: Your source code, for sale
Ben Laurie made a lot of useful points. However,... Simultaneous release is (provably?) impossible without a trusted third party. I don't think I believe this. Or at least, I don't think it's true to the extent necessary to make the original application impossible. Consider: I send you money for naked photos of Geri Ryan (that Borg chick with the ASS-KICKING hips). The money is encapsulated...you can its there, but you can't get at it. You send me encapsulated photos, perhaps with thumbnails on the outside. I see the thumbnails and click to send the pre-release. You see the pre-release arrive and click the release for the photos. My photo-bundle receives the releases and opens, and then shoots off a message that activates the pre-release on your end, giving you the cash. Is a 3rd party necessary here? I don't see it, but then again I could be wrong. -TD _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
Block Spyware Pop-Ups
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The oldest fraud
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/printts20041105.shtml Townhall.com The oldest fraud Thomas Sowell (back to web version) | Send November 5, 2004 Election frauds are nothing new and neither are political frauds in general. The oldest fraud is the belief that the political left is the party of the poor and the downtrodden. The election results in California are only the latest evidence to give the lie to that belief. While the state as a whole went for Kerry, 55 percent versus 44 percent for Bush, the various counties ranged from 71 percent Bush to 83 percent Kerry. The most affluent counties were where Kerry had his strongest support. In Marin County, where the average home price is $750,000, 73 percent of the votes went for Kerry. In Alameda County, where Berkeley is located, it was 74 percent Kerry. San Francisco, with the highest rents of any major city in the country, gave 83 percent of its votes to Kerry. Out where ordinary people live, it was a different story. Thirty-six counties went for Bush versus 22 counties for Kerry, and usually by more balanced vote totals, though Bush went over 70 percent in less fashionable places like Lassen County and Modoc County. If you have never heard of them, there's a reason. It was much the same story on the votes for Proposition 66, which would have limited the three strikes law that puts career criminals away for life. Affluent voters living insulated lives in places well removed from high-crime neighborhoods have the luxury of worrying about whether we are not being nice enough to hoodlums, criminals and terrorists. They don't like the three strikes law and want it weakened. While most California voters opposed any weakening of that law, a majority of the voters in the affluent and heavily pro-Kerry counties mentioned wanted us to stop being so mean to criminals. This pattern is not confined to California and it is not new. There were limousine liberals before there were limousines. The same pattern applies when you go even further left on the political spectrum, to socialists and communists. The British Labor Party's leader in the heyday of its socialist zealotry was Clement Attlee, who grew up in a large home with servants -- and this was not the only home his family owned. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher's family ran a grocery store and lived upstairs over it. While the British Labor Party was affiliated with labor unions, it was the affluent and the intellectuals in the party who had the most left-wing ideologies and the most unrealistic policies. In the years leading up to World War II, the Labor Party was for disarmament while Hitler was arming Germany to the teeth across the Channel. Eventually, it was the labor union component of the party that insisted on some sanity, so that Britain could begin preparing to defend itself militarily -- not a moment too soon. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, they were a couple of spoiled young men from rich families. All their talk about the working class was just talk, but it appealed to other such young men who liked heady talk. As Engels himself put it, when the Communist group for whom the Manifesto was written was choosing delegates, a working man was proposed for appearances sake, but those who proposed him voted for me. This may have been the first rigged election of the Communist movement but it was certainly not the last. All sorts of modern extremist movements, such as the Weathermen in the United States or the Bader-Meinhof gang in Germany, have attracted a disproportionate number of the affluent in general and the intellectuals in particular. Such people may speak in the name of the downtrodden but they themselves are often people who have time on their hands to nurse their pet notions about the world and their fancies about themselves as leaders of the poor, saviors of the environment or whatever happens to be the Big Deal du jour. Osama bin Laden is not someone embittered by poverty. He is from a very rich family and has had both the time to nurse his resentments of the West and the money to organize terrorists to lash out in the only way that can give them any significance. The belief that liberal, left-wing or extremist movements are for the poor may or may not be the biggest fraud but it is certainly the oldest. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. -- Thomas Sowell
Corporate governance goals impossible - RSA
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/04/rsa_redux/print.html The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register » Business » Management » Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/04/rsa_redux/ Corporate governance goals impossible - RSA By John Leyden (john.leyden at theregister.co.uk) Published Thursday 4th November 2004 16:43 GMT Companies are struggling to cope with tighter corporate governance regimes, which might even work against the goal of achieving improved IT security they are partly designed to promote. The need to comply with requirements such as data protection, Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and other corporate governance reforms is tying up IT managers in red tape, according to a banking security expert. Recent legislation is having a negative impact on risk management, said Michael Colao, director of Information Management at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. In some cases, the law has made IT managers legally responsible for adherence to corporate governance rules. Colao says that this may not necessarily be a good thing. CIOs are now relying on convoluted processes rather than using sound business judgement based on years of experience. A process is easier to defend in court than personal judgement. This means that in many cases unnecessarily cautious decisions are being taken because the CIO is focusing on their own personal liability, rather than what is best for the business, he said.? Different implementations of the European Data Protection Directive in different countries are creating a headache for multinational firms, according to Colao. This legislation was brought in as part of the EU common market and was supposed to provide clarity and harmony across Europe. Because each country implements legislation in very different ways, the result is a very fragmented and disjointed approach which causes all sorts of problems, particularly for global organisations, he said. Colao made his comments at the Axis Action Forum, a meeting of IT directors sponsored by RSA Security, in Barcelona this week. RSA Security said differences in European legislation highlighted by Colao were a real problem for its clients. Tim Pickard, strategic marketing director at RSA Security EMEA, said: The nature of implementation of EU directives in member states means that it is almost impossible for today's global CIO to be fully compliant and is therefore likely to be breaking the law in at least one member state. Business managers becoming fed up with FUD In a separate study, more than a third of the 30 delegates to the Axis Action Forum admitted that their Board had never asked for an update on security or implications of security breaches. The finding suggests widespread boardroom indifference to security issues despite the high profile security has been given in the media and by numerous industry initiatives. Firms only take security seriously in the aftermath of attacks, according to one delegate. Part of the reason could be that business managers are becoming inured to alarmist security pitches. Simon Linsley, head of consultancy and development, Philips said: For years we have had to go to the Board with messages that create the Fear of God. We can no longer rely on these doom and gloom messages - we have to go to the Board with solutions that add value to the business. The Axis Action Forum attended by more than 30 CIOs, IT directors and heads of security from a range of medium to large businesses. ® Related stories UK corporate governance bill to cost millions (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/08/companies_bill_it_costs/) Hackers cost UK.biz billions (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/28/dti_security_survey/) IT voices drowned in corporate governance rush (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/22/it_in_corporate_governance/) Big.biz struggles against security threats (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/27/netsec_security_survey/) © Copyright 2004 -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Re: Your source code, for sale
On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 10:01:41 -0500, Tyler Durden [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... My photo-bundle receives the releases and opens, and then shoots off a message that activates the pre-release on your end, giving you the cash. Is a 3rd party necessary here? I don't see it, but then again I could be wrong. What if I block the outbound release the money message after I unbundle the images. Sure, I've already committed my money, but you can't get to it. In effect I've just ripped you off, because I have usable product and you don't have usable money. The proof of delivery comes in handy here, so that as soon as I can prove to the bank that my product has arrived within your administrative area, they'll pay me. And the bank sends me a key to unlock the product as soon as it sends you the money. And what *GUARANTEE* do I have that the blob of bits you sent me with the Geri Ryan photos on the outside isn't something from goatse.cx or tubgirl...? Let's say there are 24000 items in the tarball of the IOS code. Do you want to pay $24K for all of them (once) or $12K for half of them (twice) or $1 per file or directory (24000 times)? Do you want to pay per committed bit or character? How can you protect yourself from me committing to sell you /dev/random? I'm sure everyone has this bit committed to memory, but the beginning of Applied Crypto, chapter 2 says: = Protocols have other characteristics as well: -- Everyone involved in the protocol must know the protocol and all of the steps to follow in advance. -- Everyone involved in the protocol must agree to follow it. -- The protocol must be unambiguous; each step must be well defined and there must be no chance of a misunderstanding. -- The protocol must be complete; there must be a specified action for every possible situation. ... The whole point of using cryptography in a protocol is to prevent or detect eavesdropping and cheating. = That last property is critical: what does the protocol do when someone isn't playing by the rules? Of course, there's nothing that crypto can do to prevent you from selling me garbage, only the fact that you intentionally did so can be proven. Comment about bribing the dockside worker at the shipping line deleted. -- GDB has a 'break' feature; why doesn't it have 'fix' too?
Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
Here ya go, John and Bill, Knock yourselves out... :-) Cheers, RAH --- http://slate.msn.com/toolbar.aspx?action=printid=2109218 Slate politics Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue The unteachable ignorance of the red states. By Jane Smiley Updated Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004, at 3:24 PM PT The day after the election, Slate's political writers tackled the question of why the Democratic Party-which has now lost five of the past seven presidential elections and solidified its minority status in Congress-keeps losing elections. Chris Suellentrop says that John Kerry was too nuanced and technocratic, while George W. Bush offered a vision of expanding freedom around the world. William Saletan argues that Democratic candidates won't win until they again cast their policies the way Bill Clinton did, in terms of values and moral responsibility. Timothy Noah contends that none of the familiar advice to the party-move right, move left, or sit tight-seems likely to help. Slate asked a number of wise liberals to take up the question of why Americans won't vote for the Democrats. Click here to read previous entries. I say forget introspection. It's time to be honest about our antagonists. My predecessors in this conversation are thoughtful men, and I honor their ideas, but let's try something else. I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million-my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.) Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. There used to be a kind of hand-to-hand fight on the frontier called a knock-down-drag-out, where any kind of gouging, biting, or maiming was considered fair. The ancestors of today's red-state voters used to stand around cheering and betting on these fights. When the forces of red and blue encountered one another head-on for the first time in Kansas Territory in 1856, the red forces from Missouri, who had been coveting Indian land across the Missouri River since 1820, entered Kansas and stole the territorial election. The red news media of the day made a practice of inflammatory lying-declaring that the blue folks had shot and killed red folks whom everyone knew were walking around. The worst civilian massacre in American history took place in Lawrence, Kan., in 1862-Quantrill's raid. The red forces, known then as the slave-power, pulled 265 unarmed men from their beds on a Sunday morning and slaughtered them in front of their wives and children. The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are-they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind. Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you-if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it. Next, they tell you that you are the best of a bad lot (humans, that is) and that as bad as you are, if you stick with them, you are among the chosen. This is flattering and reassuring, and also encourages you to imagine the terrible fates of those you envy and resent. American politicians ALWAYS operate by a similar sort of flattery, and so Americans are never induced to question themselves. That's what happened to Jimmy Carter-he asked Americans to take responsibility for their profligate ways, and promptly lost to Ronald Reagan, who told them once again that they could do anything they wanted. The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do-they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable. Third, and most important, when life grows difficult or fearsome, they (politicians, preachers, pundits) encourage you to cling to your ignorance with even more fervor. But by this time you don't need much encouragement-you've put all your eggs into the ignorance basket, and really, some kind of miraculous fruition (preferably accompanied by the torment of
When A Pencil And Paper Makes Sense
http://www.forbes.com/2004/11/05/cx_ah_1105tentech_print.html Forbes Ten O'Clock Tech When A Pencil And Paper Makes Sense Arik Hesseldahl, 11.05.04, 10:00 AM ET Thank goodness, it's over. Sometime around 4:30 A.M. Wednesday I went to bed, not the least bit uncertain that George W. Bush had been re-elected. But the one thing during this election cycle about which I have been uncertain is electronic voting. Florida in 2000 was a mess, and in reaction, some states and counties have turned to newfangled electronic voting machines, thinking that computer technology is the answer to a voting system that has started to creak under pressure. It seems that despite much worry about a repeat of Florida in other states, voting has gone pretty smoothly. Electronic voting methods are getting high marks. Of the 27,500 voting problems reported to the Verified Voting Project, a San Francisco-based group that monitored the election for voting problems, less than 6% of the issues reported stemmed from electronic voting machines. Election officials in states like Nevada, Georgia and Hawaii gave electronic voting systems a try. There were some problems: a memory card on an electronic voting machine in Florida failed; five machines in Reno, Nev., malfunctioned, causing lines to back up. Overall voter turnout was high. The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a nonprofit, nonpartisan outfit based in Washington, D.C., estimated that 120.2 million people, or 59.6% of those eligible to vote, cast ballots in this election, which would be an improvement of 5% and 15 million people, compared with the 2000 elections, and would make 2004's turnout the highest since 1968. Still, that's not as high as voter participation in my home state of Oregon, where 1.7 million people, or nearly 82% of those eligible, voted. In Oregon, voters cast their votes from home rather than going to a polling place. They submit their ballots by mail. The state abolished polling places in 1998 and has been voting entirely by mail ever since. Voters get their ballots roughly two weeks before election day. This year some were delayed because of an unexpectedly high number of voter registrations. Ballots must be received by county elections offices by 8 P.M. on the day of the election. Drop boxes are located throughout the state, as well. Voting should indeed take time and effort. It's undoubtedly important. But I like Oregon's common-sense approach. Voting from the comfort of your own home eliminates the inherent disincentive that comes from having to stand on a long line, for example. It's pretty simple. Oregon voters fill out their ballots using a pencil, just like those standardized tests everyone took in high school. If they want to write in a candidate, the ballot allows for that, too. I thought of this as I stood for about 45 minutes in a long, cold line at 6:30 A.M. to vote in my neighborhood in New York's Upper East Side. Throughout the day I heard reports from around the country of people who had to stand in line for as long as eight hours so they could vote, and I wondered how many others just threw up their hands in frustration because they had someplace else to be. The mail-in ballot also gives the voter a little time to consider his or her choice. Too often, voters will enter a voting booth knowing a few of the people they intend to vote for, but read about some ballot initiative or amendment for the first time. Rather than having to make a snap decision in the voting booth, having a ballot handy at home can give voters time to educate themselves and make a more informed decision. Sometimes, the best solution isn't a computer at all, but a good old-fashioned pencil and paper. Click here for more Ten O'Clock Tech Columns -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Re: Your source code, for sale
On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 03:01:15PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote: Another idea along these lines is gradual payment for gradual release of the goods. You pay 10% of the amount and they give you 10% of the source code. You pay another 10% and you get the next 10% of the source, and so on. (Or it could be nonlinear; maybe they give out half the code for free, but the final 10% requires a large payment.) The idea is that you can sample and make sure they do appear to have the real thing with a fairly small investment. If there is some mechanism for the seller to have a reputation (like Advogato's perhaps, with some spoofing immunity) then the problem is easier; the seller won't want to screw buyers because it hurts his rep. In that case it may be reasonable to ask the buyer to pay in advance, perhaps using the partial payment system just discussed. The mojonation file sharing system had an implementation like this originally... -- Taral [EMAIL PROTECTED] This message is digitally signed. Please PGP encrypt mail to me. A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail? pgpmCFDIvY6Z4.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
Well, this is just commie propaganda. Bob, you know this is against list rules, everybody knows what's right, stop blue-baiting, you fucking nazi.
Re: Your source code, for sale
Enzo Michelangeli writes: In the world of international trade, where mutual distrust between buyer and seller is often the rule and there is no central authority to enforce the law, this is traditionally achieved by interposing not less than three trusted third parties: the shipping line, the opening bank and the negotiating bank. Interesting. In the e-gold case, both parties have the same bank, e-gold ltd. The corresponding protocol would be for the buyer to instruct e-gold to set aside some money which would go to the seller once the seller supplied a certain receipt. That receipt would be an email return receipt showing that the seller had sent the buyer the content with hash so-and-so, using a cryptographic email return-receipt protocol. You could imagine a trusted third party who would inspect the code and certify it, saying the source code with hash XXX appears to be legitimate Cisco source code. Then they could send you the code bit by bit and incrementally show that it matches the specified hash, using a crypto protocol for gradual release of secrets. You could simultaneously do a gradual release of some payment information in the other direction. But it's hard to assess the value of partially-released code. If the gradual transfer bits-against-cents is aborted, what is left to the buyer is likely to be unusable, whereas the partial payment still represents good value. Actually you can arrange it so that neither the partially-released code nor the partially-transferred ecash is of any value until the whole transfer finishes. For example, send the whole thing first in encrypted form, then release the encryption keys bit-by-bit. If someone aborts the protocol early, the best each side can do is a brute force search over the untransferred bits to try to find the key to unlock the data they received. A more general issue is that source code is not a commodity, and intellectual property is not real property: so the traditional cash on delivery paradigm just doesn't work, and looking for protocols implementing it kind of moot. If the code is treated as trade secret, rather than licensed, an anonymous buyer may make copies and resell them on the black market more than recovering his initial cost, at the same time undercutting your legitimate sales (see e.g. the cases of RC4 and RC2). This can cause losses order of magnitude larger than refusing to pay for his copy. That's a good point. Maybe you could use some kind of DRM or trusted computing concept to try to force the buyer to lock up his received data. For source code that would be pretty difficult though, it needs to be handled in flexible ways. Hal
RE: Your source code, for sale
Michael_Heyman writes: Finney, Hal (CR): The problem is that if the source code you are purchasing is bogus, or if the other side doesn't come through, you're screwed because you've lost the value of the torn cash. The other side doesn't gain anything by this fraud, but they harm you, and if they are malicious that might be enough. Quick fix for seller incentive: the seller rips some amount of their own cash in such a way that they cannot recover it unless the buyer provides the remainder of the buyer's ripped cash. Yes, I'm looking at ideas like this for ecash gambling, but you have a who-goes-first problem. One side or the other has to rip their own cash first, and then the other side can just go away and leave the first side screwed. The act of ripping cash is relatively atomic and involves a transaction with the ecash mint, so they can't both do it at the same time. I guess the best fix is for each side to rip a little bit of cash at a time, so that the guy who goes first only loses a trivial amount if the other side aborts. Then after a few rounds both sides are sunk pretty deep and both have a strong incentive to complete the transaction. Hal
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
At 1:05 PM -0800 11/5/04, John Young wrote: Bob, you know this is against list rules, everybody knows what's right, stop blue-baiting, you fucking nazi. :-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
I dunno...a lot of it made sense to me. You don't have to be a Commie in order to believe that someone ELSE believes there's a class war, and that they gotta keep us black folks po', or else we'll soon be having sex with their wives and daughters and competing with their sons for decent jobs. And as long as that somebody else believes there's a class war, they're probably going to vote like there's one, and try to dupe as many others as they can into voting like there's one, and that they're in the in-crowd. And then of course they'll open a military base everynow and then to demonstrate their largesse. -TD From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: John Young [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:15:48 -0500 At 1:05 PM -0800 11/5/04, John Young wrote: Bob, you know this is against list rules, everybody knows what's right, stop blue-baiting, you fucking nazi. :-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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' _ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
RE: Your source code, for sale
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 10:18 AM -0800 11/5/04, Hal Finney wrote: Yes, I'm looking at ideas like this for ecash gambling, but you have a who-goes-first problem. Whenever we talk about financial applications, where the assets represented by one bearer certificate are exchanged for those represented by another, what's really happening is a redeem-reissue process anyway. Since it's the underwriters' reputations you're trusting anyway, we've always assumed that there would be communication between the underwriters in order to execute, clear, and settle the trade all at once. For streaming stuff, we figured that since we were streaming cash for streaming bits, like movies, or content of some kind, you'd just do tit for tat, one stream (cash, probably signed probabalistically tested coins in the last iteration that we called Nicko-mint :-)) against another, the movie, song, etc being streamed. There's the missing last 5 minutes problem, but I think that, in recursive auction-settled cash market for digital goods like this (Eric Hughes' institutional 'pirate' scheme, the 'silk road' stuff, whatever), that there will always be another source to buy what's left from, once the intellectual property issues solve themselves because of the auction process. For things that aren't useful except in their entirety, like code, or executables, (or storing money :-)), I've always been a fan of the Mojo/BitTorrent stuff, where you hash the file into bits, ala m-of-n Shamir secret splitting, and store/buy them from lots of places at once. Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQYvH6cPxH8jf3ohaEQIGGACgiS/Uv3KxDK4rM9lozOoxfI5Fg1QAoP7d 4Xw6/SwfaBOqgyh9uQTS/5oa =XMiK -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Re: Your source code, for sale
What if I block the outbound release the money message after I unbundle the images. Sure, I've already committed my money, but you can't get to it. In effect I've just ripped you off, because I have usable product and you don't have usable money. Well, yes, but this would be a very significant step forward from the current situation. As t--infinity the vast majority of non-payments are going to be for the purpose of greed. If the payment is already 'gone', then you need a whole different set of motives for wanting to screw somebody even if you get nothing out of it. So in other words, you have at least solved the payment problem to the first order, with no 3rd party. With fancier mechanisms I would think you can solve it to 2nd order too. -TD _ Check out Election 2004 for up-to-date election news, plus voter tools and more! http://special.msn.com/msn/election2004.armx
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
Tyler, Commie is the term used here like is nazi used elsewhere as the most fearsome if thoughtless epithet. Nazi here is a term of endearment, and also admirable role model by some. Calling someone both is not allowed, check the FAQ under impurity. Tim May, praise Allah, always claimed cypherpunks was a fair and balanced forum thanks to the one person of the left here who was fingered affectionately like a house rodent, an easy target for errant shooters. CJ is not to be recalled, ever. Jim Bell still sends very important legal papers, the latest yesterday, which describe the way things should be understood. But who can believe an MIT chemist political prisoner. CJ and Jim jailed by the Democratic freedom-fighters.
Election with Hunter
Last blue-baiting post, I swear. Gotta love HST, especially after the ether kicks in... Cheers, RAH --- http://www.aspendailynews.com/Search_Articles/view_search_article.cfm?OrderNumber=9156 Aspen Daily News Friday, November 5, 2004 11/4/04 Election with Hunter By Troy Hooper/Aspen Daily News Staff Writer WOODY CREEK - It was Bailey's Irish Cream and Royal Salute Scotch Whiskey at the Thompson household on Election Night. A bottle of Cristal intended for a John Kerry victory remained uncorked, chilling on ice in a backroom. A hungry smell of anticipation hung in the kitchen at Owl Farm, which morphed into a makeshift Democratic headquarters as Hunter S. Thompson hunkered down with a small group of friends and manned what seemed like a global switchboard as calls came pouring in from some of the biggest names in modern American lore. Even a few pollsters dialed up The Good Doctor in search of the most up-to-minute score. Whether they were calling to ascertain Thompson's classified political knowledge or gauge his gambler's instinct was unclear. But without question, his phone was chiming more often than the Liberty Bell. I don't mean to pop the bad news on you Bubba but John Kerry is getting beat just like George McGovern did in 1972 - or worse, Thompson proclaimed to his nephew well before the news networks gave any hint that Bush Nation was marching toward a second term. The tide turned so quickly it was difficult to breathe. Actor Sean Penn, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, Kerry press secretary David Wade and others checked in with Thompson who sat on a chair inhaling cigarettes and stiff drinks in between bites of breakfast, which wasn't served to the late-awakening writer until after the sun went down. Asked for a candid assessment of the election, Thompson put it plainly to Penn. I've got the worst possible news. Colorado has gone to hell like all the other states, Thompson said into the speakerphone. They must have all voted the same way they prayed. The way Thompson's neighbors voted was far removed from the national outcome. Bush mustered just 2,750 of Pitkin County's electorate while Kerry received 6,275. Nationally, Bush garnered the highest total number of votes ever, winning 51 percent of the record voter turnout, which preliminary estimates have put at roughly 117 million. He is the first president to win a majority of the vote since 1988 when his father beat another Democrat from Massachusetts: Michael Dukakis. The news is getting logarithmically more horrible, Thompson told another caller as the night wore on. They're all committing suicide up in Boston. Thompson has always had a keen eye for politics. His best-known work on the subject is Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 - an up-close study of South Dakota Senator George McGovern's effort to unseat President Richard Nixon. Over the weekend, McGovern and Thompson discussed the election: The two old friends suggested Bush might be more dangerous than Nixon. Kerry would make a fine president, they both agreed, as they noted the similarities between the two eras. This year's Democratic presidential candidate must have seen some similarities between now and then, too. When Kerry visited Aspen last June for a fund-raiser, he brought three hardcover copies of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 to have them autographed. Thompson obliged and struck a friendship with Kerry, serving as his unofficial Aspen tour guide, meeting the candidate on a rain-soaked tarmac at Sardy Field and riding in a Secret Service procession up Red Mountain, showing Kerry the sights and conferring with him on national affairs. Now, five months later, Kerry has met the same fate as McGovern. I feel like somebody's died, Thompson lamented as the sun was preparing to rise early Wednesday morning. I'm just not sure who it was. He deemed the election another failure of the youth vote. Yeah, we rocked the vote all right. Those little bastards betrayed us again. But despite his disappointment, Thompson remained remarkably upbeat. Their army is how much bigger than mine? Three percent? Well shucks, Bubba. Now is the time to establish a network and an attitude, he said. You make friends in moments of defeat. People in defeat tend to bond because they need each other. We can't take the attitude that it's over and we give up. We're still here. Thompson added: I'm proud to have known John Kerry. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041105/D865R1DO0.html Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes Email this Story Nov 5, 11:56 AM (ET) COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch. State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome. Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error. The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections. In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor. In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred. (AP) Voters waited up to three hours to cast ballots after one of two voting machines failed to work at... Full Image Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said. The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine. Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new ranked-choice voting, in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round. When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said. All the information is there, Arntz said. It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to. A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Windows Critical virus update - november 19h
Sat, 06 Nov 2004 01:10:17 +0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: 422994w714r2319a41t3330z4u1844_1 a href=3Dhttp://wotan.killadwareco.com;Time Magazine Digital:/a br= Spyware is the leading cause for PC failure and hard drive corruption. br= These malicious code and scripts compromise your privacy and lead to ident= ity theft . br Pleasea href=3Dhttp://adrift.killadwareco.com; scan/a your computer n= ow br br br br br alva scythebarbaric noisemake bonaventurebedimmed coarse resistorbridgetown donaldson albertacameo discriminate machomattock clark dogleghookup soundproof awareivan baffle cardaphorism daniel monitorrodgers idiosyncrasy thunderdryad twiddle scribblesurface britches centralclue
Singin' this'll be the day that it died
A long, long time ago I can still remember How the dollar used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance I'd sell the currency of France And, maybe, I'd be happy for awhile. But all our spending made me shiver With every T-bill we'd deliver. Bad news on the doorstep; I couldn't take one more step. I can't remember if I cried When I heard our politicians lied But something touched me deep inside The day the dollar died. So bye-bye, dollar assets good-bye Sold my Chevy at the levee 'cause my pension ran dry. Them good old boys were drinkin' sake to try Singin' this'll be the day that it died This'll be the day that it died. Did you write Whitehouse.gov Or have you a Yen to fall in love If Japan will tell you so? Now, do you believe in oil 'n coal Can China fill our import hole And can we teach them how to grow real slow? Well I know the country's fit and trim 'Cause the jobs are in the Pacific Rim. We all knew savers lose Man, I dug not having to choose. We were living off the almighty buck We got their goods and they were stuck But I knew we were out of luck The day the dollar died. I started singin' Bye-bye, dollar assets good-bye Sold my Chevy at the levee 'cause my pension ran dry. Them good old boys were drinkin' sake to try Singin' this'll be the day that it died This'll be the day that it died. Now for ten years we were sure we owned All the stocks and bonds and mortgage loans But that's not how it's gonna be. When we've spent it all like kings and queens In clothes we bought from The Philippines The Asians pick the reserve currency. Oh, and while the king was looking down, Their central bankers came to town. Our stocks and bonds were spurned Those dollars were returned. And while unions filled their books with Marx The President said drill in parks Our thermostats froze in the dark The day the dollar died. We were singin' Bye-bye, dollar assets good-bye Sold my Chevy at the levee 'cause my pension ran dry. Them good old boys were drinkin' sake to try Singin' this'll be the day that it died This'll be the day that it died. . Helter skelter in a summer swelter The equity's gone from your leveraged shelter Fannie and Freddie are falling fast. Crash, they landed, but in a new class Full faith and credit have long since passed With Congress, in denial, out of gas. Now the Wal-Mart there has cheap perfume With imports filling every room. We all got up to dance Oh, but we never got the chance. The consumers tried to take the field The central banks refused to yield Do you recall what was revealed The day the dollar died? We started singin' Bye-bye, dollar assets good-bye Sold my Chevy at the levee 'cause my pension ran dry. Them good old boys were drinkin' sake to try Singin' this'll be the day that it died This'll be the day that it died. Oh, and there we were all in one place Our credit rating in disgrace With no time left to start again. So come on: Al be nimble, Al be quick! Al, cut rates by 50 ticks 'cause credit is the debtor's only friend. Oh, and as I watched him on the stage My hands were clenched in fists of rage No congressman in hell Could buy what he would sell. And as the rates climbed high into the night To stem the U.S. asset flight The IMF said, Yes, that's right The day the dollar died They were singin' Bye-bye, dollar assets good-bye Sold my Chevy at the levee 'cause my pension ran dry. Them good old boys were drinkin' sake to try Singin' this'll be the day that it died This'll be the day that it died. I met a girl who sang the blues And I asked her if we still could choose But she just smiled and turned away. I went down to the Medicare store Where we'd spent our dollars years before But the man there said those dollars wouldn't pay. And in the streets the children screamed The seniors cried and the workers steamed But not a word was spoken The commitments all were broken. And the three men I admire most: Faber, Rogers, and Bill Gross Were at the forex trading post The day the dollar died. And they were singin' Bye-bye, dollar assets good-bye Sold my Chevy at the levee 'cause my pension ran dry. Them good old boys were drinkin' sake to try Singin' this'll be the day that it died This'll be the day that it died. They were singin' Bye-bye, dollar assets good-bye Sold my Chevy at the levee 'cause my pension ran dry. Them good old boys were drinkin' sake to try Singin' this'll be the day that it died. -- Harry Chernoff is an independent economist in Great Falls, VA (with apologies to Don McLean)
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Eliminate the Garbage! Stop the Porn.
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Eliminate the Garbage! Stop the Porn.
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Re: In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down
R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: These were not the sort of sporting arrows skillfully shot toward gayly colored targets by Victorian archery societies (charmingly described by Mr. Soar in later chapters) but heavy bodkin pointed battle shafts that went through the armor of man and horse. That's the traditional Agincourt interpretation. More modern ones (backed up by actual tests with arrows of the time against armour, in which the relatively soft metal of the arrows was rather ineffective against the armour) tend to favour the muddy ground trapping men and horses, lack of room to manoeuver/compression effects, and arrows killing horses out from under the knights, at which point see the muddy ground section. Obviously the machine- gun effect of the arrows was going to cause a number of minor injuries, and would be lethal to unarmoured troops, but they weren't quite the wonder-weapon they're made out to be. (There were other problems as well, e.g. the unusually high death toll and removal of ancient aristocratic lineages was caused by English commoners who weren't aware of the tradition of capturing opposing nobles and having them ransomed back, rather than hacking them to pieces on the spot. Again, arrows didn't have much to do with the loss of so many nobles). Peter.
Re: This Memorable Day
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Tiarn=E1n_=D3_Corr=E1in?=) writes: The Russians (for example) conquered Hitler's capital, Berlin. And I believe the Russian zone in Germany was larger than any of the others, reflecting the fact that Stalin bore most of entire burden of defeating Germany, uncomfortable as it may be. The figure that's usually quoted is that 80% of German's military force was directed against Russia. Of the remaining 20%, a lot had already been engaged by France, the UK (via the BEF, the RAF, North Africa), Greece, etc etc before the US got involved in Europe. So the Russians should get most of the credit. Peter.
Re: Love It or Leave It
At 6:34 PM -0800 11/4/04, Bill Stewart wrote: I have to agree with the critics of Kerry who said that he was aloof and out of touch with Middle America .. and it's a big middle this year: http://www.newsmax.com/images/headlines/BushCountry04Map.jpg Of course, there's the nuanced version, but, hey, it's a winner-take-all country, ain't it?: http://www.princeton.edu/%7Ervdb/JAVA/election2004/ Proportional representation is for Europeans, of course... In the meantime moby should learn to spell... Channeling Andy Jackson this evening, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Re: Finding Galt's Gulch (fwd)
On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 08:05:34PM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote: Where does one go today, if they are unwilling to participate in the Failed Experiment? (BTW: No, Lichtenstein does not accept immigrants, and yes, I have reverified this recently). Go East. Fortunes are made there. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp4gTtKuy0Hg.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: This Memorable Day
-- Nomen Nescio wrote: To label any argument that points out the obvious circumstance that injustice feeds hatred as communist propaganda, is really only ridiculous, even if it's also dangerously incompetent and as such no real laughing matter. Why do you mention Bin Laden anyway? There are thousands of bigger and smaller groups around the world (they exists in every country more or less) that we'd label as terrorists in the western part of the world. And all of them are instruments of the affluent and well connected. For example Shining Path was not poor peasants, but academics and students. For the most part using terror are not those suffering injustice, and all of them are those inflicting injustice. This is particularly the case with Islamic terror. For the most part it is not those suffering Dhimmi status that engage in terrorism, but those who in their native countries are successful in inflicting Dhimmi status on those of the incorrect religion, and who apply terror in the hope of expanding this success. Al Quaeda attacked westerners because of their considerable success in murdering and raping Afghans. Jemaah Islamiyah because of their considerable success in murdering and raping Timorese and Ambionese. Today's Islamic terrorism, like yesterday's communist terrorism, is the actions of evil men whose considerably privilege and comfort arises from the injustice and oppression that they have successfully inflicted, and that they intend to inflict a great deal more of. Back before the fall of communism, wherever the master's boot smashed into the face of a child, you lot would loudly praise the master, and demonize the child as a CIA agent. Now, after the fall of communism, you are still at it, even though the masters no longer even pretend to be acting to defend the poor and oppressed. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG QeJ5sNOExxqx0Vq7NTG0bDDnwEip8vKbsX9+9d8i 4IDiep3tuDmwKA77n4H3u9nHRV2g6oqOWQkRYfFcW
RE: Your source code, for sale
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Finney, Hal (CR) [SNIP discussion on ripping cash] The problem is that if the source code you are purchasing is bogus, or if the other side doesn't come through, you're screwed because you've lost the value of the torn cash. The other side doesn't gain anything by this fraud, but they harm you, and if they are malicious that might be enough. Quick fix for seller incentive: the seller rips some amount of their own cash in such a way that they cannot recover it unless the buyer provides the remainder of the buyer's ripped cash. -Michael Heyman
Re: Your source code, for sale
- Original Message - From: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 05, 2004 7:01 AM Tyler Durden writes: So my newbie-style question is, is there an eGold that can be verified, but not accessed, until a 'release' code is sent? In other words, say I'm buying some hacker-ed code and pay in egold. I don't want them to be able to 'cash' the gold until I have the code. Meanwhile, they will want to see that the gold is at least there, even if they can't cash it yet. Is there a way to send a 'release' to an eGold (or other) payment? Better yet, a double simultaneous release feature makes thing even more interesting. In the world of international trade, where mutual distrust between buyer and seller is often the rule and there is no central authority to enforce the law, this is traditionally achieved by interposing not less than three trusted third parties: the shipping line, the opening bank and the negotiating bank. First, the buyer asks his bank to open an irrevocable letter of credit (L/C), which is a letter sent to the seller's bank instructing it to pay the seller once the latter presents a given set of documents: these usually include the bill of lading (B/L), issued by the shipping line to declare that the desired cargo was indeed loaded on board. The seller gets the letter of gredit from his bank and is now sure that he will be paid by the latter (which he trusts); so he purchases or manufactures the goods, delivers them to the shipping line getting the B/L, passes it together with the other documents to his bank, and draws the payment. The seller's bank sends by mail the documents to the buyer's bank (which it trusts due to long-standing business relationships), knowing that it will eventually receive the settlement money. The buyer's bank receives the documents, debits the buyer's account, remits the monies to the seller's bank, and delivers the documents to the buyer. When the ship arrives to the buye's seaport, the buyer goes to the shipping line, presents to it the B/L and in exchange gets the cargo (in sea shipments, the B/L represents title to the goods). I've been thinking about how to do this kind of thing with ecash. That's way trickier because there are no trusted third parties, not even e-gold Ltd. / GSR, Inc. The trust chain with the L/C works well because delegation of trust is unnecessary: every link in the chain bears responsibility only to its adjacent links. [...] In the case of your problem there is the issue of whether the source code you are buying is legitimate. Only once you have inspected it and satisfied yourself that it will suit your needs would you be willing to pay. But attaining that assurance will require examing the code in such detail that maybe you will decide that you don't need to pay. Interestingly, with L/C's this problem is addressed by involving yet another third party: an internationally-recognized inspection company (e.g., the Swiss SGS) that issues a document certifying that the cargo is indeed what the buyer expects and not, i.e., bricks. Banks and shipping lines don't want to get involved in these issues; the seller's bank will only check all the documents requested by the L/C (possibly including the inspection certificate). You could imagine a trusted third party who would inspect the code and certify it, saying the source code with hash XXX appears to be legitimate Cisco source code. Then they could send you the code bit by bit and incrementally show that it matches the specified hash, using a crypto protocol for gradual release of secrets. You could simultaneously do a gradual release of some payment information in the other direction. But it's hard to assess the value of partially-released code. If the gradual transfer bits-against-cents is aborted, what is left to the buyer is likely to be unusable, whereas the partial payment still represents good value. A more general issue is that source code is not a commodity, and intellectual property is not real property: so the traditional cash on delivery paradigm just doesn't work, and looking for protocols implementing it kind of moot. If the code is treated as trade secret, rather than licensed, an anonymous buyer may make copies and resell them on the black market more than recovering his initial cost, at the same time undercutting your legitimate sales (see e.g. the cases of RC4 and RC2). This can cause losses order of magnitude larger than refusing to pay for his copy. Enzo
Cryptography Research Takes Aim at Content Pirates
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041105/sff023_1.html?printer=1 Yahoo! Finance Source: Cryptography Research, Inc. Cryptography Research VP Benjamin Jun Takes Aim at Content Pirates Friday November 5, 6:02 am ET Discusses Technology Trends and Responses at Upcoming RSA Conference Europe 2004 SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Despite piracy's high public profile as a threat to intellectual property owners, surprisingly little has been done to understand the range of technical solutions that are feasible, according to security expert Benjamin Jun. With piracy plaguing deployments of pay TV, optical media, console video games and other content, Jun, vice president of engineering at Cryptography Research, Inc., believes content publishers facing these issues have a number of tools and technologies at their disposal to take aim at the pirates, and will discuss solutions and the findings of his recent research on piracy in his seminar on Friday, November 5 at the RSA Conference Europe 2004 being held in Barcelona, Spain. According to Jun, pirates will grow bolder and more effective with advances in CPU processing power, Internet bandwidth and hard drive storage. Although piracy cannot be stopped completely, Jun believes a combination of proactive and reactive security approaches can mitigate the risk and reduce losses to survivable levels. Content publishers facing piracy can apply methods for high-assurance design that anticipate attacks and employ architectures that enable a response after attacks happen. Jun's talk discusses recent piracy trends, describes industry techniques and presents current research in content security. Although numerous products and technologies have been advertised as solutions to the problem of piracy, most commercial security systems fail catastrophically once an implementation is compromised, making them inappropriate solutions for deployment as part of a major standard, said Jun. Piracy, like credit card fraud and computer virus security, is a problem that cannot be solved completely, and requires a flexible solution that combines programmable security and 'smart content' with risk management techniques such as forensic marking and attack response capabilities. Proactive security combines tamper resistance with high-assurance design to combat known security vulnerabilities. Reactive systems provide effective tools for responding to piracy after a problem develops. These results are findings of the Cryptography Research Content Security Initiative, a CRI-sponsored, multi-year research effort focusing on understanding and controlling piracy, technology trends in consumer electronics and next-generation applied techniques for high-assurance security. Content providers must face next-generation pirates by selecting technology that avoids a repeat of painful past lessons, said Carter Laren, senior security architect at Cryptography Research. We are proud that results from our Content Security Research Initiative are helping leading companies secure their most valuable content. Benjamin Jun's talk, Piracy: Technology Trends and Responses, part of the Implementers Educational Track at the RSA Conference Europe 2004, will be presented on Friday, November 5, at 11:00 a.m. at the Princesa Sofia Hotel in Barcelona, Spain. Benjamin Jun is a vice president of engineering at Cryptography Research, where he heads the consulting practice and the company's Content Security Research Initiative. He leads engineering groups in the design, evaluation and repair of high-assurance security modules for software, ASIC and embedded systems. Ben holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University, where he is a Mayfield Entrepreneurship Fellow. About Cryptography Research, Inc. Cryptography Research, Inc. provides consulting services and technology to solve complex security problems. In addition to security evaluation and applied engineering work, CRI is actively involved in long-term research in areas including tamper resistance, content protection, network security and financial services. The company has a broad portfolio of patents covering countermeasures to differential power analysis and other vulnerabilities, and is committed to helping companies produce secure smart cards and other tamper-resistant devices. Security systems designed by Cryptography Research engineers annually protect more than $60 billion of commerce for wireless, telecommunications, financial, digital television and Internet industries. For additional information or to arrange a consultation with a member of the technical staff, please contact Jen Craft at 415-397-0123, ext. 329 or visit www.cryptography.com. Source: Cryptography Research, Inc. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the
Close the 49th Parallel
This business of blue states joining Canada is rich. Please keep it up; begging would be delightful. Actually there is a somewhat academic book published some years ago by Mike Adams called Sex in the Snow which discusses the apparent values congruence between the blue states and most but not all of Canada. I say most because there is a pocket of know-nothing evangelical morons in Alberta (currently damaging only their own community institutions and nobody else's) and a tiny knot of even more know-nothings in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver barely 50 miles from where all those same-sex marriages are being conducted. They are completely surrounded and without prospect of reinforcement. There is also the small matter of the entirety of Quebec which is far to the left of anything seen in the US since the Weathermen. Speaking of which, where are they when you need them most? Where have you gone Mark Ruud? Where are the Armstrong Bros. now? In Canada, blue means reactionary and also beer. Thats about right don't you think? Red is the sacred international colour of revolution. Once again out of step are we? Alas, having reviewed your application with the standard offer of bribes and inducements, we don't want you. Besides you are second in line. The poor Turks and Caicos Islands have been trying off and on for decades to join with pathetic beach-filled blandishments but they have been repeated rebuffed. However your indigent grandparents can still buy their medications and flu shots here at reasonable prices. Charity for the poor is important -- just keep on sending your trailer-park people up on buses as you have been doing. We will look after them if you won't. No, you will have to stew in your own juices until done. Consider it punishment for very bad international behaviour for 225 years not only in Iraq but also including Chile, Venezuela, especially Vietnam, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Panama, the Phillippines, the Halls of Montezuma, the shores of Tripoli, Beirut, Somalia, Mexico, etc. etc. not to mention the burning of my beloved city of Toronto in 1813. Oh yes, we did get even for that one didn't we. The smell of the White House in flames in the morning was said to be most bracing. YOU MIGHT TRY IT ON FOR SIZE YOURSELVES.
RE: Your source code, for sale
On Thu, 4 Nov 2004, Hal Finney wrote: Another idea along these lines is gradual payment for gradual release of the goods. You pay 10% of the amount and they give you 10% of the source code. You pay another 10% and you get the next 10% of the source, and so on. Just as an aside, this is in fact how it was being initially marketed. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF An ill wind is stalking while evil stars whir and all the gold apples go bad to the core S. Plath, Temper of Time
Re: Love It or Leave It
Bob continues to forward entertaining and occasionally insightful articles to the list. From the bluesy side of the fence, Moby wrote: can someone remind me why secession is not an option at this point? Meanwhile, on the Commie-colored side of the fence, Mike Thompson of HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE took several weeks to write a modest proposal to kick the states that didn't get with the program out of the union. Those of us who remember the Vietnam-era redneck taunt about America: Love It or Leave It also remember that if anybody *did* leave, the right wing got immensely offended by it and wanted to hunt them traitors down like dawgs. Then of course there was that unpleasantness of the War Between the States, aka the War of Northern Aggression, in which the Red States left because they didn't like the liberal northerners and their activist judges and politicians disrupting the core of their traditional values, and the Blue States insisted that Nationalism was more important than the right to secede and attacked them. So no, it probably won't fly... Unfortunately, I have to agree with the critics of Kerry who said that he was aloof and out of touch with Middle America; his campaign clearly didn't recognize that Bush had succeeded at telling them that Kerry didn't share their values, and Kerry didn't realize it and demonstrate otherwise, nor did he do an adequate job of talking about Democratic values in a way that would draw them in. And the Republicans and the Democrat establishment had pretty much gotten together to take out Howard Dean, who was building an actual political party inside the hollowed-out shell of the current party. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Your source code, for sale
Ben Laurie made a lot of useful points. However,... Simultaneous release is (provably?) impossible without a trusted third party. I don't think I believe this. Or at least, I don't think it's true to the extent necessary to make the original application impossible. Consider: I send you money for naked photos of Geri Ryan (that Borg chick with the ASS-KICKING hips). The money is encapsulated...you can its there, but you can't get at it. You send me encapsulated photos, perhaps with thumbnails on the outside. I see the thumbnails and click to send the pre-release. You see the pre-release arrive and click the release for the photos. My photo-bundle receives the releases and opens, and then shoots off a message that activates the pre-release on your end, giving you the cash. Is a 3rd party necessary here? I don't see it, but then again I could be wrong. -TD _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
Re: Your source code, for sale
Tyler Durden wrote: Hum. So my newbie-style question is, is there an eGold that can be verified, but not accessed, until a 'release' code is sent? proof-of-delivery protocols might help (but they're patented, as I discovered when I reinvented them a few years back). In other words, say I'm buying some hacker-ed code and pay in egold. I don't want them to be able to 'cash' the gold until I have the code. Meanwhile, they will want to see that the gold is at least there, even if they can't cash it yet. Is there a way to send a 'release' to an eGold (or other) payment? Better yet, a double simultaneous release feature makes thing even more interesting. Simultaneous release is (provably?) impossible without a trusted third party. I think this is one of the interesting applications of capabilities. Using them, you can have a TTP who is ignorant of what is running - you and your vendor agree some code that the TTP will run, using capability based code. In your case, this code would verify the eGold payment and the code (difficult to do this part with certainty, of course) and release them when both were correct. Because of the capabilities, the TTP could run the code without fear, and you would both know that it performed the desired function, but neither of you could subvert it. Cheers, Ben. -- ApacheCon! 13-17 November! http://www.apachecon.com/ http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff
Re: Cryptography Research Takes Aim at Content Pirates
R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041105/sff023_1.html?printer=1 Yahoo! Finance Source: Cryptography Research, Inc. Cryptography Research VP Benjamin Jun Takes Aim at Content Pirates Friday November 5, 6:02 am ET Discusses Technology Trends and Responses at Upcoming RSA Conference Europe 2004 snip Yes, we can protect you from those vil commie pirates. Our product is a flexible solution that combines programmable security and 'smart content' with risk management techniques such as forensic marking and attack response capabilities. And yes, the icon comes in cornflower blue. Meanwhile, Bittorrent now takes up 35% of global bandwidth (http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html) and 4Mb DSL lines are now available in the UK mass market (http://www.bulldogbroadband.com/general/landing.asp) for £40 ($73) per month with TCs that scream 'P2P-OK'. Good luck with those 'attack response capabilities'. W
Re: Blue Democrats Lost Red America
A shallow, stale spin, unduly sanctimonious, and highly presumptive of the legitimacy of election reports. Same vapid shit to fill news void would have been written if Kerry squeaked by.
Finding Galt's Gulch (fwd)
So, it's the night of the day of the morning after, and all around us are masses milling in despair over the destruction of freedom that has occurred here over the last four years. Given that the US was the Gulch to the brain drain of the Soviet Union, where does a true capitalist, or even just a closet objectivist flee today? France? Spain? The EU? Where does one go today, if they are unwilling to participate in the Failed Experiment? (BTW: No, Lichtenstein does not accept immigrants, and yes, I have reverified this recently). -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF An ill wind is stalking while evil stars whir and all the gold apples go bad to the core S. Plath, Temper of Time
Re: Your source code, for sale
On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 10:01:41 -0500, Tyler Durden [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... My photo-bundle receives the releases and opens, and then shoots off a message that activates the pre-release on your end, giving you the cash. Is a 3rd party necessary here? I don't see it, but then again I could be wrong. What if I block the outbound release the money message after I unbundle the images. Sure, I've already committed my money, but you can't get to it. In effect I've just ripped you off, because I have usable product and you don't have usable money. The proof of delivery comes in handy here, so that as soon as I can prove to the bank that my product has arrived within your administrative area, they'll pay me. And the bank sends me a key to unlock the product as soon as it sends you the money. And what *GUARANTEE* do I have that the blob of bits you sent me with the Geri Ryan photos on the outside isn't something from goatse.cx or tubgirl...? Let's say there are 24000 items in the tarball of the IOS code. Do you want to pay $24K for all of them (once) or $12K for half of them (twice) or $1 per file or directory (24000 times)? Do you want to pay per committed bit or character? How can you protect yourself from me committing to sell you /dev/random? I'm sure everyone has this bit committed to memory, but the beginning of Applied Crypto, chapter 2 says: = Protocols have other characteristics as well: -- Everyone involved in the protocol must know the protocol and all of the steps to follow in advance. -- Everyone involved in the protocol must agree to follow it. -- The protocol must be unambiguous; each step must be well defined and there must be no chance of a misunderstanding. -- The protocol must be complete; there must be a specified action for every possible situation. .. The whole point of using cryptography in a protocol is to prevent or detect eavesdropping and cheating. = That last property is critical: what does the protocol do when someone isn't playing by the rules? Of course, there's nothing that crypto can do to prevent you from selling me garbage, only the fact that you intentionally did so can be proven. Comment about bribing the dockside worker at the shipping line deleted. -- GDB has a 'break' feature; why doesn't it have 'fix' too?
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
Well, this is just commie propaganda. Bob, you know this is against list rules, everybody knows what's right, stop blue-baiting, you fucking nazi.
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
At 1:05 PM -0800 11/5/04, John Young wrote: Bob, you know this is against list rules, everybody knows what's right, stop blue-baiting, you fucking nazi. :-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Re: Your source code, for sale
On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 03:01:15PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote: Another idea along these lines is gradual payment for gradual release of the goods. You pay 10% of the amount and they give you 10% of the source code. You pay another 10% and you get the next 10% of the source, and so on. (Or it could be nonlinear; maybe they give out half the code for free, but the final 10% requires a large payment.) The idea is that you can sample and make sure they do appear to have the real thing with a fairly small investment. If there is some mechanism for the seller to have a reputation (like Advogato's perhaps, with some spoofing immunity) then the problem is easier; the seller won't want to screw buyers because it hurts his rep. In that case it may be reasonable to ask the buyer to pay in advance, perhaps using the partial payment system just discussed. The mojonation file sharing system had an implementation like this originally... -- Taral [EMAIL PROTECTED] This message is digitally signed. Please PGP encrypt mail to me. A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail? pgpyk4tHG01wV.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Your source code, for sale
What if I block the outbound release the money message after I unbundle the images. Sure, I've already committed my money, but you can't get to it. In effect I've just ripped you off, because I have usable product and you don't have usable money. Well, yes, but this would be a very significant step forward from the current situation. As t--infinity the vast majority of non-payments are going to be for the purpose of greed. If the payment is already 'gone', then you need a whole different set of motives for wanting to screw somebody even if you get nothing out of it. So in other words, you have at least solved the payment problem to the first order, with no 3rd party. With fancier mechanisms I would think you can solve it to 2nd order too. -TD _ Check out Election 2004 for up-to-date election news, plus voter tools and more! http://special.msn.com/msn/election2004.armx
Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
Here ya go, John and Bill, Knock yourselves out... :-) Cheers, RAH --- http://slate.msn.com/toolbar.aspx?action=printid=2109218 Slate politics Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue The unteachable ignorance of the red states. By Jane Smiley Updated Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004, at 3:24 PM PT The day after the election, Slate's political writers tackled the question of why the Democratic Party-which has now lost five of the past seven presidential elections and solidified its minority status in Congress-keeps losing elections. Chris Suellentrop says that John Kerry was too nuanced and technocratic, while George W. Bush offered a vision of expanding freedom around the world. William Saletan argues that Democratic candidates won't win until they again cast their policies the way Bill Clinton did, in terms of values and moral responsibility. Timothy Noah contends that none of the familiar advice to the party-move right, move left, or sit tight-seems likely to help. Slate asked a number of wise liberals to take up the question of why Americans won't vote for the Democrats. Click here to read previous entries. I say forget introspection. It's time to be honest about our antagonists. My predecessors in this conversation are thoughtful men, and I honor their ideas, but let's try something else. I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million-my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.) Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. There used to be a kind of hand-to-hand fight on the frontier called a knock-down-drag-out, where any kind of gouging, biting, or maiming was considered fair. The ancestors of today's red-state voters used to stand around cheering and betting on these fights. When the forces of red and blue encountered one another head-on for the first time in Kansas Territory in 1856, the red forces from Missouri, who had been coveting Indian land across the Missouri River since 1820, entered Kansas and stole the territorial election. The red news media of the day made a practice of inflammatory lying-declaring that the blue folks had shot and killed red folks whom everyone knew were walking around. The worst civilian massacre in American history took place in Lawrence, Kan., in 1862-Quantrill's raid. The red forces, known then as the slave-power, pulled 265 unarmed men from their beds on a Sunday morning and slaughtered them in front of their wives and children. The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are-they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind. Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you-if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it. Next, they tell you that you are the best of a bad lot (humans, that is) and that as bad as you are, if you stick with them, you are among the chosen. This is flattering and reassuring, and also encourages you to imagine the terrible fates of those you envy and resent. American politicians ALWAYS operate by a similar sort of flattery, and so Americans are never induced to question themselves. That's what happened to Jimmy Carter-he asked Americans to take responsibility for their profligate ways, and promptly lost to Ronald Reagan, who told them once again that they could do anything they wanted. The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do-they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable. Third, and most important, when life grows difficult or fearsome, they (politicians, preachers, pundits) encourage you to cling to your ignorance with even more fervor. But by this time you don't need much encouragement-you've put all your eggs into the ignorance basket, and really, some kind of miraculous fruition (preferably accompanied by the torment of
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
I dunno...a lot of it made sense to me. You don't have to be a Commie in order to believe that someone ELSE believes there's a class war, and that they gotta keep us black folks po', or else we'll soon be having sex with their wives and daughters and competing with their sons for decent jobs. And as long as that somebody else believes there's a class war, they're probably going to vote like there's one, and try to dupe as many others as they can into voting like there's one, and that they're in the in-crowd. And then of course they'll open a military base everynow and then to demonstrate their largesse. -TD From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: John Young [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:15:48 -0500 At 1:05 PM -0800 11/5/04, John Young wrote: Bob, you know this is against list rules, everybody knows what's right, stop blue-baiting, you fucking nazi. :-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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' _ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
Re: Your source code, for sale
Enzo Michelangeli writes: In the world of international trade, where mutual distrust between buyer and seller is often the rule and there is no central authority to enforce the law, this is traditionally achieved by interposing not less than three trusted third parties: the shipping line, the opening bank and the negotiating bank. Interesting. In the e-gold case, both parties have the same bank, e-gold ltd. The corresponding protocol would be for the buyer to instruct e-gold to set aside some money which would go to the seller once the seller supplied a certain receipt. That receipt would be an email return receipt showing that the seller had sent the buyer the content with hash so-and-so, using a cryptographic email return-receipt protocol. You could imagine a trusted third party who would inspect the code and certify it, saying the source code with hash XXX appears to be legitimate Cisco source code. Then they could send you the code bit by bit and incrementally show that it matches the specified hash, using a crypto protocol for gradual release of secrets. You could simultaneously do a gradual release of some payment information in the other direction. But it's hard to assess the value of partially-released code. If the gradual transfer bits-against-cents is aborted, what is left to the buyer is likely to be unusable, whereas the partial payment still represents good value. Actually you can arrange it so that neither the partially-released code nor the partially-transferred ecash is of any value until the whole transfer finishes. For example, send the whole thing first in encrypted form, then release the encryption keys bit-by-bit. If someone aborts the protocol early, the best each side can do is a brute force search over the untransferred bits to try to find the key to unlock the data they received. A more general issue is that source code is not a commodity, and intellectual property is not real property: so the traditional cash on delivery paradigm just doesn't work, and looking for protocols implementing it kind of moot. If the code is treated as trade secret, rather than licensed, an anonymous buyer may make copies and resell them on the black market more than recovering his initial cost, at the same time undercutting your legitimate sales (see e.g. the cases of RC4 and RC2). This can cause losses order of magnitude larger than refusing to pay for his copy. That's a good point. Maybe you could use some kind of DRM or trusted computing concept to try to force the buyer to lock up his received data. For source code that would be pretty difficult though, it needs to be handled in flexible ways. Hal
RE: Your source code, for sale
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 10:18 AM -0800 11/5/04, Hal Finney wrote: Yes, I'm looking at ideas like this for ecash gambling, but you have a who-goes-first problem. Whenever we talk about financial applications, where the assets represented by one bearer certificate are exchanged for those represented by another, what's really happening is a redeem-reissue process anyway. Since it's the underwriters' reputations you're trusting anyway, we've always assumed that there would be communication between the underwriters in order to execute, clear, and settle the trade all at once. For streaming stuff, we figured that since we were streaming cash for streaming bits, like movies, or content of some kind, you'd just do tit for tat, one stream (cash, probably signed probabalistically tested coins in the last iteration that we called Nicko-mint :-)) against another, the movie, song, etc being streamed. There's the missing last 5 minutes problem, but I think that, in recursive auction-settled cash market for digital goods like this (Eric Hughes' institutional 'pirate' scheme, the 'silk road' stuff, whatever), that there will always be another source to buy what's left from, once the intellectual property issues solve themselves because of the auction process. For things that aren't useful except in their entirety, like code, or executables, (or storing money :-)), I've always been a fan of the Mojo/BitTorrent stuff, where you hash the file into bits, ala m-of-n Shamir secret splitting, and store/buy them from lots of places at once. Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQYvH6cPxH8jf3ohaEQIGGACgiS/Uv3KxDK4rM9lozOoxfI5Fg1QAoP7d 4Xw6/SwfaBOqgyh9uQTS/5oa =XMiK -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
Tyler, Commie is the term used here like is nazi used elsewhere as the most fearsome if thoughtless epithet. Nazi here is a term of endearment, and also admirable role model by some. Calling someone both is not allowed, check the FAQ under impurity. Tim May, praise Allah, always claimed cypherpunks was a fair and balanced forum thanks to the one person of the left here who was fingered affectionately like a house rodent, an easy target for errant shooters. CJ is not to be recalled, ever. Jim Bell still sends very important legal papers, the latest yesterday, which describe the way things should be understood. But who can believe an MIT chemist political prisoner. CJ and Jim jailed by the Democratic freedom-fighters.
Election with Hunter
Last blue-baiting post, I swear. Gotta love HST, especially after the ether kicks in... Cheers, RAH --- http://www.aspendailynews.com/Search_Articles/view_search_article.cfm?OrderNumber=9156 Aspen Daily News Friday, November 5, 2004 11/4/04 Election with Hunter By Troy Hooper/Aspen Daily News Staff Writer WOODY CREEK - It was Bailey's Irish Cream and Royal Salute Scotch Whiskey at the Thompson household on Election Night. A bottle of Cristal intended for a John Kerry victory remained uncorked, chilling on ice in a backroom. A hungry smell of anticipation hung in the kitchen at Owl Farm, which morphed into a makeshift Democratic headquarters as Hunter S. Thompson hunkered down with a small group of friends and manned what seemed like a global switchboard as calls came pouring in from some of the biggest names in modern American lore. Even a few pollsters dialed up The Good Doctor in search of the most up-to-minute score. Whether they were calling to ascertain Thompson's classified political knowledge or gauge his gambler's instinct was unclear. But without question, his phone was chiming more often than the Liberty Bell. I don't mean to pop the bad news on you Bubba but John Kerry is getting beat just like George McGovern did in 1972 - or worse, Thompson proclaimed to his nephew well before the news networks gave any hint that Bush Nation was marching toward a second term. The tide turned so quickly it was difficult to breathe. Actor Sean Penn, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, Kerry press secretary David Wade and others checked in with Thompson who sat on a chair inhaling cigarettes and stiff drinks in between bites of breakfast, which wasn't served to the late-awakening writer until after the sun went down. Asked for a candid assessment of the election, Thompson put it plainly to Penn. I've got the worst possible news. Colorado has gone to hell like all the other states, Thompson said into the speakerphone. They must have all voted the same way they prayed. The way Thompson's neighbors voted was far removed from the national outcome. Bush mustered just 2,750 of Pitkin County's electorate while Kerry received 6,275. Nationally, Bush garnered the highest total number of votes ever, winning 51 percent of the record voter turnout, which preliminary estimates have put at roughly 117 million. He is the first president to win a majority of the vote since 1988 when his father beat another Democrat from Massachusetts: Michael Dukakis. The news is getting logarithmically more horrible, Thompson told another caller as the night wore on. They're all committing suicide up in Boston. Thompson has always had a keen eye for politics. His best-known work on the subject is Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 - an up-close study of South Dakota Senator George McGovern's effort to unseat President Richard Nixon. Over the weekend, McGovern and Thompson discussed the election: The two old friends suggested Bush might be more dangerous than Nixon. Kerry would make a fine president, they both agreed, as they noted the similarities between the two eras. This year's Democratic presidential candidate must have seen some similarities between now and then, too. When Kerry visited Aspen last June for a fund-raiser, he brought three hardcover copies of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 to have them autographed. Thompson obliged and struck a friendship with Kerry, serving as his unofficial Aspen tour guide, meeting the candidate on a rain-soaked tarmac at Sardy Field and riding in a Secret Service procession up Red Mountain, showing Kerry the sights and conferring with him on national affairs. Now, five months later, Kerry has met the same fate as McGovern. I feel like somebody's died, Thompson lamented as the sun was preparing to rise early Wednesday morning. I'm just not sure who it was. He deemed the election another failure of the youth vote. Yeah, we rocked the vote all right. Those little bastards betrayed us again. But despite his disappointment, Thompson remained remarkably upbeat. Their army is how much bigger than mine? Three percent? Well shucks, Bubba. Now is the time to establish a network and an attitude, he said. You make friends in moments of defeat. People in defeat tend to bond because they need each other. We can't take the attitude that it's over and we give up. We're still here. Thompson added: I'm proud to have known John Kerry. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.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'
