Re: Digital Bearer Settlements Wiki

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 4:52 PM -0800 on 12/9/02, Steve Schear wrote:


> Haven't seen this discussed here.

Meaning there is one, or you want to start one?

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
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: Supreme Court Refuses to Intervene in Money Laundering Dispute.Also Moving on (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>These ap.tbo.com links don't work. I get ap.tbo.com can't be found. I
> mentioned this a few days ago. I can do a whois on tbo.com alright, but a lookup
> on ap.tbo.com says non-existant host/domain

They work fine for me at every site (machines at three different domains)
I tested. Which seems rather obvious since I'm finding them to forward
them.

Whatever the resolution problem is, it's on your end or some
betwix the two. Sorry you're having the problem but there is nothing I can
do about it. Perhaps you should talk to your nameserver operator(s).


 --


We don't see things as they are,  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
we see them as we are.   www.ssz.com
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Anais Nin www.open-forge.org

Re: Digital Bearer Settlements Wiki

[Tim May]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 07:29  PM, R. A. Hettinga wrote:


At 4:52 PM -0800 on 12/9/02, Steve Schear wrote:



Haven't seen this discussed here.


Meaning there is one, or you want to start one?


SSShhh!, everyone! Don't tell Bob about Wikis and Blogs, else we'll be 
inundated with a dozen Wikis and Blogs like "Insta-Clearing Wiki," 
"Digifrancsblog," "Philodex Wiki," "Bearer Blog," and all the other 
cruft.

--Tim May

"You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher 
moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know 
that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged." - -Michael 
Shirley

Re: Money is about expected future value....nothing more, nothing less

[Ken Brown]

Marcel Popescu wrote:

> It does appear that the law in England is not as "demanding" as I believed:
> 
> http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/legaltender.htm
> 
> < opinion, legal tender is not a means of payment that must be accepted by the
> parties to a transaction, but rather a legally defined means of payment that
> should not be refused by a creditor in satisfaction of a debt.>>


Yep. If I owe you 100 quid, and I give you that value of English bank
notes, and you sue me in an English court saying I haven't paid, you
will lose. Which is fair enough - it is the state's court so why should
they help you if you don't like the state's money?

If I offer you 100 pounds worth of cowrie shells, then they might take a
different view.

Re: DBCs now issued by DMT

[Nomen Nescio]

Bear writes:

> If the banker
> goes broke, people want to be able to make a claim against the banker's
> future earnings for whatever worthless currency they were holding
> when it happened, and they cannot do that from a position of anonymity.
> People want a faithless banker punished, meaning jail time or hard labor,
> not just burning a nym.

More precisely, they want their banker to face such threats in the event
of misappropriating the money in the bank, so that he is motivated not
to do so.

> The sole method for any truly anonymous currency to acquire value is for
> the banker to promise to redeem it for something that has value. So the
> banker, if it's to have a prayer of acceptance, cannot be anonymous.

Not necessarily.  There are other ways for an anonymous currency to
acquire value, which I will describe below.

> Look at the possibilities for conflict resolution.  How can the anonymous
> holder of an issued currency prove that he's the beneficiary to the
> issuer's promise to redeem, without the banker's cooperation and without
> compromising his/her anonymity?

He shows the certificate with the bank's signature on it.  Why would
this require either the cooperation of the banker, or compromising
the holder's own anonymity?  Or more specifically, how would either
of these elements make his proof easier?  Suppose the holder gives up
his anonymity.  How would that help his case?  The currency is just
a digitally signed data structure, it has nothing to do with the name
of the holder.  That information seems utterly irrelevant to proving
ownership, any more than the holder's hair color or waist size.

> And if s/he succeeded in proving it, who
> could force an anonymous banker to pay up?  And if you succeeded in making
> the banker pay up, how could the banker prove without the cooperation
> of the payee that the payment was made and made to the correct payee?

This is another issue.  The bank's anonymous currency is backed by some
commodity.  But that commodity cannot be transferred non-anonymously,
we will suppose (otherwise we don't need an anonymous bank).  This is
a problem with your whole model of basing your anonymous currency on
some other commodity.  But if you do stick with this model, you must
accept that the people involved in the non-anonymous transaction will
lose their anonymity.  A client who wishes to remain anonymous must stay
in the anonymous world, he can't cash in his anonymous currency for the
non-anonymous backing commodity.

> We use a long-accepted fiat currency, so we're not used to thinking about
> the nitty-gritty details that money as an infrastructure requires. It
> is hidden from us because our currency infrastructure has not broken
> down in living memory.  We shifted from privately issued currency to
> government-issued currency largely without destabilizing the economy.
> Then once people were accustomed to not thinking of a promise to redeem
> as being the source of value, we went off the gold standard.  Our economy
> hasn't broken yet, but you have to realize that this situation is a little
> bizarre from the point of view of currency issue.  We're not thinking
> anymore about the promise to redeem currency for something of value, and
> the implications of failure to honor that promise, because we live in a
> sheltered and mildly bizarre moment in history where those things haven't
> been relevant for a long time to the currency we use most.  But any new
> currency would have to have a good solid solution for that issue.

You are commpletely wrong about the nature of our currency and what
gives it value, and this is why your analysis is incomplete.  I will
describe below the correct analysis and show how it points a way towards
an anonymous currency that has value, without the banker having to be
non-anonymous.

> The only way I found to decentralize the system, at all, was the model
> where all the actors are pseudonymous rather than anonymous, each user
> has the power to issue currency, and different issued currencies were
> allowed to fluctuate in value against each other depending on the degree
> of trust or value of the underlying redemption commodity.  Money becomes
> a protocol and a commodity and labor exchange in raw form, rather than
> a simple sum - it's back to the barter system.

This is badly broken.  Letting everyone issue currency doesn't solve
any of your problems, it simply magnifies them.  Plus it introduces
enormous costs in terms of keeping track of what everyone's currency is
worth in terms of everyone else's.  There is no advantage to having 6
billion currencies that you could not gain by having 6 thousand.

All right, here are some better ideas.  First, our money supply is
mostly created by bank loans, and most of those are real estate and
business loans.  The loans which create our money are secured loans,
they are claims on valuable business and personal property.  Our money
is not backed by fiat, it is backed by real, tangible prope

Re: [IP] Dan Gillmor: Accessing a whole new world via multimedia phones (fwd)

[Mike Rosing]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Eugen Leitl forwarded:

> Dan Gillmor: Accessing a whole new world via multimedia phones
> By Dan Gillmor
> Mercury News Technology Columnist
>
[...]

> That's not ``content'' in a Hollywood sense. But it's the most important
> kind of content: what we create ourselves. That phone call you make to your
> spouse or child or business partner is more valuable, by far, than anything
> you see on television.
>

"Content is crap, conectivity is king"
A.M. Odlyzko at Univ. Wisconsin, early 2002 (May I think?)

[...]

> Where is all this ultimately heading? Ask a teenager. She'll be first to
> figure it out.

Hell, I saw 10 year olds who figured it out.  Anybody over 20 is
too old to get it!!  Which cuts me out by a factor of 5 :-(
(or 2.5 if I'm lucky :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike

Re: Akamai

[Kevin Luddy]

Akamai also attempts to solve the problem of getting information to people
fast.  They have a huge network of servers across the world, and for a price
will manage your content so that the important stuff is already as far along
the pipeline to the requesting user as possible.  Most large corporations,
lots of media content providers, and probably some government agency buy
services from akamai because, from what I know, they have the best, if not
only, network and software of its kind.  The software actually monitors your
content to see what is most frequently requested and from where and moves
the data to the right place to make downloading a web page (or streaming
movie) as quick and painless as possible.

They stopped doing the ASP thing cause they make so much managing traffic.


on 12/9/02 10:26 AM, Tyler Durden at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Akamai was one of the up-and-coming ASPs that went nearly busto during the
> dot-bomb era.
> 
> An ASP is an Application Service Provider--for a while it was thought that
> certain expert applications would actually be adminstered and served
> remotely from a company that knew this stuff better than you. This would
> keep your company from having to staff 'experts' in each application.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> From: Harmon Seaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Subject: Akamai Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 08:52:21 -0600
>> 
>>Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also
>> akamaitechnologies.com)? I was getting about a zillion hits on my web
>> server
>> from them this morning. They seem to offer services to gov't agencies
>> according
>> to their website.
>> 
>> 
>>  --
>> Harmon Seaver
>> CyberShamanix
>> http://www.cybershamanix.com
> 
> 
> _
> The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!

[Major Variola (ret)]

> There was an article in the press a month or so ago about some
> town that was trying hard to restrict cybercafe hours,
> because of gang activity there - I'm not sure how much of it's
> just the same nonsense that tried to restrict video-game parlors,
> and how much of it's because the local bullies were playing quake
> and decided to gang up and frag the mayor's kid...

Bill, You're referring to Garden Grove in Orange County (SoCal).
This is a Vietnamese neighborhood, and meatspace gang violence
intruded into the cybercafes --which are really networked-gaming
parlours BTW--
and some kid got whacked outside.  In the meatwhacking sense.

The various reactive laws this violence generated are not
CP-list-related per se,
but are indicators of how more general-purpose cybercafes might be
regulated.

---

Tim: re "Siliness, compounded": I wasn't agreeing that such laws (cams
in 'cafes) exist now in the US, but
rather that 'cafe anonymity *will be* readily blocked by laws requiring
your drivers license
(or library card) to use the machines.  All of this in addition to the
power to subpeona all
the private videos in the neighborhood.

To implement, all it requires is a smoking crater somewhere, and the
claim that the Feebs are stymied at a 'cafe ingress point.


---
Got Reichstag?

Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!

[attila]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

> > Phone booths already don't accept calls, by State Fiat. You think 
> > detecting and dropping modem calls from a CO is tough? 

> It's just a matter of designing a (software ?) modem that will, instead of 
> whisling and peeping, emulate soccer mom chatter. Lower rates, but 
> undetectable. 

i had this idea 3 years ago and haven't done anything with it,
so perhaps someone here might actually be able to make headway,
or at least shoot it down.  unfortunately, this irc session log
is the best description that i can find anywhere, sorry for the
format...
-a

- -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-

Log taken from xchat session on 29 Nov 1999:

[14:33:49]  
[14:34:43]  i have this fucking killer idea. i'm totally fried because i've 
been up all night so i can't explain it as well as i want to
[14:35:16]  but which do you prefer, just on a gut level aesthetic reaction: 
cryptotalk, cryptospeak, cryptovox
[14:35:23]  , you doo
[14:35:28] >< wake up
[14:35:38]  yes
[14:35:39]  whgat
[14:35:50]  i'm so mentally and spiritually drained
[14:35:57]  look at what i just said
[14:36:10]  hmm, cryptovox cryptospeak then cryptotalk
[14:36:14]  i have an insanely good idea.
[14:36:15]  yeash
[14:36:18]  so you like cryptovox too, huh
[14:36:21]  i like cryptovox
[14:36:24]  i need a fucking laptop
[14:36:48]  okay, that's three votes for cryptovox
[14:36:51]  i like it best
[14:37:17]  my god i am lagged to holy fucking shit
[14:37:19]  are you going to register cryptovox.com ?
[14:37:26]  yes.  may kill me but i have to do it
[14:37:35]  so here's the basic underlying idea
[14:37:47]  end to end encryption using phonemes spoken very quickly as the 
transport
[14:38:01]  so you could hold your laptop/pda up to your cellphone or a 
payphone and have it speak ciphertext
[14:38:09]  to a similar box on the other end
[14:38:18]  thus obviating the need for crypto in the phone or in the phone 
network
[14:38:48]  i'm positive that you could come up with a variety of algorithms 
for stringing together phonemes that would hold up well over a noisy channel
[14:39:06]  and speak them and recognize them fast enough on the other end to 
make it reasonable
[14:39:08]  hmm, interesting. How would you decode it ? 
[14:39:12]  same thing
[14:39:18]  you have a little pda or laptop let's say
[14:39:24]  you hold it up to the phone or whatever
[14:39:28]  they talk
[14:39:35]  it's basically a modem but using speech
[14:39:59]  what kind of bandwidth do you think you could get ?
[14:40:09]  i have to experiment
[14:40:18]  but imagine a little palmpilot sized gizmo
[14:40:24]  you can talk to it
[14:40:33]  but its not as important as sending a secure message.
[14:40:36]  it can talk to computers via ir or 10bt or whatever
[14:40:53]  it can receive and transmit files or spoken messages you dictate
[14:41:05]  it works over any phone connection
[14:41:10]  even a crappy one in an airport
[14:41:14]  with no connectors
[14:41:20]  it uses strong crypto
[14:41:38]  that's why i wanted to borrow a voice modem
[14:41:54]  but it just hit me while i was lying in bed trying to fall asleep 
how it could all work
[14:42:07]  the thing is, there are crypto phones
[14:42:10]  but no sdks
[14:42:13]  or nothing you or i could get
[14:42:21]  because the gov't is paranoid about opening it up
[14:42:29]  bellatlantic SAYS digital pcs is secure
[14:42:31]  but fuck that
[14:42:40]  the only way you can have personal privacy is with string 
end-to-end crypto
[14:42:52]  and if you did the cryptovox thing everyone in the world could 
have it
[14:43:06]  s/string/strong/
[14:43:10]  you see what i mean?
[14:44:01]  i imagine the crpytovox phoneme thing sounding like a bunch of "la 
vo cha fi gu wa si ha mo" type syllables spoken very quickly
[14:44:13]  it would take a bit of fucking around to figure out what the 
parameters are
[14:44:24]  don't tell anyone about this
[14:45:02]  you could prototype this on a laptop with a halfway decent sound 
card and a cell phone
[14:45:41]  i can imagine the demo
[14:45:42]  ok, but why not just have 2 modems and some crypto software ?
[14:46:14]  because you don't always have something you can plug your computer 
into
[14:46:25]  I guess you could leave voicemail to people with a secure message.
[14:46:36]  and answering machines.
[14:46:37]  well, the idea is if everyone's carrying around a cryptovox voice 
pad
[14:46:48]  they can just hold it up to whatever phone is handy
[14:47:03]  or eventually it could be integrated with a phone. but the idea is 
that it turns anything into a secure medium
[14:47:14]  anything
[14:47:22]  so could it to interactive conversations, or just 1 message at a 
time.
[14:47:48]  i was envisioning it being a little bsd box internally with cfs 
and a speech interface. it could store as many messages as it could hold
[14:47:51]  or do streaming
[14:48:03]  streaming is sort 

Re: Akamai

[Mike Rosing]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>  Maybe somebody doesn't like the new look on my http://www.oshkoshbygosh.org
> site.

heh, as someone who drives by Oshkosh a few times a year, I think that's a
great satire.  Good luck staying alive :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike

Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> Got Reichstag?

Mmh, smells like victory.

Re: Akamai

[Ken Hirsch]

Harmon Seaver writes:
>Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also
> akamaitechnologies.com)? I was getting about a zillion hits on my web
server
> from them this morning. They seem to offer services to gov't agencies
according
> to their website.

Their main service is serving static content, so as to reduce the load on
their client's servers and improve response time.  Originally almost all
they did was deliver graphics.  Their clients would place graphics on
Akamai's servers and their html would point to Akamai's servers for images.
Now they can put together content within an HTML page based on "edge-side
includes" (http://www.esi.org).  They also serve streaming formats for their
clients.

None of that would explain why they were hitting your site.  Perhaps they
are working on client-caching or a search engine.

Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[Tim May]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 10:48  AM, Tyler Durden wrote:



In a state where Crypto is not resisted (OK, there probably aren't a 
lot of these...perhaps in Europe or Canada?), Crypto "defaults" to the 
above.

You really need to get up to speed on this issue if you think either 
the nations of Europe or Canada are more tolerant of crypto than the 
U.S. is. The archives have much material, findable with Google in most 
cases.


...
This is essentially the view I had coming in, and its basically the 
view I have now, except I am thinking I should start finding the time 
to write some code!

That sounds good.

--Tim May
"They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, 
and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers 
actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members 
before the vote." --Rep. Ron Paul, TX, on how few Congresscritters saw 
the USA-PATRIOT Bill before voting overwhelmingly to impose a police 
state

Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[Tim May]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 10:55  AM, James A. Donald wrote:

So far this has only been applied to people who are obviously
hostile muslim terrorist wannabees, but the program will be
steadily expanded.  Indeed, part of the homeland security act
already aims at people who make cartridges (reloaders), who
will in due course be dealt with by the extrajudicial means
provided for in the homeland security act.

In general wars lead to a major temporary reduction in liberty,
but a smaller permanent reduction in liberty.  Unfortunately
the war on terror will probably never end, so there will be no
recovery.

The government is on perfectly good constitutional ground when
it claims that the army can do as it pleases on or near the
battlefield.  Trouble is, with terrorism or guerrilla war, the
battlefield is arguably everywhere.   We need a declaration of
victory that will push the battlefield to somewhere far away.


"Permanent war" was the ideal for statists long, long before Orwell 
correctly described it in "1984." The First Fascist, Lincoln, suspended 
the Constitution and instituted Emergency Powers which are still in 
place.

(Others have studied this in more detail than I remember here. I think 
Froomkin  was one who did a study. Anyway, the gist is that various 
Emergency Orders, Emergency Powers, etc. have been more or less in 
place since the 1860s. They took a sharp turn upward during the Second 
Fascist's rule, in the 1930s, and then again during the Third, Fourth, 
and Fifth Fascist periods.)



--Tim May
"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize 
Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of 
conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are 
peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." --Samuel Adams

Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!

[Sunder]

Yeah, well terrorists use condoms and wear clothes too, so those are
terrorist tools also, so we should run around naked and have unprotected
sex just so we don't help the terrorists.  Also, terrorists don't jump off
cliffs like lemmings, so we should do that too.

--Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---
 + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\
  \|/  :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\
<--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you   \/|\/
  /|\  :their failures, we  |don't email them, or put them on a web  \|/
 + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net 

On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Steve Schear wrote:

> 
>
> 
> Feds Label Wi-Fi a Terrorist Tool
> By Paul Boutin
> 
> SANTA CLARA, California -- Attention, Wi-Fi users: The Department of
> Homeland Security sees wireless networking technology as a terrorist
> threat.

Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[Tim May]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 06:56  AM, Tyler Durden wrote:


"Frankly, millions of these fascists need a simple solution: a tree, a 
horse, and a rope."

Damn. If it gets to the point where I'm a terrorist because some local 
warlord doesn't like me (or thinks I disrespect his authority), then 
"might makes right" is all that will be left.

Anyone in the U.S. can be declared an "enemy combatant" and vanished 
away from lawyers, habeas corpus, the 6th Amendment, and any semblance 
of the system of liberty we sort of had at one time.




In a way, the potential and impending truth of Tim May's statement is 
for a me a motivator to continue to promote strong crypto, ubiquitous 
Wi-Fi, "BlackNet", and so on. Hopefully it won't come down to the 
above.

It's mildly amusing to watch your months-long transition from newcomer 
to believer that crypto provides the tools for sabotaging the State and 
protecting real liberty.



--Tim May
"If I'm going to reach out to the the Democrats then I need a third 
hand.There's no way I'm letting go of my wallet or my gun while they're 
around." --attribution uncertain, possibly Gunner, on Usenet

Re: Akamai

[Tim May]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 09:42  AM, Greg Pelcak wrote:


On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 08:52 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:


   Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also
akamaitechnologies.com)?


Most of the experience I have with Akamai is with them hosting 
high-traffic websites with geographically distributed servers.  I 
thought they had mostly gone bust, but it's possible they're still 
doing it.   A lot of websites a couple years ago talked about being 
"akamaized", meaning that they had their site hosted by akamai to 
allow for good server response time all around the country.


No, Akamai (symbol AKAM) has not gone bust. Yes, their business model 
for the past few years has been as a Web accelerator, a kind of local 
cache of content.

Speculations on the list this morning that they plan to sell their 
services to the government are worth looking into...they would not be 
the first company to propose selling Web browsing profiles of users. 
I'm not saying this is a plan, and it's probably more likely that the 
hits being seen are unrelated to any such plan.

--Tim May

Re: Money is about expected future value....nothing more, nothing less

[Tim May]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 03:23  AM, Marcel Popescu wrote:


From: "Tim May" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


Mark cited the Bank of England, not U.S. law. I don't know what 
British
law is in this regard.

It does appear that the law in England is not as "demanding" as I 
believed:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/legaltender.htm

<
opinion, legal tender is not a means of payment that must be accepted 
by the
parties to a transaction, but rather a legally defined means of 
payment that
should not be refused by a creditor in satisfaction of a debt.>>

Isn't this what I said?

"The language is along the lines of "this note good for all debts 
public and private." This does not stop parties from agreeing to 
transfers in yak brains, or houses, or gold, or tantalum.

"It says that if Alice agrees to pay Bob 50 dollars ($50), with no 
special payment instructions agreed to, and Alice at some point gives 
Bob a $50 piece of U.S. currency, she has fulfilled her debt obligation 
under U.S. law."

--Tim May
"Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David 
Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11

Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[Anonymous]

Tyler Durden said:

> In a way, the potential and impending truth of Tim May's statement is for a
> me a motivator to continue to promote strong crypto, ubiquitous Wi-Fi,
> "BlackNet", and so on. Hopefully it won't come down to the above.

 It already has. And the hell with the horses -- tie the other end of the rope
to a fast car.

Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!

[Sunder]

On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Tim May wrote:

> Siliness, compounded. Show me a law about "obligatory cameras in  
> cybercafes."

It's silly now.  A few years back, the spook said that the NSA doesn't spy
on US citizens and won't because that was not its charter.

Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[Tyler Durden]

"It's mildly amusing to watch your months-long transition from newcomer to 
believer that crypto provides the tools for sabotaging the State and 
protecting real liberty."

Well, this is for me not an easy issue. Amerika has always had a hard-on for 
fascism (as long as it was in the service of "freedom"), and as a result the 
pendulum seems to swing pretty wildly at times.

Crypto is for me primarily a way to send information to somebody else 
without worrying if a third party hears it. This may be financial data, it 
may be personal information.

In a state where Crypto is not resisted (OK, there probably aren't a lot of 
these...perhaps in Europe or Canada?), Crypto "defaults" to the above.

In a state where crypto (and hence my right to communicate discretely) is 
resisted, it then transforms into a means of resistance and possible 
preservation of residual freedoms. (And I would argue that Crypto is 
transformed precisely BY the resisting powers, contrary to their belief.)

And let's say, for 5 minutes, that I might be willing to sacrifice some of 
my freedom for more "security". Even if I actually believed this would work, 
the fact is that the state that "protects us" now from the scary Terrorists 
out there can (and likely will) transmute into a corrupt shell for the rich 
and powerful (if it isn't that already).

I am actually anti-violence (insofar as violence is defined as harm by 
humans towards other humans). I am not a passifist, however, which for me 
means that if actual violence is ever to be used, it should be used only as 
an absolute last resort, after all other possibilities have been exhausted, 
and only for reasons that have undeniable need (WW2 is an example, as was 
the Chinese Communist reaction to the Nationalist's non-response to Japanese 
Genocide in China).

In this sense, then, strong Crypto, Ubiquitous WiFi/Broadband, P2P, Blacknet 
and so on are for me tools with which to head off scenarios where violence 
might otherwise be the only reasonable recourse. Are we nearing such a 
scenario? I really don't know. I haven't yet been in a situation where I 
felt it was the only reasonable response, and I hope I never am. (I've been 
close, though.) What I DO hope is that via the proliferation of such (and 
other) technologies, the very notions of "limiting speech" (whether by "good 
guys" or "bad guys"), surveillance of on-line activites, and so on, become 
anachronistic, perhaps even non-concepts. This won't solve all thr problems, 
of course, but at least it will be difficult (if not impossible) for 
Governments to operate without their being widespread knowledge of its 
activities, and I believe this can only be a good thing (like, imagine if 
their had been video regularly uploaded out of Treblinka).

Is this view necessarily anti-State? It depends on the state.

This is essentially the view I had coming in, and its basically the view I 
have now, except I am thinking I should start finding the time to write some 
code!





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Re: Akamai

[Greg Pelcak]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 08:52 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:


   Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also
akamaitechnologies.com)?


Most of the experience I have with Akamai is with them hosting 
high-traffic websites with geographically distributed servers.  I 
thought they had mostly gone bust, but it's possible they're still 
doing it.   A lot of websites a couple years ago talked about being 
"akamaized", meaning that they had their site hosted by akamai to allow 
for good server response time all around the country.

Re: Akamai

[Harmon Seaver]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 10:04:48AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> 
> Speculations on the list this morning that they plan to sell their 
> services to the government are worth looking into...they would not be 
> the first company to propose selling Web browsing profiles of users. 
> I'm not saying this is a plan, and it's probably more likely that the 
> hits being seen are unrelated to any such plan.


   Maybe. Some of the things on their site tend to increase my paranoia tho:


EdgeScape

EdgeScape is an IP intelligence service that provides comprehensive geographic,
network, and corporate identity information for IP addresses.

With Akamai, government agencies reduce the risk of fraud and increase the
quality of service.
http://www.akamai.com/en/html/services/services.html

 And the fact that "akamai" isn't showing up in the weblogs at all (although it
might be one of the unresolved ip's) but akamaitechnologies.com was 90% of the
stuff I was seeing in tcpdump for close to a half hour. 

 Maybe somebody doesn't like the new look on my http://www.oshkoshbygosh.org
site. 

Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[James A. Donald]

--
On 9 Dec 2002 at 9:17, Tim May wrote:
> Anyone in the U.S. can be declared an "enemy combatant" and 
> vanished away from lawyers, habeas corpus, the 6th Amendment, 
> and any semblance of the system of liberty we sort of had at 
> one time.

So far this has only been applied to people who are obviously 
hostile muslim terrorist wannabees, but the program will be 
steadily expanded.  Indeed, part of the homeland security act 
already aims at people who make cartridges (reloaders), who 
will in due course be dealt with by the extrajudicial means 
provided for in the homeland security act.

In general wars lead to a major temporary reduction in liberty, 
but a smaller permanent reduction in liberty.  Unfortunately 
the war on terror will probably never end, so there will be no 
recovery.

The government is on perfectly good constitutional ground when
it claims that the army can do as it pleases on or near the
battlefield.  Trouble is, with terrorism or guerrilla war, the
battlefield is arguably everywhere.   We need a declaration of
victory that will push the battlefield to somewhere far away. 

--digsig
 James A. Donald
 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
 FLOmVFJWOQBqPSg63zjCLyzrGNzmKNAwje/jqRal
 4BI7xjE+ItnxvhioCvggkQ6IREbp21mrBxAIeCBcg

[IP] GNURadio presentation at FCC TAC meeting last week (fwd)

[Eugen Leitl]

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Sun, 08 Dec 2002 21:22:15 -0500
From: Dave Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: ip <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [IP] GNURadio presentation at FCC TAC meeting last week

I am on the FC  TAC and was there and it was indeed an excellent talk djf


-- Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



Last week, Eric Blossom gave a presentation on GNURadio at
the FCC's Technological Advisory Council (TAC)
 meeting in DC.  You can find it on-line
at:



The agenda for the meeting can be found at:

 

Eric's presentation was the second item on the agenda.  Eric
is the project manager of the GNURadio effort and I think that he did
a great job. It is well worth it to give the talk a listen,
especially in order to hear the dialog between Eric and the FCC
staffers and members of the TAC.
The FCC learned a great deal about the potential benefits and
impacts of SDR that they hadn't previously heard from any company or
industry group.  As SDR's get in the hands of more and more people,
it will cause the way that the radio spectrum and wireless devices
are regulated to undergo some major changes.  Eric painted a very
good picture about what this new world would look like and I'm happy
to say that some key FCC staffers got it.

-- Dewayne

-
You are subscribed as [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe or update your address, click
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

Re: Akamai

[Tyler Durden]

Akamai was one of the up-and-coming ASPs that went nearly busto during the 
dot-bomb era.

An ASP is an Application Service Provider--for a while it was thought that 
certain expert applications would actually be adminstered and served 
remotely from a company that knew this stuff better than you. This would 
keep your company from having to staff 'experts' in each application.










From: Harmon Seaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Akamai Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 08:52:21 -0600

   Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also
akamaitechnologies.com)? I was getting about a zillion hits on my web 
server
from them this morning. They seem to offer services to gov't agencies 
according
to their website.


 --
Harmon Seaver
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com


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Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[Tyler Durden]

"Frankly, millions of these fascists need a simple solution: a tree, a 
horse, and a rope."

Damn. If it gets to the point where I'm a terrorist because some local 
warlord doesn't like me (or thinks I disrespect his authority), then "might 
makes right" is all that will be left.

In a way, the potential and impending truth of Tim May's statement is for a 
me a motivator to continue to promote strong crypto, ubiquitous Wi-Fi, 
"BlackNet", and so on. Hopefully it won't come down to the above.








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Re: DBCs now issued by DMT

[Peter Fairbrother]

I missed a trick (I was drunk.. and am again). Why should there be a bank,
as an organisation, at all?

Money doesn't mean anything real nowadays, it's just a medium. When it was
gold it might have meant something - but when the Spanish brought lots of
gold from the new world it fd up their ecomomy.

It's just a medium. That means that it should be exchangeable for other
things, not necessarily dollars or lire. If dollars and lire are
exchangeable for goods then they should be exchangeable for our money.

But do we need a bank? I'd guess we need an issuer, but why can't it be a
distributed issuer without central control (or even distributed control?)?
Can't the protocol deal with the problem of issue?

(We'd have to write a damn good one, of course)

-- 
Peter Fairbrother 

bear wrote:

> 
> 
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
> 
>> OK, suppose we've got a bank that issues bearer "money".
>> 
>> Who owns the bank? It should be owned by bearer shares, of course.
>> 
>> Can any clever person here devise such a protocol?
> 
> I thought about this problem for several months.
> 
> The problem I kept running into and had no way around is that if the
> holders are truly anonymous, then there is no way for them to seek
> redress for fraudulent issue or fraudulent transactions.  If the
> banker goes broke, people want to be able to make a claim against the
> banker's future earnings for whatever worthless currency they were
> holding when it happened, and they cannot do that from a position of
> anonymity.  People want a faithless banker punished, meaning jail time
> or hard labor, not just burning a nym.
> 
> The sole method for any truly anonymous currency to acquire value is
> for the banker to promise to redeem it for something that has
> value. So the banker, if it's to have a prayer of acceptance, cannot
> be anonymous.
> 
> And the minute the banker's not anonymous, the whole system is handed
> on a platter to the civil authorities and banking laws and so on, and
> then no part of the system can be reliably anonymous because the
> entire infrastructure of our legal system requires identity.
> 
> Look at the possibilities for conflict resolution.  How can the
> anonymous holder of an issued currency prove that he's the beneficiary
> to the issuer's promise to redeem, without the banker's cooperation
> and without compromising his/her anonymity?  And if s/he succeeded in
> proving it, who could force an anonymous banker to pay up?  And if you
> succeeded in making the banker pay up, how could the banker prove
> without the cooperation of the payee that the payment was made and
> made to the correct payee?
> 
> We use a long-accepted fiat currency, so we're not used to thinking
> about the nitty-gritty details that money as an infrastructure
> requires. It is hidden from us because our currency infrastructure has
> not broken down in living memory.  We shifted from privately issued
> currency to government-issued currency largely without destabilizing
> the economy.  Then once people were accustomed to not thinking of a
> promise to redeem as being the source of value, we went off the gold
> standard.  Our economy hasn't broken yet, but you have to realize that
> this situation is a little bizarre from the point of view of currency
> issue.  We're not thinking anymore about the promise to redeem
> currency for something of value, and the implications of failure to
> honor that promise, because we live in a sheltered and mildly bizarre
> moment in history where those things haven't been relevant for a long
> time to the currency we use most.  But any new currency would have to
> have a good solid solution for that issue.
> 
> The only way I found to decentralize the system, at all, was the model
> where all the actors are pseudonymous rather than anonymous, each user
> has the power to issue currency, and different issued currencies were
> allowed to fluctuate in value against each other depending on the
> degree of trust or value of the underlying redemption commodity.
> Money becomes a protocol and a commodity and labor exchange in raw
> form, rather than a simple sum - it's back to the barter system.
> 
>> I'd guess that all the Bank's finances should be available to anyone who
>> asks. That should include an accounting of all the "money" issued. And not
>> be reliant on one computer to keep the records.
> 
> An interesting idea, but it more or less prohibits offline
> transactions involving a currency issue.  It also means the entire
> market must be finite and closed.
> 
>> Or the propounders wanting to: make a profit/control the bank?
> 
> I do not think that there are profits to be made as an issuer of
> anonymous or hard-pseudonymous money.  That's one of the reasons I
> advocate the "everyone is potentially a mint" model -- the expenses of
> issue, and the cost of doing business uphill against trust until one's
> issue is trusted, should be shared in something like equal proportions
> by

Akamai

[Harmon Seaver]

   Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also
akamaitechnologies.com)? I was getting about a zillion hits on my web server
from them this morning. They seem to offer services to gov't agencies according
to their website.


 -- 
Harmon Seaver   
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com

Re: Money is about expected future value....nothing more, nothing less

[Marcel Popescu]

From: "Tim May" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> Mark cited the Bank of England, not U.S. law. I don't know what British
> law is in this regard.

It does appear that the law in England is not as "demanding" as I believed:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/legaltender.htm

<>

Mark

Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[Bill Stewart]

At 03:07 PM 12/08/2002 -0500, Mark Renouf wrote:

jet wrote:

At 20:48 -0500 2002/12/07, Myers W. Carpenter wrote:


http://www.2600.com/news/display/display.shtml?id=1441

PHOTOGRAPHER ARRESTED FOR TAKING PICTURES OF VICE PRESIDENT'S HOTEL
Posted 5 Dec 2002 06:03:48 UTC


One major issue is these days, the laws have become so
incredibly complicated that the average citizen isn't confident
in their knowledge of the law, let alone most that enforce it.


There are a couple of laws that are universal.
One of them is "Don't Annoy The Cops".
While occasionally you can violate this by accident,
because there's some thing the cops are doing that you didn't expect,
or because their paranoia or grouchiness levels have recently increased,
but usually you know when you're going to violate it.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it,
just that you shouldn't be surprised.

Re: ACLU funds Total Awareness of State Abuse

[Peter Gutmann]

[Apologies if you've seen this before, one of our machines has been quietly
 dropping outgoing mail...]

"Major Variola (ret)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>It's a mirror image to the government's plan to empower some Americans to
>check on their neighbors, under a program known as the Terrorism Information
>and Prevention System.

Is that the American Neighbourhood Watch?  That lead to the following post on
the ukcrypto list a while back:

-- Snip --

Graham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>Beware! traitors are everywhere!  You must immediately report any
 terrorists
>treasonous behaviour or any suspicion of treasonous behaviour to the
 terrorist
>Computer. Failure to do so is treason.
 American Neighbourhood Watch

>Some of your brother Troubleshooters may serve the Computer as Guardians
  neigbours A.N.W.  neigbourhood
>Of Internal Security.  They are present for your protection.  They will
 wardens
>report any treasonous behaviour or hint of treasonous behaviour or
terrorist   terrorist
>suspicion that treasonous behavour might take place at some time in the
terrorist
>future, to the Computer.  Rejoice in the assurance that any treason
A.N.W.   terrorism
>among your companions will be discovered and punished.

>Devote your service to the Computer.  Your loyalty will be generously
A.N.W.
>rewarded.

So there we have the real explanation - Dubya wants a live roleplaying version
of the game.

Peter.

-- Snip --

Peter.

Re: DBCs now issued by DMT

[Tyler Durden]

I too admit of having done some imbibing (Belgian ale I'm afraid).

I was thinking about this on the heels of your last lubricated missive, and 
a very similar thing occurred to me.

Actually, something far less ambitious (in the short run)...

First of all, I see no deep reason why some bank acount (or, more likely, a 
whole bunch of 'em) can't be auto-administered like a simple mini bank. It 
would be auto-administered via the votes of its "owners", who have never 
met, and who are unaware of the real names of the other owners. Owners vote 
to lend money out of this account to whomever.

As for the administration, well that's 'obviously' handled by a proxy 
program somewhere, that translates the votes into actual decisions about the 
account (including loan amount, interest rate, debt-to-liquidity ratio and 
so on).

Needless to say, since this account is tied to one or more denominations, it 
could eventually be shutdown through the concerted actions of various 
governments. But the mechanisms of such a "bank" are (I think) independent 
of the possibility of reliability of a future digital currency. (And of 
course, there's a lot such a "bank" could do before getting shut down.)

The tough thing (or perhaps not..someone here must surely know) is the 
possibility of lending money to persons who are unidentified in "meatspace". 
(But then again, even in the non-Cyber world, 'meatspace' is very rarely an 
issue when lending money...it all boils down to credit records anyway...)




But do we need a bank? I'd guess we need an issuer, but why can't it be a
distributed issuer without central control (or even distributed control?)?
Can't the protocol deal with the problem of issue?

(We'd have to write a damn good one, of course)

--
Peter Fairbrother

bear wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
>
>> OK, suppose we've got a bank that issues bearer "money".
>>
>> Who owns the bank? It should be owned by bearer shares, of course.
>>
>> Can any clever person here devise such a protocol?
>
> I thought about this problem for several months.
>
> The problem I kept running into and had no way around is that if the
> holders are truly anonymous, then there is no way for them to seek
> redress for fraudulent issue or fraudulent transactions.  If the
> banker goes broke, people want to be able to make a claim against the
> banker's future earnings for whatever worthless currency they were
> holding when it happened, and they cannot do that from a position of
> anonymity.  People want a faithless banker punished, meaning jail time
> or hard labor, not just burning a nym.
>
> The sole method for any truly anonymous currency to acquire value is
> for the banker to promise to redeem it for something that has
> value. So the banker, if it's to have a prayer of acceptance, cannot
> be anonymous.
>
> And the minute the banker's not anonymous, the whole system is handed
> on a platter to the civil authorities and banking laws and so on, and
> then no part of the system can be reliably anonymous because the
> entire infrastructure of our legal system requires identity.
>
> Look at the possibilities for conflict resolution.  How can the
> anonymous holder of an issued currency prove that he's the beneficiary
> to the issuer's promise to redeem, without the banker's cooperation
> and without compromising his/her anonymity?  And if s/he succeeded in
> proving it, who could force an anonymous banker to pay up?  And if you
> succeeded in making the banker pay up, how could the banker prove
> without the cooperation of the payee that the payment was made and
> made to the correct payee?
>
> We use a long-accepted fiat currency, so we're not used to thinking
> about the nitty-gritty details that money as an infrastructure
> requires. It is hidden from us because our currency infrastructure has
> not broken down in living memory.  We shifted from privately issued
> currency to government-issued currency largely without destabilizing
> the economy.  Then once people were accustomed to not thinking of a
> promise to redeem as being the source of value, we went off the gold
> standard.  Our economy hasn't broken yet, but you have to realize that
> this situation is a little bizarre from the point of view of currency
> issue.  We're not thinking anymore about the promise to redeem
> currency for something of value, and the implications of failure to
> honor that promise, because we live in a sheltered and mildly bizarre
> moment in history where those things haven't been relevant for a long
> time to the currency we use most.  But any new currency would have to
> have a good solid solution for that issue.
>
> The only way I found to decentralize the system, at all, was the model
> where all the actors are pseudonymous rather than anonymous, each user
> has the power to issue currency, and different issued currencies were
> allowed to fluctuate in value against each other depending on the
> degree of trust or value of the

Re: DBCs now issued by DMT

[Bill Stewart]

At 02:17 AM 12/05/2002 +, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

OK, suppose we've got a bank that issues bearer "money".
Who owns the bank? It should be owned by bearer shares, of course.


Why?


Or the propounders wanting to: make a profit/control the bank?


There are two main reasons honest people start banks -
- either they want to make a profit / gain control / etc.
- or else they want to get banking services with some
predictability they're not finding in the commercial market,
e.g. in the US, this is a Credit Union,
or in many cultures, this is some family or private
group that lends money to each other.

Re: DBCs now issued by DMT

[Mike Rosing]

On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, Tyler Durden wrote:

> I too admit of having done some imbibing (Belgian ale I'm afraid).

Belgian beer is pretty good, in Belgium anyway.  How's it travel?

> First of all, I see no deep reason why some bank acount (or, more likely, a
> whole bunch of 'em) can't be auto-administered like a simple mini bank. It
> would be auto-administered via the votes of its "owners", who have never
> met, and who are unaware of the real names of the other owners. Owners vote
> to lend money out of this account to whomever.

Like Bail bondsmen :-)  You don't show up in court, you got more than
cops on your tail

> Needless to say, since this account is tied to one or more denominations, it
> could eventually be shutdown through the concerted actions of various
> governments. But the mechanisms of such a "bank" are (I think) independent
> of the possibility of reliability of a future digital currency. (And of
> course, there's a lot such a "bank" could do before getting shut down.)

I don't think they'd really care as long as *they* printed the currency
originally.  If you invent your own bits and don't tie it to anything,
and it actually gets believed into reality, that'd be an interesting
phenomena.  So if you collect real cash, (what ever "real" means...)
and ship bits based on it, no government is going to care since they
created it in the first place.

Many companies issue their own cash, which is only redeemable in their
stores.  It starts from the local governments cash tho, so nobody cares.

> The tough thing (or perhaps not..someone here must surely know) is the
> possibility of lending money to persons who are unidentified in "meatspace".
> (But then again, even in the non-Cyber world, 'meatspace' is very rarely an
> issue when lending money...it all boils down to credit records anyway...)

I'm gonna have to  stock up on scotch.  Usually you need some kind of hold
on the lendee (see bail bondsman above).  A meatspace hold works best :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike