Re: Breaking Iranian Codes (Re: CRYPTO-GRAM, June 15, 2003)
> Maybe Chalabi read the story himself and invented the > snitch to make it seem more important than it was, or to > drive the US security community nuts with an orgy of > internal witch-hunting. Given the lack of further > information, it could have been just about anything. Maybe Chalabi made up a story that turned out to be true and, like the 1965 movie "I saw what you did and I know who you are" where a pair of teenagers make prank calls at random and say that sentence -- which is fun until they ring up a guy who just murdered his wife -- now has to explain that which is impossible to explain. --dan
Re: Ross's TCPA paper
Over the last six months, I'd discovered that Carl Ellison (Intel), Joan Feigenbaum (Yale) and I agreed on at least one thing: that the problem statements for "privacy" and for "digital rights management" were identical, viz., "controlled release of information is yours at a distance in space or time" and that as such our choices for the future of digital rights management and privacy are "both or neither" at least insofar as technology, rather than cultural norms & law, drive. Last week at USENIX 2002 I tried this out on Larry Lessig as his keynote had been a takeoff from his recent _The Future of Ideas_ book. His response was confirming: "Of course they are the same!" and he went on to describe that when Mark Stefik (Xerox PARC) had submitted his patent on DRM in the early '90s it had roughly said "wrap data such that if you try to abuse it it will self destruct." Sometime in the late '90s a Canadian inventor had attempted to patent a privacy technology with the rough description "wrap data such that if you try to abuse it it will self destruct." The USPTO denied the patent request on the grounds that it duplicated an application that had already been granted. Speaking personally, if asked "DRM & privacy, both or neither?" then I will take "both" -- YMMV. --dan
Re: DOJ proposes US data-rentention law.
Steve, Not arguing, but the hardware cost curve for storage has a shorter halving time than the cost curve for CPU (Moore's Law) and the corresponding halving time for bandwidth is shorter still. If that relationship holds up over a period of years, today's tradeoffs between cache, re-computation, and anticipatory transmission would presumably change in the direction the economics dictates. And of course, if I really care that a particular piece of data is non-discoverable I either have to encrypt it, never transmit it, or go on one whopping search mission. Or so I think. Does the world look different from your vantage? --dan
Re: Edinburgh Financial Cryptography Engineering 2002 - CFP
Peter, > Does anyone know what happened to the Usenix e-commerce > conferences? They were in the vein of what FC used to be ... > there's also the EC-Web conference, although that has more of an > emphasis on web technology than EC. I founded this series in 1995 and was proud to have done so; we ran them in 1996 and 1998 as well, but the cutting edge quickly moved away from USENIX's core and forte to where every conference organizer on the planet had an e-commerce workshop of some sort up and running. Whether these were technical, financial or sheer hype, the noise factor was too great and we (USENIX Board of Directors) moved on to other things where we could make a difference without having to wage an advertising war in the middle of an investment bubble. I'm open to suggestions, of course, but in the meantime you might enjoy reminiscing about 1995 as seen through this lens: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/ec95/index.html --dan (current usenix president)
