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Domain: cypherspace.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to cypherspace.org.

Stories · 7

  1. UK Election Arcana, Explained By Software

    Politics · Government · · posted by timothy · from the ask-the-queen dept. · 568 comments
    An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in 35 years the UK government is looking to be at risk of getting a hung or coalition government. (The most recent previous hung parliaments were in 1974 and 1929.) The voting rules are somewhat arcane and the votes this time are such that there are many strange possible outcomes and a surprisingly large number of permutations of coalitions that could be formed and political strategies that may go into their forming. There are at least 60 permutations, some more politically plausible than others. Adam Back wrote some software to work out the permutations, and lists some of the arcane factors affecting the outcome. If Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown chose to, it would appear even that he could simply refuse to resign, ostensibly trying to form a coalition indefinitely, maybe even forcing the Queen to dismiss the current government, which last happened in 1834 under King William IV."

  2. UK Election Arcana, Explained By Software

    Politics · Government · · posted by timothy · from the ask-the-queen dept. · 568 comments
    An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in 35 years the UK government is looking to be at risk of getting a hung or coalition government. (The most recent previous hung parliaments were in 1974 and 1929.) The voting rules are somewhat arcane and the votes this time are such that there are many strange possible outcomes and a surprisingly large number of permutations of coalitions that could be formed and political strategies that may go into their forming. There are at least 60 permutations, some more politically plausible than others. Adam Back wrote some software to work out the permutations, and lists some of the arcane factors affecting the outcome. If Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown chose to, it would appear even that he could simply refuse to resign, ostensibly trying to form a coalition indefinitely, maybe even forcing the Queen to dismiss the current government, which last happened in 1834 under King William IV."

  3. Digital Credentials Offer Enhanced Privacy

    Yro · Privacy · · posted by kdawson · from the cypherpunks-write-code dept. · 49 comments
    John Q Random writes "Stefan Brands's company credentica.com announced their U-Prove library and SDK implementing ID tokens — also known as digital credentials or private credentials. (Private Credentials are a cool PKI replacement and anonymous e-cash tech that allows you to prove certified attributes like age, credit rating, group membership, etc. without revealing who you are; to allow you to have a digital life without the digital dossier effect inherent in a central databases.) Following this announcement, Adam Back announced credlib, an open source implementation of Brands credentials (and the older more basic Chaum certificates). These developments relate to recent news from IBM's Zurich labs on their identity-mixer project (previously discussed on Slashdot) that is based on the less efficient Jan Camenisch and Anna Lysyanskaya credentials."

  4. Digital Credentials Offer Enhanced Privacy

    Yro · Privacy · · posted by kdawson · from the cypherpunks-write-code dept. · 49 comments
    John Q Random writes "Stefan Brands's company credentica.com announced their U-Prove library and SDK implementing ID tokens — also known as digital credentials or private credentials. (Private Credentials are a cool PKI replacement and anonymous e-cash tech that allows you to prove certified attributes like age, credit rating, group membership, etc. without revealing who you are; to allow you to have a digital life without the digital dossier effect inherent in a central databases.) Following this announcement, Adam Back announced credlib, an open source implementation of Brands credentials (and the older more basic Chaum certificates). These developments relate to recent news from IBM's Zurich labs on their identity-mixer project (previously discussed on Slashdot) that is based on the less efficient Jan Camenisch and Anna Lysyanskaya credentials."

  5. More Applications For Hashcash

    It · Security · · posted by timothy · from the to-stem-the-tide dept. · 97 comments
    Anon writes: "Although the use of HashCash has been featured before, Adam Back has recently (August 1st) published a paper about it, outlining many other applications for the mechanism. Quite an interesting read. It seems the guys at camram have been working on a standard for use in e-mail too."

  6. More Applications For Hashcash

    It · Security · · posted by timothy · from the to-stem-the-tide dept. · 97 comments
    Anon writes: "Although the use of HashCash has been featured before, Adam Back has recently (August 1st) published a paper about it, outlining many other applications for the mechanism. Quite an interesting read. It seems the guys at camram have been working on a standard for use in e-mail too."

  7. Hash Cash

    Yro · Spam · · posted by michael · from the what-you-pay-a-short-order-cook dept. · 15 comments
    km790816 writes: "I was reading an article in US News about a novel way to end spam: Hash Cash. From US News: 'our E-mail systems could be configured to reject every message from a stranger until the sender's computer had performed a difficult math problem and sent back the correct result. For one-to-one correspondence, this preliminary step would be unnoticed. But bulk E-mailings to strangers would become too costly in terms of needed computational cycles to be feasible, even with a supercomputer.'" If you've heard of Hash Cash before, don't click through, there's nothing new here. But if you haven't, here's a good introduction to the concept.