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In case you're too young to remember or never heard of it, KoH was an encrypting virus of sorts. I recall playing with in in college in the early 90s. Was a pretty cool concept.

The big issue here is the dangerous idea that ideas are dangerous.

Far distant dystopian future: With transporter technology, customs "copies" you at the border and keeps a copy of you in stasis for further questioning/interrogation. "You are free to go. Your copy will stay behind for questioning. Don't worry--you won't feel a thing."

I keep thinking back on a USENET posting titled The Legend of Ruritania (this may not be the official link, but is the oldest preserved copy I could quickly locate).

"He is 26 years old."

26 and going on 46. (more images)

Which would be pretty incredibly stupid to pay £65mil for, considering what the "Royal Family" did to HavenCo.
http://havenco.venona.com/

Everyone remember when anon.funet.fi was raided at the request of scientology?

With enough money to fund attorneys you can apparently get other countries, especially the Finnish, to comply.

Oh, please! You called someone an idiot,

But that "someone" was not you -- or anyone identifiable

, or when you slandered me by claiming that I have a history of "hate speech" (gotta love those liberal weasel-words) against Mormons and Scientologists.

I refer you to this post for an opinion from a third party on what you wrote ("a bunch of hate-filler nonsense").

No, the link I provided was to a thread of discussion, on which many things were said, and on which the consensus of the participants seems to be that H1-B visas should be abolished.

But you stated the my position aligned with theirs, which included the claim that "white people" should get the jobs and that sabotaging the careers of coworkers was acceptable, not that we had some areas of agreement.

Why? (And, for extra credit: why do you keep dodging that question?)

Main answer: Because a primary goal of the U.S. government should be to provide for the economic well-being of U.S. citizens. Thus, the U.S. government should pass legislation that forces, or encourages, hiring of U.S. workers. This has nothing to do with race, ethnicity, or religion. It has to do with the standard of living in the U.S.

Extra credit: Because I want to get back to the original focus of our discussion.

News flash! H1-B visa workers do the work here in the USA. They come here and join the middle class.

While they are here temporarily, many of them send a large portion of their earnings back to their families overseas. They also take their learned job skills back with them, too. I was also referring to outsourcing, though I should have made that more clear.

Do yourself a big favor and cut the threats. You're not the only one who knows how to hire a lawyer, and you're on much thinner ice than you realize.

You had your chance. I hope that saving face on Slashdot was worth it to you.

Adelman was an advisor on "Sneakers".

Anyone who knows the recent history of how Interbase became Firebird appreciates just how wretched and bloody and ugly the final months were before it became open source. There were folks fighting tooth and nail to give this incredible product a fighting chance, and I have nothing but respect for what they have achieved.

From what little I know about the FirebirdSQL database, I have tremendous respect for their technical accomplishments, and the work they did to get their project off the ground.

I do not have any respect at all left for their methods in dealing with conflict. There are a lot of people trying to guess what mozilla.org did or did not do in the search for a new name for Phoenix, and how mozilla.org will or will not use the name "Firebird". These are speculations that don't need to happen, since simply asking politely would have had the questions answered. Instead, the FirebirdSQL crew assumed malice and and "dirty deeds" and went straight from "hey, they're using the name Firebird as well" to "they're evil and we must mailbomb them into the ground, so that they see that we deserve the name more".

I'm not involved in the day-to-day operation of Mozilla anymore, and I've been under email siege for days now. When this whole thing started, I was sympathetic to their emotional reaction, and interested in finding ways to mitigate the (incredibly small) chance of user confusion. Now, I don't want to have anything to do with the Firebird people at all, I no longer care much for their feelings, and I'm very unlikely to expend more effort in trying to reach some sort of outcome that makes them happy. Maybe that was their intent, but maybe I'm starting to understand why their dealings with Borland were so troublesome.

(That they've had historic problems with names and legal issues and whatever other hell they, like any other large project, have endured might explain some of their IMO immature, self-damaging, offensive behaviour, but it sure doesn't excuse it.)

Actually, the very first thing I did when I heard about the conflict was head to Google, where I found that searching for firebird turned up a pile of projects and products, firebird software was just as crowded, and firebird internet completed the trifecta of shared-namespace results. So my take was, and largely still is, that there's a community of projects using the name "Firebird", including many in the software and internet spaces, and that we would be N + 1 to their happy N. Nobody has yet made a convincing argument to me that it can't be the case, nor that FirebirdSQL's million-plus users and developers will disappear because FirebirdSQL is no longer the largest project using the name-part. And believe me, I've heard a lot of argument on this topic.

If a name change is made -- which I find to be unlikely, and which makes the "only a name change will satisfy us" position of the FirebirdSQL people somewhat unfortunate -- I hope it's to "butt-head database".

I am not speaking for mozilla.org here, in case that wasn't clear. I just think that the FirebirdSQL people could have done themselves a lot of good by approaching mozilla.org politely and explaining their concerns, before bitching to the press and inciting mail and forum-bombings, replete with ad hominem nonsense. At the least, they've lost themselves whatever meagre contribution I could have made to a peaceful resolution.

Still not definitive, but:
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/11/msg0057 6.html

...given that it was invented by NeXT?

Just make sure you get the right Robert Morris. You want this one, not this one, nor this one. (Anyone got a link to a picture of the elder Morris?, the only one I can find is google cache

Ok, I can karma whore too, Ryan Lackey, the sealand CTO has a couple of pictures on his home page He's a cool geezer. He has shown up at london 2600 and DNScon in the past.

In 1997, Symantec partnered with Ziff Davis in launching the HealthyPC.com web site. It was a subscription service that allowed customers access to Norton Antivirus, a subset of Norton Utilities, and the then newly developed LiveUpdate product. I did web design for that launch.

The way the service worked is that the apps were downloaded and installed on the client side, but they could only be activated by a launch script from the server side, so a user had to log in to the HealthyPC.com subscriber area in order to use the tools.

Here are some pages that reference HealthyPC.com and pretty clearly show dates from 1997 (according to News.com, McAfee applied for the patent in 1998):

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-318512.html
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1997/04/msg0024 1.html
http://www8.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/sod/sd970310.h tm
http://www.quantum.org/members/issues/1097/7875.ht m

Before that, there was a site offering similar services that was called TuneUp.com, but it ended up going through a few acquisitions before finally ending up as part of Symantec.

While I feel incredibly sorry for Dmitry and his family, there's absolutely nothing about this incident which couldn't be fully predicted from the DMCA itself, and the general legal trend in the US for the past 50+ years. Corporations are in the business of maximizing profit and minimizing risk, and governments are in the business of maximizing order, increasing control, and growing their headcount, prestige, and budgets. This is the logical result of evolution through time.

Without strong protections, enshrined in contracts like the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and in the everyday behavior and norms expected by a well-educated, informed, and active citizenry, things will naturally become more and more authoritarian. We've seen it in the US with DMCA, CALEA, and other new laws, as well as administrative actions taken by government agencies. We've seen it in the UK, with abominations like the RIP Act. We've seen it in the EU, which passes laws which ostensibly protect individual privacy but in fact create new bureaucracy. And Asia and Australia are even worse in a lot of ways.

Absent a major change in public perception (which I think is highly unlikely), the only path to individual liberty is technical. Perhaps it is now the case that security researchers, mathematicians, and pro-liberty activists must go underground, communicating using anonymous remailers, pseudonyms, and strong cryptography. Certainly groups have been forced underground in the past, but given certain conditions, it is impossible for them to be totally silenced. There are plenty of places in the world where people can live in freedom, due to a policy (intentional or unintentional) of tolerance -- Holland, Costa Rica, islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific -- for those who can't live underground in their own lands. Hopefully, HavenCo and Sealand can play some role in safeguarding liberty for those who live in other nations, by hosting servers for sensitive projects, remailers, and other infrastructure, as well as serving as an example of rational security policy for other nations. However, systems like Mojonation, Gnutella, Napster, ZKS Freedom, Mixmaster remailers, OpenPGP, and BitTorrent are perhaps more important for enabling this kind of research to be conducted, if not openly, at least securely.

If you're going to campaign for political change, don't just campaign for Dmitry to be released, or the DMCA to be overturned -- the core issue here is the continued erosion of individual liberty, at the hands of government, "well-intentioned do-gooders", and corporations.

I look forward to seeing people at HAL 2001, which thankfully is being held in a fairly free country.

Ryan Lackey
http://www.venona.com/rdl/
http://www.havenco.com/

One politician who deserves to be recognized is Russ Feingold, the idiosyncratic senator from Wisconsin. Best known for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill (and one of the few politicians to refuse PAC money in a campaign for national office), Feingold has also long been one of the few tech-savvy people in a notoriously over-age, anti-tech government body. His finest hour in this regard was the Leahy-Feingold bill to overturn the Communications Decency Act, which was left to the courts to litigate; but he's often spoken out on issues near and dear to the EFF, with support for encryption freedoms and online privacy.

The only Senator who really outstrips him in this area is Patrick Leahy, D-VT, who takes the lead on more tech issues (Feingold often being a co-sponsor), especially since Feingold has put so much effort into the campaign finance issue.

But especially in those early days around 1995, when hardly anyone really knew what the internet was, Feingold said on the Senate floor,

Guaranteeing the Internet is free of speech restrictions, other than the statutory restrictions on obscenity and pornography which already exist, should be of concern to all Americans who want to be able to freely discuss issues of importance to them regardless of whether others might view those statements as offensive or distasteful. Shifting political views about what types of speech are unsuitable should not be allowed to determine what is or is not an appropriate use of electronic communications. While the current target of our political climate is indecent speech (the so-called "seven dirty words"), a weakening of First Amendment protections could lead to the censorship of other crucial types of speech, including religious expression and political dissent. I believe the censorship of the Internet is a perilous road for the Congress to walk down. It sets a dangerous precedent for First Amendment protections and it is unclear where that road will end.

Very impressive. Remember, this was nineteen-ninety-five, TIME magazine was running cover stories suggesting the internet was some sinister force creeping into our homes, and most people still had to have the word explained to them. In those days, it was difficult to find anyone who would stand up for the rights of internet users, who were seen as a fringe group of suspicious characters, hackers, pornographers, terrorists and worse -- rather than today's view that the internet is a basic utility to be enjoyed by all citizens. Fortunately, shortly after this I attended a Rotary Club meeting where he spoke (we are from the same home town), and in the Q&A time I stood up and let him know that a lot of people online considered him a hero.
----
lake effect weblog

In fact, it's so simple, here is the description of the protocol from the paper. The paper elaborates on why it works and generalizes it and also includes a proof.

Three cryptographers are sitting down to dinner at their favorite three-star restaurant. Their waiter informs them that arrangements have been made with the maitre d'hotel for the bill to be paid anonymously. One of the cryptographers might be paying for the dinner, or it might have been NSA (U.S. National Security Agency). The three cryptographers respect each other's right to make an anonymous payment, but they wonder if NSA is paying. They resolve their uncertainty fairly by carrying out the following protocol:

Each cryptographer flips an unbiased coin behind his menu, between him and the cryptographer on his right, so that only the two of them can see the outcome. Each cryptographer then states aloud whether the two coins he can see--the one he flipped and the one his left-hand neighbor flipped--fell on the same side or on different sides. If one of the cryptographers is the payer, he states the opposite of what he sees. An odd number of differences uttered at the table indicates that a cryptographer is paying; an even number indicates that NSA is paying (assuming that the dinner was paid for only once). Yet if a cryptographer is paying, neither of the other two learns anything from the utterances about which cryptographer it is.

A copy of Chaums paper is located here.

Burris

While I don't mean to quash anyone's healthy paranoia, I am not aware of statistics (as opposed to anecdotes) indicating that unauthorized wiretaps are in widespread use.

The LA Times had a story in 1998 about extensive illegal wiretaps performed by the LAPD.

I was largely skeptical of the Sealand datahaven until I read that Ryan Lackey was the CTO.

This fella is one of the Financial Cryptography folks in Anguilla, along with Vince Cate. Some of the folks who sponsor the FC symposia include Zero Knowledge, E-Gold, and Hushmail.

I don't know about you guys, but when one of that trust-web is involved in something to do with liberty/cypherpunk/finance, I lend it more credence.

Given how intrusive search engines can be
(you want to download every single file
in the
Cypherpunks Archives? That's about 100k and
growing!), and how similar a lot of what they're
doing is, it would be really nice if the search
engines banded together and shared their raw data
over a private extranet, rather than every single
spider anyone with a spare PC decides to run
pillaging my website in turn. It's not such
a big deal for a well connected site like mine,
but for people on the end of a 9.6kbps link in
the developing world, search engine hits can
impose a high burden, but one which must be
borne to have one's content searchable.

The sites could still differentiate themselves
in spider technology by using their own custom
formats, analysis, etc., but ideally, whenever
one downloaded a page via http from an end-user
server, it would be available to the other
search engines automatically over private, high
speed links. By doing this, they'd all be able
to update more frequently, yet reduce overall
load on the net as a whole.

I suspect this will be more of a problem, not
less one one, in the future, and despite
the pitched competition in the search engine
industry, it'd be nice to see them work together
to improve the quality of the net as a whole.
After all, it's not a zero sum game!