Re: Cypherpunks HyperArchive

> There is another archive at http://sof.mit.edu/cypherpunks, ironically
> the machine that hosts it is not up at the moment

The machine suffered either disk controller or HDD problems as I was
logged into it.  It is located in Boston, MA.  I do not currently have
a way of getting to the machine to repair it, and this will likely
continue to be true, so until I can get one of the people I know at
the site where the machine is located to fix it, the archives will be
offline.  If the machine cannot be fixed, I will put the archive up
elsewhere.  I believe hugh@toad.com copied the entire archive at some
point, so that might be helpful.

Sorry about this -- replicated servers are always a good idea.
-- 
Ryan Lackey
rdl@mit.edu
http://sof.mit.edu/rdl/

At 8:41 AM -0700 9/7/98, Ryan Lackey wrote:

>The machine suffered either disk controller or HDD problems as I was
>logged into it.  It is located in Boston, MA.  I do not currently have
>a way of getting to the machine to repair it, and this will likely
>continue to be true, so until I can get one of the people I know at
>the site where the machine is located to fix it, the archives will be
>offline.  If the machine cannot be fixed, I will put the archive up
>elsewhere.  I believe hugh@toad.com copied the entire archive at some
>point, so that might be helpful.
>
>Sorry about this -- replicated servers are always a good idea.

Indeed, weren't you developing some kind of distributed eternity server? So
much for eternity, I guess.

Ryan, could you tell us what you are working on, and what has taken you out
of the country?

--Tim May

"The tree of liberty must be watered periodically with the blood of
tyrants...."
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist              | black markets, collapse of governments.

> Indeed, weren't you developing some kind of distributed eternity server? So
> much for eternity, I guess.

I believe Eternity depends upon a viable electronic cash system.  I put 
Eternity DDS on hold until one existed, and switched to working on HINDE,
a project with Ian Goldberg, to create a workable electronic cash system.
Creating a workable electronic cash system became...complicated (e.g. given
that I was recently at Bob Hettinga's electronic cash conference in Boston
giving a technical presentation, and it turns out the new CEO of DigiCash
was i the audience as "an interested investor"...perhaps it was impolitic
of me to continually bash DigiCash and David Chaum in a group of people
who I did not all definitely know to not be DigiCash employees...)  

Ian's gone on to do
Zero-Knowledge Systems, and I'm now working on what follows in this
email, so HINDE, the defined as the cypherpunkish protest against DigiCash, 
is probably quiescent.  Don't read anything into that, though.

For backing up the Cypherpunks Archives, I could have done just as well
by setting up two identical machines with rsync mirroring the drives.  I do
this kind of thing with real data, but didn't feel the 1gb of archive data
was high enough importance to mirror.  It appears the machine will be up
in a week or so, and if the drive is broken, I will send it off to a drive
recovery place for recovery, so the archives will be up, minus the most
recent month or two, in a month, at the outside.
> 
> Ryan, could you tell us what you are working on, and what has taken you out
> of the country?
The two answers are related, but distinct.

I am working on an interesting project with an interesting organization to
develop interesting applications for interesting clients.  I would provide
more detail here now if I could, and will in the future.

I have left the US for many reasons.  One, because I can, at least now.  I left
about a month ago.  I'm increasingly concerned about y2k issues, and my
situation in Boston (living about 0.25 miles from the exact center of Boston)
was not at all compatible with the kind of preparation I believe in.  I am
concerned not so much with the primary/prompt effects of y2k as I am
of societal panic and the government's response, perhaps proactive, to
that panic.

I left because the crypto policies of the US were getting increasingly
obnoxious, although I am a US citizen, and am not violating any EAR
restrictions.  (I'm actually probably obeying US law even more totally
here than I did when I lived in the US -- in Cambridge, MA, it is a 
crime to "interdigitate", that is, to hold hands with someone of the opposite
sex.  I think I was actually a potential felon before I left too, as I had an 
unpaid library fine at the Boston Public Library which I paid the day before
I left, and I believe having outstanding fines for greater than a year is
a felony in MA, a holdover from colonial times.)

I left because I wanted to be doing more, and plotting/scheming about what
I could be doing if I were not in the US less.  

I left because the US is just not the best place for me to live at the
current time, given that my primary goal right now is to accomplish the
"interesting projects".  

I left because in a time of uncertainty about the future, it is nice to
be far away from both soft targets and fundamentally self-serving
organizations with large amounts of power and no constraints upon
their use of such.

Given that I haven't actually broken any laws in coming here, and am being
scrupulous to avoid breaking any while I'm here, it wasn't really that
big a change.  I sold my stereo and long-term-loaned my larger computers
and monitors to one of my former housemates, but if things didn't work out, 
I could very easily move back to the US.  However, I can't imagine any
situations where this is a worthwhile choice.  I was thinking about the
things in the US I could conceivably miss -- some heavy industrial things,
the Grand Canyon, and MAE-East, and all of them can be substituted
with other things elsewhere.

So, leaving was somewhat supported by what I'm working on, but neither
really required the other -- they were independent choices which made
sense independently and made even more sense together.

I'd encourage anyone interested in leaving the US for a few years to 
seriously consider doing so ASAP, before 1 January 1999 if at all possible.
It takes some time to get set up in a new place, and you want this all
sorted out before any potential uncertainty becomes reality.

If I had the money and time to set myself up in the US with a reasonable
plot of land far away from any nearby targets or attackers, I would have
considered it more than I did, but I don't yet have investment income to
live from, so I needed a place where I could make a reasonable amount of
money, and Montana wasn't quite it.  For those who can, or who were lucky
enough to find themselves in that position before the y2k uncertainty
became a pressing issue, staying in place may easily make more sense.

Anguilla is actually a pretty reasonable choice as far as a place to
spend a few years away from the US -- 7 000 people, many with a strong
libertarian bent because they've always owned their own land, reasonable
comms, no taxes, accessible through a neighboring island's jet airport
but not really a place with a lot of through-traffic itself, etc.  If you
stockpile a bit of food and supplies, you're probably all set -- security
is nowhere near as big an issue here as it would be in most of the US.  I
was objectively evaluating my situation in Boston, and it would have required
more than a reinforced brigade to provide any reasonable security there.  The
cost of that buys an awful lot of canned/nitrogen-packed food...  I'm sure
there are other places in the world which are reasonable, but I've
only really looked at Anguilla, due to fc99, and I knew people here already.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----


At 3:38 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Robert Hettinga wrote about Ryan Lackey's
whereabouts, on cypherpunks:

> If I told you, I would have to kill you?

Whew. Glad Ryan has now said something publically now about his and Ian's bit
of extraterritorial subtrifuge (though Ian  doesn't qualify, of course). I
mean, I just *hate* keeping secrets... ;-).

Frankly, I *really* have a hard time with all this
man-without-a-first-world-country, crypto-expat stuff. I think making the
technology not eonomically optional is the way to change things, and no
amount of romantic, jurisdiction-shopping "regulatory arbitrage" is going
to alter reality all that much.

But, I guess, Anguilla's as nice a place to have this affliction as any I can
think of.

And, I wish Vince -- and now, apparently, Ryan -- good luck, whatever happens.


Yet, for some reason, memories of Vietnam-era draft-dodgers keep coming to
mind. For what it cost them all personally, not much good came of it, I'd say,
for them or anyone else. The people who protested the war and "fought the good
fight" to end it stayed here to do it, after all. The most potent anti-war
activists were Vietnam vets themselves, for that matter. And, of course,
Ridgeway told Eisenhower at the outset that Vietnam was a multi-million-man
war, and Eisenhower stayed out accordingly, throwing a few marginal people on
the ground to shut Lodge up. It took Testosterone Jack to get a Special-Forces
hard-on. Eventually he and Desktop Lyndon ended up screwing a pooch
instead of the commies.


Do people out there really think somebody like Gore's going to do a
crypto-amnesty someday? I didn't think so. Ashcroft, maybe, but don't hold
your breath, there, either. It'll be decades, I bet, and our "boys over
there" will have grey hair long before they do come back home on this one.
Political inertia is probably going to keep a few people we know outside
the fence, looking in, for an awful long time after the issue's utterly
dead.

I expect people who do this crypto-expat stuff are going to get their
new passports refused at the U.S. border when they visit, and I think that
things are going to get worse for them for a long time before they get better.
Of course, there's a fair argument to be made that if they do get refused,
it's probably time to leave, anyway, but I'll let someone else gnaw that bone.

And, frankly, I *do* expect that the FBI will attempt domestic crypto
controls, just like they've been been trying to do for some time now. But,
unlike a lot of people, I think that the marketplace will steamroller all
such silliness into yet another roadtop attraction, before or after its
legislation.

Anyway, as the old "excrable" e$yllogism goes,

Digital commerce is financial cryptography.
Financial cryptography is strong cryptography.
Therefore, if there's no strong cryptography, there's no digital commerce.


So, call me an optimist.

Like I've said before, I've heard the end of life and liberty as we know it
predicted over and over again -- hell, I've even believed so myself, once or
twice -- but, like the Gibbon quote in my .sig goes, "however it may deserve
respect for its usefulness and antiquity", I ain't seen it happen yet.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga


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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'

(Note: my original message was posted to Cypherpunks, which I consider
to be substantially different than DBS: had I been posting to DBS, I would
have included different details...list differentiation is kin of useful,
it's why the different lists were created in the first place)
> 
> At 3:38 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Robert Hettinga wrote about Ryan Lackey's
> whereabouts, on cypherpunks:
> 
> > If I told you, I would have to kill you?

I never said this.  If you'd like to fabricate/summarize/editorialize,
please make it clear that that's what you're doing, by using the traditionally
accepted editorial convention of square brackets, or some other convention.
I prefer Chicago Manual of Style, but I'm sure the AP Stylebook is acceptable.
> 
> Whew. Glad Ryan has now said something publically now about his and Ian's bit
> of extraterritorial subtrifuge (though Ian  doesn't qualify, of course). I
> mean, I just *hate* keeping secrets... ;-).
> 
Ian Goldberg isn't involved -- he's working on Zero Knowledge Systems,
AFAIK, and I wish him luck, but I haven't really spoken to him in months.  He's
a Canadian, anyway.  I haven't mentioned working with anyone else anywhere,
other than that I'm working for "interesting" clients.  If you know otherwise,
it isn't particularly public knowledge at this point.

> Frankly, I *really* have a hard time with all this
> man-without-a-first-world-country, crypto-expat stuff. I think making the
> technology not eonomically optional is the way to change things, and no
> amount of romantic, jurisdiction-shopping "regulatory arbitrage" is going
> to alter reality all that much.

I'm not breaking US law.  I'm a US citizen.  I pay my taxes, respect US
law, etc.  It's just that I'm choosing to work on something somewhere other
than the US, for a variety of reasons.

> And, I wish Vince -- and now, apparently, Ryan -- good luck, whatever happens.

Vince formally renounced his citizenship, becoming a citizen of a small
african country, and intends to remain in Anguilla.  I left the US
for a while to work on stuff, and to get away from a major US city for
a while.  I think there's a huge difference here.  What I have
done is fundamentally no different than going to Montana to write code
for a while, other than that it was cheaper and more convenient for me to
come to Anguilla.

(Of course, Vince seems to be doing quite well...)  I just happen to not want
to go back to the US right now, it's not that I can't if I decide I want
to at some point.

Thanks,
Ryan
(who generally does not provide confidential information to people
who do not like keeping secrets, out of kindness for them)

Bob Hettinga wrote:

: Anyway, as the old "excrable" e$yllogism goes,
:
: Digital commerce is financial cryptography.
: Financial cryptography is strong cryptography.
: Therefore, if there's no strong cryptography, there's no
: digital commerce.
................................................................


It could justify becoming an exile, to develop the strong crypto needed for digital
commerce.
The conditions are right for it.

    ..
Blanc

> At 3:38 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Robert Hettinga wrote about Ryan Lackey's
> whereabouts, on cypherpunks:
>
> > If I told you, I would have to kill you?
>
> Whew. Glad Ryan has now said something publically now about his and Ian's bit
> of extraterritorial subtrifuge (though Ian  doesn't qualify, of course). I
> mean, I just *hate* keeping secrets... ;-).

As secrets go, this was not a big one...  The main thing that is
meant to be confidential was the nature and names of our clients,
and under normal business practice, they hold the option(s) on PR.
I don't think anyone should need to die to protect that, as even then,
their main issue is (probably) not revealing a relationship with a
product until it did what they wanted.

> Frankly, I *really* have a hard time with all this
> man-without-a-first-world-country, crypto-expat stuff.

Well, it's not *quite* like that.  The US was seriously considered,
but Ryan's offer of a fraternity bedroom/office, T1 or no T1, was
not as attractive as some time in the sun.  After all, FC came to
Anguilla for good reasons.

Also, there are other sites under long term consideration, not
in the US, but in other cool places.  The main reason for
considering these sites is that they make business sense; and
they are definately cool.  Maybe we'll keep the details to
ourselves until they are vapour-compliant.

It should be mentioned that the contagion properties of
renouncement are somewhat less than epidemic.  Vince decided to
"do the deed," but others are not exactly leaping for their
passports and Lonely Planet guides.  In fact, most of the at-risk
group here are still swearing by the bible and running up the flag
every morning, just in case anybody gets the wrong idea.  Or at
least that's what it seems like to those of us immunised at birth.

iang

Time for a little air clearing, here...


At 6:22 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Ryan Lackey wrote:


> (Note: my original message was posted to Cypherpunks, which I consider
> to be substantially different than DBS: had I been posting to DBS, I would
> have included different details...list differentiation is kin of useful,
> it's why the different lists were created in the first place)

Perils of the internet, Ryan, everything is everywhere forever. :-).

That's okay, you didn't sound that much different than you do anywhere
else. That was not perjorative, by the way...


> I never said this.  If you'd like to fabricate/summarize/editorialize,
> please make it clear that that's what you're doing, by using the
>traditionally
> accepted editorial convention of square brackets, or some other convention.
> I prefer Chicago Manual of Style, but I'm sure the AP Stylebook is
>acceptable.

Actually, I was quoting *myself*, talking about something you discussed
later, and which crossed paths with the post in question. It might help to
go back and reread the original, in the thread about the cypherpunk
hyperarchive, but, you're excused in the meantime. :-).


> Ian Goldberg isn't involved -- he's working on Zero Knowledge Systems,
> AFAIK, and I wish him luck, but I haven't really spoken to him in months.
>He's
> a Canadian, anyway.

I wasn't talking about *that* Ian. :-). As it is, Ian Grigg has outed
himself on another list already, but he's not the one making expatriate
noise, seeing as he's Australian, and all...

> I haven't mentioned working with anyone else anywhere,
> other than that I'm working for "interesting" clients.  If you know
>otherwise,
> it isn't particularly public knowledge at this point.

Um, yes. And I haven't said anything besides what's publically known.
Certainly *who* you're working for hasn't been revealed yet, and I haven't
done that. Even as much as I hate secrets. :-).


> I'm not breaking US law.  I'm a US citizen.  I pay my taxes, respect US
> law, etc.  It's just that I'm choosing to work on something somewhere other
> than the US, for a variety of reasons.

That's nice to know. Good to hear. See ya when you get back. At least you
haven't made that trip to Antigua or Barbados, or wherever, yet. That, in
my opinion, would be rather silly.

> > And, I wish Vince -- and now, apparently, Ryan -- good luck, whatever
>happens.
>
> Vince formally renounced his citizenship, becoming a citizen of a small
> african country, and intends to remain in Anguilla.  I left the US
> for a while to work on stuff, and to get away from a major US city for
> a while.  I think there's a huge difference here.

Again, marvellous.

> What I have
> done is fundamentally no different than going to Montana to write code
> for a while, other than that it was cheaper and more convenient for me to
> come to Anguilla.

Splendid. At the moment, I'd just barely prefer Anguilla to the North Fork
of the Flathead River myself, but my opinion on the subject is changing...

> (Of course, Vince seems to be doing quite well...)  I just happen to not want
> to go back to the US right now, it's not that I can't if I decide I want
> to at some point.

Again, marvellous. I would just be careful you don't fall in with the wrong
element while you're down there in the World's Best Place for Financial
Cryptography (tm). ;-).

> (who generally does not provide confidential information to people
> who do not like keeping secrets, out of kindness for them)

And, I might add, *you* didn't. :-).

Any information I've revealed on this is public. However, I'm in an
agressively public business, these days, yes? You don't put "Evangelism" in
your business name and expect to hide your light under a bushel basket...

Frankly, I'm only *really* obligated to keep secrets I'm paid to keep,
anymore. Word to the wise, for anyone else out there who wants call me up
and spill the beans. Past obligations will still be honored, of course, but
the rent's gotta be paid, same as it ever was. This includes "keep this
quiet, but..." in email, encrypted or otherwise, followed by This Week's
Business Plan. Frankly, I don't want to hear that stuff anymore unless
there's some remuneration behind it. Game over.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga


-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'

::
Anon-To: Ryan Lackey <ryan@arianrhod.systemics.ai>, Tim May <tcmay@got.net>


At 03:27 PM 9/7/98 -0400, Ryan Lackey wrote:
>Anguilla is actually a pretty reasonable choice as far as a place to
>spend a few years away from the US -- 7 000 people, many with a strong


Jul 7 1999

The US today launched a cruise missile strike against Anguilla, 
where Osama bin "Blowback" Laden was known, according to US National
Security officials, to be investing in an online gambling casino.



--Count of Monte Carlo

At 12:17 PM -0400 on 9/7/98, Tim May trolled:

> Ryan, could you tell us what you are working on, and what has taken you out
> of the country?

If I told you, I would have to kill you?

Seriously, Ryan and Ian were both moderators the Philodox Symposium on
Digital Bearer Transaction Settlement, held this July at the Harvard Club
in Boston. During the Symposium, they had several dinner conversations with
a couple of Symposium participants from a company which will remain
nameless, and they're currently putting together a digital bearer
transaction settlement system for those folks. Somewhere. :-).

Also there at the Symposium was Scott Loftesness, who's now the new
president of DigiCash, though the rest of us didn't know that at the time.
I was hoping someone from DigiCash would show up. I just didn't know
exactly how successful I was going to be in that until about two weeks ago.

Of course, a good time was had by all, including the likes of Dan Geer,
John Muller, some fairly serious financial people from Citicorp and VISA
and EGold, and several other interesting folks from various walks of
crypto, finance, and law. Had a great time, wish you were there, and all
that.

Yup, that financial technology evangelism stuff's just a waste of time.
Never gonna amount to much.

:-).

For my next trick  (besides some road-show DBTS seminars I'd like to do,
some speeches at upcoming electronic commerce/trading conferences in places
like Boston and London, the DBTS series I'm doing for Duncan Goldie-Scott's
online edition of the Financial Times, a white paper I'm doing for a credit
card company, some other fee-and-referral-commission consulting contracts,
and a few threatend projects from book editors <whew!>:-)) is a
chinese-wall, peer-reviewed legal conference on digital bearer settlement,
hopefully next summer. I'm recruiting the program chair now, and have
several people you've probably heard of in mind for the program committee,
though ultimately that's the committee chairman's decision.

Having some fun, *now*, as those SNL wild and crazy guys used to say...

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'

I have ~100 MB from 4/97 to present archived in mbox form. I can FTP it or
make it available to anyone who might need it to restore the archive.

-Declan


On 7 Sep 1998, Ryan Lackey wrote:

> > There is another archive at http://sof.mit.edu/cypherpunks, ironically
> > the machine that hosts it is not up at the moment
> 
> The machine suffered either disk controller or HDD problems as I was
> logged into it.  It is located in Boston, MA.  I do not currently have
> a way of getting to the machine to repair it, and this will likely
> continue to be true, so until I can get one of the people I know at
> the site where the machine is located to fix it, the archives will be
> offline.  If the machine cannot be fixed, I will put the archive up
> elsewhere.  I believe hugh@toad.com copied the entire archive at some
> point, so that might be helpful.
> 
> Sorry about this -- replicated servers are always a good idea.
> -- 
> Ryan Lackey
> rdl@mit.edu
> http://sof.mit.edu/rdl/		
> 
> 
> 
>

I did not get a chance to download the great archive Ryan did, lets
hope it's on the disk there still, otherwise it has to be rebuilt by
someone.

		||ugh
		hugh@toad.com