Could E.M. Cordian be Matt Blaze in Disguise? (Nah!)

:-)

Bwahahaha!

Isn't this fun???

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

--- begin forwarded text


X-Sender: vin@shell1.shore.net
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:31:21 -0500
To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>, dcsb@ai.mit.edu
From: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
Subject: Could E.M. Cordian be Matt Blaze in Disguise?  (Nah!)
Cc: Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>
Status: U

	Out on the Cypherpunks List, "Anonymous" claimed to reveal the real
identity of E.M. Cordian, the organizer of the DES Analytical Crack. See:
http://www.cyberspace.org/~enoch/crakfaq.html

>Shouldn't we be using "Mr. Cordian's" real
>name?  Matt Blaze (mab@research.att.com), also
>occasionally known as "M.F. Tones", and even less
>often as "Mr. Rouge" (There should be an accent mark
>there actually).

	In response, Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> declared:

>Just to clear the air a smidge.
>
>If Matt Blaze says he's looking for an algebraic inverse to DES, I tend to
>believe him...

	Jeeze, Rob! This is your attempt to help "clear the air?"

	I do not for a moment believe that Eric Michael Cordian
<emc@wire.insync.net> is a pseudonym for Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>!

	You should maybe query Matt directly <mab@research.att.com> before
you endorse E.M. Cordian as Matt Blaze in drag. You could confuse a whole
lot of people who trust your insider knowledge of these steamy Net Affairs.

	To anyone familiar with Blaze's essays, speeches, & on-line posts,
a scan of  Mr. Codrian's FAQ and published comments should make it apparent
that this suggestion is unlikely, if not perposterous.

	The real Matt Blaze would also not be making these absurd and false
claims that some mysterious "book" describing a cryptosystem identical or
equivalent to the RSA public key cryptosystem was published "years" before
Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adelman  first published their RSA PKC
algorithm in April, 1977.  (It's well documented in the Cypherpunk
archives, Codrian assures us;-)

	There was no such book. Cordian's statement is just not true. The
real Matt Blaze -- the guy who wrote the pithy Afterward to Schneier's
Applied Cryptography,II -- would know that this is not true.

	(Actually, I'd bet that even Robert Hettinga knows that this is
untrue.)

	Mind you, if the real Matt Blaze announced that he was seeking $500
from twenty people to fund a private research project which he felt had a
meaningful chance of casting DES as a NP-hard combinatorial problem and
attacking it with an appropriate combinatorial algorithm, I'd send a check
off tomorrow.

	The real Matt Blaze would not have 15 donors -- as Mr. Cordian
reports -- but be stimied on how to get five more.

	I wish Mr. Cordian well in his algebraic attack on DES -- but,
unfortunately, he is not the real Matt Blaze. Not even a near-clone.

	We could do with a few more professionals with Blaze's talent,
energy, and integrity in general circulation.

	Suerte,

		_Vin

-----
"Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for
good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by
its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who
deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege."
_ A Thinking Man's Creed for Crypto  _vbm.

 *     Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net>    *
      53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548

--- end forwarded text


-----------------
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'

No, but could Bob Hettinga be Vin McLellan's sock puppet?


On Sun, 15 Nov 1998, Robert Hettinga wrote:

> :-)
> 
> Bwahahaha!
> 
> Isn't this fun???
> 
> Cheers,
> Bob Hettinga
>

Robert Hettinga wrote:

>I fixed my problem with Mr. McLellan this morning, though. Mr. McLellan can
>crusade against threats to his world view on someone else's list, I figure.

Ye gods, Robert, what'd you do to Vin, told TRW the facts of his Ponzi,
sent his name to the IRS assassin bot with e-$3, broadcast his secret key,
revealed his criminal nyms, told his deadbeat kids where he really hides, 
scrambled his biometrics so he'd never access offshore stashes, 
crayoned his sweetie's moniker, skills and number on John Glenn's
overalls, or merely plonked, readied, aimed as is the privilege of 
demigodish ganglia atwitching.

At 1:27 PM -0500 on 11/15/98, Rabid Wombat wrote:


> No, but could Bob Hettinga be Vin McLellan's sock puppet?

Um, it's *meat* puppet, Rab, meat puppet...

Or, better, "Bwahahahahahahah!"


Seriously. Like most normal people, I hate saying facially outrageous
things in well-known watering holes and being wrong, but it's particularly
annoying when you're consistantly ambushed by self-appointed, um, holes of
another kind. Vin did this kind of vigorous error correction on me twice
now, on my own turf, in the past three weeks. Not only were both flames
about two standard deviations outside the bounds of altruistic desires to
correct the record, which even *I* can excuse once in a while ;-), this
kind of silly dreck is getting to be a positive habit with Mr. McLellan. I
mean, Socrates was right, and all that, but he was also a pain in the ass.


I fixed my problem with Mr. McLellan this morning, though. Mr. McLellan can
crusade against threats to his world view on someone else's list, I figure.


So, yup, mea fucking culpa. As Frank Lloyd Wright was fond of saying when
he'd been caught in a stretcher, or at least vigorously propounding an
error, "Well. There you are!"


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'

At 7:34 PM -0500 on 11/15/98, John Young wrote:


> Ye gods, Robert, what'd you do to Vin, told TRW the facts of his Ponzi,
> sent his name to the IRS assassin bot with e-$3, broadcast his secret key,
> revealed his criminal nyms, told his deadbeat kids where he really hides,
> scrambled his biometrics so he'd never access offshore stashes,
> crayoned his sweetie's moniker, skills and number on John Glenn's
> overalls, or merely plonked, readied, aimed as is the privilege of
> demigodish ganglia atwitching.

 Bwahahahahah! (Or something like it, anyway...)


Nope. Nothing *that* serious. Something completely childish. He probably
won't even notice. ;-).

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'

At 11:27 AM -0700 11/15/98, Rabid Wombat wrote:
>No, but could Bob Hettinga be Vin McLellan's sock puppet?

Having met both of them (in the same room yet), not bloody likely.  :-)


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