Re: PC Expo, Mac World, Comdex, etc..

[rarachel@prism.poly.edu (Arsen Ray Arachelian)]

That internet guy who handed out the flyer was in NYC. at the
last internet expo at Javitz.  I don't know how much setting
up a booth would cost, however, doing it that way is not
as effective as simply handing out disks to every Joe Yuppie
who goes out the door.

People will visit whatever booths they are interested in.
However someone handing out disks as to those who walk out
is far more likely to get the disks accepted as they are
freebies.  Especially if the target is ignorant to crypto
and Billary. :-)

At some point he may try the hypertext thinggie, if it
sparks some interest he may look and use the software. If
he doesn't recycle the disks, he may pass them on to
others...  At some point some big cheeze will get his
hands on it, and start worrying about how the WireTap
act, Clipper and other issues may affect his company.
(Don't forget to include a mention that we suspect
that Clipper has other back doors beside the key-escrow
and "Imagine how much damage a hacker who tripps over
this back door can do to your COMPANY!!!  The old FUD
method...)


Disks, in bulk are cheap and we can get them preformatted.
I have (a long time ago) written a disk image duplicator
program called DIM (BTW: I lost the sources to the most
recent version, so I don't plan to update it anymore) but
we can use it to mass duplicate disks.

If we could get just four-five folks in every expo to
chip in $20 do the duplication and distribution, we
can have an effective awareness raising campaign..

MEI Microcenter sells preformatted (DOS) disks in bulk
for $0.39 cents!  Two $20 contributions can buy about
100 disks!  That's quite a lot of people to wake up.

The biggest problem is designing the software to be
in the form of animation so it'll be watched.  Plain
text is nice too, but not everyone has the time to
read.  Most folks like TV and like to vegetate
infornt of the TV.  If we can have a self running
animated demo of sorts (without having to install
to the guys hard drive!) and still have enough room
for neat stuff like PGP and SecureDrive and such, we
have got it made.

Another issue is printing flyers to go with the disks
so we can get them interested in viewing/copying the
disks.  (Perhas include a program to duplicate the
disks on the demo disk so that the DOS virgins can
spread the disk...)

Also, we need to have professional looking labels on
the disks.  I'd be weary of accepting a disk that
has a cheap looking label.  My 1st reaction would be
"Is this a trojan???"  Quality control and virus
checking MUST be included in the package.  Perhaps
when the program 1st runs it can do a CRC of all
the files on the disk to make sure that they have
not been altered and tell the viewer of this...

Once we have the collection of programs ready, I can
ftp a disk image over to a few FTP sites so that other
cypherpunks can join in on the fun.  (Also a postscript
file for the flyers and such...)

1st things 1st, I reccomend that Secure Drive 1.3x
and PGP 2.3x and PGPShell are on the disk.  Are 
there any other crypto packages that your average y
yuppie, (possibly ODS virgin) would find useful?

Remember that we need enough space on the disk to
include clipper articles.  We probably can't distribute
the New York Times articles, so we'll have to write
our own (and insert the FUD factor!!!)  We need
to write/use a freeware hypertext/hypermedia
program to list, print, and extract those files.

A small disk copy program can be included which would
simply read in the whole disk, ask the viewer for a
blank, formatted disk and write to it.  We can use
the user's hard drive for temp space (check the
DOS TEMP variable 1st!) possibly XMS and EMS so
that the user doesn't have to swap disks.  Batch
files are neat but may not always work right on
every machine.  Keep in mind that with the DOS
wars we can't use any special features found in
any DOS above 3.30 (DR DOS, IBM DOS, MS-DOS, etc.)

We should use EGA/CGA for the demo, (check for EGA
and use it!) and use highly compressed, or better
yet vector images for the animation so that we
don't fill up the disk quickly.

We could use text mode graphics and ANSI like
pictures, but we'd need our own display program
as not all machines have ANSI installed, and
we can't ask a DOS virgin to do that.  We also
don't want to modify the user's hard drive if
we can help it as that would keep their fears down.