Passwords as Galaxies, and Status of the Archives

["Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>]

At 11:15 PM -0500 11/15/96, Adam Shostack wrote:
>Tim May & I had a conversation about this in which Tim posted the
>great analogy of searching galaxies in the possible passphrase space.
>The thread covered the question pretty well.
>
>Adam
>
>(Tim, do you have a copy of your post?  I can't think of the right
>search terms for Altavista)

The name of my post was "Passwords as Galaxies." Alas, it does not show up
in an Alta Vista search, so it's probably not in the few archived periods
still available (*).

The approximate date was mid-June 1996. I know this from some followup
posts I still have. Unfortunately, my increasingly twitchy Macintosh--an
architecture that appears to be sinking under the weight of inconsistent
versions, extensions, and other such cruftiness--has dropped a lot of
chunks of my Eudora archives. My backups may have the missing sections, but
I don't have time to sort through them now.

Someone else should have it. Mid-June. "Passwords as Galaxies."

(* And speaking of the Cypherpunks archives, has anyone heard _anything_
from Todd Masco about progress on his site? His Web page,
http://www.hks.net/cpunks/index.html, just reports the same old news:

------------
"March 18, 1996

The cypherpunks and coderpunks pages will be unavailable for the next
couple of days as we switch over to a new line. We apologize for any
inconvenience this might cause.


June 06, 1996

Not to worry, we know the archives are still down. Just a bit longer,
Please be patient."
--------------

Someone alluded to threats by large newspapers to prosecute Copyright
violations (that is, the archive site perpetuates copyright violations, and
Web search engines compound the seriousness) as being a reason the archive
have not come back up. Anyone know if this is really true?

Todd, are you still reading us?

--Tim May



"The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM
that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology."
[NYT, 1996-10-02]
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."