Hackers Conference Report

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Fellow Cypherpunks,

Here's a trip report I just sent to another mailing list I'm active
on, the "Extropians" list. That's why I "introduce" Tom Jennings, John
Gilmore, and Eric Hughes...clearly they need no introduction to
readers of _this_ list (although a lot of new folks have signed up
recently, I hear).

By the way, I just picked up the latest "Mondo 2000." Our own Jude
Milhon's article, "The Cypherpunk Movement," is on pp. 36-37 (Issue
#8). The address "cypherpunks@toad.com" is mentioned, so we may get
even more new folks. Also some good stuff on MindVOX, phreaking, etc.

--Tim


HACKERS CONFERENCE REPORT

I just returned from Hackers 8.0, held 6-8 November in Lake Tahoe,
California. Approximately 170 attendees this year.

Some Highlights:

* Our crypto session went extremely well. The talks were on PGP and
FidoNet, Diffie-Hellman key exchange for rlogin, digital
time-stamping, and anonymous remailers. More comments later.

* Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) spoke on the
developing conflict between personal privacy and law enforcement,
including comments on the "key registration" trial balloon I posted
about earlier. (Godwin told me he believes the Denning proposal is
deadly serious, that the Department of Justice has put a high priority
on limiting the use of cryptography.)

* Hacking was well represented. Besides our crypto panel, sessions on
cellular phone phreaking and illegal mods to telecom equipment drew
large crowds (a "how to" talk on reprogramming the 8051 micro in the
Oki 900 cellphone was especially useful).

* Eric Drexler gave a talk on nanotechnology (surprise!), with an
emphasis on needed work in the next couple of years. Drexler argued
that proto-assemblers could be built in as short as 16 years, though
there was some skepticism expressed. He also presented a calculation
that the "cost" of delaying nanotech is $25 billion a _day_. (I
suggested we all skip dinner that night and instead put in another
hour in the labs!)

* Marvin Minsky answered questions, saying he rarely prepares in
advance. AI, robotics, gene expression in embryos, and software were
all covered.

* Allan Huang of AT&T gave an energetic 90 minute talk on optical
computing, going from optical deconvolvers to "computer origami" to
optical switches to Sagnac fibers that can store light pulses 6
femtoseconds long! Definitely the most stimulating talk.

* Demos in the machine room were better than ever. The "Reality
Engine" from Silicon Graphics displayed photorealistic simulations.
Lots of Suns, NeXTs, and Macs. Films of SIGGRAPH papers, chaos and
fractals, and artificial life were shown at night. Rudy Rucker's
session on cellular automata went well.



MORE ON CRYPTO

Since cryptology and the activities of the "cypherpunks" mailing list
are of central concern to me, I'll concentrate on those topics.

Our panel was in "prime time," mid-Saturday afternoon, with about 100
in attendance, including a couple of journalists (notably John Markoff
of the "New York Times"...if anybody sees an article on this by him,
please send me a note about it, OK?). The audience had been prepped
for crypto by the comments Friday night by Mike Godwin of the EFF and
by a 3 hour rump session on "Digital Cash" from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m on
Saturday (remember "hacker hours").

Tom Jennings, one of the chief forces behind FidoNet, an "anarchic"
net made up of PCs talking to other PCs, spoke on efforts to spread
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to as many FidoNet users as possible. It
looks like its happening and this will be another avenue to ensure
that the "crypto genie" gets safely out of the bottle.

John Gilmore, an early UNIX/Sun pioneer and current principal at
Cygnus Support, amongst other things, spoke on increasing security
against Internet eavesdroppers by using the Diffie-Hellman key
exchange protocol for rlogin (for example). This is something we can
do fairly soon.

Stu Haber and Scott Stornetta of Bellcore (formerly part of Bell Labs)
reported on their digital time-stamping system. Some document to be
"notarized" is hashed to produce a fairly short number which is hard
to forge (i.e., it is very hard to find another document which hashes
to the same value). This hash value is then published in, say, a
widely read newspaper. If a dispute arises about the time a document
was written, the published has value is persuasive. Bellcore actually
operates such a service (check the legal notices in the Sunday "New
York Times").

Eric Hughes, a mathematician who worked briefly for David Chaum's
"DigiCash" outfit, described anonymous remailers implemented in Perl
and now running. He also mentioned Hal Finney's version which embeds
PGP in the remailer, allowing more security. This generated a lot of
excitement, as the ideas of "crypto anarchy" became apparent to all.

(John Little, owner and operator of the "Portal Communications
Company," a Bay Area-based Internet access service, got excited and
offered to run the remailers on his system! The genie is further out
of the bottle. Now if we can only get GEnie to do the same!)

The spirit of contributing to the larger cause of using crypto to
_directly_ protect privacy was exhilarating. More people spoke of
actual code they plan to write (as with Russell Whittaker's offer a
few weeks ago to help with ProComm mods). 

There was a real sense that Things Had Changed. With PGP 2.0 arriving
a few months ago (and still spreading), with the onset of the
"Cypherpunks" group (which got a somehat cryptic write-up by Jude
Milhon in the just-published Issue #8 of "Mondo 2000"...but since she
coined the term "cypherpunks" to describe us, her article can afford
to be cryptic, no?), and with the "Hacker Crackdown" all around us
(Sun Devil, Legion of Doom, S.266 attempt to ban encryption, FBI's
"Digital Telephony Bill," and the latest "trial balloon" to register
keys), the time is right.

In the next several months I expect the media, via more articles in
magazines like "Mondo 2000" and by articles on crypto policy, to focus
in on this issue. Even the "Village Voice" is interested in crypto issues
(theme: crypto privacy vs. Big Brother).

These are exciting times. If I'm ever busted for sedition, money
laundering conspiracy, violation of the Munitions Act, RICO Act
violations, or just plain old political incorrectness, carry on the
fight. The stakes are high.


--Tim

--
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version.



-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version.



-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: awaiting Macintosh version.