17 Aug 2002
Laura and I might be moving at the end of Sept. Laura’s cousin has an aunt (on the side of the family not related to Laura) that owns 40 acres in Ivy with two small houses on it. One of these house is about 100 years old (we think), and the tenant is moving out. Here is a picture of the house:
The bad thing is we have to break the lease on our current apartment with a two month rent penalty charge. The good thing is our rent will be going down and we can actually start saving some money. Oh, yeah, that and this place has much more class.
14 Aug 2002
(how many times can I use “cyber” tonight?) The Register has a story on a Cyberwar performance art piece put on by with our tax money (US Military is becoming the new NEA?). The story is notable for this quote:
Human beings simply aren’t as fragile and narcotically-dependent on state authority as the government desperately desires them to be.
As they say on AOL: LOL!
14 Aug 2002
Yesterday I subscribed to Bob Hettinga’s Digital Bearer Settlements list. Today I have 120+ emails from that list all from Bob, almost all articles from papers. I think Bob might have taken a speed reading course. He uses the list like I use a blog, but instead of links he posts the interesting content in full.
It makes for some interesting reading, but unfortunately not much about real, working DBS systems out there. Perhaps because there are none.
On another sad note: Bob’s baby, the Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation, which he founded in 1999 to underwrite DBSettlements isn’t in good shape:
[…] Hope all the winch grinding will keep me from fretting about how to dig IBUC out of a very big, and imminent, hole. Sigh… […]
Yuck.
A collection of articles by Bob The Geodesic Economy (300k PDF file) is soon to be required reading for carring on a cohereant conversationt with me (no really, go read an article a day, this is really good stuff).
#cypherpunk
14 Aug 2002
Oh, Lord….
I probably saw this somewhere months ago but my concious mind denied it could exist: Am I A Cyberpunk or NOT.
Unfortunatly there’s only four pictures. :(
14 Aug 2002
I’ve started a Wiki on Digital Bearer Settlements. There are a lot of sites out there with links to papers, but I wish to write analysis and synthesis of the info out there. I only have the barest amount of stuff on there thus far, but if you felt so inclined add some stuff.
I’m working a cryptomonkey.net logo in Gimp. Think cartoon monkey outline on top of a hex dump of the Declaration of Independence. No, I didn’t read too much cyberpunk while growing up.
Of course what I really want is Ryan to reply to my email about OpenDBS, preferably with a link to some source code.
Oh yeah, I haven’t mention here what I found out from him at H2K2 because I didn’t want to steal any thunder from his talk at Defcon (which I’m looking for an mp3 of). Kevin Burton made some notes of the talk, but I’m not sure how much of these details he gave out.
There is code (that’s a good start). It’s in python (yeah!). It makes use of the Cryptix crypto lib, from which we can extrapolate that the code is in Jython, not the C based Python we know and love. Ryan initially wants to have the whole system (client wallet and all) hosted on Sealand accessable via a web interface while he works out the client-server protocol (this I wish to change his mind on. I’m not total sure what he means by that, the diffrent digital bearer systems take care of what numbers you send, and why not use XML-RPC/SOAP/XML-REST for the packaging of those numbers?). He has code for Chaum and Wagner type digital cash, and wishes to add Brands as well.