But the absolute best part is yet to come. Wait until somebody eventually finds out who that mysterious QX5773 is. Oh, and someone will, because it is the nature of the human beast to try to figure things out. The more difficult the challenge the more enticing it is. Won't that someone (or we) be surprised to learn that QZ5773 is actually a 55 yr old overweight balding guy (no offense to you overweight balding guys, just had to give a face to him) who works in the - gasp! US Department of Commerce, or is a colonel in the Pentagon using the proceeds from the sale of the pirated Gucci handbags to fund his pet little war against (Enter the name of favorite small anti-US country here). Would the US government (or any other government for that matter) actually engage in a little covert international trade to gain funds to use as they see fit without the drag of public scrutiny - Nah, couldn't happen. Jeez, what was I thinking? Peace, y'all! rhbusby -----Original Message----- From: Toby Kohlenberg [mailto:toby@private] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 12:17 AM Cc: crime@private Subject: CRIME New rant on crypto from Bruce Sterling http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/251-300/00283_geeks_and_spooks.html I think the funniest part I've found so far is: That is the ISLANDS IN THE NET scenario: where the sinister digital underground takes over some penny-ante country like Grenada, and we make every form of piracy locally legal there, and then we just run up our black skull-and-crossbones on the website, and we start selling WINDOWS for nine dollars ninety-five cents. We'll encrypt every bit of data going in and out, so nobody will even know what we're up to! We'll have these key-sharing digital networks of trust, where all the cool people will have our crypto power-handshake, and it'll be like it was when we were selling pot to each other in the dorm in Berkeley, only, like, on a cosmic scale. And this is where it just starts to get good, because we rebel crypto-fiends will be exchanging messages, and conducting all kinds of business, and negotiating electronic contracts, with people we don't even know and who we're even never gonna know. If we need a hundred kilos of black tar opium, we just hit the F1 function key, and some guy from Sinaloa or Medellin or the Northern Alliance, whom we know only as QX5773 at blacknet dot org, he accepts our anonymous electronic funny money, and he ships the drugs to us to a dead drop in a giant freight container, along with some illegal refugees, and some pirated Gucci handbags, and all the stolen UNIX code we can eat! It's crypto paradise! For we have created a totally liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures: books, movies, computer games, trade secrets, government secrets, business software; it'll all be sucked down into the black hole of the churning crypto mill, and the State will wither away. Wow! That said, he actually has some good things to say and it is an interesting read. toby
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