Vince Cate's Cryptorebel/Cypherpunk Page

I have a system called Alex that lets you access files in FTP sites through an NFS server. My machine has the Alex server available for demos. In particular, anyone can NFS mount the FTP world via this machine.

Because of this, I looked into some of the legal questions about FTP sites, exporting, etc and have Using Alex, I have some directories that have symlinks to related topics. This lets my machine act like a mirror for a large number of FTP sites. This directory is a good place to find code etc. Each night, this set of symlinks is converted for Mosaic use as the file vac-security.html. Also, all of the 40,000+ files in these FTP sites are listed in an index file which can be used to find lots of interesting things.

Impact of Encryption on Taxes and the Future

Cypherpunks are mostly focused on increasing privacy. I have written up what I think the future holds in store for us. I see the main trend as lower total taxes due to a tax free cyberspace, though tangible things will still be taxable. Since there are many tax-haven countries with very favorable laws for non-tangibles, regulatory arbitrage will eventually make most non-tangibles un-taxed.

If you can work in cyberspace, and don't mind traveling, there are legal ways to avoid most taxes. I maintain a list of info on banks that are either in tax-havens, on the internet, or both. There was an interesting post to misc.invest on offshore banking. I also keep a list of companies that accept PGP encrypted email for sending in credit card orders.

Factoring and Key Size

After RSA-129 was factored, people became very interested in the question of how hard factoring is. Last year Ron Rivest wrote up an article on this. It is available in both as scanned compressed postscript and as an ASCII text file. Also interesting is the rate at which computers are getting faster.

Scripts for easy use of PGP

I have 2 scripts that make it very easy to send PGP mail and to receive PGP mail. These scripts are a step toward the concept of an email-firewall. I have 2 PGP keys. One is high security and one is low security. Any mail to the low security one is decrypted automatically by the receive script. Richard Gooch is working on a pgp-sendmail that can replace the standard Unix sendmail program. Using this, mail sent to an address that handles encryption is automatically encrypted. I also recommend