Re: Tim May's Passing Confirmed

[grarpamp]

https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/
Author: Steven Levy
security 02.01.93 12:00 pm

Crypto Rebels

It's the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling
movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers.
At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century.

The office atmosphere of Cygnus Support, a fast-growing Silicon Valley
company that earns its dollars by providing support to users of free
software, seems like a time warp to the days when hackers ran free.
Though Cygnus is located in a mall-like business park within earshot
of US 101, it features a spacious cathedral ceiling overhanging a
cluttered warren of workstation cubicles arranged in an irregular
spherical configuration. A mattress is nestled in the rafters. In a
hallway behind the reception desk is a kitchen laden with snack food
and soft drinks.

Today, a Saturday, only a few show up for work. The action instead is
in a small conference room overlooking the back of the complex—a
"physical meeting" of a group whose members most often gather in the
corridors of cyberspace. Their mutual interest is the arcane field of
cryptography—the study of secret codes and cyphers. The very fact that
this group exists, however, is indication that the field is about to
shift into overdrive. This is crypto with an attitude, best embodied
by the group's moniker: Cypherpunks.

The one o'clock meeting doesn't really get underway until almost
three. By that time around fifteen techie-cum-civil libertarians are
sitting around a table, wandering around the room, or just lying on
the floor staring at the ceiling while listening to the conversations.
Most have beards and long hair—Smith Brothers gone digital.

The talk today ranges from reports on a recent cryptography conference
to an explanation of how entropy degrades information systems. There
is an ad hoc demonstration of a new product, an AT "secure" phone,
supposedly the first conversation-scrambler that's as simple to use as
a standard-issue phone. The group watches in amusement as two of their
number, including one of the country's best cryptographic minds, have
trouble making the thing work. (This is sort of like watching Eric
Clapton struggle with a new, easy-to-play guitar.) There is discussion
of random number generators. Technical stuff, but everything has an
underlying, if not explicitly articulated, political theme: the vital
importance of getting this stuff out to the world for the public weal.

The people in this room hope for a world where an individual's
informational footprints—everything from an opinion on abortion to the
medical record of an actual abortion—can be traced only if the
individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent
messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but
intruders and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only
gibberish; a world where the tools of prying are transformed into the
instruments of privacy.

There is only one way this vision will materialize, and that is by
widespread use of cryptography. Is this technologically possible?
Definitely. The obstacles are political—some of the most powerful
forces in government are devoted to the control of these tools. In
short, there is a war going on between those who would liberate crypto
and those who would suppress it. The seemingly innocuous bunch strewn
around this conference room represents the vanguard of the pro-crypto
forces. Though the battleground seems remote, the stakes are not: The
outcome of this struggle may determine the amount of freedom our
society will grant us in the 21st century. To the Cypherpunks, freedom
is an issue worth some risk.

"Arise," urges one of their numbers, "You have nothing to lose but
your barbed-wire fences."
Crashing the Crypto Monopoly

As the Cold War drifts into deep memory, one might think that the
American body charged with keeping our secret codes and breaking the
codes of our enemies—the National Security Agency (NSA)—might finally
breathe easy for the first time in its 30-year existence. Instead, it
is sweating out its worst nightmare.

The NSA's cryptographic monopoly has evaporated. Two decades ago, no
one outside the government, or at least outside the government's
control, performed any serious work in cryptography. That ended
abruptly in 1975 when a 31-year-old computer wizard named Whitfield
Diffie came up with a new system, called "public-key" cryptography,
that hit the world of cyphers with the force of an unshielded nuke.
The shock wave was undoubtedly felt most vividly in the fortress-like
NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland.

As a child, Diffie devoured all the books he could find on the subject
of cryptography. Certainly there is something about codes—secret
rings, intrigue, Hardy Boys mysteries—that appeals to youngsters.
Diffie, son of an historian, took them very seriously. Though his
interest went dormant after he exhausted all the offerings of the
local city college 

Re: Tim May's Passing Confirmed

[grarpamp]

from lg:

Tim May - Cypherpunks co-Founder, Discoverer of Radiation-Induced
Single Event Upsets in Integrated Circuits, Uncompromising Firearms
Proponent

Word has reached me that my dear friend, co-conspirator in many things
and for many years, fellow Freedom Fighter Tim May passed away earlier
this week at his home in Corralitos, California.

Death appears to be from natural causes pending autopsy. I.e. Tim did
not die in a hail of bullets as so many who didn’t know Tim all that
well and largely from his public writings had predicted. 

Tim May co-founded the Cypherpunks, perhaps the single most effective
pro-cryptography grassroots organization in history, together with
Eric Hughes and John Gilmore in 1992 against the backdrop of draconian
anti-cryptography efforts promulgated by the Clinton I Administration.

Early credit also goes to Hugh Daniel (since passed) who administered
some of the initial Cypherpunks mailing list infrastructure and IMHO
should be considered the fourth Cypherpunks co-founder.

For a good and reasonably accurate explanation of the early
Cypherpunks days, see the article by Steven Levy in the February 1993
issue of Wired Magazine.

https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/

Having read about the Cypherpunks in that issue of Wired Magazine at
the local bookstore, I quickly joined and became very active in this
movement, which lead to deep long-term personal friendships with many
of us principals, in particular Tim May, who was a frequent and
welcome guest at my house.

The joint efforts of the growing Cypherpunks movement ultimately lead
to the abandonment of the draconian U.S. export regulations on strong
cryptographic products, including open source software, in 2000. Tim
May was instrumental in sowing the seeds and providing the teachings
to a new generation to help bring this about.

I can say without qualification that I would not be working in my
field today if it hadn’t been for my meeting and becoming friends with
Tim May.

Tim’s discovery of radiation-induced single event upsets in
semiconductors was groundbreaking and remains to this day. His design
studies to weaponize this discovery, including for ground-to-space
warfare, are both fascinating and cheap to implement; I will leave a
detailed explanation of this area of Tim’s physics research to others.
One of Tim's most precious possessions, perhaps his single most
precious possession, was a photograph hanging on his hallway wall of
himself as a young man together with Richard Feynman. I wished I had
taken a photograph of that photograph.

Tim’s realization that any Manifesto, Constitution, or Bill of Rights
wasn’t worth the paper it was written on absent a broadly armed (and
heavily armed) population left many of his critics and admirers alike
confused. As with so many of his assertions, Tim was correct in this
analysis, though his assertion that “private ownership of firearms is
a public good” will likely not be as soon widely accepted as his
assertion that “private ownership of strong crypto is a public good”
was. As such, Tim leaves behind a very large firearms collection.

Please raise a glass of Bourbon, can be any brand, doesn’t have to be
the expensive stuff, it didn’t have to be for Tim, to Tim May!

Ad Astra, Tim!

Allow me to close this post with an editorial note: if you want to
honor Tim and his work with Cypherpunks, do not read the Wikipedia
article on Cypherpunks. Just ignore it. That is what Tim did.
The Wikipedia article is a steaming piece of editorial dreck that
appears to have been largely authored by brand ruboff-seeking
sycophants and (at best) hanger-ons and more likely non-participants.
There is hardly any word of truth to the article, in particular when
it comes to the list of supposed Cypherpunks participants and their
supposed contributions.
Instead, do what Tim would have done: close that browser window and
pour yourself another Bourbon.
Those who were there, fighting at the front lines of the Cypherpunks
trenches, such as Tim, know the truth. The hell with those seeking
credit to whom little or no credit for those days and this massive
effort that Cypherpunks was is due.

Re: Tim May's Passing Confirmed

[John Young]

Excllent post, Jim, thanks.

At 02:47 PM 12/15/2018, you wrote:
Tim May was very well-known in the 1979-era for his discovery that 
alpha particles (helium nuclei) caused data-read errors in 
then-current technology DRAMs.


(An article from the last year or two incorrectly stated that we 
met; I think that was simply a misinterpretation of the fact that I 
also worked for Intel during 1980-82. But, I worked in Oregon, 
Aloha-3 specifically; I believe May worked in Santa Clara. I never 
visited any Intel locations outside Oregon; I do not recall that Tim 
May ever visited Oregon.)


One of the very minor things I did while working at Intel involved 
Kapton (polyimide) 'shims' that were being experimented with to 
protect against such errors caused by alpha particles.  A 
rectangular sheet of very thin plastic was attached over the DRAM 
chip.  Due to the very-low penetration characteristic of alphas, 
this was plenty to stop them from striking the surface of the 
chip.  As part of the development and evaluation process, it was 
occasionally necessary to remove those shims from assembled devices. 
Peeling them off frequently destroyed the chip:  I used a tiny part 
of my Chemistry knowledge to recommend the use of the solvent, DMF 
(dimethyl formamide) to assist in this removal process, in a way 
which did not risk damage to the chip itself.


The reason Intel had the problem of alpha particles was its heavy 
use of "cerdip" packages. 
http://eesemi.com/cerdip.htm(short 
for "ceramic dual inline package")   Cerdip looks vaguely like an 
Oreo cookie, with two ceramic plates attached with a glass 
'glue'.  That ceramic had tiny amounts of radioactive elements in 
it; not a lot, but it didn't take much to produce a significant 
amount of alphas.  Cerdip was used because it achieved a hermetic 
seal, but it was cheaper than a different kind of ceramic 
packaging. 
http://www.globalchipmaterials.com/visitors/products_visitors.htm 



Had they packaged their DRAMs in plastic, that would have been a 
vast improvement, actually virtually eliminating the 
problem:  Production of plastics go through chemical processes where 
their components (monomers) are distilled, and so they contain 
virtually no radioactive atoms.  But they couldn't immediately shift 
to using plastic packaging, because such packages were not 
hermetically sealed:  Packaged in plastic, water from the 
environment eventually found its way to the chip itself.  The 
problem with that is that this water slowly reacted with one 
component of the glass, phosphorus-containing 'pyroglass'.  (a 
related material was 'pyrox')   These phosphorus glasses slowly 
reacted with that moisture to generate phosphoric acid, and in turn 
that slowly corroded the very thin aluminum conductors making up 
interconnects in that chip.


Fixing the problem caused by alpha particles eventually required 
changing the chip process so that it didn't require hermetic 
packaging, making plastic packaging workable.


   Jim Bell





On Saturday, December 15, 2018, 10:44:21 AM PST, John Young 
 wrote:



This confirms Tim May's passing, by long-time cpunk, Lucky Green

Dear Friends, It is with sadness that news reaches me of the passing
of my dear friend Tim May - Cypherpunks co-Founder, Discoverer of
Radiation-Induced Single Even Upsets in Integrated Circuits, and
Uncompromising Firearms Proponent: Tweet:
https://twitter.com/luckygreen/status/1073925779304693760 
Obit:
https://www.facebook.com/lucky.green.73/posts/10155498914786706 
Ad

Astra, Tim! --Lucky

Tim May's Passing Confirmed

[John Young]

This confirms Tim May's passing, by long-time cpunk, Lucky Green

Dear Friends, It is with sadness that news reaches me of the passing 
of my dear friend Tim May - Cypherpunks co-Founder, Discoverer of 
Radiation-Induced Single Even Upsets in Integrated Circuits, and 
Uncompromising Firearms Proponent: Tweet: 
https://twitter.com/luckygreen/status/1073925779304693760 Obit: 
https://www.facebook.com/lucky.green.73/posts/10155498914786706 Ad 
Astra, Tim! --Lucky 

Re: Tim May (fwd)

[John Young]

Well, yes, if true. Can't find any verificaion, still looking.


At 12:22 PM 12/15/2018, you wrote:

Well, shit.

Give ’em hell, Tim, wherever you are.

Cheers,
RAH


> On Dec 15, 2018, at 9:56 AM, Greg Newby  wrote:
>
> Forwarding without attribution from another list I'm on:
>
>> Date: 14 Dec 2018 22:27:00
>> Subject: Tim May
>>
>> I am sorry to report that Tim May has passed away, apparently of
>> natural causes.  I know that Tim was a controversial figure on this
>> list.  Actually, I can't think of any list or community where Tim was
>> not a controversial figure!  But, to those of us who were his fans,
>> Tim was a giant.  My condolences to all of you.
>
> I have not seen independent confirmation or 
an obituary, and his Wikipedia page isn't 
updated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_C._May

>
> Among other things, that page mentions: 
"Writings on cryptography and privacy: May was 
a founding member of, and has been one of the 
most voluminous contributors to, Cypherpunks 
electronic mailing list. He wrote extensively 
on cryptography and privacy from the 1990s through 2003."

>
>  - gbn
>

Re: Tim May (fwd)

[Robert Hettinga]

Well, shit.

Give ’em hell, Tim, wherever you are.

Cheers,
RAH


> On Dec 15, 2018, at 9:56 AM, Greg Newby  wrote:
> 
> Forwarding without attribution from another list I'm on:
> 
>> Date: 14 Dec 2018 22:27:00
>> Subject: Tim May
>> 
>> I am sorry to report that Tim May has passed away, apparently of
>> natural causes.  I know that Tim was a controversial figure on this
>> list.  Actually, I can't think of any list or community where Tim was
>> not a controversial figure!  But, to those of us who were his fans,
>> Tim was a giant.  My condolences to all of you.
> 
> I have not seen independent confirmation or an obituary, and his Wikipedia 
> page isn't updated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_C._May
> 
> Among other things, that page mentions: "Writings on cryptography and 
> privacy: May was a founding member of, and has been one of the most 
> voluminous contributors to, Cypherpunks electronic mailing list. He wrote 
> extensively on cryptography and privacy from the 1990s through 2003."
> 
>  - gbn
> 

Tim May (fwd)

[Greg Newby]

Forwarding without attribution from another list I'm on:

> Date: 14 Dec 2018 22:27:00
> Subject: Tim May
> 
> I am sorry to report that Tim May has passed away, apparently of
> natural causes.  I know that Tim was a controversial figure on this
> list.  Actually, I can't think of any list or community where Tim was
> not a controversial figure!  But, to those of us who were his fans,
> Tim was a giant.  My condolences to all of you.

I have not seen independent confirmation or an obituary, and his Wikipedia page 
isn't updated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_C._May

Among other things, that page mentions: "Writings on cryptography and privacy: 
May was a founding member of, and has been one of the most voluminous 
contributors to, Cypherpunks electronic mailing list. He wrote extensively on 
cryptography and privacy from the 1990s through 2003."

  - gbn

Re: Cryptocurrency: Music

[Cecilia Tanaka]

My pumpkin loves me, la la la...  ;)

Thanks for all the musical smiles, cutie!  Music is life!!!  <3

I love you tenderly.  Be well and take care, please.

c.

* PS for Mirimir: - Purple long hair.  Still so pale as a ghost.  Now, my
mom thinks I am a vampire.  Meh!  :((

--
Loving.  Caring.  Sharing.  Being Excellent To Each Other And To Our
Hackerspace.  <3
--
"Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your
curiosity.  It's your place in the world; it's your life.  Go on and do all
you can with it, and make it the life you want to live."  -  Mae Jemison