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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1996-01-30 - Re: FV Demonstrates Fatal Flaw in Software Encryption of Credit

Header Data

From: “Peter Trei” <ptrei@acm.org>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 8e4afbffec65638b791cf5f94e75c0cd63fe02d0056117fe4718dc2603278c19
Message ID: <9601292111.AA23738@toad.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1996-01-30 00:13:11 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 08:13:11 +0800

Raw message

From: "Peter Trei" <ptrei@acm.org>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 08:13:11 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: FV Demonstrates Fatal Flaw in Software Encryption of Credit
Message-ID: <9601292111.AA23738@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Someone claiming to be "Nathanial Borenstein" writes:
> As you may already have heard via the popular press, First Virtual
> Holdings has developed and demonstrated a program which completely
> undermines the security of every known credit-card encryption mechanism
> for Internet commerce. 

[...]

I started reading this thinking it was actually something important. All it describes 
is a keyboard monitor, which greps for CC#s, and which could be spread by an 
(unspecified) virus, and sends the output to a crook over the net by some (unspecified) 
mechanism.

So, what else is new?

[...]

> Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@fv.com>
>Chief Scientist, First Virtual Holdings
>FAQ & PGP key: nsb+faq@nsb.fv.com

It's sort of interesting that "Nathaniel Borenstein" has a PGP key, but failed to 
clearsign this message, which loudly trumpets it's great import. Considering the
lack of actual content, I feel compelled to warn readers that this may be a forgery, 
designed to make him look like he's scaremongering. 

strictly speaking for myself

Peter Trei
ptrei@acm.org

Peter Trei
Senior Software Engineer
Purveyor Development Team                                
Process Software Corporation
http://www.process.com
trei@process.com

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