Deductible Junkets
Desiphoning Dollars
Financial Cryptography 1997
I like to joke that digital commerce is financial cryptography," says Bob Hettinga, general chair of Financial Cryptography 1997. "You can't exchange financial information on the Net without link-level cryptography. But financial cryptography is also how you spend money on the Net."
Anonymous payments, authentication, copyright protection, micropayments, home banking, fungibility, and digital signatures - these issues are critical to making secure financial networks ubiquitous. At this first-time event, key members from the financial and technical communities will hack the legal, ethical, and technical aspects of networked transactions with an eye toward resolving the security problems that plague current applications of digital cash.
By drawing together technologists and financiers, Hettinga hopes to create a community that will build a working model for a global, decentralized economy. Nanobuck guru Mark Manasse, inventor of Millicent, will attend. So will the man who holds the patent for Citi-corp's digital cash infrastructure, Sholom Rosen. Not to mention the contributions to be made by Michael Froomkin, a cypherpunkish civil rights law professor, and offshore banking pioneer Vince Cate. But things will really heat up when netmeister Clifford Neuman meets Federal Reserve Bank bigwig Israel Sendrovic, two impressive minds with wildly different worlds of experience - one a Birkenstocked coder, the other a buttoned-down financier.
It's an unlikely union, but the marriage of finance and computer security holds the key to a future distributed economy. Since the stakes are so high - literally - the integration of algorythmic abstraction with cold hard cash could impact cryptography more than any other issue this side of national security, and vice versa.
Registration: US$1,000. Contact: +31 (20) 592 4169, fax +31 (20) 592 4199, email: ray@cwi.nl, on the Web at www.offshore.com.ai.
Beach Blanket Bartering in Anguilla
The organizers of Financial Cryptography scheduled the conference to end at 12:30 daily, thereby leaving each afternoon for the less cerebral activities offered in the Caribbean. Ringed by 12 miles of white sand and coral beaches, Anguilla is a low-lying island in the British West Indies. If you can't figure out how to have a copacetic time on the beach, you're doomed to a pallid and cloudy existence.
Attracted by the beautiful locale and Anguilla's status as a zero-tax jurisdiction, many Net-based companies - for whom physical geography matters little - flock to the island. Still, wired for electricity a mere 20 years ago, Anguilla is now looking to mesh the modern world with its island culture's past.
One interesting offshoot of Anguilla's newfound modernity is the Anguilla Library Computer Club, an attempt by the island's wired ones to teach the locals the digital ropes. The club has only six computers: if you would like to add to the collection, send your old computer to Anguilla Computers, Global Links, 4809 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, PA, 15224 e-mail: nat-trust@offshore.com.ai. It'll be appreciated.
Jesse Freund
The Current Roundup (see Wired 4.12)
__January 23-25__The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property; Cambridge, Massachusetts. € February 5-8 First International Conference on Autonomous Agents; Marina del Rey, California. € __February 10-11__The Internet Society Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security; San Diego, California. € February 8-12 MILIA '97; Cannes, France. € __February 12-15__Interactive Newspapers '97; Houston.
March 1-5 ACM97: The Next 50 Years of Computing; San Jose, California After listening to the technologists at this all-star gathering, you can expect to see clues of tomorrow's technology today. Hobknob with Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, dish with TCP/IP guru Vinton Cerf, jive with Gordon Bell and Brenda Laurel, or hang with Pattie Maes, Carver Mead, and Nathan Myhrvold. You'll probably get smarter just by being there, and if' you aren't too star-struck to actually learn something, check out the individual workshops on animation, communications, networks, entertainment, education, and medicine. Registration: US$750. Contact: +1 (212) 626 0531, email: acm97info@acm.org.
March 7-16 SXSW; Austin, Texas South by Southwest is the name of this mega-event, and it's also a signpost to the hippest music festival, coolest indie film scene, and nerdiest multimedia extravaganza - all at the same time, all in Austin, all day and all night. Last year, Iggy Pop rocked while Bruce Sterling spoke and Christine Vachon produced. This year's lineup should top that. Registration: US$800, for entrance to all venues. Contact: +1 (512) 467 7979, fax +1 (512) 451 0754, email: sxsw@sxsw.com, on the Web at www.sxsw.com/sxsw
March 11-14 The Seventh Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy; Burlingame, California This digital freedom ride will focus on commerce and community with an emphasis on civil liberties, the social issues created by the rise of digital commerce, and the tensions of free expression on the Net. Building a net.community depends as much on privacy as it does on dialog, and both are worth fighting for. Registration: US$550. Contact: email: cfp97@cfp.org, on the Web at www.cfp.org.
Out on the Range:
__March 18-22__Technology and Persons with Disabilities; Los Angeles. Contact: +1 (818) 885 2578, email: ltm@csun.edu. March 20-22 Computer Vision, Virtual Reality, and Robotics in Medicine; Grenoble, France. Contact: +33 (76) 56 95 55, email: troccaz@imag.fr. April 9-11 The Third International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems; Berlin. Contact: +49 (30) 25499 309/200, on the Web at www.fokus.gmd.de/. April 11-13 The International Convention of the Magic Lantern Society; London. Contact: email: s-herbert@easynet.co.uk.
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