Authentication questions

[G. Blake Meike]

Hi,
 I'm working on a project that requires me to understand the dBus authentication process.  I've encountered a couple of issue that puzzle me and that do not seem to be explained in the current spec.  I would appreciate it if anyone here could explain.

- When I attempt to authenticate with my system's session bus, I am offered ANONYMOUS as a legal authentication mechanism.  It appears, though, that if I use it, the server immediately drops the connection once I send BEGIN.  I have verified that this behavior is different than that after I authenticate with the DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 mechanism.  I'd like to verify that the dBus server will offer ANONYMOUS, but then not accept it.  ... I guess I'd also like to understand why it does so.  If it isn't going to accept, why offer?  ... and, btw, is there a way to make the server accept the (totally unsafe) ANONYMOUS authentication mechanism?

- When I look at the timestamps in the file .dbus-keyring/org_freedesktop_general, for instance, they do not seem to be, as the spec suggests, UTC seconds since the epoch.  They seem to be off by a factor of about 1200.  For instance, when 'date +%s' prints 1329836257, a recently generated key has the timestamp like 1018643.  Perhaps they are in hours, or something?

Thanks for the help.
 -blake