We re-examine Paillier's cryptosystem, and show that by choosing a particular discrete log base g, and by introducing an alternative decryption procedure, we can extend the scheme to allow an arbitrary exponent e instead of N. The use of low exponents substantially increases the efficiency of the scheme. The semantic security is now based on a new decisional assumption, namely the hardness of deciding whether an element is a "small" e-th residue modulo N2.We also show how to use Paillier's original cryptosystem to build a trapdoor commitment scheme. This new scheme is information-theoretically private, and computationally binding (this property holds under the assumption that the RSA function with exponent N is hard to invert). A novel property of this new commitment scheme is that most of the work can be done offline before knowing the message one wants to commit to. Once the message is known only two multiplications are required. This is the first trapdoor commitment scheme with this online-offline efficiency property which is also length-preserving.