September 1992 - cypherpunks-legacy

SEIZING THE MEDIA- A NETWOR
by Fen Labalme 29 Sep '92

29 Sep '92

Mail*Link( Remote SEIZING THE MEDIA: A NETWORKER CONGRESS from PeaceNet ACTIV-L: Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 23:33:10 CDT Sender: Activists Mailing List <ACTIV-L%MIZZOU1.BITNET(a)pucc.Princeton.EDU> From: "(Rich Winkel)" <rich(a)pencil.cs.missouri.edu> Subject: PAX: SEIZING THE MEDIA: A NETWORKER CONGRESS To: Multiple recipients of ACTIV-L <ACTIV-L%MIZZOU1.BITNET(a)pucc.Princeton.EDU> /** gen.media: 141.0 **/ ** Topic: SEIZING THE MEDIA: NETWORKER CONGR ** ** Written 6:39 pm Sep 25, 1992 by openmedia in cdp:gen.media ** SEIZING THE MEDIA: A NETWORKER CONGRESS A weekend of activity to discuss, self-educate, and put into practice the creation of subversive media. 1:30pm Saturday 24 October to 6pm Sunday 25 October 1992 Media and resource exchange; slides, fax, posters, pamphlets, computer files, ideas, proposals, tactics Practical action on billboard improvement and removal; Big Art and postering E-mail and fax facility to receive material to be discussed and implemented during the weekend Documentation to all participants Materials supplied: photocopier reproduction/enlargement and the streets of Oxford Bloomin Arts, Princes Street, Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4, U.K. If you can't make it in person, you can take part in the Seizing the Media Congress by post, fax, E-mail. Send documents, comments, proposals, art, ideas, and posters. Post to: BM Jed, London WC1N 3XX, United Kingdom Fax to: (011 441) 0865 72 4317 E-Mail to: Eastoxcomcen(a)GN.APC.ORG Accommodation and other information are available from Friday night onwards. To make arrangements or get more information, get in touch with Oxfin between 1-4pm Mondays to Fridays at: (0865) 240545 >From the United States: 011 41865 240 545 Background: SEIZING THE MEDIA is the title of pamphlet written by the Immediast Underground and first released in Amsterdam , New York City, and Seattle in early 1992. The 26 pamphlet combines theory, graphics, research and proposals that examine: * Information control * Propaganda and advertising * CIA * Mind control * Immediast counter-offensives * tactics, subversive networking, public empowerment * multi-media * Public production libraries * the liberation of public space ...Just when Jesse Helms thought he made the world safe from poetic terrorism, along come the Immediasts, a cadre of media hackers who are fed up with the ecology of coercion that surrounds them. Their booklet SEIZING THE MEDIA proposes an all-out artistic assault on coercive communication, cultural monologue, and media control. They want all media insurgents to take back the airwaves with pirate radio, cable access TV, altering ads and billboards, and otherwise hacking the datasphere to break the spell of State/corporate media control. . . . from Gareth Branwyns STREET NOISE, Issue 7 of Mondo 2000 SEIZING THE MEDIA Version 1.1 is available for $3 from Open Media PO Box 2726 Westfield New Jersey 07091 USA THE IMMEDIAST UNDERGROUND is a centerless network of artists, writiers, hackers, culture jammers, pirate broadcasters, and posterists who connect with one another through information systems, mail art, networker congresses, and the underground press, and who communicate with the public through actions against all forms of coercive communication, space infringement, and media control. For more info contact: Immediast U. PO Box 2726 Westfield New Jersey 07091 USA DECENTRALIZED WORLD-WIDE NETWORKER CONGRESSES Since the beginning of the year, members of alternative info-nets, artists, insurgents, and cultural workers have been holding networker congresses, transnational engagements in cultural production, dialogue, collaborations, open exchange, subversive brainstorming, and collective disruptions of dominant culture. THE NETWORKER, A NEW PERCEPTION In societies where information is money and media is power, public access is as controlled as the corporate states grip on communication law, censorship, commerce, covert action and surveillance. In this context, uninhibited public communication, expression, and cultural production are acts of freedom, sovereignty, and defiance. Rooted in the drive to connect and exchange with others, Networker Congress engage in culture and media as the battleground for greater openness and freedom. MORE INFORMATION about NETWORKER CONGRESSES contact: H.R. Fricker Buro fur kunsterische Umtriebe CH 9043 Trogen Switzerland Retrofuturism PO Box 2278 Iowa City, Iowa 52244 Face of the Congress FaGaGaGa Po Box 1382 Youngstown, Ohio 44501 Peter Kaufman Bergenwissenstrasse 11 CH-8123 EbmatigenDecentralized Networker Congresses Switzerland Decentralized Networker Congresses Netshaker PO Box 978 Hanover, New Hampshire 03766 ** End of text from cdp:gen.media **

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Hints
by not_root＠nowhere.com 26 Sep '92

26 Sep '92

Most internet traffic is archived (and later Grep'd) anyway. If you're really that worried about it, then we should have been speaking in Aramaic all this time, or using encrypted e-mail (and I'm sure traffic which mentions the characters "crypt" draws attention as well, and most of the msgs on this mailing list have already violated that one.) I'm interested to see the PGP addition to the re-mailer. -- Concerned, yet not overly unrealistic about it.

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Pointing out the obvious....
by Mark Pesce 25 Sep '92

25 Sep '92

Hey, Kidz.... I don't mean to point out the obvious, but when you mention a certain scheme for secure transfer (3 initials, you guess), or a certain organization dedicated to keeping it from the public (3 initals, you guess again), THEY READ IT. OK? Did I make my point? If not, we're going to unsubscribe from this list like a bat out of hell. Over, OS Corp.

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the hopping remailer is done
by Eric Hughes 25 Sep '92

25 Sep '92

The hopping remailer is finished. I wrote it this morning. The change to make a hopping remailer is very easy. Here's the new perl script: --------- cut here --------- while (<>) { last if /^$/ ; $subject = $_ if /^Subject:/ ; if (/^Request-Remailing-To:/) { chop ; s/^.*:// ; $addressee = $_ ; } } #open( OUTPUT, ">foo" ) || die "Cannot open 'foo'." ; open( OUTPUT, "| /usr/lib/sendmail " . $addressee ) ; select( OUTPUT ) ; print "To:" . $addressee . "\n" ; print "From: nobody\n" ; print $subject ; print "Remailed-By: Eric Hughes <hughes(a)soda.berkeley.edu>\n" ; # # check to see if there are header lines in the body to collapse # into the full header. # if ( $_ = <> ) { if (/^##$/) { # do nothing if the pasting token appears # the rest of the body will be directly appended # this allows for extra header lines to be added } else { # normal line print "\n" ; print $_ ; } } else { # empty body exit ; } while (<>) { } continue { print ; } --------- cut here --------- Short explanation. The 'print "\n" ;' line was moved inside the new if statement. The if statement reads a line of the body and stops the script if there is no body. The line read is tested to see if it contains the two characters "##" alone on the line. "##" is the ANSI C token pasting operator. If there is no pasting, a blank line is printed to mark the end of the header and the first line of the body is printed. If there is pasting, then the conditional does nothing, which has the effect that the body is appended directly onto the end of the header, allowing you to add more header lines after the header is rewritten. Here is a sample message that I sent myself after the new script was installed: --------- cut here --------- To: hughes Subject: multiple hops Request-Remailing-To: hughes ## X-Hop: 1 Request-Remailing-To: hughes ## X-Hop: 2 Request-Remailing-To: hughes ## X-Hop: 3 This is a test message of multiple hops. Eric --------- cut here --------- I received four pieces of mail after sending this to myself. The first was the actual letter, which is still delivering normally and not being filtered. The next two were the first and second remailings; they had X-Hop: 1 and 2. The last message was the final one, had X-Hop: 3 in its header and was delivered normally. At each stage, the header got rewritten and a new Request-Remailing-To: line inserted. When that mail got delivered, it was again rewritten, with a new remailing request. This process is extensible up to the 50K or so practical limitatation on mail size. Note that this system is not at all secure by itself. But if each message body were encrypted first, and the message first decrypted before the header re-write took place, the routing instructions as a whole would be hidden from prying eyes. That's the next project. Eric

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secretions
by Judith Milhon 25 Sep '92

25 Sep '92

"The alternative to mutual trust, which is indeed a risky gamble, is the security of the police state." -- Alan Watts This text may be published in MONDO2000 as my regular column, Irresponsible Journalism. Eric Hughes suggested the coda with the toad address, adding that it would be amusing to have it almost completely blotted by magic marker, as if inadequately censored. I don't want to be the venom in this toad. <I'd like to be one of the jewels it wears in its head -- I can't quote that precisely, but it's something like, "the venomous toad, which yet in its head wears a precious jewel"...> the idea is to draw in other useful minds. we can assume the WRONG PEOPLE already know the address. lady ada won't apologize for the gonzo wrapping for the ideas; she is concerned only that they be correct and clearly stated. clarifications, expansions, corrections are welcome. also abuse and threats, for that matter... any feedback, please feed me... THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT by St. Jude I don't face-to-face all that much. And I don't like clubs. I was in the Black Hole for a reason: The Screamin' Memes were in town for one night only -- Thursday, of course. Thursday's the night, now that the weekend has annexed Fri. and Mon. I was lurking in the back, hoping not to see anybody, when the Jones brothers staked me out. Damn. They are deep into the street drugs. Keeping up with the Joneses is nigh impossible; their most trivial chitchat is an exercise in decryption. Eddy -- or maybe he was being Ellis that night -- was implying something about somebody when my right foot detonated down to its steel toe. I looked up -- way up -- to a face that wasn't there at all. Just a dome of black cloth, with goggles. Three-eyed goggles. Ah: a Chador. I'd heard of that. I screamed: "You stomped my foot FLAT!" "Sorry." "Are you okay?" "Oh maaaang." Many overlapping voices, all of them synthesized, blurted from above. Out of two tiny speakers hanging like earrings off a basketweave headband like a cop's belt. The head bowed, bringing it almost within biting range. "Gah. Ow. Ooo." Pretending to be demented with pain, I lurched deep into the Chador. But I was cool: I was rootling in there for clues. Ha! Male pheromones. Hardish male torso. I was jostling this lumpy equipment hanging off him, trying to get a good feel of it without alerting him. Nuh uh: _I_ meant electronics... what did _you_ think? Okay: I had some data to work with. Male with gadgets. Quelle surprise. "What the hell have you got on your feet? HORSESHOES?" A voice like rushing water: "Kothurni." The Chador shifted a little... and under his full black skirts I saw them: big weighted club-foot boots with concealed lifts, to disguise the wearer's height. Wicked. The pain and the espionage cleared my head. I was ready to deal. "So you're protecting your meat identity, right?" The Chador seemed to teeter a little. It goggled down at me as if I were a smear on a slide. Its third-eye goggle was a lens. Check. Out of the ambient murk loomed another Chador. Exactly the same height. Right. "How come you guys are in full drag?" "We're here for a... uh... party." The voice from the other Chador was a flanged saxophone, but I could swear it had a Texas accent. "Rubbish. You're having a cell meeting, right? " The near Chador, the one I had groped, seemed to teeter again. What sounded like a tape player on fast-forward came faintly from its interior. An earphone? The saxophone honked: "If I said I even understood what you meant, what kind of a chump would that make me?" "I could hazard a guess. I think you're cryptoanarchists -- what I'd call cypherpunks!" My Chador cracked up. I could tell. The farther one seemed to stiffen; I think it was giving me a hate stare. Hard to manage behind the whole 9 yards o' cloth. "Is that clever or what? I'm onto you like psilocybe on cowshit, dudes. You want to take over the world. Haha hahaha haaaaa." Both of them rocked back a little. I went in after them. "You want to talk encryption schemes? Let's talk cryptic. Tales from the cryp'ed. But make it fast: The Memes are comin' on." Oh, I was bluffing. I don't know much about cryptography. I was just 'tuding them from tech envy. Damn: Chadors. And me without the first widget. From the far guy came a cello, very suave: "The world has already been taken over. You may have noticed this. We're just trying to get some of it back." And the accent was -- Dutch? Bob's yr uncle. Gotcha. I hadn't been certain. Maybe chadors were now trendy club gear -- what do I know? "Hey -- that cello's another guy? How many you PACKIN' in there?" Out of my Chador a sawtooth rasped: "Variable. People are ringing in and out." "You're on line?" "This is a bridge. International." Sawtooth again. The cello resumed, an annoyed cello: "We don't believe in takeovers. In fact, we are working to make things UNTAKEOVERABLE." A theremin quivered, "And to make the world safe for anarchy. _We want the air-waves, baby_." It snickered across many frequencies. The Tejana saxophone chuckled, (and an eerie treat that was, too): "Problem is, how to guarantee privacy for pseudonyms. So you can have a pseudonymous economy." A toad croaked: "So, full-RSA encrypted EVERYTHING. No back doors. Secure digital money. Swiss bank accounts for the millions." The theremin: "A global monetary system that makes governments obsolete. Down come the governments. Goodbye the feds." It sang, whoopingly: "BYE BYE, LAWWww." Horrible broad-band snickering. The toad croaked: "Er... yes. Real freedom of speech, too. Libertech!" The Dutch cello was all business: "Okay, what does it take? You need real-time protocols to prove you own your pseudonym. And your pseudonyms have online reputations, via people you've done biz with -- like a distributed credit rating system. With maybe designated angels -- Fair Witnesses." I was charmed. "And you wear the chador when you face-to-face somebody who knows your handle!" The theremin wheeped: "Actually, unmasking your real identity could be the ultimate collateral -- your killable, _torturable_ body. Even without kids, you've got a hostage to fortune -- your own meat." I was reeling. "Oh yas yas. As Dylan said: 'They asked me for some collateral/ and I pulled down my pants'." Orchestral chuckles rained down on me. Was I an international hit? But at that exact moment The Memes hit the stage. The crowd did a 9.1 Richter lurch and the other Chador pitched onto my LEFT toe, maybe denting the steel. "AAIEEeeee. That's great COVERT GEAR you got there, guys. You couldn't sneak up on Helen Keller in a HAILSTORM." I was trying to spin down. "And dudes -- this is not the neighborhood for flashing the hardware. Getting rolled by winos is pretty LOW TECH." A spike-knuckled glove slithered out of the farther guy, clutching what looked, in the near-dark, like an electric razor. "_Gonna menace 'em with a clean shave_?" The sax: "Stunner. Bottom of the line. But." A hot line of pure energy cracked across its little trodes. Of course. Rushing water: "See ya." And they did a fade into the smoke. The Screamin' Memes were worthless. To hell with clubs. To hell with lots o' things, maybe. I am now sensing my roots, mahn; dey who are my bredren. Nerds. Nerds as mainstreamed by the grainy but still fetching Robt Redford in Sneakers... Nerds who will have their revenge at last, by making the online realer than our current regrettable reality... No, I'm not quite delusional. I've heard the cypherpunks are already distributing their encrypted email software, which is quick and slick. I might even join the revolution, which is, heh, already in progress. Yeah. Why not? Give me libertech or give me... _DES_? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------- St. Jude, aka Lady Ada Lovelace, wrote "The Spook in the Machine" for MONDO #1, describing the enforcement of DES, the Data Encryption Scam with the handy backdoor. She can be reached online as stjude(a)well.sf.ca.us. Note: a definitely false rumor is now circulating that the revolutionists can be contacted via cypherpunks(a)toad.com. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- feed me? >jude<

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through mr. crypto
by nobody＠soda.berkeley.edu 25 Sep '92

25 Sep '92

** I am also the technical consultant to the show, so your mail will not be ** falling on deft ears... Awwww.... it wasn't that badly engineered. sho3t

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Returned mail: Unable to deliver mail
by Mailer-Daemon＠atdt.org 24 Sep '92

24 Sep '92

----- Transcript of session follows ----- 554 cypherpunks(a)toad.com... Recipient names must be specified ----- Unsent message follows ----- Return-Path: <cypherpunks(a)toad.com> Received: by atdt.org (5.61+++/JLK-atdt) id AA06629; Thu, 24 Sep 92 19:49:05 -0400 Date: Thu, 24 Sep 92 19:49:05 -0400 From: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Message-Id: <9209242349.AA06629(a)atdt.org> To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Information Brokers ____________________________________________________________________________ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD August 13 1992 HUGE TRADE IN PERSONAL FILES By MALCOLM BROWN Westpac, National Australia Bank, NRMA Insurance Ltd, Custom Credit and Citicorp are some of the big names in a damning report by the ICAC Assistant Commissioner, Mr Adrian Roden, QC, on the unauthorised release of confidential government information. Mr Roden found that there was a multi-million-dollar trade in such information which involved public servants, including police, and private inquiry agents. ""Information, from a variety of State and Commonwealth government sources and the private sector has been freely and regularly sold and exchanged for many years," he said. "NSW public officials have been heavily involved." Mr Roden heard 446 witnesses in public and private hearings over 168 days before compiling his 1,300-page report. Even so, he said, it was necessary to be selective; thousands of private and commercial inquiry agents had not examined. Mr Roden found that more than 250 people had participated in the illicit trade or had contributed to it. OOf these, 155 had engaged in corrupt conduct. A further 101 had engaged in conduct which allowed, encouraged or caused the occurrence of corrupt conduct. Many are NSW and Commonwealth public servants who sold information collected by the agencies where they work, including the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA), police force, Telecom and Sydney County Council. The Attorney-General, Mr Hannaford, announced that the Director of Public Prosecutions had set up a task force to consider laying charges against more than 100 people named in the report. HHe said many of the public servants named could expect to lose their jobs and that the heads of all the government departments involved had been told to examine the report and take action against those involved. The Assistant Police Commissioner, Mr Col Cole, confirmed yesterday that five police officers had been suspended and announced that three task forces had been set up and computer security upgraded. Mr Hannaford foreshadowed the introduction of privacy legislation to make the unauthorised use of confidential information a criminal offence. The major banks said that they could not condone what their staff had done but said the staff had believed that they were acting in the best interests of their employers and the community. None of the banks was planning to sack staff found to be corrupt although several said the staff had been counselled or "educated". MMr Roden said the trade involved banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions which had provided "a ready market". The link was provided by private and commercial inquiry agents. With some banks, codes had been used to conceal the nature of the transactions. "As they have gone about their corrupt trade, commercial interest has prevailed over commercial ethics, greed ha~ prevailed over public duty; laws and regulations designed to protect confidentiality have been ignored," Mr Roden said. "Frequently the client, generally an insurance company, bank or other financial institution, ordered the information from the agent with a full appreciation of how it was to be obtained. ""The evidence disclosed that in the collection and recovery departments of a number of those institutions, it has long been standard practice to use confidential government information . . . as a means of locating debtors." Some finance and insurance companies had directed agents to keep all references to the trade off invoices and reports. "Some even directed that the agents falsely state the source of the information in their reports," Mr Roden said. "Some solicitors in private practice have sought and purchased confidential government information in circumstances in which they must have known that it could not have been properly obtained." Mr Kevin Rindfleish, an unlicensed private inquiry agent, had sold Department of Motor Transport/Roads and Traffic Authority and social security information "on a large scale". His principal client had been the ANZ Bank. AA private investigator, Mr Terence John Hancock, and his company, All Cities Investigations Pty Ltd, had sold confidential government information to the National Australia Bank and Westpac on a regular basis. Two employees of the NAB had used prior contacts to provide the bank with access to RTA, social security, Australia Post and immigration information. Between them, the employees also provided silent numbers and information on electricity consumers. The Advance Bank had "over a period of years" obtained information improperly released from the RTA, the Department of Social Security and the Department of Immigration. The practice was "known and approved at least to senior management level". New Zealand Insurance and Manufacturers Mutual had bought confidential government information from private investigators. NRMA Insurance Ltd and the Government Insurance Office were "found to have participated as freely in the illicit trade in confidential government information as their more commercially orientated competitors". "Evidence relating to NRMA Insurance Ltd established not only that it purchased confidential government information through private investigators, but also that investigators were required to obtain relevant government information by unauthorised means if they were to retain the company's work." EEsanda Finance Corporation Ltd had bought confidential information over at least 23 years. Custom Credit Corporation Ltd which had engaged in the illicit trade over "many years", had maintained false records to conceal how it obtained information. Alston de Zilwa, former underwriter and operations manager of Citicorp Ltd and later, Toyota Finance Australia Limited's credit operations manager, had established for each of the two companies a system for obtaining confidential information. The companies would seek information directly from employees of the DMA and RTA and pay a private inquiry agent, Mr Kevin Robinson, who would "launder" it, then invoice the companies for the corresponding sum. Mr Roden said that hundreds of thousands of dollars had changed hands in the trade uncovered. One agent had estimated that he had paid $40,000 to $50,000 a year for Social Security information alone. Another had said he received $100,000 over two years for government information. YYet another had, according to records, charged a bank $186,000 for "inquiry services" over a period of 18 months.

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KPFA interview went well
by tcmay＠netcom.com 24 Sep '92

24 Sep '92

This is my first test of this list...hope it works...and a brief opinion on the KPFA (etc.) interview with our own John Gilmore, representing the EFF, Jim Bidzos, of RSA Data Security, and Jim Kellstrom (sp?) of the FBI. I made a tape of it and can bring it to the 10/10/92 crypto meeting. John did an excellent job of raising the constitutional issues, while the FBI guy basically said "Trust us." Jim Bidzos of RSA Data Security didn't say much, as the thrust of the discussion was more on wiretapping and the proposed Digital Telephony bill, with not much of substance said about RSA and public key cryptography. I waited on the 1-800-464-5732 line to ask about the status of use of encryption, especially with RSA and RSA-like systems, but the show ran out of time before I could get on. This series seems timely. Every Wednesday at noon on KPFA. Check your local listings and the announcement list John sent out a few days ago. --Tim -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | RSA MailSafe Public Key: by arrangement

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No Subject
by Eric Hughes 24 Sep '92

24 Sep '92

How to Make an Automated Remailer in Your Copious Spare Time with Easy to Find and Inexpensive Software Tools You May Have Lying Around. <reprinted from Popular Cryptography, September 1992. Used with permission> The basic remailer illustrates how to hook in automated software processing into the Unix mail system. Here are the basic elements. 1. .forward 2. slocal and .maildelivery 3. remail.perl 4. /usr/lib/sendmail -------------------------------------------- 1. .forward Unix mail provides a way to have accounts on many different machines but to receive all your mail in one place. That facility is the .forward file, which resides in the home directory. The file is one line long and contains the email address to which the mail will be forwarded. But the .forward file has another mode of operation. If the string begins with the pipe character '|', the mail will be piped through the program listed. Enclose the string with double quotes if you need spaces included. Here is my .forward file: "| /usr/local/lib/mh/slocal -user hughes" Thus all my mail gets processed by the slocal program, described next. I don't know where the man page for .forward is. Perhaps someone could provide a reference. --------- 2. slocal and .maildelivery The software system MH contains a bunch of useful tools for handling mail, only one of which we need. For details on MH, do 'man mh'. MH has a nice little mail hook processor called slocal. Its docs can be found by 'man mhook'. slocal can conditionally perform operations on mail messages and consider them either delivered or not. It allows multiple operations on individual mail messages. slocal reads the file .maildelivery when it starts up for instructions. Here is my .maildelivery file: # # field pattern action/ string # result (quote included spaces) # Request-Remailing-To "" pipe R "perl remail.perl" Request-Remailing-To "" file R archive.remailer The various pieces of the .maildelivery file are fully documented in the man page. I'll just explain what mine does. Each line describes one operation to be performed on each incoming mail message. Fields are separated by whitespace, so if you need to include spaces, use quotes. The first field, labelled field, is the mail header field to look for. slocal can selectively process on any header line. If the header line does not exist, then the mail does not match this line and no operation is performed. If the header line does exist, processing continues. The second field, pattern, is a text string to match with the contents of that header line, i.e. with everything after the colon. In my case, I put the empty string in, which matches everything. You need the pair of quotes to have a placeholder for the field contents. The next field, action, tells what to do with the message. 'pipe' sends the message to the standard input of the named program. 'file' appends the message to an archive or log file. A useful pipe command for testing is "tee foo", which makes a copy of the message in file foo, but does not append, so that you get an exact copy of what slocal is going to pass to your pipe. This allows testing of the pipe program without sending yourself mail all the time. The next field, result, tells what to do with the message after processing. I am currently using R for Regardless to indicate that this action should always be performed no matter what. The code R indicates that the mail should be considered not delivered after processing; thus slocal writes the mail back into my local spool and I see it as normal. Later, after I'm sick of looking at all the forwarded mail, I'll change this code to A, meaning if the processing succeeds, then the mail is considered delivered. The archive file will always remain R. The last field, string, is the parameter to the action. It is a file name or program. Use quotes to include spaces. The name of my mail processor is "perl remail.perl", which is to run the perl script remail.perl on the mail. The .maildelivery file is also the place to put encryption hooks to automatically decrypt the bodies of messages. More on that in a future version. --------- 3. remail.perl Perl is a wonderful language for doing all sorts of useful work like processing mail headers. Do 'man perl' for details, or get the O'Reilly book and really learn how to use it. The perl script, in summary, strips off the mail headers, saving the Subject: line, rewrites a new header, and appends the body of the previous message. Here is the script: --------- cut here --------- while (<>) { last if /^$/ ; $subject = $_ if /^Subject:/ ; if (/^Request-Remailing-To:/) { chop ; s/^.*:// ; $addressee = $_ ; } } #open( OUTPUT, ">foo" ) || die "Cannot open 'foo'." ; open( OUTPUT, "| /usr/lib/sendmail " . $addressee ) ; select( OUTPUT ) ; print "To:" . $addressee . "\n" ; print "From: nobody\n" ; print $subject ; print "Remailed-By: Eric Hughes <hughes(a)soda.berkeley.edu>\n" ; print "\n" ; while (<>) { } continue { print ; } --------- cut here --------- Here is a summary of the operation. To really understand this, you'll have to learn perl. The while loop processes standard input. 'last' terminates the loop as soon as a blank line is seen. A blank line separates the header from the body. The subject line, if seen, sets the subject variable to the whole subject line. The Request- header line has its final newline removed, the contents up to the colon substituted into nonexistence, and saves the rest in the addressee variable. Next the pipe to sendmail is opened and its output is selected so that all print commands will go to the pipe. There is a comment for a different output channel to the file foo which can be commented in for testing. Next the remailed header is constructed out of print statements. Lastly the rest of the standard input is passed through unmodified to the output channel. The while loop terminates when there is no more input. --------- 4. sendmail sendmail is the backend mailer; it expects complete mail messages and does not usually generate any line itself except for the first "From" (with no colon) line. Any header you construct will thus get passed through mostly unmodified. Hence you can put in any "From:" line you want and any other header info, such as my "Remailed-By:" line. sendmail expects the name of the addressee on its command line, otherwise it puts an "Apparently-To:" line in the header. Any mail processor which remails should probably go through sendmail, although it would also be possible to talk to an SMTP port directly, were you so motivated. MH also has some remailing programs; see 'man mhook'. --------- A few words for tinkerers. -- You can always send mail to yourself. Especially after you've done one kind of mail processing and want to pass the mail through the filters again. -- When getting started, create an empty .maildelivery file first and then get your .forward file working. Test it by sending messages to yourself. If you're not getting them, they are going into the bit bucket. All your other mail will as well, in this case, so if you can't afford to lose mail, do it right the first time or work on a spare account. -- Any mail slocal does not process will get delivered as normal. Running a remailer will not interfere with your other work. -- Remember to use quote marks. -- You don't need to be a sysadmin to run this kind of remailer. There is nothing, however, to prevent a sysadmin from running this sofware under an alias. The sysadmin is also a 'trusted user' to sendmail and can get rid of pesky "From"-no-colon lines. -- Perl has a random function which could be used to automatically choose various "From:" lines from a database. Remember to include yeltsy(a)kremvax.rus. -- postnews or inews could be substituted for sendmail. Different header lines would have to be created. Such a service could run in parallel with a remailer. You too can now repost to alt.sex.bondage! Enjoy. And watch for interesting improvements like encryption. Eric

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Interesting post to alt.cyberpunk.tech
by Mark Pesce 24 Sep '92

24 Sep '92

Thought ya'll might be interested in this....

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