March 1993 - cypherpunks-legacy

FLAME: Defending unpopular views
by nobody＠rosebud.ee.uh.edu 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

>From John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859: [I]f any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infalliabilty .... [T]hough the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied .... [E]ven if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension [of] or feeling [for] its rational grounds.

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Re: You Aren't [I'm Not]
by Peter Honeyman 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

Date: Thu, 4 Mar 93 08:54:56 -0500 From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)Athena.MIT.EDU> And "holding somone responsible for their actions" doesn't necessarilly mean throwing someone in jail, or sueing them for lots of money --- it can be as simple as their knowing that what they say can be traced back to them, and their own personal credibility is on the line. ted, do you think today's nets offer this assurance? i certainly do not. peter

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Encrypted voice protocol?
by Theodore Ts'o 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

People may find this very interesting..... the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 soundboard can play and record sound at the same time; as far as I know, this is the only commercially available board on the market that will do this. (Commercially available is important, because it means that people would be able to purchase said board cheaply, or perhaps alreadydy have.) So for roughly $200 US, and a little software, it should be possible to put together something that would do encrypted voice communications over the network. Is there any interest in developing some sort of standard protocol and software to do encrypted, compressed voice communications over TCP/IP? I can think some obvious design constraints right away; it should be device independent, which means it needs to be able to support multiple sampling rates, and negotiate sampling rates, in case one side as a limited range of sampling rates to choose from. It should support both multiple private and public key encryption algorithms, as well as multiple choicese of compression technologies. We'd probably want to have a core set of algorithms that everyone would be expected to support, for the sake of interoperability, and allow for people to experment with more powerful encryption/compression techniquese. And finally, for obvious reasons, at least one implementation should be developed in a non-COCOM country. :-) Is this something that people would be interested in working on? - Ted ------- Forwarded Message From: "Linux Activists" <linux-activists(a)joker.cs.hut.fi> To: "Linux-Activists" <linux-activists(a)joker.cs.hut.fi> Reply-To: "Linux-Activists" <linux-activists(a)joker.cs.hut.fi> X-Note1: Remember to put 'X-Mn-Key: SOUND' to your mail body or header Subject: Linux-Activists - SOUND Channel digest. 93-2-4-3:1 X-Mn-Key: SOUND Sender: owner-linux-activists(a)joker.cs.hut.fi Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1993 08:25:39 +0200 From: hsavolai(a)cs.Helsinki.FI (Hannu Savolainen) Subject: Preliminary GUS driver available Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1993 02:29:29 +0200 Hi folks, There is a very early testing version of the GUS (Gravis Ultrasound) driver available at klingon.epas.utoronto.ca (the GUS archive site) in directory pub/pc/ultrasound/submit. This version contains a simple API which makes it possible to write applications for GUS under Linux. Since there is no such applications yet, this is just a hacker's release. *** This is just a pre pre pre alpha version. I will release an official version after a couple of months. The official and supported version is 1.0 which you propably have already *** Additionally this version contains some changes for SB and PAS users. It is for example possible to record and play at the same time with PAS16 (there is a new devicefile (/dev/dsp1 (minor 19)), whic is connected to the SB DSP emulator of PAS. ...... ------- End Forwarded Message

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SOCIETY: crypto impact
by Karl Barrus 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

Like any new technology, selling crypto to the public will be difficult at first. I'll bet the telephone, something so vital to today's society it is difficult to imagine functioning without it, was tough to get going. PROPONENT: "Just imagine the service and convenience!" OPPONENT: "What services and conveniences? I visit the people I want to talk to and conduct my business withing 5 miles of home." At the time there were no neat services or conveniences. Buying into new technology will cause resistance, since people are not going to miss what they do not have. However, I think some crypto technology will be easier to sell than others. It should be easy to convince people of the need for good encryption, the kind that can protect you or your company's financial information, mail, ideas, etc. Also, digital signatures and authentication techniques should face little resistance. Now, anonymous remailers and other privacy methods will be a little harder :-) (witness the debate over anonymous speech occuring right now!) On a related note, it is amazing how much information about you exists. Did anyone else watch a PBS documentary about this (sorry, I can't remember the name of it)? In the report, a writer researched how direct mail marketing departments seek out infomation - from going to the county court house and obtaining property and deed information, to using census information to classify your living habits, professional organizations you belong to, catalogs for mailing lists of various interests, etc. Some supermarkets were even testing a system in which your purchases (scanned by the bar code reader) are saved and indexed by your credit card or check! Banks could then sell this extremely valuable information to direct mail houses. /-----------------------------------\ | Karl L. Barrus | | elee9sf(a)menudo.uh.edu | <- preferred address | barrus(a)tree.egr.uh.edu (NeXTMail) | \-----------------------------------/

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Re: You Aren't [I'm Not]
by Peter Honeyman 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

Date: Wed, 3 Mar 93 12:41:48 -0500 From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)Athena.MIT.EDU> Subject: Re: You Aren't [I'm Not] ... I don't believe in prior restraint; but I do believe in personal responsibility ... ... in this model, how can you provide personal responsibility? ted, when you say you favor personal responsibility, do you mean "i am in favor of people acting responsibly," which i take to be the sense of the first quote, or do you mean "i want there to be a way to hold people responsible for their actions," which i take to be the meaning of the second? (i favor the former, but am undecided about the latter. not that anyone asked ...) peter ps: pardon my wild excerpting; i hope it doesn't obscure.

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Diffie-hellman
by avalon＠coombs.anu.edu.au 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

Does anyone know of any 'sample code' that can be ftp'd from around the place or anything which uses it ?

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FWEE!: Whistleblower progress update
by deltorto＠aol.com 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

Gang, First off, since I have just now been able to process some of the couple hundred msgs in my box, I'd like to respond to a good idea... >>From: yanek(a)novavax.nova.edu >> >> [good stuff removed] >> >>The solution is the use of prefixes in Subject: lines. When you post, >>prefix your Subject: line with a short "tag" such as "ANON:", >>"DCNET:", "PGP:", "DCASH:", or others. Excellent idea, Yanek, I like the elegance of it very much. However, I prefer to label all my Whistleblower posts with "FWEEE:" rather than the mundane "WHISTLE:" and besides, it's shorter. :-) Other than that, I like your suggestions,e and here are my (short) ones (marked with "-"): ANON: Anoymity/Pseudonymity -MIX: Remailer Technology DCNET: DC Nets RANDOM: Random Generators DCASH: Digital Banking PGP: PGP App/Current Info FLAME: Crypto-Censorship -FWEE!: Whistleblowers (T he "Keith Peterson Area"?) -MTGS: Physical Meetings/Conferences -------------- OK, now Whistleblowers --------------- Secondly, I suppose that everyone has by now heard about Bill Clinton's 800 numbers for government waste whistleblowers and anyone else to call. A great idea, and I applaud him for it (it'll keep Al Gore out of trouble for a while), but it's "kid stuff" compared to the picture I have in my mind for our Whistleblowers anonymous remailer system. Eventually, I would like to see anon msgs (some encrypted) alerting specific investigators about assassinations, military cost overruns, govt sex scandals, private sector insider trading and all sorts of other nefarious goings-on. This is gonna be GREAT! We're gonna "rock the world" of the rats out there. Over the next few weeks, I will post some plans like the one below for all of you to comment on. Among these will be a phased roadmap which will hopefully diagram for all Cypherpunks what needs to be done to get a true anon remailer up and running and populate it with juicy tidbits. Make no mistake, this is no small job: it will require a team effort. Prepare to be called on for small jobs, and feel free to refuse if the work is out of your league of if you haven't enough time. It'll get done: the People are counting on us. For now, we are in Phase 1: planning, design & data acquisition. Data Acq'n: I am now working on a database which will eventually cover all of Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary and the Pentagon. As noted before, this db will list email addresses wherever possible. Many Congresspeople do not currently have email, so we may even assist our elected officials in the process of getting looped in. We will send out our initial offers to some highly placed people to visit the Whistleblowers list and sign on, get a key and start paying attention. Phase 2 will be to spec out the remail and produce a preliminary set of instructions to be sent out with the invitation to participate. Phase 3 will be the initial remailer implementation and testing. Phase 4 will involve getting a few press and activist people to log on and get used to PGP and the whole idea. I expect by then that we may already have some whistles being blown. Later Phases will be discussed as I think of them, this is a rough preliminary sketch intended for comment. FYI: several Congressperson's offices have drooled audibly over the prospect and may contribute resources or assistance to our effort. I tend to think we should do this ourselves to avoid any sort of indebtedness to any official entity. In addition, a local SF TV news service has expressed real interest in getting a copy of PGP (DOS), so I will soon post a request for someone to supply that to a certain address (stay tuned). Again, I want to stress the importance of a central repository of all PGP versions for distribution for non-profit purposes such as being able to sign on to this list. The importance of ensuring that the software at this site is not compromised in any way is crucial, just to state the obvious. More later. Hope to see people at CFP and the Modern Times bookstore gig on Sunday. dave|evad PS: In future, I will be receiving mail from the Cypherpunks list at <internaut(a)aol.com>. any personal msgs can still be sent to me at <deltorto(a)aol.com>. -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.1e mQCNAitfCt4AAAEEANk+zWV0Z1tnxsJm25BAvH2NI68RbNOaumDofJgVUL9BePQI HNNbOdu4gAmhcEXMvFVwu3vju4nh9qnzz7lYpw5Yh6TcgVI+vb9OsljfAR+ibhDN j5ParKfwZ+mexOCAfrgdt1z71XLY588qxs70ha6u76dvxUsdw6HBOF9KrwDlAAUT tCJEYXZpZCBEZWwgVG9ydG8gPGRlbHRvcnRvQGFvbC5jb20+ =YGwT -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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Re: ANON: My remailer
by dclunie＠pax.tpa.com.au 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

> I know that the remailer I was running wasn't the biggest kept secret, > however, I made sure not to mention it to too many local people. I > wonder if my sysadmin found out thru mail-logs or thru a pgp key > server or somebody told him or what? I guess I'll never find out. Why not just ask him/her ? And while you are at it, you could ask them why they developed such a policy. Though you are obviously obliged to respect it, there is no harm in asking them what their rationale is ... it would be nice to know whether the policy was adopted on purely theoretical grounds or whether they were responding to a specific pattern of misuse. I also noticed that the policy you posted made no reference to the privacy of plaintext email, or its lack thereof. david

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anon user on cypherpunks list
by Johan Helsingius 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

Er... Seems somebody has added an13556(a)anon.penet.fi to the mailing list, causing every message on the list to go through the server. This results in everyone sending to the list being allocated an anon id! Could you please change the address to be na13556(a)anon.penet.fi instead, thus avoiding the problem (yes, I've implemented the feature, but I don't want to announce it yet, as there are some implications I want to fix first...). Also a *WARNING*... an13556(a)anon.penet.fi now knows the anon id of everyone who have not set a password on anon.penet.fi, and have sent messages to the list recently. So if you have been allocated an id as a result of mailing to the list, you probably want to mail me and ask to be deleted from the anon database. Julf (admin(a)anon.penet.fi)

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a /etc/magic for the unix file command
by Peter & 04 Mar '93

04 Mar '93

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