March 1993 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Many Important Items in the News
by Arthur Abraham 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

"Consenting adults" should be able to do whatever they want -- your comments go to obtaining consent for anonymity. Since on my good days I try to act like an adult, I support the truth in labeling of anonymous postings as anonymous postings. -a2.

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Re: FREE: warning to "sci" anonymous posters
by Arthur Abraham 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

Dear internaut(a)aol.com, I note that the quoted posting, threatening use of an "Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation" to "restore the pre-Julf status quo" is anonymous. I assume you know the identity of this poster...how delicate of you to conceal it. -a2.

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New key
by A.J. Janschewitz 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

Mess-DOS struck again. My PGP directory got scrunged, so any servers and individuals who may have added my PGP public key that I posted last month have it wrong. My error. Sorry about that. My *new* key, which can be easily identified as the proper one by noting that my moribund psilink account is not on it, is available via fingering me ajay(a)holonet.net. Listfolks please note and remove my old key. Again, sorry. ==a.j.== -- Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. -Mark Twain, used w/o permission by ajay(a)holonet.net

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Add Me to the List
by ggoebel＠sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

I have tried many a time, to send mail asking to subscribe to cypherpunks-request(a)toad.com I have never received any list mail. I think I have been added to the announce list... but I would greatly appreciate it if someone would add me on to the main list. thanks, -- C. Garrett Goebel <ggoebel(a)sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de>

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Re: Many Important Items in the News
by Hal 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

Responding to Phil Karn's proposal that anonymous mail should be clearly marked as such: The only thing I object to in this is that it implicitly gives up one of the strongest arguments in favor of anonymity/pseudonymity, which is that there is already no way to verify identities on the net. In Phil's analogy with Caller ID, where the net is said to already be a "Caller ID" environment, the thing to realize is that the "ID's" are not necessarily accurate. To a large extent, identity on the net is an illusion. Pseudonymous remailers like Julf's should be seen as a natural extension of net culture. This situation is only going to become more extreme as the net continues to move beyond its original, relatively controlled, community of large universities and government research labs, to include the general public. As more and more "Free Net", Public Access, and BBS systems become part of the internet, there is either going to have to be a massive and universal crackdown on identity verification, which I think is unlikely, or else there is going to have to be acceptance that net identity doesn't necessarily correspond to real names. (I myself have had email-capable accounts in three names besides my own on various systems.) Granted, this argument did not persuade the facist forces which forced the shutdown of Julf's remailer, but that doesn't invalidate it. Julf's remailer was not shut down due to reasoned disagreement and a consensus that it was wrong; rather, its shutdown was (as far as is known so far) a demonstration of raw power by some person or small group. Responding to Marc Horowitz's point about problems with the idea of uncancellable messages: Marc raises the issue of volume abuse. I think it's important to note that, as far as I know, the Penet postings which people complained about where NOT examples of volume abuse. The objections to these messages were based on their contents. (In some cases, people objected to some messages not because of their contents or their volume, but simply because they were "anonymous"!) I realize that Marc was addressing the issue of uncancellable messages in general, not specifically with regard to anonymous messages. I am not an expert on news software but reading the debate on this issue in news.admin.policy it appears that the current system is far too lax in allowing cancel messages. It appears to be very easy to cancel postings made by someone else. This led to De Pew and his cancel daemon, which itself led to counter-threats for cancel daemons to be activated against De Pew and other posters from his site. All this points to design flaws in the cancel mechanism. I do think that it would be appropriate to put more restrictions on cancel messages, and digital signatures could play a part in this. Perhaps Marc's concern about payment for volume abuse could be dealt with by some limitations on large postings. I don't really know how Marc (or anyone) distinguishes between a 100K byte junk file in sci.crypt and a 100K byte file in alt.graphics.misc which he might find equally uninteresting and for which he has to pay equally. Maybe he's only reading sci.crypt? In that case perhaps a solution would be for the news transfer software to be enhanced to allow some filtering. Hal 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com P.S. Edgar asks about the mail-to-news gateway at ucbvax.berkeley.edu. Recently I saw postings indicating that this gateway had shut down. If anyone has information on mail-to-news gateways please post it here.

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REMAIL: Whence Remailers?
by edgar＠spectrx.Saigon.COM 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

With the unfortunate recent forced demise of the penet.fi remailer, The Cypherpunks remailers now seem to be the only holdouts. So where do we go from here? Is anyone feeling intimidated yet? Chael Hall has implemented an "--ignore--" kill line in his remailer, which I have verified works. I wish you other remailer operators (except Miron Cuperman) would adopt that hack into your own remailers. You also might help Chael integrate PGP into his remailer; he says he's having problems. Another feature I've asked for is ability to post to newsgroups through the remailers. With the demise of penet.fi, this becomes more urgent. I've been told that one can post anonymously by using Cypherpunks remailers in conjunction with a non-anonymous e-mail server newsgroup poster like ucbvax.berkeley.edu. The instructions I've received say to Send to, e.g., sci-crypt(a)ucbvax.berkeley.edu to post to sci.crypt. But what about newsgroups which contain dashes in the name, such as "rec.video.cable-tv"; how does one encode the ucbvax address for those. Anyone who knows, please post or send e-mail. But adding code to the current remailers to post instead of mail by using say, :: Request-Reposting-To: [newsgroup] should be pretty easy, shouldn't it?? -- edgar(a)spectrx.saigon.com (Edgar W. Swank) SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005 Silicon Valley, Ca

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ARMM?
by jb＠paris7.jussieu.fr 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

Hi, What's ARMM or whatever it's called? Thanx, jb

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Re: Many Important Items in the News
by Peter Honeyman 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

marc, if article cancellation is made cryptographically secure, there is the possibility that articles can be made uncancellable. of course, if there is some wild card that allows the backbone cabal to cancel articles remotely and after the fact, then i suspect usenet will remain vulnerable to forged cancellation messages. but maybe not. i see your point about backbone admins refusing to traffic in certain kinds of messages, but as a veteran of usenet from before it was even called usenet, i assure you that other admins would quickly fill in the gaps in connectivity. this has happened many times. i don't agree, btw, that we can rely on the backbone admins to be very strong supporters of speech, nor should we. as for "the guy with the disk" wanting macpgp to go away, that's not what happened here. everyone i've talked to that has a direct role in the decision agrees that there is a valid research and education function served by distributing macpgp. ah well, sometimes the dragon wins. and regarding the network providers decision to pull penet's plug, i believe this decision was based principally on the opinion of ... how did julf put it? ... oh yes, "a very well-known and extremely highly regarded net personality" (i doubt that i would regard him as a strong supporter of free speech, btw). i suspect that when we get to the bottom of this, we'll discover that many people's interests were being represented without their knowledge, assent, or agreement. regarding your comments about net abuse and megabytes of trash, i agree that we need to brainstorm and find ways to address these problems. i am optimistic that technical solutions hold a lot of promise; it's just a matter of discovering them. let's put our shoulder to the wheel! peter

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Re: Many Important Items in the News
by david＠staff.udc.upenn.edu 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

Phil Karn suggests that the ability for potential recipients to block anonymous mail is important. I agree. If you don't mind a few comments from someone who has been lurking until now . . . If, as Tim May says, the cyphperpunks anonymous remailers have been mentioned more widely, it may be time for the cypherpunks to 'go public'. I suspect, from the traffic on news.admin.policy (which I just read a bunch of) that things would have been less acrimonious if Julf had chosen to respond to admin complaints and been seen to be clearly working toward a mutually acceptible solution. I understand (I think) why he chose not to, but if news.admin.policy starts talking about cypherpunk remailers, then, based on what we learned from Julf's experience (thanks Julf, and sorry it turned out the way it did, and happy it wasn't worse) I don't think we can afford to remain silent. I suspect that even if Julf had been participating in that discussion he still would have been shut down, but it might have taken longer, and people might (/might/) understand his/our position better. I suggest we be proactive about 'anonymous call blocking', and prepare information sheets and code to make it easy for people who choose to do so to block anonymous mail/postings, and at the appropriate time publish these widely. Perhaps a member with an effective writing style (Tim?) could prepare a 'position paper' explaining our position. Of course, talk of Anarchy would be a little much, so the problem would be what to include . . . An argument that might appeal to the control freaks is that anonymous remailers are inevitable, and it would be better to codify it and provide mechanisms for 'anonymous message blocking' than to have to deal with it anew each time someone new starts up an anonymous service. The biggest problem I see is that a number of Julf's supporters pointed to the fact that penet anonymous users could be sent email, just like a regular net id, and had a sysadmin who could block them for bad behaviour, just like a regular net id. Cypherpunk remailers do away with that, and that could be a hard sell. The danger of asking news.admin.policy in on a standardization discussion is that they could decide this level of 'accountability' was required and get really nasty about anything else. I hope others have some better ideas about how to prepare for what comes next. The one clear thing is that we have a lot to learn from Julf's experience. Anyone interested in the future of anonymity on the net who has not read through some of the postings on news.admin.policy should do so. -- david david(a)staff.udc.upenn.edu

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Re: Many Important Items in the News
by DrZaphod 25 Mar '93

25 Mar '93

I think we need to gear our remailers more towards pseudonymous communication. I agree with Phil Karn when he says mailer filters will eventually be capable [and widespread] as to filter by RSA public-key so as to only need one anonymous acct... But for now I believe we need to open up more pseudonymous remailers such as penet, with an anonymous option. There may be legal trouble upon action of this suggestion, and all the better to bring attention to our cause.. assuming we can get enough people to start this type of remailer. (Phil Karn) writes: >More elaborate filters could be constructed that would accept >anonymous email only when it had been signed by certain specific RSA >keys. This would let consenting parties communicate by means of >pseudonyms, without having to open themselves up to anonymous >harassment from the entire net. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- - DrZaphod #Don't Come Any Closer Or I'll Encrypt! - - [AC/DC] / [DnA][HP] #Xcitement thru Technology and Creativity - - [drzaphod(a)ncselxsi.uucp]# [MindPolice Censored This Bit] - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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