June 1993 - cypherpunks-legacy

ALERT: PGP now back on soda
by Eric Hughes 08 Jun '93

08 Jun '93

You can stop spreading the word now. PGP is back on soda. Remember, it is my analysis that soda is still able to distribute PGP because we keep a low profile. Please keep it that way. You can find pgp with archie, so I don't feel the need to advertise. Lots of stuff happened today after I posted my initial announcement that PGP had gone offline. Because of the intervention of Eric Hollander with the folks who are in charge of the machine, reasonableness has prevailed. What happened in a nutshell was the following. Person A, a fascist asshole by all accounts, simply turned off the PGP directory without telling me. I started getting questions by email from folks trying to get PGP. Person A's argument was that PGP was illegal, therefore soda should not distribute it. Eric Hollander, after some initial rounds, played trump and observed that the machine had been recompiled without the user limit that had been part of the OS license agreement, and recommended that soda be shut down immediately because the kernel that soda was running was contrary to the license agreement. Very quickly the president of the organization which runs soda intervened and everything was OK. What is still troubling to me is the nastygram that came down from CERT. We don't know how they were informed, nor what their policy is on this. I'll have another message on that angle later. Eric

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ALERT: PGP removed from soda archive site
by Eric Hughes 08 Jun '93

08 Jun '93

The ftp site at soda will no longer be able to distribute PGP, I'm afraid. It appears that CERT informed someone on campus that "pirated" software was available on soda. The word came down, and the directory has been chown'd root and has had permissions removed. There will be more later on this. In the meantime, spread the word. Eric

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Dbase encryption
by mallen＠redvax1.dgsca.unam.mx 07 Jun '93

07 Jun '93

There is an encryption option in Dbase (SET ENCRYPTION ON). How secure is this encryption? How it works? I suspect it is not secure at all as the US Government allows its exportation :-( Guillermo

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Re: CryptoStacker, long term vision
by norm＠netcom.com 07 Jun '93

07 Jun '93

When the Iranians took over the American Embassy in Teheran they, acquired access to the machines there. Subsequently there was talk of computer systems that were guaranteed to be volatile except for ciphered disks. There would be an unciphered boot block on disk that did not have the key to the rest of the disk but did have code to read and decipher the rest of the operating system. That key, however, would be in a safe place such as Washington DC. The system could not be booted until the key was available, presumably thru secure communications. If you trusted the operating system to only use the key for reading and writing the disk but not otherwise then pulling the plug made the all data in the computer inaccessible baring action from Washington.

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remailer lossage: blank lines
by Eli Brandt 07 Jun '93

07 Jun '93

Well, nobody told me whether a message did or did not get through, but I'm now sure they didn't. All of the failed messages have blank lines before the :: token, which is consequently not recognized by recurse.pl. I dunno how they got in there, but I guess I should learn some perl and robustify against this -- unless somebody can think of a reason why :: needs to be able to start a message without being stripped. Damned in-band signalling... Eli ebrandt(a)jarthur.claremont.edu

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eastedge aDDRESS CHAnge
by b2men of EastEdge 07 Jun '93

07 Jun '93

Attention| E-mail address of EastEdge has changed to jza3001(a)huszeg11.bitnet Old address will not exist in 5 days Please spread this information Thanx -b2men signing off

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Re: Tempest@home?
by karn＠qualcomm.com 07 Jun '93

07 Jun '93

A good source of general info on RFI (radio frequency interference) suppression can be found in amateur radio publications. THe same techniques hams use to keep their computers from interfering with their radios can be used to keep your computers from getting into the NSA's receivers... Phil

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ROT-13 hoopla on EchoMac
by A1 ray arachelian 07 Jun '93

07 Jun '93

I seriously hope that this won't be way too off topic for this group, but I seem to have painted myself into a bit of a corner recently on FidoNet. Basically, it all started when someone requested a copy of a ROT-13 extension to a popular Macintosh programmer's editor called BBEdit. Soon after, the discussion was joined by the fatheaded sysops who would bible thump on the FidoNet rules that ROT-13 was encryption and as such it is outlawed on FidoNet. To make a long story shorter, in my plight to enlighten these folks (and the moderator of EchoMac who saw fit to banish me for posting a message encrypted with ROT-13,) I got a bit out of hand and started the usual on the soap-box preeching which included a message inviting everyone to join in the conversation by getting the ROT-13 extension. The rest of that message was "encrypted" by ROT-13. Now since ROT-13 is merely nothing more than A=N, B=M, C=O, D=P... and is fairly standard, I've got it on my head to convince the moderator that ROT-13 is not actually an encryption method. The FidoNet policies state that Fidonet cannot provide any sort of privacy as a measure to protect sysops from taking the heat for the possible illegal activities of users. Clearly, ROT-13 does not provide the least bit of privacy, save from a total computer neophyte. So, the reason I'm writing this here was basically "to go to the experts of encryption," and try to get them to agree with me that ROT-13 has never been a form of encryption because its purpose does not provide privacy. So I'm just asking you to agree with me, and I'll send the results to the moderator in question. If you'd like, mail me the responses directly so we won't clutter cypherpunks further, and I'll forward them myself. If you'd like, the moderator's address on FidoNet is Steve Ebener@1:152/42,FidoNet (this should be reachable via Steve.Ebner(a)f42.n152.z1.ieee.org) Please don't flame him, I'm trying to unbanish myself off the echo, not get him upset, however the thought of writing a program that sends a cookie to him every twenty minutes did occur, at least until I thought better of it.

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random access into an encrypted file?
by zimm＠alumni.cco.caltech.edu 06 Jun '93

06 Jun '93

I'm enjoying the discussion of encrypting file systems, but have a perhaps-naive question: can the methods recently proposed here work for fast "random" access of bytes from the middle of a possibly-large file? Specifically, over the years I have written some free-text information-retrieval programs which build complete inverted indices to every word in a chosen text file (which may be many megabytes long, limited by disk space, not by RAM) --- and in order to fetch and display text quickly from an arbitrary point in the file, my programs do a lot of fseek() operations. If a file is encrypted under various schemes, I wonder how long it would take to fetch byte 100,000,000? Could it cause me some performance problems? :-) Just thought I'd raise the issue.... BTW, if anybody wants to work with large text files, the stuff I've done is all free under GNU GPL; for nicest user interface, see Mac version which hides behind HyperCard (in INFO-MAC archive at sumex-aim.stanford.edu, under directory info-mac/card with a name beginning "freetext", I think). Generic command-line C code to build indices is "qndxr.c" in various archives, and the generic command-line browser is "brwsr.c". See description in THE DIGITAL WORD, eds. Landow & Delany, MIT Press, 1993, pps. 53-68, for more details. Briefly, the programs let you scroll around in alphabetized word lists, generate key-word-in-context displays and do simple proximity filtering, and retrieve chunks of text on demand, very fast. Index-building is 15-20 MB/hour on an older Mac II-class machine, 60-80 MB/hour on a Sparcstation, etc. Best, ^z (no relation!)

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My Poll.
by J. Michael Diehl 06 Jun '93

06 Jun '93

This is just a note to let you know that the deadline for my poll has been extended to Monday evening. My kitchen flooded yesterday and I will not have time to prepare the results of my poll till monday night. You may expect the results tuesday. Bummer. +-----------------------+-----------------------------+---------+ | J. Michael Diehl ;-) | I thought I was wrong once. | PGP KEY | | mdiehl(a)triton.unm.edu | But, I was mistaken. |available| | mike.diehl(a)fido.org | | Ask Me! | | (505) 299-2282 +-----------------------------+---------+ | | +------"I'm just looking for the opportunity to be -------------+ | Politically Incorrect!" <Me> | +-----If codes are outlawed, only criminals wil have codes.-----+ +----Is Big Brother in your phone? If you don't know, ask me---+

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