November 2000 - cypherpunks-legacy

CDR: Re: Florida Supreme Court freezes certification
by George＠orwellian.org 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

jonathan(a)screaming.yellow.zonkers.org wrote: # Except that the legal motion was filed by the Reps, not the Dems, # originally. They brought it on them-damn-selves. Idiots. No one asked the Florida Supreme Court to freeze the certification. ---- My current opinion is that they should take the .2% error rate optical machines from the other counties and do another vote in the chad counties. The will of the people deserves a lower error rate, when the presidency hangs in the balance. I'd say that even if the politics were reversed.

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CDR: CJ v. 9th Circuit
by John Young 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

CJ has lofted a mortar at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for dismissing his appeal for the right to self-representation, and has requested a rehearing which, if granted will take place shortly: http://cryptome.org/cej-v-ca9.htm This provides a legal analysis of the dismissal, new precedents it sets, and a warning to attorneys practising in the 9th Circuit and the State of Washington, along with the court docket. Here's his message of transmittal: It is my hope that someone might find the time and energy to distribute this to Internet legal forums and to attorneys throughout the Ninth District, especially Seattle-Tacoma. Fuck These Morons (TM) have shit all over Constitutional Law and I want to rub their faces in it. It will no doubt piss Them (TM) off to the Max, but I want to stir things up before the Appeals hearing, which should be in the next couple of weeks, if granted. It's Crunch Time, and I want to shine as much light as possible on what Fuck These Morons (TM) are doing. --

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CDR: Is this Reno/wiretap stat true?
by George＠orwellian.org 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

Found in Usenet: # I don't know if Reno is a traitor, but consider this: # Between 1992 and 1997, there were approximately 2,500 # national security wiretaps requested by the FBI. Only one # of these 2,500 requests was turned down: Wen Ho Lee's! And # this turndown took place while Wen Ho Lee was still # downloading nuclear secrets from Lost Alamos. True/False?

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20 Nov '00

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CDR: Re: Carnivore All-Consuming
by Bill Stewart 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

>On Sun, 19 Nov 2000, Steve Schear wrote: >> A PC, using off-the-shelf HW, is capable of filtering a full 100 Mbps link >> (144K packets/sec) as demonstrated by the BlackICE products >> http://www.networkice.com/html/blackice_sentry.html At 03:20 AM 11/20/00 +0000, Jim Dixon wrote: >Third, even if you believe that they can really analyse data at >100 Mbps, this still doesn't give them the ability to handle more >than one PoP with two DS3 connections. This is still orders of >magnitude away from being able to handle a major site with >multiple 2.5G connections, let alone all of the traffic handled by >a major ISP. >The original claim was that Carnivore could monitor all of an ISP's >traffic. This isn't true for most ISPs. Actually, "most" ISPs probably don't have more than two T3s or OC3s, because most ISPs are the 5000+ little ones; many only have a few T1s. But big ISPs are a different issue; any of the Tier 1 providers could melt a Pentium box if they directed a moderate fraction of their traffic at it. The question is how the carnivores tell the ISP's network what they're looking for, and how much cooperation they need from the ISP. Most ISP traffic is probably web, not email, and the email that's actually handled by ISPs (as opposed to just passing through) is handled by big mail servers that could perhaps be told to forward all mail for targeted accounts, since they need to do that level of indentification to handle the mail in the first place. For email, the big player is of course AOL, followed by specialized mail providers like iname.com, and the portal sites like Excite, Yahoo, and Hotmail, and a few ISPs like Earthlink/Mindspring. (The business has gotten sufficiently specialized that I'm not sure how many of those sites really provide their own service rather than outsourcing to specialists.) As with big ISPs, if they cooperate, the job's possible, and if they don't it's pretty intractable. If you know your target's IP address, it's a lot simpler - get the routing protocols to shove their traffic your way by advertising routes using OSPF, BGP, or whatever. >Qwest deployed 14,000 miles of fibre some years ago. This was >packaged as conduits carrying 48 fiber pairs, each pair using >wave division multiplexing to carry 8 to 16 optical channels, with >each channel running at 10 Gbps. That's 160 Gbps per fiber, >7,680 Gbps per conduit. Qwest is one of many carriers. 160 Gbps >over a fiber pair isn't state of the art. Qwest has many conduits. They do have a nice _little_ network :-) Actually, most of that fiber isn't even lit yet, much less full, and much of their bandwidth isn't ISP traffic, it's private line sold to businesses or other ISPs. The last AT&T marketing hype I saw placed us as #2, well behind UUNET. The real bandwidth constraints are mainly the routers - most big ISPs use Cisco 12000 GSRs or products from Juniper or other emerging competitors, most of which like to call their products "terabit" routers because they have reasonably large backplane capacity. A totally different bandwidth segment is inside the big hosting centers - Exodus, Globalcenter, etc. Most of that's Gigabit Ether, with various brands of switches and routers, and an amazing fraction of their traffic stays in the building, between different colo customers. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart(a)pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

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CDR: Some sort of steeerange tax revolt
by George＠orwellian.org 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/19/business/19TAXX.html # # November 19, 2000 # # Defying the I.R.S., Anti-Tax Businesses Refuse to Withhold # # By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON # # LAKE SHASTA, Calif. - Al Thompson squeezed most of his # manufacturing company's 28 employees into a conference room here # in October to say he had good news: Income taxes must be paid # by only a few Americans, mostly those working for foreign-owned # companies. So, he told the workers, they would not have to pay # income taxes ever again. His business is exempt, too, he said. # # No Social Security or Medicare taxes, either. The company was # no longer withholding taxes from their paychecks, he said, or # telling the Internal Revenue Service how much they made. [snip]

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CDR: Jim Bell Arrested
by John Young 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

A family member says Jim Bell was arrested last night when he went out to the store. The person also said the feds were searching for e-mail Jim sent around August 18. I can't prove the family member is that and not a fisher.

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CDR: Re: Key-Address correspondence in networks?
by lists＠notatla.demon.co.uk 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

From: Ray Dillinger <bear(a)sonic.net> You seem to have 2 different questions. > In an application which passes encrypted messages from one host to > another, it is desirable to have the message differently encrypted > at each 'hop' along the way (to defeat traffic analysis). But, this > link-to-link encryption requires keeping track of an enormous number > of keys, and that introduces complexity which a cracker could use > to get into the system. You might consider proxy cryptography here. ftp://research.att.com/dist/mab/proxy.ps > The proposal is to use longer keys for each machine, and have the > IP address of each machine be part of its key. (or in another > network environment, assign it an "address" which happens to *be* > its key...) > My questions: > 1) Is using a longer key just paranoia in this case, or is there > an actual weakness in constricting the choice of public key > that makes the private key easier to derive? Assuming RSA and IPv4 you are only planning to fix 32 bits (perhaps the next to least significant because you want to cater for even numbered IP addresses) out of each prime of size 512 or 1024 or whatever. That does not sound like much reduced security. > 2) Is there a reasonable class of attacks and spoofs that this > protects against? I think so. Hard cheese for DCHP users though. From: Bram Cohen <bram(a)gawth.com> > Like I said, the important thing is that it stops passive attacks - in > practice man in the middle attacks just don't seem to happen. Sorry to take issue with Bram again but this reminds me of As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.

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CDR: RE: Schneier: Why Digital Signatures are not Signatures (was Re :CRYPTO-GRAM, November 15, 2000)
by Lynn.Wheeler＠firstdata.com 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

there are issues about authentication ... like conceptual frame-works of something you have, something you know, and something you are. it is possible to put together digital signature authentication technology/frame-works involving digital signature that are dependent on one or more pieces of 3-factor authentication. legal "signatures" as indication of intent have involved issues like counterfeit and understanding (and various regulations about font-sizes, wording, different expectations about prudent person, etc). a digital signature, once executed is a lot harder to counterfeit (compared to various written signatures) ... however there is much less direct correlation between intention and the act of executing a digital signature. digital signature in conjunction with various process that can proove that every digital signature executed was directly dependant on various combinations of 3-factor authentication (for each and every digital signature executed) attempts for a tighter correlation and demonstrate some degree of actual binding (between intention and signature execution). however, they also introduce new technology challenges ... there is now a significantly wider gap between the presentation of the information that a person may be agreeing to ... and the actual representation that is involved in executing digital signatures. paper documents also have had the advantage that the presentation of the information and the signature application is nearly identical technology .... much closer binding between the representation of what is being agreed to and the method of indicating that agreement. There are not a whole lot of cases where as the person is using a pen to sign a specific piece of paper ... that the pen can wonder off and sign a totally different piece of paper (like radar getting week-end passes signed in the MASH show). So the understanding issue pretty much stays the same in both environments (digital signature and paper signature) ... digital signatures (in conjunction with the appropriate authentication framework) can reduce the instances of counterfeit signatures being applied to documents ... but also opens up the instances where what a person is presented isn't necessarily what the person is signing. So one issue might be ... all other factors being equal ... is the magnitude of any counterfeit reduction significantly greater than the increase in the "what you see is what you sign" problem and the "did the person actually intend/confirm that particular signature" problem. "Paul Kierstead" <paul.kierstead(a)alcatel.com> on 11/17/2000 06:09:02 AM Please respond to paul.kierstead(a)alcatel.com

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CDR: Drop the recounts
by George＠Orwellian.Org 20 Nov '00

20 Nov '00

The recounts will take weeks? Fugeddaboutit. Go for a revote request using the 0.2% error rate machines. Get the revote: Gore wins by thousands. Don't get it: Gore viable next election cycle, Bush out. It took 36 re-votes to elect Thomas Jefferson. [Democratic spin]

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