November 2000 - cypherpunks-legacy

BSA deploys imaginary pirate software detector vans
by Fearghas McKay 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/14562.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BSA deploys imaginary pirate software detector vans By: Kieren McCarthy Posted: 08/11/2000 at 10:57 GMT The Business Software Alliance aka The Pirate Busters is growing so frustrated in its hopeless efforts to cut down on software piracy that it has decided propaganda and misinformation is the way forward. Visitors to Glasgow Central Station yesterday were surprised to be confronted by a Ford Transit van with a small radar and rusty Sky satellite dish mounted on top. What was this apparition? Why, the BSA's latest weapon in the war against software-stealing scum. A wise reader asked one of the "consultants" what exactly the dishes were able to do and was informed they could detect PCs running illegal software. When pushed a little further, she admitted the van was "just a dummy" but the BSA still had a fleet of the real things rushing around Scotland detecting and nabbing unsuspecting criminals. Expressing incredulity, things turned nasty and our loyal reader was threatened. He'd "better watch out" because the BSA with its new super software-finding equipment will "get him easily". He quickly ran off and slid into the shadows before he was photographed and his face wired to Interpol and the CIA. Can you believe this? This has to be one of the most insane things we've heard in years. The BSA needs to take a valium and lay down for a bit. ® Related Stories BSA offers £10K bounty to catch software thieves --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0

CDR: Re: Phil Zimmerman Profiled
by auto87114＠hushmail.com 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

At Wed, 8 Nov 2000 22:29:57 -0800, "James D. Wilson" <netsurf(a)sersol.com> wrote: >Meet Phil Zimmermann, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) >encryption suite and one of the world's best-known cryptographers. Why was this article about encryption posted on this US presidential elektion discussion list? What's that you say? You're kidding! Really? You mean this is an encryption discussion list? Nah, I still don't believe it.

3 2

CDR: PGP on the Palm Pilot.
by jacques.garsous＠glaverbel.com 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Hi, Could send me where I can find more explanation about PGP using on a Palm Pilot. Best Regard, Jacques GARSOUS Network Engineering Glavinfo E-mail jacques.garsous(a)glaverbel.com Tél + 32 2 658 05 32 Mobile +32 476 40 97 93 Glavinfo E.I.G. Vandammestraat 7, Bus 2 B-1560 Hoeilaart Belgium

1 0

CDR: Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the election
by Declan McCullagh 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

With 99.9 percent of the votes in Florida counted, Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the presidency. The Florida Department of State reports -- in numbers updated in the last five minutes -- that George W. Bush won 2,898,865 votes with Gore scoring 2,898,235. You can see the stats for yourself at: http://enight.dos.state.fl.us/SummaryRpt.asp?ElectionDate=11/7/00&RACE=PRE If Bush does not win Florida he cannot win the presidency, based on the numbers calculated by CNN and the networks. Oregon and Wisconsin, the two states still labeled as tossups, have a combined total of 18 votes, not enough to propel Bush to the necessary 270 electoral votes without Florida. A win in Florida would guarantee Gore a victory. Third parties in Florida made a difference. Libertarian Harry Browne won 15,609 votes, and the Green Party's Ralph Nader received 94,201 votes in the state. Nader occasionally claims that he lures voters who would not otherwise go to the polls. But if even one percent of Nader's voters had turned to Gore -- a certainty -- the presidential election would have turned out differently. With only a 630 vote difference out of some 6 million votes cast in Florida, a recount could go a different way. As I write this, Gore has made a concession call to Bush, but I'd imagine the Dems would want a recount. That's what Gore's supporters are chanting in Tennessee, anyway. -Declan

6 5

CDR: Re: Courts interfering with election
by George＠orwellian.org 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

TimMay wrote: # I thought I was jaded, but this is too much even for me to believe. # # A judge in St. Louis has ordered the polls kept open later, until 10 # pm local time. The effect will be to let more inner city, # Democrat-leaning voters vote. What a lame-ass complaint. For some reason, certain polling areas got jammed up, as in long lines. The court agreed to keep the polls open longer so the people could vote. It didn't matter who the people might vote for, despite the Democrats asking for the extended hours. The Republicans actually went into federal court to try and block this, and failed. Did you expect a Republican judge to say no since the people who might be unable to vote by the normal deadline were Democrats? What's your objection to people voting? Try not to mention a political party in your reply. Tim the Troll, yet again.

7 8

CDR: Your IFILM registration is confirmed!
by registration＠ifilm.com 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Dear cypunks, Welcome to IFILM, the Web's largest film collection and leading entertainment resource. IFILM delivers more than 10,000 Internet films, the latest Industry news and unlimited information about films, filmmaking and the film industry. * Watch, rate and review all of our films! * Check out the daily IFILM Picks! * Read the latest on the new movie releases and box-office hits! * See today's Cool Click or Web Pick! * Take a peek at the new Erotica Showcase! * Prepare yourself for Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation! * Watch a film on any of our 11 channels: Action, Animation, Comedy, Drama, Sci-fi, Thriller and more! So...what are you looking at? Questions? Let us know! Send email to info(a)ifilm.com IFILM (www.ifilm.com) The only place to watch every film on the Web

1 0

CDR: Gore's next move
by George＠Orwellian.Org 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Gore has dispatched 50 staffers from Tennessee to Palm Beach County, contacted lobbyists in the area regarding raising $3 million in funds, petitions challenging the vote due to the bad form are being circulated, and, ugh, I forget. A legal challenge to the Palm Beach County vote seems to be in the works. ---- FoxNewsChannel posted: # Gore trails by less than 1,000 # with 32 of 67 Fla. counties recounted; It was 2100 votes in Bush's favor before the second count. County recounts, under half of them, lowered that to 1000. "At this rate", perhaps Gore will win anyway. ---- The ballot layout was illegal and resulted in a statistically verifiable set of erroneous votes. http://www.gopbi.com/news/local/ballot.html http://cnews.tribune.com/news/image/0,1119,oso-nation-82373,00.html http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-ELN-Florida-Ballot-Confusion.ht… Even though Bucanan got roughly the same number of votes in this presidential election as last, it means little compared to this data, all from the current FL election: http://web.mit.edu/norstadt/Public/election.pdf

1 0

CDR: Re: A successful lawsuit means Gore wins!
by George＠Orwellian.Org 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # There cannot be a re-vote of the County, or even of the entire State, # as this would distort the forces acting on the electorate in a way # never seen before. An honest attempt to get accurate vote from citizens is in no way a distortion of the purpose of voting. You have no case. Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # The Palm County voters would know _they_ would be electing # the next president. Gosh, they might have a higher turnout! How evil, right? Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # Billions of dollars would be spent # trying to buy each and every voter. More of your money-related miscalulations. And even you would have to admit people could still vote as they originally did without repercussion. Again: you've got nothing. Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # And there is no precedent for using "statistics" by Democrat # consultants to propose that votes be Buchanan be assigned to Gore. So # Gore won't get those votes, and there won't be a County-wide revote. Egad, are worms eating your brain? The statistics were for convincing a judge that people lost their votes due to the bad form. It doesn't matter if the people charged with it didn't catch the written legal requirement that the holes be to the right of the text. 19,000 can change the election, so it's important to get peoples' votes right. I'm glad Jesse Jackson is down there, agitating this issue. Spooky Cypherpunk Niggar Tim May Moroned: # (If there is, I'll help in rigging the dynamite truck .) More delusions of power. All you can do is shoot up your house. You are a useful troll.

1 0

CDR: Test Ignore
by Secret Squirrel 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

Test Dick

4 4

CDR: Phil Zimmerman Profiled
by James D. Wilson 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Watch the word wrap: http://developer.earthweb.com/earthweb/cda/dlink.resource-jhtml.72.1081. |repository||softwaredev|content|article|2000|10|03|SDLairdZim|SDLairdZ im~xml.0.jhtml?cda=true (PGP Signature applied with appreciation to PRZ) Meet Phil Zimmermann, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite and one of the world's best-known cryptographers. Published October 04, 2000 By Cameron Laird Page 1 of 2 1 2 Programmers can be celebrities too. Just ask Philip (Phil) Zimmermann. He's spent most of the last decade as a folk hero, and admits to having enjoyed that status. Just this summer, he suffered the flip side of fame as wildly inflated rumors circulated about his role in compromising the security of the PGP encryption suite, and he watched his e-mail inbox fill with venom. A Human Rights Project He recognizes it comes with the territory. Zimmermann is probably the world's best-known cryptographer. He created the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite in 1991. Since then, it has come to dominate the market for programming protection of online confidentiality. PGP has been heralded for its role in protecting numerous political dissidents around the world, and earned Zimmermann the prestigious Norbert Wiener Award for responsible use of technology in 1996, as well as the 1995 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and a 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from Secure Computing Magazine, along with at least a dozen other distinctions. It also brought him into highly public patent disputes with RSA Data Security Inc., and a nightmarish multi-year criminal investigation by the United States government. It began as a human rights campaign. As the '90s opened, Zimmermann was an experienced programmer -- and a pretty good one by all accounts, including his own -- specializing in data security and communications and real-time embedded systems. Electronic communications technologies were becoming widely available, and politically significant: combinations of underground radio, video tapes, satellite news updates, and e-mail are generally acknowledged to have been indispensable in the popular overthrow of Iran's Shah, Eastern Europe's Bolsheviks, and several dictatorships throughout the third world. Technical challenges remained. How, for example, could human rights monitors communicate their on-site findings without risking recrimination or distortion? How might any citizen communicate freely and fearlessly over channels subject to tapping? One technical solution was encryption: "scrambling" a message so it was unreadable except to the sender and intended receiver. Zimmermann had worked on commercial encryption systems during the '80s, and he envisioned that it could be applied more widely. He developed PGP as an "add-on" that any e-mail user could install to ensure confidentiality. A Response to Legislation And it worked. It also became controversial, which brought more attention, and encouraged even more users to experiment with it. Nowadays it's become part of the popular culture of computing. It has been so widely disseminated that even many industry participants who rely on it know nothing about Zimmermann, and assume it was first created for the commercial applications -- retail sales, banking, and so on-in which it is used today. Zimmermann, however, emphasizes that for him it remains a human-rights project. PGP was born in controversy. Zimmermann wrote version 1.0 as a response to United States Senate Bill 266. If it had been passed, this legislation would have required all communications vendors to embed "back doors" to permit government agencies to tap their products. He rushed a release of 1.0 into the hands of his computing friends, at least one of whom began to distribute it on bulletin boards throughout North America. Its circulation meant that any criminality resulting from passage of the bill would have been difficult to enforce. Code-sharing didn't stop at national borders, though, and there was nothing hypothetical about it: export of PGP outside the U.S. (with possible exceptions involving Canada) was definitely illegal. Everyone involved agreed that the Office of Defense Trade Control's enforcement of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) extended to cryptographic software. Whom to Prosecute? Whom could the US Department of Justice indict, though? Zimmermann just programmed and talked; he was careful not to engage in any "munitions exports" himself. Despite these precautions, criminal charges were brought against him. The programming and civil rights communities joined to create a legal defense fund. After three years of what Zimmermann calmly categorizes as "persecution," prosecutors dropped the case in early 1996 with as little comment as they had earlier justified it. Controversy didn't end there. Even before the criminal indictment, RSA notified Zimmermann that it considered PGP an infringement of its patents. Zimmermann had been careful to engage only in "educational use" of applicable documents and inventions. He consistently emphasized in his presentations that users were responsible for securing applicable licenses. The RSA battle ended as undramatically as the ITAR one had. Zimmermann and Public Key Partners (PKP), an RSA affiliate, signed an agreement that Zimmermann would continue not to distribute RSA inventions and PKP would not sue Zimmermann. RSA threatened Zimmermann and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for various alleged infringements. Zimmermann programmed around legal problems, and MIT shielded him from others in pursuit of its own intellectual rights. While the publicity around these disputes served as valuable marketing for PGP, it also made it hard to move on. Hecklers continue to believe, for example, that Zimmermann had secretly acquiesced to government demands and somehow weakened PGP. Although it's hard to prove covert arrangements do not exist, it's equally difficult to imagine how Zimmermann might contaminate source code available for public review, which PGP was. PGP Inc. With the disposal of the government case, Zimmermann founded PGP Inc. in 1996 to finance maintenance and enhancement of PGP. Late the next year, he sold the company to Network Associates (NAI), while agreeing to stay on as senior fellow. The programming fraternity continues to honor Zimmermann in its characteristic ways: T-shirts are silk-screened with him as subject, he speaks regularly at conferences and in the classroom, and people who haven't met him often speculate on Usenet and other public forums about his motives and interests. He is often addressed with the reverence accorded an accomplished software engineer martyred for resistance to governmental invasions of privacy. PGP's Present and Future So where are PGP and Zimmermann in the year 2000? He still has a full schedule. Between his assignments with NAI and independent consulting, he sometimes fails to make adequate time for sleep, let alone pack carefully for his many professional travels. He does little coding these days. However, he sees his contribution as critical, believing that "encryption software architectural decisions must be made by knowledgeable cryptographers, not software engineers." He has very firm opinions, for example, about Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), an open source competitor to PGP. There's no doubt in Zimmermann's mind that GnuPG suffers for being managed by programmers. He offers the Blowfish encryption method as an example: "I would never, ever allow Blowfish to be implemented in PGP, because it's not as good a design as Twofish; Twofish is superior. PGP 7 implements Two fish. Yet we see GnuPG implemented Blowfish." Even the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) makes cryptographic mistakes, he says. Zimmermann asserts, "I would never allow El-Gamal signatures to be put in PGP. I don't know how that got in" RFC 2440, which defines the OpenPGP standard. NAI still has a large backlog of serious technical work to do: integration of new algorithms and functionality, ports to new architectures, and more. Embedded systems -- encryption processing within telephones, automobiles, and so on -- are likely to be particularly important during the next few years. Also, the original RSA patent expired just a couple of weeks ago, and NAI is already offering products that exploit this. Minor controversies continue to dog PGP. Just within the last year, two small faults in the released code were discovered. While experts agree that neither one presented any practical danger to the security of PGP-based communications, both sparked arguments about NAI's ability and even its intentions. In the first case, a fault in a specific version for Unix could, in principle, compromise a key generated by a method PGP had always deprecated: automatically, without user input. Then, in mid-August, German researchers spotted an error in PGP's Additional Decryption Key (ADK) functionality. Like the key-generation error, it was quickly fixed, and detailed investigations confirmed it was unlikely that any real keys had ever been tampered with, let alone any messages cracked. However, before all the facts came out, speculation erupted that Zimmermann had personally installed a deliberate vulnerability, or perhaps allowed NAI to do so. Zimmermann promptly published an extensive personal statement through the PGP Web site, and most observers now grant that, as he concludes there, "If NAI tried to put a back door in PGP, all the engineers on the PGP team would quit in a highly visible protest, and I would be talking to the press about it. There is no way that I would let this happen." The Future Is Busy Zimmermann's personal scheduling often leaves him in what he calls "decapitated chicken mode." Apart from the frustration of overload, he likes what he does, and proudly regards it as important technically and politically. He's just beginning to redevelop PGPphone on his own, outside NAI: "I think it's a cool project." He continues to speak before university and industry groups, often in Europe. However painful the name-calling and conspiracy theorizing is to him, he plans many more contributions to cryptography and computing. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.0.2 iQA/AwUBOgpEWyavYwibXjmcEQL6BgCgs/fOglVgSiXKVIjsel6IIN1uWhcAoNY8 mEuqj4uT1WKyUFmLGQt4OgAO =tFYW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0