November 2000 - cypherpunks-legacy

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by Peter G. Neumann 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

[...] ======================================================================== FROM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, January 1989, Peter G. Neumann: The latest item on the integrity of computers in elections relates to the November 1988 Senate race in Florida. *The New York Times* (Saturday, 12 Nov 88, page 9) had an article by Andrew Rosenthal on suspicions of fraud arising from the results. At the end of the Election Day ballot counting, the Democrat Buddy Mackay was ahead. After the absentee ballots were counted, the Republican Connie Mack was declared the winner by 30,000 votes out of 4 million. However, in four counties (for which B.R.C. provided the computing services), the number of votes counted for Senator was 200,000 votes less than the votes for President while in other counties and in previous elections the two vote totals have generally been close to each other. Remembering that punched card are intrinsically a flaky medium and easy to alter surreptitiously, and that the computer systems in question reportedly permit their operators to turn off the audit trails and to change arbitrary memory locations on the fly, it seems natural to wonder whether anything strange went on. Subsequent to the Times article, a recount was requested, but a selective recount of a few precincts apparently turned up nothing unusual. However, doubts linger about the essential subvertibility of the process -- particularly in the case of punched cards. In Texas, a law suit has been filed on behalf of the voters of the state challenging the entire election and requesting not a recount but an entirely new election. The grounds are that the State did not follow its own procedures for certifying the election equipment. --- 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'

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None
by Peter G. Neumann 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

[...] ======================================================================== FROM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, January 1989, Peter G. Neumann: The latest item on the integrity of computers in elections relates to the November 1988 Senate race in Florida. *The New York Times* (Saturday, 12 Nov 88, page 9) had an article by Andrew Rosenthal on suspicions of fraud arising from the results. At the end of the Election Day ballot counting, the Democrat Buddy Mackay was ahead. After the absentee ballots were counted, the Republican Connie Mack was declared the winner by 30,000 votes out of 4 million. However, in four counties (for which B.R.C. provided the computing services), the number of votes counted for Senator was 200,000 votes less than the votes for President while in other counties and in previous elections the two vote totals have generally been close to each other. Remembering that punched card are intrinsically a flaky medium and easy to alter surreptitiously, and that the computer systems in question reportedly permit their operators to turn off the audit trails and to change arbitrary memory locations on the fly, it seems natural to wonder whether anything strange went on. Subsequent to the Times article, a recount was requested, but a selective recount of a few precincts apparently turned up nothing unusual. However, doubts linger about the essential subvertibility of the process -- particularly in the case of punched cards. In Texas, a law suit has been filed on behalf of the voters of the state challenging the entire election and requesting not a recount but an entirely new election. The grounds are that the State did not follow its own procedures for certifying the election equipment. --- 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'

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CDR: deep messages from voteauction.de
by anonymous＠openpgp.net 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

Whether or not one likes it, the net is NOT a commercial playground a priori. It is an open space for ANY communication needs between any people. If you think it is hard to know for sure if our site was a game or a business, well, then thats a good lesson you have learned.

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CDR: govt aerial photo privacy
by anonymous＠openpgp.net 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

Countys Aerial Photos Not for Public Sale Supervisors bow to residents concerns that the high-detail pictures would invade their privacy. By DAVID REYES, Times Staff Writer Bowing to privacy concerns, county supervisors backpedaled Tuesday by agreeing not to let the public buy the high-detail, digital photographs that will be taken during an aerial photo shoot of the entire county. County officials had considered selling the photos--a block-by-block sweep of the county--on the Internet to help defray the cost of the photo missions. "I think residents can rest assured that there wont be any pictures, any Big Brother efforts in the county," said Supervisor Tom Wilson, before all five supervisors voted to approve a $184,000 contract to Pictometry LLC, a New York-based corporation. Originally, the company won approval to fly over Orange County and take 60,000 photographs from an airplane flying at an altitude of 4,000 feet. The images would be stored in a county database and sold to cities and governmental agencies, including police and fire departments. To recoup its costs, the county was going to make photographs available for sale on the countys Web site for $15 to $25. Instead, supervisors were forced to reevaluate their decision after receiving hundreds of complaints by residents, upset that their privacy would be invaded or that the photos would tumble into the hands of criminals. As a result, supervisors modified Pictometrys contract so it would not include selling photographs to the public. The idea of having "Big Brother" peer into her backyard with a camera frightened Helen Pegausch of Santa Ana. She felt strongly enough that she missed work Tuesday to talk with supervisors. "I tell you having the county take photographs and then handing them over to cities so they can check for violations really bothers me," Pegausch said. "We are paying more and more in taxes and voting out more and more of our rights." Pastor Wiley Drake, an outspoken cleric on property rights issues, urged the supervisors to reconsider whether the county needed the project. "Is there a legitimate need for this type of photography?" Drake asked, as he sought anyone on the board with enough "intestinal fortitude" to move to postpone the proposal until his questions can be answered. What makes Pictometry different from scores of other aerial products is that, rather than being taken from directly overhead, pictures are taken at an angle that--once combined with the companys software--allows users to zoom in on neighborhoods and measure the height, width and length of any feature in an image, including gullies, buildings, trees, poles and roads. It makes the product perfect for county planners, said Brian F. Fitzpatrick, West Coast general manager for Pictometry, who was elated with the boards decision. Rather than having a developer show an artists rendering of a new shopping plaza, the digital software allows a planner to test the developers claims by immediately seeing how the site will look, he said. The product conceivably can be used by hundreds if not thousands of residents living in a coastal flood plain that extends through many cities as a result of the threat of a large flood from the Santa Ana River. "The $200,000 the county is paying can save thousands, even millions, of dollars to residents who may not have to pay for flood insurance," Supervisor Todd Spitzer said. Spitzer, an attorney who once worked in the district attorneys office, said the courts already allow police authority to fly over homes and take pictures. "This new proposal is an excellent balance." In other business, supervisors unanimously agreed on Lockheed Martin as the prime contractor for an 11-year, $260-million data-processing contract, which is believed to be the largest contract awarded by the county. The decision ends more than a year of procurement activity by the countys information and technology staff. Leo Crawford, the countys chief information officer, said a procurement team had recommended Lockheed over the other finalist, Science Applications International Corp., the largest private scientific research organization in the United States. http://www.latimes.com/editions/orange/20001108/t000106980.html

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CDR: [RRE]Florida recount
by R. A. Hettinga 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

--- begin forwarded text

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CDR: crypto
by Results＠TVEyes.com 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

Your keyword(s), crypto, was recently spoken on CNN during Morning News. Wednesday, Nov 8 2000 at 11:14 AM ......democrats must now find progressive routes or watch the party gradually wither away or basically become a crypto republican party if democratic are disappointed ...... For details, visit http://www.TVEyes.com/database/expand.asp?ln=2568587&Key=crypto Just follow the above link to keep your account active for this keyword. For total control of your keywords, go to http://www.tveyes.com/log_in.asp Get $200 in FREE Gasoline: no risk, no obligation! http://by.advertising.com/1/c/23066/7793// <a href="http://by.advertising.com/1/c/23066/7793//"> AOL users click here </a>

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CDR: VerySafe?
by Harmon Seaver 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

Has this been discussed on the list in recent (or even ancient) memory? If so, I can't recall it, and looked thru my own archives going back a couple years and didn't find it. http://www.verysafe.com/

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CDR: cnet article on geo location via IP
by anonymous＠openpgp.net 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

Geographic tracking raises opportunities, fears By Stefanie Olsen Staff Writer, CNET News.com November 8, 2000, 4:00 a.m. PT New technology that can pinpoint the physical location of Web surfers is creating opportunities for online merchants and advertisers but could signal new restrictions on the free-wheeling Internet. So-called geotracking techniques that trace Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are used to route signals over the Web to an individuals computer, can help Web sites and advertisers target audiences in different geographic regions. For example, a traditional retailer such as Banana Republic could hawk swimming suits to Web visitors from Los Angeles as it pushes parkas to online shoppers from New York. But if this technology offers greater efficiencies and new opportunities for online businesses, bringing physical boundaries into the largely borderless world of cyberspace raises several delicate questions. Net users worried about online privacy may balk at technology that might one day reveal their street addresses to marketers. But for governments watching their sovereignty erode online, the chance to erect virtual walls may be too tempting to pass up. "If it does become technically feasible to limit access by country, than it does seem to take away from the global reach of the Internet," said Andrew Shen, a policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy research group. Quova, a San Francisco-based Web marketing company, has developed technology to blur these lines. The company set out in January to scan the Nets 4.2 billion IP addresses. The data-gathering project netted Quova a detailed physical map of the Internet. It is using the information to launch a new service later this year, dubbed GeoPoint, which the company says will target advertising to online audiences based on location. "In the offline world, geography is so pervasive depending on what area youre in, it determines what products youll sell. Yet in the online world theres no element of geography," said Rajat Bhargava, founder of Quova, which is backed by Softbank and IDG Ventures. With GeoPoint, Quova joins a growing number of Net advertisers that hope to tempt marketers with the promise of pinpointing customers who live or work within a particular country, state, city and even ZIP code. Privacy advocates are looking at the ability of companies such as Quova to trace a Net user to a physical location. Beyond privacy, however, geotracking raises significant regulatory questions for online commerce, taxation, legal jurisdiction, online broadcasting rights and a host of other policy issues that have traditionally depended on borders. Geotracking technologies have largely flown below the radar of regulators, but they are beginning to draw notice. For example, a technology panel next week is expected to issue a report to a French court saying techniques are available for stopping a large percentage of Net users in France from using a Yahoo auction site in the United States. Yahoo has argued that blocking French customers from viewing Nazi paraphernalia banned in that country was not feasible on the Web. "Yahoo is basically saying they cant block French visitors from their site. But as Quova (and others) show, the majority of the time, you can block information coming from geographical areas," said Richard Smith, chief technology officer at the Privacy Foundation. "Geographic blocking is sort of inevitable...for such instances as blocking online casinos and political messages in China. How prevalent it will be is the question." Geotracking takes off Started late last year, Quova operated for the first nine months of this year as a "stealth-mode, Internet infrastructure company," a tagline that raised hairs among security types. In mid-September, the company launched a beta version of its software. The technology lets companies know where Web visitors originate, down to their city, so that they can target advertising, customize Web pages, and deliver digital media to certain geographic locations. A slew of businesses have emerged to offer similar services. Digital Island and Digital Envoy specialize in location targeting DoubleClick, Engage and 24/7 Media offer targeted local advertising to its customers. Last month, Microsoft licensed technology, dubbed TraceWare, from Digital Island to manage the distribution of digital content nationally and internationally. "What we do is make things easier on the Internet," said Sanjay Parekh, chief executive of Digital Envoy, based in Duluth, Ga. "Our technology is a dumbed-down version of caller ID--I know where you are, but I cant call you back...Technically it would be difficult to tie a persons IP address to their home address, and thats not something were going after." Akamai Technologies has had a rudimentary geolocation service in operation since this summer, guaranteeing an accuracy rate of about 98 percent in determining the country or U.S. state where a given Web surfer is located. The company declined to comment directly on Frances order to Yahoo, one of Akamais longstanding customers. But vice president of product management John Shumway said the companys service could help a content provider block surfers in a specific country from reaching a particular Web service. Akamai is moving ahead with a plan to ratchet up that location service another notch. It is working with some of its Internet service provider partners and using its own sprawling network of servers to develop the ability to narrow a surfers location to the level of metropolitan area, for example. The company is aware that it risks skirting the boundaries of privacy protections but says it is confident that it is still well on the side of protecting individuals information. Allowing advertisers or Web companies to streamline their sites for local content could help consumers as well as the companies themselves, as long as the information exchange stays on a fairly unspecific level, Shumway said. "Its a very difficult issue with geolocation, figuring out what is proper and what in the long run might represent some threat to privacy," he said. "But targeting (on a city level) isnt necessarily a bad thing, any more than its a bad thing to pick up a newspaper and see a local ad." Can it work? Such questions point to another big piece of the puzzle for locator companies, which face an uphill climb in creating the sales forces needed to sell local advertising online. Because there are countless businesses on the local level, the sales staff needed to reach them all would outweigh any benefits reaped from targeted advertising. Local ad spending online is expected to reach $2.7 billion by 2003, taking up $1 in every $4 spent, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, but it wont go up significantly after that. "Its going to be a hard sell--its difficult to sell to local advertisers online because they dont get it. And its hard to sell to national advertisers because theres so much waste," said Marissa Gluck, advertising analyst for Jupiter Media Metrix, a New York-based research company. Beyond the commercial promise of selling local ads globally, geotracking could provide regulators with a tempting solution to the Nets borderless architecture. "Regulators are going to try to (implement) this," said William Cheswick, a former researcher with Bell Labs who has worked extensively on Internet mapping projects. "They have an enormous motivation to do it." Companies such as Akamai and Quova can help create barriers on the Web for companies doing business internationally or nationally. Insurance and financial services companies, for example, face different laws and regulations by state and country. The Internet compounds these problems by opening access to anyone with a computer despite their homeland. "This technology will help them comply with some of these regulations. But it will be up to the courts to decide what level of accuracy they need," Quovas Bhargava said. Some already are putting that theory to the test. Conflict abroad One of the most prominent cases of geographic tangles was this years crash and burn of iCraveTV.com, a Canadian company that had hoped to offer a streaming version of broadcast TV on its Web site. The problem was, iCraveTV didnt ask permission from the TV companies whose content it was using. Its Web site ostensibly barred Americans from watching the streams, which included several U.S. TV stations. But the only real barrier was a page asking for a Canadian area code, which served as a password to the entire site. Partly because broadcasters license content and sell advertising on a regional basis, this infuriated media companies on both sides of the border. A broad coalition of media companies sued iCraveTV, which backed down. Since that time, the company has been working on a way to determine a viewers location and block U.S. residents from watching Canadian programming. Whether geotracking can meet the needs of regulators, however, depends on several factors, including winning international cooperation on assigning IP addresses in a systematic fashion. In addition, serious questions remain about how accurate geotracking is and if it can meet the demands of regulators and the courts. Technically, Quova gathers infrastructure-level information from several public-domain sources without looking at such electronic data as email addresses and cookies, or digital tracking tags. "Basically weve collected traceroute and pings to tell us how traffic is moving, where traffic is coming from, where its going to, what its performance is," Bhargava said. By analyzing the data, the company knows the city location of all IP addresses, or a designated market area, based on Nielsen/NetRatings standards. Quova wants to target anonymously based on ZIP codes, and it is in talks with various companies about additional services. There are some major holes in this approach, however. For example, Quova and others do not have a good read on the location of subscribers at the worlds largest ISP, America Online. The company, with 24 million members, poses a challenge because it uses a proxy-serve network that only shows IP addresses traveling from its home base in Virginia. For AOL, GeoPoint can only identify a person by country, with up to 98 percent accuracy, Bhargava said. Locator technology is only 60 percent to 70 percent accurate, according to research from Jupiter Media Metrix. These estimates are based on the large number of IP addresses used by AOL. And as the number of AOL customers grows, the accuracy rate will shrink. Elsewhere around the world, AOL doesnt operate proxy-serve networks, Bhargava said, so the opportunity to determine where Web visitors originate from is better. Former Bell Labs researcher Cheswick said geotracking technology may be accurate enough for advertising purposes, but it does come close to the level required for legal applications such as the Yahoo case. "On the surface, this sort of looks like it works," Cheswick said. "But it gets dicey when you try to break it down to a city or even if you break it down to a single country...For advertising or marketing purposes, 80 to 85 percent accuracy is fine. But when it come to the courts, you want to have a higher standard."

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CDR: Democrats in Florida are discovering "padlocked boxes"
by Tim May 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

CNN is reporting that teachers arriving at a pre-school in a heavily Democrat region of Miami/Dade found a "padlocked box" in their classroom. The pre-school had been used as a polling place. They "shook the box" and it "appeared to be full." So, these votes bought with welfare money will probably go for Gore. The Dems are also claiming that some or all of Buchanan's votes should be allocated to Gore, as many people who wanted to vote for Gore are claiming, now, that they must have accidentally punched the hole to the right of Gore's name instead of the hole to the _left_ of Gore's name. I expect Al Gore will "find" the extra votes he needs. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.

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CDR: How the Net gave the right Florida count
by Declan McCullagh 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

My article you received late last night: "Al Gore is only 630 votes away from winning the election" http://www.politechbot.com/p-01481.html Seems to have been the first article anywhere (3:35 am) to report that Bush's lead in Florida had dwindled to the hundreds, although CBS at approximately the same time had mentioned those numbers on the air. The politech article also appears to be the first to predict a recount. According to a wire service search, Dow Jones Newswire moved a similar article three minutes after the politech message (3:38 am), though it did not mention a recount: "WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Vice President Al Gore now trails Texas Governor George W. Bush by only 629 votes in Florida, throwing the U.S. election results into question, CBS News reported early Wednesday." AP had moved an advisory about 20 minutes before (3:11 am) saying that Bush's lead was in the thousands: "The lead in Florida for George W. Bush has dwindled to about 6,000 in the vote count." Dow Jones, in an article distributed at the same time (3:08 am), called the election even with those thousands of votes outstanding: "In an election that ultimately came down to a few thousand votes in Florida, Texas Governor George W. Bush has won the race for the presidency holding off a strong challenge from Vice President Al Gore." The networks, of course, had called the election for Bush at 2:17 am, after incorrectly saying earlier in the evening that Florida would go to Gore. Part of this mess comes from how mainstream media sources relied on Voter News Service for their results. For instance, CNN reported at 3:45 am that the Florida results were 2,890,321 (Bush) and 2,884,261 (Gore). That spread was still about 6,000 votes. For my politech article, I used the Net to go directly to the Florida secretary of state's website. The numbers there were about 20 minutes newer than CNN had at the same time. To their credit, CBS News apparently switched to those same numbers, although their hasty calculation of a 629 vote difference was incorrect. -Declan

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