September 2000 - cypherpunks-legacy

CDR: "..do not count on the anonymity of the Internet to serve as a shield for your illegal conduct"
by keyser-soze＠hushmail.com 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

>"Anyone who would use the Internet to commit a crime should understand one thing -- do not count on the anonymity of the Internet to serve as a shield for your illegal conduct. As technology advances, so do our investigative techniques and our abilities to protect the public." Quite true. However, any well informed LE-type will tell you only amateurs are likely to be caught. I dare say if we select one of this list's more informed members, say Black Unicorn, and assume he intended to engage in a similar exploit as this fellow from Bloomberg. I would find it highly unlikely that BU would ever be apprehended for the deed (assuming he didn't brag). ks

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None
by waterhouse 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

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CDR: Re: Whipped Europeans
by David Marshall 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

Sampo A Syreeni <ssyreeni(a)cc.helsinki.fi> writes: > On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, David Marshall wrote: > > >Not to mention that there exists a certain peptide, the name of which > >escapes me at the moment, which is naturally occuring in the > >brain. It is five amino acids long, and exerts an effect about 5000 > >times stronger than that of Heroin. There are far more where that came > >from. > > Of course. Just as there is anandamide, the transmitter which hemp compounds > mainly mimic. Only you do not easily get such substances into the brain > without using a needle - proteins generally do not get through the > blood-brain barrier absent active transport. So you would need proteins > which, after somehow having been delivered in the blood stream whole, are > actively transported (this means extra 'handles' so that the molecule is > recognized) across the barrier, then we probably need a working mechanism > which then processes (cleaves, oxidises etc.) to obtain a final active > compound. All in all, you do not easily deliver proteins to the brain. Yes, I know that. The point, though, was that the war on drugs is futile and is about to be made worse. If you think our freedoms are compromised for the War on (some) Drugs now, just wait fifteen years. On the topic of the blood-brain barrier, another example is compounds such as cocaine, which exist in charged and uncharged forms. Normally, the ratio is something like 99:1, so it takes some time for the entire dose to actually get into the brain where it can do something. Crack cocaine is made using a relatively simple procedure which changes that equilibrium to where almost all of it blows into the brain at once. This is why crack cocaine is considered worse than the "regular" powder. Societies -- and American society in particular -- seem to loathe actually fixing problems. We find secondary or tertiary (or worse) symptoms, and try to treat those. This is partially because fixing the real roots of the problem also affects other things, makes some of the American people accept responsibility for some things, and is suicide to a politician. This doesn't work, of course. It's like giving someone with chronic headaches, vertigo, and dementia some asprin and psychoactive drugs; it masks the symptoms, but doesn't fix the problem, which might be a brain tumor.

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CDR: Re: RC4 source as a literate program
by David Honig 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

At 09:14 AM 9/2/00 -0400, Steven Furlong wrote: ><<begin quoted material>> >As the President has made clear, encryption software is >regulated because it has the technical capacity to encrypt data and >by that jeopardize American security interests, not because of its >expressive content. Exec. Order No. 13026, 1996 WL 666563. Were this true, carrying a copy of _Applied Crypto_ (not including source) out of the country would be illegal. It is not. The law is an ass.

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CDR: Quantum 'dead' time found [science daily]
by Jim Choate 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/09/000901080350.htm ____________________________________________________________________ He is able who thinks he is able. Buddha The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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CDR: export reg timewarp? (Re: RC4 source as a literate program)
by Adam Back 03 Sep '00

03 Sep '00

The US export regulations no longer prevent export of crypto. PGP exported binary copies of PGP from US websites, as now do many other companies. Crypto source is exported also from numerous web sites. I don't follow why all the discussion talking as if ITAR and EARs were still in effect in unmodified form. Adam

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CDR: Re: RC4 source as a literate program
by David Marshall 03 Sep '00

03 Sep '00

David Honig <honig(a)sprynet.com> writes: > At 09:14 AM 9/2/00 -0400, Steven Furlong wrote: > ><<begin quoted material>> > >As the President has made clear, encryption software is > >regulated because it has the technical capacity to encrypt data and > >by that jeopardize American security interests, not because of its > >expressive content. Exec. Order No. 13026, 1996 WL 666563. > > Were this true, carrying a copy of _Applied Crypto_ (not including > source) out of the country would be illegal. It is not. The law > is an ass. So is the President and most of Congress.

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CDR: auditable gaming PRNGs (Re: PRNG server) (fwd)
by Jim Choate 03 Sep '00

03 Sep '00

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 11:49:16 -0500 From: Adam Back <adam(a)cypherspace.org> Reply-To: cypherpunks(a)ssz.com To: bill.stewart(a)pobox.com Cc: petro(a)bounty.org, cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net Subject: CDR: auditable gaming PRNGs (Re: PRNG server) Seems to me you can do better with a gaming server. If the gaming server servers RNGs in a sequence such that each sample in the sequence can be verified, they don't need to trust the server; or at least there is an audit function. Eg. say that the server publishes subsequent pre-images in a hashchain. h_0 h_{i+1} = h_i and the server computes h_i values up to i = 10^8 and then publishes them starting with h_{10^8}, h_{10^8-1}, ... Then anyone can verify that the random number is the preimage of the previous random number. You do something similar with a more efficient (log(n)) auditing function with merkle authentication trees. If they aren't doing this someone should clue them in. Adam ____________________________________________________________________ He is able who thinks he is able. Buddha The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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CDR: auditable gaming PRNGs (Re: PRNG server)
by Adam Back 03 Sep '00

03 Sep '00

Seems to me you can do better with a gaming server. If the gaming server servers RNGs in a sequence such that each sample in the sequence can be verified, they don't need to trust the server; or at least there is an audit function. Eg. say that the server publishes subsequent pre-images in a hashchain. h_0 h_{i+1} = h_i and the server computes h_i values up to i = 10^8 and then publishes them starting with h_{10^8}, h_{10^8-1}, ... Then anyone can verify that the random number is the preimage of the previous random number. You do something similar with a more efficient (log(n)) auditing function with merkle authentication trees. If they aren't doing this someone should clue them in. Adam

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CDR: Re: Good work by FBI and SEC on Emulex fraud case
by David Honig 03 Sep '00

03 Sep '00

At 07:45 PM 9/1/00 -0400, petro wrote: > Of course, one of there roles could be "verification" of the >press release, i.e. Emulex signs it, and rather than having to have >985,234,003 keys on my key ring to verify every press release I read, >the News Service can sign the whole thing saying "we witness that >this press release was signed with the proper key".. Couldn't software automatically check releases against a key given by a URL? (Skipping the problems with DNS, etc.) But yeah its always good to have human reputations on the line, too.

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