November 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Crypto Winter
by Faustine 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Tim wrote: >Companies have been trying to convince the home computer user that they >should be encrypting for years. Doesn't work. And for not very >surprising reasons. Same thing seen in the home security business, >backups, etc. >(The average user doesn't make any backups. The average homeowner >doesn't do any more to secure his house than what it came with. In other >words, "the defaults." ) Right. I suppose there's not much that can be done for people who expect "security" to be handed down to them from the sky on a silver platter. I'm sure it couldn't be more obvious to most here that if you don't put out the effort to take responsibility for your own security, you aren't going to have it--for your computer or anything else. But then, that sounds suspiciously resonant with "if they're too lazy or stupid to get it, then screw em", doesn't it. I think the real flaw there--what keeps me so uncomforable with it (even though my gut tells me it's a logical conclusion)--is reflected in the sheer number of people I've seen change their minds once they found out a little more about how insecure they really are. Haven't you ever been in a discussion/argument/presentation about computer security with someone, and at some point you notice that moment when it finally registers, you know that it really penetrated something...and they must have that sickening queazy little feeling in the pit of their stomachs when they say: "Oh my God, I had no idea". And at some point, haven't you all felt that sick, queasy shock of recognition yourselves? Maybe from something you read on John Young's site, or in response to being hacked? I certainly did--after that everything was different. It's a great feeling to have someone thank you for giving them the information they needed to wake up and do something to help themselves. The downside is you always risk coming across like a nutcase cyber-Cassandra, but you don't have to if you just let the raw facts do the convincing for you. More generally, I found it puzzling to see everyone getting hysterical over 911 when we're precisely no more and no less vulnerable than we ever were. I didn't learn a thing from it I hadn't already come to terms with on my own. (Having been abandoned as a child and homeless on your own at 17 tends to do an excellent job of ridding a person of any excess sense of security. Not that I'd recommend it...) So maybe for all the people who responded to the shock of 911 with "I'd give up all my civil liberties to feel safe again" there were enough who were jolted into taking responsibility for their own security to make a difference. Something to consider when thinking about the future of crypto, anyway. ~Faustine. *** The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms. - --William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1 (C) 1997-1999 Network Associates, Inc. and its affiliated companies. (Diffie-Helman/DSS-only version) iQA/AwUBO/mvyvg5Tuca7bfvEQLFcACgmlclCaF1BLe1+BtFWhSaS8/abiUAn1YB AYsjhc0ZiGKZD4SHMzBM4VMK =k/ZP -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: HOWTO Build a Nuclear Device
by Declan McCullagh 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 03:15:39PM -0500, baptista(a)pccf.net wrote: > i must admit i'm warming up to Tim May's tall pipe means of attaining > critical mass - much easier then playing with explosive and timing > devices - my only question is do our experts see a problem with > that means of delivery? Ah, yes. There are many -- dozens, perhaps hundreds -- of well-known, published nuclear engineers with practical experience in designing, engineering, and constructing atomic weapons posting on cypherpunks. I'm sure those folks in the audience will be delighted to answer your questions at greath length. -Declan

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Re: The Crypto Winter
by Major Variola (ret) 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

At 12:55 PM 11/19/01 -0800, Tim May wrote: >On Monday, November 19, 2001, at 12:36 PM, Faustine wrote: >> Haven't you ever been in a discussion/argument/presentation about >> computer >> security with someone, and at some point you notice that moment when it >> finally >> registers, you know that it really penetrated something...and they must >> have >> that sickening queazy little feeling in the pit of their stomachs when >> they >> say: >> >> "Oh my God, I had no idea". > >No, I can't say that I have. I have never wasted my time trying to >convince sheeple that they need to make backups, put good locks on their >doors, use encryption, not give their SS numbers to others, and so on. Besides, the news/experience does a good job. Events like bin Laden Airlines (for off-site backups), any number of virii and worms (for avoiding MS tools and not clicking random things), and random kipple (like disk failures reminding of the need for backups) eventually teach what mere words do not.

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None
by jillian hooper 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

Hi. I was following through researching gaslighting due to some horific things which have occured to me over the last 7 years. Yesterday I hit the Phantom Hearse Owners Association and got ther4 web site. I hit one of their fun buttons 'raiders' and they4 downloaded my microsft 200 version and I think my files. A number 2544097 recconnection number came up but I could't get reconnected to them. My modem couldn't be found. I now supsect as your article highlighted the threat to privacy that this is what has happened to me. To me this is just part of the ongoing harrassment as the father of my child has been involved with hearses fro a long time. I am interested in talking with you about gaslighting as I now find that I have to prove what was done to me or I will lose custody of my daughter. I don't know if this is your field or not but would appreciate you thoughts on these matters of privacy etc. I tried to contact the Los Angeles Hearse Owners Associaiton which I recently joined but the leader comes up in purple and mysteriously their details can't be found. Looking forward to hearing from u. Thank u. Kind regards Jillian Hooper _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

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Re: The Crypto Winter
by jamesd＠echeque.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

-- On 18 Nov 2001, at 14:17, Neil Johnson wrote: > > > It would seem to me that digital cash would be better off > > > not being tied either of these trust systems, but somehow > > > develop it's own. James A. Donald: > > That is a really dumb idea. > > > > It took governments a generation and the vigorous and > > frequent application of bayonets and batons to render their > > money independent of precious metals. Anonymous: > but why did governments engage in the vigorous and frequent > application of bayonets and batons to render their money > independent of precious metals? Because they could. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG e14ZjXqdjvPhGbY7gUaOBA42wTiDnGWfnEJ2q84q 4dPLVHJB12eAfQgOC1preE0ABpS1HIjeAfHn/qQN8

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Re: The Crypto Winter
by Tim May 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

On Monday, November 19, 2001, at 03:27 PM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: > On Mon, 19 Nov 2001 georgemw(a)speakeasy.net wrote: > >> It's amazing how many people assert this, even though it's clearly >> wrong. A gold standard does NOT mean that the amount of currency in >> circulation equals the amount of gold in the vaults, it means that the >> currency is exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate. Obviously, there >> can >> be more gold in the vaults than you need to actually exchange every >> dollar for the correct amount of gold. Less obviously, there can be >> less. > > Of course, the system also exposes the currency to fluctuations in world > wide supply of gold. It's not sane policy to tie one's unit of currency > to > any particular good -- think about what it would mean if the chosen good > was unrefined oil, a particular crop or electrical power. One'll get the > picture fairly soon. I'm not religious about a gold standard, but the fluctuations in world supply of gold are quite small. Nearly all of the gold extant in the world has existed for a long time in the hands of man (and governments, companies, churches, etc.). Even those mining technology has gotten better, the riches veins of ore--and most of the nuggest sitting in streambeds, etc.--have long been exhausted. I'm sure that 10 or 15 minutes spent with a search engine, maybe much less, would show the number of tons of gold mined each year versus the total amount of gold already held. > It's not really sane to opt for a tie-in to the supply of a particular > currency, either -- that's actually even worse, since the people > printing > the bills can cause fluctuations in the exchange rate even easier than > they could if they were just digging up precious metals up from the > crust. > > Hence, private, floating currency, which, again, is old news on the > list. Money things are just objects with certain beliefs and expectations attached to them. --Tim May "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler

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Virtual Bhurkas ( was : Re: Nuclear Pipe Bombs )
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

Ken Brown <k.brown(a)ccs.bbk.ac.uk> wrote : 1) I thought spherical shells were the usual geometry? 2) It sure as hell looks like it's time to start creating private archives of public data and seeing to it that the data are propagated. Sneakernet revisited only now with CD's instead of floppies. > >Shit. If the UK government passes this law they are proposing then this >email would probably count as illegal. And anonymous postings are often >so tedious. > 3) Time for ideas to don a bhurka before they go out in the street, to meet in secret places, to avoid the eyes and ears of Mullahs Ashcroft and Blair.

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Re: Cypherpunk failures
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

"Roy M. Silvernail" <roy(a)scytale.com> wrote : >On 19 Nov 2001, at 19:43, Ken Brown wrote: > >> Much too 1990s. These times suit more loyal-sounding names. >> "Programmers Rally Against Terrorism"? > >I wonder how many non-Brits will get this... > > >-- >Roy M. Silvernail >Proprietor, scytale.com >roy(a)scytale.com > Oh, I get it OK, it just doesn't sound cuddly.

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"quitting havenco", not quite!
by Ryan Lackey 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

Two people appear to have forwarded communications from a semi-private chat system through two mailing lists to cypherpunks. ("gale" at this stage is semi-private, and this is the first time anything has been forwarded from it to public lists.) These people are no longer on my christmas card list, or whatever. I suppose I should now explain: 1) HavenCo is now making sufficient money and is stable enough to be "boring". This is a *good* thing. Over the past year we've completed most of the remaining engineering, and some of our other staff are taking over more and more of the operations, first and second level support, and administration. Nothing really breaks anymore; it's easy to add new switches and routers without changing the underlying architecture; it's all operations. 2) I'm hiring engineering and sales managers in the next 3-6 months to take over more day to day responsibilities. This is independent of anything else. 3) I'm working on sofware to automate more operations, and doing various conferences throughout 2002. We're also looking at other sites; when we actually move forward on one of those, it would be a good test for the software/hardware systems. (some of these have been deployed recently. I can now do an entire new customer install without ever even seeing the customer's hardware; comes pre-configured from the vendor with PXE and it just gets plugged in, racked, and auto-configures). This means regardless of anything else I will be spending more time elsewhere in the world. It is silly that I can do everything over ssh from wherever in the world and yet still sit in an office a few feet above the racks. If something breaks, we just flash to a hot spare machine remotely and then order a replacement. Worst case, someone pulls some drive carriers out of the front and puts them in a different machine; not exactly rocket science. 4) I'm working on a couple of side projects which may be ready in 2002. These include some book projects, an offshore open-source development framework with quality control, some papers to bring a couple of fields together (crypto to p2p, traffic analysis to finance), a comprehensive survey of Gerald Bull and engineering analysis of the supergun, and some ecash and tamper-resistance related projects. I hope to have "abstract" level work on all of them completed, and then finish one at a time when I have time. Right now, I'm finishing off the completely automated ISP, and 2 papers. 5) When such things are ready to deploy, I will either switch to just doing board things for HavenCo, or will stay on as CTO but have less day to day responsibilities. Some of them might be done by HavenCo, which would mean shifting from colo operations to that project. Some of them are pretty minor; they can be "trialed" without distracting from my day to day job. Most of them would want to be separate legal entities from HavenCo, but might involve the same people. The exact date of any transition is not fixed; I suspect it will be a gradual process from mid-2002 until mid-2003. 6) Even if I shift to working on something else, it's entirely possible I'd live on Sealand 1-2 weeks/month anyway. It's actually a decent place to get work done, just lacking in entertainment (which may be related) 7) The process of setting up additional secure colocation centers around the world is pretty slow -- even if we can do most of the technical things in 4 weeks, political negotiations with telcos, governments, etc. take a long time. They are also not something *I* am directly involved in. Also, various fiber projects elsewhere in the world have been delayed by the dotcom collapse, so the options are a bit more constrained as to where we can go. We can "cheat" by coloing with other people in those markets, with a common management interface and maybe network -- specialized offshore colo providers, telcos, or major colo providers who happen to be there. Motivations for this include: (I started thinking about this a lot more at HAL2001 in Holland, not entirely sober I guess...) 1) I have worked 7-day weeks for the last 18 months. I've had several trips to conferences, and 5 days of real vacation. I have slept on concrete floors and desks because we brought over a bunch of computer gear before furnishings. I have missed Burning Man twice, a bunch of interesting conferences, been woken up at 0300 and on dark boat rides, climbed around on ladders 300' above the ground attaching lights, given press interviews with impacted wisdom teeth and passed out at a pharmacy afterward waiting for a prescription for antibiotics, etc. I miss {girls, alcohol, sushi, ...}. SFBA really is one of the nicer parts of the world, and I've still not yet had a decent vacation in asia, australia, etc. It isn't that much fun to have a successful company if you can't actually enjoy the results (I have 5TB of mp3s, but haven't gone to a live concert since...1996) 2) That I really want to work on a software project. I have this lingering need to do something intellectually challenging -- HavenCo is certainly a feat of *something*, but it's not a huge scientific or technical challenge -- more an engineering, political, marketing, or integration challenge. Which is nice, but I'd like to do something which contributes to the scientific knowledge of mankind; I've taken advantage of amazing scientific advances made by people over thousands of years, but not really contributed much myself. 3) It's been 24 months since we started, and I'd like to something different at some point, just to see if it can be done successfully twice. And I can self-finance it this time, which is a definite plus. (having gone from about USD 30k in debt when I started HavenCo) 4) Doing sales and engineering at the same time is quite stressful. It really would be best to have two distinct people doing each role. 5) Good people are cheap to hire now :) (jobs(a)havenco.com, not me please) 6) It would be nice to work on something which isn't "man vs. mankind" but actually "man vs. nature". If the world's governments became reasonable overnight, and people stopped acts of terrorism, theft, or whatever, there would be no real need for HavenCo. Yet, there would still be motivation for doing things which actually contribute to man's knowledge, ability to conquer natural environments or other challenges, etc. HavenCo is a necessary precondition for a lot of those things, but is not the goal in and of itself. 7) The current market is actually a decent time to set up new projects; there's no competition since no one else is funded, there are much more reasonable expectations (HavenCo hasn't IPO'd for billions of dollars, but we're profitable about 6 months after we started selling stuff, and growing at a reasonable rate). Plus, now that HavenCo is up, it's entirely possible for an offshore-centric startup to get started with no real expenses; operate unincorporated or incorporate on some small caribbean island, accept payment in online currencies, have everyone communicate via PGP or ssh to the box, and colo initially one but then several boxes with us. Many of our customers operate exactly like that. For a sufficiently interesting project, we might even invest a box or two in it; so you could have zero startup or monthly costs during development. 8) I can. -- Ryan Lackey ryan(a)havenco.com CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd. the free world just milliseconds away http://www.havenco.com/ OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F

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As dicas do Rudolfo
by infomacao＠giganetstore.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

Para retirar o seu email desta mailing list deverá entrar no nosso site http:\\www.giganetstore.com <http://www.giganetstore.com/> , ir à edição do seu registo e retirar a opção de receber informação acerca das nossas promoções e novos serviços

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