August 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Airwave Anarchy: The revolution will not be texted
by Anonymous Coredump 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

The revolution will not be texted http://www.channel4news.co.uk/home/20010821/4text.ram (It's the last article, check Wed 21st Aug, Special Reports for more details) The Philippines claim they used text messages to help bring down the last government. Their lack of respect for the present government has led to demands controlling the use of text messages - a task Ian Williams discovers is easier said than done -- Channel 4 News ran this story on the SMS craze engulfing the Philippines (oh those crazy Filipinos!) and the uncontrollable rumourmongering(TM) of the new technological generation. Spreading like wildfire from handset to handset, sex scandals about leading party members (including one accused of being chased naked through the Manila Hilton by an angry husband) have caused calls for clampdowns by the afore mentioned. Exaggerated reports of the Pope's demise even brought the Church into the fray, calling for sanity (or "sanity") on the MISinformation Super Highway. "Bob", who was expelled from college for spreading rumours about a teacher, revealed that he sometimes sends upwards of 100 rumours a day (but only when he has a _really bad_ day). He operates using 3 unregistered SIM cards, buys pay-as-you-go credits and spends up to 6 hours a day tapping out messages. Cellphones have been implicated in organising the rallies that brought about the end of the last government, and now the new government is feeling a cold breeze on its testicles... One interviewed government official has called for mandatory ID when you buy phone credits, likening this to "requiring a prescription when you buy Viagra". (Obviously he has his reputation to think of.) This has relevance to those cellphone-mixmasters (WalkMasters? For WalkerPunks?) that were discussed a few weeks ago. What are the chances of coding CypherSaber/RC4 for Java enabled cellphones (and I don't mean for voice data!) and a little forwarding app? We now have a proven market. -- The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope!

1 0

Re: Gnutella scanning instead of service providers.
by Steve Mynott 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

"Gary Jeffers" <jeffersgary(a)hotmail.com> writes: > Would it be possible to write some kind of scanner that would look > at an ISP, say for example, htc.net and display all the Gnutella users > there? We seem to be over the "fax effect" (a Snelling point?) It's a one liner with the fairly standard UNIX tools that ship with OpenBSD and at least SuSE Linux. $ for i in `host -a -l -vv htc.net | grep ppp | awk '{print $5}'`; do nc -w 2 -z $i 6346; done (you can of course run gnutella on ports other than 6346) -- 1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott steve(a)tightrope.demon.co.uk too many pieces of music finish too long after the end. igor stravinsky

1 0

Shielding
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

Lots of shielding products are available. Whole rooms : http://www.emctest.com/ A complete test setup : http://www.emctest.com/onsale.cfm Cu tape : http://www.2spi.com/catalog/spec_prep/5tapes.html Cu foil, cheap, no adhesive : http://www.glassmart.com/regular_foil.asp Cu Sheet : http://hi-one.com/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?ID=2078 Ag paint : http://www.2spi.com/catalog/spec_prep/spinstr.html All kinds of ferrites can be found : http://www.fair-rite.com/ Knock yerself out. Focus on the keyboard and the display.

1 0

Shielding
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

One simple comment. Below. Bill Stewart wrote : >At 04:45 AM 08/23/2001 -0700, David Honig wrote: >>Faustine, look up Faraday cages, TEMPEST, and search the archives. >>As if you didn't know. Succinctly, the electron gas in metals shields you >>from the electromagnetic antics of distant, radiating electrons, by >>shorting the >>ripples in the aether they make -and this shielding makes it harder to listen >>to your emissions, too. The problem is that cables and ventilation vents >>are antennae, >>for sending and receiving both. >> >>Testing is key. If you don't measure, you don't know. > >This stuff was a *lot* easier when computers were slower. >I used to test my TEMPEST room at 450MHz, since that was high enough frequency >to cover any realistic level of emissions from the upper harmonics from the >VAX, >and it was also a short enough wavelength that leaks were pretty detectable. >It doesn't take much to get a leak - copper foil on a joint wearing out, >or the copper mesh we'd stuff inside gaskets getting set unevenly. >The waveguides we used for fiber or air vents were typically 1/8 inch wide >and an inch or two deep - and if you pushed a paperclip halfway through you'd >twang the leak meter. > >Well, that was fine for computers that were around 10MHz. >These days, when 1GHz is slow, there's tons of stray energy above that, >and that stuff is much more penetrating, plus you've got all the > The skin depth is proportional to f^(-0.5). The skin depth for Cu at 100MHz is about 0.00026". At 1600MHZ it should be ~0.000065 I think maybe 'sneakier' ( because of its smaller wavelength ) is closer than 'more penetrating' ( it is actually less penetrating in a conductor ). Mike >100 and 133MHz memory and disk bus stuff. >Fortunately, the equipment runs at much lower power levels; >you can run on batteries instead of 208-volt 3-phase (:-), >but I'm still glad I don't have to design a room or even a box >for that level of tightness.

1 0

Re: 10'th Anniversary
by Bill Stewart 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

At 04:17 PM 08/04/2001 -0500, Jim Choate wrote: >What would be the 'official' crank-up date on the Cypherpunks mailing list >in 1992? Time for a 10 year anniversary. Cranks have been up on the list since pretty near the beginning.... :-)

1 0

Re: "Space War"
by John Young 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

Don't overlook what is reportedly happening on the back side of the moon. The URL for an IF-mooncam was posted here a while ago. The stream is encrypted but with weak crypto -- the crypto-processor is 1968-9 vintage. The cam is part of a data package placed on the dark side in a classified operation. Signals bounced off a reflector stationed at the very edge of the moon's profile. What else is being done there remains to be disclosed. Didn't somebody mention also mention here that there's a group which intercepts the stream? I believe the Smithsonian has an archive of the small amount of public material, and NARA has some of the classified stuff needing clearance for access.

4 3

Re: Testing RF Shielding
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

http://www.testequipmentdepot.com/avcom/psa-65Cspecanal.htm Not cheap but within reach. If someone gets serious I could get advice about equipment and methods from a friend who did this sort of testing for years. If you don't have a Faraday cage and a spectrum analyzer and you still want a rough idea of how noisy your device is you can tune an AM radio to a vacant space between stations, crank up the volume, and listen for your device's noise. Turn it on and off, press some buttons, you can actually make some pretty good correlations between what you hear and what your equipment is doing. There will probably be some nice configurable SW radios soon. I don't know about sensitivity or noise problems that might go along with this but it seems pretty interesting. Maybe someone who knows more could comment. Mike

1 0

Shielding, Van Eck, and Faraday Cages
by Tim May 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

On Thursday, August 23, 2001, at 01:43 AM, Eugene Leitl wrote: > On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Faustine wrote: > >> Have you happened to have seen any good papers on constructing do-it- >> yourself cheap, effective, portable shielding? Probably might as well >> ask for the moon too while I'm at it, but it's worth a shot! > > Using cast aluminum cases, copper foil shielding, tight glands which > preferably transport only optical signals or coax, using low power parts > which don't clock too many Hz, and the like. > > Even if you don't have access to a testing facility, careful work and > some > thinking will eventually make you very, very silent. > Even without spectrum analyzers and the like, it's relatively easy to test shielding: use a portable radio. Tune it to a couple of stations, loud. Put in inside the Faraday cage. If you can still hear it, not very effective. (Sound muffling should be second-order, but easy to take into account.) To get fancier, instrument the radio. Put a meter on the speaker outputs. Tune to several frequencies. What can't get in can't get out. Though this RF method is mostly working in the RF spectrum, it gives a good indication of overall shielding. Can push this up in frequency in the obvious ways. We used this method to test the Faraday cage I worked in when I was doing Josephson Junction stuff. And using the same principle, one can listen to equipment with radios and t.v.s and gauge the effectiveness of shielding. (A signal that is attenuated by 90 db a few inches away will of course be hard for even trucks with large antennas to pick up a block away.) There is much out there on building Faraday cages, either large ones or small ones. Search engines will turn up suppliers and papers. The "heads up" displays of a couple of vendors are the likely long-term solution to a lot of supposed Van Eck radiation snooping. --Tim May

2 1

Testing RF shielding
by Tim May 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

On Thursday, August 23, 2001, at 05:32 AM, Eugene Leitl wrote: >> >> Testing is key. If you don't measure, you don't know. > > Renting time in HF testing facilities is expensive. Do you have > suggestions for a simple sniffer type of instrument, that detects the > amplitude of a radiated field? Do FETs pick up HF fine? See my other post. Radios work fine. Even the leakage of a computer at much higher than radio frequencies still causes interference (beat frequencies, emissions at the lower frequencies). A blaring radio that becomes dead quiet when placed inside an enclosure is a pretty good indicator of good shielding. There are also readily available things that operate at multi-gigahertz frequencies. 802.11, if I recall correctly. A simple test with Wavelan or Airport could be rigged. (The protocol will likely fail long before the signal fades out by enough db to be interesting, so you may have to put some metering on an analog output somewhere. ) Renting a spectrum analzyer is another choice, if you're serious about this. (Or buying one on the surplus market.) But, like I said, we used a portable radio to test our Faraday cages. > I intend to build me a wearable based on a LART type of board > http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/ > A minor note. Your English is excellent, but "I intend to build me a..." is not ideal grammar. "I intend to build myself a..." is the correct form. Your form is used by some native English speakers, though. Usually in the American south or rural west. --Tim May

1 0

Unique Internet Payment Platform
by Customer Support 23 Aug '01

23 Aug '01

Dear Friend, We Are Pleased To Announce The Internet Service You Have Been Waiting For! You have always believed paying through the Internet is expensive and not safe! You were right! But now all this belongs to the past because we introduce the: "CAPITAL CARD" Now you can Make and Receive Internet Payments: * Safe and Secure! * Fast and Convenient! * Private and Anonymous! * Inexpensive and Rewarding! Who Can Benefit Of Our Services! All present and future Internet Users that (occasionally) purchase products and services on the Internet. Especially those that are: * Business Owners * Entrepreneurs * Home Based Operators * Sales Professionals * Financial Consultants And further more: * All of you that want to become a Successful Individual! * All of you who seek an Opportunity to Create a Better Life and a Financially Secured Future! Today you can Pre-Sign Up for this Great New Service, without any obligation! Please go to: http://www.PrivateCapitalBuilder.com **No Need To remove, This Is A One-Time Only Mailing***

1 0