December 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
by Tim May 31 Dec '02

31 Dec '02

On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: > But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in > TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track > where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible > weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives > can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data > could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. _Can_ be used is different from _must_ be used. Collecting valid name information costs a vendor money (both in labor, computerization/records, and in driving some customers elsewhere). It also deters some people from completing transactions. Given free choice, most parties to a transaction in a store will not exchange name information. Examples abound of this. No time today to describe the examples of where people choose not to give names. Flea markets, gas stations, grocery stores, hardware stores, etc. A gas station which refuses to take paper currency limits its sales. J. Random Terrorist will likely buy gas with cash. Only an enforceable (and unconstitutional, for various reasons) requirement for ID will work. As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this in detail. Think about it. --Tim May

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Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
by Kevin Elliott 31 Dec '02

31 Dec '02

At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: >Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a >credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in >the name Doe. Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said "here's your card and application, please fill out the application and mail it in". I say "thank you ma'am", walk out the door and toss the "application" in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name linkage... -- ___________________________ Kevin Elliott <mailto:kelliott@mac.com> ICQ#23758827 AIM ID: teargo ___________________________

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Re: [e-gold-list] Announcing Seagold.net: E-mail Privacy, Secure, Encrypted, accepts e-gold
by Bill Stewart 31 Dec '02

31 Dec '02

At 11:50 AM 12/13/2002 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >...It had to happen sooner or later, I suppose... >--- begin forwarded text > >From: <exchanges(a)seagold.net> >Subject: [e-gold-list] Announcing Seagold.net: E-mail Privacy, Secure, >Encrypted, accepts e-gold >... >Introducing Seagold.net, a secure web-based email service located in >the Principality of Sealand, outside the jurisdiction of any >government on earth! ... followed by some description of their email system and a long complex description of their shell game \\\\\\ multi- level pyramid scheme\\\\\\\\\ silly sales rep recruiting system.* If you poke around their site a bit, you'll see a reference to http://sealand.pmmit.com/seamail.html which appears to be a straightforward mail system without the shell game, though I haven't done a feature-by-feature comparison to be sure if it's quite identical. It's basically webmail plus SSL-encrypted POP3. The price ranges from $10/month to $90/year depending on contract length, vs. $25/month for the pyramid game, which offers the possibility of being free or letting you make gazillions of dollars if you can find a way to convince the untapped potential customer base to play the game instead of just buying the service. It strikes me as a bit short on features, but then I'm comparing it to fastmail.fm, which is an extremely well-run email system that my wife uses (which ranges from free accounts with signature tags to cheap accounts without them to full-featured accounts for $20-40/year.) There's no encryption, but their spam-avoidance features are the best I've seen. * Don't get me wrong - I'm not totally dissing well-designed pyramid marketing as a sales-rep recruitment technique, but it has to be something that has a product that's realistic at a price that's realistic with margins that are realistic, while these guys seem to have a margin that's unrealistic (at least compared to other services they're offering) with a total hand-waving shell-game compensation method, and other than the fact that their system is based in Sealand, which is worth paying some margin for, and open-source based, which says it has some chance of stability if administered well, they don't say anything that inspires me to expect them to be competent at running email systems well. But hey, free trials can be fun sometimes, though this one requires an e-gold account number, which makes it harder to burn lots of them.

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Re: QM, EPR, A/B
by Mike Rosing 31 Dec '02

31 Dec '02

<<< No Message Collected >>>

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[ANNOUNCE] OpenSSL 0.9.7 released
by Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker 31 Dec '02

31 Dec '02

OpenSSL version 0.9.7 released =============================== OpenSSL - The Open Source toolkit for SSL/TLS http://www.openssl.org/ The OpenSSL project team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.9.7 of our open source toolkit for SSL/TLS. This new OpenSSL version is a major release and incorporates at least 262 changes and bugfixes to the toolkit (for a complete list see http://www.openssl.org/source/exp/CHANGES. The most significant changes are: o New library section OCSP. o Complete rewrite of ASN1 code. o CRL checking in verify code and openssl utility. o Extension copying in 'ca' utility. o Flexible display options in 'ca' utility. o Provisional support for international characters with UTF8. o Support for external crypto devices ('engine') is no longer a separate distribution. o New elliptic curve library section. o New AES (Rijndael) library section. o Support for new platforms: Windows CE, Tandem OSS, A/UX, AIX 64-bit, Linux x86_64, Linux 64-bit on Sparc v9 o Extended support for some platforms: VxWorks o Enhanced support for shared libraries. o Now only builds PIC code when shared library support is requested. o Support for pkg-config. o Lots of new manuals. o Makes symbolic links to or copies of manuals to cover all described functions. o Change DES API to clean up the namespace (some applications link also against libdes providing similar functions having the same name). Provide macros for backward compatibility (will be removed in the future). o Unify handling of cryptographic algorithms (software and engine) to be available via EVP routines for asymmetric and symmetric ciphers. o NCONF: new configuration handling routines. o Change API to use more 'const' modifiers to improve error checking and help optimizers. o Finally remove references to RSAref. o Reworked parts of the BIGNUM code. o Support for new engines: Broadcom ubsec, Accelerated Encryption Processing, IBM 4758. o A few new engines added in the demos area. o Extended and corrected OID (object identifier) table. o PRNG: query at more locations for a random device, automatic query for EGD style random sources at several locations. o SSL/TLS: allow optional cipher choice according to server's preference. o SSL/TLS: allow server to explicitly set new session ids. o SSL/TLS: support Kerberos cipher suites (RFC2712). Only supports MIT Kerberos for now. o SSL/TLS: allow more precise control of renegotiations and sessions. o SSL/TLS: add callback to retrieve SSL/TLS messages. o SSL/TLS: support AES cipher suites (RFC3268). We consider OpenSSL 0.9.7 to be the best version of OpenSSL available and we strongly recommend that users of older versions upgrade as soon as possible. OpenSSL 0.9.7 is available for download via HTTP and FTP from the following master locations (you can find the various FTP mirrors under http://www.openssl.org/source/mirror.html) o http://www.openssl.org/source/ o ftp://ftp.openssl.org/source/ OpenSSL 0.9.6 (all patch levels) came in the form of two distributions, a "normal" one and an "engine" variant that included support for external crypto devices. In 0.9.7, the "engine" framework is part of the "normal" distribution, so there are no variants of 0.9.7. The distribution file name is: o openssl-0.9.7.tar.gz [normal] MD5 checksum: ef376d14205afcfb831cd3720f705d79 The checksum was calculated using the following command: openssl md5 < openssl-0.9.7.tar.gz Yours, The OpenSSL Project Team... Mark J. Cox Ben Laurie Andy Polyakov Ralf S. Engelschall Richard Levitte Geoff Thorpe Dr. Stephen Henson Bodo Möller Lutz Jänicke Ulf Möller --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Many Worlds Version of Fermi Paradox
by Tim May 30 Dec '02

30 Dec '02

On Monday, December 30, 2002, at 01:18 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote: > Hal Finney wrote: > >> One correction, there are no known problems which take exponential >> time >> but which can be checked in polynomial time. If such a problem could >> be >> found it would prove that P != NP, one of the greatest unsolved >> problems >> in computability theory. > > Whoops, I've heard of the P=NP problem but I guess I was confused > about what it meant. But there are some problems where candidate > solutions can be checked much faster than new solutions can be > generated, no? If you want to know whether a number can be factorized > it's easy to check candidate factors, for example, although if the > answer is that it cannot be factorized because the number is prime I > guess there'd be no fast way to check if that answer is correct. Factoring is not known to be in NP (the so-called "NP-complete" class of problems...solve on in P time and you've solved them all!). The example I favor is the Hamiltonian cycle/circuit problem: find a path through a set of linked nodes (cities) which passes through each node once and only once. All of the known solutions to an arbitrary Hamiltonian cycle problem are exponential in time (in number of nodes). For example, for 5 cities there are at most 120 possible paths, so this is an easy one. But for 50 cities there are as many as 49!/2 possible paths (how many, exactly, depends on the links between the cities, with not every city having all possible links to other cities). For a mere 100 cities, the number of routes to consider is larger than the number of particles we believe to be in the universe. However, saying "known solutions" is not the same thing as "we have proved that it takes exponential time." For all we know, now, in 2002, there are solutions not requiring exponential time (in # of cities). > This is also somewhat relevant to "theories of everything" since we > might want to ask if somewhere in the set of "all possible universes" > there exists one where time travel is possible and computing power > increases without bound. If the answer is yes, that might suggest that > any TOE based on "all possible computations" is too small to > accomodate a really general notion of all possible universes. And this general line of reasoning leads to a Many Worlds Version of the Fermi Paradox: Why aren't they here? The reason I lean toward the "shut up and calculate" or "for all practical purposes" interpretation of quantum mechanics is embodied in the above argument. IF the MWI universe branchings are at all communicatable-with, that is, at least _some_ of those universes would have very, very large amounts of power, computer power, numbers of people, etc. And some of them, if it were possible, would have communicated with us, colonized us, visited us, etc. This is a variant of the Fermi Paradox raised to a very high power. My conclusion is that the worlds of the MWI are not much different from Lewis' "worlds with unicorns"--possibly extant, but unreachable, and hence, operationally, no different from a single universe model. (I don't believe, necessarily, in certain forms of the Copenhagen Interpretation, especially anything about signals propagating instantaneously, just the "quantum mechanics is about measurables" ground truth of what we see, what has never failed us, what the mathematics tells us and what is experimentally verified. Whether there "really are" (in the modal realism sense of Lewis) other worlds is neither here nor there. Naturally, I would be thrilled to see evidence, or to conclude myself from deeper principles, that other worlds have more than linguistic existence.) --Tim May (.sig for Everything list background) Corralitos, CA. Born in 1951. Retired from Intel in 1986. Current main interest: category and topos theory, math, quantum reality, cosmology. Background: physics, Intel, crypto, Cypherpunks

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Brinwear
by R. A. Hettinga 30 Dec '02

30 Dec '02

http://wearcam.org/domewear/ -- ----------------- 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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Manhattan Bldgs (RE: The Geodesic Economy:)
by Major Variola (ret) 30 Dec '02

30 Dec '02

At 01:33 PM 12/29/02 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: I don't much like the Richard Meier >(tictactoe) design. Its not a tictactoe or "hollywood squares" design ---those are gleaming white prison bars. A motif for the 21st century. -- "Intended only for lawful uses." -HP Computer Advert

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Finns To Use Cell Phones To Monitor Traffic Jams
by Eugen Leitl 30 Dec '02

30 Dec '02

http://slashdot.org/articles/02/12/30/1243247.shtml?tid=126 Posted by Hemos on Monday December 30, @07:59AM from the interesting-adaptation dept. Okko writes "The Finnish Road Administration announced it is going to use cellphone location data to find out about traffic jams. They say they are using the location data available from the GSM base stations to determine the locations and speeds of vehicles carrying mobile phones. The information will be used to inform people about traffic jams and peaks in traffic trough public FM radio stations. Until now, the information about traffic has been gathered using car sensors embedded in the roads. The spokesperson of FRA, interviewed in the evening news of MTV3 Finland, seemed very pleased they can monitor cell phones even when no calls are made, it is enough the phone has power on. They said they are about to use the information anonymously and thought people approve it as long as it is done in an anonymous and "everyone-wins" way. It was told they do not currently tell the police about the data they discover as the current law forbids this. So, it is not, at least yet, possible to fine people carrying mobile phones in their cars too fast on public roads (exceeding the speed limit of the road). Unfortunately, probably because of vacations, FRA has not updated their website accordingly yet. There does exist an annoucement about testing the technology from the summer. "

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Ecstasy Air: U.S. Airforce members in Europe smuggle drugs
by Bo Elkjaer 30 Dec '02

30 Dec '02

List At least the U.S. Airforce active duty members show some ingenuity when smuggling drugs in and out of the European Union. http://www.dps.state.mn.us/MCAN/CASystem/uploadedfiles/Hydroxycut.pdf (May be gone. Google has a copy) Yours -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE DO NOT DISSEMINATE OUTSIDE OFFICIAL CHANNELS DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE AIR FORCE OFFICE OF SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS ANDREWS AFB, MD 20762-7002 NARCOTICS BRIEF 02-03 FROM:HQ AFOSI/XOGP DATE OF REPORT:23 May 02 SUBJECT:Hydroxycut(r) Capsules Used to Store Ecstasy TO:All Regions, Squadrons, Detachments, and Operating Locations (CAT III) SOURCE: SA Earl Lesniak, AFOSI Detachment 531, Aviano Air Base, Italy SUMMARY:Recent interviews disclosed Active Duty Air Force members stationed at Aviano Air Base, Italy, emptied Hydroxycut(r) capsules and replaced the contents with crushed ecstasy pills to avoid detection when crossing the Slovenia/Italy and Slovenia/Croatia borders. Hydroxycut(r) is a popular dietary supplement used for weight loss. Hydroxycut(r) is made by MusleTech Research and Development -- EOT

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