July 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Stegno and DAT and digital music...
by Peter Wayner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In this week's Sunday NYT, Hans Fantel, their music guy, writes at length about the new "dithered" CD's and how the guys have improved the sound. He says that the original CD format was limited to 16 bits of sound because of costs. But many audiophiles reacted very negatively to the tinny, metalic quality to the music. For this reason, the companies have developed 20 bit DAT recording tape and then come up with ways to "dither" this into 16 bits. I am curious if anyone knows the details of these algorithms. Also, his point suggests that flipping the least significant bit of 16 bit music may not be imperceptable to some ears. If the classical music starts to sound tinny then there might be something subversive in the least significant bits. -Peter Wayner

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Remail: errors
by HFinney＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I have been out of town for the last week, so I missed some CP mail. It looks like some good things are happening with remailers, though. Kudos to Karl, Sameer, and the others for their work! I have received many messages to my remailer in the last week which came from remail(a)tamsun.tamu.edu, which were PGP-encrypted apparently in an effort to get my remailer to send them. They did not work, though, because there was no "Encrypted: PGP" header to trigger the remailer's decryption. This can be arranged by creating the message something like this: ======================================================== :: Request-Remailing-To: hfinney(a)shell.portal.com :: Encrypted: PGP - -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- <rest of message> - -----END PGP MESSAGE------ ======================================================== This would then be sent to remail(a)tamsun.tamu.edu. I don't know whether the multiplicity of such erroneous messages is just due to one person stubbornly re-trying, or whether there is an error in one of the new programs for creating chained remailer messages. Hal Finney hfinney(a)shell.portal.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.2 iQCVAgUBLJaNuKgTA69YIUw3AQHrNwQAowMEQwuH6YyHoj6T7AqZFLNdTf+eqJ9L LhAatHS94nmC1smkfVNq0dZmigmkvBdMNEPlBZemmxALz+KJw6OSY/ULSBmuVNEq 5rJANh3XimoJWqLISy2lZiuC5Fw2R7UvRadcdM94pncSVvev92Fyf7CqEOOtrGAK PUzRds7BVNo= =FpLa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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more than spread spectrum
by cme＠ellisun.sw.stratus.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There are alternatives to spread spectrum, if we're threatened with loss of freedom to communicate. We could lay our own wires/fibers. We could set up a mesh network of infrared lasers through the air. Last time I looked, there were no laws against shining lights out your window as long as they didn't bother anyone. An infrared laser could hardly bother anyone. We could produce a line of cheap cards to plug into a PC which would do packet routing, using a variety of physical links -- our own wires, lasers, very low range radio, .... Each card would connect to three or more neighbors and become part of the global mesh. Adaptive routing with no global map would suffice for the card and would keep the whole system peer-to-peer with no need for central control and no chance for central tapping. Of course all of these solutions require a high density of users. A college campus might be the right place to start. We could then branch out to cities. I suspect that a place like Chicago or NYC with high rise apartments might be the place to start -- many options for line-of-sight communications. The benefit isn't just for Cypherpunks. It's a free network for the masses -- like the original USENET (with each user donating routing and store/forward) but with unrestricted, low-range, continuously operating physical links. I'll volunteer to do the software for the node card. Does anyone have hardware design/fab to donate to the effort? - Carl

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Pizza with a credit card
by Duncan Frissell 22 Aug '02

22 Aug '02

<http://villagevoice.com/issues/0230/baard.php>Buying Trouble In which the Village Voice discusses the use of commercial databases including supermarket discount cards in hunting terrorists. One useful piece of advice: Don't but pizza with a credit card: Oddly enough, "one of the factors was if you were a person who frequently ordered pizza and paid with a credit card," Ponemon says, describing the buying habits of a nation of college students. "Sometimes data leads to an empirical inference when you add it to other variables. Whether this one is relevant or completely spurious remains to be seen, but those kinds of weird things happen with data." Course all those terrorists buying their pizzas with cash get away clean. DCF ---- Posted by Duncan Frissell to <http://technoptimist.blogspot.com>The Technoptimist at 7/29/2002 10:19:30 AM

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Challenge to David Wagner on TCPA
by AARG! Anonymous 12 Aug '02

12 Aug '02

Declan McCullagh writes at http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-946890.html: "The world is moving toward closed digital rights management systems where you may need approval to run programs," says David Wagner, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. "Both Palladium and TCPA incorporate features that would restrict what applications you could run." But both Palladium and TCPA deny that they are designed to restrict what applications you run. The TPM FAQ at http://www.trustedcomputing.org/docs/TPM_QA_071802.pdf reads, in answer #1: : The TPM can store measurements of components of the user's system, but : the TPM is a passive device and doesn't decide what software can or : can't run on a user's system. An apparently legitimate but leaked Palladium White Paper at http://www.neowin.net/staff/users/Voodoo/Palladium_White_Paper_final.pdf says, on the page shown as number 2: : A Palladium-enhanced computer must continue to run any existing : applications and device drivers. and goes on, : In addition, Palladium does not change what can be programmed or run : on the computing platform; it simply changes what can be believed about : programs, and the durability of those beliefs. Of course, white papers and FAQs are not technical documents and may not be completely accurate. To really answer the question, we need to look at the spec. Unfortunately there is no Palladium spec publicly available yet, but we do have one for TCPA, at http://www.trustedcomputing.org/docs/main%20v1_1b.pdf. Can you find anything in this spec that would do what David Wagner says above, restrict what applications you could run? Despite studying this spec for many hours, no such feature has been found. So here is the challenge to David Wagner, a well known and justifiably respected computer security expert: find language in the TCPA spec to back up your claim above, that TCPA will restrict what applications you can run. Either that, or withdraw the claim, and try to get Declan McCullagh to issue a correction. (Good luck with that!) And if you want, you can get Ross Anderson to help you. His reports are full of claims about Palladium and TCPA which seem equally unsupported by the facts. When pressed, he claims secret knowledge. Hopefully David Wagner will have too much self-respect to fall back on such a convenient excuse.

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document popularity estimation / amortizable hashcash (Re: Hollywood Hackers)
by Adam Back 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

I proposed a construct which could be used for this application: called "amortizable hashcash". http://www.cypherspace.org/hashcash/amortizable.pdf The application I had in mind was also file sharing. (This was sometime in Mar 2000). I described this problem as the "disitrbuted document popularity estimation" problem. The other aspect of the problem is you have to distribute the popularity estimate and make it accessible, so I think you want it to be workably compact (you don't want to ship around 1 million hash collisions on the document hash). Amortizable hashcash addresses this problem. There is also some discussion of it here: http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/crypto/2000-q1/0440.html Adam On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 04:25:30PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: > It should use scarce resources (e.g. crunch) to generate a trust > currency in each node, a kind of decentralized mint (nothing > crunches quite a few million boxes on the Net).

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Re: Hollywood Hackers
by A.Melon 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

Jack Lloyd wrote: >On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Steve Schear wrote: > >> Looks amazingly familiar. Could it be, could be, could it be.... Mojo >> Nation (now MNet http://mnet.sourceforge.net )? > >Or OpenCM (http://www.opencm.org) > -Jack On the OpenCM webpage, it proclaims on the right hand side: OpenCM is designed as a secure, high-integrity replacement for CVS. Briefly, OpenCM provides ... cryptographic authentication and access control,... The OpenCM project was originally started because we needed a secure, high-integrity configuration management system and on the left hand side of the page it says: At the moment, we do not support non-Javascript browsers. If they are concerned about security, Shouldn't they be avoiding javascript?

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Re: Pizza with a credit card
by Michael Motyka 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

> > One useful piece of advice: > > > > Don't but pizza with a credit card: > > SNIP > > > > Course all those terrorists buying their pizzas with cash get away clean. > > > I've wondered for years how much longer this > will be allowed. Cash is still viable. Not > as viable as it was 10, or even 5 years ago. > I am still able to travel with only cash, buy > a pizza with only cash, or other food, still > buy groceries without having to produce mein > ausweiss (why I stopped shopping at CostCo > years back). But it is all getting stickier. > Quite clearly cash has got to go! I'm not sure how tough this would be to sneak past the slumbering electorate. Pretty tough I expect. But the usage level is certainly going down while the percentage of electronic transactions is skyrocketing. We've even had concresscritters suggesting that the transport of $10K !interstate! should be illegal. I think this came up when the most recent international transport rule changes were made. It's getting more wierd every week now. An adjustment in the other direction will come along soon - I hope but doubt.

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White House Sounds Call For New Internet Standards
by Steve Schear 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

WHITE HOUSE SOUNDS CALL FOR NEW INTERNET STANDARDS The Bush administration's cyber security czar, Richard Clarke, said it might be time to replace the "creaky, cranky" 20-year-old protocols that drive the Internet with standards better able to accommodate a flood of new wireless devices. Wireless devices, it is feared, may introduce large security holes to the network. The White House is working with the private sector to draft a national plan to secure the country's most vital computer networks from cyber attack. The plan, expected to be released September 18, will include several policy recommendations for wireless security. Clarke stated that the administration had an obligation to take an active role in ensuring the security of the Internet, especially since nearly 81 percent of major businesses today use, or plan to use, wireless networks. [SOURCE: The Washington Post, AUTHOR: Brian Krebs] <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22535-2002Jul30.html>

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Re: A Q&A exchange between me and Eugene Volokh
by A.Melon 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

On Tue, 30 Jul 2002 22:50:35 -0400 (EDT), you wrote: > > A Q&A exchange between me and Eugene Volokh: > [Eugene's responses in square brackets.] > > The topic was Gilmore v. Ashcroft -- FAA ID Challenge in which John > Gilmore is suing the Feds to be allowed to fly domestically without ID. > > So, does John have a chance? > > [No.] > > So it is your view that the Feds can ban anyone (except those wealthy > enough to rent, buy, or build their own aircraft) from flying, for life, > using secret orders, and without any > access to judicial process. > > Seems a bit extreme to me. To put this in a broader and an historical perspective, let me point out that the government of the United States moved from the eloquent ideals and words of the Declaration of Independence, to a law that declared that any treasonable activity, including the publication of "any false, scandalous and malicious writing," was a high misdemeanor, punishable by fine and imprisonment, in just 22 years and 10 days. By virtue of this legislation, twenty-five men, most of them editors of Republican newspapers, were arrested and their newspapers forced to shut down.(The Sedition Act, 1798, Section 2, http://earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/sedition/s-2.html ). As the newspapers were shuttered, the 1st amendment was only 6 and a half years old. I would submit for your consideration that governments of whatever stripe tenaciously and constantly move to expand the span and scope of their control, either with support of seemingly innocuous "stepping stone" laws, or by blatant disregard of law, precedent, or whatever else impedes that expansion. The most favorite tactic of those governments pretending western-style democracy is to implement secret, draconian controls and chilling surveillance to "protect the children" or "wage war on terrorism" or other real and imagined violent threats, over-hyped. The government uses the same pitch that comes from organized crime: "You want protection (security), you have to give up some money (freedom). You are either with us or against us. We cannot wait while dangers gather." Want to put a couple hundred thousand US citizens in concentration camps because of their ancestry? The Supreme Court sees nothing in the constitution to interfere with that. The DOJ today is quite adept at actions which it holds to be immune from judicial review, so the inconvenience of a judicial rubber stamp is no longer needed. And you wonder if the government can require a licence to be a passenger on an airliner? They can require a license to leave your house on foot, and they are in the process of doing so. "Have papers? Proceed. No papers, oh, you are not under arrest, but we need to check into a few things. This will only take a couple of hours or so and then you'll be on your way (to the next checkpoint). It's for the children, you know?" The first step will likely be for airline flight. With travel security papers, come to the airport 1 hour before departure. Without travel security papers, come to the airport 3 hours before departure. Then we can expect to hear, "May I have your travel security number please?" You know the drill. In about 27 minutes, the credit information service companies will also have that number. It will be your license, revocable at will, to move about the country, to buy, to own, to lodge. Has the president suspended the writ of habeas corpus? Sorry, that's secret, and since you asked, we must watch you carefully, because as our Attorney General says, civil liberties questions like that just give comfort to the enemy. I know full well that a substantial percentage of readers sees this line of thinking as paranoia. I expect that percentage to drop rapidly. "What do you have to hide?"

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