August 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Feudalism FUD
by Matthew X 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/30/2024235 "...Intellectual property rights create large patterns of interference in the freedom of others because abstract objects are a crucial kind of resource. Abstract objects are vital to all kinds of social, cultural and economic projects..." War on an abstract object anyone? War on a tactic? "...private, arbitrary, unchecked, global power will become a part of life in the information society. A world in which seed rights, algorithms, DNA and chemical formulae are owned by a few, a world in which information flows can be coordinated by information-media barons, might indeed be an information feudalism."

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Anarcho-commies threaten to sue? Shurley shome mishtake!
by Matthew X 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

It is the common belief of anarchists and communists of all likes to oppose property. Intellectual property is also shunned by extension. So there is a question of why(?!?) it is that these anarchist and communist works are today being copyrighted. Furthermore, the two main radical internet archivists (Marxist Internet Archives and Anarchy Archives) threaten to sue those who use their content. MIA and AA are also selling CDs of their content ($25 and $10), which is a direct exploitation of theory. MIA and AA have degraded themselves to the level of Hot Topic, selling the revolution. Anarchy for sale, $10. Be a Communist, only $25! But I faintly remember: the revolution will not be televised. MORE http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/08/04/4931670 ACE download site... Link: http://www.crosswinds.net/~redlibertad/

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ELF,Greenpeace,ALF direct actions.
by Matthew X 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/08/04/4678572 As more wilderness and farmland areas are paved under and precious pieces of earth sold for the profit of a few, more actions are being planned. We will not stop until the developers and oligarchs do. With love and hope, ELF.

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Jury rules for Paul Guthrie's Defense in ZixIt's $700mm suit (was Re: GigaLaw.com Daily News, August 5, 2002)
by R. A. Hettinga 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

If anyone can get past the "No Cookie" monster to the actual text of this link, let me know. :-). Cheers, RAH At 5:36 AM -0600 on 8/5/02, GigaLaw.com wrote: > Jury Rules for Defense in $700 Million Net Defamation Case > In one of the first trials in the nation to address Internet > defamation, a Dallas County, Texas, jury rejected a $700 million suit by > an Internet company that claimed it was harmed by negative electronic > messages. Dallas' ZixIt alleged that Paul Guthrie, formerly a vice > president with Visa, posted more than 400 anonymous messages, many > negative, about ZixIt on a Yahoo Internet message board, causing ZixIt's > stock price to drop. > Read the article: law.com @ > >http://www.law.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/View… -- ----------------- 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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dangers of TCPA/palladium
by Adam Back 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

Like anonymous, I've been reading some of the palladium and TCPA docs. I think some of the current disagreements and not very strongly technology grounded responses to anonymous are due to the lack of any concise and informative papers describing TCPA and palladium. Not everyone has the energy to reverse engineer a detailed 300-odd pages of TCPA spec [1] back into high-level design considerations; the more manageably short business level TCPA FAQs [2], [3] are too heavily PR spun and biased to extract much useful information from. So so far I've read Ross Anderson's initial expose of the problem [4]; plus Ross's FAQ [5]. (And more, reading list continues below...). The relationship between TCPA, and Palladium is: - TCPA is the hardware and firmware (Compaq, Intel, IBM, HP, and Microsoft, plus 135+ other companies) - Palladium is a proposed OS feature-set based on the TCPA hardware (Microsoft) The main 4 features proposed in the TCPA/palladium scheme are: 1. secure bootstrap -- checksums of BIOS, firmware, privileged OS code are used to ensure the machine knows whether it is running certified software or not. This is rooted in hardware, so you can't by pass it by using virtualization, only by hardware hacking (*). 2. software attestation -- the hardware supports attesting to a third party whether a call comes from a certified software component as assured by the hardware described in feature 1. 3. hardware assisted compartmentalization -- CPU can run privileged software, and RAM can contain information that you can not examine, and can not modify. (Optionally the software source can be published, but that is not necessary, and if it's not you won't be able to reverse-engineer it as it can be encrypted for the CPU). 4. sealing -- applications can store data that can only be read by that application. This works based on more hardware -- the software state checksums developed in feature 1 are used by hardware to generate encryption keys. The hardware will refuse to generate the key unless the same software state is running. One good paper to understand the secure bootstrap is an academic paper "A Secure and Reliable Bootstrap architecture" [6]. It's interesting to see that one of the author's of [6] has said that TCPA as curently formed is a bad thing and is trying to influence TCPA to make it more open, to exhibit stronger privacy properties read his comments at [7]. There are a lot of potential negative implications of this technology, it represents a major shift in the balance of power comparable in magnitude to the clipper chip: 1. Potentially cedes control of the platform -- while the palladium docs talk about being able to boot the hardware with TCPA turned off, there exists possibility that with minor configuration change the hardware / firmware ensemble that forms palladium/TCPA could be configured to allow only certified OSes to boot, period. It's intereseting to note, if I read correctly, that the X-box (based on celeron processor and TCPA / TCPA-like features) does employ this feature. See for example: [8]. The documents talk about there being no barrier to certifying TCPA aware extensions to open-source OSes. However I'm having trouble figuring out how this would work. Perhaps IBM with it's linux support would build a TCPA extension for linux. Think about it -- the extension runs in privileged mode, and presumably won't be certified unless it passes some audit enforcing TCPA policies. (Such as keeping the owner of the machine from reading sealed documents, or reading the contents of DRM policy controlled documents without meeting the requirements for the DRM policy.) 2. DSS over-again -- a big aspect of the DSS reverse-engineering was to allow DVDs to be played in software on linux. The TCPA platform seems to have the primary goal of making a framework within which it is possible to build extensions to implement hardware tamper resistant DRM. (The DRM implementation would run in a hardware assisted code compartment as described in feature 3 above). So now where does that put open source platforms? Will they be able to read such DRM protected content? It seems likely that in the longer term the DRM platform will include video cards without access to video memory, perhaps encryption of the video signal out to the monitor, and of audio out to the speakers. (There are other existing schemes to do these things which dovetail into the likely TCPA DRM framework.) With the secure boot strap described in feature 1, the video card and so on are also part of the boot strap process, so the DRM system would have ready support from the platform for robustly refusing to play except on certain types of hardware. Similarly the application software which plays these DRM policy protected files and talks to the DRM policy module in the hardware assisted code compartment will itself be an application which uses the security boot-strapping features. So it won't be possible to write an application on for example linux to play these files without an audit and license etc from various content, DRM and OS cartels. This will lead to exactly the kind of thing Richard Stallman talked about in his prescient paper on the coming platform and right to develop competing software control wars [9]. 3. Privacy support is broken -- the "privacy" features while clearly attempts to defuse a re-run at the pentium serial number debacle, have not really fixed it's problems. You have to trust the "Trusted Third Party" privacy CA not to track you and not to collude with other CAs and software vendors. There are known solutions to this particular sub-problem, for example Stefan Brands digital credentials [10], which can be used to build a cryptographically assured privacy preserving PKI avoiding the linking problems arising from identity based and attribute certificates. 4. Strong enforcement for DMCA DRM excesses -- the types of DRM system which the platform enables stand a fair chance of providing high levels of enforcement for things which though strictly legally mandated (copyright licensing restrictions, limited number of plays of CDs / DVDs other disadvantageous schemes; inflexible and usurious software licensing), if enforced strictly would have deleterious effects on society and freedom. Copyright violation is widely practiced to a greater or less extent by just about all individuals. It is widely viewed as acceptable behavior. These social realities and personal freedoms are not taken into account or represented in the lobbying schemes which lead to the media cartels obtaining legal support for the erosion of users rights and expansionist power grabs in DMCA, WIPO etc. Some of these issues might be not so bad except for the track records, and obvious monopolistic tendencies and economic pressures on the entities who will have the root keys to the worlds computers. There will be no effect choice or competition due to existing near monopolies, or cartelisation in the hardware, operating system, and content distribution conglomerates. 5. Strong enforcement for the software renting model -- the types of software licensing policy enforcement that can be built with the platform will also start to strongly enable the software and object rental ideas. Again potentially these models have some merit except that they will be sabotaged by API lock out, where the root key owners will be able to charge monopoly rents for access to APIs. 6. Audits and certification become vastly more prevalent. Having had some involvement with software certification (FIPS 140-1 / CC) I can attest that this can be expensive exercises. It is unlikely that the open source community will be able to get software certified due to cost (the software is free, there is no business entity to claim ownership of the certification rights, and so no way to recuperate the costs). While certification where competition is able to function is a good thing, providing users with a transparency and needed assurance, the danger with tying audits to TCPA is that it will be another barrier to entry for small businesses, and for open source particularly. 7. Untrusted, unauditable software will be able to run without scrutiny inside the hardware assisted code compartments. Some of the documentation talks about open sourcing some aspects. While this may come to pass, but that sounded like the TOR (Trusted Operating Root); other extension modules also running in unauditable compartments will not be so published. 8. Gives away root control of your machine -- providing potentially universal remote control of users machines to any government agencies with access to the TCPA certification master keys, or policies allowing them to demand certifications on hostile code on demand. Central authorities are likely to be the only, or the default controllers of the firmware/software upgrade mechanism which comes as part of the secure bootstrap feature. 9. Provides a dangerously tempting target for government power-grabs -- governments will be very interested to be able to abuse the power provided by the platform, to gain access to it's keys to be able to insert remote backdoors, and/or to try to mandate government policy enforcement modules once such a platform is built. Think this is unrealistic? Recall clipper? The TCPA is a generic extensible policy enforcement architecture which can be configured to robustly enforce policies against the interests of the machine owner. Clipper, key-escrow the whole multi-year fight, at some point in the near future if some of the more egregious TCPA/Palladium framework features and configuration possibilities becomes widely deployed could be implemented after the fact, as a TCPA/Palladium policy extentsion which runs in the hardware assisted code compartment and is authenticated up to the hardware boot by the secure bootstrapping process. So what I've read so far, I think people's gut reactions are right -- that it's an aggressive and abmitious power grab by the evil empire -- the 3 cartels / monopolies surrounding PC hardware, Operating systems and Content Distribution. The operating system near monoply will doubtless find creative ways to use and expand the increased control to control application interoperability (with the sealing function), to control with hardware assistance the access to undocumented APIs (no more reverse engineering, or using the APIs even if you do / could reverse engineer). So some of the already applications are immediately objectionable. The scope for them to become more so with limited recourse or technical counter-measures possible on the part of the user community is huge. Probably the worst aspect is the central control -- it really effectively does give remote root control to your machine to people you don't want to trust. Also the control _will_ be abused for monopolistic rent seeking and exclusionary policies to lock-out competition. Don't forget the fact that microsoft views linux as a major enemy as revealed by documents uncovered some the anti-trust discovery process. In fact I'd say this is the biggest coming risk to personal freedom since the days during the onset of the clipper chip / key escrow looked like they stood some chance of becoming reality. Adam -- http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/ (*) It may be possible to hack the firmware, given access to source temporarily. [1] "Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) Main Specification Version 1.1b", TCPA http://www.trustedcomputing.org/docs/main%20v1_1b.pdf [2] "TCPA Specification/TPM Q&A", TCPA http://www.trustedcomputing.org/docs/TPM_QA_071802.pdf [3] "TCPA Frequently Asked Questions Rev 5.0", TCPA http://www.trustedcomputing.org/docs/Website_TCPA%20FAQ_0703021.pdf [4] "Security in Open versus Closed Systems (The Dance of Boltzmann, Coase and Moore)", Ross Anderson, (Sections 4 and 5 only, rest is unrelated) ftp://ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/toulouse.pdf [5] "TCPA / Palladium Frequently Asked Questions Version 1.0" http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html [6] "A Secure and Reliable Bootstrap Architecture" @inproceedings{Arbaugh:97:secure-bootstrap, author = "Bill Arbaugh and Dave Farber and Jonathan Smith", title = "A Secure and Reliable Bootstrap Architecture", booktitle = "Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy", pages = 65-71, note = "Also available as \url{http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~waa/aegis.ps}" } [7] "The TCPA; What's wrong; What's right and what to do about", William Arbaugh, 20 Jul 2002 http://www.cs.umd.edu/~waa/TCPA/TCPA-goodnbad.html [8] "Keeping Secrets in Hardware: the Micrsoft Xbox Case Study", Andre "bunnie" Huang, 26 May 2002 http://web.mit.edu/bunnie/www/proj/anatak/AIM-2002-008.pdf [9] "The Right to Read", Richard Stallman, Feb 1997, Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2). http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [10] Stefan Brands Book "Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates - Building in Privacy", MIT Press, Aug 2000. http://www.xs4all.nl/~brands/ Number of other technical and semi-technical papers on that page. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Deep Perps.
by Matthew X 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

Blue pill or the red? Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, enjoy the ride. I'm a speed king you go to hear me sing I'm a speed king see me fly Sweet child in time you'll see the line The line that's drawn between the good and the bad See the blind man shooting at the world Bullets flying taking toll If you've been bad, Lord I bet you have And you've been hit by flying lead You'd better close your eyes and bow your head And wait for the ricochet. Nobody gonna take my car I'm gonna race it to the ground Nobody gonna beat my car It's gonna break the speed of sound Oooh it's a killing machine It's got everything Like a driving power big fat tyres and everything I love it and I need it I bleed it yeah it's a wild hurricane Alright hold tight I'm a highway star Nobody gonna take my girl I'm gonna keep her to the end Nobody gonna have my girl She stays close on every bend Oooh she's a killing machine She's got everything Like a moving mouth body control and everything I love her I need her I seed her Yeah She turns me on Alright hold on tight I'm a highway star Nobody gonna take my head I got speed inside my brain Nobody gonna steal my head Now that I'm on the road again Oooh I'm in heaven again I've got everything Like a moving ground an open road and everything I love it and I need it I seed it Eight cylinders all mine Alright hold on tight I'm a highway star Swiss time was running out It seemed that we would lose the race Smoke on the water, fire in the sky We ended up at the Grand Hotel It was empty cold and bare But with the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside Making our music there With a few red lights and a few old beds We made a place to sweat No matter what we get out of this I know we'll never forget Smoke on the water, fire in the sky Black night is not right, I don't feel so bright, I don't care to sit tight. Maybe I'll find on the way down the line that I'm free, free to be me. Black night is a long way from home. I don't need a dark tree, I don't want a rough sea, I can't feel, I can't see. Maybe I'll find on the way down the line that I'm free, free to be me. Black night is a long way from home. Black night, black night, I don't need black night, I can't see dark night. Maybe I'll find on the way down the line that I'm free, free to be me. Black night is a long way from home. Long way from the wife.life.Dont come back...ever.

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Merhaba;
by Bu bir reklamdir 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

Sevgili internet Kullanicilari; Bu mail belki sizleri rahatsiz edecek, belkide ilginizi �ekecek. Eger rahatsiz ettiyse sizlerden �ok �ok �z�r diliyoruz. Biz Avrupadan Erotic �r�n ithal ederek online satisini yapan bir firmayiz. �lkemizde hen�z bir takim tabularin yikilmadigini biliyoruz. Fakat i�inde olabilmek i�in yogun �abalar verdigimiz Avrupa birligi �lkelerinde bu �r�nler marketlerde satiliyor. Hatta Amerikal� �nl� manken Pamela Enderson'a sevgilisinin y�zlerce seks malzemesi hediye etti�ini duymu�sunuzdur. Artik K�resellesen d�nyada bizlerde yerimizi almak ve kisacik hayatimiza mutluluklari sigdirmak zorundayiz. Cinsel yasamin; insan hayatindaki yerini biliyorsaniz? Cinselligin sizin icin �nemini biliyorsaniz? Sizi web sitemizi gezmeye davet ediyoruz. Saygilarimizla Abana Erotik Market www.abanashop.com.tr.tc

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A WinXP patch
by szunr 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

****************************************************** POZNAMKA: priloha s menom disable.bat bola odstranena, nakolko sa jedna o potencionalne nebezpecny subor, ktory umoznuje sirenie virusov. ********************************************************

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Alien,the musical.
by Matthew X 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

Now altered slightly in transition,andrew lw dropped out...A Tom Zupko shoot is never done. And even when it's done perfectionist Zupko still seems to be doing it. But so far he's quite pleased with the way Ass Alien his latest feature is turning out though scenes remain to be shot. Gene: The other night was another long shooting night. You shot a scene involving Misty and Tony Tedeschi which took awhile to accomplish for physical reasons. [Misty's asshole was challenged to accommodate Tedeschi's bulk]. Nevertheless, you seem to be pretty pleased with what's been going on so far. Zupko: Everything's going good. This is the first movie I've shot in about five months. It's a lot of fun. It's light hearted and the way it's being put together is like a sitcom- with the canned laughter, applause, intros, and real commercials in between. And the style I'm shooting it in, isn't like my usual free style form. This is more of the traditional two-shot, single-shot style mimicking the dialogue of a sitcom. Actually it's very funny. This new guy Joe Daddy who derives his sexual pleasure from geriatrics is the Ass Alien. He did a good job. He hung in there wearing that heavy suit. Not only that he was fine in the sex scenes. This one might become a cult classic. I'm doing so much with it in post with animation and 3-D. It's going to be great. I have to say one thing. I'd like to pay special thanks to Samantha Sterlyng who hung with Zupko. A lot of people said she wouldn't be able to, but she did and did a phenomenal job. She was a dream to work with on the set. I've always thought that she was one of the most beautiful yet underrated girls in pornography. She told me she was down for anal and did five positions that were just ripping. Though we're not done yet, it's the best sex scene of the movie probably. But the whole thing was great. And not one girl gets slapped or spit on! I don't know if that's good or bad. I think when it's all said and done, it'll be unforgettable.

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FreehFall
by Matthew X 05 Aug '02

05 Aug '02

http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/thereview.cfm?id=840672002 "...Freeh turns out to be more Clark Kent than Superman. The FBI pursues Wen Lo Hee for a genuinely substantial piece of espionage - selling missile technology to the Chinese. The only problem is, he's innocent. Then it turns out the FBI has messed up the Oklahoma investigation, Freeh falls out with Bill Clinton, the Khobar Towers investigation falls prey to Saudi government intransigence and the Senate launches an investigation into what by this time is being dubbed the 'Fumbling Bunch of Idiots'. The FBI boss does catch Hanssen, but as the latter has been spying since 1980 no-one is terribly impressed. Freeh steps down early, his career, a bit like the Soviet Union, fizzling out unlamented. Vise sets out to shock us with a tale of human evil, yet Hanssen comes over as merely a bit sad. What Vise does succeed in doing is shedding some light on an intelligence establishment which has been malfunctioning for decades."

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