January 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

WPI Cryptography Seminar January 20
by Berk Sunar 16 Jan '03

16 Jan '03

WPI Cryptography Seminar Towards a Theory of Variable Privacy BY: Dr. Poorvi Vora, Hewlett-Packard Company, Corvallis, OR DATE: Monday, January 20, 2003 TIME: 10:00 AM PLACE: Atwater Kent, Room 218 ABSTRACT The traditional theory of security, with its focus on perfect secrecy, does not provide a satisfactory framework for the study of situations where information revelation bears a privacy cost and also provides a benefit. We define variable privacy as the use of randomization with user participation in the choice of parameters, and propose the beginnings of a theory for its study. Variable privacy enables the user, or a computational agent working on the user's behalf, to choose a level of interaction, based on a personal cost-benefit analysis of an instance of information revelation. Our theory is based on treating the randomization protocol as a channel for the information to be protected. We demonstrate a one-to-one correspondence between channel codes and a certain class of attacks. Shannon's theorems show the existence of very special attacks, and upper bounds on their efficiency. We use the bounds to motivate a privacy measure of randomization similar to one proposed the database literature, and thus provide connections between the theory of security and statistical privacy protection techniques. We are not aware of any other work that uses Shannon's theorems to construct the special attacks on cryptographic protocols. We are also not aware of any other work that connects error-correcting codes to attacks on randomization. DIRECTIONS: The WPI Cryptoseminar is being held in the Atwater Kent building on the WPI campus. Directions to the campus can be found at http://www.wpi.edu/About/Visitors/directions.html ATTENDANCE: The seminar is open to everyone and free of charge. Simply send me a brief email if you plan to attend. MAILING LIST: If you want to be added to the mailing list and receive talk announcements together with abstracts, please send us a short e-mail message. On the other hand, if you want to be removed from the list, just send a reply to this message with the word "remove" in the subject line. Regards, Berk Sunar and Bill Martin ______________________________________________________________ Berk Sunar, Assistant Professor Electrical & Computer Eng. Dept. Ph (508) 831 54 94 Worcester Polytechnic Institute Fx (508) 831 54 91 http://www.wpi.edu/~sunar http://ece.wpi.edu/research/crypt/ CRIS Laboratory ______________________________________________________________ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Re: The Plague
by André Isidoro Fernandes Esteves 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

On Thursday, 16 de January de 2003 02:20, Tyler Durden wrote: > Actually, this may turn out to be more an academic issue than anything. > > If someone wanted bubonic or pnuemonic samples, all he'd have to do is just > grab someone from the western hospitals that contract it each year. > > Contrary to popular belief, it still exists, but we have effective > treatments against it. (Although when I was in China, there were cities in > southern Xinjiang that had a bad bubonic problem and had to be shut from > the outside world. Much worse was the HepA epidemic that hit Shanghai at > the time...stores and schools were oncverted into Hep wards, and you could > go there provided you brought your own bed.) > > -TD And all westerns have some level of aquired imunity, for we are the descendents of the plague survivors. (Actualy, in the dark ages, it wasn't only one plague.. it was several plagues (mutants and new pathogens) that spread wavelike through europe... the populations died mainly because of sistematically reduced imunity) Greetings aife

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Pete Townshend and Pee-Wee
by Eric Cordian 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

Remember that age verification service which got busted a few years back when the feds managed to convince a jury that the owners were the "madams of a child porn bordello," based on two overseas sites which featured illegal material? http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.2001.08.06-2001.08.12/msg00433.html Well, after managing to entrap a few hundred US citizens into ordering KP from the feds, the feds are now grepping the list of 250,000 customers by country, and shipping the data off to other nations so that they may attempt to lure their own citizens as well. In the UK, this is of course the currently being reported on "Operation Ore" which is nailing pervy brits right and left, including Who musician Pete Townshend. In the US, the distortion continues full speed, with the age verification service still being referred to as "The World's Largest Child Porn Ring", with "250,000 child porn customers" paying millions for "pay per view" access to "over 6000" sites featuring pictures of "babies being raped," which is a small part of the "insatiable demand" for the" child sexual abuse pictures" featured on "over 100,000 web sites", or so Connie Chung tells us. Well, at least it makes being in the age verification business exciting. In the midst of all this frivolity, the Village Voice has written a very intelligent article on the current charges against Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, which apparently stem from an occasional minor featured in his vintage collection of 1960's muscle magazines, and a few grainy possible underage males in his now meticulously combed through collection of antique 8mm gay porn. The Village Voice: Features: Richard Goldstein: Persecuting Pee Wee http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0303/goldstein.php All this, and a dead Echols too. It's been quite a week. :) -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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Re: RIAA turns against Hollings bill
by Will A. Rodger 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

Nomen said: > How does this latest development change the picture? If there is no > Hollings bill, does this mean that Trusted Computing will be voluntary, > as its proponents have always claimed? And if we no longer have such > a threat of a mandated Trusted Computing technology, how bad is it for > the system to be offered in a free market? John Gilmore replied: >The detailed RIAA statement tries to leave exactly this impression, >but it's the usual smokescreen. Check the sentence in their "7 policy >principles" joint statement, principle 6: "... The role of government, if needed at all, should be limited to enforcing compliance with voluntarily developed functional specifications reflecting consensus among affected interests." >I.e. it's the same old game. TCPA is such a voluntarily developed >functional spec. So is the "broadcast flag", and the HDCP copy >protection of your video cable, and IBM's copy-protection for hard >disk drives. Everything is all voluntary, until some competitor >reverse engineers one of these, and builds a product that lets the >information get out of the little "consensus" boxes. Consumers want >that, but it can't be allowed to happen. THEN the role of government >is to eliminate that competitor by outlawing them and their product. This is exactly correct. Wonks on both sides in DC been drawing this distinction quite clearly for some time. Yesterday's RIAA "concession" is in fact, reiteration of their established position. The only thing different today is MPAA now seems even further outside the mainstream of American legal tradition. Will Rodger Director Public Policy CCIA www.ccianet.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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RE: RIAA turns against Hollings bill
by Trei, Peter 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

> John Gilmore[SMTP:gnu@toad.com] writes: Nomen writes: > > How does this latest development change the picture? If there is no > > Hollings bill, does this mean that Trusted Computing will be voluntary, > > as its proponents have always claimed? And if we no longer have such > > a threat of a mandated Trusted Computing technology, how bad is it for > > the system to be offered in a free market? > > The detailed RIAA statement tries to leave exactly this impression, > but it's the usual smokescreen. Check the sentence in their "7 policy > principles" joint statement, principle 6: > > "... The role of government, if needed at all, should be limited to > enforcing compliance with voluntarily developed functional > specifications reflecting consensus among affected interests." > > I.e. it's the same old game. TCPA is such a voluntarily developed > functional spec. So is the "broadcast flag", and the HDCP copy > protection of your video cable, and IBM's copy-protection for hard > disk drives. Everything is all voluntary, until some competitor > reverse engineers one of these, and builds a product that lets the > information get out of the little "consensus" boxes. Consumers want > that, but it can't be allowed to happen. THEN the role of government > is to eliminate that competitor by outlawing them and their product. > > John > "enforcing compliance with voluntarily developed functional specifications" appears to be NewSpeak for: "Let the RIAA, not Congress, write the laws, and then send in Men With Guns to enforce them." Peter Trei --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Strange spam
by Peter Fairbrother 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

I just got this spam, and I was wondering if it was a honey-pot. Anyone? The site exists, and advertises games and movies for download. -- Peter Fairbrother > > Frank > > You've gotta see this website: http://209.132.227.38/lotr/index.htm > > I just downloaded Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and I'm now watching it on > my computer. Picture quality is great and it was tottally free. > They've got a whole bunch of other games and movies as well. Take a look.

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Re: Indo European Origins
by Steve Furlong 14 Jan '03

14 Jan '03

On Tuesday 14 January 2003 15:23, Bill Stewart wrote: > ...You might as well argue that Esperanto** is just > a rapidly evolved Indo-European. > ** You probably _can't_ argue that about Logban; hacking the grammar > to make it yacc-parseable is pretty radical surgery. Allow me to introduce myself: coi rodo mi'e stivn. (Lojban: Hey, all, I'm Steve.) I might have something to contribute to this subthread. Lojban (not Logban; that's a conflation of the names Loglan and Lojban) isn't LALR-1. The grammar can be parsed by yacc only through creative use of the error-catching mechanism. It's a very impressive feat of yacc-hacking, don't get me wrong, but it's a hack nonetheless. And the grammar was indeed crafted to fit in a hacked yacc parser. A real parser which can properly handle grammatical errors in a chunk of Lojban text needs a more powerful language. Given that, Bill's point is correct: Lojban's gammar has practically nothing in common with any natural language. co'o rodo stivn. -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged. --Michael Shirley

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Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary
by Tyler Durden 14 Jan '03

14 Jan '03

Holy shit! I could done better than this! (ie, I THOUGHT this would be outrageous and amusing but it kinda sucked black prison dick.) -TD >From: Sleeping Vayu - Vayu Anonymous Remailer <noreply(a)cyberjunkiez.de> >To: cypherpunks(a)minder.net >Subject: Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary >Date: 12 Jan 2003 20:55:51 -0000 > >At 09:33 PM 01/10/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: > > For all I know, I've been posting on a list haunted by a bunch of > > crypto-white supremists (crypto, as in secret, hidden). And if that's > > the case, then I want to know. Figured I'd ask for clarification on > > this issue. (And from some of May's comments in the past, it wasn't > > clear to me.) > >As a matter of fact, I and Tim May regularly go nigger >hunting in the hills, me with my SKS. Tim May is not so >keen on those commie guns, and usually has a good old >American AR15 > >Of course, in the hills around here there usually are no >damned niggers, but sometimes we get a pig. Niggers are >pretty rare. To catch a nigger, you need the right bait. > >The tricky thing is to lure a nigger out of his native haunts, >to someplace far away and lonely with no one knowing where >he went. Fortunately a friend of ours sometimes hires some >nigger pussy to give him a good time in his house out in the >woods. Then of course the lady tells her numerous boyfriends >about all the good stuff he has, and pretty soon there are >some niggers out to rob him. They usually get caught in one >of his traps, and if a couple of days pass and it seems that >no one is missing that nigger, I and Tim May have a it of fun >killing it. It is not really as sporting as finding one in >hills, so usually we torture it a bit then give it a short >head start, track it through the hills by bloodstains, and then >shoot it. > >There are quite a few entertaining ways of torturing a nigger >before you kill it. Books are one of the best -- they have the >same effect on a nigger as kryptonite on superman. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Re: Chad Gore wants a chance to vote a second time!
by Steve Schear 14 Jan '03

14 Jan '03

At 12:28 PM 1/14/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: >On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 08:29 AM, Steve Schear wrote: >>> >>>Everything the Supreme Court did in the 2000 election was fully >>>justified. The Dems lost, then tried to change the rules. >> >>Perhaps its my lack of depth in understanding the Constitution and its >>Amendments, but it seems to me that the robed ones were applying the >>Equal Protection Clause in a way that could de-legitimize virtually every >>election in American history. Their intervention and they way it was >>decided sets a very bad precedent. > >Some old Jews and some negroes screwed up their ballots and accidentally >voted, they claimed, for Pat Buchanan instead of who they claimed to >interviewers they "intended" to vote for, namely, Al Gore. (A ballot >designed by a Democrat precinct, by the way.) > >It was proper that they were neither given a chance to vote over again nor >given a chance to have incorrectly punched ballots altered to give the >votes to Gore. All true, but you didn't address my concern about the nature of the SC intervention. In the book, 'The Accidental President,' by Newsweek writer David A. Kaplan--challenges statements by some justices in the aftermath of the decision that they had put the matter behind them and were once again enjoying cordial relations. It describes Souter and the three colleagues who joined him in dissent--Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens--as angered and baffled by the majority opinion. Kaplan's book excerpt reveals that the animosities within the Court spilled over at a gathering of the Justices while they were hosting six visiting Russian judges. ``'In our country,' a Russian justice said, bemused, 'we wouldn't let judges pick the president.' The justice added that he knew that, in various nations, judges were in the pocket of executive officials -- he just didn't know that was so in the United States,'' Kaplan writes. ``Stephen Breyer was angry and launched into an attack on the decision, right in front of his colleagues. It was 'the most outrageous, indefensible thing' the Court had ever done, he told the visiting judges. 'We all agree to disagree, but this is different.' Breyer was defiant, brimming with confidence that he'd been right in his long dissent.'' Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was more baffled than annoyed, attempting to rationalize the legitimacy of the ruling. ``'Are we so highly political, after all?' she said. 'We've surely done other things, too, that were activist, but here we're applying the Equal Protection Clause in a way that would de-legitimize virtually every election in American history','' Kaplan writes. steve

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Re: Brinworld: Samsung SCH-V310 camcorder phone
by A.Melon 14 Jan '03

14 Jan '03

Bill Stewart said: > At 12:31 PM 01/14/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: > >I saw mention on the Yahoo news site that some health clubs and > >gyms are already taking steps to limit the types of cellphones > >allowed in the changing areas (and maybe elsewhere). > > Hey, some people get their privacy by going to places that > have Rules about the kind of video-broadcast technology that's allowed, > some people build it using Technology like cell-phone jammers, > while others of us accomplish it by having figures that > nobody's going to bother photographing :-) Unless you are being rebirthed by a home applicance. http://pics.nikita.ca/artificial-gravity/bill.jpg

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