October 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants
by Major Variola (ret) 15 Oct '03

15 Oct '03

> Re: Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants Congress is monkeys controlling sheep with words...

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C3 Nehemia C5P with better hardware RNG and AES support
by Eugen Leitl 15 Oct '03

15 Oct '03

(got booted off the list due to bounces) News in from San Jose microprocessor forum: latest VIA C3 C5P does 1 GHz at 7 W power dissipation, has now two hardware RNG engines (and two x86 opcodes to read them), and an Advanced Cryptography Engine which can do AES (Rijndael128? doesn't say which) at 12.5 GBit/s rate. Next-generation (Esther, early 2004) will add SHA-1 support in hardware. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Test of BIOS Spyware
by John Young 14 Oct '03

14 Oct '03

We received the note below about spyware allegedly created for a Maryland agency with code which needs to be tested. We'd appreciate feedback on the note and the code. Beware of a sting. The code: http://cryptome.org/ExpCode.ASM ----- The note: CPR Tools Inc. of Labelle, Florida is engaged in the development of software which becomes part of the firmware BIOS of a PC motherboard and takes control of a users PC before the operating system is loaded. This enables the software to spy on the user and remain hidden to the operating system. The software is designed to be installed from a floppy disk which modifies the original BIOS, replacing it with the modified BIOS containing the "spyware" The software was developed for a government agency in Maryland. Versions of the software for a ASUS P4B266 motherboard and an IBM Netvista 8311 motherboard have been developed with other versions under development. Attached is a copy of the software, ExpCode.ASM, the version for the P4B266 motherboard. The .ASM file is assembled and converted into a .BIN file which is then pasted over a section of the original BIOS .BIN file. The checksum at the end of the BIOS is subsequently adjusted to make the BIOS checksum valid. Details: CPR Tools [http://www.cpr-tools.com] 730 East Cowboy Way Labelle, FL 33935 (863) 674-0120 Owners: Antonio Jesus Alvarez tony(a)netwacci.net Candy Michelle Alvarez -----

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[announce] Postponing CyberDawg (fwd)
by Jim Choate 14 Oct '03

14 Oct '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 13:58:20 -0500 From: David Nunez <dnunez(a)catf-austin.org> To: announce(a)effaustin.org Subject: [announce] Postponing CyberDawg Hi folks, As some of you may have heard, we were moving very fast on having a Cyberdawg next week. I spoke with JonL this morning and we decided to postpone the cyberdawg this month. We had picked the 21st as a good date because it coincided with a panel that the LBJ school was trying to pull together on eVoting. Unfortunately, the panel fell through. I decided that it would be useful to have an extra week or two to get a lot of the ducks in a row (ex. T-shirts) before having our event rather than trying to rush it. Next week's major event, then, will be the Wireless party on Thursday(?) for which EFF-A is a sponsor. It'll be useful for us to get the word out about this event. (details coming) Furthermore, I'll work again with Ruta Maya to nail down a different date (hopefully this won't be a big deal) and prepare fliers to pass around at the Wireless event. Thanks and sorry for the rampant misinformation, David Nunez david(a)davidnunez.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: announce-unsubscribe(a)effaustin.org For additional commands, e-mail: announce-help(a)effaustin.org

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clicking on ads = funding terrorists
by Major Variola (ret) 14 Oct '03

14 Oct '03

Excerpted from politech. Consider the 1st Amend implications, and how clicking on a banner ad (which automatically would pay the source site) makes you a terrorist supporter. Got assets?

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P2P Encrypted VOIP
by Guerry Semones 14 Oct '03

14 Oct '03

I caught the announcement this morning from Skype concerning their P2P-based VOIP (free) product. Apparently this is the Kazaa founder's new company. The communications are supposed to be encrypted, etc., etc. Here's the Slashdot article: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/13/1120202&mode=flat&tid=126&tid=9… Here's the Privacy section from the Skype FAQ: http://www.skype.com/help_faq.html Guerry

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Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants
by Steve Schear 14 Oct '03

14 Oct '03

[Can remote soldiering and amplified "Terminators" be too far away? Steve] Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 13, 2003; Page A01 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17434-2003Oct12?language=printer> Scientists in North Carolina have built a brain implant that lets monkeys control a robotic arm with their thoughts, marking the first time that mental intentions have been harnessed to move a mechanical object. The technology could someday allow people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries to operate machines or tools with their thoughts as naturally as others today do with their hands. It might even allow some paralyzed people to move their own arms or legs again, by transmitting the brain's directions not to a machine but directly to the muscles in those latent limbs. The brain implants could also allow scientists or soldiers to control, hands-free, small robots that could perform tasks in inhospitable environments or in war zones. In the new experiments, monkeys with wires running from their brains to a robotic arm were able to use their thoughts to make the arm perform tasks. But before long, the scientists said, they will upgrade the implants so the monkeys can transmit their mental commands to machines wirelessly. "It's a major advance," University of Washington neuroscientist Eberhard E. Fetz said of the monkey studies. "This bodes well for the success of brain-machine interfaces." The experiments, led by Miguel A.L. Nicolelis of Duke University in Durham, N.C., and published today in the journal PLoS Biology, are the latest in a progression of increasingly science fiction-like studies in which animals -- and in a few cases people -- have learned to use the brain's subtle electrical signals to operate simple devices. Until now, those achievements have been limited to "virtual" actions, such as making a cursor move across a computer screen, or to small two-dimensional actions such as flipping a little lever that is wired to the brain. The new work is the first in which any animal has learned to use its brain to move a robotic device in all directions in space and to perform a mixture of interrelated movements -- such as reaching toward an object, grasping it and adjusting the grip strength depending on how heavy the object is. "This is where you want to be," said Karen A. Moxon, a professor of biomedical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "It's one thing to be able to communicate with a video screen. But to move something in the physical world is a real technological feat. And Nicolelis has taken this work to a new level by quantifying the neuroscience behind it." The device relies on tiny electrodes, each one resembling a wire thinner than a human hair. After removing patches of skull from two monkeys to expose the outer surface of their brains, Nicolelis and his colleagues stuck 96 of those tiny wires about a millimeter deep in one monkey's brain and 320 of them in the other animal's brain. The surgeries were painstaking, taking about 10 hours, and ended with the pouring of a substance like dental cement over the area to substitute for the missing bits of skull. The monkeys were unaffected by the surgery, Nicolelis said. But now they had tufts of wires protruding from their heads, which could be hooked up to other wires that ran through a computer and on to a large mechanical arm. Then came the training, with the monkeys first learning to move the robot arm with a joystick. The arm was kept in a separate room -- "If you put a 50-kilogram robot in front of them, they get very nervous," Nicolelis said -- but the monkeys could track their progress by watching a schematic representation of the arm and its motions on a video screen. The monkeys quickly learned how to use the joystick to make the arm reach and grasp for objects, and how to adjust their grip on the joystick to vary the robotic hand's grip strength. They could see on the monitor when they missed their target or dropped it for having too light a grip, and they were rewarded with sips of juice when they performed their tasks successfully. While the monkeys trained, a computer tracked the patterns of bioelectrical activity in the animals' brains. The computer figured out that certain patterns amounted to a command to "reach." Others, it became clear, meant "grasp." Gradually, the computer learned to "read" the monkeys' minds. Then the researchers did something radical: They unplugged the joystick so the robotic arm's movements depended completely on a monkey's brain activity. In effect, the computer that had been studying the animal's neural firing patterns was now serving as an interpreter, decoding the brain signals according to what it had learned from the joystick games and then sending the appropriate instructions to the mechanical arm. At first, Nicolelis said, the monkey kept moving the joystick, not realizing that her own brain was now solely in charge of the arm's movements. Then, he said, an amazing thing happened. "We're looking, and she stops moving her arm," he said, "but the cursor keeps playing the game and the robot arm is moving around." The animal was controlling the robot with its thoughts. "We couldn't speak. It was dead silence," Nicolelis said. "No one wanted to verbalize what was happening. And she continued to do that for almost an hour." At first, the animals' performance declined compared to the sessions on the joystick. But after just a day or so, the control was so smooth it seemed the animals had accepted the mechanical arm as their own. "It's quite plausible that the perception is you're extended into the robot arm, or the arm is an extension of you," agreed the University of Washington's Fetz, a pioneer in the field of brain-controlled devices. John P. Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown University developing a similar system, said paralyzed patients would be the first to benefit by gaining an ability to type and communicate on the Web, but the list of potential applications is endless, he said. The devices may even allow quadriplegics to move their own limbs again by sending signals from the brain to various muscles, leaping over the severed nerves that caused their paralysis. "Once you have an output signal out of the brain that you can interpret, the possibilities of what you can do with those signals are immense," said Donoghue, who recently co-founded a company, Cyberkinetics Inc. of Foxboro, Mass., to capitalize on the technology. Both he and Nicolelis hope to get permission from the Food and Drug Administration to begin experiments in people next year. Nicolelis also is developing a system that would transmit signals from each of the hundreds of brain electrodes to a portable receiver, so his monkeys -- or human subjects -- could be free of external wires and move around while they turn their thoughts into mechanical actions. "It's like multiple cellular phone lines," Nicolelis said. "As my mother said, 'You can dial your brain now.' " Significant challenges remain if the technology is to find widespread application in people. Although earlier experiments suggest the electrodes are safe and able to continue functioning for three years or more, longer-term safety studies are needed, and implants with far more electrodes may be required to accomplish anything more than the simplest tasks. "For something basic like grasping a cup of coffee or brushing your teeth, apparently you could do almost all of this with this kind of prosthesis," said Idan Segev, director of the center for neurocomputation at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "If you were a pianist and had a spinal cord injury and you wanted to play Chopin again, then 500 neurons is not enough." Still, Segev expressed astonishment at how much the monkeys were able to do with signals from only a few hundred of the brain's 100 billion or so nerve cells -- evidence, he said, that "the brain uses a lot of backup and a lot of redundancy." That may explain one of the more interesting findings of the Duke experiments, he and others said: that neurons not usually involved in body movements, including those usually involved in sensory input rather than motor output, were easily recruited to help operate the robotic arm when electrodes were implanted there. Asked if the monkeys seemed to mind the experiments, Nicolelis answered with an emphatic "No." "If anything, they're enjoying themselves playing these games. It enriches their lives," he said. "You don't have to do anything to get these guys into their chair. They go right there. That's play time."

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Re: Software protection scheme may boost new game sales
by Anonymous 13 Oct '03

13 Oct '03

Sunder wrote: > The only way that this could work is if they put up some sort of > splash screen at some point to let the luser know that the program > isn't buggy, but that the copy protection noticed it's a backup. > After all, if you get a copy of a game from a friend, and it crashes > on you all the time, would you think it's because the copy is bad, or > because the software is as buggy as a Microsoft product? Unnecessary. These guys know what they're doing. The scheme is very carefully targetted at the Warez scene. Software copy protection is usually cracked by a small number of people who compete for reputation. For a copy or a crack to be worth anything in a trade, it has to be something that the other guy doesn't yet have. Thus the core software piracy networks focus on cracking and trading new software as quickly as possible (the "zero day" scene). Fade's technique makes it much harder to test a crack. There could be any number of independent copy protection code fragments hidden throughout the software. The only way to tell if you've removed them all is to play the game in its entirety - a task requiring several days or more. By that time, the other guy has already released a (probably incomplete) crack, thus reducing the value of your work to zero. A kind of prisoner's dilemma (a game theory of game piracy?): the likely outcome is that incomplete cracks are released. It's these same copies and cracks that filter down through various kinds of markets and networks to the general public. This has already happened. I've seen a number of cracked and copied games over the past year or so that appear at first glance to function perfectly; it's only after playing for several hours that it becomes obvious something isn't working. The reaction of a player at getting "stuck" after investing several hours in a game isn't to simply toss it; it's to search the game hints sites and forums (which are numerous and lively) for a solution. A shareware-style nag message isn't needed to prompt this. If they discover rumors (accurate or not) that only illegal copies are affected, there's an incentive to purchase a legal copy if the game is of high quality; and a disincentive to waste their time on illegal copies in the future. Most people who use pirated software probably wouldn't use the same software if they had to pay for it. Fade isn't aimed at these users; it's aimed at the small percentage who would purchase a copy if they couldn't get it for free. It's possible a new market will emerge for "aftermarket" cracks, that fix the gaps in the zero-day versions. But this is only likely to happen for extremely popular games. The few people with the necessary skills have little incentive to deal with a month-old game unless it's an exceptional case. The long term outcome might be to increase sales of niche software and less popular games: anything good enough to attract loyal users, but slip beneath the radar of the zero day scene.

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Re: Software protection scheme may boost new game sales
by Jamie Lawrence 13 Oct '03

13 Oct '03

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Sunder wrote: > Ok, so I finally bothered to read said article. I assumed that they had [..] > a copy of a game from a friend, and it crashes on you all the time, would > you think it's because the copy is bad, or because the software is as > buggy as a Microsoft product? How is this different than shareware? For a while, and I think still, to some extent, annoying the user was considered marketing for app developers who were too small to get shelf space. At least in the Winows/Mac client markets. -j -- Jamie Lawrence jal(a)jal.org

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Re: Software protection scheme may boost new game sales
by Jerrold Leichter 13 Oct '03

13 Oct '03

| I've not read the said article just yet, but from that direct quote "as | the copy degrades..." I can already see the trouble with this scheme: | their copy protection already fails them. They allow copies to be made | and rely on the fact that the CDR or whatever media, will eventually | degrade, because their "code looks like scratches..." Riiiiggghtt..... You should read the article - the quote is misleading. What they are doing is writing some "bad data" at pre-defined points on the CD. The program looks for this and fails if it finds "good" data. However ... I agree with your other points. This idea is old, in many different forms. It's been broken repeatedly. The one advantage they have this time around is that CD readers - and, even more, DVD readers; there is mention of applying the same trick to DVD's - is, compared to the floppy readers of yesteryear, sealed boxes. It's considerably harder to get at the raw datastream and play games. Of course, this cuts both ways - there are limits to what the guys writing the protection code can do, too. The real "new idea" here has nothing to do with how they *detect* a copy - it's what they *do* when they detect it. Rather than simply shut the game down, the degrade it over time. Guns slowly stop shooting straight, for example. In the case of DVD's, the player works fine - but stops working right at some peak point. Just like the guy on the corner announcing "first hit's free", they aim to suck you in, then have you running out to get a legit copy to save your character's ass - or find out how "The One" really lives through it all. This will probably work with a good fraction of the population. Actually, this is a clever play on the comment from music sharers that they get a free copy of a song, then buy the CD if they like the stuff. In effect, what they are trying to do is make it easy to make "teasers" out of their stuff. There will be tons of people copying the stuff in an unsophisticated way - and only a few who will *really* break it. Most people will have no quick way to tell whether they are getting a good or a bad copy. And every bad copy has a reasonable chance of actually producing a sale.... -- Jerry

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