November 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: e voting (receipts, votebuying, brinworld)
by Trei, Peter 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

Tim May [mailto:timcmay@got.net] wrote: >On Nov 25, 2003, at 9:56 AM, Sunder wrote: >> Um, last I checked, phone cameras have really shitty resolution, >> usually >> less than 320x200. Even so, you'd need MUCH higher resolution, say >> 3-5Mpixels to be able to read text on a printout in a picture. >> >> Add focus and aiming issues, and this just won't work unless you carry >> a >> good camera into the booth with you. >1. Vinnie the Votebuyer knows the _layout_ of the ballot. He only needs >to see that the correct box is punched/marked. Or that the screen >version has been checked. I realize you big city types (yes, Tim, Corralitos is big compared to my little burg) have full scale voting booths with curtains (I used the big mechanical machines when I lived in Manhatten), but out here in the sticks, the 'voting booth' is a little standing desk affair with 18 inch privacy shields on 3 sides. If someone tried to take a photo of their ballot in one of those it would be instantly obvious. All I want is a system which is not more easily screwed around with then paper ballots. Have some imagination - you could, for example, set things up so the voter, and only the voter, can see the screen and/or paper receipt while voting, but still make it impossible to use a camera without being detected. Peter

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Re: e voting (receipts, votebuying, brinworld)
by Tim May 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

On Nov 25, 2003, at 9:56 AM, Sunder wrote: > Um, last I checked, phone cameras have really shitty resolution, > usually > less than 320x200. Even so, you'd need MUCH higher resolution, say > 3-5Mpixels to be able to read text on a printout in a picture. > > Add focus and aiming issues, and this just won't work unless you carry > a > good camera into the booth with you. > 1. Vinnie the Votebuyer knows the _layout_ of the ballot. He only needs to see that the correct box is punched/marked. Or that the screen version has been checked. Pretty easy to see that "Bush" has been marked instead of "Gore." (For a conventional ballot. For a printed receipt is likely in the extreme that the text will be large, at least for the results.) 2. I don't know about cellphone cameras, but my 1996-vintage one megapixel camera has more than enough resolution, even at the "not so great" setting (about 360 x 500) to pick up text very well. (I used it to snap photos of some things with labels attached, for insurance reasons.) 3. If Vinnie is serious about this votebuying (I'm not even slightly convinced this would happen nationally, for obvious logistical and "who cares?" reasons, plus the inability of Palm Beach Jews to punch a conventional ballot, let alone work a digital camera and send the images to Vinnie), he can provide a camera he knows will do the job. Google shows that as of May 2003 the high-end cellphone cameras use CCDs with 640 x 480. This will become the baseline within a short time, certainly long before any of the "receipt" electronic voting systems are widely deployed. (e.g., this article at <http://www.what-cellphone.com/articles/200305/ 200305_Easy_Snapping.php>) But the resolution of today's very inexpensive digital cameras, and probably those in today's cellphone cameras, is more than enough to handle a ballot or reasonable-font receipt. --Tim May

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Re: Appeals court OKs no-knock warrant as perfectly appropriate
by Freematt357＠aol.com 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

In a message dated 11/25/2003 1:23:08 PM Eastern Standard Time, s.schear(a)comcast.net writes: > I know that there have been cases which determined that its illegal to use > an indiscriminate weapon (e.g., a shotgun tied to a door) to deter such > entries, but what about a discriminate, automated, weapon system? By > coupling night vision optics and a video pickup, image recognition > software, a robotic gimbal and an semi-automatic firearm, such a system > could discriminate forced entry situations from more normal entry means, > target intruders and initiate deterrence. What then? > In the 1996 release of the film, "The People vs. Larry Flynt", there is a scene where a warrant is served on Flynt's home. His bedroom typified the ultimate "safe room" where the agents serving the warrant couldn't get in until the room was opened from the inside. Obviously everyone doesn't have the money that Flynt has in order to effectively harden ones house, but you can cheaply and rather effectively improve your haunts to allow more warning. The system you describe would in most jurisdiction still be considered illegal and premeditative. You're better off with passive measures. Regards, Matt-

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Appeals court OKs no-knock warrant as perfectly appropriate
by Declan McCullagh 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. ROBERT JUNIOR WARDRICK, Defendant-Appellant. No. 02-4494 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT September 24, 2003, Argued November 20, 2003, Decided OUTCOME: Defendant's convictions and sentence were affirmed. As Judge Widener has recently recognized, the knock and announce requirement serves three purposes: "(1) protecting the safety of occupants of a dwelling and the police by reducing violence; (2) preventing the destruction of property; and (3) protecting the privacy of occupants." United States v. Dunnock, 295 F.3d 431, 434 (4th Cir. 2002) (quoting Bonner v. Anderson, 81 F.3d 472, 475 (4th Cir. 1996)). We have recognized that, HN6[]under appropriate exigent circumstances, strict compliance with the knock and announce requirement may be excused. United States v. Grogins, 163 F.3d 795, 797 (4th Cir. 1998) (holding no-knock entry justified where officers had reasonable suspicion that entering drug "stash house" would be dangerous and drug dealer frequenting house could not be found elsewhere). When the authorities "have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence ...would be dangerous or futile, or that it would inhibit the effective investigation of []crime by, for example, allowing the destruction of the evidence," an entry without knocking [*13] is justified. Richards, 520 U.S. at 394; see also United States v. Ramirez, 523 U.S. 65, 140 L. Ed. 2d 191, 118 S. Ct. 992 (1998) (upholding no-knock entry where suspect had violent past, access to weapons, and vowed not to do "federal time"). In this situation, the state court judge made a specific determination that the circumstances explained in the Overfield Affidavit justified the issuance of a no-knock search warrant. As the Overfield Affidavit recounts, Wardrick had a violent criminal history, including a battery conviction stemming from resisting arrest. Moreover, the affidavit suggested that Wardrick, a convicted felon, illegally possessed firearms. Indeed, Wardrick had threatened, in the presence of Det. Overfield, that he always carried a loaded gun and that he "never missed." Lastly, Det. Overfield reasonably believed that Wardrick would be present when the warrant was executed. As the Overfield Affidavit reflects, several records indicated that 1808 Division Street was Wardrick's primary residence, and two automobiles registered in his name had been parked outside the residence only days before the search warrant was secured. Based on [*14] our review of the Overfield Affidavit, we agree with the district court that it was reasonable for Det. Overfield and the state court to believe that execution of the search warrant would be dangerous. See Ker v. California, 374 U.S. 23, 40-41 n. 12, 10 L. Ed. 2d 726, 83 S. Ct. 1623 (1963) HN7[](determining lawfulness of entry depends on "what the officers had reason to believe at the time of their entry") (emphasis in original). In such circumstances, the issuance of the no-knock search warrant was justified, and the district court did not err in declining to suppress the evidence on this basis.

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RE: e voting (receipts, votebuying, brinworld)
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

At 01:04 PM 11/24/03 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: >Thats not how it works. The idea is that you make your choices on >the machine, and when you lock them in, two things happen: They >are electronically recorded in the device for the normal count, and >also, a paper receipt is printed. The voter checks the receipt to >see if it accurately records his choices, and then is required to >put it in a ballot box retained at the polling site. > >If there's a need for a recount, the paper receipts can be checked. > >I imagine a well designed system might show the paper receipt through >a window, but not let it be handled, to prevent serial fraud. Vinny the Votebuyer pays you if you send a picture of your face adjacent to the committed receipt, even if you can't touch it. Since the voting booth is private, no one can see you do this, even if it were made illegal. (And since phones can store images, jamming the transmission at the booth doesn't work.) You send your picture from the cellphone that took it, along with a paypal account number as a text message. Vinny knows the vote is committed at that point. Vinnie can bin diff compare pix to assure non-duplicates, hires someone (probably offshore :-) to verify its not a quick and dirty photoshop job, and that its a vote for the "right" candidate. Further resisting photoshop, Vinny accepts pictures only during voting hours. Vinny has some kind of front business which could be expected to pay lots of people in bursts --a political polling service that reimburses interviewees would be ideal. On a small scale (coerce your voting age household members) its untraceable. On a medium scale (free drinks if you can show you voted for Caesar) its easy too. On a larger scale you might need confidentiality for the image and traffic analysis resistance. Maybe anon cash. Fundamentally, its just like the analog hole for DRM ---you can't show a human a commit message without the human being able to reproduce it for others. The booths could cycle through fake commit messages for all possible candidates, so that you could take a picture of yourself with a bogus commit message, vote as you will, and still collect. That might be confusing but is a counter. NB: Collect = avoid retribution.

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Re: [mnet-devel] Grid Of Trust -- pre-design (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)
by Eugen Leitl 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

----- Forwarded message from Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko(a)zooko.com> -----

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RE: [Asrg] Re: [Politech] Congress finally poised to vote on anti -spam bill [sp]
by Hallam-Baker, Phillip 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

> Especially for domains, it's important to do some validation, > though in the absence of widely-deployed DNSSEC, it's hard to > do automatically. DNSSEC is not happening, blame Randy Bush and the IESG for refusing the working group consensus and imposing their own idea that cannot be deployed. An experimental protocol that increases the volume of data in the .com zone by an order of magnitude (read Gbs of data) is simply unacceptable. We do not need DNSSEC, we just need a notice in the DNS. It would be a relatively easy task to walk the .com zone and dump out a list of all the zones which contain a 'do not spam' TXT property record. This has the secondary advantage that it is not necessary to actualy consult the list, the authoritative information is in DNS. > There's a scalability problem that has to be solved, > which is how to prevent a DOS-by-signing-up-too-many-addresses attack. I do not expect that to be a problem, that would be a problem for the contractor. Limit the number of direct registrations from a particular IP address within a given time interval. It is likely to result in the cost of the system being considerably more than the cost of a couple of mid range servers and some software. This is not a new phenomena. Phill

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polygonal sequences
by Nomen Nescio 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

Hello I was trying to find some old references I used to have concerning an idea men tioned in sci.crypt way back. It was Phil Zimmermann I think who mentioned something about a possibly new idea for a new public key scheme. He called it "The cryptographic uses of polygonal sequences" and is found here I think: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12044%40ncar.ucar.edu&oe=UTF-8&output=… thanks

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RE: [Asrg] Re: [Politech] Congress finally poised to vote on anti -spam bill [sp]
by Bill Stewart 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

At 04:20 PM 11/21/2003 -0800, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote: >We need to consider the technical workings of the do-not-spam list and the >requirements that we would like the FTC to meet. ... [reasonable goals] ... [hashed-form lists instead of plaintext]... >5) Allow domain name owners to list their domains. >6) Provide for authentication of listing requests Especially for domains, it's important to do some validation, though in the absence of widely-deployed DNSSEC, it's hard to do automatically. Perhaps 3-way-handshake email to postmaster(a)example.com or the whois administrative contact address. (This also has the side-effect of requiring people to actually use their postmaster addresses, at least for fifteen minutes or so :-) And while hashing has the obvious risk of dictionary attacks, it'll at least cut back on some of the abuses, especially if the list is dynamic and the spamware vendors who do the dictionary attacks want to charge lots of money for it. Also, the scale's a lot more annoying searching a million obvious names on each of 20 million domains with a hash that takes a second per hit, though Moore's Law will obviously erode the hash time. Obviously spammers will target popular mail systems first. However, there are two special email address forms that complicate this a bit - tagged addresses - username+tag(a)example.com There are several different syntaxes for this - plusses, dashes, etc., and either you just ignore the problem (let the user register however many tagged addresses they want), or else you special-case the rules so that bulk-emailers who want to send mail to a plus-tagged address also must check the untagged version. - per-user subdomains - anything(a)username.example.com Technically this is no different than any other per-domain blocking, but administratively it's different, because there's no whois record and there might not be a postmaster address. There's a scalability problem that has to be solved, which is how to prevent a DOS-by-signing-up-too-many-addresses attack. An example would be a Turing test image on a web page (which has the downside of preventing automated signups, as well as annoying blind people), or else requiring a hashcash puzzle that takes ten times as long as the list's hash function.

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Re: e voting (receipts, votebuying, brinworld)
by Freematt357＠aol.com 25 Nov '03

25 Nov '03

In a message dated 11/24/2003 11:12:38 PM Eastern Standard Time, timcmay(a)got.net writes: > I expect there may be some good solutions to this issue, but I haven't > yet seen them discussed here or on other fora I run across. Like what? Regards, Matt-

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