December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

unsubscrive
by robalo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

unsubscrive * robalo(a)elogica.com.br unsubscrive * robalo(a)elogica.com.br unsubscrive * robalo(a)elogica.com.br

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PICS required by law
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What was I saying a while back about mandatory PICS through liability? As I recall, various people such as TCMay were saying that it wouldn't happen. Looks like I need to get out that article against PICS that I was working on and rewrite it a bit. I would remind people that PICS allows parents (or whoever else is holding the reins, such as an ISP - or the Chinese firewall) to filter on such content as material (including scientific studies) stating that a given illegal drug is not as harmful as some would claim, any idea futures market - even a simulated one, on homosexual content separately from heterosexual, and against criticisms of religions (such as Scientology). To their credit, the ACLU (in the CDA court case) has stated that they will not put a PICS rating on their web site, even if it contains "indecent" or allegedly "harmful to minors" material. I agree strongly with their position. -Allen Computer underground Digest Wed Mar 27, 1996 Volume 8 : Issue 25 ISSN 1004-042X [...] Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 11:47:33 -0800 From: telstar(a)WIRED.COM(--Todd Lappin-->) Subject: File 1--CONGRESS: Online Parental Control Act of 1996 [...] Maintains the Communications Act of 1934's legal defenses against liability for people who choose to give parents technology that: 1) blocks or restricts access to online materials deemed obscene or harmful to minors, and 2) restricts access to such materials through adult access codes or credit card numbers; Adds two new defenses: 1) the use of labeling or segregating systems to restrict access to online materials, such as systems developed using the standards designed by the Platform for Internet Content Selection project (PICS), and 2) the use of other systems that serve the same function of the other defenses if they are as reasonable, effective, and appropriate as blocking, adult access code, and labeling technologies; and Protects providers or users of interactive computer services, information content providers, and access software providers from civil or criminal liability under state law for making available to minors materials that are indecent or harmful to minors if they take actions to qualify for the defenses mentioned above. [...] PICS is a cross-industry working group assembled under the auspices of MIT's World Wide Web Consortium to develop an easy-to-use content labeling and selection platform that empowers people worldwide to selectively control online content they receive through personal computers. The Recreational Software Advisory Council recently announced that it will soon implement a detailed voluntary ratings system, using PICS standards, that will let computer users filter out varying degrees of sex, violence, nudity, and foul language. Companies and groups supporting PICS include Apple, America Online, AT&T, the Center for Democracy and Technology, CompuServe, IBM, France Telecom, Prodigy, Providence Systems/Parental Guidance, Surf Watch Software, and Time Warner Pathfinder.

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myths of software "standards" (long)
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

this is an essay on some ideas that have been swimming around in my head about "software standards" and the various pervasive myths associated with them, unleashed on this motley crowd for your viewing pleasure or distaste. there is tremendous amount of angst and anguish spent on software standards by designers. I'm going to try to point out some of the ways that software standards are fundamentally different from hardware standards and the implications this has for their use. with a hardware standard, we are talking about "atom configurations". if a given computer is manufactured in a given way, there are zillions of standards that are implicit in the design. there is a standard in the way that cards interface to the bus, in the ways that chips fit in sockets, in screw sizes, component sizes (such as the power supply), etc. obviously it is virtually impossible to refit a component that does not adhere to some "physical configuration standard". if the power supply does not have the right footprint, good luck filing down the edges to the point that it fits. <g> another point to make about physical components is that it is possible to "own" them. in our system, we are even allowed ownership of the abstract standards used to design their atomic configurations; we call these things "patents". however, notice that software standards are sometimes thought of in the same way as hardware standards. I want to make a point about how fundamentally different they really are. == software standards ultimately govern the "configuration of bits". to borrow Negroponte's lovely distinction, bits are far different than atoms. foremost of the difference is what might be called the fundamental "malleability" or "fluidity" of bits in contrast to atoms. atoms are expensive to move around and to manipulate. bits can be moved around and manipulated at such an infinitesmal cost as to be almost free. here is the chief myth that I want to address, and I'm going to borrow web concepts here especially, because the public is misapplying the concepts of hardware and software standards especially in this area. now suppose that Netscape comes up with their own unique HTML "extensions" which they have done. if you want to think of this "standard" in the old paradigm of atoms that are expensive to move around etc., then what netscape has done is pretty outrageous. one might assert, as the press and public tend to do, that Netscape is trying to "own" the standard and "impose" it on the rest of the world, so that they can "control" it. but what is this "imposition"? if they were saying that particular hardware components had to be designed in their way, indeed this would be an onerous and suspicious demand. it would be reminiscent of industry outrages like IBM's "microchannel" architecture. but the fundamental distinction here is that Netscape is *not* designing a standard that refers to atoms, but one that refers to bits. and standards that refer to bits have fundamentally different properties. first of all, if they are good standards, then it should be easy to manipulate the bits between the different standards, and the cost of doing so should be close to negligible. we are only talking about straightforward algorithms easily implemented by even 1st year CS students, typically. when you think about it, the concept that a company can "own" a software standard in the way that hardware configurations are "owned" is pretty obtuse and incongruous. because bits are so readily converted and manipulated, it actually becomes the case that companies that create bit standards are almost doing a public service in devising orderly systems of bit arrangements not previously established. if bits are interchangeable, then the key is to get them into an orderly form first, and then just twiddle them into the format that you want. == all this sounds a bit vague and nebulous but is extremely significant. it demonstrates how radically different the information revolution is from the industrial revolution. in the information realm, "interchangeable parts" takes on a whole new meaning. all that is necessary is that the bits be in some standard form to start, and then they can easily be transformed into some other form. a very important point to make is this: what becomes more valuable with bits i s *not* that everyone pick and agree on *the*same*standard*. this is applying "atom" type prejudice to a new problem. if everyone wants to have compatible hardware, then indeed we need to have the kinds of standards I described. but software (bit) standards work differently. you only want to have *any* kind of a standard that is well designed. you want standards that are not necessarily *universal* as with atoms, but instead are *orderly*. if they are *orderly* or "well designed", then it should be easy to convert any "bit configuration" standard to any other standard on the fly with algorithms. there is tremendous ranting and raving in the Web world about how the HTML standard is fragmenting because of Netscape etc., and there is so much angst about trying to devise a *single* cohesive, unified standard that "everyone" follows. people talk as if Netscape is trying to "hijack" the standard, when in my opinion they are performing a valuable public service of trying to hammer the bits into useful form. everything they have proposed could not be handled by the earlier standards-- and if it could have been, chances are they would have used that standard. a unified standard in software realms is a total fantasy to achieve, and in my opinion the dramatically wrong & specious goal. == instead, I taking into account the above ideas, what we need are a *variety* of different standards, all of them in themselves cohesive and fully functional, which can be *translated* readily between each other. the key goal is not *unified* standards that try to entail "everything", but instead collections of complementary standards that are in themselves nice unified "pieces" of the whole. (somewhat like original Unix design philosophy). the various image formats such as DVI, postscript, TIFF, etc. is an example of this. they all are decent standards for what they attempt to standardize, and it is silly to lament that there isn't a single image standard-- it misses the point. (one tricky thing with bit standards is the goal of trying to go "backward" in converting a very complex format into a simpler format. trying to have text-based web browsers with all the complex images and formatting out there is an example of this.) in other words, some people seem to imagine that in the future some massive HTML language is going to be devised that all browsers support. many web design discussions seem to implicitly talk as if this is the goal. instead what I imagine is that many different substandards will be devised, and will *continue* to be devised-- the point when there is a global, unified "web formatting language" will *never* come and this is an illusionary, impossible, and *unnecessary* goal. what we need are browsers that are extremely flexible and can support on-the-fly translation between different formats, and which try to support the capability that at any time in the future, someone may come up with a new language that could drive browser formatting and display characteristics. the idea of having different layers over the network, such as "conversion servers" which might convert between all the more common formats and requests, is another interesting idea to pursue. netscape 2.0 "plugins" are a first step in this direction. imho, the web of the future is going to have not one but a *zillion* different languages describing all of the data that is out there. the goal should not be unification under a single standard, but of ease of conversion between existing standards that are modular and complete in themselves. in this view, the complementing (not competition) of different formatting languages is glorious and to be encouraged, not something to be dreaded, avoided, and stamped out. the diversity and "complementarity" is the key to the power. == I've been making all my points relative to the Web, but I think the ideas apply equally well to *computer*languages*. there are all kinds of silly holy wars fought over about what are the *best* computer languages, and everyone that designs a new language seems to be implicitly trying to incorporate the features of every other language in existence and then some, i.e. a new "unified" or "complete" or "ultimate" language (I recall a long flamewar out in the newsgroups between Stallman, espousing Lisp, and Wall Perl fanatics). to me this is all ridiculous, because in the future the goal will be the ability to *convert* between languages in automated ways, such that the same problem can be automatically reformulated in another form to gain its particular idiosyncrasies. imho, new computer languages are going to be invented as long as human beings exist-- because what they really are is a "component library". for example, C is very low level but fast-- why can't I just convert my Perl code directly into C whenever I want to? or vice versa? in fact that is exactly what a compiler does, and I am suggesting that the compilers of the future will allow conversions between all kinds of languages, not merely a high level language to machine code. in this sense the idea of fighting over different languages as "ultimate" is ridiculous as the religious wars over who is the "one true god"!! all algorithms are in principle interchangeable, and I believe this theoretical concept will be increasingly applied directly in the future. == anyway, this is my contribution-of-the-moment in trying to dispel some of the "standards myths" that are extremely persistent out there esp. in regard to Web software and language extensions.

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Spinners and compression functions
by JonWienke＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Since there has been a lot of discussion about spinners derived from various things (idle loops, video retrace, etc.) used as entropy sources, here is yet another idea. Run the spinner output through a PKZip type compression function, and then seed a PRNG with the output from that. This would provide a means of gauging the amount of entropy that has been fed into the PRNG, (count the bytes output from the compression function) which will allow the program to disallow any output from the PRNG until a sufficient amount of entropy has been fed into it. Even if there are correlations in the spinner data, (I know, that is obvious) by the time it has gone through the compression function and the PRNG, it should be cryptographically useful, especially if entropy from multiple sources (keyboard & mouse events, disk access times, network access times, etc.) is used to seed the same PRNG. Jonathan Wienke Political Rant: Re: e$ Signorage >And there I was thinking it was the right for Greenspan to sleep with any >unmarried woman on the eve of her wedding... Actually, that's "prima nocte" (Latin for 'bimbo eruptions" [:)] ) and the principal beneficiary is our beloved President...

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Re: Was Cohen the first?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Little CP relevance, except as re: a former (maybe current, but no longer actively participating) list member, so I'll be brief. At 4:24 PM 4/5/96, Michael Wilson wrote: >I ran across the following article, and it set me to wondering--did >Dr. Cohen actually publish on 'computer viruses' before anybody else? >He continues to use it as the bedrock of his reputation capital, so if >this pre-dates his 'seminal' article, please let me know. > >Included message: >For Liz Bass or Reg Gale >Discovery >9:31 AM Friday, April 5, 1996 >By Lou Dolinar > > This is still my favorite computer story. I'm not saying it was the first >piece ever written about computer viruses, but I won't say that it isn't. I >still have the original, dated April 16, 1985. In some ways I wish I hadn't ... Much work was done in the 70s on "worms," which are related to viruses. John Shoch (spelling may be wrong) at Xerox PARC developed a "worm" which propagated from machine to machine, circa 1974 (give or take a year). John Brunner immortalized this in "The Shockwave Rider," his 1975 novel in which uber-hacker Nickie Halflinger uses worms to disable Big Brother's panopticon network. Having said this, Fred Cohen deserves credit for seriously studying properties of replicating programs, including viruses. (And I believe he coined the term virus, and also showed how it differs from a worm.) I will make no particular claims about how _much_ credit he deserves, as this seems petty. Nearly all discoveries have precursors, of course. The work on worms clearly was a precursor. Also, general biological work on replicating patterns was already going on, and Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" had been published in the 1970s (and I believe the work on replicating information patterns--memes--was important). His views should be taken on their merits, not on whether or not he was the first to study viruses or replicating programs in general. As it happens, I find much of what Fred Cohen writes to be tedious and repetitive, but not because he has gotten "too much" credit for his early work. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: "Contempt" charges likely to increase
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:57 AM 4/5/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >If the secrets or assets _cannot_ be retrieved--a scenario which is >possible, if the protocol is so written (clauses for court action)--then >contempt charges are meaningless and would not stand, IMNALO. The Black Unicorn indicates that if the reason the secrets _cannot_ be retrieved is because they are in a jurisdiction which refuses to reveal them when the owner is under compulsion, the owner can still be punished for contempt (A contractual situation). I don't know what would happen if they _cannot_ be retrieved for technical reasons. If a communication key was aggreeded to be DH exchange and then discarded, I would think this would be analogous to asking for a document that was destroyed (before the subpoena) as part of a policy of destroying obsolete documents. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Re: e$ Signorage
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry is closest to Webster's Third New International Dictionary: ----- seigniorage or seignorage also seigneurage [ME seigneurage, fr. MF, right of the lord, esp. to coin money, fr. seigneur + age] 1: a government revenue derived from the manufacture of coins that is calculated in the U.S. as the difference between the monetary and the bullion value of the silver contained in silver coins disregarding any alloy metal, all the metals contained in minor coins (as teh nickel and the cent), or the silver bullion that is held as backing for silver certificates -- compare brassage. 2 archaic: Dominion, Power. ----- brassage 1: a charge made to an individual under a system of free coinage for the minting of any gold or silver he may bring to the mint and usu. calculated to cover various costs -- compare seigniorage. ----- Still, Jim Gleick seems to be citing a special extension of this general definition, wherein government capitalizes on its money-coining power to reap any ancillary benefit, such as the float on money transactions. Is it not likely that there are other seigniorages of running the public till, as Kawika Gaguio suggests, or even such as pleasurably performed a la droit du seigneur cited by Simon? Another definition of seigniorage is that of any means to generate benefits for the lord. Along that line, I wonder if governments might not apply brassage to E-money.

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Re: unsubscrive
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:21 PM 4/5/96, robalo wrote: >unsubscrive * robalo(a)elogica.com.br > unsubscrive * robalo(a)elogica.com.br > unsubscrive * robalo(a)elogica.com.br Maybe these dweebs are posting from an alternate universe? A universe in which not even messages explaining that "unsubscrive," "unsuscribe," "undescribe," "unscribe," and "unimbibe" are not valid alternate spellings of "unsubscribe." I've copied my short explanation of how to subscribe and unsubcribe too many times to do it again; and it is clear that these folks are either doing this out of spite, are not reading any of the messages we send them, or think it funny. This may kill off the Cypherpunks list even where Detweiler's massive rants failed. (Now that Detweiler's cabin in Montana has been raided, and one of his tentacles carried off, who will fill his shoes? Vlad the VZNuri is well on his way to matching Detweiler's volume, if not his obsessiveness.) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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coderpunks questions
by Jack Mott 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am really into programming and the math involved in crypto, and could care less about the politics. I assume that coderpunks are more into that sort of thing. I have heard they are invitation only. How can I get an invite? -- thecrow(a)iconn.net "It can't rain all the time"

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Re: So, what crypto legislation (if any) is necessary?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:37 PM 4/5/96 -0800, sameer(a)c2.org wrote: >> Where I differ with Mr. Bell is that he seems to think the ISPs of the >> world are going to rise and unite to quash the oppressive hand of big >> government at their own expense in order to satisify some sense of >> personal ethics or customer goodwill. >> > > I urge Mr. Bell to start a business of his own with that >model, and see how much fun he has. (Or, worded differently, how long >it takes for him to go bankrupt. Perhaps we can setup betting >pools. That could be fun.) By now, you've probably seen my comment to Unicorn, that ISP's could easily pool their resources, in a form of insurance, to guarantee that any test case will be fully litigated to ensure that a bad precedent isn't set. What if it cost a million dollars? That's only about 5 cents per American Internet user. You were saying about "going bankrupt"? Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: So, what crypto legislation (if any) is necessary?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:06 PM 4/5/96 -0500, Black Unicorn wrote: >On Fri, 5 Apr 1996 sameer(a)c2.org wrote: > >> What's the point here, or is Unicorn just having fun >> lambasting Jim Bell? >> >> My basic attitude, running an internet privacy provider, is if >> Mr. Govt. wants my data, and gives me a court order (subpoena, >> "compelled discovery", whatever), then I'll give it to 'em. >> If my customers that they were looking for had any brains at >> all, a court order, compelled discover, whatever, will not help >> Mr. Govt. That's the cornerstone of my security model. >> >> Or am I confused about what you are talking about here. > >Yours seems to be about the most aggressive policy a ISP provider can >take and expect to remain in business. This is a classic defeatist attitude, the one that Unicorn specializes in. He wants us to believe that there is literally NOTHING that anyone can possibly do to solve the "government problem." I contend that had he talked to Phillip Zimmermann in 1990 or so, he would have told Zimmermann that "It's illegal to write an encryption program using RSA, because it's patented! You'll never get away with it!" But history records that Zimmermann _did_, and he "got away with it." What I'm advocating is that people do what Zimmermann did: Write programs that will extend the usages of encryption to thwart attempts to retrieve data by its owners, whether or not the data is on the owner's system. >That is, resist by what legal means are available, but ultimately depend >on the user to secure his or her own data. Notice that Unicorn never gives useful specific suggestions about which "legal means are available." >Where I differ with Mr. Bell is that he seems to think the ISPs of the >world are going to rise and unite to quash the oppressive hand of big >government at their own expense in order to satisify some sense of >personal ethics or customer goodwill. Cumulatively, they could do exactly this. Spread among most ISP's, the cost per ISP could be quite low. Augmented with my AsPol idea, the costs would be even lower. What was that quote? "A box of shells is cheaper than an appeal." Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: RC4 improvement idea
by jamesd＠echeque.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:01 PM 4/5/96 -0500, Jack Mott wrote: >I got a paper from the cryptography technical report server >"http://www.itribe.net/CTRS/" about a weak class of RC4 keys. The >report said that with some keys, it was possible to predict what some >parts of the State-Box would be. The report was bogus: For one key in 256, you can tell what eight bits of the state box are. For one key in 64000 you can tell what sixteen bits of the state box are, and so on and so forth. Such keys are not weak. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: Using crypt()
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:47 PM 4/4/96 -0400, Eric Eden <erice(a)internic.net> wrote: >I'm testing a encryption program that includes use of crypt(). Out of curiousity, why use crypt() instead of, say, MD5, which is stronger and allows arbitrarily long passphrase input? You could add a crypt()-like salt to it as well, if that helps. And just as crypt() lets you distinguish between input and output based on length and character set, if you use MD5, you know the output is 128 bits, rendered either as raw bits or 32 hexes depending on your program environment. With crypt(), for users who don't remember their passwords, you can run crack to try and recover them. This doesn't work, of course, if your stored "encrypted password" is really an unencrypted non-13-byte string which wouldn't ever be the output of crypt(). MD5, on the other hand, allows enough passphrase space that a brute force search would take much longer.

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No Subject
by James Gleick 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry E. Metzger wrote: > >James Gleick writes: >> >> Seigniorage is actually the Government's interest income on all the >> currency in circulation. > >Seignorage is neither of these things. It is the difference between >the cost of producing a currency token (like a quarter or a dollar >bill) and the face value of the token. In essense, its the profit >margin on printing or minting money. You're giving a definition straight from a dictionary--an old one. Welcome to the modern world. >> It's not obvious, but it's true, that the Fed collects the "float" >> on dollar bills you carry in your pocket, > >Oh, really? From whom? First I've heard of this. Then you're learning something new. >Now, it is indeed true that the Fed holds large numbers of government >bonds and theoretically earns interest on them, and that banks in a >free banking system do indeed loan out the money that backs their >notes. However, the fed has no mechanism to earn interest on dollar >bills, nor, in fact, does it need to. On the contrary. The Federal Reserve holds Government securities corresponding to the dollar value of currency in circulation. It earns interest income on this amount, and returns this income to the Treasury. This is called seigniorage. It amounts this year to something over $20 billion. This is a very real issue. To the extent that electronic money replaces currency (reduces the amount in circulation), it will cost the Treasury seigniorage--and the Government is acutely aware of this. Whether the beneficiaries are consumers, banks, or other issuers of digital cash will depend on the system. -- James Gleick gleick(a)around.com http://www.around.com

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Re: pgp keys
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:55 AM 4/4/96 -0500, Jack P. Starrantino jpps(a)voicenet.com wrote: >Is there a reliable method for obtaining the pgp public key for an >arbitrary email address? [....] to obtain keys I do not have. Reliable? No; not everybody follows The One True KeyDistribution Method, or even follows one-or-more of the popular electronic approaches, and not all keys that are distributed electronically are on the Internet, though some of them may be on intranets or fido or uucp nets. There's also the problem that the results are not unique. If you look at the MIT keyserver, http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html, in the cluttered "Bill Stewart" namespace, you'll find several Bill Stewarts, and you'll find many people have multiple keys for each email address, especially after they've been in the servers a few years. >I've caught some of the discussion on key servers, and noted some >people's use of their signature, plan, or home page to distribute their >keys. Are some combination of these suitable today? There's a collection of keyservers that stay in sync with each other, including the ones at pgp.mit.edu. bal's http interface is a popular way to access them, though there are others communications methods as well. Some other people use finger; finger's really just a telnet to port 79 while sending a requested name and holding the connection up to wait for replies, but not everybody uses that either, and many host systems don't serve finger. My work PGP address is available on my company's internal phone-book web, and printed on my business cards, though I have now put it on MIT's server. >Is there a parseable convention in use for extracting keys from mail/finger/html? Sure - the standard ASCII form that PGP extracts keys in is parseable by PGP. (You have to be careful, when obtaining keys by mail/finger/html, that if you get multiple keys, you do something appropriate, like split them up first.) Unfortunately, Real PGP likes to ask you interactively if you want to add the keys it found to a keyring, or whatever, but you could just feed it some "Y"s on stdin to keep it happy. The new PGP 3.0 stuff will have libraries so it's much easier to build clean routines to do this rather than interact. >My goal is to make encryption the default behavior on outgoing mail. I >am not concerned about local security. Good luck! You'll probably have to prompt the user at least for disambiguation, and possibly for methods for finding keys as well.

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Re: So, what crypto legislation (if any) is necessary?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:49 AM 4/5/96 -0500, Black Unicorn wrote: >On Thu, 4 Apr 1996, jim bell wrote: >> I really don't think you're giving me enough credit. I am fully aware that >> in the past, the organizations on which wire-tap-type subpoenas were served >> (primarily AT+T, "The phone company") were very cooperative with the police >> and probably "never" challenged the subpoena. There is the law, and there is >> the usual reaction to that law, and I expect that much of Unicorn's position >> is based on a (false) assumption that this reaction will necessarily >> continue unchanged. > >Now, if this is your postion, let's see some support. You do the research. Until 1968, Federal wiretaps were illegal, by the Federal communications Act of 1934. >From Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1970, vol 23 page 592: "The modern federal law of wiretapping begins with the case of Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928). A majority of the Supreme Court, over vigorous dissent, held that a defendant's rights against unreasonable search and siezure, protected by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, were not denied by the tapping of his telephone wires by federal police officials. In denying constitutional protection to the privacy of telephonic communicatiosn, the Olmstead decision in effect delegated to Congress the responsibility for defining what restrains, if any, are to be imposed on wiretapping activiity. In 1934, Congress enacted section 605 of the Federaol Communications ACt, whcih provides, in part: "no person not being authorized by the sender shall intercept any communication and divulte...the contents..of such intercepted communication to any person." Brittanica continued: "It is clear that federal police officers continue to engage in wiretapping despite the statute. The position of the Department of Justice has been that section 605 does not forbid wiretapping per se, but only interception _and_ divulgence. Moreover, it is assered, communication of the contents of an intercepted message by one federal police officer to another is not 'divulgence' within the meaning of the act. This interpretation has never received definitive judicial approval. Since the late 1930's numerous unsuccessful attempts have been made to amend the provisions of section 605, usually with the purpose of broadening various law-enforcement uses of wiretapping." [end of Brittanica quote] Needless to say, I find these excuses and distinctions silly and self-serving. If Congress really had the power to increase the usage of wiretapping and numerous times chose not to do it, it is reasonable to assume that no legitimate interpretation of the Act of 1934 could allow police wiretapping to occur. It is reasonable to assume that most wiretaps, when they were done, were assisted by the local phone company (usually AT+T). In other words, AT+T assisted the government in illegal actions. What happened in 1968 was that Congress, recognizing this situation, decided to "compromise": They declared those wiretaps legal, if a warrant was obtained, and and a sop to the cops they allowed that evidence into court. But them's the details. The fundamental point is that if AT+T would engage in illegal activity to benefit the cops or Feds, they would certainly go less far to give the government what it wants, whether or not that was illegal. Clearly this was (and is) a non-arm's length relationship. And notice that there was apparently no way for the police to force AT+T to do those wiretaps, before 1968. They couldn't use them, so they couldn't insist on them. You'll have to explain why AT+T did what they did even though they were apparently not obligated to act, and there was NOTHING the Feds could have done (legally, anyway!) to force them to. >Compelled discovery orders work because they are backed with the >very credible threat of financial and custodial sanctions. Obstruction, >or conspiracy is a crime, and in the case of the FBI, a federal crime of >some magnitude. As usual, you misrepresent the situation. You're setting up a straw man. "Appeals" are not "obstruction." >While some ISP's may indeed feel they are able to resist the whims and >enforcement powers of the United States, they are likely to be offshore, >small, and viewing themselves as out of the reach of U.S. jurisdiction. You continue to build that straw man. And I notice that you said "whims"? What did you mean by this? Are you suggesting that there is something wrong or illegal with "resisting the whims" of the government if that government has no legal basis for compelling cooperation with those "whims"? I think it's interesting that with each paragraph you set little traps for yourself, and fall into them so embarrassingly. >With the scope of U.S. jurisdiction for compelled discovery, however, >I think that most ISP's will find themselves in for significant surprises. There you tried to knock him down. >Mr. Bell somehow assumes that smaller ISP's will be less vulnerable. I >believe this in error. Smaller ISP's won't even have the financial >wherewithall to fight a compelled discovery order properly, much less >actualy prevail in court Think "insurance companies." Insurance companies exist to pool risk. At some point, "subpoena insurance" will be recognized as being a valuable thing, because it will allow even the smallest ISP the full legal assistance necessary. A side-benefit of such assistance is that the government won't be able to "defendant shop" and try to set up a comfy precedent, because even the smallest ISP will be able to fight back as if it were large. This is important to all other ISP's, obviously. That's why they'll happily pool their resources. >where it is firmly estlablished that compelled >discovery orders will be enforced and enforced with vigor, and that >judicial review will be a waste of time. Continuing to knock down that straw man, I see! >It is worth bearing in mind that subpoenas are not the only tool that >authorities can use to affect compliance. In many cases authorities >simply seize the equipment and hold it for the statuatory period before >which they are required to file charges in. The Ripco BBS in Chicago, >victim of the Sun Devil raids, is a prime example. In that case the >equipment was seized (via sealed warrant which later proved to authorize >seizure of "computer or other electronic equipment of any nature." and in >actuality resulted in the seizure of everything from disks to printers >to telephones), and held for five years before finally being returned. >Clearly it was obsolete by this time. No charges have been filed. What I repeatedly find amazing about Unicorn's commentary is that he lists actions and behaviors of government that most of the rest of us find disgusting or egregious, and then he seems to take the position that it is impossible to prevail in court against those actions. Even if that limited opinion were true, to the extent it's true that merely goes to show why we can't expect justice from courts, and why we're going to have to set up a system to ensure that these egregious actions get punished. >While I'm sure Mr. Bell would sacrifice hardware, freedom, cash, (though >I'm sure he would insist on representing himself), and time to fight the >tyrany of the FBI, I don't see every ISP suddenly turning into a Montana >freemen armed standoff with the authorities, which is what it would >practically take to resist such warrants and exercise of authority, even >by preemptive or malicious encryption or disposal of data. Actually, it only takes one to set a precedent hostile to the government. >> Besides, that phone company had a monopoly, so it wasn't possible for >> citizens to shop around for a phoneco that was known to make it hard for >> police. But that's changing, and that's my point. Now and in the future, >> it's going to be harder and harder for the police to get a >> bend-over-backwards level of cooperation, and in fact phonecos (and >> especially ISP's) might reasonably want to build up a reputation that they >> will defend a customer's security in court long before a wiretap is >> installed. > >In practice many ISP's or phone co's will not have the opportunity to >defend the matter in court without their services and equipment being >forcibly seized preemptively. Oh, really? Do you realize what you've just admitted? You're your own worst enemy. Let me quote you something you said below: >There are ways to resist compelled discovery. These are not they. Sounds like a big contradiction, right? You can't even keep your story straight! Your loyalty to the truth is nil. Yet another trap you set for yourself. >> Imaginative phonecos will find ways to inform the target >> legally, including naming the target as a non-hostile defendant in a court >> challenge to that wiretap, and noticing that target since he's now a party >> to a court action that must be noticed under civil procedure rules. > >So the ISP sues their client to notify them of the wiretap? Or the ISP >sues the FBI and then draws the client into the suit? I'm not sure what >you mean here. Your cluelessness is legendary. Go talk to a real lawyer and he might tell you that occasionally, entities must be brought into lawsuits if their interests are at stake and their participation is necessary to decide an existing case. It happens all the time. In this kind of case, a challenge to the wiretap inherently involves the interests of the person to be tapped, and thus his participation is logical. Not that the cops would LIKE it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it won't happen anyway. >In any event it's a totally meaningless point as ongoing >investigations could easily be blinded and the ISP or telco charged with >willful obstruction Naming the target as a non-hostile defendant is not illegal. Noticing him under civil procedure rules is not illegal. Etc. or conspiracy to destroy material evidence to a >crime, accessory after the fact in effect. You keep harping on this "destroy material evidence" kick. Is that the best you can do? I said NOTHING about "destroying evidence." (regular readers will notice that this is a pattern that Unicorn displays; typical straw-man behavior! His "destroying evidence" tirades are old.) > >> In short, there is a drastic difference between blind obeisance and >> enthusiastic hostility, even if you exclude actions by the ISP or phoneco >> that would rise to the level of some crime. > >What you have described is a crime. Your "clever" lawsuit isn't going to >fool any judge, or anyone else. There is a big difference between "not fooling the judge" and becoming a crime. As I pointed out before, these are exactly the kinds of issues that have "never" been enthusiastically challenged by an ISP or telco. Your assumption that such challenges will never happen, or will fail is touching. >> My point in the first paragraph that I am quoted in above is >> that many of the challenges that have never been made against wiretap >> subpoenas, due to a closer-than-arms-length relationship between the phoneco >> and the government, _will_ be challenged. > >This argument relies heavily on the absence of other persuasion to comply >with wiretaps, which, as I have demonstrated, exist in abundance. Thus the >thing falls in upon itself. The error you just made is to confuse the issue of adjudication and enforcement. All you just said was that, once the final decision is made, it can be enforced. I don't think it's necessary for me to challenge that claim, for the purposes of my point. My point is that challenges to subpoenas can and do occur, WHEN THE PERSON OR CORPORATION NAMED _wants_ to do them, and up until now that organization regularly failed to do so. >> will be challenged on (among other things) the basis of >> the fact that this precedent was formulated during an era when essentially >> all telecommunications was monopolized and regulated, and there is no reason >> to believe that a previous telecom monopoly would have been diligent at >> protecting the rights of their captive customers against the interest of the >> government at that time. > >You're claiming that a court is going to distinguish the case where a >small ISP/telco refuses to comply with a compelled discovery order from a >case where a large telco typically complies with a discovery on the basis >that the large company complies only under compulsion or in self interest? > >This amounts to "A obeys the law because he wants to. B doesn't want to >obey the law, therefore B need not." Further "straw-man" behavior. You just misrepresented the issue. I'll re-write it: "A obeys not only the law without question, but also agrees with all requests even if they are beyond the legal scope of the subpoena, and generously helps the cops, challenging nothing. B challenges everything, and uses 'every trick in the book' to eliminate or minimize his obligations under the law" There, that's better. >> I think we need to start challenging all the previously-assumed issues that >> have been interpretated to benefit the government. If my ISP has agreed, >> for instance, to send me daily certifications that he hasn't received any >> "official" inquiries about my account, and one day he receives such an >> inquiry and is forced to install some sort of a tap, it is hard for me to >> imagine what kind of legal precedent would allow (and, even, REQUIRE) him to >> continue to send false certifications when the alternative, simply failing >> to send any certifications whatever, is also "legal." > >As I have tried to explain to Mr. Bell before, the days of legal >formalism are over. Substance over form prevails today. What, exactly, does this mean? Are you saying, "The Constitution is dead"? Are you implicitly acknowledging here that my points are, or at least, WERE valid under a previous interpretation of the Constitution? What, exactly, happened to change this? Who passed which law to change it? >The substance >of this transaction is to inform the client that an investigation is >ongoing. This is a major no-no, whatever Mr. Bell thinks he knows. "major no-no"? It sure is interesting how Unicorn uses thes high-falutin legal terms like "major no-no" to describe the intricacies of subpoena law. I'm going to have to look in Black's to figure out the legal implications of "major no-no." >> (and, in fact, may be >> required under my contract with him, should he be obligated to do a tap or >> know one exists.) > >As I explained before, contracts are void to the extent they are >illegal. Unicorn proves, once again, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But I don't think that FAILING to send a particular certification (that the ISP isn't under subpoena) constitutes an "illegal" contract. The fulfillment of that term is not legally required, absent a contract, and likewise it is not generally prohibited if it is part of a contract. It looks like the government has no basis to object to either sending that certification or failing to. And you also misrepresented things: it is more accurate to use the term "unenforceable" rather than "void". "Unenforceable" (assuming, for a moment, that this was a correct interpretation; it isn't, however) might simply indicate that the client can't sue his ISP for lack of fidelity to that particular term of the contract. But that's somewhat misleading, because this assumes that the ISP _doesn't_ want to comply with the terms of his contract. It is irrelevant that a contract is argued to be "unenforceable" if the parties to the contract _want_ to comply with it anyway. And if the ISP _wants_ to comply, and compliance merely involves FAILING to send a certification, and not sending that certification is not otherwise prohibited by pre-existing law, then I think it's obvious that the ISP is entitled to fail to send the certification. In a government-centric philosophy enthusiastically promoted by Unicorn, government is the only enforcer. In the real, digital world of the future, digital reputations will enforce behavior. A practice by an ISP to tolerate subpoenas without legal challenge will become well-known, and that ISP will shrink to oblivion unless he changes his policies. >Mr. Bell's response? "Well, then we'll kill him and enforce >the contract that way." Given the repeated admissions you make that the government can and does engage in outrageous behavior, I'd say that extra-legal enforcement is clearly warranted. >> The fact that I'd likely interpret his failure to send those >> messages as meaning that my access is tapped is not within his control, and >> if he's unwilling to screw me I find it hard to believe that he can't act on >> this fact even if those actions have an indirect effect of alerting me. > >Your use of the word "indirect" is stretching the bounds of the >imagination. A judge, unless sleeping through argument, would see >through this like glass. Again, doesn't make it illegal. There is no reason to assume that the government will always get whatever it wants. (remember the "whim" reference you made above? I'm _still_ laughing about it!) Challenging it on what it wants should be standard procedure. >> These are the kinds of issues that have either rarely or never been >> challenged in court, simply because the organization(s) that would normally >> do those challenges was in the hip pocket of government. It's going to be a >> brave new world very soon. > >Incorrect. They have been challenged time and time again in the context >of compelled discovery. Time and time again compelled discovery has been >required, TRO's forbidding the destruction of documents and other >evidence issued, search warrants and seizure effected in place of subpoena. For a different class of people and corporations, yes. Not ISP's, and as far as I know, telephone companies have never pushed the envelope. If you have any specific contrary examples, show me. >The telco in past has not complied with such orders because of some grand >government conspiracy, You statement is wildly in error. AT+T clearly did phone taps for the government prior to 1968 PRECISELY due to "some grant conspiracy": It certainly didn't do them because AT+T was _legally_obligated_ to. >although I realized Mr. Bell finds such things >immensely sexy. It has complied because its officers faced criminal and >financial sanctions for non-compliance. Which is an interesting statement, given the fact that I pointed out that in the period of 1930-1968, the phone company assisted with ILLEGAL wiretaps. Are you suggesting that during that time frame, they actually violated the law under threat of "criminal and financial sanctions for non-compliance"? What kind of government threatens people with "criminal and financial sanctions" for NOT assisting it with illegality? Yikes! Somehow I think your morality is about as warped as it comes. Yet another trap you set for yourself, and you jumped right in. > >There are ways to resist compelled discovery. These are not they. What you haven't explained or demonstrated is how ISPs could become more agressive in their defenses. This failure is typical of you: Your bag of tricks is empty _unless_you_are_paid_. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Peeking at Your PC
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times, April 6, 1996, p. 23. Peeking at Your P.C. [Op-Ed] By Simson L. Garfinkel Cambridge, Mass. As more Americans use electronic mail, buy products over the Internet and keep their most personal records on desktop computers, there is increasing demand for cryptography software that can insure the privacy of personal electronic communication. This technology already exists, but the Government, through export-control regulations, effectively bars citizens from using it. The Government classifies encryption software as munitions, because foreign countries can use such programs to hide their communications during times of war. To prevent this, American companies are largely prohibited from selling to foreign customers any programs that include strong coding features. Unfortunately, that has stifled the domestic market. Encryption-software developers find it too expensive to create two versions of their programs -- one with strong cryptography for domestic use and one with cryptography that is weak enough for export. So in the United States, developers sell only the weaker cryptography software. Last month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced "The Encrypted Communications Privacy Act of 1996" to combat this problem. But while this measure would increase the availability of good cryptography at home, it would limit our freedoms in other ways. The act would legalize the export of any mass-market software if similar technology is already available overseas. This would put an end to the futility of forbidding such exports at a time when cryptography technology is increasingly available around the globe -- in libraries and on the Internet. Indeed, the Software Publishers Association says that the main result of the export regulations simply has been to shift the overseas marketing of military-grade cryp tography to foreign companies. So although the new bill would still prohibit American companies from exporting innovative programs, it would at least allow them to compete with foreign companies on an equal footing. However, the Clinton Administration and others oppose this minor change, because they are worried that criminals and terrorists could use the export liberalization to their own advantage. Because of this opposition, the bill throws a bone to the antiprivacy forces. While lifting export controls, it criminalizes some uses of cryptography for the first time in our nation's history. It would be illegal, for instance, to use encryption that interferes with a felony investigation. But the language of the bill is so broad that these restrictions could apply to a reporter's encrypted computer files. The bill also creates legal rules for "key holders" -- organizations that would be given copies of an individual's decryption key, or codebreaker. This means that an individual's encoded messages or documents could be decoded, under a court order, without his or her knowledge. Although the use of key holders would be voluntary under the bill, that could easily change and the system could become mandatory. There is some hope for avoiding all this. Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, plans to introduce a narrower bill that focuses simply on liberalizing exports of encryption technology. The software industry and civil libertarians are already supporting this approach -- one that is good not just for American business but also for our right to privacy. Simson L. Garfinkel is the author of the book "PGP: Pretty Good Privacy." [End]

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RNG_DEVICE Environment Variable?
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Considering a couple of RNG hardware manufacturers use different names for device interfaces, perhaps it would be 'convenient' to have apps look for the environment variable RNG_DEVICE which gives the name of whatever device is used (rnadom$, random, rand, even lpt2...) or even a special file that is mixed periodically by a cron job (noiz.c?). The assumption is that reads from that device would return "truly random" bytes (not from a pseudo-RNG), either from specialized hardware or a system-noise sampler such as noise.sys (DOS) or random.c (Linux, FreeBSD). How software would handle not getting enough bytes is another matter, perhaps left configurable to the app. Rob. --- Send a blank message with the subject "send pgp-key" to <WlkngOwl(a)unix.asb.com> for a copy of my PGP key.

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FWD: On digital cash and geodesic economies
by Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Haven's seen anything on Bionomics list for a month. Is the list silent, or is it just me. I hope you will find the following article relevant to bionomics. --- begin forwarded text From: rah(a)shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 21:21:19 -0500 To: Multiple recipients of <e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: Wired didn't like this one.... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- ...but I like it. Said it was a little too "fast paced". (For WIRED???) I'm starting over on another, so you guys might as well see this one... It *was* supposed to go into their Idees Fortes (Or, as my brother Mike in Albuqerque says, in his best Jose Jimenez, "Stron' Gideas") section. Now something else is, once I write it. Feh! It's 800 words. Exactly. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ------------------------ Geodesic Capital? Robert Hettinga I've just finished a bit of anonymous consulting on the net for an anonymous client, being paid, of course, in anonymous digital ecash(tm). I could just store it, offsite even, anonymously. But, I'm saving it for that special retirement habitat in the Belt ("Gerry's Habitats, Inc.: Pie in the sky, Nano-Built(tm) *before* you die!"). I have to *invest* it somewhere. I buy a page of mutual fund reccomendations from a LipperBot(tm). In my case, I just want to buy a broad market index, say, the (ahem) Hettinga Million(tm), and shop around for the fund server which approximates closest the HM's price over time. I link to the server, and buy anonymous bearer certificates for that server's HM fund. Later, when I cash in my certificates, I have enough appreciated capital to buy the custom Bernal sphere of my dreams. Of course, if my tolerence for risk is higher, I could buy shares from a fund manager (bot or otherwise, no way to tell with anonymous cash markets) with a hot hand for picking stocks. OK. Say I don't actually *save* money. I'm someone who borrows money for very short term "assets" like resturaunt meals, and pays the incurred debt off over the long term at some userous interest rate. How do I do this? I issue a personal digital bearer bond for the amount of the transaction. All I need is someone to underwrite the risk. Fortunately, I always have an efficient real-time market to auction it into, one that always knows my payment reputation, thanks to all those money-bots in the ubiquitous network. Voila'! Bring on the chateaubriand for one, waiter, and don't spare the bearnaise, all this thinking about money's made me hungry. What we're talking about here is nothing new, of course. We've had trade ever since we've had artifacts. The ancient "red-paint" culture was just a trading network which ran around the north Atlantic from New England to as far as Ireland. So much for the "New" World. The oldest surviving Babylonian money is a piece of clay saying "three cows" wrapped in a clay "envelope" saying something like "three cows, payable on demand, so say I, (signed) Joe Nebbuchenazzar". This happened shortly after writing was invented, which was actually invented for *accounting*. Mechanical signatures like chops and seals have been around since. Digital signatures and bearer certificates are just a new implementation of some *very* old stuff. Ornate paper certificates, representing shares in companies, or actual stuff, was physically traded for other ornate paper certificates (cash), or actual stuff, at places like the famous buttonwood tree on Wall Street. Pretty soon people didn't have to be there to trade. We built fast industrial communications (staged horsemen or coaches, then ships or trains, then telegraphy, then telephony) but we still had slow switches (people), so we had to build all the communication/organization/market hierarchies we know and love today. In addition, the power of the state (another industrial communication heirarchy) provides a sizable argumentum ad bacculum for people who repudiate trades. If you don't pay, I throw you in jail. Like every thing else, Moore's law changes that. Proportionately, semiconductor switches get more and more cheaper than lines, so the telephone network is no longer a hierarchy. Nodding to Buckminster Fuller, Peter Huber called it the "Geodesic Network", the title of the 1986 government report he wrote describing it. Ironic. I'm here saying this in a magazine founded by deciples of Stwart Brand, himself a one-time Fullerite. All threads lead to Bucky. When you combine a geodesic network with strong cryptography, you get a geodesic economy, which needs geodesic capital. Just change the size of players in either equity or debt scenario, and you're looking at what any large business organization does today. The only thing you're missing is how to deal with non-repudiation. If the state can't tax transactions or financial assets because strong crypto makes them all invisible, states can't exist, much less "bacculize" very well. The solution is the same it ever was: reputation. J. Pierpont Morgan said, when hauled before Congress one afternoon, "Character, sir. I wouldn't buy anything from a man with no character, even if he offered me all the bonds in Christendom." In a geodesic economy, reputation is abstracted to keys, not people. Geodesic capital scales up to bigger stuff than we can do now. A chaotic hoarde of autonomous money-bots swarms on the minutia of the necessary financial complexity. It also scales *down* as processor prices fall. Real time, MicroMint(tm) cash-on-the-router-head auctions for packet switching, anyone? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMWR/ovgyLN8bw6ZVAQHCkQP7BPmSNibfRQLeZETvRkUVGJdPB0WOYrTM yU33wwqDPBEcwfYLgX4oBcAfHv/Kfvr1vH4bBTioEVyanVDtJLt9KL/62kn+Ot+/ BLDdBM6Km1R/xRD9xnvQd5Kyz2INQCmNU7ZJk3BQpK484V74aW6We155fH2ovjr3 TgQ6mYMe7rs= =GVNA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -------------------------------------------------- The e$ lists are brought to you by: Making Commerce Convenient (tm) - Oki Advanced Products - Marlboro, MA Value-Checker(tm) smart card reader= http://www.oki.com/products/vc.html Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info(a)hyperion.co.uk See your name here. Be a charter sponsor for e$pam, e$, and Ne$ws! See http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ or e-mail rah(a)shipwright.com for details... ------------------------------------------------- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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Re: Spinners and compression functions
by JonWienke＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In a message dated 96-04-06 11:26:26 EST, Perry Metzger sez: >Actually, it doesn't. The entropy present from a reasonable source >like keyclick timings is much much lower than the output of pkzip is >going to suggest to you. I am not saying that the output of the compression function has 8 bits of entropy per byte, but rather that it will have a more consistent entropy level per byte than the input to the function. (Especially in the case of idle loop timings, where the entropy fluctuates considerably, depending on what the computer is doing.) If you want to be conservative, you can assume the output of the compression function has only 1 bit (or even less, if you are really paranoid) of entropy per byte, and adjust your seeding requirements accordingly. Jonathan Wienke

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Re: FWD: On digital cash and geodesic economies
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:09 PM 4/6/96, Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko wrote: >Haven's seen anything on Bionomics list for a month. >Is the list silent, or is it just me. > >I hope you will find the following article relevant to bionomics. But, Sasha, this is the Cypherpunks list... Seriously, several years ago I started hearing the hype and hoopla about "Bionomics." Following the book, the conference. Then the seminars, the training packages, and perhaps even the cult. The book didn't seem to say anything new, except that markets and various other systems share some emergent commonalities. What made me think of it as a cult is when the groupies joined, the staff was hired, and the publicity campaign began. "The Bionomics Institute"? But who am I to question EST^H^H^Hbionomics? Personally, I have accepted Eric Drexler as my personal savior in the Churh of the Assembler Multitude. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Unicorn of Color
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:00 PM 4/6/96, Black Unicorn wrote: >On Fri, 5 Apr 1996, Timothy C. May wrote: >> >> Far be it from me to question the legal advice BU/Uni/Dirsec provides, > >Unicorn is fine, don't be snide. Not meant to be snide, even if sounded that way. I just get confused by your various nyms, as some call you "Uni," others call you by what I presume is your real name (rhymes with Galois), and you sometimes sign your messages "Dirsec." Also, I am hesitant to call you "Black Unicorn," as applying the adjective "black" to a person is illegal in some jurisdictions, and "Unicorn of Color" does not ring true. (But I grew up calling blacks "colored people," and gladly switched to the more noble-sounding "black" in the 1960s, and now I almost vomit everytime I hear some radfem lesbian claim "All wimmin are people of color!!!!" Yeah, colored people. My, how the worm has turned....) Hope this clears things up. --Tim Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: ACM/IEEE Letter on Cryp
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[on the Burns bill] At 04:55 PM 4/3/96 -0500, Dave Banisar wrote: >The draft bill which currently exists only takes the export controls on >crpyto. The provisions on key escrow, criminal penalities and other problems >are not in there and Burns staff have no intention of letting them in. The >actual bill will be introduced in about 2 weeks. >-dave That sounds okay as far as it goes, but I can see a potential problem. Your wording above is unclear, but if the Burns bill totally eliminates export controls that's great. However, we've frequently heard talk of "compromises" like the Leahy bill which seem to relate exportable encryption to that which is already available overseas. There have been suspicions around there that this is intended to keep the American producers out of the market as long as possible, which is still a problem. I don't think that's acceptable. It's also not logical. Even if we assume that the strongest encryption available overseas is 2048-bit RSA, that's far more secure than 1024-bit PGP, which itself (I've heard...) is probably 1-10 million times stronger than 512-bit PGP, and the last is probably just barely within the reach of even the NSA with a reasonable amount of resources directed at the task. Obviously, this means that the best encryption commonly available is so far beyond what the NSA can decrypt, there appears to be no point in denying somebody the right to export 3000-bit RSA, when 2048-bit versions are already in use. In addition, even if this condition is assumed, there is a question about whether or not export will or must be automatically approved for any program which uses encryption equally or less strong than, say, 2048 bit PGP, or whether they will refuse export of programs which use encryption to implement functions that are "politically incorrect" despite the fact they use only "exportable level" encryption. I could mention a specific example, but if you've followed my essays you already know what I'm talking about. The government could still deter new and innovative ideas utilizing encryption that themselves don't already exist overseas. I think there's a serious enough danger here that we should insist on (at least) wording that completely takes the decision-making authority out of the government's hands for encryption that uses the same or less key length than the maximum available overseas, regardless of its function. I don't want even this minimal restriction, but if that's what it takes to pass the Burns bill, it's progress anyway. I'm sure somebody can (or already has) extend foreign-source PGP to 4096-bit keys to push the limit well beyond any practical limit, if 2048 bits isn't there already. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: "Contempt" charges likely to increase
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:19 PM 4/6/96, Black Unicorn wrote: >On Fri, 5 Apr 1996, Timothy C. May wrote: > >> If the secrets or assets _cannot_ be retrieved--a scenario which is >> possible, if the protocol is so written (clauses for court action)--then >> contempt charges are meaningless and would not stand, IMNALO. > >I'm not sure an appeals court will be particularly receptive to this >argument. I'll do a little research on the issue next week but I suspect >that appeals courts will be reluctant to overturn contempt charges on >this basis. Firstly, appeals courts generally do not do their own >findings of fact, but take the lower courts findings for granted. >Secondly, in the absence of serious error, higher courts are unlikely to >give their fellows a hard time. The culture of the jurist as it >were. Well, I think this will be a matter of time and education. The courts have not yet been presented with what we might call "unbreakable protocols" for the holding of information. Existing secret holding "arrangements" (I'll call them "arrangements" to make their informal, human-mediated nature more clear) have typically involved secrets (information, money, etc.) held by some other party subject to recall/retrieval by some form of instructions from the owner/depositor. The canonical example being a Swiss bank account, with the bank responding when the proper numbers or signatures or whatever are presented. (Things may have changed as the Swiss banks have become more compliant with U.S. demands, but the example still stands.) This model, is, I contend, the model with which courts are familiar. They know that Alice can retrieve the funds, so they simply order her to. If she does not comply, contempt of court. Q.E.D. What of a different model? What if, say, her funds are in a "time lock deposit," with the bank unwilling or even unable (cryptographic protocols involving multiple key holders) to retrieve the funds until, say, 2010? Even if she is being tortured to death and pleading with the Gemeinschaftbank of Zurich to please, pretty please, release her funds, they cannot. It may take some convincing, and some education of the court (a la the education that is slowly happening, as in the CDA case), but eventually it will be realized that "contempt of court" is not applicable. (The angle may be felonize the use of such "unbreakable" protocols, but this is part of a larger story....) >I might add that the Cayman Islands are full of trust companies with >provisions which forbid the disclosure of data to a client who is >coerced. A law on the books refuses to recognize "consent" orders made >under judicial compulsion. This would give the appearance of total >unavailability of evidence and suggest the futility of contempt >charges. Yet courts have still, and with no small measure of success, >imposed sanctions on witnesses so protected. I haven't studied such cases, but my hunch (SWAG) is that their are "leaks" in such offshore deposits, that the courts have actually had some measure of success in getting the funds that are reputed to be irretrievable. In any case, if and when the jails fill up with up with people who _cannot_ comply with a court order, something will change. (Note that I've never claimed such "unbreakable protocols" will become the norm. Many of us, myself included, would rather have a way to pay off the government to settle some tax evasion charge, or whatever, than sit in jail for an unlimited time because we absolutely cannot retrieve the funds....) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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e$ seigniorage (and is this the cost of untracability?)
by Gary Howland 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

James Gleick wrote: > Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > >James Gleick writes: > > > >> Seigniorage is actually the Government's interest income on all the > >> currency in circulation. > > > >Seignorage is neither of these things. It is the difference between > >the cost of producing a currency token (like a quarter or a dollar > >bill) and the face value of the token. In essense, its the profit > >margin on printing or minting money. > > You're giving a definition straight from a dictionary--an old one. > Welcome to the modern world. I think you're both right - Seignorage is the interest on the difference between the cost of producing the token and the face value of the token from the time the token is issued till the time it is redeemed. In the case of most government issued currencies though, the tokens can never be redeemed, so the total interest will be equal to the difference between the cost of manufacture and the face value. It is interesting to note that casinos could earn seignorage on their chips in circulation, and issuers of book/record/gift tokens will certainly earn seignorage on their tokens in circulation, and since these different types of token money reduce the amount of government currency in circulation, these earnings will be at the expense of the treasury. > This is a very real issue. To the extent that electronic money replaces > currency (reduces the amount in circulation), it will cost the Treasury > seigniorage--and the government is acutely aware of this. Sure, and this is equally true of cheques and credit cards replacing government currency. As to whether the government is concerned, that is subject to debate. If so, why all the government attempts at reducing cash transactions? > Whether the beneficiaries are consumers, banks, or other issuers of digital > cash will depend on the system. For e-cheque systems, the beneficiaries will be the consumers, in that the money which was previously in their wallets will now be earning interest in a bank account (assuming of course that the bank passes this benefit onto the customer). In the case of ecash (from DigiCash), however, the withdrawal of ecash from an account is done some time previous to it being spent and deposited, therefore the ecash is "in circulation". In this situation, the ecash issuer will earn seignorage on all the circulating ecash. Two questions arise: - What will be the typical time between the withdrawal of ecash and it being deposited? - Does the untraceability of ecash (of all types) rely on a time delay between withdrawal and deposit (I guess it does), and if so, is the interest that the consumer inevitably loses (and the ecash issuer gains) the price the consumer must pay for untracability of transactions? Gary -- pub 1024/C001D00D 1996/01/22 Gary Howland <gary(a)kampai.euronet.nl> Key fingerprint = 0C FB 60 61 4D 3B 24 7D 1C 89 1D BE 1F EE 09 06

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