December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Cypherwaffle on spoofing
by doug＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Arthur Chandler <arthurc(a)crl.com> said: > What I find odd is the number and vehemence of posts ON A LIST DEVOTED >TO ENCRYPTION saying "Hey, it's a fact of life, accept it" -- even >dragging out Machiavelli's profoundly mistaken "if you can't enforce >it, don't prohibit it." I don't understand your point. If it really is impossible to prevent people from creating multiple anonymous identities, what good does it do for any or all of us to say that we abhor the results? I grant you that there will be bad effects...but what precisely do you suggest we do about it? If you think that people *can* be somehow limited to a single anonymous identity, you'd best explain how you think so. If on the other hand you agree that such a limitation can't be enforced, then I fail to see your point at all. Doug

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Re: Digital cash announced today by UK bank.
by cypher01＠eternity.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message <199312091906.TAA22687(a)an-teallach.com> gtoal(a)an-teallach.com writes: > Apparently the Natwest Bank (or some spoonerism thereof) announced > today that they were releasing digital cash in the form of some > sort of smartcard. I have no more details - does anyone else? > I saw this a few days ago in the Guardian. Big front page splash, and lots of radio coverage. The system is called "Mondex". I'm looking into it, myself, as I know about as much as you do. Midlands Bank is cooperating in the scheme, which is not surprising, as they already have shared-ATM agreements. > Primarily I'm interested in knowing if it's *anonymous* digital > cash - knowing our govt, I suspect it's unlikely to be. Any new > opportunities to track the masses are always gratefully received > by the powers that be... > Interestingly, none of the press coverage even mentioned the *issue* of privacy. I've told Tom Burroughes at the East Anglian Daily Times (tom(a)reptile.demon.co.uk) he's deputy chief reporter there, and was a speaker at ECFP '93. He's looking into it now; if you wish to speak to him, call 0473-230-023 and ask for him in the newsroom. He may be out, as he's also chief court and legal reporter, but he always calls back. I'll be calling Australia in a few minutes to see if I can raise Simon Davies, who's out there on business. Simon (davies(a)privint.demon.co.uk) is director of Privacy International, and was another ECFP speaker... the most well-connected privacy advocate I've ever met. > G > > -- Russell Earl Whitaker whitaker(a)eternity.demon.co.uk Communications Editor AMiX: RWhitaker EXTROPY: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought Board member, Extropy Institute (ExI) Co-organizer, 2nd European Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, London, October 1994

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USENET on a tape, and future privacy
by nate＠VIS.ColoState.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I was just thinking. My roommate mentioned that he saw an ad for a service available in europe. They send you an 8mm tape evey week that has all the USENET traffic on it. I was thinking that a large corporation thinking of hiring me (or you, you just never know!) could pay some service to scrounge up all the USENET posting you have made for the last, say, 10 years, and run them through a filter to get a feel for the nature of the posts (assuming you were too prolific to have the job-hunters read _al_ of your posts). This really scared me, so I think I will start making more frequent use of the remailers in the future. Just my $0.02 (revalued to $15.00 with recent inflation) - -nate - -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nate Sammons nate(a)VIS.ColoState.Edu (303) 491-1578 | | Colorado State University -- Computer Visualization Laboratory | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Please unsubscribe from mailing list
by Paul Rushizky 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please unsubscribe me from your mailing list. Thanks.

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Re: "Cipher"
by grand-central!amix!chip 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Arthur Chandler writes: > Neil Postman, in his *Technopoly*, asserts that the word "cipher" derives >ultimately from the Hindu word for void, and therefore "suggests the idea >of nothingness." (p 128) Does anyone else have info on the origin of this >word? Is Postman correct? Postman may be right about his etymology; I don't know, though I'm sure one of the many folks out there with an OED could answer this. However, arguing from etymology is one of the most irksome of the many bogus rhetorical techniques that the academic establishment has developed as part of its standard toolkit and really wish they would cut it out. The answer to the broader question, "Is Postman correct?", is "no".

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One Time Pads $5000|Cheap
by Harry Shapiro 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The cost of write once CD-ROM drives (CD-R) drives is really going down in price. You should be able to get a complete set-up for less than $5000. I would think you could use the CD-R drive to create a bunch of one time pads. Any thought? /HAWK -- Harry S. Hawk habs(a)extropy.org Electronic Communications Officer, Extropy Institute Inc. The Extropians Mailing List, Since 1991 EXTROPY -- A measure of intelligence, information, energy, vitality, experience, diversity, opportunity, and growth. EXTROPIANISM -- The philosophy that seeks to increase extropy.

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Re: One Time Pads $5000|Cheap
by freeman＠MasPar.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Since it is quite easy to make an electronic widget that creates random noise by amplifying up shot noise and counting detections across a threshold (varying the amplifier gain to adjust the rate), I suspect you are right. -- Jay Freeman

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Re: USENET on a tape, and future privacy
by jerry＠terminus.dell.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <2ee0sd$o5s(a)uudell.us.dell.com> you write: > >From owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Sun Dec 12 02:49:42 1993 >Return-Path: <nate(a)vangogh.VIS.ColoState.EDU> >From: nate(a)VIS.ColoState.EDU (CVL staff member Nate Sammons) >Message-Id: <9312120152.AA25408(a)vangogh.VIS.ColoState.EDU> >I was just thinking. My roommate mentioned that he saw an ad for >a service available in europe. They send you an 8mm tape evey week >the last, say, 10 years, and run them through a filter to get a feel for Hm.. 1 tape a week at 52week/year, gives 520 8mm tapes, assuming they can process one tape every 30minutes, thats nearly 11 days. Proably will take about 1 to 2 hours a tape, just to read through the stuff. You are talking about thousands of dollars of cost to do such a search. Then someone has to weed out all of the other "Doe, John" messages that were not you. Considering most business don't bother to verify references, and those that do still usually only check employment history. Once again your are offered a limited protection by the volume of information. Usenet traffic being rated at some 21gigabytes a year (traffic through UUnet) considering the low information value of the vast majority of it, no one will be interested in storing it. In usenet no one can hear you scream... -- Jeremy Porter ------------- Systems Engineering -------- Dell Computer Corp. ------ jerry(a)terminus.us.dell.com ---- --- 70 4F BD AE 6D E9 D2 66 48 18 8B E7 64 7F 59 8F --- Support your Second Amendment rights to encryption technology.

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Re: LPC for speech (fwd)
by Timothy Newsham 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > >I'm not sure if a 486 can do the analysis in realtime. I'm sure ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^ > >the 486 could do the analysis in real time. I have C code for ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >LPC that will do synthesis to a file in realtime on a 486 machine. > >(The code is mostly generic C and will compile on most machines) > I'm not sure what you mean, it could or couldn't be done on a 486? > I think that you meant that the compression could not be done in > realtime but the expansion could? Or vice versa? Good one eh? Sorry for the confusion. I'm sure the 486 can do *synthesis* in real time. I'm not sure it can do *analysis* in real time. > Jeremy Porter ------------- Systems Engineering -------- > Dell Computer Corp. ------ jerry(a)terminus.us.dell.com ----

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Re: USENET on a tape, and future privacy
by jordan＠imsi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From jerry(a)terminus.us.dell.com Sun Dec 12 00:06:31 1993 You are talking about thousands of dollars of cost to do such a search. Sorry, I do searches like that all the time for "serious" candidates. Takes me no more than 10 minutes to set up the criteria, and an hour or so on an airplane to browse the output. Granted, I don't search a year (hey, if a candidate is a jerk on the net, they'll show up more than a few times in just a month's worth ...), but your "it's in the noise" statement is naive. /jordan

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Re: USENET on a tape, and future privacy
by markh＠wimsey.bc.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I was just thinking. My roommate mentioned that he saw an ad for > a service available in europe. They send you an 8mm tape evey week > that has all the USENET traffic on it. I was thinking that a large There is also a company in Vancouver B.C. that will sell you a subscription to USENET on CDROM. Each CD contains about a week of traffic (the cost is something like US$20 per CD). They CDs don't include traffic from certain newsgroups (mostly the sex related ones. I guess they don't want to get busted for distributing obscene material). I can dig up contact information, if anyone is interested. I spoke with one of their representatives a while back, and they apparently have sold subscriptions to various government agencies in the U.S. and Canada. Mark -- Mark Henderson markh(a)wimsey.bc.ca (personal account) RIPEM and ViaCrypt PGP 2.4 keys available by key server/finger/E-mail RIPEM MD5OfPublicKey: F1F5F0C3984CBEAF3889ADAFA2437433 ViaCrypt PGP Key Fingerprint: 21 F6 AF 2B 6A 8A 0B E1 A1 2A 2A 06 4A D5 92 46

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Re: Privacy as a Commodity
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Brian Beker writes: > is an appropriate level of privacy? When that question is formed on the > basis of "What have you got to hide?" it takes on the aspect of > accusation. And yet, that is precisely the question posed by our > government as it leads the cheers for the good, right-thinking folk who > know that only the guilty, only the criminally insane could ever feel the > overwhelming need for absolute privacy. Of course, the organization asking us "Why on earth would you want privacy, when we can run your lives so much better if we know everything you're doing?" is the same organization that splits up its information into categories like SECRET, TOP SECRET, ULTRA, BURN BEFORE READING, WNINTEL, RESTRICTED DATA, FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA, NO FOREIGN NATIONALS, FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY..... Cynically, Bill

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Re: One Time Pads $5000|Cheap
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One disadvantage of CDROMs is that you lose a major advantage that real paper one-time pads had - once you had used a page, you could burn it. With a CD-ROM, presumably the whole pad *will* last you a while, and you probably don't want to melt the outer tracks of the disk as you use them up... So you either send ~600MB of secret stuff or waste the disk, depending on how secure your communications needs are and how soon you expect to be busted. Bill # Bill Stewart Old address: wcs(a)anchor.ho.att.com AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ # After 10/15, NCR, 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 # Voice/Beeper 510-224-7043, Phone 510-484-6204, email bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com

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No Subject
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

seen on a real-time chat system at mit: From: The Warlord <warlord> Sigh. Anyways, I've told you all the information there is to tell: MIT administration (I/S) told me to shut down the keyserver. They were 'pushed' by PKP (Probably Bidzos). I do not know what was said, why these decisions were made, nor what is being held over people's heads... But I didn't believe I had the Political clout to do anything but comply. ---- notes: jim bruce is the vice president for information systems at mit. in general, stuff like the above doesn't happen unless jim says so. the request for the keyserver shutdown was apparantly not delivered in writing to derek, so there is no permanent record of what happened. the new keyserver at martigny.ai.mit.edu has the support of a full professor; derek's did not.

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No More Argh.
by frc＠bwnmr4.bwh.harvard.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Those who responded: Thanks, and I'm working out transfer ... To Those who didn't: You don't have to now..... FRC -- #include <hdrs/disclaim.std> /* Neural Nets catch only dreaming fish. */

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Re: One Time Pads $5000|Cheap
by freeman＠MasPar.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> ... zap part of the disc by writting them as all Ys ... The overwrite might be detectable microscopically by anyone who really wanted to crack the cypher and could steal your disc. -- Jay Freeman

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Humor: I am AC/DC!
by Harry Shapiro 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am AC/DC... that's Anarcho Capitalist /with Digital Cash /hawk -- Harry S. Hawk habs(a)extropy.org Electronic Communications Officer, Extropy Institute Inc. The Extropians Mailing List, Since 1991 EXTROPY -- A measure of intelligence, information, energy, vitality, experience, diversity, opportunity, and growth. EXTROPIANISM -- The philosophy that seeks to increase extropy.

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mirrorshades
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

After that hype, has anyone obtained the source code or the executable itself yet? Or was the entire project a hoax. It sounded quite interesting.... -uni-

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Checksums, etc. was Re: One Time Pads $5000|Cheap
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message Sun, 12 Dec 93 10:14:22 EST, bogstad(a)blaze.cs.jhu.edu (Bill Bogstad) writes: > Another problem is even if > the media itself has this capability the standard writer devices are > going to want to write block checksums etc.; which is probably going to > fail. A few years back I was into WORM disks for imaging systems. We needed to be able to burn an image on the disk, and then go back and set a "logical deletion" flag so that the records would no longer be accessible. The standard WORM device controllers wouldn't let it happen. They insisted on verifying the checksums on the block. We considered hacking the controller logic, but gave up as too much of a maintanance headache. But even WORM medea are rewritable at a low enuff level. Pat

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Writable CD-ROMS as one-time pads
by trestrab＠GVSU.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is there anything inherently superior about CD-ROMs as a one-time pad ? The size differential vis a vis Bernouli drive cartridges, floptical disk drives, or just plain old floppy disks is kind of a mixed blessing, and still doesn't answer the major question with one-time pads - secure dissemination. Jeff

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Keyservers are back :-)
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi folks - this cypherpunk has been writing code... all damn weekend (I'm really feeling old - 24hr hacks used to be no problem. Now i have to stop for 5 hours sleep...) Anyway, I've written a completely new - no pgp or RSA code - key server which I can't see anyone being able to object to. I'm looking for volunteers to alpha-test it. Note, alpha-testing means you have to know what you're doing - it's not in any way tested already and you'll be helping find the bugs and smooth the installation process. Mail me at gtoal(a)an-teallach.com if you want to volunteer as a tester for a week. This server works as a slave server hanging off the European ones; it'll be fast at returning keys that it knows about, that have been around for some time; all other operations may be a little slower. The nice thing about it is that - inspired by the cypherpunk remailers - I've written it so that it can run on ordinary users accounts. I think it will be quite hard to get rid of this time :) Just one thing - it needs the 'procmail' suite. If you have it, fine, you'll make a great tester; if you don't, please fetch it and get it running before you approach me for the keyserver code. In a week's time - ought to be enough for testing and fixing (I mean, it only took two days to write the damn thing in the first place) - I'll be releasing the code and hopefully making an announcement of all the new keyservers that will exist. (That last bit is up to you guys...) Graham

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Argh?
by frc＠bwnmr4.bwh.harvard.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone keep complete archives? Mail at my site was dead for about 5 days and i didn't recieve a single thing... And apparently my questions about Keyservers finally generated some discussion... I really just need the traffic for about the last 8 days or so... FRC frc(a)bwh.harvard.edu please reply in private (i hate to waste bw -- sorry) -- #include <hdrs/disclaim.std> /* Neural Nets catch only dreaming fish. */

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Re: USENET on a tape, and future privacy
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From - Nate Sammons: "My concern is that it is becoming more and more common for people to "grow up" on the net, many people I know of started quite young, and a determined opponent (as I'll call the snooper) could, concieveably search your entire posting history." Indeed, just from reading the postings to this and the extropians list for a few weeks, now, my neurological system has become impressed with info on one particular person such that I now know: his employment history & when he retired his present entrepreneural activities and other present interests & pursuits that he has wide feet which are his buddies on the two lists which are the women on the other list who typically disagree with him that the Energizer Rabbit (LD) considers him an enemy that he's up late, sending out posts at 2:00 a.m. some of his opinions on gender some of his opinions on women how he deals with argumentive conflicts I think someone mentioned he has beard (and it's possible I could get a dot-matrix print out of his image) where in the world he lives his past awards for a scientific discovery what kind of tub he bathes in And this is just from memory, I haven't intended to develop a file, but delete most messages once I have read them. Pretty good, for just browsing :>) Blanc

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Re: Privacy as a Commodit
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

B >what is an appropriate level of privacy? When that question is formed B >on the basis of "What have you got to hide?" it takes on the aspect of B >accusation. My mom (and others) have asked me this frequently. I even have an essay "Why Privacy?" on a disk somewhere. One of these days... The short answer is: "I don't know. If I did, I'd hide only that." In the last 300 years in Europe, people at various times and in various places have been murdered for the possesion of every conceivable human characteristic. Name any religion, occupation, habit, ethnicity, or anything about a person and I can dig up cases where people were killed (either publicly or privately) because they had that characteristic. That being the case, discretion is often the better part of valor. Besides, what is anyone else's need to know? Have they paid me to reveal info about myself? If they haven't, what call does anyone have to my labor in supplying that information. TANSTAAFL DCF --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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No Subject
by nobody＠rosebud.ee.uh.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Some quotes from the December 13, Ô93 issue of Newsweek: Cover: ÒGlobal Mafia: TheyÕre Ruthless. Stateless. High Tech. And Deadly.Ó p. 22 ÒAround the globe, intelligence agencies are refocusing their operations from spies to criminals. Some of this may reflect the desire of spooks to protect their budgets in the post-cold-war world. But the threat is real...Ó ÒThe first trend is the development of computer and communications technology. Electronic fund-transfer systems can whiz billions of dollars around the globe within seconds. Faxes and cellular telephones can be encrypted, making it all but impossible to trace calls from them. Drug-cartel planes flying north to the United States have signal interceptors to plot radar and avoid monitoring.Ó p. 24 Ò...the Cali cartel treats cocaine as a business like any other (give or take the odd murder). The cartel recently tried to lease its own satellite so the CIA and DEA couldnÕt listen in on conversations. CaliÕs recruits are intelligent and its systems are high tech. In one case, the DEA arrested a trafficker who had 20 computers to run his distribution network.Ó [Satellite KeyServers perhaps?]

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