December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
by Major Variola (ret) 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

I'd suggest "wget" for spidering sites. It can be told to ignore .robots files. It is good for mirroring sites which you suspect may be taken down. Win/Unix versions available.

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Re: cypherpunks discussions
by Major Variola (ret) 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

At 11:24 AM 12/8/03 -0800, Tim May wrote: >No, I think few topics on the Cypherpunks list are taken private. > >My reasons are two-fold: First, to get them to stop lurking and >participate. Second, to work up the energy to compose an essay (or >mini-essay, whatever), I need some motivation. I am not energetic about It can also be imprudent, as in a free trip to a grand jury in a distant land, possibly with you fronting the govt the money for the trip. All to hear you mention the Bill of Rights, repeatedly, of course. Neophytes are encouraged to look up Jim Bell, Declan, John Young, etc.

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Speaking of Reason
by Freematt357＠aol.com 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

Tim's whine (complaint) withstanding, I just got the January issue of Reason in the mail and of interest is Mike Godwin's interview of Bruce Sterling- Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future (p 42-50). It's worth a read. Regards, Matt-

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(No Subject)
by edo 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

Lne is on dialup? Wow. Anyhow, I'm a newbie who has been lurking a while. Privacy concerns and what intelligent people think about it is what got me on this list.With the USA becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... The sheen on the illusion of liberty here will wear thin soon, IMHO.People think that they enjoy liberty here because they can buy a gun. Yes the libertarians can claim that the guns protect them, and Afganistan and Iraq have been demonstrations of how it prevents a hostile takeover (just like someones sig about an RPG a day...) What good does it do inside the USA unless civil war breaks out? How does it protect the war protestors in NYC or those in Miami? I don't oppose guns, but just want to point out that the govt has been rapidly diminishing our civil liberties despite all the guns... As far as I'm concerned, true anonymity in finacial affairs (and secure communication channels) is the only real method open to peacefully combat the all seeing, all powerful government. I'm sure the interest in this will first focus on things like e-gold when common people see their life savings evaporate as the dollar continues its plunge. Any one with thoughts on this? Of course only a small percentage of the general public will be bright enough to see that a fiat currency does not last forever... and is dependent on the ever increasing projection of power by a nation state, which is not a stable sort of situation.The majority of them will want federal bailouts etc. What I'm curious about is digital currencies. Can anyone speak about the Digital Monetary Trust or DMT? I'm sorry I have not read the last upteen years of mail archives, but I'm interested in what people think NOW about Orlin Grabbe, DMT, e-gold etc. Anyone with anonymous or otherwise stories? People who've been part of the battle? Sorry for the ramble, but the most interesting comment recently was about David Chaums patents expiring soon... any word on its potential impact? Peace and liberty.

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Re: alt.anonymous.messages
by Nostradumbass＠SAFe-mail.net 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

-------- Original Message -------- From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon(a)pobox.com> > > You do not need to use remailers to take advantage of > > alt.anonymous.messages. If someone posts directly to > > alt.anonymous. messages, still the adversary cannot tell who he > > is posting to. (Assuming his recipient sets his newsagent to > > always download all new messages) > > Oh, that's true of course; but the adversary would be able to know > that you posted something (given that he's monitoring your traffic). > That's already something, and frequently more than you'd want to > give away. Use your laptop and random open Wi-Fi hotspots (esp. a consumer's) for such sensitive communication.

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Re: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
by Tyler Durden 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

Well, that sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there's got to be a lot more discussion before I'm convinced. Remember that psuedorandom or encrypted data has a certain noise spectrum. This noise spectrum is extremely different based on what PRBS one is using...PRBS 2^23-1 looks completely different from other 'noise' (and remember noise is a relative term). If you spatially fft a random photo, you'll find that the image detail energy largely occupies certain bands. These are not the bands that stego uses (or so I assume...it really can't be otherwise). The stego-able spectrum will indeed be noise, but this noise will have a certain spectrum. Stego, done well, will I assume try to mimic this noise, but there may be problems. If the message is encrypted, then merely loading that message into the photo will, I assume, NOT result in a noise spectrum that looks like real noise. So you'll need some kind of chopper or spectrum-spreader I guess. If no chopper's used, however, I'm guessing that stego-ed 'noise' doesn't look like true photo noise. If the photo has been de-stegoed stupidly (ie, by writing a random message in its place), that noise won't look like photo noise. So it seems to me that you'd need a sophisticated agent to make the de-steoed photo look like it never had stego. In other words, if the FBI are your man-in-the-middle, then you'll be able to detect that the photo was de-stegoed. If the NSA is your man-in-the-middle, you might not be able to tell. Any of you TLA lurkers wanna come in on a remailer and set me straight? -TD >From: "A.Melon" <juicy(a)melontraffickers.com> >To: cypherpunks(a)minder.net >Subject: Re: Has this photo been de-stegoed? >Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:28:31 -0800 (PST) > >Tyler Durden (camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com) wrote on 2003-12-08: > > Is it possible to determine that the photo 'originally' (ie, when it was > > sent to me) contained stegoed information, but that it was intercepted >in > > transit and the real message overwritten with noise or whatever? > >Hardly, given the simple fact that well-encrypted content is >indistinguishable from noise. _________________________________________________________________ Dont worry if your Inbox will max out while you are enjoying the holidays. Get MSN Extra Storage! http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es

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Zombie Patriots and other musings [was: Re: (No Subject)]
by Nostradumbass＠SAFe-mail.net 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

From: "J.A. Terranson" <measl(a)mfn.org> > On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Anatoly Vorobey wrote: > > > On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 12:47:27AM +0100, edo wrote: > > > With the USA > > > becoming the world's most totalitarian state in disguise... > > > > That's a pretty silly thing to say. > > Sure you don't want to educate yourself on those other states in the > > world? > > It's not silly at all: look again. He said "becoming". And it is. Fast. > It's *long* past time for the inhabitants here to have taken up arms and > blown holes in a *lot* of Federal heads. > > Just a few hundred dead federal goons, spread over a relatively short period > (~6 months), where the attacks were obviously coordinated, made against > officers enforcing particularly rancid unconstitutional laws (say the federal > tax code), and without discoverable perpetrators, would result in an almost > instantaneous shortage of officers available to enforce such uncontitutional > laws - the survivors would simply refuse. > > Long fucking overdue. At first it seems that there isn't much one person or even a few can do about this, but I'm no longer so sure. The politics and power of government is, in the end, always dispensed from the end of a gun. For this reason very few citizens even consider contending with the government for political purposes until they fell there is little choice. Nothing less than a guerilla war seems necessary to restore something akin to the original constitutional balance in the U.S. But where to recruit these people? My suggestion: the terminally ill. Many TI come to the table with a 'gift', the certainty of impending death and for some the possibility of fearlessness for physical harm or imprisonment. While the majority of the TI will not see any reason to buck the system in their final days (ideological disagreement, fear for the effect on their families, lack the health, resources, skills or mentality for such a ' final adventure ') I did some back of the envelope calculations that show that more than 100 people die in the U.S. every day who could fill the bill. I've coined the term Zombie Patriots to signify the TI who volunteer to give their last full measure to the American Restoration. Operating alone or in small groups they could form the backbone of an American Civil Liberties Army. ZPs need an education in how to create a personal plan of action and acquire the needed skills and resources (Paladin Press where are you when we need you). A Domestic American Patriot Family Fund may also be desired.

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Two interesting communication privacy tools
by Nostradumbass＠SAFe-mail.net 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

1. Invisiblog http://invisiblog.com/ lets you publish a weblog using GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network. You don't ever have to reveal your identity - not even to us. You don't have to trust us, because we'll never know who you are. 2. File-Exchange https://www.meshmx.com/fe/ allows you to exchanging files with other people without giving away your identity or harming your privacy. Furthermore it is so simple that you need nothing else but a web browser. No need for special software, hardware, resources etc. How to use it? You simply upload a file through the front end and get back an "access-key". This key can be send to any other person by email, instant-messaging or IIP. Anyone who has that key can download the file again by entering the key into the front end.... By default the file will render unaccessible one hour after it had been uploaded.

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Re: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
by Nostradumbass＠SAFe-mail.net 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

-------- Original Message -------- From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart(a)pobox.com> > On 10 Dec 2003 at 15:19, Nostradumbass(a)SAFe-mail.net wrote: > > E-gold and other DGCs do not do much if any due diligence in > > checking account holder identification > > Unfortunately, they also don't due much if any due diligence in > identifying themselves in messages to real or potential customers, > so it's extremely difficult to determine if I've gotten any > administrative messages that really _were_ from them > as opposed to the N fraudsters sending out mail asking you to - > log in to e-g0ld.com or whatever fake page lets them steal > your egold account number and password so they can drain your balance. Actually they do. Sort of at http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/alert.html - Never click hypertext links in HTML formatted e-mail to access your account. - Confirm that you are on the e-gold website before entering your e-gold passphrase into either a logon form or a payment authorization form (see note below about e-gold shopping cart interface): - Verify the address/location/URL starts with: https://www.e-gold.com/ - Verify that the site certificate is issued by VeriSign to www.e-gold.com > > A policy of PGP-signing all their messages using a key > that's published on their web pages would be a good start, > though it's still possible to trick some fraction of people > into accepting the wrong keys. Too few customers would know what to do with such a key. >For now, my basic assumption > is that any communications I receive that purport to be from them > are a fraud, and it's frustrating that there's no good mechanism > for reporting that to e-gold. They know about most of the fraudulent emails circulating. They don't want to hear about them from customers because it would exhaust what customer service resources they have. I have never received an email from e-gold following my account creation confirmation and I beleive its their policy not to send emails for just this reason.

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Re: ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
by Freematt357＠aol.com 11 Dec '03

11 Dec '03

In a message dated 12/10/2003 10:34:22 PM Eastern Standard Time, timcmay(a)got.net writes: > I receive several messages a month saying I need to re-verify > information with an E-gold account (which I never recall establishing, > by the way). > > If I ever determine that E-Gold personnel have faked an account on my > behalf, You're a moron Tim. Everybody here probably gets the scammers messages, I get e-gold and paypal cons on regular basis- E-gold never advertised itself as anything other than what it is, a bailee. What e-gold is really good is for is micropayments and I have personally found it good for making payments internationally. I know the principals involved, and I've personally viewed one of their vaults and the gold, etc. is really there. Regards, Matt-

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Re: alt.anonymous.messages
by Nostradumbass＠SAFe-mail.net 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd(a)echeque.com> > > You do not need to use remailers to take advantage of > alt.anonymous.messages. If someone posts directly to > alt.anonymous. messages, still the adversary cannot tell who he > is posting to. (Assuming his recipient sets his newsagent to > always download all new messages) Or access Usenet via a satellite feed.

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ALTA/DMT privacy [was: Re: (No Subject)]
by Nostradumbass＠SAFe-mail.net 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

At 10:37 AM 12/10/2003, James A. Donald wrote: -- On 9 Dec 2003 at 0:47, edo wrote: >> What I'm curious about is digital currencies. Can anyone >> speak about the Digital Monetary Trust or DMT? I'm sorry I >> have not read the last upteen years of mail archives, but I'm >> interested in what people think NOW about Orlin Grabbe, DMT, >> e-gold etc. ...snip.. >None of these accounts provide Chaumian anonymity, which means >they can track identity, which means they must track identity, which costs them. >However one can withdraw, and deposit, physical gold, which actually is anonymous, and provides a physical mix, since one gold atom looks very like another. E-gold and other DGCs do not do much if any due diligence in checking account holder identification, so if you use an effective proxying means (e.g., an open Wi-Fi hotspot) to create and access your accounts you are pretty safe. If you fund you accounts using money orders, you may be safe (depending on whether you've employed others to purchase the money orders or your physical identity is being captured at the money order agent during the transaction). Although ALTA/DMT doesn't support blinded tokens, it does support tokens. http://www.orlingrabbe.com/dmt_bearercert.htm ALTA/DMT does have a certain degree of un-linkability in that once accounts are deleted all db references in the system to that account are also deleted from all ALTA/DMT dbs. This means if value is transferred from account A to Account B and subsequently Account A is deleted all traces of the transaction should be unlinked from Account B. It also means if you delete an account with a balance, accidently or otherwise, the money is gone. Two e-gold exchange agents have announced either formally or informally that they will now transact with ALTA/DMT. I beleive thay both accept money orders for fuding. Money can be withdrawn using e-gold and/or ATM cards either directly supporting ALTA/DMT (https://www.liquidprivacy.net/) or e-gold.

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Re: Has this photo been de-stegoed?
by A.Melon 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

Tyler Durden (camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com) wrote on 2003-12-08: > Is it possible to determine that the photo 'originally' (ie, when it was > sent to me) contained stegoed information, but that it was intercepted in > transit and the real message overwritten with noise or whatever? Hardly, given the simple fact that well-encrypted content is indistinguishable from noise.

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Type III Anonymous message
by Nomen Nescio 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

-----BEGIN TYPE III ANONYMOUS MESSAGE----- Message-type: plaintext Tim, I AM GETTING TIRED OF SEEING CYPHERPUNKS RESTRICTING WHAT INFORMATION FLOWS AND TO WHERE IT FLOWS... -----END TYPE III ANONYMOUS MESSAGE-----

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Codecon 2004 CFP - Just a few days left
by Bram Cohen 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

CodeCon 3.0 February 20-22, 2004 San Francisco CA, USA www.codecon.org Call For Papers CodeCon is the premier showcase of active hacker projects. It is an excellent opportunity for developers to demonstrate their work and keep abreast of what's going on in their community. All presentations must include working demonstrations, ideally open source. Presenters must be one of the active developers of the code in question. We emphasize that demonstrations be of *working* code. CodeCon strongly encourages presenters from non-commercial and academic backgrounds to attend for the purposes of collaboration and the sharing of knowledge by providing free registration to workshop presenters and discounted registration to full-time students. We hereby solicit papers and demonstrations. * Papers and proposals due: December 15, 2003 * Authors notified: January 1, 2004 Possible topics include, but are by no means restricted to: * community-based web sites - forums, weblogs, personals * development tools - languages, debuggers, version control * file sharing systems - swarming distribution, distributed search * security products - mail encryption, intrusion detection, firewalls Presentations will be a 45 minutes long, with 15 minutes allocated for Q&A. Overruns will be truncated. Submission details: Submissions are being accepted immediately. Acceptance dates are November 15, and December 15. After the first acceptance date, submissions will be either accepted, rejected, or deferred to the second acceptance date. The conference language is English. Ideally, demonstrations should be usable by attendees with 802.11b connected devices either via a web interface, or locally on Windows, UNIX-like, or MacOS platforms. Cross-platform applications are most desirable. Our venue will be 21+. If you have a specific day on which you would prefer to present, please advise us. To submit, send mail to submissions(a)codecon.org including the following information: * Project name * url of project home page * tagline - one sentence or less summing up what the project does * names of presenter(s) and urls of their home pages, if they have any * one-paragraph bios of presenters (optional) * project history, no more than a few sentences * what will be done in the project demo * major achievement(s) so far * claim(s) to fame, if any * future plans Program Chair: Bram Cohen General Chair: Len Sassaman Program Committee: * Bram Cohen * Len Sassaman * Jonathan Moore * Jered Floyd * Brandon Wiley * Jeremy Bornstein Sponsorship: If your organization is interested in sponsoring CodeCon, we would love to hear from you. In particular, we are looking for sponsors for social meals and parties on any of the three days of the conference, as well as sponsors of the conference as a whole, prizes or awards for quality presentations, scholarships for qualified applicants, and assistance with transportation or accommodation for presenters with limited resources. If you might be interested in sponsoring any of these aspects, please contact the conference organizers at codecon-admin(a)codecon.org. Press policy: CodeCon strives to be a conference for developers, with strong audience participation. As such, we need to limit the number of complimentary passes for non-developer attendees. Press passes are limited to one pass per publication, and must be approved prior to the registration deadline (to be announced later). If you are a member of the press, and interested in covering CodeCon, please contact us early by sending email to press(a)codecon.org. Members of the press who do not receive press-passes are welcome to participate as regular conference attendees. Questions: If you have questions about CodeCon, or would like to contact the organizers, please mail codecon-admin(a)codecon.org. Please note this address is only for questions and administrative requests, and not for workshop presentation submissions.

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Re: whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
by FB` 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

I really would expect that preventing *spiders* (some spiders, even) using the *publicly accessible* robots.txt would be a pretty horribly ineffective form of "skullduggery"... can think of 10 things to do that are easier, more effective and less of a potential pr fiasco... see http://shock-awe.info/archive/000965.php FB`

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whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
by Eugen Leitl 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

Can somebody with a webspider crawl these documents, and put it up on the web? http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Tim May is Free!
by Tyler Durden 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

"I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny. >On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe. >When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted. Unfortunately >these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim >near the keyboard very often." I dunno...sometimes his racism and child-killing and "fuck them deads" seem to be fairly logical consequences of his basic philosophies. In fact, Tim May can only be truly free after every other human being in the world is dead... (Fade to wavy fluctuations of the visual field) The time is 2023, and Tim May finally figures out how to release a plague of nanobots that kill every human being in the world but himself. Now we see Tim May driving a Hummer over the rolling hills of No Cal, on his weekly excursion to view the piles of dead bodies on the outskirts of San Fransisco. He stops by a 7-11, picking up some supplies, and tosses a handful of pennies onto the counter, in front of the skeleton of the counter boy. "That's what the market can bare, my friend, and then some," he says with a sly grin. Arriving at the outskirts of San Fransisco he drives up to a tall hill, where some bodies are visible in the foreground, and downtown San Fransisco is visible in the distance. Complete silence pervades. Raising his fist in the air he shouts at the top of his lungs: "SODOMITES! NEGROS! STATISTS! BOLSHIES! I'M FREE, DO YOU HEAR ME! FREEEEEE!" Today he needs to re-gas the small powerplant that keeps his server farm alive. He decided to open his own Cypherpunks node, to which he posts on a regular basis. He's been issuing a stream of posts on "Darwinian Implications of Humanocide", and on how Darwinian evolution will eventually create a species much more advanced and free than the one he killed off. -TD >From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> >To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com >Subject: Re: Speaking of Reason >Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 08:26:22 -0500 > >At 4:57 PM -0800 12/9/03, Eric Murray wrote: > >I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny. > >On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe. > >When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted. Unfortunately > >these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim > >near the keyboard very often. > > > >> Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead. > > > >Ok, bye! > ><plonk> > > > >Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ >killfile) > >To quote a famous flying squirrel, that trick never works. Tried it myself >a few times over the years, and one usually misses too much of what this >list is for, as you noted yourself, above. > >Unfortunately, if you want to read Tim, you have to read his evil twin >Skippy, too. > >Living in *his* killfile, on the other hand, and if he actually uses it, >can be useful. Try it, you'll like it. > >Cheers, >RAH > >-- >----------------- >R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> >The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> >44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA >"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, >[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to >experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _________________________________________________________________ Get holiday tips for festive fun. http://special.msn.com/network/happyholidays.armx

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Re: Speaking of Reason
by Freematt357＠aol.com 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

In a message dated 12/9/2003 6:12:26 PM Eastern Standard Time, timcmay(a)got.net writes: > As for you, Gaylor, you subscribe for a while, contribute nothing, > vanish from the list for a couple of years, then resubscribe and > immediately start ranting that I am not doing enough for the cause. > > > Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead. > It's interesting to note you keep track of subscription patterns. "Fuck you dead", hmmm, I suppose that's better then your old refrain of threatening to shoot someone. Do you feel self-censored, afraid of the authorities, or just don't want to get your got.net account yanked? My point about Reason Magazine is your inability to understand that the magazine has improved. Regards, Matt-

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Re: Speaking of Reason
by Freematt357＠aol.com 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

In a message dated 12/9/2003 11:58:23 PM Eastern Standard Time, rah(a)shipwright.com writes: > Green = Red. > > Bruce Sterling is, for all intents and purposes, a commie. > > "Veridian", my ass. > My thoughts exactly. Regards, Matt-

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members
by privacy.at Anonymous Remailer 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

Hello I'm curious. You say the list got some 400+ members right now and that's only the lne node too. Can you provide some statistics on the users? How many addresses are .gov? Any valid TLA addresses in there?!

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Type III Anonymous message
by privacy.at Anonymous Remailer 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

-----BEGIN TYPE III ANONYMOUS MESSAGE----- Message-type: plaintext Tim, I AM GETTING TIRED OF SEEING CYPHERPUNKS RESTRICTING WHAT INFORMATION FLOWS AND TO WHERE IT FLOWS... -----END TYPE III ANONYMOUS MESSAGE-----

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Re: Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow"
by Tim May 10 Dec '03

10 Dec '03

On Dec 5, 2003, at 5:53 PM, Jamie Lawrence wrote: > >> I have nothing against Lessig, but it bugs me that he's considered by >> some to be one of the Great Cyberspace Thinkers when his ideas are so >> easily dismissed...and were argued on both sides so many years ago. >> >> Larry Lessig ought to read, and think deeply about, the first ten >> years >> of traffic on the Cypherpunks list. Especially the first five years. > > Lessig is a very smart man, in the framework he's very smart at dealing > with. And probably more beyond that. > > Unfortunately, I don't think copyright is an appropriate framework from > which to launch a discussion about wider modes of human communication. > > Correcting him early and often is absolutely in order - hopefully he'll > rethink a thing or two. This actually fits in with something Lessig is widely known for, his "technology-custom-law" trichotomy (*). (* He may call it something different...I haven't checked in a while. And I recall he may have a fourth component. I was talking in similar terms many years ago, too. Not that I am saying Lessig borrowed from my ideas, as I am sure many of us independently realized this. Cf. via Google some of the things I wrote about VCRs and how they changed the ground truth of what was legally copyable. Or how Gutenberg created a technology which made existing custom (e.g., the Church) and law (e.g., the Guilds) effectively moot.) Those who make Grand Plans about such things as "pseudonymity with legal warrant access" need to take systems and computer science (and hence math) into account. This usually comes through thinking about possible attacks, weaknesses, and design flaws. For example, I have cited the obvious case of someone, call him "Tim," using "Larry's LEO-Friendly Remailer." But Tim is _not_ a LEO-friendly remailer, and Tim has taken in articles from other such non-LEO-friendly remailers. The only way Larry knows that Tim is doing this is if Larry "peeks" (examines the content to see what it is, to see that it does not contain seditious or pornographic or non-LEO-friendly packets). Or Larry can wait for the eventual "legal warrant" and then find that Tim was remailing packets which could not be traced. Oops. Larry can then cancel Tim's account. More generally, I think Lessig has failed to understand the very fundamental, underlying structure of true Cypherpunks-style remailers: ::request-remailing-to: foo(a)anotherremailer.org This can be any arbitrary text, and all that is passed on to the next remailer or recipient. And this text block is not tagged in any way with sender ID. And this text can be encrypted, readable only by the specified "nextremailer." And this text block can included further requests for remailing, and so on and so forth. Tim again. With this structure, nested and packaged as a payload, for Lessig's scheme to actually give "warrant-only traceability," it must ban such nested remailings. Which means, ban on crypto. (For if crypto is allowed, then even a warrant cannot crack it. "Oh, then we'll have key escrow...") And so on. A little bit of thought reveals numerous such attacks on a "LEO-friendly remailer." And the "fixes" are all in the direction of, in the final analysis, banning strong encryption. Of course, Lessig may say that he is only advocating an ultra-weak system of remailers that only dummies will use. He may say he does not propose to actually ban "strong remailers." Some argue that weak systems--remailers or crypto--will thrive "because most crooks are lazy" has been dealt with many times. Sure, some people doing things use weak systems, out of ignorance, out of laziness, out of a sense that they are immortal and cannot be caught. But others doing illegal or marginal things are amongst the earliest adopters of relatively robust systems: offshore banks, encrypted disks, and, ironically, secure anonymous remailers. (When the Finnish police finally forced Julf Helsingius to reveal the pseudonym attached to the Church of Scientology "NOTS" documents, they found that inside was a packet from a true Cypherpunks remailer, whose last node was at C2Net, the company Sameer Parekh founded. End of trail. This showed that even as early as 1995 someone was thinking ahead to the day when the Finnish police would force a "weak pseudonymity" system like PENET (Julf's system, based on earlier code written by another hacker) to give "warranted access" a la Lessig. So much for people being too dumb to use a strong system!) If Lessig is truly _only_ proposing that some idiots be encouraged to use weak remailers and weak crypto, then, fine, no harm done. However, the goals Lessig is avowedly seeking, of access to identities through "legal warrants," then his system will rapidly become unused after the first few "legal warrant" convictions. So long as strong systems cost little more than weak systems, strong systems prevail. (And, for various reasons, strong systems are in most cases cheaper to use than weak systems.) In a kind of reverse of Gresham's Law ("weak money drives out good money"), strong crypto drives out weak crypto. (Actually, this is not so much a reverse of Gresham's Law as its manifestation in terms of what money is: people seek to get rid of (= spend) weak money and hold on to (= hoard, save) strong money. So they spend their "debased" currency and hold on to their gold double eagles. This actually confirms the above point.) Bottom Line: In the ecology of encryption, remailers, and digital money, weak systems that are LEO-friendly will ultimately lose out to strong systems. Unless the strong systems are outlawed, and maybe not even then. --Tim May "I'm sorry that Tim is being a bother again. He has a long history of being obnoxious and threatening. So far, he has not broken any laws. We have talked to the authorities about him on numerous occasions. They have chosen to watch but not act. Please feel free to notify me if he does anything that is beyond rude and actually violates any laws and I will immediately inform the authorities." Thank You Don Frederickson (co-owner and CEO of got.net, Santa Cruz)

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Re: Is Matel Stalinist?
by Tyler Durden 09 Dec '03

09 Dec '03

Tim May wrote... "This is silly, socialist nonsense. I know some of the book buyers at the "Borders" store in Santa Cruz (the very one that the "anti-bigness" lefties tried to ban from opening in Santa Cruz). Not only do they have a "local authors" section which is larger than the similar section at the "local" bookstore, but they have a sophisticated system for re-ordering books based on sales. If a title sells, they know it. And can order replacements." Nothing particularly socialist about my original statement. I was trying to point out how the knee-jerk mimicry of top-down structures prevented even big companies from making as much money as they could, by awarding and leveraging local talent and information. It would be nice to think that part of Border's success is from doing some of this. As for the small, independent bookstores, I personally helped trounce one in particular...the owner was not only a know-it-all DICK he really wasn't a very good businessman. He tried to tell his customers that they should want what he was selling and it didn't work. (Every now and then I'd try to send a customer or two his way to get the kind of books the Central Office wouldn't let us carry, and on several occasions the reply was "No thank you, I'm never shopping THERE again..."). So I'm not advocating 'requiring' big retail companies to get smarter, nor am I advocating non-shopping at the big Borders and Barnes and Nobles. My point was that a lot of corporate cultures blindly mimic hierarchies even when that's not appropriate, because it just about the only social model anyone's ever experienced. >And being a shareholder in a bunch of non-Silicon Valley companies, I can >also assure you that their 'high-level strategic decisons" are NOT "made >almost entirely in the vacuum of power." Well, I'm thinking of the Lucents, Nortels and Alcatels of the world. Oh, and all the big old financial houses as well. Those two sectors I can claim some decent familiarity with (I too am a shareholder in various companies). When Lucent bought Chromatis, or when Sandy Weil told Jack Grubman to uppe his rating on AT&T or...well, these major, corporation-shaking decisions were pretty much made in a vacuum of power. There's no way shareholders could give the thumbs-down to those absurd deals, or even (really) chuck out those responsible. Of course, you'll argue that the shareholders could vote with their feet until something was done, but that's besides the point. The point here is that shareholders, Boardmembers, and upper management alike are so used to an environment where little or no feedback is possible that something like this happens so often. I'm not saying "there should be a law"...it's a cultural thing, and the culture sucks, because we're used to being told what to do by somebody else who's "in charge". >You silly Bolshies are obviously on the wrong list if you think strong >crypto is going to help your cause. Not so fast my fine, crypto-fascist friend. Let's look at Grubman. At the time Sandy Weil gave him his marching orders he probably had (at least) 10s of millions of dollars-worth of immature Citigroup options. You can also bet he was paying out the friggin WAZOO for whatever upper-east-side space he had (as well as whatever East Hampton 'bungalo' he had). So in a way, he was on the hook, and stood to make a hell of a lot more on the AT&T deal. So he probably didn't really WANT to put lipstick on that pig, but he didn't have a lot of choice. (OK, he had plenty of choice, but that's a different matter...) Now let's say some kind of really sophisticated blacknet were available, able to support even short-selling and whatnot. In that case Grubman might have secretly shorted the AT&T deal and then given Sandy the finger, all the while preserving his tattered (but then still-salvagable) reputation as at least an "honest" pump-and-dump analyst, while being able to keep himself afloat in high-end hookers and other goodies (that's what I would have done!). >From this perspective, crypto would have allowed enough holes to be punched in the deal so that real market forces could tear it apart like pirana, which is what should have happened. -TD _________________________________________________________________ Winterize your home with tips from MSN House & Home. http://special.msn.com/home/warmhome.armx

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Re: Anti-globalization
by Declan O'Reilly 09 Dec '03

09 Dec '03

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 02:18:37 +0200 Anatoly Vorobey <mellon(a)pobox.com> wrote: > That was a rhetorical question. In the "old Soviet oligarchy", you > would get into real trouble for publicly speaking against it. In > "today's corporate oligarchy", this is obviously not true. Therefore > the comparison is flawed, and it's not at all true that "just the names > and titles are different". > > -- > avva Oops , my bad Thanks Anatoly Declan O'Reilly

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