December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [DSS] PGP Signatures
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Decoy Vilus K)ankersore( Of The Minute's family tree goes straight up. All of his ancestors were siblings, too dumb to recognize each other in the dark. |\_/| (0_0) Decoy Vilus K)ankersore( Of The Minute ==(Y)== ---(u)---(u)---

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Re: what's in a name?
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Without answering any of the points raised by Wei Dai, let me address the subject line. I have been a long time reader of and occasional contributor to the cypherpunks list. Since it is high volume, I prefer not to have it show up in my mailbox, but read it from either nntp.hks.net or infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks. With the recent change in status of the list, what I get at those two places is the edited list. The same would apply to other sublists subscribed to cypherpunks(a)toad.com too. If hks and infinity started archiving the unedited list, this wouldn't bother me so much. Other than that, I am saddened, as much as a Tim is enraged, that a supposedly libertarian and anarchistic group of people has decided that censorship is the right solution to their problems. Btw, what is with nntp.hks.net? Seems to have been down for couple of days.

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[STEGO] Degausser
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Decoy L[esbian] Vitriol K[ancer]OTM has been fired for masturbating in front of his boss. o/ Decoy L[esbian] Vitriol K[ancer]OTM <| / >

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: > ichudov(a)algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes: > > Adam Back wrote: > > > Perhaps it is time to reconsider the benefits of alt.cypherpunks. (As > > > an aside, it is ironic that John Gilmore was the guy who started the > > > alt.* USENET hierarchy, specifically to facilitate freedom of speech). > > An interesting idea. What's also interesting is Tim May posting after a long "absence", and in his post he repeats virtually sentence-for-sentence what a handful of people have been saying here for the past month.

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Re: FCPUNX:ecure Phones
by Dave Emery 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Don't think I will bore the list with it, But a slightly more complex version of this scheme was one of the major tactical medium security voice scrambling systems used by the US in the 70's and 80's and even to a slight extent into the 90's on military radio circuits. The military version is called Parkhill and the crypto gear is the KY-65 and KY-75. At one time (in the 70's) it was used for at least secret traffic. It was downgraded a couple of times since and is now considered obselete and compromised. A Parkhill crypto box can be seen in the NSA museum... The NSA version used time inversion (playing voice samples backwards) and faster shuffling than this one does, and possibly a more secure key generator. But it is rumored to have been broken by more than one opponent, perhaps including drug cartels. Its appeal and why it was so extensively used for a while is that it interfaces to normal voice radio gear at the audio input and output level rather than requiring different modulations and complex digital modems integrated into the radio. It also gives pretty good speech quality and speaker recognition. Its primary replacement is the ANDVT digital voice terminal which takes advantage of modern DSP technology to implement modems usable over radio links and vocoders which can produce acceptable speech at 1200 or 2400 baud. Dave Emery die(a)die.com

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Re: FCPUNX:ecure Phones (fwd)
by Dave Emery 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message:

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Voting on Moderation [was: Dissolving Choke Points]
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric Cordian wrote: > Peter Hendrickson writes: > > Moderation has been a failure. I'm pretty good at filtering and I > > can sadly report that there is very little signal out there. > The quality of the Cypherpunks list is determined solely by the > amount of signal. The amount of noise is irrelevant. [snip] > Now that we have moderation, I can't do this while subscribed to the > main list, and have to live in eternal fear that I am writing for > an audience of 20 every time I respond to something on the unedited > list. Foo on that. I wonder how Sandy will take the vote on continuing or abandoning the moderation experiment? In most states, one juror out of 12 can kill a conviction. In a revolution such as U.S. 1776, only a tiny percent of the people supported the revolution. Will Sandy go with a majority decision (pure democratic), or allow the moderation to go away if a significant minority wants to kill it?

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tmcghan(a)gill-simpson.com wrote: > in a message allegedly from: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> > > the really important issue is this: is the _physical hosting_ of the > > Cypherpunks mailing list coterminous with the "Cypherpunks"? > { much thoughtful and well-phrased commentary elided } > > I would have had no problem had John announced that he was creating > > a new list, the "Good Stuff" list, with Sandy has his Chooser of > > Good Stuff. But by making the _main list_ the censored one, this > > skewed things considerably. > Now that the horse is out of the barn, ( or maybe not? ), I can't help > but ask whether one specific 'change to the change' would have > satisfied most of your objections: retaining 'cypherpunks' as the > name of the unedited, all-the-crud-you-can-read-and-then-some, > version, and adding an 'cp-worthwhile' list for those of us who prefer > not to wade thru mountains of garbage to glean a few precious tidbits. > What's in a name? Is perception more important ( to you ) than > reality? If just swapping names between cp and cp-unedited would make > such a large difference, I humbly suggest to you that you consider how > much labels need to matter. Is the title of the group more important > the the content? From where I sit, this looks a lot like a > style-over-substance complaint. Of course, I don't have my trifocals > on just at the moment. If it did not suit a specific purpose, they wouldn't have done it that way. You can take it to the bank that they did this because it was the only way to keep the 1300-plus sheep subscribed to what they wanted to be their "main" list.

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Re: Dissolving Choke Points
by Peter Hendrickson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:59 PM 2/3/1997, Greg Broiles wrote: >At 10:55 AM 2/3/97 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >> Moderation has been a failure. I'm pretty good at filtering and I >> can sadly report that there is very little signal out there. > I don't think it's reasonable to expect an increase in signal within 2 1/2 > weeks of the start of moderation. What I have seen is a pretty complete elimination of the signal that was there. Some might argue that this is "just" because Tim stopped posting. But so what? The result of moderation was the elimination of signal. (Aside: Can anybody think of five members of the list whose combined contributions clearly exceed Tim's? I can't.) Also, I am curious when you expect the benefits of moderation to arrive. Two and a half weeks should be plenty of time for a reasoned creative and interesting discussion to develop. It hasn't happened. Instead the value of the list has - in my view - steadily tapered off since the announcement of moderation. >> There are lessons to be learned here. One is that censorship does >> not promote a stimulating and creative dialogue. > No, that is a silly lesson to draw from this experiment. There are > lots of useful and interesting "moderated" (on paper, it's called > "editing") publications/lists/digests where the content is > intentionally controlled for content and style. And in practice people get their friends published. Ever wonder why Denning got so much bandwidth on the RISKS list when she had so little to say? I don't like edited journals, either. I prefer to have somebody I respect say "Did you see so-and-so's paper? Here's the URL." Most of what is in, for instance, peer reviewed scientific journals is fluff designed to enhance somebody's resume. Moderation was a good idea when you had a number of people who couldn't all talk at once in the same room and in which a disruptive influence could not be easily ignored. We have better ways to communicate now. Let's use them. Peter Hendrickson pdh(a)best.com

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Mailing Lists vs. Usenet
by Peter Hendrickson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:59 PM 2/3/1997, Greg Broiles wrote: > Seriously, if you want a distributed no-choke-points "flooding" > message distribution system, you're talking about Usenet. Robust > software exists for clients and servers, and it's already supported > worldwide on many operating systems. No need to write more software > to graft that functionality onto E-mail. If the list is going to > turn into Usenet (we've already got most of Usenet's better kooks), > we might as well just move the damn thing over to alt.cypherpunks > and be done with it. (Anyone care to guess who founded alt.* as a > way to route around censorship?) > (Of course, Usenet is a technical success and a spectacular failure, > content-wise. So opponents of moderation will be forgiven for > failing to mention this sparkling example of an unmoderated, > anything-goes forum for discussion.) Several people have brought up this point and it is worth discussing. There are some differences. I don't like Usenet's architecture. It is silly to duplicate vast amounts of traffic everywhere. It was a fine idea when there were 100 groups with lots of overlap in what people read. The horse and buggy was a good idea once too. Performance is a problem with Usenet. The system I envision (nearly identical to Igor's) would have about ten mail servers, each of which sends articles to all the others. Even in situations where something is wrong, articles will be nearly instantly transmitted along an alternate path. I think this is harder to arrange with Usenet. Competition among Cypherpunks providers works the right way. If you are getting your mail on a system which is slow and isn't up all the time, you have good reasons to switch to another provider. This is easy - just subscribe yourself to one mailing list and unsubscribe from the other. It's harder for most people to do this with Usenet. You may not want to switch your ISP to get a better Cypherpunks feed. In my opinion, Usenet is less conducive to filtering than is mail. It is true that there are lots of Usenet readers which can do things like kill whole threads and the like, but mail just screams "run me through a perl script!" This is mostly subjective, of course. More subjective opinions: I don't like being associated with Usenet. It is seen as an international bulletin board. Many people believe that it is "public" space and should be subject to zoning. I like the idea of keeping the cypherpunks list "private". I like being able to say "if what's on the list upsets you so much, why did you subscribe?" This is more effective than "so tell your child not look at Usenet". I don't like the whole Usenet cabal and all of the voting to decide which lists to canonize. Less of an issue with alt.cypherpunks, but the association is still there. Peter Hendrickson ph(a)netcom.com

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Re: Dissolving Choke Points
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"gbroiles(a)netbox.com" "Greg Broiles" 4-FEB-1997 01:26:13.34 >(I'm working on a message re moderation and the list which will better >explain what I think about that - but I'm not trying to argue, above, that >we *must* have moderation for a long time - simply that it's too early to >call it a failure for failing to significantly increase the number of >useful messages.) I'll be interested in that message. I have problems with the takeover of the original list name, personally. While it is certainly John Gilmore's right to do whatever he wants with the mailing list software/hardware (I believe we've settled that, right?), I'd prefer for the cypherpunks _name_ not be associated with a moderated/censored list. (I mean no insult to either Sandy or John in this, BTW... I simply think that they've gone about this the wrong way. For instance, if John was getting an email overload for toad.com and was trying to indirectly reduce the load via reducing responses to flames, there are other ways to solve the problem - such as the distributed mailing list idea. I do think that Sandy's filtered list could provide a valuable service - most of the other filtered lists seem to filter out a bit too much, judging by the "cc any replies to this message directly to me, I'm on the [insert name of filtered list]" messages I see. If the list switches to cypherpunks and cypherpunks-edited, I might go with cypherpunks-edited (or with some combo of cypherpunks-edited and cypherpunks-flames, the latter more filtered by procmail). My objection is mainly due to the principle of the thing.) Incidentally, I checked the cyberpass.net services, and it does list mailing lists - including a 10$ per month charge per 100 subscribers. At that rate, I can afford about 100 subscribers on a local distributed list, given the 10% discount. (Depending on how it goes, I might be able to afford more... I haven't looked at my personal finances in detail recently.) >I think you misspelled "Usenet". Hope this helps. >Seriously, if you want a distributed no-choke-points "flooding" message >distribution system, you're talking about Usenet. Robust software exists >for clients and servers, and it's already supported worldwide on many >operating systems. No need to write more software to graft that >functionality onto E-mail. If the list is going to turn into Usenet (we've >already got most of Usenet's better kooks), we might as well just move the >damn thing over to alt.cypherpunks and be done with it. (Anyone care to >guess who founded alt.* as a way to route around censorship?) I'd point out that we _know_ every list member can get email, but not that they can get Usenet. I can't conveniently get it, for instance - I'd have to read it via HTTP and respond via email to a news-to-mail server. Sure, I can get an account at infonex or wherever and pick up the news groups there... but I'd prefer not to be forced to, and I suspect the same is true of many people. >(Of course, Usenet is a technical success and a spectacular failure, >content-wise. So opponents of moderation will be forgiven for failing to >mention this sparkling example of an unmoderated, anything-goes forum for >discussion.) Usenet also has easy crossposting, has been discovered by just about every spam artist known to humankind, and doesn't have very good filtering software (IMO, the last time I checked). Limited propagation, especially for a new alt group, especially for a _controversial_ alt group, is also a problem. Sure, Usenet has its advantages. (Under allens(a)earlham.edu and allens(a)yang.earlham.edu, I was the second or third highest poster on it for a few weeks a few years back. I'm familiar with Usenet.) But it also has its problems. -Allen

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:50 PM -0500 2/3/97, Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law wrote: >I agree with two of Tim's points. I express no opinion about the others, >except that I think these are the two most important. > >(1) I agree with Tim that as a matter of principle, it would be preferable >to create a new moderated list, with a similar but distinguishable name, >and leave the existing list as it was. I happen to think less turns on This is a point of view many of the most thoughtful commenters seem to agree on, isn't it? One would have thought that had Sandy and John really been interested in hearing the views of list members, this approach would have eventually won out. >(2) Much to my surprise, so far moderation is a failure. I think it is a It doesn't surprise me, but then I've rarely been a fan of moderation. As Michael points out below, it mostly works on "RISKS," but in most other cases I can think of it merely slows discussion down, introduces strange skewings of opinions (to win "approval" of the moderator), and almost never causes better posts to be written. (The case of skilled editors soliciting good articles is of course an entirely different issue.) >failure because it achieves neither of the moderation "sweet spots". No >moderation is one "sweet spot". Strict moderation -- the kind you get on >RISKS, where you know nearly every post is on-topic or at least worth your >time -- is another. This is neither. My clumsy procmail filters are almost >as busy as ever. What slips through is largely duplicative of what I get Several people have also commented on this, that their filters are still working overtime. As it should be, really, as no moderator can make the list match any given person's preferences. (Personally, I'm not even convinced filters are essential. It takes no longer than 5 seconds to glance at a message and know whether to scrap it or not. Granted, it takes a bit of time to download, especially at slower modem speeds. But whether Sandy's censorship is producing any significant "savings" depends on how many messages he's sorting into each pile...clearly if 20% or less of the total posts are being filtered out, then the savings are ignorable. Anybody have the statistics handy? Hint: Sandy should publish a periodic accounting of how many messages went into each pile, and should also publish his criteria on a regular basis, pointing out any modifications he's made to his criteria since the last report.) >As Oscar Wilde either said, or should have said, the worst crime is to be >boring. Maybe the list is like the portrait of Dorian Gray, with an image of the list sitting in a closet at Toad Hall aging not so gracefully. >PS. New members of the list may justly ask, where does he get off calling >the posters he doesn't killfile bores? I stopped posting a lot to the >list some time ago, back when I decided my energies were better spent >writing long stuff (see my web page) and playing with my kids. I kept >reading the list primarily to read the work of about six people -- and Tim >was one of them. Thanks. And I should point out in fairness that Michael recruited me for his panel on "Governmental and Societal Implications of Digital Cash" (or something like this) at the upcoming CFP. --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I 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: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: GAK/KR spin
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 14:34:49 -0800 > From: Steve Schear <azur(a)netcom.com> > To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Subject: GAK/KR spin > Several months back there were discussions on the list regarding renaming > the government's key escrow/recovery proposals (KRAP comes to mind). I > think we need something that's catchy and simple (perhaps already familiar) > to understand for the semi-litterate citizen units. I propose we encourage > use of the terms "crippleware" or "crypto crippleware" when refering to the > products limited to their weak crypto and/or key escrow/recovery. > > --Steve For some time, I have been using the term 'espionage-enabled software' to describe GAK'd products. Also, 'compromised software' - I want to make the point that 'key escrow/recovery' == insecure.' Peter Trei trei(a)process.com PS: I have SW for working on the $10,000 DES challenge available.

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Scott V. McGuire wrote: > (Even within the community, some people are more a part of > it than others, and nobody is more a part of it then Tim.) Is this like saying "some of the pigs were more equal than the others"?

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Re: Trigger-Words...Trigger-Fingers
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Larry Johnson wrote: > Cynthia H. Brown wrote: [snippo] > Theres not many girls on this list, is there? [mo' snippo] > Anyway, my uncle prints out the girl-cypherpunks stuff for the girls > on my list and they think its real cool and they all want to marry > technicians so that they can make them work on the computers for them, > kind of like making them do the computer dishes, you know. [yet mo' snippo] I want to get married. Lots of times. Are the girls cute? I don't do hardware, tho, I'm a software guy.

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FW: concerning Ben Franklin
by Butler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Kent Crispin wrote: >Franklin said "A man owns an ass; he can vote. The >ass dies; he cannot vote. Who owns the vote?" Poor Timmy May must not be able to vote then, as surely his ass must have been "bashed" to death by now. Scott. REMEMBER: "Dreams are just Screen Savers for the brain"

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May wrote: > At 10:50 PM -0500 2/3/97, Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law wrote: > >(1) I agree with Tim that as a matter of principle, it would be preferable > >to create a new moderated list, with a similar but distinguishable name, > >and leave the existing list as it was. I happen to think less turns on > This is a point of view many of the most thoughtful commenters seem to > agree on, isn't it? One would have thought that had Sandy and John really > been interested in hearing the views of list members, this approach would > have eventually won out. Once again, the reason John and Sandy weren't interested was because the main proponents of this point of view for a long time were me, Dr. Vulis, and Toto. Tim and others were either supportive of Sandy or were silent.

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Steve Schear wrote: > New X-ray gun trades privacy for safety > Reported by Andy C > Seen in The Nando Times on 13 August 1996 > "I'm incredibly concerned," said John Henry Hingson, a past president of the > National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, meeting here this past > week. "The entire nation could become a victim of illegal searches and > seizures and the law is powerless to protect them from these police abuses." > But in these nervous times following the the crash of TWA Fight 800 and > bombings at the Olympics, Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center, many > Americans are now willing to trade some of their privacy and civil liberties > for greater security. > A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of people -- > 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help > thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were > at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. The L.A. Times quotes this "poll" all the time, and in fact probably just made it up. Why do I know that? Because they ran a "letter" from a "teacher" in the valley somewhere about a year ago which said exactly this same thing. The "teacher" ran a poll of her students and they agreed to give up the rights without even knowing which rights they were giving up.

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Re: Dissolving Choke Points
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:59 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote: >If the list is going to turn into Usenet (we've already got most of >Usenet's better kooks), we might as well just move the >damn thing over to alt.cypherpunks and be done with it. >(Anyone care to guess who founded alt.* as a way to route around >censorship?) The big argument against going to a newsgroup in the past was that signal-to-noise would degrade to the point of alt.2600ness due to newbies, flamers, overflow to/from political ranting newsgroups, etc., and there's already a sci.crypt for that. The main argument in favor of moderation has been that the list has become unreadable due to newbies, flamers, political ranting, and directed attacks and maybe moderation would fix it, at the cost of annoying people who don't like moderation (which is realistically most of us; two practical reasons not to have moderation are that the volume is too high for most people to be willing to moderate, and that the delays inherent in the moderation process reduce the interactivity that's been one of the valuable things about this list.) I'd prefer that we all just get along, but things really were getting uncivil. An advantage of Usenet is the ability to deploy whatever NoCeM is called these days as a way to let people avoid spammers. Personally, I'd switched to the fcpunx filtered list a couple months ago, mainly to cut down on volume but also because I was getting fed up with Vulis's attacks through remailers, which were getting to be too much trouble to filter out. I switched back to the main list after the moderation announcement, with Eudora filters to make some discussions and some people go away. Of course, there have been several different demonstrations of ways around the moderation since then. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Re: If guilty of a lesser crime, you can be sentenced for a greater
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Igor Chudov @ home wrote: > Dale Thorn wrote: > > Igor Chudov @ home wrote: [some arguments deleted for lack of time to reply] > > > Another story: suppose that OKSAS hired me to work for her, but then > > > our relationships go south and she fires me. Again, her fate is very > > > unclear, although I would probably spare her life if it were she. > > If she does it right, with empathy, there is not likely to be a > > problem. On the other hand, if she bad-mouths you to prospective > > employers or customers you want to do business with, you might be > > inclined to hit her. This happens a lot when AP is not available. > ... But would happen more often if it was. Why, if AP was readily available, would she want to risk being hit by bad-mouthing you unnecessarily? > > people who have such money are not going to bump off very many more > > people than they already do, because: > > 1. They need the people to make money off of (Mafia rule #4, never > > kill someone who owes you money [or is a money source]). > This is a wrong Mafia rule, they do kill debtors who are in default. Really? Then how do they collect their money? BTW, I heard the rule from the mouth of a real mob hitman. > > 2. Rich people have a lot of eyes on them, and it would be easy to > > triangulate a series of murders to them, even without hard evidence. > > In an AP world, this triangulation/correlation would be enough to > > convince people to either shun this killer, or kill him outright. > When ten people make deals with each other, it becomes hard to > triangulate. And it is easy, if you know what deals are done, to change > the result of triangulation: suppose that I know that you borrowed 1 > million from Toto, that my _and_ yours business partner had been > murdered (by me, but no one knows), and I am afraid that someone will > triangulate me and implicate me in that murder. I secretly order > the AP bot to kill Toto, and you get implicated. Not good. We all know how people are framed, and we've seen the Hitchcockian murder scenarios on TV, in movies, etc. Certainly the CIA et al can create these scenarios, but what does that have to do with AP as used by ordinary persons?

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Re: Dissolving Choke Points
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 10:58 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: >An advantage of Usenet is the ability to deploy whatever NoCeM is >called these days as a way to let people avoid spammers. My mention of Usenet was somewhat tongue-in-cheek; I don't know if I'd bother with the list if it were moved to (or gated with) Usenet, as Usenet has become for the most part 100+ Mb/day of uselessness. But my impression is that many moderation opponents would also be opponents of a move to Usenet. Perhaps I'm wrong. But Usenet offers precisely what many people claim we must have for the list to be viable, e.g., uncontrolled/uncontrollable distribution and messaging. So I'm curious about whether or not the proponents of an open, uncontrolled list really want it to be *that* open and uncontrolled. In the past, there's been strong opposition to that. But it's possible that most of the people who had strong feelings about not wanting to be subjected to the downside of Usenet have already left the list. (And if the current opponents of moderation don't want to see the list be quite that open, I think what we're arguing about here is not "censorship v. no censorship" but "what degree of censorship do we want? one lump, or two?", which pretty much eliminates anyone's claim to have a moral high ground from which to argue.) There's really nothing stopping anyone from just setting up a gateway. The list is already gated one-way to Usenet; it shows up many places as mail.cypherpunks. What's missing is a gateway running the other direction; from looking at the headers as messages are received at my ISP (io.com) toad.com is already in the Path: line, so preventing backfeeding shouldn't be a problem. (Doh, it's been a few years since I fussed with mail-to-news and back again, but this isn't rocket science.) The good side I see to a move to Usenet is that it lets people use the comparatively better tools for managing messages - e.g., NoCeM, threading, nn (whose killfiles will kill by thread, author, regexp, and can be time limited so you can easily give annoying people a 30-day 'timeout' and see if they're still a kook later on), AltaVista and DejaNews archiving/searching, and server architecture that's designed to cope with storing/indexing many messages. The down side is that Usenet is more or less a sewer these days, and some of it's bound to spill over. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 4.5 iQEVAgUBMvcLpv37pMWUJFlhAQFTJgf/UAFESNbjEK2NRabq56We3PkF+sM7pwHU b7Gy/h6a+KusZECe3epIm9/ubvGiZJtVpkp1zTG/AqBJVkdRb9xyIwWpOXU9HUz+ gjzASY/x0Zwsy9AlCgAk0HSEL1bggFTgAjDPB8SSOaYuxP1czpmAAVHTZiNXioV5 AAsnCXLc0qLgXYZ6/3dQhtIznH41ciNhVgI4RhV9lfheCpIhxJJC0zlh7wX2QzMv VhPidpcCmKiCriULwvOJuIkt0SFLvIjxm18zBh6UIe/APgL6TDsr022DTB+S6G/b qgH1aO9xhZtu84I/+V/pOCyKGk+9qij94CwNumN+Hs/cZMybiaO4bQ== =YwhW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles(a)netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |

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Re: what's in a name?
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 04:58 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Wei Dai wrote: >An interesting way to look at what happened is that John >Gilmore owns the name "cypherpunks(a)toad.com" and has chosen to exercise >that ownership. [...] >I suspect that the hierarchical nature of name ownership on the Internet >today will be an important technological barrier for the establishment of >truly anarchic virtual communities. Unless this problem is solved, the >closest we'll come is pseudo-anarchies that exist with the tolerance of >beneficent dictators. Wei Dai's message raises an important question: what is the relationship between ownership and list content or quality? Much of the pathology of the list in the past few months can be characterized as a "tragedy of the commons" problem, where several private actors are seeking to maximize the gain they can extract from a finite and commonly owned (or unownable) resource. The resource in this case is the "reputation capital" which has built up in the terms "cypherpunks" and "cypherpunks(a)toad.com". Dmitri Vulis' behavior, where he seeks to punish the list for failing to punish or ostracize Tim May after Tim was disrespectful to Vulis, is an attempt to achieve private gain (public retribution) at the expense of public goods (the continuing quality and good name of the list). Several authors have characterized John Gilmore and Sandy Sandfort's actions with respect to moderation and the list as an attempt to monopolize or appropriate the good name of the list for their own private purposes. (I do not think that the latter characterization is accurate, but it is at least popular.) I suspect that many people will see at least one "tragedy of the commons" problem related to the list. Some free-market economists have suggested that the solution to "tragedy of the commons" problems is private ownership - that where economic actors are given ownership over what might have been owned in common, that they will seek to maximize their long-term gain through careful management and will not adopt wasteful or harmful short-term strategies which would have otherwise seemed attractive. That view (that private ownership is likely to eliminate or at least minimize wasteful or nonoptimal use of resources) has historically been a popular one on the list. Yet private ownership of the list (or of the list's most concrete identity, the label "cypherpunks") seems wrong to many people. Are mailing lists an example of a situation where "the tragedy of the commons" is not a useful metaphor? Are mailing lists an example of "public goods" where private ownership is impossible, or should be avoided? If not, shouldn't we work towards more private ownership, not less? Is the desire for an anarchic community at odds with a desire for good use of resources? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 4.5 iQEVAgUBMvcZgv37pMWUJFlhAQEf6gf9FAPo+nF/h3ZAZTTzmZZLpj57xDvpcgKW oXCvalcY20s+ah26SFP5cInGSxgOy+UC5zxAeEz/Oo/M/5n1LVZTFVg7f3PORgJW VwY7uVhqvekaX/vNYutg7RpwvhdEz5dneipZMaFOWm0M+8ipZ5Ffb6vNLpRd6h2v Hf+zF6aTvleTxQX1e3C8nrL1hhXd8HX12nK/Kz4/lOyRYvKw//VxtVa3++2M158t YtBXQKLlYAW/NMUhMMSuqvkWbCW3PrDBhpsZRXXqWyruIeV3TKHlR4N3Rru74wHj DPNH8sek3Ql8sjA0BbziUqbC15mLH6QSZbxy4MPVwc2s8r4Ff6t1Ew== =QFGr -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles(a)netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> This is Tim's first error of fact. I point it out not to insult > him, but because it seriously affects much of the rest of his > analysis. We are conducting an experiment. It will last one > month. After that, it's over if list members want it to be over. > If, on the other hand, moderation is seen by the list members as > beneficial to their use and enjoyment of the list, the current > form of moderation--or some variation will continue. How will you allow list members to decide? - Here presumably we have a self proclaimed anarchist in favour of direct democracy. And if the subscribers can call off this "experiment" it seems rather out of place that they did not institute it in the first place. > > With no false modesty I tried awfully hard to compose substantive > > essays on crypto-political topics, often more than one per day. > > I would hope that Tim will return to this practice irrespective > of whether the list remains moderated or returns to its previous > policies. More on this, below. You genuinely expect a thoughtful writer and intelligent author of posts to allow you to approve them or otherwise for general release? > > (Others did too, but they seem to be tapering off as well, leaving the list > > to be dominated by something called a "Toto," the "O.J. was framed!" > > ravings of Dale Thorn, the love letters between Vulis and someone name > > Nurdane Oksas,... > > Two points: Since Tim largely agrees with those in opposition to > moderation, and because of the extraordinary nature of Tim's post, > I did not send it to the "flames" list. It was a judgment call. Why? - I saw nothing whatsoever in Tim`s post that would make it a "judgement call" for any objective moderator^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcensor. The real reason it was a judegement call was because it was critical of Gilmore and yourself, in addition Tim`s points where too subtle and deep for you to respond to without resorting to sophistry. The reason on the other hand you did choose to post it to the censored list was because you realised this and could not get away with junking it to the flames list without incurring criticism. > The problems Tim describes, did not arise with moderation. > Indeed, they were the imputus for the moderation. Sophistry once again. I shall not even bother to explore in more detail this issue as any intelligent reader can, even at face value, see this to be a falacious argument. > > Second, the list was consumed with > > flames about this, many from Vulis, and many from others. > > It was consumed with flames before. Now, at least, the vast > majority of folks on the list don't have to read them, nor jump > through any hoops to implement some sort of dynamic filtering > half-measure. Three questions: 1. How do you see filtering to be a "half measure" 2. What hoops? - if you count implementing a simple filtering measure to be "jumping through hoops" how do you consider that readers of the list do not have to "jump through hoops" to subscribe to the uncensored list. 3. What makes you think that your subjective and evidently self serving method of moderation is any better than keyword filtering. > What didn't work was "local filtering" which has no feed-back > loop to engender comity. This might not work either, but I see > no evidence that it has made things worse. Remember, there are a > hand-full of subscribers to the Flames list, 20-30 on the > Unedited list and *2000* or so on the Moderated list. Sure some > of that may be due to laziness, but it would be cavalier in the > extreme to claim that such an overwhelming acceptance of > moderation is merely an artifact of inertia. Cavalier? - I`ll bet you anything you like if you had set up a new list for the censored articles and left cypherpunks(a)toad.com as an uncensored list you would have seen the same results, that 2000 or so would have remained where they were instead of trying to "unimbibe", and a hardcore of 20 to 30 subscribers would have consciously taken the decision to move to the censored list. As we seem to be in "experiment" mood on the cypherpunks list at the moment I challenge you now to re-configure the list as stated above. The we shall see whose viewpoint is "cavalier" > But to make things perfectly clear one more time, ANYONE WHO > WANTS TO READ THE ENTIRE CYPHERPUNKS FEED SHOULD SUBSCRIBE TO > "CYPHERPUNKS-UNEDITED" AND/OR "CYPHERPUNK-FLAMES." See above argument, the flock stay together. In addition other list members are lazy, stupid, ignorant etc. And cannot/will not subscribe to the uncensored list. > But let's apply Tim's above definition for the sake of argument. > Am I, thereby, a censor? Well I am examining "other material" > and I am making judgments with regard to whether or not it is > "objectionable," unfortunately for Tim's argument, I am neither > "removing" nor "supressing" anything. Anybody can read anything > that gets posted to Cypherpunks--in two places. I am sorting, > but even my sorting can be completely avoided. Waffle. There is a suprising profundity of waffle in this post considering it is supposed to be refuting some very subtle and eloquently stated arguments by Tim. The fact is you are a censor, you are deciding what is seen on the "main" cypherpunks list, you send any comments on your form of censorship, apart from compliments, to the "flames" list in order to protect yourself and John Gilmore. > Very possibly true. Moderation is like crypto, perfection isn't > and option. However, a 90% solution is a heck of a lot better > than no solution at all. Yes, I've made what I consider to be > errors, but I think on some, I've done a very good job overall. > > > * (Frankly, one of my considerations in leaving was the feeling that I > > would never know if an essay I'd spent hours composing would be rejected by > > Sandy for whatever reasons.... > > Tim, I think this is disingenuous. I have been quite clear on > my moderation criteria. You are too intelligent to feign such > a lack of understanding. Not at all, Even if you had been clear (and let me make it clear that I do not believe you have been) you still would not objectively follow those guidelines you had set for yourself. Your censorship is subjective and unethical. However, I am deviating from the point as I happen to be arguing from an anti-censorship point of view whoever were carrying out said censorship. > > * The decision to "moderate" (censor) the Cypherpunks list is powerful > > ammunition to give to our opponents, > > Piffle. Letting spoiled children destroy the list puts a far > more powerful weapon in the hands of our enemies. Piffle, showing that even an anarchic list "requires" censorship is the best ammunition we could have given them. We are better off without a cypherpunks list at all than we are playing into the hands of those who oppose us. > > and Vulis is certainly gleeful that > > his fondest wishes have been realized. > > I do not have a crystal ball. My Vulcan mind meld is in the > shop. No one--neither Tim, nor I, nor probably even Vulis--knows > whether he is gleeful about all this or not. And frankly, who cares? > The question is, are list members happy or not with moderation. > Tim was not. I am. By the end of the experiment, I dare say we > will have a good idea what most list members think. We already have a good idea what they think if we care to look at the flames list where all their relevant comments are junked to. Besides which you are not answering the question here, just picking a random point to put forward an argument you wanted to. > as far as moderating political rants go, I'm agnostic. You mis-spelled self-serving. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Re: About: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> For what it's worth, I think that this Tim May, not being a > user of the list, has no place to talk. His type, to me, > characterate those who quit something and complain later, > knowing that some people will listen to them. Tim May has been one of the most intelligent, eloquent and on-topic posters to this list in it`s entire history... Who the hell are you? I would respond to your post with reasoned and logical argument but I cannot find one substantive point in it that is worthy of comment. I will muddle through as best I can anyway: One easy jibe here is you don`t know how to spell characterise, maybe you would be better off unimbibing? > So what, if he decided to leave? It was his own choice > and he can't just come back and say everyone who stayed is > now impelled to listen to him, just because he used to > do a bunch of posts. I don't think that hardly any of > you would listened to me later if I left the list. No-one knows who you are nor do we care, you have not accumulated any reputation capital nor are you likely to with posts like this. Tim tried to cover in as much depth as possible without resorting to verbosity the points he felt were important and worthy of discussion regarding the censorship of the list and other associated issues. You were not impelled to read his post nor to reply to it with a content-free rant as you did. If you felt "impelled" to read a post simply because it was on a screen in front of you you clearly do not understand even the rudiments of anarchism. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Elliptic curves
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May's wee-wee is so tiny that only his mommy is allowed to touch it. /\ /..\ Tim May /_\/_\

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Full strength Email Clients.
by Steven Herod 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello, I'm in search of an *EASY TO USE* Internet Email client software that uses full strength (outside US export restriction) RSA encryption. It would be used for end to end encryption of Patient Pathology results, hence the need for "full strength". Any pointers to sites of interest? Best Regards Steven Herod Computer Systems Officer Med-E-Serv Connect, a division of CITEC

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Re: FCPUNX:ecure Phones
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:41 PM 2/3/97 -0700, C. Kuethe wrote: >As we were both saying (meaning to say) there's a lot of holes in there... and >you're rich if you'd trust $1e4 to this box.... I'd put maybe $100 on it. Not >that I have a problem with wealth. My point there is that I don't think this >device is secure enough to be placing a lot of trust in... For 1E3, you can get the CS8191 from Communication Security Corporation. http://www.comsec.com/ It uses 3DES. No silly "voice inversion". Sigh. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: Embarrass a Marylander, Go to Jail
by tmcghan＠mail.bcpl.lib.md.us 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

in a message allegedly from: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> this appeared... > A Maryland bill that would make it illegal to send "annoying" or > "embarrassing" e-mail was introduced this week by Democratic General > Assembly member Samuel Rosenberg. {snip} > "Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity." -- Jerry Pournelle As a marylander, in particular, a baltimoron, I am both embarrassed and annoyed that these legislative bozos have the unmitigated gall to expend time and energy on pursuits such as these. Perhaps they feel that our state attorney general needs to earn his excessive salary by attempting to defend this constitutionally indefensible mental excrement. Did the defeat of CDA not resonate?

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Re: More Hacking of the Mykotronx Site!
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

While this report may be true, I wonder if it's not a spoof or even official disinformation to mislead about the details of Aaron's mission as well as what Rainbow and others are really peddling to rabble-fearing paranoids. This last sentence seems a bit too melodramatic even for a suck-up crippled-chip manufacturer: >The MYK-82, developed by Mykotronx and fabricated by VLSI Technology, >Inc., is the first of a series of security products to be developed as >part of an alliance with the NSA, targeting both Government and >commercial citizen monitoring markets. Granted that defense to LEA-market conversionists like to pornograph the godawful carnage their technology can wreak on disobedient civilians to arouse ex-military-to-LEA converted glands -- do they actually write SOF drool like this?

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No Subject
by owner-cypherpunks 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: Secure Phones
by Peter Gutmann 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>My guess on the CESCOMM device is that they (would like us to belive that >they) use pure RSA with optional hybrid links... this seems a bit obvious >because of: > >"Guessing the unique Keys is out of the question. Acquiring the keys through >wiretapping is impossible, since they are never transmitted." <--RSA? This thing is snake oil. What it does is move the data through an FIR filter with the taps being controlled by a secret key. The data itself isn't encrypted, but is spread out over a wide spectrum in a (they hope) difficult-to-analyse manner. However with only 1K possible taps and (presumably) something as high-security as an LFSR driving it, I think the strength of the system has been overestimated somewhat. It wasn't designed for security at all, it was designed by an ex-Canterbury uni engineer to provide add-on noise-immunity to fax machines, and they only decided to market it as an encryption device later on - the designer apparently knows very little about encryption. I've got a photo of it, it's in a box the size of a small modem and consists of a circuit board with an ASIC on it and a bit of interface circuitry. The company has a patent on it, but a search for the patent has so far been unsuccessful (mind you I didn't search very hard). If anyone wants to check it themselves, the patent will probably be assigned to Ken Stokes of Cardinal Encryption Services - they claim to have worldwide coverage. >I emailed the German team about the LC-1... don't know if I'll hear back from >them, but if I do, I'll pass on everything I get. This is rather cool, it was designed by a couple of students at the University of Saarbruecken. It uses the Lintel RSA chips which are fast enough to do real-time RSA voice encryption, either singly for 512 bits or chained for 1033 bits. I've got a brochure somewhere which shows one of the inventors using it, it's a small motherboard containing the RSA chip, some other unidentifiable circuitry (presumably a modem chipset), an EPROM, etc etc. It was done as a research project by students who are unlikely to have put backdoors in it. The BSI (German NSA) were not at all happy about it. It's a pretty neat product, but unfortunately due to its origins it's having difficulty getting any market penetration. In addition the Lintel chips are f-ing expensive and there are many other components that go in on top of that, I doubt the whole thing sells for less than DM 1000-1500. Peter.

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Re: PCS Encryption?
by Phil Karn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Phil Karn is, of course, the expert on this -- I hope he'll chime in soon >-- Phil, you out there?? Yup, I'm out here. Just buried under a pile of email. >Working from my not-so-great memory, CDMA uses a fixed spreading code that >is determined by a pretty simple "cipher-like" process. I believe the >details are covered by an NDA, sorry. At any rate, it isn't "encryption" >by any means -- and tapping it requires little more than building a new >base station (again, given $ and the fact that you're going to have to >follow the bloody thing around as it moves). No, it's not covered by NDA. It is, however, all heavily covered by Qualcomm patents. It's all specified in complete detail in TIA IS-95A. The actual spec is copyrighted TIA (even though we did almost all the work) but you can find an early version, plus a much more readable overview paper, through my web page. The air interface is essentially the same as you'll find on the air. <http://www.qualcomm.com/people/pkarn/cdma.html> There is essentially no "encryption" in the usual sense of the word in CDMA. It is true that the complexity (and until recently, the obscurity) of the modulation method provides some modest protection against casual eavesdropping (e.g., someone with a Radio Shack scanner). But phones containing the necessary ASICs are now being shipped by the hundreds of thousands per month, and as I said earlier the complete air interface spec has been public for some time. I do note that the forward (base to mobile) and reverse (mobile to base) modulation methods are totally different, because the jobs they have to do are different. Only the reverse link is truly CDMA, as there you have many transmitters sending to a single receiver. Both links are spread to 1.25 MHz bandwidths, but that's about where the similarities end. The phone ASIC contains only a forward link demodulator function and a reverse link modulator function. The base station ASICs are not yet generally available. Also, an echo canceller in the base station effectively blocks any reverse link audio from coming back out on the forward link. Consider also the very low and tightly controlled transmitter powers typically used on the reverse link. One can now make certain conclusions about the relative ease of intercepting the forward link as compared to the reverse link. The closest thing to "encryption" in CDMA is the "private long key" mechanism. The private long key is the starting state of a 42-stage linear feedback shift register (LFSR) that is used to spread (reverse link) or scramble (forward link) the vocoder data. (The IS-95 signal path is too complex to describe fully here -- see the documents on my web page for the details, including the difference between scrambling and spreading). As anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of cryptanalysis knows, LFSRs are not at all cryptographically secure. The Massey-Berlekamp algorithm can easily determine the state of the long code shift register with a short (42-chip) sample of its output. Furthermore, the long key sequence has other specified uses on the reverse link; in particular it is used as a pseudorandom sequence generator to control the puncturing (on-off transmitter gating pattern) when the phone is transmitting at a low data rate between talk spurts. This obviously suggests other ways to determine the LFSR state without demodulating individual CDMA chips. Nevertheless, NSA has repeatedly objected to the export of the "private long code" feature, and I'm not even sure it's implemented on the domestic models currently being deployed. Phil

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Re: Trigger-Words...Trigger-Fingers
by Larry Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dale Thorn wrote: > > Larry Johnson wrote: > > Cynthia H. Brown wrote: > [snippo] > > Theres not many girls on this list, is there? > [mo' snippo] > > Anyway, my uncle prints out the girl-cypherpunks stuff for the girls > > on my list and they think its real cool and they all want to marry > > technicians so that they can make them work on the computers for them, > > kind of like making them do the computer dishes, you know. > [yet mo' snippo] > > I want to get married. Lots of times. Are the girls cute? > I don't do hardware, tho, I'm a software guy. Yeah their real cute, most of them anyway. Their all nice though. Some of them would like you cause they dont like regular guys, cause their troublemakers too. I know your a troublemaker (I think thats a good thing) because Ive read your stuff and myu uncle keeps you in his NotADork/MyAssholes dir. Thats where he keeps the troublemakers but its not an insult because he likes what Kevin (hes a Bodston Celtic said--"Danny Ange is an asshole, but hes _our_ asshole." He taght me how to read by using the Froggie manual since I could boot it myself when he was out of the rooom when I was two year old. Now he teachs me how to read with the cypherpunk messages and stuff from his govbernment friends. (Their good government guys though, they like you guys. Their really secret guys not lamer regualar secret guys. They laugh at those regular secret guys who screw with you guys cause they leave their pecker tracks all over the place.) Some people thik Im a lamer cause Im not good with grammer (not on the kids lists thogh) bu tmy uncle says Ill learn how to do that but Im better to learn how tho think first. Ive got dsylexia too so I use a spell checkerif I want to look smart but emailers dont have it. You guyhs should keep being troublemakers. Really. My uncle says that if you guys get too polite then you better watcvh your backs when you curtsy, cause you never know whos sneaking up behind you. He told me that if I watch you rmodernation that I wont have to have sex educaton laterer cause I'll already know how to get f*)&%ed. (Hes funny. His governmnt friends call him the fool becaise hes dumb like a fox.) Excuse my spelling but I spell things good once I see them in a dir cause myu uncle make s me look stuff up before I put it in a dir or he erases myu dir to make me learn. I think the girls would like you cause yuou are a computer guy. Ill show them your letter. Theeir smart, too. They dont like lamer guys. When their school computer guy messes up ecveyones stuff then they fix it but they dont tell him cause it makes him mad. Im not real good at 4reading code and stuff but the secret computer guys let me drink Scotch with them evcen in the bar at the Holiday In in Santafe cause Im smarter than them abou t som e stuff even if they are really good. (I go tm y uncles password on his secret machine by putting my video camera on the frige with a dead battery and pluging it into his power supply) (Now when he boots up he will getr Duke Nukem3D and when he leacves it he will get a message telling him hes a _lamer_.) He had to go to Lost Alamo again because of you guys and hell gibve me sh*&)( when he gets back but not too much cause he said I could do anything I want on his secret machine if I got on it. Im getting to play with Unix cause he has a Spark Card on it that has Unix on it. (Dos is for lamers but Bill Gates owns ecerything so its cheaper for kids) Some lamer said on cypherpunks today that it takes him an hour to get the pecker messages off his computer. My uncle has me to do it for him sometimes and it only take me like maybve two minutes. If the guy is such a lmaer that it take s hinm an hour then maybe he should just read only the pecker messages cause they have pictures and then when he mobes his lips to read then he coul d put them on the peckers. (Thats a joke) I like that Tim May is bacvk, if only even for a little while. When you guys fight at least you say stuff that isnt kissing ass for other guys money. Im going to make a message to cypherpunsk that says if anyone wants me to be their moderator then they should not write any messages to the cypherpunks. Then the 2000 people who dont post will be voting for me to be their moderator and I will be their boss. If Im the moderator then I will givbe everyone free pizz a and lots and lots of Scotch. (<--Dewars) I hope you guys stay together. My uncle says sometimes you learn by looking and sometimes you leran by seeing whos looking back. But he tells the secret gobvernmetn guys not to look back cause their might be a cypherpunk gaining on them. (Thats a joke) Ive got to go to bed so I can pretned to get up again. Im sick so I can do what I want bu t Im not supposed to stya up all night either. I wont let the door hit me in the ass on my wayout. Bye, Human Gus-Peter p.s. - dont write me after Thursday cause my dad will be back and Ill get in trouble. My uncle will help me clean u p my mess cause hes not a squealer.

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Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here. Tim May said: > I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my > posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's > sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not. Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold. If I was a social scientist I might want to run the experiment both ways, or six different ways. Name it this, or name it that. I'm not; all I want is something that works. The cypherpunks list was unusable for this kind of discussion, only a month ago. It's usable now. I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did. Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is now suggesting. "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful option. Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track. They involved a lot more work than the previous setup. I told him if he was willing to do the work, we could try it. As Dale suggests, I wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and passing judgement on the postings. Sandy was, for a month. The element I find most lacking from the whole discussion, until recently, has been responsibility. In an anarchy, *everyone* is responsible; nothing is "somebody else's job". Sandy felt responsible, so he proposed something. I felt responsible, so I helped. But a large part of the community sat on the sidelines and criticized, without making attempts to make things better; indeed the volume and tone of the criticisms themselves made things worse. Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very gratifying. You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T. Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South: The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possesion of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it. Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom. Your de-facto "leaders" have faced it for you. It is a more serious thing than than you expect. All it takes it hard work and judgement. Be responsible for setting your society's privacy policy -- without knowing whether you are right. Face the uncertainty and build anyway. Shall I post you an Emancipation Proclamation -- as if you needed one? Start a mailing list on another site! Move this list to somewhere! Create and nurture an alt group! Make an independent moderated list drawn from the unedited list! Hold meetings! Establish for it a home, a funding, the rearing of newbies, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of philosophies. Dead simple for people as capable as us. Just takes work. Who's volunteering? Just do it! The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over deciding how to run the list, and running it? If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!". John PS: Can we talk about crypto too? It's clear from the last few days of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse novices into thinking that two very different things are the same thing. Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key recovery". This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES". What should we do about this? Educate the public?

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Re: PCS Encryption?
by Phil Karn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>While awaiting Phil's response, there's an informative description of >Qualcomm's CONDOR device at: > http://www.nsa.gov:8080/programs/missi/condor.html Condor is, of course, a Fortezza (clipper) application, which makes it less than useful to those outside the government. In fact, from what I've heard even the potential government users are much more interested in STU III support. I wonder why... Phil

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by ISP_Ratings 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: > > ichudov(a)algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes: > >> Adam Back wrote: >> > >> > Perhaps it is time to reconsider the benefits of alt.cypherpunks. (As >> > an aside, it is ironic that John Gilmore was the guy who started the >> > alt.* USENET hierarchy, specifically to facilitate freedom of speech). >> > >> >> An interesting idea. > >John Gilmore of EFF is a liar and a hypocrite who likes to claim credit for >other people's accomplishments. Well EFF itself is a lie--the were very well exposed by Wired Mag. a while back as being nothing more than a corporate whore. They represent the interests of owners not consumers--the ACLU has been very open in their critisism of the EFF in this regard. A large corporation waves some money in front of their noses and tells them to bend over you can be sure they'll bend over. Respectable free speech advocates do not associate with EFF. >He had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the alt.* Usenet >hierarchy. Gilmore is a liar and a censor. > Is Mr. Gilmore making this claim? >On the other hand, creating an alt.cypherpunks sounds like a more robust >idea than yet another mailing list. And you could merely post this mailing list publically in the alt group of your choice--I find it interesting at times but not worth responding to in general since freedom of expressiion is not a given. Steve

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Re: Information Warfare
by tmcghan＠mail.bcpl.lib.md.us 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

in a message allegedly from: Peter Hendrickson <pdh(a)best.com> > The cypherpunks list has been under "attack" for some time. {snip} > Some people have dismissed the idea that rogue governmental elements > are behind some of our problems. {snip} > We know that "Information Warfare" is the big thing in the defense > establishment right now. Information Warfare Conference sponsored by DPMA/AITP Washington, DC, March 13-14, 1997 Crystal City Marriott 1999 Jefferson Davis Highway Arlington, VA 22202 Presentations by: Major General Michael V. Hayden, Commander, Air Intelligence Agency Dr. C. Kenneth Allard, Competitive Strategies Col. H. Stevens, Land Information Warfare Activity - current service visions and planned program initiatives - operational concepts for 'third-wave' warfare - information warfare drivers for 21st century C4I architectures - emerging technologies and systems for information warfare superiority: opportunities on the horizon 'information warfare targets and vulnerabilities', Maxim I. Kovel, TASC systems management group 'information warfare for deterrence', William H.J. Manthorpe, Jr. Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins 'adaptive techniques for counter-deception', James Llinas, technical advisor, DOD JDL, Data Fusion group 'emerging threats come in all sizes and flavors', Eugene Schultz, SRI consulting "Information has been termed the 'fifth dimension' in the conduct of 'third-wave' warfare, and promises to dramatically enhance the role of C4I as a force multiplier. Joint and individual service doctrine is emerging for IW, ans is affecting the needs and requirements for diverse systems: from space-based surveillance and communications systems to terrestrial image processing, visualization, and information fusion systems." "This conference will provide a valuable forum where military and industry staff can interact with key decision-makers to achieve the most current possible understanding of Information Warfare concepts, initiatives, technologies and potential opportunities. The Critical Questions to be addressed include: - how is IW changing operational concepts? - how can we defend the weak links in the planned information-intensive reconnaissance, strike, targeting architecture? - what developments in enabling technologies are needed to support current Information Operations, Battlefield Visualization, and Information Exploitation initiatives? -what can be done to develop defensive information technology capabilities? and last, but _c_e_r_t_a_i_n_l_y_ not least: - how will we move forward to develop a true offensive IW capability ==============================================

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Re: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

John Gilmore wrote: > I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here. > I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship". I'll bet you are. > Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is > now suggesting. He'd really like to, but... > You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T. > Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the > night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South: What we most remind him of are slaves. > Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom. Which freedom is that? > If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto > community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in > the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!". i.e., stop saying what I don't want to hear and start saying what I do want to hear, after all, it's *my* list.

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Re: GAK/KR spin
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 14:34:49 -0800 > From: Steve Schear <azur(a)netcom.com> > To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Subject: GAK/KR spin > Several months back there were discussions on the list regarding renaming > the government's key escrow/recovery proposals (KRAP comes to mind). I > think we need something that's catchy and simple (perhaps already familiar) > to understand for the semi-litterate citizen units. I propose we encourage > use of the terms "crippleware" or "crypto crippleware" when refering to the > products limited to their weak crypto and/or key escrow/recovery. > > --Steve For some time, I have been using the term 'espionage-enabled software' to describe GAK'd products. Also, 'compromised software' - I want to make the point that 'key escrow/recovery' == insecure.' Peter Trei trei(a)process.com PS: I have SW for working on the $10,000 DES challenge available.

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RE: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by Jason Vagner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>(And if Sandy wants comity and good cheer, let him either form >his own list or establish a filtered list just the way Blossom >and Arachelian did. Hijacking the list to reform it in his own >image is dirty pool.) Just something from another perspective: I've been on the list for quite a long time, though I've never posted. I've been online for over ten years, ran my share of mailing lists, and understand majordomo quite well. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever advertised or posted instructions for joining Blossom's or Arachelian's lists. At one time I gave a little bit of an effort to find them, to no avail. They don't seem readily available on the search engines (again, as of about 6 months ago). I never did flat out post a request for the information, as it was not that important for *me* to find it. I imagine that these individuals might have limited resources for a list-too-large, but is there really a reason this is request-only info? --- Jason Vagner <jlv(a)sig.bsh.com> Resist KRAP and GAK. Police States Are Bad. "All that one can give is what is going to happen, which may have little to do with a present that you can grasp." - Avital Ronell.

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by Adam Shostack 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

| A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of people -- | 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help | thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were | at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. Its worth noting the 'if it would help thwart terrorism.' The 'best,' most expensive anti-terrorism measures ever used in the US were at the Summer Olympics. The White House point man on encryption admitted at last years CFP that Clipper and its derivatives would not have prevented the Oklahoma city bombing. A question worth asking is do we want to apply evolutionary pressure to terrorists? I prefer hijacking to bombings wrt aircraft, but the FAA disagrees. I prefer having my car stolen without me in it as well. (I think John Gilmore asked that question, but I could be wrong.) Adam -- Pet peeve of the day: Security companies whose protocols dare not speak their name, because they don't have one. Guilty company of the day is now V-One.

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IBM's SecureWay Key Recovery technology
by Marshall Clow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From <http://www.ibm.com/Security/html/prkeyrec.html>: >At the RSA Conference, IBM announced the details of its highly >anticipated SecureWay key recovery technology. IBM is developing this >technology in response to market demands for exportable strong >encryption required to advance the growth of global e-business. >[ yada yada yada snipped ] I attended this presentation. Basically, what they do is to add two packets to the "channel setup process", one that depends only on the coorespondents, the other that contains the information about this particular session. A problem with this, as I pointed out to the presenters, is that the first packet can be trivially used for traffic analysis. The eavesdropper may not be able to determine who is cooresponding, but they can tell if it is the same people as in a previous conversation. >From <http://www.ibm.com/security/html/wp_keyrec2.html> >In order to minimize the preparation overhead, the recovery information >is prepared in two phases: one phase is independent of the particular >session/archive key being prepared; the second phase is dependent on the >particular key and session parameters. The first phase, which uses >public-key encryption, can be shared across multiple invocations of key >recovery preparation, thus reducing overhead. The public-key encryptions >can be stored for repeated use. > As you can see, IBM suggests cacheing the contents of the first packet, so that you don't have to recalculate it each time. Imagine how easy traffic analysis would be if the identification packets were identical instead of just related. -- Marshall Marshall Clow Aladdin Systems <mailto:mclow@mailhost2.csusm.edu> Warning: Objects in calendar are closer than they appear.

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AltaVista Tunnel
by Rick Osborne 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Digital / Microsoft "Driving Force" tour is in our parking lot today and I got the opportunity to have a look around. One of the 'stations' inside the truck is on intranets. They were showing off a product called "AltaVista Tunnel" which I assume is their PPTP product. I say "I assume" because the guy showing it off had absolutely no clue what he was talking about. He triumphantly exclaimed that the encryption was 128-bit, but when I said "128-bit what?" he cowered and muttered that he didn't know and went on with his little speech. The rest of my crypto-specific questions met with equal dark stares. And these are the people setting industry standards... _________ o s b o r n e @ g a t e w a y . g r u m m a n . c o m _________ Real programmers programs never work right the first time. But if you throw them on the machine they can be patched into working in only a few 30-hours debugging sessions.

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DES keyspace
by Joel McNamara 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is anyone coordinating (formally or informally) which chunks of the keyspace has been searched for the DES challenge? Yes, I know all the arguments about potential fraud and verification, but it would be nice to have a Web site that informally listed what had been scanned so far (verified or not). Did I perhaps miss something and this is already out there? URLs appreciated if so. If it doesn't exist, I'd be willing to host a site and play coordinator... Joel

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Re: Embarrass a Marylander, go to jail
by Scottauge＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Think they are trying to expand the harrassment laws to directly effect the E world, but I would think the laws on harrassment would apply anyhow (provided your in their domain, but then again thats true for all governments...) --- How has the government interfered in your life today?

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DES keyspace
by Joel McNamara 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is anyone coordinating (formally or informally) which chunks of the keyspace has been searched for the DES challenge? Yes, I know all the arguments about potential fraud and verification, but it would be nice to have a Web site that informally listed what had been scanned so far (verified or not). Did I perhaps miss something and this is already out there? URLs appreciated if so. If it doesn't exist, I'd be willing to host a site and play coordinator... Joel

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IBM's SecureWay Key Recovery technology
by Marshall Clow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From <http://www.ibm.com/Security/html/prkeyrec.html>: >At the RSA Conference, IBM announced the details of its highly >anticipated SecureWay key recovery technology. IBM is developing this >technology in response to market demands for exportable strong >encryption required to advance the growth of global e-business. >[ yada yada yada snipped ] I attended this presentation. Basically, what they do is to add two packets to the "channel setup process", one that depends only on the coorespondents, the other that contains the information about this particular session. A problem with this, as I pointed out to the presenters, is that the first packet can be trivially used for traffic analysis. The eavesdropper may not be able to determine who is cooresponding, but they can tell if it is the same people as in a previous conversation. >From <http://www.ibm.com/security/html/wp_keyrec2.html> >In order to minimize the preparation overhead, the recovery information >is prepared in two phases: one phase is independent of the particular >session/archive key being prepared; the second phase is dependent on the >particular key and session parameters. The first phase, which uses >public-key encryption, can be shared across multiple invocations of key >recovery preparation, thus reducing overhead. The public-key encryptions >can be stored for repeated use. > As you can see, IBM suggests cacheing the contents of the first packet, so that you don't have to recalculate it each time. Imagine how easy traffic analysis would be if the identification packets were identical instead of just related. -- Marshall Marshall Clow Aladdin Systems <mailto:mclow@mailhost2.csusm.edu> Warning: Objects in calendar are closer than they appear.

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AltaVista Tunnel
by Rick Osborne 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Digital / Microsoft "Driving Force" tour is in our parking lot today and I got the opportunity to have a look around. One of the 'stations' inside the truck is on intranets. They were showing off a product called "AltaVista Tunnel" which I assume is their PPTP product. I say "I assume" because the guy showing it off had absolutely no clue what he was talking about. He triumphantly exclaimed that the encryption was 128-bit, but when I said "128-bit what?" he cowered and muttered that he didn't know and went on with his little speech. The rest of my crypto-specific questions met with equal dark stares. And these are the people setting industry standards... _________ o s b o r n e @ g a t e w a y . g r u m m a n . c o m _________ Real programmers programs never work right the first time. But if you throw them on the machine they can be patched into working in only a few 30-hours debugging sessions.

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Re: Embarrass a Marylander, go to jail
by Scottauge＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Think they are trying to expand the harrassment laws to directly effect the E world, but I would think the laws on harrassment would apply anyhow (provided your in their domain, but then again thats true for all governments...) --- How has the government interfered in your life today?

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Re: Dissolving Choke Points
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:36 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >What I have seen is a pretty complete elimination of the signal that >was there. Some might argue that this is "just" because Tim stopped >posting. But so what? The result of moderation was the elimination >of signal. Nonsense. The signal had left long before the moderation began. The steepest drop in signal (not S/N ratio) was between shortly before Perry left and Vulis had completed his takeover. Signal is cause by signal generators. Most top signal generators, other than Tim, had left because of pollution caused by the likes of Vulis, aga, and his homophonic boyfriends. Moderation has nothing to do with the loss of signal other than that signal from Tim was lost. And while I appreciated Tim's essays, they were never the sole source of signal on the list. Tim did not even provide the majority of signal. "Best individual contributor", sure. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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