December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Reputations
by Omegaman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I don't see how there can be such a thing as negative reputation > capital. Wouldn't that mean B believes the opposite of what A says? If > you anti-believed someone in a consistent manner, couldn't they exploit > that? Of course they could exploit that. But you're not "anti-believing" the information an untrusted party is passing. Rather, you are not acting on their information in *any* fashion. You're ignoring them. In the case of the common killfile, you may not even know that they're talking at you. > Also, you are speaking only of 1-to-1 reputation-relationships. But that > is inefficient. The mere fact of having to evaluate each person's > reputation yourself is significant work. It is significant work. How much work depends on how valuable the transactions you are considering are to you. It's not as if the notion of reputation capital doesn't have precedent. When I make a purchase for my business, I do quite a bit of checking on the background of individuals and businesses I am purchasing from. The amount of reference work I do depends on how much I intend to spend. Furthermore, I am much more apt to do business with individuals who have been referred by other trusted parties (a transfer of raputation capital). Also my initial investment with a relative unknown is usually small. The repuatation capital of both parties increases relative to one another as a relationship is continued. > On the other hand, you could talk about the transmission of reputations. [..snip..] > For instance, when a certain infamously-low-reputation (deservedly so) > individual recently joined the cypherpunk lists, others who had endured > him in the past tried to relay their impressions of him. It proved very > difficult to convey, and they were somewhat attacked for their efforts > and not entirely believed. You seem to view the notion repuatation capital as absolute. It is relative to each user of it. The unnamed you are referring to did indeed come in with quite a bit of negative repuatation capital attached to his name. While I might regard the opinions of others on the list as being valuable, I chose to see for myself if the unnamed person warranted his bad repuation. > In other words, he *could not* spend down to 0, despite years of > unflagging effort. In other words, I decide if an when he has "spent down to zero" with me -- even if we never directly communicate. > Now, suppose J. Anonymous Gourmand spams all of Usenet, and millions of > people who have never heard of J. Anonymous Gourmand before read a > plausible but false account of the disgustingness of McDonald's food. > Perhaps the same detailed study, just fake. (Not to intertangle this > with other issues, let's further suppose that Ms. Gourmand sneaks in > underneath spam-watcher's radar, and cleverly appears to be on topic in > every group.) > > Nothing about her reputation has changed, but surely when her claim is > read by millions it will hurt McDonalds a non-trivial amount. Why? That depends on the sophistication of millions of Usenet readers (heh). I think your extension of this example is not useful. It's impossible not to "intermingle it with other issues" such as the substance of the message itself, the ability to verify any factual information, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Reputation is but one factor in many and has a mostly negative effect if J. Anonymous Goumand is indeed anonymous. Change J. Anonymous Gourmand to say, C. Everett Koop, and you can envision a more tangible example of reputation capital in action. me -------------------------------------------------------------- Omegaman <mailto:omega@bigeasy.com> PGP Key fingerprint = 6D 31 C3 00 77 8C D1 C2 59 0A 01 E3 AF 81 94 63 Send a message with the text "get key" in the "Subject:" field to get a copy of my public key. --------------------------------------------------------------

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U.K. cyberporn fearstorm, Singapore attacks Julf, from HotWired
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sgt. Toby Tyler is actually a bit of a cypherpunk. He told me he "absolutely" supports anonymous remailers -- repressive governments in Asia and all that. He just doesn't think that many people will use 'em. -Declan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 05:55:26 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: U.K. cyberporn fearstorm, Singapore attacks Julf, from HotWired [Also in today's Netizen on HotWired is a report from India on their Net-regulations and Brock in Muckraker on the White House's new "Key Recovery Initiative" anti-crypto legislation. Check out http://www.hotwired.com/ --Declan] ********** http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/96/36/index4a.html HotWired, The Netizen 6-8 Sept 96 Finnish Line by Declan McCullagh Washington, DC, 5 September Call it a cyberporn fear-storm: Splashed across the front page of the 25 August issue of the London Observer was a hysterical report naming Finnish pseudonymous remailer operator Julf Helsingius as the "man US police-experts charge with being at the hub of 90 percent of the child pornography on the Internet." The report continued: "'Somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all the child pornography I see is supplied through this remailer,' said Toby Tyler of the FBI." That was enough to make Helsingius - already reeling under threats from the Singapore government and repeated legal attacks from the always-litigious Church of Scientology - pull the plug on his anon.penet.fi site last Friday. But in trying to milk the story, the Observer went too far. The "FBI investigator" the paper cited as their only support for the accusations doesn't exist. In truth, Tyler is a sergeant in California's San Bernardino sheriff's office, and he says the Observer intentionally misrepresented his identity and his statements. Tyler says "there's very little of the story I agree with," and the Observer took a conversation he had with a reporter "and selectively chose words that would mean what they wanted." [...] Helsingius blames the Observer for scaremongering. "It was quite clear that they were trying to create a story where there was none ... I quite clearly outlined why my server wasn't transmitting child porn," Helsingius said. "I stated that the Finnish police had investigated and found that it wasn't. These comments were ignored. They wanted to make a story so they made things up." [...] Still, a malicious front-page splash in the Observer isn't the full extent of Helsingius's troubles. Now he's also up against the Singapore government, which has demanded the identity of one of the users in his half-million-person database... The unknown user, who has the email address an511172(a)anon.penet.fi, posted hundreds of messages to the soc.culture.singapore newsgroup under the name of "Lee Kwan Yew," the retired prime minister of Singapore. The messages are short and unimaginative, yet apparently are just enough to piss off the thin-skinned Singaporean officials. One post reads: "We are small and vulnerable. Without regulations, we will be like Hong Kong, oops, fuck, bad example, they are actually doing quite all right. - SM Lee Kwan Yew, Republic of Singapore." Now that a Finnish court recently ruled that the remailer's database could be breached in a Scientology case, Helsingius says he's not sure what might happen. In the meantime, he's stuck somewhere between a sensationalist British newspaper and a Singaporean government bent on silencing opposition. [...] Links from the article: Linkname: hysterical report in London Observer Filename: http://www.scallywag.com/obtext.htm Linkname: Singapore banning Web pages Filename: http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/sg/ Linkname: hundreds of messages pseudonymously posted Filename: http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/sg/anon.posts.090596.txt ###

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CFP 97: Burlingame, CA
by stevenw＠best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwadred from RISKS: ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 12:37:14 -0700 (PDT) From: Bruce R Koball <bkoball> Subject: 7th Computers, Freedom, and Privacy THE SEVENTH CONFERENCE ON COMPUTERS, FREEDOM, AND PRIVACY Call for Participation San Francisco Airport Hyatt Regency Hotel Burlingame, California 11-14 March 1997 CFP97: Commerce & Community will be sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery SIGCOM and SIGSAC. The host institutions will be Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Co-sponsors and cooperating organizations include the ACM SIGCAS, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the WELL. CFP97: Commerce & Community is the latest in a series of annual conferences assembling a diverse group of experts and advocates from the domains of technology, business, government, and academia to explore the evolution of information and communication technologies and public policy, and its effects on freedom and privacy in the United States and throughout the world. Past CFP sessions have discussed, debated -- and often anticipated -- issues of great social import. In this tradition, CFP97: Commerce & Community will examine the social and policy questions posed by: * the growth of electronic communities; * electronic commerce and the commercialization of cyberspace; * the problems of legal and regulatory control of the Net; * the interests of privacy and property in the electronic domain; * high-tech law enforcement and security concerns. The CFP97 Program Committee invites your suggestions for presentations on these or other important issues at the nexus of technology, business, public policy, freedom, and privacy. Proposals may be for individual talks, panel discussions, debates, moot courts, moderated, interactive sessions or other formats. Each proposal should be accompanied by a one-page statement describing the topic and format. Descriptions of multi-person presentations should include a list of proposed participants and session chair. Proposals should be sent by e-mail to cfp97(a)cfp.org. If necessary, typewritten proposals may be sent to: CFP'97, 2210 Sixth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710. Please submit your proposal as soon as possible. The deadline for submissions is 1 October 1996. (Please note that we have extended our deadline for submissions) For more information on the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conferences, as well as up-to-date announcements on CFP'97, please visit our Web page at: http://www.cfp.org ------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steven Weller | Technology (n): | | A substitute for adulthood. stevenw(a)best.com | Popular with middle-aged men.

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Neo-Nazis etc.
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Try to keep in mind that "Nazis" aren't skinheads and other troublemakers exactly, which is to say, those are the first people Hitler got rid of when he came to power. Real Nazis are/were bureaucrats; cold, calculating, bureaucratic. Do we know anyone like that?

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Sep 20th SF C'punks meeting: ITAR on trial
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We're having another "Cypherpunks Dress-Up Day" on Friday, September 20th. Meet at the Federal Building in San Francisco, 450 Golden Gate Avenue, at 11:45AM, in high-quality business drag. [There will also be a regular Saturday meeting this month, on Sep 14.] It's been eleven months to the day since our first hearings in Dan Bernstein's lawsuit against the NSA and State Department. At this hearing, starting at High Noon, we hope to convince Judge Marilyn Hall Patel to declare that the ITAR (export regulations) and AECA (export law) are unconstitutional. We are asking her to order the State Department to immediately stop enforcing them with respect to cryptographic software. Simultaneously, the government is asking her to declare that their actions have been completely legal and Constitutional, and to throw out our lawsuit. Judge Patel has asked both sides to fully explore all the legal issues in the case for this hearing, leaving aside any unresolved factual questions (like exactly how many people have had their exports denied). She plans to decide the questions: * Should the government's actions be examined under the "strict scrutiny" appropriate when they attempt to restrict speech, or under a looser "O'Brien" test that applies when the government seeks to restrict conduct and only incidentally restricts speech? * Is the ITAR Scheme a prior restraint on speech? * Does the ITAR Scheme impermissibly punish speech after the fact? * Is the ITAR Scheme too vague to constitutionally regulate speech? * Is the ITAR Scheme so broadly worded that it unconstitutionally limits speech protected by the First Amendment? * Were the government's actions as applied to Dan Bernstein unconstitutional restrictions on his First Amendment rights? It's possible, but unlikely, that the judge will decide some of this then-and-there. Instead, we will get some insights into how she is leaning, based on her questions and comments. Her written decision will come out some weeks or months later. She then plans to certify the case for immediate appeal to a higher court (the Ninth Circuit, also here in San Francisco), to confirm or deny her legal analysis. >From there it will probably go to the Supreme Court. Watch the wheels of justice grind! Meet the intrepid lawyers who are working hard to protect our rights! Shake hands with one or more NSA representatives specially flown in for the occasion! Meet some journalists and be quoted talking about crypto freedom! We will follow the hearing with a group lunch at Max's Opera Plaza, a block away at Van Ness Avenue and Golden Gate Avenue. As background, Dan Bernstein, ex-grad-student from UC Berkeley, is suing the State Department, NSA, and other agencies, with help from the EFF. These agencies restrained Dan's ability to publish a paper, as well as source code, for the crypto algorithm that he invented. We claim that their procedures, regulations, and laws are not only unconstitutional as applied to Dan, but in general. Full background and details on the case, including all of our legal papers (and most of the government's as well), are in the EFF Web archives at: http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/Bernstein_case. Like Phil Karn's and Peter Junger's cases, this lawsuit really has the potential to outlaw the whole NSA crypto export scam. We intend to make your right to publish and export crypto software as well- protected by the courts as your right to publish and export books. It will probably take more years, and an eventual Supreme Court decision, to make it stick. But this is the hearing at which we plan to convince our judge that these laws really are unconstitutional. Her order restoring our legal right to publish crypto source code could come out by Christmas! Please make a positive impression on the judge. Show her -- by showing up -- that this case matters to more people than just the plaintiff and defendant. Demonstrate that her decision will make a difference to society. That the public and the press are watching, and really do care that she handles the issue well. We'll have to be quiet and orderly while we're in the courthouse. There will be no questions from the audience (that's us), and no photography, but the session will be tape-recorded and transcribed, and you can take notes if you like. The lobby guards will want to hold onto guns, "munitions", and even small pocketknives, before they'll let you go upstairs to the courtrooms. So, here's your excuse to put on a nice costume, take an early lunch, and pay a call on the inner sanctum of our civil rights. See you there! John Gilmore PS: If you can't come, you can still contribute. Join EFF's Legal Defense Fund; see http://www.eff.org/pub/Alerts/cyberlegal_fund_eff.announce.

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FW: Anonymous phone calls (was: What is the EFF doing exa...
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: FW: Anonymous phone calls (was: What is the EFF doing exactly?) There is another spin possible on the reasons for replacement of pay phones with credit card phones. In Canada all new credit card phones are also able to take phone cards (which are anonymous). Using a prepaid phone card permits full anonymity. But what it also permits is metered local calls. This infrastructure would be more familiar to someone from Europe where metered local calls are the norm. Paris made the change to phones that *only* take prepaid phone cards (thus fully anonymous) obstensibly because people were breaking into phones for the money. Prepaid phone cards avoid this as well as collection costs. James Why should my long distance calling subsidize your local internet access? ;-) ---------- From: "<pstira(a)escape.com>" <pstira(a)escape.com> Sent: Friday, September 06, 1996 9:54 AM To: unicorn(a)schloss.li Cc: vznuri(a)netcom.com; cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Re: What is the EFF doing exactly? Not just DC and Chicago, I'm afraid. If anyone around NYC noticed, there are less and less payphones, and all new ones installed, just about, are those yellow credit card phones. Not all of them, but it's now one for one, at least.

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Co$ Buys EFF
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times, September 6, 1996, p. D2. Behind an Internet Message Service's Close Pressure From Church of Scientology Is Blamed for the Shutdown. A Finnish judge says different rules apply to E-mail. By Peter H. Lewis Pressure from the Church of Scientology International was at least partly responsible for the recent shutdown of a well-known Internet messaging service based in Helsinki, according to the Finnish operator of the service. The service, known by its Internet address, anon.penet.fi, was used by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to send and receive electronic messages without divulging their true identities. It was the best known of a small, global network of special computers known as remailers, whose legitimate users include political dissidents, people with medical or drug ailments and others who want to communicate anonymously. Although previous news accounts had reported that the service was shut down because of accusations that it was a primary conduit for child pornography transmitted on the Internet, police investigators in Helsinki dismissed those accusations as groundless. The real reason for terminating the service, according to its founder and operator, Johan Helsingius, was a recent Helsinki court ruling that ordered him to reveal the true name of one of his system's users to the Church of Scientology. The judge held that under Finland's current telecommunications laws, Internet electronic mail does not carry the same privacy protections enjoyed by postal mail or telephone calls. The church, which in recent years has been trying to protect its copyrighted scriptures by trying to block their dissemination over computer networks, said an unknown person or persons had used the anon.penet.fi computer to illegally publish copyrighted church documents on Usenet, the global electronic bulletin board. Mr. Helsingius, a 35-year-old computer networking expert, has not yet revealed the name sought by the Scientologists, and said he planned to appeal the court ruling. But he said the court ruling opened the door for future subpoenas seeking the real names of anon.penet.fi users, and that he would rather close the system than spend all his time in court. Mr. Helsingius has operated anon.penet.fi for more than 3 years, handling over 7,000 messages a day. "In a sense I've done my pioneer work and it is now up to others to carry on," Mr. Helsingius said. Helena Kobrin, a Church of Scientology official, said the complaint against anon.penet.fi was just one of several actions the church had taken against the operators of remailer computers in Europe and the United States. She said the church has five lawsuits pending in the United States against remailer operators and users of remailers. "We have actively been in communication with various remailers about postings that have gone through their systems," said Ms. Kobrin, general counsel for the Religious Technology Center in Los Angeles, which is responsible for protecting the copyrights and trade secrets of unpublished Scientology scriptures. Earlier this year, another remailer, known as hacktic.nl, in the Netherlands, was shut down under pressure from the Scientologists. Unlike many other churches, the Church of Scientology, founded nearly 40 years ago by the science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, regards its gospel as copyrighted material and a trade secret. Several courts have upheld the validity of the copyrights. Foes and critics of the church have used the Internet to publish the church documents, as well as other documents the church contends were stolen from its computers. The Religious Technology Center has also unsuccessfully attempted to put a stop to the forum on Usenet, alt.religion.scientology, where many of the copyrighted documents are published. A series of recent news articles in The Observer of London among others had linked the anon.penet.fi computer to accusations it was a conduit for child pornography. Mr. Helsingius, who has denied that his system is a conduit for child pornography, declined to speculate on the motives of the accusers. The accusations of child pornography first appeared several days after Mr. Helsingius declined to turn over to the court the name sought by the Scientologists. The Observer quoted Toby Tyler, identified as an adviser to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as saying anon.penet.fi was the source for up to 90 percent of the child pornography on the Internet. But Richard P. (Toby) Tyler, a sergeant in the San Bernardino, Calif., County Sheriff's Department who said his involvement with the F.B.I. was minimal, said he was misquoted by the newspaper. Mr. Tyler, who has investigated pornography trafficking in cyberspace, said that most child pornography on the Internet did not pass through remailers. He did say, however, that of the small portion that does, 70 percent to 90 percent passes through anon.penet.fi. "I think that's a shame," Sergeant Tyler said upon learning that anon.penet.fi was closed. "I personally view its closing as a loss of freedom. I did not like the abuse of the remailer for child pornography, but I felt it served a necessary political purpose in this world." Ms. Kobrin of the Religious Technology Center said that despite its legal actions, the Church of Scientology does not oppose the operation of remailers, which are also known as anonymous servers. "We were not opposing the existence of his server," Ms. Kobrin said. "We have no opposition to there being anonymity for private, consensual communications. What we oppose is using anonymous servers for the purpose of permitting criminal or other unlawful acts. There has to be responsibility and accountability." [End]

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Test...sorry about this
by Z.B. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm just posting this to see if there's something wrong with my mail filter - it dumped a ton of messages from this list over the night, and I'm trying to figure out why the !@%$# it did that. Sorry for the interruption. --- Zach Babayco zachb(a)netcom.com <----- finger for PGP public key http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/4127

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Re: Anonymous phone calls (was: What is the EFF doing exactly?)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:08 AM 9/6/96 EST, jbugden(a)smtplink.alis.ca wrote: >There is another spin possible on the reasons for replacement of pay phones with >credit card phones. In Canada all new credit card phones are also able to take >phone cards (which are anonymous). Don't be too sure about the "anonymity" of these cards. You don't have to give your name when you buy or use them, but assuming a large number of phone calls (to, from different locations) can be associated together after the fact, your name can probably be fairly easily obtained. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology (fwd)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:46 AM 9/6/96 -0400, Donald E. Eastlake 3rd wrote: >Suggest you look at draft-eastlake-internet-payment-*.txt in the >IETF shadow directories. I don't think any one step will solve all >our spam problems but I wouldn't mind spending, say, 5 cents for each >real piece of mail I sent outside my company and if end machines charged >5 cents per piece of ouside mail received, I think spamming would be >crippled. (Note that with bad guy lists, you could collect the money and >then just throw away the mail.) Assuming we all agree that we're moving from a paper-based mail system to email, it is logical that "junk mail" will move as well. As I recall, statistics show that the average cost of a piece of junk mail is about $1 or so, including postage, printing, etc. It occurred to me a while back (and this proposal appears to be at least approximated by other proposals around here) that since companies are already saving a dollar, they should use some of those savings to "bribe" Internet-users into reading those (commercial) messages. Don't bother with all the details on how to verify this, just include digital cash along with the message, to be credited automatically to the recipient. Assuming the average Internet user already pays about $15 per month for access, he would only have to receive 2 emails a day which pay him 25 cents per, to pay for this service. At that point, his Internet access would be free, at least somewhat analogous to free TV which is paid for by commercials. Everybody's ahead, except for the postman, the printer, etc. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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electronic offshore banking
by Jüri Kaljundi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Are there any good offshore banks that would allow you to use your account over the Internet? I know European Union Bank www.eub.com is on of those available, but their US$ 25.000 minimum deposit is too stupid. Jüri Kaljundi AS Stallion jk(a)stallion.ee

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

17 Dec '03

At 1:11 AM 9/6/96, Greg Burk wrote: >> I strongly disagree. It's quite possible for Person A to quickly convert >> his reputation to Person B to a _negative_ value. Real quick, in fact. > >I don't see how there can be such a thing as negative reputation >capital. Wouldn't that mean B believes the opposite of what A says? If >you anti-believed someone in a consistent manner, couldn't they exploit >that? Well, I suppose that if you don't believe in negative repuation capital, I'm not going to be able to spend enough time to convince you. It's like someone saying they're not sure such a thing as "entropy" exists. >For instance, when a certain infamously-low-reputation (deservedly so) >individual recently joined the cypherpunk lists, others who had endured >him in the past tried to relay their impressions of him. It proved very >difficult to convey, and they were somewhat attacked for their efforts >and not entirely believed. > >In other words, he *could not* spend down to 0, despite years of >unflagging effort. No, with many of the list members, his reputation was in fact negative. They disbelieved nearly anything he had to say, and his approval of some idea was largely cause for others to take the opposite tack. About as clear an example of a negative reputation as one can find. (Note that I am not saying his reputation is negative with _me_.) >I've already made the points I wanted to make, so I may not have further >comments. Nor me. --Tim May 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: What the NSA is patenting
by John Deters 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:26 AM 9/3/96 -0500, Bruce Schneier wrote: >I just spent a pleasant hour or so searching a patent database for all >patents assigned to the NSA. There's some interesting stuff: > > "Self-locking, tamper-evident package" > Method of retrieving documents that concern the same topic" > >Fifty-Four patents total. (Used to be they just kept stuff secret; now >they patent some of it.) Attached is the most interesting thing I found: a >patent on techniques for reading data off overwritten magnetic media. > >Bruce [ Interesting patent deleted ] This method implies that they have the ability to scan the entire platter surface at resolution level that is basically atomic. >From lots of experience gained from working with metalworking machinery, it sounds like some of the old magnetic data might be leaving traces behind by a process called "backlash". It happens because machines don't realign themselves precisely, unless the lead-in steps are repeated every time. A fairly simple demonstration of this can be found on most dot-matrix printers. They usually have a mode called "uni-directional" printing, where the printhead puts dots on the paper only when travelling from left-to-right. This is used to improve the quality of a graphic image. Print a simple pattern of repeating vertical bars (||||||) across the page and down several lines with this mode turned off, and you'll probably notice the lines tend to not line up perfectly. Turn uni-directional printing on, and watch the behavior of the printhead. It will "home" itself to the far left side before printing the next line of bars. The bars will then be lined up "better" than in the bi-directional print. We should be able to use this feature to our advantage to write a "backlash- enhanced" wipedisk driver. The wipedisk utilities I've seen today primarily consist of repeatedly writing a pattern such as 0x55555555, then 0xAAAAAAAA, then 0xFFFFFFFF, then 0x00000000. While this will probably eradicate most of the traces of the original data, it's all happening "unidirectionally" -- starting at the first sector of the file, write this data till all the sectors have been overwritten. Given that the original data may have been written in reverse sector order, or reverse cylinder motion order, or after a large cylinder change, the wipedisk might still leave traces remaining on the disk. Using the above example of printing vertical bars, imagine having each line print three times using the unidirectional mode, and randomly picking one line out of the entire array to print bi-directionally. It'll stand out like a sore thumb. That's what I think they're looking for with their data recovery method. What would probably make for a more secure wipe utility would be to alter the "head approach path" prior to making each of the passes described above. So, before overwriting the sectors in order from 0 to EOF full of 0x55555555s, have the head move to the 0th cylinder first. Before overwriting the sectors in order from 0 to EOF with 0xAAAAAAAAs, have the head move to the last cylinder beforehand. Repeat for the 0xFFFFFFFF and 0x00000000 sectors, except overwrite the sectors in order from EOF to 0. All this pre-writing motion could theoretically reduce the repeatability of the drive head positioning arm as well as possibly hitting different rotational sync points, using the backlash effect to its fullest extent. Of course, the biggest problem will be that of overcoming intelligent disk controllers. No self-respecting SCSI drive is going to voluntarily swing the disk head around inefficiently, and I don't know enough about how IDE works to say anything different about it. I hope some hardware hacker who knows their low-level stuff will be able to write a secure disk wiper. John -- J. Deters "Captain's log, stardate 25970-point-5. I am nailed to the hull." +-------------------------------------------------------+ | NET: jad(a)dsddhc.com (work) jad(a)pclink.com (home) | | PSTN: 1 612 375 3116 (work) 1 612 894 8507 (home) | | ICBM: 44^58'36"N by 93^16'27"W Elev. ~=290m (work) | | PGP Key ID: 768 / 15FFA875 | +-------------------------------------------------------+

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Muckraker column
by declan＠well.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Not sure it came through in my cut-and-paste, but the Muckraker column is of course by Brock Meeks and went up on the site today. -Declan

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Re: Race Bit: C
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:05 AM 9/6/96 +0000, jonathon wrote: >On Thu, 5 Sep 1996, jim bell wrote: > >> The way I see it, the status quo doesn't come "pre-justified": It needs >> just as much a defense as any other proposal. Its main advantage is that it >> tends to be more understood that most hypotheticals, because it's been > >More understood, and just more accepted, because alternatives >are hard to conceive, and even harder to popularize, without >lots of red liquid running in the streets? Since red liquid running in the streets is generally so reviled, one of the things which mystifies me is why there aren't more simulation-type programs used to test out hypotheticals, for example a "SimEconomy." For example, you'll occasionally hear about a media news organization gathering a dozen or so volunteers in a room, and asking them to solve a problem like "The Budget Deficit" or some such. The result of their interplay is generally used to explain why these problems are hard to solve. I, for one, would love to be able to program in an immediate 25%+ reduction in military spending (added to that a 5%/year cumulative cut after that for 10+ years), a 5% cut then a cap on Socialist Insecurity, 5% per year (cumulative,for 10 years) of reduction in welfare, along with similarly substantial cuts/caps in Medicare and a few other features. Obviously, a computer-based simulation wouldn't just blindly do the cuts, but would also estimate the secondary and tertiary effects of such cuts, for example spending in areas whose economies are traditionally dependant on defense programs, etc. I'm not saying that I think these changes would be _easy_, politically, but if the average citizen were made aware of how simple the changes were, he'd be less tolerant of special-interest politics. > On second thoughts, let's just terminate > with extreme prejudice, each and every individual > who has worked in any capacity for any part of any > government agency in the us -- regardless of whether it > was federal, state or local, and regardless of whether > they were president, janitor, or clerk. > All people in the employ of government agencies are death-dealers. I hope you don't expect me to argue with this B^) Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: PRESS RELEASE: GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:18 AM 9/6/96, tank wrote: >Please forward: > * * * P R E S S R E L E A S E * * * > > >GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL, WITH 3100 WEBPAGES > > >German internetproviders, joined in the Internet Content Taskforce >(ICTF), started censoring the Dutch website www.xs4all.nl, containing >3100 personal and commercial homepages. This act of censorship is >caused by the webpage of a magazine that is banned in Germany, Radikal >(http://www.xs4all.nl/ ~tank/radikal/). ... Though my German friends will perhaps feel I am picking on them, this is not so (this week Germany is in the hot seat, last week it was Singapore....). A Modest Proposal: * as Germany is bent on blocking sites which carry this subversive pamphlet, "Radikal," let us mirror it on thousands of sites around the world. * when the Germans went into Danmark and insisted Jews wear badges, ordinary citizens (and the Danish Royal Family, as I recall) also took to wearing these Star of David badges. * wouldn't it be deliciously ironic if the "Free Speech Blue Ribbon" now attached to so many pages were to be joined by a "Star of David"? This Star of David symbol could mean "We support freedom to read, and our site contains the "Radikal" publication which Germans are forbidden to access." (I know nothing of how such symbolic campaigns are actually launched and managed, so I'm suggesting the hint of an idea. I do think mirroring the banned publication (_any_ banned publication, by _any_ government) on as many sites as possible is a Good Idea.) --Tim May 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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"The Bill of Rights can be dangerous...."
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:30 PM 9/5/96, Omegaman wrote: >What strikes me as odd is that the arguments against anonymous >communication are nearly identical to those against strong crypto. >ie. the same four horsemen flare up in these discussions. Yet we >have parties who are ostensibly pro-crypto but anti-anonymity. > >To put it in a nutshell, in a free society I can have a private >conversation, but I must essentially announce that I am having one >and who I am having that conversation with? As with Adam Back's mini-rant yesterday, this is exactly correct. In a free society, speech need not be approved, registered, escrowed, labelled, or identified with the Registered True Name of the speaker. One can paraphrase Esther Dyson's concerns about anonymity in several fairly equivalent forms. Here's the original: "Anonymity can be dangerous -- as can traceability, especially in/by repressive regimes. Therefore I would favor allowing anonymity -- with some form of traceability only under terms considerably stronger than what are generally required for a wiretap." Here's a slightly paraphrased version for freedom to read anonymously, with some "reasons" included in brackets: "Books and magazines can be dangerous [bomb recipes, racial hatred, instilling bad values, etc.]-- as can restrictions on reading, especially in/by repressive regimes. Therefore I would favor allowing unfettered reading -- with some form of traceability only under terms considerably stronger than what are generally required for a wiretap." (i.e., "book escrow," where one's reading materials are escrowed with Trusted Authorities, and only accessed by law enforcement under Proper Conditions. Failure to escrow reading materials would be a Class B felony. Cf. the FBI's Library Awareness Program of circa 1987-8.) A version for freedom of movement: "People moving around can be dangerous [avoiding parental responsibilities, avoiding taxes, spying, plotting to bomb buildings]-- as can traceability, especially in/by repressive regimes. Therefore I would favor allowing freedom of movement -- with some form of traceability only under terms considerably stronger than what are generally required for a wiretap." (a la the "position escrow system" I predicted a couple of years ago would someday be seriously considered) A version for freedom of association: "Freedom of association can be dangerous [plotting of crimes, gathering of mobs, spread of dangerous ideas, disease]-- as can restrictions on such gatherings, especially in/by repressive regimes. Therefore I would favor allowing freedom of association -- with some form of traceability only under terms considerably stronger than what are generally required for a wiretap." ("Club escrow"? All mailing lists, clubs, associations, and such would have to escrow an up-to-date list of members, associates, and contacts. Then, with proper authorization by proper authorities, law enforcement could inspect these lists to see who had been meeting with whom. Hotels would have to monitor use of rooms by more than two persons (the two person case is already covered by the "Sex can be dangerous..." variant of the Dyson Principle).) A version for anonymous purchases and sales: "Anonymity in sales and purchases can be dangerous [bomb materials, stolen goods, unhealthful foods, etc.] -- as can traceability, especially in/by repressive regimes. Therefore I would favor allowing anonymous purchases and sales of goods -- with some form of traceability only under terms considerably stronger than what are generally required for a wiretap." (There go the flea markets and garage sales (for buyers), which are largely anonymous. There goes walking into a store and paying cash for a piece of pipe (could be made into a bomb). There goes cash, period. See next item.) A version for cash: "Cash can be dangerous [illegal purchases, drugs, prostitution, tax evasion, illegal workers, extortion, etc.] -- as can traceable money, especially in/by repressive regimes. Therefore I would favor allowing cash -- with some form of traceability only under terms considerably stronger than what are generally required for a wiretap." (One has to presume that Dyson would probably not support Chaumian untraceable e-cash, though I doubt she would go for the other examples.) And so on. One can take Dyson's basic argument for why anonymity may be dangerous at times and why it may need to be restricted, limited, or banned, and use these arguments for a variety of other basic freedoms. Essentially, freedom can be dangerous. The world can be dangerous. In fact, it is. (No, Dyson has not called for such restrictons on freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom to read anonymously. But her argument that she would support anonymity if some form of traceability is built in essentially applies, by the same logic (that it can be dangerous) to a wide variety of other cases.) To summarize: "The Bill of Rights can be dangerous...." --Tim May 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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RE: Anonymous phone calls (was: What is the EFF doing exactl
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Audit trails may now be in place, in which case the cost of anonymity is increased to the cost of the lowest denomination card. Think OTP. However, in both Britian and France I have seen defective phones that allowed LD calls but did not deduct the call amount from the card. Obviously, the effect was free LD and these phones were perpetually busy. If audit trails were in place, this problem should have been noticed quickly. As I said, things may have changed for newer systems. James ---------- From: Flying insect killer <kadafi(a)netcom.com> Sent: Friday, September 06, 1996 1:20 PM To: jimbell(a)pacifier.com Cc: James Bugden; pstira(a)escape.com; cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Re: Anonymous phone calls (was: What is the EFF doing exactl On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, jim bell wrote: > At 10:08 AM 9/6/96 EST, jbugden(a)smtplink.alis.ca wrote: > >There is another spin possible on the reasons for replacement of pay phones with > >credit card phones. In Canada all new credit card phones are also able to take > >phone cards (which are anonymous). > > Don't be too sure about the "anonymity" of these cards. You don't have to > give your name when you buy or use them, but assuming a large number of > phone calls (to, from different locations) can be associated together after > the fact, your name can probably be fairly easily obtained. > Jim Bell > jimbell(a)pacifier.com And phone companys that offers phone cards keep track of every call that goes thru each card number.

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Anonymous Payphones Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:31 AM 9/6/96 -0400, "<pstira(a)escape.com>" <pstira(a)escape.com> wrote: >Not just DC and Chicago, I'm afraid. If anyone around NYC noticed, there >are less and less payphones, and all new ones installed, just about, are >those yellow credit card phones. That's not a big problem - you can buy telephone credit cards, anonymously, in your local convenience store. Around here you've got a choice of cards where the announcements are in Spanish and the rates to call Mexico are cheap, cards that come in exact $20 from machines that don't give change, cards with pretty pictures on the front, cards with advertising, etc., as well as cards that are reusable and want some personal information about you to activate. I don't blame phone companies in New York for using non-coin-phones, especially non-monopoly phone companies. Collecting and handling coins is expensive, phones get vandalized to steal the coins, it's harder to change your rates when you need to go to each phone to do it, and people get annoyed at coin phones that charge higher than Bell prices. What I do get annoyed about is that most pay phones won't accept calls, they'll only initiate them. This means that if you call somebody from a pay phone who only has a beeper, or if you don't have a beeper, you can't leave them a useful message to call you back. Part of this is done because of the Great Drug Hysteria, but I suspect part of it is that pay phone companies don't make money receiving calls, so they don't want to tie up their phones doing that; perhaps if they charged money to receive calls as well as initiate them, they'd be willing to receive calls? Not all of them, but it's now one for >one, at least. > >=Millie= >PS: i wrote a fiction book about this a few years ago -- i should have >published. People could've said i was the next nostradamus. :( # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Cypherpunk meeting?
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hi all, I`m just dashing off a quick note to see how many south eastern UK cypherpunks there are here, preferably in the sussex area, I might organise a meet if we can get enough people to make it worthwhile mail me if you are an experienced cryptographer in the area and would be interested in attending an informal meeting for key signing, discussion and copious beer.... ;-) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: cp850 iQCVAwUBMi7qLb5OPIRbv66xAQGGqQP/cJI2sWgCc0cR8jlTDbCv0W2hklW5++7K oO23Qs7sxNQziK1lcEzIKX1kbQIng/apR4FEEhWggS+Bvadx3NNpW46BdHTI7IfZ rjE8M4K0EtYcDUZmsAG0pV70b8XKu+v/dogu/BlIFwAUCwR2ocDeIbW88tBXq4ok dcffJFY2Q4Q= =PCNL -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Http://www.fatmans.demon.co.uk/crypt/ "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey" -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6 mQCNAjH9j+cAAAEEAMBvREiQR0ot9dFCO0TiSCSunAYLv2g1Bc6I3bz8FzKXNH53 6mieJf/W4rD+CxJpT0q9RQaaoRtkHJLwbjfK2il3D7mEahMAyqvF/xRJNqkXfhM3 sRJM0Jh43l+W0M5vwokbEbk25/bxWWGspTsLD3YHbzKnG6pOcL5OPIRbv66xAAUR tCdQYXVsIEJyYWRsZXkgPHBhdWxAZmF0bWFucy5kZW1vbi5jby51az4= =riHc -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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Lattice Crypto
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Economist, September 7, 1996, p. 79. Cryptography: Puzzling secrets The truly paranoid have but one friend: mathematics. Nothing (and nobody) else can be as trusted to keep a secret. To transmit your credit card number, for example, through an Internet full of thieves, the best way is to hide it in a mathematical problem so excruciatingly difficult that no thief could ever crack it, even by hijacking all the world's computers for the effort. Devising such problems is the business of cryptographers. To be useful, the problems must be easy to create as well as impossible to unravel. Multiplying numbers is very easy. Taking the result and working out what numbers were multiplied together to produce it (known as factorisation) is a lot more difficult. It is not obvious that 4,294,967,297 is the product of 641 and 6,700,417. The two smaller numbers in this calculation are prime: that is, neither can be factorised into two further smaller numbers. The coding systems generally used by governments, businesses and software companies such as Netscape (known as RSA encoding schemes, after Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who invented the idea in 1977), mix a number even huger than 4,294,967,297 into a message, and then churn it in such a way that only the number's prime factors can undo the mess. The big number is used to make a "public key" (each user has his own, but it is available to those who might wish to communicate with him). The two prime factors compose a private key, guarded carefully by their owner. The trouble is that nobody is absolutely sure how safe this scheme is. At present a public key that was 400 digits long would take existing computers longer than the age of the universe to crack. But it remains to be proved in a rigorous mathematical way that no systematic short-cut exists. Indeed, some types of numbers are easy to factorise, and RSA schemes must avoid these known softies. It may yet turn out that, even if factorising is hard in general (as mathematicians suspect, after centuries of trying), there is a sneaky way, in the case of some other types of numbers, to do it quickly. This would be bad luck if you chose such a number. Private users may not care much: it is unlikely that someone who discovered such a loophole would use it for anything so modest as unscrambling credit card numbers. But governments, whose secrets are worth a lot more, are always on the lookout for better cloaks to go with their daggers. The ultimate cryptographic feat would therefore be a mathematical proof that all choices of a particular problem useful in code-making are forever intractable. Nobody is that clever yet. But Miklos Ajtai, a mathematician at the IBM Almaden Research Centre in San Jose, California, has made progress with puzzles called "lattice reductions". If you pick any such problem using his guidelines, it is -- unlike a factorisation problem -- guaranteed to be just as thorny as the most difficult one imaginable. Since many mathematicians also suspect that the toughest lattice-reduction problem is almost impossible to crack, Dr Ajtai's proof, completed in May, increases the confidence that they would all make good wrappings for secret messages. For mathematical aesthetes, lattice problems have more panache than the dull numerals of factorisation. Instead of factorising, say, a 200-digit number, a lattice reduction invites the would-be codebreaker to deduce the most basic way a pattern repeats itself in a piece of 200-dimensional decorative wallpaper. This is every bit as hard as it sounds. To describe a repeating pattern of rows and columns of flowers on an ordinary piece of wallpaper, two "arrows" suffice. Each points from one flower to a nearby one. If you start with a wall which is blank, except for one flower, you can reconstruct the entire design with the arrows: lay the ends of the arrows on the flower and draw new flowers (with new arrows) at each arrowtip. Repeat the process with the new flowers and the wall will eventually be full. Although the obvious pair of arrows to choose in this case would be at right angles to each other (eg, pointing north and east) other pairs would also work: for example north-east and east. But in this case the "north-east" arrow would have to be longer to reach the centre of the next flower than the "east" one. The puzzle is to find the shortest set of arrows that can be used to replicate the pattern -- easy in two or three dimensions, but achingly complex in the higher-dimensional spaces that the imaginations of mathematicians inhabit. By the time the pattern has 200 dimensions, today's fastest computers would be unable to find the 200 smallest arrows describing an arbitrary pattern before the sun ran out of fuel. Yet, as with two prime numbers, it is easy to begin with those arrows and produce the design. But how do you hide a secret message, accessible only with a private key, in a publicly available lattice? Shafi Goldwasser, Oded Goldreich and Shai Halevi, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute, in Israel, have just proposed a way. In order to encode a line of digits, they first interpret them as coordinates for a point in the lattice. Then they mix up the numbers by nudging that point a tiny random amount into the empty space between lattice points. To retrieve the original number, an eavesdropper would need to find the way back to the nearest lattice point, which is almost -- but not quite equivalent to knowing its shortest arrows. The trouble with it being not quite equivalent is that the encoding scheme changes the problem slightly -- enough for it to fall just outside the range of Dr Ajtai's proof that any instance of his lattice scheme is as hard to solve as the most difficult one. There is hope that the proof can be extended to include the encryption scheme, or that the scheme can be modified to fit the proof. But a proof that nobody could ever invent a quick method to solve the toughest lattice reduction would be nicer still -- except that its inventor would put fellow code-breakers out of work. A cryptographer who invented such a system might well be tempted to keep it secret. [Graphic of wallpaper omitted] [End]

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Doing away with govt. people
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Gee, if we could just prosecute "the govt." under auspices of the "three strikes" legislation: Gehlen Deal MK/ULTRA "That 'Bay of Pigs' thing" ZR/RIFLE Watergate MH/CHAOS Iran/Contra Phoenix Program BCCI/BNL COINTELPRO INSLAW Waco, etc. Just say "Three strikes and you're (what?)"

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Re: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology (fwd)
by Donald E. Eastlake 3rd 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Of course, as you say, security needs to be improved also. See draft-eastlake-muse-00.txt in the IETF shadow directories. Donald On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, SCN User wrote: > Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 10:45:57 -0700 (PDT) > From: SCN User <bf578(a)scn.org> > To: dee(a)cybercash.com > Subject: Re: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology (fwd) > > > > >Suggest you look at draft-eastlake-internet-payment-*.txt in the > >IETF shadow directories. I don't think any one step will solve all > >our spam problems but I wouldn't mind spending, say, 5 cents for each > >real piece of mail I sent outside my company and if end machines charged > > >5 cents per piece of ouside mail received, I think spamming would be > >crippled. (Note that with bad guy lists, you could collect the money and > >then just throw away the mail.) > Why should I pay for mail I can't control? > > Before charges like this can be implemented, protocols/security/etc > need to be improved to accurately indentify the sender. > > > -- > ------------------------------------------ > There are no facts, only interpretations. > I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific. > Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing. > ===================================================================== Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1 508-287-4877(tel) dee(a)cybercash.com 318 Acton Street +1 508-371-7148(fax) dee(a)world.std.com Carlisle, MA 01741 USA +1 703-620-4200(main office, Reston, VA) http://www.cybercash.com http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html

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Re: electronic offshore banking
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:25 PM 9/6/96 +0300, Jüri Kaljundi wrote: > >Are there any good offshore banks that would allow you to use your account >over the Internet? > >I know European Union Bank www.eub.com is on of those available, but their >US$ 25.000 minimum deposit is too stupid. > >Jüri Kaljundi >AS Stallion >jk(a)stallion.ee > > Does Compuserve count as the Internet? It soon will be the Internet since they are dropping their proprietary software. TSB (including TSB's Jersey subsidiary) has a new net-based banking arrangement using Compuserve. See the TSB web site http://www.tsb.co.uk/pcbank.htm or Compuserve (GO TSB). TSB in Jersey (or predecessor institutions) has been there since the 1820s or so. DCF

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Factory Memory
by Pete Gruber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Memory prices have finally stabilized after serious price drops since the beginning of this year. With Christmas demand high for electronic gadgets, memory supply is dwindling and higher prices are sure to follow. Now is a good time to upgrade memory to satisfy those memory hungry software packages. We are able to offer memory 72 pin, 70ns non-parity, SIMM memory boards at: 32 mb=$221 16 mb=$89.99 8 mb=$39.99 4 mb=$19.99 MANY more styles, sizes, speeds, are available. Check out our website - http://www.gruber.com for a complete list, or call us at 800 658-5883 Toll free or (602) 863-2655 for more details. Thank you Jillene Barr Gruber Industries Incorporated

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Junk Phone Calls, Metered Usage, and Cellphones
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:08 PM 9/6/96, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com wrote: >is done because of the Great Drug Hysteria, but I suspect part of it >is that pay phone companies don't make money receiving calls, >so they don't want to tie up their phones doing that; perhaps if >they charged money to receive calls as well as initiate them, >they'd be willing to receive calls? I am about to start worrying about "junk phone calls" more so than I have been. I just bit the bullet and bought a digital cellular phone, with a nifty rate plan called Digital Flex: I get unlimited free airtime from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. weekdays, and unlimited free airtime all weekend. From south of Salinas to north of Santa Rosa and as far east as the Central Valley. In other words, the entire Bay Area and outlying communities. I can send and receive calls over this entire region, from anywhere in the region (of course), without any charges. The downside is that calls _from_ or _to_ my phone during "business" hours are charged 42 cents a minute, airtime (tying up a channel and all), plus whatever other fees may be applicable at each end. Thus, every "junk call" I get trying to get me to buy aluminum siding, or to vote Democratic, or to switch my long-distance carrier (!), costs me a minimum of 42 cents, depending on how fast I can realize who they are and get rid of them ("Let me forward you to Jim Bell's AP hotline..."). Needless to say, my cellular number is only going out to a handful of folks, and with recommendations that they not call me during business hours unless its urgent. I believe this kind of pricing model is likely to be common. We can debate til the cows come home whether flat rate pricing makes sense, for ISPs, for cellphones, for other things. Relevance to Crypto? The "junk e-mai" issue, calls for regulations (which I'm against), technological solutions (Caller ID lets users decided to accept a call or not....same idea could be used with e-mail, a la Hal Finney's "You have a message of size X from size Y entitled Z" proposal for positve acceptance of remailed messages), and the value of True Names (and True Numbers). I'll be real pissed if my new cellphone number ends up in the hands of mass marketers, given that I don't plan to give it out to merchants, to organizations, etc. (I'm probably inviting malicious use by one of my enemies here on this list...there may be ways I don't yet grok to "look up" cellphone user numbers. I can then get hit with denial-of-service attack just by having this 42 cents a call situation. I hope no one is this malicious.) P.S. The phone is a Motorola Micro Digital Lite, a little bugger with a zillion features. It can vibrate silently instead of ringing (phone sex?), it can store 100 alphanumeric name/number combinations, it even has a data port for use with a modem (probably a special modem, and certainly a chore to set all the battery-powered stuff up properly...I'll report on it if it works). The cost was about $200 for the phone, after the rebates, kickbacks, etc., and after "sales tax on the pre-kickback price" was added back in (California has a tax collection scam where sales tax is assessed against the "real" price of some good or service....imagine the possibilities if this is extended to cover other such areas). The "Digital Flex" plan from Cellular One is $20/mo for the basic plan, and then $15/mo on top of that for the unlimited evenings and weekends use. (This could easily save me the amount I often spend in a month just yakking with friends and girlfriends who live over the hill in the Valley.) These rates have really come down a lot. The unlimited calls is what sold me. --Tim May 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Subject: Re: Race Bit: C
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:31 PM 9/5/96 -0600, Anonymous wrote: >> If I understand you correctly, it is OK for a government to >> institute violence against the residents of the land it claims >> dominion over, but it is not acceptable for the inhabitants of >> that piece of land to respond in self defence. > >I will say this: > >No, government initiation of violence (such as in Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc.) is not OK, >and AsPol initiation of violence is not either. This can lead into a long argument about >just _when_ violence is initiated, where opinion is more important than fact, but IMO: > >Randy Weaver was not initiating violence. >David Keresh was not initiating violence. >Pot growers and smokers are not initiating violence. No argument here... > But >Mr. Bell, if he follows through on his scheme, *will* be initiating violence. His scheme, >while it can sound tempting (especially every April 15th!) has no guarantee that it will >_only_ be used against the Lon Horiuchis of our government, Life generally doesn't come equipped with any guarantees. Some people object to private ownership of guns, on a similar theory that "there is no guarantee they won't be used against innocent people." Others (most of us?), particularly libertarians challenge this, pointing out that it is the abuse of a right which should be punished, rather than curtailing a right simply because a small minority abuse it. To the extent we believe the latter argument, we are accepting the idea that a "guarantee" is not necessary. AP, ultimately, is a tool that can be used well or used badly. I advocate using it well. >in fact, it may be said it >is not guaranteed to not be used against Mr. Bell himself, as many have joked. Check out what I wrote at the end of AP part 7: "Terror, too, because this system may just change almost EVERYTHING how we think about our current society, and even more for myself personally, the knowledge that there may some day be a large body of wealthy people who are thrown off their current positions of control of the world's governments, and the very-real possibility that they may look for a "villain" to blame for their downfall. They will find one, in me, and at that time they will have the money and (thanks to me, at least partially) the means to see their revenge. But I would not have published this essay if I had been unwilling to accept the risk." Long before I started publicizing AP, I had made my decision. > There are two roads to take in life, convincing and coercing others. > I think that the former is still possible, Mr. Bell and many others disagree. In a quote attributed to Al Capone, he said something like, "You can get more with a kind word and a gun, than you can with a kind word alone." Capone was probably talking about offense, but the principle is even more applicable to _defense_: If you have a gun, you can prevent somebody else from coercing you, and ensure that they have to CONVINCE you! AP is like a gun which can be aimed at the agents of the majority, to prevent them from violating the rights of the minority. > I worry that abuse of the very young >and weak (for now) anonymity system for the purpose of initiating, rather than exposing, >violence will lead to more government violence than we already have. First, AP only "initiates" if it is used against people who have not, themselves, initiated force or fraud. I contend that while this is not impossible, it is improbable. If you choose a target that "everyone" else agrees has initiated force, you'll only have to cough up a dollar, or a quarter, or even a dime and you'll all get your wish. Randomly select a guiltless individual and you'll be the only one paying, not to mention the fact that you might have trouble finding an AP organization that'll take your malicious donation. This translates into: "They'll exist, but due to lack of competition they'll be able to insist on taking a healthy cut of their own." In addition, if you attempt to use AP against somebody who already knows it's probably you (say, an ex business partner you just ripped off?), its anonymity won't be much use. > Perhaps I am >wrong and there is no hope; but if so, that means another revolution. Revolutions are >very romantic sounding, to those who have not been in a war. The whole point of crypto-anarchy is that revolutions are CHANGING. Think of a revolution like an earthquake: It's the sudden release of stress built up over years or decades. In an earthquake, if that release could be spread out from the seconds or minute it normally takes, to hours or even days (or better yet, continuously) the amplitude would be far smaller and you probably wouldn't even notice it. Likewise, politically, the only reason you get revolutions is because political leadership gets entrenched and resists change. Even in democracy, which is supposed to facilitate changes, eventually the politicians learn to play one group off another, leading to the same kind of social stratification problems that even dictatorships have. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Reputations
by Martin Janzen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

TCM> I strongly disagree. It's quite possible for Person A to quickly convert TCM> his reputation to Person B to a _negative_ value. Real quick, in fact. GB>I don't see how there can be such a thing as negative reputation GB>capital. Wouldn't that mean B believes the opposite of what A says? B wouldn't necessarily believe the _opposite_, but if R(A,B) is negative, then B would treat whatever A says with greater skepticism. ("Consider the source.") Alternatively, R(A,B) << 0 might mean that B has decided that A's posts tend not to be worth even the time it takes to read them, and has set his killfile accordingly. (Think of someone who makes unsupported assertions: this is not a reason to believe the _opposite_ of what he says, but to ignore him.) GA>If you anti-believed someone in a consistent manner, couldn't they exploit GA>that? Sure; see any number of Cold War spy novels for examples. One point that I think deserves mention, but that I haven't seen yet in this thread, is that R(A,B) is contextual; it should be R(A,B,subject). To accept the word of an authority outside his area of expertise is a common logical fallacy. (Think of political endorsements by famous actors.) Conversely, so is dismissing something just because its proponent has a negative reputation in another context. (At the risk of flirting with Godwin's law, an example might be that just because a certain well-known evil person liked Karl May novels and music by Wagner, this does not in itself make these things bad.) GB>For instance, when a certain infamously-low-reputation (deservedly so) GB>individual recently joined the cypherpunk lists, others who had endured GB>him in the past tried to relay their impressions of him. It proved very GB>difficult to convey, and they were somewhat attacked for their efforts GB>and not entirely believed. GB> GB>In other words, he *could not* spend down to 0, despite years of GB>unflagging effort. I'd interpret this situation a bit differently. In the eyes of many list members, this individual _did_ spend down to 0 -- and below, I'd argue, based on the number of people who announced changes to their killfiles. But this was because of his actions on the list; it was _not_ because of the impressions of others. Most of the regulars on this list are, IMHO, logical enough thinkers, and of sufficiently independent mind (to put it mildly), to wait and see for themselves. Results in other, more conformist or authoritarian groups may vary... In other words, it would appear that "reputation capital" is difficult to create or destroy based only on the word of others; it has to be earned. (Hmm, is it easier to destroy than to create -- are we more likely to adjust our R(A,me) score downward based on what others say about A?) TCM?> But TCM?> what if the American Heart Association publishes a detailed study on the TCM?> fat levels of MacDonald's products and declares it to "Dangerous." The TCM?> effect will probably be greater, as R (AHA, many people) = high, and by the TCM?> kind of Dempster-Shafer belief calculus I discussed a few months ago, the TCM?> rep of the AHA propagates semi-transitively to the rep of MacDonald's. TCM?> TCM?> (This all happened recently, with the famous studies of fat levels of movie TCM?> theater food...sales dropped almost overnight, and now the fat levels of TCM?> popcorn, etc., have been changed for the better.) I agree with the first paragraph; however, I'm not sure that the second paragraph gives an example of this. The high levels of saturated fats in movie popcorn were (as I recall) publicized by the previously little- known "Center for Science in the Public Interest", a group with nowhere near the reputation capital of the AHA. Their claims were taken seriously, not because the group itself was particularly reputable, but because the results were dramatic and easily verified. A better example might be that of Surgeon-General Koop vs. the tobacco companies. GB>I've already made the points I wanted to make, so I may not have further GB>comments. TCM>Nor me. Well, I've probably said enough, then, especially considering that no one is paying attention any longer. Wouldn't want excess verbiage to lower what little reputation capital I may have here... :-) -- Martin Janzen janzen(a)idacom.hp.com

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Global Alert -- Hysteria in the U.K. threatens Net
by declan＠well.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[For more details and background, check out http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/ and http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/96/36/index4a.html for my U.K. cyberporn fearstorm piece. --Declan] September 6, 1996 *** GLOBAL ACTION ALERT *** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Please redistribute this document widely with this banner intact - Redistribute only in appropriate places & only until 30 September 1996 Global Alert: Hysteria in the UK Threatens Free Speech on the Net The Sunday, August 25 issue of the London Observer splashed across its front page a sensationalized account of child pornography on the Internet, falsely accusing two Internet Service Providers, Clive Feather of Demon UK (a full service site) and Johan Helsingius of anon.penet.fi (an anonymous remailer) of involvement in the distribution of child pornography. Why were these accusations made? Demon UK had refused to remove a broad range of sexually-oriented newsgroups identified by UK authorities as possible sources of child pornography, and anon.penet.fi was identified without substantiation as a source for `90% of child pornography on the Internet.' In fact, Demon UK was simply acknowledging that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) cannot police the data that traverses their systems, or assume responsibility for it, any more than the post office can assume responsiblity for content that is sent through traditional mail. And Helsingius, contrary to allegations in the London Observer, had long before restricted the size of files that could be transferred through anon.penet.fi, effectively eliminating the possibility that binary files containing pictures could be exchanged. This story was extreme, but not without precedent: much has been written associating the Internet with those who make and distribute child porn, and there have been many attempts to hold ISPs responsible for objectionable or illegal content. ISPs are not content providers; they channel content provided by their users. It is outside the scope of the ISP to monitor, evaluate, and attempt to remove objectionable content. In fact, any attempt by an ISP to block particular kinds of content will ultimately be fruitless, as providers of that content will simply find alternate channels of distribution. Moreover, it is wrong to assume that the Internet has no rules, and is friendly to the exchange of objectionable materials. In fact the Internet is a `virtual community' of users with a distinct culture incorporating diverse views but finding consensus in opposition to censorship and access control. There is also strong opposition to the exploitation of children; in fact, many Internet users have cooperated in attempts to identify those who create and distribute child pornography. Summary: The physical abuse and exploitation of children is a very real problem demanding a proactive response, however we vigorously oppose attempts to stifle the free and open exchange of information over the Internet in the mistaken belief that overbroad restrictions on the flow of information will protect children from abuse. We support Demon UK and anon.penet.fi (which Helsingius has shut down), and deplore the Observer's lurid attempt to make respectable Internet providers the "cause" of a problem for which they have no responsibility. The Observer story is not the first of its kind: it represents an ongoing confusion about a complex new medium. Unfortunately this misunderstanding has become a global problem, represented in proposed or enacted restrictive legislation as well as negative press. Consider these possible analogies to the Internet: - The Internet is a vast mail system, like a post office. Would you favor a law that required postal authorities to open each piece of mail and evaluate its acceptability? - The Internet is a huge library system. Would you favor a law that would restrict information a library can provide? - The Internet is a collection of virtual communities. Would you favor a law that required routine searches of your community? Our position: These measures constrain everyone because of the misdeeds of a few. It is more sensible to find and deal with the sources of child pornography than to impede the flow of data over the Internet. The imposition of censorship and additional constraints applied to ISPs will not solve the existing problem, but will create a new problem, a barrier to the free and democratic exchange of ideas. For background on global privacy and liberty issues: http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/ For press contacts, and for more information about the Internet, see homepages for the signatories to this message: ALCEI - Electronic Frontiers Italy * http://www.nexus.it/alcei.html CITADEL - Electronic Frontier France * pforsans(a)in-net.inba.fr CommUnity (UK) * http://www.community.org.uk EFF (USA) * http://www.eff.org EFF-Austin (USA) * http://www.eff-austin.org Electronic Frontier Canada * http://www.efc.ca/ Electronic Frontiers Australia * http://www.efa.org.au/ Electronic Frontiers Houston (USA) * http://www.efh.org Elektronisk Forpost Norge (Electronic Frontier Norway) * http://www.sn.no/~efn Fronteras Electronicas Espan~a (Electronic Frontiers Spain) * http://www.lander.es/~jlmartin/ HotWired * http://www.hotwired.com/ ###

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TWA 800 - Friendly Fire?
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The latest rumor. The message came to me from a man who was Safety Chairman for the Airline Pilots Association for many years and he is considered an expert on safety. He would not ever spread idle rumor. In short, he is usually quite certain before saying anything! The following information about TWA Fight 800 was received this afternoon: (08-22-96 ) TWA flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy guided missile ship which was in area W-105. W-105 is a Warning Area off the SouthEast coast of Long Island and is used by the military for missile firing and other military operations. Guided missile ships travel all over the world defending the US and they were conducting practice firings up over the top of a Navy P-3 radar plane who was on a Southwest heading about over the top of TWA 800. Evidently the missile is suppose to go over the top of the P-3 and the accuracy of the missile is being measured by instrumentation in the P-3. There was a USAir flight coming from the Southeast descending towards Providence, RI that had been cleared to 21,000 feet and the TWA 800 aircarft was restricted to 13,000 feet. The air traffic controller requested the USAir flight to turn on his landing lights with the idea that TWA might see his lights and identify him. At that point, he would clear the TWA flight to continue his climb. The P-3 was a non-beacon target (transponder OFF) flying southwest in the controlled airspace almost over TWA 800 and made NO calls to ATC. After the explosion, he continued his flight to the west and then called ATC and asked if they would like him to turn around and assist with the "accident!" You will remember that the first announcement about this accident came from the Pentagon. The spokesman mentioned that they were sending the Navy to the crash site. They immediately sent a Navy Captain who was replaced the next day by an Admiral. That Admiral is still on the scene. The FBI has conducted at least 3,000 eyewitness interviews and the NTSB has not been able to be a part of these interviews not have any access to the contents of them. Some of those eyewitnesses reported seeing lights. Those were probably the landing lights of the USAir plane. It has been a cover-up from the word go. The NTSB is there in name ONLY. All announcements made by Mr. Bob Francis say absolutely nothing and notice that the FBI is always standing beside or behind Mr. Francis and it would appear that his job is to make sure that nothing is said that would give away "THE BIG SECRET!" It is time to end this farce and tell the public the real truth as to what happened to TWA 800. My source shall remain my own but the above information is true and I believe it will all become known soon. Now that all of you know the real truth.

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Public briefing on the NRC cryptography policy report at...
by CRYPTO 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: Public briefing on the NRC cryptography policy report at MIT on Sept 11 Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society A Public Briefing in Cambridge, Massachusetts Wednesday, September 11, 1996, 3:00-4:00 pm There will be a public briefing in Cambridge, Massachusetts by the National Research Council on this report. The briefing will be held at the Laboratory of Computer Science, MIT, Room NE43-518, 545 Technology Square, in Cambridge (off Main Street). Dr. Herbert Lin, study director for this report and senior staff officer of CSTB, will conduct the briefing. For further information, please contact Ron Rivest at (617) 253-6098 or rivest(a)theory.Ics.mit.edu. Pls post.

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Cellular phone tracing
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From comp.risks: Date: Mon, 2 Sep 1996 22:24:13 -0400 (EDT) From: glassman(a)sunsite.unc.edu Subject: FedEx monitoring of cellular phonecall locations [...] nowhere near either of those places, so I did not bother to mention my current location to the operator. The next day, Saturday, I called FedEx with the same cell phone from Blowing Rock to arrange the pickup. The operator immediately asked if I wanted them to come to the intersection that I had placed my call from the day before. Two days later, a FedEx operator confirmed that they are getting "new systems" at some locations that are able to record the locations from which cellular calls are placed. I have now asked Cellular One three times to explain to me why they do not tell subscribers that they pass this location information through the system, but to no avail. [...] ========== end fwd.

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No Subject
by nobody＠replay.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 5 Sep 96 at 14:31, Anonymous wrote: > This can lead into a long argument about just _when_ violence is > initiated, where opinion is more important than fact, but IMO: Agreed, if you live in a world of fantassy.... > Mr. Bell, if he follows through on his scheme, *will* be initiating > violence. You urge us not to get into the argument about "just_when_violence is initiated" and proceed to state the "Mr. Bell... ...*will* be initiating violence". What is that english word? Dogmatic? Nahhh, there must be a more precise one. Please help me here... > There are two roads to take in life, convincing and coercing > others. Looters of all persuasions have always counted on that and it worked for them for thousands of years. > I worry that abuse of the very young and weak (for > now) anonymity system for the purpose of initiating, rather than > exposing, violence will lead to more government violence than we > already have. You could worry all you want, but your only way to assess wether or not it will happens is not through your feelings but trhough the use of your rational mind. Stop "feeling" and start thinking. > Perhaps I am wrong and there is no hope; but if so, > that means another revolution. Revolutions are very romantic > sounding, to those who have not been in a war. I suppose that this refers to AP. If so, go RTFM because you conclusions and the workings of AP are not compatible. AP would not lead to a war, per se. Neither a civil war. > I urge everyone to > read "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" by Jeffrey Rogers > Hummel for a look at what our last revolution got us (hint: it was > *not* less government). I urge you to have a look at what is at the root of the growth of govt. It is not things but ideas, basic premises about life and the interaction between individuals. Ultimately, basic premises about the nature of Man is what brought us more govt. To understand govt excess, you've got to understand what is into the brain of the govt peoples. jfa "One of theses centuries, the brutes, private or public, who believe that they can rule their betters by force, will learn the lesson of what happens when brute force encounters mind and force." - Ragnar Danneskjold :) Jean-Francois Avon DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Limoges porcelain, silverware and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants physicists, technologists and engineers. PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891

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DC lock and key, from HotWired
by declan＠well.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www.hotwired.com/muckraker/ Muckraker By Brock Meeks More DC Lock and Key The Clinton administration will unveil new encryption legislation, dubbed the Key Recovery Initiative, as early as 9 September, Muckraker has learned. The bill's title is an exercise in Orwellian redirection - nothing more than an attempt to make the threadbare "key escrow" encryption concept, which was spawned via the infamous Clipper Chip, more vanilla-sounding. The Key Recovery Initiative is political hardball, calculated to split an industry currently reluctant to bow to pressure from the FBI and the National Security Agency to voluntarily adopt the key escrow encryption scheme. In making its pitch, the White House is "offering some sweetheart deals to a number of companies," says an industry source familiar with the administration proposal. Those "sweetheart deals" involve relaxing export controls on encryption software only for certain industries - finance, insurance, and health care, industry sources say. Such a move essentially leaves companies such as Netscape isolated. It's a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. In return for relaxing the export controls, the White House will ask companies in the targeted industries to provide concrete assurances that they will endorse a government-devised system of "key recovery encryption" in which the decoding keys to any scrambled data are turned over to a "trusted third party." Those third parties, of course, must first be verified and approved by the government via as yet undefined criteria. The decoding keys made available under this plan would be accessible to any law enforcement agency that could prove to a judge that it needed them to carry out an investigation. If that ambiguous level of "proof" can be provided, your keys are handed over without debate or recourse on your part. The administration's legislation will propose a "framework" based on "a global key management infrastructure," according to a little-publicized statement released by the White House on 12 July. A spokesperson from the vice president's office confirmed that the legislation will be drawn from this outline. The bill is an attempt to forge alliances with US trading partners so that data can be accessed and decoded across international borders. The legislation's blueprint includes: - Liberalizing export controls for encryption products dealing with financial, insurance, and health-care data. - A standards-setting procedure for "key recovery systems and products" that will be "eligible for general export licenses," and standards for products that the government will buy. - Transfer of export control oversight from the State Department, which currently maintains that encryption technology is a "munition," to the Commerce Department. [...]

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Re: Whistleblowing on the Internet
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com" "Bill Stewart" 3-SEP-1996 06:43:40.27 I would note that most unions are mostly run by populists of various varieties, who are generally against individual liberties - whether liberal or conservative populist doesn't make any real difference in the long run. To me, Pat Buchannan and Adolf Hitler look rather similar. >While some unions are clearly run by and for thugs, some employers have >also hired thugs to attack union organizers, and both unions and employers >have convinced government thugs to attack their opponents, though unions >generally have convinced governments to write laws with fines attached, >while employers have often had actual Federal troops shooting union strikers, >and have had police refrain from defending strikers from attack. I object to union members getting beaten up for union membership, striking, etcetera, just as much as I object to members of any other non-governmental organization being beaten activity. But there's a difference between the right not to get beaten up and someone claiming that union membership - still less not working - isn't a perfectly legitimate reason for firing someone. The state should not be interfering in this matter, in either direction. >In a free market, there wouldn't be laws requiring or forbidding union >membership, and some unions would prosper by providing good service to their >members and to the employers that hire them, while others wouldn't. Quite.... but unions that survive under a free market will look a _lot_ different from today's unions. -Allen

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Re: Reputations
by mccoy＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

gregburk(a)netcom.com (Greg Burk) writes: > mccoy(a)communities.com (Jim McCoy) writes: > > Greg Burk writes: [...] > > Go read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (a good book to read anyway :) > > and examine the nature of the computer network "discussion groups" he talks > > about: a classic example of reputation markets in many-to-many discussions. [...] > I have read it, a long time ago. Frankly, it's a spectacularly bad > example. He writes of the two child-protagonists gaining reputations as > great philosophers on a sort of Usenet. (At the time I believe OSC was a > member of Delphi, UNCLEORSON) > > Look around on the real Usenet. OSC could not have been more wrong. If you look closer you would probably be surprised to see things starting to move in this direction. As the number of participants has grown the "noise" in most newsgroups has grown to an unmanageable level. Now most newsreaders allow you to score authors or article threads so that you can keep individual reputation and interest files. I am actually an anomoly at my company, a collection of very net-savvy people, because I actually still participate in a few newsgroups; most of the interesting net discussions now take place on mailing lists which allow further reputation filtering (most mail agents have better and more flexible filters than news agents) and most bleeding-edge traffic happens in private mailing lists where one cannot even participate unless they have already established their reputation. If these lists were gatewayed to read-only newsgroups you would have what Card was talking about. > > > As an "asset", it is extremely non-liquid: > > > > > > How exactly would you "convert" your reputation into other capital? > > > Would you accept bribes and tell lies? Seems to me you would only get a > > > one-shot "conversion" and it couldn't possibly hope to equal your > > > investment. > > > > Tell that to Walter Cronkite, Siskel & Ebert, Moody's and others who have > > converted reputation capital into large piles of money [...] > > You don't seem to realize you are actually including at least one major > example of a counterfeit reputation here. > > I speak of Siskel & Ebert, whom I have caught at least once giving a > strikingly dishonest review. I had seen the movie (See You In The > Morning) on opening day, before they reviewed it. It stunk. No, this is just an example of how reputations are not global values, each reputation is modified by the perspective of the user. _You_ disagreed with the review and have probably used your experience to weight the values of future reviews by those particular reviewers. This is why there are hundreds of different sources of reviews for movies, people weight the recommendation given by the reviewer with > Conclusion: They knew it stunk, but for some reason I won't speculate on > they wanted to say they liked it so they misreported it, and covered > their butts with a review that would look mixed later but sound like a > rave now. I see a counterfeit reputation. Incorrect. One thought it was a good film and the other disagreed. You did not find it to be a good film and have since modified your weighting of the Siskel & Ebert reputation value to reflect this. It is highly improbable that there were any behind-the-scenes machinations between the movie backers and the reviewers: such a person has a value which is directly proportional to being viewed as impartial and once they have established a reputation the value in maintaining the reputation outweighs the value a potential briber could gain by trying to influence the review (nothing will drop the reputation faster than getting caught cheating, and a single reviewer does not have enough influence on the public to impact a films box office returns enough to make the bribe worthwhile.) It is more likely that you just disagreed with the review and you have since learned your lesson and now seek multiple review sources or else switched to a different source for movie review information (dropping your personal weighting of Siskel & Ebert down below other sources.) > > No, I think that you just don't understand the mechanics of reputations and > > how they interact with the most important resource in most people's lives: > > time. > > I'm tempted to tit-for-tat, but I will not refute your points by telling > you you just don't understand. I guess I could have been more diplomatic, but it seems that you just do not understand that reputations are not a global value, rather they are a weighted value which is modified over time as the user seeks to determine a balance of raters and reviewers which most closely represents their particular viewpoints, interests, and experiences. There is no one single reputation which a given person has, all reputations are dependant upon the source of the reputation and the context in which that particular reputation is used. > > time. Instead of thinking of "reputation" look at it from the other end and > > consider the "attention marketplace." > > Fine, but resolving good vs counterfeit reputations takes time too. *Sigh* There is no such thing as a "counterfeit" reputation. When someone joins a network with a particular set of interests they will start off by finding a reputation service(s) which they think, though various channels ranging from advertisement to word of mouth, closely matches their interests and views. This is the only time that outright deception can influence a person and it is also the point at which deception is least profitable (because the deceiver will be easily revealed once the user compares the reputations with what they expect to see and because most new users will choose multiple services to perform comparison shopping.) There may even be reputation services which rate other reputation services to let people know how the service compares to its stated viewpoints and advertisements. A reputation service gains income by establishing a long-term replationship with the customer, so it is in the services interests to maintain credibility with its users. If they do not then that reputation service will have a negative weighting depending on what the user is interested in, so the problem of correct vs. incorrect reputations will itself be handled by reputation services. An individual will have multiple reputations depending on which service is providing the reputation and the context in which the reputation is being used. "Tim May" may have a relatively high reputation in most services on cryptography and crypto-anarchy issues but this reputation will not apply to football predictions or articles posted to soc.culture.swedish. Someone may try to burn a reputation to pass off a false statement as truth, but this is as unlikely to work as it is for Peter Jennings to tell all of his viewers that this afternoon Bill Clinton appointed me his senior domestic policy advisor; people now have a wide variety of news and information sources to use for comparing the veracity of the statement, getting caught diminishes his reputation and this has a monetary value to him, and because his audience is larger due to his increased reputation there is a greater chance that others will investigate the matter and so his chance of getting caught is higher. > > Right now reputation markets have a > > limited presence on the internet (mostly through killfiles) because the > > tools required are not integreated into the tools used to browse the > > information. In time this will change. > > How? I ask for something more specific than In The Future Everything > Will Be Done Right. Version 0.1 (coming to a news server near you by the end of the year) will take the form of a service whereby you can subscribe to a usenet filtering service which will present your newsreader with a database of articles which have already been filtered by the reputation service to remove off-topic and "me too" posts (or perhaps based upon other filtering criteria.) The agency making this service possible will also sell to individuals or groups the ability to start their own service on this news host and perform whatever filtering they want, this will also include adaptive filters (if I can ever get the little bastards to use an internal weighting function which does not converge too quickly) which will attempt to learn the general weighting criteria are so that the people running reputation filtering need only update the filters occasionally and not score each and every posting. The hard part, and the part which is slowly gaining enough momentum to make this possible, is the integration of cryptographic signatures into messages so that one can determine the authenticity of a message and thereby assign a reputation value to a real identity instead of an easily forgeable email address. jim

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Edited Edupage, 5 Sep 1996
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"educom(a)educom.unc.edu" 5-SEP-1996 22:55:23.70 >************************************************************ >Edupage, 5 September 1996. Edupage, a summary of news about information >technology, is provided three times a week as a service by Educom, >a Washington, D.C.-based consortium of leading colleges and universities >seeking to transform education through the use of information technology. >************************************************************ [...] >AOL BLOCKS JUNK MAIL SITES >America Online is blocking all electronic mail sent from five Internet sites >that have been used to send hundreds of thousands of unsolicited messages to >AOL customers. In turn, Cyber Promotions Inc., which is associated with >three of the sites, has accused America Online of hypocrisy for "censoring" >commercial messages sent from other sites but allowing AOL itself to sponsor >commercial promotions. AOL dismisses the charge as an "apples and oranges >comparison." (New York Times 5 Sep 96 C2) There's been a court suit to stop AOL from doing so, which appears to have gotten a temporary injunction to that effect... I'll forward the details. >CHINA SCREENS OUT "SPIRITUAL POLLUTION" ON THE NET >The Beijing government has begun blocking as many as 100 Internet sites that >offer material the government deems unsuitable for its citizens -- including >dissident viewpoints from Hong Kong and Taiwan, sites sponsored by U.S. >major media organizations such as CNN and the Washington Post, and sexually >explicit sites such as Playboy and Penthouse. An official described the >blocked sites as suspected purveyors of "spiritual pollution." (Wall Street >Journal 5 Sep 96 B12) Hmm... funny similarity between Chinese objections of "spiritual pollution" and ASEAN objections of "cultural" problems, isn't there? [...] >Edupage is written by John Gehl <gehl(a)educom.edu> & Suzanne Douglas ><douglas(a)educom.edu>. Voice: 404-371-1853, Fax: 404-371-8057. >Technical support is provided by Information Technology Services at the >University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. >************************************************************ >Edupage ... is what you've just finished reading. To subscribe to Edupage: >send mail to: listproc(a)educom.unc.edu with the message: subscribe edupage >Roy Lichtenstein (if your name is Roy Lichtenstein; otherwise, substitute >your own name). ... To cancel, send a message to: listproc(a)educom.unc.edu >with the message: unsubscribe edupage. (If you have subscription problems, >send mail to manager(a)educom.unc.edu.)

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Court challenge to AOL junk-mail blocks
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I wouldn't personally use AOL in any event, but their use of their computers is their business. I do have some doubts as to whether AOL subscribers necessarily signed on for this - as noted on the list-managers list, a consent arrangement would thus be preferable. The other argument of the Cyber Promotions jerks is nonsense - how does AOL blocking affect the rest of the Internet? -Allen >PHILADELPHIA, Pa. (Sep 6, 1996 12:23 p.m. EDT) -- A federal judge has = >ordered America Online to stop blocking up to 1.8 million "junk" e-mail = >files flooding subscribers' electronic mailboxes daily from a = >Philadelphia marketing firm. [...] >Pending a trial tentatively scheduled for Nov. 12, U.S. District Judge = >Charles R. Weiner ordered AOL Thursday to lift the block on Cyber = >Promotions' mailings. Weiner is presiding over a suit Cyber Promotions = >Inc. filed accusing AOL of trying to drive it out of business. >Cyber Promotions controls three of the five sites blocked by AOL. The = >others -- one that distributes software to create bulk e-mail lists and = >one that had sent out ads for Internet video porn -- were not affected = >by Weiner's order. >AOL attorney David Phillips said the company was considering an appeal. = >He said AOL customers had been "complaining vociferously about Cyber = >Promotions' junk mail." >Sanford A. Wallace, the president of Cyber Promotions, was pleased about = >the decision. >"We feel that America Online has violated the civil rights of their = >members and has violated our rights to send e-mail through the Internet, = >which AOL does not own," he said. >Although unsolicited mail sent through the post office in the United = >States is not considered illegal, the rules have yet to be defined in = >cyberspace. The larger services -- AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve -- all = >have policies forbidding mass junk mailings

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Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Indeed. It appears the Unabomber has taken away the privelege of >dropping stamped mail weighing over 16ozs into street-side mailboxes. >One is now instructed to take these packages to a post-office mail >clerk for mailing. So switch to Fedex. The P.O. gives lousy service anyway. Privitize. DCF

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Re: Doing away with govt. people
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:13 PM 9/6/96 -0700, Dale Thorn wrote: >Gee, if we could just prosecute "the govt." under auspices of the >"three strikes" legislation: > >Gehlen Deal MK/ULTRA >"That 'Bay of Pigs' thing" ZR/RIFLE >Watergate MH/CHAOS >Iran/Contra Phoenix Program >BCCI/BNL COINTELPRO >INSLAW Waco, etc. You've probably heard of the "RICO statute," or "Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations" law. It's both criminal and civil: You're supposed to be able to bring a RICO lawsuit against an organization and get triple damages. Maybe somebody should try it and name the federal government as defendant...There's certainly plenty of evidence. >Just say "Three strikes and you're (what?)" "Dead," preferably. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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More identification laws
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"rre(a)weber.ucsd.edu" 2-SEP-1996 22:33:17.31 [The new welfare bill in the US has profound privacy implications and will require major new identification systems and databases. See the article on the front page of today's (9/2/96) New York Times for some details. (There's a bunch of useful Internet stuff in the business section too.) This issue of the Privacy Forum, which I've abridged and rearranged, includes three items on Social Security Numbers and another on fingerscanning. This is really it: pressures for universal identifiers are growing exponentially from a hundred directions as we speak. I wish I knew how to communicate the magnitude of it. If half the stuff currently being launched in this area really happens then the world is going to be completely different a year from now -- give it two if the system development projects choke as per usual on their overambition. I hope you're not sick of this topic, because you'll be hearing lots more about it this autumn. Educate, agitate, organize. Please. Speaking of which, I've also enclosed a note about a Privacy International web page on national identification cards.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). Send any replies to the original author, listed in the From: field below. You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" command. For information on RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, send an empty message to rre-help(a)weber.ucsd.edu =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Date: Sun, 1 Sep 96 18:14 PDT From: privacy(a)vortex.com (PRIVACY Forum) Subject: PRIVACY Forum Digest V05 #16 PRIVACY Forum Digest Sunday, 1 September 1996 Volume 05 : Issue 16 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 10:51:45 -0700 (PDT) From: jd(a)scn.org (Janeane Dubuar) Subject: NCSL ALERT: Driver's Licenses and Birth Certificates This alert came by mail from the National Conference of State Legislatures in Washington, D.C. I added an update which includes the names of House-Senate conferees. The federal immigration bill (H.R. 2202) is expected to emerge from conference committee some time during the first week of September. Now is the time to act. TOWARD A NATIONAL IDENTIFICATION CARD AND MORE RED TAPE: CONGRESS MANDATES CHANGES TO DRIVER'S LICENSES AND BIRTH CERTIFICATES On May 2, 1996, the U.S. Senate passed S. 1664 (now called H.R. 2202 - Senate version), a bill to reform illegal immigration, that proposes monumental changes to all driver's licenses and birth certificates (section 118). These changes will force most U.S. citizens to obtain and pay for new driver's licenses and birth certificates; compromise each citizen's right to privacy; violate state and local control over driver's licenses and birth certificates; and invite discrimination against minorities. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal driver's license mandate alone will shift up to $20 million in costs to states and localities. The House also passed an immigration bill, H.R. 2202. The House bill does not contain the driver's license and birth certificate mandates. Both House and Senate immigration staff are currently reconciling the two bills in an informal conference committee. Phone calls to House and Senate Leadership are urgently needed to demand that the driver's license and birth certificate mandates be deleted from the final bill. What Does the Senate Version of H.R. 2202 Require? 1. Driver's Licenses - State driver's licenses and identification cards MUST CONTAIN THE APPLICANT'S SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. The federal government will also create new federal standards for the application process and design of all driver's licenses and ID cards. States that currently retain and verify an applicant's social security number but do not place the number on the cards are initially exempt from the social security number mandate. According to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, of the 38 states that do not require the social security number to be on their driver's licenses, only Massachusetts would qualify for this exemption; all other states would be required to place social security numbers on driver's licenses and ID cards. All states are required to conform to the other federal standards. States with cycles of renewal longer than six years must start October 1, 2006. After October 1, 2006, NO ONE may use a driver's license or ID card for identification purposes that does not meet these federal standards. 2. Birth Certificates - All birth certificates must be printed on federally-approved safety paper and be certified by the issuing agency. The federal government will also issue additional provisions requiring other security features in the future. Starting in 1999 (three years after the bill's enactment), birth certificates that do not meet these federal standards cannot be accepted by any federal agency or by any state or local agency that issues driver's licenses or ID cards. Who Needs a New Driver's License? Anyone who wants to use their driver's license as a valid form of identification after October 1, 2006. If you need to use a driver's license to vote, to apply for a passport, to qualify for a federal school loan, license, contract or public assistance program or to meet any other federal, state or local requirement you will need a new driver's license. Will I Have to Put My Social Security Number on My Driver's License? Yes. While most states currently give applicants the option of not using this number on their driver's license or prohibit its use outright, the new federal requirements will force almost every American to put their social security number on their license or ID card. Many citizens are concerned by laws that increase the circulation of their social security number. The social security number is a key which provides access to vital personal information, which could be misused if it fell into the wrong hands. Others believe that proposals making driver's licenses uniform, including social security numbers, are a significant step toward a national ID card. Finally, many minorities contend that they will be disproportionately affected by the new requirements because they will be asked to show their documents more often than other Americans. Who Needs a New Birth Certificate? Anyone who wants to use their birth certificate as a valid form of identification after October 1, 1999. If you need to use your birth certificate to establish citizenship, apply for or renew a driver's license, passport or other identification documents, obtain a marriage license, register to vote, change your name, or many other purposes you will need a new certificate. No matter how old you are, if you need to use your birth certificate it must conform to the new federal standards, otherwise it is invalid. Fees will almost certainly be charged for new birth certificates to pay for the new federal requirements. This will impose a significant hardship on elderly and low-income Americans. THE DRIVER'S LICENSE AND BIRTH CERTIFICATE MANDATES IN ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION BILL H.R. 2202 (Senate) WILL... ...INCREASE SOCIAL SECURTY NUMBER FRAUD. H.R. 2202 (Senate version) will require the vast majority of automobile drivers in the U.S. to put their social security numbers on their driver's licenses. In the future, whenever someone shows their driver's license they will also be exposing their social security number. With the social security number accessible to so many people, it will be relatively easy for someone to fraudulently use your social security number to assume your identity and gain access to your bank account, credit services, utility billing information, driving history, and other sources of personal information. This new federal law will compound and exacerbate a disturbing trend reported by banks and credit card companies that social security number-related fraud is already on the rise. ...INVADE PRIVACY AND THREATEN CIVIL LIBERTIES. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, when social security numbers were first issued in 1936, the federal government assured the public that use of the numbers would be limited to social security programs. The driver's license and ID card provisions in H.R. 2202 (Senate version) violate this promise, and will dramatically increase the circulation of the social security number and its use as a national identifier. Now more corporations, creditors, insurance companies, government officials and others will be able to get easier access to vast amounts of personal information that can be used to support marketing schemes, determine insurance and loan eligibility, gain an advantage in a lawsuit, etc. ...PREEMPT STATE LAWS AND SHIFT COSTS TO STATES AND LOCALITIES. According to the Automobile Association of America, 38 states do not require drivers to put their social security numbers on their driver's licenses. Legislation has been introduced in a number of states (including Mississippi and Hawaii) that require social security numbers on their driver's licenses to take the numbers off the card because of fraud and privacy problems. The new federal law would require all but Massachusetts to change their laws, taking this option away from the majority of the nation's drivers and limiting state authority to decide whether this policy is appropriate for their residents. The bill also gives the federal government wide latitude to develop new and more costly requirements for state driver's licenses, ID cards and birth certificates in the future. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the new unfunded federal mandates in the law will shift up to $20 million in costs to states and force states and localities to increase fees for birth certificates to pay for new federal requirements. ...LEAD TO A NATIONAL ID CARD THAT DISCRIMINATES AGAINST MINORITIES. By requiring states to tie the social security number to state-issued identification documents, the proposal marks a dramatic shift toward using the number as an identifier. Today's mandate that the states follow federal requirements in their identification documents will lead to tomorrow's mandate: that the federal government issue the identification documents itself to ensure uniformity and reliability. Make no mistake: this provision is a key building block for national identification documents, and the national ID card. If such an ID card is mandated, Latinos, Asians, and other Americans who "look foreign" or speak with an accent will be expected to produce this document far more often than other Americans, especially if they live in border areas. Increasing discrimination against our own citizens is no way to deal with the problem of illegal immigration. ...TANGLE CITIZENS IN GOVERNMENT RED TAPE. The federal bill requires any citizen that needs to use their birth certificate for official identification to get a reissued birth certificate from their place of birth by October 1999. Senior citizens that intend to apply for Medicare will need to obtain a new birth certificate. Couples engaged to be married will need new birth certificates for a marriage license and to change their names. Professionals traveling internationally for business or families going on vacation overseas will need new birth certificates to obtain passports. With millions of citizens requesting new birth certificates, lines and waits for federally-approved birth certificates will be long. All recipients will be charged a fee for their new birth certificates. ------------------------------- UPDATE: To study the full text of the Senate's version of H.R. 2202, go to http://thomas.loc.gov and look up S.1664, section 118. Write or call conferees and your own member of the House. As of Thursday, 8/29/96, 4:30 pm EDT, Senate conferees on the immigration bill were: Feinstein, Dianne - California Grassley, Chuck - Iowa Hatch, Orrin - Utah Kennedy, Edward - Massachusetts Kohl, Herb - Wisconsin Kyl, Jon - Arizona Leahy, Patrick - Vermont Simon, Paul - Illinois Simpson, Alan - Wyoming Specter, Arlen - Pennsylvania Thurmond, Strom - South Carolina Likely House conferees include: Becerra, Xavier - California (30) Berman, Howard - California (26) Bono, Sonny - California (44) Bryant, Ed - Tennessee (7) Bryant, John - Texas (5) Conyers, John, Jr. - Michigan (14) Frank, Barney - Massachusetts (4) Gallegly, Elton - California (23) Goodlatte, Bob - Virginia (6) Hyde, Henry - Illinois (6) McCollum, Bill - Florida (8) Smith, Lamar - Texas (21) Please do not wait to contact House conferees. The conference report could be issued within as little as 24 hours of their final selection. To be most effective, letters should be postmarked by Saturday, August 31st, or faxed early the following week. Members' offices also may be reached by phone through the Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121. Thanks for your help. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 16 Aug 96 15:24 EST From: Robert Ellis Smith <0005101719(a)mcimail.com> Subject: Alternatives to Social Security Numbers [ From Risks-Forum Digest; Volume 18 : Issue 35 -- MODERATOR ] Last spring, I asked readers of RISKS for suggestions on alternatives to Social Security numbers in organizations with large data bases of information about individuals. Many such organizations find they do not need to use SSNs, and avoid privacy problems associated with using them. For a copy of all of the responses, send a request to us and specify whether you want hard copy or electronic edition of our August issue, and provide postal address or e-mail address. Robert Ellis Smith, Publisher, Privacy Journal newsletter, Providence, RI, 401/274-7861, e-mail 5101719(a)mcimail.com. Excerpts from the suggestions follow: * FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.: Maryland uses Soundex (of name and birth date concatenated [linked in a chain]) both for driver and vehicle registrations. * FROM CAMBRIDGE, MASS.: "Against Universal Health-Care Identifiers" in the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL INFORMATICS ASSOCIATION 1:316-319, 1994, by Dr. Peter Szolovits of MIT and Dr. Isaac Kohane of Children's Hospital in Boston, discusses a number of ways in which cryptography- based health care identifiers can be used to preserve privacy while remaining manageable for typical medical purposes. This is publication #49 (in Postscript format) at http://medg.lcs.mit.edu/people/psz/publications.html. * FROM YARDLEY, PA.: One way is to use a simple scheme like three letters from last name, the first initial, and some digits; another is just to use sequential numbers. Another is an MD5 hash of the full-name string [a one-way mathematical function as a stand-in for the name that makes translation back to the original name impossible]. This is always unique for a unique string, so you might need to add some numbers. * FROM MADISON, WISC.: When I was working on the development of the Wisconsin Student Data Handbook - we tried to develop what we called an "SSN surrogate," also of nine bytes per individual. It involved an algorithm which combined year, month, and date of birth with sex and two consonants each extracted from the first and middle names. * FROM CYBERSPACE: I worked with a banking software company that set up employee records simply by exact hire date and time. Since they never hired anyone at exactly the same time, it gave each person a unique number. You could do the same for any data base in which records are added gradually one at a time - just number them based on exact date and time added. * FROM PALO ALTO, CAL.: At Stanford University we made a decision long ago not to use SSN for identification except where required by law (payroll taxes, for example). We use a unique Stanford University ID (SUID), which is a lifetime number and applies to all students, alumni, faculty, staff, and patients. It serves all the same purposes that the SSN would do if it were used. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 00:25:15 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty(a)roscom.COM> Subject: SSN and Welfare Legislation Excerpt from EPIC Alert 3.15 ======================================================================= [3] Welfare Legislation Signed by Clinton ======================================================================= On August 22, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The bill includes a number of sections that expand the use of the Social Security Number and create new databases of personal information. The bill requires that states obtain individuals' Social Security Numbers for many state documents. It provides that on "any application for a professional license, commercial driver's license, occupational license, or marriage license [the SSN] be recorded on the application." The new bill also creates a national database of every employee in the United States. States are also required to create databases of "new hires." The state databases would be uploaded to a federal registry and the Social Security Administration would verify the SSNs. The Commissioner of Social Security is required to develop "a prototype of a counterfeit-resistant social security card" made of tamper proof materials for proving citizenship, and to issue a report on the cost of issuing a new card to all citizens over a three, five or ten year period. More information on the welfare bill, the Social Security Number, and efforts to expand its use is available at: http://www.epic.org/privacy/ssn/ ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 10:34:03 -0700 (PDT) From: jd(a)scn.org (Janeane Dubuar) Subject: fingerprinting by banks SEATTLE WEEKLY Copyright 1996 - used with permission July 24,1996 - "Quick and Dirty" column by Eric Scigliano Thumbprint, retinal or body-odor scan, sir? If you think those "Go to Jail" charity slumber parties are a scream, you may get a kick out of cashing checks after September 11. That's when US Bank will start requiring that non-customers cashing its checks consent to be finger--or, rather, thumb--printed. Other local banks are expected to join US Bank on the new security frontier in September, and at least one, Seafirst, plans to start taking thumbprints next year in step with its California parent, Bank America. The thumbprinting scheme is being pushed by the Washington Bankers Association, which wants all its members to take the plunge together. As Dan Doyle, regional manager over US Bank's Western Washington branches, notes, "I'm not sure any one bank wants to be the one to step out and do it--it probably sounds cold, hard, and not very customer-friendly." Indeed. "But it's really to protect customers." That protection is supposed to come from deterrence. Very few, if any, check forgers actually get caught via thumbprints in those states (most notably Texas, Nevada, and Arizona) whose banks already take them. Tellers can't (yet, anyway) check the prints for known forgers; the prints will merely be saved (on the checks themselves) for investigation in the event of a bounce. But Bruce Koppe, the Bankers Association's executive director, reports that bogus-check losses have declined by 40 percent in those states. Doyle says US Bank has charted 45 percent reductions in states where it's tried the system, and fewer than 1 percent of those asked decline to give prints. Some retailers, and reportedly at least one local credit union, are already taking prints on checks. Customers can at least be reassured that they won't have to bear the telltale black stains of traditional fingerprinting; the new "inkless" printing leaves no visible mark on the skin. Still, fingerprinting is, in the words of American Civil Liberties Union lobbyist Jerry Sheehan, "the archetypal metaphor of criminality, along with the mug shot and lineup." Some tellers are already grumbling at the prospect of having to do it. The banks take heart that they won't be demanding prints of their current customers. But the ill will may still come around to bite them; those are all potential customers they stand to infuriate, and account-holders may not like the idea of their checks being valid only when backed by thumbprints. And thumbprinting may be just the nose under the tent. That mixed bodily metaphor suits the brave new world of "biometric" identification in which we will, very soon, find ourselves. Down in Olympia, a working group of the joint Legislative Transportation Committee is considering what kind of biometric and/or computer technology to adopt in upcoming "smart" driver's licenses; its findings are due in December, preparatory to the next legislative session. Possibilities include a bar code or magnetic strip; a store scrutinizing your check or a cop writing a ticket could scan your full digitalized profile. All the drivers' license data that now fills a state warehouse could be consolidated in a single data base. And all those sci-fi and privacy-protectionist warnings about personal bar codes and instant snooping will come true. Transportation Committee staffer Jennifer Joly says that fingerprinting is still the most common form of biometric ID. But more exotic techniques are coming in: hand geometry scans, retinal scans, iris scans, computerized facial recognition, and (I am not making this up) body odor measurement. It seems unlikely that those who take IDs will stop at thumbprinting checks. Joly reports that bankers, retailers, and law-enforcement groups have joined in a coalition to weigh in on the new drivers' licenses. "We'll be pushing for legislation imposing severe restrictions" on fingerprinting, the ACLU's Sheehan vows. And they'll "continue to resist these pressures to create uniform identification papers from a document intended for driver's certification." [...] July 31, 1996 - "Quick and Dirty" column by Eric Scigliano [...] They want to know it all If you feel queasy about being fingerprinted by a bank, imagine how tellers feel about all the information they're supposed to disclose. US Bank asks employees to fill out an "extortion readiness card" listing all their cars (by number and "markings") and neighbors, the names, schools, and daily routes and schedules of their children, and any meetings they themselves regularly attend. US Bancorp spokeswoman Mary Ruble says taking such data is a longtime standard banking practice done for the employees' "own safety," to protect them in "hostage situations" and to help authorities "follow up if a claim of kidnapping is made." She adds that US Bank has never encountered such a situation, but believes other banks have. The cards are kept confidential in a central office, and filling them out is "voluntary for employees." But one bank worker who objected recalls being told to fill out the card anyway, and got the feeling, despite the explanation, that the intent was really to guard against crimes by, rather than against, employees. "The extortion readiness card has nothing to do with embezzlement," says Ruble. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Internet PRIVACY Forum is a moderated digest for the discussion and analysis of issues relating to the general topic of privacy (both personal and collective) in the "information age" of the 1990's and beyond. The moderator will choose submissions for inclusion based on their relevance and content. Submissions will not be routinely acknowledged. All submissions should be addressed to "privacy(a)vortex.com" and must have RELEVANT "Subject:" lines; submissions without appropriate and relevant "Subject:" lines may be ignored. Excessive "signatures" on submissions are subject to editing. Subscriptions are by an automatic "listserv" system; for subscription information, please send a message consisting of the word "help" (quotes not included) in the BODY of a message to: "privacy-request(a)vortex.com". Mailing list problems should be reported to "list-maint(a)vortex.com". All messages included in this digest represent the views of their individual authors and all messages submitted must be appropriate to be distributable without limitations. The PRIVACY Forum archive, including all issues of the digest and all related materials, is available via anonymous FTP from site "ftp.vortex.com", in the "/privacy" directory. Use the FTP login "ftp" or "anonymous", and enter your e-mail address as the password. The typical "README" and "INDEX" files are available to guide you through the files available for FTP access. PRIVACY Forum materials may also be obtained automatically via e-mail through the listserv system. Please follow the instructions above for getting the listserv "help" information, which includes details regarding the "index" and "get" listserv commands, which are used to access the PRIVACY Forum archive. All PRIVACY Forum materials are available through the Internet Gopher system via a gopher server on site "gopher.vortex.com". Access to PRIVACY Forum materials is also available through the Internet World Wide Web (WWW) via the Vortex Technology WWW server at the URL: "http://www.vortex.com"; full keyword searching of all PRIVACY Forum files is available via WWW access. ------------------------------ End of PRIVACY Forum Digest 05.16 ************************ Date: 2 Sep 1996 13:52:18 -0500 From: "Dave Banisar" <banisar(a)epic.org> To: "Interested People" <interest(a)epic.org> Subject: National ID Card Web Pages EXTENSIVE NATIONAL ID CARD WEB SITE IS NOW ON LINE The London-based human rights watchdog Privacy International (PI) has just opened an extensive web page on National ID cards. The initiative comes in the wake of pending efforts in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom to implement national ID card systems. The page contains a 7,000 word FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) on all aspects of ID cards and their implications. Also included in the PI documents is a paper describing successful campaigns opposing to ID cards in Australia and other countries. The page also has links to numerous other sites and documents. PI Director Simon Davies said he hoped the page would help promote debate about the cards, "ID cards are often introduced without serious discussion or consultation. The implications are profound, and countries planning to introduce them should proceed with caution." "The existence of a card challenges important precepts of individual rights and privacy. At a symbolic and a functional level, ID cards are often an unnecessary and potentially dangerous white elephant. They are promoted by way of fear-mongering and false patriotism, and are implemented with scant regard for serious investigation of the consequences." he said. The URL is : http://www.privacy.org/pi/activities/idcard/ PI has also set up an auto response function for the FAQ document. Its address is: idcardfaq(a)mail.privacy.org Privacy International is an international human rights group concerned with privacy and surveillance issues. It is based in London, UK. For further information contact the Privacy International Washington Office at +1.202.544.9240 or email pi(a)privacy.org. PI's web page is available at: http://www.privacy.org/pi/ _________________________________________________________________________ Subject: National ID Card Web Pages _________________________________________________________________________ David Banisar (Banisar(a)privacy.org) * 202-544-9240 (tel) Privacy International Washington Office * 202-547-5482 (fax) 666 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, Suite 301 * HTTP://www.privacy.org/pi/ Washington, DC 20003

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Re: German Government censors dutch site www.xs4all.nl
by tank 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded: a letter by Felipe Rodriquez, Managing Director XS4ALL Hello, This is an email I just wrote to Michael Schneider, the guy that adviced German Internetproviders to censor www.xs4all.nl and www.serve.com. He will probably forward the text to the German Public Prosecutor General, who should also read it. I try to make them understand that censoring is not very effective on the Net, and that they should stop it right now. At the same time I threathen to sue both of them for free-speech infringement and damages. We'll see what happens. Censoring the Net is _the way_ to make bestsellers, when will the governments understand ? ------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello Michael, > http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901e.htm > > It now contains a digest of the complete occasion including parts of the > letters I wrote to the Public Prosecutor General. I read it yesterday. Thanks. > I would appreciate, if you portray the activities of ICTF entirely and > exactly. I consistently state that the German providers where forced to censor by the Public Prosecutor. This is also what people understand from the press-releases we sent. Evenso the entire www.xs4all.nl website is blocked, with 3100 pages, in order to censor 1 single homepage. Regardless who is responsible for the censor-actions, it is an outrage that 3100 xs4all customers are censored by Germany. Without a single phonecall, fax, email or letter to Xs4all internet or the user that placed the Radikal pages on our website. If there are pages that are not accepted by Germany, then Germany can always confront us, or the website owner, in a Dutch court of law. It may interest you to know about some developments: There are a number of mirrors for the Radikal site. All sorts of people have spontaneously started to copy the websites to their own system: http://burn.ucsd.edu/%7Eats/RADIKAL/ http://www.jca.or.jp/~taratta/mirror/radikal/ http://www.serve.com/~spg/ http://huizen.dds.nl/~radikal http://www.canucksoup.net/radikal/index.html http://www.ecn.org/radikal http://www.well.com/~declan/mirrors/ http://www.connix.com/~harry/radikal/index.htm http://www.ganesa.com/radikal/ http://www.denhaag.org/~radikal There are more mirrors than just these, but i did not get the entire list. According to the German General Prosecutors opinion these sites would also need to be blocked. Expect the list of mirrors to grow, and expect to be forced to block that growing list of sites on the Net. Realize that a lot of internetusers consider it a sport to redistribute censored information. The way to write a bestseller on the Net is to have it censored by some government. It has the opposite effect. The entire issue 154 of Radikal has been posted in German newsgroup by anonymous users. German users can still use remote (non-german) proxy-servers to access all the Radikal information on Internet. People have posted information about these remote proxyservers in German newsgroups. Xs4all uses rotating IP-numbers for its services. The IP-numbers of certain sites and services are changed every couple of hours. A static ip-filter would certainly not be enough to block www.xs4all.nl. We have asked our parliament and department of Foreign Affairs to help us fight this blunt German censorship. We have also asked the EFF, CPSR and EPIC for advice, and to spread our press-release. A fax was also sent to CNN, Wired, and other press-services. We have discussed starting legal procedures against Germany and the ICTF with our lawyer. If any political and diplomatic actions fail to stop this act of blunt censorship, then we will most probably start litigation against the German government and the ICTF, for damages and violation of the European right on free-speech. It is clear that censoring 3100 pages, to prevent one of them from being published, is an infringement of European free-speech legislation. We have adviced the provider behind www.serve.com, that is also censored, to engage in the same kind of procedures. Please inform the German Public Prosecutor General that the censoring actions have been ineffective, and that Radikal is now on many different websites and is being distributed widely on the entire Internet. Continuing to block this growing list of sites would be an impossible task, what happens if Germany demands to block AOL, EFF, Compuserve, Prodigy, The Well, Netcom and Demon Internet next week ? Providers would be forced to block large part of Internet. I don't think that's what anyone would like to happen. Kind regards, Felipe Rodriquez -- Felipe Rodriquez - XS4ALL Internet - finger felipe(a)xs4all.nl for http://xs4all.nl/~felipe/ - Managing Director - pub pgp-key 1024/A07C02F9

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Job for netescrow ? (was Secure anonymouse server protocol...
by peter.allan＠aeat.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In the talk about replyable nym-mailers I haven't yet seen netescrow mentioned. You DID all read this ? > Oblivious Key Escrow > Matt Blaze AT&T Research > mab(a)research.att.com > 12 June 1996 > > Abstract > We propose a simple scheme, based on secret-sharing over large-scale > networks, for assuring recoverability of sensitive archived data e.g., > cryptographic keys. In our model any one can request a copy of the > archived data but it is very difficult to keep the existence of a > request secret or to subvert the access policy of the data owner. This all hinges on a policy to be followed by archive holders defining the conditions under which they release their shares. This could be receipt of a signed request from the owner (remailer). Maybe the table relating nyms to reply addresses could be stored in netescrow style so that captured remailers reveal nothing. The problem of operator coercion is not addressed by this. Police investigations might apply "angry mob cryptanalysis" to find a sender - convincing a sizable number of operators that a crime had been committed with some particular piece of traffic. Anybody want to estimate traffic + storage requirements ? Or number of participants needed for a viable scheme ? -- Peter Allan peter.allan(a)aeat.co.uk

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Re: Court challenge to AOL junk-mail blocks
by Ross Wright 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Or About: 6 Sep 96 at 18:04, E. Allen Smith wrote: > list-managers list, a consent arrangement would thus be preferable. The > other argument of the Cyber Promotions jerks is nonsense - how does AOL > blocking affect the rest of the Internet? It's affecting the rights of these fine spammers, Cyber Promotions. That affects spammers everywhere. More rules by our government affects all of us. > >PHILADELPHIA, Pa. (Sep 6, 1996 12:23 p.m. EDT) -- A federal judge has = <<<<SNIP>>>>> > >"We feel that America Online has violated the civil rights of their = > >members and has violated our rights to send e-mail through the Internet, = > >which AOL does not own," he said. > > >Although unsolicited mail sent through the post office in the United = > >States is not considered illegal, the rules have yet to be defined in = > >cyberspace. That's the real point I have always made. No rules and we should not want rules. Why are we INVITING the government into OUR internet??? Just cause we have to read spam? That is just plain stupid!!! Just cause we have to read spam, oh well, let the government come on in. Do we let the government into our bedrooms because our wife says no to sex tonight or because we don't like to make our beds?? Everyone on this list seems to want to limit government intervention EXCEPT when it comes to spam, then every one just holds the door open wide and let them in. If they get that inch, they WILL take the whole 9 YARDS!!!!!! Get a clue, delete or killfile those who spam and keep the government out of cyberspace!!!!!! By the way, I get about 2 or 3 spams a day in my mailbox and it is not killing me! Don't get the wrong idea, I don't like it. I like the government WAY LESS!!!!! =========== Ross Wright King Media: Bulk Sales of Software Media and Duplication Services http://www.slip.net/~cdr/kingmedia Voice: 415-206-9906

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Re: Race Bit: C
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 6 Sep 96 at 10:50, jim bell wrote: > Since red liquid running in the streets is generally so reviled, one > of the things which mystifies me is why there aren't more > simulation-type programs used to test out hypotheticals, for example > a "SimEconomy." For example, you'll occasionally hear about a > media news organization gathering a dozen or so volunteers in a > room, and asking them to solve a problem like "The Budget Deficit" > or some such. The result of their interplay is generally used to > explain why these problems are hard to solve. Why do you suppose that solving the problem they created is their goal? On a more fundamental level, why do you assume the their goal is to improve life at all? Ask yourself if this is what they truly want. jfa Jean-Francois Avon, Montreal QC Canada DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Limoges porcelain, silverware and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultant physicists, technologists and engineers PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891

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Re: What the NSA is patenting
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A maybe usefull program would be a little tsr that constantly overwrite unused sectors of the entire drive with random patterns (maybe seeded with a fast keyboard interval timer). Like at the very moment I am writing this, my HD has been idle for several minutes... One more of my silly ideas JFA Jean-Francois Avon, Montreal QC Canada DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Limoges porcelain, silverware and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultant physicists, technologists and engineers PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891

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Re: PRESS RELEASE: GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL
by nobody＠replay.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>A Modest Proposal: > >* as Germany is bent on blocking sites which carry this subversive >pamphlet, "Radikal," let us mirror it on thousands of sites around the >world. > >* when the Germans went into Danmark and insisted Jews wear badges, >ordinary citizens (and the Danish Royal Family, as I recall) also took to >wearing these Star of David badges. Add this plug to signatures and web pages: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Lebt und lest radikal! http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Then, your messages are "promoting a terrorist organization" (cf. http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901e.htm) and may no longer be carried in Germany. [It just says to live radically, and to read "radikal". But "radikal" is a terrorist magazine after all.]

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GAM_lin
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

8-8-96. Wash Tech: "Internet Betting Spurs Regulatory Interest." A new commission to investigate the nation's $40 billion gambling industry will initiate Congress' latest effort to curb the fast-growing gambling industry, and may open up additional efforts to regulate the burgeoning Internet industry. Extra legislation is not needed to suppress on-line gambling, said Bernie Horn, National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. "If the Justice Department wanted to, it could make things unbearable for companies offering on-line gambling from outside the country," he said. ----- http://jya.com/gamlin.txt (5 kb) GAM_lin Thanks to BC.

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Re: Cellular phone tracing
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:49 PM 9/6/96 EDT, E. Allen Smith wrote: > From comp.risks: > >Date: Mon, 2 Sep 1996 22:24:13 -0400 (EDT) >From: glassman(a)sunsite.unc.edu >Subject: FedEx monitoring of cellular phonecall locations > >[...] nowhere near either of those places, so I did not bother to mention my >current location to the operator. The next day, Saturday, I called FedEx >with the same cell phone from Blowing Rock to arrange the pickup. The >operator immediately asked if I wanted them to come to the intersection that >I had placed my call from the day before. > >Two days later, a FedEx operator confirmed that they are getting "new >systems" at some locations that are able to record the locations from which >cellular calls are placed. > >I have now asked Cellular One three times to explain to me why they do not >tell subscribers that they pass this location information through the >system, but to no avail. [...] > >========== end fwd. You should DEFINITELY start worrying when the FexX operator says something like, "I see you're the guy in the red shirt and brown pants." Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Junk Phone Calls, Metered Usage, and Cellphones
by Martin Janzen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) writes: >I am about to start worrying about "junk phone calls" more so than I have >been. I just bit the bullet and bought a digital cellular phone, with a >nifty rate plan called Digital Flex: I get unlimited free airtime from 7 >p.m. to 7 a.m. weekdays, and unlimited free airtime all weekend. From south >of Salinas to north of Santa Rosa and as far east as the Central Valley. In >other words, the entire Bay Area and outlying communities. I can send and >receive calls over this entire region, from anywhere in the region (of >course), without any charges. > >The downside is that calls _from_ or _to_ my phone during "business" hours >are charged 42 cents a minute, airtime (tying up a channel and all), plus >whatever other fees may be applicable at each end. Thus, every "junk call" >I get trying to get me to buy aluminum siding, or to vote Democratic, or to >switch my long-distance carrier (!), costs me a minimum of 42 cents, >depending on how fast I can realize who they are and get rid of them I have a similar plan. My cell phone company includes call forwarding in the package, so I deal with the possibility of junk calls by forwarding calls from my cell phone to my regular number (which has voicemail) during the day, then turning off the cell phone. This way, the calls are intercepted right at the switch (I assume), so no airtime is used, and no charges are incurred. Works for me... -- Martin Janzen janzen(a)idacom.hp.com

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