December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

None Zero-knowledge commit
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim C. May styles his facial hair to look more like pubic hair. /_/\/\ \_\ / Tim C. May /_/ \ \_\/\ \ \_\/

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NSA on GAK
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Excerpts of remarks by NSA head William Crowell to NISSC96, October, 1996: Key recovery may prove essential in making encryption scalable on an international basis. We are not the only country wrestling with the public safety implications of unbreakable cryptography. France, Israel and Russia recently imposed import and domestic use restrictions. Several Asian, South American and African countries have had similar restrictions in place for years. Others may impose them as strong cryptography proliferates. For many overseas, as well as here, the logic of the need to balance business imperatives with public safety concerns argues for key recovery. The European Union and other confederations are considering key recovery-based KMIs. The world's major standards bodies are designing future standards so that key recovery can be accommodated. International standards and protocols for key recovery may prove essential to hand off national restrictions on strong encryption, to promote a broad export market for cryptography and to establish a key management infrastructure acceptable for general international use. This would accelerate the realization of the promise of information technology, and that would be in everyone's best interest. Working in partnership, government and industry together need to lay the foundation necessary to sustain and strengthen information security for America. I wish to emphasize that the infrastructure for key management will be built by industry as a commercial venture. This task is huge. Collaboration among many partners will be essential if we are to establish a KMI that promotes the use of encryption worldwide. ----- For full talk: http://jya.com/nsagak.htm

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Re: SSL weakness affecting links from pa
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:41 am -0400 on 4/13/97, Rich Graves wrote: >I've been told that the main reason > almost the entire MSN team left Microsoft about a year ago is that they > were prohibited from pursuing more efficient non-proprietary solutions. Hettinga's paraphrase of Gilmore's Law: "A geodesic economy sees monopoly as damage and routes around it." Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Lesley Stahl: "You mean *anyone* can set up a web site and compete with the New York Times?" Andrew Kantor: "Yes." Stahl: "Isn't that dangerous?" The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Re: NSA on GAK
by geeman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[I think the other exceprt was based on this one, from Charles IX of France in 1563] Printing press registration may prove essential in making printing and literacy managable on an international basis. We are not the only country wrestling with the public safety implications of printing presses. France, Israel and Russia recently imposed import and domestic use restrictions. Several Asian, South American and African countries have had similar restrictions in place for years. Others may impose them as printing presses proliferate. For many overseas, as well as here, the logic of the need to balance business imperatives with public safety concerns argues for printing press registration. The European Union and other confederations are considering printing press registration-based infrastructures. The world's major standards bodies are designing future standards so that printing press registration can be accommodated. International standards and protocols for printing press registration may prove essential to hand off national restrictions on printing and literacy, to promote a broad export market for printing presses and to establish a infrastructure acceptable for general international use. This would accelerate the realization of the promise of information technology, and that would be in everyone's best interest. Working in partnership, government and industry together need to lay the foundation necessary to sustain and strengthen information security for America. I wish to emphasize that the infrastructure for printing press registration will be built by industry as a commercial venture. This task is huge. Collaboration among many partners will be essential if we are to establish a PPRI that promotes the use of printing and literacy worldwide. =========================================================================== At 10:47 AM 4/13/97 -0400, John Young wrote: >Excerpts of remarks by NSA head William Crowell to >NISSC96, October, 1996: > >Key recovery may prove essential in making encryption scalable >on an international basis. We are not the only country wrestling >with the public safety implications of unbreakable cryptography. >France, Israel and Russia recently imposed import and domestic >use restrictions. Several Asian, South American and African >countries have had similar restrictions in place for years. Others >may impose them as strong cryptography proliferates. > >For many overseas, as well as here, the logic of the need to >balance business imperatives with public safety concerns argues >for key recovery. The European Union and other confederations >are considering key recovery-based KMIs. The world's major >standards bodies are designing future standards so that key >recovery can be accommodated. > >International standards and protocols for key recovery may prove >essential to hand off national restrictions on strong encryption, to >promote a broad export market for cryptography and to establish >a key management infrastructure acceptable for general international >use. This would accelerate the realization of the promise of information >technology, and that would be in everyone's best interest. > >Working in partnership, government and industry together need to >lay the foundation necessary to sustain and strengthen information >security for America. I wish to emphasize that the infrastructure for >key management will be built by industry as a commercial venture. >This task is huge. Collaboration among many partners will be >essential if we are to establish a KMI that promotes the use of >encryption worldwide. > >----- > >For full talk: > > http://jya.com/nsagak.htm > > >

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PaleoAnthro: Mail List Life Cycle
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Authentication-Warning: list.srv.cis.pitt.edu: majordom set sender to owner-paleoanthro using -f Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 01:06:22 -0400 (EDT) From: Matt Fraser <mattf+(a)pitt.edu> X-Sender: mattf(a)unixs2.cis.pitt.edu To: Paleoanthropology List <PaleoAnthro(a)list.pitt.edu> Subject: PaleoAnthro: Mail List Life Cycle MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-paleoanthro(a)list.pitt.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: PaleoAnthro(a)list.pitt.edu Hey All, Dug this up from another list that I've been on for a few years now. Thought it might be of interest. Matt ----------- THE NATURAL LIFE CYCLE OF MAILING LISTS Every list seems to go through the same cycle: 1. Initial enthusiasm (people introduce themselves, and gush alot about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls). 2. Evangelism (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list, and brainstorm recruitment strategies). 3. Growth (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up). 4. Community (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other; newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone -- newbie and expert alike -- feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and sharing opinions). 5. Discomfort with diversity (the number of messages increases dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if *other* people don't limit discussion to person 1's pet topic; person 2 agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads themselves; everyone gets annoyed). 6a. Smug complacency and stagnation (the purists flame everyone who asks an 'old' question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues; all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list). OR 6b. Maturity (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many people wear out their second or third 'delete' key, but the list lives contentedly ever after) _____________________________ Robert Warner rwarner(a)electrotex.com I speak but for myself,.... _____________________________ --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Lesley Stahl: "You mean *anyone* can set up a web site and compete with the New York Times?" Andrew Kantor: "Yes." Stahl: "Isn't that dangerous?" The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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A Rumor and Reputation Paradox...
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here's something from cyberia which talks about the persistence of anti-reputation memes even in the presence of perfectly contradictory information. We've all heard about apocryphal stories, the $50 Corvette and the like, but here's a case which has financial reprocussions. It reminds me of the "satanism" claims about the Procter and Gamble moon and stars corporate symbol a while back. My first attempt at tackling this would be some kind of distributed reputation system, but it seems to me that if someone I trusted said something bad about Mr. Hilfinger, in the absence of any other respectable data, I would believe them. I guess that means the need for reputation "rental", like what financial intermediaries do, and also what we now call journalism, will increase, not deminish, in geodesic markets. Cheers, Bob Hettinga --- begin forwarded text Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 23:58:30 -0400 Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> Sender: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> From: Larry Kolodney <lkk(a)WORLD.STD.COM> Subject: Re: America Online and liability... the Horror To: CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM >Recall the libertarian maxim that the best response to >offensive speech is more speech. To anyone who actually believes this bit of 18th century enlightenment mythology, I would recommend the article "Dirty Linen: Why are they saying all those mean things about Tommy Hilfiger?" by Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan in the current edition of Slate (http://www.slate.com/TangledWeb/97-04-10/TangledWeb.asp) In essence, the article documents a number of vicious rumours which have been spread on the internet about the clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger and allegedly racist comments that he made on the Ophrah Winfrey show. Not withstanding the fact that 1) Mr. Hilfiger never appeared on the Winfrey show and never made the statements in question, and 2) Hilfiger Co. has engaged in an online P.R. campaign to counter these rumours, they are persistent and widespread. According to the article: BEGIN QUOTE A spotty paraphrase of the allegations appeared in a Nov. 13, 1996, article in the Philippine newspaper Isyu. Titled "Eat Your Clothes, Mr. Racist Designer," the piece has been excerpted on the Official Philippine Anti-Tommy Hilfiger site. The writer tiptoes around the charges, but is markedly less tentative when expressing her outrage. "I am shocked," she fulminates. "If [Hilfiger] really did insult my people, you can bet I will do every single thing I can in my power to make sure that his label never makes it here." Forums ranging from soc.culture.african.american to talk.rumors and Streetsound have been thick with anti-Tommy talk of late. When rumors of the designer's alleged racist outbursts filtered into the mainstream media, they were debunked by Time magazine, USA Today, and the Washington Post. But that didn't stem angry calls for a boycott of his products. Nor did the official response of the Hilfiger Corp. Claiming to have become aware of the brouhaha only recently, the company has posted a memo on various anti-Tommy sites detailing the "simple and incontrovertible facts": Hilfiger has never been on Oprah. Hilfiger has never been on Style. Far from wanting to limit his appeal, Hilfiger is on record about wanting to cross ethnic lines to appeal to everyone everywhere. *** In theory, the Web should be as good at eradicating legends as it is at cultivating them, but in practice, denials are quickly buried by new messages and updates. A week ago, Hilfiger's official response clogged newsgroup indexes. Today, it has been swamped by even newer anti-Tommy postings and returning favorites. END QUOTE Lest you think that such rumours are just a minor irritant and part of doing business, consider that, according to the article, "In the late 1980s, purported connections with the Ku Klux Klan so damaged the reputation of athletic-wear manufacturer Troop (whose name was rumored to be a Ku Klux Klan acronym for "To Rule Over Oppressed People") that it was forced into bankruptcy." So here we have vicious rumours being spread about a company with millions of public relations dollars at its disposal, and it is helpless in the face of a rumour that has not one grain of truth to it. After reading this account, how could anyone seriously argue beleive individuals such as the hapless Mr. Zeran have the slightest ability to counter defamation with "more speech" over the internet? (Note that Mr. Zeran did not even have an internet account!) Larry Kolodney --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Lesley Stahl: "You mean *anyone* can set up a web site and compete with the New York Times?" Andrew Kantor: "Yes." Stahl: "Isn't that dangerous?" The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Re: How to IGNORE massive To: and Cc: spams
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ichudov(a)algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes: > > [this is only of interest to UNIX(tm) users. Windows users, please ignore] I suspect that a typical Windows user with a POP account usually has a unix account and a home directory (although its shell may be /etc/false or some such); he may be able to ftp to it and create a .forward file pointing to procmail, who will look at the incoming mail before passing on to his PPP. I don't really know shit about this, so don't flame me if this doesn't work. :-) --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Re: A Rumor and Reputation Paradox...
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: > be it. Anti-free speechers, including Larry Kolodney and including those > who support libel and slander laws, would have us believe that "false > speech" is not as protected as "true speech" is. Foo on that.) That from a vocal supporter of Cocksucker John Gilmore's plug-pulling... --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Re: SSL weakness affecting links from pa
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:41 AM 4/13/97 -0700, Rich Graves wrote: >Or blame it on the client. Microsoft handled the utter absence of security >in their WFW/Win95 SMB implementation by claiming, falsely, that Samba was >sending "illegal commands." After a thorough public thrashing, the Win95 >product manager eventually changed that to "specific networking commands," >with no retraction and no indication that the document had changed. Heh. Sending illegal or unexpected commands to a program is _the_ standard way to break security; if they can't defend against that, they're hosed. I'd reserve the phrase "utter absence of security" for systems that let you ignore the permissions by just asking nicely :-) ><URL:http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/os/main.htm> Interesting paper. I was surprised it didn't explicitly mention Plan 9 when it was discussing other operating systems, though mentioning Inferno does include that indirectly. It also didn't mention security - it talked about the kind of world where you can just buy a computer, turn it on, plug it in, and it'll find whatever resources it wants in the One Big Operating System. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Competitive Betrayal
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Weekend FiTi reports on "the enemy within" corporations and the growth of "competitive intelligence" as cold war spy tactics are adapted to big business. Excerpts: Nobody in the surveillance business really knows how much commercial spying goes on. A lot of the eavesdropping is done, perfectly legally, by managers listening in to their own staff. It is, of course, in the interest of equipment suppliers and corporate consultants to maximise the dangers that companies face. "All companies are paranoid about their own security," said the spokesman of one well-known British multinational. "They don't seem to mind paying consultants to tell them things they know already." Yet all agree that the field of "competitive intelligence", as it is politely termed, is an expanding one. The privatisation of whole economies, the deregulation of monopoly markets, the globalisation of business, the spread of foreign investment and contested takeovers, the proliferation of technology and the sheer volume of information - all have made companies more aggressive, and more vulnerable. A consultant called in to investigate a theft may find himself pitted against another. In order to sanitise the business, a professional association called the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals has been set up. Its 5,000 members are meant to follow a code which vaguely urges them to obey the law, identify themselves when asking questions, and avoid "unethical practices". SCIP is influenced by the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, a group described as "very powerful" by Andre Pienaar, a young manager at the corporate investigators Kroll Associates who has written a doctoral thesis on business and intelligence. "Company information has become very valuable," he said, "more valuable than physical assets." Protecting that information is becoming ever more difficult. It is not just the tappers, buggers and hackers who are the problem, however. The problem is the loyalty - or lack of it - of employees in a world of short contracts, rapid turnover and big inducements. Tony McStravick, former acting head of the Metropolitan police Fraud Squad in London, has worked for Kroll and is now at Control Risks Group. "It all comes down to management in the end," he said. "Companies have lost the hearts and minds of their employees because of performance pay, delayering, downsizing." "You have to have a culture of honesty, from the top down. You must find the balance between maximising profits and being fair and honest. A lot of the time, companies forget they are dealing with human beings." ----- For full article: http://jya.com/tew.txt

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