December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Been good to know ya ...
by Rabid Wombat 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Later, all. And thanks to John for all the work he has put in to maintaining the list. Last one to leave, turn out the lights. -r.w.

1 0

Pre-alpha Cpunx-resource FAQ comments sought
by omegam＠cmq.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Okay folks. I have worked on this much of the day. This is a more formalized outline as well as a somewhat fleshed out version of section 1 of the FAQ I am attempting to produce. I submit this to the group for commentary and suggestions as well as pointers to the relevant info. This should be enough to give a flavor of what I am trying to do. Anything in [] needs to be located and/or verified by myself. I realize that this won't please everyone and some may not care. So be it. Those who do care, please help me make it less of a FAQ based on my subjective experience and more of a useful general reference. Here it is... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Cypherpunks Resources FAQ version 0.000000002 Compiled, edited & maintained by Scott Harney "Omegaman <omegam(a)cmq.com>" This document lists resources for readers interested in Cypherpunk issues and goals. The primary intention of this document is to get new readers of the group to explore the background issues that Cypherpunks attempt to address. It also includes pointers to many common cryptographic implementations and tools. Furthermore, pointers and instructions for various newsreaders and email-filters are provided to help users filter out some of the net's inevitable noise and glean the most useful information they can from this forum. This FAQ does not attempt to explictly define who the Cypherpunks are or answer questions about the philosophy. That is an exercise for the reader who utilizes the pointers within to find the answers on their own. After exploring these resources, the hope is that the reader will become a more effective and insightful contributor to alt.cypherpunks -- even if he/she is opposed to the goals of the group. This FAQ is not intended to be an exhaustive reference. A quick perusal of this FAQ should reveal the impossiblity of such a task. Rather, it is a jumping-off point. Almost all of the references below contain voluminous further references. If your mission-critical Cypherpunks site is not explicitly included, it is 99% likely to be referred to by at least one of them. This FAQ is propagated monthly to alt.cypherpunks. It can also be obtained be sending email with the subject and/or body "get cpunks faq" to omegam(a)cmq.com. As with nearly all net.publications, this document is in a constant state of contruction. When information in the FAQ is updated, I will also post a "what's new" message for those who are interested in reading additions/corrections without wading throught the entire FAQ again. - -------*********------- Author's Note/Disclaimer ---------*********--------- I maintain this FAQ solely on a voluntary basis. I am doing this because I think it is necessary. It would be contrary to the anarchic nature of the Cypherpunks to attempt to call this an official FAQ of the Cypherpunks group. Anyone who disagrees with the editing decisions and pointer selections I have made in this FAQ is free to. What this means is that you are encouraged to send comments, suggestions, corrections, new questions, and answers to me. I may or may not include them in future revisions of the FAQ. I do ask that somewhere in the subject of your mail redarding this FAQ you include the text "(CFAQ suggest)", so procmail can file such comments appropriately and I can address them in a more efficient manner. If I use your suggestion or answer to a question, I will attribute the reference to you unless you request that I do not. You are free to create your own Cypherpunks-resources FAQ if you don't like mine. - - Scott _______________________________________________________________ Omegaman <mailto:omegam@cmq.com> PGP Key fingerprint = 6D 31 C3 00 77 8C D1 C2 59 0A 01 E3 AF 81 94 63 Send e-mail with "get key" in the "Subject:" field to get a copy of my public key _______________________________________________________________ - -------*********--------*********---------********--------*********------ Premliminary Outline Section 1 - Introduction and General Information. Q1.1 Does this newsgroup/mailing-list have a charter? Q1.2 How did the group get started? Q1.3 What do Cypherpunks want? Q1.4 What happened to the toad.com mailing list? Are there archives? Q1.5 Are there other groups besides Cypherpunks who share these goals. Q1.6 What have the Cypherpunks done to advance their goals other that merely talk about them? Q1.7 I'm interested, what can I do? Q1.8 What are all these terms and acronyms anyway? (A Quick n' Dirty Glossary) Section 2 - Crypto in Action Q2.1 Pointers galore to PGP resources. Q2.2 Point to Schneir's site and include biblio info on Applied Crypto Q2.2 Point to cryptlib toolkits Q2.3 RSA, of course. Q2.4 pointers to disk encryption utilities for various platforms Q2.5 pointers to Raph's remailer site and other remailer info sites. remailer software. software to make remailer usage simpler (premail, PIdaho) Q2.6 pointers to the various digital cash purveyors and to explanations of how Chaumian digital cash works. Q2.7 pointers to Apache-SSL site and info, Stronghold, Q2.8 SSH Q2.9 Pointers to sites describing how various types of crypto actually work. sci.crypt faq Q3.0 But how do I know if it's good crypto? Point to snake Oil FAQ? Schneir's essay. Use your brain. Section 3 - Crypto and the Law Q3.1 Froomkin's site obviously.. John Young's also obvious. EFF has a good archive too. Karn case, others. Q3.2 Pointers to government's current position on crypto. ie. EAR, ITAR Q3.3 Pointers past Clipper failure info. Section 4 - Who's who & (recent) History of Crypto. Q4.1 A couple of good general history sites exist. also Codebreakers bibliographical reference. Q4.2 Enigma is a common question, point to relevant sites. Q4.3 Whit Diffie--some interviews etc are available Q4.4 Bruce Schneir same Q4.5 Phil Z and PGP history and interviews. Q4.6 Jim Bizdos Q4.8 Dorothy Denning (got to include the enemy too) Q4.7 Pointers to news on breaks of ciphers Q4.8 NSA site. [Others? I'm getting sleepy, names escaping me at the moment] Section 5 - Help! I want to know more but I'm drowning in noise Q5.1 Point to filtered lists in existence Q5.2 news2mail gateways as source of list. mail filtering tools come into good use. point to a bunch of them. Q5.3 Point to kill-file info for various newsreaders and platforms. [Possibly include generic examples from own experience and list user's experience who wish to contribute. Specific names will be ommitted of course. Also score information for those interested] Q5.4 point to information on other utilities and verification-type schemes [NoCeM's] Section 6 - Personal motivations, thank-you's, etc. *********----------**********----------**********---------*********---- Section 1. Introduction and General Information Q1.1 Do the Cypherpunks have an official charter? No. Cypherpunks are anarchic in nature so the notion of an official charter is directly contrary to such ideals. The two statements below are from Original Cypherpunks (OC's) Eric Hughes and Tim May. The first was part of the original welcome message to the mailing list hosted at toad.com. The second was suggested by Tim to the original list and commented upon by the readership. Both statements are accepted by much of the readership as good indicators of what Cypherpunks are about. Eric Hughes' statement: "Cypherpunks assume privacy is a good thing and wish there were more of it. Cypherpunks acknowledge that those who want privacy must create it for themselves and not expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant them privacy out of beneficence. Cypherpunks know that people have been creating their own privacy for centuries with whispers, envelopes, closed doors, and couriers. Cypherpunks do not seek to prevent other people from speaking about their experiences or their opinions. The most important means to the defense of privacy is encryption. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy. But to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Cypherpunks hope that all people desiring privacy will learn how best to defend it. Cypherpunks are therefore devoted to cryptography. Cypherpunks wish to learn about it, to teach it, to implement it, and to make more of it. Cypherpunks know that cryptographic protocols make social structures. Cypherpunks know how to attack a system and how to defend it. Cypherpunks know just how hard it is to make good cryptosystems. Cypherpunks love to practice. They love to play with public key cryptography. They love to play with anonymous and pseudonymous mail forwarding and delivery. They love to play with DC-nets. They love to play with secure communications of all kinds. Cypherpunks write code. They know that someone has to write code to defend privacy, and since it's their privacy, they're going to write it. Cypherpunks publish their code so that their fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Cypherpunks realize that security is not built in a day and are patient with incremental progress. Cypherpunks don't care if you don't like the software they write. Cypherpunks know that software can't be destroyed. Cypherpunks know that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down. Cypherpunks will make the networks safe for privacy." Tim May's statement: "Alt.cypherpunks is for the unmoderated discussion of cryptography and the political, social, and economic implications of unrestricted, strong cryptography. The Cypherpunks grpup has existed since 1992 and has been central in the debate about strong crypto, government restrictions, crypto anarchy, and in showing weaknesses of various ciphers and security products. The mailing list has had as many as 1500 subscribers, plus gateways to newsgroups and Web sites. It is expected that 'alt.cypherpunks' will be a free-wheeling forum for many viewpoints. As it is unmoderated, readers are strongly advised to learn how to use filters and other tools for making virtual anarchies manageable for their own tastes." Q1.2 How did the group get started? Needless to say, the history of such things is fuzzy at best. Eric Hughes and Tim May had some discussions which led to Eric Hughes, decision to host a meeting. Concidently, the first meeting occurred the same week PGP 2.0 was released. John Gilmore offered his site to host a mailing list, and thus Cypherpunks were born. see Q1.2, Q1.4, and Q1.6 for references containing more detail. also see: [Wired article URL] Q1.3 What do Cypherpunks want? Such a simple question with no simple, short answer. Please explore the following sites. Tim May's provacative (and large!) Cyphernomicon http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ The Berkeley Cypherpunks site is another good starting point. ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/Home.html Also see: http://www.offshore.com.ai/security/ - Vince Cate's Cryptorebel/Cypherpunk Page http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/ - Joel McNamara's Electronic Privacy Page Q1.4 What happened to the toad.com mailing list? Are there archives? As with all Cypherpunks issues, there is much controversy surrounding the dissolution of the original list hosted by John Gilmore's machine @toad.com. Some say that noise devoured the list to such a point as to make it useless, driving away the "good posters". Others argue that the failed attempt at moderating the list to eliminate some of that noise was the final nail in the coffin. Whatever the reason, Gilmore told the Cypherpunks that it was time to find a new home. Running a mailing list with 1500+ subscription base and the enormous volume that the list had is not a simple task. The physical running of the list on a single machine requires enormous computational resources as well as constant human intervention. Perhaps the resultant newsgroup and distributed mailing list approach is more in line with Cypherpunk ideals. "Cypherpunks know that a widely dispersed system cannot be shut down." Archives of the original list are available to some degree at: http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/ http://weber.u.washington.edu/~phantom/cpunk/index.html Users interested in running a "node" of the distributed mailing list version of this newsgroup are encouraged to subscribe to Igor Chudov's discussion list on the subject. Send a message to majordomo(a)algebra.com with the body "subscribe cypherpunks-hosts" Q1.5 Are there other groups besides Cypherpunks who share these goals? The following organizations and sites share Cypherpunk goals to a greater or lesser extent. The EFF(Electronic Frontier Foundation) http://eff.org http://eff.org/pub/ITAR_export/HTML/hot.html & http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/hot.html - more specific references & extensive archival information EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) http://epic.org Voter's Telecommunications Watch http://www.vtw.org Center for Democracy and Technology http://www.cdt.org The Cryptography List at C2Net is also a good resource. send a message to Majordomo(a)c2.net with the body "subscribe Cryptography" The Coderpunks list at toad.com is a technical discussion forum. Send a message to majordomo(a)toad.com with the body "subscribe coderpunks" Q1.6 What have the Cypherpunks done to advance their goals other that merely talk about them? Many Cypherpunks are professionals in the computer security field. Others work for companies and corporations which create and distribute products utilizing strong cryptography. Cypherpunks are also directly responsible for the creation and running of Type I and Type II(mixmaster) Cypherpunks anonymous remailers (surprising, eh?). see Q2.5 Cypherpunks have also produced software to make good crypto easier for the masses. [Get permission from PGP-front end producers to reference here] The Linux-IPSEC project is another good example. [see & subscribe ref?]. Mykotronx exposure and dumpster diving excursion. [reference?] see Q1.4(list-archive sites) Q1.7 I'm interested, what can I do? First of all READ before you post. Observe simple etiquette. Don't clutter the group with "me too" posts and questions which you can easily find the answer to yourself. Contribute signal, not noise. As of this writing, RSA, inc. is hosting a contest to crack the government standard DES 56 bit algorhythm. See [http://www.rsa.com/contest] for full details. Also see Peter Trei's site for software and info. Host a portion of the distributed mailing list. See Q1.5. Run an anonymous or pseudonymous remailer. see Q1.6 for site references and software. Use strong crypto. Encourage friends to use it as well. Increase the amount of encrypted traffic on the net. Can you code? There are plenty of projects and opportunites yet to be explored. Black Unicorn writes: "Where is highly sophisticated stego? Where are larger keys for symetric ciphers? Where is a fully functional and secure "stealth PGP"? Where are anonymous and encrypted WWW clients and hosts which permit chaining? If the crypto war is going to be lost it will be lost in the chill of development when crypto regulation is put into place. If you don't make the guns in the first place, the government has a much easier time taking them away." Q1.8 What are all these terms and acronyms anyway? Here's a quick-n-dirty glossary. GAK = Government access to keys. Government euphemisms for GAK include "key escrow" and "key recovery" (actually important for corporations, but misused in recent USG proposals) USG = United States Government ITAR = International Trade and Arms Regulations. Regulations export of arms from the US. Strong Crypto is regulated as a weapon by this document. see Q3.2 EAR = Encryption Algorhythm Regulations (a guess, look it up) Recent proposals by Clinton Administration. see Q3.2 TLA = Three Letter Acronym/Agency. Refers to USG agencies (typically involved in law enforcement) FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. NSA = National Security Agency. This highly secretive agency is responsible for the protection of USG secrecy via encryption as well as the spying on other governments by breaking encryption algorhythms. see Q4.8 DES = US Data Encryption Standard algorhythm. see Q2.9 RSA = a company and a public key algorhythm. see Q2.9 and Q2.3 net.loon/kook = a purely subjective characterization. Signal-to-Noise ratio = Signal refers to on-topic posts. Noise, the opposite. A high S/N ratio means the list is putting out a lot of signal("good posts"). Subjective, but fairly obvious. See Section 5 for pointers no how to reduce (what you think is) noise Memes = [get a good definition here] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [Rest of FAQ goes here :) This is a pre-alpha FAQ, intended only to solicit commentary and suggestions.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: latin1 iQCVAwUBMwJViqb3EfJTqNC9AQHigwP+IAXu+PO7aGiR/zZxz91PhnYuYvTy3jMN HzO4djcx44auPMjh6pFpmWJuYRcoxVHXCh2JO4UOR3cNYloxikwY4hGgYx8jLgN1 XORQztiCGMI/2ScVsi8tH6eJLCuZxmE7s8semel4CC8xH3H74vCiBNZD6iyyIXOG oMkSnOVFAQg= =Fdky -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

Pre-alpha Cpunx-resource FAQ comments sought
by omegam＠cmq.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Okay folks. I have worked on this much of the day. This is a more formalized outline as well as a somewhat fleshed out version of section 1 of the FAQ I am attempting to produce. I submit this to the group for commentary and suggestions as well as pointers to the relevant info. This should be enough to give a flavor of what I am trying to do. Anything in [] needs to be located and/or verified by myself. I realize that this won't please everyone and some may not care. So be it. Those who do care, please help me make it less of a FAQ based on my subjective experience and more of a useful general reference. Here it is... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Cypherpunks Resources FAQ version 0.000000002 Compiled, edited & maintained by Scott Harney "Omegaman <omegam(a)cmq.com>" This document lists resources for readers interested in Cypherpunk issues and goals. The primary intention of this document is to get new readers of the group to explore the background issues that Cypherpunks attempt to address. It also includes pointers to many common cryptographic implementations and tools. Furthermore, pointers and instructions for various newsreaders and email-filters are provided to help users filter out some of the net's inevitable noise and glean the most useful information they can from this forum. This FAQ does not attempt to explictly define who the Cypherpunks are or answer questions about the philosophy. That is an exercise for the reader who utilizes the pointers within to find the answers on their own. After exploring these resources, the hope is that the reader will become a more effective and insightful contributor to alt.cypherpunks -- even if he/she is opposed to the goals of the group. This FAQ is not intended to be an exhaustive reference. A quick perusal of this FAQ should reveal the impossiblity of such a task. Rather, it is a jumping-off point. Almost all of the references below contain voluminous further references. If your mission-critical Cypherpunks site is not explicitly included, it is 99% likely to be referred to by at least one of them. This FAQ is propagated monthly to alt.cypherpunks. It can also be obtained be sending email with the subject and/or body "get cpunks faq" to omegam(a)cmq.com. As with nearly all net.publications, this document is in a constant state of contruction. When information in the FAQ is updated, I will also post a "what's new" message for those who are interested in reading additions/corrections without wading throught the entire FAQ again. - -------*********------- Author's Note/Disclaimer ---------*********--------- I maintain this FAQ solely on a voluntary basis. I am doing this because I think it is necessary. It would be contrary to the anarchic nature of the Cypherpunks to attempt to call this an official FAQ of the Cypherpunks group. Anyone who disagrees with the editing decisions and pointer selections I have made in this FAQ is free to. What this means is that you are encouraged to send comments, suggestions, corrections, new questions, and answers to me. I may or may not include them in future revisions of the FAQ. I do ask that somewhere in the subject of your mail redarding this FAQ you include the text "(CFAQ suggest)", so procmail can file such comments appropriately and I can address them in a more efficient manner. If I use your suggestion or answer to a question, I will attribute the reference to you unless you request that I do not. You are free to create your own Cypherpunks-resources FAQ if you don't like mine. - - Scott _______________________________________________________________ Omegaman <mailto:omegam@cmq.com> PGP Key fingerprint = 6D 31 C3 00 77 8C D1 C2 59 0A 01 E3 AF 81 94 63 Send e-mail with "get key" in the "Subject:" field to get a copy of my public key _______________________________________________________________ - -------*********--------*********---------********--------*********------ Premliminary Outline Section 1 - Introduction and General Information. Q1.1 Does this newsgroup/mailing-list have a charter? Q1.2 How did the group get started? Q1.3 What do Cypherpunks want? Q1.4 What happened to the toad.com mailing list? Are there archives? Q1.5 Are there other groups besides Cypherpunks who share these goals. Q1.6 What have the Cypherpunks done to advance their goals other that merely talk about them? Q1.7 I'm interested, what can I do? Q1.8 What are all these terms and acronyms anyway? (A Quick n' Dirty Glossary) Section 2 - Crypto in Action Q2.1 Pointers galore to PGP resources. Q2.2 Point to Schneir's site and include biblio info on Applied Crypto Q2.2 Point to cryptlib toolkits Q2.3 RSA, of course. Q2.4 pointers to disk encryption utilities for various platforms Q2.5 pointers to Raph's remailer site and other remailer info sites. remailer software. software to make remailer usage simpler (premail, PIdaho) Q2.6 pointers to the various digital cash purveyors and to explanations of how Chaumian digital cash works. Q2.7 pointers to Apache-SSL site and info, Stronghold, Q2.8 SSH Q2.9 Pointers to sites describing how various types of crypto actually work. sci.crypt faq Q3.0 But how do I know if it's good crypto? Point to snake Oil FAQ? Schneir's essay. Use your brain. Section 3 - Crypto and the Law Q3.1 Froomkin's site obviously.. John Young's also obvious. EFF has a good archive too. Karn case, others. Q3.2 Pointers to government's current position on crypto. ie. EAR, ITAR Q3.3 Pointers past Clipper failure info. Section 4 - Who's who & (recent) History of Crypto. Q4.1 A couple of good general history sites exist. also Codebreakers bibliographical reference. Q4.2 Enigma is a common question, point to relevant sites. Q4.3 Whit Diffie--some interviews etc are available Q4.4 Bruce Schneir same Q4.5 Phil Z and PGP history and interviews. Q4.6 Jim Bizdos Q4.8 Dorothy Denning (got to include the enemy too) Q4.7 Pointers to news on breaks of ciphers Q4.8 NSA site. [Others? I'm getting sleepy, names escaping me at the moment] Section 5 - Help! I want to know more but I'm drowning in noise Q5.1 Point to filtered lists in existence Q5.2 news2mail gateways as source of list. mail filtering tools come into good use. point to a bunch of them. Q5.3 Point to kill-file info for various newsreaders and platforms. [Possibly include generic examples from own experience and list user's experience who wish to contribute. Specific names will be ommitted of course. Also score information for those interested] Q5.4 point to information on other utilities and verification-type schemes [NoCeM's] Section 6 - Personal motivations, thank-you's, etc. *********----------**********----------**********---------*********---- Section 1. Introduction and General Information Q1.1 Do the Cypherpunks have an official charter? No. Cypherpunks are anarchic in nature so the notion of an official charter is directly contrary to such ideals. The two statements below are from Original Cypherpunks (OC's) Eric Hughes and Tim May. The first was part of the original welcome message to the mailing list hosted at toad.com. The second was suggested by Tim to the original list and commented upon by the readership. Both statements are accepted by much of the readership as good indicators of what Cypherpunks are about. Eric Hughes' statement: "Cypherpunks assume privacy is a good thing and wish there were more of it. Cypherpunks acknowledge that those who want privacy must create it for themselves and not expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant them privacy out of beneficence. Cypherpunks know that people have been creating their own privacy for centuries with whispers, envelopes, closed doors, and couriers. Cypherpunks do not seek to prevent other people from speaking about their experiences or their opinions. The most important means to the defense of privacy is encryption. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy. But to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Cypherpunks hope that all people desiring privacy will learn how best to defend it. Cypherpunks are therefore devoted to cryptography. Cypherpunks wish to learn about it, to teach it, to implement it, and to make more of it. Cypherpunks know that cryptographic protocols make social structures. Cypherpunks know how to attack a system and how to defend it. Cypherpunks know just how hard it is to make good cryptosystems. Cypherpunks love to practice. They love to play with public key cryptography. They love to play with anonymous and pseudonymous mail forwarding and delivery. They love to play with DC-nets. They love to play with secure communications of all kinds. Cypherpunks write code. They know that someone has to write code to defend privacy, and since it's their privacy, they're going to write it. Cypherpunks publish their code so that their fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Cypherpunks realize that security is not built in a day and are patient with incremental progress. Cypherpunks don't care if you don't like the software they write. Cypherpunks know that software can't be destroyed. Cypherpunks know that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down. Cypherpunks will make the networks safe for privacy." Tim May's statement: "Alt.cypherpunks is for the unmoderated discussion of cryptography and the political, social, and economic implications of unrestricted, strong cryptography. The Cypherpunks grpup has existed since 1992 and has been central in the debate about strong crypto, government restrictions, crypto anarchy, and in showing weaknesses of various ciphers and security products. The mailing list has had as many as 1500 subscribers, plus gateways to newsgroups and Web sites. It is expected that 'alt.cypherpunks' will be a free-wheeling forum for many viewpoints. As it is unmoderated, readers are strongly advised to learn how to use filters and other tools for making virtual anarchies manageable for their own tastes." Q1.2 How did the group get started? Needless to say, the history of such things is fuzzy at best. Eric Hughes and Tim May had some discussions which led to Eric Hughes, decision to host a meeting. Concidently, the first meeting occurred the same week PGP 2.0 was released. John Gilmore offered his site to host a mailing list, and thus Cypherpunks were born. see Q1.2, Q1.4, and Q1.6 for references containing more detail. also see: [Wired article URL] Q1.3 What do Cypherpunks want? Such a simple question with no simple, short answer. Please explore the following sites. Tim May's provacative (and large!) Cyphernomicon http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ The Berkeley Cypherpunks site is another good starting point. ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/Home.html Also see: http://www.offshore.com.ai/security/ - Vince Cate's Cryptorebel/Cypherpunk Page http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/ - Joel McNamara's Electronic Privacy Page Q1.4 What happened to the toad.com mailing list? Are there archives? As with all Cypherpunks issues, there is much controversy surrounding the dissolution of the original list hosted by John Gilmore's machine @toad.com. Some say that noise devoured the list to such a point as to make it useless, driving away the "good posters". Others argue that the failed attempt at moderating the list to eliminate some of that noise was the final nail in the coffin. Whatever the reason, Gilmore told the Cypherpunks that it was time to find a new home. Running a mailing list with 1500+ subscription base and the enormous volume that the list had is not a simple task. The physical running of the list on a single machine requires enormous computational resources as well as constant human intervention. Perhaps the resultant newsgroup and distributed mailing list approach is more in line with Cypherpunk ideals. "Cypherpunks know that a widely dispersed system cannot be shut down." Archives of the original list are available to some degree at: http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/ http://weber.u.washington.edu/~phantom/cpunk/index.html Users interested in running a "node" of the distributed mailing list version of this newsgroup are encouraged to subscribe to Igor Chudov's discussion list on the subject. Send a message to majordomo(a)algebra.com with the body "subscribe cypherpunks-hosts" Q1.5 Are there other groups besides Cypherpunks who share these goals? The following organizations and sites share Cypherpunk goals to a greater or lesser extent. The EFF(Electronic Frontier Foundation) http://eff.org http://eff.org/pub/ITAR_export/HTML/hot.html & http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/hot.html - more specific references & extensive archival information EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) http://epic.org Voter's Telecommunications Watch http://www.vtw.org Center for Democracy and Technology http://www.cdt.org The Cryptography List at C2Net is also a good resource. send a message to Majordomo(a)c2.net with the body "subscribe Cryptography" The Coderpunks list at toad.com is a technical discussion forum. Send a message to majordomo(a)toad.com with the body "subscribe coderpunks" Q1.6 What have the Cypherpunks done to advance their goals other that merely talk about them? Many Cypherpunks are professionals in the computer security field. Others work for companies and corporations which create and distribute products utilizing strong cryptography. Cypherpunks are also directly responsible for the creation and running of Type I and Type II(mixmaster) Cypherpunks anonymous remailers (surprising, eh?). see Q2.5 Cypherpunks have also produced software to make good crypto easier for the masses. [Get permission from PGP-front end producers to reference here] The Linux-IPSEC project is another good example. [see & subscribe ref?]. Mykotronx exposure and dumpster diving excursion. [reference?] see Q1.4(list-archive sites) Q1.7 I'm interested, what can I do? First of all READ before you post. Observe simple etiquette. Don't clutter the group with "me too" posts and questions which you can easily find the answer to yourself. Contribute signal, not noise. As of this writing, RSA, inc. is hosting a contest to crack the government standard DES 56 bit algorhythm. See [http://www.rsa.com/contest] for full details. Also see Peter Trei's site for software and info. Host a portion of the distributed mailing list. See Q1.5. Run an anonymous or pseudonymous remailer. see Q1.6 for site references and software. Use strong crypto. Encourage friends to use it as well. Increase the amount of encrypted traffic on the net. Can you code? There are plenty of projects and opportunites yet to be explored. Black Unicorn writes: "Where is highly sophisticated stego? Where are larger keys for symetric ciphers? Where is a fully functional and secure "stealth PGP"? Where are anonymous and encrypted WWW clients and hosts which permit chaining? If the crypto war is going to be lost it will be lost in the chill of development when crypto regulation is put into place. If you don't make the guns in the first place, the government has a much easier time taking them away." Q1.8 What are all these terms and acronyms anyway? Here's a quick-n-dirty glossary. GAK = Government access to keys. Government euphemisms for GAK include "key escrow" and "key recovery" (actually important for corporations, but misused in recent USG proposals) USG = United States Government ITAR = International Trade and Arms Regulations. Regulations export of arms from the US. Strong Crypto is regulated as a weapon by this document. see Q3.2 EAR = Encryption Algorhythm Regulations (a guess, look it up) Recent proposals by Clinton Administration. see Q3.2 TLA = Three Letter Acronym/Agency. Refers to USG agencies (typically involved in law enforcement) FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. NSA = National Security Agency. This highly secretive agency is responsible for the protection of USG secrecy via encryption as well as the spying on other governments by breaking encryption algorhythms. see Q4.8 DES = US Data Encryption Standard algorhythm. see Q2.9 RSA = a company and a public key algorhythm. see Q2.9 and Q2.3 net.loon/kook = a purely subjective characterization. Signal-to-Noise ratio = Signal refers to on-topic posts. Noise, the opposite. A high S/N ratio means the list is putting out a lot of signal("good posts"). Subjective, but fairly obvious. See Section 5 for pointers no how to reduce (what you think is) noise Memes = [get a good definition here] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [Rest of FAQ goes here :) This is a pre-alpha FAQ, intended only to solicit commentary and suggestions.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: latin1 iQCVAwUBMwJViqb3EfJTqNC9AQHigwP+IAXu+PO7aGiR/zZxz91PhnYuYvTy3jMN HzO4djcx44auPMjh6pFpmWJuYRcoxVHXCh2JO4UOR3cNYloxikwY4hGgYx8jLgN1 XORQztiCGMI/2ScVsi8tH6eJLCuZxmE7s8semel4CC8xH3H74vCiBNZD6iyyIXOG oMkSnOVFAQg= =Fdky -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Remove My Name
by KENNETH A. LEONE 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I CONTINUE TO RECEIVE MAIL. PLEASE REMOVE MY NAME FROM THE MAILING LIST. THANK YOU

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Re: anonymity and e-cash
by janke＠unixg.ubc.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lee Tien <tien(a)well.com> writes: > [...] > Is payee anonymity technically possible? Under what conditions? > [...] It's not too hard: The payee forwards a blinded, non-signed coin to the payer. The payer has the bank sign this, and then returns it to the payee who strips out the blinding factor. I think this is discussed in Schneier. Leonard

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Re: John Gilmore the fascist cocksucker
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Why you are doing this, Paul? > > - Igor. It would appear that someone I gave my password to the other day (I recieve no sensitive mail through this account) so they could use it to test a machine has a rather infantile sense of humour and have taken my critical posts to the list to mean that I want to spam a mailing list with dreck like this. I shall ensure the offending fool is castrated forthwith... Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Spam posts from my acct.
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cpunks, A number of spam mails (I counted about 100 in my incoming mail) were sent to the list from my account last night. I do not take particular precautions with my password for this account as there is no sensitive mail sent through it, I recall in particular giving the password to someone to test out a machine recently and I believe they may be the culprit. Again, my appologies for the inconvenience and you have to admit that while his method may have been less than subtle his message was certainly something we can all relate to ;-) Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Re: Recommendation: Creation of "alt.cypherpunks"
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:49 PM -0600 2/12/97, Firebeard wrote: >>>>>> Timothy C May writes: > >TCM> Since posting my comments I've just seen the proposal that tivoli >TCM> may host a list. > > Whoa, Nellie! Who made that proposal? It certainly wasn't >me! I said that I was taking steps to set up a majordomo to host a >cypherpunks list. Topmost on those steps is creation of the sten.net >or sten.org domain, and getting a personal, >paid-for-out-of-my-own-pocket, ISDN connection. The majordomo will >run off of my personal computer sitting in my apartment, not on Tivoli >hardware sitting in the support lab. As I said, John forced my hand >in his announcement, causing me to 'put up' before everything was in >place, including the domain registration. Yes, my mail comes from >sten.tivoli.com. That doesn't mean that everything I do in life is >connected to Tivoli, IBM, etc. Sorry, I was just going by what I saw in your e-mail address. My point was not really about Tivoli, or IBM, or any other particular company, though. I was making the point that _any_ site distributing a list is likely to face legal pressures not to carry certain items. Read between the lines (or read the unedited list) the discussion by John Gilmore, Sandy Sandfort, and the products of Sandy's company, and legal pressures applied, to see what I mean. --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: anonymity and e-cash
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(A copy of this message has also been posted to the following newsgroups: alt.cypherpunks, talk.politics.crypto,sci.crypt) At 1:19 PM -0800 2/12/97, Lee Tien wrote (on the Cypherpunks(a)toad.com list): >The NSA's research report on e-cash says: > > "The ideal situation (from the point of view of privacy advocates) >is that neither payer nor payee should know the identity of the other. This >makes remote transactions using electronic cash totally anonymous: no one >knows where Alice spends her money and who pays her. > > "It turns out that this is too much to ask: there is no way in such >a scenario for the consumer to obtain a signed receipt. Thus we are forced >to settle for payer anonymity." > >Keeping in mind I am only a lawyer, my skim of Schneier (2d ed.) didn't >illuminate. The discussion of digital cash seemed to assume no payee >anonymity. But the immediate previous section of dining cryptographers >involved (it seemed) recipient untraceability. > >Is payee anonymity technically possible? Under what conditions? > >If so, is the issue social, e.g., as NSA notes, the lack of a signed receipt? You missed a very good talk by Ian Goldberg of UC Berkeley at the Saturday Cypherpunks meeting at Stanford, where Ian talked for more than an hour on just this issue. (He also talked for an hour on his crack of the RSA challenge using 250 workstations...this was also a good talk.) It was explicitly stated in Chaum's 1985 paper that methods existed to ensure full untraceability. Chaum has in recent years emphasized a more "surveillance friendly" system in which some of the anonymity is lost. It was the intuition of some of us that "coin changers" could solve this problem, e.g, by having intermediaries to "mix" the coins and thus break the traceability chain. Lucky Green wrote some articles along these lines, and maybe Hal Finney, too. This was a couple of years ago. The notion is similar to what Ian showed, but our arguments were not formal and robust. In August of '95, Doug Barnes released a long article on "Identity Agnostic" systems. (His article is no longer at the www.communities.com Web site, so I can't refer you to it. Maybe he'll post it again.) About a year ago Ian Goldberg considered this issue and came up with a solution which has seemingly reproduced what Chaum was thinking about (but, apparently, did not make completely clear in his papers, for whatever reasons). Ian deals with the issue of "making change" and comes up with a system in which intermediaries, which we may call "e-cashiers" and "moneychangers," can take on the role of the mint/bank. By making "negative deposits" (submitting signed withdrawal slips, effectively), these intermediaries function as moneychangers. And so the one-way anonymous features become two-way (effectively, each of the transactions contributes a "one-way anonymous" component: one-way + one-way = two-way). It is much easier to understand digital cash with the usual diagram showing the usual triangle of CUSTOMER-MERCHANT-MINT and then analyzing the flow of information, who knows what, etc. Drawing such diagrams in e-mail is beyond my patience. This system used online clearing, of course. This "disintermediates" the process, and makes for an "everyone a mint" situation, which has some of the same nice properties that an "everyone a remailer" ecology of remailers and users has. And the principle can be extended further back, to where the usual distinctions between CUSTOMER and MERCHANT vanish (as it sort of does in the real world, where the two parties are merely exchanging one item for another item), and where the role of the MINT is minimal. In fact, Ian showed, the Chaum patents on blinding are NOT USED by the Mint/Bank; only the CUSTOMER uses the blinding patents (and the MERCHANT in some cases, not in other cases). This means that "anyone a mint" does not violate any of the Chaum/Digicash patents, and "mint clients" are likely to be written by third parties. (The _customer_ is presumably on the honor system to abide by the Chaum patents...except the patents are only being licensed to banks...go figure.) (This is where, as I recall, Doug's "agnostic" system came in...it is possible his thinking was similar to Ian's...I don't have Doug's paper handy.) Ian demonstrated this on an actual system, with real live connections to mints in various countries, but with the blinding not used (as I recall). Draw your own conclusions about what this means. It was heady stuff, seeing the result many of us believed to be implicit in Chaum's 1985 paper made real. Everyone a mint. This makes the spread of fully anonymous digital cash harder to stop. Issues of the mint denying one has an account are always real ones, but not important--I think--in the real world. The untraceability of the digital coins means that a mint never knows who is testing it for reliability and "honesty," and the mint cannot set out to "screw" a particular customer by declaring his account not to exist (as the mint almost certainly does not have to know who own which accounts, as deposits can be made anonymously). I hope this helps. I plan to use this result centrally in my talk at the panel discussion on "Governmental and Social Implications of Digital Cash" at the upcoming CFP. --Tim May -- Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we 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, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: alt.cypherpunks created
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:06 PM -0800 2/12/97, Greg Broiles wrote: >According to DejaNews, Mike Duvos has also issued a newgroup for >alt.cypherpunks: I've already posted two articles to it. I expect it to be the main place I post my words, as it eliminates any possibility that some site admin will "moderate" my essays. (And few of my articles in the last several days have made it to the Main list. They were not flames, but apparently failed Sandy's test of relevance.) --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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