December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

[humor] Fwd: Computer News
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

==================BEGIN FORWARDED MESSAGE================== >Subject: Computer News >Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 20:11:42 -0800 Microsoft announced this week that due to Y2K problems, Windows 2000 will be delayed until Jan, 1901. ===================END FORWARDED MESSAGE===================

1 0

MCI hit with encryption virus [CNN]
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > X-within-URL: http://cnnfn.com/digitaljam/9812/21/virus_pkg/ > From Correspondent Bruce Francis > December 21, 1998: 7:56 p.m. ET > July 30, 1998 Network Associates MCI WorldCom More Quotes.... Network > Associates Anti-virus Research Center NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Employees > at MCI WorldCom were confronted with a science fiction scenario made > cold fact on Monday when a computer virus struck the company's > sprawling network, encrypting and destroying files. > [INLINE] To make things worse, virus consultants Network Associates > (NETA) say that the virus -- called "Remote Explorer" -- is unlike > any other and may be the smartest, most dangerous computer bug to > date. [text deleted] ____________________________________________________________________ What raises the standard of living may well diminish the quality of life. The Club of Rome The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

This one spl. for anonymous (X-mas puzzle)
by Rajiv Malik 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi there I remember u posted a nice puzzle long back this one spl. for u : --> There are two persons. A pair of no is written on each's face. They can see the no (pair of no) written on the other's face and they have to tell the no written on their face. They start one by one. Lets say one person starts he can see the no written on his opponents face , its (13,17). After 3 tries he tells the correct answer. The nos exhibit the following properties: 1> All the nos are prime. 2> Any three no taken ( from the set of 4 nos, two no on each's face) together form a triangle and the perimeter of the triangle is prime. Now you have tell the no written on that persons face and why it took him three tries. The conversation between the two persons is as follows Let p1 and p2 be the persons and p1 starts and p1 saw the no (13,17) written in p2. p1> I don't know p2> I don't know p1> I don't know p2> I don't know p1> Tells the right no. enjoy (Happy X-mas) Rajiv PS : I'm off till 28th So u have enough time.

1 0

Re: alternative b-money creation
by Ian Grigg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> What about near money, e.g., S&H Green Stamps, > frequent flier miles, Toys R Us Bucks, or anything > else that can only be used reflexively with the > issuer? Near money is something that many people hold out hope for, and you may all be right, in that it may be the way forward through the morass of difficulties. I personally don't think so, not for any killer reason, but for a whole host of little reasons. I'll see if I can't enunciate them, and no doubt within the session you are running, we'll have some lively discussions. > In the Depression, many southern manufacturing > firms and, so far as my relatives tell, 100% of > the coal mining outfits, paid in scrip which was > redeemable only at the company store. Some of my > Mother's people worked at the phone company and > converted their scrip to stock since they judged > it worthless otherwise. This is the Hiawatha Hours, as I rudely called them (I keep forgetting the name, sorry). Now, these are working systems. They are more or less the same as the LETS systems, which are sort of successful in many hundreds of places. Where they work is generally an indication of some shortage. With the above systems, and as far as I can tell, with all systems, there is a shortage of cash. It is not just that everyone is poor, but that the cycle of money in its journey from entity to entity throughout the economy is broken. In contrast to this shortage and cyclic failure, demand and supply for goods and services remain high, at least in many sectors. In this case, anything that is injected can conceivably bootstrap the cycle again, and this is why, IMHO, the many different range of instruments all appear to have been successful. It is not the instrument, but the presence of an instrument. One thing to remember is that the local economy is generally the larger proportion of the total economy. I have empirically noted that in most towns with identifiable export industries, there are 3 people employed elsewhere for every one within the direct export sector - this is a reflection that most people are actually supporting the rest. (However, this doesn't take into account the import side of the equation.) Under such circumstances, it is no real wonder that a shortage of money will cause an economy to grind to a halt, and an injection of money will start it up again - to the extent that import/export permits. But bear in mind that this is a competitive scenario, and the scrip money tends to work well when the statal currency disappeared as in the Depression. When the statal money comes back in, the scrip fails to entice, because it is only useful by definition for local products, not imported products. In that scenario it is dominated (to use the term) by statal currency. > You can buy FF miles at > 2c/mile at both the Delta and AA websites and US > Air FF miles now exchange 1-for-1 with AA FF > miles. Every affinity program in the country > offers dollar denominated discounts at the home > issuing location. Yes, one of the huge barriers to any money system is the border to any other money system. At this border, the change costs are a very important limiter on the success of the system. Remember that a merchant must convert to useful money in order to pay his costs, so a small system cannot really work without an internal method of spending money, to offset that. This is the real reason why countries have money, because they have a border that defines a naturally sized unit. With MTB ecash, this became very apparent when merchants had to extract their cash at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent, thus putting the lie to the notion of cash. With FF miles, they alleviate this somewhat by recasting the situation as a loyalty programme, and thus you use the internal goods. So it only works when you are a regular user. Adding convertability makes it closer to money. But there is one killer that will never make it be accepted as a dominating form of money. All loyalty programmes are calculated on the basis of this actually accruing value to the provider, rather than the other way around. Necessarily, this means the user is paying for the priviledge of being loyal. This is done three ways. Firstly, most successful loyalty programmes such as FF miles are based on goods with a low marginal cost but high ticket cost. To the airline, it costs the price of a seat which is somewhere around $30. To you, you believe that you are getting, say, $200 value (for points marked as $200 for example). Within that range, the airline wins. Secondly, on average, FF miles are not actually used up beyond a benchmark figure of 30%. Airlines also have a number of tricks that use up or block the use of points. Thirdly, FF miles work best when the individual is consuming, but the company is paying. What FF miles are is essentially a bribe to the business traveller to insist on using their airline, when the traveller doesn't otherwise care. This separation of user from payer is cunning marketing, something that is employed by all the best companies (IBM were the past masters, now the crown has passed to M$. Odd that computing displays this domination amongst all industries...). Now, regardless of all this, you are right that these systems take on the nature of money if people suffer all these things and then continue to participate. What can stop these becoming real useful is several things: people working out that they are regularly over paying, taxation departments working out that the business traveller is taking an untaxed benefit, and various other hurdles. If you can manage to navigate that particular river stretch of crocs and snakes, then you might make money, to stretch a pun. However, if you are going to all that trouble, why not just start a real money? That's my real thesis. > I can get a tax deduction for > turning in some of these sorts of things to, say, > the Make A Wish Foundation. Well, not sure what to say about giving away your overpaid loyalty points. That makes for two charities, the Foundation and the Airline. > My university co-op > gives rebates based on purchase volume and in > cash, but there is no attempt to verify that the > purchaser is really the account holder if that > holder pays in cash. Oh, anonymity/untraceability/bearer status might be useful features, but that is only what they are, features. If our objective is to invent one with those features as requirement, then I think you will find a single purpose, centralised registry, poor convertability system as a really bad starting point. > For the longest time, > stamps could be used in place of coin for small > denomination mail order. Single system. Why did they stop? > Until security worries > required a named passenger, shuttle tickets > between Boston and NYC might as well have been > cash. We know why these have been stopped. For precisely reasons similar to the elimination of unknown activity, including monetary activity. Add this to the list of disadvantages of near money. > The Mass State Legislature only this past > week considered a bill that would make used > (non-winning) lottery tickets have a residual > cash value useful only at lottery agents (this as > an anti-litter thing). Ah, so this will be very interesting. So will there be an arbitrary limit placed on there to stop them being used as cash? Remember that cash itself dominates if you can more easily use cash rather than a handful of used lottery tickets. > My thinking -- enough near money and it will tend > to convertibility... Yes, that I agree with. But I fall short of saying that it reaches a useful level of convertibility. Looking forward to our loyalty systems session in March! Actually, I should mention that whilst I do not favour these systems for the above reasons, I do believe that in the study of them, we better understand how money works, much more so than if we were to simply study money, which is so completely lost in statal marketing these days as to be unfathomable in isolation. iang

1 0

Trust in Cyberspace
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We offer the National Academy of Sciences September 1998 report, "Trust in Cyberspace," a 243-page survey of all security issues and technologies associated with the Internet and computer networks: http://jya.com/tic-intro.htm (Introduction only, 58K) http://jya.com/tic.htm (Full report, 882K) http://jya.com/tic.zip (Full report zipped, 302K) The report reviews prior studies such as the CRISIS report on cryptography, the PCCIP report on protecting US infrastructure, the DoD report on Information Warfare - Defense, and several others, assesses those findings in greater depth, looks at technology and research needed, and recommends what government (NSA and DARPA) and private industry/eduation should do to assure security. NSA is upbraided for its opposition to strong cryptography and culture of overcontrolling secrecy. NSA's R2 research unit is singled out as needing to find ways to compete with industry for the best talent so that the agency's skills and tools do not lag the world market.

1 0

[mitnick] on another note .. (fwd)
by Max Inux 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

No introduction needed... --Max ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 17:25:40 +0100 X-Loop: openpgp.net From: Tor Fosheim <tor.fosheim(a)bigfoot.com> Reply-To: mitnick(a)2600.com To: mitnick(a)2600.com Subject: [mitnick] on another note .. The Highest court in Norway has freed a computer engineer from Norman Data Defense Systems from charges relating to a computer break-in at the University of Oslo in 1995. It acknowledged the fact that he broke in through a security hole, but said it was not illegal for him to do so. The court said that anyone who makes their computers available on the internet should be prepared for the machines to accept "requests for information contained on it". Ie, if its not protected well enough -- its the owner of the machine who is to blame. Tor

1 0

Re: MCI hit with encryption virus [CNN] (fwd)
by Ian Moya 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone else find it interesting that the release for this outside of NAI press release was at CNN/fn and not CNN's tech section? The stock shot up 6 and 3/8 on the news. Pretty nice Christmas bonus to say the least. Couple other more timely and detailed notes on the event: http://www.ilhawaii.net/webnews/wed/aq/Nd55_38.html http://www.ilhawaii.net/webnews/wed/dm/Nd55_51.html Also a local TV station (Austin) on the 5pm news last night had some official working on this fiasco quoted as saying that this was the first large case of "cyberterrorism" that he had encountered. I hope the national media doesn't start goose stepping to that account things; otherwise, expect this and related events to be cited by CIAO and other gubment offices in their initiatives next year to round up network incident response teams nationally and globally. http://www.ciao.gov/ http://www.pccip.gov/ moya -- a Navigo farmer Have an <Interesting> New Millenium- <http://www.netmeg.net/jargo/terms/i/interesting.html> <Days: 374 Hours: 11 Minutes: 42 Seconds: 6> > Forwarded message: > >From owner-cypherpunks(a)ssz.com Tue Dec 22 07:32:13 1998 > From: Jim Choate <ravage(a)einstein.ssz.com> > Subject: MCI hit with encryption virus [CNN] > To: cypherpunks(a)einstein.ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer) > Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 07:31:11 -0600 (CST) > > > X-within-URL: http://cnnfn.com/digitaljam/9812/21/virus_pkg/ > > > From Correspondent Bruce Francis > > December 21, 1998: 7:56 p.m. ET > > > July 30, 1998 Network Associates MCI WorldCom More Quotes.... Network > > Associates Anti-virus Research Center NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Employees > > at MCI WorldCom were confronted with a science fiction scenario made > > cold fact on Monday when a computer virus struck the company's > > sprawling network, encrypting and destroying files. > > [INLINE] To make things worse, virus consultants Network Associates > > (NETA) say that the virus -- called "Remote Explorer" -- is unlike > > any other and may be the smartest, most dangerous computer bug to > > date. > > [text deleted]

1 0

First call for papers
by Gawlick, Thomas 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi everyone ! Please find the attached first call for papers for a new international forum for information security. We apologize if you have multiple receipts of this message. We wish you all a joyous Holiday Season and a Happy New Year! secunet Security Networks GmbH CQRE - Team First CALL FOR PAPERS -------------------------------------- CQRE [Secure] Exhibition & Congress -------------------------------------------------------- Nov. 30 - Dec. 2, 1999, Duesseldorf, Germany CQRE [Secure] Exhibition & Congress provides a new international forum giving a close-up view on information security in the context of rapidly evolving economic processes. The unprecedented reliance on computer technology has transformed the previous technical side-issue "information security" to a management problem requiring decisions of strategic importance. Hence, the targeted audience represents decision makers from government, industry, commercial, and academic communities. If you are concerned with solutions relating to the protection of your countryŽs information infrastructure or a commercial enterprise, consider submitting a paper to the CQRE [Secure] Exhibition & Congress. We are looking for papers and panel discussions covering: * ELECTRONIC COMMERCE * CORPORATE SECURITY --------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- - new business processes - access control - secure business transactions - secure teleworking - online merchandising - enterprise key management - electronic payment / banking - IT-audit - innovative applications - risk / disaster management * NETWORK SECURITY - security awareness and training --------------------------------------------- - implementation, accreditation, - virtual private networks and operation of secure systems - security aspects in internet in a government, business, or utilization industry environment - security aspects in multi- * SECURITY TECHNOLOGY media-applications -------------------------------------------------- - intrusion detection systems - cryptography * LEGAL ASPECTS - public key infrastructures ------------------------------ - chip card technology - digital signature acts - biometrics - privacy and anonymity * TRUST MANAGEMENT - crypto regulation -------------------------------------------------- - liability - evaluation of products and systems - international harmonization of security evaluation criteria * STANDARDIZATION * FUTURE PERSPECTIVES Any other contribution addressing the involving of IT security in economic processes will also be welcome. Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract of their contribution to the program chair. The submissions should be original research results, survey articles or "high quality" case studies and position papers. Product advertisements are welcome for presentation, but will not be considered for the proceedings. Manuscripts must be in English, and not more than 2.000 words. The extended abstracts should be in a form suitable for anonymous review, without author's names, affiliations, acknowledgements or obvious references. Contributions must not be submitted in parallel to any conference or workshop that has proceedings. Separately, an abstract of the paper with no more than 200 words and with title, name and addresses (incl. an E-mail address) of the authors may be submitted. In case of multiple authors the contacting author must be clearly identified. We strongly encourage electronic submission in Postscript format. The submissions must be in 11pt format, use standard fonts or include the necessary fonts. Proposals for panel discussions should also be sent to the program chair. Panels of interest include those that present alternative/controversial viewpoints or those that encourage lively discussions of relevant issues. Panels that are collections of unrefereed papers will not be considered. Panel proposals should be a minimum of one page describing the subject matter, the appropriateness of the panel for this conference and should identify participants and their respective viewpoints. MAILING LIST: -------------------------------------- If you want to receive emails with subsequent Call for Papers and registration information, please send a brief mail to cqre(a)secunet.de. WEB SITE: -------------------------------------- Up to date information about CQRE [Secure] Exhibition & Congress will be available at http://www.secunet.de/Forum/cqre.html IMPORTANT DATES: -------------------------------------- - Deadline for submission of extended abstracts May 14, 1999 - Deadline for submission of panel proposals June 1, 1999 - Notification of acceptance June 25, 1999 - Deadline for submission of complete papers July 30, 1999 PROGRAM COMMITTEE: -------------------------------------- Johannes Buchmann (TU Darmstadt) Dirk Fox (Secorvo) Walter Fumy (Siemens) Rüdiger Grimm (GMD) Helena Handschuh (ENST/Gemplus) Thomas Hoeren (Uni Muenster) Pil Joong Lee (POSTECH) Alfred Menezes (U.of Waterloo / Certicom) David Naccache (Gemplus) Clifford Neumann (USC) Mike Reiter (Bell Labs) Matt Robshaw (RSA) Richard Schlechter (EU-comm.) Bruce Schneier (Counterpane) Tsuyoshi Takagi (NTT) Yiannis Tsiounis (GTE Labs) Michael Waidner (IBM) Moti Yung (CERTCO) Robert Zuccherato (Entrust) PROGRAM CHAIR: -------------------------------------- Rainer Baumgart secunet Security Networks GmbH Weidenauer Str. 223 - 225 57076 Siegen Germany Tel.: +49-271-48950-15 Fax: +49-271-48950-50 R.Baumgart(a)secunet.de

1 0

RE: politically correct bomb graffiti
by Jim Gillogly 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~> WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Department officials said Monday they were ~> distressed about ``thoughtless graffiti'' referring to the Islamic holy ~> month of Ramadan on a Navy bomb being prepared for dropping on Iraq. xasper8d writes: > What's the 90's PC war cry? Go ahead and nuke 'em, just don't be > insensitive about it. While I also would be more offended by someone bombing me into a thin film of viscera and connective tissue than by having them ridicule my beliefs, I think the Pentagon was more concerned about the effect on our allies in the Gulf. The recent bombing was an attack against the Iraqi military and leadership rather than on Islam, and having that graffito get big airplay could offend other countries that we'd prefer not to offend. So while they looked silly complaining about the Ramadan reference, they'd have looked worse if they'd passed it off with a shrug and/or another ethnic or religious slur. There is of course a long tradition of personalizing ordnance; ISTR that the bomb in Dr. Strangelove had more of a message than just its megatonnage. -- Jim Gillogly Sterday, 2 Yule S.R. 1999, 18:50 12.19.5.14.5, 11 Chicchan 18 Mac, Sixth Lord of Night

2 1

Re: alternative b-money creation
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:28 AM -0500 on 12/22/98, Ian Grigg wrote: > This is the Hiawatha Hours, as I rudely called them > (I keep forgetting the name, sorry). Now, these are > working systems. They are more or less the same as > the LETS systems, which are sort of successful in many > hundreds of places. Ithaca Hours. They like LETS, are based, more or less, on Marx's "Labor Theory of Value". 'nuff said, I figure. Stupid is as stupid does, to quote a famous Alabaman... :-). Cheers, RAH ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0