December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The remailers at Hack-Tic
by usura＠vox.hacktic.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hello, The "Hack-Tic Network Foundation" has decided to change its name, into a more mainstream "XS4all Networking" [access for all]. This will include a change in domain name. The changes will be made during this weekend, this may cause some slight disturbances in the remailing service. One is advised to do a test messages before an actual remailing request since no garantee for proper functioning during this change can be given. The new domain name will be xs4all.nl, the hacktic.nl domain name will be operational for another 6 months till february 1995. The remailers affected are: usura(a)hacktic.nl -> usura(a)xs4all.nl The adresses for the remailers at my UUCP node: nobody(a)vox.hacktic.nl remail(a)vox.hacktic.nl remailer(a)vox.hacktic.nl anon(a)vox.hacktic.nl and the anon-ID's associated with them will be changed at a later date, more information will be supplied as it becomes available in the following newsgroups/mailinglists: -> alt.privacy.anon-server -> alt.anonymous -> alt.anonymous.messages -> the cypherpunks mailing list -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 for VoX Labz. iQCVAgUBLlM64FnfdBSNVpE9AQGX+wP/QfwaHdNm8HKKeLEqFnH4Kv72efkZx7Ta VS132dLH7wYn8bN+N43nCvh6jSKwSlwT261qXA5DDp9WASCgCdfovzkV4+hnxGkA Hdd3ncJ6TAMyAO4PYPiTNHVREoB3LpLPRRF/iGYfPR7R3+d7acuJApzpMg2pwGW9 nGehxc3tmuE= =sPNJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Exit! Stage Left. Alex de Joode <usura(a)vox.hacktic.nl>

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CIA Using Remailer System?
by nobody＠vox.hacktic.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I had a funny thought the other day. YES, the remailers have been set up for foiling traffic analysis and YES they are reasonably secure and YES they are oriented toward private citizens striving to protect their personal privacy....BUT: Wouldn't it be funny, if the CIA (or other agency) used the remailer system (alon with PGP) for regular communication with operatives overseas. Think about it for a second...the NSA can't be the only one monitoring Internet traffic. With that in mind, say the Company had to get a message overseas to an operative. Probably it would be a bad idea to send a message to someone overseas with the return address of spooks(a)langley.cia.gov.us, so why wouldn't they take advantage of the remailer system? That way the message (encrypted of course) would arrive in a person's mailbox from hacktic or wimsey or kaiwan and noone could attach any sort of importance to it. And because it could be encyrpted every step of the way, noone would also be able to snoop. Yeah, they probably have their own exotic encryption systems.....cyphers that would be a dead give away in the case of an operative getting busted. But again, PGP being nicely widely distributed, no enemy agency need attach an identity to a suspect by virtue of his using PGP. Just a thought and mybe a lame one at that, but what the hell, stranger things have happened. It would be mildly cynical to imagine the reamailer system set up to throw roadblocks at the intelligence community was actually being used by that same entity.

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Statistics on remail message sizes
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A couple of weeks ago Eric asked for statistical information on remailer message sizes. I put in a size-counter a week ago (just piping each message into wc >> remail2/SIZE.REMAIL) or so, and here are some results. They show 645 messages logged, a sample of what the logs look like, the average size of a message in characters (counting the header) of about 15K, and a histogram of message sizes rounded to the nearest 1000. Note that the histogram is pretty irregular, possibly being affected by repeated sending of certain messages. jobe% wc remail2/SIZE.REMAIL 645 1935 16125 remail2/SIZE.REMAIL jobe% tail remail2/SIZE.REMAIL 58 189 3225 16 90 850 18 121 1016 14 90 896 23 140 1350 653 803 41937 710 860 45666 710 860 45642 20 96 901 28 146 1344 jobe% awk '{sum=sum+$3} END{print sum/NR}' < remail2/SIZE.REMAIL 14794.4 jobe% < remail2/SIZE.REMAIL awk '{print int(($3+500)/1000)*1000}' | sort -n | uniq -c 229 1000 82 2000 50 3000 21 4000 3 5000 45 6000 9 7000 1 8000 1 9000 3 10000 2 11000 1 12000 2 13000 5 14000 3 16000 3 17000 2 18000 1 19000 2 21000 3 23000 1 24000 2 25000 2 26000 2 27000 1 28000 1 30000 1 31000 1 32000 39 34000 37 35000 1 37000 2 38000 2 42000 2 46000 1 48000 1 49000 1 50000 1 51000 1 55000 9 59000 69 60000 I did one other test, which was to see which message sizes were repeated the most. The first number shows the number of lines which have messages of exactly the second number of bytes: jobe% < remail2/SIZE.REMAIL awk '{print }' | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -nr | sed 20q > times2 40 896 40 1350 20 5797 14 1344 11 33845 11 1242 10 892 9 33992 9 1248 8 1753 7 33975 5 1765 5 1757 5 1236 4 901 4 1749 4 1251 3 59725 3 59668 3 5945 It is clear that there is a lot of repetition, probably standard ping messages and the like. This should give enough info to discard the highly repeated sets from the histogram above in order to get a possibly more representative set of numbers. Hal

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USPS key server
by peace＠BIX.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Post from FEDERAL computer week 8/15/94 The US Postal Service said this month it will establish a new electronic commerce service Post from FEDERAL computer week 8/15/94 The US Postal Service said this month it will establish a new electronic commerce service nsure that their electronic transmissions are authentic and tamper proof. Richard Rothwell, senior director of technology integration at USPS, said last week that the service IS BEING TESTED internally by USPS personnel and withiin the FAA. Although many potential hurdles remain, Rothwell said the service may be publically avaiable as early as next year. ...Much more... verrry interesting

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Re: Are \\"they\\" really the enemy?
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) on Thu, 18 Aug 4:41 PM >I'd be a lot more interested if there were >some tie-ins to crypto policy and technology. Yep, this is what I want also but need participation by others so I don't stick out too much and get Dixon-ized by Perry, or, bless him, Nzook-ized by Graham. Just see what happens when I post shortly. John

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Re: Remailer ideas
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Hal <hfinney(a)shell.portal.com> > . . . I still think that there would be real utility in the > ability to specify that a particular piece ofmail should be > re-transmitted if it does not get delivered to the destination > machine within a certain period of time. > That's one reason I like the "enabledmail" approach. All we have to do > is persuade everyone . . . . You *can't* get everybody to agree on anything, or limit themselves to anything. It'll be a long time before everybody starts supporting all the X.400 semantics, especially since people keep introducing useful competitors like MIME or painful ones like MicroSoft Mail - I'd be happy to get people to all agree to support RFC822 and SMTP... In the context of this discussion, automatic replies are probably unacceptable for many remailer-users, and don't work very well for replying to anonymous senders. Confirmation really does have to come from the user, and can only work if the user is able to build a return path. A useful surrogate for end-to-end replies are link-based bouncegrams. I'm not sure how much security you lose if you get remailers to support even one-hop NAKs, since the delays inherent in reordering mean you need to keep a return path step around in the remailer at least until you can do address validation; perhaps you could at least bounce on invalid syntax, but even that means decrypting incoming messages a while before sending and keeping them around in cleartext, which is Bad (or doubling the decryption work.) Bill

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Re: Voluntary Governments?
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Hal > What does it mean to speak of a government in cyberspace? It is the > government in physical space I fear. Its agents carry physical guns > which shoot real bullets. > ................................................................ Yeah. I recently reread Vinge's _True Names_; the protagonist is disturbed one day by a bunch of armed government thugs walking up to his house and letting him know they know his cyberspace alias, and that he'd better help them catch his friends or he'll lose his National Information Infrastructure Users' License. (It's not called that, but it's still a good prediction of what happens when you let government build the superhighways - he gives in because 98% of the jobs, and all of the good ones, require use of computer terminals.) Without cryptography, all you've got left is security by obscurity, the main technique used by the hackers in the book; even cryptographic systems need strong enough implementations built around the mathematically-strong parts to be truly safe. Bill

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Oops, Sorry
by Jeff Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sorry guys. I'll kill the message agent asap. I forgot about it. -- PGP PUBLIC KEY via finger! JAFEFFM Speaking & Thinking For Myself! * eagle(a)deeptht.armory.com email <info(a)eff.org> * *** O U T L A W S On The E L E C T R O N I C F R O N T I E R **** ***** Committed to Free Public Internet Access for World Peace ***** "When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl!" JPB

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Another crypto talk in NYC (Wed., Aug. 24)
by dmandl＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A friend has invited me to give a cypherpunk/crypto/clipper talk at ABC No Rio in scenic downtown Manhattan later this month. Here's the announcement: ------- Start of forwarded message ------- From: diseased(a)panix.com (Edward Hirsch) Newsgroups: panix.events Subject: Privacy in Cyberspace Talk Date: 15 Aug 1994 21:33:41 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Hi folks. On August 24, at 7pm, cypherpunk, Semiotext(e) editor, WFMU personality, and panix resident Dave Mandl will be leading an open discussion on privacy in cyberspace. The talk will be at ABC No Rio, a non-profit, collectively-run art gallery and performance space located at 156 Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side. Admission is free/donation, and all are encouraged to attend. For more info, email to diseased(a)panix.com. ------- End of forwarded message ------- -- Dave Mandl dmandl(a)panix.com

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medusa & xsplit
by Arsen Ray Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please forgive the delay, I've been busy restoring my files due to a nasty hard drive failure. Not to worry, I haven't lost the sources to Medusa nor Xsplit, and yes I do have a fix for xsplit.... =============================================================================== | + ^ + || ' . . . . . . . Ray (Arsen) Arachelian || | \|/ || . . . ' . ' . : . . rarachel(a)photon.poly.edu || |<--+-->||. . . |' '| .' . . ... ___ sunder(a)intercom.com || | /|\ || . . \___/ . . . : .... __[R] || | + v + || . oOOo /o.O\ oOOo :. : .. |A|"And disks to fix before I sleep" =========/---vvvv-------VVVV------------|I|----------------------------------/ / . : . ' : ' |D| This signature pannel is / / The Next Bug to kill(tm) --- now open. / /___________________________________________________________________/

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