December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The rubber and the road
by ferguson＠icm1.icp.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Grady, If this is a silly question, then chastise me later -- but when do you actually appear in court? I noticed PRZ's statement dated 12 Oct. Does your appearance fall shortly? Cheers and Support.

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PHONE PRIVACY
by Sandy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT Reply to: ssandfort(a)attmail.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Punksters, Ron McCoy asked about the 1-900 number I posted some time ago. The number is 1-900-STOPPER. Though I originally mentioned STOPPER, I would recommend that the better solution is to use a pre-paid calling card. Several companies offer them, including AT&T (buy them at AT&T Phone Stores) and Western Union (buy them at authorized Western Union agents). They both charge you about sixty cents per minute for US domestic calls (more for overseas). They come in various denominations ($5, $10, $20, etc.) To use them, you dial a special 800 number. When you get a beep, you dial in the card's unique serial number. When you get a second dial tone, you dial the area code and phone number you wish to call. Depending upon the card you have, there will be some method for determining how much time/money you have left after each call. Since I have not yet found out whether or not the issuers retain *your* phone number (captured by ANI), or for how long, it would be prudent to use the cards at payphones for any highly sensitive communications. S a n d y >>>>>> Please send e-mail to: ssandfort(a)attmail.com <<<<<< ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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[META] [LIST] Let the market decide
by paul＠poboy.b17c.ingr.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I write this in the hope that it'll finish off the list/newsgroup discussion and with the fear that it will make it worse. "Let the market decide." If you feel that a newsgroup is the right way to go, then start one. If it offers something valuable to current cypherpunks subscribers, they'll read it. Likewise with alternate mailing lists. If you want a crypto-politics list, start one. If it offers valuable material, people will subscribe. Do not presume to dictate to the folks like Eric and Tim who created, and have since nurtured, this list. Build a better mousetrap, and all that. -Paul -- Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG | "Change the world for a better tomorrow. But perobich(a)ingr.com | watch your ass today." - aaron(a)halcyon.com Intergraph Federal Systems | Be a cryptography user- ask me how.

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Bank of the Internet
by Mike Ingle 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"arthurc(a)crl.com" "Arthur Chandler" wrote: > It jarred me to see someone so blithely planning to enter into the world >of international finance from an essentially "outsider" frame of >reference. As impressed as I was by the range and depth of Eric's >understanding of the technical aspects of encryption, I have the feeling >that setting up such a revolutionary scheme -- which would threaten both >traditional banking enterprises and the governments that monitor and tax >them -- is bound to encounter opposition much more massive and >sophisticated than he indicated. > To be fair, he could only talk about the high points of his plans in >the context of the afternoon talk. But I kept having flashbacks to the1960s >and 70s, when counterculture groups laid intricate plans to overwhelm or >endrun "the system." > Put bluntly, any plans to enter international finance without a >substantial component aimed at lining up political and traditional >financial clout seems to me to be doomed to the dustbin of visionary >schemes. After the smoke clears, we are far more likely to see Chase >Manhattan with a platoon of hired cryptologists than EFF or Cypherpunks >wheeling and dealing on a global scale. The reason such "counterculture" plans didn't work is because they are hard to do. They are a pain. People may talk about them, but they aren't that anxious to actually "live underground." They are also hard to coordinate. It is easier to just get a job and live a normal life. Even with PGP, more people talk about it than use it on a regular basis. I've even been flamed for sending people PGP messages, even when those people promote their PGP keys in their .sigs! All we have to do is make it technically easy. We are tool makers. Make the tools and it will happen. As for opposition from governments and the banking establishment, governments are right now being held hostage by capital. If they don't do what capital wants, capital gets up and leaves. East Germany used the Berlin Wall to contain its capital. When the wall came down, the capital left. The forces against us may seem overwhelming, but we have one huge advantage. They are limited to a specific region, or at least to one country. International collaboration is difficult and slow for those who enforce the status quo. Data crosses borders with impunity, and short of cutting all the wires and turning a country into Albania, there isn't much the governments can do about it. --- MikeIngle(a)delphi.com

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Virtual City (tm) and Virtual Capitalism (fwd)
by szabo＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Arthur Chandler: > Any system of monetary exchange that would involve manipulating quotas, > or translating them into a kind of tradeable commodity would, I think, be > vigorously resisted by most MOO wizards. Great! One of the main strengths of Virtual City seems to be to that its gets rid of the fascist heirarchy of "wizards", the virtual equivalent of factory managers in the old Soviet Union. (Caveat: these are just my impressions of the V.C. project, I'm not personally involved in it). Also the quote is "information _wants to_ be free", not "should be". Alas, it is easy to bottle up information by restricting it to small cliques of wizards. On the other hand, many of the world-wiser wizards may be able to use their MUD building skills to become Virtual City tycoons. There are probably plenty of wizards pissed off by politically-dominated MUDs, where access to resources has increasingly become a function of sharing beers with the "god" and less a function of contribution to the MUD. Wizards who are better MUD builders than beer buddies have incentive to jump ship and carve themselves out nice niches in a free-enterprise MUD. I suspect Virtual City, and net commerce in general, will evolve to where people buy and sell some information as services, and exchange other information freely. The distinguishing feature between valuable services and free information will likely be that services will be hard to copy, the end result of obscure, logically deep computations, providing information unique to each customer order or dependent on hard-to-duplicate phyiscal hardware. Freely copyable information typically will be sellable only a few times, and even then the sale price will depend on it being hot/unique news, uniquely valuable to a specific customer or temporary situation, or conveniently located. Old news, educational material, etc. will be free, barring fascist patent/copyright enforcement, but the customers will often pay for more convenient methods of distribution (eg smart filter services). Content _per se_ will want to be free, so one will not be able to generate revenue simply based on popularity of content. Content generation will not pay and will not dominate the economy. A good example is the distinction between the freely copyable GNU and X-Windows, and the for-pay consultation, customization, porting, help desks, etc. that have sprung up around them. Most of the effort goes into the latter: since people like to make a living, most of the economic effort will go into services rather than the exchange of free information. As bandwidth becomes cheaper the free info exchange will expand, but the incentive for creation is limited to self-sacrificing efforts or side-effects of government or consulting businesses or corporate charity (eg GNU, X, PGP). I look forward to something like Virtual City providing a free-market alternative to the heirarchical control of information (crypto key authorities, Unix file permissions model, MUD Wizard model, ad nauseum); I do not see it replacing the GNU free software model. Nick Szabo szabo(a)netcom.com

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Cypherpunks Cause
by DON_HENSON＠delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ferguson(a)icm1.icp.net writes: --> > >There is no cypherpunks cause. Neither is there a cypherpunks > >movement. Get these delusions out of your head. There is, however, > >cypherpunks software. > > > >I repeat, the cause and movement are in your own head. > > <-- > > If there is no cypherpunks cause or movement, please let me know What the hell are you talking about? <-- Well, I thought I was pretty clear in the first place so if you don't know what I am talking about, I guess I don't know either. Don Henson PGP key on server or on request

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Cypherpunks Cause
by DON_HENSON＠delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric Blossom writes: --> > If you believe there is a cypherpunks cause and you believe in it, > please post a short note to that effect to the list. > Anyone who is interested can keep count. What difference will any of this make? It is completely off topic for the list. Cypherpunks write code. <-- This was pretty typical of the response I got to my question about the cypherpunks cause. Apparently, I misinterpreted the intent of the list. Thanks for clearing it up for me. Goodbye. Don Henson PGP key avail on server or on request

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DC-Net proposal, comments requested
by Timothy Newsham 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

proposal: Dining Cryptographer's (DC) net built on top of TCP/IP. purpose: To explore the problems in implementing a useable DC net. description: The Net would allow connections to a PAD machine, the PAD machine would be used to establish a "connection" across the DC-Net to another PAD machine which would then allow an outgoing TCP connection. The connection through the DC-NET would be transparent and untraceable. Machines that are part of the DC-NET could talk to each other untraceably through the network. discussion: This net would allow a user to set up an 'untraceable' connection from one point on the internet to another. The NET would be made up of one or more actual DC-Nets. A DC-NET This net is broadcast in nature (data written by one machine can be seen by all other machines on the network) but with the characteristic that it is impossible to tell which machine on a particular DC-Net wrote out the data (except if all other machines are controlled by the same person?). The DC-NET itself is bit oriented. Such a DC-network would be the underlying layer for the packet network. The actual DC-Network would be made up of processes on various (or even the same, for testing purposes) machines all connected together with TCP. The Packet Net The Packet Network would be built with the DC-Net as a base. In order to send useful information across the network a single node would form data into packets. These packets would be outputted to the network a bit at a time. Since the DC-Net is bit oriented it is possible for another node to send some bits after one node has started to write out its packets. As a node writes out a packet it should listen to the network for "collisions" and if a collision is detected it would "give up" on the current transmission and wait for some time to start again. Packets from one machine to another must have some sort of addressing. The packet could be encrypted entirely in the public key of the destination if there is only a single DC net. If there are multiple DC-Nets with packet forwarding between them then there must be some sort of plaintext address information in the packets. The return address should *never* be in plaintext. Probably the data and return address of a packet would be encrypted in the public key of the destination or in a private key shared with the destination. Sessions Virtual connections can be built on top of the packet network in the same way as they are on top of other packet networks. Some protocol like TCP (or even the TCP protocol) could be used. Why should this be built on the internet? Writting and debugging a network of this sort on top of the internet should be easier than writing it and implementing it from scratch. Some people have proposed neighborhood networks that would be used to implement untraceable and unstoppable connections. This is an excellent way to develop and debug such a network. What needs to be resolved Alot! This is just something I threw together. There are alot of questions. In fact most of it is still a question. The protocol of the underlying DC-Net needs to be written. A packet layer must be written or adapted from current protocols. The issues of addressing need to be addressed. There are also sure to be alot of politically oriented questions as well. Tim N.

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Re: The Bank of the Internet!?
by habs＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry >> I don't care for the Government, but I suspect that Chase Manhattan >> has a much better idea of the problems involved in cash transfer and >> accounting systems than you guys do. People who've never worked for >> financial institutions rarely understand where the real problems are. >Douglas Barnes >I worked for First City National Bank in MIS for three years... I'm >sure Chase has the drop in terms of experience, but you need to realize >that these institutions are the IBMs of the financial world. How >much truly innovative tech do you see out of IBM, despite all the >centuries of experience locked up in meetings? (I went to work for >them after First City, so I got to see it frist hand.) There is a huge difference between the back office transactions at a brokerage house and those in a small bank/credit union. A point of reference, in 1990 Shearson Lehman brokerage services used 18 gigabytes of data for client records (PER Month). Unable to keep all that data on disk (they were planning to go optical), they had huge costs in microfilm, esp. in paying folks to retrieve data by hand. A major problem with Brokerage back office is physically keeping track of where stocks are and where they are going (they can be sold, bought, held, borrowed and lent). Other rules, as Perry mentions, include suffering economic loss at certain points if you are unable to document certain transactions. I don't, however, see how any of this could impact a simple credit union type bank opperated over the Internet. Such a back office should be far simpler. The trick will be growing such a enterprise into a business that can offer any degree of sophisicated financial services. A major plus is that if digital signatures can be used, and strorage space allows, little if no paper records need be kept, which will allow the entire operation to exist in "cypherspace." I do agree with Perry in that it will be a full time activity, and that much learning will have to take place. I am more optimistic than Perry in feeling it can be done. >From Jan of 1988 to March of 1990 I worked in the Advanced Technology and Office Systems Consulting deptments of Shearson Lehman Brothers (now Smith Barney Shearson). I was involved in their efforts to implement optical storage systems for both data and images. -- Harry S. Hawk ON Vacation

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Breaking DES
by an41418＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My understanding of how an exhaustive search on the key space can be used to break DES is that for every key, K, D(K,Cipher) is applied until the output matches something legible. Say that some random string, to be thrown out, is added to the beginning of the plain text, and that DES is applied in cbc mode, then how could such an attack work? My point, I don't see how DES can be broken if the initial block is a grabage block, and cipher block chaining is used. Please enlighten me (gently). One other point... is the decision to encrypt - decrypt -encrypt when applying triple des arbitrary? Why not just encrypt with k1 and then encrypt with k2. Isn't the effect the same? Thanks a lot, Wonderer ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

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