December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [CRYPTO] (was: sig/noise ratio)
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > > > Items crypto related but missing the [CRYPTO] header could be > > reposted by well meaning souls. > > > > Other appropriate headers could of course be used. > > > > Brian Yeah, It`s sad that it`s got to this stage now but I support the idea anyway, I`ll start prefixing all my cryptographic code or technical postings with the headers. 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: Mousepad RNG's?
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I just downloaded a copy of the beta version of Datafellows > Windows 3.1 SSH and it asked to move the mouse around to > generate some randomness. In reading Applied Crypto, it > mentioned that there is no such thing as generating > randomness from a personal computer unless something like > a Geiger counter is used. Is there any way to create a > fairly random sample from the mouse? Should one use lots > of jerky movements, or take ones time with it? What applied crypto would have said was that one cannot generate randomness on a computer without reference to an external source, a mouse is as good as any, the real problem is generating random numbers using PRNGs (Pseudo random number generators) which are algorithms that produce statistically random data that may be predictable, in the words of John Von Neumann "Anyone who considers aritmetic methods of generating random numbers is in a state of sin" In brief, a mouse output would be acceptable, just move the mouse any old way around the screen and the data will be random enough for your uses... 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: Mousepad RNG's?
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> At 8:13 PM -0700 9/27/96, James A. Donald wrote: > >Some time ago, at a cypherpunks conference, people were making >all sorts of ridiculous proposals for being really, really, >really, sure that you had real entropy, and a prominent >cypherpunk, possibly Tim May, said, "This is ridiculous: >Nobody ever broke good crypto through weakness in the >source of truly random numbers". Sometime after that >Netscape was broken through weakness in the source of >truly random numbers. This is correct only in the first part, it is true that good cryptography has never been documentably broken through weaknesses in a real random source. The netscape attack was on the PRNG used in netscape, the proverbial state of sin. I don`t know what PRNG netscape used in the broken version, can anyone tell me what they used, and whether it was the PRNG or the seed that was weak, also I would be interested to know what they are using now in terms of the algorithm and seed... 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: crypto anarchy vs AP
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:21 PM 9/29/96 +0200, Gary Howland wrote: >jim bell wrote: >> >> On a related issue, GPS (global-positioning system) contains a de-accurizing >> mis-feature called S/A, which adds a little error to the location as >> detected by a receiver. Ostensibly, it was added so that this could be >> turned on in wartime, to deny the enemy the ability to make 10-meter fixes. >> Turns out that it was kept on all the time, probably because if it WASN'T it >> would become politically impossible to de-accurize the system even in wartime. > >Apparently S/A (selective availability) was turned *off* during the Gulf >war. "Military Intelligence" in action. Yes, because of lack of enough S/A-capable military receivers... They were stuck with using the commercial, off-the-shelf kind. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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GPS and other Dual-use technologies
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I used to be an avid RC modeler and have contemplated organizing an on-going amateur cruise missile contest. The object would be to accurately deliver various payload weights over courses of various terrain and distances (perhaps out to a hundred miles or more in the case of Giant Scale craft). Judging would be based on speed, stealth (noise, IR emissions and radar cross section) and accuracy. Craft are free to use any navigational technology, but must be autonomous from launch to delivery. To aid navigation I was considering the design of a substitute differential GPS beacon functionally interchangable with those offered by the USCG. My device would work on a different frequency, possibly using very wideband direct sequence spread spectrum (for low probability of intercept/detection) and be actuated by the missile as it neared the target in order to refine its position. -- Steve PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com Lamarr Labs | Voice: 1-702-658-2654 7075 West Gowan Road | Fax: 1-702-658-2673 Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Key-Escrow
by Scottauge＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have a question. There seems to be a lot of excitement over the key escrow stuff da gubermint is trying to install. Couldn't one burn off maybe 10 ** 200 keys and say, hey gubermint dude, these are like, gonna be my keys. Wouldn't this place them into a brute force search if they wanted to play with your info? Doing this will likely add to the tax burden for all dem disk drives needed to store them numbers. :( If ya can't do that, then they must be gonna sell key space like da radio spectrm - which means some number is gonna mean something to someone somewhere - yum yum say the hackers and the crackers. I'm thinking there will be a way no matter what happens....

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Re: The Petaflops Boondoggle Computer (was PET_ard)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:00 AM 9/29/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >(Hoist by their own petards indeed! Don't tell our Russian what petard means.) Uh, wasn't that the name of the bald captain on Star Trek Next Generation? You know, "Jean-Luc Petard"? >> The word is petaflops, computer jargon for 1000 >> trillion computations per second. Think of it as a >> year's labor for a powerful workstation compressed >> into 30 seconds. Think of it, also, as 1000 times the >> speed of the current computing benchmark, a trillion >> operations a second -- teraflops -- which is on the >... > >I doubt this will be ever be built, at least not as a government-funded >"G-job" "one-off" machine. It would, as the full article state, necessitate >a kind of "Apollo program" for supercomputers. Check out an article in about the September issue of Scientific American, 1966, on the subject of the Illiac IV, which was one of the first attempts at a multiprocessor machine. Originally it was conceived as a 256-processor unit, at 4 million (floating point?) operations per second per processor which would have been 1 giga ops per second, but it was eventually built as a 64-processor unit and turned on in about 1972 or so. The succeeding factor-of-1000 improvement appears (if the item above is accurate) to have taken 24 years to accomplish, so it's hard to imagine that the next factor of 1000 will arrive appreciably sooner than year 2020. >The reasons for the collapse of the market are well-known: the end of >communism has lessened certain needs, the cut-backs in defense spending, >"the attack of the killer micros" (arrays of cheap micros give better >bang-for-the-buck), and, related to the themes of this list, NSA's >code-breaking just ain't what it used to be. Oddly enough, however, we're getting somewhat of an echo of the "big single processor" phenomenon with the micros. We all know that in supercomputers, multiprocessors won out over single processors, and mainframes were just about defeated by microcomputers. Yet a look at Intel's pricing for Pentiums shows that they sell a 120-MHz chip for about $135, while they sell a 200-megahertz version for around $550 or so. Arithmetic suggests that a person would be far better off with a 4-120-MHz-processor Pentium (cumulative clock rate 480 MHz) than a single, 200-megahertz version. (admittedly, peripheral logic costs will adjust this a little.) Of course, this would also leave Intel flat on its ass attempting to compete with AMD, Cyrix, etc, because a somewhat higher speed per cpu is just about the only advantage they have. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: [AP] Afghanistan
by Wayne H. Allen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:10 AM 9/29/96 EDT, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: >Afghanis publicly hanged their former president, Najibullah [no last name]. >Other countries should follow their example. > >--- > >Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM >Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps > > And this would accomplish???? And this has what to do with cryptography?? Wayne H.Allen whallen(a)capitalnet.com Pgp key at www.capitalnet.com/~whallen

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Re: Utah as a Religious Police State
by Ryan Russell/SYBASE 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I guess that depends on your definition of liberty. The Mormons originally moved there to have a place to practice their religion, and have freedom from persecution. I suppose one could extend that to wanting a place to have the freedom to have a set of rules consistant with their beliefs. Should that include freedom from interferance from folks such as yourself who want to change their rules, even though you're not presently effected? Ryan ---------- Previous Message ---------- To: cypherpunks cc: From: tcmay @ got.net ("Timothy C. May") @ smtp Date: 09/28/96 10:35:42 PM Subject: Utah as a Religious Police State Hey, Attila, let me know where you folks live...I may want to move there! At 2:56 AM +0000 9/29/96, attila wrote: > the population base is changing with an influx of non-Mormons > in town, so R rated are showing up at the theatres and video > rentals in town. Just so long as my DSS dish still works in Utah--hey, I'll invite all the jack Mormons over for tomorrow night's showing of "Inside Janine," on the "Playboy Channel." (The "Playboy Channel" is kind of tame by video rental standards, but more crotch shots than we used to see a couple of years ago.) > the police visible prescence is effective --a force of 50+ for > a population base < 25,000, plus the county sherrif cars and the > state police. Curfew is 10pm weekdays for minors --and they > enforce it, big time. midnight Fri/Sat. They enforce the "curfew" big time? Looks like some Mormon pigs need to be zapped. (My kids don't cotton to no cop telling them when they can be out in public and when they can't. Any cop who tries to stop my kids from being out has earned severe retaliation. Any councilmember or state legislator who voted for such a curfew needs to be hog-tied, covered with tar, then torched.) I guess this is why I wouldn't last very long in Mormon Country. A fascist encampment, it sounds like. (I have no problem with Mormons, or Catholics, or Muslims, or Satanists keeping _their own_ children indoors after 7, or 5, or whatever their Holy Hour or Curfew Hour is, but no fucking religious nuts are going to tell _me_ when _my_ children must be indoors. I determine where my children may be, and I don't need the State's permission for them to be out. I would think anyone with an iota of libertarian sentiment would understand this.) > ...idle hands are the devil's workshop. you want good solid > kids, you start from the gate and keep 'em busy: home, neighbors, > school, church, etc. Do Utah's cops also enforce this law, too? > they do not date until they are 16 --in groups. boys and > girls --the same rules. With the Utah State Police enforcing this "dating curfew"? (I may sound harsh here, but "curfew" means one and only one thing to me: somebody restricting my freedom of those of my children to be a public place. Should one of my children be picked up by cops for doing nothing illegal, save for being "out past curfew," I'd consider violent response to be justified. It sounds to me--not that I ever thought otherwise--that Utah is not a land that favors liberty.) --Tim May 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Internet 'terrorism' newsclips [CYPHER, but news]
by Donald Weightman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From today's PARADE magazine, that valuable source for insight into the popular heart and mind, "explaining" why "we" haven't been able to catch Iranian terrorists: >Thanks to the highly sophisticated surveillance capabilities, American >intelligence agencies have intercepted enough telephone messages from Iran, >ordering acts of terrorism, that Iran's terrorist network stopped using the >phone. Reportedly this has caused them to start using codes on the Internet >that are "practically" impossible to track and isolate. >"Just when we thought we had outsmarted them, they caught on and started >using codes on the Internet", an expert in international terrorrism tells >us. "There's so much crazy srewball stuff on the Internet that it's >practically impossible to track down and isolate the terrorists. No >government can analyze those millions and millions of messages." And from another piece of hard-hitting quote-the-official-source journalism in PARADE, "A New Worry: Terrorism in Cyberspace" >The danger of computer-based "cyper" attacks is second only to that posed by >nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, says CIA's Director, John >Deutch. He expects the threat to grow as we rush to connect the world on the >Internet. <SNIP> >There were more than 250,000 attacks on Department of Defense computers last >year, and 65% were successful. Little is known about who launched them, why, or >what they found. In a recent test, Defense Department "red teams" admit to >intentionally hacking into 18,200 systems, with only 5% of the attacks >detected; only 27% of those attacks were reported. Wonder if the timing of these stories has anything to do with the end of term legislative push on wiretapping. Don Weightman dweightman(a)radix.net

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