December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: ID of anonymous posters via word analysis?
by doug＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger(a)lehman.com> said: >Astonishing how far urban legends go. This keeps getting distorted >further and further. I've heard this go further and further and >further from the version I first heard. I wonder if there ever was a >real story to begin with. Good question. I just checked a terse history of machine translation, and it didn't mention any version of this. I suspect that its origin was as a hypothetical example of the kinds of problems that can arise, and that it didn't actually happen in any real life situation. Examples like that have always been common in linguistics papers on such subjects. Doug

2 1

Re: Taxes
by ljenkins＠mv.us.adobe.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I disagree that income tax is a bad thing. What other way > does the government have of maintaining fairness across I am a relative novice in taxation policies, and among other things, I would like to hear recommendations from people in this list about books and/or articles to read, but the bad thing about income taxes is that it "gives" the government the "right" to snoop into all your affairs because they have to know what your income is. Having grown up in another country and lived in other countries, (that also have income taxes), but don't intrude so much into your private life, I must say that I was shocked the first time that I had to file an income tax declaration in the USA! Of all the countries where I have lived (four or five), this is the only place where *individuals* need to keep ridiculously detailed records of everything! And the only country I know where individuals routinely have to hire an accountant to be able to file a tax return ... Is moving to a consuption-based tax system part of the solution or not? Luis PS: I realize that this is not exactly a cypher issue, so is there a better place to discuss it?

2 1

RE: Private and Public
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

But of COURSE the government has a right to know how much money you make - It OWNS you; why else would it protect you and educate you? (Up Ahead - be prepared . . . you have now crossed into the Twilight Zone). Blanc ---------- From: Arthur Chandler Subject: Private and Public Date: Monday, November 08, 1993 9:31AM I'm sure that few folks want to unsheathe the pro- and con- spoofing arguments again. But Patrick's last post got me thinking: Does the government have the right to know how much money I make, and from what sources? The IRS says yes, absolutely. But Eric Hughes, in a talk given at San Francisco State University, said, in response to a question from an audience, that international digital banking will make it very difficult for a national government to track monetary exchanges, and thereby tax them. Furthermore, I deduced from the gleam in his eye that Eric thought that this was a Good Thing (correct me if I misconstrued you, Eric). Right now, there seems to be a kind of social contract between us and the government: it protects us, provides free schools, etc etc, in exchange for which we have to pony up a fair share of our earnings. It follows, doesn't it, that the government has a right to enforce its laws saying that everyone must pay that fair share of taxes? To enforce that rule, it has a right, under certain conditions, to rummage around in our records to see if we have hidden any income source from them. This may or may not be Big Brother. But it does seem to be the modus operandi of every government that ever was. The point: concerns of privacy often come in conflict with the larger obligations of public good. We can't say categorically that one must always predominate. What do you think?

1 0

Re: Modem taps/Caller ID
by ljenkins＠mv.us.adobe.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Does anyone here know more about this? I would dearly love to set up a > program on the PC in my basement that could capture Caller ID data and There is a number of modems that will do this for you automatically. The Supra comes to mind, and I believe the Zyxel also does it. I do have the specs for CID somewhere, but off the top of my head I don't recall how it is transmitted. There was an intersting thread in comp.dcom.telecom about something called the "Presto Chango!" box, that transmits bogus CID information after the call is answered, so you can easily confuse most CID boxes in the market. Luis

1 0

Re: ID of anonymous posters via word analysis?
by cfrye＠ciis.mitre.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For the past few years I've looked at this issue (author identification through text content analysis) a bit from a psycholinguistic point of view. According to an occasional electronic digest coordinated by a woman from the UK named Blackwell (I apologize that I don't remember her name or have her email address handy), a technique that sums the probabilities of various word occurrences (CUSUM) has come under fire recently and, if I remember correctly, is not accepted in UK courts. A 1983 paper (which I also do not have the cite handy for) by Dr. Murray Miron of Syracuse University gave his equations for analyzing two texts (of roughly similar lengths) and establishing a probability that the two writings were produced by the same individual. In his paper, Dr. Miron related the story of a trial where he was summoned as an expert witness and was not allowed to testify as to whether an extortion note was authored by the defendant based on analysis of the note vis a vis a known letter from the defendant. However, the jury ended up finding the defendant guilty based on identical misspellings of a word in each message. Dr. Miron noted that the jury's decision agreed with the overall findings of the computer analysis; however, the jury returned a guilty verdict based on a single coincident misspelling that could happen (with relatively high probability) in any two random messages. The same idea applies here - for CUSUM or similar analysis to be valid, an analyst needs large volumes of messages where one of the authors is known (an anonymous id counts) and the documents compared are of similar lengths. One note a while back indicated that matching anonymous id's could be done through tracing misspellings and uncommon word usage. Definitely not true without a large base of known messages from both id's and a high score on an evaluation function as described in the literature. Curtis D. Frye cfrye(a)ciis.mitre.org "If you think I speak for MITRE, I'll tell you how much they pay me and make you feel foolish."

2 1

Re: Mostly offline digicash
by Joe Thomas 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Alan (Gesture Man) Wexelblat <wex(a)media.mit.edu> writes" > Nick asks: > > Why haven't people backed away from credit cards despite $10's of billions > > in fraud? > > A very good question. The reason is largely > because it's a very profitable business *for the > card merchants* (banks, mostly). They get their > percentage no matter what, and losses don't eat > into it all that much. > > I agree with much of what Nick says, but I think > we have to consider ways to help make digicash pay > for its own implementation and enforcement, or it > will not take hold. Hmmm. Couldn't digicash issuers simply charge up front for their digicash notes, adding a percentage on top like travellers checks? Let the people who want the convenience and anonymity of digital cash pay for it; let the merchants redeem it for free. Sound okay? Joe

2 1

Re: Private and Public
by Arthur Chandler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hmmm... my post may well ignite some flames; but I can't go along with the notion that this list is for purely tech discussion. Encryption is a social and political issue as well as a technical one, isn't it? I would think that it's more dangerous to ignore the social and political ramifications than to have them out publically. It seems to me that encryption poses LOTS of dilemmas for any government. I chose just one -- taxes -- for my post. And looks like there are quite a few viewpoints on that one, with regards to the government's right to examine your income sources. The fact the encryption schemes are classified as military (or military-type) material and so are subject to comparable controls by the State Department should alert us to this fact. So to insist that we stick to Greatest Primes and Modulo seems... unrealistic. Of course, if the discussion seems pointless or irrelevant to you... there's always the delete key. My :9&53xS+ (= digital $.02) worth. On Mon, 8 Nov 1993, Nick Papadakis wrote: > > > What do you think? > > I think you are inviting a political flame war on what is > supposed to be a technical list. Please take it to alt.privacy. > > - nick >

4 3

UPDATE: Internet "whitepages" database of addresses
by Stanton McCandlish 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

_____ Begin forward ______________________________ Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1993 09:56:28 pst From: "JS McBride & Co. PostMaster" <jim_mcbride(a)netmail.com> Subject: InterNet Mailing List Here is the CORRECT info on the InterNet Mailing List. Addresses are extracted from news feeds, list servers, and other sources. NO personal information is collected. The following is the ONLY information we collect. 1. Electronic mail address 2. User name 3. Search keywords 4. Date info was collected The search keywords are limited to products. Example: xwindows,unix,dos,ms-windows,emacs To have your name removed from the list, send a message to DELETE(a)NETMAIL.COM Please place ANY addresses that you wanted removed from the list in the body of the message. To get more info on how and why we are building the list, send a message to LISTINFO(a)NETMAIL.COM . [Just see next message. PGN] Comments should be sent to TMANNING(a)NETMAIL.COM Thank You, James McBride, NetMail, 415-949-4295 Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1993 22:11:07 From: "JS McBride & Co. PostMaster" <jim_mcbride(a)netmail.com> Subject: Auto Reply [What you get from LISTINFO. PGN] Thank you for your mail to Jim McBride at JS McBride & Company. Due to the volume of mail be handled by this account, this is an automatic reply. PLEASE READ CAREFULLY!! 1. JS McBride is NOT collecting demographic information on email addresses. Due to the controversy surrounding this practice, we have discarded the product demographics we collected. We are however still collecting email addresses and user names. 2. The information collected (name and email address) will be offered in a printed white pages directory and in a white pages server on the net. 3. You DO NOT need to ask to have your name removed. BEFORE your name is used in the directory, you will receive mail asking for your permission. If you reply to the inquiry, your information will be used. If you do not reply, your name will NOT be used. 4. Comments regarding the white pages should be sent to Tom Manning at JS McBride & Company. <tmanning(a)netmail.com> 5. Mail to Jim McBride should be sent to <jimm(a)netmail.com> 6. Information regarding the purchase of the white pages directory should be sent to <listinfo(a)netmail.com> or telephone us at 415-949-4295 Thank you for your time, Jim McBride Thanks to all of you (too many to note) who forwarded this to RISKS. PGN] ------------------------------

1 0

Modem taps/Caller ID
by jon＠balder.us.dell.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> The recent discussions of tapping modem transmissions reminds me of > a scrap of data I saw about Caller ID [the service provided by the > phone company that displays the caller's phone number whenever your > phone rings]. Supposedly, the phone company transmits the caller's > number as a burst of 1200 or 2400 baud ASCII between the first and > second rings; if your modem is set up 'just right,' you can capture > the number with a PC. I don't know if this is particularly true but you can purchase modems that recognize caller-id and distinctive ring data. The caller-id information is printed between the RING and CONNECT strings. In particular, I have re-written the UNIX getty program in order to take these strings and put them in an environment variable before calling login. Since the getty actually uses ATA to answer the phone rather than setting S0=1, we have considered building a database of known troublemakers' phone numbers and then have getty let the phone ring away to NO CARRIER when said tarbs call. ZyXEL makes such a modem. Jon

1 0

Re: Public and private.
by GRABOW_GEOFFREY＠tandem.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ARTHURC(a)CRL.COM writes: > But of COURSE the government has a right to know how much money you > make - It OWNS you; I prefer to think of myself as a shareholder in our government. Not that it is an entity unto itself and that I am "owned" by it. This may be a little self-deluding, but it lets me sleep nights. As to the gov't tracking every penny that I earn, the only alternative to an income tax is an extremly high sales tax. This is extremely unfair to those on the lower end of the wage scale. G.C.G.

1 0