December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

"Anon" fake...
by nzook＠math.utexas.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Steganography (Was Re: What kind of encryption to incorporate?)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by a.brown(a)nexor.co.uk (Andrew Brown) on Tue, 2 Aug 9:55 AM >Has anyone got any more ideas? Andy: Some features of CAD programs such as AutoCad may be useful for concealment. Want to discuss here or by e-mail? Caution: I'm crypto impaired, but quite devious advantaged. John

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Re: Anonymous code name allocated. // penet hack
by L. Todd Masco 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rick: > Perhaps someone could remove this address (or replace it with > na111447(a)anon.penet.fi) and/or get the anon.penet.fi administrator to > beat on this person (electronically of course). In addition to writing code, Cypherpunks can telnet to port 25. Toad.com's sendmail doesn't seem to do reverse lookups on the IP address. -- L. Todd Masco | Bibliobytes books on computer, on any UNIX host with e-mail cactus(a)bb.com | "Information wants to be free, but authors want to be paid."

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Majordomo and Julf's remailer
by Philippe Nave 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Assumption: (maybe incorrect, but what the hell..) The trouble with having an anonymous penet subscriber on the list is due to the fact that cypherpunks messages appear to be 'from' the individual that posted the message as opposed to the list itself. Thus, when I post a message and it goes out to the list, it heads out to anxxx(a)penet.fi and generates an anon ID if I didn't have one before. If this is the case, is there any way to change the setup of the cypherpunks list on toad.com such that the list messages appear to be 'from' cypherpunks(a)toad.com instead of from the person who sent the message? If we got another anxxx subscriber, penet.fi would start seeing hundreds of messages from 'cypherpunks(a)toad.com' and probably generate an anonymous ID, but it wouldn't foul up the original poster. I'm not advocating majordomo code changes here; I just wonder if there's an option setting that could be tweaked in the cypherpunks list definition. I have been on mailing lists before where the traffic always appeared to be 'from' the list, and the only thing odd about it was that you had to CC: the author to send a direct reply. If this idea is all wet, so be it... it just occurred to me this morning. -Philippe

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Re: Anonymous code name allocated. // penet hack
by doug＠OpenMind.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rick Busdiecker writes: >If by "who cypherpunks" attack you mean that someone could be >subscribed using an an*(a)anon.penet.fi, you most certainly cannot rule >that out. an111447(a)anon.penet.fi continues to be subscribed... I just did a "who cypherpunks", and an111447(a)anon.penet.fi has apparently been unsusbscribed as of 10:20 a.m. PST (not by me, though I considered it...) Doug ___________________________________________________________________ Doug Cutrell General Partner doug(a)OpenMind.com Open Mind, Santa Cruz ===================================================================

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AA BBS
by nzook＠math.utexas.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

is back on line, according to hkhenson(a)cup.portal.com...

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Re: Children and the Net
by jdd＠aiki.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message <199408021705.NAA22137(a)bb.com> "L. Todd Masco" writes: > Am I the only one that's struck by the similarity between the propaganda > about the Waco massacre and the propaganda preceding the Persion Gulf > massacre? ... > [Not obviously C'punk related, but it really is: we must understand the > propaganda machine that the US government has working for it if we > hope to oppose them successfully on crypto issues] It's a much more general phenomenon that that. Two or three years ago, two doctors working for the National Health Service in the northeast of England began applying new diagnostic techniques routinely while examining children. They found that some children had been sexually abused and the children were taken into care. They began widening the use of the techniques and more children were taken into care with formal charges against parents etc being prepared by the police. The number of people involved expanded rapidly until it became clear that the two doctors were claiming that at least 20% (and climbing) of the population were sexually abusing their children. At this point credibility disappeared, support vanished, and the doctors were moved to new jobs. At the high point, children who fell off their bikes were being snatched out of emergency units, checked for "signs of sexual abuse", and usually found to have them. Then they were transferred to social workers who used extremely suggestive interrogation techniques which confirmed the doctors' [wacky] diagnoses. The doctors and social workers claimed to have the interests of the children in mind, and they looked sincere. But at some point the insanity of what they were doing became utterly apparent. They took children away from their parents because they were being abused. The children were put into foster homes. The doctors examined them again and found that they were still being abused. So the children were moved again. It became apparent that soon all of the children in the North East were going to have to be put into care, and most of the adults were going to be charged with child abuse. The people at the center of the affair never saw that they were wrong. At more or less the same time, social workers raided an island off the Scottish coast and took most of the children, claiming that the islanders were engaging in devil worship. The same type of aggressive interviewing techniques were used -- suggestive demonstrations, questions repeated on into the night until the 'right' answer was supplied, sweets and other rewards given for telling the right story. Although a commission later found that the charges were without substance, many of the children still have not been returned. It's not just the US government. Personally I believe that some fraction of the population is authoritarian in temperament and some fraction is credulous, and that these attributes are uncorrelated and distributed at random. The credulous authoritarian types can be very dangerous. They like uniforms. -- Jim Dixon

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Truth, Justice, and the Waco Way
by mpd＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Events like Waco and the Persian Gulf War, in which an authoritarian superpower obliterates a mostly harmless and largely defenseless group of people, translate with relative ease to the cyberspacial realm. Seems like a valid Cypherpunks topic to me, so I will take a crack at responding to the following message L. Todd Masco <cactus(a)bb.com> writes: > Am I the only one that's struck by the similarity between > the propaganda about the Waco massacre and the propaganda > preceding the Persion Gulf massacre? Not at all. We should remember Herbert's Two Laws here. 1. All governments lie. 2. If you think you have found a counterexample, please reread law number one. Also worth remembering is the old saying that "a liar who lies one hundred percent of the time is unlikely to be a successful liar." The trick, therefore, is learning to separate the lies from the truth in a mixture of both. The quintessential lie from the Persian Gulf War was of course the memorable "baby incubator" story, recited tearfully on the floor of the Congress by a supposedly uninvolved eyewitness who later was revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. The alleged events, which never happened, turned the tide in Congress with regard to support for the war. Of course lies abounded in the Waco case as well, with Koresh being portrayed as a heavily armed lunatic yearning to fulfill Biblical prophecy by perishing in battle with all his followers. In reality, they simply wished to live their lives and be left alone. The pitfall here, which is to be avoided, is to start characterizing every negative thing said about the folks in Waco or Iraq as false, or to start suggesting that negative comments are a ploy to absolve government of all responsibility for what took place. Some of the negative things said in both these cases were certainly truthful. For instance, political opponents of Saddam Hussein in Iraq certainly had a markedly shortened life expectancy, and the Branch Davidians certainly took a Biblical fire and brimstone approach towards signs of independent thought or action in their offspring. Not a reason for lots of people to be killed, but not a reason to recommend their canonization either. The lesson to be learned here is that societies based on a diffuse "Web of Trust" organization are far less dangerous than those based on a powerful centralized authority. A powerful centralized authority inevitably devolves into interacting with its subjects using the protocol... Do What We Say Or We'll Kill You! Or in its more tasteful two-part form... 1. Do What We Say. 2. You're Under Arrest, And If You Resist, We'll Kill You. At that point, Wars, Wacos, Encryption Bans, and BBS Porno Show trials lurk just around the corner. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd(a)netcom.com $ via Finger. $

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clarification please
by will＠thinkmedia.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Woah, >Events like Waco and the Persian Gulf War, in which an >authoritarian superpower obliterates a mostly harmless and >largely defenseless group of people, translate with relative ease >to the cyberspacial realm. I remember reading a Scientific American article about two years before Iraq invaded Kuwait, in which it was made clear Iraq had and were developing missiles with ranges paralleling only U.S., Russia and China. I don't think harmless and defenseless quite fits the description. Maybe wannabe super power would be more accurate. ______________________________________________________________________________ Opinion is a flitting thing, Thinking Media Research But Truth, outlasts the Sun-- will(a)thinkmedia.com If then we cannot own them both-- (408) 423 3720 Possess the oldest one-- Emily Dickinson

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Re: Majordomo and Julf's remailer
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

* I'm not advocating majordomo code changes here; I just wonder if * there's an option setting that could be tweaked in the cypherpunks * list definition. I have been on mailing lists before where the * traffic always appeared to be 'from' the list, and the only thing * odd about it was that you had to CC: the author to send a direct * reply. should be fairly simple, extropians works that way.

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