December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Digital blackboards
by kevin＠axon.cs.byu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May writes: > Thanks for the comments! And, again, I really wish we had some > blackboards to iron out some details and fix whatever flaws pop up. Those with draw programs conveniently available might want to consider creating diagrams to accompany their articles and posting the postscript along with the article. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kevin S. Van Horn | It is the means that determine the ends. kevin(a)bert.cs.byu.edu |

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Re: GUI for a remailer!
by nate＠VIS.ColoState.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

writes Nick Szabo: >Can you post a brief description of how this works for us >Mosaic-deprived souls? > Sorry for the brevity of the announcement, I had just finished it and needed to get to class ;-) OK, I'll start from the beginning (pardon if this is too much info). NCSA has a product (available for Xwindows, MS Windows, and the Mac) called Mosaic. It is a HyperText client (server if your in X, I suppose) that lets the user graphically connect to Gopher, WAIS, and many other already-established information servers (including ftp). The big advantage, however is that it can connect to machines running a WWW server, the most popular, and functional I might add, of these servers is the "HTTPD" server from NCSA itself. It's a long story, but httpd stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Daemon. Anyway, check with NCSA for more info on httpd. HTTPD 1.0 allows the use of "forms" where I can program in (with extreme ease) text boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, menus, selectable lists, etc. One the other end, the client (Mosaic) interprets this, and will let the user fill out the form and submit it. On my end, a little program catches a stream of data coming from the "world out there" and decodes it so that I can pick out what the user typed into the text boxes, which check boxes are checked, etc... it's quite cool and very easy. The decoding of the data is not really difficult, especially since NCSA provides some functions that will decode it into an array of structures with fields called "name" and "val" -- it's pretty straight forward. My form takes what a user types into the TO: and SUBJECT: boxes, checks to see that the TO: box is not empty and that it has a more-or-less correct email address in it (it checks for an '@' in the value). It then creates a temp file, writes some generic info into it, adds the text from the text box, and makes a system call to mail off the file and destroy it. I coded the whole thing up in about 30 minutes this afternoon. I will be adding check boxes to bounce the mail throught remailers and to do encryption for remailers. I will also add the ability to send mail through anon.penet.fi. For the password to anon.penet.fi, I will use a feture wchich allows the text written in a field to show up as asterics (just for those paranoids out there ;-) As for absolute security, you would just have to trust that I will not be archiving these messages, etc, which I will not. Also, the Mosaic server has the ability to log the IP address from which the connection comes, but as yet, it has no way of figuring out the login name of the person on the other end. Incidently, this whold thing has some *really* cool possibilities. The new HTTPD (1.x) allows for user authentication via passwords -- each directory can have an associated password and group databse... just think of having authentication systems that will let "strangers" send mail in this manner and do all kinds of things virtually anonymously. I really must applaud the NCSA folks for coming up with this, as it has more possibilities that they could have ever dreamt of (which is, I suppose, the mark of really good software). For people wishing to start up their own remailers, even if they don't have access to a machine to make the server, if your site has a server, ask your administrator about "user directories" -- this is where the server has a specified directory that goes in a user's home directory into which users can dump HTML documents (HyperText Markup Language)... for instance, on my server, the directory is called "mosaic-public" so if I have a reference to "http://monet.vis.colostate.edu/~nate/testing.html" then the server figures out that it is actually a link to the file ~nate/mosaic-public/testing.html -- very cool, and actually damn easy for a server admin to set up. Fee free to ask questions. -nate -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nate Sammons <nate(a)VIS.ColoState.Edu> <nate(a)yuma.ANCS.ColoState.Edu> | | Colorado State University Computer Visualization Laboratory | | Data Visualization/Interrogation, Modeling, Animation, Rendering | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Re: clipper pin-compatible chip
by koontzd＠lrcs.loral.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: m5(a)vail.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) >I don't think the idea proposed is to reverse-engineer the Clipper. >Rather, the idea is that once you know the pin-out you can make an >electrically-compatible (and, in important ways, software-compatible) >replacement. While the clipper chip and its CCEP brethern have chip specifications that imply that key is supplied as long as a read flag is in a certain state. The key for the clipper chip is 10 bytes of actual key plus 3 bytes of cryptographic check word (CCW), for a total of 13 bytes. Operating in a system expecting a clipper chip potentially restricts the keyspace. Non-centrally selected keys use the clipper chip to 'fish' for the CCW, where it is re-fed. The host system (to the clipper chip) is going to try and feed 10 bytes plush 3 bytes of a constant. Utilizing IDEA, the key is supposed to be 16 Bytes. The point being that dropping an IDEA chip in is not 'plug and play'.

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Re: Remailing TO anon.penet.fi?!
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I set up my remailer on hfinney(a)shell.portal.com to block the password address at anon.penet.fi just so nobody could set a password. I also set a nickname, something like "cypherpunks anonymous remailer". I did this some time ago but I think it is still active. So you can remail at least from my remailer to anon.penet.fi. Hal

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Quantum cryptography
by jito＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone know how quantum cryptography works? - Joi -- true name: <Joichi Ito> closest email address: <jito(a)netcom.com> closest fax number: <+81-3-5454-7218> current physical location: <Tokyo> travel path: <.> mosaic home page: http://iikk.inter.net/ -- finger jito(a)netcom.com for PGP Public Key, RIPEM Public Key --

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Remailers needed. My survey.
by nobody＠soda.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have now picked five of your remailers for distribution of the PGP FAQ in four parts and my "Here's How to MacPGP!" guide. The top five in this list are the ones that worked out. 1: Remailer accepts only plain text headers. 2: Remailer accepts both plain text and encrypted headers. 1 hh(a)pmantis.berkeley.edu <-[Very fast.] 1 hh(a)cicada.berkeley.edu <-[Very fast.] 1 hh(a)soda.berkeley.edu <-[Very fast.] 2 elee7h5(a)rosebud.ee.uh.edu <-[Very fast.] 2 hfinney(a)shell.portal.com <-[Fast. Ugly header.] 1 00x(a)uclink.berkeley.edu [Fwd: hh(a)soda.berkeley.edu] <-[Very fast.] 2 hal(a)alumni.caltech.edu [Fwd: hfinney(a)shell.portal.com] <-[Fast.] 1 nowhere(a)bsu-cs.bsu.edu <-[Way too slow.] 1 remail(a)tamsun.tamu.edu <-[Way too slow.] 2 ebrandt(a)jarthur.claremont.edu <-[Way too slow.] What does the "Fwd:" mean (from the PGP FAQ)? Now, would someone send me a script that I can run that will assign csh environmental variables (I use setenv) B1 through B10 with a random combination of those five remailer addresses? I will then hop each message off two remailers. Do you have any objections to this? Suggestions? I pissed Julf off without realizing the "size" of the problem beforehand. Are there any remailers I've neglected, which are FAST? If this works out, I may inadvertantly become your best "customer" ;-). -Xenon P.S. I sent about 8 rapid-fire (3-5 seconds delay) packages JUST through hh(a)soda.berkeley.edu and they came through without a glitch. This was about a full meg of traffic. Can these remailers take this? Anon.penet.fi limits messages to 48K. Do these remailers have practical limits? What about the normal size restriction on e-mail; what is this understood to be, if I need to mail to most anyone including AOL, Compuserve, BBSs and overseas? P.S.S. That's "N A THIRTY-EIGHT ONE-THIRTY-EIGHT" with Subject "Bomb me!". Do NOT tell people "an", or just hit the 'r' key. Then I'll HAVE to route the guides through anon.penet.fi since I wont know your real address. A bit of this is OK, but not a lot.

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Re: remailing T anon.penet.fi
by nobody＠soda.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal wrote, "I set up my remailer on hfinney(a)shell.portal.com to block the password address at anon.penet.fi just so nobody could set a password. I also set a nickname, something like "cypherpunks anonymous remailer". I did this some time ago but I think it is still active. So you can remail at least from my remailer to anon.penet.fi. " This isn't as good as getting a password and tagging it ON to mail sent to anon.penet.fi by your remailer, since in a minute I could fake mail to anon.penet.fi from a remailer address to password(a)anon.penet.fi so only I would know the password thus no one else could mail to anon.penet.fi any more. You CAN telnet to port 25 of anon.penet.fi. -Xenon P.S. I am interested in this too, since Julf nailed me for pumping up to two megs through his remailer a day, but I still get one or two "Bomb me!" requests a day for which I ONLY have the person's anon.penet.fi address.

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Five remailers needed NOW. Yo.
by an48138＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have played with the Cypherpunk remailers and it turns out it would be very EASY for me to chain my remailing of the five 20-45K messages that I am sending to anyone sending mail to na38138(a)anon.penet.fi with subject "Bomb me!". But it would NOT be easy for me to randomly chain them, two mailers at a time. I don't know perl. I only discovered that if I put long Unix command lines into a file and chmod u+x on it, I can use rsh to remotely execute those commands and pass an environment variable containing the person's address at the same time. I do not want to fully automate it, as one keystoke after highlighting the person's address is easy enough. But I still ask, which five or less remailers should I use. I want fast and very reliable sites, to avoid people receiving a partial mailing and sending me back complaining about it. This would become regular and confusing if the delay between the parts was great. I could add a header explaining this to them though. If you care enough, you could mail me a script that would output ten randomly seleted remailer addresses and I could use those variables in my mailer command file. Then I would be sending to five random sites and these would chain to a second random site and be sent to their final destination. Again, I am not very interested in using encryption, period. Thanks. -Xenon ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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REMAIL: Cover traffic
by nobody＠soda.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> It has also been suggested that "bit-bucket" addresses, people who >> would receive messages from the network and discard them, would help. Consider that a number of "bit-bucket" addresses already exist -- to exploit them, all you have to do is include the name of a particular account in the midwest, whose mail is already automatically filtered out by a vast number of cypherpunks readers :-)

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Re: Remailers needed. My survey.
by nobody＠eli-remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eli wrote, "I just ran a few tests, bouncing umass.edu -> remailer -> umass.edu for sizes up to 55K. Round-trip time was 3 to 4.5 minutes, uncorrelated with message size. (Bottlenecks are the jarthur outgoing queue, and some baroque hand-off job within umass.edu) What sort of timings were "way too slow"?" I just tried it again and your remailer needs to be added to the "Very fast" list! Not sure what happended the first time. By "Very fast" I mean I get something back in less than a minute or two. By "Way too slow." I mean I just never really saw it come back. I would classify anon.penet.fi as "Way too slow" as I cannot even cooperate on a mailing list with its upwards of 6-24 hour delays. That leaves, 1 nowhere(a)bsu-cs.bsu.edu <-[Way too slow.] 1 remail(a)tamsun.tamu.edu <-[Way too slow.] I'm still waiting and waiting and.... I tried these again, with no typos, and it's been 45 minutes. Gary checked these for the FAQ so they must work. Could be certain sites are down along the way. I have some OLD logs of my playing with these, and at least once they got a "fast" rating. The problem is, I'm new to these remailers so if one fails ONCE I don't know what to think. -Xenon P.S. I still need a perl (or whatever) script to output ten variables containing a random assortment of remailer addresses. These need to be csh environmental variables. This is only because I have a little commands file that uses such variables. I know if I knew perl I could whip this up in 5 minutes, so could somebody spend 5 and post this, and tell me how to run it. Thanks.

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