December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

A short response to L. Detweiler: 'I exist as myself.'
by hughes＠ah.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

L. Detweiler's recent article on the RISKS of confusing an online identity with a potentially knowable physical one are quite interesting, if hypothetical. I would be interested in hearing of situations where this practice has actually occurred. If any RISKS members know of any such incidents from first-hand experience, please share them with the readership. Unfortunately, I think he really believes that the cypherpunks mailing list has been dominated by a small cabal who have been using multiple identities who talk with each other on the list in order to enforce concensus and to suppress disagreeing positions, namely his. It just ain't so. Therefore, to set the record straight I feel I ought to make the following public statement: I, Eric Hughes, have never posted or communicated in any name other than my own. I can personally testify that I am not the same as any of the other people listed at the end of L. Detweiler's post, and I can testify from personal experience that Arthur Chandler, Hal Finney, Tim C. May, and Nick Szabo are all different people. I also decline to answer, point by point, the numerous defamatory innuendos made by L. Detweiler against the members of the cypherpunks mailing list. Might I also observe that none of the statements are specific enough to actually count as accusation, but merely as general slander? Eric

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On my recent Bcc: to cypherpunks
by hughes＠ah.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just forwarded my own contribution to the RISKS digest. Please, do not reply to the risks(a)csl.sri.com address unless you are submitting something for publication! I realized too lat what a blind carbon copy would do to repliers on the mailing list. Aack. Eric

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Re: Personality BS (was: Should we oppose the Data Superhighway/NII?)
by doug＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

arromdee(a)blaze.cs.jhu.edu said: >One problem is that if you just sit around and discuss everyone's impressions >of the candidate, you've probably got some people who automatically get >negative impressions of all candidates who are black, or Asian, or Jewish, or >gay, or in the wrong political party. True. And even aside from extreme examples like that, it is notoriously hard to judge such things, even given people who are reasonable and operating on the basis of good will. On the flip side, ideally one would not have hired bigots in the first place, so there wouldn't be such people making such judgements. (I haven't stopped to do a head count, but as a white male I may actually be in the minority in my group. Our V.P. is female and Jewish, as one example of that. We're probably atypical. ;-) And lastly, every method of interviewing anyone has ever conceived of has its bad side. Nothing's perfect. Therefore this particular interchange of ours is really merely a digression. Doug

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Meeting Saturday 13 Nov 93
by hughes＠ah.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bay Area Cypherpunks Meeting Date: Saturday, 13 Nov 93, the second Saturday of the month as always Time: 12:00 noon - 6:00 p.m. Where: Cygnus Support Offices, Mt. View, CA This month we have planned so far the following: -- Scott Collins on the Newton. Scott is bringing some fellow Apple folk down to talk about the development environment. Since the Newton might be a good platform for a private key holder, we'll examine it. -- The new Schneier book has just hit the bookstores. I just got a copy and will be talking about it. -- The usual announcements and topics from the floor. Eric [Directions to Cygnus provided by John Gilmore. -- EH] Cygnus Support 1937 Landings Drive Mt. View, CA 94043 +1 415 903 1400 switchboard +1 415 903 1418 John Gilmore Take US 101 toward Mt. View. From San Francisco, it's about a 40-minute drive. Get off at the Rengstorff Ave/Amphitheatre Parkway exit. If you were heading south on 101, you curve around to the right, cross over the freeway, and get to a stoplight. If you were heading north on 101, you just come right off the exit to the stoplight. The light is the intersection of Amphitheatre and Charleston Rd. Take a right on Charleston; there's a right-turn-only lane. Follow Charleston for a short distance. You'll pass the Metaphor/Kaleida buildings on the right. At a clump of palm trees and a "Landmark Deli" sign, take a right into Landings Drive. At the end of the road, turn left into the complex with the big concrete "Landmark" sign. Follow the road past the deli til you are in front of the clock tower that rises out of one of the buildings, facing you. Enter through the doors immediately under the clock tower. They'll be open between noon and 1PM at least. (See below if you're late.) Once inside, take the stairs up, immediately to your right. At the top of the stairs, turn right past the treetops, and we'll be in 1937 on your left. The door is marked "Cygnus". If you are late and the door under the clock tower is locked, you can walk to the deli (which will be around the building on your left, as you face the door). Go through the gate in the fence to the right of the deli, and into the back lawns between the complex and the farm behind it. Walk forward and right around the buildings until you see a satellite dish in the lawn. Go up the stairs next to the dish, which are the back stairs into the Cygnus office space. We'll prop the door (or you can bang on it if we forget). Or, you can find the guard who's wandering around the complex, who knows there's a meeting happening and will let you in. They can be beeped at 965 5250, though you'll have trouble finding a phone. Don't forget to eat first, or bring food at noon! I recommend hitting the burrito place on Rengstorff (La Costen~a) at about 11:45. To get there, when you get off 101, take Rengstorff (toward the hills) rather than Amphitheatre (toward the bay). Follow it about ten blocks until the major intersection at Middlefield Road. La Costen~a is the store on your left at the corner. You can turn left into the narrow lane behind the store, which leads to a parking lot, and enter by the front door, which faces the intersection. To get to the meeting from there, just retrace your route on Rengstorff, go straight over the freeway, and turn right at the stoplight onto Charleston; see above. See you there! John Gilmore

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the Tragedies of Pseudospoofing
by L. Detweiler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I wrote another essay, `the Joy of Pseudospoofing', which I have been refining and evolving, and will be glad to email it to anyone who is interested. For now, I would like to address briefly the issue, `The Tragedies of Pseudospoofing.' Knowledge & Friendship -- Consider the basis of friendship. In many ways, knowledge is friendship. The more you know about someone, the closer you feel. And in fact if you don't know certain things, about someone you consider a close friend, you might be surprised or upset. `I never knew that! why didn't you tell me?' or `you've been holding out on me! I'm upset!' Also, many of our metaphors about friendship involve its basis in knowledge, like thses. The whole idea of sharing knowledge is inherent to the idea of trust that is so critical in true friendship. We trust our friends not to betray us with sensitive information about ourselves to our enemies. There are plenty of classic situations about this. One really hilarious example, I recall, is that told in one Seinfeld story, where Jerry (is that right?), in the middle of some `hot and heavy' activity <g> tries to talk dirty to a girlfriend that was Elayne's (his close personal friend) secretary. It backfires, the girlfriend/secretary is incredibly upset and offended. Jerry, in total desperation, as a last ditch effort, says, `now, of course, beyond everything else, this is just between you and me.' The girlfriend storms out the room. Later, Jerry hears that Elayne promoted the secretary, or the secretary was leaving her office. He drops all kinds of hints. `Was that *all* she said?' He didn't want to be embarrassed by a frivolous girlfriend in front of his true friend. Elayne shows no sign that she heard of anything embarassing. But, later after she was walking out the door, she snidely quotes the exact lines of Jerry's backfired dirty talk! Jerry was betrayed by *both* the girlfriend and Elayne. And Elayne in an extremely callously, manipulative way! She dangled the knowledge above him, like someone teases and tortures an animal. So, the point of all this is that `information control' is one of the most crucial aspects of friendship. Pseudospoofing & Friendship -- Now, consider the ingredient of pseudospoofing, and how it completely destroys all this trust. First, suppose that no one knows I am posting under Jim Riverman. They would be really aghast to find out later, even if everything said under Jim Riverman was wholly respectable (or perhaps, especially in that case!). That is part of friendship: exploring all the nooks and crannies of each other's personalities. Its because of friendship that people say, `I want to get to *know* you' or `you think you *know* someone...'When we come upon locked boxes, the trust evaporates. Also, consider that I write a lot of outstanding material on software engineering under Jim Riverman. Everyone might get the impression that L. Detweiler doesn't know squat about software engineering. And L. Detweiler might even go to a job interview, where the interviewer was also on the Software Engineering mailing list. `I'm sorry Mr. Detweiler, your experience as I've seen on the list just doesn't cut it. On the other hand, that Jim Riverman really knows what he is talking about, but all he could do was recommend that you come. I really am disappointed. Please have him come himself.' In fact, if Jim Riverman did all the posting, people might think that L. Detweiler didn't know squat about *anything*, when in fact L. Detweiler was posting his brains out under another identity (so to speak!). They might become alienated. `What has that L. Detweiler done for the Software Engineering Mailing List, anyway?' To bring this home, consider the following. Suppose that E.Hughes was actually posting as H.Finney (my apologies to both of you, please just grin and bear this, I need the effect). We would be startled to find out that E.Hughes had such extensive legal experience with the ITAR or capability in presenting outstanding articles and tutorials to newcomers. In fact, people might even become disillusioned with, or criticize, E.Hughes because they don't see the `leadership' posting anything that helps newcomers, when in fact they are `posting their brains out' (so to speak!). Yet More Tragedies -- Another problem with pseudospoofing is that of publishing. Suppose that E.Hughes now wished to write a big article for RISKS about the ITAR. He could not do so except under H. Finney without potentially compromising a `crossing' (where someone discovers the correlation). So he would have to post as H.Finney. But this would be a problem, because people might send mail to H.Finney after seeing the great RISKS posting. `Please come give a talk to our university for $10K'. H. Finney, if he had the audacity to respond, might say, `I'm sorry, I can't make it, but my friend E.Hughes can. I taught him everything I know.' If the university even responds, it might be something in the form `why can't *you* do it?' or `sorry, we're not interested.' H.Finney at the same time craves reputation, but abhors recognition. A hellish life indeed. Also, consider the problem of phone numbers. People like to maintain relationships over the phone. Cyberspace just seems too impersonal at times. What happens when someone asks for the phone number of a tentacle? Does Medusa say, `gee, my phone service is really bad, and if you are looking for ways of getting in touch with me, the phone is the worst of all. please send me a fax instead.' If the person trying to maintain a friendship didn't go away right then, they'd be *un*lucky. But in any case, they would feel quite upset and alienated. Any way you look at it, they have been betrayed. The only question is, to what extent? I think that this `cyberspace thing' is not about building *reputations*, but about building *friendships*. A reputation is nothing but condensed admiration that is synonymous with friendship. And looking over the idea of pseudospoofing, I can't see how anyone who practices it could conceivably have *any* friends, because of all the details they have to hide from others. (Does a person with Multiple Personality Disorder or a pathological liar have any friends?) But, at the same time, I'm sure I will hear from many snakes and claiming it *is* possible, and that *they* have friends. Maybe they are referring to all their `friends' as the other tentacles around them! What a pity. Like I was telling someone recently, `I really feel sorry for you.'

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Austin Cypherpunks Meeting
by Jim McCoy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Digital Freedom: By any means necessary. Austin Cypherpunks November Meeting November 13, 1993 3:00 pm 4th Floor Austin Public Library (800 Guadalupe St.) The Austin Cypherpunks chapter will be holding its November meeting on Saturday the 13th of November from 3 to 5 pm in a meeting room on the 4th floor of the downtown branch of the Austin Public Library. I have been told the room we will be using is "the first thing you see when you get off the elevator..." The theme of this meeting will be an introduction to PGP and public key cryptography in general. We will be explaining how PGP and other public-key cryptography systems work, and will go over some basic details regaring getting such software packages and how to properly use them. Bring your public-key on a disk of you have one, if not we will try to have a machine available for you to use to generate your own public-key. Additonal agenda items for this meeting include -Education/Information Disks The HoHoCon will be held in December in Austin and this should prove to be a good place for us to spread crypto technology and information about encryption in general. To this end we will be discussing possible files, programs, and news clippings to include in a disk of CryptoInfo and one of CryptoPrograms that we can distribute at conferences such as this. -TCP/IP Protocols and Encryption One possible project for us to consider is that of adding encryption to some of the most commonly used TCP/IP protocols (particularly those that otherwise broadcast account names and passwords in cleartext...) We will toss around a few ideas and see if this is something to try. -Digital Credit Union Project We will get up to date on this project and brainstorm some possible membership questions/ideas that we did not get around to at the last meeting. To subscribe to our full mailing list or our announcement-only mailing list, send mail to: listproc(a)mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu Put the line "subscribe austin-cypherpunks [real name or nym]" in the BODY of the message to subscribe to the full list and "subscribe austin-cypherpunks-announce [real name or nym]" in the body of the message to subscirbe to the announcements list. Our file archives are available in /pub/cypherpunks via anonymous ftp at: ftp.cc.utexas.edu Cypherpunks: There is safety in numbers... large primes. Local contacts for your questions...: Jim McCoy <mccoy(a)bongo.cc.utexas.edu> Doug Barnes <cman(a)io.com>

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whisper for NeXTSTEP
by Andrew Loewenstern 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi! If there are any cypherpunks with access to a NeXTSTEP box on the net who want to help me test out a little chatter app, please let me know. The app lets multiple people chat securely over the net using DistributedObjects and the IDEA cipher from PGP. It has no whizbang features like trading unique session keys with RSA (just distribute a pass-phrase through e-mail with PGP) or rich-text support, although these could be added if there was demand... I really want to find out if it works ok between NS/i and black hardware... thanks, andrew

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Re: The Depravities of Cypherpunks
by Dark 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Look, I have sympathy, Really I do. But we are all really tired of hearing about it. Take it somewhere else. I shouldn't HAVE to use my killfile on a mailing list. Christ. -uni- (Dark)

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Elm & PGP
by lear35!mdbomber＠nebula.acs.uci.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I'm having some trouble using the morepgp filter program that's in the contrib/elm_nn directory of the PGP distribution. It works nicely in most respects. However, I haven't been able to choose a good pager program for morepgp to send its output to. If I tell morepgp to use the 'more' program, it will page through the mail message until it gets to the end. When that happens, elm suddenly retakes control and clears the screen. The last screenful of the message is therefore on the screen only an instant. This is unacceptable. A lesser problem is when the mail message has a PGP signature. As pgp works on it, it will say something to the effect of good signature from <user> at <timestamp> However, it immediately passes control to more, which doesn't pause the screen until the "good signature" message has already scrolled off the screen. At least in an xterm window I can scroll back. Speaking of less, that's the default pager for morepgp, but it has problems also. It has the same problem as more where the pgp signature information scrolls off the screen before it can be read. However, since less clears the screen between each screenful, there is no way to scroll back using the scroll bars of an xterm window. Thus I only get a few miliseconds to read whether whose signature was on that mail message I just read... I haven't found any command line options for less that disable the screen clears. Does anyone have any solutions to this problem? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQBVAgUBLOHgEjSSmvXojb+5AQH1/wH6A7j1dZalFHIIZXLxl0OW4K/CgA/hAZ0G SV2RAe5k5fDIY52JCJoFgtwL7fam0YQ+eifveIoCkkLV2EOP4ZXtUg== =4ctR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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The Depravities of Cypher
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

L.>Mr. Hughes is quite perplexed at my sheer rage at Mr. Metzger's L.>unsurpassed childishness. He didn't approve of me attempting to shame L.>Mr. Metzger (a close personal friend, I suppose) This is a joke -- right? <G> DCF --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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