December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

magstripes in $$
by nobody＠soda.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Someone worries about magnetic strips in U.S. currency... Yeah. I do too. On a slightly related topic, I know of an instance where the Secret Service located a stolen color copier with somewhat greater speed than one might have expected. Is it possible that these machines either: (1) contain transponders or (2) hide a "signature" in their output ???

3 2

Ames, Coke, & $$
by Brad Dolan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

qjones(a)infi.net, I agree with your opinion of Ames' income and the reason why it "wasn't noticed". [See my 2/24 post here.] The interesting question is: what did he do to make them want to bust him?

1 0

Re: The Coming Police State
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> - Help to convince companies _not_ to use Clipjacked > phones. Ideally, create a mood in which the use of Clipper > marks one as a stooge of Big Brother and as not having a good > work environment. (This can begin to work as potential > hires ask pointedly, for example, about the Clipper > policy of the company.) > Cypherpunks could be the keepers (and distributors) of a "piss list" of companies that use Clipper/Capstone/Tessera products. Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

1 0

Who Owns the Words?
by Arthur Chandler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I realize that a thread similar to this one was debated on this list a month or so ago; but the problem has special urgency for me right now, and so I've made the posited situation much more specific. I'd be much obliged if anyone would post or email me their feelings, or references to legal precedents, on this issue. Many thanks. A dilemma: if you are writing a paper, and you want to quote someone's posted (say, to cypherpunks) remarks, what are the obligations? 1) None: by posting, people make their words public domain. 2) No legal obligations, but it would be polite to ask permission. 3) Whatever is posted is de facto copyright, and the person whose words you took could sue you for breach of copyright. Now let's shift to a MOO or IRC: You keep a log of a conversation. Would the same rules/customs apply if you wanted to include that log in a paper? Does it matter if the conversation was held in a private room or in a public place on the MOO? Does it matter whether the paper is written to fulfill a class assignment or is intended for publication in a for-profit magazine?

3 3

Surveillance Cameras
by Audun.Joesang＠alcatel.no 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Last year I experienced to be the victime of efficient CCTV (Closed Circuit TV) surveillance in Bristol UK. My car was parked illegally and got towed away. Later at the police car pound I was told that all the streets could be seen through remote controlled zoom lens CCTV cameras mounted all around town, which made them able to efficiently direct their towing trucks. Somehow the equipment has to be payed off. Audun Josang. I used to be very uncertain, but now I'm not sure anymore.

1 0

Re: The Coming Police State
by Eric Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

: James Bamford has been : quoted as saying that he could fill an entire new book with the machination : of the Surveillance State. Does anyone know what James Bamford is up to these days? Any chance he will write such a book? --Eric

3 2

MAIL and Coming Police State
by Karl Lui Barrus 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > First, we would need a IP connection, preferably one that is from a > rather free, or non-questioning source [...deleted] A connection > that would bewilling to stand up to some pressure from authorities > is desirable Yeah, what you need is to run your own site, or have the explicit permission to run a remailer from whoever owns the site. For example, here on owlnet, the user policy forbids forwarding mail to a non-standard program. I mention this because I have asked and been told repeatedly by an attorney friend of mine that running a remailer on a system where you don't have authorization to do so is a violation of the ECPA. (i.e. access beyond what the system administration intends for you to have). So you definitely need sysadmin approval to withstand even the slightest pressure. So maybe I'm glad all the remailers I set up have expired ;-) As far as other properties, I've tried digital cash and time delay: One remailer I ran used digital cash (a very simple system), another batched mail and sent out once a day. I didn't keep logs so I don't know how popular these two remailers were, but I have a feeling not very popular at all. I also tried num-latency delays, but the remailer which did this wasn't able to run for very long, so I couldn't tell if it was a popular feature or not. Good luck! Karl Barrus <klbarrus(a)owlnet.rice.edu> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLX9tIYOA7OpLWtYzAQHpvgP5AclUZUtUmJxlrC+D8XA7d2nbCDKAm3os 1gDVIBFn/KsFk2RrbFdPdhoip1Dj2AUEVk3Zfm3bqkqly5uu3PKwALz0dYZjTDhx C+hdemVNAs1ErwPS9oPKuPA82RSKfM3NqEXejR06oKwRcSO0QNkq1TFTTe8wBpSe zvxtNlYokbM= =qv05 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

anonymous credit?
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm wondering is anonymous electronic credit is possible. At first, it seemed to me to be an unlikely thing. Banks and credit companies usually want to determine if a person is a good risk, before extending them credit. If a person has a bad credit history, they have a hard time getting credit cards and loans. How could a bank determine your credit history if they don't know who you are? Assuming you did get a credit card using an anonymous id, if you abused your credit and lost the use of the credt card, you could just re-apply under a different anonymous id. There would be no continous credit history under a single identity. After thinking about this a little is now seems to me that anonymous credit is possible, but it wouldn't work like current credit cards. A few assumptions... 1) there will be more people who pay their bills than people who don't pay their bills. 2) some people will pay their bills late and be subject to fees and interest. 3) there will always be some people who try to cheat the system by getting an anonymous credit line, spending it, then disappearing. Given these assumptions, I can see anonymous electronic credit working as follows: Anyone can get an anonymous credit line. You purchase an anonymous credit line by forking over some anonymous digital cash up front. The more you fork over, the higher the initial credit line. In return for the upfront cash, you get an anonymous credit id and an credit line to accompany it. Your initial credit line will be equal to the amount of your upfront money, perhaps minus a startup fee. You can increase you credit line by paying your bills on time, thus establishing a mini-credit history with that credit company. The *rate* of increase is the important factor, which I'll get back to later. Instead of working like current credit cards, which give the credit companies a detailed record of what you purchased, where you purchased, and when, anonymous credit will work more like a generic loan. To tap your credit line, you will use your anonymous credit id to make withdraws, converting a portion of your credit line into anonymous cash using a Chaum-ian anonymous cash withdraw protocol. You can then spend the anonymous cash anywhere you like, without revealing the details of your spending habbits to the credit company. The credit company would only by able to track your withdraws and your repayments. The credit company might charge a service fee for each withdraw. They would most likely charge interest, fees for late payment, and perhaps also a yearly fee. Basically, it works much like an anonymous bank account, except you can establish a good repayment history and increase your credit line. The rate at which the credit company increases your credit line will depend upon the credit company's assement of the risks invovled in carrying anonymous credit lines. The credit company knows that you can simply disappear at any time, therefore it won't want to increase your credit line too fast. However, the higher your credit line, the more interest it can earn. Also, competition between different credit companies will affect the rate of increase. If most people repay their credit lines, the credit company will make money. If credit lines don't grow too large, too fast, the credit company will not lose too much money from cheaters. The credit company should be able to determine a rate of increase that will make them a profit. Does any of this sound reasonable? Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

1 0

Surveillance cameras
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"T.A.Z." <an57322(a)anon.penet.fi> wrote: :Routine implants of transponder devices into humans are not a question of :if, but only of when. I predict that they will become routine before the and wrote, and wrote, and wrote... Marc, when I said "And when you get a new account, remember to post to penet.fi instead of the list directly." I didn't mean for you to take it to heart quite so strongly and post the same thing four times! G PS London has the same degree of camera surveillance as you said Germany has. There's a big centre at Kings Cross Station where all the Railway Police have their monitors (of all the Underground entrances) and another one at New Scotland Yard where all the transport police have theirs. The ones in the underground - which are ostensibly just for mass crowd volume monitoring - have an absolutely deadly killer zoom lens that's centrally steerable. It's *way* overkill for the use it's supposed to be for...

3 2

Mac SecureDrive status report...
by rarachel＠edison.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Okay, so far I have all the information I need. The secure drive for the Mac will require the user to have a fairly optimized drive to start off with. Why? Because I've wasted way too much time trying to figure out how to work with the damn extents... I don't have any driver code written yet. The reason for this is that I'm not ready to risk loosing my hard drive until I have two full backups. :-) This is a two part project as you know. The 1st project is a freeware encryption only driver... The 2nd part is an encryption/compression driver. I've written most of the routines for the 2nd project to do the free/full space management and caches. Once I write the freeware program I will have a working driver (I hope) and will be able to implement the compressing driver. I do plan to make some money off of this and give Stacker, X2 and E-disk a bit of competition, so I figure somewhere around the $30-$50 range for the compressing/encrypting driver... I'm going to make the compressing driver have a possibly self-optimizing when idle routine, but I may decide to drop this if it takes too long... Let me know if you have any suggestions/etc. NOTE: DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE!!! Send your replies to rarachel(a)photon.poly.edu. The reason for this is that there's some trouble with Photon right now, and I am using another machine to get my mail :-I Hopefully this will be fixed soon...

1 0