December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: GAMES: The "Crypto Anarchy Game"
by plaz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Tim, on the cypherpunks list you said: > > Let me also note that this issue has--like so many things on this > list--come up a couple of times. Geoff Dale, for example, proposed a > Cypherpunks game/simulation area in a virtual world at the Illuminati > BBS. I have no idea how it's coming; haven't seen Geoff here in > months. Best wishes to Seth or anyone else who actually implements > such a system. > >I don't know what Geoff has been doing with the Illuminati BBS, but I >do know that he's on the list. Majordomo tells me so: > > plaz(a)netcom.com (Geoff Dale) > >Geoff, do you think it would be appropriate to describe on the list what >progress, if any, you've made on the above referenced project? Woops, found this in my archives. Almost a week old, forever in net time. I did mention something about possibly doing a cypherpunks area in the Metaverse MOO. I was largely trying to convince someone else to do it. I have done absolutely nothing on this topic. ExI Freegate Virtual Branch, yes. A little work on Cafe Flesh, guilty, but no work on any cypunks game/environment. I doubt the value of spending much time on a cypherpunk "game" anyway. It's not like we had to introduce an internet game to the public before they started to notice it. If someone wants to do it, go for it. It won't register highly in my priority list, tho. TTFN _______________________________________________________________________ Geoff Dale -- Cypherpunk/Extropian -- Plastic Beethoven AnarchyPPL - Anarch (Adjudicator) ExI-Freegate Virtual Branch Head plaz(a)netcom.com 66 Pyramid Plaza plaz(a)io.com Freegate, Metaverse(a)io.com 7777 "Subvert the domination paradigm!"

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Clipper/Skipjack
by The PUNISHER - Judge 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

just a quick note to tell you all that I just read an editorial in info security by John Droge. He rambles on in much the same way Dorothy Denning does, terrorists, you can trust that gov't...blah, blah, blah.. Anyway, I was wondering why any sane, 1/10 intelligent person would be defending the Clipper chip...then I read his bio...he is a VP at Mykotronx. Looks like their PR machine is in full steam! :) The Punisher

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Re: Insecurity of public key crypto #1 (reply to Mandl)
by Eric Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

: >Only "sensitive" information is worth encrypting and if you want to : >stay out of trouble you don't go giving sensitive information to : >someone you don't know. : : If part of your communications are encrypted and part are not you have : sent the message about what information is sensitive and what is not. : This difference in encoding is a fir-class message in it's own right. : : Therefore _all_ communications should be encrypted at all time. It is : no argument against the principle that this is difficult to do at the : current time. : : Eric : Would it not make sense, therefore, to publish a public cypherpunks mailing list key, which is returned with subscription requests? All incoming message cleartext to the mailing list server would then be encrypted in the server's key; not for security, but precisely for the reason you state above. That _would_ create quite a volume of encrypted communications to each receipient of the list. --Eric

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.
by nobody＠soda.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>What has not been discussed here very much and what I felt going into >the conversations with these people is that they *can't* tell us what >they are afraid of. It is not a matter of won't. The conversations >bore this out. We have been concentrating on in our discussion here >on how much they fear the loss of a power they have gotten used to and >abused to where we find it offensive. That is not nearly so much >what they fear. It is the *unknown*. It is pretty hard to make public >statements like that. Repeat after me: Change is our friend. We must embrace change. Change is good. We must lose our fear of change. Change...Change...Change...Change...Change...Change...(click)...Change...

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Re: Dorothy Denning
by W. Kinney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Robert Cain Writes: >What has not been discussed here very much and what I felt going into >the conversations with these people is that they *can't* tell us what >they are afraid of. Theodore Ts'o writes: >So if the cat really is out of the bag, then the government should give >up on this ill-conceived Clipper abortion as soon as possible. The fact >that the Clipper propoents may actually be recognizing the hopelessness >of their task this is a sign of hopefulness or a sign of great danger; >the question is whether they will act like rational human beings, or a >cornered animal. I think this is very perceptive. Clipper is perhaps the best they could _think_ of given an outmoded set of axioms. If the presumptions people in government have about their own role are no longer valid, they probably don't fully realize it yet, or at least can't admit they do. Clipper is just the kind of woefully clueless thing people in that position would come up with. It is kind of scary. Yikes. -- Will -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3 iQCVAgUBLXPOevfv4TpIg2PxAQE2zQP9HY7vmwAz73DDvW0wHti07p/4hlPOLouQ Yw0gj6Ixrxw00D1trdpZloU3pw5NfHrVGjcLvA12KMJqcjyh9Ga6+q1y/oQOoGzm q/8dTwgKT61pdkTKnPt8Esyy/g30Jzy+QODjdDFMkkey+KwE1vbKIJiQccPvZypJ rFpN4KOqBZ4= =Jo/p -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: stego
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Choate's comments on steganography having problems with images that are too complex or too simple were interesting. Obviously, cartoon-like GIFs aren't a good target, though scanned real stuff may be fine. Weather maps cna be good - back when I worked with the things, I found you could really see about5-6 bits worth of depth, and after that it didn't usually look much different - we stole one or two values from the color-map to draw lines on the satellite images to add state boundaries, various data values, etc., but could have stolen the LSB and maybe 7th bit without major loss on cloud-image pictures. (Radar pictures, on the other hand, were almost all black, with one or two other pixel values, compressed to 2% of original size, and would have been useless for hiding anything in.) Bill

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Re: The answer.
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I think I have found the way to end all our problems: ESP. No good - the KGB has top psychics working for them, and the CIA has been working for years to keep up. I read it in the newspaper in the supermarket, so it must be true! Bill

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fyi
by hkhenson＠cup.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sorry to inflict this *DRAFT* copy of a letter on the net, but I have begun to feel rather paranoid--the kind of feeling you get from stepping into deep water and being among sharks. (I wonder if Danny C. would have done better if he had kept the net informed as he went along?) I have been told that the court clerks and judge's secrataries (who work for the Justice Departement, and are not really under the control of the Judges) do abuse-of-process favors like thoes reported below for the US Attorneys all the time. When the name spellings and facts get checked, I plan to print it out, put on my suit, and hand deliver it to the Judge Patel in open court. I hope to report in a day or so. H. Keith Henson 799 Coffey Ct. San Jose, CA 95123 408-972-1132 Judge Marilyn Patel Northern District of California 450 Golden Gate Ave., 19th Floor San Francisco, CA 94102 March 1, 1994 Dear Judge Patel: As a friend of the court, I suggest you look into the actions of your clerks. It appears they withhold information from you and play games with your calendar. Last Thursday, Richard Williams (a lawyer from San Jose) made telephone contact with Ms Moriyama in the clerk's office. He had a motion to file for return of property and suppression of evidence in a case which itself involves a report of fraud on Judge Brazil to obtain a search warrant. Ms Moriyama told him that the motion could be placed on the calendar of your court for Monday, February 28, 1994 at 2:30 pm if he could get the motion filed early Friday morning. Mr. Williams had the motion filed by courier with the clerks office by about 9 am last Friday. He fully expected to be before your court Monday at 2:30. I learned of the hearing Friday and made plans to be there myself since my affidavit is part of this motion. Two of Mr. William's staffers talked to Ms Moriyama last Thursday, and are prepared to testify as to her agreement to putting the motion on your calendar, though the option was left open that you might shift it to some other department at the same hour. Monday about 10 am, Ms Moriyama called Mr. Williams saying she had no copy of the motion (two were filed) and denying that she had even agreed to put this matter on your calendar, or even that she had talked to Mr. Williams or his staff the previous week. She tried to get the matter placed before Judge Brenin, and when told that a Magistrate-Judge was unacceptable, she got the motion hearing placed on Judge Caulfield's calendar one day before the matter is to be moved to Tennessee, inflicting great costs and business damage upon the plaintiffs. While talking to Judge Caulfield's clerk on Monday, Mr. Williams was told that the US attorney had ordered the clerks to remove the motion from your calendar after it had been scheduled! Though I do not know that Judge Brazil ever saw the letter I wrote to him, one of his staff called me and left a long message (which I preserved) on my answering machine. In it, the staffer stated that it was not a Judge's role to investigate the fraud perpetrated on his court to which I had directed his attention, and that I should contact the US attorney if I wished the matter to be investigated. Given that the US attorney has manipulated your calendar to prevent these very matters from being brought to the attention of your court, I believe this approach would be akin to getting a fox to guard the henhouse. I have never considered myself a naive person. In spite of this, I have always felt that the judiciary in this country was honest. I still feel this way, but how effective can an honest judge be when their information channels are completely controlled by one party in a case? Sincerely, H. Keith Henson

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No Subject
by nobody＠jarthur 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Men in Dark Suits, sunglasses and trenchcoats FORCED Bob Cain to Say: > >it is well understood that only voluntary means of controling this >exist and that liklihood is very small. Persuasion is not working and >the press has been whipped into a near hysterical state over this by we >and our friends (yes, we on the internet are considered to be the force >that has derailed their hopes and that was unforseen.) Thanks Bob... that admission from the opposing forces has made all of our effort in this fight worth it... This makes the complete devaluation of this "Clipper/Tessara" nightmare relatively easy.... we doing good... keep the pressure up!! This has lifted the fog of battle for us momentarily... > >As is obvious I don't consider this government to be a monolithic >antagonistic entity out to strip us of rights. Sure it has happened in >areas but they are reasonably isolated areas. There are *many* people >in this rather diverse government and in an advising capacity to it >whose sole concern is our safety and these people are worried. I find My Saftey is REALLY NONE of THEIR concern... they have already insured in court they cant be held liable for mistakes... >it interesting that there are many people here who lack the imagination >to understand that there probably are a goodly number of reasons for >rightly feeling the need for a Clipper like solution and that it would >not be appropriate for the government to be public about them. Why is >that so difficult to understand in these times of international strife, >terror and technology? Here I start to wonder about you Bob... OUR Government caused the current issues we are seeing haunt this country... and they want the keys to ALL the secrest??? Not a chance in HELL Bob... I AND OTHERS WILL MAKE SURE THAT CLIPPER IS TOTALLY SUNK!!! count on it!! anon p.s. to the punks... keep it up... you are doing a GREAT job...(anon pats himself on the back also!!) > > >Peace, > >Bob >

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low-overhead encrypted telnet
by Jef Poskanzer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've been talking about entrypted telnet with Craig Leres lately, and he came up with an interesting idea. The background is, sysadmins want encrypted telnet so that passwords don't fly around in the clear, but at the same time, they don't want to spend too many extra CPU cycles. I figured at least some sysadmins would resist installing an encryption-capable telnetd because of this concern about overhead. What you'd really like to do so satisfy these people is encrypt only when actually transmitting passwords. Problem is, that's hard to implement. Kerberos does it by supplying new versions of a dozen different programs, and it still only works within your organization, and even there it doesn't handle chained logins (telnet from host A to host B, then from host B to host C, etc.). It's hard because you have different levels of software trying to talk to each other. A solution that worked entirely within telnet would be a lot simpler. A compromise I thought of a while back is to encrypt the first few kilobytes and then switch to cleartext. This lets you log in securely, the average overhead for the session remains low, and there's no interaction between different software levels. But this also doesn't handle chained logins, if the second login comes later in your session. So here's Craig's idea: only encrypt the client-to-server direction. That's the only direction that passwords go, so it's secure; and it's low overhead because you generally type far fewer characters than you read. Just a tidbit for anyone working on encrypted logins. --- Jef

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