December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Q: ref. for DNA used to solve math. network prob. (fwd)
by root 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Message-Id: <m0rdRDS-0005iFa(a)hip-hop.hh.sbay.org> > Date: Sat, 11 Feb 95 15:27 PST > From: jwgruber(a)aol.com (JWGruber) > Subject: Q: ref. for DNA used to solve math. network prob. > Designated-To: Internet Amateur Mathematics Society > > Hi - I am looking for a reference (newspaper or popular magazine) on a > recent article that described the use of DNA and genetic expression to > solve a complex mathematical problem (linear algebra-matrix systems I > believe) regarding a network of paths or routes between cities. Does > anyone have a reference on this work ? I would be greatly obliged if I > could receive a note on this. Thank you ! > John W. Gruber > Philadelhia College of Pharmacy & Science > JWGruber(a)aol.com > Only peripheraly related to crypto but has anyone got any info on this?

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Involve Telcos in activism?
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

storm(a)marlin.ssnet.com (Don Melvin): > Telecoms have bucks. > Telecoms have lawyers. > Telecoms are the 'transmission' agents for pretty much all of > the internet. Even high speed dedicated T1s are usually > from a telecom or two. That's a laugh! Yes, it would be a good idea to involve telcos in our cause, but it was my impression that most cypherpunks expressed derision for the EFF for 'compromising' (i.e. being realistic). Telcos do not necessarily share the interests of cypherpunks; they want to make money, that's all. They'd love to compromise, and provide funding for CDT, Jerry Berman's new lobbying outfit. A good example of their attitude is what they do in India, or China. Here none of them are too keen to say anything against some of our ancient and idiotic laws, and they're all happy to budget for huge and unjustified 'licence fees' because they want to lick state ass. They want to grab these huge markets before it's too late, free speech be damned. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- For Electric Dreams subscriptions and back issues, send a mail to rishab(a)arbornet.org with 'get help' as the message Subject. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in rishab(a)arbornet.org Vox +91 11 6853410 Voxmail 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Clinton's No Warrant decree, and insulting dogs
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Brad Dolan <bdolan(a)use.usit.net>: > WARRENTLESS SEARCHES CAN NOW BE APPROVED BY FREEH, RENO, DOD, ET. > AL. AND CONDUCTED BY ANY FED AGENCY. DUE TO THE CRIME BILL, THE FED > AGENCIES ARE NOW ALL OPERATING IN CONSOLIDATED "TASK FORCES." Clinton's recent high-profile resort to executive orders reminds me of Yeltsin's 'democracy by decree'. I await with interest an American Chechnya. However with the latest one he seems not to be ordering anything new, he's just pulled something out of the legislative hat, he's just using powers he's been given under the cited subsections of the Foreign Intelligence Act. He seems happy to follow whatever little safeguards it has. How that Act was never ruled unconstitutional beats me. Why is Clinton kowtowing to the Notional Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Instigation all of a sudden? Is this a 'law-and-order' shift to the right of a New New Democrat? Can we all stop insulting dogs? Lawrence Detweiler can be safely refered to as LD. Rottweilers, as a correspondent writes with "great umbrage" in last week's Time, are "handsome, noble, courageous and steadfastly loyal." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- For Electric Dreams subscriptions and back issues, send a mail to rishab(a)arbornet.org with 'get help' as the message Subject. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in rishab(a)arbornet.org Vox +91 11 6853410 Voxmail 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Clinton's No Warrant decree, and insulting dogs
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in () on Mon, 13 Feb 1:26 AM >Why is Clinton kowtowing to the Notional Security >Agency and the Federal Bureau of Instigation all of a >sudden? Is this a 'law-and-order' shift to the right >of a New New Democrat? The NY Times report today on the near miss of "terrorist mastermind" Yousef in Manila after a kitchen blaze of cooking-up explosives, says that he was seen walking rapidly away talking on a cellular phone. Allegedly left behind on a laptop was a disk "filled with details of his plots to kill Pope John Paul II, and to blow up American jets flying in the Far East." Twenty (20) FBI agents were sent to pick him up in Islamabad, Pakistan for safe home in the New York. A concerned citizen may ask: What was picked up from the phone, or will be affidavited to have been picked up. What was on the disk, or will be solemnly sworn to have been found on the disk. And, finally, what armament and intergalatic technology accompanied the SWAT team -- over and back, to provide full cloak and security on land, sea and air? And, with that show as spoof, how was he really imported? How many other fake transports were set in motion? When will we learn more of the lurid Clancy-juicy details of this black-op budget-busting crowd-pleaser? Is this a laptop dog and pony? No offense to Fifi and Holy Bull and Apple.

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Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:12 PM 02/12/95, Zachary wrote: >This touches on something I was thinking the other day: Most >cryptosystems that we seem to use are based on the assumption that >factoring large numbers is a Hard Problem. Isn't this putting all our >eggs in one basket? Are there other Hard Problems crypto systems can be Keep in mind that it's been mathematically proven that factoring is NP-complete. That is, it's in the set of problems including such things as discrete logs and the travelling salesman problem, such that if a polynomial time solution is found to _any_ of these problems, one can be found for all of them. Of course it hasn't been proven that none of the problems in NP can be solved in polynomial time, so it hasn't been proven that these are "hard problems". But I suspect that most problems suspected to be Hard Problems that one could base a crypto system off of, are also NP-complete, so it wouldn't be any better to use them then to use factoring. Logarithms, for instance, are used in some crypto systems, and are another suspected Hard Problem, but are also NP complete. So if factoring is solved, discrete logarithms will be solved too. At least that's how I understand it.

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Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Zachary <zachary(a)pentagon.io.com> wrote: Most cryptosystems that we seem to use are based on the assumption that factoring large numbers is a Hard Problem. Isn't this putting all our eggs in one basket? Are there other Hard Problems crypto systems can be based on? There is of course the discrete log problem - DH and all that. Unfortunately, although the discrete log problem has not been shown to be equivalent to the factoring problem, every factoring advance immediately leads to a corresponding discrete log advance and vice versa, and the two problems take a very similar length of time to solve, suggesting that the two problems have some deep equivalence. So far no one has found a way of applying NP problems to Crypto. And that pretty much wraps it up. There are of course a lot of hard problems that are not NP, yet probably take exponential time, but obviously you want a well understood problem that is part of conventional mathematics. This narrows the field rather drastically. Discrete log and factoring pretty much covers it. Of course you can do discrete log on weird fields -- there is a lot of research in that which I do not understand at all. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.catalog.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. | jamesd(a)netcom.com

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Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:19 PM 02/12/95, Matt Blaze wrote: >No it hasn't. Factoring is believed to be hard, but no one has ever >shown it to be NP-hard (let alone NP complete). Woops. Thanks for the correction, and thanks to everyone else who managed to correct me within only minutes after I made the mistake. :) You can all stop sending me mail now. [Moral of the story: don't make a math error on the cypherpunks list.]

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Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions
by doug＠OpenMind.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bruce Schneier gives us: > Table 4: Recommended public-key key lengths (in bits) > > Year vs. I vs. C vs. G > 1995 768 1280 1536 > 2000 1024 1280 1536 > 2005 1280 1536 2048 > 2010 1280 1536 2048 > 2015 1536 2048 2048 I applaud Bruce for making this unpopular presentation of the somber facts. If these figures are taken seriously, the conclusion is that 1024 bit keys are not even good TODAY if one is concerned about the C or G level attack. In fact, not even the 1280 bit key is good for G level attack today. Pay attention, people. Factoring is still a good cryptographic approach, but the key lengths have to keep growing larger. Factoring may be NP-hard in the key length, but the rate of growth of our ability to factor is actually going up exponentially as well. The speed of encryption and decryption for 2048 bit keys on my Pentium is quite reasonable today... and my confidence in the long-term security of my encrypted files has increased considerably with the advent of PGP 2.6.2, for just that reason. Doug Cutrell _____________________________________________________________ Doug Cutrell General Partner doug(a)OpenMind.com Open Mind, Santa Cruz =============================================================

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Re: The NSA (Was Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions )
by aegis＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>I think the NSA has lost its edge completely in the last decade, >as cryptographic research in the open community has taken off. It >is much the same sort of situation experienced by IBM, when they >were slow to catch on to the paradigm shift created by >distributed computing and workstations, and companies like Sun >rose from nowhere to become major players. > >If the NSA were a corporation, they would be apologizing to their >shareholders, restructuring, and trying to identify a market >niche they could continue to be a player in. Since they are >funded by government, we don't see them doing this, but it is >absurd to suggest that they are still decades ahead of the rest >of the world in basic research and technology. As a former civilian TS Clearance holder working for the government, I can tell you I was amazed at what a small percentage of classified material really deserves to be classified. 90% of what I saw could be categorized as 1)trival, 2)in the public domain already, or 3)politically embarrassing. For example, look at the long classified human radiation experiments just coming to light. The government certainly wasn't hidding that info from the Russians, they were hiding it from the voters. I remember once fighting for months to get access to some classified papers on the fracture characteristics of ceramics only to find them to contain nothing that hadn't been available in the public domain for 20 years. This of course has a lot to do with the strange sociology of government bureacracies where the combination of classified information with need-to-know restrictions create powerful petty-fiefdoms that lead to increased perks and prestige. The other thing to realize is that inside the bureacracies there's little in the way of the vigorous competion of ideas (primarily because of the manipulation of need-to-know restrictions) that characterizes academia. Bureaucracies tend to foster myopia and tunnel vision rather than risk taking and originality. My guess (and it's only that) is that if all of NSA's secrets were laid bare, maybe 10% of what they have would be truely unique and the other 90% would be surprisingly pedestrian. Dale H. ------------------------------------------------------------ Dale W. Harrison, president | TEL: (713) 682-0501 AEGIS Software Development, Inc. | FAX: (713) 623-0030 12 Greenway Plaza, Suite 1100 | aegis(a)netcom.com Houston, Texas 77046 | daleh(a)ix.netcom.com ------------------------------------------------------------

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Automatic reply to your test message (lwall)
by News auto-reply daemon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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