December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Punk Rock Zine
by schulz＠omcron.uleth.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi Me and some friends of mine are compiling a punk rock fan zine, and i wish to include a section outlining public key cryptography, the cypherpunks as a group, etc. I was wondering if anybody had any press releases, or short (like 1 page) RSA or PGP articles or that sort of thing. It won't be a huge spread or anything, but it will be positive nondigitial media press for cypherpunkism. I am not a current list member, so please email me at schulz(a)omcron.uleth.ca TOM SCHULZ

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Remailer at Wein?
by Mark Terka 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is the remailer at remailer(a)ds1.wu-wein.ac.at up and running? Test messages to that site kept bouncing. Also, how do I get ahold of that remailer's public key for encrypting messages through them? -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Terka | werewolf(a)io.org | public key (werewolf) by Toronto,Canada | dg507(a)cleveland.freenet.edu | public key server or request ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Needed for a computer ethics class
by Patrick Juola 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I'm in the process of writing a course on computer ethics for > the University of Colorado at Boulder and I think anonymous > remailers would be a good subject for an essay assignment, but > I need enough material (ideally, primary source material) to > lay the groundwork first. You're not in any way related to Detweiler are you? :-) Nope, 'fraid not. Never even met the "gentleman," as it happens. I'm sure that whoever is running the Medusa style-analyzer can bear me out on that. 8-) (That and the fact that I've been on cypherpunks for nearly a year now, and Detweiler's not subtle enough to keep his tentacles quiet for that long. Feeling paranoid?) Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough on the question. I don't need to be convinced that remailers are a Good Thing. I already believe it. On the other hand, [I feel] it's more professional to point the students on magazine articles, FAQ's, and stuff and to let them draw their own conclusions about the inherent Rightness of anonymous Email than to simple proseletyze at them, which never works. So I'm looking for material *external* to what I'm presenting them directly, rather than simply arguments, which I can make in the course of the class. Patrick Patrick

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Re: \"Reputations\" are more than just nominalist hot air
by cwalton＠earthlink.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:41 PM 9/5/94 -0700, Hal wrote: > >Then perhaps we can avoid arguing about what a reputation is, and instead >focus on the interesting issue of what the role of cryptography will be >in establishing reputations in a possibly-pseudonymous business network. I think the distinction between "reputation" and "credential" is an important one in this context. I would be interested in discussing "the interesting issue of what the role of cryptography will be in establishing <credentials> in a possibly-pseudonymous business network", i.e. TRW credit reports, drivers licenses, or ATM cards (all of which may or may not be tied to a reputation or to a valuable, wonderful person - doesn't matter to me. Will I get my money outta the deal?). ***************************************** Conrad Walton cwalton(a)earthlink.net ***************************************** Without JOY there can be no STRENGTH. Without STRENGTH, all other virtures are worthless. Edward Abbey

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How Did This Get Done?
by werewolf＠io.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ok...ok....ignore the content of the following. I'm not interested in flames about narrow mindedness or whatever, I'm just interested in how the poster was able to pull the following off.... I picked this up from a post in alt.sex.stories (and yeah....man does not live on talk.politics.crypto alone :>) : ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Path: io.org!sun.cais.com!news.sprintlink.net!tequesta.gate.net!sysop From: no_more_faggots(a)faggots.must.die.com <===== Is this a trick? Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories Subject: NO MORE FAGGOT STORIES! Date: 5 Sep 1994 21:13:00 GMT Lines: 1 Message-ID: <34g1ks$jn1(a)tequesta.gate.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: hopi.gate.net NO MORE FAGGOT STORIES DAMMIT ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- How the hell did the poster "customize" his address to ...ummm...fit the post???

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Re: Micro Power Broadcasting Meeting/Picnic & Workshops
by wcs＠cbnewsh.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The following article in alt.society.anarchy touched on some issues that have been occasionally discussed here in cypherpunks. (I'm temporarily disconnected from receiving cypherpunks until my mail addresses get straightened out - sigh.) Bill ------- In article <34ahf1$qgb(a)crl7.crl.com> somebody writes: ] ]You are invited to a meeting of the Free Communications Coalition on ]Sunday, September 11. It will be held in Berkeley at 809 B Allston Way ](two blocks south of University Ave. between 6th and 5th) from 12 noon to ]2 PM. A potluck vegie picnic will follow at a nearby park complete with a ]live micro power broadcast. Members of the Free Communications Coalition ](the peoples' FCC) include San Francisco Liberation Radio, Radio Libre, ]Free Radio Berkeley, National Lawyers Guild Committee on Democratic ]Communications and other micro power practioners and supporters. Help ]plan the fall/winter campaign to take back the airwaves. ] ]Two workshops on micro power broadcasting are scheduled for the Bay ]Area. The first one will be held in Berkeley at the Long Haul, 3124 ]Shattuck Avenue on Saturday, September 24. New College, 777 Valencia in ]San Francisco will be the site of the second workshop on Saturday, ]October 8. Both workshops will start at 11 AM and run until about 4 PM. ]A donation of $5-$25 is requested. Materials and info will be provided. ]Learn how to put your own micropower station on the air. ] ]Listen to San Francisco Liberation Radio 93.7 on the air every night ]covering the western portion of SF, north and west of Twin Peaks. Radio ]Libre 103.3 is on every night from the Mission District covering an area ]east of Twin Peaks. Free Radio Berkeley returns to the air on Sunday, ]September 4 at 8 PM on 104.4 ] ]For further information, contact Free Radio Berkeley / Free ]Communications Coalition. You can request a current copy of our ]newsletter and list of the kits we offer. ] ]Email: frbspd(a)crl.com ] ]Snail: FRB, 1442 A Walnut St., #406, Berkeley, CA 94709 ] ]Voice mail: (510) 464-3041 ] ] -- # Bill Stewart AT&T Global Information Solutions (new name for NCR!) # 6870 Koll Center Pkwy, Pleasanton CA 94566 1-510-484-6204 fax-6399 # Email: bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart(a)attmail.com # ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465 Digital Telephony Initiative - the price of liberty is eternal vigilance!

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NY Times Fears C'punks
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times Magazine, p. 23 September 4, 1994 Method and Madness Nicolas Wade [Subhead] Little Brother Not so long ago, high technology was seen as the likely handmaiden of totalitarian government, with surveillance systems and central computers tracking every citizen from cradle to grave. By a strange turn of events, what is now in progress is the very opposite of that nightmare. So many powerful technologies are streaming into private hands that Government is struggling to protect even the bare minimum of its legitimate domains. Once only governments could launch photoreconnaissance satellites; now the C.I A. is anxiously trying to curb commercial systems that can discern objects as small as a yard across, high-enough resolution to interest generals as much as geologists. A fleet of navigational satellites designed to give military commanders their exact position anywhere in the world is now in essence available to anyone; the Pentagon has let the public listen in on a degraded signal, but commercial vendors with clever algorithms can restore it to near-military accuracy. The computers that tie together the Government's information systems have become increasingly porous. The better their security systems, the more tempting the challenge. Earlier this year the Pentagon discovered that a coterie of computer hackers had penetrated large parts of its sensitive though unclassified computer network and had even taken control of several military computers. Think tanks and academics have warned for years, quite erroneously, that terrorists would avail themselves of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; it hasn't happened, because none of these items are easy to use and simpler means have always been available. But the samples of stolen Russian uranium and plutonium that have recently been captured in Germany are a clear warning that this blithe era of security may now be over. The samples seem to have come from reactor fuel and laboratories, not nuclear warheads. But that is small comfort, especially in view of new calculations that only one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of plutonium is needed to make a bomb, not eight kilograms as was generally assumed. And the smugglers caught by the German police were hawking four kilograms for a mere $250 million. Perhaps the most surprising democratization of high technology is that of cryptography, once an elite art of those who guarded Government's most precious secrets. The first serious challenge to the National Security Agency's ability to crack almost everyone else's ciphers came from an ingenious coding approach created in academe in the mid-1970's and known as the public key cryptosystem. The commercial sponsor sold the program to American companies but was not allowed to export it. Then in 1991, a Colorado computer expert, Philip R. Zimmermann, produced a program apparently based on this system, which he named Pretty Good Privacy. A copy of Pretty Good Privacy found its way onto the Internet, free to takers from all countries, and all of a sudden Government-class security became available to everyone. Zimmermann's next project is to develop a pretty secure citizen's phone that scrambles conversations. At this point, of course, it's possible to wonder if the humiliation of Big Brother isn't being taken beyond reasonable limits. Some Government monopolies are not so bad: the use of force, for one. If you believe the F.B.I. is bugging your conversations, you'll want to see Zimmermann in the inventors' hall of fame; if terrorism and organized crime seem the more immediate threats, the universal right to absolute privacy looks less compelling. Is it possible for the state to get too weak in relation to its possible adversaries? That's the last thought that occurs to Americans across a wide spectrum of opinion, from free market economists to civil libertarians. From a variety of motives, they persistently call for governmental power to be curbed. The present headlong democratization of high technology is the flower of a decade of economic deregulation, and of the fading influence of military procurement as a driver of technical progress. The state is so familiar a political structure that its endurance is hard to doubt. For economists and political analysts, it is the only unit of account. Yet in his recent book, "The Transformation of War," the noted military historian Martin van Creveld argues that since modern states are no longer able to fight each other for fear of nuclear war, conventional warfare, too, has become outmoded. Since the purpose of states (at least in the view of military historians) is to fight each other, states that cannot do so must sooner or later yield to organizations that will, like sects, tribes and cults. "In North America and Western Europe, future war-making entities will probably resemble the Assassins, the group which ... terrorized the medieval Middle East for two centuries," van Creveld predicts. Regular armed forces, as has happened in Lebanon, will degenerate into police forces or mere armed gangs; the day of the condottieri will return. Van Creveld is not the only analyst to fear for the state. From quite different reasoning, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued in a widely read essay in Foreign Affairs last year that world politics would be shaped in future by clashes between cultures and religions. As the West loses its military and economic predominance, the counterresponse from the rest of the world will be couched in religious and cultural terms: "The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future," he wrote. Even without fully embracing these forecasts of the state's eclipse, it's hard to ignore such recent incidents as the bombing of the World Trade Center or the car bombings of Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires and London. Terrorists with secure phones, satellite maps, accurate positioning and a sophisticated understanding of modern communications systems could bring down not just a few buildings but large sections of a modern economy. Big Brother is dead. The only serious likelihood of his resurrection lies in reaction to the chaos and disintegration that an era of Little Brothers might bring. ------------------- END

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No Subject
by spaceman.spiff＠calvin.hobbes.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In refrence to Mark Terka's article on how the person faked his name, he probaably did it the same way I am doing this, only on a variation for news. You can accuatly telnet in to other ports that are instance. Anyway Loopholes arent to hard to find. Ask a net programmer what the port for news is. Groove on dude Michael Conlen

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NYT on Electronic Purses
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times today reports: Quotes: "Electronic purses" may mean the end of cash. Banks, credit card companies and even some governments are racing to introduce electronic purses, wallet-size cards embedded with microchips that store sums of money for people to use instead of cash for everything from buying fast food to paying highway tolls. * * * Long-range planners in the banking industry see the weaning of small businesses and consumers from cash as the last step to closing many expensive branches and conducting virtually all business by telephone, through cash machines and perhaps home computers. * * * "As more and more people do business on the Internet, we have to look for how you pay for things," said Catherine Allen, a vice president in Citibank's technology office and the head of the Smart Card Forum, an industry group. "The smart card allows me to identify myself securely." * * * But Mondex [Britain's system] has still another wrinkle: privacy. Unlike most other electronic purse systems, Mondex, like cash, is anonymous. The banks that issue Mondex cards will not be able to keep track of who gets the payments. Indeed, it is the only system in which two card holders can transfer money to each other. "If you want to have a product that replaces cash, you have to do everything that cash does, only better," Mondex's senior executive, Michael Keegan said. "You can give money to your brother who gives it to the chap that sells newspapers, who gives it to charity, who puts it in the bank, which has no idea where it's been. That's what money is." End quotes. The article describes smart card systems in the US and other countries. Describes how customers "recharge" the card by home phone or other means. Email copies wanted? It's about a half-page in size. John

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Re: Governments and repression
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Wed, 31 Aug 1994 08:35:12 -0400 >From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)imsi.com> Perry, >I would refer to most governments as being no more than large >organized gangs, differing from the Mafia or Hezbollah only in so far >as they have convinced large numbers of people of their legitimacy. It's always bothered me that gov'ts were people wielding power for its own sake. I had hoped we had progressed beyond the tribal chieftan stage of development. Then again, I remember the bullies in grade school. To what extent is gov't a home for bullies and to what extent is it the collective defense against bullies (both ideas finding models in the Wild West Sheriff)? How do we turn it from the first to the second? - Carl

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