December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Book review: Codebreakers, the Inside Story of Bletchley Park
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Another book with some insight into Bletchley Park is "Cloak and Gown" (I forget the author), about the relationship between Yale academics and the OSS, the WW2 predecessor to the CIA. Among the various Yalies who went into the OSS was James Jesus Angleton, who spent a lot of time at Bletchley analyzing information that might be useful for US Army and covert OSS activities, and trying to support counterintelligene work by correlating the information from intercepts of German understanding of US and British plans with the Allied sources and users of those plans, to try to find leaks, traitors, moles, spies, and other types that counter-spook spooks worry about. Besides the Enigma interceptions themselves, the big secret the OSS and British intelligence were paranoid about protecting was that all the known German spies in Great Britain had been caught and turned for disinformation use (or killed); almost everything Germany was getting from its spies was bogus. Bill

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Re: San Francisco Editorial
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Another point re Cantor and Siegel is that there is now a service calling itself CancelMoose which goes through Julf's anon server in Finland (anon.penet.fi) to cancel spams. (Spams are off-topic, nearly-identical posts to large numbers of groups.) This is what Siegel is really upset about. She and her husband are publishing a book telling businesses how they can use spam posts on usenet as free advertising. But now CancelMoose is a relatively accepted counter to these increasingly-frequent spams (pyramid schemes, etc.). This makes their book obsolete and really hits them where it hurts. But they can't sue CancelMoose because its identity is hidden. Personally, I don't like the idea of cancelling other people's posts, spam or not. I would rather see news readers enhanced to detect copies of posts I have already seen and delete them. The awful thing about Cantor and Siegel's Green Card spam was that they didn't cross-post, they used a bot to individually post to all groups. I was shown their message headers for days. Ordinary off-topic posts don't bother me much because I can ignore them easily. With a better newsreader the Green Card spam would have been equally trivial to ignore. The scary thing about cancels is that some proposals have actually been directed at anonymous posts themselves. Someone anonymously posted what purported to be a grisly transcript of the last seconds of the doomed Challenger crew as they fell to the ocean. This caused a great hue and cry and some calls for banning anonymous posts and/or retroactively cancelling them. This led to some very amusing events which Detweiler has chronicled in his FAQ on anonymity, the net result of which was that the idea was discredited. But the emergence of CancelMoose is not an altogether positive event in my view. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQBVAwUBLwnTGRnMLJtOy9MBAQGjFAH/WEzWgAEG4mX9c6yR1iyR2nWq3V1AvUBL lC1rTlUWUf8YWZDmVAuOkg8AH8nPo3L1e67l66wMrgGedaCD39/3Aw== =psrV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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rarachel - no email
by Arsen Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey guys, It's me. Don't let the new account name, and the horrible name of this despicable machine throw you off. It's me, Ray Arachelian. Some rat(s?) hacked into photon, the machine where my home account lives, and now, while I can read my prism email by going through major acrobatic maneouvers, I have to use this slimy shitty student account. So for the time being, please direct any mail to this account aarach01(a)barney.poly.edu (God I hate this machine's name!) I'll still be able to read anything you send to prism for the time being (durring winter recess they said.) See, I have to log in to barney, ftp my mailbox over from prism, telnet to barney and delete my mailbox, and then read it with pine... :-( [Eileen, could you at least build a home directory for my old account with a .forward to Barney for now? Or just let me use prism without having to have photon connected to it?] Thanks, -- Ray (Arsen) Arachelian. [also known as rarachel(a)prism/photon.poly.edu, RayDude(a)aol.com, etc.]

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Siegel and Lewis
by raph＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just got off the phone with Peter Lewis, reporter for the New York Times. He is unaware of any grand consipracy to regulate the Net, but then again if there was one, I don't think they'd tell him. His piece that ran Saturday was badly mangled by the editorial process, especially since it ran on page one. Those articles get to be mangled by a whole new set of people who otherwise wouldn't get to touch it. I think Lewis has basically good intentions, and does do his homework before writing a story. Yecchh. Now I know why I don't rely on daily newspapers for my news (the Internet keeps me up on the fast-breaking stuff, and the Economist fills me in on the rest). The fact that most people rely papers and the even worse TV news does not bode well. Martha Siegel is just fucked up enough that she will probably push for legislation regulating the nets. Congress is just fucked up that they might pass it. Raph

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Re: Anonymous payment scheme
by pstemari＠erinet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:45 AM 1/3/95 -0800, Hal wrote: > ... As I wrote, banks are >required to get SS#'s for depositers right now, and I wouldn't expect >that to change any time soon. If anything, the trend appears to be >towards more tightening rather than less. ... Isn't that only a requirement on interst-bearing, or potentially interest-bearing, accounts? --Paul J. Ste. Marie pstemari(a)well.sf.ca.us, pstemari(a)erinet.com

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Re: Anonymous payment scheme
by pstemari＠erinet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:16 AM 1/3/95 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote: >Hmmm. What if you produced a pseudonym card *with* your picture on the >front? I smell a market opportunity. Or not... You'd need to promenently state on the front "not to be used for id" or some such. Otherwise you could potentially get nailed for issuing fraudulent identity documents. Too many places think that a MC/Visa is a form of id. --Paul J. Ste. Marie pstemari(a)well.sf.ca.us, pstemari(a)erinet.com

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Re: Press attack on anonymity.
by Lile Elam 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Or prehaps it is someone at HotWired... :) -lile

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H.R.4922
by VAMAGUS＠delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- If I am digging up old info please excuse me, I haven't been able to read the majority of mail due to the volume of, fluff, shall we say. For U.S. cypherpunks this is it: H.R. 4922 "Interception of Digital and Other Communications" passed as of October. This is the first *I* heard about it. In short the bill requires: " ...telecommunications carrier shall insure that it's equipment, facilities, or services are capable of (1) expeditiosly isolating and enabling the government, persuant to a court order or other authorization, to intercept, to the exclusion of all other communications, all wire and electronic communications carried by the carrier....etc. Time for me to generate more keys! More info available at: ftp.eff.org /pub/EFF/Policy/Digital_Telephony/digtel94.bill gopher.eff.org /1/EFF/Policy/Digital_Telephony/digtel94.bill http.eff.org /pub/EFF/Policy/Digital_Telephony/digtel94.bill ***************************Frenchie Sends******************************* * PGP Public Keys: 1024/BEB3ED71 & 2047/D9E1F2E9 on request. * * As soon as any man says of the affairs of the state * * "What does it matter to me?" the state may be given up for lost. * * J.J.Rousseau - The Social Contract * * PGP info: email to mail-server(a)rtfm.mit.edu with first line: * * send pub/usenet/alt.security.pgp/* * *****************************J. Francois******************************** -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLwoD8LbmxeO+s+1xAQEuCgQAlI0vevAU7Gc1rkraQufpw+1NT9n2qSw5 DIoJvA0lS49ECiZeUOhwNql3cx6tPaOEeMeJIqkcv/PecX3wh3I2AzU2NGmNerOM Z2HPjdoz3xO8u0wDOJbZDRlzQafzbh0RShxAlCxPQE+qspWhmtydMvRl6KtvT1T+ s/kMO5VMkQY= =r8C+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Exporting cryptographic materials, theory vs. practice
by Johnathan Corgan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >No reason to risk a hassle by exporting PGP from the US on your >laptop, it's everywhere. Just take your Secret Keyring file and >download PGP from a foreign FTP site once you are out of the US. Or you can do what someone mentioned to me he does when he travels abroad: He keeps PGP and his keyrings on a floppy, but then _deletes_ PGP.EXE. Of course, being a good PC user, he _always_ carries a copy of Norton Undelete with him :) Quite creative, IMHO, and technically legal. == Johnathan Corgan "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." jcorgan(a)scruznet.com -Isaac Asimov WWW: (for now) ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/jc/jcorgan/www/homepage.htm -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLwoKl01Diok8GKihAQH00gP/VLWJaDaS7DNp+bv1BLszEQpOlNFyS22Y BL+Wv8Rs5efF2SG5t3E+6aHwSvaRigtjE1wwF3f46QY23ZnO1x+DTuEXy9gBRu+s usNniiyfcozfT90wPU79b/qhRrnM/Uzwxn8XddWNz0ONEk/QZqXLLx/4PdczwDaN L5XclEMG8n4= =Kzyl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: SAN FRANCISCO EDITORIAL
by pcw＠access.digex.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The scandalous Finland anonymous remailer is also used for good. The Samaritans, an organization in England devoted to helping folks who are thinking of suicide, often receives notes filtered through it. If someone sends me the right address, I'll send a letter to the Comical explaining this politely. We should stress the strength of anonymity.

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