December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: My pseudo-anonymous dream list
by dochobbs＠wwa.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Gary wrote, I would add a few more suggestions of my own to your wishlist. 11) Seamless integration with existing mail programs, such as Eudora. what about...pine, pegasus, sendmail, airmail, news mail programs... I think this would be up to the individual user or for someone to develop the perfect pgp mail program. 12) Notification that your message has been received (I'm not sure how to do this and maintain anonymity) I don't know either if you chain your mail before it gets to the nym server. The idea of chaining is to keep the sender anonymous. Maybe if the nym server send mail to your reply block every time your alias and password are used to send mail. Though it would have to be something like "your alias has sent mail to the following xxx(a)xxx.xxx. 13) Ability to handle very large encrypted files (binaries). Why? I think this would either 1) cripple the server from the load 2) make it easier to track back to the sender. If you are comparing 1 meg files against 1000 byte files it would be much easier to filter out what you are not looking for. 3) give anon mailers the reputation of porn/warez/church of scientology document distibuters and not privacy mailers which defeats some of the things that are trying to get done. 14) Perhaps increasing security by breaking messages into several parts, routing them through different chains, and reassembling them just prior to transmission to recipient. Ouch. I think that would be hard to manage :) Can you imagine thousands of users sending tens of thousands of messages a day and having more than one remailer having to keep track of hundreds of thousands of 'chunks' of mail. That would start to resemble tcp/ip in complexity. Keep up the good work! The concepts are good, I just don't think the implementation would be very easy. You should sign up on the nym server mailing list that was posted here a few days ago if you are interested in pursuing these ideas. _____________________________________________________________ dochobbs(a)wwa.com M.D. Hobbs mhobbs(a)rad.rpslmc.edu http://miso.wwa.com/~dochobbs finger for my pgp key I am human and nothing human do I count alien.

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Re: Are we forming the "social sector"? FYIntrospection...
by Steven Champeon - Imonics Development 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

| From owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Mon Aug 14 15:48:43 1995 | Subject: Are we forming the "social sector"? FYIntrospection... | Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com | | [ ... ] | | "the post-capitalist polity needs a 'third sector,' in addition | to the two generally recognized ones, the 'private sector' of | business and the 'public sector' of government. It needs an | autonomous social sector." (Drucker 1993) Not to start a holy war (no pun intended) but isn't this the role that according to Locke, et al., was supposed to be filled by Religion? A moral/social force standing beside government and economics? If Dr. Johnson had been less immersed in the idea of Truth, I believe he would have agreed. He wrote for money, hobnobbed with royalty for status, and was driven by a need to prove himself worthy in the eyes of his Maker. I can't stand the perspectives that come out of this "we're so objective we ignore anything that reeks of irrationality" stance. By restricting themselves to the projection of history that results, they can't see the ways in which the things they deny have been the major players in the situation they claim to understand. "Post-capitalist polity"? What the hell is this guy smoking? I say this not to advance the role of religious fundamentalism, but as a reminder of the past and an earnest attempt to get people to recognize that like it or not, religion (however you may conceive it) is already there. You could argue that people go into government for power and business for money, and whatever is left over constitutes their religious frame. Charles Winquist, a professor of the philosophy of religion at Syracuse, calls religion that which defines what is "real and important" for a person, a culture, or a nation. I would argue that once you abstract out the money and power aspects of this, you are left with exactly what this guy Drucker is trying to say we need. And we already have it. I like to write good code and do intelligent Web site design. And I don't do it for Jesus, or Buddha, or Rev. Moon. I do it because it is what gives my life a sense of reality, and because it is what I have determined to be important right now. I also pay attention to issues such as are discussed here (excepting the conspiracy crap) because I can see that it will be important to me and others. Just my $.02, Steve

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Get 1/3 net of 900-CAN-MY0B
by J. Kent Hastings 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-- [ From: J. Kent Hastings * EMC.Ver #2.5.02 ] -- Buy ads for The Agorist Institute's new privacy information audiotext distribution line (aka 900-number), and get 1/3 of the income above strictly defined costs for TeleConnect and MCI. After computing the service bureau and MCI take, it looks like we'll have to charge 1.95 (or 1.99 more likely) per minute if more than half of the money is to be available for a three way split. Right now I'm reading a script on a low audio volume tape player at 99 cents per minute. The three ways are 1/3 to Lon Weber, freedom4(a)aol.com, the owner of the 900#, 1/3 to J. Kent Hastings, zeus(a)pinsight.com, Assistant Director of The Agorist Institute, the "sponsor" of the line, and 1/3 to an advertiser. If more than one advertiser gets involved, we can assign and pay for calls in defined territories. If you buy ads in Colorado, you'd get 1/3 of the net from Colorado calls. Or if just a few participate with nationwide print, radio, or video infomercials, we can assign extension numbers, which are automatically tallied by TeleConnect, to identify who is to be paid. Of course, one single investor willing to finance a complete ad campaign could use these techniques to select the most profitable approaches. We have the line, 1-900-CAN-MY0B, and it is already approved. The "MIND YOUR 0WN BUSINESS" audiotext program. 1 - 9 0 0 - C A N - M Y 0 B (1-900-226-6902) Note the zero digit, not the letter "O." "The Feds say you can't have privacy, but we say you CAN 'Mind Your 0wn Business!'" Help get it going, so we can make a dollar and provide useful privacy news and techniques to the public. A 900# doesn't have the printing and postage costs of a newsletter, and the listener doesn't need to use a credit card or write a check for a subscription. I'm also willing to give 1/2 of my 1/3 (=1/6) for monthly professional audio production. Send e-mail to me at zeus(a)pinsight.com for more information. Kent -- J. Kent Hastings, Assistant Director of The Agorist Institute zeus(a)pinsight.com -- http://www.pinsight.com/~zeus/agorist/

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Purple Boxes vs. Native Signal Processing
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:12 AM 8/16/95, Lucky Green wrote: >I agree. You can easily do encryption and compression on the same chip. >There is no need for a separate DES/RSA chip. I only included some possible >DES chip manufactors, because the original poster asked for them. The trend is away from having two chips when one will suffice. Thus, the Macintosh 840av and 660av had a Motorola 68040 _and_ a Motorola 56000 DSP chip for speech processing and recognition, sound processing, etc....they were dropped and replaced by the PowerPC machines, which dispensed with the separate DSP chips. (The DSPs were never fully supported by software, especially from third party vendors....) And Intel is pushing "native signal processing," wherein DSP functions are pushed back into the CPU. If the CPU is fast enough, as the fast Pentiums are, this can work. This may be partly to sell more and faster Pentiums and partly because Intel has no effective DSP products at this time. (Intel has generally missed out on the DSP market, despite arguably having invented the first DSP chip. In 1977 I worked on the Intel 2920 signal processor, the first general purpose chip to do signal processing. Invented by Ted Hoff, the same guy who invented the microprocessor, it was abandoned a few years later. Then came the success of TI's TMS320 (or similar) DSP chips, the Motorola 56000 series, and Intel was out of the game.) Pushing DSP functions into the CPU can be taken too far. Apple, for example, had/has a "Geo Modem," or something like this, which does modem funtions in the CPU of some machines. Last I heard it was stuck at being too slow, with no software updates, and effectively is being abandoned. Modems have gotten so cheap that using the CPU makes little sense if it also complicates software. As in everything, the choice in partitioning is crucial. Of relevance to this list, I see no hope whatsoever that people will buy gizmos to do encryption if a software-only ("native signal processing") solution is within a factor of several in performance. After all, people complain that RSADSI wants "exorbitant" prices ($125) for public key ecryption and demand that "free" products are needed, so I can't see them spending $300 or even $100 for a hardware solution that does encryption a bit faster. If the Pentium + Soundblaster can do VoicePGP or PGPFone or Nautilus, then what's the incentive to buy additional hardware? Last I heard about CELP, it could handle "Pretty Good Voice" on a mere 66 MHz 486, and that's about 2-4x slower than what people are routinely buying today. (The situation may be slightly different for a fully-productized and consumerized "bump in the wire" secure phones, where the finished product will be sold to a different sort of customer than those clamoring for cheap crypto.) In conclusion, I'd always look to a software solution first. Anything that requires chips is automatically harder to build and to sell. Most importantly, a solution which runs on standard hardware available around the world will be trivially exportable (technologically) and will spread within days of availability, whereas a hardware-dependent solution will likely remain obscure and hard to export. Sofware solutions rule! --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Request for Cypherpunks to CU-SeeMeize mbone video
by Thomas Grant Edwards 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A while back someone mentioned that they would be videocasting a Cypherpunks meeting over the MBONE. While the MBONE is great for many of us, CU-SeeMe would provide a much larger audience. Check out http://www.umich.edu/~dschluss/nv-cusm.html for information on how to forward MBONE video to a CU-SeeMe reflector. -Thomas

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Phone Card Risks
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One of the plethora of TV Magazine shows featured Tim McViegh and phone cards last week. Maybe I should post to Risks. According to the story, Tim McViegh bought a bunch of phone cards from "The Spotlight" (famous Klan paper) which carried the Spotlight brand name. He made lots of calls. Later, the Fibbies who checked all the phone records for room and pay phones at the motels where TM was staying came up with lots of calls to the 800 number of the vendor who was actually switching calls for the Spotlight phone cards. The vendor found the card number(s) that matched those calls and all the other calls that matched those card numbers. They made it seem like such a match was a big thing. Perhaps their transaction database was not well developed. In any case, they wrote a little software and gave the Fibbies a list of all of TM's calls. There are supposed to be lots of calls to fertilizer dealers, his sister, and others. Very interesting. This is an obvious risk in the use of phone cards that anyone should be able to figure out for themselves since it is the same risk that pay phones have always had. If the Fibbies can find out what telephones you have used, they can get those records and trace things from there. This problem has occurred before for "right wing" nuts and the Mafia. Several years ago after members of The Order robbed an armored car in northern California, the Fibbies found a nearby motel where a bunch of suspicious characters had all stayed together and traced calls from the pay phone outside to various wives/girl friends and broke the case from there. Likewise Mafiosi in their NYC social clubs have often shown bad phone habits using the nearest pay phone, etc. If a pay phone is used enough and well-enough known to the Fibbies, it even becomes worthwhile to tap it. So buy lots of phone cards from different dealers (*never* The Spotlight), use phones unconnected to you, don't make too many calls from the same phone or using the same card, and be sure to destroy the card preferably before you use it (the only significant thing about phone cards are the numbers which can be stored in an encrypted file). An easy way to accomplish much of the above is to hang out in big cities instead of the boonies. It's a lot easier to find an unlinked phone (unlinked to you, that is) in the city than in the country. DCF "'Well, he hit what he was aiming at.' Marine DI discussing the fact that the guy up in the tower at the University of Texas shooting people was an ex-Marine."

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Re: PERRY METZGER: YOUR MOMMY IS CALLING YOU HOME
by lat＠iac.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anonymous remailer? What a crock! In my book, you might as well have written this rant on swift moving water or the wind. Lynn TerWoerds Cincinnati, OH

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Name Overloading
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:54 PM 8/14/95, Bryce Wilcox wrote: >(Hm. "DC" -- "DigiCash" -- "David Chaum". I just noticed that...) Also "Dining Cryptographers," as in "DC-Nets," which DC invented. Chaum only smirks when asked about this multiple overloading. --Tim May, aka Marcus Registrada (overloaded with Trade Mark, Turing Machine, and maybe other things...) ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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votelink - some discussions on Phil Z & ITAR
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A short time ago on cpunks someone posted this pointer: http://www.votelink.com/ as there was a vote and associated discussion forum being offered on the subject of Phil Z, the (somewhat leading - incorrectly leading) question: "Should Phil Zimmermann be prosecuted for allowing release of his PGP encryption program on the Internet?" (The comment on leading question being prompted of course by the fact that Phil did not himself export PGP, nor put it on the internet, nor even put it on US BBSes. The way I understand the story was that a friend of Phil's posted the code to US BBSes, and that an unknown 3rd party posted it from there to the Internet. He is being investigated for "making PGP available in a form in which it could be exported", something different to what is implied by the question. In this light I find it difficult to understand how he could be held to have "allowed it's release on the Internet", something which even the State Department investigation is not I think accusing him of. Several people pointed this out in the discussion forum. A more accurate phrasing would perhaps have been: "Should Phil Zimmermann be persecuted for writing PGP?" but then that is no doubt biased in the opposite direction.) An interesting vote in any case, and the balance so far is: YES: 000,172 | ABSTAIN: 000,096 | NO: 001,508 The abstainers I think could be partly explained by the worry that the question was leading or incorrect, as this opinion was voiced in the discussion forum. Also an interesting thread was generated in the (WWW hosted) discussion forum about the legal problems implied by me posting these two snippetts of code (which I posted to the forum earlier): #!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL $m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa 2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n)&~1)/2) ------------------ PGP.ZIP Part [024/713] ------------------- M!4HD";*K"$$=/!<29+_A`K9C/2+@"4<,5G(N0M`47K#'`T6"[&>M83PL=@FR 8ES%:6Q"(F9A#)K!&_;X4TXZ?(T]6(]`>$*.^]3K*K["(239)\@F MHA\"<%"5(%N->/2!'>X3XPU<0!Y,F``58RK(F;K#XD2,^`F[L09CT1>MH,7/ ------------------------------------------------------------- (hmm it seems that their WWW conversion chopped out some parts of it presumably due to it containing < and > symbols, so perhaps their fears were even further unfounded). They were alarmed by the implication that their WWW server now contained PGP code which they did not feel qualified to judge the implications, or correctness of. This prompted the posting to the forum of a rather worried sounding disclaimer by a votelink representative, to the effect that they were abiding by the Prodigy ruling, and so felt unable to remove the offending piece of ITAR breakage, and yet felt rather unconfortable with it's presence. I hastened to explain (after a certain cpunk kindly drew by attention to the discussion which I had neglected to check out after posting the 1st message) that the same dilema applies to numerous other forums, such as USENET news distribution sites, sci.crypt archives, cpunks archives, etc, etc. Generated some interesting discussion anyway. Adam

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e$: Reuters Smells the Coffee + (cyphergroupie confession)
by Alan Penny 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I might as well confess now and get it over with. Yes I am a cyphergroupie. I do write code, but it is not cypher-code, however I do get paid for it, which along with taking care of my family consumes most of my time. I have a sliver of time that I can devote to reading mailing lists and newsgroups from the internet. If you will indulge me, I write this letter for my own amusement and with the hope that it my spark some interest. > Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 10:05:35 -0400 > From: rah(a)shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) > Subject: e$: Reuters Smells the Coffee > > > --- begin forwarded text > > Mime-Version: 1.0 > Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 00:01:58 > From: infocker(a)megaweb.com > Sender: infocker(a)megaweb.com () (from unknown.aol.com 205.188.2.111) > To: www-buyinfo(a)allegra.att.com > Subject: Cyber Economy--Govts. Cannot Control > > Thought Mr. Hettinga might particularly appreciate this perspective. > > Jim Rapp > Alexandria, Virginia > "give me more info" > > As always, do not send the copyright police after me. > > > LONDON - Growing business on the Internet computer network could > allow companies and individuals to avoid taxes and build up a black > economy increasingly out of range of government intervention and > regulation, computer experts say. > [snip] > > "Electronic purses," loaded from banks down telephone lines, > could become the favored means of payment for fast, anonymous and > secure payments, with currencies of choice becoming more exotic, > depending on what is acceptable to dealmakers. Hmm, Lately I have seen an advertisement on TV from a credit card company (it might be CitiBank, I don't recall) describing a new style of credit card (Ringo Star is the spokesman for the card). Its name is "Private Issue". According to the ad you can pick your card design (the picture background of the card), and your billing date. After seeing this "e$: Reuters Smells the Coffee" post I wonder if the Bank/Credit-Card company is easing customers into thinking of private issue cash/credit as a Good-Thing(tm), or it may just be some sort of marketing gimick to sell more credit card. However, I do find the choice of name interesting - "Private Issue". The recent issue of Extropian Magazine (ya, they can be a little kooky, usually there is something interesting said in the magazine), featured a disussion of the privitazation of money (with references to Hayek's book The Denationalization of Money) and its "compatability" with ecash. When I first heard about the concept of privitizing money I thought it could not be done. But lately I have been wondering if it is possible to "sell the idea", especially after seeing the "Private Issue" ad. If you pitched ecash the right way it is possible that it could catch on. I think that the most important part of selling the private currency to small buisnesses would be if the ecash "works" just like credit cards. If any one out there is thinking of a real 'private issue'. I think that this is one of the most important design features for the potential private currency. What I mean by "works" like credit cards is not the transaction tracking bookeeping part, but the physical handling of the transaction at the point of sale. I envision a card reader machine that you run a magnetic strip card through. The machine read/writes the ecash card does what ever cryptographic steps necessary to complete the transaction and the card is handed back to the customer. Credits are transmited to the eash bank/currency issuer and the clerk hands the customer a recipt. It would also be good if the card reader machine could also process transactions with traditional credit cards. You could even have a logo sticker that you put on your shop window to show that you will accept that "new kind of credit-card". Is the bank/credit-card company laying the marketing ground work for a private currency based on ecash? If it is, it is a interesting way of selling the concept, making it a COOL RAD - avant garde thing to use. Other selling points of a private issue could be lack of inflation, better intrest rates and possible tax advantages. Of course the issuer would have to be trusworth (or at least more trusworth than the guverment!). Signing off, while shopping for Cayman Islands bank services... [-------------------------------------------------------------------------] [ Public pgp-key: email penny(a)tyrell.net with subject as 'send pgp-key' ] [ My opinions are mine. I have scored 90% on the the Turing Test. ] [ Alan Penny, penny(a)tyrell.net ]

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