December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Collection of personal info
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:46 PM 9/7/95 -0400, dmandl(a)panix.com wrote: >> And once the interface improves... > >...I won't have to deal with the inefficiencies of real sex, live >music performances, or (non-virtual) world travel ever again. > >> Actually, the creation of separate "spaces" that can only be entered with >> your (each person's) permission will have a big impact on life in the real >> world. Dave. Sorry you didn't catch the implied change of tone in the above. I meant to show a switch from Space Cadet rhetoric about the nets to a more realistic view. >> And once the interface improves... >> Actually, the creation of separate "spaces" that can only be entered with >> your (each person's) permission These separate spaces won't wipe out the Real World (used with permission) but they will influence it as a form of private property that is self enforcing neither dependent on force for protection nor capable of being penetrated by force. This is a BIG THING. You can't live in it yet but you will certainly be able to trade digital goods and services there and stash digital goods (work product, databases, etc.). Having a place that is under your exclusive control has enormous practical and psychological implications. Think of the change that occurred when peasants came to be able to own land. Cyberspace contains spaces that can be cheaply created, individually owned, and free of confiscation. And since the bulk of the wealth of OECD countries is non-physical (consisting of various forms of ownership rights and "choses in action") that wealth can be protected cryptographically. >I've got to tell you, Duncan, this kind of rhetoric pushes me over to >the luddite side more every day. > >No flame intended--just one man's opinion. Don't you like the idea of a "place" that's yours alone? It's not dangerous (to you). It increases your choices. Your power. DCF "You don't have to be nice to nation states you meet on the way up if you're not coming back down."

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Are booby-trapped computers legal?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(I've changed the name of this thread.) At 2:30 AM 9/6/95, Lucky Green wrote: >I am wondering about the legalities of booby trapped computer equipment. >Would it be legal if a clear warning to the fact was posted on the >hardware? There are two types of "booby traps" to consider: * Type 1 Booby Trap: a shotgun is placed inside a home, set to fire if and when a burglar enters. Or an electrified region of a room is set to "get energized" when an intruder enters. These are "surprises" and are canonical booby traps. These have been found to be illegal in several court cases. (I'm not a lawyer, but I've been reading about them for 20 years. Famous cases where a burglar sued, and won, because he was injured when breaking into a house.) * Type 2 Booby Trap: electrified perimeter fences. So long as these are adequately marked ("If you touch this fence, you will probably die"), and are not public nuisances where children and pets will inadvertently validate Darwin's theory, these are--I think--legal. There may be license fees required, to build an electrified fence, but I think it is possible to build a lethal voltage electrified fence on one's property. Thus, I suspect it is fully legal to build an electrified fence around one's PC, providing suitable warnings are included. I would not call the second type a real booby trap, though some courts might, depending. A properly labelled electrified fence seems legal, on one's own property, but may not be. And certainly I think any explosive-rigged system is illegal, for explosives reasons if not for booby trap reasons. I know of no case law on this, and suspect that if an FBI agent were to be electrocuted or blown up upon trying to open/use/disconnect the PC, even with clear warnings, that a prosecution would happen. Results are unclear (to me). (I think that if an FBI agent were to be electrocuted while climbing on a clearly labelled electrified fence, no prosecution would result.) Of course, if a PC were to be clearly labelled as being rigged, then steps could presumably be taken to defuse the arrangement. >Interesting side note: a few months ago, several hundred 5 gallon >containers of insecticide were stolen from the lot of an agricultural >supply dealer here in California. The incident made a small note in the SF >Chronicle. It was mentioned that the FBI is taking part in the >investigation. > >What wasn't mentioned was that this insecticide is an ideal precursor to >various forms of neuro toxins, namely Tabun and Soman, two types of nerve >gas so vicious and toxic that even Hitler refused to approve their use. I >predict that eventful times are just around the corner. As Lucky knows, I live out in the country. I agree that some "muckers" (R.I.P. John Brunner) are likely to mount assaults on urban centers. Bad news for some. But then the good news is that the threat of nuclear annihilation has all but gone away completely, and that cancels out an awful lot of the minor bad news items the scribblers keep telling us are so awful. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Kerberos v5's experience with ASN.1
by Theodore Ts'o 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- To: Cypherpunks Lite <cp-lite(a)comsec.com> Date: Sat, 2 Sep 1995 13:55:38 -0400 From: jis(a)mit.edu (Jeffrey I. Schiller) However, the problem with ASN.1 isn't its waste of space (which actually isn't that bad for a mechanism for encoding arbitrary objects). While I won't argue about the rest of Jeff's note about the use of ASN.1 being a mistake, I do want to point out that certain ASN.1 types are in fact very wasteful of space. Most notable of these is the ASN.1 Generalized Time --- which encodes the a timestamp in ASCII. ASN.1 GeneralizedTime therefore requires 17 bytes to encode, an over four-fold increase in the amount of space needed to store a time, compared with a 4 byte representation of "number of seconds since 1970". This is deadly in a protocol which has to store lots of timestamps, which is the case in Kerberos V5. We could have gotten around this problem by merely storing an integer whenever we needed to store a timestamp, instead of using the ASN.1 abstract type. Then it would have only taken 6 bytes (ASN.1 adds a 2-byte overhead for each object which you store). - Ted -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.2, an Emacs/PGP interface iQCVAwUBME9xO0QVcM1Ga0KJAQGiQwQAhSu4WpeVZ+hsN+o+NvWMwP8JK0GojhuI vWE1M3iIZttz4iMEbsziZ1KzWlkFTL8AKVWkzDAZ8t5lNMis9qObCfaQPQkKTLwJ UV20GjebckOzFx7Rp9OPDDI536cepvcjFN0cQkWtmiW2KP04TU9zr4caD4cfozDJ XYGZavYmpBQ= =9YUm -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Monkey Wrench into the works
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:54 AM 8/28/97 -0400, David Jablon wrote: > >James, > >You're rebuttal to Myron's message is simplistically >elegant, but just as wrong as the original posting. ... >On 8/27/97, James A. Donald replied paraphrasing Ben Franklin, >(who really knew very little about cryptography): >>What one man knows, nobody knows. >>What two men know, everyone knows. >>Shared secrets just don't work. Perhaps a more accurate, though less clean statement would be. What YOU ALONE knows, nobody knows. What YOU and ONE other person, EVERYONE MIGHT know. Each additional person who is in on the secret opens up the possibility of leaks. Although I deleted it for space, you mentioned Doctors. A lot of people are afraid to tell thier doctors everything that the doctors need to know to do thier jobs because the patients are afraid that, as illegal as it may be, the patients medical history may end up in the hands of insurers, employers, prospective employers, and numerous other people who may want it but shouldn't have it. My dad was at a seminar where a new Scholastic Aptitude test was being introduced. He or someone asked if this information was going to be used to rate the schools. He was assured that no, it wasn't for that. A few years later, Oklahoma schools were being rated on the average score on that test, after eliminating those in chapter 1 programs. My dad's beef was that the smaller schools couldn't afford to maintain some of those programs and would thus, on average, score lower than they should. The example of a secret getting out, however, is clear. The "secret" was given to the wrong sub-department, and not by the schools.

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Re: GAK
by terrell＠sam.neosoft.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Sun, 3 Sep 1995 21:25:26 -0400 (EDT) >From: Brian Davis <bdavis(a)thepoint.net> >Subject: Re: GAK >On Fri, 1 Sep 1995, Timothy C. May wrote: > >> At 10:56 PM 9/1/95, Buford Terrell wrote: >> >> >If you've ever watched Not_at_all_Funny Home Videos or any of the >> >American Urinal school of tabloid television, you soon start feeling >> >that the real threat to privacy is not the guvmint, but all of >> >the yoyos with their little cam corders running around pointing them >> >at people. >> > >> >Security cameras in ATMS and at airline ticket counters do more >> >to threaten you privacy than do FIBBIE wiretaps, and PGP won't >> >protect you from them. (and usually neither will the courts). >> >> I absolutely agree with this, though this doesn't mean I'll stop worrying >> about the government's plans for key escrow (GAK), about limits on key >> lengths, or about other efforts to thwart strong security. > >I, of course, know of the "dislike" of GAK here. I am curious to know, >however, if the "dislike" is because government would have access under >any circumstances or if the primary worry is that government will cheat >and get access when most would agree that they shouldn't (either by the >judge "cheating" or a TLA stealing it). > >In other words ... if it took agreement by a review board composed of >non-LEA members of this list, would the escrow be acceptable?? > >EBD > In my case, it's simply a matter of principle: the government has no right to know what I'm saying. Search warrants may allow them to get to "things" that I have, but the First and Fifth amendments make words sacred. If the government can eavesdrop on my conversation, then my speech is no longer free. A review board consisting of cypherpunks has no more right to listen to my private conversations than does the FBI, so I would not agree to that proposal either. --buford

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Re: ASN.1 and Kerberos version 5
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Sat, 2 Sep 1995 13:55:38 -0400 >From: jis(a)mit.edu (Jeffrey I. Schiller) >I'll say it. I was the person who pushed for the use of ASN.1 in Kerberos >version 5. I had this disease at the time that made me think that ASN.1 was >a good idea. I got better, unfortunately we have been living with the >results of my braino for quite some time now... poor Ted. Jeff, I'm collecting lists of ASN.1 problems as well as better solutions. If you'd care to contribute.... Otherwise, I'll post the results when they're firmed up. I got some *great* material from Burt Kaliski at the P1363 meeting and that needs to be folded in, so I know it's not soup yet. - Carl

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fast modular reduction
by Wei Dai 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

During the Crypto' 95 Rump Session, Josh Benaloh of Microsoft Corp. presented a new modular reduction algorithm that he and I developed. It is faster than the Montgomery method by about 10 to 15%, and is more general and easier to understand. The central idea is that it is easy to reduce a number to an equivalent one that's just one "block" (machine word) longer than the modulus, by repeatedly subtracting off the highest block, and adding back something that's equivalent, but smaller. In the following pseudocode, B is the radix in which the numbers are represented (2^32 for a 32-bit machine), n is the length of modulus in blocks, U is B^(n+1) mod the modulus, X is the number to be reduced, k+1 is the length of X, and Y is the result. 1. Y = X 2. For i from k down to n+1, repeat steps 3 and 4 3. Y = Y - Y[i] * B^i + Y[i] * U * B^(i-n-1) 4. If Y >= B^i, then Y = Y - B^i + U * B^(i-n-1) Tricks can be used to eliminate step 4, and to reduce Y to n blocks using one single precision division, and n more single precision multiplications. The algorithm will hopefully be written up more completely soon. Wei Dai

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Re: Collection of personal info
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:15 PM 9/6/95, Rob Lowry wrote: >Beyond having the willies.. This is more than just scary, it feels like >rape when you think about it for awhile. Everything you buy, on credit, is >recorded and sold to someone who wants to know your secrets. Everytime >you make a banking transaction, someone is watching and compiling the >data. > >Is there any legal recourse to get your name removed from the sellable list? >Or is it too late and we can not save even the vestiges of our privacy? Rob, I have entered this posting of yours into the "BlackNet Dossier Service" I operate. Sounds creepy and scary, eh? Well, it's part of freedom. The "legal recourse" you mention about having your name taken off lists kept by people or agencies ultimately involves visits by the authorities to private homes (like mine) to verify that the data are being "properly collected" and that no "illegal or incorrect data" are being stored. If someone wants something kept secret, the solution is to keep it secret. If someone doesn't want their postings going into my 220 megabyte file of postings, they shouldn't send them to me. Or they should adopt a digital pseudonym, unlinkable to their True Name or any other nyms they may have. Things are much simpler and less stressful when you don't look to the law to fix things. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Collection of personal info
by dr261＠cleveland.Freenet.Edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>letting it happen, and using cash instead of credit, is the smart answer I'm somewhat surprized at how much of an issue this is. The federal government prints up nice green paper for us to pay for things with. It's annonymous (to a large extent), univerally accepted (most of the time), fairly untracably (unless you really want to), easily available, doesn't collect interest, free to use, etc. No one is forcing anyone to use credit cards, etc.. Then again, being a kid, I have never bought anything with anything other than cash on the spot... -- Tobin Fricke (aka LightRay) The Digital Forest BBS (714)586-6142 dr261(a)kanga.ins.cwru.edu KE6WHF Amateur Radio, 1:103/925 fido

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Hey
by XwitTDis96＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

SUBCRIBE-ME

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