December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Brand e-cash implementation?
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Brands has a web page at <URL:http://www.cwi.nl/~brands>. I don't know of any implementations of his technology. The last time I heard from him was early this year and at that time he apparently was still looking for backers. BTW he has a new paper out as of July 95, available above, which discusses some problems and attacks on some earlier papers. He had proposed a notion called "secret key certificates" in which some problems have been found. Basically a secret key certificate is just like a public key certificate (a signature by someone on a public key as in PGP) except that realistic-looking but ultimately worthless secret key certificates can be faked up (simulated) by anyone. No one can distinguish a fake secret key certificate from a real one. However, they are worthless because the faking process requires you to choose a random public key, and you can't figure out what the secret key is. Brands has (re)expressed his digital cash technology in terms of these secret key certificates. But Berry Schoenmakers of CWI has shown a way in which a faked-up secret key certificate can be used to spend a coin which was never withdrawn. However, to do so, you have to go through the withdrawal protocol in a particular incorrect way. You force the bank to act as an "oracle" for a certain discrete log problem when you do the withdrawal. The data you get from the incorrect withdrawal protocol allows you to spend the fake coin. So this is not actually a dangerous attack, because you in effect have to withdraw a coin in order to spend the fake one. You can't make any money from it. Still it was not anticipated and that is a bit worrisome. I'm not sure why Brands' various proofs of correctness (which are one of the big selling points of his technology) did not anticipate this attack. (In effect this is a different form of a blind signature than what Brands planned for, since you withdraw one thing and get another. I was thinking Brands should write this up under the title "Unanticipated Blinding for Signatures", a pun on Chaum's "Blinding for Unanticipated Signatures", one of his credential papers.) Brands has a workaround to prevent this attack, but it hurts the provability of his scheme. "A rigorous prove [sic] of the effectiveness of the measure may be hard to provide, though, since one must hereto prove that the CA cannot be used as an oracle to perform the cryptographic action in the showing protocol with respect to simulated public keys." So this may be a setback in Brands' attempts to get his thesis finished and accepted. As for the question of whether any digital cash scheme offers "true" anonymity, I think you have to be more specific. Virtually all cash advocates will claim that they can offer this. In the debate I had earlier with Lucky Green I argued that Chaum's ecash does offer a certain kind of anonymity. The extent to which it does not is largely not technical but a product of not allowing anonymous bank accounts. With anonymous accounts Chaum's technology offers as much anonymity as any system that I have studied. There is one technical problem with Chaum's ecash which Lucky mentioned, but I believe it applies to all systems. That is that the spender of the cash can "mark" it or at least recognize it when it is later deposited. If the spender wanted to attack the receiver of the money and it is deposited non-anonymously then this will be a problem. However, as we discussed here several months ago, Chaum's paper "Transferred Cash Grows in Size" from a recent Crypto proceedings shows that by colluding with the bank a payor of cash can recognize it at any later stage of the payment chain. So this kind of anonymity is very hard to achieve. Chaum's paper applied to off-line cash, though, so perhaps an online system could do it. But you'd have to blind the coins twice, once when they pass from bank to payor and once when they go from payor to payee, and I don't see how to do this. Hal Finney

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Re: not a flame please read and think about this
by anon-remailer＠utopia.hacktic.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

i know this is unpopular but i wish someone would respond the the points rather than flaming me. pat farrel is the only one of you with the balz to try to defend himself insead of attacking me. and you attack me for being anon. i love it. cypherpunks yea right. more of the indefensible. ive been keeping a list: janet renos cypherpunk heros: wei dai patents algorithms - for microsoft!!!!. that should fucking help us a lot. whos he gonna sue first? hey i think ill patent xor!!!! and give the patent to the nsa!!! according to sci.crypt mat blaze can prove that clipper has no back door. right. that sure helps us. david sternlights new hero. pat farrel signs up with the nsa to make the key escrow rules easier for us morons to understand. hey thanks. maybe theyll give you a nicer room in the concentration kamp. a whole shitload of socalled cypherpunks jumping over each other to help and defend him. brian davis trys to convinice us that key escrow isnt so bad (who signs your paycheck davie?????) that guy from rand corp tells us words of wisdom from robert morris the nsa guy as if we should write them down and pray three times a day to them. carl elison designs key escrow for tis and acts like hes one of us. bruce schneier is copyrighting crypt programs and threatining to sue people who use it. even phil zimmerman is selling the rights to pgp. what about all the people who contributed code (like me). not a dime for us because phil is famous and your not alowed to say anythingn bad about him. sorry i forgot phil is god. no one dares to complain. ask phil about me and when i asked about sharing profits from the code i conrtibuted. also about the deal with r.f... by the way i am not the anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com person who toold farel to shut up. that was someone else. i dont think anyone should shut up. thats my point. i think we should talk about this in the open. got it perry??? lets get back to being punks. fuck these traitors. do crypto and fuck the nsa. an116512(a)anon.penet.fi

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Re: Bizdos citizenship?
by Andrew.Spring＠ping.be 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >In correspondence with someone outside the US regarding ITAR regulations, the remark was made that Jim Bizdos was Greek and not a U.S. citizen. Is this statement in the same class as an Elvis sighting? Or if it is true, what impact would ITAR have on foreign nationals working for a US company involved with export restricted crypto? > >Please don't get carried away and turn this into a Net rumor. I'm just curious if anyone on the list can confirm or deny the citizenship comment. Jim Bidzos is a US Permanent Resident Alien and Greek citizen. He has a Green Card. It doesn't have any ITAR impact, since the ITAR term 'Foreign Person' doesn't include Green Carded Resident Aliens. It probably wouldn't have any impact anyway, since he's a business weenie, and not a software weenie. Now, if he had a _programmer_ that wasn't a US Citizen, that would be a-whole-nother kettle of fish. He's previously stated that he would become a US Citizen, if it were not for the fact that Greece would require him to give up his Greek (and hence his EC) citizenship. See Simson Garfinkle's book on PGP for more details. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMFMZFI4k1+54BopBAQGK7gP+Oq+FjqjCeQziC16Ryq64i1tXMAhV/jaX 86TBumss/GPpaVfLGtDS3FZARK9eTo4gVPTfABtvIa/u6QzZGL9zCT5z5nWT5QJ4 Koj5jnGsnNpXx3YGa1bJfZOI4ctkRovPWpyPa4jWOEooJz5UbvCCwGW/YoYMlvCs sQ//Qs7uDPs= =ARLj -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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not a flame please re
by damion.furi＠the-matrix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A|i know this is unpopular but i wish someone would respond the the points You're going out of your way to be an asshole and you're surprised that you're being attacked? If you don't want to be flamed, turn off the flamethrower, shut down the bulldozer, and use a reasonable tone. |rather than flaming me. pat farrel is the only one of you with the balz |to try to defend himself insead of attacking me. and you attack me for |being anon. i love it. cypherpunks yea right. Anonymous doesn't mean anything except that you don't have the "balz" to stand up for the beliefs you're espousing. A|wei dai patents algorithms - for microsoft!!!!. that should |fucking help us a lot. whos he gonna sue first? If the patents aren't valid, they won't stick. What are you bitching about? A|according to sci.crypt mat blaze can prove that clipper has no back |door. right. that sure helps us. david sternlights new hero. Maybe it doesn't. Not that it matters. The only reasonable working assumption for Clipper (or anything like it) is that it _does_ have at least one back door and that it will be abused. What's new about this? Again, what are you bitching about? Sternlight's an idiot, use your head. A|pat farrel signs up with the nsa to make the key escrow rules easier |for us morons to understand. hey thanks. maybe theyll give you a |nicer room in the concentration kamp. <shrug> I'm not going to participate in an escrow no matter how easily the rules are understood. I'm not going to participate for any reason. But I can feel that way without jumping down Farrell's throat over it. After all, he's not my spokesman. A|a whole shitload of socalled cypherpunks jumping over each other to help and |defend him. That's not what I saw. I saw a whole shitload of cypherpunks jumping over each other attacking you, not defending him. A|bruce schneier is copyrighting crypt programs and |threatining to sue people who use it. So? His programs, his rules. If you used one of my programs without a license, I'd sue you, too. A|even phil zimmerman is selling the rights to pgp. what about all the people w | contributed code (like me). not a dime for us because phil is famous |and your not alowed to say anythingn bad about him. sorry i forgot phil is go |no one dares to complain. ask phil about me and when i asked about sharing |profits from the code i conrtibuted. also about the deal with |r.f... You weren't expecting money when you contributed code. What changed? A|lets get back to being punks. fuck these traitors. do crypto and fuck the nsa Random defiance won't get you anywhere you want to be. :----------:----------:----------:----------:----------:----------:----- : furi(a)the-matrix.com | pgp-public-key(a)demon.co.uk | LIVE LION ALERT : 2.6.2 1024/C1225CE1 | 38 11 7C 59 FB F3 7C C0 F7 E9 67 1F AF B8 2D 94 PGP: When it's none of their damned business. --- þ SPEED 2.00 #2640 þ

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Nice Guys
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

NY Times, Sept. 10, 1995. The Decline of the Nice-Guy Quotient By Daniel Goleman Contrary to conventional wisdom, nice guys do finish first. The trouble is, nice guys are harder and harder to find. Amid the agonizing over standardized intelligence tests comes a new problem to worry about. Psychologists seeking a broader measure of intelligence, one that accounts for the personality traits that seem to predict success better than IQ alone, have discovered that a newly minted virtue they call "emotional intelligence" is declining as well. A recent study done at Bell Laboratories the high-tech think tank near Princeton N.J., found that the most valued and productive engineers -- at least among electrical engineers working in teams of up to 150 people -- were not those with the highest IQs, the highest academic credentials or the best scores on achievement tests. Instead, the stars were those whose congeniality put them at the heart of the informal communication networks that would spring up during times of crisis or innovation. When these likeable engineers hit a snag and E-mailed for help, they got an answer instantly; when others less gifted in interpersonal realms sent similar messages, they sometimes waited days or weeks for a reply. The standouts excelled in rapport, empathy, cooperation, persuasion and the ability to build consensus among people. The new term for these traits is emotional intelligence, which, in addition to the social graces, includes the ability to read one's own feelings, to control one's own impulses and anger, to calm oneself down and to maintain resolve and hope in the face of setbacks. To predict the success of a financial analyst or geophysicist, IQ is still crucial. But within a pool of high-lQ people, those with high emotional intelligence will have an extra competitive edge. Emotional intelligence, like self-knowledge and personal charisma, has long been seen as ineffable, more the stuff of poets and philosophers than psychometricians. And yet, despite all that, the measuring has begun. In the mid-1970s, and again in the late 1980s, Thomas Achenbach, a psychologist at the University of Vermont, had thousands of American children assessed by their parents and teachers on a behavioral checklist. He found that over the course of that decade and a half, America's children, on average, had become more anxious and depressed, more impulsive and mean, more demanding and disobedient, more hot-tempered and aggressive -- and not just in beleaguered urban neighborhoods. The study found growing emotional deficits even among the children of the wealthiest suburbs. Although the scores were worst for the poorest children, the rate of decline was the same for all, privileged and impoverished alike. Apparently, students continue to be receptive even into their teen years. Neuroscientists have found that the centers in the prefrontal lobes that control emotional impulse are among the last parts of the brain to reach full maturity, sometime in mid- to late adolescence. Now, at last, from the emotional literacy front there is some promising news: Children in the courses show marked improvements in the ability to control their impulses, show empathy, cooperate with others, manage anger and anxiety, focus on a task, pursue goals and resolve conflicts. Delinquency, fights and drug use drop. And there is an added bonus: achievement test scores rise too. ------

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Re: Information
by scuttle＠alias.cyberpass.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:00 PM 9/1/97 EDT, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote... >Dave K-P <k.p(a)snet.net> writes: > >> > > > Information, please! >> > > Dont go swimming on a full stomach. >> > Don't "escrow" your keys. >> Don't take advice from strangers. >Don't ask, don't tell. Don't eat yellow snow.

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Re: not a flame please read and think about this
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anon writes: > i know this is unpopular but i wish someone would respond the the > points rather than flaming me. Fair enough, try these... > wei dai patents algorithms - for microsoft!!!!. that should > fucking help us a lot. whos he gonna sue first? Shame it got patented, one more patent. Patents are a mess, ick! > hey i think ill patent xor!!!! and give the patent to the nsa!!! I was kind of wandering if it would be necessary to patent something just to ensure someone else did patent *your* idea, if you came up with one. Or can you publish, and then say that's prior art, so no one else can go patent your idea. Otherwise it would be kind of cool for cpunks to be holding a few patents themselves, allowing free use, just to stop some "hmm lets see what we can patent this week", and "lets patent their work cos they haven't yet" types stealing stuff, and disabling a whole section of work. Chaum's got lots of nice technology, but his patenting and $150k price tag might not be doing him favours. Unless he really does manage to pull some big banks or something. I reckon the netscape model is a good one, give stuff away to the educational lot, sell things cheap, have free demo versions, get the standard first before charging a ransom. Guess he knows what he's doing tho. I hope so for the sake of the future of anon ecash. Be a shame if some of these lame things which claim to be ecash but are really checks with full audit logs, or credit card transactions in disguise become the defacto standard. Problem is no one stands much of a chance unless a radically new method of ecash can be had, he has his patents cover blind sigs? I guess they don't cover blind sigs in general because Brands has applied for patents on his improved blinding techniques. > according to sci.crypt mat blaze can prove that clipper has no back > door. right. that sure helps us. david sternlights new hero. That interpretation was argued. But it's interesting anyway, if a MKCS is equivalent to a PK, and PKs are computationally expensive, and clipper chips are cheap, well hey maybe that's what it does mean, and they wouldn't want to have a weak backdoor in the sense of a weak algorithm, as it may come to light some day, similarly eventually the thing would surely get reverse-engineered, they wouldn't want to be caught out, I'd have thought. They don't need that for a backdoor, they've already got the front door - a copy of all the keys. > pat farrel signs up with the nsa to make the key escrow rules easier > for us morons to understand. hey thanks. maybe theyll give you a > nicer room in the concentration kamp. I found it real informative to have a first hand report of what was going on. I don't see anything wrong with going along to the meeting just to throw your spanner in the works, sounds like the govt types didn't have an easy time of it. They're clearly asking for things which are unacceptable to industry, and cpunks alike. A lot of the stuff Pat wrote up about the NIST meeting sounded like the majority of the attenders were trying to convert a government request for GAK into a CKE discussion. Would be a cool switch. > a whole shitload of socalled cypherpunks jumping over each other to > help and defend him. Well you did ask :-) > brian davis trys to convinice us that key escrow isnt so bad (who > signs your paycheck davie?????) Not sure that there was a motive attached (I could be wrong?), seemed like a provoking question to me. Got some interesting replies. > that guy from rand corp tells us words of wisdom from robert morris > the nsa guy as if we should write them down and pray three times a day > to them. I always kind of like to hear what ex-NSA types are reported as saying, it's quite fun because you never know if they are still on the payroll and feeding you a story for ulterior motives, or if they are making a statement which they think is to their advantage to scare you, or if they really are ex-NSA and are just saying what they can, being helpful, without getting in hot water with the secrecy stuff they have to agree to. > carl elison designs key escrow for tis and acts like hes one of us. Designs CKE, CKE is fine by me, it's voluntary, and just the software equivalent of having a spare key for your own use. GAK is the evil one. > bruce schneier is copyrighting crypt programs and > threatining to sue people who use it. Let's tackle one thing at a time ok? Lots of folks would agree patents are bad news, at least the state of them in the US with idiots patenting XORed cursors, etc. Clost to unanimous on GAK being evil incarnate. Copyrights, well GPL, ILF, RMS says programs should be free. Indeed long term copyrights look like endangered species, if crypto anarchy has it's say. But it's a tricky one because a lot of people make their money writing applications, and they don't want to vote themselves out of a job. If crypto anarchy long term proves copyrights to be outmoded, well the market will change. > even phil zimmerman is selling the rights to pgp. what about all the > people who contributed code (like me). not a dime for us because > phil is famous and your not alowed to say anythingn bad about > him. sorry i forgot phil is god. no one dares to complain. ask phil > about me and when i asked about sharing profits from the code i > conrtibuted. also about the deal with r.f... Wouldn't be much to go around if all the contributers got a share, there were lots of contributers. He's the one taking the rap anyway, and the guy who made it all possible. > lets get back to being punks. Cpunks write code, so lets do it! And lobby, and analyse govt polices, and educate about crypto, and attend govt run white-washes (NIST etc) to register their protest. > fuck these traitors Nah. Crypto anarchy and all that, it's an anarchy, you ain't going to find 2 cpunks with exact identical view points on all topics. Most of the people you complained of to my understanding have done a lot of work for the cpunk causes, as well as their implied copyright/patent crimes. > do crypto and fuck the nsa. Sounds cool to me. So whats the plan of action? People have different ideas, but they're all fighting for the same cause. Down with GAK, being the #1 target at the moment. Privacy from governments, scaling down of hugely bloated governments, malign cancerous growths that they are becoming these days, freedom is what it's all about. Adam

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Re: You really do want to volunteer, don't you?
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:38 PM 9/1/97 -0700, Tim May wrote: >This was an actual case, heard by the Supreme Court several years back. Bus >passengers were given the opportunity to volunteer, as noted. Failure to >volunteer was construed as probable cause that contraband was present. > >(No, I don't know the name of the case. My recollection is that it took >place in Florida or one of the Carolinas. Nor do I recollect how the >Supremes decided the case... This sounds like _Florida v. Bostick_, 501 U.S. 429 (1991), on the web at <http://www.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&navby=case&vol=501&invol =429>. Bill Stewart's summary of the case looked like a good one to me. -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles(a)netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |

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Re: not a flame please read and think about this
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>I was kind of wandering if it would be necessary to patent something >just to ensure someone else did patent *your* idea, if you came up >with one. Nope. >Or can you publish, and then say that's prior art, so no one else can >go patent your idea. This works. IBM used to have publish a monthly journal (I forget the name, it came out of one of their Yorktown labs) that did exactly this kind of thing for exactly this kind of reason. ACtually, they wrote about stuff that they thought was 5-10 years away. >> even phil zimmerman is selling the rights to pgp. what about all the >> people who contributed code (like me) ... . ask phil >> about me and when i asked about sharing profits from the code i >> conrtibuted. also about the deal with r.f... Mr/Ms. Anonymous is lying. His/her name appears nowhere in the credits, and his/her code appears nowhere in any PGP release. Don't waste any neurons on it. /r$

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Re: You really do want to volunteer, don't you?
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:12 AM -0700 9/2/97, Greg Broiles wrote: >At 11:38 PM 9/1/97 -0700, Tim May wrote: >>This was an actual case, heard by the Supreme Court several years back. Bus >>passengers were given the opportunity to volunteer, as noted. Failure to >>volunteer was construed as probable cause that contraband was present. >> >>(No, I don't know the name of the case. My recollection is that it took >>place in Florida or one of the Carolinas. Nor do I recollect how the >>Supremes decided the case... > >This sounds like _Florida v. Bostick_, 501 U.S. 429 (1991), on the web at ><http://www.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&navby=case&vol=501&invol >=429>. > >Bill Stewart's summary of the case looked like a good one to me. Thanks, I guess, to all of you who sent further information on this case. I'm chagrinned at this repetitive pattern, though: all it takes is a "I don't remember" for a thread to be completely dominated by helpful comments, clarifications, etc. (Ditto for any question even remotely impinging on financial or tax advice, which is why I almost always include requests that helpful tax advice not be sent to me. I can't seem to mention tax issues without a bunch of helpful souls sending me their ideas on how to beat taxes by incorporating myself in Andorra and then hiring myself as a consultant to the Andorran embassy in California, or whatever.) One strategy I've considered is to never, never, ever admit that I don't know something, as this will forestall the corrections, expansions, clarifications, and citings. Or to express things more elliptically. It pays to be Young. --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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