December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Cypherpunks Lite
by hshubs＠BIX.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Would the person who does this, or someone who can point me at him, contact me via e-mail please?

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Nuke 'em 'till they glow (8)
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My contribution to the collaborative future fiction: "The True Story of the InterNet" by Bubba Rom Dos, et al. Enjoy, Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc` The True Story of the InterNet Part III Chapter 8 Nuke 'em 'till they glow Jonathan decadently lounged on the worn sofa swigging Bubbas special reserve straight out of the bottle. He burped and tossed the empty bottle to join the pile of kipple heaped in the corner -- an antique pentium-II 400 with it's case off, a huge heap of hydrocubes, a couple of busted flatscreen monitors, some empty pizza boxes. Leaning against the wall lay Bubba Rom Dos, snoring quietly, and clutching a half empty bottle of his special reserve. Jonathan lay back trying to brainstorm a direction to explore to find an exploitable bug in the Hewlett-Packard Fabasoft faba-code verifier. He was fast running out of ideas. The desire to find an exploit had arisen earlier that day when Bubba Rom Dos had tossed him a hydrocube which contained a particularly interesting deskfab 6 file. The file was named "nuke.fab". He couldn't rightly see where Bubba could have come into possession of the file, but Bubba wasn't too forthcoming on the subject, so Jonathan had contented himself with examining the contents of the 'cube. He had quickly become engrossed with the contents. Jonathan had a selection of bootleg PICS fabrication policy files, ranging from `under 18 months' (for construction of soft cudly toys with no easily swallowable parts) up to `military grade IV' (good for things like Forestry Commision SWAT team issue rocket launchers, and stealth helicopters etc, if you had a 10m3 volume fabricator and a few GigaWatts on your electricity meter). A good indication that the file was the _real thing_ was that it failed the faba-code verifier with even military grade IV PICS fabrication rating policy file -- the verifier refused to 'fab the file because it rightly diagnosed that it would result in the formation of fissionable material! (How Jonathan came to be in possession of a military grade IV PICS fabrication policy file is a story for another time). Now Jonathan also had a hacked fabber -- it was hacked to completely by-pass the PICS policy file rating system. This in itself was supposed to be impossible, but Jonathan had found that you could replace the FAPI module signature verifying key embedded in the flipper policy chip by placing a piece of sticky tape over pin 5 of the smart card contact and brute forcing the LEAF field which for some reason seemed to only use a measily 16 bit checksum, which took all of half an hour to brute force. You'd have thought they would have learned and increased the checksum size after Matt Blaze brute forced the clipper chip LEAF in the tessera cards. But in fairness, Jonathan's attack had one extra wrinkle: the sticky tape. Normally the flipper chip wrote a count of how many smart cards with failed checksums were inserted, and alerted the forces of darkness after 3 false tries, but the sticky tape took care of that. Jonathan supposed the designers had not considered that someone might place sticky tape over pin 5, the pin which was used to signal an insertion of the smart card. With that hack completed and the flipper policy chip instruction code manual which the cypherpunks had obtained dumpster diving in the Mykotronics dumpster, he was in business. He had then blown a new EPROM with a `customized' firmware, the policy chip accepted the `Circle of Eunuchs' FAPI module signature on the hacked EPROM, because there was now nestling comfortably at the heart of the NSA designed `tamper-proof' fabber flipper chip a DSS key which read: Circle of Eunuchs <coe(a)dev.null> The original key had read: NSA FAPI signature key <dirnsa(a)nsa.mil> So much for NSA security, Jonathan chuckled at the rememberance of that exploit. Anyway, for amusement value, and 1.3 MegaWatts of electricity later (the cowboy had given him a hacked power board account -- phree electricity, wheee!), Jonathan's industrial grade Hewlett-Packard deskfab 9GSII fabber had produced a nice matt black suitcase. Jonathan watched the instructional 3d-mpeg file included on the hydrocube, and spent a good hour in awe playing with the controls on the suitcase. Satiated with knowledge now that he knew how to operate all of it's modes, he was lying comatose on the sofa wracking his brains trying to overcome the next hurdle -- how to construct the perfect way to nuke washington DC. His plan so far was to spam each of the `targets' with a word99 macro virus (thanks Bill Gates) in a document describing his `SFr 10,000,000 campaign contribution' which automatically spooled a mildly modified "nuke.fab" for fabrication, and turned off the fabbers status leds through a Hewlett-Packard firmware bug. Jonathan had all this down pat. (The modification to "nuke.fab" in case you were wondering was to put the suitcase in detonate with no bypass mode, with an initial count down of 30 seconds). The problem was -- all those congress-critters were bound to be running on a PICS fabrication rating below `national-security-emergency', and so the faba-code verifier would refuse to load the code. Worse still the non-hacked HP deskfab models after mandatory GAF (Goverment Access to Fabbers) was introduced would narc out the owner to the Feds within minutes, thereby alerting the dark forces as to what the plan was. The wall clock now read 3.30am. Jonathan dozed off to sleep dreaming of glow-in-the-dark congress-critters. ... "fifty-eight ... fifty-seven ... " Jonathan woke grogily to see a group of people huddled over a suitcase. In the middle of the group was Bubba Rom Dos grandiosely counting down, in between swigging from his bottle of special reserve and pressing buttons randomly on the suitcases control panel. Priscilla and Alexis were peering closely at the pretty flatscreen status display, making sage comments as to what the buttons might do, for all the world as if they were playing a video game. Jonathan came to his senses and screamed at the top of his lungs: "Nooooo!" and sprang to his feet. He almost fell over again as the effect of moving that quickly so soon after waking up hit him, his head swimming. All heads turned to face him. "Yaieeeeeeee!" yelled Jonathan, as he rudely barged his way to the suitcase control pannel, and began franticallly pushing buttons. After a short panic attack, he calmed down sufficiently to notice that the display read "no override". Having absorbed the entire instruction 3d-mpeg, Jonathan knew what that meant. The LCD display read 50 seconds. Bubba swigged another gulp of his special reserve, and said innocently "What's the problem?" Jonathan looked fit to explode, his pulse was racing and his head hurt horribly, "It's a nuke!" he screamed hoarsely, "and you've just armed it, and I can't disarm it, and you've got ..." his eyes tore to the display "45 seconds until you're vapourised." Priscilla was already running for the door screaming. Bubba belched loudly, and looked slightly ill. Alexis gulped and said "What now?". Bubba tosssed the empty bottle of special reserve on to the growing pile of kipple in the corner, and pulled a fresh bottle from inside his rain mac. "Lets think rationally here" said Bubba, calmly, pouring himself a shot of special reserve, "can't you um disable it, or um, un-fabricate it or something". A flash of inspiration hit Jonathan, seeping through his slowly waking brain (he was not a morning person). He flashed a grin to Bubba and walloped him hard between the shoulder-blades shouting, "You're a genius!" Jonathan then hugged Alexis lifting her off the ground. Bubba looked puzzled but pleased. Alexis looked a little worried. Jonathan looked at the display pannel on the suitcase "35 seconds". `No problem' he thought. He slammed the suitcase shut and practically threw it in to the HP deskfab 9GSII fabrication bay, and slammed the door shut. Then he grabbed the keyboard, and began typing at around 100 wpm. After a deathly long pause where the terabyte hydro drive light flickered intermittently, the fab drive hummed to life. The lights dimmed with the sudden increase in power consumption. A few seconds later the drive light blinked out, and the deskfab fell silent. "That," said Jonathan, stabbing the screen -rw-r--r-- 1 jon users 7516192768 Oct 4 10:12 tmp00001.fab where the words `tmp00001.fab' were emblazoned in green writing on a black background, "is an armed nuke". "Now, where was I?" mused Jonathan, and then remembering, rounded on Bubba, "Uh yeah, just where exactly did you find nuke.fab?" Bubba made an expansive gesture with his hands, and poured himself another shot. Throwing back the shot, Bubba said: "I got it off the web,", and began searching through the pockets to his rain mac, eventually pulling a scrumpled scrap of paper from his pocket, and handing it to Jonathan. "A kindly elderly gentleman with a 9mm uzi gave me this address," he explained. Jonathan looked at the badly scrumpled scrap of paper, and was just able to make out: http://jya.eternity/cryptome/nuke.fab Jonathan looked puzzled, the initials "jya" looked vaguely familiar to him from his reading of old cypherpunks posts. Ah, yes, it was that Architect guy, John Young, who kept getting into trouble over hosting materials that the feds didn't like. So he was using the eternity service now. Now the panic was over Jonathan resumed his position on the couch, allowing himself to recover from the previous nights hacking session. "Say Bubba," Jonathan said with his eyes closed, "do you have any ideas of how to by-pass the Fabasoft faba-code verifier on an HP deskfab?" Bubba finished his mouthful of strong spirits, "Huh? Wassat you say?" Jonathan explained to Bubba and Alexis the events of the night before and of the plan to nuke washington DC, and party-way through Priscilla returned, looking a bit sheepish for deserting them at such a crucial time. "So," said Alexis, "You used the deskfab to copy the armed nuke, hence disabling it?" "Sure, that's a standard function", said Jonathan, "it's a bit like a 3d photocopier, only you can set it to unfabricate the object being copied at the same time." "Well," pressed Alexis, miles ahead of Jonathan, and not needing the mini-lecture on deskfab functionality, "couldn't you copy a deskfab?" Jonathan opened his eyes from his inert position on the couch. "Uh, I dunno, yeah I suppose so...." Then Jonathan saw the light, a second time that day: "Heh, yeah, okay!" he enthused, "that's a cool idea Alexis." Alexis and Jonathan excitedly started unplugging the deskfab from the unix box. "Carry these," said Jonathan and thrust upon Bubba a laptop, the hydrocube containing tmp00001.fab, and a bundle of interface leads. Jonathan and Alexis proceeded to lug the desk fab out back, and down into the basement. Bubba and Priscilla followed puzzled as to what the excitement was. In the basement was an ancient looking Sun unix box. The screen was one of those huge glass tube affairs. Beside it sat what looked like a refridgerator with clunky looking dials on it. Jonathan powered up the Sun box. Suprisingly enough it actually booted, and 10 minutes later, after an agonisingly slow process where it went through checking (fscking) all it's ancient hard drives, which wirred and clicked noisly, it came up, and the prompt said: Welcome to toad.com login: Without hesitation, Jonathan logged in as `gnu', and immediately typed in a password. He was in. Bubba and Priscilla exchanged glances. Jonathan explained, "I shoulder surfed the password when John logged in when I was at the physical cypherpunks meet in my grandpas study all those years ago." "This," he said patting the minifridge sized machine humming noisily in front of them, "is his old machine, `toad.com', old home to the cypherpunks list." Next Jonathan lugged his deskfab into the refrigerator affair, which apparently was an antique deskfab, sat the lap top on top of it, and hooked the laptop up to the deskfab, and inserted the tmp00001.fab hydrocube into the laptops hyro drive. Then he wandered off in search of a portable power source. He came back lugging an emergency power module `liberated' from the electric company at some point in the past. He hooked-up the power module to the HP deskfab. "Now," said Jonathan, "the timing on this is a bit delicate", I think there's only around 20 seconds left on the nuke. Jonathan set the laptop on time delay to instruct the deskfab to refabricate the primed nuke with 20 seconds left to pop time, but not to start doing that for around 1 minute. Then he slammed the refrigerator sized fabricator door shut, and began typing in earnest on toad.com. The refrigerator started humming, and toad.com's drive started buzzing frantically. "Gee I hope the transfer rate on these mechanical drives is good enough to copy it before it fabricates the nuke", opined Jonathan. Jonathan started typing again. "Shit! we're gonna run out of space!" he said. And started typing frantically rm -rf'ing anything that could be rm -rf'ed without stopping the machine. He rm -rf'ed /usr/src, and /usr/spool/ and a bunch of other stuff. He made it with half a gig or so spare, and who knows how few seconds to spare. The refrigerator-sized deskfab stopped humming, and the hum of the contained HP fabber had stopped too as it had been rudely unfabricated by the antique fabber. Jonathan was pleased with himself now. "That," said Jonathan, with a stabbing motion -rw-r--r-- 1 gnu users 8589934592 Oct 4 10:42 donation.fab where the words `donation.fab' were emblazoned on the clunky glass screen, "is a freshly fabricated top of the range HP deskfab 9GSII, which is just about to fabricate a suitcase nuke, which will pop a few seconds after being fabricated". "But will it pass the faba-whatsit verifier?" asked Alexis. "Er are you sure this is a good idea?" asked Priscilla. "Of course it is," said Bubba. "That's a good question Alexis," Jonathan said ignoring the other chatter, "I'm not real sure. I think it should pass because, well, the faba-code verifier isn't _that_ smart, right. I mean to realise that it will build a HP deskfab, which just happens to have freshly downloaded instructions to build fissionable material patterned into it's memory modules, I mean that's like solving the halting problem right?" Bubba cleared his throat, "If I might make a suggestion here", he said, "now that the high falutin' theoretical stuff is out of the way, the obvious thing to do is try it and see." "A splendid suggestion", said Jonathan, begining to type once more, "very good Bubba, the empirical hackers approach." So Jonathan tried it, and saw. He typed: To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net Bcc: president(a)whitehouse.gov Bcc: freeh(a)fbi.gov Bcc: feinstein(a)congress.gov ... Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_01BCB88F.57968E50" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_01BCB88F.57968E50 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hello, Please accept our campaign donation of SFr 10,000,000 in used swiss francs. Just double click on the enclosed attachment in your mail reader, and it'll print out the donation file attached in an HP compatible fabber. You'll need quite a large fabber, as SFr 10,000,000 is quite bulky. Kind regards, The Circle of Eunuchs ------=_NextPart_000_01BCB88F.57968E50 Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="donation.fab" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Description: donation.fab (DeskFab 6 Document) Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="donation.fab" AasdfAAzxcvAAA1234AA0M8R4KGxGudfghAApoiuAAASDFAertyAPgADAP7/CQAGAsdfgAwrtfAA zxcvAAA1234AA0M8R4KGxGudfghAApoiuAAASDFAertyAPgADAP7/CQAGAsdfgAwrtfAAdfAAzef [snipped to save space] 4AA0M8R4KGxGudfghAApoiuAAASDFAertyAPgADAP7/CQAGAsdfgAwrtfAAdfAAzefzxcvAAA123 ------=_NextPart_000_01BCB88F.57968E50 Bubba, Alexis and Priscilla wandered back up stairs to wait and see, whilst Jonathan sat working on a strategy of how to edit the donation.fab file to get back his laptop, and the top of the range HP deskfab 9GSII without also nuking himself. He reckoned all he'd got to do was edit out the memory module from the deskfab, by editing donation.fab, and then he'd have it all back with out the nuke. Jonathan become engrossed in the task at hand. ... In a splendidly appointed, luxurious penthouse suite, rich in the trappings of wealth and power, in the heart of Washington DC, a bloated congress critter was eating well at the trough. His whores were attentive, dressing him for breakfast, and he had just been bribed $1,000,000 by a telephone company special interest group to throw a few billions in corporate welfare their way. And that was just before breakfast, before he had even got out of bed! Now it appeared he had something he should attend to urgently something that had come on his `email address' what-ever one of those was. A minor aide bustled in. The aide seemed quite excited, and explained in fawning tones that a special interest group had mailed him lots of Swiss Francs, SFr 9,000,000 in fact, but that there was something strange... there was no request for favors. He said it was just being printed out now, and perhaps there would be a note with the money. The congress critter, puffed contentedly on the hookah which one of the whores had lit for him, hmm, yes he could see that this was going to be a good day. <Fade to blinding white light>

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Re: The Fortezza random number generator is not trustworthy
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A nice addition to any Netscape RNG hacks is the comment that, while Netscape may have a bug in their RNG, it's detectable and fixable; the NSA may have a BUG in theirs, and only they'll know for sure... >> Yes Fortezza cards can be instructed to produce a random number through one >> of its library calls (someday they'll have a real API). One of the >> diagnostic tools I had tested this function. What algorithm do they use? >> Haven't a clue. Sources say that the RNG implementation may vary from vendor >> to vendor (i.e., GTC, Spyrus, Mykotronix, etc.). John Gilmore's comments on CAPSTONE, subliminal channels, and FOIA blackouts certainly add depth to this suspiciousness. I'd initially not been too worried about the Fortezza (besides the obvious Master Key problems) because the NSA is letting the military use them for Defense Messaging Service. However, if the RNG might be different for different vendors, the non-military versions may be using a weak RNG, which the NSA has a backdoor to. Alternatively, the RNGs may all be the same, but there may be an option that the military can use to get full-strength random numbers while the public, not knowing this, gets weakened ones (e.g. the first n bits of the RNG may be random, and the next N-n bits may be a strong hash, while there are N-n real random bits in another register if you ask for them nicely.) On a technical note, I would have thought that Fortezza and/or CAPSTONE used some sort of hardware RNG, i.e. noisy Zener diodes or whatever. I've seen it mentioned on this list that some other NSA secure phones, such as STU-III, do that. #--- # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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Re: Nightmare Scenario: Public Key Distribution Controlled
by Antonomasia 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim wrote: > "Distribute a key, go to prison." > How does the New World Order limit the use of strong crypto without "key > recovery" when so many copies of older, pre-ban crypto are already out > there? > Simple, by declaring that public keys themselves are crypto material, as > the Brits did in their Trusted Third Parties draft proposal, and hence > declaring that distribution of keys after the effective date of the > legislation constitutes a violation. Give someone your key, either by > placing it on keyservers or even by mailing it to them, and one has just > "distributed" crypto. > This will make the public key infrastructure essentially useless, as the > public key servers go down, as corporations yank any directories they may > have, and (possibly) as individuals stop putting PGP or S/MIME fingerprints > or pointers in their messages. > How possible is this? Recall that the British proposal formally classified > key material, the keys themselves, as cryptographic products. The language > of the current unSAFE and Procto-CODE draconian bills, still changing of > course as committees rewrite them to be more Big Brotherish, is vague on > what constitutes crypto. I agree with the gist of this nightmare view, but don't think it describes the British TTP proposal very well. 140 These proposals - aimed at facilitating the provision of secure 141 electronic commerce - are being brought forward against a background ha ha ha 1122 Encryption services_ is meant to encompass any service, whether 1123 provided free or not, which involves any or all of the following 1124 cryptographic functionality - key management, key recovery, key 1125 certification, key storage, message integrity (through the use of 1126 digital signatures) key generation, time stamping, or key 1127 revocation services (whether for integrity or confidentiality), 1128 which are offered in a manner which allows a client to determine a 1129 choice of cryptographic key or allows the client a choice of 1130 recipient/s. My giving you my key does not provide you with 'choice of cryptographic key or ... recipient/s' as I read it. But if I signed your key and distributed it, that would probably be a certification service (to you) in which you had chosen the key to be signed. Also if I gave you 2 keys of mine I think that would be banned, because you'd have a choice. This certainly does discourage effective use, but I don't think the current wording is quite so dire as to outlaw distribution of a single key. I'd also say that when an ISP carries my emailed key to someone they are providing a transport service, and not a cryptographic one. The 'or allows the client a choice of recipient/s' looks to me like a direct reference to remailers. As to signing non-key material; a service would be if someone I know brought something (a photo for me to certify true likeness, a will for me to witness their signature ...) and I signed it for him to indicate something to others. Signing my outgoing letters is not normally considered a service. My checking the signatures on my incoming mail is probably not a service, even if it forms part of the decision on whether to reply. As to self-signing a key; it may be permitted following the model of the above paragraph, or not. I believe the proposal is deliberately vague for FUD - and is bad law, regardless of the bad content. I mentioned the difficulty of deciding exactly what would be banned by this proposed law in my article: "Ruritania Discovers Motor Transport". Check the ar...BANG -- ############################################################## # Antonomasia ant(a)notatla.demon.co.uk # # See http://www.notatla.demon.co.uk/ # ##############################################################

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Entropy VI: "Shannon's Choice" (with apologies to Wm. Styron)
by adwestro＠ouray.cudenver.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm always glad to see stuff here about entropy: it's a topic that comes up in PGP 101 when locals ask, "How long should my passphrase be?" and, as we've seen recently, failure to generate adequate entropy for pseudo-random numbers is often the Achilles' Heel of otherwise solid cryptosystems. I found some info about Shannon's choice of the word "entropy" in an unexpected source lately. I had some free time this week due to the surprise snowstorm here, and used it to type in a few paragraphs. This is intended less for immediate discussion than for the list's archives, so that I can point folks to it in the future. And I'm not going to cite the source, to avoid copyright infringement nastygrams...if you know who the author is, keep it to yourself: you'll only suffer public ridicule and loss of "reputation capital" for Not Watching Enough TV!!! :-) N.B. -- some of this impresses me as pompous bullshit, and I'm not in agreement with it. But the story about von Neumann made it a worthwhile read, as least to me. ================================================================== I want now to turn to another juncture in the cascading bifurcations that mark interpretations of Maxwell's Demon. The juncture occurs when Leon Brillouin and Claude Shannon diverge in their opinions about what the relationship between information and entropy should be. In Brillouin's analysis of Maxwell's Demon, the Demon's information allowed him to sort molecules, thus decreasing the system's entropy; but this information had to be paid for by an even greater increase in entropy elsewhere in the system. For Brillouin, then, information and entropy are opposites and should have opposite signs. He emphasized the inverse connection between information and entropy by coining "negentropy" (from negative entropy) as a synonym for information. To Shannon, an engineer at Bell Laboratories who published a two-part paper that was to form the basis of modern information theory (1948), information and entropy were not opposites. They were identical. When Shannon devised a probability function that he identified with information, he chose to call the quantity calculated by the function the "entropy" of the message. Why he made this choice is unclear. Rumor has it that von Neumann told Shannon to use the word because "no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage." One could argue that von Neumann's comment was only one element and that the choice of "entropy" was overdetermined, with multiple factors leading to its conflation with "information." On a conceptual level, an important consideration was the similarity between Shannon's equation for infor- mation and Boltzmann's equation for entropy. Because the two equations had similar forms, it was tempting to regard the entities they defined as the same. On the level of language, entropy was compelling because it was a term of recognized legitimacy to the concept of information. On a cultural level, Shannon's choice anticipated the contemporary insight that proliferating information is associated with the production of entropy. [...] Whatever the reasons for Shannon's choice, it is regarded by many commentators within our scientific tradition as a scandal, for it led to the (metaphoric) knotting together of concepts that are partly similar and partly dissimilar. Typical is K. G. and J. S. Denbigh's reaction in their careful study of the way the quantity defined by Shannon's equation differs from thermodynamic entropy. Recounting the story about von Neumann's advice, they write that thus, "confusion entered in and von Neumann had done science a disservice!" Jeffrey S. Wicken is even more explicit, calling Shannon's choice "loose language" that served "the dark god of obfuscation." "As a result of its independent lines of development in thermodynamics and information theory, there are in science today two 'entropies,'" Wicken writes. "This is one too many. It is not science's habit to affix the same name to different concepts. Shared names suggest shared meanings, and the connotative field of the old tends inevitably to intrude on the denotative terrain of the new." Clearly Wicken's concern is to restore scientific univocality by closing off the ability of the information-entropy connection to act as a metaphor rather than a congruence. Yet at the same time he admits that shared language creates an inevitable "intrusion" into the "denotative terrain" of one term by the "connotative field" of another. The problem is more scandalous than he recognizes, for whenever a heuristic is proposed, it necessarily uses "shared names" that cause scientific denotation to be interpenetrated by cultural connotations. For what else is language but "shared names"? As Wittgenstein has observed, there are no private languages. Moreover, the distinction between denotative and connotative language is itself part of the distinction between language-as-vehicle and language-as-concept which metaphors, and particularly self-reflexive metaphors, bring into question. To turn Wicken's argument on its head, we might say he recognizes that metaphors in general, and the information-entropy connection in particular, directly threaten science's ability to separate ideas from the language it uses to express them. In his anxiety to suppress the metaphoric potential of Shannon's choice, Wicken misses the richly complex and suggestive connections that were instrumental in enabling a new view of chaos to emerge. By the simple device of using "information" and "entropy" as if they were interchan- geable terms, Shannon's choice gave rise to decades of interpretative commentary that sought to explain why information should be identified with disorder rather than order. For the alliance between entropy and information to be effective, information first had to be divorced from meaning (a premise made explicit in Shannon's 1948 papers) and had to be associated instead with novelty. Recall the random number generator, mentioned earlier, that produces a tape we can read. No matter how long we watch the tape, numbers keep appearing in unpredictable sequence. >From one point of view this situation represents chaos; from another, maximum information. Once randomness was understood as maximum information, it was possible to envision chaos (as Robert Shaw does) as the source of all that is new in the world. Wicken is correct in noting that denotative and connotative fields overlap; in the case of information, the connotation that "intruded" upon the denotative field of chaos was complexity. Whereas chaos had traditionally meant simply disorder, complexity implied a mingling of symmetry with asymmetry, predictable periodicity with unpredictable variation. As we have seen, chaotic or complex systems are disordered in the sense that they are unpredictable, but they are ordered in the sense that they possess recursive symmetries that almost, but not quite, replicate themselves over time. The metaphoric joining of entropy and information was instrumental in bringing about these developments, for it allowed complexity to be seen as rich in information rather than deficient in order. Sources cited: K. G. Denbigh and J. S. Denbigh, _Entropy in Relation to Incomplete Knowledge_ (Cambridge University Press, 1985) Jeffrey S. Wicken, "Entropy and Information: Suggestions for a Common Language." Philosophy of Science 54:176-193 (1987) ================================================================== Alan Westrope <awestrop(a)nyx10.cs.du.edu> __________/|-, <adwestro(a)ouray.cudenver.edu> (_) \|-' 2.6.2 public key: finger / servers PGP 0xB8359639: D6 89 74 03 77 C8 2D 43 7C CA 6D 57 29 25 69 23

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Kerberos
by beckman＠cs.hope.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We are studying kerberos, the security system implemented by MIT's Athena network. Has anyone started, considered, imagined or completed any similar security systems, preferably using public key cryptography (as opposed to a single 56-bit DES key)? Please mail any responses to beckman(a)cs.hope.edu. -- Peter Beckman Hope College beckman(a)cs.hope.edu http://www.cs.hope.edu/~beckman/

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Piggybacking
by lethin＠ai.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <444bp8$sd4(a)life.ai.mit.edu> Adam writes: > Naturally, this works with programs other than Quicken. By leveraging on the popularity of Quicken and people's insecurities about their financial data cypherpunks might be able to spread PGP and SecureDrive technology more rapidly. If I were a marketing manager at a startup selling SecureDrive, for example, I'd suggest trying to exploit the above by selling my product as "QuickxxSecure" which would install after Quicken, make the secure drive, move quicken there, etc. It would then sell in a box with a graphical design (e.g. white stripe on red box, to blend nicely with Intuit's red on white) that Egghead would want to put it on the shelf right next to Quicken. Cypherpunks with a crypto-anarchic agenda might "package" shareware in a way that would exploit the same principles. Surely, a bigger market than people using EMACS RMAIL. --- Concurrent VLSI Arch. Group 545 Technology Sq., Rm. 610 MIT AI Lab Cambridge, MA 02139 (617)-253-0972

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Re: "random" number seeds vs. Netscape
by patrick＠Verity.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > Nor is there anything inherently wrong with having sex without the use > of a condom. YES! Safe exec! Use software protection;) (Can you tell that when I read this I was LOL!?) > > However, it is very difficult -- VERY DIFFICULT -- to prove to > yourself that there is never an instance in which your system() or > popen() can be abused. Well...you can tell by looking, certainly that's not true when you need a condem;) > In any case, I find its often more prudent just > to strip all these things out of my code. If you don't use them, you > don't have to prove they are done properly. Paranoia is your > friend. No one can ever break you for doing something you don't do. That's true, I have to admit that I usually don't use them either. Once you know how they're coded up, and how little code is actually used, it seems silly anyway to call a popen or system and suffer the overhead of the function calls and the loss of control. > > > The problem arises when you use information given to you from > > outside as the argument to popen or system without checking it. > > Yup, but often, you'd be suprised what turns out to be outside data. You're singing to the choir. Sigh, Eric Allman's been several times surprised about what turned out to be outside data. > > In any case, you obviously also understand why this is bad, but I hope > that people out there understan -- always make sure that you are > double extra careful about the use of such calls. Thanks:) Patrick _______________________________________________________________________ / These opinions are mine, and not Verity's (except by coincidence;). \ | (\ | | Patrick J. Horgan Verity Inc. \\ Have | | patrick(a)verity.com 1550 Plymouth Street \\ _ Sword | | Phone : (415)960-7600 Mountain View \\/ Will | | FAX : (415)960-7750 California 94303 _/\\ Travel | \___________________________________________________________\)__________/

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change of address notice for Marc Donner
by donner＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear colleague, friend, or correspondent, My new business address is: Marc Donner Union Bank of Switzerland 299 Park Avenue New York, NY 10171 212-821-6229 You can send me email at: donner(a)ubss.com The destination list for this mail is gleaned from an automated analysis of many megabytes of mail that I have accumulated over the last three years. In some cases you are receiving this not because we are acquaintances or correspondents but because you were a recipient of some piece of mail that I also received and kept. If so, I apologize for the intrusion. I have pruned the list extensively, but some email IDs are sufficiently opaque that I cannot reliably identify the person at the other end. Marc

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Re: Real issue of crypto controls: security or taxation loss?
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 13 Sep 97 at 23:44, iang(a)systemics.com wrote: > The battle should remain on the field of personal rights, because the > battle over economics cannot be won, right at this current juncture in > time. I.e., Now. Probably a sensible opinion. But what would be the effect of pulling in the other direction? Espcially if the population would be more personnally concerned with it? The way it is now, National Security is a scarecrow but the real thing is the govt corn to be protected... > As TCM will no doubt never tire of saying, the deployment of appropriate > infrastructure is something that takes time. Until the deployment of > all that juicy stuff is in place, nobody can provide a single transaction > of your three-orders-of-magnitude-reality. Only, to deploy any e-$ scheme would need an environment where govt would _tolerate_ crypto. But the way it is going, everything is set in place to trample on anybody's face that will use crypto with the "not-the-flavour-of-the-month-at-White-House" sauce such as e-$ programmers, etc. If the debate could be shifted-off, the legitimacy of the govt claimed goals could get strongly challenged. This is possible only if there is a cause that concerns citizens directly. Now, try telling me that taxation is the most popular of govt's measures... The fact that a majority voted for Politician A does not mean that a majority loves him... > Of course this raises the interesting question of why the establishment > does not shift the battle themselves ... Precisely. IMO, there is more hidden under there than meets the eye. What if we try prying at this tiny, well concealed crack in the big wall? Ciao jfa -- Jean-Francois Avon, Pierrefonds(Montreal) QC Canada DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Finest of Limoges porcelain and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants physicists and engineers, LabView programing. PGP encryption keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon http://bs.mit.edu:8001/pks-toplev.html ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891 ID# 5B51964D : 152ACCBCD4A481B0 254011193237822C

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