December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Netscape 2.0 beta
by P.Peterson＠itd.uts.edu.au 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Patrick J. Horgan <patrick(a)verity.com> wrote: >Steven Champeon said: > >> One thing that I found with the newsreader was that it doesn't >> do POP correctly. No matter what you do with your mail, it still >> doesn't check for read vs. unread articles. This is fine when you >> have a mailbox with one message. It can be annoying when you have >> 110 messages in your mailbox and don't want to 1) delete them or >> 2) download them twice. > >Neither pop 2 nor pop 3 tell you whether you've read a message or not. Eudora can tell whether you've read a message or not by reading the 'status' line of a message. The status line contains an "R" if the message has been previously read. Eudora uses POP 3 I believe. Elm also uses the 'status' line. The upshot of this is that you can configure Eudora to leave your mail on the server and next time Eudora goes to read your mail, it ignores all previously read messages and only downloads the new ones. >pop 2 does bump up the current number with an ACKS, but if you move around >with READ n, then that's useless. pop 3 doesn't do that. > >I just reread the rfcs to make sure that I wasn't missing anything, >(RFC 1725: Post Office Protocol - Version 3, RFC 937: Post Office Protocol - >Version 2). Am I missing something? This may or may not be a part of the RFC's (I haven't read them) but this is the way I've always seen it work. So there's no reason that Netscape couldn't do the same if it can't already. I can't tell yet whether it's capable or not as I'm still down loading version 2.0b as I type. :-) Cheers, Paul P. -- _--_|\ Paul Peterson, P.Peterson(a)itd.uts.edu.au / \ Systems Programmer, Ph: +61 2 330 2131 \_.--._/ University of Technology, Sydney, (Internal: x2131) v PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW, 2007, Australia. Fax: +61 2 330 1994

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Question on Galois Fields
by Usuario Acceso2 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi C'Punks. Here's a rather mathematical question. Can anyone explain or give an example of how to use arithmetic in GF(q^n)? Often in cryptography we work in GF(p). I knew the existence of other fields, like elliptic curves and so, but I found a short comment in Applied Cryptography page 210 that I couldn't understand. Thanks in advance for your help. Jaime acceso2(a)diatel.upm.es

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Re: LACC: Account sharing leads to false imprisonment
by fc＠all.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thought you might like another perspective: ... > A GORRIE STORY > > Here's the background: in October of 1994, Hirsh's stepbrother, a U of > T grad student, said Hirsh could use his school-provided net account. Almost certainly unauthorized use. The us of another person's account is almost always against school policy, and hence is likely to be a voilation of the law. > Hirsh used it to read news. He thought the net fascinating so began > uploading copies of The Anarchives. Hirsh never tried to hide who he > was -- he even included his home phone number, which is how the Super- > Sleuth Sysadmins "found" him. Hirsh made similar use of an account > belonging to "Ms X" -- a female Ph.D. student and friend of Stepbro's. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and being easy to catch doesn't make you innocent of a crime. > This would have been a happy and otherwise normal arrangement except > that in January, 1995, U of T engineering prof Jack Gorrie > (gorrie(a)ecf.utoronto.ca) bossman of U of T's engineering computing > facility computer, received a complaint from someone at the University > of British Columbia about The Anarchives being posted to net news. The > person wanted it stopped. Interstate transport of stolen (presumably copyrighted) property, possible violation of national laws of both nations. Unauthorized use of the computers at the University of British Columbia. > Gorrie came to notice Ms X wasn't signing these documents, a Jesse > Hirsch was. He also noticed Hirsh and another U of T student (the > stepbro) exchanged email about the accounts. As Hirsh and his stepbro > have different last names, Gorrie concluded a larger hacker conspiracy > was afoot. Reasonable assumption. The only way to find out different would be to violate the users' privacy by reading their mail, etc. > Gorrie launched into his Canadian rendition of Cliff Stoll, author of > compu-crime-thriller _The Cuckoo's Egg_ -- in Gorrie's case, _The > Loonie's Egg_. He "tracked" Hirsh for two months, recording every > keystroke -- even though he had all three students' phone numbers. Collected possible evidence. A good idea. Allerting potential criminals is a poor way to catch them and potentially dangerous. May not stand up in court as it is heresay - not exempt under the normal business record exception. > On March 8, 1995, he asked the cops to intervene. "I checked and found > that the account was indeed being used to broadcast information on > behalf of The Anarchist Organization," he wrote Detective Hugh > Ferguson. Sounds wise. > Thus it came to be that Jesse Hirsh was forced to model nude for > Toronto's finest, with the blessing of U of T. If he turned out to be a terrorist who was planning to blow up a building, you would have called this a tremendous piece of police work, they could have written a million-selling book, and you would hail the sysadmin as a computer age hero. > Stepbro got his own taste of U of T six-gun justice. Off in a > Washington, D.C., engineering lab, he came under FBI investigation. > Naturally, the FBI found nothing wrong because there was nothing wrong > -- except for an over-zealous sysadmin using a meat cleaver to scratch > an itch. Try again. I assume that they found this was not a "real" terrorist. But to call it over-zealous is not right. S/he was doing the job and should be commended for trying to do it as well as s/he could. > CHARGES DROPPED > > On Sept. 7, minutes before the case was to go to court, the > prosecution dropped all charges. Hirsh agreed to pay a token > settlement of $400 for four months of university computer use. U of T > first claimed it was owed $1,560. Hirsh places the real cost at $60. So Hirsh agreed that he had been illegally using the computer system and the case was settled with a monetary fine. > Hirsh devoted an issue of The Anarchives to the case. It spread around > cyberspace. In it, Hirsh includes Gorrie's email address and asks > people to send him their opinions. Quite a few did. They were rather > unpleasant. Gorrie, miffed, used the U of T pipeline to have the > stepbro make Hirsh shut up. So what's fair for Hirsh is not fair for the Sysadmin? Sounds to me like you think it's OK for Hirsh to have people write nasty letters to the admin but not OK for the admin to respond via the step-brother. > After subjecting Hirsh to complete and devastating public humiliation, > U of T was now pleading for discretion. After Hirsh broke the law, he is trying to get even for being caught by harassing the people who caught him. ... > Hirsh wrote Gorrie privately, saying he was sorry Gorrie was getting nasty > mail. Gorrie replied the whole affair was a "big misunderstanding." As > they were _both_ misled, they were _both_ victims: Victim Hirsh was > dragged down the street in handcuffs, fingerprinted, mugshotted, > strip-searched and jailed for hours; Victim Gorrie received email that was > mean to him. Hirsh realized he was wrong to harass Gorrie and appologized for creating the situation. Gorrie gracefully called it a "big misunderstanding" and accepted the abuse as part of doing a tough job. -- -> See: Info-Sec Heaven at URL http://all.net Management Analytics - 216-686-0090 - PO Box 1480, Hudson, OH 44236

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Re: (cpx) Netscape 2.0 beta
by Wolfgang Roeckelein 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, > The good news is that someone finally, after years, has implemented >Progressive JPEG (I've been yelling about it for a while myself), and >it is simply *light years* better than interlaced GIFs. How do I create Progressive JPEG pictures? Note to Cypherpunks: Please answer via email, I receive only selected material from your list! Thank you very much in adance, Wolfgang --- Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Inf. Voice: +49 261 6509 173 Wolfgang Roeckelein Fax: +49 261 6509 179 WHU Koblenz E-Mail: roeckelein(a)wi.whu-koblenz.de Burgplatz 2 (MIME and NeXTmail ok) D-56179 Vallendar WWW: http://www.whu-koblenz.de/~wolfgang/ Germany GCM/B d-- s: a- C++ US+++$ UX+++ P+ L E? W++ N++ w-- O-(++) M+ !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP(++) t+ 5? X? R+ tv b++ DI D++ G e+++>++++ h+ r++>% y? (Geek Code V3.x) --rsa--------------------------------8<------------------------------------- #!/usr/local/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-in-3-lines-PERL ($k,$n)=(a)ARGV;$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2% Sa2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*' ,$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n||die"$0 [-d] k n\n")&~1)/2) -------------------------------------8<------------------------------------- TRY: echo squeamish ossifrage | rsa -e 3 7537d365 | rsa -d 4e243e33 7537d365 Residents of the USA & France *MUST NOT* include this .sig if following up! *** Residents of France & Russia *MUST NOT* make any use of this -sig ! ***

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PC Tools' PC Secure
by Alan Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone know of a utility which can decode files encoded with PC Tools' PC Secure package (version 5, if my memory serves me correctly). The package came out some 6 years ago. Thanks Alan alang(a)rrs.co.za

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Re: Certificate proposal
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 12:24:34 -0700 >From: Hal <hfinney(a)shell.portal.com> >I don't understand this whole discussion. A certificate is a signed >binding of a key and a unique name, right? It depends on how you define certificate. If you define it this way, then I'm proposing the elimination of certificates (because I'm eliminating the unique name as something different from a key). If you define certificate as I do -- as a bound statement of some attribute of a key, then it should become clearer. It's just that the attribute I'm binding is not some unique person-name -- rather something like permission to spend money from a bank account. >I'd like to see some grounding of this discussion in terms of the role of >certificates, and ways to prevent man in the middle attacks. I certainly >have no love for facist worldwide ID cards and hierarchical, organization >based naming schemes, but just using any old key because it seems to work >OK most of the time isn't going to fly IMO. The rest should be more clear if you read the rest of the backlog.... - Carl +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme(a)tis.com http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |Trusted Information Systems, Inc. http://www.tis.com/ | |3060 Washington Road PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2| |Glenwood MD 21738 Tel:(301)854-6889 FAX:(301)854-5363 | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

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List Digest
by jgrubs＠left.webcasters.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Someone asked about a digest form for this list. I got out, dusted off, and refurbished software I wrote last year to generate a RFC-1153 compatible digest of alt.security.pgp for PRZ. I am now generating said digest. If anyone wants it, send e-mail. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: LIBERTY!! Use it or lose it!! iQCVAwUBMHkut974r4kaz3mVAQHz7wQAqMlM8CwmGGZmycWyPHYO/VJHT2Gr0mn7 G+WKvG1vKhzjP/RhF8hhQzRy5egwIKuasRZaFvV3qMbBheg8JvPwHAPf64/qKkNN Xf2IRWHKT6BBuzDo5mxv/P4CW9W5lzmWLyDp+BPlNqbMNyMshkRyUTrdriWgtUIK erJbEMu+7Ec= =luqz -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- WebCasters(tm) James C. Grubs jgrubs(a)webcasters.com 6817 Maplewood Avenue Tel.: 419-882-2697 Sylvania, Oh 43560 Fax: 419-885-2814 Internet consulting, HTML programming, Information brokering

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Re: Question on Galois Fields
by John A. Limpert 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:13 PM 10/9/95 UTC+0100, you wrote: >Can anyone explain or give an example of how to use arithmetic in GF(q^n)? > >Often in cryptography we work in GF(p). I knew the existence of other fields, >like elliptic curves and so, but I found a short comment in Applied >Cryptography page 210 that I couldn't understand. I wrote a Reed-Solomon encoder that had to do addition and multiplication over GF(2^8). Addition was simple, just a bitwise exclusive-or. Multiplication required two tables, a log-alpha table and an alog-alpha table. The product was computed by taking the anti-log of the sum of the logs of the arguments. Both tables were 256x8 lookup tables. The table contents were derived from the generator polynomial G(x) specified for the encoder. Another two 256x8 tables were used to translate between dual basis and conventional basis. Dual basis was specified for the encoder to make a hardware implementation simpler but I found that it was easier to use conventional basis for a software implementation. Not being a mathematician, I used several NASA technical reports on Reed-Solomon encoders and an excellent book on error correcting codes by Lin & Costello to understand enough of the math to write the encoder software. Galois fields are heavily used in the design of error correcting codes. -- John A. Limpert johnl(a)Radix.Net

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Re: Crypto's Role in Evil?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:01 PM 10/9/95, Lucky Green wrote: >Correct, Blanc. That's why I am saving my pennies to buy an AR-15. I know >the government of the near future will not be in a position to stand in >the way of my involuntary participation in organ transplant experiments. >It will be up to the individual and voluntary neighborhood associations, >etc. to provide our personal security. While I don't want to comment on AR-15s and the possible need for them, this being a strong cryptography group, this is a good time to mention to newcomers to the list that the book "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson, offers a wickedly satirical look at a possible future for America. (Other books of interest include: Vernor Vinge's "True Names," David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom," Hakim Bey's "TAZ," Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game," Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," and John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider.") One of the reasons I advocate having a minimal set of laws and then strongly enforcing them is that having too many laws makes enforcement of the _important_ laws very difficult. Having too many laws, such as the laws about what one can do with one's own money (chillingly recounted this morning by Doug Barnes in his trip report), also blurs the lines between what is really criminal and what it is not. It's clear that cops cannot protect people, only try to catch the perpetrators. In certain demographic groups, 30% of all males between the ages of 15 and 30 are either in jail, are awaiting trial, are on probabation, or have been in jail. California is on a massive prison-building campaign. (Many of these prisons would not be needed if essentially all behaviors except murder, rape, theft, etc., were legal, and if transfer payments into inner cities were cut off...the "criminal" gangs would not have much to do and would wither away in time.) Given the current trends, certain courses of action become clear. (Personal note: I'm amazed at the number of "punks" of various flavors who continue to live in crowded cities, given the capabilities of communications technology, and the race wars now accelerating in these rat cages. But then I'm not one of those dressed-in-black-with-noserings kind of "punk." To each their own.) --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- 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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Crypto's Role in Evil? HUG_kid
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

10-9-95. NYPaper: "The Greening of U.S. Diplomacy: Focus on Ecology." A new concern over the long-term causes of wars and disasters of the environment are the issues deemed urgent today by American foreign policy makers in much the same manner as military threats like new surface-to-air missile sites alarmed policy makers several decades ago. So in addition to their traditional intelligence gathering -- arms, nuclear weapons programs, expansion of foreign armies -- American policy makers are looking more than ever before at natural phenomena in their search for the deeper roots of war and threats to global security. "During the cold war, most security threats stemmed from state-to-state aggression, so most of the analysis was of factors that could produce state-to-state aggression," said James Steinberg, the State Department's director of policy planning. "Now we're focusing more on internal factors that can destabilize governments and lead to civil wars and ethnic strife. Now we're paying much more attention to early warning factors, like famine and the environment." Angelo Codevilla, an intelligence expert who teaches at Boston University, said this new approach is misguided. "All this soft stuff is a silly idea," he said. HUG_kid (9 kb)

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