December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: S. 1284 To Amend (C) Act
by Weld Pond 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> S. 1284, s1201: "No person shall import, manufacture or distribute >> any device, product, or component incorporated into a device or >> product, or offer or perform any service, the primary purpose or ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >IANAL, but I thought these types of laws were already tested and deemed >unconstitutional in cases involving video-tape copying boxes, dual video >cassette dubbing decks, SCMS 'scrubbers', etc... I think the large gray area here is the phrase primary purpose. The primary purpose of a device is in the users mind only. Videotape copying of noncopyright materials is done on a vast scale now due to home camcorders. But even if only a few people had camcorders they should be able to purchase equipment that can be used legally. Introducing the concept of "primary purpose" makes law abiding citizens suffer because some people are breaking the law. If an item has any legal purpose it must be allowed. This trend to take technology that *can* be used to commit crimes out of the hands of citizen units is growing. We see it with crypto export controls and recently with the PA law and Federal law making it a crime to posess devices and software to reprogram cell phones. When this doesn't make a dent in the number of these crimes I predict we will see licensing of technologies such as eeprom programmers, spectrum analyzers, frequency counters, and yes of course strong crypto. Weld Pond - weld(a)l0pht.com - http://www.l0pht.com/~weld L 0 p h t H e a v y I n d u s t r i e s Technical archives for the people - Bio/Electro/Crypto/Radio

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Article on PGP (Noise)
by Eric Anderson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- C'punks I saw a good article on PGP in this month's issue of American Survival Guide. Not only did the article portray the use ofstrong crypto as a good thing for privacy and liberty, it also tells the reader where to obtain PGP. After that, the article goes into some of the issues surrounding PGP such as ITAR, Phil Zimmerman's legal troubles (It even tells how to contribute to his legal fund.) and how the government is really against it. After the background, the article gives clear, detailed, step by step instructions on how to use it; from the inital unzipping of the program to setup and key generation and management. All in all, I found this a very informative article for the new user and even some of the more advanced users (Hey-you learn something new every day, right?). It wasn't the type of article that wouldn't be covered in Time or Newsweak that's for sure. Eric -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBVAwUBMJWDeyQV+sMsxjC5AQGT9QH9E8BHovGCmu7p9wB2nYQzmebqFPw3sfnR 2CuFTSvkdbg/4yArOsE87S+g28I2B/tscaVYdAO8HA5CdhVVAxbH0w== =wjpi -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Cuban Security Conference
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:22 PM 10/30/95 -0500, s1113645(a)tesla.cc.uottawa.ca wrote: > For that matter is civilian use of strong (or any other kind) crypto actually > legal in Cuba? Anyone know the policies? (duh, lemme guess...) Well everything is legal in Cuba since there are no discernable laws, only policies, however at they time that I visited Cuba those phones available to ordinary citizens had a phonekeeper seated right beside the phone. On the other hand, no one would stop you setting up a data haven or some such in Cuba, provided it was strictly off limits to Cubans, but you could not set up a bank, because sooner or later somebody quite important would help themselves to the banks assets. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: Cuban Security Conference
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> International Conference Center > Pabexpo, Havana, Cuba > March 4-9, 1996 > 3rd Ibero-American Seminar on Protection against > Computer Viruses and Security of Information Technologies I wonder if they'd be receptive to talks on private communications, digicash, tax avoidance through digital technology, anarchy and collapse of government power, etc. :-) (Maybe they would; Cuba's got to do something to get their economy out of the post-Soviet-subsidy doldrums, and with the US preventing free trade in sugar for them, maybe allowing capitalism will be their only choice...) For any Yankees interested in going, you generally need to be a journalist of some sort to avoid the Trading With The Enemy Act restrictions, but in cyberspace, that's easily arranged. #--- # Thanks; Bill # 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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Copy Protection Schemes
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:58 PM 10/30/95, Andrew Loewenstern wrote: >IANAL, but I thought these types of laws were already tested and deemed >unconstitutional in cases involving video-tape copying boxes, dual video >cassette dubbing decks, SCMS 'scrubbers', etc... The copy-defeat and SCMS scrubbers exist in a legal limbo, mainly being sold for "other purposes" and often by companies which come and go in the back pages of audio and video magazines. For example, I've used a audio gadget (Audio Alchemy "DTI") that reclocks the bit stream out of a digital source (CD or DAT player)...one of the side effects is that it also strips (or resets, to be more precise) the SCMS bits on a DAT recording. Effectively, it defeats the SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) copy protection scheme. The company that makes it is of coure well aware of this side effect, as is the audiophile/DAT community, but the company (Audio Alchemy) takes great pains _not_ to mention this side effect in their literature. Likewise, the various Macrovision video copy protection scheme defeaters, such as may be found in the back pages of video magazines, are "for the legitimate user only." I'm fairly certain that any open and aboveboard advertising of such products as "copy protection defeaters" would face legal challenges under the copyright laws. The Go Video and other dual-cassette systems have ostensible legitimate uses (notably, copying of tapes one has made, perhaps of lectures or speeches or other personal recordings) and have been "allowed." In particular, Go Video was held up in its plans for a couple of years while lawyers and regulators negotiated. Other cases, such as the Sony-Disney Betamax case, and, indeed, the Xerox machine itself, involve other issues. Practicalities of enforcement are one of the most important issues. The Supreme Court obviously looked at the noninfringing uses (home movies, for example), the difficulty of enforcing laws against the taping of television shows and movies, etc., and concluded that technology and markets had made that particular aspect of copyright law moot. The rationale of "time-shifting" was just the best face they could put on it, in my view. Anyway, there are lots of issues and lots of nuances. --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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Re: /dev/random for FreeBSD [was: Re: /dev/random for Linux]
by Mark Murray 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> When /dev/random doesn't have "enough" enthropy left does reading > from it return an error, or block? I would strongly suggest > blocking, as the non-blocking behavur is not really all that useful. It returns EOF. M -- Mark Murray 46 Harvey Rd, Claremont, Cape Town 7700, South Africa +27 21 61-3768 GMT+0200 Finger mark(a)grumble.grondar.za for PGP key

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FWD: Electronic Warfare (from the digitaliberty list)
by Fen Labalme 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Interesting (if a bit mild for this list) article from another list some of you might be interested in (or already subscribed to).... ---- Forwarded Message ---- From: owner-digitaliberty(a)phantom.com Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 01:00:06 -0500 To: digitaliberty-digest(a)piltdown.phantom.com Subject: digitaliberty V1 #13 digitaliberty Tuesday, 31 October 1995 Volume 01 : Number 013 In this issue: Test Electronic Warfare See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the Digitaliberty or Digitaliberty-Digest mailing lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail) <frezza(a)radiomail.net> Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 13:14:58 -0800 Subject: Test This is a test. <sigh> ------------------------------ From: DigitaLib(a)aol.com Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 18:02:17 -0500 Subject: Electronic Warfare Folks, Attached is a column that ran on the op-ed page of today's Communications Week. I have agreed to do bi-weekly opinion pieces for them focussing on the impact of technology on society, politics, and culture - all with a DigitaLibertarian slant (of course). My hope is that this fiesty group can keep me fed with grist for these pieces. For anyone that lives in NYC, I will be carrying the DigitaLiberty banner on a panel on digital commerce at the Multimedia Design conference at the Javits center Friday 11/3 at 3:30pm. Stop by and say hello. Regards, Bill - --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ELECTRONIC WARFARE WAGES ON - AND YOU'RE THE TARGET Although the flap over the Clinton administration's attempt to promote escrowed-key encryption systems like Clipper has temporarily faded, the war on electronic privacy continues. As proceedings at the Fourth International Conference on Money Laundering, Forfeiture, Asset Recovery, Offshore Investments, the Pacific Rim, and International Financial Crimes reveal, there has been no let up in our government's efforts to blockade the cyber-frontier. No, you won't learn much from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, written by journalist-generalists who have no clue about where this technology is heading. The Feds have become so skilled at manipulating the Old Media that stories about electronic privacy invariably center on the latest drug kingpin, pedophile, or domestic terrorist. Attacking these universally abhorred enemies of the people not only makes for good headlines but keeps privacy advocates off balance as they are forced to defend abstract rights using loathsome examples. But if you tune in to the Cypherpunks mailing list (majordomo(a)toad.com) you can get some excellent first hand reports from the front. In the relatively short period since the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act, which, among other things, obliges banks to file Suspicious Activity Reports on its customers, banks have become virtual deputies in the treasury department's war on uncontrolled financial transactions. And this war is increasingly spilling into cyberspace. The conference underscored the fact that, paradoxically, we are heading not toward more specific and well defined transaction monitoring regulations, but less. How so? The problem with making regulations precise is that what software algorithms can define, other algorithms can evade. Instead, regulation by "raised eyebrow" is becoming the norm. Federal bank examiners have been given significant latitude to invoke draconian penalties against uncooperative banks. Because bank officers have few due-process protections under this regime, it is no surprise that most of them have become sniveling toadies. The objective is to insure that banks "voluntarily" introduce even more aggressive, unpredictable, and intrusive monitoring than the government would ever dare mandate. And to make sure nothing slips through the cracks, human surveillance will be supplemented with artificial-intelligence agents that can perform pattern analysis on the aggregate flow of electronic transactions, flagging anything remotely suspicious. George Orwell would be impressed. Lest you think that all of this is motivated solely by the drug war, a visit to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) homepage (http://www.ustreas.gov/treasury/bureaus/fincen/facts.html) should open your eyes. This battle is not just about drug prohibition, a crime the Treasury Department would have to invent if it didn't already exist. The real struggle is about the future of tax compliance, and it has you in its sights. A famous Revolutionary War era pamphleteer, writing under the pseudonym "Brutus", perhaps said it best 200 years ago when he wrote - "The national government through its taxing power will introduce itself into every corner of the city and country. It will take cognizance of the professional man in his office or his study; it will watch the merchant in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop and his work, and will haunt him in his family and his bed; it will be the constant companion to the industrious farmer in his labour; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people and in all these circumstances on which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them will be GIVE! GIVE!" What Brutus didn't know and what the cypherpunks foresee is that one day strong encryption will make it impossible to spy on our activities in cyberspace. Heightened conflict is inevitable. Expect the rhetoric to get a lot hotter as the government spinmeisters labor to keep us focused on public enemies while frantically trying to keep its hand in every citizens pocket and its eyes on every bankbook. # # # COPYRIGHT CMP PUBLICATIONS 1995 Bill Frezza is president at Wireless Computing Associates and co-founder of the online forum DigitaLiberty. The opinions expresses are his own. Frezza can be reached at frezza(a)interramp.com. ------------------------------ End of digitaliberty V1 #13 *************************** To subscribe to Digitaliberty-Digest, send the command: subscribe digitaliberty-digest in the body of a message to "Majordomo(a)phantom.COM". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-digitaliberty": subscribe digitaliberty-digest local-digitaliberty(a)your.domain.net A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "digitaliberty-digest" in the commands above with "digitaliberty". ---- End Forwarded Message ----

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Using Holographic Memory Crystals for Encryption
by Aleph One 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

*WARNING* I have not idea about what Iam about to talk. This is a midnight rant. Take it as it is. *WARNING* I just finished reading the article on Holographic Memories on the latest Scientific America by Demetri Psaltis and Fai Mok. At the end they mention that "Given a hologram, either one of the two beams that interfered to create it can be used to reconstruct the other. What this means, in a holographic memory, is that it is possible not only to orient a reference beam into the crystal at a certain angle to select an individual holographic page but also to accomplish the reverse. Illuminating a crystal with one of the stored images gives rise to an approximation of the associated reference beam, reproduced as a plane wave emanating from the crystal at the appropriate angle." I was thinking this is simply a kind of XOR here given one image you can obtain the other. No this convined with the fact that you need to know the right angle could make for some interesting stuff. You could make a system where you give it the initial angle and password which is illuminated into the cristal to reveal the encoded data add to this some feadback mechanism where the angle changes depending on some function of the data and things get interesting. Its late and Iam tired. But if anyone has any ideas I woulkd love to heard them. Good nite. Aleph One / aleph1(a)dfw.net http://underground.org/ KeyID 1024/948FD6B5 Fingerprint EE C9 E8 AA CB AF 09 61 8C 39 EA 47 A8 6A B8 01

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Re: Important Digital Cash Question...
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>I think that the bankers name should be Ethel however. >Wait, wait! I have another one. I call digital cash bankers "underwriters", >because they're basically underwriting digital certificates, like an >underwriter in the capital markets does. >So, we need a "U" name... Obviously Alice and Bob are banking with Chaum.... #--- # Thanks; Bill # 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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Internet World Boston
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

David Fox has me on a panel discussion he's leading tomorrow (November 1) at Internet World in Boston in the Harborview Ballroom from 10:15 to 12:30. Also on the panel will be someone each from First Virtual, Open Market, and CheckFree, all of whom will be demo-ing their latest stuff. This promises to be interesting, and it would also be a great opportunity for me to actually meet some people I only read in e-mail. If you're around, I hope to see you there! Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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