December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

(fwd) e$: Looking down, not up, to the future
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Sender: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com Reply-To: rah(a)shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Mime-Version: 1.0 From: rah(a)shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 15:07:53 -0500 Precedence: Bulk To: Multiple recipients of <e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: e$: Looking down, not up, to the future -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- e$: Looking down, not up, to the future 12/29/95 First a little administrivia. Going forward, I'm going to be posting my rants here first at e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com, with a forward from e$ of the given rant, after some arbitrary delay, to any other lists that might be appropriate to the subject. My sponsors have paid for this list, and the readership of the e$pam and e$ are there to hear what I and others have to say about e$ and its consequences here, and so my stuff goes onto the e$ list first from now on. Like all my writing on the net, redistribution with attribution to me and the other people I cite (When remember to cite them all...) here is just fine. If you're publishing it, and you pay your authors, I'd like to be compensated too, of course. Not that what I say here is going to be all that earthshaking, but I thought I'd clear the air a bit. I've read a lot of interesting things about the future of the net in the last few weeks, some of which I've sent on to e$pam, and I'd like to talk about them, by way of clearing the decks for the New Year. First, I'd like to go revise my model of net.reality a bit. Most of people look at the net as a hierarchy. Architecturally, it is exactly that, from the IP addressing scheme, to the object super-hierarchies in component software models, to server-mirroring, to just about any kind of structural component of the net you would care to look at. Physically, big lines get broken up by big switches into smaller lines which get broken up by smaller switches into smaller lines, in a fractal process which ends up at you or me, where it goes back up each larger level to get where it needs to go. In software, the CORBA object model, and the super-object-model that the research people have been cooking up at Microsoft, all have a "root" somewhere; the "top" of their taxonomical system, if you will. In information, there's a source of the information, and it gets accreted with other information and synthesized and averaged and summarized and rolled up into some larger aggregate which allows you to have some knowlege about that information and other information like it. In finance, my money gets pooled with other people's money through several larger aggregation layers and then invested or spent centrally somewhere. The recipient of capital or cashflow then spends or invests it in fractally smaller chunks until I get it in a check for something I do. I could go on and on with this, but you can see my point, and it is the same point Rich Lethin loves to use on *me* when I start talking about "geodesic" anything, that is, the idea that Moore's law exponentially collapses switching costs, making nodes cheaper than lines, making the network and the software processes mapped onto it more geodesic instead of hierarchical, and "surfacting" information and software into fractally smaller and smaller pieces. What I've been saying to Rich, particularly when I talk about geodesic networks, is that the message itself is point-to-point, even though the actual electrons may flow more or less hierarchically around the network. That's kept him busy while I made my getaway. It always felt like a sophistic shuck, myself, but I'd learned to live with it until now. I don't know if I've gotten anywhere, but I've been thinking about it a bit, thrashing anologies from other parts of the world, --the major way I think, unfortunately -- to describe what I see out there. I've been thinking about biological models, because in my stranger moments, I like pretend that the net is an electro-biological entity. For instance, the circulation of blood is a good anology, I think, because all the endocrine messages in the blood stream are ultimately broadcast from a single cell and paradoxically sent point to point to another cell -- just like things are on an ethernet wire, or on Gilder's fanciful dark fiber, even though the circulatory "backbone" is hierarchical. The most obvious example of course is the organization of neurons, in that the brain pathways are essentially geodesic, but we still have to deal with the hierarchy of nerves outside of the brain. The one thing I think that differentiates these models from the hierarchies we encounter in social life, the industrial induced control hierarchies we all rail against, and the stuff I like to quixotically do battle with on the net, is that every one of those biological hierarchies is chaotic. There is no pretense of top-down control of the system. The load of the system is hierarchical, and so the system organizes itself hierarchically. There are physical forces which create physically hierarchical stuctures, but they're usually set up to solve the problem of efficient distribution of something over a distance, like draining a watershed, or getting blood to a central heart and lungs, or nerve impulses back and forth to the brain. When distance isn't a problem, networks, like the brain, tend to get more geodesic. Bandwidth is maintained by an abundance of neuronic "switches", doubling as processors, tripling as memory, each with some number of connections to other neurons, rather than a bunch of "fat" nurons doing all the signal processing. As an exception which proves the rule, note there *are* in fact "fat" neurons, more precisely redundant neuron pathways, particularly between the two halves of the brain, and between the brain and the rest of the body. So, what else is new? We still have hierarchies on the net, right? We're about to bump up by many orders of magnitude the number of possible IP addresses real soon, so that someday your toaster can tell your alarm clock to wake you for breakfast. I've ranted, tounge-in-cheek, about the "dangers" of the "X.blabla" book-entry view of the world, with hierarchical, government-as-root certification "authorities", and the consequences of having an audit trail on your every net-based financial activity. Most of this X.blabla stuff will come to pass, mostly because it's the easiest thing for the financial system as it's currently organized to do. It's sort of like financial "shovelware", moving the contents of one financial medium, the hierarchic industrial paradigm of government regulated central banking systems onto the new medium of the internet. However, in a world of micro-pay-as-you-go packet routing, where routers may someday spot-auction their bandwidth on a demand basis at packet prices displayed best in scientific notation, all those audit threads could lead to a Gulliverian restraint on personal freedom, much less on individual privacy. Fortunately, I don't think that's going to happen, because those same Lilliputian audit trails will just get in the way and slow the system to a standstill. We need to get more chaotic. I think my contention on this is that as we get smaller and smaller, the more chaotic it's going to have to be. Book-entry based transaction processing systems will choke on their own accounting at those levels. To look at the extremely-hypothetical router above, it will be easier to attach some digital bearer microcertificates to an information packet, so that the packet pays its way through all the routers it needs to go to, than it will be for some giant book entry system to account for it all. People have said that those microcertificates could work like stamps, where the first router cancels the stamp and pays back the other routers in the route some fraction of the "stamp" price to be settled later, or it may be possible to simply endow a packet with all the certificates nessary to get from point to point in a network someday. It kind of reminds me digital cash-as-processor-food, a bit. Note that this kind of bio-economic thinking is not new, the Agorics folks and Stewart Brand have been talking about this stuff for quite a while. My point here is that "down" the network, not up, is the place to look for the interesting stuff in the future. There are several interesting micropayment certificate systems out there, and there will be more. As software gets smaller and smaller with component architectures like OpenDoc and its eventual successors, it will be more and more economic to charge rediculously smaller and smaller amounts for rediculously smaller and smaller network behaviors. Just wait until someone figures how to get software to really "evolve", or gets software to write other software on a practical basis. Most of the people I read, on the net or off, don't see this. They're looking "up" the net, how connections are made up, at the level of the grosser network features, like how monolithic corporations, or book-entry database and financial control systems, or government regulations, will happen on the net. How the net will integrate itself with the "real" world they're familiar with. 8 years ago, I used to talk about people who lived "on" microcomputers versus the ones who lived "in" them. I used to say that Macs were more for people who lived "in" computers because they weren't hindered by the mechanics of the interface so much. I think that there are still a lot of mainframe-cum-client/server folks out there who still live "on" the net, and not in it. Those are the people who are looking "up" at how the "big" players will behave, when they should be look at their feet, where the real action is. Where the very ground is in the process of dissoving out from under them. Cheers, Bob Hettinga -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMORJaPgyLN8bw6ZVAQG+WQP/X4j2qn9tnhDoJKdqctxBCoQzH4F//kKc zsau7Cxs49XGHAaoZo2Pk2svU79FWG7HyWsm0VAPR9ezHiWf8W/Tyi1NgxCkNwjo 62HFNsE0U6Rfo0Itd26WuICe9aC2SG5J6tX8+MzJZqHzzx2xhBUNPKFqt/ZwVtFZ KNLAGkM/7Hg= =jc3o -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -------------------------------------------------- The e$ lists are brought to you by: Making Commerce Convenient (tm) - Oki Advanced Products - Marlboro, MA Value-Checker(tm) smart card reader= http://www.oki.com/products/vc.html Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info(a)hyperion.co.uk See your name here! Be a charter sponsor for e$pam, e$, and Ne$ws! e-mail rah(a)shipwright.com for details... ------------------------------------------------- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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The F.C. flamewar
by Jeff Simmons 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You know, if I worked for an organization that was dedicated to restricting strong crypto, eliminating people's privacy rights, monitoring and recording everything that people say or write, etc. etc. ad infinitum, I'd probably spend at least a part of every day sitting in front of my computer in my little cubicle somewhere in Virginia, making posts to cypherpunks just like these ... -- Jeff Simmons jsimmons(a)goblin.punk.net

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SHATEST (was: Re: DOS - MD5 - Thanks)
by wlkngowl＠unix.asb.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 29 Dec 1995 15:22:46 -0700 (MST), you wrote: I've got a little goodie called SHATEST which I'm going to include with the next release of the NOISE.SYS driver.. it's the Secure Hash equivalent of MD5SUM... (Originally written to test the optimized SHA code-- much thanks to Colin Plumb, BTW--- for the /dev/random driver...) --Rob >A freestanding implementation of MD5SUM (compiled from that in the PGP >distribution) for DOS is at >ftp://ftp.csn.net/mpj/public/md5sum.zip and on the Colorado Catacombs BBS >at 303-772-1062. >I suggested to Phil Zimmermann that he should put this in the next PGP >release along with the compiled DOS version of PGP, but there hasn't been >a new release of PGP since then. >Happy New Year! Ditto... >Mike Johnson >mpj(a)exabyte.com >#include <std_disclaimer.h>

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A great time to be a cypherpunk
by Raph Levien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Amidst all the silliness, flames, and lunacy of this list, there's a tremendous amount of exciting stuff going on. I thought I'd take the opportunity to do one of those self-indulgent look back at the year postings. Cypherpunks write code. One of the best things about 1995 was the volume and quality of cpunk code that was released, and, perhaps equally importantly, existing cpunk programs that continue to be supported and improved. Here's a subjective top 5 list: 1. SSLeay, by Eric Young and Tim Hudson. Ordinarily, I wouldn't consider a crypto library to be all that newsworthy, but SSLeay is clearly an exception. SSLeay's real strength is its ability to be integrated easily into real applications, including Apache/SSL, Mosaic, telnet, etc. I'll go out on a limb and guess that one of the reasons why SSLeay is so good is that Eric has a lot of experience doing this kind of thing. His libdes code dates back at least to 1990, and (I think) even further. 2. Ssh, by Tatu Ylonen. There are a quite a few secure shells around. What sets ssh apart is its dedication to usability. It is one of the few crypto applications that is _more_ usable than the non-crypto version. The transparent X forwarding is fabulous. 3. Mixmaster, by Lance Cottrell. Finally, we have remailers that come close to real cryptographic security. The mixmasters are more reliable, in addition to more secure, than the type-1 remailers. The client is well written with a fairly easy interface. No wonder it's becoming so popular. 4. Alpha.c2.org, by Matt Ghio. The idea of pseudonyms incorporating strong cryptography has long been a cypherpunk dream. Thanks to Matt's work in writing and maintaining this nymserver, it's now reality. There are well over a thousand nyms registered on alpha.c2.org now, and that's likely to increase now that automated tools are becoming available. 5. Netscape, by Jeff Weinstein et al. Netscape Navigator is the first massively popular program to incorporate strong crypto. The email hasn't materialized yet, and there have been some scary statements by top management, but I'm hopeful that this program will become the primary vehicle for acheiving cypherpunk goals. Code, while important, is not the only useful cypherpunk activity. It's also been a great year for getting the word out there. The Net was _the_ hot story this year, and a lot of the coverage had a cypherpunk spin. Much of the credit goes to Sameer Parekh for his PR work. I know some cypherpunks dislike the "interview yourself" style of press release writing, but I'm very glad that we've got someone on our side who's good at it and is willing to put in the work. More broadly, we've found that our viewpoint and opinion matters. People are at a loss for how to think about the Net and its social implications. We've been thinking about that for a while, and have something to add to the discussion, and people are listening. 1995 will surely go down in history as the year that The Great Drive to Censor the Net began. The powers that be will continue pushing ahead with laws restricting speech, increasing liability for speech, and outlawing strong crypto. A short term effect will be to create some real differentiation between service providers. Up to now, the difference between one service provider and another has been an equation with bits on one side and dollars on the other. Starting soon, it will make a difference in what information can be easily accessed. A domain name of compuserve.com now clearly labels its account holder as a free speech inactivist. More cypherpunkish domain names are a sign of not being afraid of information. Over the long term, I agree with Lucky. The powers that be will have some success in censoring the Unwashed Massnet. However, cypherpunks will be able to create an infrastructure where freedom of speech thrives. A large part of this work is the development of censor-resistant protocols. My favorite such protocol is NNTP, even though it contains no crypto. HTTP is also a bit censor-resistant because it's so easy to set up a Web server. However, it still has grave weaknesses from this perspective, because of the need for a full time Internet connection _and_ storage in order to publish on the Web. The Web can become either more centralized or more decentralized, and there are strong forces pushing in both directions. I think the best hope for a cypherpunk Web is to emphasize dual-use techniques, those that advance mundane as well as cpunk goals. For example, distributed caching will make transfers go faster and make "unable to connect to server; try connecting again later" errors much less frequent. If done right, it can also make part-time Web servers feasible, and perhaps make it extremely difficult to delete documents that the publisher didn't want deleted (can anyone say "cryptographic authentication?"). Similarly, the same crypto-enabled filters that keep spam out of Joe Random's mailbox can drive a real public key infrastructure (Web relevance: the Web is the natural home for a pubkey infrastructure. Let's make sure to be there for the housewarming party). The way that the low-tech protocols of the Web have crushed and assimilated corporate Weblike networks is inspiring - it holds out real hope we can win, even against opponents as dedicated and powerful as governments. It will take hard work, tenacity, cooperation, and technical sophistication, though. Remember that Windows took about seven years to become successful. For dud of the year, I'd have to nominate Java. Don't get me wrong, this language shows a lot of potential. But, to a large extent, they've done the easy part, and the hard part remains. Given its existing security model, it's difficult or impossible to do anything really interesting with Java. Yet, fixing the security model _is_ the hard part. Best of luck to the Java people and all javapunks, but I think a strong case can be made that the hype machine went overboard. To all the cypherpunks who helped make 1995 such an exciting year, best holiday greetings and wishes for 1996. Raph

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Is this as insecure as it sounds (was FWD: Complete Fax Privacy Draws C
by abostick＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This turned up on alt.anonymous. One would need a technical specification or a working model to be sure, but it sounds like home-grown snake oil to me. My guess is that a nineteenth-century cryptanalyst could crack this, and that the TLAs would have a field day. What do other people think? > > Complete Fax Privacy Draws Closer > > > Individuals receiving faxes, be they of a business or > personal nature, will soon be able to encrypt the contents and > make them unreadable to people for whom the messages are not > intended. > The new fax encryption technology has been developed by the > University of Rochester in New York. The encryption program > would make all faxes unreadable to the naked eye. Only by > placing a customized transparent plastic sheet over the message > could it be made readable. Each individual, employee or manager > would be issued with his own plastic sheet and encryption key > ensuring messages are only read by those specified in the message > itself. The encryption software would not slow the transmission > and reception of fax messages and the cost of installing the > system on to existing machines would be minimal. > Such software would be indispensable to those whose > activities require the utmost confidentiality or privacy. Nosy > employees, rivals, those providing faxing services and anybody > else who has, until now, had a birds eye view of your fax > communications could be successfully abolished from the security > equation. > Though the software has yet to be refined into a marketable > commodity, it is set to be introduced for public consumption in > the very near future. > > > Adam Starchild > Asset Protection & Becoming Judgement Proof at > http://www.catalog.com/corner/taxhaven > > -- Alan Bostick | SWINDON: What will history say? Seeking opportunity to | BURGOYNE: History, sir, will tell lies as usual. develop multimedia content. | George Bernard Shaw, THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE Finger abostick(a)netcom.com for more info and PGP public key

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[LOCAL] Next cpx physical meeting in SF Bay area?
by Johnathan Corgan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It's been about a year since I've been to a cpx physical meeting in the SF area (other than T.C. May's house meeting--thanks again, Tim. The AetherWire folks gave a fascinating talk). I haven't seen much talk here on the list, either. Is this still a regular thing? Back then, we were having marathon meetings at SGI's IRIS cafe on the first Sat. of the month. What goes on these days?

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Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: FH radios [Dave Emery] [Vaughan Pratt]
by andr0id＠midwest.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>think I underestimated how hard things could get. If you're just >trying to track a frequency-hopping signal where the rest of the power >in the band is some mix of Gaussian noise and non-hopping signals, the >carrier should be clearly visible as a spike hopping around in the >band. As soon as you have two or more frequency-hopping signals >however, keeping track of which carrier is which as they hop around >looks *much* harder. If they hop at discernibly different times then >you can correlate a carrier that disappeared with the one that appeared >elsewhere at the same time. This easily described and implemented >approach breaks down when two or more signals hop at the same time. >Here you might try to associate some sort of signature with each signal >to allow you to pair up the new carriers with the old, but you'd have >to know more about the situation to say what signatures would be good. > RF finger-printing would do the trick. Any and all RF equipment has its own RF fingerprint no matter how closely they are made at the factory. Now having equipment to RF fingerprint and identify that fingerprint fast enough is another story! Dr0id (andr0id(a)midwest.net callsign: N9XLM) ( Computer Consulting & Management ) (P.O. Box 421 Cambria, IL 62915-0421) -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQENAzCsIi4AAAEH/1hb5+tO/n99Nbppf0ImLJ6AaVZ3NlZP0ZHwRQor00uA129i d4zWixNXxc8t2auaqN+asV99LpIip3/nQzBnjydiumeBdGLF2PR9+6X8X/RrqKa1 dVIukxM5Agg2eM6ih+0J38hgKJ3qzKXSz6sjYmpaxvbXZoHHOLUk/ZtHUKvvEyPw hnJEYnut8NUnIeK56lqeqRw86yoeRKymbfCdjdpgeY2aRwK2FJts8sbb7Fs10s4y jgxWIxIipBznbGUTh1hb2XrLGPENwk3E/qqXQJEsrySbtwdl6VgTVQjhDDEJMitL DYeiQ3W5EgxfcdbM1j2FwYu3P/dM6Y0I8xLMYT0ABRG0NmFuZHIwaWRAb2ljdTgx Mi5jb20gKG9pY3U4MTIuY29tIHN5c3RlbSBhZG1pbmlzdHJhdG9yKYkBFQMFEDCs LO90C7R/GkJcSQEB01cH/0KC3sd+u4OxMku5378SJktoN6QIQYLJ7uVbuV4S51yK NAotCGf4Wl6wwjynzZvXKU0H87oDuMiq7FybgMNL2n+4bQIZi0iz0lIuzwoMDu63 NrHUW9Kz42pOnhrEhrdkHhHL9O5GgD1yc40fJ3qw5h7LQEjDxgypyw0IFILFc34u LeRLliNibxKp8JwAxXNHWSgxu28TQvmnkHi0AHP6tJ/uZYe+4dqJtrMMsYFjzZaz DPmxD+dzbTwlQKtJaP1ZkDI0Sr072wrZDv+G86GyGBMX2lpSafpRitnxuUttjU9o wsQ9Qo5xiH1nZRCs/bDzJe/gng+GHzevixDIITurtNA= =SgPT -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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US calls for measures against Internet porn
by nobody＠tjava.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Apologies if you've seen this before: WASHINGTON DC (Reuter) - The US called Sunday for improved management of the Internet to prevent people seeing pornographic material on the world computer network. A joint statement from the Clinton administration's State Council (Cabinet) and the office of the Republican Party's Planning Committee said there were increasing links between domestic computer systems and the Internet. ``Good use of the Internet is of great importance to increase global information exchanges, promote economic construction and develop science,'' the Associated Press quoted the statement as saying. But because of weak management and lack of control over what enters the Internet, some pornographic and other harmful materials have come onto the system, it said. ``We must take effective measures to deal with this,'' it said. German prosecutors said Friday they had launched an investigation into the U.S.-based online service CompuServe Inc on suspicion that members had sent child pornography over its worldwide computer network. The inquiry prompted the service to block access to 200 sexually-explicit Internet discussion groups and sites where pornographic pictures are available. An explosion in use and ownership of modems in the US is giving an increasingly large number of people access to the Internet. [The amazing thing is how _little_ editing was necessary.]

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throwaway
by an201465＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[from: WEIRDNUZ.410 (News of the Weird, Dec 15, 1995 by Chuck Shepherd)] LEAD STORY * A 62-year-old woman pleaded guilty in Roanoke, Va., in November to stealing about 500 pieces of mail from her neighbors' mailboxes--her third such offense in five years. She had been found sane and competent for trial but nonetheless diagnosed as having an "irresistible impulse" to steal other people's mail. The judge had kept her confined to her home since her arrest, allowing her full freedom only on Sundays, when there is no mail delivery. [Roanoke Times, 11-21-95] --****ATTENTION****--****ATTENTION****--****ATTENTION****--***ATTENTION*** Your e-mail reply to this message WILL be *automatically* ANONYMIZED. Please, report inappropriate use to abuse(a)anon.penet.fi For information (incl. non-anon reply) write to help(a)anon.penet.fi If you have any problems, address them to admin(a)anon.penet.fi

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first germany, now china
by anon-remailer＠utopia.hacktic.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

BEIJING (AP) _ China is planning measures to stop obscene or harmful material from entering the country via the Internet, its official news agency reported Sunday. The Communist Party and the State Council, China's cabinet, recently ordered such measures after learning that ``pornographic and detrimental information'' had been disseminated electronically in China, the Xinhua News Agency said. The report said China intended to use the Internet to promote the exchange and transfer of technology and scientific information, while at the same time blocking what it sees as negative influences. It did not provide further details.

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