December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

THE REGISTER [Relaxation Of Encryption Export Constraints (Not really, but better than Wassenau) - Stu]
by Stu Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

1 0

THE REGISTER [I bin einer Noski, Tooski - Stu]
by Stu Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

1 0

[Fwd: Seasons Greetings [Ref: 42057]]
by Calumn Shearer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Taking confidentiality to an extreme..... Apparently, micro$oft are giving out christmas wishes on a "need to know" basis. OEMNews <OEMNews(a)microsoft-contact.co.uk> wrote: > Dear Calumn Shearer > > __________________________________________________________________ > > The Microsoft System Builder team would like to wish you a very happy > Christmas and a successful 1999. > > __________________________________________________________________ > >> CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE << > The information contained in this email is proprietary and confidential, > and > is intended only for users of the Microsoft OEM Web site as > "confidential > information" under your Web Site Registration and License Agreement. > If you (or your company) are not licensed to use the Web site, then any > use, copying, and distribution of information contained in this message > is > strictly prohibited. > If you received this message in error, please immediately notify us by > sending email > to msoemnet(a)microsoft.com. > (c) 1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. > Microsoft and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks > of Microsoft Corporation > in the United States and/or other countries. > Microsoft OEM products are licensed to system builders by Microsoft > Licensing, Inc., a wholly owned > subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. > This email is provided for informational purposes only.

3 2

Re: OpenBSD vs FreeBSD
by Mark Lanett 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Use an etch-a-sketch. Etch-a-sketch displays are not vulnerable to power-line denial-of-service attacks or fires. They *are* vulnerable to data loss during earthquakes or if physical access is obtained, however most operating systems running on standard hardware are also vulnerable to attacks of this nature. They are not vulnerable to remote electronic eavesdropping, as they emit no power signature, in fact no emissions of any kind. I am not familiar with TEMPEST specifications, however, and can not claim this level of security. ~mark From: Robert Watson <robert(a)cyrus.watson.org> >Use a toaster oven. [...] >Toaster ovens may be vulnerable to a remote denial of service attack >involving manipulation of power lines -- however, most operating systems >running on standard hardware are also vulnerable to this attack.

1 0

CLT&G Update: 29 Dec 98
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text From: "Chip Ford" <chip_ford(a)cltg.org> To: "MassLP Reflector" <general(a)lpma.org>, "MassGOP Listserv" <debate(a)list1.channel1.com> Subject: CLT&G Update: 29 Dec 98 Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 14:31:11 -0500 Sender: owner-general(a)lpma.org Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government PO Box 408 * Peabody, MA 01960 Phone: (508) 384-0100 * E-Mail: cltg(a)cltg.org Visit our website at: http://cltg.org --------------------------------------------------------------- *** CLT&G Update *** Tuesday, December 29, 1998 The Boston Globe Monday, December 28, 1998 The US suffered through turmoil in '98 -- 1798, that is By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist, 12/28/98 So shocking were the president's deeds, so extreme were his opponents, so furiously did partisan passions roil the public, that by the end of '98 some of the nation's most eminent leaders were questioning whether America's experiment with constitutional democracy was coming undone. No, not the Clinton scandals. The year was 1798. John Adams was in the White House and the United States was undergoing an agony of political turmoil. It was a bitter time, but it produced two of the most remarkable statements on liberty and limited government in our history - the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798. Americans were sharply divided over a host of issues that year, none more so than US-French relations. The Federalists, who controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, deeply mistrusted the French revolutionaries and refused to support them when France went to war with Britain. Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson were sympathetic to the French cause, which they identified with America's own revolt against royal abuse two decades earlier. The Jeffersonians denounced Adams and the Federalists as "monarchists" and "Tories" - denunciations echoed by a growing population of anti-British immigrants. Angered by Washington's neutrality, France began seizing American vessels. US diplomats in France were snubbed. A scandal erupted - the famous XYZ Affair - when agents of the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, demanded a bribe from President Adams's emissaries. Federalists were outraged; war fever swept the country. There were rumors that France was planning an invasion - and that Vice President Jefferson, whose Republican supporters were violently condemning the federal government, would join the invaders and overthrow the Adams administration. In this superheated atmosphere, Congress and the president enacted a package of grotesquely unconstitutional laws. The Alien Enemies Act empowered the president to jail or expel without trial any foreigner he deemed "dangerous to the peace." The Sedition Act prohibited all criticism of federal officials made "with intent to defame." Just seven years after the ratification of the First Amendment, editors, printers, and politicians were hauled into court and sent to prison for the crime of opposing the president. Jefferson and James Madison - who called the Sedition Act a "monster that must forever disgrace its parents" - resolved to strike back. Knowing that a Supreme Court fight would lose (the bench was dominated by Federalists), they decided to attack through the state legislatures. Working with allies in Kentucky and Virginia, Jefferson and Madison arranged for each state's general assembly to adopt a statement protesting the new laws. Jefferson drafted the Kentucky resolution, which was passed on Nov. 16, 1798. Madison wrote the Virginia resolution, which was adopted on Christmas Eve. "Resolved," the Kentucky Legislature declared in its opening paragraph, "that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." Supreme authority in America, it argued, was held not by the federal government but by the people and the states, and Congress and the president had only those powers clearly delegated to them by the Constitution. The Alien and Sedition Acts were intolerable above all because the federal government had no right to enact them. In the 20th century, the 10th Amendment has been largely ignored, but in the Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson quoted it repeatedly: "It is true as a general principle, and is also expressly declared by one of the amendments to the Constitution, that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."' Nothing in the Constitution gave federal officials any right to interfere with freedom of speech or the press, or to exercise any jurisdiction over aliens. "Therefore, the act of Congress passed on the 14th day of July, 1798 ... is not law, but is altogether void, and of no effect." The Virginia Resolution was also blunt. Congress and the president, Madison wrote, have only the powers "enumerated in that compact [the Constitution]; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers not granted by the said compact, the states ... have the right and are duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil." These resolutions weren't empty theory. They were a forceful defense of freedom, and a reminder that when governments are allowed to infringe the liberty of A, it is only a matter of time before they move on to B's. "The friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment," declared the Kentucky resolution, "but the citizen will soon follow - or rather has already followed, for already has a Sedition Act marked him as its prey." Jefferson and Madison were fearful, as more Americans should be today, of allowing power to be concentrated in the central government. They won the battle: Americans came to hate the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Federalists were thrown out in the election of 1800. But did they win the war? In our day, the federal government has grown monstrous, strangling Americans' freedom through endless regulations, restrictions, and taxes. The bicentennial of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions reminds us how much we have lost - and points the way to win it back. Jeff Jacoby is a Globe columnist. You can write Jeff at Jacoby(a)globe.com. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * "The Only Alternative to Limited Taxation and Government is Unlimited Taxation and Government" --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0

QuickEmail, A Web-based E-mail message
by whiterose＠liveinfreedomor.die 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

SSA, IRS, VA A-OK FOR Y2K President Clinton says that the U.S. Treasury Financial Management System has completed testing by independent auditors and is now "certified as Y2K (Year 2000) compliant." The Y2K problem or "millennium bug" is found in old programs that (because their authors used only two rather than four digits to designate years) will make mistakes when doing calculations based on dates. The Social Security Administration has led the way in dealing with the Y2K problem, which it first started working on in 1989. (San Jose Mercury News 29 Dec 98) A service provided by TechAID Computer Services, http://www.techaid.net The e-mail address of the sender MAY NOT BE AUTHENTIC.

1 0

CLT&G Update: 29 Dec 98 (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 14:57:08 -0500 > From: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> > Subject: CLT&G Update: 29 Dec 98 > Jefferson and Madison were fearful, as more Americans should > be today, of allowing power to be concentrated in the central > government. The entire point of a consitutional democracy is to avoid centralization. A better way to word this is that we should be afraid of the federal government becoming the central government. ____________________________________________________________________ What raises the standard of living may well diminish the quality of life. The Club of Rome The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

STUDENTS WEB SITE COVERED BY THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH
by Pallas Anonymous Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A federal judge has ruled against the school district of a Missouri high school student suspended because he and his sister posted a personal Web page using vulgar language to criticize the school's official Web site. U.S. District Court Judge Rodney Sippel has issued a preliminary injunction barring the school district from suspending the student, punishing him, or restricting his ability to post his personal home page. Sippel's opinion asserts: "Dislike or being upset by the content of a student's speech is not an acceptable justification for limiting student speech." (AP 28 Dec 98)

1 0

Re: "Hit 'em Where They Ain't": Deploying Digital Bearer Transactions
by Ryan Lackey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[BTW, there's a new mailing list to discuss how technical implementation details of DBS would [hypothetically] affect market dynamics, user experience, etc. -- send mail to pecunia-request(a)venona.org if interest. It's for stuff a bit too technical for dbs, and stuff too tenuously connected to cryptography for a mailing list like cryptography or coderpunks.] Quoting Todd Boyle (tboyle(a)rosehill.net) > Much hot air has been expended on directions in which accounting systems > will be re-architected for the internet. Meanwhile Quickbooks continues past > 90% and up, in small and medium sized businesses. It has got the user > interface solved, among many other problems. There is no possibility anybody > will take away the Quickbooks market in the next 3-5 years. I hate this. > But it's reality. > [suggestion: integrate electronic cash clients into Quickbooks] The same argument could be made for integration with the successful shopping cart systems (for retail purchasing), the successful web server (apache, maybe netscape and ms iis if you are feeling charitable), the popular internet client platform (netscape or maybe msie). I believe in this theory to an extent. Unfortunately, it seems easier to develop a platform-independent client for a DBS system first in standalone mode, then work on integrating into various existing applications. * Development and testing tools for generic systems such as Java are generally far superior to those for closed systems * A development team experienced in the other details of a payment system (cryptography, network protocols, security) is more likely to be familiar with generic software development than with developing for a specific application * Debugging a standalone client is generally far easier than debugging a plugin for an application which may itself have bugs. * Disagreements as to which particular proprietary systems should be supported. While Quickbooks, for instance, may control the business accounting market, packages such as quicken are more entrenched for individual (and perhaps very small business), and very large corporations use different packages. Which market segment, even for just accounting, should be the target? * The risk that a proprietary vendor will change the interface on the development team partway through development, or will go out of business, or become less important in the marketplace -- this is more of an issue the longer the product development cycle is. * Substantial minorities who are very attached to particular tools, in contrast to the majority of the target market -- witness the macintosh minority. This is because of the interface, legacy plugins, or whatever, and basically needs to be taken as a given. Looking at another popular crypto application which I believe had considered this issue is PGP. The core functionality of PGP, especially until relatively recently, has been to send encrypted email messages. A fairly compelling number of users use a small number of mail programs (Eudora, maybe Netscape Mail, maybe MS Exchange/Outlook). However, PGP chose to develop and continue developing a standaline application, leaving it to third parties to integrate PGP with existing mail readers. One logic would have said PGP should have created a standalone mail program, subsuming whatever functionality a tool like Eudora offers. There are a few reasons this might be worthwhile -- easier integration for the user by virtue of only having a single tool to use, both in configuration and in daily use -- perhaps market reasons such as greater profits -- greater brand identity -- assurances of secure behavior by the underlying levels (since they're integrated into the applications). However, there are many reasons subsuming the mailer functionality into the security application doesn't make sense. First of all, it was not necessarily known that electronic mail would be such a compelling application for PGP (well, actually it was). Additionally, they rightly noted that people would be reluctant to leave their existing mail programs (additionally, the market was a bit more fractioned at the time). There were the same problems with integrating into multiple applications, and also I don't think Phil Z. or the other early PGP developers had much experience developing application-plug-ins for any of the major mail clients. There are probably other factors involved here which I haven't addressed. My take on the question of how to do clients is that one should first develop functional standalone clients, with a well defined API, then either find existing people doing plug-ins or third-party applications and get them to do the integration work (keeping the code in the main line of the application, if possible, to keep it compatible with the latest releases of the product). Additionally, in some cases there exist wide-ranging standards which are easy to implement (such as the UNIX standards for stdin/stdout and argument handling, or perhaps HTTP/HTML, or maybe at some point XML or OFX) which should be implemented. There are also some applications which are so widespread that their own internal interface standard, if well documented and relatively unchanging, is worth writing to -- perhaps this is the case for browser plug-ins for Netscape and MS IE, perhaps for MS Office add-ons, and maybe the case for Eudora. However, in most of these cases, I'd be much happier writing a standalone system first, getting most of the development process out of the way, then doing a shorter development cycle to integrate the well-tested codebase into a third-party application...this lowers the window of risk for changes in the third party application as well as providing the above advantages. In the long run, though, I agree that integrating DBS into existing accounting systems at least as well as current payment systems, and probably far better, is of very high importance. I wasn't aware quickbooks was that popular, and will look at it soon...it sounds like it would be an interesting package to work with. Happy New Years, Ryan ryan(a)venona.com

1 0

Hoppe on Defense
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text From: "Mises Institute News" <news(a)mises.org> To: <miseslist(a)mises.org> Subject: Hoppe on Defense Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 14:53:24 -0600 Sender: miseslist-owner(a)mises.org Status: U We are pleased to announce another paper in our Essays in Political Economy series: "The Private Production of Defense" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Professor of Economics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Senior Fellow, the Ludwig von Mises Institute). >From the essay: "Among the most popular and consequential beliefs of our age is the belief in collective security. Nothing less significant than the legitimacy of the modern state rests on this belief. And yet, the idea of a collective security is a myth that provides no justification for the modern state. Private-property owners, cooperation based on the division of labor, and market competition can and should provide defense from aggression." This powerful and radical essay can be purchased here http://mises.org/product.asp?sku=p131 or by calling 334-844-2500. The price is $4.00 postpaid (no postage charges will appear on your credit card, regardless of what your shopping basket says). * * * * * A special 4-page, supplemental Austrian Economics Newsletter has been published this quarter. It features an interview with Roberta Modugno of the Center for the Methodology of the Social Sciences at the Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali in Rome, Italy. She discusses her new book, Murray N. Rothbard e il libertarismo amerciano (Robbettino Ediotre, Soveria Mannelli, 1998). Students and faculty have been mailed a copy of this special AEN. If you are not on the list to receive one, email susan(a)mises.org with your address. Subscriptions to the AEN are $16 a year. Something to look forward to for Spring 1999: An interview With Richard Vedder (Ohio University) * * * * * The new Mises Review features David Gordon reviewing books by Allen Oakley on Austrian economics; Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl on relativism; Richard John Neuhaus et al. on judicial tyranny; Zbegniew Brzezinksi on American foreign policy; Jim Sleeper on liberal racism; Michael Levin on race; and Ronald Dworkin on affirmative action. Individual copies are $5. Subscriptions are $16 per year. Back issues are available on Mises.org. Subscribe: http://mises.org/product.asp?sku=MR * * * * * As we approach the new year, we wish you a happy one, and hope you enjoy Clifford F. Thies's article on millennial hysteria and its historic connection with socialist ideology. http://mises.org/fullstory.asp?FS=+%3Ch3%3EThe+Year+2000 In the next few days on Mises.org, we'll feature an article on the Euro and coverage of the continuing debate between Robert Bork (taking the statist position) and Michael Kinsley (taking the free-market position) on Microsoft's future. It may seem like a strange turnabout, but even stranger things have happened this month, in addition to the political turmoil in the Belly of the Beast: the Mises Institute and the Village Voice agreedthat the U.S. government should not be destroying people and property in Iraq. --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0