December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: (X:x)e$ 's other use
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Gary - actually this comes up every 3-6 months. There are some fundamental problems with the using e$ as a new currency. At 02:33 AM 3/22/96 -0600, you wrote: >e$ would be a sound money replacement for the corrupt currency that >every large state in the world currently pushes. Especially if e$ >can be redeemed in something of real value on demand. E$ is a fine medium for exchanging certificates of whatever it is you're trying to certify, just as paper with pictures of dead politicians is. Printing paper is easy, and it's easy to add lots of zeros when you do. Printing 1s and 0s is also easy, and there are plenty of zeros out there. Digging shiny malleable ductile yellow metal out of the ground is harder. The tough part, with all these media, is getting somebody to give you real stuff in return for a certificate that claims to be worth 1000. The three basic ways certificate-issuers have done this are 1) Guarantee that they'll give you stuff or services in return 2) Convince a lot of people to exchange stuff or services for them, so you can usually redeem them without going to the bank 3) Threaten to beat people up if they don't accept them. Method 1 works if people trust you and you've got stuff to sell. Subway tokens and postage stamps have been used as money because most people want to ride subways and mail letters, and the subway and mail-carrying companies were big enough that you'd expect to be able to redeem them before the companies went out of business (or you moved out of town), so you can spend some money safely. Note that this method works both for stuff you have on hand, like shiny metal, or for services you're promising to do later and will have to get resources for. Banknotes work because well-behaved banks only issue enough promises to deliver shiny metal to cover the amount of metal they have; if they start making more promises than they can deliver on, the market gets annoyed at them and people stop accepting their paper in return for goods and services, and stop giving them shiny metal in return for convenient paper, and Method 2 fails for them. But if banks keep their promises, people trust them, and they make money. This works both in free markets and in government-controlled markets. As long as the banks are _honest_ about their policies for issuing notes, it doesn't matter if they're doing fractional reserve or printing the stuff outright; you can decide how much to trust them, or whether to do all your transactions with shiny metal. Method 3 you'll recognize. There'd be nothing wrong with the Federal Reserve if they only used methods 1 and 2; individual consumers can decide whether to trust them not to print a lot more zeros than they should. And they don't have a monopoly on currency - there are some kinds of taxes that apply to some private currencies, but you can go into the average bank today, ask them to write a cashier's check to someone (and probably still to "bearer"), pay them, and they'll be happy to do it for only a small commission, and American Express will do it as well. And people will take their paper, though in the case of traveller's checks it's sometimes a hassle to accept on an occasional basis. On line, of course, it's tough to use metal as a way to pay people, so technologies like e$ are necessary. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissible." - US government statement on China... "SigFiles of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist!"

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Java questions
by Wei Dai 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There has been a lot of discussion on coderpunks about implementing cryptography in Java. This got me thinking. We don't see every C++ compiler using the same back end. So why is everyone licensing Sun's Java implementation? As a consequence of this if there is a bug in Sun's implementation, then that bug exists in every Java implementation. Imagine a future scenario where a virus/worm takes advantage of a single Java bug and infects 90% of all computers attached to the Internet overnight. There may not be much we can do about this, but we should at least be more aware of the possibility. On a more positive note, has anyone thought of writting a remailer server or client in Java? It would be really nice if we could run or use a remailer by clicking a link on the web. Wei Dai

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Noise sphere graphical tests of randomness
by wlkngowl＠unix.asb.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've got a short program for the PC (w/TPascal source) that plots a noise sphere from a file of (pseudo) random data, if anyone is interested. Requires a VGA card that handles mode 5Fh (640 x 480, 256 color) though the source can be eaily recompiled to use something else, or standard Borland Graphics drivers. Send a reply with the subject "send nsphere" or check ftp.funet.fi in the /pub/crypt/random directory in a few days [the ftp site would be easier on my mailer ;] The source has a brief explanation of what noise spheres are and a reference to the Pickover article the program was based on. The source code is not copyrighted, and it would be nice to see it ported to other systems, or maybe a portable C version that writes the output to a .PCX file in RBG(?). [I'm not that fluent in C to write one...] I've gotten some *very* interesting results. Raw samples collected from fast timings between Windows message broadcasts do nicely with some of the randomness tests (compressability, Maurer, chi-sq) but clearly plots a spiral. Raw samples from the keyboard don't do as nicely in other tests (~50% compressability, <6 bits/byte Maurer, and "non-random" in chi-squared] but in the plot no discernable pattern shows up.... similar to plotting the output from /dev/urandom [even when /dev/urandom was configured *not* to use keyboard...] Needless to say this will affect sampling methoids in the next version of NOISE.SYS. take care, Rob --- Send a blank message with the subject "send pgp-key" (not in quotes) to <WlkngOwl(a)unix.asb.com> for a copy of my PGP key.

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Re: protection on IoMega ZIP drives
by JonWienke＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In a message dated 96-03-23 05:19:55 EST, it was written for God and everyone to see: >> Has anyone tried SFS? It should work on the zip drive, though I've not >> tried it (yet)... > >If I recall some recent threads on alt.security.pgp (or sci.crypt?), >SFS doesn't work on ZIP drives (since ZIPs use the parallel port...). > >[Or do ZIPs use Scuzzies and the people who had problems were just >too lame to figure out that they had to load the driver before SFS?] The Syquest EZ drive (130MB twice as fast as the ZIP, a little cheaper too--around $200 for an internal drive and cartridge, with additional carts around $20, and a 1 GB version available for $500, + $100 / additional cartridge) comes in IDE, SCSI, and parallel flavors. You can get an internal IDE drive and DOS doesn't know or care that you can replace the cartridge. You can DoubleSpace the drive, (I have personally done this) so you should be able to SecureDrive it too. It is a full fledged IDE (or SCSI) drive. Jonathan Wienke

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Re: protection on IoMega ZIP drives
by mch＠squirrel.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Mar 23, 17:28, JonWienke(a)aol.com wrote: } The Syquest EZ drive (130MB twice as fast as the ZIP, a little cheaper } too--around $200 for an internal drive and cartridge, with additional carts } around $20, and a 1 GB version available for $500, + $100 / additional } cartridge) comes in IDE, SCSI, and parallel flavors. You can get an internal } IDE drive and DOS doesn't know or care that you can replace the cartridge. } You can DoubleSpace the drive, (I have personally done this) so you should } be able to SecureDrive it too. It is a full fledged IDE (or SCSI) drive. The SCSI version of the ZIP drive is a "fully fledged" SCSI drive. I use one on a Sun workstation without any special software/drivers, and secure the ZIP disks with CFS. It isn't terribly fast, but one hardly notices when one is dealing with the overhead of encrypting and decrypting the data anyway. -- Mark Henderson -- markh(a)wimsey.bc.ca, mch(a)squirrel.com, henderso(a)netcom.com ViaCrypt PGP Key Fingerprint: 21 F6 AF 2B 6A 8A 0B E1 A1 2A 2A 06 4A D5 92 46 unstrip for Solaris, Wimsey crypto archive, TECO, computer security links, change-sun-hostid, Sun NVRAM/hostid FAQ - http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel

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Unused WWW and anon FTP space
by janimmo＠ionet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Greetings Cypherpunks: I have no idea if this is the appropriate place or way to broach this topic, but I have a great deal of space on my account that is just going to waste. I am allowed a www page, and in a couple of weeks my shell space quota will be upgraded to 20 meg, with anon ftp capability. As I said, this is just going to waste, so I was wondering if anyone had some faqs, files, or whatever that they wanted to distribute or if anyone needed space for a web page. Frankly, I've never written an html document, but I suppose I could learn. Please respond directly, as I'm sure that the rest of the list doesn't want to hear the responses. ___ ( > /) /) __/_/> // // janimmo(a)ionet.net / / (__//__//_ <_/ /> /> janimmo(a)aol.com </ </ Cypherpunk newbie and general dweeb

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Pepsi World - $25,000!
by webmaster＠pepsi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey Squatter! Have you found the hidden "hot" spots and registered to win the Shaq/Pepsi World's Slammin' Techno Dream Contest? Deadline to enter is March 31st, only a few days away. Don't miss out on your chance to win a $25,000 Gateway computer shopping spree and a trip to Orlando, Florida to meet Shaq and catch the Magic in action. All ya gotta do is find the hidden "hot" spots. Seem impossible? Well, here are a couple of hints: "Shaquille O'Neal is his name, Movies and basketball are his game. So cruise by La La Land or Adrenalin to give your luck a try, And find the ball that Shaq has left behind." "Twinkle, twinkle little star, 25 grand could go real far..." Good luck!

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email profit centre
by Julian Assange 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Who wants to take this site down first? [http://unix.lgn.com/email.htm] GET A JUMP ON THE INTERNET TODAY, BEFORE YOUR COMPETITION DOES! Can you afford not to??? The Email'ers Profit Center * Increase market penetration * Great for Multi-Level marketing * Virtually no mailing expense * $$ Save money $$ You will have access to 500,000+ Email addresses * Make your product or service known to thousands of people. * Save money. (To mail postcards to 500,000 people would run you over US$95,000.00). The Email'ers Profit Center is a mailing list of over 500,000 email addresses, all gathered within the last six months. It is available on your choice of CD-ROM or 100meg ZIP disk. They both contain the list in ASCII and .dbf. FREE MONTHLY UPDATES VIA TELNET! THE LIST IS EXPECTED TO DOUBLE WITHIN SIX MONTHS! The list is $500 for your own unlimited use. You may not resell, rent or loan the listings to any other person or company. _________________________________________________________________ For more information contact George. Phone: (209)276-1707 or E-mail: bubba(a)lgn.com -- "I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?" - Leo Bulero/PKD +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+ |Julian Assange RSO | PO Box 2031 BARKER | Secret Analytic Guy Union | |proff(a)suburbia.net | VIC 3122 AUSTRALIA | finger for PGP key hash ID = | |proff(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu | FAX +61-3-98199066 | 0619737CCC143F6DEA73E27378933690 | +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+

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CDA Court Challenge: Day #2
by Declan B. McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The DoJ also quizzed Donna Hoffman about anonymous remailers. They wanted to make sure that she wasn't an expert on them, had conducted no studies of remailers, and had collected no statistics on their use. -Declan ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The CDA Challenge, Day #2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Declan McCullagh / declan(a)well.com / Redistribute freely ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- March 22, 1996 PHILADELPHIA -- At 2:21 pm today, one of the judges hearing our challenge to the Communications Decency Act finally "got it." "The folks in Luxembourg don't give a damn what our laws are. So my son, who's 10, can still view 'Sexy European Girls?'" asked U.S. District Court Judge Stewart Dalzell. "That's correct," replied Scott Bradner of Harvard University, who took the stand today to describe net.technology. Bradner told me afterwards he thought Friday's hearing went well -- he had come to Philadelphia to testify because this "is such an important issue." Judge Dalzell's remark hints that he, at least, is starting to understand the Internet -- and the consequences of the court's eventual ruling. This comes not a picosecond too soon for those of us who have been fidgeting in our seats, wincing as Department of Justice attorneys misuse technical terms and hoping the judges can sort through the cyberconfusion in just six days of hearings. Dalzell has a keen sense of humor and seems sympathetic to our arguments. In fact, I'd guess he's been doing some out-of-court web-surfing himself. In an _astounding_ question at the end of the day, he asked Bradner: "Isn't it true that the exponential and incredible growth of the Internet came about because the government kept their hands off of it?" Bradner gladly agreed. (What else would he say?) The other two judges aren't quite as reflective. In an incomprehensible decision last month, Judge Ronald Buckwalter granted us only a _partial_ restraining order preventing the Feds from enforcing the CDA. Now he's justifying his original mistake by taking a critical stance during this hearing -- that is, when he's not dozing. During one of his more alert moments, Buckwalter asked if labeling all online content is possible: "Your problems are technical and financial? If thse problems are solved and we agree on the definition of indecent, is it possible?" "Yes, it is," our witness replied. Buckwalter also asked earlier: "What do you mean by saying the Internet is a very democratic medium? Isn't there someone who steers discussion?" As proof, he held up a copy of a recent Atlantic magazine article that claimed the most popular USENET newsgroups are moderated and are therefore "quasi-authoritarian." I suggested to our attorney, Chris Hansen from the ACLU, that he clarify what percentage of newsgroups were moderated. On redirect, Hansen posed that question to Donna Hoffman of Vanderbilt University. She replied that most newsgroups are unmoderated. Later, Bradner of Harvard University added that moderated newsgroups amount to less than 10 percent of the total. Dolores Sloviter is the third judge on the panel. As the chief judge of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, she penned a sparkling decision upholding free expression in a phone sex case. In this hearing, Sloviter's questions are the most pointed and incisive. When Robert Cronenberger of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library was testifying, Sloviter asked him if under the CDA "would something have to be removed from your collection?" Cronenberger replied: "We don't know. We would be afraid that someone might find something indecent or patently offensive." The Department of Justice attorneys are an interesting lot. Jay Baron is a short, heavyset man who tries hard to land roundhouse punches during cross-examination but instead comes across as prone to malapropisms. I think he was the DoJer who confused <http://www.eff.org/> with <http://www.itef.org/> and "ISP" with "IP address." Before the hearing resumed for the afternoon, I introduced myself to him. He recognized me as a plaintiff and said he included one of my articles on Marty Rimm as evidence (!) and used it during depositions. <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~declan/rimm/> Tony Coppolino is more reserved and didn't say much when we chatted, except to say that his office is busy enough with this case that they won't be sending anyone to the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference next week. I was impressed by the poise of Patricia Rosado, the DoJ's point person on porn. Yesterday she floated the MacKinnonesque theory that porn is harmful not just to minors, but also to women. Today she greeted our witnesses with a barbed, stinging cross-examination. Unfortunately for Rosado, she was up against Cronenberger, a likable gent who came across as a traditional librarian close to the judges' own ages -- not a net.geek like Donna Hoffman and Scott Bradner. (At one point, Judge Sloviter demanded that Bradner explain URLs and linking in English, not net-ese.) The judges gladly related to Cronenberger's description of the Net as a library -- finally, something they could grasp! The ACLU's Chris Hansen expanded on this in a brilliant redirect, pointing out that the concept extends beyond that of a traditional library, allowing a user to link "from the fourth floor of Wiedner Library in Boston to the third floor of the Carnegie Mellon University library in Pittsburgh." Rosado from the DoJ rallied with questions like: DoJ: "You can do a keyword search on the seven dirty words?" DoJ: "Would a search on Abraham Lincoln turn up articles about sex?" R.C.: "I've read many articles about his sex life, or lack of sex life. DoJ: "Would a search on travel turn up articles about sex?" DoJ: "Would a search on geology turn up articles about sex?" R.C. "Only if rock is put together with roll!" <laughter>) DoJ: "Would a search on food turn up articles about sex?" DoJ: "You exercise discretion as to what you make available. You don't carry everything, do you?" DoJ: "You select materials that reflect the local community standards?" Not surprisingly, the DoJ is trying to keep the hearing focused on porn and sex. (At least it keeps Buckwalter awake!) Not the truly extreme stuff that obscenity laws already ban online, but the softcore Playboy-style cyberpix that would be permitted in the absence of the CDA. The Justice Department asked Vanderbilt's Hoffman: DoJ: "You stated in your deposition that you were generally familiar with the web page called Bianca's Smut Shack?" Judge Dalzell immediately looked up, startled: "Bianca's WHAT?" DoJ: "Bianca's SMUT Shack." Judge Dalzell: "Oh, okay." Other DoJ questions included a passing reference to would-be cyberporn researcher Marty Rimm, who claimed that pornographers were using the Net to recruit customers. (Last month, the DoJ attached Rimm's study as an exhibit in their response to our complaint and cited it as evidence of the pervasiveness of nasty stuff on USENET.) Some examples: DoJ: "You will concede, will you not, that this law will not have a profound adverse effect [on password-protected smutty sites]?" DoJ: "Pornographers are using USENET newsgroups to advertise, are they not?" DoJ: "Tell us about bots and spiders." Judge Dalzell, trying hard: "That's an acronym, right?" My fellow plaintiffs are wonderful. Kiyoshi Kuromiya testified the first day, followed by Patricia Nell Warren. Warren and I had dinner on Thursday with Jonathan Wallace of the Ethical Spectacle; we talked about the political and social forces behind the push for the CDA. I asked Wallace why he came down from New York City -- he told me because "this is the most important free speech case in 60 years." Today I sat next to the DoJ's net.experts, who kept leaning forward to whisper technical data into the ears of the Justice Department's attorneys. One of the two experts was from Brigham Young University. The other was Steve Nesbitt from the Department of Defense. One or both likely will be testifying as expert witnesses for the DoJ, but Justice isn't releasing the list until April 3. Stay tuned for more reports. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- We're back in court on 4/1, 4/12, 4/15, and 4/26. The DoJ will be taking depositions from our remaining witnesses the week of March 24. For more information and breaking updates, check out: http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/top/ To subscribe to the fight-censorship announcement list, send email with "subscribe fight-censorship-announce" in the body to: majordomo(a)sojourn.com Other relevant web sites: http://www.eff.org/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~declan/rimm/ http://www.cdt.org/ http://www.aclu.org/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: DAZ_zle
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:53 PM 3/21/96 -0500, John Young wrote: > Foreign Affairs, March/April, 1996, features two policy > essays on "The Information Edge: A technological change is > transforming the nature of power and the United States is > clearly in the lead." [deleted] > He observes that misunderstanding of > revolutionary technology all too often has had unexpected, > disastrous, consequences: "A revolution in military affairs > is under way. It will require changes of a magnitude that > military people still do not completely grasp and political > leaders do not fully imagine." Sounds like this guy has been reading my stuff.

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