December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: unsubscrive
by Brad Shantz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Time May Wrote: >Maybe these dweebs are posting from an alternate universe? A universe in >which not even messages explaining that "unsubscrive," "unsuscribe," >"undescribe," "unscribe," and "unimbibe" are not valid alternate spellings >of "unsubscribe." > >I've copied my short explanation of how to subscribe and unsubcribe too >many times to do it again; and it is clear that these folks are either >doing this out of spite, are not reading any of the messages we send them, >or think it funny. I agree with you to a point, Tim. They probably haven't read the messages about how to properly unsubscrive. Not because they are dweebs or because they think it's funny. they probably haven't read the messages because they have 2 or 3 thousand messages in their inbox and they're all from cpunks. Unfortunately, this time, I have to give them the benefit of the doubt for being ignorant. I don't think they're being vindictive. How many of them have posted Unsub messages after being told the proper way to unsub? Brad This may kill off the Cypherpunks list even where Detweiler's massive rants failed. (Now that Detweiler's cabin in Montana has been raided, and one of his tentacles carried off, who will fill his shoes? Vlad the VZNuri is well on his way to matching Detweiler's volume, if not his obsessiveness.) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: NSA Budget
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"JR Weaver" writes: > http://www.fas.org/pub/gen/fas/irp/commission/budget.htm > > This page reveals the FY96 NSA budget at $3.6 billion. It doesn't give any details, though. The general size of the NSA budget was known for a long time based on inference -- see "The Puzze Palace". In any case, they are not now making a habit of releasing budget numbers, but you can find out how much they in general spend. Certainly the original poster's request for detailed quarterly reports isn't going to be met... Perry

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[NOISE] Federal Bureau of Indigestion
by Dave Del Torto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[forwards mercifully elided] The following is a direct quote from the Center for Strategic and International Studies report on GLOBAL ORGANIZED CRIME; the author who introduces the story swears it's true. FBI agents conducted a raid of a psychiatric hospital in San Diego that was under investigation for medical insurance fraud. After hours of reviewing thousands of medical records, the dozens of agents had worked up quite an appetite. The agent in charge of the investigation called a nearby pizza parlor with delivery service to order a quick dinner for his colleagues. The following telephone conversation took place and was recorded by the FBI because they were taping all conversations at the hospital. Agent: Hello. I would like to order 19 large pizzas and 67 cans of soda. Pizza Guy: And where would you like them delivered? Agent: We're over at the psychiatric hospital. PM: The psychiatric hospital? Agent: That's right. I'm an FBI agent. PM: You're an FBI agent? Agent: That's correct. Just about everybody here is. PM: And you're at the psychiatric hospital? Agent: That's correct. And make sure you don't go through the front doors. We have them locked. You will have to go around to the back to the service entrance to deliver the pizzas. PM: And you say you're all FBI agents? Agent: That's right. How soon can you have them here? PM: And everyone at the psychiatric hospital is an FBI agent? Agent: That's right. We've been here all day and we're starving. PM: How are you going to pay for all of this? Agent: I have my checkbook right here. PM: And you're _all_ FBI agents? Agent: That's right. Everyone here is an FBI agent. Can you remember to bring the pizzas and sodas to the service entrance in the rear? We have the front doors locked. Pizza Guy: I don't _think_ so... >click<

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Open Systems, Closed Systems, & Killer Apps
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At the Digital Commerce Society of Boston lunch last Tuesday, I had an epiphany. I finally got the answer to the great question of our age: Why do open systems beat closed systems? One of the peculiar things about today is how successful open systems have become. Closed systems like Communism, X.25, and IBM have fallen to markets, TCP/IP, and the personal computer respectively. And this has happened all over the world in institutions with incredibly varied political and social systems. We were discussing the Chinese government's proposal to maintain a monopoly ISP in China that would censor the connections of its peons and as usual I pointed out the many ways that such restrictions could be overcome (Don't tell T. May about the draft defining a new MIME type "TCP/IP packet". I know he hates MIME). Which led to the response "Sure a few techies will be able to overcome the restrictions but the masses won't and the government won't mind a little leakage as long as they maintain overall control." To which I retorted "ordinary people will overcome the technical barriers if they have sufficient motivation." Which brought up the subject of what are the "killer apps" for the Net. What will motivate people enough to choose open communication even though it's hard and sometimes even dangerous. Which led to: The killer app of open systems is not any particular application it is the openness, the freedom itself. The denizens of the DDR had to overcome the Stasi, barbed wire, mines, walls, tank traps, etc to adopt an open systems architecture. Learning to use a few TCP/IP tricks (or building them into applications and using those applications) is much easier than breaching the Berlin Wall. Open systems whether MarketEarth or TCP/IP let you trade/communicate at will with anyone else. This leads to more trade/communication which leads to more wealth (or non-monetary satisfaction). Since people are able to do more things that they want to do (unblocked by hierarchies) it is only natural that they are more satisfied with the results (and there are more results to be satisfied with). After all, a hierarchical system can only produce outcomes directed by the hierarchy (in the best case). But the top of the hierarchy is much smaller than the bottom of the hierarchy so it can only think of, deal with, and authorize a small number of activities. So the system can only do a few things. I should have known this before since it is implicit in my favorite article from the Economist "THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING COMPANY" 15 December 1990 (http://www.ios.com/~lroth/CLIPS/Bussiz.html) "Part of the answer [as to why firms are shrinking] may lie in the fact that, loth though they are to admit it, top people's capacity to deal with information is limited. There is no technical reason why a Wall Street investment house should not line the walls of the managing director's office with screens, showing second-by-second price movements for thousands of securities. But there is not much a single person could do with all that information. So the best way to take advantage of increases in the amount of information coming into the firm is to push decision-making down the corporate hierarchy, to where the flow is manageable by a single mind: on Wall Street, a trader." [And if you don't, the market will.] Hierarchies my be able to produce a lot of a limited range of products: megatons of sandy concrete and dead bodies like Communism, or globe-spanning private networks like X.25, or millions of pounds of Armonk Iron like IBM, but they can't produce as broad or satisfactory or an output or in the end as *large* an output as open systems can. The Net or the Market can produce an incredible range of products that no *one* would ever think of (save for the *one* who did). And since people are more likely to find things that they want in the whole range of "products," open systems encourage more activity and hence more "wealth." Additionally, the absence of the need to ask permission from Gosplan, or the Sysadmin, or some marketing committee obviously makes it possible to do more faster. You not only save the begging and committee decision time, you can do things that others might think bad or peculiar. No need to convince strangers about the value of your idea prior to trying it out. You get to just do it. Now none of these differences between open systems and hierarchies meant much when the bulk of the world's population had to spend all of its time growing food to survive, but now... Choice exists and choices will be made. Hierarchies will try and resist the spread of open systems but they will not be successful and their failures will come faster and be much more obvious as time goes on. If one organization resists "successfully," people and money will drain away from it to other organizations where they are allowed a fuller range of choice. The success of open systems will help the spread of those systems into the surviving bastions of hierarchy. That's why I'm the Pangloss of Cypherpunks "everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds". I know that this is all Kindergarten stuff but sometimes simple things are hard to see. People today are offered a choice between two ways of doing things: 1) You get to do what you want and (by the way) have a vast wealth of "things" to own/use. or 2) You have to do what other people tell you and (unfortunately) make do with less of everything including choice, money, and "toys." I wonder what choice people will make? DCF

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None
by K00l Secrets 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Shaving probably will not be a problem, but holding your head at a > slightly different angle... will screw up the system totally, > unless the system has radically improved since the last time I read > up on it. Well, the systems I have seen are quite good at finding people's eyes. Scaling (for distance), and rotation (for the angle of your head) therefore don't really confuse the system once it has your eyes.

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Re: Enforcing the CDA improperly may pervert Internet architecture
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:51 AM 4/9/96 -0400, Declan B. McCullagh wrote: >... >The DoJ and Taylor are going to argue that IP V6 can include such an >adult/minor tag in each datagram! One of their key witnesses is Dan >Olsen, the head of the computer science department at Brigham Young >University and the incoming director of the Human Computer Interaction >Institute at CMU. Declan - One of the migration paths suggested for IPV4 to IPV6 migration is to tunnel IPV4 packets within IPV6 packets. IPV4 packets do not provide for an adult/minor tag, so until the transition to IPV6 is fairly well along, this approach will be ineffective. If the people who are worried about minor's accessing smut want something this century, they should go with PICS. Regards - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Re: Bank transactions on Internet
by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:31 PM 4/8/96 -0700, you wrote: >I agree with Jim at SFNB that the encryption made possible by VeriSign >server certificates is an integral part of remote banking on the Web. >However, I would encourage Security First and other banks looking at the Web >to focus increased attention on client certificates AND to migrate away from >their dependence on user passwords. I brought this up with SFNB a month or so ago (when I opened my account) and the word then was that client side certificates would be avaible within a month or so, my time guestimate (based on what they were saying) was half-a-year. >Admittedly, client certificate >functionality has not yet been available but it will probably be standard by >mid-1996. Let's hope so, I am not keeping significant funds in that account until I have a certificate. >Yes---it is true that security is never absolute. I hope Eric Young does attempt to crack a 40-bit SFNB session as he mentioned on cpx today. >As Michael Karlin of SFNB noted and subsequently corrected, Netscape caches >passwords. I suspected this, and was further exposed because of a common problem with using Netscape and the like from student accounts (with a big 10M quota), say on MIT's athena, where I like my disk cache to reside in the workstations /tmp . I wipe(d) it whenever I log out, but I'm sure others sprinkled their passwords in a million "public" cache's before SFNB stuck the tag no-cache tag in. OBJava: do java applets have access to the cache, would it be possible to write one of the little nasties that keep an eye on the cache? >Additionally, people tend to use a single password for 10 or more of their >relationships and one compromise, compromises all. Indeed! How many people use their easily crack "ftp:/etc/passwds" password for SFNB? _______________________ Regards, The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. - Linus Pauling Joseph Reagle http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html reagle(a)mit.edu E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E

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RE: NSA Budget - NOT!
by Anton Rager 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wouldn't it be great if it were true!!!!!!! -- sorry folks -- doesn't seem to exist 1. - No domain of dod.gov -- there is info for nsa.gov...just not dod.gov 2. - No valid URL of http://nsa.dod.gov/~reports/quarterly.txt -- no page returned This must be a joke....I was gullible enough to try anyway. ____________ Original Message Follows _____________________________________ Yes, there are annual and quarterly reports released to the public which describe in meticulous detail expenditures for the agency's program, personnel and equipment: 1. The program of services and information supplied to government and other intelligence organizations, US and foreign, with terms of each client contract. 2. US employees, their organization, skills, duties and longevity of service; their names, ranks, identification codes, secure communication methods and home addresses; the location of workplaces; the continued training each is scheduled to receive; leaves of absence and destinations while absent. 3. Foreign nationals covertly employed worldwide, with information on each as per 2. 4. A comprehensive listing of all types of world-wide equipment operated; its detailed design, function and output; where it is located; its designers, manufacturers and purchase cost; its schedule of amortization; and its schedule for replacement and/or upgrade, with fifteen-year projected procurement. 5. Special short- and long-term contracts with governmental and non-governmental organizations, US and foreign for one-time projects, by goal, personnel and equipment. 6. Special projects with other US and foreign counter- intelligence to issue disinformation about the agency. 7. Special section on world-wide US and foreign cryptology: cryptanalysis, cryptography, steganography, codes, cyphers, glyphs, mimes; each ranked for security and ease of cracking; governmental and non-governmental parties using each; names of cooperative and resistant cryptographers and cooperating pseudo-cryptographers. 8. Sub-section on methods of Internet traffic and language analysis; operation and surveillance of anonymous remailers, bulletin boards and mail lists; lists of cooperative and resistant educational institutions and commercial organizations. 9. Appendices on: black operations; transparent operations; methods for managing cooperative and resistant governmental and non-governmental persons. The public is invited to study and/or download these reports anonymously at: http://nsa.dod.gov/~reports/quarterly.txt

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Re: (Fwd) British Study Claims That Photo Credit Cards Don't Work
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:57 AM 4/9/96 -0500, Mike McNally wrote: >jamesd(a)echeque.com wrote: >There are supposedly some new techniques that look at the infrared >signature of your face (like, I guess, distribution & position of >hot & cold spots), and that's less likely to be fooled by facial >hair and other superficial disguises. It's probably a fairly simple >technology, and could be applied to the credit card ID problem. I think this is based on looking at your face with near-infrared, not the medium and far (thermal) infrared. Near infrared is supposed to penetrate flesh far better, so your blood vessels are visible and form a pattern which can be recognized. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Job at C2.NET
by sameer＠c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

See http://www.c2.net/jobs/ JUNIOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR / TECHNICAL SUPPORT Responsibilities: Responsible for day-to-day administration of UNIX servers, network, and dialin modem pool. Configure and install new servers and network connections. Handle account creation, web server maintanence, DNS setup. Maintain newsserver, webserver, nameserver. Communicate with customers and respond to customer inquiries regarding products and services. Perform low-level technical support for basic customer concerns. Maintain website. Requirements: UNIX (SunOS and FreeBSD) administration experience. Experience with BIND, Apache, INN. Strong C, Perl, general programming background. Good communication skills. Experience dealing with customers and related support issues. -- Sameer Parekh Voice: 510-601-9777x3 Community ConneXion, Inc. FAX: 510-601-9734 The Internet Privacy Provider Dialin: 510-658-6376 http://www.c2.net/ (or login as "guest") sameer(a)c2.net

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