December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: RANT: When hi-tech is a hinderance (freedom w/in limits)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 01:48 AM 1/28/96 +0100, Anonymous wrote: >Cypherpunks or crypto relevance? Sometimes high-tech can be >a weakness. You don't know how right you are. Jim Bell Klaatu Burada Nikto "Something is going to happen. Something.....Wonderful!" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQrhZvqHVDBboB2dAQFKZAP/U6tKRFYbMmag6wB/HEO/K8XxsSUFr5dt 9sMaeptBa2EEvn2f4rrlZ9AadKTEX8qhd9VI3gF+XfsZ8tVnfK7FSvdeteoN7iBB tVPfXgozxLWqKFUe1YoYIKJof9c5q4IPNkOaWCUAiMbOiA8BrhYLPUOISkC0W5f8 0yse7fmFA1w= =0Fe9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: This post is rated LTC for `Low Technical Content'
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:36 PM 1/27/96 -0800, Rich Graves wrote: >On Sat, 27 Jan 1996, Bill Frantz wrote: > >> At 7:55 PM 1/27/96 -0500, JMKELSEY(a)delphi.com wrote: >> >The best solution has always seemed to me to be one of these three: >> > >> >a. Tags appended to notes/posts, from various reviewers, digitally >> >signed and otherwise coded to allow intelligent filtering, or >> > >> >b. Electronic distributions of reviewers' evaluations tagged to >> >notes in some simple way. (I.e. give each note or post a unique ID >> >which appears in the message.) Then, a smart newsreader/mail >> >program sorts the notes accordingly, or >> > >> >c. The reviewer reads the group/list, and rates posts according to >> >some useful criteria. He then resends it out to his users, filtered >> >as desired. (CP-LITE seems like a very early version of this.) >> >> d. The "V-Chip" device makes a network query to the selected rating service >> to ask for a rating. What happen when the rating service is unreachable is >> just one of the many parameters that the parent needs to set. (If designed >> right, no parent could use it, but its availability would still stop the >> adult censorship croud in congress.) > >This just gets ridiculous. It adds a lot of overhead without necessarily >giving you good information. ... <lots of good rant deleted> Rich - Remember that this is NOT being designed for usability, only to stop a bad movement in congress. The reason I proposed solution (d) is that it adds no overhead to people who don't use it. (I propose using the Message-ID: header as a lookup ID for items received by email. I suspect it has spoofing problems, but perhaps congress won't notice.) Perhaps we should re-visit the need for usability if anyone really wants to use such a system themselves. As a parent, I always wanted my children to explore freely and discuss anything they found that bothered them. Bill

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Re: This post is rated LTC for `Low Technical Content'
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 18:03 1/27/96, Bill Frantz wrote: >d. The "V-Chip" device makes a network query to the selected rating service >to ask for a rating. What happen when the rating service is unreachable is >just one of the many parameters that the parent needs to set. (If designed >right, no parent could use it, but its availability would still stop the >adult censorship croud in congress.) Of course the V-Chip transmits the ID number of the program to be rated upstream. Since all programs will be rated by the chip, regardless if you choose to use the rating or not, the exact channel you are watching will be tracked and logged. Have fun, -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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Re: This post is rated LTC for `Low Technical Content'
by Weld Pond 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

shamrock(a)netcom.com (Lucky Green) quoth: >Of course the V-Chip transmits the ID number of the program to be rated >upstream. Since all programs will be rated by the chip, regardless if you >choose to use the rating or not, the exact channel you are watching will be >tracked and logged. Ahh.. Finally a use for anonymous remailers that the Christian right would understand. Weld Pond - weld(a)l0pht.com - http://www.l0pht.com/ 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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Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by Alex de Joode 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Belgian TV (the dutch language channel) has a page on teletext (Ceefax) [I don't think US tv has that feature] stating that the French backbone is thinking about blocking sites that provide information that they deem ethicly unacceptable, like sites that promote the denial of Konzentrations Lagers, the extreme right, pornografic and pedophile sites. [page 128 BRTN, for those who can receive BRT]

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Re: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail"
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>They probably should do, the NSA was critical in ensuring the demise >of the USSR and in maintaining stability throughout the cold war period. Please explain.

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Re: [rant] A thought on filters and the V-Chip
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:56 AM 1/26/96 -0800, Alan Olsen wrote: >[Not Perry(tm) approved -- Skip of this offends you] > >I am waiting for someone to come out with a product that will modify the >v-ship (or the various internet "protection" tools) in such a way that it >scans *FOR* pornography. > >Porn is big business. You would think that people would pay for a way to >sort through all of that non-smuttiness and just "get to the good stuff". I >also imagine that as soon as such a product appears, the censors will scream >bloody murder. Sigh! Wonderful idea, but sadly it probably will never be allowed to work, for exactly the obvious reasons. (I know that sounds like an odd argumnt to get from ME, considering MY idea...) On the other hand, this would be an EXCELLENT "argument" to bring in front of a Congressional committee considering the adoption of any V-chip type proposal. Once they discover that a ratings system could be used for the diametrically opposite reasons of their reason for having it in the first place, they'll try to modify their proposal to prevent this. If we're lucky, this'll have the effect of killing the whole concept of government-sponsored (required?) V-chip-type technology. OTOH, I agree with other posters who think that truly voluntary content selection would be an excellent addition to television: In effect, an automatic, programmable TV-Guide search engine.

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Subscription
by MatriX Spider 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'd like to subscribed to this mailing list. Thanks for your time.

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Windows PGP mail reader
by jims＠conch.aa.msen.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi. Can anyone recommend a Windows based email/POP3 reader that can decrypt content? Please reply via email: Jim Schueler jims(a)msen.com

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Time codes for PCs (fromn German Banking)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 11:11 PM 1/24/96 -0500, Dave Emery wrote: >> >> Was the person in the basement eavesdroping or actuall performing a >> man-in-the-middle attack? >> > Very much the easiest way of doing this is a classic man in the >middle attack with two vanilla off the shelf modems and a vanilla off >the shelf central office simulator. The modems would be tied more or >less back to back through two serial ports and software on a laptop in >the basement, one modem connected to the actual phone line to the central >office and the other connected to the local wires to the targets home >through the central office simulator. This way all traffic in both >directions would go through the modems and software on the laptop >allowing the connection to be taken over cleanly between packets, and >packets to be injected and deleted as needed. I beleive that it would >not be hard to make such a MITM decode the DTMF dialing from the target >and dial the same number on its outgoing modem thus enabling the >MITM to passively relay modem calls it wasn't interested in spoofing. >And incoming modem calls could be similarly handled. A peripheral I've long wanted to see, commonly available: ACCURATE time, broadcast to the millisecond/microsecond/nanosecond, available from sources as varied as TV VIR's, FM subcarriers, and other sources, available as an easy input (via a peripheral card) to a computer. I have a 12-year-old Heathkit "Most Accurate Clock" that I assembled myself, and had the foresight to install it with its computer interface option. (receives 5, 10, or 15 MHz signals broadcast from Boulder, Colorado, containing "exact" time.) While I've never taken the time to connect it to my PC, it provides (through an RS232 jack) correct time with a rated accuracy of about 5 milliseconds, as I vaguely recall. (Even has a dipswitch setup on the bottom to tell it how many 500 mile increments you are away from WWVB... corrects for delay to a first order of magnitude.) (BTW, if anybody knows how to easily connect it to the pc, or has the appropriate software, please tell me The task isn't difficult from a hardware standpoint; it's just RS-232 serial ASCII timecode at about 9600 bps which either continuously retransmits or on request. The problem is the software: How, exactly, do I INTERFACE such a serial input to the existing computer/RTC combination? (Don't tell me to plug it into an unused serial jack! I'm not stupid. I'm not a programmer, and I don't play one on TV! (I know gates, flops, op amps, A/D, D/A, microprocessor hardware design, even some Z-80 assy language, RF, and I've programmed in Fortran, Basic, APL, Algol, PL/1, Pascal, LISP, but not recently and I don't enjoy it!) (Then again, there are those "Receptor" watches which have (at least) similar accuracy, which as I understand it work on FM subcarrier principles.) Technology has now supplanted this old monstrosity: Even with CHEAP GPS receivers, they put out time which is rated in accuracy to well better than 1 microsecond, and probably better than 200 nanoseconds even with S/A turned on, and probably 100 nanoseconds with S/A off. Once GPS receivers contain equally cheap DGPS receivers, they'll be able to tell you your location to about 1 meter and corresponding time accuracy, about 3 nanoseconds. I'm not particularly familiar with TV VIR signals, but I'd imagine they are timecoded, or at least they COULD be without a lot of effort. Resolution would be FAR better than 1 microsecond, and accuracy would be primarily limited by knowledge of your location compared to the xmitter. MITM attacks would be far more difficult if both ends of the data conversation agreed on the "exact" time, and could detect transmission delays and CHANGES in transmission delays. While it would be possible to locally spoof the accurate timecode, a cheap version of a "disciplined oscillator" (which any GPS receiver is going to have, anyway) would detect such short-term spoofing trivially. Occasionally, I've speculated on whether it might be useful to be able to synchronize (or, at least, KNOW) to the PHASE of the 60 Hz power grid. True, I know that the HV grid is 3-phase and most people won't know which phase they're on anyway, but that wouldn't change (at least not frequently!) , and I would imagine that it might be useful. You wouldn't necessarily know which CYCLE you're on, either, but again that might be compensated for somehow. If your computer were talking, locally, to another computer at 4100 baud (? whatever) (7 bits per symbol(?); equals 28.8kbps) you could "easily" agree on a particular cycle relationship, which is going to be essentially constant over a distance of a few tens or even hundreds of miles. What I DON'T know (and some HV transmission engineer will probably be able to tell me, hint hint!) is how STABLE this phase is across the entire country? I realize that this will probably depend on who'se shipping excess power to whom at the moment, But I'd imagine the variability will be distinctly limited. The biggest attraction of such a system is that the interface would probably be trivial: Getting it from the P/S is out because they didn't anticipate such a thing. The easiest interface might be an AC wall xformer with a rectifying limiter and slicer (Okay, maybe just a resistor and a diode, possibly with the addition of a comparator for precision), driving a readable pin on an otherwise-unused RS-232 interface. (Possibly installed similar to a dongle.) Appropriate software (yucch!) would read the square waves, and record the phase at any one time. Such information could be used to verify the relative synchronization between two different computers, although it would be necessary to identify particular phases, as I mentioned before. BTW, if you're read this far, I think it would be appropriate to introduce myself, despite the fact that I've already been posting to this area for a few weeks. I'm James Dalton Bell (yes, THOSE Daltons!) and I'm in Vancouver, Washington, USA. I may talk like a EE, but am not; I have formal and/or informal backgrounds in Chemistry (BS Chemistry MIT 1980), electronics (analog and digital and RF (N7IJS) and uP), physics, and keep an eye on numerous other technical fields. Politically, I'm 120/120 on the Nolan chart (there's some questions they left out (that's a joke)) which means I'm a "extremist libertarian." I'm also rather newly anarchistic, and (with all due modesty) rather inventive. Current employment? None. Well, nothing to speak of. But you'll be hearing more about me. Jim Bell Klaatu Burada Nikto Remember this. It'll become important, soon. "Something is going to happen. Something....wonderful!" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQlyv/qHVDBboB2dAQHZvQP+IKeO508C7ZTA22DSELjvpWTYa0iGtTcX U486t+8P0iC9qxq346wzxm9USae4d8NOM9wBKrio095hrKnzAZQE1BETUKCx3BJv bywqin7Qjb87j6OECJ6S/eAh5t6LXMnDepGdUr7rw+gBxsNg7kzz10/TGh4pXKNu D5PuGPnTY34= =r4JO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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