December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Past one terabit/second on fiber[PHONE GEEK TALK]
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>> "Wow", I said. Far faster than the 2.5 Gb/sec transmission that is >>> currently fairly standard for long-haul fiber trunks. >>The ads say they are selling it - that doesn't mean shipping it... yet >>at least. (Note that my employer is a direct competitor of Lucent >>so I have a vested interest in setting the facts straight) No comment :-) And I certainly don't presume to speak for Lucent.... Traditional fiber-optic technology is a hybrid between electrical and optical components - big hulking multiplexers feed a high-speed electrical signal to a laser, which sends optical pulses down the fiber. Every N km, a regenerator reads the photons, decides if it saw a 0 or 1, and feeds that as an electrical signal to an output laser. Repeat as needed. The means that if you want to upgrade the signal speed, you not only need to replace the muxes and lasers, you need to replace all the regens. That's more of a problem for long-distance companies than locals (the common FT Series G 1.7 Gb system uses them every 40 km.) The new optical amplifiers not only go farther (e.g. 120 km), but they do everything optically instead of dropping down to electrical so they support a wide range of data speeds. I don't know that they can support the 1Tb experimental stuff, but they work fine for the 8-color x 2.5Gb Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing stuff AT&T will be using. This means that the first time you do an upgrade, you need to rip out a bunch of regens, splice around 2/3 of them, replace 1/3 with opamps, and optionally replace the equipment at the ends with even bigger hulkinger multiplexers. Depending on capacity needs, you may not fire up all 8 colors at once. The next time you want to upgrade the same route, replace the muxes if you didn't, or fire up more colors, or upgrade to the new Year 2005 model. And since you've got to pick _some_ framing technology, it might as well be SONET, which lets you build self-healing rings if you want (the FDDI-like configuration, which not everyone uses, burns half the capacity on restoration circuits, more than some of the less-healable SONET configurations or mux-based restoration like AT&T's FASTAR.) AT&T has announced that they'll be pouring lots of capital into this over the next few years, partly to keep up with demand, and partly to deploy SONET rings for faster restoration. >I was figuring they'd cut out silences...as well as echo-suppression >cutouts. Do they still do this? Given modern fiber's capacity, I wonder >if they bother. Voice compression and silence suppression aren't done domestically (at least by most carriers.) Undersea cables still use this, though I don't know how much it's done on the newer fiber cables. Of course, people running private networks do whatever they want, and for overseas connections, people are often willing to trade lower-voice-quality compression for the cost savings, especially if the PTT on the far end is expensive. >>I don't know that any number fiber cable is "standard" but >>36-fiber cable is not unusual. To find the capacity of a cable, you >>have to cut the number of fibers in half (as you did) because >>generally each fiber is used only for a single direction of traffic. >>You then have to cut it in half again because phone companies have >>everything redundant. A fairly common configuration for FT Series G is 8 fiber pairs (one fiber for each direction), with 7 in service and 1 protection pair to recover from mux-card and regen failures and other single-fiber hits. To restore whole-bundle hits (e.g. backhoe fade), some of the 7 pairs are typically dedicated to restoration - though seldom half. The restoration pairs are often used for short-time reserved applications such as TV connections for sports events, videoconferencing, or other applications where someone needs a lot of bandwidth for a short time and is willing to be pre-empted or blocked if there's a failure. >There's also a lot of 'dark fiber' out there, right? Fiber laid as >part of a cable but not activated, because it's not yet needed. That's _highly_ location and company dependent. Long-haul connections are likely to be used efficiently, because you can get economies of scale and because growth will fill them up (e.g. across the Rockies). Short-haul connections (e.g. around town) are more likely to have dark fiber because the big costs are digging up streets and paying for government officials\\\\\\\\ licenses and permits rather than the costs of the fiber you're putting in a trench once you dig it. And the short-haul doesn't need regens, and often uses lower bandwidth than the fiber can handle (OC3 muxes are much cheaper than OC48, though per-Mbps they cost more.) And of course, _everybody_ seems to want a T3 to the Bay Area or other Internet-heavy locations. >> I would add that much of a >>phone companies cost is in billing and customer service, etc. >>Not the cost of installing and maintaining the fiber and equipement. > >This suggests that there would be a market for a LD phone company that >charged, say, a yearly payment of $200-300 for essentially unlimited use. (The main >impediment to this would be regulatory; as I understand it LD companies have >to pay local telco's for connections on a per-minute connect basis. Is that >right? This needs to get fixed.) Their billing costs would be very small. There's a lot of cost in switching equipment as well. A feature-rich voice telecom switch costs _far_ more per 64kbps voice circuit than the 1/(24*28*36=24192) fraction of a fiber that carries it. And big muxes, while cheaper than voice switches, are still expensive. >>Internet telephony should make the use of bandwidth even more >>efficient - thereby cutting costs. The big guys who own >>the fibers will still make money - the pipes that carry internet >>traffic are still needed. But the little guys will get squeezed out. >>(until they become ISPs ;-). Internet traffic could theoretically >>be carried over this large amount of protection fiber (mentioned above) >>that is out there for a much lower marginal cost than the current >>T3 or OC3 pipes that are being used. In addition to Internet telephony, ATM switch makers are doing voice compression, and some of the fiber vendors are starting to use their equipment to offer business voice services. And voice-over-frame-relay, which has more delay and therefore doesn't handle voice as well, also is getting some market, especially internationally. Pricing is a really difficult problem - if you price bandwidth proportional to the 64kbps voice circuits, it's either too expensive for most businesses to buy much or priced too low to make money on switched voice. But if you price high-speed circuit bandwidth much cheaper than proportional, it becomes cost-effective to buy customer-premises equipment and bulk bits and run your own phone services. Phone companies have been worrying about this for video services for years, but fortunately Moore's Law and research have let compression improve enough that you can run cheap video on 2*64kbps and good video on 6*64kbps, so they haven't been killed. But Internet and similar data needs are starting to demand high bandwidth at low costs, and the market will have to catch up somehow. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 # goodtimes signature virus innoculation

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GEK_cod
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

5-17-96. WaPo: "The Code Of the Geeks." A longish lifestyles profile of Robert Hayden and his Geek Code -- "a series of letters usually found on the bottom of e-mail messages that, when deciphered, offer a snapshot of the user's geekiness." It's a way for geeks to scope out one another. But Hayden says it's a part of his effort to take the eek out of geek -- to turn what's largely thought of as a negative stereotype into something positive. "Gates had an opportunity to be one and he gave it up. That happened when he decided that making money is more important than making good computer code. One geek trait is that you take pride in your work and it's my opinion that Microsoft hasn't produced a lot that's to be proud of." "In a nutshell, a nerd is somebody who lets technology run their life and a geek is a person who runs their life with technology." GEK_cod

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Re: Securing CDROM from piracy
by sawyer＠nextek.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> >> >Is there any way of making >> >sure that the guy doesnt pull a fast on on us? Can we ensure that he cannot >> >duplicate the thing and start selling it without sharing the profit. >> >> Well, I suppose you could get it copyrighted before you hand it over for >> distribution. I'd also put my logo and other info somewhere in the code, >> such as an "About" box. They would have a hard time saying it wasn't >> yours. >> >You are missing the point. Lets say a firm X is marketing my product. Now if >they sell 500,000 copies and tell me that they have sold only 100,000, I have >no way of figuring out. > > '88888888:::888888%' Vipul Ved Prakash Fax : +91-11-3328849 > '8888888::88888%' Positive Ideas. Internet : vipul(a)pobox.com Ok, I see what your looking for now. How about tracking the number of product registrations, either via a mail-in card or fax? I'm assuming that since this is a product to be sold, not given away, that persons purchasing the program would most likely take the time to fill out a product registration card and send it in. Since not everyone fills these cards out, it is not a 100% accurate method, but if there were any major discrepancies, then you would be aware of it. Thomas J. Sawyer sawyer(a)nextek.com

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Re: found nym-differentiation! Still need perpetual motion, FTL travel, cold fusion
by mccoy＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bryce wrote: > > "Perry Metzger" <perry(a)piermont.com> is alleged to have written: > (> Bryce wrote:) > > > > Simple as pie, because of some of the properties of DC-Nets. > > > If someone sends out the wrong number of pubkeys, then > > > everyone will know, right? So when that happens everyone > > > just reveals their shared-secret data from the DC-Net > > > session. > > > > And if several people lie about their shared secrets? This is what secure bit-commitment is for. The refinements to the DC-net protocol since Chaum's original paper make this a non-issue if you are willing to spend the CPU cycles to do all of the necessary work. > If some of your N participants are going to collude to share > their nyms then it is manifestly impossible to stop them. > But that doesn't bother me. The purpose of this scheme is > to create N nyms for N people and be sure that each of then > N people who wanted a nym got one. If you are sure that > each of the N people wanted a nym, then you can be sure you > have a one-to-one mapping between people and nyms, but > unconditional untraceability from nyms to people. Or, to rephrase the question in a manner which my lead you to the solutions which already exists for this problem: You have an anonymous access channel in which you need to do frame reservation such that each member can reserve one and only one frame for the transmission phase which follows frame reservation. You are both talking about disrupter detection in an anonymous channel and it has already been solved... > But perhaps what you were talking about was a > denial-of-service attack on the DC-Net's network layer. > That has been addressed extensively in Chaum's original > "Dining Cryptographers" paper. Chaum's method for dealing > with denial-of-service attacks is typically brilliant, but > even so it is an unwieldly and expensive (in terms of > computation and bandwidth) proposition. I recommend "Dining > Cryptographers" to everyone, and I hope that someone who > reads it will come up with a better solution. They already have. Actually, the trap method in Chaum's original paper is both expensive and flawed. Get a copy of EuroCrypt 89 and read the DC nets papers in there by B. den Bos and by Michael Waidner. If you are in the Bay Area I have a copy of Pfitzmann and Waidner's "Dining Cryptographers in the Disco: Unconditional Sender and Recipient Anonymity with Computational Serviceability" which I would be happy to make copies of. This is probably the most comprehensively secure DC-net scheme I am aware of; although, like most Crypto papers, it is way more complicated and computationally expensive than necessary for real life. jim

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Re: SEVERE undercapacity, we need more remailer servers FAST
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:29 PM 5/15/96 -0400, Black Unicorn <unicorn(a)schloss.li> wrote: >I would really like to see a remailer that is somehow blinded. >I don't know enough about how mail paths are generatered, but is it >impossible to conceal the origin of remailer postings? One reason for remailers is that concealing message origin is difficult and unreliable, and making smtp servers that include all the information they can find about the origin of a message into the message is easy, so it's tough to lie about where you are. Remailers solve that by removing the header information from messages they receive and shipping out the message body with new headers, so anyone who traces all the "Received:" headers gets pointed to the remailer. >Postings made to remailernym(a)alpha.c2.org would be spit out somewhere but >without accountability? alpha.c2.org keeps encrypted reply blocks that it can't decrypt; it sends messages to some other remailer that can decrypt them, and only sends messages encrypted. That means that anybody who does succeed in stealing or subpoenaing alpha's user information has to go to each of the other remailers it uses for delivery as well - and alpha doesn't have any keys to steal. >I'd consider running a remailer, but after listening to the response to >the anonymous poster a while back, it sounds like there are few if any >simple options which do not require major time and effort to setup and >run. Setting up a remailer is easy, if you've got a Unix machine, and I'd guess that the Winsock Remailer is probably easy for Windows. If you don't support mail-to-news yourself, and you block mail to other mail-to-news gateways, you cut out lots of flame potential, which keeps the work of running it fairly low. (My remailer is based on ghio2, which has traps to detect high-volume spam, which has shut it down a couple of times. Cleaning them up is annoying.) You do need to stay on remailer-operators(a)c2.org to get notices of individuals who are being spammed or harassed so you can block mail to them, but that's typically 5-10 minutes/week. If you've got a Unix machine, you can also do a web-based remailer easily (users fill out a form with their mail, which goes to a CGI script.) If you're willing to use somebody else's script, e.g. replay.com, you can just put up the web page anywhere and won't need Unix, and they can handle most of the spam-blocking. This isn't very secure unless you're using SSL or other secure HTTP protocol, which I don't think any of the current web-remailers do. Some folks have put advertising on their remailer pages, which starts to be one economic model that can encourage people to run them, if you can find advertisers who _want_ the image this gives them. (This is fine for c2.org and maybe Digicash banks or tax-haven consultants, some political ranters, and maybe phone-sex or other services that don't have to worry about lowered reputations if somebody uses the remailer to spam the alt.sex newsgroups with phone-sex ads :-) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 # goodtimes signature virus innoculation

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Zimmermann v. ViaCrypt???
by Mark Voorhees 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Read http://infolawalert.com/stories/051796a.html for a story on how Phil Zimmermann is trying to retrieve all the rights to PGP from ViaCrypt in order to jump start his new venture, PGP, Inc. He's taking a sell out or get sued approach with ViaCrypt, which until recently has not had much success marketing PGP. Mark PS--Apologies in advance if this has been posted before.

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Re: S-Tools 4 now available [for MS only?]
by attila 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Addressed to: Matts Kallioniemi <matts(a)pi.se> roy(a)sendai.cybrspc.mn.org (Roy M. Silvernail) cypherpunks(a)toad.com ** Reply to note from Matts Kallioniemi <matts(a)pi.se> 05/16/96 10:21pm +0200 = Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 22:21:20 +0200 = To: roy(a)sendai.cybrspc.mn.org (Roy M. Silvernail), cypherpunks(a)toad.com = From: Matts Kallioniemi <matts(a)pi.se> = = Subject: Re: S-Tools 4 now available roy is a microsofter --of course, is it written for microsquish and their compiler/api fad of the month? is source code available, or is the code non-portable outside the limited interpreters and compilers of MS? 32 bit is obsolete --64 bits is the standard. after all there are other systems except MS. I have a simple policy regarding MS --I just don't! -- "Bill Gates is greedy because he has amassed a fortune of US$ 15,000,000,000 ($15 billion) but the US Government is a helpful Village because it takes US$ 1,400,000,000,000 ($1.4 trillion) from us each year and does good things with it." --Hillary Clinton

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Re: "Too cheap to meter"
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 17 May 96 at 18:54, Timothy C. May wrote: [..] > Alan's irony is well-placed. The most egregious repetition of the "too > cheap to meter" nonsense is George Gilder's "dark fiber" vision...a vision > of "infinite bandwidth" to all users. > > Guess what? If Gilder's "dark fiber" is ever built, there are a lot of > folks who will "fill it" rather quickly. Canter and Siegel were just the > beginning. "Too cheap to meter" goes away pretty quickly. Remember not-so-many-years-ago when 640k PCs were awsome and a 40MB HD was unfillable? A better phrase is "if you build it, they will fill it (eventually)". Rob. --- No-frills sig. Key-ID: 5D3F2E99 1996/04/22 wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com (root@magneto) AB1F4831 1993/05/10 Deranged Mutant <wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com> Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key.

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Re: SEVERE undercapacity, we need more remailer servers FAST
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:29 PM 5/15/96 -0700, jamesd(a)echeque.com wrote: >At 10:58 AM 5/15/96 -0700, Hal wrote: >> The problem that I think the Scientology postings raise is that the >> remailers cannot really be used to post copyrighted material. > >The major battle the net has faced is with the church of scientology. >In this battle the net is clearly in the right, and the church clearly >in the wrong, regardless of what copyright law says. The copyright issue is probably irrelevant to the Scientology dispute, anyway. The material on which the copyright is claimed almost certainly wasn't marked, appropriately, as it would have had to be for the copyright to be valid. While current law no longer requires the "circle-C" notation long used for this purpose, the material involved is far more than old enough to have been subject to this requirement, and once a copyright is lost (or not claimed) I believe it couldn't be regained. The threat to remailers is one of the many reasons the Leahy bill sucked, and that would have made it worse by imposing criminal sanctions on this kind of thing. Ironically, with the way remailers are used, it would actually have been possible for some copyright holder to fabricate a violation of copyright law by posting his own material through remailers, and then sue the final remailer, or have its owner prosecuted. I'm glad the people around here finally saw the light. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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HUGE denial of service attack against any ecash customer!!!
by Ian Goldberg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- (Again Cc:'d to ecash-feedback, hoping for a security prize. I wonder who's keeping track... Also Cc:'d to cypherpunks, for fun...) So I had some more free time... (Dave cringes when I say that.) Here's a cute one: Give me an account number, and I can prevent it from being used until an arbitrary time in the future (of my choosing). How? Simple. Send a deposit message with 0 coins (well, any message will work, I think, but this is one of the simplest messages there is) with a timestamp of some future time. Messages stamped prior to that (such as everything coming from the actual user for that account, until the time comes) will be politely discarded. (Actually, I think the last reply to a withdrawal request is continually resent, but I'm not exactly sure of this.) In any case, the actual user will be unable to withdraw money from his mint until the time sent in the denial-of-service message. (Unless he forward-dates his computer's clock, or something...) I've tested this against myself and Sameer (with his cooperation, of course). Anyone else want to be locked out for an hour? (Actually, I could pretty effectively lock out _everyone_ for an arbitrarily long time, it seems...) - Ian "Right. I want the sources to the client and the server released. Now." :-) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMZpj3kZRiTErSPb1AQF0SAQAmOEZJTg0v3utWFodDXZ4iv4xa7I+QbNQ Nlsbkug8dtkdf+Jboe+vBtrs5IWSSff8bWntGwfODckct26NwzpVM9bUIXohVoRQ jOkRT9a8m/X00jUAoFOTq5O5Rz87a3Uw8MGFugP5Y4DCk+UqnTA70cuozyOCgb8m 8oke89V9Q0E= =ARMe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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