December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Terrorism Hysteria on the Net
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:21 PM 6/10/96 -0500, snow wrote: >On Wed, 5 Jun 1996, John Young wrote: > >> "You bring me a select group of hackers and within 90 days I'll bring this >> country to its knees, " says Jim Settle, retired director of the FBI's >> computer crime squad. > > Give me 15 well trained soldiers(near special forces level) and I >can do it in less than 60 days. Without touching a computer. > There was a blue print published by Omni Magazine in the mid to >late 80's written by Henry Kissinger (IIRC). > Give me 15 McVey's with the ability to follow orders and I'll have >this country in chaos in 2 weeks. > > It isn't that hard, it is just that almost everyone prefers the >current system to total death & destruction chaos that follows a strong >government collapsing. Doesn't this statement represent something of a bias in favor of today's system? Is the "total death and destruction chaos" a function of the collapse of that strong government, or the immediate tendency of it to be replaced with dictator wannabes? In other words, if a "strong government" could be brought down with a guarantee that nobody would be able to even begin to replace it, might that not be an entirely different matter? >Society holds itself together in large part not >because of the rule of law, but becaue most people want it to. Doesn't this statement contradict the previous statement you made? If there's "chaos" perhaps that's merely because a small group of people is trying to take control. Most people want peace, but it can be disturbed by a minority. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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[NOISE] "Fascism is corporatism"
by jamesd＠echeque.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:44 AM 6/9/96 -0700, Rich Graves wrote: > All you're doing is blathering on with some > anti-intellectual lumpenlibertarian claptrap that tries to smear anything > you disagree with as tantamount to fascism. > > [...] > > Heidegger only really supported Nazism from 1933-34; in the 40's and > thereafter, he referred to Nazism as a disease. > > [...] > > any attempt to smear them as a bunch of Nazis is ludicrous > > [...] > > Your foaming-mouth projections on people who disagree with you are > laughable. During the war Heidegger wore full Nazi regalia, and compelled his students to participate in fascist rallies which he led. He consistently claimed that his philosophy led logically to fascism. See "A normal Nazi" by Thomas Sheehan, in the New York Review of Books, early 1993. Also in the same journal see a dozen of the leading lights of the academic left enthusiastically supporting a murderous Nazi and the ideas that he loudly proclaimed were fascist ideas. You revised history in favor of a couple of fascist philosophers, one of whom sent one of his former teacher to one of Hitler's concentration camps. See the following URLs for the real history. http://www.wavefront.com/~contra_m/cm/reviews/cm13_rev_heidegger.html http://www.inlink.com/~dhchase/heidig.htm You also revised history in favor of a system of ideas that has in the past been used to justify and organize the deaths of millions of people, and which has recently in America been used to justify and organize mild but widespread repression, (including the PC laws that you recently denied existed), the system of ideas that many people reasonably argue has been recently been used to justify and organize the narrowly focused severe repression, including government murder of women and children, that we have recently seen in America (which you recently denied was the intended outcome of government policy). And *you* are calling *me* an extremist. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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InfoWar and a.r.s
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It seems to me we are seeing an example of Information Warfare in the doings around alt.religion.scientology. The board game "Go" models warfare by having a goal of controlling territory. In the a.r.s war, we see the combatants trying to control the newsgroup. We even see an arms race with weapons such as cancelbots being developed and employed. The major difference between newsgroup war and conventional war is that the dimension a victor needs to control is time and not space. One question to ponder is whether the a.r.s war will perform the same role as the Spanish Civil War vs. WW2. Will we see newsgroup war expand to other news groups? I would think a few of the .culture.* groups could be candidates. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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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A guide to self control (Was funny underwear)
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A Guide to Self-Control Subject: Steps in Overcoming Masterbation Excerpt from a Mormon missionary guide, circa 1970: Steps in Overcoming Masterbation, Mark E. Petersen 1. Never touch the intimate parts of your body except during normal toilet processes. 2. If you are associated with other persons having this same problem, YOU MUST BREAK OFF THEIR FRIENDSHIP. Never associate with other people having the same weakness. Don't suppose that two of you will quit together, you never will. You must get away from people of that kind. Just to be in their presence will keep your problem foremost in your mind. The problem must be taken OUT OF YOUR MIND for that is where it really exists. Your mind must be on other and more wholesome things. 3. When in bed, if that is where you have your problem for the most part, dress yourself for the night so securely that you cannot easily touch your vital parts, and so that it would be difficult and time consuming for you to remove those clothes. By the time you started to remove protective clothing you would have sufficiently controlled your thinking that the temptation would leave you. 4. If the temptation seems overpowering while you are in bed, GET OUT OF BED AND GO INTO THE KITCHEN AND FIX YOURSELF A SNACK, even if it is in the middle of the night, and even if you are not hungry, and despite your fears of gaining weight. The purpose behind this suggestion is that you GET YOUR MIND ON SOMETHING ELSE. You are the subject of your thoughts, so to speak. 5. Never read pornographic material. Never read about your problem. Keep it out of mind. Remember -- "First a thought, then an act." The thought pattern must be changed. You must not allow this problem to remain in your mind. When you accomplish that, you soon will be free of the act. 6. Pray. But when you pray, don't pray about this problem, for that will tend to keep [it] in your mind more than ever. Pray for faith, pray for understanding of the Scriptures, pray for the Missionaries, the General Authorities, your friends, your families, BUT KEEP THE PROBLEM OUT OF YOUR MIND BY NOT MENTIONING IT EVER -- NOT IN CONVERSATION WITH OTHERS, NOT IN YOUR PRAYERS. KEEP IT _OUT_ of your mind! 7. Be outgoing and friendly. Force yourself to be with others and learn to enjoy working and talking to them. Use principles of developing friendships found in books such as _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ by Dale Carnegie. 8. Make a pocket calendar for a month on a small card. Carry it with you, but show it to no one. If you have a lapse of self control, color the day black. Your goal will be to have _no black days_. The calendar becomes a strong visual reminder of self control and should be looked at when you are tempted to add another black day. Keep your calendar up until you have at least three clear months. 9. In the field of psychotherapy there is a very effective technique called _aversion therapy_. When we associate or think of something very distasteful with something which has been pleasurable, but undesirable, the distasteful thought and feeling will begin to cancel out that which was pleasurable. If you associate something very distasteful with your loss of self-control it will help you to stop the act. For example, if you are tempted to masturbate, think of having to bathe in a tub of worms, and eat several of them as you do the act. 10. Keep your bladder empty. Refrain from drinking large amounts of fluids before retiring. 11. Reduce the amount of spices and condiments in your food. Eat as lightly as possible at night. 12. Avoid people, situations, pictures or reading materials that might create sexual excitement. 13. It is sometimes helpful to have a physical object to use in overcoming this problem. A Book of Mormon, firmly held in hand, even in bed at night has proven helpful in extreme cases. 14. In very severe cases it may be necessary to tie a hand to the bed frame with a tie in order that the habit of masturbating in a semi-sleep condition can be broken. 15. Do not let yourself return to any past habit or attitude patterns which were part of your problem. Satan Never Gives Up. Be calmly and confidently on guard. Keep a positive mental attitude. You can win this fight! The joy and strength you will feel when you do will give your whole life a radiant and spiritual glow of satisfaction and fulfillment. --

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New type2.list/pubring.mix (revisited)
by John A. Perry 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hello Everyone, The corrected (downed remailers deleted) type2.list/pubring.mix combination is available on jpunix.com. This list now contains only remailers that have responded to pings sent out by myself and by Raph. I'll automate this shortly to insure that the remailers on the list actually respond to traffic. Apologies to ecafe for saying it was down. It was poor eysight on my part. John Perry - perry(a)alpha.jpunix.com - PGP-encrypted e-mail welcome! WWW - http://www.jpunix.com PGP 2.62 key for perry(a)jpunix.com is on the keyservers. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCUAwUBMb1PQ1OTpEThrthvAQHn7gP4rHjupKUM4hWPsbFIxdXWk09KdEZLbpK3 uumHpAlApXfu7n9umOG1evxp9SRy9yUg3PvtV5pHtMGcebv8ngpQEzDekC55RCBz Rghon7Rqknte+9eRbpbqhq1e/LAzebxwJv+vRSOkYEOmiq6KWdhQ0LZyGjV1VfHA D/eWCOf2ig== =w/xe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[Fwd: public key expert witness wanted]
by Gary Howland 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From sci.crypt: Subject: public key expert witness wanted From: schlafly(a)bbs.cruzio.com Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 05:37:34 GMT Keywords: public key expert witness wanted Newsgroups: sci.crypt,misc.int-property,talk.politics.crypto Organization: Cruzio Community Networking System, Santa Cruz, CA Reply-To: schlafly(a)bbs.cruzio.com Sender: news(a)cruzio.com (The News User) Xref: beta.nedernet.nl sci.crypt:44606 misc.int-property:17035 talk.politics.crypto:17141 My lawsuit against Public Key Partners has a trial on the scope and validity of the Stanford patents scheduled to begin in San Jose, Calif, on Sept. 3, 1996. I am looking for an expert witness. Requirements: * credentials which will impress the court. * live within driving distance of San Jose. * thorough understanding of Diffie-Hellman exponential key exchange, Hellman-Merkle trapdoor knapsack, and related public key crypto. * willing to face hostile lawyers in depositions, and testify in court. * must enjoy this sort of thing enough to do it for free. I am not looking for a mercenary hatchet man. (Contact RSADSI or Cylink if that's what you are.) Just someone to explain the inventions, and give opinions as to what can reasonably be deduced from particular disclosures. For more info on the lawsuit, and on contacting me, see http://bbs.cruzio.com/~schlafly#pkpsuit Roger Schlafly

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Re: Anonymous return addresses
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: "Robert A. Rosenberg" <hal9001(a)panix.com> > If the message is split into more than one part (to meet the message size > requirement) there is some potential leakage to each server of what message > is being requested. If User a requested 3 messages, then they MAY be > requesting all three parts of a 3 part message (or 2+1). If a record is > kept of the number of requests over time, then there can be some regression > checking based on the ID (ie: If the number of new messages for ANx in the > DB matches the number that User Y requests in the current session). I may > be in error with this thought but it looks like a possible problem. Yes, this is a good point. It might be addressed by having the later parts of a multi part message not be identified with the anon ID of the receiver, but rather with a random message label which is revealed to the receiver in the first part of the message (encrypted, of course). Then the database owner could not tell which message parts went together just by looking at the messages. Arrival times might give this away, though, if all parts of a multi-part message were sent at about the same time. > >Messages would have a finite lifetime and would expire and be removed > >from the database after a while. The authors propose breaking the > >database up into batches with a fixed number of messages, but I don't > >fully follow the reasoning behind this. I guess it reduces the load on > >the server when it does its XOR's. > > This can also affect the "attack" I speculated on above since it can "leak" > more info. Multi-part messages (or multiple messages to the same recipient) > which are retrieved in one session can be correlated between the groups > (ie: User Y asked for 5 messages [Selected from Groups 1&5] and ANx is the > one AN? that has the requested number of messages in each of the Groups > [ie: 3 from G1 and 2 from G5]). Yes, there is a tradeoff with the batch size between efficiency and privacy. The multi-part message issue does seem to make the problem potentially worse. Maybe it would be necessary for anonymous receivers to mostly receive small messages, and/or make the message granularity relatively large. Some of these kinds of volume- or correlation-based traffic analysis techniques can be countered by requesting dummy messages, ones which the receiver won't be able to read. If he asks for five messages every day from that day's batch then it doesn't leak any information about which ones are for him. Asking for a random number averaging five may work even better, if occasionally he really needs to read six. Hal

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Re: Terrorism Hysteria on the Net
by Dale Drew 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I think we are in violent agreement.... The item of issue, between physical and virtual terrorism attacks is the fact the government either is, or wants to give the distinct perception that they are, ill-prepared to counter for the types of potentials wide-spread Internet-based virtual attacks. And that the intelligence channels they have in place to detect possible movement of physical attacks may not fit the "Internet" model. In addition, the US legal system is ill-prepared to deal with the prosecutory issues surrounding this type of "terrorism". =============================================================== Dale Drew MCI Telecommunications Manager internetMCI Security Engineering Voice: 703/715-7058 Internet: ddrew(a)mci.net Fax: 703/715-7066 MCIMAIL: Dale_Drew/644-3335 At 11:02 PM 6/10/96 -0500, snow wrote: >On Mon, 10 Jun 1996, Dale Drew wrote: >> At 07:21 PM 6/10/96 -0500, snow wrote: >> >On Wed, 5 Jun 1996, John Young wrote: >> >> "You bring me a select group of hackers and within 90 days I'll bring this >> >> country to its knees, " says Jim Settle, retired director of the FBI's >> >> computer crime squad. >> > Give me 15 well trained soldiers(near special forces level) and I >> >can do it in less than 60 days. Without touching a computer. >> To understand where "They" think they are coming from, you have to compare >> Apples-to-Apples. The concern is the medium of choice; the Internet and it's >> high availability of anonymity, coupled with its access to large amounts of >> computer systems available via one virtual channel. > > Preaching to the choir, but once again it is a case of nothing >new. The potential for economic terrorism is not significantly larger >given the existance of the internet than it was before. This is what needs >to constantly be drummed into the technically dis-inclined, that the same >problems exists off the net that exist ON the net. > >> A well orchestrated and well researched attack by the right folk, as the thought >> process goes, could in-fact, potentially affect large amounts of critical >> computer systems within a short period of time. And while the government >> has inroads available to identify potential physical terrorists threats, >> they do not feel as prepared for the virtual ones. > > I would think that shutting down power to New York City for more >than a couple of days would pretty much throw the economy into a fit. > > I would go so far as to say that you can cause MORE havoc in the >physical arena than the virtual. > > >Petro, Christopher C. >petro(a)suba.com <prefered for any non-list stuff> >snow(a)crash.suba.com > > >

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Re: Terrorism Hysteria on the Net
by vin＠shore.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ex-Special-Agent Settle deserves all the derision he has gotten (probably not in the right places) for his LSD-in-the-water-supply threat: >> >> "You bring me a select group of hackers and within 90 days I'll bring >> >> this country to its knees, " says Jim Settle, retired director of the >> >> FeeBee's computer crime squad. snow's jibe about doing the same with a handful of spooky special forces guys (less than 15, if he used snipers) was appropriate. I think, however, Dale Drew went too far when he denied that the demension of the Net added nothing new to the range of social or economic threat. Don't we, as a technical culture, have to acknowledge the burgening nihilism that is exemplified in both the subculture of virus (and other randomly distructive pieces of attack code,) and the larger culture that so often lauds their "creativity" and "ingenuity." Not even lumpen-Libertarianism allows the author of such pain and distruction to escape moral responsibility -- yet the popular tech culture (and the pop culture) does just that! The culture can deal with purposeful terrorism, even purposeful Net terrorism, but a whole subculture of sociopaths who -- like arsonists on a binge, or (to exaggerate slightly) the nerve gas cult in Japan -- toss out distructive code bombs to see who or what gets blown away, is indeed something new. How many wild viruses are now loose? What new corners of the networked infrastructure will be the next forum for these arsonists? Java applets? NT? The nodes of the Net itself? Is this too to be left to police suppression? Are Net Cops inevitable? Are there other forces that could be brought to bear? (Forces that could perhaps be influenced by the tone or substance of comments that originate here or in similar forums?) And isn't this threat unique to a culture which has become so dependant on the structured flow of information products and tools? The sky isn't falling; there are no bodies in the street -- so we have time... but the sense of threat could become so serious that the public would seek shelter, solice, stability. The spooks' wet-dream, the wiretapped Garrison Nation (two-way TV always on; no one allowed to whisper away from a microphone) is one answer. Of a sort. Suerte, _Vin Vin McLellan +The Privacy Guild+ <vin(a)shore.net> 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, Ma. 02150 USA Tel: (617) 884-5548 <*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*>

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Re: lambda 2.08 (1/2) - Surveillance du contenu : l'oeil biais_
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 10 Jun 96 at 19:08, Jerome Thorel wrote: > DANS LE NUMERO --> 2.08 <-- du bulletin lambda > http://www.freenix.fr/netizen/ <snip> > - Les agents, lors des PV, ne signent plus par leur nom, mais par > des numeros d'immatriculation, a remarque la revue Chroniques Bonjour Jerome! Que signifie PV? Traduction libre par: / non-official translation by: jf_avon(a)citenet.net ... The agents, during PVs(?), are not signing with their own names anymore but with an ID number, pointed out "Chroniques" magazine... La version anglaise de ce texte a-t-elle ete envoye a cypherpunks(a)toad.com? Si non, pourriez-vous l'y envoyer. Aussi, en faire parvenir une copie anglaise a jimbell(a)pacifier.com, ca sera du plus grand interet pour lui. Salutations JFA DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee; Limoges porcelain, silverware and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants: physicists, technologists and engineers. PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891

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