December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Job Opportunity - Distributed Document Work
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I can see some cryptographic implications to distributed documents, such as the relatively obvious one of making sure your competitor can't tap into them. -Allen =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). Send any replies to the original author, listed in the From: field below. You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" command. For information on RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, send an empty message to rre-help(a)weber.ucsd.edu =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 04:04:00 PDT From: Allan_MacLean.Cambridge(a)RXRC.XEROX.COM Subject: Research Position at Rank Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge Research Position in Distributed Document Technologies at Rank Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge Rank Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge Laboratory is part of an expanding European based research centre which includes a second site in Grenoble. The Cambridge Laboratory carries out interdisciplinary research in the development and use of technologies for supporting distributed organisations, with a strong emphasis on the human and organisational aspects of technology in use. The laboratory has close links with a number of divisions of Xerox and Rank Xerox, and collaborates with other research groups in the UK, continental Europe and the US. Our research programme (Studies of Technology, Organisations and Work) combines social science and technical perspectives on the design of systems for use in the workplace. Our current research projects are examining the boundaries across which distributed document work is conducted. In formulating our long-term research strategy we are focusing on investigating these in terms of personal; inter- and intra- organisational; work-practice; cultural; temporal, and geographical boundaries, and developing ways to take account of their implications for system design. We are seeking a research scientist to play a major role in developing new approaches to distributed document technology from this perspective. The appointee is likely to have a background in computer science or a related discipline, with an understanding of distributed and collaborative technologies. Applicants are expected to have a keen interest not only in the infrastructural issues of distributed systems, but also in incorporating social, organisational and psychological dimensions of work into the design and development of novel networked systems. The appointed person will take primary responsibility for the technological component of our programme and will join a multi-disciplinary team involving computer science, pychology and sociology. (Applicants for the recently advertised post in Requirements for Distributed Services need not re-apply as they will automatically be considered for this position.) Informal enquiries may be made to: Graham Button (button(a)cambridge.rxrc.xerox.com) +44 1223 341500 Allan MacLean (maclean(a)cambridge.rxrc.xerox.com) +44 1223 341517 Applicants should submit a Curriculum Vitae to: Sian Wicklow (ref. S1) Rank Xerox Research Centre 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, U.K. wicklow(a)cambridge.rxrc.xerox.com Tel:+44 1223 341553 Fax: +44 1223 341510 http://www.xerox.com/RXRC/

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Mena
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Washington Post, August 7, 1996, p. A6. CIA Probed in Alleged Arms Shipments Reports Claim Agents Involved in Arkansas-Nicaragua Drug Swaps By Susan Schmidt The CIA's inspector general is investigating claims that U.S. intelligence agencies were involved in illegal arms shipments and drug smuggling at an isolated airstrip in Mena, Ark., during the years Bill Clinton was governor. A spokesman for the CIA said Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz is preparing a report on allegations that the CIA was involved in arms shipments from Mena to the Nicaraguan rebels during the 1980s, and that pilots hired by the agency brought back large shipments of cocaine. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the inspector general will report on possible contacts between the agency and Arkansas state officials during the 1980s. His report also will deal with allegations that the CIA attempted to influence or curtail law enforcement investigations of Mena. Hitz was asked to investigate the Mena airport by CIA Director John M. Deutch, who was acting on a request from House Banking Committee Chairman Jim Leach (R-Iowa). Leach's panel is looking into the possible laundering of drug money generated at Mena. Leach's Banking Committee staff has been looking a variety of claims about Mena emanating from a collection of Arkansas law enforcement officials and various figures operating in the shadowy netherworld on contract with intelligence agencies. One congressional investigator likened sorting through the allegations to being trapped in "a hall of mirrors." Congressional sources said Leach made the request to the CIA about six months ago and expects a report from Hitz in late summer or early fall. The latest Mena claims are contained in "Boy Clinton," a book by American Spectator Editor R. Emmett Tyrrell published this week. In it, Tyrrell asserts that Clinton knew about CIA operations and cocaine smuggling at Mena. He cites as sources Arkansas state troopers, including one on the governor's security detail who says he was also a contract employee for the CIA during the mid-1980s and informed Clinton of what was going on at Mena. Clinton has said he had nothing to do with any activities at Mena. "Mena is the darkest backwater of the right wing conspiracy industry," said White House spokesman Mark Fabiani. "The allegations are as bizarre as they are false." [End]

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Mondex security
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 09:11:16 +0900 From: Yuji Sakata <sakata(a)open.rd.nttdata.jp> To: www-buyinfo(a)allegra.att.com Subject: Mondex security Mime-Version: 1.0 Status: U once,I asked you violation of Mondex security. now ,I hear more information about this rumor. it is very ambiguous info, it is .. Mondex ask some universities to try to violate Mondex IC card security unofficialy. and every univ can do that or show how to do that. Mondex don't reveal this fact. please give me some infomation about this rumor,if you know. /// Yuji SAKATA(NTT Data Corporation) /// /// Voice:+81-3-5546-9571 Fax:+81-3-5546-9572 /// /// E-mail:sakata@open.rd.nttdata.jp /// --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

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Re: FAA to require transponders on all aircraft passengers
by Arun Mehta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 00:49 06/08/96 -0500, Robert A. Rosenberg wrote: >They better hold off loading the containers with the luggage until they >lock down/up the plane so they can verify who got on (and can pull any >unaccompanied luggage). It is either that or unloading the plane if there >is a missing passenger. Many airports (e.g. Zurich) require you to identify your baggage on the way to the plane. If somebody merely keeps watch to ensure that you don't run away after identifying your baggage, the system works. There are problems that can be solved without computers :-) Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta(a)cerfnet.com for public key

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South Korean ID Card
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Phil Agre <pagre(a)weber.ucsd.edu> [I have enclosed, with the author's permission, a letter from Joohoan Kim <sjokim(a)icg.stwing.upenn.edu> raising alarms about a proposed national electronic identification card in South Korea. JK encourages you to repost the information where appropriate.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). Send any replies to the original author, listed in the From: field below. You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" command. For information on RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, send an empty message to rre-help(a)weber.ucsd.edu =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= [I don't have the original header.] Hi, all, I would like to alarm you that another Big-Brother is coming with its most ambitios dream in South Korea: The Electronic Identification Card, which will be issued to every citizen as a mandatory within a year or so. The Electronic Identification Card project is a part of South Korean government's ultra-speed communication network building project. Managed by the Ministry of Domestic Affairs, the US $413 million project is being carried out in cooperation with the Korea Computer Institute. Once the project is completed in 1997, every Koreans of 18 years or older will be assigned a single integrated circuit (IC) card which will include photo and all kinds of personal digitized information: current universal ID card (currently every adult Korean has a photo ID issued by the Government), driver's license, medical insurance card, national pension card, proof of residence, and scanned fingerprints (!) among other things. (I don't know how many "demoratic" governments are collecting fingerprints of their whole citizens.) DACOM, a big telecommunication company in Korea, which won the bidding for the project, describes it as following: "As 8,000 characters worth of information can be stored on the single credit card-sized card, personal information needed for issuing official documents and certificates can be accessed promptly by public offices, institutions, companies, and banks or other organizations. The Ministry of Domestic Affairs has announced that the new cards will be distributed starting in January 1997. Full implementation is scheduled to be completed by early 1998. While there are some nations in which drivers' licenses are used in place of ID cards, this project will be the first system in the world which combines multiple functions onto one card. Once distribution is completed, the card will greatly boost efficiency, saving the government US$1.3 billion and enabling it to eventually reduce its work force by 5,000 employees." (Quoted from: http://bora.dacom.co.kr/bora/dacom/news-clips.html) As you can see, they have no concerns about protection of personal information and privacy. True, they are a company making money from that project, and probably we shouldn't expect any criticism against the Project. The problem is, however, that almost all of the South Korean news media are talking the same thing about it: the "efficiency" and the "convenience" that the Electronic Identification Card might bring about. I tried to find critical arguments against the project via a comprehensive news data base in Korea, but I could not find any. I also checked many web sites of non-governmental organizations and socio-progressive groups in Korea, but none of them have raised the issue yet. They do not seem to realize the suspending dangers of their own privacy and human rights. Despite obvious and serious danger in protecting personal information and privacy , there is just no social discourse concerning the issue. I have also checked relevant laws (especially newly approved communication-related laws) through the database of the Korean Government, but there seems to be no clear legal basis for the project. The project has been mentioned only in the "10 Plans for Efficient National Informatization," announced by the Ministry of Information and Communication. But the City of Seoul already started to issue the Card as a "test" in March. The Ministry of Domestic Affairs said, as they were issuing the "test" version of the Card to 1,000 citizens, "we will prepare relevant laws and regulations," implying that they are doing the project "before" (and probably "above") the law. Currently, I am writing columns and news stories for "Sisa Jouranl," the weekly news magazine in South Korea, which decided to deal with the Card project as a special topic as I suggested. To write a critical article against the Project, I am starting to gather info about the similar cases, if there is any. And I hope to hear from you about some theoretical and practical knowledge about the similar issues; I would like to quote your opinions in my article, if you allow me to do so. Right after the publication of the news article, I will try to contact various NGO's in South Korea to inform them of the importance of the issue. And I will try to organize an anti-electronic ID Card movement in the cyberspace, if that is necessary. I am very happy to meet you in the cyberspace, who really concerns the privacy issues in the computerized age. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Joohan ****************************************** Joohoan Kim Ph.D. Candidate 3620 Walnut Street Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 sjokim(a)icg.stwing.upenn.edu http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sjokim/home.html

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Re: ****Tacoma, Washington Starts Taxing Internet Access 07/30/96
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:08 AM 8/7/96 GMT, Brian C. Lane wrote: > A slight correction. They are imposing a 6% tax on the Gross receipts of > all Internet Providers who have customers in Tacoma. This includes AOL, > Compu$erve, and my local favorites - aa.net and eskimo.com So if someone has six thousand customers, one of whom is in Tacoma, they want six percent of his gross on the other 5999 customers? --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Re: Public report of the EU crack.
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Hallam-Baker wrote: >>I consider the political dimension of this affair to >>be more significant that the technical. This brings the >>US and the French into the same category of anti-crypto >>government with a habit of poking its nose into other >>people business and getting caught. Phill - do you know if the French ever got caught actively breaking computers or telecomm equipment outside their country, or have they only been hit for eavesdropping and breakins on their subjects and foreigners within their boundaries? It seems like the US government, if they really did this, has gone a step beyond even France's level of tackiness, as well as exceeding the "legitimate needs of law enforcement" that Louis Freeh has been ranting about. Is this some campaign to reinforce Clinton's call for protecting the National Information Infrastructure, or have they decided that voluntary key escrow is too slow so they'll steal what they can now? The technically interesting part is just that there are bugs in routers and SNMP can be used to attack them. We've seen bugs before, and we've seen bugs used to bug people. At 02:20 PM 8/5/96 -0700, drose(a)AZStarNet.com (David M. Rose) wrote: >> >> Phill > >Say what? John Young I can understand; this blather? > >Att: "Doc" Baker/Mr. Hyde, err, Hallam: any rudimentary text on >diction/grammer/syntax might be helpful to you. > >Sheesh! At least Sternlight seemed to be acquainted with the English language. > David - It's good form, if you _must_ flame people's spelling and grammar on the net, to spell grammar correctly. Understanding grammar well enough to recognize correct English when you see it is a fine point mainly noticed by people whose abilities run beyond the capability of running a spellchecker; Phill's is fine (except a missing 's), if lacking JYA's obscure poetic touch. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Defuse Authority!

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Re: STEGO GUNS
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:28 AM 8/8/96 +1000, Julian Assange wrote: >> >> The nationwide study [from the University of >> Chicago] found that violent crime fell after >> states made it legal to carry concealed handguns: >> * Homicide, down 8.5%. >> * Rape, down 5%. >> * Aggravated assault, down 7%. >> ... >> The drop isn't primarily caused by people >> defending themselves with guns, says John Lott, >> the study's author. Rather, criminals seem to >> alter their behavior to avoid coming into contact >> with a person who might have a gun. >Correlation != causation. What are the figures on other crimes? I >presume they would have to have gone up, since the criminal element has >been deprived of it's "revenue" in this manner. Perhaps they simply >didn't have time for killing, raping and assulting; being too busy >lugging around their legally concealed handguns and pointing them at >shop-keepers. I think this is relevant, albeit in an indirect way, to cypherpunks. We're all familiar with some of the various ways that government tries to justify intrusion based on arguments which look superficially plausible. The nationwide 55 mph speed limit is one, which was first supported based on the claim that it saved gas, but later the justification changed to saving lives. Yet recently studies have shown an actual decrease in accidents in states which raised the speed limit. The other big correlation (which turns out to be an anti-correlation!) is the idea that allowing people to carry concealed handguns leads to greater numbers of deaths. By this study, that claim is shown to be false as well. The reason this is all relevant is that cryptography is currently under attack by the US government, under the guise of ITAR, with the implicit claim that the availability of good crypto will somehow help "terrorists, drug dealers, child pornographers, and Jim Bell" (oops! sorry about that one...) We, on the other hand, recognize that the advent of good cryptography will protect us far more than it might arguably harm us. All of us on CP (except, probably, Sternlight) would gladly accept a world where unrestricted crypto is ubiquitous. By showing previous examples of how government makes false claims and misuses (or ignores) statistics to support its actions, we can challenge any presumptions it makes regarding crypto. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Tim's Mac Tales
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Finger your delete key: What caught my eye in Tim's remarks about Apple was his continued use of Macs. Why was that enticing? It has to do with what hard-headed physicists know about hardware that soft-headed coders don't. So my curiosity: does Tim know Intel intel that we don't know, and can't tell it? More generally, do chip physicists know what crypto coders don't, about the covert features of those world-pervasive chips inside? Would Tim tell, could Tim disclose intel, what the world doesn't know about Intel, about what Intel's hard-headed Moore, the immigrant physicist, whispers in utmost secrecy to Microsoft's soft-headed Gates, the American-way coder? Is soft-hearted OS code the front for cold-hearted hardware spying? Maybe the most that Tim can tell without exposing Intel is that Tim uses Macs. Still, is Motorola more trustworthy than Intel, and if so, for whom? What do Apple insiders know that the world needs to know about the deals of Intel insiders, are they working with inside the Beltwayers, gobbling world-markets, gobbling intel chip by chip? Is Motorola doing the same with its adorable cellulars and satellites and boards and hardware galore, using benign code to conceal hardware malice? Dreamy, maybe, but hard-hearted Tellers did it to the Oppenheimers, and everyone knows that physicists truly enjoy playing dice with God. (Hold on, Tim, this is the way I write after thirty years of grinding out grim technical reports.)

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****CyberWatch Security With Face Recognition 08/07/96
by reagle＠rpcp.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A., 1996 AUG 7 (NB) -- By Bob Woods. A person's face may become much more valuable than providing good looks to everyone who sees him or her. That's because Miros Inc. has developed a new software product that uses face recognition to access secured areas on a network. Miros' "TrueFace CyberWatch" is described as the first product of its kind that controls access to secured data by using facial lines. The technology is based on neural networks technology invented by Miros President Michael Kuperstein and the company's Dr. James Kottas, and developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Variability of people's faces is overcome in determining whether an actual face is the same or different than a face image that was previously stored. TrueFace CyberWatch uses Miros' software and a small video camera on top of the computer monitor to verify computer users when they try to access protected data. TrueFace "snaps" a picture of the current computer operator and compares it to images in a database of authorized users. Continued spot checks are taken to ensure the same user is at the computer. Some of the information that can be protected includes medical, financial, criminal, or military records, officials said. The system requires no training, is fast to use, and cannot be fooled by holding up a photo of a person. This technology has been used in other situations, including the securing of buildings or special areas, officials said. TrueFace CyberWatch is compatible with PC client/server standards and can be used alone or with other security programs, officials said. The client runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, and costs $199. A bundle package, which includes a Connectix camera and the software, is priced at $298. Both products will be shipping within the next two months, officials said. (19960807/Press Contact: Christine Sheroff, Sheroff & Associates, 508-435-3306)

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