December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Pipeline Up
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cancel that poop about Pipeline being down. Seems only NYC is down. Access is OK through PSInet. jyy(a)gnn.com is for top secret black SIGINT only, okay?

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MTH_ead
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

9-14-96. WaPo: "Empty-Head Network Fails to Link TWA Crash to Terrorism." The frantic overseas intelligence-gathering effort, which has included eavesdropping, use of informants and offers of large cash payments for leads, has been undertaken by the CIA, the NSA and the DEA, as well as a number of foreign investigative agencies. The NRO has analyzed voluminous archives of intelligence drawn from spy satellites, intercepted phone calls and electronic eavesdrops gathered before the crash. Since right after the TWA crash, the NSA started monitoring phone conversations of people believed to have ties to terrorists groups, as well as trying to track the movements of suspected terrorists. The CIA, working through its sources, has been offering money for leads on any kind of terrorist role. The DEA has been using overseas agents to gather intelligence; the FBI liaisons stationed in 23 countries are working to gather intelligence on the crash; and Scotland Yard and the Mossad are also empty-handed (not Red-handed -- yet). ----- http://jya.com/mthead.txt (10 kb) MTH_ead

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The Living and the Dead
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For the vets unable to sleep: The Washington Post has two heart-breaking pieces today on a new book about Vietnam, "The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives," by Paul Hendrickson. The book tracks the disaster being formulated in 1965 by DC top-down policy interleaved with savagery to five grunts in bloody battle. There's a laudatory review of the grim book, and a long magazine piece gives an excerpt which includes some of Life's photos of a Marine copter gunner's transition from happy-go-lucky, to butchery of buddies, to grief-stricken collapse. It reawakens what's never forgot. That April, 1965, Life photo-essay, "One Ride With Yankee Papa 13," turned up in a sidewalk stall today so we'll put 18 photos on our Web page for a glimpse back to the future of power-mad policy begetting slaughter. http://jya.com/yp01.jpg through http://jya.com/yp18.jpg

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Re: 56 kbps modems
by craigw＠dg.ce.com.au 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

That I realize that baud and bit/sec are not the same, but I feel you would have a hard time getting a 56k modem to work on a line that does not support 28.8k fully, let alone 33.6k. A leased line (copper pair) from telstra only supports 9.6k and costs close to ISDN. When the telco reinstalls the literal tons of copper cable that we have lying underground for at least 20 years in some instances that connects the exchanges, and replaces this with optic fibre preferably, or at least higher bandwidth co-ax, we will not have 28k even. In the states you have better lines and ISDN is far less expensive. For two B channels perminantly connected I have to pay about $2500/month in this country. Not many home users can pay this, thus they have to still use modems. With the lack of bandwidth to and from the exchanges, there is not a chance in hell a 56k modem will work in this country for many years. (Australia - the lucky country...not in regards to bandwidth) > As I am sure has been discussed at length before, baud does not equal > bps. AFAIK, V32bis is only 2400baud. ,'~``. \|/ ,'``~. (-o=o-) (@ @) ,(-o=o-), +--.oooO--(_)--Ooo-----oOO-(_)-OOo-------oooO--(_)--Oooo.------+ | | | Soon, we may all be staring at our computers, wondering | | whether they're staring back. | | | | [Network Admin For WPA Business Products. aka doshai >;-) ] | | .oooO http://pip.com.au/~doshai/ Oooo. | | ( ) Oooo. .oooO ( ) | +-----\ (----( )-------oooO-Oooo--------( )--- ) /---------+ \_) ) / \ ( (_/ (_/ \_) Key fingerprint = 2D F4 54 BB B4 EA F1 E7 B6 DE 48 92 FC 8D FF 49 Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key. (if I want to give it to you)

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Re: The Living and the Dead
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sep 16, 1996 01:54:40, 'jya(a)pipeline.com (John Young)' wrote: >18 Nam photos on our Web page for a glimpse back to the >future of power-mad policy begetting slaughter. Corrected URL's: http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/yp01.jpg through http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/yp18.jpg

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Re: Kiddie porn on the Internet
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Allegations that "save the children" is a political organization providing cover for an effort to ban cryptography] At 01:54 PM 9/9/96 -0400, Hallam-Baker wrote: > Their main mission is sending food to Ethiopia and other famine > areas, development work etc. It is ultra-worthy stuff. Not everyone who sends food to the starving children is ultra respectable. Problem is that the usual cause of starving children is tyranny. In order to get close enough to the starving children to take those cute fund raising photographs you have to pay off and get cosy with tyrants. This creates a moral hazard, in that it is hard to tell the difference between normal bribery needed to do anything in a tyrannical state, and bribery to bribe tyrants to create starving children for photo ops. It is very common for international charities to develop excessively friendly relationships with murderous tyrannies, Monsters do not generally sport horns and a tail. More commonly they walk around on two legs with large neon halos prominently displayed. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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ComLaw> Down South
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cross-post from commonlaw(a)teleport.com At 09:11 PM 9/15/96 -0400, James M. Cobb wrote: > 09 14 96 Associated Press distributes a newsstory headed: > > MEXICAN REBELS WARN OF MORE 'SELF-DEFENSE' ATTACKS > AGAINST GOVERNMENT > Points from the newsstory: > Leaders of a violent new rebel group are vowing to > press their war on Mexico's military and police.... > > [Last month's] raids were the most widespread guerril- > la attacks in Mexico in decades. > > ...during the news conference, the rebel leaders... > said that...bomb threats issued since last month's at- > tacks were part of an outside campaign to discredit the > group. > > They said their targets will continue to be government, > not civilian, sites. > Please note that word: OUTSIDE. > > Imported from Atlanta. > "Overnight" via NAFTA Express: > [The rebel group's statement] cited "the TERROR and > desperation caused by unemployment, the drastic reduc- > tion of the buying power of salaries, the lack of at- > tention to health, education and housing." > Cordially, > Jim > NOTE. The AP newsstory's www.nando.net online filename: > > world2_15734.html > I capitalized the Clinton-word in the last quota- > tion. > This critical essay was composed 09 15 96. >From what has appeared in the American media about this new Mexican rebel group, I'm particularly pleased with them. This is exactly the kind of alternative that we need to the stereotypical, "kill lotsa innocent citizens" attacks which are often associated with the term terrorism. They make it clear that they specifically target soldiers, police, and other government employees. After reading a couple of articles, it is obvious what they need: A method to prevent spoofing of their communiques, a function that PGP could do quite easily. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Cryptography of a sort - redux
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If anyone remembers my original postings from a couple weeks ago (my first-ever on The Net), I described a method to "shuffle" bits in a text-stream, using simple random-number generators, to insure that the text cannot be descrambled by brute-force methods. It has occurred to me only after this time that there was significant misinterpretation of what I proposed. I do not change any bits of text, I merely reposition them, therefore there is no applicability of standard analysis techniques (XOR masking, whatever) to the decoding process. The result file contains the same number of zero and one bits as it started with, through any number of encryption layers. The only way to recover the original text is to reposition the shuffled bits correctly, which requires brute-force guessing of the pseudo-random-number output. This guess is very simple for the first encoding layer, but compounds exponentially in subsequent encodings, so that after half a dozen or a dozen passes, where the executable program(s) is called from scratch for each pass, the shuffling rapidly approaches true randomness, and cannot be decrypted in practice except through the exact mirror-image reversal of the encryption passes. An example: How long would it take for you to guess the number (between 0 and 32000) I'm thinking of, if you could guess 16 billion numbers per second? Would it be .000001 second, on average? If you had to guess the ten different numbers I'm thinking of, and get all ten correct sequentially, it should take an essentially infinite amount of time, yes? And remember, since computer bits have such low differentiation (ones and zeros), looking for "patterns" and so forth just doesn't apply in this type of encryption. As to the Public Key part of the argument, once there is general understanding on the above points at large, it might then be worthwhile to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of how to make/distribute Private keys, etc. One gentleman on this forum made an argument recently, something to the effect that it wouldn't be worthwhile for Hacker X to try to break into datastream Y, assuming datastream Y is encoded with such-and-such a key, that datastream Y is sufficiently unimportant, and motive for such a breakin would not be great enough to justify the expected effort. To such arguments, all I can say is, this is the computer age, and enough mundane transactions can add up to something significant, or, one could lower the expected-effort ratio, you get the picture.

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IBM_gak
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

9-15-96. PcWe: "IBM Boosts Encryption Initiative " IBM security initiatives next month will include a new way to build encryption into software and technology that could enable U.S. companies to export products with strong encryption algorithms. IBM also will introduce several "key-recovery" technologies that could enable businesses to satisfy the requirement imposed by the U.S. government that it be able to access encrypted data on demand. IBM is attempting to garner industry support for the new key-recovery technology and is expected to license the technology to Netscape and Sun. 9-13-96. BuWi: "Revolutionary Intranet security product to be demonstrated at Interop DotCom " DSN's NetFortress fully automates hardware-based authentication, encryption and key exchange into a plug and play solution. It completely eliminates the possibility of IP spoofing, eavesdropping and break-ins. "After installing it, I couldn't even tell which service a given packet was from - everything but the packet header itself was rendered undecipherable as it traversed the Internet." DSN Technology was founded by Dr. Aharon Friedman and Andy Savas. ----- http://jya.com/ibmgak.txt (6 kb for 2) IBM_gak

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Re: Email Robot draws fire from CypherPunkz
by peter＠baileynm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sneck. The points I get out of this: 1. Cypherpunks lives up to its name. Mainly, the second part. 2. Whether an email spam is business related or not, it's neither desirable or interesting. Two years ago having a robot like that might have been amusing. Now it's just another spam. 3. Y'all really oughta read Stand on Zanzibar again. I think you're missing the point.

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