December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: DON'T Nuke Singapore Back into the Stone Age
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:06 AM 9/2/96 +0800, James Seng wrote: >that). I have a long argument with this person, telling him that despite >what they have done, i could still access to those stuff which they ban. >his reasoning is "how many people can do it? 10%? 5%? That's fine with us. >If the people really wans it, they can get it". The flaw with this view is that it is no harder to deploy software that defeats Singapore's proxy than it is to establish a tcp/ip connection in the first place. For civilians (such as myself) establishing a tcp/ip connection is as hard or as easy as establishing an encrypted tcp/ip tunnel to defeat government control efforts. For both these tasks, I am dependent on software writers who know more than I do. Since the software of the Net is written by people not governments, the governments will find it hard to hold "free users" down to a 5% or 10% figure. The Net is nothing more than the software that it runs on and we (not governments) write the software. In addition, we are not imposing our ideology on Singapore. If Singapore changes, it will be because an encounter with the realities of the free flow of information changes it. DCF

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EFF chairwoman: Anonymity proven not to be a positive factor
by um＠c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From a Scientology magazine: Esther Dyson, member of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and member of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, spoke on the anonymity issue at the fifth Computers, Freedom & Privacy (CFP) conference in San Francisco. [...] "I have a concern about the spread of bad behavior on the Net," said Dyson. "Anonymity figures into this, and I feel that it has proven to not be a positive factor. It breaks down the community which we are seeking to build, and cout protection and privacy laws already exist and should be applied in a broad way, such that they are transparent to new wrinkles in the technology. It is not necessary to view the world of the Net as different from the rest of the world." http://www.anonymizer.com:8080/http://www.theta.com/goodman/hijack.htm [For EFF's former position on anonymity, see http://ftp.sterling.com:80/COAST/doc/law+ethics/EFF-Anonymity]

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Anonymity and free speech
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Instead of discussing whether or not Esther Dyson or other EFF board members are personally comfortable with anonymity, let's talk about whether or not the EFF and its board members believe that the First Amendment provides a right to speak and associate anonymously. (I believe that the First Amendment gives everyone the right to wear a t-shirt which says "I am an asshole." But I have no interest in wearing such a t-shirt. And so on.) I believe that it does, and that the Supreme Court has already made that clear. In cypherpunks(a)toad.comparticular, I'm thinking of _NAACP v. Alabama ex rel Patterson_, _Talley_, and _McIntrye v. Ohio Elections Commission_. (Sorry for the lack of cites; 95% of my stuff is still in boxes and I'm sending this via laptop and a Ricochet modem.) If the right to speak/associate in "real life" is protected by the First Amendment, I don't see why it wouldn't be on computers and networks which are located inside the United States. And if that right is based upon the Constitution, it will take a constitutional amendment or a big sea change in the Supreme Court to take it away. (I wonder if the decision in _McIntrye_ would have gone the other way if Ms. McIntrye were selling drugs via anonymous message pools instead of discussing school funding via windshield flyers.) Discussions about the utility of anonymity would be more useful if we were designing a communication system or a constituion from scratch; but that's not our current situation. Is there serious debate about whether or not the Constitution and the Internet allow anonymous communication? (I'm not asking a rhetorical question. If someone's familiar with an argument to the contrary, please tell me about it.) Both the Constitution and the Internet are difficult to modify quickly; we probably have anonymity (like it or not) for at least a few more years. (I'm not trying to imply that US law is the only law, or that the rest of the world doesn't existy. But I don't know poo about the right to anonymity in other nations; and to a certain extent anonymity anywhere on the Internet is the same as anonymity everywhere on the Internet. Are other readers aware of other jurisdictions where anonymous speech is considered a right?) ---- Greg Broiles gbroiles(a)netbox.com http://www.io.com/~gbroiles

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Re: strengthening remailer protocols
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:25 PM 9/2/96, John Anonymous MacDonald wrote: >I don't really see the use of this complicated scheme. The main >problem seems to be that if M floods remailer R with messages to B, >and A sends a message to C through R, then it will be clear to M that >A's message was destined for C. > >Rather than divert messages, then, I propose that for each input >message there is a 10% chance that a piece of cover traffic is >generated. Thus, if M sends 50 messages through R and sees 6 outgoing >messages going to remailers C, D, and D, he will now know which >messages correspond to the message that A send through. This type of attack is why "reply-block" schemes are fundamentally flawed. Any such scheme gives an attacker (a traffic analyst) a wedge with which to deduce mappings. It is a kind of "chosen plaintext" attack (loosely speaking). Or a "forcing attack." Maybe a "flooding attack" is as good a name as any. One floods the reply block and simply watches where the water goes. (If there were more academics in the crypto community looking at digital mix issues, there would likely be clever names for the various attacks.) Several folks on this list, including (from memory), Scott Collins, Wei Dai, Hal Finney, myself, and others, have noted this weakness over the years. Note that merely fiddling around with probabilities of transmission, such as described above, will not be enough. This just adds a layer of noise, which will disappear under a correlation analysis. (For newcomers, there are interesting parallels between statistical analysis of ciphers and similar analysis of remailer networks. And lots of statistical tools can be used to deduce likely mappings based on source/sink correlations, digram analysis, etc. Making a remailer network robust against such analyses will take a whole more basic thinking. Merely increasing message volume is not enough. Nor is increasing latency enough. Generally speaking, of course.) Instead of reply blocks, I think use of message pools (a la BlackNet) is a more robust reply method, as it uses "widely-distributed messages" (a la Usenet newsgroups) to get around the source/sink correlation issue. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology (fwd)
by Donald E. Eastlake 3rd 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Suggest you look at draft-eastlake-internet-payment-*.txt in the IETF shadow directories. I don't think any one step will solve all our spam problems but I wouldn't mind spending, say, 5 cents for each real piece of mail I sent outside my company and if end machines charged 5 cents per piece of ouside mail received, I think spamming would be crippled. (Note that with bad guy lists, you could collect the money and then just throw away the mail.) Donald (not on cypherpunks) ===================================================================== Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1 508-287-4877(tel) dee(a)cybercash.com 318 Acton Street +1 508-371-7148(fax) dee(a)world.std.com Carlisle, MA 01741 USA +1 703-620-4200(main office, Reston, VA) http://www.cybercash.com http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 19:47:15 -0400 From: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> To: dcsb(a)ai.mit.edu Subject: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 11:35:28 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com From: tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) Subject: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology Keywords: agoric systems, computational ecologies, resource auctioning, Mark Miller, K. Eric Drexler, Bernardo Huberman, contracts, distributed trust, metered usage, software objects, software ICs, superdistribution, Brad Cox, emergent order. In physics there are various conservation laws: conservation of energy, mass, charge, and whatnot. You all know about this... Conservation of mass says that mass is neither created nor destroyed. (For smart aleck quibblers, conservation of mass-energy.) How does this relate to our issues? "Abuse of Resources": Mail loops, infinite loops, spamming, overloads of networks, and congestion in general are cases where "unrealistic" models of costs are implemented in software. In the real physical world, infinite loops don't occur (at least not in the sense seen with mail loops, as a relevant example.) Conservation laws are related to the "cost model" of the universe. Real physical objects have costs, or ontological status, or presence.... (Please don't read too much into this point...I mean to be suggestive, not literal.) There are no "memory leaks" in the universe which suddenly fill it up with stuff, no perpetual motion machines, no creation and destruction of objects. Cyberspace Ontologies: There are several things which need to be done to make the cyberspatial world more like the spatial world: * payment for CPU cycles consumed (via contractual, permission-based access: "If you want access to this machine, here are the terms and conditions.") * metering mechanisms, such as e-stamps for e-mail (essentially a special case of the first point, where a machine says "I'll pass on your message if you pay me to.") * digital contracts, agreements on usage and payment (resource auctioning, or the "smart contracts" that Nick Szabo has written about) (you can all think of additional examples....) Cryptographic protocols have their uses here, but there are also some other measures which bear looking into. In the LISP community, for example, work has been done on "engines," which are building blocks that are "fueled up" with "CPU fuel" and allowed to run for some amount of CPU cycles. Thus, one could put an engine into a process and it would run for some number of ticks, then stop. (I'm sure there are Unix-level tools which do similar things, in terms of giving a spawned process so many ticks of the clock. The "engines" concept is somewhat more semantically clean, in that it's pushed down into the "ontology" of the thing being simulated or run, and is not at the "God level" (to use a non-technical term!).) Now, certainly I support the right of any person or machine to run programs freely and without charge, to pass on e-mail free of charge, to run remailers for no charge, to accept spam mail without complaint, and so on. What I'm suggesting is that many of the problems being seen with overuse of resources, spam, congestion, and denial of service are really due to a poor model of resource allocation. Unix and other modern operating systems offer various tools for helping to constrain such problems, but, I submit, better methods are needed. (Especially when multiple machines, networks, and even anonymous sites are part of the overall system....clearly the constraints must be managed locally, and via "contract," as part of a computational ecology, and not as a hierarchical, top down Unix-type operating system.) Economics is about the "allocation of scarce resources." Many of the existing models being used treat various scarce resources as _free_. Then, when the inevitable problems occur, calls for top-down regulation are heard (e.g., the frequent calls for illegalization of "unwanted mail"). In my view, building a consistent, distributed, "conservative" system is what Cypherpunks need to be thinking about. (I used the term "conservative" in the physics sense. A system in which various conservation laws are obeyed.) As I said before, this should not be compelled, but voluntary. However, those who give their resources away for free (choosing not to adopt a conservative ontology, in other words) should be in no position to complain or run to the government for top-down regulation because there freely-given resources are being overused or "abused" (in their thinking). And closely related to this whole issue--and something I've written about extensively--is the issue of "building walls in cyberspace." In the real world, persistent structures are build out of real materials, resulting in castles, forts, skyscrapers, bridges, houses, highways, etc. These objects have persistence, have controllable access (gates, doors, locks,...), and have "structural integrity." Cryptographic and distributed trust protocols are about the only means I can think of for constructing the equivalents in cyberspace. (And to a large extent, this is already happening: the Net and the Web have structure which cannot be demolished casually, or by top-down orders from any single national leader. Millions of machines, linked in various ways and implementing various protocols and "terms of service" with users and other machines....an early version of the "conservative" system I think we'll someday see.) Well, this gives the flavor of my points. I haven't rigorously argued all of the points, but the Cypherpunks forum is for presenting informal arguments. Thoughts? --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway." --- 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/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To unsubscribe from this list, send a letter to: Majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu In the body of the message, write: unsubscribe dcsb Or, to subscribe, write: subscribe dcsb If you have questions, write to me at Owner-DCSB(a)ai.mit.edu

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Re: Metcalf and Other Net.Fogies
by Jon Lebkowsky 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:27 AM 9/5/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >I'm evolving a hunch that the problems we're seeing with "old fogies" >denouncing the Net, and anonymity, and "smut on the Net," are part of a >larger cultural issue. Namely, the familiar case of an older generation >complaining about the sloth and sin of the younger generations. Hey, I'm 47, and I haven't given up on sloth and sin yet. 8-) Seriously, the problem here is that you don't want to set up the stereotype you allude to further down ('don't trust anyone over 30'). Stereotypic thinking, ya know? Besides which, I've run into some real dorks who were UNDER 30... >(Caveat: I'm 44, so I'm certainly a generation older than many of you, and >am about the same age, give or take a few years, of Dyson, Metcalfe, Kapor, >Denning, and the other Net.Doomsayers. However, 20-25 years ago, when I was >in college, I recall of course similar predictions of disaster. (And as it >turned out, the predictions that promiscuity would lead to a disaster >turned out to be partly correct, viz. AIDS.)) Hmmmmm...are Dyson and Kapor really net.doomsayers? I really haven't heard any kinda doom and gloom from those two... >Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3COM, and how >publisher of "Infoworld" and sailing enthusiast, was interviewed on CNBC a >few minutes ago. He repeated his prediction of an "Internet collapse" in >1996, based on overuse, on bad pricing models, on lack of controls, and on >other concerns. ... and I've tended to think Metcalfe was just sending an 'ad absurdum' flare when he predicted the death of the Internet, not so much predicting as taking an impact analysis to the extreme. >It could be that the Dennings, Dysons, Kapors, etc. of the world are simply >growing jaded with the Net and are projecting their own ennui in their >comments that the Net may need to be controlled. This may come with age, as >I'm sure the Kapor of 25 years ago would not have wanted President Nixon >and Attorney-General Mitchell telling him what he could read and write. I'm not sure which comments you're referring to, but I've come to understand that the generation-gap thing has no pat answer. Dave Farber is younger than Bruce Taylor, if ya know what I mean...and there are plenty of old pharts who are active in the various movements and groups opposing any restriction of the Internet. >(In fairness, none of these folks listed have called for censorship. But >all have expressed "concerns" of one sort or another. Not that discussing >concerns is inappropriate--after all, we do it all the time. But I sense in >many of their phrasings of concerns a stereotypical "old fogeyness" >emerging.) I dunno. Consider this: almost 30 years ago a bunch of us were more or less active in left wing politics that had some of the same aims I see expressed on this list and elsewhere, and we made mistakes. I don't know that I learned from my mistakes the way you're sposed to, but some folks learned, and are trying not to fuck up again. On the other hand, some folks really are just stodgy, but I bet they were stodgy kids, too. >Just a thought. Maybe the solution to the EFF problem is to "not trust >anyone over 30." Heh, right. Feet tall. -- Jon Lebkowsky http://www.well.com/~jonl jonl(a)hotwired.com

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Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:20 PM 9/6/96 -0400, David Lesher / hated by RBOC's in 5 states wrote: >> >> So switch to Fedex. The P.O. gives lousy service anyway. Privitize. >> > >Try & mail an anonymous FedEx package. >Try and pay cash in most Fedex offices. Buy money order. Slip it into the plastic pouch with the airbill. Drop it into collection box. Works. DCF

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Re: Race Bit: C
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 5 Sep 96 at 0:30, Anonymous, a man with a double standard wrote: > For them, I would go to jail; for you, I would even cooperate with > the BATF (which should be defunded 100%, IMO). Why would you go to jail? Who made jails and who would use violence to bring you in? jfa

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Re: Browne and foreign tyrants
by pjb＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

i also have never heard of an attempt on Hitler's life by anyone other that the germans. the us did, however, assassinate Yamamoto Isoroku, and did a very neat job of it at that. i once read a sci-fi story about time travelers going back to kill Hitler, and the disaster that occured when someone succeeded and Hitler's place was taken by someone even more onerous. in the story there was a group of people whose job it was to prevent this assassination, since so many people in the future had that idea that doing away with Hitler was a good thing to do there was practically a queue of would-be assassins. -paul > From cypherpunks-errors(a)toad.com Thu Sep 5 03:07:59 1996 > X-Sender: jimbell(a)mail.pacifier.com > X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 > Mime-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type> : > text/plain> ; > charset="us-ascii"> > Date: Wed, 04 Sep 1996 16:43:23 -0800 > To: libernet-d(a)listserv.rmii.com, nwlibertarians(a)teleport.com, > dnowch2(a)teleport.com > From: jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> > Subject: Browne and foreign tyrants > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Content-Length: 2362 > > >From: "George D. Phillies" <phillies(a)WPI.EDU> > >Subject: Re: Browne & foreign tyrants > >There is a section of the Geneva Protocols forbidding actions in occupied > >territories directed against officers of political parties. Under that > >section, the actions in Somalia against, e.g., the treasurer of General > >Aidid's political party, were war crimes. No one seems to get very upset. > > > >> If there is such a treaty, the US has a long history of ignoring it. > >> > >> 0) Attempts to kill Hitler. > >I don't think we ever tried this. > > And this was a real shame. Over 30 million people died in WWII, directly or > indirectly. We knew that Hitler was going to be a problem well before 1936. > Think how many could have been saved... > > If anything, WWII is excellent proof that AP is a good idea. Stauffenberg > was the German who bombed Hitler's meeting in 1944 but failed to kill him. > Stauffenberg knew as early as 1942 that Hitler needed to be killed, and a > recent "60 Minutes" episode related how hundreds of people knew about this > plot. > > The reason he failed was that while he was preparing the two bombs in a > bathroom, he was interrupted. (The bomb's delay mechamism was acid > dissolving a metal.) Rather than being caught, he left one of the > briefcases in the bathroom and went to the meeting with only one bomb. > Furthermore, he left the bomb at the meeting, but it was pushed behind the > heavy table after he left, which shielded Hitler from much of the force of > the explosion. > > If AP (or at least, some anonymous reward mechanism for Stauffenberg's > family) had been available, he would have done "the honorable thing," and > walked up to Hitler with the bomb and instantly detonated it right there, > resulting in both Hitler's and Stauffenberg's certain death. At least > hundreds of thousands or perhaps over a million people would have SURVIVED. > As it happened, Stauffenberg's reticence caused not only his death after > torture, but also the deaths of well over a hundred coup-plotters, but also > the thousands that were yet to die in the last 6+ months of WWII. > > Question: Would you kill yourself to save a million lives? Even if you > wouldn't, would you change your mind if your heirs would be anonymously paid > an extra $10 million dollars or so? I'd say that's a pretty substantial > motivation, wouldn't you? > > > > Jim Bell > jimbell(a)pacifier.com >

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PRESS RELEASE: GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL
by tank 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please forward: Contact: XS4ALL Internet BV (http://www.xs4all.nl) Postbus 1848 1000BV Amsterdam Fax: +31-20-6274498 Email: felipe(a)xs4all.nl * * * P R E S S R E L E A S E * * * GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL, WITH 3100 WEBPAGES German internetproviders, joined in the Internet Content Taskforce (ICTF), started censoring the Dutch website www.xs4all.nl, containing 3100 personal and commercial homepages. This act of censorship is caused by the webpage of a magazine that is banned in Germany, Radikal (http://www.xs4all.nl/ ~tank/radikal/). A German prosecutor sent the following message to the ICTF (http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901e.htm) "Under the following addresses in Internet: http://www.serve.com/spg/154/ http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal//154/ and using the link on page http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/angela1/radilink.htm one can call up the entire edition of the pamphlet entitled radikal Nr. 154". Parts of this pamphlet justify preliminary suspicion of promoting a terrorist organization under ' 129a, Par.3 of the German Criminal Code, public condoning of criminal activities penalizable under ' 140 no.2 of the German Criminal Code and preliminary suspicion of inciting to criminal activity under ' 130a Par.1 of the German Criminal Code. The Public Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice has therefore initiated a criminal investigatory procedure against the parties disseminating this pamphlet. You are herewith informed that you may possibly make yourself subject to criminal prosecution for aiding and abetting criminal activities if you continue to allow these pages to be called up via your access points and network crosspoints" Providers in Germany are already blocking packets to and from the host www.xs4all.nl. The 3100 websites on this server include the Kurdistan Information Network (http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/htdocs/) the very popular Internet Charts (http://www.xs4all.nl/~jojo/) and the world famous Chip Directory (http://www.xs4all.nl/~ganswijk/chipdir/) XS4ALL has not received any request from the German Government regarding the homepage of Radikal. Without any prior contact the German prosecutor decided that the XS4ALL website needs to be blocked for German Internet Users. XS4ALL is awaiting legal advice, and will investigate if legal procedures against the German government are possible. Censorship on Internet usually has the opposite effect. Internetusers consider it a sport to publish censored materials. Many users have already published the Radikal website on other Internet hosts. Here are some of the URL's: http://burn.ucsd.edu/%7Eats/RADIKAL/ http://www.jca.or.jp/~taratta/mirror/radikal/ http://www.serve.com/~spg/ http://huizen.dds.nl/~radikal http://www.canucksoup.net/radikal/index.html http://www.ecn.org/radikal http://www.well.com/~declan/mirrors/ http://www.connix.com/~harry/radikal/index.htm http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal/index.htm Xs4all Internet will rotate the IP-numbering of the website www.xs4all.nl to ensure that it's 3100 userpages will all remain available for any internet-user. <end> -- Felipe Rodriquez - XS4ALL Internet - finger felipe(a)xs4all.nl for http://xs4all.nl/~felipe/ - Managing Director - pub pgp-key 1024/A07C02F9 pgp Key fingerprint = 32 36 C3 D9 02 42 79 C6 D1 9F 63 EB A7 30 8B 1A

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