December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

IBM to unveil Internet banking alliance
by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Mon, 9 Sep 1996 11:20:03 -0400 >From: reagle(a)rpcp.mit.edu (Joseph M. Reagle Jr.) >To: reagle(a)rpcp.mit.edu >Subject: IBM to unveil Internet banking alliance > > > > SAN FRANCISCO (Reuter) - International Business Machines >Corp. <IBM.N> has made an alliance with more than a dozen >major banks to provide consumer banking services using >Internet technology, IBM and industry executives said Friday. > The consortium will be dubbed Integrity and will be owned >equally by IBM and each of the partners. > Banks will be able to use IBM's worldwide private network >as well as the Internet to enable their customers to do their >banking electronically. Specific details of the banking >arrangement have yet to be worked out, one of the executives >said. > IBM and the banking instititutions involved are due to >unveil the Integrity project in New York on Monday. > The alliance is one of several industry projects that >IBM's Internet Division is establishing to help large >companies utilize the Internet. > The banking alliance will have competition from other >electronic banking services being organised by companies like >Intuit Corp., America Online Inc. and Microsoft Corp. > Just this week, Intuit and America Online said a number of >leading financial institutions would offer their customers >online banking via AOL, using software developed by Intuit >known as BankNOW. > At an Internet and Electronic Commerce conference in San >Francisco this week, Intuit Chairman Scott Cook said the new >service targets people who want to use electronic transactions >to speed up their banking. > Cook said he expects the new service will differ from what >the IBM-led consortium might provide. > NationsBank has been among companies frequently mentioned >as participating in the IBM consortium, but a spokesman late >on Friday declined to discuss a Wall Street Journal report >that it would be involved in the consortium. > > > _______________________ Regards, Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as true strength. -Ralph Sockman Joseph Reagle http://rpcp.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html reagle(a)mit.edu E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E

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Re: [WAS xs4all.nl] Terrorists
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:50 AM 9/9/96, Jon Lebkowsky wrote: >At 11:01 AM 9/9/96 +0200, Stephan Schmidt wrote: > >>One thought : How many of you would support terrorist >>web server (say Oklahoma, TWA, Iran, Lybia, RAF, IRA, ...) ? > >I.e. "How many of you support the right to free speech regardless of content." > >Wellll...there is the rule about speech which endangers; "fire in a crowded >theatre" is the cliche-example. What could a terrorist SAY that would >endanger? Personally, I'd rather have terrorists building html than bombs. As Dettweiler is usually so fond of pointing out, it would be disingenuous of us not to acknowledge that the systems we are talking about (fully untraceable, strong anonymity, digital pseudonyms, digital cash, information markets, i.e., "crypto anarchy") will in fact be used for all sorts of things. Including folks who want to blow up Parliament, the Congress, the People's Tribunal, etc. And by folks who wish to trade in CBW secrets, who wish to arrange contract killings, and so on. This has been well-known for many years. My paper on "Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities" was villified by no less than Dorothy Denning for describing how these things may evolve. I don't worry overmuch about a few thousand or even a few million people dying as a result of something we have had an influence on developing, anymore than the developers of many technologies need to worry about how others use their technologies. And the net effect of crypto anarchy is to destabilize and marginalize central governments, which is a net positive effect. If some eggs get broken in the process, the biological imperative will generate more eggs. No big deal. --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, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: [WAS xs4all.nl] Terrorists
by jfricker＠vertexgroup.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:32 AM 9/9/96 EDT, you wrote: >Stephan Schmidt <schmidt(a)pin.de> writes: > >> One thought : How many of you would support terrorist >> web server (say Oklahoma, TWA, Iran, Lybia, RAF, IRA, ...) ? > >http://www.terrorist.org ? > Damn! In my backyard no less! whois terrorist.org Terrorist Organization (TERRORIST2-DOM) 1525 SW 14th #4 Portland, OR 97201 US

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Test...sorry about this - Reply
by Barbara Gamble 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I got it too. And since I am a new subscriber, I thought it might be the normal traffic. The Welcome msg *did* say the list is high-traffic. Still, I was aghast--300 all at once, another 100 just in the last hour. Is that typical? (Please forgive such a question from a newcomer to the list.) >>> Z.B. <zachb(a)netcom.com> 09/06 10:38 am >>> I'm just posting this to see if there's something wrong with my mail filter - it dumped a ton of messages from this list over the night, and I'm trying to figure out why the !@%$# it did that. Sorry for the interruption. --- Zach Babayco zachb(a)netcom.com <----- finger for PGP public key http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/4127

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Imminent Death of the Internet, GIF at 11
by Martin Minow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For several months (years?) Bob Metcalf has been predicting that the Internet will self-destruct from overload. His argument appears to follow one of Gordon Bell's maxims: "anyone can predict the future: all you need is semi-log paper and a ruler." As I understand it, Metcalf's argument is that network load (messages, packets) is growing exponentially, while network bandwidth (fiber capacity, switch performance) is growing linearly. At some point, these two curves cross -- and demand will exceed capacity. There are two solutions to this problem: either there will be a fundamental change in the way messages move on the Internet (i.e. they don't all have to pass through Mae East and/or Mae West) or there will be a fundamental change in the way we use the Internet. We certainly are seeing changes in the way we use the network. When I "got on the net" in the late 1970's, I was on two mailing lists (SF-Lovers and Human Net) and could read *all* of Usenet traffic in an hour or two. In the late 1980's, Usenet traffic totalled about 10 MB/Day. Now, I'm on a handful of work-dependent, low bandwidth mailing lists, one high-bandwidth, high noise mailing list, almost never read Usenet and wouldn't dare attempt to support a Usenet newsserver. Today, it takes longer for me to read mail on an office Internet or 28.8 modem at home, than it did in 1980 on a 2400 baud modem. To make a long story short, I suspect that we will be much more selective in what we access on the net; we may hire editors (or form communities that share "interesting stuff", each person serving as one member of an informal editorial board). We will also see organizations (companies or professional societies) funding network-based publications to communicate matters of common interest. (There are a number of these already, Risks Digest being possibly the most important.) So, in one sense, Metcalf is right; the Internet will self-destruct. However, in another sense, he is wrong; the information carried on the Internet will still be distributed, but probably in a different form. Martin Minow minow(a)apple.com

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towards an eternity service
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[the relevance of this to remailer-operators, is that my example prototype architecture for discussion relies heavily on mixmaster remailers] Ross Anderson's eternity service (postscript paper somewhere on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/) is a distributed file system with the criteria that it should not be possible to delete information from it. The paper outlines ways that you might go about doing this, and gives as a design goal that it should not be possible even for concerted government attacks to remove information from the service. Roughly the approach described is to have anonymous servers with secret shared data. The server doesn't know what it is serving, and the server charges per Mb/year of data storage. This seems a pretty interesting idea, as it would be a great boon to free speech to be able to reliably publish information that would survive attempts to "unpublish" it, which seem to be gaining in popularity. Notable recent examples of such attacks being Scientologist attacks on distribution of it's `scriptures', the German governments banning of nazi revisionist material, and the impending possibility of a repeat of the CDA at a (US) state level. I think it is desirable to get something working now, even if it is far short of the design criteria Anderson describes. A working model would provide something on which to base discussion of improvements, and would also be an interesting experiment to see the sorts of uses such a system would be put to, and the political reaction to it's uses. The following doesn't depend on, but would be helped by having direct socket delivery of packets (for performance) in the mixmaster remailer-net and forward secrecy (for resilence to attack). The idea comes in two parts, the first part, an anonymous www proxy using mixmaster to deliver packets, is present to provide cover traffic for real eternity system requests, the second part describes a way to acheive an eternity like system with the traffic mixed in with part 1 traffic, so that the two types of traffic can not be distinguished by attackers. 1. anonymous www proxies over mixmaster The stated design goal for this part (it's partly a cover goal, though useful in its own right) is to ensure that users can access publically accessible www pages without divulging their identity to the sites they are accessing, or even to an attacker who is monitoring net traffic. The user wants to hide which sites they are accessing, and what information they are accessing. No attempt is made to conceal the identity of the www sites accessed, a normal URL is used to access them. This is basically just like www.anonymizer.com, except that traffic is routed over the mixmaster net. An http <-> mixmaster interface would be added to the existing mixmaster. You add a blip in the line for outgoing traffic on your own machine which converts all outgoing http requests into mixmaster packets and feeds them into the remailer network. You choose random chains to get to the http servers. The delivered packet at the exit remailer node is a new mixmaster packet type, a http request type, rather than a request to email to an individual, or post to a newsgroup, it results in an (where possible SSL encrypted) http request being made to the specified http server. Also included with the request is a mixmaster reply chain, so that the exit mixmaster node can route the return the requested www pages, and SSL session traffic back to the originator. As you might imagine if this became popular, it could generate a lot of traffic. For a practical system I think it's inevitable that you'd need to provide some financial incentive for the mixmaster operators to subsidize their T3s :-) So you would need to incorporate per hop payments, for the remailers. This could be a relatively small payment, but is just there to ensure that they have the money to increase their bandwidth if the demand requires it. I think that about explains part 1. 2. an eternity like system built on this system There are a couple of extra requirements for the eternity system, firstly that the address of the www site must be concealed also, and secondly that the data is secret shared across multiple eternity www sites. The first requirement can be met by the anonymous eternity www sites publically posting to a newsgroup (via a mixmaster remailer of course:-) a mixmaster chain pointing at themselves. To reduce the problem of the flood attack for finding the endpoint of a chain, firstly some of Peter Allan's suggestions on extra cover traffic, and on adding extra hops to increase cover traffic should help, but ultimately this only makes a longer concerted flood necessary to find the output. I don't see any easy solution to the flood attack, the only _real_ answer is a DC net. A slightly simpler, but less robust solution would be to find ways to have fixed levels of traffic between nodes in the remailer network. Surplus traffic at entry points could be rejected, so that the sender knows to try another remailer. The other requirement for eternity is that the data should be secret shared. If all the eternity www servers publish their reply blocks, the user sends requests to a number of the eternity servers selected randomly. Choose the number so that it is likely that you will get the required k of n shares, given that there are n servers, and they all hold shares in the data, and that k of n shares are required to recover the secret. You also need to ensure that the exit mixmaster which is acting as a http forwarder server can't tell whether it is making an eternity system request or an anonymous www proxy request. The fact that http traffic is blindly forwarded means that if the http request is SSL encrypted the http forwarding mixmaster remailer will not know the contents of the traffic, and so will not be able to distinguish traffic type: eternity or anonymous proxy. As the eternity www servers don't know what the data in the shares they are holding is, they can't provide the indexing facility directly. Rather ordinary www pages, and other eternity www pages can be used to collect links to interesting eternity pages. In otherwords, it's decentralised, as is the www, and any indexing left up to the authors of eternity hosted www documents, or anyone elses indexing to interesting links. A compromise technology which would greatly simplify access to the service would be public www proxies or gateways to the eternity service, so that no new software was required for the client. This would serve a similar role to WWW based remailers. The scheme is complex in places but basically requires no new technology, at least for a crude implementation, without the finer points. What can be missed out in a first pass implementation, and deferred for later incremental improvements: ecash postage to pay for remailer resources fixed traffic between remailers payment for www sites (anonymous www proxy and eternity service) oblivious transfer to setup shares so that leaves the following to be done: blip in the line which routes http requests over mixmaster mixmaster reply chains for return http traffic secret sharing of data to send to eternity www servers periodic posting of mix reply blocks by eternity www servers public access www proxy, or www-cgi based gateway comments, volunteers? Adam -- exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

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Re: talker
by Wayne H. Allen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:03 AM 9/8/96 +0000, attila wrote: >=Dear Whoever, > > cypherpunks are *not* crackers; this is a crytographic > and political issues relating to cryptography mailing list. > > Well maybe, political issues galore certainly, but very very little to do with cryptography. I mean what does TWA 800 have to do with this list. I mean lets be completely honest here, whatever the original purpose of the list was for its been allowed to shift away from its intended purpose considerably. Wayne H.Allen whallen(a)capitalnet.com Pgp key at www.capitalnet.com/~whallen

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Re: take the pledge
by attila 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Alright! it's a genuine PerryGram! I'll take the pledge; I've never been able to answer Sternlight without being significantly more offensive than usual! attila -- one of the few things we all share: the utter, corrosive contempt for our elected officials. -------------------------------------------------------- In, on 07/19/96 at 12:06 PM, "Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)piermont.com> said: =Subject: take the pledge =Look, folks, we all know that 99% of what David Sternlight posts is =garbage. Why don't we all pledge not to answer any of his posts, and =then he'll go away. If necessary, someone can be appointed to post a =weekly "the views expressed by David are junk and we are deliberately =not replying to them directly" message. =David has plenty of places to argue with the wind. We don't need to =add this one. =I'd like to ask people to publically pledge that they will not reply =to David's messages. This is such a pledge. =Perry

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Re: TWA 800 - Friendly Fire?
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

<pstira(a)escape.com> wrote: > The one thing I have been thinking about, since the very beginning, is > am I the only person who feels this might have been somewhat less than > unintentional? It sure would be easy to take those rights away if > everyone is afraid for their "lives"... > Look at what has been happening in the news lately, and look at how > much is "unexplained" or flimsy evidencially speaking, in the very > least. > If, for instance, the government wanted to cut down on civil > liberties/civil rights, it would seem MIGHTY CONVENIENT that so much > is "accidentally" happening so close together. > Ditto with the Olympics thing. > I vote something is QUITE fishy, and I guess I hope I'm not the only > one paranoid enough to feel the same. Sure something's fishy. Look at the technological capabilities they have, and we're not keeping up with them. One example: L.A. riots, 1992. 6,500 or so fires, unknown arsonist(s). But very convenient for clearing certain properties if you're putting in a new freeway or subway tunnel, and you don't want to have to fight with all the riffraff who might be resistant to getting up and moving. So how do you light all those fires? Do it the hard way - plant the stuff (6,000-plus times!) and hope nobody catches your guys, or light 'em up from satellites, using "new experimental" focused energy. Gosh, Mr. Bill, would they do that? Guess it depends on what you're willing to believe. Remember what Tom Wolfe wrote about? "The reason the folks on the East Coast (circa 1700's) were such easy victims for the pirates was the fact that they couldn't comprehend just how vicious and ruthless the pirates really were." (quote approximate).

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Conjuring up the latest utopia for a minoritarian sect of illuminati
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:04 AM 9/9/96, Enzo Michelangeli wrote: >I and you may well choose to do so, but the vast majority of the human >beings believe just anything that is repeated loud and long enough. >Otherwise, nobody would hire PR and pay for advertisement, politicians >wouln't be fedwith taxpayer's money, Bosnians would trade goods instead >of gunshots, etc. I'm personally not interested in conjuring up the latest >utopia for a minoritarian sect of illuminati: I need to live in the real >world, and push for viable solutions that change it for better, now. Yes, Bosnians and Serbs would not be killing each other if only they could receive government-approved information! (Hint: This shows that neither governments nor churches nor the United Nations knows any better solutions to the "who do you trust" problem. And, I believe, mostly governments and other such entities exist to serve their own interests.) As to what I presume is an insult to the folks on this list ("I'm personally not interested in conjuring up the latest utopia for a minoritarian sect of illuminati"), you know where the exit is. --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, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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