December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

ISP Legal Fund
by William H. Geiger III 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, As it seems to be an almost daily event of hearing of a government authortity infringing on the liberty of Internet Users throughout the world I would like to present the following proposal: The establishment of an Internet Service Provider Legal Fund. All ISP world-wide would contribute to this fund. The resources of this fund would be used for the legal fees of ISP who whish to challenge government infringements of their users freedoms & liberties. Something like an ACLU for the Internet but on a Global scale. Any thoughts? -- ----------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting WebExplorer & Java Enhanced!!! Merlin Beta Test Site - WarpServer SMP Test Site Author of PGPMR2 - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice Look for MR/2 Tips & Rexx Scripts Get Work Place Shell for Windows!! PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. Finger whgiii(a)amaranth.com for PGP Key and other info -----------------------------------------------------------

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WARNING: This Message Actually Contains a Question Reguarding Crypto!
by William H. Geiger III 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, I just recently downloaded copies of Blowfish & Ghost. Does anyone have any experiance with these two algorithims? How do they comare to RSA, DES, 3DES, IDEA ? I can across a post awhile back that mentioned that they were using Blowfish in PGPPhone. Can anyone confirm this? Does anyone know how they are using Blowfish and why? Thanks, -- ----------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting WebExplorer & Java Enhanced!!! Merlin Beta Test Site - WarpServer SMP Test Site Author of PGPMR2 - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice Look for MR/2 Tips & Rexx Scripts Get Work Place Shell for Windows!! PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. Finger whgiii(a)amaranth.com for PGP Key and other info -----------------------------------------------------------

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Namibia, Marxists, and Peaceful Transitions
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:02 PM 9/24/96, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com wrote: >People have been imposing their will on others in Ireland for 800 years, >and killing off the more prominent members of the opposition has been >a long-term policy of the thugs who've been doing it. Today there are >at least three competing gangs of thugs trying to impose their will on >others by force. The Protestants are afraid that the Catholic majority >on the island will enforce their rule on them, and the Catholics in the north >are afraid that the Protestants will enforce their rule on them, >both with good reason as near as I can tell. At least a few years ago, >the IRA were spouting Marxist rhetoric and wanted to impose their >Marxist thuggery on the whole island. The Queen's Empire's army ... Apropos of this (but not apropos of mathematical cryptography :-}), I read an amazing article, an uplifting article, a few years ago in the WSJ. The article was about Namibia, the country to the northwest of South Africa. Also known at times as "South-West Africa." (Being a Pynchon fan, Namibia and its Hereros had always had some interest to me.) South Africa was involved in a war/occupation situation with Namibia for many decades, with hit teams deployed to Windhoek to kill off opponents, etc. A bad situation all around. Some similarities with the situation in Northern Ireland. The leader of the opposition--which I think was called SWAPO, though that might have been Angola...anyway, some alphabet soup name like SWAPO--was a U.S.-trained college professor-type dyed-in-the-wool Marxist theoretician. He lived for years in Harlem and wrote articles about the coming Marxist paradise in Namibia. Rhetoric about driving out the parasites that prey upon the body of the people, seizing the means of production, yadda yadda yadda. All the usual Marxist stuff. Well, South Africa pulled out. Some sort of "peaceful transition" was arrived at, and the Marxists moved in. Except they almost immediately abandoned their Marxist rhetoric (which was approximately coincident with the collapse of Communism and the Berlin Wall, U.S.S.R., etc., so this may have had something to do with their loss of Marxist faith). The long and short of it is that the Namibian economy is doing well, relations with South Africa are good (also helped by changes in RSA's government one has to assume), the citizens are happy, AP-type killings have stopped, and both blacks and whites appear to be getting along fine. After reading the article, and seeing an interesting Namibian-made movie called "Dust Devil," I decided I would one day visit Namibidia as a tourist. (The article was a stunning one, the kind that the WSJ is able to sometimes do so well. I clipped it out, but have long since lost track of it. If anybody finds it in any online archives, I would appreciate getting a copy.) Whether Northern Ireland could be handled so felicitously is not clear, though I suspect the North could be absorbed into the Republic of Ireland easily and without "summary executions" of Protestants. Ireland--the Republic--is doing pretty well, has lots of high-tech plants (including a massive Intel chip factory near Limerick) and I think even the Northern Ireland Protestants would end up better off under Irish rule. (While many of us dislike the basic notion of "Irish rule," surely the nonlocal rule by a country across the Irish Sea is less appropriate than by the historical and geographic "landmass" of Ireland per se?) --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: Private Information Retrieval
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:54 PM 9/24/96 -0700, Lucky Green wrote: >On Tue, 24 Sep 1996, Ravi Pandya wrote: > >> ABSTRACT: >> >> Publicly accessible databases are an indispensable resource for retrieving >> up to date information. But they also pose a significant risk to the >> privacy of the user, since a curious database operator can follow the user's >> queries and infer what the user is after. > >Hmm. Sounds like job for KeyKOS :-) Yup. That was the original problem KeyKOS nee Gnosis was designed to solve. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | "Cave softly, cave safely, | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | and cave with duct tape." | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | - Marianne Russo | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Re: A daily word of caution in reference Tim C[unt] May
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Mon, 23 Sep 1996 01:50:01 -0400, Dustbin Freedom Remailer wrote: >Tim C[unt] May is not only as queer as a three dollar bill, but he is also into >having sex with children. Hi Dmitri!

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Bork book
by Mike McNally 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Robert Bork was on NBC (I think) being interviewed to plug his hot new book "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" (or something like that). The snippet of interview I caught was the last part, with the interviewer asking how Bork could reconcile his desire that we all be more free with his notion that we let the Constitution "control" us, and that legislatures should be able to outlaw all the profanity and indecency that they want. Any of the cypherpunk.lawyers seen this? Bork came across as kind-of a jerk, personality-wise. -- ______c_________________________________________________________________ Mike M Nally * IBM % Tivoli * Austin TX * How quickly we forget that mailto:m5@tivoli.com mailto:m101@io.com * "deer processing" and "data http://www.io.com/~m101/ * processing" are different!

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LACC: Encryption and Japan
by T Bruce Tober 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A few months ago I read an article concerning one of the encryption gurus (other than PZ) setting up a company in Japan to create a new encryption program as good as or better than PGP which since it was developed in Japan, wouldn't be subject to ITAR. Actually I think the article indicated he'd already set up the company and developed the software and was getting ready to market it. I think it was Diffie, but can't remember and can't find any info on it. Does anyone here have any info, leads or contact details they can provide me? tbt -- | Bruce Tober - octobersdad(a)reporters.net - Birmingham, England | | pgp key ID 0x9E014CE9. For CV/Resume:http://pollux.com/authors/tober.htm | | For CV/Resume and Clips: http://nwsmait.intermarket.com/nmfwc/tbt.htm | | | | "Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our | | liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the| | First Amendment protects." -- three wise federal judges |

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Re: provably hard PK cryptosystems
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:26 PM 9/24/96 +0200, Gary Howland <gary(a)systemics.com> wrote: >I fail to see *any* (non educational) use for these DNA "computers", let >alone a cryptographic use - sure, they may be massively parallel, but >what's the big deal? I can now perform a calculation a million times >faster than I could yesterday? (something I personally doubt, but will >agree to for sake of the argument). One mole of a substance contains ~6x10**23 molecules, and weighs one gram per atomic-weight of the molecule. A DNA "computer" might weigh a kilo or two for one mole of computer virus. It may not be blazingly fast, especially if you've got to synthesize lots of different molecules to make it up, plus extract the result from the data soup, but 10**23 is a _big_ number. It's probably not very useful for cryptographic applications, but Adleman was using it to solve Travelling Salesman problems, which are NP-hard, and if you do have a crypto problem that maps well into TSP, a hot-tub full of interesting solutions might be an interesting solution, especially if you've got a huge underground lab and a National Institutes of Health nearby in case you have any bugs or memory leaks in your program..... Unlike quantum computing, it doesn't change the exponentiality of the problems it's solving, it just multiplies the computing capability by a very big constant, and it does parallelize cleanly. The engineering is tricky, but I find it more believable than practical high-precision quantum computers. And if the DNA computer doesn't work, you can always recycle your lab to synthesize large quantities of recreational pharamceuticals and use the money from them to bribe the person who knows the key. Avogadro # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Re: List participation
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Mon, 23 Sep 1996 10:25:09 -0700, Eric Hughes wrote: >I have been informed that Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM <dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com> wrote: >> [...] Tim's off-topic spews have driven Eric Hughes, John Gilmore, >> Rich Salz, and many other former valuable contributors off the >> mailing list [...] > >As for me, I stopped having time to read cypherpunks a year and a half ago. >Tim had nothing to do with it. The cypherpunks list has changed and I have >changed; so be it. What do you think the odds are the good Dr. is going to say this is a forgery by tcmay?

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Re: Bork book
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:28 AM 9/24/96 -0400, "Marc J. Wohler" <mwohler(a)ix.netcom.com> wrote: >Heard him on Limbaugh pushing hard for censorship as a cure for society's >problems. Looks like Ted Kennedy & Co. were right to keep him off the court. Bork's comment a few years ago about the Ninth Amendment being an ink-blot on the Constitution was one of those Rorschach things you can interpret either way, but given that he clearly doesn't believe in the First Amendment, I'd guess he wouldn't have helped the 9th or the other rights-protecting amendments either. I didn't catch Bork directly, but I heard Limbaugh talking about it the day before and about half an hour after, so I caught some flavor of it. It was interesting hearing Limbaugh's mixed feelings about it; he seems to clearly _approve_ of censoring people that offend him, like 2 Live Crew, but also realizes that people would want to censor _him_. I'm guessing that the schtick he did on Pee-Wee Herman (with background music by Michael Jackson) a few minutes before saying he'd be interviewing Bork on Friday was coincidence, rather than something he'd done to set the tone of a discussion of censorship, but maybe not. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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