December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Can somebody unsubscribe cyberpromo from CP?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:43 PM 10/7/96 -0400, Simon Spero wrote: >On Mon, 7 Oct 1996, Timothy C. May wrote: > >> At 10:23 AM -0800 10/7/96, jim bell wrote: >> >I think somebody subscribed that Cyberpromo organization to the Cypherpunks >> >list. It needs to be unsubscribed... >> >> "I have a solution." >> > >[Looks through pockets] - 7 Zlotys, 1.5 DM, and 1.20 GBP says October >21st, in the library, bludgeoning to death with 20lbs of junk mail Your code name is "Col. Mustard." Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Put up or shut up! was Re: legality of wiretapping: a "key" distinction
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I think those of you who continue to answer the unresearched rants of amateur lawyers waste your efforts on trying to change the learning habits of other, hopefully, mature adults. If it ain't good by now, forget it. Using, as you say, out-of-the-shower ideas to re-argue settled caselaw are almost always fruitless. Since the intents of the ranters are generally anarchistic, why even involve the law and justice. Even if their ideas have good philosophical basis there is little hope for the broad changes they seek in the political or legal landscape (given the powerful and selfish interests of those inside and outside the beltway) without a great trauma to the system. Look at the relatively pitifully accomplishments Jefferson was able to show for his many years of Republican efforts, and that after serving two terms as president. I believe that this is also the case for individuals. Almost all of us have great difficulty adopting new behaviors (e.g., dietary, excercise, change in unhealthy/illegal sexual behavior), even ones thought beneficial, unless there is great incentive or an experience which is so fundemental (e.g., near death) that we are forced confront it head on. My advice to these amateur anarchists is, if they really believe in their quest, become professionals and develop and use whatever means (civial disobedience, crypto, CBW, AP, etc.) they think they require to shock the system into confronting your demands and see how it plays out. Otherwise shut up! PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Snoop Daty Data | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com Grinder | Sacred Cow Meat Co. | --------------------------------------------------------------------- Just say NO to prescription DRUGS. "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis "Surveillence is ultimately just another form of media, and thus, potential entertainment." -- G. Beato

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Re: Voice Stress Analysis of Debates?
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 06 Oct 1996 15:28:40 -0800, jim bell wrote: >>BTW, did anyone notice that some of the evening news anchors are imaged via >>a camera/DSP to render as more youthful (e.g., removing facial wrinkles)? >Really? Where'd you hear this? I suppose it's not beyond the realm of >possibility, but that would be rather sophisticated programming, >particularly in real-time. One of the big anchors admitted it. However it was only possible in the studio. Might have even been a contrast-lowering gadget. # Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # <cadams(a)acucobol.com> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY" "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." --- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)

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Re: encrypting pppd?
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 06 Oct 1996 04:18:04 -0500, VaX#n8 wrote: >Thinking about it a bit more, if you only encrypt, say, telnet >then you've got a pretty predictable plaintext stream. If you >encrypt the entire link level properly then it might be much harder >to isolate the nonvariant bits of the protocols since the port and >that kind of header info is not available to the attacker at that >level. What about predictabilities in the PPP datastream? # Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # <cadams(a)acucobol.com> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY" "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." --- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)

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Re: Clipper spin [was Re:Flood Warning]
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> [...] > > > > High-Tech Leaders Join Forces to Enable International > > Strong Encryption > > > > See: http://www.ibm.com/news/alliance2.htm > > The "International Strong Encryption" phrase is something that we > need to become active in stopping. Anything which responds to such > announcements should put a different spin on this phrase. If the > Clipper farce is accepted as "strong" encryption then the battle is > lost; maybe something like "it is _international_ strong encryption > because it is the strongest encryption people like Saddam Hussein [insert > bogeyman du jour] want Americans to have access to" > > jim Back when IBM/Lotus came out with it's "International" version, I proposed the term 'espionage-enabled software'. I still like it. Peter Trei trei(a)process.com

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Big Brother vs. Cypherpunks
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Time, October 14, 1996, p. 78. The Netly News Joshua Quittner Big Brother vs. Cypherpunks For more than three years, the White House and the U.S. computer industry have sat locked, eyeball to eyeball, in a seemingly intractable face-off over who will control the secret codes that protect our most sensitive communications. The government claimed to be working to protect us from nuke-carrying terrorists; the computer industry said it was championing the individual's right to privacy. Neither was telling the whole truth. Last week, in a concession to Silicon Valley, the Administration blinked -- or perhaps it merely winked. Fittingly, in the arcane world of code making and breaking, it's difficult to ferret out who's doing what to whom. And why. A few things are incontrovertible. Vice President Al Gore announced the new encryption initiative at midweek, timed to coincide with support from an alliance of high-tech businesses that included such hardware heavyweights as IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. However, most of the big software makers -- and every civil liberties group -- still opposed it. At the core of the initiative is a new code-making scheme known as "key recovery." Here at last, the government and its supporters claimed, was a way to get around the more noxious aspects of the reviled Clipper chip, the Administration's first doomed attempt to balance the industry's call for stronger encryption with law enforcement's need to surveil our shadier citizens. Clipper, as proposed, would use a powerful encryption formula to encode communications sent over telephones and computer networks but would require that a "back door" key be built into each chip that would give police -- where warranted, of course -- a means to eavesdrop. Nobody -- especially foreign companies -- liked the idea of the U.S. and its agents holding those keys. The new key-recovery proposal tries to get around that objection by chopping the keys into several pieces and storing them with "trusted agents" of the user's choosing. Some nice Swiss banks, perhaps. But the Administration's plan still falls short of what civil libertarians, and especially a vocal group of cryptoextremists who call themselves cypherpunks, say they need: encryption powerful enough to give back to the citizenry the right to absolute privacy, which we have lost in the information age. According to the cypherpunks, the so-called 56-bit code the Administration has okayed for export can be cracked by the National Security Agency's supercomputers in a matter of hours. Are they right? It's hard to know whom to believe in this cloak-and-dagger debate. Civil libertarians tend to gloss over the fact that the world is full of bad people with crimes to hide. The software industry -- which makes 48% of its profit overseas -- is clearly less concerned with privacy than with losing foreign sales. And it may be no accident that the Administration chose to start making concessions the same week an influential software CEO -- Netscape's Jim Barksdale -- excoriated Clinton's cryptopolicy and endorsed Bob Dole. The issue is too complex -- and too important -- for political gamesmanship. It will never get sorted out until somebody starts playing it straight. ----- Read the Netly News daily at netlynews.com on the World Wide Web [End] Thanks to JQ.

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Seeking help on WordPerfect 6.1 cracks
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Among the possessions of a murder victim (not suspect), the local police have found a floppy disk with some provocative-sounding files on it. Rather than getting them into the habit of cracking other people's personal files, I'd prefer to give them the password myself, but there seems to be no freely available cracker for WordPerfect 6.x, and I'm not sure this one-time use is worth $100 to me. Can anyone lend a hand? Just four small files. I can give you more than enough details off the list to assure you that this is totally on the level. Feel free to discuss the implications of providing such help. Failing that, does anyone have a technical, political, or personal preference for or against AccessData or CRAK, who sell the two commercial crackers I've found? - -rich [not on cypherpunks at the moment] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBVAwUBMllpfZNcNyVVy0jxAQHtcgH8D3oW21nsaNrIHxHMqhxE/Ho9/78L1elF DYHV3jeM4VSqTP6cKhMn5ZahB4b8KP9t7EG70NAtwn/usaKiWpw92Q== =uq4u -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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challenging wiretap law
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

alright, let me try to rephrase this. if you feel the urge to flame me over a simple post, without actually posting anything substantial, please avoid it. I was trying to get at something in a previous post. I regularly see cpunks here scheming about how to attack things they don't like using court decisions. I think it's a great way to try to move the law in a favorable direction I see Bernstein/Junger as really embodying cpunk guerilla-like tactics in trying to take on the status quo govt using the legal system. of course this is not cheap, but EFF is helping out at least, and PRZ proves the public is generally willing to put its money where its mouth is on these issues. there's also a lot of scheming over patent laws going on among cylink, RSA data securities, etc. the point is that I don't recall seeing this same kind of scheming against wiretap rules here; if it was here then forgive me, I missed it. for anyone who would like to, I'd be very interested in a brief discussion over wiretap laws and which ones have gone to the supreme court in court challenges. here's my curiosity: if you were a lawyer, or actually are one, how would you go about challenging the legitimacy of wiretaps, in the same spirit in which ITAR is being challenged? note that even if there are court precedents at "lower" courts, this does not preclude strategizing to try to take the cases to the supreme court. I am not asking anyone to do my "homework" for me. I'm merely proposing that this might be a neat exercise for the collective cypherpunk brain. of course it won't get far if people rant about it, but merely discussing existing case law would make a good and interesting topic imho. if there are people out there who are familiar with it and would like to discuss it, and can stand Unicorn ranting at you no matter what you say, please do-- it would be signal in the noise around here. challenging these laws in the weak spots could be a very devastating means of defying law enforcement claims that they only want to "preserve the status quo" and want "no new authorities to wiretap". could wiretapping be "nipped in the bud" somehow? there is tremendous economic incentive for laywers to challenge things like patents etc, but this same incentive doesn't seem to exist in challenging wiretap rules. hence I wonder if they have been challenged to the same extent that other court decisions have been. of course, there are areas where wiretaps have been challenged and the challenges failed. but that doesn't mean there aren't weak spots that might exist somewhere that could "crack" it. it's like hacking, a bit, in this way, hence why I think it would make a good topic for discussion. or would the lawyers assert there are no weak spots in the wiretap laws? that the issue has been fleshed out as far as it will ever be in courts? again, what I am trying to suggest is that if there was a "new angle of attack" not used in any previous wiretap cases, it's highly relevant. again, merely because certain cases approved wiretapping does not necessarily mean all future decisions will support it.

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Did Jesus masturbate ?
by I~nigo Gonzalez 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Yes, you guessed right: the Subject came from alt.2600 famous line noise thread.... About Utah, Mormons, Religion /etc... Is someone mailing ciphertext to the list in the form of Noise ???? Please use _plaintext_ or just learn Crypto.

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A daily warning regarding Dmitri Vulis
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dmitri vulis is a liar and fills this list with lies, personal attacks and material having nothing to do with cryptography. He also has unnatural sexual urges towards children, animals and other such items.

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