December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here. Tim May said: > I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my > posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's > sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not. Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold. If I was a social scientist I might want to run the experiment both ways, or six different ways. Name it this, or name it that. I'm not; all I want is something that works. The cypherpunks list was unusable for this kind of discussion, only a month ago. It's usable now. I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did. Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is now suggesting. "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful option. Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track. They involved a lot more work than the previous setup. I told him if he was willing to do the work, we could try it. As Dale suggests, I wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and passing judgement on the postings. Sandy was, for a month. The element I find most lacking from the whole discussion, until recently, has been responsibility. In an anarchy, *everyone* is responsible; nothing is "somebody else's job". Sandy felt responsible, so he proposed something. I felt responsible, so I helped. But a large part of the community sat on the sidelines and criticized, without making attempts to make things better; indeed the volume and tone of the criticisms themselves made things worse. Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very gratifying. You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T. Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South: The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possesion of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it. Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom. Your de-facto "leaders" have faced it for you. It is a more serious thing than than you expect. All it takes it hard work and judgement. Be responsible for setting your society's privacy policy -- without knowing whether you are right. Face the uncertainty and build anyway. Shall I post you an Emancipation Proclamation -- as if you needed one? Start a mailing list on another site! Move this list to somewhere! Create and nurture an alt group! Make an independent moderated list drawn from the unedited list! Hold meetings! Establish for it a home, a funding, the rearing of newbies, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of philosophies. Dead simple for people as capable as us. Just takes work. Who's volunteering? Just do it! The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over deciding how to run the list, and running it? If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!". John PS: Can we talk about crypto too? It's clear from the last few days of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse novices into thinking that two very different things are the same thing. Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key recovery". This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES". What should we do about this? Educate the public?

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Re: Dissolving Choke Points
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 10:58 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: >An advantage of Usenet is the ability to deploy whatever NoCeM is >called these days as a way to let people avoid spammers. My mention of Usenet was somewhat tongue-in-cheek; I don't know if I'd bother with the list if it were moved to (or gated with) Usenet, as Usenet has become for the most part 100+ Mb/day of uselessness. But my impression is that many moderation opponents would also be opponents of a move to Usenet. Perhaps I'm wrong. But Usenet offers precisely what many people claim we must have for the list to be viable, e.g., uncontrolled/uncontrollable distribution and messaging. So I'm curious about whether or not the proponents of an open, uncontrolled list really want it to be *that* open and uncontrolled. In the past, there's been strong opposition to that. But it's possible that most of the people who had strong feelings about not wanting to be subjected to the downside of Usenet have already left the list. (And if the current opponents of moderation don't want to see the list be quite that open, I think what we're arguing about here is not "censorship v. no censorship" but "what degree of censorship do we want? one lump, or two?", which pretty much eliminates anyone's claim to have a moral high ground from which to argue.) There's really nothing stopping anyone from just setting up a gateway. The list is already gated one-way to Usenet; it shows up many places as mail.cypherpunks. What's missing is a gateway running the other direction; from looking at the headers as messages are received at my ISP (io.com) toad.com is already in the Path: line, so preventing backfeeding shouldn't be a problem. (Doh, it's been a few years since I fussed with mail-to-news and back again, but this isn't rocket science.) The good side I see to a move to Usenet is that it lets people use the comparatively better tools for managing messages - e.g., NoCeM, threading, nn (whose killfiles will kill by thread, author, regexp, and can be time limited so you can easily give annoying people a 30-day 'timeout' and see if they're still a kook later on), AltaVista and DejaNews archiving/searching, and server architecture that's designed to cope with storing/indexing many messages. The down side is that Usenet is more or less a sewer these days, and some of it's bound to spill over. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 4.5 iQEVAgUBMvcLpv37pMWUJFlhAQFTJgf/UAFESNbjEK2NRabq56We3PkF+sM7pwHU b7Gy/h6a+KusZECe3epIm9/ubvGiZJtVpkp1zTG/AqBJVkdRb9xyIwWpOXU9HUz+ gjzASY/x0Zwsy9AlCgAk0HSEL1bggFTgAjDPB8SSOaYuxP1czpmAAVHTZiNXioV5 AAsnCXLc0qLgXYZ6/3dQhtIznH41ciNhVgI4RhV9lfheCpIhxJJC0zlh7wX2QzMv VhPidpcCmKiCriULwvOJuIkt0SFLvIjxm18zBh6UIe/APgL6TDsr022DTB+S6G/b qgH1aO9xhZtu84I/+V/pOCyKGk+9qij94CwNumN+Hs/cZMybiaO4bQ== =YwhW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles(a)netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |

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Re: If guilty of a lesser crime, you can be sentenced for a greater
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Igor Chudov @ home wrote: > Dale Thorn wrote: > > Igor Chudov @ home wrote: [some arguments deleted for lack of time to reply] > > > Another story: suppose that OKSAS hired me to work for her, but then > > > our relationships go south and she fires me. Again, her fate is very > > > unclear, although I would probably spare her life if it were she. > > If she does it right, with empathy, there is not likely to be a > > problem. On the other hand, if she bad-mouths you to prospective > > employers or customers you want to do business with, you might be > > inclined to hit her. This happens a lot when AP is not available. > ... But would happen more often if it was. Why, if AP was readily available, would she want to risk being hit by bad-mouthing you unnecessarily? > > people who have such money are not going to bump off very many more > > people than they already do, because: > > 1. They need the people to make money off of (Mafia rule #4, never > > kill someone who owes you money [or is a money source]). > This is a wrong Mafia rule, they do kill debtors who are in default. Really? Then how do they collect their money? BTW, I heard the rule from the mouth of a real mob hitman. > > 2. Rich people have a lot of eyes on them, and it would be easy to > > triangulate a series of murders to them, even without hard evidence. > > In an AP world, this triangulation/correlation would be enough to > > convince people to either shun this killer, or kill him outright. > When ten people make deals with each other, it becomes hard to > triangulate. And it is easy, if you know what deals are done, to change > the result of triangulation: suppose that I know that you borrowed 1 > million from Toto, that my _and_ yours business partner had been > murdered (by me, but no one knows), and I am afraid that someone will > triangulate me and implicate me in that murder. I secretly order > the AP bot to kill Toto, and you get implicated. Not good. We all know how people are framed, and we've seen the Hitchcockian murder scenarios on TV, in movies, etc. Certainly the CIA et al can create these scenarios, but what does that have to do with AP as used by ordinary persons?

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Re: Information Warfare
by tmcghan＠mail.bcpl.lib.md.us 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

in a message allegedly from: Peter Hendrickson <pdh(a)best.com> > The cypherpunks list has been under "attack" for some time. {snip} > Some people have dismissed the idea that rogue governmental elements > are behind some of our problems. {snip} > We know that "Information Warfare" is the big thing in the defense > establishment right now. Information Warfare Conference sponsored by DPMA/AITP Washington, DC, March 13-14, 1997 Crystal City Marriott 1999 Jefferson Davis Highway Arlington, VA 22202 Presentations by: Major General Michael V. Hayden, Commander, Air Intelligence Agency Dr. C. Kenneth Allard, Competitive Strategies Col. H. Stevens, Land Information Warfare Activity - current service visions and planned program initiatives - operational concepts for 'third-wave' warfare - information warfare drivers for 21st century C4I architectures - emerging technologies and systems for information warfare superiority: opportunities on the horizon 'information warfare targets and vulnerabilities', Maxim I. Kovel, TASC systems management group 'information warfare for deterrence', William H.J. Manthorpe, Jr. Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins 'adaptive techniques for counter-deception', James Llinas, technical advisor, DOD JDL, Data Fusion group 'emerging threats come in all sizes and flavors', Eugene Schultz, SRI consulting "Information has been termed the 'fifth dimension' in the conduct of 'third-wave' warfare, and promises to dramatically enhance the role of C4I as a force multiplier. Joint and individual service doctrine is emerging for IW, ans is affecting the needs and requirements for diverse systems: from space-based surveillance and communications systems to terrestrial image processing, visualization, and information fusion systems." "This conference will provide a valuable forum where military and industry staff can interact with key decision-makers to achieve the most current possible understanding of Information Warfare concepts, initiatives, technologies and potential opportunities. The Critical Questions to be addressed include: - how is IW changing operational concepts? - how can we defend the weak links in the planned information-intensive reconnaissance, strike, targeting architecture? - what developments in enabling technologies are needed to support current Information Operations, Battlefield Visualization, and Information Exploitation initiatives? -what can be done to develop defensive information technology capabilities? and last, but _c_e_r_t_a_i_n_l_y_ not least: - how will we move forward to develop a true offensive IW capability ==============================================

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Hash functions
by mixmaster＠remail.obscura.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C[reep] Maya is the living proof that anal sex causes pregnancy. () \--o .-\__. ( \_ '-.-'

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Mondex
by mixmaster＠remail.obscura.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timmy C. Maypole's aberrant sexual life has negatively impacted his mental integrity. \|/ @ @ -oOO-(_)-OOo- Timmy C. Maypole

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British export restrictions?
by John Lehmann 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone know how the British govt. falls on crypto export legislation? -- John Lehmann

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Hash functions
by Mixmaster 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C[reep] Maya is the living proof that anal sex causes pregnancy. () \--o .-\__. ( \_ '-.-'

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Mondex
by Mixmaster 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timmy C. Maypole's aberrant sexual life has negatively impacted his mental integrity. \|/ @ @ -oOO-(_)-OOo- Timmy C. Maypole

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Re: "alt.cypherpunks" people?
by Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rabid Wombat <wombat(a)mcfeely.bsfs.org> writes: > > > On Wed, 5 Feb 1997, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: > > > Anil Das <das(a)sgi.com> writes: > > > > > Adam Back wrote: > > > > > > > > What do people think of starting an alt.cypherpunks USENET newsgroup? > > > > > > > > > > I have only one objection. I will never post to an Usenet group > > > under my real email address for fear of ending up in spammer > > > databases. > > > > > > -- > > > Anil Das > > > > > > > Learn to use an anonymous remailer. > > > > Unfortunately, if everyone is posting from "nobody@thevoid" or such, we'd > lose the "personalities" that make up the community. Why not use a "nym" > account to post - one that is configured to discard all incoming email? > > -r.w. Post as "nobody(a)nowhere.net", but mention e-mail address for replies in the body of the article (or the signature). --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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