December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

N.Y. judge rules for Planned Parenthood in web site case
by Vipul Ved Prakash 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

*** N.Y. judge rules for Planned Parenthood in web site case A federal judge has temporarily stopped an abortion foe from identifying his web site as belonging to Planned Parenthood and selling an anti-abortion book from that home page. The temporary restraining order, issued Wednesday, stops Richard Bucci from identifying his home page as "Planned Parenthood's Home Page" and using "plannedparenthood.com" as a domain name. Planned Parenthood, which has its own web site, sued Bucci for trademark infringement. The next hearing is slated for Feb. 20. For the full text story, see http://www.merc.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=1426121-b7e -- Vipul Ved Prakash | - Electronic Security & Crypto vipul(a)pobox.com | - Web Objects 91 11 2233328 | - PERL Development 198 Madhuban IP Extension | - Linux & Open Systems Delhi, INDIA 110 092 | - Networked Multimedia

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Re: alt.cypherpunks
by John Pearson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Hey, folks, > > I thought all you had to do to create an alt.group was to have a news admin > somewhere just make a group; send out a control message of somekind. I > thought that alt groups didn't have to go through a charter, or voting > process, or anything else. They just happened. > > Then, everyone just has to tell their local news admin that they went to > see it, or they can wait until their news admin sees it flying by, and adds > it to the available groups list at his own discretion. > > It's not like we want comp.cypherpunks or something, with a voting process, > right? > It's not quite that simple. While a "Big 7" group requires CFD, charter and voting, once you pass tthose hurdles you're virtually guaranteed good propagation. alt has no "set" creartion procedure, but your group will not receive good propagation unless the powers that be "approve" of the idea. In this case, the people you have to convince are the news admins who must permit your control message to be honoured; time was most sites ran on autopilot, but joke and badly-named groups mean that most news admins now drop most newgroup messages on the floor. These people hang out in alt.config, and you should propose the group's creation there, followed by a couple of weeks of discussion, hopefully featuring many more supportive messages than non-supportive ones. After that, a newgroup message stands a much better chance. > Cheers, > Bob Hettinga > > > Hip hip, John P. john(a)huiac.apana.org.au

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Re: Excerpt on SPAM from Edupage, 11 February 1997
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:23 PM 2/12/97 -0800, jim bell wrote: ... >I decided long ago (okay, well, many months ago) that the "solution" is to >invent a mechanism to allow spammers/advertisers to include a small amount >of ecash as a gift with every spam. I figure that if USnail junk-mailers >are willing to pay $0.32 for postage and probably $0.50 for production, >printing, and labelling costs, all for no guarantees of results, they should >even more happy to pay, say, 10 cents to each recipient. At that rate, an average >person would probably receive enough "spam" to pay for his Internet >account, quite analogous to the way advertiser-supported TV is presented to >the public for no explicit charge. First of all, they don't spend 32 cents per post. They get one of those bulk-mail permits which allows them to send those at a significant savings. The whole package complete with the cheap "Yes, I'll try your service, and send me the free gizmo"/"No, I don't need any more services, but I could use the free gizmo" stickers probably costs well within 50 cents. TV is not a gift per say, though your origional posts, involving a cookie, suggested something closer to TV. Currently, advertiser subsidized services, like hotmail, Yahoo, and similair, are closer in that you get the gift with only the minor distraction of the advertisement. A more functional system might be to include a cryptographic "key" of only a few bytes in the e-mail post that opens some online service of relative value. Along the lines of a hidden, no URL FTP site with all the best downloads. This would not be dependant upon e-cash being in place. Would require that the customer read at least part of the message in order to get the instructions on how to use the key. Prevent the user from just handing out the key to whoever asked as it would probably have a limited lifespan. And give the sender some location from which to conduct polling, headcounts, etc.

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Re: Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer (fwd)
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"ravage(a)EINSTEIN.ssz.com" "Jim Choate" 12-FEB-1997 23:19:40.35 To: IN%"cypherpunks(a)toad.com" CC: Subj: RE: Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer (fwd) Received: from toad.com by mbcl.rutgers.edu (PMDF #12194) id <01IFCGV6E7PC94GG0G(a)mbcl.rutgers.edu>; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 23:18 EDT Received: (from majordom@localhost) by toad.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id RAA13474; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 17:59:02 -0800 (PST) Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 18:59:05 -0600 (CST) From: Jim Choate <ravage(a)EINSTEIN.ssz.com> Subject: RE: Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer (fwd) Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Message-id: <199702130159.RAA13474(a)toad.com> X-Envelope-to: EALLENSMITH Precedence: bulk Forwarded message: > Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 18:47 EDT > From: "E. Allen Smith" <EALLENSMITH(a)ocelot.rutgers.edu> > Subject: Re: Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer (fwd) > > Someone with more experience correct me if I'm wrong (I'm just > starting to learn about mailing list management), but isn't saving > at least the first bounce from a given address good in order to check > what address is the one that's actually bouncing? Admittedly, this only > applies to badly-formed bounces. The rest can just have the address > noted. Hmmm, I can see saving the address causing the bounce in some sort of array that is indexed to the majordomo subscription list for a given remailer. It would not cost anything but overhead to save the entire message. I guess my motivation was not that I cared their mailbox was full or it was a invalid address but that I wouldn't be able to deliver at this time. I just don't see any reason that it helps me to know why they can't receive mail only that they can't. [re: bi-directional news-mail gateways] >> >Want to volunteer? >> >> Give me some idea of how much programming knowledge, time, etcetera >> is required, please, before I can answer. I'd be renting space on some other >> computer (e.g., an account on cyberpass.net) to do it in; the only higher-level >> programming language (i.e., beyond Applesoft Basic) that I know anything of >> is Perl (and I don't know that all that well); and I am somewhat busy with >> other stuff. In other words, it depends. >Hmmm, not shure how much programming it would take - never done it myself. >I think Perl would be an acceptable language. I certainly hope to do the >majority of the scripts on the CDR in Perl myself. Perhaps there is somebody >who knows the fine points of how INN cache's messages. Redbeard and I had a >short discussion about this issue today relating to tracking messages to >reduce mail-loops. I will discuss it with him and see what happens. So far as I can tell, there are two types of news2mail gateways in common usage: newsgate, which is in C, and the standard LISTSERV bit.listserv.* gatewaying. I don't know C and don't have that much reason to learn it (perl makes a lot more sense to me); therefore, I'd need to locate a perl version or let someone else take care of the actual programming end of it, with me just handling what the programming person didn't. Hmm... I wonder if Lance would be available for the programming? I'd probably be using an account on cyberpass.net for the gateway in any event. -Allen

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distributed mailing list architecture (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 20:11:15 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > Subject: distributed mailing list architecture > Igor Chudov <ichudov(a)algebra.com> writes: > > I'd suggest a simplier solution: to connect each server with a couple, > > or maybe three, other servers. This scheme is rather robust, does not > > consume too much CPU time and bandwidth, and is easy to implement. > > I'm not sure what the architecture you are suggesting is, but this is > what I suggest as the simplest to set up. I envision it to look like a fishnet. > Have one main majordomo. There should be no "one main" anything on this project. > You subscribe to the main majordomo request address, and it forwards > your subscription request to a random mail-exploder. > > You unsubscribe to the main majordomo request address, and it forwards > your subscription to all the mail-exploders request addresses > (unsubscribe traffic is low anyway, keeping track of who is subscribed > where at the main major domo doesn't seem worth it). > > Each person who wishes to run an exploder is subscribed (manually) to > the main majordomo. > > You submit articles to the main majordomo, and it sends copies of the > articles to it's subscribers (the mail-exploders). > > The mail-exploders send mail to the address on their subscriber lists. > > (John Gilmore suggested this architecture, as a simpler alternative). Simpler? Hardly. With the remailer chain proposal we could have a working remailer network up in a couple of more days. What you propose will take weeks to write and debug code and then follow it through. No, this approach is neither simple or efficient. What I call a fishnet toplogy is much cleaner. Each node only has to filter messages where it was in the source chain. Easy to do with procmail, if you look at the first example on the man page, eg how to dump to dev/null, you find a perfect example of what procmail needs to do. It does not need to know who else is on the network (as in a star) and its traffic consists of one copy of each incoming instead of n copies from each of the 'star' remailers plus the outgoing from the local subscribers. A easy protocol can be arranged so that if the downstream remailer breaks it subscribes to the next one in the chain, again easy to do with just a few lines of code... If (bounce count of next site expires) { subscribe backup feed } If (next site returns) { unsubscribe backup feed } As to the actual architecture: A --> D ^ \ ^ \ / v / v C <-- B <-- E ^ | v N (mail-news gateway) Again, several nice features are: * Can be gotten up from a stock majordom/procmail install in a trivial manner * Site only has to filter mail from itself * It only has to keep up with two sites in the network instead of many (support for limited scope and anonymity) * Each site gets a critical feed from only 1 other site so traffic of duplicates is a minimum * Except for sites on the boundary of the net every site has two places to send its output, adding to robustness, if we allow the edges to wrap (eg torus) then no sites have less than 2 other sites to send traffic to. * Supports various levels of encryption or authentication on a link by link basis, not forcing all members to submint to a general architecture * Scales easily, something the star model does not do since hub machines must grow at a rate dependant on the total number of remailers in the chain this equates to mullah and lots of it should the network take off * The actual number of machines in a given chain is flexible, I would guess the number should match a plane tiling figure, triangle (n=3), squares (n=4), or hexagons (n=6) * Traffic analysis and sync floods are harder to impliment in this architecture than a star or hub based network * Supports 'little' machines and operators who are not guru's or have deep pockets Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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Re: Procmail during the transition, anyone?
by Derek Atkins 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anil Das <das(a)sgi.com> writes: [snip] > It detects duplicates by Message-Id. Unfortunately, the messages that make it through to the cypherpunks list have their MessageID changed when they get approved. So, checking for duplicates by MessageID fails, given the current approval mechanism. :( I've informed Sandy of the problem, but he doesn't know how to preserve the original MessageIDs. -derek -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL N1NWH warlord(a)MIT.EDU PGP key available

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Re: NSA Rainbow Series.
by Genocide 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Wed, 12 Feb 1997, Tobin Fricke wrote: Turns out they were just late in gettin it to me, but I did get it. > > 1-800-688-6115 press 0 or just wait for the operator. My second > > order consisting of posters and video has not arrived either. It has been > > about 6 weeks. The Rainbow order was only 2 weeks. Be prepared that when > > you order the Rainbow series you will be getting a large box.Their are > > something like 30+ booklets in the series. > > There is a set of security posters that include a Santa > > poster.And there is also a video with two films on it (Acess Ins and outs > > adb Acess Control). > > How much does all this stuff from the NSA cost? > > Tobin Fricke > (please reply privately, tobin(a)mail.edm.net) > > Genocide Head of the Genocide2600 Group ============================================================================ **Coming soon! www.Genocide2600.com! ____________________ *---===| |===---* *---===| Genocide |===---* "Courage is not defined by those who *---===| 2600 |===---* fought and did not fall, but by those *---===|__________________|===---* who fought, fell, and and rose again." Email: gen2600(a)aracnet.com Web: http://www.aracnet.com/~gen2600 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion. It is by the Mountain Dew that the thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion. ================================================================================

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Remailer Network Under Attack
by Wazoo MixMaster 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It looks like a new round of attacks against the remailer network is underway. Once again, the provocation is "abuse". Unknown persons have been using anonymous remailers and mail2news gateways to "plant" e-mail addresses in various NGs for the spam-bots to harvest and deluge with spam. The original intention appears to have been to "poison the well" for spammers by planting addresses that they'd get in trouble for sending their junk mail to. It appears that one or more copy-cats is now using the same methodology to plant the addresses of people who they'd like to see spammed. (I'm using the term "plant" rather than "forge" since the messages seem to contain sufficient disclaimers that the From: addresses are not genuine. Sufficient for a normal HUMAN reader, but not an automated address harvester, that is.) Within the last week or so, a chorus of complaints has arisen about this practice, orchestrated by about a half dozen individuals who meet an interesting criteria -- they all hold dual accounts on both Netcom and a small ISP known as DataBasix.com. The scenario is quite similar each time this has happened in the past, such as with the cross-posted pro-smoking/anti-smoking threads last year. One of the complainers politely asks that the abusers be identified and their abuse stop. This is, of course, impossible because the perpetrators are posting anonymously. The second step, which follows the first very closely, is a demand that the remailer be shut down with threats being CCed to sysadmins and upstream providers. Given the variety of addresses being "spam baited", the only logical target of this abuse is the remailers themselves. Both sides of certain heated controversies report being made the target of this spam bait, each side accusing the other of being responsible. The only question is whether the main group of complainers (the Netcom/DataBasix group) are merely innocent bystanders or whether they may have initiated the "abuse" as an excuse to shut down the remailers in furtherance of some unknown agenda. Either that, or someone else is attacking the remailer net and it's just a coincidence that a group fitting such a curious pattern (dual accounts on the same two ISPs) should step in and demand the dismantling of several elements of the remailer/m2n-gateway infrastructure. HYPOTHETICAL QUESTION: Would mentioning the "Reichstag Fire" invoke Godwin's Law prematurely? <g>

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Firewalls
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timmy May proves that the Midwestern gene pool needs some chlorine in it. o o o o o /~> <><><> <> Timmy May o...(\ |||||| ||

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Re: Transmission of Crypto material and ITAR
by Benjamin Grosman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>The answer is that no one knows, but if the doctrines that apply to >cargo in transit between countries applied, there would be no >consequence to it. Of course, that doesn't mean that there will not be >consequences associated with this given U.S. governmental insanity. Or it could be dealt with differently, as with a ship that docks for refueling carrinyg munitions (a catergory shared with crypto), or nuclear waste (not quite, but you get my point...) Ben ---------------------------------------------------------------- Benjamin Grosman - Programmer, Magna Data Internet Solutions Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur. [Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.] ----------------------------------------------------------------

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