December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

WebWorld 29
by Bubba Rom Dos 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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17 Dec '03

Kent Crispin, whose sense of humor indicates he may not, after all, be a government Bot, wrote: > On Thu, Apr 10, 1997 at 12:27:29PM -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: > [...] > > By the way, I'm staying out of this latest tamper-responding device > > argument. I worked on this at Intel, actually. But I wrote a bunch of > > fairly long articles on this the 5th, or maybe it was the 7th?, time this > > came up, circa 1993. Those who refuse to learn from the threads of the past > > are condemned to repeat them. > > Let's see, to which would I rather be condemned: participating in a > lively, current discussion; or digging through musty outdated archives? I regularly cruise back through my archives of the CypherPunks list from as far back as the early 90's and I rarely find them outdated. And rather than being pretentious, I usually find them 'portentious'. > Yes, we could continually mine the archives for words of wisdom from > past participants, and thus pay them homage -- especially since it is > so painfully obvious that is what they crave. But we should forgive > them this weakness, for at some lonely age we all start wondering > about our legacy. There is, however, a far cry of difference between those to whom homage is due, and those to whom it is not. As much as I may have railed against the fascist censorship of the 'moderation experiment' badly instituted by John Gilmore, I am not ungrateful for the years of time and effort that he spent in hosting the CypherPunks list, and stated so in a post to the list before it moved on to new homes. Not knowing Tim May personally, I cannot comment on the description of him in the press as 'crusty' (not knowing if it refers to his personality or his sexual hygene), but I can see how a review of some of his recent posts might suggest that he would not be out of place in a remake of 'Grumpy Old Men'. However, his propensity for taking an attitude of 'been there, done that' (and spanking young pups on the list) in no way negates the fact that he 'has', in fact, been there and done that, and that his (somewhat vague) pointers to sources of information in regard to various list issues might prove valuable to those who have enough interest in the issue to want to indulge in a little research on the matter. While the discussions of those currently active on the list may be enlightening, there are certainly other CypherPunks (some active, some inactive) who have dealt with current issues in the past, and done so from a perspective and knowledge base that are equal or superior to those who are participating in current discussions. While Tim is certainly an icon on the list, I haven't seen any signs of senility seeping in, just yet. {From: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> Subject: Has anybody seen my shoes? I lost my shoes! } (OK, maybe a couple of signs..:) While I sometimes feel that the list would be better served by more of the long-time members being a little more specific in their aide to more inexperienced members seeking information, there is no doubt that much of the input they do provide is useful enough to point those seeking a better knowledge of crypto and crypto issues in directions which can bear much fruit if the individual is sincere enough to follow their pointers. Tim's legacy is already written in CypherStone, regardless of what he may or may not do in the future, as is that of Gilmore and Hughes. Despite whatever battles you or I may engage them in, in the future, we will be telling our grandchilren, "Hey, I <spit on>/<farted at>/ <kissed> him." when the movie 'Grouchy Old CypherPunks' hits the big screen. -- Toto "One TruthMonger down, four to go"

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Re: Black box attacks (was Re: Crypto-Dongel)
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:35 PM 4/9/97 -0400, Cynthia H. Brown wrote: >If you're trying to destroy a standard IC, why don't you just hook up the >power and ground pins to a 120V AC outlet? You are unlikely to have AC in a system by the time the tamper detector senses an intrusion. Similar problems apply to arcs and anything based on discharging a large capacitor. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: NSA Intercepts Sent to Democratic National Committee
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: > Reports that the White House fed NSA phone intercepts to the Democratic > National Committee (DNC), for political purposes. > > The calls were between a New York businessman and a Latvian national. This reminds me how some stupid cunt on Usenet thought I was latvian and posted hundreds of kilobytes of flames about how stupid latvians were using me as an example. Of course, I am NOT latvian in any way. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Re: "...markets are fundamentally chaotic, not efficient"? Really?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Kent and Bob have been huffing and puffing and blowing each others's straw men down for a few stochastically-determined rounds.... >Sorry. It's Edgar Peters, "Chaos and Order in the Capital Markets", >John Wiley, 1991. I'm sure you will rush out and buy a copy :-) > >> > Chaotic is not the same as stochastic. ... >Clearly, you don't know what you are talking about. Strictly >speaking, chaotic behavior (as mathematically defined in chaos theory) >is completely *deterministic*, not random. By that definition, markets, whether for capital or assassins, are distinctly _not_ chaotic*, since most people's decisions [* Unless Life, The Universe, and Everything are really deterministic, but fate has decreed that I don't believe that...] about what stocks to buy/sell, and particularly the timing, are influenced by lots of random events - when they hear what information, whether they were busy doing something else when they heard, whether they'd just blown their disposable income on a new car because that freak windstorm dropped a tree on their car the same week the Post Office ate their car insurance payment, whether Alan Greenspan had a bad pizza the night before the quarterly interest rates came out or too much caffeine before his latest speech.... Much of the market is driven by the large institutional trading houses, and increasingly by their computer models, but a lot of it's random, and those functions that are chaotic are driven by random inputs. To the extent that the interactions are chaotic rather than linear, it is hard to develop good models of what the market might do and squeeze a few more bits of predictive information out of the vast quantity of observable random data; even with good computer models and Nuclear Physics PhDs on Wall Street there'll probably always be enough inefficiency left in the market for people to squeeze a few more megabucks worth of arbitrage out of it. [Of course, one of the most effective ways to make money in the market has always been to provide high-priced (or low-priced high-volume) investment advice to investors - and chaos theory has contributed not only to the profitability of some investors but to the buzzword-supply of hucksters in many fields, and selling buzzwords can make a lot of short-term money...] >> Most of the physicists hired by Wall Street were people who >> discovered market analogs to physical processes. The one physicist I knew well who went to Wall Street did it during the stock market boom of 1987. (Oops...) He was fortunate to avoid getting caught in one of the major fallouts of the '87 stock crash, which was the '87-'88 stock market job crash, though. >> > Obviously I can't "prove" markets are not efficient -- >> > that's an empirical matter, not a mathematical matter. The standard way to prove that a market is inefficient is to go tap some money out of it. Doing so does eliminate that particular inefficiency after a while, but there keep being enough people employed on Wall Street to suggest that there's always inefficiency. >> > "Whip me! Beat me! Savage me in Cypherpunks!" I didn't come here for an argument.... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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[Key Markets] Re: "...markets are fundamentally chaotic, not efficient"?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Crispin and Hettinga discussing efficient markets for key bailment: >> In a geodesic network, a single node can not possibly process all >> the information in the network. It chokes, and the network routes >> around it. >> You can bet that any key escrow agent would be innundated with >> surveillance requests We're not talking about a lot of bits, here. If you take care of the hard problem, which is getting people to hand their keys over to easily located key baliffs for no good business reason, the amount of retrieval work is really a lot smaller than the work of wiretapping all the communications and selecting targets. If the government expects to get the key owners to pay for bailment, and get retrievals for free in return for paper copies of warrants blue-ink-signed by judges, in triplicate, with hand-pressed notary seals, yes, that'd be a bottleneck. On the other hand, if the key bailiffs accept electronic requests, digitally signed by the judge's key, with electronic payment attached (whether DigiCash or EscrowBucks), the costs of the key bailment service are quite low and the profit on each request makes it worthwhile to expand the business to meet rapidly-increasing demand - cheap enough to the government to make it worth wiretapping more encrypted transactions. Since the Secretary gets to approve Key Recovery Agent Parties, he can disavow all knowledge of agents who insist on a real signature and want to be sure the request was signed by a real judge rather than by some clerk or cop using the Escrowed copy of the judge's key. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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New York court hears challenge to state Net-censorship law
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

********** Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 17:50:08 -0400 To: fight-censorship-announce(a)vorlon.mit.edu From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> Subject: FC: New York court hears challenge to state Net-censorship law Sender: owner-fight-censorship-announce(a)vorlon.mit.edu Reply-To: declan(a)well.com X-FC-URL: Fight-Censorship is at http://www.eff.org/~declan/fc/ ************** http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/editorial/0,1012,811,00.html The Netly News Network April 8, 1997 The Bad Apple by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) To those of us who follow such events, it's a common enough scene: a squad of civil liberties attorneys troops into a federal courtroom to do righteous battle with an unconstitutional law. It happened this week in New York City, before a judge who finished hearing testimony yesterday in a case the ACLU brought against yet another state Net-censorship statute. The outcome in this lawsuit, however, will reverberate not just in the Empire State but also along the marble corridors of the U.S. Capitol. If the Supreme Court rules that the Communications Decency Act indeed violates the First Amendment, Congress hopes the New York case will guide it in revising the law so it passes constitutional muster. And given how the New York case is shaping up for the forces of unbridled free speech, that could be ugly. A group of 15 plaintiffs challenging the New York statute filed suit in January, arguing that that the law unconstitutionally stifles online speech and unduly interferes with interstate commerce on the Net. The measure, which took effect last November, amends the penal code by making it a crime to distribute online pictures or text "which is harmful to minors." Attorneys for the New York attorney general's office, who are defending the law, say that the "harmful to minors" legal standard isn't as heinous as the CDA's "indecency" ban -- it covers only sexually explicit pictures, not textual conversations. They also argue that filtering software could be used to help online purveyors of adult-only stuff comply with the state statute. Of course, as always, academics, librarians and artists point out that these attempts to limit online communications are overly broad and ill-defined. What I consider harmful to a kid might not be what you consider harmful, after all. Yesterday four witnesses testified for the plaintiffs, uniformly saying they felt threatened by the law. "I walk around with a healthy fear that every book in our collection would give someone the idea that we're giving harmful materials to minors," said Maurice Friedman, executive director of the Westchester Library System. Rudolf Kinsky, an artist from Poland, weighed in next: "I feel a chilling effect on my creativity. Someone could consider my art harmful to minors and could prosecute me. I came to this country [from Poland] looking for freedom of speech, not this." But yesterday's testimony seemed like the capper to an overwhelmingly poor showing the government made in its opening arguments last week. The government's case lasted a mere hour and was hardly persuasive. Among other gaffes, the state failed to slide a new legal standard -- "level of maturity" -- into the discussion; Judge Loretta Preska quickly rebuffed that attempt: "I don't read 'level of maturity' anywhere in the statute," she said, nettled. That wasn't the only time Preska pounced on the government. By the end of the three-day hearing, I was ready to bet good money on the ACLU winning yet another victory for the Net. But I have a confession to make. In January I claimed that "knocking down New York's law should be a virtual slam dunk," saying it suffers from all of the same problems as the CDA. But now, after reading a recent law review article by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, I'm not as sure. Volokh points out that the government could rely on the ready existence of ratings schemes, such as RSACi and PICS, which give publishers the ability to keep their material out of the hands of minors. He writes: "Under the existing doctrine, it would be constitutional to criminalize the display of any harmful-to-minors material which does not carry a correct rating." In other words, rate your web pages with RSACi or go to jail. (I can't see Microsoft, the Software Publishers Association and other RSACi boosters probably opposing this. I can smell another Microsoft world-domination plot brewing already...) Indeed, Volokh told me yesterday that he thinks the New York attorney general may have a workable case. "I think the state has a decent defense. They could say look, this rating imposes a burden but not a very high burden. It's like that imposed on a bookseller. All you're required to do is put on this label." Certainly, Net rating systems played a big part in the New York trial. Last Friday a government attorney asked: "In general, what would be more burdensome as a whole: requiring millions of web sites to rate their contents or just requiring a percentage of web sites that contain graphical objectionable material to rate their web sites?" What the government was trying to point out was that rating systems like RSACi -- that let you assign values to web pages based on nudity or violence -- are increasingly commonplace. If they're commonplace, then netizens may be able to comply with the New York law. And if netizens can comply with the law, then it may be constitutional. [...] "Harmful to minors is something people will talk about again and it's an option, but I don't want to say we'll be out there trumpeting it," says Connie Correll, spokeswoman for Rep. Rick White, a Republican congressman from Washington State -- whose district includes Microsoft. (Coincidence, or another Microsoft attempt at world domination? While you're pondering the question, keep in mind that White championed "harmful to minors" language in December 1995, but Congress rejected it in favor of the CDA's broader "indecency" ban.) Correll adds: "People are watching the New York case. I think it's going to be a real good indication." So do I. ### -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is public. To join fight-censorship-announce, send "subscribe fight-censorship-announce" to majordomo(a)vorlon.mit.edu. More information is at http://www.eff.org/~declan/fc/ ------------------------- Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/

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17 Dec '03

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APRIL BAY AREA CYPHERPUNKS MEETING AND BEACH PARTY, BONNY DOON
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The April Bay Area Cypherpunks Meeting will be held jointly with the Clan MacDude Back To The Beach party, April 12 at Bonny Doon Beach. ( www.macdude.org , http://www.macdude.org/aprbeach.htm for event description.) Among other things, John Randolph was planning to do a Great Wall of Fire with his leftover moving boxes, and various other cypherpunks are part of the Glorious Clan, which is a generally silly organization. Cypherpunkish agenda: It's been a quiet month, except for Jim Bell. CFP was just after the March meeting. The UK is hyping Key Escrow. Bring some discussion topics that benefit from handwaving but don't need a blackboard :-) Ron Rivest and Carl Ellison have been doing some good work on key distribution. PGP Inc. is up to something. China is announcing plans for Hong Kong. It's also time to celebrate "Diffie-Hellman Would Have Been Patent-Free!" day, though of course they changed the patent laws to make it September. MacDude planned events Fizzball: A game involving cheap evil smelling beer and large stick Caber toss: Except that we use a surf board Haggis toss: Using an old Bean Bag Chair Siege engines: How far can you launch a can of fizzbeer? Bonny knees contest: Best legs in (or out) of a kilt, blindfolded judging. Dry Ice bombs: Dry Ice in plastic soda bottles, big boom. Fire: Fire pit as executed by the army corpse of engineers Music: Bardic and Filk around the burning pit of doom and cheer Food and drink: bring stuff for potlucking. Silly clothes: Plaid and hawaiian print. "During the day there will be many special events including a Caber toss (with a longboard), a contest for best legs in a kilt (judging with and without blindfolds), ritual sacrificing of consumer goods, sand fortress building and, of course, fizzball. There will be a potluck dinner on the beach featuring a whole roast pig. Time: All day, especially afternoon and dinner time. What to bring: Food, Toys, Silly People, Sand-tolerant musical instruments. Catapults are good, too... Directions to Bonny Doon: Bonny Doon Beach is about 8-9 miles north of Santa Cruz on Hwy 1 (still south of Davenport (but only just...)). Bonny Doon Road is inland. The beach is between the highway and the ocean. Park and walk over the hill to the ocean. (This hill is a steep begger, with an abandoned rail line across the top.) Map: http://www.vicinity.com/yt.hm?FAM=mapblast&CMD=GEO&SEC=find&IC=0%3A0%3A5&IC% 3A=Beach+Party&AD2=Highway+1+%26+Bonny+Doon+Rd.&AD3=Santa+Cruz%2C+CA ASCII MAP 1 | | Beach |------ Bonny Doon Road | | ~ ~ Santa Cruz # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Information Systems Security Board
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On December 13, 1996, representatives from The National Information Infrastructure (NII) Task Force of The President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC) held a meeting at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C. to discuss industry interest in developing an industry-run Information Systems Security Board (ISSB). Stewart Baker of Steptoe & Johnson discussed the antitrust laws and their application to the meeting, with particular emphasis on the need to avoid discussion of competitive conditions and to show openness to all interested participants. Guy Copeland, a representative from the Task Force, briefly discussed the ISSB model and the purposes of the meeting. Will Ozier, Chairman of the GSSP Committee, next discussed the efforts of the Generally Accepted System Security Principles (GSSP) project. Several representatives from the Administration expressed support for the concept of the ISSB. These representatives also indicated that the Administration would like private industry to take the lead in this area and is more than willing to take "a back seat" to such an effort. These representatives did request for periodic updates on any industry driven initiative in this area. ----- For full report and links to background documents: http://jya.com/issb.htm Thanks to RH.

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