December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Mutual Link Proposal
by mail＠mkljk.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello, my name is Guy W. Rochefort, President of Dino Jump International. I found your address through YAHOO. Dino Jump International are specialists in manufacturing and distribution of Interactive Inflatables worldwide. My lines have been featured in Walt Disney productions, NFL shows, and NBA events. Our product lines include moonwalkers, bouncehouses, and castles. I am interested in mutual links on our respective webpages beneficial to both our businesses. Additionally, I am interested in opening dialog on mutual beneficial business dealings as far as wholesale/retail efforts for manufactured products from my factory and/or resale distribution at competitive pricing. Please come visit my site at http://www.dinojump.com or email sales1(a)dinojump.com or call me at 1-800-570-3466 or 619-754-5186. If this email is intrusive I apologize and you will not hear further from me. Thank you again and I am looking forward to doing business with you. Guy

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Resurrect yourself
by shiftcontrol＠nml.guardian.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In this week's Easter Fools' Issue of Shift Control: "Not only did Christ not die on the cross, but his body was never placed in the tomb at Golgotha. Indeed, by the infamous "third day" Christ had most likely already rounded the Italian coast and was, for all we know, exchanging anecdotes with Sardinian crab merchants." - Paul Robinson on the imminent resurrection of Jesus's freshly discovered remains. "The post-war baby-boomer generation keeps getting ever more wistful for its lost youth. Bowie begat Suede; the Beatles and the Small Faces begat Brit pop; Rod Stewart begat everything in a skirt in the Seventies and these days his torch is carried by Mark Morrison." - Robin Hunt on the resurrection of nostalgia. "Identical lambs are gambolling in the fields. Six-legged featherless chickens are hatching from their eggs. Piglets ready to offer their organs for every transplant need are snuffling in the new grass. A herd of calves trot happily to the slaughterhouse. It's Easter, time of regeneration and renewal, and all is well with the world." - Bronwen Davies on genetic manipulation and cloning: resurrection for the Nineties. "The gods we buried previously now arise as green shoots and come into their own at the harvest. We drink their blood and eat their flesh when we pass around the wine, beer, bread and cakes in the glorious evenings of autumn. For pagans the deities symbolise the fruits of the year - Christianity, for some reason, chose to reverse this." - Druid Steve Wilson on resurrection, pagan-style "There are a number of things I would require of anyone who would be able to clone me. I would first require that he make two clones instead of one. Next, I would demand that neither of these cloned boys be circumcised. I was and although I do not remember the experience I do well remember when I had my tonsils taken out." - Robert Nicolai on how he should be resurrected through cloning. Also this week: Your chance to win 200 quid in our fiction competition; more memoirs from Freebee the rock 'n' roll bee; and our latest quiz: how wild are you about Jesus? All this and more, waiting and willing at: http://www.shiftcontrol.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ Shift Control is produced by the Guardian's New Media Lab with help from Boddingtons and Stella Artois Dry To unsubscribe from this mailing list send e-mail to shiftcontrol-request(a)nml.guardian.co.uk with the following text in the body of the mail message: unsubscribe

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Re: Microsoft ammunition (fwd)
by Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Choate wrote: > > Forwarded message: > > > Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 16:11:50 -0600 > > From: Toto <toto(a)sk.sympatico.ca> > > Subject: Microsoft ammunition > > > But, if you're tired of the repetition, here's a > > reason you should sit through another sermon: > > RandomNoise's Coda. Coda lets you design entire > > Web pages in Java rather than use a mixture of > > HTML content, tags, and Java applets. > > > > A Java-based Web page removes the distinction > > between application and data. It presents data > > just as an HTML page would, but every element on > > the screen has the potential to be an interactive > > part of a sophisticated application. > > Mix this with the distributed processing model of Plan 9 and you may just > have tomorrows computer environment. I very much hope not. We designed HTML with very specific goals in mind, above all that the source be declarative and machine readable. That is why HTML can be edited by the recipient, fed into a voice synth or index by Alta-Vista. The Java based web pages will be opaque, just like postscript. Try to cut and paste from ghostview to emacs. Merging the distinction between applet and code will give lots of techno-geeks a nice orgasm but its the style of computing the Web has replaced. I have yet to see a single Java applet that has the slightest functional utility. I like Java as a language, particularly because it has killed C++ stone dead just as everyone thought it had taken over the world. I don't see that anyone has done anything with mobile code that is of interest however. If all you want is a better user interface add some more tags into HTML, implement Dave Raggets '94 draft perhaps. I think the idea of using Java to move an applet from the client to a server is very exciting but thats not in the Sun/Oracle game plan. The hypertext community had been beating the coda type model for decades before the Web. I was skeptical then and I'm more skeptical now. I turned Javascript, Active-X and Java off about 9 months back because I had little confidence in their security. I soon realised I was much happier when the page did not dance about in front of my eyes. I very rarely come to a site I can't access without them. If I could turn off animated Gifs as well I would be even happier. I think the future of computing is much more likely to lie in returning to simple but powerfull ideas. Presentation types, parallel languages and genuine process oriented object systems interest me much more. Phill

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Re: remailer spam throttle
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:40 PM 3/30/97 -0800, Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> wrote: >Reply blocks are unreliable anyway. Yeah, but they're a moderately useful kluge in that they let you separate the information about how to find an anonymous recipient into at least two places, which is far more secure than just one. They're relatively annoying to use, but the nymserver approach makes it possible to use them without the average user messing with the details. >The current piggy backing of recipient anonymity >on systems designed to provide sender anonymity can not work reliably and >must therefore be replaced by a separate design. Is this a distributed-commercial-remailer-boxes approach, or something different? It's a hard problem to do right. In a large-scale system, one good design is to have a Pipenet or equivalent that's used to pick up POP-mail. It needs enough traffic/users/bandwidth to achieve Obscurity, but if you could convince people to carry their Usenet feeds as cover traffic, that'd be more than enough :-) Store-and-forward variants are less reliable, but may do a good enough job, or I suppose you could cook up some sort of distributed message pools. # 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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No Subject
by Mix 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C[reep] May's family tree goes straight up. All of his ancestors were siblings, to dumb to recognize each other in the dark. /\ o-/\ Timothy C[reep] May ///\|/\\\ / /|\ \

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ZDNet Special Report: Web Tragedy
by announce＠lists.zdnet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

------------------------------------------------------------------ ZDNET ANNOUNCEMENT 3/28/97 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Join us today for our latest ZDNN news special report,"Web Tragedy". Once again, we see how the Web affects us and our culture, in ways never foreseen. Shades of Jonestown. A mass suicide. Bizarre enough. But even more so. Reason: Even this could be tied to the Internet. ___"Heavens Gate" Web Site Now Accessible Via Yahoo! Internet Life___ As the Heaven's Gate Web site continues to experience overload, Yahoo! Internet Life has mirrored a major portion of the site for Internet surfers looking for more information on the cult. Heaven's Gate Web site: http://www.zdnet.com/yil/higher/higher.html ___ ZDNet News Special Report___ Visit ZDNet News for a comprehensive news package on the suicide of the 39 Web designers, including: video reports, insight from inside the Net subculture itself, perspective from cult experts, a discussion forum and the latest news as it happens. ZDNet News Special Report: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/heavensgate ___ Yahoo! Internet Life Offers Report from Cult Experts___ Yahoo! Internet Life also offers an exclusive column by noted cult experts Robert Siegelman and Flo Conway, who try to make sense of the tragedy. Cults on the Web: http://www5.zdnet.com/yil/higher/cultcol1.html We'll be updating these sites continually as this story unfolds. ________________________________________________________ ZDNet Announcements are periodic notices of new features, special events and free offers available to members of ZDNet. --To subscribe to ZDNet Announcements, please send mail to: announce-on(a)lists.zdnet.com You can leave the subject and body blank. --To unsubscribe to ZDNet Announcements, please send mail to: announce-off(a)lists.zdnet.com You must leave the subject and body blank. _________________________________________________________ Powered by Mercury Mail: http://www.merc.com

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WebWorld 20
by Bubba Rom Dos 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Dilbert on Smartcards
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The March 21 Dilbert is on http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/ Friday; to see it later, look in http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ # 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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Re: remailer spam throttle
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM) writes: > With the present scheme, if a remailer is "raided", it has precious little > interesting stuff on it at any one time. Now consider the scenario: > > X sends 1000 copies of child porn/seditious libel to 100 people believed not > to be using remailers right now. The remailer keeps the 100 e-mails onits > hard disk and e-mails each receipient a ping, inviting them to agree to the > disclaimer terms and to retrieve their anonymous e-mail. The first recipient > to retrieve the e-mail gets upset and contacts the feds. The feds figure, the > remailer still has the 99 other e-mails and the information on who's supposed > to receive them in its queue; why not seize it and take a look. This is a potential problem, but there are some other considerations. First, there is no particular reason why one recipient of some email from the remailer should know or even suspect that other people have the same email waiting. Then, to defend against raids like this, the material could be separately encrypted to each recipient. There would be no way to know that material sent to one recipient matched material sent to someone else. The raiders would just find a bunch of encrypted files. Of course, if it were a sting operation, with the recipients being lured or entrapped into requesting information they shouldn't, then the sender might avoid using these countermeasures. However, there wouldn't really be any need to use a remailer for a sting operation like this, it could be done just by offering the material from an ordinary address. More generally, I think we need to keep in mind what a remailer does and what it doesn't do. The essential function of the remailer is to provide anonymity via mixing messages. It does not provide confidentiality of message contents. That has to be taken care of by encryption. And, as I wrote yesterday, it doesn't (can't) keep secret who the people are who send and receive anonymous mail. All it can do is to disguise which particular people send and receive to each other. The same is true of a DC-net or a perfect Chaumian mixnet. These systems do not disguise their particpants, or protect the confidentiality of their message contents; they only hide the knowledge of who is talking to whom. Having said that, I do like some aspects of this idea: > There's a big distributed database of pgp keys on the several keyservers. > Add a bit to the database specifying whether the key owner wants to receive > anonymous e-mail. By default set it to true for the existing addresses. (The "default true" is going to allow the same kinds of abuse which we have seen in the past. Some remailers may be able to tolerate this, but as we have seen, many can't.) > When the final remailer in the chain wants to send someone an anonymous > message, it attempts to retrieve a key from the keyservers. > > If it fails to find a key, it junks the mail (you don't want to keep it > around, it's baiting the LEAs!) and instead sends a notification to the > recipient that some anon e-mail was addressed to it, but it was junked; > and if they want to receive anon e-mail, they need to give a pgp key > to one of the key servers this remailer uses. This is what I like. It's a lot simpler than trying to keep a copy of the anonymous mail and deliver it later when the person asks for it. Just let him know that someone is trying to reach him anonymously, and let him enable that if he wants to be able to receive the next anonymous message that comes in for him. You can load his permission message down with all kinds of disclaimers that say he knows he's likely to receive obscene, threatening and illegal material, that he doesn't mind, that he knows the remailer is an automated system which doesn't look at the contents, etc. Not only does this give you a defense but it makes the person think about what he's getting into, so he will in fact be better prepared when something bad comes his way. Plus, having taken positive action to enable receiving anonymous mail, he will hopefully be more knowledgable about how to request that you stop, and it won't be such a big deal. He opens the pipe, and if he gets a face full of sewage, he closes up the pipe right away. You warned him. > If it finds a key, it looks at the anon mail bit; if it's on, it encrypts > the e-mail with the recipient's key and sends it; otherwise it junks it. > > Obviously, the key servers would need to be modified to allow users to > specify whether they want anon e-mail when then store their keys, and > to change this setting any time. Key servers wouldn't be the only place to store this information. I think the remailer could keep its own list, especially if it were defaulting to "off". This way recipients wouldn't have to generate and submit PGP keys, which is more work than just sending a reply to a remailer giving the OK to receive anonymous mail. > Right now, there's a very large number of addresses in the key servers. > Instantly making them into a list of addresses that accept anon mail > will make it hard (hopefully infeasible) for the LEAs to investigate > everyone willing to accept anon e-mail as a suspect in sending it. More cautious or politically vulnerable remailers might default in the other direction. It would be a matter of the individual situation. Hal

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Hello
by winsock＠rigel.cyberpass.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, anyone know if the Cyphernomicon is still available? --Chipjunkie --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" 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: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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