December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

index.html
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CNN logo Navigation Infoseek/Big Yellow Pathfinder/Warner Bros Main banner AST. Working for your business. rule BOY SHOOTS SISTER FOR TALKING ON PHONE TOO LONG October 1, 1997 Web posted at: 11:11 p.m. EDT (0311 GMT) ORANGE PARK, Florida (AP) -- A 14-year-old boy shot his sister for talking on the telephone too long, a law enforcement official said. The boy, who was not identified because of his age, was charged with attempted murder. His 15-year-old sister was treated for a gunshot wound to her chest and released from a hospital. The boy said that his sister was getting on his nerves for talking on the phone too long, the sheriff's office said. He said he took his mother's .22-caliber revolver from a locked box in her bedroom. The girl was reading a book when she was shot Monday. When officers arrived, the boy was talking on the phone. "I could understand a temper thing, but this kid had the gun for four or five hours before he went into his sister's bedroom and shot at her twice," said sheriff's Sgt. Wes Gronikowski. Copyright 1997 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. _________________________________________________________________ Infoseek search ____________________ ____ ____ _________________________________________________________________ rule Message Boards Sound off on our message boards You said it... [INLINE] AST. Working for your business. rule To the top © 1997 Cable News Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you.

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index.html
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CNN logo Navigation Infoseek/Big Yellow Pathfinder/Warner Bros Main banner Visit Regal at Buick.com rule NATIONWIDE CRACKDOWN ON MAIL FRAUD BEGINS Mail fraud graphic October 1, 1997 Web posted at: 11:11 p.m. EDT (0311 GMT) WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies joined hands with more than 1,500 private sector volunteers Wednesday to launch a nationwide crackdown on mail fraud. "Project Mailbox," initiated by the Federal Trade Commission, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the National Association of Attorneys General and the American Association of Retired People, targets con artists who use mass mail to defraud consumers. The FBI estimated several years ago that an estimated $40 billion a year is lost to mail and telemarketing scams that include a range of deceptive claims such as phony bills, bogus advance-fee card offers and false contest claims. One goal of the new effort is to get a more accurate and up-to-date estimate on the size and nature of this problem. To assist, AARP is asking members to turn over unsolicited and suspicious mail to law enforcement officials. The coalition is also launching a consumer education campaign. rule Related sites: Note: Pages will open in a new browser window * AARP * Federal Trade Commission * United States Postal Service External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive. _________________________________________________________________ Infoseek search ____________________ ____ ____ _________________________________________________________________ rule Message Boards Sound off on our message boards You said it... [INLINE] Visit Regal at Buick.com rule To the top © 1997 Cable News Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you.

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Upgrade to first class - nearly every time you fly...
by 53199432＠hotmail.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: "Show me an example of terrorists using the Internet or crypto"
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Alex Le Heux wrote: >On 2 Oct 1997 01:29:33 +0200, in list.cypherpunks you wrote: >>Cynthia Brown wrote: >>>On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, Alex Le Heux wrote: >>>> This sucks. >>> >>>I agree wholeheartedly. >> >>>IMNSHO the best way to fight crime is not with bigger guns than the >>>"bad guys", but with better social programs such as universal health >>>care, and improved day care so single parents can show their kids >>>what a productive lifestyle looks like. >> >>Of course you agree wholeheartedly, you are an exploiter. It is >>wrong. You should be ashamed of yourself. > >Can you explain who exactly exploits who here? How about our friend J.F. Avon? He has the misfortune to share citizenship with Ms. Brown. Thus, while he may be minding his own business, doing nobody any harm, and pursuing happiness, should he decline to spend thousands of hours of his life working to pay money into Ms. Brown's socialist schemes, armed men will come to his house, put him in a cage, and leave him there for years. That's not a very friendly way to treat a neighbor, is it? In the United States, many thousands of people correctly recognize this situation. Many thousands of people are gun owners. Many thousands of people are not only gun owners, but combat veterans. The logical outcome would be great violence directed towards the government. Yet, this has not happened (recently ;-). Why? Certainly if the sums at stake were involved between governments, there would be fodder for many wars. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that civilians, even armed civilians with combat experience, are so overwhelmingly peace loving that they will bend very far backwards to avoid trouble, even if it means thousands of hours of work. Can the same be said of career military or government people? >PS. What's the point in posting anonymous when you have this sig? > >>Editor in Chief >>Smile Magazine >>http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html >>http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html Tools which are not used are not improved. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNDPgFZaWtjSmRH/5AQEQ8wf+PwFFagIxuwKkoR5rUAxnseSP8DzrRsrw tQD5gCZ0t1JTBdXUinhZzr2NsyKDtGoPcauDtrxqWyMdAem5ZCf2v6D8Cgm34n3Q bkmvSJbo2bSuD9ggzboENp6rhvsbJ7THf7I4eMHRIUrnPgnQbaWTOXKqBPtG5w+W qPrgHAb7s6oaB8aRqX0sPByWKqbd853RLjsy62Tl3oMc7hp70TAKwXCtXKQTUhL+ CeNBpNFvnN1nR1L3AqL5aji0/BaN+7foptPRDH3eZfUwLx547+1R+DdLKAb7u5tL RJaza5h0O3Zkg+ImlqR2cKe5awxwB6NNkm2oR1GD1p0f80+mGUHtcQ== =C9wS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Secure phone
by John Deters 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:21 AM 10/2/97 -0700, you wrote: >At 11:13 PM 10/1/97 -0700, Lucky Green wrote: >> Bad idea. You don't want people to have to look up keys to use your device. >> Some people may not want to be listed in the phone book. Not to mention >> that a PKI adds an additional and unnecessary layer of complexity. Just use >> DH and have the parties each read half of a hash of the public >> exponentials. No keys to store, no keys to remember, no keys to compromise. > >Trouble is this exposes the system to the man-in-the-middle attack. Perhaps >you could take advantage of the real time nature of the system to prevent >man in the middle, by constructing a protocol such that man in the middle >will invariably time out during the connection setup, or produce an >audible lag problem in speech. The MITM attack is thwarted by Lucky's note: >> DH and have the parties each read half of a hash of the public ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> exponentials. No keys to store, no keys to remember, no keys to compromise. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Each party reads off a series of digits displayed on their screen. Out loud. To each other. Over the secure phone. The MITM attacker can't duplicate the hash on both ends, because a hash of the public keys used to make the connection are different between the MITM's public key and the real public keys. Here's a secure conversation (assume for the moment that the addition below represents a strong hash): Alice <-------------------------------------> Bob PK=1234 PK=5678 1234+5678=6912 5678+1234=6912 Alice reads 69 over the phone, and Bob reads 12 back to her. Alice and Bob proceed to have a private conversation. Now, since Mallory has to create a PK, he cannot just duplicate Alice's 1234, because he'd also need the private key to decrypt the conversation. Likewise, he cannot duplicate Bob's 5678. He has to generate his own PKs in an attempt to fool Bob & Alice. Alice <-----> Mallory <-> Mallory <---------> Bob PK=1234 PK=1111 PK=2222 PK=5678 1234+1111=2345 5678+2222=7900 Alice reads "23" over the phone, and Bob reads "00" back. Since Alice's hash function said she should hear "45" back from Bob, and Bob's screen said he should have heard "79" from Alice, Alice and Bob decide to talk about the weather, and how pretty the trees are in certain cities. Mallory could try to thwart this by impersonating Bob's voice to Alice, saying "45", and Alice's voice to Bob, saying "79" (Mallory does, of course, know these numbers), but if Bob & Alice know each other, this probably won't work too well. Mallory would have to be able to cut into the conversation real-time, undetected. Now, of course, Mallory could hire Anna & Barry to pull the whole impersonation thing off, so that for the entire conversation Alice talks to Barry and Anna talks to Bob, each thinking that they're really talking to the other, but that's also fraught with risk. I'm sure they could pull it off on TV, though :-) So, it'd go full circle back to pass phrases again. "I hear the cherry trees are lovely in Washington D.C." "I wouldn't know, I've never visited Washington in the spring." "I agree, the weather is usually too wet." John -- J. Deters "Don't think of Windows programs as spaghetti code. Think of them as 'Long sticky pasta objects in OLE sauce'." +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NET: mailto:jad@dsddhc.com (work) mailto:jad@pclink.com (home) | | PSTN: 1 612 375 3116 (work) 1 612 894 8507 (home) | | ICBM: 44^58'36"N by 93^16'27"W Elev. ~=290m (work) | | For my public key, send mail with the exact subject line of: | | Subject: get pgp key | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Choate: >For the sender to chain from remailer to remailer to destination the >destination has to be in the header info somewhere. Now in the most secure >system each packet header will only contain the address of the next hop. When >the next site gets it the packet contents are de-crypted (otherwise reading >the chaining info is trivial) and the contents are uncovered to reveal another >packet with the next hop header and another encrypted block. And on and on >we go. > ><Question: Are there any remailer sets that impliment the encrypted nested > packet system?> Jim Choate has been amazingly clueless throughout this discussion, but this takes the cake. Does he really not know about encrypted nested chaining? My God! Of course remailers work this way, Jim. They've worked this way practically from the beginning. All remailers work this way. The mixmaster remailers are built around this idea, making each packet a constant size and adding dummy packets as new ones are stripped off, so outgoing messages look just like incoming ones. How can you be arguing about remailers when you know so little about how they work? ><speculation: an encrypted chain could be made stronger if the next > hop header depended on which key was used to decode it. > In other words, remailer A's key will produce one next hop > address while remailer B's key will send it elsewhere. This > is a subset of the different plaintext - same cyphertext > problem - a hard problem as I understand it. Find two > distinct texts that encrypt with different keys to the > same cyphertext> That won't help. There would be no point in doing this. I'd ask you to explain, but that would just prolong the agony.

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Re: Forwarded mail...
by Brian B. Riley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 10/1/97 9:03 PM, Jim Choate (ravage(a)ssz.com) passed this wisdom: >Why is the situation more stable if both parties are armed? If I >were confronted by a armed burglar and we were facing off I would >pull the trigger as soon as I got a lock. If their gun wasn't in a >ready position Iwould warn them and if they so much as flinched I'd >drop them. If they wereunarmed I might beat them senseless with the >gun but I would not shoot themunless they made a motion to rush me, >then I would go for a non-lethal shotunless the distance was less >than a dozen feet (rushing distance) or so >in ... nothing personal, but why is it people keep deluding themselves with the idea that they can shoot to wound. You cannot know what a shot will do ... if you shoot someone the odds are pretty high that you will kill him or seriously injure. You cannot count on 'non-lethally' wounding anyone. Leg shots have a very high incidence of hitting bone and deflecting up into the torso and really raising havoc. A shot to the thigh could easily hit the femoral artery and a total bleedout .... if you are going to shoot assume your are going to kill, if the guys lives, then you get to sleep a little easier that night and later. I hear so much talk about killing like its something really easy to do ... it isn't ... unfortunately it gets easier each time, and the sleeping gets tougher ... the only consolation to the bad dreams is that it means you haven't lost your humanity, yet! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBNDMc3sdZgC62U/gIEQKPVACgnbr0UQGw0Lx8j7tJhOii6bVWB/MAnjM6 euuGEBAmFLhxWsULQLNTOFSs =LFzV -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Brian B. Riley --> http://www.macconnect.com/~brianbr For PGP Keys <mailto:brianbr@together.net?subject=Get%20PGP%20Key> "...Those of you who turned your swords into plowshares will soon find yourselves under the yokes of those of us who kept our swords..." -- author unknown

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counter-intuitive -- spam is good for you. anonymous assholes are your friend
by Zooko Journeyman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just got through reading another hilarious post from Anonymous, and I realized that instead of filtering anonymous posts _out_ of my reading list like I used to, I've gradually started filtering them _in_. I was thinking about why, and it illustrates a counter- intuitive hypothesis that's been germinating in my head for a few days/months/years. I'll call it "Zooko's Law of Evolutionary, Counter-Intuitive, Painful Serendipity": In an evolving ecosystem, things which appear to do harm often result in benefit. For example, if you consider having lots of healthy, happy bunnies to be a benefit, you might consider an influx of voracious wolves to be bad news. But in many cases the selective pressure exerted by the wolf population will result in stronger bunny genes, healthier bunnies, more bunny babies and cetera. In the case that the wolves leave again, or some other aspect of the environment changes (winter comes, etc.) then the population of passive grass-nibbling bunnies will turn out to be disappointingly fragile compared to the population of well-exercised wolf-fleeing bunnies. Now you might complain that I am not playing fair by tossing in these hypothetical environment changes late in the game. If we are evaluating _just_ the influx of wolves, and not some possible developments such as the wolves passing on, winter coming and so forth, then "obviously" the bunnies were better off without wolves. But perhaps that's just the point. In an evolving ecosystem, you _can't_ measure success without considering the likelihood of continual change. You might also object that I am sneaking in some unfounded Platonic concept of "bunny goodness" which only holds in certain contexts. I.e. maybe the environment will change in a way that penalizes bunnies with sinewy muscles and fast hearts and rewards big fat stupid bunnies who only think of the next nibble. Okay. Maybe I am. But my intuition tells me that this isn't some human-prejudice Platonic Ideal slipping in, but that in fact competition _does_ usually make the competitors better suited for all sorts of likely environmental changes. Now why do the cpunks care? Because I think the invasion of flaming, spamming Vulisses and "Graham-John Buellers" was good for the cpunks list. It drives away people with too little intelligence, stomache-strength, technical know-how or egostic attitude manage their own list input without depending on group dynamics to manage it for them. Okay, so like all "natural" selections, it takes out a few of the good guys too. I still miss Perry Metzger's involvement, but if we had to lose Perry in order to lose a few dozen clueless loudmouths, then so be it. Anyway, I consider it a Bad Thing that anonymous remailers are so difficult to learn and use. I would approve if point-n- click remailers and remailer clients were widely distributed. But in another application of Zooko's Law of Evolutionary Serendipity, the fact that remailers are hard to use means that the people who use them are smarter than average. So maybe _that's_ why I've found it rewarding to select _for_ anonymous posts instead of against in recent times. And why I toy with the notion of fomenting the kind of infowar "war games" that Phill Hallam-Baker hates. Damn, I wish Daniel Dennett were reading this list. Regards, Zooko Journeyman P.S. Just to tie up one loose end-- you might notice that I counted the flame-invasion as a goodness because it drove off "clueless loudmouths". But what's the difference between a "Graham-John Buellers" and a normal crypto-groupie? Is this a double-standard? Not at all. The clueless loudmouths that I am glad to be rid of are an insidious sort, like William H. Geiger III, Paul Bradley, and rest-his-soul Jim Bell who are on-topic and sane enough to attract attention from the real thinkers, but who are prolific and mediocre enough to pull down the over-all quality of discourse. Apologies to the named people for hurting your feelings. It's nothing personal, but I have to call 'em like I see 'em. Cut down the volume of your output to just the very best of your articles, and maybe I'll stop filtering you out.

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Remailers and ecash
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Given: We want more (reliable) remailers But someone has to pay for them Conjecture: New remailers can be financed by charging the users a fee per message to use the remailers. If a remailer charges a fee, the number of users will be reduced to those who are willing to pay the fee. When the number of users is reduced, the potential for traffic analysis is increased, which reduces the value of the remailer. If the value of the remailer is reduced, it will not be worth the cost to many users, and those users will seek a less expensive, higher traffic remailer. Thus, the commercial remailer is forced to lower its prices until it is unprofitable. Conclusion: Pay-per-message commecial remailers are not economically viable. Hence we need a new economic model to finance remailers. Several have been proposed: - Advertiser supported - Pay a flat fee per month for remailer access - Everyone a remailer. Remailers only accept messages from other remailers. To use remailers you must run a remailer. - Get companies to run remailers on their firewalls to reduce traffic analysis by competitors/spies - Pay for access to an anonymous message pool - Sell a spam filtering service to fund remailers - Sell a spamming service to fund remailers - Sell cpu cycles in exchange for remailer access - Charge people for extra services, such as low-latency - Pay for a nym account, nymserver subsidizes remailers - Have the money launderers subsidize the remailers - Somehow get all those Mac users to pay - Offer $50 to the first person to set up a remailer, as Monty Cantsin did - Fund social programs for universal remailer access and universal health care like Cynthia wants

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new in EFC's media archives - Mondex, crypto (fwd)
by Martin Janzen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Electronic Frontier Canada's David Jones (djones(a)insight.dcss.McMaster.CA) posted the following to the EFC mailing list: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New in EFC's media archives: 1. Plastic treasure ... not so smart after all http://www.efc.ca/pages/media/guardian.24sep97.html This article reports that a team in the Netherlands made a "successful attack" on a Mondex chip (Hitachi H8/3101) by activating a test mode in which the chip dumps its contents to a serial port. John Beric, security manager for Mondex simply says "I have never SEEN a report saying they have broken Mondex". (Is this plausible deniability?? ;-) The article also makes mention of EFC getting hassled by the National Bank of New Zealand over a leaked memo. In the mean time, Mondex is trying to ramp up deployment of its new chip, the Hitachi H8/3109, which (for the first time apparently) implements public key crypto. 2. If cops can read E-mail, so can the bad guys http://www.efc.ca/pages/media/gazette.24sep97.html Some coverage of the "crypto" issue in the context of a major international privacy conference held in Montreal last week. EFC scored some coverage for its position statement on crypto: http://www.efc.ca/pages/crypto/policy.html including a quote in favour of strong crypto: "There is a far greater risk to individuals, businesses, and the government if we are unable to effectively prevent criminals from gaining unauthorized access to our records and communications." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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