December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Privacy vs. Pseudospoofing
by L. Detweiler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello everyone. I am a bit unclear as to what cypherpunks are really promoting as far as privacy vs. pseudospoofing. The lack of official comments by head cypherpunks make this difficult to sort out. Clearly, you are in favor of some forms of pseudospoofing. Here is a list of all the various forms I can think of. Please indicate which ones you are in favor of. These are just some tentative names I'm coming up off the top of my head for terminology. pseudonymity: a name that is not traceable to a particular human being. 1) straight pseudonymity: the audience is aware of the fact that the name is not traceable. (e.g. anon.penet.fi aliases, some book pseudonyms.) 2) semipseudonymity: the audience is not aware of whether or not the name can be traced, and makes no assumption. 3) quasipseudonymity: the audience tends to assume from context that the name is traceable, but it is not. I think email addresses fall in this category, but (unfortunately IMHO) that is increasingly becoming the exception. 4) pseudoanonymity: the audience is deliberately deceived into thinking the name is traceable when it is not. (e.g. a tentacle saying `I am a real person.' or someone else vouching for them.) Now, I have no objections to 1-2. And one can indeed have privacy with them. But it seems to me that all the cypherpunks are promoting 3-4 in the name of `privacy'. But it seems to me that (3) is misleading, and (4) means active lies. These are not privacy. These are the tools that criminals use to evade punishment for their crimes. Also, one *must* make the distinction between *active* and *passive* pseudonymity. If I read a book, I am not conversing with the author. I am not asking him any questions about his identity. This strikes me as harmless in most cases even if the reader is tricked into thinking the name is `traceable'. But the interactive pseudonyms, those possible with the internet, are extremely dangerous, because someone can actively lie to me when I ask `who are you?'. And it really discourages me that all you cypherpunks (e.g. J. Gilmore) think it is all the same thing, Privacy. So, which do you favor? (Please do not continue to obfuscate the issue by pretending that they are all identical.) Cypherpunks, I don't think you all understand the whole purpose of names in the first place. They were invented so that we could function as a society. The ability to `trace' a name to a human being is a very basic aspect of social interaction and ettiquete. Every day that you corrupt that trust you are not only breaking down governments, but honest interactions. I am beginning to think that not only do the leaders have secrets from the followers, they have secrets from each other. Imagine one leader asking the other through a tentacle, `what do you think of so-and-so'? yee, gad. Where is your trust, cypherpunks? Why are you so paranoid? In my experience, the people I have met that are the least trusting of others are also the most paranoid. But they are also the most secretive themselves. When you keep secrets from other people, you begin to think the whole world is keeping secrets from you. Is all of history a big lie to massage the egos of some people? The Bible is probably entirely fictional too, right? Don't you people know you are playing with fire? Active pseudoanonymity is used to start riots and wars. I plant people around the mob or in a country who agitate for the destruction of everyone. And real people get caught up in the passions. Perhaps you think you can control this. You are mistaken. He who lives by a mob, dies by a mob. What is the consensus on that delightful little Nazi story about pseudospoofing for espionage purposes? A glorious example of the delights of pseudoanonymity? Something to strive for? This is the story that I was going to send you all when your leaders told me what they knew about pseudospoofing, that I was talking about for a long time. But S.Boxx sent it before I had the chance. BTW I have misplaced the comments from the leaders that said they didn't pseudospoof, could someone email them to me?

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Re: Anonymous Video on Demand
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mike Ingle writes: >Are you thinking of physical videotape or electronic distribution? Electronic distribution. "Anonymous video on demand" is a bit misleading, because I'm not so much interested in preventing the video provider from knowing my identity, just from correlating my identity with my video selections. >For electronic distribution, suppose you have a fiber-optic cable with >n channels, where n is a large number. My feeling is that this architecture is too inflexible. Here's the sort of thing I have in mind: Customer browses the video supplier's catalog and notes the catalog number of the video it wants Customer randomly chooses 99 other catalog numbers to generate a pool of 100 catalog numbers. The Customer and the Video Provider engage in a protocol so that the Customer ends up receiving 100 compressed and encrypted videos, only one of which the Customer can successfully decrypt (and uncompress). The Video Provider never learns which of the 100 videos the Customer successfully decrypts, but is sure that the Customer can decrypt only one of them. I don't know what the protocol would be, but it sounds like an ANDOS-like protocol. By the way, I think that if the "rental" fee is low enough, the Video Provider wont have to worry about cheaters. If it costs you more money (or time) to cheat the Video Provider than it does to simply pay the fee, then most people will pay the fee. I'm thinking the fee would be as small as 25 cents/video, for example. Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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_The Hacker Crackdown_ on-line
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Excuse the repost, but this is interesting stuff. From: kadie(a)cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M Kadie) Subject: _The Hacker Crackdown_ on-line Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL Date: Sat, 1 Jan 1994 20:40:43 GMT The short of it: To access Bruce Sterling's _The hacker crackdown: law and disorder on the electronic frontier_, try gopher -p1/Publications/authors/Sterling/hc gopher.well.sf.ca.us 70 The long of it: I've directed followup to this article to comp.org.eff.talk. I found _The Hacker Crackdown_ with the CAF/WELL whatsnew server (gopher gopher.eff.org 5070). You can access the book via email. For details, send email to archive-server(a)eff.org. Include the line: send acad-freedom/admin access The electronic version of the book is being released as "literary freeware". Here is the library entry for the paper version of the book. Sterling, Bruce. The hacker crackdown : law and disorder on the electronic frontier / Bruce Sterling. New York : Bantam Books, c1992. xiv, 328 p. ; 24 cm. Includes index. Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada. ISBN 055308058X : $$23.00 ($$28.00 Can.) 1. Computer crimes--United States. 2. Programming (Electronic computers)--Corrupt practices. 3. Telephone--United States--Corrupt practices. I. Title. ocm25-914955 - Carl -- Carl Kadie -- I do not represent any organization; this is just me. = kadie(a)cs.uiuc.edu =

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Re: Anonymous Video on Demand
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

could As I think about it more, the "anonymous video on demand" problem can be solved with an oblivious transfer protocol. Here's how I see it working: (The following is adapted from the oblivious transfer protocol described in "Applied Cryptography" on page 98.) Say Alice is the Video Vendor and Bob is the customer... Alice generates a public/private key pair for each movie in her video database and publishes the public keys in an electronic catalog. Each public key would be paired with a movie description and a catalog index number. Bob downloads Alice's catalog and browses through it offline. Bob makes a selection, and also randomly picks 99 (or any large number) other catalog numbers Bob generates a random DES key and encrypts this key with the public key associated with his selection. Bob sends the encrypted DES key and the list of 100 catalog numbers to Alice. Alice decrypts the DES key with the private key associated each catalog number received from Bob. In only one case will Alice successfully recover Bob's DES key, only she doesn't know which case. Alice encrypts each movie selection with the resulting DES keys from the previous step and sends all 100 encrypted movies to Bob. Bob will only be able to decrypt and view the movie he selected and Alice wont know which of the 100 movies Bob selected. Ta Da! The nice thing about this protocol is that it doesn't really have anything to do with videos. It could be used for an electronic library, or any warehouse of digital information where the Vendor wishes to charge for a download, yet the Customer doesn't want the Vendor to know which item is selected. Also, the Vendor still can use statistical analysis to determine which items are more popular and which items are less popular. The Vendor could keep track of how many times an item was mentioned in a Customer selection list. The more popular items would appear in more lists. Unpopular items would have different statistics. This analysis breaks down if all items are equally popular, or Customers don't chose the other 99 items randomly. Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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Re: _The Hacker Crackdown_ on-line
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It's also out in paperback now -- I picked up a copy yesterday.

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radiation experiments and trusting the government
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I find the recent disclosures concerning U.S. Government testing of the effects of radiation on unknowing human subjects to be yet more evidence that you simply cannot trust the government with your own personal safety. Some people, given positions of power, will naturally abuse those positions, often even if such abuse could cause severe injury or death. I see little reason, therefore, to simply "trust" the U.S. government -- and given that the U.S. government is about as good as they get, its obvious that NO government deserves the blind trust of its citizens. "Trust us, we will protect you" rings quite hollow in the face of historical evidence. Citizens must protect and preserve their own privacy -- the government and its centralized cryptographic schemes emphatically cannot be trusted. Perry

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anonymous mail
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Testing. 1/1/94

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Hoax or ???
by mikeingl＠news.delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Path: news.delphi.com!noc.near.net!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!library.ucla.edu!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!news.ysu.edu!psuvm!auvm!DSC.BLM.GOV!cjames >Comments: Gated by NETNEWS(a)AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU >Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada >Return-Path: <@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU, > @VM42.CSO.UIUC.EDU:owner-info-ada@VM1.NODAK.EDU> >Return-Path: <@VM1.NODAK.EDU:cjames@DSC.BLM.GOV> >X-Mailer: SCO System V Mail (version 3.2) >Source-Info: From (or Sender) name not authenticated. >Message-ID: <9312212330.aa07880(a)dsc.blm.gov> >Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1993 23:30:25 MST >Sender: Ada programming language <INFO-ADA(a)NDSUVM1.BITNET> >From: Colin James 0621 <cjames(a)DSC.BLM.GOV> >Subject: Public key encryption broken >Comments: To: info-ada(a)vm1.nodak.edu >Comments: cc: barlow(a)eff.org, gdean(a)yarrow.wt.uwa.edu.au >Lines: 30 William H Payne originally discovered how to break RSA without factoring by using powers of two on 10/15/90. Mr Payne wrote a draft paper "Public Key Cryptography is Easy to Break" on 10/16/90. The abstract (draft only) appears below: Public key, also known as Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman, cryptography is broken without factoring the modulus m. The product of the encryption and the decryption exponent is computed directly with order log(base 2) m shifts, adds, and compares. A continued product between the modulus and its multiplier which matches a criterion solves the Fermat-Euler theorems simply for even very large moduli. Mr Payne is writing a tutorial paper on the same subject with Jon Grant which should propose a new public encryption algorithm as a standard which can not be easily broken. This indirectly relates to Ada in that projects in the process of implementing public key encryption in Ada may find these advances of value. This information also calls into the question the validity of patent claims for RSA. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Colin James III : Disclaimer: BLM, SC-342D, DFC : ----------- Denver, CO 80225 : The opinions expressed here are solely (303) 236 - 5897 : responsible for their content. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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All of this Death Threat Shit.
by cornpop＠glia.biostr.washington.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello Fellow CypherPunks.... I've never posted to this list before, but I've been reading for quite some time. My name is Dan ieberman, and I am a high-school student in the Seattle area. I got interested in Cryptography, after my sister enrolled in a cryptography seminar at the local University. I have been published in Internet World Magazine, and that is my only professional citation. I don't think my little message will hold much water, but I was under the impression, when I joined this list, that the Cypherpunks list was a place for casual conversation about a common hobby, and maybe a place to make alliances and advancements in the cryptography field. For me, it was a place to learn about cryptology. But when it came to this 'Tentacles' and 'Medusa' stuff, I thought that it was getting a little close to the edge, but not too far. Not death threats? Come on guys! I'm 15 years old, and even I'm beyond death threats about senseless matters. I don't think that any of this should have gotten this far. I think people took Mr. L. Detweiler's posts as anything to be serious about. I dismissed them when I saw them, yet some people took them personally. I think L. Detweiler made that clear in some of his last postings. Something to the effect of: If you would have ignored me, I would have gone away. That's how it should have gone. All that's left now is to forgive and forget. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >From the Virtual Desktop of: -_____ _-_- ,, ' | -, _ /, ' || _ /| | |` < \, \\/\\ || \\ _-_ ||/|, _-_ ,._-_ \\/\\/\\ < \, \\/\\ || |==|| /-|| || || ~|| || || \\ || || || \\ || || || || /-|| || || ~|| | |, (( || || || || || ||/ || |' ||/ || || || || (( || || || ~-____, \/\\ \\ \\ ( -__, \\ \\,/ \\/ \\,/ \\, \\ \\ \\ \/\\ \\ \\ ( ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dan Lieberman Internet: cornpop(a)glia.biostr.washington.edu DBL Technology Services 17031 37th AVE NE Seattle, WA 98155-5426 (206)364-9088 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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unsubscribe
by zant0001＠gold.tc.umn.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

unsubscribe

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