December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

NSA spy machine
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim posted a few days ago: I was intrigued by this disappearance, so I sent an e-mail message to Gunter Ahrendt. Through the joys of time zones, my message this evening was answered within minutes, from Australia. He told me the NSA machine remains, though it has been renamed, has been put under another site, and its performance rating has been recalculated based on a new metric. Gunter's latest report (in comp.sys.super) explains the new metric. Grepping for the name "SMPP," here's where I found it: 58) 16.46 - (APR-1994) [SRC] Supercomputing Research Center,Bowie,Maryland,US,root(a)super.org 1) Cray 3/4-128 [-4Q96] 11.46? 2) SRC Terasys ~ 5 3) SRC SMPP-4/2M [+4Q96] 503.33? This is also very intriguing. The machine formerly called the "NSA SMPP-2/2M" and expected to be located at NSA Central Security Service, is now to be located in nearby Bowie at the Supercomputing Research Center. End Tim ---------------------------- The NY Times says (in a business report): "The new Cray computer will be a hybrid design called the Cray 3/Super Scalable System. It will link two supercomputer processors with an array of chips containing half a million inexpensive processors that were designed by a Government laboratory connected with the NSA. * * * The Cray 3 supercomputer, two years late to market when it appeared last year, has not yet found a customer, and Cray executives said they were pinning their hopes for survival on the Cray 4, due to be completed in the first quarter of next year." End Times ---------------------------- Does Gunter's "Cray 3/4" = hybrid design as Tim suggests today? How do the numbers compare to Peter's? On another point, then, does today's contract report merely tell an out-of-date story, and if so, why? A way to keep Cray afloat? If so, why not Thinking Machines? Mr. Cray has been a loyal NSA supplier for many years, perhaps this is for his well-earned retirement. Okay by me. Maybe then he can afford to share all his supercomp secrets. John

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NSA spy machine (correction)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hold on, I misquoted Tim's suggestion on the SMPP in my earlier post. This corrects it. ------------------- Tim posted a few days ago: I was intrigued by this disappearance, so I sent an e-mail message to Gunter Ahrendt. Through the joys of time zones, my message this evening was answered within minutes, from Australia. He told me the NSA machine remains, though it has been renamed, has been put under another site, and its performance rating has been recalculated based on a new metric. Gunter's latest report (in comp.sys.super) explains the new metric. Grepping for the name "SMPP," here's where I found it: 58) 16.46 - (APR-1994) [SRC] Supercomputing Research Center,Bowie,Maryland,US,root(a)super.org 1) Cray 3/4-128 [-4Q96] 11.46? 2) SRC Terasys ~ 5 3) SRC SMPP-4/2M [+4Q96] 503.33? This is also very intriguing. The machine formerly called the "NSA SMPP-2/2M" and expected to be located at NSA Central Security Service, is now to be located in nearby Bowie at the Supercomputing Research Center. End Tim ---------------------------- The NY Times says (in a business report): "The new Cray computer will be a hybrid design called the Cray 3/Super Scalable System. It will link two supercomputer processors with an array of chips containing half a million inexpensive processors that were designed by a Government laboratory connected with the NSA. * * * The Cray 3 supercomputer, two years late to market when it appeared last year, has not yet found a customer, and Cray executives said they were pinning their hopes for survival on the Cray 4, due to be completed in the first quarter of next year." End Times ---------------------------- Does Gunter's "SRC SMPP-4/2M" = "hybrid design" as Tim suggests today? How do the numbers compare to Peter's? On another point, then, does today's contract report merely tell an out-of-date story, and if so, why? A way to keep Cray afloat? If so, why not Thinking Machines? Mr. Cray has been a loyal NSA supplier for many years, perhaps this is for his well-earned retirement. Okay by me. Maybe then he can afford to share all his supercomp secrets. John

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Re: RemailerNet
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> lcottrell(a)popmail.ucsd.edu (Lance Cottrell) writes: > >Say I post a message through remailers to Cypherpunks giving one of these > >reply blocks. The TLA need only send a flood of known size messages to this > >address, and look to see where the pop out of the net of remailers. Even if > >all messages were quantized and only reconstructed by the final recipient, the > >TLA could send timed bursts of messages which (even with reordering) would > >allow a statistical determination of the recipient. In particular, this is rather rough on the "reorder and remail after N packets" approach to remailers - if N is 10, and the Bad Guys can inject messages into the system, they can tap and duplicate messages going into the remailers.... Bill

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Re: (fwd) Anonymous posters & Misinformation = Net pollution
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

McDaniel posts the following to several newsgroups, and it was forwarded to cypherpunks: > The problem: Anonymous posters supplying pseudo-news reports or > otherwise wasting bandwidth in groups more concerened with fact > or at least genuine concerns (such as political talk groups and sci groups.) > > The solution: Limited anonymous posters to forums where accountability > for what one says is of little concern (such as rec groups where > applicable.) OR provide the owners of moderated groups with detailed > accounts of the true identity of any anonymous poster who post to > a serious newsgroup and make that procedure known to the would-be > anonymous user. > .... > I believe that anonymous posting is a valuable service in many forums. > However, it seems that service is being abused in political and technical > newsgroups. > > I suppose yet another solution would be to make widely known the > general untrustability of anonymous posters in groups where truth and > fact are paramount. But this letter should go a tiny ways towards that goal. The problem: there's *far* more data on the net than anyone can possibly read, and you don't want to waste your time reading news from anonymous posters because they generally post more noise and less signal than you like. (I can sympathize with that, by the way, and it's often harder to identify anonymous users than pseudonymous or true-name-using posters.) I also have different preferences than you do about what newsgroups I think are more likely to benefit from anon-users and what newsgroups are more likely to be harassed by them, and I consider your use of the term "truth" when referring to talk.politics groups to be somewhat amusing... And the next guy down the road will want something different from both of us. Some solutions: 1) censor people you don't like, so nobody can read them. (This is Evil.) 2) find ways to not read postings by anon-users, or responses to those postings - this is *much* easier - popular newsreaders, such as rn, give you KILL files or other sorts of bozo filters which let you ignore articles with specified authors, subjects, or other header lines (e.g. references to articles from machines frequented by anon-users, such as anon.penet.fi.) (Unfortunately, this is somewhat tougher when people run remailers on popular machines, e.g. netcom) 3) only read articles from people you consider to be non-bozos. The difficulty is identifying them when you don't read their articles; maybe you can do it by reading articles that non-bozos give supportive replies to. 4) have people rate articles, and only read articles with high ratings; this sort of system will probably evolve as volume increases further. Moderation is one approach to this; there are heavily-moderated groups and minimally-moderated groups, and we may need to evolve a parallel ratings mechanism somehow... Joe Bob says "Check it out!" Go for the non-coercive solutions, and find ways to ignore stuff you think is worth ignoring. I've been reading news since the days when I could real *all* of it, and technology for selective reading has been a *lot* more useful than telling people not to post when they're bozos. There are probably some appropriate newsgroups to discuss how to build better newsreaders. Bill Stewart # Bill Stewart AT&T Global Information Solutions, aka NCR Corp # 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 Phone 1-510-484-6204 fax-6399 # email bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart(a)attmail.com # ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465

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Re: Something of Interest (fwd)
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:03 AM -0700 7/19/97, Alan wrote: >At 01:51 AM 7/19/97 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote: >>Hey, I'm here. Didn't get one of these IRS msgs at any of my accounts. >> >>Is it just me, or does anyone else remember a similar message being pumped >>out about the same time Bell was raided (April 1). > >I will check the archives... > No need to check. Recall that the odd name, "IRS Investigations," was our first word on the Bell raid. I didn't comment earlier when Declan asked, as I thought he was making a rhetorical point. --Tim May Voluntary Mandatory Self-Rating of this Article (U.S. Statute 43-666-970719). Warning: Failure to Correctly and Completely Label any Article or Utterance is a Felony under the "Children's Internet Safety Act of 1997," punishable by 6 months for the first offense, two years for each additional offense, and a $100,000 fine per offense. Reminder: The PICS/RSACi label must itself not contain material in violation of the Act. ** PICS/RSACi Voluntary Self-Rating (Text Form) ** : Suitable for Children: yes Age Rating: 5 years and up. Suitable for Christians: No Suitable for Moslems: No Hindus: Yes Pacifists: No Government Officials: No Nihilists: Yes Anarchists: Yes Vegetarians: Yes Vegans: No Homosexuals: No Atheists: Yes Caucasoids: Yes Negroids: No Mongoloids: Yes Bipolar Disorder: No MPD: Yes and No Attention Deficit Disorder:Huh? --Contains discussions of sexuality, rebellion, anarchy, chaos,torture, regicide, presicide, suicide, aptical foddering. --Contains references hurtful to persons of poundage and people of color.Sensitive persons are advised to skip this article. **SUMMARY** Estimated number of readers qualified to read this: 1 Composite Age Rating: 45 years

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USPS key server
by peace＠BIX.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Post from FEDERAL computer week 8/15/94 The US Postal Service said this month it will establish a new electronic commerce service Post from FEDERAL computer week 8/15/94 The US Postal Service said this month it will establish a new electronic commerce service nsure that their electronic transmissions are authentic and tamper proof. Richard Rothwell, senior director of technology integration at USPS, said last week that the service IS BEING TESTED internally by USPS personnel and withiin the FAA. Although many potential hurdles remain, Rothwell said the service may be publically avaiable as early as next year. ...Much more... verrry interesting

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Re: Are \\"they\\" really the enemy?
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) on Thu, 18 Aug 4:41 PM >I'd be a lot more interested if there were >some tie-ins to crypto policy and technology. Yep, this is what I want also but need participation by others so I don't stick out too much and get Dixon-ized by Perry, or, bless him, Nzook-ized by Graham. Just see what happens when I post shortly. John

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Re: Remailer ideas
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Hal <hfinney(a)shell.portal.com> > . . . I still think that there would be real utility in the > ability to specify that a particular piece ofmail should be > re-transmitted if it does not get delivered to the destination > machine within a certain period of time. > That's one reason I like the "enabledmail" approach. All we have to do > is persuade everyone . . . . You *can't* get everybody to agree on anything, or limit themselves to anything. It'll be a long time before everybody starts supporting all the X.400 semantics, especially since people keep introducing useful competitors like MIME or painful ones like MicroSoft Mail - I'd be happy to get people to all agree to support RFC822 and SMTP... In the context of this discussion, automatic replies are probably unacceptable for many remailer-users, and don't work very well for replying to anonymous senders. Confirmation really does have to come from the user, and can only work if the user is able to build a return path. A useful surrogate for end-to-end replies are link-based bouncegrams. I'm not sure how much security you lose if you get remailers to support even one-hop NAKs, since the delays inherent in reordering mean you need to keep a return path step around in the remailer at least until you can do address validation; perhaps you could at least bounce on invalid syntax, but even that means decrypting incoming messages a while before sending and keeping them around in cleartext, which is Bad (or doubling the decryption work.) Bill

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Re: Voluntary Governments?
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Hal > What does it mean to speak of a government in cyberspace? It is the > government in physical space I fear. Its agents carry physical guns > which shoot real bullets. > ................................................................ Yeah. I recently reread Vinge's _True Names_; the protagonist is disturbed one day by a bunch of armed government thugs walking up to his house and letting him know they know his cyberspace alias, and that he'd better help them catch his friends or he'll lose his National Information Infrastructure Users' License. (It's not called that, but it's still a good prediction of what happens when you let government build the superhighways - he gives in because 98% of the jobs, and all of the good ones, require use of computer terminals.) Without cryptography, all you've got left is security by obscurity, the main technique used by the hackers in the book; even cryptographic systems need strong enough implementations built around the mathematically-strong parts to be truly safe. Bill

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Oops, Sorry
by Jeff Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sorry guys. I'll kill the message agent asap. I forgot about it. -- PGP PUBLIC KEY via finger! JAFEFFM Speaking & Thinking For Myself! * eagle(a)deeptht.armory.com email <info(a)eff.org> * *** O U T L A W S On The E L E C T R O N I C F R O N T I E R **** ***** Committed to Free Public Internet Access for World Peace ***** "When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl!" JPB

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