December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Good archive of AES algorithms?
by jim finder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to everyone who responded to me on the AES archive. Most people pointed me to the counterpane.com web site, which is very nice and well done, and answers most of my questions. Unfortunately, though, Counterpane itself is one of the candidates, so the site may not exactly be unbiased. Is there any site with a similar scope being run by a disinterested party? Thanks again! ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

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Jury Duty
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In 22 years of being qualified, I am facing my first jury duty summons as a regular employee and see no way out except to report. The old self-employment, financial burden exemption no longer applies. Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse myself (I live in AZ), or if I do decide to report and get on a trial, a web site on my rights to vote my conscious, aka jury nullification? The other option is to just lie, it says the penalty is that of perjury and it seems we shall soon have case law that perjury is no longer a crime. Not a facetious post, I have seen posts here on this before, but never really paid attention because it didn't affect me. If no answers, I will resort to a search engine. But I thought this letter would get me better quality advice. Thanks

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"kryz" <chrisharwig(a)hetnet.nl> crapped: > > Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="YEAR.EXE" > *STOP* sending such *RATSHIT* to this mailing list you unforgivable dickheaded *SACK OF SHIT* Keep your fucking .EXE files to yourself. *SMASH YOURSELF* on the head with your nice little m$-windoze manuals. At least that would knock you unconscious and you won't be bothering us with your *BLATHERING CRAP*. *WE DO NOT WANT WINDOZE CRAP* on this list, you *RABIDDOGWHOREMONGER* can you get that through that *FUCKIN THICK* skull of yours?

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New synonym for GAK
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Another one to add to the list: >U.S. approves export of crypto product without key recovery > >EE Times >(12/22/98, 4:13 p.m. EDT) > >RICHARDSON, Texas. Network security specialists ODS Networks Inc. has won >government approval to export its strong encryption products to companies in >42 countries without a government-backed key recovery feature. > >ODS said it is the first U.S. company to receive a blanket export license >from the Department of Commerce to ship its crypto product. The government >strictly controls the export of encryption products with a key-recovery >feature and key lengths of 112, 128 or 1,024 bits. > >The ODS products use an alternate "stream recovery" feature that allows users >to protect encrypted data. The company said its stream recovery scheme helps >resolve conflicting requirements for privacy and monitoring. > >ODS said its objective was to introduce a monitoring capability that protects >the rights of innocent third parties in criminal investigations. Their PR which was sent to several crypto mailing lists earlier today was conveniently cut off just before the GAK paragraph (and in any case they weren't lying, just being economical with the truth). Peter.

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Context Magazine interviews with Moore, Metcalfe, and Coase
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, I don't know about *heroes*. I mean, Tom Swift, or the Grey Lensman, were *heroes*, right? ;-). Still these are some good interviews, in complete keeping with the topic of my last pico-rant. Metcalfe talks about micromoney, even what looks, facially, like a georecursive market. Sans digital bearer transaction settlement, of course, but they'll all learn... :-). Also note where Coase guess that transaction costs (not just settlement and clearing, but the whole information enchelada of finding products, etc.) might come to 45% of GDP, or $4.5 trillion for the US alone. Stuff like that is why I say that digital bearer transactions will be the dominant value transfer technology of the coming geodesic economy. Cheers, RAH --- begin forwarded text From: Somebody To: Bob Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1998 02:11:14 "GMT" Subject: Somebody has recommended a CONTEXT Magazine article to you Somebody sent you this article from CONTEXT Magazine (http://www.contextmag.com) Note: ----------------------------- A short interview with three of your heroes. Merry Christmas! <Somebody's .sig> ----------------------------- http://www.contextmag.com/archives/199809/lawAndDisorder.asp We hope you enjoy it. CONTEXT Magazine --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Polish Telecommunications
by Jan Dobrucki 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Polish Telecommunications [Telekomunikacja Polska, TP S.A..] I went to Polish Telecommunications on the 21/12/1998 [na ul. Zamenhoffa w Warszawie - on Zamenhoff St. in Warsaw] and inquired what was being done about the Millennium Bug. What I got from a medium important chief was that there was an article not long ago about it, the name of the journal escapes me. She seemed pretty angry that I even asked about it. What made me angry was that she didn't know what was the bloody problem. Total ignorance. But I guess Polish Telecommunications are going to get a kick out it when the year 2000 finally does arrive. Later, Jan Dobrucki a.k.a. jdo -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Cyber-Knights Templar build 5.5.3ckt Comment: "Information is Ammunition" Comment: KeyID: 0x49281659 Comment: Fingerprint: F220 3529 2B65 FA9C F4DF 5F02 11ED D8BB iQEVAwUBNn+aCGiR2plJKBZZAQH3twf7BohEfDHGV+mpMILXcY9xGg3E7ZQJrYIz rLqVDFXwBjmxu+dyGetY05fsUSZRM/uWLpUcyY8rnIoQ/EngXfycrQ8iIHrUVQxD Jtbfd7JDV1h3XzM0s90LINTvVlCtHCcWTpjzqsOpkMKHiA9NjdpWO+lKphgekHAH gB15//qPDdtjOv9f4uzs1wonaGWU+sco8EZozGgO3NDZ3qW/rUtl+TmnmvnLXpFi xPgaZnozQajAO/Bls7SH7oT9BJSEV4+JMUQmNRi61BolOvFE1Io2MUpBjHuCOCii bHIX+9r3yAfJv+LmVgV61dSIWZIi3npo2yMD72nFtQFTwDrB+cLjTg== =7cUG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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"U.S. Allows Export Of Crypto Product ... strong-encryption productto 42 countries, without government-backed key-recovery"
by Ken Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19981222S0016 U.S. Allows Export Of Crypto Product (12/22/98, 5:38 p.m. ET) George Leopold, EE Times, http://www.eetimes.com Network security specialists ODS Networks has won government approval to export its strong-encryption product to companies in 42 countries, without a government-backed key-recovery feature. ODS, in Richardson, Texas, said it is the first U.S. company to receive a blanket export license from the Department of Commerce to ship its encryption product. The government strictly controls the export of encryption products with a key-recovery feature and key lengths of 112, 128, or 1,024 bits. The ODS products use an alternate "stream recovery" feature that lets users protect encrypted data. The company said its stream-recovery scheme helps resolve conflicting requirements for privacy and monitoring. ODS said its objective was to introduce a monitoring capability that protects the rights of innocent third parties in criminal investigations. - ----- Ken Williams Packet Storm Security http://www.Genocide2600.com/~tattooman/ E.H.A.P. Head of Operations http://www.ehap.org/ ehap(a)ehap.org NC State CS Dept http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/ jkwilli2(a)unity.ncsu.edu PGP DSS/DH/RSA Keys http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jkwilli2/pgpkey/ ___________________________________________________________________ Get Your Email Sniffed and Decrypted for Free at http://www.nsa.gov -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 5.0i for non-commercial use Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBNoEMeZDw1ZsNz1IXAQEqJgf6AnDNmzgTEOpTRzjtcTdh0qpMH94HssYl Jo+YfCjc/zcd5mEscnX+CtBrKKggODzzl5LoXiwuJ6BShJqpj8MdAZtah1PAG5NS N6pC3/JLr0lSqGeRcRo0NiVMdizv/78wbIFMXIOWk0e9v5Dts41r9THptHkfZqmA Zae4P63jBh/9DQtEwLwN6Vuj2gkRUZsfDPRbLeRjYzMMfosLdixZTPRbm/cY0KMD bZhn/KyH10UeLE9YFhkIffPw/UThzcDhX2IxQjzoX1QoWDVSlqJSdN0Q07LJsRvz pabhYr2oYq+TGc4SH3FN/qTuI0eNu1gmP2G42zemcAt43NoQwyWOFg== =kzlM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Break the code...from RSA [CNN]
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > X-within-URL: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9812/23/codecrack.idg/ > RSA WANTS YOU TO CRACK THIS CODE > > [INLINE] > > December 23, 1998 > Web posted at: 10:30 AM EST > > by Rebecca Sykes > > (IDG) -- RSA Data Security will host another contest to break the U.S. > government's Data Encryption Standard at the RSA Data Security > Conference in San Jose, Calif., in January. > > The 56-bit DES encryption algorithm is widely used and has been broken > in the contest before, most recently in July in a record three days. [text deleted] ____________________________________________________________________ What raises the standard of living may well diminish the quality of life. The Club of Rome The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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DOES U.S. INTERVENTION OVERSEAS BREED TERRORISM?
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

<snip from http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-050es.html> Executive Summary According to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, terrorism is the most important threat the United States and the world face as the 21st century begins. High-level U.S. officials have acknowledged that terrorists are now more likely to be able to obtain and use nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons than ever before. Yet most attention has been focused on combating terrorism by deterring and disrupting it beforehand and retaliating against it after the fact. Less attention has been paid to what motivates terrorists to launch attacks. According to the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, a strong correlation exists between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States. President Clinton has also acknowledged that link. The board, however, has provided no empirical data to support its conclusion. This paper fills that gap by citing many examples of terrorist attacks on the United States in retaliation for U.S. intervention overseas. The numerous incidents cataloged suggest that the United States could reduce the chances of such devastating--and potentially catastrophic--terrorist attacks by adopting a policy of military restraint overseas. <snop> <snip> In fact, the interventionist foreign policy currently pursued by the United States is an aberration in its history. Adopting a policy of military restraint would return the United States to the traditional foreign policy it pursued for the first century and a half of its existence before the Cold War distorted it. Such a foreign policy is more compatible with the individual freedoms and economic prosperity that define the American way of life. <snop>

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dbts: Georecursive Auctions (was Re: Friedman (The Younger)Sings...)
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 4:01 PM -0500 on 12/21/98, Somebody wrote: > > If it's on my hard drive, it ain't yours anymore, in other > > words. > > What are the assumptions? Assuming that you were given what is on your hard > drive, or can you have procured it by any means, like piracy, theft, etc. :-). I'm going to do a real rant on this, someday Real Soon Now, and you can see the germ of the idea in Freidman's talk, and in my old Shipwright rants <http://www.shipwright.com/>, and also, I think, on the Philodox site <http://www.philodox.com/>. More to the point, we all, as far as I can tell, stole it from Eric Hughes, who even went so far as to present a paper on the subject, long ago at a DEFCON far away. Who knows where *he* got it from, but that's enough geneology for the time being... The point I'm making above comes from Ronald Coase, the father of modern microeconomics, winner of Nobel for same, circa 1992?. The most important thing that Coase said, the thing which got him the Nobel, was that firm size was directly related to transaction cost. In an information economy, especially in a world of Moore's law (yielding increasingly geodesic networks, and the markets overlaid on them) and strong cryptography (digital bearer transactions, perfect pseudonymity, etc.), tranaction costs get *very* small indeed, and in a considerable hurry. To some, I believe clueless :-), people, the above means that we still get economies of scale, because the first copy of a given modern bloatware application, like Word for Windows, is enormously expensive compared to its replication cost, which is functionally free by comparison, even if you put a box around it, much less if you just put it up for download from the web. However, *I* say that if you can do profitable transactions in, say, the micropenny range, you get a world where the bloated, industrially-delivered code-in-boxes that we've all come to know and love starts to surfact, under its own weight, into smaller and smaller functional bits, each maintained by different, and much smaller, firms. I use open source software as my case in point. Notice that, since the cost of code itself is free, there is a huge, and expanding, diversity of very specialized code out there now. The writers of that code don't make any money on that code except by proxy, through enhanced reputation, and so forth. However, if you could drive the cost of *transactions* down, people *would* write code just for the money, and simply auction it off their websites to the highest bidder, and could do so, profitably, for rediculously cheap prices. More about that in a minute. Sure, Red Hat grosses $20 million, but that's more a function of the cost-domination of sneaker-netted CDROM over the still-scrawny lower capillaries of the internet. More to the point, I claim, it's the result of the cost of *credit-cards*, even *checks*, as a way to pay for code. Book-entry settlement, in other words, which is done "out of band", over private, hierarchical, and proprietary financial transaction networks. If it were possible to pay to download code, as you needed it, for instantaneously net-settled *cash*, and for sufficiently small enough bits of money, then the need, the price-economy, if you will, for large glops of code would go away. And, Coase's theorem says (I think) so too would the large firms required to generate those large glops of code. So, what we're left with is a world where the legalities of intellectual property are physically impossible to enforce, thus words like "privacy" cease to have any real meaning. If you can't enforce such an intellectual "property" law, it's kind of hard to call it a law, as most law professors and philosophers of law will tell you. Ironically, I claim, that's a very strong form of a *second* observation that Ronald Coase made, that you can't have markets without private property. Sounds like a motherhood, now, but he was the first person to articulate that clearly, back in the early part of this century, and it's one of the reasons he got the Nobel, of course. *My* variant on Coase says that you don't need *laws* to ensure private property in digital form. Cryptography will do just fine. Like I said, if it's encrypted, and it's on my hard drive, it's now *mine* no matter where I got it, laws or not. I mean, who's to know I have it to begin with, and, more to the point, who's going to take it away without my permission, especially in a world of encrypted offsite net.backups, m-of-n archival reconstruction, etc. Write software, not laws, to quote the my old cypherpunk chestnut. Yet, I claim, to finally answer your point :-), people who *make* new code in such abrave new world, *still* make the most money. No, not "publish", or even distribute new code, like Microsoft and Ingram do, but the actual guy plinking away in CodeWarrior, or whatever. The mind behind the code, the developer, let's call him, in a proper use of the now mostly corrupted word. Here's how. You write software for a living. You upgrade your existing code base, and you announce its availablity to the net. Everyone who has your code knows how good your work is, and they probably have a standing bid in to buy revs of it at some specific price, anyway. So, just like the specialist's book at the New York Stock Exchange, you, or your website's CGI, accepts those bids, highest to lowest, and, as new bids come in, you sort them into the queue of outstanding orders, by price, of course, :-), and accept them in that order. Notice something important, but obvious, here. The people who bid the highest get the first copy. We'll worry about Vickery variations on that auction some other time. Secondly, there's the fun part, the *recursive* part of "geodesic recursive" or neologically, and, this very afternoon, "georecursive", auctions. That is, if I paid a monster pile for the first copy, I must have such a profitable need for it that it's worth it to me to pay that much. Of course, one of the most profitable things I can do especially in a world where the net isn't quite geodesic enough yet, and Freidman hints at this in his Cato talk, is to *flip* that code. Frankly, this is nothing really now. It's done identically the same way that large institutions flip IP0's in the market for a hot stock, or, more properly, a recording company or software "publisher" puts "talent" under contract and remarkets their output in classical vertically-integrated, and I say, now-industrial, markets for those goods. So, back to the future, I pay through the nose to get to the first copy of your code, because I have an orderbook of my *own* to fill, and, more properly, I have sufficient bandwidth and processing power of my own to remarket it. Even more fun, someone *else* can buy from me, and resell what I sell them, *recursively*, ad infinitum, and, frankly I don't really *care* what they do with what I sold them, because I've already bought low and sold high. I claim, even with all this rampant "piracy", and, especially as the network gets more geodesic -- a process which these markets would probably *accellerate* by the way think what would happen if you could sell bandwidth this way -- the person who collects the most economic "rent" would be *you*, the originator of the new code. Just like a rock star, if the code was popular enough, but without the recording company. Well, actually, with lots of very *little* record *distributors*, all taking a haircut, and, rarely would any of them make anything near like what you made selling the first copies. I mean, new information always costs more than old information, right? And, of course, you, as a developer, will always have the *newest* information of all... Finally, it even behoves huge companies who control large blocks of intellectual property, record companies, and Microsoft, for instance, :-), to compete in this new kind of market, precisely *because* the the transaction costs are so low and the initial profit margins are correspondingly higher. It's *profitable* to play in this market, even when you're losing market share, paradoxically, to smaller players. Think of what happened to large movie studios in the 1960's and '70's, and how they were replaced, in the *production* of movies, by director-owned, mostly ad-hoc, "virtual" production companies, like Coppola's Zoetrope, or Speilburg's Amblin, or Lucasfilm/ILM. Even the new "studios", like Dreamworks/SKG are really director-run enterprizes (Spielburg and Geffen, remember?). The "directors", the "auteurs" of software, are pretty much the guys who write the code, yes? Everything else is just transaction cost. Cheers, Robert Hettinga -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.5.5 iQEVAwUBNn7OucUCGwxmWcHhAQFidwf+MZ8SLZffWvH7g+QMY6Q2Q3P4flVkEVpr keXiF7cXXKlv/zL48wX1fjan93MMwN65b9/o7aIe1Wvq1nQfFE1AhPaShYZwciz9 NpInA2+9Mrz30cU4Nj775gXHfCaFl68tUmKd8GwUBI4rwjrHKgFy5hFSWlxNQSFF yQ8idMnmC7fSIELZJOurejYM90nA4z9QZZibekVuP+u3e6ogkclCS8m3e3QznpWY yCTYHqFFc5JHHEHc4PCOALWei74/rTRVvaziEU3QQCvytXgsZu2j0OLkpukc4zqb eJD/+Zkc3d1pfTqxaR4tLatr+QXVEuxozwz3nyoo3mzfd0LbKdBdnA== =kKXa -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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