December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: "ordinary public"
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in writes: > > It's not a good idea to take this debate to the ordinary public... > > Time readers, yes... > > Well, if "Time readers" aren't the ordinary public, then I give up. Well, they're a subset of the ordinary public that both reads and has some interest in news issues, but that's a reasonably good start. The folks who only watch TV are a bit different audience, and the folks who don't care about news are less likely to vote...

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

17 Dec '03

The problem with secure voice systems isn't doing the encryption, which is relatively easy; it's designing a voice compression system that's cheap enough and fast enough to work with the class of modems you're willing to use. 28.8 kbps modems are now available, using the Rockwell V.FC stuff until V.FAST gets stablized, but there are concerns about whether they'll perform well over international circuits, which are obviously one of the prime markets for secure voice. If you're willing to standardize on thise, you can get by with a number of cheap voice-compression algorithms at 16-24 kbps, but standardization really is somewhat important, as is cost for the consumer market. One of the speakers at today's BayArea cypherpunks meetings was talking about a prototype secure voice phone he's building, with a target price under $1000 for a bump-in-the-cord design. He had an alpha-quality board with him, blue wires and all, and was working on refining the design. Reasonably common DSP parts, Rockwell modem chip. One difficulty of the bump-in-the-cord design is you've got to include phone interfce circuitry, and deal with questions of whether to provide ringing voltage to the phone (90V has safety issues as well as circuit cost) or just provide a cheap speaker ringer. He was looking at Diffie-Hellman for key exchange for simplicity, (which you can afford to license if you're doing a reasonable-sized run of phones, though he hadn't negotiated prices.) The user interface was nice and simple - 3 LEDs and a "GO Secure" button, and the phone was designed to let you answer and originate calls in either secure or aalog-non-secure modes (maybe also digital-non-secure?) for convenience. Phil Zimmerman is working on a voice-PGP, but I don't know what he's doign in any detail. Bill # 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: brainstorming on cpunks' eve
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Matt Thomlinson posted some interesting ideas. > Other possible net services: random number services, For crypto use that's not very helpful - if the numbers go across the net, other people can see them. But they may be somewhat helpful as seed material for your own random number generator, along with hashes of your memory, random Ethernet traffic, etc. A slightly different application is for tax purposes - you may have a machine that needs to be used for business over 50% to make it a business asset rather than a personal one, and the amount of depreciation you can deduct is proportional to the business usage. Even if you can't make a *lot* of money selling random numbers and big primes or attempting to crack other people's keys for a small fee, it *can* be business, and certainly should keep the CPU depreciating rapidly at night.... > Also, one could set up a hashing/signing service, more akin to a time > stamp service. [....] "Digital Notary" system? There's certainly a need for such services. You have to be careful to avoid stepping on Bellcore's work, since I think it's patented, but related services may be practical and profitable. You have to decide how much you're willing to trust the timestamp that the service generated, as you would for a human notary. With a digital notary, there's a risk someone could hose the clock on the notary's machine, get something notarized, and reset the clock, so even if the notary's being perfectly honest it's not risk-free.

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Delete from mailing list
by leonar716＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I would like my name deleted from your mailing list. Too much junk mail.

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Re: Voice encryption
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The problem with secure voice systems isn't doing the encryption, which is relatively easy; it's designing a voice compression system that's cheap enough and fast enough to work with the class of modems you're willing to use. <- I dont want to use modems. -uni- (Dark) Who was the bay area speaker you were talking to?

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Color Copiers
by nobody＠soda.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

rustman(a)netcom.com says... >nobody(a)soda.berkeley.edu says... >> >> On a slightly related topic, I know of an instance where the >> Secret Service located a stolen color copier with somewhat >> greater speed than one might have expected. >> >> Is it possible that these machines either: >> (1) contain transponders >> or >> (2) hide a "signature" in their output ??? >1. Why was the secret service looing for stolen property? >2. This is an urban legend. There is no "signature" on the output of Canon CLC copiers. >because these copiers are so maintenance-intensive, and since Canon >*owns* most of the CLC dealers, it would be very easy for them to check >their s/n records when they are servicing the equipment (which needs to >be done when the devices are moved)! >pretty exciting, huh? >-- >Rusty H. Hodge, Cyberneticist <rustman(a)netcom.com> The _event_ is not an urban legend. (The signature hypothesis could be). Check the Chattanooga papers (late '92 or early '93). A copier was ...uh... relocated to a residence. I doubt that the manufacturer was invited to make service calls. The secret service was involved because of what was being copied. It could just be that the SS (funny coincidence of initials) is very good at its job, but I wonder.

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Voice encryption
by peace＠BIX.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You don't want to use modems?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? Well.. that kind of eliminates most encryption schemes that I know of. Peace oint me to a reference, I have NEVER seen it (mis)spelled Cypher. Peace

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CIA and the drug trade
by Lyle_Seaman＠transarc.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Since Aldrich Ames has been in the news recently, I think this is apropos. (the suggestion has been made that the CIA failed to uncover his activities because they ascribed his fabulous wealth to the coke business -- not that they would ever admit _that_, of course) From: ww(a)blythe.org (Workers World Service) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit CIA IS UP TO ITS EYEBALLS IN COCAINE DEALS Which banks laundered the money? By Deirdre Griswold No element of the state apparatus is more shielded from public scrutiny than the Central Intelligence Agency--the U.S. secret police whose operations span the globe. What do they really do? How much of the public treasury is diverted into their coffers? How many of the vicious wars now tearing apart poor countries were hatched in their inner sanctums? It seems that one thing they do is ship millions of dollars' worth of cocaine into the United States. That's according to an official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Annabelle Grimm, who was interviewed by the program "60 Minutes." The New York Times of Nov. 20 first broke the story. "I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000 kilos came in, funded by U.S. taxpayer money," said Grimm. A thousand kilos is over a ton of pure cocaine. CIA, COCAINE AND DEATH SQUADS The 1990 shipment was arranged by Mark McFarlin of the CIA and Gen. Ram"n Guilln Davis of the Venezuelan National Guard, said the Times story. What possible reason could the CIA give for arranging to ship a ton of cocaine into the U.S., where it was then sold on the streets? It was done to "gain the confidence" of Colombian drug traffickers, explained the agency. McFarlin's history includes a stint in El Salvador, where he worked with "anti-guerrilla forces" in the early 1980s. This is a euphemism for the government death squads that, together with the Salvadoran army, were responsible for the deaths of 70,000 people in the dirty war there. The guerrilla movement represented the workers and peasants. The U.S.-funded killers did the bidding of the landed oligarchy and the multinational corporations that have sucked El Salvador dry. What is the connection between drug trafficking and a rightwing political police agency like the CIA? Plenty. Recently, the CIA was implicated in covert support for the right-wing military in Haiti, which has deposed the popularly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At the same time, the State Department was grabbing headlines with its loud but ineffectual negotiations supposedly meant to return Aristide to his country. The Haitian military are known to be deeply involved in the highly lucrative drug trade--a compelling reason why they refuse to relinquish direct control over the government. During the Vietnam war, the CIA used its fleet of secret planes to ferry opium and heroin out of Southeast Asia--at the same time that its agents were assassinating Vietnamese villagers in the notorious Phoenix program. Drugs became a major social problem in the U.S. at this time. (See "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia," Alfred W. McCoy, Harper & Row, 1972) LINKS TO BANKS The biggest question, however, is the tie between covert government agencies like the CIA and the giant banks that launder hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money. It is public knowledge that the CIA deposits large amounts of money in the name of dummy companies. At the highest levels, bank officials obstruct public scrutiny of dubious transactions, including those involving large amounts of cash. When they are working with the CIA, all this can be passed off as necessary in the interests of "national security." In January 1985, Bank of America was fined $4.75 million in a civil penalty for failing to report more than 17,000 large cash transactions. Other huge banks paid lesser fines in this mild crackdown on widespread money laundering. No criminal charges were pursued. In 1989, after Treasury officials estimated that as much as $110 billion was being laundered by U.S. banks each year, the Bush administration announced it would regulate international money transfers by U.S. banks, and would set up a large computer center in Arlington, Va., to monitor information on money laundering. And there it has sat. No big indictments, or even civil fines, have been forthcoming against the big capitalist bankers. Repression and police corruption Instead, all the muscle has gone into sending U.S. paramilitary units into impoverished South American nations like Bolivia and Peru to interdict cocaine supplies--with no results--and beefed-up SWAT teams into oppressed communities in the U.S., where their racism and brutality are notorious. Repression against drug dealers on the street level is worse than futile. As the recent Mollen Commission hearings in New York showed, it is often linked to massive corruption among the police themselves. This latest revelation about the CIA and cocaine shows once again that drug trafficking can only be rooted out through a mass struggle aimed at the vital institutions of capitalist society. They are in it up to their eyeballs. -30- (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 West 17 St., New York, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww(a)blythe.org.)

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Re: Cypher?????
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hmm.. Perhaps you could point me to a reference, I have NEVER seen it (mis)spelled Cypher. -< how about cypherpunks(a)toad.com ^^^^^^

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guava
by nobody＠soda.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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