December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Spotlight
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Spotlight *used* to be a really revolting rag; some people I was talking to recently who were selling it said they've tried to get rid of the anti-Semitism and racist hate stuff that the Carto folks were pushing and concentrate more on Truth (or whatever the conspiracy-wacko version of Truth is at any given time :-). I didn't buy their magazine to find out if it's really improved or if they're just saying it, but it was nice to hear them say it. The other magazine called "Spotlight" I've run into is the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's program handout, truly a hotbed of radical something-or-other-ism :-)

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Re: Encyption of data between nodes across the net (fwd)
by NetSurfer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Date: Fri, 22 Apr 1994 01:57:18 GMT From: Alexander Oliver <harpua(a)RS6.TCS.TULANE.EDU> To: Multiple recipients of list TCP-IP <TCP-IP%PUCC.BITNET(a)cmsa.Berkeley.EDU> Subject: Re: Encyption of data between nodes across the net padgett peterson (padgett(a)tccslr.dnet.orl.mmc.com) wrote: : For one-time communications, I suspect that off-line encryption using : PGP/ViaCrypt, SecureExchange, or some other system would be easier : to use. I'd like to get the PGP encrypting/decrypting files. Does anyone know an anonymous ftps site from where they can be had? Thanks. Catch y'all on the rebound, --Alex (harpua(a)mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu)

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Re: Pearl Harbor
by Mats Bergstrom 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

12 Apr 1994, Bill Sommerfeld wrote: (about the strategical impact of codebraking in WWII) > Sources: the book "Bodyguard of Lies". Unfortunately, my copy of the > book is at home; I don't recall the name of the author, but it's a > book on deception campaigns in World War II; the title is a shortened > form of the (approximate) quote "In wartime, the truth is protected by > a bodyguard of lies". With some effort I found that book deep inside my private library. By Anthony Cave Brown, 1975. It has been a while since I read it but I recollect that it is a straightforward tale of spying and deception incidents without much of a critical analysis. For those who want to read a rather different conclusion (i.e. negative) regarding the importance of the spooks in WWII (and whatever) I warmly recommend: The Second Oldest Profession by Phillip Knightley, 1986. Some quotes from the cover description: He shows how, once it had gained a toehold within a single government bureaucracy, the espionage industry expanded remorselessly and firmly established itself at the very heart of the modern state. Do they make any difference - even in wartime? Over the years intelligence work has probably attracted more con-men, fantasists and sheer incompetents than any other field of human endeavour and, stripped of their mystique, the secret world and the antics of its inhabitants are as much the stuff of farce as of melodrama.

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Greynet
by anonymous＠extropia.wimsey.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- uni> In other words, a greynet dealing in industrial Actually, I prefer your spelling. Distinguishes from "Gaynet". uni> One of the problems here is that business uni> intelligence becomes industrial espionage uni> partially by way of who is in possession of the uni> information. In my experience, it's the other way around. We've always had access to data which we couldn't claim, because it could not be demonstrated on audit that it came from a "legitimate" source. In other words, we've had to "launder" the data. uni> A graynet might as well be an open e-mail account. Or a SWIFT account in Liechtenstein. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCdAgUBLbd0kRL41rmHzZFFAQFHsQQ7BRFgw5RQpifUySuRIQv+pJJV4RYj+Ywr YA2A1/kP0zFQTuKyRlWk6brwQdCtx8N2p7mu8B0h/wMEuEzlWes5Cml+V5PmCZgp H6BzqQdqu8IO2bgc/j9WXU4qKcmldlEDCDe246Z+gbhzTo/eO7sVjyJ7Hl8kh9zW SqFB0awyEdeI8NjuPnjfLA== =+h+A -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- PGP fingerprint = 3D 87 80 D2 D1 11 9D 6E C7 35 E1 AA B6 7C ED 88

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Re: Spotlight
by f_griffith＠ccsvax.sfasu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>The Spotlight *used* to be a really revolting rag; some people I was >talking to recently who were selling it said they've tried to get rid >of the anti-Semitism and racist hate stuff that the Carto folks were pushing >and concentrate more on Truth (or whatever the conspiracy-wacko version of >Truth is at any given time :-). I didn't buy their magazine to find out >if it's really improved or if they're just saying it, but it was nice to >hear them say it. > I got a copy in the mail in January and couldn't tell much difference from how it was several years ago. This might be because I was already familiar with their themes - someone who hadn't seen it before might not have recognized what lay behind some of their stuff.

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DId you ever think...
by beckman＠sauron.cs.hope.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Did anyone ever think that maybe, just maybe, PGP was developed, and before the programmer started giving it away for free, that he was paid by the government to give them the key which can unlock ANY PGP locked document/file/etc??? I mean, wasn't it kind of surprising that the government would make such a big deal over this? To make hackers/phreakers in general think that this was the greatest encryption scheme available today for free (the programmer was paid to distribute his software for free, seeing that the sum was sizable), they made an act by (i don't know the specifics) arresting him, telling him to stop distributing, etc... Makes you wonder huh... It's possible. Maybe he wrote in the PGP program a loophole in the encryption so that he could decrypt anything that was encrypted by PGP. Maybe he is big brother. Maybe big brother is running him... I mean, has anyone ever gone thru the entire source code and checked if this PGP is a valid encryption scheme, or just the gov't slipping in their clipper thing without us knowing it. Reply here--no email please... The Devils Advocate, and preventing the Government Anarchy, Farmer Pete

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Entropy, WNSTORM and steganography
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

rarachel(a)prism.poly.edu (Arsen Ray Arachelian): > In a previous post you mentioned that PGP does high entropy... Do you have > any C source code that finds the entropy of a chunk of data? (I've written a > cypher program that hides the cyphertext in a stream of random numbers.) Entropy is: sigma(- q_i * log q_i), for all i where q_i is the frequency of token i occurring in the data stream. I don't know where I've put my old entropy program, but I cooked one up now, attached to the end of the mail. > Anyway, I'd like to put in an entropy checker into the program. You may have > seen me post a notice for it. It's called WNSTORM. I sent it to soda, I don't I don't get it. OK, maybe if you see "Entropy 1.0" you may feel more secure that the white noise is white noise, but I'm sure you're using some decent generator anyway. As far as using entropy to attempt to make the input (noise) and output (with embedded data) statistically similar goes, it's hardly enough. Entropy measure is not the most sophisticated of analysis techniques! If the real use of WNSTORM is to modify it for stego, to put things into the low bits, then entropy is *definitely* not a great method of ensuring that your stegoed image will be statistically similar to the original. There have been earlier discussions on methods of ensuring that the percentage of 0s and 1s remains similar before and after stegging (I just love that verb; I steg, you steg, he stegs, thou steggeth ;-) I personally believe, based on my not inconsiderable experience working with images both from the image-processing-programming and the digital-effect-touchup points of view, that very minor changes in images tend to be noticable to the human eye, after the right preprocessing. 'Ultimate' steganography may have to bother about very sophisticated statistical modelling, or neural networks (I know that many number theorists, and Bruce Schneier, intensely dislike the latter. They are quite useful, however, in building complex models on data with which one may have no idea what to do). I'm waiting for a large collection of 'before and after' stego images, to play with them and see what I find. (I once worked on a model to recognize faces, fast, by generating a pixel-density graph of monochrome edge-outlined images. Though the project died before the computer properly recognized a face, I could identify faces from their 'densitographs'.) ----- > know if it's up there yet. I haven't checked in a while. Anyhow unfortunatly > since you're in India I can't send you a copy. I wish I could, but I don't > want the damned ITAR cops on my ass. (Now if you were to obtain an account > in the USA, or one that looks like a USA address, you could get it yourself > without my intervention or knowledge... for all I know you probably have it > already :-) Probably... ;-) ----------------------------------- // this ought to work ;-) double entropy(FILE *fp) { double count[256]; // frequency of chars int c, i; double entr= 0; for (i=256; i--; count[i]=0); while((c=fgetc(fp)) != -1) { // for every char, count[c]++; // inc its count length++; // and the length } for (i=256; i--; count[i]/= length); // convert counts to frequencies 0..1 // sigma(0..255, -q_i * log_2(q_i)), -q_i bcoz log of fraction will be // negative, we'd like our entropy between 0..1, not 0..-1 for (i=256; i--; entropy+= -count[i] * log_base_2(count[i])); return entr; // bits_of_info per BYTE, as we counted 256 values. } ------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "What is civilisation rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in but a ribonucleic Voicemail +91 11 3760335; Vox/Fax/Data 6853410 hangover?" H-34C Saket New Delhi 110017 INDIA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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DId you ever think...
by Jeff Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: beckman(a)sauron.cs.hope.edu (Peter Beckman) > >Did anyone ever think that maybe, just maybe, PGP was developed, and before the >programmer started giving it away for free, that he was paid by the government >to give them the key which can unlock ANY PGP locked document/file/etc??? I No I didn't. I'll see Phil Zimmerman tomorrow in Boulder. I'm sure he'll find your conjecture ludicrous. -- 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 *****

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Re: cryptophone ideas
by jamiel＠sybase.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:09 AM 04/22/94 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >Let me be blunt. You aren't going to deploy a complete new cellular Do we have to? >phone system on your own. If you do think you are, you have lost your Obviously. >mind. You can't just hack a CDMA or similar phone to make it secure -- >the other end has to be speaking the same protocol. The other end is a >very expensive station built and paid for by your local cellular >provider which is unlikely to be easily modified by you the customer. Obviously. >You aren't going to be able to run your own cellphone system, either. Depends on how rich I get soon ;) >Perry I am not sure if I am not explaining myself clearly or if you are being intentionally dense. The point is that if we know our stuff, have way too much liesure time and are dedicated to difficult solutions, my cellular and your cellular could be hacked to make use of the DSP as a co/dec for what ever we wish it to. The rebroadaster, central switcher, etc have nothing to do with it- they don't particularly care if they are transmitting ramblings from your mother or your voice reversed in half second snips or a Madonna song. Obviously, analog transmission techniques make, say, a PGPPhone unworkable (even is someone was bored enough to port it to a DSP :), but scrambling and reassempling an analogue stream has nothing to do with the relay and could theoretically be performed by the telephones themselves. Note that I am making no case for this being in the least bit practical- I can think of much better thigns to do with my time. -j

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Re: DId you ever think...
by joshua geller 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

more paranoid than I like to get.... josh ___ > Did anyone ever think that maybe, just maybe, PGP was developed, and before the > programmer started giving it away for free, that he was paid by the government > to give them the key which can unlock ANY PGP locked document/file/etc??? I > mean, wasn't it kind of surprising that the government would make such a big > deal over this? To make hackers/phreakers in general think that this was the > greatest encryption scheme available today for free (the programmer was paid > to distribute his software for free, seeing that the sum was sizable), they > made an act by (i don't know the specifics) arresting him, telling him to stop > distributing, etc... Makes you wonder huh... It's possible. Maybe he wrote in > the PGP program a loophole in the encryption so that he could decrypt anything > that was encrypted by PGP. Maybe he is big brother. Maybe big brother is > running him... I mean, has anyone ever gone thru the entire source code and > checked if this PGP is a valid encryption scheme, or just the gov't slipping > in their clipper thing without us knowing it. Reply here--no email please... > > The Devils Advocate, and preventing the Government Anarchy, > Farmer Pete >

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