December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

17 Dec '03

Afabbro quotes someone in Finland saying, re anon.penet.fi: > Some users have flooded the server with hundreds and hundreds of messages. > That slows the server down greatly (posting and e-mailing times up to 3 days). > Some messages might have even disappeared because these hundreds of messages > fill up the diskspace and there is no more room for new messages. I wonder if this could be a concerted denial-of-service attack. Julf's remailer has had the highest profile of any, and he certainly has his share of enemies. Maybe somebody figured it was easy to shove a few thousand messages a day his way. This makes the server slower and less convenient for others to use, as well as putting an extra load on the trans-Atlantic links just for anonymous messages. It also could cost someone some money which could be blamed on Penet. This could be an attractive strategy for an enemy of anonymity. Hal

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

Philippe Nave suggests that an anonymous remailer should do more than delete the originator's origin from a message, it should also try to hide its own origin. In some networking protocols, you can do an ok job of that - dialup networks that don't validate origins, for instance, though even there the Phone Company may be able to trace who called whom. With other protocols, you can't cover your tracks very well - TCP/IP messages do carry their originator's IP address, and there's no way you can stop the receiving mailer from logging your address even if you lie to it when generating mail headers; some mailers not only log your address, but refuse to accept connections if you're lying. So they're going to find you anyway, if they're determined enough; the strength in the remailer system comes from the service provided by the remailer itself, and having the remailer forge its address on outgoing connections may annoy the people it connects to as much as being a remailer in the first place. Remailers become much more effective when you have a bunch of them in multiple countries, which makes it much harder for governments to pressure operators, especially if they want to avoid publicity. On the other hand, copyright laws are a sticky situation; Europe and the US operate under common conventions, and there may be more the US can do in, say, Finland for copyright violations than they can do for gambling or income tax evasion for a remailer at credit-suisse.com.ch . Bill

2 1

Fixing "Flooding" with Pretty Good Digital Postage
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal Finney writes: > I wonder if this could be a concerted denial-of-service attack. Julf's > remailer has had the highest profile of any, and he certainly has his share > of enemies. Maybe somebody figured it was easy to shove a few thousand > messages a day his way. This makes the server slower and less convenient for > others to use, as well as putting an extra load on the trans-Atlantic links > just for anonymous messages. It also could cost someone some money which > could be blamed on Penet. This could be an attractive strategy for an enemy > of anonymity. (Hal knows this, but for those who are new....) Charging some small amount remailing effectively fixes this problem...if someone want to flood a site with thousands of letters a day, and each one costs them 10 or 20 cents, the remailer site makes a tidy profit, which can then be used to buy more machines, a T1 link or two, etc. This "digital postage" could be a simpler subset of digital money, e.g., collections of numbers which are bought it advance and which can be used once and only once. Anonymity comes in various ways, such as by trading with others (lots of issues here, but not unsolvable ones, I think). "Pretty Good Digital Postage" would solve a lot of these problems, as well as making the remailer economy more normal, more market-driven. (Ultimately, we want "Mom and Pop remailers," with incentives.) No central authority needs to force this to happen, nor to set postage rates. Let those who wish to remail "for free" continue to do so, let those who set their rates too high be taught a lesson in market economics, and let the invisible hand work its magic. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

1 0

Public Hearings (Clip & DT!)
by Jeff Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Stanton McCandlish <mech(a)eff.org> Subject: Clipper/DigTel Hearings Date: Tue, 19 Apr 1994 19:33:27 -0400 (EDT) To: eff-activists(a)eff.org (eff-activists mailing list) This will be in tomorrow's EFFector Online: Subject: Upcoming Congressional Hearings on Clipper and Digital Telephony ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Congressional hearings on the Administration's Clipper/Skipjack initiative, and the FBI's draft Digital Telephony surveillance bill, and their implications for privacy and First Amendment rights, are to be held April 27 and May 3, 1994. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), of the Senate Judiciary's Technology and the Law Subcommittee, has expressed skepticism of the Clipper encryption scheme, and has called for hearings to examine the problems of this proposal and its implementation. This effort is due in part to all of you who played a vital role by responding to EFF's grassroots campaign to raise fundamental questions about security and free speech issues in relation to the White House proposal. The Senate hearing will be held on April 27, 1994, 9:30am EDT, Hart Building Rm. 216, and should feature testimony from the Digital Security and Privacy Working Group (a broad coalition of industry and public interest organizations, including EFF), Trusted Information Systems' Steve Walker, Whitfield Diffie of Sun Microsystems, a representative of the Justice Dept. (possibly Atty. Gen. Janet Reno), NSA Director Adm. Mike McConnell, and Ray Kammer of NIST. For more information, contact Beryl Howell at the Senate Judiciary Committee: +1 202 224 3406 (voice), +1 202 224 9516 (fax) Note: this is the full Committee's fax, so address faxes to "Berly Howell, Technology and the Law Subcommittee" or delivery may be delayed. Following the Senate Hearings, the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Technology, Evironment and Aviation will be holding a hearing to address related civil liberties issues of both the Clipper scheme and the FBI "Digital Telephony" proposal, which so far remains unsponsored. The hearing will be chaired by Rep. Tim Valentine (D-NC), and is scheduled for May 3, 1994, 1pm EDT, Rayburn Building Rm. 2318. Witnesses will include Ray Kammer of NIST, NSA's Clint Brooks, representatives from industry in a panel that will include USTA and TIA, expert witnesses Dorothy Denning and David Farber, and EFF's Jerry Berman on behalf of DPSWG. FBI appears not to be making a showing. The House hearing is being held "to review the Administration's policies and legislative proposals dealing with electronic survellance, privacy and security, ...the adequacy of the Computer Security Act in protecting goverment computer systems", and "the Administration's proposed Digital Telephony legislation and decision to promulgate a voluntary federal encryption standard". Futher information can be provided by Tony Clark of the Subcommittee at +1 202 225 8115 (voice), +1 202 225 7815 (fax) -- Stanton McCandlish * mech(a)eff.org * Electronic Frontier Found. OnlineActivist "In a Time/CNN poll of 1,000 Americans conducted last week by Yankelovich Partners, two-thirds said it was more important to protect the privacy of phone calls than to preserve the ability of police to conduct wiretaps. When informed about the Clipper Chip, 80% said they opposed it." - Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "Who Should Keep the Keys", TIME, Mar. 14 1994 -- 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 *****

1 0

What the heck is this? Optical noise encryption?
by Stanton McCandlish 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone know anything about this? How secure is this? If you have to have 2 "identical" lasers to pull this off, sounds like this would not be very secure, since there must be a pretty wide margin of error (I mean, how "identical" can 2 lasers be?) ____ from EduPage ____ OPEN SECRET Instead of using mathematical codes to scramble and unscramble messages, Georgia Tech physicists are devising a way of sending a message with electronic noise generated by a flickering laser. By connecting identical lasers over fiber optics, the same random pattern of noise is generated at both the sending and receiving end, and the receiving simply subtracts the noise to uncover the message. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution 4/7/94 E2) __ end _______________ -- Stanton McCandlish * mech(a)eff.org * Electronic Frontier Found. OnlineActivist "In a Time/CNN poll of 1,000 Americans conducted last week by Yankelovich Partners, two-thirds said it was more important to protect the privacy of phone calls than to preserve the ability of police to conduct wiretaps. When informed about the Clipper Chip, 80% said they opposed it." - Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "Who Should Keep the Keys", TIME, Mar. 14 1994

3 2

Re: Privacy and the lack thereof.
by joshua geller 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> Does everyone do what I do... carry little cash and when you >>want to buy something with cash go to a machine and take it out within an >>hour of your purchase? no. josh

2 1

Phase Cancelling Noise (What the heck is this)
by Jeff Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Message-Id: <199404200614.CAA17953(a)eff.org> Subject: What the heck is this? Optical noise encryption? >Anyone know anything about this? How secure is this? If you have to have >2 "identical" lasers to pull this off, sounds like this would not be very >secure, since there must be a pretty wide margin of error (I mean, how >"identical" can 2 lasers be?) The noise can be phase cancelled. Dan Healy did it all the time in '74 with the Wall of Sound double microphone set up for Grateful Dead. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLbTOCl/ScHuGXWgVAQHBhwQAkjGFC7Yjtjvo85jHTzcBFPvFOhSWM0Md gCGZ4aBr1VsjdG/NcP8/x6xuymZL8/qdk1ihHSyPv3Ev6EJBqBI28PMVCEl99p9+ xlObDyKnBNt8PowKpEeLBB7uMecN2hdMJ/DZM4r9H7rOaXKshraPQDG6mr32rGho Pd/WMM1NsGg= =uPJe -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- 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 *****

1 0

Re: anti-clipper autobomber
by rarachel＠prism.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ouch! I'm sorry I asked. I won't bother finding out anything else about Serdar, thanks. :-) I don't have any time to waste on megalomaniacs. Can someone convince him to "share" his software? If not, we can write our own. :-)

1 0

CMU's digicash
by bart＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: info(a)ivory.educom.edu (E-D-U-P-A-G-E) Subject: E-d-u-p-a-g-e 04/19/94 Date: Tue, 19 Apr 1994 21:12:53 -0400 ... SMALL CHANGE ON THE NET Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing NetBill, a computerized system for tracking and billing users for small transactions, such as a ten-cent charge per document. The developers hope NetBill will evolve into a universal accounting system on the Internet. (Chronicle of Higher Education 4/20/93 A31)

1 0

Re: Remailer Musings
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It might be worthwhile to create a remailer package for a remailer that only sends to other known remailers. People hesitant about running a full service remailer may still be willing to run a behind-the-front-lines remailer. Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

2 1