December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: House Rules Committee marks encryption bill as "open"
by snyderra＠dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:54 PM 7/13/94, Kent Borg wrote: >"Shabbir J. Safdar" <shabbir(a)panix.com> wrote: >>I phoned the House Rules comm. this morning. They informed me that >>the committee voted 5-4 earlier this week to allow amendments to the >>General Export Administration Act on the House Floor. > >Stanton McCandlish <mech(a)eff.org> then copied it out to a zillion >destinations. > >Aren't we looking a bit amateurish? I'd called it "grassroots," myself. >If EFF is going to make official requests for faxes and phone calls it >should also make prompt official reports of the results. I want us to >be organized, I want us to look organized, I want the Congress to know >we are organized. Did the EFF actually make this call (for the House Rules lobbying)? I thought it was a different organization. Stanton McCandlish has a tendancy to forward anything vaguely EFF'ish to many, many places. He also forwarded that idiocy called "Telco Snooping" a while back. Does that mean the EFF supports/believes that? I hope not, or my membership dollars (and AT&T, and whoever else's) are being wasted. If the EFF did make this call, I agree they need to be reacting a bit quicker. The ability to get information out quickly and fairly cheaply is what the net/InfoBahn/Information Superhighway is all about. Bob -- Bob Snyder N2KGO MIME, RIPEM mail accepted snyderra(a)dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu finger for RIPEM public key When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

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Re: PGP bastardization (fwd)
by D.C. Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > He has no legal comeback (ha, there's an interesting irony about the > author of the world's leading piece of guerilla software...) and the > most he can do is apply peer pressure to get the guy to back down. The way I read it, he was concerned about including the hacked versions under the "PGP" banner. With this, I agree. PGP and prz will always be inseparable, and I sure wouldn't want someone to take something of mine, change it into something I didn't like, and keep my name on it. As a matter of respect and decency for anyone's work (and especially prz's), a separate and distinct identity should accompany the changes. =D.C. Williams

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Remailers and chain!
by mod＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I need a list of all applicable Cypherpunk remailers to use in conjunction with Chain... I've been out of the loop for a while now and need to get my info updated!

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Re: House Rules Committee marks encryption bill as "open"
by kentborg＠world.std.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

snyderra(a)dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu writes: >Did the EFF actually make this call (for the House Rules lobbying)? >I thought it was a different organization. It appeared to me that some individual phoned up the committee. That's cool, I thank him. My gripe is that it was EFF* that made the big stink to get us to send faxes in the first place. The people who started the stink should follow up. -kb * Possible "the Kent who can't keep his FLAs straight" retraction: If it was really CPSR that publicized the need for faxes and phone calls I will take back all the nasty things I said about EFF in this and my last message and apply them to CPSR--or EPIC (sp?) or whomever it was. All I know is it was not some guy on Panix who sent out the Big Call. -- Kent Borg +1 (617) 776-6899 kentborg(a)world.std.com kentborg(a)aol.com Proud to claim 32:00 hours of TV viewing so far in 1994!

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(None)
by Jeff Gostin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

gtoal(a)an-teallach.com (Graham Toal) writes: > He has no legal comeback (ha, there's an interesting irony about the > author of the world's leading piece of guerilla software...) and the > most he can do is apply peer pressure to get the guy to back down. OTOH, we owe it to him to respect his opinion. If he didn't have the guts to create the tool, this conversation would be moot. I say that we should respect his wishes, and not bastardize PGP, if only not to discourage other people to write "risky" software --Jeff -- ====== ====== +----------------jgostin(a)eternal.pha.pa.us----------------+ == == | The new, improved, environmentally safe, bigger, better,| == == -= | faster, hypo-allergenic, AND politically correct .sig. | ==== ====== | Now with a new fresh lemon scent! | PGP Key Available +---------------------------------------------------------+

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Re: Idle question...
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:12 1994/07/13 +1000, Ian Farquhar wrote: ... Quoting someone else > >BTW, the algorithm leaked, it was not reverse engineered. I do not expect >SKIPJACK to leak, as it's distribution would be VERY limited, even within >the NSA and chip houses. Even A5 was reputed to be known to only 2 or 3 >people within Motorola. ... How many have access to the masks?

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ecash-info (fwd)
by bart＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message:

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Re: PGP bastardization (fwd)
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Mike Duvos <mpd(a)netcom.com> > He has no legal comeback I'm not so sure. The code was released under the GPL. The names PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, and Phil's Pretty Good Software were not. People can make anything they want out of the code, as long as they also release it under the GPL and call it something else. Doesn't seem like a major artistic limitation. Yes, I agree with everyone who says prz has the right to insist that tr changes the name of the program. But prz's mail was *much* stronger than that and he was demanding editorial control of the code and the manner in which it was used. (Reread his letter if you missed that bit). That's what I'm saying he has lost by issuing the code under the GPV. (I'm not gloating - I wish he *could* have the right to do what he likes with his code, I'm just pointing out the facts - it's too late.) G

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How broad are PKP's patents?
by solman＠MIT.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Or more specifically, I'm interested in how broad PKP thinks they are. I understand that they claim all public-key systems, but am I correct that that claim is based entirely on the Diffie-Hellman patent expiring in April, 1997? Is Shamir's three-pass protocol as presented on page 376 in applied cryptography covered? If you you used his protocol with the RSA-like symetric algorithm suggested, is it covered under the RSA patent? Would an elliptic analog of this be secure? Are there other cryptographically secure communtative symetric ciphers that could be used in Shamir's three pass protocol? Being able to use this without infringing on any patents would effectively obviate the need for public key cryptography outside of authentication. What about probabilistic encryption using a BBS generator? Does RSADSI claim that because it too depends on the computational hardness of factoring? Thanks in advance, Jason W. Solinsky

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Probabilistic Encryption
by solman＠MIT.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

How secure do you guys think Probabilistic encryption using a BBS generator is? It looks like its every bit as good for key exchanges as RSA and somewhat better because of its speed. Would I compromise the security of the algorithm if I modified it to take the maximum number of random bits from each itteration of the BBS RNG and made the corrosponding changes in the encryption algorithm this making it faster? How dangerous is it (looking at system wide security) to generate the random bits ahead of time? Is it overkill to disable swaping from the location the random bits are held in? (keeping in mind that disabling swapping is a major pain since it is system specific). Thanks, JWS

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