December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Anon Remailers + Clueless people = funny
by cdodhner＠indirect.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-------- Forwarded message -------- Newsgroups: alt.sex.pedophile.mike-labbe,alt.sex.intergen,alt.sex.bondage,can.infobahn,can.general,can.legal,soc.culture.canada,ont.general,alt.usenet.kooks Date: Thu, 2 Jun 1994 12:08:30 GMT From: nightfly(a)netcom7.netcom.com (Nightfly) Subject: Re: Huge Porno Ring uncovered in Canada - audio report available In article <2sj9a0$akq(a)agate.berkeley.edu> Tommy the Tourist <nobody(a)soda.berkeley.edu> writes: Notice to all computer geeks in Canada! Got any "erotic" Gifs ? Delete them quick! Various Canadian Law enforcement agencies are about to redouble their efforts to stamp out pornography. Canadian Police are calling for a large scale crackdown on child pornography. It all started with two video tapes found by the river. The investigation has blossomed and resulted in more than 30 arrests. [yabbada yabbada yabbada] Take this with a big grain of salt, people. Tommy the Tourist has to be the biggest dust case on the net. Verify this through another source before you start chewing up and swallowing your floppies. Note addition of alt.usenet.kooks in the Newsgroups: line. *blink* Nightfly *blink*

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Re: News Flash: Clipper Bug?
by pcw＠access.digex.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> One thing this shows, even if the application of the technique turns out >> to be too difficult to be practical, is that Dorothy Denning's evaluation >> of the design was worthless. That team should have found this themselves. >> No wonder she was trying to play it down in the NYT. > >It was my understanding that Denning was just looking at the Skipjack >algorithm, and not the clipper unit as a whole. I wouldn't be too quick >to condemn her on this point. Of course, Dorothy Denning could simply say, "Gosh, the Blaze result shows how to make Clipper _more_ secure for the average user. Now they don't have to worry about the government. I stand by my assessment that it is secure."

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Re: NYT article
by joshua geller 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> joshua geller says: > > an interesting commercial product might be software to > > do blaze's trick.... > You can't build it -- the EES is not available as an algorithmic > specification to the public -- only as hardware. quite true. I was mistaken. josh

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Denning and Clipper...
by pcw＠access.digex.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> One thing this shows, even if the application of the technique turns out >> to be too difficult to be practical, is that Dorothy Denning's evaluation >> of the design was worthless. That team should have found this themselves. >> No wonder she was trying to play it down in the NYT. > >It was my understanding that Denning was just looking at the Skipjack >algorithm, and not the clipper unit as a whole. I wouldn't be too quick >to condemn her on this point. Of course, Dorothy Denning could simply say, "Gosh, the Blaze result shows how to make Clipper _more_ secure for the average user. Now they don't have to worry about the government. I stand by my assessment that it is secure."

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Matt Blaze & Tessera Linked in NYT Again
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Check the first page of the Bussiness Section of this morning's NYT for an article by John Markoff on Matt and Tessera. " 'The point is that the back door has a broken hinge,' said William Ferguson, vice president of Semaphore Corporation" DCF

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Re: HACK - U HAVE NO PRIVACY
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please tell me you posted this as a joke and didn't even contemplate it for a microsecond! Haven't you ever heard of Craig Shergold? Say, you're not the same lefty who's listed in the alt.syntax.tactical FAQ are you? G

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Re: no subject (file transmission)
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

See Tim May's "blacknet" spoof from last year. Anonymous mail pools have been the subject of long discussions. We were talking about it just last week actually - I pointed out that with suitable newsclip software you didn't even need a designated pool group. G PS I got thrown off the machine I was using to run the newsclip stuff on, so no more experiments with that for a long time...

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The Delhi Detweiler
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

gtoal(a)an-teallach.com (Graham Toal): > PPS While in paranoid mode, I thought I'd mention that I've noticed > some of Detweiler's mannerisms emanating from email in New Delhi of > all places. Weird. I think I must be cracking up. I've been worried myself, BBSes here have had a number of posts against those who oppose our Government's recent moves to be nasty to BBSes. The style of these posts is very Detweiler; maybe you can now get a degree in Detweilerese? Or did you mean me ;-) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in Voicemail +91 11 3760335; Vox/Fax/Data 6853410 H-34C Saket New Delhi 110017 INDIA The National Fairness to Game Animals Association says: Support your right to arm bears! --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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IMP (was Re: ecash-info (
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

H > 2.) It seems to me that that e-cash, contrary to the status quo's H >thinking, H > is *critical* to internet commerce. H > H >No, it's not critical. Some form of transaction mechanism is H >critical. Privacy is not critical to the bulk of the economy, H >though. Face up to it. If it were, it would be so obvious that we H >wouldn't be discussing it on a mailing list. In fact, _we_ wouldn't be H >discussing it, but rather a whole bunch of bank vice presidents. The nicest thing about electronic money is not that anonymous digital cash is possible. but that the money is electronic. This means cheap transaction costs. This means that even if "banks" deploy ID-based rather than anonymous transaction systems, civilians can quickly step in and offer to broker anonymous transactions for those who prefer their privacy. Just as you can cash checks for other people today, you will be able to carry out transactions for others on the nets. Since it is much easier to operate these kinds of services in an electronic payment system with automation and on-line verification, suppliers should appear if the demand warrants. Since people will be in different physical locations and legal jurisdictions proof of wrong doing will be hard to come by. DCF "It is perfectly possible to overthrow the old order without picking up a gun or violating any (significant) law. If the conditions of human life change as radically and rapidly as they seem destined to, the (always bizarre) notion that groups of small oligarchies are competent to run the lives of everyone on earth will be swept aside almost accidentally as people move into their new lives." -- DCF --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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more info from talk at MIT yesterday.
by sommerfeld＠localhost.medford.ma.us 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The folks from the NSA said the following about key generation: - each escrow agency provides a "seed key", seed1 and seed2 - the box which programs the chip generates two random keys, random1 and random2 - for each chip programmed during that batch (which is "12 to 14 hours of production"), the box computes a classified deterministic function (U1, U2) = F(serial, random1, random2, seed1, seed2) to generate the unit keys They did *not* explicitly say that the random seeds were destroyed at the end of the production run. Also, someone asked "How do we know that the unit key isn't a hash function of the chip serial number?" The answer was: "You don't". They also confirmed Tom Knight's suspicions about what they're going to do when someone reverse engineers the chip and publishes the Skipjack algorithm & the family key: they've got a patent application filed, under a secrecy order; if the algorithm is published, they'll lift the secrecy order and have the patent issued, and use that to go after anyone making a compatible version. They also had a comment that they considered Blaze's findings to be mostly irrelevant, as the only people who would use it would be persons who *didn't* trust the escrow system, but *did* trust the algorithm... - Bill

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