December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Message Havens
by Karl Lui Barrus 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > People could use anonymous remailers to send in messages, and use > pseudonyms to protect their privacy. It occured to me that perhaps getting messages to a message haven won't require anonymous mail to protect privacy (who you are communicating with. You would still need to use a remailer to hide the fact you are using the message haven!). In each message, the author could specify what to name the next reply. If messages are encrypted, then all a watcher would see is incoming messages from various people, but not be able to figure out who is reading what message, and what messages are responses to what other messages. This would require the service to reject unencrypted messages, which would be easy enough. But it would still require people to "download" everything and sift through it at home, to hide what messages they are interested in. Karl Barrus klbarrus(a)owlnet.rice.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLdG1c4OA7OpLWtYzAQH2MQP/f5M/4QHHHl8qg85ikGCkmFiN6wrs+DHc 3iIpogSO5oj/tJZ0xnHzky8B3Ll2rjmHgW+vH5hxTONw+2TZ5+5aFjJbqCs1pL1a rYFFyUP6AOj3809G1gSuLwa85iw5jY5fT/JZsMH82uL2v5i2839jQDZo1SCHff/1 77gQgjP9Agk= =7p6A -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: MIT TOC SEMINAR--ADI SHAMIR--MONDAY--MAY 16--4:15pm
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:07 5/11/94 -0700, Paul E. Baclace wrote: >I'm very curious as to how humans can directly decode encrypted >pictures. Do they stare at it for 10 minutes and go "ah, there >it is". ... About 10 years ago there was a Scientific American article about visual encypherment. The decoder required no computing hardware. A one time pad was available at both ends in the form of an array of 1000 by 1000 random black or white pixels in the form of a transparency. When it was time to code a black and white image an array of pixels were produced with each pixel being black with a probility proportional to the darkness at that point of the 'plain-image'. That was exclusive ored with the one time pad. This yielded a random set of black and white pixels and was transmitted physically by insecure courrier. It it reached the destination it would ideally be exclusive ored with the other copy of the one time pad. The receiver could more easily align the cypher-image with the one time pad and see a fairly good image. This yields the 'and' function in place of the 'xor' and provides about half of the image quality in the information theortic sense.

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No Subject
by mlshew＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Version 0.1--This will change in case of conflicts, etc. I'll post V1.0 on Wednesday 5/18/94. This is version 0.1 of this file. For the most recent version, try the following: o finger mlshew(a)netcom.com, to read my .plan. (This file.) o get "plan" by ftp in netcom.com:/pub/mlshew This was originally sent to the cypherpunks and extropians lists. If you would like to meet informally with other readers of these lists during next week's COMDEX, I would suggest meeting Tuesday (5/24/94) at noon, directly above the food court in CNN Center--------->+ | | Map: (Badly out of scale and oversimplified to make sense | for walkers but not drivers) | | | | | | | -------------------+ +---------------------------------|-------------- Marietta Street | -------------------+ +---------------------------------|-------------- | | | +----------------+ | | +----------+ +-------V-----------+ | World Congress | | | | The Omni | | CNN Center | | Center (COMDEX)| | | +----------+ | (Food Court here) | | Walk this way like the rest of the mobs of people | +----------------+ | | +-------------------+ | Inter- | +--------------------+ |national| | MARTA Rail Station| | Blvd. | | (The local subway) | | | +--------------------+ | | | | Lots of very expensive parking here for those | | who want to drive directly to COMDEX in the | | middle of incredible traffic and raise their More Parking | | blood pressure instead of taking a shuttle from | | their hotel, or parking at a free-parking MARTA | | lot and taking MARTA in, as is the sensible | | way to go about it. (For those who haven't been to an Atlanta COMDEX before, the CNN food court is a place where almost every COMDEX attendee is likely to eat at least once during the week. If you happen to forget, loose, or never receive the ASCII map originally above this paragraph, any random person you might ask for directions can probably point you in the direction of the "CNN Center food court.") The court is in the center of the floor you will (likely) come in on. So don't go getting confused when you see smaller sets of restaurants and tables and chairs as you enter. That's not the central court. You won't miss it, just keep going in. (Of course, you won't have much choice in the matter: There will be a mob of hungry Comdex attendies behind you, and stopping in their path is simply not a viable option.) Go to the food court, and look up. You will see a single pedestrian walkway one floor above you. That is where we'll all be. Take yourself and your food up one floor, and enjoy the pleasant conversation. (Note that up on the walkway there's no place to put your food, but that's okay, because there's no place down in the food court either--it's _really_ crowded. Down there there's hardly a place to stand, much less sit, but go up one floor, and it's a virtual dessert.) I'd like to make a publicly available list that includes the following. (To be appended to this file.) o Persons coming to Spring Comdex, interested in attending a meeting such as this, and wishing to let that and related information be known to the world. o Whether they can make the noon Tuesday meeting. o Where they heard this announcement. o Good/bad days and times. Be specific but brief. Please include this in any event, so if 3 people say only Wednesday, and 7 don't bother to mention that Wednesday is impossible for them, that I don't switch to Wednesday. No guarantees of course. o Personal interests. (Explained below) o Misc. other information they want known to the world. If you would like to enter or modify yourself in such a database, modify and mail a form such as one at the end of this file to mlshew(a)netcom.com, with this subject line or "comdex meeting info". Feel free to also add in: o Any job openings you know about. (Esp. EE/DSP/Programming) :-) If you would like to tell me and everyone to expect one more person, just mail the form with a number "1" in the "Name" column, so you needn't broadcast your name. If you'd like to tell no one anything and just show up, that's okay too. I'll append the information (edited!) to the end of this file. As to why I included a field about interests, it will allow everyone to mull over everyone else's idea of what would be nice to talk about, the theory being that it might help conversation naturally bend towards topics all are interested in. As to the other information, it's also to help other people who might want to get together to do so if they don't want to go to this meeting. (Or to remember remember to bring that book they borrowed from another person three years ago.) It is not a "vote" on what time the get-together will be. Appended are two sample forms (since this is the first version: V0.1). Delete everything else, put in your own info, and mail it back to me. See you soon! Mark Shewmaker mlshew(a)netcom.com Noon Tue. OK? Name Where heard Can Schedule at Interests ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Y Mark Shewmaker extropians Flexible all days Schelling points of mlshew(a)netcom.com cypherpunks lunch meetings near conventions Thinks this is a great place to meet, and a nice place to watch everyone come and go. Need an employee? Apply now before prices go up. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- N One fake anonymous never tell MWF 10-2 Mental Cryptography person just as an example I just kind of feel silly telling everyone that I'm going to be there; I look forward to meeting you there, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Cypherpunks Goals: Bad debate drives out good debate
by Derek Upham 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Cypher version of Gresham's Law: bad posts drive out good posts. > (The same is being seen in talk.politics.crypto, with the neverending > Sternlight vs. Everybody Else dominating the traffic by a factor of > 20-to-1. Detweiler recently reappeared (as tmp(a)netcom.com) and is back > to debating _himself_ and answering his own delusional posts.) Let's face it: Usenet is inherently broken. There are two ways to filter for content: filter at the newsgroup source via moderators, or filter at the newsgroup destinations via killfiles. Moderating does seem to get rid of most of the cruft, but the moderators are required to read every post that comes through, and, worse, make judgements with some degree of impartiality (which is not always possible). On the other side, kill files are useful, but only to a certain degree. Blocking sertain key words in subjects doesn't help against topic drift; blocking Sternlight won't help you in the slightest when umpteen other people respond to his posts. The situation for most mailing lists is just as bad. Anyone can send a post to a mailing list, and there are usually no moderators to enforce content. A reader's only recourse is another kill file---and most mail killing facilities are pretty lousy when compared with their Usenet counterparts. The only thing mailing lists have going for them is that they tend to be less obvious than newsgroups. Harder to find. To fix them problem, then, we either have to either improve the kill files or improve the moderation. Personalized AI filters (see Moran's "The Long Run") will be spiffy when they arrive, but they're not going to be arriving any time soon. This leaves moderation. If we increase the number of moderators, we can reduce the load on each and take into account as many tastes as possible. In the best case, the moderators would consist of all the readers of the newsgroup. How would this work? Assume we're running a mailing list (Usenet v.2.0 will be just a special case of a mailing list). All posts are sent to the central site. The mailing list software picks one e-mail address from all of the list receivers, and forwards the post to that e-mail address (keeping the original post on file). The forwarded post will have a subject line something like: Subject: Post ACK, list cypherpunks, msg #435A77CF with the post contained in the body. The receiver reads the post, then replies to it. The reply subject line will be: Subject: Re: Post ACK, list cypherpunks, msg #435A77CF and the body will contain "ACK" or "NAK" or "post" or "dump" or whatever. This goes back to the list maintainer, who can check that: * The message in question is in fact outstanding. * The person who sent back the evaluation was the one who was supposed to. * Other sordid details. If the message was approved, it goes to everyone. Otherwise, the original poster is informed that the post did not meet standards. We might even want to forward the evaluation body to the original poster; this would allow the evalutors to send comments explaining why the post was rejected. The nice thing about this technique is that the more people a person pisses off, the less likely it is that his or her posts will ever see the light of day. Even better, aware readers can nip MAKE.MONEY.FAST and Green Card Lottery posts in the bud. Something very similar to this exists now in the Internet Oracle, so distributed moderation ought to be possible. I suspect that the mail- handling features could be incorporated entirely into "procmail" and "SmartList" (a filter program and a mailing list program), although the databases would need C maintenance programs for efficiency. I'll go to bed and await comments. Derek

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Re: Cypherpunks Goals: Bad debate drives out good debate
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You have a good summary of what's going on. Personally I've found it useful to create a filter for my cypherpunks mail to send posts from people whom I respect more into a seperate folder such that the signal-to-noise ratio in that folder is higher. When I have more time I read the folder with the lower signal-to-noise ratio, but I often do not have those resources. I don't really have to deal with bad posts because I don't see most of them unless I have some extra time on my hands... Others interested in rational discussion and debate and actual-doing-things might find this a useful technique. Ditto. Actually I gateway c'punks straight into a local 'mail.cypherpunks' group, with the hack script below (there might be an easier way, but I had the code around anyway). First, I created a user called 'cypher', then gave it this .forward: suilven% cd ~cypher suilven% cat .forward "|mail2news mail.cypherpunks cypherpunks(a)toad.com" Since I'm running the smrsh security wrappers, mail2news has to be in the special smrsh directory, /usr/adm/sm.bin. mail2news: #!/usr/contrib/bin/taintperl # # mail2news - Incredibly simple program to take a mail message from # stdin and insert it into a moderated newsgroup so you can # read mailing list messages via news instead of mail. # # Usage: mail2news <newsgroup> <reply-gateway> # # Author: Stephen Hebditch <steveh(a)orbital.demon.co.uk> # # Operation: # 1. Create a new local group (e.g. orbital.lists.uri) with moderated # status to contain the local messages. # 2. Make sure the newsgroup isn't going to propagate outside your # system. # 3. Modify mailpaths (C News) or moderators (INN) so that your local # replies get sent back to the mailing list. # 4. Use a mail filter program (such as comes with elm) to divert # messages arriving from the list to this program instead. # # Add local config info here # Make secure (from 'perl' man page) $ENV{'PATH'} = '/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin'; $ENV{'IFS'} = '' if $ENV{'IFS'} ne ''; $path = $ENV{'PATH'}; # Not tainted $domain = "suilven.an-teallach.com"; $rnews = "/bin/rnews"; $update = "/usr/local/bin/op updatetrn"; $user = "news"; # If badly installed, news will get the replies $newsgroup = $ARGV[0]; if (!$newsgroup) { die ("No newsgroup name supplied\n"); } $replyaddr = $ARGV[1]; if (!$replyaddr) { $replyaddr = $user; } $body = 0; $kill = 0; $subject = 0; open (NEWS, "|$rnews") || die ("Can't run $rnews: $!\n"); print (NEWS "Newsgroups: $newsgroup\nPath: $domain!not-for-mail\n"); print (NEWS "Followup-To: poster\nReply-To: $replyaddr\n"); while (<STDIN>) { chop; if (!$body) { if (/^Subject:\s+(.*)$/io) { if ($1 ne "") { $subject++; print (NEWS "$_\n"); } } # Add here any headers you wish to kill elsif (/^(Received|Return-Path|X400-Received|Newsgroups|Path|To|Reply-To):/io) { $kill++; } elsif (/^From\s.*$/io) { } elsif ((/^\s.*$/io) && ($kill)) { } elsif ($_ eq "") { $body++; if (!$subject) { print (NEWS "Subject: <no subject>\n") } print (NEWS "Approved: news@$domain\n\n"); } else { $kill = 0; print (NEWS "$_\n"); } } else { print (NEWS "$_\n"); } } close (NEWS); system($update); exit (0);

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Re: PGP 2.5 available from Electronic Frontier Foundation ftp site
by Tommy the Tourist 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- From: Stanton McCandlish <mech(a)eff.org> Date: Wed, 11 May 1994 16:46:49 -0400 (EDT) Despite the patent & licensing issues being resolved, PGP is still not legally exportable from the United States (except to Canada), due to ITAR export restrictions which categorize cryptographic materials as weapons of war. Thus, EFF can only make PGP and other crypto tools and source code available to US and Canadian nationals currently residing in the US or Canada and connecting to EFF's site from a US or Canadian site. I was under the impression that NAFTA is the reason that Canada is included. Am I misinformed? If NAFTA is the reason, isn't Mexico equivalent to Canada in this context? Could someone clarify this aspect of the export situation, or perhaps point me at a document that explains the situation? Zeke -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLdJIuBVg/9j67wWxAQEebAP/flhqUugfCUJ9at1nI8kCbkXiF10NYfcE s+1+ZFNnvz16gwI/O7nEfrIHKQl6mqmqT8T4e2JCsMiw7uM7L3vYIKHJvRek45gk /6JoUE7sjVb8nyvyct9sKeExAGqKFLxAAsOZfYno88qOMAE4nc3QRxMoqLb3XDbI EbxPLyo8T/s= =RqOv -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------ To respond to the sender of this message, send mail to remailer(a)soda.berkeley.edu, starting your message with the following 7 lines: :: Response-Key: ideaclipper ====Encrypted-Sender-Begin==== MI@```$YS^P;+]AB?X9TW6\8WR:>P&2'9,7.YM5[D--('+[6(0O]013@CTWLQ FKWZ$M2G9>G1>/=5O1[0U.E)J&63=DHF($P$KX#I8T]5&9!GFQ]@` ====Encrypted-Sender-End====

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Re: State Dept Response to my second CJ request
by werner＠mc.ab.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Wed, 11 May 1994 15:37:01 -0400 >From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)snark.imsi.com> > >I'd say the obvious next step is a lawsuit -- at this point there is >standing and little point in accomodating the clowns. > >I've already offered Phil a donation towards this suit, and if he >chooses to pursue it I encourage others to donate money towards it as >well. In my opinion there is no more important action this year in the >area of cryptography than Phil's export license request. Please let us know if such a suit is filed. I will gladly contribute. tw

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San Jose Mercury News Washington News in Brief Blurb
by koontzd＠lrcs.loral.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thursday May 12, 1994 ELECTRONIC SNOOPING TAKES SHARP UPTURN Wiretaps and electronic monitoring by federal agents, primarily against suspected drug traffickers, grew by a third during the first year of the Clinton administration, the largest increase in a decade. [N722]

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More Gilder pointers
by whitaker＠dpair.csd.sgi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There's also a good interview in May '94 *Upside* with Gilder. "Upside" bills itself as "The Business Magazine for the Technology Elite", and is not a bad deal even for the $4.95 cover price (its primary competitor seems to be the $14.95 *Red Herring*, another technology-sector business magazine aimed at investors). I'm reading his 1989 bestseller "Microcosm": pick it up if you can find it. It's excellent. Gilder is a rare economist. He doesn't simply put forth solid free market arguments. He doesn't simply jump on the technology bandwagon. He knows science, and tells a whopping good story. For instance: I hadn't known that Andrew Grove (Intel CEO) was Hungarian, and had escaped Communist rule by crawling through the mud into Austria. America is full of incredible success stories. "Fibersphere" is his latest, in which he makes his controversial "death of television" and "dark fiber" arguments. I've only read excerpts in other Forbes articles, but it looks worth picking up. -Russell --- Forwarded mail from norm(a)netcom.com (Norman Hardy) To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com There was a long article in April 11, 1994 Forbes: "AUCTIONING THE AIRWAYS", by George Gilder". It had a supprising amount of technical information about a new technology similar to spread spectrum. The article has a "too cheep to meter" flavor that I do not agree with but it does present some interesting information and ideas. It is about 43k bytes and is available via anonymous ftp at netcom.com:/pub/Silk/auction.txt --- End of forwarded mail from norm(a)netcom.com (Norman Hardy) -- Russell Earl Whitaker whitaker(a)csd.sgi.com Silicon Graphics Inc. Technical Assistance Center / Centre D'Assistance Technique / Tekunikaru Ashisutansu Sentaa Mountain View CA (415) 390-2250 ================================================================ #include <std_disclaimer.h>

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Here they come...
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric Hughes wrote: H >Not quite. I met Peter Lewis at CFP-94. He has the official H >cyberspace beat, which was just created this year. Markoff reports H >on the same issues, but is not assigned to that beat. H > H > Markoff's pieces in the times show remarkable understanding of the H > issues, but Lewis's make it seem like he's never even logged in. H > H >I would suggest it would be more profitable to educate Mr. Lewis H >rather than to hold another's reputation over his head. H > H >Eric Lewis wasn't that hard to talk to at CFP'94. He used to write the Executive Computer column in the Sunday Times so I've followed his stuff for years. I didn't see any problems with his Anarchy in Cyberspace article on Monday. He was mostly talking about bad manners which exist on Internet and equally in the over-governed realms of the real world. Nothing new there. He is trying to interpret Cyberspace for the masses. His job is not to be inside talking out. Perhaps he could have talked about the problems potential regulators would face but that would be writing his article for him. DCF --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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