December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Please Remove me from the mailing list
by ZACZ＠delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ouch, I hope this isn't the reamialer address... If it is, I am getting out my flameproof jacket right now. I just can't wade through 100 messages a day, so please, please remove me... ZZ*

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STEG: Obtaining digital audio accuratly
by rustman＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

perobich(a)ingr.com sez: >The SGI drives use modified >firmware and (AFAIK) are not available elsewhere, but you can get the >Apple drives at Circuit City, Sears, etc. SGI uses modified firmware on their DAT/DDS units to read audio daata, but I am pretty sure the Toshiba mech is stock. Why? I have a program called direct to disk from OMI that lets me load audio data from an Apple CD-SC300 or the Toshiba mech, outputting AIFF, Sound Designer II and several other file formats. The AIFF and SDII formats are stereo 16-bit 44.1kHz; usually the QuickTime formats are 8 bit. So the AIFF and SDII formats have the full bit stream. -- Rusty H. Hodge, Cyberneticist <rustman(a)netcom.com>

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Oceania-history redoux
by an57322＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It is interesting to read all the recent posts about Oceania, because it is of course the story of Sealand, an independent country that was founded in the Seventies. It would be wise if the promoters and future citizens of Oceania studied the failure of Sealand before putting another dime into their doomed project. Shortly after Sealand was funded on a large surplus housing platform in the oil fields of the North sea, Sealand began issuing its own currency, passports, and stamps. The results were predictable: nobody wanted their money, no other country accepted their passports for entry, and the international postal organization refused to deliver their mail. IMHO, there can be little doubt that Oceania would suffer the same fate-if the project ever gets a far as having a platform. The nations of the world are like a very exclusive country club: no new members accepted. Occasionally, a former member gets readmitted, or one member dies and her two children take her place, but there will be no newcomers. -= T.A.Z. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

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Don't call it "VGP".
by qwerty＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is not my idea, but it will sure "sell better" than "VGP" as a buzzword to describe a PGP version with an output that is indistinguishable from noise: "Stealth-PGP". -=Xenon=-

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Re: I support HR 3627
by /G=Scott/I=M/S=Braden/OU=nsic1/O=DOS/PRMD=ALCANET/ADMD=TELEMAIL/C=US/＠alcatel.aud.alcatel.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

February 9, 1994 Dear Rep. Cantwell, I support HR 3627, because I strongly believe in every American's right to privacy. In our burgeoning global markets, American businesses must rely on secure communications to prevent industrial espionage. If the Clinton Administration succeeds in dictating that only the "Clipper Chip" can be exported, it will effectively strangle any other means of secure communications. In a competitive global market for technology and communications, I think it is crucial that American businesses retain the right to produce the products and security solutions that their customers want, free of the restrictions and demands of government controls and snooping. Rep. Cantwell, this is not an arcane technical issue of export control. The freedom of Americans to be secure in their communications from unwarranted government intrusion is essential to our liberty. I think this is one of the few issues that both Republicans and Democrats agree upon, so I hope you will be able to generate bi-partisan support for your bill. Sincerely, M. Scott Braden 1242 Briarcove Richardson TX 75081

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Another PGP Tools / Magic Money update
by qwerty-remailer＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- There should be a new version of PGP Tools and Magic Money on csn.org soon. The PGP Tools will be called pgptl10b.zip and the Magic Money will be mgmny10b.zip. The new naming was warlord's idea: the "b" will be "c" etc in future releases, until some serious updating justifies a new version. The new Magic Money does not contain the PGP Tools files, so be sure to download PGP Tools as well. Will I run out of bugs or letters first? :-) The prime-multiplication problem appears to have gone away. The new Magic Money checks the whole coin, but the attack is probably impossible anyway. jkreznar(a)ininx.com quotes: Here we consider only {\em prime\/} divisors of $n$ and ask, for given order of magnitude of $n$. ``how many prime divisors are there typically?'' and ``how many {\em different\/} ones are there?'' Some of the answers will be rather counterintuitive. Thus, a 50-digit number ($10^{21}$ times the age of our universe measured in picoseconds) has only about 5 different prime factors on average and --- even more surprisingly --- 50-digit numbers have typically fewer than 6 prime factors in all, even counting repeated occurrences of the same prime factor as separate factors. We will also learn something about the distribution of the number of prime factors and its implications for the important factoring problem. Thus, we discover that even for numbers as large as $10^{50}$, the two smallest primes, 2 and 3, account for about 25\% of all prime factors! A number of several hundred digits, such as a Magic Money coin, if it were to be made of all small primes, would need 50 or 100 factors. These would probably be very rare, considering this average. hfinney(a)shell.portal.com wrote: >I was thinking over the attack I described on Magic Money and Chaum >cash, and I now think it will not actually work, especially in the case >of the Chaum cash. Specifically, it will take as much work to forge >cash as to factor the modulus. [ describes how finding smooth numbers is equivalent to factoring ] >So, unless there is in fact some trick that can be used to quickly find >smooth numbers given that the low order 128 bits are free, I don't >think there is any need to worry about my attack on Magic Money. And >it looks like Chaum's online cash is completely invulnerable to this >approach. Unless something else comes up, it looks like we don't need to worry about this one. If it does become a problem, it would be easy to go to full Chaum cash - take the MD5 of a random number and use it, including the random number in the coin. But there is no reason to code this unless we find out we need it. As for the big-endian problem, andrewl(a)wtg20.wiltel.com wrote: >I retrieved the latest version of Magic Money from the mpj archive >and compiled it on a big-endian machine (a 68k NeXT). It seems >to work now... I was able to setup the server and client and >move a little cash around whereas before the server would never >sucessfully find a q.... This was the last version, which set all precision to max. The last version also had a bug in pgp_extract_rsa, again involving set_precision. The new one has defines which try to use lower precision and adjust pointers, for those functions which can be sped up this way. If that fails, another define will go back to setting everything max. Please test this on a big-endian machine and find out if it works without everything set to max. If it doesn't, please try to debug it and post what needs to be done. The code seems to be getting close to working. Does anyone want to set up a Magic Money server? You could run it through a remailer, if you want to. The server filters PGP messages from stdin to stdout, so you would not need root access to run one. It would probably be no harder than running a remailer. I compiled in the 8086.asm under DOS, and it is fast enough. Use the assembly for whatever system you are running on, because the server has to perform a lot of secret key operations: decrypt, sign message, and sign each coin. Pr0duct Cypher -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLVdKTsGoFIWXVYodAQFGAgQAgNs7PiGe3KItFiouUs/iXoH5bfVsgdGs pVbf4sTZcF3c531KARJGxVkXsrTXH+VOU2QPi2zj3M/w06elCnov/KZYl/aSRerg viLquHK8sUymEq9KB7swIO+Kthk5G8fke/h/3xq1i4S0n6klajtU8HuOR5FdmcAU kfA05Czngzw= =gleH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Netcom remailers.
by qwerty＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Lucky me. I got my first complaint about my remailer today, as Eric Hollander told me I would eventually get. He says once a month Mr. Employee bashes Mr. Boss with his remailer 'cause Mr. Employee is too cheap for a stamp, and so he sends Mr. Employee a nasty warning from Mr. Remailer Operator. Me, no logs, yet, even assuming it wasn't just from another remailer. And the person didn't contact me, he contacted Netcom. Gee, maybe the guy made it up. No matter. It was an edu address, possibly a student. So now I get a terse, not too serious message from support(a)netcom.com mentioning "unsolicited mail" being against Netcom policy, so cut it out. I've blocked that outgoing address and sent the guy an explanation, and he hasn't responded to my asking what was up. I've added "Report Problems to qwerty(a)netcom.com." in my outgoing header too. But I have a question. I'm the quite type. I tend to ignore things like this, till say Netcom deletes my account, or at least demands an explanation. My question is, should this happen again, say tomorrow, should I tell support(a)netcom.com what's up? "I'm running an anonymous remailer, you know, like anon.penet.fi, the one that has 10,000 active users. Thus Netcom is now diverting CPU time to anyone who wants it." I wouldn't word it like THAT, but that's what they might truthfully assume. Sure would be nice if I could fully forge e-mail as coming from "nobody(a)nowhere.org". Alternatively I could just keep logs. Or I could just never log into qwerty again, and see how long it lasts ;-)! Hit and run remailer accounts. Centralized remailers on the internet. Bah! Nik (-=Xenon=-) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3 iQCVAgUBLVhO0wSzG6zrQn1RAQEBfwP/YnMjuyphc2O8onhEHT6jH3qyDp0YPzgd JFRrJzZI/ZOCnqtR6+zyjKqDtXCbY4GvR29vAyyXIFmG4kxfMNBRmRr4lwzUxf7G quguvzMRxdOFencHxToxaoXqZ/4/tBI5O472c1hOtdvuHaFTPP+JOLpg18Git5AR e74uFtB7I4U= =eZsb -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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No Subject
by owner-cypherpunks 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Cypherpunk forum in NYC, Thurs. 2/17
by David Mandl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

========================================================= On Thursday, February 17, Cypherpunks Perry Metzger and Dave Mandl will be speaking on the subject: ----------------------- "Crypto-Anarchy: How New Developments in Cryptography, Digital Anonymity, and Untraceable Digital Cash Will Make the State a Thing of the Past" ----------------------- WHEN: Thursday, February 17, 7:30 p.m. WHERE: Penn South Community Room 7A, 330 W. 28 St., bet. 8 & 9 Aves. New York City (Warning: This place is a little difficult to find, but there will be signs posted.) This is an anarchist forum, part of the Libertarian Book Club's monthly forum series. Admission: Contribution (whatever you can afford) =========================================================

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Re: Cypherpunk forum in NYC, Thurs. 2/17
by dmandl＠lehman.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: kevin(a)axon.cs.byu.edu (Kevin Vanhorn) > > > "Crypto-Anarchy: How New Developments in Cryptography, > > Digital Anonymity, and Untraceable Digital Cash Will Make > > the State a Thing of the Past" > > I would be willing to pay $5 for a tape of this talk. Alternatively, > in exchange for a tape of the talk I would be willing to transcribe it. I can't tape it, but anyone else is more than welcome to do so and distribute tapes and transcripts to their heart's content. I say this partly because I'll be too busy concentrating on the talk and partly because I've had many problems in the past getting people to stick to their promises to transcribe tapes (notably the interview I did with Tim May on my radio show last year, which was very good; the guy who promised to transcribe the tape screwed me, and so it never happened). These messages should probably not be posted to the whole list. If anyone there next Thursday tapes the talk and wants to make copies available, s/he can let me know and I can pass the address, price, or whatever along to the list. --Dave.

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