December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Beware of Roman Catholic Corruption
by Ralph.Stokes＠f1611.n375.z1.fidonet.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Beware of the Satanic conspiracy of the WHORISH Roman Catholic Church. The Pope and his puppets have attempted to infiltrate and subvert the Protestant Christian church using corrupt modern translations of the Bible. These are nothing more than religious filth that have spewed forth from the deceitful pens of Satan-inspired men in league with the Vatican. Don't let them lure you into following them into Hell. The 1611 Authorized (King James) Version of the Holy Bible is the only book that God ever wrote. All other alleged translations are frauds written by the Devil himself. For further information regarding this damnable Satanic conspiracy, contact me: Ralph Stokes, sysop King James Bible BBS, Millbrook, AL Internet address: ralph.stokes(a)f1611.n375.z1.fidonet.org Fidonet address: Ralph Stokes (1:375/1611) BBS #: (205) 285-5948 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLf5XxlD7OIX0EWM5AQG1sgP/fdbLsmV6M89n/zZbW6I3Cjmup99BGaYm YEw2oernsmnn7cOuCM9IwZkOy24ggVXIBoD2yRhuXJ7P/7aecXchV8cERZhPuDpi 0XPTFuYeAeAIt3uV13yNAzVDYvLGNK/eWwIqjSw16IevOHLjtbw1kGS6lu9XgRFE g5YsARSzQ5I= =TEbX -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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L.J. Freeh and the Opposition
by Dave Otto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Check out sunday's _Parade_ magazine for an article on Louis J. Freeh, the director of the F.B.I. "Tough on crime", "man of the streets", and ruthless eliminator of directors :-) If he ever throws his weight behind Clipper, the battle will get *MUCH* tougher. Dave Otto -- dave(a)marvin.jta.edd.ca.gov -- daveotto(a)acm.org "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" [the Great Oz] {I *DO* have a life, it's just that my kids are using it right now!}

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Re: Having your own computer means never having....
by nelson＠crynwr.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Date: Mon, 20 Jun 1994 02:37:42 -0400 From: snyderra(a)dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu (Bob Snyder) Cc: cypherpunks(a)toad.com What to stop him/her from shredding everything in the office? Um, because desks don't *fit* in the shredder? :) Sorry about that, but this thread *is* becoming a little silly on its own. -russ <nelson(a)crynwr.com> ftp.msen.com:pub/vendor/crynwr/crynwr.wav Crynwr Software | Crynwr Software sells packet driver support | ask4 PGP key 11 Grant St. | +1 315 268 1925 (9201 FAX) | Quakers do it in the light Potsdam, NY 13676 | LPF member - ask me about the harm software patents do.

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Re: Hardware generators was: your mail
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

How about a SCSI device instead. Most UNIX boxes and Macs nowadays have a few unused SCSI IDs. The great majority of DOS machines with SCSI (all those new ones with CD-ROMs, etc.) have unused SCSI IDs. SCSI has the advantage of being rather fast, and is a cross-platform solution. ``Cross-platform'' is great, but ``fast'' is probably a bad idea. Few random number generators are particularly fast, and if you sample the input too rapidly, you're likely to get too high a correlation between successive bits.

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Hardware RN generators, data volume requirements
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm quite happy about the volume and quality of responses I've received. So here is another question: What data generation rate should we aim for? I guess I should be more precise, given that costs are usually directly proportional to data rates, what are the minimum, hoped for, and high end data rates needed? For example, Tony Patti's RANGER has a very high data rate, but is big and costs more than two cases of beer. Is a good bit a second sufficient? 100 b/s? ??? Right now, I've only generated a few of Pr0duct Cypher's magic money tokens. So if I had a daemon process collecting bits for me in the background, then 3600 per hour is plenty. I am sure that when Perry uses digicash for online trading of eurodollars, he (and his user community) will need orders of magnitude more. But I'd expect them to be willing to pay at least an order of magnitude more for the gear too. I'd like to hear grounded justification for rates, and/or a rate/dollar tradeoff. Don't worry about the exact monetary exchange rates. Estimates in bits per second per case of beer are accurate enuff for this level of design. Thanks Pat p.s. I just got up to the chapter of Bruce's _Applied Crypto_ that addresses some of the approaches to this. It really is a FAQ for serious cypherpunks. Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)cs.gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>

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Re: Decline and Fall
by lethin＠ai.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <2tnlbgINNjss(a)life.ai.mit.edu> you write: >Decline and Fall of the Nation State: > >Tuesday's WSJ had an article on how private money market funds are >starting to jawbone foreign governments just like the World Bank used to. > >Case cited was Fidelity Investments calling Mexican bank officials during >the Peso crisis after the recent assasination. They said "we'll invest >another $18 billion (of ours and other fund's money) if you do what we say >and if not..." > >DCF > >"If they hadn't killed quite so many people, you'd almost have to feel >sorry for them." > >--- WinQwk 2.0b#1165 > Noam Chomsky spoke here in January and made the point that the increasing mobility of capital increasingly holds governments hostage. He felt that it was the current greatest danger to democracy, because it bypasses any leverage voters might have on politicians at the ballot box. It's not clear how well his argument really holds together, though, since the leverage that the mobile capital has is via the satisfaction of the voters. If capital flees a country, the population will be less productive, dissatisfied and vote the politicians out of office. So policies that favor capital in some sense also favor labor. Anyone else care to take shots at his argument or support it? Mobile capital does mean that population and government lose their ability to decree the relative rewards made to capital and labor. If labor requires too high a return, capital will go somewhere else. The ownership and control of capital IS highly skewed, but since it's still distributed among many parties, it is forced to compete and remain engaged, lest it depreciate in value. Go cyphercredits.

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Anonymous Mailing list?
by Jonathan Rochkind 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has anyone tried to write some mailing list software that uses PGP-anon-remailers to implement a double-blind anon system? It wouldn't be very dificult to have a mailing list people contributed to using a remailer with a encryted address-block, so no one knew the actual address of the mailing list. Or more significantly, the mailing list, instead of keeping a list of addresses, could keep a list of encrypted address-blocks, and the proper remailer to send them to, so the list maintainer doesn't know the real address of anyone on the list. This is intriguing to me because it seems to solve the problem of a "secret" organization's security. The members of this mailing list don't need to trust anyone else on the list not to reveal their identity; no one can reveal anyone elses identity even if they wanted to. Assuming the security of the encryption (which of course can't be assumed; anyone with a sufficiently powerful comptuer and sufficient time to spend can surely break PGP, but anyway...), this mailing list would seem to be pretty much 100% secure. It would also seem desirable to have the mailing list software keep a record of all it's members public keys as well, and send out posts encrypted. As well as perhaps check signatures of incoming messages so that only legitimate list-members could contribute to it. I've been thinking of trying to write such software, perhaps by working with the procmail program from comp.sources.misc, whcih can be used to implement a standard mailing list. But has this already been done? It seems like such an obvious idea, that it's hard to believe no one has thought of it first, but I haven't heard of anything so far. Comments?

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Re: Hardware generators was: your mail
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message Sun, 19 Jun 1994 11:24:34 -0600, Richard Johnson <Richard.Johnson(a)Colorado.EDU> writes: > > How about a SCSI device instead. Most UNIX boxes and Macs nowadays have > a few unused SCSI IDs. The great majority of DOS machines with SCSI (all > those new ones with CD-ROMs, etc.) have unused SCSI IDs. SCSI has the > advantage of being rather fast, and is a cross-platform solution. Sadly, the state of PC platform SCSI is in turmoil, at least right now. Microsoft is working hard to convince folks that Enhanced-IDE is the answer, and many CD-ROMs, big disks, etc. that are aimed at the mass market are no longer SCSI, but E-IDE. I don't think you can substantiate your claim that a "great majority of DOS machines" have SCSI. Worse, MS is pushing hard to push into Windows-for-Workgroups. Many OEMs no longer ship Windows, even for standalone PCs. They ship W4Wg. W4Wg's support for SCSI devices is a step or two down from even W4Wg 3.10. My SCSI disk setup (1.7GB Maxtor) is significantly slower under W4Wg 3.11 because MS changed things to the point that I no longer have 32-bit disk I/O. Chicago is claimed to have "better" SCSI support, but I was hoping that I could get this at least prototyped this summer. No RSN reliance on 3rd party vendors for me, thanks. Right now, SCSI is too high-end (Suns, HP, Macs, serious PCs, etc.) for the market that I have in mind. Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)cs.gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>

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TV AS A SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE
by Sandy Sandfort 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

C'punks, I just watched the latest episode of "Acapulco H.E.A.T." In this weeks show, "Codename: Ghost," the Bad Guy is a renegade CIA agent who has become an arms dealer on the Black Market. He controls his far flung organization via encrypted e-mail over the Internet. The H.E.A.T. team foils his dastardly plans by *intercepting* his e-mail and sending on *forged* messages signed with his own *code* (digital signature?). Too bad he wasn't a renegade NSA agent (or a Cypherpunk), then he might have had the good sense to use strong crypto. Yeah, I guess there must be dumb criminals who would use Clipper or the like. WHY I WATCH ACAPULCO H.E.A.T. Cheap thrills. Lots of babes in bikinis, lots of guns, lots of car chases and lots of explosions. (Subtract 2 points for Fabio.) I would kill for a night with the woman who plays "Cat" (Alison Something-or-other). WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH ACAPULCO H.E.A.T. We can see really good TV and movies again and again. If you miss it the first time, it will be back again, soon enough. The really bad stuff is gone in a heartbeat. See it now, or never see it again (unless it becomes a cult show). S a n d y

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Hardware generators was: your mail
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message Sat, 18 Jun 94 19:30:35 EDT, Adam Shostack <adam(a)bwh.harvard.edu> writes: > Making it PC only shuts out the Mac/UNIX market for your > devices. There are probably lots of folks in the research/scientific > community who use UNIX & would buy a random number dongle that hangs > off the serial port. For $25, I'd probably get our lab to buy 3 or 4. > > If you put it on a PC card, you're cutting out all other > computers from using it. Adam's points are correct, and I thought of them before I posted the initial message. My thinking was that about 90% of all computers sold are Intel PCs, and to get my manufacturing costs down, I need volume and simplicity. So by addressing the 90% solution first, I have a larger market without the complexity of multiple platforms. Once I've sold thousands of Hardware random number generators, then I can afford the design effort for other platforms, if they still exist then :-) Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)cs.gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>

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