December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Mailing List
by kevin＠beach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please put me on your mailing list. Thanks Sincerely, Kevin T. Smith, President TeleSource A Division of SonRise Corp. (408) 247-4782 voice (408) 247-1070 fax ksmith(a)beach.com *************************************NeXTMail Preferred***********************************

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ID card from hell
by Brad Dolan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Yeah, I know it's not about crypto but it sure is about privacy ... 1984 COMES ONE DECADE LATE July 12, 1994 On CBS News tonight, the lead story announced a government plan to require all of us to carry a national identity card. This card will contain your picture, a fingerprint, your social security number, and other "electronically encoded" information. You will be required to present this card to obtain employment or "receive government services." CA Governor Pete Wilson and Sen. Alan Simpson were featured explaining how this was a really great idea, necessary to "stop illegal immigration." Prediction If Americans accept this, as I expect they will, we will see the following: Cops doing card-scan roadblocks, ostensibly to find drunks and immigrants. A requirement to present your card and have a computer record kept after every financial transaction over, say, $100. A requirement to present your card to get medical care. Adoption of these cards as drivers' licenses. Just a magnetic / electronic data entry to indicate if you are authorized to drive. Same thing for professional licenses. Card-scan to buy guns or ammunition - if you are allowed to buy them at all. Card-scan to buy potentially subversive tools, chemicals, books. Card-scan on entry to or exit from the U.S. Instant database check to see if you are authorized to enter or leave the U.S. Card-scan on entry to or exit from "special" areas: an extra little security check before you enter places the government is taking an extra interest in. Mandatory presentation of card to get access to an internet- attached computer account. Card-scan at your kids' school. Linked databases of parents and kids, to correlate child support payments, vaccination histories, academic performance, truancy, antisocial attitudes, you name it. I could go on, but why bother? As an exercise for the reader: The federal government currently is encouraging states to revoke drivers licenses and professional licenses of "bad" people who use drugs, drive drunk, don't pay child support, etc. What will happen to you in the future if you displease the state? Brad bdolan(a)well.sf.ca.us

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A Plea for Meaningful Message Titles
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I don't often make requests for netiquette changes here on this list, but I will now. I have no power to enforce anything, so these are only suggestions. 1. Could we people make an effort to pick reasonably meaningful thread titles? A lot of "Re: your mail" and "(None)" titles are cluttering up the list. Not to mention the overly broad titles like "PGP" and "Question." In sorting through my list archives recently I found several hundred messages that contained variations on the simple phrase "PGP," most discussing points only loosely related to PGP. 2. People should feel free to edit the subject line to better reflect the topic of their post. This may "destroy the continuity of the thread," a concern raised by some, but that's a small price to pay for having new threads more accurately labelled. 3. Forwards are really getting out of hand. It seems that the "Four Letter Acronyms" of CPSR, EPIC, ACLU, and EFF (an honorary FLA) routinely copy us on everything they put out, even though their stuff is widely distributed in other forums available to us all, and none of them seems to be reading Cypherpunks and actually participating in followup discussions. (If Banisar, Godwin, Kapor, McLandish, et. al. are actually reading this, I invite them to prove me wrong.) 4. While I'm at it, could newcomers to the world of crypto please take the time to read up on some of the basic crypto isues? The lateness of my FAQ is not the issue, as the needed knowledge is contained in any of the basic FAQs that are already out there, such as the oft-republished sci.crypt FAQ and the RSA FAQ. And basic articles and books are readily available. This list is not a place to ask 500-600 people "What's so bad about Clipper?" or "Can't the NSA break any cipher with enough effort?" Thank you for your time. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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SPA & FBI after Pornographic traitors
by Brad Dolan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sandy asked.... Associated Press reports today: Officials at one the nation's three nuclear weapons laboratories discovered their computers were used to store pornography, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. Computers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contained more than 1,000 pornographic images, said Chuck Cole, deputy associate director of computing at the lab. [...] The computers were shut down after an investigation uncovered software piracy on the Internet, a network of thousands of computer networks originally designed to connect computers at universities and government research labs. It is now used by millions of people. "We are currently tracking over 1,600 pirate sites on the Internet in a joint investigation with the FBI," said Peter Beruk of the Software Publishers Association, which represents major software manufacturers. "It is a very serious and costly problem." [...] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Some people might consider the second paragraph a nonsequitur to the first. However, if one doesn't think too clearly about things, one might get the general message that we need Daddy to help protect us from the pornographers and pirates lurking out there on that internet thing. Brad bdolan(a)well.sf.ca.us

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"True Names," chat with Vinge, and Cypherpunks
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Some random comments that may interest some of you. Someone asked me for some novels he could read that might cover some cypherpunkish topics. These are some titles I gave him: * Brunner, The Shockwave Rider * Vinge, True Names * Card, Ender's Game * Gibson, Neuromancer (He's currently reading Orwell's "1984," which is of Required Reading to remain on our list! I read '1984" when I was in the 7th grade, in 1966, probably before many of you were born.) Vernor Vinge's "True Names" comes up in another context: I spent all of Sunday talking to Vernor and several other bright folks in the aftermath of a great party in the hills of Marin County, right next to Skywalker Ranch. My mad scientist/entrepreneur friends Bob Fleming and Cherie Kushner, in whose startup company I've invested some money, had a party to celebrate something or other. As it turned out, noted author--and winner of the Hugo Award fpr Best Novel last summer for "A Fire Upon the Deep"--Vernor Vinger was giving a talk on cyberspace and whatnot at Interval Research on Friday, so they invited him to stay at their place. (Interval is doing futuristic work in a lot of areas, and is funded by billionaire Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft.) I don't plan to recap the party; that's just a party. But the discussions on Sunday (some of stayed over, due to the long distances back to our homes, or as with Vernor, in lieu of a night in a hotel) touched on point of interest to our list. Also there were Eric Hughes, who you all know, and Alan Huang, who built one of the world's first optical computers for Bell Labs. (Alan's project, which included work on optical switchers, terabit per second Sagnac fibers, optical cellular automata, and even crypto, was cancelled by AT&T because they decided to concentrate on other things....Alan chose to leave AT&T and is now planning a move to the Bay Area to set up something here.) In my years of being able to worm my way into high-power discussions, at universities, at Intel, and at too many conferences to remember, I can't recall being in such a conversation as this, with everyone of the highest possible caliber. (I'm just calling it as I see it.) Wormholes, reversible computation, the 7,000-Cray NSA computer, the problems with nanotech, the problems with AI, the Tines and the Powers, the Extropians group (Vernor was curious), the Singularity, and the implications of the OJ Simpson case were a few of the topics. (Yes, several of us had "wasted" our time watching this case. Me, I think it's drama of truly Shakespearean proportions, and should not be "dissed" just becuase it's getting more attention than the Rhwandans and Haitians are getting...not to mention the boring Bosnians.) I'd met Vinge a few times before, notably at the 1989 Hackers Conference, but this time I got to spend enough time to really get some information exchanged. We all left Bob and Cherie's place at 7 p.m., as they took Vernor down to the SF airport, and as the rest of us scattered. With all the telecommunications we have, nothing beats an intensive face-to-face session. Which is why I still live within driving distance of the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in general. Sorry if this message seems too personal, but I felt the urge to "share." And at least it's not a forward. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway." -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: NATIONAL SECURITY PORN RISK
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-- Excerpt -- One computer expert, who requested anonymity, said there might be more to the incident than meets the eye. The expert suggested that the hard-core pornography may be a cover for an ultra-sophisticated espionage program, in which a "sniffer" program combs through other Livermore computers, encodes the passwords and accounts it finds, and then hides them within the pornographic images, perhaps to be downloaded by foreign agents. -- End excerpt -- Maybe this is all just an excuse to examine the evidence (1,000 GIFs). Blanc

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RE: "True Names," chat with Vinge, and Cypherpunks
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Timothy C. May Sorry if this message seems too personal, but I felt the urge to "share." ............................................ Oh, that's okay - I wasn't doing anything, anyway. Blanc

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Encrypted, Chained Reply Blocks
by nobody＠ds1.wu-wien.ac.at 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I noticed a message posted here, anonymously, with an "encrypted reply block" (ERB) attached to the end of it. Instructions were given that to reply to the message, the block was to be pasted at the very beginning of the reply, which was then to be sent to a certain remailer. The block started with the usual "::", followed by and "Encrypted: PGP" line typically used with chained remailers. While I don't know the specifics of that particular ERB, would it be possible to chain a REPLY through several remailers, such that the body of the reply was sent along in the clear through each link of the chain, but the final destination address was only visible to the operator of the final link in the chain? This would require that after the "Encrypted: PGP" block, any appended plaintext would also be sent along by each remailer and not discarded. Which remailers allow that? Hypothetically, it would seem that one could take an "empty message", using the "CHAIN" utility to chain the "message" through remailers A,B,C,D, encrypting it at each step, placing the resulting block in the message body with instructions that the resultant block must precede any replies, which must then be sent to remailer "A". Alternatively, instead of an empty message, a single, unique, identifying line could be used as the message. This would allow a person to generate multiple ERBs and know which one had been used for any given reply. One weakness I can see in such a scheme is that traffic analysis would be a bit easier, since the plaintext of the reply would be visible at each step. Also, there would be a potential for "hand tracing" the reply to its destination, assuming each remailer operator cooperated, by sending a personal message to operator "A", with the ERB attached, asking him/her to decrypt the next link destination, then forward the message to the operator of the next link with a similar request, and so on, requesting that the last operator in the link report the ultimate recipient's email address to the requestor. This would potentially be easier than tracing a message the other direction, since by the time the message arrived, information necessary to trace it backwards might have been already deleted at one or more of the chained remailer sites. Any thoughts or suggestions? Are there any further obvious weaknesses in this scheme that I may have missed?

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Pseudonymous ID cards?
by analyst＠Onramp.NET 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On the bright side, at least the Clinton administration is trying to stir up interest in privacy issues amongst the general public. Between the administration's support of Clipper, National ID cards, National Health cards and Digital Telephony (have they supported this yet?), there should start to be a lot of public interest in these issues. Personally, rather than _just_ naysay everything that is being proposed (which I will do, strongly), I would like more concrete recommendations and proposals to make on the positive side that use technologies like digital signatures and reputations to *protect* privacy while still allowing many of the familiar sorts of social/economic interactions that we take for granted. Perhaps we can pull an Aikido maneuver on this sudden gov power grab (ok,ok, pretty far-fetched). But, short of tracking down the Scientific American article from a couple of years ago and re-reading it (and I'm sure it's out of date), I'm not really sure what we can do with pseudonymous reputations and whatnot given the current state-of-the-art. So, I'd like suggestions, comments about alternative ways of establishing digital IDs, insurance cards, credit cards, etc. that protect privacy instead of divulge it, while still providing some of the societal controls that we have come to expect (e.g. that drunk drivers will be deprived of a license to drive). Do we have alternative suggestions to make in this dark hour so that we can actually win back some of our privacy? Can these sorts of technologies be implemented in a way that is understandable by the average citizen-unit? -- Benjamin McLemore analyst@onramp,net PS I wonder what exactly Justice and/or the spooks have on Clinton that's so effective? Or are he and Gore actually as stupid as they act?

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Re:"True Names," chat with Vinge, and Cypherpunks
by analyst＠Onramp.NET 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Any newer Vinge estimates of arrival time for the Singularity? I saw an article a while back by Vinge and I think he was estimating 2013-2030 timeframe. I've been thinking of starting a Singularity Watch type Web-page/email list, as I am often struck by technological newsbits that seem enough out-of-the-ordinary and potentially status quo shattering that they seem to indicate some sort of potential for breakthrough. Some recent examples: *human genome project *quantum mechanical teleportation *high energy ion bombardment of nuclei in Germany yields something besides quarks, gluons in protons (potential challenge to QCD, is this our photoelectric effect finally?) *quantum computing *etc Despite the romantic appeal of the idea, though, I think it is a bit farther off than Vinge imagines--maybe 2050. -- Benjamin McLemore analyst(a)onramp.net

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