December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Local Cypherpunks (?) group
by Whitney, Mara 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is there any interest in establishing a local (Chicago area) equivalent of the bay area Cypherpunks which meets in physical (as opposed to cyberspace ) form. Topics to be addressed include issues of privacy, security, cryptography and .... Anyone interested please respond to this email address. I may not get back to your immediately. I will be out of town 7/29 - 8/10. Oh, please pass this along to anyone you think would be interested. Mara

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Re: CYPHERPUNKS TO THE RESCUE
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:51 1994/07/26 -0400, Russell Nelson wrote: >Why not generate a random number, checksum it, and sign it using a >public key? Or is that overkill? ... Seems good. But to thwart replay of the signed message the garage unit must never accept the same signed number twice. How about the car unit signing successive numbers. The garage unit would remember the last number that it accepted and only accept signed numbers larger than that. Garbled transmissions would then cause no problems. They would be fixed by yet new transmissions, just as with current units. P.S. Better yet: There is no need of Public key technology. It suffices for the car unit to send DES(k, n) on the nth transmission. k is a constant secret key shared between car unit and garage unit. Garage unit decodes and verifies that n is greater than it has seen before.

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Hotel locks (was:Radio-activated locks, RESCUE...)
by baum＠apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I understand the >electronic lock folks (card locks, hotels, etc.) have crypto expertise >of varying extents (and bluntly, probably more than most of us have) >and they certainly have the expertise in other areas. I've been told that the way that hotel locks work is simple LFSR type technology. The chip recognizes some key pattern, and generates a sucessor key. If a card is inserted that doesn't match the primary key, it checks the sucessor key. If that matches, the successor becomes the primary, and a new successor is generated. The machine at the front desk knows where in the sequence the a particular lock is, and simply generates a sucessor whenever a new key is asked for. So, there doesn't need to be any communication between the desk and the lock when a new key is generated. Note that after you get a new key, the old one will still work until the new key is used. Note that there is more than one primary key; there are 'master' keys for the staff, and presumably that can be used to reset the key if the sequence gets lost. Of course, who knows what happens if the master sequence get lost to a battery burp- maybe a separate ID number/lock? (as opposed to the huge back door of a permanent, single, masterkey...) Clever little system, yes? ************************************************** * Allen J. Baum tel. (408)974-3385 * * Apple Computer, MS/305-3B * * 1 Infinite Loop * * Cupertino, CA 95014 baum(a)apple.com * **************************************************

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Garage Door opener, etc...
by Jim choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi all, Seems to me the way to do this is to 'dock' the receiver and xmitter prior to leaving (could rationalize it by also doing battery charging at this time) and each time they share a unique one-time pad. Plug-N-Play so to speak... Take care.

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Re: GUT and P=NP
by Patrick Juola 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > One last word on this. Try and represnet a continum of states by an > > infinite turing machene. Go ahead, I dare you. You can't.<=big period. >Could I not let each position on the tape represent a real value in >[0...1]? Cantor demonstrated, near the turn of the century, that no such system can represent all reals in [0,1]. Boring technical explanation follows. ['cept it doesn't 'cause I edited it out.] Perhaps I misunderstood the original poster, but I assumed that s/he was suggesting simply encoding a particular real number into the infinite tape using standard binary encoding. There's no cardinality problem there at all -- but of course the tape will only hold a single real number. Standard tape compression techniques will buy you enough space for a countably infinite set of reals. Of course, the dead hand of Cantor forbids a continuous set of reals encoded onto a TM, but we all know that he's just a Dead White Male and therefore can be ignored.... 8-) - kitten

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Re: Steve Winter Declares War in Cyberspace
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:02 AM 7/26/94 -0400, Arsen Ray Arachelian wrote: uh, Ray?... You just sent mail, cc'd to cypherpunks, so he knows where we are for spamming purposes, to what appears to be king-hell spammer of the universe... The original posting seems to be from someone who was warning us about him, and included it as a public service for reference purposes, though I'm not sure what it has to do with the cypherpunks' charter... Sending a reply to that vitriol back to the list probably won't do any harm (you may get ribbed for not reading the headers in the message, maybe), but sending it to *him* with a "cc:cypherpunks@toad.com" on the message might have been a bad idea, yes? Pissfights with Detweiller about the central purposes of this list were bad enough, but a fundamentalist jihad we probably don't want. Be careful with that "reply to all" function... Cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Re: GUT and P=NP
by Patrick Juola 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

nzook(a)fireant.ma.utexas.edu writes: > Let f be a function from the integers to [0,1]. Note that the > Turing tape has precisely one space for each integer, so this > function cooresponds to your idea. m5(a)vail.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) responds Can you (without being an asshole) explain why exactly each tape position may contain only a simple integer? It's perfectly reasonable to define the tape alphabet to be an arbitrary set; can the set not be uncountably infinite? If not, why not? Well, the "standard" in all the language stuff precludes infinite alphabets just as it precludes infinite-length programs. In fact, it's fairly easy to demonstrate an equivalence betweeen the two. I've been working off-and-on (mostly off) for the past ten years or so trying to rewrite Hopcroft and Ullman for the case of infinite alphabets of various sizes, and in general, *none* of the theorems hold for problems describably in a single input symbol. >From a practical standpoint, of course, it's even harder to build an infinite tape with an uncountable alphabet than to build an infinite binary tape. More generally, the problems of *programming* such a machine are immense -- there are some very important real world continuity/expressability properties about what sort of symbols can be transformed into what other symbols. Without highly discontinuous and chaotic transformations that are informationally incompressible, you don't get any more computational power than a standard TM. - kitten

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Re: GUT and P=NP
by nzook＠math.utexas.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: My anonymous remaile
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

: At the end of the day, at a certain hour agreed upon by the remailer operators, : the remailer will split up its cached messages and split them among several All sounds reasonble *except*... this is the internet, man! We can afford to do this once every 15 minutes, can't we? G

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Re: crime and snitches
by pjm＠gasco.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Berzerk writes: >>> ABSOLUTELY! The fact is if you can't get someone to snitch, IT IS NOT A >>> CRIME (morally)! I dare anyone to come up with a counterexample. >> If you were limiting your assertion to crime over the net, I >> suggest that the long, interesting history of confidence men is a >> refutation. Done correctly, in many cases the victim doesn't even >> know he has been conned. > Then have they? Can you give an example? I recently moved to Portland, OR (any cypherpunks up here?), and haven't yet unpacked all my books, but from memory one variation used in the movie "Grifters" is: - Convince the mark that you have an undetectable method to make money from the stock market that, while technically illegal, "won't hurt anyone". - Get seed money from the mark to run the scam. - Stage a bust by the police and allow the mark to escape. - The mark feels lucky to have gotten away, the front man and faux police split the money. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with ways of doing this on the net, given ecash and the rest of the infrastructure. Regards, Patrick May pjm(a)gasco.com

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