December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

NY Times Fears C'punks
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times Magazine, p. 23 September 4, 1994 Method and Madness Nicolas Wade [Subhead] Little Brother Not so long ago, high technology was seen as the likely handmaiden of totalitarian government, with surveillance systems and central computers tracking every citizen from cradle to grave. By a strange turn of events, what is now in progress is the very opposite of that nightmare. So many powerful technologies are streaming into private hands that Government is struggling to protect even the bare minimum of its legitimate domains. Once only governments could launch photoreconnaissance satellites; now the C.I A. is anxiously trying to curb commercial systems that can discern objects as small as a yard across, high-enough resolution to interest generals as much as geologists. A fleet of navigational satellites designed to give military commanders their exact position anywhere in the world is now in essence available to anyone; the Pentagon has let the public listen in on a degraded signal, but commercial vendors with clever algorithms can restore it to near-military accuracy. The computers that tie together the Government's information systems have become increasingly porous. The better their security systems, the more tempting the challenge. Earlier this year the Pentagon discovered that a coterie of computer hackers had penetrated large parts of its sensitive though unclassified computer network and had even taken control of several military computers. Think tanks and academics have warned for years, quite erroneously, that terrorists would avail themselves of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; it hasn't happened, because none of these items are easy to use and simpler means have always been available. But the samples of stolen Russian uranium and plutonium that have recently been captured in Germany are a clear warning that this blithe era of security may now be over. The samples seem to have come from reactor fuel and laboratories, not nuclear warheads. But that is small comfort, especially in view of new calculations that only one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of plutonium is needed to make a bomb, not eight kilograms as was generally assumed. And the smugglers caught by the German police were hawking four kilograms for a mere $250 million. Perhaps the most surprising democratization of high technology is that of cryptography, once an elite art of those who guarded Government's most precious secrets. The first serious challenge to the National Security Agency's ability to crack almost everyone else's ciphers came from an ingenious coding approach created in academe in the mid-1970's and known as the public key cryptosystem. The commercial sponsor sold the program to American companies but was not allowed to export it. Then in 1991, a Colorado computer expert, Philip R. Zimmermann, produced a program apparently based on this system, which he named Pretty Good Privacy. A copy of Pretty Good Privacy found its way onto the Internet, free to takers from all countries, and all of a sudden Government-class security became available to everyone. Zimmermann's next project is to develop a pretty secure citizen's phone that scrambles conversations. At this point, of course, it's possible to wonder if the humiliation of Big Brother isn't being taken beyond reasonable limits. Some Government monopolies are not so bad: the use of force, for one. If you believe the F.B.I. is bugging your conversations, you'll want to see Zimmermann in the inventors' hall of fame; if terrorism and organized crime seem the more immediate threats, the universal right to absolute privacy looks less compelling. Is it possible for the state to get too weak in relation to its possible adversaries? That's the last thought that occurs to Americans across a wide spectrum of opinion, from free market economists to civil libertarians. From a variety of motives, they persistently call for governmental power to be curbed. The present headlong democratization of high technology is the flower of a decade of economic deregulation, and of the fading influence of military procurement as a driver of technical progress. The state is so familiar a political structure that its endurance is hard to doubt. For economists and political analysts, it is the only unit of account. Yet in his recent book, "The Transformation of War," the noted military historian Martin van Creveld argues that since modern states are no longer able to fight each other for fear of nuclear war, conventional warfare, too, has become outmoded. Since the purpose of states (at least in the view of military historians) is to fight each other, states that cannot do so must sooner or later yield to organizations that will, like sects, tribes and cults. "In North America and Western Europe, future war-making entities will probably resemble the Assassins, the group which ... terrorized the medieval Middle East for two centuries," van Creveld predicts. Regular armed forces, as has happened in Lebanon, will degenerate into police forces or mere armed gangs; the day of the condottieri will return. Van Creveld is not the only analyst to fear for the state. From quite different reasoning, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued in a widely read essay in Foreign Affairs last year that world politics would be shaped in future by clashes between cultures and religions. As the West loses its military and economic predominance, the counterresponse from the rest of the world will be couched in religious and cultural terms: "The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future," he wrote. Even without fully embracing these forecasts of the state's eclipse, it's hard to ignore such recent incidents as the bombing of the World Trade Center or the car bombings of Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires and London. Terrorists with secure phones, satellite maps, accurate positioning and a sophisticated understanding of modern communications systems could bring down not just a few buildings but large sections of a modern economy. Big Brother is dead. The only serious likelihood of his resurrection lies in reaction to the chaos and disintegration that an era of Little Brothers might bring. ------------------- END

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No Subject
by spaceman.spiff＠calvin.hobbes.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In refrence to Mark Terka's article on how the person faked his name, he probaably did it the same way I am doing this, only on a variation for news. You can accuatly telnet in to other ports that are instance. Anyway Loopholes arent to hard to find. Ask a net programmer what the port for news is. Groove on dude Michael Conlen

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NYT on Electronic Purses
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times today reports: Quotes: "Electronic purses" may mean the end of cash. Banks, credit card companies and even some governments are racing to introduce electronic purses, wallet-size cards embedded with microchips that store sums of money for people to use instead of cash for everything from buying fast food to paying highway tolls. * * * Long-range planners in the banking industry see the weaning of small businesses and consumers from cash as the last step to closing many expensive branches and conducting virtually all business by telephone, through cash machines and perhaps home computers. * * * "As more and more people do business on the Internet, we have to look for how you pay for things," said Catherine Allen, a vice president in Citibank's technology office and the head of the Smart Card Forum, an industry group. "The smart card allows me to identify myself securely." * * * But Mondex [Britain's system] has still another wrinkle: privacy. Unlike most other electronic purse systems, Mondex, like cash, is anonymous. The banks that issue Mondex cards will not be able to keep track of who gets the payments. Indeed, it is the only system in which two card holders can transfer money to each other. "If you want to have a product that replaces cash, you have to do everything that cash does, only better," Mondex's senior executive, Michael Keegan said. "You can give money to your brother who gives it to the chap that sells newspapers, who gives it to charity, who puts it in the bank, which has no idea where it's been. That's what money is." End quotes. The article describes smart card systems in the US and other countries. Describes how customers "recharge" the card by home phone or other means. Email copies wanted? It's about a half-page in size. John

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Re: Governments and repression
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Wed, 31 Aug 1994 08:35:12 -0400 >From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)imsi.com> Perry, >I would refer to most governments as being no more than large >organized gangs, differing from the Mafia or Hezbollah only in so far >as they have convinced large numbers of people of their legitimacy. It's always bothered me that gov'ts were people wielding power for its own sake. I had hoped we had progressed beyond the tribal chieftan stage of development. Then again, I remember the bullies in grade school. To what extent is gov't a home for bullies and to what extent is it the collective defense against bullies (both ideas finding models in the Wild West Sheriff)? How do we turn it from the first to the second? - Carl

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AIDs testing and privacy
by Brian D Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

'Punksters There was an interesting piece on a new AIDs self-test kit this morning that focused on privacy. The idea is that an AIDs self-test kit is made widely available via your local pharmacy. You use the kit's materials to draw a drop of blood, which you place on an enclosed test slide. You then seal the slide, attach a barcoded sticker, and mail in the enclosed mailer to a lab. After a few weeks, you call a 1-800 number, punch in your code (from the sticker) and you get a recording telling you if the test was negative. From this point on the piece (CBS this morning) was elaborating on whether or not a machine should be used to pass on this news, or should a "real" person be involved. Interesting... Brian Williams Extropian Cypherpatriot "Cryptocosmology: Sufficently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise." --Steve Witham "Have you ever had your phones tapped by the government? YOU WILL and the company that'll bring it to you.... AT&T" --James Speth

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Re: How Did This Get Done?
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Path: io.org!sun.cais.com!news.sprintlink.net!tequesta.gate.net!sysop > From: no_more_faggots(a)faggots.must.die.com <===== Is this a trick? > Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories > Subject: NO MORE FAGGOT STORIES! > Date: 5 Sep 1994 21:13:00 GMT > Lines: 1 > Message-ID: <34g1ks$jn1(a)tequesta.gate.net> > NNTP-Posting-Host: hopi.gate.net > > NO MORE FAGGOT STORIES DAMMIT > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > How the hell did the poster "customize" his address to ...ummm...fit the > post??? not hard at all...by telnetting in to port 25 of a system on the net, you can talk directly to that systems sendmail...mail is passed in ascii format...few systems require a HELO (identifying the system telnetting in)...then you simply type in the mail headers manually...combine this with the fact that some systems let you post to usenet by email, and you can do just about anything and be untraceable (i think, anyone know for sure?)... i am sure that there are other ways to do this...i don't know how usenet news is passed, but i suspect this is also done in a similar way so if you know the port number and the format, you could do it like that... Skat

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Re: Problems with anonymous escrow 2--response
by blancw＠pylon.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by solman(a)MIT.EDU The skills of an entity without any reputation capital are absolutely worthless. But usually an anonymous entity will come around brandishing all sorts of certifications (reputation capital). .......................................................... Well, I was thinking that certifications & reputations wouldn't mean all that much to me, nor either knowing or being unfamiliar with someone's identity (or pseudonymity). I would be more convinced with a demo. Something which could demostrate facility or ability would be more valuable to me than a second-hand proof. I realize some professions cannot provide such demonstrations, but I myself would rather have a way of making decisions based on the excercise of first-hand judgement whenever possible. This anonymity/identity and certification/reputation business looks to me like trying to have one's cake and eat it, too, as the expression goes. A featureless landscape with remote associations to actual substance so as to both please the aloof-ers & appease the uncertain. It's a bit odd, because for every method which is found by which to hide, another method is found by which to reveal what was heretofore undetectable in Nature. While scientists push back the envelope & reveal what was previously 'invisible' to our eyes, others work to effect stealth techniques against the tools of Consciousness. Kind of strange, though interesting. Blanc

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more detweiler foo
by Mark Hittinger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~Newsgroups: misc.invest ~Path: sdd.hp.com!hpscit.sc.hp.com!cupnews0.cup.hp.com!news1.boi.hp.com!rdetweil ~From: rdetweil(a)boi.hp.com (Richard Detweiler) ~Sender: news(a)boi.hp.com (Boise Site News Server) ~Message-ID: <CvppJx.E02(a)boi.hp.com> ~Date: Tue, 6 Sep 1994 14:28:44 GMT ~Nntp-Posting-Host: hpbs4189.boi.hp.com ~Organization: Hewlett Packard - Boise Printer Division ~Isn't this amazing? I've cut down the newsgroups to just misc.invest. The article is discussing a recent forgery. Maybe since the summer is over and its back-to-work time he has to cut back to one group? He-he-he-huh-huh.

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Re: Remailer at Wein?
by Matthew Ghio 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mark Terka wrote: > Is the remailer at remailer(a)ds1.wu-wein.ac.at up and running? Test > messages to that site kept bouncing. It answered my ping last night (finger remailer-list(a)chaos.bsu.edu) > Also, how do I get ahold of that remailer's public key for encrypting > messages through them? finger remailer.help.all(a)chaos.bsu.edu

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Rabin-Miller
by nobody＠BU.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has anyone checked to see if the Rabin-Miller Primalty testing algorithm is included in PRZ's new release of PGP 2.61?

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