December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Dummy foreign corporations and lawsuit proofing.
by Critias_the_conspirator＠informix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I, and no doubt many other cypherpunks resident in the USA, have received a lot of junk mail from Costa Rica, offering dummy Costa Rican corporations. The theory is you set up a mail drop in Costa Rica, then you gradually move all your assets to be owned by this mail drop, so that your house, your car etc, all belong to this mail drop. The junk mail claims that this makes you immune to sue happy lawyers -- that this makes you lawsuit proof. I believe this claim. Unfortunately I have also received other junk mail offering competing services, which claims that Costa Rican dummy corporations have the same effect on revenuers as catnip does on cats, and blood in the water does on sharks. This claim also sounds highly plausible to me. Doubtless the services offered by the Costa Ricans would work so long as you never generated documents going to the revenuers that showed the Costa Rican address. This might be a wee bit tricky, as the revenuers get a report whenever any financial asset is sold within America. And remember, if you do set up a dummy foreign corporation, (preferably one that looks more plausible than those offered by the Costa Ricans), if you set it up in consultation with an American advisor, that advisor's next report will probably be to the revenuers. -- Critias_the_conspirator

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Another pseudonym.
by Critias_the_conspirator＠informix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Critias_the_conspirator is of course another new pseudonym. Critias was a disciple of Socrates. Critias overthrew democracy in Athens and proceeded to demonstrate that even when democracy was thoroughly decadent, brutal, and tyrannical, it was still possible to create an even worse form of government. >From time to time this Critias will comment on financial privacy. -- Critias_the_conspirator

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Re: REMAILER PROPOSAL
by lcottrell＠popmail.ucsd.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lets call all the "Spoon-E"s you buy at one time, using one ID number, a roll. If the "Spoon-E" issuer, and the first remailer in one of your chains, collude they can identify all of your messages using any stamps from that roll. Method: The issuer keeps a log of all ID numbers and "Spoon-E" numbers. A remailer sends the address of each sender, along with the "SpoonE" number of the message. Now any message with a stamp from the same roll can be assumed to be from the same person. Unless you are sending many messages through the bramble at the same time, you are providing wonderful traffic analysis to the issuer. He will know when and approximately when each of your hops was. This almost collapses you chain to the security of a single hop. A solution to this would be to use a different roll for each hop (not each remailer), and one for each destination. You would have one "first hop" roll, which would be easy to identify with you. Several rolls would be for intermediate hops (no roll used twice in one chain). You would also keep one roll per final destination, which could be easily identified with the recipient, but not with you. -------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell who does not speak for CASS/UCSD loki(a)nately.ucsd.edu PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server. Encrypted mail welcome. Home page http://nately.ucsd.edu/~loki/ Home of "chain" the remailer chaining script. For anon remailer info, mail remailer(a)nately.ucsd.edu Subject: remailer-help "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by snyderra＠dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:49 PM 11/18/94, Timothy C. May wrote: >I suppose some messages make use of it, as Eric Blossom's just did (in >allowing retrieval of more stuff, somehow), but a lot of the >"offending" messages just seem to be non-ASCII for the hell of it. I presume you mean quoted-printable mail messages. Some mail readers do do this inappropriately, and some do it for reasons that may not seem appropriate (like an initial line consisting of "From", to try and keep the message content unmolested by Mail Transport agents. >Like Lewis, I find myself to easily delete the message and move on. >(I'm debating just deleting the messsages, which are marked "M" for >Mime, before even starting to read them.) > >Personally, I like simple ASCII. No fancy fonts, no embedded graphics, >no Quicktime movies I have to watch, etc. Use the "setenv NOMETAMAIL" I mentioned earlier. I thought you used Mac Eudora, though. That, at least in relatively recent versions, is very MIME intelligent. It changes the announcements into an Anarchie document and a Eudora email message document to retrieve it by email. Bob -- Bob Snyder N2KGO MIME, PGP, RIPEM mail accepted snyderra(a)post.drexel.edu PGP & RIPEM keys on key servers When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

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Re: The Thread Thread
by adam.philipp＠ties.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>* A tiny thread cannot be readily detected by "airport scanners," nor >>by even longer-distance scanners, unless the gain on the detector is >>turned up so high that many other things trigger the detector. >>If the threads are mostly plastic, with discontiguous metallic writing >>on them, then the detection problem is even harder. >This is just a quick thought...does anyone know what kind of metallic ink >is used? To add to the conspiracy theory, say the metallic ink is >radioactive with a higher radiation count for higher dollar amounts--would >it be implausible then to have some sort of radiation counter to gauge a >person's total 'radiation count,' and thereby approximate how much currency >they are carrying out of the country? Sorry for taking this seriously, but it has been considered and rejected... It is just inert plastic with metalic letters so that they are opaque to light while the plastic is translucent and provides a backdrop... Can someone snip this thread already? Adam -- PGP Key available on the keyservers. Encrypted E-mail welcome. Sub rosa: Confidential, secret, not for publication. -Black's Law Dictionary

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Re: The Thread Thread
by merriman＠metronet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Fri, 18 Nov 1994, Tim May writes: >>* A tiny thread cannot be readily detected by "airport scanners," nor >>by even longer-distance scanners, unless the gain on the detector is >>turned up so high that many other things trigger the detector. >> >>If the threads are mostly plastic, with discontiguous metallic writing >>on them, then the detection problem is even harder. > >This is just a quick thought...does anyone know what kind of metallic ink >is used? To add to the conspiracy theory, say the metallic ink is >radioactive with a higher radiation count for higher dollar amounts--would >it be implausible then to have some sort of radiation counter to gauge a >person's total 'radiation count,' and thereby approximate how much currency >they are carrying out of the country? Wouldn't work. Radiation is useless for something like this - how to tell the difference between X $20 bills, and Y $100 bills? The roentgen/hour levels would be close enough to make knowing which is which virtually impossible. Radiation is mostly good for yes/no type stuff, unless you're dusting things with particular combinations of very specific isotopes and sampling for them - in which case you've got a completely different set of problems. > >I wouldn't take the above seriously though.... > Seconded. Dave Merriman - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Finger merriman(a)metronet.com for PGP public key and fingerprint. PGP encrypted Email welcome and encouraged. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. No?

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by mclow＠coyote.csusm.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> Personally, I like simple ASCII. No fancy fonts, no embedded graphics, >> no Quicktime movies I have to watch, etc. > >Do PGP key blocks bigger than the message body count as "fancy crap"? > >Fancy and Crap are both in the eye of the beholder :). > >Attachment converted: Scratch:Amanda Logo Sig.GIF (GIFf/JVWR) (0000BB28) Well said. Nice .sig, too. ;-) -- Marshall Marshall Clow Aladdin Systems mclow(a)san_marcos.csusm.edu

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have one more comment. Earlier, I wrote: > Critias_the_conspirator is of course another new pseudonym. > >From time to time this Critias will comment on financial > privacy. Hear the words of Critias_the_conspirator: Put your money in ``Greek'' banks. The tentacles are everywhere. Critias_the_conspirator

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Re: Islands in the Net
by Amanda Walker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> This is just not what "liquid" means. A liquid asset refers to the > speed with which it can be traded, not what kind of value it has. > "Liquid" is an adjective about timeliness, not about resolution. Hmm. I had thought about using "valuable," but that seemed too ambiguous. "Negotiable" maybe? > Sometimes currency represents a fiat value, as with today's greenbacks. It's not entirely a fiat value; in effect, it's backed by the strength of the economy. The difference between a ruble and a dollar was not the fiat value (they were the same, as I remember), but in the fact that it was a lot easier to exchange dollars for real assets. For the record, I think that going off the gold standard was a bad idea, but growing up in the days of double-digit inflation probably gave me a biased opinion of floating currency. > Also, if it loses its ability to be exchanged for real assets > it likewise loses its value (e.g., Confederate dollars from the > Civil War). > > Under this reasoning, today's dollar bills should be worthless. > They aren't. Real assets are not the only form of value. I didn't say that the government had to be the agent of such an exchange. I can buy real assets with my dollars, but not with Confederate dollars. While it has been somewhat eroded since the start of the Drug War, dollars are still exchangable for real assets, even though the government is no longer backing them directly. > What currency do Visa or Master Card issue, perchance? Little plastic tokens that are accepted more places than the government's paper and metal ones. If it quacks like a duck... > Information doesn't obey conservation of mass, and so can't act as a > token. Exactly. On the other hand, with real-time clearing (which the Internet *does* provide the ability to do, with ever-increasing capacity), you can construct something that acts like an "instant check", which is close enough to cash for most practical purposes. Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation

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How to Mail a Letter
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, with the many helpful comments here by fellow Cypherpunks, I've begun to explore how to use the new Postal Service system. I really must say that Al Gore's Reinventing Government Task Farce has outdone itself. The new "PowerVisualMail" system is much more powerful than the old "seal the envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail it" approach. But I'm having some problems in the conversion. Perhaps some of you can help. I did the Archie search and found the Installer script at ftp.gore.gov, fetched it, used MIME_Decode on it, checked the PGP sig to make sure no one had tampered with Tipper's code, then installed it as a client on my Mac (which I bought AUX for, to run this client). After reconfiguring metamail and setting the NOMETAMAIL environmental variable (under csh, "setenv NOMETAMAIL") to the AUX agent symbol, I was able to recompile PowerVisualMail to (sort of) run on my system. I found the new O'Reilly and Associates book, "How to Mail a Letter with PowerVisualMail," to be very helpful, especially Chapter 17. I hope to spend the next couple of days ironing out the bugs and getting my mail client to properly communicate with the PowerVisualMail agent. But it'll all be worth it! This will all be so much easier than licking stamps and sending those b-o-r-i-n-g paper letters. Of course, now I've got to teach my father how to decode my PowerVisualMail letters...and he doesn't even have a computer yet! I've told him that PowerVisualMail just runs too slowly on 486 machines, so I'm hoping he gets a 90 MHz Pentium. And the phone company seems stuck in the Dark Ages, completely unwilling to accept my PowerVisualMail items! I guess they're just late getting on the Information Superhighway. Well, sorry I'll be missing today's Cypherpunks meeting in Mountain View....I'm busy making my life easier. --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. Cypherpunks list: majordomo(a)toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tcmay

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