December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Pgp in Europe
by Karl Lundkvist 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone know a way to get Pgp 2.6.2 by ftp, mail or something in Europe? All I can find that I'm allowed to download from the net is 2.3... I suppose this is because of those silly american crypto-laws, but but I've seen europeans using the later versions, so they can't be that hard to get. Karl Lundkvist

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FTP: qwerty site gone, crypto files needed
by ddt＠lsd.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Michael Paul Johnson <mpj(a)netcom.com> and I are wondering what happened to <qwerty(a)netcom.com>. He's apparently dropped his Netcom account and thus the handy Crypto-related files he used to keep there are not available to the world. If anyone has any idea of the whereabouts of Mr. Qwerty and/or his files, please contact me at <ddt(a)lsd.com> and fill me in, so I can arrange to put the files back up in my FTP directory as a public service and so Mike can update his "Where to get PGP" FAQ to reflect the new site. Thanks, dave -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6ui iQCVAgUBLvWIHaHBOF9KrwDlAQHWnQP8CNryjUdBdMhPH8BtHEyH/DKVJYhMM/eT 1l8XfuXWXmcLnp5V669h+jeVM5sRU460Px/2KuCqs5uVdeMhsLnkH0A63213OcxK HSyaHMReHG8XKMaByd+q7mdc4+d6X4637yionJDLCCDduODVKTY/rTxu88l3OtJ/ 5YFjsqK1oa4= =1jkK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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FW: The NEXUS-Berkeley Presents: a New Years Party
by SCOTT STADELI 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- From: owner-cypherpunks To: nexus-berkeley Subject: The NEXUS-Berkeley Presents: a New Years Party Date: Sunday, December 18, 1994 5:18 >around the continent. (I would include here the Australian sites but >that would require that the party start approx. 7 AM on the 31st...) You say that like it would be a _bad_ thing.

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(fwd) Re: Content-Type of application/pgp
by jamesd＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Xref: netcom.com comp.mail.mime:5131 Path: netcom.com!ix.netcom.com!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!library.ucla.edu!csulb.edu!paris.ics.uci.edu!ucivax!gateway From: nsb(a)nsb.fv.com (Nathaniel Borenstein) Subject: Re: Content-Type of application/pgp Message-ID: <0iv6J0H0Eyt5I2gP0o(a)nsb.fv.com> In-Reply-To: <3blaqd$fgn(a)wegener.ems.psu.edu> Newsgroups: comp.mail.mime Lines: 17 References: <3blaqd$fgn(a)wegener.ems.psu.edu> Date: 12 Dec 94 15:01:06 GMT After several discussions over the last few weeks -- with Phil Zimmerman, Jim Galvin, Ned Freed, and others at Email World and IETF -- I have reached the conclusion that the application/pgp type should be ABANDONED in favor of an approach based on multipart/security. My application/pgp Internet Draft is expiring shortly & will not be renewed. By using multipart/security, we can work towards a greater level of harmony between the PEM and PGP communities. It also now appears that there's a chance that PEM and PGP keys can be made interoperable, which would be a huge win. I don't want anyone to think I'm standing in the way of this convergence, so I wanted to publicly state that I have abandoned my application/pgp Internet Draft. What we need now is for someone to work up a new draft on how to use PGP inside of multipart/security. I'm swamped. Any volunteers? -- Nathaniel -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. jamesd(a)netcom.com

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Re: Name that phone
by cactus＠seabsd.hks.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I like: "Pretty Good Phone". Keep the "PGP" motif. - -- Todd Masco | "'When _I_ use a word,' Humpty-Dumpty said, in a rather cactus(a)hks.net | scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - cactus(a)bb.com | neither more nor less.'" - Lewis Carroll - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLvXmjyoZzwIn1bdtAQHtMQF/eHqzFBvL1rVgDuuZQ7DbjA3Suwpe8FDF oXhwHxwgP/uiJFr/cNV+ovOrkZ5Zzg+m =9aqH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: List of reliable remailers
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:50 AM 12/19/94, Raph Levien wrote: > eric > A variant of the cpunk style. Uses Anon-Send-To: instead. Question: Are there in fact any remailers out there that _don't_ take Request-Remailing-To:, but only Anon-Send-To:? That is, are there in fact any "eric" remailers, according to Raph's criteria? I've used at least one of the remailers that's labled as "eric" on Raph's list, and used "Request-Remailing-To:" with it, and been succesful. I'm wondering if this is the case for all of them.

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Re: Pgp in Europe
by L. McCarthy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Karl Lundkvist writes: > Does anyone know a way to get Pgp 2.6.2 by ftp, mail or something in > Europe? All I can find that I'm allowed to download from the net is > 2.3... The U.S. govt. doesn't want you to get PGP from the U.S., but you are (presumably) not a U.S. resident or citizen, so U.S. laws don't apply to you. As long as _Swedish_ law doesn't bar you from importing strong cryptography into Sweden, you can grab PGP from wherever you like. -L. Futplex McCarthy - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQCVAwUBLvXyIWf7YYibNzjpAQGY+gP/ZxIH2glPB4RVz+kDjQj4FvxLGxTd3qMk mMbaFyMS5sfDV8tcmkSK4Ll5FWZwT2jede4JYXov/nbr8gIAjcTAvD0ejtJzyYxK FQx+nf9JUr2wViLU+6gm86ea1y7sH/wHjMNhnfwLxh50G9KenZZW+Od5Jzw/t8tR +qcaUwNGDfg= =OUBK - -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLvXzayoZzwIn1bdtAQGDZQGAlQQ3P9X513paHxgmDwh84u1KmNJR9aUZ 3XMHg0Jl08FELed6hI8XJUUXep1y4DK8 =MATE -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Envelopes speak - tracking information flow
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Re traffic analysis, cpunk remailers, DC-nets. Electric Dreams Weekly column for The Asian Age by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh #41, 19/December/1994: Envelopes speak - tracking information flow Digital communication is extremely vulnerable to interception, sorting and archival. Current electronic mail systems offer less privacy than open messages on postcards - at least it's impractical to keep copies of enormous quantities of paper mail. Encryption, which is slowly gaining popularity as a means of ensuring a degree of privacy of e-mail and eventually voice communication, is analogous to letters in sealed envelopes. This protects against one invasion of privacy - of communication content, or what you write and read. However there is at present little protection against a possibly more serious invasion of privacy, that of communication context, or to whom you send and from whom you receive messages. As such messages can include anything from New Year greetings to a friend to contract negotiations to CD purchases, there is a lot that can be known about you from addressing details on the most secure, encrypted mail - the tale the envelopes tell. Currently, whether you make a phone call or send an e- mail, your communication is routed through a host of different sites - telephone exchanges or computers around the world. It may not be technically possible for these sites to extract the content of your message because of encryption. It is not feasible, and usually illegal, for them to archive traffic. But it is very easy to archive routing information, and such logs are routinely kept by computers on the e-mail network as well as telephone exchanges. The legal process of getting access to addressing information is much simpler than for intercepting communication content itself, because it is often assumed that such information is, on its own, useless. Actually it is probably more useful than interception. Such traffic analysis helped track Iranian assassins in France earlier this year, using records of 20,000 phone calls from public booths. It could also be used for intrusive monitoring of your income or hospital visits, or for that matter to crack down on Tibetan human rights activists. Cypherpunks - the assorted citizens of cyberspace who try to protect privacy through the use of technology - may have a solution. Elated by the success of anonymous remailers - special e-mail addresses that repost messages after removing any traces of the original sender, especially favoured in discussion forums for victims of sexual abuse - they are now working on methods to reduce, if not eliminate altogether, the menace of traffic analysis. Without these, it would be possible to associate anonymous messages with their original senders by carefully matching arrival times in various system logs. Remailers and their users resort to several countermeasures. They collect incoming mail and repost anonymized versions in batches of random sizes, to avoid a correlation between mail arrival times. They route mail through random groups of remailers, often in different countries, to make tracing posts back to the source harder. And of course, they encrypt as much traffic as possible. Although remailers prevent reverse traffic analysis - tracking mail from the recipient to the sender - they don't protect against traffic analysis from source - tracking the output of a specific site or individual. Dining Cryptographer networks, or DC-Nets were developed almost a decade ago as a networking protocol allowing a group of people to broadcast messages, while making it impossible to identify the specific source from within the group. Unfortunately DC-Nets have not yet gone beyond the early experiments; but there is hope that they will soon silence the electronic envelopes of traffic analysis. Privacy and freedom of expression are basic human rights. Where laws and international treaties have failed to protect them, it looks increasingly likely that in a borderless world of digital signals, technology will. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is a freelance technology consultant and writer. You can reach him through voice mail (+91 11 3760335) or e-mail (rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in) --====(C) Copyright 1994 Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED====-- This article may be redistributed in electronic form only, PROVIDED THAT THE ARTICLE AND THIS NOTICE REMAIN INTACT. This article MAY NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be redistributed in any non-electronic form, or redistributed in any form for compensation of any kind, WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION from Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in) --==================================================================--

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The Economist follows my Electric Dreams!
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The December 12th episode of my column, Electric Dreams #40, discussed the relative success in text processing using statistical methods over conventional natural language processing. The latest issue of The Economist (Dec 17-24th) has this as its lead science story. I congratulate myself on having one over my favourite periodical! Of course my article was 500 words, so the larger Economist story was more detailed. While I mentioned technology developed by the US National Security Agency and Architext, The Economist referred to research undertaken at BT (formerly British Telecom) and Cornell University, especially the work on automated text-summarization programs. If you'd like a copy of my original article, please send a blank message to rishab(a)arbornet.org with "get dreams-40" (without the quotes) as the Subject: field. For an index, send "get index"; to automatically receive future episodes of this 5kbyte/week column, send "subscribe". Happy Christmas and New Year! Rishab ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab(a)arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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NSA's text search algorithm
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Ian Farquhar" <ianf(a)sydney.sgi.com>: > I always imagined that the development of [NSA's text scanning] > algorithm itself predated email, and started back with cable and > telex traffic. Stat text scanning is ancient, but has probably not been used on the scale and efficiency that the NSA would require for net traffic. > > Earlier this year, the agency began soliciting collaborations from > > business to develop commercial applications of their technique. > > Has anyone got any further information about how this algorithm works? > It sounds like Rishab has somewhat better info than was publicly > available months ago when we last discussed this particular NSA > "technology transfer". Actually my 'info' about NSA's thing was mainly deduction put together with some (limited) specs on Architext (http://www.atext.com graham(a)atext.com) If you read NSA's note carefully, you easily rule out NLP ("independent of...language") and sophisticated neural nets ("very fast"). The Economist story I mentioned in my last post (on the fact that I beat them to the story!) goes into some detail on BT and Cornell's programs that summarize textual matter. These are apparently successful (included is an pretty good example of a computer-generated summary of the article), but also quite different from NSA's. BT uses basic NLP to get past articles, conjunctions etc (making it language-dependent), and stems (removes -ing, -ed, -s etc, unlike NSA which denies stemming, dictionaries etc; obviously language-dependent), before creating statistical table of word frequencies which are used to determine the subject of a sentence or the similarities between texts. Cornell can search "gigabytes of data ... in a few seconds [for] a subject" or similarity to an example text. It can figure out which sentences are 'important' (by comparing frequency tables). I suspect NSA's is much more pattern-oriented, as its USP is document clustering; maybe it uses some NN at some level. Of course you don't really need to know grammar to filter out articles and pronouns; you could do that statistically too. Rishab ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab(a)arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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