December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Guess what I just got In the mail? giggle..giggle
by Carol Anne Braddock 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 6 Jan 95 18:57:36 +0200 From:daemon@anon.penet.fi To: carolann(a)mm.com Subject: Chain letter bounced You, carolann(a)mm.com, have sent a message that seems to contain yet another copy of the infamous Make Money Fast chain letter. If you want to make a complaint, please send just the headers of the message to admin(a)anon.penet.fi - albeit as the messages have been blocked (as you can see), the message probably *didn't* go through anon.penet.fi but was faked (using NNTP faking or something similar). If you are trying to *post* the chain letter, please read the following: By now you should know that the net doesn't find all the waste of networking resources, time and money this stupid and illegal scam has caused amusing at all. I have actually been forced to incorporate an automatic chain letter detector / bouncer just for this... Here is the appropriate FAQ: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - This FAQ is for the benefit of those who have never experienced the advertisement MAKE.MONEY.FAST. Here are some answers to some questions frequently asked. 1. Does MAKE.MONEY.FAST really work? Not in the sense that you'll make money fast, but you'll make a lot of enemies fast. 2. If I forward or repost MAKE.MONEY.FAST, will I get a lot of mail? Yes, hate mail, flames, etc. 3. How can I get my account cancelled? Post MAKE.MONEY.FAST. 4. How can I get my system administrator mad at me? Post MAKE.MONEY.FAST. His mailbox will be so full of complaints, it'll take him/her a week to sort through all of them. 5. Who is Dave Rhodes? Salmon Rushdie's roommate. Just about every administrator wants to kill him so he had to go in hiding. 6. How can I assure I have a long and prosperous life? Well, nobody can guarantee that, but it can be guaranteed that if you post MAKE.MONEY.FAST you're life may be cut short by accident (hee hee). 7. Just how does one have to never work again after posting MAKE.MONEY.FAST? Well, MAKE.MONEY.FAST is a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes are illegal. Ponzi schemes are a form of fraud. Some of these net interchanges go over telephone wires, optic fibers, and microwave transmissions all regulated by the FCC. If you repost MAKE.MONEY.FAST over the net, and someone at the FCC wanted to get nasty, they may want to prosecute you for WIRE fraud. Once you're in jail, you never have to pay rent, your meals are free. Anal injections are free. MAKE.MONEY.FAST has a lot of side benefits. 8. How can I help to stop the spread of MAKE.MONEY.FAST? When some netter newbie blunders and posts MAKE.MONEY.FAST on the net, just send him a polite letter to not do it again (remember, the newbies act out of ignorance) then write the root@domain and request they inform all their users not to perpetuate this drivel. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Contents of message follows: X-Envelope-To: na166182 Received: by anon.penet.fi (5.67/1.35) id AA19254; Fri, 6 Jan 95 18:50:45 +0200 Received: from relay2.uu.net(192.48.96.7) by anon.penet.fi via anonsmtp (V1.3mjr) id sma017754; Fri Jan 6 18:47:54 1995 Received: from toad.com by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP id QQxxnn06516; Fri, 6 Jan 1995 11:50:16 -0500 Received: by toad.com id AA06017; Fri, 6 Jan 95 08:43:15 PST Received: from vortex.mm.com ([204.73.34.1]) by toad.com id AA05996; Fri, 6 Jan 95 08:42:58 PST Received: from downburst.mm.com (carolann(a)downburst.mm.com [204.73.34.2]) by vortex.mm.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA28027; Fri, 6 Jan 1995 10:48:27 -0600 Received: (carolann@localhost) by downburst.mm.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id KAA13250; Fri, 6 Jan 1995 10:48:16 -0600 Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 10:48:16 -0600 (CST) From: Carol Anne Braddock <carolann(a)mm.com> Subject: Re: Chain letter bounced (fwd) To: "L. McCarthy" <lmccarth(a)ducie.cs.umass.edu> Cc: cypherpunks(a)toad.com In-Reply-To: <199501061011.FAA23248(a)bb.hks.net> Message-Id: <Pine.3.89.9501061049.A13233-0100000(a)downburst.mm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Precedence: bulk Thanks for the great article....I chuckled a lot, and I haven't had a lot to chuckle about these days..... But I still think that as the computer program we trust the most, he deserves overt support in all phases of of my life. Even though I am dead broke, I could tell my main newsgroups. I wasn't asking or telling. Just informing. And it was to .1% of all Usenet ....That...is...not...a...lot! I am sure the real point of your post will come through, but for now I'm kinda clueless. Love always, Carol Anne On Fri, 6 Jan 1995, L. McCarthy wrote: > [...] > > To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > > From: "L. McCarthy" <lmccarth(a)ducie.cs.umass.edu> > [...] > > Posting letters asking for $$$ is of course a risky venture on Usenet. We > > see the PRZ Appeal as a Worthy Cause (tm), but that's just what all the > > MAKE.MONEY.FAST posters think of their garbage too. If you go sticking out > [...] > > -L. Futplex McCarthy >From carolann(a)vortex.mm.com Fri Jan 6 01:39:29 1995 Date: Thu, 5 Jan 1995 21:57:05 -0600 From: Carol Anne Braddock <carolann(a)vortex.mm.com> To: carolann(a)vortex.mm.com [icicle.winternet.com] Login name: carolann In real life: CarolAnne Braddock Directory: /usr2/carolann Shell: /etc/scripts/tcsh-susp Last login Thu Jan 5 21:38 on ttyq5 from annex3-1.wintern New mail received Thu Jan 5 21:16:23 1995; unread since Mon Jan 2 13:18:25 1995 Plan: This account has been disabled permanently. Mike Horwath - Admin - Winternet - drechsau(a)winternet.com

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SysAdmin of the year
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > According to Carol Anne Braddock: > His name is Michael Horwath, root(a)winternet.com ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > [icicle.winternet.com] > Login name: carolann In real life: CarolAnne Braddock > Directory: /usr2/carolann Shell: /etc/scripts/tcsh-susp > Last login Thu Jan 5 21:38 on ttyq5 from annex3-1.wintern > New mail received Thu Jan 5 21:16:23 1995; > unread since Mon Jan 2 13:18:25 1995 > Plan: > This account has been disabled permanently. - --- [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 iQBFAwUBLw2PxioZzwIn1bdtAQEgggF+ImxhTJlTtuMMJglmt3z/EriU0W2KisJZ kr+JZeyf2iPyi5O/xsoHNWR/jHaYtE34 =wNlp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: your mail
by Carol Anne Braddock 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is that better...giggle... Hope you make and hand out some hard copies! Love Always, Carol Anne ps if it was you instead of Zimmy the result would have been the same, I think. I'll rant why I'm actually on the list soon

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There.....Do ya like this one better?
by Carol Anne Braddock 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Signature withdrawn at the request (pretty rightfully so) of my dear friends on the Cypherpunk List. Coming Soon: The Internet Debut of CENSORED.COM

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Re: Remailer Abuse
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:28 AM 01/06/95, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote: >Again, this comes down to definitions of anonymity. In this case, if >you start from the silly assumption that the anonymous remailer actually >keeps records that correlate messages to payment mechanisms, Doug is >right, but barely. To break the anonymity, you'd need collusion between >the operator of the anonymous remailer AND First Virtual, because the >former knows which account sent a message, and the latter knows who that >account belongs to. (And before you tell me that this sounds a lot like While this might be secure enough for some people, it is important to note that it definitely is less secure then the current free remailer net. Currently, if I send my message through 10 remailers, many more then just two of the operators need to cooperate in order to get my true identity. I think that at least 8 or 9 of them do, actually. In a First Virtual payment-scheme remailernet, no matter how many remailers I send my message through, any _one_ operator, together with First Virtual, can burst my anon bubble. I suppose this still might be enough security for some people. After all, penet is enough security for some people. But I'd guess that most people using cypherpunks remailers instead of Julf's penet remailer aren't going to be willing to settle for it, because it doesn't give you very much more security then penet. My trust of Julf, who has an amazingly good reputation on the net and furthermore isn't in the U.S. (and presumably isn't subject to U.S. government coercion), certainly isn't any less then my trust of First Virtual. And if I'm still sending through 10 remailers, which I'd be doing for traffic analysis reasons, any _one_ of them, together with FV, can compromise me. Weakest link in the chain. Which means my risk _rises_ with increased remailer chain length. If I was willing to accept that level of risk, I'd just use penet which is much more convenient. The First Virtual method does seem possible for Julf's remailer, since users are pretty much already trust Julf completely, so the Julf+FV system isn't any less secure then the just Julf system. But it's just not anonymous enough for cypherpunks-style remailers.

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Carol Anne - C'Punk Poster Person?
by dwomack＠runner.utsa.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It occurs to me that Carol's problem may well be of considerable interest to c'punks and free speechers everywhere. Not that I favor spam or it's derivatives - but Cancelmoose and others define spam as *_50_* or more groups, esp. without crossposting. My basis for saying that Carol's situation is of interest is ---- as the net becomes more vulnerable to regulation, who among is immune to a quick cancellation of account? For something such as, say, the irresponsible (and antisocial?) advocacy of crypto? If an account can be chopped for 10 posts, where is the bottom limit? 5 perhaps? 2 maybe? 1 post that the sys-admin disagrees with? Developing the idea, and combining it with for-profit remailers...what would be wrong with a provider offering a unix shell based account, with the option of registering the account under a nym - and with finger user switchable from on to off and back again? The login ID would also be unconnected to the name. Frankly, none of this seems that radical...our friend, America On Line has some of these characteristics! Various 'anti-true spam' strategies could be used to prevent massive postings of Make Money Etc...But instead of a remailer, an actual *_system_* would be used. Payments could be by electronic invoice and money orders... Any thoughts on this? Dave

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Re: Files and mail
by Carol Anne Braddock 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear Mr. Horwath, A written reply will suffice. You have my permission to make all of my files world readable. You can put them in the ftp site. Upon receipt of notice, they will be removed within 24 hours, and you will recieve a signed PGP statement with the new key, stating that the files have been removed. Other Winternet users have already gone to my defense, and copied all of the world readable material anyway. And the whole account might as well be, too. Please do not forward any mail here. You will better serve yourself bouncing the letter back to the sender and informing them of my new address. If I find forwarded mail in my mailbox, I will print hard copies and visit the Attorney General's Office and file a complaint under the Stalking laws of the State of Minnesota. And please...deactivate my WWW pages. I was astounded to find out that during the suspension, they continued to remain active, as I learned in the office Wednesday. That was (and still is) stealing my net.web.goodwill, and creating a falsehood amongst other users. My WWW Pages have found a nice, new, warm sunny home in Austin, Texas. I spent six full hours making a personal appearance, at great personal expense, to the Winternet Office to resolve the situation. My original reply still sits in suspended composition in my mailer. I wasted not a nano-second in preparing my reply to the posting. In legal point of fact, the poster is violation of Minnesota State Law. He has no legal jurisdiction whatsoever. I did not take days to "investigate", nor cite that other things such as "my machines being hacked" and "I'll do it when I'm ready to do it,". I was a simple complaint. It had no validity. Crossposting an article to .1% of the Usenet News Groups does not by the very statistic constitute spam. (And I own two shares of Hormel Corp, so I do know what SPAM (tm) is. As was pointed out in alt.current-affairs.net-abuse The complainer didn't fully read said article. It was timely.(and still is) The crossposting wasn't wasting resources. It is of no one's concern the actual groups posted. They have the right and ability to respond. I asked for no money. I did not stand to profit by the posting. The person who started the whole thing was pretty heavily chastised, by the readers of his own news group. A fast "K" was all that any individual needed for this article. No, Mr. Horwath, you are "way out-of-bounds" this time. And as the time cronology unveils itself, I am sure that will be shown to be a very truthful, factual statement. Dangerous precedents were set here. I will not rest until the whole of the Internet knows and is aware of the situation. Signed Carol Anne Braddock Friday January 6th, 1995 9:40 A.M. On Fri, 6 Jan 1995, Mike Horwath wrote: > You are welcome to your files and mail, I will pack everything up for > you as you left it, including your FTP area. > > I expect you to try to reach me today in the afternoon at my office and > I will fully explain why your account was deleted, with full detail as > to why. > > I do appreciate the work you did on the shirts for Winternet. I don't > appreciate the harassment you have already tried to bring upon me. > > When we talk, I think you might understand why this was done. If you do > not, then I feel bad, as I must then not be making myself clear. But > no matter what, this was policy that you chose to break even after I > had talked to you about it. More on this when we talk. > > Good luck at your new provider, Larry Leone is an old user of mine and > seems to be a good guy, even if a little quiet on the newsgroups :) > > A copy of this letter is also going to your new admin so that he knows > what is going on. > > Larry, Carol Anne was using about 11.5MB of disk that will be moving > over from Winternet to MM. > > Also, how have you been anyway? Been awhile since I saw you. Oh, and > could you install identd on your system? Get back to me on anything, > or with questions. > > -- > Mike Horwath IRC: Drechsau LIFE: Lover drechsau(a)winternet.com > Winternet: info(a)winternet.com root(a)jacobs.mn.org <- Linux! > Twin Cities area Internet Access: 612-941-9177 for more info > Founding member of Minnesota Coalition for Internet Accessibility >

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Re: Carol Anne - C'Punk Poster Person?
by david d `zoo' zuhn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I don't think there's much of a case for 'poster child' status involved. Users on the Winternet systems (of which I happen to be one) sign an Agreement stating that they'll abide by Netiquette whenever using internet services. Failure to do so can result in termination of service. This is Mike's way to limit the amount of time he has to spend dealing with users who generate flamage. There was [apparently] another issue involving reselling of service that I don't have details on, but which is likely to be related. Where's the censorship? I don't see it. CarolAnne is free to make whatever statements she likes (since she has service from another provider). The New York Times doesn't have to allow me to put an article on page one (much as I might wish to do so). That's not censorship either. No one is obligated to provide a soap box for someone to stand on. This is a free market issue, not free speech. Since there is competition in the local area, people are free to choose whichever provider they like. Some have more explicit AUP's than others. Some probably haven't even considered the issue. There's no one crying "Foul! Begone from the net forever". THAT would be censorship. But this is a case of "You're not following my rules. Be gone from my machine." I've got my own setup at home, mostly independent of network provider and becoming moreso as time progresses, to prevent J. Random Sysadmin from cutting me off arbitrarily. It costs more money this way, but that's not entirely unreasonable. I'd rather see a market of half a dozen or more providers in any given area, each mostly independent, providing a number of choices as to service levels and policy expectations, instead of a monolithic Micro$oft (or AOL or CI$ or Delphi or etc) "We ARE the Internet" where censorship (in the traditional definition of someone vetting any public [or private!] postings) is much more common. I could see a market for service where someone who decided to armorplate their machine could provide service to those who persist in doing "net.stupid.things". Provide anonymous accounts on that machine, and remailer accounts, and such, and then stand back and ignore all of the flamage that will come the way of root|postmaster|usenet|whatever. [ Personally, I'd likely put that domain into my global killfiles, but that's selective reading, not censorship. ] [ More disclaimers -- I don't represent Winternet in any way, nor Mike Horwath nor CarolAnne Braddock. I have no connection with Winternet except as a customer. I speak solely for myself and Armadillo Zoo Enterprises. And I'm not afraid of an electronic stalking prosecution. ] -- - david d `zoo' zuhn -| armadillo zoo software -- St. Paul, Minnesota -- zoo(a)armadillo.com --| unix generalist (and occasional specialist) ------------------------+ http://www.armadillo.com/ for more information pgp key upon request +----------------------------------------------------

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Re: Remailer Abuse
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:12 PM 01/06/95, Russell Nelson wrote: > Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 14:19:07 -0500 > From: jrochkin(a)cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind) > > In a First Virtual payment-scheme remailernet, no matter how many remailers > I send my message through, any _one_ operator, together with First Virtual, > can burst my anon bubble. > >Why? Why wouldn't the FV remailers use settlements? At the end of >the month, everyone settles accounts in re who gets what fraction of >what. No logs are needed other than counters. Oh, you're suggesting that I'd only actually pay the first remailer on my chain, and at the end of the month he'd pay some of the money I (and others) paid him to all of the other remailers his transacted with over the month? I hadn't thought of that, but now that I do, I can see several problems arising. 1) The initial remailer has no way of knowing how many subsequent links there are in the chain, and so doesn't know if I've paid him enough to reimburse everyone else. I can easily cheat. He also doesn't know _who_ the subsequent chains are. He can deduct one "stamp" from the amount, and forward the rest on to the next remailer, and trust them to do the same, but if I'm cheating there won't be enough to make it to the end of the chain. Both of these facts (initial op doens't know how long the chain will be, or who will be on it) are essential to the security I get from using anon remailers, so even if they could be "fixed", it would be bad to. 2) This system requies a good deal of cooperation and organization among remailer operators. They've got to agree to send each other the proper amount of money, they've got to set up policies for what the proper amount of money is, they've got to stay in relatively constant contact to keep everything running smoothly. In effect, a remailers trade association is created, and if I want to use any of the remailers in that group, I've got to use _only_ remailers in that group in my chain. I'd rather use a chain of remailers which aren't associated that closely, hopefully don't even know each other, and possibly some of which only exist for a short period of time (guerilla remailers, a risk if I'm paying, in that I can't neccesarily trust them not to steal my money, but if the money I'm paying is something like $.05 to each remailer, not a real serious risk). Assuming that there will be some free as well as some charging remailers, I'd also like to use some of each in my chain. I see some problems with the Remailer Trade Association allowing those transactions to happen. (will they accept incoming mail from a non-affilated remailer, which surely won't be paying them at the end of the month? Surely not, which means if I use any affilated remailers in my chain, no affilated remailers can come afterwords. So all affilated remailers I'm using have to come before all non-affiliated remailers, which is an undesirable restriction which could aid traffic analsysis. If there are several affiliations, things get even more complicated.) There are probably other problems too, that I haven't thought of yet. An FV-style system doesn't seem to do the trick. And it isn't an issue of certain sacrifices you have to make in order to set up for-pay remailers, as a Chaum digicash based for-pay remailer system would work admirably, and none of my objections would apply to it.

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Re: Remailer Abuse
by Nathaniel Borenstein 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Excerpts from mail: 6-Jan-95 Re: Remailer Abuse nelson(a)crynwr.com (779) > From: jrochkin(a)cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind) > In a First Virtual payment-scheme remailernet, no matter how many remailers > I send my message through, any _one_ operator, together with First Virtual, > can burst my anon bubble. > Why? Why wouldn't the FV remailers use settlements? At the end of > the month, everyone settles accounts in re who gets what fraction of > what. No logs are needed other than counters. I hate to say it, because I generally tend to take the pro-FV side of most arguments :-), but I think Jonathan's closer to the mark in this case. If mail goes through ten remailers, and they ALL charge via First Virtual, then the last one in the chain won't have to know who you are, but it will have to know your FV billing account. Thus it, together with FV, have enough information to break anonymity. This is NOT the same as saying that ANY one operator, together with FV, can burst anonymity; it means that the last one + FV can do so. I think, however, that you'd need to break into the last one to get enough information to allow the next-to-last one to figure out the right FV-id. (This assumes that you're tracing the message from its ultimate destination, not monitoring traffic as it passes through the remailers -- in the latter case, Jonathan is probably right on the mark.) Personally, for my taste this is sufficiently anonymous for any reasonable purpose. HOWEVER, I can imagine how to make it even more anonymous. Imagine that there are ten for-profit anonymous remailer operators who form an "anonymous remailers consortium". Each of them operates TWO remailers, a for-pay one and a free one, but the free one will only take things that have come directly via some consortium member's anonymous remailer, so your message has to be paid for once, at the entry point to the overall system. Now you can build up a chain that STARTS with a payment, but then threads its way through a bunch of less traceable systems. where the operators can't give tracing information even under court order. The consortium members would probably have to agree to some revenue sharing arrangements, but you could make this work. I think this level of engineering is overkill -- for my personal level of paranoia, I would settle for a single for-pay anonymous remailer located in a country with very different laws than those that governed the payment system. Such a system would probably be "breakable" for the legal pursuit of genuine terrorists, but not for government harassment of political dissidents, closet gays from conservative countries, pornographers, etc. I guess my basic assumption is that while any given government can not be trusted with too much power, if you can't distribute your trust for such things across several very different governments, human freedom may be a lost cause in the long run anyway. -- Nathaniel

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