December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Free The World Web Server project.. :)
by monty.harder＠famend.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

PE> > PE> would be discerned by a staffer in moments. Crap like this is called PE> > PE> > They should know, because they send form letters to constituents all PE> > the time, only they don't bother to vary it a bit. PE> PE> Misdirection. This has nothing to do with my point. The staffers will PE> STILL toss your stuff. After putting the appropriate tally mark on the sheet for the day's mail, and sending out the response letter, yep. I don't expect Jan Meyers to personally =ever= see my mail to her office. I only expect her gruntlings to put that mark under "no" for the ______ Bill. PE> > Meanwhile, back at the ranch. PE> PE> In other words, you are choosing to ignore me. Regardless of whether Not at all. I concede that letters do not get read by Anyone Important. I only want them to =count= the darned things, and the variations in verbiage, margins, fonts, etc. should be enough to get them classified as part of an organized letter-writing campaign, instead of a form-letter-signing campaign. That puts the mark in a different column. PE> you are paying attentoion, however, you will still not be able to Not only am I paying attentoion [sic], but I know from experience that the staffers at least have to pay enough themselves to know which form letter to send me in response to my Heartfelt Expressions of Concern. Without fail, I get that letter from Meyers' office, but only about half the time from Dole or Kassebaum. PE> > .. If one of our DC members can set up an PE> > Imail-FAX gateway, we can publicize some nifty Iddresses for folx to PE> PE> Perhaps people who can be bothered to spell out "folks" properly also When I am writing to people whose opinion of my spelling I give a snit about, I will spell it precisely as you indicate. If it annoys you, set up your copy of exxxon to do the transform, or put my name in your twit filter. Talk about misdirection.... But "folx" is exactly the kind of thing that tells the staffer that it is =not= a form letter, because a computer would not be programmed to use variant spellings, would it? PE> are willing to write letters that will be paid attention to. As you PE> seem to prefer to ignore the fact that you will be ignored, why are PE> you willing to spend effort setting up an "Imail[sic]-FAX gateway"? Because that gateway can be used to convert genuinely original, pseudo-original, or blatantly copied Internet mail, ^ ^^^^ May God have mercy on my soul for having coined an =original= abbrv'n. rather than merely rearranging the words and phrases that others frequently use, which would, of course, be Astroturf<tm>. I have never seen the Houston Oilers play football on faxes before.... which has no, or virtually no, marginal cost to most net.people, into actual paper, which, being tangible, has the potential to be counted as Natural Grass, and thus not contribute to knee injuries. * Abuse of power comes as no surprise. --- * Monster(a)FAmend.Com *

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Re: Netscape the Big Win
by ekr＠eit.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal Finney writes: >From: Adam Shostack <adam(a)bwh.harvard.edu> >> Actually, it also supports Kerberos (not relevant to most of >> us), and PGP messaging. Although a KCA would be needed before anything >> useful came of the PGP support, at least its there. > >It appears that support for PGP messaging has been removed from the >July 1995 SHTTP draft. So it's X.500 all the way. ><URL:http://info.internet.isi.edu/in-drafts/files/draft-ietf-wts-shttp-00.txt> Well, X.509 for now. The Eastlake-Kaufman DNS Security work (draft-ietf-dnssec-secext-04.txt) plus MOSS (draft-ietf-pem-mime-08.txt --now proposed standard, awaiting an RFC number) promise to give us a non-X.509 certification structure for the Internet. S-HTTP explicitly looks to this work to free us from X.500. Note that this only marginally improves the situation, however, since what you really want is commercial-grade certification, and you still can't issue RSA certificates, whatever the format, without licensing from RSADSI. This promises to be something of an issue in the future. -Ekr

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Re: Java (was Netscape: the big win)
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

So, what would be a "cypherpunk" thing you could do with Java? I know I can use it to download little applets to my system to do animations. What can it do to enhance my privacy? What would be the Java equivalent of PGP? Hal

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Re: Netscape the Big Win
by cman＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim -- HotJava is a web browser that happens to be written in a language called Java, that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine, which is part of what gives this combination of tools the high degree of platform independence we've been talking about. JVM is the thing that is currently being ported to different platforms both by Sun and by others. Also, there is the Abstract Windowing Toolkit, which provides a set of platform-independent, browser-embeddable GUI tools. HotJava is the first (and certainly won't be the last) web browser that allows you to have small Java programs (called applets) as an HTML document type. These are obtained by the browser in the same way it obtains a GIF, but they are interpreted and run on the client machine. A Java program is compiled into Java bytecodes, which have certain properties that prevent them from, say, breaking out of their address space, playing cute games with the CPU, etc. Applets are composed of bytecodes. Most of the existing applets do stuff like 3D models you can rotate with the mouse, irritating animations, and enhancements to forms technology, but Java is a general-purpose language -- one of the most impressive applets I saw initially was a spreadsheet, plonked down in the middle of a web page. Admittedly, it was a really stupid spreadsheet, but it did a good job of convincing me that you could really do anything with this stuff. I don't get what you mean when you say, "Java isn't ready for the home market." True, I don't think that programming languages of any sort are part of the "home market", but I think that Java will enable people like cypherpunks to write extremely portable applications _once_ that will be embeddable on web pages viewed by browsers like Netscape. I can't think of anything that is going to come closer to your definition of "winning" the home market. Certainly the home market will be dominated in short order by Win 95 and MacOS (mostly the former.) I think the Win 95 port of the Java environment is only awaiting release of Win 95, and the MacOS port has been demoed around town. Also, Java is entirely orthogonal to issues like particular protocols or formats, in the same sense the C or Smalltalk are orthogonal to those same issues. It's just that we will be able to embed access to those protocols and formats into the popular tools without huge porting nightmares, or even requiring much cooperation from the vendors themselves, who are often limited politically by what they can put in themselves.

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Re: Netscape the Big Win
by cman＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Integration of crypto into Netscape is thus the Big Win. > This is why Amanda and I have been working on crypto tools for Java, a "safe" programming language that will be embedded in Netscape in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future. In addition to eventual incorporation in Netscape, it is currently available on Suns running Solaris 2.4 and PCs running Windows NT. See: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/achou/JCrypt/packages.html This is also why October is "Java month" for the cypherpunks Bay Area meeting. Marianne Mueller (mrm(a)eng.sun.com) is organizing speakers and coordinating the schedule for that month's meeting. Java will be available for Windows 95 about the time Win 95 is released, and a Mac version is due out "Real Soon Now." The Mac version has been demoed to industry insiders already. One of the obvious advantages is that it should be possible to write a nice, GUI interface once, and be done with all of the tiresome porting that seems to occupy too much of our time.

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Investigate Your Federal Building :)
by The Gate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Had problems with the original transmission... 21:22 EST July 17th, 1995 New Haven, CT Day One, Investigation Begins. Of course, I've been researching THE FACTS all my life, but never before have I gone to the FBI to ask for information. Also of course, they gave me none, or practically none, just this: (202) 324-3000. Can anyone guess? FBIHQ it says on the yellow post-it note. That's all she could give me. I have been incredibly scared these last couple of days, wondering exactly what I was doing, but I feel better this evening. Just going down to the Federal Building and poking around asking questions has not gotten me killed, and I don't think it will. Check. In a recent post to this list I said I was going to go to the Federal Building here in New Haven to begin a local investigation of Federal Events. So I put on my coat and tie, washed up a little (long-hair and beard couldn't be controlled, will not cut) and started walking, stopping off at Kinko's Copies to make a free local phone call to one of my partners and grab some note paper for the session. Then on across the green towards the courthouse, town hall and on Orange Street, the Robert N. Giaimo (sp) Federal Building. Of course, I'd been there before, to the post office, and it was always a rather non-descript affair. But now I was looking for something, and though I didn't find what I was looking for, I did find out a lot. Alot of it was disturbing, alot of it was funny, and alot of it was encouraging, especially the print of the original Declaration and Constitution/Bill of Rights, as well as the posted Code of Ethics for Government Service, Public Law 96-303, passed unanimously in Congress on June 27, 1980, signed by the President (Carter?) on July 3, 1980: Article One of Ten: "Put loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to persons, party or Government department." No problem, I thought, I'll keep that in mind. Article 9: "Expose corruption wherever discovered." Whoa, that's a tough one, where are you going to find corruption in the United States of America? Article 11:"Uphold the Constitution, laws and regulations of the United States and all governments therein and never be a party to their evasion." Well, the Constitution I can uphold, as it upholds me, but I don't know about all the other laws and regulations...I'm not sure everything signed since 1776 passes my muster. You? But though I had been to the Federal Building several times previously, I wasn't ready for what I encountered this time, as it had never before been present: heavy security presence. No secret service types, just rent-a-cops with a metal detector and baggage x-ray device. But they were bustling, somewhat loud, and definitely a presence. A humorous note: Usually the electro-magnetic energy that I generate because of meditation and honest emotional presence is enough to kick the metal detectors, but I thought if I took my belt off, I could get through. No such luck, and when I took my belt off, my pants, which were bought for my bigger brother, started to fall off. I don't wear underwear either, so I ended up walking through security holding my breeches up by hand. I thought, mmm the joy of security...of course, it was *my* costume (cover) that was falling apart, but I got back together without real embarassment. That's when I started to look around the building lobby. First I checked the directory. Yup, there it was, FBI, fifth floor, right underneath the penthouse cafe. BATF on the second floor, IRS third. Department of Protective Service (SS) first floor, though I saw no evidence of their lair or personnel. Bill Clinton and Al Gore on the wall, of course...Recycling bins for paper, cans, bottles and something else, perhaps newpapers. Nice touch I thought, it would be nice to see more of those. I wandered over to the bulletin board: Arson informants offered rewards $100,000 to $250,000 rewards offered to informers leading to convictors of international terrorists - mostly airplane and boat hijackers. The Code of Ethics for Government Service as mentioned above. Help for choking victims... (At this time, I was rushed by the closing of the computer center. The facts are flear though...) Anyway, on to greater heights... Elevator, fifth floor, get in, man there, looks like FBI, look at numbers in elevator, 5 already lit. A real live FBI agent and I in the elevator together, wow. Day already made, still only ten o'clock or so. Get off 5th floor. Man goes one way, I go another, meet another real live FBI guy, "Where's the receptionist?" "Through that door" came the warm reply from a brown-suited man with a pock-marked face. Hmm, definitely FBI. Into FBI visitor center, one small room, bulletproof glass, Time magazines, American Flag with gold tassels in corner, photos of Agents, woman behind the counter: "Uh, I'm something of a freelance reporter for Citizen's Television and Internet newsgroups, and I'd like to know if you can confirm whether or not someone worked for the FBI..." Polite no from FBI woman. "Is there a public information office?" No, then checks mind, goes to back to talk with all male contingent, at least seven agents in back room, including the one I saw on the elevator, all are rustled into alert by the inquiry from CTV producer and Searchnet Reporter. I can just hear them saying, by gosh they were right, the Internet really is spawning investigators... Then all I get back is the phone number, but it was a lot of fun. Down to the BATF? nah, enough for the day. Thoughts on the way to the library... Next time, maybe I'll deliver a message. Gotta run, Lee. ____________________________|||||||||||||||||||||______________________________ R. Leland Lehrman@The Gate, New Haven, CT. http://id.wing.net/~gate/gate.html God, Art, Technology and Ecology Research and Development >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Do you love the Mother?>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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Re: Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995 (fwd)
by ab411＠detroit.freenet.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ray Arachelian <sunder(a)escape.com> writes: >On Thu, 13 Jul 1995, Bill Stewart wrote: >> >> ["virus hackers"] >> >> ... What viruses have to >> do with encryption is that encryption makes it easier to prevent viruses, >> and Senator Grassley wants to stop that. > >Erm, not quite. Stealth viruses supposedly use "encryption" to hide >themselves.... Perhaps he was referring to the use of (cryptographically strong) hashes to implement integrity checking? Or authentication of software distribution channels? >Still, you could write beneficial viruses, or virus like programs that >are beneficial in nature in some way. KOH for instance? The problem is, it's awfully hard to come up with a case where a beneficial virus can't be replaced with a similar program that has the same features, but lacks the ability to copy itself. KOH is a good example. There are plenty of good encryption programs out there, so what is the advantage to making it a virus? Precious little. On the other hand, problems crop up, like: What if there are bugs in it? How do you "call it back" and replace it with a bugfixed version? How does someone know, when it shows up on their machine, that it is still the original beneficial program, and hasn't been turned into something malicious? This is pretty far off the subject for Cypherpunks, though. (I suppose it could come with a PGP signature, the key being well-known, and that would both answer the question of whether it'd been modified as well as tie this back into cpunks. :) -- David R. Conrad, ab411(a)detroit.freenet.org, http://web.grfn.org/~conrad/ Finger conrad(a)grfn.org for PGP 2.6 public key; it's also on my home page Key fingerprint = 33 12 BC 77 48 81 99 A5 D8 9C 43 16 3C 37 0B 50 No, his mind is not for rent to any god or government.

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Re: Netscape the Big Win
by tcmay＠sensemedia.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:23 PM 7/20/95, Jon Lasser wrote: >And from what I've heard about HotJava (not seen it yet, can't comment >strongly) there needs another jump in PC power before it would be useful >at the home level. Part of why we were stuck with DOS for so long is >that it was what got the job done when the revolution happened. For that >reason, I agree that HTML/Integrated browser solutions are what we're >looking at, and at the same time don't have strong hopes for HotJava, >though I would like to see it succeed. Just to clarify, you mentioned "useful at the home level." I can't speak for Ray, but I certainly didn't mean HotJava (or PowerObjects, or OpenDoc, or Agents tools, etc.) would be used at "the home level." Such tools would likely be used at the programming level. As to HotJava itself, who knows? It's one of several tooks coming along. The key is that folks--millions of them at last count--are voting with their feet that they want the ball of wax that is "The Web" (Netscape or Mosaic, HTML, HTTP, browsers, automated handling of images and sounds, integrated Newsreaders and mailers, etc.). They, the millions of users, demonstrably don't want to mess with Linux, or FreeBSD, or PGPelm, or even simple, straight text PGP (that is, PGP not integrated with mailers, just standalone). They want ease-of-use and a semantically simple model of how things work. (This is why I like Lisp Machines when I programmed them for Intel, and why I was an early adopter of the Macintosh, and why Windows has been doing so well...and why Netscape is doing spectacularly well.) This is not an "OS War" I'm taking sides in, just simple truth about what people are buying, using, clamoring for. It's important to our longer-range goals to recognize these important trends, like them or not. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)sensemedia.net | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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RE: Netscape the Big Win(dows)
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- on Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:39:49 -0700, tcmay(a)sensemedia.net (Timothy C. May) wrote: >The News reader in Netscape 1.1N is as good as the main "separate" news >reader, NewsWatcher, for the Macintosh, and has some added benefits. For >example, URLs in News postings automatically show up as clickable items, >which can be jumped to immediately. (Other News programs _could_ do this, >and maybe some of them do, but not on the Macintosh, at this moment.) Nit: The standard version of Newswatcher does this. Just hold down the command key and click on the URL. In addition, using the Internet Config extension allows you to do this in lots of other standard Mac internet apps, including the Eudora app you're using to read your mail with right now. Newswatcher, in it's enhanced "value added" versions, does filtering, and even will do a one-bounce anonymous remail off the remailer of your choice. >Big programs tend to grow because they can increase market share by adding >capabilities, by pulling in more customers. As someone who's developed and marketed apps for the Mac market, feature creep usually happens more to differentiate yourself from your competition than for any other reason. Don't look back 'cause they might be gaining on you. Frankly, it's more of a death spiral than anything else. You get design by focus group and feature list. The classic example of this in the Mac market is M$ Word, which has now became such a cow that I find myself reccommending WordPerfect (of all things) to my consulting customers. At least with Excel, there's still nothing much better, until the next generation, anyway. >And I'm not going to use half a dozen small programs, each doing slightly >different things and having different commands, when one will do nicely. Only when their feature sets overlap, like in word processors and spreadsheets. When they're fully differentiated like what happened on the Mac TCP/IP internet app market, interface fatigue is not much of a problem. >(I could list other pluses and minuses, a la my outline FAQ, but here's >just one more important item: cross-compatibility. Namely, with N smaller >programs in use, of varying versions, incompatibilities and even crashes >can result all too often ("We have discovered that MailMuncher 2.12 does >not work with NewsNabber 1.1."). At lest with something like Netscape, a >certain amound of cross-operability is likely, for various reasons.) Not as bad as it sounds. Most Mac internetware types are pretty good about fixing cross-crashes, that is until they get too big to care, which may happen with Netscape. In general, Mac stuff doesn't crash nearly as much as it used to, and not nearly as much as Window$ still does. You get more crashes in MacTCP apps because Apple botched their initial TCP implementation. They're fixing that with Open Transport, which I've seen and which is pretty bulletproof so far. Finally, we're still in the chewing-gum and-bailing-wire stage with most internet apps, and the MacTCP based apps are no exception. >In any case, while I respect the views Pat is expressing, about >componentware and "small is better" approaches, the market is voting with >its feet for apps like Netscape, which are becoming the main programs folks >will use for communication, News reading, and Web surfing. Tell us about it in 6 months, Tim, when you've grown out of Netscape. You sound like someone who's totally enamored with their "-works" app. Most people end up using more specialized apps when they hit the wall with something which won't get all those "general purposes" taken care of... >So go ahead and do it! I've been waiting for many years for such things. Soon. Very soon, Tim. There's talk on the mcip (Macintosh Crytography Interface Project) list about version 3.0 of MacPGP which should be completely modular, and should not require a shell-PGP session to work. Until then, the applescript hacks seem to be holding up, though Mr. 'corn's tribulations make a brilliant counterexample. My signature below was done with them... > >To state an obvious non-crypto use of such "modules," why do all major word >processing and page layout apps have their own "dictionaries"? Why do I >have to train the dictionaries of Word, Nisus, FrameMaker, MORE, etc.? That >there have not been "dictionary modules," for many and sundry reasons, is >telling. Claris started to do this, but nobody wanted to standardize on their stuff for obvious reasons (they're owned by Apple)... >(Before anyone mentions it, one can on the Mac use things like >"Thunder" instead of the local dictionaries...this is not the same as a >module usable by all programs, but instead is a user choice to bypass the >local dictionaries. We could quibble for hours about whether this is in >fact a universal module or not. Indeed, though we shouldn't. Because it is. Anyway, you're talking apples <heh> and oranges here. A crypto module like we're talking about would function more as an init, er, sorry, an extension, rather than as a separate app, though Stuffit makes a good example of something which works pretty well as both. Cheers, Bob Hettinga -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMA8WFvgyLN8bw6ZVAQE0agP9FVBNe7lPu8dsqd3tNmGAMY7ivIX0eDR4 uHcogdALmk8+p8eN/a4xpfaAu2uuNp9m/FqTbUC466XREyRI7UVqOZ5EXU8UNEDZ ykkEaqxIWZ42SZpgHgdCaMdLeNWE8Y5T1ekhN1FjmnoU2oNOQpjH1sbqs1TDuuBo jWaTC4slnxU= =MnuL -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Re: DOVE/Red Mercury doom U.S. Super State? Red Mercury myth
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Thu, 20 Jul 1995, Gary Jeffers wrote: > Red Mercury means Antimony Mercury Oxide. This compound > looks rather > harmless but it is not. This compound is very technically > difficult to This myth shows up on sci.chem every few months or so. There is no such thing. -Rat

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