December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

No Subject
by johnl＠radix.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I am searching for a time-stamping service that will sign some data of mine > (or a hash thereof) along with a certificate indicating what time(,date,year) > the signing occurred. I want to use this to substantiate my claim that I > was in possession of this data before others were. (Useful for copyrights/ > patents, and possibly other things.) I think Bellcore is providing a service like that. Check out their WWW site (www.bellcore.com) //---------------------------------------------------------------------------- // John A. Limpert // johnl(a)radix.net

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Re: something to scare the *piss* out of ya
by Tim Scanlon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If this story is true, and can be substantiated, why the hell wern't the cops involved prosecuted, or walked out to a wall and summarily shot for crimes against humanity. The last time I checked torture and dismemberment were war crimes, and intolerable behavior in civilized nations. If it *IS* true there goddamn well should be congressional hearings on it. I would suggest contacting any of the local news media in DC, but would reccommend the local ABC affiliate, WJLA for contact since they are in the midst of tearing the ATF a new asshole (and are going to do the same to the FBI tomorrow night from what they say) over the Waco raid. The ABC affiliate here has caused new Senate hearings apparently, it seems that the longer things go on, the more nastiness is dragged out on this. If this bit wasn't true, then it's despicable propaganda, and anyone involved with it's distribution should be ashamed of themselves. I do not believe liberty and democracy can easily survive if citizens or public servants lie. True strength lives in honest discourse and the actions of reasoned men, acting in a thoughtful and honest manner. It's damned easy to run around splattering the net with nasty scare stories about the evils of LEO's, but it takes a bit more to actually do something. I'd say with stuff like this the best course would be to put up, and contact your elected offcials, or shut up. Becasue if it is true, no decent person should tolerate it. And if it isn't, damn the persons who lie for obscuring the truth. Tim Scanlon ________________________________________________________________ tfs(a)vampire.science.gmu.edu (NeXTmail, MIME) Tim Scanlon George Mason University (PGP key avail.) Public Affairs I speak for myself, but often claim demonic possession

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Re: Dr. Seuss, Technical Writer
by Christopher.Baker＠f14.n374.z1.fidonet.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In a message dated: 11 Jul 95, you stated: > What If Dr. Seuss Did Technical Writing? > > Here's an easy game to play. > Here's an easy thing to say: what if there was a complete version of this rhyme? --- Following message extracted from REC.ORG.MENSA @ 1:374/14 --- By Christopher Baker on Thu Dec 15 11:27:49 1994 From: Mike Steiner To: All Date: 15 Dec 94 02:40:52 Subj: Bits in a Box From: steiner(a)best.com (Mike Steiner) Organization: Society for the Preservation of Endangered Societies A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer Bits Bytes Chips Clocks Bits in bytes on chips in box. Bytes with bits and chips with clocks. Chips in box on ether-docks. Chips with bits come. Chips with bytes come. Chips with bits and bytes and clocks come. Look, sir. Look, sir. Read the book, sir. Let's do tricks with bits and bytes, sir. Let's do tricks with chips and clocks, sir. First, I'll make a quick trick bit stack. Then I'll make a quick trick byte stack. You can make a quick trick chip stack. You can make a quick trick clock stack. And here's a new trick on the scene. Bits in bytes for your machine. Bytes in words to fill your screen. Now we come to ticks and tocks, sir. Try to say this by the clock, sir. Clocks on chips tick. Clocks on chips tock. Eight byte bits tick. Eight bit bytes tock. Clocks on chips with eight bit bytes tick. Chips with clocks and eight byte bits tock. Here's an easy game to play. Here's an easy thing to say.... If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interupted as a very last resort, and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort then the socket packet pocket has an error to report! If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash! You can't say this? What a shame, sir! We'll find you another game, sir. If the label on the cable on the table at your house says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, and your screen is all distorted by the side-effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk, and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc, then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM. Quickly turn off your computer and be sure to tell your mom! (God bless you Dr. Seuss wherever you are!) +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ Origin: COBRUS - Usenet-to-Fidonet Distribution System (1:2613/335.0) -30- TTFN. Chris -- | Fidonet: Christopher Baker 1:374/14 | Internet: Christopher.Baker(a)f14.n374.z1.fidonet.org | via Borderline! uucp<->Fido{ftn}gate Project +1-818-893-1899

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Re: general RC4 key searcher: optimisations anyone?
by Jonathan Shekter 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>/* RC4 Brute Force Key Searcher, by Andy Brown 1995 > >This part of the package is meant to be portable between most systems >so that Unix users can take part in the searching. After all, the >kind of really high powered systems that can make a large dent in the >key space are not running Windows NT. You will, however, require Umm... ever hear of an Alpha? Besides which, this will compile on NT, and just about every other OS known to man, so it's a moot point. >#define SwapByte(a,b) ((a)^=(b),(b)^=(a),(a)^=(b)) If the two values are in memory (which they are as you swap state vector elements) then this xor trick requires three read-modify-write cyles -- slow on any architecture. Use a temp variable instead. >/* prepare the key */ > >for(counter=0;counter<256;counter++) >state[counter]=(unsigned char)counter; This is bad. Use either a) memcpy as in bruterc4 or b) an unsigned long, starting at either 0x00010203 or 0x03020100 depending on endianness, adding 0x04040404 at each iteration to generate four bytes per shot. Remember, on most machines a 32-bit store is the same speed as an 8-bit store. The fastes I have been able to do on this section was obtained by unrolling the loop manually, and using *two* long variables, alternating, to remove instruction dependancies. >for(counter=0;counter<256;counter++) > >index2=(key[index1]+state[counter]+index2) & 0xFF; >SwapByte(state[counter],state[index2]); > >if(++index1==keybytes) >index1=0; 1) This loop needs to be unrolled! Using direct array offsets instead of incrementing the counter is a speedup on many machines. Also, experiment with the unroll size. Making it larger increases performance until you get too big to fit in the cache, at which point it slows down. My experiments on a few different types of machines showed that unrolling the inner loop 16 or 32 times was usually about right. See the inner loop of bruterc4. Use macros to do the unrolling. 2) You can avoid the if statement for checking for key wrap around as follows: in your initialization, construct an array as follows: for (i=0; i<keysize-1; i++) transtbl[i] = i+1; transtbl[i] = 0; Then, after each iteration: index1 = transtbl[index]; Viola, no if statements, no divides or mods. On many architectures this is worth the trouble as branches are expensive. Obviously, though, test this >/* do two RC4 operations as a preliminary test. If this fails then test >the next one, then the rest. This should result in a lot of rejections >before the rest of the loop is entered */ I like the early-out test. >x=(x+1) & 0xFF; >y=(state[x]+y) & 0xFF; >SwapByte(state[x],state[y]); Again, swapping with xor probably hurts you here. Use a register temp variable. My personal keycracker accepts general length keys and is not too much slower than bruterc4. So it can be done. - Jonathan -- ____________________________________________________ / Jonathan Shekter / / / Graphics Hack / "Probability alone / / Alias/Wavefront / dictates that I exist" / /______________________/____________________________/

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Claiming unwanted keyspace
by Donald M. Kitchen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have begun searching the unwanted 31 bit keyspace cd70000000 to cdefffffff and according to my calculations will be able to search two blocks of 31 bits a night until I get bored of starting the searches. I will be running 8+ hp9000/715s at 27,200 keys/second each. If someone was planning on searching this keyspace, let's decide on it. Thanks to those who helped me get going. Don

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Re: Don't trust the net too much (or at all)
by Tim Scanlon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Ed Carp [khijol Sysadmin]" <erc(a)khijol.intele.net> writes: |The POPs communicate with Netcom in San Jose. As I understand it, Netcom |isn't a true distributed computing environment - all the server machines |are in San Jose. Take out the servers, you take out the ISP. There's no need to use bombs, guns, any of that nastiness. As somone pointed to here allready, it's far easier and safer to use technical means. Unfortunatly for far too many ISP's, saying security is like speaking words in an alien tounge. They just don't get it, and even if they do, they don't want to spend the money on it, or worse yet, (and more commonly lately) allocate some poor sod who becomes the overnight expert on it, which is worse than admitting that it's not a high priority. Basicly, it amounts to hack 'em and drop 'em. What is to prevent the [hostiles] from trying to develop code to secretly monitor machines at ISP's and other places? And then just take them out whenever they want... Nothing I belive. Except perhaps the security offered by decent & avalible encryption. Tim Scanlon ________________________________________________________________ tfs(a)vampire.science.gmu.edu (NeXTmail, MIME) Tim Scanlon George Mason University (PGP key avail.) Public Affairs I speak for myself, but often claim demonic possession

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Re: Speedup of bruterc4.c
by Tim Scanlon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has anyone paralellized this code? I'm interested in running it on a paragon. Email me if you have or if you think this is worth bothering with. Tim

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Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995 (fwd)
by Brad Dolan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 12 Jul 1995 15:28:25 -0400 Subject: Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995 On June 27, Sen. Grassley introduced extensive criminal amendments to the federal racketeering act. S. 974, the "Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995," would amend U.S. Code sections 18 USC 1961 (criminal RICO statute), 18 USC 1030A (new section on computer crime), 18 USC 2515, 2516 (wiretapping), and 42 USC 2000aa (Privacy Protection Act). This proposed legislation is Very Bad. It would make all encryption software posted to computer networks that are accessible to foreigners illegal *regardless of whether the NSA has classified the software as a munition!!!* Here's the language: "Sec. 1030A. Racketeering-related crimes involving computers "(a) It shall be unlawful-- . . . "(2) to distribute computer software that encodes or encrypts electronic or digital communications to computer networks that the person distributing knows, or reasonably should know, is accessible to foreign nationals and foreign governments, regardless of whether such software has been designated nonexportable."

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LOU_nex
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

7-13-95. NYPaper Page Oner: "Senior F.B.I. Agent Suspended in Probe Of a Deadly Siege." The Federal Bureau of Investigation has suspended a senior career agent as a result of a Justice Department inquiry into whether officials destroyed important documents about the agency's bloody 1992 standoff with a white separatist in Idaho, law-enforcement officials said today. The suspension of the agent, E. Michael Kahoe, who was an official at F.B.I. headquarters during the Idaho siege, sent a shock wave through the agency's upper ranks. LOU_nex

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Re: Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995 (fwd)
by koontz＠MasPar.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> "(2) to distribute computer software that encodes or encrypts > electronic or digital communications to computer networks that the > person distributing knows, or reasonably should know, is accessible to > foreign nationals and foreign governments, regardless of whether such > software has been designated nonexportable." It would be kind of nice if we could get some first amendment protection for electronic media speech. Next thing you know they will want to extend RICO to librarians.

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