December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

What!!!
by tony266＠vabeach.email.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Can someone tell me this cypherpunks is all about???

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IBM's Microkernal
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 1995, p. B6. IBM Announces New Software Code That Is Universal By Laurie Hays International Business Machines Corp., in its effort to reduce the importance of computer-operating systems, announced a new kind of universal-software code called Microkernal that enables software to work on incompatible hardware. For software developers and businesses that want to develop one set of codes to run applications on many different machines, Microkernal offers an opportunity for the long-touted open computing. A big challenge remains, however: to market the technology and make a business case for software developers to write for Microkernal in a world that is dominated by Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. "It's exciting technology, but it will be hard for them to market," says Dan Kuznetsky, an analyst with International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass., market-research firm. "It's also got a long way to go from what they've announced to the future." Mr. Kuznetsky likens the technology to the development of a great automobile transmission that has yet to be turned into a truck or a car. The key to Microkernal is a single source code base that communicates between the hardware and the operating system. One long-term possibility, for example, would be to make the Apple Computer Inc.'s Maclntosh operating system work on an Intel PC, impossible today because the two have different design architectures that don't talk to each other. IBM's delayed OS/2 operating system for the PowerPC chip, which is expected to be shipped by the end of the year, will be the first IBM offering for the Microkernal allowing developers to move applications to the chip with only small changes. IBM so far has garnered a number of licensing agreements for Microkernal, including Digital Equipment Corp., Maynard, Mass., and LG Electronics, formerly the Korean electronics concern Goldstar, as well as a number of universities. -----

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Many Topics are Appropriate for Discussion Here
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:38 PM 11/3/95, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >Look, its simple. If you want the FBI and NSA to win, post lots of >crap here. Nothing will help them out more than clogging one of the >few communications channels available to people interested in >spreading cryptography. If you are really successful, all the smart >people will leave (as has happened in waves before -- the losses of >Steve Bellovin and (effectively) Phil Karn are still felt) and you >will have totally destroyed the channel. There have been many posts which are more "clogging" than some minor conspiracy rants. And if people don't want to respond to these rants, they'll decline. Far more serious, in my opinion of course, are the cross-posts to multiple mailing lists and the various press releases and position papers bombarding us. Implying that the reason Bellovin and Karn left the list--if they did, as I haven't checked--was because of "off-topic" posts seems to be a stretch. Even if Perry has gotten assurances from them personally that the "off-topic" posts were a major factor, I'm not sure much can be concluded from this. People leave for all sorts of reasons. I don't know what reasons, if any, were responsible for the unsubscribings (or at least nonpostings) of Bellovin or Karn, but I'm not too sure it matters. I don't think it is useful to speculate on the causes for specific people leaving the list, or even to ask them why they left. If they feel it is important for us to know that they left the list because of too much talk about UFOs, or about IETF committees, or about Netscape breakages, they can tell us in their departing message. Certainly using the departure of J. Random Subscriber, or even R. Noted Hacker, as "proof" that topics are inappropriate is flawed logic. "We've lost fine subscribers like Phil Zimmermann because of crap posted here." I suspect there's some fancy Latin name for this kind of appeal to authority. Topics have always been in flux, which is almost certainly a good thing, else a lot of us would have left a long time ago. Certainly those interested in some topics have little if any interest in other topics. Lots of other people have joined the list, and the subscription base has done from an earlier plateau of about 700 subscribers to more than 1200 recently. And many of the current subscribers are very active in cryptography and security. I'd be tempted to mention a half dozen or so names, but anyone I left out might feel slighted. I do agree with Perry that longish political essays are probably not the _best_ material for this list, though thoughtful essays on the implications of digital cash, such as several folks have written about, are always useful. And there are many troubling aspects of "crypto anarchy" that need more explication, something I always feel is approprate for this list. I am much less bothered by _custom written_ essays by current subscribers, whatever the topic, than by reposts of long articles from other lists. Thus, occasional rants from list members are preferable, to me, to longish essays from outsiders, generally speaking. Political aspects of strong cryptography have always been important to this list. Though new subscribers may be forgiven for thinking this is the "Netscape bug list," such has not always been the case. Key escrow was a dominant topic in the early days, as it is today. And there are massive numbers of issues to be discussed in the digital money area, involving banking laws, the role of intelligence agencies in desiring to monitor cash flows, the legal implications of anonymous cash, and scads of technical issues. --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: video as a source of public randomness
by pcw＠access.digex.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:08 PM 11/3/95, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >Timothy C. May writes: >> I don't plan to belabor this point. Radioactive decay sources are >> certainly fine, though not likely to be purchased by most people. > >Video digitzation equipment connected to TV tuners turned to dead air, >your suggestion, are equally unlikely to be purchased by most >people. The geiger counters are very simple and cheap, too. > >Perry Well, it's true that video digitization equiptment _used_ to be unlikely to be purchased. Now, it is often standard equiptment. I recently purchased a Mac Performa for a Customer Support desk. We chose a cheaper model that came with a built-in video tuner. It came with a _remote control_ that would allow you to switch channels and adjust the volume just like a regular remote. It was very nicely integrated and ready to suck down signal from an antenna. While I haven't hacked that part of the Mac kernal, I would not be surprised if it was easy to turn the signal into a Quicktime video file ready for hashing. This was, incidentally, one of the cheaper Performas available at the time. Your mileage may vary because Apple is really flipping all over the place on features. But, now that the cold war is over, I don't expect them to be offering the Radiation Manager plug-in any time soon. -Peter

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Re: censored with Perry
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry writes: >> Perry is again narrowly defining allowable speech on Cypherpunks. >> Encryption becomes a trivial topic if its best medium is taken by the >> States. Perry is still in his "only encryption algorithms in C is a >> proper topic for Cypherpunks" mode. > >No, I don't think that, Mr. Jeffers, but I must admit that my opinion >is that random political crap (NOT careful announcements by the likes >of jya(a)pipeline.com of reprints of articles on the new FBI wiretap >garbage) doesn't belong. Well, Perry, my opinion is that there is far too much noise on this list as it is. I have already seen my words drowned out by bellyaching over next to nothing. As one of the many non-Americans on this list, I find US policy and politics simply _amusing_, but certainly not in the least bit relevant to nearly anything that I do. >> This is a direction that if followed >> would take the vitality and relevance out of the Cypherpunks list. Perry >> does a disservice for Cypherpunks. > >I'm sorry, but you do a disservice to the cause of freedom. People are >trying to get work done to actually get cryptographic systems written, >deployed, and popularized, and the sort of crap that fills this place >periodically prevents people from working together towards that >end. If you want to talk about politics, go to Libernet or some such. Perry, you put an interesting twist on what the agenda of most people on this list is. It is not "getting cryptographic systems written, deployed, and popularized." It's about getting people to learn how to protect their privacy and to see that their self-interest is served by having privacy. That's much more than "writing code". If you have an insecure machine, a machine on which I can monitor your keystrokes as you enter your pass phrase, what good is strong crypto?? Somewhere between diddly and squat? >> Since when did Cypherpunks become the mailing list fit for Perry? > >Look, its simple. If you want the FBI and NSA to win, post lots of >crap here. Nothing will help them out more than clogging one of the >few communications channels available to people interested in >spreading cryptography. If you are really successful, all the smart >people will leave (as has happened in waves before -- the losses of >Steve Bellovin and (effectively) Phil Karn are still felt) and you >will have totally destroyed the channel. What would Perry have us do?? What does he want?? Does he want all of us to order radiation detectors to beef up our random number generators?? Talk about a red herring!! How about this instead Perry? How about if you suggest that everyone make sure that every Network which a machine connects to, and every other trusted Network has removed the username/password combinations, "tech/support", "LAN/admin", and "guest/user". This is easy to do, and is a solid recommendation. Unless the almighty "Perry" would rather that you NOT worry about simple security matters which protect privacy and are within anyone's control. >> we must also take the time and trouble to occasionally tell Perry to >> shove his opinions up his ass. > >If you want the anti-crypto people to win, nothing can help nearly so >much as your attitude. I'm glad to see what side you are on. There's lots of things I could think of doing to Perry's ass, and shoving his opinions is but one of them. It was hard enough for me as a Canadian to watch 3 out of 5 Francophones vote to separate from Canada and form their own nation. And to then watch as two leaders from within English Canada -- Preston Manning who runs the Reform Party, and Ralph Klein, who is Premier of Alberta -- breach protocol and insult the peoples of Quebec by discussing, commenting and gloating over the overall election results even before concession speeches by Bouchard and Parizeau. And I groaned later when Parizeau said that the overall vote squeaker was a result of "money and the ethnic vote." Touche. But this is nothing in comparison to listening to some jackass talk out of both sides of his mouth, while he deliberately attempts to steer people away from what the MAJORITY of posters to this list have a strong common conviction about. Securing their systems and their personal privacy. It might be a rag tag bunch with differing political ideologies, but one idea brings all of us together here. Except for one ... jackass. And yep, I'm back after a brief silence. Alice de 'nonymous ... ...just another one of those... P.S. This post is in the public domain. C. S. U. M. O. C. L. U. N. E.

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Apologies for spam
by cjl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

C-punx I really didn't mean to send that last message to the list. I had stiffened my resolve not to rise to the obvious troll bait, but a minor seizure of some sort resulted in the send command being issued instead of the cancel command. . . By way of making up for it I thought that some of you might be interested in knowing that AAAS is having it's annual meeting in Baltimore this year and of interest to those pondering alternative means to bruting cryptosystems are the sessions below: DNA Computing, Friday Feb. 9, 8:30 - 11:30 am Organized by Richard Lipton, Princeton University Quantum Computation, Friday Feb. 9, 2:30 - 5:30 pm Organized by Seth Lloyd, MIT C. J. Leonard ( / "DNA is groovy" \ / - Watson & Crick <cjl(a)welchlink.welch.jhu.edu> / \ <-- major groove ( \ Finger for public key \ ) Strong-arm for secret key / <-- minor groove Thumb-screws for pass-phrase / )

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Re: 767 MHz Alpha, opinion_mode_enabled (fwd)
by Ray Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I 'spose it's gettin' to be time that we ditched them 512 bit keys and them 40 bit keys. :) The very existance of a 2.6GHz CPU - yes freon cooled is more than enough... =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian |Prying open my 3rd eye. So good to see |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder(a)sundernet.com|you once again. I thought you were |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ |hiding, and you thought that I had run |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, |away chasing the tail of dogma. I opened|.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"|my eye and there we were.... |..... ======================= http://www.sundernet.com ========================== ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 11:08:40 -0500 From: "Kirk R. Erichsen" <KirkE(a)LOSNINOS.ORG> Reply-To: AlphaNT(a)beauty.mke.ra.rockwell.com To: AlphaNT(a)beauty.mke.ra.rockwell.com Subject: Re: 767 MHz Alpha, opinion_mode_enabled According to trade reports, the 21264 will be available at 800MHz by mid 98 but the die size (a .25 micron die) will need a signficant shrink to make the speed practical (heat and power consumption will be monsterous). It will need a die shrink to a .15 or .18 process in order for 800MHz + Alpha CPUs to be inexpensive enough to produce in volume. A smaller die size increases the number of chips that are "good" per waffer and decreases the finished chips power consumption and heat dissipation. Other methods for dealing with CPU speed (which don't address power or heat directly) include using CMOS alternatives like BiCMOS and Gallium Arsenide. Gallium Arsenide is very expensive, and the element Gallium is a rare earth element, so high production using it is not possible. As for the existing Digital freon "lab" chips, the 1.2GHz frequency has actually been surpassed twice already, with some reports saying that the last test with a non-production (beta 21364?) chip reached 2.6GHz. I don't know if at that frequency the processor was at sub-zero (in Celsius) temperatures, but it was at least a liquid nitrogen machine. One question no one seems to ask is "how fast were the external buses to memory and cache running on these testbeds?" Xray lithography has already produced (in very limited quantity) operable memory and processors with die sizes of below .000001 microns, a size that could accomodate about 1000 21264 processors in a package that would appear to be little more than a single "chip." The problem with implementing Xray lithography is that almost none of the existing process tools for producing chips can be used. The precise photo lithography masks (most of which are used with ultra-violet light) don't work anymore (Xray just goes right through) forcing you to use alloys of lead, bismuth and zirconium in the masks, a considerably more expensive and complex method. Ionizer units and other tools would have to be built for dealing with incredibly low tolerance. When Xray lithography is finally implmented, there will be a quantum lead in the frequency (multi GHz) while simulataneously reducing power consumption and heat dissipation. SMP and massively parallel machines will be portable boxes that will weigh only slightly more than the case and screen (if the TFT panel itself does not fall prey to light weight projection glasses) force it to be. The other option for new memory and processor devices is to "grow" them. Nanotechnologies that may be available in the next 10 years could allow microscopic machines in combination with biologic engineering could produce processors and memory of sizes at or below those of Xray lithography, with significant implications in other industries as well. One issue very rarely addressed in trade mags is the system bus speeds for the system bus (or any seperate cache, memory and I/O buses). Without a fast external bus speed, the system cannot necessarily provide more usable performance, particularly when memory becomes bottlenecked and saturated even at todays low frequencies. High internal CPU frequency does can not provide a linear increase in performance in and of itself. At about 400MHz, you have reached the maximum frequency an electrical bus can run. The next option for connecting the system bus to the processors is through optical buses. Optical buses don't suffer from the interference and noise that electrical buses do, and can operate at up to many thousands of GB without the error rates. Optical buses will connect all cache, memory and storage devices (directly without I/O adaption) in multiple segments with parallel access to all devices. The problems with doing this are the speed of the embedded switches which convert electrical signals into optical pulses are currently much too high in latency. A die shrink, the use of a high speed silicon or GA switch (or some new Selenium technology) could make the speed between electrical and optical buses practical. The other implication of more advanced methods for producing memory and processors is that the sluggish mechanical disk drive becomes totally obsolete. Massive non-volatile memory storage could be added to a system directly off the memory bus without the need for additional I/O buses. Hologramic optical storage devices (which store data as an image in 3D space) will replace most of the mechanical drive based multi-terrabyte installations with multi exabyte storage that will be 1000 smaller than existing storage devices. The entire world could place all its currently existing data and archives into a hologramic memory device the size of a lunch box. If it all sounds far fetched, its been proven possible already. Lets give it 10 years. At 10:41 AM 9/17/97 -0400, you wrote: >I talked with a tech from DEC here in Massachusetts and yes, I can >confirm that they did get 1.2 Gig but it was cooled with a liquid >nitrogen containing fan system, which cooled the chip considerably, but >not below freezing point. The FPU was very bad at this temp though Kirk R. Erichsen LAN Manager/Communications

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Webernet Madne$$
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wall Street Journal, November 3, 1995 Wall Street is in the throes of Internet mania. Or is it Internet madness? Investors have poured into Internet-related stocks in the past couple of days, pushing some Web darlings such as Spyglass and Netscape Communications to dizzying new heights. "People are blindly investing in anything that says Internet," said Willian Bluestein, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cabridge, Mass. "Everyone wants to buy into the craze," says John Sebrich, who works with mutual-fund investor Mario Gabelli. ... What is the big stampede all about? During the past week or so, some of the highest-profile, highest-flying Internet stocks have actually reported profits, a development the Street wasn't expecting until next year at best. ... "The reason Intuit's moving up is the realization that if you had to do the banking industry over again, you wouldn't use brick and mortar," said Neal P. Miller, manager of Fidelity Investments' New Millennium Fund. "I think the size of this Internet thing is just dawning on everyone," he said. Neil Weintraut said, "Money managers are realizing that there is tremendous strength behind this. It's not just a technology chasing a marketplace." ... [and more gush] ______________________________________________________ Web and Wild [Chart] ______________________________________________________ Percent Yesterday's Change Company Close This Week ______________________________________________________ Spyglass $70.50 +70% Uunet Technologies 67.00 +41% Netcom Online 68.63 +30% Performance Systems 21.25 +30% Intuit 82.75 +21% Netscape 98.25 +21% ______________________________________________________ ----- European Firms Join Research Group In Bid to Guide Internet Development By Douglas Lavin Paris - - Afraid of being frozen out of the booming interest in the Internet, 20 European companies joined together to form the European arm of an Internet research group. The World Wide Web Consortium's European branch will work with the U.S. Web consortium on such global issues as electronic commerce, but it will also work on such international issues as the use of languages other than English on the Web, the multimedia portion of the Internet. "We must assure that the beautiful springtime of the World Wide Web is not also the autumn of the French language," said Elisabeth Dufourcq, France's secretary of state for research at a conference here to announce the creation of the European branch. Several large European technology firms, including Oy Nokia of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany, who are hoping to play a major role in the development of the Internet here ponied up $150,000 to join the consortium. Particularly well-represented are telephone companies who see the Internet as a threat to their ability to control national voice and data networks. Among the European members of the consortium, announced at a conference on the Web here, are British Telecommunications PLC and the national telecommunications companies of France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. All five companies either offer or are planning to offer Internet access. One of the group's key tasks is to ensure that improvements made by such rival companies as Netscape Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp., both members of the U.S. consortium, don't create separate parts of the Internet that can only be read by Microsoft or Netscape software. Membership in the European consortium, which is to be based at the French national computer-research institute, Inria, also shows a remarkable degree of interest in the Web by the French business and government establishment, which only a year ago dismissed the Internet as a American version of France's Minitel network, but now is avidly promoting the Internet's growth. Among the members of the consortium from France are Assurances Generale de France, the insurance company; Electricite de France, the electricty company; Cie. des Machines Bull, the computer maker; Aerospatiale, the aerospace concern; and Thomson-CSF, the arms manufacturer, all of them state-controlled, as well as such private concerns as Alcatel-Alsthom SA and Groupe Michelin. Inria, which already has taken over some Web research work from CERN, the nuclear-research organization in Switzerland where the Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. Mr. Berners-Lee, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is heading both the U.S. and the European research consortia. [End] ----- Nuclear research > munitions research > controlled crypto > controlled commerce > economic espionage > ten thousand-year reign of the PGP-DigiBank-MIT-CERN crypto-commo-libertarian nerds. Phill, what's the admission code to W3 world domination?

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public random numbers
by JMKELSEY＠delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >Date: Fri, 03 Nov 1995 00:44:02 -0800 >From: tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) >Subject: Re: video as a source of public randomness > >At 6:23 AM 11/3/95, JMKELSEY(a)delphi.com wrote: > >>This seems like a potential source of a stream of public random >>bits. If these can be authenticated and matched, this kind of thing >>can be useful in a lot of protocols. For example, if there is some > >I'm not sure what you mean by "public random bits"...I don't plan to share >my random bits with anyone, nor do I see any need for "public" random bits >(except for some well-known situations involving statistical testing, for >which certain PRNGs are actually preferable to "real" random numbers). Imagine there is a stream of totally random bits over which neither Alice nor Bob has any control. We can use this to make a lot of interactive protocols non-interactive. Suppose we have a protocol where we need a random challenge from Bob. Alice sends a message to Bob starting the protocol, stating that the public random bit stream is currently at bit i, and committing to use the n-bit string starting at position (i+t) as the challenge. The t parameter here needs to be large enough to ensure that Bob receives and logs the message before the public random bit stream outputs bit i+t. Alice proceeds with the protocol, using the n-bit string starting at bit (i+t) as the challenge. She sends the resulting message to Bob. No interaction was required of Bob--he merely had to log the times of the messages, and keep track of the public random bits. This could be really useful implementing noninteractive digital cash schemes, I think, because the merchant wouldn't have to send anything back. (The merchant can also be very hard to track down by following the messages, since these messages of Alice's can be encrypted under his public key and posted to a newsgroup or something, though this implies really large values of t.) Naturally, this only works if Alice and Bob get the same random string, and if it's not possible for anyone to alter the public random bit string either one receives. For large-scale applications, the way to do this is probably to put a hardware RNG into a communications satellite, and devote one channel to continuous digitally-signed packets of random data. For smaller-scale or underground applications, it might be sufficient to use some digitized transmission that would probably not be worth the trouble for an attacker to alter, even if one could. For example, if we used the entire digital video feed off some major satellite, it would be enormously expensive to take control of that for any length of time, to attack some protocol. To prevent simple attacks, we can hash the digitized input, and we can make each shared random packet dependent on previous packets by some relation like random_packet[i+1] = SHA1(random_packet[i],SHA1(digital_video_packet[i])). >And so there's no confusion, when I said "like a noisy channel (t.v. >channel, for example)" I meant a snowy, noisy picture such as one gets with >rabbit ears on top of the set, especially when the channel is an unused >one. It is unlikely in the extreme that any attacker could deduce the snowy >pixel values used in the distillation of entropy. I was just thinking of the unintended entropy in the stuff going on on the screen. Static would mess this idea up, though there are some ways to recover. >But back to the subject of "public random bits." Could you elaborate on >what you mean by this? (I assume you don't mean a one time pad that Alice >and Bob share, since that is really a separable issue from video as a >source of randomness. Only one of them will generate the pad, and will then >securely communicate it to the other.) No, of course not. Public random bits can be used in the derivation of a shared key, to prevent replay attacks in key-exchange protocols, but you certainly wouldn't want to use the public random bits directly as key material! >--Tim May Note: Please respond via e-mail as well as or instead of posting, as I get CP-LITE instead of the whole list. --John Kelsey, jmkelsey(a)delphi.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCUAwUBMJqtkUHx57Ag8goBAQGWRgP1HES4nQiWRx0P31bi94g5MI8pSEwf5CZu 0RlWLyCl5CLB6PKu7bJDqiyHIBBJ90qqvJvZB740QHVxoRKycOD459nMWjiQXcnA 70Aq8gR+ZYCivsJLJfhKxoxuT+s/VyYVMB7mSfqGIGHHErbXHR4oA2T+Owmm8POi WDr4w3OjyQ== =3QHQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Telephone switch capacity -Reply
by Noah Brodbeck 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>> John D. Ervin <jervin(a)netpath.net> 11/03/95 05:32pm >You would be suprised as to how much is being tapped >now. >You need to do a little more research before spouting off.. >>If the FBI wishes to set up a system that is capable >>of monitoring 1% of the total number of lines, that equates >>to a ability to tap 5%, not 1% of all calls in progress. I am very confused. I was not 'spouting off' in any sense of the word. Your comment refers to my apparent lack of knowledge of the widespread practice of wiretapping. A practice, at least according to the sworn testimony of agents of the FBI, is not very widespread at all. That is, however, beside the point. I was making a very truthful comment about the engineered capacity of the telephone network in the U.S. I made no comment whatsoever about the current ability or desire of the FBI to tap into individuals telephone conversations. -=- Noah

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