December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Attila T. Spammer / Re: Denning questions/reverses her position?
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Attila T. Hun wrote: > I'm too old for this! I never thought I would see the day that > Dorothy Denning would terminate her star role as a shill for the > Clinton/LEA encryption ban! As a matter of fact, the mere thought of this happening has caused Attila to go into a state of "brain-lock" wherein he sits at his keyboard, sending the same message, over and over again, to the list. It will be interesting to see what happens to Attila's brain if Clinton ever vetos a bill because it subverts the Constitution. BTW, Dorothy Denning's new spokesperson is a flying pig, and the Weather Network reports that Hell froze over shortly before Denning's new position statement. TruthMonger

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Global Investing using Electronic Tools
by gjeffers＠socketis.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Business Week Guide to Global Investments using Electronic Tools. Dear Cypherpunks, While I was hunting around a Waldenbooks store, I found the above named book. Its by Robert Schwabach, published by Osborne McGraw-Hill. It retails at $39.95 and comes with 3 3 1/2" diskettes. I just glanced thru it. It may be of interest to some Cypherpunks. I don't know if it would be useful for PRIVATE foreign investing or not. Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers

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Re: "Telco Terrorism" -- Wired on Baby Bells v. the Net
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Telco Terrorism > By Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) > Right now, the telcos have no financial incentive to > promote speedier, more efficient technologies - and > when they've tried, they've blown it through a > combination of high prices and notoriously bad > customer service and support. Take ISDN, a digital > technology that has been ready-to-arrive for 25 years > but never quite did. "The problem isn't technology," > according to James Love, an economist at the Ralph > Nader-sponsored Consumer Project on Technology. "It's > monopoly pricing by the telcos." If the telcos don't want to use efficient, effective technology to render service to their customers, then I certainly wouldn't want to *force* them to do so. However, neither do I want to be *forced* to pay exhorbitant rates because the telecos want to maintain a sloppily run monopoly on the services I have to choose from. > The telcos' solution: the FCC must let them levy > per-minute access charges to raise the hundreds of > millions of dollars a year needed to keep the phone > system from crashing. My solution? (Thanks for asking. :>) If the telecos wish to remain in the Dark Ages, then let *their* phone system crash. There will be no shortage of people standing in line to make money by supplying customers with phone service at competitive rates. > "The Effect of Internet Use on the Nation's Telephone > Network," blasted telco assumptions and pointed out > their hypocrisy: the Baby Bells whine that flat-rate > Internet services are congesting phone lines even as > many of them are peddling flat-rate Internet access > themselves. Some have actually given it away - The old "loss-leader" promotion to get everyone into your store. The telecos, however, then want to lock the doors and petition the government for monopoly pricing, instead of letting the "customers" shop across the street, instead. > "It doesn't have to be a large charge," Bell > Atlantic's Ed Young now says. "It can be something of > the magnitude of a penny a minute, or even less. But > it has to be something." "...so that we can raise the rates outrageously in the future." > As a rule, Washington's > bureaucrats are not power-crazed authoritarians; most > are reactive creatures who simply respond to > demonstrations of influence and power. Translation~:~ They are usually manipulated by the most powerful and influential of the power-crazed authoritarians. > The high tech > community responded by forming its own ad hoc > coalition to pressure the FCC, and thousands of > Internet users chimed in to express their collective > dismay. Of course, the best way to win not just the > battle but the war may be to remove the commission's > power to regulate the Net altogether. Still, so far > the real threat to netizens has come from complacent > telcos and their legions of starched-collar lobbyists, > not the FCC. The distinction is important, because the > old rule of thumb still holds true: The enemy of our > enemy may occasionally prove to be our friend. As long as everyone has Guns & Roses (with sharp thorns). Say what you want about Timothy McVeigh, but if the government launches another Waco atrocity in the near future, the citizens will be paying much closer attention to the way it is handled. The attempt to control the InterNet is yet another attempt to disarm the citizens. They are trying to get us to "voluntarily" turn in our electronic weapons, such as crypto. "They will take my crypto when they pry it from my cold, dead algorithms." TruthMonger

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Re: (Fwd) 1995 Nanotechnology Conference
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Crypto relevance -- slight. At 09:47 AM 8/23/95 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: > Moore's Law is an observation of past behavior, not a law of > nature. Gordon thought the curve would "slow down" around > 1980 or so. It didn't, for various reasons. But many of us > expect it will. > > Consider that a new wafer fab capable of building these > "Moore's Law"devices has increased in price from about $50 > million a couple of decades ago to about $1.5 billion today. During the entire period that Moore's law has been in effect, we have used light to print the wafers. Now, with phase shifting masks in billion dollar fabs, we are reaching the absolute limits of light. If we go up to higher frequencies, we lose refraction, and phase shifting fails. Refractable light craps out at about .3 to .15 microns. Intel is currently at .35 microns. There will be a slight hiccup or a major hesitation in Moore's law as the fabs switch to a non optical printing process. Current contenders are: * Synchrotron radiation (twenty billion dollar fabs, or worse.) * ions (fab price jumps a few times higher than current fab price.) * electrons (no great escalation in fab price, but a radical drop in production rates) * flexible direct contact. (fab price goes way down, back to producing ICs in your garage.) The flexible direct contact method has enough horsepower to take us all the rest of the way down merge with biotech and to produce wires one atom thick -- assuming that people manage to get anything useful out of it at all. There have been very large investments in all of the above research projects, and so far non of them have worked as yet. (But they are all of them a hell of a lot closer to working than nanotech.) --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: Random Hiss from Mac mike
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:09 PM 8/23/95 +0100, Andrew Spring wrote: >In the simplest case, where the microphone is not attached, the signal >consists of long runs of '0x80's alternating with '0x7f's. Now, I have no >problem transforming this into uniformly distributed RN's : just hash the >buffer with MD5. If you know that's what the signal looks like, you can improve it a lot by run-length encoding before doing the MD5, e.g. crunch the output down to a series of count1 value1 count2 value2 count3 value3 (if you stick to runs of 255, you can use 1 byte for each.) That gives you a much shorter input to the MD5, and a more realistic view of how much random data you have. (I suppose it may make it harder to do things like Fourier transforms on it...) #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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OverRun Msgs Re: Denning questions/reverses her position?
by Attila T. Hun 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- on or about 970731:2245 it was expostulated: +:: +Anon-To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com +Attila T. Hun wrote: +> I'm too old for this! I never thought I would see the day that +> Dorothy Denning would terminate her star role as a shill for the +> Clinton/LEA encryption ban! + As a matter of fact, the mere thought of this happening has caused +Attila to go into a state of "brain-lock" wherein he sits at his +keyboard, sending the same message, over and over again, to the list. + It will be interesting to see what happens to Attila's brain if +Clinton ever vetos a bill because it subverts the Constitution. + BTW, Dorothy Denning's new spokesperson is a flying pig, and the +Weather Network reports that Hell froze over shortly before Denning's +new position statement. +TruthMonger dunno why the message was repeated at cyberpass --each of the 55 copies I received as of 20 minutes ago has exactly the same header date from cyberpass. that and one of them smoked the primary mailbox with a couple hundred null characters. hun.attila.org was offline so it could not have generated the extra messages --so where did they loop? only the shadow knows. If it is something by remote SMPT added on, I apologize for the inconvenience. the image of my brain in "brain-lock" is apt enough for the reaction; as for the flying pig and Hell freezes over --that too. Denning is still Denning, and maybe she's just angling for more shill money before she gets back on the track. yes, if Clinton ever vetos a bill just because it violats the Constitution, I probably would be gone.... ______________________________________________________________________ "attila" 1024/C20B6905/23 D0 FA 7F 6A 8F 60 66 BC AF AE 56 98 C0 D7 B0 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQCUAwUBM+GAjL04kQrCC2kFAQFWYgP4zjFksiIN3VGn7TMozZYvfUM2EFLbCK6a hMz73MPptUAiV0baxNV806tcYGRyjjp4OuipgrZYdAflk9iv29zMb+JVYk9cmpHg EKHq0VtqjKcqpFPLJy1bcEGUCkUblqmdh28I8TnwVTnmmMB+3s87GQjJWWjsDL9q 5QnTMzalfg== =fM7N -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Brute SSL Challenge
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> gcc -O6 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -c search.c > gcc -O6 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -o brutessl \ > brutessl.c search.o You wouldn't happen to have gcc under DOS would you? Or anyone else with djgcc for DOS? What would be really nice would be a 32 bit DOS executable, which is very hard to obtain with any PC software, and compiling it 16 bit suffers a huge performance hit. In search of a 32 bit DOS binary, Adam

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Dorothy Denning changes Escrow position
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There was an article in today's San Jose Mercury News that Dorothy Denning, the leading academic supporter of the Administration's anti-crypto stance, has backed off from that position. She's put out a paper along with William Baugh of SAIC (!) which among other things includes a survey of law enforcement officers on how much they've encountered crypto and how much difference it's made, and the answer has been that it hasn't made much difference -- of the few criminals who use crypto, some use wimpy algorithms, some are careless with their password handling, some get fingered by stool pigeons, and some mainly use their crypto for information not relevant to the case they're being investigated for. She's now taking a much less certain, more neutral position. Way to go, Dorothy! It's especially important because Dr. Denning was the main independent supporter of encryption limitations, and has a lot of reputation invested in it, so changing her position is a big step. The FBI has a vested interest - without Communists to chase around, Director Freeh is off chasing drug dealers in the name of "national security". And the industrial support for key escrow has primarily been from companies that get to export their products in return for adding it, though there have been a few firms like TIS that have developed it for its own sake. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Re: Subject: ANNOUNCE: 2nd SSL challenge - we need your compute!
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I have a working version of BruteSSL 1.02 (without SKSP client) for > Power Macintosh. However, as I don't want to run the risk of > violating ITAR, I'm still investigating ways of making it > available. Suggestions are welcome. Just send it along... several people have been shipping various DOS binaries out of the US, with out the source. The presumption taken was that as long as they didn't ship search.c or assembly.c, there is no crypto source, and the binary could not be used to encrypt anything. (Also it's for SSL with 40 bit keys which is export approved anyway). You can ship a diff for brutessl.c (which contains no crypto code) if you want the mods to be mixed back in (please include some kind of #ifdef __MAC or whatever the standard _i_am_a_mac macro is). Or if that makes you uncomfortable, well we'll do with out the source. Reckon you'd be safe enough. Anyone think otherwise? Adam

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Microsoft RAS encryption?
by Mike 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anybody know how Microsoft RAS implements data encryption? Apparently (http://www.microsoft.com/kb/articles/q136/6/34.htm) they use RC4, but is this stuff documented somewhere, like in an RFC? Mike.

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