December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Notes from NIS&T Key Escrow Export conference.
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:26 AM 9/7/95 -6, Peter Trei wrote: >"If keys are escrowed, what purpose does a 64 bit limit serve?" A 64 bit limit serves lots of purposes, like letting the NSA crack stuff; I suspect escrow is being used as an excuse to get big vendors to standardize on wimpy 64-bit crypto as much as anything else. >Secondarily, I observe that this apparently precludes the use of OTP. Not to the devious (though the devious may not be able to get export approval) After all, you could escrow a _lot_ of 32-bit OTPs :-) (yeah, I know, the requirement that you identify which escrowed key is being used makes that less than useful, unless the final standard comes out with clear, unambiguous language which fails to cover all cases and can therefore be abused - that's one problem with the current "ask the NSA" rule.) #--- # 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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Re: Scientology and police visit XS4ALL Amsterdam
by patrick＠Verity.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> My personal view is co$ deserves all the flak they get. I know who you're referring to by saying co$, but what do co$ mean? Co-DollarSign? Co-Dollar? Patrick _______________________________________________________________________ / These opinions are mine, and not Verity's (except by coincidence;). \ | (\ | | Patrick J. Horgan Verity Inc. \\ Have | | patrick(a)verity.com 1550 Plymouth Street \\ _ Sword | | Phone : (415)960-7600 Mountain View \\/ Will | | FAX : (415)960-7750 California 94303 _/\\ Travel | \___________________________________________________________\)__________/

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tax_1.html
by Damaged Justice 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[1]Reuters New Media [ [2]Yahoo | [3]Write Us | [4]Search | [5]Info ] [ [6]Index | [7]News | [8]World | [9]Biz | [10]Tech | [11]Politic | [12]Sport | [13]Scoreboard | [14]Entertain | [15]Health ] [ Reuters | [16]Wired | [17]ZDNet ] _________________________________________________________________ Previous Story: [18]SkyBridge Applies With U.S. For Satellite Network Next Story: [19]Altera Tumbles After Sales Warning, Others Follow _________________________________________________________________ Friday August 29 9:52 AM EDT Report Says Net May Help Tax Dodgers CANBERRA - Increasing use of the Internet for electronic commerce may lead to a rise in tax avoidance and accidental non-compliance, according to an Australian Taxation Office report. However, the report found Internet use would have no immediate impact on Australian tax collections because issues such as bandwidth limits and electronic payment system immaturity were restricting the amount of electronic commerce. While the report finds that the impact on the tax base will vary according to industry, tax and income type, there is no immediate appreciable impact on tax collections," it said. (But) there are also concerns about the increased scope for tax planning, especially using tax havens, and for increased accidental non-compliance, as ... businesses engage in international trade and become subject to international taxation obligations with which they may not be familiar." The ATO said international co-operation would be needed to fully respond to these issues. In addition, the ATO was seeking to: -- have Australian Company Numbers (ACNs) displayed on commercial Internet sites; -- have proper registration procedures for Internet businesses; -- apply comparable regulations to electronic money as for physical cash; -- make use of the available technology to ensure the integrity of electronic records; and, -- examine the electronic commerce distribution chains for new intermediaries. The ATO said there was potential for the Internet to cause difficulties in identifying parties behind Internet businesses. It was also possible that businesses would be able to store tax records offshore or to alter them without trace. The Internet could also lead to the removal of tax collection points in the distribution chain from producer to consumer. The report said its recommendations were designed to help the ATO avoid these problems. Copyright, Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved _________________________________________________________________ ________________________ ___________ [20]Help _________________________________________________________________ Previous Story: [21]SkyBridge Applies With U.S. For Satellite Network Next Story: [22]Altera Tumbles After Sales Warning, Others Follow _________________________________________________________________ [ [23]Index | [24]News | [25]World | [26]Biz | Tech | [27]Politic | [28]Sport | [29]Scoreboard | [30]Entertain | [31]Health ] _________________________________________________________________ Reuters Limited [32]Questions or Comments References 1. LYNXIMGMAP:http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/970829/tech/stories/tax_1.html#re… 2. http://www.yahoo.com/ 3. http://www.yahoo.com/text/suggest.html 4. http://www.yahoo.com/text/search.html 5. http://www.yahoo.com/text/docs/info/ 6. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/ 7. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/news/ 8. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/international/ 9. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/business/ 10. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/tech/ 11. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/politics/ 12. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/sports/ 13. http://sports.yahoo.com/ 14. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/entertainment/ 15. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/health/ 16. http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/wired/ 17. http://headlines.yahoo.com/zdnews/ 18. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/970829/tech/stories/skybridge_1.html 19. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/970829/tech/stories/altera_1.html 20. http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/news_search_help.html 21. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/970829/tech/stories/skybridge_1.html 22. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/970829/tech/stories/altera_1.html 23. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/ 24. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/news/ 25. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/international/ 26. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/business/ 27. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/politics/ 28. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/sports/ 29. http://sports.yahoo.com/ 30. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/entertainment/ 31. http://www.yahoo.com/text/headlines/health/ 32. http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/news_faq.html

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Re: Why Key Escrow (GAK) is So Bad
by Robert A. Rosenberg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:22 9/7/95, Timothy C. May wrote: >(Ironically, I just heard about a case in Texas where a judge ordered a >mother to stop speaking in Spanish to her child at home, calling it "child >abuse." The implications of this are self-evident.) You have the facts slightly wrong. The order was no to stop talking Spanish and to use English but only to Not use Spanish EXCLUSIVELY but to also use English (so as to allow the Child to Grow up in a Bilingual Environment). Waiting until the child was old enough to go to school would put the Child at a disadvantage in learning English since the window of Chance for Language Skill Pickup would have closed.

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Re: Announce: Web of Trust Ring
by don＠cs.byu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- First: after mailing myself the file in 16k chunks... the ring is up, and intact. The only difference from what the original was supposed to be is that both of my keys are now assigned a trust of unknown instead of undefined. *shrug* From: Bryce Wilcox <wilcoxb(a)nag.cs.colorado.edu> >A very interesting project! Can you give us some data like how many is the >maximum number of hops necessary to connect two people on the WoT? (I am >aware that one wouldn't want to trust such a connection, and that PGP >doesn't actually allow you to do so for hops > 2...) My original message details the brute-force approach I took, and the imperfections that it intails. If everybody who signed a key recieved a signature back from the same person, the ring I generated really would be "The" WoT. (I don't mean to center on "my ring" versus local WoTs that people have, but I centered around Warlord, Zimmermann, and Jeff S., and seeing as how those happen to be keys that come with PGP, that's where I'd imagine most people would start looking.) Unfortunately, there are a lot of nobodies included just because they signed someone elses key. For the same reason, someone who was signed by a well-known key, but didn't sign back, and didn't sign anybody elses key who was included, didn't make it to the ring. Imperfections aside, the ring is 4.5 meg smaller than the unimi keyring, which makes it Pretty Good[tm]. (ha ha) I forgot to mention it before, but this keyring is most accurately described as a keyring full of some of the people who are more relevant to the Web of Trust than lots of the people who aren't in the keyring. PGP lets you define how many levels of trust you want. Due to the way in which the ring was constructed, I'd guess that the longest chain could not be longer than 6-8 keys. >(P.S. I guess "12" based on the number of passes necessary. That seems >like a really high number to me...) No kidding. I ran the program with high priority most of the time, but I was doing on my home 386... Hence the 4-6 hour runtimes per pass. >Are any obvious pseudonyms in? (I would guess not.) YEEEEEEESSSSSSS, there are. (Hint: check for @whitehouse.gov) >I wonder what sorts of statistical analyses could be done on this WoT? It's still full of _nobodies_ who only got in because they signed a known key of someone they never met and mailed it to a keyserver. Unfortunately, I don't have the technical abilities to check for mutual signatures, or only include keys that are signed by someone already in the WoT. That's _my_ expert statistical analysis... >Is it fairly evenly spread out or are the noticeably larger "clumps" of >mutual signatures? How many keys *are* there in this (subset of the) WoT? There's a couple people that have half a zillion sigs. Many people have signed someone else's key but have noone else's sig on their own. >Here's a question: for two randomly selected members of your WoT, how many >signatures would a Man In The Middle have to fake in order to isolate >the one member from the other? If we talk about the WoT instead of the WoN (web of nobodies) then I would guess faking 2-3 specific (attacker-chosen) people would cut off a good share of the keys, 4-5 for many more, and about 500 (ok, maybe only 15-25) for some of the well connected people. For jargon's sake we can call those the Dial-up, the ISDN and the T3 people respectively. >Thanks for this, Don. :) - -Don the Dialup -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQB1AwUBME95P8La+QKZS485AQHmHQMAs0UXaSan5PWDfppPU1WCNuz7eiXgpxeS Y+2vHc1ZofT+Mq99Y2+aMgZGPasowQ/zdLIf4mNLZR1QNEf7eUf9wCLXY2fH5REw t4uwpvRlz9TkkaUbwSmW+kBXept8H7WE =8kPL -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Why Key Escrow (GAK) is So Bad
by goedel＠tezcat.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >At 10:22 9/7/95, Timothy C. May wrote: >>(Ironically, I just heard about a case in Texas where a judge ordered a >>mother to stop speaking in Spanish to her child at home, calling it "child >>abuse." The implications of this are self-evident.) > >You have the facts slightly wrong. The order was no to stop talking Spanish >and to use English but only to Not use Spanish EXCLUSIVELY but to also use >English (so as to allow the Child to Grow up in a Bilingual Environment). >Waiting until the child was old enough to go to school would put the Child >at a disadvantage in learning English since the window of Chance for >Language Skill Pickup would have closed. (drifting wildly off topic...) Consider me exhibit A that speaking only German in the home until age 17 does not diminish ones language skills. In fact, (drifting...) it was only until I began speaking English to the exclusion of German that my language skills began to decline. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBgAwUBMFAVMnIf3YegbdiBAQGHEQJWLnmpNDvyxYnj92AB+nQXcR3ys0TorYVQ EoIAJAi+hyARme8291R7Ky6PeCdGNXOlEVpdVchh2MO/rpgI/Zn1OwjaPMpFrFZd 1ph7 =M/sp -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Dietrich J. Kappe | Red Planet http://www.redweb.com/ Red Planet, L.L.C.| "Chess Space" /chess 1-800-RED 0 WEB | "MS Access Products" /cobre Web Publishing | PGP Public Key /goedel/key.txt

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Key Escrow Papers via FTP
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The papers on Key Escrow scanned by John Young are available for FTP from: ftp://ftp.teleport.com/pub/users/alano/nist.zip They have been seperated into seperate text files (7 in all). I will have an HTML version available from my web page soon. (I am in the process of converting the text to something HTMLlike.) Comments/flames/etc can be sent my way, to John Young (jya(a)pipeline.com) and/or to /dev/null (davenull(a)netscape.com) Enjoy! | Visualize whirled keys | alano(a)teleport.com | |"It's only half a keyserver. I had to split the | Disclaimer: | |other half with the government man." - Black Art | Ignore the man | | -- PGP 2.6.2 key available on request -- | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.teleport.com/~alano | <fnord> |

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Legality of Cash Transactions
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:05 AM 9/8/95, Tobin T Fricke wrote: >>letting it happen, and using cash instead of credit, is the smart answer > >I'm somewhat surprized at how much of an issue this is. The >federal government prints up nice green paper for us to pay for >things with. It's annonymous (to a large extent), univerally >accepted (most of the time), fairly untracably (unless you >really want to), easily available, doesn't collect interest, >free to use, etc. No one is forcing anyone to use credit >cards, etc.. Then again, being a kid, I have never bought >anything with anything other than cash on the spot... I agree with what I think your sentiment is, but bear in mind that "cash transactions" are in fact limited by various laws and regulations about reporting cash payments. Try buying a car with cash, especially a car costing over $10,000. Black Unicorn posted an account a while back (sometime last year) of his efforts to pay cash for a new car. The restrictions on cash are mostly oriented toward ostensibly stopping "drug profits" from being used to buy expensive items. The usual cash figure that invokes special laws is $10,000, with "structuring" of sub-$10K cash transfers an additional issue. I foresee more restrictions coming, not fewer. Several of us have written extensively on this subject. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- 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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VOLUNTEERS NEEDED for keying in Bernstein docs
by Stanton McCandlish 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Our copies of the Bernstein case docs are too low-quality to scan, so we're asking for volunteers to help key them in. Most of you all can type fast and could probably spare a few minutes. If you'd like to help with a page or more please drop me a line and tell me how many pages you'll do, and I'll assign you some page numbers. We have images of the docs from a captured fax at http://www.eff.org/bernstein/Legal/970825_decision.images/ and http://www.eff.org/bernstein/Legal/970827_stay_motion.images/ Thanks for any help! -- Stanton McCandlish mech(a)eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation Program Director http://www.eff.org/~mech +1 415 436 9333 x105 (v), +1 415 436 9333 (f) Are YOU an EFF member? http://www.eff.org/join

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NIST notes available
by pfarrell＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to John Young, I have placed the test of the handouts from Wedensday's and Thursday's meetings on my Nist pages. url: http://www.isse.gmu.edu/~pfarrell/nistmeeting.html It is my belief that this meeting was a staged presentation. Nearly every industry representative said that this was a fatally flawed idea. It was "a non-starter." The government representatives said that they heard the comments, but insisted on proceeding. The most depressing presentation was Thursday morning, made by a high level Dept of Justice flack. I'll have to dig out my notes, his name was Geoff G... He presented the usual drug dealer, pedophile and terrorist line, and added corrupt government officials. He pretended to talk about foriegn bad guys. Nearly all were domestic. He clearly wants weak GAK so that he can decrypt anything domestically that he wants. It is clear to me that the government intends that industry provide crippled encryption "for export" with the never stated expectation that since industry has repeatedly said that they want only one version of products, capable of being sold worldwide, that Domestic products will be crippled. It is equally clear from representatives of IBM, Compaq, DEC, Lotus, and others that I talked to, that crypto product development will simply move offshore. Ireland, Israel, and Germany already have significant experience in developing commercial software. It is depressing to hear our Commerce department chasing technology and jobs overseas. GAK is bad enough. Weak GAK makes me gag. Pat Pat Farrell grad student http://www.isse.gmu.edu/students/pfarrell Infor. Systems and Software Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA PGP key available via finger or request #include standard.disclaimer

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