December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Cuban Security Conference
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> International Conference Center > Pabexpo, Havana, Cuba > March 4-9, 1996 > 3rd Ibero-American Seminar on Protection against > Computer Viruses and Security of Information Technologies I wonder if they'd be receptive to talks on private communications, digicash, tax avoidance through digital technology, anarchy and collapse of government power, etc. :-) (Maybe they would; Cuba's got to do something to get their economy out of the post-Soviet-subsidy doldrums, and with the US preventing free trade in sugar for them, maybe allowing capitalism will be their only choice...) For any Yankees interested in going, you generally need to be a journalist of some sort to avoid the Trading With The Enemy Act restrictions, but in cyberspace, that's easily arranged. #--- # 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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Copy Protection Schemes
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:58 PM 10/30/95, Andrew Loewenstern wrote: >IANAL, but I thought these types of laws were already tested and deemed >unconstitutional in cases involving video-tape copying boxes, dual video >cassette dubbing decks, SCMS 'scrubbers', etc... The copy-defeat and SCMS scrubbers exist in a legal limbo, mainly being sold for "other purposes" and often by companies which come and go in the back pages of audio and video magazines. For example, I've used a audio gadget (Audio Alchemy "DTI") that reclocks the bit stream out of a digital source (CD or DAT player)...one of the side effects is that it also strips (or resets, to be more precise) the SCMS bits on a DAT recording. Effectively, it defeats the SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) copy protection scheme. The company that makes it is of coure well aware of this side effect, as is the audiophile/DAT community, but the company (Audio Alchemy) takes great pains _not_ to mention this side effect in their literature. Likewise, the various Macrovision video copy protection scheme defeaters, such as may be found in the back pages of video magazines, are "for the legitimate user only." I'm fairly certain that any open and aboveboard advertising of such products as "copy protection defeaters" would face legal challenges under the copyright laws. The Go Video and other dual-cassette systems have ostensible legitimate uses (notably, copying of tapes one has made, perhaps of lectures or speeches or other personal recordings) and have been "allowed." In particular, Go Video was held up in its plans for a couple of years while lawyers and regulators negotiated. Other cases, such as the Sony-Disney Betamax case, and, indeed, the Xerox machine itself, involve other issues. Practicalities of enforcement are one of the most important issues. The Supreme Court obviously looked at the noninfringing uses (home movies, for example), the difficulty of enforcing laws against the taping of television shows and movies, etc., and concluded that technology and markets had made that particular aspect of copyright law moot. The rationale of "time-shifting" was just the best face they could put on it, in my view. Anyway, there are lots of issues and lots of nuances. --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: /dev/random for FreeBSD [was: Re: /dev/random for Linux]
by Mark Murray 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> When /dev/random doesn't have "enough" enthropy left does reading > from it return an error, or block? I would strongly suggest > blocking, as the non-blocking behavur is not really all that useful. It returns EOF. M -- Mark Murray 46 Harvey Rd, Claremont, Cape Town 7700, South Africa +27 21 61-3768 GMT+0200 Finger mark(a)grumble.grondar.za for PGP key

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FWD: Electronic Warfare (from the digitaliberty list)
by Fen Labalme 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Interesting (if a bit mild for this list) article from another list some of you might be interested in (or already subscribed to).... ---- Forwarded Message ---- From: owner-digitaliberty(a)phantom.com Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 01:00:06 -0500 To: digitaliberty-digest(a)piltdown.phantom.com Subject: digitaliberty V1 #13 digitaliberty Tuesday, 31 October 1995 Volume 01 : Number 013 In this issue: Test Electronic Warfare See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the Digitaliberty or Digitaliberty-Digest mailing lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail) <frezza(a)radiomail.net> Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 13:14:58 -0800 Subject: Test This is a test. <sigh> ------------------------------ From: DigitaLib(a)aol.com Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 18:02:17 -0500 Subject: Electronic Warfare Folks, Attached is a column that ran on the op-ed page of today's Communications Week. I have agreed to do bi-weekly opinion pieces for them focussing on the impact of technology on society, politics, and culture - all with a DigitaLibertarian slant (of course). My hope is that this fiesty group can keep me fed with grist for these pieces. For anyone that lives in NYC, I will be carrying the DigitaLiberty banner on a panel on digital commerce at the Multimedia Design conference at the Javits center Friday 11/3 at 3:30pm. Stop by and say hello. Regards, Bill - --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ELECTRONIC WARFARE WAGES ON - AND YOU'RE THE TARGET Although the flap over the Clinton administration's attempt to promote escrowed-key encryption systems like Clipper has temporarily faded, the war on electronic privacy continues. As proceedings at the Fourth International Conference on Money Laundering, Forfeiture, Asset Recovery, Offshore Investments, the Pacific Rim, and International Financial Crimes reveal, there has been no let up in our government's efforts to blockade the cyber-frontier. No, you won't learn much from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, written by journalist-generalists who have no clue about where this technology is heading. The Feds have become so skilled at manipulating the Old Media that stories about electronic privacy invariably center on the latest drug kingpin, pedophile, or domestic terrorist. Attacking these universally abhorred enemies of the people not only makes for good headlines but keeps privacy advocates off balance as they are forced to defend abstract rights using loathsome examples. But if you tune in to the Cypherpunks mailing list (majordomo(a)toad.com) you can get some excellent first hand reports from the front. In the relatively short period since the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act, which, among other things, obliges banks to file Suspicious Activity Reports on its customers, banks have become virtual deputies in the treasury department's war on uncontrolled financial transactions. And this war is increasingly spilling into cyberspace. The conference underscored the fact that, paradoxically, we are heading not toward more specific and well defined transaction monitoring regulations, but less. How so? The problem with making regulations precise is that what software algorithms can define, other algorithms can evade. Instead, regulation by "raised eyebrow" is becoming the norm. Federal bank examiners have been given significant latitude to invoke draconian penalties against uncooperative banks. Because bank officers have few due-process protections under this regime, it is no surprise that most of them have become sniveling toadies. The objective is to insure that banks "voluntarily" introduce even more aggressive, unpredictable, and intrusive monitoring than the government would ever dare mandate. And to make sure nothing slips through the cracks, human surveillance will be supplemented with artificial-intelligence agents that can perform pattern analysis on the aggregate flow of electronic transactions, flagging anything remotely suspicious. George Orwell would be impressed. Lest you think that all of this is motivated solely by the drug war, a visit to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) homepage (http://www.ustreas.gov/treasury/bureaus/fincen/facts.html) should open your eyes. This battle is not just about drug prohibition, a crime the Treasury Department would have to invent if it didn't already exist. The real struggle is about the future of tax compliance, and it has you in its sights. A famous Revolutionary War era pamphleteer, writing under the pseudonym "Brutus", perhaps said it best 200 years ago when he wrote - "The national government through its taxing power will introduce itself into every corner of the city and country. It will take cognizance of the professional man in his office or his study; it will watch the merchant in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop and his work, and will haunt him in his family and his bed; it will be the constant companion to the industrious farmer in his labour; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people and in all these circumstances on which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them will be GIVE! GIVE!" What Brutus didn't know and what the cypherpunks foresee is that one day strong encryption will make it impossible to spy on our activities in cyberspace. Heightened conflict is inevitable. Expect the rhetoric to get a lot hotter as the government spinmeisters labor to keep us focused on public enemies while frantically trying to keep its hand in every citizens pocket and its eyes on every bankbook. # # # COPYRIGHT CMP PUBLICATIONS 1995 Bill Frezza is president at Wireless Computing Associates and co-founder of the online forum DigitaLiberty. The opinions expresses are his own. Frezza can be reached at frezza(a)interramp.com. ------------------------------ End of digitaliberty V1 #13 *************************** To subscribe to Digitaliberty-Digest, send the command: subscribe digitaliberty-digest in the body of a message to "Majordomo(a)phantom.COM". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-digitaliberty": subscribe digitaliberty-digest local-digitaliberty(a)your.domain.net A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "digitaliberty-digest" in the commands above with "digitaliberty". ---- End Forwarded Message ----

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Using Holographic Memory Crystals for Encryption
by Aleph One 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

*WARNING* I have not idea about what Iam about to talk. This is a midnight rant. Take it as it is. *WARNING* I just finished reading the article on Holographic Memories on the latest Scientific America by Demetri Psaltis and Fai Mok. At the end they mention that "Given a hologram, either one of the two beams that interfered to create it can be used to reconstruct the other. What this means, in a holographic memory, is that it is possible not only to orient a reference beam into the crystal at a certain angle to select an individual holographic page but also to accomplish the reverse. Illuminating a crystal with one of the stored images gives rise to an approximation of the associated reference beam, reproduced as a plane wave emanating from the crystal at the appropriate angle." I was thinking this is simply a kind of XOR here given one image you can obtain the other. No this convined with the fact that you need to know the right angle could make for some interesting stuff. You could make a system where you give it the initial angle and password which is illuminated into the cristal to reveal the encoded data add to this some feadback mechanism where the angle changes depending on some function of the data and things get interesting. Its late and Iam tired. But if anyone has any ideas I woulkd love to heard them. Good nite. Aleph One / aleph1(a)dfw.net http://underground.org/ KeyID 1024/948FD6B5 Fingerprint EE C9 E8 AA CB AF 09 61 8C 39 EA 47 A8 6A B8 01

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Re: Important Digital Cash Question...
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>I think that the bankers name should be Ethel however. >Wait, wait! I have another one. I call digital cash bankers "underwriters", >because they're basically underwriting digital certificates, like an >underwriter in the capital markets does. >So, we need a "U" name... Obviously Alice and Bob are banking with Chaum.... #--- # 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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Internet World Boston
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

David Fox has me on a panel discussion he's leading tomorrow (November 1) at Internet World in Boston in the Harborview Ballroom from 10:15 to 12:30. Also on the panel will be someone each from First Virtual, Open Market, and CheckFree, all of whom will be demo-ing their latest stuff. This promises to be interesting, and it would also be a great opportunity for me to actually meet some people I only read in e-mail. If you're around, I hope to see you there! Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- 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: PGP at Universities
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:37 PM 10/30/95 -0600, James Black black(a)suntan.eng.usf.edu wrote: >>I am talking with one of the >>administration people about putting PGP on the system for everyone to >>use, but there are issues for them (the admin) as they might be liable, >>even if they can't read the e-mail. What other legal considerations >>should be evaluated? >> Is there any large organizations (like any other universities) that >>allow their students to use PGP, and have the system in place to make it >>easier for the students? If it is offered here I might be the one to add >>to the mail program (pine) that is generally used to transparently use >>PGP, which is what I mean by having a system set up for the encryption. Well, one obvious example is MIT, which not only makes PGP available to its students, it makes it available to everyone else in the US, though ostensibly not everyone else in the world. Your University isn't required to be reading students' and employees' private email anyway, (though it can get away with it by announcing it as official policy), so not being able to read it because of PGP is just fine - if anything it may reduce their legal liability by offering students the option of having truly private email, where sysadmins won't even be able to read bouncemail or other fragments of messages left around when mailers break. On the other hand, I'm guessing that usf.edu is in the USA? If so, there may be ITAR considerations - are any of your students non-US citizens without Green Cards? Offensive as it sounds, it may not be legal to let them use a copy of PGP that you provide (though it's perfectly legal for them to import copies from the UK for their own use.) There _are_ privacy- protecting programs you can let them use, such as the next edition of Netscape, which has 40-bit RC4, and you can use digital signatures from packages like RIPEM-SIG, which is a signature-only subset of RIPEM that's approved for export. Since Netscape 2 will be using X.509 certifications, which RIPEM uses, you or your students can do things like building good friendly user interfaces to the current character-menu certification chains that RIPEM provides (somewhat like PGP's Web of Trust, but a bit clumsier for now.) #--- # 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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Turing Award
by madden＠mpi-sb.mpg.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi All, Further to previous cypherpunk discussions on cryptography, and on program checking/verification, the below announcement of this years Turing Award should be of interest (apologies if this is old news). Pete ================================================================= Dr Peter Madden, Email: madden(a)mpi-sb.mpg.de Max-Planck-Institut fuer Informatik, Phone: (49) (681) 302-5434 Im Stadtwald, W-66123 Saarbruecken, Germany. Fax: (49) (681) 302-5401 ================================================================= ----- Begin Included Message ----- >From seidel(a)cs.uni-sb.de Thu Oct 26 08:57:10 1995 Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 08:57:02 +0100 From: seidel(a)cs.uni-sb.de (Raimund Seidel) To: profs(a)sol.cs.uni-sb.de Subject: Turing Award Content-Length: 4661 ------- Forwarded Message ACM'S A.M. Turing Award, computing's highest honor, goes to Manuel Blum of University of California, Berkeley Date: Saturday, October 21, 1995 3:55PM BW1320 OCT 20,1995 15:22 PACIFIC 18:22 EASTERN ( BW)(ACM/TURING-AWARD/BLUM) ACM'S A.M. Turing Award, computing's highest honor, goes to Manuel Blum of University of California, Berkeley Business Editors NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 20, 1995--Considered the Nobel Prize of Computing, the A. M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), will be given to distinguished computer scientist, Manuel Blum, of the University of California, Berkeley. The award will be presented to Blum at a special awards ceremony during the kick off of ACM's yearlong 50th anniversary celebration, February 14-18, 1996 in Philadelphia. Blum was honored with the Turing Award "in recognition of his contributions to the foundation of computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking." computing devices, Blum's research has developed around a single unifying theme: finding positive, practical consequences of living in a world where all computational resources are bounded. Blum shows that secure business transactions, pseudo-random number generation, and program checking are all possible precisely because all computational devices are resource bounded. Blum is one of the founders of computational complexity theory, a field that is central to theoretical computer science, and one which deals with measuring the difficulty of performing computations. His work on machine-independent complexity yields a theory of computational cost that is relevant also to practical problems. Cryptographic protocols which are used in the transmission of sensitive information are secure because they can be shown to be information in a cryptographically encoded message without going through an inordinately complex computation that would be prohibitively costly and time consuming to perform. For computer programs it is very difficult to develop perfectly error-free programs. In this area Blum has shown how his techniques can be applied to make programs more reliable, and to check their results. Since this work is very fundamental one can expect that it will find application to many other practical problems, as well. "Manuel Blum is a profound thinker," said ACM President Stuart H. Zweben, chairman of the department of computer and information science at Ohio State University, "his seminal work, insights and approaches have brought about new avenues of research in the area of computational complexity and established foundations for what people can compute. Furthermore, his work has influenced other Turing Award winners to a significant degree." The ACM A. M. Turing Award is given annually for technical achievements in the field of computing which are deemed by a jury of leading professionals to be of lasting and significant importance to the computing community. It is accompanied by a prize of $25,000 contributed by AT&T. Dr. Blum is University of California at Berkeley's Arthur J. Chick Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computing Sciences, a Department in which he has served since 1968. Dr. Blum was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1938 and began his academic career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his B.S., Warren S. McCulloch, Hartley Rogers Jr. and Marvin Minsky. Dr. Blum is renowned for his work on computational complexity, automata theory, inductive inference, cryptography and program result-checking. During his career, Dr. Blum has received numerous awards, published 47 technical papers and advised 26 Ph.D. students. ACM, founded in 1947, is an 85,000 member international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the art, science, engineering and application of information technology. ACM serves both professional and public interests by fostering the open interchange of information and by promoting the highest professional and ethical standards. This is accomplished through its many publications, conferences, special interest groups, chapters and network communications. --30---rg/ny* CONTACT: Terrie Phoenix (212) 626-0531 phoenix(a)acm.org KEYWORD: NEW YORK INDUSTRY KEYWORD: COMPUTERS/ELECTRONICS COMED REPEATS: New York 212-575-8822 or 800-221-2462; Boston 617-236-4266 or 800-225-2030; SF 415-986-4422 or 800-227-0845; LA 310-820-9473 BW URL: http://www.hnt.com/bizwire ------- End of Forwarded Message ----- End Included Message -----

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Smart Snoops
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wall Street Journal, October 30, 1995, p. B3. Netcom to Use Smart Switches For the Internet By Audrey Choi Internet provider Netcom On-Line Communication Services Inc. said it will use high-speed network switches from Cascade Communicaffons Corp. in a move to upgrade the speed and flexibility of its Internet services. Netcom's decision represents a significant endorsement for Cascade, a small Westford, Mass.-based company whose revenues have soared along the rapid growth of the Internet. In addition to Netcom, Cascade also is supplying switching devices, which control the flow of information across a far-flung computer network, to UUNet Technologies Inc. and Performance Systems International Inc. To prepare for an expected rise in the number of users, networking analysts say the Internet needs to move toward a more efficient architecture based on high-speed intelligent switches, like Cascade's, which not only allow large volumes of data to be transmitted quickly, but also offer Internet service providers the ability to track and manage the data being transported. Brad Meinert, senior analyst at research firm Input, says the tremendous growth of the World Wide Web, a graphics Internet interface, "is putting increased capacity demands for greater bandwidth on the Internet infrastructure." In the past, the Internet depended primarily on simpler router-based wide-area networks that provided access to users with dial-up modems and leased lines. Bundles of data moving over this kind of network is evaluated and processed at each router until it arrives at its destination -- a tedious process that can adversely affect time-sensitive applications, such as video conferencing. "We've been talking about an information super highway, but our infrastructure is really just dirt roads," said Daniel E. Smith, Cascade's president and chief executive. Mr. Meinert noted that "switching is clearly the next generation, which allows you to create the virtual network." Financial details of the Netcom deal weren't disclosed, but Cascade's Mr. Smith said the deals with the three major Internet providers initially represents "tens of millions of dollars" of business. UUNet said it has purchased $6.5 million worth of Cascade products. Cascade's switches provide the highest port density and highest network capacity, analysts say. Its switches range in cost from $25,000 to $250,000 and enable a far greater number of users to access the Internet through any one point. While a typical router may be able to handle 20 to 50 users, a single Cascade switch can accommodate 1,000 users, says Desh Deshpande, Cascade's founder and marketing vice president. Additionally, the management capabilities of the smart switches enable Internet providers to track how many data bundles a customer sends, where each bundle is at any point in time, and what priority on the network they should be given. -----

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