December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Civility
by Tim Philp 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ladies and Gentlemen; As I am sure that most of you have noticed, this is a high volume list. I have just spent the last 20 minutes deleting personal attacks and non-crypto related junk from my mail. Normally, this list is of fairly high quality and I enjoy reading the technical and political discussions that appear here. It must be something in the water but lately the nonsense has reached epic proportions. Now I realize that trying to get an independent bunch of people (as the cypherpunks must be) to conform to a minimum standard of behaviour is like herding cats ( I like that image! <g>) but in the interests of your fellow list members, please take the attacks to private E-mail. This might make the volume of crypto-related material managable to the rest of us. Let the flames begin! ( In private E-mail please!) By the way, seasons greetings to everyone! Tim Philp Brantford, Ontario, Canada =================================== For PGP Public Key, Send E-mail to: pgp-public-keys(a)swissnet.ai.mit.edu In Subject line type: GET PHILP ===================================

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TAX_zip
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

12-24-95. NYPaper: "Money Laundering, New and Improved. To really hide loot, wait for the arrival of 'cybercash.' " The days when you could trust a Swiss banker to hold on to your millions and keep his mouth shut are long gone. Embarrassing disclosure incidents are forcing any money launderer worth his pocket change to go high-tech, using the wonder of home-banking computer programs to zip money across borders. What American authorities fear the most, however, is the rise of "cybercash." "The nightmare of it is that there is no registration of every transaction, the way there is if you use a Visa or Mastercard," said Stanley E. Morris, who heads the financial crimes enforcement network. TAX_zip (7k)

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KID_zoo
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

12-24-95. NYPaper: "Case Involving Free Speech And the Internet Is Settled." A dispute about free speech on the Internet has been settled out of Court here after a local school district admitted that a high school principal had wrongly reprimanded a student for lampooning his school on the World Wide Web. The school district apologized to Mr. Paul Kim for the punitive actions. "We now know our own boundaries," said Ann Oxrieder, the school district's spokeswoman. "The Internet is unexplored territory for schools and we now know that when a student uses his own equipment and on his own time, we should stay out of it." KID_zoo (6k)

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RAT_357
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The NYPaper of 12-23 and 12-24-95 report on the arrest Wednesday and "suicide" yesterday of Thomas Lewis Lavy, who was jailed under anti-terrorism statutes for trying to import from Canada to Alaska 130 grams of the deadly poison ricin -- enough to "kill thousands of people," officials said. Some 40 F.B.I. agents and Army chemical warfare specialists mounted the assault in deadly "survivalist, fundamentalist" Arkansas, right deadly Ollie North's recreational-poison/gun swap fly-in. Lavy's attorney, Sam Heuer, took sharp issue with the government's accusations. "It is such a tragic case," Mr. Heuer said. "An overzealous U.S. Attorney in Alaska and a hot dog F.B.I. agent tried to paint Tom as something he was not. Tom was a very gentle, very kindly person. We have the right to have rat poison or coyote poison, just like we have the right to have a .357 Magnum." RAT_357 (12k)

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FTC Privacy Initiative
by James M. Cobb 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Friend, You may wish to inform yourself about the FTC Privacy Initia- tive: The US Federal Trade Commission has launched a "Privacy Initia- tive" to investigate whether the information collected at web- sites (either that affirmatively submitted by a visitor via a form or information collected based upon a visitor's selection of pages at a site to reflect personal interests) should be the subject of regulation by the FTC. To get background on this effort, you may want to read a speech by FTC Commissioner Varney on Electronic Commerce and Privacy which is available at the FTC's site under speeches http://www.ftc.gov or [at] the Advertising Law Internet Site http;//www.webcom.com/~lewrose/home.html under speeches. This week the staff of the FTC established a mailing list to allow interested parties to discuss the issues surrounding the privacy interests of consumers visiting web sites. To subscribe, send the message subscribe to privacy-request(a)ftc.gov ---- The above is an excerpt from a 12 20 95 message to another list. Cordially, Jim

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Future Scenarios for e$: The DCSB Forecast
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- **************>>>>>> Meeting Reminder: One week to go! <<<<<<*********** ****>>>>>> Checks due to Shipwright *this* Saturday, December 30, 1995 <<<<<<** The Digital Commerce Society of Boston (Formerly The Boston Society for Digital Commerce) Presents Art Hutchinson and John Kelly Northeast Consulting Resources Inc., (NCRI) "Future Scenarios for e$: The DCSB Forecast" Tuesday, January 2, 1995 12 - 2 PM The Downtown Harvard Club of Boston One Federal Street, Boston, MA I've been talking to Art Hutchinson last week, and it looks like we're in for a treat. This is going to be particularly useful, coming as it does at the beginning of the new year. He and John Kelly are going to put our prognostication skills through their paces with what amounts to a 90's version of Delphi exercise, using us, a bunch of people who, if anyone, should have an interesting take on where commerce on the internet is going in the next few years. I'm psyched. Art and John are old pros at this kind of thing, so I expect this is going to be great fun. Since we're going to be doing something different besides listening to a speaker this time, I'd like to suggest that we get there right at 12 noon to get things started immediately, New Year's aldehyde toxcicity notwithstanding. ;-). Instead of one big group around a table, we'll be sitting at smaller tables with a pile of future "events" to prognisticate about. Our opinions about the likelihood about those events will be recorded by a "scribe" at each table, and then posted for all to look at during/after lunch. The "events" are drawn from a giant database of these things that NCRI has acquired over the years, filtered down to e$-relevance, plus some suggestions from the stuff we've discussed on the dcsb list and at monthly meetings. This meeting of the Boston Society for Digital Commerce will be held on Tuesday, January 2, 1995 from 12pm - 2pm at the Downtown Branch of the Harvard Club of Boston, One Federal Street. The price for lunch is $27.50. This price includes lunch, room rental, and the speaker's lunch. ;-). The Harvard Club *does* have a jacket and tie dress code. We need to receive a company check, or money order, (or if we *really* know you, a personal check) payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston", by *this* Saturday, December 30 , or you won't be on the list for lunch. We're trying to hold the line on advance registration this time, because the holiday makes for considerable uncertainty in reservations. I will be sending confirmations early this time, on Thursday, just to make sure. Checks payable to anyone else but The Harvard Club of Boston will have to be sent back. Checks should be sent to Robert Hettinga, c/o The Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02131. Again, they must be made payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston". If anyone has questions, or has a problem with these arrangements (We've had to work with glacial A/P departments more than once, for instance), please let us know via e-mail, and we'll see if we can work something out. Planned speakers for the following few months are: February Fred Hapgood Freelance Author March Glenda Barnes X.9 Electronic Commerce Security Group April Donald Eastlake CyberCash May Perry Metzger Security Consultant and Cypherpunk June Dan Shutzer FSTC We are actively searching for future speakers. If you are in Boston on the first Tuesday of the month, and you would like to make a presentation to the Society, please send e-mail to the DCSB Program Commmittee, care of Robert Hettinga, rah(a)shipwright.com . For more information about the Boston Society for Digital Commerce, send "info dcsb" in the body of a message to majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu . If you want to subscribe to the DCSB e-mail list, send "subscribe dcsb" in the body of a message to majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu . Looking forward to seeing you there! Cheers, Robert Hettinga Moderator, The Digital Commerce Society of Boston -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMN8PKfgyLN8bw6ZVAQGC4AP/fSCT1Fxxa/Q8x5ujQNeN6rk8tWtt2K2c S63F3ff3FJ6lbqAQLEZiXcbyYJSMDeZt0+3vSckKG54xa3dz/e+a9K7e3eE+jdrF tZRvwYMvH2X3CKszVbh++I9cO8MlJfTgrMJc4GZKEpdfl0qxuQpz5YPqU9uIS3SL mgJ5nqn7iew= =fTao -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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No Subject
by owner-cypherpunks＠toad.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric Murray wrote: | Where we're headed is mail filters with PGP imbedded (PGP 3 will | make this much easier) that check incoming mail for a valid signature | for certain PGP keyid/fingerprints and pass that mail along. | Other mail that doesn't match gets tossed into a 'junk' folder | or thrown away if you really don't want to talk to anyone that you | don't already know. I agree with the assesment of where we may be going, but the technology is available now. (Marshall Rose uses it; if you want to get mail into his private mailbox, offer him some $ via imbedded FV authorizations in the mail, and it goes into his inbox. If he thinks it was worth his time, he doesn't charge you.) Anyway, the code is defeintely available now. The back end is a little kludgy, but it was needed for an auto ley retreival script. This could easily be hacked to include a +pubring=$people line. The script gives you a keyid, which you can then use to filter on, ie: :0BW * -----BEGIN PGP KEYID=|sender_unknown # the sender unknown script is below :0: ? [ $KEYID = (`cat .buddies`) ] | /var/spool/mail/adam :0e: junk #!/bin/sh # unknown returns a keyid, exits 1 if the key is known # $output is to get the exit status. Othierwise, this would be a one liner. OUTPUT=`pgp -f +VERBOSE=0 +batchmode -o /dev/null` echo $OUTPUT | egrep -s 'not found in file' EV=$? if [ $EV -eq 0 ]; then echo $OUTPUT | awk '{print $6}' fi exit $EV -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

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Re: CFS and Linux
by Alex Strasheim 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> AT&T's refusal to support CFS and other so-called "secure" software > under Linux is typical and to be expected. This is the dumbest thread I've ever seen. First of all, AT&T lets Matt distribute CFS and other crypto related tools from an AT&T site. In the current legal environment, I think that's a good show of "support". Second of all, Matt has put in a lot of effort to make CFS usable to Linux users. I have personally gotten help on more than one occaision from Matt with CFS and Linux, and I've seen him answer lots of questions on the CFS users' mail list. Here's an example: when I first started using CFS, the documents were formatted with a macro that wasn't included with the most popular linux distributions. I pointed this out to Matt and took the time to rewrite the docs using a different macro, so Linux users would be able to read it. I'll bet he's done dozens of fixes to make CFS run better on Linux boxes. What's more, Matt recently took the trouble to set up a Linux box for the sole purpose of testing CFS on it. I love Linux and I use it, but the fact that everyone has a slightly different distribution makes it a tough platform to support. As Matt's already pointed out, most of the problems that people have with Linux and CFS seem to stem from a broken rpgen that come with some, but not all, distributions of Linux. Finally, as Perry pointed out, neither Matt nor AT&T owe us anything, so it would be impossible to find fault with Matt even if he hadn't done any work to support Linux. Lots of people run CFS on Linux. I'd even be willing to bet that Linux is the most popular CFS platform, judging from the traffic on the list. If you can't run CFS on your Linux box, you might want to consider the possibility that you don't know what you're doing.

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corporate bashing
by Alex Strasheim 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There have been some recent posts here flaming AT&T, Netscape, and people like Matt and Jeff who work for them. These posts seem to come out a paranoid mindset that distrusts any institution with power, and a romantic idea that the cypherpunks are subversive idealists fighting for truth and justice in the face of overwhelmingly powerful opponents. The truth is that several important institutions have contributed a lot to the fight for privacy. That may not be romantic, and it may not fit well with some people's adolescent fantasies, but it is what's actually happened. The New York Times, the most influential paper in America, has consistently argued against censorship on the net. MIT, one of our most prestigious universities, has taken on the free distribution of strong crypto tools and lent considerable credibility to Phil Zimmermann. AT&T funded the research Matt Blaze did which deomonstrated that a forge chip would interoperate with an escrowed one. If we had to pick one single thing that killed clipper, it would probably be that deomonstration. Netscape not only put crypto into its products, it's opening them up so that they'll talk to other people's products. This is a big step forward: even if Netscape caves into GAK, you'll be able to talk to one of Sameer's Apache-SSL servers in the Netherlands. GAK is unenforceable if standards are open and interoperability is possible. And despite the complaints of many here, Netscape has taken a strong stand aginst GAK and ITAR. Even Microsoft's Bill Gates has apparently written well and persuasively aginst GAK. None of this is conincidental, and if you don't understand why you ought to read Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom". We are not extremists. There is nothing extreme about believing that an email you send to your spouse or your friend ought to be private, or that people ought to be able to read and write about whatever subject interests them. The extremists are those who are fighting so hard to preserve the possibility of totalitarianism.

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bashing (fwd)
by fc＠all.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: >From fc Sun Dec 24 19:04:04 1995 Subject: bashing To: cp(a)proust.suba.com (Alex Strasheim) Date: Sun, 24 Dec 1995 19:04:04 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <199512242356.RAA03010(a)proust.suba.com> from "Alex Strasheim" at Dec 24, 95 05:56:44 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL22] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1253 > > 1 - You must top slandering people. > > 2 - You must stop using anonymity as a way to avoid being responsible. > > No. > > You must learn how to decide whether or not you want to believe something > by looking it's plausibility and where it came form, and when you do learn > that you need to realize that other people know how to do it as well. I'm all for believing or not believing based on your understandings, but this is not the same as slander or irresponsible behavior hidden behind false identity. I'm also in favor of anonymity, but not for the purpose of slander. There are a lot of good and valid reasons for anonymity, and I believe that it is a basic requirement of freedom, but we will lose the ability to be anonymous if enough of us abuse the freedom. > Don't blame anonymity for your own or others' inability to think critically. I don't and didn't blam anonymity for this. I blame people who hide behind anonymity as a way to be irresponsible without apparent recourse. Evaluating statements and giving your opinion is not the same as making insluting, untrue, and crude remarks about individuals. -> See: Info-Sec Heaven at URL http://all.net/ Management Analytics - 216-686-0090 - PO Box 1480, Hudson, OH 44236 -> See: Info-Sec Heaven at URL http://all.net/ Management Analytics - 216-686-0090 - PO Box 1480, Hudson, OH 44236

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