December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Sun speaks out - but not to the cypherpunks
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I know that it is rude to follow up one of your own posts, and I apologize in advance for this horrible faux-pas, but hopefully, it's excused this one time. I wrote: >One example of this that should serve as a useful case study is a recent >problem which was brought to the Canadian public's attention just this >week, on a program called the Fifth Estate. The CBC (Canadian >Broadcasting Corporation) detailed a software code problem in one of >AECL's (Atomic Energy of Canada Limited's) instruments which deliver >penetrating radiation. > >The software which controlled the radiation dose, would periodically >override the oncologist's calibration and deliver a radiation dose 100 >times what was prescribed. This software "bug" literally killed wherever >the machine was in use. Does anyone on this list know if the CBC has a web site on the Net? I'm hoping that someone (hint, hint) who has a convenient website, one with lots of spare bandwidth could volunteer to contact the CBC and persuade them to copyright clear the Fifth Estate program clip which documented some of the risks of software bugs in mission critical applications, and allow it to be placed on the Net. I'm hoping that this English language piece reaches a wide international audience. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a Crown Corporation which has historically received its primary funding from the Government of Canada. Recently, it has suffered under the budgetary ax, and the push for privatization. I'm pretty confident that the Corporation would copyright clear the clip for MPEG distribution across the Net, if they were approached with the concept that the clip was a demonstration of the CBC's journalistic excellence and integrity, a piece which is demonstrative of the critical need to continue their funding. A concrete demonstration of the need for the CBC. And a piece which could well receive deserved international acclaim. The site would help them, and would simultaneously be a site of international public service. Nothing will drive home the need for quality software, quality code, and quality security more than the vivid graphic pictures of the consequences of sloppy code, or of the risks if certain critical systems, LANs, or private networks are compromised, or if security and privacy (which are flip sides of the same coin) are ignored. The sight of a body, that has had a hole burned straight through it from the front through to the spine is truly chilling and drives the message home. Nothing seems to speak as clearly as a picture ... as to what the stakes are ... of what "bugs" in code do ... and of what a network compromise can leave in its wake. A picture of consequences. Six people died in Canada and the United States due to the software flaw. Even after numerous reports of the flaws, the company refused to even acknowledge the existence of a problem, and in fact did everything within its power to make sure doctors, radiologists and physicists were unaware. The attitude of trivialization can only be characterized as fantastic, and would be unbelievable to anyone who has not viewed the piece. It's one hell of a backgrounder which not only details problems, but looks at solutions -- it examines attitudes, especially management attitudes. It truly deserves an expanded audience. From teachers, to students, to the international media, to the concerned private individual, all will be served well if this piece gets wide attention. Takers, anyone?? 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.

2 1

Re: Re[2]: FBI seeks huge wiretapping system
by Jay Campbell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>It is a well-known fact that it was common practice for NSA operatives to > ^^^ >masquerade as Injuns in the 1800's and waylay Pony Express riders in order > ^^^^^^ >I think you'll find the NSA was not in existence in the 1800's. I'm disappointed at the sheer number of similar pieces of email I received on this. You'da thought the Capn Crunch reference was silly enough that people would give me a funny look and trash the original message. -- Jay Campbell edge(a)got.net - Operations Manager -=-=-=-=-=-=- Sense Networking, Santa Cruz Node Jay(a)Campbell.net got.net? PGP MIT KeyID 0xACAE1A89 "On the Information Superhighway, I'm the guy behind you in this morning's traffic jam leaning on his horn."

1 0

Re: Credentials Without Identity
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I do not intend my comments below to be disrespectful to the people of Sweden. At 4:32 AM 11/5/95, Mats Bergstrom wrote: >Ah, the Swedish way is so much more convenient. Directly after birth you >get a tag around your arm, with a number that is later changed to an >entry into several databases, including 'Birth Registry' and you get >your Person Number for life, in the format YYMMDD-abcd, which is >unique (at least in Sweden). All forthcoming database entries are based >on this number, usually as a first key field. Surprise immigrants get a The Swedish way may be more convenient, but the Nazi way was even more convenient. The Person Numbers (or NonPerson Numbers, I suppose) were tattooed directly on the arms. For many of us, the essence of strong crypto, crypto anarchy, and the Cypherpunks list is to avoid this "Swedish future." Truly a blight on mankind, if you ask me. The U.S is moving swiftly in this direction. (Ironically, the foreign press clucks at our "fascism" with Proposition 187-type measures, while there own countries are far more restrictive in allowing immigration.) Fortunately, I have heard there is a "right wing" backlash growing in some of the Scandinavian countries, especially Norway and Denmark. ("Right wing" is what the press calls it...I hope it's really "anti-left wing," anti-cradle-to-grave-socialism.) >other person). Most Government databases are open to the public, so >the credit tracking agencies don't have to work very hard regarding The worst of both worlds: the government mandates that information be collected at every turn, then opens the records for all to see. >Now, there are laws against cross-referencing various databases >without the approval of the Data Inspection, which often says no. To my surprise, several people on this list have expressed support for the need for so-called "data privacy laws." I look at it this way: if I put things on my computer based on things I have learned, or even compile lists of people and places, etc., who can enter my home and demand that I expunge these records? The problem with well-intentioned laws about data privacy is that they impinge directly on the freedom to read and write, to make lists, to enter thoughts into computers, etc. (I'm sure the _intent_ is to go after MasterCard-type operations and inaccurate records, but businesses in Britain are already facing investigation for having computerized mailing lists. Ironically, the Cypherpunks mailing list might be illegal in the U.K. unless the legal forms were properly filled out, the fees paid, the parties notified on a regular basis of information about them, etc. And our archiving of posts is ipso facto illegal under several interpretations of the Data Privacy laws of some countries unless extensive notifications are made and permissions received. The Data Privacy laws make us all criminals for storing received messages in data bases.) More practically, giving a government the power to say which data bases are acceptable, and which data bases are illegal, is a terrible thing. Besides the opportunities for abuse (by a Stalin, a Nixon, a Pol Pot, a Clinton), it is also an impractical law to enforce, as Mats' next point makes: >But if you do it illegaly, there is very little risk of detection. >It looks like the Approved ID will be a smart-card with a signing >mechanism (probably escrowed), naturally linked to the Person Number, >real soon now, at least before the mythical y.2000 . Links to physical >characteristics (retina?) are not (openly) discussed yet but may >eventually come into play. ... And: >2) Prepare for Crypto Anarchy. Create untrackable net aliases for > future use. Keep informed of all the tricks to bypass coming > futile attempts to link net pseudonyms to Person Numbers (or > physical characteristics). Enjoy (and help create and protect) > the virtual sanctuary with digital mixes and anonymous http > proxies (and DC-nets or something better eventually). Sad, isn't it, that the world is rushing headlong into an Orwellian future. "Disneyland with a death penalty" ("Wired"--S. Sandfort, W. Gibson). --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."

3 2

e$: 24 Hours
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- e$: 24 Hours Yesterday, I had probably the most amazing day I've had in a very long time. As the day revolved around e$, strong crypto, cryptoanarchy, Macs and the life on the internet, I thought I would share it with you. 6:00 Got up before the alarm. Carol, my wife, dropped me off at the gym, where I hadn't set foot in about 6 months. Started up yet another new exercise program. Did a lot of big muscle stuff, like squats and deadlifts -- now I can't climb stairs so well for a while. Shaved off yet another unfinished goatee (3rd time in 6 weeks) because I had to be presentable in public today. 9:30 Showed up at the speaker's desk at Infoworld Boston, got credentialled and went to find David Fox's session on transaction methods. Had some time before, so I ran down to the floor and weaseled an Apple Internet guy named Tom Bartlett into shooting a picture of me with a QuickTake so that Vinnie Moscaritolo, another friend at Apple, wouldn't have a picture of him holding a scrawled sign saying "Bob: send me a GIF for this!" on the e$ web-page he's building for me at http://www.webstuff.apple.com/~vinnie/Rah/ . I had Tom e-mail the GIF to me from the floor, and ran back to the session, with 5 minutes to spare. The session got about 300 attendees, who listened to presentations from Pierre from First Virtual, Cliff from Open Market and Mike from Checkfree, and then I got to talk a bit. I had never spoken to a convention before, and here I was batting cleanup after all the pros pitched their stuff. David Fox introduced me as a "Wild Card", and I did my best to help him out. We were running late, but after asking them to get up and stretch after sitting through 2 hours of dog-and-pony, I asked the audience how many people people were from Boston, and told them about The Boston Society for Digital Commerce and when the meeting was. I then asked them how many of them had ever sold a car, and then asked them whether they took MasterCard from the buyer, and got a nice laugh. I told them that I thought that digital commerce *was* financial cryptography, and that most people settling trades on the net were just figuring that out. I told them to go out and buy Applied Cryptography by Schneier, and Out of Control by Kelley. I told them about the difference between certificate-based and book-entry transaction systems. I told them about Tim May's idea of Crypto-Anarchy, and about the Cypherpunks. Finally I asked them to imagine a world where instead of needing to enforce copyrights and patents, a developer's code would simply refuse to run periodically without a digital receipt saying that some specified amount had been paid, to the developer, preferrably in cash. I told them about Digicash, Mark Twain Bank, and about how important that was, even if it was a bumpy first start. At question-and-answer time, a guy from Germany asked us about the ITARs, regulatory restrictions on international transactions, and deutchmark-denominated business. All of the other presenters allowed that while that was hard, they had patches or were working on it, and that regulations were a problem. I talked about Eric Hughes' idea of regulatory arbitrage, how John Gilmore said that the internet saw censorship, and by extension arbitrary regulation, as damage, and routed around it, and I said that the folks at Mark Twain and Digicash had seen this as a problem and set up their system to be denominated in one of 5 currencies, including marks. I picked up about 10 cards from people who wanted to come to lunch at the Boston Society for Digital Commerce. (Plug: The first Tuesday of the month at the downtown Harvard Club. This month's speaker is Win Treese from Open Market, on how to design systems for digital commerce. E-mail me for details.) In addition, I saw BSDC member Dave Lash, a real-estate mogul turned web-fanatic who told me how to clean up my presentation style for next time. 2:00 After schmoozing, and trying to find a bank to cash a check. I met David Fox and his web guy (forgot your name, sorry) on the trade floor in front of the Netscape booth, which was about 20% the size of the IBM booth, and was blocking the aisles so much that the fire marshall was giving them grief for it. We then went to see Jim Phillips at Security First Network Bank. SFNB is in Atlanta, and while the likes of Citicorp and Chase were putting together proprietary, dial-up, bank-by-phone systems, Jim went ahead and did his stuff on the web for some rediculous fraction of their costs. They were the only bank there. They had this tiny booth way back in the corner, and they were also a fire marshall problem. Jim was talking to a guy from California somewhere about setting up an account right then and there. I told Jim to expect a visit from my anonymous digital signature law source "Irwin" , (for Irwin Cory, The World's Foremost Authority, RIP), who had asked me earlier in the week about SFNB, and how to get ahold of them. Then, David, who was the original Aldus and Radius distributor in Australia before moving here a few years ago, went around lining up sponsors for his WWW pre-tradeshow tradeshow which in turn evolved out of his tradeshow directory business. While we walked around, I talked to David some more about e$pam, my idea for building a group of three e$-mail lists (a filtered list of other e$-ralated sources, an unmoderated "watering hole", and a newsletter), and we agreed to talk more about it on Friday sometime. 3:00 Cashed a check from my first-ever writing sale, a longish rant entitled "The Geodesic Network, OpenDoc, and CyberDog", which originally was posted to apple-internet-users, was cross-posted by bunches of other people in the Mac world to other e-mail lists all over the place, got me fan mail from the likes of Kawasaki, Alsop, Petreley, and various Apple Vice Presidents, and was even cited in a New Zealand law journal. An editor from InfoWorld bashed it from a 20kb rant down to a feature article of about 1300 words, and it will appear this Monday in the November 6th issue. 4:00 Went to see a client, who is the CFO for a famous, er, beauty salon, with about 50 salons world wide. I sort of core-dumped at him about how someday he could send his e-mail his cash to the home office in London every night. He's seen me like this before, so he didn't quite think I was from Mars... 5:45 As a lurker on the internet-marketing list, I got invited to a party at Bob Metcalfe's 5-story Back Bay townhouse. I had recruited Julie Rackliffe, a friend of mine in "Development" at the Computer Museum, to come along so I would know at least one person there. When I got there, I saw Dave Lash again. Small world. Besides the usual groceries, Bob had a big bunch of posterboard on a on his dining room table, and another piece of posterboard on his fireplace mantle. There were a bunch of questions on the table's poster, and one was about winners and loosers. I said that digital financial certificate underwriters would be the winners, and that loosers would be companies which depended on large information hierarchies. There was a question about anonymity, and I quoted Gilmore on network damage again. On the fireplace mantle was this posterboard with an org chart with business-card sized blank boxes all over it. One side of the pyramid said "Client", the other side said "Server", and so I drew a big cloud off to the side with the label "Crypto-Anarchist" in it, and put my card there. A few people moved their cards into the cloud. I was rather pleased with myself... I went upstairs where I met John Levine, who was in the PBS internet special last year, and Margy Levine Young, who wrote "The Internet for Windows for Dummies Starter Kit" in a room with a Windows box, a bonded ISDN connection and a wall projector. I showed a few people the e$ web-page, met the author of the refrigerator magnets page, and found out the John and Margy were fellow Unitarians, and that Margy's husband is the UU webmaster. We're everywhere, we're everywhere. I went up to the third floor, where by that time they were serving coffee and dessert, and Bob Metcalfe was there reccommending desserts to people. By that time I was talking to a trust officer at a very large institutional trustee bank here in Boston about how to underwrite digital cash. This guy was sympathetic because what he really wanted to do was chuck it all and go to work for Open Market. I told him that the next best thing was to let me come in and evangelize his bank a bit. He agreed. Dubiously. Anyway, He wants to come to lunch at BSDC, probably to schmooze the Open Market folks. So while I was standing there waiting for coffee, I told Metcalfe about getting a feature article into his magazine. One thing led to another, and the next thing I know, we're up another flight of stairs, and I'm dumping core again, this time about 10 steps from ARP-1, the original ARPANet transponder. Oh. Metcalfe uses a Mac, even though his internet feed is to a Wintel box. Metcalfe first starts off with a few coy questions about Phiber Optik, and Phil Zimmerman, and he figures out that my interest in cryptography is pretty much in its financial implications. So, for the better part of half an hour, he's quizzing me about stuff like digital cash, digital certificates and financial disintermediation, and pretty much the whole geodesic market rant. He says he likes "Mr., Doctor, Doctor, Huber's" stuff, a reference to Huber's hypercredentialed resume. He talked about these crazy people who were creating a secondary market in Digicash's beta certificates, so I told him about Lucky Green, Rich Lethin and how all of us created ecm. I told Metcalfe about reputation capital, and, when he talked about the evils of anonymity, I talk about how on the net, a key pair *is* your identity, and about Tim May's cryptoanarchy stuff. I told him about BSDC and asked about him speaking sometime, but he says he's working on a conference and a book, and his wife will kill him if he starts making speeches again. He wanted on the BSDC list, though, so I'm going to subscribe him and see what happens. I also said I'd mail him the e$ URL. 10:45 I get home and after telling Carol all about my day, I still can't sleep, so I jump on the net and filter cypherpunks for buyinfo, and then answer some mail from my college roomate, who found me last week. He's a commander in the Navy who's now flying planes at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. I shot him back a message and told him about the e$ web-page, which he's going to have to sneak into another office to look at some other night, ;-), and I told him that I was writing this and would send it to him when I was through. I still wasn't sleepy, so I plinked on the development version of the e$ page with the new picture, and when I was done with that, I read news, and, in reply to a comment I posted on soc.culture.alaska (I spent middle school in Anchorage), I get a reply from Mr. Pickett, my 7th and 8th grade science teacher, and my favorite science teacher on the whole planet. Since I had just put a picture on my web-page, I put the development page's URL on the message so he could see what I looked like now. 1:45 I finally go to sleep. Cheers, Bob Hettinga -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMJkyyfgyLN8bw6ZVAQFVAAP/Xmkp7H28Q/DfRCqMWiYboEo53T84hOIP n6pM/jjC1XAqf9E1v/i5PRQmCylyoJELEzsq3ET02bs4Wi25tS80dcm6oMHoHtAn 1SFCr6hHGIOxmLPJ+XnKCJgpKZEheLGqsG50ZEos26kQ3O4hD3bjZr5WcEyYFAGi 38i5yTwXR9A= =fKyZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- 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 <<<<<

1 0

Re: lp (134.222.35.2)?
by Ernest Hua 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You don't really need a special (and clearly suspicious) IP address to perform driftnet fishing. All you need is to be sure that all physical packets pass through a checkpoint charlie and just park a sniffer there to watch everything fly by. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how hard NSA pushes behind the scenes to have physical long distance cables run through the US routers/switches (in the name of US national security, of course). It would be fun (perhaps horrible) to see what the NSA does the first time Isreal or France set up their own high capacity long distance to other friendly/unfriendly countries (thus bypassing the US completely). Second, let France or some other country set up major Internet routing clearinghouses which advertise secure routes to other nations (not US). Ern

2 1

Re: FBI seeks huge wiretapping system
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> What is very odd however is the FBI request for $500 million. > [to tap phones] What is odd about that? -- when I visited Cuba a couple of years ago it looked to me as if a major chunk of the GNP went into watching people. (I hear the situation has improved since then, perhaps thanks to their continuing bankruptcy.) At 12:09 PM 11/2/95 -0500, hallam(a)w3.org wrote: > When the NSA are being asked to comment on an export license they > are being asked "is this thing dangerous", not "should it be exported". > But when the response comes back to commerce "its dangerous" you can > hardly expect the person on the other end to put their neck out on the > line and risk allowing [...] This of course is the basic evil of government regulation: Bricks are dangerous. Two by fours are dangerous. Water is dangerous. Playgrounds are dangerous. Everything is dangerous, because everything could be used to cause harm, deliberately or accidentally. Therefore every action needs to be supervised, controlled, and directed by your wise and benevolent government, and any attempt to avoid the benevolent observation of the all seeing eye shows that you must be a child pornographer-terrorist-drug-trafficker-money-launderer. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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

2 1

Re: lp (134.222.35.2)?
by Alex de Joode 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[..] : This is silly. If the NSA were monitoring traffic with the consent of : EUnet and UUNET (and note that EUnet is owned by UUNET rival PSI), they : wouldn't need to play these routing games; they'd just eavesdrop at an : interconnect or on the leased lines leading into it, run a rough filter : over it to cut down volume, and tunnel the traffic home through other : channels (probably satellite). And if they were monitoring without the : consent of UUNET and EUnet, they still wouldn't play these games because : the providers would be upset about the unexpected load on the expensive : and overloaded transatlantic pipes. PSI has an 11% stake in EUnet, since they took over EUnet Britain, 11% doesn't qualify as 'owning' where I live. Regards, -AJ-

1 0

Re: Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:48 PM 11/3/95, Ray Arachelian wrote: >Now does anyone want my old 1st edition? :-) I am interested. I will trade five (5) slightly used prime numbers for it. (Has anybody ever thought about using prime numbers as a medium of barter in a digital economy? Think of the labor that would be saved if we all didn't have to compute our own!! :-}) --Klaus! von Used Primes 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."

2 1

re:using PGP only for digital signatures
by James Black 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello, I am in a discussion (during the week) with a system administrator about seeing if we can just make PGP publically available to everyone, but now the discussion seems to be to just allow PGP to do digital signatures, and I don't think that is the best choice, then. They are not against PGP being used, but there are legal issues as to whether they can offer it to everyone, as some students are international students, and are not allowed to use the version for the US, or so I have been informed, so now I need to see if we can have the international version, so these students can use it. :( Is there any good programs (for the Unix, SunOS) that just does digital signature encryption? What they are trying to do is make certain that no one can send a message to anyone, claim to be in the faculty, and cause problems that way. My position is just a student programmer, but I am trying to learn as much as I can, to answer questions and deal with problems. Thanx. James Black black(a)suntan.eng.usf.edu

5 6

/dev/random - using up entropy?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The discussions of what to do when /dev/random has handed out all of its available entropy have assumed that entropy gets used up; I'd like to propose that maybe it doesn't, at least in the computational-complexity sense that says that you don't have the computational power around to calculate the information inside /dev/random from the output, giving a sort of "computational entropy" that reflects not only the uncertainty you have because of randomness but also the uncertainty you have because of your computational limitations. Most of the designs I've seen look like this: A Reservoir of entropy R = R1....Rn, where n is large, 1024 or 4096 An input stream I = I1....Ik, which is mixed into R A mixing function F which is used to mix R <= F(R,I) for some chunk of I, possibly empty. A hash function H, typically MD5. An output O = O1...Om = H(R), and E gets mixed after every output. (These are capital-o, not zero...) The entropy E of the reservoir E before an output is -SUM(all X) p(X) log p(X) where X is an event R1=x1, R2=x2 ... Rn=Xn which is equal to n, assuming the Ri are iid equiprobable 0 or 1. After an output, the entropy is - SUM p(X | H(R)=O) log p(X|H(R)=O) which works out to n-m, since p(X) is zero if H(R)!=O, and 2**m/2**n if it does. So that says you use up m bits of entropy if you get m bits of good output. However, what I'd like to suggest is that you don't, from the perspective of a user who doesn't have direct access to the reservoir R of random bits. For that user, p(X|H(R)=O) is the same as p(X) or P(X|H(R)=O'), because the user is neither able to invert H, nor to enumerate all possible R, nor to calculate anything useful based on multiple outputs, since the reservoir R is shuffled between outputs; even a simple circular shift may be enough. This doesn't apply to the case where n is 32 or 48 and the hash function produces n-bit outputs, or even m<<n bit outputs, because that maybe be inverted or brute-forced, but it seems to apply for the case where n is sufficiently large and the hash is good. If the hash is simpler than MD5, it may apply anyway, since the hash produces far fewer bits than its input, as long as the hash and the mixing function don't give away any information about the reservoir between successive outputs. This would suggest that /dev/random ought to have a mode that says "give me output of whatever quality you have available", and that it ought to be OK to use it, as long as the reservoir has been seeded with sufficient high-entropy input to have decent randomness. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

3 2