December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

WAY_lad
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

11-29-95. FiTi: "Information highway needs rules of the road, says report." Pointing out the possibility of technical incompatibilities and trade friction if companies are treated differently in different markets, the report outlines the case for a "global regulator" within the structure of the new World Trade Organisation. It points out that issues such as intellectual property rights, encryption and government control on cross-ownership have global rather than national aspects. "Encryption, for example, raises tricky and emotive issues connected with organised crime and national security and cannot be treated simply as a business problem." No revolution for software [Editorial] Today's software market is the way it is not because of some evil conspiracy in Seattle, Microsoft's home town, but because it meets most consumers' interests most of the time. The power to set standards follows from that success. Changing technology widens the range of possible market structures, but does not affect customers' underlying needs and preferences. In the battle between the technologically possible and the economically attractive, economics always wins. WAY_lad (7 kb) FiTi on-line at <www.ft.com> for waylaying top article.

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NOH_ide
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

11-29-95. Washrag: "Postal Service Awards Contracts to Develop Computer Kiosks." The Postal Service predicted "more than 10,000" kiosks could be installed in post offices, libraries and shopping malls "within the next few years." The Postal Service is the lead government agency on the project, one of several administration initiatives designed to provide the public with computer access to government information. "CIA, Pentagon Back NIMA 'Concept' Combining Spy Satellite Photo Units." The Pentagon and the CIA announced an agreement yesterday endorsing the "concept" of consolidating eight defense and intelligence agencies -- those responsible for managing spy satellite photos and related tasks -- into a new National Imagery and Mapping Agency. NOH_ide (10 kb)

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Re: key for Alice as promised (not)
by Adam Shostack 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > >Can you imagine?? I'm simply not willing to fool myself into thinking > > >that I ahve security by posting a key and using PGP. > > > > Unless you can post some proof that PGP is insecure, stop insisting it is. > > PGP is really not the issue. The issue is more my security and the > environment that I use PGP in. I don't have a trusted machine to run PGP > on. Anyone who wants to can come up to machine and copy my secret keyring > or they can even watch me typing my password in. Threat, please?? Do people often stand over your shoulder as you type? Enter your office, point guns at you, and take a backup of your entire computer? Have you considered putting the secret keyring on a floppy and locking it in your desk/safe when you're not actually in the office? (Or home..) > So, I don't fool myself, and I don't use PGP, except for things like > exchanging a one-time pad with someone when I've already sent the message > out across another delivery mechanism, like on a floppy delivered my > courier. I don't follow. You're claiming that PGP is good enough to transfer OTPads, but not good enough to sign pseudononymous messages? Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

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Re: GOST for sale
by fluffy＠shout.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What I wonder about is why anyone would use the Algorithm that the NSA is probably best at breaking. Breaking GOST was probably their number one project for years, and I would suspect that they have done it. chris

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Re: SKIP Source Release is out!
by smithmi＠dev.prodigy.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry Metzger writes: >Anyone who'd like to help me put the sources to the NRL IPsec + IPv6 >implementation up for FTP is invited to get in touch. It will runs on >4.4BSD machines (i.e. BSDI, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc) and should be >pretty portable to other similar Berkeley based machines. What licensing requirements exist for people who might want to use this code in their products? In particular, does one need to obtain any licensing from RSA or Cylink? --Michael Smith smithmi(a)dev.prodigy.com

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Re: The future will be easy to use (fwd)
by Rev. Mark Grant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Tue, 28 Nov 1995, Patiwat Panurach wrote: > I feel sad when they say that the market for <1000 $ machines is nill, I > had so much fun and learned so much from my old machines. Personally, I just bought a 486/66 laptop, which would have cost almost $1000 with 170 MB hard disk, 4 MB of RAM and Linux (I paid a couple of hundred extra for a 500 MB disk)... I could have got a Pentium desktop for the same price if I'd wanted one. So I don't see that there's really a great advantage to a $ 500 diskless computer (and having worked on Sun 3/50s in the past, I know about all the disadvantages). ObCrypto/Security: My landlord bought himself a computer a couple of weeks ago after he'd lived without them for over forty years, and has been enthusing about how easy it makes it for him to do his accounts. He just read about these diskless machines in a magazine, and his first reaction was that there was no way he'd keep his accounts information on a remote server. Obviously people *are* more privacy-aware than they're often given credit for. Mark

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ecash casino
by sameer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Any enterprising cypherpunks in gambling-friendly jurisdictions interested? I figure it would make ecash take off.. and you'd get rich. -- sameer Voice: 510-601-9777 Community ConneXion FAX: 510-601-9734 The Internet Privacy Provider Dialin: 510-658-6376 http://www.c2.org/ (or login as "guest") sameer(a)c2.org

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Re: Elliptic curves, patent status?
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:16 PM 11/28/95 -0400, Michael Smith wrote: > > > I'm unclear about the patent status of elliptic curve > > > systems. Are they covered by the Diffie-Hellman patent? > > > That is, is the lnguage of this patent broad enough to > > > cover _all_ public-key systems, regardless of their > > > mathematical basis? On Mon, 27 Nov 1995 23:16:10 -0800 jamesd(a)echeque.com wrote: > > No, but RSA will litigate you with the objective of > > inflicting extravagant legal costs regardless. At 08:13 AM 11/29/95 EST, Dan Bailey wrote: > Does the patent create any headaches for elliptic curve research or > publishing elliptic curve papers, or just for new products? Patents do not prohibit research -- Yet. Patent law continues to be extravagantly re interpreted from time to time, in a way that continually increases the power of the patent office and the power of the courts, but this creativity has not yet collided drastically with freedom of speech. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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: The future will be easy to use
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>James A. Donald writes >> Specs, anyone? > > I suggest a few requirements: > > Store the >keys, and information about the keys in a *real* database > ... At 09:31 AM 11/29/95 -0500, Jack P. Starrantino wrote: > Is this worth the complexity/cost? I'd have thought that the amount of > data involved would be small enough that index hashing would be > overkill, and I can't think of any operations that would require a full > up db engine. I think you envisage communicating with a few other revolutionaries, drug trafficers, etc, whereas I envisage a future where every man is his own bank and his own credit rating agency. More immediately, any extension to the web of trust to enable it to function for anything more interesting and important than logical-to-physical identity (and who gives a tinkers damn about logical-to-physical identity) will require a real database, or will be painful without a real database. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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: The future will be easy to use
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:20 AM 11/30/95 -0500, amp wrote: >unfortunately, it appears to me that if you _really_ want encryption >to be universal, it's gotta be done on windoze, it's gotta be >point-n-click and seamless to the mail application. Which, at present, means it's gotta be done on Pegasus. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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