December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: ecash lottery (Was: ecash casino)
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"tcmay(a)got.net" 29-NOV-1995 23:16:11.12 Personally, I have long had great _hopes_ for using crypto for non-sanctioned gambling, but I'm pretty skeptical that many people will do it. For one thing, anyone knowledgeable enough to be comfortable with the crytography knows that gambling when a house cut exists is a lose. (And gambling with no house cut is, at best, a wash.) ----------------------- How about gambling on something other than random numbers? Idea Futures are one instance, as is sports gambling for those interested in that sort of thing. -Allen

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Crypto-ban will pass Commerce cmte next week, from Reuters (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 22:55:02 -0400 > From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> > Subject: Crypto-ban will pass Commerce cmte next week, from Reuters > So much for the millions of dollars industry wasted on crypto-lobbying. The > lobbyists (and high-tech executives) should have realized long ago that > legislatures often are enemies of civil liberties. Civil liberties are > anti-majoritarian, and usually unpopular, by their very nature. Look at > what happened with the CDA -- it took the Supreme Court to undo Congress' > bad work. I think you are confusing 'blatant self-interest without regard to others' with civil liberties. There are no 'gay rights' or 'womens rights' or any other sort of 'minority' rights, there simply are rights that each and every human being holds. All this special interest crap is just that, blatant self-serving crap at the expense of others. Civil liberties are inherent rights human beings have by simply being human beings. They are not a statistical effect or dependant upon who happens to hold the current reigns of government. Their respect however, does depend on not only the minority but the majority realizing it is in their best long-term interest to support them. The bottem line is that it really doesn't matter what kind of government it is, as long as everyone goes along reasonably willingly. What truly amazes me is that, for example, the anti-gun lobbiest have not pushed modifying the 2nd Amendment. Shows a serious lack of character and follow-through. Oh yeah, that would get either the states or the people directly involved...imagine that. Seems to me that the best way to play poker with an equal player is to go for table stakes. Perhaps the answer is a Crypto Amendment movement, take the political ante all the way...why mess around with some pansy-waisted politicians in Washington...lets get 50 governors or several hundred million Americans involved. You'd at least get PSA's and 'equal time' out of the deal. It'd probably cost less to influence 50 governors than several hundred congress persons. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: key for Alice as promised (not)
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Alice here ... Sorry to follow up on my own post, but I made a boo boo. A real, big boo boo. On Wed, 29 Nov 1995 anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com wrote: > On Wed, 29 Nov 1995, Adam Shostack wrote: > > > > I don't follow. You're claiming that PGP is good enough to > > transfer OTPads, but not good enough to sign pseudononymous messages? > > Sure. Two different situations. > > If I take a message or a data tape and encrypt it with a one time pad. > > And then I send the message out to someone via Greyhound or DHL. > > And once they've confirmed that they have the encrypted message safely in > hand, then I'll call them and ask them to call me with their public key > delivered by voice via telephone. Actually, I made a big mistake here. It's not good enough for me to call them. Usually I have them first call me, and then I call them back. I learned to do this in real-estate when I had my property management company. Very often, someone would call the office, and say something along the lines of "This is Constable Acheson, from the Calgary City Police. Could you please tell me the forwarding address of your former tenant, Alice" (or Bob, or whatever). My standard response always was to ask for whoever identified himself as "Constable Acheson" to provide his division. Then I'd hang up, check the number for the main switchboard in the phone book and then call him. This way, I'd be sure it was actually him, and that he was calling from where he claimed. You'd probably be surprised (or maybe not) how many times, there was no such Constable. Luckily, I just didn't give out my information to just *anyone*. And the same stuff applies here ... with reading and verifying the key over the telephone. With the phone call there should be a hangup and then some third-party authority to confirm that the channel of communication is *really* a valid channel. Sorry, about leaving that part out. It was a boo boo, eh? But it's important, RL stuff. > Which I then use to encrypt the one-time-pad, using the PGP key only once. > > Then, I'm comfortable sending it (not the message, but the pad) over the > Internet encrypted with PGP. And I think at that point, I have Pretty > Good Privacy. > > > Adam > > > > -- > > "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." > > > > 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. > Yep, it was the real me this time ... and no, I didn't add another "signature" encrypted or not encrypted to the bottom of this post. Let me ask this though?? Would the "quality" of my post changed one way or another, if this was signed, or not?? IMHO, the message should make sense (or not) either way. ... Alice ...

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Applied Cryptography Questions
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A couple questions about Applied Cryptography (Second Edition) 1. What on earth is a Neural Net? 2. Consider the Chinese Lottery attack vs a processor bank. ADVANTAGES Distributed computing, no easy bombing target. DISADVANTAGES 39% inefficient Need specialized hardware [for speed] or transmission of alogrithms for any specific alogrithm Not on all the time If value(crack) * cracks/chip > cost of chip, then why not have the gov buy the chips? Its probably cheaper that way. 3. How does one cryptoanalyize a Feistel Network? I've read a bit on this and it doesn't seem that the papers are consistant, for example, one claims that 2^32 chosen plaintext is unreasonable for a 64-bit block cipher whereas DES's cryptanalysis requires something like 2^42. 4. Does there exist an n such that a keyspace of 2^n is trivial to crack [ie a matter of miniutes] on a PC but is difficult to crack for a big commercial company or even a major government? [this question relates to Merkle's puzzles, when a 40-bit key seems a bit weak.] 5. Is there an errata yet?

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Re: Israeli authorities censor book, confiscate copies (fwd)
by Mike Duvos 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Declan reports: > [Shame on the Israeli government. I suspect this would be an interesting > case for web-based mirroring. --Declan] If someone has the book in machine-readable form, it could easily be posted on the Eternity service, and be readable by everyone in Israel. If the author cares more about dissemination than he does about getting paid by the copy, this is clearly the way to go. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ enoch(a)zipcon.com $ via Finger $ {Free Cypherpunk Political Prisoner Jim Bell}

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Re: ecash lottery (Was: ecash casino)
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 20:38 11/29/95 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >Have to be _very_ careful here. A variety of scams can be developed which >show lots of "small" winners, but which fail to show any large winners. The >lottery operators can make a lot of extra bucks by simply not paying off >the large winnings, in various ways. With complete anonimity, the scam I would think of first is giving other nyms of myself all the big payoffs. Bill

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Netscape gives in to key escrow
by sameer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www.cnet.com/Central/News/govt.html Bad. Very Bad. And I was almost starting to like Netscape. -- 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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update.337 (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 18 Sep 97 10:35:28 EDT > From: physnews(a)aip.org (AIP listserver) > Subject: update.337 > > > PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE > The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News > Number 337 September 18, 1997 by Phillip F. Schewe and > Ben Stein > > REAL PHOTONS CREATE MATTER. Einstein's equation > E=mc^2 formulates the idea that matter can be converted into > light and vice versa. The vice-versa part, though, hasn't been so > easy to bring about in the lab. But now physicists at SLAC have > produced electron-positron pairs from the scattering of two "real" > photons (as opposed to the "virtual" photons that mediate the > electromagnetic scattering of charged particles). To begin, light > from a terawatt laser is sent into SLAC's highly focused beam of > 47-GeV electrons. Some of the laser photons are scattered > backwards, and in so doing convert into high-energy gamma ray > photons. Some of these, in turn, scatter from other laser > photons, affording the first ever creation of matter from light-on- > light scattering of real photons in a lab. (D.L. Burke et al., > Physical Review Letters, 1 September 1997.) > > DNA-GOLD NANOPARTICLES, employing the talent of DNA > strands for recognizing and attaching to complementary strands > and gold's electronic and optical properties, operate as a new > kind of biosensor. Scientists at Northwestern University glue > various "probe" DNA segments onto tiny gold particles (13 nm > wide). When a "target" single-stranded DNA introduced into the > solution happens to be complementary to DNA already stuck to > the particles, the probe and target strands link up, creating a sort > of polymer network whose color is different from that of the > original solution. Thus recognition of the target DNA is signaled > by a color change. The researchers can already use this approach > to detect single-strand DNA samples in 10-femtomolar amounts. > (Science, 22 August 1997.)

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Re: META: Lycos & Searchable archives
by loki＠obscura.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If you mail to an open list or post to news you are shouting through a megaphone on a street corner. If you don't want everyone to know what you said, use a remailer (this group above all others should do that). -Lance At 9:56 PM 11/29/95, Leslie Todd Masco wrote: > >Someone has expressed concern to me that the cypherpunks archives are >searchable via Lycos. Said person doesn't mind having the archives >searchable to the smaller audience of people who go to the we-site, >but is unhappy about net-wide searches turning up cypherpunks articles. > >Can we try to find a consensus on this? My initial inclination was to >shrug the concern off (properties of information, etc, as well as c'punks >being a more-or-less anarchy and the express desire for some sort of >searching mechanism for c'punks), but I thought I'd double check as I've >been mostly out of touch for the better part of a year. >- -- >Todd Masco | "life without caution/ the only worth living / love for a man/ ---------------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell loki(a)obscura.com PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server. Mixmaster, the next generation remailer, is now available! http://obscura.com/~loki/Welcome.html or FTP to obscura.com "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche ----------------------------------------------------------

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Spam the Sign II
by anon-remailer＠utopia.hacktic.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Looks like Spam the Sign I was a little premature.

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