December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: RANT: cypherpunks do NSA's job for them!!
by blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Vladimir Z. Nuri your friends, family, associates, etc. constantly *reminding* you of that law is the major, critical, unseen mechanism in propagation of laws. ............................................................................ Actually, Vlad is has a remote point. When signs on the road advise everyone to buckle up - because "it's the law", it has the intent of providing the be-all and end-all reason for why we should do the things we do. When certain activities are described as being "illegal" it lends to the laws surrounding them an air of legitimacy, even though most anyone on this list who refers to them in that way understands that they are phrasing their words in terms of how these actions are perceived/categorized by the lawmakers, not by the cpunks. Yet you must understand, Vlad: you aren't going to figure out how to deal with a looming threat like ITAR simply by being nonchalant & devil-may-care. The fact that some people (lawyers) know what corporations & individuals are facing if they try to import or export "illegal" substances like abstract code, and the fact that some people (programmers) discuss the issues openly, does not mean that they are headed in the direction of submission to the given obstacles. It just means that they're thinking through the problem, to clarify just what the situation is, to give conscious consideration to what anyone might have to deal with as a consequence of their decisions (to do what they will regardless of the NSA's perceptions). I think this is a valuable & legitimate pass-time. .. Blanc

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Webcard
by Vincent Cate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Block Intros Visa Card For Internet Users 01/25/96 KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, U.S.A., 1996 JAN 25 (NB) -- Block Financial, an H & R Block (NYSE:HRB), company, has announced a Visa card created just for Internet and World Wide Web users. The card is called Webcard. One of its features is the ability to check your account balance around the clock in real-time via the Internet. "Cardholders can monitor their current account activity or review data as far back as 12 months and even check to see if their payment was received," said G. Cotter Cunningham, vice president of Block Financial Corp. The company said it has addressed security concerns about revealing credit card numbers by designing the online account review feature so actual account numbers never appear online. To make the data more useful, Block has set up the Web site so the account information can be imported directly in many of the popular word processing, spreadsheet, database, and personal finance programs, including Quicken. Webcard is issued by Columbus Bank and Trust Company, an affiliate of Synovus Financial Corp. The card carries no annual fee. The company said it will soon launch a direct mail, advertising, and telemarketing campaign to publicize the card. Cunningham told Newsbytes the easiest way to apply for a card is to complete an online application online. Block Financial's home page on the Web is at http://www.conductor.com . Cunningham said two levels of card are available. The Gold card is the one being promoted. It carries a 12.9 percent interest rate for the first six months. After that the rate reverts to whatever the prime rate is, plus 6.9 percent. Currently the prime rate is 8.5 percent. Applicants who don't qualify for the Gold card can still receive a Classic card, said Cunningham. Initially that card carries a 12.9 percent interest rate for the first six months. After that, you pay two points more than Gold card holders. Block said the Webcard is the first in a series of co-branded financial products slated for introduction this year. Other services to be offered include online bill payment, which is set for launch in the next 60 days, and online checking services. Cunningham said the pricing structure for the bill payment service hasn't been set yet, but will be competitive. Block Financial already offers the Compuserve Visa, a credit card exclusively for Compuserve subscribers. The company said it has already issued more than 100,000 of the Compuserve cards. (Jim Mallory/19960124/Press contact: Julie Eisen, Block Financial, 816-751-6010/WEBCARD960125/PHOTO)

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Re: Cypherpunk Elitism
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:15 PM 1/25/96 EDT, "E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH(a)mbcl.rutgers.edu> wrote: > You might also find Robert Reich's _The Work of Nations_ >interesting. As a short, elegant, powerful argument against statist thinking, I recommend most highly Kenichi Ohmae's THE END OF THE NATION STATE: THE RISE OF REGIONAL ECONOMIES. Mr Ohmae focuses on areas that have geographical and social meaningfulness, on the scale of Hong Kong/Canton, Catalonia, the Pacific Northwest, and so forth. He quickly makes hash of the idea that the nation-state is a meaningful unit for modern economic analysis. ObCrypto: He looks for region-state governments that, among other things, respect citizens' privacy. Bruce Baugh bruceab(a)teleport.com http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab

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John Doe
by jdoe-0007＠alpha.c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The John Doe NYM/Remailer interface for Windows is a most excellent program that will allow even the most cypher-illiterate to make use of the technology that has been the exclusive domain of those in the "techno-know". It was a piece of cake to set up, obtain a NYM and select inbound and outbound remailers with options to chain as many as your paranoia deemed appropriate. $25.00 seemed a little steep but they will get my $$$. Nice Job. John Doe 0007

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Re: "This post is G-Rated"
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 18:11 1/25/96, Timothy C. May wrote: >Suppose "alt.fan.barney" is rated G, by "someone." Since I can post stuff >with strong language, and worse, to alt.fan.barney, is it still rated G, or >was my stuff blocked? What you will see is something like this: all lists/newsgroups will have to be moderated with the name of the moderator clearly stated just as it is in print magazines today. If something that is potentially dangerous to children, that is any information that might encourage anyone to think for themselves, gets posted, the moderator will be held liable. Since that will lead to the moderator erring on the side of caution, discussions on USENET/ mailing lists will become next to useless and therefor die out for anything non-technical (no, that won't include cryptography) or politically incorrect. Any ISPs carrying non-moderated groups or mailing lists is subject to the often mentioned mandatory long years in prison under the Child Protection Act of 1998. It is all rather simple. And the public will thank the kind and caring legislators that show such deep concerns for their children. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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NOISE Test Ignore
by jdoe-agamemnon＠alpha.c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Test Test Test

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This is not "DivineBeingPunks"
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:52 AM 1/26/96, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >I'm sure that most people seem to believe in this quasi-Divine Being, >of course. A lot of people seem to have constructed temples to some >Holy Being that they refer to as "The Government", made of marble and >steel and glass (often in the manner of temples constructed in ancient >times to Jove or Apollo). There are strange rites associated with the >worship and sustenance of this Divine Entity, such as the ritual ....etc. etc. etc. Since Perry has on several occasions said he does not want to hear about politics and other "off-topic" posts, and since he has written at least five of these posts just today (the "Gentleman do not" thread), I suggest he heed his own advice. I was skipping most of these posts that Perry, Rich Graves, and others are writing, but the hypocrisy of calling for others to not engage in "off-topic" posts while writing five of them himself...well, it speaks for itself. Debating basic libertarian theory, including the rights of Divine Beings, quasi-Divine Beings, Secular Beings, etc., is best done on another list, or in private e-mail. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. --Tim Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: "Concryption" Prior Art
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Death rays from Mars made pcw(a)access.digex.net (Peter Wayner) write: >I haven't read the supposed Concryption patent so I don't know >what the claim structure is. But if they truly claim the right >to do encryption and compression simultaneously, then I've got >some prior art that should knock out such a broad claim. The >paper is "A Redundancy Reducing Cipher" (Cryptologia, May 88). >It's not very secure, but it does do some manner of encryption >at the same time as compressing a file with a Huffman-like >system. The journal is found in many university libraries so it >should be easy to produce a solid counterclaim. There's a much earlier paper by Frank Rubin in a 1979 Cryptologia which covers encryption+compression with Huffman and arithmetic coding. However the Con-cryption patent covers first compressing, then encrypting. Unless they've got very good lawyers, you can probably ignore it. Peter.

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Re: "This post is G-Rated"
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I typically enjoy Lucky's jaundiced analyses, but I think he is overly paranoid in this one: At 5:28 AM 1/26/96, Lucky Green wrote: >What you will see is something like this: all lists/newsgroups will have to >be moderated with the name of the moderator clearly stated just as it is in >print magazines today. If something that is potentially dangerous to First, printed material does *not* have to have an author or publisher specified. The usual case cited is the Supreme Court decision on "anonymous handbills." I know of some zines that have no identifiable origin point. And anonymous pieces are published (even where the publisher/editor does not know the true author.) Second, Usenet is a global thing. Which national laws will apply? If the U.S. somehow is dumb enough to demand that each of the 12,000+ current Usenet groups have a moderator in a U.S. jurisdiction....well, there are too many issues here to properly deal with in a short note. Third, if the moderator is liable for "allowing" inappropriate material to get through, I predict a rather severe shortage of moderators. It's already a thankless job, so why any sane person take on the liability of doing it? Fourth, the Soviets couldn't control the underground "samizdat" press, and this was when the sanctions were stronger and the channels of communicaton more available. Today, in the West, there are at least two orders of magnitude more channels, and several orders of magnitude more sites, bandwidth, etc. Fifth, major constitutional challenges would be mounted. The First Amendment says that a posting to a public discussion does not first have to be cleared by a censor/moderator! (I'm not saying a group cannot be moderated, I'm saying that making it a crime to have an unmoderated, uncensored group will not pass constitutional muster.) --Tim Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: "This post is G-Rated"
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:06 AM 1/26/96 GMT, Jeff Williams wrote: >Maybe nobody would use the flag, but I don't see how it could hurt. If I had >kids, I would appreciate having the option of sorting out all the stuff that >is "NIFK" by the author. My concern about such a flag is that if it was implemented widely, it would be a small step from being optional to being mandatory. As things stand, were some legislature to adopt a "mandatory labelling" statute tomorrow, we'd end up with a complex and pointless mess of conflicting and incompatible attempts at compliance, rendering the labelling scheme effectively useless; and, likely, "industry" (e.g., the big service providers + AT&T & MCI & Sprint etc) would oppose the legislation on the grounds that compliance would take several years and complex design to bring about. So we'd get some sort of grace period to argue against it, prepare good test case(s), establish offshore mailing lists/servers, and so forth. But if we let the market do an efficient job of developing and deploying a labelling standard, over the course of the next few years, we're an afternoon's sorry debate and a few bought-and-paid-for committee meetings away from a market standard turning into a statutory duty. This makes me think that if development of a labelling standard is imminent, it's time to find ways to subvert it, misuse it, avoid it, and otherwise treat it like an enemy. It's not necessarily an enemy until it's coopted into service by a coercive force (be it big brother^h^h^h^h^h^h^hgovernment or big brother^h^h^h^h^h^h^hcorporation) but it's a potential threat. Are you sure that your relatively moderate "less NIFK material is a good thing" stance is a good reflection of others' positions? My impression is that many people are dissatisfied with anything less than a "zero tolerance" position re kids & porn or kids & drugs or kids & sexual choice or whatever. Your view of a partial-cooperation world isn't especially draconian, but do you really think that others will be as tolerant of other positions re labelling? -- "The anchored mind screwed into me by the psycho- | Greg Broiles lubricious thrust of heaven is the one that thinks | gbroiles(a)netbox.com every temptation, every desire, every inhibition." | -- Antonin Artaud |

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