December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Is Dr Fred Cohen a Loon???
by Anonymous User 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Trolling for Flames(just another anonymous poster destroying the 'net) :) The Subject says it all... I believe Fred suffers from a severely inflated ego and suffers from the "false expert" syndrome detailed by various self-help orgs... what say you fred?? Another anon poster destroying the integrity of the net

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CAV_ein
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

12-29-95. NYPaper: John Markoff page-ones Compuserve's cave-in to Reich sex law and the alt free-screeching for sex home censorship cave-in to rutting parents ashamed. CAV_ein

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Re: Australian "calculatorcard"
by amp 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-- [ From: amp * EMC.Ver #2.3 ] -- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- From: Cees de Groot \ Internet: (cg(a)bofh.toad.com) To: cypherpunks \ Internet: (cypherpunks(a)toad.com) Subject: Australian "calculatorcard" Hi everybody, CG> Yesterday, on UK Discovery, there was an item in the programme CG> Beyond 2000 about an Australian card which implements a CG> challenge-response protocol and can be used for banking, etcetera. CG> Basically, you give your card number (over the phone), get a CG> challenge number, enter your pin and the challenge, and then give the CG> response. All in CC format... sounds like the card i use for remote dialup to certain non-public systems i use at work. it has a six digit number on the front that changes every 60 seconds. the card is registered to me. when i enter my username/password i'm prompted for the number. it's Pretty Good (tm) security, but like anything not biometric, it is vulnerable to black-bag attacks. physical possession being all that is required. if you know the algorithm and the serial number of the card and the time, even that isn't necessary. CG> Can anybody provide me with pointers to more in-depth information CG> about this device and the algorithm(s) behind it ? i don't know if there are any net sources for them, but i'd be suprised if not. my card references "security dynamics" of cambridge massachusetts. amp <0003701548(a)mcimail.com> (since 10/31/88) <alan.pugh(a)internetmci.com> PGP Key = 57957C9D PGP FP = FA 02 84 7D 82 57 78 E4 E2 1C 7B 88 62 A6 F9 F7 December 30, 1995 23:29 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMOYRtIdTfgZXlXydAQGengf9EH07ubUAH43THj3l+6kWUjnXDYfe2DFj CvpEKlFoDkxwllDcIX0KfWK+ENr3YzyQp/yuWU+ZAw/ogci3y5r4IF+oJ4ItrVD6 pZ4AzF5NvXb2KWcnSaQoVsfo3yIt0bfRknuQjGyirntNhLpTkObVygbUmSSNeT8S hrpGB85IkEoy/km3pntCMfrfA0BrED3GCnNLxVYupY7jM7AxbD+mjHvS8to63bPv 68xjB93b+78ld/O0FPsOP7GQMbUZyTJMiLoNwiMhbgEi8Y4dFTlZ6mF6NMHsDxDy p/ocbp2dOj0Vy/BFbfbBqCgdjY3FoExRRHpgav8b0Xd4qNydkFDelg== =MSp2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: ideath remailer permanently down / PGP key changes for Greg Broiles
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Doh, the wordwrap on that message was ugly. Sorry. Gotta spend some more time making friends with Private Idaho. Short version: remailer(a)ideath.goldenbear.com is gone forever, sorry. All mail to anything @goldenbear.com is bouncing. Mail for me should be sent to "gbroiles(a)netbox.com", effective immediately. I have distributed a new PGP key to the keyservers and marked my old key obsolete. I will be signing list messages again once I get that wordwrap thing fixed. -- "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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Can We Cut the Crap?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Really, the S/N ratio is approaching all-time lows, even for the Silly Season of Xmas. A week or so ago there was a massive flame war involving insults and counter-insults--I returned from my Xmas vacation to find the list melting down. Now, a week later, a new flamewar has erupted. There is no point in the back-and-forth of insults, "Dr. Fred is a loon," "Alice is Detweiler," and other such nonsense. If you don't want to read the comments of Fred Cohen, Dimitri Vulis, Alice whatever, Vlad/Lance/Larry/Pablo, then just don't read them! Filter them out, delete them immediately, read them briefly, whatever. At 5:04 PM 12/31/95, deadbeat wrote: >Regarding Fred Cohen, PhD: > [typical personal insults elided] >Let's also consider the granting institution, a second-rank school. Well, not quite. I seem to recall that Cohen's advisor at USC was Len Adleman, known perhaps to some of you as the "A" in RSA and more recently as the guy doing the "DNA computing" work. He was also working on viruses, perhaps in conjunction with Cohen, as of 1987-88, and gave an interesting paper at the 1988 Crypto Conference on "An Abstract Theory of Computer Viruses." Not surprisingly, Cohen's papers were the main citations. I recall Adleman describing in the oral talk just how it is that determining if a given program contains a virus is essentially equivalent to solving the halting problem, i.e., it may be undecidable whether a program has a virus, except presumably in some special cases (e.g., for very small programs). >Cohen's thesis broke new ground, but how many people have read it, or any of >his writings, or know anything about his ideas beyond a single word? How far >did he carry this work? Where are the conference and journal papers? Cohen's >reputation faded into obscurity long ago. Now he is building a new reputation >as a pig-headed loudmouth, threatening his "defamers." Shades of Sternlight. I have plenty to disagree with some of what Fred Cohen says, as I do with many people, but this is just plain ignorant. "How many people have read it, or any of his writings..." is a ridiculous argument, even for an ad hominem. Those who want to read it, can read it. The articles are readily available. I've even seen some of his books on the bookshelves of my local bookstores (haven't read them, though I flipped through "It's Alive!" and didn't see much of interest....but how many of us have written _any_ books?). I'm not convinced there's much more about the _theory_ of viruses to "push forward," for various reasons. The theory was laid out, some Bulgarians and others are busily writing viruses, but there's not likely to be some whole reservoir of new theory to be worked on. (This is true of a lot of fields, where the work done decades ago basically was complete....look at how we all cite Garey and Johnson and how little has changed in the field of NP-completeness.) Blasting Cohen because you don't think he carried his work far enough is clearly blasting wildly. Have you asked whether others on this list have carried the work they did in their early careers far enough? (Did I carry my work in the 1970s on alpha particle effects on chips far enough, or am I just a Cohen-like slacker because I moved on to other things?) Anyway, if you don't like Sternlight, or Cohen, or May, or Detweiler, or Metzger, or Vulis, *filter* them out! So why don't I just do this? Well, I do have a filter file in my Eudora Pro mailer, and I use it. But I still see the crossfire on the list, the pointless flames and personal attacks. This angers and saddens me. Hence this message. While I don't subscribe to the extreme view espoused by some, that the topics of the list should be exclusively crypto, math, programming, and Internet standards, I do think people should try to find some relevance to the larger themes of the list. The recent increase in "one-sentance repartee" is indicative of late-stage list meltdown. (Some of the posts here quote a couple of paragraphs, add one or two lines of insults, then have another screenful of PGP sigs, auto-signing sigs, anonymous IDs, and then a conventional sig. Jeesh!) I'm hoping that this is just a Xmas vacation silly season. --Tim May 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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Chinese Cypherpunk quote [NOISE]
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I see that some rants here are rubbing off on the folks who write chinese fortune cookies, In tonites dinner, The cookie said: The will of the people is the best law. I wonder if we can get a couple thousand cookies sent to Congress with that message? A.E.N. or to T.C.M..... Xmas_Troll

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Re: Compuserve is Not "Censoring": Look to Governments for the Cause
by tallpaul＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Dec 28, 1995 23:30:19, 'tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May)' wrote: > >I see a positive longterm trend toward people connecting through smaller, >more local services. > Quite correct. Not only does the internet radically change (at least perceptions) of space and time, it also is producing serious disequilibriums of scale in economics. Economy of scale states that until a farily high limit is reached, bigger enterprises tend to produce goods that are less expensive than those produced by smaller enterprises. Specialized handicraft production aside, the goods produced in larger enterprises also tend to be of higher quality. The disequilibrium here began with the development of the microprocessor as we see from the shift to the old centralized IBM iron to the microcomputers we're using today. Ditto certain aspects of network switching. Ditto DES moved from centralized hardware to decentralized software. We're seeing a growing dystopian world where national entities and non-governmental organizations all seek to enforce their particular cultural/political/economic/etc. biases on the global internet. I believe this process will continue for some period of time. At the same time we may (and I think likely will) see aspects of the net broken down into widely geographically separated locations that simultaneously have no more effect on end users than the floor at the central library on which the book we want resides. E.G. we'll use Denmark to get "alt.sex.granny.gum-jobs," ftp to Singapore for "/warez/microsoft/win99/hack/" and to the Turcos Islands for "data.finance.internal.morgan." We'll have all three open and on our monitor at the same time, passed through an second-level ISP in some small country that decides there's money in switching and will no more regulate data throughput than they would try to hold hotel keepers responsible for the content of the phone calls made by their tenants. --tallpaul

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Re: Compuserve is Not "Censoring"
by Bill.Humphries＠msn.fullfeed.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is a resend of a reply to Tim May's message on the CI$/Bundsweiser Republic/alt.nekkid.hitler.youth controversy. The Cypherpunks mailer didn't enjoy my attempts at humor in the headers... ------------ Tim May wrote: >At 4:52 PM 12/28/95, Cees de Groot wrote, speaking of Compuserve's recent >dropping of many newsgroups in response to demands by German prosecutors: > >>I won't start to comment on the style of this message. The term "Suitspeak" >>comes to mind. > >Perhaps it is "Suitspeak," but it is not "censorship." > >Or, more precisely, it is fear that government laws will be used to >sanction the service. Thus, it is the government of Germany in this case >which is "censoring." ("Censor" and "censorship" are notoriously overloaded >terms, of course.) It's a political problem. This demonstates the basic problem with tollerating monopolies in this industry. When governments interfere, everyone subscribing loses, which means most of the people in the audience for the service loses. Unfortunately, there are no technological fixes (in the short term) for monopolies. The shumpeterian cycle is too long for the time horizons engendered by the German government's actions or the Exon/Gorton/Hyde language. You have to fight monopolies on the political arena as well as the technical (remember how the WWW was going to liberate all of us on it's own? Until the elites recognized people wouldn't be watching Microsoft ads *conspiratorial wink*.) If I were a compuserve user, complain to your nearest German consulate and call your congresscritter. Those GOP types will have a field day condeming "euro-data-imperialism" during special order speeches on C-SPAN. Support your local ISP. Bill Humphries PS: If only the Germans worried about Nazis during the Nurmemberg trials the way they worry now, maybe they wouldn't be facing their current plauge of nativist/skinhead problems.

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(fwd) DigiCash licencing?
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Organization: Digiturg Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 17:32:10 +0200 (EET) From: Jyri Kaljundi <jk(a)digit.ee> To: ecash(a)digicash.com Subject: DigiCash licencing Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-ecash(a)digicash.com Precedence: bulk Reply-To: ecash(a)digicash.com Does anyone know about the terms and costs of licencing ecash software? I have tried contacting DigiCash directly with these questions, but have got no answers :( And who and where are already implemeting ecash? Mark Twain Bank and Swedish post are two I know of, what about the others? Our company is very interested in using ecash here in Estonia, but somehow DigiCash does not seem to allow that. With all the best, Juri Kaljundi, managing director, DigiMarket jk(a)digit.ee --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Re: Ecash graphic images?
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 20:58 12/28/95, anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com wrote: >Could anyone provide some pointers to a gif or jpeg file containing >good-looking ecash coins? I would like something larger and more >detailed than the "we accept ecash" you see everywhere. Thanks very >much. Try http://www.delorie.com/gif/signs/ -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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