December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

gondolin.org remailer announcement
by Gondolin Mixmaster Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Gondolin Technologies is proud to announce our resumption of remailer services to the online community. Some of you may remember the remailer services based at <mixmaster(a)gondolin.org> that was on-line for most of this year. We are now back and better than ever with highly improved hardware and net connections. We are hosting a Type I "Cypherpunks" remailer, as well as a Type II "Mixmaster" remailer at <mix(a)remail.gondolin.org>. The PGP public key for the type I remailer is below: -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCNAzC7/HwAAAEEAKFLOSwJ6FdRb/Z0Yj+RV3inx9aRtrJI+5kXpZTWtcQNo50K qKzRB9joL68jxeQTa4FTOFsWlbsn7dCcOpkOCJqoo4Uby+bIDRP8E5MYGgALVoNh xO6Hucj2Hh1v+koOTvtv4lDWaDdhxN7rPPb8KlTC2FPFIK9/2n7xTkxYcqfxAAUR tDJHb25kb2xpbiBUeXBlIEkgUmVtYWlsZXIgPG1peEByZW1haWwuZ29uZG9saW4u b3JnPokAlQMFEDC+kr2Oh92U+GrHWQEB3s8EAI6+3t59tYB+EWUQDWvSaPNqihab 8lRkctA0gPtOWD3f6nOBcPjIrAoeZ3mB5ASJwPkXGbe6rTGrBo6HuC2t45bscviV O46wKKX6aIJnsCM6vx/vm1aWdm/a5DsBv1BYnnNEedrwFlvzzAhBFtolK1a7i6+N PDnfGlrs9q6U+9LBiQCVAwUQMLv8rPvQGgQ7UJMZAQECYgP9E2riZwFPvNFpKuX9 9JbG4PJGzOm7TAQO1/hIb9BAk7KrLs7yQuTzfQs6hAXB88o1ofIPYp5uz/GvAleg wCGIA3ZnhYh5yiS4UArZbCfr8hDvXsUqQBxR5tfLHj5qOkOejFckIHCRC/8wb23g 3Xu7Zh00PpJAD1EZVfDdhseMXGE= =AJYL -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- The Type II remailer supports posting via mail2news gateways. We are using Mixmaster 2.0.3 from Lance Cottrell. The Type I remailer supports PGP encryption, latent time, hash marks, cutmarks, and so on. Our type I software is John Fleming's Freedom Remailer v1.6beta. Our remailers also utilize a reordering pool. Address any comments, complaints, or concerns to <remailer-admin(a)gondolin.org>. - Bryan Strawser, System/Network Administrator, Gondolin Technologies

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ZD Net Update v.1 #2
by wwwziff＠internet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

__________________________________ZD Net Update_______________________________ v. 1 #3 11-27-95 Welcome to ZD Net Update, the free E-mail newsletter created especially for registered users of Ziff-Davis Interactive's ZD Net/World Wide Web edition. ZD Net Update is a bi-weekly bulletin that alerts you to new and exciting developments on ZD Net. In this issue: > COMPUTER LIFE ONLINE PRESENTS THE HOT SITE OF THE DAY > INTRODUCING Q&A WITH PC MAGAZINE'S MICHAEL MILLER > ZD INTERNET LIFE INVITES YOU TO BECOME A WEB REVIEWER > MACUSER ANNOUNCES 11TH ANNUAL EDITORS' CHOICE FINALISTS * * * * * * * * * * COMPUTER LIFE ONLINE PRESENTS THE HOT SITE OF THE DAY The editors at Computer Life Online surf the Net like a bad habit. When they find sites that are hot, fresh, interesting--or just relevant to a healthy computer life--they share the news with everyone here on the Web. Then, before the Site of the Day gets warm, they put it on the "Previously Featured Hot Sites" page and serve up another one. Check these out, and you may be on your way to developing a few bad Net habits of your own: http://www.zdnet.com/~complife/filters/site.html * * * * * * * * * * INTRODUCING Q&A WITH PC MAGAZINE'S MICHAEL MILLER PC Magazine Online (http://www.zdnet.com/~pcmag/) is now giving their readers the opportunity to ask PC Magazine's editor-in-chief, Michael Miller, frank questions regarding the ever-changing state of the computer industry. Every week, this new column will feature questions from readers about a given topic. You can send questions as well as suggestions for topics you'd like to see Miller address in future columns. As Miller puts it: "My print column is really an essay on a particular topic. I try to focus on a broad variety of things, although most my print columns have been Internet-related lately. That's not too much of a surprise, as I've been spending a lot of time working with new tools and content for the Internet. This column will be more conversational. It will give me an opportunity to answer reader questions and address their concerns. In addition, this Q&A will be more timely than my magazine column because it doesn't have to be printed, bound, and mailed." Among Miller's first topics: PC Magazine's 1995 Technical Excellence Awards and reflections on the recent Comdex show. * * * * * * * * * * ZD INTERNET LIFE INVITES YOU TO BECOME A WEB REVIEWER ZD Internet Life (http:/www.zdnet.com/zdil/), the first interactive magazine designed from the ground up around a Web site, wants you to become part of their Web review team. Now you can tell the world what you really think of a Web site. Check out the new "Rate-o-Matic" review tool http://www.zdnet.com/zdil/cgi-bin/review.cgi and see for yourself. Every review enters you in a monthly drawing, and the most astute comments may be included in ZDIL's database. Need some help finding the sites you'd like to review? ZDIL's great new Search capability will give you a lift: http://www.zdnet.com/zdil/cgi-bin/index.pl * * * * * * * * * * MACUSER ANNOUNCES 11TH ANNUAL EDITORS' CHOICE FINALISTS What were the hottest Mac products this year? Find out by perusing MacUser, which has announced the finalists for this year's Editors' Choice Awards: http://www.zdnet.com/~macuser/eddy95/ But that's just the beginning of the story. You are also invited to join the staff on Monday, December 4, when MacUser's Eddy Web Site celebrates its grand opening.This state-of-the-art Web site will feature downloadable product demos, downloadable QuickTime video, RealAudio commentary from editors, links to product reviews published in MacUser, and the 1995 Eddy Awards Sweepstakes. Winners will be announced on Sunday, December 17 in a live ceremony on America Online (Keyword: Eddy95). Information about all the winners will appear on the Eddy Web Site the following day. * * * * * * * * * * ZD Net Update is the official newsletter of ZD Net/World Wide Web Edition. It is compiled by Tom Schmidt (tom_schmidt(a)zd.com) Feel free to respond with any news, notes, comments, or suggestions. To unsubscribe to ZD Net Update, point your browser to: http://www.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/ziffmail.pl/update and select "Unsubscribe to ZD Net Update."

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Re: Info on Netscape's key escrow position
by James M. Cobb 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Blanc, On 12 02 95 you pointed to: ...an underlying problem, which is of not having a sense of freedom to stand up to the Dark Side. You have put your finger on perhaps THE problem: Why did we cast aside our sense of freedom? How may we re-ignite the spirit of freedom? I believe excerpts from a newsstory in today's Electronic Telegraph provide a hint regarding the first question: JOHN Major and Lord Taylor, the Lord Chief Justice, are to have informal talks at No 10 Downing Street in an attempt to avert a deepening rift between Government and judiciary. The meeting has been arranged following concern over the number of adverse court judgments against ministerial de- cisions and mounting opposition by judges to plans by Mi- chael Howard, the Home Secretary, to impose tougher man- datory sentences on habitual criminals. It was being emphasised in Whitehall last night that the in- formal meeting was intended to explore ways of improving relations. It was in no sense an attempt to put pressure on the judges. It emerged last night that Mr Major and Lord Taylor are like- ly to discuss ways of increasing the pay of the judiciary. Senior judges are said to be aggrieved that their salaries have fallen behind. In no sense is one part of the the State putting pressure on another part of the State... Through every sense, the populace is trained to appreciate the justice of not having a sense of freedom to stand up Except at the pay window. Cordially, Jim NOTE The URL of The Electronic Telegraph's website is: http://www.telegraph.co.uk The newsstory's headlined: "Pay and peace talks for judges." Its online filename is: 1judge05.html. It's dated 12 05 95. The story was written by: GEORGE JONES and TERENCE SHAW.

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Secure versus ?
by solman＠MIT.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to everybody who replied to my previous message. As most of you suspected, it turned out to be possible to break the permutations I was using. The reason why I have pursued this despite its non-intuitiveness is that the following well known protocol also seems to have the same property I claimed. Please tell me how a computationally unbounded adversary could defeat the following: (without active attack against which this immediatelly fails (i.e. it has to be combined with an authentication algorithm)). Please help me, this problem is totally driving me crazy! A VARIATION OF SHAMIR'S THREE PASS PROTOCOL SAFE FROM PASSIVE ATTACK BY A COMPUTATIONALLY UNBOUNDED ADVERSARY: Alice wants to send Bob a message. She is going to send her message a fraction of a bit of a time via the following protocol. Before hand: 1. Enumerate all the primes from 256 to 511. Call them N. 2. For each prime, enumerate all the numbers less than it that are also relatively prime to N-1. Call these E. 3. Number each pair of E and N. The algorithm can be divided into an inner loop and an outer loop. The outer loop calls the inner loop. Inner Loop: Alice wants to use the inner loop to send bit b. 1. Alice randomly chooses seven bits of salt, and prepends b to them creating an 8 bit M 2. Alice randomly chooses an (Na,Ea) pair from the list of possibilities. 3. Alice calculates D such that E*D mod (N-1) equals 1 4. Bob randomly chooses an (Nb,Eb) pair from the list of possibilities. 5. Bob calculates D 6. Alice sends Bob the nine bit number (M^Ea) mod Na = C1 7. Bob sends Alice (C1^Eb) mod Nb = C2 8. Alice sends Bob (C2^Da) mod Na = C3 9. Bob calculates (C3^Db) mod Nb = M, the bit being the MSB. The unbounded passive adversary calculates a probability (p) between 0.5 and one with which he/she can guess the bit. This is based on the facts that 1. only a fraction of all pairs of Na and Ea will map C2 to C3, 2. only a fraction of all pairs of Nb and Eb will map C1 to C2, 3. only a fraction of all Na are high enough to produce C1. With thousands of transform pairs, there are more bits of entropy in the transform and salt selection, than there is information in the three messages. Alice, Bob and Eve can thus know what p is. Outer Loop: 1. Alice sends Bob an initialization vector using the inner loop. 2. Alice uses the inner loop to send Bob a series of bits. Each bit is either a random bit or the next bit of the message depending what the value of p for the previous inner loop was. A simple proper (but VERY INEFFICIENT) outer loop algorithm would be the following: Alice: 1. If the p for the previous inner loop was 0.5, send the XOR of the message and the previously sent bit. 2. If the p for the previous message was not 0.5, send a random bit. Bob: 1. If the p for the previous message was 0.5, take the bit, XOR with the previous bit, and append it to the message. 2. Otherwise just save the bit for one more itteration. PLEASE help me. I CAN'T find how this fails to be information-theoretically secure, but I am convinced that it should not be possible to do this, and I have been absolutely unproductive at anything since I first started working on this. Cheers, Jason W. Solinsky

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Do companies ever do the "right thing"?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:18 PM 12/4/95, Ed Carp wrote: >> That's always a tough position to be in. If Netscape or Microsoft >> knew what was the "right" thing to do, I don't doubt that they'd be >> doing it. > >That's one of the most politically and socially naive statements I've >ever heard. Corporations *never* do the "right thing" unless it will >increase their profits. Remember, corporations are in business to >make money by providing a product or service that people will pay >money for. Whatever gets in the way of that will fall by the >wayside. That's an economic fact of life. I can think of many cases where companies chose courses of actions that seemed to be motivated by choices about what is right and what is wrong. Viewing the "profit landscape," corporations have to balance movement to the "locally most profitable" regions (fertile valleys) or to movement further out into even more profitable regions. It is just not that case that all corporations make decisions about what is the "most profitable," at any cost. They have Boards of Directors with influence, and they have various sorts of "mission statements." This applies to small businesses as well, where the owners often make decisions about which markets to compete in based on their own personal moral choices. Vegetarian restaurants, for example, choose not to offer meat, even when market studies indicate their patronship would probably increase. I also know of electronics companies that, for various reasons, refuse to bid on government contracts. (Partly they fear sinking into a bureaucratic mess, partly they don't want to do military work.) Finally, many companies understand the value of "good will" (as we discuss so often in talking about reputations) and think carefully about how their actions will be perceived _long into the future_. It is the belief, I think, of most of us that Netscape will have its reputation diminished if it acquiesces without a strong fight to government plans for GAK. In this sense, if we are right, Netscape's longterm profits may be affected by their choice. --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."

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Re: Meeting notes from ANSI X.9 Meeting on Electronic Payment
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"pfarrell(a)netcom.com" 5-DEC-1995 02:49:01.83 Accountants know how to meet acceptable auditing standards when transactions are in cash. I learned this from the CPA I live with. ----------------- How does this work? While I can see tracking expenditures (i.e., the advertized price of an item and the amount of that item purchased by a store), it would appear decidedly more difficult in the case of service companies (and even more so for self-employed individuals). I am not referring to a company being able to keep track of its own books; I am referring to the IRS accepting those books as the real ones, when a large part of the company's income is in cash and therefore hard to trace. -Allen

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[NOISE] [POINTER]
by Jon Lasser 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(All my messages will now be tagged as noise, because someone, somewhere, might disagree :) ) http://www.salon1999.com/current/features/media.html About censorship and fear in the media. No crypto mentions, but Exon, V-Chip, Internet, etc... for the average reader, really. But interesting nonetheless... Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jon Lasser <jlasser(a)rwd.goucher.edu> (410)494-3072 Visit my home page at http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/ You have a friend at the NSA: Big Brother is watching. Finger for PGP key.

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Re: Geodesic Payment Systems? (was Re: Meeting notes from ANSI X.9Meeting on Electronic Payment)
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"nsb+limbo(a)nsb.fv.com" "Nathaniel Borenstein" 5-DEC-1995 09:37:47.34 A true geodesic structure is self-supporting and self-structuring. A cryptographic infrastructure can and should be similar, I agree completely. However, a *monetary* infrastructure needs convertability, and the points of conversion are always the best targets of attack for criminals. (I've been casting about for an analogy to physical geodesics, and it's hard to find one. The best I can come up with is to imagine that in order to convert a carbon buckyball to a more conventional set of carbon molecules, you had to do it through a service bureau that was capable of error, fraud, or subversion by outside criminals. This would ONLY matter if you ever wanted to do such conversions, but it would matter a lot then, especially if you had to suffer a serious financial loss if you got the wrong carbon molecules at the end of the process.) IF you wanted to settle for a totally non-convertible economy (like rubles in the old Soviet Union, or like the LETS system on the net today, as I understand it) then you could build it geodesically. But if you want to be able to convert back and forth between Internet payment systems and non-Internet payment systems, it can never be truly geodesic. It will always be attackable at the points of conversion. (You may "trade digital certificates", but how do you know the ones you're receiving were obtained for legitimate real-world value?) Because of this, the underwriting financial institutions, who have a very reasonable desire to limit their own risk, will inevitably seek the protection-by-traceability offered by something less than perfect anonymity. We may not like it, but it's a very natural position to be taken by those who are actually bearing the financial risks at the point ---------------------------- All of this is assuming that the digital currency being produced has a one-to-one ratio with some "real" currency. If, for instance, the digital certificates were indeed bought with a one-to-one ratio from the producer, but were traded to others for "real" cash at some market-determined discount, the market would incorporate the risk. The traders who were willing to take the risk that the certificates were not actually worth one dollar/whatever would be able to make a profit by the difference between one digital dollar and one "real" dollar. The problem is simplified even more with privately backed currencies. -Allen

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No More Netscape Comments from Me
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Not that you all hang on my every word, but I owe it to you folks at least a brief mention of why I feel I can no longer comment on Netscape. Not for legal reasons, but for conflict-of-interest reasons. I'm in the midst of making some investments involving Netscape (buying/selling short, Internet Index options, etc.) and my comments from herein out could be thought of by some as disingenous. So, have fun riding the Great Internet Bubble of 1995! --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."

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Apache-SSL for export
by Jyri Kaljundi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Are the SSL patches for Apache available somewhere else than in USA or UK? You know I am a big security risk for those countries as I live in Estonia, so it is not allowed for me to get apache-ssl legally. Good old COCOM restrictions, the poor guys in Great Britain have not heard the world has changed. So can anyone suggest how to get the software? Ftp, fsp, http, e-mail, anything will do. Juri Kaljundi jk(a)digit.ee Digiturg http://www.digit.ee/

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