December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: IPG message
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Seymour, TX Snake Oilers just keep getting better all the time, now that they've left Houston, or was it Boulder! Goat-getting hype about "What is specially claimed as copyrighted and or patentable" (blatantly incorrectly using those terms, and forgetting to include trademarks), several amusing new product names, bombastic claims about speed and strength, anecdotes about things he heard Dr. Von Neumann Himself say, and a sum-of-Linear-Congruential generators algorithm which is not only breakable but far slower than RC4 or RC5 or OTPs about which he's said less recently than before. And hardware random number generators achieving multiple megabytes per second of random numbers on a simple serial port! >Note: The zipped files are considerably larger than the original > because they are random unzippable data files. UnAuTHorIZed ReproDUCTion and DIS-SEMINATION Are STRICTLY ProHIBiTeD! Yee-Hah! P.S. Ralph - you now owe us the keys to your company (Percy still gets his 10%), plus all your remarkably copious Slack! #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissible." - US government statement on China... "SigFiles of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist!"

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Re: Electronic Frontiers Houston Cyber-Political Questionaire.
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE >Electronic Frontiers Houston Cyber-Political Questionnaire. I'm not currently a candidate, though I've had the pleasure of running for Congress as a Libertarian a couple of times, and I'd like to comment on some of the issues. >Please answer the questions on the reverse side. Attach additional pages if required. Hmmm - that'll be a bit tough on line. Got any spare anti-electrons? I could run it through rot-13 :-) >1. Do you think that electronic publishing should enjoy the constitutional >protections that accrue to print media? >2. Do you think that electronic publishing should enjoy the constitutional >protections that accrue to broadcast media? >3. Do you think that electronic publishing should enjoy the constitutional >protections that accrue to libraries? The Bill of Rights was a good start, but courts have seriously mishandled it over the past 200 years, whether to support the public mood on an upcoming war (as in the Schenk (sp?) case, which gave us the appallingly misused "fire in a public theater" dictum), or to permit censorship of speech that offends the popular morals, or to support oligopolies through restricting access to radio and TV broadcasting to government-approved companies. I tend to agree with Hugo Black's position that the people who wrote "Congress shall make no law...." meant what they said. In particular, even supposing, as Holmes did, that there are types of speech so offensive and valueless as to not be protected by the First Amendment, the Constitution also doesn't specifically empower them to ban it either. >4. Do you favor new laws to regulate the content of electronic media? Yes - there's a lot of old law and FCC regulation that needs to be repealed, and that takes new laws. >5. Do you think that the First Amendment rights of free speech protect >private use of encryption? First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth >6. Do you favor laws to regulate the private use of encryption? Nope. >7. Do you agree with restrictions on the export of technology that >incorporates cryptography? No - nor of other technology, either. >9. Do you support the right of a private individual too publish printed >materials anonymously? Not only do _I_ favor it, the Supreme Court also supports it. Electronic materials as well. >10. Should the government play a role in providing access to computer >networks? Yes and No. Governments have a role to play in providing access to existing government-run systems that have public information. >11. Do you think that the government should guarantee universal >access to computer networks? No. Government-provided services are government-controlled services. And governments can't guarantee services - they can only force people to buy them (with their own recycled money) from pro-government providers, while interfering with competing technologies and services that the market would otherwise provide. From a Liberal perspective, Internet access is already available on the open market for less than the cost of cable TV, in most of the country - trading government control of the most important media of the next two decades for the cost of a half-pack of cigarettes a day per citizen would be a really bad choice. >12. Do you think that access to government computerized information >is a right? >13. Should all governmental records that are available to the public be >made available via computer resources? >14. Should access to computerized governmental records be free? Not strictly - the public does own most of the government's information, but providing subsidized access to it isn't an appropriate use of tax money. Providing at-cost access certainly is, for information that the government should be giving out, and restricting distribution of that information or giving monopoly access to rent-seeking private companies certainly is wrong. But there's a lot of information the government has today that it shouldn't - people's private data that they've been forced to provide to bureaucrats, or information that wasn't quite as forced such as census data. Most of that data should be destroyed. And there are difficult questions, such as how to reveal details on CIA/NSA/FBI abuses without violating the privacy of people they spied on or interefered with. >15. Should the government regulate electronic financial transactions >and require traceability? Of course not. (I do distinguish between banning fraud and embezzlement, which is arguably a reasonable government function, and regulating the communications often used in those activities.) >16. Do you approve or disapprove of the wiretap provisions in the >1994 Digital Telephony bill? Disapprove. >17. Do you favor expanding law enforcement access to telephonic >communications? Sure - cops need phones, too. And access to the communications of other government officials to investigate crime and corruption in government is mostly safe. But demanding access to citizens' private communications is not only _far_ outside the bounds of government's legitimate access and a bare-faced grab for political power by the folks who brought us COINTELPRO and J Edgar Hoover's files, but is a call to violate individuals' rights to use whatever tools they want to protect their privacy to support their power-grab. And they've been so _disingenuous_ about it... >In addition, candidates for national office will be asked the >following additional question: >18. Do you favor legislation which would require a national ID card? No - I favor legislation to eliminate the half-way measure we have, the single "Social Security" tax-id Number, and, until we eliminate privacy-invasive taxes altogether, give taxpayers a large group of numbers so they don't have to give everybody a universal identifier just to pay their taxes. >Candidates for state office will be asked the following question: >18. Should laws requiring fingerprints to acquire/renew drivers licences >be repealed? Yes, as should driver's licenses and other mandatory ID. >Electronic Frontiers Houston is a non-profit group that supports civil >liberties and the development of culture in cyberspace. While I don't live in Houston, I've been a member and usually a supporter of EFF. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissible." - US government statement on China... "SigFiles of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist!"

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Re: Shameless
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sandy wrote: >Actually, I doubt Mr/Ms Anonymous is a provocateur. Reads more >like a paranoid schitzophrenic to me. Dollars to donuts says >it's Detweiler. Doesn't matter if it's Detweiler; what matters is whether it's detweiling.... #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissible." - US government statement on China... "SigFiles of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist!"

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CDA Court Challenge: Day #1
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The CDA Challenge, Day #1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Declan McCullagh / declan(a)well.com / Redistribute freely ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- March 21, 1996 PHILADELPHIA -- In the shadow of the Liberty Bell in downtown Philadelphia, the future of online liberty is being decided. I arrived halfway through the first day of the hearing in our lawsuit challenging the Communications Decency Act. Overall, it went well, though there were a few surprises, like a series of computer crashes and the Department of Justice's embrace of the rhetoric of crusading anti-porn activist Catharine MacKinnon. But most importantly, the judges are engaged in the case. CDT installed a T1 line, which is the first time a courtroom has had a live net-connection -- judges tend to insist on paper. When Ann Duvall of SurfWatch demoed the web and her software this afternoon, the judges paid attention, asked questions, and were proud when they figured out the concept of a hierarchy of pages on a web site. Her demonstration wasn't without problems. The Macintosh laptop she used to demonstrate Netscape and SurfWatch crashed three times as Duvall tried to click on the Philadelphia Phillies web site. (A great idea, though -- at least one judge appeared interested in the team.) Jonah Seiger and the other CDTers fixed the problem quickly, but then net.latency prevented Duvall from accessing the Louvre or Playboy web sites. Penthouse worked properly, though: "Blocked by SurfWatch." As I'm typing this, I saw a mention that a local television station, WCAU News 10, is going to broadcast a special on the hearing early tomorrow morning. Today's press corps included CNN, CBS, NBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times Online, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, and plenty of local reporters. The most interesting witness might have been Dr. William R. Stayton, a psychologist and sex therapist who testified that minors were not necessarily harmed by sexually-explicit materials. Stayton is an American Baptist minister, and holds faculty appointments at LaSalle and the University of Pennsylvania. The DoJ's only female attorney present cross-examined Stayton, spinning her arguments around a twisted MacKinnon-esque logic that I've never heard even from honorary net.mascot Senator James Exon. Seems as though she wasn't just trying to establish that nekkid photos are *harmful to minors* -- she was trying to establish that they're *harmful to women.* She asked questions like: "Do these pictures depict a healthy view of women as sexual beings?" "Do you believe the pictures are a factor in leading minors to view women as sex objects?" "Do you believe that these pictures are part of a socialization process that depicts women as sex objects?" Stayton rallied, replying: "There's nothing inherently harmful about letting a six-year old view these images." Undaunted, DoJ counsel continued, quoting from the Attorney General's 1986 Commission on Pornography, page 343, entered into evidence as exhibit 80. Seems as though that section talks about how nonviolent and nondegrading sexual materials are still harmful to minors. Chris Hansen from the ACLU on redirect asked: "Why is it not harmful for minors to access sexual materials?" Stayton: "We are born sexual beings... Our children are bombarded with sexuality on all sides... 50% of kids are sexually active by 15-16 years old. 85% are active by 18." To illustrate their point, the DoJ showed the judges and Stayton examples of dirty pictures taken from the Internet, complete with URLs. The pictures were _not_ hardcore; they seemed to consist of solo naked women in various lewd and explicit poses. The DoJ did this to demonstrate the types of _nonobscene_ materials available online that they would be unable to prosecute without the CDA. I would report in more detail on the types of images, but as I and members of the press started to page through the exhibit book after the hearing, someone from the DoJ came over and told us we weren't allowed to look at them "since they weren't available to the public." I argued with him, and he maintained that since they weren't _entered into the record_ then the public had no right to see them. How odd that the Feds are unwilling to divulge the URLs of the dirty pix they use in their case! I also met Cathy Cleaver, who's the director of legal studies for the Family Research Council, and a strong supporter of the CDA. She says she thought the hearing went well for her side. I politely disagreed. By the end of the day, the judges might have been starting to "get it." When Kiyoshi Kuromiya testified about his Critical Path AIDS Project web site, which carries safe sex information, the judges grilled him about the number of minors in the USA with HIV. Later, one Patricia Warren from Wildcat Press: "Is it easier to create an ezine than a magazine?" Another asked her if "gay and lesbian information is likely to be censored?" Tomorrow morning Professor Donna Hoffman of Vanderbilt University will testify. (She was instrumental in debunking Marty Rimm's fraudulent cyberporn study. <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~declan/rimm/>) Stay tuned for more reports. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The DoJ's case has been rescheduled to April 12th and April 15th. For more information and breaking updates, check out: http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/top/ Other relevant web sites: http://www.eff.org/ http://www.cdt.org/ http://www.aclu.org/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: A MODEST PROPOSAL
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:03 AM 3/20/96 -0800, Sandy Sandfort wrote: >(Did I get the style right?) C'punks, if you feels as I do, >please take a few moments to sign up for the LIST OF SHAME? >Let's show Bill, Bruce, Matt and all the others what most >Cypherpunks really think about them and Mr/Ms Anonymous. Please add my name. I don't abandon my friends when I disagree with them. Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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DAZ_zle
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Foreign Affairs, March/April, 1996, features two policy essays on "The Information Edge: A technological change is transforming the nature of power and the United States is clearly in the lead." In "America's Information Edge," Joseph S. Nye, Jr. former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and Assistant Secretary of Defense, and Admiral William A. Owen, former Vice Chairman of the JCS, argue that information technology is transforming knowledge, and thereby power. They write of a "system of systems, an integration of ISR, C4I and precision force, which represents a qualitative change in U.S. military capabilities." They envision informational "soft power" -- the ability to achieve outcomes in international affairs through attraction rather than coercion -- as reinforcing the "information umbrella" shielding allies in lieu of the nuclear option. In "A Revolution in Warfare," Eliot A. Cohen, Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins, takes issue with Nye and Owen on the radical impact of information technology, and argues that its revolutionary dazzle may distort historical understanding of the more general political and economic forces that are reshaping international and military affairs. He observes that misunderstanding of revolutionary technology all too often has had unexpected, disastrous, consequences: "A revolution in military affairs is under way. It will require changes of a magnitude that military people still do not completely grasp and political leaders do not fully imagine." DAZ_zle

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Re: Minneapolis Star Tribune this morning (fwd)
by gimonca＠skypoint.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > > Charles Gimon wrote: > > Mpls. Strib did a piece this morning, front page, about AltaVista, > > Dejanews, etc. Well-worn territory to readers of this list. Your > > words can come back to haunt you, all that stuff. One paragraph that > > deserves rebuttal from those of you who are better-informed: > > > > "Of course, technology is working on solutions to itself, but > > mechanisms that would hide the name of a message's author, such as > > cryptography and anonymous remailers, are convoluted and incomplete." > > Rebuttal? Why? Remailers generally are. There aren't enough penet.fi > type remailers, which people prefer not only because there is a mapping > but because it's easier to use. (It's also a bit more secure if there > are c2-nym remailers mapped to penet.fi type remailers in various > countries). > > Not everyone is on a system that is PGP-friendly. Handling PGP-messages > from commercial services or even most mailer apps is awkward at best, > and the commands for mixmaster/c'punk remailers are not as standard as > they could be. (A PGP3 DLL would improve the use of crypto and anon- > remailers quite a bit.) > > From the excerpt you posted, it doesn't seem as if they were criticizing > remailers... which is a pretty good thing. > I'd rate the whole article as neither good nor bad. It was on the front page of the paper edition, so I was a little unhappy at an offhand remark that might discourage people from using remailers. I'm planning on doing the letters-to-the-editor thing, emphasis on saying good things about remailers. The whole article is online at the site mentioned. > > > > Author was Jonathan Gaw; no e-mail address given. Star Tribune Online > > is at http://www.startribune.com >

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Re: Tim's friend's mildly retarded son
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"asgaard(a)sos.sll.se" "Asgaard" 15-MAR-1996 14:06:44.11 >The reason FDA has not approved this drug is most probably because >it does not make mildly retarded boys less retarded. But of course, Actually, there is some evidence that nootropics do work. I've been doing a literature review on the subject (soon to be a full meta-analytic review if I can find the proper statistics for combining multiple results from the same study), and there is some evidence for them working... slightly. The lack of FDA approval can be described as being due to a combination of three factors: A. Most sucessful studies of such drugs have been on healthy individuals. (For instance, vasopressin only appears to work on those whose brains are reasonably intact in the portion that deals with memory; I find this unsurprising). However, the FDA refuses to approve drugs for the purpose of enhancement of normal humans. (They have the excuse that it's against their charter). They even include the decline of IQ with aging in this category, unless it's profound or associated with other problems. B. Most of the known to work nootropics, etcetera are beyond the patent period. Thus, the well-researched ones tend not to be profitable for a company to work on getting through the FDA. Instead, they're developing new ones... often with a concentration (as with hydergine) on drugs to treat senile dementia or other categories that the FDA _will_ approve. C. The FDA is notoriously conservative. I'm generally willing to trust anything they pass as safe and (at least marginally) effective, but that's because they're completely anal-retentive about the whole business. Anything they're willing to pass without serious political pressure (of the types mentioned in another post) is OK... it's just that they don't pass a lot of stuff that is OK. This topic's relevance to Cypherpunks, aside from the confirmations that you mentioned, is low... aside from that it's of interest to Extropians such as myself and Tim May. -Allen

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Re: ASN.1 Tools/Compilers
by tim＠dierks.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:29 AM 3/21/96, Frederick Zarndt wrote: >Does anyone know of reliable ASN.1 tools/compilers suitable for use on a >wide range >platforms? > >I already know about the following tools/compilers, but I would appreciate >comments >anyone cares to make: > > ISODE (who to contact for the DE?) > Snacc > >Thanks. > >Frederick Zarndt >Senior Software Engineer >Novell, Inc >122 East 1700 South >Provo UT 84606 >USA > >Tel 801 429-3348 >Fax. 801 429-3500 I've recently been looking into this as well. I haven't looked at ISODE yet. Snacc looks reasonable, but can't handle big integers (> 2^32), which may make it hard to use for certificates, due to embedded RSA keys; I haven't yet checked to see what could be done about this. It's free; the compiler is under the GNU license, but the runtime is redistributable without fee or onerous restriction. I also spoke to a company in NJ, Open Systems Solutions (609.987.9073), but their licensing terms were too expensive for my purposes. Their product runs on a lot of platforms and sounds very complete, but requires a licensed run-time environment. They currently support C and Pascal; C++ is coming. Their development environment starts at $11,500. I'm also searching for an ASN.1 product. We can afford to pay for a compiler, but we need unrestrained distribution of the runtime in source form. Any information would be greatly appreciated. You may wish to examine the ASN.1 homepage @: http://www.inria.fr/rodeo/personnel/hoschka/asn1.html Best, - Tim Tim Dierks - Software Haruspex - tim(a)dierks.org Hastening the heat-death of the universe since 1968.

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PGP key spoofing
by christopher＠nescio.zerberus.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello, everybody, (Please note that I sent this to several mailinglists at once. I am not subscribed to cypherpunks any longer, so I won't see any replies there.) I think I have realized a serious flaw in PGPs key-handling. This may lead to people using and signing bogus keys despite the usual security measures. The problem is that PGP fails to differentiate between two keys sharing the same 64-bit-Key-ID. It is not a real problem to generate a key with a given key-ID (just take a prime, invert the desired key-ID modulo this prime and look for another prime whose lower bits are the same as in the number you just calculated), so the following attack would be possible: - Get the real key you wish to mimic. - Generate a fake key with the correct IDs. - Send your bogus key to a person of which you know that - This person does not have the correct key yet. - This person is going to meet the correct key's owner. If the owner of the correct key does not give a fingerprint, but rather a disk with the correct key to the person you are trying to fool, his or her pgp won't ring alarm bells when reading the key (apart from possibly a failed signature), but rather will tell him the key is already there. He will then, most probably, sign the bogus key without any further thought. Therefore, you should *always* check the fingerprint, even if you got the real key, at least if it has no valid signature from its alleged owner. -- Christopher Creutzig # Im Samtfelde 19 # D-33098 Paderborn # V+49-5251-71873 # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Sammele Vorschläge zur Rettung vom Genitiv.

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