December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail"
by James M. Cobb 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rich, On 01 26 96 you say: ...the US might have received credible reports that Pearl Harbor was going to be bombed. But they also received cred- ible reports to the contrary, and decisions were made. Bamford's 1983 The Puzzle Palace, page 57: In December 1941 American COMINT [communications intelli- gence] more closely resembled a medieval feudal state than the empire it is today. P 58: The system was a hodgepodge. No one was responsible for a continuous study of all material. *** Though the technical side of COMINT, particularly in the breaking of Purple, had been performed with genius, the analytical side had become lost in disorganization. That's the background. Then Bamford step by step follows the events of the first Sunday in December 1941 FROM (p 58) interception of the Japanese government reply to the US government "diplomatic note" [=declaration of war] sent 11 days before calling "on Japan to withdraw all its forces from China and Indochina in return for a U.S. promise to release Japanese funds and resume trade" TO (p 61): At 7:55 A.M. [Hawaii time], the first bomb smashed into a sea- plane ramp on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. Before the last bomb whistled down through the black and orange sky two hours later, Americans would give their lives at the rate of almost thirty a minute. A note accompanying the Japanese government reply included these prophetic words (p 59): Will the Ambassador please submit to the United States Govern- ment (if possible to the Secretary of State) our reply to the United States [breaking off negotiations] at 1:00 P.M. on the 7th, your time. 1 PM Washington time = 7:30 AM Hawaii time. Bamford, p 60 (my emphasis): It was now about 11:00 A.M. [in Washington], almost six hours after the giant ear on Bainbridge Island had first snared the prophetic message, and ALL OF WASHINGTON'S SENIOR ELITE HAD READ IT. P 61: At 2:40 P.M. [Hawaii time] the [Ft Shafter] signal officer passed [Army Chief of Staff Marshall's warning] message to the decoding officer, and twenty minutes later,...Marshall's warning at last reached a devastated General Short. The credible report was received at 7:55 AM Hawaii time. The incredible report was received at 3 PM Hawaii time. One decision was made 11 days earlier. Another was finalized 10 days later. Bamford dryly concludes (p 62): Disorganization and divided responsibility had cost America dearly. Cordially, Jim

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Re: Crypto Exports, Europe, and Conspiracy Theories
by tallpaul＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I missed Tim's post of Jan 24, 1996 23:18:21, where he wrote, among other things:: > >Once one has good encrypted links, including access to a variety of >offshore sites, remailers cannot be stopped. The TLAs may not like them, >and the courts may rule that a remailer site is strictly liable for >misdeeds which impinge on its remailers (I'm not convinced this is so, but >no matter), but what do U.S. courts have to say about Dutch remailer sites? >What will the Fifth Circuit be able to do to hactic.nl? Or chains of >remailers that pass through Norway, Japan, Estonia, Italy, and Lower >Slobovia? > My dystopian sense leads me to believe that there will be an international treaty banning them. I speak to some agricultural-utopians today who believe the world's problems can be solved if hemp is legalized. They describe the process where it was made illegal. Essentially one individual in the government, "Drug czar" Harry Anslem (?) whipped up a global hysteria and got an international treaty passed against the hemp trade. I suspect the hysteria over the Four Horsemen is already more extreme internationally than Anslem's hysteria ever was. I see two strategies existing over issues of anonymity/remailers/etc. The first is the elite one (and I do not use the word in a derogatory sense.) It focuses on a limited number of remailers, located in different countries, and all internationally known. The second is what I call the "mass strategy" (and I hope that the libertarians on the cypherpunk list do not treat the word in a derogatory sense). Luckily for all of us the two strategies are in no way mutually contradictory. If anything they tend to reinforce each other. I see PZ's development of PGP as the first development in the mass strategy. Before PZ, quality crypto was limited to monarchs and bureaucrats. After PZ, the same (or even superior) crypto was made available, both technologically and monetarily, to almost everyone in the world. Linux was another mass strategy development. So was the development of new replaceable 100+ Mb drives likes those from IOmega and Syquest. So was the development of front-ends for the PGP/remailer combinations like Private Idaho and John-Doe. So does the development of new data transmission technologies, marked by the simultaneous increase of bandwidth and decrease in costs. These developments create the technological basis for the mass proliferation of remailers. At present we rely on elite remailers, marked by skilled sysops and a global knowledge of the location of the system. I would like to see a system of mass remailers, many-to-most of which will initially not be up for very long. For many people this will not be a significant problem as the remailers proliferate faster than others go down. In other words, I think we will see a time when Captain Boneblood (aka Billie Smith, age 13) uses the remailer provided by Baron SkuelDrool (aka Tom Jones, age 14) running off SkuelDrool Sr's computer in the SkruelDrool family rec-room of Suburbia USA. The SkuelDrool remailer might never be up for more than a month and will never be widely known outside the narrow circle of the in-crowd at Warren G. Harding Jr. High. But before the SKuelDrool remailer goes down, another two remailers go up at Dan Quail Jr. Collitch and Aaron Burr Sr. High. The mass remailer network will never replace the elite remailers that will always have technological advantages over the mass network. But the combination of elite and mass remailers will make government crackdowns -- whether local, nationa, or international -- much harder. -- tallpaul "To understand the probable outcome of the Libertarian vision, see any cyberpunk B movie wherein thousands of diseased, desparate and starving families sit around on ratty old couches on the streets watching television while rich megalomaniacs appropriate their body parts for their personal physical immortality." R. U. Sirius _The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook_

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Re: [NOISE] Re: "Gentlemen do not read each other's bank statements"
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>tenuous-at-best connection to cypherpunks material - using a currency >backed only by the supply of ones and zeroes requires a market mechanism >to encourage the issuers not to overdo it.... Aggregious plug time. The above comment is *not* so tenuously connected to my e$ lists. I've been sending juicer bits of this particular discussion on to e$pam, my e$-filter-list of other news and mail groups, where the above comment in particular is germaine. If you want to continue your discussions on e$pam's discussion list, e$, you will be welcome. Subscribe to e$ by sending, in the the body of your message to majordomo(a)thumper.vmeng.com : subscribe e$ I've been sending other money related stuff to e$pam, from places like the AustrianEcon (Hyek, Mises, et.al) list, so people on e$ are at least *interested* in intellegent comments about money of all kinds, in particular the kind made of 1s and 0s. e$'s unmoderated, and has, as they say in the money business, "endogenous" traffic. ;-). Most of it originates on the list itself. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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Re: Open NNTP servers and logging
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>I think Stephen Albert was asking about the possibility of using logs to find >out what he's reading, not posting. That's quite possible. Recall the recent >incident when an unethical researcher looked through his colleagues' .newsrc >files to see what newsgroups they were subscribed to. Most NNTP sites run INN, the software I wrote. (You can find out by doing "telnet {the_news_host} 119" and then looking to see if it says InterNetNews in the greeting line.) By default, INN logs every group command -- every time you switch to a newsgroup. It logs the full IP address of the client. If it can forward-and-backward map the IP address to a hostname (i.e., ipaddr->host and then gethsotbyname() includes ipaddr as one of the host's address) then it logs by client hostname. It is trivial to turn on full logging at compile time, boot time, or per-connection via a management program. This will then log ALL interactions. I could imagine that without too much work, someone would turn on logging for a given set of addresses (say, anyone in the "default" category). Every day INN generates a report that includes the host/ipaddr of every host that connected, what the most popular newsgroup categories are, etc. Hope this helps. Relevance? You're being watched. /r$

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The French do some things right...
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:41 PM 1/26/96, David Mandl wrote: >As has been pointed out here before, a lot of people are going to be >getting in trouble for things they posted to obscure newsgroups or mailing >lists four years ago. How do I make sure that I get credit for something >I've posted, but avoid the Alta Vista police? There are a few feeble >solutions, like: One thing I have been hoping for as America's scandal-fixated society asks whether Bill inhaled, whether Rush has a mistress, whether Madonna's grandmother is really shacked up with a 19-year-old musician...one thing I have been hoping for is that the American public will say "Enough!" Not that they will call for the ban of tools like Alta Vista, or a law against using one's past posts to alt.sex.barney as a consideration during hiring, but that people will just wake up to the triviality of it all. The French seem to have partially done this. Francois Mitterand had a mistress? Who cares? They take it for granted that people are people, with human foibles and weaknesses. The way the U.S. public and/or the media machine is devouring political candidates for minor transgressions, the blander are our candidates. Could this happen, could people get beyond the minor transgressions and foibles and just shrug off the petty scandals that seem to be fodder for "daytime t.v."? Maybe. And with search engines digging up "controversial" posts from the past, some amount of shrugging is probably better than using some ancient post to veto the hiring of a mostly-qualified candidate. (Again, I would never support a law banning the browsing of one's past public record, but I would say that wise businesses will appropriate discount such records.) It's rare that I have something positive to say about the French, so this is my rare tip 'o the hat to them. --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 frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:33 PM 1/25/96 -0600, Mike McNally wrote: >Bill Frantz writes: > > However is should be possible for TV programs > >Maybe, until it becomes common for "TV programs" to be accessible by >URL... Web sites and TV series can both be rated without seeing each and every page/show. > > > and whole newsgroups. > >Since nobody "owns" newsgroups, and nobody controls what's posted to >them, I don't see how that's possible at all. It seems to me that a moderated news group or mailing list would be easy. You don't expect explicit sex descriptions to show up in the comp. hieararcy. An unmoderated group or list carries a higher risk of seeing inappropriate material. However even unmoderated lists have standards and those people who enforce those standards. This kind of enforcement is an example of communitarian as opposed to authoritarian control. It all depends on just how vital it is to the consumer (and rating group) that NO inappropriate material appear. Crypto relevence: Public key systems or digital signitures can help ensure that the material actually comes from it reputed source (e.g. the modarator). Bill

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Re: Cypherpunk Elitism
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"bruceab(a)teleport.com" "Bruce Baugh" 26-JAN-1996 01:51:04.39 >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. -------------------- Actually, Reich realizes this.... and (being a liberal) opposes the various trends causing it. I can email people an interview with him that shows his thinking on the matter. One point he makes is that nations with high tax rates and high levels of social services (such as Canada) are losing symbolic analysts to and gaining routine producers from nations with low tax rates and low levels of social services (such as the US). Being a liberal, he doesn't like this trend, and wants the US to raise taxes and social services (without apparantly seeing that this will simply put the US in the same boat as Canada, etcetera). Cypherpunks relevance? First, anonymous digital cash will make it awfully difficult to have those high tax rates. Second, this gives rise to the phenomenon of anonymous digital cash usage probably being more common among the economically and intellectually elite than among the "peons". They're the ones with something to lose by the tax rates. I haven't had time yet to read Dr. May's piece on Virtual Communities, but I have had the thought that private anonymous digital cash makes such separation a lot easier. Reich doesn't like people splitting off into seperate communities, and wants to oppose it- like Christopher Lash, the late populist writer of _The Revolt of the Elites_. Fortunately, anonymous digital cash makes such opposition a lot harder. -Allen

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Re: Belgium has 'key escrow' law
by cman＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I should also point out that Belgium apparently has crypto export laws of sufficient complexity to inspire me to look elsewhere when attempting to purchase a hardware encryption board from a Belgian company (uti-maco). Said company also was under the mistaken belief that I needed a US _import_ license; my failed attempts to persuade them otherwise was the final kicker. ------ ------ Douglas Barnes "The tighter you close your fist, Governor Tarkin, cman(a)communities.com the more systems will slip through your fingers." cman(a)best.com --Princess Leia

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[LOCAL] pdx-cypherpunks-l Announcement
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- A mailing list for Cypherpunk issues local to Portland Oregon (and the surrounding area) has been created. It will have meeting notices and other topics of interest to local Cypherpunks in the Portland area. To subscribe send a message to majordomo(a)teleport.com with: subscribe pdx-cypherpunks-l in the body of the message. Due to problems with spammers to lists on Teleport, the subscribe request will feed back an authorization code to verify that it was actually you who subscribed to the list. If you have any problems getting subscribed, please send me mail (or owner-pdx-cypherpunks-l(a)teleport.com) and the problems will get resolved. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMQhG4eQCP3v30CeZAQFQZwf/Uxc+NYHNVwsXaH8co6vlN2qgKdt46Ymq itCZTdzlOHHnU4rcMdsDeUzod3WYsFBH3UD90x+Z+n+3tX8Y0YB0H0j+imJJhJSo 28kscZnoji0CZKevuOxbL8AFWJ3wUiaa88S6sb0+1aa97TKIuBC845p2ctMqkD90 fExZl/DobXH0HxV+O19UpWoekceIBBoWYsFwBF/6SGLmzmyoBpXmc2lpR3CuJfgk Nk8w3LIAbSmyI2ERxaUMNKffnItoBt9aCBAR+tybTDLj1RgBYkYO54qqDHVwTSOW /pkqRN0mQWjYZlryvflPYlykpSN2VUR0dqIVoO9z7ME9P/99iTytVQ== =bAIW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Alan Olsen -- alano(a)teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ National Security uber alles!

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Re: Crypto Exports, Europe, and Conspiracy Theories
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"rsalz(a)osf.org" "Rich Salz" 26-JAN-1996 04:39:43.50 >I believe that one minor reason is the PKP chokehold on public-key patents. It has slowed down adoption within the US, and the RSA licenses for example tend to get very "interesting" when it involves places where their patents don't hold. ---------------- Speaking of other countries' non-recognition of algorithms as patentable, are David Chaum's patents on digital cash enforceable outside of the US? Thanks, -Allen

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