December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Privacy Without Tears
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:53 PM 2/10/96 -0800, Lunaslide wrote: >If everyone not only has a link to these pages in text, but also has their >"PGP secured!", or similar little graphic on their pages, linked to these >sites as well, it would save a lot of people a lot of redundant explaining >and it would help spread the word about PGP like wildfire to the masses. I like that a lot! A nifty graphic would be the old-fashioned engraving of a padlock on the O'Reilly book about PGP. Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce

1 0

Re: The Communications Decency Act
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Deepthroat(a)alpha.c2.org wrote: >Why The Communications Decency Act passed, or >Follow the money > > There's been a lot of commentary the last few days about this >bill, this strange creature, seemingly of the 'Christian Right.' Talk >of how and why its unconstitutional, protests; web pages blackened. >But, oddly, no one seems to have examined who pushed the bill through >Congress, or why. >But where >does that leave the big guys? ABC, NBC, CBS?? Can they survive in >this brave new world which the net threatens to be? > > By and large, they looked at themselves, and saw they could >not. At last! Somebody bringing up the topic! I am quite recent on CPunks, but I've been trying to push that point on alt.security.pgp and alt.privacy some time ago. After several try at it, I dropped the subject. I couldn't believe that nobody considered this explanation to the CDA. The thought that many so-called "free speecher" were actually hired by the big media to create a big fuss among net users over the "porn vs religious" issue just to act as a diversion even crossed my mind! JFA

1 0

Re: Strange Sounds of Silence
by Michael Peponis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > The Strange Sounds of Silence > > Has anyone else out there noticed the strange sounds of silence > emmanating from the american print and broadcast media concerning the > rider attached to the Telecommunications Act recently signed by > President Clinton known as the CDA (Communications Decency Act)? > :Are you sure? The coverage has been wall to wall out here (Bay area); :front page above the fold, business pages, computer columns, editorials :and editorial cartoons. Apparently it's the same level of coverage back :in the RTP. :What part of the country are you in? I guess the coverage is different :in the major geek zones like the bay area and RTP It really does depend where you are at, all of the Metropolitin cities such as NY, LA, Chicago, etc are debating it. If you live in a more braindead part of the country, well, as has been stated before, most people think the internet is AOL, what do you expect? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2i iQCVAwUBMRzi80UffSIjnthhAQFUzgQAv1+te1qXW4Vm6yODxJW7B1fIl67VBSB3 5ec23filS1N0mK+D2al7F/kzcFmyneypuGL8tq6HiBbuJTzP55cNyucQJwUQ3Ysk jwxRA+GcrzntR3bWdkHNT9DCzrSjJj0DNy2BwAIo8vQlNiKLlUeXmd2wOVvWTHhy qkk5QVeFY4c= =DaB0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Regards, Michael Peponis PGP Key Avalible form MIT Key Server,or via finger

1 0

glide.c??
by Jim Small 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

DO you know where I can find glide.c , or (newer) to bruteforce .pwl files?

2 1

Re: A Rant about Senator James Exon
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:15 PM 2/9/96, Timothy C. May wrote: >P.S. As many of you may already know, a "rant generator" can be found at >http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/individual/pakin/complaint Yes! A Mass Rant-Spam! I'm inspired! Too bad we can't break the CDA in the process... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

1 0

Re: Reasons in support of crypto-anarchy WAS Re: Why am I (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > From jimbell(a)pacifier.com Sat Feb 10 20:31:23 1996 > Message-Id: <m0tlQnv-00092TC(a)pacifier.com> > X-Sender: jimbell(a)pacifier.com > X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 > Mime-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > Date: Sat, 10 Feb 1996 17:41:30 -0800 > To: Jim Choate <ravage(a)ssz.com> > From: jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> > Subject: Re: Reasons in support of crypto-anarchy WAS Re: Why am I (fwd) > Cc: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > > > At 08:13 PM 2/6/96 -0600, Jim Choate wrote: > > > >Forwarded message: > > >If the intent is to motivate others to kill or otherwise harm others simply > >because you don't agree with them or their actions is reprehensible and > >moraly or ethicaly undefensible. > > That's a misleading statement: You said, "simply because..." As should > be abundantly clear from my other arguments, I wouldn't wish to see anyone > killed "simply because" of the fact I "don't agree with them." It is their > ACTIONS that I feel violate my rights; that is what justifies my seeking > their deaths, should I choose to do so. > But it is not clear at all. Exactly how do their actions violate your rights? Are these the rights that you believe that you possess or the ones that are recognized? Do the actions have to effect you directly and immediately or must you merely percieve a threat? All of these issues are unclear in your presentation. And for the final one, doesn't your putting a contract out on them violate their rights (life, liberty, the pursuit of hapiness)? The only answer to this is 'yes', meaning that to be ethical you must put a contract out on yourself. Because your own actions violate somebodies rights. This catch-22 situation regarding deadly force is why anarchy does not work. A perhaps less different example might be: If you dislike bigots then you are a bigot. In short, you can't help but become what you hate the most. It pays not to hate or be quick to use violence since they are so strongly related. It is not yours, the governments, or anyone elses right to decide who lives and dies. You have a double standard. > > >Every citizen of this country is a 'government employee' in one sense or > >another. > > That's about the weakest argument I've heard in a long time. I'm amazed > that you weren't too embarrassed to post it to the list. While I don't know > precisely what your definition of the phrase "government employee" really > is, I "every citizen" is a "governement employee" then you must have a > REALLY weird definition of that. > Then Lincoln had a equaly weird view: Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Perhaps this failure to recognize a basic premise of representative democracy explains your apparent dichotomy in the concepts of rights. In effect, your rights and their rights. When in fact there is no difference. I would suggest you read the Declaration of Indipendance and the Gettysburg Address (again) to get a better perspective on what and who is supposed to run this government and how. We have had a basic inversion of how our government is supposed to work. In short, if there is a question the federal government is supposed to bow to the will of the people and the states. Currently the states and people bow to the federal government. Somehow, I think that this is where your argument fails, and it fails > miserably. > > > >By resorting to violence you are no better than the ones you proport to > >protect us against. > > Sorry, I disagree. Now, I am certainly aware of the classic "Gandhi-type" > total non-violence principle, but it turns out that very few people actually > believe in that. Might does not make right. Ethical cohesion does not rest on numerical values. In case you have missed my comments before. I am not non-violent. I do not support the use of violence in any format except in direct and immediate self-defence. In which case make the beggars eyes bleed, no defeat and no surrender. This means that if you walk outside and see a person breaking in your car that in and of itself is not sufficient motive for deadly force unless they attack you. I do believe (contrary to yourself I would guess) that if you were walking down the street and somebody suddenly grabbed you that would be sufficient motive to kill them in self-defence. In cases like this there simply isn't enough time to evaluate the extent of the threat, it is clear there is an apparent threat though. In short if your person is violated physicaly without your premeditated permission then deadly force is justified. I also believe that you are ethicaly justified in stopping a person from assaulting or killing a 3rd party for the simple reason that it could be you next. However, once that immediate threat is over (for example a 4th party knocks the gun out of the muggers hand and knocks them on the ground) then use of deadly force is not justified. > Most people seem to think that they are entitled to > protect themselves from violations of rights. The fact that these > violations of rights may be done by "government employees" is at most > irrelevant, in that this doesn't justify it. Anybody who feels entitled to > use violence against a burglar, rapist, or murderer is correct; attempting > to deny me the right to protect my property from GOVERNMENT people is, in > itself, a violation of my rights. > Rights as you use them are only relevant between a government and a citizen. I as an individual person am not forced to provide you with a forum for free speech or any other rights guaranteed in the constitution. Apparently you, as many people do, confuse the rights that are yours in regards the government with privileges and contractual obligations which govern interpersonal actions. The local grocery store is not mentioned in the Constitution. They are under no obligation to provide protection for your life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. Your basic argument rests on a straw man premise, namely that rights guaranteed you by government are guaranteed you by any and every other possible entity. This is clearly wrong. It is not ethical to kill another simply for being a burglar. How much must they steal before you are ethicaly justified in killing them? A $1,000 dollar stereo? Perhaps a $.20 pencil off your desk? Does this not justify your employer killing you for using their machines for your own use,it is theft of services after all (and you are on their property). If you have sufficient force detain them. The legal system will take them from there (assuming of course we revamp it with the other laws we discuss so heatedly on here). What I propose is a simple and humane system. If a person commits a crime which leads to the death or injury another they spend the remainder of their life in a solitary cell with no chance of parole. In other cases what should occur is they must work a regular job and provide restitution for an extended period (ie $100/mo. to you for 30 years). Should they fail to abide by this or they commit another crime then off they go for 20 years or so, again with no chance of parole. I also strongly object to plea bargaining. The whole concept of sending somebody to jail for 2-3 years is silly and counter-productive. It leads to nothing but professional criminals, in effect state run training grounds for the criminaly inclined. While in jail they should be forced to live in work camps and not prisons as we currently know them (unless they fall into the above 'harm another' category). What should occur is that they are forced to live a relatively normal lifestyle. In short, they work 8 hours a day and must pay for their housing, food, etc. from their earning. What needs to occur is to train persons to make a living and gain some success at managing a day to day lifestyle. Our currrent system treats criminals as animals, which does nothing to prevent further violence on their part, it only increases any sense of isolation they may have. > Are you a statist? > No, as I have said on many occassions, I am a strict Constitutionalist. Jim Choate

1 0

Re: Psion organisers
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:45 PM 2/2/96 +0000, Dave Roberts wrote: >I was wondering about a couple of things regarding the Psion Series 3a >personal organisers. (According to the manual, you have them in the USA >as well! :) Not just in the manual, but in real life! I hadn't thought about the problems of bringing it through customs, though - yuk! (I've more thought about Penn Jillette's proposal for an application that does a Countdown to Detonation when you start up the machine, just for the airport security people who want to be sure it's a real machine - you could include audio :-) >Firstly, anyone know what kind of encryption is done on documents and >spreadsheets held on it's internal disk? It only allows a 10 character >password, and claims to encrypt the whole file. I assume it's minimal, and unfortunately the encryption software I've seen on the FTP sites for it has also been minimal (calling Enigma "minimal" has a nice ring to it :-) Porting RC4 shouldn't be too hard, once I get the C support documentation. The one genuine security application I have used it for has been S/Key; typing in the challenge is a bit annoying (would be nice if the application let you store previous challenges), but it works well. Unlike the cool infrared communications Newtons can do between each other, Psions have an audio-based communication that lets them squawk at each other. I don't know how fast it is, since my machine doesn't have anyone to talk to :-), so I don't know if using it for digicash would be even vaguely practical. (If it's 1200 bps, maybe - if it's 75 bps Baudot, probably not...) #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com / billstewart(a)attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs

1 0

Re: Privacy Without Tears
by lunaslide＠loop.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>At 05:53 PM 2/10/96 -0800, Lunaslide wrote: > >>If everyone not only has a link to these pages in text, but also has their >>"PGP secured!", or similar little graphic on their pages, linked to these >>sites as well, it would save a lot of people a lot of redundant explaining >>and it would help spread the word about PGP like wildfire to the masses. > >I like that a lot! A nifty graphic would be the old-fashioned engraving of a >padlock on the O'Reilly book about PGP. There have also been graphics handily prepared by a member of this list. Regretfully, I forget the URL and who it was from. Anybody got that for us again please? lunaslide "Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." - -- Abraham Lincoln On the meridian of time there is no injustice, only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. Henry Miller ________________________________________________________________ Digitally sign your mail too! -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCPAzEX3QEAAAEEAOGQjhnqGH29pO1WDaXs5GFOVPhCBWyYEk9XEwRmscjveWzH AhA6DeOA480zWNqQURyqE2yPmR8WzT+OXYqmeiQiycKyFA41Vs/Ruf+gXXxe7uXS L5BK3K8oKbfoH0D5/TAkMT4r6BprXFQz4pFc3gY2SSaSPElpMjKHaKBsRsyRABEB AAG0HUplZmYgQ29ubiA8bHVuYXNsaWRlQGxvb3AuY29tiQCVAwUQMRffHzKHaKBs RsyRAQGNhwP9E9xEZ9/LCKnhgtnrqgD7pDoXG2pCy8FoyfFjoImGkG+jF1wELXmB Z0mf8F8CgYkys0mif1XeGDMelr1gzlZAm6LgQt4kcvztMW/aRLn18QP+iwltVT/L p8D37mitOjvuk46sWgAChIaPPPIeg/EaYQjQkmlpWKsEYIoTRy+E8mU= =4Gku -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

1 0

A Rant about Senator James Exon
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:57 AM 2/10/96, Mark Allyn (206) 860-9454 wrote: >Allright. That does it. > >I am going to volunteer to try to make a perl script that >I will make available that will automatically email every >congressman that has an email address. I will include a pre >pared text of the email message. All you would have to do is >to sign it and it would send the same message to all of them >with email addresses automatically. I can even have it have >several prepaired texts so that they are all slightly different >so that any funky gatekeepers at the congress email sites that >attempt to keep out spams could be defeated. > >What do you think? Is this worth it? Here's something I did about Senator James Exon: My complaint about James Exon I would like to take a moment to comment on James Exon's statements. What follows is a set of observations I have made about inane zombies. I truly suspect that his opinion is a lazy cop-out. If he gets his way, I might very well kill somebody. This is explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material I plan to present. To Exon, terrorism is a kind of religion. This is not the first time we've had trouble with unreasonable goofy-types, and it certainly won't be the last. His claims are a cesspool of alarmism. If you need proof that he is off his rocker, then just take a look at him. Exon has a driving need to reduce human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Ostensibly, he does not intend to insult my intelligence, but in fact, insipid porn stars like him tend to conveniently ignore the key issues of this or any other situation. Speaking of insincere megalomaniacs, it would be downright ungrateful for him to censor any incomplicitous principles. It's a sad world where fickle worthless-types have the power to feed us a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations. After all, I myself unequivocally maintain that Exon should take more responsibility for his actions. To put it another way, he likes to have difficult social issues presented to him in simple, black-and-white terms. I don't see how he can be so abusive. That doesn't necessarily mean that he is intentionally being stupid. Rather, it means that his attempts to turn the trickle of alcoholism into a tidal wave are just a game to him. Although Exon has tremendous popular appeal, Exon has come very, very close to making me defend my rights. He should just quit whining about everything. He feels he has not only a right, but also a duty, to toy with our opinions. His idea of a good time is to torture jealous radical hedonists. An inner voice tells me that Exon's claims are pure tripe. To sum it all up, pesky deranged moviegoers like James Exon often think they have the right to flush all my hopes and dreams down the toilet. -Tim May P.S. As many of you may already know, a "rant generator" can be found at http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/individual/pakin/complaint 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."

3 3

The Decense Project
by Ray Cromwell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Decense Project A few days ago I was reading Clarinet Newsbytes Top news. It read like something right out of 1984. "Germany cracks down on AOL and Compuserve", "Japan busts Japanese porn web site", "French bans web sites with banned book", "China issues internet regulations", and "Clinton signs Telecom bill" The other shoe is starting to drop. The ante has been raised as governments around the world are trying to control the content of the Internet. But the politicians writing this type of legislation have no clue what they are really dealing with. They are are part of a centralized organization with a centralized philosophy trying to cope with something inherently decentralized, non-physical, and constantly evolving. We all know the genie is out of the bottle. Let's write some code to keep it that way. Enough of the rhetoric. Decense is the name of what I hope to be, a family of software protocols designed to "decensor" the net. I'm contributing the first, and I hope, most useful piece. I hope others will join me in developing this software, making it more robust, and distributing it across the net. What is Decense? The first piece of the Decense software is designed to provide "penet" like double-blind anonymous transactions for the http protocol. It is written as a cgi-bin script which provides a seamless mapping between anonymous ids and remote web servers. Servers running Decense can be chained like anonymous remailers to increase site level security. Decense works as follows. The server maintains a database mapping anonymous ids to url directories. For instance 'foo' -> 'www.c2.org' as an example. The anonymous ids are stored as md5 hashes so that if the site is ever compromised, the db cannot be used to get a complete listing of all anonids<->sites. The attacker is forced to hash and compare each one he is looking for. [yes, he still gets a listing of all the urls, but chaining takes care of that to some extent. In the future, I want to use the unhashed 'anonid' as a key to a symmetric cipher to encrypt/encrypt each url field of the database. The db would be stored as (hashed(anonid), DES/IDEA(anonurl) ^ key ^ value ] A url is constructed as follows http://<decense.server.host>/<cgi-bin-dir>/decense/<anonid>/<relative url> Decense will lookup the anonid in the database, and map it to a url, such as "http://foo.bar", it will then append the relative url portion yielding "http://foo.bar/<relative url>" It will proceed to fetch the document at that URL. If the document is an html or text file, it will scan the file replacing any references to the remote server with the decense url. Example: Let's say I am running decense at http://foo.bar with an anonid of 'c2' which maps to www.c2.org. If I then request http://foo.bar/cgi-bin/decense/c2/index.html and index.html contains the following URL <img src="/c2.jpg"> the URL will be changed to <img src="http://foo.bar/cgi-bin/decense/c2/c2.jpg"> in the returned document. Future plans for Decense I am heavily loaded down with work right now. But future versions of Decense should have 1) the ability to filter out mailto: and instead, substitute in a url pointing to a post/mail cgi-script which sends mail to the real recipient through an anonymous remailer chain. 2) the ability to proxy through SSL servers for encryption 3) the ability to handle authenticated urls properly 4) the ability to handle a document being located on multiple sites, with optional shamir sharing, so that a site is a) either picked at random to retrieve a document or b) a portion of the sites are picked, and the document is fetched and reassembled via a sharing protocol from those sites. I will release source code in about a day, I'm now alpha testing it. If you would like to contribute to Decense, send mail to rcromw1(a)gl.umbc.edu -Ray rjc(a)clark.net

2 2