December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

detweiling
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've been studying "detweiling" in old archives as this issue is raised here every so often. imho the lesson of detweiler has nothing to do with detweiler, but in fact more to do with his targets. effective "detweiling" would be impossible if it were not for the large egos of his quarry. he selects his targets carefully based on the size of their egos, presses their obvious buttons, and stands back to watch the fireworks ensue. the larger the ego, the more easy it is to do this. (i.e. larger fireworks/provocation ratio). detweiler took a lot of pride in how much reaction he could get with just a few posts or barbs. he is not really apparently responsible for ever actually mailbombing the cpunk list from what I can tell. he believed he was perfecting the art of playing with people's egos. a sort of depraved cyberspatial psychology experiment. the amusing thing about "detweiling" is the way that it is something like a bad, self-perpetuating virus among those with big egos. detweiler took great glee in starting the virus wherein these people with big egos blame all their obvious personal problems on him (i.e. atrocious lack of interpersonal skills). since the virus propagates not because of any action on his part, but because of the inherent psychology of those with big egos, it continues on this list even though there seems to be no evidence that Detweiler has had anything to do with this list for perhaps over a year. the cypherpunks is a rabid breeding ground for this detweiler virus, because of the vast array of throbbing egos. the flamewars are routine because of the immature psychology of many posters, esp. the more "prominent" ones. even anonymous or pseudonymous posters defend themselves because of their large egos, and those with big egos feel they have to defend themselves against anonymous or pseudonymous accusations, or take intermittent jabs at whatever hapless pseudonym-of-the-week is thought to be detweiler. imho from what I have seen (which is admittedly not everything, as the detweiler stuff is rather endless), detweiler is not really destructive in himself. but he is an amazing catalyst to those that already have destructive tendencies within themselves, and he tweaks them into erupting. in a sense it is almost a public service in helping people with big egos temporarily relieve their "painful flareups". but I see no sign that he has been anywhere near the list for a long, long time, and I think all the ranting and scapegoating of him is quite strong evidence of all the big egos and small minds that litter this list. there is nothing new about detweiler's approach. there was a classic greek who was put to death for the same reason: not provoking people by calling them names, so much as asking them questions that embarrassly exposed all their ego problems. his name was called "socrates" and he was put to death for refining his art beyond that which was tolerated by a power structure largely populated by those with the ego problems (power structures are always dominated by these types, it is like flies and dead meat, or moths and flames). the joke of course may be that detweiler could have been dead for a long time, and people here would still be blaming him for their problems. perhaps we have a new convenient substitute for Satan in the cyberspace age. "the detweiling made me do it." (hee, hee). "projection" was identified by freud in another century as a basic device of the ego, a pity that few in our modern era are aware-- or perhaps it is not such a pity from detweiler's perspective. <g> (p.s. I imagine quite a few people will accuse "me" of being detweiler. I assure you my amusement will at least exceed or match that which detweiler ever obtained.)

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e$'s (mini-rant)
by jeff＠Molasar.BlackMagic.Com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

<begin mini-rant> The Internet Economy Must Be Grass Roots (or, why can't we mint coins YET ?) Just a few thoughts. Being a small business, here are some of the things we THOUGHT we'd be able to do by now with anonymously transferable digital tokens (e$'s) that I'm amazed we still can't do. 1) Issue tokens backed by services our site offers, or the services of our consultants, etc. Obviously, this isn't intended for general use (though we certainly wouldn't care if the currency was traded to organizations who would accept it for it's value)- it's intended to be traded with those people on the net that we do business with on a regular basis, rather like a ledger system, but slightly different (Even an online system that wasn't anonymous, a ledger, would be better than what's out there right now, which is NOTHING). 2) Run our own mint- obviously, it's to our advantage to run the mint, we want to make sure it's secure, it's responsible for keeping value in OUR COINS, something of great importance to our reputation. Businesses want to issue all kinds of currencies- state currency is only ONE FORM of value. We want to mint coins and distribute them freely in some cases, to advertise our services, to attract new customers, etc. We want to mint "coupons" that have the same effect. We want to mint coins that are actually licenses for use of products that we want to distribute, licenses people can TRADE, licenses that hold their value past site-by-site use. We want to be able to issue coins that we can optionally expire, optionally have anonimity, and optionally can or can't be transferred (some uses of these token systems are not served well by anonimity or by transferability). The possibilities are only endless if there is a transport, if there is a mechanism. Not in theory, but in PRACTICE. When I played with the Magic Money software, my only thought was "YES!" but then it "went away" ? It went away because it was difficult to use, which I'm sure would have been resolved (obviously, it would have needed extensions for network transport with email transport as an option but not a necessity). It went away because the inventor of the original scheme holds the patents (which I have no problem with, obviously, but aren't there any competeing ideas ? or does the inventor plan to "let" us mint our own currencies in the future ?). That this mechanism is being restricted to some "higher purpose" of a universal cash system, beginning (and ending I suspect) with backing by state currency makes me down right mad. There are a million and one uses for this mechanism that nobody has even THOUGHT OF yet, and there are plenty that people HAVE thought of- but the mechanism isn't available to the public, it's being used instead in a very narrow way. And in my Not So humble opinion, the way to Internet Economy isn't from the top anyway, it's from the people who provide the value in the first place, it's from the businesses who desperately want to get moving but feel their hands are tied. I have communicated with every author of "e$" type systems that I know of, and they all had very big plans for their systems, were all looking for sponsorship and talking to banks, and everyone of them completely FAILED to even ANSWER email from me when I asked when we could use their mechanisms for minting our own currencies and running our own mints on the Internet (I take that back, one of them answered, they just said, in a word, "no"). And I find that ANNOYING, mostly because it's just putting things off-- years now and we're not much closer to "Internet Economy" than we were when we started. It's gotta be grass roots, it's gotta be free (or cheap), and most importantly, it's gotta be SOON. History has show in endless repetition, that the only standards on the Internet are free standards. The Web would have never taken off if both the thing that "lets the user access the system" (the client) and the thing that "allows distribution of content" (the server) hadn't been available freely-- and the mint software in any of the proposed token systems are just that, content distributing servers. Every single person on this planet is a business. All good things start with the individuals (especially on the net, as we've seen OVER and OVER). The world is full of things that were "good", but were too propietary, they fill the backrooms of many a code shop. In the words of a very common-sensical post I saw just a few days ago, "... because of a Betamax attitude, I'll follow the market to VHS." The only thing lacking right now is a VHS to follow, but beware, the need is so high, there will be one ... In short, give us the mechanism! Once it's available, sit back and watch the net soar ... just like it always does ... The most recent application of this type of mechanism that I saw, or at least it could have been an application for it if there WAS a mechanism, was a group of organizations that wanted to trade certain types of information among themselves-- they wanted it to be based on merit, that is, those individuals/organizations who PROVIDE data also GET data from the system. It was a perfectly contained closed economy that desperately needed a token system as it's heart, but alas, there wasn't one. Trying to remain patient. <end mini-rant> Woowoo! Spring is here! :) Jeff. -- Simply Be.

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Re: NT's C2 rating
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:11 PM 3/22/96 -0600, Rick Smith wrote: >The big deal is that few vendors have tried to get NCSC evaluations. We walked KeyKOS a long way down the path to a B2 rating. Our investors refused to fund the estimated $1 million it would cost to do all the paperwork. They felt there was no market for NCSC secure systems. Perhaps others felt the same way. Regards - 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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Re: Excluding articles from DejaNews
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:48 AM 3/23/96, Rich Graves wrote: >AltaVista doesn't index web sites that follow the Robots Exclusion >Standard. Does that mean you won't use AltaVista anymore, either? I didn't say that an indexing policy is the determinant of my using it or not, only that DejaNews looks less attractive than it did before (which wasn't very attractive anyway, compared to AV...your mileage may vary, so I won't be engaging in Search Engine Wars). >Agreed, anyone really concerned about their privacy should be using >anonymity/pseudonymity, but a temporary hidey-hole is a Good Thing. Well, I mostly disagree with this point. It gives the poster the _comforting illusion_ of privacy, when in fact the Real Threat (tm) is that the search engines of 2-5 years from now will trivially uncover all of the "asides" (to use Rich's term) made in rec.music.white-power and alt.sex.cypherpunks. It is the searches done several years from now that will no doubt be of greatest concern to job seekers, professors seeking tenure, and candidates for political office. No matter the "no archive" headers, somebody will archive it. Thus, spiders will find it. This is the "ostrich effect" I was referring to. The illusion of security. >But I can think of a lot of reasons you might want to post something >under your real name, or your regular pseudonym -- gaining the benefit of >your good (or bad) reputation, mostly -- but on the other hand, you don't >want that post archived. It's called an "aside." The point is that just because one or more sites is not archiving the traffic does not mean that other sites are not. Look at the parallels to cancellation: some sites strongly believe that "cancellation" is a bogus concept, that once a message has gone out it is part of the overall feed. (I concur with this view, and, if I ran a site, would not honor so-called "cancellations.") >For example, I might want to say, "Tim May is a big fat idiot because of >what he just said." I do want to say that, publicly, under my name and It created a best-seller for Al Franken..... >address, but for various reasons, I don't want that saved in the >archives. Since X-Headers are readable by most newsreaders, and are in Well, what you _want_ and what you're gonna git are not necessarily the same thing. I expect some sites are going to advertise that they archive and/or index _all_ public traffic, becoming a "site of record." >OK, you've convinced me that this isn't a privacy thing, really, but I >think is a valid and useful thing. What's the alternative, really? If I At the risk of repeating myself: -- some people will want to request "no archives" (for "asides" and "off the record" comments. -- some sites will honor these requests. -- other sites will not. -- that at least one site keeps the traffic and makes indices available is sufficient to negate the effect of requesting "no archives." -- the practical effect will be initially to make a search for the "no archive" words _slightly_ more difficult, but not practically so...in spiderspace, the distances are compressed and a search will still turn up the words. >want to say something, now, are you going to tell me that I don't have >the right to request that you not take my comments on the record? That >sounds sort of totalitarian. I either have to create a new, unique nym on "Totalitarian"? You spoke publically, in this example, and I remembered your words. What is totalitarian about this? Trying to purge uttered words is the hard thing to do, actually. >the fly, in which case my comments lose anything associated with my name, >or I have to keep my comments to myself. Recognizing "Well, the full >context is recorded too, you can defend youself with that" only makes it >worse, really. > >Just thinking out loud, my thoughs being recorded for posterity on >hks.net and Exon-knows where else... Indeed, the storage densities and net connections that are coming will make your words here trivially searchable by your daughter in her third-grade class in 2005. Maybe on her handheld terminal. (And she'll probably be most interested in the words that Daddy thought to label as "no archives," as you yourself presaged in an earlier message. Those are likely to be the juicier things to read.) --Tim May THE X-ON CONGRESS: INDECENT COMMENT ON AN INDECENT SUBJECT, by Steve Russell, American Reporter Correspondent....You motherfuckers in Congress have dropped over the edge of the earth this time... "the sorriest bunch of cocksuckers ever to sell out the First Amendment" or suggesting that "the only reason to run for Congress these days is to suck the lobbyists' dicks and fuck the people who sent you there," ....any more than I care for the language you shitheads have forced me to use in this essay...Let's talk about this fucking indecent language bullshit.

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Re: protection on IoMega ZIP drives
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 23 Mar 96 at 3:00, Ed Carp wrote: > Has anyone tried SFS? It should work on the zip drive, though I've not > tried it (yet)... If I recall some recent threads on alt.security.pgp (or sci.crypt?), SFS doesn't work on ZIP drives (since ZIPs use the parallel port...). [Or do ZIPs use Scuzzies and the people who had problems were just too lame to figure out that they had to load the driver before SFS?] Rob. --- Send a blank message with the subject "send pgp-key" (not in quotes) to <WlkngOwl(a)unix.asb.com> for a copy of my PGP key.

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Summary of NIST GAK Meeting
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Pat, We received today by snail mail from NIST a March 5 "Summary of the Proposed 64-bit Software Key Escrow Encryption Export Criteria Meeting" on December 5, five-pages, "prepared by an outside observer from Martin Marietta Systems, Inc." You've probably got a copy as well. If you've not already done so, and if you like, we'll be happy to scan it and send over for your Web site. Let us know. John

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Re: New Beta Test of PGPfone available WINDOWS '95 Included!
by wlkngowl＠unix.asb.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

jis(a)mit.edu (Jeffrey I. Schiller) writes: >We have finally released a Windows '95 version of PGPfone. This release >includes PGPfone for Macintosh version 1.0b6 and PGPfone for Windows '95 >version 1.0b1. Note: The Macintosh version does not talk to earlier versions. >However the Macintosh and Windows version talk to each other! >Connections can be either via modem or the Internet. [..] Will there ever be a Win32s version of PGPfone? I have one of those systems with non-(MS)DOS partitions that MS-DOS/Wind95 doesn't like, so until MS can deal with the fact that people use other OSs, I'm staying clean of Win95.

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Re: protection on IoMega ZIP drives
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:08 AM 3/23/96 +0000, Deranged Mutant wrote: >On 23 Mar 96 at 3:00, Ed Carp wrote: > >> Has anyone tried SFS? It should work on the zip drive, though I've not >> tried it (yet)... > >If I recall some recent threads on alt.security.pgp (or sci.crypt?), >SFS doesn't work on ZIP drives (since ZIPs use the parallel port...). > >[Or do ZIPs use Scuzzies and the people who had problems were just >too lame to figure out that they had to load the driver before SFS?] There are two versions of the Zip drive. One is SCSI and one is Parallel faking scsi. The big problem is with the zip drivers. There is some sort of incompatibility between SFS and the zip drivers. (I hacked on it for a couple of hours with no luck.) Win95 makes the problem worse, as it is difficult to judge just when the driver for the zip drive loads. (I have a number of complaints about the zip drive drivers. Lack of documentation is one of them...) Sometime I will have to fire up SoftICE and see exactly what the conflict is... --- 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/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon

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Re: NT's C2 rating
by Rick Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Regarding the comment: >> Basically, I'm now questioning the C2 rating of Windows NT. The >> entire security layer is modular to the Kernel. As a modular >> driver, it can be removed, rewritten, and replaced. C2 is no big deal. It means you have the typical security measures that can be disabled or bypassed by a trojan horse. You're not doing serious protection till you put in mandatory protections like what appears in B or A level systems. The big deal is that few vendors have tried to get NCSC evaluations. Rick. smith(a)sctc.com secure computing corporation

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New Encryption Software-Encrypt Image & Text Files (fwd)
by wendigo＠pobox.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Thought y'all might find this interesting ... if not funny. : Press Release from Antelope Productions, Inc : : Subject: New Encryption Software; Quick@Crypt : : : Antelope Productions, Inc. is releasing our new encryption package : called Quick@Crypt that has several advantages over any other : encryption software available on the market. Now more than ever, : there is a need for security in transferring sensitive information : through the Internet and networks worldwide. There has not been a : universal way for people to send all types of files easily, : inexpensively and securely through the Internet or networks UNTIL NOW. : All other encryption software available on the market requires a : separate license for each site (the sender as well as the receiver). : With Quick@Crypt you may freely distribute the decryption program. : Only the encryption side requires a licensed copy of Quick@Crypt. : There is also no limit on the password size and there is no : restriction on overseas use. : : You will find pricing of Quick@Crypt a real bargain, given the : pricing and functionality compared to other available encryption : packages. Our price is only $99.95 plus $5 shipping in US plus state : sales tax in Texas, New Jersey and Florida. Quantity discounts are : also available. : : Installation is performed easily on any Windows or Windows 95 system. : Memory requirements with as little of 2 MB of RAM (I tried it on a : Tandy portable with 2 MB!). We also have a version to work in DOS. : There is a floating toolbar that always remains on top of your current : open window. Quick@Crypt's floating toolbar gives you four options. : 1. Encryption-You have a user friendly screen to select the drive, : directory and files that you want to encrypt. Chosen files for : encryption are grouped together and compiled into a single executable : file with an assigned password you enter. There is no limitation on : the password size. Overseas distribution of the encrypted files is not : restricted. File encryption often takes less then ten seconds. 2. : Decryption- Allows you to select the drive, directory and file you : want to decrypt. The password is requested once you select the : encrypted file. Decryption is performed in Windows or Windows 95 with : the freely distributed decryption module. Decryption module is sent : to each receiver with no licensing requirement. Decryption of the : executable file may also be performed at the DOS prompt with no : additional software. 3. Help- A user friendly system for all of : Quick@Crypt's functions, along with an index and glossary. 4. Exit : : For more information, wholesale quotations, or ordering, please email : your requests to schek(a)airmail.net (Walter Chek), Subject: Quick@Crypt : < Inquiry> : - -- Mark Rogaski <wendigo(a)gti.net> 100,000 Lemmings GTI GlobalNet System Administrator Can't Be Wrong! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMVMsog0HmAyu61cJAQHGGAQAxa1n7zXlD49TH7SlQTRGlRdEp2QGmvTt Vcdp/9VrbXqNIhSHQC5yxT7rc7SDOS2mvyFx9kz4rraiBOEMt5wZpGHkExpXMFHS T8mrHHrONEUjLDiiGZSLWtCPTjd0OZ4Qp/251OJxT8kZ9P/Sdmx3NueG6dlMFMpm m5qz167wK3M= =0+8d -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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