December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Crypto CD
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:53 PM 3/27/96 -0800, Matthew Ghio wrote: >alano(a)teleport.com (Alan Olsen) wrote: > >>It would be a nice thing to have if it is reletivly complete. Hopefully it >>can be created with a minimum of government interfearence. (But then, I >>have been xpecting alt.binaries.crypto to be created as well...) > >alt.binaries.warez.crypto has existed for a long time (at least on Netcom), >although I haven't seen any posts lately. I suspect many sites deliberately >exclude alt.binaries.warez.* to save disk space. I notice that Netcom takes *EVERYTHING*. (Including the incredibly bogus and silly groups.) Teleport has never, to my knowledge, taken that group. Teleport has since removed all of the remaining warez groups in an effort of moral excess. (After taking all of the groups in existance, including the forign ones that nobody on Teleport reads, and claiming they did not censor groups.) Personally I could care less about the warez groups (it is not as if you could ever find a complete program), but the crypto one would have been nice to see... --- 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: What backs up digital money?
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have to disagree somewhat with a few points Mike made. I would say that gold and diamonds do have intrinsic value, based on their beauty and the desire of people to own them. I think it is too simplistic to denigrate these desires as the product of advertising. The feelings that people have which make them desire these things are as legitimate as other forms of desire. Along these lines, I think one of the factors which made gold and silver coins accepted as money was their intrinsic value. Even without being certain that another person would take the coin, a person might accept payment in such a coin because of its inherent value to him. Other early forms of money, such as beads or tobacco, also had intrinsic value in their time and place. One area I would agree with Mike is that these items may not always retain their value, since part of it is psychological. And as with any other commodity, if new supplies became available their value would fall. This might be especially pronounced with gold and diamonds since part of their value is due to their intrinsic rarity. Diamonds as common as glass would not be worth much more. (Of course, government money as common as paper is worth the same as well, as hard experience has taught us.) A particular issue of "digital cash" could be denominated or backed by anything the issuer thinks there is a market for. Gold backed digital currency would have certain advantages and disadvantages. Currency could be backed by a basket of commodities, or a synthetic average of several countries' currencies. You would not exchange your dcash for a bushel of wheat and a barrel of oil, but rather for dollars or pounds equal to the market value of these commodities. These and more elaborate possibilites are no more difficult to imagine than mutual funds or stock market index futures, not to mention the more complex synthetic investments. Hal

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Re: Why Americans feel no compulsion to learn foreign languages
by mike＠fionn.lbl.gov 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Mar 27, 1:05pm, Rich Graves wrote: > Undeniably true. I think Tim's point was more, "Who cares? Everyone *I* > want to talk to speaks English." Maybe; & who someone talks to & how they do it is of no particular interest to me. However, he said something else: that foreign language speakers were unavailable to most Americans. This is easily shown to be false. That many other people in our English-speaking community also believe it is interesting. Often, they can provide counterexamples themselves without too much trouble (& you may recall that Tim May did). This says something about this culture. What, I don't know, but it's some kind of cognitive dissonance. It occurs to me that members of certain large language groups in the US, who don't speak English, sometimes make the same statement -- "Everyone I want to talk to speaks X". I don't know why this disclaimer is necessary, but please note that I don't think for a moment that you all are "bad" if your beliefs are in accord with what Tim May wrote. Nor do I think you should go out & learn some random language. > One may quibble with the wisdom or morality of such a statement, but if > the second statement is true in your case, then there is no reason you > should have to learn another language. Most upper-income Americans have no I'm not sure what the "second statement" is you're referring to. Anyway, there are a lot of reasons one might choose to study a foreign language, and many levels of fluency. There are many economic issues that could apply, & some non - economic arguments as well. There are very good reasons not to bother, as well.

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Re: National speed limits and expansion of federal power...
by Chevelle 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

let me tell ya' I live in Central Texas and regularly use I-35, which was the primary highway considerd for the bill. The speed limits were raised to 75 mph at increments of every 4 to 5 miles. By that I mean the minute you pass the sign that says 75 with good eyes you can see the one up ahead that says 65 or 55 and you might even catch a glimpse of the state trooper parked beside it. I personally think its a joke and an inconvience, I was totally for the the bill as it was stated but this "red light, green light" game is very disapointing. Just goes to show the government still can't do anything right. Chevelle out.... At 06:52 PM 3/28/96 -0500, Deven T. Corzine wrote: >At 06:06 PM 3/27/96 -0500, Deven T. Corzine wrote: >>Actually, the national government didn't even *pretend* it had jurisdiction >>here. Instead, they used an indirect approach -- they passed laws which >>denied some of the existing highway funding to states with higher speed >>limits than 55 MPH. (Later this limit was raised to 65 MPH, given some >>additional restrictions such as proximity to population centers.) > >At 03:12 AM 3/28/96 -0500, Chevelle wrote: >>It was only months ago that they passed a bill raising alot of speed limits >>to the 75mph range. > >To be precise, Congress repealed the laws which had pressured states into the >55/65 MPH speed limits. Once this happened, a number of states either took >advantage of it immediately to raise speed limits, or are considering it... >Other states don't intend to raise the limits. In Montana, you can now drive >at *any* speed legally, in the daytime. So if you want to go 100 MPH, head to >Montana... :-) > >Deven > >

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Re: WSJ on Big Java Flaw
by dmacfarlane＠zip.sbi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[snip] > > Mr. Felten said that unscrupulous people who discovered the > > flaw could boobytrap a Web page on the Internet, > > essentially seizing control of the browser software of any > > PC that tapped into that page. At that point, the hackers > > could read or delete an entire hard disk of data files. > > "The consequences of this flaw are as bad as they can be," > > he said.[..] > > The generalized halting problem comes to mind... > > Since it can be proved that there's no complete set of heuristics > to tell if a given program has a characteristic (such as "secureness") > then sooner or later someone will discover another security flaw. > > A question is whether a simple patch is made or if the set of heuristics > is widened (ie, learn from mistakes) so that similar flaws can be found > based on knowledge of that one flaw. Since this Java error is probably deep in the bytecode interpreter, the question is will Sun patch this *particular* problem, still allowing others, or will it have to rewrite the interpreter so that it enforces the language more rigorously? They are under pressure to make a "quick fix" (they've promised something in two days), but real security needs to be built in to a system from the ground up, with disciplline and thorough design. If they need to redesign their approach to implementing the bytecode interpreter, that could take weeks, months? BTW, its a testament to security through code review, as the Princeton team probably could not have discovered this deep flaw without looking through the code. David Macfarlane.

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NOISE: Scriveners Attack C-Punks
by Michael E. Carboy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Watch out folks... the scriveners are after us! No doubt in cahoots with teh exonites! ---------- From: Nibiru[SMTP:nibiru@columbus.co.za] Sent: Monday, February 26, 1996 1:32 AM To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: unsubscrive unsubscrive cypherpunks ------------------------------------------------------------------- NIBIRU E-Mail : nibiru(a)columbus.co.za South-Africa --------------------------------------------------------------------

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No Subject
by owner-cypherpunks＠toad.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here is an abstract of a report the German newsmagazine Focus published on March 11, 1996 (p. 16) - "Spaete Ermittlungen gegen Techno-Spione" (late/belated investigations against technology spies). I do not include a translation of the whole original text for copyright reasons. "Specialists of the German Federal Police Agency (BKA) have decrypted 44 floppy disks from the former [East German] Ministry for State Security" (MfS). A defector had handed over the floppies to the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) in spring 1990. The disks contain information on East German spies in former West Germany. Judicial inquiries against 29 suspects have started now. Apparently, the BKA got the data no sooner than 1994. This is because the BND did not tell law authorities about the floppy disks. German federal DAs learned about the data in late summer 1994 by chance. The article does not say whether the defector came over with the keys. - Probably not, otherwise prosecution should have started much earlier. It is likely that the extremely paranoic MfS used a cipher and a key length it believed to be sufficiently strong. According to Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography East Germany was quite aware of DES, it even produced DES chips. Another possibly strong algorithm used in the former Soviet block is GOST (a block cipher derived from the concepts of DES, also described by Schneier). Let us assume BKA specialists have broken the code using a combination of cryptoanalysis, brute force and good luck. They are policemen, not espionage professionals. Further, the BKA is much smaller than the FBI. Imagine what code breaking capabilities a well-funded, big intelligence agency should have then!

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Re: Why Americans feel no compulsion to learn foreign languages
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:31 PM 3/28/96, Alan Horowitz wrote: >Certainly, I believe TCM's proposition that there is no "economic need" >for an American to learn a second language. > >On the other hand, I haven't seen any demonstration of the "value" of >learning history. Yet, who would argue that ignorance of history is a >good policy to follow? Bad analogy. Studying a combination of world history and one's nation's history is an obvious thing to do. And good bang for the buck. Choosing a language is a much harder proposition. No single language stands out for most Westerners, at least not nearly as much as it once did. (Or one of several "top pick" languages, e.g., German, French, and Spanish.) My last word on this language topic will be this: far from being a closed, ignorant, immigrant-hating, shit-eating nation, as some of the usual America bashers have intimated, the decline of language skills reflects a decline in the "ethnocentrism" of the past. A few decades ago, one studied German to be a scientist, one studied French to be cultured, one studied Latin for unexplained reasons (just a joke), and one studied Spanish if not one of the others. As immigrant waves entered the U.S., and as the anti-Westernism meme spread amongst educators, Latin faded out, then German, then French. (All are still taught, but not in the numbers once seen.) Given the explosion of languages--Yoruba, Talegu, Tagalog, Russian, Korean, and on and on--the role of French, German, and to some extent Spanish is less clear than ever. (Spanish is admittedly a growing language, but not in technical fields...just a fact.) So, I am not surprised that American students have no desire to learn one of these languages. They'll have to search to find people to practice with, which they won't (on average, not at the 2-sigma point). While I don't deny the niceness of knowing Russian or Korean, the effort needed to achieve reasonable proficiency (beyond the simple words Bill Frantz was talking about....this thread is about actually learning a language, not a handful of phrases!) is not worth, in my opinion and that apparently of many others, the effort. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" 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: DESCRIBE
by Herb Sutter 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 14:27 03.26.1996 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >If you had an ounce of intelligence, of course, you would simply use >the automated unsubscription instructions you got when you >subscribed. Sadly for the rest of us, who will now have to deal with >your whining indefinately, intelligence is a commodity in precious >supply around this planet. The total intelligence on the planet is constant. The population is growing. --- Herb P. Sutter Current Network Technologies Corp. Senior Architect, Distributed Computing 2655 Benedet, Mississauga ON Canada Cell 416-618-0184 Tel 416-805-9088 Fax 905-855-7194

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Re: Crypto CD UpDate
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It pains me to often be the one who throws cold water on what seems to be a good idea, and what comes from a well-intentioned person. But I have to call 'em as I see 'em. And maybe I'm wrong. But here are my thoughts. At 10:16 PM 3/26/96, aba(a)atlas.ex.ac.uk wrote: >The idea of putting together a CD with crypto stuff is an excellent >IDEA, and one which I very much welcome. > >However a question .. are you (Ben) located in the US? If so... > >that rules out overseas buyers unless you fancy messing with ITAR... >Is it possible that you could come to some arrangement with some one >outside the ITAR fence who has a CD writer (any one reading have one?) >put together the same CD for those outside the US? A CD-ROM containing crypto programs, source code, etc. sounds like a nice idea. But it falls apart for various reasons. For brevity, I'll just list some: 1. The CD-ROM "freezes" the various programs, archives, etc. at the moment the files are finalized and the CD-ROMs are pressed (or burned individually on a CD-R, at somewhat higher per-copy price). If the author of the CD-ROM is not committed to updating the CD-ROM at frequent intervals--say, every few months--then the programs will exhibit "version decay" and be nearly useless. The next point is the reason. 2. The Web does a better job at making the latest versions instantly accessible. True, a CD-ROM will generally have faster access, but I care more about getting the _latest_ version of PGP, even if takes a minute or two to snarf off the Web. That I could get an _older_ version of PGP in fractions of a second off this CD-ROM is not compelling to me. (And fractions of a second is too charitable: in actuality, I'd have to locate the CD-ROM, dismount anything already mounted, mount the CD-ROM, search it for "PGP," etc. Probably not even faster than using Alta Vista and downloading.) 3. Where CD-ROMs really shine over modem alternatives is, of course, for very large files. Images, MPEG or Quicktime movies, etc. "Multimedia" being the operative term. For crypto, this is not an issue. (Except for list archives, where having a few hundred megabytes of articles might be nice. However, the absolute KILLER of this idea is the staleness problem mentione in Point #1: if the archives on CD-ROM lack the most recent month or two, their usefullness drops precipitously. If the CD-ROM is a year old, and no updates have appeared, then its archives are useful only to list historians. (In other words, I will almost always go to up-to-date archives on a Web site rather than dusting off a CD-ROM that was issued several months ago. And a CD-ROM every several months is more than I think we can hope for. Or pay for.) 4. The Web approach allows powerful search engines, links from other pages, and--importantly--multiple jurisdictions. The PGP could come from the U.S., the Digital Postage code from Sweden, and so on. And, again as noted in # 1, the developers could keep improving and iterating the code. And so on....I can think of more problems, but these are enough. I have no interest in quashing the enthusiasm of Mr. Holiday. Nor do I have the power to do so, except by my comments. But I'd hate to see him invest several months of his life preparing this CD-ROM only to find that it is a novelty item, ordered by some people to be "cool," with actual downloads of the latest versions of software being done the way it is now done--the Web. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" 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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