December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: washington post notices archives
by medea＠alpha.c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Andrew K. Bressen wrote: >we here at HKS.net have today received a cease and desist >letter from the washington post regarding editorial copy >of theirs that was evidently posted to c'punks and then >abosrbed into our c'punk archives. IMO, if you didn't remove the material from your archives, the Washington Post wouldn't be able to press the issue any further. Email posted to a listserv enters into and becomes the possession of the public domain. If they ran a search looking for their material, then obviously credit was appropriately given to the quote. The Unabomber's Manifesto was posted on the Net. Since the Post published it in its entirety, then they have a right to tell me to remove it if I had downloaded it? Personally, I think the letter is full of the stuff one would step into out on the range where the deer and the antelope play. Medea ============================================================ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + |---------------------------------------------| + + | The mind is its own place, and of itself | + + | Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven | + + |---------------------------------------------| + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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math patents
by tien＠well.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In reply to the message excerpted below: I believe Jim's not looked back far enough. My recollection from law school is that the law was friendly to math patents in the period before the Supreme Court weighed in. There were some PTO denials, which courts reversed (I think the Court of Claims heard these back then). So I think the trend was toward patenting processes even if mathematical until Gottschalk v. Benson. It's a conceptually messy area because "processes" have long been patentable (like the Morse telegraphy/Bell telephony patents) but the Supreme Court saw the Benson application as violating the doctrine against patenting "laws of nature." Lee From: jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> Date: Sat, 06 Apr 1996 14:52:12 -0800 Subject: Re: So, what crypto legislation (if any) is necessary? At 01:07 PM 4/6/96 -0500, Black Unicorn wrote: >> I contend that had he talked to Phillip Zimmermann in 1990 or so, he would >> have told Zimmermann that "It's illegal to write an encryption program using >> RSA, because it's patented! You'll never get away with it!" > >I would have indicated that "you're going to face the prospect of >intellectual property litigation, and that can get nasty in the extreme." One thing I've never heard is an explanation of how computer software and especially mathematics went from "extremely not patentable" in the early and middle 1970's, to "patentable" once Messr's Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman invented a piece of mathematics that the government wanted to deny to the public. How convenient.

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Re: carrick, Blowfish & the NSA
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 21:12 4/13/96, Jerry Whiting wrote: >Our marketing tag ("Encryption software so good, the Feds won't let us >export it.") may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that's OK >because having others adopt carrick is our real goal. Building up a >strong U.S. user base is OK while we wrestle with the NSA over how big a >key length we can export. Their initial response was that 40-bit keys >were specific to RC2 and RC4 and that Blowfish was another kettle of fish >(bad pun intended). > >Either way we're going to publish an extensive FAQ on carrick that should >allow someone to not only work with carick but perhaps clone our efforts. >IANAL but my understanding is that publishing such a document, with or >without source code, and making it publicly available to non-U.S. citizens >is perfectly legal. I hope you are still going to publish source for US citicens? -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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Re: [Political Rant] Was: examples of mandatory content rating?
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"unicorn(a)schloss.li" "Black Unicorn" 14-APR-1996 00:37:25.93 >I tend to disagree. Ratings are generally consumed by parents and >otherwise custodial entities. The largest and richest market anywhere >has always been the 18-25 range, or 18-30 depending on who you talk to. >I don't have figures, but I think that internet users probably >prodominantely fall into 18-25/18-30. This age group generally could >care less. It's much easier to search by subject or key word than by >paying attention to ratings in any event. There is no real market for >ratings. If there were a strong market incentive for it, there would be >no need for government intervention, which there clearly is. Sure some >schools will purchase the services, maybe some parents, but this is a >long leap from major market and industry making entities. I'm not sure if the major use for ratings may not be searching for material that the raters don't like. I'd be interested in many things the fundys don't like, for instance. One could even do this via one of the "services" that mails out listings of places to be locked from kids - just sign up one of your anonymous employees, and get the data and put it on your anonymous web access site. Doing so - if you don't admit you've done it - may be cheaper than doing the research yourself. Of course, you'll need to check out each such site to make sure that it isn't a decoy that they've inserted. -Allen

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key bit lengths
by Jack Mott 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In Applied Crypto, it talks about thermodynamic limitations of brute force attacks. I did some calculations and it looks like it will take, given a perfectly effecient computer, the combined energy of 509,485,193 average supernovas to brute force a 256 bit key. I was just wondering if there are any theoretical ways around this. I am just talking about plain brute force here, not attacking other weaknesses. -- thecrow(a)iconn.net "It can't rain all the time" RSA ENCRYPTION IN 3 LINES OF PERL --------------------------------------------------------- #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

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Re: Blowfish ain't broken
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:28 AM 4/14/96 -0700, Jerry Whiting wrote: >> Perry writes: >> They won't sweat over it long. Blowfish was broken. > >My understanding is that Blowfish using only 3 rounds, not the full 16, has been >broken. And yes, duplicate entries in an S-box are weak keys. > >carrick uses the full 16 rounds and we check for weak keys. I thought there was a variant of Blowfish that fixed the problems that had been found with the algorythm. I believe it was called "Blowfish-SK". (I need to check my archives for further details.) Are you using the original Blowfish or the improved version? --- 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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NOS_tal
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

4-14-96. TP: "Was McCarthy Right About the Left?" Citing the Venona program decryption "revelations," Nicholas von Hoffman polemicizes about the consequences of the left's refusal to face that McCarthy may have been more truthful about communist infiltration of the USG than he knew. Von Hoffman recounts the high points of the 50-year history of left dissimulation and avenges the right with a nostalgic nukem dead red-under-bedder: As yet unexplored is the possibility that certain features in the political culture of the American left are hand-me-downs from this period. The "elitism" and didacticism that so gall its opponents may be a morphed version of the communist doctrine of vanguard leadership. The liberal penchant for government gigantism, complex bureaucracy and central planning may also have taken root in the liberal admiration of the Soviet system in the 1930s. NOS_tal

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[NOISE] Consolidation of threads ...
by olbon＠dynetics.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

OK, I have a proposal that consolidates two threads that have been discussed recently. How about proposing legislation that mandates that a byte is now 9 bits instead of 8. This would allow the ninth bit to be the decent/indecent bit, thereby solving all of our problems. Clay --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Clay Olbon II | Clay.Olbon(a)dynetics.com Systems Engineer | ph: (810) 589-9930 fax 9934 Dynetics, Inc., Ste 302 | http://www.msen.com/~olbon/olbon.html 550 Stephenson Hwy | PGP262 public key: on web page Troy, MI 48083-1109 | pgp print: B97397AD50233C77523FD058BD1BB7C0 TANSTAAFL ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: washington post notices archives
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) >1. Expect more and more of these sorts of copyright "cease and desist" (or, >as I like to say, "decease and cyst") orders, as newspapers and magazines >use search engines to find their stuff. Expect some "automated searches" to >be done routinely, even offered as services by third parties. ("Find >infringing copies...make $1000 a week in your spare time.") >4. Suppose the HKS archives were actually offshore, in the Cayman Islands >or in some place that doesn't recognize copyright law in the same way most >Western or Berne Convention countries do? In addition, what if the material is edited down to try to conform to fair use, as I do? First, you're still going to find it using the search engines - and will have to filter it out. Second, the hoster of the data, if locatable, will have to decide whether to respond to a legal threat and delete something that may be within such guidelines. Third, such guidelines may vary from country to country. >5. Suppose access to such archives is done via Web remailers, and the >location is not easily determinable? (To be sure, lots of hits means >traffic analysis will reveal the location....the same general problem with >"reply-blocks," of course.) To what degree could a remailer sense that its remailings are getting too predictable (susceptible to traffic analysis)? If it had some means of doing so (without keeping enough information to make subpoenaing it a profitable proposition), then it could do something like the random looping-back remailer chains, on an automatic basis to the degree needed to offset analysis. -Allen

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Infrared photography
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>No, Clay, I did not say that the flesh RADIATED near IR. (it does, but only >a very tiny amount.) The identification system I describe would probably >use 940 nm IRLEDs to illuminate the face, and a silicon CCD detector to pick >up the images. Or it would use ambient near-IR, perhaps from the sun or a >tungsten filament or fluorescent lighting, along with an IR filter to ensure >that the CCD camera picked up only the IR bands of interest. It would be >easy to check out the results: Put such an IR-passing filter in front of a >CCD-based camcorder, and take a picture of somebody. > >Incidentally, this simplicity shows the flaw in using this kind of system as >an identifier: Since people's faces are usually visible, and can be >photographed in the near-IR surreptitiously, it isn't clear how to prevent >faking a face which appears to have the same IR signature and pattern. I remember in a booklet from Kodak on their Ektachrome IR film, there was a picture of a forearm where all the veins were made clearly visible. This film is near infrared (if I remember, the red color on the film corresponds to around 1100 nm). Veins and artery identification might be possible, maybe, since fingerprint identification is possible. A friend of mine developped a quite functionnal algorithm doing just that in the late eighties. OTOH, the blood vessels patterns are probably much more constant, from individual to individual, than fingerprints. Just correct me if I am wrong. JFA PGP 2048 bits key at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID:C58ADD0D 52 96 45 E8 20 5A 8A 5E F8 7C C8 6F AE FE F8 91 Unsollicited commercial e-mail will be proofread at US165 $/h Any sender of such material will be considered as to have ac- cepted the above mentionned terms.

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