December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Watch your language, Shabbir.
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:58 AM 4/14/96 -0500, Mike McNally wrote: >s1113645(a)tesla.cc.uottawa.ca wrote: >> > Look, very carefully, at the last paragraph quoted above. Mr. Safdar >> > says, "No reasonable person is objecting to the FBI's right to conduct >> > a wiretap." >> >> That's right. Because no reasonable person thinks they can convince Congress >> or the Supremes otherwise. It isn't impossible, but energies are best spent >> elsewhere, like getting the Burns bill passed. > >The choice of words was exceedlingly poor if that's what he really meant. >Though I agree that it's unlikely any LEA will give up capabilities it's >grown to imagine is has a "right" to have, I haven't stopped objecting. > Exactly! I think the issue is important enough so that we really ought to develop new wording, something that far more accurately reflects the bulk of our opinion towards wiretapping. For years, I've looked at it this way: Before the telephone era, "all" search warrants were probably issued for a specific address, and had to be served for a limited time period, a few hours or less. The owners of the location being searched were aware, at the time the search was going on, that the search was occuring. Moreover, once that search ended it was no more and those searched were aware of it. Unlike this, and quite unlike any warrants which preceded it, wiretaps: 1. Take an almost unlimited time period, compared to a 1-hour search. (Yes, they do come to an end, but...) 2. The users of the telephone line are not informed, while the search (wiretap) is being done. 3. To my knowledge, albeit limited, targets of wiretaps are NOT informed, subsequent to the tap, that they have been wiretapped. Therefore they are denied the opportunity to complain, even after the fact. I see no legal reason why wiretaps should have the "features" listed above. There is a certain practical reason they can: Due to the nature of wiretapping, it is not physically necessary to show up to do the tap, or tell those targeted, or tell them after the tap has been disconnected. However, it seems very unlikely that the mere fact that an invention allows a kind of search that was possible before, should automatically change the interpretation of the Constitution to allow that search. If a new invention allowed the cops to walk through walls untraceably, would that automatically mean that the normal protections that search warrants are supposed to provide are no longer valid? I don't think so! Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Anybody know of a WinNT Remailer?
by Daniel Bender 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm not sure if this is really the right place to ask this, but... Does anyone know of a remailer that will work on Windows NT??? Dan

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Blowfish ain't broken
by Jerry Whiting 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Jerry Whiting writes: > > One reason we chose to use Blowfish as the basis for carrick is that > > it _is_ a new algorithm. One has to assume that the NSA et al. has > > tools optimized to crack DES and possibly IDEA/RSA. At least let's > > give them something else to sweat over. > > 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'll sleep at night. Jerry Whiting

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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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