December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: CDA decision TOMORROW 9 am! (fwd)
by Blake Wehlage 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:47 AM 6/12/96 +0000, Omegaman wrote: >Guess I was logged in at the right time this morning. Judges ruled >3-0 that the CDA is unconstitutional. hooray. > >I thought a little rejoicing was warranted. :) > >me >------------------------------------------------------------ > Omegaman <omega(a)bigeasy.com> > PGP Key fingerprint = 6D 31 C3 00 77 8C D1 C2 > 59 0A 01 E3 AF 81 94 63 >------------------------------------------------------------ > > :-) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Blake "Pokey" Wehlage Age-13 Gaa- 3.69 (for ice hockey goalie) <jwilk(a)iglou.com> My page- http://www.iglou.com/members/jwilk.html Quote- Does whiskey count as beer? -Homer Simpson

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Re: whitehouse queries files on political enemies
by Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bill Frantz wrote: > > OBCrypto: William Safire, in his 6/10/96 column on this subject, says, > "Under Freeh, the anti-encryption zealot hand-picked by the man whose name > was used on the phony requisitions, the Justice Department's most > confidential file room has become a walk-in closet for White House pols." Well Safire should know about Nixon type dirty tricks, after all he worked for Nixon as a speachwriter and wrote a book about it:- http://econ158.berkeley.edu/williamsafire.html http://econ158.berkeley.edu/haldeman.html >From a pro-crypto point of view it is more advantageous to accept the administration position that the requests were made in error. After all that demonstrates that the govt. is not capable of admininistering sensitive information properly even when it is what must surely count as the most sensitive information the govt. tracks. If the system is ineffective in protecting the files of the party workers of opposed factions then it is unlikely to protect the secrecy of less sensitive files. This aside the general problem is one of authorisation. The current USGovt security system is based on principles of security clearances and "need to know". But how does the guardian of various personal files know _who_ needs to know? This is a _very_ hard problem, one that I for one would like an answer to. Unfortunately the USGovt is not like a computer system where the authorisation policy for information is enforced via ACLs or the like. Perhaps it should be Phill

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121. Anonymity is important to Internet users who seek
by strick (henry strickland) 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From the CDA decision: ( http://www.vtw.org/speech/decision.html ) Anonymity 121. Anonymity is important to Internet users who seek to access sensitive information, such as users of the Critical Path AIDS Project's Web site, the users, particularly gay youth, of Queer Resources Directory, and users of Stop Prisoner Rape (SPR). Many members of SPR's mailing list have asked to remain anonymous due to the stigma of prisoner rape. Anonymous remailers are mentioned in this secction: Obstacles to Age Verification on the Internet 90. There is no effective way to determine the identity or the age of a user who is accessing material through e-mail, mail exploders, newsgroups or chat rooms. An e-mail address provides no authoritative information about the addressee, who may use an e-mail "alias" or an anonymous remailer. There is also no universal or reliable listing of e- mail addresses and corresponding names or telephone numbers, and any such listing would be or rapidly become incomplete. For these reasons, there is no reliable way in many instances for a sender to know if the e-mail recipient is an adult or a minor. The difficulty of e-mail age verification is compounded for mail exploders such as listservs, which automatically send information to all e-mail addresses on a sender's list. Government expert Dr. Olsen agreed that no current technology could give a speaker assurance that only adults were listed in a particular mail exploder's mailing list.

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Re: No Kidding
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> The absence > of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably > produced a kind of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put > it with such resonance at the hearing: > What achieved success was the very > chaos that the Internet is. The > strength of the Internet is that > chaos.[23] > > Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of > our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the > unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. This is beautifully eloquent. I hope it will be persuasive with the Supreme Court. Does anyone know which witness came up with the quote above? Obviously it resonated with the judges. Hal

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UK's Trusted Third Parties
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to Professor Denning's pointer to this URL for the UK's Trusted Third Parties regulatory intent. http://dtiinfo1.dti.gov.uk/cii/encrypt/ June 11, 1996 STATEMENT ON HMG POLICY CONCERNING USE OF ENCRYPTION ON PUBLIC NETWORKS PAPER ON REGULATORY INTENT CONCERNING USE OF ENCRYPTION ON PUBLIC NETWORKS 1. Summary The Government recognises the importance of the development of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) with respect to the continuing competitiveness of UK companies. Its aim is to facilitate the development of electronic commerce by the introduction of measures which recognise the growing demand for encryption services to safeguard the integrity and confidentiality of electronic information transmitted on public telecommunications networks. 2. The policy, which has been decided upon after detailed discussion between Government Departments, involves the licensing and regulation of Trusted Third Parties (hereafter called TTPs) which will provide a range of information security services to their clients, whether they are corporate users or individual citizens. The provision of such information security services will be welcomed by IT users, and will considerably facilitate the establishment of, and industry's participation in, the GII, where trust in the security of communication has been acknowledged to be of paramount importance. The licensing policy will aim to preserve the ability of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies to fight serious crime and terrorism by establishing procedures for disclosure to them of encryption keys, under safeguards similar to those which already exist for warranted interception under the Interception of Communications Act. 3. The Government intends to bring forward proposals for legislation following consultation by the Department of Trade and Industry on detailed policy proposals. [Balance snipped] ---------- Professor Denning also has comments dated June 11 on the NRC cryptography report: http://www.cosc.georgetown.edu/~denning/crypto/NRC.txt

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HACKERPUNKS-OWNER ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As we expected - our Announcement-posting generated a number of lame Followups. Our Answers follow: in LACC-Diggest Bill Unruh <unruh(a)physics.ubc.ca> wrote: >Actually if I were a "haker" I would be far more worried that this is actually >a FBI/CIA/NSA/... run site. It sure would be a convenient way to pick off >whole loads of self styled hackers and tie them in to ongoing investigations. >"nobody can find out who hides behind alpha.c2.org accounts" >or who hides behind alpha.c2.org HACKERPUNKS-OWNER ANSWERS: Actually if you were a "haker", you should be worried REGARDLESS of who runs this List: FBI/CIA/Stasi agents can trivially create an alias like FBI(a)alpha.c2.org and SUBSCRIBE to this List. They would know all Information that is available to the List-owner, except the subscriber-list. But, the subscriber-list is useless because of Anonymity. Even if alpha.c2.org were an FBI run Site, its Users must use Anonymous-remailers to access it. That preserves their Privasy. in Newsgroups David Sternlight wrote: >Remind anyone of the police department that anonymously announced a >resisters' seminar on how to make bombs so they could find out who to >watch? HACKERPUNKS-OWNER ANSWERS: how can they find out who to watch if subscribers are Anonymous?? SINCLAIR DOUGLAS N wrote in cypherpunks: >I don't have a C2 account, and don't really want to pay for one. >I trust someone will put the hackerpunks archives on the web so >the rest of us can read them. HACKERPUNKS-OWNER ANSWERS: alpha.c2.org Accounts are FREE. Ecafe Mixmaster Remailer wrote in cypherpunks: >There was a minor error in my earlier post. If someone were to notice a >node on the internet receiving a bag with L(In)=L(Posted) *before* any >other nodes on the internet, then one could guess that node had a user who >was the owner of Hackerpunks. HACKERPUNKS-OWNER ANSWERS: There is a minor Error in your current Post. L(In) <> L(Posted) because of prepended Headers. For Protection, hackerpunks List receives some Junk-mail, automatically trashed, to create Noise. HACKERPUNKS-OWNER _A_D_V_I_S_E_S_ Sameer Parekh and GhiO to add Code to their Alpha-remailer to insert Random-Size Header 'X-Random-Noise:' before Encryption of Messages sent to Users of alpha.c2.org Accounts. Other Remailers are advised to change the Size of these Header Lines. HACKERPUNKS List-bot adds a Random-size Kookie to every outgoing Message to preserve Privacy of Subscribers.

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PBS show
by Blake Wehlage 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey did any of you guys(and ladies) see the PBS show called, Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires in Silicon Valley. I thought it was very interesting and informative. (That's coming from a 13 year with the teachers say have no future) If you saw it I was wondering your feeling on the show. Thank you. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Blake "Pokey" Wehlage Age-13 Gaa- 3.69 (for ice hockey goalie) <jwilk(a)iglou.com> My page- http://www.iglou.com/members/jwilk.html Quote- Does whiskey count as beer? -Homer Simpson

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Re: Kaos vs Control
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:34 PM 6/12/96 -0700, Martin Minow wrote: >A copy of the 11th needs to be on everyone's bookshelf. > >Martin. > > > The first volume (at least) of "The Encyclopedia Anglica" is available from The Gutenberg Project. It's the 11 ed. of the Brittanica but the name can't be used. DCF

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Re: Kaos vs Control
by minow＠apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May writes: > >See, all you doubters, "anarchy" is not so bad after all. > Check out the article on Anarchy in the 11th (or 13th) edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. It was written by Prince Kropotkin as a philosophical argument in favor of anarchy, and the editors saw fit to write a rebuttal footnote referring, as I recall, to the Haymarket (Pullman?) riots. A copy of the 11th needs to be on everyone's bookshelf. Martin.

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Re: PBS show
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:10 AM 6/13/96, Blake Wehlage wrote: >Hey did any of you guys(and ladies) see the PBS show called, Triumph of the >Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires in Silicon Valley. I thought it was >very interesting and informative. (That's coming from a 13 year with the >teachers say have no future) If you saw it I was wondering your feeling on >the show. I caught the show and thought it was pretty good, all in all. I personally despise the term "nerd," but I won't get into that here. (Except to say that "nerds," "geeks," and "dweebs" are terms of insult, and anyone who accepts this labelling by the media and by "jerks" (a comparable term, by the way) is proably just a dweeb anyone, so I guess the term is accurate.) Most of the portrayals of Silicon Valley history was pretty accurate, especially the 1975-78 "Homebrew Computer Club" days. (I used to go to about every other one of these, mainly in '77-78, where I sometimes passed out free samples of the 8080 and stuff like that. A friend of mine at the time was one of the Apple II motherboard designers, and another was the first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.) The first "Byte Shop" opened in late '75 or early '76, a few miles from my apartment, so I used to go there to see the new machines. This is the store that bought the first batch of Apple Is (not IIs). Mainly I remember the Altair, the IMSAI 8080, the Cromemco Dazzler, and so on. Those were exciting times. But, having worked at Intel during those heady days, and being pretty active these days on the Net, I'd have to say the Web, Net, Java, etc. are *just as exciting* (if not more so) than those days. So, the best years are probably yet to come. (BTW, I also had an ARPANET account in 1973, when there were only several sites as nodes.) Back to the show... Cringely (actually, Stephens) is pretty good at doing sidebars explaining computers. So, a pretty fair history of the industry. Probably the best such show I've seen. --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, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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