December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: TILT! Counterfeit pachinko cards send $588 million down the chute.
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Follow-up to Peter Wayner's post yesterday: The New York Times, May 24, 1996, p. D8. American Banknote Gets Into Pachinko The American Banknote Corporation said yesterday that it was developing optical-reading technology for a group of Japanese companies to help prevent counterfeit prepaid cards in the pachinko business. Pachinko, which is similar to pinball, is played in some 18,000 parlors in Japan and has grown in popularity in the last few years. Morris Weissman, American Banknote's chairman, said American Banknote's holographics unit was making cash-value cards and machines to read them. The cards and machines will be tested in Japan in July, and "if certain criteria are met," more will be installed in August, he said. He said cards would authorize a person to play a game of pachinko and win money. The cards, he said had "specific algorithms and codes we believe are almost impossible to duplicate." -----

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Mission Impossible
by SINCLAIR DOUGLAS N 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I saw Mission Impossible last night. It deals with some cypherpunks issues, as the plot centers on anonymous BlackNet style operations on the Internet. Unfortunately, it does it badly. Particularly silly is the reference that a STU-III is a security penetration device. The main hacker is called Luthor, though he doesn't look a thing like Lex. The Usenet is dealt with in a laughable manner -- a grep of the entire 'net for "Job" doesn't turn up a single hit. Having said all of that, lots of things explode. It's good in THX.

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RE: Truth can sometimes be harmful...
by Blake Coverett 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >The Truth? > > > > "The coordinates of Hiroshima are...." > > Q.E.D. Oh no, can the return of abombpunks be far behind? :-) regards, -Blake (who figures if your can't count or measure it, it's an opinion)

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The Anti-Briefing...
by pcw＠access.digex.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm sure the "Briefing" is quite impressive and it includes several strong arguments for government surveillance. There are bound to be more than a few kids that are alive today thanks to eavesdropping and the quick thinking of folks in FBI, NSA et al. That being said, I'm sure that there is also an "anti-Briefing" that can be given that illustrates that the huge cost of redesigning the phone system and forcing businesses and people to operate without protection. Here are some examples from the recent press that I think are good arguments for why strong crypto won't change the status quo. 1) A recent video tape on the news showed some convicted bad guy doing drugs and having sex with one of his convict buddies. They just happened to be in a side room of the prison that had a video camera. Some people tried to make political hay by saying that the prisons were really coddling the prisons too much. But prisons already have all of the enforcement tools that the police wish they had. They can strip search people without a warrant. They can read all of their mail and listen in to all conversations with visitors who aren't their lawyer. But there are still drugs in the prison. So how do they expect to eradicate drugs in the real world? 2) There are persistent rumors that Tim McVeigh et al were under some sort of surveillance. I know of no facts to back this up. I've heard some people say that they feel it was part of a sting operation that failed because the bomb actually went off. Who knows? But the World Trade Center bombers were under surveillance and that failed. This doesn't show that surveillance is bad, it just shows that it isn't perfect. 3) Pachinko machines and cell phones have both used weak crypto. Whoops. The gangsters figured out how to break the crippled system. There must more examples but I'm typing from memory. The point is that full surveillance rarely stops crime altogether, but it may make a dent. The question is whether it is worth redesigning our phone system and computer networks to introduce even more weakness just because the police can use this weakness. Some might argue that if weak crypto can save one child's life than it is worth it. This is a strong, sentimental argument, but it really doesn't reflect the reality of the tradeoff. We could spend a lot more money on airlines, trains and cars and save a few kids lives, but the cost could be phenomenal. The fact is that government enforced weak crypto is a tradeoff. We pay for the ease of the police surveillance because we make life simpler for crooks who make their living eavesdropping and circumventing security systems. The big question is whether the tradeoff is worth it.

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ecash representation
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In my last article, I slightly screwed up. A signed 32 bit fixed point number, with two places of precision (less than you need when calculating things like interest and what have you, but lets be generous) has a maximum representation of even less than I off the cuffed -- a mere 21,474,836.48. This is hardly sufficient for accounting. However, floating point is even less useful. .pm

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Re: Children's Privacy Act
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:45 AM 5/24/96, Rich Graves wrote: >I recognize that criminalizing the free flow of information is like trying >to stick your finger in a dike, but every little bit has an effect. In >this case, I'd call it a positive effect. > >I was certainly disappointed to hear a couple of cypherpunks the other day >discussing for-profit offshore data havens full of personal information >that is illegal to collect in the US as a business opportunity *they* were >interested in pursuing. I just can't see myself doing that, for anybody. >Gubmint or private, doesn't matter. These off-shore data havens, possibly in Anguilla, possibly elsewhere, have long been a motivation for crypto anarchy. "Illegal to collect in the U.S." is the operative phrase. (P.S. Cf. the sections in my Cyphernomicon for a discussion of how the main U.S. credit-collecting agencies (TRW Credit, Transunion, and Equifax) have various cozy relationships with the U.S. government and intelligence agencies. Many of the laws about collection of data are ignored when needed. Ask the credit agencies why and how they willingly participate in the falsification of credit histories, and even the creation of credit histories out of thin air.) --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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COMMUNITY CONNEXION ANNOUNCES WORLDWIDE BETA-TEST OF THE ANONYMIZER
by sameer＠c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For Immediate Release - May 24, 1996 Contact: Sameer Parekh 510-601-9777x3 COMMUNITY CONNEXION ANNOUNCES WORLDWIDE BETA-TEST OF THE ANONYMIZER BERKELEY, CA - Community ConneXion, Inc., The Internet Privacy Provider, announced today the worldwide Beta release of the "Anonymizer" service for the World-Wide-Web. The Anonymizer allows people browsing the web to be completely anonymous when making web transactions. It protects people from having the sites they visit discover their email address, hostname, type of computer, and other potentially sensitive information. "The Anonymizer finally brings Caller-ID-Block to the Internet," said Justin Boyan, who designed and implemented the system. "If you don't want records of your activities being kept by every web site you visit, you should definitely be using this service." Community ConneXion ("C2") is glad to be able to provide such a service to the Internet community free of charge. C2's President, Sameer Parekh, commented on the availability of this service, "We feel that people's privacy is too important to make people pay directly for basic privacy services. Therefore, we've built The Anonymizer with a model that will allow people on the Internet to use the basic level of service at no charge." Future enhancements to the system include support for Netscape's Secure Sockets Layer, which will provide web surfers with the ability not only to hide their identity from the remote site, but to hide the identity of the sites they are browsing from their employer, university, or ISP. The threat of a university clamping down on the ability of its students to browse the web freely is very strong, and C2 plans to make this service available in order to protect against such threats. The Anonymizer can be accessed at http://www.anonymizer.com/. Users need only click on "BEGIN SURFING ANONYMOUSLY" and then choose a site to visit anonymously. All their web transactions from that point on are anonymized. As the service is only in Beta phase at this point, users may experience slow connections or downtime. As the service moves to Production release, these problems will be eliminated. Community ConneXion is the leading provider of privacy on the Internet. They provide anonymous and pseudonymous internet access and web pages in addition to powerful web service, virtual hosts, and web design consultation. Information is available from their web pages at http://www.c2.net/.

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Re: Runtime info flow in Java
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 20:06 5/23/96, Norman Hardy wrote: >I am interested in your paper because you define the problem as we do. >There are some who think that capability architectures are the solution. >There is little information on how to solve these problems with >capabilities. I am trying to find time to address some of these issues. I walked away from your presentation of KeyKOS with the impression that a capability system to be secure it would have to be implemented at the OS level. Can you build a such a system on top of an insecure OS, as Java would have to do? TIA, Disclaimer: My opinions are my own, not those of my employer. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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Re: Cyber-Anarchy
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:14 PM 5/23/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >My point is actually not so much one of claiming credit for something I've >been involved with since 1988, as being somewhat critical of the >all-too-common tendency I see of _renaming_ something without adding any >new content. > >Jim Bell calls his set of ideas "cyber-anarchy," and certain journalists >have picked up on this (as with the Australian article). > >But with the exception of the one variant of anonymous markets, namely, >"assassination politics," most or all of the other ideas of his >"cyber-anarchy" seem to be encompassed by the already-existing term. I don't tend to carefully distinguish between "crypto-anarchy" and "cyber-anarchy" although the former is a subset of the latter. Also, one big influence on society has nothing to do with encryption at all: The fact that people are beginning to get their news and information from other ordinary people (as opposed to newspapers and TV networks) is not dependant on encryption, at least in a country that's supposed to be blessed with the 1st amendment. The deathgrip the politicians have on the public as a whole will at least start to be weakened by non-crypto "cyberanarchy" effects like this, although perhaps it would be better named "cyber-minarchy." I think we can attribute the difficulty the establishment is having passing a Clipper-type law to the portion of cyberminarchy that has nothing to do with encryption. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: [SCARE]: "If you only knew what we know..."
by minow＠apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Simon Spero writes: >If I were planning such a briefing I'd probably concentrate on real cases >that were cracked due to NSA SIGINT - especially terrorist groups >operating with only limited state sponsorship > You might find hints at "the briefing" in some of the recent terrorist-porno novels by Tom Clancey (for example). Also, "Spike" by Arnaud de Bouchgrave (apologies for possible misspelling) is an interesting book to read between the lines The briefing might go something like this: "Remember the terrorist bombing of the Libian Embassy? Well, "they" were planning to bomb the <??> embassy, but we intercepted their messages and prevented the attack. Martin Minow minow(a)apple.com

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