December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

NEW: E-LEX - electronic lexicons
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For all you dictionary attackers out there... ;-) Cheers, Bob --- begin forwarded text Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 22:17:03 -0500 Reply-To: "Sean M. Burke" <sburke(a)babel.ling.nwu.edu> Sender: NEW-LIST - New List Announcements <NEW-LIST(a)LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU> From: "Sean M. Burke" <sburke(a)babel.ling.nwu.edu> Subject: NEW: E-LEX - electronic lexicons To: Multiple recipients of list NEW-LIST <NEW-LIST(a)LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU> E-LEX on listproc(a)listserv.acns.nwu.edu E-LEX is a new email list for the discussion of the design of dictionaries with electronic interfaces. Topics may include: * the possibilities of hypertext/hypermedia for the electronic interface * adaptation of machine-readable dictionaries to user-friendly human-usable form * issues in conversion and adaptation of paper dictionaries to electronic form The list's new homepage is at http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~sburke/e-lex/ To subscribe to E-LEX, send a message to listproc(a)listserv.acns.nwu.edu containing this line in the message body: subscribe E-LEX Your Name Owner: Sean M. Burke sburke(a)babel.ling.nwu.edu ------- Use this information at your own risk. For more information and disclaimer send E-mail to LISTSERV(a)LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU with the command INFO NEW-LIST in the body. --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

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"Soft Targets" as Schelling Points
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The connection should be clear, but in case it is not: many soft targets are Schelling points for terrorist actions. Putting yourself in the mind of a terrorist or militia crazy or whatever, where would you attack? The Olympics, obviously. (And security officials of course see the same Schelling point, hence the unprecedented security measures and presence.) Given that most Olympic events are well-guarded, etc., what's the next target to look at? Crowded public gatherings, where the "message" can still be delivered and where security measures are problematic. There are tens of thousands of such soft targets/Schelling points in an "open society," and it is unreasonable to expect to defend each one of them. (Costly, too.) And if they are so-defended, the attacker moves to other targets. Keep your head down. --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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Is Colossus out of date?
by Martin Minow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You may recall recent comments by Attorney General Janet Reno where she notes that exportable encryption cannot be broken in reasonable time by modern supercomputers. With that as background, you may find the following paragraph interesting. It is from the Financial Times article on Colossus. http://jya.com/coloss.txt > [Tony] Sale describes [Colossus] as a large electronic valve > programmable logic calculator. "No lay person would argue > that it is not a computer," he says. Furthermore, because > it wasted no time retrieving a stored program it was almost > as fast as a high-speed modern computer whose nominal > work-rate is 1,000 times quicker. A simulation of Colossus > which Sale ran on a top-of-the-range Pentium PC took twice > as long as the real thing. Martin Minow minow(a)apple.com

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Re: Twenty Beautiful Women
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:19 PM 7/27/96, David Sternlight wrote: >Here's another: > >Twenty beautiful women are to pass before you, one by one (or 20 handsome >men). You see only one at a time. You cannot speak to them. After seeing >any one, you must pick her or reject her. If you reject her, you cannot >change your mind. If you pick her the exercise terminates. > >What is the optimal strategy for insuring you get the most beautiful woman >possible under the circumstances? Look at the first 1/e of them, or about the first 36.8% of them. In this case, the first 7 of them. Then pick the first one after this group which is better than any of the first group. While there is some chance that one will get to #20 and find that none of #8-20 were better than #1-7, this strategy is the best compromise between "committing too early" and "waiting too long." --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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Public vs. Private Munitions
by Erle Greer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here's how I understand it: The U.S. Government, concerned only with making America a safer place for us taxpayers to live in, wants to regulate domestic encryption in order to have access to the content of all transmissions. Their theory is that any cryptosystem that is stronger than their cryptanalysis systems can be used in illegal transmissions and should be considered munitions. Theoretically, the government should only be have the resources to control commercially-available, public encryption systems. Who is to stop anyone from designing their own cryptosystem for personal use? If the government intercepted a transmission from this private cryptosystem, and could not decrypt it, would they assume that it must be considered munitions? Similarly, anyone could send uniformly-formatted random garble that could also be considered munitions, or at least waste the governments processing time. Why are we so worried about government regulation? Can't we just devise our own cryptosystems and just don't sell them or make them publicly available? vagab0nd(a)sd.cybernex.net http://ww2.sd.cybernex.net/~vagab0nd/index.html Visit web page for public key.

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Re: fbi, crypto, and defcon
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Short review of the Fedz show at DefCon. Most of the San Francisco Computer Crime squad was in attendance. SA Black and Butler's presentation was classic good cop/bad cop (respectively). Nice quote by them in the Vegas paper about how all hackers aren't bad. They were even doing recruiting, and had the little hacker puppies eatting out their hands for a mug, t-shirt, or minature badge. It wasn't determined whose surveillance goodies were being installed in the drop ceiling of the conference room at 4:30 AM. The "hotel maintenance" guy certainly hauled ass when one of the official DefCon Goons showed up (classic textbook time for raids, black bag jobs, etc). Tsk, tsk. And me without any TSCM gear. Points to the Fedz for great psy-ops (especially the quote about how the "new" FBI is more sensitive). Points off to quite a few hackers who don't have a historical context of government abuse and are pretty damn easy to manipulate. All in all, probably more entertaining than most shows on the Strip. Obligatory comment on hackers compared to cypherpunks. Zero to no political savvy. Extremely poor organizational and communication skills. Nearly clueless on social issues. These would be the hackers. Yeah, yeah. I know there are exceptions. But all in all, I'd rather hang with C-punks.

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ANNOUNCEMENT: nym.alias.net enters beta testing
by lcs Remailer Administrator 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I'm pleased to announce that the nym.alias.net pseudonym server has now entered the beta-testing phase, and seems quite stable. Nym.alias.net offers several interesting features: * Public-Key encryption of all received mail. Once mail has gone through nym.alias.net, no one can read it except you--even if you have been sending your mail to a newsgroup and your reply-block and remailers become compromised. * Support for multiple, probabilistically-weighted, reply blocks. These can be used for redundancy or to foil traffic analysis with decoys. * Replay detection. This foils replay attacks, but can also be used for higher reliability if you send redundant copies of a message through different remailer chains. * An option to receive only fixed-length messages (by splitting up large messages and padding small ones with garbage). * An option to sign mail you send with the remailer's public key, so as to give some assurance of authenticity without having to publish your own PGP public key. * Support for finger [pending DNS approval]. You can choose to make your nym's PGP public key available to all who finger its E-mail address. Right now you can test this by fingering at 18.26.0.252. In addition, experimental nym.alias.net support for Premail is now available (in the form of a patch to premail 0.44). With this patch, premail will store your nym's PGP key on encrypted keyrings. This allows you to publish a PGP key for your pseudonym without the danger of your identity being revealed to someone with access to your main PGP keyrings (or a backup copy of them). To obtain more information about nym.alias.net, finger <nymhelp(a)anon.lcs.mit.edu> or send mail to <help(a)nym.alias.net>. To get information about using premail with nym.alias.net, finger <premail-info(a)anon.lcs.mit.edu> or send mail to <premail-info(a)nym.alias.net>. These documents are also available on the new nym.alias.net web page: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~raph/n.a.n.html Please report all bugs to <admin(a)nym.alias.net>. I'll also be glad to consider feature requests, particularly from anyone interested in developing any more client software. Enjoy! mix-admin(a)anon.lcs.mit.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMf6dcUTBtHVi58fRAQE4NgP/SoKSqHxobEHuyWl6lXVAHgk9yqNS/WAD jUfKYGodThr93kJZkmreyIHrWgbromJJlXo6MPq9KpZzIh85uHRzBPRSh293hfUo ta8/sdZsW1+uoEkAs8JUWlwAEGo+bfmgRnFswf80pAPClpbGo52DAKyLKfdCaFps kQ+4hoouUvo= =qEWa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Freeh Testimony 7/25/96
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I wish someone had asked Freeh directly whether he granted, in saying: >First and foremost, the law enforcement community fully supports a >balanced encryption policy that satisfies both the commercial needs of >industry and law abiding individuals for robust encryption products [...] that law abiding industry and individuals have a legitimate need to keep information private from the US government -- and especially the FBI. +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme(a)acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |PGP: E0414C79B5AF36750217BC1A57386478 & 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2| | "Officer, officer, arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song." | +-------------------------------------------- Jean Ellison (aka Mother) -+

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Re: Usenet Conference on Security
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:55 PM 7/26/96 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote: >While the Department of Justice guy (whose name slips my mind) was saying 4 >horsemen over and over (really an oversimplification of his position), The person was Scott Charney.

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Re: You know it's getting late when... (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi all, Forwarded message: > Subject: Re: You know it's getting late when... > Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 18:36:38 -0500 (CDT) > From: ichudov(a)algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) > > > > Ostensibly, one of the reasons for having a free and fair political system > > is so people will not be inclined to throw bombs and plot violent > > revolution. Grandly ignoring this, that reporter seems to take the > > diametrically opposite tack: A totalitarian government can best avoid > > bombings and violence. > > > Actually the graph goes like this: > > ^ Non-State Terrorism > | > | ..-.. > | /~ \ > | .-~ \ > |..---/~ ~-. > +------------------------------------------------> Level of Totalitarianism > > ^ State Terrorism > | > | ------------------------------------- > | .-~ > | .-~ > | .-~ > |/ > +------------------------------------------------> Level of Totalitarianism > So we should take your personal opinion as fact? What statistics do you base this on? What are the vertical scales, number killed? What is the horizontal scale measured in, number wanted to kill? I suspect it simply is not possible to measure such a phenomena as terrorism as anything other than a simple counting game. The problem becomes quite quickly, what qualifies as terrorism? Consider (to some) a trivial example. There are 20 million cats and dogs killed each year because somebody was irresponsible. The vast majority of these are or were pets (not feral or wild animals as some would claim) which persons simply didn't want anymore. Now there is somewhere around 250 million people in the US. This means that 1 out of 10 (roughly) are costing the rest of us about $50 ea. to take care of their pet 'problem'. I see no difference in having my money taken via taxes (where most of it comes from) for this than having somebody come and take $50 for whatever reason by kicking my front door in. Why am I being forced to pay this money to pay for somebody elses lack of discipline and simple human empathy? Jim Choate

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