December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: whitehouse web incident, viva la web revolution
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

hallam(a)Etna.ai.mit.edu writes: > As you know very well it's Dr. My apologies. From now on I will refer to you solely as Dr. Phill Hallam-Baker, PhD. > and as you also know, signing a futures, options or any other type > of contract is an open ended risk. One doesn't "sign a futures" contract. The risk is also not always open ended by any means. If I purchase 50 unleaded gasoline contracts, my risk is strictly limited -- I cannot lose more than the value of the gasoline, and that would only be if it became totally worthless (an unlikely event). If I sell an uncovered contract, things are different, of course. With options, if I buy puts or calls, again, my risk is totally limited -- I cannot lose more than the cost of the contracts. > That is how the person purchasing the contract has the theoretcial > possibility of unlimited reward. Er, no. You have potentially unlimited reward in ANY purchase, and limited risk. If I buy a box of cornflakes and next week cornflakes suddenly become worth $1,000,000 a box, well, I've experienced reward, but my risk was at most the cost of the cornflakes. > >Of course they know. There just isn't anything that can be done. There > >is no proof. Its more or less as though one finds a man with gunpowder > >stains on his hands, and a bullet embedded in the wall of his office > >and human blood soaking the carpet. You can't prove that he killed > >anyone. You can never get a conviction. But you can know. > > Its called circumstantial evidence and it leads to a conviction provided the > name of the defendant isn't O.J. Simpson. No, it isn't. If there is no body and no one knows who you have shot, the rules of Corpus Delecti pretty much dictate that you aren't going to jail. You cannot be charged with the murder of unknown persons when there isn't even any evidence of what happened (it could very well have been someone being accidently injured while you were showing off your gun collection and they might have done just fine). You don't even have to say what happened -- you are under no obligation to testify, you know. Now, your neighbors will probably talk badly of you forever, but you won't be convicted of anything. > It would certainly be enough to arrange congressional hearings, subpoena half > the Whitehouse staff and demand every document in sight. What documents can they subpoena? All of Hillary Clintons documents are available. It is known what she traded and when. Without a witness who will say who did the bribing, or broker records showing the counterparty who was doing the bribing, nothing can be done. You seem to assume that every crime in existance can be prosecuted. They can't. Hillary Clinton can claim to be the victim of a very odd set of circumstances, which is effectively what she has done, and we have no way to put her in jail. That doesn't mean, however, that we have to believe her. > Speculating in derivatives is not something I am particularly > interested in, having seen the losses of some people in this > building who got caught in the Netscape short squeeze I'm not > particularly inclined to rush into that market. Netscape options were not available at the time that the shorts got hurt. Selling short is not a derivatives investment. You don't seem to have much of a deep knowledge of these markets -- at the very least you speak of them in a manner guaranteed to produce derision from professionals. > >Switching the tickets was the fraud. Taking bribes was also a crime. > > Perry, Perry, you are off at it again. You are making allegations you cannot > back up. You are right. The human blood might have been from the blood bank, and the bullet might have been an accident. Its fucking unlikely, though. > You have hypothesised that there were multiple tickets but have no > proof, Correct. That is why Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton aren't in jail. However, court proof and proof good enough for me aren't the same thing. > All you can point to > is that a person with a net worth of several million They had a considerably smaller net worth at the time. Most of the Clinton's net worth appears to have come from dirty political dealings over the years -- things like the Cattle Futures bribe laundry, Rose Law Firm overbillings or dealings with the Arkansas state government, etc. Not a shred of it can be proven in court, of course. > made a tidy profit speculating in cattle futures with the aid of > some astute financial advice. No one out there that I know of who does this for a living has ever seen anyone make that much money in short term speculation that way. George Soros, Paul Jones and all the rest would be envious of the performance she had in the markets. I don't know anyone who can articulate a theory of why the trades were made when they were that comes from "astute thinking". They are seemingly random. Thats probably because they WERE random. > If you are to make such serious allegations against anyone you should be > prepared to back them up with something more than heresay and name > calling. As I've said, the evidence is compelling. It just isn't proof. Its just like the bullet, the blood, and the powder burns on your hands. No body and no missing person means no jail, but it doesn't mean that one has to go about thinking what one is looking at is perfectly innocent. > Just because it might have been possible to conceal a bribe does not > mean that you have evidence that a bribe was given. If this was Richard Nixon no one would be questioning what the money was. I see no other explanation for what the money would have been. The fact that her supposed advisor on these trades was the attorney for Arkansas's most important company, Tyson Chicken, is a bit on the suggestive side. Again, it is not proof, but proof isn't needed. > It is not unusual for lawyers to dabble in speculation. It is also > not unusual for clever lawyers to have friends who can give good > advice. If you can find anyone on earth who can give that good a bunch of advice, please let me know. Several hedge fund managers I work with would probably pay me for their name. I don't know anyone who has EVER performed that well in the markets. Its nearly impossible. > Consider that anyone on cypherpunks might have made a tidy profit by > realising that certain network ventures were likely to realize > substantial profits for those dealing in the market. It dosen't take > a genius to look at the rise Sun's stock price Could you have made 100 to one on that in a couple of months, though? Sure, its easy to make 20% or 30% on your money a year. Its hard, but many people do it. Making 10,000% in a few weeks is impossible. > Oh come off it Perry, the Washington media do not need proof or even > evidence to have a feeding fest. They did for a while, but when it became obvious that the evidence was not going to lead to the court room, it ended. Besides, most of the media in Washington are registered Democrats. 89% of the Washington press corps voted for Clinton from what I've read. Your attitude seems to be "you can't prove anything so you must assume that they are innocent." My attitude is "I can't prove anything so they can't go to jail, but that doesn't mean I have to believe that they are innocent -- in fact, I'm an idiot if I believe that." > I think that given Perry's ad-hominem attacks and the fact that this > has nothing to do with cryptography that its about time someone sent > Perry a Perry-gram. Cypherpunks no longer is a cryptography mailing list. Its a sewer. Perry

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Re: Markoff in NYT on NTT/RSA chip
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:33 PM 6/5/96 -0000, nelson(a)crynwr.com wrote: >David Lesher writes: > > > So Motorboatarola puts chips in the domestic MTSO's. > > For the international ones, they leave the chips out. > >Crypto hooks, or more properly, crypto pads. This raises a question: If you provide a place for a crypto chip but don't install it, shouldn't you be able to export it? But the software analogy, crypto hooks, the government is trying to restrict them. This is why I think the latter interpretation is flawed: Historically, the mere fact that a system can interface to another one that can do crypto can't be used to restrict it. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: whitehouse web incident, viva la web revolution
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

hallam(a)Etna.ai.mit.edu writes: > Well why don't you do that and come back with the results eh? You have to > actually _talk_ to them for the knowledge to transfer Perry y' know. I know the results. 99% of them laughed about the whole thing for weeks. The poster caricature of Hillary Clinton with a crystal ball and a thought ballon filled with cattle that I saw on one floor was particularly amusing. The thing was a universal joke. I never heard anyone who would be nicer than to say the whole thing was extremely suspicious. > You still don't understand, the $1000 is not the stake, it is merely > the deposit. The stake is Hillary's entire net worth, that is what > she is betting with. Gee, Mr. Hallam-Baker, it seems your ignorance about what she was trading (I believe you thought it was "options" before) also extends to an ignorance about how the futures markets work or how securities accounts work. > Rubbish, thats only 25 contracts sold without a loss. Depending on > the market one usually takes a profit when selling a contract. Making that kind of return in day trades in the cattle markets? You out of your ever living mind? Its not like there was even any basis for her trades that she could articulate. Thats because the trades were made without any basis, in matched pairs. (By the way, learn what a contract is. A contract is not the same as a trade. You are sounding thoroughly ridiculous.) > These are not "one in a million trades" Perry, they are the sort of > trade that one would expect to make in an underwritting capacity for > a commodity market. You ARE out of your ever living mind. The average individual account holder at Refco "blows out" (that is, loses their entire stake) within six months of opening their account. Refco is one of the more reputable places to trade futures. You are simply an ignoramous, talking totally outside your league. Have you ever so much as bought a futures contract or an options contract? Have you even ever opened a securities account? > >I will state this for the record: Having examined the evidence, I > >would say that even a non-expert who was reasonably informed about how > >the futures markets work would have no choice but to conclude that > >Hillary Clinton's trading pattern was impossible without some sort of > >fraud being committed. > > So you think that the Republican's in Washington haven't figured out > what Perry Metzger has? Of course they know. There just isn't anything that can be done. There is no proof. Its more or less as though one finds a man with gunpowder stains on his hands, and a bullet embedded in the wall of his office and human blood soaking the carpet. You can't prove that he killed anyone. You can never get a conviction. But you can know. Well, it was announced, and the media discussed it, and Hillary gave her teary eyed press conference cynically wearing a matronly outfit, and she gave her usual raft of "I cannot recalls" and "I don't remembers" and given no additional evidence, the whole thing ended. > Perry, its the crux of your case, you are claiming that Hilary > committed fraud but you do not know whether the responsibility for > covering the trades is on the broker or on the client. The fraud was in the ticket switching, so it makes no difference that the margin requirements were not made. The other crime was, of course, bribery. However, without records or information, there is no way to prove any of it. The mere fact that all the records from the brokerage were mysteriously destroyed should make you wonder. > You are mouthing off that Hillary was illegally trading without > putting up margin when you don't know whether or not that is a > crime. Switching the tickets was the fraud. Taking bribes was also a crime. I have no concern as to whether the margin requirements issue was criminal -- it was probably only a civil violation. In any case it makes no difference -- there is more than enough crime here to go around. Perry

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Re: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
by jfricker＠vertexgroup.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Whois this Bell anyway? Hasn't he been communally kill filed yet??

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Re: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:43 PM 6/5/96 -0400, Duncan Frissell wrote: >Yeah and they busted Jack London for publishing "The Assassination Bureau, Ltd". Do I really have to point out that London was writing the better part of a century ago, in a substantially different legal and cultural environment? (Heck, his socialism made more trouble for him than anything else.) >Advocating the general practice of killing one's opponents is as legal as >church on a Sunday. The War College (or is it the NDU these days) does it >all the time. And they, of course, are The Government, who Protect Us from the Evil Terrorists. Ditto for the heroic BATF agents who only burn bad nasty terrorists, honest. And all the rest. The rest of us (in the US) live in a country where the government can now pretty much declare anyone they like terrorists, and suspend habeus corpus on the flimsiest of grounds, and use evidence against foreigners that doesn't have to be presented to the accused, and all sorts of fun stuff. Hence my concern. I don't think that my direst claims _will_ come true. But I don't think I'm speculating anything that _can't_ happen, and I see much of it as increasingly likely in the light of the ongoing furor over crypto and related matters. -- Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce

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Zimmerman/ViaCrypt?
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has there been any news recently about what's going on with commercial versions of PGP? I've been toying with the idea of buying the Windows version from ViaCrypt just to have a PGP that doesn't need to shell out to DOS each time it runs, but I'm curious as to where, if anywhere, things seem to be going. -- Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce

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Re: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
by mccoy＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Duncan wrote: > At 10:41 PM 6/4/96 -0700, Bruce Baugh wrote: > >I think there's a non-trivial chance that this list could be shut down and > >anyone who's made interested sounds in the idea brought in to assist the > >police in their inquiries. > > Yeah and they busted Jack London for publishing >"The Assassination Bureau, Ltd".[...] > > Advocating the general practice of killing one's opponents is as legal as > church on a Sunday. The War College (or is it the NDU these days) does it > all the time. As long as that person is not the President of the United States (at least for U.S. citizens.) This was the issue which initiated this thread, the implied threat made by our favorite nutcase. jim

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Re: whitehouse web incident, viva la web revolution
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:17 PM 6/5/96 -0400, Hallam-Baker wrote: >rather than reasoned argument. His dislike for the Clinton is >well known - he recently accused the administration of being >fascist. I know of no evidence that the Clinton administration >has a genocide policy, it is an insult to the 10 million civilians >murdered by Hitler to use the term facist simply as a term of abuse, >especialy if it is being used as a substitute for an argument. Fascism has no intrinsic link to genocide. It is a theory of economics, basically, in which the state has ultimate authority over production and distribution without (as in socialism) actually _owning_ the means of production or distribution. This is generally accomplished through cartelization, the creatin of industry-wide councils in which the representatives of the most powerful firms set policy in conjunction with the representatives of the government. The US has been at least moderately fascist since the 1920s (Hoover was a big fan of cartelization, and pushed it actively). While the mechanisms of the modern regulatory state aren't those of classic fascist theory, in practice most strongly regulated industries in this country operate _exactly_ the way fascist theory says they should. And various of Clinton's policies have, in fact, been fascist in this sense. The man has no doctrinal commitment to fascism (under that name or any other), but in practical terms virtually all modern Western politics are either fascist or socialist. None of this is secret lore, by the way. -- Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce

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Triple-DES chip idea: built-in 1DES-cracker
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It just occurred to me that companies which are designing Triple-DES chips should spend a small chunk of their chip area and design time on building in features for fast single-DES key search. As in Matt Wiener's design, this would include logic to generate a sequence of trial keys, and a circuit to evaluate the likelihood that the trial key was "interesting" after examining the trial plaintext. All of this logic would be on-chip and isolated from the pins of the chip, so it could run at high speed without any impact on the rest of the system. Then, as these chips are deployed into consumer boards or motherboards, a small amount of software plus the Internet will make distributed DES cracking feasible. Whenever the chip wasn't busy doing some "real work" encoding data for the user, it would be spinning its wheels cracking a DES key for fun or profit. There are lots of interesting ways to build the comparison circuitry to examine the trial plaintext. The cheapest is to provide a single 64-bit register with the desired plaintext; that's what Matt's design did. Another cheap way would be to provide two 64-bit registers: a mask and a value. AND with the mask and compare to the value; it's interesting if equal. A second and/or third set of mask and value registers (and another ciphertext register) would permit the test to be across 16 or 24 bytes of ciphertext/plaintext rather than just 8. This would be useful if e.g. your mask is only looking to see that the high order bit of each byte is off in the ciphertext (indicating a probability of ASCII text). 8-byte comparison would give you a false-hit every 256 keys; 16-byte comparison would reduce that to one every 65,536 keys. Matt's chips froze when they got a match. A FIFO on the comparison output would let the chip continue to spin, looking for more matches, before software got around to reading the results of a previous hit. This would permit the chip to do DES-cracking in polled mode, without using interrupts. If the DES-cracking control registers were all disjoint from the ordinary DES operational registers, the DES-cracking could be initiated at any time, independent of the chip's encryption functions, and could then be checked-up on periodically, again without impacting the chip's normal functioning. As an extreme example, it could be started at system boot time, and checked only at system shutdown for hits. If you wanted to get truly fancy, the comparison should have eight 256-bit vectors, one per byte of plaintext. Each vector is indexed by the byte of plaintext, producing a single bit. If it's 1, that byte has an interesting value. So if you set only the bits corresponding to ASCII uppercase letters, then only a plaintext ASCII uppercase letter is interesting. So, the eight trial-plaintext bytes produce eight bits, one from each vector. Mash those together, and use this 8-bit value as an index to a ninth bit vector, which would let you specify which combinations of "interesting" plaintext bytes are truly interesting enough to stop the chip for. E.g. if you insist that all of the ciphertext bytes are ASCII uppercase letters, then all the eight bit-vectors will be set up the same, and this ninth bit vector will have a single 1-bit at index 11111111 (all bytes match). If on the other hand, any six out of the eight being uppercase is good enough for you, you'd put a bunch of 1-bits into the ninth vector (one for each possible way that six of the eight would match, such as 11010111 and 00111111 and 01111110). In nine 256-bit vectors (less than 300 bytes of on-chip storage), you could specify truly complex and useful conditions like "First two bytes of plaintext equals 0x2C07, next three bytes are uppercase ASCII, next byte is a don't-care, following byte is an ASCII digit". This would be great for matching up packet headers or partial plaintext, when looking for the key to encrypted network traffic. However, even these days, adding 300 bytes of static storage to a 3DES chip for this kind of ancillary function doesn't seem likely, until the market for DES-cracker boxes matures. (Each such box tends to consume large numbers of DES chips, making them an attractive target market for a chip vendor.) But some of the simpler des-cracker assists I mentioned should be easy to implement with only a few dozen bytes of static storage, some small circuits and maybe one more address pin, making them suitable for mass-market chips for PC's and such. John Gilmore, gnu(a)toad.com PS: Note that this feature would not affect the exportability of your chip, which was already nil. Design and build it overseas.

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Re: Micropayments: myth?
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:57 PM 6/5/96 -0700, Nick Szabo wrote: >Some electronic commerce projects promise dramatically lower transaction >costs, so that we can achieve "micropayments", "microintermediation", >and so forth. Is this achievable? > >Consider a feature fairly independent of the particular payment system: >the statement of charges. Here lies a tradeoff here between completeness >and complexity. On the one hand, merely summarizing charges creates >the opportunity for salami frauds, allowing widely distributed false or >exaggerated microcharges to go undetected. Furthermore, parties reading >only the summaries get no feedback by which they can adjust their behavior >to minimize costs. On the other hand, a statement too complex to >be easily read also allows fraud, error, and inefficient usage to >go unrecognized, because one or both parties cannot understand the >rationale for the charges in relation to the presumed agreement on >terms of service and payment. This is, of course, an opportunity for agents (programmed, or two legged) to use their superior knowledge of the service/technology/business to optimize service for ordinary people. > >There seems to lie here a fundamental cognitive bottleneck, creating a >limit to the granularity of billable transaction size whether electronic >or physical. One proposed solution to this has been "intelligent >agents". But since these agents are programmed remotely, not by the >consumer, it is difficult for the consumer to determine whether the agent >is acting the consumers' best interests, or in the best interests >of the counterparty -- perhaps, necessarily, at least as difficult >as reading the corresponding full statement of charges. By >sleight of hand we may have merely transformed the language of >the transaction as it needs to be understood by the party, without >reducing the complexity to be understood. Furthermore, the user >interface to enable consumers to simply express their sophisticated >preferences to an agent is lacking, and may represent another fundamental >cognitive bottleneck. I think that agent providers would gain reputations. Many consumers might trust an agent from Consumer's Union for example. If there end up being only a few types of agent, then I would expect to see an "arms race" between charging systems and agents. The providers would try to devise charges which maximize their profit, while the agents would try to get the best combination of service and cost for their users. This race would be similar to the situation we see in the telephone industry, with its continuously changing "special long distance deals". I assume any user interface will be in terms of the user's interests. Since these interests will change over time as the environment and user's knowledge change, the UI will be a hard problem. However, the UI will be another factor in the user's agent selection process. > >Telephone companies have found billing to be a major bottleneck. >By some estimates, up to 50% of the costs of a long distance call >are for billing, and this is on the order of a $100 billion per year >market worldwide. Internet providers have been moving to a flat fee in >order to minimize these costs, even though this creates the incentive for >network resource overusage. With the current low speed dialup connections, the savings on billing costs are probably greater than the costs of bandwidth "over use". > >A micropayments system assumes a solution to the billing problem. >If somebody could actually solve the this problem, rather >than merely claiming to have solved it via some mysterious >means ("intelligent agents", et. al.), the savings would be >enormous even in existing businesses such as long distance and >Internet service -- never mind all the new opportunities made >possible by micropayments. Even a cash based payment system will have costs. The lowest cost IP payment system I know of, Norm Hardy's Digital Silk Road, has the cost of increasing the complexity of the IP routers. There is no free lunch here. Whether you call it accounting, billing, or micropayment; it is an additional function which must be performed by a piece of code with stringent performance requirements. Regards - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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