December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Is Chaum's System Traceable or Untraceable?
by bryce＠digicash.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- You know, even though current ecash uses on-line clearing, it is only necessary for the _payee_ to be on-line at that time. Thus it is entirely possible with current ecash for a payer to load his portable computer up at home with e-coins and then make a purchase a convenience store on the way to work _without_ having a networkable computer. Well-- I mean the computer needs to communicate with the convenience store, but it doesn't need full-scale Internet access. Does anyone on cpunks or ecash have an Apple Newton? I know that they come with infrared-- what are the specs on that communications device? And about the Newton itself: can it compile ANSI C code? How much RAM? Permanent storage? Speed of crypto operations? Thanks, Bryce #include <stddisclaimer.h> /* I don't speak for anyone but myself. */ - -----BEGIN GOODTIMES VIRUS INNOCULATION----- Copy me into your .sig for added protection! - ----- END GOODTIMES VIRUS INNOCULATION----- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2i Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.1b2 iQB1AwUBMZ4wY0jbHy8sKZitAQG/TAMAlF1WftbM8UT1+AUvZJBuX7BimZUOtRqg 2vWYVW2ADuKvntXdsDV0NqSq05/sqDZmhh/iOUmB6bWl22FUrwBbzk2gedUbB1w2 330B6pa1IU1Q5IluNIE2IKFkMZ/KHJ9m =5W5l -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Netscape 128-bit
by Sean A. Walberg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Unfortunately, you have to buy it. I got a email from their Customer service department about that yesterday. Sean > Do you have to buy the 128 domestic version of Netscape? They used to > make it available on their FTP sites, but now they are all 40-bit > exportable versions. If you don't have to buy it what is the procedure > to get it? > > -Erinn L.T > > =================] Will work for RAM [================== | Sean A. Walberg | PGP key | C programmers | | Computer Engineering ][ | on | do it in | | umwalber(a)cc.umanitoba.ca | servers | libraries! | =============] http://www.escape.ca/~sean [=============

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Re: SEVERE undercapacity, we need more remailer servers FAST
by loki＠infonex.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It seems very reasonable to allow posting only through nym-servers. That gives a point at which payment can be received, and an account which can be removed for abuse. Since the nym is password protected, it also help build the reputation of the nym. -Lance At 5:46 PM 5/15/96, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote: >From: IN%"hfinney(a)shell.portal.com" "Hal" 15-MAY-1996 19:23:06.71 > >>Maybe the operators can try to plead that they are like "common carriers" >>and should not be blamed for what people post. Still it is going to take >>deep pockets at best to prevail in this dispute, and it isn't even clear >>that the remailer will win. Maybe the lawyers on the list could comment >>on legal liability of a remailer used to repeatedly post copyrighted >>material, whether Scientology scriptures or Microsoft Word binaries. I >>don't see how it can happen. > > Part of this problem may be solved through the proper decisions on >the liability of ISPs for material on them. The concept would seem to be >extensible. If a country has A. good laws on the subject and B. a pretty good >court system - e.g., one in which it's difficult to sue and easy to defend - >that country would seem to be suitable for setting up a remailer front end. >Other remailers can just be used for chaining, and can't be proven to have >carried a message (even unknowingly) without defeat of the remailer system >via traffic analysis. (A reason for remailer operators to run automatic >mailing scripts, BTW.) > >>This was the basis for my suggestion that remailers may have to stop >>supporting posting of messages, and instead be used for private mail >>between consenting individuals. Granted, this would probably eliminate >>99% of non-cover remailer traffic. But I would argue that as long as the >>core functionality is there of letting people communicate with each other >>anonymously and consensually, we would still offer an important service. > > In other words, a remailer that would only forward mail to someone if >the email address in question gave consent? Mailing lists and mail-to-news >gateways can still be signed up by their operators under such a system, and >it's possible the remailer might be charged along with the operator if >copyrighted material was posted. > >>Encryption hides the contents of the messages you send from >>eavesdroppers. But they can still see who you are communicating with. >>Remailers extend privacy protection beyond "what you say" to "who you say >>it to". When used with pseudonym servers and some of the extensions we >>have discussed here over the years (maildrops, etc.), they can allow the >>anonymous two-way communication that is needed for real privacy. > > How much use is a pseudonym if you can't practically use it for >building reputation capital? It's hard to do that when you can't send to anyone >but individuals, instead of to publically available sources. > One idea would be bonded pseudonyms. If you put up an adequate bond to >the remailer front end operator (to A. pay fines and B. cover any legal fees), >then you get to send to public fora. This would also be profitable for the >remailer operator, if he/she got to keep the interest (assuming deposit into >some investment). > -Allen ---------------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell loki(a)obscura.com PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server. Mixmaster, the next generation remailer, is now available! http://www.obscura.com/~loki/Welcome.html or FTP to obscura.com "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche ----------------------------------------------------------

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Interactive Week exclusive - White House to launch "Clipper III"
by rodger＠interramp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The White House is about to answer recent attempts to liberalize encryption exports with a proposal of its own. Documents obtained by Interactive Week show the Ciinton Administration has been lobbying key Republican committee members to compromise on encryption through a policy that looks very much like previous commerical key escrow efforts. This time, however, the administration has proposed a new, licensed network of certification authorities and escrow agents to control access to strong encryption abroad. The newest proposal is contained in a 24-page White Paper, a draft of which hit Capitol Hill earlier this week. Much of the administration's "key management infrastructure" assumes a similar network of certification authorities abroad. CAs would link public keys to their owners, and could serve as escrow agents for users' private keys, as well. The two would not have to be under the same roof, however. An overarching "Policy Approving Authority" would supervise all subordinate CAs and escrow agents. Since US escrow of exported products pose well-known problems for privacy and business concerns, the US is proposing foreign governments get into the act as well. If other governments acted as escrow agents, the Clinton White House argues, interlocking agreements among governments would protect all their common security concerns while giving non-US citiczens access to US encryption products. The ultimate goal, the White House says, is to allow export of anything at all, so long as keys are escrowed with an agent of its approval. The White House is evidenty relying on OECD initiatives for much of this to happen. Specifically, the "Clipper III" paper says that: U.S. companies can export software programs that use keys that are 64 bits of data long, if they agree to escrow keys that unlock the encryption in the U.S. or with an appropriate agency abroad. Manufacturers can export hardware that use 80-bit keys to encrypt data, if keys are escrowed. Large U.S. companies can escrow keys and not rely on third parties. Reaction is as before. Civil libertarians are already denouncing the White Paper, while pro-escrow forces are praising it. Staffers to Commerce and Judiciary committee call it the same old proposal, but with a large bureaucracy behind it. Quoted in the Interactive Week article: David Sobel of Electronic Privacy Information Center, Dorothy Denning og Georgetown U. and Stewart Baker, former NSA counsel. Hill staffers also quoted on background. The URL for the complete article is: http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/daily/960518y.html Will Rodger Washington Bureau Chief Interactive Week

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Re: The Crisis with Remailers
by loki＠infonex.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 9:00 AM 5/18/96, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote: >"Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri(a)netcom.com> writes: >> 1. there is no economic incentive. > >So, add the code to mixmaster (and even the old style remailers) to >collect e-cash as it passes on the anonymous message. Then this will >be a good way to accumulate some e-cash, and a number of people will >try running remailers for this very purpose. Witness the recent >Usenet spam by someone advertizing a for-pay remailer. > I was invited to the digicash API design meeting precisely to make sure it could be used in remailers. It will not be using the current API. The problem is that Mixmaster requires exact knowledge of the size of every object in the message, to maintain constant message size. I could set aside room for one, two, three coins, but there is no guarantee that the payment will be made with only that many coins. The current API is going to be high level. It will does not allow the program to know anything about the internals of the payment. I need to be able to specify payment of amount X using no more than N coins. As soon as I have that level of control, you will see postage in Mixmaster. -Lance -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMZ40x/Pzr81BVjMVAQFdTQf/VtRl3MEm+YfIYxsJdEhnv9lsL26S00oG RTvJiVbzyriGmWBhQY14ITQjnPrNNnRYfrmxVT2nRAEpfC8a63TqD5BN2eeUOSWU g/eagI3mWqlQssjCpeOEq6pzBcvKCTu2nECfAWCVN87MA7thq4Xj3haFjv+NP2K6 i8Bq/JRz6oaq35Bz0lqskBemiUOLXJOUK93LXFpw3VlTces+vDMSCWXwtkhAOLLO yav12MbRJRt/heUotsl6wzp2tdEV4xlsciedUOfk8fQVDSvh31J2xyvaupepHosC UUCz3sc8f4icWXCtBkimLyzgp/pNg7E9rN//Ps8ZzQquKPcr/7GtAQ== =BC1f -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ---------------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell loki(a)obscura.com PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server. Mixmaster, the next generation remailer, is now available! http://www.obscura.com/~loki/Welcome.html or FTP to obscura.com "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche ----------------------------------------------------------

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PLEASE HELP ME GO OUT OF THIS LIST!!!!!!
by Marc Escalier 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

how to go out of this list. please help me, it would be VERY NICE.

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Re: "Too cheap to meter"
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:03 PM 5/18/96, Brad Dolan wrote: >On Fri, 17 May 1996, Timothy C. May wrote: > >> Alan's irony is well-placed. The most egregious repetition of the "too >> cheap to meter" nonsense is George Gilder's "dark fiber" vision...a vision >> of "infinite bandwidth" to all users. >> >> Guess what? If Gilder's "dark fiber" is ever built, there are a lot of >> folks who will "fill it" rather quickly. Canter and Siegel were just the >> beginning. "Too cheap to meter" goes away pretty quickly. >> >> --Tim May > > >The same George Gilder that is Newt's buddy? And part-owner of Valujet? I don't know about the ValuJet part, but the Newt part is right. George Gilder is an interesting thinker, and has written a bunch of books and articles on the implications of technology, microcircuitry, and networks. One of his books was, for example, "Microcosm." I'm sure a search of his name will produce an abundance of information. My criticism of his "dark fiber" advocacy is that it smacks of the typical "techno-Rapture" point of view, epitomized by the "too cheap too meter!" gushings of the 1950s and the "nanotechnology will rebuild our bodies out of diamond and we'll live forever" gushings of today. Fiber optics is a Big Deal, make no mistake about it. But the notion that the bandwidth will be so high that everyone can be hooked up to the same "party line" (the core idea of the "dark fiber" thesis) and just drop stuff in and pull stuff out...well, think of how such a channel can be flooded. (So, is it really "free" or not? Obviously it can't be. If it is, I can think of many who will choose to flood it, for their own reasons.) --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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Re: Senator, your public key please?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:38 PM 5/18/96, bryce(a)digicash.com wrote: ...(my points elided)... >All of these are products of misconceptions between using the >WoT to certify identities, versus using it to certify how much >you trust a person to certify someone else's identify, versus >using it to certify arbitrary other qualities about a person. Bryce, we've differed several times before about the web of trust, especially "man-in-the-middle" issues. This looks to be the same sort of issue. I personally don't see key-signings as mainly useful for verifying the "true name" of someone whose key I sign. (I don't check birth certificates, passports, driver's licenses, etc.) Rather, I view _my_ key signings as forms of vouching, or endorsement. Not of all views, naturally, but as a statement that the person whose key I am signing is someone I know and "trust" (in the sense that the key belongs to the person I "know." Thus, I know Eric Hughes, even though he may actually be Fritz Kacynski, drop-out math student. > >For example, there is no reason why the hypothetical racist "Tom >Metzger" would sign no black people's keys. A key signature >(PGP style) is just an assertion about the identity of someone. >Haven't racists engraved markings on people's clothes, >buildings, land, bodies and other belongings in order to >identify the owners? So why not do the same for keys. Sure, he could do it. I'm saying that there's also a significant chance he has no black friends or no blacks he deals with on a regular enough basis to even be _asked_ to "vouch" for them, much less _agree_ to sign their keys. (This is the way it really does work in the real world, at least for many of us. People who ask me to sign their keys from afar will get no response from me. I don't even care if they fax me their birth certificates, etc. Only people I have met or interacted with directly, or who seem to be known by enough of my friends, get their keys signed.) Now I can certainly see other folks signing keys on a different basis: upon presentation of a valid passport, comparison of footprint with that on birth certificate, etc. Such "credentialling agencies" will be valuable players (to some) in the ecosystem of key-signers. I'm just saying that I'm certainly not in the business of checking credentials for free, and hence only sign keys for people I know fairly well, or who know my own friends fairly well. >This is illustrative of how much confusion reigns about keys, >certs, nyms, signatures and cetera right now. > > >I hope that TCMay is pointing out how _most_ people lack a >proper understanding of the differences, rather than reflecting >his own lack of understanding. Bryce, I respect your views on this and MITM issues, but the fact that we view things differently (and that Phil Z. views things differently from you, and perhaps from me) should not always be ascribed by you as "reflecting lack of understanding." >Phil Zimmermann was confused about this, I think, when he wrote >"Trust is not transitive.". Some kinds of trust _are_ >transitive (with a coefficient, of course). Hm. I wonder if >there are kinds of trust whose transitivity coefficient is 1? Well, I wrote up my thoughts on how work on "belief networks" is less confusing that the term "web of trust." I believe different agents will use these belief networks in different ways. Some will be focused on the issue of True Names and will calculate beliefs on the basis of how much they think the key-signers are being diligent enough in checking identities. Others will use belief networks to convey trust that one is not a government agent (a practical example being the use of PGP and webs of trust in the jungles of Burma, where I am quite sure the "keyrings" did not deliberately include government agents, regardless of how well they "proved" their identity! There is no single ontological interpretation of belief networks. --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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Re: Senator, your public key please?
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:44 AM 5/18/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >What if, for example, Sen. Leahy _did_ end up in the web of trust for Aryan >Nation? Even if he never intended it, this could have some severe PR >repercussions. It could happen today. All anyone has to do is down-load his key, sign it, and then up-load it again. This is exactly analogous to slanderous attack on someone's reputation. As soon as people realize that the mere fact that a key has a signature does not mean that the key-owner solicited the signature, the problem goes away. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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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Re: crosspost re remailers
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:07 AM 5/18/96 +0200, Benjamin Brochet wrote: >WHO IS THE MODERATOR OF THIS LIST ? > >I've been victim of a spoofing from a german.... he suscribed me to 2200 >mailing list... also I'd to be unsuscribed from your list ! > There is no moderator. I am just a subscriber like yourself (except I asked for it.) Did you get a welcome message which included information like the following? >If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, >you can send mail to "Majordomo(a)toad.com" with the following command >in the body of your email message: > > unsubscribe cypherpunks ben(a)bb-soft.com (Benjamin Brochet) > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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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