December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

No Subject
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have noted a clear change in the tenor of comments regarding the Hackerpunks mailing list. Initially, there was a mocking tone; recently, however, information and ideas are being shared which may be of mutual benefit regarding privacy and the freedom to express oneself as s/he chooses. Refreshing!

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Dead as a Dollar
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

6-15-96. NYP Mag: "Dead as a Dollar." For everyone who uses cash, everyone who stores it and everyone who regulates it, a challenge is nearing. The challenge will be to make choices. Some kinds of electronic currency will protect privacy, and some will violate privacy. Some will make crime easier, and some will make it extraordinarily difficult. Some will tax commerce parasitically, and some will catalyze it. The new minters of money will have enormous power to choose -- unless consumers, on the one hand, and Government officials, on the other, decide to make their own choices. In the "current climate," as those in Washington tend to say, anything that smacks of an expanded role for the Government is anathema. Policy makers at the Treasury are reluctant even to talk about electronic money on the record. "It's easy to go in and say, 'Oh, we're going to regulate everything,' without knowing what everything is," says a senior Treasury official. "We want to know what everything is." He adds: "There are very serious policy issues -- seigniorage, money laundering, financial- stability issues, consumer issues that are genuinely important that we must address and look hard at. It may be sensible for the Government to issue a card -- that's conceivable -- but what if you issue it and nobody uses it?" As money enters a new age, so does counterfeiting. The ultimate threat is the perfect copy -- the virtual coin that proves mathematically identical to the real thing. If money is a string of bits, then someone, some where, can make a perfect copy, and another and another. An arms race is already raging between those working to armor-plate digital cash with doubly and triply secure cryptography and those working to pierce the armor. Security experts assume that nefarious characters, in search of an unending stream of money, are already investing millions in the next stages of research and development. For every new idea in tamper resistance, there is a new idea in tampering.... "At least you can cause people to have to spend a lot of money," says Eric Hughes, a cryptography expert. "But doing the second chip is far, far less money than the first. And if you could make a master chip that spoke the right protocol, you could make a little money mint for yourself." "Information warfare is going to make people very worried downstream," says Crook at Citicorp. "We have an immense paranoia about how dangerous it's going to be. I think that the security requirements in our industry are going to be more severe than at the Department of Defense." Cryptography is as close as modern mathematics comes to magic. It's simply a design choice. Smart cards, or their on-line equivalents, could function as blindly as raw cash. They could be even less traceable than in Chaum's system. That is a frightening prospect to law- enforcement authorities. Having finally made life difficult for drug smugglers with heavy cash suitcases, they will not casually allow the manufacture of half- ounce chips that could make possible blind transfers of hundreds of millions of dollars, a money launderer's dream. Even if the Government takes no other action in the electronic-money arena, it will surely move to extend its restrictions on cash to cover digital equivalents. And so far, the large institutions entering the electronic-money arena are leaning toward less-anonymous, less-private approaches than Chaum's, betting that most of us will be willing to sacrifice more pieces of privacy for, say, convenience. Chaum could prove right, but only if the marketplace is willing to cast its votes for privacy. [With many remarks by Kawika Daguio.] http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/deaddoll.txt (48 kb) ----- Or, if http fails, DED_dol to <jya(a)pipeline.com> Thanks to JG and NYPaper.

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No Subject
by Michael Camp 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just subscribed and what the hey is pgp. Pretty good privacy? -Think global, act local, recycle! Michael Camp a037716t(a)bcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us

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Re: Comments on MicroPayments and the Web
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:54 AM 6/15/96 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >> Just like commercial crypto, servers, news clients, and the like are all >> superior to the free versions? > >Software and hardware follow different rules. This is true enough. On the other hand, it's true that money by itself is not (in my experience) the deciding factor on the quality of a service provider. I moved some months ago from the biggest ISP in town to one with a much smaller resource base but greatly superior service in the areas that mattered to me (fast news, reliable mail, etc). The guy in charge is making better use of what he's got. On the gripping hand, if my current provider had the other provider's bucks, things could _really_ fly. -- Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce

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Re: doubleclick monitoring web browsing habits
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 14 Jun 96 at 14:26, Hal wrote: > When I run lynx (2.3.7 beta) to <URL: > http://www.anonymizer.com/cgi-bin/snoop.pl >, it says: > > Here's a sampling of the kind of information that a site can collect > on you (please wait a moment): > Your computer is a Unix box. > Your Internet browser is Lynx. > You are coming from jobe.shell.portal.com. > You just visited the Anonymizer Home Page. > > No user name here. I visited there from Netscape. Didn't give my user name but apparently said "You are affiliated with ASB Internet, Inc. ..." and then displayed a bunch of advertising info by ISP puts out. An amusing thought: fill the personal info fields with business advertisements. Perhaps people who surf the web regularly can sell advertising space. (insert smiling emoticon here) > Also, when I follow a mailto: link it asks me to input the email address > I want the mail to be from! So I don't think it is using local user name > information, although certainly that is potentially available to it. Have you tried mailing yourself by putting something else in there? I remember trying that and seeing from the headers that I sent it (the usual "Received by ..." username -> machine paths.) Of course that was on a University's computer system, so they may have patched the sources. Rob --- No-frills sig. Befriend my mail filter by sending a message with the subject "send help" Key-ID: 5D3F2E99 1996/04/22 wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com (root@magneto) AB1F4831 1993/05/10 Deranged Mutant <wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com> Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key.

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Re: doubleclick monitoring web browsing habits
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 14 Jun 96 at 18:06, Mark M. wrote: [..] > but it is not enough to satisfy my paranoia. I would be truely satisfied if > Netscape would prompt for an e-mail address whenever it sends mail or post to > usenet. When I used to read the list over hks.net (still down, eh?) I would change my name (and sometimes address, for quasi-anonymity) with no problems... you just have to do that *before* you try to reply. (Free)Agent newsreader will let you do that as part of the reply as well. It'll still show the path and machine that sent news, but it allows you to change From:, Reply-To: and Sender: fields. Rob. --- No-frills sig. Befriend my mail filter by sending a message with the subject "send help" Key-ID: 5D3F2E99 1996/04/22 wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com (root@magneto) AB1F4831 1993/05/10 Deranged Mutant <wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com> Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key.

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Re: [noise] (was Re: PBS show)
by AwakenToMe＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Now what is actually (in depth pleaseeee) protected and real mode? Has there been any talk of intel possibly fixing this conventional mem problem in future chips????? Thanks.. Adam

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Trits
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As a complement to Jim Choate's forward on the "trits" communication research, we suggest perusing an interview of the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here're are excerpts from the interview available at: http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/silence.txt PAUL VIRILIO: I have to take a detour through physics here, and this is one of the differences between and Baudrillard and myself. Unlike him, I have a formal scientific education (that's why physics and military sciences kept me busy for a very long time). In the past, reality was a matter of mass; then it became mass + force. Today, reality is the outcome of: mass + force + information. Matter has now become truly three-dimensional. This is a clear break. What we have witnessed in Italy, with Berlusconi seizing power, is the first successful media-coup in history. Italy is again Europe's avant-garde, and is showing us where the new political alternative resides - in a realm where "left" or "right" are no longer relevant. The new political alternative is between the old political class on one side, and the new media-class on the other. With Italy, the media-class has now seized power in Europe. It will also happen in the United States, in France, in Spain, and elsewhere. CARLOS OLIVEIRA: Do you see some kind of media-fascism looming on the horizon? PAUL VIRILIO: No, because what I see is far worse! Due to its overwhelming power, the totalitarianism of the information-medium is going to be even more powerful than the traditional political totalitarianism of the old national-socialist or communist hues. The dangers are looming larger. I repeat: only if one is guarded against its dangers will it be possible to enjoy the positive aspects of the developments in the realm of new technologies. CARLOS OLIVEIRA: In your eyes, is there any way out of this rather bleak situation? PAUL VIRILIO: An accompanying evil here is the end of writing, as it unfolds through image technology, cinema/film, and television-screen. These new developments threaten the ability to conjure up mental images with oblivion. The typical modern human is characterized by a life under the dictatorship of the screen, to which the written word falls victim. We don't read any more, we hardly write each other - since we can call each other on the phone. Next, we will no longer speak! I'd really like to say: this will indeed be the silence of the lambs!

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Re: Fuseable Links - no guarantees??
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:44 PM 6/14/96 -0400, Warren wrote: >I have never paid much attention to the protection of firmware or the >technical issues revolving around such schemes...was wondering: > >I recently saw an add for a UK based group that says they can take a PIC >OTP micro and read the prom (for a fee, of course) - How the heck is this >done?? I have my suspicion that they (somehow) magically peel off the >ceramic coating (without destroying the chewy center), get a circuit mask >and 'micro probe' the I/O of the IC...they then download the secret recipe >to the afore mentioned 'chewy center'. > >Is this close to accurate?? How is it 'done' ??? While I have never come even close to needing to attempt this kind of thing, long ago it occurred to me that if the "no read" bit was stored in a programmable bit, and if the location of that bit was known or could be identified, you could expose that particular bit through a tiny mask hole and cause the part to be readable again. Locating that bit (assuming there's just one) would be relatively simple: Take a test part, program it, read-lock it, and then expose it to a VERY slowly sliding mask with UV behind. Do this for both axes, to find the bit's location on the chip. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Fuseable Links - no guarantees??
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:46 PM 6/15/96 -0400, Warren wrote: >Jim; > > I was under the impression that a fuseable link was literally a >piece of conductive material that you deliberatley 'blow-away' - In most >cases, couldn't you simply 'tap into' the data side of the fuse, and >download the info?? If it really is a "fusible link," that usually means a fuse, analogous to the much larger kinds used for circuit protection. There are also "anti-fuses" which are high-resistance silicon links which on the application of a relatively high voltage, become low-resistance. However, besides this, there is the typical EPROM-type cell, which can be programmed but not erased electrically. (I'm ignoring cells like EEPROM which are designed and constructed to be electrically erased.) As long as the chip contains most of its information in EPROM, that means that the chip was fabbed with a EPROM-compatible process, so they'd be more likely to include read-protection in EPROM as well. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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