December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: e$: Watching the MacRubble Bounce
by Christopher Hull 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >I, for one, would appreciate the chance to hear Tim May present >"crypto-anarchy" and "crypto-privacy" -- in a much more coherent fashion > >Vinnie is putting the "Mac Crypto" conference together in his spare >time using "borrowed" facilities in a way that stays below Apple's >"radar horizon". Ah, so I'm not the only one who makes nefarious use of R&D4 (Burning Man, Mike Jittlov, and other pseudo-events) ;-) Looking forward to it. > >As for the "Mac is dead," I'll leave that to another time and place. The press is a little difficult to believe when they come out with nonsense like "Apple is finally upgrading an aging product line". Excuse me? Yes, the last new Mac one could buy was the IIfx? San Jose Mercury News, A Division of Microsoft Press. (I wonder if I should extend the Shakespeare award beyond the net). -Chris .. But there *are* a million monkees on the net, .. and I still aint seen no Shakespeare! <me> ... ... smtp: nozefngr(a)apple.com .. page: 1.800.680.7351 .. http: http://virtual.net/Personal/nozefngr/ .. icbm: lat37*21'.lon121*5' .. .. the kabuki project: http://remarque.berkeley.edu/kabuki/

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Mac Crypto/ internet commerce workshop registration
by Vinnie Moscaritolo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----BY SAFEMAIL 1.0----- Attention: I have setup a webpage to handle registrations for the Mac Crypto/ internet commerce workshop. http://webtuff.apple.com/~opentpt/crypto.html please signup and book your airlines and hotel as soon as you can. I am still looking for presenters, if you plan to talk, please drop me an outline, pronto ciao -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----BY SAFEMAIL 1.0----- Version: 2.6.i iQCVAwUBMggHRfMF2+rAU+UdAQEocwQAi347wC62qlgoV0E8nL2E57beK0Uo3fjo 0ZYSYSwu0zOdF9gqGyBfM0ZEHFGh9CEiJik3JCKww4B4Pl6HVWjm9Ay1DN4IqdOo fvanrRRJXcBi00HnyaJmjq9jIrsGoH6nZ3sxM58yaldm/6iVuKezhgBprPF0WwOr aq9NPOZaePg= =Zm8+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Vinnie Moscaritolo Apple Developer Tech Support http://www.vmeng.com/vinnie/ Fingerprint: 4FA3298150E404F2782501876EA2146A

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Re: Digital Telephony costs $2
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:34 PM 8/5/96 -0800, you wrote: >What is unclear, however, is WHY they "had to" build a card that couldn't do >full-duplex. I mean, would there have been a problem implementing that? Or >was this just another one of those stupid design decisions which could have >been easily fixed if it had been realized in time? 1) Costs money - especially critical if you're trying to either - get a new product accepted by the market (when they were becoming popular) or - compete in a me-too market (after they became popular and costs came way down.) 2) DSPs tend to be really tight on resources, especially RAM, which you need to do multiple programs at once. $5-10 DSPs are especially tight. They're starting to come with mini operating systems. 3) They probably didn't think of Internet Telephony as a market - They were PC folks, and while _we_ all knew about the Internet, it was probably 1/4 as big as now and earlier on the hype curve - It's only been recently that soundcards have been ubiquitous enough for people to assume they're there for a product like Internet phone - 28.8 modems are fast enough. 14.4 are marginal. 9.6 is _really_ marginal. 4) Most of their market wants other things - MIDI, game noises, talking applications, occasional recording and sound processing. Voice crunching is mostly used for answering machines and fancy voice-response telephony units "Press 1 if you want to Press 2." >> It also has the advantage >>that the data is being moved through your CPU, so encryption is >>an easy add-on, rather than having one combined modem/voiceblaster >>card which doesn't have any hooks for crypto or other processing. >Well, I assume that if implemented as a new type of modem card, the >processor can be used to do the data transfer. If you're doing the voice crunching and A/D conversion and telephony all on the modem card, with everything tightly integrated to fit in your tiny cache, why put in hooks for the processor to intervene? >>Given that the "3KHz" is almost universally transmitted over 64kbps >>digital channels, there's really no point in pushing past 33.6 with >>analog-based coding; better to just do ISDN. > >The local phonecos still want to overcharge for ISDN, however. Major >bigtime problem. ISDN looked great back in about 1980 when the fastest >common modem was 300 baud, but it's lost much of its lustre competing >against 33.6 kbps. Maybe if ISDN were available at a premium of $5 per >month or so... Depends on the telco. Here in PacBell's fiefdom, home ISDN costs only a bit more than two voice lines, and you get two lines out of it. Local calls are a penny or four a minute daytime, free at night. This may change soon - the telco is appalled to find out that computer people think "it's free at night" means "it's free at night" :-) There's getting to be enough ISDN support that an ISDN-based phone program might find some market - especially if it can use higher sampling rates and ADPCM compression to get better sound out of 56-64 kbps than a regular phone can, and maybe you could support a shared-whiteboard program as well. Still need to do something about echo control, though. However, I wouldn't recommend writing a free encrypted ISDN telephone program, though - you wouldn't be able to export that on the Internet. But a phone program that lets users plug in their own algorithms for echo control, with an API that supports exchanging parameters - now _that_ would be a phone program. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Defuse Authority!

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Re: SSNs (was Re: Interna
by pjn＠nworks.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(There is a really good joke in my response. Try to figure it out. Be the first one on your block to realize what the numbers mean) In> Anyone know what J. Edgar Hoover's SSN was? Yeah, 276-77-3737 P.J. pjn(a)nworks.com ... Hey, Worf! I hooked Data up to a modem... Wanna see? ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20 [NR]

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Stealth cookies
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:48 PM 8/5/96 -0400, Anne Eisenberg <aeisenb(a)duke.poly.edu> wrote: >All of the discussion on the list to do with >cookies is related to Netscape. Does this mean that if one switches to >Microsoft Explorer one can avoid the problem? Many thanks. MSIE also does cookies. Netscape 3.0b5 has a nice option to let you choose whether to accept a cookie or not. However, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Sites have several ways to find out information about you, which they can use immediately or coordinate with other things 0) Stuff the site knows about itself, like contents and time 1) Stuff you tell them by filling in forms 2) Your IP address (not always very useful...) 3) Information your browser sends (somewhat adjustable.) 4) Information your browser sends that a site asked you to keep for it (i.e. cookies.) For the most part, this doesn't leak a lot of information; even cookies can only pass things the sites already knew between sessions. The cookie spec is well-designed, only allowing cookies to be retrieved by the machine or domain that set them in the first place. However, there's a way to cheat the cookie spec; I don't know if this was intentional, but it was realized quickly by the market :-) The issue is that your browser sends along an HTTP_REFERRER variable, which points to the last page you visited before the current page. It's useful for sites to find out where their pages are being referenced, and they may (legitimately) want to only give out information if you're coming from one of their previous pages. This does also mean that a page (www.alice.com/interesting.html) can hand its name to another page or program (www.bob.com/cgi/count-stuff.pl) by including an inline reference to it. But that site can send your browser a cookie marked bob.com, which is accessible by _it_, not by the referring page. This means that if you later connect to www.carol.com/foo.html, which references bob's count-stuff program, bob.com can retrieve the bob.com cookie that has information about your connection to alice.com. If alice.com and bob.com store some identifying information (e.g. alice.com records a connection from 192.9.200.1 at 12:34:59 UTC, and bob.com records a connection from 192.9.200.1 at 12:35:01 UTC, and bob.com stores a reference to that in the cookie (either storing the information directly, or more likely, storing a record-id number referencing a database entry, and carol.com and bob.com similarly share a reference, then alice, bob, and carol can coordinate what happened in the two sessions. Maybe Bob just knows that there's market correlation between viewers of Alice's Brownie Company and Carol's Congressional Consulting, or maybe they also share the credit card number, flavors, and addresses you gave alice.com with the search criteria you gave carol.com to find you've been donating special brownies to that congresscritter you've been lobbying. Without the cookie hack, the ability to correlate is limited to the common information that you've given the two sites, which tells them that some Netcom user with Mozilla 3.2b7.7 did it, which isn't enough to run a targeted campaign donation request or send out the FBI or whatever. Doubleclick.com is the site that's wellknown for exploiting the feature, and their web site is interesting. If you're using 3.0b5, try different combinations of accepting or rejecting cookie requests.... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Defuse Authority!

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Re: Apple people on the list
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 16:15 8/6/96, John Young wrote: >What would you offer to set off Tim's simmering crypto-anarcho-volcano, >make it heard round the planet? Bottle o' Scotch (my private stash). Free Ecash account. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. Defeat the Demopublican Unity Party. Vote no on Clinton/Dole in November. Vote Harry Browne for President.

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Re[2]: SSNs (was Re: Internal Passports)
by Steve Coltrin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Simon Spero <ses(a)tipper.oit.unc.edu> wrote: >one silly thought: lots of people use cypherpunks as the username and >password for all those websites that want an id. What about a cypherpunks >3-2-4 number for those cases where an SSN isn't appropriate. Anyone know >what J. Edgar Hoover's SSN was? According to one of "George Hayduke"'s books, Richard Nixon's was 567-68-0515. -spc

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Talking about Crypto Anarchy
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm going to use John's comments as a jumping off point for some things I probably should have said a while ago. At 11:15 PM 8/6/96, John Young wrote: >I'd like to hear Tim, too, in this Big Apple. RealAudio, perhaps. > >Tim's views are far more substantial and worthwhile than those play-it-safe >Pro-Code dronings. > >And his pith should go out far and wide, around the world, not only out >there on its edge. > >Vinnie, Robert, All Appledom, do your global duty, don't miss this chance >to leapfrog the small-beans promoters of the crypto industry. > >What would you offer to set off Tim's simmering crypto-anarcho-volcano, >make it heard round the planet? As I think I made clear, there is little either Vinnie or Bob have "failed" to do. I'll explain this below. It is true that I am not much of a fan of Bob's writing style, with nuggets of truth buried in bloviations about sacks of grenades, rubber rafts, shaking trees, pieces of the true cross, ad nauseum, but, then, "style" is something I tend to react to perhaps more than most. (Not the variations in style of the hundreds of folks who post here, but the florid excesses so common in "neo-journalism," where it seems the writers are paid by the word--as perhaps they are--and wrap their few nuggets in stock phrases and cutesy pastiches of Chandler, Wolfe, Gibson, Joyce, and the whole Sick Crew. Back to important issues. Let me summarize: 1. A while back there was an announcement (I thought by Vinnie, but he denied it to me) of a "Mac Crypto" mailing list. This announcement, which I no longer have (not in my own archives, and not in the few CP archives that seem to still be reachable on the Web) mentioned that the list would focus on "real" cryptography, and _not_ on political issues (including, presumably, the main topics that have motivated my contributions for the past several years, and longer). Fair enough, as the owner/maintainer of a list is free to set his policies. I of course did not join this list, as I don't think a list which only discussed quadratic residues and elliptic curve methods is exactly my cup of tea...there are plenty of textbooks and other lists for this. 2. So, when Vinnie sent me his "Mac Crypto Needs You!" mini-rant, my natural conservatism toward such things kicked in. I am not, as must be clear now, one of those "Rah rah rah! We need to evangelize crypto!" folks. I take a neo-Calvinist position on such things. Hustling memes is distasteful to me. (Some will say my posts here are an attempt to sell my ideas. Fair enough, but this is a forum I find acceptable.) 3. I told Vinnie I was not interested, that giving a "pep talk" to Mac developers is not my thing, and that if my views on politics, crypto anarchy, the undermining of governments, money-laundering as a tool of liberation, etc., were not deemed acceptable for his list, then I would not feel welcome at Apple Computer talking about the same. (In his reply, he said he'd never said any such thing about politics not being welcome on Mac Crypto....I could have sworn I saw such a thing, but, like I said, I can't find this message anywhere I've looked.) 4. Blah blah blah. That is, you saw my longer article I sent to Vinnie, explaining why I was not too interested. I won't repeat the points here. 5. I thought the subject was closed, as Vinnie then said that perhaps I was _not_ the right person after all. I agree with this. I am not an "evangelist," at least not one in the mold of the ever-bubbly Guy Kawasaki. Nor am I in the mold of a Robert Hettinga. Maybe I'm more like H.L. Mencken, or, at least I'd like to be. Evangelists disgust me. I can't read anything Kawasaki gibbers about, nor can I read the neo-journalism of "Spencer Katt," "Mac the Knife," or "Robert X. Cringely." (If you don't recognize these names, these are the terminally-hip gossip columnists and "rumormongers" of the three leading trade rags. The style is pretty similar to that used by Brock Meeks, Robert Hettinga, and the like.) Now on the the Big Issue. 6. I've given up on discussing crypto anarchy in short talks because nearly nobody in the audiences I've done it for has the foggiest notions of what I'm talking about, and I've found no short, sweet, simple methods of getting across the implications. Many audiences have no idea of how public key encryption even works, let alone how digital money might work. (Thus, panel discussions on "cryptography" bog down almost immmediately on basic issues. There's no way to get to the "juicy" stuff when 20 minutes is spent trying to educate an audience about what a prime number is!) Consider how long it takes a new subscriber on this list, one who presumably heard about this list from a background of some familiarity with the idea of encryption, to get to the point of understanding what the terms and phrases in my sig mean. I'd say it takes at least several weeks, with detours into Schneier to read up on the basics, and some mental effort to think through how anonymous remailers work, what digital money might mean for tax collection, etc. Even at the Hacker's Conference, which I last attended in 1993, the discussions of cryptography were deeply unsatisfying to me. My panel, on crypto, bogged down in trying to get across to a technically pretty competent audience the implications of strong crypto. Clearly, the hour or so we had was not enough, and people could only get the barest glimpses. 7. In several radio talk shows I have done, the same is true. Given that there just isn't enough time for a careful explication of the necessary background, the discussion and the questions from callers to the show stay at the most basic level. While I am not dismissing the importance of basic questions, it's clear that the discussion can never move on. Thus, discussions tend to never get beyond the "think of crypto as envelopes...would you want your messages all on postcards?" level. (This envelope-postcard analogy is of course due to Phil Z., and he seems more comfortable than I in giving this kind of talk over and over again.) 8. Even articles in "Liberty" and "Reason" magazines (plus more obscure magazines like "Extropy") have to spend most of the article explaining the basics, ending with a glimpse into a few topics of more recent vintage. Mostly, it is hopeless to get into "crypto anarchy," when the article is about how public key encryption works. (Note: This observation is part of a larger issue about the difficulties of building on past work. It is why so many fractious debates never get beyond the opening salvos...over and over again. The debate over nuclear power (or gun rights, or...) comes to mind, and I have, as with crypto anarchy, given up on trying to "convince" groups of the truth of my views: nearly everyone I talk to is so ignorant of the basics of radiation, containment, half lives, ionizing radiation damage, alternatives, etc., that all discussions bog down at the most basic of levels. When I used to have the energy--and the foolishness--to bend someone's ear about nuclear power for a couple of hours, I could _sometimes_ see the glimmerings of a change in positions, the flicker of a change in preconceived notions. Mostly there was only blankness and hostility. I get the same reaction when I try to explain the techno-libertarian implications of strong cryptography.) 9. So, while John Young and others might want like that my "pith should go out far and wide, around the world, not only out there on its edge," the plain fact is that it can't go out in a talk lasting only a few hours, or, much more likely, lasting less than an hour. Certain after dinner speakers are adept at getting one or maybe two simple points across in a talk--usually with some judicious humor to drive the point home--but I am not one of them. Maybe one of you is, but not me. In any case, getting "one or two ideas across" is not of much interest to me. (I've also seen David Chaum struggle to just get the basic idea of "credentials without identity" across to a tecnical audience...even when he concentrates on only getting a single facet of his ideas across, the light bulbs just don't go off in the heads of the audience members...at least this was what I witnessed.) I know there are some lawyers and law professors on this list, so the analogy to law might be useful. To wit, can a lawyer or professor be expected to really explain to a lay audience some complicated subject? Or is a series of ground-laying lectures needed first? While there are presumably lawyers willing to give pleasant after-dinner speeches on, say, "tort reform," I suspect that very little information is conveyed to lay audiences. (And, as I've said, I am not a talented dinner speaker.) 10. Finally, I am not a "motivational coach." I don't give pep talks to people at companies to help them save their companies, or their platforms. Thus, I am not interested in giving a "go out and win one for the Gipper!" pep talk at Apple. I hope this makes things clearer. And bear in mind that I actually _did_ spend a vast amount of my time putting together a compendium of my thoughts and ideas in my "Cyphernomicon." [ URL: http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ ] At more than a megabyte, and with various chapters on crypto anarchy, anonymous markets, remailers, and all sorts of implications, it is the fullest embodiment of my thinking extant in any one place. Some say it would make for a start on a book, but I can't see any publishers rushing to publish such a book (one publisher asked me to "submit a proposal" for a book on how to use PGP...this is the level of what publishers want from me...needless to say, I discarded his business card immediately). And so it goes. I'm not interested in giving a pep talk to Apple or its developers, I outlined my reasons in other messages. And I don't believe there's any way to adequately explain the collection of ideas I call "crypto anarchy" in much less than a lecture series. Even if someone were to sponsor or arrange such a lecture series, as has been done for things like nanotechnology, I'd have to think long and hard about committing to this. My inclination is to tell those who ask for such a talk or lecture series to "RTFM." Regards, --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: Stop the presses -- Anti-terrorism bill not that bad
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:16 PM 8/5/96 -0400, hallam(a)Etna.ai.mit.edu wrote: >Making that argument defeats your case. Irespective of the framers >of the constitution nobody in Congress or the Administration believes >that you have a right to take up arms against the government. Have you checked with Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) or B1-Bob Dornan (R-Orange County) about this assertion. Not to mention our former black radical friend from Oakland in Congress. I bet you could find a fair number of supporters for the concept of the "right of revolution" in Congress and other parts of the government. Better hunting on Usenet, of course. When former Idaho congressman and senator Steve Syms was first running for Congress, his slogan was "Traditionally, Americans have had three means of preserving their freedoms. The jury box, the ballot box and -- when those failed -- the cartridge box." In addition it seems to me that a certain "Mobe" leader and campus revolutionary made it as far as the White House (or was he just spying for the Company at the time?). (Mobe = Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam) Try not to say "no one believes X". That statement can always be falsified and usually with thousands of counter examples. DCF "Article 1 Section 1 of the Constitution of the State of Oregon - All power is inherent in the people and it is their right to alter or abolish the government whenever they believe it necessary or appropriate to do so." >From memory but that's the substance of what it says.

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Re: Censorship through proxy
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:12 PM 8/6/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >Sing Sing (the country is now a prison, so...) is one of the states we >should think about targetting for "special attention." Not in the sense of >violence, but in the sense of offering help to freedom fighters, those who >want to use stego, web proxies, etc. > >I wonder what would happen if "Computers, Freedom, and Privacy '98" was >held in Sing Sing? A friend of mine, who occasionally visits Singapore on business, told me this Singaporean joke: "Singapore is a fine place. There's a fine for this, and a fine for that,..." Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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