December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Minitel "saved" by hackers?
by Arun Mehta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:51 12/07/96 +0200, Daniel Salber wrote: >At 2:37 AM +0500 on 7/11/96, Arun Mehta wrote: > >> I'd love to find out exactly what happened. > >"Hacking" is inaccurate: the users >were not necessarily computer-litterate but just found another way to use >the help feature of the server. Rheingold's Virtual Community has a pretty >accurate account of the facts (see chapter 8, also online as ><http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook8.html>). Thank you for the correction. I checked Andre Lemos' original, and he uses both terms. To quote, "Through thie detournement -- literally, a 'hijacking' was born the messagerie. By hacking and then making available the bulletin board software, a counter-current to the French technocratic approach produced a usage of the system which was never a planned objective." Slightly inaccurate. >In a previous post, you said: > >> So, shocked by this, what does the government do? Being unable to >> distinguish between different kinds of messageries, the government put a 30% >> tax in 1989 on all, and raised it to 50% in 1991! No wonder the Internet is >> gaining rapid popularity in France. > >I think this is wrong. These taxes were only for sex messageries and the >30% tax didn't actually stop most of them from making money. I think the >50% tax wasn't actually enforced and the tax rate remains at 30% (see >http://www.univ-paris8.fr/~babelweb/voltaire/v_no23.htm -- this is in >french, sorry). > >You must realize that the government has no interest in stopping all >messageries: France Telecom is (at least for the coming few months) a >government agency and makes a lot of money from the messageries. Once again going back to the original: "In 1986 the first roadside billboards for the messaggeries rose appeared (picturing, for example, a robust male or a woman with slogan '3515 BUSTY', the online address of a Mintel rose chat service). French traditionalists were outraged and Charles Pasqua, acting Minister of the Interior, attacked the gay messagerie Gay Pied. Worse, the French state gains 36% of the total charges paid. Taxes on all the messagerie services became the order of the day. France Telecom has no way of distinguishing between the messagerie rose and any other board or messagerie. In 1989 the government tax was 30% and in 1991 a 50% tax was imposed in the hope of eliminating all messageries." That's seriously innacurate, it seems to me: but I would appreciate some confirmation before I attack the guy in my review. Will check out the urls you suggested, problem is during the monsoons the phone connection to my ISP keeps dropping. > >The Minitel is no more "centralized and bureaucratic" than the Internet was >only a while ago (ie, when NSF was in charge of most of the core >infrastructure). >The Minitel may look centralized and bureaucratic because anyone who wishes >to open a server has to go through France Telecom (which delivers unique >names like Internic). Has FT ever denied permission (to hard-core sex servers or neo-Nazis, for example)? That, the tax they charge and the prohibition of encryption make it too centralized for my taste. And will ultimately kill it. The longer the French take to migrate to the Internet, the worse for them (IMHO). >There were even some experiments of a european Minitel system linking >several european videotex services a few years ago. I think they fell short >because the videotex technology has been so quickly outdated. Why not link up videotex in every country with the Internet? Let people surf the Web using their TVs and remotes (and maybe a keyboard with an infra-red link). That's what I'm trying to tell our utter failure of a videotex service in India. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://mahavir.doe.ernet.in/~pinaward/arun.htm The protestors of Tiananmen Square will be back. Next time, the battle will be fought in cyberspace, where the students have the more powerful tanks...

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Re: A case for 2560 bit keys
by Mark M. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 11 Jul 1996, Chris Adams wrote: > check your setup. I used to run a 386-20 (5MB RAM) and it took about 3 > seconds for a 1024 bit key. Given it didn't even have a copro (not sure > when/if PGP uses one) and that it was off of a Stackered drive, I'd > expect you to have much better times. That's consistent with the timings I've been getting. It should take about 9 seconds to decrypt an arbitrary message with a 2048-bit key with the setup you describe. Of course, I usually use X, so that probably does throw off the timings a bit. - -- Mark =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= markm(a)voicenet.com | finger -l for PGP key 0xe3bf2169 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ | d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348 "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." --George Orwell, _1984_ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMeXTXLZc+sv5siulAQEnAAP8Dbr/WWFKDhD0CRPePVtF2o7386Na89Xd GUC7D2x9hFAcMS+YynQnLpNULHWY4e/ziY3GkpFVydSYrQfIZ7Xj8P7RPgFUmWnz 4Zo5zTIJif1jigWEmMqAr7nMBtDCFTJrB0ogD7ZlGcALHxjUKW7j20QtHyIg5/sr nS7OAI2gZgc= =/LMb -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Another bad idea
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:40 AM 7/12/96 +0500, Arun Mehta wrote: >What that does is give us a window of opportunity. Hongkong has one >remaining year of guaranteed unfettered flow of information. China still >has the Internet. What can we do? {good ideas snipped] Another thing to do is get more web sites containing information of interest to people living in such regimes on SSL enabled web servers. If the web redirectors can be set to redirect SSL traffic undisturbed, then there is another level of encryption for the chinese to have to hack through to find "dissidents". And if someone could sneak them a few copies (hint... hint...) of the 128 bit version, it would make their lives even more difficult. I see a point where the repressive regimes of the world are going to be trying to prevent their people from getting to information that is against the regime, but getting run over by the shear volume of the information. It may be possible to filter for such things, but in doing so, you destroy any usefulness the network has in the first place. Of course this is all a moot point, because it has been proven by computer projections that all informative net traffic will be buried under advertisements by the year 2000 anyways. I expect some legislative body to try and make money fast on the net by selling ad space on IP packet headers. ("This packet sponsored by Preparation H!") I think I will go drink more coffee now... --- |"Computers are Voodoo -- You just have to know where to stick the pins."| |"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer: | | mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!" | Ignore the man | |`finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ | alano(a)teleport.com |

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[NOISE] Ritalinpunks
by Mark M. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I just got the latest issue of Scientific American, and interestingly enough, there is an article on page 12 that deals with the issue of overdiagnosing ADD. It's pretty interesting reading for anyone that may have an opinion on the subject (which is definitely a high number of cpunks). - -- Mark =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= markm(a)voicenet.com | finger -l for PGP key 0xe3bf2169 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ | d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348 "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." --George Orwell, _1984_ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMeamMLZc+sv5siulAQFBYAP/UJkevlONxJywp0MsNQ0c9UwfKb7cZQgs 8F0BfVSAn31zatJ9lchNVo8ui57ojmbbdBBPGKtr2EqPgkheFGbVwn26fcZmfJ1b 8h4hq715hi+6bokrdrtIgXTGDT/lWt7FTQ01nB/VLgClB8h/X2gSQSCeXIJename Nh+liBowdKY= =kfcI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Needed: Bay Area "Cracker" for TV Show
by abacard＠well.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

July 11th, a San Francisco television reporter called me. He wants to broadcast a story about "crackers". He'd like someone who can describe, on-the-air, examples of what crackers can do. In particular, he'd like someone who can provide a demonstration. Do you want to be on Bay Area TV? If not, whom in the Bay Area do you recommend? This could be a chance for you to publicize your favorite security flaws in voice box systems, or whatever. The reporter wants to run this story during the week of July 15th. If interested, please contact me as soon as possible. The reporter uses telephones, not e-mail, so I'll need your phone number. Thanks. See you in the future, Andre Bacard ====================================================================== abacard(a)well.com Bacard wrote "The Computer Privacy Stanford, California Handbook" [Intro by Mitchell Kapor]. "Playboy" Interview (See Below) Published by Peachpit Press, (800) http://www.well.com/user/abacard 283-9444, ISBN # 1-56609-171-3. =======================================================================

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Wiretaps
by Dana W. Albrecht 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wiretaps Up Sharply in Clinton Administration WASHINGTON (Reuter) - The Clinton administration has sharply increased use of federal telephone wiretaps and other electronic surveillance in the United States since taking office, The Washington Post reported Sunday. ... Civil rights and privacy advocates were upset with the trend but unable to do much about it ... Frederick Ness, who runs the Justice Department office that approves applications for court-ordered wiretaps, told the Post: ``We are up 30 to 40 percent this year.'' In 1992, the last year of the Bush administration, there were 340 federal court orders permitting electronic surveillance in criminal cases, the newspaper said. Quoting unidentified officials, the report said that number had risen to 672 last year and almost certainly would exceed 700 in 1996. The figures did not include ``national security'' wiretap orders, obtained under intelligence legislation, which also had been rising dramatically, the Post said. Preparing for expected continued growth in surveillance of domestic criminals, the Justice Department was buying additional high-tech equipment, developing new eavesdropping techniques and adding support personnel, the report said.

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Quantum Communications
by Derek Bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

By mistake, I sent a message in reply to a list member and forgot to include the list. I also misremembered *Austria* as Australia when I sent my original question to the list. The item I read was a news item on the bottom of p.16, July 6 Issue of _New Scientist_, enititled "It's good to talk in quantum trits". The researchers are Klaus Mattle, Harald Weinfurter and Anton Zeilinger of the University of Innsbruck and Paul Quiat of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Weinfurter said "It's the first experiment which demonstrates a communications system using pure quantum states". I don't know enough QM to tell if it has the same immunity to eavesdropping as the scheme studied by British Telecom. I'll send more details tomorrow, as I have to leave now. Derek

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Re: Can't block caller ID in Massachusetts?
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:54 AM 7/12/96 -0700, Eric Murray wrote: >When I called the Pac Bell customer service droids to get my "complete" >blocking I asked them why they won't block CID to 800 numbers. >Their answer: "that's just the way it works". Since they can't bill you for LD numbers you call without reporting the calls on your bill, they can't charge 800 (or pay 900) number owners without reporting which numbers called them. I suppose you could just trust them (like the UK) and not demand a list of numbers you called and then the 800/900 businesses might do the same. Likely? DCF

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Re: I@Week on crypto export loophole 6/24/96
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:05 PM 7/12/96 -0400, Will Rodger wrote: >>As I see it, the most important issue is not the legal status of the one >>actually doing the export/mailing, but in fact the organization which is the >>recipient and thus, the beneficiary of this act. _THAT_ organization will >>be well-identified, yet will not have done anything obviously illegal. Is >>there any indication that Baker was trying to distinguish between the one >>physically mailing it, and those receiving it? > >Yup. He was speaking only of the US company. Any indication about what the USG might be able to do, SPECIFICALLY, legally or in retaliation? Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: ADD and Unix, + Ritalin Questions
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"ichudov(a)algebra.com" 10-JUL-1996 03:56:31.76 >3. Are there any long term effects from Ritalin, and can it >be discontinued easily? Well, the FDA seems to think it's addictive... my experience with it (off on weekends, evenings, and in the summer) would appear to say otherwise. There is some appetite suppression, which allegedly may lead to growth suppression, but I have some doubt about this (I'm over 6'1"). -Allen

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