December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Internet blamed for pipe bombs
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I found instructions out of the US for such a while back, which fact should help in any debates on limiting access to such information in the US. Also note the attempted link to the War On (some) Drugs. -Allen >Pipe bombs: Easy weapons you can whip up at home > _(c) Copyright 1996 Nando.net _ > Sacramento Bee > SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- It's no wonder curious teenagers, drug dealers > looking to intimidate and thousands of others for unknown reasons are > building pipe bombs, experts say: The ingredients are at the hardware > store and the instructions on the Internet. > Across the country, latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, > Tobacco and Firearms show a 20 percent jump in pipe bomb incidents > between 1990 and 1994. [...] > "We've been incredibly busy," said sheriff's bomb technician Judd > Holiday. "As crime in other categories is dropping, this is going up." [...] > Crude, cheap and surprisingly powerful, pipe bombs are proliferating > in part because directions are easy to find on computer networks, > experts say. One electronic recipe for a pipe hand grenade ends with > the exhortation "Ready to go!" > "It's all over the Internet," said Peter Urrea, resident agent in > charge of the Sacramento office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, > Tobacco and Firearms. > Pipe bombs are also an increasingly popular tool of intimidation for > makers and dealers of the illegal drug methamphetamine, said Holiday.

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Re: Lynx...
by Remo Pini 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Sun Jul 28 12:28:37 1996 well, you could turn off all those things in netscape anyway... - --------< fate favors the prepared mind >-------- Remo Pini rp(a)rpini.com PGP: http://www.rpini.com/remopini/rpcrypto.html - ------< words are what reality is made of >------ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBMftA1RFhy5sz+bTpAQG6SwgAlvNbuuCfTSuQZQ/+JNuAMuaWb03arq9f JWDH7VsoX23KNMkUSZlXiRxq3vDIR8clVfXx+j6Gwpy+vGZhC7YhTIcIutZEYh2z tpjjC1ySw92gxs7Rxm8h0IGnZIT6N8Tak070/Qc8hgWIEvHqQZHkv5UjydoSTCW7 rRcVM/mvF4x1MQrgX6NK+DRf7+1uOQFLQkbBv63sIRZeRKj/5v8u126lDShT+LOO 73S6LH7wZ6AiLEB09O2ay4v3IFJbdcLgmQGItrHn8j7v5pUf/E3MMb5TI61jj7a7 vqlin7elVIX1HXLMuvhWAfkhhISuj5YDhsChoNWDWgP1R0XnjtxfRA== =lUu/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Security debate after Olympics bombing
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, at least some people have the right idea. -Allen >Experts point out differences in Atlanta, TWA incidents > _(c) Copyright Nando.net_ > The Associated Press > WASHINGTON -- With nerves already on edge after the suspicious downing > of TWA Flight 800, the bombing at the Olympic Games in Atlanta on > Saturday renewed concerns about U.S. safeguards against terrorism. > But analyses by security experts drew important distinctions between > the incidents, and politicians cautioned against measures that would > limit liberties. > Investigators have not officially determined what caused the Flight > 800 tragedy, but if the jetliner was brought down by terrorists it was > a relatively sophisticated operation. > By comparison, the device in Atlanta was easy to make and detonated in > an easily accessible place. "I don't believe that a pipe bomb would > have taken down that TWA plane," said a Treasury agent, who requested anonymity. > Another federal investigator noted differences between the Atlanta > attack and Middle Eastern terrorists who often use high-powered truck > bombs. And domestic militia groups tend to focus on government > buildings, not crowds. > James Alan Fox, the dean of Northeastern University's criminal justice > school and a student of criminal behavior, said there are basically > two motivations for bombers: revenge and attention. > "The desire to make a statement can be that of a well-organized > terrorist group that uses the victims as pawns to advance their cause, > or it could be someone who is just interested in feeling important," > he said. > Given the recent rise of violent anti-government groups, Fox > speculated that a militia sympathizer might use such an event to grab > the spotlight. > "Through an amateurish bombing like this, he can feel like he's part > of the movement," Fox said. "He can elevate his sense of importance." [...] > And building one is almost as simple. "If you don't know how to do it, > there are any number of books available ... that will teach you > explicitly, step-by-step, how to manufacture the device," Vitch said. [...] > House Speaker Newt Gingrich stressed that security was already high at > the Olympics, and cautioned against adopting a "police state" > mentality. > "If a terrorist is nutty enough, there's always an opportunity for > tragedy," he said, appearing after Nunn on CNN. "A free people can't > back down."

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Re: "privatizing" phones?
by Remo Pini 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Sun Jul 28 12:24:57 1996 > Even if they did change the frequency the call was on, > it would be a simple matter to decode how the frequency > change was negotiated, and "follow" the call (also easily > accomplished with cellular calls). Failing that, there is > a very limited range of frequencies allocated for cordless > fones, and simply re-scanning for the conversation is a > trivial inconvenience. //cerridwyn// > Most of those systems do also change the order of the transmitted data, and that's not limited to a few possibilities. If it's digital, they usually encrypt it (only weak, but hey, you normally have to find the key real time!) - --------< fate favors the prepared mind >-------- Remo Pini rp(a)rpini.com PGP: http://www.rpini.com/remopini/rpcrypto.html - ------< words are what reality is made of >------ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBMfs/vhFhy5sz+bTpAQEcnwf9G+HAE57+cOydDLAoaetvywK5jFq8IdIW POXECrmy53+lTe4n/Z763ytNTUJRYBXcUQrTyg4BiVgDoqt5vm+ZxlPKec64FxME a/UM0wpBBANUmgZVWiojtm+lMuxUxfjXbYyV1hRkBfe+gZ0RF00kOhTsWRqEaUTX UTpbPalsh+fVtCrhU4lkxk70epu8b6F6SiFw9+awP3mRImlu5SdRBduS6G1yTvSX UetAkO60anp6wTIy5s5e+FuWFNmWVqZIGt72fKdqtQshx9xvikzpKGSOExidFTkA Z8gWmk1mfU1PiD/8Yfe6VWJdHlFWbqGDGQmRcfwqi5awmDPeNs7arw== =4IN4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Public and Private Munitions
by Charley Sparks 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Morning all, I'm only on the second cup....... - From what I gather, is someone took PGP and ... say Private Idaho ( examples only, please ) and put then in a cute box with the instructions printed out and sold it in a store, the government couldn't control it ? So, why doesn't someone round up a couple of nice shareware front ends , and the rest of ot, put it in an envelope and sell it for $5.00 US. The buyer would then have to pay the shareware fee, and the balance after the packaging could go into escrow for the legal defense fund of Cypherpunks or to Phil ? Another note on GAK One morning King Arthur and his knights set forth on a quest. Lancelot, feeling poorly, was left behind. Arthur stopped to see Lancelot on his way out and entrusted him with the key to Gwenevere's (sp) chastity belt. ( Lancelot being a true and faithful knight ) As the band made it's way about a mile from the castle, a knight happened to see a rider from the castle, riding for all he was worth. Tha king called a halt to wait for the rider. It was Lancelot... breathlessly he said to the king, sire, thou has given me the wrong key..... Charley -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCXAwUBMftKbOJ+JZd/Y4yVAQE2lAQNEuODwOm97mvJR29D8ONs2T1v5jicT7UI vBL0rL8WSxCJmeY6ZyOJPI4oS/f1VTdZiMTR48YuQsMZgNWmlPMoW+3mpqvW5lVl ZTb1eyy2OTk6BHk5h3lKTSxMPVn8shlm3YN5v8H0Qd7WJDBO8Dav2WGlKuaI4Ppp 7b81A1hNKvNOjw== =ffzw -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Charles E. Sparks<sparks(a)bah.com> In God we trust, all others we encrypt ! http:/www.clark.net/pub/charley/index.htm Public Key At http://www.clark.net/pub/charley/cp_1.htm

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War of Words
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Financial Times, July 27/28, 1996, p. XVIII. War of words over the facts By Peter Aspden It must be tough to return from a spell of duty as a war correspondent to a gentle, civilised, country such as Britain. One minute you are witnessing the most unspeakable atrocities committed in the name of politics, religion or just for the hell of it; the next, you are listening to heated debate over the future of the rugby Five Nations Championship. It does nothing for your sense of perspective. Martin Bell, who covered the Bosnian war with such distinction for the BBC, left the stench of the Srebrenica mass executions to breathe the irrelevant odours of Euro-scepticism and National Lottery-mania over the media airwaves. It shocked him to the core, as he revealed in a recent speech: "I ask myself: is this my country? Is it even my planet?" Bell's exasperation has led him to question the model of balanced, dispassionate, objective journalism which has been the bedrock of BBC -- and indeed most serious newspaper and broadcasting -- journalism. He now calls it "bystander journalism". "What I believe in now is what I prefer to call the journalism of attachment, a journalism that cares as well as knows." Predictably, this has set alarm bells ringing. Traditionalists fussed over their hallowed dictum -- facts are sacred, comment is free -- with scarcely a pause for reflection. It is precisely when issues take on a tragic, awful dimension, they argued, that one needs to stick to the facts of the matter. There is no room for sentiment on the front lines. But Bell's point is well made. The trouble with facts, or at least those which are given privilege by traditional journalism, is that they are hard, cold, numbing. If, while reporting on Srebrenica, one talks about diplomatic initiatives, talks about talks, United Nations troop movements, one soon loses one's audience. It is a lesson which even academics, those ultimate upholders of cool objectivity, have come to appreciate. I remember the American philosopher Richard Rorty beginning a lecture on human rights to Oxford University students with a harrowing account of a Bosnian Moslem having his penis bitten off. The atmosphere became electric, no mean feat for the Sheldonian Theatre. We probably would not hear of such incidents in a normal news account from Bosnia; we certainly would not see anything related to it, on grounds of poor taste. But the sexual sadism which is a component of virtually every ethnic cleansing campaign there has ever been is a fact, too. Not a cold, hard fact, but one which has the power to move people. Therein lies its strength. It is not as if the media show any consistency here. On certain occasions, they are only too willing to allow news reports to emote. When we see an interview with a distressed relative whose family has been wiped out or gone missing, we are meant to feel for them. And the police exploit that feeling: they hope that public compassion will turn to solid leads. The facts here are heart-wrenching. But, more importantly, they are facts with which we can identify. It requires little imagination to see ourselves in the wretched situation we watch on the small screen. We know what it is like to lose a loved one, or we feel we know. What we find difficult is to move from micro to macro. What happened at Srebrenica, like what happened at Auschwitz and Belsen, is almost unimaginable. And faced with the unimaginable, we go cold. This applies to news reports as well as the self-defence mechanisms of our fragile emotions. One cannot countenance sitting down after dinner in front of the television to hear of such brutalities, let alone see them. But that is no excuse. The trouble with cold facts is that they harden, while all the time we should be being tenderised. And then we fall to that terrible disease of fattened western sensibilities, "compassion fatigue". We should listen to Martin Bell. He knows a thing or two about human behaviour which most of us choose to exclude from our worldview. We should have heard more from him on the horrors of Bosnia, and less on the grotesquely inadequate responses of our gentle, civilised countries as they sought to respond to the unthinkable. [End]

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Re: Public vs. Private Munitions
by liberty＠gate.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim May wrote: <snip> >...And the government has no "Sofware Approval Office." Yet. JMR P.S. Today's Dave Barry column is worth reading for a humorous look at smoking from a libertarian who doesn't agree with Ayn Rand on the subject. Regards, Jim Ray -- DNRC Minister of Encryption Advocacy "It is long past time to end the laughable presumption that voters who can easily cope with the choices offered at Burger King are somehow 'confused' by more than two choices at the voting booth." -- me, in the Miami Herald, June 24, 1996, p. 10A. Defeat the Duopoly! Vote "NOTA," not Slick/Dull in November. Harry Browne for President. Jo Jorgensen for Vice-president. http://www.HarryBrowne96.org/ ___________________________________________________________________ PGP id.E9BD6D35 51 5D A2 C3 92 2C 56 BE 53 2D 9C A1 B3 50 C9 C8 <mailto:liberty@gate.net> http://www.shopmiami.com/prs/jimray Coming soon, the "Pennies For Perot" page. Keep billionaires off welfare! ___________________________________________________________________ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Freedom isn't Freeh. iQCVAwUBMftcFG1lp8bpvW01AQF3xwP/aOa2tmp1+oOogdq3a5VNJ3AltT/f9hcD 6z9iTRulIlgLfB56MPZfjY6/hsjL37cwHkPQB2XEuSQxuaRATJrp640yMyHoy7rj nQdUV5YetkXyS6aLExECMIfAzAPw7rZzhhP5T0ljEHRBnqiZ3uTh6JiGPQZrcDaD BcVaWfiSxjI= =gRJg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Schelling Points leads to interesting family investment opportunities
by Ian Grigg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi Tim, you said: > The _costs_ of extending beyond the Schelling point boundaries > is deemed to be too high, and the boundary persists. This reminds me of the transactional theory of business units. Working from memory, the optimal size of a business unit is positively related to the cost of the transactions conducted between units, other things being held constant. Thus, in a place where it is "expensive to do business" the dominant form of company will be large. Conversely in a cheap business environment, small companies will predominate. This notion spurs one to examine the transactional costs and to decide (or not) to lower them... The interesting part for your family context is that falling transaction costs have purportedly produced a shift away from large companies to smaller units. Those falling costs are in the sphere of digital communications, other technology, and regulation. If such were to apply to the context of families, upbringing children and education in general, one might predict that the size of the family should shrink. In a sense we might have already seen this. The extended family is really just a memory for most westerners, but is still the norm in poor countries. And I guess we have seen a strong increase in the number of single-parent families in most western countries. One would then be lead to ask, if you are proposing that Internet technologies in general and crypto in particular are influences on the Schelling points related to the family rights set, can this result in smaller family units? That is, the cost of providing (net) education falls, and the ease of crypto communication allows children to grow up as individuals in the big wide Inter-world rather than the shoolyard. If I were permitted to ramble without judicious limit, I would talk about the economic unit becoming a single person, and that person becoming responsible for their own success, regardless of their age. In this view of the future, a child is an economic unit, and is responsible for his own education, and thus must learn for the future. Obviously there is a bootstrapping problem here previously known as birth, and this could be addressed by well-meaning investors purchasing educational rights to a mother's future child (in effect, buying an unborn baby). The child then becomes the ward of the investor, who attempts to raise the child to produce the maximal return. Of course, in order to eliminate the distorting effects of love and child-like whims (I don't want to log into teacher today), there would have to be a free market for raising rights, based on caveat emptor examination of progress. Thus would be exist an informational approach to encourage the child's attention to books, and of course, towards a successful career as an investor in the youth of tomorrow. This would also allow specialisation of investment, those that concentrate on the early years, those on the teens and those that reap the final rewards of first productive working years. The arisal of these strata would lay to rest for ever that old saw of the economists by showing that there is no market failure in education, and thus no need for regulation. And in answer to those anticipated questions from concerned parents, no, I don't have any children, and yes, in the new world, senior citizens can contract to investors to provide granny services, so that they won't be unemployed. But perhaps I should really have placed a judicious limit on my ramblings :-) -- iang iang(a)systemics.com

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Re: "privatizing" phones?
by Scott Schryvers 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:26 PM 7/28/96 +0200, you wrote: If its the same standard used in digital cel phones it shouldn't take more than 30 seconds to figure out the key. The standard used in digital cel phones is a 120 bit key and the crypto is basic xor which is easily broken using basic cryptanalysis. >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > >To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com >Date: Sun Jul 28 12:24:57 1996 >> Even if they did change the frequency the call was on, >> it would be a simple matter to decode how the frequency >> change was negotiated, and "follow" the call (also easily >> accomplished with cellular calls). Failing that, there is >> a very limited range of frequencies allocated for cordless >> fones, and simply re-scanning for the conversation is a >> trivial inconvenience. //cerridwyn// >> > >Most of those systems do also change the order of the transmitted data, and >that's not limited to a few possibilities. If it's digital, they usually >encrypt it (only weak, but hey, you normally have to find the key real >time!) > >- --------< fate favors the prepared mind >-------- >Remo Pini rp(a)rpini.com >PGP: http://www.rpini.com/remopini/rpcrypto.html >- ------< words are what reality is made of >------ >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- >Version: 2.6.3i >Charset: noconv > >iQEVAwUBMfs/vhFhy5sz+bTpAQEcnwf9G+HAE57+cOydDLAoaetvywK5jFq8IdIW >POXECrmy53+lTe4n/Z763ytNTUJRYBXcUQrTyg4BiVgDoqt5vm+ZxlPKec64FxME >a/UM0wpBBANUmgZVWiojtm+lMuxUxfjXbYyV1hRkBfe+gZ0RF00kOhTsWRqEaUTX >UTpbPalsh+fVtCrhU4lkxk70epu8b6F6SiFw9+awP3mRImlu5SdRBduS6G1yTvSX >UetAkO60anp6wTIy5s5e+FuWFNmWVqZIGt72fKdqtQshx9xvikzpKGSOExidFTkA >Z8gWmk1mfU1PiD/8Yfe6VWJdHlFWbqGDGQmRcfwqi5awmDPeNs7arw== >=4IN4 >-----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > >

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Re: WaPo on Crypto-Genie Terrorism
by Charley Sparks 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I occasionally get invited to teach at a local college.. some students are not US. Anyone have any suggestions on a way I can sneek some good privacy into the lesson plan.. the course is usually the Internet or networking in general. Charley >>snip snip<< >as things stand now, windoze folks are going to have to settle with >Mcro$ofts Access to Keys...MAK or is it Bill's Access to Keys.. BAK in any >case I didnt want to get into a my pulldownmenu is longer than your >pulldownmenu argument.. I just want to see it get on the radar fo people >who code. > >You see I dont care what your favorite platform is,( if you like editing in >VI fine, I personnly like TECO), BUT I am acting localy, doing my part, >not just complaining about it... So if you want to help, I am still looking >for folks to talk... maybe about why crypto is so important. >Crypto-archarchy. or maybe some e$ stuff would be nice... > > > >Vinnie Moscaritolo >------------------ >"friends come and friends go..but enemies accumulate." >http://www.vmeng.com/vinnie/ >Fingerprint: 4FA3298150E404F2782501876EA2146A > > >

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