December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

[Noise] Unsubrscive $$$
by JonWienke＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wanna make lotsa money? Just charge $20 for instructions whenever the clueless want off the list. When they email you with their pathetic "unsubscrive" pleas, get their MasterCard / Visa / AmEx / Discover number and expiration date. Call it a "spamming fee" to compensate you for the time it takes to download and respond to their iggorant [sick] requests. See you on the Riviera!

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Re: Spaces in passwords
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Ben Rothke writes: >> Do spaces (ASCII 20) in passwords make them less secure? > >Of course not. In a normal Unix password, adding spaces to the >password search space increases the search space, so it necessarily >makes the search harder. Depends on the space of ideas that are leading to your passwords. If the reason you're adding spaces is to separate an n-character word from the dictionary from a 7-n character word from the dictionary, this reduces the search space for a cracker considerably. At least pick random punctuation instead. On the other hand, if your password is a bunch of randomly chosen characters, having another character in the space doesn't hurt. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Re: why compression doesn't perfectly even out entropy
by Jay Holovacs 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perhaps keyspace analysis and randomness analysis should be done from a Bayesian technique, with the the potential perspective of the cracker, or your estimate of the potental prospective of the cracker as a priori conditions. Hamlet could well qualify as a random string, however if your cracker was using 'Great Books of Western Civ' as a dictionary source, it would not be so good. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jay Holovacs <holovacs(a)ios.com> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PGP Key fingerprint = AC 29 C8 7A E4 2D 07 27 AE CA 99 4A F6 59 87 90 On Wed, 17 Apr 1996, Simon Spero wrote: > On Wed, 17 Apr 1996, Mark Rogaski wrote: > > > Is it possible to find a percentage of the key space to eliminate that > > will optimize security assuming that the attacker will try the easy > > stuff first (and is it possible to quantify "easy stuff")? > > Hmmm- I think this could be interesting to study; if we treat the space > of possible passwords as a non-uniform probability distribution > (Zipfian?), and then transform it in such a way to be uniform (by > having the probability of certain passwords being disqualified be > based on their relative probability it should be possible to get a > situation where all passwords are possible, and all have equal probability.

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NYT on Bernstein Suit
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0418suit.html

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Re: EFF/Bernstein Press Release
by SBinkley＠atitech.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>On the other hand, a virus is malicious speech, no? Sorta like libel or >fraud. You said bad and untrue things to the victim's computer and the >dimwitted OS believed it. > >Also this is impersonation. You spoke words that led the OS to think that >you were a legit user and, having its gained trust on false grounds, it lets >you do malicious things. Does this mean that an OS is legally considered an entity??? /sb

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CDA Court Challenges
by K00l Secrets 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Are Declan's CDA reports numbers 1 and 2 available anywhere? I seemed to have missed them on the mailing list, and the web site also starts at 3. Thanks.

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Re: DANGER! Baby-Food Bombs on the Internet! [was Re: (Fwd)]
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Rich Graves <llurch(a)networking.stanford.edu> > > On Thu, 18 Apr 1996, the intrepid anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com > FUDded to cypherpunks: > [Senatorial panic at the spread of knowledge deleted] > Does anyone know the documents that Senator Biden is quoting? I *must > know* how to build The Dreaded Baby-Food Bomb. As usual, altavista comes to the rescue. *A* baby food jar bomb is described at: http://studentweb.tulane.edu/~llovejo/explode.txt and echoed overseas at http://ps.cus.umist.ac.uk/~vivaldi/boom/original.txt I could not find the article on harvesting gunpowder from shotgun shells. Neat stuff in australia on making primary and secondary explosives however (neurocactus). With the Internet in place, government attempts to legislate the flow of ideas and knowledge are about as effective as attempts to legislate the migration routes of birds. Peter Trei trei(a)process.com

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Re: Spaces in passwords
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Ben Rothke writes: >> Do spaces (ASCII 20) in passwords make them less secure? > >Of course not. In a normal Unix password, adding spaces to the >password search space increases the search space, so it necessarily >makes the search harder. I used to recommend that passwords be a phrase of at least 15 characters. Spaces fall naturally into that model. If your spelling is as bad as mine, then your password is resistant to dictionary attacks. However, then I discovered that there are many brain damaged systems which restrict passwords to 8 characters. (e.g. IBM's VM/ESA, Netcom's UNIX) For those systems, I can only parrot the conventional wisdom, no words, include numbers and/or punctuation, no acronyms, include both upper and lower case, etc. etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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: EFF/Bernstein Press Release
by Mark Neely 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, that puts legislation making virus authoring a crime into a new (and difficult) position. Mark ___ Mark Neely - accessnt(a)ozemail.com.au Lawyer, Internet Consultant, Professional Cynic Author: Australian Beginner's Guide to the Internet Work-in-Progress: Australian Business Guide to the Internet WWW: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~accessnt

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Re: [NOISE] Suscrive toasterpun
by SBinkley＠atitech.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> If cypherpunks made toasters... >> Jim B and Black Unicorn would argue about whether toast should be >> buttered, and what the appropriate flavor of jam/jelly should be; TC May >> would point out that it wasn't really toast, but rather, sliced and >> slightly-burned bread; Perry would kvetch about the lack of crypto-relevance >> of toasters; and a few others would form a new listserver for toasterpunks. >> The service department would be flooded with calls from newbies, asking how >> to make toast. >> >> If Netscape made toasters... >> They'd beta-test the toasters for months, then make one slot too >> wide and the other too narrow. It wouldn't be until a cook in a diner >> pointed out that the toast wasn't coming out right that they'd have their >> design reviewed by a 3rd-party Toaster Engineer. >> >and during daylight savings time, you wouldn't be able to reload the >toaster for an hour unless you set your toaster to standard time or >created a timezone variable. And newbies would start crying when the forgot how to get off the list!!

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