December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Stop the presses -- Anti-terrorism bill not that bad
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:38 PM 8/6/96 -0400, hallam(a)Etna.ai.mit.edu wrote: >which such a claim was made. As for the UK laws, there is >practically no defense against a libel claim that one can >file in court. There is absolutely no basis on which to >justify them. This is why the Singapore government uses them >as a form of censorship. There was a recent US appeals court decision in which an attempt to enforce a UK libel judgment was rejected on First Amendment grounds. The court refused to allow the application of UK law here. DCF

1 0

Anonymous Remailers at work
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One of the big problems with remailers is getting them deployed widely. How can we create a demand for the service that will encourage people to both (a) deploy them and (b) think of them as good rather than bad? Aside from cypherpunks, spammers, and everyone using anon.penet.fi, there aren't really a lot of people familiar with them. I've recently run into a couple of business problems at work that could be solved by (slightly modified) remailers. 1) Manager performance review, suggestion boxes, and questions to visiting honchos - there are several departments that are using "email to the secretary who'll take your name off and forward it" to handle this problem. Remailers are an obvious solution. (More obvious if we weren't using (gack, phfft!) Microsoft Mail :-) It would probably be worth modifying the remailer to use a permit-list as well as a block-list for destinations and maybe sources, so that companies don't get surprised by outside spammers, and people can get used to using the things at work. Distribute the thing as an OmbudsKit or whatever. You'd obviously want the default to be non-logging. 2) Sending sensitive email across the real Internet - between customers, and for those days that the departmental dialup mail server or remote LAN access isn't working and you need to send something from home or on the road. A standard remailer would do the job, though you'd probably want to add a permit-list, and you might want to add logging and/or return receipts. Mail to pgprelay(a)foobar.com and it distributes it.... (Requires putting a key somewhere well-known, like in DNS or on the key servers.) (Hmmm - an alternative implementation is to use a CGI script to do the mailing and use SSL; some companies may find this easier to deploy, depending on their firewall configurations.) (Does it make sense to deploy something like this as a standard feature of an IPSP gateway system like John's?) Any other reasons to install anonymous remailers at work, and things you'd do to make them more attractive or less scary to corporate network administrative types? # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Defuse Authority!

1 0

No Subject
by Scott Schryvers 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

NBC News at Sunrise has just announced the discovery of alien life on the planet Mars. The lifeform that became extinct more than 2 billion years ago was found as a fossil in a meteor that originated from mars and landed on earth. The fossil found was a primitive germ life form. PGP encrypted mail preferred. E-Mail me for my key. Scott J. Schryvers <schryver(a)radiks.net>

5 4

Re: Freeh slimes again: Digital Telephony costs $2 billion now ...
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:59 PM 8/6/96 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >I haven't been able to find the reference, but a month or two ago >there was an article on the net or in a newspaper about the targets >of wiretapping - how many wiretaps were for drugs, gambling, tax evasion, >and of course terrorism. The number of wiretaps for bombs and guns >was something low like 80 in the last 5-10 years - about 1/10%. > (Did anybody else see this article??) Gilmore has a chart on wiretap use in various crimes in his Brain Tennis match on Wired: http://www.hotwired.com/braintennis/96/32/index0a.html DCF

1 0

Re: Censorship through proxy
by Duncan Frissell 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've been thinking of starting a "How to Defeat a Government page to pull together some of the anti-Sysadmin resources on the Net. "Your government -- just a rouge sysadmin." >I wonder what would happen if "Computers, Freedom, and Privacy '98" was >held in Sing Sing? It would be smaller going out than coming in. Singapore's retired president tried to get William Safire into town for a "debate" about whether he was still running the place via his son. Safire didn't take the bait. He joked about it in his column. DCF

2 1

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

1 0

Phone tapping in India
by Arun Mehta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"The Pioneer" headlined on August 6, 96: "CBI can tap at whim -- Agency has 6 bugging machines" (The CBI is effectively the Indian equivalent of the FBI) Apparently, these machines costing Rs. 7.5 million = $200,000 each, can each tap 7 phones in a 25-km radius, and were bought from a Hyderabad-based company, Fidelity Systems. Apparently, all that is needed to tap a phone is for the sleuths to dial the number through the machine, which then automatically starts and stops recording all conversations carried out with that number, as well the numbers dialled by the target. As it is, the law on wiretapping is draconian in India: on the occurrence of an emergency, or for "public safety", a designated government officer can direct that "any message or class of messages to or from any person or class of persons, or relating to any particular subject, brought for transmission by or transmitted or received by any telegraph, shall not be transmitted, or shall be intercepted or detained or shall be disclosed to the government." (This is from the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885(!), and applies to e-mail and BBSes as well). But with these new machines, even this designated officer can be bypassed. Under a box titled "Beware of blank calls", the newspaper mentions that when the sleuths ring your number to start tapping, you get a "blank" call (which one is quite used to here -- if that were enough evidence, the whole of India is being tapped!) What technology is this? If it indeed works this way, what is to prevent any large company or rich person from procuring the same hardware? Apparently, the purchase was authorised by former prime minister Rao, who is now complaining that his own phone is being tapped (serves him right). Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta(a)cerfnet.com for public key

2 1

****Developer Recants Hostile Java Applet Story 08/06/96
by reagle＠rpcp.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 1996 AUG 6 (NB) -- By Patrick McKenna. Finjan Software of Israel, which earlier said its Java security software detected what the company called a publicly available hostile Java applet at a game site on the World Wide Web, has issued a statement changing its earlier claims. In the first story on the Java applet labeled "hostile" by Finjan, Newsbytes reported early Tuesday that the Java applet in question is part of a game available on the Web and connected to America Online. Shmulik Suhami, spokesperson for Finjan, told Newsbytes at the time, "We were contacted by one of our users who detected a hostile Java applet and we have confirmed the user's experience." Newsbytes reported Sun Microsystems' JavaSoft division reply as saying, "This issue is totally and completely bogus. Security features built into Java do not allow an applet to read or write to another computer without issuing a warning message and this applet in question is not a hostile Java applet. An individual at AT&T, acting independently of the company, developed the applet. We suspect a file for the applet was placed on a second system and that is probably why Finjan's software incorrectly read it as a hostile application. Actually, this is a flaw in Finjan's software. There is no bug or hostile application at all." In its early story, Newsbytes also quoted a JavaSoft spokesperson as saying, "What is going on is that the person's applet called an audio file from a second machine and Java's security features are so strong and restrictive that an exception is raised whenever a second machine is called. Finjan's software appears to have read the call to the second machine as a hostile bug." In recanting its initial claims, Finjan released the following statement: "We want to issue a clarification on the media alert we sent out yesterday describing a potentially suspicious Java applet. We were perhaps mistaken to describe the applet discovered as a 'hostile applet,' since we did not know if it did anything damaging to a person's system. The activity of applet described was harmless. We misunderstood the extent of the security exception based on information we received. Though in principal the way the app was created could constitute a risk, in practice this was a relatively harmless breech of security, which the Java Security Manager dealt with appropriately." (19960805/Press Contact: Mary Jo Wagner, Successful Marketing Strategists, tel 510-644-3837; E-mail Address: maryjo(a)successful.com; or Paul Karr, KVO, 415-961-1550)

1 0

RE: DoubleClick: Does is track browsing across multiple sites?
by Scott Marquardt 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Yo, some bozo subsribed me to this thing. Who's the administrator? I want off (no offense; I'm sure it's an interesting forum, but I don't like being mail-bombed by way of forgery). Whoever administers this thing, I'd be glad of a copy of the headers on the message that subscribed me. Thanks -- Scott Marquardt

1 0

Mena
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Washington Post, August 7, 1996, p. A6. CIA Probed in Alleged Arms Shipments Reports Claim Agents Involved in Arkansas-Nicaragua Drug Swaps By Susan Schmidt The CIA's inspector general is investigating claims that U.S. intelligence agencies were involved in illegal arms shipments and drug smuggling at an isolated airstrip in Mena, Ark., during the years Bill Clinton was governor. A spokesman for the CIA said Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz is preparing a report on allegations that the CIA was involved in arms shipments from Mena to the Nicaraguan rebels during the 1980s, and that pilots hired by the agency brought back large shipments of cocaine. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the inspector general will report on possible contacts between the agency and Arkansas state officials during the 1980s. His report also will deal with allegations that the CIA attempted to influence or curtail law enforcement investigations of Mena. Hitz was asked to investigate the Mena airport by CIA Director John M. Deutch, who was acting on a request from House Banking Committee Chairman Jim Leach (R-Iowa). Leach's panel is looking into the possible laundering of drug money generated at Mena. Leach's Banking Committee staff has been looking a variety of claims about Mena emanating from a collection of Arkansas law enforcement officials and various figures operating in the shadowy netherworld on contract with intelligence agencies. One congressional investigator likened sorting through the allegations to being trapped in "a hall of mirrors." Congressional sources said Leach made the request to the CIA about six months ago and expects a report from Hitz in late summer or early fall. The latest Mena claims are contained in "Boy Clinton," a book by American Spectator Editor R. Emmett Tyrrell published this week. In it, Tyrrell asserts that Clinton knew about CIA operations and cocaine smuggling at Mena. He cites as sources Arkansas state troopers, including one on the governor's security detail who says he was also a contract employee for the CIA during the mid-1980s and informed Clinton of what was going on at Mena. Clinton has said he had nothing to do with any activities at Mena. "Mena is the darkest backwater of the right wing conspiracy industry," said White House spokesman Mark Fabiani. "The allegations are as bizarre as they are false." [End]

2 1