December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

THAT BRIT AGAIN
by Sandy Sandfort 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C'punks, Phillll came up with an excellent weasel this time. He's offered to "bet" on the Foresight Exchange. The relevant part of their FAQ says: How is FX different from a bookie? Besides the obvious fact that FX isn't real money, it differs from placing bets with a bookie in that FX is a market. In other words, it really isn't a bet at all. Instead of putting his money where his mouth is, Phillll has decided to put his mouth where his mouth is once again. Nice try guy. S a n d y ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Internal Passports
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:01 AM 8/6/96, Duncan Frissell wrote: >The SS resists issuing new numbers in spite of widespread duplication and >theft. Soon people will find themselves denied the right to work in this >country unless the SS reverses this reluctance. If your SS# is stolen and >used "too many times" in a future worker verification program, you're >screwed. And there won't even be any welfare for you. > >Use Alta Vista to find the SS Number FAQ. There's more stuff. BTW, I attempted to comply with the law in a recent request posted to ba.jobs.offered and scruz.general: I solicited workers for some brush clearing on my place, but advised them to only apply if--appearing to be Hispanic, Latin, Mexican, or otherwise unOfficial--they provided proof of their legal ability to work for me. Personally, I don't care. In fact, when employing gardeners and yard works I prefer Mexicans. But the law says, these days, that I must verify the legality of workers *if* they appear to be dark-skinned, Mexican, Latin, or the like. I say "if" because there are no requirements in general for white-skinned, Anglo workers....no work permits, no proofs of citizenship (such a document is currently lacking in the American pantheon...I, a mixed descendant of Mayflower colonist and Scandinavian immigrants, lack such "proof"). Predictably, I got e-mail threatening me with legal action (ha!) and claiming me to be a racist. I promise not to ask my potential employees for legal proof of their right to work if the Feds and Sacramentans promise not to make it a law that I check such things, and if the laws are not written such that I am a felon for not asking for such documents from a dark, dusky Mexican but not from a blonde- or red-haired ubermensch. (Jews I haven't figured out...some seem to pass the "no documents required test" and some I want to demand Green Cards for...ironically, it may be "discrimination" for me to request that these "dusky" folks supply proof of their permission to work in these Beknighted States. A strange world we live in.) --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 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

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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!

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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>

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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

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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

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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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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

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****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)

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