December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Message Digest
by Costin RAIU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, cypherpunks I'm interested in a 256 bits (or more) message digest algorithm (C source is better). Any URLs ? bye, c0s *-----------------------------------------------------------------------------* | Costin RAIU, D.S.E. (craiu(a)pcnet.pcnet.ro) | | UNIX++C, RAYTRACING, RAVE, anime and SF(ST) fan | | | | "Windows95 - Tomorrow's bugs, Today" | *-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*

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Re: DON'T Nuke Singapore Back into the Stone Age
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 2 Sep 96 at 11:46, Enzo Michelangeli wrote: > On Sun, 1 Sep 1996 ichudov(a)algebra.com wrote: > > James Seng wrote: > > > To understand the sitution better, you should not impose America > > > idealogy and perspection on how things to be done to Singapore. > > > Singapore maybe young but there are certain culture too. I agree with that. I should therefore cease, as much as possible, to interact with them by stopping to buy anything made in Singapore. Then, let them starve, fed by their highers cultural ideas. > > > Most importantly, the move to censor certain WWW site actually > > > comes as a relieve to many people, especially parents who > > > worried about the bad influence of it. We can go into the same > > > discussion about whose responsibilty it is but before you do > > > that, please bear in mind that this is Singapore. At whose moral expanse? > Of course, one may argue that the racial, social and religious > relations are better handled the American way. That, however, is a > controversial issue, and adopting confrontational cowboy attitudes > is not going to make the social evolution any faster. Who talks of social evolution? We only talk about civil liberties. And they are damn easy to implement: Leave your neighbor do what he pleases. Mind your own business. > IMHO, the present measures represent more a gesture of appeasement > to concerned social conservatives, not differently from the CDA in > the US, than an attempt to control the flow of information. This whole paragraph is a fine example of appeasement. And the CDA *is* an attempt to control the flow, not of information, but of ideas. jfa DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee; Limoges porcelain, silverware and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants: physicists, technologists and engineers. PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891

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Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:54 PM 9/2/96 -0700, someone purporting to be "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri(a)netcom.com> wrote: [EFF / Unicorn rant, deleted. ] >I also don't understand the anonymity fight by cpunks. it's the >wrong battle imho. ask any remailer operators how their services >are panning out. they will complain of the incessant spam and >increasing litigious pressure. I don't see any technological >solutions to these problems. if there were, they'd have been >invented now. As a former remailer operator who quit because of spam, and may restart when I can hack together a spam-reducing remailer, let me comment on this. We're only beginning to understand the technical questions for the parts of the problem that technology can do. One problem is that the technical definition of spam is "I'll know it when I see it", which is hard to write code for. And the definition of "offensive" is "one or more letters together, viewed by the appropriate reader", and remailers are good at finding that sort of reader. A lot of it is social, not technical. But improving blocking capabilities and news-cancel capabilities helps. And some problems are just _hard_ technically. Take 2-way remailers - encrypted reply blocks aren't perfect, because the system that handles them can decrypt them. Nymservers that depend on a different system supporting encrypted reply blocks help, because it forces Bad Guys to subvert two systems to identify the recipient, and you can chain that sort of thing to make it harder. But it's still tough, and that problem is fairly well-defined. Getting rid of vaguely-defined things is tougher. Mike Godwin has suggested that some of the major problems on the net are the results of "cheap speech". It's easy to send insults and hate email to people, nearly anonymously, nearly free, when only a few hostile people would bother doing it with paper mail, and most newspapers wouldn't print it. The News Media Establishment is threatened because anybody can broadcast anything they want to millions of people without spending millions of dollars for an artificially scarce TV channel that requires government permission to broadcast on. Readers are swamped because 25 million Internet users sending one line of text per day make 2 GB of Usenet/Web/Email, which is three or four orders of magnitude beyond what most people can actually read. Scale is tough, and problems that are half-solvable at one scale may be insolvable at the next order of magnitude. Anonymous remailers support several things I want to do, and that I want other people be able to do: 1) Let people have private conversations without being identified by third parties. 2) Let people have private conversations without being identified by each other, voluntarily and respecting each others' rights. 3) Let people broadcast things to the public that they might be afraid to do otherwise. 4) Let people broadcast things to the public without their reputations, good or bad, affecting readers' reactions. 5) Let people experiment with different personality and conversation styles, though this doesn't strictly require anonymity. 6) Let people communicate with government officials without risk. Not all of these things are always good; people can abuse them if they want, and one reason for experimenting with different kinds of remailers is to try to balance the good and bad that comes from facilitating those conversations. Technical capabilities of the remailer will affect how people use it; two-way-ness is a big win. I blocked president(a)whitehouse.gov on my remailer real early, though that's mainly because the government has this silly law against threatening the President. >let's face it, anonymity is a pain in the ass to support. >maybe there are other goals that are more crucial >that lie at the heart of anonymity. what cpunks are really >seaking is "assurance of freedom from retribution". when the >problem is phrased more openly like that, other solutions become >possible and worth consideration. An interesting formulation. While there are more issues than just preventing retribution, theft, and prejudice, that would be a good start. Unfortunately, the two approaches I can see to achieving it are 1) Have a perfect world with perfect people in it and perfect people running human-rights-respecting governments 2) Don't let them know your name. While there are groups that are working on bringing us closer to 1), or at least as far as "1a) Have a semi-tolerable world where the government doesn't harass you very much for what you say and doesn't single you out as a source of funds for their great plans", those folks have a long row to hoe. We can do something about 2). I'm happy to work on 1a) with people, though I won't see it in my lifetime, but you and I can work on 2) today, and accomplish something. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Re: Los Angeles Times article on Helsingius and anon.penet.fi
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:39 PM 9/2/96 -0800, Jim Bell (who else:-) wrote: >At the risk of sounding like a broken record (a phrase that will get ever >more obscure now that we're in the CD era...) that's why I pushing AP >(Assassination Politics.) In case anybody wonders why there _are_ relatively reasonable people like Esther Dyson who aren't happy with anonymity in spite of not liking the alternative of government control, this sort of thing _is_ one of the reasons :-) You CAN freak ALL the mundanes all the time, but it's not necessarily a good idea..... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
by Jon Lebkowsky 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:40 PM 9/2/96 -0400, Black Unicorn wrote: >> what *constructive* >> alternative to EFF do you propose? if you have none, please shut up. > >I think any organization that would apply political pressure rather than >bow to it would be an alternative. I think an organization in touch >enough with its own policy to prevent its staff and board from making >embarassing big brother type proposals to curtail the ability of any of us >to post without attributation would be an alternative. I think an >organization without the internal conflict and strife that has clearly >marred EFF in past and made it a laughable attempt at cohesive political >persuasion would be an alternative. I think an organization that had >official policies on the core issues which it proposes to influence would >be an alternative. > >In short, an organization that had even one of the needed elements of >legislative influence. (Cohesive, directed, persistent, and >uncompromising). "Uncompromising" is not an "element of legislative influence," at least not on this planet. -- Jon Lebkowsky <jonl(a)hotwired.com> FAX (512)444-2693 http://www.well.com/~jonl Electronic Frontiers Forum, 6PM PDT Thursdays <http://www.hotwired.com/eff> "No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough."--Saul Alinsky

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Voting Monarchist?
by Bovine Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

unicorn(a)schloss.li wrote: <snip> >I hate lightning it's pretty, but it can be nasty. most pretty things can. > Vote Monarchist who is the candidate? LaRouche?

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Re: POT_hot
by Jon Lebkowsky 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:50 PM 9/2/96 -0800, jim bell wrote: >At 11:39 PM 9/2/96 GMT, John Young wrote: >> Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct, Lead Essay: >> >> "Postmodern Terrorism. The terrorism of the future may be >> far more destructive than terrorism as we have known it." >> >> An informative survey and pot-heat by Walter Laqueur. >> >> Terrorism's prospects, often overrated by the media, >> the public, and some politicians, are improving as its >> destructive potential increases. Terrorism has >> replaced wars between nations of the 1800s and 1900s. >[deleted] >> Why assassinate a politician or indiscriminately kill >> people when an attack on electronic switching will >> produce far more dramatic and lasting results? If the >> new terrorism directs its energies toward information >> warfare, its destructive power will be exponentially >> greater than any it wielded in the past -- greater >> even than it would be with biological and chemical >> weapons. The single successful one could claim many >> more victims, do more material damage, and unleash far >> greater panic than anything the world has yet >> experienced. >> http://jya.com/pothot.txt (30 kb) > > ><sigh> >Am I being unreasonable to expect at least a certain degreee of logic in the >world? Why is it that this guy (Laqueur) seems to believe that the future >is filled with "greater panic than anything the world has yet experienced." >I believe that, while there may be panic, it'll be panic on the part of the >politicians, not ordinary citizens. I suppose a certain amount of bias is >to be expected, seeing as how it's Foreign Affairs magazine. A good representation of postmodern paranoia...the ingredients: a mind somewhat boggled by the extent of change (and the extent of awareness of change) occasioned by the 'information revolution,' a growing awareness of the fragile interdependence of control systems, and (this is the clincher) an inability to trust the intentions of the vast conspiratorial World Outside. -- Jon Lebkowsky <jonl(a)hotwired.com> FAX (512)444-2693 http://www.well.com/~jonl Electronic Frontiers Forum, 6PM PDT Thursdays <http://www.hotwired.com/eff> "No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough."--Saul Alinsky

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Re: SNAKEOIL? Top Secret for Windows
by peter.allan＠aeat.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

DJ> From: frogfarm(a)yakko.cs.wmich.edu (Damaged Justice) DJ> Subject: SNAKEOIL? Top Secret for Windows DJ> http://www.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/win3/security/tsecret.zip DJ> ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/win3/security/tsecret.zip 12070 bytes DJ> tsecret.zip TOPSECRET!: Easily encrypts any file DJ> TOPSECRET is a program to encrypt your sensitive files. ............ DJ> Shareware. Uploaded by the author. DJ> Siva Krishna DJ> sk510019(a)mail.idt.net PA> I'm interested in reading the source PA> code and any more detailed description you have. SK> I am currently not releasing the source code.Here is a copy of the zip SK> file if you get hold of a pc. -- Peter Allan peter.allan(a)aeat.co.uk

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Passive Trojan (was:Re: HAZ-MAT virus)
by Paul S. Penrod 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This has been done in the past using several vairants (but not in a image program). The key to the success is that the application in question has to be compromised to respond to these codes, either by design or by hacking. Either way the individual responsible must modify the execution mechanism, not just the data itself. Let's see -current examples of computing items with this kind of a "feature"... magic cookies, macros, OLE, DDE, MS Objects, JAVA, and the list keeps growing. On Mon, 2 Sep 1996, Jason Wong wrote: > > Actually , THINK about it, it does makes a interesting idea for a trojan > horse doesn't it ? I mean, just get a solid graphic program, insert codes > into it so that when certain conditions, i.e. a particular gif or jpg file > is view, print, etc, the trojan activates !! > ___________________________________________________________________________ > > Jason Wong (CNE, MCP) Jason(a)MCSB.COM.SG > Network Engineer > MCSB Systems Pte Ltd > ___________________________________________________________________________ > >

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Re: Los Angeles Times article on Helsingius and anon.penet.fi (fwd)
by Michael Froomkin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mike Godwin on E.Dyson: [please note that I'm just a conduit here; direct replies accordingly] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 02:17:12 -0700 >From: Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)well.com> To: Michael Froomkin <froomkin(a)law.miami.edu>, Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)well.com> Subject: Re: Los Angeles Times article on Helsingius and anon.penet.fi (fwd) Esther had written: >Now, speaking personally: I believe there are trade-offs -- which is what I >told the LA Times. I assume I was quoted accurately (although the word >"enforce" is awkward), but out of context. Anonymity can be dangerous -- >as can traceability, especially in/by repressive regimes. Therefore I would >favor allowing anonymity -- with some form of traceability only under terms >considerably stronger than what are generally required for a wiretap. >Anyone who seriously needs anonymity because of a repressive government is >likely to use a foreign (outside whatever jurisdiction he fears) server, so >that this is not a matter of "local" laws. The tracer would have to pass >through what I hope would be tighter hoops than we have now. This is surely a reasonable statement for Esther to have made, even though connotatively it may seem to have an anti-anonymity thrust to it. Who can dispute that individual freedom (of any sort) entails the potential that someone will use that freedom badly, and that the greater the freedom the greater the theoretical potential for harm? The civil-libertarian argument can't be any naive denial of this sort of analysis -- instead, it has to something that acknowledges the truth of the principle, yet simultaneously denies the inference that the principle, standing alone, amounts to a case for limiting that freedom. One way to do so is to argue that the theoretical threat is outweighed by the benefits both to society and to individuals. Another is to point out that there seems to be no evidence that the theoretical problem has transmuted itself into a real one. You may feel free to forward this. --Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Law Professor Volokh Errs In Slate Article About Communications Decency Act. Set your browser to the following URL to read a critique of the Slate article by EFF's Mike Godwin and MIT's Hal Abelson: <http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/~hal/volokh-slate-critique-by-godwin-abelson.html>. Mike Godwin, EFF Staff Counsel, can be reached at mnemonic(a)eff.org or at his office, 510-548-3290. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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