December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Photoshop, Steganograhy, and cypherpunks?
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 8 Sep 1996 16:16:58 -0400 (EDT), Jason Vagner wrote: >> > 1) If I hide some PGP encrypted data in a >> > gif, jpg or wav file will there be any tell tale >> > signs to the naked eye of an expert? If yes, >> > what are they? >> If you stego too many bits in a figure, it may become apparent. >The new version of Photoshop coming out this fall includes the ability to >embed "digital watermarking": >(from http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,3188,00.html: > > Digital watermarking > adds copyright information to > a photograph that doesn't alter the photo's > appearance. The watermark is detectable even > after the photo is edited or printed and rescanned. > >Question: Will stegonagrphying (?) the picture with noise mar the >watermark? Will a digital signature *and* something embedded into the >graphic through steganography seriosly affect a 24-bit image? Most certainly; the idea here is that watermarking should show that an image is unedited. >Furthermore: What about browsers? Could cookies or binary info be embedded >into images on the fly so that a java applet could preserve information or >states between pages, of different sites? Of course. You could do a cookie type implementation with a Java applet easily. - "'Anonymity is bad,' says a source who wishes to remain anonymous." - Nuff' said. * Home: Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp * Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY" * Work: cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 | (619)689-6579 * Member in good standing of the GNU whirled hors d'oeuvre

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Re: talker
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sat, 07 Sep 1996 20:10:50 -0700, James A. Donald wrote: >> Yup -- you're never going to see a very high SNR out of Juno: > >Yes, the anarchy list has a persistent moron from Juno.com, educated >well above his intelligence. A seriously proflic loon. > >I have told eudora to transfer everything from juno.com into my >loon file, regardless of author. Makes AOL.com look like >caltech. Particularly since AOL tends to get a lot of well-educated people who are just net-illiterate. Of course, they also get a bunch of cranks, particularly since those "Generate an AOL account" programs started going around... - "'Anonymity is bad,' says a source who wishes to remain anonymous." - Nuff' said. * Home: Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp * Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY" * Work: cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 | (619)689-6579 * Member in good standing of the GNU whirled hors d'oeuvre

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Re: talker
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 08 Sep 1996 11:09:07 -0400, Wayne H. Allen wrote: >> cypherpunks are *not* crackers; this is a crytographic >> and political issues relating to cryptography mailing list. > Well maybe, political issues galore certainly, but very very little >to do with cryptography. I mean what does TWA 800 have to do with this >list. I mean lets be completely honest here, whatever the original >purpose of the list was for its been allowed to shift away from its >intended purpose considerably. True, but something like TWA800 has a lot more relevency to the "political issues" part mentioned above. A Big-Brother database being setup seems on-topic... - "'Anonymity is bad,' says a source who wishes to remain anonymous." - Nuff' said. * Home: Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp * Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY" * Work: cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 | (619)689-6579 * Member in good standing of the GNU whirled hors d'oeuvre

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[NOISE] Far-reaching tentacles . . . ?
by abostick＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Found in the news: (SACRAMENTO)- The principals of six Sacramento area schools have received 46 used computers that were renovated by inmates at Folsom Prison. Warden Theo White delivered the machines after they were given a reprieve from the scrap heap. The prison obtained the donated personal computers from the non-profit Detwiler Foundation... which began working five years ago to bring new technology into the state's classrooms. [Would you want *YOUR* CHILDREN to use computers that had been HACKED by CONVICTED CRIMINALS????] -- Alan Bostick | Usenet is living proof that if you analyze a mailto:abostick@netcom.com | blackbody spectrum for semantic content you get news:alt.grelb | "Call 1-800-HOT-GIRL now!" http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~abostick

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Re: Imminent Death of the Internet, GIF at 11
by Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:40 AM 9/7/96 -0700, Martin Minow <minow(a)apple.com> wrote: >For several months (years?) Bob Metcalf has been predicting that >the Internet will self-destruct from overload. His argument >appears to follow one of Gordon Bell's maxims: "anyone can predict >the future: all you need is semi-log paper and a ruler." As I >understand it, Metcalf's argument is that network load (messages, >packets) is growing exponentially, while network bandwidth (fiber >capacity, switch performance) is growing linearly. At some point, >these two curves cross -- and demand will exceed capacity. > I would add one word into that Gordon Bell's maxim: "anyone can predict the SHORT-TERM future: all you need is semi-log paper and a ruler." Rulers are liner-extrapolation predictors; the only predictions with still lower intelligence are pointers - with the assumption that things are going to always remain the same. Unfortunately, these two kinds of prediction methods populate most of the human "visionary" landscape, with rare flowers of visionary minds elevating above it - Metcalf's doesn't seem to be one of them. This very observation on the population/food dilemma was made by Malthus quite a while ago. However, both population and food are still here, and natural resources are no longer a serious limiting factor for the production of food. If you notice that your attempt to extend your ruler farther than it can go, will not work, it's a good prediction of a breakdown - *of the ruler*, not the system you are trying to measure. The role of a visionary is not to mistake the horizon of current trends for the horizon of the world, but look ahead and predict future trends - and advise what should be done to adapt to the imminent transitions. An important observation for the net traffic/bandwidth "crisis" is that human ability to perceive textual and visual information remains pretty much the same. Addition of graphics, video and sound to the Net, as well as the growing number of users, increase the bandwidth, but this all has (though still distant) saturation point - say, 24 hour-a-day single-channel video feed to every human and his dog. (Inter-machine communications do not have this limit though). Already, most of the newsfeed coming to any single server, is never read by anybody; this is also the fate of most messages from 60 or so mailing lists coming to my PC. A solution here, that will be also quite instrumental for many future problems, is not to send messages that are not going to be read - i.e., server-side filtering agents; I have been suggesting collaborative message filtering (see proposal on my home page) for more than 5 years now - only to find people who could help implement it, uselessly running around the Net whining and waving their stiff rulers. Of course, there are also other methods of making Net traffic more intelligent and robust; if Internet was recognized as the most revolutionary development in the evolution of the global ecology of intelligence, and if there existed some mechanism for turning truly visionary ideas on the Net's evolution into changes in its structure, then, well, things would be much better. <x-rich></x-rich><x-rich> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alexander Chislenko <<sasha1(a)netcom.com> www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html Firefly Network, Inc.: <<alexc(a)firefly.net> www.ffly.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- </x-rich>

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Mailing list
by Webeus 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello, I have been away for over 2 months and in returning find that alpha.c2.org is lo longer. Can you suggest an alternative, FAQ's etc ?? Thank you Webeus

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[PARANOID NOISE] Satellites flying formation?
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 8 Sep 96 at 12:16, John F. Fricker wrote: > >I don't know. I would presume so. I only guess that it was a 3-4-5 > >formation. But it does make some constants easy! <g> > Maybe we could each watch for these formations and keep a log of > observations. I've done a little searching for more information but > I find nothing easy. Perhaps one of my hard core skywatcher friends > would know something as well. I'll try to link with my old stargazers friends and ask questions around. If you get something new, write. Cheers and good luck! jfa

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towards an eternity service
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[the relevance of this to remailer-operators, is that my example prototype architecture for discussion relies heavily on mixmaster remailers] Ross Anderson's eternity service (postscript paper somewhere on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/) is a distributed file system with the criteria that it should not be possible to delete information from it. The paper outlines ways that you might go about doing this, and gives as a design goal that it should not be possible even for concerted government attacks to remove information from the service. Roughly the approach described is to have anonymous servers with secret shared data. The server doesn't know what it is serving, and the server charges per Mb/year of data storage. This seems a pretty interesting idea, as it would be a great boon to free speech to be able to reliably publish information that would survive attempts to "unpublish" it, which seem to be gaining in popularity. Notable recent examples of such attacks being Scientologist attacks on distribution of it's `scriptures', the German governments banning of nazi revisionist material, and the impending possibility of a repeat of the CDA at a (US) state level. I think it is desirable to get something working now, even if it is far short of the design criteria Anderson describes. A working model would provide something on which to base discussion of improvements, and would also be an interesting experiment to see the sorts of uses such a system would be put to, and the political reaction to it's uses. The following doesn't depend on, but would be helped by having direct socket delivery of packets (for performance) in the mixmaster remailer-net and forward secrecy (for resilence to attack). The idea comes in two parts, the first part, an anonymous www proxy using mixmaster to deliver packets, is present to provide cover traffic for real eternity system requests, the second part describes a way to acheive an eternity like system with the traffic mixed in with part 1 traffic, so that the two types of traffic can not be distinguished by attackers. 1. anonymous www proxies over mixmaster The stated design goal for this part (it's partly a cover goal, though useful in its own right) is to ensure that users can access publically accessible www pages without divulging their identity to the sites they are accessing, or even to an attacker who is monitoring net traffic. The user wants to hide which sites they are accessing, and what information they are accessing. No attempt is made to conceal the identity of the www sites accessed, a normal URL is used to access them. This is basically just like www.anonymizer.com, except that traffic is routed over the mixmaster net. An http <-> mixmaster interface would be added to the existing mixmaster. You add a blip in the line for outgoing traffic on your own machine which converts all outgoing http requests into mixmaster packets and feeds them into the remailer network. You choose random chains to get to the http servers. The delivered packet at the exit remailer node is a new mixmaster packet type, a http request type, rather than a request to email to an individual, or post to a newsgroup, it results in an (where possible SSL encrypted) http request being made to the specified http server. Also included with the request is a mixmaster reply chain, so that the exit mixmaster node can route the return the requested www pages, and SSL session traffic back to the originator. As you might imagine if this became popular, it could generate a lot of traffic. For a practical system I think it's inevitable that you'd need to provide some financial incentive for the mixmaster operators to subsidize their T3s :-) So you would need to incorporate per hop payments, for the remailers. This could be a relatively small payment, but is just there to ensure that they have the money to increase their bandwidth if the demand requires it. I think that about explains part 1. 2. an eternity like system built on this system There are a couple of extra requirements for the eternity system, firstly that the address of the www site must be concealed also, and secondly that the data is secret shared across multiple eternity www sites. The first requirement can be met by the anonymous eternity www sites publically posting to a newsgroup (via a mixmaster remailer of course:-) a mixmaster chain pointing at themselves. To reduce the problem of the flood attack for finding the endpoint of a chain, firstly some of Peter Allan's suggestions on extra cover traffic, and on adding extra hops to increase cover traffic should help, but ultimately this only makes a longer concerted flood necessary to find the output. I don't see any easy solution to the flood attack, the only _real_ answer is a DC net. A slightly simpler, but less robust solution would be to find ways to have fixed levels of traffic between nodes in the remailer network. Surplus traffic at entry points could be rejected, so that the sender knows to try another remailer. The other requirement for eternity is that the data should be secret shared. If all the eternity www servers publish their reply blocks, the user sends requests to a number of the eternity servers selected randomly. Choose the number so that it is likely that you will get the required k of n shares, given that there are n servers, and they all hold shares in the data, and that k of n shares are required to recover the secret. You also need to ensure that the exit mixmaster which is acting as a http forwarder server can't tell whether it is making an eternity system request or an anonymous www proxy request. The fact that http traffic is blindly forwarded means that if the http request is SSL encrypted the http forwarding mixmaster remailer will not know the contents of the traffic, and so will not be able to distinguish traffic type: eternity or anonymous proxy. As the eternity www servers don't know what the data in the shares they are holding is, they can't provide the indexing facility directly. Rather ordinary www pages, and other eternity www pages can be used to collect links to interesting eternity pages. In otherwords, it's decentralised, as is the www, and any indexing left up to the authors of eternity hosted www documents, or anyone elses indexing to interesting links. A compromise technology which would greatly simplify access to the service would be public www proxies or gateways to the eternity service, so that no new software was required for the client. This would serve a similar role to WWW based remailers. The scheme is complex in places but basically requires no new technology, at least for a crude implementation, without the finer points. What can be missed out in a first pass implementation, and deferred for later incremental improvements: ecash postage to pay for remailer resources fixed traffic between remailers payment for www sites (anonymous www proxy and eternity service) oblivious transfer to setup shares so that leaves the following to be done: blip in the line which routes http requests over mixmaster mixmaster reply chains for return http traffic secret sharing of data to send to eternity www servers periodic posting of mix reply blocks by eternity www servers public access www proxy, or www-cgi based gateway comments, volunteers? Adam -- exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

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Re: Cypherpunks subscribers - Singapore and NZ gvts, plus IRS
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:56 PM 9/8/96, Declan McCullagh wrote: >I suppose it would be only polite to ask the Singapore government folks >and IRS employees to join our conversation. > >The cypherpunks list now has nearly 1,400 direct subscribers, plus >whoever reads it through local mail-news gateways. > >(Note I'm not indicating that a .gov.sg or .irs.gov address implies >anything about an individual's personal political beliefs.) > >video(a)nhmxw0.fnal.gov >e875836(a)popcorn.llnl.gov >foley_p(a)kosmos.wcc.govt.nz .. What, so now my group, Government Office of Technology, is no longer considered part of the military-bureaucratic complex? -- tcmay(a)got.net (And to think I get paid a GS-16 salary just to keep tabs on you folks, feed you disinformation, and entice you into various operations.) We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I 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, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Imminent Death of the Internet, GIF at 11
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:40 PM 9/7/96, Martin Minow wrote: >We certainly are seeing changes in the way we use the network. When >I "got on the net" in the late 1970's, I was on two mailing lists >(SF-Lovers and Human Net) and could read *all* of Usenet traffic >in an hour or two. In the late 1980's, Usenet traffic totalled The 2002 version, unless our list is outlawed as being part of a TICO (Terrorist-Influenced and Corrupt Organization) conspiracy: "I could read *all* of the Cypherpunks traffic in a day or two..." --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I 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, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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