December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Assassination Politics, was Kiddie porn on the Internet
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 22 Sep 96 at 9:36, jim bell wrote: > >Where is Jimmy Hoffa? > > And it worked! Hey Jim, makes me a bit nervous when you talk that tripe. Unions were using guns and they still do, although the hand holding it now is the govt. But I suppose that you were answering only on a strictly factual basis. Ciao jf P.S. send any comments to me directly, as I am not on CPunks anymore. So many things to do, so little time... ...sigh... Jean-Francois Avon, Montreal QC Canada DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Finest Limoges porcelain and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultant physicists and engineers, LabView programming PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891

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Re: Internet File System?
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>The other day, it occurred to me that Java could really take off if there >was some sort of file system. And, since you can't write to local files >with Java, the obvious solution is to set up the 'fopen, fclose(), etc) >set of functions that are 'rpcs' to some server application on the same >computer as the web server the applet comes from. > >Since I never manage to come up with new concepts, I assume someone is already >working on this, or has already created this. > Eric Hughes, well known cypherpunk, presented a two-part paper at DEFCON IV. The first part of the paper, entitled the "Universal Piracy System" or UPS, addresses an Internet/Web file system which offers universal access and privacy. The second part addresses how the UPS can be the enabler for the demise of copyright while offering a market driven replacement of an entirely different character. I hear Eric is refining these ideas and we hope to see something published soon. Perhaps he's lurking and will respond. PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Snoop Daty Data | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com Grinder | Voice: 1-702-655-2877 Sacred Cow Meat Co. | Fax: 1-702-658-2673 7075 W. Gowan Road, #2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | --------------------------------------------------------------------- Just say NO to prescription DRUGS.

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crypto anarchy vs AP
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Been reading the AP thread, and thought I'd donate some of my views. To me, crypto anarchy is a means to achieve a more libertarian government, it is a pivotal tool to reduce government power, and enable freedom and privacy. A libertarian government means a less powerful government, less taxes, less onerous laws, more freedoms. I don't think AP as stated by Jim could escalate quickly enough as a mechanism to introduce a libertarian government, because if it got to the state that too many politicians were openly threatened, and killed, the government would declare a state of war, and switch off the Internet. You'd just cause the government to panic, and this would have negative effects, it would take ages for them to calm down, and the laws they'd pass in the mean time would mean a near certainty of mandatory GAK as a condition to switching the Internet back on. (Before someone takes me to task for the impossibility of switching the Internet off, it all depends on the level of government panic. More specifically perhaps they would disconnect key backbones, and ISPs briefly while they rushed into effect a few presidential decrees outlawing non GAKed crypto, anonymous ecash, remailers, PGP, DC-nets, etc.) I think I understand what Jim is saying with AP, that it might be a way to accelerate the arrival of libertarian government. I'm not saying I have any moral problems with a suitably restrained version of AP, if it saved lives and resulted in a better life for many people. (Some people might even view it as having a certain element of poetic justice:-) However I don't think it would survive the above hurdle. (Also I have some thoughts on why AP might not achieve the desired effects even if it could survive the hurdle which I will save for now, in the interests of keeping this to a digestible length.) Libertarian governments, if they come, I think will be more easily, and more likely achieved via non-violent means. I think it will be a much more gradual process, and that government power will just be gradually eroded as international businesses gain power, and borders become more open, trade more free, as travel becomes cheaper, and moving to another country becomes less of a hassle. Telecommuting, and remote education should help reduce the problems of moving country. If you telecommute, and your kids (if you have any) are taught via the Net, and you can talk to your friends in photo realistic real time VR chat rooms, it becomes much less important where on the planet you live. As information based work becomes more important, significant proportions of government tax revenues may be siphoned off to tele-workers from tax havens, and to those who just ignore local tax laws in favor of anonymous ecash. The ability to jurisdiction shop for laws, and taxes in itself will reduce governments options. It will induce governments to try to provide incentives for international businesses to use their jurisdictions, and to create the appearance of as free a life style as they can for individuals. The jurisdiction shopping will start amongst the disenfranchised, and the adventurous, but will spread as the advantages become clearer, and the hurdles are reduced. Tax collection will be restructured to tax tangibles, and reduced to encourage customers (citizens). Governments are currently flailing around trying to prolong the inevitable. The fall out from this is beginning to annoy some people. If it annoys enough people soon enough that they vote in a Libertarian candidate for president in the next 20 years, crypto anarchy, and libertarian governments could be reached more quickly. I'm not sure it will ever get that far though, because the more votes the libertarians get over the following years, the closer we get to libertarian anyway, because the government has to start adopting their policies to get the votes back. (Much like the green movement, which once it started getting significant votes, and media attention, was pandered to by politicians of all parties. They're all green now:-) And so libertarian thinking starts to affect government thinking. Crypto anarchy privacy preserving goodies such as anonymous ecash, anonymous email, strongly free speech, right to encryption start to fair better, and so start to undermine whats left of government. Politicians, now posturing to try and look more libertarian might even start to take on board the idea that there are simply too many government employees, that may be the war on drugs causes more problems than it solves, that sounding pro free speech is something that might carry some votes, etc. By the time governments get weak enough for AP to be feasible, they will be so weak, and eager to entice you into their jurisdiction with promised single digit tax rates, private dietary recommendation services, friendly police forces, advertised local highlights: local casinos, brothels, cuisine, favorable climate, reasonably priced housing, etc, etc. that no one will care much about offing the fawning officials (head salesmen, and brochure designer) anyway. Well thats my theory :-) It could all suffer a huge set-back if the government panics too soon, and passes mandatory GAK by presidential decree or something. One hopes that whats left of the US first ammendment, and judicial system would be enough to repeal such a move, but you never know. Adam -- #!/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: Please do not post off-topic flames to the list.
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Unfortunately, you've probably all received something that started out like this: >> You are being gently flamed because. Sorry about that. I've been gone for the last few days and found out that one of my incoming mail filters was somewhat flawed. Instead of sending that generic response only to the esteemed Dr. Vulis it was sending it to any message with his address *in the header*. It also replied to any cc:ed addresses. Ooops... Also, there is no need to speculate about any ulterior motives. It was entirely a setup glitch. There's an important reminder here: don't make setup changes at 2 am and then disappear for 4 days! Again, sorry to the list about this. # Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 "I have never been able to figure out why anyone would want to play games on a computer in any case when the whole system is a game. Word processing, spreadsheets, telecoms -- it's all a game. And they pay you to play it." -- Duncan Frissell

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Re: Bernstein hearing: The Press Release
by Rich Burroughs 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:39 PM 9/21/96 -0800, Jim Bell wrote: >At 02:03 PM 9/18/96 -0700, John Gilmore wrote: [snip] >>* Any legal framework that allows a government bureaucrat to >>censor speech before it happens is an unconstitutional prior restraint. >>The government is not allowed to set up such a drastic scheme >>unless they can prove that publication of such information will >>"surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our >>Nation or its people" and that the regulation at issue is necessary >>to prevent this damage. > >At the risk of being a devil's advocate, let me suggest that you are >conceding too much even with the preceding paragraph. The 1st amendment >says nothing about preventing speech which (even admittedly) would result >in "direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our nation or its people." [snip] Jim, that's a quote of Potter Stewart from the Pentagon Papers case, if I'm not mistaken. It's not written in the Constitution, but Supreme Court precedent is the next best thing as far as con law goes. >The way you've written the paragraph I've quoted above, it appears that you >are somehow acknowleding that there are certain circumstances where certain >types of speech are controllable because they are "harmful," but you fail to >explain how even this constitutional restiction is tolerable. Frankly, I >don't see it! What you need to do is to be far more specific about such >speech and exactly where it can be controlled. What you need to do is look at the case law :) The government can restrict speech in time, place or manner, according to the courts. Restricting content is more difficult, and places a much heavier burden on the gov. To expect people writing about and arguing the case to completely ignore the existing case law is foolish, IMHO. >I should point out, also, that this is the second time I've mentioned this. >You're doing us a disservice if you concede too much in this area. I think that John and EFF are doing us a huge service by their involvement in the case. I am very optimistic about the outcome of the Bernstein case. Judge Patel's ruling that source code = speech really puts the debate in the plaintiff's court, and we saw some of that in the hearing on Friday, IMHO. Much of the argument was about prior restraint, with the government trying to claim that they are only trying to restrict a specific functionality of crypto code and not the ideas behind it. This seemed to be a fairly weak argument to me, and the plaintiff's attorney pointed out that the ideas embodied in the source code are what dictate the functionality. The plaintiff's attorney (Cindy Cohn) also argued 3 lines of cases that bear on the issue: 1) Compelled speech. 2) Anonymity. 3) Freedom of association. Cohn also argued that the statute is vague (terms like "general principle" and "fundamental research") and overbroad; also that the current version of ITAR does not even meet the scrutiny of the DOJ's own OLC review of the statute. When the attorney for the gov tried to drift back to the issue of whether source code is speech, Judge Patel said, "You'll get that chance again in another court with more judges." Near the end of the hearing, the government attorney stated that the statute describes "what is not controlled," which elicited a pretty hearty laugh from the spectators. Not a real strategic admission. The plaintiff's brief is at: http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ITAR_export/Bernstein_case/Legal/960726_filin g/motion_partsj.html There's quite a bit of info in that same directory. Rich ______________________________________________________________________ Rich Burroughs richieb(a)teleport.com http://www.teleport.com/~richieb See my Blue Ribbon Page at http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/blueribbon U.S. State Censorship Page at - http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/state New EF zine "cause for alarm" - http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/cause

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Go away CIA
by skeeve＠skeeve.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well well... After putting up the CIA hack mirror page on http://www.skeeve.net/cia/ I learnt a few things. o it got 50,000 hits in 1 day o everyone from the cia, senate, fbi, nsa (ncsc) and every other bloody US gov department looked at it masses of times. The CIA looked at it every 10-15 minutes. zztop{root}:15: cat skeeve.net-access_log | grep ucia.gov | wc -l 281 o Even the CIA tries to hack you. relay1-ext.ucia.gov unknown - [21/Sep/1996:01:56:44 +1000] "GET /cgi-bin/phf?Qalias=x%0a/bin/cat%20/etc/passwd HTTP/1.0" 404 1180 o Dozens of in.fingerd/in.telnetd attempts from ucia.gov, some mil sites and ncsc.mil sites. as I speak the house are looking at it. b252-209.house.gov unknown - [21/Sep/1996:02:41:37 +1000] "GET /cia/ I "PRESUME" there are no laws (international or otherwise) being broken by my housing of the mirror... not like I actually care.. but it would be good to know. Ok... ive been up all night chuckling at all the different sort of sites hitting the mirror... time to sleep. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Skeeve Stevens Email: skeeve(a)skeeve.net CEO/The Big Boss/All round nice guy URL: http://www.skeeve.net/ MyInternet Australian Anglicans Online http://www.myinternet.net/ http://www.anglican.asn.au/ Phone: (+612) 869-3334 Mobile: (0414) SKEEVE [+61414-753-383] Key fingerprint = D2 7E 91 53 19 FE D0 5C DE 34 EA AF 7A 5C 4D 3E

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Re: AP [was: Re: Kiddie porn on the Internet] [NOISE]
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:38 PM 9/22/96 -0400, hallam(a)vesuvius.ai.mit.edu wrote: > >I agree with Bill, AP sounds like a very good club for the Exon types >to beat us with. But they're not doing it. They know about it, but they're NOT using it. This should tell you something. This really is no surprise to me; before I started publicizing AP, I tried to carefully consider whether letting the cat out of the bag was going to assist the government in stopping it. My conclusion was that they didn't stand a chance. If anything, they're afraid of publicizing the idea, because their opposition to it can look only self-serving. >Jim's latest comments sounded no different to me than the mealy mouthed >"understanding" messages that Sinn Fein publish about the IRA. Given >the opportunity to condem any attack on the President under AP rules >we get a non commital non-condemnation. Its the type of thing that Gerry >Adams says after his men have just killed two kids with a bomb in a litterbin >outside a MacDonalds. Don't try to tar me with that brush. I made it clear long ago that I'm opposed to truly random attacks on ordinary citizens. However, I hasten to add that I'd very much prefer that these attacks be re-targeted against the people who deserve them. However, I usually find that the people who make the biggest deal about disliking random citizen attacks are the ones who recommend replacing them with...nothing...and have no plan to solve the problems with any other method, violent or otherwise. [doctrinaire BS deleted] >As the Marxist idealogues got frustrated by their evident lack of progress >they turned to terrorism. The Bader Minehof gang believed that they could >spark the revolution by jolting society out of its complacency. Their >strategy was remarkably like AP. Somehow, I doubt it. Anybody who thinks an AP-like system would be effective for bringing in his pet communist (or fascist, or monarchist, or anything other than pure-anarchic) government is an idiot. AP is fundamentally anti-heirarchical in its leanings and effects. >If the heads of large corporations were >likely to be assasinated then noone would want to lead a large firm. Who said companies need "leaders"? Remember, I said AP is anti-heirarchical. Any heirarchies, particularly those forced on people, are strongly deterred. This includes social and religious heirarchies, BTW. Even corporate heirarchies would only exist if approved-of by the vast majority of the shareholders, most of whom will be the workers as well. > In >fact as any person with counter terrorism experience will tell you the >threat of death is remarkably ineffective as a means of intimidation. It >creates the opposite effect, strengthening the resolve of the target. I >discussed this point recently with someone close to Mossad who agreed. Under a set of circumstances similar to the status quo, that is not surprising. But that can change. That WILL change. People occupy positions of authority when they feel, personally, they are better off doing so than not. Give the average member of the public (not merely crazed "terrorists") the opportunity to remove those people, and you won't be able to keep them around. I mean, presumably they do their job for a salary and benefits, right? How many bombs or bullets will they tolerate, rather than resigning and taking a safer job? >Terrorism is becomming an increasing concern. The amount of damage an >individual can cause is much greater than that possible in the past. If anything, I think the advantage of AP is that it REDUCES the amount of damage that any given person has to cause, per citizen, to achieve his anti-government political ends. I've pointed out that it would only take a penny or two from each citizen, on average, to remove one of even the highest-level US officeholders. Far less than that if you include resignations. What I'm advocating is a system that makes it impossible for agents of the status quo to resist the opposition of the public, which is unlike the current system. Rather than have to build a bomb, or wait for somebody else to do so, the ordinary citizen only needs to make a modest contribution to the "revolution fund." And today, an officeholder can claim to resist "terrorism" based on the fact that he opposes the extreme action of a handful of people. What happens when they have to admit that a million people paid for that gun to be fired or that bomb to be planted? >There >are plenty of exhausted ideologies about which can be fashioned into >a justification of murder. Don't blame me for them. > Jim's post shows very clearly how Libertarianism >can be converted into a justification for terrorism. Its a very short gap >between being opposed to government and actively fighting against it. What, exactly, is the MEANING of "being opposed to government"? If you pay taxes to support that government (even if that support is not voluntary) those taxes mean that you are indeed acting to strengthen that government and assist its efforts. I suggest that you can't realistically claim "opposition to government" (other than rhetorical) under these circumstances. >I see libertarianism as the exhausted remnant of the mercantilism of the >1980s. As constructed it recognises only those rights which favour the >privileged in society and none of those which benefit the ecconomically >disadvantaged. Politically it reached its peak influence almost a decade >ago when Regan and Thatcher were at their zenith. The '94 congress will >probably be seen as the turning point in the political tide with the mainstream >of politics moving back to the left again. There will always be people arround >who conclude that the failure was not being close enough to the ideology. You've already made it clear you don't consider yourself a libertarian. Why go on with this stuff? >If the libertarians are not carefull they will be inexorably linked in the public mind >with the terrorists who act in their name. I think the stereotypical "terrorist" doesn't really claim to "act in their [the public's] name." The one recent counter-example that I've heard of, that of the EPR in Mexico, is a very welcome exception. If anything, I think the governments of the world are truly frightened that "terrorism" as commonly practiced will change from the "blow up random airliner" mode, passing through the "blow up nearby government building" mode, to "find and kill a particular official" mode. Far less collateral damage, far harder to whip up public opposition to in the press, etc. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: (Fwd) Australian "ITAR" regulations
by cjh＠osa.com.au 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Peter Trei writes: > Forwarded from the cypherpunks list... > http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp.pl/au/legis/cth/consol_reg/cer43… Thanks for posting this URL Peter. Of particular note is the heading: > 43. Other goods as follows: An anonymous opinion from inside the Defence Dept holds that electronic bits on a wire do not constitute goods, and as a result if you ship electronically, you are not subject to the regulations. If you ship a CD or floppy or other physical media containing software, you violate the regulations. I'll add this to the SSLeay legality FAQ - standard disclaimers apply of course, obtain professional legal advice before exporting SSLeay. ------------------------------------------------------------ Clifford Heath cjh(a)osa.com.au Open Software Associates Limited 29 Ringwood Street / P O Box 401 Phone +613 9871 1694 Ringwood VIC 3134 AUSTRALIA Fax +613 9871 1711 ------------------------------------------------------------ Deploy Applications across the Internet and Intranets! Visit our Web site at http://www.osa.com

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Re: Snake-Oil FAQ
by steven ryan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:27 AM 9/22/96 -0700, you wrote: >My view is that people interested in buying and using crypto are either >bright enough to learn, or are not. A "Snake Oil FAQ" is largely >unnecessary, for either category. For the first, because they're bright. >For the second, because they're not. My view is that there is a large third group of people who are bright enough to learn, but don't have the time or inclination to read books or do extensive research on the subject. There are a lot of people using PGP for the wrong reason, not because they read the books or did the research. Nor do they even understand how it works as opposed to how it is used. They are using it because they cruised the net and read good things about it or heard it was cool. A Snake Oil Faq could help prevent these people from choosing wrong products. It would also be very helpful to have all the arguments in one place in one concise faq. Before I joined this list and read Applied Cryptography I was in a discussion in a previous job about securing one of our products. The programmer wanted to protect the key with a convoluted series of transpositions. I knew it was dumb but couldn't successfully argue the point why. A faq would have been helpful. There a lot of people with a casual interest in crypto who will remember that there is a faq on bad crypto. When the time comes they may be able to use those arguments to help avoid the use of bad crypto. Steven ------------------------------------ Steven Ryan - Reading Access - sryan(a)reading.com PGP Fingerprint: E8 A2 C5 A2 7A C4 77 93 0A 1B 1D C6 B9 2F 36 9B Finger me for my PGP public key

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provably hard PK cryptosystems
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

extracting from part of another thread... Dimitri Vulis <dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com> writes: > Adam Back writes: > > [...] I think I remember that you posted some time ago a way to have > > two plausible decryptions for one ciphertext, to enable things like > > duress keys, in terms of RSA. The problem with this, however is > > that RSA is currently very slow to use in its pure form for > > messages. > > I don't recall this one... My feeling about RSA is that one of these > days there will be a breakthrough allowing much faster factorization > (either through a better algorithm on a conventional computer, or by > a practical quantum computer) and then all the codes based on > factorization will become essentially plaintext. It's time to start > looking for other hard problem to base PKC on. I'm not sure about quantum computers, some people who know much more about particle physics than I do seemed initially sceptical, and didn't think it was doable. However I have read some optimistic sounding news clippings (on the list) which sounded as if things are progressing well, with techniques being found using redundancy to get around what were earlier problems of reliability. Is this accurate reporting (thinking of garbled stories by over enthusiastic journalists)? I'd be interested to hear opinions from anyone who does know about particle physics about the likihood of practical quantum computers being practical in the next 20 years or so. RSA has always had problems with two pitfalls in any proof of its hardness: no proof that RSA is as hard as factoring, and no proof that factoring is hard. Rabin and variants of it at least have the proof of being as hard as factoring. You mentioned your opinion that a vastly better factoring algorithm may yet be found. What about the possibility of finding proof of a useful lower bound for the complexity of factoring, do you have any thoughts on the likelihood of this being achieved? That would be a very significant result, and in the absence of a quantum attack would be as good as it gets. It would allow you to make realistic calculations about physical limits of attacking it, in a similar manner to the entropy calculations possible for brute force of symmetric ciphers. (Heat death of the sun before a solution even if every particle was part of hardware key cracking computer type arguments). One other area that did sound promising was some kind of mapping problem in n dimensional tiling that Tim was discussing at a physical meet while I was over in the US. A news clipping posted to cypherpunks a short time ago was talking about a researcher who had constructed a crypto system related to the problem of finding paths in a tiling problem (sounded like the same problem). The interesting part was that the researcher was reported as having a proof of hardness. Similarly is this being reported accurately? > E.g., does anyone know of any progress made on public-key > cryptosystems based on the word problem in semigroups, described in > Neal Wagner and Marianne Magyarik, _A public key cryptosystem based > on the word problem_, Advances in Cryptology: Proceedings of Crypto > '84, G. R. Blakley and D. Chaum, eds., Lecture Notes in Computer > Sciences #196, Springer Verlag, 1985, and also mentioned in Wayne > Patterson, _Mathematical Cryptology for Computer Scientists and > Mathematicians_, Rowman and Littlefield, 1987? Not familiar with the problem. Is it something you could explain briefly, or are there any on-line papers on the subject? > >From what I neard, NSA tried very hard to implement it and failed, > and the Soviets actually built a cryptosystem similar to what they > described. I tried to duplicate what the Soviets supposedly did, but > without success. Adam -- #!/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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