December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

All Bets Off
by Brock N. Meeks 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just so this isn't hanging in cyberspace forever, my $5,000 bet for anyone to prove the TWA 800 flight was downed by a U.S. missile is now *off the table*. It's been two-plus weeks since I tossed out the bet and no one took me up on it, so it's now being formally withdrawn. --Brock

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WinSock Remailer Now Accepting Only PGP Encrypted Messages
by Joey Grasty 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Y'all: Effective immediately, the WinSock Remailer (operating at winsock(a)c2.org) will now accept only PGP encrypted messages. All incoming messages (with the exception of messages with subject headers of help, remailer-help, remailer-stats, and remailer-key) must now be encrypted with the public key for winsock(a)c2.org. All other messages will be rejected. Regards, Joey Grasty (jgrasty(a)gate.net) Jim Ray (liberty(a)gate.net) WinSock Remailer Operators -- Joey Grasty jgrasty(a)gate.net [home -- encryption, privacy, RKBA and other hopeless causes] jgrasty(a)pts.mot.com [work -- designing pagers] "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann PGP = A7 CC 31 E4 7E A3 36 13 93 F4 C9 06 89 51 F5 A7

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Re: forward secrecy in mixmaster
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:29 PM 9/12/96 +0000, paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk wrote: >Stewart> I think they chose a strong prime (form p = 2q+1, q prime), ... >Strong primes are no longer of any benefit for cryptographic >applications. You're probably right, for today's factoring techniques. For a key you're only planning to use for the next couple of years, you can pretty much ignore strong primes, unless you're stuck with 512-bit keys, in which case you need to glean any crumbs you can. But for a value that needs to last a long time, such as a Diffie-Hellman modulus that's going to be a default value in a standard, and which you're only going to generate once anyway, it makes sense to generate a strong prime in case factoring methods that are affected by it become popular again in the future. It also makes sense to turn loose a bunch of people using different primality tests just in case somebody gets lucky (e.g. crank the test long enough that the probability of non-primality is 10**-9 or 10**-12 instead of just 10**-6. >Implementing strong primes won`t make your code any less secure, it >will just take longer to create the keys and won`t gain you any >security, all the big boys are using elliptic curve factoring methods >now so you really have nothing to gain. Do Generalized Number Field Sieve and its friends count as elliptic curve methods? # 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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The GAK Momentum is Building...
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:59 AM 9/17/96, David Lesher wrote: >Clarinet sez: > >OTTAWA, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- The federal government has chosen >Northern Telecom's data security software, Entrust { } Public-Key >Infrastructure (PKI)... for gov't use..... > >worth $7.3 million...... Add to this these items: -- the IBM GAK product -- the "Clipper IV" (or is it only Clipper III?) GAK announcement expected "soon" It seems that several of these announcements are happening at the same time, which I doubt is coincidental. As the Republican challenger (whose name escapes me at the moment :-}) is not making an issue out of this, and is not making any issues out of anything related to liberty issues as near as I can tell, Clinton and the national security establishment seem to have free rein (and reign) to deploy GAK> As Lucky pointed out, GAK now appears inevitable. There's probably still time to monkeywrench these schemes, though. A few Blaze- or Wagner/Goldberg-type hacks could undermine confidence in the Key Authority (not to be confused with the Port Authority, which I presume handles i/o port assignments). --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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Re: Spam blacklist project
by Jim Ray 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: hallam(a)ai.mit.edu, cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Mon Sep 16 21:57:31 1996 Phill wrote: [interesting anti-spam idea.] > Of course I don't for a moment imagine that this will > be 100% effective. Without government regulation there will > always be slimeballs who send mail to people who don't want it. Your faith in big government, despite seemingly every bit of evidence possible to the contrary, astounds me sometimes. Churches, Mosques, etc. struggle mightily for this kind of thought pattern in believers, yet it comes to you naturally, in secular life. Truly a marvel, and on _this_ list, of all places. It has kept me from killfiling you, but I must occasionally express my awe at the power of faith to literally move mountains. There is a "regulation" (law) against [murder, selling/growing reefer, selling sexual services, assault, you name it] yet you'd never deny that these behaviors still exist, would you? Somehow, though, you still seem to manage to think that spamming slimeballs will just disappear with more regulations. It's astonishing. > The advantage of this scheme is that it would mean that > the spam industry can avoid regulation pressure and they can > deflect criticism. I thought that "The Hippie of Crime" proved that spammers, if slick enough, could deflect criticism from themselves without any government help. > Meanwhile recipients of unwanted spam have > a legitimate beef. Don't we already have a legitimate beef, though? [I like your idea, BTW.] In fact, in view of Ian's recent posting, don't we already have a law, too? JMR -- "I think I'll reattach my printer to this machine." Regards, Jim Ray -- DNRC Minister of Encryption Advocacy "As govt.s grow arithmetically, corruption grows exponentially." -- Ray's Law of official corruption. Defeat the Duopoly! Stop the Browne out. Harry Browne for President. Jo Jorgensen for Vice-president. http://www.HarryBrowne96.org/ http://www.twr.com/stbo ___________________________________________________________________ PGP id.E9BD6D35 51 5D A2 C3 92 2C 56 BE 53 2D 9C A1 B3 50 C9 C8 I will generate a new (and bigger) PGP key-pair on election night. <mailto:liberty@gate.net> http://www.shopmiami.com/prs/jimray ___________________________________________________________________ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMj4FkG1lp8bpvW01AQFvzAQAlLcZV+zsFfsvGodK7uyJP2hxNgugWpwD qYV23LgwV2dU5NRb7TPbqhp9Z6R7J5YZ3DnA6QuLnvn0pKVFITIyhcq7Wn3zu4PK 5uQ3slYJof1nT3l79zDA6Xx/2pBUm4IxhYXsrw4z4jQFGWHl28rZ1JpbAWghCRcM b7JXzqaRnek= =AbJE -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Report on security of e-money by BIS
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Sender: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com Reply-To: lvhove(a)vnet3.vub.ac.be (Leo Van Hove) Mime-Version: 1.0 Precedence: Bulk Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 10:39:14 +0100 From: lvhove(a)vnet3.vub.ac.be (Leo Van Hove) To: Multiple recipients of <e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: Re: Report on security of e-money by BIS >So, I am still keen on that report ... > >> No political recommandations. >(ok) >> Possibliy the report will soon be online. Meanwhile it should be >> possible to order a copy at www.bis.org. > >but the site has no email address or ordering info. The report >is not listed as far as I could see. As I have a scanner, I >shall attempt to secure a paper copy, but it looks like recourse >to historical methods of communications is called for. Now, how >does one operate this push-button dial thingy... > >-- >iang >iang(a)systemics.com Found the following on the FRB of New York site at http://www.ny.frb.org/pihome/news/g10.html --- SECURITY MEASURES FOR ELECTRONIC MONEY ARE EFFECTIVE, G-10 TASK FORCE REPORTS NEW YORK -- Existing security measures to protect electronic money products, when implemented correctly, can provide consumers and issuers adequate protection from fraud, according to a report by G-10 central bank computer and security experts. The report, issued through the Bank for International Settlements, was prepared by <snip> *** This report will be available in its entirely on this site in the near future.*** --- leo _________________________________________________________________________ Leo Van Hove Centre for Financial Economics Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels) Pleinlaan 2 B-1050 Brussels vox: +32 2 629.21.25 fax: +32 2 629.22.82 e-mail:lvhove@vnet3.vub.ac.be home page: http://cfec.vub.ac.be/cfec/leo.htm _________________________________________________________________________ --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

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Re: 56 kbps modems
by craigw＠dg.ce.com.au 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Also note there's no mention of the hype-writer's old friend, > compression. But than if ypou are doing the compressed rate 56k is not that high. There are 28.8k modems that (in theory) do 336k including compression, so 56k would be redundant. Most current modems specify they will compress to 115k, whether they ever get close to this is unlikely Craig ,'~``. \|/ ,'``~. (-o=o-) (@ @) ,(-o=o-), +--.oooO--(_)--Ooo-----oOO-(_)-OOo-------oooO--(_)--Oooo.------+ | | | Soon, we may all be staring at our computers, wondering | | whether they're staring back. | | | | [Network Admin For WPA Business Products. aka doshai >;-) ] | | .oooO http://pip.com.au/~doshai/ Oooo. | | ( ) Oooo. .oooO ( ) | +-----\ (----( )-------oooO-Oooo--------( )--- ) /---------+ \_) ) / \ ( (_/ (_/ \_) Key fingerprint = 2D F4 54 BB B4 EA F1 E7 B6 DE 48 92 FC 8D FF 49 Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key. (if I want to give it to you)

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Something crypto-financially relevant for a change
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

C-punks, I have somr wire clippings that I think are more relevant to this list's stated topic that the constant personal attacks, rants, and newbie questions. I don't have the resources to send them out on request like JYA does. Would anyone be interested in my sending more materials like this to this list? BANKS BANK ON INTERNET Internet banking is poised for a rapid growth in Europe according to a survey of the European banking industry by Booz Allen & Hamilton. Thirty seven banks took part in the survey, which found that 80% were planning to upgrade existing Web sites to incorporate most traditional banking transactions within three years. There was also signs of the emergence of the first Internet-only banks. Wide-spread concerns about security are more an issue of perception than of real obstacles, according to Claus Nehmzow, a principal of BAH. The survey predicts that over the next five years 2,000 European banking institutions will be online. -- New Media Age, 9/12/96 IBM TEAMS WITH 15 BANKS TO FORM INTEGRION FINANCIAL NETWORK Fifteen of North America's leading banks and IBM today announced the formation of Integrion Financial Network. Beginning in early 1997, Integrion will offer a broad range of interactive banking and electronic commerce services to banks in the U.S. and Canada. Representing over half the retail banking population in North America, over 60 million households, Integrion will be owned and operated by IBM and the member banks (ABN AMRO, BANC ONE, Bank of America, Barnett Bank, Comerica, First Bank Systems, First Chicago NBD Fleet Financial Group, KeyCorp, Mellon Bank, Michigan National Bank, NationsBank, PNC Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and Washington Mutual). This ownership structure enables banks to play a central role in determining the manner and format in which these services are offered to their customers, ensuring that electronic banking services are consistent with the bank's full range of services, are branded by the bank, and that the bank's customers receive maximum benefit. -- Business Wire, 9/9/96 IN CHECK FRAUD WAR, SIMPLE IDEA MAKES ITS MARK In Texas, Nevada, Arizona and more than a dozen other U.S. states, bankers are fighting check fraud by equipping tellers with ink pads so they can affix the thumbprint of customers who are not regular patrons of the bank to the backs of checks they cash. Banks lose millions each year to organized crime and gang members who steal checks or duplicate payroll checks and then cash them. These crimes cost banks $815 million in 1993 alone, more than 12 times what they lost in robberies, according to American Bankers Association statistics. Said Dawn Duplantier of the Texas Bankers Association, which began selling its member banks the pads last December, "Across the board in the first six months, we have had a 70% decrease" in check fraud," she said. Bank of America, the third-largest U.S. bank, began taking prints at 43 of its branches in Nevada in 1994. Since then the bank has seen a 40% to 60% decline in check fraud, said Robert Randolph, liaison officer for the bank's investigative services division. -- Int'l Herald Tribune, 9/7/96 DAIWA SECURITIES SELLS U.S. GOVERNMENT SECURITIES OVER INTERNET Daiwa Securities America has expanded its trading room into cyberspace by allowing dealers to negotiate purchases and sales of U.S. government securities through the Internet, the worldwide computer network. The move will let clients log on to the bank's network using any Internet Service Provider and effectively close a deal online. Clients can access Daiwa's network through the bank's Web site -- located at http://www.oddlot.com -- and from t here place their buy or sell orders. To skirt the security holes, Daiwa is using several mechanisms, ranging from Internet firewalls to Secure ID cards, in an effort to prevent hackers from placing rogue or phony deals into the system. "Anybody can hook up to our Web site, but they can only get as far as our firewall. Then they have to have a Secure ID card and an account open with Daiwa," a spokesman said. The "secure IDs" are in fact small electronic cards that give the user an entrance code, which change s every 60 seconds, to a computer network. The system is now available only for financial institutions and brokerage houses interested in dealing with Daiwa. No individuals are allowed to open personal accounts and trade using the system at this point. -- Reuter, 9/6/96 BANKS SHOULD PREPARE TO CASH IN ON E-CASH According to a new study by Killen & Associates, banks can regain the leadership position in payments by leveraging their payment transaction infrastructure to support electronic cash (E-cash) services. "By 2005, E-cash transactions will escalate to almost 30 billion," stated Michael Killen, president of the market research firm. "Non-banks see this as a new opportunity to carve further market share away from the banking industry. All will compete for new revenue streams including Internet-based micropaym ents and 'by the byte electronic commerce purchasing services. E-cash, including secured credit/debit cards, stored-value cards, smart cards, ATM derivatives, and other forms, is less expensive for business than handling cash or standard credit cards and more secure than checks," Killen continued. "Opportunities will open for financial and other product and services players, including ATM vendors; ATM/POS terminal manufacturers and network suppliers, including bank-owned networks, American Express, Deluxe, ACS, and VeriFone; and cash handling/cash management services firms." -- Business Wire, 9/4/96 THE CHECK IS NOT IN THE MAIL The federal government must stop using checks by Jan. 1, 1999. Can the rest of us be far behind? A quarter-century ago digital visionaries were predicting the checkless society, and the number of checks written in the U.S. has tripled since then, to 61 billion in 1995. But one day, the predictions will come true, and that day moved closer with a little-noticed provision in April's federal budget compromise. It will force the biggest check writer of all -- the U.S. government -- to abandon paper checks almo st entirely by Jan. 1, 1999. After that, virtually all 1 billion federal payments made each year, including Social Security, must be made through electronic funds transfers. Yet, 90% of U.S. banks, and some federal agencies, aren't capable of electronically transmitting and receiving key information that accompanies vendor payments. The new law will force them all to get moving. -- Forbes, 9/9/96 --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Forwared message from Pres. of juno.com
by Rabid Wombat 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just thought I'd pass this along. I had jumped all over Juno on the list after the "talker" started, and tarred all of juno with the same brush. I was rather harsh on a company that I really don't know all that much about, except by judging a small sample of its clients. Sorry, Charles, and good luck with the grand social experiment. - r.w. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 15:25:58 -0400 From: Charles Ardai <charles(a)staff.juno.com> To: Rabid Wombat <wombat(a)mcfeely.bsfs.org> Subject: Annoying spam incident(s) Hi. Your posting to cypherpunks was brought to my attention, and I wanted to take a minute to respond. (I also forwarded a copy of it to "postmaster(a)juno.com", where we have a (small) staff of people to deal with incidents like the one you ran into. If you run into more in the future, please e-mail the information to that address.) Since this is not directly relevant to cypherpunks, I'm replying directly to you, but you are welcome to forward this note to the list if you want. > Complaints about spamming and cross-posting probably won't get you far, > either. On-Net spamvertizing seems to be their source of revenue. Perhaps > shaw.net needs to be contacted instead. A couple of clarifications: Juno has never sent a single piece of spam and, as long as I have anything to say about it, never will. We provide a free e-mail service which is paid for by advertising, but the advertising takes the form of graphical banners built into Juno's custom interface and the ads only appear on the screens of Juno's members. We have never sent any ads by e-mail, and have never sent any online ads of any sort to anyone who was not one of our members. What's more, we expressly prohibit the use of Juno to transmit commercial solicitations in the Service Agreement that all members have to accept before they can create a Juno account. When we hear about violations, we investigate and (if it seems appropriate) take actions up to and including terminating a violator's account on our service. Needless to say, we do not read or in any way screen the mail our members send or receive, so until we hear about a spamming incident we have no way to prevent a particular piece of spam from being transmitted; but I promise you we do listen to the complaints we receive and act on them as quickly as we responsibly can. In short, we do not send spam, we do not tolerate spam, and we will not allow our service to become a home to spammers. Note that today we supply e-mail to more than 400,000 members, and over 6000 people create Juno accounts every day. At this rate of growth, we can expect to have millions of members by this time next year. The vast majority of our members use our service responsibly; it's only a fraction of a fraction of one percent who send spam. I appreciate your frustration at dealing with these abusers of our service -- and believe me, they don't frustrate you half as much as they do us -- but I ask that you not penalize the hundreds of thousands of responsible Juno members (and those users of your network who want to communicate with them) because of the actions of the handful of miscreants doing their best to give us a bad name. Juno has no more (and, alas, no less) spam-producing potential or control over the spam its members send than Netcom, AOL, CompuServe, or any other e-mail provider. (We're slightly better, perhaps, because Juno currently offers its members no tools for direct posting to newsgroups or information about mail->news gateways, and slightly worse because it is possible to get a Juno account without having to give us a credit card number.) By shutting off access to your network by our members' mail you hurt the spammers only minimally -- they'll find another address elsewhere and spam again, I'm afraid -- but may hurt Juno quite a lot. And since we're the only major provider of free e-mail in the country today, I'd hate to see the service needlessly or inappropriately hurt. (I also have personal reasons, of course, for not wanting to see Juno hurt.) I apologize for the length of this message, and if we have been unresponsive to your past complaints I apologize for that as well. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me directly. Best regards, Charles Ardai President Juno Online Services, L.P.

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Re: Judge Kozinski Responds
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:21 PM 9/16/96, Jim Ray wrote: >I have been having a private e-mail conversation with Judge Alex Kozinski of >the 9th circuit. Today he said: >>Halloween, it only really works when the people dressed up >>are about four feet tall. In the rare instances where there >>have been adults at my door that were so disguised you >>couldn't tell who they were, I felt threatened--kept my >>Glock handy before opening door. I'll only comment on this one item, for now. Any judge who talks about keeping his Glock handy has my vote. (Of course, I've heard of such things many times before. Chief Supreme Warren Burger once got a lot of publicity by answering his door--in D.C.--with a revolver in one hand. I suspect that an awful lot of judges fully appreciate the kind of perps that are out there, and know the threats they could face, both from random acts of violence and home invasion and from targetted acts of revenge. As they learn that perps they send away to prison are requesting archived copies of "Assassination Politics," I rather expect their paranoia will increase sharply.) (Hint: One reason I seldom discuss AP is that to me it's just a special case of the larger issue of untraceable markets for such acts, something I've been worried about for almost a decade now. There is little reason to engage in the fiction of a "betting pool" when a hit may be untraceably contracted for and the standard fee ($1000 or less in some inner cities, $5000 for ordinary suburbanites, $30,000 or more for high-profile cases...so I hear) be paid with untraceable cash...as soon as truly untraceable digital cash becomes a reality.) --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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