December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Public Schools
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:31 AM 9/23/96, Lucky Green wrote: >On Sun, 22 Sep 1996, snow wrote: >> I would agree that parents can do as good or better at _most_ subjects >> thru about the 3rd or 4th grade, and I do agree that most of todays schools >> are shit, however there is one area--social skills--that homeschooling >> simply can't compete. Children need to learn how to interact with one another >> in groups larger than a family unit. I don't think that homeschooling can >> accomplish this nearly as well as the public (or private) schools could. > >I understand that many parents that homeschool belong to organizations >that provide for meetings twice a week in which the children so educated >in a certain area get together. Homeschooling does not have to stand in >the way of a normal socialization process. Also--and I mean this point completely seriously!--many parents are not altogether convinced that the "public school socialization" is all that beneficial. Do kids really _need_ to learn to wear gang colors, smoke to be cool, get pregnant at age 14, and so on? An awful lot of accomplished persons grew up in isolated areas, on small farms, and were educated in very small classrooms (or at home). I think the "social skills" Snow talks about above are actually the _worst_ part of public schools in fin-de-Siecle America. If I had a kid, I wouldn't want him or her in the local public schools. (And my area is more remote than over in San Jose--San Francisco, which is even worse. And LA is even worse.) --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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Kicking the Furriners out of our Classrooms
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:19 AM 9/23/96, Matthew Gream wrote: >Hi there, > >> 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. > >Watch out for those anonymous opinions; I received exactly the opposite >opinion when I spoke to the Defence Signals Directorate about the issue >(back in 1994) -- after specifically asking about a few hypothetical >cases. Of course, either opinion may be correct, which is the real >problem! Cindy Cohn made the excellent point at the Bernstein hearing that the ITARS are so vague and overbroad that a professor cannot be sure if his lecture is violating the law because foreigners are in the audience (a la the Junger case). As she notes, nearly all college and postgraduate classes are heavily populated by non-U.S. citizens, and the ITARs specifically make illegal the propagation of certain items to non-U.S. citizens. (There is no exemption in the ITARs for university professors teaching their classes. If foreigners are in the classroom, and cryptographic or weapons-related knowledge is imparted, an ITAR violation has probably occurred.) Personally, I'd relish the opportunity to say to my class: "Now, the International Trafficking in Arms Regulations, the ITARs, make it a felony for me to disclose certain methods or techniques to non-U.S. citizens. Accordingly, in this class, I must insist that all non-U.S. citizens, or suspected Israelis, ragheads, Papists, or Marxists, illegal Mexicans, etc., leave the lecture hall immediately. All those remaining must present at least five forms of identification, dating back at least to 1978. Foreign-looking persons should provide at least seven forms of identification, including documentation that they are not in the U.S. illegally. Jew-looking or Jew-sounding names will be subjected to special scrutiny to ensure that they are not dual-citizens with the ITAR-restricted Zionist Entity. "Oh, and since classroom participation counts for 65% of your grade, those I exclude under the ITAR restrictions had better score 155% on the exams I let you into the classroom to take, else you'll flunk. Good luck, you fucking foreigners!" (Cindy Cohn pointed out to the court that their might also be 14th Amendment problems with enforcement of the ITARs with regard to teaching in universities.) --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: provably hard PK cryptosystems
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I want to say something about "tiling problems," an area I find very exciting. I ordinarily would not have commented on "quantum computers," but will make just a couple of comments, since I want to comment later on tilings. At 9:58 PM 9/22/96, Adam Back wrote: ... >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. Caveat: I'm a skeptic on quantum computers. I've read a couple of the early papers, but am not current. And I certainly am not an expert. For what it's worth: * I think it's nearly certain that no significant results will be gotten in the next 20 years, probably not in the next 50 years. (I personally am skeptical that significant results will be gotten in 200 years, and probably never, but this is a harder point to make.) * Sure, there may be demonstrations of a "collapsed quantum state" which is isomorphic to factoring a number like "42," but not 50-digit numbers anytime soon. And, I feel, a 300-digit number is probably many, many orders of magnitude harder. * Experts may point to partial successes, and maybe they're right. But I'm skeptical. The recent post by someone outlining a bunch of "promising approaches" has got me thinking of spending some more time looking at recent results, though. I doubt anything will happen in the next 20 years...that just isn't much time in the high-tech business (which may sound crazy, but it's true). (A way to "creatively visualize" this point is this: for those of you who are now 25, when you are 45 the world will probably _not_ be radically different. Sure, computers will be faster and cheaper, but most things will look _mostly_ the way they look today. Not a compelling argument, perhaps, but one which makes sense to me. When I was 25 I suppose I expected dramatic advances to come...largely, they haven't. I can elaborate on this if there's sufficient interest.) >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 One of the most interesting books I've read is David Harel's "Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing." (Warning: The book came out in a second edition, which as near as I can tell took out some parts and synopsized the book a bit. My reading was of the First Edition.) Harel described Huang's work on "tiling problems." These are easier to describe with pictures, and I don't have the time to try to generate ASCII representations of tiles. So, I refer people to Harel's book. Briefly, imagine a grid in a plane. Imagine a set of "dominoes" or "tiles" with different edge properties, e.g., some edges are blue, some red, some green, etc. (or the edges can be numbered, have symbols on them, etc.). Suppose one has an unlimited supply of, for example, N different type of tiles. Suppose a tile is placed at some place on the grid, and another tile (possibly a different tile, possibly the same type of tile) is placed some distance away on the grid. The problem is this: Can a "domino snake" be found which reaches from the first tile to the second tile, with the constraint that edges must match up on all tiles? (And all tiles must be in normal grid locations, of course) If the grid area is, say, a finite space, then clearly an exhaustive search of all legal domino snakes would answer the question. (However, even a relatively small grid of, say, 8 x 8, generates a truly enormous number of possible snakes, each of which must be tested. Of course, if a domino snake is "guessed" (a la the "nondeterministic" language one encounters in complexity theory), verification that it is answer is nearly instantaneous (one glances at the solution and verifies it). If the grid is unlimited, then even if the two initial tiles are located close together, there are of course an infinite number of possible snakes.... (Oddly, to me, the domino snake problem is "more undecidable" in the infinite half-plane that in the full infinite plane....) Huang proved that the domino tiling problem is formally equivalent to the standard set of NP problems (consult Harel, or Huang, for more details and more precise language...I'm just going from recollection here!). I like this approach because I can easily visualize the domino tiling problem and can make some points about expansion of knowledge into uncharted areas (research and tool-building is a kind of domino snake expansion, with local laws of physics, etc., the constraints on stepping stones (hand wave inserted here)). I find this easier to understand than more "algebraic" and "logical" versions, such as the representation problem and the word problem. (These other NP problems are also described in Harel (and in standard complexity books, such as Garey and Johnson, Papadimitrou, etc.). It has always been a great hope that some of the provably-hard problems be adapted for use in crypto. And yet factoring remains the core of popular modern crypto programs (discrete logs, too, for D-H). I don't think this is a major cause for worry, though. It's not as if factoring is suddenly going to become "easy." (I think the consensus is that factoring _is_ hard. Whether RSA is really equivalent to factoring also hasn't been proved, as folks have noted, but many think it is, loosely speaking.) --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: Mercenaries
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:45 AM 9/23/96, Brian Davis wrote: >On Wed, 18 Sep 1996, Timothy C. May wrote: >> Brian Davis, our former Prosecutor, can tell us how likely it is that any >> person would be charged and brought to trial for being a paid mercenary for >> some small country in the Third World. The CIA is often behind such >> mercenaries, so national security issues could make the issue murky. > >Exceedingly unlikely. A variety of practical problems. If you came up >to a U.S. Attorney to show him your picture on the cover of The Zaire Daily >News as mercenary of the week and spit in his face, you'd get prosecuted. > >For spitting in the prosecutor's face. > >On a slightly more serious note: you'd only get prosecuted in someone at >Main Justice (i.e. in Washington) wanted you prosecuted. This of course matches my expectation. I still think if prosecution is so unlikely, the law ought to actually come to terms with this and remove the "official illegality" of such things. _Almost_ more important to me than "libertarian" ideals are "consistency" ideals: namely, that there oughtn't to be laws which are not enforced, or which are too expensive to enforce, or which can be selectively enforced. And since I know that the full suite of laws, all 25,000 or 45,000 of them (on all 27 linear feet of bookshelf space) cannot possibly be consistently enforced, I favor a "minimalist" or "fallback" position of having relatively few laws, covering mostly "crimes" which are more easily detected and prosecuted (with draconian punishments). >> But the real reason such prosecutions are rare is that the government >> realizes how Orwellian it sounds to say: >> >> "You are being prosecuted because you were a mercenary for Oceania in its I was probably overstating things to say this was "the real reason." The real reason (or the more important reason) is that resources are finite, and, as Brian noted, no prosecutor is much interested in someone being in Zaire's mercenary army. It doesn't register on the public's concern meter, and it probably doesn't get one promotions in the prosecutorial community. But the law should still be changed to reflect this 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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Re: Bernstein hearing: The Press Release
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:10 AM 9/23/96, Brian Davis wrote: ... >There isn't such a clause. The allowed restrictions were developed in >case law. > >Constitutional literalists take note: the First Amendment says nothing >about what the executive branch or the states can do .... Which is why President Jefferson was able to say: "While the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law...," I am hereby outlawing all discussion of the following subjects:.... And I have had it with the Catholics and Jews in this country. While Congress has no power to make laws respecting the establishment of religion or the exercise thereof, I am under no such restrictions. Therefore, I am ordering the immediate arrest and summary execution of all Papists and Jews...." Seriously, does not the Constitution and Bill of Rights define what states may do? And Presidents? The Executive is under various restrictions, and cannot behave unconstitutionally. After all, if Alabama, for example, reinstituted slavery, would not the 14th Amendment trump this? If California were to, say, ban speech critical of women's or homosexual's rights, would not the First Amendment trump this attempt? --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: Where to write crypto?
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:33 AM 9/23/96 +0200, Remo Pini wrote: >Switzerland has NO crypto laws (yet)... > However they are cooperating with the Gang of Seven (G7) Net restriction efforts. See: http://www.admin.ch/ejpd/d/bj/internet/indexe.htm DCF

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Re: A daily warning regarding Tim ... [edited]
by DMiskell＠envirolink.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>On Fri, 20 Sep 1996, John Anonymous MacDonald wrote: > >> Tim C[*] * studied yoga back-streching exercises for >> five years so he could * * (*). > >Likely the NSA has nothing better to do these days. They got bored with >just listening, so now they're spamming. Can we lock this fucker out of >the list? Sure, he'll probably pick another nym to post from... > Can't lock him out of the list, but you can either set up a kill file, or find something like the 3.0b version of Eudora, which has filters; you can set it up where, if an incoming message has a certain From: string, it is transferred directly into the Trash mail folder, which is, as a rule, cleaned up before quitting. Daniel. -- If in fact we are the only intelligent life on this planet, why the fuck are we in this goddamn mess? -- Find my public key on the World Wide Web -- point your browser at: http://bs.mit.edu:8001/pks-toplev.html

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Snooping ISP admin??
by Michael E. Carboy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Greetings All, Question for the group: I have encountered a situation that causes me to believe an ISP is snoopingthrough encrytped mail. It seems that PGP'd mail has aroused the curiosity of an ISP (not hooked.net) I have encountered "POP3 account in use by another user" several times in the past few days and I am the only user... wondering if that "in use" messsage is the result of a clumsy sysadmin being caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Any thoughts from the group??? If those more knowledgeable than I deem these NOISE... my sincere apologies. regards, Michael E. Carboy carboy(a)hooked.net carboy(a)carboy.com

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Re: (Fwd) Australian "ITAR" regulations
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>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. > >Watch out for those anonymous opinions; I received exactly the opposite >opinion when I spoke to the Defence Signals Directorate about the issue >(back in 1994) -- after specifically asking about a few hypothetical >cases. Of course, either opinion may be correct, which is the real >problem! If the DSD is anything like our GCSB then what they'll have told you is what they'd like to be the case, not what's really the case. They will tell you what it pleases them to tell you, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the facts. The easiest way to check the real situation is to look at your customs act, the NZ Customs Act of 1995 (which in the relevant area is almost identical to the 1966 one) covers forms of export in excruciating detail. Doesn't mention anything about computer networks in there. In practice it'd have to be decided in the courts, but I don't think the DSD will take action because there's a very good chance they'd get a ruling against them, which is also why the NSA is so reluctant to enforce the ITAR in court. Peter.

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RE: USA_exe
by Brian D Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

John (jya(a)pipeline.com) posts: >The Washington Post reports at length today on the Defense >Department's disclosure yesterday of heretofore classified >training manuals used in the School of the Americas to instruct >Latino troops on killing a wide range of civilians for political >purposes. This is not particularly new news, I have a copy at home of one of these manuals, it was put out by a humans rights group that got their hands on it during all the El Salvador business. It's as nasty as it sounds... Further info on request. Brian "Semiautomatic's and Boundless Love."

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