December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: Anonymous phone calls (was: What is the EFF doing exactl
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Audit trails may now be in place, in which case the cost of anonymity is increased to the cost of the lowest denomination card. Think OTP. However, in both Britian and France I have seen defective phones that allowed LD calls but did not deduct the call amount from the card. Obviously, the effect was free LD and these phones were perpetually busy. If audit trails were in place, this problem should have been noticed quickly. As I said, things may have changed for newer systems. James ---------- From: Flying insect killer <kadafi(a)netcom.com> Sent: Friday, September 06, 1996 1:20 PM To: jimbell(a)pacifier.com Cc: James Bugden; pstira(a)escape.com; cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Re: Anonymous phone calls (was: What is the EFF doing exactl On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, jim bell wrote: > At 10:08 AM 9/6/96 EST, jbugden(a)smtplink.alis.ca wrote: > >There is another spin possible on the reasons for replacement of pay phones with > >credit card phones. In Canada all new credit card phones are also able to take > >phone cards (which are anonymous). > > Don't be too sure about the "anonymity" of these cards. You don't have to > give your name when you buy or use them, but assuming a large number of > phone calls (to, from different locations) can be associated together after > the fact, your name can probably be fairly easily obtained. > Jim Bell > jimbell(a)pacifier.com And phone companys that offers phone cards keep track of every call that goes thru each card number.

1 0

Anonymous Payphones Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:31 AM 9/6/96 -0400, "<pstira(a)escape.com>" <pstira(a)escape.com> wrote: >Not just DC and Chicago, I'm afraid. If anyone around NYC noticed, there >are less and less payphones, and all new ones installed, just about, are >those yellow credit card phones. That's not a big problem - you can buy telephone credit cards, anonymously, in your local convenience store. Around here you've got a choice of cards where the announcements are in Spanish and the rates to call Mexico are cheap, cards that come in exact $20 from machines that don't give change, cards with pretty pictures on the front, cards with advertising, etc., as well as cards that are reusable and want some personal information about you to activate. I don't blame phone companies in New York for using non-coin-phones, especially non-monopoly phone companies. Collecting and handling coins is expensive, phones get vandalized to steal the coins, it's harder to change your rates when you need to go to each phone to do it, and people get annoyed at coin phones that charge higher than Bell prices. What I do get annoyed about is that most pay phones won't accept calls, they'll only initiate them. This means that if you call somebody from a pay phone who only has a beeper, or if you don't have a beeper, you can't leave them a useful message to call you back. Part of this is done because of the Great Drug Hysteria, but I suspect part of it is that pay phone companies don't make money receiving calls, so they don't want to tie up their phones doing that; perhaps if they charged money to receive calls as well as initiate them, they'd be willing to receive calls? Not all of them, but it's now one for >one, at least. > >=Millie= >PS: i wrote a fiction book about this a few years ago -- i should have >published. People could've said i was the next nostradamus. :( # 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

1 0

Cypherpunk meeting?
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hi all, I`m just dashing off a quick note to see how many south eastern UK cypherpunks there are here, preferably in the sussex area, I might organise a meet if we can get enough people to make it worthwhile mail me if you are an experienced cryptographer in the area and would be interested in attending an informal meeting for key signing, discussion and copious beer.... ;-) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: cp850 iQCVAwUBMi7qLb5OPIRbv66xAQGGqQP/cJI2sWgCc0cR8jlTDbCv0W2hklW5++7K oO23Qs7sxNQziK1lcEzIKX1kbQIng/apR4FEEhWggS+Bvadx3NNpW46BdHTI7IfZ rjE8M4K0EtYcDUZmsAG0pV70b8XKu+v/dogu/BlIFwAUCwR2ocDeIbW88tBXq4ok dcffJFY2Q4Q= =PCNL -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Http://www.fatmans.demon.co.uk/crypt/ "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey" -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6 mQCNAjH9j+cAAAEEAMBvREiQR0ot9dFCO0TiSCSunAYLv2g1Bc6I3bz8FzKXNH53 6mieJf/W4rD+CxJpT0q9RQaaoRtkHJLwbjfK2il3D7mEahMAyqvF/xRJNqkXfhM3 sRJM0Jh43l+W0M5vwokbEbk25/bxWWGspTsLD3YHbzKnG6pOcL5OPIRbv66xAAUR tCdQYXVsIEJyYWRsZXkgPHBhdWxAZmF0bWFucy5kZW1vbi5jby51az4= =riHc -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

1 0

Lattice Crypto
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Economist, September 7, 1996, p. 79. Cryptography: Puzzling secrets The truly paranoid have but one friend: mathematics. Nothing (and nobody) else can be as trusted to keep a secret. To transmit your credit card number, for example, through an Internet full of thieves, the best way is to hide it in a mathematical problem so excruciatingly difficult that no thief could ever crack it, even by hijacking all the world's computers for the effort. Devising such problems is the business of cryptographers. To be useful, the problems must be easy to create as well as impossible to unravel. Multiplying numbers is very easy. Taking the result and working out what numbers were multiplied together to produce it (known as factorisation) is a lot more difficult. It is not obvious that 4,294,967,297 is the product of 641 and 6,700,417. The two smaller numbers in this calculation are prime: that is, neither can be factorised into two further smaller numbers. The coding systems generally used by governments, businesses and software companies such as Netscape (known as RSA encoding schemes, after Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who invented the idea in 1977), mix a number even huger than 4,294,967,297 into a message, and then churn it in such a way that only the number's prime factors can undo the mess. The big number is used to make a "public key" (each user has his own, but it is available to those who might wish to communicate with him). The two prime factors compose a private key, guarded carefully by their owner. The trouble is that nobody is absolutely sure how safe this scheme is. At present a public key that was 400 digits long would take existing computers longer than the age of the universe to crack. But it remains to be proved in a rigorous mathematical way that no systematic short-cut exists. Indeed, some types of numbers are easy to factorise, and RSA schemes must avoid these known softies. It may yet turn out that, even if factorising is hard in general (as mathematicians suspect, after centuries of trying), there is a sneaky way, in the case of some other types of numbers, to do it quickly. This would be bad luck if you chose such a number. Private users may not care much: it is unlikely that someone who discovered such a loophole would use it for anything so modest as unscrambling credit card numbers. But governments, whose secrets are worth a lot more, are always on the lookout for better cloaks to go with their daggers. The ultimate cryptographic feat would therefore be a mathematical proof that all choices of a particular problem useful in code-making are forever intractable. Nobody is that clever yet. But Miklos Ajtai, a mathematician at the IBM Almaden Research Centre in San Jose, California, has made progress with puzzles called "lattice reductions". If you pick any such problem using his guidelines, it is -- unlike a factorisation problem -- guaranteed to be just as thorny as the most difficult one imaginable. Since many mathematicians also suspect that the toughest lattice-reduction problem is almost impossible to crack, Dr Ajtai's proof, completed in May, increases the confidence that they would all make good wrappings for secret messages. For mathematical aesthetes, lattice problems have more panache than the dull numerals of factorisation. Instead of factorising, say, a 200-digit number, a lattice reduction invites the would-be codebreaker to deduce the most basic way a pattern repeats itself in a piece of 200-dimensional decorative wallpaper. This is every bit as hard as it sounds. To describe a repeating pattern of rows and columns of flowers on an ordinary piece of wallpaper, two "arrows" suffice. Each points from one flower to a nearby one. If you start with a wall which is blank, except for one flower, you can reconstruct the entire design with the arrows: lay the ends of the arrows on the flower and draw new flowers (with new arrows) at each arrowtip. Repeat the process with the new flowers and the wall will eventually be full. Although the obvious pair of arrows to choose in this case would be at right angles to each other (eg, pointing north and east) other pairs would also work: for example north-east and east. But in this case the "north-east" arrow would have to be longer to reach the centre of the next flower than the "east" one. The puzzle is to find the shortest set of arrows that can be used to replicate the pattern -- easy in two or three dimensions, but achingly complex in the higher-dimensional spaces that the imaginations of mathematicians inhabit. By the time the pattern has 200 dimensions, today's fastest computers would be unable to find the 200 smallest arrows describing an arbitrary pattern before the sun ran out of fuel. Yet, as with two prime numbers, it is easy to begin with those arrows and produce the design. But how do you hide a secret message, accessible only with a private key, in a publicly available lattice? Shafi Goldwasser, Oded Goldreich and Shai Halevi, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute, in Israel, have just proposed a way. In order to encode a line of digits, they first interpret them as coordinates for a point in the lattice. Then they mix up the numbers by nudging that point a tiny random amount into the empty space between lattice points. To retrieve the original number, an eavesdropper would need to find the way back to the nearest lattice point, which is almost -- but not quite equivalent to knowing its shortest arrows. The trouble with it being not quite equivalent is that the encoding scheme changes the problem slightly -- enough for it to fall just outside the range of Dr Ajtai's proof that any instance of his lattice scheme is as hard to solve as the most difficult one. There is hope that the proof can be extended to include the encryption scheme, or that the scheme can be modified to fit the proof. But a proof that nobody could ever invent a quick method to solve the toughest lattice reduction would be nicer still -- except that its inventor would put fellow code-breakers out of work. A cryptographer who invented such a system might well be tempted to keep it secret. [Graphic of wallpaper omitted] [End]

1 0

Doing away with govt. people
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Gee, if we could just prosecute "the govt." under auspices of the "three strikes" legislation: Gehlen Deal MK/ULTRA "That 'Bay of Pigs' thing" ZR/RIFLE Watergate MH/CHAOS Iran/Contra Phoenix Program BCCI/BNL COINTELPRO INSLAW Waco, etc. Just say "Three strikes and you're (what?)"

1 0

Re: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology (fwd)
by Donald E. Eastlake 3rd 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Of course, as you say, security needs to be improved also. See draft-eastlake-muse-00.txt in the IETF shadow directories. Donald On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, SCN User wrote: > Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 10:45:57 -0700 (PDT) > From: SCN User <bf578(a)scn.org> > To: dee(a)cybercash.com > Subject: Re: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology (fwd) > > > > >Suggest you look at draft-eastlake-internet-payment-*.txt in the > >IETF shadow directories. I don't think any one step will solve all > >our spam problems but I wouldn't mind spending, say, 5 cents for each > >real piece of mail I sent outside my company and if end machines charged > > >5 cents per piece of ouside mail received, I think spamming would be > >crippled. (Note that with bad guy lists, you could collect the money and > >then just throw away the mail.) > Why should I pay for mail I can't control? > > Before charges like this can be implemented, protocols/security/etc > need to be improved to accurately indentify the sender. > > > -- > ------------------------------------------ > There are no facts, only interpretations. > I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific. > Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing. > ===================================================================== Donald E. Eastlake 3rd +1 508-287-4877(tel) dee(a)cybercash.com 318 Acton Street +1 508-371-7148(fax) dee(a)world.std.com Carlisle, MA 01741 USA +1 703-620-4200(main office, Reston, VA) http://www.cybercash.com http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html

1 0

Re: electronic offshore banking
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:25 PM 9/6/96 +0300, Jüri Kaljundi wrote: > >Are there any good offshore banks that would allow you to use your account >over the Internet? > >I know European Union Bank www.eub.com is on of those available, but their >US$ 25.000 minimum deposit is too stupid. > >Jüri Kaljundi >AS Stallion >jk(a)stallion.ee > > Does Compuserve count as the Internet? It soon will be the Internet since they are dropping their proprietary software. TSB (including TSB's Jersey subsidiary) has a new net-based banking arrangement using Compuserve. See the TSB web site http://www.tsb.co.uk/pcbank.htm or Compuserve (GO TSB). TSB in Jersey (or predecessor institutions) has been there since the 1820s or so. DCF

1 0

Factory Memory
by Pete Gruber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Memory prices have finally stabilized after serious price drops since the beginning of this year. With Christmas demand high for electronic gadgets, memory supply is dwindling and higher prices are sure to follow. Now is a good time to upgrade memory to satisfy those memory hungry software packages. We are able to offer memory 72 pin, 70ns non-parity, SIMM memory boards at: 32 mb=$221 16 mb=$89.99 8 mb=$39.99 4 mb=$19.99 MANY more styles, sizes, speeds, are available. Check out our website - http://www.gruber.com for a complete list, or call us at 800 658-5883 Toll free or (602) 863-2655 for more details. Thank you Jillene Barr Gruber Industries Incorporated

1 0

Junk Phone Calls, Metered Usage, and Cellphones
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:08 PM 9/6/96, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com wrote: >is done because of the Great Drug Hysteria, but I suspect part of it >is that pay phone companies don't make money receiving calls, >so they don't want to tie up their phones doing that; perhaps if >they charged money to receive calls as well as initiate them, >they'd be willing to receive calls? I am about to start worrying about "junk phone calls" more so than I have been. I just bit the bullet and bought a digital cellular phone, with a nifty rate plan called Digital Flex: I get unlimited free airtime from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. weekdays, and unlimited free airtime all weekend. From south of Salinas to north of Santa Rosa and as far east as the Central Valley. In other words, the entire Bay Area and outlying communities. I can send and receive calls over this entire region, from anywhere in the region (of course), without any charges. The downside is that calls _from_ or _to_ my phone during "business" hours are charged 42 cents a minute, airtime (tying up a channel and all), plus whatever other fees may be applicable at each end. Thus, every "junk call" I get trying to get me to buy aluminum siding, or to vote Democratic, or to switch my long-distance carrier (!), costs me a minimum of 42 cents, depending on how fast I can realize who they are and get rid of them ("Let me forward you to Jim Bell's AP hotline..."). Needless to say, my cellular number is only going out to a handful of folks, and with recommendations that they not call me during business hours unless its urgent. I believe this kind of pricing model is likely to be common. We can debate til the cows come home whether flat rate pricing makes sense, for ISPs, for cellphones, for other things. Relevance to Crypto? The "junk e-mai" issue, calls for regulations (which I'm against), technological solutions (Caller ID lets users decided to accept a call or not....same idea could be used with e-mail, a la Hal Finney's "You have a message of size X from size Y entitled Z" proposal for positve acceptance of remailed messages), and the value of True Names (and True Numbers). I'll be real pissed if my new cellphone number ends up in the hands of mass marketers, given that I don't plan to give it out to merchants, to organizations, etc. (I'm probably inviting malicious use by one of my enemies here on this list...there may be ways I don't yet grok to "look up" cellphone user numbers. I can then get hit with denial-of-service attack just by having this 42 cents a call situation. I hope no one is this malicious.) P.S. The phone is a Motorola Micro Digital Lite, a little bugger with a zillion features. It can vibrate silently instead of ringing (phone sex?), it can store 100 alphanumeric name/number combinations, it even has a data port for use with a modem (probably a special modem, and certainly a chore to set all the battery-powered stuff up properly...I'll report on it if it works). The cost was about $200 for the phone, after the rebates, kickbacks, etc., and after "sales tax on the pre-kickback price" was added back in (California has a tax collection scam where sales tax is assessed against the "real" price of some good or service....imagine the possibilities if this is extended to cover other such areas). The "Digital Flex" plan from Cellular One is $20/mo for the basic plan, and then $15/mo on top of that for the unlimited evenings and weekends use. (This could easily save me the amount I often spend in a month just yakking with friends and girlfriends who live over the hill in the Valley.) These rates have really come down a lot. The unlimited calls is what sold me. --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."

6 5

Re: Subject: Re: Race Bit: C
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:31 PM 9/5/96 -0600, Anonymous wrote: >> If I understand you correctly, it is OK for a government to >> institute violence against the residents of the land it claims >> dominion over, but it is not acceptable for the inhabitants of >> that piece of land to respond in self defence. > >I will say this: > >No, government initiation of violence (such as in Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc.) is not OK, >and AsPol initiation of violence is not either. This can lead into a long argument about >just _when_ violence is initiated, where opinion is more important than fact, but IMO: > >Randy Weaver was not initiating violence. >David Keresh was not initiating violence. >Pot growers and smokers are not initiating violence. No argument here... > But >Mr. Bell, if he follows through on his scheme, *will* be initiating violence. His scheme, >while it can sound tempting (especially every April 15th!) has no guarantee that it will >_only_ be used against the Lon Horiuchis of our government, Life generally doesn't come equipped with any guarantees. Some people object to private ownership of guns, on a similar theory that "there is no guarantee they won't be used against innocent people." Others (most of us?), particularly libertarians challenge this, pointing out that it is the abuse of a right which should be punished, rather than curtailing a right simply because a small minority abuse it. To the extent we believe the latter argument, we are accepting the idea that a "guarantee" is not necessary. AP, ultimately, is a tool that can be used well or used badly. I advocate using it well. >in fact, it may be said it >is not guaranteed to not be used against Mr. Bell himself, as many have joked. Check out what I wrote at the end of AP part 7: "Terror, too, because this system may just change almost EVERYTHING how we think about our current society, and even more for myself personally, the knowledge that there may some day be a large body of wealthy people who are thrown off their current positions of control of the world's governments, and the very-real possibility that they may look for a "villain" to blame for their downfall. They will find one, in me, and at that time they will have the money and (thanks to me, at least partially) the means to see their revenge. But I would not have published this essay if I had been unwilling to accept the risk." Long before I started publicizing AP, I had made my decision. > There are two roads to take in life, convincing and coercing others. > I think that the former is still possible, Mr. Bell and many others disagree. In a quote attributed to Al Capone, he said something like, "You can get more with a kind word and a gun, than you can with a kind word alone." Capone was probably talking about offense, but the principle is even more applicable to _defense_: If you have a gun, you can prevent somebody else from coercing you, and ensure that they have to CONVINCE you! AP is like a gun which can be aimed at the agents of the majority, to prevent them from violating the rights of the minority. > I worry that abuse of the very young >and weak (for now) anonymity system for the purpose of initiating, rather than exposing, >violence will lead to more government violence than we already have. First, AP only "initiates" if it is used against people who have not, themselves, initiated force or fraud. I contend that while this is not impossible, it is improbable. If you choose a target that "everyone" else agrees has initiated force, you'll only have to cough up a dollar, or a quarter, or even a dime and you'll all get your wish. Randomly select a guiltless individual and you'll be the only one paying, not to mention the fact that you might have trouble finding an AP organization that'll take your malicious donation. This translates into: "They'll exist, but due to lack of competition they'll be able to insist on taking a healthy cut of their own." In addition, if you attempt to use AP against somebody who already knows it's probably you (say, an ex business partner you just ripped off?), its anonymity won't be much use. > Perhaps I am >wrong and there is no hope; but if so, that means another revolution. Revolutions are >very romantic sounding, to those who have not been in a war. The whole point of crypto-anarchy is that revolutions are CHANGING. Think of a revolution like an earthquake: It's the sudden release of stress built up over years or decades. In an earthquake, if that release could be spread out from the seconds or minute it normally takes, to hours or even days (or better yet, continuously) the amplitude would be far smaller and you probably wouldn't even notice it. Likewise, politically, the only reason you get revolutions is because political leadership gets entrenched and resists change. Even in democracy, which is supposed to facilitate changes, eventually the politicians learn to play one group off another, leading to the same kind of social stratification problems that even dictatorships have. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

1 0