December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Why organizations turn statist.
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:44 AM 9/11/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: > A wonderful idea, Stephan! You might try contacting > EFF to see if a German branch exists The EFF is ultimately a business lobby group, because it gets most of its funding from businesses. It is therefore potentially subject to the same corruption as other business lobbies. Business lobby groups are intermediaries, and therefore serve two masters, both the politicians and the businessmen, not one master. Frequently they serve the interests of the politicians at the expense of their donors, at the expense of the goals that the lobby group is supposed to pursue. Suppose for example you have a lobby group that represents the widget industry. On the one hand, the CEO of General Widgets might ring them up and say: "We are being trashed by these great japanese widgets, and unless something is done about it we might have to reduce prices or improve quality", and the lobby organization has a little chat with some tame politicians about the terrible suffering the Japanese are inflicting on American workers. That is the way lobby groups are supposed to work, but seldom do. On the other hand sometimes the politician (or a gofer on his staff), rings the lobby and says: "I need a million dollars fast: What potential political action gets the chairman of General Widgets waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night? What could destroy the widget industry, and yet be politically feasible?" Shortly thereafter the lobbyist has a little chat with chairman of General Widgets about forthcoming legislation. The lobby group gets a big bag of money, some of which it passes on to the politician, and the threatened legislation evaporates until the next election. To be a successful lobby group, the EFF needs to get its fingerprints on legislation, so that it can make threats and promises to businessmen in the computer industry. Thus the EFF's best interests as an organization are contrary to our desires and contrary to the announced aims of the organization. Legislation, any legislation, is in their interests and legislation, any legislation is against our interests. Our interests, and the EFF's interest are opposed with no apparent mutual good possible. Now it is possible that the EFF is virtuously pursuing its supposed goals, rather than its practical interests. We should consider the available evidence in order to infer what it is in fact up to. According to Dave Barry the word "politics" derives from the Greek "poly" meaning many, and "ticks" meaning small disgusting bloodsucking parasites. In order to be well funded, the EFF needs government regulation of the net. The kind of regulation that would be most effective in ensuring large donations would be regulation that compels internet businessmen to lobby the government. for example regulations that make impossible, inconsistent, and contradictory requirements on those who provide software, hardware, and services, for example a demand that big companies police the net in ways that even governments would find extremely difficult, such as the British child porn crackdown, or legislation which if properly crafted would have the effect of giving some businessmen a monopoly of some aspect of the net, and putting other businessmen out of business, for example legislation that requires case by case approval of software, or legislation that compels the businessman to invade his customers privacy, and also prohibits him from invading that privacy unless he has a waiver issued by the state. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: Jury Nullification = Voting One's Conscience
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:24 PM 9/11/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: > And I don't think there has _ever_ been a case of a juror prosecuted/jailed > for voting his or her conscience, regardless of jury instructions. Where have you been for the last twenty years? In fact a juror was recently jailed for this. She had informed the other juries of the likely severity of the punishment for pot, and refused to vote for conviction. She was charged with perjury and various contrived and bogus charges. The basis of perjury charge was that she had sworn there was no reason she could not do justice, and, according to the court, she was not doing justice because of her opposition to the drug laws.. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Uses of Computational Chaos
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It is reasonably obvious that using _computational_ (as opposed to physical) chaos won't increase entropy. But how about using it to make an attacker work harder to use any flaws in your method of generating random bits? As a simplistic example, say that the scribble window you're using tends to result in a 1 for each 3rd bit. Nice and simple for an attacker to exploit. But if that output is then fed into a chaotic system as its starting conditions, and you then take the state of that system after a sufficient number of iterations and use it as the basis for the IDEA key or whatever, the attacker doesn't just have to search through all the IDEA keys with the third bits being 1's - they have to process each of those through the chaotic system and use those results. Sort of like factoring - checking any two given prime factors will be rather easy, it's just the sheer number you have to check that makes things difficult. (This can be thought of as an odd variety of hash, particularly if you do something like chopping off the most-significant-bit in the chaotic system's output.) -Allen

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Re: "Remailers can't afford to be choosy"
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"jf_avon(a)citenet.net" "Jean-Francois Avon" 14-SEP-1996 03:33:52.00 To: IN%"cypherpunks(a)toad.com" CC: Subj: RE: "Remailers can't afford to be choosy" >If, just for the sake of example, you were truly believing in >unregulated capitalism, with all the arguments in the world, and , >say for the sake of the example, again, a True Communist (tm) was >mailing through your remailer, advocating that they seize your >property for the benefit of some unknown, but all deserving stranger. >Would any censorship be illegitimate? In other words, should you >work to further the work of the ones who whishes, but their avowed >goals, to bring you harm? Actually, I already may have helped a radical left organization - namely Radikal - by putting some mirror sites on a lot of search engines. Quite simply, capitalism works - and it will win out in an unfettered contest. It's communism and other varieties of authoritarianism that need the fetters to win. (In the ultimate extreme, I include gun control under the fetters that communism/etcetera need to win... the "redistribution" from producers ("rich") to welfare drones ("poor") during the Rodney King riots would have been nicely prevented by some shopkeepers with automatic weapons. -Allen

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Re: "Remailers can't afford to be choosy"
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"tcmay(a)got.net" 13-SEP-1996 20:33:15.39 >I'm fully aware of the rights of remailers to limit what they pass on. I >just don't think it wise, nor do I think it fits with pious calls for "free >speech." I've been looking over your original posting... such as at your comment about situations working out the best when only the parties involved are involved in rulemaking. I'd agree... and remailer operators are among the parties involved in these cases. This may be via direct individual pressure (for remailers without front ends) or through conscience/social pressure (for remailers with disposable front ends or chaining-only remailers), but they're still involved. To me, there are two different types of filtering that can be done. There's the filtering of data into their appropriate categories - e.g., a moderator of a mailing list deciding that something is off-topic _for that list_, not for any discussion - and filtering of data into stuff that should be transmitted and shouldn't be transmitted, even though, e.g., it's on topic for a given mailing list. I discourage people from doing the second type of filtering - it's something that government shouldn't do at all, and that makes in my view the person doing such filtering responsible for _everything_ that they do let through (preferably legally responsible). The first type is tricky enough to tell from the second that I don't want government doing it, but I don't discourage others from doing so. There's also the matter that it will take some improvements to get to a situation where remailer operators won't have to deal with so much - e.g., expiration of some patents so that remailers can take digital cash. It's just that I don't see pressure such as from spamming through remailers as helping to get those improvements, all in all. Some of it may - e.g., encouragement of dropping of inadequately secure remailers like anon.penet.fi (sorry, Julf), as you mentioned - but this isn't the case for all of it. -Allen

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Re: 56 kbps modems
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> >U.S. Robotics and Rockwell International are planning new modems with >> >speeds up to 56 kbps a second, almost double the speed of the fastest >> >rate now available. The new devices should be available by the end of >> >the year, although their top speed initially may be less than 56 kbps. >> >(Wall Street Journal 12 Sep 96 B11) >> People who seemed to know used to say that 'the Shannon limit' >> set an absolute upper limit around 40 kbps. Has Shannon been >> proven wrong, or what? >Well, it all depends on the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, if the noise is >not white gaussian the situation can be even better. Or it can be worse. Almost all voice traffic in the US these days, either once it gets to your local telephone wire center or maybe before, is carried on T1 digital connections, which use 64kbps digital voice - it's sampled at 8000 samples/second, A/D converted using a non-linear 8-bit scale called mu-law (or A-law for Europe), and (for the most common framing format) has a signalling channel stego'd onto the LSB of every 6th byte. If you knew which the "robbed bit" was, you could get 63 kbps of digital data, but since you don't, digital signals are limited to 56kbps since they can't trust any of the low bits (analog doesn't lose much from this.) Unless they're _really_ talking about ISDN "modems", I'm surprised to hear somebody saying they can take 56 kbps, turn it into analog, let the phone company quantize and mu-law the analog into 64kbps, and still get the original 56kbps back out. But if they can, well, yee-hah, ISDN is nearly dead :-) (Not totally dead; the signalling is still useful for some applications, the convenience of two channels on one wire pair is nice, and the fact that people can get 56kbps without the phone company's help will pressure them into offering ISDN for a lower price in areas where the Phone Company's idea of "all the market will bear" is substantially higher than voice pricing.) (For Norm Hardy's comment on PBXs, the main transparent approach to that is to use ISDN as the interface. PBXs often use ISDN to reach either local or long-distance phone companies, since they generally want more than vanilla signalling anyway.) # 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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HipCrime as MetaSPAM
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Hippie Of Crime <robert(a)precipice.v-site.net> suggests that anybody who puts a mailto: with their name on it is inviting mail, so what he did shouldn't be construed as rude. He also asked that remailer operators not block HipCrime SPAM deliveries and all mail to HipCrime because people might be interested in his cool fractals and Java neural net lotto-predicters and anarchist pages. I disagree, on various points. 1) There's a Robot Exclusion Standard, which uses a robots.txt file as a convention for websites to inform webcrawling programs of sections of their directories they don't want crawled through. The HipCrime Email Robot appears to ignore this convention - I don't have a Java Decompiler on my Wimpy Win3.1 system, but the strings program doesn't show the string robots.txt anywhere in the bytecodes, which I assume means it ain't there. 2) If a mailto: on a web page is an offer to human readers to send mail to a human or bot that handles mail relevant to some topic on the page, that doesn't mean the author invited mail except as described in the human-readable-language on the page, which may say which addresses are invitations to send mail on what topic. Furthermore, the author may not be the recipient of the mail anyway; The Hippie Of Crime Lives Here 3) An invitation to a reader to send mail from the reader isn't an invitation to send a large number of identical mail messages. A spam-generator like the Hippie Of Crime posted isn't designed to add comments from the reader of the MetaSpamEmailRobot page, it's designed to get many other people to send HippieSPAMs from the Hippie Of Crime. 4) This isn't the first time he's done this sort of thing. I took a look at the www.hipcrime.com pages, and aside from the Annoying Frames and Highly Annoying Evil META REFRESH auto-flipping pages, and Annoying Animated GIFs, there were some really cool-looking fractals, and a saga about how a few years ago he was faxing fractals out to a few hundred people who he'd put on a fax-mailing list, many without asking them. ====================================================================== Free FAX Fractals Free-FAX-Fractals was a long running FAX prank/art project, using facsimile machines to invade office spaces with monochrome mathematical psychedelia. During 1992 and 1993, a list of over 500 fax numbers was compiled while roaming around San Francisco. These numbers were taken mostly from signs and business cards, but many people volunteered their numbers hoping to receive trippy fractal faxes on a weekly basis. ===========rest-of-saga omitted================================ Only a couple people actually complained, and the police _asked_ to get added to the list. 5) "Anarchist Info" - sigh. Where do people get the idea that publishing recipes for drugs and explosives is anarchist info? He didn't talk about anarchy, or getting along without governments, or getting rid of them. Also, he neglects to note that you can simply _buy_ potassium chlorate, rather than having to (dangerously) boil down bleach and potassium chloride to make the stuff. Don't try this crap at home, kids, and please don't blame the anarchists for it. Just a Hippie Of Crime, not a Hippie Of Clue. # 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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Re: Cypherpunks
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> CypherPunks live so far from real-life, that it's impossible for them > to communicate rationally. Never having any danger in their lives, > they want to avoid encountering any in "cyberspace". They are trying > to craft that new world according to their intellectual guidelines. > Trying to make sure real-world annoyances have been removed. No, I can`t let that pass, the say that cypherpunks try to avoid danger in real life and online is absolute rubbish. The libertarian polotics embodied by the cypherpunk movement encourages a way of life which is indeed more dangerous than other type of society, annoyances are different, sure they try to avoid annoyances, but this does not stretch as far as encouraging censorship, its just that, from my point of view anyway, most cypherpunks idea of a utopian society does not include big commerce, which is associated with big government, indeed most of us find the one minded lust for money of the junk mailers to be distasteful in itself. to say we attempt to create a "safe" society online and off is correct but only in a superficial sense, I believe the cypherpunks want a safe society as much as anyone else but believe that the best way to achieve it is through individual liberty, not through totalitarian statist government, furthermore cypherpunks and libertarians as a whole accept that a dangerous society is an inevitable consequence of a free society, but that this is a price worth paying. 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: 2.6.3ia mQCNAjH9j+cAAAEEAMBvREiQR0ot9dFCO0TiSCSunAYLv2g1Bc6I3bz8FzKXNH53 6mieJf/W4rD+CxJpT0q9RQaaoRtkHJLwbjfK2il3D7mEahMAyqvF/xRJNqkXfhM3 sRJM0Jh43l+W0M5vwokbEbk25/bxWWGspTsLD3YHbzKnG6pOcL5OPIRbv66xAAUR tCdQYXVsIEJyYWRsZXkgPHBhdWxAZmF0bWFucy5kZW1vbi5jby51az6JAJUDBRAy NwfvNkCBjDT0xHEBATQPA/9TORmN/UjNecj03q4anpvdyCLiez5sKuNbnYK50RiP Jj4QpWWvST3smyQ0A86DrZY/re056MXwQmARESx0rFZxdnD0oORICl5r8dJLIy3b j8rbA5olXwZwKz73/X5s13v/pvHYX4cIsbVK8NHXqh5llSKt6TBAuGgkIGF29z5k C4kAlQMFEDI3B9mdtf/umVkv7QEBcRYD/1FBteLqsUmr81euxqqnnrpLlyHb58B/ 9sdATuua4uSjX46hXDZ264YozspNrzSB4NEdrmXOWVX3fiE0ga6XkSSkIeF23V90 En37Z0BdbFzgF00FRYTFyTq8eezQrdg/+rBPUsZUmG5wpq3e12FKHQsX01i+1mB2 YmqqwCV5e95eiQCVAgUQMh8uSb5OPIRbv66xAQEqJwP/fxQyiCasjFcbDpsFfsYp put5cCC/9pOx6X3DlbKShPMpUOS+A9HsTEmJQN8Iawv1nSwPdtc2cR/GhW6ilVjW LSloGdMVLabm9pGpZZMkRaZlXFUkOv7VhfgsUiL+vIDryBCAwUZCzQiWycjt/cPi mUqFH41Z7NkyO8ZFdi5GGX0= =CMZA -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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[Noise] Shopkeepers Preventing Riot Redistribution
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: EALLENSMITH(a)ocelot.Rutgers.EDU, cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Sun Sep 15 09:26:45 1996 EALLENSMITH(a)ocelot.Rutgers.EDU wrote: ... >... the "redistribution" from > producers ("rich") to welfare drones ("poor") during the Rodney King > riots > would have been nicely prevented by some shopkeepers with automatic > weapons. Indeed, it was. In a beautiful-to-me scene which Miami's WSVN, Channel 7 (our big-hair station) called "chilling," Korean-American shopkeepers, perched atop their building with semi-automatic firearms, kept one block safe while the rest of the neighborhood burned without police protection. Upon being informed that this was a biased interpretation of legitimate actions by the merchants, which _I_ found heartwarming, they said that chilling was "just a word." JMR -- "'Media bias' is just 2 words." 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 iQCVAwUBMjwEGm1lp8bpvW01AQExZQQAm6mj+Oi+4+sd72j79f+S3vYxy2rKY6TR OTwDChBPe9pgswg1wAR7uRVwXN1UlsB2NqHTsQhuU9/D+Te9ncZdpqowoyVZRqUG /1NSA8NA9WMOEjW0OoyXCw6EIYOxBvwDqTpxokF4RfLBlVzyYVJVnvnSXMDzkJ4O gh922BlaqRg= =DLRS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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URGENT: Final draft GLOBAL ALERT: German Government censors dutch site www.xs4all.nl
by tank 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Stanton McCandlish suggested some important corrections. I changed the draft accordingly and extended the sign-on deadline with one day. Please sign on for your organisation to the following alert NOW, deadline: Tu. sept. 17th 24.00 hr. GMT. I added already some (default) signatures, let me know before the deadline when you want your signature deleted. After the deadline I'll make this alert public on Wednesday sept. 18th (again: provided I don't get serious objections!). Arie *** GLOBAL ALERT *** (not yet) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SEPT. 18, 1996 - Please redistribute this document widely with this banner intact - Redistribute only in appropriate places & only until 15 October 1996 Global Alert: German Government Pushes Blockage of Netherlands Web Sites At the behest of, and in response to legal threats from, the German government, internet providers in Germany have blocked the Dutch Web site Access For All (www.xs4all.nl) removing German users' access to the entire xs4all system. The German government demanded this action because xs4all hosts a Web "home page" with so called left-wing political content that, though fully legal in the Netherlands, is allegedly illegal in Germany. (see: http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901e.htm) As a result of this action, *all* xs4all web sites, including several thousand that have nothing to do with the offending home page, are unavailable to readers in Germany. Please send a letter of protest to the German ambassador in your country, ask your foreign minister to protest officially to the German government, and distribute this alert as widely as possible online and to the press. Referring to article 19(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights, which Germany ratified in 1973, we, the undersigned organizations, consider this censorship an illegal act. Additionally, the value of attepting to ban content the German government finds offensive is highly questionable. The proper response to offensive expression is more and better expression, and prosecution of offending criminals, not censorship. As a result of the overly broad censorship measure which targets and entire Internet access provider instead of a specific user, all 3000 and more Web site hosted by xs4all are virtually inaccessable in Germany.The loss of clients who market in Germany has resulted in economic damage to xs4all. The immeasurable harm of censoring thousands of other users for the speech of one is even greater. Access for All, though it has expressed willingness to assist the Dutch police in identifying online criminals abusing the xs4all system, has a policy against censoring its clients. Mirroring this position, at least one German Net provider has responded to the government demands with skepticism, pointing out that their compliance with the censorship request may cause them to violate contracts with their own German users, and that the governments liability threats are tatamount to holding a phone company liable for what users say on the telephone. Instead of the futile act of censorship that has simply drawn increased attention to the offending material and resulting in its widespread availability on other sites throughout the world, the German government should have acted through legal channels and asked that the authorities in the Netherlands take appropriate actions. We are concerned that German internet providers have cooperated so easily with government censorship efforts. Some level of cooperation was probably assured by underhanded and rather questionable police threats of system operator liability for user content, but we must urge more resistance on that part of Net access providers to such online censorship schemes. As with libraries, there are many who would censor, but there is a responsibility on the part of providers of access to information, to work to protect that access, else libraries, and Internet service providers, lose the reason for their existence. We demand that the German government refrain from further restrictive measures and intimidation of internet providers and recognize the free, democratic, world wide communications represented by the Internet. All governments must recognize that the Internet is not a local, or even national, medium, but a global medium in which regional laws have little useful effect. "Top-down" censorship efforts not only fail to prevent the distribution of material to users in the local jurisdiction (material attacked in this manner can simply be relocated to Italy or Antigua or any other country), but constitutues a direct assault on the rights and other interests of Internet users and service providers in other jurisdictions, not subject to the censorship law in question. For press contacts, and for more information about the Internet, see homepages for the signatories to this message: DB-NL (Digital Citizens Foundation in the Netherlands) * http://www.xs4all.nl/~db.nl ALCEI - Electronic Frontiers Italy * http://www.nexus.it/alcei CITADEL-E F France *http://www.imaginet.fr/~mose/citadel CommUnity (UK) * http://www.community.org.uk Electronic Frontier Canada * http://www.efc.ca/ Electronic Frontier Foundation (USA) * http://www.eff.org Other signatures: Please send the signature of your organisation to me that I can add it to this alert. Arie Dirkzwager, Board member of DB-NL (Digital Citizens Foundation in the Netherlands).

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