December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Basis of FCC Jurisdiction [RANT]
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Last week I started a thread on the Telecom Regulation list. My intention was to introduce discussion of some circe-1780s Republican questioning, as opposed to the widely accepted Federalist. The most interesting composite result is below: >Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 22:08:03 -0500 >Reply-To: telecomreg(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu >Originator: telecomreg(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu >Sender: telecomreg(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu >Precedence: bulk >From: "Michael D. Sullivan" <mds(a)access.digex.net> >To: Multiple recipients of list <telecomreg(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu> >Subject: Re: Basis of FCC Jurisdiction (Republican rant) >X-Comment: Requests (UNSUBSCRIBE/HELP) to: listserver(a)relay.doit.wisc.edu >MIME-Version: 1.0 > >Steve Schear <azur(a)netcom.com> wrote: > > >I've been wondering lately about the jurisdictional limits of the FCC > >vis-a-vis the Article(s) of the Constitution from which they derive their > >authority. My understanding is that the FCC is empowered under the Fed's > >interstate commerce clauses. If so, how valid is their jurisdiction over > >low power and/or millimeter wave transmissions. It seems a case can be > >made that such transmissions represent little or no possibility of > >interstate transmission. > >To which Bob Jacobson <bob(a)worldesign.com> replied: > > >The FCC derives its authority by Congressional mandate, so the question is > >rightly posed as "Does Congress have rights to regulate local radio trans- > >missions?" Congress abrocated to itself the right to regulate all radio > >transmissions, on the grounds that any transmission might interfere with > >the transmissions of interstate broadcasters. Generally, this right has > >been upheld by the courts, although states have successfully challenged > >the absolute power of the FCC with regard to certain aspects of non-radio > >transmissions -- for example, telephone calls -- that do not cross state > >boundaries and even some that do. To my knowledge, no form of electronic > >transmission is invulnerable to some type of regulation, whether federal > >or state (including municipal regulation by cities and counties, creatures > >of the states). Of course, there are loopholes, as the Internet has amply > >demonstrated. > >In further response, John Levin <jlevin(a)paonline.com> added: > > >This discussion is incorrect by omission. The reason that states have > >authority over intrastate telephone service is because Congress says they > >do. The Telecommunications Acts carve out areas of state and federal > >jurisdiction. The FCC, like any other agency, takes an expansive view of > >their authority and courts occasionally rein in such excursions after > >looking at their enabling statutes. The technical doctrine is 'federal > >preemption', and unless Congress expressly preempts the states, or the > >preemption is necessary to effectuate a national policy authorized by > >federal legislation, the states retain control of state activities. As to > >what constitutes 'interstate commerce' for the purposes of the U.S. > >Constitution, there are hundreds, if not thousands of court decisions on > >that topic. During most of this century, usually even a very slight > >impact on interstate commerce has been found to be sufficient for Congress > >to legislate. Those of you who plan on using 'states rights' as a basis > >for disobeying Federal laws or regulations should consult an attorney and > >get your affairs in order before you act. > >Although nothing in the Communications Act of 1934 or it predecessor Radio >Acts states so explictly, it is implicit that the Interstate Commerce Clause >is the basis for the statute and for FCC radio licensing jurisdiction. That >was undoubtedly one of the bases for earlier legislative and Commerce >Department regulation of radio, along with providing for the national >defense. Under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, >Congress can assert jurisdiction over virtually anything affecting >interstate commerce. This clearly underlies Section 301 of the >Communications Act, which asserts federal jurisdiction and control over all >interstate radio transmissions and requires FCC licensing for the same. > >The Communications Act does not assert jurisdiction over, or require FCC >licenses for, radio transmissions between two points in a single state (not >including D.C.). In fact, this doesn't remove virtually anything from >federal jurisdiction or licensing as a matter of law, because radio >transmissions don't stop at any particular point, they merely attenuate as >they continue to propagate onward ad infinitum. As a technical matter, a >milliwatt-level millimeter-wave radio transmission from one end of a >steel-encased underground chamber to a receiver at the other end propagates >to points thousands of miles away, albeit at an undetectible level (i.e., >waaaaay below the noise floor), and it therefore could be viewed as an >interstate radio transmission. Practically, however, such transmissions >stop at the steel shielding. The FCC, therefore, will be unable to document >that there was an interstate radio transmission and would likely be unable >to shut you down. > >The FCC has adopted rules that permit unlicensed operation under common >circumstances when there is unlikely to be any interstate effects. Part 15 >sets forth power levels and other transmission parameters for certain >frequency bands that do not require licensing. Although the jurisdictional >basis for Part 15 has never been expressly stated, the FCC views such >transmissions as not, in any practical sense, likely to interfere with >licensed transmissions, and the unlicense use of spectrum is conditioned on >not interfering. > >One could argue that other low-power or physically confined radio >transmissions are also unlikely to cross state lines as a practical matter, >or to interfere with licensed transmissions, and are therefore beyond the >FCC's jurisdiction. The FCC has not conceded its jurisdiction in such >cases, however. There is currently litigation ongoing regarding a >California (Berkeley, perhaps?) low-power FM station that did not obtain a >license. It doesn't interfere, and it can't be received out-of-state. Can >the FCC shut it down? Yet to be decided. > >Steve Schear also wrote: > > >Another question has to do with spectrum ownership. Prior to the '34 Act > >who owned the spectrum. Was any compensation made for the taking? > >To which Bob Jacobsen replied: > > >As to ownership of the spectrum, the spectrum still is owned by the people > >of the United States, held in public trust. So-called "sales" of spectrum > >are actually licenses to use various frequencies under different rules. > >Presumably Congress has the right to sell this "property" in the same way > >that it sells forests on public lands, but so far it has not done so. On > >the other hand, the federal government has exacted remarkable fees for > >certain licenses: PCS operators have already put up over $17 billion in > >fees for licenses auctioned by the FCC! > >Actually, spectrum isn't "owned" by anyone, including the people of the >United States. One can't own a physical dimension such as frequency, any >more than distances, speeds, or colors. The federal government has asserted >*control* over the *use* of spectrum, however, just as it and the states >assert control over the use of particular speeds in particular locations >(e.g., 55 or 65 mph on freeways). As Bob said, the right to use spectrum, >within specifically defined geographic, frequency, power, and time limits, >is conferred by licenses awarded by the FCC. These licenses, for a >specified term, are sometimes given away to the first person who asks for >them, sometimes awarded by hearing or lottery, or, more recently, sometimes >awarded on the basis of the highest bid. The FCC isn't selling spectrum per >se, but a license for the exclusive right to use particular spectrum under >the defined terms of the license. This is very different from selling >public land, but is somewhat like selling the right to harvest the trees (or >mine the coal, or drill and pump the oil) from a piece of federal land for a >certain number of years. > > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Michael D. Sullivan, Bethesda, Maryland, USA >mds(a)access.digex.net / avogadro(a)well.com / 74160.1134(a)compuserve.com >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Snoop Daty Data | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com Grinder | Voice: 1-702-655-2877 Sacred Cow Meat Co. | Fax: 1-702-658-2673 7075 W. Gowan Road, #2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | --------------------------------------------------------------------- Just say NO to prescription DRUGS. "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis "Surveillence is ultimately just another form of media, and thus, potential entertainment." -- G. Beato

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Re: Mitsubishi MISTY LSI
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Does anyone have a reason not to consider this algorithm snake oil? e.g.: > >Was it developed by a well known cryptographer? >Has it been vetted by someone/some organization with reputation? > >I other words, why should we trust it? It was developed by a team lead by Mitsuru Matsui and has been subject to fairly intense analysis, although not by non-Mitsubishi people AFAIK. In any case it's not the usual snake oil. When I last talked to someone from Mitsubishi who was working on Misty I tried to convince them to make details available online, you could try something like www.melco.co.jp to see if there's anything available. Peter.

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Public Schools
by ronsimpson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I hate to burst any bubbles but, the school with the highest number of National Merit Finalists and highest number of 1600 SATs is a Public High School (Jefferson High in Fairfax, VA)

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Re: Technical difficulties with AP [AP NOISE]
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:07 PM 9/28/96 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >Aside from details like dead bodies, vendettas, and government suppression, >there are technical complications with Assassination Politics >that make it more than the simple job Jim Bell is imagining. >Some of them provide ways to defend against AP, and turn it into more like >Extortion Politics. > > [Do I _really_ want to bring up more discussion of AP? > Not sure, but if it's clear that it won't work very well, > it'll be less likely for the government media to freak about :-)] OTOH, if it's going to work, the earlier you're satisfied about that the better, huh? >Let's look at the critical part of the problem - paying the assassin. >The model we've generally been using is that the players are the >victim, the escrow agent who manages the system, an enthusiastic public, >and the assassin or assassins who are competing for the jackpot. All of whom could play multiple roles in difference circumstances, incidentally, at different times. The public should be particularly interested in this process, BTW, because they realize that someday they may want to participate as donors, bettors, or they may have no choice but to participate as...victims. >I can see three approaches to identifying the correct payee: >1) Payee provides physical evidence to the escrow agent - > the traditional approach doesn't work here: since the > escrow agent is anonymous, so you can't mail him the > victim's wallet or finger with well-known fingerprint or whatever. >2) Assassin leaves physical evidence at the scene which the news media > would be likely to report, which payee confirms with escrow > agent, presumably committing in advance (e.g. after the event, > the payee sends a key which allows the escrow agent to decode > the encrypted message that said "I'm leaving a note on the body > saying 'Jacques De Molay is Avenged - Assassin's Guild Member #32767'.") > Works fine for the first couple of assassinations, but after a while > the police will catch on and stop revealing kinky details to the media. >3) The main solution has been the gambling deal - > it's just a lottery on the date of death of the victim, which presumably > the payee will win because he knows when the assassin will strike. > For a lottery to be effective, prospective assassins need to > be able to determine how much the jackpot is and who the victim is, > so they can place their bets and be the closest winner. There are a number of advantages to the gambling scenario. The first, obviously, is that it is, technically, gambling, and gambling is legal in many locales and "accepted" (morally) in most. The second is that being gambling, no participant other than an assassin knows, for sure, that the person collecting the payoff is actually guilty of any crime. A third is that to many people, gambling is fun, which means that they are already primed to partipate. > But the prospective victim can also play, individually or as part > of an insurance pool (which is especially valuable for victims like > "the first IRS agent to be assassinated".) Obviously you don't want > to just bid up the price on your own head, so it needs to be accompanied > by publicity that the IRS Agents' Benevolent Association is placing > a large number of small bets every day to maximize the chances that > _they_ will collect the money rather than the assassins. > If the times that the bets are for are published, you can beat this, > but you also invite speculators to be small bets just before and after > your bets, so it becomes a mishmash and perhaps a race condition. > If the times aren't published, the assassin can make lots of bets > surrounding the planned date of the hit, which is also a warning > to the prospective victim to be careful if the bets on his demise > start increasing rapidly. The way I've envisioned it, the bettor must commit to his prediction, but he then encrypts it so that nobody else knows what he's predicted, either the date or the target, and he must "buy" his prediction by including digital cash. One advantage of this system is that the victim isn't warned (although the victim is already aware of how much money has been donated to fund the prize), but a potential disadvantage is that there might be a collision between the predictions of two or more people. This probably can't be entirely avoided, but it can be minimized by forcing the bettors to compete with their bets. It is impractical for a person who just guesses to make such a bet, against somebody who knows the date. The bettor doesn't reveal the decrypt key to the particular prediction involved unless he chooses to do so; when he does presumably, it's because the prediction has come true. A failed prediction isn't disclosed, so it doesn't alert anyone else, including the "escrow agent" AP organization. The amount of digital cash included with the prediction will be revealed publicly, the moment it is received by the organization, as well as the (still encrypted) prediction. Saving these predictions allows anyone to verify (after the decrypt key has been released) that the prediction actually identified a particular person. This allows the public and the other players to verify that the game is being played honestly. > This does make the AP lottery somewhat of an extortion deal - > by advertising that someone is a target, you're forcing them to > continually make lots of bets. This, of course, is only true if the specifics of the predictions are revealed, which is not the scenario I envision. Obviously, revealing the predictions allows the victim to lay low whever he's likely to be hit, which is why I think that's a bad idea. > But if they've got any way of tracing > money, even partially, it'll help them find the escrow agent, > who can then be targeted for justice of one sort or another. > You're also forcing the assassin to make lots of bets, though in > a jackpot system the successful payee will recover most of it. It is at least conceivable that an assassin won't know the exact date he'll be successful. If he sends a letter-bomb, for instance, he won't know for sure when that letter will be delivered, or the day it will be opened. However, he need merely make two or three predictions, and he won't have to make the last one or two unless the prediction didn't come true on the first day. Multiple predictions does raise his cost, but it will still be economical to do given the probabilities. > To some extent the defense can be fought if the escrow agent > wants to establish a minimum bet, say $100, which an assassin > can afford to make a few of for the targeted day, but the > victim can't keep paying too much. This also reduces the > since of the potential better pool, and therefore reduces > the jackpot and the attractiveness of the job to the assassin. > Lots of people might be willing to spend $5 to contribute; > $100 bets are much fewer, especially if there are enough > targets to successfully overthrow a government. Originally, I had anticipated that the AP organization would require specific payments included with a prediction based on the value of the reward and the estimated probability of the death on any particular day. I was never comfortable with this system, because it would involve a great deal of calculation based on numbers that no particular people know. I don't know whether you saw my idea a couple weeks ago in which I pointed out that it should merely be necessary to allow all predictors to include whatever amount of money they want with their prediction, with the reward split up and paid to all successful predictors, pro-rated based on the size of their contribution. This shifts the burden to the public to estimate the amount they should include, which should be okay since a predictor is probably a fairly good judge of the probabilities associated with his target. At least hypothetically, it means that an assassin might have a portion of his reward "stolen" by another lucky predictor, but this is unlikely and in any case, the fact that this loss was genuine can be verified by all participates after the fact. And a predictor need merely increase the value included with the prediction to increase his pro-rata share of the reward. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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quotation
by um＠c2.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Found in a sig file: "The people involved in the crypto debate are all intelligent, honorable and pro-escrow, but they never possess more than two of these qualities at once." -- Kenneth Neil Cukier (100736.3602(a)compuserve.com)

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Re: Mousepad RNG's?
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:14 PM 9/27/96 +0200, Anonymous wrote: > I just downloaded a copy of the beta version of Datafellows > Windows 3.1 SSH and it asked to move the mouse around to > generate some randomness. In reading Applied Crypto, it > mentioned that there is no such thing as generating > randomness from a personal computer unless something like > a Geiger counter is used. Is there any way to create a > fairly random sample from the mouse? Should one use lots > of jerky movements, or take ones time with it? In this case the entropy is the negative of the logarithm of the probability that you or someone else could exactly duplicate those mouse movements. I would guess that you get at least three bits a second just doodling around, so half a minute of doodles (a pretty long time) should be unbreakable. Some time ago, at a cypherpunks conference, people were making all sorts of ridiculous proposals for being really, really, really, sure that you had real entropy, and a prominent cypherpunk, possibly Tim May, said, "This is ridiculous: Nobody ever broke good crypto through weakness in the source of truly random numbers". Sometime after that Netscape was broken through weakness in the source of truly random numbers. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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[SUGGESTION] signal/noise ratio
by Brian D Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In the interest of those who wish a significant increase in the signal/noise ratio I make a proposal. Significant crypto related posts could be prefaced with [CRYPTO] on the subject line on a strictly volunteer basis, that way those desiring a more topical list could have one simply by setting the appropriate filter. Items crypto related but missing the [CRYPTO] header could be reposted by well meaning souls. Other appropriate headers could of course be used. Brian

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[CRYPTO], or hash, anyway
by P. J. Ponder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I need a copy of the appendix to the SHA FIPS pub (180-1?) that has the three test texts and corresponding SHA hashes, so that I can test an SHA implementation I'm working with. I have tried the NIST site, and can't seem to get through. If anybody has this test deal, or knows where it is out there on the net somewhere, please let me know. Thanks in advance. (My problem is I keep getting different hashes between an MS-DOS version I'm running and one running on a Linux box, when I ftp the same files back and forth. @#$%. I thought maybe I was having problems with some kind of Line-feed vs. Carriage Return/Line-feed conversion deal, but it also generates different hashes on binary files. So I thought I would test the Linux and the DOS one against the specs in the FIPS, and see which one is hosed up.) -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ to unsubscribe, send to majordomo(a)toad.com a message that reads: unsubscribe cypherpunks in the message body, not the SUBJECT: line. -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

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Re: WARNING: This Message Actually Contains a Question Reguarding Crypto!
by cvhd＠indyweb.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>A program called F-Secure Desktop for Windows 3.x and Windows 95 is using >Blowfish with 256-bit keys. It is meant for encrypting the files on your >hard disk and it works nicely together with Windows File Manager or >Windows95 shell. I would say it is one of the best strong and easy to use >HD encryption programs (only that it costs $$). Yes, but how "safe" is a 256-bit key with blowfish? Would it withstand the efforts of big bro' ?

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[NOISE, was CRYPTO], or hash, anyway
by P. J. Ponder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please disregard earlier message about finding copy of the SHA document: FIPS PUB 180-1, I found it at: http://bilbo.isu.edu/security/isl/fip180-1.html Thanks, anyway.

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