December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

FLO_odd
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

2600, Summer, 1996 Flood Warning by Jason Fairlane This program scans a host to determine which ports are open, or listening for connections. Once a list of receiving ports has been compiled, the program then floods each of them with the specified number of SYN packets. Don't use this software without permission. I'm serious. It's very very very bad. This is probably one of the worst forms of Denial-Of-Service attacks there is. No one will be able to connect to your target's machine. It's bad. [Code follows.] ----- http://jya.com/floodd.txt (12 kb) FLO_odd Thanks to XX.

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Re: Alien and Sedition Acts [WAS xs4all.nl] then Terrorists
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Look for something along these lines from Congress in the not too distant future. All in our best interest, of course. (from 'In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Nobel E. Cunningham, Jr.) "The first alien act (June 25, 1798) empowered the president to order the deportation of any alien he judged "dangerous to the peace and saftey of the united State" or had reasonable grounds to suspect was involved in any trasonable intrigue against the government. It was up to the president to determine what constituted a danger." "Even more sweeping and more objectionable to Republican opponents of the administration was the sedition act (July 14, 1798). Passed in the final days of of the session, after Jefferson had left for Virginia, the act made it unlawful for any person to combine or conspire together to oppose any lawful measure of the government, to prevent any officer of the united States from performing his duties, or to aid or attempt to procure 'any insurrection, roit, unlawful assembly, or combination.' Furthermore, it provided for the punishment of any person writing, uttering, or publishing 'any false, scandalous and malicious writing' against the president, the Congress of the government of the united States, made with the intent to defame them or exite against them 'the hatred of the good people of the united States.'" >At Mon, 9 Sep 1996 17:54:29 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: > >> Then again, the only reason I am not a terrorist is that the government >>hasn't YET defined hate speach directed against the government to be >>terrorism. > >Don't be so hasty in saying this. > >A couple of months ago Clinton signed some sort of bill having to do with >terrorism, terrorist organizations, funding of same, and deportation of >alien-units suspected of being allied with terrorist organizations. (I seem >to recall another such act being passed in early 1995, so there may be more >than one of these things...) > >Given the mounting hysteria about terrorism (by the government, at least), >and given the various laws on the books, I would not be surprised to see >some Web sites prosecuted as "harboring" terrorists terrorist-symps. > >If any of you are not citizens of the U.S., and are here on visas, I would >give this some real serious thought. Of course, maybe deportation is a >blessing in disguise. > >--Tim May

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Re: FLO_odd
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sep 14, 1996 22:03:28, '"Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)piermont.com>' wrote: >The software in question should come with a warning attached: use it and go to >jail. Its a felony to maliciously disrupt someone's machines. ---------- Heed Perry: here's the author's warning at the commencement of code: /* !!THIS PROGRAM IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS!! NO GUIDELINES * ARE PROVIDED FOR THE CODE CONTAINED HEREIN. IT IS MERELY * A DEMONSTRATION OF THE POSSIBLE DESTRUCTIVE USE OF IP * SPOOFING TECHNIQUES. THE AUTHOR CLAIMS NO RESPONSIBILITY * FOR ITS USE OR MISUSE. - JF (3/8/96) */

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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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