December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [NEWS] More internet-tax proposals
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:08 PM 9/30/96 EDT, E. Allen Smith wrote: >> INTERNET BEWARE: GOVERNMENTS ARE SMELLING A RICH NEW SOURCE OF TAXES >> Copyright &copy 1996 Nando.net >> Copyright &copy 1996 The Boston Globe >> So Netcom contacted state tax officials for clarification. Netcom's >> 500,000 customers are scattered throughout the United States, but the >> company is focusing on tax laws in Massachusetts and 14 other states >> where most of its customers dwell. Weatherford said he still had >> received no official word from Massachusetts, but Netcom attorneys had >> concluded the company is subject to the state's telecommunication >> sales tax. To play it safe, it will begin collecting the tax this >> month. > > Remind me not to sign up with Netcom. > >> It's probably a smart move. At the Massachusetts Department of >> Revenue, acting general counsel William Hazel told the Globe that >> Netcom and every other on-line service provider should be paying the >> sales tax. > >> "To the extent that folks are being charged for the ability to >> telecommunicate through the Internet... that's taxable," he said. Obligatory AP solution: If Netcom and every other telecommunications company doing business in Massachusetts were to pool their money, say a half a year of their normal payments, they could (in effect) buy an "AP Insurance Policy" which would guarantee that they wouldn't have to pay the tax...forever. Since Netcom is a known entity, all they'd have to do is to announce publicly that they are not going to pay the tax because they don't believe they owe it, but that they are going to allocate a certain proportion of its gross receipts into a fund to disable the tax collection...by "other means"...if it was ever tried. This would have to be a rather powerful deterrent to any state attorney considering opening up this can of worms. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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No Subject
by barina man 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

unsubcribe cypherpunks(a)toad.com

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Re: Mailmasher
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:29 AM 9/30/96 -0400, Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> wrote: > http://www.mailmasher.com/ Interesting (potentially; the Anonymizer isn't currently listening to me, and I'm not going to set up an account non-anonymized there. The operator nicely provides an Anonymized URL for getting there.) SSL is down, ostensibly for performance reasons. The mail system says it's basically pseudonymous - there's a privacy policy which says he doesn't log what accounts belong to whom. If the government wants to use subpoenas or warrants to seize his logs, the operator won't stop them, but the log files will be disappointing... The IP address is in space that appears to be hotwired.com Class C space. Poking around whois was interesting..... # 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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Mailmasher
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey guys, Take a look at: http://www.mailmasher.com/ It's a way to get your mail through a web page. Pretty useful when you're at a braindead "cyber-cafe" machine and want to read your mail. The problem is, mailmasher knows you POP password. Anyway to do this more securely? Cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

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Re: active practice in America
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:45 AM 9/30/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >(Legal purists will point out that the second trial was for "Federal civil >rights violations." Harummphh. What would the Founders think of this logic: >"First we try them on ordinary criminal charges. If they are found Not >Guilty, we charge them in the next higher court with more abstract charges. >If they are still found found Not Guilty, we hit them with "civil rights" >and "being disrespectful to women" charges. And if that doesn't work, we >charge them in the World Court. We've only had one guilty party get past >them, and for that guy we appealed to the Pope and he put a Papal Hex on >the guy and ordered him burned in oil.") > >Double jeapardy means the system gets one shot at proving charges, not two >or three. > >(And, yes, even though I am sure O.J. Simpson killed those two people, I am >not happy with what appears to be a _second_ trial. For sure, it's a >_civil_ trial, for damages, but to this layman it looks like a second trial >on the main charges. I suppose I always thought that being found "Not >Guilty" on the act itself made it essentially impossible for a civil trial >to redecide the same issue. Boy, was I wrong.) As usual, I have a solution to this problem! (AP, for the relatively unitiated out there.) If people really believe OJ is guilty, just pool your shekels and see him dead. Or, if you believe the cops planted evidence, buy THEIR deaths via donation. (No cop would have dared risk AP to jump the wall...particularly if by doing so he risked having the evidence thrown out due to illegality. Nor would they have risked trying to frame an innocent person, or at least one believed innocent by a few million citizens.) Or do both. And so on... Notice, however, that if AP were operational, a lot might have turned out differently. First, if you assume that OJ is guilty, he would have KNOWN that he would be the first person suspected if Nicole were murdered. This would have been an enormous deterrent, because he would have known that he'd be a potential target even if he managed to commit the "perfect crime" and leave no evidence. However, it's even a bit more complicated that this. Anyone considering an AP donation against OJ would have to realize that he KNEW all this, and might have been appropriately deterred, and if Nicole was killed anyway it's quite possible it WASN'T OJ. Sure, thinking about this can give anyone a headache. That's because AP can't answer the question, "Is OJ guilty," but it could dramatically change the circumstances in which such questions are answered. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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No Subject
by Max Sanchez 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

mail me back! --------------------------------------------------------- Get Your *Web-Based* Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------

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Anonymous: Re: Phoenix News
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone else get one of these things in their mailbox? ------- Forwarded Message Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 01:04:21 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <199609292304.BAA11993(a)basement.replay.com> Subject: Re: Phoenix News Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII To: perry(a)piermont.com From: nobody(a)REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) Organization: Replay and Company UnLimited XComm: Replay may or may not approve of the content of this posting XComm: Report misuse of this automated service to <abuse(a)replay.com> Perry Metzger, You will find in your inbox, maybe you already have, a posting made by me. I am the President and CEO of IPG. Included therein is my resume and various other explanatory materials. We are now in the position of being able to prove what we have only been able to contend up to now, I realize that probably do not believe that, but it is true nonetheless. I have personally dealt with thousands of OTPs during the last 40 years, and our product produces a legitimate true OTP, pure and simple. In those materials, you will also find an attack made on you and Bill Stewart. That attack is in retaliation to the snide remarks, and your highly stilted subjective opinions, and attacks that you and Bill have made on me and IPG in the past. I do not object to criticism, when I am wrong, but I do object to using just highly subjective opinions to attack me, or anyone for that matter. I do not know about you, but I have more important things to do with my time than to engage in a ''war of words,'' with you and Bill. However, if you wound me, as you have repeatedly in the past, by such tactics, I will fight back furiously to the best of my abilities. I think it a terrible waste of your talents to engage in such conduct, and mine too of course. I do not expect either of you to agree with me unless you know me to be in the right. Either, or both of you, can criticize me all you want as long as such criticism is objective and based on facts. I seek a truce - and am willing to apologize publicly, if we can agree that we will not engage in personal subjective attacks on each other. The ball is in your court, I seek peace and a more productive usage of my time and will only respond in you lash out and try to wound me further. Appreciatively, Donald, ''Ralph'', Wood. "Civility in all human matters is the best indicator of intelligence!" - Aristotle ------- End of Forwarded Message

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Re: The Nature of the Cypherpunks List
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:11 PM 9/30/96 -0500, Travis Hassloch x231 <travis(a)evtech.com> wrote: >here here. 400 messages in less than a week, with no digest, no moderated >equivalent and no explanation for the "-ratings" list? >who has time for that? i'm interested in crypto but >i have a hard time believing any serious researcher could sift through all >the messages and still have time left to eat & breathe, much less code! ... >i am interested in any alternatives, cypherpunks readers... >other mailing lists that are serious about crypto, security, etc. >wasn't there talk at one time of a list for coders? Cypherpunks-announce(a)toad.com has one or two postings a month, mainly Bay Area cypherpunks meetings. cypherpunks-announce-request for info. You can read cypherpunks with a newsreader at nntp.hks.net ; use all your favorite newsreading tools to filter and organize it. You can get 5-10% of the volume from filtered lists from Ray Arachelian or Eric Blossom. (Ray's FCPUNX list is at either sunder(a)dorsai.org or sunder(a)brainlink.com if he's moved it. Send mail with Subject: help fcpunx There's a digested form of the list. It's free. Eric's at eb(a)comsec.com ; cypherpunks-light costs @20/year.) Coderpunks(a)toad.com is a lower-volume code-related-discussion-only list. Send mail to coderpunks-request(a)toad.com for help. # 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: Making Remailers Widespread [REMAILERS]
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:37 AM 9/29/96 EDT, you wrote: >How about: maintain a list of trusted blocking-list sites (comparable to the >list of remailers used for chaining) and when it comes the time to update the >local copy of the blocking list, ask a random one on the list; if it's down, >ask another random one on the list. There may even be more than one list. :-) Getting more complex, but it might be workable. >> sender-blocking list ... >With most ISP's it's trivial to forge one's From: header in SMTP. >Switching to another dime-a-dozen throwaway account is also trivial. >Just admit that you can't block senders, and don't pretend that you >can - false pretenses destroy one's credibility. You obviously can't source-block a determined spammer, but you can slow down some spam attacks, especially if they're one individual using his/her regular account. It's no panacaea, but it helps. Also, if you source-block based on patterns anywhere in the header, you can catch less capable email forgers. >I think I see a way to accomplish this without too much trouble. >When an e-mail is directed at u@c4.c3.c2...c1, the code that checks >for blocking will search for the following records in the blocking list: >u@c4.c3.c2...c1 (exact match) >*@c4.c3.c2...c1 (replace user by *) >u@*.c3.c2...c1 (replace leftmost .-separated piece of domain by *) >*@*.c3.c2...c1 (both) >and repeat until there are only 2 components left in the domain name. That'd work. It's clunky, but there's no avoiding clunkiness for this sort of thing, and it does preserve privacy. >Now, the question is, who would be allowed to add records containing >'*' to the blocking list using the cookie protocol? I suggest that it be >one of the contacts listed in Internic's database. postmaster@domain is (ostensibly) guaranteed to exist. The Internic database is an interesting alternative, but for this I suspect postmaster is good enough. There's also the problem that for many domains, where smallcompany.com is virtual on an ISP, the Internic database will generally list someone at the ISP, who probably has no interest in the issue, rather than someone responsible for making decisions about smallcompany.com >Thus a blocking record for cypherpunks(a)toad.com could be added by >anyone listed in toad.com's Internic entry. There's no need for any >Remailer Cabal [tinc] to maintain blocking lists. For destination blocking, I agree that users should be able to block their own stuff as automagically as possible. For source blocking, most of the need is for spams and abusers that have been tracked down (or identify themselves in their postings), and that takes human thought. In particular, spammers are unlikely to block themselves from the remailers (:-), but forgers may try to block legitimate users. >One other suggestion: instead of storing one bit of information (the >address is on the list or not), why not have several flag bits. >E.g., the blocking list could contain records similar to: >hash - e.g. 160-bit SHA >flags - e.g. reserve 32 bits Interesting. I suspect the state of the art would be to collect the bits with a disclaimer that there isn't any code to interpret them :-), but it does let you build a blocking database that's usable as capabilities grow. Any suggestions for flags besides block/allow one-way, block/allow two-way, and max-size? I'm thinking of doing a remailer that instead of sending you a message, it sends you a retrieval cookie and lets you send it back to collect the message; blocking that would be another flag. The other kind of blocking that needs adding is blocking by words in message bodies - the spammer that caused me to shut down my remailer and not bring it back up was posting hate messages with somebody else's name and email signed at the bottom. It only took one or two to generate a flood of flames to the victim, and my current remailer couldn't block any followups. Also, since the spammer wasn't generating the flames himself, his spam slipped under the remailer's spam counter, just as hipcrime's did. This sort of blocking also lets you block things like the hipcrime spam and MAKE MONEY FAST. But it's a much more sensitive problem - anybody who can add things to the body-checking list can start doing real censorship, and it's probably best to leave that to individual operators to block, or at least to turn on by hand rather than default. # 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: active practice in America
by Marc J. Wohler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:45 AM 9/30/96 -0800, you wrote: >At 11:32 PM -0700 9/29/96, Dale Thorn wrote: > >(Legal purists will point out that the second trial was for "Federal civil >rights violations." Harummphh. What would the Founders think of this logic: I am sure you know the reason for the 'civil rights violation laws. In the 50's & early 60's, all while jury's in the deep south refusing to convict obviously guilty white defendants of rape and murder against blacks. What would be *your* remedy in such cases.

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