December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: AP [was: Re: Kiddie porn on the Internet] [NOISE]
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:00 PM 9/25/96 -0700, Dale Thorn wrote: >jim bell wrote: >> That's about it. I long ago noticed the similarity between AP and the >> fictional Gort. >> Problem is, Gort would have to be programmed. How would you write such >> a program? Governments would want their hand in it. They'd insist on >> "government exceptions" to rules, like: "All violence is forbiddden! >> (except for violence by duly authorized government employees!)" >> Not very practical. > >Indeed it may not be practical to try such a program on current >computers. I've had thoughts for some time about an analogy where each >person in a civilization represents a cell in a single brain, and so on, >so perhaps AP is merely a portion of the program for this "brain". As >to what happens when you try to concentrate a disproportionate amount of >the programming task into a few hands, that appears to be the situation >we have now. Exactly correct. The current system is intended to present the illusion that it is the product of the voters, where it is really defined by the political establishment. Bill Stewart pointed out (correctly) that what I'm proposing is "mechanism without a built-in policy." While this may appear to be a bit reckless, the reason I'm confident it will work is that the status quo has a _throughly_corrupt_ policy, a policy which is actively hostile to the interests and rights of the average citizen. Replacing that system with one that is merely neutral is a great improvement, particularly if there is no way for that policy to be hijacked by a tiny minority of the public. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: AP Protocol Failures [NOISE]
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:37 PM 9/26/96 -0500, snow wrote: >> >> Troops are in Northern Ireland for a very simple and depressing >> >> reason. People like Jim want to impose their will on others by force. >> But AP is great - adding more violence to Ireland is just the thing >> they need........ > > It wouldn't ADD more violence. I had intended to respond to Bill Stewart's comment before this. I was surprised that he would suggest that AP would (necessarily?) cause "more violence." To me, it's obvious that it will cause _different_ violence, and I strongly suspect it'll actually reduce the total violence level, and certainly will do so in the long term. But far more than reducing violence, it'll reduce coercion that doesn't rise to the level of violence as well. When people AREN'T put in jail or prison for a victimless crime, I consider that a drastic reduction in coercion, and that's progress. Put fewer people in jail, and you anger fewer people, and you rob fewer people by taxation to pay for that jail, etc. >> One of the strong negatives of AP is that it leads to reverse AP - >> if you don't know _which_ Hatfield killed the latest McCoy, >> you might as well just shoot one or two Hatfield Boys at random. >> If you kill off GrandDaddy Hatfield, there's nobody to say >> "OK, let's stop shooting each other"; instead there's a bunch of >> angry grandkids, and uncles, _all_ of whom have the >> authority to say "Let's go kill the McCoy bastards who did this!" >> The protocols may work when there's one hierarchical target - >> they don't work with two. Hammurabi's law about "An eye for an eye >> and a tooth for a tooth" was a _limitation_ on the amount of vengeance >> you were allowed to take, not a minimum required vengeance. > > Putting AP into place doesn't make murder legal. You could still >be arrested, tried (depending on the jurisdiction) and punished for it. Not only that, you could use AP to kill somebody who killed SOMEBODY ELSE with AP! (which is, to me, a rather obvious fact, but one that escapes an unusually large number of people. 'course, you'd have to figure out who did it... a non-trivial task under the circumstances.) Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Public Schools
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Phil Fraering <pgf(a)acadian.net> writes: >> > Without vouchers, you don't say anything about the intelligence of >> > your test subjects; to a _very_ large degree, intelligence isn't >> > genetic. Or Bag of shit wrote: >> That's the political correct thing to say, but do you have any >> scientific evidence to support this claim? At 11:19 PM 9/25/96 -0700, Dale Thorn wrote: > People have argued for genetic disposition to certain things, and I > think they are sometimes (most times?) confused [...] [Lots of meaningless hand waving hot air deleted] The key basic test of the power of genes is studies of identical twins raised in different families. They have near identical IQ's, and a wide range of very similar behavior. Identical twins raised in different families are more similar than identical twins raised in the same family, probably because of deliberate attempts to differentiate themselves. Except in the case of extreme environmental pressures -- starvation, neglect, and the like, genes count for just about everything, and environment for almost nothing. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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"Confessing to a felony"
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:03 AM 9/26/96, Black Unicorn wrote: >On Wed, 25 Sep 1996, Igor Chudov @ home wrote: > >> > >> Soon I am going to be going overseas to Japan, and I want to take >> > >> my notebook with me so I can keep up with everything, however, I have >> > >> encrypted my hard drive and usually encrypt my mail. Is this in >> > >> violation of the ITAR to keep everything the same when I go over? >> >> Gentlemen, us customs does not give shit about what you take out >> on your diskettes. >> >> When I went to Russia recenty, I took PGP for DOS, and no one gave >> me any problem. >> >> IANAL > >Obviously not, you've just confessed to a felony. So? "Confessing to a felony" is meaningless, as I understand things. While BU is a lawyer, and I am not, I maintain "confessing to a felony" is meaningless without several necessary factors: a. interest by law enforcement that a crime has been committed and needs to be prosecuted b. evidence that the "confession" can be backed up by other evidence c. common sense Thus, if even former prosecutor Brian Davis, when he was a prosecutor, were to have "confessed to a felony" (for example, saying a bad word on a forum where minors might be present, under the CDA, and before it was put on semi-hold), his colleagues would just have snickered, thinking him crazy. As to the felony status of taking PGP to Russia, I think it's not a felony. The "personal use" exemption in the ITARs certainly makes taking PGP to _Western_ Europe an OK thing. Whether Russia is still considered to be worthy of an "exemption to the exemption," as it were, is unclear to me. Mostly, I think U.S. Customs doesn't care. --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."

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Re: Hallam-Baker demands more repudiations or he'll write!
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:51 PM 9/26/96 -0700, Declan McCullagh wrote: >Anonymity and nonescrowed crypto are the linchpins of AP and its more >general case, Maysian crypto anarchy. The withering of the nation-state. >Whatever you want to call it. >To prevent it, governments will ban both. A criminal law, passed in the >wake of say a bombing this fall in Washington, DC, banning nonescrowed >crypto. (Freeh will assert he has evidence the terrorists used PGPhone.) >And another law banning online anonymity. >What then, Mr. Bell? While we should continue resist such developments, I (like many others) tend to believe that the government is going to have a great deal of difficulty implementing such restrictions, for reasons which have been discussed here ad nauseum. I happen to believe that the really crucial reason Clipper was proposed is so that it would exclude non-escrowed encryption using market forces, because they understood that banning encryption or non-escrowed encryption would be essentially impossible. Remember the VHS/Beta VCR wars? With a fairly equal market in about 1978, Beta died 10 years later because the market couldn't support two incompatible standards. It wasn't that one was dramatically better than the other, it was simply that having two standards forced the market to duplicate stocks, for the machines as well as tapes, particularly pre-recorded tapes. Notice, however, that VCR's are relatively "isolated": It doesn't really matter if you have one format and your neighbor has another, unless you want to swap tapes. But crypto telephones inherently require (in the long term) full intercompability. If you didn't have that, there'd be half a world of people you couldn't call! (This kind of situation is remeniscent of a recollection my mother has of a small town she grew up in, in which there were two competing telephone companies serving the same area, but customers of company "A" couldn't call company "B." The most popular girl in town was the daughter of a doctor, who as a consequence of his profession had telephones from both companies. That girl was constantly being called to relay information between people on opposite telephone companies!) The government understood this, and realized that the best way to derail the advent of a good crypto telephone standard was to produce one of their own, which they figured would pre-empt and kill off any competing system. It turns out that an essential element to this killing-off process is to ensure that the telephones aren't compatible, so I was a bit surprised to have to wait a long time to hear that one of the requirements for Clipper-phone approval is that they NOT co-operate with non-escrowed telephones. (I was surprised to have to WAIT to hear this, NOT that they said it eventually...) I think they realize that Clipper was their last opportunity to implement a de-facto market ban on good encryption, but it isn't working. As for a ban on anonymity I don't think that'll fly either. There are too many interactions we do today (off the 'net as well as on) which are already anonymous, even if we don't normally think of it that way. Visit a theater, pay cash, and nobody records your name, for instance. Buy groceries, pay cash. Throw coins in toll booth. Put coins in Coke machine, ride on bus, etc. It would be very hard to prohibit non-anonymous interactions on the net, with so many opportunities for unrestricted anonymity. There's even less reason to ID non-economic transactions too. Since most interactions on the 'net are not a financial transaction, there is even less reason to identify the people involved. So at the risk of being overly optimistic, I think the government isn't going to be able to pull off the kind of anti-crypto/anti-anonymity coup you describe. But nevertheless, I think that if they "progress" towards that goal against the odds, that could easily be an excellent justification for actions which you know they'll describe as "terrorism." Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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ssh - How widely used?
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone know if there are MS-Dos or Mac versions of the ssh client? How much is ssh used? I've not seen much discussion of it but poking around an ISP yielded this: Ssh (Secure Shell) a program for logging into a remote machine and for executing commands in a remote machine. It is intended to replace rlogin and rsh, and provide secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network. X11 connections and arbi- trary TCP/IP ports can also be forwarded over the secure channel. and Usage: ssh [options] host [command] Options: -l user Log in using this user name. -n Redirect input from /dev/null. -a Disable authentication agent forwarding. -x Disable X11 connection forwarding. -i file Identity for RSA authentication (default: ~/.ssh/identity). -t Tty; allocate a tty even if command is given. -v Verbose; display verbose debugging messages. -q Quiet; don't display any warning messages. -f Fork into background after authentication. -e char Set escape character; ``none'' = disable (default: ~). -c cipher Select encryption algorithm: ``idea'' (default, secure), ``des'', ``3des'', ``tss'', ``arcfour'' (fast, suitable for bulk transfers), ``none'' (no encryption - for debugging only). -p port Connect to this port. Server must be on the same port. -L listen-port:host:port Forward local port to remote address -R listen-port:host:port Forward remote port to local address These cause ssh to listen for connections on a port, and forward them to the other side by connecting to host:port. -C Enable compression. -o 'option' Process the option as if it was read from a configuration file. Looks like a nice little implementation. Comments anyone? -- I hate lightning - finger for public key - Vote Monarchist unicorn(a)schloss.li

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This list is a joke
by Dave Temple 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

When I subscribed to this list, I thought it would have decent communication on worthwhile topics. I've come to realize though that 75% of the messages I receive are from people whining like 4 year olds. I am making a huge assumption in saying that most of the people on this list are adults. It is time to start acting like it. Please take my name off of this list.

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Re: Inflation-index bonds and private e-currency
by Richard Fiero 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

E. Allen Smith wrote: > One of the attractions of privately-produced currencies is as a > hedge against inflation; this development may be a competitor to this > idea. On the other hand, this setup does have an unavailability in _time_ > of the money (more so than other, equal-security bonds of the same duration), > which may offset its greater spendability. > -Allen I don't get it. Why is this bond not saleable like any other? What "privately-produced currencies" are a hedge against inflation? If this bond is saleable like any other, why is the money unavailable? What means "greater spendability?" Is this assumed to be yet another government plot because it competes with other offerings and reduces the cost of borrowing? Respectfully. -- Richard Fiero --

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Re: Another briefing in Atlanta on the NRC crypto report,... (fwd)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm still waiting for a briefing from Dorothy Denning, Dave Maher, and the rest of the Clipper Chip review team on their findings and a final report :-) They released a preliminary report, saying that SkipJack was strong, and never did release a final report analyzing Clipper itself - the Clipper protocols, the chip itself, the master key loading system, or the master key handling procedures (or if they did issue a final report, they didn't advertise it widely...) Bill Stewart At 02:31 PM 9/30/96 -0700, Stanton McCandlish <mech(a)eff.org> forwarded: >Date: Mon, 30 Sep 96 10:26:00 EST >From: "CRYPTO" <crypto(a)nas.edu> >Subject: Another briefing in Atlanta on the NRC crypto report,... > >Subject: >Another briefing in Atlanta on the NRC crypto report, October 21, 1996 > Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society > A Public Briefing in Atlanta, Georgia > Monday, October 21, 1996, 1:30-3:30 pm > >There will be a public briefing in Atlanta, Georgia by the National >Research Council on this report. The briefing will be held at the >Manufacturing Research Center on the campus of the Georgia Institute of >Technology on Monday October 21, from 1:30 to 3:30. Dr. Herbert Lin, >director of the NRC study will conduct the briefing. Questions from the >audience will be entertained. For further information, please contact Dr. >Myron L. Cramer (404) 894-7292, <myron.cramer(a)gtri.gatech.edu> at the >Georgia Tech Research Institute. # 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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Can we kill single DES?
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Since it looks like the US government will be allowing the export of 56 bit espionage-enabled software, it's time to kill single DES. As some of you will recall, a while back I wondered aloud about the feasibility of brute-forcing DES on general purpose machines, ala the RC4-40 crack last year. Unlike many cypherpunks, I actually write code (:-). I took Phil Karn's DES386 as a starting point, and modified it to run effiiciently on the Pentium. The code I've written will run 14 round DES (all that is required for a key test app) at 254,000 crypts/sec on a 90 MHz Pentium. Allow about 10% overhead for key scheduling (there are some tricks to speed this up), and we're still at about 250,000 keys/sec on a 100MHz Pentium (I'm using a nominal 100 MHz Pentium as my 'unit' of cpu power). On a Pentium, it runs entirely in the L1 cache. The code will also run on a 486, but at less than half the number of crypts/sec for the same clock speed. On this type of processor, it would still take 9133 years to exhaust a 56 bit key space. On the other hand, on 20,000 processors of this power it would take less than 6 months. If the target is encrypted in a chaining mode with an unknown 8 byte IV, the time more than doubles. Clearly, this goes far beyond the number of cpus available to the members of this list (though well within the power of most governments and many corporations) The best idea I've heard for recruiting this many cpu cycles is to create a screen saver which does DES-cracking while machines are idle. Another incentive is to offer a cash prize to the person(s) who find the key. Yes, I KNOW that a hardware based cracker is a LOT more efficient, but between the up-front cost and the difficulty of design and production, it's less likely to get done. (Still if someone wants to buy me a nice FPGA board, I'll see what I can do). If you're interested in volunteering machines to do a key search, please read to the end. Questions for general discussion: 1. Is this a good idea? What will happen if DES becomes perceived as insecure? 2. What is the probability of success required to make it worth doing? 3. What would be the consequences of failure? 4. What other platforms than NT/Win95/Pentium should be considered? I could write a Unix demon version, but unless it's tailored for the cpu, a lot of efficency is lost (The aggregate number of idle cycles available for testing is the crucial number). 5. What's a good target? Ideally, we need a plaintext/ciphertext pair, encrypted in Single DES ECB mode. Preferably from a commercially available program, in which a single key is used for a great deal of traffic over a long period. I would strongly prefer, however, that the target key be a *test* key - I don't want to compromise anyone's actual security. We need a target which is both convincing and realistic. 6. What other incentives can be used to recruit machines? ------------------------------ If you're interested in volunteering cycles: RESPOND ONLY TO ME (trei(a)process.com) NOT TO THE LIST. The last thing we need is a hundred 'I'll help' messages on the list. Assume that the program will be a Win95/NT screen saver or Unix deamon. Think about how many machines you could get it to run on (maybe you can talk other people into installing it as a screen saver or background task) I have not written the screen saver yet. I will not do so unless it looks like we'lll get enough machines, so nothing is likely to happen for a couple of months at least. I need to estimate how many cpu cycles will be available: Calculate: Number of Pentiums * Hours available/week * MHz + (Number of 486's * Hours available/week * MHz * 0.30) For, Alphas, MIPS, Motorola, PowerPC etc, running UN*X, MAC, etc, just report how many cpus, their speed, and OS - I'll need help to get versions for other platfoms. 64 bit processors like the Alpha can run this stuff *fast*. Send the aggregate numbers to me. I'll also need to know how many machines are directly on the Internet and could thus query a key-space server, and how many would need some other mechanism to get keyspace and report results. If you're volunteering machines which are outside of the US/Canada, please note the fact: ITAR may be an issue here. I'll summarize to the list. Peter Trei trei(a)process.com

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