December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

GPS and other Dual-use technologies
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I used to be an avid RC modeler and have contemplated organizing an on-going amateur cruise missile contest. The object would be to accurately deliver various payload weights over courses of various terrain and distances (perhaps out to a hundred miles or more in the case of Giant Scale craft). Judging would be based on speed, stealth (noise, IR emissions and radar cross section) and accuracy. Craft are free to use any navigational technology, but must be autonomous from launch to delivery. To aid navigation I was considering the design of a substitute differential GPS beacon functionally interchangable with those offered by the USCG. My device would work on a different frequency, possibly using very wideband direct sequence spread spectrum (for low probability of intercept/detection) and be actuated by the missile as it neared the target in order to refine its position. -- Steve PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com Lamarr Labs | Voice: 1-702-658-2654 7075 West Gowan Road | Fax: 1-702-658-2673 Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Key-Escrow
by Scottauge＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have a question. There seems to be a lot of excitement over the key escrow stuff da gubermint is trying to install. Couldn't one burn off maybe 10 ** 200 keys and say, hey gubermint dude, these are like, gonna be my keys. Wouldn't this place them into a brute force search if they wanted to play with your info? Doing this will likely add to the tax burden for all dem disk drives needed to store them numbers. :( If ya can't do that, then they must be gonna sell key space like da radio spectrm - which means some number is gonna mean something to someone somewhere - yum yum say the hackers and the crackers. I'm thinking there will be a way no matter what happens....

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Re: The Petaflops Boondoggle Computer (was PET_ard)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:00 AM 9/29/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >(Hoist by their own petards indeed! Don't tell our Russian what petard means.) Uh, wasn't that the name of the bald captain on Star Trek Next Generation? You know, "Jean-Luc Petard"? >> The word is petaflops, computer jargon for 1000 >> trillion computations per second. Think of it as a >> year's labor for a powerful workstation compressed >> into 30 seconds. Think of it, also, as 1000 times the >> speed of the current computing benchmark, a trillion >> operations a second -- teraflops -- which is on the >... > >I doubt this will be ever be built, at least not as a government-funded >"G-job" "one-off" machine. It would, as the full article state, necessitate >a kind of "Apollo program" for supercomputers. Check out an article in about the September issue of Scientific American, 1966, on the subject of the Illiac IV, which was one of the first attempts at a multiprocessor machine. Originally it was conceived as a 256-processor unit, at 4 million (floating point?) operations per second per processor which would have been 1 giga ops per second, but it was eventually built as a 64-processor unit and turned on in about 1972 or so. The succeeding factor-of-1000 improvement appears (if the item above is accurate) to have taken 24 years to accomplish, so it's hard to imagine that the next factor of 1000 will arrive appreciably sooner than year 2020. >The reasons for the collapse of the market are well-known: the end of >communism has lessened certain needs, the cut-backs in defense spending, >"the attack of the killer micros" (arrays of cheap micros give better >bang-for-the-buck), and, related to the themes of this list, NSA's >code-breaking just ain't what it used to be. Oddly enough, however, we're getting somewhat of an echo of the "big single processor" phenomenon with the micros. We all know that in supercomputers, multiprocessors won out over single processors, and mainframes were just about defeated by microcomputers. Yet a look at Intel's pricing for Pentiums shows that they sell a 120-MHz chip for about $135, while they sell a 200-megahertz version for around $550 or so. Arithmetic suggests that a person would be far better off with a 4-120-MHz-processor Pentium (cumulative clock rate 480 MHz) than a single, 200-megahertz version. (admittedly, peripheral logic costs will adjust this a little.) Of course, this would also leave Intel flat on its ass attempting to compete with AMD, Cyrix, etc, because a somewhat higher speed per cpu is just about the only advantage they have. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: [AP] Afghanistan
by Wayne H. Allen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:10 AM 9/29/96 EDT, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: >Afghanis publicly hanged their former president, Najibullah [no last name]. >Other countries should follow their example. > >--- > >Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM >Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps > > And this would accomplish???? And this has what to do with cryptography?? Wayne H.Allen whallen(a)capitalnet.com Pgp key at www.capitalnet.com/~whallen

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Re: Utah as a Religious Police State
by Ryan Russell/SYBASE 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I guess that depends on your definition of liberty. The Mormons originally moved there to have a place to practice their religion, and have freedom from persecution. I suppose one could extend that to wanting a place to have the freedom to have a set of rules consistant with their beliefs. Should that include freedom from interferance from folks such as yourself who want to change their rules, even though you're not presently effected? Ryan ---------- Previous Message ---------- To: cypherpunks cc: From: tcmay @ got.net ("Timothy C. May") @ smtp Date: 09/28/96 10:35:42 PM Subject: Utah as a Religious Police State Hey, Attila, let me know where you folks live...I may want to move there! At 2:56 AM +0000 9/29/96, attila wrote: > the population base is changing with an influx of non-Mormons > in town, so R rated are showing up at the theatres and video > rentals in town. Just so long as my DSS dish still works in Utah--hey, I'll invite all the jack Mormons over for tomorrow night's showing of "Inside Janine," on the "Playboy Channel." (The "Playboy Channel" is kind of tame by video rental standards, but more crotch shots than we used to see a couple of years ago.) > the police visible prescence is effective --a force of 50+ for > a population base < 25,000, plus the county sherrif cars and the > state police. Curfew is 10pm weekdays for minors --and they > enforce it, big time. midnight Fri/Sat. They enforce the "curfew" big time? Looks like some Mormon pigs need to be zapped. (My kids don't cotton to no cop telling them when they can be out in public and when they can't. Any cop who tries to stop my kids from being out has earned severe retaliation. Any councilmember or state legislator who voted for such a curfew needs to be hog-tied, covered with tar, then torched.) I guess this is why I wouldn't last very long in Mormon Country. A fascist encampment, it sounds like. (I have no problem with Mormons, or Catholics, or Muslims, or Satanists keeping _their own_ children indoors after 7, or 5, or whatever their Holy Hour or Curfew Hour is, but no fucking religious nuts are going to tell _me_ when _my_ children must be indoors. I determine where my children may be, and I don't need the State's permission for them to be out. I would think anyone with an iota of libertarian sentiment would understand this.) > ...idle hands are the devil's workshop. you want good solid > kids, you start from the gate and keep 'em busy: home, neighbors, > school, church, etc. Do Utah's cops also enforce this law, too? > they do not date until they are 16 --in groups. boys and > girls --the same rules. With the Utah State Police enforcing this "dating curfew"? (I may sound harsh here, but "curfew" means one and only one thing to me: somebody restricting my freedom of those of my children to be a public place. Should one of my children be picked up by cops for doing nothing illegal, save for being "out past curfew," I'd consider violent response to be justified. It sounds to me--not that I ever thought otherwise--that Utah is not a land that favors liberty.) --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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Internet 'terrorism' newsclips [CYPHER, but news]
by Donald Weightman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From today's PARADE magazine, that valuable source for insight into the popular heart and mind, "explaining" why "we" haven't been able to catch Iranian terrorists: >Thanks to the highly sophisticated surveillance capabilities, American >intelligence agencies have intercepted enough telephone messages from Iran, >ordering acts of terrorism, that Iran's terrorist network stopped using the >phone. Reportedly this has caused them to start using codes on the Internet >that are "practically" impossible to track and isolate. >"Just when we thought we had outsmarted them, they caught on and started >using codes on the Internet", an expert in international terrorrism tells >us. "There's so much crazy srewball stuff on the Internet that it's >practically impossible to track down and isolate the terrorists. No >government can analyze those millions and millions of messages." And from another piece of hard-hitting quote-the-official-source journalism in PARADE, "A New Worry: Terrorism in Cyberspace" >The danger of computer-based "cyper" attacks is second only to that posed by >nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, says CIA's Director, John >Deutch. He expects the threat to grow as we rush to connect the world on the >Internet. <SNIP> >There were more than 250,000 attacks on Department of Defense computers last >year, and 65% were successful. Little is known about who launched them, why, or >what they found. In a recent test, Defense Department "red teams" admit to >intentionally hacking into 18,200 systems, with only 5% of the attacks >detected; only 27% of those attacks were reported. Wonder if the timing of these stories has anything to do with the end of term legislative push on wiretapping. Don Weightman dweightman(a)radix.net

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Re: Utah as a Religious Police State
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(I received this message, with "cypherpunks(a)sybase.com" as well as "tcmay(a)sybase.com" (???) cc:ed, so I assume this message was intended for the Cypherpunks list, with some sybase domain name weirdness, or reflector, going on.) At 12:30 PM -0400 9/29/96, Ryan Russell/SYBASE wrote: >I guess that depends on your definition of liberty. The Mormons >originally moved there to have a place to practice their religion, >and have freedom from persecution. I suppose one could extend that >to wanting a place to have the freedom to have a set of rules consistant >with their beliefs. Should that include freedom from interferance from >folks such as yourself who want to change their rules, even though >you're not presently effected? Well, if Utah can rig a way to _secede_ from the Union, your arguments would make more sense. But so long as they are part of these United States, their religious beliefs about when children should be at home cannot supersede basic liberties. (There are some thorny issues about whether _minors_ have full civil rights. But I certainly know that _my_ civil rights are being affected when my children are not allowed on the streets after some hour. If my child is out, this is my problem. I neither want cops to stop-and-detain my children, nor do I want my tax monies to be used to control the behavior of other people's children. Providing no crimes are being committed, curfews for the sake of controlling the behavior of children are no more just than would be a bunch of related behavior control laws, e.g., a ban on comic books, a mandate that all children join after-school youth leagues, etc.) As for "changing their rules," you're missing the point. There are presumably many in Utah who believe as I do (maybe even some Mormons). Those who are living in Utah, as renters, owners, whatever, should not be bound by unconstitutional rules, no matter how many Mormon Elders favor them. Unless the Mormons own _all_ of the property (and maybe not even then, as renters have civil rights), they cannot impose their own notions of morality on the rest of the population, except in compelling cases (e.g., involving the well-known actual _crimes_). I don't mean to pick on Mormons, as other communities have also attempted to impose curfews and other restricitions on the children of others. My ire was raised by Attila's enthusiastic support for laws which no freedom-loving person should be enthusiastic about. Again, I have no problem with Attila restricting his own children's movements, or joining with other parents to control the behavior of their _own_ children, via religious camps, religious schools, youth leagues, etc. He can even make his own kids wear funny uniforms, funny religious hats, whatever. But, for example, tellling _me_ when _my_ children may be out on public streets (doing nothing illegal, neither robbing nor spray-painting nor committing any other real crimes) is unacceptable. I urge Attila (and others) to rethink enthusiastic support for curfews. --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: Internet 'terrorism' newsclips [CYPHER, but news]
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>There were more than 250,000 attacks on Department of Defense computers last >>year, and 65% were successful. Little is known about who launched them, >why, or >>what they found. In a recent test, Defense Department "red teams" admit to >>intentionally hacking into 18,200 systems, with only 5% of the attacks >>detected; only 27% of those attacks were reported. > >Wonder if the timing of these stories has anything to do with the end of >term legislative push on wiretapping. Quite possibly. The message from this article is clear. Step up investigation and prosecution of illegal government Net activities :-) -- Steve

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Chinese Censorship
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> _________________________________________________________________ > Cisco-Job Fair > _________________________________________________________________ > CHINA RELAXES CONTROLS ON INTERNET ACCOUNTS > __________________________________________________________________________ > Copyright &copy 1996 Nando.net > Copyright &copy 1996 Reuter Information Service > SHANGHAI (Sep 25, 1996 08:48 a.m. EDT) - China has removed limits on > the country's number of Internet accounts following the recent > installation of safety controls on the computer network, a senior > Shanghai telecommunications official said on Wednesday. Safety controls... nice euphemism, similar to "key recovery". > "Some time ago, our security arrangements were incomplete and there > was a problem with pornographic and politically unacceptable > material," said Zhang Weihua, vice-president of the Shanghai Post and > Telecommunications Administration. [...] > Zhang said access to sites on the Internet containing pornographic or > politically unacceptable material had been restricted, adding, "This > material is restricted all over the world." > He declined to give details of the security controls placed on the > servers, saying he was only responsible for the technical side of the > service. > But Zhang did say he was unaware of any restrictions on access to > major international news sites through China's Internet servers. > Foreign reports have suggested that China has cut off access to such > news sites. Analysts say that China is concerned over development of > public computer networks and their use by people opposed to communist > rule or communist policies. [...] > Zhang said for "security" reasons there was a need to control > information and discussion on the Internet and related bulletin board > services. > "But surveys done on the usage and interests of people in China with > Internet access indicate that virtually all the material they wanted > to look at is domestic," he said. Due to language differences, I would guess. > China's key Internet Service Provider (ISP) selling access accounts is > Chinanet, controlled by the Post and Telecommunications Bureau. > Zhang said the bureau took measures earlier this year to control > unauthorised activities of other access providers, including > Shanghai's Fudan University, in order to handle the security issue. > China currently has access points to the Internet in Beijing and > Shanghai. It has no plans to add more, Zhang said. > He said his department was being assisted in building its computer > network by several American-Chinese originally from mainland China who > spent time working with the U.S. space agency NASA. I see.... (grimace) > Copyright &copy 1996 Nando.net

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Does any body know anything about this?
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is this just more snakeoil or is this real? <<<<<<<< FORWARDED MESSAGE >>>>>>>> From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson(a)cl.cam.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 09:05:28 +0100 Subject: Seminar in Cryptology and Computer Security *** *** *** *** *** University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory EXTRA SEMINAR SPEAKER: Matt Blaze AT&T Research DATE: Monday 23rd September 1996 at 11.30 am PLACE: Room TP4, Computer Laboratory TITLE: SYMMETRIC-KEY CIPHERS BASED ON HARD PROBLEMS A useful principle in cipher design is to reduce or at least relate closely the cryptanalysis of the cipher to some long-studied problem that is believed to be difficult. Most public-key ciphers follow this principle fairly closely (e.g., RSA is at least similar to factoring). Modern symmetric-key ciphers, on the other hand, can rarely be reduced in this way and so are frequently designed specifically to resist the various known cryptanalytic attacks. In this informal talk, we examine a simple cipher primitive, based on Feistel networks, for which recovery of its internal state given its inputs and outputs is NP-complete. We outline simple and efficient block- and stream- cipher constructions based on this primitive. * * * The regular Michaelmas term seminar series will resume on the 8th October with a series of talks on Tuesday afternoons at 4.15 PM in room TP4, Computer Laboratory, Pembroke Street, Cambridge. A list of speakers will be circulated shortly. * * *

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