December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Mail OnNet
by jfricker＠vertexgroup.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:06 AM 9/4/96 -0700, Alan Olsen wrote: >At 05:10 PM 8/31/96 -0700, Joel McNamara wrote: > >>Two notes. (1) It only runs under Win95 and NT. (2) It's ITAR restricted. > >(3) It is bigger than a battleship. The distribution is just shy of 10 >megs. Installed it is supposed to be about 45 megs. (In perspective, a >full install of Visual Basic 4.0 "Professional" is about 50 megs.) >--- The install is only 5MBs. Part of that 10MB package is a silly collection of netscape plugins which don't have to be installed. I guess they could be nice if I tried them. It also only works on NT4 regardless of what the web page says. With it's ability to run a program on receiving an email based upon filter criteria the possibilities are endless. (I know I know old hat for unix but so whiz bang for NTnoids like me.) --j

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Re: DON'T Nuke Singapore Back into the Stone Age
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:13 PM 9/2/96 -0400, you wrote: >> (This was done by many of us during the Karla Homulka and Teale trial in ... >There is a big difference between the Canada situation and the Singapore >situation. In Canada the restrictions are temporary and stem from making >the right to a fair trial a higher priority than the right to free >speech. >It is a conflict of two competing individual liberties. No observer of ..... >The situation in Sigapore is simply a corrupt government trying to >supress >legitimate democratic discussion. The intention is not to protect an >individuals right to a fair trial, the intention is to restrict argument >permanently. The Karla Homulka case and other criminal trials aren't the only censorship in Canada - there are far more serious problems. Zundel's problems (his legal ones, not just his moral ones) are well-known, as are the Dworkin/MacKinnon-inspired anti-pornography laws which Canada uses to censor lesbian bookstores and gay magazines. For the most part, other than sex and drugs, Canada's censorship is the pro-human-rights-politically-correct-liberal-hypocritical variety rather than the Singapore-style anti-human-rights-order-enforcing- politically-correct-dictatorship variety. But it's not only illegal to sell unapproved drugs in Canada, it's illegal to sell materials advocating drugs or their legalization, or of course information on how to make or grow drugs as well. (This helped Mark Emery get the capital to start his Hemp store in Vancouver by selling Cannabis magazines door-to-door :-) (It turns out that, since hemp seeds don't contain THC, they're not illegal in Canada, and hemp stores he's started or encouraged have sold enough seeds to grow more dope than Canada's police have confiscated in the last year or two. Mark openly violates the censorship laws, and his shop occasionally gets raided, and after the last bust they've decided he's a co-conspirator with everybody who's grown drugs using seeds or light bulbs bought from him, and they're playing a FUD game about whether to charge him with 8 life sentences, in under-5-year pieces....) Vancouver newspaper columnist Doug Collins gave a talk on censorship at an international libertarian conf. in BC recently, which Emery also spoke at. He knows the subject fairly well, since some of BC's censorship laws were written just for him. He's one of those anti-immigrant anti-Semitic* WW2-veteran curmudgeons who's got an editor who lets him write whatever he wants, and he offends a lot of people. In BC, and to some extent in the rest of Canada, you can be charged with human rights violations for disparaging ethnic and religious groups, and he's been tried and defended himself successfully for that, because Canada does have some limited protections for free speech in their Charter. So BC wrote a law that allows the BC human rights commission to fine people for human rights violations with just an administrative proceeding, not requiring a full-scale trial, and you generally can't get a jury in Canada for crimes with punishment less than 5 years in jail anyway. He hasn't been busted under the new law yet, but his publisher has spent about $30K in legal costs trying to make sure it doesn't happen. [*He knew better than to specifically say anything anti-Semitic while he was talking to us, but he referred to Jewish groups that oppose him in ways that implied he probably was.] And of course Canada has broadcasting licensing requirements that prevent people from starting radio and TV stations whenever they want to, plus a huge government broadcasting company, but they're not as limited as Singapore on that, and there are other countries with that problem. And of course they have silly language laws in Quebec, but they don't really limit what you can say as long as you say it in French (or Chinese or Vietnamese or just about anything except English and maybe Native languages.) # 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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Tack of Internet censorship
by nobody＠replay.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Six months ago, the Internet censors and Exon wannabees took the tack of "the Internet is too hard to censor". Now, their motto is "There will be some who get around our censorship, but we will try anyway." Unfortunately, I believe these censorship strikes will keep happening unless we find a way to stalemate them. What I am proposing is that Apache or other WWW servers have a way to allow access to site B's URL at site A, similar to the old trick of finger user@sitea.com@siteb.com. Implementation should be simple. However, I wonder what is a good standard way to specify this in the URL or a site.

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GSI
by gsi＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: GSI Full-Name: Floyd W Odom To: Bugtraq Subject: GSI Message-ID: <19960904.195621.3230.0.GSI(a)juno.com> X-Status: Unsent X-Mailer: Juno 1.15 Dear Recipient, We at Galaxy Software would like to offer you a chance to buy software over the magic of e-mail. How it works is you can send us here at GSI(Galaxy Software Inc.) e-mail orders from our software list telling us that the check or money order is in the mail. To e-mail us just send a letter to GSI(a)JUNO.COM. For more information you can e-mail at: doom13(a)juno.com.1. CGW Game Pack2. One must fall 2097 3. Decsent 24. CD Sampler: Volume Two5. Cannon Creative6. Animation Festival7. Duke Nukem 3D8. Doom9. World Atlas10. Crime City11. Airforce Combat12. GT Personel Accounting13. Wolfenstein 3D14. Print Master Gold15. Chaos16. Wizardry17. Corel 618. America Online 3.019. Power Chute Plus Demo20. UPC Doctor21. Epic Pinball: Enigma22. Epic Pinball: Android23. Epic Pinball: 1, 2, 324. Jazz Jackrabbit: Holiday Hare25. Jazz Jackrabbit: All*

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GSI
by gsi＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: GSI Full-Name: Floyd W Odom To: Bugtraq Subject: GSI Message-ID: <19960904.195621.3230.0.GSI(a)juno.com> X-Status: Unsent X-Mailer: Juno 1.15 Dear Recipient, We at Galaxy Software would like to offer you a chance to buy software over the magic of e-mail. How it works is you can send us here at GSI(Galaxy Software Inc.) e-mail orders from our software list telling us that the check or money order is in the mail. To e-mail us just send a letter to GSI(a)JUNO.COM. For more information you can e-mail at: doom13(a)juno.com.1. CGW Game Pack2. One must fall 2097 3. Decsent 24. CD Sampler: Volume Two5. Cannon Creative6. Animation Festival7. Duke Nukem 3D8. Doom9. World Atlas10. Crime City11. Airforce Combat12. GT Personel Accounting13. Wolfenstein 3D14. Print Master Gold15. Chaos16. Wizardry17. Corel 618. America Online 3.019. Power Chute Plus Demo20. UPC Doctor21. Epic Pinball: Enigma22. Epic Pinball: Android23. Epic Pinball: 1, 2, 324. Jazz Jackrabbit: Holiday Hare25. Jazz Jackrabbit: All*

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Re: Pseudocrypto detector is going wild
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Is it just me, or is the snake-oil frequency factor scaling up? > We used to get this stuff quarterly, and now it's monthly, if > not weekly! > > slither-squeek Yeah, I too have noticed this. Hey kids, heres uncle Pauls Snake oil test. if the post contains any of the following it is slither-squeek material: 1. The word "Proprietary" 2. References to a new algorithm, which hasn`t been seen yet and is "the strongest ever" 3. people who use TM after their alogorithm, this is Snakeoil(TM)(R) 4. People who think cryptographers seeing their algorithm will make it less secure 5. People who have never coded a crypto tool in their life then instead of working on current algorithm implementations re-invent the wheel because they don`t understand how to implement current ciphers. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Http://www.fatmans.demon.co.uk/crypt/ "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey" -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6 mQCNAjH9j+cAAAEEAMBvREiQR0ot9dFCO0TiSCSunAYLv2g1Bc6I3bz8FzKXNH53 6mieJf/W4rD+CxJpT0q9RQaaoRtkHJLwbjfK2il3D7mEahMAyqvF/xRJNqkXfhM3 sRJM0Jh43l+W0M5vwokbEbk25/bxWWGspTsLD3YHbzKnG6pOcL5OPIRbv66xAAUR tCdQYXVsIEJyYWRsZXkgPHBhdWxAZmF0bWFucy5kZW1vbi5jby51az4= =riHc -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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Re: Reputations
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:11 AM 9/5/96, Greg Burk wrote: >That part of the "reputation capital" theory has always seemed >suspicious to me. "reputation capital" doesn't behave linearly. There's >too much incentive to bottom-feed and too little incentive to shoot for >the heights. As an "asset", it is extremely non-liquid. It is hard to >spend it in a controlled manner. Sure, it isn't fungible, it isn't transitive, it isn't neat and clean. But it's the best thing we've got, imperfect as it is (and must be, I believe). >Too much incentive to bottom-feed: > >For example, let's say there's someone well-known who frequently speaks >nonsense on crypto issues. We'll call her "Norothy Nenning". She makes a >recommendation on some particular crypto issue, say "The government's >Nipper chip is a safe and effective form of crupto". Plenty of naive >people will credit her to some degree. True, fewer people than if she >had carefully husbanded her reputation, and to a lesser degree, but >still a lot more than zero. > >Notice that that's a zero cost/benefit ratio. She never does anything to >husband her reputation, she just spends it every chance she gets. And >while no single expenditure rewards her as much as it would if she made >the same expenditure with a good reputation, she spends so much more >freely that it is a good strategy for her on the whole. To stick with my restaurant example, consider _advertising_. MacDonald's and Burger King spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year claiming their "restaurants" are great. Many millions of people obviously are swayed. So? Others choose not to trust the advice of the MacDonald's hucksters. Maybe only a tiny fraction choose Chez Panisse over MacDonald's. This is the way of the world. It's still the give and take of reputations. It ain't perfect (in that it doesn't produce results I believe are empirically valid and optimum :-}). But it's all we have. It's the market. The agora. >"Reputation capital" is hard to spend down to absolute 0 because it is >significant work to distinguish valid "reputation capital" from >worthless counterfeit, and it is easy to counterfeit... just talk. I strongly disagree. It's quite possible for Person A to quickly convert his reputation to Person B to a _negative_ value. Real quick, in fact. Perhaps my short article did not fully explain a few things. Reputations are a _tensor_ or _matrix_ quantity. Person A has a reputation R(A,B) to Person B, a reputation R(A,C) to Person C, and so on. (And the matrix may be further broken down into reputations for advice on various subjects, in various fields, etc.) We may lump a lot of folks together and say, for example, that MacDonald's has a reputation of R (MacDonald's, lots of people) = 0.7531. And perhaps R (Chez Panisse, lots of people) = 0.0013 (i.e., they don't know what it is, and so value the rep of Chez Panisse at near zero). And so on. Lots of examples could be given. Now suppose that J. Anonymous Gourmand announces that MacDonald's is shit. How much will anonymous claim hurt MacDonald's? Obviously, not much. But what if the American Heart Association publishes a detailed study on the fat levels of MacDonald's products and declares it to "Dangerous." The effect will probably be greater, as R (AHA, many people) = high, and by the kind of Dempster-Shafer belief calculus I discussed a few months ago, the rep of the AHA propagates semi-transitively to the rep of MacDonald's. (This all happened recently, with the famous studies of fat levels of movie theater food...sales dropped almost overnight, and now the fat levels of popcorn, etc., have been changed for the better.) This is a real example of how reputations matter, how negative and positive reps matter, etc. Note especially that the "identity" (in the Dyson sense of providing True Name accountability) of an opinion-giver is not what it is important...it is not the essence of why people believe or don't believe the opinions of others. (Some years ago on the CBS station in San Francisco, there was an "anonymous gourmet" who visited restaurants and gave reviews. His reviews were taken quite seriously, and his anonymity did not matter, provided his personna was _persistent_. That is, provided that people thought it was "the guy they had come to trust," and not, say, a guy the station recruited off the street each day and sent out as the "anonymous gourmet." In the case of this guy, his face was cloaked in shadows, but his voice was distinctive. (His voice on the show was probably different from his food-ordering voice, so restaurants would not know who was ordering and alter the food or service.) Much could be written abou the role of anonymity in such reviews, in tests of service, etc.) >I anticipate the answer "Well, the work pays off". But that misses the >point. Frequently the work required to tell the good "reputation >capital" from the worthless is as much as would be required to find the >straight dope yourself. Reputations work OK for me in the real world. Given the limits on a lot of ontological facts, hard to see how it could be better. I've already spent too much time writing this, so I can't address the remainder of your points. --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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Using Compromised Remailers to Get the Goods
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:21 PM 9/4/96, jim bell wrote: >Perhaps the most ominous part of making "use of encryption to thwart an >investigation" illegal is _not_ that remailer operators might be prosecuted, >but that they might NOT be prosecuted in a deal where (in exchange for not >being prosecuted) they continue to operate the remailer, "cracked" or >sabotaged so that they share all the info with the cops. While even that >won't make chained remailers totally useless, eventually suspicions of such >a crack will surface, which will help sabotage the credibility of all >remailers, >not just the ones that have been "stung." A very valid concern. As Jim must be tired of hearing by now, this was brought up a couple of years ago in discussions about the pressure that could be brought to bear on remailers. One suggestion was a duress signal, effectively saying "I have been compromised." (Also known as a "wave off" in criminal circles.) The issue of whether a remailer can be trusted to wave off others, via covert channels, is of course another issue. One can hope that additional channels will be acquired to produce the necessary information. (For example, full sender untraceablility means that sources within police departments can go home, log on with the own PCs, and sell information about pending investigations, modulo their concerns about pointing to themselves with information provided (see "canary traps"). What an exciting world we are entering.) --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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ZD Net Registration
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://community.zdnet.com/register/register.cgi Check this out! Harvesting Mother's Maiden Name. I wonder how many they get each hour....

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ALERT: Join thousands of net users in their fight against the White House! (9/4/96)
by Voters Telecommunications Watch 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

============================================================================= ____ _ _ _ / ___|_ __ _ _ _ __ | |_ ___ | \ | | _____ _____ | | | '__| | | | '_ \| __/ _ \ _____| \| |/ _ \ \ /\ / / __| | |___| | | |_| | |_) | || (_) |_____| |\ | __/\ V V /\__ \ \____|_| \__, | .__/ \__\___/ |_| \_|\___| \_/\_/ |___/ |___/|_| NET LUMINARIES JOIN THOUSANDS IN SIGNING PRO-ENCRYPTION PETITION http://www.crypto.com/petition/ CRYPTO ACTION WEEK ENDS WITH JUDICIARY HEARING ON HR 3011 (9/11/96) Date: September 4, 1996 URL:http://www.crypto.com/ crypto-news(a)panix.com If you redistribute this, please do so in its entirety, with the banner intact. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents Introduction Join Phil Zimmermann, Bruce Schneier, and other cyber luminaries! How to receive crypto-news Press contacts ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION This week is a hard week for many working on the encryption issue. The House pro-encryption bill, SAFE (HR 3011), will have a hearing in the Judiciary committee on September 11. Between now and then, individuals and industry representatives will be calling on their legislators to support HR 3011. On the other side of the issue, the White House is expected to release their "solution" to the encryption debate no earlier than September 8th. It will surprise no one if it is designed to be in the best interests of law enforcement with concerns for privacy placed dead last. Be a part of this assault on the White House by signing the pro-encryption petition at http://www.crypto.com/petition/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- JOIN PHIL ZIMMERMANN, BRUCE SCHNEIER, AND OTHER CYBER LUMINARIES! The following petition can be signed onto at http://www.crypto.com/petition/ The Information Revolution is being held hostage by an outdated, Cold War-era U.S. encryption policy. Current U.S. export controls and other initiatives are slowing the widespread availability of strong encryption products, endangering the privacy and security of electronic communications, harming the competitiveness of U.S. businesses, and threatening the future of electronic commerce and the growth of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII). We the undersigned Internet users and concerned citizens strongly support Congressional efforts to address this critical issue. Bills are currently pending in both Houses of Congress which would: -Relax export controls on encryption technology; -Prohibit the government from imposing "Key Escrow" solutions domestically; and -Recognize the importance of privacy and security for the future of electronic commerce, individual liberty, and the success of the Internet. We urge Congress to act NOW to enact a U.S. encryption policy that promotes electronic privacy and security. Join Phil Zimmerman, author of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), Bruce Schneier, author of "Applied Cryptography", Dr. Matt Blaze of Tessera card fame, Phil Karn and Vince Cate as they pressure the White House to change their wrong-headed encryption policies. Add your name to theirs at http://www.crypto.com/petition/ ! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- HOW TO RECEIVE CRYPTO-NEWS To subscribe to crypto-news, sign up from our WWW page (http://www.crypto.com) or send mail to majordomo(a)panix.com with "subscribe crypto-news" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send a letter to majordomo(a)panix.com with "unsubscribe crypto-news" in the body. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- PRESS CONTACT INFORMATION Press inquiries on Crypto-News should be directed to Shabbir J. Safdar (VTW) at +1.718.596.2851 or shabbir(a)vtw.org Jonah Seiger (CDT) at +1.202.637.9800 or jseiger(a)cdt.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- End crypto-news =============================================================================

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