December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Taking crypto out of the U.S.
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Tue, 24 Sep 1996 07:01:51 -0700, Dale Thorn 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? >Bad enough now that many places require you to put your laptop computer >through the big gray x-ray machine (no exceptions in some places, >especially federal buildings in the U.S.), but if they start requiring >you to list individual files (?????). Very high potential for abuse here! <g> Under HPFS (OS/2's file system) each file takes a minimum of 512 bytes. On your average $200 2GB drive, that'd be around 4194304 files. I wonder if they have that much printer paper? (Particularly to handle those fully qualified filenames...) <g> Now, if you were some sort of evil-cypherpunk-hacker, you might have a hacked copy of Linux that has some really "creative" file systems (The fractal file system - 5 trillion files and counting) and puts that to shame. Even better, have something equivelent to a source-code shrouder that would go through and create a bunch of random looking file names (Was PGP 0e3ahjw2.exe or 052a6v62.obj?) In other words, I have a feeling this would fly about as far as a V-22.

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The Iron Lady almost on target
by attila 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Iron Lady launched into an attack against government regulations, political correctness, and a licentious socity. Let's run her for President. she couldn't be any worse than Bubba or Dolt --and she might terrorize half or more Washington. ------ Forwarded ------ London Daily Telegraph for 25 Sep 95 <HTML> <Head> <Title>Thatcher hits out at moral 'corrosion' [Anonymized]</Title> </Head> <Body bgcolor=ffffff text=000040 link=ff0000 vlink=7080f0 alink=ff0000><H1 ALIGN=center> LADY Thatcher spoke out against the "licentiousness" of the permissive society last night and said that children were being brought up in a morally corrosive atmosphere.</summary> The former Prime Minister expressed her distaste for the coarsening of popular culture in a lecture in London which praised the enduring values and institutions of American civilisation. On the day in which the annual crime figures showed the first overall increase in Britain for several years, she also lamented the steady decline in law and order which had rendered everyone "less secure than we of a right should be". She said: "From the most heinous acts of terrorism to the petty burglar and street corner mugger, we are confronted by those for whom words such as 'justice' and 'right' have no meaning. We see around ourselves the licentiousness of modern society manifested in popular culture. We have witnessed a coarsening of everything from art to music to literature and film. But for some people there seems to be nothing beyond the pale, for them freedom has no limits." Lady Thatcher did not specify the targets of her criticism, but went on to accuse those who advocated unrestrained freedom of expression as perverse, demeaning and dangerous. She said: "The younger generation is being reared in a morally corrosive atmosphere where they are taught that in the name of liberty, anything goes. There is no elevation of the human spirit in works designed merely to shock or to appeal only to our most base instincts." Lady Thatcher's vigorous defence of the rule of law reprised a familiar theme from her period of office in Downing Street, when the Conservatives were themselves accused of fuelling the rise in lawlessness by putting too great an emphasis on individualism. However she did not refer to the present Government and its internal difficulties at all, except to warn in passing of what she saw as the dangers posed by the Labour Party or bureaucrats in Brussels. She said: "If we should be enticed once more down the rutted and muddy road of socialism, we will again find Britain mired in a morass of stifling regulations and government controls." In a sustained attack on state-enforced egalitarianism, Lady Thatcher also hit out at the fashion for political correctness as "the guiding sentiment of tyrants in every age" who believed that if they controlled what people read, they controlled the people themselves. Delivering the inaugural James Bryce lecture for London University's Institute of United States Studies, Lady Thatcher called for more serious study of the history and culture of America to understand the exceptional role the US had played in world affairs. It had served as a beacon of enlightenment in the struggles against German imperialism, fascist aggression and communist tyranny during this century, and would dominate the next. She said: "We are confronted by a stream of dictators and tyrants who will seek to dominate those nations around them, if not the entire world. The deepest conflicts between men will not subside, nor can they subside until the basic principles of individual liberty and political freedom are embraced throughout the world." Lady Thatcher said that too much talk of "rights" was in danger of overwhelming the importance of duty and responsibility in a free country. She said: "In the process, liberty decays into licence in an atmosphere where all is permitted and nothing prohibited. The resulting permissive society is in fact no society at all. It is little more than a state of nature where the line between right and wrong is first blurred and then obliterated - a place where no one dares to say no. There can be no order without authority, and authority that is impotent or hesitant in the face of intimidation, crime and violence, cannot endure." She challenged the modern assumption that progress was the general rule and corruption the exception. Often, it was the other way around. "Freedom and civilisation are conditions that require great effort, deep thought, and unwavering commitment," she said. </body> </html>

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[Fwd: Int'l Crypto Resolution Released in Paris]
by geeman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: Snooping ISP admin??
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Mon, 23 Sep 1996 08:30:34 -0700 (PDT), Eric Murray wrote: >> encountered "POP3 account in use by another user" several times in the >> past few days and I am the only user... wondering if that "in use" >> messsage is the result of a clumsy sysadmin being caught with his hand >> in the cookie jar. >> Any thoughts from the group??? > >If the sysadmin is reading your PGP mail, let him. It's very very >unlikely that he has the resources available to crack a PGP >message in this century. And if he does, his machine should be fast enough to read the entire mailbox before Michael could notice... <g>

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Not reputation again! (Was: The Nature of the Cypherpunks List)
by gregburk＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I know, I said I was through arguing "reputation theory" and I really thought I was, but this latest impelled me to say more. tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) writes: > --Tim May, whose reputation is, like the list, whatever it is, for whatever > reasons, and who thus needs no defenders Indeed, your reputation needs no defenders among those of us who know you directly (if electronically) But here's something for you to think over: If there are such things as negative reputations, why hasn't your reputation zoomed to godlike status upon the ... let us say unreserved... condemnations of the Poster With Nothing Better To Do, if s/he has a negative reputation (I presume you would say so) You could contend that his/her reputation is positive, but if that's positive, what isn't? This would appear to concede my point. You could contend that the Poster With Nothing Better To Do's reputation is balanced precariously at exactly 0. I would find that a big stretch, and as above, if that's 0, what's negative? Or you could contend that there's no such thing as collective reputation, but I think there are two major flaws: His/her 1-to-1 "reputations" clearly add up to a collective consensus among us annoyed cpunk readers. Even if you contend that reputations in general do not behave collectively, it is no defense in this case at least. And I think if "reputation theory" predicts no collective behavior, it must be pretty weak. > But there comes a point where I need to speak up. (By the way, somebody > even sent me a bizarre message, saying: "I am not quite sure why you have > not shot back at Dr Virmin and his cause. Maybe that is the best way? Or > are you guilty as charged?" So, to some, my silence means I might be > guilty. Jeesh.) Because s/he can *never spend reputation down to zero*. BTW, your example is reflected in politics too. A charge that goes unanswered is assumed true by many. Just ask Michael Dukakis. Frankly, I think you should just admit that your reputation theory is flawed and rethink it. I would be interested in hearing it, but what you have now is IMHO badly flawed. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQBVAwUBMkjPErMyVAabpHidAQFmVAH/XJ8GqayxiJOKv/5obx7MPcFX9VUJSldJ M/Vh4OBN3PYytw8TKvzxwcvJAqCjSA7AfZZZAgzfb9UMCetR4wZv8g== =5HgH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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

17 Dec '03

At 6:40 AM 9/25/96, Jay Gairson wrote: >First off, what does this have to do with cryptography? or anything >cypher for that matter? Nothing, but Dmitri has "different" standards of what is list-relevant than many of us do. >So, basically your saying, since my parents cannot afford to pay for a >private school for me, we are genetically inferior to those who can? >Because hate tell ya, but I've ran into some major idiots that go to >private schools. Also to consider that from the school I go to, last >year we had two perfect sat scores (no problems missed). A minor point: An 800 SAT or Achievement score does _not_ mean "no problems missed." There is some threshold for the percentage of right answers, which varies from year to year and from test to test, above which the score is marked "800." Don't ask me why they do this. (*) This should give you more hope and more determination to get a few 800s when you take the exams. (* Back in 1969 when I was taking these exams and was more neurotically interested in such things, I surmised that the 800 top end was set up to correspond to the IQ = 160 top end reported on some major IQ tests of the time. While some IQ tests are open-ended, resulting in, for example, the dubious claim that Marilyn vos Savant has an IQ of 210 or somesuch, it's more common for tests to have an upper limit, beyond which the results are considered essentially meaningless. So, if one notes that 800 + 800 = 1600, which is exactly 10 times 160, and that the "percentiles" for SAT combined scores of 1500, 1400, 1300, etc. match up with the percentiles for IQs of 150, 140, 130, etc., it's pretty clear what was done with the SAT scoring model. Obviously, many imperfections, some implicit in the nature of tests, some in the whole nature of "IQ" per se. This is why Mensa, which takes (alleged) IQs of 130, also accepts SAT combined scores in that general range (x10, of course). Of course, as Roger Gregory puts it, "Mensa is the scum of the cream of the crop.") --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: Not reputation again! (Was: The Nature of the Cypherpunks List)
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:45 AM 9/25/96, Greg Burk wrote: >I know, I said I was through arguing "reputation theory" and I really >thought I was, but this latest impelled me to say more. > >tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) writes: >> --Tim May, whose reputation is, like the list, whatever it is, for whatever >> reasons, and who thus needs no defenders > >Indeed, your reputation needs no defenders among those of us who know >you directly (if electronically) > >But here's something for you to think over: If there are such things as >negative reputations, why hasn't your reputation zoomed to godlike >status upon the ... let us say unreserved... condemnations of the >Poster With Nothing Better To Do, if s/he has a negative reputation (I >presume you would say so) First off, I certainly don't know what the precise "calculus of reputations" looks like. That is, how it adds, subtracts, how the reps of others factor in, etc. I think studying how it might work--and how it compares to other fields, such as movie reviews, music reviews, book reviews, etc.--might be an excellent Masters-level thesis for someone in sociology or even CS (if done with the proper slant). However, I would never think the calculus is something so simplistic as: "I rate Alice's reputation as very negative. Alice just said some bad things about Bob. Therefore, Bob's reputation will go up a great deal." More likely, something like: "Alice just said a bunch of things bad about Bob. Cool. Maybe this Bob person deserves a look." In other words, smaller steps, with diminishing returns. And with few sudden movements, except by direct judgment. >Or you could contend that there's no such thing as collective >reputation, but I think there are two major flaws: His/her 1-to-1 >"reputations" clearly add up to a collective consensus among us annoyed >cpunk readers. Even if you contend that reputations in general do not >behave collectively, it is no defense in this case at least. And I think >if "reputation theory" predicts no collective behavior, it must be >pretty weak. I believe that, to first order, reputation is a tensor. Given N people, imagine this matrix: Alice Bob Charles Daphne Earl Fiona Gloria Harold Alice .99 -.21 .75 .94 .94 .83 -.03 .22 Bob .72 .96 -.02 .85 .71 -.60 .10 .32 Charles .82 .02 .97 .90 -.50 .42 -.10 .70 Daphne .45 .87 .23 .92 .74 .87 .11 .23 Earl .89 .54 .34 .90 .95 .23 .23 .46 Fiona .87 .50 .32 .68 -.34 .97 .78 -.15 Gloria .59 .78 -.23 .15 .29 -.30 -.80 .51 Harold .65 .03 .34 .78 .51 -.76 -.51 .97 This can be read thusly: Alice has a .99 rating of her own self, a negative .21 rating of Bob (or Bob's opinions, or his posts, or whatever is being rated), and so on. Bob has a .72 rating of Alice, a .96 rating of himself, etc. "Alice(Bob) = -.21" Now in this example I made up, some various observations can be made. Nearly everyone rates Harold pretty low, except for Harold. Thus, Harold's own opinions of others, if expressed, probably won't change too many other opinions. Nearly everyone rates Daphne very highly, and her opinions are read carefully. However, Gloria does not rate Daphne highly...but then Gloria rates her own stuff a negative .80, so Gloria has some psychological issues to deal with and others typically rate her pretty low. And so on. In the real world, I think we can see how such a matrix could be constructed, based on either direct inputs (votes) from people, or based on their apparently positive or negative comments, etc. (For example, it is fairly obvious that I might give Hal Finney a rating of .90, and Vulis a -.90. And so on, for others.) Now is there a "collective reputation"? There are various additive properties, with easily understandable meanings. (If Harold is in a lot of kill files, this says a lot, for example.) Anyway, as I said before, the "calculus of reputations" is not worked out, so far as I know. Some weeks back I suggested that the mathematics of belief as developed in "Dempster-Shafer belief theory" has some nice properties that make it seem a promising area to look into. .... >Because s/he can *never spend reputation down to zero*. So you say. I see no reason reputations cannot be negative, in the sense that not only do I take the opinions of such a person very seriously, I tend in fact to believe the opposite opinion is more likely. This is a "negative " reputation. Thus, a reputation can be "spent down" to zero, and below. >Frankly, I think you should just admit that your reputation theory is >flawed and rethink it. I would be interested in hearing it, but what you >have now is IMHO badly flawed. --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: SAY WHAT? [Assassination NOISE]
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

An earlier generation of Assassination Politics set the public's stereotype view of "anarchists" for the next hundred years. Do we really want to do it again? Perhaps the public will realize that we're not lefty-anarchists, we're the Totally Unified Cypherpunk Anarcho-Capitalist Movement... Someone, probably Simon Spero <ses(a)tipper.oit.unc.edu> said: >= .Assasination politics is impossible to defend from a classical >= .Liberal/Libertarian position. Bell advocates arbitrary applications >= .of violence and coercion without restriction. There is no way to >= .justify the initiation of force without abandoning any pretence of >= .being a Libertarian (which, to be fair, Bell doesn't claim to be). Bell, like X, is proposing mechanism without built-in policy, as well as suggesting some potential policy implementations. If you use the mechanism to sponsor assassination of people who have initiated force against you, you're only using retaliatory force, not initiating it. On the other hand, the mechanism also can be used against people who haven't initiated force against the sponsor - even against politicians who have refused to get the country into misguided but popular wars or judges who have refused to convict innocent but wrong-colored defendants. Like democracy, it's a really terrible system, and like democracy, there are some alternatives that aren't worse :-) Maybe even democracy. It's at least as appalling an idea as government. If it does catch on, and I suspect that the technology will certainly make it possible, I hope that most of the public will have enough sense and decency not to pay for murdering people who don't deserve it, so assassins will find more of a market for killing people who do, and that the lower-paid assassins who kill undeserving people will be less competent and get caught like most stupid bank robbers do. But there are enough Drug-War-Loving Americans that I doubt it. And there's enough intersection between the morality-challenged and the financially-challenged fellow Americans down on their luck that some of them will take a break from robbing liquor stores for drug money to make bigger bucks serving the desires of the public that the high-tech lynch mobs will have people they can hire. Not everybody needs Mario Greymist to get some basic "work" done. Glory of the market, matching up supply and demand. And attila replied > all very true. but I will defend Jim Bell's rights to propose > them, even if Bell is more than a few cards short of a full deck. Sure, he's got the right to, and if I run a remailer again he's welcome to use it to discuss AP (though not to propose assassinations....) Doesn't mean I want to encourage this sort of thing, though. Remailers can damn well afford to be choosy, and I'll bet 5 zorkmids that the first person to use my remailer for assassination doesn't last a month. (Oh, wait...) # 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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An idle thought on CBC and block lengths
by Rick Osborne 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

So I was sitting bored at home and thinking to myself: CBC is cool. Without the key, you're screwed because a single bit error propagates throughout the entire message. But then I was thinking, yeah, but you can still eventually get the ONE key. So I began to wonder what the difference in security is between encrypting an entire M with just one K in CBC, or encrypting M with permutations of K over specific block lengths. On the one hand you've got just one key, which makes it that much harder to find in the keyspace. On the other hand, If evil interloper Eve gets her hands it, she has to find all of the keys to get all of M. (Assuming she is using brute force and can't necessarily find the master K to permute into the subkeys.) The downsides are of course that on the one side you've got just one key, and once you get it, you get M. But on the other hand, you can get any one part of the message with less difficulty because of the higher number of keys. And, of course, if your master K is easy to brute force, then it's actually worse than the first option. Does anyone have opinions / knowledge of which is better? ____________________________________________________________ Rick Osborne osborne(a)gateway.grumman.com "The universe doesn't give you any points for doing things that are easy."

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Re: We removed radikal 154 from xs4all :(
by pjb＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam, you know the german government did not win this one, and i know that they did not win, my point was, will they, and other governments take this as a win and be encourgaged to press their luck with someone else. -paul > From aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk Wed Sep 25 02:45:54 1996 > Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 17:21:16 +0100 > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > To: pjb(a)ny.ubs.com > Cc: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Subject: Re: We removed radikal 154 from xs4all :( > Content-Length: 989 > > > Paul <pjb(a)ny.ubs.com> writes: > > i was under the impression that germany's goal was to stop the distribution > > of radikal 154 by xs4all, not by 50 mirror sites. they seem to have > > accomplished their goal. do you really think that they will let a little > > thing like reason stand in their way when claiming victory? > > They lost: it is still available. If they went after another mirror > the number of mirrors would double :-) > > Someone in the German press needs to rub their noses in the fact that > they lost, say by printing a list of URLS, or just mentioning the > number of mirrors, and the different countries they are located in. > > The need to translate the quote: > > `The internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it' > > and put that in big letters. > > Any German net freelance journalists reading? > > Adam > -- > #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj > $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 > lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) >

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