December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

re: [NOISE] sci fi
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 18:48:22 +0100 (MET) > From: Asgaard <asgaard(a)Cor.sos.sll.se> > To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Subject: re: sci fi > On Thu, 21 Nov 1996, Alan Olsen wrote: > > For absolute brain candy, I recommend "Star Smashers of the Galaxy > > Rangers". EE.Doc Smith meets the Hardy Boys. The ending I had to read > > twice... > A rather odd book that I found immensely stimulating is > 'Venus on a halfshell' by a Nym (allegedly for Kurt Vonnegut, > who in most of his books under his own name now and then > refers to some hilarious non-existing SF story by this 'author'). > Asgaard "Star Smashers" first appeared under a wierd 'Generic Book' imprint in the late 70s/early 80s. There were a series of them - with plain white covers and black capital titles such as "SCIENCE FICTION", "ROMANCE", "WESTERN", "MYSTERY", etc, all actually by well respected authors in their respective fields. I think "Star Smashers' was by Harry Harrison, but am not sure. VotHS claimed to have been written by Kilgore Trout, an third rate SF author who exists only in the works of Kurt Vonnegut. However, the actual author is Phillip Jose Farmer, whom Kurt granted permission to use the character as a joke at a party. Farmer then wrote and published VotHS, perfectly imitating Vonnegut's style, to Vonnegut's great dismay. Peter Trei trei(a)process.com

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Re: Patent Fight Could Add to Cost of Inter
by Phillip M Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- > > ``We believe it's important to draw a line in the sand and make > > them prove infringement,'' said CompuServe spokeswoman Gail > > Whitcomb. ``We think their claim is way too broad.'' > > This is quite a statement coming from a company that flexed its muscles on > the .GIF file spec. about 3 years ago. > > If I remember right Compuserve caused some some major changes in RIP and > HTTP developement. Until that time the only graphic format supported in > Mosaic was .GIF. JPEG was promptly added and there was hot debate about > the issue. Having been at CERN at the time and having been the first person to incorporate JPEG into a browser (Arena) I know this to be incorrect. We intended to put JPEG into the browsers from before the time that Marc introduced the IMG tag. Indeed a principle point of discussion on the list was how to cope with multiple formats. We knew that GIF was poor and that 24 bit screens would soon become the standard. On the other hand GIF was better for icons, line drawings and such and had better support from tools. The question was how to do content negotiation well and support the best configuration for the particular hardware. Marc did not exactly allow much time for comment on the list and chose to interpret the constructive criticism of his IMG tag as opposition to the idea of transcluded images. Actually the question was whether images should be a special class of transcluded object, it really should be possible to transclude HTML within HTML, something that frames attempts to do but not particularly well. The patent issue was not of CompuServe's making. They were unaware of the UNISYS patent when they developed the spec and had they known about it would have developed GIF differently. When UNISYS asserted their patent rights CompuServe had no choice to pay up, they did however negotiate a blanket license agreement which has assisted the rest of the industry in making agreements. The main effect of the patent issue was to give added impetus to the PNG (prn. "Ping!") which is a patent free extension of the GIF idea. Unlike GIF PNG is designed to work on the 24 bit displays we use today and provide a good, general purpose standard for interchange of images in a lossless manner. JPEG is fine for presentation of images but useless as an editing format since it looses information on each cycle. It is also poor at handling line drawings and other non photographic sources (the P in JPEG is Photographic). It would be nice if the industry would support PNG more widely since its probably the best piece of original work to come out of the Web consortium. I believe that Microsoft are supporting it in their next browser release and even if they don't both 4.0 browsers are much better at supporting plug ins. Phill

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Nov 26 DC: House hearing on compsec & crypto: PRZ, Denning, Lin, ...
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

DC-area cypherpunks may want to attend to watch the sausage machine in action. Forwarded-by: Dave Farber <farber(a)cis.upenn.edu> Subject: IP: House Briefing on Crypto From: Dorothy Denning The Technology Subcommittee of the House Science Committee is holding a briefing on computer security and encryption at 2:00 PM in Room 2318 Rayburn on Tuesday, November 26. Panelists are: Herb Lin, moderator. Study director of NRC crypto report. Bill Reinsch, Commerce Dept. Undersecretary for Export Administration Dan Geer, Director of Engineering, Open Market, Inc. John Linn, chair of IETF Common Authentication Technology Working Group Dorothy Denning, professor at Georgetown University Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP

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Re: Stewart Baker on new crypto rules
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:17 PM 11/20/96 -0800, Lucky Green wrote: > he [hp's policy person] >replied: > >"There are many >possible interpretations of the words 'voluntary' and 'mandatory'." > >I am willing to testify to this under oath. > >I don't know what dictionary HP is using. Orwell himself must have >written it. Well, if the customer does not complain about its inclusion, and chooses to use it for its simplicity over more secure, "after market" systems, then thats voluntary. Thats the same voluntary that means that if the people don't get out to the polls then they volunteered to keep thier opinions about how government should be run to themselves. It will probably be voluntary, no one tells you that you have to use interNic when using the internet, but you probably do because it is easier than trying to route around it to its new competitor (the one issuing URL's ending in .auto and .bus among others). No one is telling you to use interNic, no one is telling you to pay to register with interNic, but it is definately less of a headache.

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Re: Why I Don't Read SF Much Anymore
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:00 PM 11/20/96 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote: >At 9:09 pm -0500 11/20/96, Hal Finney wrote: >>What fiction can people recommend which presents crypto/privacy issues >>realistically? How about this new book that Neal Stephenson is working >>on, does anyone know what it's about? His short story, "Hack the Spew", >>a few months ago (in Wired, I think?) had a strong crypto flavor. > >His, "Great Samolean Caper" for Time/Pathfinder was pure cryptoanarchy... > >I don't know if it's still around though. > I saved the whole magazine, I can copy it for you if you like. I thought that I had the magazine in the dorm room but I can't seem to find it.

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Re: Does John Gilmore EAT Asshole?
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This aga nut is getting to be a real pain in the... Well lets say that he is one hellish proctologist. I am very tempted to send this nut a few copies of the netscape 1.0 executable. Worthless and fairly bulky. AND I would be a citizen taking action. When Mr. Gilmore took action, he was lambasted for his troubles. Mr. Gilmore, however, had the misfortune of holding a position of percieved power, I don't. I assume that aga will not see this as he doesn't follow the list.

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Re: Mass-market crypto phones
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:10 AM 11/21/96 -0500, Clay Olbon II wrote: >A while back, Eric Blossom posted a URL for a mass-market, phone encyrption >device (http://www.comsec.com/) The point of this post is to posit a >scenario based on the implications of this product. This is speculation >based on where I think such products should be heading. > >I think we need to keep a couple of goals in mind. The first, is to get >encrypting phones (or phone add-ons) into Wal-mart, K-mart, etc (where >probably most Americans now buy their phones). The prices need to be low >enough that people will want to buy them (<$100?). Is this technically >feasible? The comsec device from the above URL already demonstrates the >needed capability. Is the cost target possible? My guess is soon, given >the lowering costs and increasing capabilities of current processors. > >The second goal needs to be to push a similar product for cell-phones. I >think this will be perhaps an easier sell, given the higher initial cost for >these phones, and their reduced security. Perhaps a home device could be >sold with the cell-phone as a package deal, so that communications with the >"home base" (i.e your office, home, etc) would be secure. With the rapid >growth in cell-phone sales, selling a package such as this might ensure a >larger user-base of home devices. > >Given that these goals are met, I think widespread use of crypto over phone >lines would become almost inevitable. However, the fun part would be the >introduction of such products. The FUD coming from police, the government, >etc. would be amazing to behold. > At first this seemed to be a challenging goal as public key encryption (at least the type of which I am aware) requires a public key ring, but then I thought, what would be the point in real time communitation? Here is my idea. The initiating phone sends a public key to the receiving phone. The receiving phone takes this public key and uses it to prepare the session key, or perhaps both session keys (one key for each simples circuit), as in PGP. Both boxes would need to have hybrid circuits in them like the telephone company uses to filter out the incoming signal from the outgoing signal. The telephone amplifiers only amplify half of the signal, so it basically consists of two simplex circuits from the local trunk to the other trunks. This could be bypassed if the device set between the base and the handset. Best would be to have the hybrid circuit so that it could work with the more basic models. I can only see two problems. The first problem I can see right now would be randomization, (line noise sampling?, hold the microphone close to a radio playing static until the LED starts flashing?) The second challenge would be getting public key encryption to work with an analog system. The device will have to have two analog to digital converters and two digital to analog converters. I believe that the telephone operates with a carrier of about 3000 Hz, thus the box will probably need to maintain a sampling rate of 1500 Hz or less, if this frequency will carry voice. The system will probably need some form of run-time compression built in as well as sample voice at a low bit depth. The result, under ideal circumstances will probably be a tinny sound and loss of fidelity. The D-A, A-D pair on the telco side could be replaced by a good modem, this would eliminate some of the problems of the RBOC filters cutting out the "noise" which would really be signal. If you set the sampleing rate at 3000 cycles per second, by 8 bits of depth, you would need to be able to transmit clearly 3000 * 8 bits per second or 24000 bits per second. That would be 24 KiloBITS per second, about 1/8th the 28.8 KiloBYTE modems that are commond today. A 3000 baud modem should be both cheap and easy to pack into a small package. This would probably allow for no compression at 8 bits of sampling depth. So, the block diagram would be as follows. ________________ _______________ ___________ | | | --> | | --> | | Line to | Line from RBOC | 3000+ Baud |-----| Public Key |-----|A-D /D-A | Telephone | ----------------| Full Duplex | | Encryption | | Pair |-------------- | <---> | Modem |-----| Layer |-----| | <---> | |______________| <-- |_____________| <-- |_________| | I was thinking that the device could be built into a case about the same size as a modem or answering machine, possibly a little taller to accomidate the modem circuit, should a full duplex modem replace the telco end A-D, D-A pair. Unfortunately, I have very little experience with circuits. I can't even draw out an asyncronis multivibrator right now. (That is a square wave generator involving 2 transistors, 4 resistors, and 2 capicitors, not a toy based around a motor with an off center weight) P.S. The line on the far right is for alignment, If this line is crooked, copy and paste the diagram to a standard ASCII editor. this should eliminate the pipes and spaces from being shorter than every thing else.

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[noise] Re: Why I Don't Read SF Much Anymore
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:14 AM 11/21/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: ... >- John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider," and, my favorite, "Stand on >Zanzibar." Required reading. As Shalmaneser would put it, "Christ, what an >imagination he had." ... Anyone else notice similarites between the protagonist in "The Shockwave Rider" and "The Pretender" the new Television series. They both even have sympathetic pursuers. Any wagers on how long it will take the pretender to turn his old handler? BTW, Tim, I don't mean to offend you by adding noise to the front, but this post is a little off topic, mine not yours. I seem to have offended someone else by doing something similar.

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Re: The public sees no need for crypto at this time
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:25 AM 11/21/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >I believe that at this time the differential market value to customers of >having strong crypto in telephones is near-zero, and in cell-phones is only >slightly greater. [reasoning deleted]. I generally agree with Tim about consumers. However, I remember working on a theater production where we were using Radio Shack 2-way headphones for communication. One day while we were setting up, we were able to overhear a woman discussing (presumably with a girlfriend) her boyfriend and their sex life over a portable telephone. You can bet that every available headset was in use and all other work stopped. Where I think there is a market and an awareness of a need is in the corporate world. I recently saw a corporate security policy which specifically restricted discussing classified information on portable or cell phones. If I were in France (to pick on just one guilty country), I would not want to discuss secrets involving competitive position vs. a French company on a landline connection. The big driving force for companies is how much the facility costs. (I recently heard a price of $700 for non-crypto phones.) If the cost is low enough, company employees will have these boxes in their homes. The other big obstacle is standards. As far as I can tell, every crypto phone has its own protocol. If there were a standard set of protocols, it would greatly help the market, as it has for so many other products. As a first step, I suggest that Eric Blossom and PGP Inc. work together to develop a mode where their products can communicate with each other. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The lottery is a tax on | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | those who can't do math. | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | - Who 1st said this? | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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by Success 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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