December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: RSA and me...
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>On Sun, 10 Nov 1996, Gemini Thunder wrote: >> 'Lo. >> Is the "RSA in 3 lines of Perl" a munition (under ITAR)? >> What if I got it as a tatoo? Lucky replied >Somebody did this. Check the RSA in perl homepage. Furthermore, you'd be wasting pain, time, and money. Perl5 makes it possible to do RSA in two lines of Perl :-) And that'd leave room on your arm for the 3-line RC4! If you want to leave the country with it, you might need to register as an, um, international arms dealer... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk

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Re: How many people killed by there own governments (Was: Re: a retort + a comment + a question = [RANT])
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:27 PM 11/11/96 -0500, Joseph M. Reagle Jr. wrote: >>With regard to b), governments--primarily through the use of >>their militaries--have killed, by some counts 170,000,000, men, >>women and children in this century alone. Hardly the guardians >>of freedom, in my opinion. > > Do you have a breakdown of that number? I'm working on one of my thought >experiments and am looking for the appropriate stats: > > >o THUGS V. GOVS > (during times of "modern" govts. 1800+) > >Deaths by Govts. on "own people" > > US Civil War x M > US Native Americans > Hitler: Jews 6 M > Hitler: Others 6 M > Stalin: 30 M > China: Cult Rev x M > France: Rev x M Don't forget that the likely cause of the 1917 world-wide influenza pandemic was probably caused or greatly increased in seriousness by the WWI movement of soldiers, and the conditions at the front. Had there been no war, there might still have been a very localized outbreak, but it would have been much less serious. The estimate of 170 million seems a bit high, but not by much. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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RE: two bogus messages to this list
by Mark M. Lacey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Um, not to disagree with you re Intel/Micro$loth, but most UNIX systems >can be brought up in single-user mode and the root password changed by >anyone with physical access to the system. You could end up with even >more trouble than if someone messed with your M$ box. Microsloth has, at the heart of it's system, a call which traps ALL KEYSTROKES and EVENTS. This call exists from Win32s on, and can be placed inside of a DLL which most users would have no idea was loaded. Even under NT, this DLL can be made to remain resident and trapping Keystrokes, events, and window contents. This is (or was?) no problem under X Windows the last time I tried it (not recently), too. In fact, you could monitor the keystrokes of any machine that you had access to remotely, as long as X was running. All it took was a short little C program. So what call is it on NT that you're talking about? Mark M. Lacey <mml(a)halcyon.com> "Speaking for nobody but myself." [Finger mml(a)halcyon.com for my PGP public key.] [If you don't have 'finger', e-mail me for it.]

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Re: Sifting data; looking for "strong crypto"
by ph＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:18 AM 11/11/1996, Mark Rogaski wrote: >An entity claiming to be Murray Hayes wrote: >: >: >: As far as bit patterns go, is executable code random? >: >: mhayes(a)infomatch.com >: >: It's better for us if you don't understand >: It's better for me if you don't understand >: -Tragically Hip >: > Nope, any executable has the same text-data-stack structure. Within the > text segment, all instructions are (usually) of the same size with > one to four possible formats. Consider that every instruction will > begin with one of ~128 opcodes, operands are pretty predictable depending > on the opcode's associated format. Any references to symbol and literal > tables are within a predictable range, and the format of these tables > is fixed. > An assembled/linked program is going to be very far from random, same > basic patterns are used for I/O, subroutine calls, iterative loops, etc. > I would assume that the entropy of an executable binary is extremely low. It has been my experience that executable code compresses well, so there is empirical evidence that you are right. Peter Hendrickson ph(a)netcom.com

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Re: Sliderules, Logs, and Prodigies
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:30 AM 11/9/96 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote: ... >FORTH has fallen out of favor for most PC users of the mid 1990's, but then >again, so have computer languages as a whole, since few persons write software >today as compared to the early 1980's. ... I was tinkering around in Basic back then, I wasn't writing much of my own, but I did know a few commands. I remember when using "canned" software had a certain stigma to it, like saying "you are not a true computer afficinado, you don't even type in your own code." I also remember that my dad taught computer programming out of the back of magazines, ones with names like TI/99er, Home Computing (is it still out there?), and K-Power. Heck, even 3-2-1 Contact, the PBS based magazine had a source code section for a while. I'm afraid I don't remember Forth, though I have heard of it, about as much as my friends have heard of PGP.

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DC Net-politics reporter needed
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A political publication is looking for an experienced journalist to cover Net-happenings on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and in Federal agencies. Let me know if you're interested and I'll forward your contact info and clips to the right people. -Declan

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RE: His and Her Anarchies
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> wrote: >Well, I think there clearly _is_ a gender gap on these sorts of issues. Technologies that matter make daily life less obnoxious, and you can leverage them all the time. The Net is going to start mattering in a significant way when it relieves people of the burden of dealing with the garbage inherent in the information flow of everyday life. The net is going to matter when I can rely on it to store the information I now keep on disk, and the computer is a completely transparent object. All the documents that are important to me are maintained by the Net with sufficient reliability that I can unplug my computer and smash it with a hammer without affecting anything. Under this scenario, strong, reliable crypto becomes similar to electricity. The entire infomration infrastructure is built on it, but hardly anyone gives it a second thought. What kind of people use the Net and what are their activities doing to the country, the world, the culture? It may sound like a parochial issue that women don't much like computers, but they don't, and the issue is a tremendously important one. They're not attracted to this world, certainly not to the extent that men are, and that's one of the reasons why it is such a spiritually impoverished world. Most reasonable sophisticated men are happier in an environment that included women. One of the problems with the computer society is that not only is it an almost all-male society, but it's part of a little-boy society, part of an ongoing infantilization of the society over the past half century. Excerpt from Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite (HardWired 1996) where David Gelernter, a Yale computer scientist, comments on the Web. >This may sound sexist. But sexism, like other "isms," is often based > on plain old truth, however politically incorrect it may be to some. >--Tim May Galileo, you must recant. You are in blatant disagreement with the truth. Ciao, James

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Re: another possible remailer attack
by anonymous＠miron.vip.best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Steve Reid writes: > > >> You want to know if Dimitri is the person regularly posting these > >> messages. So, you use your powers as ISP to block his access to all > >> remailers. If the public messages suddenly stop then you can be > >> reasonably certain that Dimitri was sending them. > > I'm not following something...just how to your "powers as ISP" affect a > > remailer in, say, Holland, or one for that matter on another ISP? (As a > > Packet filtering at the ISP's router. If Dimitri can't connect to a > remailer, he can't send anonymous messages. Sure there are a lot of hacks > that could be done (like have sendmail on another system send it to a > remailer) but such things could be detected and blocked by clever filters. I disagree, it's easy to bounce mail through ANY Internet-connected host running sendmail and thence to a remailer. In fact this mail was sent that way, I bounced it through sun.com before hitting a remailer. > In fact, the ISP could just claim to be "going down for maintenance" and > completely block Dimitri from the internet for a while. Only if the Backbone Cabal (there is no Cabal) is re-formed (and given special SuperPowers!) with the sole purpose of blocking Dimitri from posting to cypherpunks. > > Just as the Nazis could isolate spy transmitters by selectively > > turning off electricity to different neigborhoods, so, too, can various > > Isolating spy transmitters by selectively cutting power is exactly > alalogous to what I have suggested. The spy transmitters couldn't bounce their transmissions off of regular radio transmissions, could they? Buck Satan

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Re: Why is cryptoanarchy irreversible?
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>At 12:58 AM 11/8/1996, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com wrote: >> Strong vs. weak crypto isn't the real issue - for most business use, >> weak crypto is obviously unacceptable, but strong crypto with GAK >> is ok as long as it doesn't interfere with use (and as long as the >> government bureaucrats don't sell too many keys.) To which, at 09:02 AM 11/8/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >We often say that the government is a security weak point and that >this makes GAK impractical. However, this is not true. If the >holders of the government keys were individually responsible for >their release, they would not be released very often. That is, >in order to use cryptography you must purchase an expensive >encryption license. That pays the salary of a certified "key >escrow agent" who is the only person who can decrypt your messages. >What stops him from revealing your keys to unauthorized parties? >It's his business. If that's not enough, you back it up with >criminal penalties for disclosure. And, hiring this person is >no different from hiring an employee for your company. > >There are already similar activities. Lawyers are nominally employees >of the state. Employees of Swiss banks can go to jail for violating >their secrecy laws. Then there is the meat-packing inspectors, I don't know if this should give piece of mind or instill new fear. The inspectors were put in there because the meat was rancid, the thing is, some of it still is if you listen to the critics. A partial fix at least. >At 12:58 AM 11/8/1996, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com wrote: >> The government might be able to stop new Netscape versions from >> using strong crypto - threatening to confiscate the company's >> ill-gotten gains from aiding and abetting money launderers might help, >> and threatening to confiscate PCs that use unapproved crypto. >> But it's tough to use a widespread threat like that on popular >> software once it's out there. To which, at 09:02 AM 11/8/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >I agree, if the software is popular. But, if the fears of the GAKers >and the dreams of certain cypherpunks are real, such software will >not be popular. Another point is, if the government attacks Netscape for their strong crypto(which is pretty hard to get, I'm in Oklahoma and I couldn't get it because some server didn't know for sure that my server was in the United States or Canada), someone will probabally make an in-line plug-in for encrypted data, and this plug-in may affect more of the browser than the existing system, making it more dangerous to the governments schemes. Anyone know where the data is stored on how to write for Netscape?

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Re: Why is cryptoanarchy irreversible?
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:02 AM 11/8/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >At 12:29 AM 11/8/1996, Jim McCoy wrote: >>Peter Hendrickson writes: >>[...] >>>> Get a warrant, search my system, find nothing but a bunch of applications >>>> and a collection of risque (but definitely legal) pictures which I exchange >>>> with a few friends. You may suspect that when the images are concatenated >>>> in a particular way the low-order bits form a stego filesystem but no one >>>> will be able to prove it in court. > >>> Are you concatenating these images by hand? If so, the level of entropy >>> is probably low enough to recover the information through brute force >>> methods or you are hiding a very small amount of information. > >> I hide the relatively small amount of data within a very large amount of >> data which makes it impossible to find. Data from analog sources, like >> the "real world" (images, sounds, etc) is noisy. This is a fact of life. >> Because this data is noisy I can hide information in the noise. As long >> as the information I am hiding maintains the same statistical properties >> of noise it is impossible to pull the information out of the data file unless >> you have the key. If I am paranoid enough I can make this key impossible >> to discover without a breakthrough in factoring. > >Where will you keep your secret key? Remember, when they go through your >house they bring 20 young graduates from MIT who are just dying to show >how clever they are and save the world at the same time. > >> This is the essence of steganography and the nature of signal and noise are >> fundemental principles of information theory. > >The concept of noise is not all that well defined, however. There is no >way to look at a signal and say "this is all noise." Sometimes physical >theories may lead you to believe that it is all noise. That is fine >for many applications, but when becomes less convinced of things if >the consequences are severe. > >>> If you are not doing it by hand, you own terrorist software and will pay >>> the price. > >> Ah yes, terrorist programs like cat and perl and operating systems like >> Linux which contain a loopback filesystem that I can hook a perl >> interpreter into at compile-time (which is enough for me to rewrite the >> program from scratch each time if necessary, unless things like math >> libraries are also outlawed on computers :) I think that the crypto >> concentration camps are going to be very crowded places. > >Can you elaborate on this? I am curious to know exactly what you are going >to keep in your head and what goes on the disk. Please post the Perl >code that you would type in from scratch every time. (Most of the message left for clarity) I would type dungeon at the prompt and Ctrl-Alt-6 at the first door. But that's just me. BTW. The hypothetical Steno program (Trojan Horse) that I wrote about earlier (and that this refers) could have its own source hidden in the opening screen of both the game and the bmp that I would use for my windows background. If anyone has access to the source of a soon to be released game, they could add this to it as an easter egg, thus, the author would be spreading a very powerful tool which would be advertized several months after it was released. If it were added to a program with references to cypherpunks or similar, it might even reach the (primary) target audience.

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