December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Well-regulated
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote: >>Cypherpunks does not seem to me to be anything like the well- >>regulated lists you ascribe to Prof Volokh. >> > >Declan should rest his point here. the cpunk list is notorious >for being way astray. yet cpunks continuously argue against >anyone with a moderator type role. could there be some correlation >between lack of moderation/leadership on the list and the >piles of noise that people incessantly complain about? of >course I'm insane for suggesting this. Vlad, "Well-regulated" means different things to different mind-sets. As do "leadership," "moderator" and "anarchy." All can be fulfilled in diametrically opposite ways: benevolent suppression of assent to attain uninspired unanimity or pissed respect for your opponents skill at insulting you and your ideas, sexual preferences, hair style, even, ahem, code and writing abilities. What you call "way astray" about cypherpunks I would call "healthy waywardness of stray cats." I say, let the wild cats grow and wail backalley of the spiffy facades and green lawns; let them disturb sly cultivators of the currently fashionable, marketable career-boosting management of the Internet herd. That's my critique of the 1st Amend mongers (spit): too narrow- minded about freedom of speech, they always give themselves away by fanaticism about proper grammar and spelling and behavior, well, you know, demanding polymorphous heathens do it like missionaries who think tongues are only for talking. Heed the complicity of God and Mammon, one person's butthole is another person's way to heaven on earth. As missionaries admit about the joys of exotic lands and stray cat codes and wailing discourse. The Occident is a prig, and overly addicted to a tight-laced definitions of propriety, heirarchy and rank. That's "well-regulated" at its worst and meanest and murderous and censorious.

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Why I shall never undescribe
by camcc＠abraxis.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: Bovine Remailer <haystack(a)cow.net> >To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > >Foulmouthed Timothy May rehashes his lies like a rabid parrot >choking on a stale mantra stuck in its poisonous beak. Where else today can one find such prose? Nay poetry! And they say poetry is dead!

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No Subject
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Declan, Cypherpunks does not seem to me to be anything like the well- regulated lists you ascribe to Prof Volokh. Could you, with Professor Volokh, expand on the application of "editorial control" on "unmoderated" lists? (See Netly below) As well as amplify "the power to kick folks off a list ... if conversation veers too far from the list's charter." (See your quote below) Isn't this power the black heart of free speech racketeering? And what makes the glands of secret authoritarians thrill with benevolent suppression of assent on behalf of the disorderly, fuzzy-minded citizenry? Media moguls and list runners share commonalities, to be sure, but I wonder if it's not cruel to compare John Gilmore to Professsor Volokh, and both to, say, Rupert Murdoch. -------- [Netly News] Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, runs a number of mailing lists and has kicked people off to maintain better editorial control. Volokh says that the most valuable publications are those that exercise the highest degree of editorial control. [Your post of 11-13] In my experience, and I've talked about this at some length with Prof. Volokh who runs a number of lists himself, the best and most valuable discussion lists are those that are unmoderated but have a list owner who has the power to kick folks off a list and can try to steer the direction of a conversation if it veers too far from the list's charter.

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Re: The Key for the IPG 200 Megabytes at NETPRIVACY.COM
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> In response to the numerous requests for us to post the key that we used > to produce the almost 200 megabytes of raw encryptor stream at our web > site, we are pleased to provide the ASCII values of same as follows: Numerous requests? - I was right, he is halucinating... > In order for those few who have not had the opportunity to check it out, > we will leave it up another week and then take it down and put up a > new shorter one, maybe a 2,560,000 byte one permanently and a monthly > 2,560,000 byte one where we publish the key each month. No-one wants to... > Of course, no university, coderpunk( no offense intended please), or > cypherpunk , or any collection of same has broken the system, nor will > they ever. As most of you now know, it is unbreakable. We have had over > 100 universities, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, several dozen different > government agencies, and thousands of others to download the data and > look at the algorithm. Of course, like everyone else, they have been > benighted. Oh do be quiet you self satisfied smug little man. Every single member of this list and indeed of other forums in which you post (I don`t know of any but I assume it is not just us you annoy) knows you are a fool. Some while ago I seem to recall you offering to sell your company for one dollar if anyone could break your last algorithm, it was sumarily broken - why are you still owner of the company? - Oh I get it, they wouldn`t pay a dollar for it, neither would I. But seriously, was this you, and why didn`t you sell the company, and how are people to trust you now knowing this past debacle... Go away, you are like an unpopular bore at a party who doesn`t seem to realise that everyone wants him to leave.... Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Command confirmation request (057CCA)
by L-Soft list server at CCI (1.8b) 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Your command: SIGNOFF NEWSLETTER has been received. For security reasons, you are now required to reply to this message, as explained below, to confirm the execution of your command. If you have problems with this procedure, you can contact the list owner directly (NEWSLETTER-request(a)MAIL.COMPCURR.COM) and ask to be manually removed from the list. To confirm the execution of your command, simply reply to the present message and type "ok" (without the quotes) as the text of your message. Just the word "ok" - do not retype the command. This procedure will work with any mail program that fully conforms to the Internet standards for electronic mail. If you receive an error message, try sending a new message to LISTSERV(a)MAIL.COMPCURR.COM (without using the "reply" function - this is very important) and type "ok 057CCA" as the text of your message. Finally, your command will be cancelled automatically if you do not confirm it within 48h. After that time, you must start over and resend the command to get a new confirmation code. If you change your mind and decide that you do NOT want to confirm the command, simply discard the present message and let the command expire on its own.

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ABI_tch
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

11-15-96. WaJo: "History of Software Begins With the Work Of Some Brainy Women" The Army called the women "computers." One day word spread that the brightest "computers" were needed to work on a new machine called the Eniac, setting dozens of dials and plugging a ganglia of heavy black cables into the face of the machine, a different configuration for every problem -- "programming," they came to call it. "The Eniac," says one woman, now 71, "was a son of a bitch to program." ----- http://jya.com/abitch.txt (6 kb) ABI_tch

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Re: Cryptoanarchy in the field
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:35 PM 11/14/1996, Sandy Sandfort wrote: >On Thu, 14 Nov 1996, yet another John Anonymous MacDonald wrote: ^^^^^^^^^^^ Problem?

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Copyright violations
by alzheimer＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Financial Times: Tuesday, November 9, 1996 Visa Set to Test 'Electronic Purse' By George Graham Visa, the international payments card consortium, has picked Leeds for a trial next year of its electronic purse, a plastic card with an embedded computer chip which can be loaded with cash and used for small purchases. The Visa Cash card was launched last year in the US and widely promoted this summer in Atlanta during the Olympic Games. Other pilots have been launched in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Spain. The card will clash directly with the UK-developed Mondex card, another electronic purse about to be taken over by MasterCard. Mondex is currently on trial in Swindon, and at the universities of Exeter and York, and a Hong Kong trial was launched this week. Visa Cash will be launched by Abbey National, Barclays Bank, the Co-operative Bank, Halifax Building Society, Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Visa said it did not expect banks to charge customers for the empty card during the pilot. It hopes that 2,000-3,000 merchants will accept the card. Electronic purses are designed to act as a substitute for cash for regular purchases such as newspapers or bus tickets. Because the money is already loaded on the card, a shop can accept it immediately without a signature or a personal identification number, and without a telephone call to the bank's computer for authorisation. That makes them economical for much smaller transactions than a credit or debit card would be used for. But ordinary bank cards will soon also contain a computer chip. The Association for Payment Clearing Services, which runs the UK's payment systems, plans to start chip card trials next October in Bristol, Edinburgh and Northampton. Banks could start replacing the UK's 90m magnetic strip cards with chip cards by next summer. The initial purpose is to produce a card that is harder to counterfeit than today's magnetic strip cards. But extra security features such as electronic signature recognition or even biometric keys -- retina scans or palm prints -- could also be loaded on to the chip. Plastic card fraud losses have halved in the last four years to #83.3m last year, and many banks now doubt whether chip cards will cut fraud by enough to justify their extra cost. But bankers are also intrigued by the potential for using the chip to add extra services to their payment cards. American Banker: Wednesday, November 13, 1996 Mellon Starts Internet-Based Corporate Service By STEVEN MARJANOVIC Mellon Bank Corp. has launched an Internet-based electronic commerce service for its corporate customers. The service, which uses encryption and authentication software from Premenos Technology Corp. of Concord, Calif., lets corporate customers send payments and related information to the bank over the Internet using standard electronic data interchange formats. The deal is a new example of how banks are slowly growing more confident about the security of sending sensitive payment and business information over the public network. Mellon says it is confident it can conduct secure transactions over the open medium after a six-month "testing" phase of Premenos' security features. The goal of the pilot was to "try to kill the software," by cracking its public key-private key data encryption features, said Mauro DeFelice, manager of security and technical services at Pittsburgh-based Mellon. "We wanted to make sure we knew what our risk was," he said. A rising number of banks are looking to use the Internet as a channel for corporate banking transactions. The attraction, according to Lawrence Forman, cash management analyst at Ernst & Young, is that the Internet is much cheaper than alternatives, like the automated clearing house network or value-added private networks. But he said not all banks are comfortable with the Internet yet. Further, he questioned whether Internet security issues have been adequately addressed, and noted that many institutions, like Citicorp, remained "very wary of it." Encryption measures are still relatively new technologies, Mr. Foreman noted, and "as volume picks up, the incentive for criminals to break these algorithms will grow," he said. Several banks send and receive EDI payment transmissions over the Internet, including BankAmerica Corp., and Banc One Corp. Chase Manhattan Corp. recently struck a deal with Premenos to conduct EDI transactions with Diamond Shamrock Inc., an oil refinery based in San Antonio, Texas. Mellon's first customer for its new service is Bell Atlantic Corp. Mellon now issues as many as 10,000 payment and payment-related transmissions daily. The bank receives files via the Internet, processes them with its EDI translation system, and initiates ACH transactions, Fed Wire electronic funds transfers, or issues checks. Mellon has offered customers EDI services using payment formats found on the ACH network for five years. The Internet's advantage, aside from its ubiquity, is cheaper transmission rates. The deal between Mellon and Premenos is mutually beneficial. Mr. DeFelice said the bank, which licensed Premenos' software at a discount, can offer competitive EDI services to a larger market of business customers. Premenos gets access to Mellon's extensive corporate customer base. Bell Atlantic at one point wanted to develop EDI software for the Internet with Mellon. But it scrapped those plans, opting instead to use software Premenos had already developed. Financial Times: Tuesday, November 12, 1996 US Lawyers Turn to Fraud-Busting In murder mysteries, getting rid of the body is the biggest problem. Fraudsters face a different dilemma: they need to lay their hands on the spoils once the hue and cry has calmed. Two American lawyers have set up a company to prevent them doing just that. Mr Irving Cohen and Mr Martin Kennedy believe there are enormous opportunities for recovering money taken illegally. "The US Treasury has estimated that $ 500bn of off-shore funds are assets protected from creditors," says Mr Kennedy, who has worked on bad debt recovery with banks such as CIBC and Bank of Tokyo. The reason the money is not recovered, he says, is because "there is no understanding that deliberately hidden assets can be recovered." Interclaim plans to take advantage of that with a form of global factoring. It is looking for debts worth at least $ 5m, and with an average value of $ 20m. "This is a completely new kind of company," Mr Kennedy says, "but it is going to open up a field where there is going to be competition in five to 10 years." The reasons large sums lie unrecovered are a combination of financial services regulations and psychology. A bank faced with a probable bad debt is legally required to make provisions, but that act moves the debt from a profit centre to the bank's recovery or special loans department. More crucially, once the provision has been made, the bank and its shareholders have already accepted the loss; it is written into the accounts and the impetus to pursue it is lost. "Institutions have lost their faith in traditional methods of recovery," Mr Kennedy say. According to KPMG, the accountants, such methods usually recover 2-4 per cent of the debt; Interclaim believes its recovery rates will be closer to 20 per cent. Part of that success will come from its "find, freeze and settle" philosophy. It aims to find the money and freeze the assets, thus immobilising the fraudster and bringing him to the settle ment table quickly. "These individuals are not interested in complying with the rule of law," Mr Irving says. "And we are not interested in grinding through the legislation for five or 10 years. If we find someone whose 12-year-old daughter has $ 10m in her bank account, we can be sure she didn't get that from a paper round." The philosophy relies on an understanding of the fraudster and his assumptions. He is, says Mr Kennedy, not only cunning but arrogant; he regards his victims with derision. But criminals are also usually pragmatic. So when faced with an adversary who outwits them, they capitulate quickly. Interclaim either buys claims outright for between 0.5 per cent to 6 per cent of their value, or works with the institution in a joint venture. It will spend between $ 250,000 and $ 500,000 to enforce and prosecute a claim, though the cost of recovery bears no relation to the size of the claim.

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Re: PGP3.0 & ElGamal
by Bert-Jaap Koops 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk wrote: > I know 3.0 uses discrete log cryptography but whether it will be > El Gamal or DH or other I don`t know. I would imagine in the end it > would come down to a question of what is unpatented first and I have > no idea on the patent date for El Gamal (is it even patented?) but DH > hasn`t long to go.... According to Schneier, ElGamal isn't patented, but claimed to be covered by the Diffie-Hellman patent, which expires 29 April 1997. Bert-Jaap

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Water supplies
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It should be easy to poison a water supply and kill many people. Yet, this never happens. Why would this be? Surely, there are malicious folks who want to do it.

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