December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Debunking rumors -- Re: ARKANSAS BANS PHONE SCRAMBLERS
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, Declan McCullagh wrote: > >> Time to debunk this rumor. >> I just spoke with the Arkansas state police, who told me: >> "It wasn't put out by the state police. [If anything] it must be a city >> ordinance from some city. That state police definitely didn't do it." >> -Declan >> >jcr(a)idiom.com ("John C. Randolph") quotes Charles R. Smith >> >> IMMEDIATE ATTENTION >> >> The Arkansas Police have declared that is is illegal to own, use, or >> >> possess RSU product #11265113, a fully assembled >> >> descrambler/scrambler, in the State of Arkansas. Tandy Corporation's >> >> legal department is researching this and the product has been removed >> >> from RSU distribution. DO NOT take order or sell this product until >> >> this situation can be resolved. >> > >> >I called the Arkansas State Police, 501-221-8200, to try to verify this, >> >and they're "going to have somebody call me back." I'm not holding my >> >breath... >> > >> >If anybody has a definative source on this, I'd love to see it; it's >> >mindboggling. >> > >> >thad The strangest part of this story is that I haven't even heard of the product they've described above. The number given sounds like a serial number, NOT a product number. Somehow, I think that it would have been covered around here by now if it were real. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Homo/bi/sexuals Most Destructive
by aga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

An excellent Article here, pointing out why everybody should shun homosexuals to be safe and healthy. On Wed, 15 Jan 1997, Dr. Jai Maharaj wrote: > When it comes to AIDS, unless there are facts to invalidate the following > information, it is evident that the homo/bi/sexual lifestyle is > overwhelmingly the most destructive among those listed: > > "Who Are The Patients? > "In the United States, homosexual and bisexual males make up > approximately 62 percent of the total patients. The other major group > afflicted with AIDS are intravenous drug abusers -- both men and women -- > who constitute 20 percent of the total. . . ." > > "ADULTS AND ADOLESCENTS WITH AIDS, 1981-87 > ================================== Males % Females % Both sexes % > Homosexual/bisexual males 50,325 68 0 50,325 62 > Intravenous (IV) drug abusers 12,529 17 3,622 52 16,151 20 > Homosexual male an IV drug abusers 5,874 8 5,874 7 > Hemophilia/coagulation disorder 751 1 22 0 773 1 > Heterosexuals 1,516 2 2,073 30 3,589 4 > Blood transfusion 1,297 2 747 11 2,044 3 > Undetermined (1) 2,143 3 519 7 2,662 3 > TOTAL 74,435 91 6,983 9 81,418 100 > ========================================================================= > "Note: Provisional data. Cases with more than one risk factor than the > combinations listed are tabulated only in the category listed first. > (1) Includes patients on whom risk information is incomplete, patients > still under investigation, men reported only to have had heterosexual > contact with a prostitute, and patients for whom no specific risk was > identified; also includes one health care worker who developed AIDS after > a documented needle-stick to blood. Source: Centers for Disease Control." > ========================================================================= > Cited in "The Universal Almanac 1990", Andrews and McMeel, 1989. > ========================================================================= > > Readers are invited to post data supporting or opposing the above. > > Jai Maharaj > jai(a)mantra.com > Om Shanti >

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Re: ARKANSAS BANS PHONE SCRAMBLERS
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> The Arkansas Police have declared that is is illegal to own, use, or > possess RSU product #11265113, a fully assembled > descrambler/scrambler, in the State of Arkansas. Yee-hah! I'm guessing that it's probably illegal because the police use them for "secret" conversations, or some such silliness, and don't want Bad Guys to be able to eavesdrop on what's probably a trivially analog-scrambled phone-garbler. Perhaps them good ol' boys have some more devious reason, or even have a law backing them up, but probably not. How soon do you think it'll be before they start busting people for Radio Shack Equipment Smuggling? Why, next thing you know there'll be people sneakin' across the border from Texarkana with pickmeup-truck loads full o' contraband encryption gear as well as the usual Lone Star Beer cans in the back. If I were Radio Shack, and the state did this to me after the police bought a bunch of them for police use, I'd be real upset. # 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/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Privacy Issue (ANI in SF Bay Area)
by Ryan Russell/SYBASE 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here's something cute: Yesterday PacBell turned on ANI on our trunk groups, for local area calls. On their own, mind you, without request from us. If you call anyone here with a display phone, it displays your number, even if you have caller-id blocking on or you do a *70 (for those who don't know, ANI is not caller-id, you can't block your number from being displayed with ANI.) It also grabs your phone number if you leave a voice mail, so even folks without display phones can benefit. I post this thinking it may be of interest. I actually disagree that people ought to be able to block their number. My feeling is that if someone is calling me, they have no right be anonymous. Of course, I realize that this is easy to defeat with call forwarding and such.. In fact, if I call you from my work phone..you won't see my direct dial number...you'll see a number for PacBell's trunk group. Now...I just have to figure out how PacBell is charging us.. if it's .01$ per call like regular ANI...at 100,000 calls per day.. Hmm...first fix is free? A new PacBell marketing program? Our CIO loves the new "feature." Ryan

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Virus
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi all, Check out, Virus Bill Buchanan ISBN 0-515-12011-1 $6.50 paperback Very interesting book about adaptive technology and one possible 'alternate' future. May not be technicaly correct but then again, what prediction is. On a related note (at least future tech predictions), I saw the new book put out by Wired on this issue (don't remember the exact title) in the science section of BookStop. It belongs in the sci-fi section. A bigger pile of wishfull thinking with no realistic view of either technology or society doesn't come to mind immediately. Is definately not a 'buy it'. "For a succesful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature will not be fooled." Richard Feynman Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com ps check out www.srl.org for the Austin show on March 28, 1997.

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Re: DCSB: The Internet Consumer -- 1996 in Review & Predictions for 1997
by ed.falk＠Eng.Sun.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > Robert Hettinga wrote: > > I fished this out of my killfile. Ironically, I had just plonked Toto > > yesterday because I saw no compelling merit in anything he has posted to > > cypherpunks since he got here, and given the quantity of his posts, he was > > starting to waste my attention. However, this morning, as my mail was > > coming down in Eudora, I saw that he had replied to this month's DCSB > > announcement, and, frankly, I knew that it had to be something like this. > > Why do people feel compelled to 'explain' how they 'chanced' > to read items in their 'killfile'? It always seems to me to be > for the purpose of insulting someone while keeping egg off of > their own face. Well, I can't speak for R.H., but in my own case, my KILLfile entries typically look like /toto/f:=:j which displays the subject lines as it junks the articles. Sometimes I'll see one go by which interests me, so I'll go back and read it anyway. Similarly, people who've been plonked are often quoted in somebody else's message, so I see it anyway.

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re: Airport security [no such thing]
by Internaut 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:11 PM 1/15/97 -0700, C. Kuethe wrote: >>Yeah... took the words outta my mouth. Let's all write to the FAA, DOT, etc. >>and tell them what morons they are... sorry tell them that they need >>work. No >>more Lockerbies, TWA800's and other such tragedies. Lucky Green wrote >Write them? Why? How are they going to prevent someone from boarding with a >bottle of aftershave containing the extra strong flavor? A bottle that will >be left in the seat? One could cut open the seat if need be. [Dozens of >other examples omitted in the interest of brevity.] I say we make people fly naked and ship their stuff via UPS ;).

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Re: Newt's phone calls
by Phillip M. Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Michael Tighe SUN IMP <michael.tighe(a)Central.Sun.COM> wrote in article <5bjhda$f44(a)life.ai.mit.edu>... > Alan Bostick writes: > > >It is also possible that somewhere in the chain of information between > >mom&pop, the media, and us, the distinction between "cordless phone" > >and cellular phone. I gather it was a conference call that was > >intercepted. All it takes is one participant using a cordless phone in > >range of one scanner, and the whole conversation is compromised. > > Yes, a conference call (and we do know there were multiple participants) > over a cordless makes sense. It was a conference call but over a cellular phone. Martin had hacked his Radio Shack Scanner using a well known technique. He had a radio ham license. I still don't expect a conviction. Lets see a guy gets a tape he believes shows that the Speaker of the house lied to the ethics committee. He hands it to a senior member of the ethics committee of the house despite knowing that in doing so he put himself at risk of prosecution. Does anyone in their right mind expect any jury to convict in such a case? Basically a trial would be open season for the defense to take pot shots at Newt. Q. "Why did you not hand the tape over to the chair of the committee? A. I thought they might try to suppers it. Q. Why did you give the tape to MacDermott? A. I thought it showed that the Speaker had acted illegally. Q. Illegal? How? A [at very great length to be repeated verbatim on CNN twice an hour] As a first time offender the most the Martins could expect to suffer would be a $5000 fine. They could easily recoup that on the chat show circuit. This is the country where Ollie North launched his political career by subverting the constitution and lying to congress and where JO Simpson murdered his wife and got away with it. Don't expect the Martins to be occupying a jail cell any time soon. Newt on the other hand... Phill

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Re: One time pads and randomness?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Welcome! You've asked a Frequently Asked Question, so you're obviously new here, but you're also thinking, so we'll cut you some slack :-) A good book on cryptography that you should read is Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography", which talks about both math and practical issues. At 09:51 AM 1/18/97 -0500, AaronH4321(a)aol.com wrote: >I want to use a one time pad pased crypto system. I understand that the >randomness of the pad genorator is key to security (other than lossing >the keys). What I want to know is if I use a psuedo-RNG that .... Pseudo-Randomness isn't Real Randomness, and OTPs need Real Randomness. [Von Neumann said that anyone using mathematical methods to generate random numbers "is, of course, in a state of sin."] If you've got a Pseudo-RNG, your random number generator has some state at step 1 that totally determines the output at steps 2...infinity. This means that anybody who can determine the state of the PRNG at step n can decode all messages for steps n+1, n+2, ...., and often for steps 1....n-1 as well (depending on the particular PRNG.) If you're got Real Randomness*, even if you know the value of the pad at step n, it tells you entirely nothing about any other step. To make it worse, the popular PRNGs turn out to be annoyingly easy to crack, i.e. to determine the state from a small number of samples. >Say I create a 1 million character one time pad that passes all of the >randomness tests. It is "truely random". Unfortunately, passing randomness tests doesn't tell you a pad is "truly random" - it just eliminates the blatantly easy stuff. For instance, x[n+1] = Hash( x[n] ) or X[n+1] = Encrypt( x[n] ) for a cryptographically strong hash function or encryption like MD5 or SHA or 3-DES will pass randomness tests just fine, but it's still totally deterministic. Still not a OTP. However, say you create the pad from really random sources like flipping lots of coins or counting gamma rays, and haul it to your computers by well-armed guys with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. >"A" grabs a chunk of the one time pad starting at a random point and >encrypts it....There "B" moves to the random point and begins decryption. If the pad is _really_ random, and you're sure nobody's seen any of it, then there's no difference between starting at a random point and starting at the beginning, and the bookkeeping is much cleaner. >During to process both computers mark that section of the OTP used so >that they don't retransmit with it. I realize this has a limited amount >of messages before it is used up. But would this be secure? Yeah, you've got it (once you remember to use a really random pad so there's entirely no relationship between bits n and n+1.) And you've also hit one of the basic difficulties with using OTPs, which is making sure you only use the once, and that this means that sometimes you run out AND YOU STILL CAN'T USE THE PAD AGAIN. [*Some philosophers will argue that there isn't any Real Randomness, that there's just a deterministic State Of The Universe that's more complex than you happen to know, and some will rant about Quantum Mechanics, and others who actually have some clue about Quantum will tell you that it doesn't get you off the hook; in any case, as long as the universe is messy enough it's be close enough for government work.] The NSA was able to crack a bunch of Russian OTP transmissions back in the 50s (the project name was Venona, and it was recently announced) because the Russians did two major things wrong: They used pads more than once when they were sloppy or out of new pads, and they didn't use very good randomness - clerks banging "randomly" on typewriters generate data with more correlation and less even distribution than they'd expect, and in nearly-pre-computer days they weren't able # 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/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Re: Eudora PGP
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:07 AM 1/18/97 -0800, Some Anonymous Remailer User wrote: >If somebody wants to play with the new Eudora PGP >but don't have Eudora Pro 3.0, it is available at >ftp://ftp.catalog.com/aussie/biscoe/Eudora30.zip Rather than ripping off a commercial product, from a company that's nice enough to give away free versions, you can get Eudora Lite 3.0.1 from www.eudora.com; I haven't yet installed PGPmail with it, but it should work, and meanwhile it's nicely junking the more common flamers. It is a beta version, but there should be another out soon. >Btw, is it legal for a moderator to let messages >like this one through to the list...? This list isn't currently moderated. The legality if it were is unclear. > > > # 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/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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