December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Politics of Export Restrictions
by Rick Hornbeck 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is it possible the unreasonable crypto export restrictions are simply being imposed at this time for the purpose of making Al Gore look good when he runs for President in 2000? In other words, his campaign could include promises to retract existing crypto export restrictions established by his predecessor. The campaign would be accompanied by slogans and rhetoric such as "export crypto, not jobs" and the crypto/high-tech community would support Gore and the Democratic party in droves.

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Re: Passphrase security
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Deadwood Vilest K"arcinogen"OfTheMonth is so vile because rancid semen is dripping from all of his orifices. ^ ^ (o o) Deadwood Vilest K"arcinogen"OfTheMonth ( ) \___/ !_!

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Re: Fighting the cybercensor
by ichudov＠algebra.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

jim bell wrote: > Exactly correct. I will be killed by AP, my own invention. (however, I > will be killed for merely DESCRIBING it, not only if I started the first > instance of it.) Before I'd published the first part of AP, I knew and > accepted what was going to happen. See AP part 7, at the end, quoted here: > See, Phill, I was right. igor

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A comment on the censorship policy
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I cannot understand how some of my (accurate) criticisms of Sandfort's censorhip polices---some in direct response to his own self-serving posts declaring himself not to be a flamer himself---are not making it to the "New and Improved Censored List," while inane posts from Toto, Thorn, and someone named "Nurdane Oksas" are appearing. (Oksas has the especially annoying habit of quoting entire posts and then appending a one-line piece of completely list-irrelevant fluff. Also, engaging in lovey-dovey posts with Vulis, who writes messages about how he longs to see Oksas naked.) This whole process is showing the worst of Sandfort's censorship policy. (If this is dumped into the "Not suitable for Cypherpunks to read" list, I urge those of you who see it to pass it on to the main list.) END --

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The Politics of Export Restrictions
by Rick Hornbeck 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is it possible the unreasonable crypto export restrictions are simply being imposed at this time for the purpose of making Al Gore look good when he runs for President in 2000? In other words, his campaign could include promises to retract existing crypto export restrictions established by his predecessor. The campaign would be accompanied by slogans and rhetoric such as "export crypto, not jobs" and the crypto/high-tech community would support Gore and the Democratic party in droves.

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Re: Sovreign Right of Lawful Access
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:11 PM 1/28/97 -0600, Mike McNally wrote: >Somebody wrote: >> >> This morning at the RSA keynote, David Aaron, the US Crypto >> ambassador quoted the "Sovreign Right of Lawful Access" as >> something that goverments were determined to preserve. > >Speaking as a private indiwidual, and not as a drone in the employ >of IBM (don't get me started on the "but wait, key recovery *isn't* >the same as key escrow" hoo-ha), that dude scared the piss out of >me. I think that terminology is odd. They're getting desperate. "Soverign Right of Lawful Access" doesn't state HOW DIFFICULT that "access" is to be. Interpreted broadly, that would outlaw any encryption even if it only impeded that access a tiny bit! Or under an alternative interpretation, the mere fact that it is hypothetically possible to decrypt a message means that nothing (other than mathematical improbability) stands in the way of doing the decrypt. Also, it didn't say SECRET ACCESS, although experience tells us that they (the thugs) probably assume this. I've long pointed out that ordinary search warrants require informing people who are being searched, even if they're not home and assuming the thugs didn't trash the place the way they frequently like to. I see no reason to believe that the advent of telephone technology in the late 1800's should have retroactively re-written the US Constitution to make secret searches okay. Technically, the Bill of Rights prohibits "unreasonable searches and siezures," and doesn't specifically mention the secrecy issue, but since (am I correct in this, Real Lawyers <tm>?) the practice up until that time required people searched to be informed of searches, a change in policy that wiretaps could be secret sounds more like taking advantage of a technological windfall, not "discovering" that the Constitution allowed something that had always before been prohibited. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Workaround for filtering/cybersitter
by Pavel Korensky 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mark Rogaski <wendigo(a)pobox.com> wrote: > If I had experience with Netscape plugins and spare time, I'd > try it myself. But here's my proposed solution. > > A plugin in Netscape intercepts all requests, encrypt the URL > with a pubkey algorithm, encode the string base64, send it as GET input to > a proxy server. > > The proxy server decodes and decrypts the URL, gets the requested page, > and returns it. This beats out URL-based filtering. > > Still need to figure out the specifics of key-exchange. If we use > 40-bit encryption, it's exportable, and it still works in our threat > model (ie. we don't care if the watchers figure out the URL a few hours > later). > > To beat out dropping packets with unacceptable pattern in them, we > could use an SSL-based server as the proxy. > > The plugin could even have a nice little on/off switch and a list > list of available proxies. Nice, but I can see one problem here. If I (as a censor) will want to block your communication to prohibited sites, I can block the access to the proxy computers. You will just move the blocking strategy one level up with your plug-in. The censor will block the web servers AND proxy servers. Because the list of proxy servers must be available somehow to users, it is very simple to write some kind of script running on the gateway which is blocking the acccess. The script will download the list of proxy servers, update the gateway tables and the gateway will be blocking acccess to all sites on the proxy list. Bye PavelK -- **************************************************************************** * Pavel Korensky (pavelk(a)dator3.anet.cz) * * DATOR3 Ltd., Modranska 1895/17, 143 00 Prague 4, Czech Republic * * PGP key fingerprint: 00 65 5A B3 70 20 F1 54 D3 B3 E4 3E F8 A3 5E 7C * ****************************************************************************

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Best Computer School?
by Hal Abelson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rick Osborne <osborne(a)gateway.grumman.com> writes: The only thing I didn't have that the next MIT applicant had was money. I made the mistake of letting them know that I was dirt poor and would need full aid/grants/etc, and to quote "The Great Escape" it was "Zzzt! To the Russian front!" Just to set the record straight, MIT's admissions is need-blind. Lots of things go into our admissions decisions, but whether or not an applicant needs financial aid is not one of them. Admissions and financial aid are handled out of separate offices, and the people making the admissions decisions don't even see the financial aid requests. One exception: We are experimenting with the possibility of considering the amount of aid needed in the case of a few international applicants, but even here this is only a minor consideration for a small number of applicants. For domestic applicants, financial aid plays no role at all in the admissions decision. -- Hal Abelson

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Best Computer School?
by Hal Abelson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rick Osborne <osborne(a)gateway.grumman.com> writes: The only thing I didn't have that the next MIT applicant had was money. I made the mistake of letting them know that I was dirt poor and would need full aid/grants/etc, and to quote "The Great Escape" it was "Zzzt! To the Russian front!" Just to set the record straight, MIT's admissions is need-blind. Lots of things go into our admissions decisions, but whether or not an applicant needs financial aid is not one of them. Admissions and financial aid are handled out of separate offices, and the people making the admissions decisions don't even see the financial aid requests. One exception: We are experimenting with the possibility of considering the amount of aid needed in the case of a few international applicants, but even here this is only a minor consideration for a small number of applicants. For domestic applicants, financial aid plays no role at all in the admissions decision. -- Hal Abelson

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Re: The Politics of Export Restrictions
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:44 PM 1/29/97 -0800, Rick Hornbeck wrote: >Is it possible the unreasonable crypto export restrictions are simply being >imposed at this time for the purpose of making Al Gore look good when he >runs for President in 2000? I suppose it's plausible, but it's an opportunity open to both candidates, and more plausibly (because of lack of collaboration) to the Republicans - e.g., Dan Quayle and the "Crypto Freedom For Americans" platform, promising to rescue Silicon Valley from those evil regulatory Democrats. If I were an evil politician trying to set up a trick like you suggest, I think I'd want a scheme that my opponent(s) couldn't hijack and use against me. -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles(a)netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |

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