December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Network of majordomos
by Peter Hendrickson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:09 PM 2/11/1997, Greg Broiles wrote: >At 10:45 AM 2/11/97 -0600, Firebeard wrote: >> [...] I've already taken steps, along with Jim Choate, to >> start a network of majordomos hosting a Cypherpunks mailing list. >> [...] Our intention is to have a set of majordomos which >> are intersubscribed to a cypherpunks list on each one, with measures >> taken to ensure that mail loops don't develop. > I still think you're just rediscovering Usenet technology.... > And, if you must, run mail-to-news gateway(s) which send the newsgroup to > people who want it as E-mail. > Usenet technology does exactly what you're describing:... How about this? The people who like Usenet should race ahead and set it up. The people who like networks of majordomos should race ahead and set those up. Just so long as the tracks meet somewhere in Utah. The more people are involved with distributing the "list" the more robust it will be. Peter Hendrickson pdh(a)best.com

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Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up"
by ichudov＠algebra.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

i have already set up majordomo(a)algebra.com and cypherpunks(a)algebra.com and can join. igor Firebeard wrote: > > >>>>> John Gilmore writes: > > JG> Sandy has agreed to continue moderation through the end of the > JG> original 1-month experiment (through Feb 19). And it's a good > JG> thing, too, because the "cypherpunks community" had better get off > JG> its whining butt in the next ten days, or it will no longer exist. > > [...] > > JG> This is a "put up or shut up" to the cypherpunks community. > > This appears to be as good a time as any to announce that I'm > "putting up". I've already taken steps, along with Jim Choate, to > start a network of majordomos hosting a Cypherpunks mailing list. I > didn't intend to announce this until Jim and I had gotten the first > pair of 'domos working properly, but this means that we'll need to > speed things up. Our intention is to have a set of majordomos which > are intersubscribed to a cypherpunks list on each one, with measures > taken to ensure that mail loops don't develop. As the resulting > mailing list from each 'domo will be identical, periodically > (initially weekly), the subscriber lists of all of the participating > majordomos will be compared, with any duplicate subscribers being > removed from the 'domo(s) with the longest subscriber list. There > will be no filtering done of any mail to the collective list, although > anyone interested in providing a filtered list will be welcome to > subscribe to the list. Anyone interested in joining the 'domo network > with the conditions described (duplicate subscriber checking and no > filtering) is welcome. > > John, I'd appreciate your permission to use your Cypherpunks > welcome message as the basis for the welcome message of this new list. > Also, while we will make every effort to have this new list available > for subscriptions by Feb 20, I'd appreciate it if you could consider > making the current list available for a short period longer if we > encounter unanticipated difficulties. > > -- > #include <disclaimer.h> /* Sten Drescher */ > ObCDABait: For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the > flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. [Eze 23:20] > ObFelony: President Clinton, you suck, and those boys died! > Unsolicited bulk email will be stored and handled for a US$500/KB fee. > - Igor.

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Re: Recommendation: Creation of "alt.cypherpunks"
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:20 PM -0600 2/11/97, Igor Chudov @ home wrote: >If the people decide for creation of a new USENET newsgroup, >we need to think very hard about actually moving it to a different >hierarchy from alt.*. I would propose comp.org.cypherpunks, >comp.cypherpunks, sci.crypt.cypherpunks or something like that. > >A comp.* or sci.* newsgroup, if created, has the following advantages >over an alt.* newsgroup: > >1) There is usually less spam in sci.* or comp.* >2) There are virtually no completely irrelevant flamewars >3) The propagation will be a lot better >4) More people will be able to read it because of the issue of providers > not carrying alt.*. > >I see nothing that would make a sci.* or comp.* newsgroup worse than >alt.* newsgroup. Sure, and this has come up in every past discussion of creating "alt.cypherpunks." But the creation of alt.cypherpunks is _easy_, and needs little permission or support, whereas the creation of "soc.culture.cypherpunks" or whatever takes work, requires a vote, blah blah blah. And so it never gets off the ground. (Nor is it clear to me, and perhaps not to others, that it belongs in the the various places Igor mentioned. Comp.org.cypherpunks probably is the best fit, but then many would cite the "comp" part to try to insist that only _computer_ topics be discussed. Likewise, the "soc" domain would skew discussion...etc. "Alt" has the nice advantage of explicitly not be part of sci, or comp, or soc, or even talk.) Since posting my comments I've just seen the proposal that tivoli may host a list. Fine with me. But I wonder how long Tivoli and its parent company, IBM, will tolerate such things as postings of dumpster divings at Mykotronx and RSADSI, of deliberate slams against Tivoli products (a la the case John Gilmore referred to this morning), postings about assassination markets, and so on. I still feel that the time has come to move virtual forums such as ours out of U.S. jurisdictions. Given that most European nations are worse in some ways (no Holocaust denial posts allowed in "cypherpunks(a)foobar.de"?), I recommend the alt.cypherpunks as the best overall compromise. --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: List! No Way: Creation of "alt.cypherpunks"
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:11 PM +0000 2/11/97, Attila T. Hun wrote: > tim: > > two points you make: > > 1. the propogation is slow... > > 2. some sites do not carry alt. groups > > are enough to kill an active discussion list. of course, it does > slow down excessive volume. Good points. However, I'm used to fairly robust debate on Usenet, and the prop delay does not seem too stifling to me. As you note, it cuts down on immediate replies; this may not be a bad thing. I see any site which can be identified with a corporate or institutional entity--like C2Net, toad, Tivoli, Primenet, Netcom, whatever--being targetted if a controversial mailing list is hosted at that site. (This may not have been the case when the list was full unmoderated, and was only a "reflector" or exploder of incoming messages. As soon as a moderator started passing on some messages and rejecting others, the precedent was set (somewhat) for charges that a site or sysadmin is now liable. This has not been tested in court, of course, but I fear this is how things will go. As I mentioned in another message, had the traffic in alt.religion.scientology instead flowed through a site such as "scientology(a)primenet.com," the operators of Primenet and the sysadmin of that mailing list almost certainly would have received "decease and cyst" orders. Remember that Netcom was hit with similar orders. Usenet cannot be stopped in this way. A major strength.) > I vote we just set up a new majordomo with some additional antispam > filters including knocking out exploding mail headers, etc. I would > accept excluding non-members as long as we take the remailers which > are listed with either JP or RL. This is a suggestion I have long thought to be a good one. Only allow posts from list subscribers, and make a special exception for remailers by adding them to the approval list. Figure if a spammer is smart enough to know what a remailer is, at least see her traffic for a while. Drop the inclusion of remailers if volume is too high. (Or, put remailer messages in a special place. An ftp or Web site, for retrieval. Or have list members "vet" the remailed messages, as someone was suggesting a few months back. Or....) > Likewise, Jim Choate and Sten Drescher apparently are trying to > establish a multi-site majordomo. the extra work of maintaining > non-duplicates and sychronization makes the task non-trivial and > questionable... Yeah, it seems to be one of those potentially good ideas that will just never get done, due to the difficulties, the maintenance, and the press of other projects. (And even if it gets done, which I hope for of course, I doubt many of us will want anything with added complexity, new commands for our posting software to deal with, etc. So, it will have to look just like an ordinary mailing list, with the mirroring handled transparently.) (Speculation: Isn't some of this talk about distributed mailing list sites and mirroring beginning to echo the structure of FidoNet?) --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Cocksucker Gilmore's Big Adventure
by Jeremiah A Blatz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- mpd(a)netcom.com (Mike Duvos) writes: > John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> writes: > > Sandy has agreed to continue moderation through the end of the > > original 1-month experiment (through Feb 19). And it's a good > > thing, too, because the "cypherpunks community" had better get > > off its whining butt in the next ten days, or it will no longer > > exist. > > Ten days notice to relocate a high volume mailing list is > insufficient. This is yet another ultimatum by a whining coward > who does not yet realize he is in a battle he is not going to win > by escalation of reciprocal pissing. <big, disgusted, snip> You know, I was vaugley offended by John's comments about whiny cypherpunks, until I read this message and realized who he was talking about. John, thank you for your years of service to the cypherpunk community 9such as it is), and Sandy, thanks for your well-intentioned (but doomed from day one) efforts to take some resopnsibility for our current mess. It's too bad things had to end in such a pissy way, but anyone who wants to dole out blame should realize that in an anarchy, all members are responsible for the maintainence of freedom. Jer "standing on top of the world/ never knew how you never could/ never knew why you never could live/ innocent life that everyone did" -Wormhole -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQB1AwUBMwEAm8kz/YzIV3P5AQHEagL8Co832vJ75u3U0zfEYp8ixZ1yGM1sx4jQ Aybf55rSeeCUVIOpxgWL03NHEm2+5l9eIAg6qxbne4UZpURu79suMJGe1i5p8ekT UIJsRRZTpq6OVr9w86uJHl3HDvaM9CnK =SeWH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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NEW CYPHERPUNKS LIST (was Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up") (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 18:49:46 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > > > This appears to be as good a time as any to announce that I'm > > "putting up". I've already taken steps, along with Jim Choate, to > > start a network of majordomos hosting a Cypherpunks mailing list. I > > didn't intend to announce this until Jim and I had gotten the first > > pair of 'domos working properly, but this means that we'll need to > > speed things up. Our intention is to have a set of majordomos which > > are intersubscribed to a cypherpunks list on each one, with measures > > taken to ensure that mail loops don't develop. > I'll contribute what I had planned: > > As a stop gap measure you could create a standard majordomo at the > beefiest of your 'domo hosts. While it is true I was planning on bringing the Austin Cpunks remailer back (kourier.ssz.com) this rather unexpected expansion has got me backpedalling. So it looks like it will take about 3 weeks to get the intial site ready for public access. Right now my ISDN based site is all we have working. We have another site through another ISP in the process of registering and configuration. I have currently created a 'cypherpunks(a)ssz.com' but still have a couple of other issues to work out. The most relevant one is that I will be upgrading both Linux and Majordomo in approx. 2 weeks. We will be discussing this issue further on Saturday at the Austin Cypherpunks meeting. If all goes well with our discussion and my upgrade we should have the SSZ cypherpunks site available in about 2 weeks. Sten and I hope that we can pursuade some others to get involved both running remailers as well as modifying the various scripts. At this point everything we do will be released to the public domain. We also are expecting to add a proviso that all submissions to the cpunks distributed remailer will be de facto public domain unless a specific 'fair use' header is included in each submission. Finaly, another issue that will slow me down is the upcoming SRL show here in Austin. I have committed time and effort so I don't know yet how the conflicts will come or how I will resolve them. The next SRL planning meet is Thu. nite so I will have a clearer idea of my upcoming schedule. > Or you could create a quick 'n dirty mail exploder, by taking the > current subscribers, and putting 100 mail addresses in a .forward file [much good comments cut out] > Final comment: perhaps you've investigated this, but what Perry > Metzger has for the majordomo running cryptography(a)c2.net is excellent > at stopping people forging subscribe and unsubscribe messages. > > And would really cut down the nuisance of people subscribing others > without their knowledge. These are several of the issues that we will be discussing this Saturday. We will also be looking at various means to distribute the subscriber list. The current lead suggestion is to have subscriptions at any of the cpunks be evenly distributed among them. This would somewhat complicate the subscriber process. Another aspect that I am hot to trot on is setting the system up so that some of the cpunks sites could be anonymous, crypto, or combo remailers as well. Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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Re: Cocksucker Gilmore's Big Adventure
by Eric Cordian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A Gilmore Supporter writes: > You know, I was vaugley offended by John's comments about whiny > cypherpunks, until I read this message and realized who he was talking > about. John, thank you for your years of service to the cypherpunk > community 9such as it is), John Gilmore's only contribution to Cypherpunks has been to provide a box. I can't even remember the last time he contributed something of interest to the list, and he certainly ranks as one of the least frequent contributors of substance over the years. Any goodwill John might have built up by letting us all use his box has certainly been eradicated over the last few weeks by his takeover of the list, and the series of edicts which followed. Yes, it was nice of John to donate the use of his box, back in the days when he did not feel the urge to exercise unilateral editorial control. But if it hadn't been his box, it would have been someone elses box, and our gratitude towards him shouldn't be so great that we are willing to sit back and let him do major damage to that which "Cypherpunks" is supposed to stand for, lest someone claim we are unappreciative. > and Sandy, thanks for your well-intentioned > (but doomed from day one) efforts to take some resopnsibility for our > current mess. It's too bad things had to end in such a pissy way, but > anyone who wants to dole out blame should realize that in an anarchy, > all members are responsible for the maintainence of freedom. Sandy, unlike Herr Gilmore, has been a major contributor of substance to the list since its inception, and hopefully he will continue to be in the future. The idea that he should moderate the list was of course a silly one, but for reasons which do not reflect badly on him in the least. What Mr. Blatz fails to realize is that the "problem" which certain people tried to solve never really existed. The quality of the Cypherpunks list is determined solely by the amount of signal, not by the amount of noise, unless one is getting ones feed of the list via 1200 baud long distance UUCP. Anyone can create signal by writing about relevant topics, and if you feel signal is lacking in your particular area of interest, feel free to add some. The notion that the list was ever threatened by the humour of Dr. Vulis, or the one line bot-spammed insults about Tim May's heritage, is an absurd one. No one should have had any problem ignoring such material, and only a politically naive fool would buy this as the excuse for the blatant usurpation of the list by Gilmore and crew. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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whois cypherpunks.org ?
by Anil Das 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

With all this talk about relocating the home of cypherpunks, I decided to see if any second level domains are registered under the cypherpunks name. Both cypherpunks.org and cypherpunks.com are registered by one Elias M. Levy in Ft. Meade, MD. I haven't seen his name on the list though. Anybody knows more about this? -- Anil Das

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Germany Versus Scientology
by Evil se7en 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have posted a rather lengthy story about Germany's war against the Scientologists. It was long enough to preclude mailing it directly to the lists, so I have put it on my web site. You may find it at: http://www.dis.org/se7en/ with the link being directly under the large "X." I decided to post it for the reasons that I know several people who suffered directly at the hands of the Scientologists after trying to infiltrate their organization via the Internet. These people will recieve this message due to this posting. Enjoy. se7en

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http:--cnnfn.com-digitaljam-wires-9702-11-hackers_wg-
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Click here to download the shareware YOU want at ZDNet [INLINE] Digital Jam hackers graphic Hackers victimize firms Experts tell House panel breaking into networks is too simple February 11, 1997: 6:17 p.m. ET [INLINE] Hackers and Feds in Vegas - July 31, 1996 Internet firms make hacking pay - April 12, 1996 WASHINGTON (Reuter) -- Hackers are finding it easier to break into computer networks and steal money, partly because companies are reluctant to admit that they are vulnerable, security experts said Tuesday. [INLINE] "If I want to steal money a computer is a much better tool than a handgun," Daniel Geer, engineering director for Open Market, Inc., told a House of Representatives technology subcommittee hearing on computer security. "They start out stealing $1,000 a day and figure they can get away with $2,000 a day and then they get greedy and hit some figure which sets off alarm bells." [INLINE] A panel of experts assembled by the subcommittee said many companies refuse to report breaches in their security because they want to avoid negative publicity and embarrassment. [INLINE] "Most computer crimes are not reported," Eugene Spafford of Purdue University told the panel. He estimated losses run into "hundreds of millions of dollars" but said no one really knows since so much goes unreported. [INLINE] Daniel Farmer, a security consultant, said penetrating a computer system is relatively easy. "Just using simple tests, I could break into two-thirds of the systems I tried," he said, adding that he could easily raise that figure to three-quarters if he wanted. [INLINE] Farmer said that during his tests he even discovered a problem with the White House World Wide Web site and told the system manager about it. He said he never received a reply. [INLINE] "Defensive programs have been overtaken by offensive programs" developed by hackers, he said. [INLINE] Spafford said law enforcement has kept pace with advances made by hackers who are able essentially to take over entire networks and run them by remote control. [INLINE] In addition to banks and corporations, the experts said, government secrets can be stolen and used to threaten national security. They cited recent computer network tampering at the Justice Department and the CIA. [INLINE] A General Accounting Office study recently found that there were 250,000 "hits" aimed at the Defense Department's computer networks last year and 65 percent were successful. Link to top home | digitaljam | contents | search | stock quotes | help Copyright 1997 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Copyright © 1997 Cable News Network, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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