December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: New X-Ray Imager
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:38 AM 2/4/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: > >| A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of people -- >| 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help >| thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were >| at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. > > Its worth noting the 'if it would help thwart terrorism.' It is irrelevant if terrorism is indeed be thwarted. The public does not require this to happen. All that matters is to generate the *perception* of increased security, not to increase security itself. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"gnu(a)toad.com" "John Gilmore" 4-FEB-1997 12:20:22.10 >Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this >month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are >conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; >42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people >cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted >to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email >message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold. You're making an invalid assumption... namely that people who stayed on the moderated list are neccessarily wanting it to be the main list. This isn't the case with me, for instance. I'd also point out that some of us - including me - were taking the time to take a look at what happened with the moderated list. On the one hand, it did result in a decrease in the trash messages... on the other hand, it also drove away 1+ good posters (TCMay for one). As I've said before, I might wind up going with Sandy's (or some other) filtered list. But changing the name (effectively, to cypherpunks-unedited) was a bad idea. >I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my >"censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing >something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was >to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't >make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did. I can see how you might ignore objections from those who did make the signal/noise get worse... but from those who didn't? _I_ tried to help you by letting you & Sandy know when something was going wrong. >Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is >now suggesting. "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful >option. Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete >suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track. They >involved a lot more work than the previous setup. I told him if he >was willing to do the work, we could try it. As Dale suggests, I >wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and >passing judgement on the postings. Sandy was, for a month. I (and others, I believe) are gratified by y'all's attempts to help. I just think that you went about it the wrong way. >Start a mailing list on another site! Move this list to somewhere! [...] >The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over >deciding how to run the list, and running it? Would you be willing to help in starting up a distributed list? That would appear to solve at least some of the toad.com problems (keeping it running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) with which I am sympathetic. >If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto >community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in >the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!". I'm willing to help the _libertarian_ crypto community, to the limit allowed by my available resources (I'm a grad student). Organize? I'm not so sure to what degree that's helping. Progressive? I'm not a liberal. Slight but meaningful difference in terms. >PS: Can we talk about crypto too? It's clear from the last few days >of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse >novices into thinking that two very different things are the same >thing. Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key >recovery". This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES". What >should we do about this? Educate the public? The public won't listen until 56-bit DES is broken; then, they can be told that "somebody broke the cryptography used by banks" and they might listen. In other words, what can be done is supporting DES-breaking efforts (ideally, via the collection of different possible keys and their indicators, as someone had mentioned earlier - sorry, I'm a biologist, not a mathematician, so I've forgotten the actual terms. It was something that would essentially enable the near-instant breaking of _any_ DES code after the competion of the project. My apologies if I've gotten mixed up on this). -Allen

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:38 AM 2/4/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: > >| A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of people -- >| 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help >| thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were >| at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. > > Its worth noting the 'if it would help thwart terrorism.' It is irrelevant if terrorism is indeed be thwarted. The public does not require this to happen. All that matters is to generate the *perception* of increased security, not to increase security itself. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by ichudov＠algebra.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lucky Green wrote: > At 10:38 AM 2/4/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: > >| A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of > people -- > >| 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help > >| thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were > >| at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. > > > > Its worth noting the 'if it would help thwart terrorism.' > > It is irrelevant if terrorism is indeed be thwarted. The public does not > require this to happen. All that matters is to generate the *perception* of > increased security, not to increase security itself. Let's remember though that perception of security applies not only to passengers, but also to potential terrorists. If they *think* that they would not be able to bring a bomb easily, they would be less inclined to do so. - Igor.

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Re: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by Against Moderation 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> writes: > Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this > month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are > conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; > 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people > cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted > to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email > message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold. I just have to point out that you are ignoring some important factors (though I do trust your intentions and believe it is unintentional). I initially tried subscribing to all the lists, but the headers of the edited and unedited lists were identical making it impossible to sort the mail. To make matters worse, some messages seem to have gone out only to the edited list, and not to the unedited (particularly at the beginning), so that, unable to come up with a decent filtering scheme easily, I finally gave up and just subscribed to cypherpunks. In general, unsubscribing and resubscribing to a mailing list is not completely trivial. In addition to the particulars of cypherpunks, there are also the issues of what if your E-mail address depends on the machine you send mail from and your unsubscribe request gets delayed for confirmation. What if the new list no longer works properly with your mail filter and you end up with 1,000 pieces of cypherpunks mail in your main mailbox, etc. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they certainly provide a strong enough disincentive for people to switching their list subscriptions that I think the numbers you list above are meaningless. Perhaps a better comparison would be to look at how many people subscribe to the other two filtered cypherpunks lists. > Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is > now suggesting. Well, you don't appreciate the content of the list, and you seem to feel that many members of the list don't appreciate what you are doing. Why not shut the list down? I can think of one reason: cypherpunks seems to suck in a lot of crap, and might be keeping that crap away from the coderpunks list. Other than that, though, I think killing this list would probably be a good idea.

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Re: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by Jeff Barber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm another long time list member. I've posted before on a number of occasions but not often. And I was one of those who subscribed immediately to the unedited list. Anyway, herein my 2 cents. John Gilmore writes: > Tim May said: > > I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my > > posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's > > sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not. > > Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this > month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are > conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; > 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. "Conclusively" this has shown only that most folks are willing to go along with an experiment -- especially if it requires them to do exactly nothing. The results of the moderation experiment itself can't possibly be conclusive until the moderation has gone on for much longer--a few months at least, possibly years. Then, we'll see how many people are willing to put up with the high volume over the long term, even possibly in the absence of thoughtful essays from long-time list members (like Tim) who have been driven away from the list. Even if it "survives" by that criteria, it may not survive in *my* book. There are only a handful of people whose posts make the cypherpunks list worthwhile (IMO of course). There're quite a few others who contribute to the discussion but aren't themselves worth the trouble (no offense intended to anyone; I would certainly count myself in this group as well). I don't deny that putting up with the noise on the list takes some effort. In fact, after years of surviving with only my 'd' key, I'd finally been driven to install a procmail filter shortly before moderation was announced. Interestingly, since that point, it *has* become more difficult to filter--but IMO that's because it's also gotten less interesting (how do you know if you're filtering is successful?). In fact, lately I've begun to "filter" *all* of cypherpunks into an alternate mailbox file, and find that I'm perfectly content to look at it only every couple of days, and just pick and choose among the posts based on author and subject. I don't claim to be representative of the average cypherpunk, but in my view, this is a bad sign--it indicates a lack of compelling "content". It might as well be a Usenet group--I don't feel like a "member of the Cypherpunks list" anymore. As the list stands now, I would hardly even notice (or care) if I were no longer subscribed. > I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my > "censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing > something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was > to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't > make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did. Well, I did do something. When the volume got too high for me to take unassisted, I installed procmail to tailor the list to my own likings. Many have been advocating it on the list for years. I was just too lazy to do so until the pain of not having it finally got too high. As for the signal to noise ratio, John hasn't made it worse, but he hasn't made it much better either. No offense is intended--John's posts were always at the top of my reputation list--but he posts so infrequently that he falls into that "not worth subscribing for" group. What was the problem with the list that finally required that somebody "do something"? Sure, the list was high volume. And there were a lot of flames and silly useless garbage. But this is no different than it has been for years. And the Vulisgrams were no more (or less) vicious or annoying than Detweiler's Medusa and S.Boxx rants from the old days. (The reason I personally could stand it [without procmail] back then was that I wasn't on so many *other* mailing lists at the same time.) > The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over > deciding how to run the list, and running it? Can't we just forget any of this ever came up? Drop the moderation, resubscribe the Vulis 'bot and go on as before. > PS: Can we talk about crypto too? ... Sorry, that would be off-topic; this list is only for discussions of the cypherpunks moderation policy. Maybe you could post something on Perry's "cryptography" list though. (:-) -- Jeff

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Re: Dissolving Choke Points
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:36 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >What I have seen is a pretty complete elimination of the signal that >was there. Some might argue that this is "just" because Tim stopped >posting. But so what? The result of moderation was the elimination >of signal. Nonsense. The signal had left long before the moderation began. The steepest drop in signal (not S/N ratio) was between shortly before Perry left and Vulis had completed his takeover. Signal is cause by signal generators. Most top signal generators, other than Tim, had left because of pollution caused by the likes of Vulis, aga, and his homophonic boyfriends. Moderation has nothing to do with the loss of signal other than that signal from Tim was lost. And while I appreciated Tim's essays, they were never the sole source of signal on the list. Tim did not even provide the majority of signal. "Best individual contributor", sure. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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e$
by mixmaster＠remail.obscura.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy May is so full of shit that some of it bursts out on this mailing list. o /\O/ O Timothy May 0 \\ | 0-# // | / \

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[UPDATE] Making OCR'ed code transfer easier
by nobody＠zifi.genetics.utah.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Deceased Vilus has such a small penis because the mohel who circumcised him was trying to do the world a favor. _ /| `o_O' Deceased Vilus ( ) U

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Press/Digital Wins US Dept of Comm. Approval to Export Encryption Prod. (fwd)
by Vincent Cate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 08:37:24 -0500 From: DIGITAL PRESS RELEASE <irprod(a)nimv03.das.dec.com> To: pr-news(a)majordomo.das-x.dec.com Subject: Press/Digital Wins US Dept of Comm. Approval to Export Encryption Prod. |||||| Digital Press and Analysts News |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Digital Equipment Corporation Maynard, Massachusetts 01754-2571 Editorial contact: Patrick Ward (508) 493-9441 patrick.ward(a)mail.dec.com Digital Equipment Corporation Wins US Department of Commerce Approval to Export Stronger Encryption Products 56-bit Data Scrambling Technology Safeguards Internet Commerce Worldwide MAYNARD, Mass., February 3, 1997 -- Digital Equipment Corporation today announced that it has won United States Department of Commerce approval to export 56-bit encryption products worldwide, the strongest yet for protecting Internet commerce worldwide. Last week a University of California at Berkeley graduate student used a set of workstations to crack a 40-bit encryption code in 3.5 hours. "The same workstations would require more than 20 years to break a 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES Code), according to Samuel H. Fuller, DIGITAL's vice president and chief scientist. "The Commerce Department's action enables DIGITAL to provide its international customers with complete systems for electronic commerce over the Internet, including the necessary security software," according to DIGITAL's Chairman, Robert B. Palmer. "This makes the Internet more attractive for our customers worldwide, and represents an exciting market opportunity for DIGITAL." "We are very pleased with the leadership shown by DIGITAL's top management, including Robert Palmer, in making a long-term commitment to develop, produce and market key recovery products and to take advantage of the Administration's new policy on encryption exports," said Sue E. Eckert, assistant secretary for Export Administration. DIGITAL will immediately export 56-bit encryption for its OpenVMS operating systems and for its RoadAbout/DES Product for wireless LAN computing. Shipments of the 56-bit export version of AltaVista Tunnel will follow this year. "AltaVista Tunnel software can simply and cost-effectively create 'Virtual Private Networks,' allowing customers who are traveling or at remote sites to securely access their company's private network over the public Internet," said Ilene H. Lang, president and chief executive officer of AltaVista Internet Software, and a vice president at DIGITAL. "Now the Virtual Private Networks we offer to customers in the United States can become Global Private Networks as the market expands worldwide." The Commerce Department announced on December 30 that American companies could export "strong" or Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption products, such as DIGITAL's industry-leading AltaVista Tunnel, if the companies could demonstrate progress in developing key-recovery products over the next two years. Previously the US government had restricted export of strong encryption for security reasons. Digital Equipment Corporation is a world leader in open client/ server solutions from personal computers to integrated worldwide information systems. DIGITAL's scalable Alpha and Intel platforms, storage, networking, software and services, together with industry- focused solutions from business partners, help organizations compete and win in today's global marketplace. #### Note to Editors: DIGITAL, the DIGITAL logo and OpenVMS are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation. CORP/97/537 ============================================================================ Digital Press and Analysts News is sent as a courtesy to members of the press, analyst and consulting community. For subscription information please contact pr-news(a)pa.dec.com. All Digital press releases, fact sheets and backgrounders are archived on ftp.digital.com in the /pub/Digital/info/pr-news directory. They are also available at http://www.digital.com/info/pr-news/ on the World Wide Web . ============================================================================

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