December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Cypherpunks afraid of spam?
by snow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> It seems very strange that the denziens of this list, reputed to be gutsy > enough to take on the FBI, NSA, CIA, and White House, would be scared > away from a discussion forum (Usenet) by uninvited email. > We'd better hope they never figure out Cypherpunks, Guardians of > Privacy and Defenders of Free Speech, are afraid of spam. It isn't the Once and a While Big Ass Knock Down Drag Outs that kick your ass, it is the mosquito's and the heat, the moldy bread and the drip drip drip of the constant rain. Even Solid rock gets worn away by the steady drip drip drip of the rain. I hate that drip.

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Re: Private property & the cypherpunks list(s) (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 17:39:32 -0800 > From: Toto <toto(a)sk.sympatico.ca> > Subject: Re: Private property & the cypherpunks list(s) (fwd) > Personally, I try to let people know that they may use even my > private email in any manner they see fit. I have no objection to > even those who disagree with me using it to attack me or misdirect > others, or whatever. > I agree with Jim's 'defacto public domain' idea, as long as it > does not conflict with the reality of the need for intellectual > property rights. > e.g. - copyright and patent law I am not preventing people from retaining their rights. I simply recognize that there are entirely too many different views of 'fair use' to create a blanket order. I also recognize that one responsibility in a democracy of all citizens is the protection of the results of human effort. The best way to protect and preserve information is to place it in the public domain. Of course the other option is to sell large 'collections' to groups like Microsoft who would end up charging you out the ya-ya for looking at 'their' pretty pictures. Wonder what DaVinci would have thought of the way we treat HIS paintings? But I digress. Given that people have many highly individualistic views about copyright of their expression and the need to preserve that expression we must ask ourselves how? One obvious answer is to place everything in the public domain, I am shure the information race we experience now would be nothing compared to that worlds output. However, this prevents truly gifted individuals from being able to spend the time (eg lifetimes) needed to truly master some forms of expression. We certainly don't want to support them on the public dole, so there must be some way for them to make a living off their work. So we recognize their originality or inherent worth in their expression. We also recognize that there can't be complete and total protection because most people would not find a buyer for their expression simply from lack of knowledge. So, lets find a middle ground, one where people can tell other people about things they experience as well as feel secure that their efforts have some inherent worth and also some failsafe to ensure that as much effort as possible gets archived. So let's require each person to include their prefered choice of copyright in their communications, otherwise it falls into the public domain. The only resolution of this approach is that everyone gets what they want. Not relevant in this forum, but I also believe that material being held in copyright should fall into the public domain when the copyright holder dies. > If you are having trouble understanding the concept I am dealing > with, here, then I suggest that you drink a bottle of Scotch and > read this post again. That's certainly one way to get in the correct attitude...;) Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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Re: Private property & the cypherpunks list(s) (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > From: Kent Crispin <kent(a)songbird.com> > Subject: Re: Private property & the cypherpunks list(s) (fwd) > Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 14:10:36 -0800 (PST) > Jim, if I put "Copyright (c) 1997 by Kent Crispin. All Rights > Reserved." in my .sig, would that constitute a "fair-use header"? As I understand it '(c)' is not considered acceptably close to the normal copyright symbol. What I have been advised is to always spell out 'copyright <date> <person>'. Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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Re: [Declan McCullagh: "A List Goes Down In Flames," from Netly]
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Toto <toto(a)sk.sympatico.ca> writes: > Omegaman wrote: > > the notion that cypherpunks is dead and destroyed is silly. > > Give the man a fucking cigar! > Why don't a few of us start a "CypherPunks is ignonimous" thread, > and see what silly clap-trap results? Maybe the thread could be > started by the guy in New York city who began a campaign to clothe > animals, so that their 'dicks' wouldn't show. He garnered quite a > following. > > Did anyone notice the 'pun' in Declan's subject header? > "A List Goes Down In FLAMES" > Did Declan notice it? > > My theory is that the news/press that we consume from our media-feeders > starts around a 'catchy' headline, from which the press then builds a > story to highlight their puns. The whole list? Or just Gilmore goes down on Sandfart and Sandart goes down on Parekh and Parekh goes down on Gilmore - like a daisy chain? --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Cypherpunks afraid of spam?
by aaron＠herringn.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Fairly prominent Cypherpunk I'll decline to name- I don't mean to ridicule him personally, just his (distressingly common) attitude] >Just for the record. I will not post to USENET given the spamming that >seems to go to IDs that appear there. [chuckle] Just add an anti-spam segment to your email address. example: jsmith[at]foo.com Most people worth talking to have enough of a clue to replace [at] with @. if your software requires an apparently valid email address, try jsmith(a)NOSPAM.foo.com I put a spam-busted address in my .sig and give root(a)127.0.0.1 as my email in the from: header. Sure, somebody out there is going to be unhappy with me, but if they have a clue they'll figure it out. Meantime, the SpamBots are bouncing mail to the admin of the site instead of to me. That may not be enough if you're already in the spamming lists. Try using 'positive' filtering- instead of filtering to eliminate unwanted mail, filter email from regular correspondents into a 'approved' directory, and leave the rest in the inbox to pick through later. It seems very strange that the denziens of this list, reputed to be gutsy enough to take on the FBI, NSA, CIA, and White House, would be scared away from a discussion forum (Usenet) by uninvited email. We'd better hope they never figure out Cypherpunks, Guardians of Privacy and Defenders of Free Speech, are afraid of spam. (And supposedly the 'Moderation experiment' is over, so this won't get kicked onto the -flames list, although it's more ridicule than flame...)

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Re: Excerpt on SPAM from Edupage, 11 February 1997
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:05 AM 2/14/97 -0600, snow wrote: >Pete: >> Yes, but why does monetary compensation make it then O.K.? I'd rather >> pay for my Internet access, then be bombarded by spam, no matter what >> they paid me! I think the best soln. is the one that is currently in >> place for phone calls - they can call once, but if I tell them not to >> call me again and they do, I can then begin legal action against them. >> I pay more per month for my phone service than my Internet service ( >> although in NY, *everything* is more expensive. ), and junk phone calls >> are way more intrusive then spam. > > I figure if this scheme comes to fruition, I'll just set up a seperate >account (or procmail) to filter out the spam, deposit the coin, and go on >about my business. That's fine...that's EXACTLY the way the system would work! Intentionally so! The purpose of the payment is not because the sender feels some sort of legal obligation to pay; rather it's analogous to a tip to a waiter. The sender makes the payment based on however much he _wants_ you to pay attention to his message, but fully aware that there is no guarantee that you'll do so. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up"
by Dave Hayes 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Against Moderation writes: > If you want to fight censorship effectively, going around telling > people "You're a shit-eating faggot you fucking cock-sucking homo > censor" in public forums is not going to win you many points. On the contrary. John Grubor is Usenet's most effective probe as to the mindset of people who really want free speech. The precise litmus test of free speech is vehemently offensive things that are spoken. > Instead, it will quickly land you in many people's killfiles, and will > eventually lead some people with bad client software to wonder if it > wouldn't be worth giving up some freedom of speech for the benefit of > not having to see your rants any more. Then they don't want free speech. They want the illusion of free speech, "free speech as long as you don't say THOSE things". > Unfortunately, it sort of makes life harder for those who actually > fight the censorship when you pretend to be one of them. Your > argument seems to run something like, "To protect freedom of speech, > bad all faggots from the net, and especially don't let them run any > mailing lists." If this offensive and highly noticeable argument > eclipses many of the important, fundamental ones as the censors would > like it too (why do you think your articles make it to cypherpunks- > flames while mine only get as far as -unedited), you will end up not > only inducing censorship but also seriously hampering the efforts of > those who are legitimately fighting that censorship. Don't you get it? Real censorship issues do not arise until someone rocks the boat. It takes someone to rock the boat to make you aware of your own prejudices of that nature. If it takes attacking homosexuals and pissing them off enough to make them show their true colors and begin censorship...so be it. Why be civil when that civility serves to hide that which is ultimately against free speech? You'll find those of us who -truly- want free speech are extremely good at ignoring what we don't like. ------ Dave Hayes - Altadena CA, USA - dave(a)jetcafe.org Freedom Knight of Usenet - http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet Don't teach the blind until you have practiced living with closed eyes

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Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up"
by Dave Hayes 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ok. I'll "put up". If the cypherpunks will have me, -I'll- run the cypherpunks list. Those that know me know that I will *not* censor, moderate, or otherwise alter the content (other than the stuff majordomo does with "resend") of any messages to the list. ------ Dave Hayes - Altadena CA, USA - dave(a)jetcafe.org Freedom Knight of Usenet - http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet Advice is priceless; when it becomes interference it is preposterous.

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Re: Good Bye Cypherpunks!
by Vin McLellan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It's always interesting to see how another person, particularly a writer, filters and reshapes an experience you shared with them . Differences in the telling are inevitable -- but I perceived the recent experience of the C'punks List quite differently than what Declan described and implied in his column. My understanding of Sandy's effort, for instance, was that he was to filter out the sludge of spam and contentless name-calling with which some idiots were flooding the list. My impression was that he was passing along any posts with content (ideas, pro or con, on almost anything) but filtering out the empty obscene name-calling and slurs (many of which seemed anon or forged, with varied and misleading titles, to duck my kill-file filters.) I, for one, was appreciative. I don't mind flames (and I expected to still be able to recieve them, from whatever POV -- and it seemed that I did!) but I also want a little meat somewhere amid the smoke. Who did the filtering (at the minimal level I expected) was almost irrelevant. If the filtering was on content, I'd be unhappy -- but I was eager to see some effort to cut out the empty hate messages. I even suggested to Dale, off-list, that he take it on for awhile. To me, the issue was whether this community could develop some mechanism to defend itself against a willful and intentional effort to destroy it. I think we failed to do so, despite the creative search for alternative venues -- and I think the triumphant cackling I read on what's left of the List is quite out of place. It may be that ideological purists were able to develop dynamic local filters on their PCs which satisfied them, but my filters just could't do enough. It was clear that the fecal-buckshot attacks on the List were designed to evade them. I'm still here, but it was more than a minor annoyance. (A year ago, I knew maybe five friends and acquaintances who subscribed to C'punks, but they all ran out of patience with the unchecked flow of sludge and unsubscribed... months before John tried to introduce his moderation experiment.) If 700 dropped off right after the moderation experiment was announced -- which I somehow doubt -- I wonder how many were battered into unsubscribing in the six or eight months prior? And, of the fleeing 700, how many became bored with the obsession of some (exhaustively prolific) writers with the "Moderation & Me" -- and went off to find some discussion of cryptography, politics, and ideas elsewhere? (Gawd knows, on the then-Moderated List I never found any lack of overwrought attacks on Sandy or John. I even read them for a week or two;-) From this whole experience, I carry away something different than those who gleefully celebrate Gilmore's surrender. I think something unusual and valuable is being killed. I'm now convinced that virtually all mailing lists will soon be forced to either limit posts to authenticated subscribers or introduce some sort of moderation -- just to deal with the spam threat and the problem of concerned attacks by those who decide they hate or dislike or simply want to destroy that particular List community . By the logic of Tim and others, a clever and dedicated crusade against Cypherpunks by any minimally-organized group, bir or small -- your local coven, CoS, RC bishops, FBI, Romanian Govt, , whomever! -- could have destroyed the List at any time in the past. I'm glad they never realized how vulnerable we were; I've enjoyed this Community greatly in its current manifestation. I also hate to think of how gleeful the sociopaths who mail-bombed us into the choice of submission or suicide must be today. I think it is a particularly henious crime to destroy a virtual community; something akin to book-burning, but maybe more like arson -- like burning village schools. There was a willful attempt to destroy C'punks, an attack of depth and volume which led many of us (even those who had ignored at least three earlier efforts to offer filtered subsets to the List) to welcome the Moderation Experiment. Unfortunately, the attempt at moderation just twisted our own energies against ourselves. We were, perhaps predictably, quite easy to manipulate. If I have any criticism of John et al, it is that our List-Owner (a statement of function, rather than property) never gave the List Community an overt option to vote for minimal moderation. A tactical error. That that allowed the anarchists, nihlists, and others pure of heart to focus their ire on toad.com and Sandy -- rather than on those of us who (when John finally acted) might have gladly re-subscribed to another version of the List in order to obtain minimal spam and slur filtration. So now we ourselves burn the village in order to save it. <nostalgic sigh> How American! Suerte, _Vin At 11:23 PM 2/13/97 -0800, you wrote: >Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 21:24:37 -0800 (PST) >From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> >To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu > >The Netly News Network >http://netlynews.com/ > >A List Goes Down In Flames >by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) >February 12, 1997 >

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DES and RSA crypto hardware from the free world
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've just got the details on two new crypto chips produced by the Dutch company Pijnenburg Custom Chips B.V. These are the PCC 201 bignum coprocessor and the PCC 101 DES-with-everything processor (the official names are slightly different :-). The PCC 101 sells for approximately US$27, the PCC 201 sells for approximately US$50 (for people who aren't familiar with the market for these things, these are very good prices, especially for the 201). The PCC 201 is officially a "Large number modular arithmetic coprocessor" which is designed to perform the operations: A^x mod N AB mod N C mod n very quickly for quantities of up to 1024 bits. Typical procesing times for 1K-bit operands is 40ms, for 512 bits it's 12ms when clocked at 25 MHz. Unfortunately you can't directly chain them for larger operands, although it's possible to use two 201's and some software tricks for CRT decrypts to stretch the operand size to > 1024 bits. The way the 201 works is that you load the fixed components (exponent and modulus for A^x mod N, modulus only for AB mod N and C mod N) into one of three sets of on-chip registers, and then use them to perform arbitrary numbers of operations on data. This means that for something like a micropayment application you would load the necessary private key components once and then generate signatures at the (theoretical) rate of 25 a second. To date the cost of this kind of hardware has been such that the most viable solution was to run racks full of cheap P5 boards booting a bare-bones RSA-processing application through a network card, but with the PCC 201 you could populate a board with 201's and a few microcontrollers a la a Wiener machine and use these as a payment transaction processing engine. They'd also make fairly cool SSL co-processors for web servers. The PCC 101, officially a "DES encryption device", does DES, 3DES (EDE with 2 or 3 keys), and DESX in ECB, CBC, CFB, OFB, and MAC modes at a maximum rate of 132 Mbits/s (16.5 Mbytes/sec) for single DES, or 1/3 that for 3DES, when clocked at 33 MHz. It's possible to load either single or triple-DES encrypted keys which are then decrypted using onboard key encryption keys (KEKs). The chip contains onboard storage for 24 keys, 3 KEKs, 4 IV's, and 2 DESX keys (pre/post-whitener). Processing is done in a 3-stage pipeline, so once you feed in 3 64-bit blocks it churns out a new result every 16 clocks (this also allows overlapped I/O operation). You can add an external battery to save the internal state when power is removed, so you could keep your keys permanently stored onboard (although given that these keys can be recovered given enough money and effort I'm not sure if this is a good thing). The PCC 101 is available in 44-pin PLCC/TQFP packages, the PCC 201 is available in 68-pin PLCC and 80-pin TQFP packages. The PCC 201 contains a multiplexed address/data bus and a few control signals (most of the pins are unused), the PCC 101 contains data and address ports and a few control signals. They look fairly easy to interface. There's an ISA evaluation board available which contains the PCC 201 and the slightly older PCC 100 (predecessor of the 101) and some test software. Note that this is an evaluation board only, Pijnenburg make the chips but don't sell general encryption cards. A fast PCI card containing these chips and drivers for various common operating systems and MSDOS is currently being designed by an international cabal. This will be a PCI 2.1-compliant card containing a PCC101, an optional PCC201, and possibly a few other things (we're still arguing about the design). I'll be writing DOS and Win16 drivers for it, and someone else will do an NT and possibly Linux driver (again, it's still at the design stage). cryptlib (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/cryptlib.html) will probably end up having native support for it when it's ready. Pijnenburg don't have a web page yet but are working on it, I'll post the details here when it becomes available. Until then you can contact them at asic(a)pijnenburg.nl. The only slight problem is that they're subject to the Dutch governments export rules (the usual Wassenaar stuff) which means that if you're not using it for an authentication/integrity-only application or a financial application, you'll probably need to go through some paperwork to show that it's for your use only and you won't be passing it on to your friend Jose from Columbia. Pijnenburg have a standard Statement of Application which people can use as to write their own statement for export approval. These chips look *very* promising. Who needs Clipper, or HP's Clipper-under-another-name, when you can get triple DES from the free world at prices like this? Peter.

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