December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

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

17 Dec '03

Kent Crispin writes: > Dave is offering a single mailing list, which, while I am sure Dave is > a great person, still represents a single point of control and a > single point of failure. A distributed mailing list has a potential > for being much more robust, and for supporting a wide range of > viewpoints. I can also offer my participation in the distributed mailing list, if that is what it takes to get cypherpunks free of control interests again. ------ Dave Hayes - Altadena CA, USA - dave(a)jetcafe.org Freedom Knight of Usenet - http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet A poor man shames us all.

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

17 Dec '03

Kent Crispin writes: > Dave is offering a single mailing list, which, while I am sure Dave is > a great person, still represents a single point of control and a > single point of failure. A distributed mailing list has a potential > for being much more robust, and for supporting a wide range of > viewpoints. I can also offer my participation in the distributed mailing list, if that is what it takes to get cypherpunks free of control interests again. ------ Dave Hayes - Altadena CA, USA - dave(a)jetcafe.org Freedom Knight of Usenet - http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet A poor man shames us all.

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Bad Headers Added to John Young postings via owner-cypherpunks@sirius.infonex.com
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi! The following headers are from a posting by John Young that looks like it was sent to cypherpunks(a)toad.com, forwarded to cypherpunks(a)sirius.infonex.com and/or cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net, and has the Reply-To: header set to reply to cypherpunks(a)toad.com instead of to John Young.... It looks like the obvious implementation of cypherpunks-style mail header patching, but isn't quite right..... Leads to people sending their John Young mailbot requests to cypherpunks(a)toad.com instead, as some well-known cypherpunks have mistakenly done recently :-) ===================================================== Return-Path: <owner-cypherpunks(a)sirius.infonex.com> X-Sender: jya(a)pop.pipeline.com Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 09:04:14 -0500 To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> Subject: FBI_100 Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)sirius.infonex.com Reply-To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com X-List: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net 2-15-97. NYP: "Phone Companies Balk At Latest Plan by FBI." Markoff. ============================================== # 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: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up"
by ISP_Ratings 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dave Hayes wrote: > >> censorship on cypherpunks. However, I think most peoples' opinions >> didn't really turn, or at least people didn't realize how serious >> things were and didn't really care, until Tim May [someone the many >> freedom-knights hate] started criticizing this censorship in extremely >> reasonable messages that were suppressed from both the -edited and >> -flames mailing list. > > Assuming that is true, that people do not care about censorship until > a person with an arbitrary reasonability says something, I would say > that such a group cares not about free speech...even if they think > they do. I agree--and again that is sad. Hopefully many have learned from the experience--that does on occassion really happen. Steve

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Proposed info file
by ichudov＠algebra.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, The text below is what I wrote for cypherpunks(a)algebra.com to be sent to new subscribers. Feel free to criticize. - Igor. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ About cypherpunks mailing lists ------------------------------- * * * ATTENTION: PLEASE SAVE THIS MESSAGE IN A MAIL FOLDER!!! IT WILL BE * * * HELPFUL FOR YOU WHEN YOU WANT TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM cypherpunks MAILING * * * LIST. * * * * * * DO NOT JUST DELETE THIS MESSAGE. I. Administrivia (please read, boring though it may be) The cypherpunks list cypherpunks(a)algebra.com is one of the cypherpunks mailing lists discussing cryptography, privacy, and social issues relating to them. These lists are connected to each other in such a way that all messages appear on all of these lists. All of these lists are high-volume mailing lists. There are several reasons for existence of multiple mailing lists that are inter-subscribed. The main reason is the large number of subscribers and limited bandwidth of each of the participating list nodes -- each node can take on only that many users. Most people will not want to subscribe to more than one of these lists. If you don't know how to do something, like unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo(a)algebra.com and the software robot which answers that address will send you back instructions on how to do what you want. If you don't know the majordomo syntax, an empty message to this address will get you a help file, as will a command 'help' in the body. Even with all this automated help, you may still encounter problems. If you get really stuck, please feel free to contact me directly at the address I use for mailing list management: cypherpunks-request(a)algebra.com Please use this address for all mailing list management issues. Hint: if you try to unsubscribe yourself from a different account than you signed up for, it likely won't work. Log back into your old account and try again. If you no longer have access to that account, mail me at the list management address above. Also, please realize that there will be some cypherpunks messages "in transit" to you at the time you unsubscribe. If you get a response that says you are unsubscribed, but the messages keep coming, wait a day and they should stop. Do not mail to the whole list asking to be removed. It's rude ans stupid. To post to the whole list, send mail to cypherpunks(a)algebra.com If your mail bounces repeatedly, you will be removed from the list. Nothing personal, but I have to look at all the bounce messages. There is no digest version available. There is a meta list which discusses the architecture and other issues of the distributed cypherpunks lists. It is not intended to be used for crypto discussions. if you want to be added or removed to the metadiscussion list, send a message "subscribe cypherpunks-hosts" to majordomo(a)algebra.com. II. About cypherpunks The cypherpunks list is not designed for beginners, although they are welcome. If you are totally new to crypto, please get and read the crypto FAQ referenced below. This document is a good introduction, although not short. Crypto is a subtle field and a good understanding will not come without some study. Please, as a courtesy to all, do some reading to make sure that your question is not already frequently asked. There are other forums to use on the subject of cryptography. The Usenet group sci.crypt deals with technical cryptography; cypherpunks deals with technical details but slants the discussion toward their social implications. The Usenet group talk.politics.crypto, as is says, is for political theorizing, and cypherpunks gets its share of that, but cypherpunks is all pro-crypto; the debates on this list are about how to best get crypto out there. The Usenet group alt.security.pgp is a pgp-specific group, and questions about pgp as such are likely better asked there than here. Ditto for alt.security.ripem. alt.cypherpunks is indended as a mirror USENET forum for this mailing list. III. Posting Policy. Please note that some members of cypherpunks mailing list may surprise you as very rude people. You may see views that sound very offensive to you. You will also see many articles that make no sense to you, are very stupid, or appear to be commercial advertisements. Consider such situation to be a price of YOUR freedom to post anything you want. Remember that speech that pleases everyone needs no protection: it is the offensive speech that is most often assaulted and thus needs to be protected. Also, speech that you find silly and distasteful may seem to be of great use for others. If you feel that some poster's articles are not useful and offensive to you, you can set up your mail reading software to ignore all articles coming from that person. Ignoring them silently has shown to be the best way of dealing with them. It will save you a lot of your own time. Even though you are free do write anything, please consider not following up to their posts with suggestions to shut them up. It only decreases usefulness of this mailing list. Eudora for Windows is known for its mail filtering capability. Procmail is a tool of choice for Unix users who want to filter their articles. Please read the documentation for these programs to find out how to set them to filter and delete unwanted messages. None of the above precludes the administrator of this mailing list to use tools protecting his hardware and bandwidth from denial of service attacks. If someone maliciously mailbombs cypherpunks mailing list, the mail bombs may be silently ignored and not passed on to the list. IMPORTANT: the list owner does not monitor the content of the messages appearing here. I disclaim any liability whatsoever for the content of articles on cypherpunks(a)algebra.com. If you have a problem with any materials posted here, please contact the poster to resolve them. Your use of the resources of this list constitutes an agreement with these terms. You have been warned. IV. Resources. A. The sci.crypt FAQ anonymous ftp to rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet-by-group/sci.crypt The cryptography FAQ is good online intro to crypto. Very much worth reading. Last I looked, it was in ten parts. B. cypherpunks ftp site anonymous ftp to ftp.csua.berkeley.edu:/pub/cypherpunks This site contains code, information, rants, and other miscellany. There is a glossary there that all new members should download and read. Also recommended for all users are Hal Finney's instructions on how to use the anonymous remailer system; the remailer sources are there for the perl-literate. C. Bruce Schneier's _Applied Cryptography_, published by Wiley This is required reading for any serious technical cypherpunk (and there are no non-technical cypherpunks). An excellent overview of the field, it describes many of the basic algorithms and protocols with their mathematical descriptions. Some of the stuff at the edges of the scope of the book is a little incomplete, so short descriptions in here should lead to library research for the latest papers, or to the list for the current thinking. All in all, a solid and valuable book. It's even got the cypherpunks-request address. Enjoy and deploy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cypherpunks assume privacy is a good thing and wish there were more of it. Cypherpunks acknowledge that those who want privacy must create it for themselves and not expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant them privacy out of beneficence. Cypherpunks know that people have been creating their own privacy for centuries with whispers, envelopes, closed doors, and couriers. Cypherpunks do not seek to prevent other people from speaking about their experiences or their opinions. The most important means to the defense of privacy is encryption. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy. But to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Cypherpunks hope that all people desiring privacy will learn how best to defend it. Cypherpunks are therefore devoted to cryptography. Cypherpunks wish to learn about it, to teach it, to implement it, and to make more of it. Cypherpunks know that cryptographic protocols make social structures. Cypherpunks know how to attack a system and how to defend it. Cypherpunks know just how hard it is to make good cryptosystems. Cypherpunks love to practice. They love to play with public key cryptography. They love to play with anonymous and pseudonymous mail forwarding and delivery. They love to play with DC-nets. They love to play with secure communications of all kinds. Cypherpunks write code. They know that someone has to write code to defend privacy, and since it's their privacy, they're going to write it. Cypherpunks publish their code so that their fellow cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Cypherpunks realize that security is not built in a day and are patient with incremental progress. Cypherpunks don't care if you don't like the software they write. Cypherpunks know that software can't be destroyed. Cypherpunks know that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down. Cypherpunks will make the networks safe for privacy. [Last updated Sun Feb 16 13:10:56 CST 1997 ichudov(a)algebra.com] [Adopted from the original version by John Gilmore and Eric Hughes]

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Re: Questions about Naughty Robot (fwd)
by Genocide 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I got this message (on a system that I am webmaster on) regarding something that sounded so stupid it made me chuckle...Naughty Robot...I have enclosed the message below. If any of you have any idea what this user is talking about, any info would be appreciated. Personally it sounds like another "GoodTimes Virus" again... Genocide Head of the Genocide2600 Group ============================================================================ **Coming soon! www.Genocide2600.com! ____________________ *---===| |===---* *---===| Genocide |===---* "Courage is not defined by those who *---===| 2600 |===---* fought and did not fall, but by those *---===|__________________|===---* who fought, fell, and and rose again." Email: gen2600(a)aracnet.com Web: http://www.aracnet.com/~gen2600 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion. It is by the Mountain Dew that the thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion. ================================================================================ Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 10:30:37 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Questions about Naughty Robot Resent-Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 12:10:54 -0800 (PST) >> Don't wanna bug ya too much, but I was wondering if you have ever heard >> of Naughty Robot, and whether or not if it is a hoax or Real? >> >> I had a customer in Tennesee who got an E-Mail saying that Naughty Robot >> has infected your host computer and consider all your credit cards >> stolen. >> >> I think it's a hoax, but the Admins at VR-NET Cafe say that they have >> been hit with it and say that it's a script that does hack into the >> IPS's server and sits back and watches the users browse the web and take >> the info they see on there screen and dump to some remote server?? >> >> I was wondering if you have heard about it...and if so can you direct to >> the right locations on the web to get the "Official" Scoop on it?

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Re: DFA
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Paul Bell wrote: >does anyone know what has happened to DFA, and the people who >just a few months ago were publishing such encouraging results? There seems be sustained investigation of DFA, offensive and defensive, by Biham and Shamir, by Anderson and Kuhn, by the Bellcore team, by Quisquater and others. However, the smartcard manufacturers appear to have a role in dampening publicity about the ongoing research, or at least diminishing the claims of effectiveness of DFA. Carol Francher, of Motorola, for example, writes in February IEEE Spectrum: Technology is a wonderful thing but criminals, too, can use it as new equipment and techniques become available or less expensive the barriers to cracking a system may weaken. Recently Bellcore announced a paper, "Cryptanalysis in the presence of hardware faults" (available at www.bellcore.com) that proposed a theoretical method for breaking an asymmetric encryption code once a computer (or a smartcard microcontroller) had been forced into faulty behavior. The Smart Card Forum, a multi-industry membership organization headquartered in Tampa, Fla., has stated that it does not regard this approach as a real-world risk, since in smartcard applications more than one technique is used to protect the security of the entire system. But the Bellcore methodology for breaking algorithms -- as well as similar theoretical approaches, such as the one taken by two Israeli researchers, Eli Biham and Adi Shamir -- highlights the need to analyze and evolve the security of any system continually. -- "In your pocket: smartcards." <http://jya.com/tee08.htm> Several of the DFA-type researchers have commented on the smartcard industry's reluctance to publicize security weaknesses when the push is on to increase consumer trust and use; see, for example, Anderson and Kuhn at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tamper.html Quisquater and the SG group also note the reluctance of smartcard mass-marketers to own up to security shortcomings of which their own engineers know and fret. Meanwhile, the DFA proponents and opponents are eagerly absorbing the continuing DFA-relatged reports, quietly watching one another, and both sides eying the booming smartcard market for lucrative rewards, as Ms. Francher suggests: licit and il.

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Bad Headers Added to John Young postings via owner-cypherpunks@sirius.infonex.com
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi! The following headers are from a posting by John Young that looks like it was sent to cypherpunks(a)toad.com, forwarded to cypherpunks(a)sirius.infonex.com and/or cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net, and has the Reply-To: header set to reply to cypherpunks(a)toad.com instead of to John Young.... It looks like the obvious implementation of cypherpunks-style mail header patching, but isn't quite right..... Leads to people sending their John Young mailbot requests to cypherpunks(a)toad.com instead, as some well-known cypherpunks have mistakenly done recently :-) ===================================================== Return-Path: <owner-cypherpunks(a)sirius.infonex.com> X-Sender: jya(a)pop.pipeline.com Date: Sat, 15 Feb 1997 09:04:14 -0500 To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> Subject: FBI_100 Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)sirius.infonex.com Reply-To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com X-List: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net 2-15-97. NYP: "Phone Companies Balk At Latest Plan by FBI." Markoff. ============================================== # 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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MagicMoney
by hjk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I finally got a copy of MagicMoney (from ftp://utopia.hacktic.nl). It is just the code (compiling without error), but there is no README or documentation at all.Can someone give me a hint,what to do with this package? Is there a documentation somesite? BTW utopia is the site,you can get all the export restricted stuff outside the US. Heinz-Juergen Keller email: hjk(a)ddorf.rhein-ruhr.de

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Cypherpunks FAQ
by aga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 16 Feb 1997, Igor Chudov @ home wrote: > Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 10:40:15 -0600 (CST) > From: "Igor Chudov @ home" <ichudov(a)algebra.com> > Reply-To: freedom-knights(a)jetcafe.org > To: aga <aga(a)dhp.com> > Cc: freedom-knights(a)jetcafe.org > Subject: Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up" > > aga wrote: > > I have mail.cypherpunks though, and I thought that was > > the usenet newsgroup for cypherpunks. > > > > let's see what dejanews says about this one. > > > > How about every posting to alt.underground for the time being, > > until we get this matter settled? > > > > John, > > I think that you would be the best author for writing the official > alt.cypherpunks FAQ. I have no doubt that many readers will appreciate > your effort and it will win you a lot of new points with them. > > One thing is, you have a lot of ideas, and two, your writing style is > very good (you are a law doctor after all). > > The FAQ should not be necessarily very big. > > - Igor. > But I have never been on the cypherpunks mailing list. I only got involved because they were in the header of some F-K list mail. And I think that Dr. Vulis would be much better qualified than I would be. My Doctorate was in Law, but Dimitri did his in math and/or cryptography, which is more appropriate. All I can say is that it should be a list where everybody is required to state their sex and sexual orientation up front. And the rule MUST BE that you are a queer by default. We MUST have a correct sexual definition up front, and nobody is allowed to say, "I refuse to state my sexuality" because we then know that they are closet homosexuals. what we want is the truth up front. BTW, all five of the newsgroups in this header are available through dejanews for posting to, if you use them in the current order. the a.g.g. newsgroup ate dejanews gets your article posted to ANY other newsgroup, including alt.cypherpunks and cypherpunks.cunt

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