December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: FCPUNX:Layoffs at PGP
by jamesd＠echeque.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> [arrow] PGP Pretty Good on Privacy of Layoff Details > by Kristi Coale > > [...] > > > "Internet Fast-Forward is not as closely related to the tools we > develop for individuals for privacy," he said. And the fact that > Fast-Forward filters ads which are an "inimical part of some of > the emerging Web commerce models ... we don't want to hinder this > development." I think this tells us everything we need to know about the management of PGP inc. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Cyberstrike
by harka＠nycmetro.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- May be of interest... In> From: cleacy(a)execulink.com (Chris Leacy) In> Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.announce In> Subject: SOFTWARE: CyberStrike 1.13a Ad filtering/Cookie cutting Proxy In> Date: 30 Apr 1997 23:28:43 -0400 In> CyberStrike: Version 1.13a First Public Release In> The first public alpha of CyberStrike was released today. In> It can be found at <URL:http://www.execulink.com/~cleacy> In> CyberStrike is a banner ad filtering, cookie cutting, HTTP In> header overriding proxy of a program. In> Whether for privacy concerns, or just to speed up your In> browsing, CyberStrike performs admirably well at it's task. In> Chris Ciao Harka /*************************************************************/ /* This user supports FREE SPEECH ONLINE ...more info at */ /* and PRIVATE ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS! -> http://www.epic.org */ /* E-mail: harka(at)nycmetro.com (PGP-encrypted mail pref'd) */ /* PGP public key available upon request. [KeyID: 04174301] */ /* F-print: FD E4 F8 6D C1 6A 44 F5 28 9C 40 6E B8 94 78 E8 */ /*<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>*/ /* May there be peace in this world, may all anger dissolve */ /* and may all living beings find the way to happiness... */ /*************************************************************/ ___ Blue Wave/386 v2.30 [NR] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAgUBM2mQeTltEBIEF0MBAQEbUAf+NQOMPrml38ijLwv8MIPSkTUbtbNQebJy R4LaeYhXI6Z/OzJdX6AQC2GisxMyPiz3QWWBoAqxGkunWDHbQzDfZVWW6nZa4zLY do2r11CEWFPba1igX+8JtCm9gd11S8Zlff5Pw5eTYOMcsVSHf6Z/+iAT5aqnIdcb YU26JswL1MofhWlNhbNXYc/9wQ3uUn1hU3lin+Lujfa5+cXXlTyfz6eFcJlwD7ZY KdK7UfPMuCeZnUX/VJqBdJ1idXfC5YOlwVMBNIyQK7PgCy59FvP5CiiXhpui7uSj WijKBSMUsz2HuQIuQJf6zvW/bi5DGWr6PerTXnuVaUkjNHr4Fp13Mg== =5TtH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption...

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Re: Bombs Away, from The Netly News Network
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:50 PM 5/1/97, Jeff Barber wrote: >Declan McCullagh writes: >> "A >> member of the DoJ committee accessed a single web site >> on the World Wide Web and obtained the titles of 110 >> different bomb-making texts." > >I wonder if this was a bookstore. I did a search for "explosives" >on amazon.com and came up with at least that many titles. Only a >handful were of the Anarchist's Cookbook ilk. Most were academic or >industrial studies; a few were from US Govt or Govt-affiliated >organizations. Probably Paladin Press. Publisher of such notables, as Hit Man: A technical manual for independent contractors, a semi-fictional work with lots of details (written by an anonymous woman, BTW). See http://www.paladin-press.com PGP mail preferred Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 Key available on BAL server, http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | tel: (702) 658-2654 CEO | fax: (702) 658-2673 First ECache Corporation | 7075 West Gowan Road | Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I know not what instruments others may use, but as for me, give me Ecache or give me debt."

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Re: Privacy news: Oakland Cameras
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>How do you hack a camera? Physically damaging the camera works, but can get you jail time. A better solution, if you have a nearby office window facing the cameras, is to use a near-infrared laser (<$100) and blind camera. A strong IR signal will easily overwhelm the AGC circuit and cause the camera to behave as if its pointed into the sun. All video cameras contain an IR block, but it generally isn't sharp enough to cut off an 850 nm diode laser. --Steve PGP mail preferred Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 Key available on BAL server, http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | tel: (702) 658-2654 CEO | fax: (702) 658-2673 First ECache Corporation | 7075 West Gowan Road | Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I know not what instruments others may use, but as for me, give me Ecache or give me debt."

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Re: SAFE Bill discussion
by Shabbir J. Safdar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Administration hates this bill, because it threatens their ability to roll out Key Recovery. They've said as much in the letter Declan forwarded: "The bill could be read as prohibiting the United States government from using appropriate incentives to support a key management infrastructure and KEY RECOVERY." [emphasis added] Do you think that if this bill helped the Administration, that they'd be out there urging the subcommittee chairman to stop it? I think not. I'm also puzzled by the fact that CDT is being criticized pretty much solely, even though the entire Internet Privacy Coalition, and several other groups all wrote a letter of support of the bill with only a criticism of one provision. However the overall statement was of support. (see http://www.privacy.org/ipc/safe_letter.html) As far as I can tell, everyone criticizing the bill either thinks that: a) CDT actually runs all these groups behind the scenes, or b) pretty much all of the Internet advocates believe that this bill is needed and are doing the best they can with what Congress has written. You're pretty hard on CDT, but EFF, EPIC, the ACLU, VTW, Americans for Tax Reform, the Association for Computing Machinery, Computer Professionals for Social Responsiblity, Eagle Forum, the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers, and PGP Inc all signed this letter. Can you consider, perhaps, for a second, that critics of SAFE are being unreasonable? I would think so, as critics of SAFE include the Clinton Administration. Is that the kind of company that cypherpunks keep? Here's a great excerpt from the Internet Privacy Coalition letter: The pending bill provides a positive framework for the reforms that are long overdue in this critical area. It makes clear that the sale or use of encryption, a vital technique to promote network security and individual privacy, should not be restricted in the United States. This is the view widely shared by users of the Internet and the computer and communications industry. It was also a central recommendation of the report of the National Research Council last year. Looks like widespread support from people who study this issue for living. I'm glad to be counted among them. -S -Shabbir

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Re: Bypassing the Digicash Patents
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Robert Hettinga, <rah(a)shipwright.com>, writes: > Again, it's using the right business model, and not necessarily > cryptography, which makes a market happen. Blind signatures and hash > collisions are necessary, but not sufficient, for the market to exist. Bob, if I understand you correctly, you've suggested that digital bearer instruments will in the long run actually be more efficient than conventional book entry based transaction models. Anonymity will be cheaper than identified transactions. But, if digital bearer certificates of all kinds are, as you suggest, cheaper and more efficient than conventional ones, why can't we just use ordinary non-blinded digital instruments and ignore the identifying information? For example, XYZ Co. could issue a signed note saying "Serial number 12345, worth 100 shares of XYZ Co.". A bank could issue a signed note saying "Serial number 54321, worth $100 at DigiBank". These can be done with ordinary digital signatures. No blinding or patent issues arise (by the end of this year, when the patents expire!). These are not blinded, so they are in principle traceable. They have to have unique serial numbers to solve the double spending problem, and those could be used to track them. This makes them less attractive from the privacy perspective, but what about from the point of view of the financial markets? Can they just ignore the serial numbers and treat them as the bearer certificates you have been talking about? (Don't real bearer certificates often have serial numbers on them?) Maybe this geodesic market you're talking about (which I don't understand at all) could work with current technology? Hal

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Re: Chaum steps down as CEO of Digicash
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:53 pm -0400 on 4/28/97, Hal Finney wrote: > Chaum's orientation towards privacy has not been well accepted by the > conservative banking community (a similar point was made by Peter Swire > in his article about payments and anonymity). Again, financial privacy is like flight. To the people who invented it, flight was an inherent good. People died trying to create it. However, the thing which made flight commonplace was commerce. Flying is not only the fastest way for people and other important things to get somewhere, but, over great distances, it is simply the cheapest way for people to travel. People don't purchase "wow, we can fly". They purchase economy seats to Cleveland. :-). The same thing with financial cryptography, and, by extension, strong cryptography in general. What will sell financial cryptography is not financial privacy per se. What will sell financial cryptography is the fact that digital bearer certificate protocols will prove, by virtue of their very *anonymity*, to be many orders of magnitude cheaper to use than any internet transaction method of equal security. Or any transaction method at all, for that matter. Including, of course, the book-entry transaction settlement methods (like checks, credit cards, securities clearinghouses, interbank settlement) we use today. It is under *that* proposition alone, the potential for radical cost reduction in *all* transaction settlement processes -- and the prospect for radical economic transformation that that brings -- that the blind signature patent should be marketed and licensed. Notice I said "licensed". Cryptographers -- and that is who Digicash is, nothing else, no matter how hard they try to be otherwise -- should invent, license, and validate the use of cryptographic protocols. And, clearly, there is no better financial cryptographer in the world than David Chaum, the man who created, from whole cloth, everything we consider to be modern financial cryptography. Digicash should not try to be a financial trustee, or a certificate underwriter, or even a software developer. All three things Digicash, BV, has tried to be in its many previous incarnations. Now, it appears, Digicash, Inc., is going to try to become the internet equivalent of a credit card association. However, once you understand what Digicash's strengths really are, you can see why this current strategy is just the next progression in, I'm sorry to say, the fool's market that Digicash, Inc., has become in terms of investment return. So, you can understand how, sometimes, I'm very much afraid we'll have to wait until this round of funding is burned through -- say 3 to 5 years -- before we see any progress in the market for digital bearer certificates. And, if Digicash keeps finding a "greater fool" when the money runs out, we'll end up waiting until 2007, the expiration date on the blind signature patent, in order for anything to happen at all. Yet, most of rest of the time, however, I'm not so pessimistic. I'm convinced that if Digicash starts non-exclusive licensing of the blind signature patent, and the other relevant Chaum patents it now controls, even as an experiment, I expect that they would very soon find that their profit margins on those licenses would dwarf the profits on all their other projects. Maybe then they'll realize they should stop trying to be something else, and be what they what they have been all along: the very best financial cryptographers in the world. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA Lesley Stahl: "You mean *anyone* can set up a web site and compete with the New York Times?" Andrew Kantor: "Yes." Stahl: "Isn't that dangerous?" The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Re: Artikel about XS4ALL in New York
by Paul Bradley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 2 May 1997, tank wrote: > "A few years ago, we would have been portrayed as a band of dangerous > anarchists, bent on disrupting society," Rodriquez told the Dutch daily > Trouw. "But now they have come to see that we are nice and quiet people > really." The only "nice people" are dangerous anarchists bent on destroying governments and buggering poloticians to death. (last part a personal preference of course, the author is totally straight but would nonetheless be distinctly amused to see any government official butt-raped to death) > The company was instrumental in the creation of the Amsterdam Digital > The hotline is run by Internet users and providers. Unlike Britain's > Internet Watch Foundation, the Dutch hotline doesn't censor any > information nor does it ask the provider to do so. Hotline operators > contact the author of the information and ask him to remove the > offending content. "If the author does not comply, we report him to > the police, and he'll be prosecuted," said Rodriquez, who also is > chairman of the Dutch Providers Association. How very benevolent. Its nice to know that instead of censoring your pages they send in the jackbooted thugs to do it for them, then throw you in a nice 6x9 cell for the henious crime of displaying some .gifs or similar. > "The Internet Watch Foundation forces the provider to remove the > illegal content," he added. "This is a fundamentally different approach > to responsibilities on the Internet. We think the author of the > information is responsible for his own actions, not the provider." And if he chooses not to remove the content you happen to find offensive? If you truly believed in the rights of the author and publisher of the information you would think about it before sending in your own particular brand of thugs to "crush the mutiny". > Yet when violation of the law is flagrant, XS4ALL doesn't hesitate to > comply, as it did a few weeks ago when it shut down a customer's home > page called Neuroroom, which sold marijuana and other soft drugs in > Holland and abroad. Sometimes one really wonders why we bother to set up mirrors to allow freedom of information to users, when the owners of these servers, supposedly in favour of free speech, do not even have the strength of character or conviction to decide for themselves what they will allow on their servers rather than bending over for the long cock of the law... > The company's commitment to support free expression and democratization > of the Internet doesn't stop here. As far as I can see it hasn`t even started yet. > Last fall when the Serbian > government censored radio station B-92, XS4ALL helped design an > Internet campaign and started to carry news broadcasts (in RealAudio > format) that kept the rare opposition voice alive and the international > public informed through independent accounts of the events occurring > during the mass demonstrations in Belgrade. I presume B-92 fell into line and matched the "requirements under law for obtaining a free-speech permit" before XS4ALL allowed this/ > "Basically any project we like gets free resources from XS4ALL," > Rodriquez commented. And anyone who guarantees to publicly lick the boots of the benevolent owners in thanks for their support gets as much free space as they like? Of course I believe in the right to free expression of anyone and if these thugs choose not to allow material they don`t like on their servers they have every right to remove it. I just don`t see that setting up mirrors to defeat blocks on sites that refuse to carry certain content is of any value in the fight for free speech. Sure, create a mirror of Radikal, but giving any credit or attribution to XS4ALL seems to be a poor choice. Paul "Still messing with mail apps so totally .sig-less" Bradley

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Conference on UK Crypto Initiative 19 May 1997
by Dave Banisar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

SCRAMBLING FOR SAFETY Privacy, security and commercial implications of the DTI's proposed encryption policy May 19, 1997 Computer Security Research Centre The London School of Economics Organised by: Privacy International Global Internet Liberty Campaign Chairman: Prof. Ian Angell, London School of Economics On May 19, the Computer Security Research Centre of the London School of Economics will host a one day meeting on the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry's policy paper "Licensing of Trusted Third Parties for the Provision of Encryption Services," The event is being jointly organised by Privacy International and the Global Internet Liberty Campaign. The LSE meeting - the only public meeting during the consultation phase - will comprehensively assess all aspects of the governments proposal. Security specialists, academics cryptographers, legal experts, cyber-rights groups, ISP's and other commercial organisations will participate. The DTI and representatives from other agencies will be in attendance for the entire day. There will be no cost for members of the public to attend. An interactive audiocast on the Internet will also be available. DRAFT AGENDA: Introduction to cryptography Welcome and opening remarks - Dr James Backhouse Keynote - Geoffrey Robertson QC (invited) The DTI proposals - presented by the DTI Perspectives: * Legal and Commercial - Peter Sommer (LSE) and Alistair Kelman (LSE) * Architectural and Technical - Dr. Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems - Phil Zimmermann, PGP Inc. - Dr Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge - Dr. Carl Ellison, Cybercash * Civil Rights and Privacy - Simon Davies, Privacy International * International - OECD (invited) Section by Section analysis of the document. Wrapup (Around 3:30) MORE INFORMATION More information on the conference and the DTI initiative is available from http://www.privacy.org/pi/conference/dti/. REGISTRATION To register for the conference, email Simon Davies at davies(a)privacy.org. ABOUT PRIVACY INTERNATIONAL Privacy International was formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations. With members in more than 40 countries, it has created an international movement that has helped to counter abuses of privacy by way of information technology. Privacy International has conducted campaigns in Europe, Asia and North America to raise awareness about the dangers of ID card systems, military surveillance, data matching, police information systems, and credit reporting. It is based in London, UK, and is administered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C. Privacy International publishes a quarterly newsletter (the International Privacy Bulletin) and organizes conferences each year on privacy and technology. More information is available at http://www.privacy.org/ ABOUT THE GLOBAL INTERNET LIBERTY CAMPAIGN The Global Internet Liberty Campaign is an international coalition of 28 human rights, free speech, cyber-liberties and privacy groups that has come together to promote free speech and privacy on the Internet. More information is available at http://www.gilc.org/ ------- David Banisar (Banisar(a)epic.org) * 202-544-9240 (tel) Electronic Privacy Information Center * 202-547-5482 (fax) 666 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, Suite 301 * HTTP://www.epic.org Washington, DC 20003 * PGP Key http://www.epic.org/staff/banisar/key.html

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Re: Layoffs at PGP
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

First ECache is seeking a qualified individual to head e-cash related development. Company is headquarted in Las Vegas, but candidate would ideally be located in SV. --Steve PGP mail preferred Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 Key available on BAL server, http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear | tel: (702) 658-2654 CEO | fax: (702) 658-2673 First ECache Corporation | 7075 West Gowan Road | Suite 2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I know not what instruments others may use, but as for me, give me Ecache or give me debt."

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