December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

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by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For what its worth; Australian Financial Review 8-10-97 http://www.afr.com.au/content/971008/inform/inform5.html ********************************** Power play to plug in the Internet In what could usher in a new era of competition between telephone companies and electric utilities, engineers have developed a breakthrough technology that lets homeowners make phone calls and access the Internet at high speeds via the electric outlets in their walls. If the technology from United Utilities plc and Northern Telecom Ltd proves commercially viable, it could transform power lines around the world into high-speed conduits on the information superhighway. Because electric utilities are wired into virtually every home and business, the new technology could provide easy entry into the phone and Internet access businesses, thus posing a serious threat to current providers of those services. United Utilities, a power company, and Northern Telecom, a Canadian maker of telecommunications gear, confirmed that their system was "ready for mass market", but declined to reveal details. The two companies have tested phone service over power lines in about a dozen UK households over the past 12 months -- with positive results, according to Alistair Henderson, chief of technology at Energis plc, the telecommunications unit of National Grid Group plc. AP-Dow Jones =A9 This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited. ********************************** Ooops i didnt know my mailer was loaded orifacer

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privacy rights: giving away the store
by Attila T. Hun 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- do you believe this? so what happened to our privacy? the man screams about privacy and encryption one minute, then: > What if I told you there's one easy thing you can do to make > your 1998 Internet experiences simpler and safer? Get a > digital ID. Jesse Berst, ZDNet AnchorDesk, full story at http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_1324.html really? > Also called digital certificates, digital IDs (DIDs) are > like electronic passports -- universal ID cards that prove > your identity to anyone who needs to know. You get a DID > from an independent certificate authority such as VeriSign, > which performs a background check first. just what I wanted, a fucking background check. nice schill, Jesse. OK, I'll call my broker and buy Verisign stock. they're going to be worth bocu bucks taking over the fascists' National ID project. > ...Most Web servers have it already. Most email programs > will have it by the end of the year. And both major > browsers... gee, that's clever. but The NYTimes, The Times [London], the Telegraph, and so on, already log me in immediately with a cookie I authorized. why do I need certified identity? even Wired mag knows me as Attila T. Hun. interNIC knows me as Attila T. Hun, I even get mail to my drop box as Attila T. Hun.... My check writer can even print checks as Attila T. Hun (the bank does not care what the name on the check is --just the MICR numbers). > ...Your bank knows for sure that it's really you... sure, after I enter my password... so what's the big deal? that's all I do now. automated, too. > Simpler Surfing. Sick of separate names and passwords > for each site? A single DID will authenticate you for > any site that supports the technology -- about 20,000 at > last count, including Netscape Netcenter, Internet > Shopping Network, K-Mart, Cellular One and many others. OK, but I still must ID my system with my National-ID card available from the cookie wash. I dont see any place to turn it off! bastards! --they've implanted it under my skin. why? so big government or big business can really catalogue my political views by the stories I read? maybe it's my anti-authoritarian, psychotic behaviour and rants against fascist oligarchies, or, maybe because I post to Cypherpunks? > ...you'll help the Internet make an important transition > --from a fun place to surf to a safe place to do business. aah haa! I knew there was a reason for all this hoopla! What's good for Bill Gate$ is good for the country. ...uuh, sorry Mr. AL (GM) $loan; I meant to quote you correctly: "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." > A safer Internet is at hand. All you have to do is seize it. no, jesse, you got that one wrong --the coy fascist dog F[reeh,uck] just seized you --and the rest of the suckers that fall for Verisign's National-ID. attila still going out... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQCVAwUBNDuu5704kQrCC2kFAQFXxgQAo/THjROjaWOCEdsFD0K9Yy1SXu6G2I3Z W7GDfTEv4bwalBUSwzHQJjPNcfrYnRoNpxkWm+kHiqolvoJP2XKtk89tnTumwyvK EfBLPbxRz0lfsXmxy5iNJXWEyJ1Tb3mYbu5CQuAhkWpFhP4xVaRsVSDzCzkmtnBs 7YRH8+KSwoI= =piYW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Jackbooted Posturing in Panama
by Eric Cordian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Five years after the US military murdered thousands of Panamanian civilians, and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves prior to the arrival of the press, the US is again demonstrating its unmitigated arrogance on the world scene by staging a show trial of a Panamanian citizen accused of killing a US soldier. Jury selection began Tuesday in the trial of Pedro Miguel Gonzalez, the son of a prominent Panamanian politician. Gonzalez, who was at a demonstration protesting Bush's impending visit, denies any connection to the incident in which a US vehicle was sprayed with gunfire. He has been in hiding since the 1992 incident, fearing he could not get a fair trial from the US-installed Panamanian government. At the time, the US government promptly termed the killing of the US soldier a "terrorist act", and offered a $100,000 reward for the identity of the perpetrators. The pretense for the US invasion, and subsequent massacre, as announced on television by President Bush, was that Panamanian soldiers had kicked a US soldier who had run a roadblock. The hidden agenda was retaining US control over the Panama canal after it appeared relations between the US and Panama might turn sour. In addition to killing thousands of civilians, the US also kidnapped Panama's President, Manual Noreiga, and convicted him in the United States of various vague drug-related charges, after installing a regieme sympathetic to the United States. Gonzalez faces 20 years in prison if convicted. -- 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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Re: russia_1.html
by Bill Frantz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:01 AM -0700 10/8/97, Peter Trei wrote: >I don't know if it's comforting or worrying knowing that these >devices degrade - any in the hands of terrorists have a limited >time that they are a threat, but that fact may pressure a terrorist >to 'use it or lose it'. What I have heard about these suitcase nukes is that they yield about 1-2 kilotons. I know of no technical reason for them to be thermonuclear devices. As such, the decay of tritium would not seem to affect them. (They will still need a source of neutrons, which might go bad faster than the plutonium/U235.) I feel very little comfort. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | Internal surveillance | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | helped make the USSR the | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | nation it is today. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Re: What's really in PGP 5.5?
by Jim Russell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The swirl of controversy that has arisen since the 2 Oct announcement of the PGP Business Security Suite has been quite amazing. Yet, all of the focus has been on what's been *added* to PGP v5.5. Jon Callas said it explicitly: >>Corporate Message Recovery is included *only* in PGP for Business Security. What sense, then, can I make of the following? I have been examining the published source code for PGP v5.0 for Personal Privacy (note that this is *not* a corporate version), and have discovered that this recovery scheme already appears to be in place, in some form at least, in that version. The following code appears in the published pgp.c, lines 518-537: /* * This is our version of "Commercial Key Escrow". * * A company can set the CompanyKey in the site-wide * configuration file and it will be added to the * recipient list for all encrypted messages. Then * again, the user can override the setting in their * own pgp.cfg or on the command line. */ companyKey = pgpenvGetString (env, PGPENV_COMPANYKEY, NULL, NULL); if (companyKey && *companyKey) { /* Add the company key to the recipient list */ e = ringSetFilterSpec (ui_arg->arg.ringset, ringset, companyKey, PGP_PKUSE_ENCRYPT); if (e <= 0) exitUsage(e); } This certainly *looks* like the implementation that is being discussed in the press release, although I did not find it mentioned in any documentation for PGP for Personal Privacy v5.0. The questions this code brings to my mind are: 1. Does this mean that even the Personal Privacy versions of PGP have a message recovery scheme available? The 2 Oct press release from PGP states that the corporate message recovery "transparently integrates with *any* version of PGP client software". (Emphasis mine). 2. If this is implemented via a configuration setting, does it provide an opportunity for an attacker to reset the "CompanyKey" to their own key? In the Windows environment, it appears that PGP uses the System Registry to hold configuration settings. Is it possible for me to trick someone into running a .REG script that will set the CompanyKey to a key to which I hold the private component? 3. This appears to me to be quite contradictory to the descriptions posted by Jon Callas on 7 Oct. The procedure that Jon describes, using an attribute in the self-signature, would tell an encryptor external to The Corporation to use the "skeleton key" on INCOMING mail. The 5.0 code seems to imply an automatic extra recipient on OUTGOING mail, and this impression is reinforced by the description of the SMTP server policy enforcement in the 2 Oct product description on PGP's web site. (Let's not forget that SMTP is a protocol for OUTGOING mail.) Which is it, or is it actually both? Now, I realize that the long-time PGP users, the computer experts who can take the source code and recompile the application, could simply remove any sections they don't like, or go into the configuration settings and change everything to their liking. However, isn't encryption supposed to be moving to a new target audience, the people who use a computer as a tool, and don't necessarily know the internals? These are the people who need to feel secure using encryption, and magic, invisible encryption to a third-party is probably not going to give them warm fuzzy feelings. Jim Russell <jrussell(a)syndata.com> Senior Engineer SynData Technologies, Inc. http://www.syndata.com

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Question
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 8 Oct 1997 11:24:51 -0400 From: alain(a)research.bell-labs.com (Alain Mayer) To: rah(a)shipwright.com Subject: Question Hi Bob, stypid question: how to I post a message to the Cypherpunks. I have an announcement on a new method to fight junk e-mail, which has been integrated in LPWA (nee Janus). See below Best, -- Alain Hi, we are Bell Labs researchers announcing a method to help you combat junk e-mail (spam) via a new kind of e-mail address, termed a target-revokable e-mail address. Every time you give out your e-mail address, e.g., when you register at a Web-site or post to a Usenet newsgroup, there is a risk that your address will end up in the hands of an e-mail a marketeer or spammer. Until now, you had no way to undo giving out your e-mail address. Target-revokable e-mail addresses effectively let you do that. Currently, most e-mail users typically have a very small number of e-mail addresses. For example, one at the office and one for private use with an ISP at home. In contrast, the principle behind target-revokable e-mail addresses is that each user has many e-mail addresses. In fact, users can have a different e-mail address for each group or entity with whom they interact. Furthermore, target revokable e-mail addresses are defined such that a recipient of such an address cannot guess other target-revokable addresses belonging to the same sender and destined for different groups. Target-revokable e-mail addresses have been integrated with LPWA for easy use with Web sites and Usenet newsgroups (more application to follow at a later date). The Lucent Personalized Web Assistant (LPWA, formerly known as Janus) is a new tool that provides you with privacy, convenience and security when browsing the Web. LPWA is having a highly successful test run, having won PC Magazine "Developer's site of the Week Award". For more info and instructions on how to use target-revokable e-mail: http://lpwa.com:8000 ==================== --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

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Thanks Peter! / Re: russia_1.html
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Peter Trei wrote: > I conceed that it may not be the Pu decay products that cause the > limited shelf life of thermonuclear weapons; I suspect that it may > be components of the 'pit', which produces the initial burst of > neutrons to kick of the reaction (the pit is effectively a small > fission bomb). This 'pit' may contain tritium (pit design is a very > well guarded secret, and I've seen very little about it in the open > literature). Peter, I lost your email address when I spilled Scotch on my computer and lost all my data, so I thought I'd send this to the CypherPunks list. Thanks for explaining to me how to decide where the 'yellow' wire goes. My 'you know what' ought to work now (but I'm not going to try it at home, kids...heh...heh). I'm going to go to Washington as soon as I get my cast off. I left in on an extra week since I make more money spare-changing since I got it, and now I have enough to take a bus to 'you know where,' DC. Tell Declan that he should probably go visit his mom, or something, like next Friday, until at least Monday (because that's when my mom leaves Washington, 'you know where.'--{boy, is *she* going to be sorry she grounded me on my uncle's weekend away from the 'Home'.}) My uncle's going to be mad when he finds out I took his suitcase, but he couldn't even get his Heathkit radio to work, and I *almost* did. Besides, you should never trust anyone over fifteen, eh? (And these things are dangerous in the wrong hands, eh?) Human Gus-Peter p.s. - Cynthia still hasn't answered me as whether or not she is wearing any panties. Is she stuck-up, or something? p.p.s. - I wonder if Dimitri thinks its suspicious that your first name is the same as my last one. Of course, if he thought we were doing what John-John do, then ? the Playpus would call you a pedal-file, eh? (Unless you were doing it to a girl my age, and then he would call you a 'petal-file.') {<-- that's a sexist joke}

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Re: your mail
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>> >>>Here is a cool test!! Just write everything down and find out >>everything you >>>need to know about yourself. My answers were GREAT (and some true) >see >>how >>>yours turn out! :-) Don't strain yourlsef thinking though! >>> >>> >>>Chapter I >>> >>>Arrange the following 5 animals according to your preference: >>> >>>Cow >>> >>>Tiger >>> >>>Sheep >>> >>>Horse >>> >>>Monkey >>> >>> >>>Chapter II >>> >>>Describe the following : >>> >>>Dog >>> >>>Cat >>> >>>Rat >>> >>>Coffee >>> >>>Ocean >>> >>> >>>Chapter III >>> >>>Think of somebody (who also knows you) that you can relate to the >>following >>>colors : >>>( Pls. don't repeat your answer twice only one person for each color) >>> >>>Yellow >>> >>>Orange >>> >>>Red >>> >>>White >>> >>>Green >>> >>>And finally indicate your favorite number and favorite day >>> >>> >>>-----------------------------------------------------(See >>interpretations >>>below) : >>> >>>But before going on, just make one wish.......=) >>> >>> >>> >>>Chapter I >>> >>>(This will define your priorities in life) >>> >>>Cow means career >>> >>>Tiger means pride >>> >>>Sheep means love >>> >>>Horse means family >>> >>>Monkey means money >>> >>> >>>Chapter II >>> >>>Your description of Dog implies your own personality >>> >>>Your description of Cat implies your partner's personality >>> >>>Your description of Rat implies your enemy's personality >>> >>>Your description of Coffee is how you interpret sex >>> >>>Your description of Ocean implies your own life >>> >>> >>>Chapter III >>> >>>Yellow - somebody who will never forget you >>> >>>Orange - someone whom you can consider as your real friend >>> >>>Red - someone you really love >>> >>>White - your soulmate >>> >>>Green - a person who will you always remember for the rest of your >>life >>> >>>Your favorite number will be the number of persons you will be sending >>this >>>test to and the favorite day will be the day that your dream will >come >>true! >>> >>>Hope you had fun! > > > >______________________________________________________ >Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com > > <---- End Forwarded Message ---->

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Immoral Cryptographers vs. Kindlier, Gentler Cryptographers
by bureau42 Anonymous Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

* In April, Premier Lien Chan of Taiwan ordered a crackdown on the national craze of public betel-nut chewing, which he said was responsible for mouth cancer, slimy sidewalks when they are spit out, and immorality, in that they are mostly sold by young, underdressed women at sidewalk stands. The betel nut is reportedly a mild stimulant and is slightly more expensive than a cigarette. * The Washington Post reported in May that some tribes in Yemen routinely kidnap tourists and hold them for days, though treating them well, regaling them with propaganda, and ultimately offering them to the government in exchange for political concessions, such as new road construction. Said the speaker of the Yemen parliament, "Kidnapping is part of tourism. [The] tourist will end up learning about the customs of the tribes, as well as their good hospitality." ------ To read these News of the Weird newspaper columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html (That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no audio. Just text. Deal with it.)

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Re: Internet Via Electric Lines
by Ian Sparkes 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 12:06 08.10.97 -6, Peter Trei wrote: >> Ian Sparkes <ian.sparkes(a)t-online.de> > >> Peter wrote: >> >[...] Putting a few optical >> >fibers into a power line is cheap, easy, and widely done. >> >> But much cheaper and easier is using the signalling gulleys that run >> along the side of the railways - no High Tension precautions, no >> scaling pylons. This, incidently is the reason that a number of >> telecomms consortia (in europe, at least) include a railway element - >> they provide the long-haul backbone. > >It looks like we're seeing different parts of the problem. You're >worried about the long-haul backbone. I'm trying to see ways to >get a 10Gbps fibre into my living room. > >The backbone cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of getting fiber >into every house in the country. > Maybe in retrospect I was just tugging your leash a bit, for which I apologise. I agree, in principle there are few entities which are more aptly placed than the power utilities to provide a roots to leaves high- capacity network into your home. Telephone companies could do it, although the very final stage in the link (twisted copper) is a capacitive load, and therefore not very well suited to high frequencies. Power wires, on the other hand, would exhibit better properties and are universally installed. The solution, however, must be a fibre/copper hybrid. The trick will be getting the bridges between fibre/copper and copper/copper (across the step-downs) cheap and reliable enough. This is probably the breakthrough. The post from Judith Lewis seems to hint at about 0.5MB/s. Good enough for your average Joe. Sorry for the obtuseness of my reply. Ian -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBNDu6gvzOjjBJiFUeEQIewACdGPe87UKBq7aGRkFew/02fHNBwh0AnAqN eidJ2PV2IVO05Gg+ZSXD9NRI =RxdS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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