December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Where is the reorg FAQ?
by das＠razor.engr.sgi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I saw a reference to an FAQ by Adam Back, explaining the mailing lists that are being set up to replace cypherpunks(a)toad.com, but I didn't see the FAQ itself, on either cypherpunks-unedited or cypherpunks(a)toad.com, which I read as mail.cypherpunks. Maybe it fell through the cracks. Could Adam or somebody else repost it? Thanks. Btw, one of our many news servers has alt.cypherpunks, but it has very low traffic. I doubt people are not posting. Must be alt.cypherpunks missing from some upstream sites. -- Anil Das

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Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up"
by Cynthia H. Brown 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sat, 15 Feb 1997 paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk wrote: <earlier discussion excised> > Not my point, I didn`t say I would refuse, as in my example, to have > my car serviced by a woman, rather, that I would not feel comfortable > doing so. This is not prejudice, it is a statistical judgement based > on the fact that, as a percentage, I know few women who are competent > car mechanics but I know a number of men who, by the same criteria, I > would call competent. Acknowledged, agree to disagree :-). (Very few of my male friends can do more than sew on a button, but that doesn't weight my choice of a *professional* tailor.) It did, however, sound like you were agreeing with the previous poster's (more extreme) position. > Very much so, I did not intend, even though my post may have appeared > that way, for one minute to suggest that women were *unable* to carry > out certain tasks, just that they seem less suited to certain > vocations that others. For example, I know a number of good female > History or English students but very few good female mathematics > or computer science students. This is not, I believe, because women are > not "suited" to computer science rather that they have never been encouraged > at high school etc. to learn about such subjects which are seen as male preserves. > I wholeheartedly believe this should not be the case, and my original > post may have been misleading, I just believe that in the current > system very few women do become good at science/technical subjects. Agreed (sadly) that there is a dearth of role models like Mme. Curie or Roberta Bondar. There is also an unfortunate "geek stigma" often attached to those who are good at math or science (male or female). Whether this stigma discourages more girls than boys is questionable (psychology thesis, anyone?), but it has probably resulted in good-math-potential brains taking economics (or whatever) instead. Fewer competitors for the 56-bit prize, but also fewer brains thinking up better PRNGs. Cynthia =============================================================== Cynthia H. Brown, P.Eng. E-mail: cynthb(a)iosphere.net | PGP Key: See Home Page Home Page: http://www.iosphere.net/~cynthb/ Junk mail will be ignored in the order in which it is received. Klein bottle for rent; enquire within.

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Re: More on digital postage
by Cynthia H. Brown 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sat, 15 Feb 1997 Dale Thorn wrote: > jim bell wrote: > > > But having an address, and a walkway, and a doorbell is generally considered > > if not explicit permission, but at least toleration of the idea that > > somebody can walk up and knock on the door, etc. Having a telephone with a > > number that anyone can dial is going to result in some level of intrusion. > > Having a fax machine is a similar issue, unless technology provides a way to > > block unwanted faxes. > > There are some neato methods to deal with the door and the phone, > but I haven't investigated faxes since I don't run one at home. Boring but it works: There are plenty of fax-to-PC programs out there. Anyone can save *lots* of trees by viewing faxes on the screen before printing the useful page(s). Yes, I know, this means human intervention, but so does crumpling up the ***BUY NOW*** garbage, tossing it at the recycle bin, missing, cursing, etc. Here in Canada, the CRTC (Canadian Radio & Telecomms Commission) put out rules limiting the time of day, etc. for phone spam (voice or fax). Does anyone out there have the specifics of the CRTC regs? Cynthia =============================================================== Cynthia H. Brown, P.Eng. E-mail: cynthb(a)iosphere.net | PGP Key: See Home Page Home Page: http://www.iosphere.net/~cynthb/ Junk mail will be ignored in the order in which it is received. Klein bottle for rent; enquire within.

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Crypto code published in magazines
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm trying to find instances of crypto code published in computer magazines in the last few years. I know of Blowfish in DDJ, are there cases of more mainstream computer mags like Byte publishing crypto code (I know Byte did DES in 1977, I'm hoping for something a bit more recent)?. Please mail or cc replies directly to me, nntp.hks.net seems to have died :-(. Peter.

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Re: Mirrors and replies-to
by snow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> However, I would like it if the mirror operators would reinstantiate a > feature of the original list for me. The reply-to field on the mirrors is > currently set to cypherpunks(a)toad.com. On the original list, this was set > to "sender", both to keep people from replying to the list unnecessarily > (hah! :-)) but also to keep mail loops from forming. Mail loops could be a > big problem, especially when you guys put together your neo-netnews > mailring. (a little jyaism, that... :-)). As to the Mailloops: Majordomo seems (at least to me) to be pretty good about handling those kinds of things. If you configure it right. I would rather have the replyto:cypherpunks as I am rather lazy, and would like to be able to save everything in one file easily. Just my $0.01.

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Re: More on digital postage
by snow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mr. May wrote: > At 11:40 AM -0600 2/15/97, snow wrote: > >Mr. Bell wrote: > >> However, you connect that fax machine to a phone line, when you know full > >> well that should it be enabled to do so, it will automatically pick up the > >> phone when it "hears" a ring, and will print out a fax based on information > >> provided. It isn't clear why sending a fax is any "wronger" than mailing > >> junk mail, or making a (voice) phone call to somebody. > > That is a ridiculous argument. The door to my home is connected > >to the street,m and I know full well that that makes it easy for anyone > >to come wandering in to my home. Is it legal, just because I have my > >home hooked to the street, for someone to come in and help themselves to > >a beer out of my fridge? > > The proper parallel is to _knocking on the door_. Talking about "unwanted > phone calls" or "unwanted faxes" as being equivalent to entering a house > and wandering around is incorrect. With phone calls, yes. With unwanted faxes no. With Phone Calls, and knocks on the door I have the option of simply not answering. Faxes (in certain enviroments) you can't do that with. > Our society fairly reasonably allows tort relief for, say, having one's > doorbell rung frequently or at odd hours. On the fax issue, similar tort > relief could be obtained if a person or business was truly "under attack." > (Purists, like me, would probably prefer technological solutions even in > these cases. Leave a phone on answering machine mode, only switch on the > fax mode when a fax is expected, etc.) Or simply a societal acceptance of retaliation(sp?) Someone who constantly wakes you up in the middle of the night, well you just arrange it so they get no sleep. > These tort actions are a far cry from proposals that anyone whose knock on > the door, or phonecall, or e-mail, or fax is subject to criminal > prosecution under proposed new laws. > (I think the courts are already clogged enough, and I have faith that no > court in the land will accept a case where no real harm was done. A friend > of mine got mailbombed with 25,000 e-mail messages in one day, shutting > down his account until the mess could be cleaned up, and it's not even > likely he'll ever get any relief.) I (I think like you) feel that almost no one will get convicted of these "crimes" unless the attacker simply goes too far. > What CompuServe did was quite different, as CompuServe decided that some > e-mail would not be delivered. This is essentially comparable to the Postal > Service deciding that mail from the National Rifle Association is, to them, > "junk," or to the phone company deciding that phone calls from Libya or > Iraq or some other unfavored nation will be fed to a dead number. Not really. The US Postal service is a regulated monopoly, and is the only game in town. If they weren't a regulated monopoly, I wouldn't care if they refused to carry certain peices of mail, the mailer would have the option of simply using a different service. Thus with compuserve, they have the right (as a private company) to refuse to deliver what ever they wish. And their users have the right to go elsewhere. > Getting the courts and the regulators involved in deciding what speech is > junk and what is not junk is unconstitutional, which was my earlier point. Which I argee with.

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Re: (fwd) DES challenge organisation
by Mike Duvos 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes: > How can this be enforced? The RSADSI DES challenge is open > to all comers, and how do you prove that someone who finds > the key found it through this group effort? > I have a suspicion many people would be tempted to fill in > the RSA challenge form and email it in themselves. $10,000 > is a fair amount of money. Of course they will. If the unsearched portions of the keyspace are published, you can just sit back until the odds go up and then throw some CPU power at it. There is no obligation on the part of the individual who finds the key to not claim the prize personally. The issues of random keyspace assignment to protect against sabotage and centralized monolithic server vs autonomous client have been debated on the "muffin" list, where I have been lurking, but the people in charge seem to like explicit keyspace partitioning and servers a lot. Should be an interesting effort. By the way, does anyone know if des-challenge(a)muffin.org is alive? I haven't seen any messages from it in over a day and majordomo is not responding to inquiries. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd(a)netcom.com $ via Finger. $

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Re: More on digital postage
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

jim bell wrote: > At 11:40 AM 2/15/97 -0600, snow wrote: > >Mr. Bell wrote: > But having an address, and a walkway, and a doorbell is generally considered > if not explicit permission, but at least toleration of the idea that > somebody can walk up and knock on the door, etc. Having a telephone with a > number that anyone can dial is going to result in some level of intrusion. > Having a fax machine is a similar issue, unless technology provides a way to > block unwanted faxes. There are some neato methods to deal with the door and the phone, but I haven't investigated faxes since I don't run one at home. For the door, you can have a locked gate so they can't knock on the door, and an adjustable volume ringer or phone at the gate that's easy to ignore when you don't want them to know you're there and you're ignoring them. If the gate is not practical, at least put a locked screen door in front of the regular door, and the ringer or whatever outside the screen. For more aggressive pests, some signs might be necessary. For the phone, you can do like I did, and simply remove (or break) the outgoing message tape, so when they call, all they get is a beep and they'll have to think fast or they're cut off. Cuts way back on pesky calls, but allows your loyals to leave messages or speak so you'll know who it is.

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Re: DES challenge organisation
by Anil Das 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Feb 15, 5:01pm, Timothy C. May wrote: > Subject: Re: (fwd) DES challenge organisation > However, an uncoordinated search is only less efficient by a small factor > of two or three, with a 95% probability that the key will be found with an > effort "only" 3 times greater than with a coordinated search. (The Poisson > probability distribution is what's involved here, and the math is fairly > easy to work out.) > The motivation to crack the DES challenge is more the political one of proving DES (aka 56 bit encryption in the popular press) insecure than the financial one of getting the $10,000 prize. To actually get a good mesaure of the strength of DES using this approach, the number of machines that participated in the attack and the time they spend has to be known. This is a main reason why Germano's team prefers the search to be co-ordinated and why they have been asking people not to start the search before the server is ready. > One of the problems with a coordinated search, if the remaining keyspace to > be doled out is publically announced, is that as the keyspace is searched > and a key _not_ found, the remaining keyspace is increasingly more tempting > for "independent searchers" to search. Sort of the way the odds on some > lotteries actually become "acceptable" as the lottery pot grows. The > organizer of the coordinated search must then, I surmise, keep the > assignments secret and dole out keyspace securely. Knowing the number of people they were able to get to participate in the RC5 attack, this is not a significant problem. They are going to have 5000 clients nibbling away on the not-yet-searched keyspace. Some Johnny-come-lately trying to muscle in on the action towards the end is not going to make a significant dent in their chances of hitting the correcy key first. > Having the prize money go to the finder of the key, as opposed to some > artificial division between EFF, Gutenberg, etc., is also an incentive for > people to contribute more CPU time. Again, they didn't have a problem getting people to join in on the RC5/32/12/6 attack. At least the same number of people can be expected to join in for the DES attack, giving an estimated search time of around eight months, if nobody else builds a hardware DES cracker first. -- Anil Das

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Re: FBI_100
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

John Young wrote: > "Phone Companies Balk At Latest Plan by FBI." Markoff. > Telcos are arguing that the new system will be far more > intrusive and expensive than industry first thought, and > would expand LEA wiretap capabilities 100-fold. "This is > kind of scary. What does the FBI know about our future > that we don't?" > See the FBI's latest wiretap plan at: > http://jya.com/fbi011497.txt You could start by interviewing Freeh's own kids, who conspired (according to the L.A. Times) to have the local police make a call the other night. According to Freeh, "I dealt with my kids in a most un-Constitutional and autocratic manner" (quote approx.).

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