December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

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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Need Info
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

sampler-request(a)lmboyd.com wrote: > ====================================================== > Q. Can you confirm the claim that a ferocious bull won't > attack a naked human being? > A. Hard to find an authority on this. Those who know > won't explain the circumtances wherein they found out. > Such has been reported, though. snow? Zooko? Anyone...? > LMBoyd Web Site / U. S. Newspapers / Start Email / Stop Email > http://www.LMBoyd.com/postscript.htm

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Secret Information
by Newfile＠man.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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The 5th Horseman: Cryptoanarchist doctors.
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I don't often get Forbes, but the Oct 6 issue caught my eye. Leafing through it, I found something fun in the letters column. It's in response to a 'fact & comment' column in the Sept 22 issue, the core of which is: ---------------- Here's how this basic attack on our personal freedom will work: A doctor who provides medical services to a Medicare-eligible patient without billing Medicare must sign an affidavit to the Secretary of Health and Human Services that he or she will not treat a single Medicare patient for the next two years. Any doctor found treating both Medicare patients and Medicare-eligible private patients will be subject to fines and perhaps prison. As Moffit points out, Section 4507 is "deliberately designed to make private contracting and medicine all but impossible except for physicians who reside in very wealthy communities." Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) correctly observes that this prohibition is the equivalent of Social Security's barring retirees from dealing with stockbrokers: "Surely, a law that made it illegal to supplement with private funds the amount received from Social Security would be met with disbelief and derision." Yet that is the equivalent of what this Medicare regulation does. ------------------ The letter reads: SIR: I have been treating Medicare patients for cash without filing Medicare claims for years. I do not intend to stop. If the government receives no forms, how will it know that a beneficiary received care from me? And the feds can't seize my records. They are all computerized and encrypted. Anthony A. Cassens, M.D Los Angeles, Calif. --------------------- Peter Trei trei(a)process.com

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Fund-Raisers Allege long term DNC Wrongdoing
by Attila T. Hun 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Two Democratic fund-raisers have agreed to testify in exchange for immunity that Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 and the Democratic Party engaged in an array of questionable activities, a House committee disclosed today. see: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-House-Fund-Raising.html the allegations will cover incidents from 1991 to the present including Indonesian, Chinese, and other foreign interests; details on Peter Trei; influence peddling; a letter with Clinton's name on it for a now SE Asia head of state, etc. Big Macs as legal tender. bacon extra. these folks are ready to do some serious singing! the proposed revelators were convicted and sentenced on one of the charges and are apparently willing to sing to avoid prosecution on the rest. if they had enough evidence to put them in jail for the tip of the iceberg... so, when the fat lady sings, and Valhalla incinerates, do you think the market will have a confidence crisis? too bad stock certificates are electronic; they could bring on the dancing girls and have a tickertape parade with the output of the shredders as the fraudsters run for cover. Wall Street is going to look like Pol Pot came to visit, left a few calling cards, too. since clinton has been busy tossing Gore to the sharks, maybe we will have the Grinch as President --he's next in line. at least the Grinch will look better in a Santa suit! he may be just in time. that might be enough to have the whole infrastructure collapse; it might be time to close the bankruptcy proceedings initiated by Mr. "chicken in every pot" himself on 09 Mar 1933. ironic that his ad her intellectual <g> baggage is being cared for by the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania --full circle! as debtors are absolved when bankruptcy is satisfied or liquitdated, do you suppose we can get rid of that stupid fringed [admirality] flag and the contract courts? maybe even have common law and habeus corpus restored? of course, we must remember to hire the Merchant of Venice's lawyer to save us each a pound of flesh. dang, I had old William's plot phone number here somewhere. naw, that's too much to ask for; the four horsemen just came over the horizon... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQCVAwUBNDvTOb04kQrCC2kFAQHm+gP/YEG9GK7jLSy7nJ4p/jQ+C967M4+tPwEs nBkQZ5qwCYm2M3U2D0UQ/hE3Pcphrfcc8xzCNstIjtM5bS4ZW7zGqQJG8PwZzRc6 QkSaEOigL4USpj208juDTQB4dxg57EGjQTLCLFma3J481zEVWUXcJPsXs9ee2WYR HC6se+auV1M= =eCld -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[news] Azalea releases encryption software
by Vipul Ved Prakash 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

*** Azalea releases encryption software Azalea Software has just released three new encryption and security products: DESTools v1.5, BlowfishTools v1.5 and SHATools v1.0. All three packages are SDK's (software developers kits) targeting Windows developers who need to add encryption and security features to the applications they write. DESTools and BlowfishTools provide encryption and decryption based on the DES (Data Encryption Standard) and Blowfish algorithms respectively. DES provides 56-bit keys and is used extensively in banking and finance. (PR Newswire) For the full text story, http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=5315843-c31 -- Powell lingered. "How's Earth?" It was a conventional enough question and Muller gave the conventional answer, "Still spinning." -- "Reason", Asimov. ================================================================== Vipul Ved Prakash | - Electronic Security & Crypto vipul(a)best.com | - Web Objects 91 11 2233328 | - PERL Development 198 Madhuban IP Extension | - Linux & Open Systems Delhi, INDIA 110 092 | - Networked Virtual Spaces

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Anthrax Bombs
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:37 AM -0700 10/8/97, Bill Frantz wrote: >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. I'd fear an "anthrax bomb" a lot more than a 2 KT suitcase nuke. (If I lived in a crowded target zone, aka a soft target, which I don't.) (As is well-known, or should be, folks survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki as close as 400 meters from ground zero. And they were both roughly 20 KT nukes. Inasmuch as the blast effects scale as the cube root of megatonnage, a 2 KT blast might be expected to be survivable as close as a few hundred meters or even less. Of course, some will die even out at a 1000 meters, but not many.) By comparison, anthrax bacillus is relatively easy to manufacture, and aerosol dispersion could kill hundreds of thousands or more before even being detected. Aerosolized dispersion in Washington or Manhattan could be a far worse human and infrastructure disaster than a suitcase nuke. I expect this sort of attack to occur fairly soon. (The Aum Shinretsu cult in Japan was working with such things, including Sarin, a nerve toxin. Some of the sites knocked out in Iraq were CBW sites.) P.S. I used to work a lot with radioisotopes. Pu-239 has a long half-life, as noted here by others, and is not going to decay significantly in human times. But poising and neutron-stealing can render nukes duds in just a few years. However, battlefield nukes are typically made with some design choices which minimize the routine maintenance/refurbishing which the main MIRV nukes need. My understanding is that most of the NDT (nuclear demolition) devices have a shelf-life of up to a decade or so. Anthrax is a whole lot cheaper. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Secure phone
by bureau42 Anonymous Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

John Deters wrote: > At 12:44 PM 10/7/97 -0700, Eric Blossom you wrote: > >I wrote: > >> Therefore, man-in-the-middle can be more precisely described as an > >> unauthenticated end-point problem. Therefore, without authentication, > >> there is no defense (yet) against MITM attacks. > >I concur from the theoretical point of view. > It would be easy enough to "trick" the MITM into exposing their existance > anyway, just by using digits that come up in conversation. > A sudden dropout of sound (or "accidental" loss of > connection) while the MITM recognizes the trap and tries to backpedal will > be instantly noticed. Human protocols are resilient, whereas mathematical > protocols are precise. Speaking from a practical standpoint, since I have been the target of a variety of electronic surveillance for over a quarter of a century, the Man-in-the-Middle rarely operates so well that there are not a number of small anomalies that one cannot spot in the quality and/or flow of the service they are receiving. On the other hand, they rarely screw up so badly as to make it glaringly obvious what they are doing. The main thing, when one has reason to believe that quality or technical problems may be the result of MITM, is to take subtle actions such as the one suggested above, in order to force the MITM to adjust on-the-fly to situations that you create in order to monitor the monitor. e.g. - "Call me in 5 minutes at 555-PAY-PHONE for the secret code." If you already have a shill using that pay phone to monitor sudden anomalies in the function, fine, but it is ususally sufficient to take a call at the phone in five minutes, and the results of a quick patch will be noticeable. - "Do you have a radio playing, or something?" Hi-tech MITMs use a white-noise system designed to provide a cover for noise from their equipment, and a statement such as the above will invariably cause them to adjust it, usually resulting in a greater clarity or greater fuzziness on the line. Similar analysis of one's email, particularly if you have several recipients who can send you full feedback on timing/routing, etc., can reveal consistent differences between letters to your mom, and your death threats against the King (as well as letter to your mom which contain death threats against the King). Bottom line: If you are sending something worthy of being monitored, then your actions and methodologies should reflect the belief that you *are* being monitored. Please destroy your hard drive after reading this post. TruthMonger

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

17 Dec '03

> There are two reasons which are given as to why someone might want to > have GAK installed for company use. > > 1. to allow access to important material lost in the mail system in the > event that an employee is hit by a bus > > 2. to allow management to spot check the emails being sent and received > > > Argument 1 seems pretty flimsy to me. I reiterate my comment in an earlier > post: who in their right mind keeps their _only_ copy of ultra valuable > company information bouncing around in the email system? Did those arguing > for this position not notice that sometimes email gets lost in transit? > > Regardless, if PGP claims to be catering to those who use this argument, and > to not want to try that hard to make it impossible to by-pass, the more > secure, and less GAK friendly way to do it is to have the mail client > software archive the email sent and received. Two problems. First, not all mail clients let you archive the mail in a different form than how it arrived. Netscape 3 worked like this, maybe 4 too. If the mail comes in encrypted just to an employee key, that is how it will be stored, and no business access is possible. Second, what if an employee doesn't come back from vacation? You've got messages sitting in his inbox which go back three weeks. All encrypted to his personal key, which is gone. It's been long enough that the senders may not have backups any more. It's all lost, and at best the company is going to put its partners and customers to a great deal of inconvenience by making them re-send everything they've sent in the last three weeks, not to mention making the company look incompetent.

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update.340 (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: >From physnews(a)aip.org Wed Oct 8 14:08:52 1997 Date: Wed, 8 Oct 97 09:47:35 EDT From: physnews(a)aip.org (AIP listserver) Message-Id: <9710081347.AA08262(a)aip.org> To: physnews-mailing(a)aip.org Subject: update.340 PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 340 October 8, 1997 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein TURNING ONIONS INTO DIAMONDS. Nano-diamonds can be created without high pressure by squeezing carbon "onions" (nested buckyball-like structures) with ion beams. Graphite material can be made into diamond the hard way, with the use of high pressure (above 10^6 atmospheres), high temperature, and the use of catalysts. But recently scientists have been able to bombard carbon onions with electron beams and now ion beams as well, and have been able to convert the onions almost completely into diamonds, up to 100 nm in size. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart (Florian Banhart, banhart(a)wselix.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de) use a beam of neon ions to pelt the onions, which act like miniature pressure cells. With larger ion accelerators, one should be able to make macroscopic amounts of irradiation-induced diamond. (Experimental work: Wesolowski et al., Applied Physics Letters, 6 Oct. 1997; theory paper (Zaiser and Banhart) upcoming in Physical Review Letters; figure at www.aip.org/physnews/graphics.) MOLECULAR HYDROGEN SHOULD BECOME SUPERFLUID if placed on the right surface, say physicists at the University of Illinois (David Ceperley, ceperley(a)ncsa.uiuc.edu) Superfluids, substances that flow without friction, are few in number: liquid helium-4, special gases of rubidium and sodium atoms (in the form of Bose-Einstein condensates), pairs of helium-3 atoms, and pairs of electrons (which flow through superconductors). The trouble with getting hydrogen molecules (H2) to become superfluid is that they are all too ready to combine with each other into H2 solids. By laying them on a silver substrate and by salting them with a pinch of alkali metal atoms, the H2's should be able to resist the tendency to solidify all the way down to zero temperature. At 1.2 K they would become a superfluid, the Illinois theorists predict. They believe this can be carried out over the next year, after which experimentalists could explore unique hybrid superfluids, such as H2/He-4 mixtures. (M.C. Gordillo and D.M. Ceperley, Physical Review Letters, 13 Oct; see figure at www.aip.org/physnews/graphics) A POLYMER THAT CAN TRANSFER ENERGY BETWEEN DIFFERENT LIGHT BEAMS has been demonstrated by researchers at UC-San Diego (W.E. Moerner, 619-822-0453), opening possibilities for inexpensive and easily manufacturable "optical transistors" that can amplify or attenuate a light beam. The San Diego polymer is an example of a "photorefractive" material, a material that adjusts its structure and electronic properties when two or more light beams combine on it to form an interference pattern. On these materials, light from one beam can bend in such a way as to bounce back in the direction of a second beam, adding energy to it. Inorganic versions of these materials exist, but they are difficult to make and can cost thousands of dollars for a tiny cube. Moerner constructed a polymer whose three main components carried out essential tasks: buckyballs offer electrons, poly (n-vinyl carbazole) (PVK) molecules carry these electrons along their backbone, and PDCST molecules stretch or contract, changing the way light bends in these regions. The researchers demonstrated a "net gain" of about 5, in which one of the laser beams shining on the material gained energy. These materials have numerous possible applications, including correcting distorted images. (Science, 25 July.)

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