December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Emptying the trash...
by Toto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Sent to Netscape feedback defartment] The next trash I will be emptying will be my installation of Netscape. Netscape has been my only browser since gaining InterNet access, but I am not going to use a product from a company who requires me to jump through hoops to ensure privacy through strong encryption and then tells me to fuck off because they are incapable of verifying my net persona and/or location. If Netscape intends to make their software compliant with the wishes of those who want to illegally monitor my location and identity, then they should at least require those fascists to supply you with this information for you to use for my convenience in acquiring your product. I send weekly death threats to Bill Gates, but I'll bet my ass that Micro$not lets me download their browser so that he can go to his grave clutching my cash in his hand. ~~~~ Toto <president(a)whitehouse.gov>

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stand-by
by an105＠hotmail.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, after adjusting claims for several insurance companies, I found one thing the same. No one seems to know much about what they are entitled to. So I decided to help the public towards even footing with insurance adjusters. I have been a crusader for policyholder's rights for a good many years since and received acclaim from state departments' of insurance and state Governors for my work, albeit obscure. Anyway, you may want to bookmark my "deserve" website just in case that rainy day happens to come your way. Socrates never sold insurance, but his words apply to this industry as well: "The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance." Best wishes, Tony Braga deserve link: http://www.sure-net.com/deserve.html

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Re: Prediction: NAI will issue a "Clarification" about PGP from Europe
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Robert Hettinga wrote: >John has the drugs. Talk to him. Then you'll ***Understand***... You talking to me? Look at me! Let's settle this now. Get it straight from the purple nose: Not drugs, nuts, A-grade shit, highest quality, cheap E$, dosing me and the other Messiahs vampiring Big DaddyMommy -- that spaced-out hermaphroditic duo's infinitely beyond psycho-pharmacological cryptanalysis. Try it, you'll like it. Endorsed by Thor and Brunhilde, Zeus and Juno, Samson and Delilah, Amazons and Moses, Cleopatra and Nero, Jesus and FHC, Atilla and Joan d'Arc, Machiavelli and Teresa de Avilla, Nietzsche and Cosima, Hitler and Eva, Ghandi and Queen Mary, Elvis and Janis, Paglia and Dice Clay, Teller and Penn, Pogo and Dilbert, NSA and BXA, and others here faking normalcy: Watch for very clear articulation, point by point argument, neat numbered paragraphs, implacable coherency, occcasional bullet spray for emphasis, peculiar indents and concussion grenades, unpredictable ellipses of EM wipeout, wide-area split infinitives, carpet bombs of dangling modifiers, genocidal threats at contra-blancos, vile accusations of self-flagellations, all with not a hair or beard out of place, a sure sign of uh oh, don't jiggle this nitroid. That's just those who post. The others back there, well.

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Rivest's Chaffing and Winnowing
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times, March 22, 1998, p. 31. New Method To Veil Data Could Upstage Export Policy Cryptologists find a way to foil eavesdroppers without secret codes. By John Markoff San Francisco, March 21 -- One of the nation's leading computer scientists has proposed a novel technique for scrambling data that could circumvent Government export policies aimed at limiting the foreign sale of encryption technology. The technique, which was described this week in an Internet discussion among computer researchers, was introduced by Ronald L. Rivest, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the inventors of the most widely used commercial encryption scheme, RSA. The new approach, which is described in a short technical paper that has been posted to Mr. Rivest's M.I.T. Web site (http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/chaffing.txt) is described as "chaffing and winnowing" digital information instead of encrypting it. According to Mr. Rivest's paper, it is possible to hide a message by breaking it into packets that are then secretly identified as good information, or "wheat," and gibberish, or "chaff," in such a way that an eavesdropper cannot distinguish the two. Because the individual packets would not be encrypted, Mr. Rivest said, such a system would circumvent current export restrictions. The two principal ways of communicating in secret are encryption and steganography. Steganography uses computer techniques to embed a secret message in a document like a digital image. In encryption, secret information is encoded using functions that require difficult mathematical tasks to decode, and it has become the standard way of transmitting secret information electronically. There are no restrictions on the domestic use of this technology, but the Government has been trying to force the industry to adopt standards that would permit law-enforcement officials to have mathematical keys allowing them to decode messages without the knowledge of the sender or receiver. The Clinton Administration says the standards are needed to fight crime and terrorism. Opponents argue that the Government decoding keys, to be stored in computers, could easily be stolen, compromising privacy and the security of credit card numbers and other personal information. In terms of exports, with few exceptions the Government limits the software to codes that can be easily broken. "Winnowing does not employ encryption, and so does not have a 'decryption key,' " Mr. Rivest wrote in his paper. "As usual, the policy debate about regulating technology ends up being obsoleted by technological innovations." Peter Neumann, an SRI International computer scientist who has read Mr. Rivest's paper, said that although "there is still no certainty that this is a practical idea," if it works, "it throws another clinker at the Justice Department." Other cryptography experts said they were uncertain whether it would be possible to skirt Government export restrictions in this way, but that the idea was an impressive new approach that might have valuable commercial applications. "He's a very clever guy," said George Spix, a Microsoft researcher who specializes in cryptography policy issues. " It goes to show that for all the technological wizardry in the world, there's nothing like an intellect." One of the potential limitations of the new method is that the total information transmitted might need to be hundreds of times larger than the actual message. Mr. Rivest said, however, that he had discussed the idea with Adi Shamir, an Israeli cryptographer, and that Mr. Shamir had proposed compression methods that would reduce the total transmission to only about twice the actual message size. The strength of the idea for chaffing and winnowing is that it is possible to prove mathematically that a message cannot be decoded, Mr. Rivest said. He said he had come up with the idea recently while teaching an undergraduate computer course. In addition to his role as associate director of the Laboratory of Computer Science at M.I.T., Mr. Rivest is a consultant and shareholder in RSA Data Security Inc., a company that develops encryption software. "I put the winnowing and chaffing idea out there to stimulate debate,"' Mr. Rivest said. "I hope it will help clear up some of the issues that have been raised in the policy discussion. [End]

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Re: Prediction: NAI will issue a "Clarification" about PGP from Europe
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:27 AM -0500 on 3/22/98, John Young wrote: > You <snip> >well. Keewwwl... So. John. Don't the trees look like stuffed animals this morning? Cheers, Bob Hettinga <who laughed so hard tears ran down his face upon reading the snip-occluded above. I *love* this list.> ----------------- 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: UPSs
by Pearson Shane 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi Stan, Yeah. Since the big powersupply transformer primary winding is in _parallel_ with the AC power coming from the wall, this inductor will transfer the spikes, etc to the secondary winding and into the bridge rectifier, etc quite nicely. But decent ripple prevention should also help out here. Though this hasn't much to do with PC switchmode powersupplies. An inductor/capacitor spike filter that may be in UPS' would have 2 large inductors in _series_ with the active and neutral and high voltage capacitors in parallel with both ends of the inductors across the active and neutral. This is specifically designed as a low pass filter for getting rid of spikes. I don't think the SW supply would do it quite as well with as much power handling, strength etc. I'd rather a great big low pass filter designed for spike dampening doing the deed than having my PC power supply bearing the brunt of it. It's also an extra layer that is quite cheap. Bye for now. > -----Original Message----- > From: StanSquncr [SMTP:StanSquncr@aol.com] > Sent: Saturday, March 21, 1998 8:51 AM > To: Pearson Shane; spectre(a)anthrax.net; cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Subject: Re: UPSs > > In a message dated 98-03-19 18:48:51 EST, Shane.Pearson(a)tafensw.edu.au > writes: > > << A simple low pass filter made of 2 large inductors and a > few high voltage capacitors will do the trick nicely. >> > > Right. The filtering that's already in the power-supply (except that > the > switching transformer isn't as big as an inductor as a normal > old-style power > transformer. > > Stan

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Re: Rivest's Chaffing and Winnowing
by Kevlar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Now I read about this before it was mentioned on this list, and wanted to comment briefly upon it. Although at first glance this appears to be a hopelessly ineffective way of communicating (it requires double the information, plus MAC's), It does have some interesting possibilities. For instance... Rivest mentioned in his technical paper that you might use this in a situtation where you are multiplexing two or more streams of information, in which one persons "wheat" is another persons "chaff"... This would elminate the need to generate random "chaff", and therefore bring the ammount of wasted space WAY down... I could see this in use in situtations like LAN's or intranets, where bandwidth is not nearly as much of a concern because there is usally an overabundance anyway. Something else that occured to me while reading this tho... a major flaw if implemented "out of the book".... He mentions generating random MAC's... and this would be allright because the chance of randomly generating a genuine MAC is 2**64, or 10**19, but that is unacceptable, as the law of advrages WILL catch up to you eventualy. Therefore his second party adding chaff idea is failable. Of corse, this is easliy remedied at run-time by checking to see if the MAC that was just randomly generated is genuine, and therefore unacceptable. I hope to stimulate discussion on this subject, and welcome your opinions about mine... Peace. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 5.5.5 for non-commercial use <http://www.nai.com> iQA/AwUBNRWlqgbVu2P/8fhEEQLxAACbBTO08OT/uYnDPQ1dKJH0xaZi3ocAniXQ Z0O3d1uKcvfLDcbTHPb6PTw2 =aJRQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -Kevlar <Kevlar(a)smartlink.net> Oh, I'm sorry... Was I not suposed to EXPORT STRONG CRYPTO? print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"| dc` Beat your algorithms into swords and your virtual machines into spears... Let the weak say, "I am strong".

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Encryption without encryption - from Ron Rivest
by Martin Minow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In a paper entitled "Chaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption," Ron Rivest describes a method of transmitting a document that gives an evesdropper no information about the content of the document. <http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/chaffing.txt> "Winnowing does not employ encryption, and so does not have a``decryption key.'' Thus, the usual arguments in favor of ``keyrecovery'' don't apply very well for winnowing. As usual, the policydebate about regulating technology ends up being obsoleted bytechnological innovations. Trying to regulate confidentiality byregulating encryption closes one door and leaves two open(steganography and winnowing)." Martin Minow minow(a)apple.com

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My post earlier.
by Aspen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sup, It's Kevlar. I posted earlier about the "new" encryption method. It occured to me if you assign the "MAC"'s to computers and make a simple router (some transistors to act at "signaler" lines, one way of corse, so 3 a computer, A few ic's, hardware, and a power supply, ($75)), You have the makings for a basic network. Isn't that allready pattented? Hope I made somebody think for a second. I know I concidered this notion quiet a bit.

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Here
by V75ortex 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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