December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Joe Farah 9/14
by Jeff Penrod 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Americans get what they deserve I love America. I love the spacious skies. I love the amber waves of grain, the purple mountains' majesties and the fruited plains. But what I love most about America is the God-breathed revolutionary spirit that led its founders to risk everything in a desperate fight for freedom and a noble effort to write the greatest Constitution the world has ever known. But something dreadful has happened to that spirit. It's gone. Oh, there's a small remnant of people who still have it, understand it and live by it. But, apparently, the vast majority of Americans are clueless about it. They have no sense of history. They have no connection with their revolutionary past. They have no idea of how blessed they are to live with the fleeting legacy of freedom they inherited from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and our other forefathers who staked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in a quest for liberty. Americans have grown fat and lazy, content with their material blessings and ignorant of their far more important endowment of freedom. It's enough to make you sick. Oh, sure, Americans have lots of scapegoats for their ignorance. They've been deliberately dumbed down for 30 or more years by government schools determined to turn them into mindless robots. They have been the victims of media propaganda designed to deceive them and lead them astray. And for a generation or more they have been seduced by government plans to instill in them an ever-greater sense of dependency. But those are excuses. The truth is out there. It's more readily available to Americans who choose to seek it out than any other people in history. Americans are just too busy, blind or comfortable to bother searching for it. Most don't even comprehend the way they are being manipulated -- or just don't care. In other words, ultimately, they have no one to blame but themselves. As an example of what I'm talking about, take the latest polls conducted after the release of the Starr report. Most Americans say President Clinton is doing a good job and should not resign or be impeached. A CNN/Gallup poll released the day the report went public on the Internet placed the president's job approval rating at 62 percent, about where it was before the report was released. More than half, 58 percent, said Congress should vote to censure the president for behavior that has eroded the public's respect for his ethics and truthfulness -- a thoroughly meaningless gesture, a slap on the wrist with no consequences, the kind of punishment Bill Clinton awaits more eagerly than the next class of White House interns. Almost 60 percent of those polled said they thought Clinton was fit to be president. By what standard? That's the trouble. Americans have no standards -- no unchangeable yardsticks by which they measure right and wrong, truth from fiction. Now, I don't put much stock in public opinion surveys. They are often conducted by the same corporate media interests whose agenda is inextricably tied to bigger and more intrusive government. Nevertheless, these surveys are at least an indication that our nation is in grave trouble. What do they tell us? We've lost our moorings -- just as surely as Bill Clinton has. America is morally, politically, intellectually, spiritually adrift. There are no anchors aboard. No compasses. The USS America is at the mercy of the winds and currents, and most on board don't care. As long as the crew is serving them fine food and entertaining them, the passengers don't give a second thought to their fate or their ultimate destination. In a way, Americans are getting just what they deserve. Their choice of leaders reflects their own inadequacies and shortcomings -- their own cowardice. No wonder they look at Bill Clinton without judgment. To hold him accountable would mean holding themselves to a standard of accountability. They like looking up to see a leader who is every bit as dysfunctional, soulless and lost as themselves. It's comforting, in a perverse way. And psychic and material comfort is the only standard by which Americans today measure their lives, their liberty and their pursuit of happiness. It's not an easy observation or admission to make, my fellow Americans. But somebody has to say it. A daily radio broadcast adaptation of Joseph Farah's commentaries can be heard at http://www.ktkz.com/

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DoD on Crypto, Echelon, Secrets
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We attended Defense Secretary Cohen's talk today at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City on "Security in a Grave World." While not included in the prepared text, Secretary Cohen remarked in the Q&A on terrorism and encryption policy that Americans will have to decide how much privacy they will be willing to give up for protection against terrorism, and cited the FBI's similar views on the threat of encryption use by terrorists. Afterwards I had an informative chat with Kenneth Bacon, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, to ask about interviewing Secretary Cohen on Echelon, the global electronic intercept and surveillance system operated by the National Security Agency. Mr. Bacon said the Department will not comment on such matters. I acknowledged that was the case heretofore, but with intense European interest in Echelon, I asked if would it be possible for Secretary Cohen to give a statement on the topic. I noted that Secretary Cohen in his talk today had listed international cooperation as a principal need of US defense policy, and that Echelon had raised considerable suspicion of US interception and surveillance prowess which could inhibit international trust and cooperation. I also asked Mr. Bacon if Secretary Cohen could discuss as well the possibility of further declassification of secret technology, as with the Skipjack encryption algorithm, to enhance US economic security and for protection against information espionage. Mr. Bacon said that others in the Department would be more appropriate to discuss such topics in detail then Secretary Cohen. I asked if anyone except the Secretary had authority to discuss Echelon and declassification of secret technology. Mr. Bacon would not answer that but suggested I send a letter proposing such topics for discussion and the Department will respond.

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The DES Analytic Crack Project
by Eric Cordian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As some of you may have noticed, a new attempt to crack the Data Encryption Standard has been started, with a descriptive FAQ located at the following URL http://www.cyberspace.org/~enoch/crakfaq.html A while back, after the first DES challenge was announced, a number of us made the observation that a known plaintext attack on DES, expressed as a system of a few thousand boolean variables with constraints in 3-conjunctive normal form, was not too far from the size and complexity of problems that could be directly solved by bleeding edge combinatorial algorithms, albeit with signficant CPU and memory consumption. We thought this would be an interesting result, and generated a number of problems of various numbers of DES rounds based on the DES Challenge data, and some not particularly optimized S-Box representations, and set about the task of solving them, smaller problems first. We wrote a lot of code, learned a lot about arbitrary systems of boolean variables, and after breaking 2-round and 4-round problems, the first almost instantly, and the second with very reasonable amounts of resources, set about the task of seeing if we could break the higher round problems, and immortalize ourselves by beating DESCHALL to the key. To our very great regret, we did not manage to do this, and once the $10k prize was claimed, we figured the game was over and returned to working on other things. We still thought DES was a problem of approximately the right size to demonstrate the existence of an analytical solution which would beat a well-tuned exhaustive search on a problem of practical interest. Since that time, DES has been broken twice more by exhaustive search, once by distributed.net, and again by a hardware DES cracking machine designed by Net legend John Gilmore and the EFF for a non-trivial amount of money. Remarkably, although most agree DES is dead for new applications, with Moore's Law and additional hardware crackers being possible today for much less than the cost of the prototype, it still seems to enjoy a reputation amongst the public as a cipher that takes 20,000 pentiums running for half a month or a hardware box with $100k of chips running for several days to break, neither of which seems to have thrown the Fear of God into its current users, most notably the Banking Industry. With other analytic attacks like differential and linear cryptanalysis being really practical only for reduced round DES, and all current high-profile cracks on production ciphers employing key trial, the press has latched onto keysize as a synonym for strength, and has made numerous statements which have reinforced this questionable paradigm in the minds of the public. We have therefore been taking another look at our idea of a combinatorial crack of DES, and decided that even with DES having been cracked three times by key trial, it is definitely a project worth doing. This time, rather than working frantically in an unsuccessful attempt to beat other teams on a public challenge, we wish to finish up our original efforts, and repeat the three cracks previously done, this time using our algorithms, and distribute working code continuously as the project progresses, to sponsors who have donated some money to defray our costs. This will offer people the opportunity to participate vicariously in a fun project which has the potential to be a genuine paradigm shift in the way the world thinks about codebreaking. Sometimes, promising areas of research are not followed because of knowlege of some well-known result which suggests that such exploration will be unfruitful. Years ago, for instance, suggestions that programs could be checked by software for proper behavior, and run without using protected memory regions, were usually met with snide comments about the "computer halting problem" and various adjunct results. Today, there are many variants of "safe execution" technology, from prove and carry schemes, to Java bytecode, with a sound theoretical basis behind them. None of these is a violation of the "computer halting problem" results, of course. Similarly, after a large burst of activity decades ago, which resulted in the notion of NP-Completeness, and various results in computational complexity theory, suggestions that an analytic solution exists for some large combinatorial problem of practical interest conjure up visions of exponential resource utilization, speaker cluenessless, and the lack of progress on NP=P. For this reason, we feel this project is definitely a Schnelling Point. If it works, even badly, people will begin to look at lots of problems in ways they would not have considered before, and much new code which improves upon what we have done will be created. This will be an irreversible change in the Order of Things. In the several days since we put up our FAQ, we have gotten quite a few comments, and some concerns. The comments have mostly been along the lines that it is an interesting, even intriguing project. The concerns are generally that we will experience an unexpected "combinatoric explosion" in the higher round problems, and that no one in their right mind would send money to a nym, because it might just vanish and be used by the nym to live in perpetual ecstasy in some place warm and tropical, without the possiblility of the nym being sued for fraud. We hope the close coupling between the sponsors and the project members will eliminate this latter concern, with weekly progress reports and working code being distributed to permit the sponsors to reproduce our results as they occur. If three people are willing to sponsor and give us the go-ahead to begin, without wanting their money back if other sponsors do not join, we can probably get through the minimal S-Box representations and their proof-of-correctness as well as some cleaned up code for the 2-round problem. Hopefully we will then have a reputation with these people which will encourage others to join in the effort. Clearly, we're after speculative capital, rather than widow and orphan money, and hope a few of the wealthy older retired (and perhaps even crusty) engineer types might find this a productive thing to support. After all, if you've just blown $220,000 on a DES Cracker, making it $220,500 and getting your very own Schnelling Point in return is probably a reasonable amount of fun for your money. I'll stop ranting now. :) -- Sponsor the DES Analytic Crack Project http://www.cyberspace.org/~enoch/crakfaq.html

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Globalisation: Demise of the Australian nation
by Scott Balson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

New book: 'GLOBALISATION: DEMISE OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION'. This is Graham Strachan's follow-up to his controversial sellout success, 'Economic Rationalism: a Disaster for Australia'. (See articles at: <A href="http://www.gwb.com.au/gwb/news/economic">http://www.gwb.com.au/gwb/news/economic) We recommend it to those who are concerned about where Australia will be, and has been going under the Laboral factions (Labor and Coalition parties) for the last 20 PLUS years. Globalisation is no longer a conspiracy theory: it is official Government (and Opposition) policy! The only secret now is just what 'globalisation' means.According to the power elites it involves 'trade liberalisation' and that's it. In fact it goes far beyond that, and includes political and social globalisation as well. This book explains how it is all being engineered behind a screen of lies and half truths by dishonest politicians, corrupt media, and treacherous elites in business, government bureaucracies, academia and the churches, with the aid of false economic and social theories. While it concentrates on economic deceit, this book goes on to uncover the complete globalisation programme. The real nature of Globalism might surprise you!At $15 plus $2.50 postage (with discounts on both book and postage for larger orders) every Australian must read this book. Ordering details at Graham's website: <A href="http://www.overflow.net.au/~bizbrief">http://www.overflow.net.au/~bizbrief. GWB Scott Balson Pauline Hanson's One Nation webmaster

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READ THE FULL EXPLICIT CONTENTS OF THE STARR REPORT TODAY/PLUS CLINTON'S REBUTTAL!
by STUFFED NEWS DAILY 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

IN TODAY'S ISSUE: 30 NEW EXTRA HOT JPEGS! 5 NEW SIZZLING STORIES HOW TO PEEL A PORN STAR'S PANTIES THE STAR REPORT IN FULL VIRGIN PENIS POLISHING BEER BASHING BOOBS STUFFED SPINS MTV'S 98 VID AWARDS ORGASMATRON THE BEST OF EUREKA CAMP CLINTON FERTILITY FINGERS FINGERED CLOSING THE DEAL THE ART OF LUST ----> http://stuffed.net/98/9/15/ <---- Welcome to today's issue of Stuffed. To read it you should click on the URL above. If it is not made clickable by your email program you will need to use your mouse to highlight the URL, copy it and then paste it into your browser (then press Return). This email is never sent unsolicited. Stuffed is the supplement for the Eureka newsletter you subscribed to. Full instructions on unsubscribing are in every issue of Eureka! ----> http://stuffed.net/98/9/15/ <----

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Fwd: WHITE HOUSE MULLS NEW INTERNET TAX PROPOSAL from edupage
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded from Dave Farber's List ----------------------------------- I think the something at the WH has pushed them off the edge. How much you want to bet that it gives a lot more information than just the item costs. It will be used to police obscenity laws and censorship laws before it is done. Dave Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's senior Internet advisor, has proposed a new plan for tracking and taxing goods sold over the Internet that would use electronic "resident cards" and private-sector escrow agents around the world. Consumers would obtain digital cash at banks that would allow merchants to identify which country the buyer is in, but would reveal no other personal information. Consumption taxes would then be calculated, collected, and placed with an escrow agent who would then funnel the money to the appropriate government. "Governments would get their money more quickly... they would get a higher compliance rate... and the system would be easier to police," says Mr. Magaziner. (Wall Street Journal 11 Sep 98) ================================== Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart(a)pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

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Starr report zipped and prepared for offline reading somewhere?
by tom＠cat.ping.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You are all writing about Clinton and Monica et al. Dunno what this does here but anyway, let me add to the noise: Is it possible to download the Starr report somewhere, zipped and prepared for offline reading?

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CTIA Daily News from WOW-COM - September 14, 1998
by CTIA Daily News 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

========================================== Welcome to today's edition of the CTIA Daily News from WOW-COM. Please click on the icon / attachment for the most important news in wireless communications today. Your company just formed a partnership in a country you never heard of. Are you worried about international roaming fraud? You should be. CTIA's Wireless Security '98 - It's Just Smart Business. Orlando, Florida · November 9 - 11, 1998 http://www.wow-com.com/professional Team WOW-COM wowcom(a)ctia.org ===========================================

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Re: Joe Farah 9/14 (Pppbbbttt)
by Richard.Bragg＠ssa.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>Almost 60 percent of those polled said they thought Clinton was fit to be >>president. By what standard? That's the trouble. Americans have no >>standards -- no unchangeable yardsticks by which they measure right and >>wrong, truth from fiction. >By *their* standard, by their own personal judgement. There's no moral >yardstick, and God help us if there is in the future. Who makes the >yardstick? Who sits down and says, "This is the moral standard in this >country, abide by it or suffer the consequences"? Sorry but there are absolutes and there is a moral yardstick. Whether this is accepted or not is beside the point. There has to be absolutes otherwise any action can be excused (or damned). The real cry should be "God help us to instigate Your yardstick". God doesn't change and neither does His measure. 1)Love the Lord, with all your heart, with all you soul with all your mind and all your strength 2)Love you neibour as yourself. Everything else hangs on these.

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IP: Critics Pick Apart Study on Internet and Depression
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com X-Sender: believer(a)telepath.com Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 21:18:32 -0500 To: believer(a)telepath.com From: believer(a)telepath.com Subject: IP: Critics Pick Apart Study on Internet and Depression Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com Precedence: list Reply-To: believer(a)telepath.com Source: New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/biztech/articles/14digicom.html September 14, 1998 TECHNOLOGY COLUMN Critics Pick Apart Study on Internet and Depression By DENISE CARUSO Robert Kraut, co-author of a new study linking depression with Internet use, sounded a bit depressed himself last week. "I thought I was finished with this," Kraut, a professor of social psychology and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, said with a sigh. He was alluding to the flood of attention -- and criticism -- that his study, titled "Home Net," had received since it was published two weeks ago. Starting in 1995, "Home Net" researchers gave PCs and free Internet accounts to 169 people in 73 families in the Pittsburgh area. After monitoring their online behavior, in some cases for more than two years, the researchers concluded that spending time on the Internet was associated with statistically significant increases in depression and loneliness. Critics assert that the study has fatal flaws that neutralize its findings and that they are appalled at the authors' far-reaching conclusions about the impact the findings might have on Internet policy and technology development. Donna Hoffman, a Vanderbilt University professor and outspoken critic of Internet research design, was unequivocal about the "Home Net" study. "Speaking as an editor, if this had crossed my desk, I would have rejected it," said Ms. Hoffman, who edits the journal Marketing Science. "The mistakes are so bad that they render the results fairly close to meaningless." Among those mistakes, she said, were the absence of two standard safeguards: a control group and random selection of subjects. "With 'Home Net,' we don't know for sure what led to their results," Ms. Hoffman said of the lack of a control group, "because we don't know what happened to people who weren't using the Internet." In addition, the study recruited people from high schools and community service organizations, instead of selecting people randomly from a large area. Random selection is crucial to building a truly representative sample of a population -- in this case, residents of the United States. The study found that one hour a week online led to small but measurable increases in depression and loneliness and loss of friendships. While those measurements might well be statistically significant, critics assert that without a random sample, they are meaningless outside the group that was studied. "The assertions have no statistical relevance to any population of Internet users beyond those in the study population -- even in principle," declared Charles Brownstein, a former director at the National Science Foundation, now an executive director at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va. Although research studies do not always have to use control groups or randomly chosen participants to be valid, Ms. Hoffman said, those safeguards become imperative "when you're doing a study that claims causal relationships and that these relationships hold in the larger population." The "Home Net" team clearly made such claims. For example, the news release stated that "Carnegie Mellon Study Reveals Negative Potential of Heavy Internet Use on Emotional Well Being," and even suggested that parents move PCs out of teen-agers' bedrooms and into shared family rooms. Kraut was quoted extensively in the release, with such statements as, "We were surprised to find that what is a social technology has such anti-social consequences." Also: "Our results have clear implications for further research on personal Internet use. As we understand the reasons for the declines in social involvement, there will be implications for social policies and for the design of Internet technology." Last week, Kraut wearily defended his study. "In 1995, we did start with a control group, but it was very hard to keep it, with little in the way of incentives for them to continue to fill out questionnaires," he said. "And we couldn't use a random sample because of the nature of the study's design -- we wanted to be able to include groups who already had social connections with each other so we could observe some shifting, if it was going to occur, between existing social relationships." And despite criticism of the researchers' methods, he said that the study was widely applicable. "We have changes big enough that they aren't likely to have occurred on the basis of chance," Kraut said. "There is something here to explain." But critics like Ms. Hoffman look askance at such results, given her experience debunking other Internet studies, including one from Neilsen Media Research in which she participated in 1996 and another in 1995 in which Marty Rimm, a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering, published a study purporting to show that the Internet was overrun with pornography. The impact of Rimm's study, though based on false premises and quickly discredited, was profound. The resulting furor in the media and in Congress helped bring about the Communications Decency Act, which the Supreme Court ruled was a violation of the First Amendment. Critics fear that the "Home Net" study might end up having a similar effect. "It's easy to imagine the results of this study being used to influence policy decisions about Internet access, especially in controversial funding decisions for schools and libraries," Ms. Hoffman said. But in the end, Ms. Hoffman said, protecting the Internet itself is not the point. "We're trying to protect the standard of research," she said. "This isn't obscure ivory-tower stuff that never sees the light of day. It has an impact on people's lives. If we're going to the trouble to study the Internet, at least we should make sure we're doing it right." Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ********************************************** --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 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'

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