December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The World's Smartest Highway (opened earlier this week)
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The worlds smartest highway opens tomorrow. So far, Highway 407 runs 36 km between Brampton and Markham, Ontario. Eventually it will cover an additional 33 km, and cost a total of $929.8 million over $13,000 per meter. What does that buy for Ontario commuters? The highway has a series of UHF radio antennae that pick up signals from small transponders installed in commuters vehicles. The highway measures the distance a vehicle travels, and deducts a per-kilometer fee from the owners credit card or prepaid account. The fee is 10 cents per kilometer in rush hour, 7 cents in off-peak hours, and 4 cents at night. Thats not a first a few U.S. toll highways have similar systems. But the 407 is the first highway able to send bills to drivers without transponders, without stopping them at toll booths. Overhead gantries along the highway take video images of license plates as vehicles travel the highway. The bill comes in the mail with a $1 premium. Ontario expects to pull in $40 million a year from Highway 407 tolls in theory. The license-plate billing system has never been tested under heavy traffic. The highway will be watching but not charging for the next 30 days or so, while Hughes Aircraft and Bell Canada, the companies who designed the system, hammer out the kinks. Related links: Canadian Highways International Corporation -30- Copyright ) 1997 Convergent Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. [INLINE] Canadian Highways International Corporation http://www.chichwys.com http://www.theconvergence.com

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Re: Wired News' War Correspondent on kiddie porn
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/4437.html > > Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers > by Steve Silberman [...] > "Basically, we're talking about a Dirty Harry attitude," one network > technician/cypherpunk told Wired News. Though he senses "real feeling" > behind Se7en's battle cry, he feels that the best way to deal with > pornographers is to "turn the police loose on them." Grr. Didn't notice that on first reading. Of course I meant evidence of criminal child abuse that Mike Godwin considers illegal, not "pornography." Since he snipped my name on request, though, I suppose I can't really complain. -rich http://www.stanford.edu/~llurch/

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Wired News' War Correspondent on kiddie porn
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Full text: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/4437.html Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers by Steve Silberman 2:32pm 13.Jun.97.PDT After 17 years in the hacker underground, Christian Valor - well known among old-school hackers and phone phreaks as "Se7en" - was convinced that most of what gets written in the papers about computers and hacking is sensationalistic jive. For years, Valor says, he sneered at reports of the incidence of child pornography on the Net as "exaggerated/over-hyped/fearmongered/bullshit." Now making his living as a lecturer on computer security, Se7en claims he combed the Net for child pornography for eight weeks last year without finding a single image. That changed a couple of weeks ago, he says, when a JPEG mailed by an anonymous prankster sent him on an odyssey through a different kind of underground: IRC chat rooms with names like #littlegirlsex, ftp [...] On 8 June, Se7en vowed on a hacker's mailing list to deliver a dose of "genuine hacker terror" to those who upload and distribute such images on the Net. The debate over his methods has stirred up tough questions among his peers about civil liberties, property rights, and the ethics of vigilante justice. [I was not aware that he'd sent it to DefCon first, with cypherpunks as a secondary distribution. That explains the language barrier Lizard noticed.] Se7en claims to have already "taken down" a "major player" - an employee of Southwestern Bell who Se7en says was "posting ads all over the place." Se7en told Wired News that he covertly watched the man's activities for days, gathering evidence that he emailed to the president of Southwestern Bell. Pseudonymous remailers like hotmail.com and juno.com, Se7en insists, provide no security blanket [...] A couple of days after submitting message headers and logs to the president and network administrators of Southwestern Bell, Se7en says, he got a letter saying the employee was "no longer on the payroll." The hacker search for acceptance Se7en's declaration of war received support on the original mailing list. "I am all for freedom of speech/expression," wrote one poster, "but there are some things that are just wrong.... I feel a certain moral obligation to the human race to do my part in cleaning up the evil." [...] Pitching in to assist the Feds just isn't the hacker way. As one poster to the DefCon list put it, "The government can't enforce laws on the Internet. We all know that. We can enforce laws on the Internet. We all know that too." The DefCon list was not a unanimous chorus of praise for Se7en's plan to give the pornographers a taste of hacker terror, however. The most vocal dissenter has been Declan McCullagh, Washington correspondent for the Netly News. McCullagh is an outspoken champion of constitutional rights, and a former hacker himself. [Wired forgot the (tm).] "Few people seem to realize that the long-standing federal child-porn law outlawed pictures of dancing girls wearing leotards," McCullagh wrote - alluding to the conviction of Stephen Knox, a graduate student sentenced to five years in prison for possession of three videotapes of young girls in bathing suits. The camera, the US attorney general pointed out, lingered on the girls' genitals, though they remained clothed. "The sexual implications of certain modes of dress, posture, or movement may readily put the genitals on exhibition in a lascivious manner, without revealing them in a nude display," the Feds argued - and won. [Declan fails to recognize that everybody here already knows this, and agrees that Knox was the victim of hysteria.] The menace of child porn is being exploited by "censor-happy" legislators to "rein in this unruly cyberspace," McCullagh says. The rush to revile child porn on the DefCon list, McCullagh told Wired News, reminded him of the "loyalty oaths" of the McCarthy era. [With James Donald, on the other hand, no analogies are necessary.] But McCullagh is not alone. As the debate over Se7en's declaration spread to the cypherpunks mailing list and alt.cypherpunks - frequented by an older crowd than the DefCon list - others expressed similar reservations over Se7en's plan. "Basically, we're talking about a Dirty Harry attitude," one network technician/cypherpunk told Wired News. Though he senses "real feeling" behind Se7en's battle cry, he feels that the best way to deal with pornographers is to "turn the police loose on them." [ROFL. I insisted on not being identified because I didn't want any conflict with Declan, and here he has me AGREEING with him. Cool! And in context, a good addition to the story.] It's not JPEGs of clothed ballerinas that raise his ire, Se7en says. It's "the 4-year-olds being raped, the 6-year-old forced to have oral sex with cum running down themselves." Such images, Se7en admits, are very rare - even in online spaces dedicated to trading sexual imagery of children. "I know what I'm doing is wrong. I'm trampling on the rights of these guys," he says. "But somewhere in the chain, someone is putting these images on paper before they get uploaded. Your freedom ends when you start hurting other people." [I.e., we ain't talking about Knox or Angeli, folks.] -rich http://www.stanford.edu/~llurch/

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Re: Do reporters have special rights the rest of us don't have?
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: > (I have no problems with private agents, e.g., Microsoft or > whatever, limiting contacts to the "main" reporters. It's their > property. If they grant interviews to Declan, Brock, John, Steve, > etc., and not to me, I cannot claim my "rights" were violated. > Government functions are another matter, and I would generally favor > letting anyone claiming to be a reporter in to government press > conferences...to do anything else is to give licensing and > credentials to speech, which the government should have no right to > do. If they need to hold press conferences in RFK Stadium, so be > it.) Are you proposing the President can't choose who he meets? Whether such a meeting is called a "press conference" is irrelevant. The legitimization of reporters through the use of "press credentials" by the government can only occur when people operating the news channels and their customers allow it to happen. Panther Modern

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Re: FUCK YOU: There's no general right to privacy -- get over it, from Netly
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Declan McCullagh wrote: >Ray Arachelian wrote: >> Yes, I do take privacy seriously, and I do protect it. But to say >> anyone has the right to snoop my machines and see what I have there >> is NOT cool. What I leave on my computer is my private business, >> and NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO SURF IT WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. Whether >> or not they have root. >I'm not saying that people have a "right to surf (?) it without your >permission." That's a violation of your property rights, a trespass. >But if you connect to my web site, I should be allowed to record >whatever info leaks from your computer. Don't like it? Cut the flow >or don't come. "Trespass" is a misleading term. The person "trespassing" doesn't have to leave their chair. What really happens is that somebody sets up a machine that will transmit information when it receives certain combinations of bits. Then the machine is made available to the whole world. It is most reasonable to put the burden for security on the person who wants to make their machine available to the whole world. The legal approach has several problems. 1. It is ineffective and gives a false sense of security. 2. It undermines the demand for secure machinery. (Intentional: the people in governments believe secure machinery threatens their positions.) 3. It brings up problems with borders and seignority. 4. Such laws are expensive to enforce if we are to observe legal customs like "innocent until proven guilty." 5. The legal prohibitions break down under the very circumstances when we most want our systems to remain secure: times of war and times of social unrest or revolution. Panther Modern

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PLEASE DON'T PASS THIS UP
by 65188000＠22151.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: IBM sues critics?
by John Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Can someone explain the difference between key recovery and key escrow? The IBM white paper describes it at http://www.ibm.com/security/html/pp_global5.html in terms of giving a keys or a combination to your neighbors, but the analogy was hard to follow. "John --------------------------------------------------------- Get Your *Web-Based* Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------

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Impact of Netscape kernel hole (fwd)
by Paul Bradley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>It'd be nice to have more specifics about the whole situation, but >regardless - any preliminary threat assessments? Exactly how widely >exploited do you think this has been? > >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 > >Some coherent input on the possible impact of this would be appreciated. Basically the threat model is very simple: Joe "slightly crypto-savvy pgp user" sixpack keeps his pgp keyring in c:\pgp on a dos/w95 box. The average user of any of the unices keeps his keyring in /usr/pgp or /usr/local/pgp it does not take a lot of attempts to go through most of the common places. The very same guy probably has a password that is: A. FRED (notice how close the letters are, this is a real dumb-ass password of the century) B. His wifes name C. Her birthday D. The name of his favourite film or some character from it... Can you say "dictionary attack"???. I must admit I personally, against all the rules, keep my pgp secret key on this box. This doesn`t worry be greatly because: 1. I have a strong passphrase. 2. This box is only on dialup, so is not connected for long, and I VERY rarely use the web anyway, Its too slow, so I prefer ftpmail and ftp for getting files. This corresondingly reduces the risk of me having used a site that exploited this hole. 3. If I ever have anything to recieve that needs to be really secure I use a one time key pair, so even the RSA key is one time. Most PGP mail I send or recieve is fairly innocuous and the use of encryption is just precautionary, ie. to stop nosy sysadmins. What it basically comes down to is that Joe Sixpack, the guy most likely to have his key compromised by this attack, is: 1. Not likely to be sending valuable enough mail to expend time mounting even a simple dictionary attack on his key. 2. The least likely to know about, understand or respond to this flaw. So basically the threat is the usual one: The stupid will get caught. If you are sending highly criminal mail your key shouldn`t be on any machine not 12 feet underground in a concrete bunker with 24 hour fully trusted security guards, CCTV etc. etc. anyway. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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This is NOT trespassing.
by cypherpunks＠Algebra.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Did you pay for your TV? Do you buy electricity by the KWH? Pay a monthly cable bill? If so, then why isn't a television commercial considered theft of your televised resources? Doesn't it cost something to ride the bus? Then why aren't the public transport's advertisers guilty of stealing your wallspace? What about newspapers, magazines, radio stations, going to the movies, driving on any road, almost any PAID activity in life? Each has its attendent advertisments and commercials. We PAY for an enormous percentage of solicitations. Everyday. WHY SHOULD YOUR EMAIL BOX BE ANY DIFFERENT? Fact is, it isn't. Nor will it ever be. When you make any contact in public via any media or communication form, there will come invitations, solicitations, possibly vexations and the like. It's one of the prices we must pay in order to be able to communicate at all. P.S. sure is hard to tell what's "blue" these days.

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[ANNOUNCEMENT] Forgery detection
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timmy May studied yoga back-streching exercises for five years so he could blow himself (nobody else will). ,,, -ooO(o o)Ooo- Timmy May (_)

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