December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Infowar, war, and cpunks
by Michael Wilson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If any cpunk is interested in infowar, but with a strong crypto perspective, help yourself to: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/4843/ MW

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Eternity server considerations and musings
by Paul Bradley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I spent some considerable time today thinking about the eternity server idea proposed, and implemented in alpha stage, by Adam Back. The main method used by governments around the world so far to attempt to censor information has been the use, or proposal of, proxy servers for whole countries or jurisdictions. This method has only thus far been used to censor www connections, and has been used to censor specific sites, hence the use of mirroring to circumvent government censorship. To give an overview of the eternity server idea for those who didn`t see the original post the idea was that a non existant virtual TLD .eternity would be used to access HTML posted to usenet. So to access a site that was at say bombmaking.terrorist.com/assasination/killing.html you would send your browser to: http://bombmaking.terrorist.com.eternity/assasination/killing.html The assumption being that the distributed nature of usenet would not allow censorship. The proxies idea however can be extended to censor usenet, usenet traffic, although pretty huge, is not yet too large to be grep`d for keywords (currently around 600mb of traffic a day passes through the newsgroups) before being proxied, so a government can run a server which first checks to ensure the usenet article is not encrypted (this can be done crudely by checking for occurances of common words or by checking the redundancy of the text by attempting to compress it) and if it is encrypted junks it, if it is plaintext, greps it for keywords like "assasination", "anarchy", "porn" etc... then kills the articles that have these words in them, the other articles the government does not want to censor are put on a main server like news.fourth-reich.de and access blocked to all the other news servers. I know this might seem an unlikely scenario but it is not really when we consider the wacky ideas we have seen from governments in recent years, a dictatorship like France or Germany might begin implementing this within a few years, although the German government has had it`s fingers burnt recently with the Radikal fiasco. What I was considering was the possibility of circumventing proxies altogether, this is not an easy question and I could not think of one single way to get access, of course one could use and ISP outside of the jurisdiction but this incurs internation call charges for dial up users, and the gubmint of fascist-regime-N can block telephone access to internet POPs outside of their country. The problem with attempting to prevent censorship of usenet is that we cannot mirror it like we can web sites, the web is too huge for a government to mirror the whole of the "acceptable" part of it, so mirroring sites faster than they can block them is effective, usenet is too small to protect in this way, it could be effectively mirrored and all other access killed. Of course while we can mirror sites to prevent censorship this is almost an academic question, rather than a practical one, however, it would be nice to see a more robust system which thwarted all attempts to censor without the need for human intervention by mirroring sites etc. I can see no way that a government can censor internal traffic within a country, because this need not pass through the proxy, so if we can get a copy of a document onto one server within a country all others can access it through a virtual URL. However, this is likely to incur the displeasure of the authorities in that country and have them knocking at the door of the owner of the server holding the document, so we would have to have a system for server anonymity. This is all getting very complicated ;-) Anyway, as I have said, I can give no insight here into what is a possible solution, I hope that this post might cause someone who does have the beginnings of an idea to think about it some more and maybe give us a really robust solution to preventing censorship of this kind. 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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test cp@cyberpass.net 10:10a pdt ignore
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

# Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Re: Disinformation in L.A.
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Potassium nitrate is a natural byproduct of the decay of organic material. > It is highly soluable in warm water, but at low temperatures (<10C) will > quickly precipitate out and be displaced in solution by other salts, such > as sodium chloride. Extract by evaporation of water from chilled solution. > Mix seven parts potassium nitrate with three parts carbon (coal). Compact > and ignite to produce explosion. 94% AN : 6% Fuel Oil (hence the abbr. ANFO) - more brisant than TNT, good stability and sensitivity, cheap and easy to manufacture almost anywhere worldwide in large quantities. Thanks for playing - go get yourself another encyclopedia. BTW, have a friend post your obit. when you've blown your head off, fuck-up.

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PGP Prestidigitizes RSA...
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To paraphrase the cypherpunks maxim: "Cypherpunk fellow-travellers hack corporations"... Cheers, Bob Hettinga --- begin forwarded text MIME-version: 1.0 X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by listserv.aol.com id LAA18484 Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 11:03:31 -0500 Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> Sender: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> From: "Kevin J. Connolly" <kconnolly(a)EVW.COM> Subject: Re: Encryption--RSA v. PGP To: CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- There are several additional bits and pieces to report. First, RSA is not seeking to enjoin the distribution of PGP products. The lawsuit is seeking solely to revise the royalties to be paid. Second, it can be said that the suit represents something of a stretch. RSA (the original patent holder) assigned the patent to Public Key Partners, whose membership consists of RSA Data Security, Inc. and Cylink Corporation. Public Key Partners had granted a license to ViaCrypt, Inc., which was acquired by Lemcom, Inc. Then Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. acquired Lemcom and performed a reverse subsidiary merger, with Lemcom as the surviving entity. Lemcom then changed its corporate style to (surprise!) Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. Cylink--the other half of Public Key Partners-- was not consulted before RSA purported to terminate the license and sue PGP. Third, It appears that one major reason for RSA's purported termination of the license agreement was to get around the very broad arbitration clause in the license agreement. Finally, it appears that RSA commenced the suit in reaction to PGP's development of algorithm-independent encryption. This innovation would make it possible for PGP to embrace not only the RSA Algorithm but also Diffy-Helman, El Gamal (a variant of Diffy-Helman), elliptical curve cryptography or even n-dimensional lattice vector schemes. In the meantime, however. PGP continues and will continue to incorporate the RSA algorithm, if for no other reason than downward compatibility and the need to continue to support the significant number of existing RSA-based keypairs. It should be noted that any bias apparent in this posting stems from the failure of RSA's counsel to return my calls, even though I identified myself and the fact that I am preparing an article for print in a significant news weekly (which I will not identify until and unless the article actually runs). However, I did identify the publication to RSA's counsel, and he chose to let me get my information from PGP, Cylink, and other industry sources. Kevin J. Connolly The opinions expressed in this communication are those of the author, not of Eaton & Van Winkle. This communication is not legal advice. If it were legal advice, it would be accompanied by an invoice. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBM3iC4jQOqu5WyMfpAQECGQP+IkL0fslR6M/GSHKNdrnCVqQNoYllXurt qcPM0okSKCGEnySvBdeHJE2nf/7nn/CpYtFiPe36hkbfplpjOE4cRgupbr57AL9V kxQluZQdJwJJKNwXrdhiCHHBleM7l7RUSSwIRovsMxy6+4Zd3MNweGKX7wfmFnX8 yRFOV1z7CGs= =W5P9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --- 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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test 10:10 am PDT ignore cp@toad
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

# Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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test cp@algebra.com 10:10a pdt ignore
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

# Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Printers are munitions?
by Sidney R. Phillips 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Last Sunday on The Learning Channel there was a somewhat silly program on information warfare. One thing which caught my attention however, was a claim by Win Schwartau (of inforwar fame) that NSA had placed narrow band transmitters in printers which wound up in air defense sites in Iraq. Subsequently the transmissions were used for targeting durring the gulf war. Has anyone heard of a separate source for this?

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Re: [STEGO] Secure envelopes
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim C[ocksucker] May carries a turd in his wallet for identification purposes. _@_ / \ | o o | -U|--U--|U-- Tim C[ocksucker] May

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Re: War & InfoWar
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 11 May 1997, Paul Bradley wrote: >> > How many government employees quit in outrage, stating that > > they would not take part in such atrocities? How many took a > > vocal moral stand against their superiors, or exposed the > > government duplicity involved in the police action? > > They are all whores, so I suggest we fuck them like whores. > No thanks, you have to pay for whores. Let's not give them any more business. Besides, who knows what VD government whores carry. AP is better. FP (Fucking Politicians) is what they do best to each other. WhoreMonger.

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