December 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: punkly current events
by Trei, Peter 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

Eugen Leitl > You could claim your machine was infected with > mixmaster malware, or something. Now that would be an interesting worm - one which, instead of installing a spamalator, installed a remailer and posted public keys and contact info to usenet. (Disclaimer: No, I don't do things like that). Peter

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Sheep Herding
by R.W. (Bob) Erickson 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

The secular bible: Our project First let me speak to my Christian brothers and sisters. I mean you no disrespect by using the term "bible" in an unholy attack on your faith. The project of this secular bible honors the sanctity of holy documents. A secular bible could only be true to itself is it stood for tolerance and cooperation. We all know of the worldwide spread of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. We acknowledge the existence of what we can only call "evil" in the world. We have less agreement on what we call "good" or "godlike" We have not found enough agreement on what to do about evil. There are those among us who hold to the principle no agreement is required. The proper agents in the war against chaos are the free and independent thinkers of the mythical open society. The radical edge of this stance is the notion that cooperation always entails disaster in the form of unintended consequences. There are those among us who are afraid of the unknown. Many of us prefer to keep to the familiar. We find ourselves in circles of friends and relatives and find comfort or at least solace in the company of these others. We become "us". There is a subtle danger in this. The formation of community is also the formation of "them" There are those among us who fear "them" so much that the very thought of cooperation is scary. To them the idea that there could be a science of cooperation is absurd. They will cite economics and rational self interest to avoid gambling on trust. The run-away paranoia that can ensue will tax their freedom as surely as the state must. The project of the science of understanding, this secular bible giving people an understanding of their part in the universe, and the tools they need to get along with all manner of thinkers. (tbc) Of course this is all meant sarcastically. The Lord knows, nobody wants to just get along.

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tangled contexts
by R.W. (Bob) Erickson 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

Process and perception This capacity for making high order discriminations about relationships between objects in our world, can be taken as the proper function of our cognitive competency. The attribute of intentionality, to this way of thinking, is best understood as "work product" of a discrete sub-module of our brain. We infer agency from our observations. What is agency? Well first and foremost, it is that which is recognizable to the competencies in process, that form these judgments. Does this sound circular? Surely it is circular in a crucial sense. All that we "know" comes to our attention as the work product of process in various competencies. Ultimately the "authority" of these high order discriminations comes not from a judgment about the correlation between our perceptions and the state of the "objective" world, but instead from their immediacy. This is to say that we do not perceive and then make judgments, our first awareness of every "thing" is located in the moment that the competent module forms some thing out of the possibilities. These awareness's are not in the semantic domain. Our knowing of particular attributes precedes the semantic transform that tags and packages up insights, for storage and shipping. We know what we know and we apologize for not being able to convey this knowing more effectively. That we are able to communicate at all, is a testament to the power of trial and error and the phenomenal similarity of our minds. This similarity is not accidental. Even as each person is an absolutely unique instance of humanity, what we are, is the embodiment of a phenomenally complex tangle of historical accomplishments that is fundamentally common to us all. Creativity emerges via the capacity/ability to merge contexts Biological instrumentality: The complex objects of our knowings come to our awareness as circumstances demand, literally selected by their features. Apprehension of the world via a sophisticatedly evolved biological instrumentality is an entropy hack. Life is the opportunistic bloom of a viral exploitation of regularity in the universe. In the beginning there was sequence, and it begat pattern and context space. Within every context space there is a tree of combinatorial consequences some leaves of which are potentially lucky. Blind evolution isn't trial and error testing of mistakes (mutations), it is the random testing of legal combinations So who set up the game, where did the rules come from, and the design language? The dynamic core of our consciousness consists of transient alignments of Feature Value - Action loops that compete for selection in a flicker-dance-sort of associations and sensory stimuli. Perception is a physics hack. Timing is everything. Three dimensionality is accessible to us via a cross mapping within the temporal manifold. Propagation of coherent correlations between map-mapped sheets of neurons act as a massively parallel delay line with multiple taps. Because both spatial and temporal coherence is preserved, the network sorts up the objects of perception and tracks them real time. Reality is best fit. Misperceptions happen, but its better than being blind. Our competency at this is not postulated, it is stipulated that the high order discriminations we perceive as qualia are exactly as amazing as the incredible complexity of the neurological stack that gives us them. Intentionality is an emergent design goal in secondary consciousness. (before getting upset about intentional language, remember that it works because reality fits.) Phenomenal transform is a semantic label for a context shift. If you insist on thinking of it as a happening, what's happening is that we find ourselves switching lexicons when we discuss certain things. Its not a description of a change of state in the object, it is a handle for referring to a pragmatic feature of discourse about it. The important thing to realize is that this sorting out of the features of the objects of our perception usually is done before we are aware of the process, but this does not mean that the process is different for hard discriminations, just that they are taking longer than the ~400ms self context loop, that feeds a product of the net's immediate state back into itself. Think convolving and converging. Discrimination occurs opportunistically, our competencies do not require conscious attention. In the formation of PV Action loops each project become one of the factions in our interior parliament. We have lots of timing to tap. Response times, flicker fusion times, saccades, pulse, peristalsis, menstruation. The royal road to cognitive illumination is the path of chronus. --bob "me, I'm just a lawn mower"

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Nul Context
by R.W. (Bob) Erickson 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

Communication is about context Sometimes the context is so obvious that the frame is nearly invisible, sometimes the context is so subtle that indications of obvious significance can only be detected after much study. Language and meaning involve sharing of contexts. This is obvious, what is less obvious is the way that communication implicates a context one might call, A Theory of Mind What does this mean? Well a lot of it is hidden in what we call common sense, or folk psychology. You know what I mean because I'm behaving conventionally in my choice of words, and saying stuff that makes sense. When we use language conventionally, we talk about things that are happening and what people are thinking. When we talk about things that matter we wonder what others think. We think about what other people are thinking, all the time. Its a common enough usage of language, and quite comprehensible. Which makes it all the more peculiar that for a long time science had a weird rule that said that unempirical terms like intention and purpose, not to mention perception and comprehension were "metaphysical nonsense". Science has come a long way since the logical positivists held sway. Its not that they were wrong, the problem was they couldnt be right. The original proof that they were wrong was at hand for most of the 20th century, in the interference pattern between the works of Wittgenstein and Gvdel, As recently as the middle of the last century, back when Chomsky was doing his seminal work in deep structures, psychology was firmly stuck with Pavlovian Reflexes and Skinner Boxes and vigorously opposed adopting any working theory of mind. Stimulus Response Theory just cant handle task of explaining what an artist does. Into this context, Modern Linguistics was born.

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RE: Blinky Rides Again: RCMP suspect al-Qaida messages
by John Kelsey 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

>From: "J.A. Terranson" <measl(a)mfn.org> >Sent: Dec 9, 2004 1:19 PM >To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com> >Cc: rah(a)shipwright.com, cryptography(a)metzdowd.com, cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net, > osint(a)yahoogroups.com >Subject: RE: Blinky Rides Again: RCMP suspect al-Qaida messages .. >As recently as two years ago, I had a classroom full of cops (mostly fedz >from various well-known alphabets) who knew *nothing* about stego. And I >mean *NOTHING*. They got a pretty shallow intro: here's a picture, and >here's the secret message inside it, followed by an hour of theory and >how-to's using the simplest of tools - every single one of them was just >blown away. Actually, that's not true - the Postal Inspectors were bored, >but everyone _else_ was floored. But the real thing they needed to know was "there can be hidden information in files that look innocent" and what they need to do to find that hidden information. I expect the answer to that will involve either shipping it off to some expert at the FBI (who will have to do some serious flow control, or he'll be receiving copies of all the video games on every small-time drug dealer's computer), or running some tools to look for the hidden data. It's not like you're going to expect a random detective to learn how to cryptanalyze stego schemes, anymore than you're going to expect him to learn how to check for DNA matches in a lab. He'll need to have some notion of how the technology works, and some rules of thumb for how to handle the evidence to keep from tainting it, and that's about it. >J.A. Terranson >sysadmin(a)mfn.org >0xBD4A95BF --John

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[p2p-hackers] Re: Memory and reputation calculation (fwd from muller@emse.fr)
by Eugen Leitl 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

----- Forwarded message from MULLER Guillaume <muller(a)emse.fr> -----

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CodeCon CFP deadline nearing
by Len Sassaman 10 Dec '04

10 Dec '04

CodeCon 4.0 February 11-13, 2005 San Francisco CA, USA www.codecon.org Call For Papers CodeCon is the premier showcase of cutting edge software development. It is an excellent opportunity for programmers to demonstrate their work and keep abreast of what's going on in their community. All presentations must include working demonstrations, ideally accompanied by source code. Presenters must be done by one of the active developers of the code in question. We emphasize that demonstrations be of *working* code. We hereby solicit papers and demonstrations. * Papers and proposals due: December 15, 2004 * Authors notified: January 1, 2005 Possible topics include, but are by no means restricted to: * community-based web sites - forums, weblogs, personals * development tools - languages, debuggers, version control * file sharing systems - swarming distribution, distributed search * security products - mail encryption, intrusion detection, firewalls Presentations will be a 45 minutes long, with 15 minutes allocated for Q&A. Overruns will be truncated. Submission details: Submissions are being accepted immediately. Acceptance dates are November 15, and December 15. After the first acceptance date, submissions will be either accepted, rejected, or deferred to the second acceptance date. The conference language is English. Ideally, demonstrations should be usable by attendees with 802.11b connected devices either via a web interface, or locally on Windows, UNIX-like, or MacOS platforms. Cross-platform applications are most desirable. Our venue will be 21+. To submit, send mail to submissions-2005(a)codecon.org including the following information: * Project name * url of project home page * tagline - one sentence or less summing up what the project does * names of presenter(s) and urls of their home pages, if they have any * one-paragraph bios of presenters, optional, under 100 words each * project history, under 150 words * what will be done in the project demo, under 200 words * slides to be shown during the presentation, if applicable * future plans General Chairs: Jonathan Moore, Len Sassaman Program Chair: Bram Cohen Program Committee: * Jeremy Bornstein, AtomShockwave Corp., USA * Bram Cohen, BitTorrent, USA * Jered Floyd, Permabit, USA * Ian Goldberg, Zero-Knowledge Systems, CA * Dan Kaminsky, Avaya, USA * Klaus Kursawe, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, BE * Ben Laurie, A.L. Digital Ltd., UK * David Molnar, University of California, Berkeley, USA * Jonathan Moore, Mosuki, USA * Len Sassaman, Nomen Abditum Services, USA Sponsorship: If your organization is interested in sponsoring CodeCon, we would love to hear from you. In particular, we are looking for sponsors for social meals and parties on any of the three days of the conference, as well as sponsors of the conference as a whole and donors of door prizes. If you might be interested in sponsoring any of these aspects, please contact the conference organizers at codecon-admin(a)codecon.org. Press policy: CodeCon provides a limited number of passes to bona fide press. Complimentary press passes will be evaluated on request. Everyone is welcome to pay the low registration fee to attend without an official press credential. Questions: If you have questions about CodeCon, or would like to contact the organizers, please mail codecon-admin(a)codecon.org. Please note this address is only for questions and administrative requests, and not for workshop presentation submissions.

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Cryptography firm Certicom posts quarterly loss, year after big U.S. contract
by R.A. Hettinga 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

<http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/TechNews/TechInvestor/2004/12/09/pf-775547.html> CNEWS - Tech News: December 9, 2004 Cryptography firm Certicom posts quarterly loss, year after big U.S. contract By CRAIG WONG TORONTO (CP) - Data encryption company Certicom Corp. is reporting a second-quarter loss of about $1 million US, down sharply from a profit of $22.3 million a year earlier when the numbers were boosted by a lucrative contract from the U.S. National Security Agency. Certicom (TSX:CIC) reported Thursday quarterly revenue of $2.6 million US, compared with $2.7 million US a year ago - excluding revenues from the $25-million NSA contract. The Mississauga-based firm reports in U.S. dollars. CEO Ian McKinnon said the NSA contract has given the company a boost to help sell its technology as the standard for encryption around the world. "It has also hiked Certicom's position as the authority for strong efficient cryptography," McKinnon said during a conference call with analysts. The technology at the core of Certicom's products - elliptic-curve cryptography, or ECC - is well suited to such purposes since it can work faster and requires less computing power and storage than conventional forms of cryptography. "We see the greatest potential in intellectual property licensing as ECC adoption grows. Our focus is to maximize our share of that market," McKinnon said. During the quarter, the company used $10 million to retire its convertible debentures, which matured on Aug. 30, making the company debt free. In its outlook the company said it expects operating expenses, including cost of sales, are expected to range from $3.3 million to $3.6 million in its third-quarter of its 2005 financial year. Research Capital analyst Bruce Krugel said the NSA gave Certicom some profile, but it has yet to be seen if Certicom can deliver consistently on its strategy to sign intellectual property deals. "There's no denying they have a good stroke of valid, but what I'm wrestling with at the moment is rate of adoption and what people are prepared to pay for it," he said "We've seen two nice intellectual property licensing deals be announced so far . . . we just need to see more which would give us at least better comfort as to what the potential might be." At its annual meeting in October, Certicom said it saw a growing demand for its data encryption technology in both government and the private sector, including the entertainment industry. The company said the explosion of digital music, movies and books that are easily copied is causing companies such as Disney and Time Warner to demand that electronic devices and distribution networks be fully secure. In its most recent quarter the company reported two important contracts including one with software integration company Sybase and another with a customer that could not be disclosed for confidentiality reasons. For the six months ended Oct. 31, Certicom reported a loss for $2.2 million or six cents per share on revenue of $5.5 million. That compared with a profit of $20.7 million or 65 cents per share on revenue of $29.8 million for the same period a year earlier. During the 1999-2000 boom in technology stocks, Certicom shares (TSX:CIC) traded above $100 Cdn. However, as the dot-com mania faded and technology spending dried up, the shares fell and Certicom downsized repeatedly. Certicom shares closed up nine cents at $3.42 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Thursday. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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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Re: SEC Probes Firms That Gather Data on Who Owns What Shares
by Major Variola (ret) 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

At 10:51 AM 12/9/04 -0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote: >cash payments of $50 to $100 per tip. The people add that a separate >internal probe found that four employees of Mellon Financial Corp. had >received Pittsburgh Pirates tickets, $50 American Express gift certificates >and boxes of steaks for such data. Just for the newbies, these are all bearer instruments, in RAHspeak. Bearer instruments (incl. gold, tobacco, whiskey, goats, etc.) let you do things that you don't want monitored. They also have 'finders keepers' property, which is a corollary, and a bug (not a feature) should you lose your wallet/stash. This is a hard property to imbue digicash with because you need to prevent double-spending, which generally requires some kind of online access, also a feature. (Think gas station in the boonies without a credit card terminal; only cash, gold, silver, Pu, etc if the vendor believes he is competent to verify those precious elements, etc.)

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Re: tempest back doors
by Major Variola (ret) 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

At 07:46 PM 12/9/04 -0500, Steve Thompson wrote: > --- "Major Variola (ret)" <mv(a)cdc.gov> wrote: >> >Perhaps I am stupid. I don't know how one would go about modifying >> >application software to include a 'back door' that would presumably >> >enhance its suceptibility to TEMPEST attacks. Isn't tempest all about >> EM >> >spectrum signal detection and capture? >> >> You have your code drive a bus with signal. The bus radiates, you >> 'TEMPEST' the signal, game over. Back in the 60s folks programmed >> PDPs to play music on AM radios. Same thing. Dig? > >Fine. That's great as an example of transmitting data over a covert >channel, but so what? As you suggest, people have been doing that with AM >radios since the 60's, although the folklore mentions the phenomenon in >the context of monitoring the computer's heartbeat, purely as a debugging >technique. The poster didn't understand how to backdoor a program using unintentional RF as the channel. I told them. That's "so what"

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