April 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: On Killing Blaster
by Major Variola (ret) 13 Apr '04

13 Apr '04

At 04:26 PM 4/11/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: >"When faced with force, you reply with force when you can." > >Nah. This isn't even true in a fistfight, except when the guy you're >fighting is a) significantly smaller than you, and b) less trained. More >often than not, if someone attacks you, it's because they either have or >perceive themselves to have an overwhelmingly superior force. See "asymetric warfare" Sometimes a stronger adversary decides its not worth it. See Lebanon and a few hundred dead Marines. See Vietnam. (Speaking of which, I heard McCain arguing that if we leave .iq the place becomes a hotbed of 'terrorism'. Anyone remember the Domino theory?) And of course, if it's possible to >diarm your opponent without actually killing or maiming him, that's >sometimes far more appropriate... No, then he'll sue you. >As someone said better than myself, Crypto is one little tool in an aresenal >against "Men with Guns"...in the end Men With Guns will probably try to >shoot away bits, but it's not going to work too well. You forget that there are no bits which are not physical. Physical things reside on land leased from the State (try not paying your real estate taxes). All cables make a landing somewhere. Meanwhile, P2P, WiFi, >Crypto,and lots of other stuff will slowly start to chip away at things on >the edges, until the core is exposed. Where are you going to buy your hardware from, that it can't be shut down? How are you going to hide your TX from the DXing white vans?

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American Airlines is an info whore too
by Major Variola (ret.) 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

American Airlines admits disclosing passenger data WASHINGTON (AFP) - A contractor for American Airlines has admitted to sharing personal passenger information with the US government and other companies, thrusting the world's largest carrier into a bitter controversy over rights to privacy in the post-September 11 world. The disclosure, certain to alarm civil libertarians, made American the third leading US airline caught disseminating private data behind the back of its customers in the name of fighting terrorism. <snip> http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&u=/afp/20040411/pl_afp/us_at…

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Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
by Tyler Durden 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

Jim Dixon wrote... >>A) Two links to the same ISP: In terms of redundancy for the purposes of >>being fault tolerant, only one of the multiple links is ever used. With >You don't understand and you are quite wrong. >If one AS has more than one link to another AS, there are often very good >reasons for it, and both links are used. If network A peers with network >B in both Paris and New York, both will generally dump traffic for the >other network at the nearest connection. He's not wrong, he's merely kinda confused on this issue. Any big link (T1/DS1/DS3/STS-3c...) into an ISP provided by the telecom service provider is almost certainly protected via SONET. SONET architectures can provide various forms of protection (not all utilize redudant compies of the data...UPSR and Linear 1+1 do, BLSR is different). Of course, the router does not see that redundancy and can not make use of it. The multiple links that do exist (each of which protected behind the scenes by the telecom service provider) can be utilized by the router. If one of those links goes down (perhaps it was unprotected "extra traffic" in a BLSR and there was a fiber cut), the router will just send the stuff through the other link. -TD >From: Jim Dixon <jdd(a)dixons.org> >To: sunder <sunder(a)sunder.net> >CC: <cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net> >Subject: Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies >Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 18:41:14 +0100 (BST) > >On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, sunder wrote: > > > > The term is used because most or all trees in the region where the >English > > > language originated are shaped just like that: they have a single >trunk > > > which forks into branches which may themselves fork and so on. These > > > branches do not connect back to one another. > > > > I believe the real issue here is one of being able to stretch your mind > > into seeing things from different points of view. This is the reason I > > brought in the quasi-mystical quote about the sphere whose center is > > everywhere. > >Someone comes to me and says: "the Internet is a tree". Then he points me >at a graph of inter-AS (Autonomous System) connections to illustrate his >point. That graph includes all of those seemingly redundant connections >that make it _not_ a tree. These seemingly redundant connections are in >fact a high proportion of all connections. That is to say, the graph is >accurate and his statement wasn't. > >You can see the Internet in many ways. You can run a single traceroute >and see it as a line. You can ping broadcast on your LAN and see it as a >chorus line. > >If you understand what you are looking at, you can run traceroutes and see >stable rings: hot potato routing at work, where the packets go out one way >and come back another. > >Then again, I have spoken to hundreds? thousands? of people who think that >the Internet _is_ the World Wide Web. > > > Let's explain why we have multiple connections and what types of these >you > > can expect. There are two common types of multiple connections: > > > > A) Two links to the same ISP: In terms of redundancy for the purposes >of > > being fault tolerant, only one of the multiple links is ever used. With > >You don't understand and you are quite wrong. > >If one AS has more than one link to another AS, there are often very good >reasons for it, and both links are used. If network A peers with network >B in both Paris and New York, both will generally dump traffic for the >other network at the nearest connection. Why? Well, on the one hand, >there is no reason to carry packets originating in Paris and destined for >a host in Paris all the way to New York. On the other hand, many or most >networks employ hot potato routing, meaning that if network A picks up a >packet for network B in Paris, it dumps it on network B as soon as it can, >to minimize costs, wherever the destination might be. Some networks, >concerned with quality of service, adopt the opposite strategy, and carry >packets as far as possible within their own network. > > > most ISP's, when you negotiate a contract for a backup connection, it's > > with the understanding that you'll only use it when the main one goes >down. > >I don't think that you have any evidence for this assertion about what >characterizes 'most' backup agreements. I do know that most networks >regard this sort of statistical information as highly confidential. > > > B) You have multiple connections to different ISP's (possibly with >peering > > contracts, etc.) In this case when a node at your location tries to > > contact some other node on the internet, it's traffic doesn't go over >ALL > > of your connections - it takes only a single path. [Ok, if your routers > > are correcting for an outage, then perhaps you'll see different paths >being > > taken, but this is just the routing tables/routers settling or >converging.] > >The world is more complicated than this. Much more. > > > If both case A and case B, a single node in your location will see the > > entire internet as a tree with the root of that tree being the default > > gateway. (i.e. go back to doing traceroutes.) In the case of a > > multi-homed machine, or machine that participates in routing, it itself > > becomes the root of the tree. > >There are tens of thousands of machines on the Internet that don't have >a default gateway. > >Machines that participate in backbone routing have multiple connections >and aren't the root of a tree in any normal sense of the word. There is >no parent-child relationship between such routers: they are peers. >These peers participate in a highly complex graph which dances >continuously. The result is that routing has a large stochastic >component: if you can understand what you are looking at, you often see >traceroutes involving packets jumping sometimes one way, sometimes >another. > >To make things even more difficult to understand, an increasing amount of >traffic flows through MPLS tunnels, which are invisible to traceroutes. > > > Once you eliminate cycles, and you do so in real life, you go back to a > > tree. You only see the alternate paths used when failover or routing > > errors occur. > >This just isn't true. Hot potato routing is the most easily understood >example: traffic goes out one way and back another. It does this because >the ASs involved have set their policy that way. > >Backbone routers have lots of knobs to configure traffic flow. Some of >these allow you to throttle it, some allow you to split flows according to >traffic type, some allow to to split flows statistically, some allow you >to drop packets statistically. And some allow you to ignore pings and >traceroutes ;-) > > > At the same time, I also disagree with you. If your POV is a single >host, > > it sees the internet as a tree. > >Sorry. I have spent too many long hours probing the Internet from >single hosts to accept this. If you understand what you are looking >at, you see something much more complicated than a tree. > > > In fact, one of the properties of trees is > > that you "pick up" any leaf node and designate it as the root. > >There are different types of trees. Most discussions of 'trees' are >about rooted trees, which are directed acyclic graphs with one and only >one root. However, all trees are acyclic. The Internet isn't. > >Of course, most of this discussion revolves around one word: "is". If you >said "the Internet _can be seen_ as a tree", few would disagree with you, >especially if you allowed for the fact that that tree is continuously >changing its shape. But "the Internet _is_ a tree"? That's simply an >error. > >-- >Jim Dixon jdd(a)dixons.org tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 >http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage >http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure > _________________________________________________________________ MSN Toolbar provides one-click access to Hotmail from any Web page FREE download! http://toolbar.msn.com/go/onm00200413ave/direct/01/

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my periodic rant on quantum crypto
by R. A. Hettinga 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

--- begin forwarded text

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Re: <nettime> PlayFair > Sarovar
by proclus＠gnu-darwin.org 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

On 12 Apr, To: R. A. Hettinga wrote: > http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=6042 Ahh, that link just dropped ;-}. Here is another. http://www.advogato.org/article/764.html Regards, proclus http://www.gnu-darwin.org/ -- Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/ -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++ h--- r+++ y++++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]

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Re: On Needing Killing (Orwell was an optimist)
by Major Variola (ret) 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

At 07:20 PM 4/11/04 +0000, Justin wrote: >Major Variola (ret) (2004-04-11 16:42Z) wrote: > >> Blacknet is a robust archive for words, immune to force >> (by State or private actors), but merely words. > >With all due respect to the principle of freedom of speech and all that, >I think that cypherpunks, and people in general, give far too little >respect to words, as if words are a vague, unimportant, and remote link >in the chain of causation of acts or failure-to-acts. I don't see >anything wrong with Orwell's view that words control the future's view >of history. His certainly have. Language is how you manipulate people from a distance. Much more convenient than hitting them. Crypto *can* keep bits free. And so maybe language. But Men with Guns control physical reality, which limits what those bits can do. Read the archives on the problems with linking "credits" to dollars or physical merchandise. Note that the Saudis are organizing conferences on registering and recording hawala. Note that the US will kidnap (mexican MD for instance) if they can't extradite. And how many will run a prohibited node when the penalty is watching your family assets seized, family members raped, before your eyes are gouged out? --- "It can't happen here" -Suzy Creamcheese

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Re: BBC: File-sharing to bypass censorship
by Major Variola (ret) 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

At 06:48 PM 4/11/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: >http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3611227.stm >By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, >eliminating censorship of any kind. > >This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer >(P2P) file-sharing, Cambridge University's Professor Ross Anderson. Well duh. KaZaa carries news film clips that the media don't transmit. So does ogrish.com, but ogrish is not distributed and its name servers are run by the State of course. And then there's the indymedia (again, single point of failure) sites. There are censorship and authentication issues, of course, its hardly novel. >'Impossible to censor' > >To enable this, Prof Anderson proposes a new and improved version of Usenet, >the internet news service. > > If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, >then it's possible to track it down and close it down First, that flavor of erotica is not well defined. E.g., A picture of one of your 15 year old wives? Your legally emancipated 16 year old lover? Second, Anderson, who should know better, forgets about stego.

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Afghan duty offers ultimate in unconventional warfare
by R. A. Hettinga 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

<http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-04-11-afghan-cover_x.htm#> USA Today Afghan duty offers ultimate in unconventional warfare By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY ORUZGAN, Afghanistan - Afghan fighters bristling with rocket launchers and machine guns pour into a government compound here to try to intimidate a small team of U.S. Special Forces soldiers in their midst. (Related graphic: A-Team in Afghanistan) Capt. Paul Toolan and District Chief Ubai Dullah walk off together after averting a showdown in Oruzgan. By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY The Green Berets, a long way from home and two days from their base, want to destroy 10 tons of weapons found in bunkers under the hilltop headquarters of the fighters' leader, a district chief here. The atmosphere is suddenly hostile. "If things go sour," Special Forces Capt. Paul Toolan tells a two-man sniper crew he quickly orders into position on a rooftop, "go for the head of the food chain." He nods at the white-turbaned district chief standing nervously a few feet away. In a nation raw from two decades of fighting, with remnants of the al-Qaeda terrorist network still a menace and with Osama bin Laden having eluded capture for 2 1/2 years, the front lines of war emerge and vanish like storm clouds. Elite teams of Special Forces soldiers see the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan as their classic fight. Many concede that they relish serving here. For a few recent weeks, Toolan and his 10-member team allowed rare and intimate access into their operations in the southern Afghan province of Oruzgan. They momentarily let slip the Special Forces mystique of super-soldiers in beards and baseball caps who conduct secret missions and are known only by their first names. They emerge as soldiers who carry their own set of contradictions and complexities: proud and embarrassed by the public perception of them as elite soldiers; both sympathetic toward and contemptuous of the Afghans; confident that this war is theirs to win, even if victory is years away. Finding bin Laden is unlikely here because the terrorist leader is believed to be hiding along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan. Their job is to destroy Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, capture or kill fugitives such as Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, and bring security to the still-untamed Afghan countryside. In March, two GIs with the 10th Mountain Division were killed during a U.S. raid in Miam Do, a village in Oruzgan province. To operate in this region, Toolan and his men must coordinate with local leaders and militia, whose loyalties are sometimes unclear. The Green Berets exercise a certain independence in their actions. Many say this is the best time to serve in the Special Forces since Vietnam. They are the only American faces anybody ever sees in the vast, rugged stretches of formidable terrain about 200 miles from Kabul, the Afghan capital. Unshaven in their Oakley sunglasses, with 15-shot Beretta pistols strapped to their hips, they stalk a province the size of Indiana, gunslingers in an Asian frontier. But they also are health care providers, diplomats, combat instructors, roadside mechanics and crisis managers. In the course of one afternoon, Toolan will take steps aimed at killing District Chief Ubai Dullah and his armed minions for their belligerence. Then, after feverish talks, he and Dullah will walk arm-in-arm across the chief's compound in the local custom of male bonding, as tears well up in Dullah's eyes. "Let's discount for a moment my 5 1/2-month-old son, my wife, paved roads and a soft bed," says Toolan, a Rhode Islander with a razor-sharp wit. "Without all that, you can never beat this. It's got everything. It's got every single aspect of unconventional warfare you could ever possibly imagine." Muck and grease Like everyone else in this arid wasteland, the Special Forces troops find day-to-day conditions harsh. They suffer diarrhea from the local cuisine. Their faces cake with muck from hours bouncing atop a Humvee. Their hands blacken with grease as they repair broken-down U.S. vehicles. There's nothing elite about events that go wrong. For 45 minutes in a narrow mountain pass, Green Berets hold up frustrated local drivers because a four-wheeled Army ATV gets a clogged fuel pipe. A water tank on an Afghan National Army truck breaks loose in the middle of a Green Beret convoy. And when American and Afghan troops set up a human chain to load captured ammunition, they wind up standing in a field of human excrement that had been used as an open privy by the local militia. "Yeah, that was really glamorous," Toolan says later. Nor are they immune from troubles at home. The team sergeant, Kevin Patrick, frets over a 6-month-old daughter in the USA who is without her parents. He is in Afghanistan, and his wife, a civilian defense analyst, has been assigned to duty in Iraq. A woman caring for the infant e-mails photos. "She's starting to crawl," Patrick, 38, reports with a mixture of joy and regret. Staff Sgt. Jaison Eggleston, 29, a barrel-chested soldier who can bench-press 400 pounds and has a fondness for SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirts, is a victim of credit fraud at home. His wife, Sonya, seven months' pregnant, scrambles to salvage their family finances. But bureaucrats demand to speak with a husband who is away at war. "I am helpless," says her husband. "What I need is a lawyer." A team medic, Sgt. 1st Class Don Grambusch, 27, is a single parent who uses a satellite connection and a speakerphone to bond with his 5-year-old son. The boy is being cared for by the soldier's sister. "Basically, my private life back there is a mess," Grambusch says. "But work (here) seems to be excellent." Because they work roughly five months on and five months off overseas, these Green Berets spend as much time with each other as they do with wives or girlfriends. They heckle one other relentlessly but take pride in their close association. "They're not supermen," says Sgt. 1st Class Larry Hawks, a senior team member. "They're just guys who won't quit." Even though he's the commander, Toolan is just "Paul" to the men. He likes to fire war-movie lines at each of them for a rote reply. From Apocalypse Now: "Who's the commanding officer here?" Response: "Ain't you?" From Platoon: "Don't drink that ... you're gonna get malaria." Response: "I hope so." There is an insularity created by their isolation. "We are, in every sense of the word, on our own out here," Toolan says. Building an Afghan force Their mission to this town is an important first for Oruzgan province, home to nearly a million Afghans and the area where Omar, the Taliban leader, was raised. They are introducing Afghan soldiers to this backwater region. For the past two years, coalition forces in Afghanistan have fashioned from ragtag fighters a multiethnic Afghan force of 9,000. The hope is that one day a 70,000-man Afghan National Army (ANA) will be able to tame a nation steeped in conflict. Some of the veteran Green Berets on Toolan's team helped train the new soldiers. Grambusch personally designed an Afghan National Army marksmanship badge. "You kind of feel proud - like, 'Hey, I helped build this,' " he says. The mission begins with a platoon of Afghan soldiers. They are taken across rollicking mountain roads from the Special Forces base near the village of Deh Rawood to the provincial capital in Tarin Kowt to meet Gov. Jan Mohammad, an appointee of President Hamid Karzai. In the convoy are Toolan and eight other team members, two dozen ANA troops, a U.S. Marine advising the Afghans, an Air Force combat air controller, two journalists and three other U.S. soldiers supporting the operation. A tenth member of Toolan's team, Chief Warrant Officer Bruce Defeyter, is back at a U.S. military installation in Kandahar providing logistical support. So arduous is the Afghan landscape that it takes another full day from Tarin Kowt to reach Oruzgan. Everywhere they go, the reception is positive. The ANA soldiers, in their green military fatigues and Russian-style helmets, are received with enthusiasm. "It's the first evidence of the central government that we have seen," says Majeed Akhand, a money changer in Deh Rawood. Children ogle the Afghan soldiers and tug at their uniforms. Adults crowd around in curiosity and shake hands with the officers. For Toolan, the Afghan troops are much more than a symbolic gesture. A seasoned Afghan fighting force could help U.S. forces navigate the crosscurrents of tribal rivalry, opium drug dealing and the still-lethal threat of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. "They'll be able to open up doors that we couldn't," Toolan says. That's exactly what happens here. An Afghan lieutenant, Mohammed Taher, finds the cache of weapons under the district headquarters by poking around and asking questions. The haul includes heavy machine gun ammo, land mines, hundreds of rockets and a thousand mortar shells. There are even 6-foot-long missiles. Special Forces teams had visited the compound before but were unaware of what was below. "I asked the district chief," Taher says of how he found the weapons. "He told me they were from Taliban time." The Taliban regime controlled much of Afghanistan from 1996 until it was driven out of Kabul by U.S.-led forces, including northern rebels, in December 2001. Confrontation Toolan and Taher have no reason to believe that Dullah, the district chief, has Taliban sympathies. He has close ties to the Karzai-appointed governor. But a tradition of harboring heavy weapons, emblematic here of power and survival, is a tough habit to break. But if security is ever to come to Afghanistan, Toolan says, weapons such as these can only be in the hands of the central government. He decides that the stuff has to be collected and destroyed. Dullah balks and trots out armed fighters to intimidate the GIs. Toolan sends the sniper team to the district headquarters roof. Dullah calls the governor on a satellite phone. Both leaders threaten to quit their posts if weapons are taken. Toolan, wearing no helmet or body armor as a measured counter-response to the growing tension, calls their bluff. Through an interpreter, he tells them: OK, go. He directs the Air Force combat controller to summon air support by radio. In 20 minutes, a B-1 bomber that was on close standby is crisscrossing the valley. "Nothing like flexing a couple billions dollars' worth of technology," Eggleston says with a grin as the supersonic jet roars overhead. Hawks chimes in: "That's going to change their politics." By phone, the governor relents: It's all a misunderstanding. Dullah and his men turn docile. The Green Berets agree to leave a few boxes of machine gun ammo and mortar rounds for the local police. The rest goes. Locals look on gravely as the weapons disappear into rented trucks, to be carted away and blown up. But by the end of the day, Dullah, seemingly relieved to have the burden of this confrontation lifted, is embracing Toolan and holding his hand. When they say their farewells, Dullah has tears in his eyes. The episode highlights an American frustration with Afghanistan's culture of violence that has, in the view of many Special Forces soldiers, left the country chaotic and backward. The night before the standoff, Americans and Afghans shared dinner on the floor of the district chief's meeting room. Shoes and sandals were left outside by custom. A wood-fired tin furnace warded off the mountain chill. Platters of rice, flatbread and bowls filled with freshly slaughtered lamb - the hunks of roasted mutton floating in grease - were devoured off mats on the floor. At one point, a young Afghan man, carrying apples into the room in his shirt, stumbles and spills them on the floor. Toolan can't resist. "First day?" he wisecracks. The ensuing laughter causes Dullah to ask for a translation. When he hears Toolan's joke in Pashto, he bursts out laughing, all the more pleased because the man who spilled the apples is one of his in-laws. It is a moment that cuts through two cultures. Later, Dullah goes to bed, and Toolan reflects on his conflicted feelings. "The Special Forces experience in Afghanistan is the ultimate emotional dichotomy," he says. "On the one hand, in your mind, you hold these people in contempt for the situation they have created for their country and themselves. And on the other hand, in your heart, you have sympathy for them, because you know that it's not their fault." -- ----------------- 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: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ??
by Poindexter＠SAFe-mail.net 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

At 04:10 PM 4/11/2004, Tyler Durden wrote: >So...how many years before it's possible for an online group to anonymously fun, order up and drop-ship weapons on a besieged people trying to maintain their national sovereignty? Why not join http://www.ideosphere.com and wager some play money (a real money version is underway). JP

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Geodesic markets for nuclear secrets
by Bill Stewart 12 Apr '04

12 Apr '04

The price of nuclear secrets has been dropping rapidly: http://theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4014 WASHINGTON, DC- Top-secret information about the design, construction, and delivery of nuclear weapons has never been more affordable than it is today, CIA Director George Tenet announced Monday. (ok, ok, so it's the Onion... It's still geodesic markets at work, even if it's all made up :-) --- Bill Stewart bill.stewart(a)pobox.com

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