July 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [IP] Hi-tech rays to aid terror fight
by Major Variola (ret) 09 Jul '04

09 Jul '04

At 01:08 PM 7/8/04 -0400, Sunder wrote: >I recently visited the Canadian side of Niagra falls. On the return entry >to the US customs, etc. meant driving through penns that look like toll >booths. But I noticed little sensors in pairs and large square sensors as >well. 1. I've seen adverts for linear sensors which image the bottoms of cars as they drive over. Sort of a scanner where the paper does the moving. Installed in the road. 2. There are companies developing sensors that bombard your car with neutrons (don't have to open the trunk), and detect the N from the temporary neutron-activated gamma emissions. 3. Obviously license plate OCR is trivial. 4. I've read papers on recognizing vehicles by their inductive signature as they drive over regular road sensors. This was to passively measure road speed for traffic control. The idea is that a VW Beetle has a different inductance vs. time than a Ford-250 or an 18 wheeler. You correlate between roadloops at known distances apart and infer road speed. 5. One could call terahertz "hard RF" in same way that hard x-rays bleed into soft gammas. But calling anything "hard" implies danger, and we mustn't scare the proles. Perhaps soft IR is better. Whatever, its still pornography if the resolution is high enough.

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Faster than Moore's law
by Major Variola (ret) 09 Jul '04

09 Jul '04

At 02:55 PM 7/7/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: >"A few years ago". Lets call it two years ago. That would make the >average hi-cap drive around 30gb. Just want to remind y'all that drive capacity has increased *faster* than semiconductor throughput, which has an 18 month doubling time. -------- "They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years, and Hell, we're not using it anymore." -Jay Leno

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Querying SSL/TLS capabilities of SMTP servers
by Thomas Shaddack 09 Jul '04

09 Jul '04

I cobbled up together a small bash shell script that does this. It lists the MX records for a domain, and then tries to connect to each of them, issue an EHLO command, disconnect, then list the output of the server, alerting if the server supports STARTTLS. It should be easy to further query the server for the certificate, using some external utility called from the script. It requires netcat and a pair of djbdns utilities. It's a bit crude, but could be helpful. Script follows: --------------------- cut here -------------------------------------- #!/bin/bash ## Query the capabilities of mailservers for a domain. ## ## Requirements: nc (netcat), dnsmx and dnsip (from djbdns package) TMP=`mktemp /tmp/queryehlo.XXXXXX` EHLOSTRING="capquery" TIMEOUT=15 function help() { cat << EOF queryehlo - query the capabilities of mailservers for a domain Usage: queryehlo <domain> EOF exit 0 } function checkresources() { ERR=""; if [ ! "`which nc 2>/dev/null`" ]; then echo "ERROR: nc (netcat) not available in \$PATH." echo "netcat should be part of standard distro, or can be acquired from eg." echo " http://www.atstake.com/research/tools/network_utilities/". echo ERR="1" fi if [ ! "`which dnsmx 2>/dev/null`" ]; then echo "ERROR: dnsmx (from djbdns) not available in \$PATH." echo "djbdns can be downloaded from eg. http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html" echo ERR="1" fi if [ "$ERR" == "1" ]; then exit; fi } function queryrelay() { if [ ! "$x" ]; then return; fi echo "Querying mail relay $1, `dnsip $x`" cat << EOF | nc -w $TIMEOUT $1 25 > $TMP EHLO $EHLOSTRING QUIT EOF if [ "`cat $TMP|grep STARTTLS`" ]; then echo "*** RELAY ADVERTISES SMTP/TLS SUPPORT" # insert eventual further interrogations here fi echo cat $TMP echo echo rm $TMP } checkresources if [ "$1" == "" ]; then help; fi if [ "$1" == "-h" ]; then help; fi if [ "$1" == "--help" ]; then help; fi dnsmx $1 | sort -n | while true; do read x1 x; if [ "$?" == "1" ]; then break; fi queryrelay $x; done

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sweet noise
by Major Variola (ret) 08 Jul '04

08 Jul '04

If you've ever developed crypto hardware or software, you get to the point where you memorize the hex for a key & block, and when you see it computed correctly (even as you tweak the code or RTL) its a joy. One can also look at the entropic properties as you feed test vectors (eg 1,2,3,4...) into it (emulating a PRNG), and when you pass Marsaglia's Diehard or otherwise measure 1 bit/symbol, you know things are cool. See, you write test progs to encrypt, decrypt, and check that things D(E(x))=x; you also use published test vectors as "gold standards". But I've only got half the protocol coded, so I could only assure that highly redundant input gets turned into noise. Noise, sweet noise, even if its just eyeballing the hex. Of course, lots of error handling and input checking to assure that one has covered all the bases (and corner cases); but before that tedium there's the joy of making munitions by typing. Cypherpunks *do* write code. Or copy others', wrap it in a class, and put it together in useful ways. Under the cold, shaded eyes of a poster of lots of Agent Smiths. When I was unemployed for a year, which might recur in a month or so, I was worried about outsourcing, albeit as a lib that bothered me. Recently I realized that the kiretsu has outsourced software to the US, refilling my checking account, even better, saving my self-esteem. -------- Additional case studies are needed, however, to determine which traits of chemical and biological terrorists might help identify them because charisma, paranoia, and grandiosity are alo found to varying degreees among, for example, leaders of political parties, large corporations, and academic depts. --John T Finn, _Science_ v 289 1 sept 2000

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Re: Faster than Moore's law
by Major Variola (ret) 08 Jul '04

08 Jul '04

At 03:05 PM 7/8/04 -0700, Steve Schear wrote: >At 09:31 PM 7/7/2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > > >>At 02:55 PM 7/7/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: >> >"A few years ago". Lets call it two years ago. That would make the >> >average hi-cap drive around 30gb. >> >>Just want to remind y'all that drive capacity has increased *faster* >>than semiconductor throughput, which has an 18 month doubling time. > >But access time has not nearly kept pace. Which is why all manner of >database architectures have been created to make up for this shortcoming. True 'nuff. But DRAM is so cheap you put a few tens o' megs in the drive and cache the hell out of it. And the busses on the x86 have gotten much faster too. And the CPU itself is caching things up the kazoo. Remember the 640KB days? Its easier to add cache than to add a Montgomery unit, though instruction-sets are evolving towards symmetric crypto too. The FPGA players are noticing all this too. Get an Arm (tm) by default, or synthesize a soft CPU, and buy a third-party verified Montgomery unit. Maybe even get to add your own instructions to the basic CPU unit. And yeah, you keep enough pointers around, you can have some pretty fast DBs. Dereferencing spaghetti. Or dodder in the forest of trees. ------ PS: if the TSA goons detect a tumor with their highres Thz scanners, do they have to tell you?

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Re: Faster than Moore's law, Brinworld
by Major Variola (ret) 08 Jul '04

08 Jul '04

At 02:49 PM 7/8/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: > >I'd also point out that imaging technology (eg, CCDs) are moving like a bat >out of hell, though I'm not sure of the relevance vz Cypherpunks. Although its kinda boring and dry, Brill's work on ubiquitous cameras is relevent to this list. In the EE trade mags I've seen 1. how to do strobe flashes efficiently with camera batteries 2. piezo and/or hydraulic autofocus mechanisms being developed. For cellcams. Stabilization will come too. And the CMOS boys are fighting to get their sensors as good as CCDs, though it really doesn't matter, the volume is so high, you can use funky fabs --just like primitive 6" wafer fabs being used for cellphone power amps. Heck, big fat 1 uM wires are better for analog. And you can still have your 0.1 uM CMOS logic do the compression to save bandwidth, which is the commodity being sold, the handset part of the contract. In the future only pros will own gizmos that only take pictures. Just like only surveyors and farmers would own a gizmo that only does GPS.

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RE: photodisc search (was Re: BOUNTY BEAR is Faster ...)
by Tyler Durden 08 Jul '04

08 Jul '04

Yeah, but this is a metadata search, correct? Seems to me Our Protectors(TM) are probably able to search a vast database of images themselves. In other words, go look for details they hadn't previously thought of as being important (and hence were not available in metadata). Given high-density CCDs and real cheap storage, these details may be very minute, or perhaps small+far away. -TD >From: Rediscover/db <daryl.bunce(a)attws.com> >To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com> >CC: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: photodisc search (was Re: BOUNTY BEAR is Faster ...) >Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 13:26:41 -0700 > >Tyler Durden wrote: > > arrays, it might be possible for a database search to include parameters > > such as "brown eyes"..."1mm zit pockmark on left cheek", and then a >search > >You probably already know of this, but something like Photodisc? >Getty Images - stock photos and images: > >http://www.photodisc.com/ >http://www.fotosearch.com/photodisc/ > >Has a search feature, eg "content young woman sitting looking at camera" >(direct quote used to find the pic MicroSoft used for their >"switch" campaign). > _________________________________________________________________ MSN Life Events gives you the tips and tools to handle the turning points in your life. http://lifeevents.msn.com

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BOUNTY BEAR is Faster than Moore's law
by Tyler Durden 08 Jul '04

08 Jul '04

Um. Interesting point. Come to think of it, it might actually make a lot more sense to be able to run those risk models offline. That way, you can always refine them later. Better safe than sorry. Given Variola's little factoid, even if they aren't grabbing everything now, they probably will soon. I'd also point out that imaging technology (eg, CCDs) are moving like a bat out of hell, though I'm not sure of the relevance vz Cypherpunks. Riffing a bit...with effectively inifinte storage capacity and high-density imaging arrays, it might be possible for a database search to include parameters such as "brown eyes"..."1mm zit pockmark on left cheek", and then a search is run on all Metrocard terminals through all city subway's security cameras in the world. Anyone see Wim Wender's "The End of the World"? BOUNTY BEAR! -TD >From: Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org> >To: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: Re: Faster than Moore's law >Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 08:55:11 +0200 > >On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 09:31:45PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > > > Just want to remind y'all that drive capacity has increased *faster* > > than semiconductor throughput, which has an 18 month doubling time. > >Yes. Also, human-generated traffic (the relevant part: which email you >write, >which sites you browse) has an upper bound for each meat person. Even if >one >doesn't have access to your ISP's logs this should be enough to identify >(not >necessarily link to a specific fed-issued ID, though) almost >every person within a session. > >I think it is safe to assume that every relevant traffic which is in clear >is >being recorded, some or all of it forever. > >-- >Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> >______________________________________________________________ >ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org >8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE >http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net ><< attach3 >> _________________________________________________________________ Check out the latest news, polls and tools in the MSN 2004 Election Guide! http://special.msn.com/msn/election2004.armx

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[IP] Hi-tech rays to aid terror fight (fwd from dave@farber.net)
by Eugen Leitl 08 Jul '04

08 Jul '04

----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> -----

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RE: Final stage
by Tyler Durden 08 Jul '04

08 Jul '04

Hum. Does this mean Tim May has resuscribed? -TD >From: Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer <nobody(a)cypherpunks.to> >To: "cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net> >Subject: Final stage >Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 20:52:34 +0200 (CEST) > >Praise Allah! The spires of the West will soon come crashing down! >Our Brother wishes for us to meet at the previously discussed >southeastern roadhouse on August 1st, in preparation for the >operations scheduled for August 6th and 9th. > >Alternative targets have been chosen. Contact Jibril if you have not >heard of the changes since the last meeting. The infidels have machines >that detect the biologicals, so make sure the containers are sealed and >scrubbed as discussed. > >Leave excess semtex behind. The more we transport, the more likely the >infidels are to detect us. > >We have received more funding and supplies from our brothers in Saudi >Arabia and Syria. Be prepared for another operation before January. > >Praise Allah! May the blood of the infidels turn the oceans red! > _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

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