November 2005 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Liberty Dollar
by Gary Jeffers 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

My fellow Cypherpunks, The Liberty Dollar My fellow Cypherpunks, I think I may have some really great news here, but you all can check it out to be sure. I found an alternative money on the Internet. It is called the Liberty Dollar. The Internet site is: http://www.norfed.org NORFED is The National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code. The money is backed by silver and gold and can be redeemed widely in America. As many of you know, the $US is a corrupt, proprietary, debt issued, fait, fractional reserved,illegal, unconstituional, U. S. State enforced monopoly currency. As corrupt as it is I don't know why it hasn't already collasped and dragged us down with it! If the Liberty Dollar is honest and robust, then it may be the vehical to beat the elite bankers tyranny and give us an honest wealth produced money. Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers BEAT STATE !!!!

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RE: Cypherpunks IQ Test
by Aimee Farr 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

Mike: Are you often the victim of mercenary females? > -----Original Message----- > From: mmotyka(a)lsil.com [mailto:mmotyka@lsil.com] > Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 3:28 PM > To: aimee.farr(a)pobox.com > Subject: Cypherpunks IQ Test > > > It's an obvious setup. The woods are part of a defense installation, > apple is filled with coke, the girl is underage, the woods are full of > trigger happy fibbies. > > You hit the ground and roll into the brush, drawing on the way. You > attempt to locate opponents and identify the safest route away from the > situation. > > Mike > > > >CYPHERPUNKS IQ TEST > > > >QUESTION #1. > > > >You are walking through the woods alone. A beautiful unclothed woman > >magically appears in front of you. She holds out an apple. > > > >1. Please darken in the correct choice using a Number Two pencil: > > > >(a) you bite the apple. > >(b) you take the woman. > >(c) you run away. > >(d) a and b, but not c. > >(e) b and c only. > >(f) all of the above. > >(g) none of the above. > > > >2. Please justify your answer: > > > > > >___________________________________________________________________. > > > > > >Just curious.... > > > > -Aimee

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More on "new physics"
by Tim May 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

Someone sent me a private note. I have deleted his name for this public reply. > Tim May wrote: > > >> The "new physics" stuff is quite different. It is scorned in a way >> that plate tectonics was not, and for good reason. Folks should visit >> Bearden's site. http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/index.html > > I did. Oh, dear. > > Not sure what is supposed to be denoted by "Tesla physics", but Tesla's > work with power transmission via HF is fascinating, even if there was > apparently no practical or safe use for it. No one disputes the outstanding work Tesla did on a.c. transmission. And anyone who has seen or used a Tesla coil knows how real it is. "Tesla physics" is all the cruft that has developed around some of his more obscure (and late) writings, usually mixed together with stuff Tesla could not have known about at the time of his death. To wit, the stuff about zero point energy and perpetual motion machines. And, sometimes, mixed together with the usual nutcase stuff about the Hollow Earth theory (zeta reticulans colonizing the hollow earth, Greys, underground UFO bases, secret Nazi weapons, etc.). Tesla is a hero to these "new physics" nuts, even though nothing Tesla ever worked on or built contradicts in the slightest way the predictions of Maxwell's theories. They take Tesla's very real contributions and some of his weirder theories (though none of them so weird as the Hollow Earth/antigravity/time reversal theories of modern nutters) and say that this means "They laughed at Tesla, they laugh at me!" BTW, I was/am an early ("angel") investor in a company doing work on ultrawideband transmissions. Some of the works Bearden cites, like those of Barrett, are familiar to me and others with this company. Saying that there is a role for ultrawideband pulse technology, a la spread spectrum and beyond SS, is NOT the same as saying there are confirmed "problems" with electromagnetic theory. There may be, and there are a handful of folks doing "foundational" work in E&M, but, so far, there are no indications that their foundational work is changing any engineering calculations. Quite the contrary, in my view. Electromagnetic theory basically "works"--to many decimal places of accuracy. Circuits work as expected, antennas work as expected, and there are no "unexplained observations" (as usually exist before a new theory arrives). There may be some _semantic_ issues, e.g., does a square wave or impulse "really" have components that were sent out _before_ the square wave or impulse? (A Fourier decomposition of a square wave starting at time t = 0 has "sine wave components" spread out over time and adding up in such a way as to give the square wave, or the impulse, or any other signal. Some think this means deep and mysterious things are happening, something having to do with time travel and reversing the aging process, blah blah blah. Henning Harmuth may write fairly eloquently about the "dogma of the circle" and how the Fourier decomposition of a signal into (allegedly) a near-infinite series of sine waves is "not real," but for all intents and purposes it all works. And the "new physics" people like Bearden go way beyond what Harmuth and Barrett are talking about: they bring in "curved space-time" and gravitation and antigravity and the ultra-weird notion that aging can be reversed by "pumping the conjugate time-axis of the Minkowski manifold" (OK, I made this up...don't have time to lift one of Bearden's direct quotes...and this will help train me in the jargon if I ever become a "new physicist."). Nut cases like Bearden have the patter of physics down. Very few actual physicists waste their time dissecting and refuting Bearden for obvious reasons. I urge readers of this list not to waste time on this stuff. --Tim May, Citizen-unit of of the once free United States " The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. "--Thomas Jefferson, 1787

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Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?
by Declan McCullagh 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

At 09:57 AM 5/14/2003 -0400, Sunder wrote: >Yes, but how will you stop the spammer from double spending the same $0.25 >micropayment on all of his 170,000 email addresses? Depending on whether >you check that there is a payment attached or not, and also check it with >the bank before delivering it, you'd have already wasted your bandwith and >possibly have accepted a spam into your mail spool. It is true that the notions of micropayments as applied to spam (that I'm familiar with, at least) would require that the email recipient check with the bank to detect doublespending. This would introduce an additional delay before delivery from unknown senders, yes, but I fail to see how it would impose an unacceptable cost in bandwidth or CPU usage. Spammers could still try the same-micropayment-a-million-times route, just as they could try to spam without micropayments, but if their email is rejected in sufficient quantities, the cost to the spammer would outweigh the benefits. The key is achieving sufficient quantities. -Declan

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Re: AP Al Qaeda
by mattd 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

>>No, no. AP is funny because it's impracticeable. One does not find an assassin exclusively by tracing who paid him to kill. One can (and often does) find him because he makes a mistake in the act of commiting the crime. Which, if I'm >>reading my history right, is what's hampered the noisy proponents of AP up to this point already. Crime? Wot crime,guvnor? Jim and CJ were not 'noisy'.imo. Im a bit noisy cos Im pushing the 'let it all hang out' version. >The point is that Bell's theory does a really good job of sorting out the business end of assassination,...< Oh THATS funny.I get it. HAHAHA! >>Killing one person, especially a public official, pisses a whole bunch of people off. Those people have a tendency to come find their buddy's killer. Mmm,where do we start,lets get some firebrands and go up to the proffrs? Look at sites with no logs for quad anon 'predictors' who may be overseas briefly visiting cybercafes,Good luck china.(you just contradicted yrself btw.) Oh,unless you mean the torture/french village reprisal thang.Win friends and influence people. The one person killed will have had to have done a lot of evil shit to get enough pooled (presumably) to tempt a seasoned pro.Unless some professional killer turns all altruistic,stranger things have happened.The killer could be suicidal.another possibility.Lots of scenarios possible here,movie scripts,even.Pop songs,video games.DoCoMo assasinphones. Someone like a torturer,murderer,terrorist,pedophile is a logical candidate.(stephen roach?)Sometimes these happen to be public officials.Theres one here where I live named dennis Tanner.(vic.au) Those killers by remote control like arbusto might be be made more accountable. What better way than...Bell's theory, "a really good job of sorting out the business end of assassination"according to you. KILL THE PRESIDENT! "Id buy that for a dollar!" >>No kind of real or threatened assassination can weaken a government in which a majority of the governed people >believe. It can only make it seem more righteous and be more strong. Thats true,roll over and go back to sleep,if you live under that govt you have nothing to worry about. More righteous and more smug.

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Branded Watches at Huge Discount 3b
by Marcelo Brock 30 Nov '05

30 Nov '05

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[dave@farber.net: [IP] Getting consumers' consent to sell cellphone tracking data]
by Eugen Leitl 30 Nov '05

30 Nov '05

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

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[Clips] Matt Blaze: Security Flaw Allows Wiretaps to Be Evaded
by R. A. Hettinga 30 Nov '05

30 Nov '05

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: clips(a)philodox.com Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:48:25 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Clips] Matt Blaze: Security Flaw Allows Wiretaps to Be Evaded Reply-To: rah(a)philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces(a)philodox.com <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/national/30tap.html?pagewanted=print> The New York Times November 30, 2005 Security Flaw Allows Wiretaps to Be Evaded, Study Finds By JOHN SCHWARTZ and JOHN MARKOFF The technology used for decades by law enforcement agents to wiretap telephones has a security flaw that allows the person being wiretapped to stop the recorder remotely, according to research by computer security experts who studied the system. It is also possible to falsify the numbers dialed, they said. Someone being wiretapped can easily employ these "devastating countermeasures" with off-the-shelf equipment, said the lead researcher, Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. "This has implications not only for the accuracy of the intelligence that can be obtained from these taps, but also for the acceptability and weight of legal evidence derived from it," Mr. Blaze and his colleagues wrote in a paper that will be published today in Security & Privacy, a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. said "we're aware of the possibility" that older wiretap systems may be foiled through the techniques described in the paper. Catherine Milhoan, the spokeswoman, said after consulting with bureau wiretap experts that the vulnerability existed in only about 10 percent of state and federal wiretaps today. "It is not considered an issue within the F.B.I.," Ms. Milhoan said. According to the Justice Department's most recent wiretap report, state and federal courts authorized 1,710 "interceptions" of communications in 2004. To defeat wiretapping systems, the target need only send the same "idle signal" that the tapping equipment sends to the recorder when the telephone is not in use. The target could continue to have a conversation while sending the forged signal. The tone, also known as a C-tone, sounds like a low buzzing and is "slightly annoying but would not affect the voice quality" of the call, Mr. Blaze said, adding, "It turns the recorder right off." The paper can be found at http://www.crypto.com/papers/wiretapping. The flaw underscores how surveillance technologies are not necessarily invulnerable to abuse, a law enforcement expert said. "If you are a determined bad guy, you will find relatively easy ways to avoid detection," said Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who is now chief security counsel at Solutionary Inc., a computer security firm in Bethesda, Md. "The good news is that most bad guys are not clever and not determined. We used to call it criminal Darwinism." Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and technical director of the Hopkins Information Security Institute, called the work by Mr. Blaze and his colleagues "exceedingly clever" - particularly the part that showed ways to confuse wiretap systems as to the numbers that have been dialed. Professor Rubin added, however, that anyone sophisticated enough to conduct this countermeasure probably had other ways to foil wiretaps with less effort. Not all wiretapping technologies are vulnerable to the countermeasures, Mr. Blaze said; the most vulnerable are the older systems that connect to analog phone networks, often with alligator clips attached to physical phone wires. Many state and local law enforcement agencies still use those systems. More modern systems tap into digital telephone networks and are more closely related to computers than to telephones. Under a 1994 law known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, telephone service providers must offer law enforcement agencies the ability to wiretap digital networks. But in a technology twist, the F.B.I. has extended the life of the vulnerability. In 1999, the bureau demanded that new telephone systems keep the idle-tone feature for recording control in the new digital networks, which are known as Calea networks because of the abbreviation of the name of the legislation. The Federal Communications Commission later overruled the F.B.I. and declared that providing the idle tone was voluntary. The researchers' paper states that marketing materials from telecommunications equipment vendors show that the "C-tone appears to be a relatively commonly available option." When the researchers tried the same trick on newer systems that were configured to recognize the C-tone, it had the same effect as on older systems, they found. Ms. Milhoan of the F.B.I. said that the C-tone feature could be turned off in the new systems and that when the bureau tested Mr. Blaze's method on machines with the function turned off, the effect was "negligible." "We were aware of it, we dealt with it, and we believe Calea has addressed it," she said. Mr. Blaze, a former security researcher at AT&T Labs, said he shared the information with the F.B.I. His team's research is financed by the National Science Foundation's Cyber Trust program, which is intended to promote computer network security. The security researchers discovered the new flaw, he said, while doing research on new generations of telephone-tapping equipment. In their paper, the researchers recommended that the F.B.I. conduct a thorough analysis of its wiretapping technologies, old and new, from the perspective of possible security threats, since the countermeasures could "threaten law enforcement's access to the entire spectrum of intercepted communications." There is some indirect evidence that criminals might already know about the vulnerabilities in the systems, Mr. Blaze said, because of "unexplained gaps" in some wiretap records presented in trials. Vulnerabilities like the researchers describe are widely known to engineers creating countersurveillance systems, said Jude Daggett, an executive at Security Concepts, a surveillance firm in Millbrae, Calif. "The people in the countersurveillance industry come from the surveillance community," Mr. Daggett said. "They know what is possible, and their equipment needs to be comprehensive and needs to counteract any form of surveillance." -- ----------------- 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' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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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[Clips] Matt Blaze: Security Flaw Allows Wiretaps to Be Evaded
by R. A. Hettinga 30 Nov '05

30 Nov '05

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: clips(a)philodox.com Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:48:25 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Clips] Matt Blaze: Security Flaw Allows Wiretaps to Be Evaded Reply-To: rah(a)philodox.com Sender: clips-bounces(a)philodox.com <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/national/30tap.html?pagewanted=print> The New York Times November 30, 2005 Security Flaw Allows Wiretaps to Be Evaded, Study Finds By JOHN SCHWARTZ and JOHN MARKOFF The technology used for decades by law enforcement agents to wiretap telephones has a security flaw that allows the person being wiretapped to stop the recorder remotely, according to research by computer security experts who studied the system. It is also possible to falsify the numbers dialed, they said. Someone being wiretapped can easily employ these "devastating countermeasures" with off-the-shelf equipment, said the lead researcher, Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. "This has implications not only for the accuracy of the intelligence that can be obtained from these taps, but also for the acceptability and weight of legal evidence derived from it," Mr. Blaze and his colleagues wrote in a paper that will be published today in Security & Privacy, a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. said "we're aware of the possibility" that older wiretap systems may be foiled through the techniques described in the paper. Catherine Milhoan, the spokeswoman, said after consulting with bureau wiretap experts that the vulnerability existed in only about 10 percent of state and federal wiretaps today. "It is not considered an issue within the F.B.I.," Ms. Milhoan said. According to the Justice Department's most recent wiretap report, state and federal courts authorized 1,710 "interceptions" of communications in 2004. To defeat wiretapping systems, the target need only send the same "idle signal" that the tapping equipment sends to the recorder when the telephone is not in use. The target could continue to have a conversation while sending the forged signal. The tone, also known as a C-tone, sounds like a low buzzing and is "slightly annoying but would not affect the voice quality" of the call, Mr. Blaze said, adding, "It turns the recorder right off." The paper can be found at http://www.crypto.com/papers/wiretapping. The flaw underscores how surveillance technologies are not necessarily invulnerable to abuse, a law enforcement expert said. "If you are a determined bad guy, you will find relatively easy ways to avoid detection," said Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who is now chief security counsel at Solutionary Inc., a computer security firm in Bethesda, Md. "The good news is that most bad guys are not clever and not determined. We used to call it criminal Darwinism." Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and technical director of the Hopkins Information Security Institute, called the work by Mr. Blaze and his colleagues "exceedingly clever" - particularly the part that showed ways to confuse wiretap systems as to the numbers that have been dialed. Professor Rubin added, however, that anyone sophisticated enough to conduct this countermeasure probably had other ways to foil wiretaps with less effort. Not all wiretapping technologies are vulnerable to the countermeasures, Mr. Blaze said; the most vulnerable are the older systems that connect to analog phone networks, often with alligator clips attached to physical phone wires. Many state and local law enforcement agencies still use those systems. More modern systems tap into digital telephone networks and are more closely related to computers than to telephones. Under a 1994 law known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, telephone service providers must offer law enforcement agencies the ability to wiretap digital networks. But in a technology twist, the F.B.I. has extended the life of the vulnerability. In 1999, the bureau demanded that new telephone systems keep the idle-tone feature for recording control in the new digital networks, which are known as Calea networks because of the abbreviation of the name of the legislation. The Federal Communications Commission later overruled the F.B.I. and declared that providing the idle tone was voluntary. The researchers' paper states that marketing materials from telecommunications equipment vendors show that the "C-tone appears to be a relatively commonly available option." When the researchers tried the same trick on newer systems that were configured to recognize the C-tone, it had the same effect as on older systems, they found. Ms. Milhoan of the F.B.I. said that the C-tone feature could be turned off in the new systems and that when the bureau tested Mr. Blaze's method on machines with the function turned off, the effect was "negligible." "We were aware of it, we dealt with it, and we believe Calea has addressed it," she said. Mr. Blaze, a former security researcher at AT&T Labs, said he shared the information with the F.B.I. His team's research is financed by the National Science Foundation's Cyber Trust program, which is intended to promote computer network security. The security researchers discovered the new flaw, he said, while doing research on new generations of telephone-tapping equipment. In their paper, the researchers recommended that the F.B.I. conduct a thorough analysis of its wiretapping technologies, old and new, from the perspective of possible security threats, since the countermeasures could "threaten law enforcement's access to the entire spectrum of intercepted communications." There is some indirect evidence that criminals might already know about the vulnerabilities in the systems, Mr. Blaze said, because of "unexplained gaps" in some wiretap records presented in trials. Vulnerabilities like the researchers describe are widely known to engineers creating countersurveillance systems, said Jude Daggett, an executive at Security Concepts, a surveillance firm in Millbrae, Calif. "The people in the countersurveillance industry come from the surveillance community," Mr. Daggett said. "They know what is possible, and their equipment needs to be comprehensive and needs to counteract any form of surveillance." -- ----------------- 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' _______________________________________________ Clips mailing list Clips(a)philodox.com http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- 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: test disk from cgsecurity versus data security
by Travis H. 29 Nov '05

29 Nov '05

> As "test disk" is able to restore overwritten/shredded (dev/urandom) or > erased (dev/zero) partitions, The documentation doesn't say it can do that. It just says it can find where they start (and/or end) when that information (which is usually in the MBR) has been lost. This is easy as most filesystems have signatures ("magic numbers") which can be identified, and/or they tend to be at certain places on the disk (for example, cylinder boundaries). Overwriting an entry in your partition table is much different than overwriting the partition itself. So far, as Simson Garfinkel has pointed out, nobody has shown any evidence that you can recover data after just one overwrite with zeroes. Then again absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Lacking any evidence one way or the other, I assume it is possible in my risk analyses, since that way I don't get any nasty surprises. See: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html http://www.simson.net/clips/2001/2001.TR.04.RememberanceOfThingsPast.pdf -- http://www.lightconsulting.com/~travis/ -><- "We already have enough fast, insecure systems." -- Schneier & Ferguson GPG fingerprint: 50A1 15C5 A9DE 23B9 ED98 C93E 38E9 204A 94C2 641B

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