March 2005 - cypherpunks-legacy

Build your TV!
by R.A. Hettinga 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

<http://www.sfbg.com/39/22/cover_fcc.html> San Francisco Bay Guardian News THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2005* Vol. 39, No. 22 Build your TV! As the FCC and the entertainment biz get ready to end home recording as we know it, a bunch of radical geeks are working on a solution or two. By Annalee Newitz 'ALL I WANT is to make a high-definition copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, save it on a DVD, and loan it to my friend," says Sarah Brydon, looking up from a long table covered with half-built computers. These sound like the words of a science fiction nerd, not a revolutionary. But Brydon is a new breed of protester - and she's expressing her discontent with the U.S. government by building a television. She's one of a dozen consumer activists who have gathered on a Saturday morning in late January for a high-definition television "Build-In" at the Mission District office of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (where I work). Part computer hardware nerdfest, part hell-raising political action, the Build-In is a high-tech protest of a new Federal Communications Commission regulation called the "Broadcast Flag." According to the FCC, the flag is going to ease the nation's transition from today's analog televisions to tomorrow's high-definition televisions. What exactly does it mean for a government agency to "ease" the transition from one kind of TV signal to another? In this case, it seems to mean making the entertainment industry feel very warm and fuzzy inside. The Broadcast Flag is designed - poorly - to stop people from putting high-quality recordings of TV shows on popular file-sharing networks like BitTorrent. In reality, it will give the government an unprecedented amount of control over what we do in our own homes with recordings of HDTV. The flag is supposed to stop mass copying and infringement, but it will also stop most consumers from perfectly legal activities like saving HD copies of shows for personal use. Past generations of media activists protested government and industry control of TV content. They battled FCC censorship, denounced market grabs by massive content conglomerates like News Corp., whose bland, mainstream programming turned a diverse media landscape into The O'Reilly Factor and 7th Heaven reruns. Those activists nourished independent TV content on local cable access channels, where they could talk openly about radical politics or get naked on a whim. Now the Broadcast Flag has alerted a new group of media guerrillas to another way in which government and industry control pop culture: by locking down the devices that receive, copy, and remix broadcast signals. And these activists are responding by building independent technologies that don't bend to the will of the FCC or MGM. The televisions created at the Build-In are also computers, and they contain a TiVo-like device called a personal video recorder (PVR) - you can use them to pause a show, record it, sample it, and even save a copy to DVD. Using the TV she builds today, Brydon won't have any trouble loaning her friend a copy of Buffy. The television liberation front By noon every surface in the EFF office is covered with computer guts: multicolored ethernet cables lie in snarled piles all over the floor, hard drives occupy precarious positions near half-eaten bagels, TV antennae poke into the air, and exposed circuit boards are tenuously connected to monitors whose output isn't always good. These TVs are going to rock, but getting the software running perfectly is a pain in the ass. Celebrated consumer gadget blogger Phillip Torrone is bouncing around the room, interviewing everybody with his iPod for a Podcast about building televisions. He's flown down from Seattle just for the Build-In. "Tell me about this machine!" he says excitedly, thrusting the little white device at audiovisual geek Gregor Menasian, who has packed the last bit of open space with a computer full of extremely sweet components: quiet fan, capacious hard drive, fast CPU. As the two of them talk, EFF special projects coordinator and attorney Wendy Seltzer snaps photos of an error message on Menasian's monitor. Seltzer, who helped organize the Build-In, wants to be sure that accurate reports of glitches go to the hackers who wrote the software everybody's using today to turn their computers into HDTVs with built-in PVRs. Called MythTV, it's named for the "mythical convergence box" gadget-crazy futurists often predict will finally combine TVs, DVD players, Web browsing, and stereos in one simple machine. What has galvanized this group - made up of TV fans, civil liberties activists, and politically minded hackers - is outrage at what the Broadcast Flag will do to the future of innovative, crazy-dream devices like MythTV. After the mandate goes into effect July 1, it will be illegal for anyone in the United States to manufacture a device that records high-definition television unless it's built to obey a special signal - the flag - emitted by stations broadcasting HD shows. The flag will tell PVRs and other equipment whether they're allowed to copy a show onto some other medium, like a DVD. In short, broadcasters and content owners will actually be able to control your recording habits. Let's say, for example, that it's a couple of years from now, and your TiVo (bought anytime after July 1 of this year) has recorded the excellent Marx brothers movie Animal Crackers, which was just broadcast on TNT in HD. Tomorrow you're getting on a plane to Australia, and you'd like to save a copy on DVD to watch on your computer during the 15-hour flight. You're entitled to make a personal copy under federal copyright law, so it should be no problem. And in fact, it was no problem back in the days of analog broadcasts and VCRs. But with the Broadcast Flag in place, TNT can send out a signal that tells your TiVo not to make HD copies of Animal Crackers. So when you burn that DVD and put it into your computer somewhere over the Pacific, you get a bunch of garbage. The FCC has just stolen your rights. Think of it this way: if the Broadcast Flag applied to VCRs, it would, in effect, allow you to tape shows but not necessarily take the tape out of the VCR. And you'd likely be forced to erase your show in order to tape the next thing. Certainly there may be broadcasting companies that refuse to send out the flag, or that send out a flag saying "go right ahead and copy this." But a company like Paramount, which owns the rights to Star Trek, is unlikely to allow them to do so, for fear that letting people make copies will undercut its ability to sell syndication rights to Spike TV and UPN. Networks like CBS aren't going to want to let their shows out of the box either - they don't want to lose control of their intellectual property. For years we've taken for granted our ability to record television programs to enjoy weeks or even years later. Now that we have a chance to get extremely high-quality, HD broadcasts, the FCC is trying to take our HD media libraries away from us. Why would it do this, especially given that it has received absolutely no mandate from Congress? Basically, the agency succumbed to pressure from Hollywood. Entertainment companies figure that as long as the copies available online are of a lower quality than what's on TV, the broadcasters have a leg up on downloaders. But instead of relying on the law to stop people from infringing copyrights, these companies lobbied the FCC to take control of the marketplace and force vendors to sell machines that make all forms of copying effectively impossible. If your super-excellent HD copy of CSI can't get out of the TiVo box, then you can't stick it online and break the law. Too bad you can't do what the law permits either. Even more disturbing, the Broadcast Flag mandates that recording devices be "robust against user modification." In plain language, that means consumers can't repair, tinker with, or optimize their own machines. What's more, it will also become impossible for small, upstart technology companies to break into the consumer electronics market for TV recorders. If they can't take apart the devices that output the HD signal, they can't build cool new devices to play with that signal. Which also means that the devices people are using at today's Build-In will be illegal in four months. The government-entertainment industrial complex "I don't care about TV, and I don't watch it," says Build-In organizer Seltzer, who's been fine-tuning her MythTV box for several months, coaxing better and better performance out of it. "I'm concerned with the Broadcast Flag because it could be the first step in a new kind of technology regulation" - a precedent-setting moment in which one government agency takes control of the high-tech marketplace, allowing only certain companies to manufacture devices outputting the HD signal. It seems a dangerous direction to be heading in. For now, consumers may not realize the immense impact of the Broadcast Flag - the big content owners and the FCC are being pretty foxy about it. Even after the Broadcast Flag goes into effect, you'll still be able to make low-quality copies with your VCR. Most televisions are still receiving and outputting analog signals. The full impact of the flag won't be felt for several years, when most broadcasts are in HD and most people have chucked their VCRs. Suddenly you'll find out that the DVD player you bought last year can't play HD programs you burned from your new TiVo. Sound confusing or hard to imagine? That's precisely the point - the FCC is counting on your not being able to figure it out until it's much too late. Over the next decade, HD is going to become the standard signal - most new TVs will be able to tune it, and free-to-air networks like ABC, CBS, and Fox are going to move to HD broadcasting. So will cable. Most networks already make some shows available in HD - CSI, most sports events, some PBS shows, like The Desert Speaks. If your current TV receives HD, you'll know it - the quality is so much better it's almost scary. A traditional analog TV creates its picture out of 480 interlaced lines on your screen, while a typical HDTV creates the same picture using 1,080 interlaced lines. Those extra lines mean more detail, more intense color, and an eerie sense that the picture on your screen is literally the same quality you'd get if you were watching something with your own eyes. The FCC is acting now to shut down what you can do with this amazing quality because once consumers have something (the way they've long had VCRs that record TV), it's harder to take it away. As long as what's being taken away is something "in the future," it's hard to feel like you're losing. But of course you are. For a perfect example of how you'll feel this loss, consider the DVD player. Ever wonder why there have been no new nifty gadgets you can use with your DVD player for at least 10 years? Seems strange, doesn't it? I mean, think of how many new hoozits and zoomies have been invented for your computer in the past decade. Given the rate of invention in this country, shouldn't DVDs be making breakfast for you by now? There's one simple reason they aren't. A coalition of companies from the entertainment, consumer electronics, and computer industries got together in 1999 and formed a group called the DVD Copy Control Association, which enforces a strict standard on all devices that can play DVDs. Anyone who develops such a product must comply with the CCA's standards, which include forcing it to place copy protections on any copies made of a DVD. Those protections mean you can only play the DVD in "approved" devices, such as a Sony DVD player or a Microsoft Media Player. It means you can't run the DVD through a mixing board to make a video collage, or create a tiny digital copy of it to play in your cell phone when you're bored on the bus. Just a few weeks ago, a company called Kaleidescape was sued by the CCA for having the audacity to invent something it called a DVD jukebox - a cool device that could hold dozens of movies ripped from DVDs and output them to as many TVs or computers as the user liked. It was sort of like an iPod for movies, except several people could watch the movies in the same house at the same time if they wanted. At $27,000, the DVD jukebox is a very high-end toy. Kaleidescape execs say it's ideal for somebody who wants to make his or her DVD collection available to people in multiple rooms all over a large house (like, say, Steve Jobs's). CCA sued Kaleidescape on the grounds that the jukebox promoted piracy, despite the fact that the recordings in it were made from legitimately purchased DVDs and that copies couldn't be removed for distribution elsewhere. The industry group wanted Kaleidescape to rebuild it so that viewers had to insert the DVD they were watching to prove they actually owned it. Of course, that would defeat the whole purpose of a jukebox. It would be nothing more than a very expensive DVD player. And that pretty much sums up why the DVD player you bought in 1995 isn't much different from the one you'll buy tomorrow. This is a situation that sucks for the consumer and sucks for the small-business owner or innovator who wants to bring his or her ideas to market. The Broadcast Flag will create a cartel similar to the CCA, only this time the government will be directly involved. Instead of the CCA launching a civil suit against somebody for making a noncompliant device, under the Broadcast Flag the government will be able to fine that person or stop him or her from selling the product. This will allow big media companies like MGM, Sony, and Paramount to get what they want - total control of how you watch television - without having to get their hands dirty. Already, small-business owners like Jack Kelliher - who runs a tiny computer hobbyist company called pcHDTV - are being forced to change their business strategies to survive the flag. A longtime hardware hacker and entrepreneur, Kelliher sells a computer component called a PC card that lets computers tune in HD signals like a television (people at the Build-In used his cards to turn their computers into TVs). "We wanted to do something for hobbyists who wanted to build their own HD systems," he tells me by phone from his office in Utah. "But then the FCC did their embargo, and the rule means we can't offer the product next year." He and his partners are scrambling to come up with other (legal) products to sell next year, in order to make ends meet. Among other things, they're creating a computer card that will receive TV signals and output them to analog devices that aren't affected by the Broadcast Flag. "This whole thing bothers me because I come from an era when we built radios in high school and stuff like that," Kelliher says. "Being able to build your own TV seems really American to me. It's sad that the government wants to halt innovation - it's just un-American." Another innovator whose brainchild will be seriously affected by the flag is Isaac Richards, the Ohio-based lead developer of MythTV, the program the Build-In participants are using to make their computers act like PVRs. MythTV interacts with a PC card like Kelliher's, then displays TV shows on your monitor. It also records and stores shows, movies, and music, and it can even be set up to display the weather for your area (scraped from the Weather Channel) and bring you the latest news from your favorite blogs. It's not much different from TiVo - except that it's free and it isn't authorized by the FCC. Like many inventors, Richards started his project because he wasn't satisfied with what was commercially available. "I wanted a TiVo, but it was limited," he says. "And the concept was simple: you just record TV and play it back." Since Richards released the first version of MythTV on the Net two years ago, the program has become quite popular: nearly 100,000 people downloaded the last release. And part of what makes MythTV such a seductive package is the fact that it's entirely open: anyone can add to it. It's the diametrical opposite of a DVD player, whose every element must be reviewed and approved by an industry cartel. In general, people are using MythTV to watch analog TV. But when HD becomes the standard, MythTV's development may face stagnation. As analog becomes an obsolete format, MythTV will also become obsolete. People can build their own analog TVs, but they won't be able to build their own HDTVs. And thus there's no chance an upstart young innovator like Richards will ever create a bigger, badder, cooler PVR for HDTV the way he did with MythTV for analog. Looked at from this perspective, the Broadcast Flag isn't really a deterrent against piracy so much as a deterrent against the big consumer electronics companies losing market share to little guys with big ideas. As long as it's illegal for people like Richards to tinker around with HD components, nobody will ever invent something better than TiVo or Media Player. It simply won't be possible to create new HD-related toys without a fleet of expensive lawyers in tow. The Broadcast Flag is an unholy alliance of government, big entertainment, and big electronics. Each is protecting the others' interests so that they can maintain control over the marketplace. The only losers in the deal are small entrepreneurs and consumers. Geeks and librarians unite Hope is not lost - at least, not yet. Several public interest groups, including Washington, D.C.-based Public Knowledge and the EFF, as well as the American Library Association, are fighting the Broadcast Flag tooth and nail. Librarians worry that limiting devices that can output HD may interfere with future methods for distance learning and archiving. Public Knowledge is concerned with the bigger picture. As executive director Gigi Sohn puts it, "People who want to make fair use of copyrighted materials won't be able to do it." In other words, no personal copy of Animal Crackers to make the flight to Australia less arduous. Last week, a D.C. appeals court heard oral arguments in ALA v. FCC, the lawsuit these groups brought against the FCC, in which they argue that the FCC overstepped its jurisdiction when it mandated the flag. "There is no precedent for what the FCC did here," Sohn says. "Every time the FCC has regulated devices, it's because Congress gave it the authority. But this rule isn't based on any congressional mandate or even ancillary to a provision in the Communications Act." Sohn, who was at the oral arguments, says the three-judge panel was very persuaded by the merits of the case. All three acknowledged that the flag seemed unnecessary to ease the nation's transition to HDTV - one even remarked that this was as ridiculous as the FCC attempting to regulate washing machines. Unfortunately, the case may hit a snag when it comes to whether these groups actually have standing to bring the case. The court seemed eager to have more concrete examples of how people would be harmed by the mandate. "Of course, it's hard to come up with concrete examples when the devices in question aren't even out yet," Sohn points out. And may never be, given the flag rule's chilling effects. The EFF's Seltzer says the flag will create media fiefdoms, in which consumers are locked into particular devices or sets of devices in order to enjoy their media. It will be costly to buy a set of flag-compliant consumer electronics that all work together - and even when you do, recordings made in, say, a Sony machine won't be able to play in a Microsoft one. Which is just one more reason why it's time to build your own TV. Back at the Build-In, Seltzer and Brydon are jumping up and down and shouting. "We've got TV!" Seltzer exults. Brydon can't stop grinning at her monitor, where they've tuned in some local news. The picture is still a little jerky - the software needs some tuning - but we've got our first HDTV working. Best of all, it's a liberated TV - it isn't an "authorized device," and it's not "broadcast flag compliant." It certainly isn't "robust against user modification." But because it was built before the July 1 start date of the Broadcast Flag rule, it's going to remain perfectly legal. This TV will always be able to record HD shows and burn them to DVDs for personal use. Next year, Brydon can loan her friends an HD-quality copy of Battlestar Galactica if they missed it that week. Dale Kiefling, another Build-In participant, is almost ready to channel surf on his box too. He and his friend Lorena Fleming say they're excited to play around with TV the way they do with their computers. "I think the Broadcast Flag punishes the wrong group," Kiefling says. "The people who do mass piracy will always have the means to - the flag won't stop them. Meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck with broken entertainment systems." All the people who now take for granted the act of removing a tape from their VCR - the Star Trek fans, the OC addicts, the Marx brothers aficionados - will gradually discover they can't do the same thing with their new PVRs. Copyright law permits consumers to make personal, fair-use copies of their media. And yet the government-entertainment industrial complex will have engineered every device to stop them. "That's the worst part of all this," Fleming says. "People won't realize how bad it is until suddenly their stuff stops working." Annalee Newitz is policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a freelance writer. Get the gory details at www.techsploitation.com. -- ----------------- 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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How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp
by R.A. Hettinga 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

Actually, it's not just "sender pays", it's "a whitlist for my friends, all other others pay cash", but "sender pays" will do for a start. :-) Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/business/yourmoney/13digi.html?th=&pagewa…> The New York Times February 13, 2005 DIGITAL DOMAIN How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp By RANDALL STROSS OMPARE our e-mail system today with the British General Post Office in 1839, and ours wins. Compare it with the British postal system in 1840, however, and ours loses. In that year, the British introduced the Penny Black, the first postage stamp. It simplified postage - yes, to a penny - and shifted the cost from the recipient to the sender, who had to prepay. We look back with wonder that it could have ever been otherwise. Recipient pays? Why should the person who had not initiated the transaction be forced to pay for a message with unseen contents? What a perverse system. Today, however, we meekly assume that the recipient of e-mail must bear the costs. It is nominally free, of course, but it arrives in polluted form. Cleaning out the stuff once it reaches our in-box, or our Internet service provider's, is irritating beyond words, costly even without per-message postage. This muck - Hotmail alone catches about 3.2 billion unsolicited messages a day - is a bane of modern life. Even the best filters address the problem too late, after this sludge has been discharged without cost to the polluter. In my case, desperation has driven me to send all my messages sequentially through three separate filter systems. Then I must remember to check the three junk folders to see what failed to get through that should have. Recipient pays. Do not despair. We can now glimpse what had once seemed unattainable: stopping the flow at its very source. The most promising news is that companies like Yahoo, EarthLink, America Online, Comcast and Verizon have overcome the fear that they would prompt antitrust sanctions if they joined forces to reclaim the control they have lost to spammers. They belong to an organization called the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, formed only last year. It shares antispam techniques and lobbies other e-mail providers to adopt policies that protect the commons. Civic responsibility entails not merely screening incoming mail to protect one's own customers but also screening outgoing mail that could become someone else's problem. Carl Hutzler, AOL's director of antispam operations, has been an especially energetic campaigner, urging all network operators to "cut off the spammer's oxygen supply," as he told an industry gathering last fall. And those operators who do not "get smart soon and control the sources of spam on their networks," he said, will find that they "will not have connectivity" to his provider and others who are filtering outgoing e-mail. He did not spell out the implications for customers, but he doesn't need to: we can select a service provider from the group with a spam-free zone, or one that has failed to do the necessary self-policing required for joining the gated community and is banished to the wilds of anything-goes. One measure backed by advocates like Mr. Hutzler is already having a positive impact: "Port 25 blocking," which prevents an individual PC from running its own mail server and blasting out e-mail on its own. With the block in place, all outgoing e-mail must go through the service provider's mail server, where high-volume batches of identical mail can be detected easily and cut off. Internet service providers are also starting to stamp outgoing messages with a digital signature of the customer's domain name, using strong cryptography so the signature cannot be altered or counterfeited. This is accomplished with software called DomainKeys, originally developed by Yahoo. It is now offered in open-source form and was recently adopted by EarthLink and some other major services. A digital signature is what we will want to see on all incoming e-mail. If your Internet service provider is not on the working group's roster, you can insist that it take the oath of good citizenship. This month, MCI found itself criticized because a Web site that sells Send-Safe software gets Internet services from a company that's an MCI division customer. Send-Safe is spamware that offers bulk e-mail capability, claiming "real anonymity"; it hijacks other machines that have been infected with a complementary virus. Anyone can try it out for $50 and spray 400,000 messages. MCI, for its part, argues that it has an exemplary record in shutting down spammers, but that the sale of bulk e-mail software is not, ipso facto, illegal. Unfortunately, there has been no good news on the legal front. When the first batch of antispam bills was introduced in Congress in 1999, one could have reasonably expected that legislators were ready to stamp out unsolicited e-mail, just as they had banned unsolicited faxes with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. While spam-filled e-mail boxes do not entail monetary costs in the form of fax paper and toner, they cost us dearly in time. Surely Congress would not be so literal-minded when comparing e-mail with faxes as to miss the parallel and equally offensive notion of "recipient pays"? The years passed, the antispam bills multiplied, hearings were held and more bills were introduced, with each session's bills weaker than the previous ones. In the end, in 2003, we got the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, or Can-Spam. Its backers took a brave stand against deceptive subject lines and false headers and then went home. The law did not prohibit unsolicited commercial e-mail and has turned out to be worse than useless. "Before Can-Spam, the legal status of spam was ambiguous," said Professor David E. Sorkin, an associate professor at the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. "Now, it's clear: it's regarded as legal." Only fraudulent representations in unsolicited bulk e-mail are verboten, but "unsolicited" has now been blessed, and so, too, has "bulk." Katie, bar the door! Instead of giving marketers access to our e-mail boxes only if we expressly indicate that their attention would be welcome, which is an "opt in" system, Can-Spam gives the direct marketers the gift of an "opt out" system, where the onus is on us to notify each sender, one by one, that we do not wish to be on its list. Recipient pays, again and again. If one goes back and reads the transcripts of the hearings held in the summer of 2003, before the bill's passage, one is treated to an edifying "how a bill becomes law" lesson. An especially enlightening moment was when Representative Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican since elected to the Senate, spoke passionately about unsolicited commercial e-mail: "I think there is one thing that we can all agree on. One, we would all like to get the discount airfare offers, we would like to get the discount hotel offers. We never know when they are going to be advantageous to us." Looking to the future, let's not count on Congress to do any better in spurning the blandishments of the Direct Marketing Association. And let's not count on authentication technologies like DomainKeys as a panacea. Even when most mail is properly authenticated, we will still have to figure out whether to trust names that are unfamiliar to us. What we need is a way to make all bulk e-mailers pay for the privilege of using our e-mail boxes. That would make legitimate businesses focus on the best prospects, just as bulk mailers of ordinary junk must do. And it would force spammers to shell out for an expense unfamiliar to them: buying "stamps." That would bring a swift, permanent end to their activities. What we need, in other words, is what was proposed in 1992 at the International Cryptology Conference. In a paper titled "Pricing Via Processing, or Combating Junk Mail," two computer scientists, Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor, came up with a way to force a sender to pay every time a message was sent - payment not in money, but in time, by applying the computer's resources to a computational puzzle, devised on the fly for that particular message. Ms. Dwork now works at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley and has continued to work on the project. It has yet to be adopted in a commercial e-mail service, but it shows promise in its current form. The puzzle uses an intricate design involving the way a computer gains access to memory and resists a quick solution by speedy processors, requiring about 10 seconds. It is not so long that you'd notice it for the occasional outgoing message, but if you have eight million Viagra messages queued up, good luck in getting each one "stamped." Use of the system would always be voluntary, and wholly unnecessary when sending to friends and family. On the receiving end, your e-mail program could be set to filter incoming messages arriving from unfamiliar senders on the basis of proof of completion of the assigned problem. No stamp, no entry. Ms. Dwork and her colleagues have named this the Penny Black Project. Sender pays. Randall Stross is a historian and author based in Silicon Valley. E-mail:ddomain@nytimes.com. Copyrigh -- ----------------- 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: SHA-1 results available
by Whyte, William 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

> http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~yiqun/shanote.pdf > > No real details, just collisions for 80 round SHA-0 (which I > just confirmed) > and 58 round SHA-1 (which I haven't bothered with), plus the > now famous work > factor estimate of 2^69 for full SHA-1. > > As usual, "Technical details will be provided in a > forthcoming paper." I'm not > holding my breath. A preprint was circulating at the RSA conference; Adi Shamir had a copy. Similar techniques were used by Vincent Rijmen and Elizabeth Oswald, in their paper available at .http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/010. William --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com

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FYI: paper about Metcalfe's Law
by R.A. Hettinga 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

--- begin forwarded text

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FYI: paper about Metcalfe's Law
by Andrew Odlyzko 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

Dear Colleagues, Sorry for the spam, but I thought you might be interested in the paper described below. Comments are invited. Andrew A refutation of Metcalfe's Law and a better estimate for the value of networks and network interconnections Andrew Odlyzko Digital Technology Center University of Minnesota odlyzko(a)umn.edu Benjamin Tilly ben_tilly(a)operamail.com Abstract Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the size of the network. It is widely accepted and frequently cited. However, there are several arguments that this rule is a significant overestimate. (Therefore Reed's Law is even more of an overestimate, since it says that the value of a network grows exponentially, in the mathematical sense, in network size.) This note presents several quantitative arguments that suggest the value of a general communication network of size n grows like n*log(n). This growth rate is faster than the linear growth, of order n, that, according to Sarnoff's Law, governs the value of a broadcast network. On the other hand, it is much slower than the quadratic growth of Metcalfe's Law, and helps explain the failure of the dot-com and telecom booms, as well as why network interconnection (such as peering on the Internet) remains a controversial issue. FULL PAPER AT: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf --- 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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FYI: paper about Metcalfe's Law
by Andrew Odlyzko 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

Dear Colleagues, Sorry for the spam, but I thought you might be interested in the paper described below. Comments are invited. Andrew A refutation of Metcalfe's Law and a better estimate for the value of networks and network interconnections Andrew Odlyzko Digital Technology Center University of Minnesota odlyzko(a)umn.edu Benjamin Tilly ben_tilly(a)operamail.com Abstract Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the size of the network. It is widely accepted and frequently cited. However, there are several arguments that this rule is a significant overestimate. (Therefore Reed's Law is even more of an overestimate, since it says that the value of a network grows exponentially, in the mathematical sense, in network size.) This note presents several quantitative arguments that suggest the value of a general communication network of size n grows like n*log(n). This growth rate is faster than the linear growth, of order n, that, according to Sarnoff's Law, governs the value of a broadcast network. On the other hand, it is much slower than the quadratic growth of Metcalfe's Law, and helps explain the failure of the dot-com and telecom booms, as well as why network interconnection (such as peering on the Internet) remains a controversial issue. FULL PAPER AT: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf --- 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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China charges U.S. monopolizes the Internet, seeks global control
by R.A. Hettinga 02 Mar '05

02 Mar '05

<http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/breaking2453432.0569444443.html> World Tribune.com China charges U.S. monopolizes the Internet, seeks global control Special to World Tribune.com EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COMWednesday, March 2, 2005 China's ambassador to the United Nations last week called for international controls on the Internet. Chinese Ambassador Sha Zukang told a UN conference that controls should be multilateral, transparent and democratic, with the full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations. "It should ensure an equitable distribution of resources, facilitate access for all and ensure a stable and secure functioning," he said at the conference on Internet governance. Sha said China opposes the "monopolization" of the Internet by one state, a reference to the Untied States, which ultimately controls the digital medium. "It is of crucial importance to conduct research on establishing a multilateral governance mechanism that is more rational and just and more conducive to the Internet development in a direction of stable, secure and responsible functioning and more conducive to the continuous technological innovation," he said. China's communist government fears the Internet would dilute Beijing's control over its population, as information passes unfiltered throughout the country and outside of strict government censorship. China strictly prohibits any public criticism of the ruling communist party and closely monitors and censors Internet usage. Periodically, Chinese security forces raid Internet cafes and arrest people who violate Chinese rules. Sha said China has 94 million Internet users out of a worldwide total of about 810 million. -- ----------------- 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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[IP] Books -- The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping (fwd from dave@farber.net)
by Eugen Leitl 02 Mar '05

02 Mar '05

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

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Re: [FoRK] X.509 certificate collision via MD5 collisions (fwd from jeff@k2.com)
by hal＠finney.org 02 Mar '05

02 Mar '05

Eugen forwards from FoRK: > >Colliding X.509 Certificates version 1.0 > >1st March 2005 > >Arjen Lenstra, Xiaoyun Wang, and Benne de Weger > > > >http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/067 > > > >We announce a method for the construction of pairs of valid X.509 > >certificates in which the ?to be signed? parts form a collision for > >the MD5 hash function. As a result the issuer signatures in the > >certificates will be the same when the issuer uses MD5 as its hash > >function. The real news of the paper was the announcement that Wang's techniques will be revealed this May at Eurocrypt. I'm looking forward to finding out what the secret is! Presumably everyone will receive MD5 collision finding software at around that time. The cert collision is not a surprise, people anticipated this possibility shortly after the MD5 collisions were announced. And notice that Xiaoyun Wang was an author of this paper; she was of course the lead author on the original MD5 collision paper and presumably the originator of the technique for finding MD5 collisions. Using her technology it is straightforward to do this kind of thing. But no one else could have written this paper at this time. The only nontrivial part (given the remarkable ability to generate MD5 collisions) was arranging that both keys were valid RSA moduli with known factors. The did this by generating random bignums and trying to factor them. And keep in mind that her methods find random-ish collisions. They don't find matches to existing hashes, and (as far as we know) they don't find structured collisions as would be necessary to get two certs with different and plausible-sounding names in them. >From what I've read (mostly http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/264) the way these collisions are found is to start with analysis of the structure of the hash, and decide on an XOR difference between the two inputs. This implicitly makes certain assumptions about where and when carries and other nonlinearities will occur in the hash calculation. Then you do a search for inputs which match that pattern of carries and for which the pre-determined XOR difference yields an actual collision. This doesn't give you much ability to control the content of the two inputs that you create. Hal

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Academics, artists back file-sharing firms before high court
by R.A. Hettinga 02 Mar '05

02 Mar '05

<http://www.the-dispatch.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20050302&Category=AP…> The Lexington Dispatch Article published Mar 2, 2005 Academics, artists back file-sharing firms before high court By ALEX VEIGA AP Business Writer Several major technology companies, consumer groups and academics want the U.S. Supreme Court to stay out of a long-running legal dispute between online file-sharing firms and the entertainment industry. Recording companies and Hollywood movie studios are appealing to the high court to reverse lower court decisions that absolved Grokster Inc. and StreamCast Networks of responsibility when their customers illegally swap songs and movies using their software. The tech firms and others argue that a court victory by the entertainment companies would stifle innovation in the technology sector. In briefs filed Tuesday, Grokster, StreamCast and their supporters urged the court not to reinterpret the legal doctrine it established in the 1984 Sony Betamax case. At the time, the court ruled that Sony's video recorder was legal because it had legitimate uses apart from making unauthorized copies of movies and television shows. The entertainment industry has asked the court to reconcile the 20-year-old ruling to protect copyright holders it says are hard-pressed to safeguard their intellectual property in today's digital and online world. But such a move is exactly what the file-sharing firms and their supporters hope to avoid. "A rule like this will make it almost impossible for anyone to innovate or create new products unless they have the blessing of the copyright holders," said Grokster attorney Michael Page during a conference call with reporters Tuesday. "And when the copyright holders also control the distribution systems, that blessing will not be forthcoming." A group of 17 computer science and engineering professors at nine universities, including Harold Abelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edward W. Felten of Princeton and David J. Farber of Carnegie Mellon, stressed in their brief that they feared if the court sided with the entertainment companies it could chill technological progress in computers and the Internet. "If this court should announce a more restrictive rule, those who create the latest advances in technology will halt or significantly scale back their work, for fear of massive copyright infringement damages," the professors' brief asserts. Four consumer and public-interest groups also weighed in, arguing that any steps to change the Betamax doctrine would give Hollywood and other copyright owners the power to censor information technology that ultimately could benefit consumers. Entertainment companies "would turn this into a surveillance society in which every file is fingerprinted, every user is tagged, every transaction is monitored," said Mark Cooper, a spokesman for the Consumer Federation of America. Others who filed briefs in support of Grokster and StreamCast included a group of law professors, the National Association of Shareholder and Consumer Attorneys, the National Venture Capital Association, Creative Commons and trade groups representing technology companies such as Intel Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. A brief by several telecom firms argues "only Congress has the constitutional mandate and institutional capacity to address peer-to-peer technology in a way that promotes the good and punishes the bad." Intel also submitted a separate brief, where it argues that any changes to the Sony Betamax decision would put the onus on it and other companies to "anticipate the potential uses of their innovations ..." and then redesign their technology to make sure it doesn't violate copyright laws. That "would stifle innovation and dramatically increase the cost of such technologies and of the consumer and enterprise products based on those technologies," the company argued. Several recording artists, conservative family groups, professional sports leagues, state attorneys general from 39 states, the U.S. government, university professors and online services that legally sell music or movies have filed briefs in support of the entertainment industry. The justices are scheduled to hear arguments in the case March 29. -- ----------------- 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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