July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [p2p-hackers] Alpha testers needed
by Zooko O'Whielacronx 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Thanks for the history lessons, IanG and JimM! And thanks for the new p2p research references, Dan Menasche and Vijay Gurbani. And thanks for the valuable skepticism, DavidB and SergueiO. ;-) Something that I would like to append to IanG's story about cypherpunks thinking prices are the answer and p2p-punks thinking decentralization is the answer: That there is also a new generation of interesting payment systems including The Love Machine and Flattr. I think Flattr is very interesting: http://flattr.com Founded by founders of The Pirate Bay, they do several things that are very promising: 1. The marginal cost to you of clicking on someone's "flattr me" button is zero. This is due to the scheme of subscribing to Flattr.com with a monthly fee and then at the end of the month your money gets split among everyone whom your clicked on. This is the most promising solution to the problem of "mental transaction costs" [1]. 2. The pitch is that this is a way to express love to people. b% > $ 3. Look: content! http://flattr.com/category/software It is very easy to find things to love on the flattr.com web site. This has a lot in common with the "tipping" feature that we advertised as a future feature of Mojo Nation (e.g. it features prominently in the write-up of Mojo Nation in The Economist). (Inside Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow we called that feature the "Pay Lars" button, in honor of a certain musician who had publicly criticized Napster for depriving him of well-earned income.) >From a historical perspective Flattr is a fascinating example of the evolution of ideas. The founders of The Pirate Bay are probably intimately familiar with BitTorrent, but as far as I know, they are unfamiliar with anonymous Chaumian digital cash. I wouldn't be surprised if they got the idea for Flattr from their experience with BitTorrent and basically observing that there was a "hole" in BitTorrent where micropayments could go. :-) Does anyone know the inside story on how they got the idea for Flattr? Regards, Zooko [1] http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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None
by Jim Choate 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> > Socialism: state intervention in private transactions. By extension, any > > state is socialist, or it's not really a state, but a company in the defense > > (and maybe law) business. > > The problem here is there isn't any issue of 'private property' so there > can't be any 'private transactions' in a socialism. This description is > more applicable to fascism. Private transaction = transaction between two individuals / companies who are both not employees / property of the state (not even partially). The point being that I don't care if the gov't stops Clinton from selling his daughter to someone else - he's a state employee. Mark

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[Geowanking] MS local.live.com & privacy (lack of)
by Mike Liebhold 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I took a look yesterday at Microsofts new Virtual Earth incarnation, called local.live .com. <http://local.live.com/> I won't write a full review here. Anyone interested can take a look themselves. Beyond the irritating, unblockable CSS-like popups, There 's a critical point about Microsoft's handling of sensive location information that's worth immediate comment here: The service includes a feature called "locate me" which launches a Placelab-like wifi base-station geolocation technique.called 'Location Finder" which listens for the MAC address and compares it to a client cache of locations of known base stations. Placelab, which was developed by Intel Labs, is available free for download on sourceforge, and as many people may know, was explicitly designed by Intel to be 'privacy observant'. Unlike most e-911 and mobile phone location systems which sureveil, and actively track a users location, Placelab was designed to present location coordinates privately to a user, without querying, or notifying the network. IMHO this is a noble design goal. Microsoft's "Location Finder" program, on the other hand, includes the following disclaimer in the terms and conditions link which says " Your privacy is important to us. click here <http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=51332&clcid=0x409> to see our privacy policy:" [snip] "Use of Location Information ... Microsoft may use the information collected to provide you with more effective customer service, to improve Location Finder and any related Microsoft products or services,... Microsoft may disclose location information if required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to (a) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Microsoft; (b) protect and defend the rights or property of Microsoft and our family of Web sites; or (c) act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of Microsoft employees or agents, users of Microsoft products or services, or members of the public. Location information collected by Location Finder may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Microsoft or its affiliates, subsidiaries or agents maintain facilities. " [snip] So much for privacy of Microsoft's 'Location finder' program. If this is unpalatable to you, you may be interested in trying as I did an alternate location techique. Instead of 'Location Finder' local.live.com also offers users a choice to select IP location lookup. As discussed here in the past, IP geolocation is an imperfect art, dependent of the accuracy of the data in the offical IANA database ( Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.) In my case, my IP address has shown that am in San Diego, since that's where my IP connection is officially terminated at the downlink center for my satellite service provider. I'm actually connected to the Internet via a KuBand satellite in the remote wilds of Northern California, a long ways away. The location of my dish is simply not visible to the net. It looks, to the net, like I'm in San Diego, over 700 miles south. So, you might understand that I was quite suprised and dismayed that Microsoft's IP lookup returned my actual location in the woods in Northern California !!! Just to be sure they didn't get my address from my satellite service provider, I called the Network Operations Center, who said the location of my dish is private, but looked up my record anyway, and confirmed " Our database, and the IANA database show your IP address is in San Diego. Clearly Microsoft's IP location database includes spooky datamined information about users' actual location that is not normally available by querying the publically accessible databases. Be forewarned. Mike Mike Liebhold Senior Researcher Institute for the Future iftf.org <http://www.iftf.org> | starhill.us <http://starhill.us> | starhill del.icio.us blend <http://del.icio.us/inbox/starhill_blend> _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking(a)lists.burri.to http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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NYT: "Internet Users Thinking Twice Before a Search"
by Steven 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Excerpt from NYT story: "But the government's move is one of several recent episodes that have caused some people to think twice about the information they type into a search engine, or the opinions they express in an e- mail message." What was it Thomas Paine said..... "When the people fear the government, you have tyranny. When the government fears the people, you have freedom." -------------- NYTimes.com January 25, 2006 Internet Users Thinking Twice Before a Search By KATIE HAFNER Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy." It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute? Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. "I told him I'd Googled 'rent boy,' just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night," she said. Ms. Hanson's reaction arose from last week's reports that as part of its effort to uphold an online pornography law, the Justice Department had asked a federal judge to compel Google to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries. Google is resisting the request, but three of its competitors - Yahoo, MSN and America Online - have turned over similar information. [snip] The full story can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/dgy9k Steven Hertzberg ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] NYT: "Internet Users Thinking Twice Before a Search"
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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Re: [p2p-hackers] cryptocounters for our PETs
by Alfonso De Gregorio 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi David, On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 8:48 PM, David Barrett <dbarrett(a)quinthar.com> wrote: > That's interesting! Can you give a bit more information about it's use for > secure voting? Absolutely, thanks for asking. Cryptographic counters were introduced by Jonathan Katz, Steven Myers, and Rafail Ostrovsky in a work where they especially addressed their applications to electronic voting. So, I suppose its relevance makes the paper a good candidate for a reference: 'Cryptographic Counters and Applications to Electronic Voting', Eurocrypt 2001, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.29.52 Though cryptocounters may find application as subroutines in electronic voting system (more below), the possibility to use them as useful building blocks ultimately depends upon the requirements engineering for electronic vote (e.g., is coercion resistance a requirement?) > (I think there is a typo in the blog post around the word "addend", or > that's a word I don't recognize -- it's key to that sentence, which itself > is the key sentence of that section -- so I'm left confused.) Sorry for the confusion. Let me rephrase the section. Lets consider a secure electronic voting where each participant holds a binary vote, which is either 0 or 1. We want to compute the tally without revealing the individual votes. A secure protocol to compute the sum of integers can be of help here. Votes, actually their randomized encryptions, are terms of the addition. The addition can be computed privately using an additive homomorphic cryptographic scheme, hence providing means to privately cast the participants' votes. To compute the tally, the voting authority -- which may inlcude participants themselves -- decrypt the cryptographic counter and publish the final result. > I'd love more information on the real world applications of this interesting > concept. Thanks! Lately, I've been working with a company interested in applying cryptocounters and building an application where privacy is taken care of by design. I'll do my best to help them delivering their project. Perhaps they will decide to write something about this in the future. At the same time, there are few application of cryptocounters, unrelated to electronic voting and my current engagements, suggested by Adam Young and Moti Yung in their Malicious Cryptography (J. Wiley) and the upcoming Advances in Cryptovirology http://www.cryptovirology.com/ But I'm pretty confident we could devise more applications. Thanks! > -david > > > > -- Sent from my Palm Pre Cheers, -- alfonso blogs at http://Plaintext.crypto.lo.gy tweets @secYOUre _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[Geowanking] MS local.live.com & privacy (lack of)
by Mike Liebhold 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I took a look yesterday at Microsofts new Virtual Earth incarnation, called local.live .com. <http://local.live.com/> I won't write a full review here. Anyone interested can take a look themselves. Beyond the irritating, unblockable CSS-like popups, There 's a critical point about Microsoft's handling of sensive location information that's worth immediate comment here: The service includes a feature called "locate me" which launches a Placelab-like wifi base-station geolocation technique.called 'Location Finder" which listens for the MAC address and compares it to a client cache of locations of known base stations. Placelab, which was developed by Intel Labs, is available free for download on sourceforge, and as many people may know, was explicitly designed by Intel to be 'privacy observant'. Unlike most e-911 and mobile phone location systems which sureveil, and actively track a users location, Placelab was designed to present location coordinates privately to a user, without querying, or notifying the network. IMHO this is a noble design goal. Microsoft's "Location Finder" program, on the other hand, includes the following disclaimer in the terms and conditions link which says " Your privacy is important to us. click here <http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=51332&clcid=0x409> to see our privacy policy:" [snip] "Use of Location Information ... Microsoft may use the information collected to provide you with more effective customer service, to improve Location Finder and any related Microsoft products or services,... Microsoft may disclose location information if required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to (a) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Microsoft; (b) protect and defend the rights or property of Microsoft and our family of Web sites; or (c) act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of Microsoft employees or agents, users of Microsoft products or services, or members of the public. Location information collected by Location Finder may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Microsoft or its affiliates, subsidiaries or agents maintain facilities. " [snip] So much for privacy of Microsoft's 'Location finder' program. If this is unpalatable to you, you may be interested in trying as I did an alternate location techique. Instead of 'Location Finder' local.live.com also offers users a choice to select IP location lookup. As discussed here in the past, IP geolocation is an imperfect art, dependent of the accuracy of the data in the offical IANA database ( Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.) In my case, my IP address has shown that am in San Diego, since that's where my IP connection is officially terminated at the downlink center for my satellite service provider. I'm actually connected to the Internet via a KuBand satellite in the remote wilds of Northern California, a long ways away. The location of my dish is simply not visible to the net. It looks, to the net, like I'm in San Diego, over 700 miles south. So, you might understand that I was quite suprised and dismayed that Microsoft's IP lookup returned my actual location in the woods in Northern California !!! Just to be sure they didn't get my address from my satellite service provider, I called the Network Operations Center, who said the location of my dish is private, but looked up my record anyway, and confirmed " Our database, and the IANA database show your IP address is in San Diego. Clearly Microsoft's IP location database includes spooky datamined information about users' actual location that is not normally available by querying the publically accessible databases. Be forewarned. Mike Mike Liebhold Senior Researcher Institute for the Future iftf.org <http://www.iftf.org> | starhill.us <http://starhill.us> | starhill del.icio.us blend <http://del.icio.us/inbox/starhill_blend> _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking(a)lists.burri.to http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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NYT: "Internet Users Thinking Twice Before a Search"
by Steven 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Excerpt from NYT story: "But the government's move is one of several recent episodes that have caused some people to think twice about the information they type into a search engine, or the opinions they express in an e- mail message." What was it Thomas Paine said..... "When the people fear the government, you have tyranny. When the government fears the people, you have freedom." -------------- NYTimes.com January 25, 2006 Internet Users Thinking Twice Before a Search By KATIE HAFNER Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy." It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute? Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. "I told him I'd Googled 'rent boy,' just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night," she said. Ms. Hanson's reaction arose from last week's reports that as part of its effort to uphold an online pornography law, the Justice Department had asked a federal judge to compel Google to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries. Google is resisting the request, but three of its competitors - Yahoo, MSN and America Online - have turned over similar information. [snip] The full story can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/dgy9k Steven Hertzberg ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] NYT: "Internet Users Thinking Twice Before a Search"
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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Re: [p2p-hackers] cryptocounters for our PETs
by Alfonso De Gregorio 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi David, On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 8:48 PM, David Barrett <dbarrett(a)quinthar.com> wrote: > That's interesting! Can you give a bit more information about it's use for > secure voting? Absolutely, thanks for asking. Cryptographic counters were introduced by Jonathan Katz, Steven Myers, and Rafail Ostrovsky in a work where they especially addressed their applications to electronic voting. So, I suppose its relevance makes the paper a good candidate for a reference: 'Cryptographic Counters and Applications to Electronic Voting', Eurocrypt 2001, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.29.52 Though cryptocounters may find application as subroutines in electronic voting system (more below), the possibility to use them as useful building blocks ultimately depends upon the requirements engineering for electronic vote (e.g., is coercion resistance a requirement?) > (I think there is a typo in the blog post around the word "addend", or > that's a word I don't recognize -- it's key to that sentence, which itself > is the key sentence of that section -- so I'm left confused.) Sorry for the confusion. Let me rephrase the section. Lets consider a secure electronic voting where each participant holds a binary vote, which is either 0 or 1. We want to compute the tally without revealing the individual votes. A secure protocol to compute the sum of integers can be of help here. Votes, actually their randomized encryptions, are terms of the addition. The addition can be computed privately using an additive homomorphic cryptographic scheme, hence providing means to privately cast the participants' votes. To compute the tally, the voting authority -- which may inlcude participants themselves -- decrypt the cryptographic counter and publish the final result. > I'd love more information on the real world applications of this interesting > concept. Thanks! Lately, I've been working with a company interested in applying cryptocounters and building an application where privacy is taken care of by design. I'll do my best to help them delivering their project. Perhaps they will decide to write something about this in the future. At the same time, there are few application of cryptocounters, unrelated to electronic voting and my current engagements, suggested by Adam Young and Moti Yung in their Malicious Cryptography (J. Wiley) and the upcoming Advances in Cryptovirology http://www.cryptovirology.com/ But I'm pretty confident we could devise more applications. Thanks! > -david > > > > -- Sent from my Palm Pre Cheers, -- alfonso blogs at http://Plaintext.crypto.lo.gy tweets @secYOUre _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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