July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Fwd: [PGP-USERS] Another Flaw in PGP found.
by Fearghas McKay 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

--- begin forwarded text

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[mnet-devel] Mac OS X binary package up
by Zooko Wooko 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I put up a Mac OS X binary package which is actually just a tarball with the Mnet.sh script as the way to launch it. I know that this doesn't make users want to lick the screen, so it is only a temporary measure. http://mnet.sf.net/download.php ------------------------------------------------------- This SF. Net email is sponsored by: GoToMyPC GoToMyPC is the fast, easy and secure way to access your computer from any Web browser or wireless device. Click here to Try it Free! https://www.gotomypc.com/tr/OSDN/AW/Q4_2003/t/g22lp?Target=mm/g22lp.tmpl _______________________________________________ mnet-devel mailing list mnet-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mnet-devel --- 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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CRYPTO-GRAM, September 15, 2009
by Bruce Schneier 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

CRYPTO-GRAM September 15, 2009 by Bruce Schneier Chief Security Technology Officer, BT schneier(a)schneier.com http://www.schneier.com A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. For back issues, or to subscribe, visit <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. You can read this issue on the web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0909.html>. These same essays appear in the "Schneier on Security" blog: <http://www.schneier.com/blog>. An RSS feed is available. ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* In this issue: Eighth Anniversary of 9/11 Skein News Real-World Access Control News File Deletion On London's Surveillance Cameras Robert Sawyer's Alibis Schneier News Stealing 130 Million Credit Card Numbers "The Cult of Schneier" Comments from Readers ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Eighth Anniversary of 9/11 On September 30, 2001, I published a special issue of Crypto-Gram discussing the terrorist attacks. I wrote about the novelty of the attacks, airplane security, diagnosing intelligence failures, the potential of regulating cryptography -- because it could be used by the terrorists -- and protecting privacy and liberty. Much of what I wrote is still relevant today. http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0109a.html Me from 2006: "Refuse to be Terrorized." http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Skein News Skein is one of the 14 SHA-3 candidates chosen by NIST to advance to the second round. As part of the process, NIST allowed the algorithm designers to implement small "tweaks" to their algorithms. We've tweaked the rotation constants of Skein. The revised Skein paper contains the new rotation constants, as well as information about how we chose them and why we changed them, the results of some new cryptanalysis, plus new IVs and test vectors. Tweaks were due today, September 15. Now the SHA-3 process moves into the second round. According to NIST's timeline, they'll choose a set of final round candidate algorithms in 2010, and then a single hash algorithm in 2012. Between now and then, it's up to all of us to evaluate the algorithms and let NIST know what we want. Cryptanalysis is important, of course, but so is performance. The second-round algorithms are: BLAKE, Blue Midnight Wish, CubeHash, ECHO, Fugue, Grxstl, Hamsi, JH, Keccak, Luffa, Shabal, SHAvite-3, SIMD, and Skein. You can find details on all of them, as well as the current state of their cryptanalysis, at the SHA-3 Zoo. In other news, we're making Skein shirts available to the public. Those of you who attended the First Hash Function Candidate Conference in Leuven, Belgium, earlier this year might have noticed the stylish black Skein polo shirts worn by the Skein team. Anyone who wants one is welcome to buy it, at cost. All orders must be received before 1 October, and then we'll have all the shirts made in one batch. Skein website: http://www.skein-hash.info/ Revised Skein paper: http://www.schneier.com/skein.pdf Revised Skein source code: http://www.schneier.com/code/skein.zip My 2008 essay on SHA-3: http://www.schneier.com/essay-249.html Details on Skein shirts: http://www.schneier.com/skein-shirts.html NIST SHA-3 Website: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/index.html http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/Round2/submissions_rnd2.html SHA-3 Zoo: http://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/The_SHA-3_Zoo ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Real-World Access Control Access control is difficult in an organizational setting. On one hand, every employee needs enough access to do his job. On the other hand, every time you give an employee more access, there's more risk: he could abuse that access, or lose information he has access to, or be socially engineered into giving that access to a malfeasant. So a smart, risk-conscious organization will give each employee the exact level of access he needs to do his job, and no more. Over the years, there's been a lot of work put into role-based access control. But despite the large number of academic papers and high-profile security products, most organizations don't implement it -- at all -- with the predictable security problems as a result. Regularly we read stories of employees abusing their database access-control privileges for personal reasons: medical records, tax records, passport records, police records. NSA eavesdroppers spy on their wives and girlfriends. Departing employees take corporate secrets A spectacular access control failure occurred in the UK in 2007. An employee of Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs had to send a couple of thousand sample records from a database on all children in the country to National Audit Office. But it was easier for him to copy the entire database of 25 million people onto a couple of disks and put it in the mail than it was to select out just the records needed. Unfortunately, the discs got lost in the mail and the story was a huge embarrassment for the government. Eric Johnson at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business has been studying the problem, and his results won't startle anyone who has thought about it at all. RBAC is very hard to implement correctly. Organizations generally don't even know who has what role. The employee doesn't know, the boss doesn't know -- and these days the employee might have more than one boss -- and senior management certainly doesn't know. There's a reason RBAC came out of the military; in that world, command structures are simple and well-defined. Even worse, employees' roles change all the time -- Johnson chronicled one business group of 3,000 people that made 1,000 role changes in just three months -- and it's often not obvious what information an employee needs until he actually needs it. And information simply isn't that granular. Just as it's much easier to give someone access to an entire file cabinet than to only the particular files he needs, it's much easier to give someone access to an entire database than only the particular records he needs. This means that organizations either over-entitle or under-entitle employees. But since getting the job done is more important than anything else, organizations tend to over-entitle. Johnson estimates that 50 percent to 90 percent of employees are over-entitled in large organizations. In the uncommon instance where an employee needs access to something he normally doesn't have, there's generally some process for him to get it. And access is almost never revoked once it's been granted. In large formal organizations, Johnson was able to predict how long an employee had worked there based on how much access he had. Clearly, organizations can do better. Johnson's current work involves building access-control systems with easy self-escalation, audit to make sure that power isn't abused, violation penalties (Intel, for example, issues "speeding tickets" to violators), and compliance rewards. His goal is to implement incentives and controls that manage access without making people too risk-averse. In the end, a perfect access control system just isn't possible; organizations are simply too chaotic for it to work. And any good system will allow a certain number of access control violations, if they're made in good faith by people just trying to do their jobs. The "speeding ticket" analogy is better than it looks: we post limits of 55 miles per hour, but generally don't start ticketing people unless they're going over 70. This essay previously appeared in Information Security, as part of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. You can read Marcus's response here -- after you answer some nosy questions to get a free account. http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazineFeature/0,296894,sid14_gci1365… or http://tinyurl.com/m7qhf4 Role-based access control: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazineFeature/0,296894,sid14_gci1257… or http://tinyurl.com/n5mjmx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc780256(WS.10).aspx http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/rbac/documents/design_implementation/Intro_… or http://tinyurl.com/ku8vnd http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/rbac/documents/ferraiolo-kuhn-92.pdf Abuse of database access: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/09/local/me-hospital9 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/irs-worker-snooped-on-tax-records-of-almos… or http://tinyurl.com/mrh7a8 http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&art… or http://tinyurl.com/mwr9je http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/18/reporter-nsa-analysts-spied-on-own-w… or http://tinyurl.com/mbgmw3 http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200924/3849/Trust-still-an-issue-i… or http://tinyurl.com/mk3lyf http://searchsecurity.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid180_gci1318… or http://tinyurl.com/mu5ovb UK access control failure: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/news/hartnett-poynter-icc.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7103566.stm http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/06/27/231267/hmrc-left-the-door… or http://tinyurl.com/mdqvm9 Johnson's work: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/digital/Research/ResearchProjects/DataFinanci… or http://tinyurl.com/ln4vhr http://weis2008.econinfosec.org/papers/Zhao.pdf http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/digital/Research/ResearchProjects/wise_v1.pdf or http://tinyurl.com/mtgsq2 ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* News Flash has the equivalent of cookies, and they're hard to delete. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cookies-think-again/ or http://tinyurl.com/l2gqaz Movie-plot threat alert: robot suicide bombers. Let's all be afraid. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6028144/Rob… or http://tinyurl.com/orxxuz I'm sure I've seen this stuff in movies. It's possible to fabricate DNA evidence: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/08/dna-samples-used-by-crime-labs-… or http://tinyurl.com/pxwosm http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html http://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(09)00099-4/abstract The legal term "terroristic threats" is older than 9/11, but these days it evokes too much of an emotional response: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/the_continuing_2.html Interesting developments in lie detection: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-load-of-lying&sc=WR_20… or http://tinyurl.com/njnn3o Marc Webar Tobias on hacking the Assa Solo lock: http://www.thesidebar.org/insecurity/?p=447 Me on locks and lockpicking: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/lockpicking_and.html >From the humor website Cracked: "The 5 Most Embarrassing Failures in the History of Terrorism." Yes, it's funny. But remember that these are the terrorist masterminds that politicians invoke to keep us scared. http://www.cracked.com/article/79_the-5-most-embarrassing-failures-in-histo… or http://tinyurl.com/lt68pa My 2007 essay, "Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot," is also relevant. But less funny. http://www.schneier.com/essay-174.html Modeling zombie outbreaks: the math doesn't look good. "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/Zombies.pdf It turns out that flipping a coin has all sorts of non-randomness: http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/the-coin-flip-a-fundamentally-unfair… or http://tinyurl.com/d9kgt7 http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~susan/papers/headswithJ.pdf As part of their training, federal agents engage in mock exercises in public places. Sometimes, innocent civilians get involved. It's actual security theater. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/16/AR200908160… or http://tinyurl.com/qd6zzz http://www.startribune.com/59017377.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU The sorts of crimes we've been seeing perpetrated against individuals are starting to be perpetrated against small businesses. The problem will get much worse, and the security externalities means that the banks care much less. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/small_business.html Interesting video demonstrating how a policeman can manipulate the results of a Breathalyzer. http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Breath+tests&qs=n&docid=992451363282&mi… or http://tinyurl.com/kkq8dk There is a movement in the U.K. to replace the pint glasses in pubs with plastic because too many of them are being used as weapons. I don't think this will go anywhere, but the sheer idiocy is impressive. Reminds me of the call to ban pointy knives. That recommendation also came out of the UK. What's going on over there? http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/banning_beer_gl.html More security stories from the natural world: marine worms with glowing bombs: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/marine_worms_wi.html Weird: "The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to figure out who is sending laptop computers to state governors across the U.S., including West Virginia Governor Joe Mahchin and Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal. Some state officials are worried that they may contain malicious software." http://www.itworld.com/government/75885/fbi-investigating-laptops-sent-us-g… or http://tinyurl.com/llf53a Fascinating story of a 16-year-old blind phone phreaker. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/29787673/the_boy_who_heard_too_much/… or http://tinyurl.com/nxnb9h Hacking swine flu: "So it takes about 25 kilobits -- 3.2 Kbytes -- of data to code for a virus that has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 Kbytes. It's humbling that I could be killed by 3.2 Kbytes of genetic data. Then again, with 850 Mbytes of data in my genome, there's bound to be an exploit or two." http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353 Good article on the exaggerated fears of cyberwar: http://bostonreview.net/BR34.4/morozov.php The real risk isn't cyberterrorism, it's cybercrime. SIGABA and the history of one-time pads: http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/control/ I wrote about one-time pads, and their practical insecurity, in 2002: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0210.html#7 Interesting discussion of subpoenas as a security threat: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/subpoenas-and-search-warrants-… or http://tinyurl.com/lwtdaz A very interesting hour-long interview with David Kilcullen on security and insurgency. http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2668177.htm Nils Gilman's lecture on the global illicit economy Malware is one of Nils Gilman's examples, at about the nine-minute mark. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3173247273890946684# The seven rules of the illicit global economy (he seems to use "illicit" and "deviant" interchangeably in the talk): 1. Perfectly legitimate forms of demand can produce perfectly deviant forms of supply. 2. Uneven global regulatory structures create arbitrage opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs. 3. Pathways for legitimate globalization are always also pathways for deviant globalization. 4. Once a deviant industry professionalizes, crackdowns merely promote innovation. 5. States themselves undermine the distinction between legitimate and deviant economics. 6. Unchecked, deviant entrepreneurs will overtake the legitimate economy. 7. Deviant globalization presents an existential challenge to state legitimacy. Perfectly legal (obtained with a FISA warrant) NSA intercepts used to convict liquid bombers. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/nsa_intercepts.html The BBC has a video demonstration of a 16-ounce bottle of liquid blowing a hole in the side of a plane. I know no more details than what's in the video. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7536167.stm ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* File Deletion File deletion is all about control. This used to not be an issue. Your data was on your computer, and you decided when and how to delete a file. You could use the delete function if you didn't care about whether the file could be recovered or not, and a file erase program -- I use BCWipe for Windows -- if you wanted to ensure no one could ever recover the file. As we move more of our data onto cloud computing platforms such as Gmail and Facebook, and closed proprietary platforms such as the Kindle and the iPhone, deleting data is much harder. You have to trust that these companies will delete your data when you ask them to, but they're generally not interested in doing so. Sites like these are more likely to make your data inaccessible than they are to physically delete it. Facebook is a known culprit: actually deleting your data from its servers requires a complicated procedure that may or may not work. And even if you do manage to delete your data, copies are certain to remain in the companies' backup systems. Gmail explicitly says this in its privacy notice. Online backups, SMS messages, photos on photo sharing sites, smartphone applications that store your data in the network: you have no idea what really happens when you delete pieces of data or your entire account, because you're not in control of the computers that are storing the data. This notion of control also explains how Amazon was able to delete a book that people had previously purchased on their Kindle e-book readers. The legalities are debatable, but Amazon had the technical ability to delete the file because it controls all Kindles. It has designed the Kindle so that it determines when to update the software, whether people are allowed to buy Kindle books, and when to turn off people's Kindles entirely. Vanish is a research project by Roxana Geambasu and colleagues at the University of Washington. They designed a prototype system that automatically deletes data after a set time interval. So you can send an e-mail, create a Google Doc, post an update to Facebook, or upload a photo to Flickr, all designed to disappear after a set period of time. And after it disappears, no one -- not anyone who downloaded the data, not the site that hosted the data, not anyone who intercepted the data in transit, not even you -- will be able to read it. If the police arrive at Facebook or Google or Flickr with a warrant, they won't be able to read it. The details are complicated, but Vanish breaks the data's decryption key into a bunch of pieces and scatters them around the web using a peer-to-peer network. Then it uses the natural turnover in these networks -- machines constantly join and leave -- to make the data disappear. Unlike previous programs that supported file deletion, this one doesn't require you to trust any company, organization, or website. It just happens. Of course, Vanish doesn't prevent the recipient of an e-mail or the reader of a Facebook page from copying the data and pasting it into another file, just as Kindle's deletion feature doesn't prevent people from copying a book's files and saving them on their computers. Vanish is just a prototype at this point, and it only works if all the people who read your Facebook entries or view your Flickr pictures have it installed on their computers as well; but it's a good demonstration of how control affects file deletion. And while it's a step in the right direction, it's also new and therefore deserves further security analysis before being adopted on a wide scale. We've lost the control of data on some of the computers we own, and we've lost control of our data in the cloud. We're not going to stop using Facebook and Twitter just because they're not going to delete our data when we ask them to, and we're not going to stop using Kindles and iPhones because they may delete our data when we don't want them to. But we need to take back control of data in the cloud, and projects like Vanish show us how we can. Now we need something that will protect our data when a large corporation decides to delete it. This essay originally appeared in The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/09/bruce-schneier-file-deleti… or http://tinyurl.com/m9k2cm BCWipe: http://www.jetico.com/data-protection-wiping-bcwipe-enterprise/ Me on cloud computing: http://www.schneier.com/essay-274.html Control and the iPhone: http://www.schneier.com/essay-204.html Social networking companies don't want to delete data: http://www.schneier.com/essay-278.html How to delete your Facebook account: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account Kindle: http://bit.ly/KindleDelete http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090416/0246064526.shtml Vanish: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tm/displaystory.cfm?story_id=141… or http://tinyurl.com/nxtkfg http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/index.html http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/pubs/usenixsec09-geambasu.pdf ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* On London's Surveillance Cameras A recent report has concluded that the London's surveillance cameras have solved one crime per thousand cameras per year. I haven't seen the report, but I know it's hard to figure out when a crime has been "solved" by a surveillance camera. To me, the crime has to have been unsolvable without the cameras. Repeatedly I see pro-camera lobbyists pointing to the surveillance-camera images that identified the 7/7 London Transport bombers, but it is obvious that they would have been identified even without the cameras. And it would really help my understanding of the report's per-crime cost-to-detect of #20,000 (I assume it is calculated from #200 million for the cameras times 1 in 1000 cameras used to solve a crime per year divided by ten years) if I knew what sorts of crimes the cameras "solved." If the #200 million solved 10,000 murders, it might very well be a good security trade-off. But my guess is that most of the crimes were of a much lower level. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8219022.stm http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CCTV-cameras-to-s… or http://tinyurl.com/nblfwd ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Robert Sawyer's Alibis Back in 2002, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote an essay about the trade-off between privacy and security. I've never forgotten the first sentence: "Whenever I visit a tourist attraction that has a guest register, I always sign it. After all, you never know when you'll need an alibi." Since I read that, whenever I see a tourist attraction with a guest register, I do the same thing. I sign "Robert J. Sawyer, Toronto, ON" -- because you never know when he'll need an alibi. Sawyer's essay: http://sfwriter.com/privacy.htm Essays I've written about privacy: http://www.schneier.com/essay-109.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html http://www.schneier.com/essay-261.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Schneier News I'm speaking at the University of Kentucky on September 17. http://www.cs.engr.uky.edu/events/distingLectures.php I'm also speaking at the II International Symposium on Network and Data Communications, in Lima, Peru on September 25. http://www.tecsup.edu.pe/simposio09/redes/preventaingles.html And I'm speaking at GOVCERT.NL in Rotterdam on October 6. https://www.govcert.nl/symposium/index.html Here's a video of a talk, "The Future of the Security Industry," I gave at an OWASP meeting in August in Minneapolis. http://vimeo.com/6495257 ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Stealing 130 Million Credit Card Numbers Someone has been charged with stealing 130 million credit card numbers. Yes, it's a lot, but that's the sort of quantities credit card numbers come in. They come by the millions, in large database files. Even if you only want ten, you have to steal millions. I'm sure every one of us has a credit card in our wallet whose number has been stolen. It'll probably never be used for fraudulent purposes, but it's in some stolen database somewhere. Years ago, when giving advice on how to avoid identity theft, I would tell people to shred their trash. Today, that advice is completely obsolete. No one steals credit card numbers one by one out of the trash when they can be stolen by the millions from merchant databases. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090817/ap_on_re_us/us_hacker_charges ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* "The Cult of Schneier" If there's actually a cult out there, I want to hear about it. In an essay by that name, John Viega writes about the dangers of relying on Applied Cryptography to design cryptosystems: But, after many years of evaluating the security of software systems, I'm incredibly down on using the book that made Bruce famous when designing the cryptographic aspects of a system. In fact, I can safely say I have never seen a secure system come out the other end, when that is the primary source for the crypto design. And I don't mean that people forget about the buffer overflows. I mean, the crypto is crappy. My rule for software development teams is simple: Don't use Applied Cryptography in your system design. It's fine and fun to read it, just don't build from it. [...] The book talks about the fundamental building blocks of cryptography, but there is no guidance on things like, putting together all the pieces to create a secure, authenticated connection between two parties. Plus, in the nearly 13 years since the book was last revised, our understanding of cryptography has changed greatly. There are things in it that were thought to be true at the time that turned out to be very false.... I agree. And, to his credit, Viega points out that I agree: But in the introduction to Bruce Schneier's book, Practical Cryptography, he himself says that the world is filled with broken systems built from his earlier book. In fact, he wrote Practical Cryptography in hopes of rectifying the problem. This is all true. Designing a cryptosystem is hard. Just as you wouldn't give a person -- even a doctor -- a brain-surgery instruction manual and then expect him to operate on live patients, you shouldn't give an engineer a cryptography book and then expect him to design and implement a cryptosystem. The patient is unlikely to survive, and the cryptosystem is unlikely to be secure. Even worse, security doesn't provide immediate feedback. A dead patient on the operating table tells the doctor that maybe he doesn't understand brain surgery just because he read a book, but an insecure cryptosystem works just fine. It's not until someone takes the time to break it that the engineer might realize that he didn't do as good a job as he thought. Remember: Anyone can design a security system that he himself cannot break. Even the experts regularly get it wrong. The odds that an amateur will get it right are extremely low. For those who are interested, a second edition of Practical Cryptography will be published in early 2010, renamed Cryptography Engineering and featuring a third author: Tadayoshi Kohno. http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/the-cult-of-schneier.html Applied Cryptography: http://www.schneier.com/book-applied.html Practical Cryptography: http://www.schneier.com/book-practical.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Comments from Readers There are thousands of comments -- many of them interesting -- on these topics on my blog. Search for the story you want to comment on, and join in. http://www.schneier.com/blog ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your address on the Web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. Back issues are also available at that URL. Please feel free to forward CRYPTO-GRAM, in whole or in part, to colleagues and friends who will find it valuable. Permission is also granted to reprint CRYPTO-GRAM, as long as it is reprinted in its entirety. CRYPTO-GRAM is written by Bruce Schneier. Schneier is the author of the best sellers "Schneier on Security," "Beyond Fear," "Secrets and Lies," and "Applied Cryptography," and an inventor of the Blowfish, Twofish, Threefish, Helix, Phelix, and Skein algorithms. He is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT BCSG, and is on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). He is a frequent writer and lecturer on security topics. See <http://www.schneier.com>. Crypto-Gram is a personal newsletter. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of BT. Copyright (c) 2009 by Bruce Schneier. ----- 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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[Fwd: High-traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C. Confirmed]
by Vlad SATtva Miller 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

...However none of the mentioned below router nicknames or fingerprints was found in the current local cache file. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: High-traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C. Confirmed Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:35:52 -0400 From: Nostra2004(a)Safe-mail.net To: cypherpunks(a)jfet.org A group of 9 Tor routers also functioning overtly or indirectly as Tor exit nodes have been observed colluding on the public Tor network. The colluding routers map to two /16 IP subnets administered by Cogent (formerly by PSINet) [1]. Traceroute reveals all routes to these routers pass through Rethem.demarc.cogentco.com (38.112.12.190) at the final hop. Analysis of a local snapshot of the Tor cached-routers file from 2006-05-27 first suggested the presence of colluding routers. The analysis yielded the following information: - 9 Tor routers self-identified as aala, donk3ypunch, TheGreatSantini, mauger, paxprivoso, soprano1, hubbahubbahubba, m00kie, and joiseytor together reported carrying what amounted to 11% of the traffic on the Tor network at the time of the snapshot, while the remaining 89% of Tor traffic was carried by the other 551 (approximated) routers. - All 9 of these routers appear to be located in the Washington, D.C. area. - 5 of these routers are on the same 149.9.0.0/16 IP subnet. - 4 of these routers are on the same 154.35.0.0/16 IP subnet. - All 9 routers reported running Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 machines. - All 9 routers reported nearly identical uptimes. - 3 of the 5 routers on the 149.9.0.0/16 IP subnet reported providing outproxy service for DNS, HTTP, POP3, IMAP, HTTPS, AIM and IRC traffic on Tor. - The other 2 routers on the 149.9.0.0/16 IP subnet reported rejecting all outproxy traffic. - The 4 routers on the 154.35.0.0/16 IP subnet reported providing outproxy service for the above traffic plus SSH and NNTP. Collusion was definitively established by the following method: 1. The following lines were added to the local torrc: ExitNodes donk3ypunch,mauger,paxprivoso,soprano1,hubbahubbahubba, m00kie,joiseytor StrictExitNodes 1 2. The local Tor client was restarted so the new configuration would take effect 3. Using Tor as an HTTP proxy, the websites of the IP address mirror services whatismyip.com and whatsmyipaddy.com were visited repeatedly over the course of one hour The results: An IP address of 149.9.0.25 was always reported by the IP address mirror services. This is not the IP address of any of the exit nodes forced by the new torrc configuration, but rather the address of aala, one of the 2 other colluding Tor routers which report themselves as rejecting direct Tor HTTP outproxy traffic. Although further testing is needed, it appears that all 8 of the other Tor routers identified may be forwarding their HTTP outproxy traffic to the router known as aala, and that aala may be performing the exit node duties on their behalf. aala may perform exit node duties for all protocols supported by this collusion network--not merely HTTP. This strategy would make aala a single point of transit (and possible data retention or traffic analysis) for up to 11% of the traffic leaving and entering the Tor network through exit nodes. The function in this collusion network of the router identified as TheGreatSantini is still undetermined. Its published exit policy, like aala's, purported to reject all outproxy traffic, yet it hasn't been observed acting as an outproxy as aala has. It may simply serve as an intermediate router. Due to the sheer amount of traffic apparently passing through this collusion network, consolidation and analysis of exit node traffic is only one of several forms of anonymity attacks made more feasible. Hence these 9 routers appear to pose a significant anonymity threat to users of the public Tor network. ------------------------------------------- Excerpted router descriptor data [2] of colluding routers taken from snapshot of local Tor cached-routers file on 2006-05-27 1. router aala 149.9.0.25 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 16:39:07 opt fingerprint 3F8A 0FF0 39E0 E047 6EF9 24C2 7519 2A59 E6AE 58FB uptime 2462963 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 695815 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 695.82 KB/s) 2. router donk3ypunch 149.9.25.222 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 16:00:20 opt fingerprint AA40 19D8 5823 518F 0904 3F05 E61E AE5E 52CA 78B4 uptime 2460631 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 700879 accept *:53 accept *:80 accept *:110 accept *:143 accept *:443 accept *:5190 accept *:6660-6669 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 700.88 KB/s) 3. router TheGreatSantini 149.9.92.194 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 17:39:30 opt fingerprint 2C75 CCA2 A663 5D80 B286 B2EC 88AC A449 333F 6018 uptime 2466570 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 683980 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 683.98 KB/s) 4. router mauger 149.9.137.153 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 11:39:56 opt fingerprint 00E0 3AAF EE0A 45BF E617 7DD3 E45B 91B2 EC15 E554 uptime 2445004 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 728744 accept *:53 accept *:80 accept *:110 accept *:143 accept *:443 accept *:5190 accept *:6660-6669 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 728.74 KB/s) 5. router paxprivoso 149.9.205.73 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 18:20:52 opt fingerprint 66E8 A96B 5AB3 702A 16F3 85CD A11F 569A 3302 7224 uptime 2469058 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 801391 accept *:53 accept *:80 accept *:110 accept *:143 accept *:443 accept *:5190 accept *:6660-6669 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 801.40 KB/s) 6. router m00kie 154.35.36.18 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 09:39:34 opt fingerprint 72C7 F3BA AF5B 4AF6 878F 6970 5842 80B2 F97A 07D4 uptime 2437788 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 774745 accept *:22 accept *:53 accept *:80 accept *:110 accept *:119 accept *:143 accept *:443 accept *:5190 accept *:6660-6669 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 774.75 KB/s) 7. router hubbahubbahubba 154.35.47.59 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 12:39:56 opt fingerprint 86C8 B35E D131 1782 490B 7E8F FD79 F23D 51D4 620F uptime 2448609 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 696962 accept *:22 accept *:53 accept *:80 accept *:110 accept *:119 accept *:143 accept *:443 accept *:5190 accept *:6660-6669 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 696.96 KB/s) 8. router soprano1 154.35.72.223 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 20:20:58 opt fingerprint F902 4CBC D340 93C4 D9E1 D1F7 FA82 F5D4 A57F 25B5 uptime 2476261 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 857343 accept *:22 accept *:53 accept *:80 accept *:110 accept *:119 accept *:143 accept *:443 accept *:5190 accept *:6660-6669 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 857.34 KB/s) 9. router joiseytor 154.35.85.17 9001 0 9030 platform Tor 0.1.0.16 on FreeBSD i386 published 2006-05-27 20:00:30 opt fingerprint 7BC2 DC0A 06CA C5B6 21BE D132 AD3A 7217 0BBF 5FDB uptime 2475043 bandwidth 2097152 5242880 729315 accept *:22 accept *:53 accept *:80 accept *:110 accept *:119 accept *:143 accept *:443 accept *:5190 accept *:6660-6669 reject *:* (Observed throughput for this router: 729.32 KB/s) ------------------------------------------- Total Observed Throughput of Above Washington, D.C. Routers: 6.67 MB/s Total Observed Throughput of All Known Running Tor Routers *: ~60.00 MB/s * Taken from aggregate stats of all known (~560) running Tor routers at [3] Notes on select router descriptor fields: bandwidth <bandwidth-avg> <bandwidth-burst> <bandwidth-observed> Estimated bandwidth for this router, in bytes per second. The "average" bandwidth is the volume per second that the OR is willing to sustain over long periods; the "burst" bandwidth is the volume that the OR is willing to sustain in very short intervals. The "observed" value is an estimate of the capacity this server can handle. The server remembers the max bandwidth sustained output over any ten second period in the past day, and another sustained input. The "observed" value is the lesser of these two numbers. uptime The number of seconds that this OR process has been running. References: [1] http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/exit.pl [2] http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-spec.txt [3] http://www.noreply.org/tor-running-routers/ Found at: http://jadeserpent.i2p.tin0.de/tor-dc-nodes-2.txt ----- 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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[gsc] USC. 486
by Ragnar 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Folks, ' 486. Uttering coins of gold, silver or other metal Whoever, except as authorized by law, makes or utters or passes, or attempts to utter or pass, any coins of gold or silver or other metal, or alloys of metals, intended for use as current money, whether in the resemblance of coins of the United States or of foreign countries, or of original design, shall be fined under this title [1] or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. -- Click here to compare rates and find the best deal on renting a car. http://tagline.hushmail.com/fc/Ioyw6h4eRvDwuz9P8m2D4s4zsdl6iHIgravRnCU4NwqN… --- 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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CRYPTO-GRAM, September 15, 2009
by Bruce Schneier 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

CRYPTO-GRAM September 15, 2009 by Bruce Schneier Chief Security Technology Officer, BT schneier(a)schneier.com http://www.schneier.com A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. For back issues, or to subscribe, visit <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. You can read this issue on the web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0909.html>. These same essays appear in the "Schneier on Security" blog: <http://www.schneier.com/blog>. An RSS feed is available. ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* In this issue: Eighth Anniversary of 9/11 Skein News Real-World Access Control News File Deletion On London's Surveillance Cameras Robert Sawyer's Alibis Schneier News Stealing 130 Million Credit Card Numbers "The Cult of Schneier" Comments from Readers ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Eighth Anniversary of 9/11 On September 30, 2001, I published a special issue of Crypto-Gram discussing the terrorist attacks. I wrote about the novelty of the attacks, airplane security, diagnosing intelligence failures, the potential of regulating cryptography -- because it could be used by the terrorists -- and protecting privacy and liberty. Much of what I wrote is still relevant today. http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0109a.html Me from 2006: "Refuse to be Terrorized." http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Skein News Skein is one of the 14 SHA-3 candidates chosen by NIST to advance to the second round. As part of the process, NIST allowed the algorithm designers to implement small "tweaks" to their algorithms. We've tweaked the rotation constants of Skein. The revised Skein paper contains the new rotation constants, as well as information about how we chose them and why we changed them, the results of some new cryptanalysis, plus new IVs and test vectors. Tweaks were due today, September 15. Now the SHA-3 process moves into the second round. According to NIST's timeline, they'll choose a set of final round candidate algorithms in 2010, and then a single hash algorithm in 2012. Between now and then, it's up to all of us to evaluate the algorithms and let NIST know what we want. Cryptanalysis is important, of course, but so is performance. The second-round algorithms are: BLAKE, Blue Midnight Wish, CubeHash, ECHO, Fugue, Grxstl, Hamsi, JH, Keccak, Luffa, Shabal, SHAvite-3, SIMD, and Skein. You can find details on all of them, as well as the current state of their cryptanalysis, at the SHA-3 Zoo. In other news, we're making Skein shirts available to the public. Those of you who attended the First Hash Function Candidate Conference in Leuven, Belgium, earlier this year might have noticed the stylish black Skein polo shirts worn by the Skein team. Anyone who wants one is welcome to buy it, at cost. All orders must be received before 1 October, and then we'll have all the shirts made in one batch. Skein website: http://www.skein-hash.info/ Revised Skein paper: http://www.schneier.com/skein.pdf Revised Skein source code: http://www.schneier.com/code/skein.zip My 2008 essay on SHA-3: http://www.schneier.com/essay-249.html Details on Skein shirts: http://www.schneier.com/skein-shirts.html NIST SHA-3 Website: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/index.html http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/Round2/submissions_rnd2.html SHA-3 Zoo: http://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/The_SHA-3_Zoo ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Real-World Access Control Access control is difficult in an organizational setting. On one hand, every employee needs enough access to do his job. On the other hand, every time you give an employee more access, there's more risk: he could abuse that access, or lose information he has access to, or be socially engineered into giving that access to a malfeasant. So a smart, risk-conscious organization will give each employee the exact level of access he needs to do his job, and no more. Over the years, there's been a lot of work put into role-based access control. But despite the large number of academic papers and high-profile security products, most organizations don't implement it -- at all -- with the predictable security problems as a result. Regularly we read stories of employees abusing their database access-control privileges for personal reasons: medical records, tax records, passport records, police records. NSA eavesdroppers spy on their wives and girlfriends. Departing employees take corporate secrets A spectacular access control failure occurred in the UK in 2007. An employee of Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs had to send a couple of thousand sample records from a database on all children in the country to National Audit Office. But it was easier for him to copy the entire database of 25 million people onto a couple of disks and put it in the mail than it was to select out just the records needed. Unfortunately, the discs got lost in the mail and the story was a huge embarrassment for the government. Eric Johnson at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business has been studying the problem, and his results won't startle anyone who has thought about it at all. RBAC is very hard to implement correctly. Organizations generally don't even know who has what role. The employee doesn't know, the boss doesn't know -- and these days the employee might have more than one boss -- and senior management certainly doesn't know. There's a reason RBAC came out of the military; in that world, command structures are simple and well-defined. Even worse, employees' roles change all the time -- Johnson chronicled one business group of 3,000 people that made 1,000 role changes in just three months -- and it's often not obvious what information an employee needs until he actually needs it. And information simply isn't that granular. Just as it's much easier to give someone access to an entire file cabinet than to only the particular files he needs, it's much easier to give someone access to an entire database than only the particular records he needs. This means that organizations either over-entitle or under-entitle employees. But since getting the job done is more important than anything else, organizations tend to over-entitle. Johnson estimates that 50 percent to 90 percent of employees are over-entitled in large organizations. In the uncommon instance where an employee needs access to something he normally doesn't have, there's generally some process for him to get it. And access is almost never revoked once it's been granted. In large formal organizations, Johnson was able to predict how long an employee had worked there based on how much access he had. Clearly, organizations can do better. Johnson's current work involves building access-control systems with easy self-escalation, audit to make sure that power isn't abused, violation penalties (Intel, for example, issues "speeding tickets" to violators), and compliance rewards. His goal is to implement incentives and controls that manage access without making people too risk-averse. In the end, a perfect access control system just isn't possible; organizations are simply too chaotic for it to work. And any good system will allow a certain number of access control violations, if they're made in good faith by people just trying to do their jobs. The "speeding ticket" analogy is better than it looks: we post limits of 55 miles per hour, but generally don't start ticketing people unless they're going over 70. This essay previously appeared in Information Security, as part of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. You can read Marcus's response here -- after you answer some nosy questions to get a free account. http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazineFeature/0,296894,sid14_gci1365… or http://tinyurl.com/m7qhf4 Role-based access control: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazineFeature/0,296894,sid14_gci1257… or http://tinyurl.com/n5mjmx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc780256(WS.10).aspx http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/rbac/documents/design_implementation/Intro_… or http://tinyurl.com/ku8vnd http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/rbac/documents/ferraiolo-kuhn-92.pdf Abuse of database access: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/09/local/me-hospital9 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/irs-worker-snooped-on-tax-records-of-almos… or http://tinyurl.com/mrh7a8 http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&art… or http://tinyurl.com/mwr9je http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/18/reporter-nsa-analysts-spied-on-own-w… or http://tinyurl.com/mbgmw3 http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200924/3849/Trust-still-an-issue-i… or http://tinyurl.com/mk3lyf http://searchsecurity.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid180_gci1318… or http://tinyurl.com/mu5ovb UK access control failure: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/news/hartnett-poynter-icc.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7103566.stm http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/06/27/231267/hmrc-left-the-door… or http://tinyurl.com/mdqvm9 Johnson's work: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/digital/Research/ResearchProjects/DataFinanci… or http://tinyurl.com/ln4vhr http://weis2008.econinfosec.org/papers/Zhao.pdf http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/digital/Research/ResearchProjects/wise_v1.pdf or http://tinyurl.com/mtgsq2 ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* News Flash has the equivalent of cookies, and they're hard to delete. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cookies-think-again/ or http://tinyurl.com/l2gqaz Movie-plot threat alert: robot suicide bombers. Let's all be afraid. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6028144/Rob… or http://tinyurl.com/orxxuz I'm sure I've seen this stuff in movies. It's possible to fabricate DNA evidence: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/08/dna-samples-used-by-crime-labs-… or http://tinyurl.com/pxwosm http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html http://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(09)00099-4/abstract The legal term "terroristic threats" is older than 9/11, but these days it evokes too much of an emotional response: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/the_continuing_2.html Interesting developments in lie detection: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-load-of-lying&sc=WR_20… or http://tinyurl.com/njnn3o Marc Webar Tobias on hacking the Assa Solo lock: http://www.thesidebar.org/insecurity/?p=447 Me on locks and lockpicking: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/lockpicking_and.html >From the humor website Cracked: "The 5 Most Embarrassing Failures in the History of Terrorism." Yes, it's funny. But remember that these are the terrorist masterminds that politicians invoke to keep us scared. http://www.cracked.com/article/79_the-5-most-embarrassing-failures-in-histo… or http://tinyurl.com/lt68pa My 2007 essay, "Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot," is also relevant. But less funny. http://www.schneier.com/essay-174.html Modeling zombie outbreaks: the math doesn't look good. "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/Zombies.pdf It turns out that flipping a coin has all sorts of non-randomness: http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/the-coin-flip-a-fundamentally-unfair… or http://tinyurl.com/d9kgt7 http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~susan/papers/headswithJ.pdf As part of their training, federal agents engage in mock exercises in public places. Sometimes, innocent civilians get involved. It's actual security theater. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/16/AR200908160… or http://tinyurl.com/qd6zzz http://www.startribune.com/59017377.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU The sorts of crimes we've been seeing perpetrated against individuals are starting to be perpetrated against small businesses. The problem will get much worse, and the security externalities means that the banks care much less. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/small_business.html Interesting video demonstrating how a policeman can manipulate the results of a Breathalyzer. http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Breath+tests&qs=n&docid=992451363282&mi… or http://tinyurl.com/kkq8dk There is a movement in the U.K. to replace the pint glasses in pubs with plastic because too many of them are being used as weapons. I don't think this will go anywhere, but the sheer idiocy is impressive. Reminds me of the call to ban pointy knives. That recommendation also came out of the UK. What's going on over there? http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/banning_beer_gl.html More security stories from the natural world: marine worms with glowing bombs: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/marine_worms_wi.html Weird: "The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to figure out who is sending laptop computers to state governors across the U.S., including West Virginia Governor Joe Mahchin and Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal. Some state officials are worried that they may contain malicious software." http://www.itworld.com/government/75885/fbi-investigating-laptops-sent-us-g… or http://tinyurl.com/llf53a Fascinating story of a 16-year-old blind phone phreaker. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/29787673/the_boy_who_heard_too_much/… or http://tinyurl.com/nxnb9h Hacking swine flu: "So it takes about 25 kilobits -- 3.2 Kbytes -- of data to code for a virus that has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 Kbytes. It's humbling that I could be killed by 3.2 Kbytes of genetic data. Then again, with 850 Mbytes of data in my genome, there's bound to be an exploit or two." http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353 Good article on the exaggerated fears of cyberwar: http://bostonreview.net/BR34.4/morozov.php The real risk isn't cyberterrorism, it's cybercrime. SIGABA and the history of one-time pads: http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/control/ I wrote about one-time pads, and their practical insecurity, in 2002: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0210.html#7 Interesting discussion of subpoenas as a security threat: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/subpoenas-and-search-warrants-… or http://tinyurl.com/lwtdaz A very interesting hour-long interview with David Kilcullen on security and insurgency. http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2668177.htm Nils Gilman's lecture on the global illicit economy Malware is one of Nils Gilman's examples, at about the nine-minute mark. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3173247273890946684# The seven rules of the illicit global economy (he seems to use "illicit" and "deviant" interchangeably in the talk): 1. Perfectly legitimate forms of demand can produce perfectly deviant forms of supply. 2. Uneven global regulatory structures create arbitrage opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs. 3. Pathways for legitimate globalization are always also pathways for deviant globalization. 4. Once a deviant industry professionalizes, crackdowns merely promote innovation. 5. States themselves undermine the distinction between legitimate and deviant economics. 6. Unchecked, deviant entrepreneurs will overtake the legitimate economy. 7. Deviant globalization presents an existential challenge to state legitimacy. Perfectly legal (obtained with a FISA warrant) NSA intercepts used to convict liquid bombers. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/nsa_intercepts.html The BBC has a video demonstration of a 16-ounce bottle of liquid blowing a hole in the side of a plane. I know no more details than what's in the video. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7536167.stm ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* File Deletion File deletion is all about control. This used to not be an issue. Your data was on your computer, and you decided when and how to delete a file. You could use the delete function if you didn't care about whether the file could be recovered or not, and a file erase program -- I use BCWipe for Windows -- if you wanted to ensure no one could ever recover the file. As we move more of our data onto cloud computing platforms such as Gmail and Facebook, and closed proprietary platforms such as the Kindle and the iPhone, deleting data is much harder. You have to trust that these companies will delete your data when you ask them to, but they're generally not interested in doing so. Sites like these are more likely to make your data inaccessible than they are to physically delete it. Facebook is a known culprit: actually deleting your data from its servers requires a complicated procedure that may or may not work. And even if you do manage to delete your data, copies are certain to remain in the companies' backup systems. Gmail explicitly says this in its privacy notice. Online backups, SMS messages, photos on photo sharing sites, smartphone applications that store your data in the network: you have no idea what really happens when you delete pieces of data or your entire account, because you're not in control of the computers that are storing the data. This notion of control also explains how Amazon was able to delete a book that people had previously purchased on their Kindle e-book readers. The legalities are debatable, but Amazon had the technical ability to delete the file because it controls all Kindles. It has designed the Kindle so that it determines when to update the software, whether people are allowed to buy Kindle books, and when to turn off people's Kindles entirely. Vanish is a research project by Roxana Geambasu and colleagues at the University of Washington. They designed a prototype system that automatically deletes data after a set time interval. So you can send an e-mail, create a Google Doc, post an update to Facebook, or upload a photo to Flickr, all designed to disappear after a set period of time. And after it disappears, no one -- not anyone who downloaded the data, not the site that hosted the data, not anyone who intercepted the data in transit, not even you -- will be able to read it. If the police arrive at Facebook or Google or Flickr with a warrant, they won't be able to read it. The details are complicated, but Vanish breaks the data's decryption key into a bunch of pieces and scatters them around the web using a peer-to-peer network. Then it uses the natural turnover in these networks -- machines constantly join and leave -- to make the data disappear. Unlike previous programs that supported file deletion, this one doesn't require you to trust any company, organization, or website. It just happens. Of course, Vanish doesn't prevent the recipient of an e-mail or the reader of a Facebook page from copying the data and pasting it into another file, just as Kindle's deletion feature doesn't prevent people from copying a book's files and saving them on their computers. Vanish is just a prototype at this point, and it only works if all the people who read your Facebook entries or view your Flickr pictures have it installed on their computers as well; but it's a good demonstration of how control affects file deletion. And while it's a step in the right direction, it's also new and therefore deserves further security analysis before being adopted on a wide scale. We've lost the control of data on some of the computers we own, and we've lost control of our data in the cloud. We're not going to stop using Facebook and Twitter just because they're not going to delete our data when we ask them to, and we're not going to stop using Kindles and iPhones because they may delete our data when we don't want them to. But we need to take back control of data in the cloud, and projects like Vanish show us how we can. Now we need something that will protect our data when a large corporation decides to delete it. This essay originally appeared in The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/09/bruce-schneier-file-deleti… or http://tinyurl.com/m9k2cm BCWipe: http://www.jetico.com/data-protection-wiping-bcwipe-enterprise/ Me on cloud computing: http://www.schneier.com/essay-274.html Control and the iPhone: http://www.schneier.com/essay-204.html Social networking companies don't want to delete data: http://www.schneier.com/essay-278.html How to delete your Facebook account: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account Kindle: http://bit.ly/KindleDelete http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090416/0246064526.shtml Vanish: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tm/displaystory.cfm?story_id=141… or http://tinyurl.com/nxtkfg http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/index.html http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/pubs/usenixsec09-geambasu.pdf ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* On London's Surveillance Cameras A recent report has concluded that the London's surveillance cameras have solved one crime per thousand cameras per year. I haven't seen the report, but I know it's hard to figure out when a crime has been "solved" by a surveillance camera. To me, the crime has to have been unsolvable without the cameras. Repeatedly I see pro-camera lobbyists pointing to the surveillance-camera images that identified the 7/7 London Transport bombers, but it is obvious that they would have been identified even without the cameras. And it would really help my understanding of the report's per-crime cost-to-detect of #20,000 (I assume it is calculated from #200 million for the cameras times 1 in 1000 cameras used to solve a crime per year divided by ten years) if I knew what sorts of crimes the cameras "solved." If the #200 million solved 10,000 murders, it might very well be a good security trade-off. But my guess is that most of the crimes were of a much lower level. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8219022.stm http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6082530/1000-CCTV-cameras-to-s… or http://tinyurl.com/nblfwd ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Robert Sawyer's Alibis Back in 2002, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote an essay about the trade-off between privacy and security. I've never forgotten the first sentence: "Whenever I visit a tourist attraction that has a guest register, I always sign it. After all, you never know when you'll need an alibi." Since I read that, whenever I see a tourist attraction with a guest register, I do the same thing. I sign "Robert J. Sawyer, Toronto, ON" -- because you never know when he'll need an alibi. Sawyer's essay: http://sfwriter.com/privacy.htm Essays I've written about privacy: http://www.schneier.com/essay-109.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_value_of_pr.html http://www.schneier.com/essay-261.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Schneier News I'm speaking at the University of Kentucky on September 17. http://www.cs.engr.uky.edu/events/distingLectures.php I'm also speaking at the II International Symposium on Network and Data Communications, in Lima, Peru on September 25. http://www.tecsup.edu.pe/simposio09/redes/preventaingles.html And I'm speaking at GOVCERT.NL in Rotterdam on October 6. https://www.govcert.nl/symposium/index.html Here's a video of a talk, "The Future of the Security Industry," I gave at an OWASP meeting in August in Minneapolis. http://vimeo.com/6495257 ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Stealing 130 Million Credit Card Numbers Someone has been charged with stealing 130 million credit card numbers. Yes, it's a lot, but that's the sort of quantities credit card numbers come in. They come by the millions, in large database files. Even if you only want ten, you have to steal millions. I'm sure every one of us has a credit card in our wallet whose number has been stolen. It'll probably never be used for fraudulent purposes, but it's in some stolen database somewhere. Years ago, when giving advice on how to avoid identity theft, I would tell people to shred their trash. Today, that advice is completely obsolete. No one steals credit card numbers one by one out of the trash when they can be stolen by the millions from merchant databases. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090817/ap_on_re_us/us_hacker_charges ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* "The Cult of Schneier" If there's actually a cult out there, I want to hear about it. In an essay by that name, John Viega writes about the dangers of relying on Applied Cryptography to design cryptosystems: But, after many years of evaluating the security of software systems, I'm incredibly down on using the book that made Bruce famous when designing the cryptographic aspects of a system. In fact, I can safely say I have never seen a secure system come out the other end, when that is the primary source for the crypto design. And I don't mean that people forget about the buffer overflows. I mean, the crypto is crappy. My rule for software development teams is simple: Don't use Applied Cryptography in your system design. It's fine and fun to read it, just don't build from it. [...] The book talks about the fundamental building blocks of cryptography, but there is no guidance on things like, putting together all the pieces to create a secure, authenticated connection between two parties. Plus, in the nearly 13 years since the book was last revised, our understanding of cryptography has changed greatly. There are things in it that were thought to be true at the time that turned out to be very false.... I agree. And, to his credit, Viega points out that I agree: But in the introduction to Bruce Schneier's book, Practical Cryptography, he himself says that the world is filled with broken systems built from his earlier book. In fact, he wrote Practical Cryptography in hopes of rectifying the problem. This is all true. Designing a cryptosystem is hard. Just as you wouldn't give a person -- even a doctor -- a brain-surgery instruction manual and then expect him to operate on live patients, you shouldn't give an engineer a cryptography book and then expect him to design and implement a cryptosystem. The patient is unlikely to survive, and the cryptosystem is unlikely to be secure. Even worse, security doesn't provide immediate feedback. A dead patient on the operating table tells the doctor that maybe he doesn't understand brain surgery just because he read a book, but an insecure cryptosystem works just fine. It's not until someone takes the time to break it that the engineer might realize that he didn't do as good a job as he thought. Remember: Anyone can design a security system that he himself cannot break. Even the experts regularly get it wrong. The odds that an amateur will get it right are extremely low. For those who are interested, a second edition of Practical Cryptography will be published in early 2010, renamed Cryptography Engineering and featuring a third author: Tadayoshi Kohno. http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/the-cult-of-schneier.html Applied Cryptography: http://www.schneier.com/book-applied.html Practical Cryptography: http://www.schneier.com/book-practical.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Comments from Readers There are thousands of comments -- many of them interesting -- on these topics on my blog. Search for the story you want to comment on, and join in. http://www.schneier.com/blog ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your address on the Web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. Back issues are also available at that URL. Please feel free to forward CRYPTO-GRAM, in whole or in part, to colleagues and friends who will find it valuable. Permission is also granted to reprint CRYPTO-GRAM, as long as it is reprinted in its entirety. CRYPTO-GRAM is written by Bruce Schneier. Schneier is the author of the best sellers "Schneier on Security," "Beyond Fear," "Secrets and Lies," and "Applied Cryptography," and an inventor of the Blowfish, Twofish, Threefish, Helix, Phelix, and Skein algorithms. He is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT BCSG, and is on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). He is a frequent writer and lecturer on security topics. See <http://www.schneier.com>. Crypto-Gram is a personal newsletter. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of BT. Copyright (c) 2009 by Bruce Schneier. ----- 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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Re: [liberationtech] Drones for Human Rights
by James Losey 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I would venture to guess that a considerable factor is resources. Recent FOIA responses<http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/3426/nick_turse_the_crash_and_burn/>state that keeping a Predator drone in the air for 24 hours requires 170 personnel. Granted this is a) a Predator drone, and b) few (if any) on this list would argue that the Military is an exemplar of efficiency, there is a time and expense in supporting drones with a considerable range. I support thinking about positive ways of exploiting technology but a greater question might be: what is the goal of the operation? I agree with the proposal that "Drones can reach places and see things cell phones cannot." and I think on that front, there are a number of innovative ways to approach transparency. For example, this past year students in Chile used<http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/live-iphone-balloon-video-coverage-1500…>a weather balloon and an iPhone to provide coverage of a protest. Along this line of thinking, what is the range, the type of coverage, and requirements that should be considered? Best, J On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 7:28 PM, Nabiha Syed <nabiha.syed(a)gmail.com> wrote: > It* is* surprising that it's not more widespread already, right? But it is > getting more and more popular --the Drone Journalism > Lab<http://dronejournalism.tumblr.com/about>is trying to encourage the > use of drones, and I believe the > Occupy folks< > http://techland.time.com/2011/12/21/occupy-wall-streets-new-drone-the-occuc… > >have > been using drones to monitor their encampments recently, too. > > As shameless self-promotion, I'll be interviewing Mickey > Osterreicher<https://twitter.com/#!/nppalawyer>of the National Press > Photographers Association about surveillance drones > and drone journalism for the Harvard Law and Policy Review blog -- I'd be > happy to share the link once it's up! > > Nabiha > > > > Nabiha Syed > First Amendment Fellow > The New York Times Company > 620 Eighth Avenue > New York, NY 10018 > nabiha.syed(a)nytimes.com | 212.556.5187 > > On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 7:20 PM, Yosem Companys <companys(a)stanford.edu > >wrote: > > > A group of Stanford students pitched this idea for a startup 8 years ago! > > And yet no one is doing it yet? > > > > YC > > > > > > > > ********************** > > > > January 30, 2012 > > > > Drones for Human Rights > > > > By ANDREW STOBO SNIDERMAN and MARK HANIS, New York Times > > > > DRONES are not just for firing missiles in Pakistan. In Iraq, the State > > Department is using them to watch for threats to Americans. Itbs time we > > used the revolution in military affairs to serve human rights advocacy. > > > > With drones, we could take clear pictures and videos of human rights > > abuses, and we could start with Syria. > > > > The need there is even more urgent now, because the Arab Leaguebs > observers > > suspended operations last week. > > > > They fled the very violence they were trying to monitor. Drones could > > replace them, and could even go to some places the observers, who were > > escorted and restricted by the government, could not see. This we know: > the > > Syrian government isnbt just fighting rebels, as it claims; it is > shooting > > unarmed protesters, and has been doing so for months. Despite a ban on > news > > media, much of the violence is being caught on camera by ubiquitous > > cellphones. The footage is shaky and the images grainy, but still they > make > > us YouTube witnesses. > > > > Imagine if we could watch in high definition with a birdbs-eye view. A > > drone would let us count demonstrators, gun barrels and pools of blood. > And > > the evidence could be broadcast for a global audience, including > diplomats > > at the United Nations and prosecutors at the International Criminal > Court. > > > > Drones are increasingly small, affordable and available to nonmilitary > > buyers. For hundreds of thousands of dollars b no longer many millions b > a > > surveillance drone could be flying over protests and clashes in Syria. > > > > An environmental group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has > reported > > that it is using drones to monitor illegal Japanese whaling in the waters > > of the Southern Hemisphere. In the past few years, human-rights groups > and > > the actor and activist George Clooney, among others, have purchased > > satellite imagery of conflict zones. Drones can see even more clearly, > and > > broadcast in real time. > > > > We could record the repression in Syria with unprecedented precision and > > scope. The better the evidence, the clearer the crimes, the higher the > > likelihood that the world would become as outraged as it should be. > > > > This sounds a lot like surveillance, and it would be. It would violate > > Syrian airspace, and perhaps a number of Syrian and international laws. > It > > isnbt the kind of thing nongovernmental organizations usually do. But it > is > > very different from what governments and armies do. Yes, we (like them) > > have an agenda, but ours is transparent: human rights. We have a duty, > > recognized internationally, to monitor governments that massacre their > own > > people in large numbers. Human rights organizations have always done > this. > > Why not get drones to assist the good work? > > > > It may be illegal in the Syrian governmentbs eyes, but supporting Nelson > > Mandela in South Africa was deemed illegal during the apartheid era. To > fly > > over Syriabs territory may violate official norms of international > > relations, but governments do this when they support opposition groups > with > > weapons, money or intelligence, as NATO countries did recently in Libya. > In > > any event, violations of Syrian sovereignty would be the direct > consequence > > of the Syrian statebs brutality, not the imperialism of outsiders. > > > > There are some obvious risks and downsides to the drone approach. The > > Syrian government would undoubtedly seize the opportunity to blame a > > foreign conspiracy for its troubles. Local operators of the drones could > be > > at risk, though a higher-end drone could be controlled from a remote > > location or a neighboring country. > > > > Such considerations figured in conversations we have had with human > rights > > organizations that considered hiring drones in Syria, but opted in the > end > > for supplying protesters with phones, satellite modems and safe houses. > For > > nearly a year now, brave amateurs with their tiny cameras arguably have > > been doing the trick in Syria. In those circumstances, the value that a > > drone could add might not be worth the investment and risks. > > > > Even if humanitarian drones are not used in Syria, they should assume > their > > place in the arsenal of human rights advocates. It is a precedent worth > > setting, especially in situations where evidence of large-scale human > > rights violations is hard to come by. > > > > Drones can reach places and see things cell phones cannot. Social media > did > > not document the worst of the genocide in the remote villages of Darfur > in > > 2003 and 2004. Camera-toting protesters could not enter the fields where > > 8,000 men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica in 1995. Graphic and > > detailed evidence of crimes against humanity does not guarantee a just > > response, but it helps. > > > > If human rights organizations can spy on evil, they should. > > > > *Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Mark Hanis are co-founders of the Genocide > > Intervention Network.* > > _______________________________________________ > > liberationtech mailing list > > liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu > > > > Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: > > > > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech > > > > If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click > > above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily > > digest?" > > > > You will need the user name and password you receive from the list > > moderator in monthly reminders. > > > > Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. > > > > Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech > > > _______________________________________________ > liberationtech mailing list > liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu > > Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: > > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech > > If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click > above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily > digest?" > > You will need the user name and password you receive from the list > moderator in monthly reminders. > > Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. > > Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech > _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- 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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[PGP-USERS] Another Flaw in PGP found.
by Keith 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 It seems a programer has found another security flaw in PGP. Details tomorrow and the web page is at: http://www.security.nl/artikel.php3?id=2293 if you read Dutch. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBO5PU3bwKMbGJKZceEQI7FACgwMnUV0zDjIF4TG5Df636NQaRmuoAoOub rbDtGn3YmaId3B8AstQ59m4f =KhFO -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Best Regards, Keith YahooIM:strongsignals_com AIM:KeithYit23 ========================================================== Find Windows Freeware @ http://strongsignals.com/ The rec.radio.swap Email List http://groups.yahoo.com/group/recradioswap/ Microsoft said OE5 or better so I installed Pegasus V4! ========================================================== .................................................................... Unsubscribe: <mailto:pgp-users-listbot@cryptorights.org?body=unsubscribe> Automated Help/Info: <mailto:pgp-users-listbot@cryptorights.org?body=help> List Homepage: <http://cryptorights.org/pgp-users/> List Admin (human): <mailto:pgp-users-admin-human@cryptorights.org> Please do not send administrative commands to the list address! Thanks. --- end forwarded text --- 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' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Fwd: [PGP-USERS] Another Flaw in PGP found.
by Fearghas McKay 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

--- begin forwarded text

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[mnet-devel] Mac OS X binary package up
by Zooko Wooko 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I put up a Mac OS X binary package which is actually just a tarball with the Mnet.sh script as the way to launch it. I know that this doesn't make users want to lick the screen, so it is only a temporary measure. http://mnet.sf.net/download.php ------------------------------------------------------- This SF. Net email is sponsored by: GoToMyPC GoToMyPC is the fast, easy and secure way to access your computer from any Web browser or wireless device. Click here to Try it Free! https://www.gotomypc.com/tr/OSDN/AW/Q4_2003/t/g22lp?Target=mm/g22lp.tmpl _______________________________________________ mnet-devel mailing list mnet-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mnet-devel --- 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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