July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[tahoe-dev] programmer looking for a distributed filesystem chooses Tahoe-LAFS
by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://roland.entierement.nu/blog/2012/03/01/looking-for-the-ultimate-distr… "Looking for the ultimate distributed filesystem, take 2" It ends with: """ In summary, I guess the replies I got didn't cause me to change my mind too much. Tahoe-LAFS still seems to be, if not the best solution, then at least the b least badb. Hopefully the drawbacks will be fixed soonish; the main sticking point (at least from my point of view) still seems to be the lack of focus on proper filesystem integration. I'll try setting it all up at some point; I may report further if I end up finding interesting things. """ I think I may have patronized the author, whose name I think is "Roland", in my email in reply to his previous post. I think I told him something to the effect that he probably wouldn't use "integration into his kernel as a filesystem" as much as he thought he would. I should probably work on a less patronizing way to argue about this stuff. Probably getting into more specific technical details and less general value statements is the way to do that. (I intend to reply to Greg Troxel's recent discussion of related topics on this list soonish...) Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- 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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CDR: Re: Inferno: The Constitution & Gun Rights: It's bigger than the 2nd alone (fwd)
by Jim Choate 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Date: Sat, 09 Oct 1999 17:04:05 -0500 > From: Sean Roach > Subject: CDR: Re: Inferno: The Constitution & Gun Rights: It's bigger than > the 2nd alone (fwd) > I was under the impression that that applied only to the army. I > thought that it was the intention to keep the navy going full time. There was no intent not to keep the army going full-time. The intent was to keep them from getting funding for long periods of time. In other words to make it harder for them to build a long-term command structure and weapons cache's (ie hide trusted soldiers away for rainy days). The army is intended for repelling invasions and insurrections, how often do those happen and how many last more than two years? If an actual invasion were to take place martial law would be invoked and the budget limits would be irrelevant at that point. But your point is true enough, and I was hoping somebody would bring this aspect up. It has some interesting points that don't seem to have been discussed. If you or others know of references I'd appreciate a vector. If we accept this view (which I have no problem with, it'd be hard for a Navy to invade Kansas - navies are self limiting) we are left with joint-contracts that involve the army and navy are unconstitutional. The other side would be that the navy must accept the more strict contractual limitations imposed on the army by the Constitution (what I actualy prefer because of new weapons systems). The intent is to keep the army on a short leash and to be able to simply bypass this by working with other arms of the military would be contrary to the Constitutions intent. One could transfer all the army soldiers to navy command and impliment an oppressive regime that way. I don't believe that was what was intended. It also raises the fact that since the Army Air Corp was turned into the Air Force (and this applies to the Navy and Marine Corp. as well) and no specific guidance was made via constitutional amendment as to its budget constraints it may be unconstitutional as currently implimented. Per the 10th there is nothing that gives Congress the authority to create new military forces outside of the army and navy. This should be done via a constitutional amendment. What we have today is a joint command that integrates all the various military forces under one umbrella. That joint command is an arm of the executive branch and not Congress, that may be unconstitutional itself. This raises the question of how seperate they are now and how congruent with the Constitution it actualy is. So, because of this the Joint Chiefs and the Pentagon may be unconstitutional as currently implimented, or one could argue that all budgets must be limited to 2 years. Since the Constitution requires such budgets to be reviewed from time to time it implies that a full budget review of the military is required every two years. > However, it is not my place to say that they would have done this had > they had the chance. If you're a citizen of the US not only is it your place it's your duty. > Too many of our regulations are based on this belief that our founding > fathers would have seen things "my" way. I hate that the intent of the > constitution is ignored so blatently, but judging intent is like proving > opinion. To quote Jefferson: The earth belonds to the living, not the dead. The founding fathers wanted Americans to be free peoples pursuing their own individual life, liberty, and happiness. It is the duty of all Americans to protect those rights, even from other Americans. We have to decide the way *we* want to live and the kind of world our children will inheret. The kind of world our forefathers had and the decisions they made within that milieu are good for exemplary review only. Santyana is a good guide. If nothing else it is clear the fight is never over. No matter what we do our children will have to fight it all over again on different ground and different issues. We should at least give them a fighting chance. I don't believe for a moment the founding fathers felt they had created a once-and-for-all document. Nor do I believe they felt they were living at the epitome of technical and social achievement within the total history of mankind. Part of Jeffersons stock and trade was advancement, it's why he created the University of Virginia. They knew they couldn't predict the future and the best peoples to judge it were the ones living it. What they wanted was a mechanism that would guarantee that the poeple had a say and were not ruled over by a despot or tyranny. They hoped to give us a good chance at reaching our individual and social goals, what those goals were are for us to decide. We, not the founding fathers, have to live with them after all. They were, if nothing else, simply trying to be good parents (both to a country and to their biological children) and teach us basic principles. > I'd like to see something more like the swiss have. Everyone gets > basic. Perhaps as part of grades 11-12. Some few can stay on in > administrative roles throughout. And rely entirely on the draft, but > only for threats on home ground. I don't believe in the draft, it is coersion and is contrary to the tenets of the Constitution. An army made of people who don't *want* to fight for their country will lose. An army of peoples who will die rather than surrender their liberty will always win, even if they are all killed they deny the oppressor their goals. One does not give up democracy to protect democracy. This does point up one aspect of nuclear defence that has also seldome been discussed, nuclear suicide. Instead of pointing weapons at other countries one points the weapons (lot's of them) at oneself. If another country begins a nuclear conflict (which is inherently unwinnable) the Earth as we know it will become uninhabitable. Who wants to subject their peoples to the starvation and other privations that will bring on. It is better to kill oneself quickly and humanely and in that act poison the well so the enemy suffers at their own hands and in the worst way. I believe we will never get rid of nuclear weapons, and shouldn't, and this is the only sane way to control their use. [1]

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CDR: Re: An immediate way to end federal gun control? (fwd)
by Jim Choate 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

----- Forwarded message from Steve Schear -----

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CDR: Constitution, gun rights, et al (fwd)
by Jim Choate 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

----- Forwarded message from Sean Roach -----

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[tahoe-dev] programmer looking for a distributed filesystem chooses Tahoe-LAFS
by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://roland.entierement.nu/blog/2012/03/01/looking-for-the-ultimate-distr… "Looking for the ultimate distributed filesystem, take 2" It ends with: """ In summary, I guess the replies I got didn't cause me to change my mind too much. Tahoe-LAFS still seems to be, if not the best solution, then at least the b least badb. Hopefully the drawbacks will be fixed soonish; the main sticking point (at least from my point of view) still seems to be the lack of focus on proper filesystem integration. I'll try setting it all up at some point; I may report further if I end up finding interesting things. """ I think I may have patronized the author, whose name I think is "Roland", in my email in reply to his previous post. I think I told him something to the effect that he probably wouldn't use "integration into his kernel as a filesystem" as much as he thought he would. I should probably work on a less patronizing way to argue about this stuff. Probably getting into more specific technical details and less general value statements is the way to do that. (I intend to reply to Greg Troxel's recent discussion of related topics on this list soonish...) Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- 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: OT: cheap colo space in Southern Germany/Munich
by Nick Hilliard 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On 24/11/2012 17:38, Eugen Leitl wrote: > E.g. see > https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/rfcs/Whitepaper.md > which is an instance of street technology to address > multiple issues the current networks don't deal with. cjdns is certainly an interesting approach, but its inventor doesn't appear to understand: - scaling issues - point to multipoint networking - that deterministic reachability is usually considered a good thing - non-local connectivity lookup introduces hilarious denial of service mechanisms - the value of bitfield qos - that the use of bEncoding for connectivity lookup is a degree or two worse than using TLVs for the same means - full independence from traditional ip protocols ("Router messages are sent as normal UDP/IPv6 packets except that their UDP source and destination port numbers are zero and the hop limit (TTL) field in the IPv6 header is set to zero.") - that strictly symmetric routing is a bug, not a feature - that 64 bits as a routing path mechanism is woefully insufficient for modern networking - that separation of control plane and data plane on a router is probably a good idea - throwing out the book on existing networking models is only valid if the proposed replacement is measurably better What's left in cjdns is a poorly specified mishmash of curious ideas which will work fine on the author's playpen network and which will break horribly on large networks, regardless of how hard the author waves the "hey look at me, i'm having a revolution" flag. Nick ----- 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: Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries
by Steven Murdoch 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 03:36:05AM -0700, coderman wrote: > you state "an assumption that the global passive adversary is > unrealistic". is this really true in anonymity research circles? The convention in anonymity research is to assume a global passive adversary, since then any system shown to be secure under that model is probably secure in the real world. The problem with this approach is it eliminates all practical low-latency designs, hence the weaker threat model adopted by Tor. I do think that a global passive adversary is stronger than the real world situation. For example, such an adversary could read traffic between two computers in my office, which I suspect is outside of the NSA's capabilities, unless I were targeted for special attention. The actual capabilities will probably lie somewhere between the two extremes. Sometimes your connections through Tor will go via enough monitored nodes to be tracked, sometimes they won't. The interesting question is the relative proportion between the two quantities, and how to change it for the better. > i am also curious if you had considered lower layer propinquity of > physical paths. I had thought about that aspect, but given the shortage of space didn't include it. Perhaps I should for the final version. Traceroute gives a more accurate picture of topology the BGP data (in that it shows up IXes), but it is still not "true". For example, it only discovers devices which reduce the IP TTL, and so will not find MPLS links or long-haul layer-2 VLANs. Then, as you point out, it could be that seemingly disparate traffic is going through the same cable-tunnel, if not the same fibre. On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 03:47:22AM -0700, coderman wrote: > one more comment that ties into your mention PCIe bus limitations. > previous research on monitoring high speeds links has shown FPGA > devices well suited for header and deep packet inspect at line rates > up to 10GigE for hundreds of snort style filter rules. this > approach scales in a linear fashion. The point behind that section was to dispel the myth that traffic analysis is easy, because you can just run tcpdump on off-the-shelf hardware. Actually, on high-speed links it requires serious engineering effort to even capture the data, let alone store it. That said, there is demand for such capabilities and given enough hardware it is possible. Thanks, Steven. -- w: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/ ----- 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: [cryptography] US Appeals Court upholds right not to decrypt a drive
by Jon Callas 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Feb 24, 2012, at 5:43 PM, James A. Donald wrote: > Truecrypt supports an inner and outer encrypted volume, encryption hidden inside encryption, the intended usage being that you reveal the outer encrypted volume, and refuse to admit the existence of the inner hidden volume. > > To summarize the judgment: Plausibile deniability, or even not very plausible deniability, means you don't have to produce the key for the inner volume. The government first has to *prove* that the inner volume exists, and contains something hot. Only then can it demand the key for the inner volume. > > Defendant revealed, or forensics discovered, the outer volume, which was completely empty. (Bad idea - you should have something there for plausible deniability, such as legal but mildly embarrassing pornography, and a complete operating system for managing your private business documents, protected by a password that forensics can crack with a dictionary attack) > > Forensics felt that with FIVE TERABYTES of seemingly empty truecrypt drives, there had to be an inner volume, but a strong odor of rat is no substitute for proof. > > (Does there exist FIVE TERABYTES of child pornography in the entire world?) > > Despite forensics suspicions, no one, except the defendant, knows whether there is an inner volume or not, and so the Judge invoked the following precedent. > > http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/201112268.pdf > > That producing the key is protected if "conceding the existence, possession, and control of the documents tended to incriminate" the defendant. > > The Judge concluded that in order to compel production of the key, the government has to first prove that specific identified documents exist, and are in the possession and control of the defendant, for example the government would have to prove that the encrypted inner volume existed, was controlled by the defendant, and that he had stored on it a movie called "Lolita does LA", which the police department wanted to watch. There is no such thing as plausible deniability in a legal context. Plausible deniability is a term that comes from conspiracy theorists (and like many things contains a kernel of truth) to describe a political technique where everyone knows what happened but the people who did it just assert that it can't be proven, along with a wink and a nudge. But to get to the specifics here, I've spoken to law enforcement and border control people in a country that is not the US, who told me that yeah, they know all about TrueCrypt and their assumption is that *everyone* who has TrueCrypt has a hidden volume and if they find TrueCrypt they just get straight to getting the second password. They said, "We know about that trick, and we're not stupid." I asked them about the case where someone has TrueCrypt but doesn't have a hidden volume, what would happen to someone doesn't have one? Their response was, "Why would you do a dumb thing like that? The whole point of TrueCrypt is to have a hidden volume, and I suppose if you don't have one, you'll be sitting in a room by yourself for a long time. We're not *stupid*." Jon _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- 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: Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries
by Steven Murdoch 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 03:36:05AM -0700, coderman wrote: > you state "an assumption that the global passive adversary is > unrealistic". is this really true in anonymity research circles? The convention in anonymity research is to assume a global passive adversary, since then any system shown to be secure under that model is probably secure in the real world. The problem with this approach is it eliminates all practical low-latency designs, hence the weaker threat model adopted by Tor. I do think that a global passive adversary is stronger than the real world situation. For example, such an adversary could read traffic between two computers in my office, which I suspect is outside of the NSA's capabilities, unless I were targeted for special attention. The actual capabilities will probably lie somewhere between the two extremes. Sometimes your connections through Tor will go via enough monitored nodes to be tracked, sometimes they won't. The interesting question is the relative proportion between the two quantities, and how to change it for the better. > i am also curious if you had considered lower layer propinquity of > physical paths. I had thought about that aspect, but given the shortage of space didn't include it. Perhaps I should for the final version. Traceroute gives a more accurate picture of topology the BGP data (in that it shows up IXes), but it is still not "true". For example, it only discovers devices which reduce the IP TTL, and so will not find MPLS links or long-haul layer-2 VLANs. Then, as you point out, it could be that seemingly disparate traffic is going through the same cable-tunnel, if not the same fibre. On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 03:47:22AM -0700, coderman wrote: > one more comment that ties into your mention PCIe bus limitations. > previous research on monitoring high speeds links has shown FPGA > devices well suited for header and deep packet inspect at line rates > up to 10GigE for hundreds of snort style filter rules. this > approach scales in a linear fashion. The point behind that section was to dispel the myth that traffic analysis is easy, because you can just run tcpdump on off-the-shelf hardware. Actually, on high-speed links it requires serious engineering effort to even capture the data, let alone store it. That said, there is demand for such capabilities and given enough hardware it is possible. Thanks, Steven. -- w: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/ ----- 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: [cryptography] US Appeals Court upholds right not to decrypt a drive
by Jon Callas 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Feb 24, 2012, at 5:43 PM, James A. Donald wrote: > Truecrypt supports an inner and outer encrypted volume, encryption hidden inside encryption, the intended usage being that you reveal the outer encrypted volume, and refuse to admit the existence of the inner hidden volume. > > To summarize the judgment: Plausibile deniability, or even not very plausible deniability, means you don't have to produce the key for the inner volume. The government first has to *prove* that the inner volume exists, and contains something hot. Only then can it demand the key for the inner volume. > > Defendant revealed, or forensics discovered, the outer volume, which was completely empty. (Bad idea - you should have something there for plausible deniability, such as legal but mildly embarrassing pornography, and a complete operating system for managing your private business documents, protected by a password that forensics can crack with a dictionary attack) > > Forensics felt that with FIVE TERABYTES of seemingly empty truecrypt drives, there had to be an inner volume, but a strong odor of rat is no substitute for proof. > > (Does there exist FIVE TERABYTES of child pornography in the entire world?) > > Despite forensics suspicions, no one, except the defendant, knows whether there is an inner volume or not, and so the Judge invoked the following precedent. > > http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/201112268.pdf > > That producing the key is protected if "conceding the existence, possession, and control of the documents tended to incriminate" the defendant. > > The Judge concluded that in order to compel production of the key, the government has to first prove that specific identified documents exist, and are in the possession and control of the defendant, for example the government would have to prove that the encrypted inner volume existed, was controlled by the defendant, and that he had stored on it a movie called "Lolita does LA", which the police department wanted to watch. There is no such thing as plausible deniability in a legal context. Plausible deniability is a term that comes from conspiracy theorists (and like many things contains a kernel of truth) to describe a political technique where everyone knows what happened but the people who did it just assert that it can't be proven, along with a wink and a nudge. But to get to the specifics here, I've spoken to law enforcement and border control people in a country that is not the US, who told me that yeah, they know all about TrueCrypt and their assumption is that *everyone* who has TrueCrypt has a hidden volume and if they find TrueCrypt they just get straight to getting the second password. They said, "We know about that trick, and we're not stupid." I asked them about the case where someone has TrueCrypt but doesn't have a hidden volume, what would happen to someone doesn't have one? Their response was, "Why would you do a dumb thing like that? The whole point of TrueCrypt is to have a hidden volume, and I suppose if you don't have one, you'll be sitting in a room by yourself for a long time. We're not *stupid*." Jon _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- 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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