- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

USPO & Digital Postage/E-Cash Project
by daleh＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The US Post Office just killed a project that would have created a digital postage/e-cash system. This would have been a digital replacement for the Pitney-Bose style Postage Metering machines. To use a PM machine one has to take the entire machine physically to a Postal Station and purchase some fixed dollar amount of postage. The Postal clerk unseals and unlocks the machine, dials in the amount of postage purchased and then relocks and reseals the machine. This mechanical system would have been replaced by a serial-port dongle and a piece of software. The dongle would contain an EEPROM in a replacable button (made by Dallas Semiconductor) into which would be loaded data indicating the amount of postage that had been purchased and not yet used. The software package would be able to print the address, postage seal, routing codes, etc directly on the envelope via a laser printer and decrement the amount of available postage left in the dongle. In the original test, customers would have to take the dongle to a Postal Station to purchase additional postage, but the ultimate goal was to have been to have a commerical dial-up service available that one could dial into and purchase additional postage directly. A proof-of-concept prototype was developed in VB and a production prototype was then developed in VC++. Unfortunately the crypto wasn't very strong. The USPO contracted with Carnege-Mellon to try and break the system and they were able to within a couple of weeks. USPO then killed the project. Dale H.

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Re: Effects of S.314 (Communications Decency Act)
by Brett Turcotte 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Feb. 8, Samuel Kaplin wrote: > The question is: What is obsene? What the community in NYC considers > obsene is sure a lot different than what the community in Elk River > Minnesota considers obsene. (They've been trying to eject their one XXX > bookstore for years now while NYC has the American Museum of Pornography > at 42nd Street ;) ;) :) ) As you can see, obsenity depends where you are > geographically located, at least according to our highest court. If > community standards say it is obsene then it is. They never legally > defined what constitutes something as being obsene or an obsenity. > > Sam > And don't forget the recent case where the operators of a California bulletin board were prosecuted and convicted in court in Memphis....whereas they never would have been convicted under the community standards in California. You want to talk about scary....there is a section in Robert Heinlein's "Job: A Comedy of Justice" where the protagonist describes some "moral" codes that they got passed...one of them was having the community standards of the median size community of the state apply to all communities in the state. What's the betting out there that this is what would ultimately happen under these kinds of bills?

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MBONE access needed
by perry＠imsi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey, guys! I need to get MBONE access in New York City or nearby this weekend in order to deliver a presentation for the Cypherpunks meeting this Saturday on IPSP. If anyone in New York can provide such access, please get in touch with me ASAP; the site that I thought I could use has sadly become unavailable... Perry

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Re: lwall
by NIEHS Autoresponder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Your Usenet test article was received here at the news gateway machine for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA 35 47 N by 78 38 W. The NIEHS newsadmins can be reached via e-mail at usenet(a)news.niehs.nih.gov. Please note that we do not offer news access to sites outside of our organization. If you're a newsadmin and you'd like to run your own autoresponder, this one is available from ftp://ftp.cccd.edu/pub/usenet/innautorespond. If you want to suppress this message in the future, include the word "ignore" in the Subject: header of any subsequent articles posted to *.test. You could also post your test articles with a Distribution: header of "local" to prevent them from leaving your local machine, or you could also ask your local newsadmin to create a local *.test group that will not propagate outside of your organization. Path: jeeves.niehs.nih.gov!darwin.sura.net!news.udel.edu!udel!news.mathworks.com!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.duke.edu!godot.cc.duq.edu!hudson.lm.com!news.pop.psu.edu!news.cac.psu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!overload.lbl.gov!emf.emf.net!hilbert.dnai.com!nbn!miwok!news.zeitgeist.net!ack.berkeley.edu!not-for-mail Subject: lwall Message-ID: <PINE4545-dhfsdkjc(a)ack.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: ack.berkeley.edu Organization: cypherpunks Lines: 2 From: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Distribution: world Newsgroups: alt.test Date: 6 Feb 1995 19:34:19 GMT test test

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Re: USPO & Digital Postage/E-Cash Project
by haeberli＠apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dale, I would appreciate any citations you can offer which: -Describe the proposed system in some detail -Describe the weaknesses identified by the CMU team. Also, this group might want to know that CMU has (perhaps independently) done work in this area over two years ago. It may well be that the team at CMU which did the USPO contract research is the same team that proposed digital postage in a research paper in that time frame, and it may well be that their system would withstand a much more rigorous attack. I'm afraid I've lost the precise citation, but I found the report browsing the CMU tech reports server about 18 months ago. Martin At 10:25 PM 02/07/95, Dale Harrison (AEGIS wrote: >The US Post Office just killed a project that would have created a >digital postage/e-cash system. This would have been a digital >replacement for the Pitney-Bose style Postage Metering machines. To use >a PM machine one has to take the entire machine physically to a Postal >Station and purchase some fixed dollar amount of postage. The Postal >clerk unseals and unlocks the machine, dials in the amount of postage >purchased and then relocks and reseals the machine. > >This mechanical system would have been replaced by a serial-port dongle >and a piece of software. The dongle would contain an EEPROM in a >replacable button (made by Dallas Semiconductor) into which would be >loaded data indicating the amount of postage that had been purchased and >not yet used. The software package would be able to print the address, >postage seal, routing codes, etc directly on the envelope via a laser >printer and decrement the amount of available postage left in the >dongle. In the original test, customers would have to take the dongle >to a Postal Station to purchase additional postage, but the ultimate >goal was to have been to have a commerical dial-up service available >that one could dial into and purchase additional postage directly. > >A proof-of-concept prototype was developed in VB and a production >prototype was then developed in VC++. Unfortunately the crypto wasn't >very strong. The USPO contracted with Carnege-Mellon to try and break >the system and they were able to within a couple of weeks. USPO then >killed the project. > > >Dale H.

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Re: MIME based remailing commands
by Nathaniel Borenstein 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Excerpts from junk.interesting: 7-Feb-95 Re: MIME based remailing co.. "Perry E. Metzger"@imsi. (2553) > > > It is being remailed via a MIME-based structure where two new content types > > > are defined: multipart/remail and application/remail-commands. The > > > multipart/remail type is supposed to be composed of two parts, the > > > application/remail-commands part which has remailer commands, and the > > > other part which is the "payload" to be remailed. Perhaps you might consider writing up an informational RFC to define these types? I think that would be very useful. -- Nathaniel

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Re: Seals and Sealing Waxes
by kkirksey＠world.std.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Message-Id: <v01510102ab5ecd95ffb0@DialupEudora> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > "All crypto is economics," and this is what made seals and sealing wax so > useful for so long. Saying "seals were duplicatable from the start" does > not mean this feat was easy, even if technically possible. > > In fact, the fine details produced by a good seal are hard to exactly > emulate with a copy. Even on a two-dimensional surface. And with the advent > of three-dimensional surfaces, which sealing wax made possible, the fine > detail of a good seal was in fact very hard to forge. But not impossible. According to Kahn, the Austrian Black Chamber was quite adept at forging seals in the late 1600's / early 1700's. They were able to take sealed correspondence in at 7 a.m., unseal it, copy the message, re-seal it, and have it back in the postal stream by early afternoon. There was only one recorded case of them re-sealing a message with the wrong seal, and that was because the seals were so similar. All this is from memory, since I don't have my copy of _The Codebreakers_ here at work, so I may be off in some details. Ken = Ken Kirksey And the Clinton administration launched an attack on = = kkirksey(a)world.std.com people in Texas because those people were religious = = Mac Guru & Developer nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by = = religious nuts with guns. - P.J. O'Rourke = -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAwUBLzkeVusZNYlu+zuBAQG5HgP+LuE0aOG6UxgZp/IrZCm2y9ESi9AT13v+ ePMulQHUXUv8cc4m0RTjD35+cmKSKADrP6L1oC6BCia+5d3Rhidh2KcqaoQZQLvc rSuXbPgUpM7VJBOELtxc68CLJTpyaHBHvORJ//xH+/kN/++2f110+hZMwvgynrRd Pj54hvqthKA= =Jhff -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Selection key crypto protocol trial balloon
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

wcs(a)anchor.ho.att.com writes: > I'm not sure I really believe it's workable, but what it does > sound a bit like is CDMA spread-spectrum, which lets a bunch of Um no. The main thing is that what is extracted with the selection key is _different_ from what was put in... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab(a)arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Re: Not necessarily crypto but scary anyway...
by dshayer＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>A friend advises me that today House Bill 666 passed. This supposedly would >allow police officers to use evidence collected illegaly if they 'believed' >that it was collected in good faith. > >Any word on it? Yes, this bill is real, and it passed the house resoundingly. (I don't know if the bill number is accurate.) According to the ny times, the republicans have been trying to pass this for a long time, and now they control congress. Interestingly, the ATF and IRS are specifically excluded! The bill was opposed by both civil liberties groups and gun nuts. (Hope I don't offend too many gun nuts.) The ATF was excluded as a sop to the NRA I suppose. During debate, Rep. John Dingell (MI) called the ATF "jackbooted American fascists." Way to go John! David +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |David Shayer dshayer(a)netcom.com | |Sentient Software / Symantec shayer(a)applelink.apple.com | |"Shoot Newt." | +------------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Wiretaps & terrorism
by Adam Shostack 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(Why the FBI doesn't really need wiretaps) (Part of a continuing series) >From todays (Feb 8) Boston Globe, page 3 by Larry Neumeister, AP New York- the FBI was on the trail of three of the World Trade Center bombers nearly four years before teh explosion that killed six and injured 1,000, the government said yesterday. In evidence presented at the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and 10 others, the FBI also said it had bugged the Sheik's phone a week before the blast. The surprising testimony - a day ater a key defendant switched sides - indicated that the government had more extensive knowledge of the planning for the trade center bombing than it had acknowledged. And it reaised anew questions about why the FBI was unable to prevent the 1993 bombing, one of the most serious terrorist actions in the United States. ...

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