- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Persistent Services Needed
by Erik E. Fair 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One way to establish persistent services is to use the DNS for indirection: register a name for a service (or a set of services), which then point to servers of those services by a DNS name. If the service needs to move (hosts, net connections, etc), the only thing that changes is the DNS zone file and the references to the service through the name stay exactly the same. Hell, if your service requires no state information or can have replicated data (e.g. DNS, FTP, WWW), you can use "round robin" techniques with very low DNS RR TTL's to spread the service load over a bunch of widely distributed hosts. The NetBSD gang understand this principle: netbsd.org has several servers all over the place: E-mail to netbsd.org is handled at MIT. www.netbsd.org is served up by WWU.EDU ftp.netbsd.org is at CMU. Perhaps Eric Hughes can be prevailed upon to permit "privacy.net" to be used in this manner. Erik Fair

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The NetBuyer Basement is Open!
by announce＠lists.zdnet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Federal Emergencies, Martial Law, etc.
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I ran across this short summary of various national emergency orders. A useful reminder that the government views us as cogs in the machine, to be used as necessary. And that private property may be seized at will. So much for the actual Constitution. (Declan cited a poll showing ignorance of the Constitution. I would have flunked, too. E.g., "What do you call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution?" My answer: "You call them "null and void."") Search engines will turn up the full versions of each of these orders. Some are part of the Continuing Economic Emergency (tm), either the one declared in 1971 by Nixon, or the one declared by Johnson or Kennedy or Eisenhower. Or perhaps the one declared by Roosevelt (when banks were shut, when gold was declared contraband, and so on). Or maybe the one declared 135 years ago by Lincoln. Or maybe the emergency declared during the Whiskey Rebellion. And so it goes. --Tim > From: mrostov <mrostov(a)doitnow.com> > Newsgroups: misc.survivalism > Subject: Re: DEFINITION OF MARSHALL LAW ? > Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 03:24:01 -0700 > > FEDERAL EXECUTIVE ORDERS > > 10995 Seizure of all print and electronic media in the United States > > 10997 Seizure of all electric power, fuels, and minerals, public and > private. > > 10998 Seizure of all food supplies and resources, public and private, > including farms and equipment. > > 10999 Seizure of all means of transportation, including cars, trucks or > any other vehicles, including control over highways, harbors, and > waterways. > > 11000 Seizure of all American people for work forces under federal > supervision; it allows the government to split up families if they > believe that it is necessary. > > 11001 Seizure of all health, education, and welfare facilities, public > and private. > > 11002 Registration by the Postmaster General of all men, women, and > children for government service. > > 11003 Seizure of all airports and aircraft. > > 11004 Seizure of all housing and finance authorities; authority to > establish forced relocation, designate areas that must be abandoned as > 'unsafe'. Establishment of new locations for population groups, building > of new housing on public land. > > 11005 Seizure of all railroads, inland waterways, and storage > warehouses, public and private. > > 11051 Authorize the Office of Emergency Planning to put the above > orders into effect in times of increased international tension or > financial crisis. > > > Rostov -- There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Crypto APIs
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:29 PM 10/2/95 -0400, Matt Blaze wrote: > It seems best to encourage the realistic > side of NSA as much as possible... Why? Surely the realists are more dangerous than the nuts. > [...] > > In other > words, the parts of the military that are concerned with actually > securing communications want exactly what we want, and are just > starting to realize it. This does not necessarily protect our right to cryptography, any more than it protects our right to full auto guns. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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is this a bug of Netscape
by John Cheng 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If you go to http://c.gp.cs.cmu.edu:5103/prog/webster, you will get a input textbox and two buttons, leave textbox blank and push Look Up Definition button, you will get a GPF? I am using Netscape V1.2N for windows. Sorry if you have knew it. J

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Oct 14 mtg - focus on java
by mrm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi - The Oct 14 cypherpunks meeting will be focussing on Java topics. I'm putting together an agenda, and finalizing the meeting location. It looks like we'll have someone from the Java group at Sun to talk about what the current Java security policy is, and about Java and HotJava security mechanisms. Doug Barnes and Amanda Chou will talk about JCrypt, which is a set of Java wrappers for existing C encryption routines. If you'd like to talk at the Oct 14 meeting, please send me email with a description of your project, and I'll schedule you in. I'll send out mail early next week with the agenda, and letting you know where the meeting will be held. I'm trying to get a large conference room at one of the Sun facilities. Marianne mrm(a)netcom.com mrm(a)eng.sun.com

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Re: Rethinking the utility of netnews "cancel" control messages
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sigh. >Replacing cancel with setaside makes Usenet architecture useful for >many business semantics/requirements. That's not something I'm willing to Sigh. useLESS for many ...

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GC Tech GlobeID pilot
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: pays(a)edelweb.fr Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 00:46:46 +0100 To: Amir Herzberg <amir(a)watson.ibm.com> From: pays(a)gctech.edelweb.fr (Paul-Andre Pays) Subject: GC Tech GlobeID pilot Cc: e-payment(a)cc.bellcore.com, ietf-payments(a)cc.bellcore.com, www-buyinfo(a)allegra.att.com As it seems everyone is broadcasting URL about electronic payment systems, let me propose http://globeid.gctech.fr/cgi-gid/welcome?Language=English which does no lead to a specification but the Globe Online, Globe ID pilot setup By GC Tech. Sorry only a few pages are available in english by now. English and some other languages wil be available within a few weeks Sorry again, but because real content is and will be available we commited to deliver only a few hundreds Web Wallets for this pilot. You can still use the web form to apply for one... -- PAP _________________________________________________________________________ PAP: paul-andre.pays(a)gctech.edelWeb.fr tel: +33 1 34 52 00 88 fax: +33 1 34 52 25 26 GC Tech "The Globe Online and Globe ID Technology Company" http://www.globeonline.fr/ http://www.gctech.fr/ --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Re: Simple Hardware RNG Idea
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:20 PM 10/5/95, Simon Spero wrote: >On Thu, 5 Oct 1995, Norman Hardy wrote: .... >> You presumably use the oddness of the count for your random bit in some >> predetermined time interval. External radiation can change, but not bias >> the parity. If the counter saturates, the counter may be biased towards one > >Hmmm. But isn't this method slightly biased? If the probability of N >events < the probability of N+1 events, wouldn't you need a large number >of events per bit to make the bias insignificant? .... What you really need is entropy (information). I propose concatenating several counts and sending them thru MD5. The counts are distributed the same way but are independent so that the entropy of the concatenation is the sum of the entropies. Each count has a Poisson distribution. That tells you how many bits of entropy there are in the input to the MD5. Take that many bits, rounded down, as your random bits. If there are an average of x bits in a time interval then the probability that the count will be exactly K is (x^K/(K!))exp(-x). That is the Poisson distribution. The entropy is then: - sum[i=0 to infinity] (x^K/(K!))exp(-x)log( (x^K/(K!))exp(-x)) = - sum[i=0 to infinity] (x^K/(K!))exp(-x)(log(x^K/(K!)) - x) = - sum[i=0 to infinity] (x^K/(K!))exp(-x)(K*log(x) - log(K!) - x) Here is a klutzy Scheme program to evaluate these: (define (sum g)(letrec ((ss (lambda (n) (if (= n 0) (g 0) (+ (g n) (ss (- n 1))))))) (ss 30))) (define (log2 x)(/ (log x)(log 2))) (define (fact n)(if (= n 0) 1 (* n (fact (- n 1))))) (define (p x k) (* (/ (expt x k)(fact k))(exp (- x)))) (define (en n)(sum (lambda(x) (let ((c (p x n))) (if (= c 0) 0 (* c (log2 c))))))) (en 1) => 2.07 (en 3) => 2.92 (en 10) => 3.73 (en 15) => 4.0 I.e. if 1 count is expected on average there are two bits of entropy in the count (supprising!) and if the count averages 10 then there are 3.7 bits worth. It goes up as the log. Before you bet your enterprise on this scheme consider that the math was done at 03:30 AM.

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Re: subjective names and MITM
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:24 PM 10/5/95 -0400, Adam Shostack <adam(a)homeport.org> wrote: > The key does indeed have a high likelihood of being unique, >but dealing with 1024 bit identifiers could strain database systems, >especially when 100 well chosen bits would be than enough. If everybody in the world has a 1024-bit key, that's 750 GB; that's not bad at all by the time everybody in the world would have one, and you could do MD5s in about 100 GB, which is a little more convenient. Today, for 750 GB, you'd probably have tape in your system, or optical jukebox. But not everybody has one; on the other hand, I suppose individuals in well-heeled countries might end up with dozens of their own. On the other hand, the number of 1024-bit primes is something like 2^1023/log(2^1024) (if I remember right), or roughly 2^1013. The probability of two independent uniformly distributed primes matching is about 2^1023/2^32, which is still an astoundingly mindbogglingly LARGE number. If you've got 1024 bits of entropy in your input process, there will not _be_ any matches. (If people insist on using sources of randomness like clocks or user names, the chances are a lot higher....) Now, for 128-bit hashes, whether it's MD5 or just the near-bottom 128 key bits, by the time you get 2^64 of them together, you've got a 50% chance of a match. Not a problem, since you'll not likely need that many, even for the 2^33 people in the world. Still not a problem. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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