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David Sobel interview on ISP-TV Monday Night Sept. 30
by ISP-TV Main Contact 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

*** ISP-TV Program Announcement: David Sobel Interview *** Monday, Sept. 30 9:00 PM ET David Sobel is a legal counsel to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and an outspoken crusader for Internet free speech, cryptographic rights, and on-line privacy. He has litigated dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) cases involving subjects such as the Digital Signature Standard, the Clipper Chip, the FBI's Digital Telephony proposal and the 2600/Pentagon City Raid. He has also written for WIRED magazine, and "The Net" online magazine. This video interview can be viewed on the ISP-TV main CU-SeeMe reflector at IP 205.197.247.33, or other ISP-TV affiliate reflectors listed at http://www.digex.net/isptv/members.html See URL http://www.digex.net/isptv for more information about the ISP-TV Network To obtain CU-SeeMe software, see URL http://www.wpine.com/cudownload.htm

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"Soul Catcher" Computer Chip (fwd)
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What's next? Thought escrow? --Lucky ---- Forwarded Message from other list ------ Figured you might be interested in this. I copied it from Nexus Oct/Nov 1996. QUOTE SOUL CATCHER IMPLANTS British scientists are developing a concept for a computer chip which, when implanted into the skull behind the eye, will be able to record a person's every life time thought ands sensation. "This is the end of death," said Dr. Chris Winter of British Telecom's artificial-life team. He predicts that within thirty years it will be possible to relive other people's lives by playing back their experiences on a computer. "By combining this information with a record of a person's genes, we could recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually." Dr Winter and his team of scientists at BT's Martlesham Heath Laboratories, near Ipswich, call the chip "the Soul Catcher." British telecom would not divulge how much money it is investing in the project, but Dr. Winter said it was taking "Soul Catcher 2025" very seriously. He confessed there were profound ethical considerations, butr emphasised that BT was embarking on this line of research so it could keep at the forefront of communications technology. Dr. Winter said "an implanted chip would be like an aircraft's black box, and would enhance communications beyond current concepts. "For example, police would be able to use it to relive an attack, rape or murder from the victims viewpoint, to help catch the criminal... I could even play back the smells, sounds and sighs of my holidays to friends. Other more frightening applications include downloading an older person's experiences into a newborn baby by transplanting the chip. Sources: The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, 18 July 1996 UNQUOTE

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Decense: What ever happened to it?
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I haven't seen anything on the Net since February regarding Ray Cromwell's Decense Web anonymity project. Does anybody on the list have more recent info? PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Snoop Daty Data | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com Grinder | Voice: 1-702-655-2877 Sacred Cow Meat Co. | Fax: 1-702-658-2673 7075 W. Gowan Road, #2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | --------------------------------------------------------------------- Just say NO to prescription DRUGS. "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis "Surveillence is ultimately just another form of media, and thus, potential entertainment." -- G. Beato

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Re: Internet plug pulled on Colombia's guerrillas
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:05 PM 9/26/96 -0700, Chris Adams wrote: >Internet plug pulled on Colombia's guerrillas > 3:05pm EDT, 9/26/96 >BOGOTA, Colombia - A Colombian guerrilla group currently >involved in a bloody offensive in the mountains and jungles, >suffered a setback in its propaganda battle when its new-tech >voice on the Internet was mysteriously silenced. > >The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which >has periodically paralyzed half the country with road blocks, >found its route to the information superhighway barred. > >The Communist insurgents, who rose up in arms in 1964, >embraced new technology last year in their fight to overthrow the >government by launching a home page on the Internet. I couldn't resist smiling when I read this. Not that I want their access cut; quite the opposite. But it is REALLY reassuring to see the authorities behave in exactly the fashion you expect them to! Attempting to cut off dissenting political voices IRL is de rigeur; now, this shows that they believe "threat" to the government posed by allowing others to voice contrary opinions on the 'net is real. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Newsgroup proposal: misc.anonymous
by David E. Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com, cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Fri Sep 27 22:31:14 1996 > "Mark M." <markm(a)voicenet.com> writes: > > In an effort to get anonymity and message pools more widespread, I > think it > > would be a good idea to establish a newsgroup for anonymous message > pools tha > > would get the same distribution as any other newsgroup in the "big 8". > The > > "misc" hierarchy is probably the best place for such a newsgroup since > it > > already carries groups like "misc.misc" and "misc.test". Does anyone > have an > > suggestions or objections? > > It should be under misc.activism: misc.activism.anonymity or even > m.a.privacy. This doesn't seem entirely appropriate for a message-pool group, which is what I understood as the original idea. m.a.anonymity would be a great place for a discussion group, though. dave - ----- David E. Smith, P O Box 324, Cape Girardeau MO USA 63702 dsmith(a)prairienet.org http://www.prairienet.org/~dsmith send mail with subject of "send pgp-key" for my PGP public key "Madness takes its toll . . . please have exact change ready." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMkycBTVTwUKWHSsJAQFuXgf7BWoshYYQ4qIjBLpZznba90iDlkCOgBBr dyAQDohGs8euJcUxAYejmg2MufekGR5KlhSq7qlqutF7b0ngcgQj0OtDboZz4M3y SIDZtealn5f6rNCz/r8utgc5hhUrkxJty9zYWphJxesBzSqWWw9yq5zU+7m0uKj0 9P3zN+9ezWpF9F45XH/c1NX9pIrJSax7n1ONYg6SyuSX+WfhFKSlFGHseBi7kV8f 5B/PhPFpYwCKfiqiW4Wang5qOqXzojXdddWOyBTTRoSxXHGoGlxcZ+aat+A7moI8 yjzwyDW2MA+yRLN0Z8a9rbIhuaBgpsqNL+fU5nFqaXOv98ZPiXcJDQ== =Zj+K -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Technical difficulties with AP [AP NOISE]
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:07 PM 9/28/96 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >Aside from details like dead bodies, vendettas, and government suppression, >there are technical complications with Assassination Politics >that make it more than the simple job Jim Bell is imagining. >Some of them provide ways to defend against AP, and turn it into more like >Extortion Politics. > > [Do I _really_ want to bring up more discussion of AP? > Not sure, but if it's clear that it won't work very well, > it'll be less likely for the government media to freak about :-)] OTOH, if it's going to work, the earlier you're satisfied about that the better, huh? >Let's look at the critical part of the problem - paying the assassin. >The model we've generally been using is that the players are the >victim, the escrow agent who manages the system, an enthusiastic public, >and the assassin or assassins who are competing for the jackpot. All of whom could play multiple roles in difference circumstances, incidentally, at different times. The public should be particularly interested in this process, BTW, because they realize that someday they may want to participate as donors, bettors, or they may have no choice but to participate as...victims. >I can see three approaches to identifying the correct payee: >1) Payee provides physical evidence to the escrow agent - > the traditional approach doesn't work here: since the > escrow agent is anonymous, so you can't mail him the > victim's wallet or finger with well-known fingerprint or whatever. >2) Assassin leaves physical evidence at the scene which the news media > would be likely to report, which payee confirms with escrow > agent, presumably committing in advance (e.g. after the event, > the payee sends a key which allows the escrow agent to decode > the encrypted message that said "I'm leaving a note on the body > saying 'Jacques De Molay is Avenged - Assassin's Guild Member #32767'.") > Works fine for the first couple of assassinations, but after a while > the police will catch on and stop revealing kinky details to the media. >3) The main solution has been the gambling deal - > it's just a lottery on the date of death of the victim, which presumably > the payee will win because he knows when the assassin will strike. > For a lottery to be effective, prospective assassins need to > be able to determine how much the jackpot is and who the victim is, > so they can place their bets and be the closest winner. There are a number of advantages to the gambling scenario. The first, obviously, is that it is, technically, gambling, and gambling is legal in many locales and "accepted" (morally) in most. The second is that being gambling, no participant other than an assassin knows, for sure, that the person collecting the payoff is actually guilty of any crime. A third is that to many people, gambling is fun, which means that they are already primed to partipate. > But the prospective victim can also play, individually or as part > of an insurance pool (which is especially valuable for victims like > "the first IRS agent to be assassinated".) Obviously you don't want > to just bid up the price on your own head, so it needs to be accompanied > by publicity that the IRS Agents' Benevolent Association is placing > a large number of small bets every day to maximize the chances that > _they_ will collect the money rather than the assassins. > If the times that the bets are for are published, you can beat this, > but you also invite speculators to be small bets just before and after > your bets, so it becomes a mishmash and perhaps a race condition. > If the times aren't published, the assassin can make lots of bets > surrounding the planned date of the hit, which is also a warning > to the prospective victim to be careful if the bets on his demise > start increasing rapidly. The way I've envisioned it, the bettor must commit to his prediction, but he then encrypts it so that nobody else knows what he's predicted, either the date or the target, and he must "buy" his prediction by including digital cash. One advantage of this system is that the victim isn't warned (although the victim is already aware of how much money has been donated to fund the prize), but a potential disadvantage is that there might be a collision between the predictions of two or more people. This probably can't be entirely avoided, but it can be minimized by forcing the bettors to compete with their bets. It is impractical for a person who just guesses to make such a bet, against somebody who knows the date. The bettor doesn't reveal the decrypt key to the particular prediction involved unless he chooses to do so; when he does presumably, it's because the prediction has come true. A failed prediction isn't disclosed, so it doesn't alert anyone else, including the "escrow agent" AP organization. The amount of digital cash included with the prediction will be revealed publicly, the moment it is received by the organization, as well as the (still encrypted) prediction. Saving these predictions allows anyone to verify (after the decrypt key has been released) that the prediction actually identified a particular person. This allows the public and the other players to verify that the game is being played honestly. > This does make the AP lottery somewhat of an extortion deal - > by advertising that someone is a target, you're forcing them to > continually make lots of bets. This, of course, is only true if the specifics of the predictions are revealed, which is not the scenario I envision. Obviously, revealing the predictions allows the victim to lay low whever he's likely to be hit, which is why I think that's a bad idea. > But if they've got any way of tracing > money, even partially, it'll help them find the escrow agent, > who can then be targeted for justice of one sort or another. > You're also forcing the assassin to make lots of bets, though in > a jackpot system the successful payee will recover most of it. It is at least conceivable that an assassin won't know the exact date he'll be successful. If he sends a letter-bomb, for instance, he won't know for sure when that letter will be delivered, or the day it will be opened. However, he need merely make two or three predictions, and he won't have to make the last one or two unless the prediction didn't come true on the first day. Multiple predictions does raise his cost, but it will still be economical to do given the probabilities. > To some extent the defense can be fought if the escrow agent > wants to establish a minimum bet, say $100, which an assassin > can afford to make a few of for the targeted day, but the > victim can't keep paying too much. This also reduces the > since of the potential better pool, and therefore reduces > the jackpot and the attractiveness of the job to the assassin. > Lots of people might be willing to spend $5 to contribute; > $100 bets are much fewer, especially if there are enough > targets to successfully overthrow a government. Originally, I had anticipated that the AP organization would require specific payments included with a prediction based on the value of the reward and the estimated probability of the death on any particular day. I was never comfortable with this system, because it would involve a great deal of calculation based on numbers that no particular people know. I don't know whether you saw my idea a couple weeks ago in which I pointed out that it should merely be necessary to allow all predictors to include whatever amount of money they want with their prediction, with the reward split up and paid to all successful predictors, pro-rated based on the size of their contribution. This shifts the burden to the public to estimate the amount they should include, which should be okay since a predictor is probably a fairly good judge of the probabilities associated with his target. At least hypothetically, it means that an assassin might have a portion of his reward "stolen" by another lucky predictor, but this is unlikely and in any case, the fact that this loss was genuine can be verified by all participates after the fact. And a predictor need merely increase the value included with the prediction to increase his pro-rata share of the reward. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Mousepad RNG's?
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:14 PM 9/27/96 +0200, Anonymous wrote: > I just downloaded a copy of the beta version of Datafellows > Windows 3.1 SSH and it asked to move the mouse around to > generate some randomness. In reading Applied Crypto, it > mentioned that there is no such thing as generating > randomness from a personal computer unless something like > a Geiger counter is used. Is there any way to create a > fairly random sample from the mouse? Should one use lots > of jerky movements, or take ones time with it? In this case the entropy is the negative of the logarithm of the probability that you or someone else could exactly duplicate those mouse movements. I would guess that you get at least three bits a second just doodling around, so half a minute of doodles (a pretty long time) should be unbreakable. Some time ago, at a cypherpunks conference, people were making all sorts of ridiculous proposals for being really, really, really, sure that you had real entropy, and a prominent cypherpunk, possibly Tim May, said, "This is ridiculous: Nobody ever broke good crypto through weakness in the source of truly random numbers". Sometime after that Netscape was broken through weakness in the source of truly random numbers. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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[CRYPTO], or hash, anyway
by P. J. Ponder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I need a copy of the appendix to the SHA FIPS pub (180-1?) that has the three test texts and corresponding SHA hashes, so that I can test an SHA implementation I'm working with. I have tried the NIST site, and can't seem to get through. If anybody has this test deal, or knows where it is out there on the net somewhere, please let me know. Thanks in advance. (My problem is I keep getting different hashes between an MS-DOS version I'm running and one running on a Linux box, when I ftp the same files back and forth. @#$%. I thought maybe I was having problems with some kind of Line-feed vs. Carriage Return/Line-feed conversion deal, but it also generates different hashes on binary files. So I thought I would test the Linux and the DOS one against the specs in the FIPS, and see which one is hosed up.) -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ to unsubscribe, send to majordomo(a)toad.com a message that reads: unsubscribe cypherpunks in the message body, not the SUBJECT: line. -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

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Re: GPS and other Dual-use technologies
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:34 AM 9/29/96 -0700, Steve Schear wrote: >I used to be an avid RC modeler and have contemplated organizing an >on-going amateur cruise missile contest. The object would be to accurately >deliver various payload weights over courses of various terrain and >distances (perhaps out to a hundred miles or more in the case of Giant >Scale craft). Judging would be based on speed, stealth (noise, IR >emissions and radar cross section) and accuracy. > >Craft are free to use any navigational technology, but must be autonomous >from launch to delivery. To aid navigation I was considering the design of >a substitute differential GPS beacon functionally interchangable with those >offered by the USCG. My device would work on a different frequency, >possibly using very wideband direct sequence spread spectrum (for low >probability of intercept/detection) and be actuated by the missile as it >neared the target in order to refine its position. The data standard for differential corrections is called "RTCM-104", and it's the signal you input into differential-capable GPS receivers. Boxes to generate RTCM-104 are probably relatively cheap, primarily needing a multi-channel GPS receiver and another processor for coding. Differential corrections can, of course, be transmitted on any frequency you'd like, including frequency-hopping if you're really concerned about intercept. (which you won't be...) Incidentally, GPS receivers are getting REALLY small these days, particularly for just the module-level products. A size like about 1 inch by 2-inches is pretty close to state-of-the-art. Power consumption is about 3/4 watt. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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What about making re-mailers automatically chain?
by Geoffrey C. Grabow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Would it be a good idea to have a re-mailer "randomly" decide whether to send the mail to the destination or to another re-mailer. If all re-mailers performed this way, not even the sender would know the path. The chain could be short sometimes and long others. Granted, there is a possibility that every mailer decides to chain instead of sending the message to the recip, but some clever counter tag could keep the number of links to a certain maximum. The "randomness" of this would aid in traffic analysis, and of course each mailer that decides to chain the mail would encrypt under the next mailer's pub key. Any thoughts? G.C.G. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | Geoffrey C. Grabow | Great people talk about ideas. | | Oyster Bay, New York | Average people talk about things. | | gcg(a)pb.net | Small people talk about people. | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | PGP 2.6.2 public key available at http://www.pb.net/~wizard | | and on a plethora of key servers around the world. | | Key ID = 0E818EC1 | | Fingerprint = A6 7B 67 D7 E9 96 37 7D E7 16 BD 5E F4 5A B2 E4 | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | That which does not kill us, makes us stranger. - Trevor Goodchild | ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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