- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Virus Found in message "A very new website"
by Barb Conder 05 Dec '02

05 Dec '02

Norton AntiVirus found a virus in an attachment you (cypherpunks) sent to bconder(a)hoffcocomet.com. To ensure the recipient(s) are able to use the files you sent, perform a virus scan on your computer, clean any infected files, then resend this attachment. Attachment: BellSouth[1].scr Virus name: W32.Klez.H@mm Action taken: Clean failed : Quarantine succeeded : File status: Infected

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Citizens spying on citizens, for bounties paid by state
by Major Variola (ret) 05 Dec '02

05 Dec '02

TRENTON, N.J. These days, a truant officer's job goes beyond keeping kids in school. Some spend more time keeping out-of-towners out, sometimes by spotting bogus leases or trailing students home. A few school districts are even going a step further, offering members of the public bounties of $100 or more for information on students who sneak across district lines. <snip> http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=14587&section=NATION_WO…

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Emanations from Choate Prime
by Tim May 05 Dec '02

05 Dec '02

On Thursday, December 5, 2002, at 06:50 AM, Peter Fairbrother wrote: > Jim Choate wrote: > > No he didn't. He proved Mathematics is incomplete, ie that there are > universally valid but unprovable statements within it. > > He proved that any system that contains Peano arithmetic (roughly, a > concept > of the natural numbers) is incomplete. Mathematics certainly contains > Peano > arithmetic. > > Go and lie down. Your brain is feverish. And stop posting nonsense. I believe you, Peter, are fairly new to the list. At least I have only been seeing a lot of posts from you recently. So, you being new, you apparently don't know that Jim Choate is a visitor from Choate Prime, a reality which is parallel to our own but "different" in many strange, but ultimately boring, ways. In Choate Prime, the laws of physics are quite different from our own. In Choate Prime, the prime numbers (the so-called Choate Prime primes, or CPPs) have substantially different properties than they have in our world. Mathematics and logic are generally quite different in Choate Prime than here on Earth. In Choate Prime, naturally, history and law are substantially different from what we here on Earth see. Many of us have found various ways to disconnect the signals coming in from Choate Prime. We see his signals only in the replies of others who have not yet realized what kind of weird place Choate Prime is. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay(a)got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/ML/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns Recent interests: category theory, toposes, algebraic topology

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Re: Delegates tagged and tracked
by Major Variola (ret) 05 Dec '02

05 Dec '02

At 06:51 PM 12/5/02 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: >Scientists often use radio tags to track elusive animals. But at last >week's Supercomputing 2002 conference in Baltimore, Maryland, they used >them on each other. > >Each researcher carried a small transmitter That's all very nice, but they'll still go extinct without habitat protection and managed breeding. We need this for congressvermin, and it shouldn't be voluntary for them.

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Re: Money is about expected future value....nothing more, nothing less
by Tim May 05 Dec '02

05 Dec '02

On Thursday, December 5, 2002, at 10:31 AM, Tim May wrote: > Swiss banks could take in and dispense from accounts without any > identity credentials (the passwords and equivalents to signatures and > chop marks) because of this basic point about Bayesian probability. > Swiss banks were not trustworthy because they let customers examine > their vaults, their computers (!), or who their owners were. In rereading the first line here, I didn't mean to define identity credentials as passwords and equivalents to signatures and chop marks. Just the opposite.; Identity credentials are taken to be biometric ID, or is-a-person signed credentials, or other statements of legal and personal identy. The passport of Timothy C. May, for example. But a Swiss bank, pre-eunuch version, did not require passports or credentials issued by the Vichy Government or Pol Pot or whomever. This is what numbered accounts were all about. (Perhaps some did, and this was their "right" to operate as they wished.) The core point is that identity credentials of the is-a-person sort have nothing to do with banking and money in general. --Tim May

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3rd test
by Anonymous 05 Dec '02

05 Dec '02

3rd test 5 chained remailers

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copyright, royalties, micropayments, Finn cabbies to pay
by AARG! Anonymous 04 Dec '02

04 Dec '02

mv(a)cdc.gov (Major Variola ret) writes: > http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_721008.html > > Finnish taxi drivers to pay royalties for backseat music > > Finland's Supreme Court has ruled taxi drivers must pay royalty fees > if they play music in their car while a customer is in the backseat. > > The order even applies to the radio. > > A case, based on one driver's refusal to pay, is likely to set a > precedent for the 9,500 cab drivers in the country. > > Under the ruling, a cab driver in Finland must pay #14 annually for > playing music while transporting a fare. > > Lauri Luotonen, chairman of the Helsinki Taxi Drivers' Association, > says the ruling is likely to force most drivers to keep their radios > off. > > Recently, two Finnish churches refused to pay royalties to the > country's copyright society for the performance of Christmas hymns. > The congregations won their case in a district court, but the society > has appealed.

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pamphleting is now a crime
by Major Variola (ret) 04 Dec '02

04 Dec '02

The distribution of printed material is now a crime. Hate Leaflets Distributed in San Fernando Valley Neighborhoods (Van Nuys, CA) -- Los Angeles Police say they are investigating the distribution of Anti-Semitic hate leaflets found in a Van Nuys neighborhood. A police spokesperson referred to the distribution of the material believed to have taken place between Monday evening and yesterday morning, a "hate incident." The Jewish Defense League is urging the LAPD and FBI to investigate the incident as a hate crime. JDL spokesperson Brett Stone says residents in Encino and Sherman Oaks called to complain about the leaflets he says were distributed by a group calling itself the National Alliance. --- We have always been at war with Oceania bin Laden

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ACLU funds Total Awareness of State Abuse
by Major Variola (ret) 04 Dec '02

04 Dec '02

The organization has budgeted $3.5 million for a campaign that asks Americans to monitor their government monitors and report abuses. It's a mirror image to the government's plan to empower some Americans to check on their neighbors, under a program known as the Terrorism Information and Prevention System. http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=190&xlc=883000 --- Wonder if this ties in with JG's Total Pointdexter Awareness program.. and the Kirkwood, WA police monitoring...

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Password security
by Martin Crandall 04 Dec '02

04 Dec '02

I've been thinking about and investigating the issue of password management. Passwords are the weak link in any computer security system. The problem is that following the standard recommendations -- choose long, random passwords, and never recycle them for use with multiple accounts -- quickly overloads the memory capacity of all but the most dedicated. Here are some solutions that I've been investigating, intended to be practical for unsophisticated computer users. I'd like your comments. 1. Use Diceware (www.diceware.com) to generate passphrases. The way it works is that you use physical randomness (rolling dice) to generate groups of five numbers in the range 1-6. For each group of five numbers you then look up the corresponding word in a list of 7000+ of the shortest English words. Your passphrase is the sequence of words thus generated, separated by spaces. I have found that the passphrases generated using this method are much easier to memorize than random alphanumeric strings of equal entropy. You get a shorter sequence of symbols by choosing from a larger -- and semantically rich -- "alphabet" (the list of 7000+ words). 2. Use something like Bruce Schneier's Password Safe (now an open source project at http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net) to keep track of your passwords, so that you only absolutely, positively have to remember one. 3. The problem now is that Password Safe only runs on the notoriously insecure Windows operating systems. Even if it were to be ported to something more secure (Linux, *BSD), there are still plenty of security bugs found every day even on these systems, and it's not inconceivable that someone hacking into your system could catch your master password as you type it into Password Safe. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of leaving my password database on any network-connected machine. This leaves two possibilities: 3a. Keep your "password database" as a handwritten list on physical paper. This is secure from network attacks, but physical security is minimal. 3b. Use a Palm OS-based PDA with PDA Defense (www.pdadefense.com) installed to store your password database. I'm not sure yet if you can use that to encrypt important databases, or if it's aimed more at securing the entire device. If the latter, use a Palm OS port of Password Safe (doesn't yet exist :-( ), or use one of the encrypted PDA password managers at Tucows.com. Backup the encrypted password database onto a removable expansion card, NOT on your PC. What are your thoughts? Am I off-base here? Are there better solutions I've missed? -- Martin Crandall

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