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RE: Laws of mathematics, not of men
by Subcommander Bob 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

At 06:42 PM 8/1/01 -0400, Faustine wrote: > For what it's worth, here >are the specs on the best California-street-legal defensive knife I've ever >seen: > >Smith & Wesson Small SWAT Tactical Folder > Unfortunately S & W are being boycotted...

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Sircam releases govt docs in Ukraine
by Alfred Qaeda 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010802/wr/tech_ukraine_virus_dc_1.html Thursday August 2 6:57 AM ET Website Says Virus Leaked Ukrainian Secret Documents KIEV, Ukraine (Reuters) - A Ukrainian Web site said on Thursday it had received secret documents from the administration of President Leonid Kuchma due to a computer virus that infected government computers and e-mailed it the files. ``The Sircam virus, having infected the computers in the presidential administration, is bombarding our editorial department with their documents,'' said the ForUm news Web site (www.for-ua.com) Administration officials declined to say whether their security had been breached, but told Reuters they had started an investigation into whether any of their computers were infected with viruses. ForUm printed one of the documents it said it had received -- a timetable for Kuchma's movements on Ukraine's 10th anniversary of independence later this month. Kuchma's exact movements are usually a tightly guarded secret. The Sircam virus, which first emerged in July, is a so-called e-mail worm which arrives as an e-mail attachment and sends copies of itself to names and addresses in the infected computer's address book. ----- Tim, you don't write Ukrainian, do you?

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Red Light Cameras, I don't get it.
by cubic-dog 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

years ago, when I was a MP in Germany, I used to chuckle over the red light cameras and camera speed traps used by the Polizei. Neat idea, never work in the states, we have a 4th amendment after all. Then the technology started moving over here. I was suprised at first, but then, I though about how many bank cameras had been used to build cases against bank robbers, and no one ever fussed about it. I wasn't very happy about this, but again, no one ever fussed about cameras in banks, or convience stores et al. I still don't like it, years ago, when these things started showing up in Alexandria Va, someone posted to the list about it, and no one even commented. So I figgured it was a non issue. Now, for some reason, folks are getting their panties in a knot over this. What's the big deal? Yeah, big brother has a new surveillence tool, so what?

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Thought-A-Day
by Fountain Of Joy 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

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RE: Spoilation, escrows, courts, pigs.
by Trei, Peter 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

BU writes: Peter Trei writes: > > You may be a lawyer, but I'm a cryptographic software engineer. > > > > Cleansing disks and memory of keys and plaintext isn't done > > to prevent some hypothetical court from looking at evidence; > > there are good, legally unremarkable reasons to do so, which > > are regarded as good hygiene and 'best practice' in the > > industry. > > Unfortunately, that conduct is going to be assessed by some old guy who > was > once a lawyer, and who I highly doubt was ever a cryptographic software > engineer. (The latter actually has to think hard on a regular basis). > > [Lots of good stuff elided for brevity] > > > Destroying sensitive data is part of doing the job right, in > > a professional, 'best practice' manner. > > Again, it's going to be an uphill battle to get a jury of people too > stupid to > get out of jury duty to believe that. You might think about a side job > offering expert testimony services for this exact thing. > Judges have to take testimony on subjects they know little about all the time. Yes, I'd consider being an EW (but generally not for free). I'd have no problem showing that zeroisation is a standard practice - in fact, it's mandated by some government standards for protecting classified data. Peter Trei

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N.H. town mounts tax revolt
by Jim Choate 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/08/01/tax.revolt.ap/index.html James Choate Product Certification - Operating Systems Staff Engineer 512-436-1062 jchoate(a)tivoli.com

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RE: Do not taunt happy-fun-court.
by Trei, Peter 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

> ---------- > From: Black Unicorn[SMTP:unicorn@schloss.li] > > > At some point I will probably begin keeping logs that expire after a > > period of several hours, so that I can identify and block spammers. I'm > > interested in your thoughts on this, Uni. Is the defense "I never retain > > logs longer than 2 hours; they are automatically deleted out of disk > space > > considerations" as string as the first one? (This is how many remailers > > are configured. But even if the remailers all kept logs, if users are > > chaining their messages through multiple remailers, anonymity should > still > > be preserved.) > > See my (huge) posting on this, but I would suspect that this isn't great. > Were I operating one, which I am admittedly not, I'd want there to be no > data > of evidentiary value ever hitting my memory or media. To some degree > that's > not possible. In the alternative, actually _disabling_ logging is the > best > policy, in my view. The evidence never existed in the first place then. > It > suddenly becomes a challenge to show some kind of conspiracy on your part > since the actual spoliation claim is harder to make. Showing conspiracy > for > anything with respect to either probably starts hard and gets marginally > less > hard in this order: > > a) A middle remailer in a multiple chain that knows nothing (little) > about > original sender, content or recipient. [...] > b) A back end remailer in a multiple chain that knows nothing (little) > about > content or original sender. [...] > c) A front end remailer in a multiple chain that knows nothing (little) > about content or recipient. [...] > d) A "one hop" remailer. [...] You're forgetting e) A remailer which silently ignores (and deletes) all mail which is not still encrypted after the remailer's decryption key is applied. (Complaints from Choate that I don't show how to distinguish encrypted vs cleartext mail with 100% accuracy will be silently ignored (and deleted).) This protects the remailer operator from: (1) having any knowledge of the ultimate destination of the mail, since there is a good possibility that the next email address is just another remailer. (2) having any knowledge of the content of the email, since it is still encrypted. Thus, a remailer operator in Afghanistan doesn't knowingly pass on copies of 'The Satanic Verses'. (3) passing on 99.9999% of spam. Spammers do not use encrypted mail - it requires far too much per-message processing, in terms of obtaining public keys, constructing nested encrypted messages, etc. And yes, BU's point about not generating logs at all is well taken - I've not looked at remailer software, but commenting out a few lines should take care of this. If I ran one, I might consider keeping aggregate data (# of messages/week, MB/week), but I can't see anything useful I'd do with individual message data. This ties into the discussion about headless, disposable remailers - many of the discussed designs have no mass storage to speak of, so of course they would not keep logs. Peter Trei

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RE: WHERE IS DILDO? was: Laws of mathematics, not of men
by Trei, Peter 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

> Sandy Sandfort[SMTP:sandfort@mindspring.com] wrote: > > Dildo blathered: > > > On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Alan Olsen wrote: > > ... > > > "The first rule of not being seen > > > is ''Don't stand up''." > > > > That should be 'Don't stand out'. > > If everyone else is standing up > > you're toast. > > Jimbo is obviously still having trouble understanding and using metaphors. > > S a n d y > Actually, Jim and Sandy are both missing the root reference, a Monty Python sketch entitled "How not to be seen". Of course, 'not standing up' is shown to be ineffective, since the narrator procedes to blow up every object behind which the subject may be 'not standing up'. Peter

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Adversaries would find other attack methods, game theory shows
by Jim Choate 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/08/010802080823.htm James Choate Product Certification - Operating Systems Staff Engineer 512-436-1062 jchoate(a)tivoli.com

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Empire of the Air
by Duncan Frissell 02 Aug '01

02 Aug '01

I'm grateful to Michael Hardt, co-author with Antonio Negri, of the social satire "Empire" for reminding me of a *very* inconvenient fact that the foes of Media Monopoly hope we'll forget. On the WBUR (Boston) program "The Connection" after talking about the initial promise of radio as a liberating medium he said: "The way radio and television have developed have been ways in which democratic voices have been excluded systematically and have been controlled by the forces of capital -- the ones who own these media." See: http://www.theconnection.org/archive/2001/07/0723a.shtml Listen: http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/w/b/wbur/connection/audio/2001/07/con_… (quote appears just after 16:00). What he hopes the rest of the world will forget and Americans will never know is that from the dawn of broadcasting until the last few years almost all of the Earth's radio and television were owned and operated by the various national governments. Read the history of the pirate radio ship Radio Caroline if you want to see the lengths to which governments went to secure their monopoly: http://www.radiocaroline.co.uk/history/index.htm With all of the different channels into our brains (many of which didn't exist 25 years ago), it is hard to argue that electronic media is less competitive than it was when most of it was controlled by governments. DCF ---- When I was growing up, three white guys in NYC determined everything 90% of Americans saw on TV. Most towns had no more than two newspapers. Radio was exclusively Top 40 format. Yet, today, with 6 broadcast networks, 1000 newspapers available online, netcasting costing $39.95/month, and 5 Gigs of webpages extant, those commentators who themselves favor monopoly *government* complain that a Media Monopoly exists. There are more media outlets than ever.

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