- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

ATM AND IMAGE RECONGITION
by Sandy 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT Reply to: ssandfort(a)attmail.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Just a minor quibble to Tim May's otherwise excellent post on ATM cameras and image recognition. Tim said: Comment: The case of banks having cameras doesn't bother me much at all, as the bank already knows exactly who its customers are. That is, the surveillance is not used to gather any information the bank does not already have immediate and complete access to. Not quite true. One very good privacy technique is to use an ATM or credit card issued to someone else. How can this be done? Well, a friend (preferably a visiting foreigner) could do it for you. Or you could hire a bum (pardon; "hygienically challenged person") to do the honors. At any rate, you wouldn't want to get busted by an image recognizing ATM, now would you? S a n d y "Privacy Consultation and Services since 1978" (Sorry Duncan, got you beat by a mile) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Anonymous contact service
by M..Stirner＠f0.n0.z1.FIDONET.ORG 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Uu> Maybe all penet users on the list should activate passwords on Uu> penet.fi. Penet may search back along the chain of addresses for any Uu> familiar address to check against it's list of password-enabled Uu> addresses. Something is way screwy with Penet lately. I have found that I have had passwords required when I had no recollection of installing them. On top of this, I am unable to use the password provision due to header grunging at the UUCP gate, in any case. . I have requested to admin(a)anon.penet.fi that the accounts by number be deleted in order that I can start over with fresh accounts, & despite three requests, this has not been done. Bloody annoying, but I suppose when we give Julf a big raise, _then_ I can start bitching, huh? 8-) . Speaking of related remailers, what is the status of Charcoal? ********************************************************************* * <m..stirner(a)f28.n125.z1.fidonet.org> - PGP Key D30909 via servers * * > What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not <* * > warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit <* * > of resistance? Let them take arms!" - Thomas Jefferson, 1787 <* ********************************************************************* ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 -- M. Stirner - via FidoNet node 1:125/1 UUCP: ...!uunet!kumr!shelter!0!0!M..Stirner INTERNET: M..Stirner(a)f0.n0.z1.FIDONET.ORG

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Re: Spooking of neural nets and image recognition...
by tcmay＠netcom.com 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

>On Thu, 12 Aug 93 18:02:06 PDT, szabo(a)netcom.com (Nick Szabo) said: > >>Are the pictures taken by ATMs good enough for automated >>recognition? >>Nick Szabo szabo(a)netcom.com > >Do atm's usually have real cameras? I always figured most of them >were fakes. > >Mike I'll comment on both questions. First, Nick's question. Yes, the resolution is sufficient, especially since the faces are right in front of the camera. They're black-and-white (so far, but this will change, and the costs of small surveillance cameras will drop further), and of limited res (probably not full NTSC). But adequate for image recognition (though I've not heard of this being done, just archiving of videotapes for some time period....see the movie "Rising Sun" for some insights). Second, Mike's question. I have no idea what fraction are real cameras, but I suspect many if not most are real. Robberies and killings near ATMs are often accompanied with video footage from the ATMs, shown on television. Some of the cameras may now be dummies, but this will likely change as the costs drop further and as local communities push for more surveillance. (Speculatively, I would not be very surprised to see private companies--banks, convenience stores, daycare centers--forced to install surveillance cameras. Big Brother arrives throught the corporate liability laws? Orwell missed this one, though he got so much of it right.) Comment: The case of banks having cameras doesn't bother me much at all, as the bank already knows exactly who its customers are. That is, the surveillance is not used to gather any information the bank does not already have immediate and complete access to. A much more serious situation will arise when convenience stores, gas stations, and the like adopt the same camera systems--maybe they already are--and begin to compile customer dossiers, purchasing preferences, etc. (Credit card and check purchases are already being used, according to a CNN report I recently saw, to compile such dossiers, so that customers can be sent "customized" advertisements reminding them or making special offers. Cypherpunks can avoid using checks and credit cards, for the time being.) Understand that I don't support bans on such surveillance cameras--it is always my choice to patronize a store--but I do object to situations where the State mandates that stores have cameras or outlaws masks and other efforts to hide one's features. -Tim -- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: by arrangement Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it.

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Today's Quotable Notes
by fergp＠sytex.com 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Today's "Notable quote" - "... I have to say up front I don't speak for the CIA and this is just me. I can tell you I did my doctoral work studying Soviet-East European personal computing. I have seen export controls and all that close at hand, and actually kicked the tires and things and all that. I can say I agreed nearly 100% with what Mr. Diffie said, up until he said something that surprised me, in that this room didn't shout it down. That was when he said information is less dangerous than physical things. Good God! If you believe that, I'll give you a choice. I can go to your school district and give out one hit of PCP, or I can cover the area with instructions on how to make it. All I'd ask you to keep in mind is to have some sympathy for the foreign policy-niks who know that, in a sort of frustrated air, when it's hard to move information around, it's unlikely that someone can even get an atomic bomb plan, despite the fact that we've got tens of thousands in both the former Soviet Union and in the United States. But I would fear someone giving out the Princeton dissertation and broadcasting it over the nets to all and sundry in that form -- now, given plutonium, we can make a bomb. So, information is a dangerous thing, in the right hands. I think we're all selling ourselves short if we think information is an unempowered commodity. All that said, I have to agree with everything else. Cryptography is not magic, it's math, and DES is not only here, it's on a server in Helsinki, so we have to live with the fact that information moves around. We may want to be sympathetic to the fact that there are people, in fact people without the tools that we all have here, trying to enact the current and past foreign policy. Help educate them, help tell them why these things are happening, but realize that we're disrupting a lot of things real fast." -- Ross Stapleton, Central Intelligence Agency "WHO HOLDS THE KEYS?" Friday, March 20, 1992 Chair: Dorothy Denning, Georgetown University Panel: Jim Bidzos, RSA Data Security David Bellin, Pratt Institute John Gilmore, Cygnus Support Whitfield Diffie, SunSoft, Inc. John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation Paul Ferguson | "Government, even in its best state, Network Integrator | is but a necessary evil; in its worst Centreville, Virginia USA | state, an intolerable one." fergp(a)sytex.com | - Thomas Paine, Common Sense Type bits/keyID Date User ID pub 1024/1CC04D 1993/03/15 Paul Ferguson <fergp(a)sytex.com> Key fingerprint = EE D2 93 7D 04 6D C6 05 AC 36 AD 9D 8E 4F 41 58

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Re: ANONYMOUS CONTACT SERVICE
by an26436＠anon.penet.fi 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

At 6:44 PM 8/11/93 -0700, Warren Keith Russell wrote: >I received a message from System Daemon telling me that I had sent a >message using the anonymous contact service, allocating a code name, and >explaining how I can be reached anonymously. > >What does this mean? Sounds great, but I have no idea how I managed to >send such a message! Probably means someone sent a message to cypherpunks(a)toad.com using that service. The service then allocated an id to cypherpunks(a)toad.com and sent it mail. At 9:08 AM 8/12/93 -0700, hfinney(a)shell.portal.com wrote: > >A few months ago, someone subscribed to the list through the Penet service, >and it ended up revealing the Penet aliases of everyone who posted. Each >post was delivered to that subscriber marked as being from the Penet alias >corresponding to the poster. All it took was a parallel non-Penet subscription >to break the anonymity provided by Penet. > >Has this now happened again? > >At the time, there was some discussion about using "an..." versus "na..." >forms of the Penet aliases, one of which would avoid this revelation. Has >that been taken care of? Now the service requires a password, so we're safe (I hope). Stuff sent by an unsuspecting user through the list to penet will cause a bounce at penet saying something like 'are you new? set your password.' However, the way Julf set up the password setting/using is not totally secure. There is an option where you can set no password which an attacker would find useful. It wouldn't work for a mass disclosure though. The attacker would have to pick and impersonate each of his targets, and unless the attacker can intercept his victims' mail they will get stuff from penet giving them a clue that something's amiss. I suppose this is a worthy topic for this list: How do you have anonymity that allows replies and psuedonyms that can't be hacked by impersonation? One cheap way would be to not automatically include the poster's pseudonym in the recipient's copy - have it be totally anonymous like the cypherpunks remailers. Pseudonyms would be only for replies/return addresses. Actually, Julf's solution isn't too bad. Having your password in plain text on its way to the remailer is insecure, but Julf's remailer doesn't allow encryption, so you're vulnerable to a truly determined attack anyhow. Maybe Julf needs to bite the bullet and start using PGP. > >Again, I'd like to find out who it is, have them removed, and have my >new penet id cancelled. After all, this person now has email from me, >with my penet id on it, with my name signed at the bottom. If I >decide to use the penet remailer in the future, I don't want this >person to have a binding between my penet id and my real name. > > MArc If you'd set a password you'd have no problem. If you got a bounce, you're OK. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

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No Subject
by Anonymous 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Is there any reason why a single mail address should have only one pseudonym? Along with declaring a private password, why not declare any number of public names? One password per name would be nice. Another plus - then penet could be chained between cypherpunk remailers. Now this is not possible because it identifies users with their 'From:' field.

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Re: On The Inherent Evil of Electronic Democracy
by plmoses＠unix.cc.emory.edu 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Regarding the Electronic Democracy idea, I vote with Tim May. Look at the way public opinion is molded today through CNN, Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung, Oprah Winfrey, etc. One could even say that Clinton is the "Phil Donahue president" (he 'cares') - just look at the second candidate debate last fall. A talk show if ever there was one. No, erasing procedural safeguards in the name of access by the masses is an *EXTREMELY* bad idea, because a lot of these archaic procedures still have use and serve a filtering function, albeit one that may not be recognized fully until they are removed and drastic, undesirable, unwanted,and unintended consequences follow. What we should be doing instead is focusing our analytic powers on the present bottlenecks and distortions in the system and resolving those rather than opening ENTIRELY NEW "runoff channels". For at the end of the day, the only beneficiaries of innovation are the ones poised to exploit it. And that certainly is not the "enlightened citizen" today. What am I saying? If we allow direct legislating power to go to everyone, we will eliminate the concern with PLURALITY that the Constitution protects. If not sooner, then later.

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Re: CA online legislative database access
by smb＠research.att.com 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Lance Dettweiler writes: > cypherfolks, do you have any idea what these efforts are the faint > glimmers of? Imagine a future society where *anyone* can propose law s, > not just the elite few called Legislators and identified in an Actually, this is my worst nightmare of what this country could become: a direct democracy of the most populist sort. Agreed. Let me put the issue in technical terms: you want a government with hysteresis. Call hysteresis the antidote to hysteria. The concept, if not the word, was well known to Jefferson et al. In fact, that was the reason that Senators serve six-year terms, and are elected at staggered intervals. Why? Well, there was an Op-Ed column in the NY Times recently that explained it quite well -- the instantaneous reaction of the public to certain kinds of events (like shooting up Iraqi missle batteries, or starting a war) is quite noticeable. Was George Bush really doing a much better job the day after Desert Storm started than the day before? A substantial portion of the American people seemed to think so. No, I'll pass. Our current system of government is far from perfect. But a switch to direct democracy (the technical term for what you Lance Dettweiler proposes) is not the answer. (Want more evidence -- look at the effects of the referendum and initiative process, especially in California. While it can -- and has -- acted as a check on government, a vast number of propositions have been passed that reflect either well-financed advertising campaigns or a desire to decree magic.) --Steve Bellovin

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neural nets
by remail＠tamsun.tamu.edu 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Speaking of neural nets and image recognition, my former employers landed a contract with "various law enforcement agencies" although the project manager I spoke to said primarily the FBI and CIA - to develop neural network hardware and software to do face recognition, to be used to identify criminals at the airports. Indeed, I recall being photographed twice when I hired on - normal lighting for my regular id, and low lighting. At the time, I wondered why but didn't think anything of it. The project manager said they were amassing a database of pictures to use as training sets. Pretty interesting...

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Democracy
by fnerd＠smds.com 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

A procedural point about this democracy debate, and then a substantive (hah! didn't think I knew that word, did you?) one. It's in line with the idea of this list to keep up with possibilities and developments like electronic direct democracy ideas, and to serve as a way for people who are into things like that to get in touch with each other. But at some point the purely political aspect of the disagreement isn't especially a cypherpunk issue. I hope everybody cools off or takes it elsewhere (I don't know where) before that point. Robin Hanson's Alternative Institutions list seems like a good place for that. That said, I want to throw in my bic lighter... Democracy is bad; smarter democracy would be worse. The system we have is ravenous and stupid, but we're adapted to it. There's nothing "good" about representative democracy except that it's relatively slow-changing and we know some ways of dealing with it. If we made democracy able to respond to events more quickly, it might be smarter and better at what it does best-- prey on us. It might break past our defenses. I feel the same way about calls for efficient government. No-o-o-o-o thanks! This has nothing to do with respect for the common man. I think people are basically decent and reasonably smart. But no one has a right to take part in the crime called government, including the parts people are playing right now, much less more active parts. I think democracy evolved from standoffs in multi-way wars. Wars used to be won by body count, and at some point someone said, "Okay, we'll compromise and make peace for now, but I'm still keeping track of who's on my side, just so you don't get out of line." Voting is a way of predicting who would win a war. Which is nicer than real war, and all respect and rights are ultimately based on what other people can do, but there's nothing inherently right about democracy, and it keeps people in a sort of tense standoff, unable to trust each other. Nothing in democracy itself lets the sides make agreements and structurally keeps them from changing their minds the next day. Cumbersome, procedure-bound setups like we have actually allow those sorts of things somewhat, but not in an up-front and reliable way. Democracy doesn't hold individual voters responsible for the effects and costs of their votes. Even in our "unresponsive" democracy there's little reason for the statistical will of the people not to be flighty and untrustworthy. Technology can help somewhat in replacing the systems we have with better systems. Better would be anarchic. To me, anarchy means shifting from overarching systems for regulating and taking care of people, to ways for people to take care of their own interests. Democracy sounds like the latter, but instead of taking care of your own life, you have a sort of metaphorical surrogate--a minute influence on what happens to everybody. As usual, I would have stopped, but I thought some things I hadn't before. I'll post the body of this to AltInst and then shut up about it on this list. -fnerd quote me

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