- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

REMAIL: Juries...
by Hal 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

Tim Moors offers an interesting suggestion that a jury should be used to decide when a remailer operator should pierce the anonymity of an especially egregious poster. But I could see a way this could fail. If a post really is terrible, one might expect the poster to have taken some extra precautions. What if Tim's jury starts up, deliberates, argues, goes back and forth, and finally decides that the real email address of the poster should be revealed. When this is done, it may well turn out that the original email address was forged, or was another remailer which doesn't keep logs! This would mean that no replies to the message would have worked, but if the posting was harmful enough the poster might have been willing to give up the capability to receive private replies (he can always read followup postings on the newsgroup). In a case like this, all the effort on the part of the jury would have been wasted. We should also realize that, in a sufficiently bad case, there may well have been law enforcement involvement, anyway. If the harm is "real world" (not just something net folk would object to) then the jury activity may be superfluous, as court orders could have been used to force the remailer to reveal his mappings. I wonder, though, if Tim's jury could be married with Marc Horowitz's idea to have remailer operators support anonymous posting only from "approved" pseudonyms. Marc's idea was that people would literally buy approval of given digital pseudonyms (e.g. public keys). This approval would be granted by the operator(s) themselves, or buy some other agencies, and would be shown by a public log of signed pseudonymous public keys. Each message through the remailer would have to be digitally signed by one of these approved keys. (The approval process would be _completely anonymous_, that is, there would be _no_ correspondence between real identities and approved pseudonyms.) Then, if someone posted abusive messages, their approval could be cancelled. Their digital pseudonym (e.g. public key) would be removed from the list of approved "nyms" (I like Eli's shorthand). This way they could not post any more, at least unless they were willing to spend more of their hard-earned money to buy approval of another nym. This way we get the parallels to the postal service. If the approval agencies donated their earnings then this would not represent commercialization so it could even be done today. (Another thought along these lines would be to use Karl Barrus' digital bank to buy approval. I'm not sure this would work, but it's worth considering.) One weakness of Marc's proposal was what criteria would be used to yank approval of nyms. A person might be reluctant to pay real money for an approval certificate if he knew that it could be removed just because some blowhard complained about one of his postings. And remailer operators would be constantly forced to make judgement calls (as I gather Julf is today). Perhaps Tim's juries could serve this purpose. People would get their approval certificate removed only upon a jury's recommendation. The jury could even be specified in advance, composed of respected but fair members of the net community. If people had this kind of assurance that their posting privileges would be lost only under a fair system like this, they would be more willing to pay for an anonymous posting certificate. Hal Finney

1 0

Let's look at this ....
by fergp＠sytex.com 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

Okay, cypherpunks - I've watched enough "unsubscribe me" requests drop in, now I figure (that's a Virginia word, BTW) that since I'm silently digesting most of this nonsense, I can at least crop a few pennies in the mill from time to time. I've managed to irk several of you with the virus encryption post (a bona fide topic, for those of you who snicker); then with the "Why Anon (especially when there are twelve step programs) ?", but the federal deficit is peanuts to popcorn compared to the bandwidth wasted here. <Soap_box_mode_off> Lest I begin to resemble some cypher-drop-out (never happen), let's re-examine what we are now discussing: o Problems (solved yet?) with penet.fi o Arguments and innuendo regarding: _ digital cash _ digital anarchy (Gee, thanks, Tim.) _ digital bad-mouthing The one topic that _does_ interest me is the nonsensical fodder stemming from a post regarding the (actual?) governmental consideration to license keys. That just drops my carrier. This is probably the one reason why I tolerate the wasted bandwidth here -- there are many powerful souls amongst you (us) who can keep this bullshit from happening. On a serious note, I have been a programmer-slash-analyst from the card-punch days of not_so_old. My assembly programming began in the bowels of a IBM 360; somehow that weeded it's way into the desktop arena. Damned odd. Now I just put networks together. Much like tinker toys. My (long-winded) question is this: What are cypherpunk priorities? (NO, no, please do not cite the norms. I've heard 'em.) Where are we going with anon mailers? Are they going to serve us or cause us unlimited problems? (From a political point of view?) I stand _strongly_ behind private communications, and behind the right to privately encrypt. Personally, I do not think that it can be taken away from us. Thoughts? Cheers. Paul Ferguson | Network Integration Consultant | "All of life's answers are Alexandria, Virginia USA | on TV." fergp(a)sytex.com (Internet) | -- Homer Simpson sytex.com!fergp (UUNet) | 1:109/229 (FidoNet) | PGP public encryption key available upon request.

2 1

No Subject
by Ryan, Edmund J 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

Greetings, Please unsubscribe me. I'd appreciate it if cypherpunks had a digest. It would be easier to handle the mail volume. Virtually, Ed ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - Edmund J. Ryan Major: Computer Information Systems - - KL62@MARISTB Minor: Computer Science/Business - - Marist College --Cypherpunk--------Extropian------- - - Poughkeepsie, NY --Libertarian-------Voluntarist----- - - - - "Replace taxpayers with shareholders, - - regulators with customers: privatize!" - ------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

Re: Handling Abuses of Remailers
by tcmay＠netcom.com 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

>In article <CypherPunksList.0606(a)arcticus.UUCP> tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. >May) writes: >> * To handle _abusive volumes_ through remailers, charge for remailing. >> Short term, this may be a problem, but this is the long term market >> solution. > > Quick but relevant question: Assuming a commercial anonymous remailer >were set up tomorrow, with (don't ask me how this would be done, it's >hypothetical...) provable anonymity -- what should it charge per message, >or per kilobyte of message? > >> -Tim May >> tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero > >Chris - Xenon I don't know. That's for the market to decide. This is not a glib answer. There is no "real" price for any service or commodity, only a complicated emergent market price that typically evolves and changes. An anonymous remailer (the "Mom and Pop" remailer I like to cite) may initially charge some price and find it is being undercut by others, or others are not matching its price. Prices will change, evolve. It is, however, that remailing prices will be much below a few pennies per 1 KB message, nor much above $2.00. I often use the crude estimate of $0.50 per remailing, suggesting that a 5-hop mailing will then cost about $2.50. (But once the infrastructure for remailer hops is in place, then even a single hop is basically enough--this may sound paradoxical, but think about it.) -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: MailSafe and PGP available.

2 1

Unsubscribe
by ghabrech＠ultrix.ramapo.edu 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

Please unsubscribe me. I am involved in a few other email groups and my load is way too high. I may resubscribe again, but for now can't handle it. Thanx George ghabrech(a)ultrix.ramapo.edu

1 0

implementing positive reputation systems
by tribble＠xanadu.com 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

The scheme I always think of when envisioning positive reputation systems is that I get the feed of everything I might be interested in, then sort and filter using whatever cleverness I desire. Occasionally (perhaps regularly) I exchange message with various people so that we can update our transitive reputation information. Eric Hughes and the recent discussion about volume problems got me thinking about how to implement positive reputations at server sites. I want a system in which the semantics are similar to the ideal scenario above, but lower overhead in bandwidth and in processing power for the receiver. I suspect that the mailing list server would provide filtering, and the receiver would provide sorting. This will let us create mailing lists with anonymous participants without letting them overwhelm the list. It controls volume, etc. Hmmmm.... Anyone with ideas, please send them to me (or the list) and I'll collect them and post them. dean

2 1

Re: Future of anonymity (short-term vs. long-term)
by jthomas＠mango.mitre.org 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

> IMHO a remailer operator should *NEVER* reveal any identities, but I > also believe very strongly that especially if you provide a way to post > news articles, there has to be a way to send replies to the original > sender. Thus a remailer must maintain mapping info. >I like this. Does it make sense (and has it already been talked >about?) to preserve the return information only for a limited time? It could make sense. It would make _practical_ sense in a scheme like the one I proposed (then amended thanks to John Gilmore's comments) in which the remailer encrypts the return addresses with a key that is regularly changed. Just forget the old keys after a certain amount of time. (BTW, forget I ever said anything about using timestamps as salt. The amount of known-plaintext per message is huge if you do that. Any PRNG would be better. I must have left my brain at home yesterday...) Joe

1 0

Just came back.. (fwd)
by jcoryell＠nwu.edu 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

Newsgroups: alt.cyberspace From: andyc(a)rock.concert.net (Richard A Ciordia -- Personal Account) Subject: Just came back.. Message-ID: <1993Feb24.042117.12675(a)rock.concert.net> Organization: CONCERT-CONNECT -- Public Access UNIX Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1993 04:21:17 GMT Lines: 6 Just came back from a VR Lecture, hosted by one of the Directors at Autodesk. There are some new VR releases comming out that is Wicked.. Lower cost too. Anyhow... It was way cool.. 3d-Studio, for those who havent used, grab a copy it's a blast.. Easy to make, rend, animate.. Hasta.. Andy

1 0

ANON: Textual analysis
by jthomas＠mango.mitre.org 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

> > This reveals a minor and probably obvious weakness of pseudonyms--writing > > styles. >We probably need "rephrasing remailers" which do some rudimentary >grammar parsing on input text, and randomly substitute equivalent >constructs such as switching active/passive voice, synonyms, changing >the word order where it is insignificant, joining/splitting sentences, >etc. Anyone here have any experience in NLP (natural language processing), >specifically parsing english? ... >Another starting point is language translation software. After your text >has been translated automatically to spanish -> french -> german -> english, >not much of the orignal style will remain. Hopefully, enough meaning >will be preserved to allow understanding. This whole problem looks to me to be AI-complete. I mean, I can't understand the manual from my Roland synth without a whole lot of head-scratching, and that was translated by a human! I don't think you're going to see a computer program giving intelligible rephrasing any time soon. The burden of disguising writing style may continue to fall on the author, but if everyone has the tools to statistically analyze their own messages before they send them, they'll at least see what they need to change around before sending. [I, for example, might decide to use sentences with fewer than three clauses...] Joe

1 0

ANON: Revealing identities
by tim＠atri.curtin.edu.au 03 Mar '93

03 Mar '93

I sent the following to Julf earlier, and he encouraged me to post it to news.admin.policy and the cypherpunks list. He mentioned that "the mapping thing has been discussed recently". Feel free to tear it to shreds, but remember that it is only a rough idea at present: don't tell me I forgot to cross the 'l's (oops 't's). ---- 8< Cut Here 8< ----

1 0