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Re: Love It or Leave It
by Bill Stewart 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

Bob continues to forward entertaining and occasionally insightful articles to the list. From the bluesy side of the fence, Moby wrote: > can someone remind me why secession is not an option at this point? Meanwhile, on the Commie-colored side of the fence, Mike Thompson of HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE took several weeks to write a "modest proposal" to kick the states that didn't get with the program out of the union. Those of us who remember the Vietnam-era redneck taunt about "America: Love It or Leave It" also remember that if anybody *did* leave, the right wing got immensely offended by it and wanted to hunt them traitors down like dawgs. Then of course there was that unpleasantness of the War Between the States, aka the War of Northern Aggression, in which the Red States left because they didn't like the liberal northerners and their activist judges and politicians disrupting the core of their traditional values, and the Blue States insisted that Nationalism was more important than the right to secede and attacked them. So no, it probably won't fly... Unfortunately, I have to agree with the critics of Kerry who said that he was aloof and out of touch with Middle America; his campaign clearly didn't recognize that Bush had succeeded at telling them that Kerry didn't share their values, and Kerry didn't realize it and demonstrate otherwise, nor did he do an adequate job of talking about Democratic values in a way that would draw them in. And the Republicans and the Democrat establishment had pretty much gotten together to take out Howard Dean, who was building an actual political party inside the hollowed-out shell of the current party. ---- Bill Stewart bill.stewart(a)pobox.com

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OK, It's Done
by R.A. Hettinga 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

<http://moby.com/cms/viewdiary.asp?Diary_ID=2143&ViewType=Current> Moby Tour Diary Updates OK, It's Done 11/3/2004 - New York City can someone remind me why secession is not an option at this point? i mean let's be realistic, we live in a divided country. can't we have the breakaway republics of 'north-east-istan' and 'pacific-stan'? wouldn't the red states be happier without us? we could still travel freely and trade freely with them, but can't we just leave? then you could have 3 countries: northeastistan pacificstan redstateistan one other option would be for us to all join the republican party en masse and make it socially liberal and fiscally conservative(as opposed to it's current 'socially puritanical/fiscally insane' status). ok, it's done. john kerry has seceded. if you need us, my friends and i will be drunk for the next 4 years. -moby << | Close | >> Email to a friend -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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'dear rest of america,
by R.A. Hettinga 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

<http://moby.com/cms/viewdiary.asp?Diary_ID=2144&ViewType=Current> Moby Tour Diary Updates Dear.... 11/4/2004 - New York City 'dear rest of america, can't you please let little old new york city secede from the rest of the nation? please? we're very little and you probably wouldn't even notice that we were gone. please? pretty please? how about if we buy you guys donkeys? will you let us secede if we buy each and every person in the rest of the united states a donkey? you'd like to have your own friendly donkey, wouldn't you? wouldn't you rather have a friendly donkey than a small insignificant city that no one really likes anyway? we will be good neighbors, and you can come visit whenever you like(considering you have a valid passport). again, please? thank you very much, and i look forward to hearing your response. -moby' << | Close | >> Email to a friend -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Dear Canada
by R.A. Hettinga 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

<http://moby.com/cms/viewdiary.asp?Diary_ID=2146&ViewType=Current> Moby Tour Diary Updates Dear Canada 11/4/2004 - New York City 'dear canada, now, more than ever, your neighbor to the south(aka-the blue states)needs you. most of us living in the northern and western parts of the united states don't feel very connected to the rest of the u.s, so can we bring our states and become part of canada? we have a lot of money and some interesting cities and we promise not to be too much trouble. the benefits to you: a-in one fell swoop you can have southern california and new york city! surfing in canada! suddenly the u.n is on canadian soil! broadway is suddenly in canada! you could then say that canada is the birthplace of jazz and hip-hop! b-money. cold hard cash. the red states in the u.s might have the voting power, but guess who has the money? yup, your friendly neighborhood blue states. so when/if you accept our offer you will instantly become the richest country in the world! that sounds pretty good, right? c-karma. accepting this offer will give you more good karma than you'd know what to do with(because you would instantly make 120 million people VERY happy). so you get warm beaches, tons of cash, and good karma. who can say no to that? please let us know if you accept the offer. given our enthusiasm to join canada it's safe to say that the details of the offer could probably be worked out in an afternoon. thank you very much, moby p.s-just to put your minds at ease, we do know that we can't bring our assault weapons with us.' << | Close | >> Email to a friend -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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"Scan design called portal for hackers"
by David Honig 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

EETimes 25 Oct 04 has an article about how the testing structures on ICs makes them vulnerable to attacks. The basic idea is that to test a chip, you need to see inside it; this can also reveal crypto details (e.g., keys) which compromise the chip. This has been known to us with an interest in both crypto and IC design for some time, but its nice to see it exposed in the public lit. There are methods that avoid this, such as BIST, but they are less popular. ================================================= 36 Laurelwood Dr Irvine CA 92620-1299 VOX: (714) 544-9727 (home) mnemonic: P1G JIG WRAP ICBM: -117.7621, 33.7275 PGP PUBLIC KEY: by arrangement Send plain ASCII text not HTML lest ye be misquoted. Really. ------ "Don't 'sir' me, young man, you have no idea who you're dealing with" Tommy Lee Jones, MIB --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com

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File-sharing network thrives beneath the radar
by R.A. Hettinga 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

<http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html> Yahoo! Thursday November 4, 3:01 AM LIVEWIRE - File-sharing network thrives beneath the radar By Adam Pasick LONDON (Reuters) - A file-sharing program called BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth, and Hollywood's copyright cops are taking notice. For those who know where to look, there's a wealth of content, both legal -- such as hip-hop from the Beastie Boys and video game promos -- and illicit, including a wide range of TV shows, computer games and movies. Average users are taking advantage of the software's ability to cheaply spread files around the Internet. For example, when comedian Jon Stewart made an incendiary appearance on CNN's political talk show "Crossfire," thousands used BitTorrent to share the much-discussed video segment. Even as lawsuits from music companies have driven people away from peer-to-peer programs like KaZaa, BitTorrent has thus far avoided the ire of groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America. But as BitTorrent's popularity grows, the service could become a target for copyright lawsuits. According to British Web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet -- more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined -- and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages. "I don't think Hollywood is willing to let it slide, but whether they're able to (stop it) is another matter," Bram Cohen, the programmer who created BitTorrent, told Reuters. John Malcolm, director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the MPAA, said that his group is well aware of the vast amounts of copyrighted material being traded via BitTorrent. "It's a very efficient delivery system for large files, and it's being used and abused by a hell of a lot of people," he told Reuters. "We're studying our options, as we do with all new technologies which are abused by people to engage in theft." FOR GOOD OR EVIL BitTorrent, which is available for free on http://bittorrent.com, can be used to distribute legitimate content and to enable copyright infringement on a massive scale. The key is to understand how the software works. Let's say you want to download a copy of this week's episode of "Desperate Housewives." Rather than downloading the actual digital file that contains the show, instead you would download a small file called a "torrent" onto your computer. When you open that file on your computer, BitTorrent searches for other users that have downloaded the same "torrent." BitTorrent's "file-swarming" software breaks the original digital file into fragments, then those fragments are shared between all of the users that have downloaded the "torrent." Then the software stitches together those fragments into a single file that a users can view on their PC. Sites like Slovenia-based Suprnova (http://www.suprnova.org) offer up thousands of different torrents without storing the shows themselves. Suprnova is a treasure trove of movies, television shows, and pirated games and software. Funded by advertising, it is run by a teen-age programmer who goes only by the name Sloncek, who did not respond to an e-mailed interview request. Enabling users to share copyrighted material illicitly may put Suprnova and its users on shaky legal ground. "They're doing something flagrantly illegal, but getting away with it because they're offshore," said Cohen. He is not eager to get into a battle about how his creation is used. "To me, it's all bits," he said. But Cohen has warned that BitTorrent is ill-suited to illegal activities, a view echoed by John Malcolm of MPAA. "People who use these systems and think they're anonymous are mistaken," Malcolm said. Asked if he thought sites like Suprnova were illegal, he said: "That's still an issue we're studying, that reasonable minds can disagree on," he said. GOING LEGIT Meanwhile, BitTorrent is rapidly emerging as the preferred means of distributing large amounts of legitimate content such as versions of the free computer operating system Linux, and these benign uses may give it some legal protection. "Almost any software that makes it easy to swap copyrighted files is ripe for a crackdown BitTorrent's turn at bat will definitely happen," said Harvard University associate law professor Jonathan Zittrain. "At least under U.S. law, it's a bit more difficult to find the makers liable as long as the software is capable of being used for innocent uses, which I think (BitTorrent) surely is." Among the best legitimate sites for movies and music: -- Legal Torrents (http://www.legaltorrents.com/) which includes a wide selection of electronic music. It also has the Wired Magazine Creative Commons CD, which has songs from artists like the Beastie Boys who agreed to release some of their songs under a more permissive copyright that allows free distribution and remixing. -- Torrentocracy (http://torrentocracy.com/torrents/) has videos of the U.S. presidential debates and other political materials. -- File Soup (http://www.filesoup.com) offers open-source software and freeware, music from artists whose labels don't belong to the Recording Industry Association of America trade group, and programs from public television stations like PBS or the BBC. -- Etree (http://bt.etree.org) is for devotees of "trade-friendly" bands like Phish and the Dead, who encourage fans to share live recordings, usually in the form of large files that have been minimally compressed to maintain sound quality. Email this article to your friend - View most popular Prev Story: Web calls may be more popular than thought - survey ( Reuters) Next Story: Net banking fraudsters step up the "phishing" scam ( Reuters) More Technology Stories 7 Time Warner's AOL unit to cut 700 jobs - source ( Reuters) 7 Time Warner's AOL unit to cut 700 jobs - WashPost ( Reuters) -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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campus network admins
by cypher＠tediouspath.com 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

I recently violated the network user agreement (they packet-sniffed and got the username/password for my FTP server and didn't like what I was sharing with myself) and was informed by the admin that I am now 'under observation' and that they "hope I don't like privacy". Considering this admin was an NSA employee, I tend to take that threat a little seriously. Two questions: 1) I'm assuming they can legally look at anything that comes in or out of my computer, but is that the case? Can they look at my computer itself, or take me off the network for the private contents of my computer? 2) Is there some sort of service I can use to have everything I do on the network encrypted, such as a tunneling service to the internet? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This message was sent from The Tedious Path Are you ready to travel The Tedious Path? http://www.tediouspath.com http://forum.tediouspath.com

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Gigabit Ethernet board for TCP/IP security
by R.A. Hettinga 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

<http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=37931&liA…> Thursday 4 November 2004 Gigabit Ethernet board for TCP/IP security SDC Systems offers a range of Gigabit Ethernet single board computers designed by ADI Engineering and based on Intel XScale and Intel IXA technologies. Designed for network security devices such as TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOE), firewalls, VPN equipment, IPSec and SSL accelerators, intrusion detection, and cryptography equipment, Shadwell supports line wire speed in both single and dual port versions. The board features an Intel 80200 processor, running at 733MHz, 256MB SDRAM (128Mbyte in the single mode), Intel 82545/82546 fourth-generation GbE MAC/PHY, and Intel 21555 PCI-PCI bridge. The board is implemented in a half size PCI form factor, and only dissipates 6W of power in the single port version. A Virtex-II FPGA can be used to offload of time-critical tasks including cryptography, firewall filtering, and virus scanning. www.sdcsystems.com Tel: 01462 473928 -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[ISN] Online payment firm in DDoS drama
by InfoSec News 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/03/protx_ddos_attack/ By John Leyden 3rd November 2004 Online payments processing firm Protx is continuing to fight a sustained internet attack which has severely impacting its services for the fourth successive day. Since Sunday (31 October), Protx's systems have been reduced to a crawl because of a malicious DDoS attack. Although Protx felt it was on top of the problem by Monday (1 November) the attack once again intensified, prompting the company to draft in heavy duty DDoS defences which it hopes will finally thwart the assault. In a statement, Mat Peck, chief technical officer, Protx said: "Earlier today [1 November] the parties responsible for the Distributed Denial of Service attack on our systems stepped up their assault, this time pushing our systems beyond their capacity to cope. A large number of compromised machines from a wide range of spoofed IP addresses have been attacking our site in a varied and well structured manner. We have been working all day with Globix, our ISP, to implement a specific DDoS solution which can burst up to 1Gb connectivity during periods of peak load whilst also analysing and killing traffic generated by zombie machine on the Net." "We have migrated the WWW site across to this system first to check the functionality and now that's working, we will be moving the payment servers in the next few hours. This new service, whilst expensive, still mainly developmental and bleeding edge, should enable us to continue to process transactions even under DDoS attacks ten times the size we've seen so far. Future attacks will be dealt with in a matter of minutes instead of hours (or days as many victims of such attacks have found). We're continuing to work closely with the National High Tech Crimes Unit (NHTCU) to bring the perpetrators to task," he added. On 2 November Globix said it was also beefing up the hardware used by its systems in the process of moving across to a new platform. "Whilst all the payment services are available, some of the auxiliary services will not be available until tomorrow," Peck wrote in an update. However Register readers report problems processing payments through the service today. "Thousands of small transactional websites, like mine, have been affected," Reg reader Bruce Stidston tells us. At the time of writing Protx's website was unavailable but you can get an insight into what's going on through Google's cache of the firm's status page. _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[ISN] Online payment firm in DDoS drama
by InfoSec News 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/03/protx_ddos_attack/ By John Leyden 3rd November 2004 Online payments processing firm Protx is continuing to fight a sustained internet attack which has severely impacting its services for the fourth successive day. Since Sunday (31 October), Protx's systems have been reduced to a crawl because of a malicious DDoS attack. Although Protx felt it was on top of the problem by Monday (1 November) the attack once again intensified, prompting the company to draft in heavy duty DDoS defences which it hopes will finally thwart the assault. In a statement, Mat Peck, chief technical officer, Protx said: "Earlier today [1 November] the parties responsible for the Distributed Denial of Service attack on our systems stepped up their assault, this time pushing our systems beyond their capacity to cope. A large number of compromised machines from a wide range of spoofed IP addresses have been attacking our site in a varied and well structured manner. We have been working all day with Globix, our ISP, to implement a specific DDoS solution which can burst up to 1Gb connectivity during periods of peak load whilst also analysing and killing traffic generated by zombie machine on the Net." "We have migrated the WWW site across to this system first to check the functionality and now that's working, we will be moving the payment servers in the next few hours. This new service, whilst expensive, still mainly developmental and bleeding edge, should enable us to continue to process transactions even under DDoS attacks ten times the size we've seen so far. Future attacks will be dealt with in a matter of minutes instead of hours (or days as many victims of such attacks have found). We're continuing to work closely with the National High Tech Crimes Unit (NHTCU) to bring the perpetrators to task," he added. On 2 November Globix said it was also beefing up the hardware used by its systems in the process of moving across to a new platform. "Whilst all the payment services are available, some of the auxiliary services will not be available until tomorrow," Peck wrote in an update. However Register readers report problems processing payments through the service today. "Thousands of small transactional websites, like mine, have been affected," Reg reader Bruce Stidston tells us. At the time of writing Protx's website was unavailable but you can get an insight into what's going on through Google's cache of the firm's status page. _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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