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UBL is George Washington
by Major Variola (ret) 04 Jul '04

04 Jul '04

At 09:58 PM 7/1/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: >Submitted for comment :-) > "...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do > not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out > about them." > > Osama Bin Laden UBL's morals, which he unfortunately gets from a book (being a smart guy, he could derive them himself like any half-cluefull atheist), are largely convergent with the pre-Judaic/Xian culture the Moslems forked a few hundred years ago. (And what, Haiwatha rooted the tree some time ago?) Ie, as the Gadsen flag says, "Don't tread on me". However, this is contrary to the methods of colonial agents, eg. Romans, Brits, and Yanks. Where yanks includes neocons. At this point I will quote the reluctant general, Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign entanglements. -George Washington Where you can replace "all" with "oil" and "none" with Israel. Etc. Personally I think North America can be energy sufficient (nuke & coal sands) but this is an engineering/political issue. Morally I think our influence stops within 3 miles of our coasts, and as high as out ABMs can reach.

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GPS, phones, toothing
by Major Variola (ret) 04 Jul '04

04 Jul '04

At 07:23 PM 7/3/04 -0500, bgt wrote: > >"With a few keystrokes on a wireless phone, a m-mode subscriber is >given the approximate geographic location of his friend, such as a >street intersection. The two friends can then exchange messages, call >the other, or choose a place to meet from a directory of nearby >restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and bookstores." > >I'm pretty sure they don't use GPS for this... I think they do some >form of triangulation from the cell towers. The cool thing about 'toothing' is that the party you're arranging to mutually stimulate is within a finite physical range. An amusing unintended consequence.

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Re: Tyler's Education
by Major Variola (ret) 03 Jul '04

03 Jul '04

At 04:35 AM 7/4/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: >On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > >> And digital edges are sharp, in the Ghz even when the "clock" is in the >> Mhz. > >How much do the "spread spectrum clock" feature on the modern motherboards >help here? They do complicate things. But I bet their spread-spectrum jitter is derived from a PRNG. All your PRNGs are belong to us. 'Specially because you can just buy them and either analyze their output, or strip the layers and get back to the Verilog. >> And boxes need ventilation slots. > >Not necessarily. Indeed Centaur/Via's x86 w/ crypto is advertized as "fanless" >There are other ways of heat transfer. A good way could >be water cooling for transport of the heat from the CPU and other parts to >a massive metal heatsink that's the part of the case, with an optional fan >on its outside. Voila, water cooling is not only for case mod freakz >anymore. Just put the ventilated box in a bigger box and use some steel wool in the ductwork to the outside... >> Any questions? > >I expect much bigger problem in the attached cables and connectors. How to >solve this? Shielding. Shielded room. Shielded building. Basic idea: electro-magnetic disturbances penetrate only a short distance into conductors. Folks who deal with low noise amplifiers deal with this all the time. Ground loops. Faraday cages. Low voltage differential signalling. Grounded thin metal layer over your LCD display. I once worked for a chipmaker and they had a metal room. Horrible ventilation. Copper gaskets on all the seams. You could probe a chip in there, with a microscope and micromanipulators. But they also had a PC which kinda nulled out the RFI issue. However that PC's output would not have escaped. The power cables from the outside to inside are an issue too. As Schneier says, pros go after people, not tech; which is not to say you can ignore RF tracking if you're a target. I don't think you can "fish" with van Ecyk (sp?) tech, although wardriving/flying sorta counts, except that those are intentional emitters. If I promise you a green card or citizenship, and give you a grand, will you install this gizmo between the keyboard and computer for me when you're cleaning the office? (Assuming you're an 'illegal' working for shit wages and the Suit has credentials, or cash, or both. Ask Nicky Scarfo about this..) Or plug a camoflaged 802.11blah AP into a RJ-45 and listen from the van... (Succeptible to sweeps, but how often are they done? And real pros use bursty bugs that aren't broadcasting all the time, eg in the woodwork of the State Dept.)

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Re: China about to begin realtime censoring SMS messages
by Major Variola (ret) 03 Jul '04

03 Jul '04

At 06:25 PM 7/3/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: >automatically send SMS messages to a list of numbers. The government >already keeps statistics on number of messages sent at time period from a >single number, and alerts the officials when it's above the limit and then >the content is checked manually. What you need then is also a "telephone tree" to do mass distributions (randomly time-delayed) without having any one source go "over quota". Could be phone meshed or use computer SMS I/O. Wouldn't it be horrible if some otherwise benign, quiet worm infected computers to implement this? Zombies aren't just for porn & pills, they can help spread the newz.

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Re: EZ Pass and the fast lane ....
by Major Variola (ret) 03 Jul '04

03 Jul '04

At 09:34 PM 7/2/04 -0400, Dave Emery wrote: >frequency of 915 mhz at a power a little under 1 mw (0 dbm). Meaning one can have a lot of fun while tossing one's change into the funnel as the privacy-whores cruise by... Diamond dust in the machine...

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Re: For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
by Major Variola (ret) 03 Jul '04

03 Jul '04

At 06:27 PM 6/26/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: >On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: >> >> Eventually the cellphones will be able to tell another phone approx >> where they are. Remember the 911-locator fascism? > >I hate to break the news to you Major, but GPS enabled phones cannot be >instructed to turn off the GPS feature for law enforcement queries (e.g., >911). Turn it on or turn it off, makes no matter. Sir, I do not own a cellphone. Do any models let YOU decide to send your location to ANOTHER phone? Do any models even let YOU know your OWN approx location (to within that 100m Fedfascist standard)? I'm fully aware the pigs track you unless the battery is removed or you have a TEMPEST case. I'm suggesting that regular citizens will have access to that, if (in my cluelessness) they don't already.

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Re: [IP] more on more on E-mail intercept ruling - good grief!! (fwd from dave@farber.net)
by Tyler Durden 03 Jul '04

03 Jul '04

I dunno...as an ex-optical engineer/physicst, I'm sceptical about this whole scary "tempest" bullcrap. Even if it can be made to work fairly reliably, I suspect deploying it is extremely costly. In contrast, the main benefit of CALEA is that they can merely provision their copy of a circuit to go back to VA or wherever. They can be eavesdropping while surfin porn all without leaving their desk and cup of coffee. Hey--if they want me that bad these days, it would probably be cheaper just to send the van and beat whatever they need out of me. Actually, I suspect that Tempest is some kind of smokescreen..."Don't bother encrypting because we have this super-technology called tempest that can read your mind anyway." -TD >From: Sunder <sunder(a)sunder.net> >To: "Roy M. Silvernail" <roy(a)rant-central.com> >CC: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: Re: [IP] more on more on E-mail intercept ruling - good grief!! > (fwd from dave(a)farber.net) >Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 16:15:59 -0400 (edt) > > > > The Tempest argument is a stretch, only because you're not actually > > recovering the information from the phosphor itself. But the Pandora > > argument is well taken. > >Actually there is optical tempest now that works by watching the flicker >of a CRT. Point is actually even more moot since most monitors are now >LCD based, etc. so there's no raster line scanning the display, etc... > > _________________________________________________________________ MSN 9 Dial-up Internet Access helps fight spam and pop-ups now 2 months FREE! http://join.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200361ave/direct/01/

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China about to begin realtime censoring SMS messages
by Thomas Shaddack 03 Jul '04

03 Jul '04

Mass-sending of SMS messages in China is a popular channel of spreading "alternative", government-unsanctioned news. Used eg. by the Falun Gong group, to spread the news about SARS, and probably in numerous other cases. Some phones are even directly equipped with the functions to automatically send SMS messages to a list of numbers. The government already keeps statistics on number of messages sent at time period from a single number, and alerts the officials when it's above the limit and then the content is checked manually. Mentioned Falun Gong news campaigns suffer from this. The new system, delayed by technological problems probably caused by the sheer volume of data, will scan the messages for keywords, keep logs of suspect ones, and automatically alert police. According to me, a partial solution of the problem could be deployment of encrypted messaging. The SMS standard, 160-character messages, doesn't offer enough space to fully use PKI (though we could sacrifice some message space - then we could afford 128 bits of key and 128 bits of HMAC, which is total of 32 characters, or maybe even use reduced HMAC of only half size as in this threat model we don't need the message integrity as much as denying the adversary access to the content, 64 bit hash could be enough). We can sacrifice also signing the message, or give the choice of signature vs additional content length (the signature is the message hash encrypted with the sender's private key, which is about another 128 bits; we could perhaps use only 64-bit of signature in this threat model). We can sacrifice the identification of sender/receiver keys (or more accurately, we can't even afford it in so short message space), but the GSM SMS standard has the sender phone number as part of the message, which can serve as identificator of the sender's key for eventual message signature check. Contemporary cellphones tend to have Java in them, and should have enough horsepower for 1024-bit RSA and 128-bit AES. However, according to my consultant, there is a problem with most of the cellphones; Java on them runs in sandbox, so they can only send the messages (and even that only when they have access to messaging API), and there is no access to message inbox. So you can merrily encrypt, but the receiver then won't decrypt it. There is a solution, though - use a phone with OpenAPI, eg. running Symbian, Linux, or (*shudder*) WinCE as its OS, but these are so far in the higher end of price spectrum. I hoped it will be possible to implement with already widely deployed cheap technology. :( Another hope lies in the advent of MMS, expensive now but bound to become a standard bulk commodity service tomorrow, which offer much bigger space (up to 64 or even 100 kbyte per message). Same problem as above applies. Then all the adversary can get is the pattern of traffic of the messages instead of their content. (And the message content too, but only when seizing the recipient's private key - I am not sure if we can avoid this in this scenario, without resorting to using one-time pads and using them correctly, or without using a direct handset-to-handeset connection, perhaps through a proxy, with a DH key exchange. The proxy could be very beneficial here, even for the traffic analysis purposes, if combined with onion routing.) ----------------- Yahoo News: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=516&u=/ap/20040702/ap_on_re_as/ch… BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3859403.stm The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/02/china_text_snoop/ Slashdot discussion: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/03/0035224

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other mailing list recommendations ?
by Joe Schmoe 03 Jul '04

03 Jul '04

Can anyone recommend any other mailing lists besides cypherpunks to lurk on / read ? The aspects of cypherpunks that I value are the strong and opinionated stances on civil liberty issues, the pro gun and preparedness stances, and the general tech slant ... any suggestions ? __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo

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EZ Pass and the fast lane ....
by Dave Emery 02 Jul '04

02 Jul '04

Having been inspired by some subversive comments on cypherpunks, I actually looked up the signaling format on the EZ-Pass toll transponders used throughout the Northeast. (On the Mass Pike, and most roads and bridges in NYC and a number of other places around here). They are the little square white plastic devices that one attaches to the center of one's windshield near the mirror and which exchange messages with an interrogator in the "FAST LANE" that debits the tolls from an account refreshed by a credit card (or other forms of payment). They allow one to sail through the toll booths at about 15-20 mph without stopping and avoid the horrible nuisance of digging out the right change while rolling along at 70 mph in heavy traffic. Turns out they use Manchester encoded on-off keying (EG old fashioned pulsed rf modulation) at 500 kilobits/second on a carrier frequency of 915 mhz at a power a little under 1 mw (0 dbm). The 915 mhz is time shared - the units are interrogated by being exposed to enough 915 mhz pulsed energy to activate a broadband video detector looking at energy after a 915 mhz SAW filter (presumably around -20 dbm or so). They are triggered to respond by a 20 us pulse and will chirp in response to between a 10 and 30 us pulse. Anything longer and shorter and they will not respond. The response comes about 100-150 us after the pulse and consists of a burst of 256 bits followed by a 16 bit CRC. No present idea what preamble or post amble is present, but I guess finding this out merely requires playing with a transponder and DSO/spectrum analyzer. Following the response but before the next interrogation the interrogator can optionally send a write burst which also presumably consists of 256 bits and CRC. Both the interrogators and transponders collect two valid (correct) CRC bursts on multiple interrogations and compare bit for bit before they decide they have seen a valid message. Apparently an EEPROM in the thing determines the partition between fixed bits set at the factory (eg the unit ESN) and bits that can get written into the unit by the interrogators. This is intended to allow interrogators at on ramps to write into the unit the ramp ID for units at off ramps to use to compute the toll... (possibilities for hacking here are obvious for the criminally inclined - one hopes the system designers were thoughtful and used some kind of keyed hash). No mention is made of encryption or challenge response authentication but I guess that may or may not be part of the design (one would think it had better be, as picking off the ESN should be duck soup with suitable gear if not encrypted). But what I have concluded is that it should be quite simple to detect a response from one's transponder and activate a LED or beeper, and hardly difficult to decode the traffic and display it if it isn't encrypted. A PIC and some simple rf hardware ought to do the trick, even one of those LED flashers that detect cellphone energy might prove to work. Perhaps someone more paranoid (or subversive) than I am will follow up and actually build such a monitor and report whether there are any interogations at OTHER than the expected places... -- Dave Emery N1PRE, die(a)dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493

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