- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: More Hacking of the Mykotronx Site!
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

While this report may be true, I wonder if it's not a spoof or even official disinformation to mislead about the details of Aaron's mission as well as what Rainbow and others are really peddling to rabble-fearing paranoids. This last sentence seems a bit too melodramatic even for a suck-up crippled-chip manufacturer: >The MYK-82, developed by Mykotronx and fabricated by VLSI Technology, >Inc., is the first of a series of security products to be developed as >part of an alliance with the NSA, targeting both Government and >commercial citizen monitoring markets. Granted that defense to LEA-market conversionists like to pornograph the godawful carnage their technology can wreak on disobedient civilians to arouse ex-military-to-LEA converted glands -- do they actually write SOF drool like this?

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Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm glad we're talking about some of the real issues here. Tim May said: > I don't want Sandy Sandfort sitting in judgment on my > posts, deciding what the Cypherpunks--a group I co-founded for God's > sake!!!!--are to be allowed to read and what they may not. Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; 42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold. If I was a social scientist I might want to run the experiment both ways, or six different ways. Name it this, or name it that. I'm not; all I want is something that works. The cypherpunks list was unusable for this kind of discussion, only a month ago. It's usable now. I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my "censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did. Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is now suggesting. "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful option. Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track. They involved a lot more work than the previous setup. I told him if he was willing to do the work, we could try it. As Dale suggests, I wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and passing judgement on the postings. Sandy was, for a month. The element I find most lacking from the whole discussion, until recently, has been responsibility. In an anarchy, *everyone* is responsible; nothing is "somebody else's job". Sandy felt responsible, so he proposed something. I felt responsible, so I helped. But a large part of the community sat on the sidelines and criticized, without making attempts to make things better; indeed the volume and tone of the criticisms themselves made things worse. Unpaid labor for a peanut gallery of spoiled children isn't very gratifying. You-all remind me of a passage from Booker T. Washington's book _Up From Slavery_, describing what happened on the night that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the South: The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possesion of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it. Most of the people on the list haven't bothered to face that freedom. Your de-facto "leaders" have faced it for you. It is a more serious thing than than you expect. All it takes it hard work and judgement. Be responsible for setting your society's privacy policy -- without knowing whether you are right. Face the uncertainty and build anyway. Shall I post you an Emancipation Proclamation -- as if you needed one? Start a mailing list on another site! Move this list to somewhere! Create and nurture an alt group! Make an independent moderated list drawn from the unedited list! Hold meetings! Establish for it a home, a funding, the rearing of newbies, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of philosophies. Dead simple for people as capable as us. Just takes work. Who's volunteering? Just do it! The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over deciding how to run the list, and running it? If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!". John PS: Can we talk about crypto too? It's clear from the last few days of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse novices into thinking that two very different things are the same thing. Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key recovery". This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES". What should we do about this? Educate the public?

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The V chip
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dr.Demented Vomit was born when his mother was on the toilet. \|/ @ @ -oOO-(_)-OOo- Dr.Demented Vomit

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Re: [DSS] PGP Signatures
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Decoy Vilus K)ankersore( Of The Minute's family tree goes straight up. All of his ancestors were siblings, too dumb to recognize each other in the dark. |\_/| (0_0) Decoy Vilus K)ankersore( Of The Minute ==(Y)== ---(u)---(u)---

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Re: what's in a name?
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Without answering any of the points raised by Wei Dai, let me address the subject line. I have been a long time reader of and occasional contributor to the cypherpunks list. Since it is high volume, I prefer not to have it show up in my mailbox, but read it from either nntp.hks.net or infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks. With the recent change in status of the list, what I get at those two places is the edited list. The same would apply to other sublists subscribed to cypherpunks(a)toad.com too. If hks and infinity started archiving the unedited list, this wouldn't bother me so much. Other than that, I am saddened, as much as a Tim is enraged, that a supposedly libertarian and anarchistic group of people has decided that censorship is the right solution to their problems. Btw, what is with nntp.hks.net? Seems to have been down for couple of days.

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[STEGO] Degausser
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Decoy L[esbian] Vitriol K[ancer]OTM has been fired for masturbating in front of his boss. o/ Decoy L[esbian] Vitriol K[ancer]OTM <| / >

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Re: My Departure, Moderation, and "Ownership of the List"
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: > ichudov(a)algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes: > > Adam Back wrote: > > > Perhaps it is time to reconsider the benefits of alt.cypherpunks. (As > > > an aside, it is ironic that John Gilmore was the guy who started the > > > alt.* USENET hierarchy, specifically to facilitate freedom of speech). > > An interesting idea. What's also interesting is Tim May posting after a long "absence", and in his post he repeats virtually sentence-for-sentence what a handful of people have been saying here for the past month.

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Re: FCPUNX:ecure Phones
by Dave Emery 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Don't think I will bore the list with it, But a slightly more complex version of this scheme was one of the major tactical medium security voice scrambling systems used by the US in the 70's and 80's and even to a slight extent into the 90's on military radio circuits. The military version is called Parkhill and the crypto gear is the KY-65 and KY-75. At one time (in the 70's) it was used for at least secret traffic. It was downgraded a couple of times since and is now considered obselete and compromised. A Parkhill crypto box can be seen in the NSA museum... The NSA version used time inversion (playing voice samples backwards) and faster shuffling than this one does, and possibly a more secure key generator. But it is rumored to have been broken by more than one opponent, perhaps including drug cartels. Its appeal and why it was so extensively used for a while is that it interfaces to normal voice radio gear at the audio input and output level rather than requiring different modulations and complex digital modems integrated into the radio. It also gives pretty good speech quality and speaker recognition. Its primary replacement is the ANDVT digital voice terminal which takes advantage of modern DSP technology to implement modems usable over radio links and vocoders which can produce acceptable speech at 1200 or 2400 baud. Dave Emery die(a)die.com

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Re: FCPUNX:ecure Phones (fwd)
by Dave Emery 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message:

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Voting on Moderation [was: Dissolving Choke Points]
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric Cordian wrote: > Peter Hendrickson writes: > > Moderation has been a failure. I'm pretty good at filtering and I > > can sadly report that there is very little signal out there. > The quality of the Cypherpunks list is determined solely by the > amount of signal. The amount of noise is irrelevant. [snip] > Now that we have moderation, I can't do this while subscribed to the > main list, and have to live in eternal fear that I am writing for > an audience of 20 every time I respond to something on the unedited > list. Foo on that. I wonder how Sandy will take the vote on continuing or abandoning the moderation experiment? In most states, one juror out of 12 can kill a conviction. In a revolution such as U.S. 1776, only a tiny percent of the people supported the revolution. Will Sandy go with a majority decision (pure democratic), or allow the moderation to go away if a significant minority wants to kill it?

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