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Re: Imminent Death of the Internet, GIF at 11
by Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:40 AM 9/7/96 -0700, Martin Minow <minow(a)apple.com> wrote: >For several months (years?) Bob Metcalf has been predicting that >the Internet will self-destruct from overload. His argument >appears to follow one of Gordon Bell's maxims: "anyone can predict >the future: all you need is semi-log paper and a ruler." As I >understand it, Metcalf's argument is that network load (messages, >packets) is growing exponentially, while network bandwidth (fiber >capacity, switch performance) is growing linearly. At some point, >these two curves cross -- and demand will exceed capacity. > I would add one word into that Gordon Bell's maxim: "anyone can predict the SHORT-TERM future: all you need is semi-log paper and a ruler." Rulers are liner-extrapolation predictors; the only predictions with still lower intelligence are pointers - with the assumption that things are going to always remain the same. Unfortunately, these two kinds of prediction methods populate most of the human "visionary" landscape, with rare flowers of visionary minds elevating above it - Metcalf's doesn't seem to be one of them. This very observation on the population/food dilemma was made by Malthus quite a while ago. However, both population and food are still here, and natural resources are no longer a serious limiting factor for the production of food. If you notice that your attempt to extend your ruler farther than it can go, will not work, it's a good prediction of a breakdown - *of the ruler*, not the system you are trying to measure. The role of a visionary is not to mistake the horizon of current trends for the horizon of the world, but look ahead and predict future trends - and advise what should be done to adapt to the imminent transitions. An important observation for the net traffic/bandwidth "crisis" is that human ability to perceive textual and visual information remains pretty much the same. Addition of graphics, video and sound to the Net, as well as the growing number of users, increase the bandwidth, but this all has (though still distant) saturation point - say, 24 hour-a-day single-channel video feed to every human and his dog. (Inter-machine communications do not have this limit though). Already, most of the newsfeed coming to any single server, is never read by anybody; this is also the fate of most messages from 60 or so mailing lists coming to my PC. A solution here, that will be also quite instrumental for many future problems, is not to send messages that are not going to be read - i.e., server-side filtering agents; I have been suggesting collaborative message filtering (see proposal on my home page) for more than 5 years now - only to find people who could help implement it, uselessly running around the Net whining and waving their stiff rulers. Of course, there are also other methods of making Net traffic more intelligent and robust; if Internet was recognized as the most revolutionary development in the evolution of the global ecology of intelligence, and if there existed some mechanism for turning truly visionary ideas on the Net's evolution into changes in its structure, then, well, things would be much better. <x-rich></x-rich><x-rich> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alexander Chislenko <<sasha1(a)netcom.com> www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html Firefly Network, Inc.: <<alexc(a)firefly.net> www.ffly.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- </x-rich>

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Mailing list
by Webeus 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello, I have been away for over 2 months and in returning find that alpha.c2.org is lo longer. Can you suggest an alternative, FAQ's etc ?? Thank you Webeus

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[PARANOID NOISE] Satellites flying formation?
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 8 Sep 96 at 12:16, John F. Fricker wrote: > >I don't know. I would presume so. I only guess that it was a 3-4-5 > >formation. But it does make some constants easy! <g> > Maybe we could each watch for these formations and keep a log of > observations. I've done a little searching for more information but > I find nothing easy. Perhaps one of my hard core skywatcher friends > would know something as well. I'll try to link with my old stargazers friends and ask questions around. If you get something new, write. Cheers and good luck! jfa

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towards an eternity service
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[the relevance of this to remailer-operators, is that my example prototype architecture for discussion relies heavily on mixmaster remailers] Ross Anderson's eternity service (postscript paper somewhere on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/) is a distributed file system with the criteria that it should not be possible to delete information from it. The paper outlines ways that you might go about doing this, and gives as a design goal that it should not be possible even for concerted government attacks to remove information from the service. Roughly the approach described is to have anonymous servers with secret shared data. The server doesn't know what it is serving, and the server charges per Mb/year of data storage. This seems a pretty interesting idea, as it would be a great boon to free speech to be able to reliably publish information that would survive attempts to "unpublish" it, which seem to be gaining in popularity. Notable recent examples of such attacks being Scientologist attacks on distribution of it's `scriptures', the German governments banning of nazi revisionist material, and the impending possibility of a repeat of the CDA at a (US) state level. I think it is desirable to get something working now, even if it is far short of the design criteria Anderson describes. A working model would provide something on which to base discussion of improvements, and would also be an interesting experiment to see the sorts of uses such a system would be put to, and the political reaction to it's uses. The following doesn't depend on, but would be helped by having direct socket delivery of packets (for performance) in the mixmaster remailer-net and forward secrecy (for resilence to attack). The idea comes in two parts, the first part, an anonymous www proxy using mixmaster to deliver packets, is present to provide cover traffic for real eternity system requests, the second part describes a way to acheive an eternity like system with the traffic mixed in with part 1 traffic, so that the two types of traffic can not be distinguished by attackers. 1. anonymous www proxies over mixmaster The stated design goal for this part (it's partly a cover goal, though useful in its own right) is to ensure that users can access publically accessible www pages without divulging their identity to the sites they are accessing, or even to an attacker who is monitoring net traffic. The user wants to hide which sites they are accessing, and what information they are accessing. No attempt is made to conceal the identity of the www sites accessed, a normal URL is used to access them. This is basically just like www.anonymizer.com, except that traffic is routed over the mixmaster net. An http <-> mixmaster interface would be added to the existing mixmaster. You add a blip in the line for outgoing traffic on your own machine which converts all outgoing http requests into mixmaster packets and feeds them into the remailer network. You choose random chains to get to the http servers. The delivered packet at the exit remailer node is a new mixmaster packet type, a http request type, rather than a request to email to an individual, or post to a newsgroup, it results in an (where possible SSL encrypted) http request being made to the specified http server. Also included with the request is a mixmaster reply chain, so that the exit mixmaster node can route the return the requested www pages, and SSL session traffic back to the originator. As you might imagine if this became popular, it could generate a lot of traffic. For a practical system I think it's inevitable that you'd need to provide some financial incentive for the mixmaster operators to subsidize their T3s :-) So you would need to incorporate per hop payments, for the remailers. This could be a relatively small payment, but is just there to ensure that they have the money to increase their bandwidth if the demand requires it. I think that about explains part 1. 2. an eternity like system built on this system There are a couple of extra requirements for the eternity system, firstly that the address of the www site must be concealed also, and secondly that the data is secret shared across multiple eternity www sites. The first requirement can be met by the anonymous eternity www sites publically posting to a newsgroup (via a mixmaster remailer of course:-) a mixmaster chain pointing at themselves. To reduce the problem of the flood attack for finding the endpoint of a chain, firstly some of Peter Allan's suggestions on extra cover traffic, and on adding extra hops to increase cover traffic should help, but ultimately this only makes a longer concerted flood necessary to find the output. I don't see any easy solution to the flood attack, the only _real_ answer is a DC net. A slightly simpler, but less robust solution would be to find ways to have fixed levels of traffic between nodes in the remailer network. Surplus traffic at entry points could be rejected, so that the sender knows to try another remailer. The other requirement for eternity is that the data should be secret shared. If all the eternity www servers publish their reply blocks, the user sends requests to a number of the eternity servers selected randomly. Choose the number so that it is likely that you will get the required k of n shares, given that there are n servers, and they all hold shares in the data, and that k of n shares are required to recover the secret. You also need to ensure that the exit mixmaster which is acting as a http forwarder server can't tell whether it is making an eternity system request or an anonymous www proxy request. The fact that http traffic is blindly forwarded means that if the http request is SSL encrypted the http forwarding mixmaster remailer will not know the contents of the traffic, and so will not be able to distinguish traffic type: eternity or anonymous proxy. As the eternity www servers don't know what the data in the shares they are holding is, they can't provide the indexing facility directly. Rather ordinary www pages, and other eternity www pages can be used to collect links to interesting eternity pages. In otherwords, it's decentralised, as is the www, and any indexing left up to the authors of eternity hosted www documents, or anyone elses indexing to interesting links. A compromise technology which would greatly simplify access to the service would be public www proxies or gateways to the eternity service, so that no new software was required for the client. This would serve a similar role to WWW based remailers. The scheme is complex in places but basically requires no new technology, at least for a crude implementation, without the finer points. What can be missed out in a first pass implementation, and deferred for later incremental improvements: ecash postage to pay for remailer resources fixed traffic between remailers payment for www sites (anonymous www proxy and eternity service) oblivious transfer to setup shares so that leaves the following to be done: blip in the line which routes http requests over mixmaster mixmaster reply chains for return http traffic secret sharing of data to send to eternity www servers periodic posting of mix reply blocks by eternity www servers public access www proxy, or www-cgi based gateway comments, volunteers? Adam -- exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

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Re: Cypherpunks subscribers - Singapore and NZ gvts, plus IRS
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:56 PM 9/8/96, Declan McCullagh wrote: >I suppose it would be only polite to ask the Singapore government folks >and IRS employees to join our conversation. > >The cypherpunks list now has nearly 1,400 direct subscribers, plus >whoever reads it through local mail-news gateways. > >(Note I'm not indicating that a .gov.sg or .irs.gov address implies >anything about an individual's personal political beliefs.) > >video(a)nhmxw0.fnal.gov >e875836(a)popcorn.llnl.gov >foley_p(a)kosmos.wcc.govt.nz .. What, so now my group, Government Office of Technology, is no longer considered part of the military-bureaucratic complex? -- tcmay(a)got.net (And to think I get paid a GS-16 salary just to keep tabs on you folks, feed you disinformation, and entice you into various operations.) We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Imminent Death of the Internet, GIF at 11
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:40 PM 9/7/96, Martin Minow wrote: >We certainly are seeing changes in the way we use the network. When >I "got on the net" in the late 1970's, I was on two mailing lists >(SF-Lovers and Human Net) and could read *all* of Usenet traffic >in an hour or two. In the late 1980's, Usenet traffic totalled The 2002 version, unless our list is outlawed as being part of a TICO (Terrorist-Influenced and Corrupt Organization) conspiracy: "I could read *all* of the Cypherpunks traffic in a day or two..." --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: [NOISE] Far-reaching tentacles . . . ?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:38 PM 9/8/96, Alan Bostick wrote: >Found in the news: > > > (SACRAMENTO)- The principals of six Sacramento area schools have >received 46 used computers that were renovated by inmates at Folsom >Prison. Warden Theo White delivered the machines after they were given a >reprieve from the scrap heap. The prison obtained the donated personal >computers from the non-profit Detwiler Foundation... which began working ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >five years ago to bring new technology into the state's classrooms. > >[Would you want *YOUR* CHILDREN to use computers that had been HACKED >by CONVICTED CRIMINALS????] Who cares about the convicted criminals? It's the connection to the Detwiler Foundation that would worry me. (Now that's what you call an S. Boxx!) --Medusa

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Re: ASEAN nations generally pro-censorship
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> _________________________________________________________________ > ASEAN FORUM AGREES ON NEED TO POLICE THE NET > __________________________________________________________________________ >[...] > But the statement suggested there was no agreement on a uniform > approach to policing the Internet. One could argue that the hundred years war was in substantial part the result of regulatory arbitrage against attempts to censor the printing press, that it was in large part an unsuccessful attempt to create a uniform standard of censorship by force of arms. History suggests that there *wont* be a uniform approach on policing the net. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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"Intended Purpose" of the Cypherpunks List
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:09 PM 9/8/96, Wayne H. Allen wrote: > Well maybe, political issues galore certainly, but very very little >to do with cryptography. I mean what does TWA 800 have to do with this >list. I mean lets be completely honest here, whatever the original >purpose of the list was for its been allowed to shift away from its >intended purpose considerably. I'm curious. You say the list has "been allowed to shift away from its intended purpose considerably." First, who "allowed" it. (We should perhaps track down those who allowed this and rap them upside the head.) Second, and more importantly, just what was its "intended purpose"? While I delete immediately fantasies about how the Bilderbergers ordered TWA 800 shot down with Russian Strelas as a warning for Bill Clinton, the other discussions related to TWA 800, e.g., mandatory person-number I.D. to board planes, increased inspections, national data bases of "suspicious persons," etc., are very much on-topic for this list. But, then, what would I know? --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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RE: Court challenge to AOL junk-mail blocks
by Will rodger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Declan, in reply to questions about Cyber Promo's statue re: AOL wisely wrote: >>No. A customer buys service from AOL and in doing so signs a contract >>with the company. AOL and the customer each has certain rights and >>obligations spelled out in the contract. >> >>I confess I don't know if AOL's contract allows them to block spam. But >>in any case, spammers are not customers. >> >>-Declan >> Cyber Promotions of course is not now a client of AOL, which is one the company's defenses against AOL. Although AOL attorneys don't make the connection outright, their filings seem to imply that once one is an AOL customer, he's always subject to their rules. Wallace, it seems, had an account or two with AOL and was spamming during that time in violation of terms of service. They soon bumped him from the service. Now that he's not a subscriber, they claim Wallace is still violating terms of service. How that's relevant to a former subscriber is far from clear. Wallace's attorneys, of course say it isn't relevant at all. No doubt about it; this one is going to be a lot of fun. Will Rodger Washington Bureau Chief Inter@ctive Week -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.9 iQEVAgUBMjN30UcByjT5n+LZAQEO0QgAhKgbD1ljZfDoZR/J9PF9wQFgZxoSM8DZ SfhfPMNDnBDqx1dq2qjxbxKC0uqP5AQq76ZPr+MVexvdI9ec+8W9DFW/O8ujOsJT yU/vg0XnWC3kNeQVW9OpTjlNZrlm37TRM5Fl/JeBxrFlws1aS1fG57Xnq2YYEJJ2 hrn20q9szJiRLnFJ0hSfjhsYkLir7qErhqMMOu0kw1HAqfA7kAzmoxD4ukaeqqL9 Hkqqf2E59xtOSvmMRtqgtGhUijiMeuO1K/wCITp0SS6U4XieeHrV5jpfY3RU6c2s g7OBHkMq6fjzWO29WJO67imOeb45bsZMM3vvqKlH5lxXHR+g1DjUnw== =Iatg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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