- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Andy Grove on Clipper
by Vinod Valloppillil 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I saw Larry King Live last night on CNN and the guests were Al Gore, Andy Grove (CEO/Intel), Dan Sussman (? -- I think that's his name, he was an editor at Newsweek), and Reed Hundt from the FCC. As can be expected, it was another talk show about the "Data Superhighway". It got interesting on two points: First, Larry King asked Andy Grove what he thought Intel should do for the Data Superhighway and he told Larry that since Al Gore was on the show, he'd rather get into what he thought the Feds _shouldn't_ do and discussed the path towards universal access to PC's without any federal involvement. Al Gore tried to get involved by arguing that the Fed's were originally responsible for the computer revolution b/c of the Apollo program. The two hit back and forth a couple of times on the issue. At this point, I was patting Andy on the back for being a non-statist. Then, the editor from Newsweek said that in any show about the "Data Superhighway" the Clipper chip had to be discussed. He then went on to say (and occasionally apologizing to Gore for being blunt) how the chip and the whole program were "loathed" by the industry and privacy advocates. Larry asked Groves what he thought about it and he went off talking about the govt's legitimate right to tap analog media and how all this chip did was to extend that right into the digital realm. I was shocked. Even worse, Al Gore supported Andy's position and then when Larry King got back to the editor, he backed off saying "well, I just heard that people in the industry didn't like it." Larry asked for his opinion on it as a provider of information services and he said, "we just report on public opinions in our magazine and don't try to take positions on the issues. Yuck.

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(None)
by Jeff Gostin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

paul(a)hawksbill.sprintmrn.com (Paul Ferguson) writes: > It does my heart good to hear someone use the term 'grok' -- I don't > hear many folks use that term very much anymore. ,-) I'll admit, I first ran into this term about 6 months ago, straight from the "source". Since then, I've been using it rather frequently. Sometimes, it's the only word that'll fit, y'know? :-) --Jeff -- ====== ====== +----------------jgostin(a)eternal.pha.pa.us----------------+ == == | The new, improved, environmentally safe, bigger, better,| == == -= | faster, hypo-allergenic, AND politically correct .sig. | ==== ====== | Now with a new fresh lemon scent! | PGP Key Available +---------------------------------------------------------+

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Re: Did anyone see...
by mpd＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eli Brandt writes: >> Victor S. Miller, [who I suspect is the same Victor S. Miller I >> knew at UMass Boston many years ago], published a nifty little >> paper in the mid 1980's on the computation of the function Pi(n) > Do you have a pointer to this paper? I'd been under the > impression that this function had no analytic closed form > (unless you cheat). I'll also post this to the list since I need to correct a dumb error in my previous post. I previously stated that Pi(n) was the Nth prime. It is of course in reality the Prime Number Counting Function which is equal to the number of primes <= n. Computing the Nth prime is trivial given a program which computes Pi(n) since Pi(n) is asymptotic to a known smooth function and one need only evaluate it a small number of times to refine an initial estimate of the Nth prime into the correct value. Miller's definitive paper on the subject is... Computing Pi(x): The Meissel-Lehmer method Mathematics of Computation, 1985, 44, no. 170, 537-560 There is another paper by this gentleman which may be of interest to Cypherpunks. It is on the use of elliptic curves as a basis for cryptosystems. He demonstrates how an analogue to the Diffie-Hellman secure key exchange may be constructed using groups of points on elliptic curves and conjectures that such a system may be stronger than one based on the discrete log problem. Here is the citation. Use of elliptic curves in cryptography Advances in cryptology---CRYPTO 85 1986, 417-426 ISBN: 0-387-16463-4 Happy reading. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd(a)netcom.com $ via Finger. $

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Primes & Miller's Paper
by Jeff Gostin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

mpd(a)netcom.com (Mike Duvos) writes: > Victor S. Miller, [who I suspect is the same Victor S. Miller I > knew at UMass Boston many years ago], published a nifty little > paper in the mid 1980's on the computation of the function Pi(n) > which gives the Nth prime as a function of N. He had a table > giving the (10^N)th prime for n={3,6,9,12,15,18,...} which was > quite impressive. Calculating the correct value for the > zillionth prime directly is a cute bit of mathematics. Any chance you could give us a pointer, or perhaps a summary? I'd bet dollars to donuts that you'll give us the pointer, but in either case, I'm sure we'd appreciate it! --Jeff -- ====== ====== +----------------jgostin(a)eternal.pha.pa.us----------------+ == == | The new, improved, environmentally safe, bigger, better,| == == -= | faster, hypo-allergenic, AND politically correct .sig. | ==== ====== | Now with a new fresh lemon scent! | PGP Key Available +---------------------------------------------------------+

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Re: "The Virtual Hand": Free-market Internet guide
by Tommy the Tourist 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >[Please distribute this as widely as you see fit. Thanks -- Sasha Volokh] > > > >The Competitive Enterprise Institute is pleased to announce: > > > > THE VIRTUAL HAND > > > > CEI'S FREE-MARKET GUIDE TO THE > > INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY > >... > Alright, who let the spammer in? I subscribe to net-resources for this > sorta crud; I don't need to see it here in cypherpunks. Didn't look like a spam to me. It looked like a very targeted ad to a receptive audience. Cypherpunks contains, after all, a high population of libertarians and free market types. All net advertising is not bad. ------------ To respond to the sender of this message, send mail to remailer(a)soda.berkeley.edu, starting your message with the following 7 lines: :: Response-Key: ideaclipper ====Encrypted-Sender-Begin==== MI@```$US^P;+]AB?X9TW6\8WR:^P&2':U$*B?=.'8=A+`0J*__K;`&\ER>Q$ E>G&CYW:$($=$#V1Z)#<$?PIF\;'!$C>]?$-]1&/WJA[9G%PN7``` ====Encrypted-Sender-End====

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Re: "The Virtual Hand": Free-market Internet guide
by snyderra＠dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:30 AM 6/17/94 -0700, Tommy the Tourist wrote: >> >[Please distribute this as widely as you see fit. Thanks -- Sasha Volokh] >> > >> >The Competitive Enterprise Institute is pleased to announce: >> > >> > THE VIRTUAL HAND >> > >> > CEI'S FREE-MARKET GUIDE TO THE >> > INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY >> >... > Didn't look like a spam to me. It looked like a very targeted ad >to a receptive audience. Cypherpunks contains, after all, a high >population of libertarians and free market types. All net advertising >is not bad. Cypherpunks also can contains, after all, a high population of computer users. Does that mean that Apple or Compaq sending ads to the list wouldn't be bad? If it's target was libertarians, it should have been sent to one of the various libertarian lists/groups. Bob -- Bob Snyder N2KGO MIME, RIPEM mail accepted snyderra(a)dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu finger for RIPEM public key When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

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New program to integrate encryption/signing with mail/news
by Stuart Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I have written a new program to help integrate encryption and signature programs such as (but not limited to) PGP. This is the doc file that is included. I am going to try to upload it to ftp.csua.berkeley.edu, the cypherpunks ftp site, in directory /pub/cypherpunks/incoming. The file name is mess11.zip. Not sure where it will end up, but if you can't find it or don't have ftp, I will gladly mail it to you. This is the first program of any sort, simple though it is, that I have ever unleashed on the public at large, comments are greatly appreciated - please be gentle :) I'm biased of course, but I find it a rather elegant (ergonomic is what I want to say :) way to let users encrypt or sign messages. Please give it a try, it is freeware and may be distributed under the GNU Public License. mess - automagic Mail Encryption and Signing System for mail & news Copyright 1994 Stuart Smith May be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This program is meant to be run in lieu of an editor from a mail or news program. The editor you want to use should be the first argument on the command line. The article or message to be edited should be the second. mess first starts the editor with the specified file. If you want your message to be encrypted or signed, place one or more of the following strings at the beginning of a line. (i.e. each string must start at the beginning of its own line) [encrypt] [encrypt] <key_ID> [sign] [sign] <key_ID> Only the first encrypt or sign string will be acted on and removed from the text. Further copies are ignored. If you add a space and a key ID, these will be added to the PGP command line so that PGP will not ask you for them. A key ID (any text fragment unique to a public key description) is considered as everything from one space after the [encrypt]/[sign] string. mess now also scans headers, if they are included, for To: or From: headers and will use these as key_ID's. If you specify a key_ID after [sign] or [encrypt], it will override the key_ID found in the headers. I use trn, which does pass headers to the editor and it seems to work great. Elm doesn't though so I can't test it, but I assume it would work as well. I had to try and make the program smart enough to figure out if there even are headers. To do this, it first splits the file in two at the first blank line. Everything above is considered header lines. If however, it does not match From:, To:, or Subject:, then it assumes that headers were not in fact included in the file and that it is really just parsing the first paragraph. In which case it throws it out and just uses the whole file as the body, with no headers. If a public or secret key is not found matching the key_ID found in the header or entered manually, PGP will fail, leaving your message intact, including the [encrypt]/[sign] strings, if present. I've tried not to emphasize PGP to much because I wrote the program so that it could be used with any encryption program. PGP is of course a natural for the job. Right now, the defaults for the encrypt and sign strings, encrypt and sign options, and even the encryption program to call are in #define statements, so they're pretty easy to change. In the future I might add a configuration file for such things or allow them to be specified on the command-line. Ideas I have for the near future include somewhat better help for wrong command-line args and such; configuration file for some default or more command-line options; allow mailers or news readers that will do this to pass sender & recipient information on the command line; less moving around of temp files - right now the plaintext of a message gets copied into a temporary file before going to pgp, and while *that* temporary file is wiped by pgp, the original file is only deleted. I will try and organize things better or perhaps if someone can point me to a portable file wipe? The executable included runs under OS/2 with the emx runtime package. I've tried to avoid doing anything platform specific (I use OS/2), if I messed up, let me know. I have tested the program using Elm for OS/2 and TRN for OS/2 which I use to read mail and news from the UUPC v1.2b program. I got the idea for the [encrypt] and [sign] bit from Elm_2 for OS/2 which had something similar, but I tried to improve on it. I would like to hear from people using this on other computers or with other mail/news programs. If you have any suggestions, please forward them, thanks. I hope you find this useful, I'd appreciate any comments & ideas. <Stu(a)nemesis.wimsey.com> - -- Baba baby mama shaggy papa baba bro baba rock a shaggy baba sister shag saggy hey doc baba baby shaggy hey baba can you dig it baba baba E7 E3 90 7E 16 2E F3 45 * 28 24 2E C6 03 02 37 5C Stuart Smith <stu(a)nemesis.wimsey.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLgGmhai5iP4JtEWBAQG57gP/WYN7IPhww23irASao7BRT+NWbJcxAi+K 3FGw+YZm3Q7kzFO3ASB/DghzGmpxA1s6ZjpJWZAqqmhPMMBPNHZHHBQVF4OfxAtZ 2LK9vKi+Lfv5aOX5OVddEq9MxAOH6t6W6MlPL270gzir+uBhV38apqrj4iOqLSw/ mmZ9rrjNAPA= =Ofwa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: swipe working on infinity.c2.org
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Alastair McKinstry says: > What do yo see as the problem with this (PGP keys) ? What kind of > key management architecture would you recommend ? Well, as I said, just as one example, its too hard to reverse map key IDs into the entities that possess the keys. I'm thinking these days in terms of building an infrastructure in which a large fraction of the net can run "in black", which means you need good automated key management. To do that, you need distributed databases. Databases like DNS work very nicely for this purpose. Now, DNS can reverse map IP addresses because IP addresses are structured so it is possible to assume that if you have delegation over a set of them that you likely have the forward maps as well. However, you can't build something like that to handle random PGP key IDs. That means that if you want to be able to look up key IDs automatically in a network wide DNS style database, you lose. Key IDs need structure so you can trace them to organizations with delegation over particular sections of the keyspace, just as in DNS you have structure to domain names so you can figure out who has delegation over what part of the domain name space. Anyway, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking about these days. Perry

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Re: Bart Nagel in Mondo
by dmandl＠lehman.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Dave Otto <dave(a)marvin.jta.edd.ca.gov> > > Check out the lead article in the "Summer 94" issue of _Mondo2000_. > It is a spoof by Bart Nagel that starts off sounding like steganography. > > The article basically states that the photo-journalist-publisher industry > is proposing that all images be encoded using stego techniques to contain > unique identifiers that would prevent copy infringements. The article > starts in a *VERY* believable fashion before trailing off into an obvious > spoof. Very well done. It's not that far-fetched, though. There are filters for Adobe Photoshop that will do this sort of thing right now--they'll imbed copyright symbols in the image, for example (there was just a big discussion of this very issue on the Photoshop list). A more sophisticated technique might be hiding an unspoofable signed message somewhere in the image. This is just the flip side of the LSB stego techniques cypherpunks have been talking about all along. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of practice becomes widespread as electronic image manipulation becomes more universal. It won't stop the pirates, though. --Dave.

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(None)
by Jeff Gostin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bill Frezza (via RadioMail) <frezza(a)radiomail.net> writes: > So much for lobbying. ...and, apparently, by/for/of the People. > Look, something is going on here that doesn't meet the eye. Nothing is > ever unanimous in Washington. These guys were told something by somebody > that caused them to vote like this. Ah, the "Deep Throat" Theory... I was waiting to see how long this would take the surface. I agree. Something _very_ unsavory is happening here, but I doubt we'll find out what it is. If I had to guess (and this is VERY uninformed, as far as wild speculation), someone in the NSA with the Power To Do So, said that they would blatantly ignore the rules, and consider all crypto their private little hunting grounds. Being as the NSA probably is used in some Intelligence work, and lots of other things the Government Hopes We Don't Find Out About, Congress probably ran the other way, as it was in Their Best Interests. Of course, this is wild speculation. It could just be that the Director of the NSA makes one hell of a matzah ball soup, and they didn't want to lose the saturday afternoon Matzah Ball 'Fests... ;-) --Jeff -- ====== ====== +----------------jgostin(a)eternal.pha.pa.us----------------+ == == | The new, improved, environmentally safe, bigger, better,| == == -= | faster, hypo-allergenic, AND politically correct .sig. | ==== ====== | Now with a new fresh lemon scent! | PGP Key Available +---------------------------------------------------------+

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