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Anonymity
by don＠cs.byu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In a project relating to the need for anonymous remailers, I would like to find out about someone in particular. (I would like to do so without the resulting information getting circulated any more than it probably already is.) Specifically, I have a full name and an email and am curious how much information can be collected. (whoever has those US-population CD's, that's the kind of thing I'm looking for) Preferrably I would like to go from the email address only to a SSN or address or something unique, but I will make the two of them my starting point if necessary. The point being, of course, that anonymous remailers are the only thing that keeps many email addresses from becoming a life history. Anyone who can help me research please send PGP encrypted (key 0x994b8f39) mail. Thanks -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQB1AwUBMR2C0cLa+QKZS485AQFGNgL/XIOSJqabFsiHa9xtwWb1kltGbjcMnLZ4 appMShASZNBUULl9dj7qwyhSxVosgaaKIHPMd9H4DiywRG47WYXxqbKDI1dBSA+l f7Wy68QYA0RVtL9oci6z+w6UGpwfRbnV =rP7B -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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"internet underground" magazine
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

just went to Barnes&Noble to check out magazine titles on the Internet/cyberspace, and walked away with 10 separate titles!! anyway, there is a new one that will be especially appealing to cpunks here. I haven't seen it mentioned here: "internet underground". issue #3 has interesting articles on - web transaction tracking, by S.Garfinkel - "my secret life with Phil Zimmerman", S.Garfinkel - how to send anonymous email. mentions cpunk remailers. by editor S.Ellerman plenty of other fluff. maybe some people here may want to contribute. often when magazines start out they are hungry for writers and getting into them is not as hard. I suspect "internet underground" may end up covering cpunk topics regularly with or without anyone's help from here. (oh, the spooks are rolling in their coffins. heh.)

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The Decense Project
by Ray Cromwell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Decense Project A few days ago I was reading Clarinet Newsbytes Top news. It read like something right out of 1984. "Germany cracks down on AOL and Compuserve", "Japan busts Japanese porn web site", "French bans web sites with banned book", "China issues internet regulations", and "Clinton signs Telecom bill" The other shoe is starting to drop. The ante has been raised as governments around the world are trying to control the content of the Internet. But the politicians writing this type of legislation have no clue what they are really dealing with. They are are part of a centralized organization with a centralized philosophy trying to cope with something inherently decentralized, non-physical, and constantly evolving. We all know the genie is out of the bottle. Let's write some code to keep it that way. Enough of the rhetoric. Decense is the name of what I hope to be, a family of software protocols designed to "decensor" the net. I'm contributing the first, and I hope, most useful piece. I hope others will join me in developing this software, making it more robust, and distributing it across the net. What is Decense? The first piece of the Decense software is designed to provide "penet" like double-blind anonymous transactions for the http protocol. It is written as a cgi-bin script which provides a seamless mapping between anonymous ids and remote web servers. Servers running Decense can be chained like anonymous remailers to increase site level security. Decense works as follows. The server maintains a database mapping anonymous ids to url directories. For instance 'foo' -> 'www.c2.org' as an example. The anonymous ids are stored as md5 hashes so that if the site is ever compromised, the db cannot be used to get a complete listing of all anonids<->sites. The attacker is forced to hash and compare each one he is looking for. [yes, he still gets a listing of all the urls, but chaining takes care of that to some extent. In the future, I want to use the unhashed 'anonid' as a key to a symmetric cipher to encrypt/encrypt each url field of the database. The db would be stored as (hashed(anonid), DES/IDEA(anonurl) ^ key ^ value ] A url is constructed as follows http://<decense.server.host>/<cgi-bin-dir>/decense/<anonid>/<relative url> Decense will lookup the anonid in the database, and map it to a url, such as "http://foo.bar", it will then append the relative url portion yielding "http://foo.bar/<relative url>" It will proceed to fetch the document at that URL. If the document is an html or text file, it will scan the file replacing any references to the remote server with the decense url. Example: Let's say I am running decense at http://foo.bar with an anonid of 'c2' which maps to www.c2.org. If I then request http://foo.bar/cgi-bin/decense/c2/index.html and index.html contains the following URL <img src="/c2.jpg"> the URL will be changed to <img src="http://foo.bar/cgi-bin/decense/c2/c2.jpg"> in the returned document. Future plans for Decense I am heavily loaded down with work right now. But future versions of Decense should have 1) the ability to filter out mailto: and instead, substitute in a url pointing to a post/mail cgi-script which sends mail to the real recipient through an anonymous remailer chain. 2) the ability to proxy through SSL servers for encryption 3) the ability to handle authenticated urls properly 4) the ability to handle a document being located on multiple sites, with optional shamir sharing, so that a site is a) either picked at random to retrieve a document or b) a portion of the sites are picked, and the document is fetched and reassembled via a sharing protocol from those sites. I will release source code in about a day, I'm now alpha testing it. If you would like to contribute to Decense, send mail to rcromw1(a)gl.umbc.edu -Ray rjc(a)clark.net

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Strange Sounds of Silence
by Alan Pugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please reply to amp(a)pobox.com as this email address dies on the 14th. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- AEN News Commentary by Alan M. Pugh <mailto:amp@pobox.com> The Strange Sounds of Silence Has anyone else out there noticed the strange sounds of silence emmanating from the american print and broadcast media concerning the rider attached to the Telecommunications Act recently signed by President Clinton known as the CDA (Communications Decency Act)? Here we have a piece of legislation that has enormous ramifications to the free flow of information and ideas through various electronic media, and yet we hear hardly a peep from the "defenders of the 1st amendment". Many readers here have probably noticed the screams of censorship and gnashing of teeth that accompany any attempt to pass legislation or regulations that have even tangental relationships to the 1st amendment. The first amendment has, during this century, been greatly expanded from the protections it was widely recognised to afford at the begining of this century. It has been "incorporated" through the courts to bar states from infringing on our freedoms as well as the federal government. The definition of "speech" has been stretched to the point that the act of burning a flag is considered to be an act of speech, and not destruction of property. (I agree with the court wholeheartedly on this point.) We've so expanded its scope, and rightly so, that it is difficult if not impossible to win in court on a charge of slander or libel. The press in this country enjoys wide lattitude. They cannot be forced to divulge sources except under very specific and limited circumstances. They have recently been restricted more than in the past on military operations. These restrictions have garnered almost universal cries of "censorship!" from those news organizations affected. Why then, when almost all of cyberspace is up in arms over this provision is this story almost universally ignored or distorted to be merely an issue of "child pornography" or "protecting our children"? I recall several prominent news organizations across the country coming to the aid of Larry Flint, the publisher of _Hustler_ magazine a few years ago through amicus briefs filed with the court when an overzealous prosecutor was attempting to nail him for the distribution of material that violated his puritanical interpretations of local "community standards". Where are these papers now? Where is their outrage? I'd like to know what the difference is between a picture of Michelangelo's David displayed in an article by the _Smithstonian Institution_, and the same picture when displayed on someone's home page? Where is the outrage that someone who makes a copy of _Catcher in the Rye_ available to people who visit their home page who may very well now be open to prosecution by that same puritanical prosecutor? Where is it? Has the "free" press in this country suddenly discovered the virtues of censorship? Do these organizations not realize that the precidents that will soon be laid down on this issue will soon be affecting them as well? Any major publisher who is not looking at electronic media as a method of distribution is a fool. The _New York Times_ is now available on the World Wide Web. Perhaps they are living in a delusion that *they* will not be held to the same standards that will soon be enforced against the small publisher who sees the Web as means for cheap mass distribution. Perhaps for a time, they won't. Eventually, the bird will come home to roost. One would think that they would understand that the free flow of information is important enough that we will have to stand a little pornography and other distasteful material - the same way we allow magazines to be sold at the local convienience store. If you don't want to see it, don't look at it. If you don't want to read racist material, go somewhere else. Noone will *force* you to consume that which you cannot abide. They also do not seem to recognise the international nature of the internet. It is not something that operates entirely within the confines of the united States. It is an international community that reaches nearly every corner of the globe. What is proper to be displayed in New York City or Los Angeles, is probably not something that, say the government of Saudi Arabia would like to see available to its subjects. By the same token, what is deemed to satisfy the "community standards" of Amsterdam, may very well not fly in many places in the united States. In order for any government to restrict access to any country that flaunts its standards, it would have to disconnect itself from the internet. It is not possible to build walls around a country and still have all the good benifits of the internet still available. Is it a bad thing for a group of children to be able to become electronic pen-pals with another group of students in Malaysia, or Russia? Do we not think that personal relationships with people from another culture helps personalize our understanding of their cultures? I think many wars could have been avoided in the past if each side knew each other better. How can someone claim that "all russians are evil" when they have a personal relationship with Ivan in St. Petersburg? For better or worse, the technology is now out there. The world will always be smaller than it once was. We are no longer limited in our circle of friends by distance or time. (Time could indeed be an issue if one were attempting to place a phone call to someone in Paris from Dallas. Many people don't want to talk at 4am their time.) We are also not limited by the delays and expense of postage. I've met good people around the world through electronic communications who have points of view that I would probably never have considered. Again I ask, "Where is the media?" Why is the censorship of individuals a good thing? Don't come crying to me when you find, a few years down the road that this camel's nose has snuck into the tent with its bad breath, prelediction to spit, and no potty training. Since this message is being transmitted electronically, I feel that it is my moral duty to include the following so this message will fall under the purview of the act I so abhor. Shit, Piss, Cunt, Fuck, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Teats. There they are. Come and get me Big Brother. =end of article= This article was digitally signed with PGP so as to further aid prosecutors. A signed document is hard to deny. amp <0003701548(a)mcimail.com> <alan.pugh(a)internetmci.com> PGP Key = 57957C9D February 10, 1996 15:23 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMRz+6YdTfgZXlXydAQG2qgf+Omae9/yVYvcyX1ADp6mmSHQJlQJ3qS4C AnT4VK4AepDHnqrh7gVsNPQB58QAWekY4IZBGws0mdxDQF9h3q8+pu+CNEFB2CDo Zi24IqjbCD2wYnovPOAZVmppOCoD0Au6XdUPdY2rLN/AEqo7H4H3RefTXDozu1J6 9QTOytuwLhaSlQ6BeBi2XhTrKFM7g1EtpA8O+B2tEOqvghQgq9f5SeY2kOY+5792 RY4EKlhcGIeT95pevnoQFPWTQA5wJghpXD1D4gfg7hULDZM1ZXLZRHF+XxlQImgZ SrxISrE1kDxlwHe4BYM4WXPH3OU0Gj4H9pH2J0YZA5H5pZS90u7mwA== =aNzy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- #!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL $m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa 2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length$n&~1)/2)

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POINTERS: 02 08 96 Edupage
by James M. Cobb 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Friend, 02 08 96 Edupage includes-- COPYRIGHT IN THE DIGITAL AGE (European Film Companies Alliance: "It's mine!") INTERNET USAGE POLICIES (Employees' rights: NOT!) Cordially, Jim NOTE. Archives: http://www.educom.edu Edupage dated 02 08 96 is archived under date 02 09 96.

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Re: Choices
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:05 PM 2/10/96 -0500, A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security wrote: >Gov does have the right (in fact the duty) to regulate communications >between citizens and non-citizens/sites in other lands (and if you do not >think communications with sites such as anon.penet.fi are inside the charter >of the NSA, I have this prime Florida land - we're in the dry season now 8*). Needless to say, I disagree. Government does not possess ANY "rights." Merely powers. Secondly, the Constitution says NOTHING about the authority of the Federal government to "regulate" (or, for that matter, even merely MONITOR) communications cross-border. Sounds to me like you're arguing the statist line. Jim Bell Klaatu Burada Nikto.

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Re: China
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:18 PM 2/10/96 +0530, you wrote: > Remember that starting this year, satellites of Iridium and other >LEO satellite projects will start to go up, spreading bandwidth around >the world. How will the Chinese government build a firewall against >satellites? Say, for instance orbiting anonymous remailers with pgp? Will >happen some day. Remember that much of censorship, as with cryptography, is economics. With Iridium satellite time at $3/minute, charged to the recipient, it's well within the financial means of a Banned Pharmaceutical Wholesaler, and well outside the financial means of an average Chinese university student, partly because the Chinese economy has much lower price and wage structures than the major Western economies do. On the other hand, renting a few gigabytes per day of satellite broadcast time to broadcast isn't out of the question, or at least renting a few tens of megabytes per day wasn't out of the question a couple years ago :-) On the other hand, as you say, if the Chinese government tries a Tien-an-men in cyberspace, the students _will_ have better tanks. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com / billstewart(a)attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs Pager +1-408-787-1281

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Re: Privacy Without Tears
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>If everyone not only has a link to these pages in text, but also has their >>"PGP secured!", or similar little graphic on their pages, linked to these >>sites as well, it would save a lot of people a lot of redundant explaining >>and it would help spread the word about PGP like wildfire to the masses. > >I like that a lot! A nifty graphic would be the old-fashioned engraving of a >padlock on the O'Reilly book about PGP. ViaCrypt's PGP version for Windows has a more modern-looking padlock; the icon I use for the Program Manager group I keep PGP, Private Idaho, etc. in is the Safe icon that's one of Program Manager's builtins. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com / billstewart(a)attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs Pager +1-408-787-1281

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Privacy Without Tears
by Bruce A. Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Since it wouldn't do me any good to write code (I've _seen_ my code, it's not pretty), I'm writing in English instead. :-) I've started work on what I currently call Privacy Without Tears, a guide to PGP and related programs pitched specifically at a novice audience. I would appreciate comments, particularly in the fact-checking line (more on this in a moment). I'd also appreciate anyone who feels like it passing the URL I'll give in a moment on to crypto newbies and seeing if they can follow the instructions and get good results. So far, I've only written an intro and a section on PGP. Now I'm working on a section on DOS and Windows front ends. I'm only discussing software I can actually use on my own system, so explaining to me about the merits of tools for other OSes won't do any good. But if you have useful information about such, I'd be happy to link to your pages. Likewise, I'm deliberately not getting in a number of technicalities up front - only in the last section, for instance, will I explain about IDEA's role in PGP keys. This is for _novices_, the people who have as much need to protect their privacy as any of us but fewer clues. One thing I could really use is a short - paragraph-length - discussion of probable times to crack keys of various lengths. The URL (for the moment): http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce/privacy/privacy.html Thanks in advance for constructive comments! Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEQAwUBMR0Phn3AXR8sjiylAQGkMgfRAcH5qowi9wG/4o2cYR0qwlNXZM92TLJJ G8Klpk//5Hd3q5PAdz6QOL3ct7QYhlpjlT/UYrJ/dhjpIxWX6jmgxM0jTDdDr1q8 qXcWwzNMz5d1V0z+95NkD7hCOV7inP5ycqFRRPtAgF4LCiT4V0GrbaTLaqKbi7G+ 1YXo6ginBOjQ8WABRtpwIgGbxmJPQmTue5SqTX6zuGhTGrounCGShYZKT8ViLqtl swtD6sG6TPCAOpAgeV8TOPnJEKdbd9ASHAFdEN63DnTHNgjUWLo2bO3VcblRHVjf 1fi+UkeEF/yYXD4nryhhA8E95GUqBdIasN2E8J214Wp4Qoo= =5fO2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Reasons in support of crypto-anarchy WAS Re: Why am I (fwd)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It's hard to tell the difference between "Assasination Politics" and government-sponsored provocateurism, a well-documented practice to stigmatize anarchical and anti-authoritarian ventures. However, it takes guts and thick skin to advocate overthrow of authority, knowing that reasonable people will think you're a nut seeking celebrity martyrdom. Happily for the careers of agent-and-anarchist back-stabbing back-scratchers, there is no easy way to know for sure which is which, or even if there's any difference when the media juggernauts are provocateuring both roles for melodramatic infotainment.

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