- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Digital cash market
by frissell＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:16 PM 8/21/94 -0500, Jim Hart wrote: >At this point Duncan Frissel will regail us with some wonderful >scheme, understandable only to lawyers, that can be used to >get credit cards under aliases, perfectly legal if you >use a doubly nested corporate structure going through Aruba >and the Caymans, and the IRS and FBI don't decide to get >to get you on some technicality Duncan failed to mention. I can't recall any time I've laid out a complicated structure to avoid the privacy invaders. Most of my techniques are simple and depend merely on a willingness to not do the conventional things that other people tell you are necessary if you are to prosper. In fact, hasn't Tim May actually accused me of offering solutions that are too simple and that are not based on careful and exotic Harry Margolis sort of International Tax Planning? The many people who have gotten anonymous Visa and Mastercard credit cards for example have used the simple scheme of applying for a secured credit card in a nome de guerre. Others have opened bank accounts in convenient names that come with Visa debit cards. It is actually easier than it has ever been to obtain credit cards in names other than your own. Signet Bank is promoting it's secured credit card with TV ads. >The surprisingly large number of folks who actually do go to Frissell style >lengths is proof that there are plenty of peope who care about privacy. Gee, I wish you could convince my wife that I "go to great lengths." She always accuses me of taking the easy way out. <G> DCF "How is it that the bulk of the 'Great Unwashed' manage to stand out in the pouring rain and never get wet? Persons of all ages whine these days about how tough and boring things are even though there are more exciting and profitable things going on in the world today than ever before in human history."

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Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
by Matthew Ghio 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

pstemari(a)bismark.cbis.com (Paul J. Ste. Marie) wrote: > Mark Terka wrote: > > Not to mention the fact that without tritium, the "trigger" for nuclear > > weapons (and extremely expensive and rare at $ 100m a gram) all you have > > is a radioactive paperweight. > > The "trigger" isn't tritium. Tritium (along with lithium 6) is used > in fusion bombs. A fission-only device, ala Hiroshima or Nagasaki, > doesn't require any. > > The trigger in the center of the plutonium core is a neutron source, > polonium if memory serves correctly. Tritium is a beta emitter. A neutron source is usually a light element with a high neutron/proton ratio, coupled with an alpha emitter. I believe the Nagasaki bomb used beryllium-9. An alpha particle impacting a beryllium nucleus will fuse with it, forming carbon-12, and the binding energy will eject a neutron. I think aluminum and a few other light elements will undergo similar reactions to release neutrons in the presence of alpha particles. Polonium is primarilly an alpha emitter. It would work as part of a neutron source, but it is not a particularily good choice because its half-life is only 138.4 days (polonium-210). This makes it expensive to obtain, and impractical to store.

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Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
by jdd＠aiki.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message <199408251633.JAA16087(a)netcom4.netcom.com> Mike Duvos writes: > Uranium is not particularly radioactive, being a long lived alpha > emitter. This is true of plutonium and some other fissionable > materials as well. I can handle clad uranium or plutonium > reactor or bomb components in complete safety with no protective > clothing needed. The only hazard is from ingestion of the > material, or from accumulation of decay products such as radon in > a badly ventilated area. > > Workers in nuclear fuel fabrication facilities have been known to > use small disks of plutonium sintered into a ceramic base as > poker chips. Is this true? I mean, do you know it from personal experience? I was told by what I considered to be reliable sources that plutonium was extremely toxic. Upon reflection, I am sure that this is the word that was used: toxic, not radioactive. By "clad", do you mean coated in lead? -- Jim Dixon

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Re: Using PGP on Insecure Machines
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > Also importantly, the user interfaces for PGP simply suck as it > > stands, making people like Tim uninterested in going through the .... > At the risk of repeating myself, what's the problem with wrapping PGP in > a shell script? Works for me - see a previous mailing, complete with > wrapper scripts. I can send either encrypted or just signed email > without especially noticing it. Wrapping PGP in shell scripts is only useful for people who use shells, and a lot of people either use GUIs instead (often non-extensible ones), or keep their PGP on PCs at home rather than their networked Unixen at work where they get their mail. This means that to use PGP, they need to do things like kermit from home to work, read their mail, save it in files, kermit the files to their PC, PGP-decrypt and read them on the PC, etc. It's a bit easier if people have remote-scriptable terminal emulators on their PCs, which let the Unix end run a script to save the file and download it and maybe fire up PGP on the PC, but it still feels annoyingly like work, and if your Unix box can download files to your PC and run them, it can run pgp-steal-keys just about as well as real PGP. Similarly, if you've got TCP/IP running on your PC, whether through SLIP or directly, you've still got a security risk to worry about. You can reduce these problems by running a _real_ operating system on your PC, but it's tougher to run your favorite applications that way, and you still need to either run all your mail down to the PC, which isn't practical for lots of people, or explicitly forward the stuff down there from your main mail system. There's another transparency problem, at least for reading encrypted mail - you either need to type in your passphrase each time, which is annoying and increases exposure somewhat, or you need to leave it aorund in environment variables, etc., which also increase exposure. On the other hand, a shell script approach can be just fine for signature checking, as long as your mailreader has a painless interface, since there isn't much security risk from having PGP on a machine without your real secret key and passphrase there. There's still some risk - if the machine is shared with other people, someone may be able to replace PGP with pgp-cc:-kgbvax or pgp-nsa-sig-verify - but it's a start. Bill # Bill Stewart AT&T Global Information Solutions, aka NCR Corp # 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 Phone 1-510-484-6204 fax-6399 # email bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart(a)attmail.com # ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465

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Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
by thad＠pdi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Re: Nuclear Weapons Material >> Roy M. Silvernail says: >> Plutonium oxide has a reputation for causing eventual lung cancer when >> inhaled in microgram quantities. But if the plutonium metal is sintered >> into a ceramic, it's not loose and breathable. I can't say how >> otherwise toxic it might be, but I'd expect it to be similar to other >> heavy metals. So the poker chips sound pretty safe. They'd be safe unless the pot got really big. I recall hearing a radio show in which some nuclear engineer was saying that such-and-such and incident couldn't have really gone critical, because when that happens, it starts to glow sort of bluish color, and you feel heat as if you were standing in front of a really big oven. The way it sounded, I got the impression that unintended criticalities did happen now and then. Thad Beier Pacific Data Images 408)745-6755 thad(a)pdi.com

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Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
by jdd＠aiki.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message <199408251812.NAA00474(a)zoom.bga.com> Jim choate writes: > I would like to request some reference on the use of Uranium in the casing > of a shell or round. The casing gets thrown out on the ground (by both > aircraft and tanks) when the round goes off. There is no reason to use > anything other than brass or steel for this. There is some confusion in terminology here. The brass case is indeed discarded when the round is fired. Byt 'casing' he means the exterior of the warhead. The word 'round' is used for both the warhead+gunpowder+brass and then for the warhead itself. Larger artillery pieces do not use a brass shell case at all. The round is loaded, and then the powder is rammed in after it. > I can find no reference any U-core round being HE or otherwise carrying a > charge. In all cases that I am aware of and can find reference to it is simply > a KE attack on the target where the by products of the impact bounce around > inside the target grinding up whatever is in there. I believe that this is true, except that the 'products of the impact' are drops of metal and what they do is worse than grinding something up. -- Jim Dixon

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Re: Using PGP on Insecure Machines (fwd)
by chen＠intuit.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> [ On Knuth no longer reading his mail ] > > > He's also trying to complete his "Art of Computer Programming" series... > > > > Is Volume IV out yet? My I-III still await the promise of the Intro... > > Not that I know of. A recent Computer Literacy newsletter has an interview with Knuth in which he says (if I recall correctly) that he plans to complete vols. IV and V by 1998, whereupon he will begin work on a revised edition of vol. I. He's now emeritus at Stanford so that he can write full-time. -- Mark Chen chen(a)netcom.com 415/329-6913 finger for PGP public key D4 99 54 2A 98 B1 48 0C CF 95 A5 B0 6E E0 1E 1D

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Are RSA licenses fungible?
by paul＠poboy.b17c.ingr.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I'm developing some software for use in psychiatric research; basically, about 20 field sites will run the software, collect data, and modem it back to a mothership central site. The encryption & security needs are evident, and one of the main reasons to meet these needs is that the doctors involved perceive that they might be liable for leaks. Code based on Pr0duct Cypher's PGP Tools would do exactly what I want done The good doctors' general fear of liability means that I can't expose them to the risk of unlicensed use of RSA's patents (even though I think those patents are questionable, my job is to not get my clients involved with that question.) So.. if I buy 20 licenses of ViaCrypt PGP, then proceed to use PGP 2.6-based code in my applications, does that constitute a legitimate solution? - -Paul - -- Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG | Demand that your elected reps support the perobich(a)ingr.com | Constitution, the whole Constitution, and Not speaking for Intergraph. | nothing but the Constitution. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLlyusKfb4pLe9tolAQHH6gP/cA/UwqpKqIDXv4ztBkUzyvLPypOUWRYB OoYGcE/AZF7vO1fgvkObZgwP59QC1Z0fsVU+lNUVgW8qIfadcwb0awBHcooQZ3OL 4d4cX9oD0ARxOrFoA4lFBU97k3lBXa+szyBD+hN2qyIxXUvHPPn5SZcZGYb7swMf zHfDONdqnq8= =FwPl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Spoofing Nuclear Weapons and PGP
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by dichro(a)tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Mikolaj Habryn) on Thu, 25 Aug 5:51 PM >not really certain. *shrug* sorry. Read some books on >it - the amount of literature which should be >classified but is freely available is mind-boggling. To tie this back to crypto and technology: Under a sub-sub-sub-contract I once worked on some phony CAD drawings for the nuclear weapons production process, plotting false info that still appears in popular books, some of which has been posted here. The docs were then encrypted and stegonagraphied for authenticity. We were told that they were turned loose on the market for this product in other countries. I don't know if the USG was involved, there no security clearances. It may have been a commercial scam. Also, growing up not to far from LANL, I was told that kids of staff were encouraged to chat about B-this and W-that by the security people there as part of the fog around that outfit. This supports the suggestion for profligate use of PGP as a stratagem, to make it harder to tell the trivial from the other. Or is public encryption a stratagem to focus on software rather than hardware? Anybody hear anything about covert ID in new-generation CPUs, like done with supercomps? John

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Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
by Patrick Juola 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In order to cause damage, alpha emitters like plutonium must come in intimate contact with a material, such as the tissues of your lungs or bones or the inside of your favorite memory chip. A billionth of a gram of plutonium inhaled or swallowed is something to seriously worry about, but you can hold a lump of the stuff in your hand as long as it is covered with a leakproof cladding or vitrified into a ceramic. It is in this sense that plutonium is extremely toxic and hazardous to the environment, while at the same time not being particularly radioactive. Heavy shielding is not required between you and it. My understanding is that the heavy metal toxicity of Pu exceeds the radioactive toxicity by several (10?) orders of magnitude. In other words, the fact that Pu is an alpha emitter is irrelevant to the risk -- it's simply like lead poisoning only several billion times worse. Simple arithmetic yields that the amount of alpha exposure from a billionth of a gram of an alpha emitter with a half-life measured in thousands of years is infinitismal. - kitten

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