- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

PGPfone list
by Jim Ray 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: jmr(a)shopmiami.com Date: Thu Dec 05 22:54:33 1996 [My apologies for cross-posting this, but it's important IMO.] The list owners have given me permission to post an announcement of a list for those of us who wish to play with the new PGP-fone software. This is a list solely for the discussion of PGP-fone. It is to be low volume and on topic, with none of the garbage that the cypherpunks are presently enduring (my killfile filter gets enough of a daily workout as it is). Usual rules apply on the posting of private mail without the other author's consent, polite discussion, etc. Violators of these policies will likely be *truly* "censored," (booted off the list, *and* unable to post). To subscribe to the list, use the web based gateway at: http://www.rivertown.net/cgi-bin/lwgate [To prevent abuse, your subscription will be verified.] PGPfone for Macintosh and Windows 95/NT can be obtained at these locations: US/Canada users [like PGP, PGPfone falls under ITAR export restrictions.]: http://web.mit.edu/network/pgpfone International users: http://www.ifi.uio.no/pgp/PGPfone.shtml Current versions are: Macintosh - version 1.0b7 Windows 95/NT - version 1.0b2 These versions DON'T talk to previous versions. Presently, the PGPfone Owner's manual is a MAC file and unfortunately it won't open in the Windows environment. Those of us who are MAC-impaired can use the on-line manual available at: http://www.pgp.com/products/fone_01.cgi There is also a "PGP Fone Registry" at the Rivertown.net PGP-users site (which is quite extensive and worth a look for other crypto-related stuff). At this site, people willing to test PGP Fone with others can leave their names and e-mail addresses, along with their area code and local telephone exchange (first three digits) which indicates willingness to be contacted via e-mail to possibly set up a time and place to use PGP Fone with each other. It's very basic right now. You can access it at: http://pgp.rivertown.net/pgp-fone and follow the instructions to sign up. The biggest problem folks have had with PGP Fone is finding someone else to use it with. This site can help alleviate this. Rivertown.net also has a fine PGPfone icon by Mike Acklin. P.S. I concur with Peter Trei on the Forbes ASAP big issue. Try to find a Forbes subscriber and read it all. He left out one author, cypherpunk Bill Frezza. I liked Bill's article best of all. IMO, Buckley and Paglia unwittingly proved in their ASAP articles that it's much easier to fashionably label yourself a "libertarian" than it is to actually *be* one. JMR Regards, Jim Ray DNRC Minister of Encryption Advocacy One of the "legitimate concerns of law enforcement" seems to be that I was born innocent until proven guilty and not the other way around. -- me Please note new 2000bit PGPkey & address <jmr(a)shopmiami.com> PGP id.A7D63DA9 98 1F 39 BA 93 86 B4 F5 57 52 64 0E DA BA 2C 71 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEPAwUBMqeZATUhsGSn1j2pAQFFOQfQzF0pGgGKt9/VR44TzGxAq9yk7dUs0JPK 4G9TIRePcnZ+IYqBFiqGaCws9EGrK/1ztv7ryl0FstROmldTxFj197lSsEysPMQb M8DUbKsDbsLYlNJNCFJkYz9tihM5w5h1YNj4jPwjec3Js/Bh4T3ab6d+h4Ax1ku0 wsWlVv0keP2yXhcFFHPRkkyXmPtTL31/zkGKkwU9dY/efYSf4GeIApfvnYXzInFD vraFSVd0Qi+8py86RZBauKO/vt7mj9r32HCZevPE89AUDVgVnb9Y5SeT9J0f2pXT qHrpDEguBofvsU/q436Vgla+wrHme2rNYqEPqDslSkNzgg== =FH37 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

V-Chip
by sasha1＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I assume that this chip works on some password scheme.. Here's a little excerpt from a letter sent by a Cybermind list member Robert A. Kezelis to Mr. President: >3) V-chip technology is cute, but ineffective. You realistically suggest >(with a straight face, no less) that a parent who probably has trouble >programing a VCR (which sits on the TV and suffers from a constant flashing >12:00am) can outfox and hide the proper command from a computer-literate, >intuitive, aggresive and creative teen? Surely you jest. Ask your >daughter and her schoolmates, not some older advisor whose experience with >teen hackers is limited. The V-chip is like telling a child, you can go >into the candy store, but don't open this jar when I walk to the other >side of the store! > Some kids also have friends. Friends whose parent are more permissive then theirs, and friends who are smarter than their parents. Kids whose V-Chip has 1-1-1 rating allowing them to watch nothing but selected episodes of Barney demoing new versions of V-Chip, may be embarrassed to invite anybody over. Kids with 5-5-5 rating will be the New Cool Guys. Now if your child wants to go over to Billy's, you may want to call Billy's mom and ask her what her V-Chip settings are. Do not forget to ask her when was the last time she beat Billy at any computer game... One restriction that I could possibly consider for my child, would be a 'crap' factor. I think it's a much more serious danger to the young americans; IMO, watching baseball and psychic idiocy is much less natural and a lot more harmful to a young mind than seeing a picture of a breast. This factor is the reason why I restrict *myself* from watching most of TV programs. ----------------------------------------------------------- | Alexander Chislenko | sasha1(a)netcom.com | Cambridge, MA | | Home page: http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html | -----------------------------------------------------------

1 0

Re: Regarding employee rights on company equipment
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:32 AM 2/9/96 -0800, lunaslide wrote: >A day or so ago, I reasoned incorrectly that university students and >employees were free to encrypt mail they sent through their student or work >accounts. This was in response to a statement that the govt could retain >at least some control of internet traffic through the universities and >businesses. I would credit the person who called me on it, by I do not >remember who it was. It seems that, at least for employees, it is totally >up to the employer: > >>From Edupage Feb 8, 1996, > >INTERNET USAGE POLICIES >Neal J. Friedman, a specialist in online computer law, says that "employees >are under the misapprehension that the First Amendment applies in the >workplace -- it doesn't. Employees need to know they have no right of >privacy and no right of free speech using company resources." According to >Computerworld, a number of employers are adopting Internet usage polcies, >such as one developed at Florida Atlantic University: < >http://www.fau.edu/rinaldi/net/netpol.txt > (Computerworld 5 Feb 96 p55) I don't think this issue is as simple as Friedman wants to make it sound. (Then again, he may have been quoted out of context.) In any event, what he said is true, modulo explicit or implicit contracts to the contrary, rules about union activity, common-law privacy rights, Title VII, the ECPA and similar state statutes, and so forth. The quote sounds like a self-serving statement intended to scare people into believing that their rights are as limited as the speaker wishes they were. That's not so unusual, but it's not always useful to get legal advice from someone who sees their interests as adverse to yours. (We've gone over the "I think the law regarding employers rights vis-a-vis employees rights *should* be 'x'" ground a zillion times, and another rehash seems unproductive. I don't intend to respond to messages along those lines.) -- "The anchored mind screwed into me by the psycho- | Greg Broiles lubricious thrust of heaven is the one that thinks | gbroiles(a)netbox.com every temptation, every desire, every inhibition." | -- Antonin Artaud |

1 0

Re: Fair Credit Reporting Act and Privacy Act
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:25 AM 2/5/96 -0500, you wrote: >Probably the easiest way of ensuring that personal information isn't >wantonly distributed by credit agencies or (anyone else) is to update >our Privacy Act - which is ridiculously out-of-date and badly in need of >being re-written. It is also hampered by its apparent lack of teeth. The parts of the Privacy Act that I remember are all restrictions on _government_ actions, not private actions. It's an important distinction; even though TRW may know way too much about you, it's all information that you voluntarily released to somebody, unlike data that the government requires you to give them. And, yes, it's out-of-date and toothless. ... >If the Privacy Act were rewritten to be as strict as the BDSG, businesses >would have a (mandatory) legal requirement to: ... >o Ensure that databases are *not* being maintained which describe the > characteristics of individuals (buying habits, income, property > ownership, etc) wantonly propagated by marketing (direct mail, > telemarketing, etc) companies. If you're going to propose laws, you should not only think about whether they'll do what you want, but also about what else they'll do, how they'll be enforced, what are the side effects of that enforcement, etc. How is the government going to ensure _non_existence of databases? If I'm a prosecutor, and claim that you _might_ have personal data about somebody on your machines beyond the Politically Correct Data Elements, can I get a search warrant for _all_ your databases? What about that encrypted file on your PC at work? Such things have been used to hold personal data before (even by police like the LAPD or Stasi.) No thanks. If you want to require that a database exists, then a business can demonstrate that they have it by producing it (though proving whether or not in really includes all transactions is still difficult.) On the other hand, if you don't make the law adequately enforceable, you're encouraging violation and selective enforcement. >o the promotion of the use & implementation of encryption - including > the possibility of ITAR being reduced or eliminated for the export > of encryption products Yes! GAKed encryption, to be sure - once there's a requirement that you be able to produce your data for the government, they'll discover that they need guaranteed access to data that would otherwise be guaranteed inaccessible by strong encryption. >o reduced propagation of personal information A much stronger way to increase privacy is to eliminate one of the most popular unique keys used by these databases - the Social Security Number which the government requires you to give almost anybody who gives you money. Give each taxpayer a pile of taxid numbers (either cryptographically related, or just randomly generated and stored in a big tax-department database) so you can use a different taxid for everyone who needs one, making it impossible for anybody but the government to correlate them. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com / billstewart(a)attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs

1 0

Re: What is really happening in Oregon
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:29 PM 2/9/96 -0800, Joe Zychik wrote: >Excerpted from today's Zychik Chronicle > >The Los Angeles Times writes: "rivers raged through Oregon" [should say >"Oregon taxpayers sunk by Oregon government"]. "the regions worst flooding >in three decades" [should say, "State of Oregon has been wasting tax payer >money for 30 years"]. "At least 3 deaths were attributed to the flooding >[should say, "State of Oregon kills 3 more innocent citizens"]. "13 counties >were declared a disaster area [should say, "State of Oregon has been >screwing these 13 counties especially"] "And the worst is yet to come" [the >citizens will blame the weather]. "Rats by the hundreds started crawling out >of Portland's sewers" [should say, "The parents of Oregon's politicians and >bureaucrats came forward."] You need to cut back on your medication (or increase it). The water damage in oregon has little to do with the action or inaction of government. It has much more to do with a strange set of weather patterns in Oregon. (Mainly a whole lot of snow and ice followed by heavy rains.) Right now the weather here is just creating lots of land slides and flooding. The worst seems over for now. Time to wait for the water to recede and then clean up the mess. How this can be blamed on the Oregon State government is beyond me... What it has do do with Cypherpunks, I have no idea... (Not even much of a conspiracy there.) Sounds like someone just wnats to rant. --- Alan Olsen -- alano(a)teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon "I, Caligula Clinton... In the name of the Senate and the people of Rome!" - Bill Clinton signing the CDA with the First Amendment bent over.

1 0

CPU_nks
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

SciAm, March, 1996 "Privacy and Data Collection on the Net." There are still a few eccentric souls who gamely try to hold on to what lingering shreds of anonymity they possess. They never fill out questionnaires; they give their Social Security numbers only to their bank and to their broker. They encrypt their e-mail; they bypass the supermarket discount card that links identity to purchases; they pay cash for medical procedures they do not want known; and they wait patiently for e-cash to become a reality. Joining these hardy individualists are privacy advocates such as EPIC and Net groups like cypherpunks which believe in untraceable communications and in the technology needed to achieve it. CPU_nks

1 0

Re: IPG hoax?
by Wink Junior 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Arley Carter sez: >Fess up guys. You are either: >1. A team of undergrads or graduate students conducting an "exploit". >2. A Detweiller tentacle. Dr. FC ? >3. The return of Alice D'nonymous ? >4. The reason the coderpunks lists was started. I must admit that after the first day I've been wondering if this whole IPG thing isn't some kind of deep troll or early April Fool's joke. Has anyone actually spoken on the phone with IPG or confirmed their existence in any way? For the record, I'd like to state that I saw their ad posted in comp.security.firewalls and forwarded an edited copy (technical details only) to the list, but if this turns out to be a hoax of some sort, I was and am not a willing participant. Would IPG Sales please post an address and phone number so we can confirm the company exists? Wink

1 0

"This is not Coderpunks--we don't need no steenking cryptography!"
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:51 PM 2/21/96, Peter Monta wrote: >Cypherpunks used to be a place where I could fairly reliably see >high-SNR commentary from real cryptographers/number theorists. >Now we have the blind replying to the blind's obfuscatory >nonsense, and the useful posts take some effort to find. I believe this is why the "real cryptographers/number theorists" are now supposed to post to "Coderpunks." While I agree with your points, it now appears that this is the way things are dividing up: * Coderpunks -- number theory, DES, Haval, C/C++/Java, IETF and TCP/IP stuff, digital signatures, crypto libraries and APIs, Diffie-Hellman, BSAFE, RSAREF, etc. * Cypherpunks -- nuclear bomb triggers, why women are more free under the will of Allah than in Western decadent societies, movie reviews, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Zimmermann, Zambian newspapers, alien bases in Antarctica, Himalayan treks, etc. Coderpunks is a membership-only list, with a list.cop who approves membership and who expels those who post inappropriate material. Cypherpunks is an open list, with no one ever having been expelled. So, if anyone asks "What does this have to do with cryptography?!?!," point out to him that this is Cypherpunks, not Coderpunks! "Cryptography? You want _crytography_? This is not _Coderpunks_! We don't have to show you no steenking cryptography!" --Tim Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we 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: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

3 2

Schneier Attacks
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Schneier says in a March SciAm brief on Kocher's timing attack: "In theory there are other attacks. You can measure power consumption or heat dissipation of a chip; timing is just one way."

4 3

"consent of the governed"
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I was musing over this phrase, "a government rules by consent of the governed" which popped up in an earlier essay on digital cash (microcurrency) I wrote here and deserves further elaboration. it seems like a basic and obvious truth on some levels, a concept held sacred by our founding fathers, but on the other hand its exact meaning has escaped precise analysis for many centuries, and in various sense our government seems to have strayed far from this promise. what does it mean? does it mean, "majority of the governed?" how exactly is consent expressed? Barlow brings up this topic in his recent "cyberspace declaration of independence" (which can clearly be criticized as out of touch with physical reality but is nevertheless compelling). the essay comes close to the major point I want to make: I believe that the phrase "a government rules with the consent of the governed" is one of those magic statements that is going to become increasingly defined by new technology. often, the clear intent of a law is not obvious until new technology is introduced that tests its meaning. for example, the "right to bear arms"-- does that mean submachinegun, handguns? what about armor-piercing bullets? new technology is always constantly forcing a new interpretation of laws. or how about "the right to free speech" -- is cyberspace a place for "speech", or is it something where things are published? which laws apply? does it mean I am free to encrypt anything I want in any way I choose? interestingly, does the "freedom from illegal search and seizure" apply to cryptographic encoding? in other words, is there such a thing as search and seizure of bits (plaintext) in encoded messages? these are all questions that have various answers (and I'm not really too interested in debating them), but which in one sense anything besides what a court decides is not relevant. and most of these above questions could take decades to sort out in courts, if ever. === anyway, my main point here: I believe that "a government rules with the consent of the governed" is a phrase that is going to be tested in the next few years, and more closely defined, because the emergence of new cyberspatial technology. it seems to me that libertarians would tend to say, "oh yeah, wouldn't it be great if that were true. no one ever asked ME if I wanted to be in this system". well, what if there was an actual overt choice of government that when on with the citizen? what if we really could choose our government? would be tend to believe that all governments are corrupt inherently, or could new systems based on voluntary cooperation from the start work? in a sense, any government that uses force on its populace is violating a charter rule, (if it was one), that a government rules by the consent of the governed. if some segment of the populace is resisting this government, then obviously there is no consent among that sliver. all this raises the question of how much a government can be split up over a population. what is the "granularity" of government? to date, governments are based on geographic region. they are often circumscribed by various geographic features such as oceans or continents. but would it be possible to construct a governing system in which geographic location is irrelevant? such that anyone, anywhere, can pick whatever government they want? surely if such a thing is possible, cyberspace comes the closest to facilitating it. but it would not really be a government in the current sense of the word. === in my digital cash essay, I introduced a radical new interpretation of the phrase "consent of the governed" that went largely unnoticed but deserves further thought. in it, I proposed that "consent of the governed" is measured by whether people pay their taxes to a government. in other words, not paying taxes is a basic test of whether an individual does not subscribe to a particular government system. there are other obvious tests such as civil disobedience, but I believe this one is going to serve as the basic operative test of the future. this is radical for the following reason: today supposedly a government has the authority to coerce "inhabitants" to pay their taxes and punish them if they don't. interestingly, our whole country was started as a sort of tax revolt, and yet today our taxes are arguably just as onerous and oppressive as any other country's. it is a heresy within government circles to propose that citizens should have a choice in paying taxes. "we could never permit it. it would never work". "nobody would pay them". but is that to say, admittedly, "we do not have the consent of the governed"? I believe that digital cash will give rise to the ability to have completely "black" economic systems on scales far larger than ever before practical. what this means is that anyone who wants to can simply "opt out" of being seen by the existing government in their economic transactions. I think this may actually lead to "underground governments" in which people voluntarily subscribe to certain communities and their "laws" while at the same time opting out of participation in the "overt" system they are geographically constrained to. hence "we could never permit it" said by bureacrats may be true, but not relevant-- their permission has nothing to do with what technology permits. "it would never work" may actually be tested outright by new technology and systems of mass cooperation (in a sense, the basic point of government) developed in cyberspace. in any case, I do believe Barlow has some very important points and that we are on the verge of new forms of government that remove many of the nagging difficulties of earlier human models. much of this innovation will center around new definitions/explorations of the basic concept that "a government rules by the consent of the governed", and the approach to collection of dues, or taxes, and the way that they are allocated based on group decision processes, will be a chief area of experimentation and new approaches.

2 2