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Re: Milgram & Authority
by dmandl＠lehman.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Duncan Frissell <frissell(a)panix.com> > > Milgram, Stanley > -------------------------------- > [...] Milgram took the results as > proof that ordinary people will inflict pain on innocent people when > commanded by an authoritative figure. I would agree, but I'd add an important qualifier: "in this country" (or "in this world," or whatever). I think it's important to keep in mind exactly how obedience to authority is inculcated in people from birth. _I_ don't think it's inborn. The goal should be breaking this pattern and, if it's too late for adults, at least try to raise kids to think for themselves and not follow orders so unquestioningly. --Dave.

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Re: message splitting for better mixing?
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Miller > > The idea: > > 1) write sender-side code to split message into N parts and send each > part through a different remailer chain. > > 2) decrypt the parts as they arrive as per normal encrypted remailer > messages. > > 3) write receiver-side code to detect "a part" and stuff it in a file > until the remaining related parts arrive. When all related parts > have arrived, present the complete message to receiver. Here is a program I found in the usenet archives which will do some of the splitting and merging features. Note that the merge is smart in that you just cat the pieces together and process them. The main feature of the prog is that you can reconstruct even with a few missing pieces, necessary because of the unreliability of remailer email. I don't think the splitting is cryptographically strong, but each piece could be separately encrypted if desired. > Path: ghost.dsi.unimi.it!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!newsflash.concordia.ca!clyde.concordia.ca!altitude!mirkwood.CAM.ORG!hebrais > From: hebrais(a)mirkwood.CAM.ORG (Philippe Hebrais) > Newsgroups: alt.sources > Subject: shade -- split a file with shadows > Message-ID: <hebrais.0xu4(a)mirkwood.CAM.ORG> > Date: 13 Dec 92 07:57:05 GMT > Organization: Secte des adorateurs des semiconducteurs > Lines: 675 > X-Newsreader: MeNews 2.8.0 > > > SSSSS HH HH AAA DDDD EEEEEEE > SS SS HH HH AA AA DD DD EE > SSS HH HH AA AA DD DD EE > SSS HH HH AA AA DD DD EE > SSS HHHHHHH AAAAAAA DD DD EEEE > SSS HH HH AA AA DD DD EE > SSS HH HH AA AA DD DD EE > SS SS HH HH AA AA DD DD EE > SSSSS HH HH AA AA DDDD EEEEEEE > > `shade' is a file splitting and merging utility. It takes a large > file and splits it into uniformly sized blocks. It can also output > extra blocks (called shadows). These shadows can be used to recover > missing sections if they get corrupted or it they are lost. With a > single shadow, `shade' can recover ANY single missing block. As many > shadows are needed as there are blocks missing. If too few blocks > and shadows are available, nothing can be recovered. > > For example, foo.bar (259042 bytes) is split into 5 sections > of 45000 bytes, 1 section of 34042 bytes and 2 shadows of > 45000 bytes. Each of these 8 parts is sent through email. > Even if any two of these eight parts gets lost, the original > foo.bar can be reconstructed. > > `shade' is a simple application of the chinese remainder theorem > for polynomials with coeficients modulo two. For more information > see the comments at the beginning of project.c. > > > > SAMPLE USAGE > > Split "bar" (111042 bytes) into 20000 byte chunks and output 2 > shadows. All these parts will be uuencoded and output to > foo.uu.001, foo.uu.002, etc. > > % shade -u -k 2 -l 20000 -o foo bar > [001] [002] [003] [004] [005] [006] [aaa] [aab] Done. > > Merge these parts back together: > > % rm foo.uu.003 foo.uu.005 > % cat foo.uu.* | shade -m -u > Merging bar (111042 bytes) > Got section 4 (20000 bytes) > Got section 1 (20000 bytes) > Got section 2 (20000 bytes) > Got section 6 (11042 bytes) > Got shadow 1 (20000 bytes) > Got shadow 2 (20000 bytes) > > Missing: [003] [005] > > Recovering 2 sections: > [001] [002] [aaa] [004] [aab] [006] > > > > DISTRIBUTION > > Shade is copyright Philippe Hebrais 1992. You have the permission > to use this code is anyway you feel appropriate as long as you give > credit where it is due. There is no warranty of any kind. I am not > responsible for any damage caused directly or indirectly by this > program. > > > AUTHOR > , > Philippe Hebrais <hebrais(a)mirkwood.cam.org> > > -- > Philippe Hebrais hebrais(a)mirkwood.cam.org > Voix: (514)731-9146 uunet!philmtl!altitude!mirkwood!hebrais

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spy satellites
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Two points re the spy satellite thread. First, spy satellites want to be close to what they are looking at, so they can see it better. That means they are generally in low orbits, and low orbits are fast orbits. Typical speeds are on the order of 10,000 mph. This means that any given spot is in view of a particular satellite for only a few minutes on each pass, and due to the earth's rotation it is hard to pass repeatedly over the same spot frequently. This means you need a large number of satellites in order to provide much coverage, and even then you will probably get snapshots at an interval of hours at best (I don't know how many satellites are flying). This is OK for military bases where you are looking at construction, ships, and other large equipment, but it is not at all adequate for tracking the movement of terrorists. Secondly, any technology which did allow the government to surveil us well enough to track the physical movements and meetings of terrorists would be far more of a threat than any Clipper chip! Offering satellite surveillance as an alternative to Clipper jumps from the frying pan into the fire, IMO. Hal

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RE: Milgram & Authority
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Duncan Frissell <frissell(a)panix.com> > The subjects were very upset during and after the experiment. Some broke > down while administering "lethal" shocks. They often cried and begged the > "researcher" to let them stop zapping the victim. I saw a documentary about this research about ten years ago, and they made a point which hasn't come up here: that Milgram, in subjecting his exper- imental subjects to such psychological stress (many were traumatized for months afterwards about what they had done) was being just as unethical, just as unfeeling and unthinking, as his experiment was designed to show his sub- jects as being. Why was Milgram willing to push his subjects to such lengths? Was his obedience to the "authority" of abstract scientific research any more defensible than his subjects' obedience to that authority? In a strained attempt to tie this thread to the list, I will point out that our own efforts to distribute cryptographic tools will be judged by their consequences, not by our hopes. We have as much responsibility as Milgram to consider the likely results if we succeed. It will be a different world, and, we hope, a better one. But some things will be worse, of that there is little doubt. We must constantly weigh the bad against the good and take actions on that basis, rather than blindly and unthinkingly seeking to push the env- elope just to see what happens. Hal

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anti-clipper t-shirt
by iplus1hope＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am amazed at the response to the anti-clipper t-shirt we created. If you still haven't received your shirt, we apologize for the delay. Since word spread around the Net, we have received hundreds of orders. A picture of the shirt was included last week in an article in The Washington Post! We have gotten orders from well-known cyber authors and an MTV veejay. I wonder if Al Gore saw it... As information has spread, it seems to have gotten a bit diluted. Here is the information. The shirt says "Don't Give Big Brother a Master Key. Terminate Clipper Now." It has a graphic of a skeleton key on a chip. The shirts are XL and black only. I can't evaluate our own work, but everybody seems to like it a lot. We accept COD orders at iplus1hope(a)aol.com ($14.50) and check orders ($12.50) at PO Box 59152 Renton, WA 98058. Thanks. Paul Clark

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VMS Anonymous Remailer/LISTSERV Software
by cfrye＠mason1.gmu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks, this sounds like a start, the only question is do I have to have root capabilities to implement this? Do you know of a LISTSERV site I might contact? *** It sounds like you would need only your own account for email access, though the amount of traffic may attract your sysop's attention :-). Or, to leave the programming running "resident", you may require root priviledges after all. If there are hooks in the listserv source code allowing it to fire whenever a new message comes in, you wouldn't. I'm sorry, it's really late -- I'm trying to say that you probably won't need root priviledges to set up the remailer if you could have a daemon-like software agent waiting for the mail to come in. There, that wasn't so hard! <YAWN> I know that in the UNIX world, users have set up remailers in Netcom accounts and university accounts without root priviledges. For a complete list of publically accessible mailing lists, which includes LISTSERV's, look in the newsgroup news.answers and find the eight-part posting entitled something like "Guide to Publically Accessible Mailing Lists". I used the search term "Mailing List" and found it after a few tries. If you don't have access to Netnews, mail me and I'll get them for you. One LISTSERV location I know of is news-admin(a)auvm.american.edu. Yeah, it's an Internet address, but there should be a human on the other end. I wish I could help technically, but I hope this information gets you started on a successful project. Don't hesitate to ask if you think I could help out. g'night! Curt

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PGP Question:
by Jim Sewell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I've looked in the docs for the answer but it is successful in evading me. My question: I have changed my ID string from my name to my name "-1024" and "-512" to differentiate between the different keys I have. Of course, using the -ke to do this has added a "Also known as" to my key. Since my name is the same in both and the mentioned keysizes are all that have changed I'd like to remove the AKA. Can I do this? If so how? Thanks, Jim -- Tantalus Inc. Jim Sewell Amateur Radio: KD4CKQ P.O. Box 2310 Programmer Internet: jims(a)mpgn.com Key West, FL 33045 C-Unix-PC Compu$erve: 71061,1027 (305)293-8100 PGP via email on request. 1K-bit Fingerprint: 8E 14 68 90 37 87 EF B3 C4 CF CD 9A 3E F9 4A 73 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLb19ClZo7sR6KUT1AQFQwwP8Cg1tHgG3vSOO07YtGOjrJcgKWe/9Pyr3 IKtIRV0msg8pp1RrTwp/rDiWi11DG3VxAYWbZZ8Fnf8Y5prPRCwL5vGs2WZqFoXi rMSQCxlacUBt4hbzeQQ9IzzYgA8+9YTP9RIVY9k+sd1iu9tsIcP8yjPDJ9jcBgpb BEyCWAPDpXQ= =XMdl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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VMS remailer?
by VACCINIA＠UNCVX1.OIT.UNC.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- For people wanting to get more remailers going there seems to be a serious apathy for helping people get them going. After posting that I had come into possesion of a VAX account from which I might run a remailer and then asking for some help, I got all of ZERO responses (except from people asking me to help them if I did manage to get any information). Since I had already checked out the available code which only seems to work on UNIX accounts, perhaps someone might inform me that one cannot run a remailer from a VMS account. I assume this is the case since no one deigned to answer. Pretty bogus. Scott G. Morham !The First, Vaccinia(a)uncvx1.oit.unc.edu ! Second PGP Public Keys by Request ! and Third Levels ! of Information Storage and Retrieval !DNA, ! Biological Neural Nets, ! Cyberspace -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLbyNrD2paOMjHHAhAQGy5gP/X0OgIotYPnF9+MneK9g+JGqVlhwQCZel B/Dy7Unb+c25TIjo7C3IwLzGZkst+3Lnt3SlPKUoqmpYRESiPeONZs+G1Ra6gXeD Hl/7eQFAQp+4T5medwDmp69m7gn3dMKQcVmBmSN8uZ5MN4KiaKuzExWPHNTAxWDD KpZQr2Pfcx4= =sG2o -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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prime numbers
by johnsonc＠chem.udallas.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm just wondering if anyone knows whether or not (1+4k) can be written as the sum of squares or not, and if so, what the proof of that is? Anyone care to share?? Thank you, Carrie Anne Johnson -- What? Because I kill indiscriminately? -Tom Servo

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Re: DId you ever think...
by jpp＠markv.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: uri(a)watson.ibm.com > Date: Tue, 26 Apr 1994 20:00:44 -0500 (EDT) > > jpp(a)markv.com says: > > Also, after reading Crypto '92 and '93 for a while, I am more and > > more impresed and suprised with the work that NSA put into creating > ^^^ > > DES from Lucifer. > > Surely you mean IBM? [Also a similar message which I unfortuenatly deleted so I can't credit the author :(] No, my writing ability is not in error here -- my mental model of the history of DES is what is in error. I will now update my personal model of DES development to include two steps at IBM. Lucifer -> proto-DES at IBM, and proto-DES -> DES at NSA. Learn something new every day... Since about 1977 I wondered what the 'rediscovered crypto techniques' were. Thanks! j'

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