- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Warning letter from Co$. [any comments ?]
by koontz＠MasPar.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Other than the obvious, that elctronic media hasn't been shown to be covered by intellectual property, and that something that has been placed in the public domain, rightly or wrongly isn't confidential ... Is this a hoax?

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Re: who?
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

i'm sorry to hear the jpunix remailer is down for good-- why can't people learn to be more fuckin responsible! i guess this is just yet another inconvenience we can tank terrorists for and those aol-holes! anybody know the email address of the good samaritans? tia

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Re: The Good Times virus ...
by bshantz＠spry.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to the people who've sent me copies of the CIAC announcement. That should cover my needs for right now. Hopefully I can convince these people not to worry. -- brad

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Re: British Hacker Article
by pstemari＠erinet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:31 PM 1/4/95 -0500, Duncan Frissell wrote: >>From The Independent (London) Tuesday 3 January 1995 - Front Page > ... The US Defence Information >Systems Agency admitted in a private briefing, which has been confirmed, >that the hackers had affected the Department's "military readiness." "Admitted"? Probably "complained without substaniation" would be more accurate. > ... It is understood that >he invented a "sniffer" programme which searched across hundreds of >computers attached to the Internet for passwords and user names. ... If he was really behind the various password sniffers running on Netcom, etc, he has a lot of explaining to do. > ... "They contained information about >firing sites in North Korea and stuff like that. Field intelligence. He >kept detailed logs of communication traffic. ... The Korean files were on >the Girths Air Force Base computer system and therefore the could have been >accessed. ... Harumpf. Either the stuff wasn't classified, or else someone had a major security procedures breach and had classified material sitting on a computer with an uncrypted comm link. --Paul J. Ste. Marie pstemari(a)well.sf.ca.us, pstemari(a)erinet.com

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gif format in newsbytes
by an172607＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CompuServe GIF License & Royalties Raises Hackles COLUMBUS, OHIO, U.S.A., 1995 JAN 4 (NB) -- On-line giant CompuServe has sparked controversy on the Internet by offering a $1-plus-royalties license for developers to use its previously free GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image file format. CompuServe terms the fee an offer and a benefit to the on- line community, but skeptics quickly dubbed it a "GIF tax." The new fee system is based on a licensing agreement reached between CompuServe and Unisys Corp. (NYSE:UIS) in June, 1994, for use of LZW (Lempel- Zev-Welch) compression in its GIF format. Unisys has claimed a patent on LZW technology. Under the CompuServe agreement, developers who wish to operate under the on- line firm's LZW license agreement with Unisys pay a one-time fee of $1 plus a royalty of 1.5 percent or 15 cents per registered program, whichever is greater. Downloaded programs that do not get registered are not subject to the fee, nor are end-users. CompuServe announced the new fee system in various areas or "forums" of the service on December 29. The timing has led to suspicions by some that the service was not being fully honest with its members. In an open letter, Pat Clawson, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of TeleGrafix Communications Inc., called it "the online communications community's equivalent of the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor," and added: "The announcement of the CompuServe-Unisys GIF Tax on December 29, during the lull between Christmas and New Year's Day, was clearly timed to cause maximum damage while an unsuspecting public celebrated the holidays." Clawson said his firm, which developed the RIPscrip 2.0 online multimedia technology and the RIPTERM terminal program that leans heavily on the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) image format, will drop support of GIF images because of the new fee system. RIPscrip 2.0 is scheduled for release January 16. Speaking to Newsbytes, CompuServe spokesman Pierce Reid acknowledged that the release date may have been unfortunate from a public relations viewpoint, but he said it was an accident of timing, not a desire to avoid public scrutiny. Reid pointed out that it took a year and a half to hammer out a licensing agreement with Unisys Corp. (NYSE:UIS). Unisys holds a patent on the GIF format's underlying LZW compression technology. Once the agreement with Unisys was signed in June, 1994, he added, it took CompuServe another six months to arrive at a way to, as he put it, "share" the license. "Six months is not a long time to settle the details of a licensing agreement, if you know how these things work," he told Newsbytes. "We're not making any money on this. We paid a substantial fee to Unisys for the license, and we offered to share the license for the benefit of the development community as well as for ourselves and our subscribers." Reid said the license was based on the fact that CompuServe had found merit in a Unisys patent claim. CompuServe had used the patented LZW technology in its 1987 development of the GIF format, believing the technology to be in the public domain. Unisys contacted the on-line firm about its patent claim in 1993, and that eventually led to the December 29 announcement, the firm said. Commented Reid: "I've been watching the Internet, and those who are commenting are on a bell curve -- the vast majority are taking a reasonable view, but there are always those out on the extreme ends. "A number of people regard this as a real benefit. CompuServe, by requiring no money for negotiations, is saving developers from the need to waste time. There's no worrying about legal or licensing issues, and we've done that for a dollar." (Craig Menefee/19950104/Press Contact: Pierce Reid, CompuServe, 614-538-4571; Pat Clawson, TeleGrafix, 714-379-2140, Internet e-mail rip.support(a)telegrafix.com; Oliver Picher, Unisys, 215-986-5367) Unisys Seeks Royalties On GIF Algorithm BLUE BELL, PENNSYLVANIA, U.S.A., 1995 JAN 4 (NB) -- Unisys Corp. (NYSE:UIS) said it will seek royalty payments from developers of software using the Graphic Interchange Format (GIF). Unisys said it owns rights to an algorithm that is widely used in GIF tools. Oliver Picher, a spokesman for Unisys, told Newsbytes that the online service CompuServe introduced the GIF format in 1987, and incorporated the Unisys algorithm, apparently believing it was in the public domain. Unisys learned that the algorithm was used in the GIF technology about two years ago, contacted CompuServe, and in June, 1994, the companies reached an agreement under which CompuServe paid Unisys an undisclosed sum for use of the algorithm. The payment was "a reasonable amount but not an overwhelming amount," Picher said, declining to reveal the exact sum. CompuServe was the first to license the algorithm from Unisys for use in a GIF tool, Picher said, but about 100 companies have licensed it for other purposes. Picher said one other online information service has already licensed the algorithm, but could not say if it was for GIF-related use in that case. Unisys is negotiating with all the major online services for possible license agreements, Picher said. While he would not give specifics, he said the terms Unisys is seeking are "very reasonable to the point where license fees shouldn't be a barrier" to using GIF. He added that people who have GIF software on their PCs will not be affected. The same algorithm is also used in the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) graphics format, and Unisys concluded a license agreement with Aldus Corp. some time ago, Picher said. (Grant Buckler/19950104/Press Contact: Oliver Picher, Unisys, 215-986-5367) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

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British Hacker Story
by nobody＠replay.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: newsbytes(a)clarinet.com (NB-LON) Subject: London Newspaper Runs Old "Superhacker" Story 01/03/95 Date: 3 Jan 95 20:44:22 GMT LONDON, ENGLAND, 1995 JAN 3 (NB) -- As the UK started back to work today after the long Christmas and New Year shutdown, readers of the Independent newspaper were treated to the banner headline "British Boy Raided US Defense Secrets." The curious thing about the story was that none of the other nationalpapers or news wires carried any reports. On investigation, Newsbytes discovered why -- the story dates back to July of last year, and briefly resurfaced in early November on the US news wires. According to the Independent, a 16-year-old British boy has been arrested in connection with a alleged unauthorized intrusions into the US government's computers and "was able to watch secret communications between US agents in North Korea during the crisis over nuclear inspections last spring." The story is quite correct, except that the boy in question was arrested last July, when the original story broke. Commenting on the story, Peter Sommer, a leading security consultant and a senior with the Computer Research Center at the London School of Economics, said that it smacked of the British Telecom secrets case of late November,also reported in the Independent. That story, as reported by Newsbytes, turned out to be something of a non-event when the hacker, who posted details of top secret files on BT's ex-directory computer "across the Internet," turned out to be Steve Fleming, a Scottish freelance journalist who worked as a temp for BT in the summer and broke BT's own security rules by downloading files from the BT's Customer Service System (CSS) computer, then mailed them -- across the Internet -- to other people. "I'm amazed at the Independent running yet another story involving the Internet," Sommer told Newsbytes, adding that it is "a very old story. It seems that all they have to do is to work up a story about a hacking attempt, whether successful or not, and weave in a story about the Internet, and it's a headline story." Ken Young, newly installed editor of Communicate, a leading industry communications magazine in London, and a veteran of the UK communications industry for more than a decade, told Newsbytes that the story seemed a little thin. "It looks like another hacking story except that (the newspaper) has written in something about the Internet, and bingo! You've got a report that the information was accessible to 32 million users on the Internet," he said. Sommer, meanwhile, told Newsbytes that he had made his own discreet inquiries about the story with high level authorities when it broke last summer. "There are two problems with this case. Firstly, any lawyer worth his salt would invoke Section 69 of the Police & Criminal Evidence Act," he said. This Act, Sommer explained, requires that, before a computer can be considered as admissible evidence in court, the owner of the computer must issue a certificate of correct working. This, he said, could not be issued, as a casual user of a PC would be unable to make such a certification. Sommer went on to explain that the second reason that the case could be problematic for the prosecution was "that the lawyer would ask the court for full disclosure of all affected files on victim's host computers," which, since such files are almost certain to be classified in the US, could not be revealed in a British courtroom. The facts surrounding the case, as reported by Newsbytes, were that the 16-year-old -- operating under the code name of Data Stream -- was one of several who gained unauthorized access to the US defense computer network in late 1993 and early 1994 and that some files were deleted. At the time, press reports said that as many as a million passwords were compromised, and may have compromised the military readiness of the United States. The case has, Newsbytes understands, been fully investigated by the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) although details of the report of the investigation by the USAF OSI are classified. Originally, the press reports of the time speculated whether the youth would be the first under-18 to be extradited to the US to face charges. It seems that, following last summer's arrest and submission of the report to the Crown Prosecution Service that the case is being quietly shuffled into a file because of the practical problems in pursuing a prosecution.

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The NYTimes article
by nelson＠crynwr.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times article is on Nando (News and Observer)'s WWW server: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/nt/inf/01029537644.html For those who haven't seen it... -- -russ <nelson(a)crynwr.com> http://www.crynwr.com/crynwr/nelson.html Crynwr Software | Crynwr Software sells packet driver support | ask4 PGP key 11 Grant St. | +1 315 268 1925 (9201 FAX) | What is thee doing about it? Potsdam, NY 13676 | What part of "Congress shall make no law" eludes Congress?

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Re: Anonymous payment scheme
by L. McCarthy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The Dalai Lama writes: > I know that in Delaware it is illegal for a merchant to request ID when > you pay by credit card. I'm not sure if this is wide spread or just > local. As I recall there was something of a national outcry about this practice several years back. I think California outlawed it at the time, along with other states, though I don't know if any federal law was passed. Since I understand MBNA America is the second-largest employer in Delaware, I'd guess that if Delaware banned it, so did most states. Retail stores often asked one to write one's phone number on the check when paying that way. I remember my father habitually writing the police dept.'s non-emergency number in all such cases :] > -- [Here's something for those friendly mail scanners...] > [...] LSD-25 plutonium north korea terrorist encryption die NSA CERT quiche "quiche" ? The *real* Four Horsemen don't eat quiche ! -L. Futplex McCarthy; PGP key by finger or server "The objective is for us to get those conversations whether they're by an alligator clip or ones and zeroes. Wherever they are, whatever they are, I need them." -FBI Dir. Freeh - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQCVAwUBLwt8YWf7YYibNzjpAQF02QP/dTKpXWYIIQmc53X+TqctbvSY3Lv2Rohz GP1Lm1RXkMtmEPfsLgmZOg6J+E7dw6NYlr9rpANLHsy3Hf7lPlMSbVKNJ/b3dO7z 6Cox4ve2hG1WjLaHu8tKbzW1mPWASX+wojyvJhe8dX1wCEdlUkJk7qMk5kSLWqKk K4X8H7MH5Nw= =noOA - -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLwt9kSoZzwIn1bdtAQFIrgF+OxMRUbtLW4JhKFMxvdNg62v6Lqdb5Bog IRrUySoeo39h5EL9474TY9Gnd4r7debR =iplm -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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_Why_ the print media doesn't like Usenet
by Tommy the Tourist 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As many of you know, recent articles and editorials in the nations main newspapers (_New_York_Times and the _Chicago_Tribute_ to name just two) have presented shockingly distorted accounts of the infamous Canter & Siegel Usenet spam. Ordinary Usenetters, outraged at the socking abuse of the internet by Canter & Siegel, were transformed into "network terrorists" in these editorials. The attorneys, who have haughtily expressed their determination to repeatedly inconvenience millions of Usenet readers by flooding Usenet newsgroups with unsolicited advertisements, were portrayed as the innocent victims of anti-business "vigilantes" bent on terrorizing the attorneys after their widespread Usenet spam last year. The articles also included numerous serious technological inexactitudes which supported the distorted conclusions of the articles. The articles called for increased government regulation of the internet in order to thwart the alleged abuses. Determined efforts by Usenetters to educate the print media into presenting a more balanced (and, I might add, less dis-ingenuous point of view) have been in vein. It seems reasonable to point out the following facts: 1. It has not been unknown for powerful individuals in newspapers (such as editors and owners) to manipulate articles for political purposes. 2. Usenet has often been highly critical of the print media, especially editorials which disagreed with strongly held Usenet views and articles which contained erroneous information. This criticism may have been seen by the print media as damaging. 3. From time to time articles published in newspapers have been posted (sometimes anonymously) to various newsgroups. This has denied the print media of revenue since readers only had to turn to Usenet to read especially sensationalist articles. 4. In the past, the print media has held a monopoly on detailed news. Sure, television could bring news stories instantly, but for detail one had to turn to the newspaper. Usenet and the internet are capable of providing very detailed information rapidly and on demand, changing instantly as conditions change. It is a very real competitor. 5. Government regulation would seriously hurt Usenet. Censorship (like an FCC censor) and regulation of anonymous remailers would result in increased legal liability on the internet. Holding Usenet posters and other providers of information liable for the accuracy and tastefulness of their information would make many people think twice before making their information available. This would eliminate not only inaccurate and tasteless information, but it would also greatly hinder the flow of even accurate information. This would put the print media on a more even footing. These facts together suggest that it might be to the advantage of the print media to call for government regulation. Once this is realized, the behavior of these newspapers can be better understood, and action can be taken against them: 1. Misleading information in the print media about Usenet must be widely disseminated so as to damage the reputations of newspapers that print inaccurate accounts and encourage them to get their facts straight the next time around. 2. The print media's self-interest in government regulation of Usenet must be pointed out, both to the public and to law-makers so as to reduce the effectiveness of their pleas. 3. Usenet should seek the support the of the media (especially rivals like TV media that have less to lose from Usenet) to obtain favorable and anti-regulatory publicity. -> If you found this article interesting, please feel free to distribute widely. <- ------------ To respond to the sender of this message, send mail to remailer(a)soda.berkeley.edu, starting your message with the following 8 lines: :: Response-Key: the-clipper-key ====Encrypted-Sender-Begin==== MI@```%I^&2?(E<U9BPG1]W7L'=&KH_PWY8"RO>+YR'QAJ3&+D2`UAI&EZX\# M%D0S6>LX!B&XC`CI2S9?]$AN7*P9K`)Q4JT_V`>$K2Z<X!O-/MH$TO5V:@(L %BQ>,T(@` ====Encrypted-Sender-End====

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Remailer postage
by jpb＠gate.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Russ, Where can I get the Magic Money software? I'm also interested in a combination FV/MM approach to anonymous postage. I'm still waiting to get my linux box set up (hassle with client paying the bill and all that fun stuff) but am considering starting a remailer once I get the site set up. I am concerned about the ethics of having a paymailer feed into the free remailer soup - how would their operators react if I'm effectively making money (no matter how little) off of them? In the interest of preserving anonymity, perhaps their should be a set postage rate - that way someone could use a digital stamp anywhere, helping to confuse the audit trail. I'm not sure if I want to get involved in the hassles of redemption though. It would probably become a major hassle for all the operators to have to do that much accounting on a regular basis. jpb(a)gate.net finger for pgp and ripem keys

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