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Third World Man
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(Wow! I just trimmed 7 of the 8 names cc:ed on this message I'm quoting...I think the auto-quoting software most of use is getting out of hand. The trimmed recipients were; To: bdavis(a)thepoint.net, aba(a)atlas.ex.ac.uk, davby(a)ida.liu.se, Damien.Doligez(a)inria.fr, hfinney(a)shell.portal.com, asb(a)nexor.co.uk) Anyway... At 9:19 PM 8/20/95, Adam Shostack wrote: >| So ... has this proven that the banning of strong crypto is the correct >| way to go, and that, at least to some, credit card transactions using >| weak crypto will be acceptable to most (given the ease of getting CC#s >| other ways)? > > No. Banning strong crypto will not help; those darn furriners >are using it anyway. What it will mean is that the Information >Infrastructure of the future will bypass the United States, as without >strong cryptography, it is impossible to build a secure architechture. > > Should the United States wish to relagate itself to the status >of a third world nation becuase of terrorists, druge dealers, child >pornorgaphers and money launderers, that is indeed unfortunate. The U.S. is not likely to find itself relegated to third world status over this issue. Rhetorically, I wish it were so, but it just ain't. This issue--like the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, the race issue in the '60s, the Vietnam war in the '60s and '70s, to name a few cases, _sounds_ really serious. And it is, as those cases were, but predicting the imminent collapse of American civilization is usually a lose. There is no way the technologlcal and manufacturing prowess of leading American companies will be substantially crippled. I would like to see export laws relaxed, especially as they are seldom effective, and so on. You know my views. But the likeliest outcome if strong crypto export remains hard, but import is unaffected, is that strong crypto will be imported from Europe and elsewhere. (It does not violate any laws that I am aware of to have a product for sale in the U.S. with "hooks" for arbitrary crypto, so long as that product and the hooks are not _exported_. Naturally, companies like Microsoft, Lotus, Novell, etc., do not want to have a U.S. version and an export version. But if they _have_ to, they can. My point is that this would certainly not relegate the U.S. to Third World status, at least not faster than many other trends are already doing.) Several European companies are strong in crypto, of course. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Web Proxy Servers
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:26 PM 9/12/95 -0400, hallam(a)w3.org wrote: >If they ever want an anonymous proxy server they are wellcome to use ours. So where's a pointer to it? Others might be interested. Even willing to pay. DCF

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An opportunity not to be missed
by David C. Lambert 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- It has occurred to me with the approach of the presidential campaign in the US (and its attendant press frenzy), that there is an an unprecedentedly vast opportunity to bring certain items on the cypherpunk platform into the public spotlight. There are two planks of this platform that I believe: 1. would benefit from this exposure; 2. would be relatively easy to inoculate among the press and/or the candidates (actually, inoculation of the candidates, with subsequent propagation by the rabid campaign press). The first of these has to do with net.censorship, and formal recognition under law of ISPs' common carrier status. The second concerns remailers. I'll deal with each in turn. I believe that, given the hunger of the candidates for as much exposure as possible, that one of them might be persuaded to take a part in the Scientology fracas. (This would have to happen fairly soon, since it looks like the Church <spit> is losing some major battles lately - the brand new news from Denver re:FACTnet and the ruling in VA concerning Arnie Lerma and the Washington Post). The desirable features of such a candidate might include: a certain amount of current power, marginal current press exposure, fairly deep pocketed financing, an anti- regulatory stance, and a smidgeon of net awareness. It should be fairly straightforward to convince such a candidate that: 1. there would be tremendous increase in exposure due to the songs of praise from netizens (whose influence is most likely to be overly discounted by campaign strategists, IMHO, at this point in time), and from the mainstream press (especially Time magazine and the Washington Post, for obvious reasons). 2. that the exposure would be worth the peril of inviting the wrath of the Church <spit>. The payback of the press coverage of such a candidate would be infection of John Q. Public with the idea that ISPs are no more responsible for content of carried messages than the phone company, and an anti-censorship stance that does not make him (John Q.) pro-porn. This last is a huge flaw in the current battle for free speech on the net, IMO. (Thank you Marty Rimm.) If this issue could be refocused, I think that John Q. (and Jane) would find it much easier to support. The second plank that could be potentially advanced is anonymity. Anonymous remailers in particular, but the benefits of anonymity to users of the Net in general as well. I propose that we get some likely candidate (actually, a similar candidate to the one above) to advocate the benefits of anonymity on the net. The "spin" that would have to be used would depend on the particular candidate, but let's for example we have: Candidate Posturing Required Spin ----------------------------------------------------------------- Pro-business, tough on crime anonymous crime tip e-mail a la Fed whistleblower stuff, and the SPA Pro-choice, womens' vote anonymous support services Of course, there are many more examples, but we'd have to see which postures this campaign's candidates are going to pick. Of course, I am somewhat cynical in my advocation of the particular "Required Spins" (the SPA support, especially), but I feel that the threats to privacy and public use of strong encryption (which walks hand in hand with the use of the remailers, naturally) are worth the potential risk on other fronts (the burgeoning software patent silliness, eg). You may ask why these candidates would be interested in this type of thing, and my response is that they can be forced. The religious right has no problem bringing their agenda into the public spotlight and forcing their issues onto candidates because of their willingness to use hyperbole and fanaticism (not to mention pressure on advertisers and other sponsors). I believe that netizens in general, and cypherpunks in particular can bring similar, and more reasoned, pressure to bear. I think that our job is easier than the religious right because it should be trivial to enlist the support of the mainstream press on these issues, and to direct the anti-federal ire that has been building in the US. In addition, Democratic candidates that are currently in office would love to have some way of attacking the Republican plans for this session of Congress. An attack on net.censorship via the CDA and the telecomm bill could be seen as the ideal place to attack the Republican agenda, and thereby the success of Republican candidates in the presidential race. <whew.> Let the flames begin. - - David C. Lambert dcl(a)panix.com (finger for public key) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMFcB+qpplsfgM88VAQFdewP9G0aHVTweUeCMa7J7Xhtu2R4cID6yP/J3 7WS5OicRWfl/hPRXj1Db74A9tDrkStEfobbL/2H6CsO9N4wZNgcDLQAa5MjX8ujf 0EF6v57nlcANb1qLJ5kmwfGj96PUMDtw00409tin3KssRAL0uz/lL9SWP/Mhj9q5 emZHYW3VC3c= =bTsO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Dirty Pix Ad
by anonymous＠freezone.remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Financial Times, Sept 13, 1995. Scientist urges action on Internet pornography By Clive Cookson Pornography accounts for about half of non-academic use of the Internet, the global computer network, the British Association science conference heard yesterday. Prof Harold Thimbleby, professor of computing research at Middlesex University, said most parents, politicians and educators had no idea how easy it was to find graphic descriptions of horrific perversions, through any personal computer linked to the net. "If you want to know about any perversion, you can find full details," Prof Thimbleby said, "and they are described in deceitful and evil ways." He was particularly upset by Internet porn sites that masquerade as victim support groups, such as those for child abuse that tell paedophiles how to entrap children. "I have found text, film and sound material that I find extremely disturbing, for example instructions for killing minors for sexual gratification." Prof Thimbleby has been researching the pattern of traffic on the Internet since the beginning of the year. It is impossible to monitor how more than a tiny fraction of the estimated 30m to 40m users utilise the net. But Prof Thimbleby analysed a representative sample of "bulletin boards" and of searches made via so-called "web crawlers" which act like telephone directories for the World Wide Web, the fastest growing part of the Internet. He said his conclusion - that pornography accounted for about 50 per cent of the searches - tallied with recent US findings about the dominance of porn on the net. "There is no reliable way, technical or otherwise, to detect or intercept pornography," Prof Thimbleby said. Censorship of the Internet was impossible, because pornographers could easily disguise their material. And censoring programs such as SurfWatch and Internet Filter could not cope with all the fast-changing pornographic material. Because censorship was technically and politically impractical, Prof Thimbleby suggested that a better response was to dilute the pornography with other material. "The Internet has very little interesting material for the non-specialist user. It needs more," he said. "When it has more, it is just possible that pornography will slip into its statistically appropriate place, one aspect of humanity but not the most prominent on the Internet." -----

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Re: GAK/weak crypto rationale?
by Andrew Loewenstern 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Brain Davis writes: [...snip...] > Particularly effective were the court-approved video and audio > tapes of the Speaker taking a bribe in exchange for certain action > on legislation [...snip...] > Wiretaps, hidden microphones, and hidden cameras put corrupt > politicians (I know - redundant) out of business. Encryption does little to protect you from hidden cameras and microphones (or informants!). If you already know your target then you can probably get around encryption (sure it's not as simple as a wiretap, but hey, nobody said it had to be easy). Encryption prevents 'fishing expeditions' and unauthorized monitoring; this is what the LEAs don't want to admit. andrew

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Can GAK be made "not interoperable" with PGP?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:34 PM 9/13/95, Hal wrote: >I think this is setting up the rationale for software key escrow. One of >the big loopholes in this idea has always been that it would be easy for >bad guys to superencrypt or otherwise bypass the legal encryption. The >response has been that the systems will be designed so that compliant >systems will not interoperate with rogue systems. And the counter-response ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >to that was that criminals (and privacy advocates) would use software >which would operate compliantly with conventional programs and maintain >privacy when talking to other rogue programs. But is this even possible, to make a GAK system "not interoperable" with, say, PGP? Unless the GAK system has some sort of entropy analyzer, and can recognize high-entropy sources which it presumes to be encrypted data (*), one can of course PGP-encrypt a text file and then GAK the resulting file. Many of us are already using PGP mostly in this way, i.e., writing files in text editors, PGP-encryting and getting an ASCII file back, and then sending. GAK will still have to deal with this mode. (* On the idea of entropy analyzers. This is implausible, for many reasons. Any high-entropy file could have the entropy reduced by padding with low-entropy sources. And there would be "false positives." Some ostensibly plaintext posts are so incoherent (;-}) they might be "rejected" by such a GAKalyzer.) So, is any conceivable GAK escrow system possible that cannot be used with other crypto programs? Text is text, unless the GAK program purports to accept or reject the text based on entropy considerations. And I can't imagine that part of the GAK program would be robust against hacking. >This new line will be used to respond to this argument, I think. Even if >it is admitted that there is no way for the government to be able to tell >what the criminals say amongst themselves, it will still be useful to be >able to tell what they say to other people. Therefore software key >escrow will be argued to still be useful even though it can be defeated. But such traffic analyis is made moot by remailers, as we all know. What I think we may be facing, if the folks pushing GAK are really serious about all this, are restrictions on *who we may mail to*!!! For if Alice is "allowed" to send a message, GAKked or not, to a remailer.... (I can speculate about laws saying only "internationally registered" sites can use e-mail, but this seems impractical in the extreme...lots of issues.) The GAK advocates need to realize that superencryption will be as easy as it is today to use PGP, and that even traffic analysis will be defeated if remailers are used. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: (Fwd) 1995 Nanotechnology Conference
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by jamesd(a)echeque.com ("James A. Donald") on Sun, 20 Aug 8:17 PM >And what does this have to do with cryptography? The topic has come up here several times in connection with development of molecular computers. It has been suggested that there is a link to Len Adelman's work. But maybe that was just a transparent cover story. Perhaps it's actually a molecular part of the Waco Vince Foster Tom Clancy Pat Robertson Nuclear Weapons Material divulgation. Thanks for provoking. What do you think? Your lively disputations have been missed.

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Re: Secure, reliable (Re: Distributed computing)
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:59 PM 8/20/95, Nathan Loofbourrow wrote: >A couple of months back, someone (Adam Back, perhaps?) made mention of >work on secure, reliable distributed computing on untrusted networks >of untrusted machines. I seem to remember mention of sending out bogus >computations in order to obscure the actual computation being >performed. > >I was never able to follow the reference, since all the info available >was the name of a Japanese professor, with no mention of the >university or of any publications I could look up. > >Does this work ring a bell with anyone else? Joan Feigenbaum, then of Stanford and now of Bell Labs, has worked for many years on what she calls "computing with encrypted instances." The canonical example is one where one wishes to send a problem, e.g., a routing problems a la the Travelling Salesman Problem, to a service for solving. But one doesn't wish to reveal the cities being considered, perhaps for business reasons. (The extension of this concern to crypto should be clear.) So, one transforms the data set, sends it to the compute services, gets back and answer, and reverses the transformation. I've always thought of her work as a kissing cousing to zero knowledge interactive proof systems, but it evolved along a different path. A check of her published papers should reveal several summaries. I know some of her stuff got published in "Crypto Proceedings." --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: The NSA Visits Compendium
by strick at Jihad 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> So, send me your examples. Supply as much detail as you can, including > company names if possible. I'll accept "unnamed sources" if they are > _primary_ sources, but no "friend of a friend told me that...," unless the > details look very convincing. Tim, a friend comments that if you're serious about getting reports this way, you should contact one of the human rights groups (Amnesty International, Article 19...) that gathers reports which are generally believed to be accurate under much more threatening situations. I thought it a good comment. I've worked for amnesty before, and know of their reputation, but now how they attained it... strick

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"Crypto-Data" gif
by Sameer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Where can I find a GIF of the "crypto-data" stickers? The diagnol "warning sign"-type sticker with the floppy and 1s and 0s in the back. Thanks.

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