- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

New sig, let me know what you think!
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Since Clinton is getting ready to sign the Exon Amendment/Communications Decency Act/Telecom Bill, with some amazingly restrictive rules about what kind of material can be sent over computers (especially if there's a chance anyone under the age of 18 can see it), I have been worried about the implications for my hobby. You see, I am also an amateur Biblical scholar, and have been working on my "Modern Vernacular Translation." For most of my messages involving speech, the CDA, censorship, etc., I plan to include part of my translation as a kind of inspirational quote. Surely Sen. Exon will not object to this material as "indecent"? After all, it's the word of God. I threw this together quickly, excerpting some online versions of the Bible. Others could do the same thing, by quoting salacious material from other sources. The letters of Thomas Jefferson, for example? Or Congressional testimony itself, maybe stuff from the Meese Commission reports? Juicy stuff there. Is the CDA going to make quoting from the Congressional Record a crime? (I suppose it ought to be....) --Tim May [This Bible excerpt awaiting review under the Communications Decency Act] And then Lot said, "I have some mighty fine young virgin daughters. Why don't you boys just come on in and do em right here in my house - I'll just watch!"....Later, up in the mountains, the younger daughter said. "Dad's getting old. I say we should do him." So the two daughters got him drunk and did him all that night. Sure enough, Dad got em pregnant....Onan really hated the idea of doing his brother's wife and getting her pregnant while his brother got all the credit, so he whacked off first....Remember, it's not a good idea to have sex with your sister, your brother, your parents, your pet dog, or the farm animals. [excerpts from the Old Testament, Modern Vernacular Translation, TCM, 1996]

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Re: [NOISE] Futplex makes the news!
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:00 PM 2/3/96 -0500, you wrote: > >James Donald may characterize me as gutless. I think he would probably be >correct to some extent. You acted for liberty: I failed to act: How could I characterize you as gutless? --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: Sometimes ya just gotta nuke em
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www2.ari.net/home/bsabath/950711.html At 12:25 PM 2/3/96 -0800, Jordan Hayes wrote: >Sorry to inject a little scholarly research on this topic, but I >would urge those of you who are interested in how this mythology >was created and disseminated to do an AltaVista serach for Alperovitz; >he's potentially the leading scholar on this subject. I've read >his book, and Tim probably ought to as well ... SCHOLARLY RESEARCH!!!! You do not know shit from beans: Alperovitz is no more a scholar than Zundel is: He is a historical revisionist who lies even more crudely than the holocaust revisionists. It is clear that in the opinion of the high command, the decision to surrender after they were nuked was a dramatic and radical change of position. Alperovitz says otherwise, thus he is either grotesquely ignorant or, more likely simply dishonest. Alperovitz writes: The use of the atomic bomb, most experts now believe, was totally unnecessary. Even people who support the decision for various reasons acknowledge that almost certainly the Japanese would have surrendered before the initial invasion planned for November. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stated that officially in 1946. We found a top-secret War Department study that said when the Russians came in, which was August 8, the war would have ended anyway. The invasion of Honshu, the main island, was not [And so on and so forth] After the second nuclear attack, the Japanese high command had a meeting with the emperor: They heard testimony on the effects of atomic bombs. About half wanted to surrender, about half argued that Japan should die gloriously: They were unaware that the US had just used up almost its entire nuclear arsenal. They expected that surrender would be followed by the same kind of reign of terror, rape, brutal degradation, and mass murder, that they inflicted on the people that they conquered. They expected that failure to surrender would result in continued nuclear bombardment at about the same rate. (Both beliefs were incorrect.) The Emperor *at that meeting* made the decision to surrender, shocking a large part of the high command, and then made a speech on radio announcing the surrender, stating as reason for the surrender that if they did not surrender, Japan would be utterly destroyed by nuclear weapons. Seeing as they were still debating the issue *after* two nuclear weapons had landed on them, it seems reasonable to believe that without atomic weapons, it would have been necessary to fight from house to house from one end of Japan to the other. When Hirohito ordered surrender in response to atomic bombing, the high command attempted to violently overthrow him, and when they failed, many in the high command committed suicide. > >If you read nothing else on this topic, I urge you to check out >an interview with him at http://www2.ari.net/home/bsabath/950711.html > >#endif > >/jordan > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: Microsoft's CryptoAPI - thoughts?
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:11 AM 2/3/96 TZ, Wasser wrote: > I have "standardized" the PS files on the MS website, so there should > be no more problems. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you, but it would be even better to webify them. I have webified them (http://www.jim.com/jamesd/mscryptoapi.html) but I am sure most people would prefer an official copy: --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: free speach and the government
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis) writes: >Eric Murray <ericm(a)lne.com> writes: >> Stephan Mohr writes: >I believe that any exception to unlimited free speech, be it libel, or >copyright violation, or child pornography, or Nazi propaganda, or Chinese >dissident materials, just isn't compatible with the cpunk agenda. No censorship >is acceptable. That's an absolute. I agree with that. Principles are important. I agree that Sarin reciepes might be dangerous. I also agree that such information should not be broadcasted. But I think that this control should be effected by the individual poster, out of benevolence for Man, not enforced at the point of a gun by a govt that pretends that we are to dumb to act by ourselves. The nature of the Internet is unique in the history of mankind. We must adapt, *as individuals* not as "a society". The collectivity is a statistical concept that have no existence, apart in the pretensions of the collectivists do-gooders. >There's a widespread misconception that most journalists support freedom of >speech for non-journalists. I deal with journalists occasionally, and my >impression is that the attitude of some of them can be summarized as follows: >"I'm an important guy because I can say something that hundreds of thousands of >people will see/read; and I can libel another person and s/he won't be able to >respond". People with this attitude are very threatened by the Internet. I'm >not saying that all journalists are this way; I'm just pointing out that it's >foolish to assume that just because a person works in the media, s/he's in >favor of free speech, especially unlimited free speech. I think it is safe to say, especially regarding coverage of the Internet by popular medias, that even if there are some journalists that still have integrity, most of their bosses don't. >From the technology point of view, there's no difference between helping >Chinese dissidents circumvent their government's restrictions on the net, >and helping neo-Nazis in Germany and helping child pornographers in the >U.S. No one can determine which of the countless bits of information that >travel over the Internet every second are false, or harmful, or subversive, >or otherwise not worthy of transnmission. Well, here I don't completely agree. *you* can determine what is worth and what is not. But again, I suppose that if you have rationnal arguments, you will be able to convince other rationnal individuals. I am not in favor of broadcasting neo-nazi scum all over because I think that their essence is the same as the one underlying the censorship movement. They share the same vision of man, only the flavor change slightly. OTOH, somebody presenting facts pertaining to nazism and what happened to the jews (confirming or infirming) are acceptable, as long as they are *facts*. But there are plenty of causes that seems worthwhile to defends, so why pick up the mosts dubious? Ciao JFA

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monkey-wrenching GAK
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is along the lines of a technical monkey-wrenching of GAK: 1) The state of email encryption If the NSA decides they would like to get a decrypt of an email that you sent, they turn up with a copy of the encrypted email and request that you decrypt it. The reason that this is so bad is that you have effectively secret shared your plaintext between the NSA (who has archived all of your encrypted email), and yourself who still has they key. This is not in your interests. 2) Mandatory GAK In a future with mandatory GAK, the NSA has all your keys already, because they have a nice database of them, and so they can decrypt any thing they feel like. 3) Monkey-wrenching Even with GAK, where you are forced to give the government the keys, you can do much to make the job of administering GAK very expensive. You start by ensuring that the government can not get your encrypted data (the other half of the secret share), so that the key is of no use :-) You can do this by using a forward secret protocol such as Diffie-Hellman to exchange data, then you can't provide the encrypted text to the NSA even if you want to. But won't they make forward secret protocols illegal at the same time as enforcing GAK? Well, maybe they've left it too late already, consider: IP security layers in general - they provides an extra layer of encryption that the NSA has to obtain the keys for to make sense of their tap. They may have to archive impossible amounts of IP traffic if they can't recognize the type of IP traffic through the IP level encryption (www traffic has its uses as cover traffic :-) IP security layers which use Diffie-Hellman: forward secrecy means that the site owners can't decrypt old IP traffic even if they want to. When using an IP security layer, email delivered via SMTP will be transparently sent over an encrypted link with a random symmetric encryption key negotiated with DH. So the NSA can't get your encrypted email so the fact that they have the decryption key doesn't help them. Even if the NSA had access to the signatory keys used to authenticate DH key negotiation, this means that they still have to do an active MITM attack on the link. This is not something they can do after the fact. Bang goes the ability to archive it all and present it to people afterwards for decryption. Also the expense and complexity of fishing expeditions become impractical. To do a successful MITM attack, the NSA must also subvert the authentication key infrastructure, and hope that no one uses a subliminal, or out-of-band channel to verify the authentication. The above arguments, depending on how quickly things like John Gilmore's S/WAN are deployed, will quickly reduce the Governments options to: attempting to revoke de facto international standard internet protocols after the fact requesting the authentication keys used to sign DH negotiations, so that they can do MITM attacks, and get an IP packet modification infrastructure built (something significantly harder, and more expensive than the digital telephony bill which is still floundering at an estimated $4Bn) So, to monkey wrench GAK, be an early adopter of IP link level security, make sure that everybody is using link level security with forward secrecy, long before Clipper IV gets forced into use as a voluntary, or possibly later mandatory scheme. Adam -- #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

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Re: THE JEWS (ALL of them!) Try to kick Ernst Zundel off Usenet!!
by ErnstZundl＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> Surley you can't expect us to belive people wrote that? Who do you propose wrote it then? Aryan Space Nazis?

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Interesting article in Upside ...
by Ernest Hua 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Article on the political side of crypto with respect to this year's election: http://www.upside.com/print/oct96/election.html Ern

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Re: [noise] Re: Charter of PDX Cpunk meetings
by bernardo＠alpha.c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

jim bell wrote: >> I think an explanation for this is due. Jim is going to move his complaints >> here instead of dealing with them with me no matter what I do... > > Alan Olsen is correct, here. This is childish and pointless. Please shut up or take it to email. > But he (the anonymous poster): > 1. FLamed me on this national list, similarly to the way Alan Olsen later did. FWIW, this is an _international_ list with a lot of people who are just not interested in your petty bickering. If you want to argue about this, please do it in private. If Alan posts responses to the list, that's his problem. You don't _have_ to answer in public. > 2. Failed to be willing to sustain the debate in a more appropriate list, > even under a stable nym. You have something against anonymity? In this case, perhaps this list is not the best place to be. > that I had been flamed by that anonymous poster. The fact that he was > anonymous says it all. The fact that he has not returned says it all. The The fact that he was anonymous says nothing whatsoever. So what if you received some email agreeing that you'd been flamed? > the fact that I am relatively new here. I have no intention of inflicting > an unwelcome discussion of "Assassination Politics" on the list, and Actually, and Perry may disagree here, but I'd have no objection to a discussion of "Assassination Politics", or any other nutty political theories, as long as we can stick to reasonably mature discussion and not flames and petty ego boosting. > suffered any longterm loss of reputation of his own. I, on the other hand, > use my REAL NAME. Whoopie! A True Name! Big deal. I care not one jot whether or not you use your REAL NAME. I have no way of knowing if it is, in fact, your real name. Should it make a difference? No one is going to "suffer any longterm loss of reputation" by disagreeing with you, or anyone else, whether or not they use a nym (or anonymity). > Only a fool would have taken an anonymous flamer seriously under those > circumstances. An anonymous post is no less valid for being anonymous. The only advantage of a stable nym, whether or not it's a True Name, is the ability to gain (or lose) reputation through the content of its posts. Perhaps a nym with some reputation is taken more seriously than an anonymous poster, but so is an unknown nym. Neither you nor Alan has any reputation to speak of (to me, at least), so an anonymous post has no less. >> Jim ignored that request and I removed him from the list. > > Read: "Alan Olsen exercised his authority in his own personal fiefdom, the > "PDX Cypherpunks list." Are you saying he doesn't have that right? If it's his list, he can do whatever the hell he likes with it. > On the contrary, I have no interest in dealing with this sleazy character in > email. He was the one who chose a national list to do his flaming and > baiting, and I think he deserves full "credit." In other words, you are not interested in resolving any problem you have with Alan, you just to make a lot of noise in public in an attempt to "embarrass" him. Go play on some other list where this kind of thing is appreciated. >> The following is the last I will say publically on the matter. > > You're going to take your bat and ball and "go thwait home!" You hear your > mommy calling, Alan. This list periodically devolves into this childishness. I'm glad Alan is not going to say any more. I award Alan 20 Reputation Points for being mature enough to walk away (delayed long enough to see whether he does)

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"Nations see Internet as threat to security"
by Mike Ang 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Nations see Internet as threat to security" made the front page of the Saturday _Globe and Mail_. There are some really nice lines in the article, which basically states that electronic freedoms through the Internet are a direct challenge to the power of nation states. They mention all of the more recent examples in China, Germany, France, and the States. Here are some of the more interesting paragraphs: But as China, Germany,

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