- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

RE: Question on U.S. Postal Service and crypto
by Trei, Peter 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My understanding is that a post BOX has to be a design acceptable to the USPS; and that no one else can put things INTO it. This is a pretty narrow restriction; door slots can be used by anyone for anything, and many postboxes either share a support post with a newspaper delivery tube or have an external rack for stuffing newspapers, etc. Back about 20 years ago, some company (FedEx, UPS????) tried to get into the first class mail delivery business, and they dealt with this by putting mail in a plastic bag and hanging it on the doorknob. Where I live (*small* town in New England), FedEx and UPS regularly leave packages unattended; either by the front door, the back door, or in the garage (this is a very low crime area). Around 1979, when the existence of email was just beginning to penetrate (there where only a few hundred thousand people on the Arpanet), there was considerable debate over the legality of email. Since access to Arpanet was theoretically only for people working on Federally funded projects, it was widely thought that it should only be used for project related work, and any personal mail was a misuse of government funds. Columbia University (where I was working at the time) allowed unlimited internal use, but had tinkered their mail client to ignore addresses to off-campus addresses. I think my very first hack involved defeating this restriction. About the same time, I remember that the Postal Carriers Union realized (quite correctly) that email was a threat to their civil service jobs, and came out with a statement to the effect of 'We don't quite understand what this thing is, but the USPS owns it." They wanted to require that email be received only at Post Offices, where it would be printed, stamped, and delivered (by one of their members) along with the rest of the mail. Peter Trei ptrei(a)securitydynamics.com > ---------- > From: Brian B. Riley[SMTP:brianbr@together.net] > > Maybe they are confusing an electronic mailbox with a snailmail box > ... > the USPS has always contended that they (the USPS) "own" your mailbox > and > use that criterion to prosecute people who drive around putting things > > like circulars etc in mailboxes. Maybe they we on a role thinking that > if > they got into the e-mail business they would 'own' that piece of your > hard drive so to speak. > > >

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Cute
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May is cute and cuddly! (_) _____ (_) /O O\ Timmy C[uddly] May ! I ! ! \___/ ! \_____/

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Re: Jim Bell... lives... on... in... Hollywood!
by David Honig 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:28 AM 1/9/98 -0500, Ryan Lackey wrote: ><daemon(a)ATHENA.MIT.EDU> (David Honig) writes: > >> >> I agree, but "contribute to death" needs to be operationalized. Here's a >> proposal: >> If a homicide suspect is arrested within N months, they will be isolated >> from the net >> and the owner of the winning ID will have to perform a challenge-response. >> Since >> the suspect couldn't have replied, they are different; if a pair >> collaborated, well, >> when a hit man is caught, his payoff matrix will usually make him turn in >> the client. > >Given strong cryptography and something like my current Eternity DDS >almost prototype (a reliable distributed way of selling >storage-compute-bandwidth being the relevant part), why couldn't the >incarcerated person have left an agent out on the net to handle the >challenge for him, and hold the money in anonymous trust for him until >he gets out? I can't think of any anonymity-preserving system which >contains an "is-a-person" predicate -- even if you asked an AI-hard >question, you could blind the question and post it to usenet or CNN >or something and quote one of those responses (which would be wise to >do anyway for styleometry prevention). > >The other option is having a non-anonymous system, or one that is >anonymous until someone tries to collect the prize, but in that case, >it's not all that interesting a problem. > >Ryan the Nightshifted >-- >Ryan Lackey >rdl(a)mit.edu >http://mit.edu/rdl/ > I think this gets into legal issues. Consider fraudelent insurance and gambling schemes involving collaboration -illegal, but hard to detect unless someone turns. Consider a hit man who takes the fall for the boss, so that his family is taken care of. In these cases and in an AP scheme, the law can't prove much if certain parties collaborate. Maybe the winner of the "BATF agents blown up in 97" bet *is* John Doe III; but since the investigation claims no such person, and the winner is not in jail now, the winner has fairly earned their reward via their skill in actuarial matters. ------------------------------------------------------------ David Honig Orbit Technology honig(a)otc.net Intaanetto Jigyoubu "How do you know you are not being deceived?" ---A Compendium of Analytic TradeCraft Notes, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA

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waco trail / german bugs -- from spyking list
by Ray Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

15)From: SpyKing(a)thecodex.com Subject: Re: Deadly Physical Force This thread might be getting tired but I ran across something that is applicable. I make no judgement on who is right or wrong. I was not there and only those who were know the truth. I'm posting this to show that despite being acquitted in one court the shooter in this case is being charged and brought to trial in another court on similiar charges. Some will scream double jeapordy and others will say justice is prevailing. The jury will have to decide... but I'll say one thing... If this guy IS convicted the rules of engagement change forever... SWAT teams will have to think twice before firing into dwellings... FBI sniper ordered to stand trial in Ruby Ridge case BONNERS FERRY, Idaho (Reuters) - An FBI sharpshooter has been ordered to stand trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter over the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which three people died, prosecutors said Wednesday. Idaho Magistrate Quentin Harden ruled there was enough evidence to allow the sharpshooter, Lon Horiuchi, to face trial on charges he acted with negligence when he fired a shot that killed the wife of white separatist Randy Weaver at his cabin. The standoff near Weaver's cabin turned into a rallying cry for extreme right-wingers who condemned what they saw as federal government excesses and held up Weaver as a hero. Boundary County prosecutor Denise Woodbury last August charged Horiuchi and Weaver's friend Kevin Harris with the deaths of two people killed in the standoff. The charges against Harris were later dismissed on the grounds that he had already been acquitted of those charges in federal court. In filing charges against Horiuchi, Woodbury accused the sharpshooter of using a gun in a reckless manner by firing through the front door of Weaver's house without first determining whether anyone other than his intended target was behind the door. Horiuchi could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted. The standoff began Aug. 21, 1992, when U.S. Marshals approached Weaver's cabin to arrest him for failing to appear in court on gun charges. U.S. Marshal William Degan and Weaver's 14-year-old son Sammy were killed in a gun battle near the cabin, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was called in later that day. The next day, Horiuchi wounded Weaver and Harris and killed Vicki Weaver. Weaver and Harris surrendered 10 days later and were acquitted of murder charges in the killing of Degan in a 1993 federal trial. Weaver said in a telephone interview from his home in Montana that he was pleased by Harden's ruling. ``It's taken a long time, but sometimes the wheels of justice grind slowly. We are looking to see some justice in all of this,'' Weaver said. ``To be honest I hope that he (Horiuchi) eventually sees that he is just one of two scapegoats and that eventually he will tell the whole truth.'' Horiuchi's lawyers were due to appear next Monday before a federal judge in Boise to ask that the case against the FBI sniper be moved to federal court. Horiuchi was scheduled to be arraigned Friday, Feb. 13, in Idaho district court in Boundary County, but that could change if his case is remanded to federal court. Neither Horiuchi's lawyers nor Woodbury were immediately available for comment on Harden's ruling. 16)From: SpyKing(a)thecodex.com Subject: Germany to restore bugging Thursday January 8, 1:58 PM GMT Germany to restore bugging banned since Nazi-era BONN, Jan 8 (Reuters) - German political leaders agreed on Thursday to allow police to bug apartments of suspected criminals, restoring a crime-fighting tool banned since abuses by the secret police in the Nazi era. Leaders from Chancellor Helmut Kohl's centre-right coalition and the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) said they had reached a deal allowing police to plant microphones in private homes of suspected criminals for the first time since 1945. Both houses of parliament are now expected to quickly pass the long-debated measure, which police have argued was needed to better fight organised crime and bring the country in line with other nations that allow electronic surveillance. Germany, which reacted to the Gestapo's abuses with some of the Western world's most extensive civil liberties laws, has long resisted any relaxation in constitutional protections that have kept police out of private homes. Interior Minister Manfred Kanther said the agreement would give police the necessary tool to fight organised crime. "This is a decisive step towards more effectively fighting crime," Kanther said. "We can now keep surveillance on suspected gangster apartments and we will be able to better fight money laundering." The opposition SPD, which controls the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, said it would support the measure after the government agreed to partial exemptions for some professional groups such as priests, attorneys and journalists. Police will be required to obtain advance court permission for any surveillance. Previously, police were only given rare exemptions to the constitutional law protecting the private home. They were allowed to use listening devices or electronic surveillance only with court permission if there was concrete evidence that a serious crime was about to take place. Now authorities will have the power to use eavesdropping methods far more extensively and will also for the first time be able to bug apartments after a crime has been committed to obtain evidence. Germany's post-war constitution barred police from electronic surveillance, telephone taps and intercepting mail. The bans on telephone taps and mail intercepts were relaxed in the 1970s amid a wave of left-wing guerrilla attacks.

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17 Dec '03

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Re: Microsoft Windows98 - Make your own decision.
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: jnoble(a)pop.dgsys.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 13:09:13 -0400 Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> Sender: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> From: John Noble <jnoble(a)DGSYS.COM> Subject: Re: Microsoft Windows98 - Make your own decision. To: CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM At 10:22 AM -0600 1/9/98, Virginia Metze wrote: >Those are the Fortune 500 figures which they identify as total revenues and >which I take to mean gross. Incidentally, Microsoft is 172, IBM #6. >Destruction of Microsoft's Word revenues, which accounts for a lot of their >profit, is what >would really seriously damage them, and note the push of IBM into the >desktop applications market... > >And IBM is going to be way out in front of everyone no matter how it >is measured. > I share Virginia's sentiment about MS-bashing, but if I were going to measure market power I'd look at profit margins. These figures are provided by Hoovers Stockscreener http://www.stockscreener.com which is a lot of fun to play with. Market Value (mils.): General Electric Company 243000.0 The Coca-Cola Company 164792.0 Microsoft Corporation 157473.0 Exxon Corporation 146881.0 Nippon Telegraph and Telephone 135252.0 Merck 127673.0 Intel 121575.0 Philip Morris Companies Inc. 112867.0 Royal Dutch Petroleum Company 112039.0 The Procter & Gamble Company 108281.0 Toyota Motor Corporation 105326.0 IBM 102912.0 Revenues (mils) (for mkt caps over 100 bil): Exxon Corporation 119507.0 Toyota Motor Corporation 98740.6 General Electric Company 86658.0 Royal Dutch Petroleum Company 85784.7 IBM 77928.0 Philip Morris Companies Inc. 71512.0 Nippon T & T 71262.4 AT&T Corp. 52839.0 The Procter & Gamble Company 36216.0 Intel Corporation 25003.0 Merck & Co., Inc 22810.9 The Coca-Cola Company 18610.0 Microsoft Corporation 12193.0 Pfizer Inc 12169.0 PROFIT MARGIN (for mkt caps over 100 bil.): Microsoft Corporation 30.4% Intel Corporation 24.7% Merck & Co., Inc. 19.6% The Coca-Cola Company 18.8% Pfizer Inc 17.1% AT&T Corp. 11.0% The Procter & Gamble Company 9.5% General Electric Company 9.3% Philip Morris Companies Inc. 9.1% IBM 7.1% Royal Dutch Petroleum Company 6.9% Exxon Corporation 6.4% Toyota Motor Corporation 3.2% Nippon T & T 2.9% John Noble --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

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Batch DSA
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Batch DSA Amos Fiat invented a way to do multiple RSA signatures using only one full-sized exponentiation [J Cryptology v10 n2 p75]. The trick is to sign each one with a different RSA key, where the keys all share the same modulus n but differ in their public exponents e. A similar technique allows DSA signatures to be batched. As with Batch RSA, each message ends up being signed with a different DSA key, where the keys share the same p, q, and g values, but differ in their public y values, where y = g^x mod p for a secret x. These techniques may be useful for situations where heavily loaded servers need to digitally sign many responses. A DSA signature on a message M (where M is the hash of the actual data) is done as follows: Choose a random value k. k must be different for every signature. Calculate R = g^k mod p mod q. Calculate S from S*k = M + R*x mod q. Then (R, S) is the signature. The time consuming part of this is the calculation of g^k. This is the only exponentiation which must be done. All the other calculations can be very fast. We can't re-use a k value because it allows x to be discovered very easily. If two signatures (R, S_1) and (R, S_2) use the same k value, we have (mod q): S_1*k = M_1 + R*x S_2*k = M_2 + R*x The capitalized values are known, the lower case k and x are the unknowns. We have two equations in two unknowns, which allows us to recover k and x. If different x values are used for each signature, then it should be safe to re-use k. This is how Batch DSA would work. The signer would publish his public key as p, q, and g as usual, but now he would publish multiple y_i = g^x_i values. The convention is that any message is considered signed by the key if it is signed by any of the y_i. To sign a batch of messages, one k value is used for all of them. The same calculation as above is used: R = g^k mod p mod q (same for all) S_i * k = M_i + R * x_i mod q The signature is (R, S_i, i), where the index i is included to tell the verifier which y_i to use. This is not vulnerable to the problem above of re-using k. The multiple signatures have the relationships: S_1*k = M_1 + R*x_1 S_2*k = M_2 + R*x_2 S_3*k = M_3 + R*x_3 ... We always have more unknowns than there are equations, which hides the values of k and x_i. This same technique can be applied to most other discrete log signatures, which generally have the same structure although they differ in the details of how x and k are used to construct R and S. With Batch RSA, there is a tradeoff between batch size and efficiency. The calculations become inefficient for batch sizes larger than tens of messages when keys are about 1K bits. Batch DSA can efficiently handle larger batches, but it has a tradeoff between batch size and key size. Each key variant requires specifying a full-sized y value, while with Batch RSA the variants just required listing a small e value (and possibly not even that, if the exponents are the small primes). This will limit Batch DSA in most circumstances to similar batch sizes of on the order of tens of messages, otherwise the keys become unreasonably large.

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Re: rant on the morality of confidentiality (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Subject: Re: rant on the morality of confidentiality (fwd) > From: dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM) > Date: Fri, 09 Jan 98 10:24:24 EST > I'm sorry, I don't have the time to look this up. If you're trying to prove > that Gauss was not a nice person, I don't believe it. Anyone who would tell their dying wife, via their son, to wait a moment until he had finished his calculations is not a nice person. > argument you can make is to cite Bolyai's claims that Lobachevsky was not > a real person but a "tentacle" of Gauss, created to persecute Bolyai > (gee, that sounds vaguely familiar...), and you can't find any more dirt > on Gauss, then it proves to me that he was indeed a remarkably nice person. What the hell are you talking about here? I made no such claims at all. Lobashevski was the first person to write in modern history on non-euclidean geometry. Gauss was a contemporary and was quite familiar with Lobashevski's work. He was even asked to review "The Theory of Parallels". Gauss, in an uncharacteristic act, even admitted that Lobachevski's work had progressed farther than his own. > only for the noble-born and wealthy. Gauss did a lot to help other > people in many ways, both as individuals, and in targeting his research > to solve practical problems for good of the humanity. Gauss did a lot of harm as well. He characteristicaly denied works of others and trivialized their contributions while at the same time promoting his own. He was prone to bouts of drunken anger and is known to have physicaly attacked quite a few people while in that state. His usual treatment of contemporaries was based on contempt, not respect. > You also haven't explained how Bolyai could have been Gauss's school friend, > being 25 years younger. Bolyai's father worked with Gauss (as I explained) and his son John also worked with Gauss from the time he (Bolyai) was in school; not Gauss. I am going to refrain from going on with the remainder of your 'points'. You have strayed so far afield, as usual, or misconstrued comments that it has no relevance to what the original discussion was about, which was science advances when people publish and share their work - not when it is held back and unpublished. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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In God We Antitrust, from the Netly News
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 11:57:07 -0500 From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> To: politech(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: FC: In God We Antitrust, from the Netly News ************ http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1678,00.html The Netly News (http://netlynews.com/) January 9, 1998 In God We Antitrust by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) Bill Gates likes to portray himself as a businessman hounded by hordes of boorish bureaucrats who resent his success. "It's absolutely clear that our competitors are spending an enormous amount of time and money trying to whip up anti-Microsoft sentiment in Washington, D.C.," says spokesman Mark Murray. "For the past year, Netscape, Sun and other competitors have been crawling all over Washington, D.C., trying to use the government as a weapon against Microsoft -- rather than competing head-to-head in the marketplace." Of course, that's what you'd expect a PR flack to say, whether it's true or not. But maybe, just maybe, Microsoft has a point. A close look at the history of antitrust law reveals that its enforcement has always been political. The demand for antitrust regulations in the first place came from midwestern butchers who wanted to block competition from more efficient meat-packing plants in Chicago. Since then, execution of the 1890 Sherman Act has been highly partisan: Democratic administrations are nearly twice as likely to bring antitrust cases as Republicans. Antitrust regulations are also protectionist: Regulators wield them to protect domestic companies from overseas competitors. If it's politics and not policy that prompted the Justice Department to assail Microsoft this time around, the paper trail may not become public until well into the next century. For now, though, we can look at antitrust history instead: ITT and Nixon: President Richard Nixon intervened in an antitrust action against International Telephone & Telegraph in 1971 in exchange for a bribe -- a hefty contribution to the 1972 Republican convention. "I don't know whether ITT is bad, good or indifferent," he said on April 19, 1971, White House tapes reveal. "But there is not going to be any more antitrust actions as long as I am in this chair... goddamn it, we're going to stop it." [...snip...] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe: send a message to majordomo(a)vorlon.mit.edu with this text: subscribe politech More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: rant on the morality of confidentiality (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ok, my absolutely last post on this issue. Forwarded message: > Subject: Re: rant on the morality of confidentiality (fwd) > From: dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM) > Date: Fri, 09 Jan 98 19:50:35 EST > > Anyone who would tell their dying wife, via their son, to wait a moment > > until he had finished his calculations is not a nice person. > > Do you have proof that Gauss did that? This sounds like another one of > those urban legends the envious sheeple like to invent about celebrities, > like the claim that Leonrado da Vinci was a cocksucker. It is a commen citation in several of his biographies. The first place I saw it was in a science history book that Isaac Asimov wrote (you know who he is I assume, known for writing world-class sci-fi and one of the best bio-chemistry textbooks around in the 70's and early 80's) back in the late 70's. It's the same book where he talks about Torricelli (he invented the mercurey barometer) and how he sent his brother-in-law into the bandit infested hills to actualy test the device. There seems to have been some indication that Torricelli had an alterior motive in this action. Unfortunately I think I have attempted to read a large fraction of the 300+ books that Asimov wrote at one time or another since about 1965 when I really started to read sci-fi and as a result they all seem to run together. I looked in the couple of Asimov books that I actualy own but unfortunately it isn't in either of them. I will look at the library I keep at the shop next time I go out there but it is equaly likely it was destroyed in my house fire 3+ years ago. If somebody out there knows which book this is I would appreciate the citation. I will add this to my 'hunt-list' that I keep as I tour the many bookstores here in Austin. If I find it I'll holler. > > > argument you can make is to cite Bolyai's claims that Lobachevsky was not > > > a real person but a "tentacle" of Gauss, created to persecute Bolyai > > > (gee, that sounds vaguely familiar...), and you can't find any more dirt > > > on Gauss, then it proves to me that he was indeed a remarkably nice person. > > > > What the hell are you talking about here? I made no such claims at all. > > You're citing janos Bolyai, who claimed exactly that. Unfortunately, the > poor chap went insane. No, I am citing the translator of Bolyai's book; Dr. George Bruce Halsted. If you want to discuss this further and intelligently it might do you well to have actualy read the book, which by your own admission you never have. Don't be a miser, spend the $6.00 US. I *might* take your comments a hell of a lot more seriously if just once you would cite a single reference to *any* of your comments or claims. It is interesting that when it comes down to proof you don't have the time to do the research nor do you *ever* fill any request for references. > You're confused, Jim. Farkas Bolyai (the father) never claimed to have > invented non-euclidean geometry. Your twisting words and dangerously approaching straight out lying. Both Farkas Bolyai and Gauss worked together on non-euclidian geometry. Let me quote the translators notes for the book: " But to prove Euclid's system, we must show that a triangle's angle-sum is exactly a straight angle, which nothing human can ever do. However, this is anticipating, for in 1799 it seems that the mind of the elder Bolyai, Bolyai Farkas, was in precisely the same state as that of his friend Gauss. Both were intensely trying to prove what now we know is indemonstable. ..." As to my making mistakes, big fucking deal. Everyone does. The difference between you and me is that I am not trying to do anything other than figure out what happened and why. If I'm wrong I'll admit it (and I am at least once a day). I am also willing to do the research (as best I can with what resources I have) and also willing to cite it. All I ask from those who wish to debate issues with me is equal treatment, in short the opportunity to review their sources and an honest opportunity to refute those sources. You seem to have a personal motive in everything you submit and further *never* cite any sort of source that can be reviewed and repudiated or supported. To put it bluntly, you lack honesty in your dealings with others. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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