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Re: Bob - FYI -- not sure if this was already posted ?
by Mark Grant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jonathan Wienke (JonWienk(a)ix.netcom.com) wrote: > Like a kidnapper is really going to encrypt a ransom note so the kidnap > victim's friends won't be able to figure out how to deliver the ransom > money. DUHHHHHHH! But what if you're out at lunch or on vacation, or just moved, and no-one can read the message because they don't have the key? We must have GMR encryption to FBI keys now, just in case! (That's not entirely facetious, I could see them making this kind of argument if CMR is widely adopted... it's not Big Brother, it's just another useful public service). Mark

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Re: Orthogonal (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > From: Mark Rogaski <wendigo(a)ne-wendigo.jabberwock.org> > Subject: Re: Orthogonal (fwd) > Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 02:28:33 -0500 (EST) > : Some of you people are fucking worthless for anything other than baiting. > > Oh, come now, any human has many uses if you put your mind to it. > A cheap, renewable replacement for ballistic test gelatin, maybe? ;) Ok, so I was wrong that particular point. Come to think of it, I do need somebody to wipe my butt after I shit too, when I do it my carpal-tunnel syndrome gets aggravated... ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ 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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Crypto-update: Magaziner on Clinton, Senate on crypto-czar
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Reminder: There //is// a DC cypherpunks meeting this Sunday afternoon! Email me for details if you don't have 'em yet. --Declan] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 14:53:07 -0800 (PST) From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> To: fight-censorship-announce(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Crypto-update: Magaziner on Clinton, Senate on crypto-czar Ira Magaziner, Clinton's Net-advisor, spoke today at the District of Columbia Bar Association, Computer and Telecommunications Law section conference. A brief report, as told to me by someone who was there: >Magaziner said Clinton and Gore specifically oppose mandatory >domestic key recovery. Said they're still fighting it >out within the administration and hope to work out a >reasonable compromise. Aligned himself pretty clearly >with the commercial, not the law enforcement side. Said >that when Freeh waves around the "four horsemen," he's >hard-pressed to come up with an informed answer. Said >NSA had been involved in lobbying on the Hill. Also, a Senate committee today approved the nomination of David "Crypto-Ambassador" Aaron to be Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade. Aaron has been for the last year trying to export the FBI's crypto-proposals for mandatory Big Brother cryptoware. (And unconfirmed reports say he's been getting into fights not just inside the OECD in Paris, but outside: apparently he's tussled with Parisian cabbies more than once...) Aaron's nomination now goes to the full Senate; no vote has been scheduled yet. -Declan

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Discrete logs 1
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Even adders can multiply using log tables..." PGP is moving to discrete log based cryptography. It will still support RSA, but people will be encouraged to generate discrete log keys. It will use RSA to encrypt to people with RSA keys, and discrete log crypto to encrypt to people with discrete log keys. Many discrete log cryptosystems will be patent free after next year. It may be that they will become more popular over the next few years for that reason. RSA has several more years before its patents expire. Most people are not as familiar with the math behind discrete logs as they are with RSA. The general idea of the difficulty of factoring is pretty easy to understand. It's much easier to multiply two large primes together than to figure out what the primes were just by looking at the result. Discrete logs require a little more explanation. First I am going to write a little bit about the lore of logarithms. I think today a lot of people don't know what they are. When I was a boy, in the 1960's, computers and even calculators were not widely available. Yet engineers in many fields needed to perform calculations. Reaction rates, material strengths, friction, current flow, all such calculations require multiplication and division of numbers with several significant digits. The choices were basically to multiply it out the long way, which was slow, error-prone, and wasteful because it generates twice as many digits as you need; use a slide rule, which usually only gets you two or three digits of accuracy; or to use log tables, which could get you four or five, or sometimes even more, accurate digits. The logarithm of a number is the power that you have to raise some specified base (usually 10 for these purposes) to in order to get that number. The logarithm of 100 base 10 is 2 because 10**2 = 100. The log of 1000 is 3. For numbers not powers of 10, the logarithm has fractional parts. The logarithm of 20 is about 1.3, for example. To multiply two numbers, you find their logs and add them, and then turn the result back into a number. To divide, subtract the logs. So most of the work is just in looking up what the logs are using published tables. Actually we do use logs in a crude form in much of cryptography. Any time you say that the product of two 512 bit numbers is 1024 bits what you mean is that the log base two of the smaller numbers is about 512, and so the log base two of their product is 512+512 or 1024. By the time I was in high school calculators were becoming fairly widespread, but we still learned how to use log tables to do multiplication and division. Whole books were published containing nothing but tables of the logarithms of numbers. You can still find these sometimes in used book stores. There were lots of tricks to using these tables which we had to learn. Logarithms of numbers less than 1 are negative, but the trick was to treat them as the sum of a positive fractional part and a negative integer, so for example the log of .2 was treated as +.3 - 1. This made it easier to look up the values. And there were special sub-tables within the tables to help with interpolating, looking up log values between the entries in the table. Using these you could get more accuracy in your answers. All this was part of the craft of working engineers and scientists of the time. It's hard for people today, raised on throwaway and even virtual calculators, to understand the sense of power that came from using logs for calculations. Until we learned these advanced techniques the only accurate alternatives were the terribly tedious hand methods. Being able to get results by adding up a few numbers from a book was an amazing improvement. The discrete logs used in crypto have very different mathematical properties than regular logarithms, but I thought this bit of history would spark some memories in old-timers and give a new perspective for younger people. Hal

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Cypherpunks Web
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cypherpunks International (CYPHERPUNKS5-DOM) 23 Net St. Ste 31337 New York, NY 10001 Domain Name: CYPHERPUNKS.ORG Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact: Burnham, Daniel E. A (DEB48) deab(a)FRESH.FLY.NET 212-840-2600 Billing Contact: Burnham, Daniel E. A (DEB48) deab(a)FRESH.FLY.NET 212-840-2600 Record last updated on 20-Sep-97. Record created on 04-Jul-97. Database last updated on 5-Nov-97 05:56:01 EDT. Domain servers in listed order: NS.OTEC.COM 206.64.4.67 NS1.EARTHWEB.COM 206.152.10.2 ----------------------------------------- Cypherpunks (CYPHERPUNKS4-DOM) 9705 Standford Road Ft. Meade, MD 20755 US Domain Name: CYPHERPUNKS.NET Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact: Shostack, Adam (AS409) adam(a)HOMEPORT.ORG (617) 354-4827 Billing Contact: Shostack, Adam (AS409) adam(a)HOMEPORT.ORG (617) 354-4827 Record last updated on 11-Apr-97. Record created on 11-Apr-97. Database last updated on 5-Nov-97 05:56:01 EDT. Domain servers in listed order: NS.HOMEPORT.ORG 205.136.65.205 SATISFIED.APOCALYPSE.ORG 192.48.232.24 ----------------------------------------- cypherpunks (REMAILER-DOM) 1819 Woolsey St. Berkeley, CA 94703 Domain Name: REMAILER.NET Administrative Contact: Hughes, Eric (EH9) eric(a)SAC.NET (415) 392-0526 Technical Contact, Zone Contact: Levy, Elias M. (EML2) aleph1(a)DFW.NET 619-794-8383 (FAX) (619) 794-8373 Billing Contact: Hughes, Eric (EH9) eric(a)SAC.NET (415) 392-0526 Record last updated on 16-Apr-97. Record created on 09-Nov-94. Database last updated on 5-Nov-97 05:56:01 EDT. Domain servers in listed order: FLYING.FISH.COM 140.174.97.13 NS1.SAC.NET 208.146.161.2

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Taxing Churches for their views? Bad idea. (fwd)
by Brandon Crosby 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > >More telling, she doesn't seem to have a problem using a religious (and > >therefore tax-exempt) organization to push a political agenda. Apparently > >that whole 'separation of church and state' thing only applies when it's > >convenient. > > > >If religions want to play politics, the least we can do is get them to pay > >for the privilege. I'd feel a certain guilty pleasure seeing some of those > >bottom-feeders taxed into penury. > > Nonsense. And a dangerous course. Yes. > One can decide to "tax churches" or to "not tax churches." I have no > particularly strong opinion on either option. > > But one must definitely _not_ base the decision to tax or not to tax on the > opinions expressed by a church! Agian, yes. > One cannot decide to tax the Catholic Church "into penury" because its > anti-abortion views have become politically incorrect in the last 30 years. > Nor can one decide to tax the tempes and synagogues of Judaism "into > penury" because they are centers of support for the Zionist Entity. 'Political Agenda' and free speech are two seperate things. Nowadays, free speech is constantly being challanged by racism, bias and such. People sue each other because they say something that makes someone feel bad. Churches lie at the center of free speech, being awarded for their views by tax exemption. Should 3M have tax exemptions because it gives people jobs? While I do not want a debate over tax exemptions in churches, 'Free Speech' may very well involve supporting canidates for positions in a democracy. This is the very basis for elections. However, one begins to question this reasoning when a church leader attempts to get into the government, using the church's tax exemptions, for either support of the church, support of self, or some illegal (or, at least, unethical) mix. Should churches be tax exempt? Without their long history of helping people, I doubt they would have any benifits. However, even if their privillige was removed, they would simply be able to donate less money to community causes. Uncle Sam (and his son, IRS) really shouldn't be applied to this subject: What is free speech? Is tax exemption justifiable to all types of [free] speech? -Brandon Crosby [Can you see the ghosts making snowmen?]

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Re: [news] TV station sets cybersex sting
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>*** TV station sets cybersex sting >With cyperporn and cybersex ranking as sensational news items on >local TV stations, Fox's Los Angeles outlet has taken the trend a >step further by ensnaring adult sexual predators. KTTV's Fox 11 News >at 10 worked with a 21-year-old woman posing as a 14-year-old to >conduct cybersting operations that led to the arrests of five men. >KTTV used the unnamed woman as bait, having her enter online chat >rooms where she was immediately targeted. The station filmed the >online seductions as well as the arrests of the men, who included an >attorney, a doctor, a retired Army officer and an investigator for >the Dept. of Labor. See story at >http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=5777644-464 And then they tricked a real 14 year old girl into meeting with them and having sex so that maybe, if they really, really tried very hard, they could argue that a real crime had been committed, right? Didn't think so.

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First American Corp.
by fasc＠mxtro.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: Raids on Cypherpunks?
by Blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: >(One can only hope. I'm getting tired of setting my traps every night and >having no BATFags to show for it.) ..................................................... You know, a long time ago (in '93) when L..D.(etweiler) was provoking the list with his various "Secret Operations" against the "Big Macs" on the list, you (Tim) remarked that you half expected to hear one day that he had been shot and arrested (or was it shot and killed) for his bizarre behavior. Ironically, I wonder if it will not be yourself, who one day is found under those circumstances. (Not that your behavior is bizarre, or anything). .. Blanc

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17 Dec '03

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