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Assassination Politics on Website
by Toto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Bell's "Assassination Politics" is at: http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/carljohn/ -- Toto "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" http://bureau42.base.org/public/xenix/xenbody.html

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Re: No, it's PayWord, no, it's MicroMint, no, it's...
by daw＠cs.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <199704040538.VAA01156(a)crypt.hfinney.com>, Hal Finney <hal(a)rain.org> wrote: > David Wagner, daw(a)cs.berkeley.edu, writes: > > http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/my-posts/anon-micropayments > > I wonder if there is a problem with the double spending detection. > Somebody could spend at a store, then return some of the spent coins to > the broker before the store has a chance to update the broker with the > most recent spending report. Maybe the broker could contact the store and > let them know that the stack was redeemed now, and see how many had been > spent. In the non-anonymous case, shops can go offline and redeem sticks nightly; this doesn't prevent double-spending, but allows detection, so that brokers can blacklist double-spenders. When you move to anonymity, you need a different approach; going online at stick commitment time works (i.e. when the shop checks the digital signature it simultaneously goes online to the bank). This has some of the costs of online schemes, but isn't terrible, because you only do it when the first coin is paid, not when subsequent coins are. If going online is a problem, you could imagine doing probabilistic online checking. The shop has a 10% chance (say) of going online and checking immediately, and a 90% chance of batching for verification on the half hour. If the shop sees a bunch of fraud going on during some batched verification, then the shop has to take that as a loss, but it then knows to increase the chance of going online significantly. You can imagine auditing agencies (or the bank) publishing daily statistics on fraud, and businesses adjusting their percentages to respond with the trends. Again, different shops will probably have different trade-offs (based on performance demands, risk, whether they're using durable goods or selling just bits, and such); this gives them flexibility in choosing their risk profile. You mention specifically the special double-spending problem of spending once at a shop and once when asking for a redemption of a partially-spent stick. To help ameliorate this particular problem, some special-purpose solutions are available: for instance, you could enforce a one-day waiting period on trade-ins for partially-spent sticks. For instance, the consumer commits today, and if no shop has collected by tomorrow, he gets the cash back; shops are instructed to verify nightly, or else they bear much more risk. Consumers don't need to trade back their sticks in real-time; they can certainly be forced to wait a day or two at no real inconvenience. > I had an idea for doing the double-spending problem in an offline way by > using the same technique used for Chaum's offline coins. The customer > embeds his identity in the coins, blinded with a random number. A cut > and choose technique is used during withdrawal for him to prove that > he has set up his coins correctly. Then when he spends the first time > at the shop, he responds to a random challenge revealing some of his > blinded info. This is done in such a way that if he spends at two shops, > his identity is revealed by combining the info from the two different > challenges. > > Unfortunately then when he returns the unspent coins at the broker, > and goes through the protocol there, that will reveal his identity since > he is in effect double spending the stack. I don't know; I know nothing about Chaum's offline coins. Can you enforce a trade-in where the new stick the user gets has the same identity information in it that the old stick had, and the bank can verify this equality (cut-and-choose somehow??) without needing to know the identity informatino itself? I don't know. > Another concern was for the method where a stack of 87 coins gets redeemed > for a fresh stack of 87. This has the slight problem that the size of > the new stack would be correlated with the size of the one turned in. Good point. That didn't occur to me. Thanks.

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Meinel news article(hehe) (fwd)
by se7en 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 04 Apr 1997 02:42:48 EST From: J R S <the_incubus(a)juno.com> To: dc-stuff(a)dis.org Subject: Meinel news article(hehe) Routers- Redmond, Wa - It seems that after Microsoft squashes one bug, another shows up. Today, in Happy Hacker Digest, the ueber-cracker Carolyn Meinel found another one. It relies on the fact that NT does not use good, strong encryption. Meinel, a NSA-approached hacker turned media glutton relied on a her mathematical skills to find the weakness. "I was once offered a job by the NSA. I read the book _Applied Cryptography_. I know lots of good math jokes." In actuality, it was her cousin who was offered the job at the NSA, as he could factor numbers in his head. Carolyn's cousin does other things, such as carry on as her in internet IRC 'chat sessions'. "Diffie Hellman is not secure. It has back doors in it. I mean it is suspected to have back doors in it. I mean some guy thinks it might have a back door in it. I wrote about it in my paper. Go read my paper." Unfortunately, Meinel was not able to be questioned as to the name of her paper. With her knowledge of cryptography, Meinel was able to make a 'k-rAd x-pl0it' against the Windows NT operating system. Carolyn found that if one has administrator access to the 'NT box' than she could decrypt the passwords because of NT's lax cryptography. When asked about the possibility that her exploits come out of other areas, such as bugtraq or dcstuff, Meinel replied with "Oh, I'd say I only get %5 from the other lists." When asked again, she came back with "Ok, well about %lk3j3pfv;ldjf08w damn line noise anyways, the point is that I found an x-ploit in NT that should be fixed." Mike Nash, Director of Marketing for WindowsNT thinks differently of though. "Even Ms. Meinel said that if you use 'really big passwords' than decryption is not possible. If you look at the NT manuals, you will notice that they have always cautioned to use really big passwords. Besides, isn't this the same bug that was found last week?" We tried to reach Meinel for comment, but she was unreachable. Getting a straight answer out of her "is like nailing Jello to the wall," as one crypto-hacker put it after talking to her. T.I. Incubus "SunOS, the swiss the_incubus(a)juno.com cheese of UNIX" ...Major

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Re: Assassination Politics on Website
by David E. Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:06 PM 4/3/97 -0600, Toto wrote: >Jim Bell's "Assassination Politics" is at: >http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/carljohn/ Toto, I'm disappointed. You didn't even point them at http://bureau42.base.org/public/apfull.txt where the (AFAIK) complete AP essays have lived for months. (Note that's the same site that hosts The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre and the current drafts of WebWorld: The True Story of the Internet, modulo the last part of the URL.) dave

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US Domestic GAK
by Steve 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has Anyone heard about this????? sorrin privsoft(a)ix.netcom.com Clinton administration has new encryption proposal Network World via Individual Inc. : Washington, D.C. For months the Clinton administration has lobbied for its version of key escrow that largely focused on encryption export. Now in its first formal legislative document, the White House is asking that its policy also apply to data encrypted within U.S. borders and that law enforcement be given access to that data based on a simple request from a law enforcement or government security agency. The U.S. Attorney General will set up the specific rules for written authorization. Civil liberties groups highly critical of the White House plan pointed out that under the basic guidelines it will be easier for law enforcement to get encryption keys than to tap phones, which requires a warrant or court order. The administration does not just face domestic opposition to its proposed policy. The international community, represented by the 29-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), also has not rallied behind the Clinton cause. After a year of study and intense lobbying by the U.S. Justice Department, the OECD, based in Brussels, Belgium, last week released the ``Cryptography Policy Guidelines,'' an eight-point document that recognizes nations may want to have access to cryptographic keys or un-scrambled plaintext. But the OECD guidelines fall far short of recommending key recovery as the preferred international approach. Some participants in the OECD crypto-policy effort were pleased with its outcome, including Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center here. ``There's a strong emphasis here on privacy and voluntary market guidelines,'' Rotenberg said. The OECD guidelines state that users should have a choice in cryptography, that cryptography should be driven by business requirements, and that the privacy of personal data and the secrecy of communications should be respected. Congressional cold shoulder So far, no legislators on Capitol Hill have embraced the ideas in the administration-drafted legislation, the Electronic Data Security Act of 1997, which also calls for nationally certified key-recovery centers for storing copies of encryption keys. ``From our point of view, it's a breathtaking expansion of law enforcement's surveillance au-thority,'' said Alan Davidson, staff counsel at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) about the draft bill. The CDT has posted the bill on its Web site, www.cdt.org. Commerce Department Un-der Secretary William Reinsch, whose office took the lead in drafting the bill, last week had no comment. The draft bill emphasizes that the key-recovery regulation is voluntary in the U.S., but opponents argue otherwise. The White House draft defines as the federal standard only digital certificates that work with key-recovery encryption products. And under the drafted bill, employees working in a government-certified key-recovery center would be spared any civil or criminal liabilities for disclosing decrypted information to a government agency. Through the economic in-centives and regulatory impact of the Clinton administration bill, ``they plan to severely limit [the products] you can choose from,'' according to Jim Bidzos, president of RSA Data Security, Inc., whose public-key technology is widely deployed in encryption products. ``The intent is to discourage the use of strong, unescrowed encryption in the U. S.'' [Copyright 1997, Network World]

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Re: Feds reading this list, Jim Bell, and threats
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Phil Hallam-Baker's rejoinder to Paul Bradley' defense of AP: Virtually all of Phil's charges against AP apply equally well to state-sponsored killing in the natonal interest, including that arranged by highly educated, cultured, philosophical, nuclear physicists and electrical engineers. That's the issue. Who gets to decide who lives and who dies, and how close the killer is to the slaughter, unprotected by law, by public consensus, by popular will, by apologetics for the security of national interest. Jim Bell is hardly the first to articulate this challenge to the grand tradition of the majestic state and its precursors -- the king, the bandit, the tribal bully, the strong -- all sanctioned beasts taking what their trainers want by force, while being excused and celebrated by fey intellectuals and balladeers of all craven submissive dress. Rushdie, hmm. Phil what mind-swill you elbow-tipping? Is Rushie not closer to Jim Bell than he is to you in challenging the arrogant mullahs of highly sophisticated armed thuggery. Who you shillinging for these days, Crispin's bandits of the NLs?

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by Mid West Electronics 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: Feds reading this list, Jim Bell, and threats
by Phillip M. Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May <tcmay(a)got.net> wrote in article <5i3tpu$86h(a)life.ai.mit.edu>... > At 1:51 PM -0600 4/4/97, null(a)myemail.net wrote: > > > Horseshit. Anybody here ever hear of the Boston Tea Party? How > >about the American Revolution? War of Independece? French Revolution? > > You know, people who said "Fuck this shit, I've had enough." People > >who acted in concert to fight injustice and oppression. If you care to read the history of the times from unbiased sources you will find that the Boston patriots main gripe with Britain was not the tax on tea but the insistence of the British authorities on negotiating with the Sioux nation amongst others. It was the fear that the British would sign a peace treaty with the Indians recognising them as a sovereign nation that was the spark to the flame. Try reading "Lies my teacher told me" sometime. Given that the American revolution institutionalised slavery and lead to the theft of Indian land, and the French revolution the murder of about quarter of a million people they cannot be said to be entirely laudatory events. The national myths of the countries concerned nothwithstanding. People are not fit judges of their own cause. The civil war was started by the South who believed that the North might infringe their "right" to own others as property. > Note that I've never called for a witch hunt, nor have I called for his > posts to be censored out of the list. I chose a long time ago to filter > Jim's stuff into my appropriate folder for such stuff, and occasionally > took him out of the filter when he seemed (from occasional checks on what I > was filtering), to be discussing things other than his "Klaatu Narada > Nictoo" (or whatever) Final Solution. Same for me. I objected to Bell's AP proposal but not to his _right_ to post it. It was the tedious length at which he bored the rest of us with it that I objected to. Last I heard the Feds were concerned that he might have been putting AP into effect. Collecting the names and addresses of IRS officials, setting up a kangeroo court to try them, sending them demands, those sound like actions Bell would have serious difficulty in doing without giving someone reasonable cause to believe they were being targetted for murder. Phill

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RE: Feds reading this list, Jim Bell, and threats
by Phillip M. Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk pissed off Hallam-Baker to the >extent that gave up all pretense hiding his support for >a New World Order, and wrote: Yeah, like I wrote in "The Laird of the new world order". ... They said they worked for freedom but they had another plan. The only new world order is, obey your Uncle Sam. Must be in deep, deep cover. >> I have degrees in Nuclear Physics, Electronic Engineering, I have >> been offered a contract for my book on the philosophy of >> communication. > ...so the rest of us are just dirt under your feet? I was pointing out that the attempt to claim that the rest of us poor slobs didn't see Jim Bell as a shining Messiah was not because we were too stupid to understand him as claimed. >> I don't believe that people >> are fit judges of their own cause as Bell and you do. > So we should only fight for other people's causes, and not >our own? Or not fight at all? I think that before you murder someone because you think they are wrong you need to at the very least put the matter to an impartial arbitrator. Phill

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The Laird
by Toto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Phillip M. Hallam-Baker wrote: > > >paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk pissed off Hallam-Baker to the > >extent that gave up all pretense hiding his support for > >a New World Order, and wrote: > > Yeah, like I wrote in "The Laird of the new world order". > ... > They said they worked for freedom but they had another plan. > The only new world order is, obey your Uncle Sam. I would like to see the complete work, if you have it available online. > Must be in deep, deep cover. I'm a conspiracy theorist. Any particular Crayola colour you would like me to use to draw the links between yourself and the Cabal? > I was pointing out that the attempt to claim that the rest of > us poor slobs didn't see Jim Bell as a shining Messiah was > not because we were too stupid to understand him as claimed. I once recorded a tune called, "He used to take acid, and now he's found God, but he's still got that look in his eye." I can't deny that Jim Bell seems to have "that look" in his eye. > >> I don't believe that people > >> are fit judges of their own cause as Bell and you do. > > > So we should only fight for other people's causes, and not > >our own? Or not fight at all? > > I think that before you murder someone because you think they > are wrong you need to at the very least put the matter to an impartial > arbitrator. I believe that the AP system pretty much spreads out the "arbitration" in much the same manner that the electoral system does. To me, it is similar to the inter-family dynamics that take place in Dr. Kevorkian's work, only on a more pervasive scale. I have always seen Jim Bell's work as a theoretical exercise that deserved a more serious analysis than he, himself, gave it. It pushed the envelope of issues that need to be dealt with, and did so in a manner that went beyond seemingly mundane matters wherein one could easily dismiss the long-term consequences of the train of logic involved. An analogy might be made to those who dismiss a little ass- grabbing as inconsequential when compared to rape, as opposed to those who view it as a precursor to rape. Despite my sometimes caustic, irreverent demeanor, I enjoy your posts, as they show a thoughtfulness which goes beyond some of the "Oh yeah! Sez who! Yo' mamma!" threads that sometimes prevail on various lists. So, don't change on my account, I hate you just the way you are. (Please note my aversion to adding little 'happy faces' to my posts. Humor be humor.) -- Toto "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" http://bureau42.base.org/public/xenix/xenbody.html

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