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UN_nab (Re: an137768)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by an137768(a)anon.penet.fi () on Sun, 27 Nov 1:16 AM Dear an137768, Penet.fi middle-digited the Pink Bunny Mailbot here in rejection of UN_nab. PBM is fearfully quivering now awaiting a planetary address to flip your request. Please try again with return-tattoo and blank message with subject: UN_nab.

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PRIVACY DIGEST
by Sandy Sandfort 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gary Jeffers wrote: ... Urgently needed are the opinions of Black Unicorn, or possibly Sandy Sandfort or Duncan Frissell as to whether or not the Costa Rican reference I gave is a "STING". Sting are a lot less likely than plain old scams or poor advice. When I was in Costa Rica I never met or heard of the folks in question. I haven't had any personal contacts or dealings with them either. However, I was not particularly impressed with the material you posted. Costa Rica is certainly NOT the best place to set up a privacy business. It's too far from where the offshore action is. A remarkably high number of con men are based there, however. The best places for a sting operation would be in Caribbean islands, especially noted havens such as the Cayman Islands. The Cayman's was where Castle Bank (I think that was the name) was chartered. It was a conduit for CIA money laundering and payoffs. This all came to light when the IRS(?) used a Miami prostitute to keep one of the bank officials occupied while the contents of his briefcase--including confidential client lists--were examined and photographed. When the left hand found out what the right hand had done, the IRS investigation was dropped and the photos were destroyed lest some CIA asset might be compromised. (Gosh, don't we just love those euphemisms.) Anyway, I doubt that the Costa Rica folks are a sting operation, but I also doubt they offer much of value either. S a n d y P.S. "Live Free or Die" is the New Hampshire state motto, NOT the name of a book by Abbie Hoffman and Dr. Jack Kavorkian. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Privacy Digest
by Critias_the_conspirator＠au.informix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I had thought that if Williams of Costa Rica was a sting, the stuff he sells would be better quality. His advertising brochures look like they were put together by a thirteen year old who speaks English as a second language. On the other hand, his stuff may be truly representative of the intellectual level of our opponents -- (Consider Sternlight) If this is the case then we have little to fear. "Captain Bob" writes: > Worse, at least one report does not exist - and that is the > one that would point to most government heat > if you order it. Just out of idle curiosity, > I had my foreign lawyer order so that was how I found out. This incident is suggestive of a sting. I presume this was what "Captain Bob" intended to imply, though he did not state the conclusion. > While I hate to say it, there is currently to my knowledge no easy turn-key > one-stop-stop "Where to go to break the law" foreign operators that I would > trust. If you want true privacy, carve it out for yourself Exactly so. Many people around the world offer services that are convenient if one wishes to prevent the government from learning about your financial activities, but they do not advertise "Hey, come to us to cheat taxes and evade controls" because if they did it would diminish their usefulness, both to those of their clients that are using them to avoid taxes, and to those of their clients who use them for other purposes. By the way, when one wishes to move money out of the country, I recommend that the money spends a short time in some third country that has numerous financial transactions with your home country, friendly relationships with your home government, no privacy laws, and is not a tax haven. Thus moving it to country X does not attract attention, and if you then move it to country Y (the money laundering haven), country X does not care and your home country does not know. "Wire $20 000 to account such and such in Canada" attracts little attention. "Give me 20 000 cash", or "wire 20 000 to the Cayman Islands" attracts much attention. -- Critias_the_conspirator

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NYT on Hiding Cash (Re: Privacy Digest)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sorry to fall asleep at the switch, but Gary Jeffers posts on The Privacy Digest and those of Black Unicorn and Critias jogged me to note that The New York Times had two articles on Friday about a UN conference on control of money laundering and the flight of German capital to Luxembourg banks to escape high taxes. Both articles describe the resistance of banks to government snooping, and how laws are being modified to try to keep up with increasing demand for cash havens and/or laundering. ------------------- Here's an excerpt from the first, "Laundering of Crime Cash Troubles U.N.": ". . . the skillful manipulation of dirty street money through former Soviet replublics, offshore banks and major stock exchanges, until it emerged as legitimate cash for buying and selling of a hotel in Bogota. As outlined today by officials in Naples at a major United Nations conference on organized crime, it is not just the growers, smugglers and assassins who make the worldwide drug trade a scourge, but a new breed of skilled money-managers, lawyers and other professionals in the pay of the mob. Devising ever more complex ways of laundering money, they handle an estimated $750 billion every year. . . . By long tradition, banking secrecy and numbered accounts were associated primarily with such financial bastions as Zurich, Vienna and Luxembourg, and the money came mainly from the drug trade. But, United Nations officials say, as these banking centers slowly yield a few secrets to narcotics investigators, a whole new array of less reputable banks are springing up across the former Soviet Union . . . . . . The world's increasingly coordinated and sophisticated crime syndicates, by contrast, now deal in everything from organs for transplant to nuclear materials; with their money laundered, they put their investments into legal business." For an e-mail copy of this article send blank message with subject: UN_nab ------------------- >From the second article, "Germans in Tax Revolt Embrace Luxembourg", these excerpts: "Since 1993, when the Finance Ministry in Bonn imposed a 30 percent withholding tax on interest income for residents, Germans by the thousands have used Luxembourg to carry out a quiet but powerful tax revolt. Carrying suitcases and plastic bags of cash, they have deposited $150 billion in Luxembourg bank accounts, placing it beyond the reach of the tax authorities in Bonn, and behind the screen of Luxembourg's rigid bank secrecy laws. . . . [Description of Germany's proposal that all European Union banks agree to withhold taxes on interest income for the various governments and the banks' demurs.] 'People think they are overtaxed and so they are looking at every way possible to avoid paying taxes,' said a banking lobbyist in Bonn who insisted on anonymity. 'We assume that if people deposit their money in Luxembourg, they will pay taxes. If they don't, that is a political problem for the government, not the banks. We are not policemen.' " For an e-mail copy of this article send blank message with subject: LUX_out

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Re: Interfacing PGP with Pine (Script pointer)
by jamiel＠sybase.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:47 AM 11/25/94, Michael Handler wrote: > For a well written script to interface PGP with Pine: > > finger slutsky(a)lipschitz.sfasu.edu | pgp -f > mkpgp.txt.uu > > If you don't have finger access, mail me privately, and I'll send >the file to you. If you don't mind, could I have a copy? finger is disabled here... thanks, -j

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Re: PC MSDOS hardware key proposal
by cwedgwood＠cybernet.co.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jyri Poldre <jp(a)pitsa.pld.ttu.ee> wrote: ______________________________________________________________________ Frgiv me if i am a bit off theme, but it just seemed as a good idea. As I am going to have some off-time tonight I might forget that and on the other hand maybe someone can use it in protecting his/her intellectual property and this would certainly be linked with our topic. The idea came to me after seeing some incredibly small piece of code doing some unbelievable damage. Like 3 kbytes of com making hardware key useless. I started to play with idea of having something more reasonable for PC SW developers. For start it is not possible to use any type of key checking, because dos is open system and allows everyone to intercept and disable it. The lock must be a part of program itself. Also one must concider the dataflow and power consumption, meaning you cannot have second floating point unit in printer/serial port.You cnt put it into slot , cause it should be reasonably cheap. My idea for such device is the following: Have the HW unit calculate the If-then-else conditions in program flow. it is not reasonable to do it everywhere, but just in some places( depends on the money/time one used to devolop product and similar relation of expected hacking ) . For that purposes you could collect all results into flags and present them to this Hw unit. It calculates the condition as boolean function of input variables. If you want more entropy you could involve state machine in this unit. Also some delay, what would be built into ( one cannot just send data through printer port with 32 Mbytes /sec.) although for user it would be unnoticed , but using brute force and 32 bits of data this would make our friendly hacker quite old. Another alternative is to understand the dataflow in program but from binary to get the idea... no , this is a bad idea. so - just when it comes to ITE you present printer port with 3-4 bytes calling some procedure what reads flags from global variables and returns carry - to go or to stay. that's it. An attack might also concider just listening the device and writing down the values but you would have to go through all checkpoints using all possible flag values and that would take some and also involve understanding of program dataflow. One good point using that system is that it would possibly not always crash- it would just for starters give you wrong answers. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Doesn't work, atleast in some form. I have removed hardware dongle protection that does just that by watching what the hardware does for a long period of time (logging it) and then writing interception/emulation code. A better idea I think is something like digital signatures. Get the hardware to produce a digital signature or some random data. If random isn't available then a reasonable pseudo-random algorithm would suffice provided it was implemented carefully (well seeded). SmartCards can probably do this with say ESIGN [see Eurocrypt '93 (or maybe 92?)] If you do want to make a delay in your dongle (or whatever) then it should ONLY delay for wrong responses or for patterned responses (hard to detect) that might indicate an attempt to brute force it - like many modern UHF car alarms and garage door openers. Extensive control of program flow might be very difficult to program and quite cumbersome. Another thing - how practical is this hardware? If it is implemented on a micro-controller then it can be disassembled is the code inferred via other means. PAL and GAL chips can also be read - and if the no-read bit is set and the complexity of the device low enough (as is likely for in-expensive devices) then you can infer whats inside these also (although usually it not a NP-complete soln time wise....) Chris

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CP lawyers?
by merriman＠metronet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I seem to recall that some of the postings to the CP list indicated that the authors were lawyers, and it got me to wondering: If true that some on the CP list are lawyers, have they (or would they consider) providing pro bono representation of someone charged with an ITAR, or similar, violation? It would seem like one way (though not the best :-) of pushing back some of the limitations on crypto..... Dave Merriman - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Finger merriman(a)feenix.metronet.com for PGP public key and fingerprint. PGP encrypted Email welcome, encouraged, and preferred. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." John F. Kennedy

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DC-nets
by tim werner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

------- Start of forwarded message ------- >From: rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in >Date: Thu, 24 Nov 94 00:03:28 IST Writing about Brad Templeton's fears: >He'd have been even more shocked if you told him about other future >technologies such as DC-Nets... Of course if faced with a situation he'd >probably try to claim 'conspiracy'. What's a DC-net? thanks, tw

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NONE
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Fri, 25 Nov 94 20:20:01 CST Gary Jeffers <CCGARY(a)MIZZOU1.missouri.edu> wrote: What follows is an advertisement by the Privacy Digest people. These people have been around longer than 10 years. [ snip ] Since these people are in Costa Rica, it will take more postage than [ snip ] The copied text follows: [ long advertisement for photocopied reports deleted ] I am hoping for a reply from Tim May (who's been absent for some days now?) and especially Black Unicorn; I know neither but have a gut feeling one of them would have a comment or two. My own 2 cents: 1. As a rule, while lots of Cypherpunks are no doubt interested in related themes (privacy in general, for instance, or liberty) please do not point entire texts to the list. Instead, sum it up and explain where those of us with a yen to see more can get the full information. This is not a flame to you personally, Gary, but please heed it. Otherwise you are flooding us... 2. Dealing with your post specifically, I have to ask for your qualifications. I happen to know this particular neck of the woods fairly well, as does Mr Unicorn, and I know that Williams in Costa Rica has not been around for 10 years. In fact, on the same address and phone number, he has not even been around for 1! (He did have other phones there before, granted). 3. While not wanting to single out Williams (the "Privacy Digest people" as you call them) because I have nothing more than a hunch, I want to let the list know that there has been at least one US Government sting operated out of a Costa Rica front address. Also, another sting used the corporate name of Financial Engineering as Arnie (Offshore) mentioned about a month ago. 4. The stuff that Williams sells -- and that you advertised to the list -- is not worth a lot of money. His services, if they are for real and not a sting, are good, but they are not organized efficiently and they are slow (I actually opened a test account with him so I am qualified) which means that even if he is not in bed with Sam you probably still ought to take your cash elsewhere. 5. If you do go ahead and decide to buy his programs, be aware that their lega advice is highly "inventive" and that much of their information is untrue or at least misleading. On more complex subjects (such as 2nd "banking passports" he whips up 20 halfbaked pages of false info where in fact the subject needs to be treated in at least 200 pages, thoroughly researched. And where the leading authority in this field is in fact on his 9th edition now, totalling 400+ pp. 6. Finally, some of Williams stuff is out of date. Worse, at least one report does not exist - and that is the one that would point to most government heat if you order it. Just out of idle curiosity, I had my foreign lawyer order so that was how I found out. If you order it (and if Williams is a front, or just if the Evil Empire is watching his mail; which IMO is even *more* likely) this mere fact will trigger an extensive immediate FBI investigation of who you are. While I hate to say it, there is currently to my knowledge no easy turn-key one-stop-stop "Where to go to break the law" foreign operators that I would trust. If you want true privacy, carve it out for yourself, don't rely on someone who advertises a lot and sells photocopied reports to give it to you. BTW, the services Williams are offering are sorely needed -- when they can be trusted. (Fiduciary accounts for everybody is one service, anonymous foreign credit cards is another, and several of his services could come under the heading of benevolent moneylaundering). One day you will see them coming from somewhere else, with a more professional twist and from guys who earn their bread off the fees, not off photocopies. I can outlike how such a private 'parallel-bank' is going to work if asked. For now, I prefer to post anonymously. I would be interested in getting a pseudonymous account of the kind described by 'Nobody' on Friday but would want a better place that mg5n to set it up. "Capt'n Bob" -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6 mQCNAy7W3GoAAAEEAMQqHR+mHowjb7JsVxkCRCg0iM3uitOS2cIcctVIuXVJW6ou iumOw2zMURT5LFgGD2XHr7sre8jm9VUGWwFAaRTJB85Kj4Vy2/dGId2kK7Z/YsrE tVQDw75I8UYa3//PS5C2xCZROz5YHVEjvGcl3QqRLw8xVsgG+OZrkMibcPMNAAUR tBpUaGUtQ2FwdGFpbiAoIkNhcHQnbiBCb2IiKQ== =yrC+

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Internet World Interview
by James Domengeaux 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is for PrOduct Cypher I am the research producer for Computer Television Network and we are currently working on a series (3) of TV shows about Business and the Internet. We will have a camera crew at Internet World in Washington DC Dec 6 and would like to schedule an interview if your company will be represented at this show. Please contact me via email as to availability. ------------------------------------------------ James Domengeaux Research Producer 11/25/94 23:37:04 Email:ace@phoenix.phoenix.net Home Page:http://www.phoenix.net/USERS/ace/ctn.html ------------------------------------------------

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