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a comment on AP vs. more peaceful resistance...
by Phil Fraering 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You know, it occured to me earlier that all of this AP stuff flooding the list is overlooking one thing about cryptography: in a way, its use and dissemination represents to some people a means of nonviolent protest. Comments, anyone? Phil Fraering The above is the opinion of neither my internet pgf(a)acadian.net service provider nor my employer. 318/261-9649

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Re: Bare fibers
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:20 AM 7/23/96 -0400, Rabid Wombat wrote: > >> >> Doesn't that make it vulnerable (detectable) to Tempest attacks? >No. >Transmitting light via fiber doesn't emit EM. >Anyway, the original post, as I recall, was about keeping sensitive data >on a second hard drive, connected via (very thin, therefore harder to >notice) fiber. Tempest monitoring was not a factor. It occurs to me that a bare fiber could actually be (randomly) hung across treetops, roofs, power lines, and various other structures, over a many-block distance in suburban areas. Such a fiber wouldn't be protected very well, but it would probably last a few months. It would also be exceedingly hard to find its terminations, and tracing it would be a real pain. (It probably wouldn't be visible against a bright sky more than a meter or two away.) Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Netscape
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:23 7/23/96, Jeff Weinstein wrote: > If you know that the recipient can read a message encrypted with >3DES, IDEA, or RC2-128, then you can send the message using one of >these strong algorithms. Given that you need someones public key >to send them a message, there are several obvious ways to transmit >information about what algorithms they accept along with it. Granted. What about the signature bug? Will Netscape encrypt the outside signature? -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. Defeat the Demopublican Unity Party. Vote no on Clinton/Dole in November. Vote Harry Browne for President.

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Re: Digital Watermarks for copy protection in recent Billbo
by Alex F 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > People buying CDs at a garage sale & getting arrested for > >piracy. Wonderful. > > Arrests like this are uncommon. Even buying "cheap bikes" and other "cheap" > (= probably stolen and fenced) merchandise almost never subjects the > purchaser to criminal sanctions. Yes, but concievably if (whoever would be incharge, FBI?) *could*, under law do this, even if they are wrong. It is a lot harder to prove that they intentionally harrassed *you* than it is for them to say that they were following leads and show evidence. Yes, this may never happen, but the mere fact that it *could* is uncomforting. Kinda like the CDA an Clinton saying "we will not enforce this...." Fine, but there is still a law on the books that allows them to if they decide to change their mind. Even if you can't be found guilty, you could still be ruined by legal fees, job loss, etc. > ("Alice's Restaurant" not to the contrary; the confession to Officer Obie > cinched his fate.) Don't wanna end up on that "Group-W" bench! :) > > It would be trivial to add a digital ID signal at, > >say 30,000 or 15 or something like that. This could then be decoded, > > Doubtful. The existing CD standard tops out at a Nyquist limit of about > 20KHz, with the actual sampling at 44 KHz--but there is simply "nothing" at > above 20-22KHz. Putting a signal in at "30 KHz" is simply not possible, > given the Nyquist Theorem and the CD sampling rate. Cds are often sampled at 48 these days. Mine was, and we had to reduce it to 44.1 for mass producing (much to our surprise, since many CD manufacturers love getting stuff at 48 over 44.1) Not familiar with the Nyquist limit w/ regards to sampling rate vs frequency :( Alex F =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Alex F alexf(a)iss.net Marketing Specialist Internet Security Systems =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Wiesenthal Center (Canada) and the Ostrich Syndrome (fwd)
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- For Skippy. - ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 23 Jul 1996 08:26:15 -0700 From: Ken McVay OBC <kmcvay(a)nizkor.almanac.bc.ca> Newsgroups: alt.revisionism, can.general, alt.censorship, comp.org.eff.talk, misc.legal, ont.general, bc.general, talk.politics.misc Subject: Wiesenthal Center (Canada) and the Ostrich Syndrome The July 19 article in the Vancouver Sun, "B.C. Internet provider is the largest Canadian site for racist material" is alarming. (See URL http://ftp.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?orgs/american/wiesenthal.center/press for a copy of the article.) It is not the material found on the websites mentioned, nor the fact that the host server is Canadian - nor indeed that the server is physically located in BC - which give cause for alarm. It is alarming because - either by deliberate design or by abject ignorance - - Sol Littman (and the Simon Wiesenthal Center [SWC] whom he represents in Canada) is fostering and promoting the spread of the "Ostrich Syndrome." Their actions represent a counter-productive denial of reality - akin to the Ostrich burying its head in the sand. Littman is quoted as saying: "We found the longer you leave these groups unexposed, the longer they fester and the more they infect others and the only way to deal with them honestly and forcefully is to expose them to the light of truth." Yet the article concludes, "Littman said he wants to see if Klatt will remove the groups from Fairview voluntarily before the centre takes any other action." The only truth that seems to emerge from such a veiled threat is that Littman has no understanding of the Internet. One is at a loss to determine how removal of the "groups" from one Internet Provider's server would in any way "expose them to the light of truth." If Littman had any knowledge of the Internet, he would know that the Nizkor Project [http://www.nizkor.org/] is an award winning website that is accessed daily by hundreds. In addition to being a source for those who seek information about the facts of the Holocaust, it is used as an electronic resource for those who wish to "deal with [these groups] honestly and forcefully" thereby exposing Lemire and many others - of whom Littman may not even be aware. Nizkor is arguably the "host" to more hate literature than any other website. Since we also include a link to the Zundelsite amongst others, will Littman next be targetting Nizkor and demanding that we remove such links? Or that we hide from public view the mountains of archived material which meticulously documents and uses the "arguments" put forward by these groups as instruments of their refutation and exposure? If Littman and the SWC prefer to bury their heads in the sand while engaging in this futile exercise in darkness, let them do so. But the martyrdom they hand on a platter to Lemire and others whom they find offensive stands in marked contrast to their failure to use the Internet on their own website. Conspicuously absent on the SWC website are links to the increasingly growing number of useful resources for those who truly do wish to participate in the battle to expose racist and anti-semitic groups on the Internet. The Ostrich syndrome is far more dangerous to society than any white supremacist group on the Internet. Such groups will fester in darkness, but wither in light. Kenneth McVay, OBC The Nizkor Project - -- Nizkor Canada | http://www.nizkor.org - -----------------------| Prince Myshkin's Troll Bait Sold Here |-------------------------------------- http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/giwer-matt/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBVAwUBMfVcLJNcNyVVy0jxAQENJQIAwGhMdP82l3S0Ac3uSaYaUcj1TowW6J9F K+l+wRmWwpQBuxq+INEPghNcY54thnc6iQIqGfR5KVoUsFNLAk9lcg== =12JK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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RE: Brute Force DES
by Matt Thomlinson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

well, first of all, I wasn't computing 2^40, I was computing something like 2^(56*0.667) * 8bytes/each or somesuch, I don't recall exactly as I don't have the paper in front of me. In any case, it was the tradeoff between time and space -- 2^40 in time was something like 2^38th in space. But don't trust my numbers, get the paper and rattle them off yourself. It just seems like if we're going to browse all of the way through the DES keyspace, we _ought_ to take notes along the way -- that means building a table. I don't care how big the table is; if it is only 2^30 entries (about 1G entries, each 8 bytes = 8Gig) we reduce our next DES crack by a factor of 8. If we keep 2^31 entries (16Gig) we can cut it down to 2^50, or a factor of 16. If we have 4 - 9 Gig drives (or perhaps three drives and some wiggling, described below) we can save about 2^32 entries and the search becomes a measly 2^48. :) To whittle this down to a 40-bit workload, we'd have to save 2^36 entries* 2^8 bytes/entry = 2^39 Bytes = 512 Gig. Yes, admittedly large. What's the cheapest form of storage, magtape? How much can you store on magtape? The entries can be sorted so that lookup doesn't take long even when you have to mount tapes. Wiggling: We may be able to save less than 2^8 bytes/entry because we know the quality that made the point interesting enough to save (say we only keep points where the top 32 bits were zeros -- no need to save these zero prefixes) but I suppose we'd only be able to cut this storage factor down by a factor of two at most. If you don't have Hellman's paper handy, the apropos formulas are: Total time=T, memory=M, search space=N Time/space tradeoff: M=mt , T=t^2, m*t^2=N In our case, N=2^56; M, T variable. mattt >---------- >From: Ray Arachelian[SMTP:sunder@dorsai.dorsai.org] >Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 1996 3:16 PM >To: Matt Thomlinson >Cc: 'trei(a)process.com'; 'cypherpunks(a)toad.com' >Subject: RE: Brute Force DES > >On Tue, 23 Jul 1996, Matt Thomlinson wrote: > >> why not put together (a LOT of) disk space and we can build a table >> (read: "a cryptanalytic time-memory tradeoff") for cracking DES? Using >> the table, we could brute-search the DES keyspace in less time than it >> would take to do an exhaustive search of a 38 bit keyspace, according to >> the paper. 4 gigs is what, a couple of hundred nowadays? >> >> Making DES equivalent to a 40-bit crack would take approx. 500Gig, but >> publishing the table would push DES out usefulness. Certainly we could >> scale back (make DES equivalent to a 45-bit crack?) if we don't have >> enough disk... > >IMHO it's more expensive to go this route than to build a machine with >dedicate DES cracking chips. 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 or about 1 terabyte >worth of space, not 500G. 2^39 would be 500Gb. A 4Gb drive these days is >$800, hardly a couple of hundred dollars. :) > >Even so, that's a ton of hard drives. Further you need machines to hook >these drives up to. Infact, you need a farm of machines. Why? You can >only put 7 on a chain, and maybe if you're lucky four chains in a machine >using four controllers. > >A better idea might be to make small cheap computers, say based on 8086's >or 68000's that replace the drive's controller card, or if that drive >controller card is intelligent enough to be a CPU or contain one, burn >EEPROMs. Have the EEPROMs be able to generate DES (or any other >cypher's) keyspace given a range, and then have them able to search the >whole drive for a match. > >Even so, if you build these drive boxes, all you've accomplished is to >create a nice huge big searchable array. You still will need some sort >of logic to figgure out when it finds the right key, and you still can't >do 3DES or recusively encrypted files, nor know when you've found the key >for data you can't recognize - or rather have these drives recognize. > >However: Reading a 4Gb drive end to end takes less than 2 hours. I know >this because I have a RAID array of them, and it takes 2 hours to >rebuild, so since rebuilding an array requires reading from two drives >and writing to one drive, reading a whole 4Gb drive at full speed would >be something like maybe 1 to 1.5 hours(???) > >You might be better off with 9.0Gb drives if you can afford them because >you then have less controller logic cards to build. > >The drives alone will cost $204,800. $800*(2^40/(4*1024*1024*1024)). >You could get a nice big discount if you buy that many, but this will >also mean however much it will cost you to build the cpu cards for >multiplied by 256 drives, plust the R&D cost, plus the network connection >between all the CPU boards. > >At that point you also run into the MTBF of the drives which means that >your drives will fail quite often. > >If you want to go dirt cheap on the CPU's while using this huge space >method, you could just buy something like 37 Mac IIsi's, hook each up to 7 >of the drives (you'll have to partition the drives as they won't support >volumes that huge.) and network the machines using localtalk. You won't >need a faster connection because all you need for networking is keyspace >distribution and success reporting. But then IIsi's are sloooow machines >and your searches will suffer a hit from the lack of the machine's speed, >plus all the overhead of having an operating system and using the SCSI >chain to talk to the drives. > >IIsi's go for $350-$500 nicely loaded... $14800 for 37 at $400 a pop, >add the drives to that, plus the cost of writing the program and hooking >all of this crap together and that'll be $219,600. Ya got that kinda >dough to spare? > >========================================================================== > + ^ + | Ray Arachelian |FL| KAOS KERAUNOS KYBERNETOS |==/|\== > \|/ |sunder(a)dorsai.org|UL|__Nothing_is_true,_all_is_permitted!_|=/\|/\= ><--+-->| --------------- |CG|What part of 'Congress shall make no |=\/|\/= > /|\ | Just Say "No" to|KA|law abridging the freedom of speech' |==\|/== > + v + | Janet Reno & GAK|AK| do you not understand? |======= >===================http://www.dorsai.org/~sunder/========================= > Key Escrow Laws are the mating calls of those who'd abuse your privacy! >

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Re: Ross Anderson's Eternity service
by Arun Mehta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 20:13 22/07/96 -0700, Hal wrote: >Sherry Mayo posted here a while back a reference to Ross Anderson's >Eternity service paper, <URL: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk:80/users/rja14/#Lib >. Got that far, but could not download the Eternity service paper itself. Something about only accepting connections from certain sites. Would someone kind-hearted enough mail me a copy? Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta(a)cerfnet.com for public key

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Re: Responding to Pre-dawn Unannounced Ninja Raids
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:38 PM 7/23/96 -0400, hallam(a)Etna.ai.mit.edu wrote: >>I don't understand this conclusion. One book people aside, it is generally >>believed that humans evolved in an evolutionary context and they certainly >>frequently use cooperative strategies. Cooperation usually also involves >>the ability to sanction misbehavior. Unilateral disarmament is throwing >>away your sanction. > >That depends on the circumstances. If you are arguing the case for >unilateral disarmament or unilateral reduction. In many cases there was a >deliberated attempt to confuse one with the other. Unilateral >reduction can be the right move to make. No argument. I said disarmament. >In the case of a minor nuclear power such as the UK unilateral >disarmament may be the right move... But still, the UK has available other sanctions. That's why they are still called the Falklands. >... Burglars are not rational actors, and >are more likely to have their behavior determined by drugs or >alcohol than analytical game theory. Burglars are among the most rational of thieves. They try to maximize gain and minimize risk by acting when no one can oppose them. Even muggers, a much less rational activity, try to pick on people smaller than them. >The facts are very clear, if you have a handgun in the house it is >far more likely to kill a member of the familly than stop an >intruder. The NRA know this which is why they have lobbied for the >CDC to stop research in this area - they do not like the facts. Christmas trees make your house far more likely to catch fire. However many people have them because they provide other, hard to quantify, values. (BTW, my mother's retirement home does not allow them in individual units.) Guns have value besides home defense. Just one off-the-wall example: I learned to hold a camera steady by competitive target shooting. Home defense is not the only reason to have a gun. (Besides, I would rather have a shotgun with a short barrel for close-up defense than a handgun. As the California police forces discovered when they (briefly) changed from pump shotguns to "automatics", the sound of chambering a round with a pump shotgun makes people focus very clearly on their situation. Frequently it avoids violence.) IMHO handguns are much more useful when you need a portable defense. Examples: 1. The USGS will allow field geologists to carry handguns in bear country after a rigorous training program. 2. I have a friend who defended himself from a pack of feral dogs after they attacked him and forced him to retreat to the roof of his car. (He killed three of the four. The local rancher treated him to dinner for ridding the neighborhood of a dangerous nuisance.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | Cave ab homine unius lebri | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | [Beware the man of one | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | book] - Anonymous Latin | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Re: Another fascist
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"david(a)sternlight.com" "David Sternlight" 23-JUL-1996 08:30:51.02 >One of the great friends of free speech on this list sent a forged cancel >message to the listbot to try to cancel my subscription. >The listbot, being reasonably well designed, ignored him and told me about >it, though I have no doubt less of a dunce could bring it off. >What a piece of slime! What do others think of this practice? You have my sympathies. Either I got logged off the list accidentally a bit back, or someone did this successfully to me. I didn't notice due to being gone for a bit, but I finally did and got back onto the list. I'd meant to email the list maintainer (Eric Hughes, as I recall), but haven't gotten around to it - lack of time. Any signs of who did it from the message? I would guess not. -Allen

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Re: E-Cash promotion idea
by Matt Carpenter 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Lucky Green wrote: >At 23:19 7/22/96, Anonymous wrote: > >>How about getting the CyberCafes to accept ecash? Just pull out your >>Newton/HP48/PDA and point the IR beam at the cash register. Now that's >>an ecash application I'd like to see!! > >So would I. And one day we will. Though not not on the HP48. Actually I've been doing some more thinking about this recently, and it may be possible even on an HP48, if you're willing to limit your spending flexibility a little in order to gain the advantages provided by ecash. A couple months ago there was a similar thread on using ecash with Newtons, PDA's, palmtops, and so on. I mentioned an idea of having an "ecash ATM" on an online machine, which would allow you to download ecash coins to your portable device. You could then carry the ecash around with you. This way you wouldn't need a full blown ecash client on the portable, just a simple program that would ask you for the payment amount and send off the appropriate coins. The main problem with the idea seemed to be that I suggested getting change from the merchant. Ian Goldberg pointed out that with the current ecash protocol, accepting change not only eliminates your anonymity, but that you also have to go online to make sure you aren't being cheated. Anonymous's post got me to thinking about this again. Since I know many of you are more knowledgeable about ecash than I, let me know if you can add more detailed information or see any problems with the approach below (other than a certain lack of convenience, which may be the major issue with this approach). What if we just forget about change? One of the neat things about ecash is that it allows for coins of (fairly) arbitrary values. We can use this to our advantage, since we can guarantee that we can make a single payment of any value with a small number of coins. (People familiar with ecash know all this already I'm sure, but I'll describe it in some detail for others who may not have thought about it as much). Here's the basic formula: Number of required coins = ceiling( log2( P/L ) ) where P is the maximum payment amount available to spend on a single transaction, and L is the "loss limit", or the upper limit of money we are willing to lose on a single transaction. For example, if we want to be able to make a $50 payment to the nearest cent ($.01), we need: ceiling(log2( 50/.01)) = 13 coins So with only 13 coins, we are guaranteed to be able to make any single payment from $.01 - $50 to the nearest cent. Since we are dealing with base 2 logarithms, if we increase the maximum amount to $100, we only need a single additional coin. The algorithm to generate the coin values is simple. Basically you start at P and just keep dividing by two until you reach L. For the above example, we could use 13 coin values of: $25, $12.50, $6.25, $3.13, $1.57, $0.79, $0.40, $0.20, $0.10, $0.05, $0.03, $0.02, and $0.01. This actually gives us a total of $50.05 due to rounding, but we are guaranteed of being able to pay to the nearest cent any amount between $0.01 to $50.00, with multiple possible combinations for certain values. Now, I'm not sure what the average size of an ecash coin is (anybody?), but the few I've seen floating around the net in "ASCII armor" have been around 500-600 bytes (of ASCII text), I think. So guessing (hopefully conservatively) that the average coin size is about 1k or less, then we need about 13k worth of storage space to make any single payment of $50 or under. We can do a little better if we are willing to lose a little money in the transaction. For instance, if L=$0.10, then we only need 9 coins (and we will lose less than $0.10 in the transaction). For L=$0.40, 7 coins. Of course this probably isn't cost effective in most cases, but might potentially be useful, if you are tight on storage space or something. So, with a storage space of approximately 64k (close to 5 x 13k), we are guaranteed of being able to make any 5 payments of $50 dollars of less, to the nearest cent. Of course, we also need some software, but it should be fairly simple and small. Just a little database to keep track of which coins we have, and a simple user interface to prompt for payment amount, select the appropriate coins, and beam them off to the payee (probably also a transaction log, and encryption capabilities). A few points: * This should be doable with current technology. All we need is a fairly small storage space, say 128K or less (more gives us more flexibility), and something like IR, wireless, or even a serial port connection via cable to send the coins to the payee. This seems to allow things like Newtons, HP Palmtops (and perhaps higher end calculators), USR Pilots, etc. to be used as unconnected ecash "wallets". This assumes the payee is online, since they will want to clear the coins to make sure they are good. * This is less expensive than requiring both parties to be online. The payee doesn't need to provide a net connection to the payer; the payer doesn't need to utilize memory space (and possibly additional hardware) for more complicated software to carry out the online transactions and payment generation. All the payee needs (besides the standard ecash software and a net connection) is a method of receiving coins, like IR, and some fairly simple software. * Although one may be carrying around $250 with the above example, it is much safer than carrying cash. Ecash maintains the advantage of cash-like anonymity, but we can keep a back-up of the money on our home machine, and we can encrypt the coins we carry to avoid having them spent by someone else, in case our portable device is lost or stolen. (Of course we do lose a possibly expensive portable device.) * With the proper software and connections to the "ecash ATM" we can have our portable device automatically recharged when we get home (and also update the records of which coins were spent). The ATM also gives us complete control over our spending configurations. There could even be several default set-ups for frequently used cases, each assigned to a single button. Just connect your portable device, click a button, and you're ready to go. For example, if you are going to work, you might generally want to have the capability of several smaller payments for snacks, lunch, and such. For grocery shopping you may want a few larger payments, etc. Also the software could automatically keep track of your purchases (like a credit card statement, or checking account log, but you'd be the only one who has access to it). Plus you don't need to run off to find an ATM; you can get cash from "the comfort and privacy of your own home". * The main problem seems to be the loss of flexibility. After you make your maximum number of guaranteed payments you may have money left over, but it may not be useful for buying what you want. You may only have a $25 coin left to purchase that $1.00 item. Personally, as a possibly paranoid technophilic cypherpunk, I don't see this as a major problem. It means you have to plan ahead a bit, but it gives you the same anonymity as cash, with less chance of having you're money lost or stolen. Those with PDD (Paranoia Deficit Disorder (cypherpunks, are there drugs to treat this? :-)) may not have the same view, and be more likely to use less private, more "convenient" methods of payment. But with the proper software setup and user interface, this approach could probably be made acceptable to many. * I'm not sure how easy this would be with the existing ecash software. Browsing over the ecash API (http://www.digicash.com/api/Home.html) I see there is a EC_pocket_begin_withdrawal() function which looks like it may automatically do something similar to the guaranteed payment thing I described above (I've been salivating over the ecash API for a while, but haven't actually had to time to play with it yet). Things may get tricky if you pick funky values of L, the "loss limit". In any case, it seems like this would be possible, even on an HP48. Probably not all that useful/usable though until you move up to something a little more powerful (how much memory does the HP48 have? I have an old HP28S with 32k, so I'm guessing the '48 has more than that). Once I finish up my thesis, find a job, and find some free time (hopefully all within the next month and a half :-) I plan to play with this idea. Unless someone else beats me to it, or there is something important I'm missing. Comments? - --Matt - -- mcarpent(a)mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMfX32ijtJAMyBnp9AQGD+gf/TOe/ouunmhRz7jL+y65iqU57OaZAK1g0 gLIRDFQDTYMX7387FMBKlQ66RMJx4K80lW59oCAaa3/GyBDZR6Kn9bj2m7aZbYkL 4UDV7HoSJrV8qJv08HXnPibi7kmv+bAztHOAx7M7qo5qUayYCFrMeib65ksrrQYY nnlnCPfLWAPMHeFYUSA3fv9XwQB9NZVSCgr8Z2vhnfCAERqLLukaXHJq9InSPmWw XFIdU1x/cPzOUJx7rxth6qBonz5DD9AMof9Qqk8VY/AzohqHylKirog/IJRTefNl p1xEdI/iBhH3m3azvNhtkEIl0MAzBGU26hBIjB2P9P+08shtMfznow== =vR9P -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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