- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re :Re?
by Alec 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:02 PM 2/12/97 -0500, you nastily wrote in the form of : : :Attachment Converted: "c:\remove1.txt" : How, do you imagine, did you get on this God-forsaken list? Anger abounds. Is this Kismet that you are here now at this crucial moment of the list's evolution? Perhaps you have something to offer of which you are not aware. Avail yourself of our hospitality as we implode. Flee not. There is meaning to this. So our savants have told us. Speak the words to Majordomo(a)toad.com in the message panel (no quotes): "unsubscribe cypherpunks" Speak only thus. Bother us no more at our moment of transfiguration. Hail and farewell, Bro.

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ticket switching
by David C. Taylor 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

According to the Elliot Wave Theorist (reprinted in "The Reaper", 6 Apr 1994) Hillary Clinton's commodities broker was sacked for, among other things, reassigning winning tickets to certain accounts. Sounds like a laundered gift to me. dct(a)newt.cs.byu.edu Soaring, the Ultimate Three Dimensional Art Form

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Re: Cypherpunks as lobbying/propagandizing group
by werner＠mc.ab.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) >Date: Sun, 1 May 1994 17:38:54 -0700 (PDT) > >I can't think of much bad press, frankly. (The NSA guy's comment about >Woodstock and trig homework, maybe, but that was more than countered >by Bruce Sterling's closing talk at CFP and other talks. No big deal.) When I thought back to where I was during Woodstock, I remembered that it took place in the summer. The only ones doing homework would have been those in summer school, not the nerds. Personally, I had just graduated from high school. A guy I was working with invited me to go with him to Woodstock, on the Thursday before the big weekend, but I didn't know what he was talking about. He was going with a bunch of people in a semi trailer. He never came back to work. At least, not that summer. I've often wondered what would have happened if I had accepted his offer. But you didn't have to go to Woodstock to do LSD. There was plenty of it in Cleveland in 1969. (Still is, from what I hear). However, I wasn't doing trig homework. I was assembling vacuum cleaners. tw

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Re: Random #'s via serial port dongle?
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Steve Bellovin writes: (quoting me and Perry) > Timothy C. May says: > > I don't think generating random numbers is all that much of a > > priority. The Blum-Blum-Shub C code is available, and I defy anyone > to > > break _that_ PRNG! > > Its partially a question of speed. Many applications, like one time > pads, are just too slow to generate random strings for given normal > techniques. Its partially a question of automation -- I'd like to be > able to generate public/private key pairs on a regular basis and its > hard to do given all the goddamn typing. Its partially a question of > abstract hacker satisfaction -- one would like to know that one's > numbers are RANDOM. > > That isn't a matter of ``abstract hacker satisfaction''. That's a very > strong security requirement: how do you *know* that your keys are > random? > > Tim May suggested using Blum-Blum-Shub. Fine -- but how are you going > to seed it? That's why I want real random numbers -- as a seed to > Blum-Blum-Shub or quintuple IDEA or MD5 composed with SHS' or whatever. > I probably wouldn't use the random numbers in raw form, though -- and > no one else does, either; the real random number generators I've seen > all incorporate some sort of scrambling function. My point, not shown above, was not that a good RNG based on physical sources isn't needed. I would in fact buy one, if only for playing with it, if it was cheap enough (the $25 numbers sounded reasonable). Rather, my main point was that we've seen this proposal for a RNG dongle at least 4 or 5 times before. Sort of like the t-shirt proposals, except with t-shirts the problems are simpler, the pathway clearer, and eventually someone goes ahead and starts the process and t-shirts come out the other end. With crypto dongles discussed here over the past year and a half, there is typically a flurry of "wouldn't it be nice" and "it ought to be easy to reverse bias a diode" and "what about alpha particles?" posts and "why doesn't someone do it?" messages, and, then.....silence. Until the next flurry, of course. I have not called for a cheap RNG, so I am not obligated to put up or shut up. For those who have claimed it ought to be easy, here's your chance! (I worry less about random numbers because I believe an attack on one's PGP messages is much, much likelier to come from inadvertent revealing of one's key and passphrase, through the usual means, than through an attack based on the nonmaximal entropy of the random numbers generated. But if better random numbers are essentially free... Of course, there's then the possibility that one's RNG dongle is actually generating nonrandom bits--maybe NIST and NSA can license RNGs and sell "Ripper" chips?) I'll commit right now to paying $25 for a serial port dongle that "looks like" a standard serial port device (a modem, for example, looking like a modem hooked up at 19,200 or better to the Cosmic Random Number). It won't even have to have drivers to talk to it...I'll buy the dongle first and worry about that later. (The dongle must meet certain basic requirements, such as outputting bits of the right amplitude. No RS-232 connectors with 1K resistors soldered across the pins, please.) --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Blum-Blum-Shub source?
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Blum-Blum-Shub PRNG is really very simple. There is source floating around on the crypto ftp sites, but it is a set of scripts for the Unix bignum calculator "bc", plus some shell scripts, so it is not very port- able. To create a BBS RNG, choose two random primes p and q which are congruent to 3 mod 4. Then the RNG is based on the iteration x = x*x mod n. x is initialized as a random seed. (x should be a quadratic residue, meaning that it is the square of some number mod n, but that can be arranged by iterating the RNG once before using its output.) The only questionable part about the RNG is how many bits of x to use per iteration. The original BBS paper proved that the RNG was secure if you used just the LSB of x each time. Later there was a proof that you could use log-base-two of the number of bits of n bits each time; if n were 512 bits then you could use 9 bits per iteration. Some time back I saw a claim on sci.crypt that you could use up to 1/3 of the bits each time safely, but I don't think that was proven. Hal

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John Gilmore the fascist cocksucker
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Priority: normal X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v2.31) John Gilmore is a fascist cocksucker Sandy Sandfort is a censorous motherfucker John Gilmore is a fascist cocksucker Sandy Sandfort is a censorous motherfucker John Gilmore is a fascist cocksucker Sandy Sandfort is a censorous motherfucker John Gilmore is a fascist cocksucker Sandy Sandfort is a censorous motherfucker Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Re: Detweiler
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-> Frederic Halper says: > If Detweiler is a big nut. Why was he involved in the > implementation of MacPGP along with people like Atkins and Finney? He wasn't. He did do some testing. Perry <- Interesting, but not about politics.

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Re: So, what are we going to do?
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-> "Jim Sewell" says: > A friend of mine that repaired computers said he ran across an > old disk drive that was used in WWII. There were no disk drives in WWII. There were barely computers. Hell, there was barely magnetic audio storage -- on steel wire! <- Stunning, but not about politics or cryptography.

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Re: Pretty Lousy Privacy
by Carl Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Alec wrote: > I have not been sucessful producing my fingerprint with PLP though I > am certain it has been installed correctly. > > What does one look like? I mean, how will I know I have a > fingerprint; oh, you know! Alec, There is an Example below: -----BEGIN PLP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1.0 gamma Enter Full Name: Carl Johnson Enter Password: minimumsecurity Enter Residence Address: 709 Security Place, ButtFuck, Saskatchewan Does Your Home Contain Valuables: Yes When Do You Start Your Vacation: Feb. 9th How Long Will You Be Away: Two weeks -----END PLP SIGNATURE----- Hope this has been of help. Toto

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Re: Why Digital Cash is Not Being Used
by dmandl＠lehman.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: "Michael V. Caprio Jr." <mikecap(a)wpi.edu> > > So what is the natural currency to trade in on the Internet? What is the > medium that is most widely spread across the myriad nodes and networks that > crisscross the globe? Hot air? --Dave.

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