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SIGH Kent clueless again(was Re: spam is a good thing (was Re: Spam IS Free Speech)) (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > From: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii(a)amaranth.com> > Date: Fri, 23 May 97 08:29:59 -0500 > No not at all. Just because I am connected to the network I am under no > obligation to accept a single bit. I don't have to ever download any mail > or I can download all or I can pick and choose what I accept or what I > don't. Exactly, This is the whole point of a firewall after all. Simply connecting your cable to a publicly accessible source implies no more than having your driveway end in a public street. It is NOT an open invitation to stroll through your living room. > Obviously you have not ever entered into contract agreements with an > accesses provider. There is no obligation on my part to receive a single > bit. If I never run a sendmail daemon then I will never receive a single > e-mail message regardless of how many are aimed at my servers. This is the > same with any TCP/IP service. The only obligation I have with my upstream > provider is to pay my bill. If I choose to bounce everything that is > routed from Spamford it is my right to do so as it is *MY* equipment. This is certainly the exact case between myself and my provider for SSZ. Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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Re: Key Recovery / The True Story
by Ernest Hua 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> And some government spook is going to break into a church's computer > to find out if they are secret terrorists because they oppose this > or that government policy. This is an interesting point on which very little serious debate is taking place: Is it EVER okay for spooks to break into a church's computer to find out if they are secret terrorists? I'm not sure the answer is clearly one way or another, and I am willing to bet that the tone of the answers will mostly be emotional appeals to some idealistic standard or pessimistic nightmares. A meta question is whether the answer to a question like this one above can be answer strictly through a "for all practical purposes it would never affect me so it does not matter" answer. Ern -- Ernest Hua, Software Sanitation Engineer/Chief Cut And Paste Officer Chromatic Research, 615 Tasman Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1707 Phone: 408 752-9375, Fax: 408 752-9301, E-Mail: hua(a)chromatic.com -- Ernest Hua, Software Sanitation Engineer/Chief Cut And Paste Officer Chromatic Research, 615 Tasman Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1707 Phone: 408 752-9375, Fax: 408 752-9301, E-Mail: hua(a)chromatic.com -- Ernest Hua, Software Sanitation Engineer/Chief Cut And Paste Officer Chromatic Research, 615 Tasman Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1707 Phone: 408 752-9375, Fax: 408 752-9301, E-Mail: hua(a)chromatic.com

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Re: Crypto use to foil law enforcement?
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:21 am -0400 on 5/23/97, Carl Ellison wrote: > With the congress so woefully uninformed that they confuse password > protection with cryptography and naive enough to believe that 1.9E6 > possibilities represents a serious roadblock to entry, it looks like we have > a major education effort to perform. For 35 years we've sown innumeracy, and now it's time to reap the harvest, I'm afraid. Heinlein once half-jokingly proposed that all voters have to prove they can solve a quadratic before they can vote. That joke's not so funny anymore. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Quotation for 5/23/97
by Rick Osborne 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

________________________ R i c k O s b o r n e ________________________ Today's quote of the day seems only *slightly* appropriate for this list. :) >Before all else, be armed. >Machiavelli (1469-1527) _________ o s b o r n e @ g a t e w a y . g r u m m a n . c o m _________ If it weren't for doctrine, a lot of the world's religions would get along a lot better, because the core roots of their beliefs aren't that dissimilar, it's the interpretation and the rules that grew up around them that seem to cause all the trouble. J Michael Straczynski -- Creator of _Babylon_5_

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Re: LSE UK crypto politics conference
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:03 PM 5/20/97 +0100, Adam Back wrote: >Panel: Carl Ellison, legal advisor to GLIC (forget name), Nigel >Hickson DTI, someone from TIS (?) who spoke too quitely. Chair was >Caspar Bowden, Scientists for Labour. The person from TIS was Brian Gladman. BTW, he wrote an open letter response to the DTI proposal which is on the web from one of the standard Privacy sites. - Carl +------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme(a)cybercash.com http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |CyberCash, Inc. http://www.cybercash.com/ | |207 Grindall Street PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 | |Baltimore MD 21230-4103 T:(410) 727-4288 F:(410)727-4293 | +------------------------------------------------------------------+

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"You have the right to remain silent" (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 19:03:11 -0800 > From: Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> > Subject: "You have the right to remain silent" > >The 5th is meant to apply ONLY to persons being accussed of a crime, it is > >not nor was it ever meant to protect non-accussed persons from turning over > >evidence of criminal acts. > > So you are saying the police may compel any and all information from > someone just so long as that person has not been formally accused of a > crime? If they ask you questions regarding the commission of a crime the 5th will not protect you unless you were involved. The flip side to this that protects this 'hole' from being catastrophic is that you don't have to talk to the police at all unless accussed of a crime. They most certainly can take physical evidence from 3rd parties (ie hostile witnesses) which they believe are involved in some manner with the crime (ie entering your apartment to track the path of a bullet in the hopes of retrieving it). Refusing to answer the questions of the prosecutor while under oath has its own consequences. What really keeps it from getting out of hand is the cost of interviewing and calling all possible witnesses to some crime. Just imagine calling everyone on the floor of a murder as SOP. > The Miranda precedent ("you have the right to remain silent...") > establishes that someone under arrest may remain silent. And someone _not_ > under arrest is under no obligation to cooperate, unless subpoenaed, right? As I understand it that is correct. > The latest example being the Ramsey case in Boulder ("Home of PGP"). Much > is made of the fact that the Ramseys, not being under arrest, are not > required to *say anything* to the police. (Left unanswered is why innocent > parents whose daughter has been brutally murdered would choose to say > nothing to the police...even I, a skeptic about much that modern cops are > involved in, am suspicious of the Ramseys for their noncooperativeness.) If they are truly innocent, what could they possibly have to say other than "Please find the killer of our daughter" and "We didn't do it." Innocent people have little to say, the guilty need to convince us of their innocence. "Me thinks he protest too much." I have no idea Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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Re: "You have the right to remain silent" (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 15:08:27 -0400 > To: "Willaim H. Geiger III" <whgiii(a)amaranth.com>, cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Subject: Re: "You have the right to remain silent" > they can't order you to talk to them. They can arrest you with probable > cause > and detain you briefly for purposes of investigation. They can arrest you at will w/ or w/o probable cause. If they can't produce probable cause at your hearing then a writ of habeas corpus comes into play. They can't CHARGE you without probable cause, minor but important distinction. As I understand it, the charges that are recorded when you first go to the police station are not 'official' until your hearing and a judge signs the paperwork. The police can even arrest you as a witness or for 'protective custody' and then even the habeas corpus gets murky because no charges are filed. If they can convince a judge to go along they can even hold you in communicado. > They can ask you for > your name and you may have to supply it, According to the 5th(?) Federal District you don't even have to do that unless you are driving a vehicle or otherwise operating under a public license. > Since cops are not judges, This particular point if kept in mind changes the interpretation of the Constitution considerably. It also puts such actions as making it illegal for citizens to own assault weapons but the police can questionable since the constitution does not draw a distinction between law enforcement and the citizenry, as it does with the judicial, legistlative and executive bodies. It therefore follows that if I as Joe Citizen can't do it then a police officer can't either since they have no constitutional rights that I don't and the 10th Amendment prohibits expansion of federal power (and by extension of the 14th, states) by anything other than that proscribed in the constitution. Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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Western Union & IRS
by Ray Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I donno if this is news or not, but having just visited one of these places, I noticed prominently place warning signs that transfers over $3K are reported to the IRS including your SSN, effective May 28 of this year or something... =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian | "Boy meets beer. Boy drinks Beer, |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder(a)sundernet.com| Boy gets another beer!" |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ | |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, | For with those which eternal lie, with |.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"| strange aeons, even death may die. |..... ======================== http://www.sundernet.com =========================

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ecash & remailers
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It occurs to me that there is a problem with remailers using Chaum's ecash as offered by MT bank and others. The attacker could coerce the sender of an anonymous message into revealing his blinding value, and use this to obtain the identity of each remailer hop by colluding with the bank. (The bank keeps a database of the blinded coins minted against who they were given to; unblinding reveals the coin which can then be compared against those deposited by remailers, tallying sender with remailer, all the way to the exit remailer.) To stop this, the sender should discard the blinding values, thereby removing his ability to be later coerced, or to later trace the recipient of his cash. Is there a way to purge blinding values from the ecash directory? Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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Cyberspatial governments?
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have been very impressed with the imagination and depth of Jason Solinsky's ideas, especially considering his apparent youth. However, I want to take issue (not semantically this time!) with the idea of a government in cyberspace, which IMO Jason tends to rely on too heavily. As I understand Jason's proposal, his government does not rely on force, but rather it acquires authority by people voluntarily putting themselves at the mercy of the government to a certain extent. The principal mechanism I have seen suggested is for people to put some money into escrow or a bond which they will surrender (according to agreed-upon rules) if they break the laws of the government. Now the simple objection I offer is that most people don't have enough cash lying around to effectively obligate themselves. Most people, unfortunately, spend their money rather than saving it. Even people who do have large sums of cash are, for that very reason, able to tolerate larger losses, so they will apparently have to put up very large bonds, which would have to be a strain on their liquid capital as well. And, for people who do have the money, how can they tolerate tying up a large sum of cash for such a long period of time? Does the government offer interest? How are the funds invested - safe or risky? Low returns or high? People want to diversify their investments, and I don't think they are going to be willing to put all their cash into this one lump sum bond. When people do save money, it is often with the intention of spending it later. They save money to put their kids through college, or for retirement. Sooner or later their comes a time when they have to start consuming the nest egg. Will this entail withdrawal from the benefits of the cyberspace government? To sum up, I don't think most people's lives are structured in such a way that they can credibly obligate and commit themselves to a potentially risky contract. With physical governments people might say "as long as I live on this island I agree that the government can shoot me if I kill someone," and I will be inclined to believe that they will not try to commit murder. But that promise is much less credible if all they will do is forfeit a $2,000 bond, if that's all the money they've managed to save. Hal

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