jadestar@netcom.com (JaDe) writes:
Daniel Miskell <DMiskell@envirolink.org> writes:
I'm sure.
I too fail to see the cryptorelevance of this thread... Unless alt.sex.stories is used for steganography... Alice wants to send a secret message to Bob, so she posts a porn story to alt.sex.stories, where the key phrase is "That was the best sex I've ever had", which sounds like a mild hyperbole to most people;
I like the stegonography angle. However I'd encode the actual message contents into the typos. Filter out the typos to retrieve your crypto-text.
Wouldn't text with a lot of typoes look suspicious? For ultimate silliness, I've put together the following program to encode 8 bits at a time in an R-rated sentence: #include <stdio.h> #define BIT(c,n) ((c>>n)&1) const char*bits[]={ "Senator Exon", "L.Ron Hubbard", "made passionate love to", "had great sex with", "Hillary Klinton", "J.D.Falk", "experienced", "gave her", "six", "twelve", "in", "during", "one", "a single", "night", "weekend"}; void stegaporn(int c) { printf("%s %s %s and %s %s orgasms %s %s %s. ", bits[BIT(c,7)], bits[2+BIT(c,6)], bits[4+BIT(c,5)], bits[6+BIT(c,4)], bits[8+BIT(c,3)], bits[10+BIT(c,2)], bits[12+BIT(c,1)], bits[14+BIT(c,0)]); } int main(void) { int c; while (EOF!=(c=getchar())) stegaporn(c); return(0); }
Ultimately I think that the whole issue of legal cryptography actually boils down to this:
If you illegalize strong crypto than criminals will simply resort to steganography and "hidden" channels of communication (in which they can also embed/tunnel the crypto-text of their strongly encrypted data).
Therefore all you've done is create a lesser crime for the real criminals and make people with valid (non-criminal) uses of the technology into criminals.
Unfortunately this reasoning doesn't help at all with our (U.S.) legislature. There is some hidden aggenda as to why "they" really want strong cryptography to be difficult for the average user to obtain. I have a uniquely hard time believing that "they" are merely concerned that "we" might be pursuing simple privacy (even if cryptography were already illegal I could use it for years and never get "caught." so long as I was using non-broadcast channels and communicating with "trusted" associates (fellow "crypto-criminals")
In fact I've suggested to several people that we start a dial-up uucp revival for this and related reasons. (If the number of users/webpages and the bandwidth usage continues to increase at the recent rates -- without a corresponding improvement in the infrastructure we'll probably all want to go back to uucp for mail and news anyway. Old fashioned dial-up may be faster than T1 access in a few years and direct point-to- point uucp over ISDN is probably faster already.
So:
What is the "real" reason for opposition to strong crypto? Who "really" benefits? (and please don't mention the LE types 'cause I don't believe it).
and: Anyone else want to participate in the great '90's uucp revival? I'm in Santa Clara and could use some feeds and some help with the setup.
I'm all for it. My site is connected to the rest of the world via dial-up UUCP, I haven't touched the setup in 5 years, and am not planning to. It might be interesting to have a variation of dial-up UUCP where site 1 passes encrypted stuff to site 2 and doesn't quite know what site 3 they're supposed to go on to. Sort of like the remailers with encryption. --- Dr. Dimitri Vulis Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps