Re: Cypherpunks response to viral stimuli
petard wrote:
Along these same lines, mightn't a TLA or similar induce someone downstream of them to spam the cypherpunks remailers and collect the identities of those who complain?
That's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. No TLA would do that. They'd simply watch upstream of each node. They can wait for outgoing messages and collect email addresses to their heart's content.... By definition, if you've subscribed to cypherpunks, you can expect all of the TLA's to at least know your email address. If anything, you can blame the slew of anti-SCO and non-SCO related virii for the lack of messages... If you were going to pull some half assed conspiracy theory, you might have come up with something more original - like "Maybe the TLA's are sending the virii so as to choke off the lists..." But that's dumb as well for far more obvious reasons: See, the cypherpunks is a gold mine for the TLA's. All they have to do is subscribe, listen, and wait. At some point, some poor dumb nutcase like Jim Bell will do something silly. The polyester suited knights will hit the champale and have a nice party on his ass... Man, the collective IQ's of the posters on this list has certainly been dropping lower and lower... sheesh!
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Five or ten years ago, when the Feds were still pretending to be in control of crypto, crypto enthusiasts were still a threat - these days you can pick up VPN boxes at the grocery store, and if they still care about us, they're more likely to be interested in content and the identities of active posters than in the identity of lurkers. They can observe a lot just by looking, or they can announce a sale on tinfoil hats and see who responds, or ask a Stupid Newbie Question and see who flames them, or forge a message about Guns from a Usual Suspect and see who claims that theirs is bigger, or post about something tangential like how to stop spam (which has pretty much replaced libertarianism and censorship as the all-consuming discussion topic on the net.) Viruses and Web Bugs are less likely to be useful for detecting Cypherpunks (or Mac users, or Linux users) than for detecting the general public - to some extent we may be smarter about that, or at least grumpier about HTML mail, plus some of the cpunks nodes filter out that sort of thing. But perhaps they're exploiting that stack overflow bug in PGP 2.6.2 instead. <<attachment GoodTimes.txt was deleted by RoboVirusBlocker>> <<attachment echelon.scr was deleted by RoboVirusBlocker>> ----END PGP SIGNED MESSAGE---- ----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE BLOCK----- LKJSHFVDJHDSKL5REWAJKLHFVJDSHVHDSKLJFHLKGJVHJHSDAFLHKJSADHFLKSAJDHR IOUVIUASDFKLDSAFHLKJHYCLSACHADJKSDHLFCKJSDHCLKJSHLCJKHSDLKFJHSADFHF FHVLJKHDSLKFJHWQLKJFHLKSJHDVSDAJKFHVJKLDHFVJKLHSVHHJKL3245324VCSCSS -----END PGP SIGNATURE BLOCK------
On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 05:23:02PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
Five or ten years ago, when the Feds were still pretending to be in control of crypto, crypto enthusiasts were still a threat - these days you can pick up VPN boxes at the grocery store, and if they still care about us, they're more likely to be interested in content and the identities of active posters than in the identity of lurkers. They can observe a lot
I presume tracking down people who're actually concerned about security and take some troubles to conceal their identity would be a good bootcamp for beginner TLAings. Iterated tiger teams interactions will inbreed, so they need a source of novelty. But tracking down competent h4x0rs will be no doubt far more challenging.
just by looking, or they can announce a sale on tinfoil hats and see who responds, or ask a Stupid Newbie Question and see who flames them, or forge a message about Guns from a Usual Suspect and see who claims that theirs is bigger, or post about something tangential like how to stop spam (which has pretty much replaced libertarianism and censorship as the all-consuming discussion topic on the net.)
What's the point of busting a wannabee? Just to earn some tinfoil stars, to make your organizational unit look good? Doesn't compute. No one got bitchslapped but the AP fellow.
Viruses and Web Bugs are less likely to be useful for detecting Cypherpunks (or Mac users, or Linux users) than for detecting the general public - to some extent we may be smarter about that, or at least grumpier about HTML mail, plus some of the cpunks nodes filter out that sort of thing. But perhaps they're exploiting that stack overflow bug in PGP 2.6.2 instead.
If you have advanced remote-diagnostic and remote-exploit capabilities, you never let your hand show on an insignficant target. Even if you camouflage as a h4x0r, penetrating a well-secured box is bound to raise some eyebrows (you don't see a packet logger in passive mode). No doubt such capabilities are reserved for cyberwar and industrial espionage. P.S. Sorry about the MIME sig screwup. I forgot. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart -
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sunder