CDR: Re: Spam free secure email accounts.

[Ray Dillinger]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Jim Choate wrote:

>
>On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>> Plaintext looks like plaintext.
>
>Yeah, if the only thing you right is simple English. Most of the planet
>doesn't speak English and their plaintext doesn't necessarily look like
>plaintext.
>
>This is a xenophobic view.

No, it's not.  Every natural language has a detectable frequency 
distribution and contacts.  *ALMOST* every cipher does not. 

Someone could be writing martian using the cyrillic alphabet, and 
you could still look at it and say "this character occurs seven 
times as often as average and is never followed by that character. 
This other character is preceded by the same character fully half 
the time it appears.  And over here we have a set of characters 
one of which *always* follows any appearance of any member of this 
other set of characters (which is a constant in almost all languages 
with plosive consonants -- the only thing that normally follows a 
plosive consonant is a vowel...) 

You don't have to know what it says or what language it is.  
Plaintext looks like plaintext, and by the time you have 
more than 50 characters the probability curve of mistaking 
it for anything else is flat as a goddamn strap.

>> This isn't even a "real" problem, once you look at the text 
>> produced by, eg,  PGP, GPG, and whatever  else you allow on 
>> the system. 

>Ah, here's the rub. Here we are trying to stop the government and other
>organizations from dictating 'standards' and yet here you are wanting to
>impose another one.

Did I say someone else couldn't set up a crypto-only mailer using 
DES and AES?  You always get to dictate 'standards' for systems you 
own.  I always get to dictate standards for systems I own.  And the 
government rightfully gets to dictate standards for systems it owns. 
Sometimes it tries to do more than is rightful, but that is another 
question. 

>The function of an anonymous remailer should NOT be context/content
>sensitive.

Uh, now who's trying to impose a standard?  You want a system that 
_someone_else_ runs to conform to _your_ ideas of what it ought to 
do.  You get to dictate standards on systems _YOU_ own -- not on  
anyone else's.

				Bear