The Enquirer

[Anonymous Remailer (austria)]

                   THE CYPHERPUNK ENQUIRER

   "Just when we thought we were out, they drag us back in ..."


Recently reviewed documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal that,
following the discovery of large quantities of pornography on hard
drives retrieved from the Abbottabad compound where Osama bin Laden
was assassinated, the NSA became concerned that al Queda was using
steganographic techniques to hide various communications within the
jpgs and animated gifs, and began a program (known internally as
'Project Creampie') to collect all the pornography on the internet
into one giant database, presently located at the new NSA data
storage center in Bluffdale, Utah, that could be searched by
various interns and subcontractors. Progress has apparently been
slowed due to subcontractor Hewitt Packard's problems in designing
and building a computer keyboard impervious to "precious bodily
fluids". In response to the newly discovered NSA obsession with feelthy
peectures, the old al-queda.net NSA bait URL has been changed to
porn-are-us.org.


Responding to charges of 'language-ism', the Obfuscated C contest
opened itself to languages other than just C this year, and the clear
winner in the English category was our own John Young of cryptome.org.
"We don't have a clue what he's saying," the nominating committee
stated, "but we sure as hell know what he means." The judging
committee was impressed by Mr. Young's ability to be almost totally
incomprehensible while still getting his point across, and by the fact
that he had obviously attained bootstrap status, and in addition is
Turing complete. The debate over whether Mr. Young qualifies as P or
NP has yet to be resolved.

In a shout-out to the old DEFCON ritual of playing 'Spot the Fed',
the RSA Conference has announced a contest to 'Spot Tim May', the
winner receiving an 'I Outed Tim May' tee shirt and a personal
bodyguard for the conference duration. Interest appears to be
limited due to the boycott.

After a long absence, the Cypherpunks steering committee, due to
recent revelations about NSA spying, has once again opened One
Time Pad season. The early leader appears to be Ian Goldberg's (of UC
Berkeley's 'Glow in the Dark Campanile' fame) proposal to distribute
OTP bits via entangled photons, awaiting only Phillip Hallam-Baker's
work on developing a room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate. Open
source programmers have already initiated a Kickstarter campaign to
develop a delivery method for the distribution of OTPs that would
avoid the internet completely and still be RFC 1149, 2549, and 6214
compliant.

The NIST is facing further controversy following claims that it
intentionally 'backdoored' the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator.
Now an IETF taskforce, after several months of study, has determined
that NIST's proposal to increase the security of a venerable UNIX
encryption algorithm by 'doubling the cycle length' actually makes
the algorithm more susceptible to cryptanalysis. Cryptographers are
recommending that all programs that use the new algorithm immediately revert to the old 'ROT13' standard.

Quote of the Week: "In conclusion, the main thing we did wrong when
designing ATM security systems in the early to mid-1980s was to worry
about criminals being clever; we should rather have worried about our
customers - the banks' system designers, implementers, and testers -
being stupid."
        Ross Anderson, "Security Engineering"

SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia was arrested yesterday and charged
with threatening to assassinate POTUS Barak Obama. Justice Scalia
was released 6 hours later after scientific vocal analysis of his
Skype call to Justice Samuel Alito revealed that his actual
statement was, "Let's kill the precedent". The FBI blamed the British
GCHQ for providing them a poor quality recording, to which a GCHQ
spokesperson replied that the recording was "exactly what the NSA
gave us". The Microsoft Corporation denied it provided any Skype
information to the NSA whatsoever via a press representative whose
trousers were quickly extinguished by an attentive aide.

Tonight on NSA TV - "Sexting with the Stars" Miley Cyrus and Lady
Gaga in hot girl-on-girl action! (security clearance 'Secret' or
above required)