- cypherpunks-legacy@lists.ogf.org

Today's Quotable Notes
by fergp＠sytex.com 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Today's "Notable quote" - "... I have to say up front I don't speak for the CIA and this is just me. I can tell you I did my doctoral work studying Soviet-East European personal computing. I have seen export controls and all that close at hand, and actually kicked the tires and things and all that. I can say I agreed nearly 100% with what Mr. Diffie said, up until he said something that surprised me, in that this room didn't shout it down. That was when he said information is less dangerous than physical things. Good God! If you believe that, I'll give you a choice. I can go to your school district and give out one hit of PCP, or I can cover the area with instructions on how to make it. All I'd ask you to keep in mind is to have some sympathy for the foreign policy-niks who know that, in a sort of frustrated air, when it's hard to move information around, it's unlikely that someone can even get an atomic bomb plan, despite the fact that we've got tens of thousands in both the former Soviet Union and in the United States. But I would fear someone giving out the Princeton dissertation and broadcasting it over the nets to all and sundry in that form -- now, given plutonium, we can make a bomb. So, information is a dangerous thing, in the right hands. I think we're all selling ourselves short if we think information is an unempowered commodity. All that said, I have to agree with everything else. Cryptography is not magic, it's math, and DES is not only here, it's on a server in Helsinki, so we have to live with the fact that information moves around. We may want to be sympathetic to the fact that there are people, in fact people without the tools that we all have here, trying to enact the current and past foreign policy. Help educate them, help tell them why these things are happening, but realize that we're disrupting a lot of things real fast." -- Ross Stapleton, Central Intelligence Agency "WHO HOLDS THE KEYS?" Friday, March 20, 1992 Chair: Dorothy Denning, Georgetown University Panel: Jim Bidzos, RSA Data Security David Bellin, Pratt Institute John Gilmore, Cygnus Support Whitfield Diffie, SunSoft, Inc. John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation Paul Ferguson | "Government, even in its best state, Network Integrator | is but a necessary evil; in its worst Centreville, Virginia USA | state, an intolerable one." fergp(a)sytex.com | - Thomas Paine, Common Sense Type bits/keyID Date User ID pub 1024/1CC04D 1993/03/15 Paul Ferguson <fergp(a)sytex.com> Key fingerprint = EE D2 93 7D 04 6D C6 05 AC 36 AD 9D 8E 4F 41 58

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Re: ANONYMOUS CONTACT SERVICE
by an26436＠anon.penet.fi 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

At 6:44 PM 8/11/93 -0700, Warren Keith Russell wrote: >I received a message from System Daemon telling me that I had sent a >message using the anonymous contact service, allocating a code name, and >explaining how I can be reached anonymously. > >What does this mean? Sounds great, but I have no idea how I managed to >send such a message! Probably means someone sent a message to cypherpunks(a)toad.com using that service. The service then allocated an id to cypherpunks(a)toad.com and sent it mail. At 9:08 AM 8/12/93 -0700, hfinney(a)shell.portal.com wrote: > >A few months ago, someone subscribed to the list through the Penet service, >and it ended up revealing the Penet aliases of everyone who posted. Each >post was delivered to that subscriber marked as being from the Penet alias >corresponding to the poster. All it took was a parallel non-Penet subscription >to break the anonymity provided by Penet. > >Has this now happened again? > >At the time, there was some discussion about using "an..." versus "na..." >forms of the Penet aliases, one of which would avoid this revelation. Has >that been taken care of? Now the service requires a password, so we're safe (I hope). Stuff sent by an unsuspecting user through the list to penet will cause a bounce at penet saying something like 'are you new? set your password.' However, the way Julf set up the password setting/using is not totally secure. There is an option where you can set no password which an attacker would find useful. It wouldn't work for a mass disclosure though. The attacker would have to pick and impersonate each of his targets, and unless the attacker can intercept his victims' mail they will get stuff from penet giving them a clue that something's amiss. I suppose this is a worthy topic for this list: How do you have anonymity that allows replies and psuedonyms that can't be hacked by impersonation? One cheap way would be to not automatically include the poster's pseudonym in the recipient's copy - have it be totally anonymous like the cypherpunks remailers. Pseudonyms would be only for replies/return addresses. Actually, Julf's solution isn't too bad. Having your password in plain text on its way to the remailer is insecure, but Julf's remailer doesn't allow encryption, so you're vulnerable to a truly determined attack anyhow. Maybe Julf needs to bite the bullet and start using PGP. > >Again, I'd like to find out who it is, have them removed, and have my >new penet id cancelled. After all, this person now has email from me, >with my penet id on it, with my name signed at the bottom. If I >decide to use the penet remailer in the future, I don't want this >person to have a binding between my penet id and my real name. > > MArc If you'd set a password you'd have no problem. If you got a bounce, you're OK. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

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No Subject
by Anonymous 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Is there any reason why a single mail address should have only one pseudonym? Along with declaring a private password, why not declare any number of public names? One password per name would be nice. Another plus - then penet could be chained between cypherpunk remailers. Now this is not possible because it identifies users with their 'From:' field.

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Re: On The Inherent Evil of Electronic Democracy
by plmoses＠unix.cc.emory.edu 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Regarding the Electronic Democracy idea, I vote with Tim May. Look at the way public opinion is molded today through CNN, Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung, Oprah Winfrey, etc. One could even say that Clinton is the "Phil Donahue president" (he 'cares') - just look at the second candidate debate last fall. A talk show if ever there was one. No, erasing procedural safeguards in the name of access by the masses is an *EXTREMELY* bad idea, because a lot of these archaic procedures still have use and serve a filtering function, albeit one that may not be recognized fully until they are removed and drastic, undesirable, unwanted,and unintended consequences follow. What we should be doing instead is focusing our analytic powers on the present bottlenecks and distortions in the system and resolving those rather than opening ENTIRELY NEW "runoff channels". For at the end of the day, the only beneficiaries of innovation are the ones poised to exploit it. And that certainly is not the "enlightened citizen" today. What am I saying? If we allow direct legislating power to go to everyone, we will eliminate the concern with PLURALITY that the Constitution protects. If not sooner, then later.

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Re: CA online legislative database access
by smb＠research.att.com 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Lance Dettweiler writes: > cypherfolks, do you have any idea what these efforts are the faint > glimmers of? Imagine a future society where *anyone* can propose law s, > not just the elite few called Legislators and identified in an Actually, this is my worst nightmare of what this country could become: a direct democracy of the most populist sort. Agreed. Let me put the issue in technical terms: you want a government with hysteresis. Call hysteresis the antidote to hysteria. The concept, if not the word, was well known to Jefferson et al. In fact, that was the reason that Senators serve six-year terms, and are elected at staggered intervals. Why? Well, there was an Op-Ed column in the NY Times recently that explained it quite well -- the instantaneous reaction of the public to certain kinds of events (like shooting up Iraqi missle batteries, or starting a war) is quite noticeable. Was George Bush really doing a much better job the day after Desert Storm started than the day before? A substantial portion of the American people seemed to think so. No, I'll pass. Our current system of government is far from perfect. But a switch to direct democracy (the technical term for what you Lance Dettweiler proposes) is not the answer. (Want more evidence -- look at the effects of the referendum and initiative process, especially in California. While it can -- and has -- acted as a check on government, a vast number of propositions have been passed that reflect either well-financed advertising campaigns or a desire to decree magic.) --Steve Bellovin

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neural nets
by remail＠tamsun.tamu.edu 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Speaking of neural nets and image recognition, my former employers landed a contract with "various law enforcement agencies" although the project manager I spoke to said primarily the FBI and CIA - to develop neural network hardware and software to do face recognition, to be used to identify criminals at the airports. Indeed, I recall being photographed twice when I hired on - normal lighting for my regular id, and low lighting. At the time, I wondered why but didn't think anything of it. The project manager said they were amassing a database of pictures to use as training sets. Pretty interesting...

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Democracy
by fnerd＠smds.com 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

A procedural point about this democracy debate, and then a substantive (hah! didn't think I knew that word, did you?) one. It's in line with the idea of this list to keep up with possibilities and developments like electronic direct democracy ideas, and to serve as a way for people who are into things like that to get in touch with each other. But at some point the purely political aspect of the disagreement isn't especially a cypherpunk issue. I hope everybody cools off or takes it elsewhere (I don't know where) before that point. Robin Hanson's Alternative Institutions list seems like a good place for that. That said, I want to throw in my bic lighter... Democracy is bad; smarter democracy would be worse. The system we have is ravenous and stupid, but we're adapted to it. There's nothing "good" about representative democracy except that it's relatively slow-changing and we know some ways of dealing with it. If we made democracy able to respond to events more quickly, it might be smarter and better at what it does best-- prey on us. It might break past our defenses. I feel the same way about calls for efficient government. No-o-o-o-o thanks! This has nothing to do with respect for the common man. I think people are basically decent and reasonably smart. But no one has a right to take part in the crime called government, including the parts people are playing right now, much less more active parts. I think democracy evolved from standoffs in multi-way wars. Wars used to be won by body count, and at some point someone said, "Okay, we'll compromise and make peace for now, but I'm still keeping track of who's on my side, just so you don't get out of line." Voting is a way of predicting who would win a war. Which is nicer than real war, and all respect and rights are ultimately based on what other people can do, but there's nothing inherently right about democracy, and it keeps people in a sort of tense standoff, unable to trust each other. Nothing in democracy itself lets the sides make agreements and structurally keeps them from changing their minds the next day. Cumbersome, procedure-bound setups like we have actually allow those sorts of things somewhat, but not in an up-front and reliable way. Democracy doesn't hold individual voters responsible for the effects and costs of their votes. Even in our "unresponsive" democracy there's little reason for the statistical will of the people not to be flighty and untrustworthy. Technology can help somewhat in replacing the systems we have with better systems. Better would be anarchic. To me, anarchy means shifting from overarching systems for regulating and taking care of people, to ways for people to take care of their own interests. Democracy sounds like the latter, but instead of taking care of your own life, you have a sort of metaphorical surrogate--a minute influence on what happens to everybody. As usual, I would have stopped, but I thought some things I hadn't before. I'll post the body of this to AltInst and then shut up about it on this list. -fnerd quote me

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Re: on the inherent evil
by M..Stirner＠f0.n0.z1.FIDONET.ORG 13 Aug '93

13 Aug '93

Uu> From: plmoses(a)unix.cc.emory.edu (Paul L. Moses) Uu> Regarding the Electronic Democracy idea, I vote with Tim May. Look at Uu> the way public opinion is molded today through CNN, Tom Brokaw, Connie Uu> Chung, Oprah Winfrey, etc. One could even say that Clinton is the Uu> "Phil Donahue president" (he 'cares') - just look at the second Uu> candidate debate last fall. A talk show if ever there was one. As a Second Amendment activist, I am particularly aware of the dangers of an instant-input viewer poll bearing the weight of law following a particularly disgusting piece of BooHoo/Advocacy Broadcast Journalism. . Though I don't see how this is directly relevant to the cypherpunks thang, I do know that I am horrified at the potential for abuse inherent in the "electronic Town Hall" concept. I also find that most computer folk have wild enthusiasm for this idea while bearing no inkling of the ease with which the process could be subverted. ********************************************************************* * <m..stirner(a)f28.n125.z1.fidonet.org> - PGP Key D30909 via servers * * > What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not <* * > warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit <* * > of resistance? Let them take arms!" - Thomas Jefferson, 1787 <* ********************************************************************* ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 -- M. Stirner - via FidoNet node 1:125/1 UUCP: ...!uunet!kumr!shelter!0!0!M..Stirner INTERNET: M..Stirner(a)f0.n0.z1.FIDONET.ORG

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Re: Secure voice software issues
by smb＠research.att.com 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

I see 160ms round trip times on my SLIP link from home to work, and I can't account for all of this time by just adding up transmission times and store-and-forward delays for the data rates and packet sizes I'm using. And I don't think it can be explained by the trellis decoding in V.32 bis, as that should account for only a few bits of delay. I've since heard of very similar figures for other modems, so It's not just my modem. I'm beginning to suspect the V.42bis packetizing algorithms. Although they're not described in the spec, I suspect that real V.42bis implementations use timers to determine when to send the the currently queued data as a frame. Or maybe there's a Nagle-like algorithm like the one in TCP: immediately send the first byte of data on an idle link, but keep additional traffic pending until the first byte is acknowledged in order to aggregate stream traffic into larger frames. This is all speculation so far, but it does explain the long RTTs I see with packet traffic even though raw character-at-a-time traffic seems to be fast. Stream traffic would see the worst delays of all, which is ordinarily okay for a file transfer, but death to a real time stream like voice. That's why we may be forced to turn off V.42 entirely and speak synchronously to the modem. Time to haul out a protocol analyzer and do some timing measurements. Real timing measurements would help, but it's not just the V.42bis algorithms. A year or two ago, I did some measurements on a number of different modems. I saw large -- and sometimes unacceptable -- delays even without V.42 or MNP in use. My methodology was to enable loopback at various points -- hardware loopback plugs, local loopback on my modem, remote loopback or a plug at the far end, etc. I sent single characters, and timed how long they took to show up. The modems seem to either buffer up several characters, or have to wait a while before sending the first one, but the delays appeared to be for the first character in a ``bunch'' (``packet'' is too strong a word).

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Re: On The Inherent Evil of Electronic Democracy
by James Still 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

>Regarding the Electronic Democracy idea, I vote with Tim May. Look at the >way public opinion is molded today through CNN, Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung, >Oprah Winfrey, etc. One could even say that Clinton is the "Phil Donahue >president" (he 'cares') - just look at the second candidate debate last fall. I don't think public opinion is 'molded' so much, just that it's fancies are entertained too much. (Info-tained?) I dropped by a local bookstore last night to hear Jim Lehrer (McNeil/Lehrer Newhour on PBS) speak about his new book. He brought up this topic, saying that "mainstream news," (never mind the dribble of Donahue or Oprah) has been remiss in *reporting the news* for years, instead sensationalizing news and entertaining the masses. According to Lehrer, T.V. news (and newspapers who must now compete with them) have stopped asking their reporters to "get the facts" instead encouraging them to "get the dirt," or else. Look what has happened: the three major networks have lost over 30% market-share to other outlets like NPR and PBS or from people that just plain turn it off. Extreme voter apathy. Twentynothings from hell :-) The good side to this according to Lehrer is that one day soon a bunch of balding men will sit around the NBC board-room table and say, "We need more viewers, what do we do?" One particularly bright young man will finally say, "I know, let's report the news!," and everyone will bust out in applause. Lehrer's been doing it for 18 years. The info-tainment stuff is a small blip on the Neilson charts and nothing more. Maybe I'm a bit too optimistic for my own good though :^) - Jim

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