- cypherpunks-legacy@lists.ogf.org

Re: Many Important Items in the News
by peter honeyman 27 Mar '93

27 Mar '93

this seems to have fizzled out somewhere along the line. ------- Forwarded Message Date: Thu, 25 Mar 93 11:54:30 EST From: Peter Honeyman <honey(a)citi.umich.edu> Subject: Re: Many Important Items in the News To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com marc, if article cancellation is made cryptographically secure, there is the possibility that articles can be made uncancellable. of course, if there is some wild card that allows the backbone cabal to cancel articles remotely and after the fact, then i suspect usenet will remain vulnerable to forged cancellation messages. but maybe not. i see your point about backbone admins refusing to traffic in certain kinds of messages, but as a veteran of usenet from before it was even called usenet, i assure you that other admins would quickly fill in the gaps in connectivity. this has happened many times. i don't agree, btw, that we can rely on the backbone admins to be very strong supporters of speech, nor should we. as for "the guy with the disk" wanting macpgp to go away, that's not what happened here. everyone i've talked to that has a direct role in the decision agrees that there is a valid research and education function served by distributing macpgp. ah well, sometimes the dragon wins. and regarding the network providers decision to pull penet's plug, i believe this decision was based principally on the opinion of ... how did julf put it? ... oh yes, "a very well-known and extremely highly regarded net personality" (i doubt that i would regard him as a strong supporter of free speech, btw). i suspect that when we get to the bottom of this, we'll discover that many people's interests were being represented without their knowledge, assent, or agreement. regarding your comments about net abuse and megabytes of trash, i agree that we need to brainstorm and find ways to address these problems. i am optimistic that technical solutions hold a lot of promise; it's just a matter of discovering them. let's put our shoulder to the wheel! peter ------- End of Forwarded Message

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Remailers
by rubin＠citi.umich.edu 27 Mar '93

27 Mar '93

I contacted Eric Hughes, and he suggested that my question was of general enough interest to share with the group. Here is my question followed by Eric's response: ---------- Hi, You pointed me in the direction of hal's remailer at soda.berkeley.edu:pub/cypherpunks and I have the code now. However, since I'm not that familiar with perl, I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how it works. Do you know if anyone has written a technical description of how the remailer works? I would like to build a remailer too, and I wanted to try and understand how Hal's remailer works first. Also, do you know if there is code available for any other remailers in shell script or C? Thanks a lot, Avi Rubin ----------- Chael Hall wrote a remailer in C. He should be willing to share his code. Ask on the list. The question you asked me about understanding the remailer operation is of general enough interest that you ought to just ask the list at large. In specific, I don't know of any such theory of operation. Eric

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Re: we need a faq.
by tcmay＠netcom.com 27 Mar '93

27 Mar '93

J. Michael Diehl writes: >I will mantain the faq if people will send my usefull information, such as ftp >sites, remailer-reposter sites, short answers to "obvious" questions, etc. I >will mail it out on a regular basis and perhapse to new subscribers, if that is >possible. > >Come on folks give me a hand here! ;^) The problem with FAQs is that someone almost always volunteers to put together a FAQ if people will "send them stuff." Then he realizes what an enormous job it is, as the submissions are either a) not there, b) are too brief or confusing, c) require lots of editing, or d) other problems exist. Then that volunteer just sort of lets it all slide--and several months later some new eager beaver makes a similar proposal. I've seen this happen on several groups and mailing lists. Someone on this list boldly stepped forward last September, begged for submissions (some of us even sent stuff in), then let it slide. Officially, I suppose he is still working on it, but nothing has appeared. I'm not holding my breath. Since we are an anarchy, nobody can force him--or you, for that mattter--to finish it. The way FAQs traditionally get done is for someone to just write the whole damn thing...this will of course mean that someone must become quite knowledgeable about remailers, PERL, Chaum's work, the math of crypto, the politics and jargon of crypto privacy, and on and on. Not trying to scare you off, just pointing out that a FAQ will not write itself, nor can you count on others to "contribute" (for the reasons mentioned above). (Sometimes a "stone soup" approach works, where a "Rev. 0" FAQ is posted and then the critics come out of the woodwork to suggest improvements. If I was writing the FAQ, that's how I'd approach it...just get *something* out as quickly as possible and then see if anyone wants to change anything or make additions.) If you publicly announce your plans to do the FAQ, and begin soliciting contributions, PLEASE make sure it gets finished! By the way, in my opinion, the Cypherpunks FAQ is *essentially* available already in the regular postings of list members Lance Detweiler (he posts a long article to sci.crypt describing privacy on the Internet) and Karl Barrus (he keeps an updated list of remailers). Good luck. -Tim May -- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: MailSafe and PGP available.

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How secure is an anonomous mail-server
by baumbach＠atmel.com 27 Mar '93

27 Mar '93

Suppose somone wanted to compromise an anonomous mail-server. Couldn't it be possible without the owner of the mail-server knowing? The attack might consist of monitoring all traffic to and from that address. Unless the server waits a long and random time to forward the incoming mail, couldn't a mapping be made of real-name/possible-anon-names? If a users uses the same anonomous name for long enough (2 times?) couldn't the attacker be very confident of the mapping? If the attacker uses the server themselves creatively, wouldn't the task be even easier? This seems like a simple cipher easily broken. I am new to this, so I appologize if this is a dumb question. Peter Baumbach baumbach(a)atmel.com

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Re: ANON: Shutdown of Anon.penet.fi
by pete＠cirrus.com 27 Mar '93

27 Mar '93

----- Begin Included Message ----- Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1993 10:38:31 -0800 To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com From: lefty(a)apple.com (Lefty) Subject: ANON: Shutdown of Anon.penet.fi I have been told that Clayton Cramer, the bete noire of alt.sex.bondage, is the "net.personality" responsible for the shutdown of anon.penet.fi. I do not know this to be a fact. Funny, I never thought of him as being particularly "highly regarded". ----- End Included Message ----- Mr. Cramer is highly regarded for his scolarly work in regard to the Civil War, and the political history of the Second Amendment. He has just published a book on the later. His other 'opinions' have always amused me somewhat, because he was one of the first net.people that got me interested in the Libertarian Party. Those rantings seem very out of step with this general political attitude, quite un-libertarian, in fact. Pete Carpenter pete(a)cirrus.com Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills, One man gathers what another man spills. - Robert Hunter

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Re: ANON: Shutdown of Anon.penet.fi
by nobody＠alumni.cco.caltech.edu 26 Mar '93

26 Mar '93

It is fruitless to guess. You only tar innocent people. The truth will come out, more likely sooner than later. Nowhere, Man.

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REMAIL: sendmail.cf problems
by nowhere＠bsu-cs.bsu.edu 26 Mar '93

26 Mar '93

I am working on a new project on 386BSD with pseudonymous user ID's. What I want to do is use a rule in the /etc/sendmail.cf file to make all messages to "anon.###" be processed by the anonymous contact service and everything else to be processed as local mail. I added the following lines to my configuration file and made a new frozen config file, but I keep having trouble getting it to work: Ranon.$- $#acs$:anon.$1 Macs, P=/usr/guest/anon/anon-reply, F=nlF, S=10, R=20, A=anon-reply $u The first line should make all mail directed to "anon.*" be processed by the mailer "acs." The second should define a mailer named acs that executes anon-reply. I found that this would make it impossible to alias anon.post, anon.admin, anon.ping, anon.help, etc. So, I changed the first line to: Ranon.[0-9]$- $#acs$:anon.$1 That makes newaliases stop bitching about the aliases, but any mail directed to an anon.### account bounces and it says "User unknown." I ignored the alias problem once and actually got it to get farther, where it said "Unknown mailer error 2." I think that's because it was using /bin/sh instead of /bin/csh which is required for the scripts that I got from a friend. (acs2.2 is what I got, it was used for alt.personals) I want to rewrite it, but the important part is getting the aliasing to work. The rest is a piece of cake once I can get sendmail do to this. I hate to rebuild my alias database, besides which, that slows down ALL mail. If anyone knows which RFC's to look at for the sendmail.cf format or has experience with this problem, I would be eternally grateful. Chael Hall -- Chael Hall nowhere(a)bsu-cs.bsu.edu, 00CCHALL(a)BSUVC.BSU.EDU (317) 285-3648 after 5 pm EST

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Many Important Items in the News
by tcmay＠netcom.com 26 Mar '93

26 Mar '93

I urge all Cypherpunks to keep up with what's happening in several newsgroups: * alt.security.pgp and sci.crypt, for the latest in availability of PGP, MacPGP, etc. Also, a debate over Dorothy Denning's ideas on key registration and restrictions on crypto. (And for entertainment, David Sternlight and our own Perry Metzger are duking it out. Sternlight caused MacPGP to be pulled off the announced archive sites.) * news.admin.policy, for the latest on Julf's shutdown of his anonymous server, and for discussion of proposed successors. The whole shutdown is an important topic--perhaps someday Julf will be able to tell the whole story. Mention of the "Cypherpunks remailers" has been made in several places....this may be a good time to a) prepare for a wave of new users, b) be sure the code is solid and ready, and c) advertise the existence of the remailers and which one are up, which ones require PGP, etc. And given that our systems are "even more anonymous" that Julf's was, the abuses seen with his system will have to be faced on our systems. The alleged abuses of Julf's system: supposedly a picture of a burn victim was posted to one of the erotica groups (tacky in the extreme, but hardly illegal or a threat), instructions on how to poison cats (also tacky but not ipso facto criminal), etc. (I don't know what the culminating case was, nor will I speculate.) As we've talked about before, some folks may try to shut us down by deliberately posting extremely controversial material. There was also a major flamewar over the weekend when one Richard DePew decided to initiate his "ARMM" ("Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation") program, which sent out "CANCEL" notices for anonymous messages posted to certain groups. Very controversial, and a sign of things to come. (The connection, if any, with Julf's shutdown remains unclear. Certainly the whole issue of anonymous postings reached a head this past weekend. Sternlight's threats about PGP may have been involved as well. Julf?) (Cypherpunks remailers may want to change the "Nobody" and "Anonymous" tags to names that are less screenable, less susceptible to censorship by ARMM-type programs. Using a rotating list of fictional or historical names may be an approach, but I'm sure we can think of many ways to bypass ARMM-type cancellers.) These are certainly interesting times. -Tim May -- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: MailSafe and PGP available.

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Anonymous Corollary...
by Peter Wayner 26 Mar '93

26 Mar '93

The debate about the advantages of anonymity reminds me of the debate over Hillary's Health Care Committee which is a nameless group of individuals who have all signed a secrecy pledge. Many are not part of the government and can't be held accountable or even fired. The Wall Street Journal was able to get the list of the people involved and published it along with a reminiscence of the good old days when studying who was in power in the Kremlin involved watching the cars to see who was coming and going and meeting in the baths at the same time. There never was any dependable list of who was in power at the Kremlin back then. Now, in response to the WSJ's coup de fax, the Clintonians say that they'll release the list as soon as it has been prepared. The point: the government has a relentless desire to document and assign accountability for everything. It's bred in their bones. Even the President can avoid it. -Peter

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Re: TEMPEST in a teapot
by pete＠cirrus.com 26 Mar '93

26 Mar '93

----- Begin Included Message ----- It is speculated that poorly protected systems can be effectively monitored up to the order of one kilometer from the target equipment. ----- End Included Message ----- The "readability" of the relatively high energy sweeps in a standard CRT monitor is well known. Any idea of similar effects on LCD screens ? The energy involved would be orders of magnitude less, just for starters. Also, since the whole screen is effectively oscillating, I'm not sure that there is any 'raster' sweep per se going on here at all. This could be a factor for the truly paranoid :-) using portables with LCD screens. Pete Carpenter pete(a)cirrus.com Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills, One man gathers what another man spills. - Robert Hunter

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