Re: losing laptops, opsec
"Paul H. Merrill" wrote: While CypherPunks tend to be a paranoid lot, they do not hold a candle to the level of paranoia that is considered Line of Duty by the Inte/CounterIntel Community. NSA has demonstrated a compiler that introduces backdoors and Trojan aspects while compiling clean source. (Purely for demonstration purposes, of course.) which is why there's been an effort by Alan Cox and others to do some kind of auditing on gcc, which is currently being taken up again as a side project of the Linux Kernel Audit Project. I'm following that effort, and I'll gladly forward any suggestions as to how one can prove a given compiler binary to be clean without having to rely on the compiler one used to compile it being clean (which would only turn things in circles forever).
FC: Mexican hackers race clock to decrypt key files before election
-- Forwarded Message -- Date: June 20, 2000 9:52 AM -0400 X-Loop: openpgp.net From: Declan McCullagh [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: FC: Mexican hackers race clock to decrypt key files before election [Elections in Mexico are scheduled for July 2. Apparently, according to the article below, there are some encrypted files that could prove explosive -- corruption, drug money, etc. -- if they're decrypted in time. --Declan] From: "Alberto M. Giordano" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mexican Hackers to the Rescue of Democracy Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 21:57:26 CDT Narco News publishes early tonight with a bulldog edition: "Mexican Computer Hackers working 'round the clock' to Open Fobaproa File" http://www.narconews.com/hackers1.html and related story: "PAN ACCUSES PRI: NARCO Calls for Investigation of Labastida Money" The web of drug money, the Fobaproa bank bailout and electoral fraud explodes as an issue in the final stretch to the July 2nd Mexican elections. Right now, the future is in the hands of the hackers... developing Al Giordano publisher The Narco News Bulletin http://www.narconews.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -- -- End Forwarded Message -- Robert Guerra [EMAIL PROTECTED], Fax: +1(303) 484-0302 WWW Page http://crypto.yashy.com/www PGPKeys http://pgp.greatvideo.com/keys/rguerra/
Re: losing laptops, opsec
At 03:26 AM 6/20/00 -0400, Bill Stewart wrote: Not-invented-here is no excuse. In the crypto world, it used to be a decent excuse, because the No Such Agency did have a lot more crypto experience than the civilian world, and lots of people in commercial space kept reinventing the same snake oil. It's not true any more (certainly nobody's sold snake oil in decades! :-), but old habits die hard. So we lose national security secrets because of it. I was starting to suspect it had to do with key management, if different (unknown beforehand) people would need the disks, depending on the crisis. They could have/should have kept the passphrases written on paper in another vault, or used a (more complex) PK scheme. But *why bother* when you're in the middle of a nuke factory, surrounded by extremely well-checked out people and extremely well guarded because of the isotopes if not the data?
Re: filters
Most of the things suggested here have been implemented by the lists [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] The difference between the two lists is that [EMAIL PROTECTED] doesn't resend sent to toad.com, and [EMAIL PROTECTED] also only forwards mail that has either CPUNK in the subject line or has a header line of Approved: CPUNK in the message. You can subscribe by sending mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I agree with other posters that removing toad.com mail gets rid of a great deal of garbage. I've found the list to be much more readable in the last couple weeks. -Bill -- Bill O'Hanlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professional Network Services, Inc. 612-379-3958 [Defunct [EMAIL PROTECTED] address replaced.] Kurth Bemis [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: can we place a filter to reject all incoming messages that dont have CPUNK or CPUNKS or something in the subject? Why pollute the subject line? I'd suggest that people just filter postings which don't have CPUNK in the subject line by themselves and leave the list nodes out of it, but that will probably just encourage people to do it, and it isn't very asthetically pleasing, particularly if only some people do it. Just add a X-CPUNK (or whatever becomes standardized) header to the messages, then score down, delete, or filter messages which don't have that header. This "CPUNK" business in the subject line is no better than Choate's "CDR: " header, and it is totally transparent. It's not controversial as it doesn't force people to participate in this filtering. It's also portable, provided that the remailers will pass arbitrary headers. Another good idea may be to filter postings which are addressed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yet another thing to do -- though this only works if your mail reader supports some form of scoring mechanism -- is to score down postings based on some criteria, as well as scoring other postings up. When you go to read the mail, sort by thread, then sort the threads by collective score. It's a sort of one-man reputation capital system. I used this on USENET back when I used to read it. Say that you like all of Tim May's postings. You score his postings +5. On the other hand, you dislike all of Lucky Green's postings, so you score him -5. You find that AOL users rarely have anything coherent or useful to say, so you score them down -20. On the other hand, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is someone you like, so you set him +5. You neither like nor dislike me most of the time, but you hate it whenever I mention grammar, so you score any posting written by me with the word "grammar" in it -1000 and blow it away. Meanwhile, you happen to like postings which mention hackers in any sense, so you score those up +10. If Lucky Green sends a posting about hacking, it's still +5. It's nowhere near as complex as it sounds. I haven't tried doing it on this list, but it should work. Of course, it won't solve any kind of bandwidth problem. --- End of Forwarded Message
Re: Fw: (Fwd) Statement from Janet Reno
The only problem is is doesn't check out when you go talk to the 60 Minutes people. At 5:48 PM -0400 6/20/00, Marcel Popescu wrote: Interesting indeed :) Mark Read this statement from Janet Reno: "A Cultist is one who has a strong belief in the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ; who frequently attends Bible studies; who has a high level of financial giving to a Christian cause; who home schools for their children; who has accumulated survival foods and has a strong belief in the Second Amendment; and who distrusts big government. Any of these may qualify a person as a cultist but certainly more than one of these would cause us to look at this person as a threat and his family as being in a risk situation that qualifies for government interference." - Janet Reno, Attny. General of the United States during an Interview on CBS "60 Minutes" on June 26, 1999.
