Re: It's Baaaaaaaaaaaaack - NEO Project and other distributed computing
At 04:23 PM 01/11/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Saturday, January 11, 2003, at 03:47 PM, Bill Stewart wrote: - A distributed computing like this needs several parts: - A problem to solve - they seem to keep waffling on this; their FAQ really needs to be upfront about it, but it only talks about RSA-576, while their forum says they are or aren't also doing something with X-Box, depending on their legal worries, but doesn't say what they're trying to do to it (Cracking a 2048-bit RSA key certainly isn't a rational problem to solve, but maybe they're trying to crack something else about it, like a passphrase used for a key file?) If neither is solvable in the lifetime of the earth, does it matter which one they claim to be working on? RSA-576 is certainly crackable in a reasonable lifetime, though not likely by these guys. RSA expects it to be done in a year or so. 2048-bit RSA obviously isn't factorable with current mathematics unless somebody can build a high-resolution quantum computer. Cracking a 128-bit-entropy passphrase with a 128-or-more-bit algorithm is not realistic, but cracking a human-chosen passphrase might or might not be, depending on the competence of the human, and they're talking about Microsoft here. (I suppose I should try running pgpcrack on my _own_ passphrases :-) It's unlikely they'd have such a file unless somebody leaked it out of Microsoft or put it into the Xbox's code for some reason, but you never know. - Some way to hand out work and collect results, and it's possible that they've done this well, though I doubt they scale to seti.org sizes. Although, as simple calculations show (reported here several times over the past decade), random and overlapping self-apportionment of keyspace to search is only a factor of 38% or so worse than more careful, non-overlapping apportionment is. (And random apportionment stops the attack where someone finds the solution, or knows where it is and claims that portion of the keyspace to search, and then doesn't announce a solution.) That's true for symmetric-key algorithms, but not always for factoring. Most of the high-end factoring programs work in two phases, one of which looks for some kind of interesting intermediate result, and a second phase which takes the intermediate results and crunches on them. Random keyspace self-apportionment may work well for the first phase, but for at least some of the recent major algorithms, the second phase has usually been run on some big computer or cluster by the people running the project because it required too much RAM for the vast majority of desktop PCs. One of the most frustrating things about the Neo Project's web site was that it's got one forum comment that suggests that they may have found an efficient way to distribute the second-phase calculations, but there's no pointer to any way to find out the mathematical work, if any, to tell if they really meant that or were correct about it.
Re: Television
On Saturday, January 11, 2003, at 11:10 AM, Sunder wrote: For fuck's sake you guys are truly illeterate slaves to Microsoft aren't you? That's the output of the fucking Linux banner command. RTFM: http://nodevice.com/sections/ManIndex/man0074.html And long before Linux, Unix variants of all kinds. And before Unix, things running on PDP-10s and 7s and 15s and IBM and Univac machines. As I said earlier, I saw these in the late 60s. Popular in Vietnam. --Tim May
Re: unlawful combatants, interrogation methods, is your lawyer a spook?
On Saturday, January 11, 2003, at 09:24 AM, Major Variola (ret) wrote: US argues against counsel for terror suspects By Lyle Denniston, Globe Correspondent, 1/11/2003 WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, going to unusual lengths to keep lawyers away from suspected terrorists now in custody, has revealed in court its methods of secret interrogation to get information from these detainees. The administration contends that those methods surely will fail if lawyers are on hand. Too bad for government there's a little matter of the Constitution which provides for access to counsel, protection against mandatory self-incrimination, presentation of charges, speedy and fair trial, and all that other rot. "But if perps are allowed to have open trials, how will we find them guilty in secret?" "If their lawyers are not actually working for us, we won't get their defense strategy!" "Rules? _What_ rules!?!" It long ago should have happened that the Supreme Court heard an emergency case on the Padilla matter (and similar cases) and issued an emergency "What part of the Bill of Rights do you bozos not understand?" ruling. They expedited the Gore-Bush Florida case, why not a real case involving real constitutional issues? But they are silent. Well over a year has passed since the mass detention of 1200 Arab men in NYC, most of them legal residents, and yet the Supremes have said nothing. "We haven't had a case brought before us...of course, any lawyer bringing such a case would necessarily be one of the Evil Doers and would face interrogation under extreme prejudice...in fact, he might die in his jail cell." And we have Zionists like Alan Dershowitz arguing that the United States should adopt Israel's methods of torturing the subhumans, the sand niggers. The Constitution is toilet paper these days. The U.S. is preterite, beyond salvation. Reformatting the hard drive is necessary. --Tim May "You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged." - -Michael Shirley
Re: Television
At 07:49 PM 1/8/2003, Tim May wrote: On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 07:38 PM, Anonymous wrote: [...]Am I just imagining it, or is there a definite increase in people never heard from before mounting attacks on list regulars? Indeed, someone must have posted the list address to "Mother Jones" or "Utne Reader" or somesuch. A lot of people unfamiliar with crypto, with crypto politics, or even marginally familiar with the issues of Clipper, Echelon, Carnivore, and liberty have appeared recently. I don't "list regulars" are exempted from attacks, but newcomers should at least know what the issues are. Most of the newcomers don't, and don't care that they don't know. Their motives are obvious. --Tim May Any new visitor reading the posts of Tim May will find many self-indulgent posts like the above. And comments from Tim, like yesterday's "I hope someone kills your family within the next two weeks." Gee Tim, please teach us some of your great wisdom, so we can be like you. I'm so glad I found this list, with its "regulars". It is a veritable pearl of the Internet! :-) Todd
Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary
On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, Bill Stewart wrote: > Any time you post to a list of a bunch of people you don't know, > you might be posting to a list of a bunch of people you don't like. > Reading the archives sometimes helps. A (hopefully) helpful hint for the newcomers to this list: Bill is usually the voice of reason and of patience here. Pay attention when he posts. -MW-
Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary
At 09:33 PM 01/10/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: For all I know, I've been posting on a list haunted by a bunch of crypto-white supremists (crypto, as in secret, hidden). And if that's the case, then I want to know. Figured I'd ask for clarification on this issue. (And from some of May's comments in the past, it wasn't clear to me.) If that makes me a moron, so be it. Any time you post to a list of a bunch of people you don't know, you might be posting to a list of a bunch of people you don't like. Reading the archives sometimes helps. It's certainly likely to clarify whether everybody on the list agrees with everybody else on everything, unless you think that the arguments here are robo-generated to make it _look_ like we're not all really just different tentacles of Tim May, the Medusa of Crime. (Or was Tim really a tentacle of Eric? At this point I've forgotten :-)
Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary
On Saturday, January 11, 2003, at 01:46 PM, Bill Stewart wrote: At 09:33 PM 01/10/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: For all I know, I've been posting on a list haunted by a bunch of crypto-white supremists (crypto, as in secret, hidden). And if that's the case, then I want to know. Figured I'd ask for clarification on this issue. (And from some of May's comments in the past, it wasn't clear to me.) If that makes me a moron, so be it. Any time you post to a list of a bunch of people you don't know, you might be posting to a list of a bunch of people you don't like. Reading the archives sometimes helps. Amusing to see the pun made by this "Tyler Durden" tentacle, his "crypto-white supremists (crypto, as in secret, hidden)." Gee, why didn't some of us think of this sort of pun on "crypto"? Oh, I did. Fifteen years ago. Duh. Do a Google search on the term crypto-anarchy, with modifiers like "crypto-fascist" and "Buckley" to disambiguate. "Tyler Durden" _really_ needs to read the archives. His cluelessness is getting tiresome, even from his residency in my filter file. --Tim May, Corralitos, California Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." --Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.
Re: Oooh, hackers are bad!
Or watching too much Predator and crossdressers (the alien is wearing fishnet pantyhose after all...) The other posters are cute too... try poster1-14.jpg... especially the camel-flaged STU III one... --Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Bill Stewart wrote: > At 12:14 PM 01/10/2003 +0100, Bo Elkjaer wrote: > >This is worth a laugh. I have never before heard of or seen a hacker as > >bad as this one. Oh my. > > > >http://www.andrews.af.mil/89cg/89cs/scbsi/images/poster8.jpg > > Obviously the "artist" had been playing Quake or Ultima Online or whatever > and just gotten his ass fragged again :-)
Protect Your Country From Terrorists: Use Crypto Wherever possible
Any time you post to a list of a bunch of people you don't know, you might be posting to a list of a bunch of people you don't like. Reading the archives sometimes helps. This is a good point, and one I attempted to address (very) indirectly a few months back. I hope this may clarify: There's a major strength to have a list composed of folks with wildly different philosophies, particularly if what might "unite" them might be, for instance, a desire to preserve privacy. Indeed, is it not the duty of us fatherland-loving citizens to preserve a subset of our liberties at home while our boys are off protecting us from the evil ragheads and their hatred of our freedoms? (They're obviously jealous.) Therefore, I hereby declare that it is the duty of all freedom-loving, patriotic Americans to protect our personal secrets from the terrorists who are listening to our conversations and trying to disrupt our economy by snooping in on our Internet purchases, online banking, and so on. It is therefore encumbant on us to utilize strong crypto wherever possible, even in the most routine and mundane of transactions. We must also demand that even our naughty file-sharing systems also incorporate heavy crypto, so that terrorists don't even know where to look. (As for those few bad young people who insist on stealing from the Record Companies, shame on you, but we can deal with that after our war is over.) Crypto-phones, or PGP-based Java apps in the next generation of cell phones, will also help confuse and disorient the numberless terrorists that we must assume are listening everywhere, at all times. Let us no longer bicker about political differences, for those will always exist. We need to unite NOW for the good of God, Country, and our precious freedoms. My God be with us as we struggle against evil. Tyler Durden. _ The new MSN 8 is here: Try it free* for 2 months http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup
US Government didn't even claim Hamdi was Taliban
Ran across this in the Villiage Voice today. Basically, the Adminstration got some token pushback from Judge Doumar, pointing out that the 2 PAGE document issued by Bush & Co doesn't even specify what is meant by "enemy combatant", and doesn't ever actually claim Hamdi was even in the Taliban. In addtion, he doesn't actually seem to have been grabbed as the result of battle. But then again, I guess that shouldn't be a suprise. Our boys know they have to take drastic measures to protect us, even if that means protecting us poor stupid proles from our own legal system. Anyway, here's the link, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0302/hentoff.php and here's an excerpt. (-TD) A fuller account of what Judge Doumar said is in an extraordinarily valuable report by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights: A Year of Loss: Reexamining Civil Liberties Since September 11. Released last September 5, the report quotes more of what Judge Doumar indignantly said to the government prosecutor who had handed him the Mobbs document: "I'm challenging everything in the Mobbs declaration. If you think I don't understand the utilization of words, you are sadly mistaken." Mr. Mobbs had declared that Hamdi was "affiliated with a Taliban unit and received weapons training." Bolstering the government's caseor so it seemedwere photographs in some of the media of Hamdi carrying a weapon. So what was Judge Doumar's beef? The Mobbs document, Judge Doumar said bluntly, "makes no effort to explain what 'affiliated' means nor under what criteria this 'affiliation' justified Hamdi's classification as an enemy combatant. The declaration is silent as to what level of 'affiliation' is necessary to warrant enemy combatant status. . . . "It does not say where or by whom he received weapons training or the nature and content thereof. Indeed, a close inspection of the declaration reveals that [it] never claims that Hamdi was fighting for the Taliban, nor that he was a member of the Taliban. Without access to the screening criteria actually used by the government in its classification decision, this Court is unable to determine whether the government has paid adequate consideration to due process rights to which Hamdi is entitled under his present detention." _ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
RE: It's Baaaaaaaaaaaaack - NEO Project and other distributed computing
At 03:35 PM 01/10/2003 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: Neo has been ping-ponging between working on RSA-576 and the Xbox signing key (2048 bits). I initially thought that that sounded irresponsibly silly of them. Now that I've read their web page, they seem a bit too disorganized and non-mathematical to rate as "irresponsible" :-) Some particular issues about www.theneoproject.com - Their basic concept is "We'll run distributed computing challenges and donate most of the winnings to charity." Fine, but unless their approaches to the computation are good, the main charities their supporting are electric companies and the "Support Canada Through Global Warming" campaign... - You have to read their forum discussions to have any clue what they're actually doing when, because their FAQ doesn't seem to be up to date. - A distributed computing like this needs several parts: - A problem to solve - they seem to keep waffling on this; their FAQ really needs to be upfront about it, but it only talks about RSA-576, while their forum says they are or aren't also doing something with X-Box, depending on their legal worries, but doesn't say what they're trying to do to it (Cracking a 2048-bit RSA key certainly isn't a rational problem to solve, but maybe they're trying to crack something else about it, like a passphrase used for a key file?) - Some way to hand out work and collect results, and it's possible that they've done this well, though I doubt they scale to seti.org sizes. - An algorithm that can solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time. Their forum said something about Mahmoud's Number Field Sieve, but I can't tell if that's currently being used or not, or what it is (since it sounds like they were saying that one of them developed it.) The FAQ currently says they're picking random numbers that might be prime, testing if they're prime, and then doing trial division, which is guaranteed not to get the correct answer except by stupendously unlikely luck, because it's more work than simple brute force... - A way to split up that algorithm into manageable pieces. Well, it sounds like their current algorithm has that :-) - A publicity campaign to get enough participant. "Coolness + Word Of Mouth" worked fine for SETI, and perhaps if these guys were currently cool it would work for them... Now, one of their pages suggests that all of this is really just a placeholder while they try to find a good challenge project (presumably meaning one that's small enough to succeed at that also pays enough money to make it worthwhile, but I'm not convinced such things exist except paid grid-computing-for-hire work), and if so they ought to say so in their FAQ instead of having unbelievable drivel. Until then, might as well run Yeti@home or the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence http://totl.net/STI/athome/ (hey, they've got a cool logo) or else go to http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-projects.html which has a bunch of mostly-real distributed computing (and distributed human-attention-based) projects. (Minor note: Some of those projects are charity-donation things, where you click on the page and their sponsor shows you a logo in return for donating to their page. The Landmine Clearing one seems like a good politically correct thing to do - the ad is for the "CAW/TCA", which is Canadian but otherwise doesn't say what it is, but apparently it was the Canadian Auto Workers union before doing enough mergers to be Nothing But Initials. They've got a poster for their Auto Policy Campaign http://www.caw.ca/images/campaigns&issues/content/norules.jpg "No Rules. No Borders. Government Asleep At the Wheel. No Jobs." Well, three out of four isn't too bad :-)
Re: It's Baaaaaaaaaaaaack - NEO Project and other distributed computing
On Saturday, January 11, 2003, at 03:47 PM, Bill Stewart wrote: - A distributed computing like this needs several parts: - A problem to solve - they seem to keep waffling on this; their FAQ really needs to be upfront about it, but it only talks about RSA-576, while their forum says they are or aren't also doing something with X-Box, depending on their legal worries, but doesn't say what they're trying to do to it (Cracking a 2048-bit RSA key certainly isn't a rational problem to solve, but maybe they're trying to crack something else about it, like a passphrase used for a key file?) If neither is solvable in the lifetime of the earth, does it matter which one they claim to be working on? - Some way to hand out work and collect results, and it's possible that they've done this well, though I doubt they scale to seti.org sizes. Although, as simple calculations show (reported here several times over the past decade), random and overlapping self-apportionment of keyspace to search is only a factor of 38% or so worse than more careful, non-overlapping apportionment is. (And random apportionment stops the attack where someone finds the solution, or knows where it is and claims that portion of the keyspace to search, and then doesn't announce a solution.) - A way to split up that algorithm into manageable pieces. Well, it sounds like their current algorithm has that :-) You mean like "All computers on planets circling stars in the Local Group will work for the next billion years on the following one trillionth piece of the keyspace."? (Minor note: Some of those projects are charity-donation things, where you click on the page and their sponsor shows you a logo in return for donating to their page. The Landmine Clearing one seems like a good politically correct thing to do - Reason enough _not_ to participate. --Tim May
Re: Television
For fuck's sake you guys are truly illeterate slaves to Microsoft aren't you? That's the output of the fucking Linux banner command. RTFM: http://nodevice.com/sections/ManIndex/man0074.html --Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Nomen Nescio wrote: > > ## ## > > ## ## > > ## ## > > # > > # > > # > > # > > # > > ## ## ## > > ## ## ## > > ## ## > > ## ## > > ## ## > > ## ## > > ### ## > > ## ## > > ## ## > > ## > > ## > > ## > > > > # > > # > > Does anyone have a pointer to software that will create messages > like this? Could be a great opportunity for stego - just replace the > # characters with random ones. Then let there be an option to either > use a crypto RNG for the random char choice, or to load in a stealthed > version of a PGP message. > > All we need is a nice ascii-font-based program like this and the rest > would be easy. Anyone?
unlawful combatants, interrogation methods, is your lawyer a spook?
In the following excerpt, the US wants to keep a US citizen, away from lawyers for interrogation purposes. Perhaps the interrogation consists of telling him that X is his public defender when X is in fact an interrogator. Combined with synthetic (disinfo) newspapers and news stories intentionally 'leaked' to him, Padilla's idea of his situation may be very different from reality. While its probably legit to use disinfo newspapers (in the same way a cop can lie to you, or a detective can bluff the prisoner's dilemma) the former deception isn't. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/011/nation/US_argues_against_counsel_for_terror_suspects+.shtml US argues against counsel for terror suspects By Lyle Denniston, Globe Correspondent, 1/11/2003 WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, going to unusual lengths to keep lawyers away from suspected terrorists now in custody, has revealed in court its methods of secret interrogation to get information from these detainees. The administration contends that those methods surely will fail if lawyers are on hand. In a filing late Thursday in a federal court in New York City, the Justice Department disclosed that military teams have been interrogating a detained US citizen, Jose Padilla, for several months in hopes of winning his trust as a source of intelligence about the Al Qaeda
