patriot act and public key encryption
If secret searches with secret warrants are legal now, what good is it to use public key encryption and keep a backup of your private key at home on a floppy? Is there a protocol to have a blinded private key, so you wouldn't actually have access to your own private key? -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred That government is best which governs not at all - Henry David Thoreau [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Life Sentence for Medical Marijuana?
I think this is what you call taxation without representation Note also, that the judge in the case was the brother of the supreme court judge who bush appointed who's totally opposed to these sates right cases. Great how bush's daughter, the cocaine addict, isn't in jail, but this man, who was deputized by the city of oakland to grow this marijuana, is going to be in jail for 20 years. Bush himself was arrested for DUI, I wish he was rotting in jail instead of ed. disgusting. On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 04:50:00PM -0800, Eric Cordian wrote: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,77234,00.html The Feebs are crowing over their latest victory, having just obtained a conviction against a medical marijuana grower for the city of Oakland. The individual was of course prohibited from any mention at his trial of medical marijuana, that he was growing the stuff legally under a 1996 state law, or any other mitigating factors. There is no such thing as medical marijuana, said Richard Meyer, a DEA spokesman. We're Americans first, Californians second. Actually, I think that should be Assholes First. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists. - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged msg04526/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
[Fwd: ScanMail Message: To Sender, sensitive content found and action t aken.]
Anyone have any idea what the fuck this is? Is the post office subscribed to cypherpunks? - Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] - X-Envelope-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ScanMail Message: To Sender, sensitive content found and action t aken. Trend SMEX Content Filter has detected sensitive content. Place = [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ; Sender = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject = Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants Delivery Time = January 09, 2003 (Thursday) 10:46:04 Policy = Dirty Words Action on this mail = Quarantine message Warning message from administrator: Sender, Content filter has detected a sensitive e-mail. - End forwarded message - -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: Rusted Root - martyr That government is best which governs not at all. - Henry David Thoreau [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: biological systems and cryptography
I see that you're entirely correct. I've read about half of Scheiner's applied cryptography, and I'm familiar with the fact that current algorithms' strength is based on factoring large primes, and familiar with his estimates of 10^11 years for a 112 bit key, (given the caveat of no new scifi computing technology, from his book). And actually, in the chapter on key length he talks about biologocai systems and even about thermodynamics and computing machines in space that capture the energy of supernovas, giving a rather powerful upper bound, given that computation is bound by the laws of space and thermodynamics. So, do you think that there are enough feasilbe research topics in cryptography to do graduate research in it, today? It seems that most of the work to be done is application, or solving the reimann zeta function and determining how primes come about. Tim May wrote: On Wednesday, January 1, 2003, at 08:55 PM, Michael Cardenas wrote: On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:23:51PM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:41 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: How do you all see the future use of biologically based systems affecting cryptography in general? By biologically based systems I mean machine learning, genetic algorithms, chips that learn (like Carver Mead's work), neural networks, vecor support machines, associative memory, etc. Strong crypto is, ipso facto, resistant to all of the above. For the obvious reason that the specific solution to a cipher is like a Dirac delta function (a spike) rising above a featureless plain, this in terms of the usual hill-climbing or landscape-learning models which all of the above use in one form or another. People do break cyphers, by finding weaknesses in them. Are you saying that you think that current cyphers are unbreakable? You know not whereof you speak. Breaking RSA or similar systems is very, very, very strongly believed to be related to, for example, factoring large numbers. Hill-climbing and landscape-learning algorithms are of no use. I said this in my last message. Rather that you reading up on how such ciphers work so as to see immediately the content of what I said, you resort to the Are you saying that you think that current cyphers are unbreakable? chestnut. Yes, if by breakable we are excluding brute force factoring, mathematical breakthroughs that are deep (and unexpected) and which have nothing to do with dumb hill-climbing, or some application of Shor's algorithm with quantum computers. Give it up. Neural nets, simulated annealing, support vector machines, etc. are not going to factor a 1000-digit number. Also, what about using biological systems to create strong cyphers, not to break them? I talked about this as well. You need to learn about what strong ciphers are. It seems that all of these analyses assume that an instruction is a single mathematical operation in a turing machine. What if each operation was something else? I refuse to believe that the human mind is just a turing machine. What if magic wands exist? What if time machines send the decrypted message backward in time? --Tim May -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted mail preferred That government is best which governs not at all - Henry David Thoreau
Re: biological systems and cryptography
On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 10:39:45AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: At 02:18 AM 01/03/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Wednesday, January 1, 2003, at 08:55 PM, Michael Cardenas wrote: People do break cyphers, by finding weaknesses in them. Are you saying that you think that current cyphers are unbreakable? You know not whereof you speak. Breaking RSA or similar systems is very, very, very strongly believed to be related to, for example, factoring large numbers. Hill-climbing and landscape-learning algorithms are of no use. That's one of the main points of doing mathematical cryptography, as opposed to the traditional I can make a function too ugly for you to figure out approaches. You can make definite statements about how hard it is to solve them, as opposed to vague statements about how ugly and unbreakable your functions are. Actually, if I'm not mistaken, it's not yet proven whether or not factoring large numbers is hard. Until the reimann zeta function is solved, a solution may be found that shows that it is easy. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Searching for the Truth through words and speech is like sticking your head in a bowl of glue. - Yuan Wu [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: biological systems and cryptography
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:23:51PM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:41 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: How do you all see the future use of biologically based systems affecting cryptography in general? By biologically based systems I mean machine learning, genetic algorithms, chips that learn (like Carver Mead's work), neural networks, vecor support machines, associative memory, etc. Strong crypto is, ipso facto, resistant to all of the above. For the obvious reason that the specific solution to a cipher is like a Dirac delta function (a spike) rising above a featureless plain, this in terms of the usual hill-climbing or landscape-learning models which all of the above use in one form or another. People do break cyphers, by finding weaknesses in them. Are you saying that you think that current cyphers are unbreakable? Also, what about using biological systems to create strong cyphers, not to break them? Cryptanalysis of weak crypto, in terms of mundane things like passphrase guessing, finding images tagged with stego code, etc., already in some cases makes use of these tools. Bob Baldwin's Crytpographer's Workbench used learning algorithms a long time ago. Strong math wins out over weak crypto any day, and attempting to brute force a cipher with even a swimming pool full of Adleman machines will not work: if a 400-digit number takes, for instance, a million Pentium 4 years to brute force factor, then how long does a 600-digit number take? (And using larger RSA moduli is of course trivial...) Homework: Using the estimates Schneier, Diffie, Hellman, and others have made for the number of computer operations to break ciphers of various kinds, describe a reasonable cipher and modulus or key length which will take more energy than there is in the entire universe to break. The answer, in terms of how small the key or modulus is, may surprise you. It seems that all of these analyses assume that an instruction is a single mathematical operation in a turing machine. What if each operation was something else? I refuse to believe that the human mind is just a turing machine. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around. - Henry David Thoreau [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Quantum Probability and Decision Theory
On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 09:57:58AM -0800, Tim May wrote: First, I sent this in error to the CP list...it was intended for another list. (My mailer has command completion and I am so used to typing cy in the To: box and having it expand to [EMAIL PROTECTED] that I sent it to CP by accident. As to why type list addresses rather than Reply to All, this is to get the list in the To: and not the Cc: and not have misc. other lists or persons getting copied--as in this reply, where TD is initially in the To: and CP is in the Cc:, in OS X Mail.) And what list would that be? I'd like to take a look at it. ... On Tuesday, December 24, 2002, at 08:25 AM, Tyler Durden wrote: Yes. I strongly suspect that minds are quantum mechanical. Penrose also believes this, and has actually identified Aharanov-Bohm-like structures in certain simple organisms used to probe their immediate environment. Max Tegmark fairly conclusively demonstrated that decoherence occurs far too rapidly in proteins and other biological structures for QM to be an actor. As for Stuart Hameroff's nanotubules idea, I've been a skeptic of this ever since meeting him at the A-LIFE Conference in 1987. Last summer I read the physics of consciousness. It was a pretty disappointing attempt to explain consciousness with QM, mixed with lots of emotional and relgious hand waving, nice background info though. Anyway, this is exactly why I want to do computational neuroscience. I also think that the turing machine is a sorely classical model, and that the brain is definitely not a turning machine, but something else, far more powerful. As for making a neuron, look into the research of henry abarbanel. I was in his lab the other day, and his students have actually made simple neurons that can be wired into the brain of a lobster to simulate removed neurons, creating the proper oscillation to generate the signals which allow the lobster to digest things. He mostly does research into the nonlines dynamic properties of neurons. I'm hoping to work in his lab next year. michael -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: Lamb - Cotton Wool Sit Rest Work. Alone with yourself, Never weary. On the edge of the forest Live joyfully, Without desire. - The Buddha [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
biological systems and cryptography
How do you all see the future use of biologically based systems affecting cryptography in general? By biologically based systems I mean machine learning, genetic algorithms, chips that learn (like Carver Mead's work), neural networks, vecor support machines, associative memory, etc. It seems to me that computer science based on writing longer and longer streams of instructions is coming to an end, as it cannot possibly scale. We now have supercomputers that can execute 35 trillion instructions per second, but if someone has to write all of those instuctions, what good are they? Also, it seems that the brain has immensely powerful visual processing power, without having millions of lines of code written to do so. I only ask this because I'm deciding whether to study computational neuroscience or cryptography in grad school. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: David Bowie - Wild Is The Wind He who knows himself knows his Lord. - Sufi saying [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Recommended: Catch Me If You Can, a film
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 01:22:49PM -0800, Tim May wrote: ... (The next time a CP meeting/party is at my house, someone remind me and I'll put it on. Along with A Beautiful Mind, also of interest to us.) The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots tyrants. --Thomas Jefferson, 1787 I actually found a beautiful mind to be a disappointment. I was hoping for a movie more about math and crypto, but it turned out to be a movie about schizophrenia. Did you not find the same thing? -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Zen is the madman yelling 'If you wanta tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars!' - Jack Kerouac [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 11:02:48AM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. ... * Dossier compiling at grocery stores is not very useful for Big Brother, either. Who consumes Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. is not interesting even to George Bush and Dick Cheney. And few hardware or electrical supply stores have courtesy cards. In any case, no requirement to use cards, etc. * All in all, not a very interesting example of ID and tracking. Things will get much more interesting, and worrisome, if there is ever a national ID system (in the U.S.) and some kind of legislated requirement (albeit unconstitutional!) that citizen-units must ID themselves with valid ID for all purchases, or at least of certain classes of purchases (beyond guns, for example). I don't see this happening in the next 15 years unless some major new terrorist incident occurs. But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: A Tribe Called Quest - Scenario Each molecule preaches perfect law, Each moment chants true sutra; The most fleeting thought is timeless, A single hair's enough to stir the sea - Shutaku [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:12:02PM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. ... As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this in detail. Think about it. Isn't the whole purpose of TIA (or the claimed purpose) to be able to say person A bought weapon B on this day, bought C gallons of gas to drive to govt building D, and then blew up building D with weapon B, therefore person A must be the criminal? -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: Sonic Youth - Inhuman Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. - Jean-Paul Sartre [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: BigBrotherWare
Tim May wrote: Speculation: I expect the battles over cyberspace to shift to the OS, with the leading private (non open source) OS makers enlisted in the War Against Illegal Thoughts. The easiest initial front in this war, one the OS companies like Apple and Microsoft have a corporate interest in, is for the OS to more aggressively check for hacks or products not approved. Software registration and signatures will of course not be granted to DVD hacks. This is exactly what Palladium is all about, forcing people to use only approved software. Maybe they'll be md5summing websites for version 2 of palladium and only letting you read approved content. (Much has been made of how the Microsoft- and Intel-backed security regimes will be opt in or voluntary. This seems dubious. It is precisely the non-volunteers who these companies, and Hollywood, and the Nation States, will be most concerned about. So I would expect this opt in approach to not be the full picture.) Microsoft is pushing hard to get palladium into the silicon, with intel and amd happy to comply. It's hard to imagine how it will be voluntary after that happens. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted mail preferred Be the change you wish to see in the world -Mahatma Gandhi
Re: Bruce Schneier hullabaloo
Anonymous wrote: Like I said before, P2P, Crypto, WiFi and cheap chips will turn everything upside down. I'm curious as to what makes you, or anyone on this list, think that these technologies by themselves will cause any sort of political upheaval. Lawrence Lessig has talked about how technologies, as long as they're created and controlled by people and corporations operating within the laws and boundaries of some country, can be regulated to express the will of governments. Your MAC address is already sent out in every packet that your machine generates, so with that, a snoop could tell a whole hell of a lot about what you're doing. What's to say that these technologies are not going to be shaped to meet the needs and wants of the transnational corporations that run our government? I think that Bruce Schneier's terse comment just illustrates the flippant attitude that lots of geeks have towards politics, and that lots of people have also. Just because geeks know a lot about technology, doesn't mean that they're impervious to the massive propaganda and mind control that goes on in democratic societies to keep the rabble out of the political process. I just have a hard time seeing the bridge between armed rebellion against the largest military power the world has ever known, the U.S., and some new networking technologies that are being designed for cisco to make more money. Even beautiful open source efforts like p2p and linux that actually express the will of the people are starting to get onto the radar of U.S. legislators, who see the danger it poses to the traditional power structures. Unless all those free software programmers are prepared for armed rebellion when their right to share code is taken away, I'm not sure its all going to mean much. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted mail preferred Be the change you wish to see in the world -Mahatma Gandhi
Re: Bruce Schneier hullabaloo
Mike Rosing wrote: On Fri, 20 Dec 2002, Michael Cardenas wrote: I just have a hard time seeing the bridge between armed rebellion against the largest military power the world has ever known, the U.S., and some new networking technologies that are being designed for cisco to make more money. Even beautiful open source efforts like p2p and linux that actually express the will of the people are starting to get onto the radar of U.S. legislators, who see the danger it poses to the traditional power structures. Unless all those free software programmers are prepared for armed rebellion when their right to share code is taken away, I'm not sure its all going to mean much. It's an absolute last resort that nobody really wants to get into. Nobody like the idea of getting shot at. So as long as they don't have to, they won't. Be the change you wish to see in the world -Mahatma Gandhi So how we gonna change the world dude? I'm not advocating armed rebellion. I'm saying that the current political structures in power have massive political might and are willing to use it to stay in power, as we are witnessing more everyday, and anything that challenges that might will eventually have to face it. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted mail preferred Be the change you wish to see in the world -Mahatma Gandhi
Re: Misconceptions about how remailers work
Tim May wrote: On Friday, December 20, 2002, at 12:34 PM, Michael Cardenas wrote: Anonymous wrote: Like I said before, P2P, Crypto, WiFi and cheap chips will turn everything upside down. I'm curious as to what makes you, or anyone on this list, think that these technologies by themselves will cause any sort of political upheaval. Lawrence Lessig has talked about how technologies, as long as they're created and controlled by people and corporations operating within the laws and boundaries of some country, can be regulated to express the will of governments. Your MAC address is already sent out in every packet that your machine generates, so with that, a snoop could tell a whole hell of a lot about what you're doing. What's to say that these technologies are not going to be shaped to meet the needs and wants of the transnational corporations that run our government? Remailers and Web proxies work in ways that skirt this transparency of MACs and routing that you are referring to. These are the types of technologies we are discussing. The fact that Disney or Lockheed may be using Carnivore- and Echelon-vulnerable technologies does not challenge the points about how better technologies will turn everything upside down. ... There are other forms of traffic besides email that are significant. These sorts of things have been covered in many of the past messages on this list and in tutorials and reviews. I recommend my own article in Vernor Vinge's True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. Still being sold at Borders and other bookstores, so you can read my article there for free. I've read your article there, and it was very interesting. That's why I'm here. I just didn't see the bridge from the technology to the revolution clearly articulated in your essay either. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted mail preferred Be the change you wish to see in the world -Mahatma Gandhi
Re: Build It Rolling Your Own Tivo (fwd)
Of course, you could do this yourself with a $199 microtel box from walmart and linux. Then you'd just have to add a $30 tv in card. On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 04:48:44PM -0600, Jim Choate wrote: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,692134,00.asp We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred One evening I seated beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter, And I cursed her. - Arthur Rimbaud [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
