Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread Tim May
On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 01:23  PM, W H Robinson wrote:





The view I get fed all the time is that crypto is, on the whole, in 
the hands of
the terrorists, the anti-patriots, the paedophiles, et al.

Correct.



That it is a bad
thing.


We don't think so.


 People using it should surrender keys to the government, if you're
encrypting mails then you should be viewed as having something to 
hide...
Interfaces and usability aside, there's an air that only the wrong 
need
ciphers.

 Most of us laugh at these kinds of proposals.


History as we see it backs this up to an extent, in the fact that
secrets are presented as something in the hands of the enemy to be 
broken as a
tool of war.

No, the various provisions of the Constitution, flawed though it is, 
make it clear that there is no prove that you are not guilty 
provision (unless you're a Jap, or the government wants your land, or 
someone says that you are disrespectful of colored people).

I don't understand what you mean my history...backs this up. A person 
writing in a private language is not compelled to translate, or even to 
testify. O.J. Simpson never took the stand. Bill Clinton was not sent 
before a firing squad.

But it just seems stange to me that the government in all their 
paranoia haven't
announced nationwide plans to start encrypting all government 
communications, to
implement federal-, nay industrial-spanning secure infrastructures.

Much of the sensitive parts of government (as opposed to the 99% which 
is nattering about rules and regulations) have been using AUTOVON, 
STU-III, and similar things for decades. In popular parlance, 
scramblers. When I did some advisory work for DOD in 1979 they 
already had their own network of secure satellites, the DSCS 
(pronounced discus) satellites. This was at least 24 years ago.

In my proletarianism, maybe I'm just blind to it. Have people in 
sensitive
positions of power actually seen an increase in taking this seriously? 
Is it
already in such a state? The security of simple things such as .mil 
webpages and
IP'd resources certainly doesn't convince. Or are they really not 
bothered, and
just want to make a good headline?

I thought everyone knew that .mil and .gov sites are on the public side 
of the Net. Most sensitive sites are forbidden to have a direct 
connection to the public Net.


Further, if such a scheme were announced, could this conceivably 
introduce
cryptotech as part of a mainstream process? Necessity is the mother of
invention, and in such times, necessity is what people say it is and 
sell it as.
As a safeguard against nations' security and/or economy, should we 
look to
paranoid industries as the first step towards a secure, anonymous 
society?

Hum, just me thinking aloud anyway. Apologies if this is in the 
archives..
crypto + govenment throws up a few results...


--Tim May




Re: Putting the NSA Data Overwrite Standard Legend to Death... (fwd)

2003-02-06 Thread Bill Stewart
If you actually care about the NSA or KGB doing a low-level
magnetic scan to recover data from your disk drives,
you need to be using an encrypted file system, period, no questions.
There are occasional articles that pop up on the net talking
about somebody's improved capability for data recovery.

If you're part of a US government agency with NSA or DoD rules,
that isn't necessarily required, or approved as adequate,
but that's strictly an issue of their flexibility.
On the other hand, if your threat model includes the Mafia,
you might want to get some steel kneecaps pre-installed.

It's been a long time since I've read any official regulations
on this topic, and at the time they were mostly for
declassifying equipment that formerly held classified data:
- either use physical destruction, or
- use an officially NSA-approved Big Magnet, or
- use software that's been approved by your security officer
	for your operating environment
and remember that you need to wipe memory as well.

My reaction to letting any NSA-approved Big Magnets near
any of *my* computers was absolutely no way - keep them outside our
TEMPEST shield so they don't bother my working disk drives.:-)
And I was never convinced we'd find officially-approved disk-wiping
software that would actually run on Unix as opposed to VMS
and wouldn't require immense reams of paperwork to get permission for.

But our building had a machine shop in the basement,
so when the sysadmin after me decommissioned the VAX,
she got to help sandblast the disk drives.
I don't know what they did about RAM, if anything.
Most sysadmins in those days had wall decorations made from the
disk drive platters with nice stripes on them left by the head crash.
Hers was sandblasted smooth metal :-)

Our standard on ATT 3B2 computers was to wipe memory 3 times,
and there was a special program that would wipe half the RAM,
relocate itself into that half, and then wipe the other half,
using first 0s, then 1s, then a (fixed? random?) bit pattern.




Re: Two Finalists Are Selected for the Void at Ground Zero

2003-02-06 Thread John Young
I'm currently working with Rafael Vinoly's firm, though not on the WTC project, 
instead a giant medical research campus outside DC for the Howard Hughes Medical 
Institute, a cool $500 million semi-underground facility described at hhmi.org.

Vinoly's on a roll, just having won a competition for a $gadzillion Kennedy Center 
makeover (the firm has long got most of its work through competitions not by kissing 
asses at dinners and enduring rot gut confabs).

Rafael's not a vanity architect, humorous about his evanescent celebrity, and says 
nothing's going to be built at WTC for 20 years, so fucked up is its politics (he 
escaped Argentina's/CIA's death squads, thinks Bush/Cheney are oily scum). The 
publicity is welcome, and worth far more than a piddling fee for putting up with vile 
NYC infighting and backstabbing going on among architectural circles, and nobody knows 
who is going to do the final design, but it is unlikely to be the current celebrated 
doofuses who are useful only to divert attention from the backroom riggery by 
Rockefeller's Port Authority and Silverstein's fronting for capitalistic socialism. 

Vinoly's and Schwartz's design for a symbolic aircraft stabbed into both towers is 
gutsily disrespectful of towering architecture as a flag waver begging for assault.




Baptista on Dud queries swamp US Internet Root servers

2003-02-06 Thread Joe Baptista

there's a revolution going on - enjoy.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29185.html

   Dud queries swamp US Internet Root servers
   By Joe Baptista
   Posted: 05/02/2003 at 09:47 GMT

   Broken queries are swamping US Internet servers with unnecessary
   traffic. A detailed analysis of 152 million messages received on Oct.
   4, 2002 by one of the root servers in California showed that only 2
   per cent of the queries were legitimate.

   The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at
   the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) which conducted the research
   is trying to understand why the roots get so many broken queries from
   Internet service providers.

   DNS root servers provide a critical service to Internet users by
   mapping text host names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
   The 13 roots are operated by a mix of volunteers and U.S. government
   agencies. The U.S. Department of Commerce is the agency responsible
   for managing the root system which serves most Internet users.

   If the system were functioning properly, it seems that a single
   source should need to send no more than 1,000 or so queries to a root
   name server in a 24-hour period, said CAIDA researcher Duane Wessels.
   Yet we see millions of broken queries from certain sources.

   CAIDA researchers speculate that 70 per cent of the bad requests are
   due to misconfigured packet filters, firewalls, or other security
   mechanisms intended to restrict network traffic. Twelve per cent of
   the illegitimate traffic however could not be explained and was for
   nonexistent top-level domains, such as .elvis, .corp and
   localhost.

   .elvis is alive and well and living in an Alternative Root Universe

   CAIDAs results are no surprise to Bradley Thornton, a root server
   operator at PacificRoot and director of the Top Level Domain
   Association, an organization of domain operators. He operates the
   .corp alternative TLD for the business community.

   The localhost queries are to be expected, he says. A computer can
   have many names - but all computers use localhost on the Internet as
   the host name of the local loopback interface. The localhost naming
   convention is an Internet standard and the localhost errors represent
   misconfigured DNS settings at the user or ISP level, he says. The rest
   of the nonexistent illegitimate traffic is a vote of confidence in
   the inclusive namespace (i.e. alternative TLDs) which Thornton
   helped pioneer.

   There may only be one Internet, explains Thornton, but we now have
   many namespaces and thats confusing the legacy root system. Top-level
   domains in the U.S. roots include country codes such as .uk for
   England, .ca for Canada, or .us for the United States, as well as
   generic domains such as .com, .net, and .edu. There are some 300
   top level domains in the US root but inclusive namespace has over
   10,000 listed.

   Thornton thinks that inclusive namespace user activity is the cause of
   much of the rogue traffic. Anytime one of our users publishes a URL
   from our namespace or any namespace in email or via the web that link
   becomes available to potentially millions of U.S. root users. When
   those users clicks one of our URLs a query is generated.

   This explains the dud traffic discovered by CAIDA, he says. In the
   inclusive namespace universe .corp is a busy top level domain and
   Thornton speculates that .elvis is alive and well and living in some
   unknown root system heaven.

   According to KC Claffy, a resident research scientist at CAIDA,
   traffic originating from the inclusive namespace system is likely part
   of the results. But Wessels, the project leader, emphasized there was
   not much evidence of alternative (inclusive namespace) TLDs in the
   data collected.

   Thornton disagrees: the data clearly shows were having an effect. A
   TLD only needs an average of 10,000 hits in the root to show
   significant activity based on the CAIDA data of 3 million legitimate
   queries for 300 listed TLDs, he argues.

   CAIDA reports that .corp got 51,000 queries and that's very
   significant evidence, he says. ®

   Joe Baptista is involved in the running of dot-god.com, the official
   domain registry for web addresses ending in .god and .satan.

Joe Baptista - only at www.baptista.god

 Mac.Independent - Get the most out of your Mac. http://mac.ind/




Re: [IP] Open Source TCPA driver and white papers (fwd)

2003-02-06 Thread Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer
Mike Rosing wrote:
  - secure boot
  - sealing
  - remote attestation

 It does *not* do these parts.

I think you may have been mislead by the slant of paper.

Quoting from the paper:

http://www.research.ibm.com/gsal/tcpa/why_tcpa.pdf

you will see:

| The TCPA chip is not particularly suited to DRM. While it does have
| the ability to report signed PCR information, and this information
| could be used to prevent playback unless a trusted operating system
| and application were in use, this type of scheme would be a
| nightmare for content providers to manage. Any change to the BIOS,
| the operating system, or the application would change the reported
| values. How could content providers recognize which reported PCR
| values were good, given the myriad platforms, operating system
| versions, and frequent software patches?

which clearly admits that the IBM TPM does implement the full set of
TCPA functionality as specified in the openly published TCPA spec, and
for the purposes of our discussion specifically as you see it does
implement the remote attestation feature.

(Though the author makes some unimaginative claims that it is not
suited for DRM because of upgrades may make that difficult to manage.
Any sane software architecture built on top of this tech can easily
tackle that problem.)

 That's why IBM wants the TPM != TCPA to be loud and clear.  That's
 why the RIAA can't expect it to solve their problem.

I'd think the more likely reason they want to downplay that TCPA is a
DRM enabling technology is because it's bad publicity for a hardware
manufacturer.




Re: [IP] Open Source TCPA driver and white papers (fwd)

2003-02-06 Thread Mike Rosing
On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer wrote:

 I think you may have been mislead by the slant of paper.

 Quoting from the paper:

 http://www.research.ibm.com/gsal/tcpa/why_tcpa.pdf

 you will see:

 | The TCPA chip is not particularly suited to DRM. While it does have
 | the ability to report signed PCR information, and this information
 | could be used to prevent playback unless a trusted operating system
 | and application were in use, this type of scheme would be a
 | nightmare for content providers to manage. Any change to the BIOS,
 | the operating system, or the application would change the reported
 | values. How could content providers recognize which reported PCR
 | values were good, given the myriad platforms, operating system
 | versions, and frequent software patches?

 which clearly admits that the IBM TPM does implement the full set of
 TCPA functionality as specified in the openly published TCPA spec, and
 for the purposes of our discussion specifically as you see it does
 implement the remote attestation feature.

They can say all they want in a white paper.  I was looking at the source
code.  That can only query the tpm chip.  The chip itself contains no rom,
you can't jump into it.  In order to meet the requirement of tcpa it
needs a secure execution region, and the IBM TPM simply doesn't have it.

 (Though the author makes some unimaginative claims that it is not
 suited for DRM because of upgrades may make that difficult to manage.
 Any sane software architecture built on top of this tech can easily
 tackle that problem.)

And any hacker can bypass it, which is what the guys at IBM are saying.

 I'd think the more likely reason they want to downplay that TCPA is a
 DRM enabling technology is because it's bad publicity for a hardware
 manufacturer.

I doubt it.  If they could do what RIAA wants they could make a lot of
money.  Morals come second to money.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread David Howe
 No, the various provisions of the Constitution, flawed though it is,
 make it clear that there is no prove that you are not guilty
 provision (unless you're a Jap, or the government wants your land, or
 someone says that you are disrespectful of colored people).
Unfortuately, this is not true in the UK - the penalty for
non-decryption of encrypted files on request by an LEA (even if you
don't have the key!) is a jail term.




Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread David Howe
at Thursday, February 06, 2003 11:21 AM, Pete Capelli
 Then which one of these groups does the federal government fall
 under, when they use crypto?  In the feds opinion, of course.  Or do
 they believe that their use of crypto is the only wholesome one?
Terrorism of course, using their own definition - they use force or the
threat of force to achieve their political aims :)




Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread Pete Capelli
- Original Message -
From: Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 3:03 AM
Subject: Re: A secure government


 On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 01:23  PM, W H Robinson wrote:
 

  The view I get fed all the time is that crypto is, on the whole, in
  the hands of
  the terrorists, the anti-patriots, the paedophiles, et al.

 Correct.

Then which one of these groups does the federal government fall under, when
they use crypto?  In the feds opinion, of course.  Or do they believe that
their use of crypto is the only wholesome one?

-p




Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread Peter Fairbrother
David Howe wrote:

 No, the various provisions of the Constitution, flawed though it is,
 make it clear that there is no prove that you are not guilty
 provision (unless you're a Jap, or the government wants your land, or
 someone says that you are disrespectful of colored people).
 Unfortuately, this is not true in the UK - the penalty for
 non-decryption of encrypted files on request by an LEA (even if you
 don't have the key!) is a jail term.

Dave,

a) it's not law yet, and may never become law. It's an Act of Parliament,
but it's two-and-a-bit years old and still isn't in force. No signs of that
happening either, except a few platitudes about later.

b) Plod would have to prove you have the key, and refused to give it, before
you got convicted. Kinda hard to do.

c) you already know this!!!


-- 
Peter Fairbrother




Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread Declan McCullagh
On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 12:03:07AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
 I thought everyone knew that .mil and .gov sites are on the public side 
 of the Net. Most sensitive sites are forbidden to have a direct 
 connection to the public Net.

True. What's more, when I wrote about this last (a few weeks or months
ago), I could find no verifiable instance of classified material
leaking via the Web. Seems not to have happened, scares over terrorist
hax0rs during budget time notwithstanding.

-Declan




Re: Putting the NSA Data Overwrite Standard Legend to Death... (fwd)

2003-02-06 Thread David Howe
at Thursday, February 06, 2003 2:34 PM, Tyler Durden
[EMAIL PROTECTED] was seen to say:
 I've got a question...

 If you actually care about the NSA or KGB doing a low-level
 magnetic scan to recover data from your disk drives,
 you need to be using an encrypted file system, period, no questions.

 OK...so I don't know a LOT about how PCs work, so here's a dumb
 question.

 Will this work for -everything- that could go on a drive? (In other
 words, if I set up an encrypted disk, will web caches, cookies, and
 all of the other 'trivial' junk be encrypted without really slowing
 down the PC?)
Provided the drive is mounted, yes. and there is no without slowing
down the pc - obviously it *will* cost CPU time (you are doing crypto
on each virtual disk sector on the fly), but it shouldn't impact on
bandwidth unless you have a really slow pc.  Virtual drives occupy a
drive letter like a normal drive. most (including pgpdisk) have to be
mounted while windows is already running - ie, there is nothing at
that disk letter until you run a program and type a password. Some (like
DriveCrypt Pluspack) allow the boot volume to be a virtual volume and be
mounted *before* windows starts running.
Easiest way to find out what you can and can't do is download Scramdisk
or E4M, and play :)




Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread David Howe
at Thursday, February 06, 2003 3:44 PM, Peter Fairbrother
[EMAIL PROTECTED] was seen to say:
 David Howe wrote:
 a) it's not law yet, and may never become law. It's an Act of
 Parliament, but it's two-and-a-bit years old and still isn't in
 force. No signs of that happening either, except a few platitudes
 about later.
Indeed - and the more FaxYourMP can do to keep that ever coming into
force the better :)

 b) Plod would have to prove you have the key, and refused to give it,
 before you got convicted. Kinda hard to do.
Not true - they have to prove you *had* the key at some point in the
past. having lost the key isn't a defense

 c) you already know this!!!
probably - it was an oversimplification of a complex legal situation.
the law *is* on the books, and as far as I can see, all that is stopping
the first part of it coming into force is the desire of the HO to add a
shopping list of new people to the list already defined in the act. I am
assuming that the part we are discussing here is held up in the queue
until the bits before it come into effect.




Balancing Reason and Emotion in Twin Towers Void

2003-02-06 Thread R. A. Hettinga
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Well, folks, we might as well call it New York, DC, now.

As we slouch toward the triumph of theocratic decoration in lower
Manhattan, the expropriation and mere ceremonialization of the
birthplace of modern finance continues apace.

Social Darwinism, indeed.

I suppose, at this point, the THINK proposal, with its final solution
for the extermination of commerce from the site -- completing the
expropriation that created the WTC in the first place some 50 years
ago -- a design which includes, as John Young notes, a PoMo
quotation of an air-crash in the upper stories of a PoMo
quotation of the original twin towers, is the most obscene of the
two.

So, now that we've voted about valuable commercial real-estate,
boys and girls, we've given you two politically correct choices left.
Take your pick: Leni Reiffenstahl does Stonehenge, or Noam Chomsky
mugs Bucky Fuller and calls it art.


For myself, I'm completely shameless. Sell the site and let the
market decide.

That, indeed, would be World Trade.

Cheers,
RAH
- 


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/arts/design/06DESI.html?th=pagewant
ed=printposition=top


February 6, 2003

Balancing Reason and Emotion in Twin Towers Void By HERBERT MUSCHAMP


Taken together as a kind of shotgun diptych, the two designs chosen
as finalists by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation
illustrate the confusion of a nation torn between the conflicting
impulses of war and peace.

Daniel Libeskind's project for the World Trade Center site is a
startlingly aggressive tour de force, a war memorial to a looming
conflict that has scarcely begun. The Think team's proposal, on the
other hand, offers an image of peacetime aspirations so idealistic as
to seem nearly unrealizable.

While no pacifist, as a modern-day New Yorker I would like to think
my way to a place beyond armed combat. The Think project accomplishes
this. As I observed in an appraisal last week, the design - by the
architects Frederic Schwartz, Rafael Viqoly, Ken Smith and Shigeru
Ban - is an act of metamorphosis. It transforms our collective
memories of the twin towers into a soaring affirmation of American
values.

The Think project calls for two frameworks of steel lattice in
approximately the same locations as the original towers, but without
touching their footprints. The new towers would form the
infrastructure for a vertically organized complex of cultural and
educational buildings designed by different architects. New York
could only gain from the restoration of the image of the twin towers
to the skyline.

Students of civilization will not be offended by the thought that a
tragedy of global proportions has given birth to an occasion for
civic self-regard. That is how cities have been responding to acts of
terror and destruction for at least 4,000 years. Destruction is not a
path anyone would choose to get to art, but it is well-trod path.

Compared with Think's proposal, Mr. Libeskind's design looks stunted.
Had the competition been intended to capture the fractured state of
shock felt soon after 9/11, this plan would probably deserve first
place. But why, after all, should a large piece of Manhattan be
permanently dedicated to an artistic representation of enemy assault?
It is an astonishingly tasteless idea. It has produced a predictably
kitsch result.

Mr. Libeskind's Berlin-based firm, Studio Daniel Libeskind, has not
produced an abstract geometric composition. It is an emotionally
manipulative exercise in visual codes. A concrete pit is equated with
the Constitution. A skyscraper tops off at 1,776 feet. As at Abu
Simbel, the Egyptian temple, the play of sunlight is used to give a
cosmic slant to worldly history. A promenade of heroes confers
quasi-military status on uniformed personnel.

Even in peacetime that design would appear demagogic. As this nation
prepares to send troops into battle, the design's message seems even
more loaded. Unintentionally, the plan embodies the Orwellian
condition America's detractors accuse us of embracing: perpetual war
for perpetual peace.

Yet Mr. Libeskind's design has proved surprisingly popular. Its
admirers include many culturally informed New Yorkers. With its
jagged skyline and sunken ground plane, the project does make a
graphically powerful first impression. Formally, at least, it
represents the furthest possible extreme from the six insipid designs
released by the development corporation in July.

The contrast is surely part of the appeal of Mr. Libeskind's design.
Those who rejected the earlier designs because of their blandness
cannot accuse Mr. Libeskind's concept of wanting to fade into the
background of Lower Manhattan. Isn't his design precisely what some
of us were seeking? A vision that did not attempt to bury the trauma
of 9/11 in sweet images of strolling shoppers and Art Deco spires?

And yet the longer I study Mr. Libeskind's design, the more it comes
to resemble the blandest of all the projects 

Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread Major Variola (ret)
At 12:03 AM 2/6/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 01:23  PM, W H Robinson wrote:
 The view I get fed all the time is that crypto is, on the whole, in
 the hands of
 the terrorists, the anti-patriots, the paedophiles, et al.

Correct.

 That it is a bad
 thing.

We don't think so.


Mr Robinson: we understand the Bill of Rights applies to
some unsavory types too.  Do you think this is a bad thing?

See you in Manzanar, baby.




Re: A secure government

2003-02-06 Thread David Howe
at Thursday, February 06, 2003 4:48 PM, Chris Ball
[EMAIL PROTECTED] was seen to say:
 Another point is that ``normal'' constables aren't able to action the
 request; they have to be approved by the Chief Constable of a police
 force, or the head of a relevant Government department.  The full text
 of the Act is available at:
at least in theory. It was only a massive public FaxYourMP campaign
that aborted the attempt to extend the people able to authorise list
for interception to the head of any local government department (and a
few other groups). I have no reason to believe that a similar paper
would not have extended authority to demand keys right down to the
dogcatcher general too :)




Congressmen in need of composting: Manzanar fine with him

2003-02-06 Thread Major Variola (ret)
HIGH POINT, N.C. - A congressman who heads a homeland security
subcommittee said on a radio call-in program that he agreed with the
internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storyu=/ap/20030206/ap_on_re_us/congressman_prison_camps_7



Why don't they stop pretending and call it Fatherland Security Agency?




Re: Congressmen in need of composting: Manzanar fine with him

2003-02-06 Thread Tyler Durden

Holy sh*t is this guy stupid. Racist too. I guess anyone who doesn't 
look/sound/think like this MF is they.

Better round up those blacks while we're at it.
-TD

And if I were to have him shot I'D be the one to go to jail!
(Paraphrase of Mr Burns...)






From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Congressmen in need of composting: Manzanar fine with him
Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 11:26:20 -0800

HIGH POINT, N.C. - A congressman who heads a homeland security
subcommittee said on a radio call-in program that he agreed with the
internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storyu=/ap/20030206/ap_on_re_us/congressman_prison_camps_7



Why don't they stop pretending and call it Fatherland Security Agency?

t

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Re: The Statism Meme

2003-02-06 Thread Bill Frantz
At 2:39 PM -0800 2/4/03, André Esteves wrote:
in Northern Italy they live close to Switzerland... What more can be said...
A car, a suitcase and a weekend in Geneva with a numbered account.

I'd go to St. Moritz.  It's closer, has better skiing, and the Swiss banks
have discovered branch banking.  :-)


-
Bill Frantz   | Due process for all| Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506 | used to be the Ameican | 16345 Englewood Ave.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | way.   | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA





Two Finalists Are Selected for the Void at Ground Zero

2003-02-06 Thread professor rat
Putting the hideousness of what they both look like aside,how are they 
going to get fire union approval?
Don't tell me they still don't need it!
Shame Gaudi's rocket couldn't get up or even a bigger version of that big 
Stalin era hotel in Moscow.That would slot right into Gotham IMO.

I also don't see any provision for observation platforms/chopper evac 
area's.Lightning cant strike twice?



Re: Putting the NSA Data Overwrite Standard Legend to Death... (fwd)

2003-02-06 Thread Tyler Durden
I've got a question...


If you actually care about the NSA or KGB doing a low-level
magnetic scan to recover data from your disk drives,
you need to be using an encrypted file system, period, no questions.


OK...so I don't know a LOT about how PCs work, so here's a dumb question.

Will this work for -everything- that could go on a drive? (In other words, 
if I set up an encrypted disk, will web caches, cookies, and all of the 
other 'trivial' junk be encrypted without really slowing down the PC?)
The reason I ask is that's it's very easy to imagine that, say, FedGroup X 
wants to take out some outspoken or otherwise questionable person by 
secretly introducing some kiddie porn or whatnot onto the drive. 15 minutes 
later they burst through the door and grab the PC.
If I buy PGP off the shelf, will it make the ENTIRE drive encrypted? (And 
will I wait half an hour for Hard Drinkin' Lincoln to download?)

-TD


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Re: Putting the NSA Data Overwrite Standard Legend to Death...(fwd)

2003-02-06 Thread Mike Rosing
On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

 Will this work for -everything- that could go on a drive? (In other words,
 if I set up an encrypted disk, will web caches, cookies, and all of the
 other 'trivial' junk be encrypted without really slowing down the PC?)

Depends on how well you build the encryptor.  If you put a box between the
board and the disk which has lots of static ram you can pretty much make
speed a non-issue.

 The reason I ask is that's it's very easy to imagine that, say, FedGroup X
 wants to take out some outspoken or otherwise questionable person by
 secretly introducing some kiddie porn or whatnot onto the drive. 15 minutes
 later they burst through the door and grab the PC.
 If I buy PGP off the shelf, will it make the ENTIRE drive encrypted? (And
 will I wait half an hour for Hard Drinkin' Lincoln to download?)

PGP is file based.  It would be hard to push data onto a drive, but
it's pretty easy to eavesdrop.  Usuall targets do stupid things,
much easier to take advantage of that.

A web search on encrypted disk will get you some software based tools.

Patience, persitsence, truth,
Dr. mike