Re: Geopolitical Darwin Awards
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: How about Iran stating that they're messing with UF6, when Israel[1] is a known pre-emptive bomber of Facilities to the East? That's pretty much tickling the dragon. Maybe they are playing a different game. They couldn't use the eventually produced nukes anyway, without being showered back with the same kind - but an entire Middle East crammed full of decently pissed Arabs may be well-worth of one lousy sacrificed reactor. A PR campaign with virtually guaranteed results is cheap for that price. [1] A wholly 0wn3d subsidiary of the US. Or perhaps vice-versa. Don't be so harsh on them. Mutual ownership of controlling stocks is likely to be more accurate description.
Re: Spam Spotlight on Reputation
- BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE - At 05:33 AM 9/13/2004, Ben Laurie wrote: Bill Stewart wrote: I find it more annoying that there are spammers putting PGP headers in their messages, knowing that most people who use PGP assume PGP-signed mail is from somebody genuine and whitelist it. Surely you should check that: a) The signature works b) Is someone in your list of good keys before whitelisting? My terminology was a bit sloppy, but until recently, you could use the presence of PGP format indicators as a whitelist entry, or at least a SpamAssassin good weight - spammers didn't use the stuff, and the worst would be quasi-spam like Yet Another Invitation to some crypto-industry marketroid's seminar. It might be a rant from Detweiler or some other cypherpunk that you bozofilter, but at least that was a job for your email program to sort out, not your first-tier spamfilter. Besides, with most email clients, you can't check the PGP information without opening the email (more obviously true for PGP encrypted mail than signed mail), so the email filters just go for basic syntax. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] -END PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- LKJEDGFDAFKLHFDSAFDSLAFHLKDFHLKJDHFHLDSKFHLKDHFLKDHFKLFDSFLDSFHDX DASHFLDSFHDSFKLFDSLKFLKDJSFKLSDHFLKJHDFLKJFJKDSHFDLKJHFDLKSHFLDSK BADSIGNATUREBADSIGNATUREBADSIGNATURENODOUGHNUTBADSIGNATUREBADSIGN -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: Nanometer Bamboo Carbon TEMPEST Protection
At 9:40 AM -0700 9/14/04, Bill Stewart wrote: Hey, you cultural imperialist! Western domination of the Tinfoil Hat market has got to stop! Traditional Chinese materials can be equally effective and aesthetically superior. Who you callin' imperialist! You Veridian!!! ;-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
RE: Symantec labels China censor-busting software as Trojan
We hope that the mislabelling of Freegate is a simple mistake, soon rectified, rather than yet another example of an IT firm helping Beijing implement restrictions. I'd say this was naive, but they give an example after this that shows they know the score. Symantec wants in to China and their $$$, and Jong Nan Hai holds the key. Hum. Seems the Chinese government is pretty effective at self-preservation. Does this contradict the widely-held Cypherpunk belief in the inevitability of deterioration of the state? Perhaps from a Crypto-anarchy perspective, there's a bootstrap point: once there exceeds a certain level of state info-control, it's very hard to get rid of it. Below that level it seems the state can't hold on. (Perhaps W is a little smarter than we thought!) -TD From: R. A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Symantec labels China censor-busting software as Trojan Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 00:38:32 -0400 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/14/symantec_targets_freegate/print.html The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register ; Internet and Law ; Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs ; Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/14/symantec_targets_freegate/ Symantec labels China censor-busting software as Trojan By John Leyden (john.leyden at theregister.co.uk) Published Tuesday 14th September 2004 18:10 GMT Symantec has labelled a program that enables Chinese surfers to view blocked websites as a Trojan Horse. Upshot? Users of Norton Anti-Virus cannot access Freegate, a popular program which circumvents government blocks, the FT reports. Freegate has 200,000 users, Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT (http://www.dit-inc.us)), its developer, estimates. It lets users view sites banned by the Chinese government by taking advantage of a range of proxy servers assigned to changeable internet addresses. But a recent update to Symantec's AV definition files means the latest version of Freegate is treated as malware and removed from systems protected by Norton. Short of disabling Norton AV, users would have little say in this. A Symantec staffer in China told the FT that Norton Anti-Virus identified Freegate as a Trojan horse, but declined to provide a rationale for such a definition. The absence of an explanation from Symantec raises concerns. We hope that the mislabelling of Freegate is a simple mistake, soon rectified, rather than yet another example of an IT firm helping Beijing implement restrictions. History provides as least one example (http://www.vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=316page=4) of the AV industry extending favours to China that it would normally withhold. AV firms normally keep virus samples under lock and key. But suppliers agreed to hand over virus samples to the Chinese government a few years ago as a condition of trading in the country. These samples could be easily found on the net but the incident illustrates a precedent of China being treated as a special exception. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' _ On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement
Symantec labels China censor-busting software as Trojan
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/14/symantec_targets_freegate/print.html The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register » Internet and Law » Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs » Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/14/symantec_targets_freegate/ Symantec labels China censor-busting software as Trojan By John Leyden (john.leyden at theregister.co.uk) Published Tuesday 14th September 2004 18:10 GMT Symantec has labelled a program that enables Chinese surfers to view blocked websites as a Trojan Horse. Upshot? Users of Norton Anti-Virus cannot access Freegate, a popular program which circumvents government blocks, the FT reports. Freegate has 200,000 users, Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT (http://www.dit-inc.us)), its developer, estimates. It lets users view sites banned by the Chinese government by taking advantage of a range of proxy servers assigned to changeable internet addresses. But a recent update to Symantec's AV definition files means the latest version of Freegate is treated as malware and removed from systems protected by Norton. Short of disabling Norton AV, users would have little say in this. A Symantec staffer in China told the FT that Norton Anti-Virus identified Freegate as a Trojan horse, but declined to provide a rationale for such a definition. The absence of an explanation from Symantec raises concerns. We hope that the mislabelling of Freegate is a simple mistake, soon rectified, rather than yet another example of an IT firm helping Beijing implement restrictions. History provides as least one example (http://www.vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=316page=4) of the AV industry extending favours to China that it would normally withhold. AV firms normally keep virus samples under lock and key. But suppliers agreed to hand over virus samples to the Chinese government a few years ago as a condition of trading in the country. These samples could be easily found on the net but the incident illustrates a precedent of China being treated as a special exception. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: potential new IETF WG on anonymous IPSec
Bill Stewart wrote: Also, the author's document discusses protecting BGP to prevent some of the recent denial-of-service attacks, and asks for confirmation about the assertion in a message on the IPSEC mailing list suggesting E.g., it is not feasible for BGP routers to be configured with the appropriate certificate authorities of hundreds of thousands of peers. Routers typically use BGP to peer with a small number of partners, though some big ISP gateway routers might peer with a few hundred. (A typical enterprise router would have 2-3 peers if it does BGP.) If a router wants to learn full internet routes from its peers, it might learn 1-200,000, but that's not the number of direct connections that it has - it's information it learns using those connections. And the peers don't have to be configured rapidly without external assistance - you typically set up the peering link when you're setting up the connection between an ISP and a customer or a pair of ISPs, and if you want to use a CA mechanism to certify X.509 certs, you can set up that information at the same time. On the backbone, between BGP peers, one would have thought that there are relatively few attackers, as the staff are highly trusted and the wires are hard to access - hence no active attacks going on and only some passive eavesdropping attacks. Also, anyone setting up BGP routing knows the other party, so there is a prior relationship. The whole point of the CA model is that there is no prior relationship and that the network is a wild wild west sort of place - both of these assumptions seem to be reversed in the backbone world, no? So one would think that using opportunistic cryptography would be ideal for the BGP world? iang
Re: potential new IETF WG on anonymous IPSec
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Ian Grigg wrote: The whole point of the CA model is that there is no prior relationship and that the network is a wild wild west sort of place - both of these assumptions seem to be reversed in the backbone world, no? So one would think that using opportunistic cryptography would be ideal for the BGP world? If I remember correctly, the TCP MD5 option field was designed for securing BGP traffic, using the shared secret approach. I was also thinking about borrowing this feature for things like announcement of additional features, eg. the possibility of opportunistic encryption, in eg. the TCP/SYNACK packets. There's space for 16 bytes of magic numbers.
Award#0442154 - Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chatroom
At 05:41 AM 9/15/04 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: NSF Award Abstract - #0442154 Yeah, this is Science (snicker)... Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chatroom Communities Abstract The aim of this proposal is to develop new techniques for information gathering, analysis and modeling of chatroom communications. First, the investigator and his colleague consider graph-less models to capture the structure of chatroom communications. In particular, the investigators study how to develop a multidimensional singular value decomposition buzzword alert approach for component analysis of chatroom communication data. Second, the investigators develop new visualisation techniques to display the buzzword alert structural information found in the first step. Internet chatrooms provide an interactive and public forum of communication for participants with diverse objectives. Two properties of chatrooms make them particularly vulnerable for exploitation by malicious parties. First, the real identities of the participants are decoupled from their chatroom nicknames. As if email doesn't share that property? You really think I work for cdc.gov? Second, multiple threads of communication can co-exist concurrently. What a fucking concept... Although human-monitoring of each chatroom to determine who-is-chatting-with-whom is possible, it is very time consuming, hence not scalable. Thus, it is very easy to conceal malicious behavior in Internet chatrooms and use them for covert communications (e.g., adversary using a teenager chatroom to plan a terrorist act). How about teenagers planning terrorist attacks? Or terrorists' senior proms? This project aims at a fully automated surveillance system for data collection and analysis in Internet chatrooms to discover hidden groups. Use textual stego, mofo. Thus, the proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chatrooms without human intervention. A pretty good argument for broadcast stego. This award is supported jointly by the NSF and the Intelligence Community. I bet. They already 0wn the fucking IX points, and can grab the DHCP records; don't you think the spooks already do this, and more? Look at Orion Sci, which graphs gangs. Extrapolate to IP. If these bozos were better they wouldn't be in Troy.
RE: Symantec labels China censor-busting software as Trojan
At 09:45 AM 9/15/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Hum. Seems the Chinese government is pretty effective at self-preservation. Does this contradict the widely-held Cypherpunk belief in the inevitability of deterioration of the state? We have always held that a sufficiently policed state can defeat crypto. If the RIAA could put a vidcam in your computer room, things are easy. If crypto is illegal, things are easy. (We have remarked on how, modulo stego, crypto traffic is trivial to detect with any entropy measure. Got PGP headers?) China is a police state. A state with freedom of expression ---which does not include much or all of Europe--- is less so. China is also a nukepower, so it is likely to persist.
