Re: SEC probing ChoicePoint stock sales
R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7087572/print/1/displaymode/1098/ While this is marginally more cypherpunks-related than Hunter Thompson's suicide, I think we're all capable of reading the daily headlines if we care about the SEC investigation du jour.
Re: Handheld Licence Plate Scanner/OCR/Lookup
On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 02:03:23PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: Bootfinder, made by G2 Systems in Alexandria VA, is a combination of a handheld digital camera, Germany has recently deployed a Toll Collect system which has license plate OCR mounted on many points (hundreds to thousands) over highways. It reads all license plates (missing out some 5% or so currently), supposedly discarding everything but the truck's. Currently. It is sufficient to create movement profiles of individual vehicles with a rather good resolution (but then, mobile phones are even more useful for that). -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpbYlSA8jXIW.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: End of a cypherpunk era?
--- Anonymous [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snip] Still, if we could achieve mutual respect and freedom in the physical world, we would happily pay the price of increased rudeness online. Speak for yourself. Regards, Steve __ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
Handheld Licence Plate Scanner/OCR/Lookup
More news dispatches from Brinworld http://www.chieftain.com/business/1109862027/1 http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/01/196.asp Bootfinder, made by G2 Systems in Alexandria VA, is a combination of a handheld digital camera, OCR software for locating and reading license plates, and a database lookup system that shows the user whatever information it has about that license plate. The software runs on a laptop; the article doesn't say if it has an online live data feed or just runs on stored data. The two governments currently using it, New Haven Conn and Arlington County VA, are using it to find car tax and parking ticket delinquents, so it's something that doesn't need a live data feed, but that would be easy to patch on - the hard technology's in reading the number, not in using it. It was originally developed for tracing stolen cars, but the developer found that to be a hard sell with cash-strapped police departments, while parking enforcement is a revenue-generating activity so anything that lets those departments rake in money faster is an easy sell. One city saw their car tax payment compliance go from 80% to 95% because it was easy to catch many non-payers and to scare other people into paying before they get caught. The camera can scan 1000 license plates per minute - the article doesn't say how fast the cars can be going, but the cities that use it have parking officials driving down the street scanning parked cars' plates, which are easier to aim at than moving cars. Even so, that suggests that more widespread privacy-invading applications should be easy to develop - David Brin's Transparent Society prediction of cameras and computing being cheap enough to become ubiquitous becomes more realistic every year.
Re: Jeff Jacoby: An inglorious suicide
Thus spake Anonymous ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [04/03/05 15:18]: : What does this have to do with cypherpunks? This is not your personal : blog. Most of the list traffic is forwarded or cross-posted news : articles, but how is HST's suicide remotely on-topic? Actually, I'm kinda getting sick of reading about his suicide. Seriously, enough already. He's dead. Let him rest in peace.
Re: [Htech] Tracking a Specific Machine Anywhere On The Net (fwd from eugen@leitl.org)
hi, After looking at RFC1323 below http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1323.html#sec-4 the only reasonable option is to use the time old pseudorandom numbers for TCP sequence numbers in the TCP IP stack. Another option would be to synchronize the client with NTP but that wouldn't work either.Say that the client clock can be updated ever one millisecond. However the minimum network delay between the time server and the client is usually 300ms to 800 ms.During this period a large number of outboud packets are send from the client depending on the speed at which the client is blasting away. There are plenty of packets to analyze for the attacker to determine the skew. Sarad. --- Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Forwarded message from Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] - From: Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 18:28:27 +0100 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Htech] Tracking a Specific Machine Anywhere On The Net User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/04/1355253 Posted by: Zonk, on 2005-03-04 16:45:00 from the not-the-sandra-bullock-movie dept. An anonymous reader writes An article on ZDNet Australia tells of a new technique developed at CAIDA that involves using the individual machine's clock skew to [1]fingerprint it anywhere on the net. Possible uses of the technique include tracking, with some probability, a physical device as it connects to the Internet from different access points, counting the number of devices behind a NAT even when the devices use constant or random IP identifications, remotely probing a block of addresses to determine if the addresses correspond to virtual hosts (for example, as part of a virtual honeynet), and unanonymising anonymised network traces. References 1. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,261744,39183346,00.htm - End forwarded message - How to track a PC anywhere it connects to the Net Renai LeMay, ZDNet Australia March 04, 2005 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,261744,39183346,00.htm __ Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday! Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/
End of a cypherpunk era?
Ian Grigg writes at http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000381.html: : FC exile finds home as Caribbean Brit : : Vince Cate (writes Ray Hirschfeld) created a stir a number of years ago : by relocating to the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla, purchasing a : Mozambique passport-of-convenience, and renouncing his US citizenship : in the name of cryptographic and tax freedom. : : Last Thursday I attended a ceremony (the first of its kind in Anguilla) : at which he received his certificate of British citizenship. : : But Vince's solemn affirmation of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, her : heirs and successors was done for practical rather than ideological : reasons. Since giving up his citizenship, the US has refused to grant : him a visa to visit his family there, or even to accompany his wife to : St. Thomas for her recent kidney surgery. Now as a British citizen he : expects to qualify for the US visa waiver program. : : Is this the end of an era, a defining cypherpunk moment? Cypherpunk responds in the comments: I never saw this kind of thing as being central to the cypherpunk concept. In fact, to me it seems like the wrong direction to go. The point of being a cypherpunk is to live in cypherspace, the mythical land where online interactions dominate and we can use information theory and mathematics to protect ourselves. Of course, cypherspace is inevitably grounded in the physical world, so we have to use anonymous remailers and proxies to achieve our goals. But escaping overseas is granting too much to the primacy of the physical. It would be better for Vince Cate and other expats to help create anonymizing technology and other infrastructure to allow people to work and play freely in the online world. And tying it back to this blog, the gold at the end of the cipherpunk rainbow is a payment system which can be deployed and exploited anonymously. That's hard, for many reasons, not least because most people are happy and eager to share information goods for free. Modern-day online communism (creative commons, open source, etc) actually undercuts cypherpunk goals by reducing the need and motivation for anonymous payment systems. How can you buy and sell information goods online, when everyone gives everything away freely?
Re: End of a cypherpunk era?
On 2005-03-06T00:03:01+0100, Anonymous wrote: Ian Grigg writes at http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000381.html: : Is this the end of an era, a defining cypherpunk moment? It doesn't make much sense to renounce your U.S. citizenship if your relatives, who you care about and who you want to visit, still live there. What did Vince Cate expect? He wants to be free to enter the U.S. temporarily, but doesn't want to be a citizen of a country the U.S. deems sufficiently similar to itself? From the American State's perspective, he is dangerous. He is a near-anarchist, and individuals with that kind of status threaten the existence of the U.S. -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936
Re: SHA1 broken?
Well, what would you call a network processor? An FPGA or a CPU? I think of it as somewhere in between, given credence to the FPGA statement below. -TD From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: SHA1 broken? Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 06:51:24 -0800 At 09:23 PM 2/19/05 +, Dave Howe wrote: I am unaware of any massive improvement (certainly to the scale of the comparable improvement in CPUs) in FPGAs, and the ones I looked at a a few days ago while researching this question seemed to have pretty FPGAs scale with tech the same as CPUs, however CPUs contain a lot more design info (complexity). But FPGAs since '98 have gotten denser (Moore's observation), pioneering Cu wiring, smaller features, etc.
Re: End of a cypherpunk era?
EMC writes: Loudly renouncing ones citizenship is a lot less effective in destroying the infrastructure of oppression, than anonymously telling everyone in the world how they can make a 20 megaton thermonuclear explosion working for a few years in their basement using only non-radioactive materials that can never be made illegal to own. That would certainly be conducive to destruction, but I imagine we'd see a lot more than just the infrastructure of oppression being destroyed in such a world. The problem, vs your dolphins, is that nukes can be delivered anonymously, hence used without fear of retribution. There are two types of societies in the world. Those in which everyone has a deadly weapon that can never be take away, and against which there is no defense. And those in which everyone has an inpenetrable shield that can never be taken away, and against which no weapon is effective. No, I don't think every society in the world falls into one of these two categories. Don't you recognize that we live in a world where there are neither perfect shields nor perfect weapons? Dolphins are an example of the former. Usenet is an example of the latter. Dolphins are polite, friendly, and respectful of eachother, and no group of dolphins can ever form a government to oppress the rest of them. We should try to be more like dolphins in cypherspace, while attracting as little attention to ourselves in other places. Unfortunately, cypherspace even more than cyberspace tends towards the perfect-shield side of the equation. You can't harm a person if your only interactions are anonymous communications. About the worst you can give him is a stern talking-to. If your social analysis is correct, then cypherpunk technologies are going to make online interactions even less polite, friendly and respectful. Still, if we could achieve mutual respect and freedom in the physical world, we would happily pay the price of increased rudeness online.
RE: Jeff Jacoby: An inglorious suicide
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Anonymous Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 3:01 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Jeff Jacoby: An inglorious suicide R.A. Hettinga spoke thusly... http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/printjj20050304.shtml Townhall.com An inglorious suicide Jeff Jacoby (back to web version) | Send March 4, 2005 Hunter Thompson's suicide was an act of selfishness and cruelty. But more depraved by far has been the celebration of that suicide by those who supposedly loved or admired him. What does this have to do with cypherpunks? This is not your personal blog. Most of the list traffic is forwarded or cross-posted news articles, but how is HST's suicide remotely on-topic? I absolutely agree. The value of Hettinga's posts to Cypherpunks and the Cryptography list has absolutely gone down the tubes, to the point where I have had to write special filter rules to isolate his posts from the actual content. The dozen or so full-length article on HST have simply no relevance to either list. If he had any respect for others at all, he'd give the URL and a couple lines of summary. Or even better is your suggestion that he use his own blog, or set up his own mailing list instead of spamming the lists with off-topic crap. His behaviour has sunk his reputation well into the Choate/Matt Taylor range. Peter Trei
