Re: network topology

[Jim Choate]

On Fri, 29 Mar 2002, Ben Laurie wrote:

> Surely not - in a torus you have loops of nodes, whereas here we have
> each node directly connected to 99 others in each segment. It may be a
> bit like a torus, but it isn't one. Spose it might be a set of
> interconnected 100-dimensional toruses (my head hurts).

H, I was thinking (multi-dimensional) chain mail w/ 'hinges'. each
'ring' was 100 nodes, and each node was a member of so many other rings
(the hinges), ring members could only be so 'close' to other ring nodes
with respect to who could be their next ring, sort of...a 'ring foam'
geometry.

I'm sticking with the Sea Urchins myself.


 --


 There is less in this than meets the eye.

 Tellulah Bankhead
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]  www.open-forge.org

Re: DOJ press release: Visa offshore records to be turned over

[Duncan Frissell]

At 07:17 PM 3/28/02 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
>
>COURT APPROVES IRS SUMMONS FOR OFFSHORE CREDIT CARD  RECORDS Records from 
>VISA International Will Identify People Who Use Offshore Credit Cards to 
>Evade Federal Income Taxes WASHINGTON, D.C.  - A federal court in San 
>Francisco, Calif. on Wednesday issued an order authorizing the IRS to 
>serve a summons on VISA International for offshore credit card 
>records.  The court acted just two days after the Justice

I guess it must be almost April 15th.  As sure as the crocuses bloom in the 
spring, press releases blossom in the Department of the Treasury.   "Al 
Capone, Lou Costello, Willie Nelson  caught by heroic Agents of the 
Infernal Robbery Service.  You may be next."

If I were one of those 2 million offshore card holders I'd really be 
sweating it.  Why I might end up being like one of the 632 Americans 
prosecuted in 2000 for tax 
evasion.  http://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/findings/national/aousc.html.

2 million offshore card holders (plus another 8-10 million non-filers and 
8-10 million filing evaders who *don't* have offshore credit cards) being 
taken down at the rate of 632/year.  It won't be long before they're all in 
stir.

3.16 convictions per 100,000 evaders in 2000 vs a murder rate of  6-9 per 
100,000.

http://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/findings/aboutIRS/keyFindings.html

"The IRS's use of levies has continued a long-term slide. Liens, while 
going up somewhat last year, remain extremely low compared with past years. 
IRS seizures have for all practical purposes been abandoned. Tax delinquent 
investigations aimed at both individuals and businesses were down last 
year. (See graph and table.)

The law authorizes the IRS to bring civil suits in federal court against 
recalcitrant taxpayers. In 1992, according to data recorded by United 
States Attorneys, the agency filed 2,519 such actions. In 1999, it filed 
641. (See graph and table.)

An even more serious sanction involves allegations of criminal tax 
violations. According to federal court data, federal tax prosecutionsmost 
of them by the IRSrecently have dropped by more than half1,550 in 1987 
(at its peak), 632 in 2000. (See graph and table.) "

DCF


[1] And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.
[3} ... but, my lord the king, are they not all my lord's servants? why 
then doth my lord require this thing? why will he be a cause of trespass to 
Israel?
[7] And God was displeased with this thing; therefore he smote Israel. 1 
Chronicles 21.

We'll call off the SEC if your products ignore Magic Lantern

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 04:34 PM 3/26/02 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>http://scripts.ireland.com/newspaper/breaking/printable.cfm?id=44705
>
>
>FBI checks Network Associates accounting
>
>The SEC has launched a formal inquiry into Network Associates' fiscal
2000
>accounting practices, the California based company said.

c-punks and cpunx-news archives

[Steve Furlong]

Thanks to Adam Back, I have a user-friendly domain name rather than
simply an IP address.

The LNE cypherpunks archive is available at
http://cypherpunks.dhs.org/cypherpunks/index.html

The cpunx-news archive is available at
http://cypherpunks.dhs.org/cpunk-news/index.html


The archives go back only to mid-February 2002. If anyone has saved
(nearly) complete lists of traffic before then, please contact me.

-- 
Steve FurlongComputer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.  -- George Bernard Shaw

Re: c-punks and cpunx-news archives

[Steve Furlong]

Steve Furlong wrote:

> The cpunx-news archive is available at
> http://cypherpunks.dhs.org/cpunk-news/index.html

That's http://cypherpunks.dhs.org/cpunx-news/index.html

My apologies.

SRF

-- 
Steve FurlongComputer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.  -- George Bernard Shaw

Re: CDR: Re: network topology

[Ben Laurie]

"James B. DiGriz" wrote:
> 
> Jim Choate wrote:
> > Draw a picture. If you don't have a place to post it I can arrange a page
> > gratis.
> >
> > You take three nodes.
> >
> > Arrange them in a ring/triangle. Each node branches to 295(?) other nodes
> > (making it a member of three 100 node subnets - somehow these numbers
> > don't add up). It's not clear if those are a 'one to many' branch or if
> > that node simply has two links to two other nodes in the ring (which has a
> > total of 100 nodes). And where did the '2 other triangles' come from? We
> > start with a single triange that is a member of a larger set the nodes of
> > which are the members of a -two triangle- set? Why is 'our' triangle
> > 'single'?
> >
> > Is this a 'big version' of the 'Caveman World'?
> >
> >
> 
> The evil triangles have been banished for now. I played with graphviz
> for a while last night and it's easy enough to see that this is a torus.

Surely not - in a torus you have loops of nodes, whereas here we have
each node directly connected to 99 others in each segment. It may be a
bit like a torus, but it isn't one. Spose it might be a set of
interconnected 100-dimensional toruses (my head hurts).

Cheers,

Ben.

--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html   http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff

Re: Celsius 451 -the melting point of Cat-5 Re: network topology

[Greg Broiles]

At 08:55 AM 3/29/2002 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>I've been thinking about noncentralized self-organizing network
>topologies since George
>posted his query.  First, there are several problems that any P2P
>network faces in the future
>hostile world:
>
> 1. ISPs blocking its ports
>
> 2. The "entry points" to P2P are vulnerable ---web sites that point
>to dynamic list of *tella
> servents, or the Kazaa site that points to active Kazaa supernode
>servents.  Simply sue
> any of the sites with lists of *tella hosts.  Even better, get the
>ISPs to drop host lists
> as fast as they drop stuff under DMCA.
>[...]
>To resist 2. you have to be able to randomly probe IP addresses to find
>a node.

This sounds like a bad assumption to me - both because it seems unworkable 
given the size of the IPv4 address space (without even thinking about 
IPv6), and because randomly probing other machines isn't likely to be 
allowed (or successful) in a more security-aware environment, which is what 
the DMCA and its ilk are creating.

Also, from an inbound perspective, it's not sensible to respond to incoming 
queries from unknown users with potentially incriminating information - 
e.g., "If he's connected to my port 31337, he's here for my warez, I'll 
give him a full list!" - because what looks like an inbound "random probe" 
may be a sweep performed by hostile actors, e.g., 
 or .

Naive "self-organization" is not a reasonable approach for a hostile 
environment. P2P content networks exist (and have always existed) in a 
hostile environment.

Designs which depend on friendly behavior on the part of unknown 
counterparties are doomed. Eliminate the "friendly" assumption, or 
eliminate the "unknown" aspect of the counterparties before transacting 
with them.


--
Greg Broiles -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961

Re: Celsius 451 -the melting point of Cat-5 Re: network topology

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 09:28 AM 3/29/02 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:
>At 08:55 AM 3/29/2002 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>> 1. ISPs blocking its ports
>>
>> 2. The "entry points" to P2P are vulnerable ---web sites that
point
>>to dynamic list of *tella
>> servents, or the Kazaa site that points to active Kazaa supernode

>>servents.  Simply sue
>> any of the sites with lists of *tella hosts.  Even better, get
the
>>ISPs to drop host lists
>> as fast as they drop stuff under DMCA.
>>[...]
>>To resist 2. you have to be able to randomly probe IP addresses to
find
>>a node.
>
>This sounds like a bad assumption to me - both because it seems
unworkable
>given the size of the IPv4 address space (without even thinking about
>IPv6), and because randomly probing other machines isn't likely to be
>allowed (or successful) in a more security-aware environment, which is
what
>the DMCA and its ilk are creating.

Re IPv6: yes, you'd have to restrict search to netblocks known to be
used by folks at home.

Randomly probing machines is legal if not intended to disable the
destination.  And how else
can you find peers if a fixed site that refers you to them is
succeptible to attack?   The very
fact that such a fixed site would be advertizing its services brings
(unwanted legal) attention
to it, even as it helps the user community through this same attention.

If the "probe" were disguised as an HTTP request it would not be seen as
a probe, but
as a misconfigured browser request.

>Also, from an inbound perspective, it's not sensible to respond to
incoming
>queries from unknown users with potentially incriminating information -

>e.g., "If he's connected to my port 31337, he's here for my warez, I'll

>give him a full list!" - because what looks like an inbound "random
probe"
>may be a sweep performed by hostile actors, e.g.,
> or .

But how do you admit new nodes without also admitting spies?   This is
how those
spy-sites work.

>Naive "self-organization" is not a reasonable approach for a hostile
>environment. P2P content networks exist (and have always existed) in a
>hostile environment.

>Designs which depend on friendly behavior on the part of unknown
>counterparties are doomed. Eliminate the "friendly" assumption, or
>eliminate the "unknown" aspect of the counterparties before transacting

>with them.

How *do* you stop hostile entities from finding your network?  How do
you
admit benign users without accepting spies?  Passwords and the like
offer small
obstacles to spies and prevent network deployment.  Yes, you can have
the
equivalent of invisible 'private clubs' but how do you open a general
gallery to the public
without admitting spies who report that you're reading copyrighted poems
without paying
the author?   I don't see how crypto for authentication,
confidentiality, or stego for concealment
can help.

All the RIAA has to do is get the congresshits to pass a few laws making
Freenet & *tella list sites illegal,
ISP's responsible, and publicly-accessable P2P is toast.   Random
probing and forged-source encrypted UDP
packets seem like a good place to start... when the nightmare of the
RIAA shredding the 1st
and 4th becomes the present.

Thanks

network topology considerations

[georgemw]

I'd like to discuss what the considerations are for
network topology.  The particular topology
I mentioned (which I've since been convinced
isn't really a cube or torus after all) was
designed with the idea that it's important to
be able to reliably query the entire network
without sending any nodes duplicate queries.
I'm not sure how important these considerrations 
really are, though.  I got the impression that
there are huge numbers of duplicate queries sent to the
same node by multiple paths in the current gnutella network,
but this may be lessa problem than I think it is.  Also,
as the number of nodes in the network becomes large,
it clearly becomes impossible for every query to
reach ever node, and besides, this isn't really desirable
if you're getting lots of hits.

I get the impression that network design generally starts off
with the assumption that you've got data that is intended to
go to a particular place, and a "good" design is one where
you can get your data there in a small number of hops while 
avoiding creating any bottlenecks.  But the criteria for
a p2p file sharing network are very differnt;  you're not trying
to query any particular node, you just want to query a sufficent 
number of nodes such that you find what you're looking for
(assuming it's out there).

The implications I get from this are:
1) if you're looking for something pretty common, there's
really very little point in querying much of the network.

I think maybe if I query packet included a "hits so far" stat as
well as a time to live (BTW, does anyone else think "time to live"
should be "time to die"?) and stop forawrding the query when the
hits passes some threshhold.  Of course, you're only seeing hits 
along one particular branch at  at time, so it may turn out that
you very seldom see enough hits on one branch for this number to 
be 
meaingful.

2)If we accept the fact that most queries will only reach a small
piece of the network, then if we want to find something relatively 
obscure we should either have some way of designating some 
queries
as being "special" and needing/deserving wider distribution
(vast potential for abuse here) or we'd like to ensure that
if we requery we will hit a distinct (and ideally disjoint)
subset of the network.

So...
what are the other important considerations?
what are the implications for network topology?  

George

Re: CDR: Re: network topology

[James B. DiGriz]

Ben Laurie wrote:
> "James B. DiGriz" wrote:
> 
>>Jim Choate wrote:
>>
>>>Draw a picture. If you don't have a place to post it I can arrange a page
>>>gratis.
>>>
>>>You take three nodes.
>>>
>>>Arrange them in a ring/triangle. Each node branches to 295(?) other nodes
>>>(making it a member of three 100 node subnets - somehow these numbers
>>>don't add up). It's not clear if those are a 'one to many' branch or if
>>>that node simply has two links to two other nodes in the ring (which has a
>>>total of 100 nodes). And where did the '2 other triangles' come from? We
>>>start with a single triange that is a member of a larger set the nodes of
>>>which are the members of a -two triangle- set? Why is 'our' triangle
>>>'single'?
>>>
>>>Is this a 'big version' of the 'Caveman World'?
>>>
>>>
>>
>>The evil triangles have been banished for now. I played with graphviz
>>for a while last night and it's easy enough to see that this is a torus.
> 
> 
> Surely not - in a torus you have loops of nodes, whereas here we have
> each node directly connected to 99 others in each segment. It may be a
> bit like a torus, but it isn't one. Spose it might be a set of
> interconnected 100-dimensional toruses (my head hurts).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Ben.
> 
> --
> http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html   http://www.thebunker.net/
> 
> "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
> doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
> 
> 

Yes, that's what was throwing me, too, and why I couldn't reconcile 
1,000,000 with the three segments. The connections to the other 297 
nodes. This means you have 100 cycles for each segment. In an ordinary 
torus there's only one.

Am I wrong or isn't this just the hypercube anolog for a torus, that is, 
a hypertorus. If not I suppose you'd just have to call it a polycyclic 
torus.

It does provide a small diameter for such a large number of nodes.

jbdigriz

Re: Celsius 451 -the melting point of Cat-5 Re: network topology

[georgemw]

On 29 Mar 2002 at 12:25, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> How *do* you stop hostile entities from finding your network?  How do
> you
> admit benign users without accepting spies?  Passwords and the like
> offer small
> obstacles to spies and prevent network deployment.  Yes, you can have
> the
> equivalent of invisible 'private clubs' but how do you open a general
> gallery to the public
> without admitting spies who report that you're reading copyrighted poems
> without paying
> the author?   I don't see how crypto for authentication,
> confidentiality, or stego for concealment
> can help.
> 
Techology doesn't know morality.  There's no way to make
service that's available to the general public but not
to spooks,  that's for certain.  Maybe you can find some way
to issue non-forgeable, unstealable, rubber-hose-proof
"I am not a spook" credentials.  But then holders of such credentials
would no longer be the general public.
 
> All the RIAA has to do is get the congresshits to pass a few laws making
> Freenet & *tella list sites illegal,
> ISP's responsible, and publicly-accessable P2P is toast.   

I don't think they can do that. OTOH, I think they can go after individuals
"sharing" copyrighted stuff on their machines.  I kind of expect them
to sue some random schmuck in order to
"make an example" of him, I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened 
already.

>Random
> probing and forged-source encrypted UDP
> packets seem like a good place to start... when the nightmare of the
> RIAA shredding the 1st
> and 4th becomes the present.
> 

But this won't solve the problem.  Any technique that would allow
a member of the general public to find a gnutella server
(or whatever) could also be used by and LEO or a RIAA
lawyer or whatever.


> Thanks
> 
> 

George

Celsius 451 -the melting point of Cat-5 Re: network topology

[Major Variola (ret)]

I've been thinking about noncentralized self-organizing network
topologies since George
posted his query.  First, there are several problems that any P2P
network faces in the future
hostile world:

1. ISPs blocking its ports

2. The "entry points" to P2P are vulnerable ---web sites that point
to dynamic list of *tella
servents, or the Kazaa site that points to active Kazaa supernode
servents.  Simply sue
any of the sites with lists of *tella hosts.  Even better, get the
ISPs to drop host lists
as fast as they drop stuff under DMCA.

3. Slow connections, slow machines

4. Active, hostile attacks, not just doofuses querying with
too-common keywords

To resist 1. you can use port 80, which ISPs can't block without losing
most
'legitimate' utility for the masses :-)  Or you use randomly varying
ports and have to do more door-knocking.

To resist 2. you have to be able to randomly probe IP addresses to find
a node.

To manage 3., nodes should announce their capacities and the network
should work with this info.
(Cf. self-management in Morpheus/Kazaa, where users can disable the
'supernode' function).
Caching probably helps a lot.

So what you have is your client randomly 'knocking on doors' looking for
someone to answer with
the handshake that means, 'yes, I'm in the network'.  Then the knocker
asks to join, and joins
the resident's "cell" :-) or is told to try another known to be in the
network.

I then started thinking about how to keep nodes connected in a single
connected graph.  I ended up
with an algorithm which I realized resembled funky tree
growing/balancing algorithms I had seen
in datastruct/algorithm CS classes years ago.  Only the nodes were
hosts, the links were communication links (IP addr=pointers) instead of
in-memory locations & pointers.  Nodes can add children, keep track of
their
parents (and several great-ancestors for redundancy), and defer requests
to join to their children.  When nodes
leave, they tell their children to reparent to the leaving-node's
parent.  When parents defer join-requests
to their children, they first do an application-ping to see if the child
is still alive.  When the 'root' node
leaves, it tells each of its children that they are each other's
parents, to keep the graph connected.

I'm going to code up a simulation when I get the time, with nodes
randomly receiving join requests and
randomly leaving, gracefully and not gracefully.

This does not handle various hostile/spoofing attacks, crypto
authentication, content-finding-query routing,
managing slow connections, etc. Its about keeping a virtual network
together.

Now that I write it up, I realize a tree has the flaw that child nodes'
queries must go through slow upstream links.
So I will think about algorithms to grow meshes dynamically, robustly,
to overcome that problem.

We welcome comments & pointers, and apologize for the rambling.

--
In the future, you will need a state license for a general-purpose
computer, otherwise you can only
run state-approved code.  Similarly for Inet "connections" which
transport other than approved
protocols on well known ports.

Celsius 451 -the melting point of Cat-5

Re: DOJ press release: Visa offshore records to be turned over

[Steve Schear]

At 07:17 PM 3/28/2002 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
>THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2002
>TAX
>(202) 514-2007
>TDD (202) 514-1888
>WWW.USDOJ.GOV
>
>COURT APPROVES IRS SUMMONS FOR OFFSHORE CREDIT CARD  RECORDS Records from 
>VISA International Will Identify People Who Use Offshore Credit Cards to 
>Evade Federal Income Taxes WASHINGTON, D.C.  - A federal court in San 
>Francisco, Calif. on Wednesday issued an order authorizing the IRS to 
>serve a summons on VISA International for offshore credit card 
>records.  The court acted just two days after the Justice Department filed 
>a petition for approval of a "John Doe" summons, which permits the IRS to 
>obtain information about possible tax fraud by people whose identities are 
>unknown.

I wonder how this will impact those using e-gold funded debt cards, which 
appear to be often traded after purchase to subsequent users?

steve

Re: DOJ press release: Visa offshore records to be turned over

[Tim May]

On Friday, March 29, 2002, at 07:35  AM, Steve Schear wrote:

> At 07:17 PM 3/28/2002 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>> DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
>> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
>> THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2002
>> TAX
>> (202) 514-2007
>> TDD (202) 514-1888
>> WWW.USDOJ.GOV
>>
>> COURT APPROVES IRS SUMMONS FOR OFFSHORE CREDIT CARD  RECORDS Records 
>> from VISA International Will Identify People Who Use Offshore Credit 
>> Cards to Evade Federal Income Taxes WASHINGTON, D.C.  - A federal 
>> court in San Francisco, Calif. on Wednesday issued an order 
>> authorizing the IRS to serve a summons on VISA International for 
>> offshore credit card records.  The court acted just two days after the 
>> Justice Department filed a petition for approval of a "John Doe" 
>> summons, which permits the IRS to obtain information about possible 
>> tax fraud by people whose identities are unknown.
>
> I wonder how this will impact those using e-gold funded debt cards, 
> which appear to be often traded after purchase to subsequent users?


So long as they reported all income from offshore sources, and all 
offshore accounts, and paid all taxes, it shouldn't affect them. If they 
failed to report, blah blah, then they may face the usual criminal tax 
evasion charges. Probably most of them will be offered the usual 
opportunity to pay back taxes, penalties, interest, and to narc out 
those they did business with.

Personally, I believe the blanket order to sift through millions of 
records is precisely what the Fourth Amendment was designed to _BLOCK_. 
Remember that in the days of King George (the Good, by modern 
standards), it was common for the king's men to sift through the records 
and writings of people and businesses more or less at random. That is, 
without any clear evidence of wrongdoing.

Regrettably, these kinds of inspections are now part and parcel of the 
War on Some Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on Indecency, and the War 
on Money Launderers. The Four Horsemen, in other words. Examining the 
records of millions of customers of VISA and Mastercard is not different 
from ordering that Borders turn over complete data bases of books 
purchased so that "patterns of thoughtcrime" might be uncovered.

Of course, relying on VISA or Mastercard to protect privacy has always 
been "laws of men" nonsense. If not even Swiss banks are now doing right 
by their customers, why would San Mateo-based VISA do so?

The laws of mathematics are the only hope.

This episode, and the likely fizzling of the silly "E-Gold" scheme, is a 
useful object lesson.

--Tim May
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, 
my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists."  --John Ashcroft, 
U.S. Attorney Generalim M

Re: CDR: Re: network topology

[James B. DiGriz]

Jim Choate wrote:
> Draw a picture. If you don't have a place to post it I can arrange a page
> gratis.
> 
> You take three nodes.
> 
> Arrange them in a ring/triangle. Each node branches to 295(?) other nodes 
> (making it a member of three 100 node subnets - somehow these numbers
> don't add up). It's not clear if those are a 'one to many' branch or if
> that node simply has two links to two other nodes in the ring (which has a
> total of 100 nodes). And where did the '2 other triangles' come from? We
> start with a single triange that is a member of a larger set the nodes of
> which are the members of a -two triangle- set? Why is 'our' triangle
> 'single'?
> 
> Is this a 'big version' of the 'Caveman World'?
> 
> 

The evil triangles have been banished for now. I played with graphviz 
for a while last night and it's easy enough to see that this is a torus. 
I'm not clear if George meant a 100x100x100 or 3x100x100 lattice, but 
either way it's easy to see it as a wrapped cubical structure. The fact 
that all nodes have the same number of connections should have been my 
tip-off.

That's not to say that there isn't a way to do this with triangles, or 
maybe tetrahedra.  I couldn't see an easy way to do it, though. It does 
seem unlikely with those numbers.

Ignore the 2 other triangles stuff, I was groping at something else. In 
future I will try to avoid thinking out loud like that.

Not familiar with the "Caveman World" reference.

jbdigriz

Re: network topology

[Ben Laurie]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
> On 27 Mar 2002 at 22:43, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 27 Mar 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> > > I don't recall ever having read of this type of structure before,
> > > but it seems so obvious that I'm sure it's been discussed before.
> > > So is there a name for it? Does anyone use it? has it been
> > > shown to be utterly worthless?
> >
> > You don't mean something like this:
> > http://www.perfdynamics.com/Papers/Gnews.html do you?
> >
> 
> Yeah, I think what I was describing was more or less what
> they call a hypercube, or maybe just a cube.

Nope. What you've described doesn't have the properties of any
n-dimensional cube.

Sketch of proof: in an n-dimensional cube, the maximal number of steps
to another node is n-1, so the dimension of your cube would have to be
4. A 4-cube has 16 nodes. You have a million. QED.

Cheers,

Ben.

--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html   http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff

Re: 1024-bit RSA keys in danger of compromise

[V Alex Brennen]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Bill Stewart wrote:

> While SSL implementations are mostly 1024 bits these days,
> aren't PGP Diffie-Hellman keys usually 1536 bits?

I think there's a general consensus that the minimum
recommended key size for X9.42 Diffie-Hellman PGP keys 
is 1024bits.  I'm not sure if the standard size is 1536bits.
I  might be wrong, but I don't believe such a key length
standard exists. I think the only size related limitation
in X9.42 was related only to size of the prime defining
the Galos Field.  I haven't worked with X9.42 before.

There does not appear to be many 1536bit keys in the global PGP
public keyring (the keys of the synchronized public keyservers).

I count 1,057 in my copy of the ring, or 0.0748% of the
total keys in the ring.

Here is more information about that ring:

http://gnv.us.ks.cryptnet.net/stats.html

Notice the % of keys which is =< 1024bits. 


- VAB
---
V. Alex Brennen
Senior Systems Engineer
IBM Certified Specialist
e-TechServices.com
IBM Business Partner
Bus: 352.246.8553
Fax: 770.216.1877
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.e-techservices.com/people/vab/

Re: Content Management Nightmares

[Morlock Elloi]

>From: "CDR Anonymizer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

There goes another polluted entry point.

=
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:
Yahoo! Greetings - send holiday greetings for Easter, Passover
http://greetings.yahoo.com/

Re: network topology

[Jim Choate]

Draw a picture. If you don't have a place to post it I can arrange a page
gratis.

You take three nodes.

Arrange them in a ring/triangle. Each node branches to 295(?) other nodes 
(making it a member of three 100 node subnets - somehow these numbers
don't add up). It's not clear if those are a 'one to many' branch or if
that node simply has two links to two other nodes in the ring (which has a
total of 100 nodes). And where did the '2 other triangles' come from? We
start with a single triange that is a member of a larger set the nodes of
which are the members of a -two triangle- set? Why is 'our' triangle
'single'?

Is this a 'big version' of the 'Caveman World'?


On Thu, 28 Mar 2002, James B. DiGriz wrote:

> You have to start one dimension lower, with a triangle. Each vertex also
> has branches to 295 additional nodes, that is, is a member of 3 fully-
> connected 100 node subnets, the other nodes of which are also each
> vertices of  2 other triangles. There are no edge nodes as in a lattice.
> The constraint is that any given node is shared by exactly three
> triangles which have no other nodes in common, which seems intuitive
> given that there are also no leaf (terminal) nodes. Again, I'm not not a
> mathematician, so I don't know exactly what you'd call this. Geodesic,
> Hettinga says, and he's right, but it's not any regular figure or solid
> I know. It has tree-like properties but is obviously not a tree, since
> there are links between nodes at what would be the same level.
> 
> In terms of practical considerations, network diameter is 3, and minimum
>connectivity is 8 (if you count routes with common links) at the 3 hop
> level, which you'd probably want to use, with a fallback to longer
> routes on retries. Unless you're trying to discourage tracing or
> something.) It's a highly redundant, fault-tolerant network, and you're
> also right that duplicates aren't going to be a problem. However, there
> are only 297,000 links (if I'm counting right) among the 1 million
> nodes, and they're probably going to get saturated real quick.


 --


 There is less in this than meets the eye.

 Tellulah Bankhead
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]  www.open-forge.org

Re: DOJ press release: Visa offshore records to be turned over

[georgemw]

On 28 Mar 2002 at 19:17, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
> THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2002
> TAX
> (202) 514-2007
> TDD (202) 514-1888
> WWW.USDOJ.GOV
> 
> COURT APPROVES IRS SUMMONS FOR OFFSHORE CREDIT CARD  RECORDS Records from 
> VISA International Will Identify People Who Use Offshore Credit Cards to 
> Evade Federal Income Taxes WASHINGTON, D.C.  - A federal court in San 
> Francisco, Calif. on Wednesday issued an order authorizing the IRS to serve 
> a summons on VISA International for offshore credit card records.  The 
> court acted just two days after the Justice Department filed a petition for 
> approval of a "John Doe" summons, which permits the IRS to obtain 
> information about possible tax fraud by people whose identities are unknown.

Minor correction:  as was previously pointed out,  a "John Doe
summons" is a summins for a particular person suspected of
a specific crime, whose identity is unknown.  The proper
legal term for this type of warrant is a "writ of assistance".

George

Choate's header stripping address

[A. Melon]

I have added Choate's header stripping cpunks address (I won't lie and 
call it an anonymizer) to my killfile, as 95% of all traffic through it 
has been spam previously. Apparently, Jimbo left a mailto: link on a 
website somewhere, and it got harvested.

Now, Mr. CACL is evading my killfiles by using his "anonymizer". Perhaps 
he has realized that most of us have plonked him a long time ago, and 
this is his way of forcing his Slashdot headlines on us?

For those few of you who have been using that address to post to the 
list whose comments are actually interesting, you may wish to find an 
alternative method. Real cypherpunks use real remailers.