<nettime> 'DecSS' v2

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

<http://www.meme.com/soft/trojancow/>

                           The Trojan Cow Project
                                      
            The deadline for comments is Thursday, Feb 17, 2000!
                                      
   Welcome,
   
   If you wish to submit a comment to the Copyright Office regarding the
   Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you've come to a good place.
   
   *Warning*, before submitting a comment through the Trojancow service,
   you should read this page with care so you know what you're getting in
   to.
   
  What Cow?
  
   You should note that appended to your comment will be one of two
   original art works, of a cow. This is possible because the Copyright
   Office wishes to place all comments on their web site, and they find
   it easier to do this if the comments are in PDF format. And, of
   course, images can be included in PDF files.
   
  Wadda mean Trojan?
  
   Well, it turns out that if you were to have _both_ original art works,
   both cows, and you knew what to do with them, you would find that
   there is copyrighted material cleverly, and effectively, protected by
   technological means from those who would illegally, according to the
   Digital Millennium Copyright Act, obtain access to this material. It
   also happens that a portion of the technologically protected material
   is the DVD-CAA v. 521 - Reply Declaration of John J. Hoy, Exhibit B.
   This is a public US court document containing the text of the DVD
   decryption code that got that poor 16 year old in Norway arrested.
   
  I've heard that the DVD decryption code attracts lawyers. Can I get in
  trouble for using or setting up the Trojancow service?
  
   I'm no lawyer, but I wouldn't think so. You see, any one Trojancow
   artwork contains only a portion of the information necessary to
   _construct_ the DVD decryption code. Here's the analogy: supposing you
   didn't want to get caught with a latte (you know, the stuff made with
   expresso coffee and milk.) Well, if you have only the milk, or only
   the coffee, there's no latte. You need both the milk and the coffee,
   and an expresso machine to make latte. One cow artwork corresponds to
   the milk, the other to the coffee. The expresso machine corresponds to
   the program an evil copyright violator would have to write to obtain
   the DVD decryption code. (See next section.)
   
  Prove that there's hidden DVD decryption code.
  
   I'm not going to, you'll just have to take my word for it. You see,
   right now I value the license to view the protected material at about
   10 million dollars. I figure that's probably enough to keep me rolling
   in lawyers for a while, should I need to go there. Anyone, the Motion
   Picture Association, for instance, who wishes to check on the
   "content" of the Trojancow artwork will have to come up with the
   money. I'm torn, because I very much would like to release the code
   (written in guile) that protects my copyrighted material so others can
   benefit from it. However, at this time it's not happening.
   
  Ok, so how do I send a cow to the Copyright Office for inclusion on their web
  site?
  
   1) Have a look at their request for comment and come up with something
   good to say. You may also wish to see their extension of the deadline
   in which they expanded the data formats they accept to include mime
   attachment encoded plain ASCII text.
   
   Remember, this is _public_ comment. You don't want to make the crew
   your hanging with look like hostile malcontents, even if they are.
   
   I wish I could provide a good example, but I'm pressed for time.
   
   2) Write an e-mail to one of the Trojancow servers listed below. Our
   recommendation is to use the following format:
   
   The copyright office requires the following information with your
   submission:
name
title
organization
mailing address
telephone number
fax number
e-mail address

   Please begin your e-mail with this information, with no leading blank
   lines. Please follow this information with at least one blank line.
   
   Note: You could, of course, claim to be anybody. Before you abrogate
   your identity, please remember that freedom isn't free. If nobody
   takes a stand, they'll be nobody to stand up for what's right.
   
   You will receive an e-mail back suitable for re-sending to the
   copyright office. If you have followed our formatting guidelines, the
   textual information will be the your contact information as shown
   above, and a PDF attachment containing the contents of your original
   e-mail and a cow artwork.
   
   You may wish the PDF to differ slightly from the e-mail sent to the
   Trojancow server. For example, you plan to Cc: the President of the
   United States when you send your message to the copyright office.
   You'd like the PDF to show this Cc: header so that the folks at the
   copyright office will know that you're going straight to the top with
   your comments. But you don't want to Cc: the President until you send
   the real message, he shouldn't see your experiments with the Trojancow
   service. So, you want the Trojancow service to put an e-mail header
   (Cc:) into the PDF, a header that's not in the message you send to the
   service. For other reasons, you may want to change the appearance of
   an e-mail header that you _have_ included in your message to the
   service. To do these things, you'll need an e-mail program that allows
   you to add additional e-mail headers. Traditional programs like elm,
   pine, mail, or emacs allow you to do this, but I don't think that the
   fancy GUI ones like Eudora or Outlook allow it. (Although I haven't
   looked at Eudora Pro.) See the documentation that comes with your
   e-mail program.
   
   Here's how to use the feature, for those of you willing and able to
   diddle with your e-mail headers. The writer may add a X-Trojancow-*:
   headers to the e-mail sent to the Trojancow service. In the generated
   PDF, the 'X-Trojancow-' part is removed and the resulting headers
   become part of the PDF. Any existing headers with conflicting names
   are replaced. To get back to our Cc: example, add the extra header:
X-Trojancow-Cc: president@whitehouse.gov

   in your mail to the Trojancow service. This produces a PDF that shows
   the 'email header':
Cc: president@whitehouse.gov

   along with the rest of the headers.
   
   By default, you'll get a
To: 1201@loc.gov (Office of the General Counsel, Copyright
    Office, Library of Congress)

   in the PDF instead of the To: [trojancowservice] of the e-mail sent to
   the server. This address this is where your comments should be mailed.
   
   3) When you get a satisfactory e-mail back, send it on to the
   Copyright Office at:
To: '1201@loc.gov (Office of the General Counsel, Copyright
     Office, Library of Congress)'

   The available Trojancow e-mail addresses are:
   
   (There are no Trojancow servers available at the moment.)
   
  Why hasn't The Meme Factory set up a Trojancow e-mail service?
  
   We want to keep our site available to others who wish to set up a
   Trojancow service. If we're plugged up with e-mail, we can't
   distribute the Trojancow package.
   
  How do I set up a Trojancow service to help spread the cows?
  
   You'll need to be root on a Unix system that's permanently connected
   to the net.
   
   Run this software at your own risk. It's licensed under the GPL and
   has no warranty.
   
   Performance Issues:
   
   The software is somewhat CPU intensive, it costs at least 1350 BogoMIP
   seconds/email, and that doesn't count mail delivery overhead. (Divide
   by the BogoMIP rating of your machine to see how long it will take to
   generate one e-mail.) The generated e-mail messages are about 80K,
   which adds up too. I'm hoping that if there's lots of people wanting
   to comment, lots of people will set up Trojancow servers. They'll also
   be a sore need for a master list of available Trojancow servers. Right
   now, it doesn't look like I can put any more time into it.
   
   Trojancow was written on a RedHat 6.1 system, but should work on about
   anything. Here's what I had to do:
   
   First, download _only_ one of:
     * trojancow_A-0.0.tgz
     * trojancow_B-0.0.tgz
       
   While you're at it, feel free to change these links to a local copy of
   the software when you set up your copy of this web page.
   
   Here's the stuff that has to be there and the packages they're in:
     * metasend metamail-2.7-22-i386.rpm (included in RedHat 6.1)
     * pdflatex tetex-latex-1.0.6-7.i386.rpm (included in RedHat 6.1)
       I'm sure this requires lots of tex stuff. It could also be
       important to have a new version as pdflatex is still in beta.
     * perl-MailTools This package is not part of the RedHat 6.1
       distribution.
       You'll have to find it at:
       ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/powertools/CPAN/CPAN_rev.2/i386/perl-MailT
       ools-1.13-2.i386.rpm 
       If you're not using rpm, find it at
       http://www.perl.com/CPAN.
       
   If you have problems finding any of these rpms, I suggest rooting
   around in www.rpmfind.net.
   
   Sorry, but there's no installation utility. I ran out of time. Here's
   where stuff goes:
   
/usr/local/bin/mailtopdf
/usr/local/bin/trojancow
/usr/local/bin/trojancow.pl
/usr/share/trojancow/letter_A.tex
/usr/share/trojancow/letter_B.tex
/usr/share/trojancow/trojancow_A.png
/usr/share/trojancow/trojancow_B.png

   Obviously, you'll have only either the A or the B files. (Yes, I know
   I'm not being consistent in the use of local, but I'm rushed.)
   
   You'll also want to put up the pages in the html directory on your web
   site somewhere. (yes?) (This page, etc.)
   
   Installing in locations other than /usr/local/bin /usr/share/trojancow
   breaks the paths hardcoded at the top of:
trojancow
trojancow.pl

   Then, configure the mail system:
   (This gives the trojancow program permissions to be run by sendmail.)
ln -s /usr/local/bin/trojancow /etc/smrsh/

   Add one of these these aliases to enable the program:
trojancow_A      : "| /etc/smrsh/trojancow /usr/share/trojancow/letter_A.tex"
trojancow_B      : "| /etc/smrsh/trojancow /usr/share/trojancow/letter_B.tex"

   And then run:
newaliases

   to make the aliases active.
   
   Try sending trojancow_A@yourdomain.com an e-mail and see if it works!
   
   When you get it working, please e-mail whoever's maintaining the
   master list of trojancow servers.
   
   If you have troubles, you might check this, although I may have all
   the paths hardcoded by now.
   
   Be sure that /usr/local/bin is in $PATH. If not, edit
   /usr/local/bin/trojancow to explicitly reference
   /usr/local/bin/trojancow.pl.
   
  Security considerations
  
   There shouldn't be any. No backticking is done and no user submitted
   material is ever evaluated. Anyhow, that's what I think. Youse pays no
   money and youse takes yer chances.
   
   Potential bugs:
   
   I can't get perl to exec metasend when long e-mail headers are folded,
   long subjects for example. And it looks like metasend doesn't fold
   either. This could be a problem, depending on the mail transport
   agents on either end.
   
   Thank you for your participation in the Trojancow Project.
   (Have a cow, man!)
   
   Regards,
   
   Karl O. Pinc kop@meme.com
   President, The Meme Factory, Inc.

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