December 2000 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Questions of size...
by Tim May 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

At 5:56 PM -0500 12/11/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >At 9:48 PM +0000 on 12/11/00, Ben Laurie wrote: > > >> Chambers defines geodesic as "the shortest line on a surface between two >> points on it" > >Thank you. It works in all dimensions, and, thus it's topological, right? > Topology is typically not concerned with distance metrics. Doughnuts and coffee cups and all. Geometry is what you're thinking of, presumably. Not as sexy as saying something is "a topologically-invariant geodesic fractally-cleared auction space," but that's what happens when buzzwords are used carelessly. By the way, one topological aspect of a geodesic dome, to go back to that, is that each node is surrounded by some number of neighbors. Applied to a "geodesic economy," this image/metaphor would strongly suggest that economic agents are trading with their neighbors, who then trade with other neighbors, and so on. Tribes deep in the Amazon, who deal only with their neighbors, are then the canonical "geodesic economy." This is precisely the _opposite_ of the mulitiply-connected trading situation which modern systems make possible. So, aside from the cuteness of suggesting a connection with geodesic domes, with buckybits as the currency perhaps?, this all creates confusion rather than clarity. --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.) --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> 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' ---------------End of Original Message----------------- --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> 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'

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Re: Questions of size...
by Tim May 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

At 5:56 PM -0500 12/11/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >At 9:48 PM +0000 on 12/11/00, Ben Laurie wrote: > > >> Chambers defines geodesic as "the shortest line on a surface between two >> points on it" > >Thank you. It works in all dimensions, and, thus it's topological, right? > Topology is typically not concerned with distance metrics. Doughnuts and coffee cups and all. Geometry is what you're thinking of, presumably. Not as sexy as saying something is "a topologically-invariant geodesic fractally-cleared auction space," but that's what happens when buzzwords are used carelessly. By the way, one topological aspect of a geodesic dome, to go back to that, is that each node is surrounded by some number of neighbors. Applied to a "geodesic economy," this image/metaphor would strongly suggest that economic agents are trading with their neighbors, who then trade with other neighbors, and so on. Tribes deep in the Amazon, who deal only with their neighbors, are then the canonical "geodesic economy." This is precisely the _opposite_ of the mulitiply-connected trading situation which modern systems make possible. So, aside from the cuteness of suggesting a connection with geodesic domes, with buckybits as the currency perhaps?, this all creates confusion rather than clarity. --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.) --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> 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' ---------------End of Original Message----------------- --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> 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'

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Yet Another Survey: Americans have become privacy pragmatists
by Declan McCullagh 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

[Originally sent to politech at politechbot.com. --DBM] --- [I believe Americans care a lot about privacy invasions _when they don't have a choice_ -- such as cops sniffing your house for illegal drugs with airborne drones or Thermovision 210s. But when Americans _get to choose_ whether to give up their privacy in exchange for something of value, they often do. Just look at Safeway discount cards (and, in DC, Fresh Fields discount cards). Obviously not all choices -- health insurance comes to mind -- are as clear. But I don't think Americans will pay a lot extra to protect their privacy. How many Internet consumer-privacy firms have succeeded? --Declan] *******

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RE: RE: Re: About 5yr. log retention
by Carskadden, Rush 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

James, you are so violently skewed, I'm sea-sick just reading this. Anti-Semite or indifferent to child murder? Is there a third choice? And I might also point out that if you are choosing (correctly, from a technical perspective) to include the Arabs in the general grouping of "Semites", then you must also point out that to avoid being someone who is indifferent to the murder of children, one must be anti-Pope, anti-Jesus, anti-early-Christanity, and anti-cryptanalysis. I don't really buy your generalization, so if you are going to be a vocal bigot, please at least be a little more clear. -----Original Message----- From: James A. Donald [mailto:jamesd@echeque.com] Sent: Friday, December 08, 2000 11:24 AM To: cypherpunks(a)einstein.ssz.com Subject: Re: RE: Re: About 5yr. log retention -- Jim Choate wrote: > > Muslims have the stricture not out of privacy concerns but > > property concerns of the husband. Remember, women are things to > > those ragheads. Ken Brown wrote: > Jim is turning in to Tim... When Jews are murdering small children in reprisals against stone throwing by young men, and Arabs are blowing up school buses, then anti semitic statements against both Arabs and Jews become legitimate, indeed required. Are you an anti semite, or are you indifferent to the murder of children. Choose one. Yes, Virginia, not only are there individual evil people, but there are entire evil nations that demand and expect that their members do evil things, a demand widely supported and forcefully encouraged by the people of that nation. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG N6hvr8nWXopwCzktuWlQMZpBXyVkyyohyyGfxxcd 4aXcdw/9Raf7wyVHdrlnGQGeL79UzvNj/vRMzjF+p

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RE: Masks [was: Re: About 5yr. log retention]
by Carskadden, Rush 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

I believe it is still illegal in Ulster, though, right? -----Original Message----- From: Ken Brown [mailto:k.brown@ccs.bbk.ac.uk] Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 4:43 AM To: Ray Dillinger Cc: Mark Allyn; Jim Choate; cypherpunks(a)einstein.ssz.com Subject: Re: Masks [was: Re: About 5yr. log retention] Ray Dillinger wrote: > > It is illegal in Georgia, and a number of other Southern states of the US, > to appear in public wearing a mask. > > Not that it's usually enforced on anybody but the Ku Klux Klan. > > Dunno about other countries and other states. Not at all illegal over here in UK. Banks & some other offices have signs up requesting visitors to remove masks & especially motorbike helmets. Lots of cyclists wear little filter masks or bandanas round their mouths - I suspect it is a style statement more than anything else. In London & some northern cities it isn't at all rare to see Muslim women going completely veiled (though the vast majority don't - it seems to be cultural - some Arabs & East Africans go completely covered, a lot of south Asians & also European Muslims wear headscarves, but don't actually hide their faces. Turks almost never seem to wear veils but then Turks seem to dress more or less the same as Western Europeans these days, at least the ones from Istanbul & Cyprus do, who of course are the vast majority of Turks we see in London (perhaps 5% of the population of the area I live in), maybe things are differnt in Anatolia) I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a law that says the police can tell you to take a mask off. Ken

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RE: Personal Firewalls Fail the Leak Test
by Carskadden, Rush 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

Whatever. Comments below. -----Original Message----- From: Nomen Nescio [mailto:nobody@dizum.com] Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2000 12:00 AM To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net Subject: Personal Firewalls Fail the Leak Test > problem of hacker attacks. Most people don't have any > vulnerabilities; there's nothing a hacker can do to you. So I argue > against the necessity of any kind of inbound blocking tool," said > Gibson. This man is clearly a security genius. > "They do a cryptographic signature of the programs you're allowing. > That's not hard to do, but they're the only ones who do it," he > said. Is it the responsibility of firewall software to do integrity checking? Isn't host-based intrusion detection a different thing altogether? I'm not defending software that is pretty obviously crap, but at least make an intelligent argument on it's weakness.

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Masks [was: Re: About 5yr. log retention]
by Trei, Peter 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

> Tom Vogt[SMTP:tom@ricardo.de] > > the muslim veil, on the other hand, IS a sharp boundary. as I understand > it, it is NOT permisable to lift it in public under ANY circumstances. > > rounding that up, I'd guess that if we were religious about our privacy, > things may be different (possibly just more ugly, but who knows). > Be careful about making sweeping generalizations about Islamic cultures; they vary almost as much as Christian and Jewish ones. While female modesty is a widely practiced virtue, it's implementation covers a wide range, from all-encompassing covering to a simple head scarf. Jim claims it has to do with 'property rights' the husband has in the wife. This really applies more to purdah, the practice of isolating women from society as a whole, or allowing them to contact non-family males only under carefully chaperoned situations. While veiling has some application to this, it is more done to prevent inciting male lust. If you grew up in a place where the only women you saw were either relatives, or completely veiled, a bare face or a 'glimpse of stocking' would be quite exciting. I've read articles written by Western women who have lived in countries where women were required to veil completely. Some of them actually came to rather like it - under the veil they had privacy - no one could mark them as a foreigner, they could come and go anywhere as easily as a native. Underneath they could dress for comfort, not style or appearance. They felt safer. Peter Trei

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RE: Hettinga does *nothing* but hand-waving, folks...
by Carskadden, Rush 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

Agreed. My understanding of Hettinga's (and this list's, for the most part) use of the term "geodesic" is to indicate the accomplishment of a shortest path between two elemnts via increased individual capabilities and reduced reliance on low-efficiency centralized control, as opposed to the concept of eliminating or reducing centralized control in general just for the sake of itself. I am only part of the way through the geodesic economy texts, myself, but I like to think of the particular form of geodesic architecture implied therein as incorporating some distributed infrastructure as a means to an efficiency gain end. But then, I know fuck all. Am I mistaken? -----Original Message----- From: Jim Choate [mailto:ravage@EINSTEIN.ssz.com] Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2000 10:49 AM To: cypherpunks(a)EINSTEIN.ssz.com Subject: Re: Hettinga does *nothing* but hand-waving, folks... On Sat, 9 Dec 2000, R. A. Hettinga wrote: > dropped packets, or time or something, and the network certainly *looks* > like a geodesic one, with multiple nodes plugged into lots of lines > routing packets in arbitrary directions instead of up and down a > hierarchy. That's not geodesic, that's a distributed systems with stochastic management algorithms. The epitomy of 'free market' thinking applied to communications engineering. It's certainly non-hierarchical but it isn't 'minimum distance'.

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RE:
by Carskadden, Rush 11 Dec '00

11 Dec '00

An even simpler answer is that, for the most part, biometric devices look cool and get investors and potential customers all moist, but really aren't very good security solutions at all. But yes, I have implemented or seen implemented a few different biometric devices that verify animation of the identifying anatomy. However, as I'm sure you can imagine, that doesn't really make things any better. And after standing in a chilly mantrap for a while with one needle in your arm, another in your hand, and a band around your wrist, you start to think that passwords are pretty neat technology. -----Original Message----- From: R. A. Hettinga [mailto:rah@shipwright.com] Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2000 9:10 AM To: Jonathan Wienke; cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net Subject: RE: At 3:00 AM -0800 on 12/9/00, Jonathan Wienke wrote: > Hasn't any seen the movie 6th Day? Who needs a password when you can borrow > the necessary biometric token from its owner if you have a hatchet or decent > knife? The simple answer is that most decent fingerprint readers require a living thumb, either through simple body-heat or, if I remember correctly, bioelectrical measurement. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> 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'

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11 Dec '00

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