September 2000 - cypherpunks-legacy

CDR: data
by Mike Brown 23 Oct '00

23 Oct '00

How about Nevada? _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.

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CDR: And you thought Nazi agitprop was controversial?
by Declan McCullagh 12 Oct '00

12 Oct '00

[A veteran free speech activist in Cambridge, Mass. sent me this. Any offers of mirroring should go to the list, where I assume they'll be duly forwarded. I wonder how long the HTML files in question here would last on a Geocities/etc account. --Declan] --- Hi Declan, I know you're aware of the case of Curley v. NAMBLA, which has very serious First Amendment implications. Jeffrey Curley was a 10-year-old who was murdered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October of 1997. The parents are alleging that the murderers were driven by NAMBLA literature in general and specifically by the contents of NAMBLA's web site. After the suit was filed in May of this year, the current NAMBLA web site was taken down. Frisoli, the Curley lawyer, has been making very outrageous and false statements about what was on the web site. Because the media has no access to the site, no one can contradict him. A vicious media war is now being waged against the ACLU and other free-expression advocates for defending freedom of expression in this case. Few reporters seem even interested in finding out the contents of NAMBLA literature or the contents of the web site as of 10/97. But even if a fair-minded reporter did have this interest, he or she would be out of luck. Printed material from NAMBLA is difficult to find. Members of NAMBLA will speak to the press only under conditions of strict anonymity because they fear for their lives. And the web site is not accessible. I am not a NAMBLA member, but I believe that the First Amendment applies to them. I have obtained the web files as of 10/97. I don't wish to put them up myself for a variety of reasons. First of all, my ISP might make me take them down. Also, I am involved in another case which I don't want tarred with the NAMBLA brush. There is no court injunction against the publication of the materials. But a site outside the US might be best in any case. Anyway, if you can help me find someone to take the files and put them up, please let me know.

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CDR: Internet bearer cryptography patent trusts (was Re: Chaumian cash redux)
by R. A. Hettinga 09 Oct '00

09 Oct '00

This idea below of a "patent pool" is similar to the bearer cryptography patent trust idea I was kicking around with a couple of investment bankers here in Boston a few years ago... It seems that these guys were sitting on a public shell, and were noticing that both Millicent and DigiCash were both up for sale at the time, and were trying, like every one does, :-), to figure how to make money with them. I suggested that, while the code for Millicent at least might be valuable, that the patents were the most valuable thing about *either* of those businesses. I talked to these gentlemen about the model I had for internet bearer underwriting and how it could pay royalties right off the top to certain global holders of patents like blind signatures, allowing their use even for open source software, and that it might be possible to create something like a publicly held trust to hold those kinds of patents. Just like if someone like when Warren Buffet buys a company, the patent holders would get a liquid publicly traded asset, and the trust would collect royalties as revenues of the corporation, and the stock would go up accordingly. :-). Don't know if it would work, though, and not just for purely financial reasons, either. It seems to me at the outset that unless Chaum has a way to completely kill the usefulness of the blind signature patent and replace it with something better -- and to withstand the inevitable charge from Ecash Technologies that he knew about it at the time of the DigiCash liquidation, which would be a pretty serious legal cat-fight whether the charge were true or not -- that Ecash Technologies has enough funding from Deutchebank and others to make it a long time before the original Chaumian patent portfolio will be on the market again, if ever. The patents expire, speaking of such things, in 2007, after all. Cheers, RAH --- begin forwarded text

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CDR: Re: Re: Choate physics again
by Michael Motyka 05 Oct '00

05 Oct '00

Wasn't it grounding and Maxwell's equations last time? I can't believe I'm falling for this again but here goes... > On Thu, 28 Sep 2000, Michael Motyka wrote: > > > >>By the time the coherent radiation (needed to make an image) passes > > > > > >Were not talking holograms, Jimmy-boy > > I didn't get the original message so I'll reply here. > Actually I didn't write this ^ I wrote this : I think what he was trying to convey were the effects of reflection, absortion and diffusion. etc... > No, we're not talking about lasers. But then again 'coherent' simply means > 'arranged' or 'synchronized'. If you don't believe there is coherence in > imaging the rays of light through a camera then you don't have a fucking > clue about optics. > I am not an optics expert but I DO have a clue. And any coherence in the light that hits the film in my Canon as I snap one poorly composed photo after another is purely accidental unless the scene has been painted by a targetting system. What is a laser Jim? LASER Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation An atom in an excited state, ie one that is not in the ground state, may be stimulated to release a photon by an incoming photon. The most interesting part of this is that the emitted photon after the interaction is in phase with the incoming photon and in the same direction. Get lots of these interactions taking place in the right medium and you get a river of photons all in phase. That's what coherent means in optics - in phase. Check your Webster's and please read the definition that says "3. Physics. ..." Go to any optics book. Want references? Thermal radiation ( what you are imaging with your snooperscope ) is not coherent by any definition that I know of. > The fact is, that if you take a lens and form an image there IS most > certainly a level of coherence. You can break that coherence by simply > injecting a fogged piece of glass for example. > You could say that light and an optical system form a "coherent" image because the image is recognizable but that usage might be confusing because of the common and accepted use of coherent with reference to LASER light. Form an image is probably adequately descriptive. > This is what the walls of the house do, they break the coherence of the > original light rays so that no image can be formed on the other side of > the wall. > The walls of the house do not "break the coherence." The more interesting processes that would be going on at and in the walls of the house would be reflection, scattering, absorption, diffusion( thermal) and reradiation. These effects would probably vary widely with construction materials and wavelength. The end result as these wavelengths are incident on a wall might vary from little or no effect, through blurring to outright shielding. > Glass howerver is reasonably transparent and as a result the light doesn't > lose coherence through that. However if you attenuate the light using an > aluminized mylar sheet and then break up the image using the bubble pack > (the little bubbles of air absord the IR and then re-emit it out of phase > with the original stream of photons - that! is coherence), walah. No > usable image the cops can use against you. > What your talking about is reflection, scattering, absorption etc...the coherence of the light don't enter into it. > [Rest of a dumbass rant from another party deleted] > Go back to your physics boooks Jim. You missed it again on this one. Damn I could kick myself for even trying. Mike

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CDR: would it be so much to ask..
by Asymmetric 02 Oct '00

02 Oct '00

That the list be changed so that unregistered email addresses cannot send messages to it? This spam is getting ridiculous. -------signature file------- PGP Key Fingerprint: 446B 7718 B219 9F1E 43DD 8E4A 6BE9 D739 CCC5 7FD7 "I don't think [Linux] will be very successful in the long run." "My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse." -Ken Thompson, Interview May 1999. http://www.freebsd.org FreeBSD - The Power to Serve http://www.rfnj.org Radio Free New Jersey - 395 streams - 96kbps @ 44.1khz

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CDR: HOME MADE BOMBS
by Texasman8012＠aol.com 02 Oct '00

02 Oct '00

NEED INFO TEXASMAN8012

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Re: AES winner to be announced Monday.
by Nomen Nescio 02 Oct '00

02 Oct '00

On Fri, 29 Sep 2000 14:38:30 -0400, "Trei, Peter" <ptrei(a)rsasecurity.com> wrote: > I can't get the web page myself, but the appended message > is in sci.crypt today: > > Peter Trei > ------------------------ > From: Jim Gillogly <jim(a)acm.org> > 1:03 PM > > Subject: Re: Deadline for AES... > > Tim Tyler wrote: > > No official announcement of the date has been posted yet on > > http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/ > > The new notice just went up at this site: announcement to be made > 2 Oct with simultaneous webcast. They (explicitly) won't say yet > how many algorithms have been chosen as the AES. There's no mention > of new versions of SHA-* with appropriately longer hashes. > -- > Jim Gillogly > Sterday, 8 Winterfilth S.R. 2000, 17:00 > 12.19.7.10.12, 8 Eb 15 Chen, Fifth Lord of Night Though NIST is being very secretive regarding the AES announcement, they let the following rumors leak: 1. There is a single winner. 2. It is not an American design. If so, this rules out MARS, RC6, and Twofish. But now comes the third rumor: 3. The winner is not covered by any patent or patent claim identified or disclosed to NIST by interested parties. Assuming this is true, there is only one algorithm that is not explicitly mentioned in Hitachi's claim: Rijndael.

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CDR: Re: <nettime> Rebirth of Guilds
by David Honig 02 Oct '00

02 Oct '00

At 04:36 AM 9/25/00 -0400, Sampo A Syreeni wrote: > >So how do you feel, for instance, about bullying in the form of cooperative >isolation of someone by his/her peers? Certainly everybody has the /right/ >not to speak to someone... Freedom of association includes freedom not to associate. >Only that sort of thing harms people more than an occasional, physical >punch, something which few liberty-advocating people would say is tolerable. Exclusion harms you only if it bugs you ---you have to want to be a homosexual atheist boyscout for their exclusion to matter. Non-consensual violence always harms. > >I think liberty should carry a pricetag of tolerance. > No, liberty is absolute, and probably not being exercised if *someone* isn't offended. Your suggestion to "play nice" is quaint but irrelevent when talking about sovereign adults. Tolerance means tolerating intolerant groups. The latter-day euros (germans and french esp.) don't get it. When you burn nazi literature you have become them.

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CDR: Natural rights (was Re: Shunning, lesbians and liberty)
by Gil Hamilton 01 Oct '00

01 Oct '00

Sampo Syreeni writes: >Actually I s ub scribe to neither view. I see rights as something that do >not >naturally exist, but are purely a societal product, subject to change >through redefinition. Whether this happens because the government effects >it >or if the people start to view something as an inherent right is, to me, >immaterial. At heart, the notion of a right is a moral one; it is closely tied to the moral concepts of good and evil. These concepts are known and understood universally among members of our species. Some view them as attributes of their religious belief, but even those who aren't religious and don't think in terms of "sin" recognize the concepts. The idea of right versus wrong is clearly both natural and universal to humankind. While individuals' beliefs as to exactly which "natural rights" exist may differ, all people (save some tiny few sociopaths who must be considered "abnormal") agree on some of them. For example, if you did a poll, you'd find that pretty near 100% of people believe at some level that they have a right to protect their own lives and the lives of their family members. The limits or boundaries of that right would of course be the subject of considerable dispute. A frequent critique of libertarianism (and anarcho-capitalism) is that it advocates a law-of-the-jungle, winner-take-all society: that the strong, the wealthy and the powerful prosper while the weak, the poor and the powerless are doomed to suffering, exploitation and oppression. However, it is this idea that natural rights do not exist, that any right you have is something that can simply be taken away by "society" (in practice of course that means the government), that is the real law-of-the-jungle situation. It is saying, in effect: you have no rights except those "we" (variously defined as society or government, but it always boils down to the Men With Guns from the government) allow you. "And don't complain too loudly or we might have to take those away too" (for the chiiiiiildren, perhaps). I and most others on this list utterly reject that crap. As James Donald's .sig used to say (and maybe still does): "We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are." You can't take away my right to defend myself by simply "redefining" it. And anyone who tries to do so has marked himself as one worth careful watching, or even perhaps, as Tim so often suggests, killing. - GH _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.

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CDR: no fedbucks means freedom
by A. Melon 01 Oct '00

01 Oct '00

"Because the school accepts no government aid and prohibits its students from doing the same, it has the right to discriminate on the basis of religion." from a story http://www.newsday.com/ap/text/national/ap170.htm about a college for home-schoolers. Re: why govt subsidized arenas have to be neutral wrt who you kiss, a recent thread here. Along those lines, two more recent refs: one where a govt school cuts off the Scouts, another where a county doesnt and gets sued. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/xnyap/20000927/lo/brf_boy_scout_ban_1.html District Ends Boy Scout Affiliation NEW YORK (AP) - A Manhattan school board has banned its 42 schools from sponsoring Boy Scout troops because the 90-year-old national organization excludes gays. The board of Community School District Two passed the resolution at a meeting Tuesday night, becoming the first district in the city to enact such a ban. http://www.latimes.com/editions/orange/20000927/t000091530.html Scouts Lease on Base Extended ACLU, gays claim rent-free access to Newport Beach site is a government subsidy for a discriminatory group. By DAVID REYES, Times Staff Writer Over objections from the gay and lesbian community and the threat of an ACLU lawsuit, Orange County supervisors Tuesday unanimously approved a 30-year extension of the Boy Scouts lease on a Newport Beach sea base under county authority. "This is good news for everybody in Orange County," said David Janes, a sea base volunteer and retired Navy rear admiral, after the boards vote. About 35 Scouts, their parents and Scout leaders attended the meeting in a show of support for the rent-free extension of the base lease, beginning in 2006. The Scouts have operated the base for 63 years and recently raised $4.5 million to renovate the popular facility. Opponents of the lease renewal argued that the county should not "subsidize" a group that discriminates against people because of sexual orientation. "It is clear that the Boy Scouts do not have the right to receive any government subsidies, sponsorship or special privileges, such as sweetheart deals on rent of government lands and buildings," said Martha Matthews, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU recently sued San Diego in federal court over a lease of public parkland to the Scouts for $1 a year. In response to a question Tuesday by Supervisor Todd Spitzer about whether the ACLU intends to sue Orange County, Matthews said, "Its likely that we would." Another great quote: The only thing different is you dont have to dumb down the vocabulary when youre teaching home-schooled kids, said Farris, a Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in 1993 and founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

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