October 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Any Reason I Should NOT Killfile Choate?
by An Metet 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

Incognitor inquired: > Does he ever post anything worthwhile? Yeah, actually, despite all the pain in the ass stuff he posts, sometimes he posts some good URLS. And I hope this doesn't encourage him, because half the time he posts old shit. And half the time he posts totally worthtless shit. But now and again he sends an URL that is pretty interesting, so, although his opinions are mostly absurd, I've always stopped myself from killfiling him. And I've got a list of killfiled people who I can't even remember who or why.

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Does he ever post anything worthwhile?
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

Sure. He watches lots of stuff and occasionally a link leads somewhere interesting but the true value is in the humor of such classics as the grounding and shielding thread from 1 or 2 years ago. Priceless.

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NATO Bails Out USA
by John Young 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

DoD has announced that NATO is sending five AWACS to help protect the skies of military-poor USA. Now is this a variation on the UKUSA helping each other avoid violating domestic law against homeland spying and fast disappearing posse comitatus?

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Re: Any Reason I Should NOT Killfile Choate?
by sonofgomez709 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

Incognito Innominatus QueryPosited: > Does he ever post anything worthwhile? Canadian Customs thinks so. They kept me waiting at a border crossing for 5 million hours while they photocopied printouts of his CPUNX emails that I had in my possession. I offered to testify that Choate was the Real [TM] author of the Federalist Papers, which CanCustumsOffalSchills deemed to be hard evidence of CriminalIntentOfSomeSortOrAnother, but they declined... CJ Parker <sonofgomez709(a)yahoo.com> http://profiles.yahoo.com/sonofgomez709 http://www.technopagan.org/politics/xenix/ http://members.w-link.net/~sog/INDEX.HTM

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Indymedia interviews Noam Chomsky
by Greg Newby 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

(Includes some good comments on US censorship. gbn) ----- Forwarded message from Peter Phillips <peter.phillips(a)SONOMA.EDU> -----

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Fwd: [free-sklyarov] Fwd: Smell Test for a Certain Unconfirmed Meeting Report
by Karsten M. Self 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

Following post calls to question the legitimacy of the Cryptome RIAA meeting report. Others have expressed doubts as well. I don't agree with most of its points (see free-sklyarov archives for my response), but would appreciate back-propogation to point of origin for response. John, anything you can do? on Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 02:16:20PM -0400, Seth Johnson (seth.johnson(a)realmeasures.dyndns.org) wrote: > > (Forwarded from p2p-legal list) > > -----Original Message----- > From: hal(a)finney.org > Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2001 10:38:05 -0700 > > This report fails the "smell test". It sounds like the quotes have at > least been doctored to provide red meat to the opposition. > > > > "The failure of the CPRM specification to be applied to computer > > hard drives was a giant step back for the publishing, music, and > > entertainment industry, and we will work to develop a new > > specification that accomplishes what CPRM would have done." > > CPRM was never intended to be applied to computer hard drives. It was > for removable media. The reason it was added to the spec in question > was for support of Compact Flash drives, which are accessed via the > ATA hard disk spec but which are removable. > > There was considerable debate about this point at the time the > accusations were made that it was part of a conspiracy. IMO the > defense won. There were a lot of technical people involved in that > committee who were not the conspiratorial type and they had a good > explanation of what was involved. The purpose of the CPRM spec was to > allow writing the data encrypted on one drive and reading it back on a > different drive which lacked the same encryption keys. This is a > technical complication which CPRM was designed to solve. There is no > need for this complexity if the data is being written and read on the > same drive, as the accusers suggested, since the same keys would be > available for both steps. > > See http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/16300.html for a > "response" article and you will see that the specific accusations > about CPRM have been dropped altogether in favor of a general set of > complaints about copy protection. > > Hence it is highly unlikely that Rosen would say that CPRM was > intended for computer hard drives, but it feeds exactly the fears of > the conspiracy theorists at whom this document is apparently aimed. > > > > "Once we stem piracy, we will be able to raise prices in order to > > regain lost profits from piracy." > > Again this is a highly improbable quote. In the first place it is too > obvious, everyone there would already have such thoughts in mind. In > the second place it can only hurt the group in the event that it was > leaked out. And in the third place it assumes that piracy is forcing > them to keep prices down, which seems unlikely (although not > impossible). > > > > Sony's Heckler stated that, "Once consumers can no longer get free > > music, they will have to buy the music in the formats we choose to > > put out." > > Again, an unlikely thing to say unless the intention is to get > consumers riled up. > > > > Gerald Levin stated, "There has been an unconfirmed break in the DVD > > audio encryption scheme in Russia. We cannot ignore this threat, as > > DVD Audio represents the future of this company. We will have to be > > vigilant, and prosecute anyone who posts a program or source code to > > defeat CPPM in an extremely expeditious manner." > > I'm not familiar with this. What is DVD audio? Are they distributing > songs on DVD disks now? And what about the well known decss DVD > encryption breaking algorithm? Doesn't that already retrive the audio > stream? Levin represented AOL Time Warner. Do they really think that > DVD audio is "the future of this company"? It's a pretty big company > to be betting its future on one unproven technology. > > > > Paul England stated, "By tweaking hardware slightly, we can stem > > content piracy by making software attacks a thing of the past." > > This seems technically unlikely and in a group like this which has > been burned so often by broken copy protection schemes, it would seem > strange that someone would make such a bald claim. These people are > not idiots and they would be highly skeptical that any such > technological fixes could work. > > > One particularly disturbing fact is that Codex Data System's DIRT > > software is supposed to be restricted to law enforcement agencies, > > yet the RIAA, MPAA, and IFPI have all purchased it, and use it > > routinely to monitor servers which are suspected of infringing > > content, yet are password protected such as servers which require > > one to sign up for a password account like hotline servers that have > > no guest download. > > I don't know much about this but I'm skeptical that there is automated > software to break into hotline servers. Besides, those which have no > guest downloads are used by only small groups, typically no more than > a few dozen users, and are unlikely to be a significant threat to the > RIAA. They don't care that much about small scale piracy, it is the > big systems which they want to shut down. > > > All in all it looks like at least some of these quote have been > manufactured or enhanced for political purposes. > > Hal Finney > > _______________________________________________ > p2p-legal mailing list > p2p-legal(a)dtype.org > http://dtype.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-legal > > > > _______________________________________________ > free-sklyarov mailing list > free-sklyarov(a)zork.net > http://zork.net/mailman/listinfo/free-sklyarov -- Karsten M. Self <kmself(a)ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ Land of the free Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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There was a day when we would call it kidnapping,
by Dynamite Bob 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/280/nation/US_Egypt_raids_caught_militant… Story on US role in kidnapping Moslems, and how this may have motivated Al Qaeda's blowback. No mention of (since ruled illegal by US courts) kidnapping of mexican physician by DEA goons.

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Domestic Surveillance: stills from video
by Dynamite Bob 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000080591oct09.story?c… Still images can be derived from many video frames with better resolution than you think. BOSTON -- Like so many Americans, Steve Hill was appalled when he saw newspaper reprints of two World Trade Center terrorists as they passed through airport security the morning of Sept. 11. The sight of Mohamed Atta and Waleed M. Alshehri as captured on a video camera in Portland, Maine, was shocking enough. But Hill had another, deeply visceral reaction. "Professional pride," he explained. "I saw these rotten-looking images in the newspaper, and thought, 'We can do better.' " So he called the Boston FBI and offered to install--for free--his company's software that clarifies visual images. Salient Stills is a small start-up, and when shareholders and directors winced at about $20,000 worth of corporate altruism, Hill reminded them that, since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans have opened their hearts and their pocketbooks. Hill figured Salient could at least pony up their pixels. "So many people in the country right now are feeling, 'I could go beat up those terrorists,' " Hill said. "It was sort of the same idea." The weapon the 10-person enterprise supplied the local FBI is a technique for clarifying moving images from videotape. Reproduced as still photographs, video images tend to be grainy. Subtleties vanish. Facial features and details such as license plate imprints are hard to distinguish. "Many years ago"--in 1990, Laura Teodosio said--the challenge of transforming a moving medium into a still image with precise resolution became the subject of her master's thesis at MIT. Working at the university's famed Media Lab--where advanced technology finds practical applications--Teodosio developed a software system she called videoFOCUS. Its purpose was "temporal condensation," essentially squeezing a series of moving images into a legible print. Her signature effort was a glorious portrait of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, sawing away at a concert, yet absolutely still in Teodosio's finished image. She also produced a clear likeness of pitcher Roger Clemens with his legendary fastball streaming sequentially overhead. Neither endeavor seemed destined for widespread appreciation. "But as it turned out, there was a side effect," said Teodosio, 37. "We wound up getting video frames that were higher quality than the original." The 3-year-old company's name was taken from Teodosio's thesis, which posited that "you take the salient features from each frame" to create a more cohesive image. Newspapers were Salient's first target audience. Teodosio's product was born under the aegis of a group called "news and the future," MIT techies seeking novel avenues to interact with news information. Though USA Today and the New York Times snapped up a Salient system that enhanced the translation of video images to still photos, others were uncomfortable because the process involves combining pixels--tiny dots that make up any image on film or videotape--from several sequential frames. The word "composite" strikes fear in the souls of media purists. But Salient CEO Hill, a 52-year-old former book publisher, persevered, noting that "every camera is moving, even if it is affixed to a tripod." His firm's technology--in use on a trial basis at the Los Angeles Times--captures common information from consecutive frames and "basically cleans up the dust," he said. From news environments Salient made an unexpected transition into the world of security, Hill said. Every day, he said, most Americans unknowingly are videotaped a dozen times or more. Video cameras whir at banks, rental car agencies, convenience stores and, of course, airports. But many mothers would not recognize their own children from the soupy images that result. The video cameras function mainly as deterrents, Hill said. Late in June, however, the video system in a Boston pharmacy recorded a prescription drug theft. The incident, one in a series of synthetic opiate robberies that have plagued the area in recent months, received wide attention. Hill contacted the Boston police and offered to help refine the blurry images of the man seen stealing OxyContin, a powerful painkiller. A spokesman for Police Commissioner Paul Evans confirmed that the department is using the Salient technology. Hill said his company also has sold the process to the Singapore defense force, and to the Carabinieri, Italy's paramilitary national police force. Boston FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz would not comment about whether the Salient technology is in use at headquarters here. But at Salient--a "little private company" valued at $12 million to $15 million--Hill said the decision to help what he playfully called "an unnamed federal agency" stemmed from President Bush's entreaty to all Americans to aid in the investigation of the attacks. That plea, Hill said, may have had special resonance in Boston, where terrorists boarded the two planes that crashed into the twin towers. "I definitely think we're feeling real guilt here," he said. "We let them through. They were hanging around here. They figured it was easy pickings here, and they were right." The Portland airport security video is almost incidental to the investigation at this point, Hill said. Both terrorists are dead. "But they have a lot of different images of a lot of different things. There's a lot going on. I can say this: The federal agency is devoting an enormous amount of resources to this process."

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Do not say where Mr. Happy Fun FBI Agent lives
by Dynamite Bob 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

The FBI's Gore counters that Nasser, who was not arrested, crossed the line. "He made a remark insinuating he knew where the agent lived, which was taken as a threat and not well-received," Gore said. "Sometimes-Hostile Scrutiny Difficult for San Diego's Muslim Community" http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-000079572oct05.story?coll=la%2Dn…

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Anthrax Case Number Three
by Eric Cordian 09 Oct '01

09 Oct '01

http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/31567.htm The New York Post is reporting that a female librarian at American Media has pneumonia, and has tested positive for anthrax. There's still no evidence, according to the FBI, that this anthrax outbreak was the result of criminal activity. Legionaire's Disease first appeared to be a terror weapon when significant numbers of cases appeared at a convention center. Later we learned that it was simply a virulent form of pneumonia that liked to live in standing water in building air conditioning systems. Time will tell whether this anthrax outbreak is something similar. Clearly the timing is suspicious. One would think that a competent biological warfare attack against an office building with 300 people in it would kill more than one person. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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