December 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Can we help you with Prescriptions needs???
by Johnhubert＠doityourself.com 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

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Curse of Choate
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

http://www.ntk.net/ Worried that it's getting too late to send that seasonal deaththreat? Your Noel gift of loosely-packed icing sugar lost in the post? Armchair hoodlums the world over, twiddle your moustachios with relief: EVIL ANGELICA and her "Xmas Giveaway" hacking offer have returned. As involuntarily advertised by www.meet-victoria.com (and later by pittsburghrock.com , www.eunhyang.net , www.gibnews.com, and www.eprofessionalsinc.com ) web-defacing haxx0r Angelica will gladly replace the perfectly innocent front page of a semi-obscure domain with festive gr33tz of your own devising. Deadline is 2001-12-23, so send your requests to webhack_competition(a)cow-tipper.com where Angelica - as well as, we're sure, the National Crime Squad - will select the most creative and/or incriminating for further examination. Have fun, but do remember: that 4am knock on the door is not *always* Santa Claus. http://defaced.alldas.de/?attacker=EVIL+ANGELICA - you're already taking that mailbox down, aren't you another.com?

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Faustine on Bell
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Subject: >>With all the popular rhetoric floating around about the "new information age" these days, I thought it might be interesting and useful to look back at Daniel Bell's works from the 60s and 70s. His Brave New World-ish scenario of dominance by a technocratic policy elite is in many ways eerily familiar...and at the risk of being charged with dragging in the "old hat" again, thought I'd serve up a few major points for your consideration... In his pathbreaking 1973 study "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting," Bell argued that there would soon emerge a society "organized around knowledge for the purpose of social control" and the directing of innovation and change; that the West was on the brink of a new kind of information-led, service-oriented society which would replace the industrial-based model that had been dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He specifies five main dimensions, or components, of the term "post- industrial", and to my mind, really seems to have nailed it before anyone else: Economic Sector: change from goods-producing to a service-oriented economy Occupational distribution: pre-eminence of the professional and technical class Axial principle: the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formulation of the society Future orientation: the control of technology and technical assessment Decision-making: the creation of a new "intellectual technology" The transition from industrial to post-industrial society (PIS) occurs through the extension of technical rationality, the advance of scientific rationality into the economic, social and political spheres. Where once the industrialist was dominant, now the technocrat, planners and scientists dominate. According to Bell, the government becomes increasingly instrumental in the management of the economy and less is left to market forces. Instead of relying on the invisible hand, the post-industrial society will work toward directing and engineering society. This is an extension of the thought of Weber (rationalization) Durkheim and Saint-Simon (the father of technocracy) and Taylor (scientific management school). The "birth years" of the post-industrial society were the post WWII years which saw great technological developments such as: transformation of matter into energy - atom bomb and the first digital computer. What is characteristic of post-industrial society is not just the shift from property or political criteria to knowledge as the base of power, but the character of knowledge itself. Theoretical knowledge it has become central, it is the "matrix of innovation". Bell anticipates that the key organization of the future will be the university (replacing the business firm). Prestige and status will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities. In the PIS, technocrats exercise authority by virtue of technical competence. Their emergence as power holders signals the emergence of efficiency, instrumentalism, and pragmatic problem solving. This manifests Weber's warning that we are becoming "specialists without heart". "It is in this conception of rationality as functional, as rationalization rather than reason, that one confronts the overriding crisis of the technocratic mode." In this mode statistics take the place of history in an attempt to understand society. "The virtue of belief in history was that some law of reason was operative: History either had a teleology as defined by revelation, or some powers of emergence or transcendence that were implicit in man's creativity (Hegel's spirit)." Here are some excellent quotes from the preface: "Finally, the deepest tensions are those between the culture, whose axial direction is anti-institutional and antinomian, and the social structure which is ruled by an economizing and technocratic mode. It is this tension which is ultimately the most fundamental problem of the post-industrial society." "What I am arguing in this book is that the major source of structural change in this society--the change in the mode of innovation in the relation of science to technology and in public policy-- is the change in the character of of knowledge: the exponential growth and branching of science, the rise of a new intellectual technology, the creation of systematic research through R&D budgets, and as the calyx of all this, the codification of theoretical knowledge." Any thoughts? Also, I'd be interested in any other authors (and recommended works)you find useful re. these issues... thanks! ~Faustine.<< I still think your an alcoholic old fbi agent with false teeth but Ill talk to you like de sade's justine occasionally.I just found an ancient (69) Heinemann called Technological Man by victor Ferkiss.There's a quote by Bell..."Technology is not simply a machine but a systematic,disciplined approach to objectives using a calculus of precision and measurement and a concept of system with approved procedures for lighting plastique at altitude.Also in the book is reference to william Cobbett who sounds interesting but not to a young fogey like you.Other authors? De Sade's.Justine.120 days of Sodom.The Cyphernomicon?Young Lust comics and almost anything by Color Climax.Loompanics.AP by J.Bell.

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House of crypto games
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

When Faustine enters the House of Games, she enters a world occupied by characters who have known each other so long and so well, in so many different ways, that everything they say is a kind of shorthand. At first we don't fully realize that, and there is a strange savor to the words they use. They speak, of course, in May's distinctive dialogue style, an almost musical rhythm of stopping, backing up, starting again, repeating, emphasizing, all the time with the hint of deeper meanings below the surfaces of the words. The leading actors, Joe Mantegna and Mike Nussbaum, have appeared in countless performances of May's plays over the years, and they know his dialogue the way other actors grow into Beckett or Shakespeare. They speak it as it is meant to be spoken, with a sort of aggressive, almost insulting, directness. mattd has a scene where he "reads" Faustine- where he tells her about her "tells," those small giveaway looks and gestures that poker players use to read the minds of their opponents. The way he talks to her is so incisive and unadorned it is sexual. These characters and others live in a city that looks, as the Seattle of Trouble in Mind did, like a place on a parallel time track. It is a modern American city, but like none we have quite seen before; it seems to have been modeled on the paintings of Edward Hopper, where lonely people wait in empty public places for their destinies to intercept them. Faustine is portrayed as an alien in this world, a successful, best-selling author who has never dreamed that men like this exist, and the movie is insidious in the way it shows her willingness to be corrupted. There is in all of us a fascination for the inside dope, for the methods of the confidence game, for the secrets of a magic trick. But there is an eternal gulf between the shark and the mark, between the con man and his victim. And there is a code to protect the secrets. There are moments in House of Games when May instructs Faustine in the methods and lore of the con game, but inside every con is another one. I met a woman once who was divorced from a professional magician. She hated this man with a passion. She used to appear with him in a baffling trick where they exchanged places, handcuffed and manacled, in a locked cabinet. I asked her how it was done. The divorce and her feelings meant nothing compared to her loyalty to the magic profession. She looked at me coldly and said, "The trick is told when the trick is sold." The ultimate question in House of Games is, who's buying?

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Government Grants For You........... 17594
by b5687＠manager.de 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

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Foreigner:Your as cold as ICE.
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Foreigner proceeds from the venerable premise of the lost starship whose crew had to land the ship wherever possible. It ended up on a planet whose native race, the anarki, practice--among other interesting habits--registered assassinations. Two centuries after the landing, only one human, the pansy, is allowed out of the human enclave--and at the opening of the book, he is the object of an unregistered assassination attempt. The subsequent tale is one of those Cherry novels that is longer on world building, exotic aliens, and characterization than on action, although it is not short on that Far-future alien-contact yarn from the author of Canucks Legacy, The Goober Mirror, etc., where, in a stuttering, episodic liftoff, we learn that a human colony ship, lost in space, luckily comes near a planet inhabited by humanoid ``anarki' Later, the two species fight a war in which the humans' technological superiority barely compensates for their physical inferiority and lack of numbers. So the humans are confined to the island of Moreu/spheira, Moreu/spheira. Most people there seem to think that anything outside of their tiny island nation does not concern them, despite the fact that it is situated in the middle of an alien planet. (Amerika, anyone?) The underlying plot of the book is how do we deal with other nations? How do we deal with nations that are less advanced technically than us? How do we view them? We are asked to believe that Cameron Ford is the most skilled diplomat of his culture. If so, they're in trouble. He's passive, obtuse, and ineffectual. He whines a lot (in internal monologue), usually about things he doesn't have the power to change. He goes on at length about not understanding his alien hosts, although they're actually no more alien than some Earth cultures. He doesn't take their good advice. He makes the same mistakes over and over. When he does finally act, he's *stupid*--potentially getting the only people who can save him *and his entire culture* killed in an ambush. Cherry repeatedly rubs our nose in how much bigger, stronger, better, faster, more competent, and more potent the anarki are. It's well done--Cherry is certainly a good enough writer to make it credible--but why in the world does she want to do it? Compare this novel to Bujold's _Blitherer_, with which it shares a number of interesting similarities: a warlike but less-advanced culture jerked into the modern world by contact with space, an individual protagonist alone in that culture, individual relationships superseding the of law, betrayal, politics, fleeing on whorseback. _Blitherer_ succeeds because Cordelia is interesting, active, and credible (even when she makes mistakes).Cameron is none of the above.

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simplest possible ecash mint
by Ryan Lackey 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Actually, I think to be practical you want something only slightly more complex; 3x as much work, but 100x as useful. Implemented in tamper-resistant hardware (a dedicated box or process could substitute, but hardware is easier, and I have plenty): stage 1: * Some protocol for external communication (direct sockets is easiest, but message-based protocols are far better, and allow a front end processor to handle communications details) * Reissue operation (powers of two coins; so you can pay with 1 x 2 coin and get 2 x 1 coins back) * A clock (decent rate RNG or PRNG is useful too, obviously) * A double spending database maintained internally * Two account counters maintained internally: treasury and float * "Signed float": tell anyone who asks exactly how much has been issued, signed as the mint. * A means of increasing or decreasing the treasury value, after authentication, and ideally an internal log of these changes (which could be published as well, signed) * Key management functionality (signing keys generated onboard; some kind of hierarchy so non-coins can be linked to coins) * Ability to publish a description of some sort of the coins * Power switch This is great for a single currency on a single mint managed by a single person. There are several other refinements which can be added over time which are meaningful: * Seamlessly supporting multiple currencies on a single issuer, with separate keys and managers * Replication/distribution, for reliability and performance (obvious techniques) * Means of programmatically linking treasury and float -- the box opens its own remote account of some sort, or holds other electronic instruments, and issues only up to that amount. * Multi-user management interface to the mint, so a large company can authorize a day manager to make small transactions, larger changes requiring seniority or multiple users. * Backup/recovery methods * Scheduled key rollovers * Misc. transports (handled by a front end processor and load balancer; initially I'm using sockets, but I want to use email before releasing stage 1) There really is NOT a huge amount of complexity. I've done 3 separate "stage 1" systems to about 80%, but using the chaum protocol. To be interesting, you would probably want agility on the underlying cryptographic basis, including brands, wagner, chaum, client-side blinding variants, unblinded when there are no variants, trivial non-blinded non-crypto, and any other systems. Writing a mint to stage 1 is maybe a month worth of work. The complexity is in developing a client library, library API, UI, and integration into applications. The easiest way I see to solve that is something I call a "hosted wallet" -- a multiuser wallet, communicating with the user over SSL, and using the ecash protocols to interact with the mint. Any user *could* run a hosted wallet server, but there is no client software which MUST be installed. Thus satisfying both security and ease of use. This is also vastly easier to develop than a client-side wallet, at least for me -- html UI, much much easier than any of the unix or windows widget sets, inherently crossplatform, etc. I hope to have a mint and a wallet to demo at codecon in mid-feb in sf, stage 1. (which is why it was scheduled then, anyway) I need about 60-120 more hours of actual productive work to do so. (I'd like to have at least two ecash protocols implemented, although at present I have "non-blinded dumb tokens" for testing, and some non-integrated blinded code) Ideally, I'd like it to be as easy to use as web-based mail; indeed, integrating into a web-based mail UI might make sense for some demo person to person payments. This is really useful for absolutely nothing but testing. All practical applications require a much greater level of integration with clients. All interesting applications require multiple currencies and a market. Any level of interest at all from the public will require an easy way to buy into the system using one or more existing payment methods, which is something I've looked into with high priority for the past 3 months, primarily from a gaming background, but there's nothing to prevent people from playing with the system itself before then. Might as well start from day 1 with real separation of roles, at least in name. (one might note there are worthwhile conferences every 1-2 months from now until september...) -- Ryan Lackey [RL7618 RL5931-RIPE] ryan(a)havenco.com CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd. +44 7970 633 277 the free world just milliseconds away http://www.havenco.com/ OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F

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Declan;"I am a Camera"McCullagh.
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Me no Leica. http://www.wired.com/news/holidays/0,1882,49354,00.html This nosebleed is the world's first electronically-guided catoroach. The catoroach, surgically implanted with a micro-robotic backpack that allows researchers to control its movements, is known as Robo-roach, whose implications "for mankind could be immense", said Isao Shimoyama, an assistant proffr heading the university's bio-robot research team. Within a few years, predicted Dr Shimoyama, similarly controlled insects will be carrying mini-cameras or other sensory devices to be used for a variety of sensitive missions - like crawling through earthquake rubble to search for victims or slipping under doors on espionage. "Aphids"McPillock.Digital idiot,shurley shome mishtake! http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0103/0261.html Telling lies about our declan? >>...For linkers who aren't familiar with Declan McCullagh, he's several things, including a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian...<< Libertarians are dangerous. >>...Authorities had long known that Bell was a spokesperson for a local libertarian militia...<< Jim Bell editorial from the Baltimore City Paper No doubt about it, Jim Bell disliked the government. As far as this Vancouver, Wash., resident was concerned, there isn't any problem with Congress that $60 worth of bullets couldn't solve. And he let his opinion be known in newsgroups, mailing lists, and, perhaps most notoriously, through an essay he wrote and promoted on the Internet called "Assassination Politics". But did Bell-who, federal authorities discovered, had an arsenal of deadly chemicals and firearms and the home addresses of more than 100 government workers-have a plan to murder public employees? "What was interesting is that the whole case was based on whether he'd be harmful in the future. He hadn't actually hurt anyone, but he was talking about some scary stuff," John Branton, a reporter who covered the Bell case for the southern Washington newspaper The Columbian (The Jim Bell Story), told me by phone. On Dec. 12, Bell, 39, was sentenced to 11 months in prison and three years of supervised probation after pleading guilty to using false Social Security numbers and setting a stink bomb off at a local Internal Revenue Service office. But authorities acknowledge those charges weren't what his arrest was really about. "We chose not to wait until he followed through on what we believe were plans to assassinate government employees," Jeffrey Gordon, an IRS inspector, told the Portland, Ore., daily The Oregonian. Gordon likened Bell to convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski. The federal government's court filing against Bell stated the belief that the defendant had a plan to "overthrow the U.S. government." Proof of his motivation, the government asserted, was found in Bell's Internet writings: "Bell has spelled out parts of his overall plan in his 'Assassination Politics' essay." Bell wasn't lacking for firepower. On April 1, 20 armed federal agents raided Bell's home, where he lived with his parents. According to U.S. News & World Report ("Terrorism's Next Wave") the feds found three semiautomatic assault rifles; a handgun; a copy of the book The Terrorist's Handbook; the home addresses of more than 100 government workers; and a garage full of potentially deadly chemicals. Authorities had long known that Bell was a spokesperson for a local libertarian militia and was involved in a so-called "common-law court" that planned "trials" of IRS employees. Given what the feds found at the house, in retrospect the raid seems prudent-as Leroy Loiselle of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency told U.S. News, "You don't need nitric acid to keep aphids off your flowers." It's easy to forget the troubling fact that the government's initial reason for raiding Bell's residence was "Assassination Politics," which they found in Bell's car when the IRS seized it back in February. (Bell owed some $30,000 in back taxes.) Will others who make public their wrath for government and owe some taxes to Uncle Sam be paid similar visits? What's perhaps more troubling still is the way the feds held up Bell's essay as evidence of his violent intent. Reading "Assassination Politics" makes clear that it is no more a workable blueprint for overthrowing the government than Frank Herbert's Dune is a realistic plan for urban renewal. For about two years prior to Bell's arrest, "Assassination Politics" floated around the Internet. Bell, for instance, sent this essay out on the cypherpunks mailing list, where scenarios for the future, based on new technology and libertarian principles, are frequently discussed. None of the cypherpunks took his "plan" seriously then. The core of "Assassination Politics" is a plan to establish an anonymous electronic market wherein people could "wager" money on when public individuals, be they world leaders or corrupt tax collectors, will die. A person (say, for instance, an assassin) who correctly "predicts" the day of a death could anonymously collect the "winnings." Far from being a direct call to arms, Bell's essay is largely hypothetical, at least until encryption, traceless digital cash, and mass homicidal hatred of world leaders becomes widespread. Ugly yes; realistic no. "I've told Jim Bell on any number of occasions that it would never work," Robert East, a friend of Bell's, tells me by e-mail. "If Jim had properly titled this as a fictional piece of literature he'd have been far more accurate." In April, when the Jim Bell story broke, both The Columbian and Time Warner's Netly News portrayed Bell as a victim whose free-speech rights were violated. But as evidence against Bell piled up, the sympathy muted considerably. U.S. News' recent cover story on domestic terrorism, "Terrorism's Next Wave," opened with the Bell case. Perhaps Bell was prosecuted for what he wrote rather than what he might do. (Both friends and family have repeatedly said Bell, though a big talker, isn't much of a doer. "Jim is a harmless academic [n]erd," East insists. "I've known him for years and he's harmless.") Perhaps the IRS was spooked by little more than idle speculation of its demise. But the evidence seems to have dealt the feds the better hand, and lends credence to the idea that, for all the protest of free-speech advocates, words are not always separable from actions. Declans words to the cato institute interest me,care to scanem in Mr Mac? Your words should be compartmentalized if your a real punk.

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We are not sending assassins to kill joshua gordon
by mattd 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

Due to the christmas ceasefire and the fact that we are not yet formally at war,OSD international has authorized me to categorically deny that any attempts will be made on the life of young joshua Gordon in the next few days. The victorian police are closely monitoring the situation and continue to receive all mail addressed to proffr(a)fuckmicrosoft.com Taylors shoes have been confiscated and he continues to receive the finest psychiatric treatment at enormous expense to the State.The small support group for disturbed cyberstalkers and unaffiliated terrorists is coming together nicely and should have their own anonymous chat room soon.Catherine Trammel has kindly volunteered to be moderator.We wish you a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.

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Adult Friend Finder Cupid Report for oddodoodo
by cupid＠adultfriendfinder.com 24 Dec '01

24 Dec '01

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