July 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

So, what do the Russians think?
by Trei, Peter 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

One of the curious aspects of the whole Sklyarov affair is the silence of the Russians. I've not heard of any comment from the Russian government on the US news, the Novosti press agency has said nothing today or Tuesday (all I can check), and TASS has a couple of headlines, but (as far as I can tell) no editiorial material going either way (I can't read the TASS articles without a subscription). Most odd.... Peter Trei

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Re:Job satisfaction and security clearances
by Faustine 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

At 5:54 PM -0400 7/24/01, Faustine wrote: >Tim wrote: > >>Likewise, I know of even some Cypherpunks who have left their >>employers for ideological reasons. And if some have _left_ jobs, the >>effects are likely greater on the _recruiting_ side (where the costs >>of a decision are much less). > >Absolutely. More than that, I try to never take a job unless I'd be willing >to do it for free. All free-market principles aside, if you're just in it >for the paycheck, what's the point? I'd rather do something I love that's >meaningful to me than just make a pile. Even better not to have to choose >at all. (Not there yet, so #1 it is...) >I liked, even greatly liked, some aspects of my job in the 70s and >80s, but there is no way I would have done it for "free." I was >getting up at the crack of dawn, arriving by 8 or earlier every >morning, working more or less continuously until 6 each night, often >working on Saturdays, sometimes working on Sundays, to do what my >bosses told me needed doing. While I could often innovate, the broad >outlines of my "interests" were set by management. >I believe this is mostly the case in 99% of all work environments, >even ones "loved" by the workers. Very few jobs are of the form "Do >what turns you on." True, I guess--this time around, I just happen to be in the extremely lucky 1%. Any work I have to do that's somewhat of a grind is a tiny, tiny price to pay for the rest of the time I have complete freedom to work on whatever projects I want while surrounded by excellent resources: my office is so private, comfortable and well-equipped, I usually stay late every night and come in on the weekends--researching, writing, coding, studying, absolutely anything I feel like doing. In a few weeks, it's back to a full graduate courseload on top of a flexible 40 hour workweek (we set our own hours), but since my employer is actually paying 100% of the tuition, and all the coursework dovetails nicely with the research I'm doing (for myself and for them), I couldn't be happier. I'd be a fool to let an opportunity to be in an environment like this pass me over in the name of "more leisure time." Even if I were unemployed and had my absolute choice, I'd still be researching, writing, coding, studying, etc. So the paycheck and free tuition is basically just icing on the cake. I never dreamed I'd get to the point I could say that, but there it is... >What most people think of as "loving" the job is >really just the result of adapting their own goals to that of the >organization. It works for dogs, who also "love" their jobs, so why >not for humans? Yep, good point. But then again, there's the question of the differences in work environment between academia/nonprofit/NGO/think tank-types of places and the private sector, small businesses/corporations. Each of these sectors has a different reason-for-being, which in turn attracts different types of people. For instance, no matter how much freedom I could possibly have at a widget factory, I don't think I could ever get over the fact that the bottom line is I'm just there to make money for someone else via widgets. Plenty of dissatisfation to go around. On the other hand, the first group of institutions is different in that respect because the "end" isn't a healthy profit, it's producing ideas or some other kind of service for the "good", (define as you will). Sure, there can be a lot of overlap between the public and private sectors, but in the best-case scenario that's a large part of the motivation. In fact, I think that blending the best of the nonprofit and for-profit worlds is the key to eliminating their respective drawbacks and getting rid of government intereference alltogether. I'd be glad to take this up further, if you don't find it utterly laughable. (snip) > If you can >scrape by, trading your free labor for experience isn't always a bad >bargain...it's worked for me more than once, and I sometimes I eventually >ended up on the payroll. >News flash: some of us were on the payroll from Day One. oh blah, blah: for the rest of us, it's just part of a strategy to get farther, faster on the continuum of doing what you want to do. If you want to be able to work at Prestegious Groups X Y or Z but they aren't hiring, what else can you do? Before you know it, you've got a resume with experience from X Y and Z on it. And since you had the guts to propose and design the internships yourself, you have better control over what you get experience in whereas Day One payrollees get stuck with the low-level stuff, longer. Use people's sense of self-interest to further your own, it's the easiest thing in the world. >I have never worked a minute of "free labor," not counting helping friends >move their stuff, you make it sound like volunteering is just busywork for dupes and suckers... >and not counting the thousands, nay, tens of thousands, of hours I have >spend on lists like this one. So when are you going to set up the Cypherpunks Mailing List 501(c)(3)? LOL! ~Faustine.

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RE: FINALLY!!! A REAL BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY!!!
by James K 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

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Fox & Rabbits, or Fox & Hounds (re: Fox's Ape Letter)
by David Honig 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Fox & Rabbits implies an arms race. Fox & Hounds implies dead Fox. Here's a way to tickle the Fox. With a taser^H^H^H^HLinux. Copied from another list. On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 05:12:53PM -0700, David Honig wrote: > It would be amusing to create very large files named Planet_of_the_Apes > hosted on very slow servers ----servers slow enough to discourage actual > downloaders, but existent enough to annoy Fox. 'Servers' includes > numerous P2P tools, so you can do this at home. > > Extra credit if the very large files are uniformly distributed noise. > > Extra credit if the noise has the appropriate headers so it looks like > a Divx or whatever is a plausible format. trivial to accomplish, too. attached to this mail is an empty mpeg file (zipped). you can inflate it to any size you desire by doing (on Linux): unzip empty.zip dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=xxx >>empty.mpg where xxx is the number of KB you want to add. use 681574400 for 650 MB which is the size of a CD and would look very promising for a pirated movie.

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Re: Attention to detail lacking
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Tim, >>I think the reflected beam has the same wavelength as the incident beam. > >Photons hitting a surface most definitely do not "lose some energy" >and get "re-emitted." There are some very particular configurations >that can act as wavelength doublers, but this is a particular, and >hard to set up, configuration. > >Photons hitting a mirror either are re-emitted with the same energy >as before or interact via the photoelectric effect and are >thermalized (converted to phonons). > >That colors are preserved in mirrors, absent tints (special >absorbers), is a Physics 1 clue that mirrors do not downshift photon >energies!. > The reason for the weak statement "I think" is that I imagine you might make an argument that the momentum transfer from the photon to the "mirror" results in a very small doppler shift...I'm just not positive about it at the smallest level of interaction. >I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: lacking a solid >grounding and overly reliant on his own private notions of what >"mass" and "energy" and "group velocity" and so on are. All the best >cranks view the world this way. > >I don't know Choate's educational background, but I would not be at >all surprised if he is self-taught and moved into computers out of >some technician training school. > I've reached the same conclusion. I've known some very bright people who lacked access to a formal education. The results were some startling levels of understanding mixed right in with some mind blowing misconceptions and some outright gaps. Mike

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Lasers and ICBMs
by Tim May 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Being older than most of you, I remember doing some of these calculations about burn times, laser intensities, etc. more than 20 years ago. (Although Reagan did not announce SDI until around 1983, the topic was widely discussed in the late '70s. "Scientific American" published articles by Prof. Kosta Tsipis, Richard Garwin, and others about the difficulty of intercepting ICBMs with lasers and particle beams. I remember some of these articles from circa 1977-79. I even used one of the them as the basis for a presentation I made to DARPA in Washington on a kill method for satellites.) A lot of the calculations being sketched out here, of watts/cm^2, dwell times, gold coatings, etc. are slightly off-base. We've known for 20+ years that the kill method is to use a short pulse to "push" (not from the photons' momentum) in the thin wall of an ICBM's fuel system. A very short pulse can produce enough ablative heating, a kind of "puff," to trigger buckling of the very thin wall of an ICBM. So the theory goes. Countermeasures to traditional "heating" are so easy to imagine (rapidly spinning the missile, deploying gold-plated shrouds once exoatmosheric, changing the missile coating at random intervals to foil laser frequencies, etc.) that the "punch" method was developed. I'm still skeptical, for the reasons many have outlined over the years. Bill Stewart, most recently, who pointed out that the Macedonian Liberation Army will simply smuggle in a bomb and then demand that the U.S. and NATO stop arming the Albanian terrorists. And so on. For knocking out satellites, particle beam weapons are the way to go. And don't believe Kosta Tsipis' 1978-79 article in Sci Am about how 50 loads of fuel in the space shuttle would be needed for every firing of a particle beam weapon. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay(a)got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns

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Are the digits of Pi random? A Berkley lab researcher may hold the key
by Jim Choate 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/07/010725081838.htm James Choate Product Certification - Operating Systems Staff Engineer 512-436-1062 jchoate(a)tivoli.com

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Attention to detail lacking
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Jim, I think you often don't word things carefully enough. The resulting discussions get pointless in a big hurry. >>> >>>The optics used for focusing are NOT mirrors, they are (hopefully) >>>transparent at the frequency under use. A mirror on the other hand is >>>required to be OPAQUE with respect to transmission, we want full, 100%, >>>reflectivity. That means that every photon that hits that mirror >>>interacts, loses some energy, and gets re-emitted. >>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >>> >>Are you implying that the wavelength for incident photons changes upon >>interaction with the mirror? >> >>The energy loss at the mirror is lost photons not altered wavelengths. >>The lost photons have varying fates. >> You stated that every photon interacts, loses energy and is re-emitted. I think the reflected beam has the same wavelength as the incident beam. Your blurb about absorption and cascades is only true for some fraction of the lost photons that constitute the inefficiency of the mirror. Others have a different fate. Maybe that's what you meant but you did say "every photon." And here's an exchange with Tim : >At 6:30 PM -0500 7/24/01, Jim Choate wrote: >>And these are reasonably low power lasers... >> >>http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/IJSSE/issue1/unwin/unwin.html >> >>The simple fact is that the thermodynamic impact of a laser beam that is >>several feet across and emitting more photons than the surface of the sun >>will not be easy to reflect unless immense cooling is taken. Cost/weight >>factors alone argue it in the negative. > >"More photons than the surface of the sun" for HOW LONG? > >A minute? A second? A millisecond? A microsecond? > >You confuse fluence with flux, a classic mistake. > >(A pulse "brighter than the sun" but lasting only milliseconds will >have far less heating effect than other flux level pulses lasting >longer. Calculations matter. And, yes, I used to do these >calculations when I was refuting Kosta Tsipis' calculations of the >late 70s. Fluence matters.) > >--Tim May > The sun produces shitloads ( check your CRC Handbook for conversions between the shitload and more familiar units ) of power : http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/sol.html says 386 billion billion megawatts If we know the spectral characteristics of the sun ( the black body spectrum perhaps? ) we could come up with a photon count. I'm not sure whether you mean to talk about photon counts and adjust the power and wavelength variables or you really mean to discuss something that operates somewhere between IR and UV. Let's assume the latter. It is after all a LASER. You did say "surface of the sun". To me that means integrate over 4 pi. 3.86E26 W regardless of the radius. I doubt if anyone has made a laser that operates at that power level even for one fs. Let's try the other approach... The power output from the sun is about 1350 W/m^2 as measured here. Maybe that was what you meant as a reference power level. Let's see, 1350 W/m^2 -> 1.35E-3 W/mm^2 so a 1 mW laser with a beam area of .74mm^2 is "as bright as the sun" at least in terms of gross energy density. That disregards spectral effects. Not too tough to be "brighter than the sun". I don't think you could even light a bucket of gasoline 1 m away with it no less knock down a rocket. It's also pretty easy to handle with a basic mirror. I'd say that's a pretty wussy power level for something that needs to melt a rocket in flight. Focussed to a spot that is 1/1000 the area of the parent beam it starts to get interesting but let's see you hold that spot steady from a 747 in turbulence long enough to burn a hole in a nice shiny casing going 8000kph 200km away. So if we're going to discuss physics let's do it with a bit of care. Maybe it will be more interesting. I'm no expert but I'm willing to try. Yawn, Mike

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RE: FINALLY!!! A REAL BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY!!!
by James K 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

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RE: FINALLY!!! A REAL BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY!!!
by James K 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

For a limited time, we are offering a FREE WEBSITE that will promote your service or product. This website will be custom designed for you and your needs. Our staff of graphic designers, web designers and our marketing team will work with you to design a site that will grab attention and get your product or service sold!!! If your FREE WEBSITE does not appear within the first 20 listings on the major search engines, you are not able to easily gain new clients for your business - because they can't find you!!! Our staff will get your FREE WEBSITE ranked in the top of the search engines so that when the estimated one million internet users today go shopping for what you sell, they will see your new website. They will buy from someone, shouldn't it be you? Millions of dollars are being spent on the Internet every day, What percentage of that do you want to receive??? Click on the link below to find out how to obtain your FREE WEBSITE!!! www.whereismysiteranked.com/freewebsite.htm Thank you again, James Kennsley III WhereIsMySiteRanked.com ************************* We apologize if you received this advertisement by mistake. We make every effort to insure that the recipients of our direct marketing are those individuals who have asked to receive additional information on promotional offers from companies with whom we trade mailing list. If you would like to be removed from our mailing list please email us at removemyname(a)whereismysiteranked.com. You may also send us a remove request via snail mail at RemoveMyName 3747 Beltline Rd. # 225 Addison, TX 75001, or you may phone us at 972-614-1140. Again we apologize if this message has reached you in error. *************************

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