November 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: CHAUM CHIMES IN
by cme＠ellisun.sw.stratus.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: 08 Sep 93 16:30:55 EDT >From: Sandy <72114.1712(a)CompuServe.COM> >Subject: CHAUM CHIMES IN >Message-Id: <930908203054_72114.1712_FHF95-2(a)CompuServe.COM> ..From: > SANDY SANDFORT Reply to: ssandfort(a)attmail.com [ . . . ] >Of course, the next letter to the editor calls for the adoption >of systems to track every vehicle at all times. The genius who >wrote the letter, thinks it would be a good way to prevent >nuclear, biological or chemical terrorism. Geeeeez. It was signed by Dorothy Denning, right? Actually, they should take that to its full conclusion. We need implants in every individual, broadcasting to the local surveillance agency, giving not only location but also every word spoken in the vicinity. It could also do a chemical analysis of the air in the neighborhood. It should also have a radiation counter. It should also monitor the host body, looking for signs of anger or sexual arousal? How else will we be guaranteed safe from mad bombers, rapists and child molesters? How else will our big budget LE agencies be able to protect us? I know. When it's finally adopted, worldwide, they'll call it the Ellison Plan. :-( - Carl

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Stegno and DAT and digital music...
by Peter Wayner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In this week's Sunday NYT, Hans Fantel, their music guy, writes at length about the new "dithered" CD's and how the guys have improved the sound. He says that the original CD format was limited to 16 bits of sound because of costs. But many audiophiles reacted very negatively to the tinny, metalic quality to the music. For this reason, the companies have developed 20 bit DAT recording tape and then come up with ways to "dither" this into 16 bits. I am curious if anyone knows the details of these algorithms. Also, his point suggests that flipping the least significant bit of 16 bit music may not be imperceptable to some ears. If the classical music starts to sound tinny then there might be something subversive in the least significant bits. -Peter Wayner

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Remail: errors
by HFinney＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I have been out of town for the last week, so I missed some CP mail. It looks like some good things are happening with remailers, though. Kudos to Karl, Sameer, and the others for their work! I have received many messages to my remailer in the last week which came from remail(a)tamsun.tamu.edu, which were PGP-encrypted apparently in an effort to get my remailer to send them. They did not work, though, because there was no "Encrypted: PGP" header to trigger the remailer's decryption. This can be arranged by creating the message something like this: ======================================================== :: Request-Remailing-To: hfinney(a)shell.portal.com :: Encrypted: PGP - -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- <rest of message> - -----END PGP MESSAGE------ ======================================================== This would then be sent to remail(a)tamsun.tamu.edu. I don't know whether the multiplicity of such erroneous messages is just due to one person stubbornly re-trying, or whether there is an error in one of the new programs for creating chained remailer messages. Hal Finney hfinney(a)shell.portal.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.2 iQCVAgUBLJaNuKgTA69YIUw3AQHrNwQAowMEQwuH6YyHoj6T7AqZFLNdTf+eqJ9L LhAatHS94nmC1smkfVNq0dZmigmkvBdMNEPlBZemmxALz+KJw6OSY/ULSBmuVNEq 5rJANh3XimoJWqLISy2lZiuC5Fw2R7UvRadcdM94pncSVvev92Fyf7CqEOOtrGAK PUzRds7BVNo= =FpLa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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more than spread spectrum
by cme＠ellisun.sw.stratus.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There are alternatives to spread spectrum, if we're threatened with loss of freedom to communicate. We could lay our own wires/fibers. We could set up a mesh network of infrared lasers through the air. Last time I looked, there were no laws against shining lights out your window as long as they didn't bother anyone. An infrared laser could hardly bother anyone. We could produce a line of cheap cards to plug into a PC which would do packet routing, using a variety of physical links -- our own wires, lasers, very low range radio, .... Each card would connect to three or more neighbors and become part of the global mesh. Adaptive routing with no global map would suffice for the card and would keep the whole system peer-to-peer with no need for central control and no chance for central tapping. Of course all of these solutions require a high density of users. A college campus might be the right place to start. We could then branch out to cities. I suspect that a place like Chicago or NYC with high rise apartments might be the place to start -- many options for line-of-sight communications. The benefit isn't just for Cypherpunks. It's a free network for the masses -- like the original USENET (with each user donating routing and store/forward) but with unrestricted, low-range, continuously operating physical links. I'll volunteer to do the software for the node card. Does anyone have hardware design/fab to donate to the effort? - Carl

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Re: The CDR as a Cliological experiment
by Tyler Durden 01 Dec '02

01 Dec '02

"(Tyler Durden, _please_ learn to trim your replies. Your "quote the entire thing" top posting is getting tiresome. I hear there are night school classes which teach Outlook Express or whichever braindead mailer you are using.)" Damn are you grumpy Tim May. Whaddya usin', carrier pigeon to download messages? (Or does some form of carpal tunnel make it excruciatingly painful to scroll down?) As for the historical references to the slave trade, I am finding that black folks are almost equally in the dark about history as whites in this country. And as my father has said... "The only thing stupider than a stupid black guy is a stupid white guy." And... "Wherever two or more Americans are gathered have ye a lynch mob." _________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Re: The CDR as a Cliological experiment
by Tim May 30 Nov '02

30 Nov '02

On Saturday, November 30, 2002, at 05:23 PM, Tyler Durden wrote: > As far as I'm concerned, most strife boils down to the perceived > economic interests of the concerned parties, and apparently > ehtnic/religious/whatever differences are just a mask for these > simpler problems. As a big for instance, racism during the slavery > days was really a way to allow for economic explouitation of "human > resources"...slavetraders of course searched for Biblical and > Darwinian justification of their actions, and codified them into their > "religion". The slave trade was centered around some negroes capturing and selling some other negroes. The Moslems who ferried the captured negroes along the coast were just middlemen, as were the Dutch and English who carried the negro cargo to the final customers. Ironically, the negro in America, especially the negro Muslim, blames the Jew for what other negroes and other Muslims did to some of his ancestors. And now the negro in America wants the "honkey" to give him reparations. (Tyler Durden, _please_ learn to trim your replies. Your "quote the entire thing" top posting is getting tiresome. I hear there are night school classes which teach Outlook Express or whichever braindead mailer you are using.) --Tim May

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Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 (fwd)
by Dave Howe 30 Nov '02

30 Nov '02

Morlock Elloi wrote: > Not so. Self-organasing mesh networks appear to have some interesting > properties. There is a number of open solutions and at least one > startup I know about based on this. <snip links> fascinating - I obviously have a lot of reading to do - thankyou :)

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Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 (fwd)
by Dave Howe 30 Nov '02

30 Nov '02

Jim Choate wrote: > On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Dave Howe wrote: > The scaling problem is a valid one up to a point. The others are not. > The biggest problem is people trying to do distributed computing using > non-distributed os'es (eg *nix clones and Microsloth). not as such, no. the vast majority of "free internet cloud" users couldn't care less about computer resources and/or distributed computing - they want to access websites, ftp servers and read/send their email. with a large(ish) number of otherwise standalone nodes, you need to worry about addressing space, routing and (to conserve what little bandwidth you have to the classic internet) caching. ad-hoc routing also doesn't scale well - so you get into issues of cells mapping to address ranges and dynamic allocation to mobile nodes as they move from cell to cell (there are probably better ways to do that than cells and static ranges, but self-networking swarms blow out their bandwidth purely negotiating routing long before the amount of traffic those nodes needs becomes an issue) its possible I am wrong and there is a wonderful distributed-computing method to solve these purely network routing problems, but it is news to me. >> 2. no matter how large the new network becomes, it still needs a >> link to the "old" network; > Granted, up to a point. That point is when this network has more > resources than the 'old' networks. At some point the old networks > move over and start running from the new one. that would require that the new network be not only larger (and more cost effective) but joined up enough (and routing-efficient enough) to see it become the primary backbone. I am willing to imagine a world where "classic" isps have a peering arrangement with such cloud networks (giving free access to their own sites in return for free access to Cloud sites by their customers) but there is always the prisoner's dilemma (which has been attempted by so many ISPs lately) of refusing to peer with anyone they think they can sell transit to instead. >> almost all ISPs frown on use of home connections for sharing >> more than just the owner's machines, and many consider using even >> unmetered in a manner they didn't provision for (ie, using unmetered >> more than 100 hours a month at the full bandwidth limit) as "abuse" >> and end the contracts of those who do so. what you would need would >> be an ISP (or large commercial) style contract with a guaranteeed >> bandwidth and dedicated ip addresses - which do not come cheap >> enough to be worth giving away. > Bullshit on the too expensive to give away. A typical commercial setup (2mb bandwidth, no ratio, no contention (sharing) over a dedicated line) is about 700ukp/month. (say about a thousand dollars). ok, to a large commercial operation that is about the cost of one employee - probably even less. assuming that it came out of a pr budget though, that is one less staff member and/or one less campaign a year, for the (dubious) benefit of whatever pr you could get by donating it. I didn't say it was too expensive to give way, I said it was too expensive to be *worth* giving away compared to cheaper pr stunts that don't have to paid for every year as an ongoing cost (with all the pr loss of having to shut it down if it becomes too much of a drain) and that is a *recent* cost - as little as two years ago you could pay that for a 512K link. > Irrelevant since there are plenty of commercial feeds out there that > are not ISP's. yes, of course there are - but they aren't cheap. the US has a history of cheap connectivity and free local calls - the uk (along with most of the rest of the world) doesn't. > I keep seeing thes ney saying views yet the guerrilla networks just > keep getting bigger... There is a ratio thing - anyone with a home broadband connection (which is a lot more common in london, where most of the free MAN schemes seem to be concentrated) can afford to carry a few freeloaders on an ad-hoc basis, and it isn't currently in the interests of the telco monopoly to crack down on it - it doesn't cut into their core business (selling phone lines and leased lines) and the traffic blips can be absorbed by the ISP who has statistical models of how much they can underprovision their total sold broadband and/or dialup pool bandwidth by without complaints (the monopoly, who is also an ISP got its sums wrong a couple of years back when it first went unmetered and the *average* bandwidth allocation during busy times was less than 2Kbits - and that was dialup pool only) If the number of freeloaders became significant, and more importantly, became predominantly home users (who want continuous high bandwidth) rather than passing "war driving" people grabbing a few ks of download for email or a quick website surf purely because it is cool) then it would both cut into the bandwidth available to the person paying for it, and the higher average load curve would alert both the isp and the telco to take a closer look at why that user is using so much bandwidth. This is in a world where you are committing breach of contract to the monopoly telco's isp if you use the unmetered home service and attempt to use a vpn connection to your employer's network (which is "business use" and therefore needs a business dialup account at eight times the cost) and where the unmetered service drops the connection every two hours to prevent you running servers and discourage large downloads.... Yes, I would like to see more MAN "guerrilla" networks to compete with the monopoly telco - both for local links (and a surprising amount of local traffic could happily stay local - particularly most of the high-bandwidth games servers) and voice-over-IP. however, that isn't the same as free internet service, as ultimately someone has to pay for the bandwidth that leaves the local MAN cloud and travels elsewhere - and given the local monopoly telco and the big-name so called "tier one" isps would all want their cut, I can't see free internet ever happening in the UK - however, I *can* see a high-bandwidth, uk only cloud that the majority of the uk users connect to, with mail servers and webservers, supplimented by a dialup isp account for access to the internet as a whole; could that gradually expand until almost everything you need is reachable via "the cloud"? yes, possibly, if you are interested only in stuff on your own continent. but I don't expect to live long enough to see the current hierachical and big-money dominated internet replaced by an anarchistic global cloud - not just because of scaling and routing issues, but because the land surface (and distribution of population centres) is just not continuous enough to support even a continental cloud in my lifetime using current wifi technology - and there is little enough incentive for those with a vested interest in the system remaining as it is now to improve technology until that *is* possible.

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Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 (fwd)
by Dave Howe 30 Nov '02

30 Nov '02

> http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/11/21/yourtech.wifis/index.html Its a nice idea, but unfortunately gets easily bitten by the usual networking bugbears 1. large wifi networks start to hit scaling problems - they start to need routers and name services that are relatively expensive, and ip address ranges start to become a scarce resource. 2. no matter how large the new network becomes, it still needs a link to the "old" network; almost all ISPs frown on use of home connections for sharing more than just the owner's machines, and many consider using even unmetered in a manner they didn't provision for (ie, using unmetered more than 100 hours a month at the full bandwidth limit) as "abuse" and end the contracts of those who do so. what you would need would be an ISP (or large commercial) style contract with a guaranteeed bandwidth and dedicated ip addresses - which do not come cheap enough to be worth giving away. 3. unmetered is only just becoming common in england, and is still mostly on 56K modem. broadband is often *massively* underprovisioned, and quite often all the connections in an area feed to a single fixed-bandwidth multiplexor at the telecomms office, so adding additional connections doesn't actually add any bandwidth at all. the *only* end user deal is 500kb down, 250kb up shared amongst *50* people in your area (the uk has a telecomms monopoly from a recently privatised company that has already forced two would-be competitors out of the market). Even now (given expected usage patterns) the mere existance of a microsoft OS service pack more than 30mb in size is enough to throw available bandwidth per-user below modem levels....

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Anyone heard about the Berkeley college student?
by Tyler Durden 29 Nov '02

29 Nov '02

In the Chinese papers over the last few days they've been reporting an incident that happened to a Chinese UC Berkeley college student, who was using her cell phone to discuss playing some sort of videogame. The videogame involves placing "explosives" in various places in the game. Apparently, whithin minutes after completing the call, police (or other) officers showed up at her room and brought her in for questioning. She apparently brought the officers over to the friend's house to show them the videogame, "proving" that she was indeed talking about a videogame. Has anyone heard of this in the "regular" (ie, non-Chinese) press? The Chinese folks are of course up in arms about the apparent "profiling" this would imply, apparently ignoring the deeper implications. (For instance, did they actually get a wire tap for this monitoring? If so, why? If not, well...) _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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