December 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002
by Steve Schear 03 Dec '02

03 Dec '02

At 12:54 PM 12/3/2002 -0500, Sunder wrote: >Simple. Signal strength from at least three access points will pinpoint >your location. If any of the AP's have known GPS coordinates, your >location can be interpolated. > >To fix this, change your MAC address (or whatever WiFi uses for that), >randomly every time you move around, and don't share things that can >identify your machine. i.e don't run things such as SMTP, FTP, Microsoft >File sharing which give away your host name, and don't accept cookies from >web sites that can track you, and make sure your browser doesn't leak your >email address, and be aware that anything you do can be sniffed. In the late 70s, I was at TRW we built inflatable (beach ball) antennas for a black project. About 1/3 of the balloon's inside surface was aluminized and the feed was simply snapped into place at the opposite side. The antenna could either be used hand-held or place in a ring mount on a flat surface. This sort of approach could work well for cell phones and WiFi cards with external antenna port. For cell phones the entire instrument could be placed in at the reflector's focus and operated via a mic/headset adapter (some older Nokia models have an external antenna port behind a small rubber plug on the rear.) A State must pay attention to virtue, because the law is a covenant or a guarantee of men's just claims, but it is not designed to make the citizens virtuous and just -- Aristotle

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Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002
by Peter Fairbrother 03 Dec '02

03 Dec '02

Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, Dave Howe wrote: > >> ah. Sorry, I don't think of dns as a name service (apart from once >> removed) - we are talking DHCP or similar routable-address assignment. > > You can use GPS as naming service (name collisions are then equivalent to > physical space collisions). You can actually label the nodes > automagically, once you know that it's a nearest-neighbour mesh spanned > over patches of Earth surface. You can use signal strenght and > relativistic ping to make mutual time of flight triangulation. It is a > good idea to use a few GPS anchor nodes, so that all domains are > consistent. What I don't understand is how a node knows the location of a person who moves about in the first place. Also, I don't like the idea that my location is known by the location of my equipment. But I know very little about geographical routing. -- Peter Fairbrother

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Re: A couple of book questions...(one of them about Completeness)
by Tyler Durden 03 Dec '02

03 Dec '02

Well, this is quite a post, and I agree with most of it. As for the Godel stuff, there's a part of it with which I disagree (or at least as far as I take what you said). >If you want >to compare something mathematically you -must- use the same axioms and >rules of derivation. The -only- discussion there is one of two parts: >Is the sequence of applications/operators valid? (ie Proof) >Is the sequence terminal, does it leave room for more derivation? > (ie Publish or Perish) Well, not necessarily, unless I misunderstand you. Take the Fermat's last theorem example I gave (a^n+b^n=c^n for a,b,c,n integers but n>2). And let's say I want to "prove" (or disprove) the statement "This has no solution for n>2. There are two 'distinct' methods of determining the validity of the statement. One is by what is normally considered a "proof". In other words, by building up from axioms using the logical rules of the system. The other is to actually find a solution for a,b,c and n. In this case the statement will have been disproven, but not by a series of logical statements and axioms. It is now seen to be "untrue", but not via the methods of "proof". Thus, the statement is untrue, and (possibly) unprovably untrue (which is the same thing as saying the statement's negation is "unprovably true"). Now if subsequent truths need to be made but require the statement above (a^n+b^n=c^n has no solution for n>2), even though we know that it is true (or untrue, in my example above), to build subsequent truths we need to include this statement as an axiom even though we know it's true. It's "true", but unprovable. But perhaps this is what you meant. >And no, there is zero confusion on what true means under Godel or Cauchy. Yes, I agree, and the confusion to which I referred had to do with the term "true" as it seemed to be used by various parties in the conversation. From this alone I think a big "take away" here is that "true" in the Godelian sense means something probably quite different from what many believe it to be. >The reality is that most people have problems grasping concepts or >ideas because there is a conflict with other ideas/concepts they hold dear >and near. In most cases of mental block it is an emotional issue not an >intellectual one. People have a hard time learning not because they are >stupid but because they don't deal with their emotional landscape >effectively. Couldn't agree more. "Reason is the whore of desire." Well, not always, but its clear to me that most of the time we start with the conclusion we want and then work backwards! Most human beings seem to stumble upon some little piece of flotsam and then cling onto it for dear life, not knowing they can actually swim (or perhaps they don't need to!). I don't consider myself an exception, except for the fact that knowing this, I constantly try to expose myself to information and experiences that do not correspond to what I currently believe. As the spanish mystic St John of the Cross wrote: "To come to be what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not. To come to know what you know not, you must go by a way in which you know not." _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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test post from ???
by An Metet 02 Dec '02

02 Dec '02

do not reply!

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Wireless Routing, Position Inference (was Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade)
by Major Variola (ret) 02 Dec '02

02 Dec '02

At 02:57 PM 12/2/02 +0000, Peter Fairbrother wrote: > >What I don't understand is how a node knows the location of a person who >moves about in the first place. > >Also, I don't like the idea that my location is known by the location of my >equipment. But I know very little about geographical routing. I'll bite. Lets think about fundamentals, and play the adversary game. If I know that you can receive in *any wireless* system, then I know something about your location. This includes nets with huge 'cells', like a 100,000 watt commercial broadcast station (are you listening to KFOO or WFOO?), and nets with smaller cells, like the 'cellular' phones and 802.11foo meshes. The only difference (albeit a significant one) is the size of the cell ---the smaller your cells the more bits I get about your location. (Barring cypherpunk jokesters who make cell calls from the foci of dishes to hit another base station...) Of course if you're needing to transmit, you give your location. If you're needing to receive, and you roam beyond the diameter of a single 'cell', you are going to have to transmit your location (think cell phones) for routing XOR the system has no routing and must broadcast to all cells (think pagers) (you might consider the physical cells merged into a large single virtual cell in this case.). This latter doesn't scale. ---- Got Yagis?

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Re: A couple of book questions...(one of them about Completeness)
by Tyler Durden 02 Dec '02

02 Dec '02

>That any particular string can be -precisely- defined as truth or false >as required by the definition of completeness, is what is not possible. Here we come down to what appears to be at the heart of the confusion as far as I see it. "True", depending on who's saying it (even in a discussion of Godelian Completeness), may be different. Mathematical types may define "true" as being "provably true", meaning something like "this statement can be derived from the other statements in my system by building up from logic plus the fundamental axioms". In Godel, in any formal system there are statements that are true but unprovable in that system. This would seem to render the notion of "true" above meaningless. But what it means in a "practical" sense is that there may be truisms (such as, "there exists no solution to the problem of a^n + b^n = c^n, where a,b,c and n are integers and n>2"), which are true (and let's face it, this statement is either true or false) but which can not be proven given the fundamental axioms of the system. Thus, in order to build more mathematics with this "truth", it must be incoroprated as an axiom. (Godel also says that after this "incoporation" is done, there will now be new unprovable statements.) I originally mentioned Godel in the context of the notion of the dificulty of factoring large numbers. My point was that its possible that... 1) Factoring is inherently difficult to do, and no mathematical advances will ever change that. and 2) We may never be able to PROVE 1 above. Thus, we may have to forever live with the uncertainty of the difficulty of factorization. _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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

02 Dec '02

at Monday, December 02, 2002 8:42 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org> was seen to say: > No, an orthogonal identifier is sufficient. In fact, DNS loc would be > a good start. I think what I am trying to say is - given a "normal" internet user using IPv4 software that wants to connect to someone "in the cloud", how does he identify *to his software* the machine in the cloud if that machine is not given a unique IP address? few if any IPv4 packages can address anything more complex than a IPv4 dotted quad (or if given a DNS name, will resolve same to a dotted quad) > The system can negotiate whatever routing method it uses. If the node > doesn't understand geographic routing, it falls back to legacy > methods. odds are good that "cloud" nodes will be fully aware of geographic routing (there are obviously issues there though; given a node that is geographically "closer" to the required destination, but does not have a valid path to it, purely geographic routing will fail and fail badly; it may also be that the optimum route is a longer but less congested (and therefore higher bandwidth) path than the direct one. For a mental image, imagine a circular "cloud" with a H shaped hole in it; think about routing between the "pockets" at top and bottom of the H, now imagine a narrow (low bandwidth) bridge across the crossbar (which is a "high cost" path for traffic). How do you handle these two cases?

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Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 (fwd)
by Eugen Leitl 02 Dec '02

02 Dec '02

On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Dave Howe wrote: > without routing and name services, you have what amounts to a propriatory I believe I mentioned geographic routing (which is actually switching, and not routing) so your packets get delivered, as the crow flies. The question of name services. How often do you actually use a domain name as an end user? Not very often. People typically use a search engine. It doesn't matter how the URI looks like, as long as it can be clicked on, or is short enough to be cut and pasted, or written down on a piece of paper and entered manually, in a pinch. So you need (distributed) searching and document (not machine) address spaces, which current P2P suites create the architecture for. > NAT solution - no way to address an interior node on the cloud from the It depends on how large the network is. Wireless is potentially a much bigger node cloud, so the current Internet could became a 'proprietary niche' eventually. However, there is no reason why the nodes wouldn't have a second address, or the IPv6 address would double as a geographic coordinate. At least during the migration. > internet (and hence, peer to peer services or any other protocol that > requires an inbound connection not directly understood by the nat > translation - eg ftp on a non standard port or ssl-encrypted as ftps) Fear not. > under ipv6 you can avoid having to have a explicit naming service - the You obviously understand under naming service something other than DNS. > cloud id of the card (possibly with a network prefix to identify the cloud > as a whole) can *be* the unique name; routing is still an issue but that Anything which relies on global routing tables and their refresh will always has an issue. Which is why geographical local-knowledge routing will dominate global networks. > reduces to being able to route to a unique node inside the cloud - which > appears from a brief glance at the notes from Morlock Elloi (thanks again :) > to have at least a workable trial solution. if a IPv6 internet ever becomes > a reality, clouds would fit right in. It is a patch, not a solution. But wireless ad hoc meshes are really a first real reason to go IPv6. > TCP/IP tunnelling without a name service at at least one end isn't workable; > *static* NAT/PAT is of course a name service and can't be considered, but > SOCKS and socks aware p2p is a definite possibility. The best solution would seem to leave the multilingual node the choice of means of delivery. It would be completely transparent to the packet.

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Re: Question on P=NP
by Peter Wayner 02 Dec '02

02 Dec '02

At 8:55 AM -0800 12/1/02, Sarad AV wrote: >hi, > >Is the problem P=NP or not 'Decidable'. I don't even think we know. I vaguely remember someone saying that it would be really fascinating if it turned out not to be decidable. -Peter

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Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 (fwd)
by Tyler Durden 01 Dec '02

01 Dec '02

"Photons are bosons, so they don't interact with each other. Photon detectors can and usually have anisotropic sensitivity. Sure you can never beat fiber, but line of sight is free..." Well, by interfere I meant in the detectors of course. So are you telling me that two WiFi receivers pointed in different directions will not receive the same information? I don't think WiFi (IR) is all that directional is it? If it is, then maybe we CAN have a new LAN segment. >From: Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org> >To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina(a)hotmail.com> >CC: <cypherpunks(a)lne.com> >Subject: Re: CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 >(fwd) >Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 11:39:37 +0100 (CET) > >On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Tyler Durden wrote: > > > I just don't see how a single WiFi cloud will be able to scale very far. >All > > the WiFi users within "eyeshot" of each other are always going to >contend > > for bandwidth, no? It'll be just like the old half-duplex 10BaseT copper > >There is limited bandwidth within a cell, if you use omni radiators. How >high is the limit? No one knows, but you can get 100 MBits/s with current >ultrabroadband prototypes. Then you have stuff like > > http://www.mobileinfo.com/News_2002/Issue05/NTT_2.5gps.htm > >Wireless Transfer Rate of 10 Gbps Possible, NTT says > >Always stretching the boundaries of wireless communications is Japanese >telecom NTT. > >The company?s most recent accomplishment was achieving a peak data >transfer rate of 2.5 Gbps, breaking the recorded rate of 1 Gbps; NTT >researchers now believe they will eventually break the 10 Gbps barrier. > >As the airwaves become increasingly congested, exploring uncharted >airwaves could pay NTT high dividends in the future. > >As an article in ComputerWire explains, NTT's solution has been to harness >new electronic and optical technologies to access the empty 120 GHz radio >band. Optical systems are used to generate the original signal which is >passed, using amplitude modulation to a 300 GHz photodiode, which creates >an electrical signal that is passed to a direct slot antenna. The key to >the whole process is the 300 GHz photodiode, which harnesses optical >technology, in this case the Lithium Niobate substrate originally designed >for light switching, to the business of generating an electrical signal. > >Commercial viability is still a ways off. At the moment, the sustained >1.25 Gbps signal generates a range of only 50 cm. Nevertheless, as demand >for wireless services out strips available spectrum, NTT will no doubt >find itself swarmed by partners and competitors alike. > >Then, you have funky stuff like antenna arrays. People have started >tinkering on MEMS galvanometers lately, which would allow to use line of >sight lasers across free space without need for manual alignment; possibly >dynamically tracking moving objects. > > > LANs. And I still don't understand how a WiFi router will help you...if >the > >Current routers use an omni to cover local area, and directional aeries to >create a mesh with their peers. Directional aerials for long-range >connections have both a longer range and are less sensitive to crosstalk >from the omni. > > > different Layer2 LANs overlap in space at all, they'll interfere with >each > > other optically even if they are on different segments. (With copper you > >Photons are bosons, so they don't interact with each other. Photon >detectors can and usually have anisotropic sensitivity. Sure you can never >beat fiber, but line of sight is free... > > > didn't even have this problem.) Thus, aren't you stuck with zillions o > > little WiFi islands that must not overlap without things getting very >slow? > >No. > > > As for service providers not wanting freeloaders, I'd point out that DSL > > "cares" much less....the DSL connection is mapped over ATM and is >basically > >If I have a P2P infrastructure run on end-user owned hardware (little >boxes glued to windowpanes) across an urban area with ~100 MBps/cell there >is not all that much use for an ISP. > >Things only become difficult if you want to crosslink cities. Here you >have to use fiber, or similiar. > > > a dedicated connection to a router port, with fixed bandwidth in either > > direction. Whether that port is processing lots of freeloader packets or > > idle packets from a single dedicated user shouldn't matter much. > > > > Uh, but now that I think of it ATM does allow for some oversubscription, >so > > in order to maximize the conection between the DSLAM and the ATM switch > > that's in front of the router (it might be in thesame box as the router, >I > > know!), maybe they'l discourage freeloading. BUT, DSL companies have >been > > touting that they're very happy for you to put a home-based LAN on your >side > > of the connection (Cable Modem providers don't normally like that). _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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