February 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

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: Sheeple Land With Hands on Heads
by Riad S. Wahby 12 Feb '02

12 Feb '02

Steve Schear <schear(a)lvcm.com> wrote: > I've been thing about this the past few days. From what I've read the > executive jets are not required to adhere to the same restrictions as the > public flights, partly because they are not public carriers. Shared exec > jet services allow a lower buy-in than sole use at a fixed monthly rate > plus a premium to be paid every time you use a plane. What if a scheduled > airline was formed that required all passengers to be part owners, just > like a shared exec jet (so they are not public carriers), plus a > competitive fare each time you use one of your planes? Might it be > possible to bypass all that crap by leaving from the exec terminal? The enhanced security regulations apply only to airplanes flying under FAR part 121---airplanes with 10 or more passengers onboard. Those airplanes operating under FAR part 135 (9 or fewer passengers---what most general aviation pilots fly) are not subject to the same security procedures; for the most part, I'd expect that people and companies who don't fly commercial airlines are more or less ignoring the enhanced security bullshit. (There are other requirements for FAR part 121---max gross weight, etc.---but for the most part, you expect that 10 or more passengers is 121, 9 or fewer is 135.) Up until some time in 1997, pilots who were certified only for part 135 could still fly small commuter planes. The Clinton administration enacted the "single level of safety" rules that required all commercial carriers to operate under 121, mostly due to pressure from various interests after the several ValuJet-style crashes. However, charters and private airplanes are still almost exclusively operated under 135. As to your idea for a buy-in airline, the biggest problem is going to be that you have to have 9 or fewer people on each flight. Because of that, it's going to be prohibitively expensive (you're going to be investing $5M to $10M on the plane initially, plus operating costs around $1k/hour of flight, if not more). -- Riad Wahby rsw(a)jfet.org MIT VI-2/A 2002

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