April 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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Smart inventory control overshoot
by Paul Breed 29 Apr '02

29 Apr '02

I've been working on an old car, in the process of removing the spot welds I needed a specific sized bullet tipped drill bit. The bit would only last about 5 welds and I had hundreds to do. The only place I could find locally to buy the bits was in a pack of 15 various size bits at the local home center. So, over the period of three months, I purchased all of their drill sets, every weekend (usually 3 sets). Now I have disassembled the old car and don't need more bits. The last time I was in the home center they had so many of these drill bit sets that they were overflowing on to the floor. >From my experience the computerized inventory system has a delay of about 3 months. It determined that this item sold out for 12 weeks straight, plugged this into it's inventory tracking prediction S/W and ordered hundreds and hundreds of sets...... ------------------------------

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Smart inventory control overshoot
by Paul Breed 29 Apr '02

29 Apr '02

I've been working on an old car, in the process of removing the spot welds I needed a specific sized bullet tipped drill bit. The bit would only last about 5 welds and I had hundreds to do. The only place I could find locally to buy the bits was in a pack of 15 various size bits at the local home center. So, over the period of three months, I purchased all of their drill sets, every weekend (usually 3 sets). Now I have disassembled the old car and don't need more bits. The last time I was in the home center they had so many of these drill bit sets that they were overflowing on to the floor. >From my experience the computerized inventory system has a delay of about 3 months. It determined that this item sold out for 12 weeks straight, plugged this into it's inventory tracking prediction S/W and ordered hundreds and hundreds of sets...... ------------------------------

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Re: Wireless IP?
by Riad S. Wahby 17 Apr '02

17 Apr '02

Igor Chudov <ichudov(a)Algebra.COM> wrote: > Any practical suggestions will be appreciated. I have a Samsung SCH-8500 cell phone that has a built-in modem. (You connect it to the serial port on your computer via an overpriced cable and send it AT commands.) Using pppd under Linux on both the client and server end, I dial a modem on my home machine. The only other piece of software I use is mgetty on the home machine to actually answer the phone---it hands it off to pppd quite nicely. The mgetty+sendfax documentation and the pppd manpage contain all the information you need to get something similar working for you. -- Riad Wahby rsw(a)jfet.org MIT VI-2/A 2002

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