June 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Home Loans, Refinance, Debt Consolidation - Fast SS
by Phil 30 Jun '02

30 Jun '02

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Re: mount filesystem and run a program when hotplugged
by Paweł Krawczyk 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 05:29:17PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: > I've bought me a little (32 MBytes) hotpluggable USB flash stick (a > TrekStor). It mounts fine, but what I'd like to do is to automount it, and > fire up a program (I intend to put my keyring on it) if hotplugged. You need to enable hot-pluggable devices in your kernel configuration (along with USB storage stuff as well of course). Then, when you insert the flash, kernel will automagically load all necessary drivers and call /sbin/hotplug (path set in /proc), which can be a shell script. >From here you can do everything you want. Actually, those flash devices are quite cool, I'm using them to distribute configuration, keys and software upgrades on my security gateways etc., so feel free to ask if you have any problems. -- Pawe3 Krawczyk * http://echelon.pl/kravietz/ Krakow, Poland * http://ipsec.pl/

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RE: Rendering Unto Ceasar
by R. A. Hettinga 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

<...hypoxic, spittle-soaked screed elided...> (I remember something my brother said to me once, in another context hereabouts, about being careful not to get into a pissing match with a sewer outfall. Oh, well. Hope it was as good for him as it was for me, and all that...) Plutocracy forever, Dr. Brin. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Piracy is wrong
by Jay Jay 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Anonymous <nobody(a)remailer.privacy.at> Date: Sat, 29 Jun 2002 20:16:06 +0200 (CEST) >When an artist releases a song or some other creative product to the >world, they typically put some conditions on it. If you want to listen >to and enjoy the song, you are obligated to agree to those conditions. >If you can't accept the conditions, you shouldn't take the creative work. This assumes the truthfulness of the fundamental premise, that an artist can both share information, and yet control it after it's shared. This is more an artifact of our time than a fundamental moral principle of nature. Throughout most of human history, information was either secret, or it was public knowledge... no other choices. j ________________________________________________________________ Sent via the WebMail system at 1st.net

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Increase Your Business
by Sales Manager 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

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!
by love 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

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Re: [IRR] Brin Responds to Re: Brin
by R. A. Hettinga 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

At 1:49 PM -0400 on 6/29/02, Somebody wrote: > I am delighted to see that David Brin is becoming even more loony with the > passing of time, and even more delighted to find you quoting him. What > else can one do with Brin, but quote him? More than anyone I have ever > known, he debunks himself, thus saving everyone else the time and trouble > of doing so. For this, I am extremely grateful. Most loonies are not so > considerate of other people's time. :-). Unfortunately, I couldn't leave well enough alone, I'm afraid. I haven't gotten flamed in quite a while, but, on the other hand, I haven't written very much get flamed for, I suppose. As friend Rodney Thayer says, you're only as good as the people you piss off. Taken in the spirit offered above, it looks like I've just rattled the bars on the monkey-cage to no good effect. Oh, well. I need to get in the habit of writing again one way or another, even the word-count *is* in the service of an on-line pissing contest... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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RE: Rendering Unto Ceasar
by davidbrin＠cts.com 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

R. A. Hettinga writes: >At 3:31 AM -0700 on 6/29/02, davidbrin(a)cts.com paints a picture out >of the second "Planet of the Apes" movie, Roddy McDowell, Ceasar >Romero, and all...: > >Brin said: >> An AGGRESSIVE approach, barging into the citadels of power, >> ripping the blinds, opening the windows, protecting the >> whistleblowers, siccing elites against each other, unleashing a >> myriad news-hounds and generally stripping the big boys naked! > >Hettinga comments: In other words, using the nation-state (a mob by any other name >smells just same) to solve a technological, a physical, problem. >Shall we legislate pi, while we're at it? Brin's new remise: The attempt to paraphrase me, above, using "in other words", is yet another example of the profound dishonesty we're witnessing here. It truly is pathetic when people feel a need to cram words and meanings into the mouths of other people, in blatant attempts to make them look foolish or to erect strawmen to knock down. In fact, Hettinga's "in other words" above has no relationship to anything I believe, nor to anything I've said. And certainly no relationship to the very paragraph to which he refers! This is truly dismal. >I think my original point about Brin "trusting" the nation-state -- >one I thought fairly tangential to my review of Wayner's excellent >"Translucent Databases", though apparently not tangential enough -- >is proven above, and throughout Dr. Brin's latest fulmination. Meet >the new mob, same as the old mob, with a nod to Mr. Townsend and the >now late Mr. Entwhistle. Please note, not an iota of actual citation or specificity. He avoids addressing the central issue -- that he crammed words and meanings into my mouth that have no bearing on my views - a harmful act since others might believe him. Moreover, he did not offer me a chance to see or comment. Moreover he abused quotation marks. These are my "mob" actions... apparently Hettinga can do whatever he wants to others, but calls it 'mob' when one of those people explicityly and carefully holds him accountable for deliberate untruths. >Sure, we're going to have ubiquitous *supervision* of *property* >using exponentially cheaper charge-coupled camera devices attached to >geodesic internetworks. Moore's, Metcalfe's, Gilder's(?) "laws", will >not be denied. But it will be increasingly done by property owners, >and not by nation states. I think that Brin used his entire book to >grope for that same point, but, apparently, he can't see beyond his >own statist nose to the ultimate answer to the problem he poses >there. At last, a paraphrasing the glancingly touches my actual views. Cameras HAVE proliferated as much in the US as in Britain - though mostly into private hands, rather than the police. This bothers me because ALL elites should be held accountable. Still, dispersal of vision among as wide a variety of elites as possible is certainly preferable. As for 'statist' views... again, pathetic. I am keynote speaker for this year's Libertarian National Convention. Guys like Hettinga hurl such words at anything they do not understand. If it's not their standard line, it must be Big Brother. Feh. >Dr. Brin says something about never hearing of "society", much less a >nation-state, that succeeded in an atmosphere of ubiquitous personal >privacy, and, oddly enough, I believe he's right. First, we haven't >been able to organize in large groups without force monopolies until >now, and second, of course, nation-states probably can't survive in a >world of ubiquitous strong financial cryptography and geodesic >internetworks. Fine. He is proposing an experimental new kind of society. I am willing to listen. Meanwhile, however, I will try to defend THIS society using the tools that have created more freedom and wealth than any other. Forcing accountability upon elites is the method that has worked. A burden of proof falls upon the romantics who propose that we switch to an entirely different strategy of hiding from each other behind masks. In The Transparent Society I pose many many problems with this approach. Instead of making caricatures to avoid arguing, ANSWER those problems, one by one. Convince us this untested prescription will work better than one that is already working well. You may succeed, I have a more open mind than yours, apparently. But for now, I consider masks to be craven. You'll find me, bare-faced, confronting statists and aristocrats and plutocrats and other elites demanding that they strip. Enough. You haven't a clue what I believe Hettinga. You have proved it so leave me OUT of your screeds. Stop lying about me, or I'll hold you accountable again. Others, please let me know if/when he starts in again. Better yet, go listen to honest men. With cordial regards, David Brin www.davidbrin.com

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None
by davidbrin＠cts.com 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

Thanks Bill, for passing on your message, along with the news that I've been dissed and discussed by R.A. Hettinga. Naturally, he never informed me, nor copied me his missives, nor invited me to answer. This appears to be quite typical. Let me make clear, this is not a case of disagreement over public issues of privacy, security and freedom. That topic area merits serious attention by adults, and your attempt, below, to paraphrase my position in The Transparent Society, is an example of adult discourse. Paraphrasing is what men and women do when they truly want to understand another's point of view. They then seek feedback in order to find out if their impressions are right, or if they've been just in their counter-arguments. Your attempt, below, is a good effort. Inaccurate in some details, but also quite interesting. I wish I had time for a full reaction. Perhaps I will try later, after returning from giving a keynote at the Libertarian National Convention. (An irony that will surely gall cypherpunks who routinely insist that theirs is the only possible pro-freedom zeitgeist.) No, my case against Hettinga is much simpler. The man publicly attributed to me views that I do not have, and have never expressed. Views that are, in fact, diametrically opposite to anything that I believe. Moreover, this cannot be due to inadvertence or carelessness, since he used quotation marks, something that an educated person only does when he can back it up with demonstrable citations. Not inadvertence or laziness, then, but rather deliberate falsehood bordering on libel. The man is an outright liar. I had no choice but to say so, lest the words that he tried to cram into my mouth become part of the public record. But enough about such people. They are noisy and - I've learned - quite irrelevant. It's why I no longer bother with cypherpunks. They are romantics who dream of fighting 'Big Brother". If tyranny ever does come, the loudest - already foolishly on record - will never get a chance to try out their fancy spy toys before they are shot. It's up to adults like you and me to see to it that never happens. For you, I'll offer the respect of a (brief) argument. Let's shift from technological determinism (the Moore's Law thing) to basic epistemology. * It is fundamentally impossible ever to verify for certain that someone else does NOT know something. * It is demonstrably possible - though sometimes difficult - to verify that YOU do know something. That's it, in a nutshell. The premise of the cypherpunks - to protect themselves and their freedom from inimical elites by limiting what those elites know - is untenable. Cowering under blankets and covers and shrouds and ciphers cannot possibly work in the long run, because it is based on an absurdity. They will never know which of their encryption programs has a back door, or which anonymity site is a police front. (Hint: they ALL will be.) Cowering can never offer any peace of mind. Moreover, it is a craven, self-centered and ultimately futile approach. In setting me up as a strawman, guys like Hettinga claim that I 'trust' government elites. Hogwash. I am far more suspicious of authority than any of them are! They would pick and choose some elites to trust while focusing their ire on just one (government). I don't trust ANY elite, of government, wealth, criminality or technology. Moreover, I will not cower from them. The only defense of freedom that works is the one americans have used for 200 years. An AGGRESSIVE approach, barging into the citadels of power, ripping the blinds, opening the windows, protecting the whistleblowers, siccing elites against each other, unleashing a myriad news-hounds and generally stripping the big boys naked! These guys see themselves as Keanu Reaves - cheap movie cliche heroes - skipping ratlike through garbage under the dark towers of the Neuromancer zaibatsus, while the rest of their fellow citizens mewl like sheep. Meanwhile, in real life, those citizens are standing up and - en masse - empowering themselves with the very same technology that the cynics and pundits think will enslave us! See: http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm Feh! Dig it, man. My freedom is NOT contingent on blinding govt. Let em see! They will, anyway. Maybe if they see better, they will do their jobs better. So? My freedom is protected by MY ability to supervise govt... to know what they are up to and to hold them accountable if they abuse their power. Not only is that epistemologically possible, it is exactly how we got the freedom we now have! I never said that task would be easy! The present administration makes daily efforts to erect barriers to public oversight and accountability, with vigor unseen since the Sedition Acts. I wish the cypherpunks were helping in the fight to preserve transparency, instead of playing into the concealers' hands. I don't want a blind guard dog. I want a guard dog who can see... but with a fierce choke chain around its neck, controlled by every american who is empowered to clearly supervize what the dog is up to and react quickly if so much as growls in the wrong direction. A few who read this will get it. The rest will call it 'naive', even though it's what worked for us so far. Nor is it any more naive than actually trusting PGP! In ten years, not one cypherpunk has answered my challenge to name a society in history that adopted widespread secrecy as a freedom-protection measure - and thrived. Ours, utilizing the tool of open accountability, has. Oh, one last metaphor. Humans are monkeys. Ever try to BLIND a big monkey? It won't let you! But you can LOOK at a big monkey. You can look at it, and yell for help from other little monkeys if you see it try mischief. You can do that if your top priority is protecting YOUR eyes, not trying to hide. Enough. Thanks again, Bill. Look up Witness.org. They are doing more good in the world than all the cypherpunks, cowering under their fantasy masks... masks that will blow away like dust, if ever a real storm comes. With cordial regards, David Brin www.davidbrin.com Bill Stewart <bill.stewart(a)pobox.com> writes: >Bob - I'm not sure if you copied David separately/Bcc on your reply, >and I've dropped Cc:s to some of your lists that I'm not on, >and I missed your original message that David flamed you for >which you're flaming back about, but.... > >Perhaps I've missed some really critical things the time or two >that I've read "The Transparent Society", or projected too much >liberarian hype into my reading, but to me the big points were >- Moore's Law, etc., will make networked cameras so appallingly cheap > that that they'll be pretty much universal. It'll do it to other > information technologies as well, but the public has an easier time > understanding what a camera means than a database, so that's the > one to focus on when you're writing popular science. > >- Usual digressions into what Moore's Law and cheap and universal mean, > and some implications about the realism of expecations of privacy > that need to be said slowly for people who haven't spent years > talking about geodesic economies and therefore don't get it (:-) > >- Lots of people will be watching you on cameras, either because they > feel like it, or because they're watching something else > and it's too much trouble to not watch you at the same time. > And you'll be watching lots of people or things, for similar reasons, > and realistically there's not much that'll stop it. > >- The government will be watching you, like it or not. > Brin spends a while discussing the issue of whether we should > try to stop them from doing so through legislation, > but basically views it as a lost cause for economic reasons, > and all the related reasons of power, convenience, control, etc. > (I don't remember how much time he spent on the "even if they ban > government from watching you most of the time, they'll always > give themselves exemptions even if they bother following the rules, > so just get used to it" issue, but it was there. Video's too cheap.) > >- We might be watching the government, or we might not, > and the government are the only major group that can easily > make it hard to watch them, because they can throw you in jail > if you get in their face, and they've got enough control over > their actions to make it difficult to watch them. > THIS IS WHERE WE NEED TO FOCUS AS CITIZENS, because if you don't > force them to do their work in the sunshine, they won't, > and because getting them not to watch you is a lost cause. > >- Cypherpunks technologies are mostly a lost cause, because > Bad Guys (mainly the government) will use them to do their bad open >things, > whereas they can put cameras in your ceiling to watch you type >your passwords, > hide bugs under your bed (next to the Communists) to listen to the > conversations you're having on your EnCryptoPhone, etc. > Making sure the government is maximally watchable is more important, > and if you say you're allowed to hide your actions, > they'll make sure they're allowed to hide theirs, > and they're better at this organized coercion thing than you are. > >Perhaps I'm putting words in Brin's mouth, especially about the latter, >but it has seemed to have been the major bone of contention >between Brin and various Cypherpunks. Meanwhile, Big Brother *is* >increasingly watching us, even if in GeodesicWorld nobody else >has bothered paying enough to watch hi-res videos of most of us very often, >and BB is trying very hard to make himself much less accountable, >because if we can see where George is, we can question him, >and if that happens, the Terrorists Have Won... > > (Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has been promising > heavy scrutiny of the Worldcom Debacle, if nothing else because > they're so pleased to have dishonesty from somebody who's > not in the Oil Business or Military-Industrial Complex for a change.) > > >At 12:54 PM 06/25/2002 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >>I should say, at this point in things, that I've never complained at >>all about Brin's heralding some mechanical ubiquity of *observation*, >>per se, any more than I complain about the market, celestial >>mechanics, or the weather. You can't fight Moore's (or Metcalfe's, or >>whoever's) Law, and all that. >> >>I *do* think that observation done by people of their own property >>(call it supervision, I guess), is much better than observation by >>states of their own citizens (call that surveillance). In fact, I >>would go far enough to say that the former is just plain common >>sense, and the latter is the very definition of totalitarianism. >>... >>Put in less Proustian terms, the *market* for such things will >>determine which side will prevail: Monopolistic surveillance with the >>"consent" of the "governed", versus the supervision of private >>property by a whole swarm of individual market actors. It will not be >>decided, as some people seem to want, Dr. Brin among them, >>apparently, by having two "monkeys" fight it out in an internet zoo >>cage somewhere about who gets to control some pile of intellectual >>bananas.

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Herbal Viagra 30 day trial.... UQYU
by Olivia 29 Jun '02

29 Jun '02

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