August 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Hollywood Hackers
by A.Melon 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

Jack Lloyd wrote: >On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Steve Schear wrote: > >> Looks amazingly familiar. Could it be, could be, could it be.... Mojo >> Nation (now MNet http://mnet.sourceforge.net )? > >Or OpenCM (http://www.opencm.org) > -Jack On the OpenCM webpage, it proclaims on the right hand side: OpenCM is designed as a secure, high-integrity replacement for CVS. Briefly, OpenCM provides ... cryptographic authentication and access control,... The OpenCM project was originally started because we needed a secure, high-integrity configuration management system and on the left hand side of the page it says: At the moment, we do not support non-Javascript browsers. If they are concerned about security, Shouldn't they be avoiding javascript?

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SAP,saps.
by Matthew X 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

Software giant SAP said Wednesday that it scored one of its biggest sales in three years, inking a deal with Ford Motor. The company will supply business applications to the automaker and its logistics partner, Caterpillar. FROM http://news.com.com/2100-1017-947503.html?tag=fd_top Stop Tax-Funded US Aid To Israel NOW ! ... *****. Check Out These Featured Articles: Why the US Supports Israel, by Steven Zunes. The Caterpillar Effect, by Neve Gordon. *****. SUSTAIN ... Description: Advocating the end of United States tax-funded aid to Israel, and supporting the Palestinian movement... Category: Society > Issues > ... > Middle East > Israel-Palestine > Organizations www.sustaincampaign.org/ - 34k - Cached - Similar pages Stop Tax-Funded US Aid To Israel NOW ! ... When Caterpillar began doing business with Israel, it could not have known that its products -- which are manufactured for civilian use -- would be employed to ... www.sustaincampaign.org/cat_gordon.html - 26k - Cached - Similar pages Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights - Home/What's New ... ... Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights. Caterpillar should end aiding Israel's demolishing of Palestinian homes Jerusalem - 2 March 2002. ... www.jcser.org/english/caterpillar.html - 9k - Cached - Similar pages The FORD_German tradition is a longie I guess,kinda like shrubs grandpappy.

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Is Your Financial Future Setup the Way it Should Be?
by pcwealth＠yahoo.com 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

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Human rights! Democracy! You must be insane!
by Matthew X 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

JUDICIAL PSYCHIATRY IN CHINA AND ITS POLITICAL ABUSES Robin Munro During the 1970s and 1980s, reports that the security authorities in the Soviet Union were incarcerating substantial numbers of dissidents in mental asylums aroused widespread concern in the West. As the quantity and reliability of the documentary evidence and victim testimonies steadily increased, the issue of politically directed psychiatry in the Soviet Union quickly became, along with political imprisonment and the refusal of the authorities to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate, a third principal item of human rights contention in Soviet-Western relations. By January 1983, a protracted campaign by Western psychiatric professional bodies and international human rights organizations led to a decision by the Soviet All-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists to withdraw from the World Psychiatric Association in order to avoid almost certain expulsion. It was not readmitted to the body until 1989, after several years of perestroika and the preliminary establishment of direct access by Western psychiatric delegations to Soviet forensic-psychiatric institutions and their alleged mentally ill political inmates. The subject of forensic psychiatry in China has thus far received little academic attention outside of China. A number of very detailed and informative studies of China's general psychiatric and mental healthcare system have been written, but these have rarely addressed the legal or forensic dimension of the topic in significant depth. In particular, very little documentary or other evidence has hitherto come to light suggesting that abusive practices similar to those that occurred in the former Soviet Union might also have existed, or might even still be found, in China. The general assumption has therefore been that the Chinese authorities, despite their poor record in many other areas of human rights concern, have at least never engaged in the political misuse of psychiatry. This article seeks to challenge and correct that assumption. From the early 1990s onwards, scattered reports from China began to indicate that individual dissidents and other political nonconformists were being subjected to forensic psychiatric appraisal by the police and then committed to special psychiatric hospitals on an involuntary and indefinite basis. One prominent example was that of Wang Wanxing, a middle-aged worker who had first been arrested in the mid-1970s for supporting the then officially denounced policies of Deng Xiaoping. Partially rehabilitated after the death of Mao, Wang resumed his political-activist career in the 1980s and became personally acquainted with the student leaders of the spring 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing. In June 1992, he unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square calling for greater human rights and democracy in China, was immediately arrested, and then sent to an institution for the criminally insane in the outskirts of the capital, where he remained - diagnosed by police psychiatrists as a "paranoid psychotic" - until early 1999. In November of that year, after he announced his intention to hold a press conference with foreign journalists to discuss his ordeal, he was again detained and sent back to the same psychiatric detention facility for an indeterminate period. Wang's case and others like it have been the subject of several statements of concern to the Chinese authorities by relevant bodies of the United Nations. Another recent example is that of Xue Jifeng, an unofficial labor-rights activist who in December 1999 was detained by police in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, for attempting to hold a meeting with other labor activists and independent trades-unionists. He was then committed involuntarily to the Xinxiang Municipal Mental Hospital, where he remained as of December 2000. Xue was reportedly being force-fed psychiatric drugs and held in a room with mental patients who kept him awake at night and harassed him by day. Moreover, this was his second forced term in a mental hospital for "illegal" labor activities. The first came in November 1998, after he tried to pursue legal action against local Party officials who he alleged had swindled, through a bogus commercial fundraising scheme, thousands of his fellow residents of their life savings. On that occasion, more than 2,000 people staged a public demonstration in Zhengzhou demanding their money back and calling for Xue's release. Finally, in July 1999, the Chinese government launched a major and continuing campaign of repression against the Falun Gong spiritual movement, a neotraditional sectarian group, several months after the group staged a massive peaceful demonstration outside the Zhongnanhai headquarters of the Chinese leadership. Over the past year or so, numerous reports have appeared indicating that practitioners of Falun Gong were also being forcibly sent to mental hospitals by the police authorities. The overseas Falun Gong support network has so far compiled details of around 100 named individuals who have been dealt with in this manner, while overall estimates suggest the total number may be as high as 600. To date, reports indicate that three Falun Gong practitioners have died as a direct result of their detention and mistreatment in Chinese mental asylums. These disturbing cases highlight the need for a comprehensive reexamination of our previous understanding of the role and purposes of forensic psychiatry in China, both historically and contemporaneously. MORE http://www.columbia.edu/cu/asiaweb/JAL001_1.htm

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Linked
by Matthew X 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

Missed this link! http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23539 Linked Albert-Laszlo Barabasi $26 Perseus Nexus (Small World in Britain) Mark Buchanan $25.95/£18.99 W. W. Norton/Weidenfeld & Nicolson America's baseball superstar Yogi Berra has a sideline as a man-in-the-street philosopher. His epigram, "It's déjà vu all over again", sprang to mind while I was reading Linked and Nexus. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Mark Buchanan deal with the emerging science of networks - how they form, how information and matter move through them, how puzzling aspects of everyday life can be explained by understanding their dynamics. What's the message, then? Simply that all networks - -the Internet, terrorist groups, multinational industries, interstate highways, Amazonian ecosystems - follow the same simple and powerful rules. The "science of networks" has sprung up to uncover these rules, and provide a firm foundation for the care and feeding of these interconnected patterns. Curious as to how Google came to be the most popular search engine on the Internet or what it would take to dismantle the Al Qaida terrorist network? The Barabasi volume will tell you. But if you want to understand the spread of infectious disease, how riots form or why the rich always seem to get richer, then Buchanan's treatment is for you. The mathematician Paul Erdös published over 1500 papers with 507 co-authors before his death in 1996. This prodigious output gave rise to something mathematicians call the "Erdös number," an integer representing the number of steps between Erdös and any given mathematician. Erdös obviously has Erdös number 0. Anyone who wrote a paper with him has number 1. Anyone who co-authored a paper with one of Erdös's co-authors has number 2, and so on. A low Erdös number is a matter of considerable pride among mathematicians, so important in fact that there is a Web page devoted to keeping track of the Erdös number of thousands of mathematicians. What is quite astonishing is that almost everyone - even a non-mathematicians like Bill Gates - has a very low Erdös number, typically between 2 and 5. This is a quintessential example of what Barabasi and Buchanan call the "small worlds" phenomenon. Basically, this web of science is a small world because it is a highly interconnected web, in which almost all mathematicians are closely linked to each other via a short path of co-authored papers. The network of mathematicians and their Erdös numbers serves as a prototype for just about every human social network - including the Internet, as both Barabasi and Buchanan show. Suppose you look at a particular Web page and ask how many clicks of your mouse it takes to get from this page to any other page via hyperlinks. Barabasi and his students actually did this calculation for their website at the University of Notre Dame. It contained 325,729 documents connected by 1,469,680 links. Counting up how many pages had one link, two links, and so on, they discovered that the number of pages having a certain number of links decreased by about a factor of five each time the number of links was doubled. These results lead to a simple relationship between the number of links in a network and the number of nodes in the network having that many links. Called a "power law", this relationship forms a central principle by which networks structure themselves. As both authors point out, power laws play as important a role in understanding networks as the famed bell curve of the normal probability distribution plays in understanding the role in statistics of independent random variables, such as a person's height. Two other extremely important rules of networks are also considered in some detail in each of these books. One of these is the "weak link" discovered some 30 years ago by sociologist Mark Granovetter. It refers to the seemingly paradoxical fact that the most important connections for spreading information throughout a network are not the people who are most closely connected to you. Rather, the key "connectors" are those who form a bridge between the cluster of people you know and other, similar clusters of close acquaintances of your friends. Thus, the links in a social network are not established at random. Instead,they are strongly clustered, and some of the connections are more important than others - that is, the ones enabling one cluster to link to another. These "busy bees" with an uncommonly large number of links to many clusters are the people writer Malcolm Gladwell claims are responsible for creating fashions and trends. They make deals happen and generally serve as agents or middlemen who "tip" things in one direction instead of another. The central idea of his book The Tipping Point (reviewed by Paul Marsden, 6 May, page 46) is that tiny and apparently insignificant changes can often have consequences out of all proportion to themselves, accounting for the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers or the rise of teenage smoking. Both Buchanan and Barabasi give enlightening accounts of both Granovetter's and Gladwell's work. Dig in, too, for fascinating accounts of the stability of food webs, the formation of "old boys" networks, the "new economy", the human genome, and much, much more. Both books are extremely well-written, entertaining accounts aimed at the intelligent lay audience. The overlap is inevitable: Barabasi and Buchanan employ the same anecdotes, talk about the same people and use similar diagrams to illustrate their message. Even the size and price of their two books are roughly the same. You could call them two peas in a pod - but their flavours are distinct. In short, both are to be heartily welcomed as about the best introduction you could hope to get to the whys and wherefores of networks, human and non-human. John Casti is at the Technical University of Vienna

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Re: Pizza with a credit card
by Michael Motyka 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

> > One useful piece of advice: > > > > Don't but pizza with a credit card: > > SNIP > > > > Course all those terrorists buying their pizzas with cash get away clean. > > > I've wondered for years how much longer this > will be allowed. Cash is still viable. Not > as viable as it was 10, or even 5 years ago. > I am still able to travel with only cash, buy > a pizza with only cash, or other food, still > buy groceries without having to produce mein > ausweiss (why I stopped shopping at CostCo > years back). But it is all getting stickier. > Quite clearly cash has got to go! I'm not sure how tough this would be to sneak past the slumbering electorate. Pretty tough I expect. But the usage level is certainly going down while the percentage of electronic transactions is skyrocketing. We've even had concresscritters suggesting that the transport of $10K !interstate! should be illegal. I think this came up when the most recent international transport rule changes were made. It's getting more wierd every week now. An adjustment in the other direction will come along soon - I hope but doubt.

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new rulers of the world,review.
by Matthew X 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23542 The New Rulers of the World John Pilger $19/£10 Verso ASSUMING US propaganda is accurate, President George W. Bush is intending to bomb Iraq as part of his war on terrorism. If you want to know just how big a mistake that would be, read John Pilger's latest tour de force. Iraq's 22 million people are already the victims of a 12-year "medieval blockade" imposed by the US and British governments, argues the campaigning journalist. The UN Children's Fund says that these sanctions are the main reason why up to 6000 Iraqi children die every month. And the justification put about by US intelligence for an attack on Iraq is a myth: there is no evidence that it has any weapons of mass destruction. According to Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, the threat the country poses is "zero". Pilger also condemns the US bombing of Afghanistan, which one study said killed 3800 civilians between 7 October and 10 December last year. The overthrow of the Taliban regime has brought only minimal change, he says. The amount of time that corpses are hung out in public, for example, has reduced from four days to 15 minutes. As well as essays on Iraq and Afghanistan, The New Rulers of the World includes writing based on Pilger's TV documentaries about corporate power carving up Indonesia and the apartheid suffered by Aborigines in Australia. They are all empirical, angry and well-referenced; they illustrate his essential argument that the imperial power wielded by rich states and multinational corporations, led by the US, is far more destructive than any terrorist organisation. The terrible irony is that the US bombing of Afghanistan, and the proposed bombing of Iraq, create and reinforce the very conditions which breed extremism. In the aftermath of 11 September, Pilger points out, the point was powerfully made by Robin Theurkauf, a lecturer in international law at Yale University. "Terrorist impulses ferment in poverty, oppression and ignorance," she wrote. "The elimination of these conditions and the active promotion of a universal respect for human rights must become a priority." Her husband, Tom, had been killed in the attack on the Twin Towers.

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2 new books on networks,'linked' and "nexus'
by Matthew X 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

27 july new scientist dead tree may be worth a squiz in the newsagents... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738206679/qid=1028202873/sr=2-1/ref… Reviews of 2 books 'Linked' and 'Nexus' Popular science,I personally want to identify and target significant nodes. 13 years later New Scientist is living down 'cold fusion'...,just.

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White House Sounds Call For New Internet Standards
by Steve Schear 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

WHITE HOUSE SOUNDS CALL FOR NEW INTERNET STANDARDS The Bush administration's cyber security czar, Richard Clarke, said it might be time to replace the "creaky, cranky" 20-year-old protocols that drive the Internet with standards better able to accommodate a flood of new wireless devices. Wireless devices, it is feared, may introduce large security holes to the network. The White House is working with the private sector to draft a national plan to secure the country's most vital computer networks from cyber attack. The plan, expected to be released September 18, will include several policy recommendations for wireless security. Clarke stated that the administration had an obligation to take an active role in ensuring the security of the Internet, especially since nearly 81 percent of major businesses today use, or plan to use, wireless networks. [SOURCE: The Washington Post, AUTHOR: Brian Krebs] <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22535-2002Jul30.html>

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No wardriving in the war room.
by Matthew X 01 Aug '02

01 Aug '02

You cant fight in here! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24904-2002Jul31.html The Defense Department, concerned that hackers or spies might eavesdrop on classified meetings or secretly track the locations of top U.S. officials, is imposing new limits on its workers' use of the latest generation of wireless devices inside military buildings. Wonder if these are covered http://www.cpen.com/

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