September 2002 - cypherpunks-legacy

seeking information for Wired News article
by R. A. Hettinga 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

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Warchalking?
by Matthew X 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

Chalking It Up To Experience Graphic artist Sean McDonough, a 34-year-old Canadian citizen, doesn't seem like a security threat. He's polite, soft-spoken, clean-shaven, and owns a one-bedroom condo in an exclusive downtown Toronto neighborhood. But on Wednesday night, when McDonough arrived by Greyhound bus at the Buffalo, N.Y., Peace Bridge border checkpoint on his way to participate in Sunday's Kennedy Center Open House Arts Festival he was denied entry and sent packing back to Toronto. "Everybody got off the bus and went into the waiting area. I was pretty well held over while everybody else was allowed to go ahead," McDonough told us yesterday, a couple of hours before making his second attempt to cross the border in order to take part in Edwin Fontanez's Washington Chalk Festival, a Kennedy Center tradition. "I answered a lot of questions. I showed them my sketchbook. When I said I was going down for a chalk drawing festival, the lady got very suspicious. She said, 'Are you going to sell any of your art?' And I said no. She said, 'How do I know that?' And I said, 'I guess you'll have to take my word for it.' And so they rejected me." We tried to obtain an explanation from the appropriate federal officials. McDonough said he noticed the blue uniforms and sidearms of U.S. Customs officers, but a Customs Service spokesman sent us to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS told us Customs was responsible. "He's an artist: If he says they were wearing blue uniforms, that's good enough for me," an INS public affairs officer said. But then Customs insisted that INS did the deed. "This is not the first time that Customs has bounced something back to us," the INS flack responded. But later we were told, confidentially, that the INS had filed an incident report describing its role. Department of Homeland Security, anyone?

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Anne thrax needs an asslift.
by Matthew X 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

Is Human Uzi Ann Coulter 38 or 40 years old? And when she insists that she's the former, is she telling a fib? The right-wing media scourge who has been getting plenty of ink for her best-selling book, "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right" frequently scorches hapless reporters who dare write that she's no longer in her thirties. Newsday's Aileen Jacobson who was planning to rely on numerous published accounts, including People magazine's, that Coulter is 40 let her subject argue her into using the younger age in a recent profile. "Media accounts that she's 40 are wrong, she maintains," Jacobson wrote. But yesterday Jacobson told us: "I do believe that she is 40." London Telegraph writer Toby Harnden, meanwhile, wrote in his July 19 piece: "An air of mystery surrounds Coulter's age. She says she is 38 but her publicist puts her at 40. After the interview, she sends me an e-mail: 'I think you should go with one of the incorrect younger ages.' " Ann Coulter: 38 and holding firm? (Dayna Smith - The Washington Post/File Photo) Our own investigation revealed that: * Coulter's Connecticut driver's license lists her birth as December 1961. * Her D.C. driver's license, acquired many years later, says she was born in December 1963. * The birth date on file at the New Canaan, Conn., voter registration office is Dec. 8, 1961. In an effort to clear up all this confusion, a member of The Post's crack research team phoned the New Canaan registrar of voters, who chuckled, checked his records and reported that Coulter registered to vote in 1980, when presumably she was the legal minimum voting age of 18. That would make her 40 today. But when we reached Coulter, she predictably stuck to her guns. "It's like the difference in being thrown off the 13th floor or the roof," she e-mailed us. "So the upside is, I'm two years younger than at least some newspapers have said I am, but the downside is, I'm still 38. Yikes!" My only regret with Osama bin Laden is that he did not manage to kill every member of the Wall Street Journal editorial staff." "In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about [George W. Bush's stolen presidency].... Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate. MORE ABOUT... Eric Alterman Media Analysis "We need to execute people like Ann Coulter in order to physically intimidate conservatives, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors." First things first: Mr. Ashcroft, if you're there, I do not mean any of the statements above to be taken literally. I do not mean them at all. None of them. OK? What I do mean is to point out the incredible hypocrisy of those on the right, the center and the "liberal media" who defend the lunatic ravings of Ann Coulter, whether because she is "kidding" or because "the left does the same thing." (For those who have been lucky enough to have missed the Coultergeist of the past few months, the author of the summer's number-one bestselling nonfiction book in America has--in language identical to that above--expressed her regret that Timothy McVeigh did not blow up the New York Times building, mused aloud whether Bill Clinton should have been impeached or murdered, and called for the execution of John Walker Lindh in order to intimidate liberals.) It's degrading to have to write about Coulter again. As a pundit, she is about on a par with Charles Manson, better suited to a lifelong stay in the Connecticut Home for the Criminally Insane than for the host's seat on Crossfire. Her books are filled with lies, slander and phony footnotes that are themselves lies and slanders. Her very existence as a public figure is an insult to our collective intelligence. I should really be writing about the campaign by neocon chickenhawks to intimidate Howell Raines and the New York Times on Iraq. But fortunately, John Judis and Nick Confessore have taken responsibility for that, leaving me to the less ominous but more baffling phenomenon of the bestselling Barbie-doll terrorist-apologist, who continues to be celebrated by the very media she terms "retarded" and guilty of "mass murder" while calling for their mass extinction by the likes of her ideological comrade Timothy McVeigh. Make no mistake. Coulter may routinely call for the murder of liberals, of Arabs, of journalists, of the President, among many others. She may compare adorable Katie Couric to Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels and joke about blowing up the Times building. But instead of ignoring, laughing at or, perhaps most usefully, sedating her, we find Coulter's blond locks and bony ass celebrated by talk-show bookers and gossip columnists--even a genuine book reviewer--from coast to proverbial coast. Do I exaggerate? While promoting her hysterical screed against "liberals"--a category so large she occasionally includes, I kid you not, Andrew Sullivan--this malevolent Twiggy with Tourette's was booked on Today, Crossfire (as guest and guest host), Hardball, The Big Story With John Gibson and countless other cable and radio programs. She was lovingly profiled in Newsday, the New York Observer and the New York Times Sunday Style section. She was the Boston Globe's honored guest at the White House correspondents dinner. Her incitements to murder and terrorism have been cheered and defended in the Wall Street Journal and National Review Online. (The latter did so, moreover, despite her having termed its editors "girly boys" and behaving, in the words of the website's editor, Jonah Goldberg, "with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty.") And her publisher, Crown, says it has no plans to correct her lies in future editions. Why should they care? Is anyone holding them accountable? The slanderous nonsense she puts between hard covers, moreover, is selling not only to the caveman crowd, it's also receiving praise in such respectable outlets as the liberal LA Times Book Review and being quoted as constitutional gospel by alleged intellectual George Will on ABC's This Week. This despite the fact that Coulter's accusations have been as effectively discredited as Hitler's diaries. (The last time I checked, the folks at Tapped, the American Prospect's weblog, had compiled so many of these falsities it took them nearly 3,000 words to enumerate them. Coulter has also been ripped to shreds by dailyhowler.com, spinsanity.com, mediawhoresonline.com, Scoobie Davis Online and by Joe Conason in Salon. The most comprehensive compilation can supposedly be found at slannder.homestead.com. I cannot bring myself to actually wade into it.) So what's the deal? Is looking like an anorexic Farrah Fawcett and wearing skirts so short they lack the dignity and reserve of Monica Lewinsky's thong enough to insure the embrace of the national entertainment state no matter what you say, just so long as your murderous bile is directed at "liberals"? Would it have worked for Saddam if he wore a size 6? I really don't know. Naïve optimist that I am, when I first picked up Coulter's book in galleys in the late spring, I felt pretty certain we were done with her. I mean, how even to engage someone who terms Christie Todd Whitman a "birdbrain" (page 51) and a "dimwit" (page 53); Jim Jeffords a "half-wit" (page 50); and Gloria Steinem a "deeply ridiculous figure" (page 37) who "had to sleep" with a rich liberal to fund Ms. magazine (page 38)--all of which makes her "a termagant" (page 39)? Coulter's done far worse since, of course, and yet, like one of those Mothralike creatures that feed on bullets and squashed Japanese villagers, the monster continues to grow, debasing everyone and everything in its wake. Coulter jokes about McVeigh blowing up the Times, and the Wall Street Journal--which was blown up by terrorists on September 11--rushes to her defense. Their man, Daniel Pearl, was murdered by terrorists in Pakistan. Have they no shame? At long last, have they no sense of decency left?

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Sites under Threat.
by Matthew X 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

Ten Porn Websites Were Threatened in Granholm Letter Michigan's attorney general Jennifer Granholm threatened at least ten porn websites with legal action in last week's guilt by association letter that was sent to iBill, a website billing company. Frankiesangels.com was one of them. The other nine are identified in that letter. Frank Bongiorno says iBill has now assured him that they would support him in any legal action against Granholm. Bongiorno says attorney Jeffrey Douglas has referred him to a free speech attorney in Michigan. "I've gotten a proposal on what the costs might be and we're going to try and generate some funds for this legal endeavor," says Bongiorno. "We're going to go after her for defamation of character and do it in a way that creates as much publicity as possible. We want to get this on CNN and MSNBC; we want to get this story any place we can possibly get it. We're going to keep plugging away until she gives us a public apology, recants what she said and pays us for our losses." According to Bongiorno, the webmasters of the other nine sites being targeted are reluctant to go public. "I don't know why," he says. "That doesn't make any sense to me. Adult webmasters aren't known to be the best businessmen in the world." The ten companies are listed in the threatening letter sent from Granholm to iBill. Granholm specifically states that the companies are "engaged in the promotion and distribution of child pornography" - a libelous accusation if there were ever legal grounds to sue. Granholm accuses iBill, vis a vis, of aiding and abetting the distribution of child pornography and that their conduct will result in prosecution. iBill is ordered to cease and desist in its activities. Bongiorno said on advice of Jeffrey Douglas he'd be breaking the other adult companies' rights to privacy by divulging their names from the letter. The companies include gay sites, fetish sites and straight. "Mine stands out like a sore thumb," Bongiorno says. "The other ones are pretty hardcore urls. Frankiesangels seems out of place on the list." In au the daily planet,a legal brothel has been ordered to pull alleged 'ads' off the web as they can be printed out in Victoria.The Judge joins a list of aussi Canutes that includes state attorneys of NSW and SA.Also the Federal Minister has had some flak for being a bull in an internet china shop.('cept the damge is being routed around)

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Corruption Cali style,encrypted donations needed.
by Matthew X 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

LA Film Permit System Investigated for Possible Fraud Almost everyone in the porn industry can relate to this in some degree. Those pesky permits. You know the ones- LA's ritual form of blackmail that keeps the cops off your back. And God forbid if you don't have one. Well you might just get a visit from the constabulary during a shoot and have your tapes impounded. Then you have to go to court. Yadda yadda yadda. And it's a real pain in the ass. Well guess what? All that money you've been paying has gone to support the lavish lifestyle of LA's bureaucrats. The LA Times broke the following story Saturday. Move over Enron and WorldCom. Move over John Rigas. L.A. Film Permit Agency Is Target of Investigation: Lavish spending and political donations by officials of the quasi-public body lead to raids. The Times reports an investigation of the Entertainment Industry Development and its alleged misuse of public funds by lavishing exorbitant tips at restaurants, sending its executives on Caribbean jaunts and donating money to politicians who sit on its board. The Entertainment Industry Development Corp., whose board includes the entire Los Angeles City Council and county Board of Supervisors, gets its $3-million budget from permit fees that would otherwise go to public coffers. An investigation by the district attorney's office, with the assistance of county auditors, led to a Wednesday night search of the agency's offices and the home of its president, Cody Cluff. Financial documents and computer disks were seized. Prosecutors said Cluff, 43, charged $500,000 worth of personal expenses, steered funds to his children's school, and perjured himself on state documents he signed denying that any of EIDC's directors profited from the agency. Cluff's attorney, Tom Brown, said his client and the EIDC have cooperated with investigators. Cluff has done nothing wrong, he said. "EIDC entertains and markets the film industry," Brown said. "We believe that when we've had an opportunity to explain its business and what we've done, both EIDC and Cody Cluff will be fully vindicated." Records show that the agency contributed nearly $200,000 to politicians, including more than a dozen who sat on its board. No charges have been filed. County auditors said the search warrant was sought after the agency refused to turn over financial records this summer. "They've been fighting giving us information," said Pat McMahon, the county's assistant auditor-controller. Auditors found that Cluff, a former deputy mayor under Riordan, received more than $50,000 in direct payments from EIDC to his personal American Express card. Prosecutors found more than $40,000 in charges for Laker basketball games and other sporting and concert events, and $20,000 in cashier's checks from the EIDC to Cluff. Cluff charged the EIDC for his membership in the Grand Havana Room, a Beverly Hills cigar club that lists a $3,000 initiation fee and a $200 monthly charge. Auditors also noted "numerous payments for meals and bar [alcohol] tabs at exclusive restaurants and clubs, often incurred late at night or early in the morning," where Cluff sometimes signed for tips equal to 100% of the bill. Court papers also state that Cluff, who had once worked as an auditor, used $40,000 in EIDC money to pay for trips to Georgia, as well as Utah and France--where two of the world's biggest film festivals, Sundance and Cannes, are held. Prosecutors said Cluff and another EIDC executive traveled to the Caribbean at agency expense. Court papers said the EIDC gave money to the school that Cluff's children attend, and list a $5,000 contribution to Covina High School. The office also paid $341,000 to an Internet company run by one of its 45 board members. State records show that the EIDC has contributed $194,000 to political committees since 1998. The recipients include more than a dozen politicians who at the time were sitting on the group's board. Jackie Goldberg, who represented Hollywood on the Los Angeles City Council and now represents the region in the state Assembly, received at least $15,500, the largest amount. The EIDC also contributed $10,000 to the anti-secession campaign run by Mayor James K. Hahn, an EIDC board member. On Friday, secessionists called for an investigation by the city ethics commission into a possible conflict of interest by Hahn. "It's absolutely appalling," said Gene La Pietra, head of the Hollywood secession effort. Kam Kuwata, Hahn's consultant on the anti-secession campaign, said Friday the mayor solicited the contribution but that there is no conflict.

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Indyjournos a go go.
by Matthew X 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=202052&group=webcast Four filmmakers - one from IMC South Africa, 2 from IMC Italy and one from IMC New York, narrowly escaped arrest in Cape Town, South Africa this morning. The 4 were filming a strike by privatised water workers at the request of the workers. Workers were fearing the heavy police presence and harassment during their strike. The 4 IMC people were arrested and then de-arrested. An autonomist lawyer was negotiating with cops on the phone when the 4 saw they were about to be arrested again. They got into their cars. The cops shouted to the security to keep the gates of the water plant locked. The four intrepid filmmakers were then forced to bust through the gates in their cars, having to bash them five times. One got everything on film! Expect a preview soon. Unfortunately after this the workers were all arrested. It seems they have been taken to a far away cop station to prevent their friends, the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign, from marching on the police station. However, as they are SA Municipal Workers Union members the union should be able to get lawyers to get them out today. WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP: Especially in France - please hold protests at Suez Lyonnaise offices. This is the worlds worst water multinational. They did terrible things like raise prices 300% in Buenos Aires and cut off to the poor. We need to expose them internationally. It is not for nothing that the Cape Town workers are striking partly over poor wages but also to have the plant nationalised. Please publish to the South Africa Indymedia site details of your protest - we will pass the info on to workers. To contact the workers in custody call Max on +27 73 1546555 Independent Journalism,its not a job,its an ADVENTURE.

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<<<:::...Get your site noticed...:::>>>
by Search n' shop 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

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Local Support for Jim Bell quoting Anarchists free speech trial.
by Matthew X 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=33127&group=webcast MELBOURNE URGENT SUPPORT free speech trial MATT TAYLOR 11 SEPT. Who's attending? by Joanna 10:53pm Sat Sep 7 '02 (Modified on 11:41pm Sat Sep 7 '02) article#33127 address: http://melbourne.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=32685&group=webcast bpossum(a)hotmail.com URGENT ACTION NEEDED IN MELBOURNE to support person facing potential extreme miscarriage of justice, and to uphold freedom of speech. "On sept 11 the police are charging a mentally disabled man with threats to kill them. One was a comment to a post made here on May 8 and another on june 1 of 01." Matt Taylor could be jailed for 20 years. MORE ON www.indymedia.org Melbourne au actually I just found out its 5 years max from my lawyer.

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Re: Wolfram on randomness and RNGs
by Eric Cordian 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

Steve Schear writes: > Stephen Wolfram's book, "A New Kind of Science," is nothing if not > interesting. This encyclopedia-sized volume traces how his fascination > with cellular automata, beginning in the 1970s, led him to spend decades > exploring the significance of complexity created from simple rules. I bought a copy the day it came out. It's an interesting read, but as far as I can tell, contains nothing of startling import. It contains not a single proof. It merely suggests that Cellular Automata are sufficiently rich to model any physical process, and maybe someone, someday, will use them for that purpose. Then again, so are Turing Machines. It's much like a book on Cosmology that goes on and on about how lovely Riemannian Geometry is, and presents lots of beautiful pictures of manifolds, but leaves it for others to actually figure out a way to use Riemannian Geometry to model the interaction of geometry and matter. The one test I usually apply to books is to ask what I can do after reading them that I couldn't do before reading them. After Wolfram's book, I can write the Rule 30 RNG in a couple of lines of the programming language of my choice. Not a massive skills increment, but the book does have some pretty pictures. Definitely worth $48 if it's in your interest area, but it's no "Godel, Escher, Bach." > But the remarkable fact is that none of these > methods seem to reveal any real regularities whatsoever in the rule 30 > cellular automaton sequence. And thus, so far as one can tell, this > sequence is at least as random as anything we see in nature. Yes, but... A cellular automaton consists of an array of cells in 1-1 correspondence with the integers, and does a potentially infinite amount of computation at each step. It is not particularly striking that we can generate a seemingly random sequence of bits using an open-ended amount of computation between emitting each of them. > But is it truly random? I get the impression Wolfram believes the universe is not random but pseudo-random. His measure of randomness is that there is no shorter method of computing the random sequence than by running the CA that generates it. This gets into the whole descriptional or Kolmogorov complexity idea of random strings being those that have no shorter description than themselves. As opposed to the type of randomness we imagine we get from things like radioactive decay, which Wolfram no doubt secretly believes are the result of small scale discrete processes as well. We hashed some of this around in sci.math when the book came out, and someone mentioned that Wolfram was peddling Rule 30 at Crypto '85. Article Reference: (Crypto '85) Article: Cryptography with Cellular Automata Author: Stephen Wolfram While "A New Kind of Science" contains lots of new and original things, what's new isn't original, and what's original isn't new. That Wolfram is less than candid in disclosing this, and according to some, does not credit colleagues for their ideas which he borrows, makes the book less than a stunning exposition of its subject matter. There's even a 1993 post by Bruce Schneier in sci.crypt commenting on Rule 30. [There is a known plaintext attack against these generators; see W. Meier and O. Staffelbach, "An Analysis of Pseudo-Random Sequence Generators by Cellular Automata," Advances in Cryptography--EUROCRYPT '91 Proceedings, Springer- Verlag, 1991, pp. 186-199. The attack is quite efficient on a PC with values of n (widths of th CA) up to 500. Additionally, Paul Bardell proved that the output of a CA is identical to the output of a linear-feedback shift register, and is hence no more secure. See: P.H. Bardell, "Analysis of Cellular Automata Used as Pseudorandom Pattern Generators," Proceedings of 1990 International Test Conference, pp. 762-768.] I'm also not convinced that the Rule 30 bitstream does not have a compact discription, merely because Wolfram has so far failed to discover one. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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What Kind of man has a pussy?
by Matthew X 07 Sep '02

07 Sep '02

Who let the cats out? and what's with the Merc? Wasn't it in the 60's you had a small German car,the 70's you had a small German gun and the eighties, a small German boy? Hang on to something long enough I guess... Has Mongo been hanging on to his sausage too long? Searching for the perfect man, Kathy Lette takes a butcher's at what's on offer. http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/06/1031115934706.html Throw another shrimp on the barbie for me mate.

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