October 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

What Really Happened to Whatreallyhappened.com
by Eric Cordian 26 Oct '03

26 Oct '03

Everyone's favorite link farm of news stories which annoy Neocons, http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ disappeared suddenly and has been unavailable for 2 days now. Anyone know What Really Happened to it? Hopefully just a minor hardware problem. -- 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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Re: "If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it!"
by Ben Laurie 26 Oct '03

26 Oct '03

Sunder wrote: > To add to this: > > There is no law stating that I cannot take my books and read them > backwards, skip every other word, read the odd chapters in reverse and the > even chapters forward, or try to "decode" the book by translating it to > another language, ask someone with better eyes than mine to read it to me, > or chose to wear green tinted lenses while reading it, read it to kids or > the elderly, lend it - or rent it to friends, use it as a paperweight, ^^^^^^^ this, I believe, there are laws about. At least here. > drop it on the floor, et cetera. I can take it with me to other countries > and read it there, as well etc. Once I bought it, it's mine. Again, only within the permitted uses. For example, copying it and selling copies is clearly not permitted. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff

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Re: Certicom? [...] [Fwd: NSA Turns To Commercial Software For Encryption] (fwd from harley@argote.ch)
by Eugen Leitl 26 Oct '03

26 Oct '03

----- Forwarded message from "Dr. Robert J. Harley" <harley(a)argote.ch> -----

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Re: "If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it!"
by Steve Wollkind 26 Oct '03

26 Oct '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday 24 October 2003 10:14, Harmon Seaver wrote: > On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 10:43:22PM -0700, Tim May wrote: > > TM: the last two paragraphs were of course added by me. But the point > > is still valid, that much of Hollywood's claims about "illegal > > listening" are not really any different from "reading without buying" > > books and magazines in libraries. The more urgent issue is this crap > > Not to mention all the CDs and movies available in libraries. What's the > difference in borrowing CDs from a library and taking them home and taping > or mp3ing them and getting them from the net? There's no difference....both are illegal. It's just much easier to catch people who leave a trail by downloading files than people who legally check a disc out of a library and then illegally copy it in the privacy of their own home. Steve - -- Steve Wollkind 810 C San Pedro steve(a)njord.org College Station, TX 77845 http://njord.org/~steve 979.575.2948 - -- The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -- Harlan Ellison -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/mUxP0uexoyuzySARArjAAJ93lhUZcDogLhWpH9/TsMdz4x4hDgCfYbom ZFUggCCKfNTZ07FdlXPCwyw= =rddG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Cliff-Hanger
by R. A. Hettinga 26 Oct '03

26 Oct '03

<http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2003/1110/100_print.html> Forbes On The Cover/Top Stories Cliff-Hanger Brett Pulley, 11.10.03 A mix of art, philosophy and religion and truckloads of production dollars created a Hollywood blockbuster. But how will the cool, quirky franchise that is The Matrix end? It is a rainy, chilly, dreary afternoon in London. But the Hollywood producer Joel Silver is ebullient. As his chauffeur-driven Mercedes navigates the city's slippery streets, he stares out at the dreadful gray sky and joyously proclaims: "It's a great day!" Is he living in another world? Does he have some superior knowledge? Is he The One? His accountant surely thinks so. For the past six years Silver's life has been consumed by a futuristic film fantasy known as The Matrix . As the primary person responsible for pulling together what has become a multibillion-dollar motion picture series, Silver is personally receiving an estimated 7% of merchandise royalties and what's left after exhibitors get their half of box office sales. It's enough to buy plenty of sunshine on the cloudiest of days. So far, the first two films in the Matrix trilogy have generated $1.9 billion in gross revenue. The second installment, The Matrix Reloaded , which was released earlier this year, has by itself already grossed more than $1 billion from box office sales, a videogame, a soundtrack and other merchandise. The DVD, released Oct. 14, should haul in at least $200 million more. Even if the filmmakers stop at three movies, something they vow to do, the entire franchise will still near $3 billion in sales. Says Silver, who has toiled in Hollywood for years: "This is like my IPO." To get big bucks you have to take big risks. The studio distributing the film, Time Warner's Warner Bros. Pictures, along with its financial partner on the project, Australian ministudio Village Roadshow Pictures, invested $300 million to shoot two movies, the second and third installments of The Matrix , at one time. An additional $150 million was committed to market the two movies. Typically sequels get the green light only after the results on the previous film are in, says Warner Bros. studio chief Alan Horn. Despite the worldwide success of The Matrix Reloaded , with $289 million in domestic box office sales, the flick suffered the indignity of ranking second last summer at the U.S. box office, behind Disney's Finding Nemo . Now, the third film in the series, The Matrix Revolutions , is being released worldwide in November. It has the same stars, heavily layered story, fast action and stunning special effects of No. 2. A sure hit? Not really. It might get the benefit of momentum--or it might suffer from overload. If the fad-following youngsters who keep Hollywood solvent deem No. 3 uncool, it may just bomb. By comparison, there was a four-year gap between the first two films. The long waiting period caused anticipation to build so much that during the days leading up to the release last May the movie was the subject of a 30-minute special on NBC's Dateline , and the film's stars were on the covers of both Time and Newsweek . The publicity got people to the theaters, but it also created heightened expectations that were virtually impossible to live up to. Reviews were lukewarm and audiences sighed with disappointment when the credits rolled. "It's really hard for a performance to reach expectation when the expectation is in the stratosphere," says Horn. What could bring even the naysayers back for more is that the last film ended with a cliff-hanger:Will Keanu Reeves' character, Neo, free humanity from its enslavement by a computer program that fills our brains with a false reality while using our bodies as copper-top batteries?Can he save Earth's remaining free folk from extermination? Is he really The One? Is It The One? The Matrix Franchise The Matrix Domestic Box Office: $171 million Foreign Box Office: $294 million Video/DVD: $398 million The Matrix Revisted Video/DVD: $11 million The Matrix Reloaded Domestic Box Office: $289 million Foreign Box Office: $453 million Video/DVD (just released): $200 million? "Enter The Matrix" (videogame) 3.25 million sold @$49.95 each: $162 million The Animatrix 2.7 million sold @$24.95 each: $68 million The Matrix Reloaded (soundtrack) 1.85 million sold @$19.99 each: $37 million Merchandise (apparel, toys, shades, etc.): $3.5 million Much like the films' blurred distinctions between reality and make-believe, the public has hazily viewed The Matrix Reloaded as a financial failure. Untrue. The worldwide box office for the movie has topped $742 million. The videogame "Enter the Matrix," which was produced using $20 million of the film's production budget, has sold 3.2 million copies at $50 each, for a gross total of $162 million. Also, a selection of nine video shorts, The Animatrix , which explain background details of the complicated story, was released on DVD at the same time that the second film was released in theaters. It has sold 2.7 million copies at $25 each. The soundtrack to the film has sold 1.8 million copies, grossing $37 million. Warner Bros. receives a fee for distributing the film in the U.S. and most international markets. Thereafter Warner and Village Roadshow, which split the $300 million cost of making the last two films 50-50, will split the profit. Even after half of the box office sales go to the theater operators, there is plenty of gross profit left for the studios' coffers and for the film's so-called gross players. In addition to Silver, that includes the directors and several actors. For the last two films, the main star, Keanu Reeves, received $30 million plus perhaps 7.5% of the gross. The next-highest paid star was Laurence Fishburne, who received $15 million and an estimated 3.75% of the gross. The ancillary products generated a windfall for many others. Jada Pinkett-Smith earned a modest fee for her role in the second two films, but she cleaned up on the videogame, in which she is the main star. Pinkett-Smith is receiving an estimated 10% of the profit on the game, placing her earnings thus far near $5 million. "I got a check already," she recently confirmed. "It was like, 'Wow!'" In an unusual move, all of the gross players on the films chipped in a portion of their shares to a pool for production crew managers. Most Hollywood film franchises (like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings ) are big-budget popcorn extravaganzas, tailor-made for fast-food promotions and intended to cut a large swath across the moviegoing public. The Matrix is a little more narrowly targeted. Its R rating (for violence) cuts 12-year-olds out of the audience. There are no Happy Meal figurines to be lost between the seat cushions of automobiles. But what was lost in the hamburger trade was presumably earned back in coolness. Reloaded is the top-selling R-rated movie of all time, $200 million ahead of the second-highest seller, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator 2 . Even among film franchises aimed at adults, few films take themselves so seriously as does The Matrix . The enduring James Bond franchise started off in 1962 in a very serious manner but eventually veered towards playful self-parody. The 1971 Diamonds Are Forever had Sean Connery trading barbs with a vixen named Plenty O'Toole. Revolutions will probably be as pompous as the last Matrix (typical dialogue: "What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn't that worth fighting for?Isn't that worth dying for?"). The Matrix was expected to be a decent midlevel Hollywood movie when it debuted in 1999. It was produced at a cost of about $80 million, and during its first weekend in theaters it did a merely respectable $28 million of ticket sales. But it had tremendous word of mouth. There was something cool about the religious symbolism, the martial arts scenes, the serene characters and the pioneering digital film techniques. The film went on to sell $450 million of tickets worldwide. The DVD, released the same year, became the first movie ever to sell more than a million copies in that format. It went on to sell 30 million. The creators of the film, two brothers in their mid-thirties from Chicago named Larry and Andy Wachowski, had already written screenplays for two more sequels. They wanted to shoot them together, ` la Lord of the Rings . The crew spent 270 days shooting in Australia and additional time in northern California, where a 1.6-mile freeway was built just for the movie. In all, 3,600 extras would be hired, 3,500 props built and enough wigs purchased for the shellac-haired Agent Smith character (who--eek!--multiplies) to carpet a four-bedroom house. The Wachowskis wrote the videogame, which connects to the plot of the movie but tells its own story. They worked on the development of nine animated shorts that dig deeper into the story behind The Matrix . They launched a Web site and spent $350,000 on a documentary that has sold $11 million of DVDs and videos. Now to make a cult out of the thing. The storyline revolves around a belief system and a dark, hip underground subculture. But overdo the publicity or make the films appear mainstream and you disrupt the ethos and turn off fans. Says Silver, "Whatever we did had to be cool." The head of marketing at Warner, Dawn Taubin, assigned staffers to function as the "cool police." They played hard to get. For a fee, Heineken, Samsung and Coca-Cola were permitted to make advertisements mimicking the look of the movie, pushing their product and the film simultaneously. The Heineken ads, for example, use martial arts and obvious knockoffs of the movie's characters. " The Matrix gives us timeliness and relevancy for people between the ages of 21 and 34," says Steve H. Davis, who heads marketing for Heineken USA in White Plains, N.Y. The distinctive green computer code that streams down at the beginning of the first film turned into an icon. Last May Coca-Cola's sport drink, Powerade, launched new packaging in a Matrix -green-colored bottle. The night after The Matrix Reloaded premiered in Cannes the cast joined other Hollywood royalty at a party on the Mediterranean seafront as they popped champagne and gazed up into the sky to watch a fireworks display in green over the ocean. Part of the shtick: The third film will absolutely, positively be the last in the series. Time Warner's Horn says he hasn't tried to convince the Wachowskis otherwise. But, he admits, "I'd like to know what else they've got in their heads." Borrowing the "I vant to be alone" line from Greta Garbo, the Wachowskis have let it be known that their agreement with the studio stipulates they don't make promotional appearances or talk to any media. This could be the ultimate publicity stunt--but it could also backfire. Showbiz fame can be as fleeting as a white rabbit. -- ----------------- 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: "If you use encryption, you help the terrorists win" [Reply to Durden]
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Oct '03

25 Oct '03

At 05:27 PM 10/25/03 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: >frontol assault. Also watch carefully for hole-pokers...I'd bet their's also >been disinfo campaigns to get the public to think that no crypto is secure >(every ask anyone if they believed there was such a thing as effectively >'unbreakable' encryption? Reglar folks always believe SOMEBODY'S got the >technology to break what scheme you use, so "why bother"). 1. Well there's always Silk and Cyanide. Ie OTP. 2. Big Bro does not marshall all the atoms in the observable universe. Remind Joe Sixpack of that. Joe isn't as paranoid as some of us, who worry about quantum engines sorting through our precious prime bodily fluids. *Do* remind Joe about such mundancities as key management, coercion of confederates, video bugs, how crypto is all economics, etc. >So let's beat them to the punch: "Use strong crypto in order to keep America >free from the terrorists." An RPG a day keeps the colonialists away. Or at least, losing in the polls. PS: extra points for someone who finds a good expansion of S.L.O.G. Or who finds Condosleeza Rice's secret lesbian sex tape. (I have nothing against secrecy, or lesbians, of course)

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Re: "If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it!" [reply to Sunder]
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Oct '03

25 Oct '03

At 07:01 AM 10/25/03 -0400, Sunder wrote: >If you bought an audio DVD and your car doesn't have a DVD player, or your >only portable stereo system can only play tapes, you're not allowed to >legally copy the music off the DVD onto other media to play in other >devices. IANAL so I'm not actually sure about duping DVDs to tapes. But you *can*, do it, trivially, regardless of the evil digital gremlins, which makes the point about the Analog Hole. And of course, if you rip to an MP3, that is the last ADC your content need ever see. Game over, Valenti. Get a real job. ----- "all the normalities of the social contract are abandoned in war" Jack Valenti MPAA pres, in LATimes on Kerry's war crimes

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Re: "If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it!"
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Oct '03

25 Oct '03

[Chronic readers can skip this..] At 12:08 AM 10/25/03 -0400, BillyGOTO wrote: >On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 03:11:27PM -0700, Tim May wrote: >> On Friday, October 24, 2003, at 02:04 PM, BillyGOTO wrote: >> >Not really. Libraries have to pay more than we do for their >> >subscriptions. > >> Be careful using the phrase "have to" in any discussion of legal issues. >> Does government force libraries to pay more for some subscriptions? Not >> to my knowledge. >> >> Do some publishers have different rates for individuals versus >> libraries and other institutions? Yes. > >Okay, I'll try to be more careful. They are given a choice by the copyright >holders to either pay more than we do OR to not get a subscription. >Is this not the case? Yes it is the case. But many of us regard State force as a *very* different thing than a property owner's whims. So the State can censor, but an individual merely doesn't want your bumper sticker on his car. Individuals *can't* censor in the 1st amend sense. (Similarly with compelled speech.) The State *must* treat everyone the same, but private entities are not similarly bound. The State must permit citizens to bear arms, but in my saloon you leave them at the door, or don't enter. Simple. Entering my saloon is a private transaction. >Books and magazines aren't guarded by cryptogremlins the way digital >media could be. The cryptogremlins are embedded, "tamperproof", and are >given absolute authority over their assigned treasure by the DMCA. 1. Tech point: Any passive media for human consumption can NOT be guarded by gremlins. ADCs handle that. The "analog hole". Active content (eg programs) can be though. 2. Many of us do worry about eroding conventional rights by these same gremlins, *when they are supported by wrong law*. E.g., I have a right in the US to lend a book. A digital book could make doing so a pain, but not impossible. And again, I (as reader) have *no* right to compel the publisher to use a large font (if I've got bad eyes) or make it easy to xerox. Or backup or lend or sell. Now, if it is simply some publisher's whim to release content protected by gremlins, that's their decision. *What gets our goat* is when the State uses its force eg to make tinkering with our property illegal. You'll need to understand that difference around here. Many of us (unlike many working for the State) still respect private property, and *mutually consensual* transactions. If you want to publish a book on paper that prevents its xeroxing, that's fine. Might be annoying, but its within your rights. But when the State says that say scanners or image processing or figuring out how the book is bound is illegal (DMCA), well... A gremlin is a nuisance, a gremlin backed by the state.. indicates that someone "needs killing", and its not the gremlin. >I'm saying that there is an even wider difference between the lending >restrictions on the gremlin-guarded digital media versus those on >printed media. You usually don't have to talk your way past a robotic >Pat Schroeder avatar to read a printed book, as you do with an encrypted >scientific journal on DVD. Again, you can publish in fonts that don't photocopy. Its your right. And its my right to try to get around that, to exercise my right eg to fair use. But it is immoral and unconstitutional for the State to interfere with *either* of us -publisher or reader. Because we're both choosing to enter a mutually consensual transaction, the State has no grounds to interfere. That's basically what freedom is about. It doesn't even matter if the transaction is harmful to one or both of us; masochism (pharmaceuticals, N-ary sex between arbitrary conspecifics, etc) should be legal. Life liberty and the pursuit of whatever. Some of these journals have announced that >they will be discontinuing their print editions altogether because they >are fed up with libraries letting the public look at them. So? And other journals are free to everyone. (Is that unfair competition? No) Its up to the journal, their contributors, their readers. Some of the >digital publications you might ask for at a university library are >boobytrapped and crisscrossed with razor-sharp bardwire (not a typo). >Librarians can't let you see it unless they have a way to bill you. Nice pun. But librarians are merely acting in accordance with contracts they chose to sign. No one put a gun to their heads; only the State does that. >| Unlike paper materials, digital information generally is not purchased >| by the library; rather it is licensed by the library from information >| providers. A license usually takes the form of a written contract or >| agreement between the library and the owner of the rights to distribute >| digital information. I've bought some helically grooved vinyl disks. This also gives me a license to play their content, or make a Wimshurst generator from them, or go skeet shooting with them. Should the vinyl object warp, I retain that license. Should I download an MP3 of the same content (which may have been derived from diffraction-grating polycarbonate disks), this is no different than making a tape for my car. It is not copyright infringement. If I lend, or sell, my disks, I also transfer that license for the duration of the transfer. Now forget that the content happens to be embedded in a slab of plastic. >If we're looking for a model on which to base this homebrew >personal-computer/digital-lending-library, think of how "REAL" lending >libraries are handling digital content. Suddenly considering yourself a >one-man library doesn't give you any new liberties than you had as an >individual, when it comes to DRM. Bingo! Librarians have the same rights as the rest of us mortals. Similarly, it doesn't matter if 1 or 1e6 read my blog, we are all reporters, and better recognized salaried reporters have no special rights. >The way I see it, we're taking two leaps here.. One leap is thinking of >ourselves as individuals with the same rights as libraries under law. Not a leap. Equal under the law. >This first leap has landed firmly. The second leap is thinking of our >personal MP3s and digital media licenses (let's say online journal >subscriptions, IEEE spec PDFs, or eBooks) on the same terms as we would >consider our IKEA bookshelf of printed material. This second leap isn't >looking so good from where we stand in 2003. Its looking particularly grim because the Congressvermin are 0wn3d. That doesn't change the principles. Just makes us yearn for regime change. ---- We are all reporters, we are all book sellers. We are all first class objects. --Tim May

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Re: "If you didn't pay for it, you've stolen it!"
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Oct '03

25 Oct '03

At 07:43 AM 10/24/03 -0700, Steve Schear wrote: >At 06:28 AM 10/24/2003 -0400, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: >>The problem with the central premise, of course, is that without some Big >>(Brother) Central Server, there's just no way to track simultaneous usage, so >>there's no way to assure that the number of users <= the number of owners. Wrong. >Why not have each individual's PC which offered to lend do the >accounting. This means their PC must be on-line whenever someone who >didn't pay wants to listen, limiting the number of copies available, but it >could be fully decentralized. Yes but it needn't be online constantly. What *is* a library? 1. A library is legal. A library needn't be licensed by any state entity. 2. Thus, I can declare my computer a library. The only requirement is that I own a license to what I lend, and that only 1 user exercise that license at a time. That is what a library is. 3. Among library-users, we contractually require that "borrowed" materials be not used after the "return" date. Since bits are bits, "borrowing" is "copying" and "returning" is simply not exercising the bits. When something is being used no one else can use the same. We use our library-patron-contract to implement what meatspace does with objects --usable at one place at one time. 4. We could implement this by merely keeping a flag for each file in our collection denoting that the file is borrowed. We would be obligated not to relend it until after the return date; the library patron would be similarly obligated not to use it afterwards (without checking it out again). 5. We do *not* need to be constantly online for this, any more than a library needs to be open 24 hours a day. We *do* need a shared timebase and good IDs for objects. A legal assault on this mechanism is an assault on bricks and mortar libraries, ie the right to lend a book to an associate. Even if that associate xeroxes the book without our knowing it. Perhaps these features could be added to KaZaa. (Simply: when a file is uploaded from your disk, you move it from shared to not shared directory for a day. You also have some lameass clickthrough library-patron contract.) Gentlemen, start your lawyers. --- Talk softly and carry a big lawyer. ---Hunter S Roosevelt

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SafeNet buys Rainbow, is NetAss 2.0?
by R. A. Hettinga 24 Oct '03

24 Oct '03

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/33565.html> The Register 23 October 2003 Updated: 23:14 GMT SafeNet seeks gold in Rainbow By John Leyden Posted: 23/10/2003 at 20:32 GMT SafeNet, the networking security firm, is scooping up rival Rainbow Technologies for $457 million (at today's prices) in new stock. Post-merger, Rainbow shareholders will own approx. 43 per cent of the enlarged company. Both companies have strong ties to the US government and military. Rainbow Technologies worked with the NSA in developing the latter's controversial Clipper chip proposal in the 1990s (before the idea was shelved because of industry and public opposition to the idea of building government back door access into communication networks). SafeNet was set up by former NSA spooks in the late 1980s. These days, Rainbow specialises in authentication tokens and anti-piracy / DRM software, while SafeNet develops WAN and Virtual Private Network, encryption and security technologies. Together, the companies aim to become the "premier network security provider for the government and large financial institutions, mid-sized firms, OEMs, and consumers". The merger is subject to the approval from both sets of shareholders and is expected to close during Q1 2004. Rainbow brings approximately $70 million in government business to SafeNet. SafeNet forecasts that the merger will be accretive to earnings in the first quarter after the deal concludes. SafeNet yesterday reported revenues for the three months ended September 30 (Q3 2003) of approximately $17.6 million, double the $8.8 million it recorded in Q2 2002. SafeNet's net income for Q3 2003 pegged out at approximately $2.6 million. The results reflect the effect of two full quarters from the operations of crypto outfit Cylink Corporation, which SafeNet acquired in February this year. Since then SafeNet has been on an acquisition roll. First, it purchased certain assets from Raqia Networks, a developer of programmable systems-on-a-chip and co-processors designed for content inspection. Last week SafeNet signed an agreement to acquire the assets of the OEM Products Group of SSH Communications Security for approximately $14m in cash. And now it's snaffled up Rainbow. The security industry hasn't seen the likes of this since Network Associates' acquisition spree in the heady days of the mid to late 1990s. . -- ----------------- 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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