December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Online Fraud Case Settled
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

According to a story on the radio, the "Online Fraud" that Chase Consulting is accused of advertising ($99 credit repair) was really a kit for obtaining a new identity. Certainly wouldn't want to have folks selling *those*...... (Though I'd certainly object if somebody charged me money for telling me that a way around my credit problems was to change my name, unless that's the kind of thing I really *wanted* to do.)

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Re: S-HTTP
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jon Cooper, talking about S-HTTP, writes: > I don't much see the point in encrypting _EVERYTHING_, and if you're > only talking about encrypting a credit card number or an occasional > paid-for document, it shouldn't be much of a burden at all with a good > implementation. There are a number of times when you might want to do this, such as delivering an information product as well as paying for it (e.g. a new software release, shipped encrypted to avoid eavesdroppers pirating it for free), or information you want conveniently accessible on the web but only to approved people (e.g. your political campaign's strategy material or your corporate information made available to your sales group who are often out at customer sites instead of behind your firewall), or your corporate complaints web-form (enter your problem in the box below; please type legibly), or of course your politically-incorrect- substance ordering system, which should provide anonymity as well as payment and ordering, (which may be beyond the complexity of S-HTTP.) Bill

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Re: anon ftp/mail
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jon writes: > > Find someone who can give you a temp account that you can download > > from... ...something that will be erased. The only other way would be to > > hack out a copy of ftp to send false information > > Spoofing your DNS info, while certainly possible [ and this is > assuming lame admins, no identd, no tcpwrapper, etc. ] is probably not > the easiest way to go about it. I have to believe that none of the > common ftpd's are brain-dead enough to trust nameservers extensively. Some of them do, some of them don't, at least for anon-ftp. I have accounts behind two different kinds of firewalls - the accounts behind router-based firewalls have difficulty with the FTP servers that authenticate using RFC931 or DNS, since the firewall blocks them, while the accounts behind the AT&T Firewall (ref. Cheswick and Bellovin) need to use proxy ftp clients, but don't have trouble accessing the servers, which think (incorrectly) that the requests are coming from the outside part of the firewall. Bill

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by jamiel＠sybase.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:49 PM 11/18/94, Timothy C. May wrote: >Personally, I like simple ASCII. No fancy fonts, no embedded graphics, >no Quicktime movies I have to watch, etc. But Tim, don't you believe in the march of progress? ;) (I agree. I retrieved some of those docs this issue arose over. I got a MIME doc, the header of which told me to fetch a translator, and when translated I text plain text. I know that simple ASCII will be overtaken by fancier tech, but why the hell encode plain text in a non-human readable format?) -j

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Dummy foreign corporations and lawsuit proofing.
by Critias_the_conspirator＠informix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I, and no doubt many other cypherpunks resident in the USA, have received a lot of junk mail from Costa Rica, offering dummy Costa Rican corporations. The theory is you set up a mail drop in Costa Rica, then you gradually move all your assets to be owned by this mail drop, so that your house, your car etc, all belong to this mail drop. The junk mail claims that this makes you immune to sue happy lawyers -- that this makes you lawsuit proof. I believe this claim. Unfortunately I have also received other junk mail offering competing services, which claims that Costa Rican dummy corporations have the same effect on revenuers as catnip does on cats, and blood in the water does on sharks. This claim also sounds highly plausible to me. Doubtless the services offered by the Costa Ricans would work so long as you never generated documents going to the revenuers that showed the Costa Rican address. This might be a wee bit tricky, as the revenuers get a report whenever any financial asset is sold within America. And remember, if you do set up a dummy foreign corporation, (preferably one that looks more plausible than those offered by the Costa Ricans), if you set it up in consultation with an American advisor, that advisor's next report will probably be to the revenuers. -- Critias_the_conspirator

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Another pseudonym.
by Critias_the_conspirator＠informix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Critias_the_conspirator is of course another new pseudonym. Critias was a disciple of Socrates. Critias overthrew democracy in Athens and proceeded to demonstrate that even when democracy was thoroughly decadent, brutal, and tyrannical, it was still possible to create an even worse form of government. >From time to time this Critias will comment on financial privacy. -- Critias_the_conspirator

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Re: REMAILER PROPOSAL
by lcottrell＠popmail.ucsd.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lets call all the "Spoon-E"s you buy at one time, using one ID number, a roll. If the "Spoon-E" issuer, and the first remailer in one of your chains, collude they can identify all of your messages using any stamps from that roll. Method: The issuer keeps a log of all ID numbers and "Spoon-E" numbers. A remailer sends the address of each sender, along with the "SpoonE" number of the message. Now any message with a stamp from the same roll can be assumed to be from the same person. Unless you are sending many messages through the bramble at the same time, you are providing wonderful traffic analysis to the issuer. He will know when and approximately when each of your hops was. This almost collapses you chain to the security of a single hop. A solution to this would be to use a different roll for each hop (not each remailer), and one for each destination. You would have one "first hop" roll, which would be easy to identify with you. Several rolls would be for intermediate hops (no roll used twice in one chain). You would also keep one roll per final destination, which could be easily identified with the recipient, but not with you. -------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell who does not speak for CASS/UCSD loki(a)nately.ucsd.edu PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server. Encrypted mail welcome. Home page http://nately.ucsd.edu/~loki/ Home of "chain" the remailer chaining script. For anon remailer info, mail remailer(a)nately.ucsd.edu Subject: remailer-help "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have one more comment. Earlier, I wrote: > Critias_the_conspirator is of course another new pseudonym. > >From time to time this Critias will comment on financial > privacy. Hear the words of Critias_the_conspirator: Put your money in ``Greek'' banks. The tentacles are everywhere. Critias_the_conspirator

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by snyderra＠dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:49 PM 11/18/94, Timothy C. May wrote: >I suppose some messages make use of it, as Eric Blossom's just did (in >allowing retrieval of more stuff, somehow), but a lot of the >"offending" messages just seem to be non-ASCII for the hell of it. I presume you mean quoted-printable mail messages. Some mail readers do do this inappropriately, and some do it for reasons that may not seem appropriate (like an initial line consisting of "From", to try and keep the message content unmolested by Mail Transport agents. >Like Lewis, I find myself to easily delete the message and move on. >(I'm debating just deleting the messsages, which are marked "M" for >Mime, before even starting to read them.) > >Personally, I like simple ASCII. No fancy fonts, no embedded graphics, >no Quicktime movies I have to watch, etc. Use the "setenv NOMETAMAIL" I mentioned earlier. I thought you used Mac Eudora, though. That, at least in relatively recent versions, is very MIME intelligent. It changes the announcements into an Anarchie document and a Eudora email message document to retrieve it by email. Bob -- Bob Snyder N2KGO MIME, PGP, RIPEM mail accepted snyderra(a)post.drexel.edu PGP & RIPEM keys on key servers When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

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Re: The Thread Thread
by adam.philipp＠ties.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>* A tiny thread cannot be readily detected by "airport scanners," nor >>by even longer-distance scanners, unless the gain on the detector is >>turned up so high that many other things trigger the detector. >>If the threads are mostly plastic, with discontiguous metallic writing >>on them, then the detection problem is even harder. >This is just a quick thought...does anyone know what kind of metallic ink >is used? To add to the conspiracy theory, say the metallic ink is >radioactive with a higher radiation count for higher dollar amounts--would >it be implausible then to have some sort of radiation counter to gauge a >person's total 'radiation count,' and thereby approximate how much currency >they are carrying out of the country? Sorry for taking this seriously, but it has been considered and rejected... It is just inert plastic with metalic letters so that they are opaque to light while the plastic is translucent and provides a backdrop... Can someone snip this thread already? Adam -- PGP Key available on the keyservers. Encrypted E-mail welcome. Sub rosa: Confidential, secret, not for publication. -Black's Law Dictionary

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Re: The Thread Thread
by merriman＠metronet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Fri, 18 Nov 1994, Tim May writes: >>* A tiny thread cannot be readily detected by "airport scanners," nor >>by even longer-distance scanners, unless the gain on the detector is >>turned up so high that many other things trigger the detector. >> >>If the threads are mostly plastic, with discontiguous metallic writing >>on them, then the detection problem is even harder. > >This is just a quick thought...does anyone know what kind of metallic ink >is used? To add to the conspiracy theory, say the metallic ink is >radioactive with a higher radiation count for higher dollar amounts--would >it be implausible then to have some sort of radiation counter to gauge a >person's total 'radiation count,' and thereby approximate how much currency >they are carrying out of the country? Wouldn't work. Radiation is useless for something like this - how to tell the difference between X $20 bills, and Y $100 bills? The roentgen/hour levels would be close enough to make knowing which is which virtually impossible. Radiation is mostly good for yes/no type stuff, unless you're dusting things with particular combinations of very specific isotopes and sampling for them - in which case you've got a completely different set of problems. > >I wouldn't take the above seriously though.... > Seconded. Dave Merriman - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Finger merriman(a)metronet.com for PGP public key and fingerprint. PGP encrypted Email welcome and encouraged. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. No?

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Re: Islands in the Net
by Amanda Walker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> This is just not what "liquid" means. A liquid asset refers to the > speed with which it can be traded, not what kind of value it has. > "Liquid" is an adjective about timeliness, not about resolution. Hmm. I had thought about using "valuable," but that seemed too ambiguous. "Negotiable" maybe? > Sometimes currency represents a fiat value, as with today's greenbacks. It's not entirely a fiat value; in effect, it's backed by the strength of the economy. The difference between a ruble and a dollar was not the fiat value (they were the same, as I remember), but in the fact that it was a lot easier to exchange dollars for real assets. For the record, I think that going off the gold standard was a bad idea, but growing up in the days of double-digit inflation probably gave me a biased opinion of floating currency. > Also, if it loses its ability to be exchanged for real assets > it likewise loses its value (e.g., Confederate dollars from the > Civil War). > > Under this reasoning, today's dollar bills should be worthless. > They aren't. Real assets are not the only form of value. I didn't say that the government had to be the agent of such an exchange. I can buy real assets with my dollars, but not with Confederate dollars. While it has been somewhat eroded since the start of the Drug War, dollars are still exchangable for real assets, even though the government is no longer backing them directly. > What currency do Visa or Master Card issue, perchance? Little plastic tokens that are accepted more places than the government's paper and metal ones. If it quacks like a duck... > Information doesn't obey conservation of mass, and so can't act as a > token. Exactly. On the other hand, with real-time clearing (which the Internet *does* provide the ability to do, with ever-increasing capacity), you can construct something that acts like an "instant check", which is close enough to cash for most practical purposes. Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by Amanda Walker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Personally, I like simple ASCII. No fancy fonts, no embedded graphics, > no Quicktime movies I have to watch, etc. Do PGP key blocks bigger than the message body count as "fancy crap"? Fancy and Crap are both in the eye of the beholder :).

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by mclow＠coyote.csusm.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> Personally, I like simple ASCII. No fancy fonts, no embedded graphics, >> no Quicktime movies I have to watch, etc. > >Do PGP key blocks bigger than the message body count as "fancy crap"? > >Fancy and Crap are both in the eye of the beholder :). > >Attachment converted: Scratch:Amanda Logo Sig.GIF (GIFf/JVWR) (0000BB28) Well said. Nice .sig, too. ;-) -- Marshall Marshall Clow Aladdin Systems mclow(a)san_marcos.csusm.edu

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:48 PM 11/18/94 -0500, Amanda Walker wrote: > >Fancy and Crap are both in the eye of the beholder :). > >Attachment converted: :Amanda Logo Sig.GIF (GIFf/JVWR) (00003907) Indeed. No offense offered Amanda, but a scruffy 200dpi gif of your sig is taking your point over the top, yes? Net Goddess or no... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Zero crypto content.... tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) writes: > We are getting bogged down in banal details and platform > idiosyncracies. Dozens of platforms, dozens of flavors of Unix and > other operating systems, half a dozen major display options (as noted > above), lots of image formats (at least that's relatively > standardized, to GIF, PICT, JPEG, etc....and yet many people spend > _days_ trying to convert, download, uncompress, read, display, etc.) > > There's got to be a better way. The better way is the spontantous order that markets generate. We are too early in the cycle to have figured out that having a standard 2 by 4 is better than cutting boards to custom sizes for each job. But some of this is self inflicted by the folks on this list, and other serious netheads. The vast majority of the world's populations would have no idea what Tim is ranting about. The last figure I saw had the percentage of home computers in the US with modems at 14%, but only 4% had accounts at a service provider of any type. The folks on this list are on the leading edge, and are exposed to more of the leading edge, failure prone experiments. MIME's encryption of ASCII so it is unreadible is just an example of a false start. Tim's approach to SLIP/PPP is the solution to the rest of his problems -- wait until there is a compelling reason to change. Let the academics with time on their hands invent possible standards with incremental improvements at the cost of incompatibility. Eventually the tiller will be replaced with a steering wheel, and the brakes and accelerator controls will be two or three pedals. Contrary to Tim's claim, ASCII is not the ideal way to read information. Fixed font, 78 character lines are hard to read. There is a reason that books are printed using proportional type on lines only two and a half alphabets wide -- it is easier for our eyes to read and our brains to comprehend. But studying typography is like studying cryptogrophy, something that takes time and effort and concentration. Interestingly, the net is a fairly weak place to learn typography, as it is impossible to see what is meant by "color" of a page of text unless it is properly typeset, which requires the fonts, kerning, leading, etc... so get a book :-) Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)cs.gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) wrote: >And now that Mosaic and Netscape are such big deals (which I'm not >knocking, though--true to form--I use the character-based "lynx" to >access the Web), I expect a swing of the pendulum in the other >direction, toward a time-wasting focus on kerning, fonts, leading, >whitespace, gutter widths, etc. Actually, I see the benefit of html to be that you really _don't_ spend time on pretty visual effects like kerning, fonts, leading, whitespace, gutter widths, etc. You don't deal with any of those things, or anything like it, in a html document. Yes, you spend more time doing formatting then with straight ascii, but the structure you put in is content based structure, rather then pretty-but-useless display based structure. The type that you were doing with outliners and such, although for the goal of making them more readable rather then of helping to organize ideas. But I think html, once you've gotten the hang of it, gives you a pretty good return to the amount of work you put in. A well done html document is, in my opinion, actually much easier to read then a straight ascii document, and the amount of effort neccesary to turn ascii to html is relatively minimal. Just my opinion, of course. I agree with you that there is a problem when too much time and energy is spent on prettifying trimming rather then on content, but I'm not sure that html is really representative of this. Have you tried using MacWeb with the auto-loading of images turned off? Like I said, I find it easier to extract the relevant information quickly out of a html-formatted text then a straight ascii text. And we all know that when you are on the net, being able to extract relevant information quickly is vital. (There's a whole nother treatise waiting to be written there.)

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How to Mail a Letter
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, with the many helpful comments here by fellow Cypherpunks, I've begun to explore how to use the new Postal Service system. I really must say that Al Gore's Reinventing Government Task Farce has outdone itself. The new "PowerVisualMail" system is much more powerful than the old "seal the envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail it" approach. But I'm having some problems in the conversion. Perhaps some of you can help. I did the Archie search and found the Installer script at ftp.gore.gov, fetched it, used MIME_Decode on it, checked the PGP sig to make sure no one had tampered with Tipper's code, then installed it as a client on my Mac (which I bought AUX for, to run this client). After reconfiguring metamail and setting the NOMETAMAIL environmental variable (under csh, "setenv NOMETAMAIL") to the AUX agent symbol, I was able to recompile PowerVisualMail to (sort of) run on my system. I found the new O'Reilly and Associates book, "How to Mail a Letter with PowerVisualMail," to be very helpful, especially Chapter 17. I hope to spend the next couple of days ironing out the bugs and getting my mail client to properly communicate with the PowerVisualMail agent. But it'll all be worth it! This will all be so much easier than licking stamps and sending those b-o-r-i-n-g paper letters. Of course, now I've got to teach my father how to decode my PowerVisualMail letters...and he doesn't even have a computer yet! I've told him that PowerVisualMail just runs too slowly on 486 machines, so I'm hoping he gets a 90 MHz Pentium. And the phone company seems stuck in the Dark Ages, completely unwilling to accept my PowerVisualMail items! I guess they're just late getting on the Information Superhighway. Well, sorry I'll be missing today's Cypherpunks meeting in Mountain View....I'm busy making my life easier. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo(a)toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tcmay

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usenet-to-mail
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Robert A. Hayden" <hayden(a)krypton.mankato.msus.edu> wrote: >More importantly, are there are usenet-to-mail gateways? My first impression was that that was just a joke. Then I thought it might be a very good idea after all. Then I thought it surely wasn't a joke, but also wasn't a very good idea. Now I'm not sure. :) It seems like it might be a good idea. All the anon remailers could watch a certain newsgroup, alt.remailer.submit perhaps, and take messages with a "anon-remailer-attn: specific@remailer", and deal with them just like normal mail input. Would there by any benefit to doing this at all over the present system? Why would someone submit a message to the remailer "bramble" via newsgroup instead of just mailing it? Unless you find an anonymous way to post to the newsgroup in the first place, your security seems to be seriously compromised. Even if everything is encrypted, you've made traffic analysis a huge amount easier. And if you are finding a way to post the a newsgroup anonymously in the first place, odds are you have some other entry point to the remailer bramble, so why make a stop on the newsgroup opening yourself up to traffic analysis? Now that I think about it, it seems that there isn't really any reason for such a thing.

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

L. McCarthy wrote: >Bob Hettinga writes: >> At 10:48 PM 11/18/94 -0500, Amanda Walker wrote: >> >Fancy and Crap are both in the eye of the beholder :). >> Attachment converted: :Amanda Logo Sig.GIF (GIFf/JVWR) (00003907) > >You bothered ? > >$ This message contains data in an unrecognized format, image/gif, >$ which can be decoded and written to a file. >$ Please enter the name of a file to which the data should be written, >$ or just press RETURN to skip writing it to a file. Perhaps Bob is one of the many fortunate people who use a Mac to read their mail ;-) Eudora auto-converts the MIME attachments and dumps them in the folder of your choice. Give it a try. I think you'd like it. -- Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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tips
by Cyber City 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

:Request-Remailing-To: snitch(a)atf.bogus.gov -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Dear ATF, Here is a list of Cypherpunks members who have admitted to me that they did not turn in their assault rifles. Please execute search warrants and send me my anonymous digital reward. - -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: 2.6 hDwCpkY8we5dNykBAX918sq0PCIgfsaVVjD3gfwsTVtumQPb74rPoeUeoWlkBcfI N2Z6OL3es4EnjlZrsgWmAAAAhj5ySLZTPVQ96fngDmbGJ8aoryignRSm43RyrdoA C41To/PJYVW9O2srJZYC+WVG+5dfVTqdRT4wSnEtr1Q6tQOfwtywVGF9djIGUVs/ oQMTxXn42gX6C+6GleUBdgXIgFX7cBVTu+j2xD3gldVOUZMLAcGN1XI/i0zih0bt jduae3T9dFtA =ud0m - -----END PGP MESSAGE----- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQBFAgUBLs5LDShcUzyq2FJRAQGqaQGAoO+oNrEW8lOKpkiPx3wAcinfxJdNg2+W d5r2rlBiFe22k/E6sfM9Werx1F4UNZZQ =Ui8K -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Foreign Transactions & The Pistol Whip Test
by blancw＠pylon.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here's a simple checklist for making decisions about foreign transactions & financial institutions. Question: Can they kick down the door and pistol whip this one: Yes No ___ ___ consultant who works in the country ___ ___ consultant who works out of the country ___ ___ relative who is in a foreign country ___ ___ relative who is in the USA ___ ___ friend who is in a foreign country ___ ___ friend who is in the USA ___ ___ bank account in another country ___ ___ bank account in the USA ___ ___ all financial institutions ___ ___ self proclaimed financial experts ___ ___ your puppy dog ___ ___ All of them! All of them! Blanc :>)

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(fwd) "Process Mime Article y/n?"
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There was a lot of hilarity at today's Cypherpunks meeting, about the MIME/complexity thread. Others are reporting similar experiences, percolating into newsgroups: > From: sag(a)hera.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (Steve Goldfield) > Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.digest > Subject: "Process Mime Article y/n?" > Message-ID: <3ainnf$itf(a)agate.berkeley.edu> > Date: 18 Nov 94 17:19:42 GMT > Sender: usenet > Distribution: world > Organization: University of California, Berkeley > Approved: info-mac(a)sumex-aim.stanford.edu > > A day or so ago while trying to read this newsgroup, I got > the prompt, "Process Mime Article? y/n?" I said "y" and was > immediately sorry. Message after message came up and no > character seemed to permit escape from that loop. Seems to > me there should be a warning about such things. I had to > disconnect and relogin to my account and then delete the > message without reading it. I notice today that if I'd said > "n," I'd have got the same old very long message. Anyway, > I'd urge the moderator of the newsgroup to stick in a > warning or tell the unwary reader how to excape from the > Mime loop. > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > Steve Goldfield :<{ {>: sag(a)coe.berkeley.edu > University of California at Berkeley Richmond Field Station > > --

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:19 AM 11/19/94, Timothy C. May wrote: >Jonathan Rochkind wrote: >... >> return to the amount of work you put in. A well done html document is, in >> my opinion, actually much easier to read then a straight ascii document, >> and the amount of effort neccesary to turn ascii to html is relatively >> minimal. > >Well, I've looked at maybe 50 home pages now, with "lynx," and I'm not >convinced that html docs are "much easier to read" than straight text. >Perhaps the "well done" qualifier is what I haven't yet seen (but 50 >home pages is a pretty fair sample). I think I might not have made my point clear enough. I meant to say that an html document, viewed with a program that displays different headings in different fonts and sizes and stuff (note that the writer doesn't have to deal with font and size issues herself) are much easier to read. Meaning, "an html document viewed on anything but lynx". In my opinion. An html document viewed with lynx _is_ pretty much straight text, isn't it? So it's not going to be much easier to read then straight text, obviously. >In any case, the problem is not just html. On a Smalltalk mailing list [various problems] I agree there are problems like that. Much of the problem is due to lack of tools on the user-end of it. Which is a completely different thing from the issue of the author spending too much time on inane prettifying, form over content, etc. Still an important issue. Until nearly everyone _is_ able to use a graphical web browser, html isn't going to be as useful as it could be. Until there are easy or automatic ways to use PGP, it's not going to be as easy to send and receive PGP mail as it could be. Until everyone has a MIME-compatible mailer that behaves reasonably and can be configured to do whatever one wants it to do... etc. This is a legitimate issue, but not the same one as the form over content thing you were foaming about earlier. :) > >My point? Much wheel-spinning. Like trying to read Amanda's "X11" GIF, >and then wondering if my Netcom disk quota was being sucked up by a >hidden file somewhere! Or jumping through hoops to download a >PGP-encrypted note to my home machine, decrypting it, only to find a >"Like, wow, this PGP sure is neat! Like, rock on, dude!" message >awaiting me! All due to lack of proper tools to deal with this stuff, I'd argue. If you had a MIME compatible mailer that displayed Amanda's GIF inline, or did something logical with it, or just tossed it in the bit bucket cause you told it to, it wouldn't be so much of a problem. Yes, not everyone (or possibly anyone) has that capability at the moment, and that's a good point. [I know you asked not to have advice, but I'll quickly say that I've found that using the Eudora-compatible PGP-related applescripts makes it _immeasurably_ easier to deal with PGP stuff. Decrypting a PGP-encrypted note is a single mouse click. Lack of tools is what makes it a problem] >We are getting bogged down in banal details and platform >idiosyncracies. Dozens of platforms, dozens of flavors of Unix and >other operating systems, half a dozen major display options (as noted >above), lots of image formats (at least that's relatively >standardized, to GIF, PICT, JPEG, etc....and yet many people spend >_days_ trying to convert, download, uncompress, read, display, etc.) I agree that it's important _not_ to get bogged down in banal details, or platform idiosyncracies. The point of such things as MIME and HTML are to avoid both of these things. The MIME and HTML specifications are completely platform-independent, and their whole purpose is basically to take care of the banal details so humans don't have to. Whether theory matches practice is another issue. > There's got to be a better way. The net is evolving. I _like_ the fact that I can option-click on a ftp URL in my newsreading software, and have that URL automatically fetched. I don't like the fact that Eudora _automatically_ fetched the documents referenced by the MIME voodoo in that recent contribution to the list, but if it had merely shown "referenced document: 1994.Standards", and allowed me to option-click on that (or ignore it) to download it if I wished, I would have liked that too. At one point ASCII _wasn't_ a standard. It was never quite such a problem as we have now, admittedly, but it's not as powerful as what we are on the verge of having now either. Once MIME compatible mailers work right, and the user interaction issues are taken care of the right way, and everyone has a direct high-bandwith net connection, I firmly believe that MIME and html will be of enormous utility. No, I'm not holding my breath for that to happen, but technology has a way of moving faster then you would expect (and at times slower then you would expect too. but unpredictable nearly always). Or maybe I'm just a hopeless techno-phile.

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim wrote: [various reasons why television is a bad thing because it can't be received on a radio deleted <g>] >Me, I think I'm just going on a personal crusade to simplify things. >Computers should not be making my life _vastly more complicated_. Amen. They also should enable people to communicate in more and better ways with more people. MIME, HTML, Maven (phone calls over the net for free), CU-SeeMe (video over the Net for free,) and similar tools are first examples of how these goals might be achieved. I love email, but I would also like to be able to see and hear from some of the friends I made all over the world. >One last note: I read my mail on-line, interspersed with reading >NetNews. Although I have Eudora, and of course use it, I don't use it >for routine work (for one thing, it may take 20 minutes to download my >mail, so I tend to use it when I'm heading out to do something else, >or to go to sleep, etc.). So all the "solutions" that involve using >Eudora are not my cup of tea. That's just the way it is. Twenty minutes for your mail? How fast a modem do you use? As for solutions, the only solutions there are and ever will be involve you getting of that terminal server. The evolution of the Internet will make ASCII terminals obsolete. If it hasn't already done so. Let's take that poll of what people use. I am curious. Happy netting, P.S. If anybody here on the list wants to know how to turn their regular shell account into a SLIP account, email me for info or read alt.dcom.slip-emulators. Please don't ask about it on the list. -- Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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