December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?
by nnburk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation? by John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers version in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) Download Acrobat Editor's Note: This is a draft of an article scheduled for publication in the October 1998 issue of THE FUTURIST. Due to the time-sensitive nature of the material, it was posted here to create greater awareness of the issue as well as elicit comments and questions before final publication. Please send your comments and questions to the authors at johnp(a)arlinst.org and the editors at cwagner(a)wfs.org . The Millenial sun will first rise over human civilization in the independent republic of Kiribati, a group of some thirty low lying coral islands in the Pacific Ocean that straddle the equator and the International Date Line, halfway between Hawaii and Australia. This long awaited sunrise marks the dawn of the year 2000, and quite possibly, the onset of unheralded disruptions in life as we know it in many parts of the globe. Kiribati's 81,000 Micronesians may observe nothing different about this dawn; they only received TV in 1989. However, for those who live in a world that relies on satellites, air, rail and ground transportation, manufacturing plants, electricity, heat, telephones, or TV, when the calendar clicks from '99 to '00, we will experience a true millennial shift. As the sun moves westward on January 1, 2000, as the date shifts silently within millions of computerized systems, we will begin to experience our computer-dependent world in an entirely new way. We will finally see the extent of the networked and interdependent processes we have created. At the stroke of midnight, the new millenium heralds the greatest challenge to modern society we have yet to face as a planetary community. Whether we experience this as chaos or social transformation will be influenced by what we do immediately. We are describing the year 2000 problem, known as Y2K (K signifying 1000.) Nicknamed at first "The Millennial Bug," increasing sensitivity to the magnitude of the impending crisis has escalated it to "The Millennial Bomb." The problem begins as a simple technical error. Large mainframe computers more than ten years old were not programmed to handle a four digit year. Sitting here now, on the threshold of the year 2000, it seems incomprehensible that computer programmers and microchip designers didn't plan for it. But when these billions of lines of computer code were being written, computer memory was very expensive. Remember when a computer only had 16 kilobytes of RAM? To save storage space, most programmers allocated only two digits to a year. 1993 is '93' in data files, 1917 is '17.' These two-digit dates exist on millions of files used as input to millions of applications. (The era in which this code was written was described by one programming veteran as "the Wild West." Programmers did whatever was required to get a product up and working; no one even thought about standards.) The same thing happened in the production of microchips as recently as three years ago. Microprocessors and other integrated circuits are often just sophisticated calculators that count and do math. They count many things: fractions of seconds, days, inches, pounds, degrees, lumens, etc. Many chips that had a time function designed into them were only structured for this century. And when the date goes from '99 to '00 both they and the legacy software that has not been fixed will think it is still the 20th century -- not 2000, but 1900. Peter de Jager, who has been actively studying the problem and its implications since 1991, explains the computer math calculation: "I was born in 1955. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it subtracts 55 from 98 and announces that I'm 43. . . But what happens in the year 2000? The computer will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am minus 55 years old. This error will affect any calculation that produces or uses time spans. . . If you want to sort by date (e.g., 1965, 1905, 1966), the resulting sequence would be 1905, 1965, 1966. However, if you add in a date record such as 2015, the computer, which reads only the last two digits of the date, sees 05, 15, 65, 66 and sorts them incorrectly. These are just two types of calculations that are going to produce garbage."1 The calculation problem explains why the computer system at Marks & Spencer department store in London recently destroyed tons of food during the process of doing a long term forecast. The computer read 2002 as 1902. Instead of four more years of shelf life, the computer calculated that this food was ninety-six years old. It ordered it thrown out.2 A similar problem happened recently in the U.S. at the warehouse of a freeze dried food manufacturer. But Y2K is not about wasting good food. Date calculations affect millions more systems than those that deal with inventories, interest rates, or insurance policies. Every major aspect of our modern infrastructure has systems and equipment that rely on such calculations to perform their functions. We are dependent on computerized systems that contain date functions to effectively manage defense, transportation, power generation, manufacturing, telecommunications, finance, government, education, healthcare. The list is longer, but the picture is clear. We have created a world whose efficient functioning in all but the poorest and remotest areas is dependent on computers. It doesn't matter whether you personally use a computer, or that most people around the world don't even have telephones. The world's economic and political infrastructures rely on computers. And not isolated computers. We have created dense networks of reliance around the globe. We are networked together for economic and political purposes. Whatever happens in one part of the network has an impact on other parts of the network. We have created not only a computer-dependent society, but an interdependent planet. We already have frequent experiences with how fragile these systems are, and how failure cascades through a networked system. While each of these systems relies on millions of lines of code that detail the required processing, they handle their routines in serial fashion. Any next step depends on the preceding step. This serial nature makes systems, no matter their size, vulnerable to even the slightest problem anywhere in the system. In 1990, ATT's long distance system experienced repeated failures. At that time, it took two million lines of computer code to keep the system operational. But these millions of lines of code were brought down by just three lines of faulty code. And these systems are lean; redundancies are eliminated in the name of efficiency. This leanness also makes the system highly vulnerable. In May of this year, 90% of all pagers in the U.S. crashed for a day or longer because of the failure of one satellite. Late in 1997, the Internet could not deliver email to the appropriate addresses because bad information from their one and only central source corrupted their servers. Compounding the fragility of these systems is the fact that we can't see the extent of our interconnectedness. The networks that make modern life possible are masked by the technology. We only see the interdependencies when the relationships are disrupted -- when a problem develops elsewhere and we notice that we too are having problems. When Asian markets failed last year, most U.S. businesses denied it would have much of an impact on our economy. Only recently have we felt the extent to which Asian economic woes affect us directly. Failure in one part of a system always exposes the levels of interconnectedness that otherwise go unnoticedwe suddenly see how our fates are linked together. We see how much we are participating with one another, sustaining one another. Modern business is completely reliant on networks. Companies have vendors, suppliers, customers, outsourcers (all, of course, managed by computerized data bases.) For Y2K, these highly networked ways of doing business create a terrifying scenario. The networks mean that no one system can protect itself from Y2K failures by just attending to its own internal systems. General Motors, which has been working with extraordinary focus and diligence to bring their manufacturing plants up to Year 2000 compliance, (based on their assessment that they were facing catastrophe,) has 100,000 suppliers worldwide. Bringing their internal systems into compliance seems nearly impossible, but what then do they do with all those vendors who supply parts? GM experiences production stoppages whenever one key supplier goes on strike. What is the potential number of delays and shutdowns possible among 100,000 suppliers? The nature of systems and our history with them paints a chilling picture of the Year 2000. We do not know the extent of the failures, or how we will be affected by them. But we do know with great certainty that as computers around the globe respond or fail when their calendars record 2000, we will see clearly the extent of our interdependence. We will see the ways in which we have woven the modern world together through our technology. What, me worry? Until quite recently, it's been difficult to interest most people in the Year 2000 problem. Those who are publicizing the problem (the Worldwide Web is the source of the most extensive information on Y2K,) exclaim about the general lack of awareness, or even the deliberate blindness that greets them. In our own investigation among many varieties of organizations and citizens, we've noted two general categories of response. In the first category, people acknowledge the problem but view it as restricted to a small number of businesses, or a limited number of consequences. People believe that Y2K affects only a few industriesprimarily finance and insuranceseemingly because they deal with dates on policies and accounts. Others note that their organization is affected by Y2K, but still view it as a well-circumscribed issue that is being addressed by their information technology department. What's common to these comments is that people hold Y2K as a narrowly-focused, bounded problem. They seem oblivious to the networks in which they participate, or to the systems and interconnections of modern life. The second category of reactions reveals the great collective faith in technology and science. People describe Y2K as a technical problem, and then enthusiastically state that human ingenuity and genius always finds a way to solve these type of problems. Ecologist David Orr has noted that one of the fundamental beliefs of our time is that technology can be trusted to solve any problem it creates.3 If a software engineer goes on TV claiming to have created a program that can correct all systems, he is believed. After all, he's just what we've been expecting. And then there is the uniqueness of the Year 2000 problem. At no other time in history have we been forced to deal with a deadline that is absolutely non-negotiable. In the past, we could always hope for a last minute deal, or rely on round-the-clock bargaining, or pray for an eleventh hour savior. We have never had to stare into the future knowing the precise date when the crisis would materialize. In a bizarre fashion, the inevitability of this confrontation seems to add to people's denial of it. They know the date when the extent of the problem will surface, and choose not to worry about it until then. However, this denial is quickly dissipating. Information on Y2K is expanding exponentially, matched by an escalation in adjectives used to describe it. More public figures are speaking out. This is critically important. With each calendar tick of this time, alternatives diminish and potential problems grow. We must develop strategies for preparing ourselves at all levels to deal with whatever Y2K presents to us with the millennium dawn. What we know about Y2K a technological problem that cannot be solved by technology the first-ever, non-negotiable deadline a systemic crisis that no one can solve alone a crisis that transcends boundaries and hierarchies an opportunity to evoke greater capacity from individuals and organizations an opportunity to simplify and redesign major systems Figure 1 The Y2K problem, really We'd like to describe in greater detail the extent of Y2K. As a global network of interrelated consequences, it begins at the center with the technical problem, legacy computer codes and embedded microchips. (see Figure One) For the last thirty years thousands of programmers have been writing billions of lines of software code for the computers on which the world's economy and society now depend. Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes "old, undocumented code written in over 2500 different computer languages and executed on thousands of different hardware platforms being controlled by hundreds of different operating systems . . . [that generate] further complexity in the form of billions of six character date fields stored in millions of databases that are used in calculations."4 The Gartner Group, a computer-industry research group, estimates that globally, 180 billion lines of software code will have to be screened.5 Peter de Jager notes that it is not unusual for a company to have more than 100,000,000 lines of code--the IRS, for instance, has at least eighty million lines. The Social Security Administration began working on its thirty million lines of code in 1991. After five years of work, in June, 1996, four hundred programmers had fixed only six million lines. The IRS has 88,000 programs on 80 mainframe computers to debug. By the end of last year they had cleaned up 2,000 programs.6 Capers Jones, head of Software Productivity Research, a firm that tracks programmer productivity, estimates that finding, fixing and testing all Y2K-affected software would require over 700,000 person-years.7 Programmers have been brought out of retirement and are receiving extraordinary wages and benefits to stick with this problem, but we are out of time. There aren't nearly enough programmers nor hours remaining before January 1, 2000. Also at the center of this technical time bomb are the embedded microprocessors. There are somewhat over a billion of these hardware chips located in systems worldwide. They sustain the world's manufacturing and engineering base. They exist in traffic lights, elevators, water, gas, and electricity control systems. They're in medical equipment and military and navigation systems. America's air traffic control system is dependent upon them. They're located in the track beds of railroad systems and in the satellites that circle the earth. Global telecommunications are heavily dependent on them. Modern cars contain about two dozen microprocessors. The average American comes in contact with seventy microprocessors before noon every day. Many of these chips aren't date sensitive, but a great number are, and engineers looking at long ago installed systems don't know for sure which is which. To complicate things further, not all chips behave the same. Recent tests have shown that two chips of the same model installed in two different computers but performing the same function are not equally sensitive to the year-end problem. One shuts down and the other doesn't. It is impossible to locate all of these chips in the remaining months, nor can we replace all those that are identified. Those more than three years old are obsolete and are probably not available in the marketplace. The solution in those cases is to redesign and remanufacture that part of the system -- which often makes starting over with new equipment the best option. That is why some companies are junking their computer systems and spending millions, even hundreds of millions, to replace everything. It at least ensures that their internal systems work. At issue is time, people, money, and the nature of systems. These technical problems are exacerbated by government and business leaders who haven't yet fully understood the potential significance of this issue for their own companies, to say nothing of the greater economic implications. The U.S. leads all other developed nations in addressing this issue, minimally by six to nine months. Yet in a recent survey of American corporate chief information officers, 70% of them expressed the belief that even their companies would not be completely prepared for Y2K. Additionally, 50% of them acknowledged that they would not fly during January 2000. If America is the global leader in Y2K efforts, these CIO comments are indeed sobering. The economic impacts for the global economy are enormous and unknown. The Gartner Group projects that the total cost of dealing with Y2K worldwide will be somewhere between $300 billion to $600 billion -- and these are only direct costs associated with trying to remedy the problem. (These estimates keep rising every quarter now.) The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in a recently released Quarterly Report, estimated total government Y2K expense at $3.9 billion. This figure was based only on federal agency estimates; the OMB warned that this estimate might be as much as 90% too low considering the increasing labor shortage and expected growing remediation costs as January 1, 2000 looms nearer. And in June of this year, it was announced that federal agencies had already spent five billion dollars. Of twenty-four agencies, fifteen reported being behind schedule. These numbers don't consider the loss of output caused by diverting resources to forestall this crisis. In more and more businesses, expenditures for R&D and modernization are being diverted to Y2K budgets. Business Week in March of 1998 estimated that the Year 2000 economic damage alone would be $119 billion. When potential lawsuits and secondary effects are added to this -- people suing over everything from stalled elevators to malfunctioning nuclear power plants -- the cost easily could be over $1 trillion. But these problems and estimates don't begin to account for the potential impact of Y2K. The larger significance of this bomb becomes apparent when we consider the next circle of the global network-- the organizational relationships that technology makes possible. Who works with whom? The global economy is dependent upon computers both directly and indirectly. Whether it's your PC at home, the workstation on a local area network, or the GPS or mobile telephone that you carry, all are integral parts of larger networks where computers are directly connected together. As we've learned, failure in a single component can crash the whole system; that system could be an automobile, a train, an aircraft, an electric power plant, a bank, a government agency, a stock exchange, an international telephone system, the air traffic control system. If every possible date-sensitive hardware and software bug hasn't been fixed in a larger system, just one programming glitch or one isolated chip potentially can bring down the whole thing. While there isn't enough time or technical people to solve the Y2K problem before the end of next year, we might hope that critical aspects of our infrastructure are tackling this problem with extreme diligence. But this isn't true. America's electric power industry is in danger of massive failures, as described in Business Week's February '98 cover story on Y2K. They report that "electric utilities are only now becoming aware that programmable controllers -- which have replaced mechanical relays in virtually all electricity-generating plants and control rooms -- may behave badly or even freeze up when 2000 arrives. Many utilities are just getting a handle on the problem." It's not only nuclear power plants that are the source of concern, although problems there are scary enough. In one Year 2000 test, notes Jared S.Wermiel, leader of the Y2K effort at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the security computer at a nuclear power plant failed by opening vital areas that are normally locked. Given the complexity and the need to test, "it wouldn't surprise me if certain plants find that they are not Year 2000-ready and have to shut down."8 Other electric utility analysts paint a bleaker picture. Rick Cowles, who reports on the electric utility industry, said at the end of February: "Not one electric company [that he had talked to] has started a serious remediation effort on its embedded controls. Not one. Yes, there's been some testing going on, and a few pilot projects here and there, but for the most part it is still business-as-usual, as if there were 97 months to go, not 97 weeks.9 After attending one industry trade show, Cowle stated that, "Based on what I learned at DistribuTECH '98, I am convinced there is a 100% chance that a major portion of the domestic electrical infrastructure will be lost as a result of the Year 2000 computer and embedded systems problem. The industry is fiddling whilst the infrastructure burns." 10 The Federal Aviation Administration is also very vulnerable but quite optimistic. "We're on one hand working to get those computers Year 2000 compliant, but at the same time we're working on replacing those computers," said Paul Takemoto, a spokesman for the FAA in early '98. At the twenty Air Route Traffic Control Centers, there is a host computer and a backup system. All forty of these machines --mid-'80s vintage IBM 3083 mainframes--are affected. And then there are the satellites with embedded chips, individual systems in each airplane, and air traffic control systems around the globe. Lufthansa already has announced it will not fly its aircraft during the first days of 2000. Who else is affected? But the interdependency problem extends far beyond single businesses, or even entire industries. Indirect relationships extend like tentacles into many other networks, creating the potential for massive disruptions of service. Let's hope that your work organization spends a great deal of money and time to get its entire information system compliant. You know yours is going to function. But on the second of January 2000 the phone calls start. It's your banker. "There's been a problem," he says. They've lost access to your account information and until they solve the problem and get the backup loaded on the new system, they are unable to process your payroll. "We don't have any idea how long it will take," the president says. Then someone tells you that on the news there's a story that that the whole IRS is down and that they can neither accept nor process tax information. Social Security, Federal Housing, Welfarenone of these agencies are capable of issuing checks for the foreseeable future. Major airlines aren't flying, waiting to see if there is still integrity in the air traffic control system. And manufacturing across the country is screeching to a halt because of failures in their supply chain. (After years of developing just in time (JIT) systems, there is no inventory on handsuppliers have been required to deliver parts as needed. There is no slack in these systems to tolerate even minor delivery problems.) Ground and rail transport have been disrupted, and food shortages appear within three to six days in major metropolises. Hospitals, dealing with the failure of medical equipment, and the loss of shipments of medicine, are forced to deny non-essential treatment, and in some cases are providing essential care in pre-technical ways. It's a rolling wave of interdependent failures. And it reaches across the country and the world to touch people who, in most cases, didn't know they were linked to others. Depending on what systems fail, very few but strategically placed failures would initiate a major economic cascade. Just problems with power companies and phone systems alone would cause real havoc. (This spring, a problem in ATT rendered all credit card machines useless for a day. How much revenue was lost by businesses?) If only twenty percent of businesses and government agencies crash at the same time, major failures would ensue. In an interdependent system, solving most of the problem is no solution. As Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes: It is not enough to solve simply "most of these problems." The integration of these systems requires that we solve virtually all of them. Our ability as an economy and as a society to deal with disruptions and breakdowns in our critical systems is minuscule. Our worst case scenarios have never envisioned multiple, parallel systemic failures. Just in time inventory has led to just in time provisioning. Costs have been squeezed out of all of our critical infrastructure systems repeatedly over time based on the ubiquity and reliability of these integrated systems. The human factor, found costly, slow, and less reliable has been purged over time from our systems. Single, simple failures can be dealt with; complex, multiple failures have been considered too remote a possibility and therefore too expensive to plan for. 11 The city of New York began to understand this last September. The governor of New York State banned all nonessential IT projects to minimize the disruption caused by the year 2000 bomb after reading a detailed report that forecasts the millennium will throw New York City into chaos, with power supplies, schools, hospitals, transport, and the finance sector likely to suffer severe disruption. Compounding the city's Y2K risks is the recent departure of the head of its year 2000 project to a job in the private sector.12 But of course the anticipated problems extend far beyond U.S. shores. In February, the Bangkok Post reported that Phillip Dodd, a Unysis Y2K expert, expects that upward of 70% of the businesses in Asia will fail outright or experience severe hardship because of Y2K. The Central Intelligence Agency supports this with their own analysis: "We're concerned about the potential disruption of power grids, telecommunications and banking services, among other possible fallout, especially in countries already torn by political tensions."13 A growing number of assessments of this kind have led Dr. Edward Yardeni, the chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, to keep raising the probability of a deep global recession in 2000-2001 as the result of Y2K. His present estimate of the potential for such a recession now hovers at about 70%, up from 40% at the end of 1997.14 How might we respond? (To be continued...) <http://www.wfs.org/year2k.htm>

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The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation? (Part 2)
by nnburk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

How might we respond? As individuals, nations, and as a global society, do we have a choice as to how we might respond to Y2K, however problems materialize? The question of alternative social responses lies at the outer edges of the interlocking circles of technology and system relationships. At present, potential societal reactions receive almost no attention. But we firmly believe that it is the central most important place to focus public attention and individual ingenuity. Y2K is a technology-induced problem, but it will not and cannot be solved by technology. It creates societal problems that can only be solved by humans. We must begin to address potential social responses. We need to be engaged in this discourse within our organizations, our communities, and across the traditional boundaries of competition and national borders. Without such planning, we will slide into the Year 2000 as hapless victims of our technology. Even where there is some recognition of the potential disruptions or chaos that Y2K might create, there's a powerful dynamic of secrecy preventing us from engaging in these conversations. Leaders don't want to panic their citizens. Employees don't want to panic their bosses. Corporations don't want to panic investors. Lawyers don't want their clients to confess to anything. But as psychotherapist and information systems consultant Dr. Douglass Carmichael has written: Those who want to hush the problem ("Don't talk about it, people will panic", and "We don't know for sure.") are having three effects. First, they are preventing a more rigorous investigation of the extent of the problem. Second, they are slowing down the awareness of the intensity of the problem as currently understood and the urgency of the need for solutions, given the current assessment of the risks. Third, they are making almost certain a higher degree of ultimate panic, in anger, under conditions of shock.15 Haven't we yet learned the consequences of secrecy? When people are kept in the dark, or fed misleading information, their confidence in leaders quickly erodes. In the absence of real information, people fill the information vacuum with rumors and fear. And whenever we feel excluded, we have no choice but to withdraw and focus on self-protective measures. As the veil of secrecy thickens, the capacity for public discourse and shared participation in solution-finding disappears. People no longer believe anything or anybodywe become unavailable, distrusting and focused only on self-preservation. Our history with the problems created by secrecy has led CEO Norman Augustine to advise leaders in crisis to: "Tell the truth and tell it fast."16 Behaviors induced by secrecy are not the only human responses available. Time and again we observe a much more positive human response during times of crisis. When an earthquake strikes, or a bomb goes off, or a flood or fire destroys a community, people respond with astonishing capacity and effectiveness. They use any available materials to save and rescue, they perform acts of pure altruism, they open their homes to one another, they finally learn who their neighbors are. We've interviewed many people who participated in the aftermath of a disaster, and as they report on their experiences, it is clear that their participation changed their lives. They discovered new capacities in themselves and in their communities. They exceeded all expectations. They were surrounded by feats of caring and courage. They contributed to getting systems restored with a speed that defied all estimates. When chaos strikes, there's simply no time for secrecy; leaders have no choice but to engage every willing soul. And the field for improvisation is wide openno emergency preparedness drill ever prepares people for what they actually end up doing. Individual initiative and involvement are essential. Yet surprisingly, in the midst of conditions of devastation and fear, people report how good they feel about themselves and their colleagues. These crisis experiences are memorable because the best of us becomes visible and available. We've observed this in America, and in Bangladesh, where the poorest of the poor responded to the needs of their most destitute neighbors rather than accepting relief for themselves. What we know about people in crisis shared purpose and meaning brings people together people display unparalleled levels of creativity and resourcefulness people want to help others - individual agendas fade immediately people learn instantly and respond at lightning speed the more information people get, the smarter their responses leadership behaviors (not roles) appear everywhere, as needed people experiment constantly to find what works Who might we become? As we sit staring into the unknown dimensions of a global crisis whose timing is non-negotiable, what responses are available to us as a human community? An effective way to explore this question is to develop potential scenarios of possible social behaviors. Scenario planning is an increasingly accepted technique for identifying the spectrum of possible futures that are most important to an organization or society. In selecting among many possible futures, it is most useful to look at those that account for the greatest uncertainty and the greatest impact. For Y2K, David Isenberg, (a former AT&T telecommunications expert, now at Isen.Com) has identified the two variables which seem obvious the range of technical failures from isolated to multiple, and the potential social responses, from chaos to coherence. Both variables are critical and uncertain and are arrayed as a pair of crossing axes, as shown in Figure 2. When displayed in this way, four different general futures emerge. In the upper left quadrant, if technical failures are isolated and society doesn't respond to those, nothing of significance will happen. Isenberg labels this the "Official Future" because it reflects present behavior on the part of leaders and organizations. Figure 2. The upper right quadrant describes a time where technical failures are still isolated, but the public responds to these with panic, perhaps fanned by the media or by stonewalling leaders. Termed "A Whiff of Smoke," the situation is analogous to the panic caused in a theater by someone who smells smoke and spreads an alarm, even though it is discovered that there is no fire. This world could evolve from a press report that fans the flames of panic over what starts as a minor credit card glitch (for example), and, fueled by rumors turns nothing into a major social problem with runs on banks, etc. The lower quadrants describe far more negative scenarios. "Millennial Apocalypse" presumes large-scale technical failure coupled with social breakdown as the organizational, political and economic systems come apart. The lower left quadrant, "Human Spirit" posits a society that, in the face of clear adversity, calls on each of us to collaborate in solving the problems of breakdown. Since essentially we are out of time and resources for preventing widespread Y2K failures, a growing number of observers believe that the only plausible future scenarios worth contemplating are those in the lower half of the matrix. The major question before us is how will society respond to what is almost certain to be widespread and cascading technological failures? Figure 3. Figure 3 above shows a possible natural evolution of the problem. Early, perhaps even in '98, the press could start something bad long before it was clear how serious the problem was and how society would react to it. There could be an interim scenario where a serious technical problem turned into a major social problem from lack of adaquate positive social response. This "Small Theatre Fire" future could be the kind of situation where people overreact and trample themselves trying to get to the exits from a small fire that is routinely extinguished. If the technical situation is bad, a somewhat more ominous situation could evolve where government, exerting no clear positive leadership and seeing no alternative to chaos, cracks down so as not to lose control (A common historical response to social chaos has been for the government to intervene in non-democratic, sometimes brutal fashion. "Techno-fascism" is a plausible scenario -- governments and large corporations would intervene to try to contain the damage -- rather than build for the future. This dictatorial approach would be accompanied by secrecy about the real extent of the problem and ultimately fueled by the cries of distress, prior to 2000, from a society that has realized its major systems are about to fail and that it is too late to do anything about it. Collaboration is our only choice Obviously, the scenario worth working towards is "Human Spirit," a world where the best of human creativity is enabled and the highest common good becomes the objective. In this world we all work together, developing a very broad, powerful, synergistic, self-organizing force focused on determining what humanity should be doing in the next 18 months to plan for the aftermath of the down stroke of Y2K. This requires that we understand Y2K not as a technical problem, but as a systemic, worldwide event that can only be resolved by new social relationships. All of us need to become very wise and very engaged very fast and develop entirely new processes for working together. Systems issues cannot be resolved by hiding behind traditional boundaries or by clinging to competitive strategies. Systems require collaboration and the dissolution of existing boundaries. Our only hope for healthy responses to Y2K-induced failures is to participate together in new collaborative relationships. At present, individuals and organizations are being encouraged to protect themselves, to focus on solving "their" problem. In a system's world, this is insane. The problems are not isolated, therefore no isolated responses will work. The longer we pursue strategies for individual survival, the less time we have to create any viable, systemic solutions. None of the boundaries we've created across industries, organizations, communities, or nation states give us any protection in the face of Y2K. We must stop the messages of fragmentation now and focus resources and leadership on figuring out how to engage everyone, at all levels, in all systems. As threatening as Y2K is, it also gives us the unparalleled opportunity to figure out new and simplified ways of working together. GM's chief information officer, Ralph Szygenda, has said that Y2K is the cruelest trick ever played on us by technology, but that it also represents a great opportunity for change.17 It demands that we let go of traditional boundaries and roles in the pursuit of new, streamlined systems, ones that are less complex than the entangled ones that have evolved over the past thirty years. There's an interesting lesson here about involvement that comes from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Just a few weeks prior the bombing, agencies from all over the city conducted an emergency preparedness drill as part of normal civil defense practice. They did not prepare themselves for a bomb blast, but they did work together on other disaster scenarios. The most significant accomplishment of the drill was to create an invisible infrastructure of trusting relationships. When the bomb went off, that infrastructure displayed itself as an essential resource--people could work together easily, even in the face of horror. Many lives were saved and systems were restored at an unprecedented rate because people from all over the community worked together so well. But there's more to this story. One significant player had been excluded from the preparedness drill, and that was the FBI. No one thought they'd ever be involved in a Federal matter. To this day, people in Oklahoma City speak resentfully of the manner in which the FBI came in, pushed them aside, and offered no explanations for their behavior. In the absence of trusting relationships, some form of techno-fascism is the only recourse. Elizabeth Dole, as president of the American Red Cross commented: "The midst of a disaster is the poorest possible time to establish new relationships and to introduce ourselves to new organizations . . . . When you have taken the time to build rapport, then you can make a call at 2 a.m., when the river's rising and expect to launch a well-planned, smoothly conducted response."18 The scenario of communities and organizations working together in new ways demands a very different and immediate response not only from leaders but from each of us. We'd like to describe a number of actions that need to begin immediately. What leaders must do We urge leaders to give up trying to carry this burden alone, or trying to reestablish a world that is irretrievably broken. We need leaders to be catalysts for the emergence of a new world. They cannot lead us through this in traditional ways. No leader or senior team can determine what needs to be done. No single group can assess the complexity of these systems and where the consequences of failure might be felt. The unknown but complex implications of Y2K demand that leaders support unparalleled levels of participationmore broad-based and inclusive than ever imagined. If we are to go through this crisis together rather than bunkered down and focused only on individual security, leaders must begin right now to convene us. The first work of leaders then, is to create the resources for groups to come together in conversations that will reveal the interconnections. Boundaries need to dissolve. Hierarchies are irrelevant. Courageous leaders will understand that they must surrender the illusion of control and seek solutions from the great networks and communities within their domain. They must move past the dynamics of competition and support us in developing society-wide solutions. Leaders can encourage us to seek out those we have excluded and insist that they be invited in to all deliberations. Leaders can provide the time and resources for people to assess what is critical for the organization or community to sustainits mission, its functions, its relationships, its unique qualities. >From these conversations and plans, we will learn to know one another and to know what we value. In sudden crises, people instantly share a sense of meaning and purpose. For Y2K, we have at least a little lead time to develop a cohesive sense of what might happen and how we hope to respond. Secrecy must be replaced by full and frequent disclosure of information. The only way to prevent driving people into isolated and self-preserving behaviors is to entrust us with difficult, even fearsome information, and then to insist that we work together. No leader anywhere can ignore these needs or delay their implementation. What communities must do Communities need to assess where they are most vulnerable and develop contingency plans. Such assessment and planning needs to occur not just within individual locales, but also in geographic regions. These activities can be initiated by existing community networks, for example, civic organizations such as Lions or Rotary, Council of Churches, Chamber of Commerce, the United Way. But new and expansive alliances are required, so planning activities need quickly to extend beyond traditional borders. We envision residents of all ages and experience coming together to do these audits and planning. Within each community and region, assessments and contingency plans need to be in place for disruptions or loss of service for: all utilities electricity, water, gas, phones food supplies public safety healthcare government payments to individuals and organizations residents most at risk, e.g. the elderly, those requiring medications What organizations must do Organizations need to move Y2K from the domain of technology experts into the entire organization. Everyone in the organization has something important to contribute to this work. Assessment and contingency plans need to focus on: how the organization will perform essential tasks in the absence of present systems how the organization will respond to failures or slowdowns in information and supplies what simplified systems can be developed now to replace existing ones relationships with suppliers, customers, clients, communitieshow we will work together developing systems to ensure open and full access to information The trust and loyalty developed through these strategic conversations and joint planning will pay enormous dividends later on, even if projected breakdowns don't materialize. Corporate and community experience with scenario planning has taught a important principle: We don't need to be able to predict the future in order to be well-prepared for it. In developing scenarios, information is sought from all over. People think together about its implications and thus become smarter as individuals and as teams. Whatever future then materializes is dealt with by people who are more intelligent and who know how to work well together. And such planning needs to occur at the level of entire industries. Strained relationships engendered by competitive pressures need to be put aside so that people can collaboratively search for ways to sustain the very fabric of their industry. How will power grids be maintained nationally? Or national systems of food transport? How will supply chains for manufacturing in any industry be sustained? What you can do We urge you to get involved in Y2K, wherever you are, and in whatever organizations you participate. We can't leave this issue to others to solve for us, nor can we wait for anyone else to assert leadership. You can begin to ask questions; you can begin to convene groups of interested friends and colleagues; you can engage local and business leaders; you can educate yourself and others (start with www.Year2000.com and www.Y2K.com for up-to-date information and resources.) This is our problem. And as an African proverb reminds us, if you think you're too small to make a difference, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room. The crisis is now There is no time left to waste. Every week decreases our options. At the mid-May meeting of leaders from the G8, a communiqué was issued that expressed their shared sensitivity to the "vast implications" of Y2K, particularly in "defense, transport, telecommunications, financial services, energy, and environmental sectors," and the interdependencies among these sectors. (Strangely, their list excludes from concern government systems, manufacturing and distribution systems.) They vowed to "take further urgent action" and to work with one another, and relevant organizations and agencies. But no budget was established, and no specific activities were announced. Such behaviorthe issuing of a communiqué, the promises of collaboration and further investigationare all too common in our late 20th century political landscape. But the earth continues to circle the sun, and the calendar relentlessly progresses toward the Year 2000. If we cannot immediately change from rhetoric to action, from politics to participation, if we do not immediately turn to one another and work together for the common good, we will stand fearfully in that new dawn and suffer consequences that might well have been avoided if we had learned to stand together now. Copyright 1998 John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers (posted with permission) John L. Petersen is president of The Arlington Institute, a Washington DC area research institute. He is a futurist who specializes in thinking about the long range security implications of global change. He is author of the award winning book, The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future and his latest book is Out of the Blue - Wild Cards and Other Big Future Surprises, which deals with potential events such as Y2K. He can be reached at 703-243-7070 or johnp(a)arlinst.org Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers are authors and consultants to business. A Simpler Way, their book on organizational design was published in 1997. Dr. Wheatley's previous book, Leadership & the New Science, was recently named one of the 10 best management books ever, and it also was voted best management book in 1992 in Industry Week, and again in 1995 by a syndicated management columnist. Their consulting work takes them these days to Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Australasia and Europe. In the States, they've worked with a very wide array of organizations. 1 See Peter de Jager, www.year2000.com 2 United Airlines, Flight Talk Network, February 1998 3 "Slow Knowledge," _______1997. 4 See "The Complexity Factor" by Ed Meagher at www.year2000.com/archive/NFcomplexity.html 5 "Industry Wakes Up to the Year 2000 Menace," Fortune, April 27, 1998 6 The Washington Post, "If Computer Geeks Desert, IRS Codes Will Be ciphers," December 24, 1997 7 Business Week, March 2, 1998 8 www.igs.net/~tonyc/y2kbusweek.html 9 "Industry Gridlock," Rick Cowles, February 27, 1998, www.y2ktimebomb.com/PP/RC/rc9808.htm 10 Cowles, January 23, 1998, ibid www site 11 The Complexity Factor, Ed Meagher 12 www.computerweekly.co.uk/news/ll_9_97 13 REUTER "CIA:Year 2000 to hit basic services: Agency warns that many nations aren't ready for disruption," Jim Wolf, May 7, 1998 14 see http://www.Yardeni.com 15 www.tmn.com/~doug 16 "Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent," Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec. 1995, 158. 17 In Fortune, April 27, 1998 18 quoted in "Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent," Norman Augustine, Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1995, 151. To WFS Home <http://www.wfs.org/year2k.htm>

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Navy fights new hack method http://www.abcnews.com/sections/tech/CNET/cnet_navyhack980925.html Tim Clark CNET NEWS.COM Hackers are banding together across the globe to mount low-visibility attacks in an effort to sneak under the radar of security specialists and intrusion detection software, a U.S. Navy network security team said today. Coordinated attacks from up to 15 different locations on several continents have been detected, and Navy experts believe that the attackers garner information by probing Navy Web sites and then share it among themselves. "These new patterns are really hard to decipher--you need expert forensics to get the smoking gun," said Stephen Northcutt, head of the Shadow intrusion detection team at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. "To know what's really happening will require law enforcement to get hold of the hackers' code so we can disassemble it." The new method involves sending as few as two suspicious probes per hour to a host computer, a level of interest that usually won't be detected by standard countermeasures. But by pooling information learned from those probes, hackers can garner considerable knowledge about a site. Northcutt said the new technique for attacks was discovered only this month and has been detected at Defense Department facilities as well as in private sector sites, including some outside the United States. The Shadow group has posted descriptions of the attacks and countermeasures, and the information has been forwarded to CERT, which investigates security attacks. "Most intrusion detection systems have a threshold, a radar. These attacks are intentionally sliding under that threshold so normal intrusion detection tools will not detect them," said Tim Aldrich, principal analyst at the Navy facility. The Shadow team said that although the new method is harder to detect, it should not affect sites that are well-secured. But the technique puts sites with weak security at greater risk. The attacks do not involve a new hacker tool or new kind of attack, but rather represent a low-visibility technique for perpetrating attacks. For example, one coordinated attack that involved at least 14 locations simply probed a Web site for security weaknesses without mounting a break-in. The Shadow Intrusion Detection team said it cannot determine how many people might be involved in the attacks--hackers frequently use many different machines to launch their attacks. But the number of individuals involved is less important than the technique itself, Northcutt said. The technique could be used to scan or mount attacks from more than 100 Internet addresses. The security experts also suggested that makers of commercial intrusion detection software need to counter the new method. "This stealthy probing enables large amounts of parallel firepower, which means many attack attempts [from many sites] over a short time frame," said a note distributed by the System Administration Networking and Security (SANS) Institute. Going public with a news of new hacker techniques is somewhat unusual in the secretive network security community, which often fears that publicizing attacks before countermeasures are known will tip off attackers to vulnerabilities. "We went public in hopes of raising awareness," Northcutt said. "You're only going to be able to find stealthy stuff by looking for stealthy stuff." But before publicizing the new hacker technique, he added, the Shadow team had checked to be certain it would not jeopardize any official actions against the attackers. He also thinks that users of the attack may be caught. "If they're working together, it ought to be easier to track them down because they leave more of a trail," he said.

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CSapronett(a)aol.com (note: AOL.COM -- LOL!) wrote: >My only regret is that I wont get to watch you all burn in hell !!! I see. Would you mind elaborating? We are going to burn in hell because...? We don't use AOL? We like our privacy? We use cryptosystems that you'll never understand in your life time? Because we know how to use (and create) remailers? ** ~*--*~ ___________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]

3 2

Ueli Maurer's Univ. Stat. Test for Rand No -in C
by David Honig 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

/* UELI.c This implements Ueli M Maurer's "Universal Statistical Test for Random Bit Generators" using L=16 Accepts a filename on the command line; writes its results, with other info, to stdout. Handles input file exhaustion gracefully. Ref: J. Cryptology v 5 no 2, 1992 pp 89-105 also on the web somewhere. -David Honig honig(a)sprynet.com Built with Wedit 2.3, lcc-win32 http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32 26 Sept CP Release Version Notes: This version does L=16. It evolved from an L=8 prototype which I ported from the Pascal in the above reference. I made the memory usage reasonable by replacing Maurer's "block" array with the 'streaming' fgetc() call. Usage: UELI filename outputs to stdout */ #define L 16 // bits per block #define V (1<<L) // number of possible blocks #define Q (10*V) // at LEAST 10 * V, to assure each block seen #define K (100*Q) // at LEAST 100 * Q, as large as possible #define MAXSAMP (Q + K) #include <stdio.h> #include <math.h> int main( int argc, char **argv ) { FILE *fptr; int i; int b, c; int table[V]; float sum=0.0; int run; // Human Interface printf("UELI 26 Sep 98\nL=%d %d %d \n", L, V, MAXSAMP); if (argc <2) {printf("Usage: UELI filename\n"); exit(-1); } else printf("Measuring file %s\n", argv[1]); // FILE IO fptr=fopen(argv[1],"rb"); if (fptr == NULL) {printf("Can't find %s\n", argv[1]); exit(-1); } // INIT for (i=0; i<V; i++) table[i]=0; for (i=0; i<Q; i++) { b= fgetc(fptr)<<8 | fgetc(fptr); table[ b ]=i; } printf("Init done\n"); // COMPUTE run=1; for (i=Q; run && i<Q+K; i++) { // COMPOSE A 16-bit quantity b=fgetc(fptr); if (b<0) run=0; c=fgetc(fptr); if (c<0) run=0; if (run) { b = b<<8 | c; sum += log( (double) ( i-table[b] ) ) ; table[ b ]=i; } } if (!run) printf("Premature end of file; read %d blocks.\n", i-Q); sum = (sum/( (double) (i-Q) ) ) / log(2.0); // i should be K if enough samples printf("fTU= %f\n\n", sum); printf("Expected value for L=16 is 15.167379 \n"); // Add further interpretation/thresholding of the number of sigmas from expected, // and include the fudge factors explained in the paper. } // end

1 0

Re:
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 27 Sep 1998, Reeza! wrote: > > At 12:14 AM 9/27/98 +0200, Anonymous wrote: > >CSapronett(a)aol.com (note: AOL.COM -- LOL!) wrote: > >>My only regret is that I wont get to watch you all burn in hell !!! > > > >I see. Would you mind elaborating? We are going to burn in hell > >because...? We don't use AOL? We like our privacy? We use cryptosystems > >that you'll never understand in your life time? Because we know how > >to use (and create) remailers? > > Don't bother, it is a troll. > > Not a very original, or even interesting one either. Whenever these people troll for flames here they get them one way or another. Then it seems Merrill always tries to take the moral high ground and show us all his bleeding heart and tell us how we should embrace the AOL idiots and cherish them. The AOLers get triple effect that way. I don't think Merrill ever misses a chance to defend AOL and attack anybody who attacks them. About a week ago somebody posted a copy or parts of most AOL postings which were sent here in the last months. Merrill ignores the part about how the posts were classified and sends back some vague flame accusing the author of classing posts he disagreed with as "clueless" then he quotes the entire thing back to the list. I don't know which is worse. At least the people flaming the AOL wimps are funny.

2 1

Re: Clinton's fake apologies (fwd)
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 23 Sep 1998 04:27:46 Reeza! wrote: > Well, it seems I have an admirer. A follower, anyway. Quoting things I said > from two separate posts. I read all the posts to cypherpunks. Some several times to try to understand what some blowhard is trying to say. [Re; Clinton] > I believe the other issues are relevant. ... clear evidence of malfeasance > in many, and every area should not be ignored ... My argument was: 1. You can't seriously be this fired up over perjury (post OJ), can you? 2. there have been several topics discussed on cypherpunks that were more odious. 3. Charge him with his big crimes. Don't "Al Capone" him. Your belief that Starr is leading up to the real issues is compatible with my (now belaboured) point. I still don't understand what you're trying to add. > I'm not building up the bogey man, I'm discussing what I see. What I see, > on every major and minor newstation, is a disgrace. A documented, public > record disgrace. Well, this *is* a pathetic reason. You want Clinton impeached because the media tells you so. At 23 Sep 1998 04:31:48 Reeza! wrote: > > -- an anonymous aol32 user. > > You must be proud of that sig. It's a shit magnet. Works, too! > I'll bet you weren't on the list when the list of deceased CIC bodyguards, > friends and associates was posted either. > <sigh> > flush out your head, you aol user. there is more going on here than just > 'fibbing'. Fine. charge him with the other things! As far as the "newby" flame, I've seen that corpse lists here twice recently. Maybe you've dated yourself? I remember a time without Reeza! posts... And there's a sig flame in there, trying to get out. A new low for you, Reeza? > > Reeza! -- an anonymous aol32 user.

2 1

Re:
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Paul H. Merrill wrote: > <<Heavily snipped to allow for those who don't like it otherwise.>> Yeah, if you quote back over a hundred lines after adding 6, 8, or whatever it happened to be. > > About a week ago somebody posted a copy or parts of most AOL > > postings which were sent here in the last months. Merrill ignores the part > > about how the posts were classified > > I read his classification criteria closely, and read the results of the > classification process. > > and sends back some vague flame accusing > > the author of classing posts he disagreed with as "clueless" then he quotes > > the entire thing back to the list. > > > Then commented that he had not followed his own criteria. And where did he not? A few could be debated. The rest were either written so badly that they were incomprehensible, were off-topic, or didn't include quoted material in a reply/followup. He also stated that he was counting postings which used that '<< >>' scheme as automatically bad, which is understandable. Either way, he seemed to be trying to show the statistics. Pull one or two postings off of one side and put them on the other and the statistics are still pretty bad for AOL. > > I don't know which is worse. At least the people flaming the AOL wimps are > > funny. > > If funny is all you want, may I recommend rec.humor.funny and, in case > you are up on no current events but Clinton, rec.humor.funny.reruns. No, I want a Cypherpunks list which discusses political issues, cryptography, and things related to that. Since this is the Cypherpunks list, we aren't going to censor on the basis of content or origin point. If all you want to do is defend AOL and their ilk, may I recommend comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and alt.aol-sucks. > And to the brilliant person seeking muff diving pics, gee send a real > address and we'll see what we can do. (At least he didn't want it for > pre-muff variety.) Muff diving pics? Do we want to know? Serious questions.

2 1

TODAY'S NEWS AND PICS PACKED STUFFED! - READ IT NOW!
by STUFFED NEWS DAILY 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

+ 30 FREE HOT JPEG PHOTOS + 5 SUPER SEXY STORIES + OH MY GOD, YOU'RE MARRIED + TROY BEYER TALKS ABOUT SEX + THE BOTTOM LINE IN SURFING FOR SEX + THE BEST OF EUREKA + SEX COURT + MENO-PLAY + MAROONED IN THE BIG EASY + SEX STILL SELLS ----> http://stuffed.net/98/9/27/ <---- Welcome to today's issue of Stuffed. To read it you should click on the URL above. If it is not made clickable by your email program you will need to use your mouse to highlight the URL, copy it and then paste it into your browser (then press Return). This email is never sent unsolicited. Stuffed is the supplement for the Eureka newsletter you subscribed to. Full instructions on unsubscribing are in every issue of Eureka! ----> http://stuffed.net/98/9/27/ <----

1 0

This stock up 250%
by oppykm＠usa.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Omicron Technologies, Inc. The stock is up 250% in less than 45 days. During this same time period the DOW has gone down over 1,700 points! This obscure, but soon to be famous company can make you a fortune with patented technology originally developed for NASA Don't Miss This One For more information: http://www.network-2001.com/orcron The stock symbol is: OGPS _______________________

1 0

Why do we need remailers, anyway?
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 23 Sep 1998 04:27:46 Reeza! wrote: > anonymouse, 32 bit aohell to boot. you must feel very safe. Yours is hardly > the type of post that might necessitate the use of a remailer, so it should > be safe to assume you haven't the courage to stand behind your words, even > as mild as they are. > > Fuck you too. I suggest you discuss your lack of a spine with the maker. > See the above for instructions to meet the maker. > > Reeza! Hello? This is an old topic, but what the heck... There is a concept cypherpunks have called "Blacknet", which is an organisation that sells profiles of prospective employees based on their public comments on the Internet. This allows employers to filter out undesirables who might or might not have outgrown their rebellious youth. (You can never be too safe!) Now, there are laws making discrimination illegal. But it's hard to *prove* that an employer based its decision on BlackNet files, isn't it.... The cypherpunk philosophy is to rely on technology to solve the problem, rather than rely on the government (or anyone else). Cypherpunks write code. -- an anonymous aol32 user.

2 1

Boxer and Fong on encryption
by Jim Gillogly 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For California types: Barbara Boxer and Matt Fong responding to questions in today's SJMC news: HI-TECH ISSUES 1. Did the administration's July 7 decision to let software companies export encryption software to financial institutions in certain counties go far enough toward relaxing the rules on encryption exports? Why/why not? BOXER: I am a cosponsor of Senator Burns' Pro-CODE legislation, which prohibits the Secretary of Commerce from putting any restrictions on the export of encrypted items -- regardless of bit or key length. The administration's proposal did not go far enough at all. FONG: The administration's new policy simply does not go far enough. The administration is rightfully worried about national security, but the Genie is out of the bottle. While Clinton has stuck to his restrictive export policy on encryption software, foreign encryption products have become more sophisticated and more price competitive. US companies should be allowed to export encryption software if similar products are already available by foreign competitors. We'd see more contrast with Feinstein's answer. Too bad <she's> not running in this race. -- Jim Gillogly Mersday, 6 Winterfilth S.R. 1998, 15:05 12.19.5.9.19, 3 Cauac 12 Chen, First Lord of Night

1 0

Body Count
by Edwin E. Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 24, 1998 ------------------------------------------ [WorldNetDaily Exclusive] ------------------------------------------ The Clinton 'body count' New alarm over growing list of dead close to president By Michael Rivero Copyright 1998, WorldNetDaily.com "Dear Sir," began Monica Lewinsky's somewhat peevish letter of July 3rd, 1997. In it, according to the recently released report by Kenneth Starr, the former intern chided the president for failing to secure for her a new White House job, and hinted that continued stalling would result in word of their affair leaking out. The next day, Monica confronted Bill Clinton in an Oval Office meeting she described as "very emotional;" a meeting which ended when the president warned her, "It's illegal to threaten the president of the United States." Three days later, another former White House intern, Mary Mahoney, was shot five times in the back of the Georgetown Starbuck's she managed. Two of her co-workers were also killed. Even though cash remained in the register, the triple murder was quickly dismissed as a botched robbery. No suspects have ever been arrested. Coincidence? Maybe. Former Democratic National Committee fundraiser and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was under criminal investigation. Indictments seemed imminent. Ron Brown had reportedly told a confidante that he would, "not go down alone." Days later, his plane crashed on approach to Dubrovnik airport during a trade mission excursion to Croatia. Military forensics investigators were alarmed by what appeared to be a .45-caliber bullet hole in the top of Brown's head. Coincidence? Maybe. Yet another fundraiser was Larry Lawrence, famed for his short residence at Arlington National Cemetery. Less well known is that he had been under criminal investigation by the State Department for three weeks when he died. Coincidence? Maybe. But for a growing number of Americans, the sheer numbers of strange deaths surrounding the career of Bill Clinton has begun to raise serious questions. In a meeting with Vernon Jordan, Monica Lewinsky reportedly expressed fears that she might, "end up like Mary Mahoney," and began to make sure that others knew of her affair with Bill Clinton. Of all the strange deaths surrounding the Clintons, none has come under more renewed scrutiny than the fate of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, who was found dead in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993. The official investigation concluded that Foster inserted a gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Yet according to the lab results neither Foster's fingerprints nor blood was on the gun, nor were powder granules or bullet fragments traceable to that gun in his wounds. The purported "suicide note" was found to be a forgery by three independent experts. The record of a second wound on Foster's neck, and an FBI memo that contradicts the official autopsy, strongly suggests that Foster's wounds were misrepresented in the official report. The FBI's own records revealed that deliberate deception was used to link Foster with the gun found with his body. Partly on the basis of that evidence, the FBI is now in federal court on charges of witness harassment and evidence tampering in the case. In normal police procedure, homicide is assumed right from the start. Suicide must be proven, because homicides are often concealed behind phony suicides. Yet in the case of Foster, serious doubts persist regarding the credibility of the evidence offered up in support of the claim of suicide, and a recent Zogby Poll revealed that more than two-thirds of all Americans no longer think the official conclusion of suicide is believable. The official conclusion regarding Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's death was that his plane was brought down by, "the worst storm in a decade." However, the Dubrovnik airport weather office, just two miles from the crash site, could not confirm the existence of any such storm, nor did any other pilots in the area. According to the April 8, 1996, Aviation Week & Space Technology, three separate radio links to the aircraft all quit while the aircraft was still seven miles from the crash, evidence that the plane suffered a total electrical failure in flight which was never investigated. The perfectly cylindrical hole in Ron Brown's skull never triggered an autopsy. After Ron Brown's death, his co-worker, Barbara Wise, was found locked in her office at the Department of Commerce, dead, bruised, and partially nude. Following Brown's death, John Huang's new boss at Commerce was Charles Meissner, who shortly thereafter died in yet another plane crash. These and other questionable deaths have been collected together in a document known as the "Dead Bodies List," which can now be found in many locations on the World Wide Web. Some of the cases are poorly documented and have been dismissed until now as "conspiracy theory." However, analysis of the "Dead Bodies List" by experts on the Internet revealed that in many cases, deaths whose circumstances demanded an investigation had been ignored. Some events officially declared to be accidents seem to stretch the bounds of credulity. In one case, Stanley Heard, member of a Clinton advisory committee and chiropractor to Clinton family members, and his lawyer Steve Dickson were flying to a meeting with a reporter. Heard's private plane caught fire, but he was able to make it back to his airport and rent another plane to continue his journey. The rented plane then caught fire. This time, Heard did not make it back to the airport. Gandy Baugh, attorney for Clinton friend and convicted cocaine distributor Dan Lasater, fell out of a building. Baugh's law partner was dead just one month later. Jon Parnell Walker, an RTC investigator looking into Whitewater, interrupted his inspection of his new apartment to throw himself off of the balcony. Nor does the pattern of suspicious deaths discriminate by gender. Susan Coleman was reportedly a mistress to Clinton while he was Arkansas attorney general; she was seven months pregnant with what she claimed was Clinton's child when she died. Judy Gibbs, a former Penthouse Pet and call girl, reportedly counted Bill Clinton among her clients. Shortly after agreeing to help police in an investigation into Arkansas cocaine trafficking, Judy burned to death. Kathy Ferguson, a witness in the Paula Jones case, was killed with a gunshot behind the ear and was declared a suicide, even though her suitcases had all been packed for an immediate trip. One month later, Bill Shelton, Kathy's boyfriend and a police officer who had vowed to get to the bottom of Kathy's murder, was also dead of a gunshot, his body dumped on Kathy's grave. Another alarming trend observed in these deaths is how society's safeguards against murder appear to have been compromised. Many of the questionable deaths involved either negligence or the complicity of medical examiners. Dr. Fahmy Malek was the Arkansas medical examiner under then-Gov. Bill Clinton. His most famous case involved his ruling in the "Train Deaths" case of Don Henry and Kevin Ives in which Dr. Malek ruled that the two boys had fallen asleep on the railroad tracks and been run over by a train. A subsequent autopsy by another examiner found signs of foul play on both the boys' bodies and concluded that they had been murdered. According to Jean Duffey, the prosecutor in the Saline County Drug Task Force, the two boys accidentally stumbled onto a "protected" drug drop and were killed for it. Dan Harmon, the Arkansas investigator who concluded there was no murder, is now in prison on drug charges. Despite the evidence for murder and national exposure, the Henry/Ives case has never officially been re-opened, and Jean Duffy has since left Arkansas out of fear for her life. Several witnesses in the Henry/Ives case later died and were ruled as either suicides or natural causes by Dr. Malek, whose willingness to provide an innocuous explanation for these deaths is illustrated in one case where he claimed that a headless victim had died of natural causes. Malek claimed that the victim's small dog had eaten the head, which was later recovered from a trash bin. When pressed to fire Dr. Malek, Gov. Clinton excused the medical examiner's performance as the result of overwork and gave him a raise. Dr. Malek's Washington D.C. counterpart was Fairfax, Virginia, Medical Examiner James C. Beyer. Long before his autopsy on Vincent Foster, Beyer's work was disputed. In the case of Tim Easely, Beyer ignored obvious defensive wounds, and eyewitness reports of an argument between Easely and his girlfriend, to conclude that Easely had committed suicide by stabbing himself in the chest. When an outside expert called attention to the fact that Easely had been stabbed clear through one of his palms, the girlfriend confessed to the murder. In the case of Tommy Burkett, Beyer ignored signs of violence done to Burkett to rule it was a simple suicide. A subsequent autopsy showed that Beyer had not even done the work he claimed in his original autopsy. Even though Beyer showed X-rays to Burkett's father, Beyer later claimed they did not exist. When Beyer performed the Foster autopsy, he wrote in his report that X-rays had been taken, then again claimed they never existed when asked to produce them. In some cases, the deaths simply have no innocuous explanation. One witness, Jeff Rhodes (who had information on the Henry/Ives murders) was found with his hands and feet partly sawn off, shot in the head, then burned and thrown in a trash bin. Another obvious murder was Jerry Parks, Clinton's head of security in Little Rock. Immediately following news of Foster's death, Parks reportedly told his family, "Bill Clinton is cleaning house." Just weeks after the Parks' home had been broken into and his files on Clinton stolen, Parks was shot four times in his car. Ron Miller, on whose evidence Nora and Gene Lum were convicted of laundering Clinton campaign donations, went from perfect heath to death in just one week in a manner so strange that his doctors ordered special postmortem tests. The results of those tests have never been released, but toxicologists familiar with the case suggest that Miller's symptoms are consistent with Ricin, a cold war assassin's poison. For a fortunate few the murder attempts have failed. In the case of Arkansas drug investigator Russell Welch, his doctors were able to identify that he had been infected with military anthrax in time to save his life. Gary Johnson, Gennifer Flowers' neighbor whose video surveillance camera had accidentally caught Bill Clinton entering Flowers' apartment, was left for dead by the men who took the video tape. Gary survived, although he is crippled for life. L.J. Davis, a reporter looking into the Clinton scandals, was attacked in his hotel room but survived (his notes on Clinton were stolen). Dennis Patrick, whose bond trading account at Dan Lasater's company was used to launder millions of dollars of drug money, has had four attempts on his life. But the real importance of the "Dead Bodies List" isn't what it tells us of modern political intrigues, but what it tells us of ourselves, in how we respond to it. The list has been around for quite some time, largely ignored by the general public, completely ignored by the mainstream media. The common reaction has been that such a list is unbelievable, not for its contents, but for its implications. For that reason, most Americans have, until recently, accepted at face value the official assurances that all these deaths are isolated incidents with no real meaning; that all the indications of foul play and cover-up are just an accumulation of clerical error and "overwork;" that it's all just "coincidence." On Aug. 17, as Bill Clinton admitted his "inappropriate relationship" with Monica Lewinsky on nationwide television, Americans began to confront the unavoidable fact that this president and his administration had lied to the public about a rather trivial matter. Americans came to realize that this president and his administration could no longer safely be assumed to have told the truth on more serious matters. In this new climate of doubt, the "Dead Bodies List" has enjoyed a new vogue, albeit a dark one. Talk radio discusses it. Total strangers e-mail it to each other. What was unthinkable a few months ago has become all too plausible. Political murder has come to America. Those cases on the "Dead Bodies List" where hard evidence directly contradicts the official conclusion have come under renewed scrutiny. It takes courage for the average citizen to accept that the government has lied to them, for by doing so, the citizen also accepts the obligation to do something about it. Americans know beyond a doubt that they have been lied to. Americans are discovering that they cannot ignore the fact of being lied to without sacrificing that part of the American self-image that holds honor and justice as ideals. But as the above poll would suggest, such a sacrifice is no longer acceptable. --------------------------------------------------------- [WorldNetDaily.com] --------------------------------------------------------- (C) 1998 Western Journalism Center --------------------------------------------------------- This page was last built 9/24/98; 11:51:28 Site: matlanta(a)mindspring.com REFERENCES: A List of Strange Deaths of Individuals Who All Had Verifiable Ties with Bill Clinton http://www.devvy.com/death_list.html VINCE FOSTER FIVE YEARS AFTER Unsolved Mystery Hampers All Starr's Probes By Carl Limbacher http://www.esotericworldnews.com/vince.htm VINCE FOSTER INVESTIGATIONCHRIS RUDDY, (PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE) http://www.ruddynews.com Christopher Ruddy's New Web Site <NewsMax.com> http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover.shtml Vince Foster - Patrick Knowlton v. FBI Agent Bransford http://www.monumental.com/lawofcjc/pk/ *** Foster "J'Accuse!" http://www.angelfire.com/fl/pjcomix/zola1.html EENIE MENA MINIE MOE... http://www.esotericworldnews.com/eenie.htm The Mena Coverup http://www.esotericworldnews.com/mena.htm THE "SECRET" CHEMICAL FACTORY THAT NO ONE TRIED TO HIDE http://www.esotericworldnews.com/london.htm ---------------------------

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Test [no reply] (should be last one)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Test [no reply] ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Medical Equipment
by sales＠galaxyhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re:
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Paul is coming from AOL using Netscape as a mailer and using the open relay at cesvxa.ces.edu. Received: (from majordom@localhost) by toad.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id CAA16186 for cypherpunks-unedited-outgoing; Sun, 27 Sep 1998 02:59:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from cesvxa (cesvxa.ces.edu [144.50.1.2]) by toad.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id CAA16181 for <cypherpunks(a)toad.com>; Sun, 27 Sep 1998 02:59:56 -0700 (PDT) Received: from 200-148-112.ipt.aol.com (200-148-112.ipt.aol.com) by cesvxa.ces.edu (PMDF V5.0-6 #6874) id <01J2AH6J8P400003T4(a)cesvxa.ces.edu> for cypherpunks(a)toad.com; Sun, 27 Sep 1998 06:01:57 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 05:59:49 -0700 From: "Paul H. Merrill" <paulmerrill(a)acm.org> Subject: Re: To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Message-id: <360E36C5.33C7DFDC(a)acm.org> Organization: Twenty First Century Camelot MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 [en] (Win16; U) Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit References: <199809270531.HAA09168(a)replay.com> Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)Algebra.COM Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: cypherpunks(a)algebra.com X-List-Admin: ichudov(a)algebra.com X-Loop: cypherpunks(a)algebra.com Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

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IP: US Says Bomb Suspect Had Nuclear Ambitions
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com X-Sender: believer(a)telepath.com Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 11:03:36 -0500 To: believer(a)telepath.com From: believer(a)telepath.com Subject: IP: US Says Bomb Suspect Had Nuclear Ambitions Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com Precedence: list Reply-To: believer(a)telepath.com Source: Chicago Tribune http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,1051,SAV-9809270407,00. html U.S. SAYS BOMB SUSPECT HAD NUCLEAR AMBITIONS From Tribune News Services September 27, 1998 AFRICA -- American authorities have charged that a person described as a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile suspected in last month's bombings of two U.S. Embassies in East Africa, made significant efforts on behalf of the bin Laden group in 1993 to develop nuclear weapons. The authorities said that, in at least one case, there was evidence of documents relating to a proposed purchase of enriched uranium, but they did not say whether the group obtained uranium. The allegations, concerning Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, also assert that bin Laden had an official agreement with the Iranian government and with Sudan's ruling party to oppose the United States. They also suggest that the U.S. had penetrated the bin Laden organization and learned detailed information in 1996. The allegations were contained in newly unsealed court papers that charged Salim with conspiracy to murder and to use weapons of mass destruction against Americans overseas, including those in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia. Salim was arrested in Germany a week ago after flying there from Sudan. The U.S. said Friday it will seek his extradition to face charges in New York City. The government also asserted for the first time in court papers that the Iranian government had entered into a formal three-way "working agreement" with bin Laden and the National Islamic Front of the Sudan to "work together against the United States, Israel and the West." The front is the ruling party in Sudan. The Aug. 7 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed more than 250 people. ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ********************************************** --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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:
by Anonymous lo14 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Paul H. Merrill wrote: >1. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Nice cliche. Unfortunately, it doesn't say anything at all. >2. So if the quoted material is included it's bad and if it is not >included it's bad. I think I see the general idea. Use the rules >appropriate for complaining about whoever you want to complain about. You got it half right. If quoted material is included, it's good. If no quoted material is included, it's bad. If quoted material is included but it uses the '<< >>' style, it's bad. If a few hundred lines are quoted and six added, it's bad. This was explained to you twice; once in the post you're responding to, and once in that posting with the AOL quotes. You're conveniently ignoring that and you're playing dumb with regard to network etiquette. Maybe you aren't just pretending. AOL users originally didn't quote at all, they claimed because of software constraints. AOL users complained and used the fact that their ISP was lame as an excuse for not getting another one. Other net users complained. AOL responded by using the '<< >>' quoting style, which was effectively giving the rest of the net the bird. If AOL didn't cater to every moron out there, and if AOL didn't keep running stupid ads with claims like "AOL is the Internet!", and if AOL wasn't sending things like requests for Real Player all over the net, and if AOL didn't do things to deliberately piss everyone else off, they'd have a much better reputation. Maybe the first two can be written off as simple marketting, and maybe the third can be written off as the results of that marketting, but there is no excuse for the fourth. All four of those are what gets AOL flamed, kill filed, ignored, insulted, and shunned. >3. And what I said was along the lines of most were justified, but some >showed his lack of clues. Merely being incomprehensible to a person >means little if the person is a little clue-shy. Badly written is a bad >thing. There were one or two which may have been questionable. The rest of them fell into his criteria quite well. That's unless you want to claim that requests for stickers, CDs, and the rest actually express some subtle political point other than to say "I'm a moron." I ensure you, if "We're morons" was the point the AOL posters in question were trying to make, their message came through quite well. Maybe "you got it?" was actually a secret code. >> > > I don't know which is worse. At least the people flaming the AOL wimps are >> > > funny. >> > >> > If funny is all you want, may I recommend rec.humor.funny and, in case >> > you are up on no current events but Clinton, rec.humor.funny.reruns. >> >> No, I want a Cypherpunks list which discusses political issues, >> cryptography, and things related to that. Since this is the Cypherpunks >> list, we aren't going to censor on the basis of content or origin point. >> >And the general degradation of our society to the level that taking the >moral ground is something to be ridiculed is not a political issue? I was refering to the spam from AOL, Sixdegrees, the "child molestor" spammers, and their like. The responses to that, including your's, are political speech like you describe. What you're being ridiculed for is, almost without fail, defending every AOL weenie and spam site which comes onto this list. The child molestor spammers may be able to claim that it isn't their fault because they're using lame software, but if they use swiss cheese they shouldn't be surprised when the holes are exploited. I'm not saying it's very ethical to exploit them, but it isn't surprising. Paul, with regard to the rest of this, it's obvious that you're either trolling or are yourself severely clue-shy, and you aren't worth a response anymore. Your #2 is proof enough of that. #3 is pretty good evidence too.

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Website owner/administrator
by BigStar.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Where I mail through and from Was "Re:"
by Paul H. Merrill 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Another method of discerning that information would have been to actually read my posts which daid the same damn thing. BTW, I lobbied to have the server closed off when I worked for the school, but they decided that was just a little too paranoid for them. PHM

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Mailing-List
by Marky 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please email me information about your mailing-list.

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Remailers, PGP, and a Project Suggestion
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 27 Sep 1998, Anonymous wrote: > At 23 Sep 1998 04:27:46 Reeza! wrote: > > anonymouse, 32 bit aohell to boot. you must feel very safe. Yours is hardly > > the type of post that might necessitate the use of a remailer, so it should > > be safe to assume you haven't the courage to stand behind your words, even > > as mild as they are. > > > > Fuck you too. I suggest you discuss your lack of a spine with the maker. > > See the above for instructions to meet the maker. > > > > Reeza! > > Hello? This is an old topic, but what the heck... > > There is a concept cypherpunks have called "Blacknet", which is an > organisation that sells profiles of prospective employees based on > their public comments on the Internet. > > This allows employers to filter out undesirables who might or might > not have outgrown their rebellious youth. (You can never be too safe!) Even this is a secondary issue. Many people are using remailers these days because of the advent of the WWW. Virtually anything written, retrieved, or transfered on the Internet is vulnerable to monitoring, logging, and future use against you. Even if you trust the guy you're sending mail to, you can't necessarily trust his computer security or the security of the network. Systems like Dejanews and the web search engines illustrate just how much of a log is out there. That isn't counting the information available solely from mail headers and IP addresses. When somebody wants to perform a "great purge," they just go off to a search engine or database, type in some parameters, and get a list of people to shoot, jail, or harass. The natural solution to this is to disguise your identity whenever possible. I estimate that we have several dozen people who actively post to Cypherpunks through remailers judging by the way some things are stated in the postings. I can't tell for sure, and that's the point. If you want to generate reputation capital, use a nym server. Nym servers make it obvious that you're using a nym, but it allows you to generate as many reputations as you want and keep them separate. They're hard to use without a tool, even for the best of us. Premail leaves a lot to be desired in that it's slow, has some bugs, and lacks some good features, but most of the people who want to create a new version seem to live in the U.S.. The real advantage of the nym servers is that they allow people to see the origin of the message at a glance. You can do the same thing with regular anonymous remailers, but you have to verify the signature rather than glancing at the headers. You should still verify the signature in either case. This was less of a problem than it once was because premail was out there, until PGP 5 came out. PGP 5.x is incompatable with previous versions since it changed both the protocols and the command line interface. Unfortunately, they changed the command line interface in a rather stupid way. They also wound up releasing the Windows version before the UNIX version (by something like three months). They seem to check argv[0] to determine what kind of operation you want to do. 'pgp -seat' won't work anymore. Instead, it's a variant under 'pgpe'. One PGP binary is created, and several links are set up. The result is that you can't change the name of the binaries and links if you want. If there's an advantage to this, I sure don't see it. When they released the Windows version, Windows users understandably snatched it up and started using it. The result was a bunch of incompatabilities between two platforms which could have easily been solved had PGP, Inc. exercised a little more discression. That's a moot point now, though. The problem which still remains is the command line interface. It breaks any script which references PGP, and that's the main problem. What UNIX really needs is some kind of mailer which integrates an updated premail, PGP 2.x support, and PGP 5.x support. Unfortunately, much to the delight of the government, the people who would code such a thing are probably in the U.S. like I am.

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Re:
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 27 Sep 1998, Anonymous wrote: > > Paul is coming from AOL using Netscape as a mailer and using the > open relay at cesvxa.ces.edu. He's admitted this at least once in a sidebar on a message, as I seem to recall, so it's nothing new. It does go to show conflict of interest, and it could be claimed that he's trying to make himself feel better, I suppose. Looking back, he's used AOL for most of his postings, except for one I came across which apparently came from an admin machine at ces.edu, so he isn't exploiting some random open relay somewhere. Generally they all route through ces.edu. I can't speak for Paul, but I figure that he's probably doing what he once said that he is, and using a modem link to AOL, using AOL for a routing service, then routing mail through the relay at CES. I don't know why someone would want to do that if they're sitting on a university network, but it doesn't matter much. I just checked: the relay does appear to be an open relay. I just hope spammers don't wind up finding out which, of course, they probably will after that post. Can we have some signal somewhere, please?

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sunday, September 27, 1998 - 23:06:35 MET First of all I want to say that the last posting I did to cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net did not reach the intended recipients. And two, > Subject: Remailers, PGP, and a Project Suggestion > Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1998 20:50:36 +0200 > From: Anonymous <nobody(a)replay.com> > To: cypherpunks(a)cyberpass.net > Unfortunately, much to the delight of the > government, the people who would code such > a thing are probably in the U.S. like I am. I would be more than glad to do the coding. I am not in the US. However, the only thing that stops me is the fact that I just don't know enough programming.

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GNUcash [/.]
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > X-within-URL: http://www.gnucash.org/ > content In the spirit of cooperation we bring you The GnuCash > Project. We all realized that it was senseless to have several > different projects working toward the same goals. So we did the most > logical thing, we merged! The result of this merger is the GnuCash > Project. > > Some of the projects that merged included X-Accountant, and GnoMoney. > GnuCash will be based on the lastest version of Xacc. We will use the > "transaction engine" from Xacc, and port the GUI from Motif to > Gnome/Gtk. Several other significant features will also be added. Such > as support for splits, and online banking via OFX. To see a list of > other planned features please check out the features page. > > There is unfortunately no stable version of GnuCash available yet. So > if you are interested in using a financial package now I suggest using > the lastest version of Xacc, which is a very stable, and full featured > piece of software! =) Check out the pages below for more info on Xacc. > News 09-17-98 > * ANNOUNCE - Gnucash 1.1.18 is released. Get it at ftp.gnucash.org ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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