December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Why no action alert, coalition opposing S. 974?
by Paul Elliott 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Many of the leaders of the major net civil liberties organizations have made statements concerning SB 974. They seem to agree that no action alert or coalition on SB 974 should be formed at this time. Some of the statements about SB 974. "Silly Bill" "not going anywhere" "subcommittee hearing not set yet" "premature" "inflammatory distraction" "campaign is unlikely to be successful" "the bill is doomed" I remain concerned about this bill and am not satisfied with the response to this bill. Exon was a silly bill, but it passed the Senate by a wide margin. How can a campaign to stop the bill not be successful if the bill is not going anywhere? Perhaps we need to have a success to gain momentum. The people on the subcommittee are going to be very important as the rest of the Senate will consider them to be the "experts". Since the net is esoteric to most people there will be a strong tendency to depend on the "experts". The best time to persuade these "experts" will be before they make any public statements about the bill in the subcommittee hearings and their positions are locked by pride not wanting to publicly change their positions. Thus we should be contacting these people now, and we may have a chance to nip SB 974 in the bud. By the way, what subcommittee was it sent to? I understand it was one of the subcommittees of Judiciary but no one said which one. Because there is no action alert, people do not know what States have the senators on the sub-committee. People from these States are the ones that should be especially encouraged to contact their Senators. In any case, it is clear that if any significant action on SB 974 will be taken at this time, the CYPHERPUNKS will have to do it. The major net civil liberties organizations have bowed out for now. Are there any cypherpunks out there who can help? Perhaps someone has writing skills that would be willing to write an action alert? Perhaps someone knows which subcommittee it was sent to? Since SB 974 hobbles our right to use encryption, the cypherpunks should be especially interested in opposing it. -- Paul Elliott Telephone: 1-713-781-4543 Paul.Elliott(a)hrnowl.lonestar.org Address: 3987 South Gessner #224 Houston Texas 77063

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Government Access to Safes
by Martin Minow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You may have been following the recent murder of Gianni Versace and the subsequent suicide of his alleged murderer. One minor footnote that popped up in the news is a small safe located in the houseboat where the suicide was found. This safe uses a keypad lock (rather than a mechanical combination or physical key). Is this more secure than a regular safe lock? Does the government have an access key that would premit a law enforcement officer (with appropriate authority) to open any such lock? Should I be required to deposit the secret key to my safe with a government-mandated "escrow" agent? Martin Minow minow(a)apple.com

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Louie Freeh
by ben＠reston.opnsys.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I was just listening to the G. Gordon Liddy Show, he was talking to a reporter for the American Spectator, which has a piece on our favorite FBI director Freeh. From the sound of the reporter the story is very damming, on everything from Waco to the entrappment of Malcolm X's daughter. Ben Hill From the land of the Freeh

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Yet another self-labeling system (do you remember -L18?)
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 12:08:32 -0400 (EDT) From: James Love <love(a)cptech.org> To: Jonah Seiger <jseiger(a)cdt.org> Cc: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com>, fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu, chris_barr(a)cnet.com Subject: Re: CDT, RSACi, and "public service" groups Jonah, I think the problems with the RSACi rating system are pretty obvious, and I also think it should be obvious that *any* rating system that would aspire to rate all or even a significant number of web pages would be a bad thing. That said, it seems to me that there exist web pages that are unambiguously inappropriate for children. Has CDT rejected the idea of a very narrowly focused voluntary rating system that would apply to those sites only? I have in mind a simple voluntary tag of the nature: <META NAME="Rating" CONTENT="adult"> that would only be used when the web site wanted to signal that it did not want children to have access to the site? It seems to me that a consensus to use this simple system would take the steam out of the more ambitious (and troubling) PICs type systems, and also do much to eliminate the market for filtering software. I also think it would make it easier for many libraries and schools to permit students to have unrestricted access to the Internet. I know that some people think this simple tagging system is not among the proposals seriously under consideration. But why should we let RSAC or large commerical entities like AOL or Microsoft control this debate? In any event, I was wondering what CDT's thoughts are on this. James Love <love(a)cptech.org> ------------------------------- James Love Center for Study of Responsive Law | Consumer Project on Technology P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036 | http://www.cptech.org Voice 202/387-8030 | Fax 202/234-5176 | love(a)cptech.org

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Re: Cyberporn on NPR today - 2pm EDT / 11am PDT
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:04 AM 7/21/95 EDT, Rich Lethin wrote: > >Talk of the Nation on NPR is having a call-in program this afternoon >on the "pervasiveness of cyberporn". I think it's 1:00 or 2:00. >Crypto-relevance... 4 horsepeople... TotN is on at 2:00 Eastern Time, 11:00 Pacific #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281

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Re: Netscape the Big Win
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:45 7/21/95, Ray Cromwell wrote: >> > The answer is: integration. While TRN is a great newsreader, and >> >Eudora's a great mail reader, etc, if I read a post in TRN or a message >> >in Eudora, there is no hyperlinking. If I see a link or reference, >> >> If you used a Mac, all you had to do is click on the URL in your mailer, >> newsreader, even some text editors, and the correct helper aplication will >> open the URL. > > Yeah, but does it fire up 1 browser process everytime you click on it, or >will it command an already running browser to follow the link? If the helper app is not running it will start it, if it is running it will pass the URL to the already running app. Note that it doesn't have to be a browser. You can - and usually will - use separate apps for different types of URLs. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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CanadaBanAna Censors US TV (and bans decryption)
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Saturday, July 26, 1997 By Terence Corcoran HOME Box Office, the U.S. cable network, just garnered 90 Emmy nominations in recognition of quality programming. But HBO is still banned in Canada. The network was not on the list of foreign services approved Wednesday by Canada's dictator of cable and satellite television content, the CRTC. Others banned by the CRTC include Bloomberg Television and the U.S. versions of the Discovery Channel, The Comedy Network, the Disney Channel and scores of other program services deemed too subversive for Canadians to watch in their original form -- unless, of course, the same programming passes through the hands of a Canadian middleman or monopolist who will culturally sanitize the programming by skimming off a fat profit. Once a Canadian has grabbed a piece of the action -- as a distributor, broadcast licence holder, cable operator or satellite owner -- Canadians are allowed to view the U.S. content. This banana republic setup has been in place for decades, and now it may be getting worse. A judge has concluded in one of the satellite disputes that it may even be illegal for a Canadian to pay for HBO and other networks as they come in over the border on U.S. satellite systems. The oral judgment by Mr. Justice Frederick Gibson of Federal Court of Canada in the case of ExpressVu versus Norsat and other companies was issued last month, but the written version sets a number of bizarre precedents that appear to deeply infringe on individual rights. By ruling in favour of ExpressVu, the Canadian satellite company, Judge Gibson has essentially come up with a judgment that is the equivalent of making it illegal for a Canadian to subscribe to Fortune or Cosmopolitan magazines or to buy a copy of Vanity Fair or Esquire on the newsstand. In this judgment, it is illegal for a Canadian to watch HBO and scores of other channels now available in the United States -- even if the service is paid for -- on the grounds that the federal Radiocommunication Act makes it illegal. The act says no person shall decode an encrypted signal without paying for the service and without authorization of the person who has the lawful right in Canada to transmit the signal. The purpose of the act's clauses on encryption is a technical one to prevent fraud. Evidence presented by Andrew Roman, the lawyer for Norsat, makes it clear that the intent of the government was to make it illegal for people to use counterfeit decoders and other devices to avoid payment. All the debates in Commons committee focus on the act as an attempt to prevent theft of signals. No such theft occurs when Canadians subscribe to and pay for a U.S. satellite service. But Judge Gibson's judgment ignores the theft-of-signal intent of the legislation. Instead, he interprets the act, in conjunction with other laws, and concludes that the clause on encryption makes it illegal for anyone to subscribe to a U.S. satellite service. Norsat has filed an appeal. What makes this judgment even more unusual is that it effectively attempts to make it illegal for a Canadian to pay for a U.S. channel on a U.S. satellite, when the identical U.S. channel is available on Canadian cable or satellite. For example, WGN-TV in Chicago can be picked up on Canadian cable, Canadian satellite or on U.S. satellite. In each case, the subscriber pays for the service. But under this judgment, it would be illegal to pay the U.S. satellite for WGN-TV. Who does this serve -- other than giving Bell and the cable companies more revenue. Even stranger is that many of the networks carried by U.S. satellites are already available in Canada over the air waves free, or on cable, or on C-band, an alternative satellite service that has been available in Canada for years. A Seinfeld episode can be picked up free over the air from a U.S. television station, or on a U.S. station via cable, or on a Canadian station on cable. But if the same Seinfeld episode were bought by a Canadian from a U.S. satellite service, it's illegal. Filling the troughs of the Canadian broadcasting industry and transmission systems may be the purpose of broadcasting policy, but it is certainly not the objective of this section of the Radiocommunication Act. Canada's specialty networks, meanwhile, are gearing up to flood the country with copy-cat versions of the networks banned by the CRTC -- including The Globe and Mail, which is a partner in ROBTv, a business channel that hopes to benefit from the fact that Bloomberg will be banned in Canada. Other brilliantly innovative duplications of U.S. networks are The Home and Garden Channel, History Television, The Comedy Network, Discovery and Country. Is this unique Canadian culture? One such Canadian offering, The Family Channel, has even abandoned all pretext to being a Canadian original: it's changing its name to recognize the source of most of its content: The Disney Channel. http://www.globeandmail.ca/docs/news/19970726/ROBColumn/RCORC.html

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Re: Netscape the Big Win
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Enzo Michelangeli <enzo(a)ima.net> > On Thu, 20 Jul 1995, Hal wrote: > > That is why I am working on the proxy approach. Any browser should be > > able to use enhancements supplied in this way. Netscape is the big name > > this year, who knows who it will be next year. As long as IP > > connectivity is available a proxy can get into the stream and apply > > enhancements. > > I still maintain that an approach based on SOCKS would be more flexible, > adaptable to any TCP-based application. Here's what I'm thinking about: I agree with this general approach, but I looked into it in some detail, and SOCKS has a fatal flaw for my purposes: the address to connect to is passed as an IP 32-bit address. That means the software on the PC has to do the DNS lookup. And *that* means that the ultimate site being connected to is revealed. One of my goals is to protect the secrecy of the sites that a person is browsing. If an in-the-clear DNS lookup is done for each site that will hardly be effective, even if the actual connection request is encrypted. An eavesdropper on the internet will be able to observe the DNS lookup traffic. Now SOCKS V5 is going to change this; it allows the proxy to receive the request as a hostname rather than an IP address. So no DNS lookup is necessary by the client. Conceivably a modified winsock such as Enzo is suggesting could use that protocol, although it is not really stable yet. Also, I don't know how easy it is to intercept winsock calls and modify them in this way. So the proxy I have written works using the HTML proxy hook rather than the SOCKS hook. > 1. Windows apps: a general purpose socksifier, intercepting Winsock API > calls by *unmodified* applications and opening a single TCP connection to > the port 1080 of a sockd server. The good news is: some good folks at NEC > are already working at this project, and are looking for beta-testers. This sounds very good if it already is almost working. The TCP connection which is opened would have to be to a server on the local machine, so it would be important that the software support that. Also, the local SOCKS relay would of course not want its winsock calls to be intercepted and translated in this way, so there would need to be some alternative way to access "vanilla" winsock. Can you give any more information on the NEC work? > 2. A "SOCKS en/decrypting relay": a sockd server that, on a > per-site/per-port basis depending on a configuration file, may either > a) open TCP connections on behalf of its clients; > b) relay a plain SOCKS connection to a remote peer; > c) open a SSL connection to a remote peer on, say, a port 1180 reserved > for "SSL-ized SOCKS" connections) > Of course, that beast should also listen at the ports 1080 and 1180 and > take the same actions a) b) or c) as appropriate. For chaining purposes you would connect to the relay on the net on the secure port and request a TCP connection (not a SOCKS connection) to the second relay in the chain at its secure port. Then you negotiate a secure connection from your home PC to that second relay so that the traffic you send to it won't be visible to the first relay. Once that is done you send a SOCKS request to that second relay to connect to the next machine in the chain. So really only function (a) is needed for the relays on the net. The relay on the PC needs to be able to do (c), but more importantly it needs to be able to set up encryption chains, where every outgoing packet is nestedly encrypted, with the outermost encryption for the first relay in the chain, the next layer for the next relay, and so on. Each relay decrypts and strips off one layer, then passes the remaining raw data through. This way no one relay knows who is talking to whom or what they are saying. The reverse happens for return packets. > The SOCKS en/decrypting relay could be written both as MS-Windows DLL and as > UNIX daemon. I have written a simple dummy relay for winsock and it requires a pretty different programming style than for Unix. Netscape has a habit of firing off a bunch of requests at once, so it has to be extremely asynchronous. For Windows this means you get a windows message every time a packet arrives and use non-blocking I/O. In Unix this is usually handled by forking a new process to handle each independent connection. Non-blocking I/O can be used in Unix but I don't think there is a non-blocking connect as there is in Windows. Maybe Windows 95 will allow a more Unix-style communication model, though. Should the proxy require Windows 95, or will Windows 3 still be in widespread use for another year or two? Also IMO the requirements for the Internet relay are pretty different than for the Windows relay. The Internet relay needs only to be able to decrypt/encrypt on the port where the request comes from while sending plain data the other way. It needs a config file so the owner can control what kinds of outgoing TCP connections can be done. The Windows one needs to be able to do nested encryption (if chains will be allowed eventually), to set up chains, etc. So for these reasons I am inclined to think that the two relays would be separate programs. > The chain would be: > > - From a Windows client machine: > > Standard app -> Socksifier DLL by NEC -> encrypting relay -----> > ---> Internet -----> decrypting relay -> server > > - From a Unix client machine: > > Socksified (recompiled) app -> encrypting relay ------> > ---> Internet -----> decrypting relay -> server > > I'm assuming here that the encrypting relay should live close to machine > (the same, or, at least on the same network) as the client app, and the > decrypting relay close to the server. A single daemon could do both jobs, > allowing chaining "a` la remailer", but I'm using here two different > names for sake of clarity. Besides, the Windows version probably wouldn't > need decrypting ability. The Windows version would need to decrypt incoming data; you don't want that coming in the clear. > Great advantage over Netscape: we could use EAY's free SSL implementation, > and all the server administrators could generate and sign their own > certificates. The present trouble with Netscape is that NS-Navigator > refuses to accept certificates not signed as "Netscape compatible". Our > en/decrypting relay could be more forgiving :-) The other problem with Netscape SSL is that it will only open secure connections to URL's marked "https://". Similarly SHTTP has a special URL "shttp://". There is no provision in either one to open a secure connection to "http://". A relay proxy would allow all connections to be encrypted between the PC and one or more relays. I am a little unclear on the certificate situation. As we saw with the PGP key servers before RSAREF PGP existed, RSA put pressure on these public sites which they saw as contributing to the use of infringing software. Similarly having a certificate created by infringing software might be seen as illegal, even if RSAREF was actually used for the handshaking in the protocol. Server operators are quite vulnerable to threatening letters from RSA. Another problem with RSAREF is that it does not allow you to exchange a session key using RSA encryption in a straightforward manner. The entry points you have legal access to choose a random session key, PK encrypt it, send it, and then encrypt the message using that session key with DES or 3DES. However I notice that SSLREF calls undocumented entry points like RSAPrivateDecrypt and RSAPublicEncrypt. I am not sure how they are able to do this. Maybe they got special permission from RSA. I don't know whether the SSLEAY library would be able to do this without such special arrangements. > As the SSL stuff built in > Netscape would be unused, we could also improve the protocol (plugging > security holes) ignoring compatibility issues. Yes, really there is no need to make it be SSL specifically except for the fact that it is an explicit protocol for which libraries exist. > The administrators of > secure servers should just advise the users to configure their local > encrypting relays to pass through their decrypting relay (that would boil > down to a line added to the encrypting relay configuration). > It would all be beautifully modular, relatively simple to code (as someone > else has done, or is doing, most of the hard work) and independent from > big-brother certifying authorities. Yes, I think the overall approach is very promising. Perhaps my desire for chaining is too ambitious for a first attempt. The transparent intervention of SOCKS that you describe would be very nice if that is available soon. One other problem is the risk taken by people running the relay servers on the net. These could be used to launder connections by hacker / cracker types. So probably only a limited set of outgoing ports would be permitted, say, 80 and 1080 which are the most common http ports. This would restrict the utility of the SOCKS approach for other uses like secure telnet, unfortunately. Hal

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New Ratings Categories / Re: Yet another self-labeling system (do you remember -L18?)
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

William H. Geiger III wrote: > What is your proposal for those who would "mislable" their sites? I am > sure that you are not under the assumption that everyone will have the > same ideals of what is appropriate for children and what is not. > > How do you handle the web site for alt.sex.sheep.bah.bah.bah if the owner > decides to self rate it Y-7? An anonymous source has confirmed that the operator of an Assassination Bot has struck a deal with government officials to drop them from the betting list in return for their support for the following self-rating categories being approved: "Suitable for children who masturbate excessively." "Suitable for children who are fucking their siblings." "Suitable for children who would like to make a quick twenty bucks." "Suitable for children who are considering murdering their parents." "Suitable for children whose Uncle Jim can make ice-cream come out of his pee-pee." "Suitable for children who pull the legs off of grasshoppers and set the family cat on fire." "Suitable for children who are being tried as adults because their case got enough press to result in votes for a judge who shows that he is 'tough on crime.'" "Suitable for children whose parents or guardians are beating them more severely than in the fantasy scenes portrayed on this web site." "Suitable for children whose parents, teachers and priests tell them they are sinful, evil creatures whom God will burn in Hell-Fire for questioning and/or resisting Authority." "Suitable for children who will never amount to anything, anyway, because they have the wrong skin color, are being raised in poverty, and will probably be shot to death by policemen who will be fined two day's pay for not following proper police procedure." "Suitable for children who plan to kill themselves because nobody loves them enough to make life seem worth living." "Suitable for children who are selling crack to children even younger than themself." "Suitable for children who carry a gun to school so that they have a chance of getting home alive." "Suitable for children who, in the future, will be the victim of sexual harassment by the President." "Suitable for children who will eventually suffer major health problems as a result of serving their country, and will be denied health benefits." "Suitable for children who need to experience as much as they can, right here and now, because in the future they will have no rights or freedom, but will have their lives tightly monitored and controlled by the state." > Self-rating and/or browsers that can read these self-ratings will be of > little good except as a stepping stone to maditory rating system because > they are unable to solve the percieved problem of children accessing > website that their parents do not want them to see. The government is grandstanding their ploy to promote an increasing level of censorship (and eventually "criminalize" non-compliance with what they now portray as "voluntary" ratings) *DESPITE* the fact that there are already tools available to meet the needs the government claims to be addressing. If city kids drive their cars out into the country to watch the farmer's wife undressing through the bedroom window, will the government pass laws criminalizing country residents building houses which have windows? God forbid that the Founding Fathers might have their words twisted by villainous Cypherpunks to suggest that they would expect parents to take responsibility for their children's upbringing and activities. I'm getting sick and fucking tired of the government restricting and/or violating my rights, liberty, freedom and pursuit of happiness in order to enable the sheeple to have the illusion of righteousness and security despite their laziness/unwillingness/stupidity which is used as a rationale to pretend that products and tools which are easily within their reach are not sufficient to meet their needs. What, exactly, is the problem? Are these censorous motherfuckers of the opinion that protecting their children from these loudly proclaimed moral threats is not worth spending thirty or forty bucks on? Are they saying that your and my rights and freedoms are worth less than the thirty or forty bucks it would take for them to purchase censoring software? > Even if you could convince "Enough-is-Enough" and the rest of Donna "2 bit > hore" Rice's cronnies that voluntary ratings was worth a try they would be > shortly back to DC pushing for manditory legislation because they wouldn't > like the way people were self rating their web pages. Bottom Line: If you or I personally developed, and distributed freely, a product which would guarantee that no child would ever be exposed to any material that their parents did not approve of, these stinking, lying, conniving bastards would still be pressing for censorous legislation because they feel that it is their right to force their narrow, fascist, moralistic standards on everybody. A Challenge To Declan: Do you have the balls to contact all of those individuals pushing for fascist censorship in the name of "protecting children" and ask them if they would support the rights of adults to promote and access adult material on the InterNet if a way can be found to guarantee that minors will not be able to access it? Do you have the balls to refuse letting them dodge the issue with meaningless, bullshit, political rhetoric? Do you have the balls to tell them that if you don't get a straight answer, you will report that they are lying, fascist, censorist motherfuckers who are hiding behind children to disguise their hidden agenda of forcing their personal beliefs on others? > You have two major groups pushing for rating systems: > 1) Lazy parents that do not wish to be bothered with the obligations of > raising their children. > 2) "Born again" censors like Rice want the power to control what people > can and can not say. > > The problem is that no rating system can satisfy these groups. Just as > voluntary rating will be used as a stepping stone to manditory rating, > manditory rating will be used by these same two groups for the outright > baning of certian forms of speech (their true agenda). Oops! I seem to be redundating the "other" Billy G's points and comments. Could it possibly be that the true/hidden agenda and fascist, slimeball tactics of the CR's (Censorous Ratfuckers) are so blatantly obvious that anyone on the list could have easily written this post, as well as the "other" Billy G's post? Could it possibly be that this is an "open secret" that the sheeple are pretending they do not know because they have been brainwashed into accepting the guilt/blame placed on them by the self-proclaimed "righteous" who feel that they are superior to those with different values and beliefs, and thus are entitled to force others, at gunpoint, to live according to their own narrow constraints of acceptable beliefs and behavior? Could it possibly be that I am not, in fact, the brilliant genius that I conceive myself to be, in seeing through the fascist righteousness which the Censorous Ratfuckers use as a tool to justify forcing their values and beliefs on others? Is it possible that even the sheeple understand the injustice that is being forced upon them at gunpoint, but have the wit and wisdom to complacently comply, in order to survive long enough to live lives of quiet desperation? Could it possibly be that Jesus and Jim Bell are not isolated examples of society and government breaking down, but are actually examples of the way the "real world" works? Perhaps I need to spend $200,000.00 getting elected to a $20,000.00 a year position on the Water Board in Austin, Texas, and become a millionaire within a year's time. Perhaps I need to become a TV preacher and make millions by putting pictures of starving children on TV, in order to be able to pay for the hookers and cheap motel rooms that go with the territory. Perhaps I need to run for Congress so that I can pay myself around $300,000.00 for *not* growing cotton, guarantee that my neighbor's tax money will pay me an inflated price for my milk and cheese, and put shoes on my kids by making my home state a dumping ground for nuclear waste. Perhaps I should run for President, become the leader of our country, and lie about...well...about *everything*, I guess. Could it possibly be that I am helping to destroy America by failing to support forced compliance with "Family Values?" Should my bid for the Presidency be centered around a theme of a "return" to God-fearing decency and Christian values? "We need to fight drug dealers and child pornographers by returning to the values that made this nation great!" "We need to require the terminally ill to die a horribly painful death without benefit of a medicinal herb that would relieve their suffering, in order to fight drug dealers and child pornography." "We need to send our armed citizens to other countries to kill their citizens, in order to fight drug dealers and child pornography." "We need for women who wear short skirts to take responsibility for their being raped in order to fight drug dealers and child pornography." "We need to make niggers sit in the back of the bus, in order to fight drug dealers and child pornography." "We need to send Jews to the gas chamber, in order to fight drug dealers and child pornography..." {Oops! Wrong country.} Question: "What rating will be acceptable for a web site that contains only pictures of 'people of color' sitting at the back of a bus, and 'color challenged' people sitting in the front?" Question: "Who is going to explain to the child of the naturists who place on their web site their pictures of themself enjoying a glorious day at the nude beach, that their bodies are vile, filthy, disgusting things which require their web site to contain an 'obscenity' rating?" Question: "Who is going to explain to women that they have to quit their jobs, become unpaid housewife/laborers, quit voting, and do all of the housework, in order to fight drug dealers and child pornographers?" Question: "What rating will be required of a web site which contains a picture of a loving parent bathing their beautiful (NAKED!!!) newborn child?" {To get a "Suitable For Children" rating, will the parents have to fill out a form that certifies that they did not get sexually aroused while bathing their newborn? If a cop or judge visits the site and gets aroused, are the parents guilty of a crime?} Bottom Line #2: Squeaky Fromme will be imprisoned for putting naked pictures of herself, as a child, on her web site. John Hinkley will be hospitalized for the same offense. Kennedy family members 'A', 'B' and 'C' will not be prosecuted for the same offense, but Squeaky Fromme will have to serve an extra 2 years in prison for revealing that the nude Kennedy pictures made her horny. Special Offer: "Purchase and use Pretty Good Pornography software, and you will receive the phone number of a person who will buy your drugs, as well as a picture of my dick in a child's mouth." (Offer not valid in states where children are being buggered by the Police Chief, the Mayor, the President, Hillary, Socks, and a buggerer to be named later.) News Flash!!!: Early this morning Vatican military forces invaded the United States and arrested President Clinton for his involvement in the birth-control drug trade. Saddam Hussein ordered an air strike against the D.C. Whitehouse in retaliation for U.S. support of terrorist fashion designers who produce clothing which exposes women's ankles. The President escaped unharmed, but his daughter was justifiably slaughtered. U.S. Attorney-General Larry Flynt appointed a special prosecutor to investigate reports that Janet Reno sent out Christmas Cards containing a picture of herself in which she was fully clothed, with neither her breasts or her vagina showing. "Studies have shown," Flynt told reporters, "that pictures of clothed women frustrate unimaginative males, leading to an increase in rape as a result of cockteasers like Janet Reno." The "Drug Dealers and Child Pornographers" regulatory commitee, a special agency appointed by the President to fight against the threat that Family Values pose to the sex industry, approved the use of video surveillance in private homes in a crackdown on parents who refuse to get their children high and bugger them with a variety of foreign objects. "The Tin Bible," an award winning movie by producer Tim May, was removed from libraries and store shelves in Oklahoma today. The offending scene involved a male "pulling out" while fucking a blood relative, and "wasting a perfectly good piece of pussy," according to the National Council For The Promotion Of Indecency. "If you're not part of the precipitate, you're part of the solution." - James D. Bell TruthMonger

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big word listing
by It's supposed to crash like that. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As a security measure, I am trying to get a massive dictionary of words together, and each time a user changes his/her password, it checks the list to see if the password is in it. My question is, are there any pre-built lists of this nature? I am currently only using a spelling dictoinary, and would like somthing a little bigger.

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Re: Netscape the Big Win
by Steven Champeon - Imonics Development 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

| From owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Fri Jul 21 13:24:22 1995 | From: Ray Cromwell <rjc(a)clark.net> | Subject: Re: Netscape the Big Win | | > If you used a Mac, all you had to do is click on the URL in your mailer, | > newsreader, even some text editors, and the correct helper aplication will | > open the URL. | | Yeah, but does it fire up 1 browser process everytime you click on it, or | will it command an already running browser to follow the link? You can't have multiple processes running on a Mac. (Unless the application has a different name -- for example, you *can* have two different copies of the Netscape application, named "NS1" and "NS2", set as the default "helpers" for a) news and b) HTTP, should you want to do that...) What ICeTEe does is send an Open AppleEvent to the browser application. If it is running, it responds by opening the URL in the browser. If the browser isn't running, it starts the browser and then opens the URL. The INIT (extension) patches the System "TextEdit" routines, which are used in most apps with limited need for text processing. The name of the INIT comes from its authors, who wrote "InternetConfig", and because it patches "TextEdit". This isn't to say that Java isn't cool :-) Steve

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Re: big word listing
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>or set it as a variable and fork, or something like that. Berkely-derived unices have a "ps" that can print the environment. /r$

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Declassified crypto-hearing transcript now online
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The URLs, thanks to JYA: http://site108240.primehost.com/hir-hear.htm (97K hearing transcript) http://site108240.primehost.com/crypto-law8.htm (11K Reno letter) -Declan

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Re: Java (was Netscape: the big win)
by cman＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>So, what would be a "cypherpunk" thing you could do with Java? I know >I can use it to download little applets to my system to do animations. >What can it do to enhance my privacy? What would be the Java equivalent >of PGP? > Portable PGP with a GUI interface that didn't suck? Note that I'm championing the use of Java as a portable language, with a portable windowing toolkit, that will (real soon now) have commercial tool support from a variety of vendors, as well as free tools available on the net (the best of both worlds.) The whole issue of how to do cryptography with applets is kind of complicated, and is something Amanda and I have been working on very dilligently. They hard part is determining what the interface is between trusted code (that you have installed on your machine, or ultimately, that you've specifically designated as being trusted based on secure hash) and untrusted code that comes from random web sites on the net. In general, for any general-purpose cryptography tool, you're going to want almost all of it to be based on locally-installed, trusted code. Certain protocols can actually work much better using applets, but they should only be allowed to access a very narrow set of local routines that directly interface with the user. (e.g. "Do you really want to sign this?", "Confirmed signed by so-and-so.", etc.) This is, however, a separate issue from the use of Java to do standalone applications. See: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/achou/JCrypt/packages.html

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Re: Netscape the Big Win(dows)
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <ac35228910021004fd83(a)[205.199.118.202]>, tcmay(a)sensemedia.net (Timothy C. May) wrote: >Out of curiousity, the phrase "grown out of Netscape," aside from the >implied barb, means what? Just what am I missing and what do I need to >"grow out of"? Tim, I won't presume to speak for Robert, but I can tell you this: Netsacpe/Mosaic is an awsome program. It fundamentally changed the way I use and access the net. Going from terminal emulation to the present version of Netscape, as you have, can not fail to impress an individual. This is similar to the awe one might feel when going from a typewriter to a computer with MS Works preinstalled. But we both know that MS Work is often not the best tool for the job. It spreadsheet pales compared to Excel, its wordprocessor lacks features, etc. Consequently, many people that buy a computer packaged with Works end up replacing or augmenting Works with other, specialized, programs that do a better job at many of the tasks that Works claims to do. Netscape is, in many regards, just like Works. It has a sub-standard newsreader, a featureless mailer -- but a very nice browser. So many people use Netscape for a browser and other programs for other tasks, because other programs are better suited for it than Netscape. When Robert mentioned that he was wondering how you would think about Netscape in six months, he was perhaps thinking what most experienced Mac using netsurfers know: The various leading Mac Internet programs are excellent modular tools that, thanks to cooperation between the various authors, are tighly integrated. Often, the same key combinations that work in one progamm, work in the other. They are small, they are fast, and they can call each other. The only odd man out is Netscape, which tries to do it all by itself and therefore does nothing right. Once someone tries Anarchie for ftp, or one of the enhanced (current leader seems to be Y.A.) Newswatchers for USENET, there is no going back to just Netscape. I remeber writing here once that after someone tries surfing the Web with Mosaic, there is no going back to just using lynx. The same holds true for Anarchie, Newswatcher, Eudora -- and Netscape. Let's talk in six months (no barb, just confidence that you will learn new things as time goes by), - -- - -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMA/x6SoZzwIn1bdtAQGXNgGAm2v5m3S8rJ4UWOpWSR+JD6KU1zscjsEm xU89gO9nuJzUXk5JbOM0EhAWc9bi/kER =Nwn1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Rules for "Them" and Rules for "Us"
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(A copy of this message has also been posted to the following newsgroups: rec.knives, talk.politics.guns,alt.cypherpunks) [Note to Usenet readers. I wrote this for the Cypherpunks mailing list, but decided you folks in rec.knives and talk.politics.guns might be interested too.] Pardon the rant, to borrow a line from Dennis Miller. One of the recent trends which really bugs me, and which seems to be indicative of a major shift in the American system is this: "They" have certain rights the rest of "us" don't have. Who are "they"? - law enforcment - the military - the spies - the secret police The "us" is anyone not in a special group exempted from the ban. (Note: Please don't cite the hackneyed example of how the government has the right to own nuclear weapons but ordinary citizen-units do not. This is indeed so, and I don't even necessarily think this is completely unreasonable...though I now am more inclined to support the right to keep and bear nukes. But, seriously, the issues are not so cosmic as nuclear weapons....the examples I'll cite here are much more mundane, and more pervasive.) Here's an example I ran across tonight, in the group rec.knives: In article <01bc99fa$f7d16420$538a98cf@kevlar>, "James R Thorpe" <kevlar(a)meganet.net> wrote: > > Does the name refer to the blade length.? > > IE only 2 inches and therefore legal in California. > > Nice looking knife. What's the blade made out of? > > daithi > > > Got mine in the mail, it's a sweet little knife. Better than I expected. > Rugged feeling too. ATS-34 Blade, and aluminum handles. Lanyard Hole, where > I tied a piece of leather shoestring, and the blade pivot is tension > adjustable. The blade on the ones PV Knife is shipping now is a little > different than the picture. It has a clip point and hollow grind. It's > small but feels bigger than the picture once you get it in your hand. My > fiancé even wanted to fondle it. Its a very "grabable" knife. After she cut > herself she didn't want to play with it anymore. > Not sure why its named CA Special. You can probably get one shipped to you > with out any LEO/Military credentials due to the blade length. > Jim Here's what these guys are referring to: There are large numbers of knives and knife types which are forbidden for ownership and/or carrying in California, amongst other states, but which are commonly carried by cops. Some are the evil "switchblades" (a category which may or may not include the thumbhole folders a lot of us carry in our pockets, depending on what the local cops decide). Some are "butterfly" knives. Some are just plain knives which are longer than the local burghers (or is it "burgers"? :-)) have "permitted." In California, there is ongoing uncertainty about whether a fixed-blade knife may be carried openly, which may be "brandishment," or may be carried in a backpack (and hence "concealed")...one analysis noted that it is probably a felony to carry a kitchen knife home from a store, as it is either being "concealed" if in a bag, or "brandished" if not. I guess hiring a delivery boy would shift the felony to him...or make one a co-conspirator in a RICO felony. (Practically speaking, there are few arrests and even fewer prosecutions. Cops have been known to tell people to "keep your knife out of sight and you'll be OK," even though the laws are usually quite clear that this is felony concealment. The law is an ass.) OK, enough about knives. The point is that the term "LEO" means "Law Enforcement Only." Meaning, your local cop is free to buy these items, even for personal use in many cases, but the sheeple are not. My local gun stores have sections marked "Law Enforcement Use Only," and these sections are getting bigger every year. Here are some things which now fall into this "Them" vs. "Us" situation: * Knives. They get to own all sorts of things. We are being limited more and more each year: the allowable knives are getting shorter, the types are being further restricted. (All in a putative move to reduce crime...anybody think that telling T.C. May he's a felon if he carries his Benchmade AFCK is going to reduce the number of knifings?) * Guns. 'Nuff said, as we all have heard much about this. A recent example is telling though--the banning of magazines (clips) holding more that 10 rounds. (Unless already made before some date, and some other details.) Cops and even retired cops and retired military personnel are allowed to buy the 15-round magazines their guns are made to use, but the sheeple are not. (And there are proposals to ban magazines holding more than 5 rounds, to ban detachable magazines completely, to ban semi-automatic weapons, to ban all firearms except "sporting" rifles, and so on.) * Ammunition. Believe it or not, some forms of bullets are now restricted to "LEO." (Usually after some shooting spree, or some mass media hysteria--as with the never-produced "Black Rhino" ammo--there are sudden moves to ban some class of ammo. Cops make sure they are not affected, and,voila, a new "LEO" item is added to the list.) * Martial arts supplies. Batons, kubotans, throwing stars, nunchuks, etc. These are allowed for cops, but not for ordinary people, regardless of training. * Drugs. Aside from the evidence that the CIA and other gov't agencies ran drugs into the U.S. (cf. the usual sources), there are lots of drugs the gov't. dispenses to its own troops, including methamphetamines, which it declares to be contraband in the civilian sector. (Pilots, for example, are given uppers to maintain alertness, but of course a truck driver caught with them faces jail.) * Radio equipment. Certain frequencies are not allowed on civilian radios, and there are related restricitons. (Radio buffs will know a lot more.) Some of this may be for "legitimate" (barf) reasons, to maintain radio security for sensitive operations, but mostly it is not needed (and is bypassable by spies and anyone seriously interested in doing so). Note of course that strong crypto would bypass this issue of banning certain types of electronic equipment. (I am not including TEMPEST equipment as being banned, as this seems to be a false rumor. The TEMPEST research may be classified, but there are no laws that I know of that make it a crime to make a piece of equipment radiate very little RF. In fact, the FCC likes it this way.) * Armor. Especially body armor (aka "bulletproof vests"). I believe there are some restrictions on what may be sold to civilians. * Biological research. There are specific laws making it illegal for private individuals or companies to do research in certain areas without government approval. (I believe the specific law dates from around 1975, and covers CBW weapons and related research. Ditto for nuclear weapons, probably under the Atomic Energy Act or somesuch.) * Crypto, of course. Not yet, domestically, but we appear to be entering an era in which the government and its employees have access to crypto the rest of us are forbidden to use. PGP may have a warning sticker: "Law Enforcement Use Only." I assume others of you can think of examples I've left out. Obviously things like wiretap equipment, etc. are often restriced to law enforcement and spies. At least one of those "007" spy shops was shut down for selling to civilians stuff that cops readily have (I heard this on CNN, but I don't have the details). The danger in all of this is not that there are a _few_ things that we let police and soldiers have that we think civilians should not have, but that _so many_ things are now classified this way, with the number of things so classified growing constantly. This makes for a dangerous society, civil liberties-wise, when industrial companies and shops have two classes of customers: them and us. This stinks. We're not talking about private ownership of nukes. We're talking about a situation where a citizen can go to prison for having a knife longer than 3 inches in his pocket, while cops are free to have them for their own purposes. This stinks. --Tim May -- There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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"Where is the Market?"
by tcmay＠sensemedia.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I want to elaborate on the words from last December that I just posted, in response to some comments about how I had just "discovered" the Web. L. McCarthy just had some good points about differing privacy/political goals here on this list. When we first formed, almost three years ago, one of the first things we did at a physical meeting--and the issue was echoed on the new mailing list--was to conduct a poll of who was using what mail tools, e.g., pine, elm, emacs, Microsoft Mail, MCI Mail (?), Lotus Notes, Eudora, etc. The results--which should be in the archives for sometime around November-December 1992--were, as expected, all over the map. No clear winner. The reason for the poll was obvious: to determine what sort of target markets the various PGP integrators would have. Even then, there were religious wars, with, for example, the emacs crowd arguing that PGP should be integrated into emacs and then the world could just switch to emacs (as they should have long before :-)). Now I wish I could draw pictures here---and that I can't draw pictures here and still communicate with most of you here makes an interesting point about the still-dominant nature of ASCII, which ain't about to change anytime soon for lists like this---so I could better explain my "stable attractors" line of reasoning. But I'll do it instead with more words. Here's an elaboration on my points made last December 15: "I see two "stable attractors" for text/graphics/multimedia/etc. sent over the Net:" What I mean by "stable attractors" are the "islands" or regions in product space that have solidity and success. Leading commercial products are obvious examples, with a cloud of related or ancillary products supporting them. Product versions are like a chain of these islands. As with "attractors" in general (and I assume everyone on this list has read much about attractors, usually in the context of strange attractors), there are not many "occupied" regions in the nether-realm between attractors. That is, between the islands lies open water. "Survival" is difficult in these open waters. My main model for software, borne out by everything I see, is that this "island colonization" model is appropriate. "1. Straight text, ASCII, 80 column format. All systems can handle this, all mailers and newsreaders can handle it, it's what the Usenet is essentially based upon, and it gets the job done. It meets the needs of 95% of us for 95% of our needs." By this I mean just what this list is doing _now_. ASCII is the de facto lingua franca. People with PCs, various operating systems on their PCs (DOS, Win3.1, Win95beta, Linux, OS/2, NeXTStep, Solaris, etc.), Macintoshes, terminals, Amigas, Ataris, Suns, SGIs, NeXTs, and so on, are all mostly able to read what is distributed here. Deviations occur, but mostly unintentially or as "experiments." Occasionally people will still try to send NeXT-formatted mail--I forget what it was called--and various people send their messages as "attachments," even when the text is apparently just straight ASCII. (Hint to the attachment-senders: I periodically go into the "Attachments" folder on my system and empty it of the unread big and little attachments that have accumulated in it...others have said they do the same. So, if your message will fit into the standard text/ASCII "primary format" of the Cypherpunks list, that is how you should send it...and if it _isn't _ straight text, but instead includes attached spreadsheets, JPEG movies of the Waco raid, etc., you might ask yourself just how many people will bother to read or view your message?) Hence my comment that "the written word" is a massively stable, heavily colonized "island" or "attractor." It can be handled in foreign languages, with some difficulty, and on nearly any computer system in the world. It is the language of legal briefs, of economic reports, of crop reports, and of a zillion other forms of communication. Pure text is powerful stuff. But what about pictures, illustrations, diagrams? Magazines and books use them widely, so why can't we? And what about styled text, footnotes, superscripts, hypertext links, etc.? Well, in a different world we might have adopted standards earlier than we did and such things might be more common and acceptable today. (For those who will argue that it is "possible" to exchange e-mail with embedded diagrams, equations, footnotes, etc., "sure." But ask yourself how many times you have ever actually _done_ this, with friends and e-mail correspondents? Some who have done this point out that it usually involved folks within corporations who can standardize on the tools and default settings to make this transparent...then they can send richly-formatted stuff without excessive work. And how many other mailing lists, besides Cypherpunks, have such embedded diagrams and illustrations? I'm not talking about the Web here--I'll get to it in my next point--but about what this list is and what NetNews, for example, is. What will "the masses" likely use to implement a richer communications channel, one that encompass pictures, illustrations, movies, spreadsheets, etc.? What will be the _next_ big island people colonize? (Which is of obvious interest for the deployment of crypto to users.) >From Dec. 15: "2. The Web, for graphics, images, etc. This will be the next main stable attractor, deployed on many platforms. (I'm assuming the debate here about Netscape standards does not imply much of a fragmentation, that Mosaic, Netscape, MacWeb, etc., will all basically be able to display Web pages in much the same way.)" Enough people are starting to "surf the Web" (whatever you think of that expression) that this is becoming the _de facto_ next attractor, or island. _Millions_ of users will have whatever tools and "helper apps" in their versions of Mosaic, Netscape, MacWeb, etc. such that this will be the platform/environment of choice. As the browsers add e-mail (receiving, as most or all can send mail), and as applets/helpers proliferate, then these platforms/environments will allow new forms of e-mail to finally become _widespread_ (note that I did not say "possible," but instead said "widespread"). Many folks I have expressed this view to have said "But the Web is not a two-way medium like e-mail." That is, most people spend most of their time on the Web "reading" (viewing) the stuff others have put on the Web. Three points: 1. This is changing already, as "feedback" is included on pages. This feedback is beginning to look like local newsgroups, and will become more so (IMO). (Speculation: The current Usenet "feed" is of course huge. It may get replaced, via evolution/revolution, by a shift to a Web-oriented system of local newsgroups. What I mean by this is that instead of reading, say, "alt.cypherpunks," one points one's browser at "http://www.cypherpunks.org/" and uses one's various Web tools to browse, sort, search, read, and respond to comments of others. BTW, this could be done today, and might be a better alternative than creating "alt.cypherpunks." The current approach of shipping the entire Usenet feed to all the sites that carry it is likely to eventually break down.) (Even more speculation: Currently I point my Netscape at which news server I wish, from a choice of several. The idea of "subscription-based" News sites is an interesting one. I might pay extra money for a site that is very current and carries all News groups, while parents might pick a site that is sufficiently sanitized for them, a site they let their children access. Much more to say here, but I see several Cypherpunks themes.) 2. The easy-to-use integration of helper apps into Web browsers will confer the same capabilities on mailers that are now associated with these Web browsers. (Again, don't tell me what _your_ mailer can now do, look to what the millions of people are using...they'll gain a lot when their mailers, whether part of Netscape or MacWeb or not, can automatically handle things their browsers can now handle.) 3. The main development seems to me to be in Web tools these days. Being a user of "tin" for several years, and seeing minimal development of it the past two years, I've seen tin get almost no new features. Ditto for "elm," my mailer (when logged-on to Unix systems). (Before you comment, I can't speak for trn, nn, rn, etc., or mailers such as pine. But friends of mine have told me the same stagnation is happening with other mailers and newsreaders. Many of the developers of tin, elm, archie, gopher, etc., have moved on to bigger and better things.)) So, given that it has long been recognized as a valid Cypherpunks goal to see what people are using for mail and newsreading, I think an analysis of what's likely to be popular amongst the "masses" is valid. (I don't disdain the "masses," at least not in this context. The needs of a lawyer wanting to communicate securely with his client are not the needs of a C hacker wanting to configure his Linux box to auto-sign his emacs messages.) My views on the Web have *not* changed dramatically since last fall and winter when I was talking in these terms, though all I had then was a text-oriented browser (lynx), and it was not very exciting (as Ray Cromwell also notes). (And I recall this discussion on the importance of the Web going on several times earlier, including a prediction/hope by the Extropians list organizers, including Harry Shapiro (Hawk) that the Web could be the solution for distributing graphics-content mailing lists...this was around 1993 sometime.) I'm definitely not "dissing" Unix, though I personally never had much use for it. The world is made up of all kinds of people. Some are hackers, some are expert cryptographers, some are lawyers, and so on. The needs of a lawyer for computer tools and writing aids are quite a bit different from those of someone who wants to put together a Linux box for C hacking. If I sound snide in my comments about Linux, I don't mean to be. What I mean is that very, very few users, even fairly sophisticated users, are going to be doing their work on Linux boxes. (If I'm wrong about this, and Linux becomes a serious deployment system--as opposed to a Sun-killer, which is what it looks like now--then I'll acknowledge that I was wrong.) As cheap boxes to deploy remailers and Web sites on, Linux sounds like a win. I'm unconvinced that it has a future for _general_ users, though. (And by general users I don't mean computer-phobic newbies, I mean the folks buying Windows in the tens of millions and Macs in the millions per year. Wider use of crypto means these users, not just the current PGP users.) Nothing has changed my view that the Web is clearly the next big attractor, the next big island. Integrating crypto into it is likely the next big win, which is how this latest thread started. (And by "integrating crypto into it" I don't necessarily mean getting the source code from Netscape or Spry or whomever and adding it...the integration can be done in multiple ways, I think, and as several folks here are already thinking about.) In any case, the future will unfold as it unfolds. Maybe I'm right, maybe not. Maybe only partially right. Debate is healthy, and at least this debate is closer to being on-topic than discussions of red mercury (and the even rarer columbium-niobum alloys the Japanese have developed) and Cypherpunks logos. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)sensemedia.net | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Phrack SummerCon - I enjoyed your talk
by Owen Lynn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric, I was there in 'lanta when you gave your talk at SummerCon, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was especially intrigued by some of the, um, fun you can have with corporations. Are there any books I can read that are sort of _Fun with Your Corporation for Beginners_? fnord

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Re: CanadaBanAna Censors US TV (and bans decryption)
by David Yaffe 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is my sarcastic reply to the article.. has a couple of interesting 'facts' about canadian life.. Enjoy! > HOME Box Office, the U.S. cable network, just garnered 90 Emmy > nominations in recognition of quality programming. But HBO is still > banned in Canada. The network was not on the list of foreign services > approved Wednesday by Canada's dictator of cable and satellite > television content, the CRTC. Others banned by the CRTC include > Bloomberg Television and the U.S. versions of the Discovery Channel, > The Comedy Network, the Disney Channel and scores of other program > services deemed too subversive for Canadians to watch in their > original form -- unless, of course, the same programming passes > through the hands of a Canadian middleman or monopolist who will > culturally sanitize the programming by skimming off a fat profit. Hey we don't even have a Canadian version of Sesame Street anymore.. The government controlled TV station (that CBC) decided that the content of the Canadian version of Sesame Street was still to American... (Like 5 year olds know the difference!) > Once a Canadian has grabbed a piece of the action -- as a distributor, > broadcast licence holder, cable operator or satellite owner -- > Canadians are allowed to view the U.S. content. This banana republic > setup has been in place for decades, and now it may be getting worse. > A judge has concluded in one of the satellite disputes that it may > even be illegal for a Canadian to pay for HBO and other networks as > they come in over the border on U.S. satellite systems. Okay, so if I get a video feed of the internet is that illegal in Canada? You bet!! Even PGP-fone is.. after all, telephones are designed for voice communication, the internet is for data. All praise the High and Mighty CRTC. > The oral judgment by Mr. Justice Frederick Gibson of Federal Court of > Canada in the case of ExpressVu versus Norsat and other companies was > issued last month, but the written version sets a number of bizarre > precedents that appear to deeply infringe on individual rights. By > ruling in favour of ExpressVu, the Canadian satellite company, Judge > Gibson has essentially come up with a judgment that is the equivalent > of making it illegal for a Canadian to subscribe to Fortune or > Cosmopolitan magazines or to buy a copy of Vanity Fair or Esquire on > the newsstand. Shit! no more WIRED Magazine & No more comic books... [Snip] > The purpose of the act's clauses on encryption is a technical one to > prevent fraud. Evidence presented by Andrew Roman, the lawyer for > Norsat, makes it clear that the intent of the government was to make > it illegal for people to use counterfeit decoders and other devices to > avoid payment. All the debates in Commons committee focus on the act > as an attempt to prevent theft of signals. No such theft occurs when > Canadians subscribe to and pay for a U.S. satellite service. Yup.. but the government thinks we're all after free TV.. Even those of us who don't even have "Basic cable", and have just the three free channels... (All I need is my Simpson's :) > What makes this judgment even more unusual is that it effectively > attempts to make it illegal for a Canadian to pay for a U.S. channel > on a U.S. satellite, when the identical U.S. channel is available on > Canadian cable or satellite. For example, WGN-TV in Chicago can be > picked up on Canadian cable, Canadian satellite or on U.S. satellite. > In each case, the subscriber pays for the service. But under this > judgment, it would be illegal to pay the U.S. satellite for WGN-TV. > Who does this serve -- other than giving Bell and the cable companies > more revenue. Yup -- Canadians love to pay tax, that's why we pay so much of it.. ( well over half of a Canadian citizen's income is taxes. If the average Canadian were to devote 100% of their paychecks to their taxes for the year, they would start seeing some income in the middle of July. For the first six plus months of the year, they would be paying taxes. I believe that Simon Fraser University does the calcuations each year.. > Even stranger is that many of the networks carried by U.S. satellites > are already available in Canada over the air waves free, or on cable, > or on C-band, an alternative satellite service that has been available > in Canada for years. A Seinfeld episode can be picked up free over the > air from a U.S. television station, or on a U.S. station via cable, or > on a Canadian station on cable. But if the same Seinfeld episode were > bought by a Canadian from a U.S. satellite service, it's illegal. > Canada's specialty networks, meanwhile, are gearing up to flood the > country with copy-cat versions of the networks banned by the CRTC -- > including The Globe and Mail, which is a partner in ROBTv, a business > channel that hopes to benefit from the fact that Bloomberg will be > banned in Canada. Other brilliantly innovative duplications of U.S. > networks are The Home and Garden Channel, History Television, The > Comedy Network, Discovery and Country. Is this unique Canadian > culture? One such Canadian offering, The Family Channel, has even > abandoned all pretext to being a Canadian original: it's changing its > name to recognize the source of most of its content: The Disney > Channel. Don't forget Much Music.. I need my MTV oops muchmusic... No, the problem is not canadian content, the problem is the percieved canadian content. A lot of Canadians think that canadian culture is under constant attack from the US. After all how many magazines are canadian? how much of the music on the Radio is Cancon (canadian content)? How much of the news we get from the newspaper is Canadian? Also, seeing that most of the people in canada (except for the aboriginals) are of European Decent, just like the US.. what does it matter anyway? What the CRTC fails to realize is that canadian culture will do fine even if as Canadians we get American satellite.....

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New Form of DOS Attack
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Apropos of nothing... Suppose that you are in charge of a separatist compound/Blacknet POP/Meth Lab and you are worried that The FBI/BATF/DEA/FEMA/UN jackbooted thugs with their black helicopters are planning a little "dynamic entry." If you want to deny the Feds the opportunity for some energetic service of process, all you have to do is hire Rodney King to move in. Once he is onsite, the Feds will be helpless. Just keep your Greenpeace Special (tm) sat cams focussed on old Rodney and you have absolute immunity from all incursion. Too bad we can't clone him. DCF "Goodby cruel world, I'm off to join the circus. Hey, Mr. Barnum save a place for me."

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New Form of DOS Attack
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Apropos of nothing... Suppose that you are in charge of a separatist compound/Blacknet POP/Meth Lab and you are worried that The FBI/BATF/DEA/FEMA/UN jackbooted thugs with their black helicopters are planning a little "dynamic entry."

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Rules for "Them" and Rules for "Us"
by David Yaffe 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>This stinks. We're not talking about private ownership of nukes. We're >talking about a situation where a citizen can go to prison for having a >knife longer than 3 inches in his pocket, while cops are free to have them >for their own purposes. We can all pray for the day when law enforcement, and government personel wake up one morning, realise what they are and shoot themselves. Then again, they are all such nice people, why would we want them to do that.. David Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those that know nothing about anything, lead..

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Today's Internet discussion on Science Friday
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi! I just saw that you'd be discussing the Exon Censorship Bill discussion on today's Science Friday on Talk of The Nation; I found out from a mailing list on the Internet, and had time to tune in, but not enough advance warning to attack-dial and become the one lucky caller who actually got on :-) You picked a well-balanced set of interviewees; I was a bit disappointed by the time balance between discussion and callers. It would also be nice if you extended the on-line discussion to the Internet as well as the commercial services AOL and Compuserve, since that extends the collection of people who can be involved in the discussion. [Summary for list-folk - the speakers were Bruce Taylor of National Law Center for Children and Families (sounds like a Pat Robertson thing), Dan Weitzner of CDT, and Larry Maggoth(sp?) who wrote the Child Safety on the Info Superhighway pamphlet. Larry led off, Taylor dominated the discussions, Weitzner mostly wimped out. Everybody agreed that there's obscenity on the Internet if you want to find it, and that it's great that we have obscenity laws to punish Bad People and Protect Kids; Rimm's bogus numbers weren't discussed, the indecency-vs-obscenity was starting to be discussed but got cut off by time.] #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281

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Re: Cyberporn on NPR today
by lethin＠ai.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>But I expect it to focus on the technology questions, not the shrill >"Save our children from the plague..." hysteria. Only two callers through, first one should have hung up when he heard all of his arguments made (better) in the first half hour. Second caller asked whether the Pynchon mailing list he's on would have to censor itself if the Exon ammendment passed (seemed a decent point - succinct too). The rest of the time was the same old political debate with a few moments about Surfwatch. Equal time given to the opposition, who spoke about the horrors of unspeakable besiality, rape, etc. -- --- Concurrent VLSI Arch. Group 545 Technology Sq., Rm. 610 MIT AI Lab Cambridge, MA 02139 (617)-253-0972

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Re: big word listing
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>| As a security measure, I am trying to get a massive dictionary of words >| together, and each time a user changes his/her password, it checks the list to >| see if the password is in it. My question is, are there any pre-built lists of >| this nature? I am currently only using a spelling dictionary, and would like >| something a little bigger. > > Look on coast.cs.purdue.edu in the password/Crack areas. There are also Grady Ward's Moby Words and related moby-listings, though things like Crack will probably do a more thorough job of variants like word, drow, w0rd, word0, drow0, word1, 0word, 1word, word1word, etc. which people use to complicate their passwords. Caveat: If you're building it on Unix, _don't_ set up the command to take the proposed password on the command line, e.g. "checkpass foobar2", since that makes it visible to anyone who runs ps. Feed it through stdin, or set it as a variable and fork, or something like that. And remember that binary searches are _far_ faster than reading whole dictionaries, and hashes are even faster if you're willing to preprocess more. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281

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