December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: RANT: When hi-tech is a hinderance (freedom w/in limits)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 01:48 AM 1/28/96 +0100, Anonymous wrote: >Cypherpunks or crypto relevance? Sometimes high-tech can be >a weakness. You don't know how right you are. Jim Bell Klaatu Burada Nikto "Something is going to happen. Something.....Wonderful!" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQrhZvqHVDBboB2dAQFKZAP/U6tKRFYbMmag6wB/HEO/K8XxsSUFr5dt 9sMaeptBa2EEvn2f4rrlZ9AadKTEX8qhd9VI3gF+XfsZ8tVnfK7FSvdeteoN7iBB tVPfXgozxLWqKFUe1YoYIKJof9c5q4IPNkOaWCUAiMbOiA8BrhYLPUOISkC0W5f8 0yse7fmFA1w= =0Fe9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: This post is rated LTC for `Low Technical Content'
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:36 PM 1/27/96 -0800, Rich Graves wrote: >On Sat, 27 Jan 1996, Bill Frantz wrote: > >> At 7:55 PM 1/27/96 -0500, JMKELSEY(a)delphi.com wrote: >> >The best solution has always seemed to me to be one of these three: >> > >> >a. Tags appended to notes/posts, from various reviewers, digitally >> >signed and otherwise coded to allow intelligent filtering, or >> > >> >b. Electronic distributions of reviewers' evaluations tagged to >> >notes in some simple way. (I.e. give each note or post a unique ID >> >which appears in the message.) Then, a smart newsreader/mail >> >program sorts the notes accordingly, or >> > >> >c. The reviewer reads the group/list, and rates posts according to >> >some useful criteria. He then resends it out to his users, filtered >> >as desired. (CP-LITE seems like a very early version of this.) >> >> d. The "V-Chip" device makes a network query to the selected rating service >> to ask for a rating. What happen when the rating service is unreachable is >> just one of the many parameters that the parent needs to set. (If designed >> right, no parent could use it, but its availability would still stop the >> adult censorship croud in congress.) > >This just gets ridiculous. It adds a lot of overhead without necessarily >giving you good information. ... <lots of good rant deleted> Rich - Remember that this is NOT being designed for usability, only to stop a bad movement in congress. The reason I proposed solution (d) is that it adds no overhead to people who don't use it. (I propose using the Message-ID: header as a lookup ID for items received by email. I suspect it has spoofing problems, but perhaps congress won't notice.) Perhaps we should re-visit the need for usability if anyone really wants to use such a system themselves. As a parent, I always wanted my children to explore freely and discuss anything they found that bothered them. Bill

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Re: This post is rated LTC for `Low Technical Content'
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 18:03 1/27/96, Bill Frantz wrote: >d. The "V-Chip" device makes a network query to the selected rating service >to ask for a rating. What happen when the rating service is unreachable is >just one of the many parameters that the parent needs to set. (If designed >right, no parent could use it, but its availability would still stop the >adult censorship croud in congress.) Of course the V-Chip transmits the ID number of the program to be rated upstream. Since all programs will be rated by the chip, regardless if you choose to use the rating or not, the exact channel you are watching will be tracked and logged. Have fun, -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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Re: This post is rated LTC for `Low Technical Content'
by Weld Pond 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

shamrock(a)netcom.com (Lucky Green) quoth: >Of course the V-Chip transmits the ID number of the program to be rated >upstream. Since all programs will be rated by the chip, regardless if you >choose to use the rating or not, the exact channel you are watching will be >tracked and logged. Ahh.. Finally a use for anonymous remailers that the Christian right would understand. Weld Pond - weld(a)l0pht.com - http://www.l0pht.com/ L 0 p h t H e a v y I n d u s t r i e s Technical archives for the people - Bio/Electro/Crypto/Radio

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"German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[I sent this to the Cyberia list, but it seems likely to have some interest for Cypherpunks. Apologies to those who get it twice.] More interesting news from my own backyard: "German service cuts Net access: Neo-Nazi materials posted on Web by Santa Cruz company" San Jose Mercury News, 1996-01-27, D1 "Germany's biggest Internet provider has blocked access to a Santa Cruz computer service that makes available neo-Nazi propaganda in another sign of the growing tension over material available on the Internet. "Deutsche Telekom, Germany's national phone company, blocked its 1 million customers Thursday from gaining access to Internet "Web sites" maintained by customers of Web Communications of Santa Cruz. "The 18-month-old company offers customers the ability to self-publish material on the World Wide Web, a fast-growing subsection of the Internet. Among its 1,500 custoemrs is a Canadian manwho has posted material that questions the existence of the Holocaust. ""We want to make it very clear we condemn anti-Semitism, racism and hatred in any form," said company president Chris Schefler. But "we do not monitor, police or control the content of any of our customer sites."" ---- I'd quote more from the article, but I think I'm at about the limit of fair use quotation. I expect the story will be picked up nationally; it was on several t.v. shows last night and today. For those interested--though merely including this information could I suppose cause the William and Mary site to be similarly turned off, the page in question is noted Revisionist Ernst Zuendel, or Ontario, Canada. His Web page at Webcom can be found by searching on Zuendel or Zundel and the usual other terms: holocaust, revisionism, Webcom, etc. (I tried last night to connect to Zuendel's page, and couldn't. Nor could I connect to www.webcom.com, so they may be having problems.) Apparently irate users at Webcom, whose pages are likewise now inaccessible to Germany, are clamoring to have Zuendel thrown off, so that all good Germans can once again access their pages. The implications of this are fairly clear. I'm not sure if there are any U.S. _legal_ questions, except that Zuendel and similarly controversial material is protected by customer agreements (as Schlefler notes, Zuendel has violated no user rules, and so Webcom cannot kick him off for rule violations). What next? AOL and Compuserve turn off access to the many European countries that have Web pages containing what we call "child porn" (but which is legal in the Netherlands, Denmark, etc.), Bangla Desh turns off access to sites that have pages describing the cooking of beef, and Iran turns off access to any country that allows women to have a presence on their systems? A good thing Web proxies (remailers for http accesses) are so far along! By the way, I saw Schlefler being interviewed. I'll keep you posted. --Tim May Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- 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: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by Alex de Joode 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Belgian TV (the dutch language channel) has a page on teletext (Ceefax) [I don't think US tv has that feature] stating that the French backbone is thinking about blocking sites that provide information that they deem ethicly unacceptable, like sites that promote the denial of Konzentrations Lagers, the extreme right, pornografic and pedophile sites. [page 128 BRTN, for those who can receive BRT]

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Re: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail"
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>They probably should do, the NSA was critical in ensuring the demise >of the USSR and in maintaining stability throughout the cold war period. Please explain.

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Subscription
by MatriX Spider 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'd like to subscribed to this mailing list. Thanks for your time.

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BAA_bab
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Hash trees and bank solvency.
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I publish this trivial and obvious idea, because if I do not, publish it, some clown will surely patent it. (Has the patent on chewing gum and walking at the same time been taken yet. The more outrageous patents the patent office issues, the more power and influence they get and the more funds they recieve.) One of the great hazards with banking, and with financial services similar to banking, is that the financial institution has the opportunity to steal a great deal of money. One solution to this problem is government auditors. Government inspectors, unlike private auditors, can force their way in, in the early hours of the morning, and as each bank employee turns up, take him to a separate cubicle and interogate him with a gun in one hand and an account book in the other. This makes it difficult for the financial institution to fabricate a misleading picture of its financial situation. A hash tree can provide proof to a banks customers that the bank only has the amount outstanding that it claims to have, without the need for gunmen to check the totals. At the close of month, the customer accounts are orgnized into a hash tree with the totals forming part of the hash Each node is a hash of the two nodes below it, and the amounts of money in the two nodes, and the sum of those two amounts. Each customer can then see that the money the bank owes him is a part of the total the bank claims to owe. If a customer discovers he is not part of the hash tree, he knows the bank, or financial institution, understates its indebtedness; No auditors, government or otherwise, required. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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