December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by David K. Merriman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 04:02 PM 01/28/96 -0600, m5(a)dev.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) wrote: > >olmur(a)dwarf.bb.bawue.de writes: > > It's illegal in Germany to publish material denying the holocaust. In > > the same moment this guy sent his book [...] per snail-mail from Canada > > to Germany he commited a crime here in Germany. > >Hi. President M5 of Psychonia here. I'm afraid we've recently >enacted legislation in the tiny nation of Psychonia that makes it >illegal to parenthesize question marks in electronic mail messages, >because such acts are a direct offense to some of the members of >primitive hill tribes who live in remote portions of our land. > >I issue this warning not to set foot in Psychonia or any of the >countries with whom we share extradition treaties, or you will be >arrested and brought here for trial, conviction, and punishment. > This message is _clearly_ an effort to spread *pornography* on the net. I know this to be true through the use of a 3-letter code that I have cleverly deleted . If you continue to spread this vile and disgusting trash, I shall have no choice but to complain to my government representatives and have all imports from your country banned, and to pressure companies not to do business in/with your nation. Dave Merriman -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQtudMVrTvyYOzAZAQEJlAP/WeH2TkFaa0MBz2AfWsbOU30flSmghqCn Hg30Uwi44fHg4zpGsQYPfwPofK5BJ+cwPcTBuhurZgmKxhEJuj5OrrOw/kaKLjnu uJ82MEIEhkojCUGAQicYgW+B2g62vtJXYhBuQWTKzrKpiys2vYucil6m/8fxZFKx TDSq4sHK5IA= =MtgG -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------------- "It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error." Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), U.S. Judge <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> My web page: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1148

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Re: "Concryption" Prior Art
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>However the Con-cryption patent covers first compressing, then >>encrypting. > >Isn't that how PGP does its thing (first compress the data and then feed it >into the Encryption Stage)? PGP is prior art in-and-of-itself. Peter Wayner posted that the "new" thing about the way they do it is that it saves time by combining the steps. But I think I've seen approximately the same done with arithmetic-coding compression? #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # # "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" used to mean us watching # the government, not the other way around....

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Re: Downsizing the NSA
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May wrote: >AT&T is downsizing, IBM downsized a while back, so why couldn't the NSA >just do the right thing: admit that the Soviet threat is no more, >congratulate the victors, and downsize by 20,000 employees? Your post is very interesting. I would like to add to it in the form of a question: Q) What are the factors, in what context did AT&T and IBM and many other big companies downsize? Or, in other words: What are the ultimate contextual causes of the downsizing? Regards to Cypherpunks from a new guy on the mailing list. JFA

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Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:47 AM 01/29/96, Felix Lee wrote: >> Are you saying that, if I ran a bookstore, and accepted international >> mail orders, I would have to screen every order to ensure I did not >> ship something offensive to the German government? > >urrr. yes? anyone doing international shipping has to comply with >customs regulations anyway. this isn't really any different. (except >when telecom or broadcast media become involved.) > >(excuse me while I see if I can ship smallpox to germany.) >-- If you violate customs regulations on the receiving end, all that's going to happen is the book you sent gets confiscated. Which is only bad for the receiving party (in Germany), since you already have the money, which is fine since it's reasonable to expect the receiving party in Germany to know German customs regulations. You, as shipper, certainly won't get extradicted to Germany from Denmark or anywhere else. Trying to ship smallpox to Germany might be another matter, of course.

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Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, here is a very costly but ultimate answer: Cancel all business you have with germany and let them know the reason. This will speak much more louder than any civil liberty protest. The feodal view of most europe makes any appeal to liberty futile. JFA

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Ernst Zundel impersonator on Usenet
by Declan B. McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ernst Zundel is the holocaust revisionist who sparked the Wiesenthal Center's attempts at censorship, and the latest move by the German government. Now an AOL alias, "ernstzundl(a)aol.com", is being used in the course of an impressive trolling spree on Usenet newsgroups including aus.flame, alt.skinheads, alt.mindcontrol, and soc.culture.jewish. Some excerpts from posts to soc.culture.jewish: Prior to 1904, there *were* no black people. But they invented the whole myth of Africa, the slave trade, pyramids in Egypt, etc-- to serve their own ends. I know this because *I* have studied history. This is why I am the Revisionist Extraordinaire. I know obscure things about history that nobody except me knows. FOIL THE JEWISH PLOT!! POLUTE THE EARTH!! CONTAMINATE THE WATER!! DESTROY EVERY LIVING THING TO SAVE IT FROM THE JEWS!! AND THEN WAIT FOR THE MOTHER SHIP TO BRING US TO OUR HOME IN THE STARS! I found an interesting message with the help of Alta Vista. Posted by "ernstzundl(a)aol.com" to rec.scuba, it said: Does anyone know of any scuba clubs in or near Kingston, NY? Thanks! I'm not familiar with how AOL screen names work, but my guess is that the Kingston, NY resident impersonating Zundel forgot to switch back to his other screen name before posting. -Declan

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Re: Downsizing the NSA
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"tcmay(a)got.net" 28-JAN-1996 03:47:14.08 >However, as Phill notes, the NSA and other intelligence agencies are now in that most dangerous of positions: a powerful agency or department casting about for something to do. Spying on citizens and keeping the keys to their private communications and diaries is not an appropriate option. AT&T is downsizing, IBM downsized a while back, so why couldn't the NSA just do the right thing: admit that the Soviet threat is no more, congratulate the victors, and downsize by 20,000 employees? ------------------- Funny, everyone seems to forget about China. If I were dictating NSA policies, I'd simply reassign the people to China. Admittedly, modern cryptography makes some of it useless, but HUMINT to get (parts of) codes is still quite possible. -Allen

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Re: CP LITE: A Censorship Device?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:54 AM 1/28/96 -0600, you wrote: >I've been watching this CP Lite thing develop. > >Sounds like an attempt to moderate the list. >I mean it's easy to post out of it, >but hard to answer to it. >And all of the good back and forth discussion >gets lost in a backwash of private email. The default behaviour of Eudora seems to work reasonably well for replying to these. Reply pops up a message with To: John Doe #2 <jdoe-2(a)alpha.c2.org> From: My Name <me(a)here.com> Subject: Re: whatever Cc: At 03:54 AM 1/28/96 -0600, you wrote: > WHATEVER IT WAS and you can just fill in cypherpunks(a)toad.com as the Cc:. Your mailer may vary, but it's probably got a similar capability. The main problem I have is the "you wrote" as opposed to "John Doe <jdoe-2(a)alpha.c2.org> wrote", which is more like what you want for mailing lists, but that can be copy&pasted or ignored. The person you're replying to usually gets two copies, but that's minor. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # # "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" used to mean us watching # the government, not the other way around....

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Re: Denning's misleading statements
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:54 PM 1/28/96 -0500, perry(a)piermont.com wrote: >Well, not really. Silvio Micali did some work on this topic. Er, yes - Micali's term "fair cryptosystem" outranks even "key escrow" on my outragious pro-government toadyism bogometer ..... #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs

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Re: Denning's misleading statements
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:12 PM 1/28/96 -0500, Ben Samman. wrote: >There's quite a few folks in the Yale CS department that are pro-Clipper >or fence sitters. They justify it in class by claiming that law >enforcement needs these abilities if LE is to remain effective. They're quite correct - it's a problem of values and goals, and theirs differ from mine. IF law enforcement is to be effective (at those things it's effective at, like self-preservation and politician-electing), then it WILL need this increase in power. Because otherwise we WILL move to crypto-anarchy. I hope we will anyway, and perhaps the tackiness of the Clipper forces will encourage the general public to get there faster rather than slower. BTW, the reason Swiss banking laws were so strong for so many years was because the Nazis were pressuring bankers to give out information on their Jewish customers... #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs

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