December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

New sig, let me know what you think!
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Since Clinton is getting ready to sign the Exon Amendment/Communications Decency Act/Telecom Bill, with some amazingly restrictive rules about what kind of material can be sent over computers (especially if there's a chance anyone under the age of 18 can see it), I have been worried about the implications for my hobby. You see, I am also an amateur Biblical scholar, and have been working on my "Modern Vernacular Translation." For most of my messages involving speech, the CDA, censorship, etc., I plan to include part of my translation as a kind of inspirational quote. Surely Sen. Exon will not object to this material as "indecent"? After all, it's the word of God. I threw this together quickly, excerpting some online versions of the Bible. Others could do the same thing, by quoting salacious material from other sources. The letters of Thomas Jefferson, for example? Or Congressional testimony itself, maybe stuff from the Meese Commission reports? Juicy stuff there. Is the CDA going to make quoting from the Congressional Record a crime? (I suppose it ought to be....) --Tim May [This Bible excerpt awaiting review under the Communications Decency Act] And then Lot said, "I have some mighty fine young virgin daughters. Why don't you boys just come on in and do em right here in my house - I'll just watch!"....Later, up in the mountains, the younger daughter said. "Dad's getting old. I say we should do him." So the two daughters got him drunk and did him all that night. Sure enough, Dad got em pregnant....Onan really hated the idea of doing his brother's wife and getting her pregnant while his brother got all the credit, so he whacked off first....Remember, it's not a good idea to have sex with your sister, your brother, your parents, your pet dog, or the farm animals. [excerpts from the Old Testament, Modern Vernacular Translation, TCM, 1996]

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Re: New sig, let me know what you think!
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May signature is truly a gem! >[This Bible excerpt awaiting review under the Communications Decency Act] >And then Lot said, "I have some mighty fine young virgin daughters. Why >don't you boys just come on in and do em right here in my house - I'll just >watch!"....Later, up in the mountains, the younger daughter said. "Dad's >getting old. I say we should do him." So the two daughters got him drunk and >did him all that night. Sure enough, Dad got em pregnant....Onan really >hated the idea of doing his brother's wife and getting her pregnant while >his brother got all the credit, so he whacked off first....Remember, it's >not a good idea to have sex with your sister, your brother, your parents, >your pet dog, or the farm animals. [excerpts from the Old Testament, Modern >Vernacular Translation, TCM, 1996]

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Re: free speach and the government
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:52 PM 2/3/96 +0000, Stephan Mohr wrote: > But do > you fighter[s] for free speech, in principle, think that nothing, really > nothing, [should] be prevented [from] being published? Yes: > [...] > >I know, of course, that by accepting that there is something that >shouldn't be available on the net, we would need something to decide what >and how to ban. So I wonder what would be a more 'net'-like way of handling >this type of thing and how to prevent that some 'strong-armed' governments >take the net over. There is no "net-like" way of preventing people from communicating when one wishes to speak and another wishes to listen. To attempt to achieve such a goal violates the principles that made the internet possible, such as the "no settlements" rule. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Re: [NOISE] Futplex makes the news!
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:00 PM 2/3/96 -0500, you wrote: > >James Donald may characterize me as gutless. I think he would probably be >correct to some extent. You acted for liberty: I failed to act: How could I characterize you as gutless? --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Re: Sometimes ya just gotta nuke em
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www2.ari.net/home/bsabath/950711.html At 12:25 PM 2/3/96 -0800, Jordan Hayes wrote: >Sorry to inject a little scholarly research on this topic, but I >would urge those of you who are interested in how this mythology >was created and disseminated to do an AltaVista serach for Alperovitz; >he's potentially the leading scholar on this subject. I've read >his book, and Tim probably ought to as well ... SCHOLARLY RESEARCH!!!! You do not know shit from beans: Alperovitz is no more a scholar than Zundel is: He is a historical revisionist who lies even more crudely than the holocaust revisionists. It is clear that in the opinion of the high command, the decision to surrender after they were nuked was a dramatic and radical change of position. Alperovitz says otherwise, thus he is either grotesquely ignorant or, more likely simply dishonest. Alperovitz writes: The use of the atomic bomb, most experts now believe, was totally unnecessary. Even people who support the decision for various reasons acknowledge that almost certainly the Japanese would have surrendered before the initial invasion planned for November. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stated that officially in 1946. We found a top-secret War Department study that said when the Russians came in, which was August 8, the war would have ended anyway. The invasion of Honshu, the main island, was not [And so on and so forth] After the second nuclear attack, the Japanese high command had a meeting with the emperor: They heard testimony on the effects of atomic bombs. About half wanted to surrender, about half argued that Japan should die gloriously: They were unaware that the US had just used up almost its entire nuclear arsenal. They expected that surrender would be followed by the same kind of reign of terror, rape, brutal degradation, and mass murder, that they inflicted on the people that they conquered. They expected that failure to surrender would result in continued nuclear bombardment at about the same rate. (Both beliefs were incorrect.) The Emperor *at that meeting* made the decision to surrender, shocking a large part of the high command, and then made a speech on radio announcing the surrender, stating as reason for the surrender that if they did not surrender, Japan would be utterly destroyed by nuclear weapons. Seeing as they were still debating the issue *after* two nuclear weapons had landed on them, it seems reasonable to believe that without atomic weapons, it would have been necessary to fight from house to house from one end of Japan to the other. When Hirohito ordered surrender in response to atomic bombing, the high command attempted to violently overthrow him, and when they failed, many in the high command committed suicide. > >If you read nothing else on this topic, I urge you to check out >an interview with him at http://www2.ari.net/home/bsabath/950711.html > >#endif > >/jordan > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Re: Microsoft's CryptoAPI - thoughts?
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:11 AM 2/3/96 TZ, Wasser wrote: > I have "standardized" the PS files on the MS website, so there should > be no more problems. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you, but it would be even better to webify them. I have webified them (http://www.jim.com/jamesd/mscryptoapi.html) but I am sure most people would prefer an official copy: --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Re: C2 and the Worst Case
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

sameer <sameer(a)c2.org> wrote: > > The question is, how much would they get? How much information about c2 > > users would fall into the wrong hands? > > The only information we have is the information you give > us. If you don't give us your name, we don't have your name. If you > don't give us the site you're coming from, we don't have the sit eyour > coming from. They can't get information out of us that we don't > have. That's our guiding principle, in terms of the privacy against > government-level attack. Are you saying that when someone with an anonymous mailbox on c2.org retrieves his/her mail via a POP3 connection, no log is made of the originating IP address?

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Re: Sometines ya just gotta nuke em-and nuke em again
by jamesd＠echeque.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:39 PM 2/3/96 -0800, paralax(a)alpha.c2.org wrote: >Mr. Hayes MAY have used a condescending tone but you have exposed your >racist roots again. First you embarass yourself with you lack of knowledge, Paralax does not know shit from beans. He presumably imagines that Tim is "embarrassed" because Tim's knowledge of the historical facts differs from those facts dreamed up by the usual crew of apologists for totalitarian terror. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Re: THE JEWS (ALL of them!) Try to kick Ernst Zundel off Usenet!!
by joseph＠genome.wi.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

what the hell was that? Surley you can't expect us to belive people wrote that? --Joseph

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Re: Imminent Death of Usenet Predicted
by Jim McCoy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> One thing that I'm worried about is InterNIC. As I understand it, it >is a central company that is in the business of receiving domain name >registrations, including the info on what that domain is connected to, and >sending it out to various nameservers. The nameservers then use this to route >some (not all, I do believe) traffic. Close, but not quite. The role that the InterNIC serves is to register domains and to maintain the top-level mappings. It is from InterNIC that the root-level nameservers load info regarding which domains are served by which nameservers. The way this process works from any particular users point of view is as follows: 1) You request that the host name www.foo.bar be resolved to an IP address. 2) Your TCP/IP software checks its local cache (if any) to see if it already has the requested information and if so it returns it without doing a lookup [there are timeouts and other bits involved but this is the simple version] 3) If a lookup is necessary your TCP/IP software digs up a pre-defined name/number for who is should ask. This is the info that you enter into a resolv.conf file in unix, a MacTCP DNS setting, etc. It is usually the nameserver for your internet service provider or a local nameserver for your network. Once the resolver knows who to ask it formats a query and sends it off. 4) This nameserver checks its cache to see if it already has the info and if not it forwards the request to another nameserver. Eventually the request hits a root server; the root servers then check the domain name against their tables (the ones it loaded up from the NIC) and forward the request to the appropriate nameserver. 5) Eventually the request is forwarded to a nameserver which is able to give an authortative answer for this domain and the result is sent back to the original requester. At any point in this chain it is possible for someone to decide who will give the authoratative answer for this domain. It is possible for you, the requester, to decide for yourself who will be asked. All you need to do is to add whatever nameserver you trust early into the query chain and that server will be asked first and only if it does not answer authoratatively will the regular nameservers be asked to resolve the request. The DNS system represents to oldest digital reputation system I know ot. It is _all_ about trust; if you think that someone is giving out bogus information or you want your answers to come from someone else it is trivial to change the way your nameservice is configured so that lookups happen in the manner that you want. No one can control how names are resolved into numbers unless someone else grants them that power. There was a minor rebellion among the internet service providers this fall when the NIC announced that they would begin charging for their services and it flares up every now and then when some of the larger independant ISPs begin to feel that the NIC is favoring the major players like MCI, Sprint, et al. when it comes to address and routing blocks and other name/IP number issues. The point that is frequently raised to keep the NIC in line is that there is nothing preventing these providers from going out and doing whatever they want, whether it be establishing new root servers, allocating whatever numbers they want, or just plain ignoring that the NIC exists. And there would be absolutely nothing that InterNIC could do about it, because that is how DNS works. The biggest problems that would occur would be when there was a conflict in the namespaces served (e.g. your lookup for www.foo.com returns one number when a InterNIC served root nameserver responds and another when a different set of root nameservers respond) and the number that would be returned would depend entirely on which nameservers your query asked to get the answer. In short, it would depend on who you decided to trust... On a more cypherpunk-related note, it is actually quite trivial for you to create your own shadow domains which are completely private to whatever group you want. If you want to create the foo.cypherpunk domain you can do it just by downloading the BIND nameserver code and settting up a nameserver which answers queries for the top-level .cypherpunk domain. All that is required for someone else to resolve names in this set of domains is for them to know that a .cypherpunk address needs to be resolved by the nameserver you created (which involves adding only a single line in every DNS config system that I know of.) It is also difficult for any authority to mandate that certain nameservers be used because the entire system is already so distributed as to make such a mandate useless (it would also cause such a performance hit for net connections that it would be about as effective as the old 55mph federal speed limits :) jim -- Jim McCoy mccoy(a)communities.com

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