December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Free speech debate on MSN Encarta
by jpb＠miamisci.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:17 PM 3/21/96, Raph Levien wrote: >So here's a random idea: have an ISP that essentially firewalls the >Internet connection to the house, so that it is very difficult to get >unwanted stuff over the wire at all. The ISP can maintain and update the >latest high-tech tools, including filtering by URL, filtering by >keyword, and other stuff like detecting proxies. While they're at it, >they can filter out junk email. This is easily done from a technical standpoint. There is a set of patches for the CERN server that lets you have it automatically delete advertisments from certain prominent sites (used to be called NoShit, I heard they changed the name) when you're running in proxy mode. You can even have it change profanity into "EXON EXON" on the fly. Running something like this is probably a good thing for the ISP as running a cache will allow them to get more mileage out of their net connection. However, I don't think it likely that many ISPs will go this route from a liability point of view - if some parent is paying them to filter out smut, and little Zippy finds a brand new x-rated site, chances are some irate parent will sue them. With the proliferation of new pages, it is impossible for anyone to keep up, unless the authors voluntarily include some smutscan codes in their pages. >Raph (whose son, Alan Mathison, was born Sunday morning at 5:01 am) Congrats. Joseph Block <jpb(a)miamisci.org> "We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans ..." -- Bill Clinton (USA TODAY, 11 March 1993, page 2A) PGP 2048bit-Fingerprint: F8 A2 A5 15 56 42 9B 16 3F BD 57 0F 8A ED E3 21 No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

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Unused WWW and anon FTP space
by janimmo＠ionet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Greetings Cypherpunks: I have no idea if this is the appropriate place or way to broach this topic, but I have a great deal of space on my account that is just going to waste. I am allowed a www page, and in a couple of weeks my shell space quota will be upgraded to 20 meg, with anon ftp capability. As I said, this is just going to waste, so I was wondering if anyone had some faqs, files, or whatever that they wanted to distribute or if anyone needed space for a web page. Frankly, I've never written an html document, but I suppose I could learn. Please respond directly, as I'm sure that the rest of the list doesn't want to hear the responses. ___ ( > /) /) __/_/> // // janimmo(a)ionet.net / / (__//__//_ <_/ /> /> janimmo(a)aol.com </ </ Cypherpunk newbie and general dweeb

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Pepsi World - $25,000!
by webmaster＠pepsi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey Squatter! Have you found the hidden "hot" spots and registered to win the Shaq/Pepsi World's Slammin' Techno Dream Contest? Deadline to enter is March 31st, only a few days away. Don't miss out on your chance to win a $25,000 Gateway computer shopping spree and a trip to Orlando, Florida to meet Shaq and catch the Magic in action. All ya gotta do is find the hidden "hot" spots. Seem impossible? Well, here are a couple of hints: "Shaquille O'Neal is his name, Movies and basketball are his game. So cruise by La La Land or Adrenalin to give your luck a try, And find the ball that Shaq has left behind." "Twinkle, twinkle little star, 25 grand could go real far..." Good luck!

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email profit centre
by Julian Assange 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Who wants to take this site down first? [http://unix.lgn.com/email.htm] GET A JUMP ON THE INTERNET TODAY, BEFORE YOUR COMPETITION DOES! Can you afford not to??? The Email'ers Profit Center * Increase market penetration * Great for Multi-Level marketing * Virtually no mailing expense * $$ Save money $$ You will have access to 500,000+ Email addresses * Make your product or service known to thousands of people. * Save money. (To mail postcards to 500,000 people would run you over US$95,000.00). The Email'ers Profit Center is a mailing list of over 500,000 email addresses, all gathered within the last six months. It is available on your choice of CD-ROM or 100meg ZIP disk. They both contain the list in ASCII and .dbf. FREE MONTHLY UPDATES VIA TELNET! THE LIST IS EXPECTED TO DOUBLE WITHIN SIX MONTHS! The list is $500 for your own unlimited use. You may not resell, rent or loan the listings to any other person or company. _________________________________________________________________ For more information contact George. Phone: (209)276-1707 or E-mail: bubba(a)lgn.com -- "I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?" - Leo Bulero/PKD +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+ |Julian Assange RSO | PO Box 2031 BARKER | Secret Analytic Guy Union | |proff(a)suburbia.net | VIC 3122 AUSTRALIA | finger for PGP key hash ID = | |proff(a)gnu.ai.mit.edu | FAX +61-3-98199066 | 0619737CCC143F6DEA73E27378933690 | +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+

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CDA Court Challenge: Day #2
by Declan B. McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The DoJ also quizzed Donna Hoffman about anonymous remailers. They wanted to make sure that she wasn't an expert on them, had conducted no studies of remailers, and had collected no statistics on their use. -Declan ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The CDA Challenge, Day #2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Declan McCullagh / declan(a)well.com / Redistribute freely ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- March 22, 1996 PHILADELPHIA -- At 2:21 pm today, one of the judges hearing our challenge to the Communications Decency Act finally "got it." "The folks in Luxembourg don't give a damn what our laws are. So my son, who's 10, can still view 'Sexy European Girls?'" asked U.S. District Court Judge Stewart Dalzell. "That's correct," replied Scott Bradner of Harvard University, who took the stand today to describe net.technology. Bradner told me afterwards he thought Friday's hearing went well -- he had come to Philadelphia to testify because this "is such an important issue." Judge Dalzell's remark hints that he, at least, is starting to understand the Internet -- and the consequences of the court's eventual ruling. This comes not a picosecond too soon for those of us who have been fidgeting in our seats, wincing as Department of Justice attorneys misuse technical terms and hoping the judges can sort through the cyberconfusion in just six days of hearings. Dalzell has a keen sense of humor and seems sympathetic to our arguments. In fact, I'd guess he's been doing some out-of-court web-surfing himself. In an _astounding_ question at the end of the day, he asked Bradner: "Isn't it true that the exponential and incredible growth of the Internet came about because the government kept their hands off of it?" Bradner gladly agreed. (What else would he say?) The other two judges aren't quite as reflective. In an incomprehensible decision last month, Judge Ronald Buckwalter granted us only a _partial_ restraining order preventing the Feds from enforcing the CDA. Now he's justifying his original mistake by taking a critical stance during this hearing -- that is, when he's not dozing. During one of his more alert moments, Buckwalter asked if labeling all online content is possible: "Your problems are technical and financial? If thse problems are solved and we agree on the definition of indecent, is it possible?" "Yes, it is," our witness replied. Buckwalter also asked earlier: "What do you mean by saying the Internet is a very democratic medium? Isn't there someone who steers discussion?" As proof, he held up a copy of a recent Atlantic magazine article that claimed the most popular USENET newsgroups are moderated and are therefore "quasi-authoritarian." I suggested to our attorney, Chris Hansen from the ACLU, that he clarify what percentage of newsgroups were moderated. On redirect, Hansen posed that question to Donna Hoffman of Vanderbilt University. She replied that most newsgroups are unmoderated. Later, Bradner of Harvard University added that moderated newsgroups amount to less than 10 percent of the total. Dolores Sloviter is the third judge on the panel. As the chief judge of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, she penned a sparkling decision upholding free expression in a phone sex case. In this hearing, Sloviter's questions are the most pointed and incisive. When Robert Cronenberger of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library was testifying, Sloviter asked him if under the CDA "would something have to be removed from your collection?" Cronenberger replied: "We don't know. We would be afraid that someone might find something indecent or patently offensive." The Department of Justice attorneys are an interesting lot. Jay Baron is a short, heavyset man who tries hard to land roundhouse punches during cross-examination but instead comes across as prone to malapropisms. I think he was the DoJer who confused <http://www.eff.org/> with <http://www.itef.org/> and "ISP" with "IP address." Before the hearing resumed for the afternoon, I introduced myself to him. He recognized me as a plaintiff and said he included one of my articles on Marty Rimm as evidence (!) and used it during depositions. <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~declan/rimm/> Tony Coppolino is more reserved and didn't say much when we chatted, except to say that his office is busy enough with this case that they won't be sending anyone to the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference next week. I was impressed by the poise of Patricia Rosado, the DoJ's point person on porn. Yesterday she floated the MacKinnonesque theory that porn is harmful not just to minors, but also to women. Today she greeted our witnesses with a barbed, stinging cross-examination. Unfortunately for Rosado, she was up against Cronenberger, a likable gent who came across as a traditional librarian close to the judges' own ages -- not a net.geek like Donna Hoffman and Scott Bradner. (At one point, Judge Sloviter demanded that Bradner explain URLs and linking in English, not net-ese.) The judges gladly related to Cronenberger's description of the Net as a library -- finally, something they could grasp! The ACLU's Chris Hansen expanded on this in a brilliant redirect, pointing out that the concept extends beyond that of a traditional library, allowing a user to link "from the fourth floor of Wiedner Library in Boston to the third floor of the Carnegie Mellon University library in Pittsburgh." Rosado from the DoJ rallied with questions like: DoJ: "You can do a keyword search on the seven dirty words?" DoJ: "Would a search on Abraham Lincoln turn up articles about sex?" R.C.: "I've read many articles about his sex life, or lack of sex life. DoJ: "Would a search on travel turn up articles about sex?" DoJ: "Would a search on geology turn up articles about sex?" R.C. "Only if rock is put together with roll!" <laughter>) DoJ: "Would a search on food turn up articles about sex?" DoJ: "You exercise discretion as to what you make available. You don't carry everything, do you?" DoJ: "You select materials that reflect the local community standards?" Not surprisingly, the DoJ is trying to keep the hearing focused on porn and sex. (At least it keeps Buckwalter awake!) Not the truly extreme stuff that obscenity laws already ban online, but the softcore Playboy-style cyberpix that would be permitted in the absence of the CDA. The Justice Department asked Vanderbilt's Hoffman: DoJ: "You stated in your deposition that you were generally familiar with the web page called Bianca's Smut Shack?" Judge Dalzell immediately looked up, startled: "Bianca's WHAT?" DoJ: "Bianca's SMUT Shack." Judge Dalzell: "Oh, okay." Other DoJ questions included a passing reference to would-be cyberporn researcher Marty Rimm, who claimed that pornographers were using the Net to recruit customers. (Last month, the DoJ attached Rimm's study as an exhibit in their response to our complaint and cited it as evidence of the pervasiveness of nasty stuff on USENET.) Some examples: DoJ: "You will concede, will you not, that this law will not have a profound adverse effect [on password-protected smutty sites]?" DoJ: "Pornographers are using USENET newsgroups to advertise, are they not?" DoJ: "Tell us about bots and spiders." Judge Dalzell, trying hard: "That's an acronym, right?" My fellow plaintiffs are wonderful. Kiyoshi Kuromiya testified the first day, followed by Patricia Nell Warren. Warren and I had dinner on Thursday with Jonathan Wallace of the Ethical Spectacle; we talked about the political and social forces behind the push for the CDA. I asked Wallace why he came down from New York City -- he told me because "this is the most important free speech case in 60 years." Today I sat next to the DoJ's net.experts, who kept leaning forward to whisper technical data into the ears of the Justice Department's attorneys. One of the two experts was from Brigham Young University. The other was Steve Nesbitt from the Department of Defense. One or both likely will be testifying as expert witnesses for the DoJ, but Justice isn't releasing the list until April 3. Stay tuned for more reports. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- We're back in court on 4/1, 4/12, 4/15, and 4/26. The DoJ will be taking depositions from our remaining witnesses the week of March 24. For more information and breaking updates, check out: http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/top/ To subscribe to the fight-censorship announcement list, send email with "subscribe fight-censorship-announce" in the body to: majordomo(a)sojourn.com Other relevant web sites: http://www.eff.org/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~declan/rimm/ http://www.cdt.org/ http://www.aclu.org/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: DAZ_zle
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:53 PM 3/21/96 -0500, John Young wrote: > Foreign Affairs, March/April, 1996, features two policy > essays on "The Information Edge: A technological change is > transforming the nature of power and the United States is > clearly in the lead." [deleted] > He observes that misunderstanding of > revolutionary technology all too often has had unexpected, > disastrous, consequences: "A revolution in military affairs > is under way. It will require changes of a magnitude that > military people still do not completely grasp and political > leaders do not fully imagine." Sounds like this guy has been reading my stuff.

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Java questions
by Wei Dai 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There has been a lot of discussion on coderpunks about implementing cryptography in Java. This got me thinking. We don't see every C++ compiler using the same back end. So why is everyone licensing Sun's Java implementation? As a consequence of this if there is a bug in Sun's implementation, then that bug exists in every Java implementation. Imagine a future scenario where a virus/worm takes advantage of a single Java bug and infects 90% of all computers attached to the Internet overnight. There may not be much we can do about this, but we should at least be more aware of the possibility. On a more positive note, has anyone thought of writting a remailer server or client in Java? It would be really nice if we could run or use a remailer by clicking a link on the web. Wei Dai

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Re: detweiling
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:18 AM 3/23/96, Rich Graves wrote: > On Sat, 23 Mar 1996, Anonymous wrote: >> <Detweiler stuff.> > <Rich's response to Detweiler stuff> Uh, Rich?... You've probably been detweiled by Detweiler himself. Someone around here has a concordance program, called MEDUSA, if I remember right, which can spot Detweiler pretty well by statistical analysis of the words he uses. My hunch is that this particular "anonymous" is LD himself. I take my hint from this line: > the joke of course may be that detweiler could have > been dead for a long time, and people here would > still be blaming him for their problems. perhaps > we have a new convenient substitute for Satan in > the cyberspace age. "the detweiling made me do it." > (hee, hee). "projection" was identified by freud ^^^^^^^^^^^ > in another century as a basic device of the ego, > a pity that few in our modern era are aware-- or > perhaps it is not such a pity from detweiler's > perspective. <g> > > (p.s. I imagine quite a few people will accuse "me" of > being detweiler. I assure you my amusement will at least > exceed or match that which detweiler ever obtained.) ... Which could have been put there on purpose. You Never Know... ;-). All this and the fact that he now wants to convert his name into a verb. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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e$'s (mini-rant)
by Gary Lee Jeffers 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

e$'s (mini-rant) I have some thoughts on John Humphrey's post. I thought the big problem with E$ was with the clearing house. Is it the consensus that it is the e$ patents? If the problem is that the inventors are sitting on their patents, then why can't we just RIP THEM OFF$ When the patent system was started in the U.S., it was done for the population in order to stimulate the invention process and so improve the lot of the people. Invention is a SPECIAL kind of production. It is not normal mass property! Patents are only property because it is considered that they are of value to the people rather than the owners! Patents pro- cess was started to give property to patent "owners" in order to persuade the inventors to invent for the people. If an inventor "SITS ON A PATENT", then it is ABUSE OF PATENT! Fuck the patent owner! Fuck him with bells on! RIP HIM OFF! its a noble cause! If this has become a serious problem then finding techniques of riping off e$ patent owners is a moral and practical undertaking. Then it should be a topic of Cypherpunks. I am not sure that hoarding of patents is the main hinderance of useful e$. What do other Cypherpunks say? patents? workable e$ schemes! clearing- houses? P.S. Maybe doing private Internet business while hiding from the owner of the e$ patent will be a new privacy concern :-) P.P.S. Thoughts for a rip-off technique. Take a good private e$ tech., restate it in different terms, throw in a few changes, options, extras so it doesn't look so much like the original. Then offer it to the public with a variety of very low cost deals - especially for start-ups. By the time the original inventor gets you into court, you'll have a ton of money he'll have nothing and with our system of "justice" you can bury him. :-) Even if he "wins" - with your privacy skills you can take it with you and hide it - talk to Duncan Frissell. Note: You'll have the money to talk to Duncan, the original inventor won't. :-) P.P.P.S Why not just take the best features of several private e$ tech.s and make a hybrid? It wouldn't even be plaguerism! (sorry, I lost my dict- ionary). Central power is stolen freedom. THE UNITED STATES "FEDERAL" GOVERNMENT HAS NO LEGITIMACY. The United States "Federal" Government - We'll be even more American without it. PUSH EM BACK! PUSH EM BACK! WWWAAAYYYY BBBAAACCCCK! BBBEEEAAATTTT STATE! Gary Jeffers

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Re: e$'s (mini-rant)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:00 AM 3/24/96 -0600, Gary Lee Jeffers <gjeffers(a)ns.htc.net> wrote: > e$'s (mini-rant) > I have some thoughts on John Humphrey's post. I thought the big problem >with E$ was with the clearing house. Is it the consensus that it is the e$ >patents? If the problem is that the inventors are sitting on their >patents, then why can't we just RIP THEM OFF$ Yes, it's the patents. Chaum owns them, and he's not Easy To Do Business With. On the other hand, a couple of banks _have_ recently started doing business with him - Mark Twain Bank in St. Louis, and Merita Bank in Finland - check the cypherpunks archives (www.hks.net / nntp.hks.net) for details. There were a couple of earlier attempts, in which one group discovered that there are an appalling number of banking laws which make it hard to get a real bank started, and another group discovered that it's much easier to be a Credit Union than a Bank under US banking law, but it's still hard to get a business model that's likely to make non-negative amounts of money that way. The reason you can't just rip them off (unlike, say, PGP's early relationships with RSADSI/PKP) is that electronic commerce can only work well if it's legitimate - if you want real businesses to deal with you, and real banks to handle money for you, they need to be assured that they won't lose their assets in a patent lawsuit. On the other hand, Doug Barnes posted some interesting articles on "agnostic banking", a variant on Chaum's digicash where the bank can run simpler digital cash protocols that don't violate Chaum's patent, but the bank can't tell whether the customer is using Chaum's blinded signatures or not, so the customer can rip off Chaum's intellectual property without the bank having to be knowledgeable or involved (nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) On a non-financial level, Chaum didn't complain about the Magic Money / Tacky Tokens demos that some of the cypherpunks did, and Digicash came out with a play-money version that some of us used before the commercial deal was done. > [patent rant] Yeah, yeah, many of us can rant against patents as well. Been there, done that, even invented stuff and found somebody else had previously invented and patented it. The League for Programming Freedom has some high-quality detailed patent rants, and if you give RMS a grant for airfare he'd probably be happy to go picket Chaum's company for you :-) As far as Chaum hoarding the patents, he's always been willing to deal, but since he's mostly an academic rather than a businessman, he's set a very high up-front price so little guys don't bother him, only mega-banks that will come now that he built it. I'd guess the prices the banks he's now dealing with paid are rather lower than that, but it's a start for getting real business to evolve. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissible." - US government statement on China... "SigFiles of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist!"

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