December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Thoughts about Morph Escrow Crimes
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) wrote: >As the law cannot tell if an image of prurient interest started out as a legal image of Raquel Welch or Jennifer Aniston, or started out as an illegal image of a minor child, morph escrow will force all image possessors and distributors to produce proof that the image started out legal. It is not hard to imagine a future where computer modelling has reached the stage that a real picture is not required. An obvious extension of this is a film with computer generated actors. Now, consider this scenario: 1) The computer generated image is "indistinguishable" from reality. 2) The computer generated image depicts something considered obscene or illegal under present laws (e.g. pedophilia). At some point in the future it would seem possible that the computer generated image will be treated as a real image under the law (and evaluated accordingly) because it is indistinguishable from a real image. Or perhaps we will take the other tack and simply say: What is truth? I'm not quite ready to wash my hands on this issue. James Welcome to MorphSex - Fulfilling your fantasies - Painlessly. Select Gender [M/F/H]: Select Age [2-80]: Options: [Orgasm/Suffocation/Dismemberment/Disembowlment/Ennui]

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Re: PANIX.COM down: denial of service attack
by pjb＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From cypherpunks-errors(a)toad.com Thu Sep 12 18:16:43 1996 > Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 09:09:18 -0700 > From: #6 <thevillage(a)void.gov> > X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.01 (Win95; U) > Mime-Version: 1.0 > To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Subject: PANIX.COM down: denial of service attack > Content-Type> : > text/plain> ; > charset=us-ascii> > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Content-Length: 969 > > WSJ 9/12/96 > > Paraphrasing: > > Panix has been under attack for the last week by someone flooding > their server with bogus "requests for information" [see below] ... > > The attack(s): > > * "Have rendered almost defenseless the small NY company" > * "...began late Friday afternoon ... were still continung yesterday" > * have targeted "computers that control WWW pages, store e-mail, and > still others that link Internet addresses to Panix subscribers." > > "The hacker [sic] has been sending up to 150 requests a second to > Panix's computers, seeking to establish a connection ... the requests, > presumably generated by a malicious computer program, contain fake > Internet addresses, which the computer must sort out before they can > discard them. The computers have choked under the deluge." > > "As to who might be targeting Panix, the firm's Mr. Rosen speculated it ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ It could, of course, also be someone, from a set of several million, that find Mr. Rosen to be such as odious prick that they did it just to drive him out of their misery. Just thinking out loud.. > could be someone upset by the fact that the site hosts, free, the Web > site for Voters Telecommunication Watch...." > -paul

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position of cellular phones
by SCN User 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-->After seeing the messages about Federal Express doing something similar, -->I thought this would be of interest: Date: Mon, 09 Sep 96 17:41:31 GMT From: campbellp(a)logica.com (Peter Campbell Smith) Subject: Re: Locating the position of cellular phones (Stover, RISKS-18.41) There is an interesting article in Traffic Technology International, Aug/Sept 96 issue about a system called CAPITAL that uses cellular phone calls as a probe to monitor road traffic around Washington DC. It describes an experiment which has been running for two years and which has demonstrated that this is an extremely cost-effective alternative to conventional means of traffic monitoring. The system is independent of the cellular phone system per se, but has antennae on the cellular phone masts which listen to the cellular frequencies. Every time a call is initiated, CAPITAL locates the caller by a combination of directional multi-element antennae and time-of-arrival analysis between different masts. The geographical accuracy is reported to be to about 115m, and subsequent tracking allows the speed of the vehicle to be established within 30 to 50sec to an accuracy of 5mi/h. At any time only less than 5% of vehicles are making calls, but this is a sufficient sample for analysing the traffic speed (though not presumably the traffic density). Moreover, when the traffic slows down even more people make calls, so there is a better density of data from the areas most interesting to those monitoring traffic flows. It is claimed that the boxes ignore the voice content of the call and that the data they deliver has randomly assigned identifiers for each call, so that nothing leaves the system which would allow calls to be associated with specific phones. -->Until the government thinks it needs the info! Peter Campbell Smith, Logica, London, UK campbellp(a)logica.com

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(fwd) Email Robot draws fire from CypherPunkz
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Path: news.eff.org!news.umbc.edu!haven.umd.edu!cs.umd.edu!news.abs.net!ddsw1!news.mcs.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!agate!boulder!ucsub.Colorado.EDU!peterson From: peterson(a)ucsub.Colorado.EDU (Peterson Penny) Newsgroups: alt.privacy Subject: Email Robot draws fire from CypherPunkz Date: 12 Sep 96 02:57:19 GMT Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder Lines: 11 Message-ID: <peterson.842497039(a)ucsub.Colorado.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: ucsub.colorado.edu NNTP-Posting-User: peterson X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #8 (NOV) The Cypherpunks gang has apparently attacked a San Francisco artist's www site, harrassing him and mail-bombing his service provider in an attempt to get him to drop the account. The Cpunks objected to an applett that this artist had on one of his pages that would send a mail greeting to people who had a *mail-to:* button on their www pages. This greeting consisted of his URL only and went through an anon remailer. More info and a sample of the email robot can be found at: http://www.hipcrime.com -- // declan(a)eff.org // I do not represent the EFF // declan(a)well.com //

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Re: Jury Nullification = Voting One's Conscience
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:39 PM 9/12/96 -0400, Brian Davis wrote: >> Though I often condemn aspects of the American political and legal system, >> it is true that an awful lot of things are done right. > >Perhaps, like democracy, it is the worst system possible, except for >every other system man has invented. >EBD I have to disagree with that... Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: 260_0it
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:02 PM 9/13/96 GMT, John Young wrote: > FiTi: "Intelligent machines will take control of our lives" > > Before long, every vehicle will be fitted with a GPS > receiver, making its position known to local area > traffic management systems. In the home, a financial and > stock control system would automatically order food and > groceries when necessary. Intelligent machines might > "decide" that it would be more efficient not to order > any more food - and shut you out of the house. > > "It's more or less inevitable. Business and science will > drive this to the utmost." "Open the garage door, HAL." "I'm sorry, Dave, but those sirloin steaks in the refrigerator are too valuable for me to allow you to eat them. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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did you go to school?
by HipCrime 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> THIN SLICES CUT FROM OUR PRECIOUS FORESTS. > > "OUR?" Since when did my trees become partially yours? > JMR JMR, it's hard to believe that your English education is SO LACKING, that you missed the fact, that in my sentence quoted above, the word "ours" refers to MANKIND IN GENERAL, not me personally. Go sit in the corner with the duncecap on, and don't come out until you can read an 8th grade piece of literature (with full comprehension). -- HTTP://www.HIPCRIME.com

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Re: 56 kbps modems
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:24 PM 9/13/96, Enzo Michelangeli wrote: >On Fri, 13 Sep 1996, Asgaard wrote: > >> >U.S. Robotics and Rockwell International are planning new modems with >> >speeds up to 56 kbps a second, almost double the speed of the fastest >> >rate now available. The new devices should be available by the end of >> >the year, although their top speed initially may be less than 56 kbps. >> >(Wall Street Journal 12 Sep 96 B11) >> >> People who seemed to know used to say that 'the Shannon limit' >> set an absolute upper limit around 40 kbps. Has Shannon been >> proven wrong, or what? > >Well, it all depends on the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, if the noise is >not white gaussian the situation can be even better. No, this is not what's important in this case. (Besides, the "upper limit" is really more about the Nyquist Limit. Shannon's Theorem says that even in the presence of noise, this limit can be approached if proper coding schemes and whatnot are used.) While it is true that a noisy channel can reduce the effective channel capacity to something less than its capacity (for some particular coding scheme), the upper limit on channel capacity is whatever it is. As to the original question about modems and 40 kbps vs. 56 kpbs rates, this depends on "tricks" involving definitions of a "symbol" (a la the familiar argument about baud vs. bits per second). "Trellis coding," for example. I'm not a modem designer, but I'm not surprised to see these incremental improvements...none involve huge gains, and none involve getting, say, a megabit per second through a 6 kHz (or whatever) audio line--now that _would_ violate Shannon's Theorem, the Nyquist Limit, etc. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: J'accuse!: Whitehouse and NSA vs. Panix and VTW
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:58 PM 9/12/96 -0400, Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> wrote: >I think someone should just stand right up and accuse the NSA, at the >behest of the Whitehouse, of running a denial of service attack on Panix at >*exactly* the time when VTW is lobbying its hardest on the PRO-CODE bill. Let's see, anon.penet.fi gets shut down (Church of Scientology), PRO-Code bill is being lobbied for and against, PANIX is attacked by TCP-spammers, HipCrime initiates a distributed spam against remailers, newspapers accuse remailers of promoting Child Pornography Louis Freeh's recently gotten wiretap money approved. Clipper-3 is trying to build an escrowed key-certification hierarchy Could it be *conspiracy*? Yah, sure. But it could be just a bunch of separate people who don't like anonymity. (Kind of like somebody getting stabbed twelve times at night on the Orient Express - the problem is finding someone who _doesn't_ have a motivation to attack anonymity :-) At least one of the newspaper articles I've read has referred to the need for real authentication on the net to prevent the anonymity that makes this kind of attack possible, and in particular for the major network providers to make sure that they don't export messages with bogus addressing, a cure that the article said would take several months to deploy. I don't know if they were referring to IPv6, or sendmail modifications, or router hacks, or what; the article's author seemed to think this was about bogusly-addressed email messages rather than understanding SYNs. Anybody for an Internet Driver's License? # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> Dispel Authority!

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Re: Nonsense, absolute nonsense... [Fwd: HipCrime and Spam]
by Richard Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 19:02 9/12/96, Ross Wright wrote to cypherpunks(a)toad.com and remailer-operators(a)c2.org and...: >On Or About: 12 Sep 96 at 17:48, Rabid Wombat wrote: >> However, since others may think like you, I guess I'll have to add a line >> above my link stating that email not related to the purpose of my site >> will be happily proof-read at the rate of $200 per hour, > >Just great. That sure takes away any anonymity you had about being >"on the cutting edge" of the information age. That 1952 "proof-read" >crap went out in the 70's. How can you hope to enforce it? It's a >joke, right? :) Maybe not, since it's on your sig-line. Hey, that was my too-long sig, Ross. There is obviously more than one person who disagrees with your assertion that listing an email address somewhere is an open invitation for mail to that address on any topic or for any purpose. Also, I charge $500 per message. I've always liked flat fees. :-) ------- Forwarded Message ------- At 21:50 9/11/96, Ross Wright <rwright(a)adnetsol.com> wrote to cypherpunks(a)toad.com and remailer-operators(a)c2.org: >As I said having a website invites comments. It's like being a >public figure. In effect you are publishing your e-mail address. Interesting perspective. However, placing an email address on a web page is by no means an offer to take "comments" (i.e., marketing spams) on anything that strikes the spammer's fancy. The context in which any email address is mentioned will tell you what sorts of messages are expected at that address. To maintain otherwise is just a flimsy excuse for "seedy low life multi-level-marketing jerks" who want to cover their postage-due unsolicited advertising/promotional email in some false cloak of respectability. To continue the comment box analogy, the stuffing of salsa sample comment boxes (next to the salsa sample booth in the grocery store) with ads for anything you're pushing is most decidedly not what the comment box is for. ... -- "As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion. ... Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects." -- Judge Stewart Dalzell Unsolicited advertising/promotional email proofread for $500/message! Your sending such a message to me is an explicit request for my services!

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