December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Impact of Netscape kernel hole
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dave Smith wrote: >I still have a copy of MCOM/Netscape Navigator 0.94 around... does the >bug exist this far back, or am I going to have to start using Cello, >or something equally obscure? Dave suggests the key to Netscape's Andreesen's amazing trajectory from lab rat gizmoid to market leader, while others languish uncompensated, at least just yet. It's Mark's changeable feature for peeking and tracking, approved by law for orderly commerce. "Bugs bounty" is the make light of it charade, while "bug" is the venerable hardware name. Find the first few, sure, that's for easy diversion, find those somewhat deeper, those're for sweeping by the seasoned pros. Then there are those that are never found, the ones that always tell what's needed to know in national emergency but can never be revealed. Perhaps any day now MS and NSCP will morph to push browser GAK, claiming that public privacy and secure commerce demand protection from cyber-terrorists. That's the theme, hey, hey, of the Denver meet of global leaders on June 20. Could it be that that's what the Silicon chiefs went to DC to plan last week while speechifying contrarily to CNN, C-SPAN and Declan. Surely, though, bountifully trusty PGP is not party to this G-10 globalization of crippled crypto, or at least not its Chief Technology Officer, right? BTW, Declan's spin on national affairs is starting to smell of pontification to the masses, classis sign of "if only you knew what I've been let in on." Shimomuraism, that, empty data.

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Re: Impact of Netscape kernel hole
by Ross Wright 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On or About 13 Jun 97 at 18:35, Tom Weinstein wrote: > week for 4.0. A fix for 3.x will follow once we have 4.0 fixed. Saw this post to Cypherpunks. I hate to sound less than savvy, but I use 2.02. You guys are gonna help us who refuse to upgrade, right. Ross =-=-=-=-=-=- Ross Wright King Media: Bulk Sales of Software Media and Duplication Services http://www.slip.net/~cdr/kingmedia Voice: (408) 259-2795

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Receiving Messages Anonymously
by pdh＠best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Receiving anonymous messages is still an open problem. The solutions we have so far are cumbersome to operate. They also depend on a chain of machines remaining up and reliable for a long time, which is expensive. A quick solution is to use the list to send anonymous messages. It is inexpensive to tell if a message is encrypted for a key you control so it is cheap to find messages you can read. The nice thing about this solution is that it is quite difficult to make a complete list of cypherpunk recipients given the multi-rooted "tree" structure of the list. There are leaves in many countries. Even if every wire were tapped and tracked, it would be hard to guarantee that people were not moving list traffic around on diskettes. To make filtering easy for people, I would suggest adding an "X-Private-Message" field to the header. For PGP messages, the contents of this field could be "PGP-Key-Id:0xDEADBEEF". (New formats can be invented as new protocols are invented.) Some people will object to this new form of "noise" message. It should be easy for somebody to set up a subsetted version of the list which pre-filters the private messages. (Although, how anybody can read the raw list without a filter of their own is a mystery to me.) A good reason to receive the complete list is that it conceals the fact that you are receiving (or not receiving) anonymous messages. If you think you might ever in the future receive an anonymous message, this will allow you to do so without revealing it. This scheme could be attacked by actively intervening with the propagation of the list and supplying people with different messages depending on which branch of the "tree" they are on. This could be used successively to narrow the list of "suspects" receiving a certain message. There are two ways to prevent this. One is to receive the list from more than one source and compare the messages received. If many people are doing this, which is likely since each has a strong motivation to detect this attack, then the first attempts should be detected immediately. The other method is to have a trusted person post a signed list of message ids and checksums that have come down the wire every day. (Acknowledgement: This is probably a rehash of BlackNet.) Peter

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Recipient Anonymity
by ghio＠temp0097.myriad.ml.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A group of servers collects messages of equal length for anonymous recipients. All servers exchange messages so that each has copies of all messages. A recipient wishes to retrieve a message from the servers without any server knowing which message he is receiving. The recipient selects a group of n servers. From each server, S_1...S_n-1, he requests a random selection of messages, with a 50% probability that any particular message will be selected. The server returns the xor of all messages requested. He sends the final server a request which is the xor of all the previous requests and the one single message that he wants. The xor of all the responses is the desired message. It is impossible to determine which message was received unless all servers collude. A variant of this scheme where there is only one server and a number of anonymizing proxies will also work, however in this case there must be sufficient delay to obscure the time correlations or the server will know which message was received, and collusion with any one of the proxies could reveal the recipient. It is also possible to eliminate the need for real-time communication and operate the system on a store-and-forward network. The recipient generates a one time pad and sends it to a remailer/messageserver along with a reply-block which is a nested series of encrypted message requests and next-hop addresses. Each remailer along the way xors the requested messages onto the existing message data before forwarding it to the next hop. When the recipient gets his message back, he decrypts it using the one time pad. To account for the situation where first and last remailer collude, it is desireable to have some of the intervening remailers apply a stream cipher to the message using a supplied key. The server-to-server broadcast eliminates the need for cover traffic, but the anonymizing proxy system does not. However, there is no reason that both schemes could not be used concurrently in the same network, and in fact they would look the same to the end-user. Except for the additional server-to-server communications necessary to broadcast new messages into the system, the bandwidth utilization is comparable to sender-anonymous remailers; it scales linearly as the number of parties involved in the delivery of a particular message. The failure rate is also the product of the failure rate for each server; if one server delivers corrupt data, the message is unreadable, and the recipient must identify the bad server and eliminate it from future requests.

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Re: How did these people find our list? (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 10:30:11 -0400 > From: Duncan Frissell <frissell(a)panix.com> > Subject: Re: How did these people find our list? (fwd) > June 21, 1942, Fort Stevens at the mouth of the Columbia in Oregon is fired > upon by the deck gun of a Japanese submarine. The first continental costal > battery to be attacked by a foreign enemy (not counting those Southerners) > since the War of 1812. The Japs fire 17 shells. No apparent damage. Fort > Stevens is unable to depress its guns sufficiently to hit the submarine. A > draw. Two Jap subs were sunk in San Francisco harbor. Unfortunately I can't find the dates, will keep looking. > Oregon also suffered the U.S. Mainland's only domestic casualties due to > enemy action when a teacher and members of her family on a hike in southern > Oregon were killed by a Japanese balloon bomb. (These bombs were attached to Actualy it was a man, his wife, and two children. The two kids were playing with it when it went off. My memory tells me that the women and two kids were killed. Don't remember if she was a teacher or not. There was an interesting video recreation on TDC last month on this incident on a special on the Japanese balloon bombs. > balloons released from Japanese submarines off the coast.) Actualy most of them were released from the Japanese mainland at specific points. If you do further research on this you will learn how they used the ballast sand in the balloons (mechanicly complicated) to track their source. All the sites were bombed and the baloons ceased. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Japan & bombing the US
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Several people have made comment on the difference between states and protectorates of one sort or another in reference to the comment I made about Oregon being the only US state to be bombed in WWII. While this is technicaly true if you go back and look at the original posting I replied too was made in the context of US involvment in the war and how isolated we were, so isolated, the claim went, that the Japanese were unable to invade or otherwise attack the US. While it is true that Oregon was the only area attacked which was a state under the context of US possessions being attacked it is false. The main point here is that the original proposal was incorrect due to more than a semantic technicality. This brings the whole issue of the US sitting out the war into question. A question I answer strongly in the negative. It is not possible that the US could have sat out the war as a neutral. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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SAFE clears House subcommittee, with amendments
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

*************** Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 21:09:41 -0400 To: fight-censorship-announce(a)vorlon.mit.edu From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> Subject: FC: SAFE clears House subcommittee, from LEGI-SLATE [Since I showed up late today and missed some of the early discussion, I asked my friend Amy for permission to pass along her report. She graciously agreed. --Declan] ***************** SAFE Act Nears Home in House After Subcommittee Tosses It Out Favorably By Amy Branson LEGI-SLATE News Service WASHINGTON (June 24) -- Casting the only opposing vote to H.R. 695 -- the "Security and Freedom Through Encryption Act" -- Rep. Doug Bereuter, R-Neb., knew his position was the lonely one at a subcommittee markup Tuesday. "The goal must be to balance between the competitiveness of U.S. companies and U.S. national security goals," Bereuter began. "However, this bill fails that balance because it significantly relaxes U.S. export control of encryption without requiring a key recovery policy ... to those exports." Despite Bereuter's problems with the bill, the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade passed H.R. 695 by a recorded vote of 14 yeas and 1 nay [Vote 1]. H.R. 695 lifts export restrictions on many kinds of strong encryption products, prohibits federal or state governments from requiring anyone to give up the key to their encrypted communications, and establishes criminal penalties for using encryption to further a criminal offense. "This is a vitally important piece of legislation if we're going to continue to promote the United States dominance of the software industry worldwide," the bill's sponsor, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Tuesday afternoon. Goodlatte, who does not sit on the International Relations Committee, spoke on behalf of his bill at the markup session. "This legislation is also very important from the standpoint of promoting the safety and security of American citizens and others in the use of the Internet," he added. Subcommittee members also adopted by voice vote an "en bloc amendment" that made what they described as mostly "technical" changes to the bill. Subcommittee aides emphasized that the purpose of the amendment language was to close loopholes and fix unintended omissions contained in the underlying legislation. For example, the amendment expands the kinds of products that do not have to have a validated license for export or re-export to include "any consumer product commercially available in the U.S. or abroad using encryption capabilities which are inaccessible to the end user and is not designed for military or intelligence end use." The amendment also expands the term "generally available" as it is used in the bill to include hardware with encryption capabilities. As the bill now is written, only software with encryption capabilities is covered. Also, the en bloc amendment added a "Sense of Congress" section to the end of the bill. In addition to "finding" that the president "has not been able to come to agreement with other encryption producing countries on export controls on encryption," the amendment suggests the president immediately should call an international conference to reach a policy agreement with other encryption exporting countries. Administration officials disapprove of this language because they say they are "close" to reaching an encryption export policy agreement with these countries, one House aide said. But the administration has been making this claim for several years, the aide said. This legislation already has been reported favorably by the House Judiciary Committee, which did not have jurisdiction over the export language. The International Relations subcommittee, however, had jurisdiction over the most controversial parts of the bill: the export provisions. The bill still faces a markup in the full International Relations Committee where there likely will be another technical amendment, the aide said. Meanwhile, the Senate Commerce Committee recently adopted a so-called "compromise" encryption bill that satisfies Clinton administration concerns about the availability of strong encryption technology overseas. But industry officials decry the legislation, sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Robert Kerrey, D-Neb. Senate legislation [S. 377] that more closely resembles Goodlatte's SAFE Act has been put on the back burner because of Clinton administration objections. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., is sponsoring that bill, which also is known as Pro-CODE, or Promotion of Commerce Online in the Digital Era Act of 1997. -30- TYPE*MARKUP BILL*HR695 DATE*6/24/97 ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is public. To join fight-censorship-announce, send "subscribe fight-censorship-announce" to majordomo(a)vorlon.mit.edu. More information is at http://www.eff.org/~declan/fc/

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Underground extract: System X
by proff＠iq.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone read this book? Apparently the first in-depth investigation into the international computer underground to come out of the Southern-Hemisphere - or so I'm told ;) - J.A Extracts from Underground - The true nature of System X Extracted from Chapter 10 - "Anthrax - The Outsider" Note: System X's name has been changed for legal reasons. Sometimes the time just slipped away, hacking all night. When the first hint of dawn snuck up on him, he was invariably in the middle of some exciting journey. But duty was duty, and it had to be done. So Anthrax pressed control S to freeze his screen, unfurled the prayer mat with its built-in compass, faced Mecca, knelt down and did two sets of prayers before sunrise. Ten minutes later he rolled the prayer mat up, slid back into his chair, typed control Q to release the pause on his computer and picked up where he left off. This company's computer system seemed to confirm what he had begun to suspect. System X was the first stage of a project, the rest of which was under development. He found a number of tables and reports in System X's files. The reports carried headers like 'Traffic Analysis', 'calls in' and 'calls out', 'failure rate'. It all began to make sense to Anthrax. System X called up each of the military telephone exchanges in that list. It logged in using the computer-generated name and password. Once inside, a program in System X polled the exchange for important statistics, such as the number of calls coming in and out of the base. This information was then stored on System X. Whenever someone wanted a report on something, for example, the military sites with the most incoming calls over the past 24 hours, he or she would simply ask System X to compile the information. All of this was done automatically. Anthrax had read some email suggesting that changes to an exchange, such as adding new telephone lines on the base, had been handled manually, but this job was soon to be done automatically by System X. It made sense. The maintenance time spent by humans would be cut dramatically. A machine which gathers statistics and services phone exchanges remotely doesn't sound very sexy on the face of it, until you begin to consider what you could do with something like that. You could sell it to a foreign power interested in the level of activity at a certain base at a particular time. And that is just the beginning. You could tap any unencrypted line going in or out of any of the 100 or so exchanges and listen in to sensitive military discussions. Just a few commands makes you a fly on the wall of a general's conversation to the head of a base in the Philippines. Anti-government rebels in that country might pay a pretty penny for getting intelligence on the US forces. All of those options paled next to the most striking power wielded by a hacker who had unlimited access to System X and the 100 or so telephone exchanges. He could take down that US military voice communications system almost overnight, and he could do it automatically. The potential for havoc creation was breathtaking. It would be a small matter for a skilled programmer to alter the automated program used by System X. Instead of using its dozen or more modems to dial all the exchanges overnight and poll them for statistics, System X could be instructed to call them overnight and reprogram the exchanges. --- No-one would be able to reach one another. An important part of the US military machine would be in utter disarray. Now, what if all this happened in the first few days of a war? People trying to contact each other with vital information wouldn't be able to use the telephone exchanges reprogrammed by System X. THAT was power. It wasn't like Anthrax screaming at his father until his voice turned to a whisper, all for nothing. He could make people sit up and take notice with this sort of power. Hacking a system gave him a sense of control. Getting root on a system always gave him an adrenalin rush for just that reason. It meant the system was his, he could do whatever he wanted, he could run whatever processes or programs he desired, he could remove other users he didn't want using his system. He thought, I own the system. The word 'own' anchored the phrase which circled through his thoughts again and again when he successfully hacked a system. The sense of ownership was almost passionate, rippled with streaks of obsession and jealousy. At any given moment, Anthrax had a list of systems he owned and that had captured his interest for that moment. Anthrax hated seeing a system administrator logging onto one of those systems. It was an invasion. It was as though Anthrax had just got this woman he had been after for some time alone in a room with the door closed. Then, just as he was getting to know her, this other guy had barged in, sat down on the couch and started talking to her. It was never enough to look at a system from a distance and know he could hack it if he wanted to. Anthrax had to actually hack the system. He had to own it. He needed to see what was inside the system, to know exactly what it was he owned. The worst thing admins could do was to fiddle with system security. That made Anthrax burn with anger. If Anthrax was on-line, silently observing the adminsÕ activities, he would feel a sudden urge to log them off. He wanted to punish them. Wanted them to know he was into their system. And yet, at the same time, he didnÕt want them to know. Logging them off would draw attention to himself, but the two desires pulled at him from opposite directions. What Anthrax really wanted was for the admins to know he controlled their system, but for them not to be able to do anything about it. He wanted them to be helpless. Anthrax decided to keep undercover. But he contemplated the power of having System X's list of telephone exchange dial-ups and their username - password combinations. Normally, it would take days for a single hacker with his lone modem to have much impact on the US military's communications network. Sure, he could take down a few exchanges before the military wised up and started protecting themselves. It was like hacking a military computer. You could take out a machine here, a system there. But the essence of the power of System X was being able to use its own resources to orchestrate widespread pandemonium quickly and quietly. Anthrax defines power as the potential for real world impact. At that moment of discovery and realisation, the real world impact of hacking System X looked good. The telecommunications company computer seemed like a good place to hang up a sniffer, so he plugged one into the machine and decided to return in a little while. Then he logged out and went to bed. When he revisited the sniffer a day or so later, Anthrax received a rude shock. Scrolling through the sniffer file, he did a double take on one of the entries. Someone had logged into the company's system using his special login patch password. He tried to stay calm. He thought hard. When was the last time he had logged into the system using that special password? Could his sniffer have logged himself on an earlier hacking session? It did happen occasionally. Hackers sometimes gave themselves quite a fright. In the seamless days and nights of hacking dozens of systems, it was easy to forget the last time you logged into a particular system using the special password. The more he thought, the more he was absolutely sure. He hadn't logged into the system again. Which left the obvious question. Who had? ________________________________________________________________________ [This extract may be reposted non-commercially and without charge only] Underground; Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, by Suelette Dreyfus; published by Mandarin (Random House Australia); (P) 475 pages with bib. http://www.underground-book.com/ or http://underground.org/book

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Internet knuckle-dragging from the New York Times
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 22:03:20 -0400 From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> To: fight-censorship-announce(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: FC: Internet knuckle-dragging from the New York Times Wired's Todd Lappin started the flamefest last Friday. A bit uncharacteristic, perhaps, since Todd is generally mild-mannered both online and offline -- but then again, he had a good point and a juicy target. It was the New York Times, which had front-paged a scaremongering above-the-fold article by Christopher Wren: http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/062097drug.html Todd posted on fight-censorship: The article, headlined "Seductive Drug Subculture Flourishes on the Internet," notes that the Net has become "a virtual do-it-yourself guide to drug use, at a time when adolescents' experimenting is on the rise." Our intrepid reporter then goes on to assert that "partly owing to free-speech protection, the Internet lacks a quality control mechanism to separate fact from hyperbole or from outright falsehood." Indeed, it is also because of those nettlesome free-speech protections that the New York Times is able to publish such drivel -- replete with it's schoolmarm fearmongering, silly correlations, and ankle-deep analysis. Then the Boston Globe's technology reporter, Hiawatha Bray, leaped in... -Declan *********** Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 15:44:55 -0400 From: Hiawatha Bray <wathab(a)tiac.net> Awright. The lurking is over. What IS your problem? Can you point to any inaccuracies in Mr. Wren's story? If not, tough luck. I'm tired of listening to so-called "free speech advocates" going ballistic when they don't like what someone has to say. Every time a journalist writes a story about the seamier side of the Net, somebody complains that this will give outsiders the wrong idea. Nonsense. I think what really worries you is that such stories give people the RIGHT idea--that there are sex fiends, dope smokers and would-be Unabombers on-line. Well, there are. And as long as there are, journalists will write about the fact. Don't like it? Too bad. Deal with it. Hiawatha Bray 617-929-3115 voice Technology Reporter 617-929-3183 fax Boston Globe wathab(a)tiac.net P.O. Box 2378 Boston, MA, 02107 http://members.tripod.com/~krothering/index.html ********** Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 15:18:34 -0500 From: Jon Lebkowsky <jonl(a)onr.com> Subject: RE: Internet Knuckle-dragging from the NYTimes At 03:44 PM 6/20/97 -0400, Hiawatha Bray wrote: >Awright. The lurking is over. > >What IS your problem? Can you point to any inaccuracies in Mr. Wren's >story? If not, tough luck. > >I'm tired of listening to so-called "free speech advocates" going ballistic >when they don't like what someone has to say. Every time a journalist >writes a story about the seamier side of the Net, somebody complains that >this will give outsiders the wrong idea. Nonsense. I think what really >worries you is that such stories give people the RIGHT idea--that there are >sex fiends, dope smokers and would-be Unabombers on-line. Well, there >are. And as long as there are, journalists will write about the fact. > Don't like it? Too bad. Deal with it. > You missed the point. We all know that there are sex fiends, dope smokers, and would-be Unabombers in this world, on the net and elsewhere. What we're saying is that they have free speech rights, just like you. This isn't about blowing people up. This isn't about molesting children. This isn't about doing drugs. You don't *do* any of those things online. But you may talk about them. This is about SPEECH. *********** Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 13:28:27 -0800 To: Hiawatha Bray <wathab(a)tiac.net>, <Fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu> From: "--Todd Lappin-->" <telstar(a)wired.com> At 11:44 AM -0800 6/20/97, Hiawatha >What IS your problem? Can you point to any inaccuracies in Mr. Wren's >story? If not, tough luck. > >I'm tired of listening to so-called "free speech advocates" going ballistic >when they don't like what someone has to say. Every time a journalist >writes a story about the seamier side of the Net, somebody complains that >this will give outsiders the wrong idea. Nonsense. I think what really >worries you is that such stories give people the RIGHT idea--that there are >sex fiends, dope smokers and would-be Unabombers on-line. Well, there >are. And as long as there are, journalists will write about the fact. > Don't like it? Too bad. Deal with it. This is complete and utter bullshit. I didn't say Wren's article was inaccurate... I said it is a load of sensationalist crap, laden with half-baked innuendo and unsubstantiated correlations. Don't pull the "so-called 'free speech advocate'" horsepucky with me either. I'm not calling for censorship of the Times... I'm simply saying that their story was garbage. Of course, they have a right to print garbage... but I also think they have an obligation to recount the facts accurately, and in proper context. This article failed to to that. Instead, it implies that Websites use cartoons to tempt the young (as if cartoons are only for the young), and that the availability of drug info online somehow ties in to the fact that "adolescents' [drug] experimenting is on the rise. That's both absurd and factually unsubstantiated. I have no problem discussing the darker side of the Net... I do so regularly and openly. But I'm fed up with the "Internet Did It" genre of newspaper reporting. It's shoddy, and worse, it's dangerous -- because it promotes public hysteria through techno-fearmongering. Deal with it. --Todd--> PS: Jon Lebkowsky's last point was excellent. ************ Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 13:35:46 -0700 (PDT) From: baby-X <baby-x(a)millennium-cafe.com> On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Hiawatha Bray wrote: > I'm tired of listening to so-called "free speech advocates" going ballistic > when they don't like what someone has to say. Every time a journalist > writes a story about the seamier side of the Net, somebody complains that > this will give outsiders the wrong idea. Nonsense. I think what really > worries you is that such stories give people the RIGHT idea--that there are > sex fiends, dope smokers and would-be Unabombers on-line. Well, there > are. And as long as there are, journalists will write about the fact. > Don't like it? Too bad. Deal with it. Either educate yourself about the fact that what these stories portray as some virulent epidemic of "bad" information is never anywhere near as severe as the hysteria said stories try to foster (for example, go spend this weekend reading all of Jon Katz over at the Netizen), or go back to lurking. ************ Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 16:57:49 -0400 From: freematt(a)coil.com (Matthew Gaylor) >Awright. The lurking is over. > >What IS your problem? Can you point to any inaccuracies in Mr. Wren's >story? If not, tough luck. > >I'm tired of listening to so-called "free speech advocates" going ballistic >when they don't like what someone has to say. Every time a journalist >writes a story about the seamier side of the Net, somebody complains that >this will give outsiders the wrong idea. Nonsense. I think what really >worries you is that such stories give people the RIGHT idea--that there are >sex fiends, dope smokers and would-be Unabombers on-line. Well, there >are. And as long as there are, journalists will write about the fact. > Don't like it? Too bad. Deal with it. Rather than write sensationalist stories on rather rare crimes in tabloid fashion- [Not that you are guility of this.] I'd personally rather see journalists mention that in comparison to kids swimming, riding a bike, or even playing a game of summer baseball- The chances of harm to children surfing the net is infinitesimal. Regards, Matt- ******** From: Hiawatha Bray <wathab(a)tiac.net> To: "Fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu" <Fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 17:07:08 -0400 Hmmm...how can I put this? The quality of the responses to my previous message was, well...lame. I don't do flame, so I'm trying to be courteous about this. But folks--you need to grow up. ******** Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 14:05:31 -0700 To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu From: Lizard <lizard(a)dnai.com> At 03:44 PM 6/20/97 -0400, you wrote: >Awright. The lurking is over. > >What IS your problem? Can you point to any inaccuracies in Mr. Wren's >story? If not, tough luck. > If every week, all you saw in the papers were stories of journalists who beat their wives, jounalists who were arrested on drunk driving charges, journalists who falsified facts, and journalists who were late on their child-support payments, would you simply be content to know that all the stories were accurate? Or would you beging to think that maybe, just maybe, there was a slant? What you choose to report on is as important as the accuracy of the report. What makes this story newsworthy? Why the snide reminder that it's that darn ol' Free Speech thing that keeps these sites from being shut down? Why the emphasis on how 'anyone' can post stuff to the net, since there's no business interest to keep them controlled? It's 100% pure propaganda, designed to stir up calls for a law to prevent distributing 'drug information' to minors, what with the pending (we hope -- well, *I* hope -- you probably don't) collapse of the CDA. You know it is, too. why are you defending it? *********** Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 14:15:31 -0700 (PDT) From: baby-X <baby-x(a)millennium-cafe.com> To: "Fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu" <Fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu> Subject: RE: Internet Knuckle-dragging from the NYTimes On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Hiawatha Bray wrote: The following is an example of why we don't hold your opinions to be of very much worth: > At no point does Mr. Wren say that Internet use among the young causes > increased drug abuse. He merely notes that a communications medium very > popular with young people is laden with messages that encourage drug use, Laden? Here is the definition of laden from the Hypertext Webster Gateway: Definition for Laden from database web1913 (web1913) Laden \Lad"en\, p. & a. Loaded; freighted; burdened; as, a laden vessel; a laden heart. Loaded? Freighted? Burdened? It's the use of this sort of hysteria-tinted language that causes so many problems in establishment media ocverage of cyberspace. We know, from use of words like this one, what YOUR bias is in these cases. We're just trying to keep that bias from infecting too much media coverage. baby-X <baby-x(a)millennium-cafe.com> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BitBurn Access - CyberPOLIS - Millennium Cafe - Sluggish Canine ----------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.millennium-cafe.com/~baby-x/ ************* Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 17:19:19 -0400 (EDT) From: Rebecca Daugherty <rebeccad(a)CapAccess.org> To: Hiawatha Bray <wathab(a)tiac.net> I think it's at least philosophically inaccurate to blame the net for the action. It's like killing the messenger, cursing the pen. And it's too sure 'n easy a spin -- bad ole technology has done this too us. um.um.um. There are changes to note -- there are new kinds of technologically proficient pedophiles and they merit some ink so they can be combatted. But the net is the same old net and a benign one with no seamy side at all in my thinking. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rebecca Daugherty <rebeccad(a)capaccess.org> Director, FOI Service Center, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Visit our web site for media law information: http://www.rcfp.org/rcfp/ ************** Subject: Re: Internet Knuckle-dragging from the NYTimes Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 18:07:19 -0400 From: Thomas Grant Edwards <tedwards(a)isr.umd.edu> In fairness, I don't see many stories in the media about guns except in consideration of their use for murder or suicide. Infact, the Net gets off much easier than guns! -Thomas ************** Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 15:54:47 -0700 To: Hiawatha Bray <wathab(a)tiac.net> From: Lizard <lizard(a)dnai.com> Subject: RE: Internet Knuckle-dragging from the NYTimes Cc: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu At 06:22 PM 6/20/97 -0400, Hiawatha Bray wrote: >I gotta admit, I find your reply irresistible! Much too much fun to argue >with. Okay. You win. You get to be Lizard. > >But you're still talking nonsense about the Times story. Just because it >makes you nervous to read nastiness about the Net, doesn't make it wrong >for journalists to write the truth. Besides, have you ever kept count of >how many pro-Net stories there are? If anything, we reporters have been >guilty of shamelessly hyping the Internet. I could probably show you 10 >positive stories about the Internet for every negative one. Trust me--I >end up reading nearly all of them...it's the cross I must bear! > Very few 'pro internet' stories deal with the REAL benefits of the Internet -- the breakup of the media monopoly, the 'everyone is a reader, everyone is a writer' concept, the building of communities of interest rather than coincidence. We all know about children meeting Evil Predators on the net -- why not stories about children meeting mentors, teachers, or counselors? Rather than "My wife left me for her cyberlover!", why not "I met my wife thanks to our shared interest in barbed-wire collecting"? Let's look at that drug story. Why not write it like this? ==================================================== "After decades of getting only one side of the story from teachers, government, and a lapdog media, teenagers are now able to easily access both pro- and anti- drug information on the Internet, and chat with each other about their drug experiences in secure anonymity, permitting them to make up their own minds on this complex issue. Because Internet access is so inexpensive, people do not need the support of advertisers or subscribers to post any information they wish -- so views outside the mainstream, which would never be aired in traditional forums, can reach anyone with a modem, anywhere in the world. Further, the interactive nature of the net makes it easy for people on all sides of a debate to fire off points and counterpoints, so that the audience (who can become participants at will) can make up their own minds, ask questions, and raise issues that neither side might choose to raise on their own. "It's wonderful for kids", says Mr. Fictional, teacher at Utopia Public School. "We don't want them to 'Say No to Drugs' out of fear or ignorance, but out of a reasoned understanding of the harm drugs can do to them -- and that means they need to get the facts, not a lot of scare tactics. The government would never let us teach the 'straight dope', if you will, but we can turn kids on to the net and let them learn for themselves." ==================================================== There. There's all the "facts" -- but a very different spin, no? ************ Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 16:53:29 -0500 From: Jon Lebkowsky <jonl(a)onr.com> Subject: RE: Internet Knuckle-dragging from the NYTimes >Very nice. But so what? Mr. Wren simply reported what's going on. He >never called for censorship of the Internet. Were you reading the same >article I was, or what? Yeah, the article that said "partly owing to free-speech protection, the Internet lacks a quality control mechanism to separate fact from hyperbole or from outright falsehood." While not exactly a call for censorship, this is certainly dismissive of free speech. ************ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is public. To join fight-censorship-announce, send "subscribe fight-censorship-announce" to majordomo(a)vorlon.mit.edu. More information is at http://www.eff.org/~declan/fc/

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Re: Japan & bombing the US (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 18:20:17 -0700 > From: Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> > Subject: Re: Japan & bombing the US > No, this is incorrectly paraphrasing what I wrote. What I said, very > precisely, was "as there has been no credible threat of attack or invasion > of the states in America in at least 170 years." I was careful to say > "states in America." Distinction noted. I suppose the fact that American laws govern these areas, and they pay taxes, and can be drafted into our military, get citizenship at birth, etc. are totaly and completely irrelevant and completely unrelated to issues such as these. Thinking like yours is why McArthur got such support when he promised to return to the Phillipines when even his bosses were ready to write it off. It's why the Japanese have such a high regard for him respecting his tenure as military dictator of Japan during their rebuild. If you haven't read it you might consider reading his biography American Ceaser for its insight into the politics of these two periods. > And I also limited my comments to the events leading up to wars...my > context was clear: that had the U.S. not chosen to enter wars, no states > would have been attacked even later. That the U.S. has entered wars and had > states attacked hardly disputes my point. The US didn't choose to enter the war however, that is the issue not your nit-picking over some irrelevant boundary distinction. One thing is clear to anyone who lived in that period as an adult or studies it carefuly, the distinctions that Tim is claiming to be relevant were not important to the people living at the time. When it came to shooting 'Americans' (not Americans in a state, or not on vacation, etc. noise) it was the shooting of Americans that was at issue and not whether Alaska or Hawaii really would become a state in 1959. It is not reasonable to expect the United States of America could have 'sat out' the war. It was and is clear that American MUST enter the war at some point. The British were down to their last $750M in a S. African bank that went walkaround on an American transport to pay outstanding bills. Because of the economic and social ties between American and Britian any thesis claiming America could (let alone should) have remained neutral is pure meta-history. Consider the unrestricted German submarine warfare occuring as close as 30 miles from the Eastern seaboard. How long would people put up with bodies washing up on their beaches regularly? What would have been the impact of doing business with Europe under the German helm in the US (which couldn't exist at anything close to todays tech/social level without strong economic markets)? The Germans and Russians managed to arrive at a commen goal in the invasion of Poland. Without the drain of the African and Cicilian campaigns (which required the support of the US on a military footing to succeed) it is just possible that Russia could sue for peace with Germany causing at least a temporary breathing spell for the marshalling of forces. It is also clear at this point that Germany had a much larger technology lead over the Russians (research where the tubes for Russian radios came from) and such weapons as the ME-262, V1, V2, etc. Under this light it is clear that given a breathing space Germany allied with Japan (assuming the successful invasion of Australia, with no Britian and no US how long would they last?) would pose a real threat to the US, including the direct assault on the continental US. If we can do it in Europe and Africa what in the world makes you think somebody else can't do it? Without US intervention in the war Italy would own Africa now. Those folks were predators, they didn't back down. The Japanese would have gone for the west coast. The Russians would look at the Alaskan peninsula (bought from Russia in the 1800's) and lick their chops. The South American continent would have been Germanic/Japanese without US intervention. The influx of Germans into Argentina and Japanese to Peru started in the 20's and not the 50's. Germany was building a bomber to hit New York and long range fast transport subs, their intent was clear. Why the United States entered WWII can't be attributed to ANY single simplistic thesis such as this. It is also clear that the Japanese and German decision making processes were not motived this simply either. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________| ps legaly US military bases are US soil in the same class as DC, clearly a part of the United States. An attack upon such is treated legaly as an attack upon one of the 48 states.

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