December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Trans World Specials Fare Sales
by Trans World Specials 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Welcome to Trans World Specials for January 13, 1998. All tickets must be purchased by January 16, 1998. Fares are valid for travel originating 1/17/98 and returning 1/19/98 or 1/20/98. We have some great fares to great cities for you again this week. Call right away and take advantage. Have you read about our new Trans World First service? Read about it at http://www.twa.com On to this week's Trans World Specials. Roundtrip Fare: To/From: $69 St. Louis (STL) / Nashville (BNA) $69 Washington, DC (National) / New York (JFK) * * TWA Flights only. Trans World Express excluded $79 Detroit (DTW) / New York (JFK) nonstop only $99 Chicago (ORD) / New York (JFK) nonstop only $99 St. Louis (STL) / Atlanta (ATL) $99 St. Louis (STL) / Washington, DC (National only) $129 Cedar Rapids (CID) / Atlanta (ATL) $129 Hartford (BDL) / Houston (HOU) $129 Lincoln (LNK) / Atlanta (ATL) $129 Nashville (BNA) / Salt Lake City (SLC) $129 St. Louis (STL) / Colorado Springs (COS) $129 St. Louis (STL) / Hartford (BDL) $129 St. Louis (STL) / Houston (HOU) $129 St. Louis (STL) / New York (LGA) $129 St. Louis (STL) / Norfolk (ORF) $129 St. Louis (STL) / Toronto (YYZ) ** $129 Colorado Springs (COS) / Toronto (YYZ) ** $129 San Antonio (SAT) / Toronto (YYZ) ** $159 Boston (BOS) / Colorado Springs (COS) $159 Hartford (BDL) / Colorado Springs (COS) $159 Nashville (BNA) / Ontario, CA (ONT) $159 Nashville (BNA) / Portland, OR (PDX) $159 Nashville (BNA) / San Jose, CA (SJC) $159 New York (LGA) / Colorado Springs (COS) $159 Norfolk (ORF) / Colorado Springs (COS) $159 St. Louis (STL) / Ontario, CA (ONT) $159 St. Louis (STL) / Portland, OR (PDX) $159 Washington, DC (National) / Colorado Springs (COS) $179 Boston (BOS) / Ontario, CA (ONT) $179 Hartford (BDL) / Ontario, CA (ONT) $179 Los Angeles (LAX) / New York (JFK) nonstop only $179 New York (JFK) / Las Vegas (LAS) nonstop only $179 Norfolk (ORF) / Ontario, CA (ONT) $179 Ontario, CA (ONT) / New York (LGA) $179 Ontario, CA (ONT) / Washington, DC (DCA) $179 Ontario, CA (ONT) / Toronto (YYZ) ** ** Fares are valid for U.S. origins only. Fares for Canadian origins may differ. All travel is valid on TWA only. Call TWA at 1-800-221-2000 and book your Trans World Special now. ******************************GETAWAY VACATIONS************************* Puerto Vallarta -- Sheraton Buganvilias includes: - roundtrip airfare - 2 nights hotel accommodations at the deluxe Sheraton Buganvilias Resort - airport transfers - 2000 bonus FFB miles in addition to actual mileage earned - only $399 from St. Louis - $459 from Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Little Rock, Moline, Nashville, and Omaha. - $519 from Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Milwaukee and Minneapolis London Theatre Week includes: - roundtrip airfare - Continental buffet breakfast - half-day sightseeing tour - tickets for 2 plays or musicals - choice of first-class or superior first-class hotel - bonus 5000 FFB miles in addition to actual mileage earned - valid for 2/6/98 or 2/27/98 departures - only $1099 from Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis and St. Louis - $1179 from Austin, Columbus, Dayton, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Oklahoma City San Antonio, and Tulsa For reservations call 1-800-GETAWAY (438-2929) today ! *********************************ALAMO********************************** Alamo offers these low rates for an economy car valid 1/17/98 - 1/19/98 $16.99 Houston, San Antonio $17.99 Chicago, Detroit, Nashville, St. Louis, Toronto $18.99 Colorado Springs, Las Vegas, Portland (OR) $20.99 Atlanta, Hartford, Norfolk, Washington-DC, $21.99 Los Angeles For reservations call Alamo at 1-800-GO-ALAMO and request rate code RT and ID # 443833. For online reservations access http://www.goalamo.com ********************************Hilton Hotels & Resorts***************** Hilton Hotels/Resorts offers these low rates valid the nights of 1/17/98-1/19/98 $55 Washington National Airport Hilton, Arlington, VA (free airport shuttle, only 5 minutes from the sites of DC) $65 Galveston Island Hilton Resort, TX ( located directly on the beach; hotel offers tennis and outdoor pool) $69 Los Angeles Airport Hilton & Towers (free airport shuttle, fitness center, outdoor pool and 12 restaurants) $79 Colonial Hilton & Resort, MA ( located 12 miles north of downtown Boston) $87 Detroit Metro Airport Hilton Suites ( suite accommodations, full american breakfast and beverage reception) $88 O'Hare Hilton, Chicago ( connected to O'Hare via walkway, 18 miles from downtown) $99 The Capitol Hilton, Washington-DC ( in the heart of DC, 2 blocks from the White House) $131 Alanta Hilton & Towers ( pool, fitness center, tennis courts and easy access to area attractions) For reservations call Hilton at 1-800-774-1500 and ask for Hilton Value Rates. Visit Hilton at http://www.hilton.com ***********************************TERMS & CONDITIONS******************* Airfare Terms and Conditions: GENERAL CONDITIONS: Fares shown are round trip, nonrefundable and are subject to change. Changes to itinerary are not permitted. Fares do not include Passenger Facility Charges of up to $12 depending on itinerary. Must use E-Ticketing and credit card is the only form of payment accepted. Offer is not available in conjunction with any other discount, coupon or promotional offer. Seats are limited and may not be available on all flights or days of the week. Tickets must be purchased at time of booking and no later than 1/16/98. Standby passengers not allowed. Valid for outbound travel on Saturday (1/17) and return Monday (1/19) or Tuesday (1/20). Travel is effective 1/17/98 with all travel to be completed by 1/20/98. Minimum stay is 2 days. Maximum stay is 3 days. Travel to/from Canada a $6 US departure tax is additional. Getaway Conditions: ALL PACKAGES: All packages include round-trip economy airfare. Price is per person based on double occupancy and is subject to change. Availability, restrictions, surcharges, blackouts and cancellation penalties apply. No other discounts or promotions are valid in conjunction with these packages. DOMESTIC CONDITIONS: Depart for Puerto Vallarta Tuesday or Sunday and return Thursday or Tuesday. Travel valid for departures 2/3, 2/8 or 2/10 and return 2/5, 2/10, or 2/12 LIMITED AVAILABLITY. Price does not include Passenger Facility Charges, US departure, agricultural, customs & immigration tax of up to $54 per person. Full payment due by 1/19/98. INTERNATIONAL CONDITIONS: Seats are limited and may not be available on all flights. Price does not include Passenger Facility Charges, US departure/arrival, agriculture and security fees from point of origin of travel up to approximately $85 per person. Price includes standard room - superior rooms have an additional charge. Full payment is required by 1/16/98. Car Rental Conditions: Taxes (including in California, VLF taxes ranging up to $1.89 per day), registrations fee/tax reimbursement, and airport access fees/taxes, if any, are extra. Optional CDW, liability insurance, fuel, additional driver fee, drop charges and other optional items are extra. Rates higher for renters under age 25. Rates valid for rentals commencing on Saturday and ending by 11:59 PM on Tuesday. Rates only valid during week in which they are published via TWA Internet site. A 24-hour advance reservation is required. Availability is limited. Hotel Conditions: Hilton Hotels and Resorts special rates are available only during the specific week in which they are published via the TWA Hot Deals Internet site and the HiltonNet Internet site. Limited availability; rooms at these Hilton Value Rates are sold on a first-come, first-served basis. Availability, rate, and terms of occupancy are not guaranteed and will be confirmed at time of reservation. Participating hotels, rates and terms are subject to change without notice. Single or double occupancy. Early check-in, late check-out subject to availability. No extra charge for children when they stay in parents' or grandparents' room; total room occupancy subject to local fire safety regulations and other applicable laws or regulations. Rates vary by season, do not include any other fees or charges, including without limitation state or local taxes or gratuities and are subject to change without notice. Advance booking required. Advance deposit may be required. Offer cannot be combined with any other special discounts, coupons, certificates, special rates, promotional offers, award stays, or meeting/group stays. Hilton reserves the right to cancel any Hilton Value Rate at any time without notice. Hilton is not responsible for the terms of other offers in the program, or for any electronic, computer, telephone, security, virus or any other problem or damage related to use of the program or its offers. For reservations call 1-800-221-2000 (domestic) or 1-800-892-4141 (international) or call your travel agent and ask for TWA's special Internet fares.

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autonomous agents
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A canonical way to do implement things like remailers, eternity servers etc. is to build a distributed computation system to allow autonomous agents to be distributed across the internet. Create a market for CPU resources, bandwidth and disk-space so that the agent can pay it's way. Charge per CPU/hour, Mbit comms at given data rates and Mbyte/year storage, base it on Java as a portable network based language with code distribution support. Then let people fire off what ever they like, so long as they are paying. In this environment an eternity variant, or remailers, or anything else becomes a collection of autonomous agents which must fund their own distribution. The autonomous agents could send back profits to their creators, or use the profits to self propagate. Someone who thought up a good application, and got the economics right for their bot's buy and sell algorithms might become rich, even. I had considered that a generic perl execution system charging for resources would be useful for remailers a few years back. Java seems pretty good for this purpose also, being another portable network aware language. >From what Ryan has said his design uses markets for resources also. The question is though would you let a bot of this sort loose on your system? For agents to be able to achieve anything useful, the Java sandbox model has to be relaxed to allow the agent to make network connections to other than the machine the code was served from. Java has support for this in that signed applications are allowed to make external network connections. The problem is the flexibility would allow an autonomous agent to pay it's way in say breaking into a series of machines, and sending back obtained documents via remailer to the operator. A well funded attacker could cause lots of problems for operators. However the system as a whole is nice for our `creating lawful excuses' drive, because there are many applications which could make good use of the distributed computation system: filmatic quality image rendering computations, scientific computations, code breaking efforts, distributed web server applications. The liability questions are interesting also. If the participant in the CPU resource market is not expected to be able to vet all source code he runs, this gives the would be eternity operator a chance to distribute his risk. If the system becomes widely used, this helps protect it from attack. Adam

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Re: Congratulations!
by nobody＠nsm.htp.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>To: Anonymous <anon(a)anon.efga.org> >cc: cypherpunks(a)toad.com, abuse(a)MCI.Com, >hostmaster(a)cyber-dyne.com Ha, ha, ha! who CC'd the "Congratulations" thread to those addresses?? <LOL> (would they know how to smurf d00d?) This list gets fucking better!

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[ADMINISTRATIVIUM] Firewalls
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timmy C. Mayonnaise's reheated, refurbished, and regurgitated cud is completely inappropriate for the mailing lists into which it is cross-ruminated. ,,, -ooO(o o)Ooo- Timmy C. Mayonnaise (_)

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metrics of eternity service properties
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: > >> This of course doesn't scale at all well. It is semi-OK for a tiny, > >> sparse set of reposted items, but fails utterly for larger database > >> sets. (If and when Adam's reposted volumes begin to get significant, > >> he will be viewed as > >> a spammer. :-) ) > > > >The best criticism of my eternity design to date! I agree. > > I assume you are serious, and do agree, as it is a very solid > criticism of the "Eternity as continuous posting to Usenet" model. Yes. I think my eternity service in USENET is actually fairly resistant to attackers determining readers and publishers. The limiting factor is the bandwidth consumed. We have to keep below some threshold otherwise news admins may attempt to filter out eternity articles; and there is some limit at which the system would break down altogether. One suspects posting more than around 10Mb-20Mb / day would be enough to motivate administrators to start filtering. Some people with questionable motivation also have made something of a sport of sending forged cancel messages, and these people will be more easily motivated, as as far as I can tell their motivation is a perverse enjoyment of censorship, and sense of self importance, and of malice in perpetrating DoS attacks. > I see several axes to the analysis of the various Eternity schemes. > > -- retrieval time for a customer or client to obtain some set of data, > ranging from (I assume) ~minutes or less in an Eternity DDS file system to > ~days or less in a Blacknet system to (I am guessing) ~weeks or months in > an Adam Back sort of system. Actually I was aiming for seconds access time with "Eternity USENET". (I am going to dub it "Eternity USENET" -- just any name -- because the lack of names to denote the services under discussion is becoming awkward.) However the reason I am able to claim seconds is because I aim to keep the data either in the newspool, or in a local copy of recent messages. The design is similar to TELETEXT, the text mode information services hosted as side bands on TV signals. The basic topology is the same: we have a broadcast medium, data is slowly re-broadcast. So my design is fairly analogous to a FAST-TEXT system, which keeps a copy of all the pages, and updates them as the TEXT signal sweeps past. So metrics we could use to describe the functionality of an eternity design should include "update time", and "access time". I'll try a quick table of this to illustrate my understanding of Eternity BlackNet (BlackNet used to host an Eternity like service), and Eternity DDS as compared to Eternity USENET. E-BlackNet E-USENET E-DDS update delay 2-3 days 2-3 days minutes access time 2-3 days seconds minutes b/width efficiency good/ poor intermediate intermediate nodes 10 10,000 10,000 capacity 100 Gb 100 Mb 10 Tb security good good intermediate security dependencies remailers, remailers, custom USENET USENET componenets ease of deployment easy easy hard Clearly these figures are order of magnitude only, if even that accurate. My reasoning is as follows: Eternity BlackNet: I am presuming we have third party BlackNet operators who offer to buy and sell information, acting as distribution agents. It takes around a day to send requests or submissions to the operator via a dead drop (encrypted material posted to USENET via remailer). If requested information is sent to clients via replyable nyms bandwidth efficiency is improved. If information is sent to clients via dead drops efficiency drops because the information is broadcast for each request. Clearly a user could, if he wished to improve his access time for browsing BlackNet eternity documents, replicate the entire BlackNet database locally. (Or perhaps subsets defined as all documents by a chosen set of authors, or all documents with given keywords, or with a given third party rating etc). E-USENET: This involves re-posting documents periodically to USENET, and relying on the small data set size to ensure that local eternity proxies can retain a current copy of the dataset. Variants on this approach can migrate towards E-DDS approach by using publically accessible E-USENET servers, and by E-USENET server caches sharing their then larger document store. Also by adding other submission mechanisms to the pool formed by the set of publically accessible E-USENET services. E-DDS: Economic incentives are used to encourage people to take risks in hosting controversial documents. Indirection is used to have a hidden set of data servers, which are only accessed via publically known gateways. (I would recommend looking at Ian Goldberg and David Wagner's TAZ server, the url for which I posted in an earlier post, for this indirection function). I am unsure how an attacker would be prevented from discovering the hidden set of data servers. How do we exclude the attacker from becoming a gateway server? I get the impression that the idea also is make the service a commercial success as a distributed web hosting system, and to get away with comparitively small amounts of controversial materials which migrate. This idea is a useful model I think. Comments? Clarifications, Ryan? Adam

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Micromoney CryptoMango?
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 08:52:16 -0500 From: rah-web <rah(a)shipwright.com> Reply-To: rah(a)shipwright.com MIME-Version: 1.0 To: rah-web <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: Micromoney CryptoMango? http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/metcalfe.htm [Image] [StorageTek Click Here.] [| Navigational map -- for text only please go to the bottom of the page |] [|Opinions|] [From the Ether] January 12, 1998 Mango `pooling' is the biggest idea we've seen since network computers Mango, in Westborough, Mass., is not your average software start-up. In 30 months the company has raised $30 million. Its first product, Medley97, has shipped, transparently "pooling" workgroup storage. And someone at http://www.mango.com really knows the difference between features and benefits. But it's not the benefits of Medley97 pooling that interest me. What's interesting are the features and long-term potential of Mango's underlying distributed virtual memory (DVM). Mango's pooling DVM is the biggest software idea since network computers -- perhaps since client/server -- and Microsoft had better watch out. According to Mango, Medley97 offers transparent networking that's easy to use, fast, and reliable (not to mention secure and high fiber). Windows users working together on a LAN can share files in a pool of their combined disk storage. Every pooled PC is both a client and server. Go ahead and drop Medley97 into any PC you want to pool. Medley97 installs, checks configuration, and updates required Windows networking software. The product adds the PC's storage to the pool, giving you a shared, fast, and reliable network drive, M:/, which is available on all pooled PCs. For this you pay Mango less than $125 each for up to 25 PCs. Mango CEO Steve Frank was technology chief at Kendall Square Research (KSR), the ill-fated parallel processing company near MIT that was not Thinking Machines. Frank says KSR taught him how dishonesty doesn't work but parallelism does. Unlike KSR's, Mango's parallelism just has to be on volume platforms, such as Ethernet, TCP/IP, and Windows. Hence Mango. Underlying Medley97 are DVM processes cooperating through a TCP/IP Ethernet on pooled Windows PCs. The processes manage a 128-bit object space that copies virtual 4KB pages up, down, and around a distributed memory hierarchy. Medley97 offers ease of use by hiding continuously, automatically, and adaptively behind your familiar Windows user interface -- just below the file system APIs and above physical disk pages. Medley97 offers performance by moving files through the Ethernet from disk to disk and from disk to memory, closer to where the pages are used most. And Medley97 offers reliability by keeping synchronized backup copies of file pages on different pooled PCs. Mango's DVM generalizes backup and caching. Pages are copied for nonstop operation. Copies are moved closer to where they are used. Frank says it is often faster to access a page through Ethernet from a pooled PC's semiconductor memory than to access it from a local disk. Transaction logs are kept on all pooled PCs. The DVM detects when a PC drops out of a pool and copies any page that thereby lacks sufficient backups. When a PC rejoins a pool, transaction logs ensure it accesses updated pages. The garbage collection of deleted pages runs in the background. Noticing that Medley97 is available for up to 25 PCs, I asked the perennial parallelism question, "Does it scale?" Frank's answer: Yes. Medley97 is limited to 25 PCs only because that's all Mango has so far found time to test. With each PC adding resources, pool performance is "superlinear" as far as the eye can see. Well, this makes pooling the next in a long list of major computing paradigms: batch mainframes, interactive minicomputers, stand-alone PCs, PC LANs, client/server, peer-to-peer, thin-client, server clustering, and now peer clustering or pooling. According to Frank, Medley next needs to go from Ethernet to Internet. To support many pools. To add change control and archiving. Medley also needs to go beyond Windows. To pool processing as well as storage. So Medley, now written in C++, needs what else? Java. You can log into a Medley pool from anywhere and have your workgroup files available on the M:/ drive. With Java you could pool non-Wintel network computers. Well, if pooling scales, the whole World Wide Web should be one big pool. Mango's DVM generalizes the caching now done ad hoc all over the Web -- on server disks, in clusters, in caching farms, in proxy servers, in browsers, and in the file systems of PCs. Add Java network computers and before Frank knows it, Mango will be ripe for purchase if not integration by Microsoft. ------------------------------ [Image] Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com in 1979, and today he specializes in the Internet. Send e-mail to Metcalfe(a)infoworld.com. Missed a column? Go back for more. [Image] ------------------------------ Copyright © 1998 InfoWorld Media Group Inc. | SiteMap |Search | PageOne | Conferences | Reader/Ad Services | | Enterprise Careers | Opinions | Test Center | Features | | Forums | Interviews | InfoWorld Print | InfoQuote | [Lion's Den] [InfoWorld Electric Features] [Intel Manageability] --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

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StockAlert News: UNFC expects increase of $50M in assets
by kouqi32＠mci.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

<HTML><PRE><BODY BGCOLOR="#000000"> <HTML><PRE><BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff"> REMINGTON-HALL CAPITALIZES ON RESURGENT REAL ESTATE MARKET Company expects to acquire $50 million in assets by mid-1998 DALLAS -- UNFC ), a diversified real estate investment firm formerly known as Universal Fuels Company, is quietly acquiring over $50 million in previously undervalued, undercapitalized or mismanaged commercial properties and making this new major player one of the best moderate-risk real estate investments in 1998. Founded in 1975 as Universal Fuels, the company provided uranium to the world as an alternative fuel, but as uranium became less used as a nuclear fuel source than other more economical and useful materials, Universal Fuels' stock declined almost to extinction over several years. Less than a year ago the stock price was less than 1¢. Four months ago officials from Camden-Townwest, a privately held real estate investment firm, approached Universal Fuels former management about converting Universal Fuels into a publicly traded real estate conglomerate. Camden-Townwest, founded in 1994, grew from $19,000 in cash to $3 million in assets in three years without seeking any outside capital. Since the change in management and corporate mission last October, <A HREF="http://quote.yahoo.com/q?s=UNFC&d=t">U NFC</A> has seen its stock value increase by over 800%. Remington-Hall is now making its move to increase assets at a tremendous rate. By mid-year management expects to acquire in excess of $50 Million in office buildings and multi-family properties at a significant discount to their market value. "We have been referred to as 'Cat Burglars of Real Estate'," said Douglas Fonteno, president & chief executive officer. "And that's a title we hope to keep." Larry Hood ,formerly Chief Operating Officer of Pizza Inn and Chief Financial Officer of Reliance Mortgage Company, is Remington-Hall's Chief Financial Offi cer, giving the new company immediate and substantial financial integrity. Wade Hyde, previously public relations and investor relations executive for Blockbuster Video and FoxMeyer Corporation, is Vice President of Marketing & Public Relations. Currently Remington-Hall is seeking to be listed on the Pacific Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq National Market. The company anticipates announcing over $10 million in newly acquired assets by the end of January. Name: Remington-Hall Capital Corporation ( formerly Universal Fuels) Symbol: Nasdaq: UNFC Mission: To aggressively acquire steeply undervalued real estate properties due to previous mismanagement or undercapitalization. Management: Senior executives with diverse experiences, including: Fortune 500 corporations, leading stock brokerage firms, real estate companies and national marketing. Goals: To increase assets to $10M by January 98 and $50M by mid-year Address: 1401 Elm St., Ste. 1818, Dallas, TX 75202-2925 Phone: (214) 749-4600 FAX: (214) 749-4608 Internet: www.remington-hall.com E-Mail: InvestorRelations@remington-hall ll.com Quote Yahoo! Remington-Hall <A HREF="www.remington-hall.com"> </A> </PRE></HTML> <FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZ

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Census Director quits [CNN]
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID > Associated Press Writer > > WASHINGTON (AP) -- Census Director Martha Farnsworth Riche, who > battled Republican lawmakers over counting methods for 2000, is > quitting. > > Riche said Monday she would leave office Jan. 30. > > She has been involved in a lengthy dispute with members of Congress > over Census 2000, largely over how to count the many people who might > be missed by regular methods. > > The fight focused on a practice called sampling, in which the bureau > would determine the number and characteristics of people it cannot > reach based on the people it can. > > Though the practice was endorsed by the National Science Foundation > and statistical groups, Republicans in Congress have opposed it, > concerned that the result would be more people counted in largely > Democratic large cities. > > The results will be used to redistribute House seats to the states. [text deleted] ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ 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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19 European countries ban human cloning [CNN]
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > 19 EUROPEAN NATIONS SIGN BAN ON HUMAN CLONING > > Britain, Germany not among signatories > > January 12, 1998 > Web posted at: 8:00 p.m. EST (0100 GMT) > > PARIS (CNN) -- Nineteen European nations on Monday signed an > agreement to prohibit the cloning of humans. > > Representatives from 19 members of the Council of Europe signed a > protocol that would commit their countries to ban by law "any > intervention seeking to create human beings genetically identical to > another human being, whether living or dead." It rules out any > exception to the ban, even in the case of a completely sterile > couple. > > "At a time when occasional voices are being raised to assert the > acceptability of human cloning and even to put it more rapidly into > practice, it is important for Europe solemnly to declare its > determination to defend human dignity against the abuse of > scientific techniques," Council Secretary-General Daniel Tarchys > said. > > The text, which is to become a part of the European Convention on > Human Rights and Biomedicine, would permit cloning of cells for > research purposes.CNN's Margaret Lowrie reports > icon 2 min. 3 sec VXtreme video > > The accord will become binding on the signatories as soon as it has > been ratified in five states. > > Countries signing are: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, > Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Moldova, Norway, Portugal, > Romania, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Macedonia and Turkey. [text deleted] ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ 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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(eternity) autonomous agents
by Ross Anderson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam Back: > If the participant in the CPU resource market is not expected to be > able to vet all source code he runs, this gives the would be eternity > operator a chance to distribute his risk. It's even better than this - your PC becomes a common carrier and you are no longer liable :-) If this doesn't happen, then the advocates of Java need a whole new security infrastructure to assure users that the applets they download aren't defamatory, pornographic, seditious or in breach of copyright! Tim May: > Another science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, popularized "data havens" At one time, Malta was thinking seriously about becoming just such a data haven, and I expect one will appear sooner or later. After all, what's left of the British Empire is funded by money laundering and tax evasion - pardon me, Sir Humphrey, `offshore financial services'. Once the online world becomes a significant part of the global economy, small countries that wish to achieve the high living standards of Bermuda, Gibraltar and Jersey will be able to get there by cashing in on `offshore data services'. Countries like Tonga already sell domain names, but a full offshore data service would need some way of resisting pressure from the EU and the US government. Most of the tax havens do this by being under a colonial umbrella. Is there an alternative? Can we create virtual colonies in cyberspace? Can we set up a gateway to Eternity in some country like Liberia or Somalia, which is too dangerous even for the US Marines? Or do we have to cut a deal with Sir Humphrey? Hiding stuff inside usenet is actually a bit like hiding behind the skirts of Empire, isn't it? The same goes for hiding stuff on open access web sites, or in spam. Given the rate at which spam is growing these days, maybe that's where to put it. If the only way for Authority to cut mortals off from Eternity was to pass effective laws against spam, and the only way to stop spam was to have a global non-escrowed public key infrastructure so that all mortals could be strongly authenticated, then ... Ross

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