December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

unit1.html
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Unit 1: The Scope and Method of Economics [INLINE] UNDER CONSTRUCTION Read "Case and Fair": Chapter 1 - pages 1-20. _________________________________________________________________ A. Definition of Economics Economics is the study of how individuals and societies choose to use the scarce resources that nature and previous generations have provided. The key word in this definition is "choose". Economics is a behavioral science. In large measure it is the study of how people make choices. _________________________________________________________________ B. Why study economics? 1. To learn a way of thinking: This summer we are going to learn to think like economists - to use tools that will help us analyze complex situations in the real world of economics. 2. To understand society: Past and present economic decisions have an influence on the character of life in a society. 3. To understand global affairs: Understanding international relations begins with knowledge of the economic links among countries. 4. To be an informed voter: When you participate in the political process, you are voting on issues that require a basic understanding of economics. _________________________________________________________________ C. The difference between micro and macro economics Microeconomics deals with the functioning of individual industries and the behavior of individual economic decision-making units - business firms and households. It explores the decisions that individual businesses and consumers make - firms' choices about what to produce and how much to charge, and households' choices about what and how much to buy. Macro economics looks at the economy as a whole. Instead of trying to understand what determines the output of a single firm or industry, or the consumption patterns of a single household or group of house holds, it examines the factors that determine national output and income. While micro economics focuses on individual product prices, macro economics looks at the overall price level and its behavior over time. Micro economics questions how many people will be hired or laid off in a particular industry and the factors that determine how much labor a firm or industry will hire. Macro economics deals with aggregate employment and unemployment: how many jobs exist in the economy as a whole, and how many people are willing to work but unable to find jobs.. We are going to be using this word "aggregate" a lot. It refers to the behavior of firms and households taken together. For example, aggregate consumption refers to the consumption of all the households in the economy; aggregate investment refers to the total investment made by all firms in the economy. There are some topics which micro and macro economics share. For example, the study of how government policy affects the economy. However, again micro economics looks at these effects on the level of the individual firm or household, macro economics considers the effects of policy on the economy as a whole.. The micro economic foundations of macro economics. There is also another important relationship between the two branches of economics and this is what is called the micro economic foundations of macro economics. This is a fairly new development and one which is trying to reconcile the assumptions and principles of micro economic analysis with efforts to understand the economy as a whole. For example, in efforts to understand inflation, macro economists are now trying to include micro economic ideas about the way that prices adjust to changes in supply and demand.. _________________________________________________________________ D. The relationship between economics and social philosophy. One of the first economists was an Englishman by the name of Adam Smith. (Some would say he was the first economist.) Born in the early part of the 18th century, Smith developed the idea of the "invisible hand" and was the first to describe the relationship between supply and demand in a free market economy. He described himself as a "social philosopher". Social philosophy is concerned with fairness. It deals with questions such as: Why are some people rich and others poor? Is it fair that 90% of the country's wealth is controlled by 5% of the population? Is the progressive income tax, which taxes a higher proportion of the income of the wealthy, fair? These questions are still relevant and are the subject of economic policy. _________________________________________________________________ E. Economic Policy A policy is a plan that guides action. An example of an economic policy would be the Federal government's plan to keep the economy working at full employment. Anyone can recommend macro economic policies but it is up to governments to implement them. In general we judge the outcomes of any policy according to four criteria: 1. Efficiency: In economics we say that a policy is efficient if it leads to outcomes that help the economy produce what people want at the least possible cost. 2. Equity or fairness: This is obviously hard to define because fairness like beauty depends on who's looking, but in general terms we could say that an economic policy is fair if it leads to outcomes in which the costs and benefits are shared in a way that is proportional to a person's participation. 3. Growth: At the present time economic policies are also judged according to whether or not they lead to increases in output. I say "at present" because some economists are beginning to question the assumption that economic growth is always a good thing. 4. Stability: In economics stability is defined as the condition of the economy in which output is growing at a steady rate, with low inflation and full employment. Currently, the Federal Reserve is defining stability as a growth rate of about 3%, with inflation between 2% and 3% and unemployment between 5% and 6%. _________________________________________________________________ F. What economists do. In addition to making policy recommendations, economists spend a lot of time formulating theories and developing models. These two words have more or less the same meaning in economics that they do in other academic disciplines. A theory is a coherent set of hypotheses which make statements about the way the world works. To illustrate this idea of theory, the text refers to what is known as "the law of demand". This so-called law is really just a well-tested hypothesis which states that when prices fall, people tend to buy more, and vice versa. A theory is said to be "good" if its hypotheses turn out to valid statements about the real world and if it has predictive power. I should say at this point that very few economic theories, particularly in macro economics, have predictive power. A model is just a formal statement of the theory, usually a mathematical statement. Several institutions have built huge models of the US economy and how it works that have hundreds of equations linked together. These big models usually run on computers. When we visit the Federal Reserve in San Francisco we will see one of these models in action. We will also be working with a number of smaller models and a large number of pictures of models. The text points out two common errors that are made when people develop theories or build models. These are: 1. The post hoc fallacy: This mistake is made when someone mistakes an association between two variables for a cause and effect relationship. My favorite example of this is taken from a study done in Holland at the end of WWII which showed a positive relationship between the number of storks inhabiting a certain city and the number of babies born. 2. The fallacy of composition: This has to do with the belief that what is true for the part is also true for the whole. There are many examples of this kind of thinking in economics. For example, we have seen over a very long period of time the benefits of free markets - the efficiencies in individual markets that are created whenever people are free to pursue their own self-interest. However, it might be a mistake to assume that pursuit of one's own self interest was the best thing for society as a whole. You cannot prove a theory. It is important to note that neither theories nor models can ever be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. The best we can say of a theory is that it is consistent with the facts as currently observed and that it is seems to have predictive power. Another fact about theories is that they are always based on certain assumptions which have to be accepted for the theory to work. For example, in economic theory two of the most important assumptions are (1) that people make rational choices based on analyzing costs and benefits and (2) that people try to maximize utility. Another important assumption that is rarely discussed is that the world of economics can be understood by understanding the behavior of discrete variables. All of these assumptions are now under attack. _________________________________________________________________ G. Other Important Concepts Introduced in Chapter 1 1. Opportunity Cost: This can be understood as the cost of lost opportunities. An example would be the opportunity cost of coming to Skyline this summer. This cost is measured by the wages I could have been earning if I had decided to work instead. The reason that opportunity costs exist is because resources are scarce; it is an especially important concept in economics where we are often trying to measure the costs and benefits of different economic choices, policies, etc. 2. Marginal: This refers to the "last unit" and is also an important factor in making economic choices. For example, suppose the publisher of our textbook is trying to calculate the costs of producing more books. In making this calculation, Prentice Hall would only consider the marginal or additional costs of just these new books. The money they have already spent would be irrelevant. These are the sunk costs and even though they would be included in a calculation of average costs, they wouldn't influence the decision to produce additional books. 3. Markets - free and regulated, efficient and inefficient: Markets can be free or regulated, efficient or inefficient. Most markets in the real economy represent some combination of these qualities. A market is said to be free if buyers and sellers are free to come together and make deals without government interference. A regulated market is one where the government sets at least some of the rules. For example, the stock market is relatively free - people can buy and sell shares of stock without much interference from the government. However, the Securities and Exchange Commission establishes many rules in this market, particularly for companies who wish to sell their stock. An efficient market is one in which there is a very rapid circulation of information and in which profit opportunities are grabbed up almost as soon as they appear. Inefficiencies arise wherever the flow of information is restricted and where people are not free to take advantage of profit opportunities. 4. Ceteris Paribus: This is a Latin phrase which mean "all else equal" and refers to the difficulty of analyzing more than two variables at a time. It is trotted out by economists when they want to emphasize the fact that they are looking at a single relationship, holding everything else constant. For example, "The amount of a good or service that people want is inversely related to the price, ceteris paribus." The things that are held constant in this example are the tastes and preferences of consumers, the availability of substitutes etc. [LINK] Return to Econ 100 Home page [LINK] Problem Set for Unit 1

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Re: Freedom Forum report on the State of the First Amendment (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 16:40:11 -0400 > From: The Sheriff <sheriff(a)speakeasy.org> > Subject: Re: Freedom Forum report on the State of the First Amendment > Sam Adams (as it may or may not have been mentioned on this list) > himself had a problem with our constitution -- he didn't think that > it was right for the people to ratify the bill of rights, thereby > protecting certain rights under the constitution. Why? Simple. > > He was of the mind that setting our rights, such as the right to > free speech, in concrete meant that anything NOT set in concrete > wasn't a right -- he felt that by ratifying the bill of rights, > rather than using logic as I did above, we were actually LIMITING > our rights as freely roaming human beings. Which is the reason they put the 9th and 10th in there. > America should be about not taking any shit from anybody -- not > because you can sue, but because you have enough attitude to realize > when the other guy's being an idiot, and because you have enough > balls to tell him so. Actualy it should be because people realize you don't owe that other person an explanation for your actions and you further don't need their permission. Of course this assumes you *aren't* using anything that belongs to them. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | 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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Re: Adding SSL to things
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:11 AM 1/11/98 -0500, Ryan Lackey wrote: >Does anyone know of a way I can take a web server, say AOLserver, which >does not support useful SSL, and also does not distribute source, and >retrofit a useful 128-bit SSL implementation to it? It has a C API, but >I haven't looked at the API enough to see if I could do it within the API. >Are there any proxies which could be stuck between the insecure server >and the user (preferably with an ssh link between the servers) which could >provide SSL proxy service? It seems like this should be trivial to do, >but I haven't tried yet, and I want to have some reedeming value for this >post.] Why not just get a server that _does_ have useful SSL support, like Apache-SSL (for non-US freeware) or Stronghold (for US commercial use)? There are workarounds out there for undersecure clients, like SafePassage and some German Java applet, but that's the easy side. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart(a)pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

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Re: Spam
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Matthew L Bennett <lord_buttmonkey(a)juno.com> wrote: >>I'm hoping you guys would know where I could find out >>more about this individual -- I'm hoping that he does >>in fact buy his service from someone else, and if so, >>I'm not sure how to find that out. If he doesn't, is >>there anything I can do? > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >Yeah, there is. > >Delete the friggin e-mail like a sensible person. > >I get a lot of spam every day, but I just delete it and go on with my >life. Since even many of the major sites these days seem to be run by a bunch of idiots who don't care that they destroy the network so long as they make a buck. 1) Trash mail from throwaway account providers like Juno (which I notice you're using), Hotmail, AOL, Prodigy, MSN, and anybody who offers something like a "fifty hours free spamming" policy. 2) Trash mail from chronic problem sites like AGIS, Earthlink, Worldnet, and their ilk. 3) If you get a flame for a civilized spam complaint (zippo.com did this to me) trash the mail from the site on the grounds that they're idiots. 4) If you get an incredibly stupid set of responses like I got from IBM today kill mail from them on the grounds that they have no idea what they're doing. 5) If it comes in with an obviously forged address then trash it. This has the possibly beneficial side effect of killing mail from "legitimate" users who purposefully use invalid addresses. 6) If it uses a relay site in one domain but comes from another trash it. A good example would be spam mail which is relayed off of someplace.com.au but has a "From" header which points to someplace.edu.tw, and has some other received lines which point to a dialup at MCI. 7) If it overuses punctuation in the subject line such as "!!!!!" then trash it. 8) If it comes in with a bunch of bogus IP addresses in the header then trash it. 9) If it's in HTML then trash it. 10) If it has lines over 80 characters nuke it. 11) If it comes in more than twice nuke it.

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Crypto Jokes
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Inspired by "Crypto Kong," contributions of crypto jokes are requested, to enliven our Web site, which is pretty gray these days without congressional buffoonery. Thigh-slappers are preferred, but since one person's humor is another's pain, any bizarre tales of woe, stupidity and vanity are welcomed. Short as possible, like Adam's three swines of pearl. Sure, anonymous zingers are great. No pay, no apologies for missing the point.

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Crypto Jokes
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Inspired by "Crypto Kong," contributions of crypto jokes are requested, to enliven our Web site, which is pretty gray these days without congressional buffoonery. Thigh-slappers are preferred, but since one person's humor is another's pain, any bizarre tales of woe, stupidity and vanity are welcomed. Short as possible, like Adam's three swines of pearl. Sure, anonymous zingers are great. No pay, no apologies for missing the point.

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If man were meant to clone, he'd have twins. - Anon

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Just Released! 16 Million!
by Friend＠public.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

IT WAS JUST RELEASED!! INTRODUCING...MILLIONS VOL. 1 We took a total of over 92 million email addresses from many of the touted CD's that are out there (bought them all - some were $300+)! We added the millions we had in storage to those. When we combined them all, we had in excess of 100+ million addresses in one huge file. We then ran a super "sort/de-dupe" program against this huge list. It cut the file down to less than 25 million!!! Can you believe that? It seems that most people that are selling CD's are duping the public by putting numerous files of addresses in the CD over and over. This created many duplicate addresses. They also had many program "generated" email addresses like Compuserve, MCI, ANON's, etc. This causes a tremendous amount of undeliverables, and for those that use Stealth programs, clogs up servers quickly with trash, etc. We then ran a program that contained 150+ keywords to remove addresses with vulgarity, profanity, sex-related names, postmaster, webmaster, flamer, abuse, spam, etc., etc. Also eliminated all .edu, .mil, .org, .gov, etc. After that list was run against the remaining list, it reduced it down to near 16 million addresses! So, you see, our list will save people hundreds of dollars buying all others that are out there on CD and otherwise. Using ours will be like using the 100+ million that we started with, but a lot less money and alot less time!! We also purchased Cyber-Promos ($995.00) CD. We received it just prior to finishing production work on the new CD. We had our people take a random sample of 300,000 addresses from the touted 2.9 that they advertised. We used a program that allows us to take a random sample of addresses from any list. We were able to have the program take every 9th address, thus giving us a 300,000 list of Cyber's email addresses from top to bottom. We did not clean these, but we did create 3 seperate files named cyber1.txt, cyber2.txt, & cyber3.txt of 100,000 addresses each. This will give all people that use the list a opportunity to send mail to the list before deciding if their CD is all it's hyped to be. We also included a 2+ million "Remove/Flamer" file broke into seperate files for ease of extracting and adding to your own database of removes. "You can buy from the REST or you can buy from the BEST. Your choice. _____________________________ What others are saying: "I received the CD on Friday evening. Like a kid with a new toy, I immediately started bulking out using the new email addresses. Over the course of the weekend, I emailed out over 500,000 emails and I received less than TWENTY undeliverables!! I am totally satisfied with my purchase!! Thanks Premier!!" Dave Buckley Houston, TX "This list is worth it's weight in gold!! I sent out 100,000 emails for my product and received over 55 orders! Ann Colby New Orleans, LA **************************************** HERE'S THE BOTTOM LINE Here is what you get when you order today! >> 16 Million Email Addresses... 1 per line in simple text format on a CD. Files are in lots of 100,000 (no codes needed to open files). All files are separated by domain name for your convenience. PLUS you receive a tremendous REMOVE list! AND the a sampling of CyberPromo's HOT list. >>> NOW ONLY $149.00! This price is effective for the next seven days, thereafter the price will be $199.00 so ORDER NOW! All lists are completely free of any Duplicates. We also on a continual basis, add New Names and Remove Undeliverables and Remove Requests. The result is the Cleanest Email Addresses Available Anywhere to use over and over again, for a FRACTION of the cost that other companies charge. Typical rates for acquiring email lists are from 1 cent to as high as 3 cents per email address - that's "INFORMATION HIGHWAY" ROBBERY!. Don't even hesitate on this one or you will miss out on the most effective way to market anywhere..PERIOD! If you have any further questions or to place an order by phone, please do not hesitate to call us at: 908-245-1143 To order our email package, simply print out the EZ ORDER FORM below and fax or mail it to our office today. We accept Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, Checks by Fax and Mail. _________________ EZ Order Form _____Yes! I would like to order MILLIONS Vol. 1 email addresses for only $149.00. *Please select one of the following for shipping.. ____I would like to receive my package OVERNIGHT. I'm including $15 for shipping. (outside US add an additional $25 for shipping) ____I would like to receive my package 2 DAY delivery. I'm including $10 for shipping. (outside US add an additional $25 for shipping) DATE_____________________________________________________ NAME____________________________________________________ COMPANY NAME___________________________________________ ADDRESS_________________________________________________ CITY, STATE, ZIP___________________________________________ PHONE NUMBERS__________________________________________ FAX NUMBERS_____________________________________________ EMAIL ADDRESS___________________________________________ TYPE OF CREDIT CARD: ______VISA _____MASTERCARD CREDIT CARD# __________________________________________ EXPIRATION DATE________________________________________ NAME ON CARD___________________________________________ AMOUNT $____________________ (Required) SIGNATURE:x________________________ DATE:x__________________ You may fax your order to us at: 1-908-245-3119 CHECK BY FAX SERVICES! If you would like to fax a check, paste your check below and fax it to our office along with all forms to: 1-908-245-3119 ****************************************************** ***24 HOUR FAX SERVICES*** PLEASE PASTE YOUR CHECK HERE AND FAX IT TO US AT 1-908-245-3119 ******************************************************* If You fax a check, there is no need for you to send the original check. We will draft up a new check, with the exact information from your original check. All checks will be held for bank clearance. If you feel more comfortable sending payment through the mail, please send all forms and Check or Money Order to: Rapture Marketing Inc. P.O. Box 616 Kenilworth, NJ 07033

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Re: (eternity) mailing list and activity
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[I've Cc'ed this to cypherpunks from discussion on eternity(a)internexus.net] Jeff Knox <trax(a)ix.netcom.com> writes: > I do have a few questions. I am curios as to how i would go about > creating a domain service. If i wanted to start a domain service to > server a domain i create like test.dom, how would i run a server to > processes the request, and how would all the other servers around > the world cooperate? Firstly note that there are 3 (three) systems going by the name of eternity service at present. Ross Anderson coined the term, and his paper which describes his eternity service, you should be able to find somewhere on: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/ Next, my eternity prototype which I put a bit of time into hammering out last year in perl, borrows Ross's name of "eternity service", but differs in design, simplifying the design by using USENET as the distributed database / distribution mechanism rather than constructing one with purpose designed protocols: http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/eternity/ And there is Ryan Lackey's Eternity DDS (where DDS stands for I presume Distributed Data Store?). I am not sure of the details of his design beyond that he is building a market for CPU and disk space, and building on top of a an existing database to create a distributed data base accessible as a virtual web space (amongst other `views'). He gave this URL in his post earlier today: http://sof.mit.edu/eternity/ To answer your question as applied to my eternity design, I will describe how virtual domains are handled in my eternity server design which is based on USENET as a distributed distribution medium. A proto-type implementation, and several operational servers are pointed to at: http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/eternity/ In this design the virtual eternity domains are not based on DNS. They are based on hash functions. Really because it is a new mechanism for accessing information URLs should perhaps have the form: eternity://test.dom/ Where a separate distributed domain name lookup database is defined, and a distributed service is utilised to host the document space. However because it is more difficult to update browsers to cope with new services (as far as I know, if anyone knows otherwise, I'd like pointers on how to do this), I have represented URLs of this form with: http://test.dom.eternity/ This would enable you to implement a local, or remote proxy which fetched eternity web pages, because you can (with netscape at least) direct proxying on a per domain basis. Using the non-existant top level domain .eternity, you can therefore redirect all traffic for that `domain' to a local (or remote) proxy which implements the distributed database lookup based on URL, and have normal web access continue to function. My current implementation is based on CGI binaries, so does not work directly as an eternity proxy. Rather lookups are of the form: http://foo.com/cgi-bin/eternity.cgi?url=http://test.dom.eternity/ The virtual eternity URLs (URLs of the form http://*.eternity/*) are converted into database index values internally by computing the SHA1 hash the URL, for example: SHA1( http://test.dom.eternity/ ) = d7fa999054ba70e1ed28665938299061b519a4f7 The database is USENET news, and a distributed archive of it; the database index is stored in the Subject field of the news post. The implementation optionally keeps a cache of news articles indexed by this value on eternity servers. If the required article is not in the cache it is searched for in the news spool. Currently this is where it stops, so articles would have to be reposted periodically to remain available if articles are either not being cached, or are flushed from the cache. However the cache is never flushed, because the cache replacement policy is not currently implemented. An improvement over this would be to add a random cache flushing policy and have servers serve the contents of their cache to each other forming a distributed USENET news article cache. Another option would be to search public access USENET archives such as dejanews.com for the requested article. The problem is really that we would prefer not to keep archives of articles directly on an open access server, because the server's disks could be seized, and the operator could be held liable for the presence of controversial materials. Wei Dai suggested that documents should be secret split in a redundant fashion so that say 2 of 5 shares are required to reconstruct the document. If the shares are distributed across different servers, this ensures that one server does not directly hold the information. Ross describes ideas on how to ensure that a server would not know what shares it is holding in his paper which can be found on his web pages, the url being linked from: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/ Adam

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Future War on TDC this Sunday
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Just saw an add for Future War on The Discovery Channel this Sunday evening. It is supposed to discuss the impact of global television as the primary weapon in the warfare of tomorrow. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | 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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