December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re:Bandwidth limitations, DNA binary coding
by VACCINIA＠UNCVX1.OIT.UNC.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Perry writes: >15 symbols, HALF a byte (actually a touch less.) One nybble can express 16 >possible symbols (or one Hex digit, or whatever.) Oops, I stand corrected, 15 symbols half a byte. What I was trying to convey is that GenBank (the repository for genomic sequence data) has a specific format for binary representation of DNA sequence data. Most genomic analysis programs use GenBank sequence format now (some use EMBL which is similar) and probably will in the future. Thus, the half byte per GATC symbol is defined as convention, not by the fewest binary digits neccesary for encoding them. It may waste bandwidth but that's no problem for fiber optics. Which is how this thread started. >plus, of course, the genome is highly compressable -- lots of repeated >sequences, especially in interons. This brings up an interesting topic. There are four classes of DNA: Foldback DNA, highly repetitive DNA, middle-repetitive DNA and single-copy DNA. Foldback DNA consists of palindromic sequences which form hairpin like structures. Highly repetitive DNA is made up of short sequences from several to hundreds of bases long (repeated around 5 x 10^5 times). Middle repetitive DNA consists of longer sequences, hundreds or thousands of bases long (these appear hundreds of times in the genome). Single-copy DNA sequences are usually genes themselves, of which (in humans) it is estimated that there are around 1 x 10^5. Since the genome is highly redundant (in mammals up to 60% of the genome is repetitive sequence), you could probably compress alot of it just by designating symbols for specific repetitive elements. Most of the repetitive nature of the genome is found as highly repetitive sequence localized as tandem arrays (not in introns). However, a second class of element known as SINEs and LINEs are found in introns, gene flanking regions and intergenic regions. The most widely characterized SINE is the Alu sequence, which is approximately 300 bases long and scattered throughout the genome over 5 x 10^5 times. This constitutes 5-6% of the genome! That's a lot of compressability. I often wonder if the redundancy is a way to encrypt a species genome, thus keeping different species from genetic communication. The "key" being millions of random base pairings which allow like species to decrypt their own genetic code and successfully have progeny. Pairings between species that are too dissimilar would be a refractory event because the key is not homologous. By the way, genes are made up of exons and introns. Scott G. Morham ! The First, Vaccinia(a)uncvx1.oit.unc.edu ! Second PGP Public Key by Request ! and Third Levels ! of Information Storage and Retrieval ! DNA, ! Biological Neural Nets, ! Cyberspace -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLOR1gj2paOMjHHAhAQFNZwP+Lv7Xv4bityeHd2L53fgY4seWKZX/Mkrw YmHv5hPpusiXx6jt2tVGPnPyH0TVtdFb5Cy1YVnvLydgU4FPblJAO7chWuc5EPXn 7/SQ29AuGrDnWu9gEGaQiqEUgn40idPgvDVVQPikAX8tn5OmWo8vygMwIYgicQUh Po8BHvPSLfg= =ek9F -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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REMAIL: installer script not working
by Sameer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I jumped the gun, and posted before I was ready. Oops. The installation script isn't working perfectly yet. Hopefully I won't wait two months before fixing these problems like I did last time. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLOUdEni7eNFdXppdAQG6AwQAkJAoiz3KE7nYhS2JPmtP6u0VokIaJ1Dl TfgYEgNxqQhb3M1VBvM0vIaxtGk6K956+ji3W7WhpkJk65IBvmyVMm/O3b6ZFG1h kGQ9wjmUTOGageXag3fXCOGo3NFXi2WIhLyzix1u02Q+iw7Bwf2pSTztp60Mw32g ePTbENC128E= =8jWg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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REMAIL: scan, folders scripts
by Karl Lui Barrus 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, I put two PERL scripts I wrote at the ftp site (named misc.elm.scripts.tar.gz); here is the README file: scan is the script which prints out signature information of pgp signed messages (instead of where the message came from). Thus, if pgp signed mail is sent through an anonymous remailer, you see who signed the message instead of where it came from. The inner loop is ugly and needs major reworking; I've noted this below and in a comment in the code :-) It would be easy to include this in the mh 'folder' command, but I don't have mh anymore here on owlnet :( Integration into elm itself would be great. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- These are two experimental PERL scripts I wrote which report information about elm mail folders. folders prints a summary of mail in your ~/Mail directory. It prints out how many letters are in each folders, and how many files are in each directory. ~> folders Folder austin : 4 messages Folder cypher : 20 messages Folder educom : 1 message Folder inc : 17 messages Directory misc : 12 messages Folder store : 26 messages Folder ysn : 0 messages - -------------------- scan prints out a more detailed summary of a folder in the ~/Mail directory. It prints message number, who the message is from, and the subject. ~>scan cypher 1 hfinney(a)shell.portal.com Chaum's credentials (technical question) 2 hughes(a)ah.com Chaum's credentials (technical question) 3 hfinney(a)shell.portal.com Signing keys for nyms 4 hfinney(a)shell.portal.com message depots, packet routing? 5 hughes(a)ah.com Signing keys for nyms 6 szabo(a)netcom.com Commerce models scan also takes an optional argument: -p this will make scan look for pgp signed messages, and attempt to verify them. An asterisk is printed at each signed message, and the signer's address is printed instead. ~>scan -p cypher 1* Hal Finney <74076.1041@com Chaum's credentials (technical question) 2 hughes(a)ah.com Chaum's credentials (technical question) 3* Hal Finney <74076.1041@com Signing keys for nyms 4* Hal Finney <74076.1041@com message depots, packet routing? 5 hughes(a)ah.com Signing keys for nyms 6 szabo(a)netcom.com Commerce models Here, we see three messages are signed, and the signer's address is printed instead. This distinction is important if a message is sent via and anonymous remailer, for example. In this case, instead of printing the anonymous remailer as who sent the message, you will see who signed the message (which may in turn be a pseudonym, etc.) BUGS: folders counts the number of message by looking for 'From' at the beginning of a line. This causes problems if the text of a message contains 'From' at the left, or if a message contains a forwarded message, or somehow pastes in another message's header. In these cases, the message count will be off. scan probably also makes this mistake. In fact, you will find the inner loop of scan to be pretty ugly. I will clean it up eventually. scan winds up piping message to PGP to check signatures. This degrades performance. scan is not able to deal with pathological files: pgp messages that don't have an end delimiter, etc. One of these days I will read RFC-822 and other relevant documents and make the message count accurate. Comments, bug fixes, enhancements :-) are all welcome at klbarrus(a)owlnet.rice.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLOUhEoOA7OpLWtYzAQG4PAP/eTw/EWw0wlQ4QVpHfUP6OI3sWdKOltwN 3pgB41JxK1sY/GCnP8rCP9HDEkY/OePTBZDsu9CGJG1fneTsZIlCXrXpKSGzQpvC 94819bdF/+OFe5DcMUcaTcsG/KN3asw3TO0ed4KyOXqTE/SrAIyHsChgKRtHO70u 3uuLWrp0nR8= =vVg8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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key servers
by lear35!mdbomber＠nebula.acs.uci.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Could someone tell me where to find a list of PGP keyservers and how to use them? I haven't been able to find such a thing on soda.berkeley.edu or on toxicwaste.mit.edu (the 2 relevant sites I can remember). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQBVAgUBLOUvDTSSmvXojb+5AQGt0gH/T1ikHaWU/W7GR2VAGcx5fncjw9bDbmn3 CPfzPu28j4ejq3OlUJKRt3yz3wYryhYM/xT+OftOFfONpgqPjIS+TA== =U7Q0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Should we oppose the Data Superhighway/NII?
by doug＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger(a)lehman.com> said: >Just one question, Doug -- in what sort of "Long Term" do you envision >individuals needing to be able to send MORE than several thousand >video signals worth of data simultaneously? Even if you put a camera >facing every corner of every nook of your house, [...] >you couldn't exhaust the potential bandwidth of a single fiber. This is highly misleading. Consider this. The Nyquist limit puts a fundamental limit on bandwidth; you cannot transmit more information over a channel than (roughly) the cycles-per-second rate of the carrier. If a fiber uses optical wavelengths, then that fiber cannot carry more than a single fully quality analog optical *pixel*. We get a lot more out of them than that by reducing the quality of the image being sent, e.g. by sending only 60 frame-samples per second, where each frame-sample is itself carved up into X * Y discrete pixels, and each pixel has a reduced dynamic range etc. My point in saying this is that you're speaking as if current day video standards are some kind of ultimate load on information transmission, whereas actually it's just something we've settled for. HDTV will vastly improve the quality of what we transmit without increasing bandwidth much, but it is still a far cry from what can be desirable. 60 frames per second makes it impossible to transmit adequate information about objects moving quickly across the frame of view that are easy to perceive in person. 1000 frames per second is desirable. 2D images are less desirable than 3D images. A minimum of about 300 horizontal views by perhaps 100 vertical views is desirable for 3D viewing. Assume compression of that 300 * 100 down to a simple factor of 300. Now notice that depth of field information is desirable for realism (without this everything is always in focus, good for some things, bad for others). Let's give that a simple factor of 10. I'll leave out arguments for increasing e.g. the dynamic range of contrast and color information, even though they are currently several orders of magnitude worse than the human eye can perceive. That all gives us roughly 10 * 300 * 10 = 30,000 times more information in a single *really* high quality "video" signal than we are currently accustomed to. Ultra high quality image transmission like this won't begin to become significantly widely used for quite a while. But it will happen eventually, because we'll be able to, and will perceive differences, etc. > What applications do you envision >that would require more bandwidth than this, even in twenty or thirty >years? Truly high quality video is one answer, even without taking into account the problems carriers would have in supporting the full bandwidth of a single fiber in switched networks (combinatorial explosion means that they can never support every possible connection simultaneously, therefore switching and multiplexing is here to stay). The more general answer is to just keep in mind that demand for uses of technology *always* outstrips the capacity of technology, if it is affordable. Demand is limited only because of economic issues. Doug

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"Applied Cryptography" at Cody's
by jel＠sutro.SFSU.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As of 14:30 today, Cody's in Berkeley has 4-1=3 copys of "Applied Cryptography" by Schneier.

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Re: Bandwidth limitations
by doug＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Clark Reynard <clark(a)metal.psu.edu> said: >Perry writes: > >[Elegant refutation of all examples I give in original article.] > >Perhaps some true bandwidth stretchers: > >Complete maps of all the known universe, with spectrographic assays, It occurs to me that Perry will refute my attempted refutation of his refutation by pointing out that even a factor of 30,000 in video won't saturate theoretical fiber limits, and that he may consider your examples too fanciful. But part of what we're talking about is just timing, even Perry said so. We cannot yet modulate fiber at its theoretical limits. To do that we'll need optical frequency sub-band frequency modulation, and that hasn't even been achieved in the lab yet. (FM tuneable dye can't be modulated at optical rates. Semiconductor "variable frequency" modulated lasers can only switch between discrete frequencies.) Some think it will take twenty years to achieve this. But I'm optimistic and hoping for 5 to 10 years. (Unsure about commercial deployment, but let's say it is fast and can use existing fibers, if not trunk equipment.) So if you're "realistic" about when we'll be able to achieve fiber saturation modulation, we're also far enough into the future that it gets easier to see that we may have completely novel demands on information transmission by then, and that existing demands will continue to cause problems for existing fiber technology. Conversely if one is optimistic about achieving theoretical limits on fiber, then the fine points of the argument begin to be relevant. That factor of 30,000 for video won't be enough to fill the fiber. Receiving every global TV and Internet (ultra high quality) video transmission simultaneously (to record and allow later channel switching) might do it, but I have to admit that it seems chancy. So it all comes down to the time frame in which the theoretical limits are achieved. Unless one gets speculative...for instance, nanotechonology scan-transmit- and-rebuild could easily more than saturate even a large number of fibers. Or slightly less blue sky: if your computer is an array of 10,000 optical computers each operating at 100 gigahertz, and doing a distributed computation with other systems over the net. (In this case networks are *always* the bottleneck.) Anyway the whole subject seems debatable and a matter of which numbers one cares to predict for which future year. But we all agree that it's merely a question of *when* fiber runs out of steam, not whether. Doug

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CIA admits Timothy May Surveillance: PHOTOS!
by nobody＠pmantis.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

*********************************************************************** ________________ / \ / / \ \ \ | | / / | ___\ \| | / / | / | | | __ | / | \ | | | \ | "HEH HEH HEH !!!!!" | | __ | L. Detweiler can eat my | __\ (_o) | shorts! Am I Beavis | | | / or am I tcmay? \ || \ / PSEUDOSPOOF THIS! | |__ \ | | (*___\ | | _ | | | //_______| | / |_|_|_|___/\ \| \ - | | _----_______/ | / |_____/ ***********************************************************************

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The Contortions of Cypherpunks
by L. Detweiler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

N.Szabo <szabo(a)netcom.com> in RISKS >I'd like to assure the readers of RISKS that I am in fact a unique person, >distinct from the other names L. Detweiler listed. Of the people on his list >I know from personal contact, all are distinct people in Real Life(tm). Give specific evidence to support your claim or retract it. Who do you know from personal contact? What do you mean that you are `distinct from other names'? >Well >before his post to RISKS, L. Detweiler was provided means of personally >verifying that many of the names he listed are distinct True Names (eg phone >numbers he can call), but it doesn't seem to help. You appear to be referring to my private mail among many different people. Please elaborate on your claim, or retract it.

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the Zen of Cyberspace
by an12070＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Yang said to Yin, ``why are you so weird? why can't you be more like me?'' ``because you are Yang, and I am Yin,'' said Yin. * * * I was walking along a path in a foreign city, and came upon a group of men carrying their king on their shoulders on a massive platform and weighty throne. They were struggling and sweating from the oppressive weight in the hot sun. ``Long live the Royal King'' they called out to me as I was about to pass. The king had haughty expression, and looked down on me sullenly and, I thought, somewhat belligerently. ``What do you think of my kingdom, traveller?'' he called out. I answered, ``Kind sir, I have been treated most generously by your gracious citizens. They have offered kind hospitality to a weary traveller. Truly, it is an oasis in the desert.'' ``Long live the Holy King!'' they called out. The king waved me away, and I bowed. But I was curious and followed the procession. The king made many strange contacts along the way, but that is another story. After a time he became bored, yawned, and fell asleep. The carriers continued to struggle with the sheer weight of his burden. ``How long have you been carrying the king?'' I whispered to one. ``Many years, traveller. Many years the people of this country have beared the weight of this tyrant.'' Of course, I was shocked at this. But other men echoed out upon hearing us, but whispered and were careful not to wake the slumbering king, who now had a steady stream of drool running down his chin and was snoring quite noisily. They told me horrible tales of his tyranny and crimes against the people. But they also told me of their great fear in challenging him. I was quite surprised -- It seems that each of the carriers shared a common vice with the king, and they were bound by the chain of their depravity. They were all greedy, and thirsted after the gold that he taunted them with every night in secret meetings in the palace chamber halls. Much of the populace saw many signs of the corruption but ``looked the other way''. Some had been executed for their dark discoveries. Many years later, I passed through the country again. I came upon the same sight -- the weary and toiling men carrying the heavy king upon their backs. By this time His Highness was quite fat and ugly from his vice and excess, and the carriers had great despair, desperation, and resignation etched in their faces. But they trudged on. That time, the king was apparently asleep when I found them. This time, he was quite inert and lifeless. ``How long have you been carrying the king?'' I said. ``Many years. Too numerous to remember. You get used to it after awhile.'' I talked to the men quietly. They still beared their great burden, prodded by their intense hunger for the gold of the king, which he had teased them with for many years. The king had tremendous power over people. Nevertheless, they began to laugh loudly at their king's stupidity and ignorance of their embezzlements. I wondered if the king was in turn embezzling from them. Suddenly, I realized the whole royalty was corrupt. The men laughed some more, oblivious to my epiphany, and one man jabbed the king accidentally with his flailing arms in the midst of his ridicule and mockery. The man was horrified. But the king did not stir. The other carriers were puzzled. They apparently had not looked at the king for some time, and suddenly realized that their highness had a pale pallor. The carrier who had jabbed him thought his body felt rather stiff. Suddenly, the night grew utterly cold. The king was dead. They were flabbergasted. ``How long has the king been dead?'' I asked. They did not know. With this, they suddenly dropped the massive platform in terror, and it broke and shattered with an ugly, ear-splitting noise. The king was lost within the rubble. I was injured by some fragments. Some of the carriers were crushed. Some cursed me. Some claimed that I was an evil omen that triggered the death of the king! Others fled. Many headed for the Castle, to steal whatever was left of the unguarded gold. They were astonished to find it was all counterfeited, and worthless. After many weeks, the entire populace finally realized they had been sustaining a black lie, and the country plunged into chaos. I was lucky to escape alive. * * * Yin said to Yang, ``why are you so weird? why can't you be more like me?'' ``because you are Yin, and I am Yang,'' said Yang. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

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