December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Gun conversion info banne
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: CYPHERPUNKS(a)toad.com S.> Duncan Frissell <frissell(a)panix.com> writes: S.>Then there's the time in the early '80s when the Consumer Products S.>Safety S.>Commission banned the "Button Book." S.> S.>Query: S.> What pray is the "Button Book". S.> Readers may recall that many years ago, their parents gave them this book that had, attached to its pages, all sorts of fastening devices. The Button Book had cardboard pages with shoelaces, zippers, buttons, buckles and all sorts of great stuff. Good training for fastening things. The CPSC felt that the buttons were too easy to remove. The old "oh no your book is dangerous it may kill my (stupid) kid." The publisher didn't try a 1st Amendment defense. I don't know if they've ever reissued. DCF Who survived to adulthood before the CPSC (as difficult as that may be to believe). --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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Mac encryption
by fhalper＠pilot.njin.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What is everyones opinion of the best encryption software forthe Mac? Frederic Halper fhalper(a)pilot.njin.net

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ADMIN: cypherpunks-ratings created
by hughes＠ah.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

While we were creating majordomo groups, I had Hugh create a new mailing list for our use, cypherpunks-ratings. The ratings list is meant for the implementation of distributed moderation similar to what I outlined for Usenet a week or two ago. This experiment is slightly different, since we're going to leave the main list as it is. The ratings list currently doesn't go anywhere. You can join the ratings list, but that doesn't get you anything. We'll turn on distribution of the list later. Here's the deal. The ratings posted to the ratings list have to be some fixed standard form. This form has yet to be decided upon, and should be debated on this list. I will implement a filter which only passes syntactically correct ratings, once the syntax is decided upon. At this point we'll turn on the list. Other motivated cypherpunks participants will have to come up with a system to merge the two lists into a coherent whole, as well as provide an interface for creating and sending ratings. Ratings are intended to be broader than voting. Ratings should be manifold, in order to support various areas of interest. Ratings can support voting, but not vice versa. Please use the RATINGS: tag in the subject line for discussion. Eric

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Unbridled Enthusiasm
by anonymous＠extropia.wimsey.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

* Reply to msg originally in CYPHERPUNKS Uu> At last, my long-promised pseudo-account remailer is open for testing. Uu> Here's how it works. We know you're excited, but did you have to post this THIRTY-TWO times? Just wondering...

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RATINGS: Subject tags
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One issue is the purpose of the ratings system. I don't think it will help to solve the problem of intentional disruption. If the disrupter is really motivated, he could have multiple identities and give positive ratings to his messages, so they would get through. I think a good purpose would be filtering out uninteresting or lower-quality messages. Unless someone else vouches for a message, it would not appear for a subscriber to the filtered list. Eric asked that discussions on this topic use the "subject tag" concept, putting "RATINGS:" in the subject line. Subject tags are a good idea but are not widely used. If more people would use them it would help people to read those messages that interest them. My suggestion is that the ratings be based on subject tags. A rater reads a message, and if he endorses it as being worth reading he sends in one or more subject tags (keywords) which apply. Then someone on the filtered list could subscribe based on particular tags that interest them. The advantage is that this way even newcomers' messages are tagged with useful keywords, tags provided by old-timers on the list when they approve the messages. This also provides for the multi-dimensional aspect of approval, more useful than a simple "thumbs up". I won't try to suggest a syntax, but under this proposal a rating message would include some message identifier (perhaps the list should produce messages with an incrementing message number), along with a list of applicable subject tags. Hal

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RATINGS: Subject tags
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: hughes(a)ah.com (Eric Hughes) > >If the disrupter is really > >motivated, he could have multiple identities and give positive ratings to > >his messages, so they would get through. > > No one says you have to believe a particular rating. This would imply that subscribers see the source of each rating. You would have to know that in order to judge whether to believe one or not. But I think this might consume too much bandwidth. With possibly many raters, each producing a potentially multi-dimensional rating per message, this would be a lot of stuff to send along with each message. My suggestion would be to just present the union of all the subject tags produced by the raters. This is a moderate amount of information, and to the extent that raters agree on subject tags it could in many cases be a very succinct presentation. We don't want to make this too unwieldy. > >Unless someone else vouches for a message, it would not appear > >for a subscriber to the filtered list. > > The system I want to experiment with for cypherpunks is not filtration > at the mailing list server but rather filtration at the user's end. > The "filtered list" is whatever passes through one's own filter. I am > not talking about making toad into an extropians-style list with lots > of server operations. This makes sense, but there must still be two lists: one, the "raw" list, which is seen (at least) by raters and contains messages which have not yet been rated; and the other, the "rated" list, which has the rated messages. My suggestion was that messages which did not receive any ratings by anyone would not make it into the rated list. Obviously an alternative would be to send it out tagged to show that no one cared enough to rate it. > >My suggestion is that the ratings be based on subject tags. > > I suggest that one kind of rating be based on subject tags, or primary > topic, or keywords, or something similar. I also suggest that other > kinds of ratings exist. > > Hal's suggestion is to make a rating based on salience to topic. This > is fine, it allows a sheaf of related topics and concerns to be > unbundled according to a particular reader's viewpoint. This could also be used for negative ratings: subject tags such as "flame", "faq", "rant", etc. could be used to give more information than just the topic of the message. People could set up their own systems to filter the message to exclude messages with certain of these tags. > > a rating message > >would include some message identifier > > There is already the right message identifier. It appears in each > piece of mail in the header field Message-Id. Message-ID is probably OK, but it is kind of long. Many mail agents will insert an "In-Reply-To" into the header which identifies the message ID, but not all will. It would be a real pain to type one in manually. Another advantage of numbering messages sent on the "raw" list would be that people would be able to tell when they have missed messages (but that is irrelevant to the ratings issue, I admit). Hal

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MacPGP
by fhalper＠pilot.njin.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Can anyone give me a FTP site where MacPGP is available. i think the Ratings idea is brilliant. Frederic Halper (Reuben Halper) fhalper(a)pilot.njin.net

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RE: the black budget
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"It took the Colonists several decades to get worked up enough to fight a war. We're only halfway through an equivalent time period. And I don't want to change the situation only with crypto, but also with public speech." Would you elaborate? Earlier, Tim May said something about using "the active spreading of disinformation about the compromise of the key escrow system" as part of the attempt to "Actively Sabotage Clipper and Capstone" (title of his message). What sort of public speeches would you (or others) make (to whom)? (Just curious) Blanc

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RATINGS: proposal
by iansmith＠weasel.cc.gatech.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric: I was about to send this to the cpunx list, but got your message first. I'll send this to you first, and maybe we can hash out something better before 'going public' with it... here it is. I had not thought about the possibility of rating multiple messages in one "rating message." My scheme doesn't address this, although simple changes could accomplish it. I'm not sure that I understand why a mail message could be rated multiple times by the same rator, unless you mean that one might define "axes of rating", like "content", "spelling", "novelty", etc. I think that such a scheme is good, but is starting to place more load on the rator. I had hoped that I could use a slider widget, and have the user generate somewhat reasonable ratings just by setting the slider to a value between 0 and 100 and hitting a "rate" button. This would automagically put in motion the scheme outlined below. As an MUA implementor, here's my first cut of a proposal for a rating system that would hopefully meet the goals that eric outlined and be quickly implementable. 1) Mail to cypherpunks-ratings will be gatewayed back to all members of the list if it has the following lines in its body [Headers are ignored...] Lines in brackets are optional: [whitespace] Target-Message-Id: <messageId> Rating: <integer> [Comment: <newline terminated string>] [Subtopic: <one word string>] [Rating-originator: <newline terminated identity string: preferably PGP public key ident] [PGP signature] Body lines which don't have the syntax mentioned above are ignored. The comment field is intended to allow the person doing the rating to give info about his rating or the rated message to the rated message reader, when the message is read. I.e. when I read a message from the cypherpunk list from joe blow which has been rated by iansmith(a)cc.gatech.edu with a comment of "this message is fantastic" I can get something like: From: joe blow Subject: foobar Rating-Comment: (iansmith(a)cc.gatech.edu) this message is fantastic! Rating: 100 Similarly the subtopic field is to provide an automatic version of what is now being done by hand with ADMIN: and RATING: in subject fields or the like. This would allow a mail user agent to provide some automatic content help, provided that a displayed mail message meets enough of its criteria for this (have enough ratings been received? do 75% of the ratings agree on the subtopic for the mail message? etc). The PGP information is intended to facilitate "rating reputations" so that MUAs could be configured to "trust" ratings from people with good reputations for rating in ways that meet the user's idea of "goodness." Now, this strategy doesn't say anything about what the numeric rating scale means. I favor a 0-100 scale, with 0 being a "don't read this, its crap" and 100 being "must read." Although ideally this should be a curve with 50 being very common and 100's and 0's being very uncommon, it seems unlikely to me that such a system would occur in practice, as the common case (50) is the MOST unlikely to motivate someone to issue a rating message. I'm not sure what to do about this problem. When the mail messages is echoed out to the ratings mailing list, it would bear the additional header line: X-Mail-Rating: cypherpunks This would allow the MUA of the recipient to easily recognize the "ratings mail" messages and not display them to the user. The MUA should be building a database or otherwise storing the ratings of mail messages, so that when it displays a message it can bring up the appropriate ratings information. This allows clever user interfaces to be constructed based on ratings information, especially reputation-based arragements. Consider our message from Joe Blow above and the message display below: From: joe blow Subject: foobar PGP-Signed-Message-Ratings: 7 PGP-Signed-Rating-Average: 67.5 PGP-Signed-Common-Subtopic: DIGICASH Highest-Rator-Comment: Good discussion of Chaum's methods Lowest-Rator-Comment: Stupid rehash of Chaum's approach Now back the MUA implementation: This database (or other storage) which I have been discussing is somewhat irritating in its complexity and storage requirements, but mostly unavoidable because of the ordering properties of the problem. It is quite likely that one will receive ratings *before* the mail message itself arrives (in fact, this may be exactly what you want!) so the MUA will be forced to "sit on" ratings for messages it hasn't seen yet. To make the database/storage problem a bit more managable, MUA's can delete ratings information when they delete a mail message. However, it seems like a good idea to keep this information lying around for potential searches of an archive of a mailing list. I.e. "Give me messages which have the rating subtopic of DIGICASH and average ratings over 50" Major problems with this scheme: 1) Heavy dependance on Message-Id: field of messages and not all messages bear one of these. I don't see that is avoidable, since we must uniquely identify mail messages and the Message-Id is designed to do this. 2) This scheme rewards people who wait on the mail message ratings to come in then read the mailing list. This could be problematic if we get into a situation where people who should be doing the rating aren't reading messages (and rating them) because they are waiting on others to do so. I'm not really sure how to address this problem; timeliness cannot be used a factor when considering ratings, because of the speed differences in different peoples mail transport system (its unfair to penalize those that have long mail delays or are vacation). I think that perhaps some sort of "carrot" should be used to encourage to rate messages, but I'm not sure what this carrot would be. what do ya think? ian

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Re: ratings
by nobody＠rosebud.ee.uh.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Robert Hayden said: >Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this a lot of overkill? I mean, one >could simply set up a filter for subjects/people you don't want to see >or press the 'D' key. Well, a rating system like the one I think Eric is talking about would disassociate "people" (the authors) from their post... so for example in the future when everybody is using anonymous remailing services to participate here and elsewhere, you would be able to read messages from "people" (pseudonyms on digitally signed posts). Of course, the anonymous remailing services would prevent you from figuring out the true author, so you can't filter for people in the manner you describe. Then you could pay attention to mail from Pr0duct Cipher and Deadbeat, who have kept their identities secret, but filter out other "anonymous" messages. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLWp/s4OA7OpLWtYzAQEaowP9FVOSEFtOR2WNV4a5cjleR06BRTBB2eZd HB7cPwsiOzReufDJz9/i1PMeFBzd548DtC8AnyIriAY/c8zDAuK3ujMDgWM0FQ2+ W8khShw19GrFg0gsnuozHjorrivXw9OZzK3wOQQL5xx1BvWZ8kehM+YMjjKaq0vh 6Sjlt0RzKmM= =IWy1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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