December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Detweiler
by wrevans＠oceanus.mitre.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To quote from the Welcome to Cypherpunks posting: >"The cypherpunks list has its very own net.loon, a fellow named L. >Detweiler. The history is too long for here, but he thinks that >cypherpunks are evil incarnate. If you see a densely worded rant >featuring characteristic words such as "medusa", "pseudospoofing", >"treachery", "poison", or "black lies", it's probably him, no matter >what the From: line says. The policy is to ignore these postings. >Replies have never, ever, not even once resulted in anything >constructive and usually create huge flamewars on the list. Please, >please, don't feed the animals." Can we stop feeding the animals? I'm tired of getting 20 to 30 postings about Detweiler. I'm new to this interesting and high volume list, but its interest is reduced by the flame war. I hope I haven't offended anyone, but lets talk issues and technology and raise the SNR. Thanks, Ward R. Evans wrevans(a)mitre.org voice: (703) 883-7631 fax: (703) 883-1363

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Re: Voice/Fax Checks
by hfinney＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Robert Hettinga writes: >As someone who's been thrashing this a little bit, I've gotten stuck on >exactly how to "*undercut*" the transaction costs of existing methods. Got >any ideas? Are those transaction costs as a percentage of total cost >meaningful enough to embue digital cash with the rocket-like competitive >advantage we hope for? It's pretty clear that credit cards don't work for some of the transactions people want to do: 1) one-cent and fractional-cent charges for connecting to a useful Web page or ftp site. A useful resource like this wouldn't have to charge much on a per-user basis to fund the equipment and people. 2) Transactions with individuals or small companies who are not VISA clients. It's not that easy for a mail-order shoestring startup to get the ability to accept VISA cards. Because of the danger of fraud, the credit card companies like to see a storefront and/or some previous history. Someone who writes a nifty PGP shell and wants to sell it for $10 per will have this problem. 3) People who don't like giving out their credit card numbers to an unknown email address. This is the flip side of the above. The danger of fraud is always present, and the more people I've given my card number to, the more chance that I'll get burned. Of course most states have protection laws in place, but it's still going to be a major hassle. Now, 2 and 3 can probably be addressed by electronic checks, and I think the secure Mosaic announcement included that possibility. I suspect that echecks are a considerably stronger competitor to ecash than today's credit-card infrastructure. For one thing, an echeck can be sent in the clear, while ecash has to be sent encrypted; an eavesdropper can spend ecash but not an echeck. Example 1, the fractional-cent transaction, will be tough to address by any technology IMO. Even with ecash, there are a lot of questions. Is it on- line or off-line? Does the server actually try to validate each half-cent or does it just trust people? If the latter, how much fraud is likely, and how would we track down and penalize the half-cent counterfeiters? Solving these problems is going to add overhead which will make it hard to deal with such small sums efficiently. How many cash businesses sell low-value items for pennies today? Not many. >Light dawns on Marblehead. (Massachusetts joke). Isn't the point of >digital cash that you *can* send it through unsecure mail and buy things? No, I don't think you can. Ecash can generally be cashed by the bearer so it has to be sent through secure mail. That is why I was saying that echecks might be better for those purposes. I don't understand the Telescript agent world well enough to judge whether it would drive a market for ecash. I have the impression that at least with the initial implementations the agents will not be on the Internet as we know it but rather on a separate AT&T network of special servers. So they may not have much impact for a while on the "net" as we know it. Hal

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DEF CON II Conference Schedule?
by gbe＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone have the latest DEF CON II conference schedule? If so, could you please email me a copy? Thanks -- Gary B. Edstrom | Sequoia Software | PGP fingerprint: Internet: gbe(a)netcom.com | Programming Services | 2F F6 1B 28 6E A6 09 6C CompuServe: 72677,564 | P.O. Box 9573 | B0 EA 9E 4C C4 C6 7D 46 Fax: 1-818-247-6046 | Glendale, CA 91226 | Key available via finger What is PGP? Subscribe to alt.security.pgp and find out!

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Re: "dumb incompetent sex bimbos"
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

: From: "Sue D. Nym" <nym(a)netcom.com> : She's not asking you to have polite consideration because "we" women : think of "ourselves" as "victims"--She's asking you to show respect and : courtesy to everyone in the forum and the forum because we think of ourselves : as part of humanity. Personally I find your caricature of how you think women post to Usenet the most discourteous of all these posts, Larry. (Like this, for example: : Here's hoping the positive vibrations of the Jupiter-trumpet will beam into : OUR lives and wreak a positive transformation. ) G

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Who Detweiler is *really* posting as
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Remember this? "We will shortly be commencing operation Woodcock Bludgeon. During this period you will experience some confusion and chaos due to secondary effects of our meme carrier launchings in cyberspace. " There must be some LD memes floating around confusing everyone's neural recognition pathways. Blanc

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Re: Come on
by rjc＠powermail.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lefty: > >> Anyway, I'm surprised that there isn't a feminist witch-hunt > >> investigating Samdy Sandfort, for his non-pc H.E.A.T. reports. > > > >Yikes, Ray, let's not give anybody ideas! In reality, though, I think the > >perceptive women on this list know my heart is in the right place. Isn't > >it clear to everyone what I'm making fun of? > > Heh. > > It's not clear to Ray. Well, I can certainly say that I am impressed that you've progressed to telepathy, but humor a poor student for once. Could it be that H.E.A.T. is a low budget campy syndicated show with bad writing whose only "redeeming" (gimmick) feature is the hunky guys and bodacious babes which appear on it? Like 9 million similar shows on USA up-all-night. I'm a fan of the genre myself, only instead of H.E.A.T., I watch "Thunder in Paradise" which has Hulk Hogan, a wonder speedboat, and Carol Alt in it. You can't beat the ridiculous plots, impossible boat technology (artificial intelligence, rocket powered *in water* at speeds that would easily tear it apart, and cheesy morphing effects), and the way Carol Alt seems to fall into the hands of the bad guy every week. (the bad guy usually has a harem of women, or amazons from American Gladiators). Sandy may think that the women "know his heart is in the right place", but that is a dangerous assumption to make, especially in a professional setting where you aren't judgement proof. Let me tell you what happened to my brother-in-law 2 weeks ago. He had just gotten back from vacation in the Bahamas with my sister and was eager to show his buddies at work(United Airlines) the pictures he had taken on the beach. It just so happened that this beach had plenty beautiful women in bikini's on it and he had taken many pictures of them. His buddies made a few comments like "check out that one", "that one's a babe", etc. One of the female coworkers overheard and filed sexual harrassment charges. (she thought the pictures were pornographic, she hadn't seem them). He was punished and given a list of words and phrases you can't say around the office, including stuff like, "you look different, did you change something?" and "your hair looks nice today." The point being, it doesn't matter what your intentions are, or if you meant no harm by a comment, one sexist comment or mention of a woman's body part, and in many workplaces, you could be in hot water. The key phrase is "perceptive women". There will always be one twit, or group of twits, waiting to pounce on you. After experiencing speech codes and feminist wackos on the U of MD campus, I'm not going to underestimate the power of twits any more. Sandy's pretty safe making comments on this list because of the make up of the list (mostly male, many libertarian, many anti-pc, etc) just as Tim May was safe making plenty of politically controversial statements on Extropians. Try making those kinds of statements in a more politically diverse forum. (and indeed, I believe Tim did eventually catch fire in the netcom newsgroups where someone mistook one of his comments against welfare as bigotry) I hope I "got it"

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(fwd) Noise diodes
by Jim choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!news.onramp.net!convex!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!agate!msuinfo!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!aggedor.rmit.EDU.AU!goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au!not-for-mail From: ok(a)goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: sci.electronics,sci.math.consult Subject: Noise diodes Date: 21 Jul 1994 18:03:24 +1000 Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 35 Message-ID: <30la4c$bng(a)goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au NNTP-Posting-User: ok Keywords: rng Some people I'm working with have built a machine to generate "real" random numbers, using a BC546 transistor as an avalanche mode noise diode (12V Vcc). The noise output is supposedly 100mV peak. That's then fed into an LM311 comparator, to generate 0/1 signals. This is then fed to a divide-by-2 counter. When their CPU wants a random number, it samples the output of the divide-by-2 counter eight times at 6.25kbit/sec. They did collect a bunch of samples from this, and claim that successive samples did seem to be uncorrelated, but there seemed to be a slight bias in favour of 0 bits. However, they say the test results have been lost. I don't really understand how the output of a divide-by-two counter can be biassed this way (free-running biassed random 0s and 1s) -> (divide by 2) -> (sample at regular intervals) -> (take 8 consecutive samples as one random number) They don't need to produce random numbers at a very high rate (a couple of hundred a second is more than enough for their application). I have a faint memory that there are several problems with generating random numbers from noise diodes, but I can't remember what any of them are. The requirement is for - independent - equidistributed - random 0..255 integers - which remain so throughout a 0 to 40 degree Celsius range If there is a standard way to get something like this, I'd like to hear about it. If there is a standard set of problems I should know about and check for, that'd be great. -- 30 million of Australia's 140 million sheep suffer from some form of baldness. -- Weekly Times.

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Re: Come on
by lefty＠apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Lefty: >> >> Anyway, I'm surprised that there isn't a feminist witch-hunt >> >> investigating Samdy Sandfort, for his non-pc H.E.A.T. reports. >> > >> >Yikes, Ray, let's not give anybody ideas! In reality, though, I think the >> >perceptive women on this list know my heart is in the right place. Isn't >> >it clear to everyone what I'm making fun of? >> >> Heh. >> >> It's not clear to Ray. > > Well, I can certainly say that I am impressed that you've progressed >to telepathy, but humor a poor student for once. > > {long, irrelevant diatribe, elided} > > I hope I "got it" Er, no. Not at all. In fact, I think you demonstrated what I was saying quite clearly. But not to leave you hopelessly adrift, what's the fundamental difference between the actions of the subject of your oh-so-sad story, and Sandy's actions? Take your time. Off by a millimeter at the arrow's point; off by a mile at the target. -- Lefty (lefty(a)apple.com) C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:.

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Detweilure
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by wrevans(a)oceanus.mitre.org (Ward R. Evans) on Thu, 21 Jul 2:18 PM >To quote from the Welcome to Cypherpunks posting: > >>"The cypherpunks list has its very own net.loon, a fellow named L. >>Detweiler. . . . The policy is to ignore these postings. >>Replies have never, ever, not even once resulted in anything >>constructive and usually create huge flamewars on the list. Please, >>please, don't feed the animals." > >Can we stop feeding the animals? The beguiling welcome cypherpunks excerpt about @@ entices not repels. It's a notorious literary lure. Was put it there by @@ himself as titillating recuiting poster?

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Re: Leaving the Country
by frissell＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:32 AM 7/21/94 -0700, Sandy Sandfort wrote: >Stuff and nonsense. The tactic Heinlein used, for the reasons he used >it, would work just as well today. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with what >he actually did and why. (Remind me to cover it in the Seminar.) > > > S a n d y The traditional Japanese saying, "The nail that sticks up will get pounded down." The American version, "The nail that sticks up is too much trouble to pound down so we will go find a nail that's already pounded down."

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