December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Thread Thread
by merriman＠metronet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Fri, 18 Nov 1994, Tim May writes: >>* A tiny thread cannot be readily detected by "airport scanners," nor >>by even longer-distance scanners, unless the gain on the detector is >>turned up so high that many other things trigger the detector. >> >>If the threads are mostly plastic, with discontiguous metallic writing >>on them, then the detection problem is even harder. > >This is just a quick thought...does anyone know what kind of metallic ink >is used? To add to the conspiracy theory, say the metallic ink is >radioactive with a higher radiation count for higher dollar amounts--would >it be implausible then to have some sort of radiation counter to gauge a >person's total 'radiation count,' and thereby approximate how much currency >they are carrying out of the country? Wouldn't work. Radiation is useless for something like this - how to tell the difference between X $20 bills, and Y $100 bills? The roentgen/hour levels would be close enough to make knowing which is which virtually impossible. Radiation is mostly good for yes/no type stuff, unless you're dusting things with particular combinations of very specific isotopes and sampling for them - in which case you've got a completely different set of problems. > >I wouldn't take the above seriously though.... > Seconded. Dave Merriman - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Finger merriman(a)metronet.com for PGP public key and fingerprint. PGP encrypted Email welcome and encouraged. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. No?

1 0

Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by mclow＠coyote.csusm.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> Personally, I like simple ASCII. No fancy fonts, no embedded graphics, >> no Quicktime movies I have to watch, etc. > >Do PGP key blocks bigger than the message body count as "fancy crap"? > >Fancy and Crap are both in the eye of the beholder :). > >Attachment converted: Scratch:Amanda Logo Sig.GIF (GIFf/JVWR) (0000BB28) Well said. Nice .sig, too. ;-) -- Marshall Marshall Clow Aladdin Systems mclow(a)san_marcos.csusm.edu

1 0

No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have one more comment. Earlier, I wrote: > Critias_the_conspirator is of course another new pseudonym. > >From time to time this Critias will comment on financial > privacy. Hear the words of Critias_the_conspirator: Put your money in ``Greek'' banks. The tentacles are everywhere. Critias_the_conspirator

6 8

Re: Islands in the Net
by Amanda Walker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> This is just not what "liquid" means. A liquid asset refers to the > speed with which it can be traded, not what kind of value it has. > "Liquid" is an adjective about timeliness, not about resolution. Hmm. I had thought about using "valuable," but that seemed too ambiguous. "Negotiable" maybe? > Sometimes currency represents a fiat value, as with today's greenbacks. It's not entirely a fiat value; in effect, it's backed by the strength of the economy. The difference between a ruble and a dollar was not the fiat value (they were the same, as I remember), but in the fact that it was a lot easier to exchange dollars for real assets. For the record, I think that going off the gold standard was a bad idea, but growing up in the days of double-digit inflation probably gave me a biased opinion of floating currency. > Also, if it loses its ability to be exchanged for real assets > it likewise loses its value (e.g., Confederate dollars from the > Civil War). > > Under this reasoning, today's dollar bills should be worthless. > They aren't. Real assets are not the only form of value. I didn't say that the government had to be the agent of such an exchange. I can buy real assets with my dollars, but not with Confederate dollars. While it has been somewhat eroded since the start of the Drug War, dollars are still exchangable for real assets, even though the government is no longer backing them directly. > What currency do Visa or Master Card issue, perchance? Little plastic tokens that are accepted more places than the government's paper and metal ones. If it quacks like a duck... > Information doesn't obey conservation of mass, and so can't act as a > token. Exactly. On the other hand, with real-time clearing (which the Internet *does* provide the ability to do, with ever-increasing capacity), you can construct something that acts like an "instant check", which is close enough to cash for most practical purposes. Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation

5 5

How to Mail a Letter
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, with the many helpful comments here by fellow Cypherpunks, I've begun to explore how to use the new Postal Service system. I really must say that Al Gore's Reinventing Government Task Farce has outdone itself. The new "PowerVisualMail" system is much more powerful than the old "seal the envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail it" approach. But I'm having some problems in the conversion. Perhaps some of you can help. I did the Archie search and found the Installer script at ftp.gore.gov, fetched it, used MIME_Decode on it, checked the PGP sig to make sure no one had tampered with Tipper's code, then installed it as a client on my Mac (which I bought AUX for, to run this client). After reconfiguring metamail and setting the NOMETAMAIL environmental variable (under csh, "setenv NOMETAMAIL") to the AUX agent symbol, I was able to recompile PowerVisualMail to (sort of) run on my system. I found the new O'Reilly and Associates book, "How to Mail a Letter with PowerVisualMail," to be very helpful, especially Chapter 17. I hope to spend the next couple of days ironing out the bugs and getting my mail client to properly communicate with the PowerVisualMail agent. But it'll all be worth it! This will all be so much easier than licking stamps and sending those b-o-r-i-n-g paper letters. Of course, now I've got to teach my father how to decode my PowerVisualMail letters...and he doesn't even have a computer yet! I've told him that PowerVisualMail just runs too slowly on 486 machines, so I'm hoping he gets a 90 MHz Pentium. And the phone company seems stuck in the Dark Ages, completely unwilling to accept my PowerVisualMail items! I guess they're just late getting on the Information Superhighway. Well, sorry I'll be missing today's Cypherpunks meeting in Mountain View....I'm busy making my life easier. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo(a)toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tcmay

1 0

Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Zero crypto content.... tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) writes: > We are getting bogged down in banal details and platform > idiosyncracies. Dozens of platforms, dozens of flavors of Unix and > other operating systems, half a dozen major display options (as noted > above), lots of image formats (at least that's relatively > standardized, to GIF, PICT, JPEG, etc....and yet many people spend > _days_ trying to convert, download, uncompress, read, display, etc.) > > There's got to be a better way. The better way is the spontantous order that markets generate. We are too early in the cycle to have figured out that having a standard 2 by 4 is better than cutting boards to custom sizes for each job. But some of this is self inflicted by the folks on this list, and other serious netheads. The vast majority of the world's populations would have no idea what Tim is ranting about. The last figure I saw had the percentage of home computers in the US with modems at 14%, but only 4% had accounts at a service provider of any type. The folks on this list are on the leading edge, and are exposed to more of the leading edge, failure prone experiments. MIME's encryption of ASCII so it is unreadible is just an example of a false start. Tim's approach to SLIP/PPP is the solution to the rest of his problems -- wait until there is a compelling reason to change. Let the academics with time on their hands invent possible standards with incremental improvements at the cost of incompatibility. Eventually the tiller will be replaced with a steering wheel, and the brakes and accelerator controls will be two or three pedals. Contrary to Tim's claim, ASCII is not the ideal way to read information. Fixed font, 78 character lines are hard to read. There is a reason that books are printed using proportional type on lines only two and a half alphabets wide -- it is easier for our eyes to read and our brains to comprehend. But studying typography is like studying cryptogrophy, something that takes time and effort and concentration. Interestingly, the net is a fairly weak place to learn typography, as it is impossible to see what is meant by "color" of a page of text unless it is properly typeset, which requires the fonts, kerning, leading, etc... so get a book :-) Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)cs.gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>

2 1

Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:48 PM 11/18/94 -0500, Amanda Walker wrote: > >Fancy and Crap are both in the eye of the beholder :). > >Attachment converted: :Amanda Logo Sig.GIF (GIFf/JVWR) (00003907) Indeed. No offense offered Amanda, but a scruffy 200dpi gif of your sig is taking your point over the top, yes? Net Goddess or no... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

2 1

Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

L. McCarthy wrote: >Bob Hettinga writes: >> At 10:48 PM 11/18/94 -0500, Amanda Walker wrote: >> >Fancy and Crap are both in the eye of the beholder :). >> Attachment converted: :Amanda Logo Sig.GIF (GIFf/JVWR) (00003907) > >You bothered ? > >$ This message contains data in an unrecognized format, image/gif, >$ which can be decoded and written to a file. >$ Please enter the name of a file to which the data should be written, >$ or just press RETURN to skip writing it to a file. Perhaps Bob is one of the many fortunate people who use a Mac to read their mail ;-) Eudora auto-converts the MIME attachments and dumps them in the folder of your choice. Give it a try. I think you'd like it. -- Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

1 0

Foreign Transactions & The Pistol Whip Test
by blancw＠pylon.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here's a simple checklist for making decisions about foreign transactions & financial institutions. Question: Can they kick down the door and pistol whip this one: Yes No ___ ___ consultant who works in the country ___ ___ consultant who works out of the country ___ ___ relative who is in a foreign country ___ ___ relative who is in the USA ___ ___ friend who is in a foreign country ___ ___ friend who is in the USA ___ ___ bank account in another country ___ ___ bank account in the USA ___ ___ all financial institutions ___ ___ self proclaimed financial experts ___ ___ your puppy dog ___ ___ All of them! All of them! Blanc :>)

1 0

(fwd) "Process Mime Article y/n?"
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There was a lot of hilarity at today's Cypherpunks meeting, about the MIME/complexity thread. Others are reporting similar experiences, percolating into newsgroups: > From: sag(a)hera.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (Steve Goldfield) > Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.digest > Subject: "Process Mime Article y/n?" > Message-ID: <3ainnf$itf(a)agate.berkeley.edu> > Date: 18 Nov 94 17:19:42 GMT > Sender: usenet > Distribution: world > Organization: University of California, Berkeley > Approved: info-mac(a)sumex-aim.stanford.edu > > A day or so ago while trying to read this newsgroup, I got > the prompt, "Process Mime Article? y/n?" I said "y" and was > immediately sorry. Message after message came up and no > character seemed to permit escape from that loop. Seems to > me there should be a warning about such things. I had to > disconnect and relogin to my account and then delete the > message without reading it. I notice today that if I'd said > "n," I'd have got the same old very long message. Anyway, > I'd urge the moderator of the newsgroup to stick in a > warning or tell the unwary reader how to excape from the > Mime loop. > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > Steve Goldfield :<{ {>: sag(a)coe.berkeley.edu > University of California at Berkeley Richmond Field Station > > --

1 0