December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Economist follows my Electric Dreams!
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The December 12th episode of my column, Electric Dreams #40, discussed the relative success in text processing using statistical methods over conventional natural language processing. The latest issue of The Economist (Dec 17-24th) has this as its lead science story. I congratulate myself on having one over my favourite periodical! Of course my article was 500 words, so the larger Economist story was more detailed. While I mentioned technology developed by the US National Security Agency and Architext, The Economist referred to research undertaken at BT (formerly British Telecom) and Cornell University, especially the work on automated text-summarization programs. If you'd like a copy of my original article, please send a blank message to rishab(a)arbornet.org with "get dreams-40" (without the quotes) as the Subject: field. For an index, send "get index"; to automatically receive future episodes of this 5kbyte/week column, send "subscribe". Happy Christmas and New Year! Rishab ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab(a)arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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NSA's text search algorithm
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Ian Farquhar" <ianf(a)sydney.sgi.com>: > I always imagined that the development of [NSA's text scanning] > algorithm itself predated email, and started back with cable and > telex traffic. Stat text scanning is ancient, but has probably not been used on the scale and efficiency that the NSA would require for net traffic. > > Earlier this year, the agency began soliciting collaborations from > > business to develop commercial applications of their technique. > > Has anyone got any further information about how this algorithm works? > It sounds like Rishab has somewhat better info than was publicly > available months ago when we last discussed this particular NSA > "technology transfer". Actually my 'info' about NSA's thing was mainly deduction put together with some (limited) specs on Architext (http://www.atext.com graham(a)atext.com) If you read NSA's note carefully, you easily rule out NLP ("independent of...language") and sophisticated neural nets ("very fast"). The Economist story I mentioned in my last post (on the fact that I beat them to the story!) goes into some detail on BT and Cornell's programs that summarize textual matter. These are apparently successful (included is an pretty good example of a computer-generated summary of the article), but also quite different from NSA's. BT uses basic NLP to get past articles, conjunctions etc (making it language-dependent), and stems (removes -ing, -ed, -s etc, unlike NSA which denies stemming, dictionaries etc; obviously language-dependent), before creating statistical table of word frequencies which are used to determine the subject of a sentence or the similarities between texts. Cornell can search "gigabytes of data ... in a few seconds [for] a subject" or similarity to an example text. It can figure out which sentences are 'important' (by comparing frequency tables). I suspect NSA's is much more pattern-oriented, as its USP is document clustering; maybe it uses some NN at some level. Of course you don't really need to know grammar to filter out articles and pronouns; you could do that statistically too. Rishab ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab(a)arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Re: rehash of fbi v. weaver, or 'freeh is a jerk'
by RGRIFFITH＠sfasu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It was announced (I think last week) that there would be no prosecution of the sniper who shot Vicki Weaver as she stood in the cabin door holding her baby. It's good to see an editorial like that in a major newspaper. >i happen to be on the road in tennessee, and read this editorial in the >knoxville new-sentinel. i don't remember seeing anything about this when it >happened...but since freeh and the fbi seem to be disliked these days, >here's some more fodder for the fire. > >-avi > >ps - hopefully this isn't a repeat, but being on the road, i'm mail-delayed >at least 24 hours. > >The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Dec 16, 1994, pA16 > >DISTURBING SILENCE >-FBI chief taking his time acting on report about Idaho shootout > >All eyes are on Louis Freeh, director of the Federal Bureau of >Investigation, as he ponders disciplinary action in the infamous shootout at >Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. This being the end of 1994, one starts to wonder >what is taking the director so long. > >Excessive use of force by the FBI is no trivial matter. Citizens might >gather from the Idaho case that the government claims special license to >abuse the rights of loners with extremist views. >

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test1
by Harry S. Hawk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Test.. Please ignore.. /hawk -- Harry S. Hawk habs(a)panix.com Product Marketing Manager PowerMail, Inc. Producers of MailWeir(tm) & PowerServ(tm)

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test2
by habs＠cmyk.warwick.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Test. Please ignore

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Re: An Attempt to Hobble SAFE Crypto Bill (fwd)
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 18:22:48 -0400 From: Alan Davidson <abd(a)cdt.org> To: "--Todd Lappin-->" <telstar(a)wired.com>, fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Re: An Attempt to Hobble SAFE Crypto Bill At 11:03 AM -0800 7/25/97, --Todd Lappin--> wrote: > >An Attempt to Hobble House Crypto Bill > > by Rebecca Vesely ... > The amendment, by Representative Benjamin Gilman > (R-New York), who chairs the International Relations > Committee, would make it unlawful to "manufacture, > distribute, sell, or import any product within the United > States that can be used to encrypt communications or > information if the product does not permit the real-time > decryption of such encrypted communications or > information." The full text of this very frightening amendment is now available on CDT's Web site at: http://www.cdt.org/crypto/legis_105/SAFE/index.shtml#970725 It's a chilling glimpse at the Administration's view of a mandatory-domestic-key-recovery world. This is the first time I've seen anyone put such a provision through the House Legislative Counsel process. -- Alan Alan Davidson, Staff Counsel 202.637.9800 (v) Center for Democracy and Technology 202.637.0968 (f) 1634 Eye St. NW, Suite 1100 <abd(a)cdt.org> Washington, DC 20006 PGP key via finger

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c'punks top 5
by Andrew Lowenstern 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What, IMHO, are the top 5 most important things the cypherpunks should be concentrating on? No doubt everyone else has their own ideas of what the "cypherpunks top 5" (or top 10) is, so please tell us your suggestions. 1. anonymous http proxy servers ("re-webbers") 2. PGP compatible crypto library 3. reply-able remailers that are secure and easier for the recipient 4. better remailer security (dc-nets) 5. socket-based keyserver interface for real-time automagic key fetches andrew <btw, this is a top 5 rather than a top 10 because I couldn't think of 10 good things to concentrate on when I wrote this>

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(fwd) Newt says Clipper Chip is Dead
by jamesd＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Xref: netcom.com alt.culture.usenet:6563 alt.rave:37968 Newsgroups: alt.culture.usenet,alt.rave Path: netcom.com!ix.netcom.com!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!crl.dec.com!crl.dec.com!pa.dec.com!mtshasta.snowcrest.net!ken From: ken(a)snowcrest.net ("Ken Stuart") Message-ID: <82739.ken(a)mtshasta.snowcrest.net> Reply-To: ken(a)snowcrest.net Subject: Newt says Clipper Chip is Dead Date: Tue, 13 Dec 94 20:09:25 PDT X-Received: by usenet.pa.dec.com; id AA29312; Tue, 13 Dec 94 20:15:43 -0800 X-Received: by pobox1.pa.dec.com; id AA20213; Tue, 13 Dec 94 20:15:37 -0800 X-Received: from mtshasta.snowcrest.net by inet-gw-1.pa.dec.com (5.65/10Aug94) id AA16575; Tue, 13 Dec 94 20:14:24 -0800 X-Received: from [204.94.225.49] (sl1.mtshasta.snowcrest.net [204.94.225.49]) by mtshasta.snowcrest.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) with SMTP id UAA15046; Tue, 13 Dec 1994 20:13:23 -0800 X-Minuet-Version: Minuet1.0_Beta_16 X-Popmail-Charset: English X-To: alt.rave.usenet(a)decwrl.dec.com, alt.culture.usenet.usenet(a)decwrl.dec.com Lines: 16 Hello, On his weekly call-in TV show on National Empowerment Television tonight, Newt received a call asking about his opinion on the Clipper Chip, and he replied that it was a moot point, in that the Clipper chip concept was designed for a condition that no longer exists. So, paranoiacs, lighten up! :-) - respect to all, Ken ken(a)snowcrest.net (primary address) (if no answer, try ken.stuart(a)tigerteam.org ) -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. jamesd(a)netcom.com

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the idiot spamming people who post to alt.2600 through my remailer
by Erich von Hollander 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

:: Post-To: alt.2600 has been squished. e

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Re: Doomsaying, development, and deployment
by Adam Shostack 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Why use the PGP libs? Would it be easier to use swIPe as an engine for encryption? If you do use swIPe, name the package link IP encryption. Adam Steve wrote: | > | How about starting a todo list so we can reach a consensus on a | > | prioritized list of goals. This may help us come up with projects | > | we can work together on. I'm itching to do some coding... | > | > Some projects worth doing: | > | > a link encryptor | | If someone would recommend the best version of the pgp libs, | I'll think about adding it to plug-gw (from TIS). That would | provide a ready made transparent shell for connecting | systems. -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

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