December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Thread Thread
by adam.philipp＠ties.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>* 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? Sorry for taking this seriously, but it has been considered and rejected... It is just inert plastic with metalic letters so that they are opaque to light while the plastic is translucent and provides a backdrop... Can someone snip this thread already? Adam -- PGP Key available on the keyservers. Encrypted E-mail welcome. Sub rosa: Confidential, secret, not for publication. -Black's Law Dictionary

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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?

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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

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by Amanda Walker 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 :).

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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

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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

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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>

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Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) wrote: >And now that Mosaic and Netscape are such big deals (which I'm not >knocking, though--true to form--I use the character-based "lynx" to >access the Web), I expect a swing of the pendulum in the other >direction, toward a time-wasting focus on kerning, fonts, leading, >whitespace, gutter widths, etc. Actually, I see the benefit of html to be that you really _don't_ spend time on pretty visual effects like kerning, fonts, leading, whitespace, gutter widths, etc. You don't deal with any of those things, or anything like it, in a html document. Yes, you spend more time doing formatting then with straight ascii, but the structure you put in is content based structure, rather then pretty-but-useless display based structure. The type that you were doing with outliners and such, although for the goal of making them more readable rather then of helping to organize ideas. But I think html, once you've gotten the hang of it, gives you a pretty good return to the amount of work you put in. A well done html document is, in my opinion, actually much easier to read then a straight ascii document, and the amount of effort neccesary to turn ascii to html is relatively minimal. Just my opinion, of course. I agree with you that there is a problem when too much time and energy is spent on prettifying trimming rather then on content, but I'm not sure that html is really representative of this. Have you tried using MacWeb with the auto-loading of images turned off? Like I said, I find it easier to extract the relevant information quickly out of a html-formatted text then a straight ascii text. And we all know that when you are on the net, being able to extract relevant information quickly is vital. (There's a whole nother treatise waiting to be written there.)

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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

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usenet-to-mail
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Robert A. Hayden" <hayden(a)krypton.mankato.msus.edu> wrote: >More importantly, are there are usenet-to-mail gateways? My first impression was that that was just a joke. Then I thought it might be a very good idea after all. Then I thought it surely wasn't a joke, but also wasn't a very good idea. Now I'm not sure. :) It seems like it might be a good idea. All the anon remailers could watch a certain newsgroup, alt.remailer.submit perhaps, and take messages with a "anon-remailer-attn: specific@remailer", and deal with them just like normal mail input. Would there by any benefit to doing this at all over the present system? Why would someone submit a message to the remailer "bramble" via newsgroup instead of just mailing it? Unless you find an anonymous way to post to the newsgroup in the first place, your security seems to be seriously compromised. Even if everything is encrypted, you've made traffic analysis a huge amount easier. And if you are finding a way to post the a newsgroup anonymously in the first place, odds are you have some other entry point to the remailer bramble, so why make a stop on the newsgroup opening yourself up to traffic analysis? Now that I think about it, it seems that there isn't really any reason for such a thing.

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