December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: FCPUNX:FBI calls for mandatory key escrow
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:40 AM 9/4/97 +0200, Anonymous wrote: > Who is going to stop them? They have the guns! When our elected > officials in Congress delved into the INSLAW affair, the Department > of Justice told them to "Fuck off." and refused to cooperate with > those who represent the citizens. Congress's reaction was to say, > "Yup. They're defying us." > Ipso facto--Congress is not running the country. The LEA's are running > the country. Go figure... It used to be that normal federal agencies did not have their own goons. They relied on the fibbies. Now every federal agency is creating their own goon squad. Sometimes they send in the goons to illegally enforce the laws that they are lobbying for. Congress then has to make it legal, or crack down on illegal use of force by a federal agency. Frequently they make it legal This is reminiscent of the latter days of the Soviet Union. Towards the end in the Soviet Union, armed government agencies would raid other agencies for valuables, and set up road blocks at random times and places, and confiscate anything valuable being trucked through by another government agency. No kidding. A government factory would be working on producing widgets, and suddenly guys with guns would come in and take their stuff for another government factory. The west is beginning to show the same symptoms, though as yet not nearly as severe. The state is visibly losing cohesion, and at the same time, through improved communications, the citizenry is gaining cohesion. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: FCPUNX:Krispin Preaches Revolution!
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:47 AM 9/4/97 -0700, Tim May wrote: > And this is what I think they may try: a global crackdown to try to stamp > out the wildfire of anarchocapitalism before it spreads beyond any hope of > control. I think it already too late: A global crackdown, by creating a visible confrontation, would simply accellerate matters. If instead they simply rely on social inertia, it will take a long time for existing institutions to fade away. We have all victories except for one very important one. Money. Now once we take that key bastion, and it is being besieged on every front, everything else will fall in due course, but it will still be a slow process, only unusually far sighted politicians will see and fear what is happening. There is vast inertia in social institutions. > Louis Freeh is no dummy. He understands the power struggle. But he has to > speak babytalk to Feinswine and Kyl to let them glimpse what the issues are. Career civil servants have more reason to take the long view than do politicians. Politicians do not really care if the state is being undermined in the long run, provided they are re-elected in the short run. Although politicians are our enemies, they are a lesser enemy than career civil servants. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Hypermail gateway
by Raph Levien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Yesterday, I started a new hypermail gateway at: http://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/~cpunks/ Please try not to overload the site; it's a research machine. Raph

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Re: Please send me SSL problems...
by Erik E. Fair 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:22 9/20/95, Rich Salz wrote: >> Jeff, the SSL specification has a severe *architectural* problem - it >> assumes that Internet Protocols are APIs ... >> The IETF quite explicitly doesn't care about APIs > >With one exception so important that it might blow away your whole >complaint... > >...GSSAPI. > /r$ And we see how far *that* effort has gotten... There was some discussion in Toronto last summer about APIs for the basic transports (i.e. standardizing "sockets", or TLI, or whatever), which got backed off to a list of "required service elements" that a good stack vendor should make available to the app programmers, and then the whole notion got killed off for the reasons I cited. GSSAPI was an attempt to make it easy to slide in authentication & encryption into existing software - lay a foundation for real security in the applications. A fine goal, but a bad plan for achieving the goal. I think they were also trying to avoid blessing any particular crypto scheme, to avoid both the export morass, and the patent morass - "we'll drop in whatever we can get on good terms, later." API and interface standards are to be avoided in part because of the reasons I cited previously, in part because they're hard to do right for all platforms (not everyone uses function-call style system/library calls), and in part because they do not guarantee you interoperability - classic case in point is the Microsoft Mail API (MAPI): you can put *anything* under MAPI: Novell MHS, cc:Mail, QuickMail, or SMTP, just to name a few. If you are not speaking the same wire protocol as your intended correspondent (or peer), you lose, regardless of the fact that your software and hers are both using the same API - you cannot interoperate. What really annoys me is the fuss you see in the trade rags about "middleware" these days; they've missed this entire point about interfaces versus protocols, and they're propagating the misconception that interfaces give interoperability to the general marketplace. And the vendors are laughing all the way to the bank. Erik Fair

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backdoor man?
by Dave Del Torto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

White House policy chief backs away from FBI plan By Reuters September 5, 1997, 6:10 a.m. PT WASHINGTON--The Clinton administration's top official on domestic legal policy yesterday backed away from a proposal by the head of the FBI to regulate access to residential property in the United States. "What he proposed was not the administration's policy," Dept. of Justice Undersecretary William "Mon-key" Wrench told reporters during a break at a congressional hearing. FBI Director Louie Free's comments Wednesday before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee sparked strong criticism from civil liberties groups and the housing industry. U.S. law, Supreme Court decicisions, and the U.S. Constitution itself, strictly regulates law inforcement's access to private property. But on Wednesday, Free proposed mandatory law inforcement access to all domestic residential property, and went on to suggest commercial property be subject to law inforcement access as well. "The administration has been very clear to the director that he has an obligation to tell the Congress what's in the interests of law enforcement, and he did that," Wrench explained. "That doesn't mean he was speaking for everybody." Free said developers and construction companies should build their products such that they give government free access to all domestic and commercial buildings. Without such capabilities, criminals, terrorists, and pedophiles could use housing to hide their illegal activities from law enforcement agencies, Free said. But housing industry lobbyists maintain that Free's plan would make their products less attractive and make all housing less secure. Civil liberties groups said mandatory controls on domestic housing might violate constitutional guarantees of privacy and freedom of expression. Under the FBI director's proposal, all construction plans would have to include special "back doors" allowing government access to the finished structures, but residents could choose to shut their back door if they saw fit. Some senators wanted to go further. Sen. Dianne Fineline (D--California) proposed requiring all housing residents to enable the back-door access feature. Free said such a law would be the best solution for law enforcement but added that he did not think it was politically viable. Wrench said Free's proposal was also unlikely to pass. "If the committee were to report that [bill out], I think that would be something we would look at very seriously," he said. "But I don't expect that to happen. We have not asked them to report that and we are not going to ask them to report that." -30- [from: Noah Salzman <noah(a)pgp.com>]

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Dianaism Was: Re: Di and Dodi Run Over A Land Mine
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:54 AM 9/5/97 -0600, toto wrote: ... > Diana used the position that was bestowed upon her to give comfort >and hope to the halt, the lame, and the downtrodden. Did she do it >out of self-serving egoism, or an attempt to gain recognition and >fame as a humanitarian? > I don't know, I don't care, and it is really none of my business. >What *is* my business is to view my fellow man/woman and perceive >if they are lifted up or further downtrodden by their interactions >with myself and others. I have seen the faces of the AIDS children >that she touched, when no one else would, and the lepers whom she >shook hands with, when others were afraid to do so, and I have seen >the light that she spread among those whom society had cast aside. ... Anyone care to lay odds as to how soon a religion will start up with the late princess as the main diety? I'm guessing 5 years for the first hard-cores. And 20 years for international visibility.

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Re: Dianaism Was: Re: Di and Dodi Run Over A Land Mine
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sean Roach wrote: > Anyone care to lay odds as to how soon a religion will start up with the > late princess as the main diety? > I'm guessing 5 years for the first hard-cores. And 20 years for > international visibility. I have already seen one newscast which has predicted that Diana will join Elvis as a diety-figurehead. So, now that we have a King _and_ a Queen, why don't we start a new nation? They would be the perfect titular heads for a Virtual Nation, because their lifestyles would be inexpensive for us to maintain, no matter how lavishly we choose to treat them.

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Re: Di and Dodi Run Over A Land Mine
by Toto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A Private Email wrote: > > > Yes, in reality, the story of Diana, the commoner turned Princess, > >was overblown. > > Diana, though a high-school dropout who described herself as "a bit thick," > was not a commoner. Daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer, she was a direct > descendant of Charles II, and thus carried more "English royal blood" in > her veins than does Prince Charles Windsor (really Saxe-Coburg Gotha, of > course.) Of course, but "the commoner turned Princess" is the fairy tale that is perceived by the public. This is because people perceive her as being a rather ordinary person--like them. Thus it makes the "dream" possible for them, as well. > Whether this makes it sensible for some overweight London shopgirl of > Pakistani descent, with a cockney accent, to "reach for the same gold > ring," is highly debateable. In fact, for such a woman to dream of being > accepted into the royal family strikes me as downright loony. It _is_ looney. So is the "American Dream." So is going to the moon. So is the belief that we can end poverty and war, and turn back the tide of unconstitutional fascism that is building up for another run at freedom and liberty. Sometimes the dreams come true--most often, the dream comes partly true, or serves to inspire a person on their road to an achievable goal in a more realistic manner. > Diana Spencer appears to have been a dear and well-intentioned young woman, > though no intellect. She bore healthy children, whom I'm sure she loved. > But Americans' excessive and nearly worshipful fascination with her is a > bad sign, a sign that we've lost track of our own dream. Our heroines ought > to be intelligent, energetic women who make their own fortunes, and their > own celebrity. Instead, we sneer at our own self-made millionaires as > "nouveau upstarts" and "greedy exploiters of the oppressed working class." Yes, but the reason that Diana is so popular is that The Dream (TM) came true for her, and then, when The Dream (TM) turned sour, because she would not play her role as accepting pawn, she walked away from it instead of debasing herself. Then, she overcame the powerful pressures against her, as well as her own inner frailty, and became the best person/Princess that was possible for her, choosing to make the best use of the position and attention that was impossible to avoid. > If the magazines brought us stories of women who started small businesses > (often with their husbands), and MADE THEMSELVES rich and successful, we > might truly be inspired to save that extra $20, to take on a part-time job, > to start a little part-time enterprise of our own. It is true that the stories of the average working joe who lives frugally and uses his/her money to put a dozen children of others through college gets short play in the press. Likewise, the Sam Walton and Bill Gates types of stories don't get constant exposure as do the fairy tale stories of the rich and famous. But I think that all of these dreams, of varying realistic levels, serve a function. > But the hidden message > of all the coverage of the Dianas of this world is, "You can never have > this, because you're not of the right blood. So don't even try; just put in > your eight hours on the assembly line, and then have a few beers and look > at the pretty pictures of the princess, close your eyes and dream that you > were there ... until the alarm clock rings and it's time to trudge back to > work." Yes, if that is the "hidden message" that you want to see. The reality is that we ignore reality in many ways, hence our _ability_ to dream of things which may be somewhat (or totally) unrealistic. We construct our own "hidden messages" according to our desires and needs. > WHICH dreams we choose to indulge, can determine the course of our lives. I very much agree with you on this. The same applies to our choice of role models, as well. Of equal or greater importance is our ability to emulate the best characteristics, values, etc., of our role models or our dreams, and to eschew the qualities that are unrealistic for us, or of mean spirit. Perhaps Diana could have made a _better_ job of using her knowledge, talents and social position to make the world a better place for her having been in it, but to whom of us does this _not_ apply? Precious few, I suspect. I think that your throwing a realistic perspective on the overblown fairy tale serves a valid purpose. It is for this type of realism that I read your works. I don't think your perspective is a threat to those who need to hold on to a more unrealistic view for their own purposes, since our minds are pretty good at creating our own revisionist history when it suits our purpose. As a matter of fact, your column gave me a wider base of knowledge and perspective in viewing Diana's life and history. All in all, I hope that more people choose Princess Diana as a role model of sorts, than choose Diane Feinstein. Toto "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" http://bureau42.base.org/public/xenix "WebWorld & the Mythical Circle of Eunuchs" http://bureau42.base.org/public/webworld "The Final Frontier" http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/carljohn

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Usenet Propagation Sucks
by Mark Hedges 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mike Duvos <enoch(a)zipcon.net> wrote Fri 29 Aug 1997: >Theoretically, I was under the impression that Usenet consisted of a large >number of machines, which compared their news spools continuously, with >each giving the other all articles that were not on both machines. > >Practically, this seems to work a lot less well than the designers >envisioned. In practice, it's really tough to keep a good feed going. We happen to keep the alt.anon* stuff for a longer period of time. We've started keeping individual groups longer as requested by readers. This makes them happy, for the most part. It needs so much disk! We have two incoming server feeds and three outgoing and people still complain that their groups don't have enough messages for their liking. Plus the damn thing's history database has to be rebuilt twice a month, and at night lest the customers come for blood when they don't get their daily usenet, and it never seems to go right without someone (me namely) sleeping in the office keeping it company during the process. A server would need terabyte upon terabyte to store a good archive of Usenet for, say, the past year. I wonder if the designers could forsee Usenet's explosive popularity, or the taxing load the spammers place. Mark Hedges

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"700 HITS Per Day!"
by delta7＠onlinebiz.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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