December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: corporate bashing
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Fred seems to have been slipping through my filters in recent days. Though I usually trash any message containing a reference to him, I thought that this latest escalation into the ionosphere of net-sillies begs to be brought to heel... On 24 Dec 95 at 17:20, Fred Cohen wrote: > and that anonymity should be used as an escape from > responsibility for what they do and say. If you want to > remain free to speak your mind, you have to become > responsible in at least two ways: > > 1 - You must top slandering people. > 2 - You must stop using anonymity as a way to avoid being > responsible. > > When I say must, I am not intending to mean anything less. > If the cypherpunks continue to do these two things, they will > rapidly find that they are doing more to destroy all of our > rights to free speech in the Internet than they ever did to > encourage freedom of expression. There are several things wrong with this, but first, just on the surface: Fred has now dropped his cyberdrawers and stands before us displaying the ugly engine of his manhood, the handle by which he maintains a grip on his pointless existence. He reveals himself to be yet another in that small, tired parade of self-appointed lightning rods -- people with so little of import in their lives that they have to resort to trolling for what they can claim are offenses against them, then flex the borrowed, imagined musculature of mindless law to rise in self-righteous threats of exercise of vindictive wrath. This is worse than "My big brother will kick your ass!" It is like a 90-pound weakling going to the beach with a large but retarded cousin in tow. The idea is to troll to get sand kicked in his face, then to point to the drooling cousin and use him as a lever to gain and exercise control over the hapless dupes of the ruse. Freds have existed on BBS's, and before the technological age in most small clubs and societies. In the Internet they show up in newsgroups and on mailing lists, and when crossed they ALWAYS descend to threats of legal action. So predictable, so utterly dull and unimaginative, they are like the party guest who has that inappropriate laugh, who doesn't seem to notice that pairs of people are together, who approaches people oddly and, in the end, makes a scene and reveals himself to be a complete fruitcake. Unmoderated fission looking for a place to fulminate. Fred, you've come to the wrong place. If you want to be ignored, just pack your terminal and stay home with the sitcoms. Noone asked you to interject your trolls and threats here. You invited yourself, and whatever you are suffering is of your own creation. Speaking of Freds brings me to a more interesting aspect of this nonsense: How do we know there is only one Fred? Fred doesn't sign his messages... oh-oh. This attack of deja vu feels like I've had it before. Why do I get the feeling that Fred is about to embarrass himself terribly by blurting out some of the poison that fills his soul? Let him who hath not slandered cast the first suit. We Jurgar Din (that will have to suffice: I do not yet live in a free country) +"The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone. It is to the+ +vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no + +election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now + +too late to retire from the contest." -Patrick Henry 1775 + -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBVAwUBMN8TVEjw99YhtpnhAQFDngH/cTzEDHzxYZ7Z9jOmoALxaIdxpgpvlIr+ /zsZndz1KfQlqUunH5i7YsJS7tm/XOsrRcWQgKQEr9WaI8wRgrqh5g== =Hl/v -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Bidzos on C-Span 2
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:41 PM 12/25/95, John Young wrote: >If you care, Jim is smoothly hawking a beautiful world of >easy-going crypto on C-Span 2, at least in NYC at 5:35 PM. Actually, he did a pretty good job of towing the er, party line. Lots of good opportunities for analogical heavy lifting in arguments with statists. "Suppose you had a very strong door which protected your whole house and made it inviolate. Suppose then the government then wanted to have copy of your door keys on the off-chance you turn into a crack dealer someday...", etc. Except for the fact that he wants Uncle to protect his patents, that is... ;-). This was done on December 8 at the Commonwealth Club in SFO. Were there c'punks there? The questions sounded like it... He also said something about some kind of magic badge with biometric/PK software which would allow you to work anywhere there was a network connection. Reminiscent of our discussions about Xerox PARC's ubiquitous computing stuff, Gerry O'Neil's 2081, etc. I feel a rant coming on about this "information toaster" stuff, Metcalfe's fight with Alsop in Infoworld, etc. Guess I'll start it tomorrow. Take cover everybody... Merry Christmas! Cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Re: Only accepting e-mail from known parties
by tallpaul＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

How about one-time electronic stamps. I generate a large-ish number of long-ish random numbers. I store these into a data base on my system. I send one e-stamp to all of the people I want to communicate with and vice versa. Each person uses the e-stamp in the header or some other area of their message to me easily accessible to my mail bot. My bot reads the e-stamp and then checks the data base to see if the stamp is valid. If not, then /dev/null. If so, then: a) send the message to me; b) delete the used e-stamp from the data base; c) send a confirmation of received message with a new e-stamp in it. Thoughts? (I see one problem with this but it should be able to be worked out once the basic method is agreed to). --tallpaul

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Re: bashing (fwd)
by Daniel Miskell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Allan, shut the hell up. This thread is truely unnecessary, can we just let it die? Munster --- _________________________________ *!Cheese Doctrine:!* Though cultured over time, and aged to perfection, one must not yield to produce mold. One must also not belittle themselves by conforming to the "whiz", but melt over the unprocessed ideas of Ghuda. _________________________________

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Re: Only accepting e-mail from known parties
by tallpaul＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Dec 25, 1995 14:53:19, 'Adam Shostack <adam(a)lighthouse.homeport.org>' wrote: > The basic problem is that (personal) spam is a social, not a >technical problem. If someone wants to annoy you via the internet, >they can do so. You can raise the cost of their annoying you, but you >need to be careful not to make it difficult to talk to you. > I agree in many ways. On a personal level, I am far more interested in the *social* are of this form of privacy. It is more a problem of the data-hermit than privacy. And in a society increasingly generating narcissistists, I see the problem getting worse. Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab can sing the praises of the personal e-newspaper with personal filters to cut out everything uninteresting while culling the world new feeds for desired information. I see this feeding into the narcissitism problem. E.G. Imagine two people who "feel" that members of the other gender are "only interested in one thing." Each wakes up in the morning and looks at their personal e-paper. She reads nothing of particularly nasty rapes, serial rapists at large, rapists who have been convicted, and rapists who an uncaring pro-male system has let out to rape again (i.e. been found not guilty). He reads nothing of particularly nasty robberies of men by women, serial robberies by prostitutes, female robbers who have been convicted, and robbers who an uncaring pro-female system has let out to rob again. Both believe that their custom filtered feeds are the *real* events going on in the world and are far more accurate than any non-customized news feed. I hope nobody takes this as a generic attack on the privacy issues that the list is devoted to. I am a great supporter of privacy and pro-privacy tek. But I see myself as a realist on privacy issues, not as a privacy-utopian or a privacy-dystopian. We live in a post-Faustian world. It is divided into two groups of people. First are those who understand the post-Faustian character and devote themselves to getting used to it and even having fun with the new opportunities while understanding that the new world also generates new problems (like furthering data-narcicism). Second are those classic-reactionary forces (from all parts of the political spectrum) who whine about how the post-Faustian world is personally unfair to them and how everybody in the world has a personal obligation to them to move the world back to its pre-Faustian origins. --tallpaul PS to Tim May: I understand your posts on material that is off-topic. I usually agree with your posts. But I see the issues I discussed above as far more on topic (even if highly mediated) than, say, the ongoing discourse on the differences between an Army Captain and a Navy Captain.

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Encryption Discrimination from Sun
by mpd＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I was just browsing through the rules for the million dollar contest just announced by Sun Microsystems to encourage the writing of killer applets in Java, Sun's new architecture- independent program format. The URL is http://javacontest.sun.com/rules/index.html in case anyone is interested. While reading the contest rules, I found the following one particularly interesting... "No entries may include encryption as a feature or part of an applet." This was made even more curious by the later revelation that one of the criteria for judging entries was... "The applet should be able to transfer information from one point to another, with no possibility of interception or other interference during the process." Doubtless the reason Sun nixed encryption is because this is an international contest, and they did not want to deal with legal hassles involving international borders and different laws in every country. Nonetheless, they seem to have missed an excellent opportunity to encourage the migration of privacy software into the new realm they are creating. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd(a)netcom.com $ via Finger. $

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Bidzos on C-Span 2
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If you care, Jim is smoothly hawking a beautiful world of easy-going crypto on C-Span 2, at least in NYC at 5:35 PM. At a session in San Francisco, probably a recording. Jingle jangle.

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Bidzos Coda
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Bidzos show was recorded 12/8/95 at the Commonwealth Club in SF. It finished here at about 5:45 PM. Only caught a piece. Jim was answering written questions about a range of crypto and Internet security issues from the audience. Among other things, he says they're working on an encryption program "closely tied to the OS of portables, to protect the data if the machine is lost or stolen." He also said, "don't throw tomatoes," but they're doing something with "private key escrow" for those who want to provide access to their encrypted material in case of death or other emergency. Maybe some other idle sinner saw more, or was at the realtime tomato-chucker.

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(cpx) Re: Bidzos on C-Span 2
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:41 PM 12/25/95, John Young wrote: >If you care, Jim is smoothly hawking a beautiful world of >easy-going crypto on C-Span 2, at least in NYC at 5:35 PM. Actually, he did a pretty good job of towing the er, party line. Lots of good opportunities for analogical heavy lifting in arguments with statists. "Suppose you had a very strong door which protected your whole house and made it inviolate. Suppose then the government then wanted to have copy of your door keys on the off-chance you turn into a crack dealer someday...", etc. Except for the fact that he wants Uncle to protect his patents, that is... ;-). This was done on December 8 at the Commonwealth Club in SFO. Were there c'punks there? The questions sounded like it... He also said something about some kind of magic badge with biometric/PK software which would allow you to work anywhere there was a network connection. Reminiscent of our discussions about Xerox PARC's ubiquitous computing stuff, Gerry O'Neil's 2081, etc. I feel a rant coming on about this "information toaster" stuff, Metcalfe's fight with Alsop in Infoworld, etc. Guess I'll start it tomorrow. Take cover everybody... Merry Christmas! Cheers, Bob -------------------------------------------------- The e$ lists are brought to you by: Making Commerce Convenient (tm) - Oki Advanced Products - Marlboro, MA Value-Checker(tm) smart card reader= http://www.oki.com/products/vc.html Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info(a)hyperion.co.uk See your name here! Be a charter sponsor for e$pam, e$, and Ne$ws! e-mail rah(a)shipwright.com for details... -------------------------------------------------

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Re: (cpx) Re: Bidzos on C-Span 2
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Oops. You can shoot me now... Sorry, folks! e$pam first and let god sort 'em out. Fixing that little problem this week, as a matter of fact. Cheers, Bob ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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