December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by Alex de Joode 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Belgian TV (the dutch language channel) has a page on teletext (Ceefax) [I don't think US tv has that feature] stating that the French backbone is thinking about blocking sites that provide information that they deem ethicly unacceptable, like sites that promote the denial of Konzentrations Lagers, the extreme right, pornografic and pedophile sites. [page 128 BRTN, for those who can receive BRT]

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Re: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail"
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>They probably should do, the NSA was critical in ensuring the demise >of the USSR and in maintaining stability throughout the cold war period. Please explain.

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Subscription
by MatriX Spider 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'd like to subscribed to this mailing list. Thanks for your time.

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BAA_bab
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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Hash trees and bank solvency.
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I publish this trivial and obvious idea, because if I do not, publish it, some clown will surely patent it. (Has the patent on chewing gum and walking at the same time been taken yet. The more outrageous patents the patent office issues, the more power and influence they get and the more funds they recieve.) One of the great hazards with banking, and with financial services similar to banking, is that the financial institution has the opportunity to steal a great deal of money. One solution to this problem is government auditors. Government inspectors, unlike private auditors, can force their way in, in the early hours of the morning, and as each bank employee turns up, take him to a separate cubicle and interogate him with a gun in one hand and an account book in the other. This makes it difficult for the financial institution to fabricate a misleading picture of its financial situation. A hash tree can provide proof to a banks customers that the bank only has the amount outstanding that it claims to have, without the need for gunmen to check the totals. At the close of month, the customer accounts are orgnized into a hash tree with the totals forming part of the hash Each node is a hash of the two nodes below it, and the amounts of money in the two nodes, and the sum of those two amounts. Each customer can then see that the money the bank owes him is a part of the total the bank claims to owe. If a customer discovers he is not part of the hash tree, he knows the bank, or financial institution, understates its indebtedness; No auditors, government or otherwise, required. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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When do patents expire on Rabin's public key scheme?
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

When do patents expire on Rabin's public key scheme? RSA claims that the Diffie Helman patent, which expires on the 29th of April, 1997, covers all public key cryptography. ElGamal and Rabin are unpatented. Schmeier says that ElGamal will be free of patent restrictions after that, but he says nothing about Rabin. Rabin's encryption and signatures take up the same amout of space as RSA signatures, and encryption, but ElGamal takes up twice the space, thus Rabin seems preferable to ElGamal. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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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PIDAHO and EUDORA PRO 2.2
by jdoe-0007＠alpha.c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In response to the "what has John Doe got that PIDAHO doesn't" messages I tried to PIDAHO v2.6b. I am unable to make it work. Messages from PIDAHO can not be sent to the selected and OnLine EUDORA PRO application. I also suspect that it has something to do with the fact PIDAHO is a 16bit app and EUDORA PRO v2.2 is 32bit. I am running it on a WIN95 internal tcp/ip stack to a dial up ppp connection. Any help and or advice would be sincerely appreciated. John Doe -0007

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Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:53 1/28/96, Alex de Joode wrote: >Belgian TV (the dutch language channel) has a page on teletext (Ceefax) >[I don't think US tv has that feature] stating that the French backbone >is thinking about blocking sites that provide information that they deem >ethicly unacceptable, like sites that promote the denial of Konzentrations >Lagers, the extreme right, pornografic and pedophile sites. Wonder how long before they will include gereral purpose proxies in the proposed ban. We should start a "banned websites pool". If a site gets banned, the controversial content will be mirrored at all other sites. There are enough ISPs on this list to make that happen. Will they have the courage? -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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Re: RANT: When hi-tech is a hinderance (freedom w/in limits)
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:48 AM 1/28/96 +0100, Anonymous wrote: > > A short 'rant' on techno-dinosaurism... > > Or look back to the 13th century when European soldiers were > high-tech wearing tons of armor and used cross bows. it was > imposing high-tech for the time, but they couldn't move fast or > fire arrows quickly... and they were skagmeat for Mongols > who were comparatively low-tech. This is incorrect: The Mongols had superior technology to the people they conquered. In particular Mongol arrows could penetrate armor more effectively than anybody else's arrows, and Mongol siege engines could level city walls far more effectively than anybody else's siege engine. It might well seem strange that nomads had higher technology, but urban civilization of that era was in a twilight era and suffered great technological stagnation and regression. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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: German service cuts Net access
by Damaged Justice 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To momentarily flog a dead horse, banning content only makes it more desirable. Fortunately, the economic aspect doesn't seem to hold true for now; i.e., when real world objects are banned, they become more expensive to access (cf. the artificially inflated prices of heroin, cocaine, LSD, etc). Information, OTOH, so far does not seem subject to this cause-and-effect rule. Italics: So Far. The less regulated and more diverse the net becomes, the more the relative prices for commodities (disk space, CPU cycles, bandwidth) will accurately reflect their "true" value at any given moment. Anyway, my original point was just to remind everyone of what they should already know: namely, that people may not care about not doing something until they are told that they cannot, at which point they will move heaven and earth to Do the Deed. Statists (and a lot of child psychologists) call it "obstinate" or "defiant". ObAside: If you haven't yet, read the latest DSM (the holy writ of the so-called "mental health" profession). Ugly stuff. Who is allowed to define "normal"? Who profits from the creation of such definitions and labelling of individuals? -- http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~frogfarm ...for the best in unapproved information Tell your friends 'n neighbors you read this on the evil pornographic Internet "Where one burns books, one will also burn people eventually." -Heinrich Heine People and books aren't for burning. No more Alexandrias, Auschwitzs or Wacos.

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