December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Comments on MicroPayments and the Web
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: "Mark M." <markm(a)voicenet.com> > I think it would be interesting to see how copyright law will be applied to the > Web if micropayments ever become popular. Would memory or disk caching be > considered fair use? If so, then people could just set up a very large disk > cache and maybe delete it every month or so. It would also be a pretty neat > hack to use a proxy that only cached pages that charged micropayments. > Companies would not make a lot of money from things like this. If disk caching > was not considered to be fair use, people would still turn it on anyway. Where does the money come from to run this proxy? Consider two sites, one which acts as a proxy and cache but which charges something under a penny per page, and another which acts for free. Won't the for-pay site be able to afford a larger disk, more servers, and better net connections? It will be a superior service. Micropayments will allow new services and improved quality over what we have today where we have to rely on charity and advertising as motivations for much of what we find on the web. Hal

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Re: Report from Germany on "backdoor" net-censorship
by um＠c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A short update from Germany: The "ICTF" attorney has half-retracted their announcement on Usenet. "ICTF" is going to be only an advisory group for ECO members. They will make recommendations about newsgroups that might be 'dangerous' to carry, and will only react on individual articles when they are informed about articles that would be illegal to keep on the news servers. The "ICTF" plans to use a modified Cancel message format that will only affect their members' servers. He says that the press release was not addressed to the net (well, they tried their best to hide it...) but to journalists with no clue. Of course, political harm has been done, but I am glad that the Social Democratic Party's net expert has severly critizised this censorship attempt in a press release and on Usenet. For those who can read German (if you can't you'll sure find the most important news on Declan's international censorship page), I have put up a web page on "ICTF" at http://www.thur.de/ulf/zensur/ In September, we will see what they are really going to do other than issuing bogus press releases.

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Re: PBS show
by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:26 PM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >I caught the show and thought it was pretty good, all in all. I thought so too? When is part II coming on? (I hope it didn't come right after that, I had to run.) Next week? >I personally despise the term "nerd," but I won't get into that here. Ahhh... it makes them happy. What I find most unnapealing is the unabashed, "I don't have a life, I live with a computer" mentality. I was rather taken with that mentality myself for a bit (and I'm sure it contributed to the RSI), but even then I would have found it painfully difficult to only associate with one "culture" and only do one thing all day long. Maybe "nerds" over do it, but they do do other things, like play magic, or assasin, D&D, or whatever. <grin> And the most interesting/brilliant computer people that I run into _have_ other interests beyond computers. >first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal >computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked >too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.) The thing that startled me, was the contrary temporal perspective. Watching it I felt like, "Hey! I remeber that, I used an Apple II in kindergarden to write LOGO," or though I didn't have an Altair, I had a Bailey Arcade. No one here probably remembers, but it was a kick ass game playing (the best at the time) and programmable machine. I remember belonging to a mailing-list club and getting a thick envolope of type written code that I'd dutifully punch into a calculator like entry pad. (All ~20 keys for quadrupely overloaded!!) The cool thing was it had cool (c-64 like) peeks and pokes and you could call a plethora of the pregenerated graphical things from your own code. Then there was always saving it to the audio tape... <ack> Ok, so that is the nostalgia bit (hey I remember that), the other bit was a, wow that was a long time ago. Looking at PC-history always feels like a contradiction in time. _______________________ Regards, Laziness is no more than the habit of resting before you get tired. -Jules Renard Joseph Reagle http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html reagle(a)mit.edu E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E

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Re: PBS show
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:26 PM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: > >Most of the portrayals of Silicon Valley history was pretty accurate, >especially the 1975-78 "Homebrew Computer Club" days. (I used to go to >about every other one of these, mainly in '77-78, where I sometimes passed >out free samples of the 8080 and stuff like that. A friend of mine at the >time was one of the Apple II motherboard designers, and another was the >first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal >computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked >too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.) But the Apple II WAS a toy! Non-detached keyboard, poor placement of reset key, upper-case only, 40-character wide display, odd microprocessor, VERY SMALL capacity floppies (which were very slow as well), as well as a hostile legal situation regarding the building of clones. Hell, they even objected to other companies building boards which plugged into the bus! Personally, I soured on the Apple II when I followed EDN magazine's attempt to build an engineering system with it, called "Project Indecomp." They ran into a boneheaded design problem with the Apple, due to improper clock synchronization and bus timing. They gave up the project, concluding that the Apple II was brain-dead. BTW, Intel shares a substantial proportion of the blame for Apple's choice of the 6502. The decision was made, I've heard, because Intel was still trying to get $200 for a slow 8080, while Western Design Center (?) wanted only about $20 for a 6502. And by refusing to build Masatoshi (?) Shima's design for the Z-80, they totally lost the race for the 8-bit PC world. The Z-80 turned into the highest-volume 8-bit microprocessor by far, leaving both the 8080 and the 8085 in the dust, and even the 6502. I have other, even harsher word for the design of the IBM PC. Oh yes, the Mac sucks bigtime as well, although primarily for legal reasons. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: Tripwire and SATAN for Linux
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:25 AM 6/13/96 -0700, Steve O wrote: >Hey guys, > Can any one point to where i can get Tripwire and SATAN for Linux? >a friend is in dire need. thanks... >From the notes passed out at Venema and Farmer's "Security Auditing and Risk Analysis" class: Archive locations for important auditing software: COPS http://www.fish.com/security/cops Crack ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/security/ ipsend (part of the IP Filter package) ftp://coombs.an.edu.au/pub/net/kernel/ip-fil3.0.4.tar.gz lsof ftp://coast.cs.perdue.edu/pub/tools/lsof SATAN ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/security/satan.tar.Z Tiger ftp://net.tamu.edu/pub/security/TAMU Also try: CERT ftp://cert.org Gene Spafford http:/coast.cs.perdue.edu Wietse Venma ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/security ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The Internet may fairly be | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | regarded as a never-ending | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | worldwide conversation. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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No Subject
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"We're sitting here watching the sun rise for the first time and we've never even seen the sun" -- Rush Limbaugh about the Internet on today's show. Rush also opined that it was impossible to regulate. DCF

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President Clinton's Statement on the CDA Decision
by jseiger＠cdt.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What's more interesting is what it doesn't say. He is not at all definitive on whether the gvt will file an appeal... Jonah -- THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ___________________________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release June 12, 1996 STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT The Justice Department is reviewing today's three judge panel court decision on the Communications Decency Act. The opinion just came down today, and the statute says we have twenty days to make an appeal. I remain convinced, as I was when I signed the bill, that our Constitution allows us to help parents by enforcing this Act to prevent children from being exposed to objectionable material transmitted though computer networks. I will continue to do everything I can in my Administration to give families every available tool to protect their children from these materials. For example, we vigorously support the development and widespread availability of products that allow both parents and schools to block objectionable materials from reaching computers that children use. And we also support the industry's accelerating efforts to rate Internet sites so that they are compatible with these blocking techniques. -30-30-30- * PROTECT THE INTERNET AND THE FUTURE OF FREE SPEECH IN THE INFORMATION AGE * Join the legal challenge against the Communications Decency Act! For More Information, Visit the CIEC Web Page http://www.cdt.org/ciec/ or email <ciec-info(a)cdt.org> -- Jonah Seiger, Policy Analyst Center for Democracy and Technology <jseiger(a)cdt.org> 1634 Eye Street NW, Suite 1100 Washington, DC 20006 (v) +1.202.637.9800 PGP Key via finger (f) +1.202.637.0968 http://www.cdt.org/ http://www.cdt.org/homes/jseiger/

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Re: PBS show
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:35 PM 6/13/96, jim bell wrote: >At 10:26 PM 6/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: ... >>first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal >>computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked >>too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.) > >But the Apple II WAS a toy! Non-detached keyboard, poor placement of reset >key, upper-case only, 40-character wide display, odd microprocessor, VERY >SMALL capacity floppies (which were very slow as well), as well as a hostile >legal situation regarding the building of clones. Hell, they even objected >to other companies building boards which plugged into the bus! Compared to my SOL, the Apple II would've been more useful, in retrospect. As to the 40-character display, that was the norm in those days. (My SOL, and certainly the other machines available to home users at that time, had only a 40-character-wide display...when in worked.) The comments about the floppies (" VERY SMALL capacity floppies (which were very slow as well") is even more off-base. In fact, it was probably Apple's ability to put _any_ kind of floppies on the Apple II, for a reasonable price, that ensured its success. Processor Technology was effectively sunk by delays in getting its "Helios" 8-inch floppy drive working. The bigger and faster 8-inchers may have been technically superior to Apple's "Integrated Woz Machine" drivers and 5-inch floppies, but Apple was shipping. That counts for a _lot_. >BTW, Intel shares a substantial proportion of the blame for Apple's choice >of the 6502. The decision was made, I've heard, because Intel was still >trying to get $200 for a slow 8080, while Western Design Center (?) wanted >only about $20 for a 6502. You need to check your claims more carefully. There are always many reasons a chip is selected for a design. >And by refusing to build Masatoshi (?) Shima's design for the Z-80, they >totally lost the race for the 8-bit PC world. The Z-80 turned into the >highest-volume 8-bit microprocessor by far, leaving both the 8080 and the >8085 in the dust, and even the 6502. Again, your understanding of the history of Intel, Zilog, and the industry in general is lacking. The design and process technology resources were instead committed to the 8086, and history is rather clear about the wisdom of doing that. Intel is now capitalized at something like $50-70 billion, and Zilog is no longer on the radar screen. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Clinton Backs Internet 'Decency Act'
by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At odds with what gore said..... > WASHINGTON (Reuter) - President Clinton says the >Communications Decency Act is a legal way to protect children >from online obscenity, despite a three-judge panel's ruling that >blocks large parts of the act. > ``I remain convinced, as I was when I signed the bill, that >our Constitution allows us to help parents by enforcing this Act >to prevent children from being exposed to objectionable material >transmitted through computer networks,'' Clinton said in a >statement Wednesday. > He said he would continue to work to shield children from >such material and supports ``the development and widespread >availability of products that allow both parents and schools to >block objectionable materials from reaching computers that >children use.'' > Clinton also applauded the communications industry's efforts >to rate Internet sites so they are compatible with blocking >techniques. > The act, signed into law as part of the sweeping >Telecommunications Act of 1996, prohibits the distribution to >minors of indecent or ``patently offensive'' materials over >computer networks. > The three judges issued an injunction blocking portions of >the Communications Decency Act, but let stand prohibitions >against obscenity and child pornography and types of speech that >are not constitutionally protected. > > > _______________________ Regards, Laziness is no more than the habit of resting before you get tired. -Jules Renard Joseph Reagle http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html reagle(a)mit.edu E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E

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Zimmerman/Viacrypt
by Steve Reid 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Phil disagrees with ViaCrypts new "business" version of PGP which > apparently encrypts all messages with an employer-supplied public key > in addition to any specified by the employee. Looking at Denning's critique (pro-escrow rant) of the NCR crypto report, she mentioned that mutant version: [http://www.cosc.georgetown.edu/~denning/crypto/NRC.txt] "Other corporations are similarly adopting products with data recovery capabilities as they integrate encryption into their systems (even PGP comes with data recovery in Viacrypt's Business Edition)." IMHO Phil Zimmerman has good reason to object to the mutant version, if it's going to cause the PGP name to somehow endorse escrow. If there really is a demand for escrow, maybe cypherpunks could create a One Time Pad escrow service. Different custom 'keys' could be produced, depending on who's asking for the data... <G> ===================================================================== | Steve Reid - SysAdmin & Pres, EDM Web (http://www.edmweb.com/) | | Email: steve(a)edmweb.com Home Page: http://www.edmweb.com/steve/ | | PGP (2048/9F317269) Fingerprint: 11C89D1CD67287E68C09EC52443F8830 | | -- Disclaimer: JMHO, YMMV, TANSTAAFL, IANAL. -- | ===================================================================:)

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