December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption Technology
by Arun Mehta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 19:36 11/08/96 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > >Bart Croughs writes: >> But there is another axiom of economics which the >> nationalist/socialist can use for his case against the free movement of >> capital. This axiom states that the wages of workers depend on the >> amount of capital invested. The more capital invested, the higher the >> wages are. > >This must be some new axiom of economics that I had not heard of. > >> If American companies are moving capital to Third World >> countries because of the low wages in these countries, then the workers >> in the Third World will of course be better off. But in the US, the >> amount of capital will be lowered. > >???? > >> So the American workers will be able to get other jobs, but these >> jobs will pay less, because of the diminished amount of capital in >> the US. > >This is truly one of the oddest economic theses I've seen in years. Indeed. Bart makes a very remarkable assumption, which is that the total amount of capital in the fastest growing industry in human history is constant. As I mentioned in my note (which was a bit long by my standards, so you are forgiven if you haven't read it) software producers are software consumers as well. So, if the software industry grows in the world, it can only benefit the producers in the US, who make most of the compilers and sophisticated utilities that programmers need in order to develop software. The danger to the US software writer comes from another direction, one which this list is thoroughly familiar with: government policies, such as ITAR. Gilmore, I believe, plans to get the software written for secure Internet routing outside the US, to not fall foul of ITAR. As security, internet commerce and other applications needing crypto become a more important part of software development, others might follow -- of course it won't hurt that the move reduces costs, but that will not be the prime motivation. This will not be the first industry that the US government developed and nurtured, only to hand on a platter to foreign competitors: CNC machine tools is an example I am familiar with. For long, the writing was on the wall, but when the debacle came, it was swift. If I'm not mistaken, the Japanese share in the US market of CNC machining centers increased from 2% to 51% over a 2-year period. The problem there, at least partly, was that government encouraged machine tool R&D and industry to cater to the needs of defense, rather than the rest of us. Sounds familiar? So, while US software isn't in any danger of losing quite that badly, as I have explained, if the US loses revenue and capital in this sector, it will only have its own government to blame. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta(a)cerfnet.com for public key

1 0

Re: FCC_ups
by Brian D Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Disclaimer: All opinions are my own, I do not speak for Ameritech or it's alliance partners. Lucky Green writes: >I am glad to see some movement in this area. I designed a similar >system for a previous employer of mine. But the real choke point >is the local loop. As of this day, the local telos still have a de >facto monopoly in the local markets. The new competitors (the same >old Phone Company) that we will see in the near future seem to >show no desire to deliver the really interesting services that are >now possible. They long distance carriers about to enter the local >markets plan to offer the same old stuff at a (perhaps) somewhat >lower price. First I would like to mention Lucky that I always enjoy your posts. Second I would like to say that as I have mentioned previously, the RBOC I work for filed for complete unbundling of the local loop in March of 93. We are not the one's holding up the show. >The company I used to work for has technology capable of >delivering a 10 Mb/s Ethernet plus 100 ISDN B channels to your >home, using the very same wires already in your wall. Keep this in >mind next time you hear what great new services the local telcos >are about to offer. Then demand better. 10 Mb/s ethernet and 100 ISDN B channels (64k each)? I would certainly like to here more! Unfortunately as I have also previously pointed out, point-to-point copper is a thing of the past, it is rare and expensive now. The current fiber-to-the-curb standard involves "slick 96" muxes which use 4 framed T-1's (1.536 Mb/s) to provide 96 voice channels. Thanks for the info. Brian

1 0

Re: US Power Outages
by ericd＠shop.internet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:02 PM 8/11/96, Bill Stewart wrote: >It surprises me how little these systems appear to be monitored. >It took some hours for them to decide that the brush fire on the >California border didn't cause the system to shut down; >you'd think they'd know quickly that the subsystem shut itself down >or disconnected from the grid or whatever because of reason #17... The fire "story" was, I guess, a result of excessive media fodder. (whatever sells the headlines....) Example: This morning (Monday 7:00am PST) STATION A: Replayed a recorded press briefing, with a head from PG&E, stating that the cause is *not* yet known, however it *MIGHT* have something to do with the excessive loads/demands on the system during the high temp season. (AC units running, etc..) -- minutes later -- STATION B: A newsperson *read* the news. This person stated, "At a recent press briefing, a PG&E official said the outage *WAS* caused by excessive loads. (quoting the same briefing that I just heard, from the source, on STATION A) Thank you Mass Media! Eric Reminds me of the aftermath of the last large SF quake. I lived in Santa Cruz at the time. After the quake we all kicked back and had a large yard party to kill the time. An, un-named, news network was broadcasting, nation wide, live telephone calls from people in the SF area. One call was from a person in Santa Cruz, or so he said. He told the news network, and at the same time live to the nation, that Santa Cruz was completely leveled, dead bodies everywhere, and only a handfull of people seemed to have survive. Needless to say my Grandparents in Tennessee were not to excited... ----------------------------------------------------- Eric Davis ericd(a)cyberfarm.com Co-Founder MediaCast: http://www.mediacast.com/ -----------------------------------------------------

1 0

Re: Read; NOW
by Chris Adams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 11 Aug 96 23:24:24 -0800, unix_code(a)geocities.com wrote: > Hi I'm Unix Code and have a few things to ask...(it may not go with >Cryptography but go ahead and read) I won't say anything if you won't... # Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> - Webpages for sale! Se habla JavaScript! # Automatically receive my resume or PGPKEY by sending email with a subject # of 'send PGPKEY' or 'send resume'. Capitalization counts so be careful! # Web site: http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp

1 0

Name search -- Enigma owner
by David Lesher 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There was a person in .ch with with several Enigmas, including a four-rotor Naval model. I think his name was ?Fro....? Does anyone recall the person I mean? -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz(a)nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

1 0

Re: Rumors of death of Anguilla Data are greatly exagerated.
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:22 AM 8/12/96 -0400, Vincent Cate wrote: > > >Think your lawyer would be willing to give his name and a statement on >this? If a cypherpunk ever got in trouble and could say, "I was told by >the lawyer XYZZY this was legal", it might help. :-) > > -- Vince I didn't say it was legal. I said it wasn't fraud. DCF

1 0

Re: A ban on cryptography?
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:53 AM 8/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: > > `(l) It shall be unlawful for any person to teach or demonstrate the >use of cryptographic systems, or to distribute by any means information >pertaining to, in whole or in part, the construction of digital ciphers, >if the person intends or knows, that such cryptographic materials or >information will be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that >constitutes a Federal criminal offense or a criminal purpose affecting >interstate commerce.'. Luckily, the nature of the Web is such that publicly placing something on a server would probably never be held to fulfill your or Di Fi's intent language. You are clearly making it available to all comers. No specific customer at all since anyone can read it. DCF

1 0

re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption Technology
by Bart Croughs 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sandy Sandfort wrote: >On Sun, 11 Aug 1996, Bart Croughs wrote: >> If American companies are moving capital to Third World >> countries because of the low wages in these countries, then the >> workers in the Third World will of course be better off. But in >> the US, the amount of capital will be lowered. So the American >> workers will be able to get other jobs, but these jobs will pay >> less, because of the diminished amount of capital in the US. >The fallacy in this argument is the assumption that because some >American capital moves overseas, there will be less capital >available in the US for investment/wages. It doesn't contemplate >infusion of foreign capital investments in American industries >that have a competitive advantage over their foreign competition. At least you agree that wages are determined by the amount of capital invested! As to your argument, I don't see why the movement of American capital overseas would lead to the infusion of foreign capital investments in American industries. It seems to me that these two processes work independently. If they do work independently, then the movement of American capital overseas will lead to less capital in the U.S. Bart Croughs

1 0

Advice from a CPSR conference organizer on conferences
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Given various people on here interested in organizing cryptography conferences, I thought the below would be interesting. -Allen From: Phil Agre <pagre(a)weber.ucsd.edu> X-URL: http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/rre.html X-Mailing-List: <rre(a)weber.ucsd.edu> archive/latest/1259 Notes on organizing conferences Phil Agre August 1996 This article is adapted from the post mortem that I write immediately after organizing the 1994 CPSR Annual Meeting, together with notes to myself from other meetings I have been involved in organizing. Its purpose is to offer future organizers the benefit of our experience. I accepted the job of program chair because I wanted to develop my skills for organizing events, and I definitely learned some things along the way. One thing I learned is apparently very subtle, since I've never seen or heard of anybody explaining it. The professional world has a special way of defining identity: people are identified with issues. When I started planning the program, my initial approach was simply to start with the most dynamic individuals in the general area that CPSR covers. So I sent out a batch of e-mail messages to well-connected personages, asking them who we should get to speak. Alas, few of them were able to say anything very useful, saying (usually in a nice way) that they regarded my request as overly vague. I gather that one is supposed to decide first what issues to cover, and then ask who is associated with that issue. For example, "who are some good people to speak on the political aspects of building community networks?" Or, "who is a good person to speak on technology activism on issues affecting people with disabilities?" This is nearly the only form of question I could get answered. Even a simple variant like, "who has something fresh and original to say about topic X?" didn't work very well. It's as though everyone maintains a lookup table in their heads, indexing people to issues. Having started this way, some other problems then arise. Sometimes you can't get the number one speaker on a given issue to speak, so then you ask who else you might get, and you'll get some more names. It's good to ask whether so-and-so is a good speaker or not. Sometimes you'll hear someone say something bad (or something diplomatically irrelevant) about a potential speaker whom you haven't met, and such comments will probably weigh heavily with you, for the simple reason that it's a disaster to schedule an unskilled or irresponsible speaker on your program. This dynamic bothered me, since it seemed to have a built-in tendency to reinforce a single individual's standing even though other people might be equally talented; if someone already has a reputation as a speaker in a given area, those other people don't get invited to speak, so they can't develop reputations as speakers. I had a certain amount of success asking, "who deserves a chance to be heard on this issue?", and some people even volunteered the names of people who they felt deserved a chance. This made me feel better. Start early. You need to get your publicity out in time for monthly publications listing in their schedule. I don't know when precisely this is, since we didn't come close to making the deadline. I didn't start the publicity machinery for our October conference until we had every last speaker pinned down in early summer. Big mistake: people go on vacation in the summer, and your rate of progress in assembling the program will plummet starting in late June. Identify your prominent, featured speakers and get them pinned down first; they're the only ones you need to get your publicity under way. I found e-mail seductive; it's easy to publicize something to the whole net in a few days, so I conveniently forgot that large parts of the world don't read announcements on the net -- print publicity is still absolutely necessary. We had a professional PR person working for us. She works at UCSD in the PR office. She's perfectly good at her job, but I've learned some lessons for working with such people in the future. One is to clarify goals. My central goal was to get a lot of interesting people to attend our meeting; this meant PR aimed at obtaining advance publicity. UCSD's main goal, though, was to get lots of press coverage on the day of the meeting itself; this meant PR aimed at getting reporters to attend the meeting. These two goals are equally valid, but they happen on different schedules. Local advance publicity mostly happened in the three or four days before the meeting, and with a little effort we did well. We made some mistakes in the meeting brochure. One was that the brochure only mentioned the three main speakers, even though it had room for much more. This might not have been so bad, except that the three-line summaries of those three speakers' speeches all sounded pretty similar. I have no way of knowing how much difference this made to the final turnout, but I do think we should have taken more conscious care to identify broad categories of people we wanted in attendance, and then making sure each one sees something on the brochure that they find appealing. When this problem came up, we made a single-page (front and back of a green sheet of paper) version of the electronic meeting announcement, including the full program and registration information. We ended up distributing hundreds of these, and I am sure that they gave lots of people a good idea of what the organization is about. I made some mistakes when booking the speakers for the meeting. I don't regret any of the people we chose, though I ended up disagreeing with a couple of them much more intensely than I had thought I would. The problem was with financial matters. We had a $500-per-speaker budget for people who were coming from outside California, so we had to minimize the number of such people. The problem is that some speakers simply cannot attend for $500, since their travel expenses simply cannot be covered for $500. My response to this problem was denial: I just got vague and hoped it would go away. But of course it didn't. Some speakers took losses despite my clear statement of the $500 limit, and I should have been even clearer with them that they should book flights etc right away to ensure that their losses are not greater than they're happy with. The reason I didn't do these things was that I was focused on getting the people to accept our invitations, especially in one case where our first choice declined after weeks of hemming and hawing. (If you're invited to speak at a conference, please decide whether to accept right away.) One thing we did right was to send out a press release. The UCSD PR person wrote it. I thought that the press release, like all of the press coverage, tended to trivialize things with buzzwords like "access to the information superhighway". But I was repeatedly assured that that's how it is: you have to use words that people understand. Anyway, we sent our press release out on PR Newswire, and I mailed it to all of the local computer press. I also mailed it to an eccentric local newspaper that's distributed free in coffee houses, and they reprinted it verbatim. I found that San Diego has all kinds of free publications that I hadn't even heard of, including something called Terminal Velocity that's aimed at the cyberculture and comics crowd -- 40,000 circulation. Not to be sneezed at. One issue was the phone number to use in the press release -- where should people call for more information about the meeting? At first I used the CPSR number in Palo Alto since nobody here wanted to field a million phone calls. But this was a mistake. Lots of people don't want to call long distance, and once I broke down and started listing my own office phone number, I only got a couple dozen calls, including several calls from very interesting people. The only category of calls that bothered me was from people wanting technical help with their computers. Most of these calls were easy enough, since I could send them to local user groups, but one of them was extremely obnoxious. On the whole, being the contact person listed in these publications was a far more positive experience than I thought it would be. Another thing we did right was outreach. This was a principle of the meeting from the beginning. Think of the meeting as primarily an occasion for organizing. Call people on the phone, tell them about the meeting, and ask them who you should be speaking with. At the very beginning of the process, write a small announcement of the meeting and invite people to become involved and sent it out on the net; we got some excellent contacts this way. The Internet may not reach the masses yet, but we found that San Diego now has a pretty reasonable density of Internet penetration among computer people. Announcements about CPSR events here have reached all sorts of interesting people by being passed hand-to-hand through the net. We made dozens of phone calls along the way: computer user groups, Latino organizations, city government, political activists, commercial Internet providers, BBS operators, industry people, and so forth. People have heard about the "info highway", so your job is to get your message boiled down to something that sounds like your interlocutor's next step on their way to the net. Don't try to "sell" your organization or issue to someone who's not interested; rather, if they're already interested in the issues then make the meeting process tangible for them. We visited a number of computer user group meetings; I also called up the organizers of several such meetings and asked if they would be willing to announce the Annual Meeting, and sent them copies of the aforementioned "green sheet" schedule. Early on in the process, I organized a speaker series that Dave Noelle did good publicity for, making posters and sending them to various people and publications. Since the first speaker's topic was privacy, the "Reader" (free weekly tabloid) decided to feature her talk, and their article drew a few dozen people. We also sent the announcements out on the Internet, and each talk had at least a couple dozen people. At the beginning of each talk, I introduced myself and told people about the conference. We sent around a sign-up sheet. We got a bit of a mailing list and some good contacts from that process, but I cannot swear that it was really worth all the effort. Maybe we would have reached those people through other channels. The speaker series was intellectually worthwhile though. The meeting weekend itself was so thoroughly organized, primarily by the local librarians, that it's hard for me to draw any particular lessons besides getting good people to do the work. Typing this now, I can't think of anything that went wrong that's worth telling you about. Oh yes. We got screwed by the student center, whose new management decided that she wasn't interested in honoring the agreement we had made with her predecessor. Of course we didn't have it in writing, because we had been assured that we didn't *need* to have it in writing. After I grouched at her a while, she told us that she would "honor your agreement" by charging us 2.5 times what that agreement had called for. I flipped out and decided that we would move the meeting to an engineering lecture hall that I could book for free because I'm a professor. But hey -- if I wasn't a professor then we could have been shafted. So remember, get it in writing. No matter what conversations you've had with them, they've always got more rules printed on sheets of paper that you've never heard about. You can't enforce your agreements until they're written down. And beware of those extra little charges. We were told that the banquet would cost $X per person, but when the paperwork finally arrived, that turned out to mean $X plus tax and gratuity plus a $400 "facility fee". (I then got this infuriatingly condescending little speech to the effect that this is a standard industry practice -- i.e., everyone does it -- and that I must therefore not know what I'm doing. But setting out to take revenge about such things will probably not serve your real goals.) Get it in writing. In doing the early outreach, I had to learn some lessons. I know that it's good to consult people: call them, visit them, tell them what you're doing, and say "what advice do you have for me?". This makes friends for you and the organization and makes people feel included. It also prevents you from being perceived as grabbing someone else's turf -- that is, claiming sovereignty over an issue that someone else has invested effort identifying themselves with already. Often the people you talk to will actually have good advice for you. (If they have an agenda or an axe then you can usually figure out what it is and steer around it.) Find out who knows people and approach them this way. They don't have to be obvious allies. Even people who specialize in elite networking in your city are perfectly good candidates for this, though you should pick the highest status individual in your organizing group to approach such people. A professor of any rank will do fine. Get rid of your political jargon. Be able to talk to people in language they can understand. Evolve a bunch of honest ways of explaining what the meeting is about. If you cannot come up with an honest way of explaining your meeting to someone then that person is not part of your audience. If they *ought* to be part of your audience then you need to go back and redesign the meeting. Anyway, this cycle of asking advice sometimes became clumsy when I was speaking with someone who wanted to be a speaker at the meeting. It's hard to invite someone to participate in a meeting and simultaneously tell them they can't speak at the meeting. So decide ahead of time which people might want to be speakers, and what you'll say when they explicitly ask you to put them on the program. The standard response is to hide behind your program committee, saying "that would be great, I'll take it up with the program committee". But a lot of people don't buy that. So you won't always end up on perfectly positive terms with people. One way you can be helpful to people is to explicitly invite them to make their organization's (or company's, or whatever) literature available on the conference literature tables. We had several books and journals being advertised, along with several nonprofit Internet providers and local computer organizations. I'm sure we could have had many more if I had gotten those literature invitations out earlier. Anybody who isn't attending your meeting on a corporate expense account will care a lot about how much it costs. Make it cheap. If you work with professional meeting organizers, or people who are accustomed to the world of expense accounts, you will have to resist their seemingly inexorable impulses to make everything "nice" by piling on exotic banquets, racks of A/V equipment, free notebooks for everyone, hotel rooms for speakers, nice little selections of juices and cookies at breaks, and so on. These people mean well, but you will need to bring them back to fiscal reality gently, step by step. Make conscious choices about who should run panels, give opening and closing remarks, introduce speakers, etc. We made good choices, but I wasn't thinking about the issue until very late. If you have any speakers in wheelchairs, plan way ahead for their housing and transportation. Carefully walk the whole path that they will need to travel from curbside to podium, and make extra sure that the necessary doors will be unlocked for handicapped access, including bathrooms. I didn't like the page I wrote about the Annual Meeting for the summer issue of the CPSR Newsletter. I *should* have written an advertisement aimed at turning out the maximum number of CPSR members, most of whom have had rather little personal contact with the organization and really do need to be "sold" on the Annual Meeting, which after all requires a real expenditure of time and money. Instead I wrote a fancy think piece about strategy and gave too much attention about our plans to connect to the local community. I'm glad that we connected to the local community, but that was not the major message to emphasize for people from outside the local community. We put up a WWW page for the Annual Meeting program and registration. It was fun, but I have no idea what difference it made. I *do* know that it's useless to put up a WWW page unless you advertise it by sending messages to various mailing lists. When you're about to choose a date for the meeting, make sure you ask all of the people who know lots of organizations. We had an unfortunate conflict with a AAAS/ABA workshop on cyberspace ethics and law in Washington. Get people together early and brainstorm about the meeting. People have lots of great ideas. Let their ideas influence you so that your thinking is broadened and you're making your decisions more consciously than you might be otherwise. I was glad that we clarified early what jobs the National Office does. They ended up doing some extra jobs, and we ended up doing pieces of some things that I had originally been happy to let them do, but clear assignments of tasks are good. Draw on the experience of the people who have organized the meeting in earlier years. And then when you're done, write down your own experiences to benefit others. - end -

1 0

Police on the Net
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

First, I'd be interested in knowing some of those online reporting addresses, and how much limits they place on what can be mailed to them... persuading these cops to deal with the improper use of another's computer (i.e., spam) would seem to be a distinct possibility in diverting them from other activities. Second, it would appear possible (unless they're encrypting it) to intercept some of these email lists of theirs - if necessary, by forging a subscribe to an _overseas_ nymserver that isn't too well known (unlike, say, anon.penet.fi). That's about on the same grounds as their mention of "know thine enemy." (It is, of course, pretty certain that various libertarian groups are among those monitored, such as cypherpunks.) Third, this gives additional reasons not to give out one's address to anyone. What people know about me is a post office box and my old address. -Allen > webslingerZ > LONG ARM OF THE LAW IS GOING ONLINE > Copyright &copy 1996 Nando.net > Copyright &copy 1996 Seattle Post-Intelligencer > (Aug 10, 1996 00:05 a.m. EDT) -- When police "net" a crook these days, > cops may be referring to the Internet. [...] > On the Internet, citizens anonymously report drug dealers to the > cyberpolice, check out crime in their neighborhoods, calculate their > risk of being murdered and communicate directly with the chief of > police. > Police say the Internet is a powerful and versatile law-enforcement > tool: Communication is immediate and crosses jurisdictional > boundaries, information is just a keystroke away and the cost is > commonly less than hiring a police officer. > "I think it's the most effective money you can spend to prevent > crime," said Bill Taylor, crime analyst for the Sacramento, Calif., > Police Department, which has developed one of the nation's most > sophisticated Internet police sites. > More than 2,000 law-enforcement agencies have gone online, extending > the long reach of the law to millions of Internet users, said Ken > Reeves, a Microsoft manager who recently established a Web site > promoting new technology in law enforcement. > "They're creating virtual police," he said. [...] > The Internet also has become a popular tool for police to communicate > among themselves. > Thousands of police officers subscribe to electronic mailing lists and > read electronic bulletin boards where they can discuss ethical issues > in private and exchange information about firearms, narcotics and > other sensitive topics. > "These are things you don't want to make public, but you need other > professionals to bounce off ideas," said Ira Wilsker, a former police > officer who is leading a series of U.S. Department of Justice seminars > on law enforcement and the Internet. > Run for and by police officers, the computer exchanges often offer > information that cannot be found elsewhere, Wilsker said. For example, > police raised the alarm on the Internet about illegal use of Rohypnol, > the notorious "date rape" sedative, more than a year before warnings > about the drug were issued through official channels, he said. > On the philosophy of know thy enemy, Wilsker said police also turn to > the Internet as an intelligence source, monitoring online chatter by > hate groups, drug users and others who discuss their views on computer > news groups. These news groups, though commonly thought of as private > communications, are open to public view. > The Internet also can be an effective people finder, he said. > For example, more than 90 million people and their telephone numbers > and addresses can be found at the Internet site www.switchboard.com, > making a nationwide search sometimes as simple as keying in a name, he > said. The service is free. > With an address in hand, Wilsker advises police to turn to > www.mapquest.com, which in seconds can pinpoint on a map the location > of a suspect's home. > "We use it for serving warrants where we don't know the area," he > said. [...] > Still, the response to serious attempts at online policing at times > has been disappointing. The vast majority of people prefer to deal > directly with police than go online to report a crime. Chicago's > effort to elicit information about drug dealing over the Internet has > drawn only a smattering of responses. Some departments have dropped > their most-wanted postings on the Internet because they brought in so > few tips. [...] > Copyright &copy 1996 Nando.net

1 0