December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Austin, TX: RoboFest 7
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi all, I would like to pass the follwing along. If you have any questions then please let me know. If you are in Austin around this time, then stop by for a spell. Jim Choate -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 13 Aug 96 21:38:53 From: "Sonia Santana" <sonia(a)hyperweb.com> Subject: RE: RoboFest 7 speaking gig To: Jim Choate <ravage(a)bga.com> The dates for RoboFest 7 are Sept. 14th & 15th and it will be held at Dobie Mall this year. If you are interested please let me know or contact Glenn Currie at <currie(a)eden.com> who is actually making the schedule for our guest speakers. There aren't any monetary perks but we plan to reward our guests with T-shirts, videos and movie passes to our film festival. Please let us know by August 15th if you are interested and can make it. Also please let us know a title or topic of your talk. And finally how do you want to be billed in the program. Hope you can make it. Sonia Santana Admin. Coordin. The Robot Group http://www.robotgroup.org

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

17 Dec '03

At 08:49 14/08/96 -0700, James A. Donald wrote: >At 07:00 PM 8/14/96 +0600, Arun Mehta wrote: >> Whoa! In economies that are highly de-coupled, incomes and prices >> can easily find quite different equilibria. > >So? What does this have to do with the price of fish? I was trying to explain how incomes and prices happened to be lower in India, which is the reason why companies like Informix like to hire Indian engineers. >The fact is a company like Informix has a campus in India, and >it has campuses in the US that are largely staffed by Indian teams, >and it will pay big bucks to get its people out of India, even >though it has to pay them more than ten times as much in the US. I imagine (not knowing why Informix does what it does) that the reason might have something to do with: 1) Bringing the programmer closer to the customer, to understand the problem better, or to commission the software, debug it under working conditions, whatever 2) If a team in the US is working on the project as well, sometimes it helps to have the entire team physically proximate. 3) With team members far away, you may have concerns about security of confidential information. I could think of another reason or two. > >An Indian programmer doing the same job for the same company is >more than ten times as valuable to that company if he is not >subject to the power of the Indian government, as proven by that >companies actions. Could you please be more precise? In what way does the "power of the Indian government" intrude? You use the term "proven" rather loosely... there could be other explanations for the company wanting to move its employees around. > >Plainly Informix does not like the power of the Indian government, >which is no surprise as a few years ago just about every company on >earth utterly detested the power of the Indian government and would >not touch the place with a ten foot pole. Huh? Yes, we do have a bureaucratic state, which is infuriating, and not just to the companies, but we've always had lots of companies happy to be here. This is a big market, and a nice place to live (and not just the natives say so). >Under democracy, people get the government they deserve and >get it good and hard. True -- democracy is a learning process, and the lessons sometimes come hard. I don't know of any other way to learn. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta(a)cerfnet.com for public key

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Anguilla - commercial and mailbombing policies
by Vincent Cate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM <dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com> > > A while back, when Vince first started advertizing his site, I asked him >a few hypothetical questions, and he said roughly this: If client X posts >something to Usenet from Vince's site, and if Y dislikes X's article so >much that he mailbombs X, then Vince would pull X's plug. (I have the >exact quote saved.) I lost interest right then. I'm not surprised that >Vince acted dishonorably by pulling a client's plug with no warning for a >very flimsy reason. That question was about commercial ads, and I said "As long as I am not mailbombed I don't care about how you post.". I did *not* say I would pull the plug (full exchange below). From your other questions it looked like there was no chance of you being a customer so I did not fully explain. I have been mailbombed around a dozen times in the last year and never cut anyone off. Details below (I too have the exact quote)... Dimitri: > e) to spam usenet with commercial ads. Vince: >e) I think you would have to spam more than 100 groups to get my >system mail bombed. As long as I am not mailbombed I don't >care about how you post. First, yes, that 100 groups is off the wall. What I meant was you can send out commercial ads and I don't care at all. If you get mailbombed, that is another issue. If mailbombed then it goes toward your traffic. You get 100 MB/month of traffic with a domain name, and if you go over that amount of traffic the cost is $1/MB. If you have prepaid by check, and I don't know who you are, and your account goes below $0, I would cut you off till more money came in. Sorry for not explaining that. -- Vince ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vincent Cate vince(a)offshore.com.ai http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/ Offshore Information Services http://www.offshore.com.ai/

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Re: India, Productivity, and Tropical Climes
by Arun Mehta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 18:59 13/08/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >that virtually none of the countries which the most vocal critics are from >have anything approaching the U.S. policy about immigration! You are right -- India's immigration policy is lousy too. However, this is an anachronism in increasingly globalizing economies. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta(a)cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta(a)cerfnet.com for public key

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Re: Another thing the Net is being blamed for...
by Ryan Russell/SYBASE 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At least we didn't sue every ISP ala CoS. Also, I don't think he was "blaming" the Internet neccessarily... It's been published in books before. Ryan ---------- Previous Message ---------- To: cypherpunks cc: From: mirele @ xmission.com ("Deana Holmes") @ smtp Date: 08/09/96 06:52:44 PM Subject: Another thing the Net is being blamed for... Yet another thing that we're being blamed for. FYI, the temple ceremony has been reproduced many times since it was first exposed in the 1840s. The most recent revision (1990) was kept secret for only a short time before notorious former members got ahold of a tape and transcript of the ceremony. (I have a good idea of how they got it.) As far as I can tell, it didn't actually make it on to the Net until about 1994. This particular Mormon churchman (Russell Ballard) gave a speech a year or so ago warning Mormons in vague terms about the evils of the Internet. I suppose this is part of it. ===== >From this morning's Rolley&Wells column in the Salt Lake Tribune (without permission): "During a press tour this week of the LDS [Mormon] Church's new Mount Timpanogos Temple in American Fork, a member of the news media asked why a writtem copy of the temple ceremony was not given to members with temple recommends so they could study it in the privacy of their homes. Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles informed the reporter that there was no need. A church member had 'broken the covenant' -- taped the ceremony, transcribed it, and put it on the Internet for all to read." <end> Deana M. Holmes April 1996 poster child for clueless $cientology litigiousness alt.religion.scientology archivist since 2/95 mirele(a)xmission.com

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Non-U.S. programmers working for Sun and Informix
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:49 PM 8/14/96, James A. Donald wrote: >The fact is a company like Informix has a campus in India, and >it has campuses in the US that are largely staffed by Indian teams, >and it will pay big bucks to get its people out of India, even >though it has to pay them more than ten times as much in the US. > >An Indian programmer doing the same job for the same company is >more than ten times as valuable to that company if he is not >subject to the power of the Indian government, as proven by that >companies actions. My hunch is that a much stronger reason for Informix to want to get its programmers out of India and closer to its other U.S. programmers has to do with what Coase called "the nature of the firm." Friends of mine at Sun have reported to me on the severe problems they are having with their very inexpensive to hire Russian programmers. The hope had been that there were legions of well-trained, eager programmers and mathematicians who could be hired for, say, a few bags of cat food. Sun, like other companies, set up satellite operations in Russia and farmed-out various projects. What they're finding is that the programmers are reasonably well-trained (and may be much better trained than most U.S. programmers, at least in some areas...not too many CS majors in the U.S. know what a Lebesgue integral is, for example). However, their work is unacceptable, for various reasons. Sun has taken to bringing over the programmers for a stay in the U.S in order to acculturate them, innoculate them, whatever you wish to call it, in the ways of Sun and of other American high tech companies. So far, it isn't clear if the experiment can be salvaged. Now certainly part of this is just the "remote control" problem, that of a bunch of people off on their own at the end of a very long feedback loop. Phone calls help, code reviews help, video conferencing helps, but perhaps not enough. And since the difference between a "mediocre" programmer and a "great" programmer can far, far exceed any slight savings in salary, the incentives are clear: hire locals who can work locally, or bring offshore programmers to the local facility. I suspect Sun's experiences with Russians are pretty similar to Informix's experiences with Indians, with Tata Institute replacing Moscow State. --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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RE: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption Technology
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: Bart Croughs > >You are wrong. I'm not in error; I don't think the US is worse off when US > capital moves abroad. I just want to know how you can proof it, so I would >be > able to rebut protectionist arguments. I don't know how to prove it. And, >unfortunately, neither do you. Rhetoric is no proof. ............................................... I said in my post: > "I think people who put up a lot of objections [...] do not want any proof of their error." Are you the one putting up the objections? Are you the one who does not want to see the proof which you are asking for? I would think that after having read Mises, Hayek, et al, the economic cause&effect principles which they outlined would make the resulting situation pretty clear. .. Blanc > > >

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Verisign CA practices documents
by Paul Robichaux 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Verisign's put their Certification Practice Statement up at <http://www.verisign.com/repository/CPSNEW>. This document appears to set forth the policies Verisign's implementing when it acts as a CA. I haven't fully reviewed it yet, but my hat's off to Verisign for coming clean and clearly stating their policies. -Paul -- Paul Robichaux LJL Enterprises, Inc. paul(a)ljl.com Be a cryptography user. Ask me how.

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Re: photographed license plates
by koontz＠netapp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>I note those plastic cover for plates "to keep them clean" >seem to be more & more popular. These are not allowed in California (although the chance of getting popped must be quite slim, by the number you see). I remember seeing some water based spray paints in dun colors (such as a nice mud tan) - Gee, officer, its just mud, <wipe>. (Why water colors should be in spray cans is beyond me, unless intended for taggers).

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Re: Schlafly on crypto
by Chris Adams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 14 Aug 96 09:11:30 -0800, bdolan(a)use.usit.net wrote: > Amendment guarantees our right to speak in public but not in > private. It would be just as ridiculous to say that we have > freedom to speak in words that the government can understand, but > not in words the government can't decipher. This definitely does beg the question of what the FBI would ask us to do if, for instance, the drug dealers started hiring Navajo speakers to play "Code-talkers" over a GAKed phone... | Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> - Webpages for sale! Se habla JavaScript! | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp | Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY"

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