December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Reputations
by gregburk＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- mccoy(a)communities.com (Jim McCoy) writes: > Greg Burk writes: > > Too little incentive to shoot for the heights: > > > > Suppose you judge that you've accumulated twice as much "reputation > > capital" as Joe. How do you get twice as much payoff? It seems to me > > that above the threshhold of credibility, minor side issues make more > > difference than your two-fold "reputation capital" differential. > > Go read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (a good book to read anyway :) > and examine the nature of the computer network "discussion groups" he talks > about: a classic example of reputation markets in many-to-many discussions. > With the proper tools someone with twice the reputation capital in a > particular category as another will have a greater chance of what they say > not being filtered out as noise. I have read it, a long time ago. Frankly, it's a spectacularly bad example. He writes of the two child-protagonists gaining reputations as great philosophers on a sort of Usenet. (At the time I believe OSC was a member of Delphi, UNCLEORSON) Look around on the real Usenet. OSC could not have been more wrong. > > As an "asset", it is extremely non-liquid: > > > > How exactly would you "convert" your reputation into other capital? > > Would you accept bribes and tell lies? Seems to me you would only get a > > one-shot "conversion" and it couldn't possibly hope to equal your > > investment. > > Tell that to Walter Cronkite, Siskel & Ebert, Moody's and others who have > converted reputation capital into large piles of money. Time is an asset > that has a monetary value to most people, and they are willing to spend money You don't seem to realize you are actually including at least one major example of a counterfeit reputation here. I speak of Siskel & Ebert, whom I have caught at least once giving a strikingly dishonest review. I had seen the movie (See You In The Morning) on opening day, before they reviewed it. It stunk. After the credits rolled, the audience walked out in sullen silence, unable to believe they had spent money to see it. Nobody in the entire audience gave any sign of liking any part of the thing even a little bit. Whereas they had been talkative and somewhat excited before it started. A few days later, I saw S&E's review. One of them (Siskel, I think) raved and raved about it. Perhaps he was the only person in the country who liked it, but I don't believe that. He gave it a lengthy, raving thumbs-up. Then the other (Ebert, I think) said "Well, I didn't like it as much as you did", thumbs down, and *stopped*. Conclusion: They knew it stunk, but for some reason I won't speculate on they wanted to say they liked it so they misreported it, and covered their butts with a review that would look mixed later but sound like a rave now. I see a counterfeit reputation. > No, I think that you just don't understand the mechanics of reputations and > how they interact with the most important resource in most people's lives: > time. I'm tempted to tit-for-tat, but I will not refute your points by telling you you just don't understand. > time. Instead of thinking of "reputation" look at it from the other end and > consider the "attention marketplace." Fine, but resolving good vs counterfeit reputations takes time too. > Right now reputation markets have a > limited presence on the internet (mostly through killfiles) because the tools > required are not integreated into the tools used to browse the information. > In time this will change. How? I ask for something more specific than In The Future Everything Will Be Done Right. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQBVAwUBMi9qsbMyVAabpHidAQFhmwH9HjxB1rgc1DgIZ0eJzidY4CSr7D7s2gCc qRq+v2APKgIDqjOTt04u+sDgKxeJFb0POBajeV0ARSA61mr3B7mQDA== =DppT -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Tack of Internet censorship
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>nobody(a)replay.com wrote: >Six months ago, the Internet censors and Exon wannabees took the >tack of "the Internet is too hard to censor". > >Now, their motto is "There will be some who get around our >censorship, but we will try anyway." > >Unfortunately, I believe these censorship strikes will >keep happening unless we find a way to stalemate them. > >What I am proposing is that Apache or other WWW servers >have a way to allow access to site B's URL at site A, >similar to the old trick of finger user@sitea.com@siteb.com. > >Implementation should be simple. However, I wonder what >is a good standard way to specify this in the URL or >a site. Whatever happened to Ray Cromwell's Decense <http://www.clark.net/pub/rjc/decense.html> project ? Decense, "a cgi script designed to provide a double-blind pseudonym scheme which allows a site to hide behind a chain of http servers which 'proxy' for it. Neither the user [ID] requesting the document, nor the ultimate address of the destination web site is immediately available to prying government eyes. -- Steve PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Schear, N7ZEZ | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com Grinder | Voice: 1-702-655-2877 Sacred Cow Meat Co. | Fax: 1-702-658-2673 7075 W. Gowan Road, #2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | --------------------------------------------------------------------- Just say NO to perscription DRUGS.

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Re: Metcalf and Other Net.Fogies
by Jon Lebkowsky 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:27 AM 9/5/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >I'm evolving a hunch that the problems we're seeing with "old fogies" >denouncing the Net, and anonymity, and "smut on the Net," are part of a >larger cultural issue. Namely, the familiar case of an older generation >complaining about the sloth and sin of the younger generations. Hey, I'm 47, and I haven't given up on sloth and sin yet. 8-) Seriously, the problem here is that you don't want to set up the stereotype you allude to further down ('don't trust anyone over 30'). Stereotypic thinking, ya know? Besides which, I've run into some real dorks who were UNDER 30... >(Caveat: I'm 44, so I'm certainly a generation older than many of you, and >am about the same age, give or take a few years, of Dyson, Metcalfe, Kapor, >Denning, and the other Net.Doomsayers. However, 20-25 years ago, when I was >in college, I recall of course similar predictions of disaster. (And as it >turned out, the predictions that promiscuity would lead to a disaster >turned out to be partly correct, viz. AIDS.)) Hmmmmm...are Dyson and Kapor really net.doomsayers? I really haven't heard any kinda doom and gloom from those two... >Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3COM, and how >publisher of "Infoworld" and sailing enthusiast, was interviewed on CNBC a >few minutes ago. He repeated his prediction of an "Internet collapse" in >1996, based on overuse, on bad pricing models, on lack of controls, and on >other concerns. ... and I've tended to think Metcalfe was just sending an 'ad absurdum' flare when he predicted the death of the Internet, not so much predicting as taking an impact analysis to the extreme. >It could be that the Dennings, Dysons, Kapors, etc. of the world are simply >growing jaded with the Net and are projecting their own ennui in their >comments that the Net may need to be controlled. This may come with age, as >I'm sure the Kapor of 25 years ago would not have wanted President Nixon >and Attorney-General Mitchell telling him what he could read and write. I'm not sure which comments you're referring to, but I've come to understand that the generation-gap thing has no pat answer. Dave Farber is younger than Bruce Taylor, if ya know what I mean...and there are plenty of old pharts who are active in the various movements and groups opposing any restriction of the Internet. >(In fairness, none of these folks listed have called for censorship. But >all have expressed "concerns" of one sort or another. Not that discussing >concerns is inappropriate--after all, we do it all the time. But I sense in >many of their phrasings of concerns a stereotypical "old fogeyness" >emerging.) I dunno. Consider this: almost 30 years ago a bunch of us were more or less active in left wing politics that had some of the same aims I see expressed on this list and elsewhere, and we made mistakes. I don't know that I learned from my mistakes the way you're sposed to, but some folks learned, and are trying not to fuck up again. On the other hand, some folks really are just stodgy, but I bet they were stodgy kids, too. >Just a thought. Maybe the solution to the EFF problem is to "not trust >anyone over 30." Heh, right. Feet tall. -- Jon Lebkowsky http://www.well.com/~jonl jonl(a)hotwired.com

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Re: Race Bit: C
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 5 Sep 96 at 0:30, Anonymous, a man with a double standard wrote: > For them, I would go to jail; for you, I would even cooperate with > the BATF (which should be defunded 100%, IMO). Why would you go to jail? Who made jails and who would use violence to bring you in? jfa

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Re: Reputations
by gregburk＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) writes: > To stick with my restaurant example, consider _advertising_. MacDonald's > and Burger King spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year claiming > their "restaurants" are great. Many millions of people obviously are > swayed. So? > > Others choose not to trust the advice of the MacDonald's hucksters. Maybe > only a tiny fraction choose Chez Panisse over MacDonald's. This is the way > of the world. > > It's still the give and take of reputations. It ain't perfect (in that it > doesn't produce results I believe are empirically valid and optimum :-}). > But it's all we have. It's the market. The agora. I'm reading "It's shaky. Accept that." Fine, consider it accepted. I don't think it is comparable to the market, simply because even the more nebulous market exchanges (say, consultant-on-call) are much more clearly defined. > >"Reputation capital" is hard to spend down to absolute 0 because it is > >significant work to distinguish valid "reputation capital" from > >worthless counterfeit, and it is easy to counterfeit... just talk. > > I strongly disagree. It's quite possible for Person A to quickly convert > his reputation to Person B to a _negative_ value. Real quick, in fact. I don't see how there can be such a thing as negative reputation capital. Wouldn't that mean B believes the opposite of what A says? If you anti-believed someone in a consistent manner, couldn't they exploit that? Also, you are speaking only of 1-to-1 reputation-relationships. But that is inefficient. The mere fact of having to evaluate each person's reputation yourself is significant work. On the other hand, you could talk about the transmission of reputations. This seems more in line with what I understood "reputation" to mean, to include some element of indirect knowledge. But that's mighty easy to abuse and therefore mighty hard to trust. For instance, when a certain infamously-low-reputation (deservedly so) individual recently joined the cypherpunk lists, others who had endured him in the past tried to relay their impressions of him. It proved very difficult to convey, and they were somewhat attacked for their efforts and not entirely believed. In other words, he *could not* spend down to 0, despite years of unflagging effort. > Perhaps my short article did not fully explain a few things. Reputations > are a _tensor_ or _matrix_ quantity. Person A has a reputation R(A,B) to > Person B, a reputation R(A,C) to Person C, and so on. (And the matrix may > be further broken down into reputations for advice on various subjects, in > various fields, etc.) I can't dispute or agree with your mathematical model until we can agree on more basic issues. > We may lump a lot of folks together and say, for example, that MacDonald's > has a reputation of R (MacDonald's, lots of people) = 0.7531. And perhaps R > (Chez Panisse, lots of people) = 0.0013 (i.e., they don't know what it is, > and so value the rep of Chez Panisse at near zero). > > And so on. Lots of examples could be given. I'll accept your example, but I don't see how the numbers are meaningful. > Now suppose that J. Anonymous Gourmand announces that MacDonald's is shit. > How much will anonymous claim hurt MacDonald's? Obviously, not much. Well, how many people did J. Anonymous Gourmand reach, anyways? Now, suppose J. Anonymous Gourmand spams all of Usenet, and millions of people who have never heard of J. Anonymous Gourmand before read a plausible but false account of the disgustingness of McDonald's food. Perhaps the same detailed study, just fake. (Not to intertangle this with other issues, let's further suppose that Ms. Gourmand sneaks in underneath spam-watcher's radar, and cleverly appears to be on topic in every group.) Nothing about her reputation has changed, but surely when her claim is read by millions it will hurt McDonalds a non-trivial amount. Again, that doesn't mean the reputation was not a factor. > But > what if the American Heart Association publishes a detailed study on the > fat levels of MacDonald's products and declares it to "Dangerous." The > effect will probably be greater, as R (AHA, many people) = high, and by the > kind of Dempster-Shafer belief calculus I discussed a few months ago, the > rep of the AHA propagates semi-transitively to the rep of MacDonald's. > > (This all happened recently, with the famous studies of fat levels of movie > theater food...sales dropped almost overnight, and now the fat levels of > popcorn, etc., have been changed for the better.) I don't think you are illustrating what you think you are. Consider the American Sociological Association. Wouldn't you say its reputation is equivalent to the American Heart Association's? Most people would, I think. And various claims by ASA members have certainly gotten as much press as anything the AHA has got. But the ASA winks at severe violations of its Code Of Ethics and lets its members pursue their Politically Correct agendas at the expense of science. They have effectively counterfeited a reputation. I've already made the points I wanted to make, so I may not have further comments. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQBVAwUBMi9qpbMyVAabpHidAQFRnwH8CyCjOnz071ZMWXNNURR/NMSMw9y9bs+n dutQOqLSNqeJhsYwNZJP2Z1o+JdhWZ7sQ/xnhdWbdupYsoRhcpacpA== =zcJQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Browne and foreign tyrants
by pjb＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

i also have never heard of an attempt on Hitler's life by anyone other that the germans. the us did, however, assassinate Yamamoto Isoroku, and did a very neat job of it at that. i once read a sci-fi story about time travelers going back to kill Hitler, and the disaster that occured when someone succeeded and Hitler's place was taken by someone even more onerous. in the story there was a group of people whose job it was to prevent this assassination, since so many people in the future had that idea that doing away with Hitler was a good thing to do there was practically a queue of would-be assassins. -paul > From cypherpunks-errors(a)toad.com Thu Sep 5 03:07:59 1996 > X-Sender: jimbell(a)mail.pacifier.com > X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 > Mime-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type> : > text/plain> ; > charset="us-ascii"> > Date: Wed, 04 Sep 1996 16:43:23 -0800 > To: libernet-d(a)listserv.rmii.com, nwlibertarians(a)teleport.com, > dnowch2(a)teleport.com > From: jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> > Subject: Browne and foreign tyrants > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Content-Length: 2362 > > >From: "George D. Phillies" <phillies(a)WPI.EDU> > >Subject: Re: Browne & foreign tyrants > >There is a section of the Geneva Protocols forbidding actions in occupied > >territories directed against officers of political parties. Under that > >section, the actions in Somalia against, e.g., the treasurer of General > >Aidid's political party, were war crimes. No one seems to get very upset. > > > >> If there is such a treaty, the US has a long history of ignoring it. > >> > >> 0) Attempts to kill Hitler. > >I don't think we ever tried this. > > And this was a real shame. Over 30 million people died in WWII, directly or > indirectly. We knew that Hitler was going to be a problem well before 1936. > Think how many could have been saved... > > If anything, WWII is excellent proof that AP is a good idea. Stauffenberg > was the German who bombed Hitler's meeting in 1944 but failed to kill him. > Stauffenberg knew as early as 1942 that Hitler needed to be killed, and a > recent "60 Minutes" episode related how hundreds of people knew about this > plot. > > The reason he failed was that while he was preparing the two bombs in a > bathroom, he was interrupted. (The bomb's delay mechamism was acid > dissolving a metal.) Rather than being caught, he left one of the > briefcases in the bathroom and went to the meeting with only one bomb. > Furthermore, he left the bomb at the meeting, but it was pushed behind the > heavy table after he left, which shielded Hitler from much of the force of > the explosion. > > If AP (or at least, some anonymous reward mechanism for Stauffenberg's > family) had been available, he would have done "the honorable thing," and > walked up to Hitler with the bomb and instantly detonated it right there, > resulting in both Hitler's and Stauffenberg's certain death. At least > hundreds of thousands or perhaps over a million people would have SURVIVED. > As it happened, Stauffenberg's reticence caused not only his death after > torture, but also the deaths of well over a hundred coup-plotters, but also > the thousands that were yet to die in the last 6+ months of WWII. > > Question: Would you kill yourself to save a million lives? Even if you > wouldn't, would you change your mind if your heirs would be anonymously paid > an extra $10 million dollars or so? I'd say that's a pretty substantial > motivation, wouldn't you? > > > > Jim Bell > jimbell(a)pacifier.com >

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PRESS RELEASE: GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL
by tank 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please forward: Contact: XS4ALL Internet BV (http://www.xs4all.nl) Postbus 1848 1000BV Amsterdam Fax: +31-20-6274498 Email: felipe(a)xs4all.nl * * * P R E S S R E L E A S E * * * GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL, WITH 3100 WEBPAGES German internetproviders, joined in the Internet Content Taskforce (ICTF), started censoring the Dutch website www.xs4all.nl, containing 3100 personal and commercial homepages. This act of censorship is caused by the webpage of a magazine that is banned in Germany, Radikal (http://www.xs4all.nl/ ~tank/radikal/). A German prosecutor sent the following message to the ICTF (http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901e.htm) "Under the following addresses in Internet: http://www.serve.com/spg/154/ http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal//154/ and using the link on page http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/angela1/radilink.htm one can call up the entire edition of the pamphlet entitled radikal Nr. 154". Parts of this pamphlet justify preliminary suspicion of promoting a terrorist organization under ' 129a, Par.3 of the German Criminal Code, public condoning of criminal activities penalizable under ' 140 no.2 of the German Criminal Code and preliminary suspicion of inciting to criminal activity under ' 130a Par.1 of the German Criminal Code. The Public Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice has therefore initiated a criminal investigatory procedure against the parties disseminating this pamphlet. You are herewith informed that you may possibly make yourself subject to criminal prosecution for aiding and abetting criminal activities if you continue to allow these pages to be called up via your access points and network crosspoints" Providers in Germany are already blocking packets to and from the host www.xs4all.nl. The 3100 websites on this server include the Kurdistan Information Network (http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/htdocs/) the very popular Internet Charts (http://www.xs4all.nl/~jojo/) and the world famous Chip Directory (http://www.xs4all.nl/~ganswijk/chipdir/) XS4ALL has not received any request from the German Government regarding the homepage of Radikal. Without any prior contact the German prosecutor decided that the XS4ALL website needs to be blocked for German Internet Users. XS4ALL is awaiting legal advice, and will investigate if legal procedures against the German government are possible. Censorship on Internet usually has the opposite effect. Internetusers consider it a sport to publish censored materials. Many users have already published the Radikal website on other Internet hosts. Here are some of the URL's: http://burn.ucsd.edu/%7Eats/RADIKAL/ http://www.jca.or.jp/~taratta/mirror/radikal/ http://www.serve.com/~spg/ http://huizen.dds.nl/~radikal http://www.canucksoup.net/radikal/index.html http://www.ecn.org/radikal http://www.well.com/~declan/mirrors/ http://www.connix.com/~harry/radikal/index.htm http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal/index.htm Xs4all Internet will rotate the IP-numbering of the website www.xs4all.nl to ensure that it's 3100 userpages will all remain available for any internet-user. <end> -- Felipe Rodriquez - XS4ALL Internet - finger felipe(a)xs4all.nl for http://xs4all.nl/~felipe/ - Managing Director - pub pgp-key 1024/A07C02F9 pgp Key fingerprint = 32 36 C3 D9 02 42 79 C6 D1 9F 63 EB A7 30 8B 1A

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Metcalf and Other Net.Fogies
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm evolving a hunch that the problems we're seeing with "old fogies" denouncing the Net, and anonymity, and "smut on the Net," are part of a larger cultural issue. Namely, the familiar case of an older generation complaining about the sloth and sin of the younger generations. (Caveat: I'm 44, so I'm certainly a generation older than many of you, and am about the same age, give or take a few years, of Dyson, Metcalfe, Kapor, Denning, and the other Net.Doomsayers. However, 20-25 years ago, when I was in college, I recall of course similar predictions of disaster. (And as it turned out, the predictions that promiscuity would lead to a disaster turned out to be partly correct, viz. AIDS.)) Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3COM, and how publisher of "Infoworld" and sailing enthusiast, was interviewed on CNBC a few minutes ago. He repeated his prediction of an "Internet collapse" in 1996, based on overuse, on bad pricing models, on lack of controls, and on other concerns. It could be that the Dennings, Dysons, Kapors, etc. of the world are simply growing jaded with the Net and are projecting their own ennui in their comments that the Net may need to be controlled. This may come with age, as I'm sure the Kapor of 25 years ago would not have wanted President Nixon and Attorney-General Mitchell telling him what he could read and write. (In fairness, none of these folks listed have called for censorship. But all have expressed "concerns" of one sort or another. Not that discussing concerns is inappropriate--after all, we do it all the time. But I sense in many of their phrasings of concerns a stereotypical "old fogeyness" emerging.) Just a thought. Maybe the solution to the EFF problem is to "not trust anyone over 30." --Tim May (untrustable since 1981) We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I 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, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Race Bit: C
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:11 PM 9/5/96 +0000, jonathon wrote: >On Thu, 5 Sep 1996, Anonymous wrote: >> defunded 100%, IMO). Violence begats violence which begats even larger >> government, don't start us on that road -- leave me in peace. >If I understand you correctly, it is OK for a government to >institute violence against the residents of the land it claims >dominion over, but it is not acceptable for the inhabitants of >that piece of land to respond in self defence. I think Mr. Anonymous displays a mental crutch that you'll occasionally see: A person who, while he'll not quite admit defending the status quo, criticizes alternatives to it yet doesn't have a solution of his own. He says he wants to be left "in peace," forgetting that most people in the world today are NOT left in peace. The way I see it, the status quo doesn't come "pre-justified": It needs just as much a defense as any other proposal. Its main advantage is that it tends to be more understood that most hypotheticals, because it's been tested. Sadly, people tend to ignore its disadvantages, to to excess familiarity. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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No Subject
by Zaphoid _d00l 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

desubscribe

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