December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

USF_avv MS's Martha Stewart
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For MSerfs and groupies: A NYC local rag has a salacious article, "Microsoft's own Martha Stewart," on Michael Goff, the newly appointed editor of Cityscape, MS's upcoming urban-slurp-fuck-and-vomit vanity. Excerpts: The key to why Bill Gates hired Mr. Goff may lie in the fact that Mr. Goff is a marketing maniac, a self-confessed "media whore." "He became more of an egotistical asshole overnight than anyone I'd ever seen when the magazine [Out] came out," said one prominent gay journalist and acquaintance. Mr. Goff is indeed a family man, of sorts: He confirmed that he is considering donating his services to two lesbian friends who want to raise their own child. He bristled at being pigeonholed for being gay, rather than being recognized for his creativity. "It has nothing to do with me being gay or not," he said. "I've always been focused on doing mass consumer media." Besides, he added, "They're not paying me like that. I don't have a jet or anything." ----- http://jya.com/usfavv.txt USF_avv

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

17 Dec '03

At 06:49 PM 9/6/96 +0000, jonathon wrote: >On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, jim bell wrote: >> used to test out hypotheticals, for example a "SimEconomy." For example, > > They are very hard to program, and the ones that do exist are > based on the usually flawed assumptions that the designers make. > EG: taxation is a requirement for government stability A few months ago, somebody posted onto CP a phony story, which claimed that "somebody" had developed an artificially-intelligent program which would take the place of the judge and (?) jury in the (so-called) justice system. It was an obvious phony, but I thought it was even more obvious, even if we assumed the existence of a program which is smart enough to interpret evidence and laws. The problem is, the "legal system" is practically saturated with unwritten biases which favor the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak, and the government over everybody else. Any program which read the Constituion and the laws wouldn't see those biases, and would start writing decisions...respecting the Constitution! It would presumably view the violation of someone's Constitutional rights as a criminal act, and it would be hard for the cops to stay out of jail. The standard for conviction, "beyond a reasonable doubt," when religiously adhered-to would make convictions difficult to obtain. The program would look for Constitutional justification for anti-drug laws, and finding none, would ignore such violations but would convict anyone trying to enforce them. Likewise, it would read the second amendment (and the lack of authority for regulating guns in the rest of the Constitution) and conclude that guns were un-regulatable. The program would see that nothing in the Constitution requires people to testify for the prosecution. The program wouldn't see any justification for the judge-written concept of judicial civil immunity, or government-employee immunity in most cases. The program would notice that double-jeopardy is prohibited, and would prohibit any retrials in which there are "hung juries" or government errors. In other words, the government would actually have to start OBEYING THE CONSTITUTION! Ask most lawyers, and they'll say, 'No, that's not the way we do things.' In a sense, they're right! That's NOT the way they do things. And that's the problem! This would be considered unacceptable; the program would be declared "broken" and "useless." Sure, it could be fixed, but they'd have to qualify and quantify all of the biases currently present in the system, and write them into the program in the form of subroutines. The problem is, nobody who actually supports these biases would want to acknowledge what they are and why they're there, and nobody who opposes these biases would agree to keep them. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: What the NSA is patenting
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>(Used to be they just kept stuff secret; now they patent some of it.) > >United States Patent Patent Number: 5264794 > Date of Patent: 23 Nov 1993 > >Method of measuring magnetic fields on magnetically recorded media using a >scanning tunneling microscope and magnetic probe > >Inventor(s): Burke, Edward R., Silver Spring, MD, United States > Mayergoyz, Isaak D., Rockville, MD, United States > Adly, Amr A., Hyattsville, MD, United States > Gomez, Romel D., Beltsville, MD, United States >Assignee: The United States of America as represented by the Director, > National Security Agency, Washington, DC, United > States (U.S. government) That isn't NSA research, it was merely sponsored by the NSA. Those are all university people who have published their work on MFSTM in journals, papers, and theses (I used some of it in my paper at the Usenix Security Symposium, and two of the images in my talk were provided by one of Mel Gomez' students). What the NSA is doing in this area is still classified (although I suspect the techology isn't much different from what's publicly available), in this case all they were doing was protecting their investment (just like the various PKC patents originally assigned to universities). Peter.

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Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
by mccoy＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

wb8foz(a)nrk.com writes: > > So switch to Fedex. The P.O. gives lousy service anyway. Privitize. > > > > Try & mail an anonymous FedEx package. Just lie on the sender label, isn't that obvious? I know people who actually use "codeword" sender labels, in case FedEx or federales ask about a package they can tell by the sender mentioned which to disavow :) > Try and pay cash in most Fedex offices. I always do and as long as I have exact change I have never been hassled. jim

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Re: Metcalf and Other Net.Fogies
by mccoy＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

perry(a)piermont.com writes: > Alan Olsen writes: > > Metcalfe may have a valid prediction here. > > Metcalfe is talking out his ass. He's reached the "old geezer who's > impeding his own field" stage. Many of his articles seem to be written > as though no one was trying to fix problems. Well, having talked with people involved with the problems I can assure you that they are real. The net brownouts when MAE-East dumps its BGP core or the fact that when one of the NAPs upgraded to FDDI it soon found that by the time people had installed the upgrades to the routers the bandwidth was already saturated should indicate that there are problems. Most of the problems are in the routers, even the top of the line Cisco boxes can only handle so much. The sky is not falling, but these sorts of problems are cracking the whip behind IPv6 and pushing the companies that make the routers pretty hard (Have you ever tried to buy even a lowly Cisco 2401? Do you know what the wait is on delivery? I really wish I had bought Cisco stock earlier...) > > When I run traceroutes, the blockage is in MCI or Sprintnet land. > > How do you manage to determine where you are losing bandwidth using > traceroute? That must be a mighty powerful traceroute to do that -- > most traceroutes I've seen are hard pressed just to find out what the > connectivity path is. Then you should probably upgrade your traceroute, preferably to one which allows source routing of the packets and then couple the output to a nice udp source routing script which will bounce a few packets between links with slow response times. Most of the problems are at the exchange points where packets go from one company's network to another. It seems that users have the annoying habit of wanting to talk to other people's customers...imagine the nerve :) > > The bandwidth to the net has been oversold. > > Always the case. Big deal. Bandwidth is still increasing pretty > fast. There are, naturally, growing pains, but the outages and > bandwidth situation are pretty good, all things considered. Compared > to the way things were eight or nine years ago they are amazing; > compared to four years ago they are still astoundingly better. Bandwidth may be increasing quickly, but demand for it is increasing even faster with every moron wanting tose the web while the routers to hook it all together and make it work are still very expensive and not being produced fast enough to satisfy the demand. Compared to the way things were even a few years ago the aggregate bandwidth that one person can expect is decreasing, it seems that no one writing internet protocols passed an Intro to Sociology/Poly Sci course and assumed that the tragedy of the commons did not apply to them. The upside of all of this is that it is creating a demand for value-added services which offer users dedicated bandwidth and faster response time in return for a little coin. This will probably push micro-currency on to the net faster than any other consumer demand... jim

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Re: Court challenge to AOL junk-mail blocks
by mccoy＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

frogfarm(a)yakko.cs.wmich.edu writes: > This is utter horseshit. AOL, like any private individual or organization, > has the right to refuse service to anyone at any time for any reason, or > even for no reason at all. The gubmint isn't doing SQUAT, except forcing > AOL to allow the spammers access. AOL has a service agreement with their customers, and they are not allowed to change the rules just because they feel like it (I believe that this is called a contract :) This is the jist of the injunction. jim

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Re: Conservation Laws, Money, Engines, and Ontology (fwd)
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 6 Sep 96 14:04:51 -0500, Andrew Loewenstern wrote: >> I don't think any one step will solve all our spam problems >> but I wouldn't mind spending, say, 5 cents for each real piece >> of mail I sent outside my company and if end machines charged >> 5 cents per piece of ouside mail received, I think spamming >> would be crippled. (Note that with bad guy lists, you could >> collect the money and then just throw away the mail.) >So would you be willing to pay $50.00 for this message you sent to >cypherpunks? If there are a thousand recipients and each one charges $0.05 >for the priveledge of you sending it e-mail.... It seems like such a scheme >would not only cripple spam, but public discussion lists like this one. It's likely his $.05 would go to the list owner. When signing up for the list you would forfeit the right to collect on junk mail. Charging spammers would be up to the list... - "'Anonymity is bad,' says a source who wishes to remain anonymous." - Nuff' said. * Home: Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp * Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY" * Work: cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 | (619)689-6579 * Member in good standing of the GNU whirled hors d'oeuvre

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Re: What the NSA is patenting
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 06 Sep 1996 11:59:18 -0500, John Deters wrote: >I hope some hardware hacker who knows their low-level stuff will be able to >write a secure disk wiper. They have: it's called a bulk tape eraser. <g> I'd just store everything sensitive on a floppy. Those are easy to erase with a heavy duty magnet (not a wimpy refrigerator magnet). I understand slagging one in the microwave is also effective <g>. - "'Anonymity is bad,' says a source who wishes to remain anonymous." - Nuff' said. * Home: Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp * Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY" * Work: cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 | (619)689-6579 * Member in good standing of the GNU whirled hors d'oeuvre

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Re: What the NSA is patenting
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 6 Sep 1996 14:03:43 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >>A maybe usefull program would be a little tsr that constantly >>overwrite unused sectors of the entire drive with random patterns >>(maybe seeded with a fast keyboard interval timer). Like at the very >>moment I am writing this, my HD has been idle for several minutes... >The NSA STM method is related to reading _very subtle_ variations in >magnetic domain modifications. Jitter in read-write head positions can be >thought of as a noise (N) added to some signal (S)l. Extraction of signals >in low S/N ration environments is a well-developed science. > >Not to start another round of "thermite bomb" posts, but I would not trust >n-pass erasures. It's still likely that if you left it running after a month or so it would be next to impossible to do (assuming the NSA didn't get lucky - you still have to worry!) >Of course, this is about the least of my concerns. If the Feds are planning >to use STM probes on your seized drives, you've got more serious problems. Such as asking why you didn't use some very strong crypto software? Work out some sort of parallel port dongle that could be connected, the software generates a random key, the parallel port device is written and then removed. Further access would involve connecting. The code & chips needed have been provided in many places; DDJ for one. Allows a very convincing "Well it was encrypted and your goon stepped on the key!" >(The oft-discussed possibility of more secure dongles, or secret decoder >rings. is still off in the future. Most of us just enter our various >passwords, and our local disk drives reveal all.) This is too true. - "'Anonymity is bad,' says a source who wishes to remain anonymous." - Nuff' said. * Home: Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp * Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY" * Work: cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 | (619)689-6579 * Member in good standing of the GNU whirled hors d'oeuvre

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[NOISE] Propaganda Bit: C
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:50 AM 9/6/96 -0800, Jim Bell wrote: >Since red liquid running in the streets is generally so reviled, one of the >things which mystifies me is why there aren't more simulation-type programs >used to test out hypotheticals, for example a "SimEconomy." For example, As someone else pointed out recently, this depends _so_ strongly on the assumptions built into your model, both explicit and implicit. SimHealth, for instance, was a propaganda piece put out for the last election so people could play with different approaches to managing other peoples' health care. If Duncan were to write something like that, anybody who tinkered with the economy would make it go downhill. If Ross Perot wrote it, anybody who started making the deficit larger would find his picture at the bottom of the screen having the ears grow larger. I assume that if Jim wrote it, anybody who did anything to the economy other than decrease government involvement would find a bunch of nasty little dwarves throwing stone knives at them.... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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