December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Justice Department stalls for time in CDA lawsuit, from HotWired
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 20:12:42 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)eff.org> To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Justice Department stalls for time in CDA lawsuit, from HotWired [Read the complete column at the URL below... -Declan] http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/ HotWired, The Netizen 21 August 1996 DOJ Dodge by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) Washington, DC, 20 August The US Department of Justice is stalling for time. The Supreme Court yesterday granted the government an extra month to submit the next phase of its Communications Decency Act appeal, allowing the DOJ a few more weeks to coordinate the original ACLU lawsuit with a lesser-known suit filed by Joe Shea, editor of the American Reporter. [...] But in truth, the DOJ shouldn't need any more time to file this paperwork. The "jurisdictional statement" the department's been working on for seven weeks - and now has until 29 September to submit - must argue only that there's a substantial constitutional issue at stake in the CDA lawsuit, something transcendently obvious to anyone who hasn't been napping through the 14 months since Time magazine's cyberporn cover hit the newsstands. [...] While this is likely just normal legal skirmishing in a battle where the DOJ attorneys have few useful weapons and already have suffered one crushing defeat, the government's five-page application for an extension of time hints at why a delay would be to their advantage. [...] In other words, the CDA might be unconstitutional now, but _constitutional_ some months from now - depending on how labelling and blocking technologies such as PICS and SurfWatch evolve. Keeping kids out might have been a royal pain when the judges heard the case in March 1996, but by March 1997 it might amount to no more than the minor irritation of a constitutional hangnail. David Sobel, a lawyer for the Electronic Privacy Information Center and co-counsel on this case, said: "They could make the argument in the Supreme Court that the court in Philadelphia hasn't really completed its work on the case, and all that is entered is a preliminary injunction. They could argue that this case should go back to Philadelphia for further proceedings, since they're now prepared to answer the court's questions about what kind of technology may be coming down the pike." Whatever the reason for the DOJ's delay - summer bureaucratic slothfulness or malicious conniving - one thing is certain: we have the rest of the year to enjoy the government's lawyer tricks. ###

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Re: License Plates
by Ross Wright 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Or About 20 Aug 96, 18:02, Skip wrote: > and with worse threats concerning license plates, it's time to pull > off that rear plate again! Doing it tonight, join me! ALL RIGHT Skip!!! Personal protest is the way to go. Ross =========== Ross Wright King Media: Bulk Sales of Software Media and Duplication Services http://www.slip.net/~cdr/kingmedia Voice: 415-206-9906

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Edited Edupage, 18 Aug 1996
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"educom(a)educom.unc.edu" 18-AUG-1996 23:56:45.22 >***************************************************************** >Edupage, 18 August 1996. Edupage, a summary of news about information >technology, is provided three times a week as a service by Educom, >a Washington, D.C.-based consortium of leading colleges and universities >seeking to transform education through the use of information technology. >***************************************************************** Speaking of Net-in-Orbit (while distributed datahavens have their points, sometimes you'd prefer not to have a given chunk of data on your hard drive - even encrypted with a passphrase), what's the physical setup for rewriteable optical drives? Are there any methods of doing those that will work OK in orbit? >ECHOSTAR TO DELIVER DATA, TOO >EchoStar Communications has successfully completed a public test of the >technology it will use in cooperation with Intel Corp. and Comstream to >deliver data via satellite to subscribers. Transmission rates could be >several megabits per second, says EchoStar's director of program management, >who adds that the opportunity to download Web content at higher speeds is >attractive to people hampered by slow phone lines. "If the download could >be made quickly and it could be stashed on their hard drive, that might be >something they'd be interested in," he says. In the recent test, >subscribers who use EchoStar's system to receive video and audio content >were given cards to install in their PCs, enabling them to receive data as >well. (Broadcasting & Cable 12 Aug 96 p86) [...] >Edupage is written by John Gehl <gehl(a)educom.edu> & Suzanne Douglas ><douglas(a)educom.edu>. Voice: 404-371-1853, Fax: 404-371-8057. >Technical support is provided by Information Technology Services at the >University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. >*************************************************************** >Edupage ... is what you've just finished reading. To subscribe to Edupage: >send mail to: listproc(a)educom.unc.edu with the message: subscribe edupage >Charles Baudelaire (if your name is Charles Baudelaire; otherwise, >substitute your own name). ... To cancel, send a message to: >listproc(a)educom.unc.edu with the message: unsubscribe edupage. (If you >have subscription problems, send mail to manager(a)educom.unc.edu.)

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Re: Spamming (Good or Bad?)
by Ross Wright 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Or About 20 Aug 96, 16:23, Jim Gillogly wrote: > > Vipul Ved Prakash <vipul(a)pobox.com> writes: > >I don't know if there has been much discussion on the ethics of > >spamming here? Is spamming free speech? > > I oppose spamming because it's rude and inefficient, lowering the > S/N everywhere it happens. Market droids Market Droids???? As a salesman I take offence at this slur. > favor it because it's > cheap, and no matter how many people they piss off bigtime, they > make some sales. Even make sales to people who are pissed off at first... Ross =========== Ross Wright King Media: Bulk Sales of Software Media and Duplication Services http://www.slip.net/~cdr/kingmedia Voice: 415-206-9906

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Re: [NOISE]CIA Contra Crack and LA Gangs (fwd)
by Jim Ray 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Tue Aug 20 23:34:46 1996 OK, Rich cites a loon, but the fact is that Southern Air Transport right here in Miami was in there early in the contraarms-coke trade. You don't make the real money in any transport business unless you can have full loads both ways. Also, the skills needed to land an overloaded airplane on an unimproved strip are different than those held by typical pilots, even very good, carrier-rated military pilots. Drugsmugglers had 'em, nobody else did, the CIA needed pilots with the skills to have their filthy little war. You can search the "major papers" libraries of West & Lexis for: "mena /p cocaine" and find all kinds of stuff. You can look into the case of John Hall's ranch in Costa Rica and find all kinds of stuff, too. The best experiment I've run across is to ask anyone (especially anyone under 30, for some reason) the following: "Do you think those planes came back empty?" When I do this, _I_ don't have to say the word "cocaine," they say it for me. Every time. It is a major, bipartisan, Watergate-style but bigger scandal, and the strange bedfellows in the media who were doing a halfway decent job of covering it [The Wall Street Journal and "High Times" magazine(!)] have fallen strangely silent on the subject as the election approaches. Hmmmmm. JMR Regards, Jim Ray -- DNRC Minister of Encryption Advocacy "'Filegate' is starting to make _Ed_ _Meese_ look ethical." -- me Defeat the Duopoly! Vote "NOTA," not Slick/Dull in November. Harry Browne for President. Jo Jorgensen for Vice-president. http://www.HarryBrowne96.org/ ___________________________________________________________________ PGP id.E9BD6D35 51 5D A2 C3 92 2C 56 BE 53 2D 9C A1 B3 50 C9 C8 <mailto:liberty@gate.net> http://www.shopmiami.com/prs/jimray Coming soon, the "Pennies For Perot" page. Keep billionaires off welfare! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMhqD221lp8bpvW01AQF1SwP+JOEoKPgIeFD5EEMMj+psfRaAZHoA+yzC ntVGjl22ThuqwyUJbbhmNEEP2+/mcGd4D1AWvs2Q0yFwWRyQybGGlnTyXtNNVY8s rY4pHCtkUftOxD9oxpB7FSaN2giZzYohbd3bduet1kO6DoXRRHxFq8F/4rbAZbA/ WnRbDSfblUQ= =WDGI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Phoneco vs X-Phone
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:02 AM 8/21/96 +0000, Vipul Ved Prakash wrote: >Now lets see, you say we have enough capacity out there, alright, but then >why is everyone raving about "a slow internet". We all know in IT 640K >is never enough, niether is 640Mb. At some point in time, new cables >_have_ to be laid. Moreover you seem to be considering a static growth rate, >but we all know the Internet is nothing short of a big-bang. > >I am trying to debate a model rather than numbers and in which case its >important to to consider a long-term scenario. Well, okay, here's some numbers: First, I've recently found out that in large quantities, it costs 10 cents per meter for bare fiber. Assume 30 cents per meter per fiber for cabled fiber, or about $10 (US) per meter for 36-fiber cable. Each fiber pair should be able to handle approximately 1 million conversations at current data rates, or a total of 18 million conversations for that 18-pair cable, or 9.5 trillion conversation-minutes. Multiply this cost by 10 for right of way, trenching, repeaters, and other auxiliary hardware, or $100 per meter. This is probably just a ballpark estimate, but... Let's assume that the average phone call goes through 5000 kilometers of fiber, which is approximately the width of the US. (yes, I realize this is vastly over-inflated. But my estimate is attempting to be conservative, on the "safe" side.) A cable the width of the US costs $500 million. Assume that if it is to pay for itself, it must provide gross revenue of at least this amount to make a profit. (It would probably be more accurate to say that the cable needs to actually profit by 10% of its value per year. If it grossed 100% of its value, per year, then that would provide up to $450 million per year in maintenance and other costs per year, and still be a profit of 10%. But again, I'm trying to be CONSERVATIVE in how I account for costs.) Assume an average of 1/10th of its capacity is used, or 950 billion conversation-minutes. Do the division, dividing $500 million by 95 billion, and this works out to 1/20 of a penny per conversation-minute. At this point, your jaw should drop. Despite my dramatically over-inflated cost estimates for the fiber and installation and maintenance, and vastly underestimated utilization, I've still managed to justify only 1/20 penny per minute of cost. >This reminds me of a survey on a "proposed Rural Telecom Network" back in >India, which finally decided that ROI will not justify the project >even in 20 years time. I've read that estimates show that it would probably be cheaper to provide cellular-telephone service in China to everyone than to wire the country up with copper lines. This isn't particularly surprising. Cell-phones solve the "last few hundred yards/mile or two" problem quite well. Since nearly all of the actual connections in a copperline telephone system are switch-to-individual-phone lines, going cellular saves a bundle of installation costs. >> In the US, the current telephone company infrastructure is ALREADY PAID FOR. >> It was paid for by over-inflated rates during a monopolized era. If >> anything, the locals have an "unfair advantage" over the rest of the >> companies: Only they have a copper pair into every home. > >Alright, once again I try to show what exactly I am pointing at. Alice uses >the phone 23 hrs a day, Bob uses 10 mins, both get their connections >from ABCTel. The bandwidth with ABCTel saturates and it has to buy more >bandwidth (if ABCTel is a babybel, it will be buying it from a BigBell, >and whether or not bandwidth exists is quite besides the point here) >Its because of subscribers like Alice ABCTel is buying more bandwidth, >and the flat rate revenues generated by addition of a couple of members won't >justify the new bandwidth. >Flat rates are based on the assumption that a subscriber will use the service >for X amount of time. Since the phoneco has no control over user behaviour, >more that reasonable number of Alice-type clients will screw up the phonecos >economics. Re-read my estimate, above. Apparently, POTS-level "bandwidth" in a national fiber network should "cost" about 1/20 cent per minute, or maybe even less than that. Your commentary just above shows that you are assuming a far greater cost. For example, even your "23-hours-per-day" exaggeration should only cost 23x60x$0.0005, or $0.69 per day, or $21 per month. High, but that usage is unrealistic, of course. However, assuming one eighth of this usage, or 3 hours per day, that would be a daily cost of approximately $0.08, or about $2.75 per month. Also, you need to remember that if the telephone usage (in for example, the US) was so high as to get a substantial fraction of the population on the phone, LD, for as long as 12 hours per day, the average utilization of the fiber cable I've projected would rise from the highly-conservative figure of 10%, up to perhaps 25% or so. Since this increased usage wouldn't increase the cost of the cable itself or the installation or maintenance, the corresponding cost estimate would drop from 0.0005 dollars per minute to 40% of this or so, which is about $0.0002 per minute. At that rate, a "12 hours per day" usage would cost only $4.32 per month, which is well in line with current phone plans. But again, remember that most of these "costs" are really merely the result of allocating some proportion of an existing, fixed cost. Make that cost small enough (as fiber optics does) and spread it over enough users, and it becomes ignorable. >With explosion of Internet, people have found a new way of using their phone >line, and all these companies are already in trouble. To top all that we >are loudly professing the Internet (ultra-low-cost) solutions to LD Calls >with phoneco. I don't see any problem at all! You're just (falsely) assuming that LD should, somehow, be more expensive than local calls. Maybe it should be VERY SLIGHTLY more expensive, but LD fiber is basically a one-time investment with little maintenance costs. In order to determine how much more expensive LD should be over local, all you should have to do is figure out how much the additional equipment and fiber costs, and then consult an telephone engineer to figure out usage rates, and then go to an economist who can tell you how many more dollars you're going to have to charge. (Based on typical ROI tables,etc.) I've done enough of the numbers already to convince me that the amount is so tiny as to be ignorable. The fact is, LD phone is a business that, like it or not, is going to shrink drastically _in_terms_of_dollars_, simply because the cost of that service will likewise, go down. That's life. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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raygun shielding
by grad 96 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

not being an authority on the uses of X-Ray technology, I have no idea how useful tinfoil or gold lamme would be for shielding. As a professional photographer, I do know that one can purchase lead lied bags to protectect one's film from being ruined by the X-Ray machines at the airport. They do not work. When the customs people come to an object in your bag that they can not see into, they turn up the power until they can. I have ruined film and customs officer testimony to back this up, that's why I have them do a visual inspection of my film. If you have a lot, they don't look very hard, which has it's own bundle of opportunity right there. Not that I am advocating that kind of behavior. clint barnett lord of the cosmos emily carr institute

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Re: Hackers invade DOJ web site
by P. J. Ponder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

keywords: Crypto-policy, digital signatures, Anti-Horsemen, secure-DNS, DOJ-web-prank, Ayn Rand, hydrazine Will Day <willday(a)rom.oit.gatech.edu> responed to Frank Stuart's cogent and insightful posting on the DOJ hack and a possibility of using the tawdry event to some advantage.... If you missed Frank Stuart's original message, much of it is in Will Day's response. I have made some tedious reformatting here with prepended 'Day' and 'FS' marks to separate the two and clipped some ephemeral lines. Will Day signed his message with Pretty Good Privacy, but I clipped the signature from that off, also, having already hosed it up with my editing of line lengths, &c., so that you couldn't check it anyway, even if you wanted to. The gist of Will Day's question is how can an argument be made that supports the greater availability of strong crypto from the fact that someone swapped spoofed-up (and inane) pages for the DOJ's own on the DOJ's own web site? Let's start by trying to imagine a future world of geodesic networks based on robust strong protocols that are ubiquitous, easy to use, and embedded in the chips of even the most mundane devices. In this world, authentication of data, such as web pages, is required (or at least it could be) for every packet we receive. For data retrieved from remote sites we may require multiple signatures, and certificates signed by someone in whom we have placed a high reputation value. When (or if) freely available legal authentication technology becomes ubiquitous and transparent, we will be able to use it for even low risk, trivial, applications - like remote controls for televisions. We sure as hell won't have to stay up at night worrying that some punk is going to change any of the bits on our web server and that such changes might go undetected by our code-signed auto-gunsel. We are a long way from crypto-Chaumian-utopia, and it appears as though the US federal government wants to make it harder for us to get there. (As an aside, I think the Clinton administration gets more of the blame for this than they should, since it was entrenched policy before they got out of Arkansas. I think the roots of Clipper and GAK are back in Reagan's stint, about the time of NSDD 145. But then, the current leaders aren't doing much to develop meaningful *public* cryptography policy, so they have to take the heat now.) Strong crypto helps people protect what is theirs. That is part of what Frank Stuart is saying, and he's right. That is a good point, and it deserves some attention. Strong crypto can help big powerful organizations like the DOJ, and it can help regular folks, too. Frank Stuart's next point is a beauty - at least the DOJ site that was attacked didn't have copies of everyone's secret keys stored on it. We all may know that even if GAK were ever passed, no one would be stupid enough to store the keys on a web server sitting out on the big bad Internet, but the cleverness of this spin-vector is that it raises the issue of GAK-riskiness in the context of DOJ's computer security. The last point is that another law on the books isn't needed, and wouldn't be effective anyway. I have gone on way too long already, but to sum up, the DOJ being abused may serve to help the cause, if the proper angle can be seen - and Frank Stuart is off to a good start. The specific answer to Will Day's question, which is a good one - how does crytpo protect your poor little Linux box in the corner that serves up web pages? - is left up to the student as an exercise. -- Day>A short time ago, at a computer terminal far, far away, Frank Stuart Day>wrote: FS> however, I think those in a position to do so should start with FS> the spin control. Some suggestions: FS> FS> The fact that even the U.S. Justice Department is unable to FS> adequately protect it's own site from intruders underscores the FS> need for widely-available strong encryption. FS> FS> While this is certainly a major embarrassment for the Justice FS> Department, at least the mandatory "key escrow" program the Clinton FS> administration is insisting upon has not yet been implemented; FS> no private citizens' data appears to have been compromised this time. FS> FS> It's doubtful that a new law or government bureaucracy would have FS> prevented this from happening but it's entirely possible that tools FS> such as strong encryption could have. It's ironic that the U.S. FS> Government is focusing on the former while fighting use of the latter. Day> I understand how it affects their claim for the security of escrowed Day> keys, but I'm afraid I don't follow the other argument. How would Day> the wide availability of strong encryption have helped prevent the Day> breakin? How would encryption in general prevent breakins? I'd Day> love to use this as an argument for strong encryption, but I Day> don't see how it really applies.

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Re: phoneco vs x-phones
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:21 PM 8/20/96 -0700, Brian D Williams wrote: > >Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own, I do not speak for >Ameritech or it's alliance partners. >Jim Bell replies: > >>If that is the main difference in costs, then we should abandon >>those regs. Another big cost is billing, which could be eliminated >>if usage were unmetered. In any case, I tend to agree: Make >>these changes, eliminate the LD/local subsidy, and the LD >>companies would have no problem (at least domestically) competing >>against Internet phone. (International may be a different story, >>because foreign telcos tend to be owned by countries.) > >Yes compliance costs are a sore subject. Billing costs are actually >very cheap,(the mainframes are on the floor above me) the >difference between sending a metered bill or a flat rate bill is >tiny. Really tiny (NDA). The local/long distance subsidy was >eliminated at breakup, but long distance companies do have to pay >to use local networks, "the king is dead, long live the king!"??? The long distance companies are not "using local networks," your customers are...to connect to those long distance companies. And any payments LD companies make to you are, indeed, a subsidy. Tell me, how much is this _subsidy_, exactly? BTW, in case you doubt this assessment, let's do a fair comparison, shall we? Let's suppose, for the moment, that the amount of the subsidy is 3 cents per minute. (a figure I heard around here, recently.) As an alternative, the phone company would presumably be entitled to be served by phone lines, at say $30 per month or so, through which their customers reach them. $30 per month is $1 per day or 4 cents per hour or about 0.07 cents per minute. 3 cents doesn't equal 0.07 cents, now does it?!? Tell me again how "the local/long distance subsidy was eliminated at breakup." Tell me another one, daddy... >but as competition heats up these rates are >dropping and new players (competitors) join the table, Or they can >build their own. ;) How has this remaining SUBSIDY dropped over time, assuming it has? When is it scheduled to drop to zero? >One of the fun turns of events might be that the threat of x-phones >might lead the RBOC's to actually turn into an ISP's! We could pull >this off at amazing speed. (if you can't beat them, join them!) We >are after all one of the four major nodes of the Internet...... First, you need to figure out how to supply ISDN for a REASONABLE charge, like "no extra charge!" to customers. It's been over 16 years after I first heard of ISDN. At the time, it seemed like a wonderful idea...against the 300 baud modems then in use. Against modern 31K modems that you only have to pay for...ONCE...ISDN seems mighty lame. Face it, ISDN used to be a good idea. But it's just barely shown up the moment it's hit the end of its marketing window. ISDN will have a marketing lifetime for maybe a couple of more years, and only then because you can't put more bits through a 3.4 khz passband. Not to mention all the bullshit propaganda that claimed that with ISDN, you wouldn't have to buy any modems. Well, maybe that's just because they didn't CALL them modems, but they charged way more for an essentially indistinguishable function. Can you say, "Fraud"? I knew you could! Okay, go ahead, charge a little extra for ISDN. How much more? Well, let's see: 31K modems sell for $99. ISDN is four times faster, so let's say it's worth four times more, or $400. Amortized over 10 years, that's about $3.60 per month. Fair enough? Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: [NOISE] Airport legal question
by William Knowles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lucky, >I know that it is a violation of federal law to joke about explosives at >the X-ray machine. Would an "I love Explosives" sticker on carry-on >luggage violate any laws? Dunno, But you might get a kick out this from The Chicago Reader that published a list of the "bomb threats" made at O'Hare International airport a few weeks back. 7/18: "I have nothing other than the bomb I am going to put on the plane." 7/18: "I have a bomb that's going to go off in 30 seconds." 7/18: "You mean the bomb I have in my bag?" 7/19: "I don't have an ID, but I have a bomb." 7/21: "There's a bomb in the bag in my hand." 7/23: "I don't have a bomb in the bag." 7/23: "I got a bomb in my bag to kill everyone here." 7/24: "Well no, I left my pipe bomb at home." 7/25: "The one that looks like [there's] a bomb in it." 7/26: "I have a bomb in my bag. Boom." 7/27: "Where should I put the bomb?" 7/27: "No, nothing but a bomb." 7/31: "Are you checking for bombs? I've got a bomb in my bag." 7/31: "I have some explosives to transport." 8/1: "It's not as if we were Swedish and here to blow up the airport." 8/2: Offender: "It's a bomb in the bag." Witness: "That's not funny." Offender: "I'm not playing." 8/3 "I have a bomb." -- William Knowles erehwon(a)c2.org -- William Knowles <erehwon(a)c2.org> PGP mail welcome & prefered / KeyID 1024/2C34BCF9 PGP Fingerprint 55 0C 78 3C C9 C4 44 DE 5A 3C B4 60 9C 00 FB BD Finger for public key -- Vote for Harry Browne in November -- http://www.HarryBrowne96.org

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