December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Curl up and dye
by Shift Control 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This week, in the Hair issue of Shift Control... "To be fair, I've never left a hairdresser's happy. In fact, I don't know anyone who hasn't fled from a hairdresser's in search of the nearest reflective surface (I chose the window of an Iranian rug importer on Piccadilly) to try and rub away the salon-induced feeling of idiocy. But on this day I was particularly woeful. The haircut was nothing a five-year-old boy would have been ashamed of. But I'm a bit older than that. My own mother, who I saw later that day for the first time in two years, said I looked like a 'dork'." - Paul Robinson on getting a high-class haircut. "'And the new world champion for imperial whiskers is... Jurgen Burkhardt!' When it dawned on the short German dressed in the Kaiser outfit that he'd won his event, the loops at either end of his huge moustache began to twitch maniacally. The dimensions of the new world champion's imperial growth were staggering. From left to right, including the loops, it

1 0

Jim Bell defense fund
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has anyone talked to Jim to find out what he wants? I wouldn't be surprised if he wants to represent himself without the assistance/interference of an attorney. (I think that'd be a big mistake, but he's an adult and should be allowed to make his own choices.) Is he currently represented by a court-appointed attorney? Are they working out of the federal public defender's office, or are they in private practice? I'm not familiar with the Tacoma federal PD's office (nor am I sure that one exists) but the federal public defenders in Oregon typically did a pretty good job for their clients, frequently better than that available from the cheaper/less experienced end of the spectrum in the private bar. A court-appointed attorney may also be more familiar with/comfortable with clients who want to take an active part in their defense. (Sometimes, defendants will choose to represent themseves, but with the aid of an attorney to help them understand courtroom protocol/procedure, and to give help/advice with the trickier issues.) It's also possible that organizing only a small defense fund will turn out to be worse than no defense fund, if it eliminates his eligibility for an appointed attorney but fails to generate enough money to attract a good private attorney. If the government really wants to screw him, forcing him to represent himself or be represented by someone inexperienced or uninterested or underfunded seems like a good way to do that. My hunch is that an attorney from the private bar will want somewhere between $15K and $30K to take this to trial, could be higher. Someone who asks for a lot less probably doesn't intend to do very much work, unless they're doing it on a pro bono basis. If people are serious about this, I suggest getting in touch with Jim or his family to see if it's actually helpful/useful, and setting it up such that any money raised goes directly to the attorney, not to Jim or his family. (not because I don't think they're trustworthy, but because gaining extra cash/assets may make him ineligible for a court-appointed attorney - but if the cash/assets aren't available to him because they're being held by some unconnected cypherpunk, it'd be much harder/impossible to deny him appointed counsel.) Also, given Jim's tax status, it's possible that the IRS will try to seize/levy against any funds that come into Jim's control, which would turn the "defense fund" into the "pay Jim's taxes fund". -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles(a)netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |

4 4

A Spam Experiment
by Robert A. Hayden 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Over the past two weeks I ran a little, completely non-scientific, experiment to examine the propgation of spam. First, I created a bogus mailing address that forwarded to my normal address, allowing me to see the different "to" headers. I then posted a single "test" message to six usenet newsgroups to act as catalyst. These were: alt.tv.nypd-blue comp.org.eff.talk comp.os.ms-windows.apps.utilities.win95 comp.sys.mac.portables misc.legal rec.arts.sf.tv Over the next 72 hours, I received 28 pieces of spam, which I catagorize as an unsolicited email attempting to sell me a product or service. 12 of these messages had an address indicating I could respond to have my name removed from future mailings. I responded carefully to each address, but 4 of them bounced as an invalid address, no such domain, or other problem (no route to host, probably because it was physcially diconnected). I also notied that the "reply-to" field had no relationship with the address to request removal on all 12 of them. The other 14 pieces of spam were replied to the "Reply-to:" field. All were bounced as "no such user" or "no such domain". One postmaster wrote with a canned form letter saying their domain had been put in as the reply-to field unknown to them. Over the next 72 hours, I received an additional 49 pieces of spam, including one that was 850k in size and another that was 421k. This batch was NOT replied to in any way, although 17 of them did include an address to reply to request removal. Since the initial six days, there have been a total of 4 spam messages, all of them were also ignored. The last 72 hours have had zero spam. - --- I need to do more tests with a new address, but I am curious as to if the spike in activity during the second 72 hours wasn't caused by the fact that I replied to messages requesting removal. While it is possible that it was caused by slow usenet propogation, it seems to have happened much slower than propogation usually takes (about 12-18 hours on average in the states, last I heard.) This test wasted 3MB of mail space and total of about 75 minutes to download and reply to (requesting removal). Not that at no time did this mail address reqest any mail be sent to them. The only crime committed was to post to usenet. Just my numbers, FYI. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: PGP Signed with PineSign 2.2 iQCVAwUBM5ICSDokqlyVGmCFAQHMegP/U9jLlTR3gtT1fNqqPx2dnWGhGhRl/18W k4nzWHLsDGE08UxJ8xILJ1jkV9UJOhUpHqzZuy6Hr6zUE5duoAEWGBL4tY8xrzty cG2lDXnrXjfkvtDUf7Ixo49aSHz2mQUT/ia6JbLCFPNKby+16LteSQa7w/O0h9aF +u5WonQvCAc= =A18d -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Robert A. Hayden hayden(a)krypton.mankato.msus.edu __ -=-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-=- \/_ http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~hayden/Welcome.html \/

1 0

CyberTects/SSZ status (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: >From ravage(a)ssz.com Sun Jun 1 22:33:10 1997 From: Jim Choate <ravage(a)ssz.com> Message-Id: <199706020333.WAA10315(a)einstein.ssz.com> Subject: CyberTects/SSZ status To: users(a)einstein.ssz.com Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 22:33:08 -0500 (CDT) Cc: consulting(a)einstein.ssz.com, pwright(a)einstein.ssz.com, toddm(a)tivoli.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2928 Hi, We had our business planning meeting tonite and the following was dediced: * CyberTects will be no more by the end of the week. In its place is a new Commercial Web Service firm called (tadah).. The Armadillo Group There will be specific instructions in a day or so about where to send your payments for outstanding service bills. * Update of service fee's: Monthly webpage $25.00 Customer Server Hosting, monthly $100.00 SLIP/PPP, dial-in, monthly $20.00 SLIP/PPP, dedicated, monthly, 1 IP $100.00 IP Sets, 10 IP's (initial 1 & 9 more), annual $100.00 Shell access, w/ other account only $10.00 Labor charges, hourly, rounded up $80.00 Sales Tax NOT included, 8.25% in Texas * We will be focusing on a limited set of services: - expansion of services provided outside the SOHO sector into the general business community. - various flavors of dial-in and dedicated connectivity options including a move to ISDN availablity with the increase in our primary feed to the Internet. - webpage hosting w/ in-house development as required by the customer. - hosting of customers servers in-house providing a level of technical support previously available only to large firms. * The current Real/Time ISDN contract expires at the end of September. At this point we plan to have either a T1 or ADSL in place with additional servers. * It looks like the current plan is to NOT have onsite service, training, and other services available through CyberTects in the past propogate through this change over. There will be a clearer mailing later in the week better detailing exactly what will be available and what we will be dropping. Note: Even if the firm as a whole ceases to host mailing lists I will continue to host them using my own resources. I will continue to do some onsite service and such on my own. * The future of the Elgin site expansion to fully mirror SSZ and provide 100% backup may not be implimented because of the drop of other services. I have not decided if this will be something that I take on personaly if it is dropped. If you have any further questions or would like to express your views on these changes, please don't send email to me. Instead send it to 'consulting(a)ssz.com' so that the whole group may discuss the issues. Our goal as always is to provide you with professional service & support. Jim Choate The Armadillo Group ravage(a)ssz.com

1 0

Re: Rotenberg as the Uber Enemy
by TruthMonger.tm＠dev.null 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Robert A. Costner wrote: > If EFGA has a > position, it is that first the current laws should be tested against spam. No > new laws should be proposed until today's laws can be shown to be useless > against the problem. Regardless, you are already preparing to participate in the process of new laws being implemented. > DATA GATHERING > While there is nothing wrong with data > harvesting in it's self, what one does with the info may be called into > question. The data is going to be misused. Future legislation will be nothing more than a fight over who gets to misuse it. > Data Collection procedures may be less restrictive than identification > requirements, or content bans. > The reason the TCPA is carefully considered is that once the law allowed for > the promulgation of rules, the FCC had a series of public comment periods and > promoted rules that highly favored privacy while trying to balance the fair > practices of telemarketers. Unfortunately, with spam, most spammers do not > have "fair practices". This can be translated to mean that the little guys can do the same thing that large companies do, only without having to hire high-priced legal help to tell them how to route around the "rules." > If is highly likely that the spam question could be quickly addressed and more > clearly defined without new laws simply by a comment period and the > promulgation of new rules. No new laws, just new rules. Doublespeak? > SPAM vs TELEMARKETING > In 1990, more than 30,000 telemarketing operations employed over 18 million > Americans. Easily we could see over 300K spam operators in business, > employing less than one million people. Each of these individual spammers > could be sending out daily spams. Many of them would be able to reach a > significant portion of the internet users on a daily basis. Right. I'm going to receive 300,000 spams a day without taking steps to stop it, because I'm stupid. And nobody in the free market is going to figure out that they can make a shitload of money by providing a product that solves the problem. And enough people are going to sort through 300,000 emails a day and send people money to keep all the spammers operating. Since we're all so stupid and incompetent, I guess we'd better count on the government and the EFGA-type organizations to do what is necessary to "save" us. Robert's immediate solution is to take a law that doesn't work and promulgate "new rules" so that it does. Right. The "new rules" are going to be decided on by the same lame bunch of actors who made the "old rules" which don't work. And all of those people who aren't paying attention to the old rules are going to have a vision from heaven which tells them to follow the new rules. Question: "With all of the organizations 'busting their ass' for our benefit, when do we start seeing the *good* legislation?" I can use strong crypto to keep my communications private and I can maintain control over my private key. The government wants to pass legislation to change that. What's to debate? I need groups of self-appointed saviors to negotiate the method and timing of how my privacy and freedom are going to be taken away? I don't think so! These "saviors" of our rights are doing nothing more than serving as a buffer for the government as what we already have is being stolen from us. They have taken it upon themselves to negotiate our retreat in the face of loss of our privacy and freedom. They are providing the government with a stamp of approval for "reasonable compromise" of our freedom and privacy via "acceptable legislation." If these organizations are so concerned about my rights, then why do I never see the words "Nazi Ratfuckers!" in their press releases? No more free buffets? No more power lunches with the power mongers? No more nights in the Lincoln bedroom? (OK. I'll calm down and be "reasonable." How about the word, "Bullshit!" I've read the government press releases, I've heard the speeches. It's bullshit, but all I hear coming out of the mouths of the "saviors" of my rights is replies in kind--politispeak.) I keep hearing how these organizations that haven't kept us from getting fucked in the past are working for the future, when one of our own is in jail *now*. Want to impress me? Do something for Jim Bell, because tomorrow it's Tim May, and Adam Back a week later (they got Noriega, and they can get Adam, too.) You don't have time to aide Jim Bell, but you have time to give me dire warnings about getting 300,000 emails a day? You have time to tell me that the "solution" is to have the people who wrote rules that don't work write *new* rules? Horseshit! TruthMonger

1 0

Economist: The disappearing taxpayer
by Vincent Cate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cypherpunks views of the future in mainstream media. Kind of fun. The following is from: http://www.economist.com/issue/31-05-97/ld4660row.html -- Vince http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince/ [The Economist] The disappearing taxpayer "THE art of taxation", advised Louis XIV's treasurer, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, "consists in so plucking the goose to obtain the largest amount of feathers, with the least possible amount of hissing." His observation remains true, except for one big change. Unlike geese, people in the 17th century did not know how to fly. Now they can. In the coming decades electronic commerce -- combined with the growing ease with which firms can shift their operations from one part of the world to another -- will make it ever easier for people to flee countries where taxes are high, or to evade tax altogether by doing their business in cyberspace. The hole this will leave behind is already worrying many governments (see ). Some argue that it is "unfair" for others to lure their firms away by levying lower taxes, and are pushing for the harmonisation of taxes. Another new idea is to impose a tax on electronic transactions. But although governments everywhere will have to start thinking -- and soon -- about how to raise taxes in the newly weightless global economy, both remedies are flawed. A question of sovereignty . . . Those who advocate harmonisation say that the alternative is a "race to the bottom", as governments sacrifice social spending on the altar of competitiveness. But different countries have different spending needs and make different judgments about the proportion of income to devote to transfers and public services. Indeed -- remember "no taxation without representation" -- such decisions lie at the heart of modern politics. That is why even in the EU, a relentless prober of the boundaries of national sovereignty, proposals to harmonise taxes have made little progress so far. A recent proposal from a panel of economists to make up for the tax losses caused by electronic commerce by introducing a "bit tax" on flows of electronic information is similarly defective. It is hard to see how a single country or even a group might impose such a tax without simply forcing on-line transactions offshore. But in so far as it succeeded, such a tax might just hamper the adoption of information technology, depriving people and businesses of its great productivity benefits. So if neither of these ideas is any good, why not do nothing? It is true that the full impact of electronic commerce and globalisation on governments' taxation powers is still some way off. The fact that tax levels vary from 60% of GDP in Sweden to 32% in America suggests that even in a globalising economy governments are still able to make distinctive fiscal choices. However, every so often a big Swedish company -- Ericsson most recently -- threatens to decamp because egregious income taxes make it difficult to recruit skilled employees. America's corporate taxes have withered to insignificance because of the mobility of firms. At present these are merely straws in the wind, and hardly new ones, but there is no doubt which way the wind is blowing. Some competition between tax regimes may be a good thing, if it encourages governments to show more discipline in their tax and spending policies. But one day globalisation and electronic commerce could make a sizeable dent in a country's total tax revenues. And these forces have already made a big impact on the way the burden of taxes falls on a population. This is what rules out the option of inaction. . . . and of equity Not all firms, workers and products are equally mobile. Entrepreneurs, scientists, tennis players and film stars may be able to uproot themselves in search of lower taxes, but the average worker is still unlikely to become a tax refugee. Although this may reassure governments, it implies that governments will eventually have to cut taxes on the most mobile factors of production, notably skilled workers, while taxes on less mobile unskilled workers will have to rise. Over the past decade or so taxes on capital have already fallen sharply while those on labour have risen. In future it will be harder to tax firms or high-earners at high rates because they are the most mobile. The implication is that unskilled labour will have to bear a greater burden. If they are to mitigate this change while maintaining their tax revenues, governments need to speed up tax reforms that are needed anyway to improve economic efficiency. In most countries at present, exemptions and loopholes distort the allocation of resources. Broadening the tax base by scrapping exemptions such as mortgage interest relief and zero rates of VAT on certain goods and services would allow a much lower rate of tax and therefore reduce the incentive for both tax evasion and migration. Less complex reporting requirements would reduce another incentive to hide from the taxman. A second needed change is to shift the tax base from income towards consumption and property, which is both immobile and hard to hide. Even consumption is becoming more mobile. But a consumption tax would both remove the present disincentive to save and help to collect taxes from tax dodgers (even those whose income comes from invisible Internet sales have to spend it). Having changed so much else in the world economy, globalisation and information technology will inevitably undermine the way governments raise taxes. Reforming the tax system to plug the hole is going to be hard. Not reforming it would be even worse. The Economist Home Page - Search - Contents - Next article © Copyright 1997 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All Rights Reserved

1 0

Firewalls
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timmy C[retin] May prefers to have sex with little kids because his own penis is like that of a three-year-old. ____ _(____)_ _ooO_(_o__o_)_Ooo_ Timmy C[retin] May

2 1

Re: Creating a unique ID number for a dollar
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Death rays from Mars made Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> write: >There's a way to generate a number for any person which is unique. It is not >shared by anyone else on the planet. It's not guaranteed unique. First, the dollar you use may be a forgery (why forge a dollar? I don't know, maybe they're practicing on low-denomination notes which noone ever looks at closely so they can get the twenties and hundreds perfect. I have a vague memory of someone doing this with either US dollars or UK pound notes some time ago, motivated by the "noone would ever bother forging a dollar/pound, so it has to be genuine" mentality). In addition you'd have to specify "US dollar" rather than just "dollar" because, apart from the different serial number formats, some countries will reissue banknotes if the originals are damaged in printing, which leads to the possibility of two (legitimate) notes with the same serial number being in circulation if the original isn't destroyed as required (I have some of these replacement notes for now-defunct NZ dollar and two-dollar notes stashed away somewhere). Does the US Treasury issue replacement notes if the originals are damaged in printing, or does it just destroy the notes and leave it at that? Peter.

3 2

New SSN Law
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Robert A. Costner wrote: > Why does the store need my social security number for me to purchase soft > drinks and eggs? (40 cents off on eggs this week) I see no reason for it. > If I provide a false number, I have probably committed some crime. > > Yes, I would support a law that forbids private companies to ask for social > security numbers except for tax purposes. Am I missing something? Didn't we used to have one of those? Wasn't that changed so that government and corporate interests could put us all in more efficient boxes to control us and make money off of us? Some states already use the SSN on the driver's licenses. More will follow. The SSN is our National Identity Card and there is no going back. The tattoo is history and the Identity Chip is the future.

1 0

Australian explosion explained...
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > S P A C E V I E W S > Volume Year 1997, Issue 6 > June 1997 > http://www.seds.org/spaceviews/9706/ <snip> > Things That Go Boom in the Night: Scientists working for the National > Science Foundation have concluded that a peculiar, loud explosion heard > in the Australian outback in September 1993 was just a meteorite, and > not evidence of terrorist activity. The explosion seemed to be located > near a ranch owned by Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult linked to the > gassing of the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that injured thousands of > morning commuters. The cult was reported interested in developing > nuclear weapons and was mining uranium in the area. However, seismic > data recorded during the event are better explained by a small iron > meteorite crashing to Earth. The meteorite explanation also fits well > with reports of a bright streak seen in the sky at the time of the > explosion. ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

1 0