December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

[ON TOPIC] Re: Why porn must be stopped at all costs, by Jodi Hoffman
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Paul Spirito wrote: > >Alexander Tyler wrote: > >> "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only > >> exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves > >> largess out of the public treasury." > This assumes there is a "majority of voters". Read James Madison, & kiss a > multiculturalist today. > Now can we get back to denouncing Jewish Nazis? Sorry, that's off-topic. You _can_, however, discuss 'Remailer Hating Nazis'...

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Re: Why porn must be stopped at all costs, by Jodi Hoffman
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Declan: >[Wow. First time I've ever been personally accused of being "a major >reason for the downward spiral of society." --Declan] Best way to mobilize a society: give them a Devil to hate. It's much easier to get people to hate than to love. Blame the Press, the Permissive Society, the Liberals, the Educational System. Of course, once you get rid of the Devil, it's usually a good idea to have the slave's collars on everyone BEFORE they realize the problem's still around. >---------- Forwarded message ---------- >Date: Mon, 03 Nov 1997 11:53:27 -0500 >From: Jodi Hoffman <jlhoffm(a)ibm.net> >To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu >Subject: Why porn must be stopped at all costs..... [sneck] >Try as I might, I cannot forget standing on the steps of the Supreme >Court building with my husband and 10 year old daughter in the freezing >drizzle. I really thought we could make a difference, standing there >with our banner and signs, one of which read, "DON'T SACRIFICE MY CHILD >ON THE ALTAR OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT." Stupid me. As the saying >goes...we've come a long way, baby. You need a song to cheer you up. Try this one: "There's a place in the world for the angry young man With his working-class ties and his radical plans, He refuses to bend, he refuses to fall, And he's always at home with his back to the wall. He's proud of the scars and the battles he's lost And he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on the cross, And he likes to be known as the angry young man." --Billy Joel, "Angry Young Man" [sneck] >So, keep protecting your porn-induced orgasms. That's exactly what >happened with the Hitler youth, etc... After all, I'm sure it does help >to blur the lines of reality. You clearly need a better country to live in. I suggest China; they have a long history of keeping impure materials out of the hands of the easily influenced sheeple. If you have trouble there, perhaps Singapore, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon would be more to your liking. If you're interested in a proven weight-loss program, maybe North Korea is your best bet. [sneck] >RULE FOR REVOLUTION #1: CORRUPT THE NATION'S YOUTH Done already, by the gub'mint. Kids can't read or write at all nowadays, despite the high level of per-pupil spending. >RULE FOR REVOLUTION #2: CONTROL THE MASS MEDIA Done already, by the FCC and the religious right. >RULE FOR REVOLUTION #3: ENCOURAGE PUBLIC INDIFFERENCE Done already, by the actions of mudsucker politicians who seek re-election at any cost, even the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. "I think I'll vote Demopublican this year, or maybe Republicrat. I have such a hard time telling their extremist positions apart." >RULE FOR REVOLUTION #4: ENCOURAGE PUBLIC BICKERING I could claim this was the reason Usenet was created, but I'm not a conspiracy buff. Of course, on C-SPAN, we can see politicians ranting at each other, the President, and nothing at all. >RULE FOR REVOLUTION #5: SEIZE POWER, THEN CENSOR The religious right again. >RULE FOR REVOLUTION #6: BANKRUPT THE GOVERNMENT See if you can guess who said this and when: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury." Was it: a) Alexander Tytler, 18th century; b) Thomas Jefferson, early 1800s; c) Karl Marx, late 1800s; d) V. I. Lenin, 1915 Here's a hint: Pick the Scottish historian who lived in the 1700s. So the concept of a "bankrupt democracy" has been around for a while. >RULE FOR REVOLUTION #7: DESTROY NATIONAL VALUES Create a climate of fear. Spread uncertainty and doubt among the populace. Wave the battle flags of pedophilia and terrorism proudly from the ramparts, so that people gladly give up their liberties to be saved from the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. >RULE FOR REVOLUTION #8: ATTACK GUN OWNERSHIP If someone were to hang around your child's schoolyard with a full-auto AK-47, would you scream "DON'T SACRIFICE MY CHILD ON THE ALTAR OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT"? >RULES FOR REVOLUTION #9 AND #10: UNDERMINE THE ARMED FORCES Hey, that's one rule! >THE REALITY: >Our country's armed forces consume a vast percentage of our gross >national product. Defense of any kind is wasteful by nature. Even white corpuscles don't do jack when there's no infection to fight. >We possess the best and most advanced weapons systems in the world. But >our armed forces are a joke for two reasons: >(1) they are completely restrained in their actions by a hostile >Congress, and >(2) the armed forces have been saddled with such a bad reputation that >it is virtually impossible to fill the ranks with volunteers, even in >the new and streamlined armed services. Say what? The last I heard, military recruiting was up because it was a way to get training in technical areas that might otherwise be impossible for recruits to learn. (Of course, some people still have to carry rifles...) >FINAL REALITY: WELCOME TO AMERIKA, COMRADES. Land of the Freeh, and the home of the knave. Thanks for making it just a little worse by your actions.

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Senate Commerce cmte approves tax freedom bill 14-5
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Right now I'm over at the Digital/Altavista summit to discuss rating systems in search engines so I missed the vote. (Barry Steinhardt from the ACLU just finished speaking. Sen. Judd Gregg, a CDA fan, spoke this morning.) This bill limits local and state governments' ability to tax the Net. --Declan] ---- (forwarded to me by a House staffer) >The full Senate Commerce Committee voted today 14-5 to approve an amended >version of the Internet Tax Freedom Act. Here's how members voted: > >14 Yes: McCain, Stevens, Burns, Snowe, Ashcroft, Frist, Abraham, Brownback, >Hollings, Inouye, Rockefeller, Kerry, Breaux, Wyden >5 No: Gorton, Hutchinson, Ford, Bryan, Dorgan >1 Did not vote: Lott

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RE: S/MIME
by Ian Clysdale 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There is an old saying in the Security Field: "Poor Security is worse than no security at all". I doubt that you would find few if any that would agree with you that it is a good thing having the masses using weak crypto. At least the US members of the Open-PGP group are willing to sacrifice overseas sales in the effort to provide STRONG crypto to EVERYONE. It is the right thing to do. I am sorry to see that you do not uderstand this. Sorry, I'm going to continue to take a viewpoint that I suspect is rather unpopular in this list, and argue for the advantages of weak crypto in certain circumstances, when it is KNOWN to be weak. The phrase "Poor security is worse than no security" refers to the dangers in assuming that your communications are secure, even when they're not. If you know that your cryptography is weak, it can still sometimes be sufficient for your purposes. What weak cryptography does is protect from passive attacks, such as simple wire-tapping. While an RC2/40 message can be trivially broken in a matter of hours, it can't be broken in real-time. If EVERYONE used even RC2/40, then passive attacks would be foiled, because the <insert evil NSA/CSIS/etc here> just isn't going to bother breaking every single transmitted message. Now, of course, if you're doing something where you don't want your communications to be intercepted under any circumstances, then you want to be using something stronger than RC2/40. However, S/MIME doesn't prevent that at all. DES is a published standard, and I'm waiting for somebody outside of the USA to implement triple-DES with S/MIME. This will inter-operate with Outlook and Netscape clients inside the USA (theoretically). Including a minimum baseline of weak cryptography is NOT denying strong cryptography to everyone. Once the patent on RC2 expires (which is very soon) or if RSA gets dropped on their head and finally does the intelligent move of releasing it to the public domain, then S/MIME provides an expandable infrastructure for secure mail, with a huge user base already out there, and in a form much more spoonable to the unwashed masses. Ian

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Re: Terrorism is a NON-THREAT (fwd)
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

snow wrote: > Part of the problem is that people _assume_ that legislation fixes > problems. It doesn't. Laws just give society permission to punish the > offender. Prosecutor: "You should find this nanny guilty of murder because young people like to party." Jury: "Duuhhh...OK!" What I find ironically hilarious, offensive and sad, is that there are still so many new laws being passed, in spite of the fact that they are no longer really needed. Courtrooms now pretty much just serve as an arena for engaging in the age-old sport of public stoning. Whoever does the best job of finger pointing, while working the crowd into a frenzy, wins. Tim McVeigh was Dead Meat (TM) the minute the judge ruled that fingers in the courtroom could only be pointed at Terrible Timmy. I guess I'm an old fart...I remember when $15 million could buy you a decent attorney. I don't own any guns, so I guess when the Feds kick my door in, I'll just point at the dog, and hope they go for my clever ruse. Hell, I'm even willing to testify... Not-Me!

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Cypherpunks Physical Meetings...The Rest of the Story
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From News of the CypherPunks: * In March, a 36-year-old man choked to death on a 6-inch tropical fish he had popped into his mouth while showing off for friends in Bayou Vista, La. And in April, a 12-year-old boy was electrocuted in East Palo Alto, Calif., after he climbed a high-voltage transmission tower in the rain, dared his three companions to join him, and then accidentally touched a wire. And in July, a 22-year- old man, described by his grandmother as "smart in school," died in a bungee-cord accident on a railroad trestle in Fairfax County, Va. (Said a police spokesman: "The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the ground.")

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Re: Why porn must be stopped at all costs, by Jodi Hoffman
by Abstruse 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Someone on this list, I forget who, has made numerous attempts at > convincing us that pornography 'does no harm' to children. It is > exactly at this point that I must draw a line. Studies have shown that > an event which lasts even so much as three-tenths of a second, within > five to ten minutes has produced a structural change in the brain. > Exposure to porn causes actual brain damage, especially in a child. let me guess . . . scientology? it sounds to me as if you just despise porn so much that you're seeing red, and hence . . . not seeing the facts straight (or believing whatever you [want to] hear).

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by test.test.com＠mail.txcc.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: www.cypherpunks.to
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lucky Green wrote: > > What happened to www.cypherpunks.to? It appears to have disappeared. > > The server works fine and I can reach it from the US. I tried www.cypherpunks.to and couldn't get connected. I dropped the www and got sent to the www site. And the root password there is...

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Financial Cryptography '98 Final Call for Papers
by Ray Hirschfeld 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Financial Cryptography '98 Second International Conference February 23-26, 1998, Anguilla, BWI FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS General Information: Financial Cryptography '98 (FC98) is a conference on the security of digital financial transactions. Meetings alternate between the island of Anguilla in the British West Indies and other locations. This second meeting will be held in Anguilla on February 23-26, 1998. FC98 aims to bring together persons involved in both the financial and data security fields to foster cooperation and exchange of ideas. Original papers are solicited on all aspects of financial data security and digital commerce in general, including Anonymous Payments Fungibility Authentication Home Banking Communication Security Identification Conditional Access Implementations Copyright Protection Loss Tolerance Credit/Debit Cards Loyalty Mechanisms Currency Exchange Legal Aspects Digital Cash Micropayments Digital Receipts Network Payments Digital Signatures Privacy Issues Economic Implications Regulatory Issues Electronic Funds Transfer Smart Cards Electronic Purses Standards Electronic Voting Tamper Resistance Electronic Wallets Transferability Instructions for Authors: Send a cover letter and 12 copies of an extended abstract to be received by November 17, 1997 (or postmarked by November 7, 1997 and sent via airmail) to the Program Chair at the address given below. The extended abstract (a short draft of the full paper, typically 10 pages in length) should start with the title, the names of the authors, and an abstract followed by a succinct statement appropriate for a non-specialist reader specifying the subject addressed, its background, the main achievements, and their significance to financial data security. Submissions are limited to 15 single-spaced pages of 12pt type. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to authors no later than January 12, 1998. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will be presented at the conference. Proceedings: Proceedings of the conference will be published by Springer Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Preproceedings will be available at the conference, but final versions will not be due until afterwards, giving authors the opportunity to revise their papers based on presentations and discussions at the meeting. Instructions and deadlines for submission of final papers will be sent later to authors of accepted papers. Rump Session: In addition to the regular conference program, a rump session will be held to provide an opportunity for less formal presentations. Although the rump session will be organized during the conference itself, any advance proposals may be sent to the Program Co-Chair at the email address given below. Rump session contributions will not appear in the conference proceedings. Stipends: A very limited number of stipends may be available to those unable to obtain funding to attend the conference. Students whose papers are accepted and who will present the paper themselves are encouraged to apply if such assistance is needed. Requests for stipends should be addressed to one of the General Chairs. Registration: Information about conference registration and on travel, hotels, and Anguilla itself will follow in a separate general announcement. There are special reduced registration rates for full-time academics and students. Further information about registration is available online via the URL listed below. Workshop: A workshop, intended for anyone with commercial software development experience who wants hands-on familiarity with the issues and technology of financial cryptography, is planned in conjunction with FC98, to be held during the week following the conference. Further information about the workshop is available online via the URL listed below. For information about workshop registration, please contact one of the General Chairs. Special Attraction: On Thursday, February 26, 1998, there will be a total eclipse of the sun. The narrow zone of 100% totality will pass just south of Anguilla, and there should be an excellent view of the eclipse from the conference site. Send Submissions to: Rafael Hirschfeld FC98 Program Chair CWI Kruislaan 413 1098 SJ Amsterdam The Netherlands email: ray(a)cwi.nl phone: +31 20 592 4169 fax: +31 20 592 4199 Send Rump Session Contributions to: Matthew Franklin FC98 Program Co-Chair email: franklin(a)research.att.com Program Committee: Matt Blaze, AT&T Laboratories--Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA Antoon Bosselaers, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Yves Carlier, Bank for International Settlements, Basel, Switzerland Walter Effross, Washington College of Law, American U., Washington DC, USA Matthew Franklin, AT&T Laboratories--Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA Michael Froomkin, U. Miami School of Law, Coral Gables, FL, USA Rafael Hirschfeld, CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Alain Mayer, Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, USA Moni Naor, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel Frank Trotter, Mark Twain Ecash/Mercantile Bank, St. Louis, MO, USA Doug Tygar, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Moti Yung, CertCo LLC (formerly: Bankers Trust E-Commerce), New York, NY, USA General Chairs: Robert Hettinga, Shipwright, Boston, MA, USA email: rah(a)shipwright.com Vincent Cate, Offshore Information Services, Anguilla, BWI email: vince(a)offshore.com.ai Exhibits and Sponsorship Manager: Julie Rackliffe, Boston, MA, USA email: julie(a)sneaker.net Workshop Leader: Ian Goldberg, Berkeley, CA, USA email: iang(a)cs.berkeley.edu Financial Cryptography '98 is held in cooperation with the International Association for Cryptologic Research. FC98 is sponsored by: RSA Data Security Inc. <http://www.rsa.com> C2NET, Inc. <http://www.c2.net> Hansa Bank & Trust Company Limited, Anguilla <http://www.hansa.net/> Offshore Information Services <http://www.offshore.com.ai/> e$ <http://www.shipwright.com> Those interested in becoming a sponsor of FC98 or in purchasing exhibit space, please contact the Exhibits and Sponsorship Manager. A copy of this call for papers as well as other information about the conference will be available at URL http://www.cwi.nl/conferences/FC98.

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