December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: East German Collapse (Was: Fighting the cybercensor
by Phillip M. Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rich Graves <rcgraves(a)disposable.com> wrote in article <5cnvpf$jeu(a)life.ai.mit.edu>... > Hallam-Baker wrote: > > > > One point I had forgotten. The demonstration took place > > on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. This is one explanation > > as to why the border guards did not attempt to open fire with > > firearms or attempt to break up the demonstration with tear gas. > > I think the timing was a coincidence. (And I'm told that Kristallnacht > wasn't well advertised in East Germany; especially after the Soviets > sided the United Arab Republic, the official story was that Hitler had > been exterminating good Communists, not Jews.) This differs from my information. In point of fact the Nazis _did_ exterminate communists. At the time of Kristalnacht it was the communists who were the more direct target because they had places in the Riechstag. It was by imprisoning the communist deputies that the Nazis were able to take power and pass the enabling act. Portraying the Nazis as uniquely persecuting Jews is simply not supported by the facts. The Jews were the largest group of those persecuted but not the only group. Gypsies had less support in other countries. Other groups were persecuted for opposition rather than who they were but the numbers of murders were still large. This is one reason why the Catholic church established a convent inside Aushwitz where it is estimated that about a quarter of a million Catholics were murdered. Quite what one is then to make of appeasement by the Papacy at the time is beyond me... I don't think it points to any great moral or spiritual stand. > They gave him a gun and put him on the front, where he waved to his > friends as they walked across the border. > > I think a lot of the border guards were like Thomas. Shades of Machiavelli's description of the mercenaries union in the 1500s. Basically you could hire yourself an army but they weren't keen on there being much killing. > Yeah, yeah. Economics has something to do with it. But I think it comes > down to "Sure, I'll carry a gun, and I'll go where you tell me to go, > but I will not hurt anyone." Ideas matter. Absolutely! Phill

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Re: Getting into MIT is impossible
by Phillip M. Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anonymous <nobody(a)REPLAY.COM> wrote in article <5cndl2$89k(a)life.ai.mit.edu>... > "The only thing I didn't have that the next MIT applicant had was money. I > made the mistake of letting them know that I was dirt poor and would need > full aid/grants/etc, and to quote "The Great Escape" it was "Zzzt! To the > Russian front!"" > > My guess is that "other factors" were involved. Inevitably since the admissions tutors would not have known the means of the parents. Thats the whole idea of "needs blind" admissions. The admissions people could not give a damn about means. The alumni that are most likely to make donnations are those who made it from scratch in any case. > I noted with some interest, but little surprise, that the guy claiming MIT > required a 4.0 GPA and a 1600 combined SAT score could barely spell, and > had major problems making a coherent point. Methinks this is why MIT > rejected him, not his lack of a "1600." Possible but remember that dyslexia is not an indicator of intelligence. The director of the Media Lab is dyslexic. Certainly if you think that being taught in a particular operating system is important you should probably try elsewhere. Depending on which classes you take you could end up using UNIX, Windows or Genera. The main advantage of UNIX is that it is reasonably compact and we have full sources which means that people can be set operating system projects. Windows NT is much too large for that although it does have many interesting APIs that make it usefull for teaching application level stuff. I would imagine that there will be people interested in NextStep for Apple too, Tim-B-L was always a Next person, but he learnt how to use it because he had an open mind. If he had thought that nothing could be better than what he had already he would still be using CERN-VM. If someone can't cope with an unfamilliar O/S they probably shouldn't be an engineer at all. An O/S is only one large software system a grad needs to deal with. They have short lifetimes, rarely being dominant for more than a decade. Phill

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Re: Trigger-Words...
by Elliot Lee 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Wed, 29 Jan 1997 harka(a)nycmetro.com wrote: > Actually, I might not have chosen the correct words for what I > wanted... > I am looking for sniffer-programs, that analyze e-mail traffic on > the Net and filtering out all e-mails potentially interesting for > _intelligence services_. For example, I've heard, that if an e-mail > contains the words: "assassinate President" (DISCLAIMER: I hope, our > President lives a long and happy life, even after his > impeachment...:)), it will automatically get filtered and checked > out by the Secret Service. Everytime someone sends a message through White House web site to the president ( there is a comment form on the site ) it is scanned for keywords. It probably happens on other key avenues as well. Of course there are exceptions to every rule. I heard of a woman who wrote to Clinton something like: You are such a dynamite leader. I think you have such an explosive personality, and I'm dying to meet you. If you want to scan your E-mail, write a little perl script that takes a list of keywords to scan for, and the action to take when the keywords are found. It shouldn't be too hard. -- Elliot http://www.redhat.com/ "I'm a member of the Association of Federations of Linux Project Initiators That Never Really Get Much Done (AFLPITNRGMD, for short)." Just do it!

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Workaround for filtering/cybersitter
by Mark Rogaski 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If I had experience with Netscape plugins and spare time, I'd try it myself. But here's my proposed solution. A plugin in Netscape intercepts all requests, encrypt the URL with a pubkey algorithm, encode the string base64, send it as GET input to a proxy server. The proxy server decodes and decrypts the URL, gets the requested page, and returns it. This beats out URL-based filtering. Still need to figure out the specifics of key-exchange. If we use 40-bit encryption, it's exportable, and it still works in our threat model (ie. we don't care if the watchers figure out the URL a few hours later). To beat out dropping packets with unacceptable pattern in them, we could use an SSL-based server as the proxy. The plugin could even have a nice little on/off switch and a list list of available proxies. mark -- [] Mark Rogaski || "Computers save time like kudzu [] [] wendigo(a)pobox.com || prevents soil erosion." [] [] http://www.pobox.com/~wendigo/ || - afcasta(a)texas.net [] [] >> finger for PGP pubkey << || []

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Re: Fighting the cybercensor
by ichudov＠algebra.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hallam-Baker wrote: > > > I think that with the demise of Mr Bell and anyone running > a remailer there would be an end to his scheme pretty quickly. > > Society is not bound to put up with cranks and psychopaths. > there is no right to anonymously call for murder. The authorities > could easily stop Bells scheme. > > The point I was making is that it is not consistent as claimed. > Why, death of Jim Bell from his own murder machine is a very exciting, I would say a very Kafkian thing to happen. I am looking forward to it. I even think that Jim Bell would not oppose such an outcome that much, since his assination bot would be such an important invention for the humanity. Maybe it will reverse the course of world history! - Igor.

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Re: Best Computer School?
by Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ichudov(a)algebra.com writes: > moscow state university in russia is not bad also. > > they teach lots of theory... which is good. > > - Igor. > Do they have a master's program in computer science? :-) --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Re: PGP Key Preview...
by William H. Geiger III 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <199701291511.HAA03682(a)toad.com>, on 01/29/97 at 07:28 AM, harka(a)nycmetro.com said: >Hi there, >is there a way to preview the contents of a received public key, >without adding it automatically to the public key ring? >Thanks a lot in advance... Yes, Say newkey.asc contains the new keys you wish to preview. Thye the following: pgp -kv newkey.asc It will display all the key info in that file. - -- - ----------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. Finger whgiii(a)amaranth.com for PGP Key and other info - ----------------------------------------------------------- Tag-O-Matic: Air conditioned environment - Do not open Windows. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Registered E-Secure v1.1 0000000 iQCVAwUBMu++/49Co1n+aLhhAQEa/AP/b6LvLkII2itKK1L8kvOO7rk5qta3/7kV lbB1r+cSakVGBaCpjI1tq6TmWP4H6bhP1atZX1V/yGlg6cFJx8chy6jgx3JO0Ium 6qJGsBWhSentsJfiMan13uflDLVBJ9JSEy/II5EIzxHPR88UBokal3R/XkHpkjwt tOBF5Q9hFVU= =pgtD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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RE: Internet, Countries, Nationalism, etc.
by P.J. Westerhof 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 20:06 27-01-97 -0500, Hettinga wrote: >At 7:39 pm -0500 1/26/97, blanc wrote: >>p.s. I be femme > ^^^^^^^^^^ > >Franconics... Or Lesbonics of course, Skol, Peter _________________________________________________________ P.J. Westerhof LL.D e-mail P.J.WESTER(a)NGI.NL | Computerlaw voice +31-347-375400 | Legal informatics fax/data +31-347-375400 | IT - consultancy Web: www.ngi.nl/cr/ | Soaring _________________________________________________________

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Re: exporting stego
by Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[I've been taking my equipment apart and rearranging it, hence the silence] Syntel <syntelsi(a)ix.netcom.com> writes: > Just a quickie, > Does the present ITAR / DoC regulations cover the export of Steganography pro > thanks > Steveo EAR covers all security software, including even virus checkers. Of course the gubmint is irrelevant and should be soundly ignored. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Re: Getting into MIT is impossible
by Phillip M. Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anonymous <nobody(a)REPLAY.COM> wrote in article <5cndl2$89k(a)life.ai.mit.edu>... > "The only thing I didn't have that the next MIT applicant had was money. I > made the mistake of letting them know that I was dirt poor and would need > full aid/grants/etc, and to quote "The Great Escape" it was "Zzzt! To the > Russian front!"" > > My guess is that "other factors" were involved. Inevitably since the admissions tutors would not have known the means of the parents. Thats the whole idea of "needs blind" admissions. The admissions people could not give a damn about means. The alumni that are most likely to make donnations are those who made it from scratch in any case. > I noted with some interest, but little surprise, that the guy claiming MIT > required a 4.0 GPA and a 1600 combined SAT score could barely spell, and > had major problems making a coherent point. Methinks this is why MIT > rejected him, not his lack of a "1600." Possible but remember that dyslexia is not an indicator of intelligence. The director of the Media Lab is dyslexic. Certainly if you think that being taught in a particular operating system is important you should probably try elsewhere. Depending on which classes you take you could end up using UNIX, Windows or Genera. The main advantage of UNIX is that it is reasonably compact and we have full sources which means that people can be set operating system projects. Windows NT is much too large for that although it does have many interesting APIs that make it usefull for teaching application level stuff. I would imagine that there will be people interested in NextStep for Apple too, Tim-B-L was always a Next person, but he learnt how to use it because he had an open mind. If he had thought that nothing could be better than what he had already he would still be using CERN-VM. If someone can't cope with an unfamilliar O/S they probably shouldn't be an engineer at all. An O/S is only one large software system a grad needs to deal with. They have short lifetimes, rarely being dominant for more than a decade. Phill

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