December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

news from spyking list...
by Ray Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: GPS Jamming *New Scientist* (8 Jan 1998, http://www.newscientist.com) included an article saying that a Russian company called Aviaconversia was offering a 4-watt GPS/Glonass jammer for less than $4000 at the September Moscow Air Show. It says that it could stop civilian aircraft locking onto GPS signals over a 200 Km radius; military aircraft would be harder to jam, but a more powerful unit could be built. The risks (terrorism etc.) are fairly obvious, and it's mentioned that it would probably be easy to build one even if this company's product is somehow removed from the market. ************************************************************************** 21)From: SpyKing(a)thecodex.com Subject: Spying around the world Corporate Spying On The Rise In India Corporate espionage is big business in India, and because of this, Indian corporations are busy installing internal information security programs that include paper shredders, computer database password-protection, and careful security checks of new employees. Indian analysts predict that corporate counter-espionage will become mandatory at many big companies as competition among the major players heats up, even between regional businesses. NSA Monitoring Sales Of Encryption Software In July, 1995, the National Security Agency (NSA) wrote "A Study of the International Market for Encryption" which NSA official Jon A. Goldsmith declared in sworn testimony should remain secret because "in developing its portion of the study, NSA sought and received information from the Department of State, the CIA and from foreign sources." NSA acquired data for their portion of the report from its global spying programs. But in some cases, the information was obtained by the CIA and passed onto the NSA. Goldsmith noted one section of the report involved the "Proposed Netherlands Telecommunications Service Act in 1993." Goldsmith testified "The first sentence of this paragraph was supplied by the CIA and is protected." The Netherlands is a major encryption hardware and software exporter (particularly Philips). Apparently the CIA spent some monitoring the Dutch legislature to find out what kind of laws it intended to pass regarding encryption technologies. Those details found their way into the NSA's secret report. Another section of this report details the close cooperation between the NSA and foreign intelligence services. Goldsmith testified the report "References discussions between Italian officials and members of the National Security Authority regarding Law Number 222 of February 27, 1992 and is protected in its entirety..." The NSA for some time has routinely monitored foreign-produced encryption technologies and has performed daily reports on these products, in addition to how fast and how economically it can crack these products, which so far the NSA has been able to do. But, NSA officials have testified before Congress, foreign encryption software is getting increasingly more sophisticated and thus harder and more costly to break in a timely manner. Domestically, the NSA appears to be secretly keeping tabs on U.S. sales of encryption software. In the secret 1995 report there's a section titled, "Software Outlets/Computer Stores" which "Refers to a internal NSA document control number and project name..." Observers believe this project involves domestic surveillance of US retail sales of encryption software. What, how, and who is being monitored, though, is a secret. FBI Finds Files On Chinese Influence, Counterintelligence Sources Worried The FBI recently discovered new and heretofore unknown counterintelligence files in its investigation of a possible Chinese plot to influence U.S. elections. The material was found following a search FBI Director Louis Freeh ordered in September "when it became apparent the FBI was in possession of certain counterintelligence information" an FBI statement said. Sources at other agencies say they are appalled that the FBI could misplace or overlook such vital information in a major counterintelligence probe. Particularly when the probe is of a government like that of China, which is well known for spying on America and is notorious for stealing details on advanced American technologies. "Either the Bureau is inept, or something else happened here," said one counterintelligence source, who was alluding to the files possibly being been alleged in relation to White House campaign fund-raising activities). China Grooming More Spies? About 100 elite Hong Kong schools, headed by the territory's Catholic institutions, are allowed to teach all classes in English, despite the territory's return to Chinese rule. Starting with the new school term, a total of 307 of the territory's 400 schools must teach all subjects in Chinese. However, believing that their children will have better job opportunities, most parents still want English instruction for them. By the year 2000, all students will study Mandarin Chinese, the basis for nation-wide university entrance exams. Western intelligence experts believe the elite school language leniency stems from the mainland government's desire to continue the English language program to groom economic and political spies. The US State Department has identified China as the country which sends the largest number of spies to the United States and has uncovered a Chinese spy within its own ranks during 1997. Iraq's Intelligence Service Spies On UN WMD Observers Utilizing sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and other SIGINT resources, Iraqi intelligence agents have been spying on UN weapons inspectors (whose ranks reportedly include individuals collecting particular intelligence for the U.S.) and have been able to learn in advance of the UN inspection team's targets. Consequently, Iraq has been able to quickly secrete both their weapons of mass destruction and their records of manufacturing, U.S. military and intelligence officials have said. These officials suspect that some of the SIGINT capabilities of Iraq have been provided through black market channels from the Former Soviet Republics (FSR). U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen has publicly acknowledged that the U.S. believes the Iraqis have the ability to eavesdrop electronically on the UN inspectors. In addition, Iraqi agents are suspected of conducting physical and electronic surveillance of individual UN inspection team members, including monitoring their homes. Ewen Buchanan, the spokesman for the inspection commission at UN headquarters in New York, is quoted saying "we are obviously aware that the Iraqis try their damnedest to monitor us, our planning, our thoughts, even in New York, and to develop an early warning system -- what we want, where we're going, what we are trying to inspect. They must use every means at their disposal." Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said intelligence authorities do not believe that Saddam Hussein has managed to penetrate the UN Special Commission of weapons inspectors, known as UNSCOM, but rather they believe that "Iraq has found ways to learn ahead of time some of UNSCOM's plans," using SIGINT and other technical means. Counterintelligence Searches For North Korean Spies The Agency for National Security Planning (NSP) believes North Korea has targeted 1,500 South Koreans to establish new spy networks within South Korea. Evidence of this effort has been obtained through the investigations and arrests of alleged spies. That North Korea is bankrolling a massive spy operation against the South bolsters intelligence findings by U.S. counterintelligence sources, who say North Korea is aggressively recruiting spies in South Korea, targeting infrastructure, commerce, and technology in particular. Details on the North Korean spying activities began to emerge following the recent arrest of 69-year-old Ko Young-bok, a noted sociology professor who once worked for Seoul National University. Ko stands accused of spying for North Korea for 36 years. He was arrested after having been linked to a North Korean spy couple. During its investigation, the NSP intercepted a telephone communication Ko had received from an unidentified source immediately before his Ko had received from an unidentified source immediately before his arrest urging him to fly to Beijing and take shelter at the North Korean embassy there. The caller is believed by the NSP to be in charge of North Korean spy rings in South Korea. According to intelligence sources, few people, except for ranking North Korean spy officials, know who all the spies are in South Korea. Intelligence officials said all North Korean spies form small separate rings and contact between the different rings is limited. Earlier, Shim Jong-ung, 55, was arrested on charges of spying for North Korea. A Seoul subway official, Shim is accused of providing North Korea with information which could be used to destroy subway systems. Bok is an eminent scholar known as the father of sociology studies in South Korea, who served as director of a government research center and who made two official trips to North Korea in 1973 as a South Korean adviser. South Korean authorities assert that on those occasions he actually briefed North Korea on the South's bargaining position. The alleged spy ring was broken up when a leftist reported to South Korean authorities that he had been approached by two North Koreans and asked to spy for the North. That led counterintelligence officials to detain the two North Koreans, Choi Chung Nam, 35, and his wife, Kang Yun Jung, 28. Kang committed suicide a day later. The police had searched the two carefully for any suicide capsules, X-raying them and examining their mouths, but when Kang went to the bathroom with an escort she removed a cyanide capsule she had hidden in her vagina and killed herself with it. Choi, however, confessed and apparently led the counterintelligence agents to the North Korean spies with whom he had been in contact. He also showed them drop-off places around Seoul used to hide guns, radio transmitters and ball-point pens that shoot lethal poison Choi allegedly confessed that their mission was to recruit agents, future infiltrations, and obtain information about a new, highly productive strain of corn developed in the South. Have Pakistan Intelligence Agents Penetrated U.S. Agencies? According to fundamental Pakistani sources monitored by U.S. intelligence analysts, "trusted" "brothers" have managed to rise to crucial positions in U.S. military intelligence, and have access to details about CIA operations in the Middle East. English NSA Facility Comes Under Fire An NSA facility in Menwith Hill, England, the biggest spy station in the world capable of monitoring the communications spectrum throughout Europe, has come under British scrutiny. The European Commission has issued a report, "Assessing the Technologies of Political Control," that says the spying system, known as "Echelon," is a threat to European privacy rights and laws. European Commission spokesman, Simon Davies, said the report warns that the system can "eavesdrop on every telephone, email, and telex communication around the world." According to the report, "the Echelon system forms part of the UKUSA system but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, Echelon is designed primarily for non- military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country. "The Echelon system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like MEMEX to find key words." Echelon uses a number of national dictionaries containing key words of interest to each country. The Commission report was requested last year by the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. It contains details of a network of American-controlled spy stations on British soil and around the world that "routinely and indiscriminately" monitor "countless phone, fax and email messages." It states "within Europe all email telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill" in Yorkshire. The report recommends a variety of measures for dealing with the NSA facility at Menwith Hill and other centers including that "the European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network Internet) accessible to US intelligence agencies. The report also urges a fundamental review of the involvement of the American NSA in Europe, suggesting that the activities be scaled down, or become more open and accountable. The report was the subject of discussion on Dec. 21 by the committee of the office of Science and Technology Assessment in Luxembourg. They confirmed that the citizens of Britain and other European states are subject to an intensity of surveillance far in excess of that imagined by most parliaments. The report was developed due to pressure by Glyn Ford. Labour MEP for Greater Manchester East, England. He says "there are times in history when technology helps democratize, and times when it helps centralize. This is a time of centralization. The justice and home affairs pillar of Europe has become more powerful without corresponding strengthening of civil liberties." The reaction of the members was one of shock and "deep concern" for the rights of European citizens even though the UK facility has been in place for over 15 years and the technology there has been an "open secret" for most of that period. Thus, the question becomes have the European governments dismissed information from their own intelligence personnel as impossible, or does this signal a new coldness in European/US relations. According to the London Telegraph, the real concern is not so much civil liberties as industrial espionage. In a Dec. 16 report it stated that "the principal motivation for this rush of development is the US interest in commercial espionage." The report pointed out that several of the facilities have been in place since the Nineteen-Fifties. The role of these NSA sites was to provide military, diplomatic and economic intelligence by intercepting communications from throughout the Northern Hemisphere. When the British Parliament has questioned new eavesdropping developments over the past 40 years, secrecy issues have generally been invoked. With treaties and agreements with other European countries, these concerns are not likely to block future investigations by the European Parliament and other E. U. groups. France and Germany are particularly expected to pursue the issues raised based on concerns about industrials spying. Last year, several American agents were expelled from France on charges of economic espionage. Whether the impetus for the European report was concern for civil rights or over trade secrets, the results may be that we in the US will be better informed of what the NSA is doing at home and how our own rights have been treated by an organization which has the motto: "We don't talk, we listen."

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Re: Talk of Banning Research into Human Cloning (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 06:10:14 +0100 (MET) > Subject: Re: Talk of Banning Research into Human Cloning > From: nobody(a)REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) > > Though I'm not a constitutional expert, this would seem to me to be a > > violation of various rights. A First Amendment right to speak and publish > > as one wishes for one, a Fourth Amendment right against search and seizure > > Actually, not at all. > > There is no ban on publishing information on cloning, "just" a ban on the > activity. Spin doctor bullshit. Without the research there isn't anything to publish. By banning the basic research we would in fact be banning the publishing of the results of that scientific research. > Hence the first amendment is not implicated. If it were the > case the every action (as opposed to speech/publication) were protected by > the 1st Am. then every statute making robbery a crime would be > unconstitutional too. Not at all. Equating swinging of ones fist in a empty field and swinging it into somebodies nose and then taking that supposition as justification to ban fist swinging *is* most certainly unconstitutional. Furthermore, robbery isn't illegal under the Constitution unless its the federal government taking the material and refusing to follow the Constitutional directive to pay for *all* property, irrespective of how it was gained, for public use as those duties are relegated per the 10th to the purvue of the states. > Similarly, the 4th Am. is not implicated. The right to be secure against > UNREASONABLE search and seizure is not violated when and if congress > passes a law defining a new crime, or you are arrested for committing it. The question here is whether Congress even *has* the power to regulate those sorts of behaviours without an amendment being passed by the states to surrender their authority per the 9th and 10th to the federal government. > > and to be secure in one's papers, and probably more general rights that > > have long-held that government agents cannot tell people what books they > > again, note that the ban is on CLONING, not THINKING OR WRITING OR READING > about cloning. It's not the same thing. Without doing the research it isn't possible to think very much about cloning except in a *very* abstract manner. That forcing of abstraction against ones will may very well infact be unconstitutional. > > may read, what thinking they may do, and whom they may asssociate with (if > > the Civil Rights Act is viewed as the unconstitutional anomaly it is). > > This is an aside, but the CRA is in no way anomalous given the 13th, 14th > and 15th Amendments. It is only "anomalous" if one sticks to the > Constitution as written in the 18th century... and ignores the articles > written in that same century that clearly contemplate amendments.... The articles contemplating the amendments are irrelevant to this issue. Only the actual amendments are relevant. What people might *want* to do has nothing to do with what they *can* do under the limiting documents of this country. > > But a ban on cloning research would not be a matter of "national security," > > only of ethics and religious beliefs. Whatever the arguments for banning > > unapproved research into CBW and nuclear weapons, banning cloning research > > is an entirely different set of issues. > > > > Arguably, many of the legal bans in force today are due to ethics, e.g.: No, they are a result of political wrangling by small groups to gain political power and the economic and social conseuences thereof. They also result from a clearly premeditated absolution of the Constitution that these self same 'representatives' gave an oath to uphold with their lives. The justification that is profered is the ethics of the constituents. > A. Michael Froomkin +1 (305) 284-4285; +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax) > Associate Professor of Law > U. Miami School of Law froomkin(a)law.miami.edu > P.O. Box 248087 http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/ > Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA It's warm here. Your a law professor and your logic, respect for the Constitution, and basic scientific comprehension is this bad? No damn wonder we're in the shit hole we're in now... ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Congress' *real* job...
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Congress' real job should not be passing laws providing funding, prohibiting activities, etc. It *should* be in creating and passing Constitutional amendments per the 10th that re-define the responsibilities and duties of the federal government within the changing millieu of the current society. This way the people via their state representatives have a much closer input into what the feds are actualy enpowered to do and to who. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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MS presents technical defence [CNN]
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > MICROSOFT TO PRESENT LENGTHY TECHNICAL DEFENSE > > graphic January 12, 1998 > Web posted at: 11:14 p.m. EST (0414 GMT) > > WASHINGTON (AP) -- Microsoft Corp., attempting to fend off contempt > of court charges, plans to make a detailed defense in court that its > Internet Explorer software is interwoven with its popular Windows 95 > program and the two can't be separated without debilitating the > Windows program. > > Attorneys for Microsoft and the Justice Department are scheduled to > face off in federal court again Tuesday in the latest chapter of the > bitter antitrust lawsuit. The Justice Department has asked U.S. > District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to find Microsoft in contempt > of his December 11 order that it separate its Internet browser > software from Windows. [text deleted] ____________________________________________________________________ | | | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | | violent revolution inevitable. | | | | John F. Kennedy | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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unsolved billing problem
by CLAUD W WELCH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I cancelled my membership prior to the end of two days. i would like a refund.

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Trans World Specials Fare Sales
by Trans World Specials 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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(eternity) autonomous agents
by Ross Anderson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam Back: > If the participant in the CPU resource market is not expected to be > able to vet all source code he runs, this gives the would be eternity > operator a chance to distribute his risk. It's even better than this - your PC becomes a common carrier and you are no longer liable :-) If this doesn't happen, then the advocates of Java need a whole new security infrastructure to assure users that the applets they download aren't defamatory, pornographic, seditious or in breach of copyright! Tim May: > Another science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, popularized "data havens" At one time, Malta was thinking seriously about becoming just such a data haven, and I expect one will appear sooner or later. After all, what's left of the British Empire is funded by money laundering and tax evasion - pardon me, Sir Humphrey, `offshore financial services'. Once the online world becomes a significant part of the global economy, small countries that wish to achieve the high living standards of Bermuda, Gibraltar and Jersey will be able to get there by cashing in on `offshore data services'. Countries like Tonga already sell domain names, but a full offshore data service would need some way of resisting pressure from the EU and the US government. Most of the tax havens do this by being under a colonial umbrella. Is there an alternative? Can we create virtual colonies in cyberspace? Can we set up a gateway to Eternity in some country like Liberia or Somalia, which is too dangerous even for the US Marines? Or do we have to cut a deal with Sir Humphrey? Hiding stuff inside usenet is actually a bit like hiding behind the skirts of Empire, isn't it? The same goes for hiding stuff on open access web sites, or in spam. Given the rate at which spam is growing these days, maybe that's where to put it. If the only way for Authority to cut mortals off from Eternity was to pass effective laws against spam, and the only way to stop spam was to have a global non-escrowed public key infrastructure so that all mortals could be strongly authenticated, then ... Ross

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[ADMINISTRATIVIUM] Firewalls
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timmy C. Mayonnaise's reheated, refurbished, and regurgitated cud is completely inappropriate for the mailing lists into which it is cross-ruminated. ,,, -ooO(o o)Ooo- Timmy C. Mayonnaise (_)

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metrics of eternity service properties
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: > >> This of course doesn't scale at all well. It is semi-OK for a tiny, > >> sparse set of reposted items, but fails utterly for larger database > >> sets. (If and when Adam's reposted volumes begin to get significant, > >> he will be viewed as > >> a spammer. :-) ) > > > >The best criticism of my eternity design to date! I agree. > > I assume you are serious, and do agree, as it is a very solid > criticism of the "Eternity as continuous posting to Usenet" model. Yes. I think my eternity service in USENET is actually fairly resistant to attackers determining readers and publishers. The limiting factor is the bandwidth consumed. We have to keep below some threshold otherwise news admins may attempt to filter out eternity articles; and there is some limit at which the system would break down altogether. One suspects posting more than around 10Mb-20Mb / day would be enough to motivate administrators to start filtering. Some people with questionable motivation also have made something of a sport of sending forged cancel messages, and these people will be more easily motivated, as as far as I can tell their motivation is a perverse enjoyment of censorship, and sense of self importance, and of malice in perpetrating DoS attacks. > I see several axes to the analysis of the various Eternity schemes. > > -- retrieval time for a customer or client to obtain some set of data, > ranging from (I assume) ~minutes or less in an Eternity DDS file system to > ~days or less in a Blacknet system to (I am guessing) ~weeks or months in > an Adam Back sort of system. Actually I was aiming for seconds access time with "Eternity USENET". (I am going to dub it "Eternity USENET" -- just any name -- because the lack of names to denote the services under discussion is becoming awkward.) However the reason I am able to claim seconds is because I aim to keep the data either in the newspool, or in a local copy of recent messages. The design is similar to TELETEXT, the text mode information services hosted as side bands on TV signals. The basic topology is the same: we have a broadcast medium, data is slowly re-broadcast. So my design is fairly analogous to a FAST-TEXT system, which keeps a copy of all the pages, and updates them as the TEXT signal sweeps past. So metrics we could use to describe the functionality of an eternity design should include "update time", and "access time". I'll try a quick table of this to illustrate my understanding of Eternity BlackNet (BlackNet used to host an Eternity like service), and Eternity DDS as compared to Eternity USENET. E-BlackNet E-USENET E-DDS update delay 2-3 days 2-3 days minutes access time 2-3 days seconds minutes b/width efficiency good/ poor intermediate intermediate nodes 10 10,000 10,000 capacity 100 Gb 100 Mb 10 Tb security good good intermediate security dependencies remailers, remailers, custom USENET USENET componenets ease of deployment easy easy hard Clearly these figures are order of magnitude only, if even that accurate. My reasoning is as follows: Eternity BlackNet: I am presuming we have third party BlackNet operators who offer to buy and sell information, acting as distribution agents. It takes around a day to send requests or submissions to the operator via a dead drop (encrypted material posted to USENET via remailer). If requested information is sent to clients via replyable nyms bandwidth efficiency is improved. If information is sent to clients via dead drops efficiency drops because the information is broadcast for each request. Clearly a user could, if he wished to improve his access time for browsing BlackNet eternity documents, replicate the entire BlackNet database locally. (Or perhaps subsets defined as all documents by a chosen set of authors, or all documents with given keywords, or with a given third party rating etc). E-USENET: This involves re-posting documents periodically to USENET, and relying on the small data set size to ensure that local eternity proxies can retain a current copy of the dataset. Variants on this approach can migrate towards E-DDS approach by using publically accessible E-USENET servers, and by E-USENET server caches sharing their then larger document store. Also by adding other submission mechanisms to the pool formed by the set of publically accessible E-USENET services. E-DDS: Economic incentives are used to encourage people to take risks in hosting controversial documents. Indirection is used to have a hidden set of data servers, which are only accessed via publically known gateways. (I would recommend looking at Ian Goldberg and David Wagner's TAZ server, the url for which I posted in an earlier post, for this indirection function). I am unsure how an attacker would be prevented from discovering the hidden set of data servers. How do we exclude the attacker from becoming a gateway server? I get the impression that the idea also is make the service a commercial success as a distributed web hosting system, and to get away with comparitively small amounts of controversial materials which migrate. This idea is a useful model I think. Comments? Clarifications, Ryan? Adam

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Micromoney CryptoMango?
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 08:52:16 -0500 From: rah-web <rah(a)shipwright.com> Reply-To: rah(a)shipwright.com MIME-Version: 1.0 To: rah-web <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: Micromoney CryptoMango? http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/metcalfe.htm [Image] [StorageTek Click Here.] [| Navigational map -- for text only please go to the bottom of the page |] [|Opinions|] [From the Ether] January 12, 1998 Mango `pooling' is the biggest idea we've seen since network computers Mango, in Westborough, Mass., is not your average software start-up. In 30 months the company has raised $30 million. Its first product, Medley97, has shipped, transparently "pooling" workgroup storage. And someone at http://www.mango.com really knows the difference between features and benefits. But it's not the benefits of Medley97 pooling that interest me. What's interesting are the features and long-term potential of Mango's underlying distributed virtual memory (DVM). Mango's pooling DVM is the biggest software idea since network computers -- perhaps since client/server -- and Microsoft had better watch out. According to Mango, Medley97 offers transparent networking that's easy to use, fast, and reliable (not to mention secure and high fiber). Windows users working together on a LAN can share files in a pool of their combined disk storage. Every pooled PC is both a client and server. Go ahead and drop Medley97 into any PC you want to pool. Medley97 installs, checks configuration, and updates required Windows networking software. The product adds the PC's storage to the pool, giving you a shared, fast, and reliable network drive, M:/, which is available on all pooled PCs. For this you pay Mango less than $125 each for up to 25 PCs. Mango CEO Steve Frank was technology chief at Kendall Square Research (KSR), the ill-fated parallel processing company near MIT that was not Thinking Machines. Frank says KSR taught him how dishonesty doesn't work but parallelism does. Unlike KSR's, Mango's parallelism just has to be on volume platforms, such as Ethernet, TCP/IP, and Windows. Hence Mango. Underlying Medley97 are DVM processes cooperating through a TCP/IP Ethernet on pooled Windows PCs. The processes manage a 128-bit object space that copies virtual 4KB pages up, down, and around a distributed memory hierarchy. Medley97 offers ease of use by hiding continuously, automatically, and adaptively behind your familiar Windows user interface -- just below the file system APIs and above physical disk pages. Medley97 offers performance by moving files through the Ethernet from disk to disk and from disk to memory, closer to where the pages are used most. And Medley97 offers reliability by keeping synchronized backup copies of file pages on different pooled PCs. Mango's DVM generalizes backup and caching. Pages are copied for nonstop operation. Copies are moved closer to where they are used. Frank says it is often faster to access a page through Ethernet from a pooled PC's semiconductor memory than to access it from a local disk. Transaction logs are kept on all pooled PCs. The DVM detects when a PC drops out of a pool and copies any page that thereby lacks sufficient backups. When a PC rejoins a pool, transaction logs ensure it accesses updated pages. The garbage collection of deleted pages runs in the background. Noticing that Medley97 is available for up to 25 PCs, I asked the perennial parallelism question, "Does it scale?" Frank's answer: Yes. Medley97 is limited to 25 PCs only because that's all Mango has so far found time to test. With each PC adding resources, pool performance is "superlinear" as far as the eye can see. Well, this makes pooling the next in a long list of major computing paradigms: batch mainframes, interactive minicomputers, stand-alone PCs, PC LANs, client/server, peer-to-peer, thin-client, server clustering, and now peer clustering or pooling. According to Frank, Medley next needs to go from Ethernet to Internet. To support many pools. To add change control and archiving. Medley also needs to go beyond Windows. To pool processing as well as storage. So Medley, now written in C++, needs what else? Java. You can log into a Medley pool from anywhere and have your workgroup files available on the M:/ drive. With Java you could pool non-Wintel network computers. Well, if pooling scales, the whole World Wide Web should be one big pool. Mango's DVM generalizes the caching now done ad hoc all over the Web -- on server disks, in clusters, in caching farms, in proxy servers, in browsers, and in the file systems of PCs. Add Java network computers and before Frank knows it, Mango will be ripe for purchase if not integration by Microsoft. ------------------------------ [Image] Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com in 1979, and today he specializes in the Internet. Send e-mail to Metcalfe(a)infoworld.com. Missed a column? Go back for more. [Image] ------------------------------ Copyright © 1998 InfoWorld Media Group Inc. | SiteMap |Search | PageOne | Conferences | Reader/Ad Services | | Enterprise Careers | Opinions | Test Center | Features | | Forums | Interviews | InfoWorld Print | InfoQuote | [Lion's Den] [InfoWorld Electric Features] [Intel Manageability] --- end forwarded text ----------------- 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/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

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