December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: PGPsdk is out, but not for free (fwd)
by Brian B. Riley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 11/1/97 5:02 PM, Jim Choate (ravage(a)ssz.com) passed this wisdom: >Hmmm, will have to rethink suggesting any PGP based products to my customers >now. I simply refuse to pay anybody any percentage of my product revenues >simply because I use their tool. I buy a SDK for a flat fee like I buy a >book, screwdriver, or a car. I can't imagine Black & Decker wanting a >percentage of the house sale simply because the carpenter used their hammers >and saws. Ford or Chevy wanting to see my income statement each year so they >can figure out how much I owe them because I drive their brand of vehicle to >my customers sites...yeah right. Have you ever priced earth moving equipment ... the price on them is easily 150-300% of what it should be, say comparing it to 'consumer' items, like cars and small pickups and extrapolating up for the backhoe or whatever ... everyone I talk to in the contracting business says the same thing, "... its an item you are going to use to make money and they are taking a cut of your profits up front" Brian B. Riley --> http://www.macconnect.com/~brianbr For PGP Keys <mailto:brianbr@together.net?subject=Get%20PGP%20Key> "The Box said Win '95 or better - So I used a Macintosh!" -- Harold Herbert Tessman

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Re: Why porn must be stopped at all costs, by Jodi Hoffman
by semprini＠theschool.com 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. Wrong. Exposure to pornography does not cause "brain damage" or "structural changes in the brain." That's like saying that holding up dirty pictures in front of an office building is going to cause "structural changes" in the building. Sure, a percentage of the little people inside looking out the windows are going to have a twisted little grin on their face, but holding up the pictures isn't going to compromise the integrity of the building structure. I'd like to know where you get your information, because it's false.

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Re: Copyright commerce and the street musician protocol
by Landon Dyer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Someone recently told me that game manufacturers have stopped worrying > about piracy. Why? Because most new games come on CD-ROM, and > copying a CD-ROM is an expensive, time-consuming operation. Bulk > duplication of CD's is substantially cheaper than one-off duplication, > and since games are cheap, people will usually buy them rather than > copy them. you can duplicate a CD for about $2, in half an hour i've already encountered some copy-protected software (the CD duplicates don't work). my guess is we'll see a lot more of this > I'm unconvinced that there really is an Internet copyright problem check out the "warez" newsgroups... peace, -landon

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Re: SynCrypt: the new PGP?
by Jim Russell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>Anybody heard of syncrypt? I have. Of course, being one of its authors, that's to be expected. >>File wiping, group encryption, automatic encryption of files put in certain directories... hiding encrypted files in pictures! True, true, true and true. I might add that the Secure Delete file wiping passes Kent Briggs' "Directory Snoop" check on Windows 95. >>It pulls them back out again too. We'd have some unhappy customers if it didn't. <g> >>Plus it has an interesting "20 questions" method for backing up your passphrase. For the algorithmically inclined among us, this was implemented via Shamir's secret-sharing scheme. There was also a great deal of discussion about what questions to ask -- "What's your favorite color?" doesn't provide as much entropy as "What was the last name of your favorite grade school teacher?", for example. >>Bruce Schneier is working with them, so they should have good crypto. Yes, having Bruce and his colleague Chris Hall consulting with us was invaluable. They beat up on us pretty good during the betas, which is exactly what we wanted. >>No gak or even cak in sight. Absolutely true. Our enterprise level product, SynCrypt Gold, is currently in development, and its data recovery features will be implemented in such a way that it could *never* become an infrastructure for GAK. Jim Russell <jrussell(a)syndata.com> Chief Software Engineer SynData Technologies, Inc. http://www.syncrypt.com

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To TruthMonger
by snow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > snow wrote: > > You must live in such a nice world, where the sky is always blue, > > the grass always green, and the police eager and willing to serve a happy > > populace. > > Can I come live in your world? > snow > take two of the green ones, three of the yellow ones, and four of the > red ones But But But all I have are little pale blue ones, and big honkin white ones.

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I Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

BASIC TRUTHS Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film. A day without sunshine is like, night. Diplomacy is saying "nice doggy " until you find a rock. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine. Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse? I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory. When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty. Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it. Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't. I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe. He's not dead, he's electroencephalographically challenged. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you. I wonder how much deeper would the ocean be without sponges. Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular? Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool. Atheism is a non-prophet organization. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.

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www.cypherpunks.to
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What happened to www.cypherpunks.to? It appears to have disappeared.

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

17 Dec '03

Dear Jodi- So occasionally I like to turn these arguments around in my head: Why should the smart, mature people under 18 in this country be penalized because your immature, mentally retarded and over-fragile kids can't seem to handle the sight of naked people? What if I wanted to protect my children from the evils of Christianity? Could I ban that from the internet with the same sort of high horse the anti-porn people seem to be riding? And damage and change are completely different things. We're all changed by our experiences. Some people among us were apparantly beat over the head with dirty pictures as children and are now horribly afraid of them. The other bits in her letter (The bible being thrown out of public schools for example) were just plain lies. It's sad that when most of America has to chose between its essential freedoms and the most trivial of protection from objectionable thought, that we chose to lose the freedoms. _______________________________________ -wabe

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Charityware
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My advice to Monty Cantsin or whomever actually wrote this: write shorter pieces! The quote-and-coment style, especially for very long pieces, usually results in people skipping huge sections, or the whole thing. I only scanned this and stopped when I saw the word "cryptoanarchist." At 4:41 AM -0700 11/3/97, Mix wrote: (quoting someone else) >>New payment models will need to come in. How can you extract money >>from a cryptoanarchist? Copyright? Patent? Hah, hah. > >The important thing is establishment of the custom. Most >cryptoanarchists with class will pay. The way to do this is to make >it clear from day one that it is not free software. If you want to >run it, you should buy it. (The problem with share ware is that people >get used to "borrowing" it.) _This_ cryptoanarchist will almost _never_ pay for that which is free. If someone gives me something, no strings attached, and then says, "Oh, the "suggested donation" is $10," I tell them that they should have charged me that in the first place. (I'm obviously not fond of leftie events which are advertised as free, but which require a mandatory voluntary "suggested donation.") More to the point, I use various freebies I get off the Net. Some of them have obscure schemes for sending payments to the alleged authors. Too much hassle. And if it's _free_, why pay anything? Charityware is not a viable business model. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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

17 Dec '03

snow wrote: > > > People kill for religion, politics, insanity, and fun. > > Nope. Economics, survival, revenge, and insanity. Nope. Voices inside my head.

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