December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Digital Signatures Come of Age
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

* San Francisco "conceptual artist" Guy Overfelt, 29, was prominently, if not favorably, reviewed for two recent projects: For a show at the Refusalon gallery in San Francisco, he called 2,000 toll-free numbers to request that information be sent to the gallery. (That's it.) For a show at New York City's White Columns Gallery in the winter, he exhibited two 1,000-name mailing lists of art collectors, one for the East Coast and one for the West Coast. (Overfelt offered for sale a "signed" edition of the mailing lists, on PC and Mac diskettes, for $20 each.)

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FUD
by Thomas Jefferson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts." - Thomas Jefferson

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Forcing someone to mow your lawn, in the commission of a crime...
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

* In July, police in Lexington, Ky., were searching for Delbert Buttrey, 47, who they believe is the man who kidnapped a transient couple from Indiana, took them to an isolated spot, and forced them to perform oral sex on him while Buttrey's girlfriend snapped photographs. After that, according to police, Buttrey took the couple home with him and forced the man to mow his lawn.

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If it wasn't for the Internet, you might never know this... (WAS: Your Tax Dollars At Work...)
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From News of the Weird: * The February Scientific American reported on how conservation biologist Joel Berger (University of Nevada at Reno) field-studies moose, which are notoriously unfriendly to humans. Berger needed to be able to hurl fresh bear and wolf dung accurately enough to assure that a moose immediately smelled it, to see if it made the moose fearful or aggressive. To be able to get that close to a moose, he engaged a designer who worked on the movie "Star Wars" to make a moose suit, which worked so well that Berger said he spent much of his time in the suit worrying about being mounted.

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Re: Taxing Churches for their views? Bad idea.
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: > At 7:10 PM -0700 11/4/97, Anonymous wrote: > >More telling, she doesn't seem to have a problem using a religious (and > >therefore tax-exempt) organization to push a political agenda. Apparently > >that whole 'separation of church and state' thing only applies when it's > >convenient. > > > >If religions want to play politics, the least we can do is get them to pay > >for the privilege. I'd feel a certain guilty pleasure seeing some of those > >bottom-feeders taxed into penury. > Nonsense. And a dangerous course. > > One can decide to "tax churches" or to "not tax churches." I have no > particularly strong opinion on either option. > > But one must definitely _not_ base the decision to tax or not to tax on the > opinions expressed by a church! I feel that Tim is correct, in terms of "opinions," but the Christian political agenda goes beyond 'opinions' and into the realm of political activism which is regulated by law. It is a fact that the Moral Majority/Christian Right/Felons For Jesus, etc., make no bones about using their tax-deductible resources to mount political campaigns that illegally skirt the rules pertaining to the direct support of political parties and candidates. If the Commie Chincs brunching at the Whithouse and sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom tried to excuse their illegally made payoffs to the current administration by getting a glazed look in their eye and speaking about answering to 'a higher power', the press and the citizens would lynch them. Certainly, the Christian political movement is no 'dirtier' or more criminal than the rest of the Fools On the (Capitol) Hill, but they are all the more hypocritical for claiming the higher moral ground in their illegal activities. Criminals is criminals... JHFCMonger

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Re: Will Jews be Forced to Accept Christ in Public Schools?
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: > Due to my advanced age, compared to most of you, I was attending elementary > school in the State of Virginia before the Supreme Court struck down school > prayer (circa 1962). I vaguely recall a kind of prayer at times, which > anyone was free to ignore. Obviously a child will feel social pressures to > conform...but such is life in many ways. And then the rest of the children were made to stand at attention while the Jews, the Buddhists, the Muslims, et al, performed their own religious rituals, right? > The Jew in our class was specifically exempted from school prayers. Seth > Schrager--I remember his name somehow--was excused from Christian > activities, like building manger scenes and reenacting Christian parables > in school plays. Actually, we didn't _want_ any Christkillers in our school > plays. Big news, Tim...non-violent discrimination against a particular religious faction is not quite the same as freedom from religious persecution. i.e. - Not kicking Seth's Christkilling little butt is not the equivalent of letting him engage in his religious activities in school just as the Christian kids do. Still looking for your shoes? Check under the bed... ~JC~

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Re: SMTP Encryption Extension
by Mike 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Ariel Glenn wrote: >So data kept on the filesystem has to be protected and it has to be encrypted when it is sent out to the browsing (legitimate) user. But you can do that already with standard software. Just encrypt the disk with CFS and the web server with SSL. Nothing needs to be invented to solve your problem. All the popular browsers already have SSL running. Which leads to another idea, couldn't we encrypt SMTP by running it over SSL as a web server cgi? If 99% of Internet traffic is web browsing and we are trying to hide our email, then why not make the email look like web browsing? Just make your mailer try a "POST https" command before falling back to plain SMTP. The problem with including crypto in a popular Linux distribution is that all popular Linux distributions are from the USA. Maybe suse (www.suse.de) can change that... Mike.

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Re: Taxing Churches for their views? Bad idea.
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anonymous wrote: >Also tax any church where the sermon is immediately followed by an orgy. Well, so much for the Church of the SubGenius. Of course, they already weren't tax-exempt, so it's kind of a moot point. The orgies are worth it. though. Can we at least tax the Scientologists, too? All that Reactive Mind shit makes me puke. JR"B"D

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Re: Privacy Software
by Adam Shostack 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam Back wrote: | Monty Cantsin writes: | > We should consider a rewrite, which gives us the added benefit that | > it will be completely unencumbered. | | Sounds maybe worth doing. | Not maybe at all. The IETF will require a second, interoperable implementation for standardization of OpenPGP. Its sad that the interoperable SSH was written for Pilots, since it uses some libraries there that are not portable. | > Something I've never liked about PGP is their approach to encrypting | > to multiple keys. For one thing, the PGP crowd seems overly | > conservative with bit expenditure, which is silly because bits are | > cheap. This means that creating entirely separate messages is | > completely economical. | | This is more secure I agree. The real kicker with this problem is | people who turn on encrypt to self -- I don't want messages with | encrypt to self (an extra door into the message) on them in my | mailbox, nor coming over the wire headed to me. Pretty Good, not Perfectly Strong. Never underestimate the value of pretty good security. The bad guys use scanners that need to work in real time; even 40 bit crypto with a 30 second delay creates huge headaches. I see a PGP encrypted message, even with encrypt to self on as pretty good. Sure, its not sealed with a two color wax seal in a tyvek envelope, but its pretty good. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

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Re: PGP and Compliance with SEC and Liability Rules
by mark＠unicorn.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May quoted from macweek: >"The Gartner Group's Wheatman pointed out that PGP Policy Management Agent >allows corporatins for the first time to centralize control over >encryption: "For encryption to be accepted, IT had to gain control. This >isn't Big Brother; this is necessary to comply with liability laws and SEC >regulations."" However, this doesn't seem to work, unless I'm mistaken about CMR enforcement and the SEC regulations. CMR will only allow the snoops to read incoming email, not outgoing, and hence if Joe Blow at Foo-Bah.com wants to send me some handy insider trading tips CMR will not stop them. So this seems to be another justification for CMR which just doesn't make sense. Mark

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