December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

First Monday, July 1997
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 8 Jul 1997 22:59:42 +0200 (METDST) From: lm(a)webhotel.uni-c.dk X-For: rah(a)shipwright.com To: rah(a)shipwright.com Subject: First Monday, July 1997 Mime-Version: 1.0 Dear First Monday Reader We proudly announce the July Issue of First Monday: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/odlyzko/ Fixed fee versus unit pricing for information goods: competition, equilibria, and price wars by Peter Fishburn, Andrew M. Odlyzko, and Ryan C. Siders http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/drelichman/ Efficient Pricing in Data Transmission Networks: The Argentine experience by Mauricio Drelichman http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/goldhaber/ What's the Right Economics for Cyberspace? by Michael H. Goldhaber http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/berentsen/ Digital Money, Liquidity, and Monetary Policy by Aleksander Berentsen http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/almeida/ WebMonitor: a Tool for Measuring World-Wide Web Server Performance by Jussara M. Almeida, Virgilio Almeida, and David J. Yates http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/hibbitts/ E-Journals, Archives and Knowledge Networks: A Commentary on Archie Zariski's Defense of Electronic Law Journals by Bernard Hibbitts http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/bookrev/ Working the Web's Global Community: new books ---------------------------------------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/odlyzko/ Fixed fee versus unit pricing for information goods: competition, equilibria, and price wars by Peter Fishburn, Andrew M. Odlyzko, and Ryan C. Siders Information goods have negligible marginal costs, and this will create possibilities for novel distribution and pricing methods. The main concern of this paper is with pricing of goods that are likely to be consumed in large quantities by individuals. For example, will software continue to be sold at a fixed price for each unit, or will it be paid for on the basis of usage? There is substantial evidence both from observing marketplace evolution and from surveys that customers overwhelmingly prefer subscription pricing. It turns out that even if we ignore this factor, per-use pricing is not a clear winner, and therefore when the preference effect is taken into account, subscription pricing is likely to dominate. We model competitive pricing between two companies that supply essentially equivalent services (such as movies or word processing software). One company charges a fixed fee per unit, while the other charges on a per-use basis. Each is interested in maximizing its revenue. We consider instances of the models that have stable competitive equilibria between suppliers along with situations that are unstable and, in the absence of collusion, lead to ruinous price wars. ---------------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/drelichman/ Efficient Pricing in Data Transmission Networks: The Argentine experience by Mauricio Drelichman This paper develops a model to reflect the Argentine market for end-user Internet access and draws conclusions on certain aspects of economic efficiency. After the Introduction, the second section, entitled A Simple Model, provides a descriptive analysis of the market and its related industry, deriving a stylized technology and setting up a basic model. The third part of the paper, An Application to the Argentine Market, applies the model to Argentina, while the fourth section, Lessons from a Linear Demand Case, examines the results of the model under certain conditions. The model and the linear demand case are fully developed in the Appendix. ------------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/goldhaber/ What's the Right Economics for Cyberspace? by Michael H. Goldhaber Which economic theory best describes what goes on on the Internet? If you believe as I do that the explosive growth of the net and its relatives will likely continue until they become the dominant arenas for human effort and involvement, this is no idle question. Theories are guides to action: sticking to the wrong one can lead to ruin; adopting the right one opens the path to success. ------------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/berentsen/ Digital Money, Liquidity, and Monetary Policy by Aleksander Berentsen The term digital money refers to various proposed electronic payment mechanisms designed for use by consumers to make retail payments. Digital money products have the potential to replace central bank currency, thereby affecting the money supply. This paper studies the effect of replacing central bank currency on the narrowly defined stock of money under various assumptions regarding regulatory policies and monetary operations of central banks and the reaction of the banking system. ---------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/almeida/ WebMonitor: a Tool for Measuring World-Wide Web Server Performance by Jussara M. Almeida, Virgilio Almeida, and David J. Yates Server performance has become a crucial issue for improving the overall performance of the World-Wide Web. This paper describes WebMonitor, a tool for evaluating and understanding server performance, and presents new results for realistic workloads. WebMonitor measures activity and resource consumption, both within the kernel and in HTTP processes running in user space. WebMonitor is implemented using an efficient combination of sampling and event-driven techniques that exhibit low overhead. Our initial implementation is for the Apache World-Wide Web server running on the Linux operating system. We demonstrate the utility of WebMonitor by measuring and understanding the performance of a Pentium-based PC acting as a dedicated WWW server. Our workloads use file size distributions with a heavy tail. This captures the fact that Web servers must concurrently handle some requests for large audio and video files, and a large number of requests for small documents, containing text or images. Our results show that in a Web server saturated by client requests, up to 90% of the time spent handling HTTP requests is spent in the kernel. These results emphasize the important role of operating system implementation in determining Web server performance. It also suggests the need for new operating system implementations that are designed to perform well when running on Web servers. ------------------- http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_7/hibbitts/ E-Journals, Archives and Knowledge Networks: A Commentary on Archie Zariski's Defense of Electronic Law Journals by Bernard Hibbitts In his First Monday article "Never Ending, Still Beginning: A Defense of Electronic Law Journals from the Perspective of the E-Law Experience", Professor Archie Zariski asserted that, despite recent musings to the contrary, electronic legal periodicals have a bright future in the age of the Internet. This article challenges that contention, arguing that in law as in other disciplines, the reach, dynamism and interactivity of the Internet offer opportunities for the development of new scholarly publishing paradigms - in particular, archives and "knowledge networks" - which have the potential to enrich and envigorate legal learning more than even the most progressive electronic legal journals. --- 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/

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French satellite attack...
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Several of you asked for a reference to the French satellite attack. I have been unable to locate any of my books because of moving related to the business expansion we are going through at the moment. However, if one of you out there has a copy of "When the phones stopped" or whatever the name was please be kind enough to chech the index, as there is a reference to this incident in that book (it's the only one I can clearly remember and a cpunk might have a copy of). I hope to have all the reference works unboxed and shelved within the next couple of weeks. I have added this item to my To-Do list and will pursue it then provided an answer is not forthcoming. Sorry for the delay. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | _____ 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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German Army Train Neo-Nazis
by Magus Mixmaster Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well, appears that while the German government is railing against neo-Nazis on the Net, the German army is busy training the next generation of jack-booted thugs: "Pictures That Shame The German Army" (London Independent, 7/7/97, p.9) Bonn -- A German newspaper yesterday published pictures from an amateur videotape of soldiers staging mock executions and rapes. A youthful recruit in a Bundeswehr uniform is shown holding a pistol in the mouth of another recruit in an image published on the front page of <I>Bild am Sonntag</I>. Another photograph shows a soldier pretending to rape another recruit acting as a woman civilian, who is later shown being marched to "execution" by troops. Other pictures show enactments of "civilians" being tortured and hanging from trees, images which revived memories of atrocities by Hitler's armies. "There will be no toleration whatsoever of such perversion in the Bundeswehr," the Defence Minister, Volker Ruhe, said in an interview with ZDf television. "I will do everything to see that those involved are disciplined and prosecuted. We will ... take action against all those involved, even if they are no longer in the army." The army said eight recruits on the film, made at Hammelburg training grounds, near Wurzburg, in April 1996, were no longer in the army. The Bundeswehr investigation also focussed on officers who failed to report the incident which took place during a break in training for soldiers preparing for a mission in former Yugoslavia. Lieutenant-General Helmut Willmann, the army's officer, said acts by "a handful of mentally disturbed individuals" could not besmirch the force's good name. "I am horrified by what happened at the Hammelburg training ground," he said in a statement release by the defence ministry. The Greens criticized Gen Willmann for trying to write off the incident as an abberation, as officers knew of the tape for more than a year but said nothing about it. Jurgin Trittin, chairman of the Greens, said the incident was the latest of a series of unsettling incidents. There had been 53 reported incidents of right-wing extremism in the army in 1995. Wolfgang Schraut, commander of Jaeger Battalion 571, where the incident took place, said the recruits could no longer be punished by the army because they had left. "We will not be able to get our hands on them any more," the officer said. "They were released from the army in an entirely normal fashion after completing their military service." He said that he did not know of the existence of the videotape until Friday and had learned that it was shown "on occasion in small circles amongst the comrades." Some 3,000 Germans are in the Nato-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) in Bosnia. Around 4,000 Germans took part in SFOR's predecessor, the peace Implementation Force but were stationed in nearby Croatia.

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Re: [MILCOM] NSA: struggling with diversity ...
by Mix 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>The National Security Agency, whose size, secrecy and mission were spawned by >the Cold War, is in the midst of personnel changes that current and former >employees warn are a threat to national security. > >Former employees call senior leadership the "Irish Mafia" and the Office of >Discrimination Complaints and Counseling "a party organization for blacks." A heartwarming report. The NSA represents the worst of America: its paranoia, its ruthlessness, its end-justifies- the-means amorality. The NSA's personnel policies reveal its attitudes clearly (http://theory.stanford.edu/people/donald/NSA.doc.html) It is ironic indeed that the NSA is being weakened, not by the foreign enemies it sees behind every curtain, but by the EEOC, as its immoral and callous mistreatment of employees, its jealous defense of white male privilege, are all finally revealed to be utterly inconsistent with modern principles. There is no place any longer in the world for an agency like the NSA. It is an enemy to freedom and an enemy to the free citizenry of its own country. We need a new agency, one to defend us against infowar, to help industrial competitiveness, to assist Americans in retaining their freedoms rather than attempting to strip them away for its own evil purposes. Let us all hope that the changing of the guard at the NSA will lead to a rebirth and a renewal as an agency looking forward, rather than one concerned only with guarding its own rear. Anon

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Copy of: Bonn Conference - press release and links to final conference documents on the WWW
by Theodor.SCHLICKMANN＠bxl.dg13.cec.be 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Self-certified keys
by Theodor.SCHLICKMANN＠bxl.dg13.cec.be 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You may find some articles related to the subject on http://www.ens.fr/~petersen/publications.html In these papers several extensions of self-certified keys, which make them more competitive compared with certificate-based keys are presented. The main features of self-certified keys lie in their easy availability and accessibility. Other parameters than system parameters are not required to be authentic. Therefore large databases with certified public keys (TTPs) are not needed any more. However, small lists with the authentic public keys of the certification authorities are still needed. The properties of self-certified keys are: -- Determination of a public key without an authentic public directory (TTP). -- Non-repudiation of public keys. -- Efficient verification of a single certificate. -- Efficiency in verification of hierarchical certificates vs. batch signatures -- Importance of key propagation. -- High security of self-certified keys. Theodor Schlickmann

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Bonn Konferenz (2)
by Theodor.SCHLICKMANN＠bxl.dg13.cec.be 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

please find attached the Bonn Conference press release . Please note that the following are also available on http://www2.echo.lu/bonn/conference.html English, French and German versions of the Ministerial declaration (WinWord, RTF, PostScript) Industrial declaration (WinWord, RTF, PostScript) Users Declaration "Putting people's needs at the centre" (WinWord, RTF, PostScript) Theodor Schlickmann

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The Vulisbot
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Re: Liberating the Bits Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM blathers: >Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: >> Let it be known I did not write any of the material above attributed to me. > >And we're supposed to believe you? Yup. Like we believe you when you deny the Vilusbot. get over it, Kook.

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Rose Bird vs Multi-Ethnic Diversity/IRS racial quotas
by winsock＠rigel.cyberpass.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wonder what the lefty-racists will say about this... Sunday, July 6, 1997 . Page B 8 San Francisco Examiner LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Rose Elizabeth Bird's ignorant and poorly reasoned column ( "A brutal education legacy," June 29) in which she identified the end of affirmative action at the University of California with apartheid is an example of why race-based policies have become so bankrupt among the citizens of California. Apartheid classified individuals strictly according to race and ignored their individual abilities. Blacks in South Africa could not go to white universities regardless of their intellectual accomplishments. Affirmative action classified individuals according to race and their individual accomplishments. The end of affirmative action means that individuals will be assessed in terms of their individual accomplishments. It is as far away from apartheid as a policy could possibly be. Moreover, the end of affirmative action will not result in ethnically homogeneous campuses at the University of California. The student population in this state is astonishingly diverse. There are large numbers of men and women whose forebears came from all over Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. What the end of affirmative action will do is to change the mix. There will be more individuals of Chinese, Japanese, Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani and Russian descent, and fewer individuals of African and Latin American descent. Bird might not like this new mix, but the astonishing ethnic diversity of California universities will not end as a result of the termination of affirmative action - only race-based discrimination will. Stephen D. Krasner Department of Political Science Stanford University Rose Bird's "disgraceful, social do-gooding, liberal attack' Anent Rose Elizabeth Bird's disgraceful - albeit typically social do-gooding liberal - attack upon Gov. Wilson and UC Regent Ward Connerly for taking us from "affirmative action to California-style apartheid" : The opinions, political philosophy and judicial activism of former California Chief Justice Bird were unequivocably repudiated by the voters of California when she and two other like-thinking liberal justices were deservedly removed from the court. Bird's words today - as were her pronouncements from the bench of yesteryear - would be laughable were they not so dangerous. Thomas M. Edwards San Francisco ==================================================== US NEWS & WORLD REPORT UPDATE July, 1997 The IRS loses a round SOON AFTER PRESIDENT CLINTON announced his "mend it, don't end it" policy on affirmative action, U.S. News reported ("Between the Idea and the Reality," July 31, 1995) on race-and-employment skirmishes within the federal bureaucracy. In one prominent example, critics accused the Internal Revenue Service of maintaining virtual quotas in its hiring practices. In the past two years, the IRS has lost several cases involving charges of "reverse discrimination" that were brought by white males. Two of the cases involved accusations by IRS employees who charged that the agency had retaliated against them for filing or supporting reverse-bias claims. Federal District Court Judge Donald E. Walter in Shreveport, La., recently declared the IRS's policy on racial and gender diversity unconstitutional, saying that it amounted to a "quota, guarantee, or set-aside." The judge issued his ruling in a suit brought by four white males that is set for trial next month. The case may be settled, but the IRS will be under pressure to overhaul its policy, which may be challenged in a class-action suit.--Ted Gest Copyright U.S. News & World Report, Inc.

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Re: A really meaningfull upgrade
by Casey Iverson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:18 PM 7/8/97 EDT, you wrote: > >Casey Iverson <iverson(a)usa.net> writes: > >> At 01:15 PM 7/7/97 EDT, THE RUSSIAN SCUM BAG, ASS HOLE VULIS wrote: >> >> >I've replaced OS/2 on it by Windows 95. I'm going to add some more hardware >> >I think it's sort of a change for the better. >> >> The only meaningfull upgrade would be a total replacement of his fucked up, >> disease ridden perverted brain. >> >> C.I. > >Not that I advocate such censorship, but usa.net is very fond of pulling the >plugs on its free accounts whenever there are complaints about contents. :-) > Who do we talk to about pulling the plug on the Russian Scumbag KGB lovers TC May insult bot???

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