February 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

[>Htech] WP: Leave-Us-Alone Democracy (fwd)
by Eugen Leitl 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

<<< No Message Collected >>>

1 0

Re: The Statism Meme
by Tyler Durden 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

Tim May wrote... "Even t.v. commercials are spreading the meme that Big Brother is our friend." Funny he should mention this. This very morning was watching the news and a commerical came on for a local monitored Burglar alarm system. It featured a Customed Superhero "Alarmo" (I think), going around the neighborhood interrogating garbage men, mailmen, even kids and dogs and crap. Basically, the guy was 'jokingly' depicted to have gone a little nutty and certainly facsist. And in the end there was an old couple looking on that LOOKED horrified but basically called to see if Alarmo could work for them to. That commercial was either written by a real nut or by someone who also doesn't like the way things are headed. -TD >From: Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> >To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com >Subject: The Statism Meme Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 20:16:05 -0800 > >OK, so I watch a lot of t.v., or at least have t.v. dramas on a lot. > >I'm struck by how many of them this year treat civil liberties as gone, >either as old-fashioned or as just plain ignorable. > >* On the episodes of "Law and Order" (three different versions weekly, >often repeated on other nights), the cops routinely roust citizens, shop >owners, hotel clerks, etc. Warrants are the exception, and when they are >produced, they are merely waved in front of the targets. Whether this >represents reality is not the point--the point is that the Fourth, Fifth, >and Sixth Amendments are treated as technicalities to be violated at will. >Cops, prosecutors, and judges violating the Constitution are not >sanctioned. Those being violated never fight back, whether with shotguns >or their own lawyers. > >* I just watched a new series called "Miracles." A planeload of passengers >is held without charges, without arrest warrants. One passenger is simply >taken away by the NSA because he may have information of use to them >someday. Again, maybe not plausible, but this shows the meme Americans are >becoming conditioned to accept. > >* On one often execrable show called "Judging Amy," "Child Protection" >workers are shown bursting into homes and apartments, sans warrants of >course. One memorable line was "Yes, we can enter your home without a >warrant...because we're not the police." > >* Even t.v. commercials are spreading the meme that Big Brother is our >friend. G.E. has one such commercial where doctors are told: "Wouldn't it >be wonderful if you could just type in a name and see every medical >treatment your patient has ever received?...with G.E.'s new software, >you'll be able to." (paraphrase of their actual commercial) > >* "Hate speech" is presented on these cop and lawyer shows as being ipso >facto illegal. "These people think the Constitution gives them the freedom >to spew hate." > >* Nearly all of the programs present the Internet as a place which needs >government control. The lawyers and cops editorialize (actually, the script >writers, of course) about how the "Wild West" atmosphere is a haven for >terrorists, gun nuts, pornographers, and Islamic militants. Various plots >on the court shows have involved ISPs being forced to spy on customers. > >* "9/11 changed everything" is heard at least weekly. The judges cite it to >justify unconstitutional measures, the prosecutors use it to justify >warrantless searches and coerced admissions. > >Yes, I understand this is all fiction. Well, some of the scripts are based >on actual events, including coerced confessions, warrantless searches, >"sneak and peek" wiretaps, concentration camps in Cuba, etc. That so many >of these popular programs have themes as I've described tells us what to >expect. > >The statism meme is growing under hothouse conditions. > > >--Tim May, Corralitos, California >Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; >perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." >--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty. _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

1 0

opportunistic encryption
by Eugen Leitl 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

Are there any reasons why current systems (whether OpenSource or not) don't ship with opportunistic IPsec out of the box? FreeS/WAN is really easy to set up, and such, but why having to do BIND juggling and extra installation steps. What are the reasons, crypto restrictions?

1 0

Re: "Real Facts" and "Good Facts"
by Ken Hirsch 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

Eric Cordian writes: > In another teletext moment on CNN, the shuttle was described as traveling > at "Mock 18." There was an interesting article in the New York Times (http://tinyurl.com/5b4x) back in Nov 2001 about stenographers working on 9/11--that was an angle I didn't see anywhere else. When these special reports come on--and then go on and on and on--the captioners don't get a break. There are no commercials and they have to keep typing even though the talking heads get to take turns. On 9/11 it was even worse because communications in NY were so screwed up. Y'all are making a big deal about the "dangerous debris". As you may have noticed, there were very few real facts to report so they kept repeating the few tidbits they had, whether they made sense or not. The danger may well be overblown, but it is just prudent of NASA to say not to touch it. There were some pretty big pieces that fell and it is plausible they are still dangerous: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030203/170/36q9q.html http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030203/168/36jm1.html Good article from 1980 on the boondoggle that is the space shuttle: http://washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/8004.easterbrook-fulltext.html

2 1

[arma@mit.edu: [freehaven-dev] CFP: Workshop on Economics of P2P Systems]
by Gabriel Rocha 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

Might be of interest to some here... ----- Forwarded message from Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu> -----

1 0

Re: Say goodbye to the ISS
by R. A. Hettinga 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

Our messages crossed in the mail, but there's this bit here... At 7:18 PM -0800 on 2/3/03, Tim May wrote: > Two crewmen > were prepared to to an EVA to fix dislodged cargo/hatch doors, as on > every flight to date. The other crew could have transferred in their > pressure suits. Ah. Forgot about the pressure suits. Doh. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 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'

1 0

Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say
by R. A. Hettinga 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

Speak of the devil... Cheers, RAH ------- http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/national/04OPTI.html?ei=5062&en=f65800eae… February 4, 2003 Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say By KENNETH CHANG HOUSTON, Feb. 3 - Even if flight controllers had known for certain that protective heat tiles on the underside of the space shuttle had sustained severe damage at launching, little or nothing could have been done to address the problem, NASA officials say. Virtually since the hour Columbia went down, the space agency has been peppered with possible options for repairing the damage or getting the crew down safely. But in each case, officials here and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida say, the proposed solution would not have worked. The simplest would have been to abort the mission the moment the damage was discovered. In case of an engine malfunction or other serious problem at launching, a space shuttle can jettison its solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank, shut down its own engines and glide back down, either returning to the Kennedy Space Center or an emergency landing site in Spain or Morocco. But no one even knew that a piece of insulation from the external tank had hit the orbiter until a frame-by-frame review of videotape of the launching was undertaken the next day. By then, Columbia was already in orbit, and re-entry would have posed the same danger that it did 16 days later. Four other possibilities have been discussed at briefings or in interviews since the loss of Columbia, and rejected one by one by NASA officials. First, repairing the damaged tiles. The crew had no tools for such a repair. At a news conference on Sunday, Ron D. Dittemore, the shuttle program manager, said that early in the shuttle program, NASA considered developing a tile repair kit, but that "we just didn't believe it was feasible at the time." He added that a crew member climbing along the underside of the shuttle could cause even more damage to the tiles. Another idea, widely circulated on the Internet in the last few days, was that the shuttle could have docked with the International Space Station once the damage was discovered. But without the external fuel tank, dropped as usual after launching, Columbia had no fuel for its main engines and thus no way it could propel itself to the station, which circles the earth on a different orbit at a higher altitude. "We have nowhere near the fuel needed to get there," said Bruce Buckingham, a spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center. Another shuttle, Atlantis, was scheduled for launching on March 1 to carry supplies and a new crew to the space station, and it is possible to imagine a Hollywood-type series of events in which NASA rushed Atlantis to the launching pad, sent it up with a minimal crew of two, had it rendezvous with Columbia in space and brought everyone down safely. But Atlantis is still in its hangar, and to rush it to launching would have required NASA to circumvent most of its safety measures. "It takes about three weeks, at our best effort, to prepare the shuttle for launch once we're at the pad," Mr. Buckingham said, "and we're not even at the pad." Further, Columbia had enough oxygen, supplies and fuel (for its thrusters only) to remain in orbit for only five more days, said Patrick Ryan, a spokesman at the Johnson Space Center here. Finally, there is the notion that Columbia's re-entry might have been altered in some way to protect its damaged area. But Mr. Dittemore said the shuttle's descent path was already designed to keep temperatures as low as possible. "Because I'm reusing this vehicle over and over again, so I'm trying to send it through an environment that minimizes the wear and tear on the structure and the tile," he said at his news conference on Sunday. Today he added that he did not know of a way for the shuttle to re-enter so that most of the heat would be absorbed by tiles that were not damaged, on its right wing. "I'm not aware of any other scenarios, any other techniques, that would have allowed me to favor one wing over the other," he said. Even if that had been possible, it would probably have damaged the shuttle beyond repair and made it impossible to land, requiring the crew to parachute out at high speed and at high altitude. He said there was no way managers could have gotten information about the damaged tiles that would have warranted so drastic a move. Gene Kranz, the flight director who orchestrated the rescue of astronauts aboard the crippled Apollo 13 in 1970, said that from what he knew about the suspected tile damage, there was probably nothing that could have been done to save the flight. "The options," he said in a telephone interview, "were just nonexistent." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 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'

1 0

[freehaven-dev] CFP: Workshop on Economics of P2P Systems
by Roger Dingledine 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

[Please forward this to any other appropriate lists. -RD] Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems Berkeley, California June 5-6 2003 http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/p2pecon From file-sharing to distributed computation, from application layer overlays to mobile ad hoc networking, the ultimate success of a peer-to-peer system rests on the twin pillars of scalable and robust system design and alignment of economic interests among the participating peers. The Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems will bring together for the first time researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines to discuss the economic characteristics of P2P systems, application of economic theories to P2P system design, and future directions and challenges in this area. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: - incentives and disincentives for cooperation - distributed algorithmic mechanism design - reputation and trust - reliability, identity, and attack resistance - network externalities and scale economies - public goods and club formation - accounting and settlement mechanisms - payment and currency systems - user behavior and system performance - measurement studies - leveraging heterogeneity without compromising anonymity - economic impact to network providers - interconnection of P2P networks The program of the workshop will be a combination of invited talks, paper presentations, and discussion. Workshop attendance will be limited to ensure a productive environment. Each potential participant should submit a position paper that expresses a novel or interesting problem, offers a specific solution, reports on actual experience, or advances a research agenda. Participants will be invited based on the originality, technical merit and topical relevance of their submissions, as well as the likelihood that the ideas expressed in their submissions will lead to insightful discussions at the workshop. Accepted papers will be published on the workshop website. Submission guidelines: Submissions of position papers are due March 27, 2003, and should not exceed 5 pages. Two column papers are acceptable, but the font size should be no smaller than 11pt. Papers must be submitted electronically in postscript or PDF format to <p2pecon(a)sims.berkeley.edu>. Important Dates : Submission due: March 27 Notification of acceptance: April 25 Revised version due: May 22 Workshop: June 5-6 Program Committee: John Chuang, UC Berkeley (chair) Roger Dingledine, The Free Haven Project Ian Foster, University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs Ramayya Krishnan, CMU (co-chair) H.T. Kung, Harvard University David Parkes, Harvard University Paul Resnick, University of Michigan Scott Shenker, ICSI Michael D. Smith, CMU Hal Varian, UC Berkeley ----- End forwarded message -----

1 0

[freehaven-dev] CFP: Workshop on Economics of P2P Systems
by Roger Dingledine 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

[Please forward this to any other appropriate lists. -RD] Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems Berkeley, California June 5-6 2003 http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/p2pecon From file-sharing to distributed computation, from application layer overlays to mobile ad hoc networking, the ultimate success of a peer-to-peer system rests on the twin pillars of scalable and robust system design and alignment of economic interests among the participating peers. The Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems will bring together for the first time researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines to discuss the economic characteristics of P2P systems, application of economic theories to P2P system design, and future directions and challenges in this area. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: - incentives and disincentives for cooperation - distributed algorithmic mechanism design - reputation and trust - reliability, identity, and attack resistance - network externalities and scale economies - public goods and club formation - accounting and settlement mechanisms - payment and currency systems - user behavior and system performance - measurement studies - leveraging heterogeneity without compromising anonymity - economic impact to network providers - interconnection of P2P networks The program of the workshop will be a combination of invited talks, paper presentations, and discussion. Workshop attendance will be limited to ensure a productive environment. Each potential participant should submit a position paper that expresses a novel or interesting problem, offers a specific solution, reports on actual experience, or advances a research agenda. Participants will be invited based on the originality, technical merit and topical relevance of their submissions, as well as the likelihood that the ideas expressed in their submissions will lead to insightful discussions at the workshop. Accepted papers will be published on the workshop website. Submission guidelines: Submissions of position papers are due March 27, 2003, and should not exceed 5 pages. Two column papers are acceptable, but the font size should be no smaller than 11pt. Papers must be submitted electronically in postscript or PDF format to <p2pecon(a)sims.berkeley.edu>. Important Dates : Submission due: March 27 Notification of acceptance: April 25 Revised version due: May 22 Workshop: June 5-6 Program Committee: John Chuang, UC Berkeley (chair) Roger Dingledine, The Free Haven Project Ian Foster, University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs Ramayya Krishnan, CMU (co-chair) H.T. Kung, Harvard University David Parkes, Harvard University Paul Resnick, University of Michigan Scott Shenker, ICSI Michael D. Smith, CMU Hal Varian, UC Berkeley ----- End forwarded message -----

1 0

Re: Shuttle Humor, Risk Estimation
by Tim May 04 Feb '03

04 Feb '03

On Monday, February 3, 2003, at 03:01 PM, Harmon Seaver wrote: > > The biggest question there is why didn't they inspect it? Seems > very > bizarre, since that's what they did in the past. That's what they _reported_ later that they did in the past...there certainly was no public announcement that Keyhole satellites were being tasked to look at the shuttle tiles. One might assume that they did in fact look at the tiles this time around, noted the damage, reported to Admiral Poindexter the "toast" conclusion, and that was that. Had the landing gone OK, we would have been hearing about how NASA had verified that little damage had occurred. Now, it's "we didn't have a chance to look, but even if we had, there was nothing anyone could do, so we didn't look." (Of course, there is _much_ they could have done, including coming in at a more westerly landing site, either Edwards or White Sands. Or, with about 10 days of advance notice, Atlantis could have been ready for launch and rendezvous to take the crew off, and perhaps even to transfer fuel to let Columbia go into a higher parking orbit until repairs could be arranged.) But the ostrich was strutting and now NASA is dying. --Tim May "Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11

2 1