April 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: Fake News for Big Brother
by Major Variola (ret) 29 Apr '03

29 Apr '03

At 10:16 AM 4/29/03 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: >I'm not sure how I feel about this. Problems would arise if there *were* a >law against >news media presenting false information. The question becomes 'What is >truth?', and >'Who decides". Peter is right on. Everyone needs to remember that police can lie, media can lie, governments lie. And remember that broadcast media requires government licensing. ---- "They did what?" --My wife, when I reminder her about the Tuskegee experiments, when she doubted the USG would plant things in Iraq

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RE: Fake News for Big Brother
by Trei, Peter 29 Apr '03

29 Apr '03

> ---------- > From: David Howe[SMTP:DaveHowe@gmx.co.uk] > Sent: Monday, April 28, 2003 11:42 AM > To: Email List: Cypherpunks > Subject: Re: Fake News for Big Brother > > > Well, it might not be such a bad thing in the long run, particularly if > they > > printed a retraction some days later. Already the masses believe what > they > > read/hear from "trusted" media sources, even to the point of "knowing" > that > > Saddam Hussein was somehoe behind 9/11/01. If this were well publicized, > > there could be the realiztion of "what!they LIED to us?!" > > http://www.sierratimes.com/03/02/28/arpubmg022803.htm > > On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing > illegal about > lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. > The court > reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who > charged she was > pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew > and documented to be > false information. The ruling basically declares it is technically not > against any law, > rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a > television broadcast. > On August 18, 2000, a six-person jury was unanimous in its conclusion that > Akre was indeed > fired for threatening to report the station's pressure to broadcast what > jurors decided was > "a false, distorted, or slanted" story about the widespread use of growth > hormone in dairy > cows. The court did not dispute the heart of Akre's claim, that Fox > pressured her to > broadcast a false story to protect the broadcaster from having to defend > the truth in court, > as well as suffer the ire of irate advertisers. > > Fox argued from the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in > front of three > different judges, to have the case tossed out on the grounds there is no > hard, fast, and > written rule against deliberate distortion of the news. The attorneys for > Fox, owned by > media baron Rupert Murdock, argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters > the right to lie > or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves. > > In its six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the > Federal Communications > Commission position against news distortion is only a "policy," not a > promulgated law, rule, > or regulation. > > Fox aired a report after the ruling saying it was "totally vindicated" by > the verdict. > I'm not sure how I feel about this. Problems would arise if there *were* a law against news media presenting false information. The question becomes 'What is truth?', and 'Who decides". Laws of this type are used in many tyrannies (recently, Zimbabwe) to persecute reporters on the grounds that they were 'libeling the government'. 'Truth in media' is a sword that cuts both ways. Peter Trei

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Re: text analysis!
by Tyler Durden 29 Apr '03

29 Apr '03

"Of course that's over a baseline of 50%...)" That's still very sobering. Start plugging that kind of info into a SAS program and you might be able to pull out some probable suspects from a list of, say, known contributors to "Cypherpunks". Which reminds me... How often are solicitations for employment, software, and other nominally crypto-type stuff that appears on this list actually some sort of TLA info-harvesting tool? -TD >From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv(a)cdc.gov> >To: "cypherpunks(a)lne.com" <cypherpunks(a)lne.com> >Subject: text analysis >Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 03:23:17 -0700 > >FWIW: There's a paragraph in the current _Science_ that mentions >"Winnow", a program >by some .il researchers that guesses the sex of authors by their >writing. They >claim 80% accuracy on general lit and 74% accuracy on 30 science papers. > >(Of course that's over a baseline of 50%...) _________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Secret hearing today on "critical infrastructure"
by Declan McCullagh 29 Apr '03

29 Apr '03

HOUSE SELECT HOMELAND SECURITY COMMITTEE Critical Infrastructure Infrastructure and Border Security Subcommittee hearing on critical infrastructure issues. Witnesses: Robert Liscousky, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection, Homeland Security Department Location: 2456 Rayburn House Office Building. 3 p.m. Contact: 202-225-5611 http://hsc.house.gov **NEW/CLOSED**

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Re: [9fans] OK, cpu server is up. (fwd)
by Jim Choate 29 Apr '03

29 Apr '03

If anyone happens to be going and is interested... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 07:56:29 -0600 (MDT) From: ron minnich <rminnich(a)lanl.gov> To: 9fans(a)cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] OK, cpu server is up. On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 okamoto(a)granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp wrote: > Are you using a file sever of v9fs on Linux, and Plan 9 CPU server, > and Plan 9 terminals system? And you can use grid computing using > your Plan 9 CPU server? no, this setup is a kludge just to get me there. Proof of concept, and next comes the transition to all Plan9-based hardware. Also, I am trying to keep it to two physical pieces: the clump of geodes and a laptop, as I plan to bring this to Usenix if anybody wants to see it (I hope there is a Plan9 BOF ...) The auth and terminal are on my IBM Thinkpad X24, and are the same vmware image running under linux (i.e. my terminal is the auth/kfs server). The CPU server is a Geode (Geode rhymes with: slow) board (Advantech PCM-5823) running LinuxBIOS out of FLASH rom with 9load loaded onto a compact flash. LinuxBIOS loads 9load from the compact flash. This has proven to be very handy for debugging, as I can pop the CF out of the geode and put it in my X24 if I need to fix 9load for anything. The plan9 host is using host-only networking on vmnet1. The Geodes are on eth0 (ether0 in Plan9 parlance). 9load DHCP requests don't make it across the eth0->vmnet1 gap, so I have to run linux dhcpd. Two other things I have to do: enable ipforwarding on the linux side so that the geode packets get to the vmware image; and hard-wire the Linux ARP tables for the Geode (more on that later). 9load comes up on the geode and sends dhcp requests. Linux responds with a host name and IP address. 9load then loads the 9pccpu kernel from Linux, and connects to the auth server running in vmware. Here is an interesting problem. 9load gets its IP address but won't respond to ARP requests, so the tftp load of 9pccpu can't happen as Linux doesn't have an ARP entry for the geode. I assume on plan9 this is not an issue, but I have to hardwire the ARP cache for the CPU server or nobody can talk to it. Also, there is no plan9.ini for the 9load to read, and for some reason I still can't get environment variables from 9load to 9pccpu, so I have also had to hard-wire environment variables in the 9pccpu kernel. So the 9pccpu that 9load downloads from Linux has one or two mods to it :-) Once the 9pccpu is loaded, it contacts the auth server in vmware, and from there things are pretty straightforward, and up it comes. There are mods to both 9load and 9pccpu. 9load cyrix interrupt routing code is completely busted (no shock there, it's almost impossible to test this stuff unless you're using linuxbios) and I have made some quick fixes to it to get it working. I just run the many Geode devices (all 2 of them) at IRQ 9. There are a few other things 9load does that have proven to be dangerous in a non-bios environment and I am trying to put together a patch set for possible acceptance by the Plan 9 kernel folks. The kernel itself doesn't have a huge number of changes, although again there are IRQ routing issues and a few other things. So, short story is, it all works, it's held together with gum and wire right now, and the effort for the next month is to get it working more smoothly and slowly rip out as many of my changes as I can. I may just put 9pccpu into the CF and dispense with 9load altogether, since 9load takes a long time to get going and boot something. But we'll see -- 9load is very handy in many ways. I plan to update the wiki with all this info next week. ron -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage(a)ssz.com jchoate(a)open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Rapid information dissemination in hostile environment
by Thomas Shaddack 29 Apr '03

29 Apr '03

Sipping from a cup of tea, reading newspapers, and enjoying my favorite pastime - idle musing. I am possibly stating the obvious and already known, though, but someone may find something I forgot about... Time to time, the situation arises an information has to be let out in the fastest possible way. It may be a whistleblowing, it may be the "liberation" of some discovered or "acquired" closed technological detail, it doesn't matter what it is as long as there are The Powers That Be that aren't too happy about it getting out. The less amount of copies Out There, the more vulnerable the information is. Web is excellent as persistent data source, but a website is way too easy to be taken down. FreeNet is better in this regard, as it is fairly impossible to find the physical location of the data source, but the weakness is the Freenet key that has to be published somewhere, the lack of content search engine ("Freenetoogle"?) and the abysmally low utilization by the General Public. For initial distribution of an information in a hostile environment, populated by factors aiming for elimination of the information, Web is rather unusable; sooner than a reasonable number of people get the chance to retrieve the information, the site gets taken down. (Consider the most pessimistic situation with an immediately aware adversary and fully complying ISPs.) The Rapid Information Dissemination (RID) (or maybe Rapid Information Proliferation, RIP?) system has to achieve the widest reasonably possible distribution within first couple seconds, or at most minutes. Two good examples of robust systems providing this feature are Usenet and unmoderated mailing lists. Cypherpunks could be an excellent example for a list especially suitable for RID; spanning several continents, the core list is unmoderated and distributed by automated means (which ensures that even in the case of forced compliance of the moderators they won't have any practical chance of intercepting a mail before it being sent to the unmoderated-list subscribers), and populated by the people whose profiles make them unlikely to comply en-masse with every whim of The Authorities, whoever tries to be that at the moment. One post, matter of few seconds, can then achieve the rapid seed distribution, necessary for ensuring the information can't be entirely eliminated from the world anymore (and then possibly making it even to Web archives - being it the List web archives themselves, or cryptome.org, or Politechbot, or any of the numerous others, depending on the type of the information). The adversary's only possibilities then are "data poisoning", publishing versions of the data with intentional inaccuracies (eg, the way British Secret Service(?) (MI6?) reacted to the leak of their agents list onto the Net), and/or finding the author and unleash the havoc of Exemplary Punishment onto him. The author has the choice of protecting his identity by using eg. an anonymous remailer chain, further limiting the adversary's options, or playing rough and taking the risk in the cases the situation warrants it (though it's always better to keep the awareness that a free guerrilla is better than a hero in prison). Finished the tea, back to work. Opinions, comments, peer review? :)

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Re: DRM technology and policy
by David Howe 28 Apr '03

28 Apr '03

I am not sure the commercial-album-by-major-label business model is really needed any more - perhaps a gig-based income model, plus an extension to the mp3/ogg formats to support a "tip for this song now" button on players, would suffice...

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Makeup as low-tech measure against automated face recognition?
by Thomas Shaddack 28 Apr '03

28 Apr '03

Vnity is about as old as mankind. With vanity, various ways come to change one's appearance. Wider lips. Narrower mouth. Wider eyes. Different shape of eyes. Name a facial feature, there is a way to enhance or suppress it. Face-recognition systems rely on visual appearance. They typically need edges - edges of mouth, edges of eyes...; one popular algorithm for indexing a face is recognizing these points and measuring their distance. A little amount of properly applied pigment could shift these values by couple percents. So low-tech device a lipstick is could be a potential tool for lowering the probability of a successful identification by face recognition. Ladies often carry many more similar "terrorist tools" in their purses. Opinions, comments?

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Suggested Reading
by Jim Choate 28 Apr '03

28 Apr '03

The Meek Scott Mackay ISBN 0-451-45823-0 $6 US -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage(a)ssz.com jchoate(a)open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Old men easier for Face Recog Tech: DARPA/NIST study
by Major Variola (ret) 28 Apr '03

28 Apr '03

DARPA/NIST's most recent signal detection studies now online. They even mention "watch list tasks". Abstract The Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2002 is an independently administered technology evaluation of mature face recognition systems. FRVT 2002 provides performance measures for assessing the capability of face recognition systems to meet requirements for large-scale real world applications. Ten commercial firms participated in FRVT 2002. FRVT 2002 computed performance statistics on an extremely large dataset121,589 operational facial images of 37,437 individuals. FRVT 2002 1) characterized identification and watch list performance as a function of database size, 2) estimated the variability in performance for different groups of people, 3) characterized performance as a function of elapsed time between enrolled and new images of a person and 4) investigated the effect of demographics on performance. FRVT 2002 shows that recognition from indoor images has made substantial progress since FRVT 2000. Demographic results show that males are easier to recognize than females and that older people are easier to recognize than younger people. FRVT 2002 also assessed the impact of two techniques for improving face recognition: three-dimensional morphable models, and face recognition from video sequences. Results show that three-dimensional morphable models increases performance, and that face recognition from video sequences offers only a limited increase in performance over still images. For FRVT 2002, a new XML-based evaluation protocol was developed. This protocol is flexible and supports evaluations of biometrics in general. http://frvt.org/DLs/FRVT_2002_Overview_and_Summary.pdf

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