May 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Mike Hawash
by Tyler Durden 02 May '03

02 May '03

OK, aside from the obvious problems with being held without charge until now, there are some other major issues here. Apparently, the guy is only being charged with traveling to China in an attempt to enter Afghanistan and fight US forces. This counts as terrorism? I thought it was good old fashion treason. -TD _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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[Factoring] TWIRL and RSA key sizes
by Trei, Peter 02 May '03

02 May '03

This just came to me over one of our internal mailing lists. It may be of interest. Peter Trei RSA Security --------------------- > A new technical note on Adi Shamir's "TWIRL" design for integer > factorization has just been posted on the RSA Labs site, at > http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/technotes/twirl.html. > > Executive Summary: The popular 1024-bit key size for RSA > keys is becoming the next horizon for researchers in integer > factorization, as demonstrated by the innovative "TWIRL" > design recently proposed by Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer. > The design confirms that the traditional assumption that a > 1024-bit RSA key provides comparable strength to an 80-bit > symmetric key has been a reasonable one. Thus, if the 80-bit > security level is appropriate for a given application, then TWIRL > itself has no immediate effect. Many details remain to be > worked out, however, and the cost estimates are inconclusive. > TWIRL provides an opportunity for review of key sizes in > practice; RSA Laboratories' revised recommendations are > given in Table 1 below. > > -- Burt > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com

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Mike Hawash: Time for an AP site?
by Nomen Nescio 02 May '03

02 May '03

Someone on this board mentioned that a fake AP site might be almost as good as real AP. I suggest that someone create a fake AP board, on the tonga server or wherever, for Mike Hawash. Basically, it would be a website that lists the name of anyone involved in incarcerating this man without due process. It will also sport logos of the various "payment" options, including Paypal, Digicash, egold, or whatever else. It will also have the current $-value associated with each name. Future additions to the name list will be tactical, however. D u b y a, for instance, would not be on there, nor would Fabio, Britney, or any other "funny" slam-dunks. Hopefully, the board will look like its real, and as if there's already a price (and date) established for those involved in holding Hawash.

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Re: Mike Hawash
by Major Variola (ret) 02 May '03

02 May '03

At 03:10 PM 4/29/03 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: >OK, aside from the obvious problems with being held without charge until >now, there are some other major issues here. > >Apparently, the guy is only being charged with traveling to China in an >attempt to enter Afghanistan and fight US forces. According to 1 "informant", who is getting *what* in return? Buying a parka and flying is not treason. Even trying to enter .af is not illegal. (And congress never did declare war there, did they?) Shooting off guns in a quarry is not illegal. Going to the same church as folks who pled is not illegal. Clearly, he was given a deal, while in illegal custody, cooperate or we file charges. He didn't, so they did. If they had charges to begin with, they needn't have held him illegally. Of course, he won't be tried in the justice system, so we'll never know the facts.. Maybe they'll go after his wife, if he still doesn't do as they dictate.

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Students who ran file-sharing systems will each give the recording industry up to $17,500
by Major Variola (ret) 02 May '03

02 May '03

4 lives destroyed by record companies. Time to add onion routing. Note that the record companies didn't go after *downloaders*, only offerers. Note that its legal to have ripped tracks on your computer, and P2P clients often auto-search for content you don't intend to share. Perhaps the defendants should have quickly gotten CDs with the tracks on their machine, and used that defense. Oh, that's right, these are poor students without funds for defense. Burn, baby, burn. 4 Pay Steep Price for Free Music Students who ran file-sharing systems will each give the recording industry up to $17,500. Four college students learned Thursday that free music downloads can carry a hidden price tag $12,000 to $17,500, to be exact. The major record companies had accused the students two at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and one each at Princeton University and Michigan Technological University of fueling music piracy by running file-sharing networks on campus and offering hundreds of songs for copying. On Thursday, the four settled the companies' claims and promised not to violate their copyrights. Although they did not admit to committing or aiding piracy, they each agreed to pay thousands of dollars to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the labels' trade group. The settlements mark the first time the record companies have recovered money from individuals in the United States accused of piracy on file-sharing networks. But they may be a harbinger of more lawsuits, as the industry starts taking its battle against online piracy directly to users. Evan Cox, a copyright attorney in San Francisco who has helped software companies battle piracy, said the amounts are high enough to catch the attention of file swappers. "I'd personally think twice about doing something that would cost me $12,000 to $17,500 to avoid spending 12 to 15 bucks on the occasional CD," Cox said. But Howard Ende, an attorney for 18-year-old Princeton University sophomore Daniel Peng, predicted that the tactic would backfire. "This case had very little to do with Dan Peng and everything to do with the recording industry's attempt to intimidate Internet users around the country and college students in particular," Ende said. "They looked to instill fear, but instead they got fear and loathing." In the settlements, all four Peng; Joseph Nievelt, a 21-year-old junior computer science student at Michigan Tech in Houghton, Mich.; Jesse Jordan, a 19-year-old freshman information technology student at Rensselaer in Troy, N.Y.; and Aaron Sherman, a student studying management and computer networks at Rensselaer agreed not to infringe or support the infringement of the companies' copyrights. Peng and Nievelt each agreed to pay $15,000. Sherman agreed to pay $17,500, and Jordan agreed to pay $12,000. For Nievelt, who was raised in a Detroit suburb, the payment amounts to nearly three years' tuition. For each of the other three, the settlement translates to about half a year's worth of classes. None of them appear to have made any money off the file-sharing systems they operated, which were confined to their campuses' computer networks. "It's been kind of a bad day, and a bad week and a really, really, really bad month," Nievelt said from the dorm room he shares with two other students, where the corkboard is covered with exam announcements and fliers touting anti-RIAA rallies. The lanky Nievelt started tinkering with computers in the seventh grade and gradually moved on to explore the flexibility of computer networking. Last summer he landed an internship at *Microsoft *Corp., working as a development engineer in the software giant's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. There, he met fellow intern Sherman, who also had spent much of his young life steeped in technology. While attending Huntington High School in Long Island, N.Y., the short-haired, clean-cut student launched a Web site dedicated to a rare genetic condition, Triplo-X syndrome. At Rensselaer, he quickly became involved in a variety of activities, including joining the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha and publishing extensive research on "Efficient Solutions for Peer to Peer Resource Discovery on Local Area Networks." When officials from Michigan Tech called him one April afternoon and told him that the RIAA was serving him with legal papers, Nievelt felt sick. "My dad's not happy. My mom's more on the paranoid side," Nievelt said. "For a while, it seemed that they [the RIAA] were going to get more money than we ever would have had in the family." Sherman, who could not be reached for comment late Thursday, has written or contributed to several academic papers related to file sharing and MP3, the most popular format for music on file-sharing networks. These include a treatise on FlatLan, the file-sharing software at the center of the record labels' suit against him. For Jordan, the $12,000 settlement will wipe out his college savings account. It was money the quiet freshman who wrote his first computer program at age 9 and helped test Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system at age 13 had earned by working summers at a pet store near the family home in Oceanside, N.Y. And it was money that the family was counting on to stretch the loans and scholarships that helped cover Jordan's $29,000 annual bill for tuition and housing. "I've been out of work for a while," said Jordan's father, Andy, 54, a former technology manager for financial service companies. "We had a small fund set aside for his schooling, but that was in the markets and is pretty much gone." Noting that he owns thousands of records and CDs, Andy Jordan added: "They [the RIAA] have sued one of their most avid customers. The RIAA says that they wanted to teach these kids and their families a lesson. The lesson we learned is that we will never, ever buy another product from any of those companies again. That's the lesson we're going to tell everyone." Peng, a former salutatorian of Manalapan High School in central New Jersey, is a physics whiz who won a silver medal at the 2001 International Physics Olympiad in Antalya, Turkey. On his personal Web site, the young scientist detailed his hopes of majoring in electrical engineering or computer science, as well as his love of authors Ayn Rand and Isaac Asimov. The Nievelt, Sherman and Jordan settlements took the form of court orders that, if violated, could subject the students to fines and jail terms. They and Peng were allowed to pay the record companies in installments spread over two or more years. Many record company executives blame the protracted slump in CD sales on file-sharing networks, which let users copy songs from one another's computers for free. They responded by suing the most popular networks, with mixed results. The music industry's suit against Napster Inc. effectively shut down the pioneering network and forced the company into insolvency. But a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled last week that two other popular networks, Morpheus and Grokster, were not liable for the unauthorized copies made by their users. Nevertheless, every judge on the cases has held that users on these networks who offer or download files without the copyright owner's permission are violating the law. Those rulings have supplied the RIAA with ammunition for lawsuits against individual file swappers. Peng said in a news release, "I don't believe that I did anything wrong." His attorneys also defended him, saying he'd simply set up an index that enabled others on the Princeton network to find and copy all kinds of files from one another's computers. Lawyers for the record companies, however, said the four students facilitated piracy the same way that Napster did by providing on their computers a central directory to unauthorized copies of songs. They also offered 1,800 to 6,000 songs from their own computers for others on their campuses to copy, the companies alleged. The lawsuits, which were filed early last month, asked for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. That translated to hundreds of millions of dollars for each of the students. Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the RIAA, said the settlements, although well below what the companies asked for, are "the right amount given the situation." Most students "will view $15,000 as a fairly significant amount of money," Oppenheim said. He also noted that since the four suits were filed, at least 18 campus file-sharing networks have been taken down by their operators. "The message," Oppenheim said, "is clearly getting through that distributing copyrighted works without permission is illegal, can have consequences, and that we will move quickly and aggressively to enforce our rights." http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-settle2may02,1,6792735.story?coll=la%…

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Re: Cheese-eating surrender monkeys
by Tim May 02 May '03

02 May '03

On Friday, May 2, 2003, at 07:50 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: >> Tim May[SMTP:timcmay@got.net] wrote: >> >> The right-wing columnist Jonathan Goldberg dubbed them "cheese-eating >> surrender monkeys" several years ago, long before this latest matter. >> Has a great cadence, and it's accurate. >> > No one expects the Pedantry Police! > > Goldberg used the phrase in a 1999 column, but he did not invent it. > > It's from a actually from a 1995 Simpsons episode, "Round Springfield" > (production number 2F32) Here's the quote in context: > > [I agree with most of the post, but couldn't let this misquote stand] > Peter Trei Yes, now that you remind me, I remember this. And I think Goldberg acknowledged his source in an interview I saw with him just before the war started. Likewise, my quotes below come from Blair and Bush, respectively. --Tim May "We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania." "We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia." "We are at war with Iraq. We have always been at war with Iraq. "We are at war with France. We have always been at war with France."

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RE: Capitalism and economic struggles
by Vincent Penquerc'h 02 May '03

02 May '03

> Two people start businesses in the same town. Alice works hard, works > long hours, concentrates on her business. Bob fails to do this. Alice > drives Bob out of business. The point is to balance consequences of everyone's actions for everyone. In your case, Alice works hard and drives Bob out of business because she gains something in it (as the smoker did gain something (pleasure) from smoking). But the smoker could gain the same pleasure from smoking at another time (though if smoking was forbidden everywhere, that would be a different matter) for little annoyance. Alice could not do with changing business to help Bob, this would be a huge strain on her. So, you see, there is a large difference in the two examples, though I grant you they seem similar. Now, you might also say that being exposed to the smoke is only a small inconvenience, but this is to be compared to the small inconvenience for the smoker. As a side note: I'd have different views on your example if Alice was specifically trying to get Bob out of business, and depending on the methods she was using to further these ends. > capitalism is the process of creative destructionism Life as a whole is, whether at the micro level of one's life or at the macro level of evolution. -- Vincent Penquerc'h

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Re: Making Money in Digital Money
by Major Variola (ret) 02 May '03

02 May '03

At 08:14 PM 5/1/03 -0400, zem wrote: >> Why would Bob's "clients" care if the cost was low enough, or just >> casually traded? > >Spam. > >The reason clients pay Alice or Bob to receive their approval ratings is >to avoid downloading bogus files - incomplete, poorly encoded, misnamed, >or deliberately spoofed files (cf Madonna's "what the fuck?" example). Zem, the editor need not be a single or static entity. Consider slashdot, which uses its readers as ephemeral editors. Consider the (new) KaZaa ratings system which does the same. Consider ebay's user rating system. So yes, the editing *function* is valuable, but it needn't be implemented by a paid individual. --- E pur si muove -G Galilei

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Showdown at the FCC
by Harmon Seaver 02 May '03

02 May '03

SHOWDOWN AT THE FCC MoveOn Bulletin Friday, May 2, 2003 Co-Editors: Don Hazen and Lakshmi Chaudry, AlterNet Subscribe online at: http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/ You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking here: http://moveon.org/s?i=1334-1692048-4yD_r3kLzrTkA0oje7vXpQ CONTENTS: 1. Eli Pariser: Why Worry About Who Owns the Media? 2. Jeff Chester: Showdown at the FCC 3. Neil Hickey: The Gathering Storm Over Media Ownership 4. Bill Moyers: Barry Diller Takes On Media Deregulation 5. Danny Schechter: The Media, the War, and Our Right to Know 6. Eric Boehlert: Clear Channel's Big Stinking Deregulation Mess 7. Paul Schmelzer: The Death of Local News 8. Caryl Rivers: Where Have All the Women Gone? 9. About the Bulletin ------------------------------ WHY WORRY ABOUT WHO OWNS THE MEDIA? MoveOn Bulletin Op-Ed by Eli Pariser It's like something out of a nightmare, but it really happened: At 1:30 on a cold January night, a train containing hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic ammonia derails in Minot, North Dakota. Town officials try to sound the emergency alert system, but it isn't working. Desperate to warn townspeople about the poisonous white cloud bearing down on them, the officials call their local radio stations. But no one answers any of the phones for an hour and a half. According to the New York Times, three hundred people are hospitalized, some are partially blinded, and pets and livestock are killed. Where were Minot's DJs on January 18th, 2002? Where was the late night station crew? As it turns out, six of the seven local radio stations had recently been purchased by Clear Channel Communications, a radio giant with over 1,200 stations nationwide. Economies of scale dictated that most of the local staff be cut: Minot stations ran more or less on auto pilot, the programming largely dictated from further up the Clear Channel food chain. No one answered the phone because hardly anyone worked at the stations any more; the songs played in Minot were the same as those played on Clear Channel stations across the Midwest. Companies like Clear Channel argue that economies of scale allow them to cut costs while continuing to provide quality programming. But they do so at the expense of local coverage. It's not just about emergency warnings: media mergers are decreasing coverage of local political races, local small businesses, and local events. There are only a third as many owners of newspapers and TV stations as there were in the 1970s (about 600 now; over 1,500 then). It's harder and harder for Americans to find out what's going on in their own back yards. On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering relaxing or getting rid of rules to allow much more media concentration. While the actual rule changes are under wraps, they could allow enormous changes in the American media environment. For example, one company could be allowed to own ABC, CBS, and NBC. Almost certainly, media companies will be allowed to own newspapers and TV stations in the same town. We could be entering a new era of media megaliths. Do you want one or two big companies acting as gatekeepers and controlling your access to news and entertainment? Most of us don't. And the airwaves explicitly belong to us -- the American people. We allow media companies to use them in exchange for their assurance that they're serving the public interest, and it's the FCC's job to make sure that's so. For the future of American journalism, and for the preservation of a diverse and local media, we have the hold the FCC to its mission. Otherwise, Minot's nightmare may become our national reality. ------------------------------ Interested in taking on the FCC and other media-related concerns? Join the MoveOn Media Corps, a group of over 29,000 committed Americans working for a fair and balanced media. You can sign up now at: http://www.moveon.org/mediacorps/ ------------------------------ SHOWDOWN AT THE FCC Jeffrey Chester and Don Hazen, AlterNet Despite wide protests and the Clear Channel debacle, the FCC is about to award the nation's biggest media conglomerates a new give-away that will further concentrate media ownership in fewer hands. The impact on the American media landscape could be disastrous. Recent TV coverage of the Iraq war already illustrates that US media companies aren't interested in providing a serious range of analysis and debate. This overview describes what's at stake and offers an introduction to the following articles. http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15796 ------------------------------ THE GATHERING STORM OVER MEDIA OWNERSHIP Neil Hickey, Columbia Journalism Review CJR's editor-at-large explains just what is at stake in this fight over media ownership. He provides an in-depth look at the issues, and major players in a battle that is pitting journalists against their bosses, breaking up old alliances, and gathering momentum as the day of reckoning draws near. He traces the snowballing trend of media consolidation and its implications for the future, revealing just how the drive for profit is eroding diversity, local control, and more importantly giving a few mega-corporations a monopoly over the dissemination of news. http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15654 ------------------------------ BARRY DILLER TAKES ON MEDIA DEREGULATION Bill Moyers, Now with Bill Moyers The founder of Fox Broadcasting and present CEO of USA Networks is an unlikely but passionate opponent of plans to loosen media ownership rules. In an interview with Bill Moyers, the media mogul explains how deregulation creates corporations with "such overwhelming power in the marketplace that everyone has to do essentially what they say." Diller argues that government regulation is essential to prevent media companies from controlling everything we see, read, and hear. As he puts it, "Who else is gonna do it for us?" http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15768 ------------------------------ THE MEDIA, THE WAR, AND OUR RIGHT TO KNOW Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org Why did the media do such a poor job of reporting on the Iraq war? The boosterism of news anchors, the suppression of antiwar views, and the sanitized images of war that defined television coverage are not a simple matter of bias or ineptitude, says media analyst Danny Schechter. He draws attention to the connection between the decisions made by journalists and the lobbying efforts of owners who will profit immensely from the upcoming FCC decision in June. http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/moveon.shtml ------------------------------ CLEAR CHANNEL'S BIG STINKING DEREGULATION MESS Eric Boehlert, Salon Clear Channel, the radio and concert conglomerate, has been the greatest beneficiary of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which stripped all ownership limits in the radio industry. The rapacious company, led by Bush supporter Lowry Mays, has grown from 40 stations to 1,225 since then, and now uses its power to routinely bully advertisers and record companies, and more recently censor antiwar artists. However, as Eric Boehlert points out, its "success" may be the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of media activists. Clear Channel's stranglehold on the radio industry is the best and clearest example of the effects of rampant deregulation. http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15281 ------------------------------ THE DEATH OF LOCAL NEWS Paul Schmelzer, AlterNet Meet the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the "Clear Channel of local news." Since 1991, the company has managed to acquire 62 television stations or 24 percent of the national TV audience. The company's modus operandi is the centralized production of homogenized, repackaged faux "local" news. Its success offers an alarming glimpse of the post-deregulation world in which all news may be produced in one giant newsroom and from a single viewpoint -- which in Sinclair's case is wholeheartedly conservative. http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15718. ------------------------------ WHERE HAVE ALL THE WOMEN GONE? Caryl Rivers, Women's Enews Once the war on Iraq took center-stage in the headlines of newspapers and magazines across the country, women writers became increasingly rare in the media. In their place are mostly white men who write on a narrow band of foreign policy issues, mostly recycling their views over and over again. From the all-male line-ups in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times to the dwindling female bylines in the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, women's voices have been caught in a "spiral of silence" that is unprecedented since the pre-women's movement days. http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15677 ------------------------------ ABOUT THE MOVEON BULLETIN AND MOVEON.ORG The MoveOn Bulletin is a free email bulletin providing information, resources, news, and action ideas on important political issues. The full text of the MoveOn Bulletin is online at http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/; you can subscribe to it at that address. The MoveOn Bulletin is a project of MoveOn.org. MoveOn.org is an issue-oriented, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that gives people a voice in shaping the laws that affect their lives. MoveOn.org engages people in the civic process, using the Internet to democratically determine a non-partisan agenda, raising public awareness of pressing issues, and coordinating grassroots advocacy campaigns to encourage sound public policies. You can help decide the direction of MoveOn.org by participating in the discussion forum at: http://www.actionforum.com/forum/index.html?forum_id=223 This is a message from MoveOn.org. To remove yourself (Harmon Seaver) from this list, please visit our subscription management page at:<br> http://moveon.org/s?i=1334-1692048-4yD_r3kLzrTkA0oje7vXpQ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com

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RE: Cheese-eating surrender monkeys
by Trei, Peter 02 May '03

02 May '03

> Tim May[SMTP:timcmay@got.net] wrote: > > The right-wing columnist Jonathan Goldberg dubbed them "cheese-eating > surrender monkeys" several years ago, long before this latest matter. > Has a great cadence, and it's accurate. > No one expects the Pedantry Police! Goldberg used the phrase in a 1999 column, but he did not invent it. It's from a actually from a 1995 Simpsons episode, "Round Springfield" (production number 2F32) Here's the quote in context: ---------------------- [A little later, Bart puts his hand up]. Bart: Mrs. Krabappel, I'm done failing the test. Can I _please_ go to the nurse? Edna: Gosh, Bart, maybe you really are in pain. Well...it would be cruel not to let you go. [files her nails, hums the national anthem] [hums part of "Stars and Stripes Forever"] Heh heh heh, _now_ you may go. Bart: [walking into nurse's room] Lunch Lady Doris? Why are you here? Doris: Budget cuts. They've even got Groundskeeper Willy teaching French. Willy: "Bonjourrr", you cheese-eating surrender monkeys! ---------------- First broadcast: April 30, 1995 More info than you wanted to know: http://www.snpp.com/episodes/2F32.html [I agree with most of the post, but couldn't let this misquote stand] Peter Trei

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