May 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Making Money in Digital Money
by zem 01 May '03

01 May '03

> So Bob either redistributes the decrypted bits, or cruises through > the analog hole. Game over. All your Valentis are belong to us. Point is Bob can't redistribute the file with Alice's approval rating still intact. And it's the approval rating that people are paying her for, not the content. Bob can't redistribute the profitable part, only the worthless part. -- mailto:zem@vigilant.tv F289 2BDB 1DA0 F4C4 DC87 EC36 B2E3 4E75 C853 FD93 http://vigilant.tv/ "..I'm invisible, I'm invisible, I'm invisible.."

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Re: text analysis
by Major Variola (ret) 01 May '03

01 May '03

At 12:37 AM 5/1/03 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >At 12:09 AM 04/30/2003 -0500, Jim Choate wrote: >>On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote: >> >> > 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 >> >>Perhaps impressive, perhaps not. What's the actual percentage ratio? I bet >>it's decidedly male. >> >> > and 74% accuracy on 30 science papers. >> >>Considering the known sex ration in science fields one can guess 'male' >>all the time and hit that level. > >Yup. >Weather forecasting in Ithaca New York was similarly simple. >"50% chance of rain today" (Or snow, in the winter...) Jeez Bill, I'd expect such cluelessness to be limited to JC.. Don't you think they'd pick their sample set to be more useful? If you're testing weather prediction algorithms then a desert is not a useful place. --- A stopped clock is right more often than one that runs fast (or slow)

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Factoring progress (was: RE: All trust is economics)
by Trei, Peter 01 May '03

01 May '03

> Eric Cordian[SMTP:emc@artifact.psychedelic.net] wrote: > > Is anyone even working on factoring any more? How long has it been since > the last RSA Challenge number was factored? Seems like aeons. > > RSA-160 was factored only a month ago. This is a 530 bit number. The effort appears comparable to that for the previous 512-bit challenge (much quicker due to advances in hardware over the intervening four years). RSA-160 is one of the old series of challenges, which carried piddling prizes, and were dropped by RSA a few years ago. As a result, Franke's team did not receive a prize from RSA. The newer challenges (see http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/) carry more substantial prizes, ranging from $10,000 (RSA-576) to $200,000 (RSA-2048). Note that the labling has changed - the old series denoted challenges by the number of digits in the decimal representation of the moduli. The new series uses the number of binary bits. So, old RSA-160 would be about equivalent to new RSA-530. Peter Trei ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- http://www.loria.fr/~zimmerma/records/rsa160

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VANGUARD: May Day (fwd)
by Jim Choate 01 May '03

01 May '03

Not sure why I got it....YMMV (mine certainly did). ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 19:18:49 -0700 From: Rod D. Martin <Rod.Martin(a)theVanguard.org> To: TheVanguard.org <Vanguard(a)theVanguard.org> Subject: VANGUARD: May Day Vanguard of the Revolution http://www.theVanguard.org MAY DAY by Rod D. Martin, 1 May 2003 You would have never heard of Karl Marx had it not been for V.I. Lenin. Marx was neither terribly successful nor terribly important in his own right, and had it not been for a revolution carried out three decades after his death, he would be a footnote at best. But on this May Day, the high holy day of Communism and Socialism, it is important that we remember. As a student, both in England and America, I often heard the refrain -- even from conservatives -- that "communism wouldn't have been so bad if it had been carried out like Marx suggested, without all that junk from Lenin and Stalin." It still amazes me the degree to which this leftist propaganda can be passed off as true. It shows that the speaker has never read much (if any) Marx or Lenin, and, usually, that he wants to sound "intellectual". It also shows that socialists, whether of the national socialist (Nazi) or of the international socialist (Communist/Socialist) stripe, have been very successful in employing Herr Goebbels' doctrine of "the big lie." In fact, Marx never produced a political program at all. The entirety of his plan for his new world order was contained in ten short points -- nothing more than slogans, really -- in his very first "book", the Communist Manifesto. He never defined them further. He never saw a need. Marx had grander work in mind. He was producing a religion. Marx, the anti-Semitic Jew, the hater of Christianity and all it stood for, created an entire atheology. It was, in the words of James Billington, "fire in the minds of men." Marx sought to turn the old order on its head, to regenerate mankind through chaos. He preached a dialectical view of history which seemed to derive from Fuerbach but really just represented ancient dualism. He propounded a materialism which he said "turned Hegel right-side up," and which said that no person was anything more than a mechanistically determined automaton, "matter in motion." He wedded to this a naively classical interpretation of the labor theory of value to produce his economics, and a utopian view of the state that said man, who was morally neutral and therefore perfectible, could be utterly re-made -- regenerated, or "saved" -- by a state or party which completely controlled and molded his environment. To all of this he added an eschatology of victory, a certainty of success which was raised to the level of first principle, of dogma, of prerequisite faith. It is eternally worth noting that Whittaker Chambers, even when he embraced freedom, believed without question that he was abandoning the winning side. The contagiousness of the Communist faith was such that virtually everyone at the time agreed. The tenor of the "worker's paradise" to come was already apparent in Marx's own leadership of the International Workingmen's Association, which was nothing if not dictatorial. Once in the hands of a state, however, Communist atheology became truly consistent with its presuppositions. Since the individual man was just a biological machine, he could be discarded at will. Since good and evil were entirely relative, they could be defined entirely by the party and therefore by the state. Since the state/party could and must regenerate man and build the paradise to come, it's power must be absolute and unquestioned. And since victory was inevitable, millions gave up their individuality, their families, even their lives, without a fight. Marx's atheology created the greatest idol of all, the idol of the omnipotent state. This idol appealed to men more than any other in history, because it made all morality relative and it gave ambitious men the means to become gods themselves. But it also appealed precisely because it was not an idol of stone or wood, but an idol of power: prayers to it could be answered, needs and greeds fulfilled. And because it indulged all of man's basest instincts while ever appealing to his noblest motives, it was exactly the sort of god man wanted to create, a god in his own image. Marx's work was nothing new -- it was the logical conclusion of left-wing Enlightenment humanism, and had roots as old as Pharaoh -- and it was left to others -- Lenin, Stalin, Mao -- to carry out his work. Yet Marx's idol was and remains in many ways the most successful false god of human history. In its heyday enslaving more than half the world (and nearly taking the rest), its presuppositions still remain the dominant faith of the ruling elites of most of the western world. That is itself a terrifying thought. Marxism in this century killed a hundred million people, and sent probably two billion to hell. It withered whatever it touched, and it frankly touched us all. If Lenin's minions were the "vanguard" of the old revolution, we must be the vanguard of the new. Nothing has taught us better than Marxism the danger of holding false theological presuppositions, even in the absence of a clear political program. Mankind may embrace the truth, or he may embrace a lie. The difference between the American Revolution and the Russian is the difference between worlds; and it is that better world -- indeed a better world even still -- which we must build. Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 1 May 2003. This column first appeared (with minor differences) on 1 May 1998. -- Rod D. Martin, Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC (http://www.theVanguard.org) is an attorney and writer from Little Rock, Arkansas. A former policy director to Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, he is the Center for Cultural Leadership's Senior Fellow in Public Policy and Political Affairs, and Special Counsel to PayPal.com Founder Peter Thiel. ================================================================ SEVEN GREAT CONSERVATIVE BOOKS! Don't miss these outstanding conservative book selections, ON SALE NOW by arrangement between the Vanguard Bookstore and Amazon.com. 1. "Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle And Final Triumph Over Communism", by Peter Schweizer http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385504713/vanguardoftherev/ 2. "Let Freedom Ring", by Sean Hannity http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060514558/vanguardoftherev/ 3. 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For More Information: http://www.theVanguard.org/nelvictourhome/ VanguardPAC(a)theVanguard.org ================================================================ To subscribe to "Vanguard of the Revolution", send the message "Subscribe Vanguard", or the message "Unsubscribe Vanguard" to unsubscribe, to listadmin(a)theVanguard.org. Contact listowner(a)theVanguard.org if you have questions. ================================================================ http://www.theVanguard.org Vanguard(a)theVanguard.org Vanguard PAC P. O. Box 250038 Little Rock, AR 72225 The information contained herein may be disseminated for non- commercial purposes as long as attribution (including our Web address) is provided. ================================================================

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Re: Fake News for Big Brother
by David Howe 01 May '03

01 May '03

at Tuesday, April 29, 2003 3:16 PM, Trei, Peter <ptrei(a)rsasecurity.com> was seen to say: > 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'. I think there is a distinction between truth as an absolute, the twisted wording required to avoid libel in the uk, and deliberately lieing to people who believe you are a source of truth about the world they can't see. The UK has some pretty strong rules in this area - for instance, a newsreader can't be seen to promote (advertise) a product, as a viewer could confuse marketing (which is always a bit suspect) with "news" (which is supposed to be unbiassed and as accurate as the broadcaster can make it) and in libel/slander cases, the burden of proof is on the defendant - not fun at all. > 'Truth in media' is a sword that cuts both ways. Indeed - but (at least in a free press) there is supposed to be a distinction between "marketing" "news" and "propaganda". Of course, freedom of the presses has only ever been available to those who own presses....

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Re: Making Money in Digital Money
by zem 01 May '03

01 May '03

Anonymous writes: > Let me explain it so simply you can't miss it. This system does not > work, because by the time the content is in the hands of just a few > people, they will be bidding against each other to sell it on the net. > Such a state of competition will quickly drive the prices down to the > cost of reproduction, which is effectively zero. Therefore you can't > sell more than a dozen-odd copies of the software at a non-zero price. > > If most of the people buying this software are doing so with the > expectation of recouping their costs by re-selling, then no one will > buy after the first few, since they will not be able to make any money > selling at zero. But this means that even those first few buyers won't > be able to sell at non-zero, since these second-wave potential buyers > were their customers. You're assuming that resellers add zero value to the content. They can make a profit by providing some service over and above the content itself. Take file sharing networks as an example. Current networks are flooded with bogus, incomplete or poor quality files. A nym could build a reputation as a validating service - a critic, if you like. Perhaps something like this: Alice the music critic buys copies of new content at relatively high prices from the creator, or close sources. When Bob requests a copy of a particular file, Alice encrypts it to Bob's public key and signs the encrypted copy, selling him this 'reviewed' copy for reproduction cost + profit. Bob can verify he's received a good copy, but he can't redistribute Alice's reviewed version without revealing his secret key. (Yeah, Mallory can create a one-shot key pair with the intention of revealing it and redistributing Alice's reviewed file. Alice can reduce her losses by refusing to deal with unknown buyers, or by demanding pre-payment for 100 copies up front, or something like that.) -- mailto:zem@vigilant.tv F289 2BDB 1DA0 F4C4 DC87 EC36 B2E3 4E75 C853 FD93 http://vigilant.tv/ "..I'm invisible, I'm invisible, I'm invisible.."

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The Word Spy for 05/01/2003 -- ethnomathematics
by R. A. Hettinga 01 May '03

01 May '03

--- begin forwarded text

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Re: Quarantines may be justified
by Jim Choate 01 May '03

01 May '03

You know, I keep thinking you've said the stupidest thing ever. And then you say something else. On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Sunder wrote: > Then, by extension, I find that when people say "libertarians" in quotes > like you said, but not like I said, is no different than having them > assult me with their fists. > > In fact, I find such behavior as direct threats against my life, and > instilling terror, so that makes you a terrorist, and possibly an Arab > because in my experience, people who put libertarians in menacing quotes > like you do were mostly Arabs who hate our freedoms, and that's why they > bombed the World Trade Center, and therefore must be harboring WMD's -- > and they probably got a huge stash of oil we can grab too - I mean, are > torturing their subjects and are anti-freedom, and hate the American Way > of Life (Wave Flag Here!) > > > Should we really be able to make up our own definitions and turn things > which merely annoy us into crimes? Think about it a bit longer before > you reply again. -- ____________________________________________________________________ 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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Re: Mike Hawash
by Tyler Durden 01 May '03

01 May '03

Neil Johnson wrote... "An "source" claims he/she "thought" he saw someone "maybe" fitting hawash's description "maybe" talking with the other guys at the hotel in China." Do you know where in China the hotel was? I'm assuming it was out by Afghanistan, in which case Hawash looked like practically everybody there: Western Xinjiang province is very Muslim (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Uigurs), with not too many Chinese (well, no Han Chinese...there may be some Hui Moslems out that far west). Half of the guys there will look like the Hawash picture they're floating these days (yeah, the one where he's wearing a beard and looking real scary...). FYI...the largest Mosque in the world is actually located in that area (Urumqi, maybe? Tashkent? I can't remember...) In other words, that's exceedingly flimsy evidence. -TD >From: Neil Johnson <njohnsn(a)njohnsn.com> >To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com >Subject: Re: Mike Hawash >Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 06:21:50 -0500 > >I read the compliant. It is only 43 pages. > >Here's what I gathered. > >It was a quick read, and I fully expect and welcome comments, corrections, >and >opinions. > >Of course mixed between these claims is a bunch of stuff about the >activities >of the "Portland Six", but other than the few assertions below, there is no >direct evidence that Hawash committed any of the acts that the "Portland >Six" >did. > >Hawash - bought a parka and a backpack at REI. (ooooh, ominous). > >Hawash filed a quit claim transferring his house into his wife's name. > >(My dad, a consulting civil engineer, had the deed of our house put solely >in >my mother's name to protect against losing the house in a liability suit. >Hawash could have done it just because he was leaving the country and >didn't >want any issues in case of airplane accident, kidnapping, etc.) > >Hawash had his wife open a bank account in her name only and transferred >$5K >to it. > >($5K ?, Later they document that Hawash made around $320K in 2001, and >$180K >in 2002. Yeah, she could start a new life on that.) > >Hawash flew to China and returned to the US on exactly the same dates as >the >other guys. > >Hawash appears to have stayed in the same building as the other guys. >His and the other guy's lodging was in the same building, but different >hotels, and the hotel that Hawash had reservations to stay at doesn't have >a >record of him being there. > >(Okay, even this does look suspicious to me, but it's definitely seems a >little less than "beyond a reasonable doubt".) > >An "source" claims he/she "thought" he saw someone "maybe" fitting hawash's >description "maybe" talking with the other guys at the hotel in China. > >In searchs of the other guys houses, they found that one of the other guys >had >a business card with Hawash's phone number on it. Some of the other guys >had >Hawash's phone number also. > >One guy mowed Hawash's lawn. Hawash wrote a check for $105 to the guy that >mowed Hawash's lawn. > >The all attended the same Mosque in CA. > >"Neighbors" reported to the FBI that Hawash became withdrawn after the >September 11th attacks, changed his clothing style (From "Western" to >"Eastern"), grew a beard, and starting attending the mosque more regularly. > >(Gee, I saw a lot of press reports about an upsurge of people in the US >taking >their religious convictions more seriously and attending church more >regularly after the Sept 11th attacks, are they potential terrorists too >?). > >Hawash told others that he was going to China to pursue clients for his >software consulting practice. However, his home phone and cell-phone >records >show he made no phone calls to China in advance of his trip. > >(Hmmm, "negative evidence", that's a good one. Hellooooo, ever heard of >e-mail, snail-mail, or communication via intermediaries ?) > >Therefore, he MUST be guilty of conspiracy. > >Even the LE admits that they showed some pictures to one their "sources", >and >He/She didn't recognize Hawash's picture as being one of the "other guys". > >Be afraid. VERY afraid. > >-- >Neil Johnson >http://www.njohnsn.com >PGP key available on request. _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Re: Thanks for the living hell, and question about OpenSSL
by Patrick Chkoreff 01 May '03

01 May '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Tim May wrote: > Not meaning to sound too harsh, but you need to think deeply about what > cryptography is all about and why "trust me, I promise not to look" > systems are not desirable or interesting. I'm writing "(unblind (sign (blind X))) = (sign x)" on the board one hundred times. - -- Patrick http://fexl.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 iQA/AwUBPqm3I1A7g7bodUwLEQLBtQCgxyXbUvKDtgfIM1yPdpy1CuynegMAnjWd NDt1h4fmiu1OBreIZdrc8CnV =deYX -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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