December 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [Antisocial] Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theorist
by Major Variola (ret) 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

At 01:23 PM 12/19/04 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: >"..They have computers, they're tappin' phone lines, you know that ain't >allowed.." > >Zappa...Heads...Crimson? A profile is emerging here! Either that or you >recently broke into your dad's vinyl collection... Very funny. My walls o' vinyl are, BTW, licenses to KaZaa the content in more convenient forms. Here, this will amuse you. Only last week did I burn my first audio CD. The week before, my first data CD. Before that, it was hot backups and ZIP disks. Yes, we're 4 years into the 21st century. Dig. As far as "Dad's", well, how many five year olds know Waits, Krimso, and Einsturzende, but know nothing of Brittny? I recently recycled a computer fan guard into the AA site of a mock toy RPG, using styro cups as the grenade and a broken plastic gun as the handle. Compleat with balaclava on the young-un. Stick that in your chillum and process it. And have a nice solstice.

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Re: RAH's postings.
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

At 10:23 AM -0500 12/21/04, Somebody wrote: >What the hell does an article about gypsy >mechanics have to do with cypherpunks? I plead anarchic markets, m'lord. Emerging phenomena, and all that, in spite all regulation to the contrary. Which was why I sent the traffic thing as well. No laws (or regulation) is better rules, in many interesting cases. > It may >be interesting to you, but it's off-topic, You may say that, I couldn't possibly comment. > and >voluminous. That's what your 'd' key is for. If that's not good enough, perhaps an addition to your kill-file is in order. Or you need assistance in creating a filter for your mailer? 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'

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[i2p] weekly status notes [dec 21] (fwd from jrandom@i2p.net)
by Eugen Leitl 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

----- Forwarded message from jrandom <jrandom(a)i2p.net> -----

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Border Patrol hails new ID system
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

<http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041220-103705-…> The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com Border Patrol hails new ID system By Jerry Seper THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published December 21, 2004 Border Patrol agents assigned to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) identified and arrested 23,502 persons with criminal records nationwide through a new biometric integrated fingerprint system during a three-month period beginning in September, CBP officials said yesterday. Most of those arrested were foreign nationals. "This 21st-century biometric identification technology is a critical law-enforcement tool for our CBP Border Patrol agents," said CBP Commissioner Robert C. Bonner. "It allows CBP Border Patrol agents to quickly identify criminals by working faster, smarter and employing technology to better secure the nation." Mr. Bonner has described the new system as "absolutely critical" to CBP's priority mission of keeping terrorists and terrorist weapons out of the country, adding that it gives the agents the ability to identify those with criminal backgrounds "we could never have identified before." The program, known as the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), is a biometric identification technology enabling Border Patrol agents to search CBP's Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) and the FBI's criminal fingerprint database simultaneously, CBP spokesman Mario Villarreal said. It allows Border Patrol agents to rapidly identify people with outstanding warrants and criminal histories by electronically comparing a live-scanned 10-fingerprint entry against a comprehensive national database of previously captured fingerprints, he said. The IAFIS/IDENT system went on line this year at all 148 Border Patrol station throughout the country. It began as a pilot project in San Diego, where it was employed at the Border Patrol's Brown Field, Calif., station, and at the Calexico, Calif., port of entry. During the three-month period this year, the agents identified and detained 84 homicide suspects, 37 kidnapping suspects, 151 sexual assault suspects, 212 robbery suspects, 1,238 suspects for assaults of other types, and 2,630 suspects implicated in dangerous narcotics-related charges. CBP is the unified border agency within the Department of Homeland Security charged with the management, control and protection of the nation's borders at and between the ports of entry. CBP is charged with keeping terrorists and terrorist weapons out of the country while enforcing hundreds of U.S. laws. -- ----------------- 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'

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Roads Gone Wild: No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents.
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic_pr.html> Wired 12.12: Roads Gone Wild No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer. By Tom McNichol Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things." Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer - equal parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologist. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they'll be safer. Monderman and I are tooling around the rural two-lane roads of northern Holland, where he works as a road designer. He wants to show me a favorite intersection he designed. It's a busy junction that doesn't contain a single traffic signal, road sign, or directional marker, an approach that turns eight decades of traditional traffic thinking on its head. Wearing a striped tie and crisp blue blazer with shiny gold buttons, Monderman looks like the sort of stout, reliable fellow you'd see on a package of pipe tobacco. He's worked as a civil engineer and traffic specialist for more than 30 years and, for a time, ran his own driving school. Droll and reserved, he's easy to underestimate - but his ideas on road design, safety, and city planning are being adopted from Scandinavia to the Sunshine State. Riding in his green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior - traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings - and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous - and that's the point. Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at last. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road." It's no surprise that the Dutch, a people renowned for social experimentation in practically every facet of life, have embraced new ideas in traffic management. But variations of Monderman's less-is-more approach to traffic engineering are spreading around the globe, showing up in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US. In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a year from three to zero. In England, towns in Suffolk and Wiltshire have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slow traffic - experts call it "psychological traffic calming." A dozen other towns in the UK are looking to do the same. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents. In the US, traffic engineers are beginning to rethink the dictum that the car is king and pedestrians are well advised to get the hell off the road. In West Palm Beach, Florida, planners have redesigned several major streets, removing traffic signals and turn lanes, narrowing the roadbed, and bringing people and cars into much closer contact. The result: slower traffic, fewer accidents, shorter trip times. "I think the future of transportation in our cities is slowing down the roads," says Ian Lockwood, the transportation manager for West Palm Beach during the project and now a transportation and design consultant. "When you try to speed things up, the system tends to fail, and then you're stuck with a design that moves traffic inefficiently and is hostile to pedestrians and human exchange." The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a recognition that the way you build a road affects far more than the movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it, whether pedestrians feel safe to walk alongside it, what kinds of businesses and housing spring up along it. "A wide road with a lot of signs is telling a story," Monderman says. "It's saying, go ahead, don't worry, go as fast as you want, there's no need to pay attention to your surroundings. And that's a very dangerous message." We drive on to another project Monderman designed, this one in the nearby village of Oosterwolde. What was once a conventional road junction with traffic lights has been turned into something resembling a public square that mixes cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. About 5,000 cars pass through the square each day, with no serious accidents since the redesign in 1999. "To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you." With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions. From the beginning, a central premise guiding American road design was that driving and walking were utterly incompatible modes of transport, and that the two should be segregated as much as possible. The planned suburban community of Radburn, New Jersey, founded in 1929 as "a town for the motor age," took the segregation principle to its logical extreme. Radburn's key design element was the strict separation of vehicles and people; cars were afforded their own generously proportioned network, while pedestrians were tucked safely away in residential "super blocks," which often terminated in quiet cul de sacs. Parents could let kids walk to the local school without fearing that they might be mowed down in the street. Radburn quickly became a template for other communities in the US and Britain, and many of its underlying assumptions were written directly into traffic codes. The psychology of driver behavior was largely unknown. Traffic engineers viewed vehicle movement the same way a hydraulics engineer approaches water moving through a pipe - to increase the flow, all you have to do is make the pipe fatter. Roads became wider and more "forgiving" - roadside trees were cut down and other landscape elements removed in an effort to decrease fatalities. Road signs, rather than road architecture, became the chief way to enforce behavior. Pedestrians, meanwhile, were kept out of the traffic network entirely or limited to defined crossing points. The strict segregation of cars and people turned out to have unintended consequences on towns and cities. Wide roads sliced through residential areas, dividing neighborhoods, discouraging pedestrian activity, and destroying the human scale of the urban environment. The old ways of traffic engineering - build it bigger, wider, faster - aren't going to disappear overnight. But one look at West Palm Beach suggests an evolution is under way. When the city of 82,000 went ahead with its plan to convert several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed so much that people felt it was safe to walk there. The increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings. Property values along Clematis Street, one of the town's main drags, have more than doubled since it was reconfigured. "In West Palm, people were just fed up with the way things were, and sometimes, that's what it takes," says Lockwood, the town's former transportation manager. "What we really need is a complete paradigm shift in traffic engineering and city planning to break away from the conventional ideas that have got us in this mess. There's still this notion that we should build big roads everywhere because the car represents personal freedom. Well, that's bullshit. The truth is that most people are prisoners of their cars." Today some of the most car-oriented areas in the US are rethinking their approaches to traffic, mainly because they have little choice. "The old way doesn't work anymore," says Gary Toth, director of project planning and development for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. The 2004 Urban Mobility Report, published by the respected Texas Transportation Institute, shows that traffic congestion is growing across the nation in towns and cities of all sizes. The study's conclusion: It's only going to get worse. Instead of widening congested highways, New Jersey's DOT is urging neighboring or contiguous towns to connect their secondary streets and add smaller centers of development, creating a series of linked minivillages with narrow roads, rather than wide, car-choked highways strewn with malls. "The cities that continue on their conventional path with traffic and land use will harm themselves, because people with a choice will leave," says Lockwood. "They'll go to places where the quality of life is better, where there's more human exchange, where the city isn't just designed for cars. The economy is going to follow the creative class, and they want to live in areas that have a sense of place. That's why these new ideas have to catch on. The folly of traditional traffic engineering is all around us." Back in Holland, Monderman is fighting his own battle against the folly of traditional traffic engineering, one sign at a time. "Every road tells a story," Monderman says. "It's just that so many of our roads tell the story poorly, or tell the wrong story." As the new approach to traffic begins to take hold in the US, the road ahead is unmarked and ambiguous. Hans Monderman couldn't be happier. How to Build a Better Intersection: Chaos = Cooperation 1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals - dictates traffic flow. 2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the intersection is. 3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the pedestrian areas. 4. Do it in the road: Cafis extend to the edge of the street, further emphasizing the idea of shared space. 5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather than commonly ignored signs. 6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture and color. -- ----------------- 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'

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E-protection necessary for nation's security: Kalam
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

<http://www.newkerala.com/news-daily/news/features.php?action=fullnews&id=49… p> E-protection necessary for nation's security: Kalam [Business India]: Chennai, Dec 21 : India was moving into an "era of e-business, e-marketing, e-commerce and e-banking" and encryption technology to protect network communication was the only way to ensure the nation's security, said President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. The president was addressing scientists here Monday evening at the 5th International Conference on Cryptology in India via videoconferencing. Reminding his audience that Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujam's work was being applied in communication networks today, Kalam said: "Cryptography is a wealth generator and wealth protector." Noting that India was the only country in the world with a huge linguistic diversity and more than 3,000 languages, he asked: "Can we make use of this diversity to our advantage by using different languages as a cryptographic tool?" Addressing several hundred delegates from all over the world, who had gathered here for the three day conference that began Monday, Kalam said: "Nations that are capable of generating and managing information in a secure way will become world leaders and economic superpowers" He called for state-of-the-art technology at competitive costs in India, to secure Indian e-systems. Inaugurating the conference, hosted by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Society for Electronic Transactions (SETS), principal scientific advisor to the central government R. Chidambaram said the science of encryption was the "only know-how" technologists had to protect e-systems. Information flows over open networks. And to secure this information is "of social, political, commercial and strategic" importance, Chidambaram said. He asked Indian scientists for research inputs into standardisation processes, called 'advanced encryption standard' it could develop quickly in India. Experts from various countries, including France, South Korea, Australia, Belgium and Germany are attending the meet. During the conference, 147 scientific papers on the art and science of encryption will be presented. Cryptology is the science of hiding information through codes. Mathematical systems provide some of the best encryptions the world has so far generated. It is also the art of breaking down codes and getting at secrets. --Indo-Asian News Service -- ----------------- 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'

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'Video Miners' Use Hidden Cameras in Stores
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110357897849105150,00.html> The Wall Street Journal December 21, 2004 MARKETING 'Video Miners' Use Hidden Cameras in Stores 'Video Miners' Use Cameras Hidden in Stores to Analyze Who Shops, What They Like By JOSEPH PEREIRA Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL December 21, 2004; Page B1 BRAINTREE, Mass. -- Stepping into a Gap store at the South Shore Shopping Plaza on a recent evening, Laura Munro became a research statistic. Twelve feet above her, a device resembling a smoke detector, mounted on the ceiling and equipped with a hidden camera, took a picture of her head and shoulders. The image was fed to a computer and shipped to a database in Chicago, where ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a consumer research firm, keeps count of shoppers nationwide using 40,000 cameras placed in stores and malls. ShopperTrak, whose profile has risen this holiday season as appetite grows for more real-time shopping data, is a leader in "video mining" -- an emerging field in marketing research enabled by technology that can analyze video images without relying on human eyes. ShopperTrak says it doesn't take pictures of faces. The company worries that shoppers would perceive that as an invasion of privacy. But nearly all of its videotaping is done without the knowledge of the people being taped. "I didn't even know there was a camera up there," says Ms. Munro, a public-transit manager who popped into the mall on her way home from work to find a gift for her 12-year-old daughter. Using proprietary software to gauge the size of the images of people, a ShopperTrak computer determined that Ms. Munro was an adult, not a child, and thus a bona fide shopper. Weeding out youngsters is critical in accurately calculating one of the valuable bits of data ShopperTrak sells -- the percentage of shoppers that buys and the percentage that only browses. It arrives at this data, including the so-called conversion rate, by comparing the number of people taped entering the store with the number of transactions. Ms. Munro's visit was tallied up twice: once as a visitor to the Gap and once in a national count of shoppers. Gap Inc., of San Francisco, pays ShopperTrak for the tally of Gap shoppers. ShopperTrak sells the broader data -- gleaned from 130 retail clients and 380 malls -- to economists, bankers and retailers. ShopperTrak takes into account how much shoppers spend, data that it gets from credit-card companies and banks, and extrapolates outward to the entire retail landscape. "We can get sales and traffic figures that are identical to the government's, two months before they can issue their report," says Bill Martin, ShopperTrak's founder and president. Of the millions of shoppers videotaped daily in the U.S., many are aware that security cameras are watching to detect shoplifting. In some cases, stores post signs to disclose such monitoring. But there is far less awareness by consumers that they are being filmed for market research. ShopperTrak discloses its clients -- a list that includes Gap and its Banana Republic unit; Limited Brands Inc., of Columbus, Ohio, and its Victoria's Secret chain; PaylessShoe Source Inc., of Topeka, Kan; American Eagle Outfitters Inc., of Warrendale, Pa.; and Children's Place Retail StoresInc., of Secaucus, N.J. Several other research companies that videotape shoppers say they sign agreements with clients in which they pledge not to disclose their names. They say their clients want the taping to be secret -- and worry shoppers would feel alienated or complain of privacy invasion if they knew. Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of Caspian, a Cambridge, Mass., consumer-advocacy group, says consumers have "no idea such things as video tracking are going on" and should be informed. When she tells them about such activities, she says the response she often hears is, "Isn't this illegal, like stalking? Shouldn't there be a law against it?" There aren't any state laws forbidding retailers from videotaping shoppers for research -- although in New Jersey last week, Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino was fined $80,000 for videotaping the breasts and legs of female employees and customers with cameras intended for security. Some research companies' cameras, with lenses as small as a quarter, can provide data on everything from the density of shopping traffic in an aisle to the reactions of a shopper gazing at the latest plasma TV set. The cash register is a popular spot for cameras, too. But cameras can be found in banks, fast-food outlets and hotel lobbies (but not guest rooms). Video miners say their research cameras are less invasive than security cameras, because their subjects aren't scrutinized as closely as security suspects. Images, they say, are destroyed when the research is done. Robert Bulmash, founder of the Private Citizen Inc., of Naperville, Ill., which advocates for privacy rights, says that being in a retailer's store doesn't give a retailer "the right to treat me like a guinea pig." He says he wonders about assurances that images are destroyed, since there isn't any way to verify such claims. The pictures "could be saved somewhere in that vast digital universe and some day come back to haunt us," he says. Already, video images can be subpoenaed from retailers for law-enforcement purposes. Technology capable of matching a photo with an individual's identity, say from credit-card transactions, "has certainly arrived," says Rajeev Sharma, a Penn State University computer science professor who has launched a company that is creating shopper-monitoring systems. It isn't certain whether retailers are availing themselves of the know-how. Credit card companies currently aren't sharing individuals' financial information with retailers, he adds, but retailers have their own customer databases as the result of loyalty cards, store credit cards and other in-house programs. Theoretically, they could link a transaction at a cash register with the face of a shopper appearing on the videotape. Dr. Sharma's start-up, Advanced Interfaces Inc., of State College, Pa., is expected this week to launch a Web site, videomining.com, highlighting the company's patented "computer vision" technologies. In a pilot project conducted last year in the Philadelphia area, Advanced Interfaces set up nine cameras in each of two McDonald's Corp. restaurants to find out which consumer types would find a new salad item most appealing. The research was done without consumers' knowledge, says Dr. Sharma, who is Advanced Interfaces' chief executive. Seven of the cameras were already in place for security purposes and needed only to be reconfigured using Advanced's sensors. Two additional cameras were positioned in the ceiling directly over cash registers. By measuring the shapes of people's faces, the sensors were able to provide a breakdown of the fast-food customers by race, gender and age group, he says. The videos also revealed the length of time customers spent waiting in line or looking at the menu before ordering. Mr. Sharma declined to discuss the findings. All of the video was subsequently destroyed, he says. "Only the computers and no humans saw the pictures of the customers," Mr. Sharma says. Advanced is conducting similar consumer-behavior analysis this holiday season for three other retailers that Mr. Sharma declined to identify. Video mining is being spurred by digital video cameras. Unlike their analog counterparts, digital video cameras can be programmed so that the images can be quickly read by computers -- taking only hours to complete tasks that might have taken weeks for humans to do. In a recent assignment that Kahn Research Group, of Huntersville, N.C., completed for American Express Co., computers took only a couple of days to sift through 64 hours of tape. Kahn researchers hid four cameras near the checkout counter at a couple of supermarkets in Southern California to study whether American Express gift cards should be displayed off in a spot by themselves, or lumped with competing brands near the cash registers. Researchers were interested in customers' facial expressions and eye movements as they spotted the gift cards, and whether they walked to a display to pick up a card. Kahn cameras, each the size of a golf ball, were hidden behind the displays. The devices were programmed to detect fast-eye movement, smiles and frowns, says Greg Kahn, the company's CEO. The research, which involved filming 2,000 shoppers, was "really not invasive," Mr. Kahn says. "Nobody knew they were being recorded and our work didn't interfere with the store environment. Had we tried to interview people, the process would have taken much longer." And had people known they were being taped, he says, "I know many of the shoppers would have stuck their hands in front of the camera lens and refused to be recorded." A spokeswoman for American Express described the project as a "pilot program ... that's not for public consumption" and declined to comment further. It isn't clear whether the American public will be as tolerant of secret market research using videotape as they are of security cameras. There are 29 million cameras videotaping people in airports, government buildings, offices, schools, stores and elsewhere, according to one widely cited estimate in the security industry. -- ----------------- 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'

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A Bronx Curbside Whisper: 'Hey, Need a Tuneup?'
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

<http://nytimes.com/2004/12/19/nyregion/19bronx.html?pagewanted=print&positi…> The New York Times December 19, 2004 A Bronx Curbside Whisper: 'Hey, Need a Tuneup?' BY ANDREA ELLIOTT he men saunter up and down a littered block of Third Avenue in the Bronx, casting sidelong glances at passing cars. When the cars slow down, the men mouth silent promises of a cheap fix. When the drivers pull over, the men scan for cops before sliding up to the curb. It is a singular hustle. There are no drugs or sex. Instead, the hoods of the cars fly open and the men get to work, pulling out greasy tools to perform every mechanical remedy from oil changes to hair-raising tuneups and axle replacements, right on the street. In the vast underground of New York's economy, street mechanics hold a peculiar if utilitarian place. For people who balk at a $30 oil change, there is Country, a 41-year-old Virginia native who charges a third of that, jacking up his clients' cars as rush-hour traffic creeps by. In the expert hands of Chino and Heavy, a $200 brake job costs half as much, parts included. On busy days, cars line Third Avenue like sick patients, propped up by metal jacks, worn-out tires flung to the side. The mechanics disappear underneath, their boots peeking out, their tools splayed on asphalt outside the neon blink of auto parts shops. Sometimes ingenious, sometimes deceptive, they form a blue-collar rung in the city's freelance work ladder. They are mobile, carrying their tools in wheeled suitcases, on call around the clock by cellphone or pager. They draw clients from as far as Connecticut and Rhode Island. Some even wear uniforms, and the best ones travel on distant missions, reviving broken-down cars on roadsides from Boston to Atlantic City. "I'm like an ambulance," said Luis Mares, 40, who installs rebuilt alternators for as little as $85. "Where there's trouble, I go." The flourishing, although illegal, street business blends comical improvisation with corporate savvy. But as it does in any profession, the talent ranges. Some mechanics leave customers careering away brakeless. Many make a mess, with discarded oil and strewn parts. And hovering over them all is the constant threat of the police, who issue tickets to the men tirelessly, leading to hundreds of dollars in fines and repeated stays in jail. Yet week after week, the mechanics stubbornly return to the same street to eke out a living on their own terms. "This is New York," said Country, who would give only his street name and who has been issued, he said, 42 summonses in the last two years. "If you're not on your feet, you're on your butt." Street mechanics ply their trade all over the city. They can be found near Shea Stadium in Queens and around Pacific Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. But perhaps nowhere are they more brazenly visible than on Third Avenue from East 161st to 163rd Streets, in the Melrose Commons section of the South Bronx. On any given day, up to 15 mechanics work the street, competing for clients. Repairs begin after noon (the late hours are among the perks of the job) and pick up around 5 p.m., when customers leave their jobs and stop by for a new timing belt change or a brake adjustment. Paydays are the peak. Saturdays are prime: the best mechanics can pocket $400 in one day, saving clients the steeper prices charged by Pep Boys or Jiffy Lube. "I can't afford to go to the shop," said Howard Dawson, 66, a retired Amtrak repairman who regularly takes his '93 Cadillac Fleetwood to the street. "One hand's got to wash the other." The Third Avenue mechanics, like most workers, operate in a hierarchy. At the top are the owners of the auto parts stores, who moved to the street starting in the early 1970's. The mechanics came uninvited around the same time, like weeds in a garden. They formed a symbiotic relationship with the stores' employees. The stores sell parts to customers who often need a mechanic to install them and the mechanics will send their clients to the stores. "You help me and I'll help you," explained Humberto Ortiz, 56, a salesman at Ocampo Auto Electric on Third Avenue. At the bottom of the ladder are the "helpers" - mechanics in training who earn much of their pay by luring clients. They, too, have street names that in the mores of the South Bronx are assigned more than chosen. There is Little Mexico, Dominica and Mouse. Not by coincidence, they share several traits: they are small in build, move quickly and seem to have an outsized view of their own mechanical abilities. "Every time I see them doing something heavy, they look stuck in it," said Luis Martinez, who goes by Chino and is among the street's veterans. Tales abound of jobs the helpers started and botched, only to be saved by the street's experts. But unlike other would-be street mechanics, whose bad reputations result in swift excommunication, these helpers have clung to their place on the street. They tend to live off small jobs, not always involving cars. "I walk this dog for $2," said Little Mexico, stabbing two fingers in the air as a tiger-colored pit bull named Puppy yanked him away. Some mechanics admit they work to support a drug habit. Others say they are "clean" and look upon their entrepreneurship as a career choice. Two Third Avenue mechanics - Pernell Dingle and Elliot Rodriguez - claim they graduated "Mechanic of the Year" from Alfred E. Smith High School, two decades ago. (An official at the school, Jeff Block, confirmed that both men got mostly A's. "Dingle owes us $8," he added, for an automotive encyclopedia he never returned.) Chino, who has dozens of regular clients, takes his job especially seriously, arriving promptly at noon with a yellow plastic tool case. He wears one of his six navy blue uniforms, washed and pressed by his wife. "Who would you hire: a guy who looked like a bum or me?" he says. One recent weekday, Mr. Martinez is swiftly dismantling the innards of a shiny black Lincoln Town Car to change the alternator. His hands maneuver expertly around the radiator tank, the power steering wheel tank, several hoses and the engine belt. (He learned the trade as a boy, taking apart engines in his backyard in the Soundview section of the Bronx.) Mr. Martinez's client watches closely and then instructs his gum-chewing girlfriend, who is seated behind the faux-fur covered wheel, to rev the engine. The engine roars. A Betty Boop air freshener flutters from the rearview mirror. The job is almost done. "I promised him more power," said Mr. Martinez, 40, who has worked on the street for a decade. "Now we'll check." The two men jump into the car and head off. Not only do clients get test drives, some get credit. "I've got about $200 in the street right now," Mr. Martinez said. He keeps a stack of his clients' business cards. One is a plumber, another a lawyer. Then there is the candy wholesaler whose fuel pump went bad on a trip to Boston. He paid Mr. Martinez $400 to fix it. Recruiters from auto repair shops visit the street from time to time, looking for potential hires, but Mr. Martinez is quick to rebuff them. He makes enough on his own, he says - about $40,000 a year. "You walk into my house right now, you won't want to leave," said Mr. Martinez, who lives in a housing project a few blocks away. "Big-screen TV. Surround-sound system." He sends his stepdaughter to a Catholic school and vacations in Puerto Rico twice a year. The only nuisance, he concedes, are the tickets and occasional trips to jail. Mr. Martinez has been locked up twice, for two days each time. Some mechanics pay their tickets as dutifully as other people pay taxes. Mr. Dingle, on the other hand, has not paid one of his more than 50 tickets and has been jailed 17 times. "I tell them to put me in my regular cell," said Mr. Dingle, 44, as he stood on the street one early evening. "The cops know me by name." A few minutes later, a Chevy Impala with tinted windows slowly glided by. "See that little black car?" said Country. "That's the captain. He's out scouting." Street mechanics violate a number of city codes seemingly written with them in mind: on the street it is illegal to repair vehicles, remove vehicle parts or discard oil. Each violation can carry a fine of $100. But fines were rare, the mechanics said, until 2000, when the 42nd Precinct made "quality of life" issues a sudden priority and the police began cracking down on the trade. It was a sign of new times: the South Bronx was transforming, block by block, amid sweeping plans for urban renewal. These days, the police know the mechanics well. They know, for instance, that Frankie Rosado flashes his worn brown tool belt at passing cars the way a prostitute might lift her skirt. "If I'm looking at a car, I'm guilty," said Mr. Rosado, 44. One recent weekday, the security guards at the Bronx Criminal Courthouse on East 161st Street gave Mr. Rosado a familiar nod as he emptied his pockets: fuses, bulbs and screws. He navigated the building like he was walking through his own kitchen. He turned without looking, smiled at a guard who winked back, and approached a man sitting before a computer. "When's my next court date?" he asked. With so many tickets, he had lost track. His latest offense, written up on a pink summons dated Sept. 29, was for "dismantling." The man behind the desk lifted a plump arm, "Monique" tattooed across it in curly letters, and clicked on a mouse. "Somebody's always messing with you somewhere," said the man as he searched the Rosados on the screen. "Frankie C.?" "That's my son," Mr. Rosado said. Seconds later, the dates were found and Mr. Rosado took off in search of more work. The street mechanic world is organic to South Bronx life, but like other underground trades, it is increasingly at odds with the borough's evolving self-image. The Melrose Commons area is awash in new development: stately town houses, a gleaming BP gas station, and a $250 million criminal courthouse close to completion. Even the three-block stretch where the mechanics work is destined to become part of a new $30 million campus for Boricua College. The mechanics shrug it all off, doubtful that new buildings will extinguish the need for bargain car repairs. Some of their clients, they laugh, are off-duty police officers. One of them, Edward Sanchez, dropped by recently to have the alternator changed on his 1993 Nissan Maxima. "For me, it's better if I see somebody working on the street than making problems, stealing in stores," said Mr. Sanchez, 29, who flashed his badge to prove he works as an auxiliary police officer. "Maybe it's not legal, but I give them credit. They're trying to survive." -- ----------------- 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'

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Re: Israeli Airport Security Questioning Re: CRYPTO-GRAM, December 15, 2004
by John Kelsey 21 Dec '04

21 Dec '04

>The difference here is that Bad_Guy is visiting the >country for the first time. Now, there are fewer >questions to ask. But that's a common enough situation that the questioners are going to be ready for it. And I bet a lot of the point of their questioning is just to see if they detect signs of stress where they expect to. If you are a smart person who does something like this 20 times a day, you'll soon get a really good feel for when something odd is going on. Also, any kind of in-depth questioning is likely to uncover a lot of fraudulent claims. If I say I'm a chemical engineer, it's not going to take much depth of knowledge for the questioner to find out I don't know things any chemical engineer would know, for example. (It wouldn't be hard to come up with some computerized system for pulling up lists of questions like this. Like, someone says he's Catholic, and you ask him who was born without sin as a direct result of the immaculate conception, or ask him to say a Hail Mary.) So this might force you to tell more of the truth, which makes it easier to profile you. And this is all physical / procedural security. You're not building an unclimbable wall, you're building lots of challenging speedbumps. No doubt a real intelligence agent would be good at getting through this kind of screening, but that doesn't mean most of the people who want to blow up planes would be any good at it! >Sarad. --John

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Rice University Computer Scientists Find a Flaw in Google's New Desktop Search Program
by R.A. Hettinga 20 Dec '04

20 Dec '04

<http://nytimes.com/2004/12/20/technology/20flaw.html?pagewanted=print&posit…> The New York Times December 20, 2004 Rice University Computer Scientists Find a Flaw in Google's New Desktop Search Program By JOHN MARKOFF AN FRANCISCO, Dec. 19 - A Rice University computer scientist and two of his students have discovered a potentially serious security flaw in the desktop search tool for personal computers that was recently distributed by Google. The glitch, which could permit an attacker to secretly search the contents of a personal computer via the Internet, is what computer scientists call a composition flaw - a security weakness that emerges when separate components interact. "When you put them together, out jumps a security flaw," said Dan Wallach, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice in Houston, who, with two graduate students, Seth Fogarty and Seth Nielson, discovered the flaw last month. "These are subtle problems, and it takes a lot of experience to ferret out this kind of flaw," Professor Wallach said. Google introduced a test version of the desktop search tool on Oct. 14, and it can be downloaded at no cost. The program indexes material on a user's local hard disk and then blends Web search results with local user information like electronic mail, text documents and other files. The flaw would permit a search to reveal only small portions of the files. The way the software tool is designed, a user's queries, but no locally stored information, is distributed via the Internet. But by reading user queries sent to its search service, Google is able to place its AdWords text advertisements next to the search results displayed in a user's browser window. In a statement over the weekend, the company said that it had been notified of the flaw by the computer researchers in late November and had begun distributing a new version of the desktop search engine that repairs the potential security hole. Google's introduction of a desktop search tool has touched off a competition with its closest Web search service competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo. Microsoft made a test version of its desktop search tool available last Monday as part of its MSN toolbar suite, and Yahoo has said that it will begin testing a similar search tool in January. The Rice University researchers said that they had not yet examined Microsoft's desktop search program, but noted that the service did not appear to integrate Web and local search results in the same manner as the Google tool. The researchers said that the Google security weakness lay in the way that Google Desktop was designed to intercept outgoing network connections from the user's computer. The program looks for traffic that appears to be going to Google.com and then inserts results from a user's hard disk for a particular search. They found that it was possible to trick the Google desktop search program into inserting those results into other Web pages where an attacker could read them. An attack would require a user to visit the attacker's Web site first, and any type of Web browser could make a user vulnerable. Google said there was no evidence that any such attacks had occurred. The Rice group was able to create a Java program that makes network connections back to the computer from where it was downloaded and then make it appear as if it were asking for a search at Google.com. That was enough to fool the Google desktop software into providing the user's search information. The program was able to do anything with the results, including transmitting them back to the attacking site. "This began as a student project to study how Google Desktop worked and to see if there were any security flaws," said Professor Wallach. "We started by wondering how Google did the local search integration. Once we figured out how it worked, it wasn't too much extra work to break it." The researchers said that Google had responded quickly to their alert last month and had begun releasing a corrected version of the program on Dec. 10. The Google desktop program includes an update feature that permits the company to automatically install new versions of the program on users' computers without user intervention or knowledge. The Rice researchers said that it was possible for users to tell if their version of the Google program had been patched by examining the "about" page from the Google Desktop icon in the browser task bar. Version numbers above 121,004 indicate a newer edition of the program. -- ----------------- 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'

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