March 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

Earthlink to Test Caller ID for E-Mail
by R. A. Hettinga 08 Mar '04

08 Mar '04

The "whitelist for my friends" part of "a whitelist for my friends, all others pay cash" seems to be underway... If we really do get cryptographic signatures on email in a way that works, expect 80% of all spam to be blown away as a matter of course. Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/0,aid,115094,00.asp> PCWorld.com Earthlink to Test Caller ID for E-Mail New systems could fight spam and Internet scams, company says. Paul Roberts, IDG News Service Friday, March 05, 2004 ISP Earthlink will soon begin testing new e-mail security technology, including Microsoft's recently released Caller ID technology, a company executive says. AdvertisementEarthlink will be experimenting "very soon," with "sender authentication" technology including Caller ID and a similar plan called Sender Policy Framework (SPF). The Atlanta-based ISP will be evaluating other e-mail security proposals as well, but is not backing any specific technology, says Robert Sanders, chief architect at Earthlink. Plans to secure e-mail by verifying the source of e-mail messages have garnered much attention in recent months, as the volume of spam has swelled and the number of Internet scams has increased. Spammers and Internet-based criminals often fake, or "spoof," the origin of e-mail messages to trick recipients into opening them and trusting their content. Sender authentication technologies attempt to stop spoofing by matching the source of e-mail messages with a specific user or an approved e-mail server for the Internet domain that the message purports to come from. Different Strategies So far, Earthlink has stayed out of the sender authentication fray while Web-based e-mail services, including Yahoo and Hotmail, and major ISP America Online, have all backed slightly different sender authentication proposals. Yahoo is promoting an internally developed technology called DomainKeys, that uses public key cryptography to "sign" e-mail messages. AOL said in January that it is testing SPF for outgoing mail, publishing the IP (Internet protocol) addresses of its e-mail servers in an SPF record in the DNS (Domain Name System). Finally, Microsoft-owned Hotmail is publishing the addresses of its e-mail servers using that company's recently announced Caller ID standard. Earthlink believes that sender authentication is necessary, and is prepared to support multiple sender authentication standards if necessary. However, the company hopes that one clear winner emerges from the field of competing proposals, Sanders says. "I don't think it's unlikely that we'll see two or three coexisting proposals go into production. We had hopes that they would be able to merge, but I think at this point each standard adds a different function, and we're unlikely to see a merger," he says. Coming Soon? For now, Caller ID and SPF will probably make it into production first, because neither require companies to deploy new software to participate in the sender authentication system, he says. Earthlink is also interested in proposals like Yahoo's DomainKeys, which allows e-mail authors to cryptographically sign messages, enabling recipients to verify both the content of a message and its author. However, DomainKeys is more complicated to deploy than either Caller ID or SPF and requires software changes that will slow implementation, he says. Earthlink is not backing any proposal but is interested in looking at the results of its trial deployments, and those of other organizations. "We have to get real world data from people who have deployed SPF or Caller ID," he says. The company is also a member of the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance, an industry group that includes Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Comcast, and British Telecommunications, and continues to participate in meetings and initiatives through that organization, he says. Microsoft's backing of Caller ID and its plans to use that technology for Hotmail tips the scales in favor of that technology, he says. "One factor that determines what you, as an e-mail sender, deploy is the important question of 'Who am I sending mail to?' What the larger [e-mail] receivers deploy is what you're going to support," he says. -- ----------------- 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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Chameleon Card Changes Stripes
by R. A. Hettinga 07 Mar '04

07 Mar '04

<http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,62545,00.html> Wired News Chameleon Card Changes Stripes By Mark Baard? Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62545,00.html 02:00 AM Mar. 05, 2004 PT Your next wallet may be 8 mm thick and contain the only card you'll ever need. Chameleon Network, in Concord, Massachusetts, plans to replace the stacks of credit, bank and customer-loyalty cards burdening modern consumers with a single, rewritable Chameleon Card, which works just like an ordinary card with a magnetic strip. The Chameleon Card's black strip covers a programmable transducer that mimics the information on the magnetic strips of the cards it is replacing. A new handheld device from Chameleon, the Pocket Vault, programs the Chameleon Card to take the place of any credit card the consumer chooses for a transaction. Shoppers will be able to swipe their Chameleon Cards through the same magnetic readers used in stores and banks today. And instead of reading bar codes off the back of customer-loyalty cards, retail bar-code readers will scan the bar code displayed on the Pocket Vault itself. The Pocket Vault has a slot for the Chameleon Card, but has no buttons or stylus. The device, which will be about half the size of an iPaq pocket PC, will be on sale in stores such as Best Buy and Circuit City as early as January 2005, according to Chameleon CEO Todd Burger. First-time users of the Pocket Vault will read their old credit cards with the device, which stores their information internally and backs it up to an online or local database in case the Pocket Vault is lost or stolen. Each credit card stored on the Pocket Vault is then represented by an icon on the device's touch-screen display. The Pocket Vault also prompts its owners to place their fingerprints on the device's reader pad to create a biometric profile. To use the Chameleon Card for a credit card transaction, a shopper taps the logo on the Pocket Vault's display representing the credit card account he wants to use. Seconds later, the Pocket Vault spits out the shopper's Chameleon Card, with the selected credit card account number, expiration date and logo imprinted on its flexible display, and its transducer reconfigured to work in the store's or bank's magnetic card reader. The Pocket Vault, which Burger expects to sell for less than $200, will also replace ExxonMobil's Speedpass and similar radio-frequency identification applications with its own, built-in RFID chips. But the Pocket Vault promises to do more than prevent slipped discs caused by overstuffed wallets. Its security features should also help safeguard shoppers from the devastation of credit card fraud and identity theft, said Burger. The Pocket Vault will only power up when it detects its owner's fingerprint. And unlike an ordinary credit card, the information stored on a Chameleon Card becomes unreadable (and the transducer inoperable) within 10 minutes. The Pocket Vault also switches off shortly after ejecting a Chameleon Card. That's plenty of time for a shopper to swipe his Chameleon Card through a magnetic reader at the grocery store, but hardly enough for a thief to do much damage to the shopper's credit. "Your worst possible exposure," said Burger, "is that a thief may be able to get in one illegal purchase in the 10 minutes after the card is ejected from the (Pocket Vault)." Major credit companies, banks and other financial institutions are just weeks away from signing an agreement with Chameleon, said Burger. Chameleon has built most of the components of the Pocket Vault system, and it has successfully tested its replacement for the Speedpass. But an analyst warned that, although the Pocket Vault and Chameleon Card may be easy to use, consumers are typically reluctant to change their buying behaviors. They may also balk at the Pocket Vault's strongest security feature, its use of fingerprint authentication. "Consumers still associate biometrics with an invasion of their privacy," said Forrester Research analyst Penny Gillespie. "For better or worse, they see it as intrusive." -- ----------------- 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: Earthlink to Test Caller ID for E-Mail
by Major Variola (ret) 07 Mar '04

07 Mar '04

At 10:56 AM 3/6/04 -0500, Steve Furlong wrote: >No, pseudonymity lets others identify messages on, say c-punks, as >coming from a particular sender. Reputation can work here, even with no >meat-space identity attached. Anonymity means reputation can't work, so >each message has to be taken on its own, with no history to give clues >as to bias or reliability. Correct. Think of pseudonymity as a persistant endpoint of a communication, which thanks to (PK-verifiable) persistance can accrue reputation. An anonymous endpoint is necessarily ephemeral. >I realize that your, RAH's, "book" mostly deals with financial >transactions. In the very narrow domain of transactions which don't >require any trust, anonymity should be as useful as pseudonymity. In the >more general case, I'd think true anonymity would be a handicap. eg, I'm >certainly not going to send my hard-earned e-money to the account of >some untraceable joker in exchange for his promise to deliver me a >week's worth of groceries. Sure you will, if the groceries are in front of you, and the purchase or possession of some of them you don't want associated with anything. In this case the reputation of the grocer and/or your ability to assay the groceries (in meatspace) suffice.

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Autobrinification: Microsoft Gadget Keeps Record of Your Life
by R. A. Hettinga 05 Mar '04

05 Mar '04

<http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/040304/microsoft_visual_diary_3.html> Yahoo! Associated Press Microsoft Gadget Keeps Record of Your Life Thursday March 4, 8:51 pm ET By Allison Linn, AP Business Writer Microsoft's SenseCam Can Be Worn Around Your Neck and Take 2,000 Images REDMOND, Wash. (AP) -- SenseCam, touted as a visual diary of sorts by Microsoft Corp., is designed to be worn around the neck and take up to 2,000 images a 12-hour day automatically. The prototype responds to changes such as bright lights and sudden movements and might one day even respond to other stimuli such as heart rate or skin temperature -- to track medical problems as easily as to record a Hawaiian vacation. And it could eventually link with other technology, such as face recognition to remind wearers when they've seen someone before. As Lyndsay Williams trudged along snow-covered paths and passed by shop windows one recent day in Cambridge, England, so too did her SenseCam -- automatically snapping hundreds of photos along the way. Later that day, Williams could have used those pictures to figure out where she'd left her car keys, or to show a friend the sweater she saw in a window. Perhaps weeks or months later, she might have zipped through them to figure out when she last saw a particular colleague or what bottle of wine she had been drinking that night. Williams and other Microsoft researchers are showcasing dozens of futuristic gadgets and projects to company employees and journalists. The annual TechFest is hosted by Microsoft Research, a unit that delves into everything from super-technical programming applications to tools for developing HIV vaccines. Though Microsoft Research works on security and other issues deemed important today, its head, Rick Rashid, said researchers also try to anticipate what Microsoft developers will want in several years. Some projects never make it into a for-profit product. But many do, including the TabletPC and a smart watch that gets news and other information from a service called MSN Direct. Other technologies could soon be available to the public. Microsoft is looking to license technology for identification cards touted as forge-proof because they combine a regular picture ID with a box that includes a compressed facial image. Another project converts a regular webcam image into low-resolution animation -- stripped of everything but the eyes, lips, nose and eyebrows. It's easier to transmit than full video and can be used with instant messaging to convey emotion and nuance. Rashid, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University before joining Microsoft, is already thinking ahead. One item he has in mind: an alarm clock that figures out when to wake you based on current traffic conditions. http://research.microsoft.com -- ----------------- 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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Happy Reichstag Day...
by R. A. Hettinga 05 Mar '04

05 Mar '04

>From Writer's Almanac 5 March Literary and Historical Notes: It was on this day in 1933 that the Nazi Party won the majority of the seats in the German parliament, known as the Reichstag, effectively taking control of the country. It was the last free election in Germany the end of World War II. Adolf Hitler had secured the chancellorship after the November 1932 elections, but he still didn't have a majority in the Reichstag, so he set March 5, 1933 as the date for new elections. Six days before the election, the Reichstag building caught fire, and the Nazis used the fire as a symbol of the chaos that they would help correct, though some historians believe that the Nazis set the fire themselves. After the election, Hitler passed a law that gave him absolute power over the country. Just five days after the election, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of romantic languages living in Germany, wrote in his diary: "What, up to election Sunday on March 5, I called terror, was a mild prelude. . . . It's astounding how easily everything collapses. . . . Since [the election,] day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc., etc. . . . A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the earth. . . . No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid." -- ----------------- 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: Vote changing gizmos (paid for by feds)
by Tyler Durden 04 Mar '04

04 Mar '04

"..slow exhale.. thanks for the hit, Bob, that's the good shit.. I miss it." Yeah...I admit it. I snuck down to the cellar and took a few tokes as well. I don't dig all the calls for "needs killing", but every now and then the dude delivers. -TD >From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv(a)cdc.gov> >To: "cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net> >Subject: Vote changing gizmos (paid for by feds) Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 >10:32:28 -0800 > >At 09:54 PM 3/2/04 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: > > >From: Tim May <timcmay(a)removethis.got.net> > > >Or enter a voting place with a "gizmo" and aim it at the electronic > >polling stations. Turn to the little old biddies who run our polling > >places and smile. If they ask what you just did, tell them "I just > >changed the votes. Have a nice day!" Leave before they can call the > >cops. > >..slow exhale.. thanks for the hit, Bob, that's the good shit.. I miss >it. > >Of course, the e-election rubes contribute to the vote changing too: > >Glitches Hinder Casting of Votes >Problems with new electronic systems in Orange and San Diego counties >frustrate voters. Officials call the harm minimal. > >Problems with new electronic voting systems caused some Orange County >residents to vote in the wrong district elections Tuesday and prevented >some >San Diego County voters from casting any ballot at all. > >http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-machines3mar03,1,3468893.story?coll… > > > _________________________________________________________________ Frustrated with dial-up? Lightning-fast Internet access for as low as $29.95/month. http://click.atdmt.com/AVE/go/onm00200360ave/direct/01/

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FLA to use fingerprint scanners on schoolbusses
by Major Variola (ret.) 04 Mar '04

04 Mar '04

The Pinellas school system is ready to approve a new technology that uses student fingerprints to keep track of who is riding school buses. Beginning in the fall, the fingerprint system would identify students as they board and leave. The goal is to ensure they are getting on the right bus and getting off at the right stop. School officials say the $2-million project will save money and dramatically improve safety for students, whose fingerprints will serve as authorization to board and disembark. If the School Board approves the proposal March 9, Pinellas will become one of four Florida school districts in the process of implementing Global Positioning Systems with a student-tracking system. "This is Management 101 in transportation. Now we will have good, factual information that we can use in a very timely manner to make our services as good as humanly possible," said Terry Palmer, the district's transportation director. But some parents and national organizations are concerned about the implications of fingerprinting 45,000 bus riders, some as young as 5. "This is probably a really good idea, but in my mind it was just this terrible feeling, like they're watching my kids wherever they go," said Nancy McKibben, mother of three teenagers at Palm Harbor University High School and president of the school's PTSA. Critics say programs of this nature raise significant privacy concerns and teach students at a young age to accept what amounts to a "Big Brother" surveillance society. "We are conditioning these children to understand that they have no personal space, no personal privacy," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Program on Technology and Liberty. <snip> http://www.sptimes.com/2004/02/28/Tampabay/Have_your_thumb_ready.shtml

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Re: How Tiny Swiss Cellphone Chips Helped Track Global Terror Web
by Major Variola (ret) 04 Mar '04

04 Mar '04

At 10:30 PM 3/3/04 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: ><http://nytimes.com/2004/03/04/international/europe/04PHON.html?hp=&pagewant…> > >The New York Times > >March 4, 2004 > >How Tiny Swiss Cellphone Chips Helped Track Global Terror Web And that, boys and girls, is what traffic analysis is about. You don't need to know the surname of the endpoint of a communication to know that said endpoint is interesting. Also, of course, Al's mistake of thinking that the handset is the endpoint, instead of the SIM. Internet-broadcast stego is best if you don't have a courier and a donkey. ---- See you in Athens

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Medical insurers checking terrorist list
by Major Variola (ret) 04 Mar '04

04 Mar '04

Some Insurers Checking Provider Lists for Terrorists Joyce Frieden Associate Editor, Practice Trends Insurance plans say they now must cross-reference lists of business partnersincluding providersagainst a federal list of known or suspected terrorists. As a result of an executive order issued shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, many health plans say that they are now required to compare their provider, member, and applicant lists with a list of potential terrorists maintained by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). If we didn't have to do it, we probably wouldn't, said Helen Stojic, spokeswoman for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, which is matching the names on the OFAC list against its database of 4.8 million members and 20,000 providers. [But] we did not see it as something that was voluntary. Other plans that are checking member and provider databases with the OFAC list include Cigna and Aetna US Healthcare. So far, none of those three plans has found any matches to the list. The executive order states that any transaction or dealing by United States persons or within the United States in property blocked pursuant to this order is prohibited, including but not limited to the making or receiving of funds, goods, or services to or for the benefit of those persons listed by the government. Because there was some confusion about whether the order applied to health insurers, the American Association of Health Plans-Health Insurance Association of America sought more information from the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department sent back an informal guidance document explaining that the executive order applies to government agencies and private companies including health plans and insurers and that one method for health plans and insurers to comply is to search their records to see if there are any individuals or businesses that match the names on the OFAC list. If a plan does receive an insurance application from someone on the list, it is obligated not to issue the policy, and if it has inadvertently already issued a policy to a person on the list, plan officials are supposed to contact the Treasury Department. Although the document did not say that comparing lists was the only way to find out if an insurer is doing business with a suspected terrorist, I haven't heard of any other method, Ms. Stojic said. The federal government is not alone in requiring health insurers to comply with the executive order, noted Fred Laberge, spokesman for Aetna US Healthcare, in Hartford, Conn. We've seen similar requests from state departments of insurance saying, We've seen this executive order; demonstrate that you're complying with it. Florida and New York are among the states that have made these requests, he said. Since member and provider lists change constantly, the cross-referencing will be ongoing, plans say. It includes scanning of our databases on a periodic basis to screen new customers and transactions on the OFAC list, said Cigna spokeswoman Amy Turkington. Plans say these checks do not compromise any personal health information or raise any privacy concerns under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). We're not sharing any information about our members beyond checking the list of names, said Aetna's Mr. Laberge. Private medical information is not even being looked at or asked about. Still, civil libertarians are not happy with the order. We know that databases are filled with errors, said Virginia Rezmierski, Ph.D., of the school of public policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. If a patient's account is mistakenly frozen because he or she is thought to be on the OFAC list, what does that do to someone getting ready to have a procedure? Checking names against the OFAC list is not as bad as using claims data to do the same thing, Dr. Rezmierski said. However, by approaching terrorism and deterrence of it in this way, we've effectively thrown out the entire notion of innocent till proven guilty. We are now guilty until there's no match. Instead of going from knowledge about the behavior of an individual and having cause to do this violation, we're violating everyone. Jay Stanley, communications director for the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, said he was concerned that this is part of an overall trend of the government enlisting private individuals and companies into its information-gathering and enforcement proceedings. Obviously, it's a good thing if no one does business with true terrorists, Mr. Stanley said. But the problem is that there are no established guidelines for due process in how one gets placed on these lists. Mistakes have been rife, especially when you are talking about Arab names which have to be translated into a different alphabet. Mr. Stanley noted that such lists are set up primarily to prevent terrorists from laundering money through unsuspecting American corporations. As far as I can tell, nobody uses health insurance to launder money. There are basic questions that need to be asked about the cost and benefit of targeting here. February 2004 Volume 32 Number 2 http://www2.eClinicalPsychiatryNews.com/scripts/om.dll/serve login: cypherpunks/writecode

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Fwd: Re: Don't Panic - Not All Jobs Are Headed Overseas
by R. A. Hettinga 04 Mar '04

04 Mar '04

NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 17:29:41 -0600 Subject: Re: Don't Panic - Not All Jobs Are Headed Overseas Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 15:29:41 -0800 From: Tim May <timcmay(a)removethis.got.net> Newsgroups: misc.survivalism Message-ID: <210220041529416788%timcmay(a)removethis.got.net> References: <20040219051351.19387.00001980(a)mb-m26.aol.com> <1e4e3692.0402211504.1db2b7ea(a)posting.google.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit Mail-Copies-To: nobody User-Agent: Thoth/1.6.0 (Carbon/OS X) Lines: 125 NNTP-Posting-Host: 69.19.240.48 In article <1e4e3692.0402211504.1db2b7ea(a)posting.google.com>, William <billybeeper(a)juno.com> wrote: halcitron(a)aol.comhatespam (Halcitron) wrote in message news:<20040219051351.19387.00001980(a)mb-m26.aol.com>... Don't Panic - Not All Jobs Are Headed Overseas Any keyboard job can be shipped overseas, including engineering (CAD), XRAY and MRI analysis/interpretation. Unless they have robotic heavy equipment, bulldozer and crane operators may still have a future. The rest will be burger flippers and Walmart greeters. Here's an article I sent off this morning to a mailing list made up of some of the brightest programmers I know. A few names have been replaced with pseudonyms, for their protection: --begin forwarded article-- Most of these comments all support the basic point: programming is not an easy, or "blue collar," job, and attempts to teach programming to folks who really are better-suited to be welders or auto mechanics or seamstresses (for the PC, "sewpersons") are probably doomed. Just yesterday there was a news item (Yahoo) about the financial collapse of a bunch of "technical schools" which purported to teach their students how to get high-paying jobs in the burgeoning field of Web page development!! (Not too surprisingly, most of the students didn't get interesting or well-paying jobs, and this was only partly because of the dot bombs.) Larry's point: "Before you get them to university, stuff them with years of doing geometric proofs. Works wonders." goes to the heart of the issue. (I loved geometry, did very well in it, and the lessons I learned from it I use every day. One of my earliest exposures to programming was c. 1967 when my _excellent_ 10th grade geometry teacher told us about how a computer had discovered a brand-new proof of triangle similarity, using a truly "out of the box" approach...I didn't catch the name then, but I later surmised he was talking about one of David Gelernter's geometry theorem-provers, which were developed in the early 1960s.) My strong belief is that poor students make poor programmers. (Poor students in the sense of ability to learn, not the grades they get...I know a bunch of very smart programmers, many of them presenting code this weekend at CodeCon in San Francisco, who never went to college. Some dropped out of high school. But they were still quick learners, i.e., good students.) Good programmers really are mathematicians of a sort. Understanding logic and how to think are crucial stages (the point John Stenhart made about "I've been volunteering to teach "computer science" in my local high school. The course that I've designed is along the lines of "Learning to think using computers as an excuse." It's been a real adventure because, at least where I live, kids don't learn how to think in school.") If students don't know even how to frame a simple argument, how to consider alternatives, how to refute or falsify assumptions, it's pretty hopeless to try to train them to be Java or PHP programmers. Maybe doing cookie-cutter Web pages, but nothing very substantial and nothing with much of a future. (As the many "Webmasters" at companies discovered in the late 90s, when Web page creation tools got more sophisticated; turned out that memorizing a bunch of HTML wasn't needed.) Overheard many times at the local malls: "Like, you know, and then she goes "Huh?", and then I go "Way!", and it was, like, weird!. And then I was like _so_..." This doesn't translate well into computerese. Not the words, and especially not the stream-of-consciousness mental process. (I read an analysis of this kind of valspeak, and its isomorphic ghettospeak versions, with the conclusion that many of today's kids are "replaying movies in their head," hence the blow-by-blow recitation of what people said, in fragmentary form. Logic, summaries, induction, deduction, and analysis are mostly absent from their speech. I have virtually no hope for 95% of today's high school graduates in terms of their involvement in technology. And while exporting programming to India isn't the full solution, it's a start: at least their high school graduates are for the most part solidly trained in the things a programmer needs--and not just math and logic: also rhetoric, grammar, understanding the parts of speech, etc., are all variants of the formalist, logical approach. (I've talked to a lot of those at Intel who are rapidly moving software and even design jobs to India and China. My old boss, Craig Barrett, has been warning of these problems for _years_. Many high schools would rather be babysitters for gang bangers and teach fluffy stuff about lesbian sex and "tolerance" than teach the "logic and rhetoric" core. Which means a lot of programming and design jobs are going to be moving out of the U.S.) For the truly gifted, which I think nearly all Programmer's Conference attendees are, things should be bright, especially with powerful tool, languages, and machines leveraging the innate capabilities. But for "Joe Average programmer," things don't look so bright. And the prospects for teaching those who can't think, in Jon's analysis, the prospects are grim. (The community colleges are mostly a total joke. I see the syllabi (in plain speak, the courses) from my local JCs, notably Cabrillo College and UFO (University of Fort Ord, aka Cal State Monterey Bay) and they are travesties. The computer courses are crammed with the "trade school" junk about learning to be a Certified Microsoft Windows Technician. Some of these students may in fact get jobs helping local businesses figure out how to insert the CD-ROM into their PCs, but mostly the training is scut work, almost guaranteed to be obsolete in a few years when the Next Big Thing appears...then I guess they go back for night school retraining in "How to be a Certified Microsoft Longhorn Security Installer.") As a welfare state nation, we are reaping what we have sown. The dumbing-down of education has been successful. It's going to be interesting to see where we are in 20 years, when today's illiterates are the tax-paying core earners who are expected to pay for the retirement of the largest generation in American history, the Boomers. --Tim May -- ----------------- 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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