April 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Liberty Dollar
by Gary Jeffers 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

My fellow Cypherpunks, The Liberty Dollar My fellow Cypherpunks, I think I may have some really great news here, but you all can check it out to be sure. I found an alternative money on the Internet. It is called the Liberty Dollar. The Internet site is: http://www.norfed.org NORFED is The National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code. The money is backed by silver and gold and can be redeemed widely in America. As many of you know, the $US is a corrupt, proprietary, debt issued, fait, fractional reserved,illegal, unconstituional, U. S. State enforced monopoly currency. As corrupt as it is I don't know why it hasn't already collasped and dragged us down with it! If the Liberty Dollar is honest and robust, then it may be the vehical to beat the elite bankers tyranny and give us an honest wealth produced money. Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers BEAT STATE !!!!

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RE: Cypherpunks IQ Test
by Aimee Farr 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Mike: Are you often the victim of mercenary females? > -----Original Message----- > From: mmotyka(a)lsil.com [mailto:mmotyka@lsil.com] > Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 3:28 PM > To: aimee.farr(a)pobox.com > Subject: Cypherpunks IQ Test > > > It's an obvious setup. The woods are part of a defense installation, > apple is filled with coke, the girl is underage, the woods are full of > trigger happy fibbies. > > You hit the ground and roll into the brush, drawing on the way. You > attempt to locate opponents and identify the safest route away from the > situation. > > Mike > > > >CYPHERPUNKS IQ TEST > > > >QUESTION #1. > > > >You are walking through the woods alone. A beautiful unclothed woman > >magically appears in front of you. She holds out an apple. > > > >1. Please darken in the correct choice using a Number Two pencil: > > > >(a) you bite the apple. > >(b) you take the woman. > >(c) you run away. > >(d) a and b, but not c. > >(e) b and c only. > >(f) all of the above. > >(g) none of the above. > > > >2. Please justify your answer: > > > > > >___________________________________________________________________. > > > > > >Just curious.... > > > > -Aimee

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More on "new physics"
by Tim May 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Someone sent me a private note. I have deleted his name for this public reply. > Tim May wrote: > > >> The "new physics" stuff is quite different. It is scorned in a way >> that plate tectonics was not, and for good reason. Folks should visit >> Bearden's site. http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/index.html > > I did. Oh, dear. > > Not sure what is supposed to be denoted by "Tesla physics", but Tesla's > work with power transmission via HF is fascinating, even if there was > apparently no practical or safe use for it. No one disputes the outstanding work Tesla did on a.c. transmission. And anyone who has seen or used a Tesla coil knows how real it is. "Tesla physics" is all the cruft that has developed around some of his more obscure (and late) writings, usually mixed together with stuff Tesla could not have known about at the time of his death. To wit, the stuff about zero point energy and perpetual motion machines. And, sometimes, mixed together with the usual nutcase stuff about the Hollow Earth theory (zeta reticulans colonizing the hollow earth, Greys, underground UFO bases, secret Nazi weapons, etc.). Tesla is a hero to these "new physics" nuts, even though nothing Tesla ever worked on or built contradicts in the slightest way the predictions of Maxwell's theories. They take Tesla's very real contributions and some of his weirder theories (though none of them so weird as the Hollow Earth/antigravity/time reversal theories of modern nutters) and say that this means "They laughed at Tesla, they laugh at me!" BTW, I was/am an early ("angel") investor in a company doing work on ultrawideband transmissions. Some of the works Bearden cites, like those of Barrett, are familiar to me and others with this company. Saying that there is a role for ultrawideband pulse technology, a la spread spectrum and beyond SS, is NOT the same as saying there are confirmed "problems" with electromagnetic theory. There may be, and there are a handful of folks doing "foundational" work in E&M, but, so far, there are no indications that their foundational work is changing any engineering calculations. Quite the contrary, in my view. Electromagnetic theory basically "works"--to many decimal places of accuracy. Circuits work as expected, antennas work as expected, and there are no "unexplained observations" (as usually exist before a new theory arrives). There may be some _semantic_ issues, e.g., does a square wave or impulse "really" have components that were sent out _before_ the square wave or impulse? (A Fourier decomposition of a square wave starting at time t = 0 has "sine wave components" spread out over time and adding up in such a way as to give the square wave, or the impulse, or any other signal. Some think this means deep and mysterious things are happening, something having to do with time travel and reversing the aging process, blah blah blah. Henning Harmuth may write fairly eloquently about the "dogma of the circle" and how the Fourier decomposition of a signal into (allegedly) a near-infinite series of sine waves is "not real," but for all intents and purposes it all works. And the "new physics" people like Bearden go way beyond what Harmuth and Barrett are talking about: they bring in "curved space-time" and gravitation and antigravity and the ultra-weird notion that aging can be reversed by "pumping the conjugate time-axis of the Minkowski manifold" (OK, I made this up...don't have time to lift one of Bearden's direct quotes...and this will help train me in the jargon if I ever become a "new physicist."). Nut cases like Bearden have the patter of physics down. Very few actual physicists waste their time dissecting and refuting Bearden for obvious reasons. I urge readers of this list not to waste time on this stuff. --Tim May, Citizen-unit of of the once free United States " The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. "--Thomas Jefferson, 1787

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Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

At 09:57 AM 5/14/2003 -0400, Sunder wrote: >Yes, but how will you stop the spammer from double spending the same $0.25 >micropayment on all of his 170,000 email addresses? Depending on whether >you check that there is a payment attached or not, and also check it with >the bank before delivering it, you'd have already wasted your bandwith and >possibly have accepted a spam into your mail spool. It is true that the notions of micropayments as applied to spam (that I'm familiar with, at least) would require that the email recipient check with the bank to detect doublespending. This would introduce an additional delay before delivery from unknown senders, yes, but I fail to see how it would impose an unacceptable cost in bandwidth or CPU usage. Spammers could still try the same-micropayment-a-million-times route, just as they could try to spam without micropayments, but if their email is rejected in sufficient quantities, the cost to the spammer would outweigh the benefits. The key is achieving sufficient quantities. -Declan

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Re: AP Al Qaeda
by mattd 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

>>No, no. AP is funny because it's impracticeable. One does not find an assassin exclusively by tracing who paid him to kill. One can (and often does) find him because he makes a mistake in the act of commiting the crime. Which, if I'm >>reading my history right, is what's hampered the noisy proponents of AP up to this point already. Crime? Wot crime,guvnor? Jim and CJ were not 'noisy'.imo. Im a bit noisy cos Im pushing the 'let it all hang out' version. >The point is that Bell's theory does a really good job of sorting out the business end of assassination,...< Oh THATS funny.I get it. HAHAHA! >>Killing one person, especially a public official, pisses a whole bunch of people off. Those people have a tendency to come find their buddy's killer. Mmm,where do we start,lets get some firebrands and go up to the proffrs? Look at sites with no logs for quad anon 'predictors' who may be overseas briefly visiting cybercafes,Good luck china.(you just contradicted yrself btw.) Oh,unless you mean the torture/french village reprisal thang.Win friends and influence people. The one person killed will have had to have done a lot of evil shit to get enough pooled (presumably) to tempt a seasoned pro.Unless some professional killer turns all altruistic,stranger things have happened.The killer could be suicidal.another possibility.Lots of scenarios possible here,movie scripts,even.Pop songs,video games.DoCoMo assasinphones. Someone like a torturer,murderer,terrorist,pedophile is a logical candidate.(stephen roach?)Sometimes these happen to be public officials.Theres one here where I live named dennis Tanner.(vic.au) Those killers by remote control like arbusto might be be made more accountable. What better way than...Bell's theory, "a really good job of sorting out the business end of assassination"according to you. KILL THE PRESIDENT! "Id buy that for a dollar!" >>No kind of real or threatened assassination can weaken a government in which a majority of the governed people >believe. It can only make it seem more righteous and be more strong. Thats true,roll over and go back to sleep,if you live under that govt you have nothing to worry about. More righteous and more smug.

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[Lucrative-L] double spends, identity agnosticism, and Lucrative
by R. A. Hettinga 21 May '05

21 May '05

--- begin forwarded text

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Re: message, but also test
by An Metet 02 May '04

02 May '04

Ryan Lackey writes: > I have two questions: > > 1) Does anyone have actual performance measurements of ZKS from when > it was operational/at peak, in terms of bandwidth, MTU, latency, and > jitter? Is there a good way to quantify just how far from > "acceptable" it was? I don't have any actual measurements, but as far as I can remember it worked pretty well, i.e., slower than usual but still pages would load within a few seconds. Recently I've experimented with the onion routing system at www.freehaven.net/tor, and the main problem there is slow startup times setting up the first path. Seems to take a couple of minutes sometimes for the first web page to download. I think it's struggling to find a working path, or something. But then after that the performance seems comparable to Freedom. I'm a big user of anonymity systems, and the worst problem I've had with proxies is remembering who I am supposed to be at the time. Several times with Freedom and more recently with other proxies, I have done stuff using my real name when I was in the mode where my nym was being used, and vice versa. Oops. That's a pretty big mistake to make and can totally destroy your pseudonymity, both at the time and throughout the past lifetime of the nym. What I'd like would be some kind of big, glaring indication that I am in "anonymous" mode, like overlaying some kind of color display on the screen, or maybe a crawling animation around the edges, or something. I realize that this is out of scope for most efforts of this type, but from my experience it's a big problem. > (I also subscribed the al-qaeda node, and will probably finish setting > up the spamfiltered version of the list, as well as passing the back > archives through the same archiving software as current archives, and > search-indexing them, next time I get bored) Making your deep archive available in search-indexed form would be a great service, as would spam-cleaning your current one. May you grow bored soon. BTW, how big is the entire CP archive when compressed? Would it fit into a gmail account that someone could set up and share the passphrase to? I'd pay quite a few bucks to have a copy of that on my disk. _______________________________________________ cypherpunks mailing list cypherpunks(a)cypherpunks.metacolo.com http://cypherpunks.metacolo.com/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks

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no anon conversations?
by An Metet 02 May '04

02 May '04

What technologies currently exist for receiving a/psuedononymous message? With Mixmaster, sending mail, posting news, and even blog posting are possible, However, receiving replies securely or, better, holding a private conversation is difficult or impossible. Best bet seems is to encrypt and spam somewhere very public? Ugly, ugly. No technological method, just a few "trust me" remailers. Other options?

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Fwd: [ISN] Mobile flaws expose executives to bugging
by R. A. Hettinga 01 May '04

01 May '04

*Took* 'em long enough... Cheers, RAH --- begin forwarded text

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Re: no anon conversations?
by An Metet 01 May '04

01 May '04

On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 14:12, An Metet wrote: > What technologies currently exist for receiving a/psuedononymous message? > With Mixmaster, sending mail, posting news, and even blog posting are > possible, However, receiving replies securely or, better, holding a private > conversation is difficult or impossible. Best bet seems is to encrypt and > spam somewhere very public? Ugly, ugly. No technological method, just a few > "trust me" remailers. Other options? A simple option is to use a free webmail account and access it via an anonymizing proxy. You can send mail that way too. The great advantage of this is that it does not brand you as an "anonymous mail user" and thereby call attention to your activities. You look like just another of the millions of people who use such services. For anonymizing proxies, do a google search on anonymous web surfing. There are many more companies than anonymizer.com, although it is the oldest and probably the best. You can also begin experimenting with the onion routing network at http://www.freehaven.net/tor. This is like a free version of the old ZKS Freedom network where you construct a path through a number of forwarding nodes. You could also combine these and use TOR to access anonymizer.com and go from there to hotmail.com, etc. There's a new proposal out called the Pynchon Gate from Len Sassaman and Bram Cohen, http://www.freehaven.net/doc/pynchon-gate/. Sassaman is one of the main Mixmaster/Mixminion developers, and Cohen of course has revolutionized the P2P file sharing scene this past year with his BitTorrent. These guys have a pretty good pedigree for getting stuff done, and they claim to be in the process of implementing this new system. The Pynchon Gate will use a crypto protocol called Private Information Retrieval to let people receive messages anonymously. The way PIR works, all the incoming messages for all users are stored in a big database which is replicated at several servers. Recipients connect to each server and download a packet of data, which is combined at the local machine to reconstruct one incoming message. However the algorithm is such that each individual server learns nothing about which message is being fetched, protecting the receiver's anonymity. Here's a simple example of how it would work. The method relies on two properties of XOR: XORing a value with itself yields zero; and the result of XORing a random value with a predetermined pattern is still a random value. Suppose there are only two database servers, each holding 8 messages, where the messages are all split or padded to be a standard size: M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 Suppose you want to fetch M4. Now you create a random 8-bit binary string: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 Make a copy of that string and XOR in the bit position of the message we want, in this the 4th bit: 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 Note that because of the 2nd property of XOR listed above, both bit strings are individually indistinguishable from random and neither by itself gives any information about which bit was XOR'd. Send the first bit string to the first server and the 2nd bit string to the 2nd server. Each server XOR's the messages corresponding to the 1 bits and returns the results, which will be the size of single standard message: Server 1: M1 xor M3 xor M8 Server 2: M1 xor M3 xor M4 xor M8 The recipient xors these two messages together: (M1 xor M3 xor M8) xor (M1 xor M3 xor M4 xor M8) = (M1 xor M1) xor (M3 xor M3) xor (M8 xor M8) xor M4 = M4 The result is the required message. Individually, each server saw a random bit string and neither one by itself had any indication about which message was being fetched, hence the recipient's anonymity was protected. The same method can be generalized to larger numbers of servers, and that is the intention with the Pynchon Gate system. The privacy threat with this approach is that if the servers combine their information, they can deduce which message the recipient was fetching, by XORing all their bit strings together. However, as long as even one server is honest and refuses to go along with this, the other servers can learn nothing about which message was being fetched. This security guarantee is similar to that of a remailer chain, where if they all colluded they could track user messages, but if at least one is honest then privacy is protected. Hence it is a good match for users who rely on remailers. It's not yet clear that this method can be really practical, can scale to a reasonable number of users, resist flooding, and avoid leaking information in terms of how many requests a given user makes in a given period of time. These are serious practical issues that need to be solved. But they do have one really good idea, which is that the user-end software will be an agent that executes this protocol on a regular basis to fetch messages, then makes them available to the mail client by acting as a local POP server. All modern mail clients let you set multiple POP servers to be queried, so this should produce nearly transparent integration to existing mail clients. This concept might be copied for other mail receiving methods in the future.

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