April 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

VIA Pulls PadLockSL (fwd from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org)
by Eugen Leitl 16 Apr '04

16 Apr '04

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DIMACS Workshop on Electronic Voting -- Theory and Practice
by R. A. Hettinga 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

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RE: US Brings Freedom of Expression to Iraq
by Tyler Durden 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

"I don't suppose there'll be any civilians in AmeriKKKa either, and therefore, it will be impossible to label any destructive act committed against the US, either at home or abroad, as "terrorist."" Ah shit I hate hearing this. Is it possible to retroactively re-cast a "terrorist" attack (eg, World Trade Center) into regular old, 'valid' warfare? Bush policies seem to be doing this. Meanwhile, it seems Al Qaeda has offered some kind of bizarre 'treaty" to the Europeans while hardening their stance on the US. SOunds like there getting smarter... -TD >From: Eric Cordian <emc(a)artifact.psychedelic.net> >To: cypherpunks(a)minder.net >Subject: US Brings Freedom of Expression to Iraq >Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 11:02:53 -0700 (PDT) > >For extra credit, try to find even one mainstream newspaper in AmeriKKKa's >Rah Rah "free" press in which this international wireservice story is >printed. > >See the Neocons argue that because the story only appears in the Arab >press, it can't be true. Hey, it worked with Accused Jewish War Criminal >Ariel Sharon's "The Jewish people control AmeriKKKa" remarks. > >Somehow, I don't think beating people and bulldozing their houses and >businesses every time some writing or image the US chooses to characterize >as "anti-Coalition" is spotted, does much to further the US message that >we are bringing "democracy" to Iraq, and that those opposed to our >behavior "hate our freedoms." > >It's too bad an alien power can't just lift all 157,000 US troops and >associated military hardware from Iraq, compact it into a cube, and drop >it on the White House lawn for Shrub to explain to the AmeriKKKan people. > >I once said "there are no civilians in Israel, not even the babies" after >the Jewish people re-elected Accused War Criminal and Egregious Human >Rights Violator Ariel Sharon in an overwhelming landslide, >enthusiastically supporting his defiance of International Law, and >deliberate oppression of the Palestinian people. > >If the AmeriKKKan people re-elect George W. Bush, who has made a mockery >of the UNited Nations, started a war of conquest based on deliberate lies, >in violation of International Law, with complete contempt for the wishes >of the world community, I don't suppose there'll be any civilians in >AmeriKKKa either, and therefore, it will be impossible to label any >destructive act committed against the US, either at home or abroad, as >"terrorist." > >----- > >KUT, Iraq (AFP) - An Iraqi has died of his wounds after US troops beat >him with truncheons because he refused to remove a picture of wanted >Shiite Muslim leader Moqtada al-Sadr from his car, police said >Wednesday. > >The motorist was stopped late Tuesday by US troops conducting search >operations on a street in the central city of Kut, Lieutenant Mohamad >Abdel Abbas told AFP. > >After the man refused to remove al-Sadr's picture from his car, the >soldiers forced him out of the vehicle and started beating him with >truncheons, he said. > >US troops also detained from the same area five men wearing black >pants and shirts, the usual attire of al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militiamen >and followers. > >Qassem Hassan, the director of Kut general hospital, identified the >man as Salem Hassan, a resident of a Kut suburb. > >He said the man had died of wounds sustained in the beating. > >-- >Eric Michael Cordian 0+ >O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division >"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law" > _________________________________________________________________ MSN Toolbar provides one-click access to Hotmail from any Web page FREE download! http://toolbar.msn.com/go/onm00200413ave/direct/01/

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OHP's Col. Paul McClellan Makes Misleading Statements about MATRIX Database?
by Freematt357＠aol.com 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

Note from Matt Gaylor: Ohio Highway Patrol Superintendent, Colonel McClellan says in the below article that the availability of the Matrix database could have brought more law-enforcement attention sooner to the recent Columbus-area car shootings that included the killing Nov. 25 of Gail Knisley on I-270. Additionally, Colonel McClellan commented that he can get better Intel from the public library than he can at his office. Col. McClellan's statements are somewhat strange given the fact that Ohio had already been enrolled in the MATRIX database surveillance system during the sniper shootings. This raises the question of the usefulness of the MATRIX system in general or the Patrol's ability to use the system. Col. McClellan gives the impression that Ohio does not have access to the MATRIX system, when in fact Ohio does. --- Article published Friday, April 9, 2004 Database search system debated Police agencies, civil libertarians divided over online records access By DAVID PATCH BLADE STAFF WRITER http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040409/NEWS03/40409… 85/-1/NEWS Information in a controversial database searching system already is publicly available but not coordinated so law-enforcement officials can easily use it to investigate crimes or thwart terrorism, the head of the Ohio Highway Patrol told a local trucking group yesterday."Right now, the public library has better information than we do," Col. Paul McClellan, the patrol's superintendent, told the Toledo Trucking Association at the Toledo Club. "When I go home at night, I can find out more about people by surfing the Internet on my home computer than I can in my office." The MATRIX search system, which combs public records like driver's licenses, vehicle registrations, court records, and land transaction information, is available only to law-enforcement personnel with a specific investigative purpose, the colonel said. The system, whose name stands for Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, is managed by a Florida firm under contract to five states that are piloting it, including Ohio and Michigan. So far, however, Ohio is not fully participating by contributing photos or Social Security numbers from its licensing records, the colonel said. Civil libertarians argue that the system is an open invitation for police to track the behavior of ordinary citizens, regardless of their involvement in criminal or terrorist activities. MATRIX effectively is "an advanced surveillance system" designed not only to "build dossiers on all of our lives," but also to allow rapid mathematical searches for supposed irregular patterns that might identify troublemakers, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. "Judgments about reasonable suspicion of criminal activity are fundamentally human judgments that cannot now be made accurately by computers," the ACLU said in a recent position paper on the subject. "They make it sound like such an ominous project, but it's not. It's very open," responded Sal Hernandez, vice president of Seisint, Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla.-based information services firm that pioneered the system and manages it for its multistate clients. MATRIX data represent "things the cops already have, but it's putting it all in one place and letting the police access it faster." Dean Kaplan, the trucking association's president who, with his wife, operates a local trucking firm specializing in hazardous materials transport, said his main concern about the system would be if its capability "gets into the wrong hands." Seisint asserts that the system is protected by the most advanced online security available. Colonel McClellan, meanwhile, said that availability of such a system could have brought more law-enforcement attention sooner to the recent spate of Columbus-area car shootings that included the killing Nov. 25 of Gail Knisley on I-270. Only after Mrs. Knisley's death did area police start comparing notes and realize that each had received similar reports of gunshots hitting vehicles on I-270 and other nearby roads, he said. A system like MATRIX would have allowed various agencies to enter what they knew about the case and start narrowing the field of suspects sooner, he said. Charles C. McCoy, Jr., 28, who was arrested March 17 in Las Vegas, pleaded not guilty Monday to charges accusing him of 12 of 24 shootings dating to May, 2003. Contact David Patch at: dpatch(a)theblade.com or 419-724-6094. ### Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. ---

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Re: legally required forgetting
by An Metet 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

Regarding the question of whether debt must be merely 'forgiven' or actually 'forgotten', see http://www.epic.org/privacy/fcra for information on the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970: "The FCRA limits the length of time some information can appear in a consumer report. For instance, bankruptcies must be removed from the report after 10 years. Civil suits, civil judgments, paid tax liens, accounts placed for collection, and records of arrest can only appear for 7 years." BlackNet thwarts such limitations on the reporting of consumer credit. Clearly, providing access to this data harms individual privacy. Yet Cypherpunks traditionally have supported this concept. A privacy advocacy group promotes technology which would aid the compilation of individual dossiers and allow access to personally identifying data about past financial transactions. Of course, these were "classical" Cypherpunks, from the days when "men were men and giants walked the earth". They understood that the way to keep data private was not to let it out in the first place. They believed in freedom: freedom of association, freedom of contract. They saw privacy as a means to achieve that freedom, not as an end in itself. Today, the Cypherpunks list is but a shadow of its former glory, with anarcho-capitalism all but forgotten in favor of fashionable nihilism, libertarians replaced by liberals. Perhaps it is not too late to resurrect the ideals of the past, but it will require hard work and open mindedness on the part of all.

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US Brings Freedom of Expression to Iraq
by Eric Cordian 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

For extra credit, try to find even one mainstream newspaper in AmeriKKKa's Rah Rah "free" press in which this international wireservice story is printed. See the Neocons argue that because the story only appears in the Arab press, it can't be true. Hey, it worked with Accused Jewish War Criminal Ariel Sharon's "The Jewish people control AmeriKKKa" remarks. Somehow, I don't think beating people and bulldozing their houses and businesses every time some writing or image the US chooses to characterize as "anti-Coalition" is spotted, does much to further the US message that we are bringing "democracy" to Iraq, and that those opposed to our behavior "hate our freedoms." It's too bad an alien power can't just lift all 157,000 US troops and associated military hardware from Iraq, compact it into a cube, and drop it on the White House lawn for Shrub to explain to the AmeriKKKan people. I once said "there are no civilians in Israel, not even the babies" after the Jewish people re-elected Accused War Criminal and Egregious Human Rights Violator Ariel Sharon in an overwhelming landslide, enthusiastically supporting his defiance of International Law, and deliberate oppression of the Palestinian people. If the AmeriKKKan people re-elect George W. Bush, who has made a mockery of the UNited Nations, started a war of conquest based on deliberate lies, in violation of International Law, with complete contempt for the wishes of the world community, I don't suppose there'll be any civilians in AmeriKKKa either, and therefore, it will be impossible to label any destructive act committed against the US, either at home or abroad, as "terrorist." ----- KUT, Iraq (AFP) - An Iraqi has died of his wounds after US troops beat him with truncheons because he refused to remove a picture of wanted Shiite Muslim leader Moqtada al-Sadr from his car, police said Wednesday. The motorist was stopped late Tuesday by US troops conducting search operations on a street in the central city of Kut, Lieutenant Mohamad Abdel Abbas told AFP. After the man refused to remove al-Sadr's picture from his car, the soldiers forced him out of the vehicle and started beating him with truncheons, he said. US troops also detained from the same area five men wearing black pants and shirts, the usual attire of al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militiamen and followers. Qassem Hassan, the director of Kut general hospital, identified the man as Salem Hassan, a resident of a Kut suburb. He said the man had died of wounds sustained in the beating. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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[IP] Cyberspace warriors (MOST INTERESTING djf) (fwd from dave@farber.net)
by Eugen Leitl 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <dave(a)farber.net> -----

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Clearing Up The Confusion
by R. A. Hettinga 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

<http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,63050,00.html> Wired News Clearing Up The Confusion By Paul Boutin? Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63050,00.html 02:00 AM Apr. 15, 2004 PT Science-fiction author Neal Stephenson's latest 800-page dispatch, The Confusion, arrived in stores this week. But Stephenson fans hoping for another brain-wracking, cryptographic puzzle to solve will find a surprise instead: A central scene in the book provides a long, detailed description of the mechanics of 17th-century bills of exchange. Pivotal themes in the book involve the emergence of a cashless market at Lyon, France, and Sir Isaac Newton's 30-year stint at England's national mint. The Confusion, which consists of two 400-page novels interleaved (literally "con-fused") with one another, is the second of three volumes in The Baroque Cycle, a nearly 3,000-page opus that fictionalizes the exploits of Newton and the Royal Society of scientists to which he belonged. In an interview with Wired News, Stephenson, who rose to fame on cyberpunk-themed novels including Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, said his interest in money and markets dates back to 1994, a time when crypto hackers and Citicorp/Citibank CEO Walter Wriston were equally likely to expound on the concept of money as an information technology. Wired News: Why the shift from cryptography to money and markets? Neal Stephenson: Cyberpunk has been over for a long time. Some would say it was already over by the early '90s. It's over because it became part of the main current of science fiction. One way of thinking about cyberpunk is that it was a process by which SF belatedly came alive to the importance of information technology, and re-evaluated not only the future but also the past in that light. Similar things have been going on more recently with nanotechnology and biotech. Anyway, for the last 10 years or so, money and markets have been inseparable in my mind from other themes that are of great interest to contemporary SF writers. WN: What does this have to do with The Confusion? Stephenson: To fuse means to melt; "con-fuse" means a melting together. When you say "I'm all mixed up" you're saying the same thing in simpler words. At least as far back as Chaucer, "confused" was being used in its current sense of being muddle-headed. The older, technical meaning of melting things together has become obsolete, but alchemists of the 17th century would have been comfortable with it. Confusion de Confusiones is the title of a book written in 1688 by Joseph de la Vega about the Amsterdam stock market. It takes the form of a very long letter written by a Spanish Jew living in Amsterdam to his country cousins who are thinking about moving to the city. He describes the amazingly diverse tactics and schemes used by investors playing the market there. Even though there was only one stock being traded -- the Dutch East India Company -- they had bulls, bears, panics, bubbles and most of the other features of modern bourses. (There is a de la Vega family in The Baroque Cycle, but they are not meant as historical depictions of Joseph and his cousins. I just used the family name as a way of paying homage to this author.) In The Baroque Cycle we have got confusion of a few different sorts: Not only alchemists melting things together, but also pandemonium in the markets, a re-coinage in England (which means gathering together and melting all the old coins) and the confusion of a war between France and her enemies. Prior to the time I'm writing about -- let's say, 1618 to 1650 -- England and the Continent were in a Hobbesian state of war, chaotic and frozen at the same time. Starting around the mid-1650s, things settled down and there was a time of astonishing creativity and flux, which I attempted to capture in the first volume of this series, Quicksilver. What I'm trying to depict in The Confusion is its aftermath: a time when so much has changed, so fast, that things are all unsettled and out of whack, and settling, in a chaotic way, toward a new equilibrium. WN: In a central scene in The Confusion, the entrepreneurial heroine, Eliza, conducts a lengthy parlor game among idle rich Frenchmen and women of Versailles to explain how they can transfer silver safely across the English Channel using a bill of exchange. Did you think your readers also needed the concept explained in detail? Stephenson: This passage is admittedly an expository one, but it's meant to work on a couple of levels. Partly there is a need to acquaint readers of the book with the basic principles of a bill of exchange. But what's much more alien to modern readers, I think, is the notion that the upper crust of that society tried to avoid having anything to do with commerce. Bills of exchange weren't a new concept. They had been around for centuries at the time the book takes place. They were the basis for the medieval economy and the rise of the Italian banking houses. It is, however, a new concept to the nobles to whom Eliza's explaining it, because according to the code of behavior of the noble class, they're not allowed to dirty their hands with commerce. Nowadays, we take it as a given that the most powerful people in any given society will be the ones who have mastered the art of making and holding on to money, but it was different back then. From our point of view, it seems obvious that this was a crazy situation and such a system was bound to fall apart. How it began to crumble is part of the story I'm telling here. WN: In the book, a huge financial crisis hits Western Europe in the early 1690s, driven by a lack of available coinage, as well as the entire French government losing its credit rating. Did that really happen? Stephenson: It really happened. It would take a better economic historian than I to explain why. At some level, trying to explain such events is a little like trying to explain the weather. Very generally, it has to do with the flow of metal around the world. That's important because money is a sort of medium for the exchange of information. When the price of cloth went up in Antwerp, it was because the system of international trade, in some fashion that's too complex for us to understand, was transmitting information about the supply/demand balance. Money makes that kind of information flow better. Nowadays money is electronic and there's plenty of it. Back then, money had to be silver or gold. In those days silver came from the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Peru, and gold came from the Portuguese colony of Brazil. It was transported across the Atlantic to Europe, though English and other privateers did their best to intercept it en route. Some of it circulated in European markets, some was hoarded in the vaults of wealthy families and institutions, and a lot of it flowed east toward India and China. China was notoriously hungry for silver. It was a complicated flow pattern, with any number of sources and sinks and eddies and feedback loops, and like any other such system it was capable of chaotic behavior. If enough people hoarded their metal, a money shortage would develop, which would make it very difficult to conduct trade on any level beyond that of a village market, and throttle the flow of information. The English coinage had been reformed a century and a half earlier, under Elizabeth. Thomas Gresham is rightly or wrongly given credit for this. At any rate, he got rich and endowed Gresham's College in London, which became the clubhouse of the Royal Society. And after the Royal Society luminaries had achieved a foothold in London, and helped rebuild the place after the fire, many of them turned their attention to problems relating to money. John Locke and Isaac Newton debated how much silver should be in a pound sterling, and what the exchange rate ought to be between silver and gold. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 at a time when the economy was almost stopped because of a currency crisis, and a general re-coinage got under way at around the same time. You asked about France's credit rating. This had its ups and downs, which make for a pretty long and complicated story unto itself. I had to set at least a few limits on how much detail I was going to include about such things in this project, and so I've given a highly simplified, streamlined account of it here. The real crash of the old Lyon system occurred some years later, in the early 1700s. In The Baroque Cycle, I have depicted a major crash during the 1690s. This is not far off the mark since the French economy was profoundly screwed up during that period owing to war, famine, hoarding and messed-up coinage. But as always if you want the full story, you need to read some real history. The third volume of Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism trilogy covers this pretty well. WN: In the novel, Isaac Newton agrees to join the mint in hopes of recovering a legendary horde of special gold that had been scattered around the globe. Is that true? Stephenson: This is altogether fictitious. No one knows why he decided to work at the mint, but there is zero evidence that it had anything to do with recovering some stolen gold. No one can really know what was going on in Newton's head. In trying to get some understanding of why he was interested in alchemy, I've had to rely on scholars who know more about it than I do, like Richard Westfall and Piers Bursill-Hall. And if I state their views wrongly, I apologize in advance. But the gist of it seems to be that Newton was trying to achieve some specific goals with alchemy. Some of those goals might have been religious, but many were clearly scientific. As a scientist, he knew that he could only explain so much with the tools that he was using, and that to advance beyond that point he was going to need a different toolbox. He recognized that a lot of alchemy was nonsense, but he thought that by going about it in a systematic and rational way he'd be able to solve some scientific problems. He would have rejected the label of magician because it might have had dark connotations to him. WN: Any parallels between the economic crises in The Confusion and today's U.S. economy? Stephenson: That's not what I'm aiming for here. I'm not trying to say that this epoch was interesting because it was somehow analogous to the way things are today. I'm saying it was interesting in its own right. Part of what makes it interesting is just how different it was from today's world. This might sound funny after all that I've said above, but I hope that readers won't be conscious of any of the abstract themes that I've been talking about here. This book is meant to work as a yarn. I hope that readers will take it as such. If they also want to go think deep thoughts about currency fluctuations during the 1690s, then there's plenty of that in here for those who want to read it on that level. Everything I've talked about above took place in a world full of pirate ships, sword fights, seductive courtesans, picaroons and other staples of the bodice-ripping and swashbuckling genres, which I have not been above putting into these books. Neal Stephenson will serve as toastmaster for the Nebula Awards in Seattle this week, and will appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on April 25. -- ----------------- 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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Fornicalia Lawmaker Moves to Block Gmail
by Riad S. Wahby 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A California state senator on Monday said she was drafting legislation to block Google Inc.'s free e-mail service "Gmail" because it would place advertising in personal messages after searching them for key words. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040412/wr_nm/tech_google_dc_1 A private interaction between two consenting parties has absolutely nothing to do with the state, period. The bitch supporting this shit should be removed from office forthwith. -- Riad Wahby rsw(a)jfet.org MIT VI-2 M.Eng

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Voice Over IP On Wireless Mesh (fwd from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org)
by Eugen Leitl 15 Apr '04

15 Apr '04

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