March 2008 - 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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Jim Bell Looking for a Job Out of Jail in 2009
by John Young 01 Dec '08

01 Dec '08

[Envelope postmarked 29 September 2006.] Bell 26908-086 Federal Correction Institution P.O. Box 33 Terre Haute, IN 47808 INMATE IDENTIFICATION CONFIRMED Legal Mail/Special Mail Cryptome E-Magazine Attn John Young, Editor 251 West 89th STreet Suite 6E New York, NY 10024 [Letter] Jim Bell 26909-086 P.O. Box 33 TerreHaute, IN 47808 Dear Mr. Young, I am still in prison, and I will probably be so until Sept 2009. (You know I was railroaded.) I am very, very worried about my future. When I get out, I will have nearly no assets and I will need a job. Right now I'm "networking" to figure out how I will live under exceedingly trying circumstances. If you have any ideas, or contacts, or ? My degree is in chemistry (MIT 1980, Bachelors) and I have extensive knowledge of electronics. (Analog, digital, etc.) (Ham N7IJS) Thank you for your past efforts. Please contact my parents with any ideas. Sam & Lou Bell 7214 Corregidor Vancouver, WA 98664 360-696-4308 Please help if you can. Jim Bell

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Making a PRNG cryptographically secure
by Sarad AV 14 Apr '08

14 Apr '08

Hello, For Pseudo Random Numbers Generator based on linear recurrences, using SHA-1 over the PRNG's output appears to be the mostly common approach to make the output cryptographically secure. Are there any approaches that is not as computationally intensive as passing it over SHA-1/other block ciphers such that the output is cryptographically secure. Cryptographically secure as in the output sequence cannot be predicted to the left or right, given a substantially long subsequence of the output. Thank you, Sarad. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping

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announcing allmydata.org "Tahoe", the Least-Authority Filesystem, v1.0
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Apr '08

01 Apr '08

Begin forwarded message: From: zooko <zooko(a)zooko.com> Date: March 25, 2008 10:06:38 PM GMT-04:00 To: Cryptography <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> Subject: announcing allmydata.org "Tahoe", the Least-Authority Filesystem, v1.0 ANNOUNCING Allmydata.org "Tahoe", the Least-Authority Filesystem, v1.0 We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 of the "Tahoe" Least Authority Filesystem. The "Tahoe" Least Authority Filesystem is a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem. All of the source code is available under a Free Software, Open Source licence (or two). This filesystem is encrypted and distributed over multiple peers in such a way it continues to function even when some of the peers are unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious. A one-page explanation of the security and fault-tolerance properties that it offers is visible at: http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/about.html We believe that this version of Tahoe is stable enough to rely on as a permanent store of valuable data. The version 1 branch of Tahoe will be actively supported and maintained for the forseeable future, and future versions of Tahoe will retain the ability to read files and directories produced by Tahoe v1.0 for the forseeable future. This release of Tahoe will form the basis of the new consumer backup product from Allmydata, Inc. -- http://allmydata.com . This is the successor to Allmydata.org "Tahoe" Least Authority Filesystem v0.9, which was released March 13, 2008 [1]. Since v0.9 we've made the following changes: * Use an added secret for convergent encryption to better protect the confidentiality of immutable files, and remove the publically readable hash of the plaintext (ticket #365). * Add a "mkdir-p" feature to the WAPI (ticket #357). * Many updates to the Windows installer and Windows filesystem integration. Tahoe v1.0 produces files which can't be read by older versions of Tahoe, although files produced by Tahoe >= 0.8 can be read by Tahoe 1.0. The reason that older versions of Tahoe can't read files produced by Tahoe 1.0 is that those older versions require the file to come with a publically-readable hash of the plaintext, but exposing such a hash is a confidentiality leak, so Tahoe 1.0 does not do it. WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? With Tahoe, you can distribute your filesystem across a set of computers, such that if some of the computers fail or turn out to be malicious, the filesystem continues to work from the remaining computers. You can also share your files with other users, using a strongly encrypted, capability-based access control scheme. Because this software is the product of less than a year and a half of active development, we do not categorically recommend it for the storage of data which is extremely confidential or precious. However, we believe that the combination of erasure coding, strong encryption, and careful engineering makes the use of this software a much safer alternative than common alternatives, such as RAID, or traditional backup onto a remote server, removable drive, or tape. This software comes with extensive unit tests [2], and there are no known security flaws which would compromise confidentiality or data integrity. (For all currently known security issues please see the Security web page: [3].) This release of Tahoe is suitable for the "friendnet" use case [4] -- it is easy to create a filesystem spread over the computers of you and your friends so that you can share files and disk space with one another. LICENCE You may use this package under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or, at your option, any later version. See the file "COPYING.GPL" for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. You may use this package under the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1.0. The Transitive Grace Period Public Licence says that you may distribute proprietary derived works of Tahoe without releasing the source code of that derived work for up to twelve months, after which time you are obligated to release the source code of the derived work under the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence. See the file "COPYING.TGPPL.html" for the terms of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1.0. (You may choose to use this package under the terms of either licence, at your option.) INSTALLATION Tahoe works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Cygwin, and Solaris. For installation instructions please see "docs/install.html" [5]. HACKING AND COMMUNITY Please join us on the mailing list [6] to discuss uses of Tahoe. Patches that extend and improve Tahoe are gratefully accepted -- the RoadMap page [7] shows the next improvements that we plan to make and CREDITS [8] lists the names of people who've contributed to the project. The wiki Dev page [9] contains resources for hackers. SPONSORSHIP Tahoe is sponsored by Allmydata, Inc. [10], a provider of consumer backup services. Allmydata, Inc. contributes hardware, software, ideas, bug reports, suggestions, demands, and money (employing several allmydata.org Tahoe hackers and instructing them to spend part of their work time on this free-software project). We are eternally grateful! Zooko O'Whielacronx on behalf of the allmydata.org team March 25, 2008 San Francisco, California, USA [1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/relnotes.txt?rev=2315 [2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev [3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Security [4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/UseCases [5] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html [6] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev [7] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/roadmap [8] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/CREDITS?rev=2345 [9] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev [10] http://allmydata.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com

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Fwd: [gsc] eBay Sick of Whole "Internet" Thing
by R.A. Hettinga 01 Apr '08

01 Apr '08

Begin forwarded message: From: "fm1234" <gsc(a)fm1234.cotse.net> Date: March 25, 2008 6:37:45 PM GMT-04:00 To: gold-silver-crypto(a)rayservers.com Subject: [gsc] eBay Sick of Whole "Internet" Thing More hilarity from the leaders in online commerce: eBay has banned the sale of digital goods in auction format. This includes _anything_ that can be digitally delivered, from ebooks to audio to websites and domains to transcriptions etc. "It's back to the post office for you, motherfuckers! Welcome to Web 3.0 -- It's like Web 2.0, with Stamps!" Not entirely a ban: you can list them in the classified section, which is a fixed $10 for a fixed 30 days at a fixed price (ie. utterly without value to anyone for any reason.) Some points from John Thornhill, probably the highest volume seller of digital books on eBay: http://planetsmsblog.com/digital-items-banned-on-ebay/ Like other powersellers who were unfazed by the last round of eBay/PP changes, John sees no point to worrying about the changes. But that's because every move eBay has made in the last few months have evidenced a desire to circle the wagons around its shrinking auction revenue*, by raising the barrier to entry for new and/or small participants. Wonder how long they can sustain such practices? I also wonder if this is a precursor to PayPal banning payments for digital goods and services. PP has followed most of the major eBay changes with some new policy related to the eB change. It would be interesting to see if PP has decided they just don't want to be involved with this new fangled "digital commerce" nonsense all the young punks are going on about. Frank /*shrinking as a % of profits, according to eBay's financials. I think the actual net number is still up and up and up, but that eBay obviously is no longer working on pushing the auction thing as its business model. They just can't cut it off any more than eg. Ford Motor Company could quit making cars, no matter how much they lose on cars relative to their other divisions. -- "When ignorance reigns in society and disorder in the minds of men, laws are multplied, legislation is expected to do everything, and each fresh law being a fresh miscalculation, men are continually led to demand from it what can proceed only from themselves, from their own education and their own morality." --Dalloy

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consolidate debts
by Anthony Walker 31 Mar '08

31 Mar '08

Still Juggling Those Credit Cards? Apply Online & Get Out Of Debt! http://www.freefromdebtfd.com.cn

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