August 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 !!!!

3 5

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

2 1

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

5 22

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

6 19

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.

2 15

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

4 6

Codebreaker Makes $2.8B in a Year
by John Young 11 Oct '08

11 Oct '08

For Hettinga's nose coke blowing about the virtues of coding: New York Times reports today: "James H. Simons, a mathematician and former Defense Department code breaker who uses complex computer models to trade, earned $2.8 billion. His flagship Medallion fund returned 73 percent." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16wall.html What could NSA do in the market with its acres of computers and thousands of cryptologists? To be sure, Simons might just be stealing data in the NSA way and covering it up with the tall tale. Financial cryptography is not be trusted.

4 6

Tromboning: Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.
by R.A. Hettinga 12 Sep '08

12 Sep '08

"Tromboning". That's a word I've been looking for. Tromboning is what happens when I send packets between the Cable & Wireless DSL line and the Caribbean Cable cablemodem on the other side of the living room in Seafeathers Bay -- via New York (and Washington), and/or Miami (and Washington), and/or Atlanta (and Washington), not to mention Washington. Too bad little countries like Anguilla don't permit third-party peering between competing internet service providers. After all, that kind of latency is just... unacceptable. ;-) A geodesic internetwork sees um, latency, as damage, &c. Evidently not just anyone can stick two links together using one box and three ethernet cards, or whatever, or the Internet Gets Broken. Geeze, to paraphrase Grace Slick, I wish I knew BGP. (Though, like Grace was at the time, I'm too burned-out a dog these days to learn those new tricks. Easier to doze off on the veranda watching the weather go by.) Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/business/30pipes.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&par tner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print > New York Times August 30, 2008 Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S. By JOHN MARKOFF SAN FRANCISCO The era of the American Internet is ending. Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the networks first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States. Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control. And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence and conceivably military consequences. American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge, Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us. Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications. Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States. Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S., said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches. But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. Its no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs, said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. You wouldnt want someone owning your roads either. Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers. This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local I.S.P.s but instead was routed through European operators. The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian government Web sites during the countrys fighting with Russia. Most of Georgias access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September. Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they dont have to route through the U.S. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, We discovered the Internet, but we couldnt keep it a secret. While the United States carried 70 percent of the worlds Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent. Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business. That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers. The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies. Whether its a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand, said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Googles Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasnt helpful. International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly. While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally not on the Internets main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches, routers and the wires into a house. As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance impossible. Were probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder, said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. Weve given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace, he said. Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level playing field both economically and politically. This is one of many dimensions on which well have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours, said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big player, but not in control. China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the worlds Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization. By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent. The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI. Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet. The U.S. telecommunications firms havent invested, said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. The rest of the world has caught up. I dont see the AT&Ts and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity.

6 9

Help Stop Premature Ejaculation!
by Joesph Hobbs 31 Aug '08

31 Aug '08

Get your free bottles today, and change your life - why wait? Size DOES matter, and unfortunately, many traditional methods to increase size simply DON'T work, and are very inconvenient. http://baddown.com/

1 0

Kremlin critic shot in Ingushetia
by R.A. Hettinga 31 Aug '08

31 Aug '08

This guy didn't read enough Thomas Paine. Cheers, RAH ---------- <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/europe/7590719.stm> BBC NEWS / EUROPE 19:37 GMT, Sunday, 31 August 2008 20:37 UK Kremlin critic shot in Ingushetia The owner of an internet site critical of the Russian authorities in the volatile region of Ingushetia has been shot dead in police custody. Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the ingushetiya.ru site, was a vocal critic of the region's administration. The Russian prosecutor's office said an investigation into the death had been launched, Russia media report. A post on Yevloyev's site says he was detained by police after landing at the airport of the main town, Nazran. The website owner was taken to hospital but died from his injuries. Reports quoting local police said Yevloyev had tried to seize a policeman's gun when he was being led to a vehicle. A shot was fired and Yevloyev was injured in the head. Fierce critic Yevloyev was a thorn in the side of Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB general. His website reported on alleged Russian security force brutality in Ingushetia, an impoverished province of some half a million people, mostly Muslims, which is now more turbulent than neighbouring Chechnya. President Zyazikov had been on the same flight as Yevloyev. Ingushetia borders Chechnya and has suffered from overflowing unrest. There is a low-level insurgency, with regular small-scale ambushes against police and soldiers. In June 2008, the Human Rights Watch group accused Russian security forces there of carrying out widespread human rights abuses. HRW said it had documented dozens of arbitrary detentions, disappearances, acts of torture and extra-judicial executions.

1 0