July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[Politech] Texas government targets peer-to-peer software use on state computers [ip]
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Excerpt: "The Department of Information Resources shall develop a statewide policy for use by each state agency, department, board, and commission which prohibits unauthorized or illegal use of peer-to-peer software programs." -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Texas peer to peer policy Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2006 09:54:01 -0500 From: James Henson <jhenson(a)mail.la.utexas.edu> To: 'Declan McCullagh' <declan(a)well.com> Declan - Maybe of some interest to Politechers. http://www.governor.state.tx.us/divisions/press/exorders/rp58 Best - Jim Henson James Henson, Ph.D. Executive Producer, Texas Politics 512.471-0090 http://texaspolitics.laits.utexas.edu _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[p2p-hackers] p2p/mesh economies: observations/speculations + an attempt to define some useful terms
by Jon Cox 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dear p2p-hackers, After thinking about the similarities between the commons issues faced by the PaulGardner-Stephen's Serval project & Zooko's Tahoe LAFS, I was motivated try (yet again!) to refine my understanding of currency systems, barter and money. I'd like some help! These concepts seem to have direct bearing on problems that arise when bootstrapping new users into a p2p/mesh system, trust, credit, fairness protocols & so on, yet I lack a standard terminology for talking about them in a precise way. First, I'd like to share a speculation: My guess is that it would be best if Tahoe LAFS computed all credits and debits in terms of its native "commodity currencies" (this term is defined below) like storage, availability, bandwidth, latency, and priority, and then possibly mapped these things to other currencies via forward contracts in a fairly pluggable manner. While Bitcoins might be interesting as one of several possible side-channels to establish "credit" for the system's own native currencies when dealing with non-boostrapped strangers, or for those who would otherwise hit their "debt ceiling", I'm hoping that friends could still offer credits for "native" commodities denominated as such *directly*, without needing to think about a fluctuating 3rd-party / non-native currency abstraction. That said, here's my first shot at defining a few terms, along with a note to the Serval project that may be of more general interest: o Benefit That which produces a net increase in some desired state of being. o Intrinsic value Non-bartered perceived benefit. o Value Optimally bartered perceived benefit. o Money The mathematical abstraction of value Note: this can be a positive or negative quantity. o Currency The concrete manifestation of money. Note: currency always has a non-negative value. Example: physical dollars & coins. o Pure liability Something of negative value that isn't the result of owing anybody something. Example: an inadequate reputation o Debt A liability resulting from owing something of positive value to another party. o Pure asset Positive value that isn't the result of someone owing you. Example: good health. o Credit A liability that another party owes to you and recognizes. o Commodity currency Some fungible good or service that is easy measurable and comparable, transferable and transportable, sufficiently divisible and durable, widely bartered with known rates of exchange, and derives its value from its intrinsic usefulness rather than its role as a currency or as an item of speculation predicated on the existence of a greater fool. Example: cigarettes in a POW camp. o Native commodity currency A commodity currency whose production and consumption are intrinsic to the economy itself. Example: Carpool rides in a ride-sharing network. o Collectible currency Like a commodity currency, except that its value comes from the mutual speculation of those who create demand for it, rather than its intrinsic worth to any end user. Example 1: Bitcoin is a perfect example of a collectible currency because its intrinsic worth is exactly zero (you can't even use them to line the bottom of a bird cage). Example 2: Gold and silver are best thought of as being somewhere between commodity and collectible currencies; however, the volatility of silver prices relative to its supply and industrial demand shows it's more on the speculation- driven "collectible" side if things. o Fiat obligation currency Like a collectible currency, except that every unit created represents the transfer of value from someone who has actually produced a good or service of non-zero intrinsic worth to a person or institution that has offered nothing in exchange for it but the currency itself. Crucially, the production of fiat obligation currency is restricted by law, and demand for it is created by requiring its use. Hence, every unit represents a claim by its producer to simply extract things of actual value from those who cannot create the currency themselves, and yet are bound to use it by law or necessity. Example: The deceptively named "Fed", a group of privately owned for-profit banks, create legal tender (US dollars) out of thin air, then "exchange" them for US Treasury for T-bills. The T-bills have real value in that they represent fractional ownership of the US government's ability to extract goods and services from its own citizens, and from the citizens of foreign countries. To do this at home, it puses the IRS, federal marshals, and the legal system. Abroad, it uses military and/or political power to enforce its will directly, or it can use intermediaries in its thrall, such as the IMF, The World Bank, various resource-rich or strategic client governments, and so-called "Coalitions of the Willing". Hence, every dollar represents the assertion of a one-sided obligation; they aren't coupons for anything of intrinsic value that the Fed used to barter with the US Treasury in exchange for a fraction of the tribute our government is able to demand. Instead, they are more like souvenirs commemorating an outright confiscation of it that has already taken place. The obscene material wealth and power held by those happy few who are on the receiving end of this arrangement is the direct result of the compulsory exchange of intrinsically valuable goods and services for inherently valueless slips of paper decorated with stars, eagles, and the faces of dead presidents. o Fiat commonwealth currency Like a fiat obligation currency, except that the value extracted in the process of its creation goes to the community's own public fund, rather than being siphoned off by a private aristocracy. Example (I think): Treasury-issued "United States Notes". ----------------------------------------------------------------- Here are some comments I made to the Serval project recently. I'd love to get some feedback on them. Hopefully, the ideas I'm tossing around are of wide enough applicability to merit general interest and/or or an informed & corrective critique ----------------------------------------------------------------- Serval already has at least three commodities with universal value, and native non-speculative demand: bandwidth, latency, and priority. Using these in combination with a system of reputation and credit as a "commodity currency" makes a lot more sense than dragging in a collectible currency. Assuming nodes in a Serval mesh are free to associate in different virtual communities of reputation (as humans do in real life), all a community needs to do is restrict mesh access ("the commons") in ways it sees fit to discourage behavior it dislikes, or grant special credit for positive actions (eg: donating bandwidth, particularly in times of shortage). It seems as though you could even model the policies of Serval "community" as an autonomous System (AS) on the Internet, and then go on to think about communities honoring each other's credits with bandwidth, latency, and priority as parameters like a AS-AS forex. This would keep every community free from central domination by other groups, yet open to engage in mutually beneficial data transfers. It seems likely that a few huge communities would naturally arise, along with lots of little ones. Users might like to have different policies for each of them, as different levels of generosity (or blind trust) might be appropriate; one might have reputations in personal groups, affinity, regional/global, etc. It seems like the core requirement is the ability to assign a policy profile to a group ID, and the ability to have more than one. If someone with a sufficiently large balance and community reputation never gets bumped by somebody who might be free-riding or has no reputation, it makes sense to build a positive and credible "accounts receivable" bandwidth balance. Someone could always cheat you with a series of bogus IDs, if doing so entails them being second-class citizens the entire time, there isn't much incentive. I think it's good to place the main focus on first degree contacts, as has been done with great success in hawala networks. The hawala system is well known for its efficiency and real-world security, even over wide geographical areas lacking any common authority sanctioned to use powers of state (such as garnishment) in order to enforce contracts. Reputation-based access to the commons can go a long way to regulate behavior. Diamond traders that operate via handshake agreements are another nice example of regulation by community restriction. More generally, the principles and practices of Islamic banking look like they're worthy of serious study. I've only begun to explore this topic, but the prohibition against outright interest seems to have generated a fascinating array of partnership-oriented contracts and non-leveraged financial relationships -- all with a bare minimum of bookkeeping. If an adversary's goal is to hunt down all copies of a message and destroy it, another consideration emerges: perservering ignorance. Example: Julian Assange has no idea how to reclaim all copies of insurance.aes256; therefore, he cannot be forced to help anybody else do so either, even under the threat of torture. Had a recording been made of every person who downloaded the file, then thugs could go after these people too, even if they number in the tens of thousands. However, what if these folks placed the same data on the net in a way that couldn't be detected, and was then downloaded by yet another set of people that's unknown to the first group. The same logic applies to the release of the key to unlock the encrypted data. You probably want some sort of anonymous quorum where the various members don't actually know all the other members, but share an ability to look at a common "outer envelope" wrapping a sig and an inner blob. The disconnected cliques have these blob-bearing coconuts floating between them, yet the inner blob part within the coconut cannot be cracked solo by any one clique; however portions of the key to crack it can be posted publicly by them (in any form: wrapped by the group envelope or not, steganographically or not, signed or not, and so on). Cheers, -Jon _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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FC: FBI investigates bonsaikitten.com, sends subpoena to MIT
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

************* Background on depictions-of-animal-mutilation law: http://www.politechbot.com/p-00574.html http://www.politechbot.com/p-00667.html Recap of story prior to FBI investigation: http://www.cruel.com/sub/bonsai.shtml ************* http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41733,00.html FBI Goes After Bonsaikitten.com by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 10:10 a.m. Feb. 9, 2001 PST WASHINGTON -- A website devoted to squishing kittens into Mason jars is one of two things: A trenchant parody designed to provoke, or a nefarious kitty-mutilation scheme that must be stopped, and probably outlawed. Count the FBI among the many visitors to bonsaikitten.com who are anything but amused at the descriptions of how to use muscle relaxant, feeding tubes and Klein bottles to shape a perfect Bonsai Cat. FBI agents in the Boston field office have launched an investigation into the site. They also have served MIT with a grand jury subpoena asking for "any and all subscriber information" about the site, which was initially hosted in a campus dormitory but has since moved to a commercial provider. MIT said in a letter to bonsaikitten.com's pseudonymous webmaster, a graduate student using the alias Dr. Michael Wong Chang, that it will wait until Sunday to turn over records that would identify him by name. "I was surprised," Chang said. "I really thought that the FBI had better things to do. That's your tax dollars at work." Bonsaikitten.com is, of course, a joke devised by prankster MIT students -- who else would talk about "rectilinear kittens?" -- to provoke owners of kittens, an adorably fuzzy topic that's usually beyond parody. Bonsaikitten.com offers to sell visitors a custom-shaped kitten -- the site says "typical wait time for a fully shaped Bonsai Kitten is 3 to 4 months" -- but the site does not list prices or a mailing address for where to send money orders. It does, however, occasionally receive requests for more information. It also has sparked tens of thousands of hate-mail messages, anti-Bonsai Kitten groups on Yahoo, and even a blistering denunciation from the venerable Humane Society of the United States. For the site's fans, watching e-mail nastygrams arrive has become a kind of spectator sport: There's even a mailing list that lets bonsaikitten.com aficionados view any mail sent to the site's webmaster. A typical message: "This site is horrible! You should go in a mental hospital! You son of a bitch! I'll do my best to shut down this site and your disgusting hobby!" [...] In December 1999, President Clinton signed a law that makes it a federal felony to possess "a depiction of animal cruelty" with the intent to distribute across state lines -- such as on the Internet. During a floor debate, Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.) claimed that "sick criminals are taking advantage of the loopholes in the local law and the lack of federal law on animal cruelty videos." The law, which observers at the time said probably violated the First Amendment, only applies to images, videos, and sound recordings that are distributed "for commercial gain" -- and bonsaikitten.com's tongue-in-cheek descriptions of mail-order cats in bottles appears to have given the FBI sufficient justification for an investigation. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----

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[x-risk] Global Terrorism Database
by Hughes, James J. 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I wonder what kind of expert systems extrapolation could be done on this database? - J. http://www.start.umd.edu/data/gtd/ Global Terrorism Database Overview Global Terrorism Database (GTD)The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world since 1970 (currently updated through 2004). Unlike many other event databases, the GTD includes systematic data on international as well as domestic terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes almost 80,000 cases. For each GTD incident, information is available on the date and location of the incident, the weapons used and nature of the target, the number of casualties, and -- when identifiable -- the identity of the perpetrator. The START Center is making the GTD available to government policy makers and academics in an effort to increase understanding of terrorist violence so that it can be more readily defeated. Characteristics of the GTD * Contains information on over 80,000 terrorist attacks * The main types of information found in the GTD are items that you would expect to find in a well written newspaper story about a terrorist attack: the type of attack, the number of persons killed, the group claiming responsibility, the date of the event and so on * The GTD is currently the most comprehensive unclassified data base on terrorist events in the world * It includes information on more than 27,000 bombings, 13,000 assassinations, and 2,800 kidnappings * The original data include information on over 45 variables; the new data include over 120 variables * More than 75 data collectors with expertise in six language groups are currently engaged in collecting GTD data * Data collection is supervised by an advisory panel of 12 terrorism research experts * Over 2,000,000 news articles and 25,000 new sources were reviewed to collect GTD from 1998 to 2004 alone * The goal of START is to make all GTD data available to government employees immediately and to release all data to researchers approximately one year after the end of data collection * The original GTD data base (1970-1997) is available to researchers through the Inter University Consortium for Political and Social Research (www.icpsr.umich.edu) The GTD Story The Global Terrorism Database -- or GTD -- began in 2001 when researchers at the University of Maryland obtained a large database originally collected by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services, a relative of the famous Irish detective agency. >From 1970 to 1997, Pinkerton trained researchers -- mostly retired Air Force personnel -- to identify and record terrorism incidents from wire services, government reports, and major international newspapers. With funding from the National Institute of Justice, the Maryland team finished computerizing the original Pinkerton data in December 2005, making corrections and adding additional information wherever possible. In April 2006, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), working with the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), received additional funding from the Human Factors Division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to extend the GTD beyond 1997. By June 2007 data collection was completed through 2004. During the next year the new data will be systematically integrated with the original data to form a single source of information on terrorist attacks, covering the entire period 1970 to 2007. _______________________________________________ existential mailing list existential(a)transhumanism.org http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/existential ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Experiences with "advanced" network taps.
by Darren Bolding 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

We are planning on purchasing some network taps for a couple of locations in our network, and we expect to make significantly greater use of them in the next year or two. Something that is new since I last investigated taps (it has been a while) is that many of them now allow for functionality I would typically think of as far outside what a simple tap does. For example: Selective forwarding of packets based on MAC address, TCP/UDP port, IP address range etc. Selective forwarding/load balancing based on flow, so that you can distribute traffic across a cluster of devices (e.g. IDS or netflow probes) Ability to insert a device (firewall, IDS, etc) into the network flow and via software configuration bypass traffic around the device- e.g. able to quickly drop a device out of the network path. - Some have the ability to send network probes, or monitor traffic downstream of an inline device so they can automatically take the device out of line if it fails to pass traffic. - Some can filter which traffic goes through the inline device and merge it back with the traffic that was not sent to the inline device for downstream consumption. Some can be connected and automatically be managed as if one device, allowing monitor and replication ports to be used across the stack/mesh of devices. All of this is very interesting. Of course these taps cost more than your basic dumb tap. More interestingly to me is that these taps are no longer dumb, and that makes them a bit of a riskier proposition. In evaluating some we have run into issues ranging from misconfiguration/user error to what appear to be crashes (with associated loss of forwarding). I'm wondering if anyone has had significant experience deploying these more advanced taps, whether it was good or bad, general comments you might like to share regarding them, and whether you would recommend particular vendors. If people reply off-list, I will make a point of summarizing back if I get any feedback. Thanks! --D -- -- Darren Bolding -- -- darren(a)bolding.org -- ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Experiences with "advanced" network taps.
by Darren Bolding 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

We are planning on purchasing some network taps for a couple of locations in our network, and we expect to make significantly greater use of them in the next year or two. Something that is new since I last investigated taps (it has been a while) is that many of them now allow for functionality I would typically think of as far outside what a simple tap does. For example: Selective forwarding of packets based on MAC address, TCP/UDP port, IP address range etc. Selective forwarding/load balancing based on flow, so that you can distribute traffic across a cluster of devices (e.g. IDS or netflow probes) Ability to insert a device (firewall, IDS, etc) into the network flow and via software configuration bypass traffic around the device- e.g. able to quickly drop a device out of the network path. - Some have the ability to send network probes, or monitor traffic downstream of an inline device so they can automatically take the device out of line if it fails to pass traffic. - Some can filter which traffic goes through the inline device and merge it back with the traffic that was not sent to the inline device for downstream consumption. Some can be connected and automatically be managed as if one device, allowing monitor and replication ports to be used across the stack/mesh of devices. All of this is very interesting. Of course these taps cost more than your basic dumb tap. More interestingly to me is that these taps are no longer dumb, and that makes them a bit of a riskier proposition. In evaluating some we have run into issues ranging from misconfiguration/user error to what appear to be crashes (with associated loss of forwarding). I'm wondering if anyone has had significant experience deploying these more advanced taps, whether it was good or bad, general comments you might like to share regarding them, and whether you would recommend particular vendors. If people reply off-list, I will make a point of summarizing back if I get any feedback. Thanks! --D -- -- Darren Bolding -- -- darren(a)bolding.org -- ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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FC: FBI investigates bonsaikitten.com, sends subpoena to MIT
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

************* Background on depictions-of-animal-mutilation law: http://www.politechbot.com/p-00574.html http://www.politechbot.com/p-00667.html Recap of story prior to FBI investigation: http://www.cruel.com/sub/bonsai.shtml ************* http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41733,00.html FBI Goes After Bonsaikitten.com by Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 10:10 a.m. Feb. 9, 2001 PST WASHINGTON -- A website devoted to squishing kittens into Mason jars is one of two things: A trenchant parody designed to provoke, or a nefarious kitty-mutilation scheme that must be stopped, and probably outlawed. Count the FBI among the many visitors to bonsaikitten.com who are anything but amused at the descriptions of how to use muscle relaxant, feeding tubes and Klein bottles to shape a perfect Bonsai Cat. FBI agents in the Boston field office have launched an investigation into the site. They also have served MIT with a grand jury subpoena asking for "any and all subscriber information" about the site, which was initially hosted in a campus dormitory but has since moved to a commercial provider. MIT said in a letter to bonsaikitten.com's pseudonymous webmaster, a graduate student using the alias Dr. Michael Wong Chang, that it will wait until Sunday to turn over records that would identify him by name. "I was surprised," Chang said. "I really thought that the FBI had better things to do. That's your tax dollars at work." Bonsaikitten.com is, of course, a joke devised by prankster MIT students -- who else would talk about "rectilinear kittens?" -- to provoke owners of kittens, an adorably fuzzy topic that's usually beyond parody. Bonsaikitten.com offers to sell visitors a custom-shaped kitten -- the site says "typical wait time for a fully shaped Bonsai Kitten is 3 to 4 months" -- but the site does not list prices or a mailing address for where to send money orders. It does, however, occasionally receive requests for more information. It also has sparked tens of thousands of hate-mail messages, anti-Bonsai Kitten groups on Yahoo, and even a blistering denunciation from the venerable Humane Society of the United States. For the site's fans, watching e-mail nastygrams arrive has become a kind of spectator sport: There's even a mailing list that lets bonsaikitten.com aficionados view any mail sent to the site's webmaster. A typical message: "This site is horrible! You should go in a mental hospital! You son of a bitch! I'll do my best to shut down this site and your disgusting hobby!" [...] In December 1999, President Clinton signed a law that makes it a federal felony to possess "a depiction of animal cruelty" with the intent to distribute across state lines -- such as on the Internet. During a floor debate, Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.) claimed that "sick criminals are taking advantage of the loopholes in the local law and the lack of federal law on animal cruelty videos." The law, which observers at the time said probably violated the First Amendment, only applies to images, videos, and sound recordings that are distributed "for commercial gain" -- and bonsaikitten.com's tongue-in-cheek descriptions of mail-order cats in bottles appears to have given the FBI sufficient justification for an investigation. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----

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[x-risk] Global Terrorism Database
by Hughes, James J. 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I wonder what kind of expert systems extrapolation could be done on this database? - J. http://www.start.umd.edu/data/gtd/ Global Terrorism Database Overview Global Terrorism Database (GTD)The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world since 1970 (currently updated through 2004). Unlike many other event databases, the GTD includes systematic data on international as well as domestic terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes almost 80,000 cases. For each GTD incident, information is available on the date and location of the incident, the weapons used and nature of the target, the number of casualties, and -- when identifiable -- the identity of the perpetrator. The START Center is making the GTD available to government policy makers and academics in an effort to increase understanding of terrorist violence so that it can be more readily defeated. Characteristics of the GTD * Contains information on over 80,000 terrorist attacks * The main types of information found in the GTD are items that you would expect to find in a well written newspaper story about a terrorist attack: the type of attack, the number of persons killed, the group claiming responsibility, the date of the event and so on * The GTD is currently the most comprehensive unclassified data base on terrorist events in the world * It includes information on more than 27,000 bombings, 13,000 assassinations, and 2,800 kidnappings * The original data include information on over 45 variables; the new data include over 120 variables * More than 75 data collectors with expertise in six language groups are currently engaged in collecting GTD data * Data collection is supervised by an advisory panel of 12 terrorism research experts * Over 2,000,000 news articles and 25,000 new sources were reviewed to collect GTD from 1998 to 2004 alone * The goal of START is to make all GTD data available to government employees immediately and to release all data to researchers approximately one year after the end of data collection * The original GTD data base (1970-1997) is available to researchers through the Inter University Consortium for Political and Social Research (www.icpsr.umich.edu) The GTD Story The Global Terrorism Database -- or GTD -- began in 2001 when researchers at the University of Maryland obtained a large database originally collected by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services, a relative of the famous Irish detective agency. >From 1970 to 1997, Pinkerton trained researchers -- mostly retired Air Force personnel -- to identify and record terrorism incidents from wire services, government reports, and major international newspapers. With funding from the National Institute of Justice, the Maryland team finished computerizing the original Pinkerton data in December 2005, making corrections and adding additional information wherever possible. In April 2006, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), working with the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), received additional funding from the Human Factors Division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to extend the GTD beyond 1997. By June 2007 data collection was completed through 2004. During the next year the new data will be systematically integrated with the original data to form a single source of information on terrorist attacks, covering the entire period 1970 to 2007. _______________________________________________ existential mailing list existential(a)transhumanism.org http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/existential ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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None
by John F. McMullen 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<declan(a)well.com>, Peter Neumann <neumann(a)csl.sri.com> Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Cybersecurity: they just don't get it... FYI ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: wes_morgan(a)US.IBM.COM To: johnmacsgroup(a)yahoogroups.com Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Cybersecurity: they just don't get it... I'm watching CNN's Headline News, and they run a story on security preparations for this week's Democratic Convention in Boston. They go on, at great length, about the extensive network of cameras--approximately 75 of them, scattered around various Federal buildings and convention sites--and make it a point to illustrate how the security force, with their wireless networks and handheld devices, can grab the feed from any of these cameras at the tap of a stylus. So, they show one such device - with it's 802.11b card clearly identifiable - and show another agent viewing a webcam of the Boston Harbor shoreline - with the URL of the hosting site clearly readable. When talking about the cameras, they show several different cameras on different buildings, some of which seem fairly unusual in their architecture. I now know that they're using 802.11b, and I know the name at least one system handling the webcam feeds, and (with a bit of reconaissance) I can probably determine the position of at least one camera. So much for cybersecurity; I can't believe that the Feds even let that stuff on the air, much less that they did so without obfuscating critical information. *sigh* What were they thinking? --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> "When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra "Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C. Clarke "You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP) John F. McMullen johnmac(a)acm.org johnmac(a)computer.org johnmac(a)m-net.arbornet.org johnmac(a)tmail.com johnmac(a)panix.com johnmac(a)echonyc.com jmcmullen(a)monroecollege.edu johnmac(a)alumni.iona.edu ICQ: 4368412 Skype, AIM & Yahoo Messenger: johnmac13 http://www.westnet.com/~observer ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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[IP] Cybersecurity: they just don't get it...
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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