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Cypherpunk on IRC
by Jan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Greetings... So where are you people on IRC? it would be nice to talk more directly bout crypto ideas.... Jan

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No Subject
by haxor_401＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What is the command to recieve this list in DIGEST form.? _____________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]

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One last time
by StanSqncrs＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sorry about buggin' you guys so much on this, but I think I have a final piece of the puzzle together. It's amazing how well all the pieces fit. I think now the big task is to keep it on-line (and promotion - spread the word!). If you weren't convinced before, this should do it. Check it out again, Stan, http://members.aol.com/whtsametau/camel/index.htm

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SweatHog Log -- SPACE ALIENS HIDE MY DRUGS!!!
by Linda Reed--PCC West Campus CSC 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

SweatHog Log -- SPACE ALIENS HIDE M DRUGS!!! --------------------------------------------- [Austin Nutly News--LoneBeerState]IT WAS THE tURKEbASTE of times, it was the LiverWurst of times... Bob Wills Beer and Lone Star Music. Captain BeefJerky and the Lost Bozo Band opening for Jerry Jeff Garcia and the DreadFul Drunks at the Split Lip Saloon. Knocking back shots of Townsend's Treacherous Treat at Amaretto World HindQuarters. Mom Nelson declaring C.J. Parker to be her illegitimately adopted son, making him a half-nelson and making him live in the basement of the outhouse behind Willie's Fool Hall. A million degrees in the shade and TruthMongrel sitting in the truck in the parking lot of the HEB Central Market Cafe while Toto was inside drinking cold beer and asking the barmaid what type of wine goes with TruckRoasted PuppyDog. Drinking West Texas ChugWater... Austin CypherPunks gathered around a couple of tables in the beer garden, the BigRedBook unflapping in the breeze and serving as a standard to rally together a handful of anarchist frontiers(wo)men to prepare to stand as the lone outpost against the mighty Digital Army of Santa AnnaChrist in his War Against The Digitally United States of Terra. JimBob Choate drawing a line in the sand... Most of the CypherPunks crossed that line--the bar was on the other side of it--but they came back. A strange, deranged desperado appearing out of nowhere to announce that someone had nuked DC, and he wanted to ask them a few questions, then sitting down and babbling in a nonsensical manner in order to distract their attention while he played footsie with the blonde sitting across from him, until she finally left, in disgust. WeBeastMaster JimBob waiting until only the StewedGuy and the Disparate Stranger were left before passing along the SecretMessageThatHadNoMeaning from Declan McCullagh. The Dissipating Strangler fading into the mist with a bottle of red wine tucked under his arm. Lieutenant JimBob Choate, Army of Dog-Digital Division & MeatSpace Multiplication, feeling a shiver go down his spine as he walked slowly to his vehicle, heard a TruthMongrel howling in the distance, and realized that 'red wine' goes with TruckRoasted PuppyDog.] MenInTheShadows unable to find the second VirtualNuclear Device claimed to have been planted in a pubic building eleven KILLometers from MongerItaVille--wondering if their first mistake hadn't been to threaten a six-year old child and his mother with deportation from Canada if they continued to involve themselves in the battle for Medicare in Saskatchewan. For almost a half-century thereafter, the child had been a thorn in their side, seemingly breaking every rule in the book, violating everything that anal-retentive WhiteCanadianImmigrants held sacred as they strove to promote the Rule of (White)Law in the Great White Snort. Despite their many failed attempts to imprison him, ususally succeeding only in harrassing him and causing him great personal loss and expense, they had never before had to fear for their own lives and the safety of their families, but now all that had changed... An elite, secretive cabal of Mounties gathered around a table reviewing the security implications of a hidden file being found on their computer system which had the same name as the file on the floppy disk left at the site of the first VirtualNuclear Device found in a public building eleven KILLometers from MongerItaVille. Silence in the room as each of them heard, in their own mind, the screams of the Author as they resounded through the Analogue Reality of his home in Bienfait, through the Digital Reality of MongerItaVille, and through the MeatSpace DigiZeros on a dozen or more Canadian Government computer systems. "OU WANT TO FUCK WITH *CHILDREN*? OU WANT TO STEAL M NEPHEWS' COMPUTERS? OU WANT TO FILE FALSE CHARGES ON M NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE LITTLE GLUE-SNIFFER, OU NAZI RATFUCKERS? "THE *MEATSPACE* REVOLUTION IS *NOW*!!!!" The Author may be bluffing, of course, but could they really afford to take that chance? HeOrShe had offered them "pole position" on receiving the key that the BackDoor Boogie (TM) was being played in to provide a soundtrack to the RCMP Musical Ride taking place on Trojan Horses ridden by DigitalAnarchists throughout Canadian Government computer systems. The offer was simple enough...return all of the stolen computers to the possession of Human Gus-Peter and the RCMP would get the checkered flag in the race against finding their digital security breach...if there, in fact, *was* one... The 'clues' of its existence were rather vague, though startling, and they could conceivably be the result of collusion on a part of the Author's widespread Inner Circle, which undoubtedly included more than a few people with access to secure Canadian Government computer systems. Of course, the phrase 'pole position' implied that there were others in the race who the Author could bless with the checkered flag if they were the first to provide Human Gus-Peter with a state-of-the-art portable multi-media computer such as the one that had been stolen from the Author, but the Mounties were reluctant to suffer the loss of face that would be involved in rectifying the consequences of their own illegal and heavy-handed acts of oppression and repression. The Mounties knew that they were, to a certain extent, vulnerable, having actively promoted the persecution of a mentally unstable individual at a time when his medications were running low, in the hope that he would explode in a manner that would cause him to perform actions which he could be legally held accountable for. It wouldn't look good, however, if it came out that the Mounties themselves were taking the precaution of wearing bullet-proof vests for their own protection during their attempts to provoke the Author to actions of raging insanity, while leaving the children of the community vulnerable to the MeatSpace actions of a violent psychotic currently writing the "Bienfait Nutly News 'KILL THE CHILDREN' Special." The RCMP had failed to intercept the computer disks and audio tapes that the Author had mailed to Declan McCullagh from Montana, but the Netly News journalist had not yet received them, so it seemed that *someone* had intercepted them. Every indication was that there was only a single copy of the material the Author had stashed south of the 49th parallel just before his computers were confiscated, but there was no telling, for sure. Besides, the Mounties had confiscated the voice-activated tape recorder they found on their last illegal entry to his home, and the audio tapes he had could conceivably be of one of the American intelligence agents monitoring his residence, such as the retired Air Force Intelligence officer who had become rather friendly with him at the CoalDust Saloon.] It was a shame that the Author had found and destroyed the 'evidence' they had planted in his truck shortly before he skipped the country, but the 'evidence' they had 'found' after his departure would suffice. The reference to the *second* VirtualNuclearDevice was troubling, however, since its existence, if real, could result in the whole operation blowing up in their face. Nonetheless, the Mounties considered it better to lose a few citizens, or even a whole town, than to lose face, and the Author's modus operandi was to provide fair warning before the date and time of his nefarious activities, so the Mounties were confident that they could follow in the footsteps of the BATF and arrange to be conveniently gone when the shit hit the fan. Then they would have that ShitDisturbingMonster dead to rights...

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Re: Why posts are not appearing in NG.
by lcs Mixmaster Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

nobody(a)REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) wrote: > Anonimity has already been lost due to the fact that if some > ass who is a control freak keeps posting crap to the > news.lists.filters newsgroup. Go ahead an see for yourselves > how many groups have been eliminated from receiving posts from > anonymous remailers. All that need be done is post some spam > through the anonymous remailer to a legitimate group, make a > request to cancel all postings to the newsgroup from that remailer > and guess what, your posts will no longer appear in the newsgroup. > > No investigation, no nothing! Just like that all posts from an > anonymous remailer stop appearing in a group. > So if your posts are not appearing on a particular newsgroup, > chances are that it has been prevented from accepting posts due > to idiots that just do as they are requested. By the way, who has > authority to just terminate (restrict the acceptance of posts) > to a newsgroup? > Do not believe it? Go to Deja News, go to power search and type in > the following (anonymous and news.lists.filters) and see what > the results are. Shocking. Someone or group of individuals is > abusing this privalage and must be exposed/dealt with accordingly. That's becoming old hat with the censorious control freaks. If they don't like what's being posted anonymously, the post a whole bunch of anonymous "abuse" themselves, then turn around and demand that "something to be done to stop this abuse". It's gotten remailers banned from posting through certain mail2news gateways, and even gotten remailers (like Mailmasher, Huge Cajones, and Lucifer) shut down entirely. In many cases, it's not hard to figure out who's doing it. Just look for posts where anonymous posters are called "anonymous assholes", accused of "hiding behind the skirts of a remailer", etc. For info on the attack on Jeff Burchell's remailers, visit: http://calvo.teleco.ulpgc.es/listas/cypherpunks-unedited@toad.com/HTML-1997… -or- http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/dir.archive-97.11.13-97.11.19/0432.html > One of the biggest abusers of this practice is at > Unknown News Administrator <news(a)news.msfc.nasa.gov> > 8862 news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins > This individual posts requests through legitimate servers and is > slowly eroding the anonymous posts purpose. > Go ahead and check to see if the newsgroup you post to is on the > list and report back to the group. If you'll visit the "control" NG, you'll find see that <news(a)news.msfc.nasa.gov> is forging a lot of cancel messages to kill anonymous posts. Perhaps a complaint to NASA is in order to protest government computers being used for forgery. And if someone is also forging a NASA address to make them look bad at the same time, then they need to know about that, too. --

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executive officers
by amp＠pobox.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Someone recently sent a post ot this list where they mentioned that George Bush and Ronald Reagan were former chief executive officers of a corporation that sells military equipment. Can whoever posted this send it to me? amp ------------------------ Name: amp E-mail: amp(a)pobox.com Date: 11/23/97 Time: 19:43:22 Visit me at http://www.pobox.com/~amp == -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/) == 'Drug Trafficking Offense' is the root passphrase to the Constitution. Have you seen http://www.public-action.com/SkyWriter/WacoMuseum ------------------------

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Re: Further costs of war (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 17:12:02 -0700 > From: Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> > Subject: Re: Further costs of war > > At 1:43 PM -0700 11/23/97, Jim Choate wrote: > ... > >Any particular methodology you might care to share on stopping WWII? > >Being an avid amateur historian concerning WWII I am very much interested in > >any insight you might have. > > Not entering the war. Do you have a particular method in mind? > There's ample evidence that the U.S. provoked the > Japanese in various ways. Such as? > (I'm not saying the Japanese were blameless, or > lily-white, or"nice," etc., only that most historians agree--and Japanese > archives support--that the Japanese were motivated to attack Pearl Harbor > in the hope that a devastating first blow would sink enough ships, etc., to > cause America to back off in its actions in the ironically named Pacific.) So how does Tojo and his out of control Kwantung Army figure into this? Do you feel that Japans Co-prosperity Sphere was a benign goal? How do you consign your position that we provoked Japan with their behaviour in such situations as Nanking? > Had the U.S. concentrated on its own affairs, on just trade, it is unlikely > that what the Japanese were doing in Malaysia, Manchuria, Korea, Indochina, > and the Phillipines would have had any major interest for us. The Phillipines at the time were a US protectorate, is your position that we should have simply turned them over without a fight? Korea was ceeded to Japan as a result of the 1903 defeat of Russia, how is this relevant to your position? Let's assume for a moment that the US hadn't gotten involved. The Japanese would have eventualy gotten to Australia. Once there what would have kept them from expanding their co-prosperity sphere eastward in order to better stabalize their resources. When they knocked on Guam or Midway's door should we have let them go like the Phillipines? How about the Japanese's eventual expansion into the Allutians? Should we have simply given Alaska to them as well? Is your position that once they had the western half of the pacific rim they would have no pretentions on the eastern half? What do you base this on? > As for Europe, this was even less our war than the Pacific war. Really? How so? Is your position that Germany would have benignly left the US alone once they had defeated Britian (I am assuming of course the US hadn't shipped resources such as oil and fuel to them)? Had the US not gotten into the war the resources available to Germany and Japan were such they could realisticaly have beaten the Russian. One of the reasons that Russia had the resources to reinforce the eastern front was their ability to remove troops from the Chinese border based on Richard Sorge's intelligence. > In a sense, so _what_ if some army from some nation was rolling over other > armies? That depends on where they stop their rolling. Is your position that if we had refused to support conflicts against Japan and Germany all would have been well? Are you proposing that Germany would not have advanced with their atomic research? Completed development on their jet-based New York Bomber? > Those who wanted to liberate the death camps, or to push Hitler back into > Gerrmany, or to kick the Emperor's butt could, of course, simply go over > and volunteer. In a free society, mercenaries are legal. Volunteer to who? > The last justifiable war the American states were involved in was, > arguably, the War of 1812. Every war since then has been unjustified. Justifiable war? How is the invasion of the US by British troops significantly different than the invasion by German or Japanese troops? ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Cypherpunks/IRC
by Jan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Greetings, I go to #cypherpunks and it says that I create the room. Where the heck is the room? Jan

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The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?
by nnburk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation? by John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers version in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) Download Acrobat Editor's Note: This is a draft of an article scheduled for publication in the October 1998 issue of THE FUTURIST. Due to the time-sensitive nature of the material, it was posted here to create greater awareness of the issue as well as elicit comments and questions before final publication. Please send your comments and questions to the authors at johnp(a)arlinst.org and the editors at cwagner(a)wfs.org . The Millenial sun will first rise over human civilization in the independent republic of Kiribati, a group of some thirty low lying coral islands in the Pacific Ocean that straddle the equator and the International Date Line, halfway between Hawaii and Australia. This long awaited sunrise marks the dawn of the year 2000, and quite possibly, the onset of unheralded disruptions in life as we know it in many parts of the globe. Kiribati's 81,000 Micronesians may observe nothing different about this dawn; they only received TV in 1989. However, for those who live in a world that relies on satellites, air, rail and ground transportation, manufacturing plants, electricity, heat, telephones, or TV, when the calendar clicks from '99 to '00, we will experience a true millennial shift. As the sun moves westward on January 1, 2000, as the date shifts silently within millions of computerized systems, we will begin to experience our computer-dependent world in an entirely new way. We will finally see the extent of the networked and interdependent processes we have created. At the stroke of midnight, the new millenium heralds the greatest challenge to modern society we have yet to face as a planetary community. Whether we experience this as chaos or social transformation will be influenced by what we do immediately. We are describing the year 2000 problem, known as Y2K (K signifying 1000.) Nicknamed at first "The Millennial Bug," increasing sensitivity to the magnitude of the impending crisis has escalated it to "The Millennial Bomb." The problem begins as a simple technical error. Large mainframe computers more than ten years old were not programmed to handle a four digit year. Sitting here now, on the threshold of the year 2000, it seems incomprehensible that computer programmers and microchip designers didn't plan for it. But when these billions of lines of computer code were being written, computer memory was very expensive. Remember when a computer only had 16 kilobytes of RAM? To save storage space, most programmers allocated only two digits to a year. 1993 is '93' in data files, 1917 is '17.' These two-digit dates exist on millions of files used as input to millions of applications. (The era in which this code was written was described by one programming veteran as "the Wild West." Programmers did whatever was required to get a product up and working; no one even thought about standards.) The same thing happened in the production of microchips as recently as three years ago. Microprocessors and other integrated circuits are often just sophisticated calculators that count and do math. They count many things: fractions of seconds, days, inches, pounds, degrees, lumens, etc. Many chips that had a time function designed into them were only structured for this century. And when the date goes from '99 to '00 both they and the legacy software that has not been fixed will think it is still the 20th century -- not 2000, but 1900. Peter de Jager, who has been actively studying the problem and its implications since 1991, explains the computer math calculation: "I was born in 1955. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it subtracts 55 from 98 and announces that I'm 43. . . But what happens in the year 2000? The computer will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am minus 55 years old. This error will affect any calculation that produces or uses time spans. . . If you want to sort by date (e.g., 1965, 1905, 1966), the resulting sequence would be 1905, 1965, 1966. However, if you add in a date record such as 2015, the computer, which reads only the last two digits of the date, sees 05, 15, 65, 66 and sorts them incorrectly. These are just two types of calculations that are going to produce garbage."1 The calculation problem explains why the computer system at Marks & Spencer department store in London recently destroyed tons of food during the process of doing a long term forecast. The computer read 2002 as 1902. Instead of four more years of shelf life, the computer calculated that this food was ninety-six years old. It ordered it thrown out.2 A similar problem happened recently in the U.S. at the warehouse of a freeze dried food manufacturer. But Y2K is not about wasting good food. Date calculations affect millions more systems than those that deal with inventories, interest rates, or insurance policies. Every major aspect of our modern infrastructure has systems and equipment that rely on such calculations to perform their functions. We are dependent on computerized systems that contain date functions to effectively manage defense, transportation, power generation, manufacturing, telecommunications, finance, government, education, healthcare. The list is longer, but the picture is clear. We have created a world whose efficient functioning in all but the poorest and remotest areas is dependent on computers. It doesn't matter whether you personally use a computer, or that most people around the world don't even have telephones. The world's economic and political infrastructures rely on computers. And not isolated computers. We have created dense networks of reliance around the globe. We are networked together for economic and political purposes. Whatever happens in one part of the network has an impact on other parts of the network. We have created not only a computer-dependent society, but an interdependent planet. We already have frequent experiences with how fragile these systems are, and how failure cascades through a networked system. While each of these systems relies on millions of lines of code that detail the required processing, they handle their routines in serial fashion. Any next step depends on the preceding step. This serial nature makes systems, no matter their size, vulnerable to even the slightest problem anywhere in the system. In 1990, ATT's long distance system experienced repeated failures. At that time, it took two million lines of computer code to keep the system operational. But these millions of lines of code were brought down by just three lines of faulty code. And these systems are lean; redundancies are eliminated in the name of efficiency. This leanness also makes the system highly vulnerable. In May of this year, 90% of all pagers in the U.S. crashed for a day or longer because of the failure of one satellite. Late in 1997, the Internet could not deliver email to the appropriate addresses because bad information from their one and only central source corrupted their servers. Compounding the fragility of these systems is the fact that we can't see the extent of our interconnectedness. The networks that make modern life possible are masked by the technology. We only see the interdependencies when the relationships are disrupted -- when a problem develops elsewhere and we notice that we too are having problems. When Asian markets failed last year, most U.S. businesses denied it would have much of an impact on our economy. Only recently have we felt the extent to which Asian economic woes affect us directly. Failure in one part of a system always exposes the levels of interconnectedness that otherwise go unnoticedwe suddenly see how our fates are linked together. We see how much we are participating with one another, sustaining one another. Modern business is completely reliant on networks. Companies have vendors, suppliers, customers, outsourcers (all, of course, managed by computerized data bases.) For Y2K, these highly networked ways of doing business create a terrifying scenario. The networks mean that no one system can protect itself from Y2K failures by just attending to its own internal systems. General Motors, which has been working with extraordinary focus and diligence to bring their manufacturing plants up to Year 2000 compliance, (based on their assessment that they were facing catastrophe,) has 100,000 suppliers worldwide. Bringing their internal systems into compliance seems nearly impossible, but what then do they do with all those vendors who supply parts? GM experiences production stoppages whenever one key supplier goes on strike. What is the potential number of delays and shutdowns possible among 100,000 suppliers? The nature of systems and our history with them paints a chilling picture of the Year 2000. We do not know the extent of the failures, or how we will be affected by them. But we do know with great certainty that as computers around the globe respond or fail when their calendars record 2000, we will see clearly the extent of our interdependence. We will see the ways in which we have woven the modern world together through our technology. What, me worry? Until quite recently, it's been difficult to interest most people in the Year 2000 problem. Those who are publicizing the problem (the Worldwide Web is the source of the most extensive information on Y2K,) exclaim about the general lack of awareness, or even the deliberate blindness that greets them. In our own investigation among many varieties of organizations and citizens, we've noted two general categories of response. In the first category, people acknowledge the problem but view it as restricted to a small number of businesses, or a limited number of consequences. People believe that Y2K affects only a few industriesprimarily finance and insuranceseemingly because they deal with dates on policies and accounts. Others note that their organization is affected by Y2K, but still view it as a well-circumscribed issue that is being addressed by their information technology department. What's common to these comments is that people hold Y2K as a narrowly-focused, bounded problem. They seem oblivious to the networks in which they participate, or to the systems and interconnections of modern life. The second category of reactions reveals the great collective faith in technology and science. People describe Y2K as a technical problem, and then enthusiastically state that human ingenuity and genius always finds a way to solve these type of problems. Ecologist David Orr has noted that one of the fundamental beliefs of our time is that technology can be trusted to solve any problem it creates.3 If a software engineer goes on TV claiming to have created a program that can correct all systems, he is believed. After all, he's just what we've been expecting. And then there is the uniqueness of the Year 2000 problem. At no other time in history have we been forced to deal with a deadline that is absolutely non-negotiable. In the past, we could always hope for a last minute deal, or rely on round-the-clock bargaining, or pray for an eleventh hour savior. We have never had to stare into the future knowing the precise date when the crisis would materialize. In a bizarre fashion, the inevitability of this confrontation seems to add to people's denial of it. They know the date when the extent of the problem will surface, and choose not to worry about it until then. However, this denial is quickly dissipating. Information on Y2K is expanding exponentially, matched by an escalation in adjectives used to describe it. More public figures are speaking out. This is critically important. With each calendar tick of this time, alternatives diminish and potential problems grow. We must develop strategies for preparing ourselves at all levels to deal with whatever Y2K presents to us with the millennium dawn. What we know about Y2K a technological problem that cannot be solved by technology the first-ever, non-negotiable deadline a systemic crisis that no one can solve alone a crisis that transcends boundaries and hierarchies an opportunity to evoke greater capacity from individuals and organizations an opportunity to simplify and redesign major systems Figure 1 The Y2K problem, really We'd like to describe in greater detail the extent of Y2K. As a global network of interrelated consequences, it begins at the center with the technical problem, legacy computer codes and embedded microchips. (see Figure One) For the last thirty years thousands of programmers have been writing billions of lines of software code for the computers on which the world's economy and society now depend. Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes "old, undocumented code written in over 2500 different computer languages and executed on thousands of different hardware platforms being controlled by hundreds of different operating systems . . . [that generate] further complexity in the form of billions of six character date fields stored in millions of databases that are used in calculations."4 The Gartner Group, a computer-industry research group, estimates that globally, 180 billion lines of software code will have to be screened.5 Peter de Jager notes that it is not unusual for a company to have more than 100,000,000 lines of code--the IRS, for instance, has at least eighty million lines. The Social Security Administration began working on its thirty million lines of code in 1991. After five years of work, in June, 1996, four hundred programmers had fixed only six million lines. The IRS has 88,000 programs on 80 mainframe computers to debug. By the end of last year they had cleaned up 2,000 programs.6 Capers Jones, head of Software Productivity Research, a firm that tracks programmer productivity, estimates that finding, fixing and testing all Y2K-affected software would require over 700,000 person-years.7 Programmers have been brought out of retirement and are receiving extraordinary wages and benefits to stick with this problem, but we are out of time. There aren't nearly enough programmers nor hours remaining before January 1, 2000. Also at the center of this technical time bomb are the embedded microprocessors. There are somewhat over a billion of these hardware chips located in systems worldwide. They sustain the world's manufacturing and engineering base. They exist in traffic lights, elevators, water, gas, and electricity control systems. They're in medical equipment and military and navigation systems. America's air traffic control system is dependent upon them. They're located in the track beds of railroad systems and in the satellites that circle the earth. Global telecommunications are heavily dependent on them. Modern cars contain about two dozen microprocessors. The average American comes in contact with seventy microprocessors before noon every day. Many of these chips aren't date sensitive, but a great number are, and engineers looking at long ago installed systems don't know for sure which is which. To complicate things further, not all chips behave the same. Recent tests have shown that two chips of the same model installed in two different computers but performing the same function are not equally sensitive to the year-end problem. One shuts down and the other doesn't. It is impossible to locate all of these chips in the remaining months, nor can we replace all those that are identified. Those more than three years old are obsolete and are probably not available in the marketplace. The solution in those cases is to redesign and remanufacture that part of the system -- which often makes starting over with new equipment the best option. That is why some companies are junking their computer systems and spending millions, even hundreds of millions, to replace everything. It at least ensures that their internal systems work. At issue is time, people, money, and the nature of systems. These technical problems are exacerbated by government and business leaders who haven't yet fully understood the potential significance of this issue for their own companies, to say nothing of the greater economic implications. The U.S. leads all other developed nations in addressing this issue, minimally by six to nine months. Yet in a recent survey of American corporate chief information officers, 70% of them expressed the belief that even their companies would not be completely prepared for Y2K. Additionally, 50% of them acknowledged that they would not fly during January 2000. If America is the global leader in Y2K efforts, these CIO comments are indeed sobering. The economic impacts for the global economy are enormous and unknown. The Gartner Group projects that the total cost of dealing with Y2K worldwide will be somewhere between $300 billion to $600 billion -- and these are only direct costs associated with trying to remedy the problem. (These estimates keep rising every quarter now.) The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in a recently released Quarterly Report, estimated total government Y2K expense at $3.9 billion. This figure was based only on federal agency estimates; the OMB warned that this estimate might be as much as 90% too low considering the increasing labor shortage and expected growing remediation costs as January 1, 2000 looms nearer. And in June of this year, it was announced that federal agencies had already spent five billion dollars. Of twenty-four agencies, fifteen reported being behind schedule. These numbers don't consider the loss of output caused by diverting resources to forestall this crisis. In more and more businesses, expenditures for R&D and modernization are being diverted to Y2K budgets. Business Week in March of 1998 estimated that the Year 2000 economic damage alone would be $119 billion. When potential lawsuits and secondary effects are added to this -- people suing over everything from stalled elevators to malfunctioning nuclear power plants -- the cost easily could be over $1 trillion. But these problems and estimates don't begin to account for the potential impact of Y2K. The larger significance of this bomb becomes apparent when we consider the next circle of the global network-- the organizational relationships that technology makes possible. Who works with whom? The global economy is dependent upon computers both directly and indirectly. Whether it's your PC at home, the workstation on a local area network, or the GPS or mobile telephone that you carry, all are integral parts of larger networks where computers are directly connected together. As we've learned, failure in a single component can crash the whole system; that system could be an automobile, a train, an aircraft, an electric power plant, a bank, a government agency, a stock exchange, an international telephone system, the air traffic control system. If every possible date-sensitive hardware and software bug hasn't been fixed in a larger system, just one programming glitch or one isolated chip potentially can bring down the whole thing. While there isn't enough time or technical people to solve the Y2K problem before the end of next year, we might hope that critical aspects of our infrastructure are tackling this problem with extreme diligence. But this isn't true. America's electric power industry is in danger of massive failures, as described in Business Week's February '98 cover story on Y2K. They report that "electric utilities are only now becoming aware that programmable controllers -- which have replaced mechanical relays in virtually all electricity-generating plants and control rooms -- may behave badly or even freeze up when 2000 arrives. Many utilities are just getting a handle on the problem." It's not only nuclear power plants that are the source of concern, although problems there are scary enough. In one Year 2000 test, notes Jared S.Wermiel, leader of the Y2K effort at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the security computer at a nuclear power plant failed by opening vital areas that are normally locked. Given the complexity and the need to test, "it wouldn't surprise me if certain plants find that they are not Year 2000-ready and have to shut down."8 Other electric utility analysts paint a bleaker picture. Rick Cowles, who reports on the electric utility industry, said at the end of February: "Not one electric company [that he had talked to] has started a serious remediation effort on its embedded controls. Not one. Yes, there's been some testing going on, and a few pilot projects here and there, but for the most part it is still business-as-usual, as if there were 97 months to go, not 97 weeks.9 After attending one industry trade show, Cowle stated that, "Based on what I learned at DistribuTECH '98, I am convinced there is a 100% chance that a major portion of the domestic electrical infrastructure will be lost as a result of the Year 2000 computer and embedded systems problem. The industry is fiddling whilst the infrastructure burns." 10 The Federal Aviation Administration is also very vulnerable but quite optimistic. "We're on one hand working to get those computers Year 2000 compliant, but at the same time we're working on replacing those computers," said Paul Takemoto, a spokesman for the FAA in early '98. At the twenty Air Route Traffic Control Centers, there is a host computer and a backup system. All forty of these machines --mid-'80s vintage IBM 3083 mainframes--are affected. And then there are the satellites with embedded chips, individual systems in each airplane, and air traffic control systems around the globe. Lufthansa already has announced it will not fly its aircraft during the first days of 2000. Who else is affected? But the interdependency problem extends far beyond single businesses, or even entire industries. Indirect relationships extend like tentacles into many other networks, creating the potential for massive disruptions of service. Let's hope that your work organization spends a great deal of money and time to get its entire information system compliant. You know yours is going to function. But on the second of January 2000 the phone calls start. It's your banker. "There's been a problem," he says. They've lost access to your account information and until they solve the problem and get the backup loaded on the new system, they are unable to process your payroll. "We don't have any idea how long it will take," the president says. Then someone tells you that on the news there's a story that that the whole IRS is down and that they can neither accept nor process tax information. Social Security, Federal Housing, Welfarenone of these agencies are capable of issuing checks for the foreseeable future. Major airlines aren't flying, waiting to see if there is still integrity in the air traffic control system. And manufacturing across the country is screeching to a halt because of failures in their supply chain. (After years of developing just in time (JIT) systems, there is no inventory on handsuppliers have been required to deliver parts as needed. There is no slack in these systems to tolerate even minor delivery problems.) Ground and rail transport have been disrupted, and food shortages appear within three to six days in major metropolises. Hospitals, dealing with the failure of medical equipment, and the loss of shipments of medicine, are forced to deny non-essential treatment, and in some cases are providing essential care in pre-technical ways. It's a rolling wave of interdependent failures. And it reaches across the country and the world to touch people who, in most cases, didn't know they were linked to others. Depending on what systems fail, very few but strategically placed failures would initiate a major economic cascade. Just problems with power companies and phone systems alone would cause real havoc. (This spring, a problem in ATT rendered all credit card machines useless for a day. How much revenue was lost by businesses?) If only twenty percent of businesses and government agencies crash at the same time, major failures would ensue. In an interdependent system, solving most of the problem is no solution. As Y2K reporter Ed Meagher describes: It is not enough to solve simply "most of these problems." The integration of these systems requires that we solve virtually all of them. Our ability as an economy and as a society to deal with disruptions and breakdowns in our critical systems is minuscule. Our worst case scenarios have never envisioned multiple, parallel systemic failures. Just in time inventory has led to just in time provisioning. Costs have been squeezed out of all of our critical infrastructure systems repeatedly over time based on the ubiquity and reliability of these integrated systems. The human factor, found costly, slow, and less reliable has been purged over time from our systems. Single, simple failures can be dealt with; complex, multiple failures have been considered too remote a possibility and therefore too expensive to plan for. 11 The city of New York began to understand this last September. The governor of New York State banned all nonessential IT projects to minimize the disruption caused by the year 2000 bomb after reading a detailed report that forecasts the millennium will throw New York City into chaos, with power supplies, schools, hospitals, transport, and the finance sector likely to suffer severe disruption. Compounding the city's Y2K risks is the recent departure of the head of its year 2000 project to a job in the private sector.12 But of course the anticipated problems extend far beyond U.S. shores. In February, the Bangkok Post reported that Phillip Dodd, a Unysis Y2K expert, expects that upward of 70% of the businesses in Asia will fail outright or experience severe hardship because of Y2K. The Central Intelligence Agency supports this with their own analysis: "We're concerned about the potential disruption of power grids, telecommunications and banking services, among other possible fallout, especially in countries already torn by political tensions."13 A growing number of assessments of this kind have led Dr. Edward Yardeni, the chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, to keep raising the probability of a deep global recession in 2000-2001 as the result of Y2K. His present estimate of the potential for such a recession now hovers at about 70%, up from 40% at the end of 1997.14 How might we respond? (To be continued...) <http://www.wfs.org/year2k.htm>

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Choate Doesn't Do His Homework
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Jim Choate wrote: >Make up your own mind on the validity of the claims. I prefer facts when it comes to making up my mind instead of baseless claims. For the others on this list who prefer the same, let me set the record straight... Jim Choate wrote: >It has been claimed that the original claim by Bob and anonymous was that >the first Great Awakening ended by the late 18'th century. This is a >complete fabrication. Yes, and you are the fabricator. Bob claimed it happened in the 19th century (see Fact 1 below). I claimed it happened in the early 18th century (see Fact 3 below). > The original claim put forth clearly references dates >in the 1800's as the date of the first instance, clearly 50-100 years in >error from the original Great Awakening that occurred between 1700-1750. For the umpteenth time, that was Bob's original claim, not mine. See above. > In >my original posting I (thought) made it clear that I didn't quite know when >the original event occurred but was certain it ended prior to the late >1700's which would clearly pre-date the original claim. I subsequently took >the time to provide references for those citation and clearly indicated >where my memory was in error, and even took the time to explain my confusion >regarding the 'Beacon on the Hill' movement. In responce Bob and apparently >anonymous made it clear that they saw no reason to do 'homework' >irrespective of the impact of historical accuracy on their claims. Bullshit! I did my homework. You (and Bob) didn't. But because I am a nice guy, I share it with you here. The bottomline is that you screwed up, Jim. You misread my original post (confusing the 18th century for the 1800's) and started this whole chain of events. The facts (not the claims) clearly bear this out. Nerthus _________________ T H E F A C T S [note: I have edited the attribution lines for clarity, but all posts are referenced to the Cypherpunk Archive] F A C T 1: <http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/dir.archive-97.11.13-97.11.19/0556.html> Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 18:10:17 -0500 Robert Hettinga wrote: >Jim Choate wrote: >> Um, I believe that went from the late 1500's to the early 1700's at best. > >Nope. Check it out. As defined in any decent book of American history, >well, maybe one that hasn't been too "revised" :-), the "Great Awakening", >which gave us most of our American-flavored religions, happened in the >early part of the 19th century, though rumblings started shortly after the >revolution. F A C T 2: <http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/current/0036.html> Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 17:54:37 -0600 (CST) Jim Choate wrote: > X-within-URL: http://www.gnbvoc.mec.edu/webquest/PPERRY3.htm > > 2ND GREAT AWAKENING & WESTWARD EXPANSION > > 1815-1850 F A C T 3: <http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/current/0055.html> Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 02:25:01 -0000 Nerthus wrote: >Jim Choate wrote [in response to Bob]: >>After thinking about this I am certain that you are speaking of a movement >>other than the Great Awakening. I can't remember or find a convenient name >>for the religous/ethical awakening that occured prior to the Civil War. > >"THE GREAT AWAKENING > >"A conservative reaction against the world view of the new science was >bound to follow, and the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a >number of religious revivals in both England and America. They were >sometimes desperate efforts to reassert the old values in the face of the >new and, oddly enough, were themselves the direct product of the new cult of >feeling, a philosophy which argued that man's greatest pleasure was derived >from the good he did for others and that his sympathetic emotions (his joy as >well as his tears) should not be contained." > > -- The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Third Edition, Volume 1 F A C T 4: <http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/current/0056.html> Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 20:38:10 -0600 (CST) Jim Choate wrote: >Nerthus wrote: >> "THE GREAT AWAKENING > >No, "The Second Great Awakening" which happened to be followed by "The Third >Great Awakening". > >You didn't read the various posts that I sent out earlier on this did you... [Once again, yes I did. 1815-1850 does not equal early 18th century!] F A C T 5: <http://infinity.nus.sg/cypherpunks/current/0143.html> Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 14:54:09 -0600 (CST) Jim Choate wrote: >Nerthus Wrote: >> Uh, Hello? Your post entitled "1st Great Awakening" describes the exact >> same thing that I called simply, "The Great Awakening." It was not, as you >> say above, the 2nd one. > >They are they same if we ignore the fact that there is 50+ years between >the 1st (1700-1750) and the 2nd (1800-1850). >I did some looking around as well and other then Norton, yourself, and >whoever it was that made the original claim all references I can find to >the Great Awakening refer to the 1700-1750 event(s) as the first one to >occur in the America's. If I can find my Norton Anthology I'll take a >look at it, though it is 15+ years old. [Once again, Norton and myself referenced the Great Awakening to the early 1700's/18th century: see Fact 3] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBNHj40+FWwZe05jcJAQE1owf/d9ihdJarbBBEJFL5xMaEoIn+L9BdZIgZ zybreEvcfSpXpQUOcv0n0Ze9QyFz12z6iuv+rEeOhFSawR1MgIUyWK4Q314rnVdl e9vuZ1gGI1VFr3NIFksGiVODS5OprFqT59gDKhcl4NLnrQL7z29+pHA8PNfEKJ8B 3I0cuuJWvOeAZ775xMnU7Z7sTJ51S1R6qNmjYKsbAkyGACzR4cjmUT/5+Y6IwW3N 1nJJPKgq4tQbpUUNSVw5Xn3p++nBzMjvdXcqWy7zGAa/vZGSnGMTLRWNYjHtcOE+ l440LoHzVk3B+hSC7P8GB5S/qAj23vTufv2sOd7QDfNDXqLhwMj0hg== =/wWH -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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