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Bookies in Exile
by Duncan Frissell 17 Aug '03

17 Aug '03

Today's NYT Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/magazine/17GAMBLING.html?position=&pagewa… August 17, 2003 Bookies in Exile By WILLIAM BERLIND Costa Rica is highly prized by the world's backpackers and sightseers for its unspoiled natural beauty, but it's easy to forget that when arriving in its grimy capital, San Jose. The newly remodeled airport is surrounded by chain hotels, freshly paved roads and shiny corporate plazas. After that it goes rapidly downhill. A dusty highway heading vaguely toward downtown takes you through the poorer suburbs of San Jose, packed with families in corrugated-tin-roof shacks. Above them, on the sides of the surrounding hills, Costa Rica's elite live behind high, fortified walls. The entire valley is blanketed with smog from auto fumes, brush fires and burned trash. This Costa Rica doesn't make for much of a postcard, but to a small group of men, Americans mostly, it is alluring, enchanting and brimming with possibilities for adventure. The men are bookmakers taking bets and dispensing winnings over the Internet, and Costa Rica has exactly what they need -- a government that welcomes new investment in almost whatever form it takes, a well-developed business environment that makes it possible get phone lines hooked up and computer equipment serviced and a sizable English-speaking population capable of manning the phones and helping customers place their bets. Legal prostitution, as well as a plethora of strip clubs, seedy casinos and bars festooned with Budweiser signs, round out the atmosphere. Betting operations are now among San Jose's most lucrative and visible enterprises, and their success has transformed the city. One prominent suburban landmark is an office building occupied by an outfit called BETonSPORTS.com. Throughout its nine floors, 1,500 Costa Ricans are employed (in mostly clerical positions) and offered amenities like on-site day care and classes to improve their English. Most of the bookmaking companies, though, are a good deal smaller and harder to see, tucked away in strip malls and shadowy side streets. The American proprietors are generally in their 30's and 40's, and for them, the Internet provides not only the means to escape the reach of American law, but also a chance to turn what had been the equivalent back home of small, local shops -- sustained by personalized attention and all the headaches that involves -- into booming, virtual superstores that can rake in action from all over the world. The experiences of these men in Costa Rica, as well as of those elsewhere in Central America and the Caribbean, started out as thrilling adventures in what seemed to them like Las Vegas in the 1950's. But as betting operations multiplied, the offshore business has become hotly competitive and complicated. Worse, in recent years lawmakers and ambitious prosecutors back in the States have been mounting ever more serious legal challenges. Returning home to a normal life now means facing the possibility of going to prison. And so, many of the bookmakers who started out so optimistically are finding themselves locked into an isolated way of life that with each passing day seems a worse bet. ....

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reliance that's scary
by Major Variola (ret) 17 Aug '03

17 Aug '03

At 10:13 AM 8/16/03 -0400, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: > >Security, as Schneier says, is a process. It's also a mindset, and I think >one either has the mindset or he doesn't. And for those that don't have it, >it is *very* difficult to impart. And you don't get any droid-demonstrable features for all your efforts. Whereas being able to control <whatever> from a network has gee-whiz sellability. And the customer has a hard time imagining the attack -how are they going to find the network, how are they going to guess the password. I had the pleasure ca 1997 of figuring out how to browser-enable a multiton industrial machine (the kind with big red "stop" buttons, rotating lights on it when it was operating, and stickers showing various forms of dismemberment possible) once. A password was the only access control. I hope anyone who installed this understood firewalling and air gapping... (Meanwhile, my garage door is "protected" merely by the number of possibilities, 256)

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US soldiers in Iraq held against their will
by Harmon Seaver 17 Aug '03

17 Aug '03

Just heard about this local guy who reluctantly went to Iraq because he was in the reserves, now his contract is up (as of 7/31) and they won't let him out. ======================================================================== Dear friends As many of you know I am in Iraq with the 724th Eng Bn. Many of you may not know however that on July 30th 2003 my enlistment contract ended and the I have been involuntarily extended. I am now a prisoner of the US army. I find it very troubling that the USA would force people against their free will to be in the military, furthermore the fact that their are hundreds perhaps thousands of able bodied volunteer soldier in the Wisconsin Army System that have not been activated and that could replace those soldiers who are in Iraq involuntarily. I request you assistance in helping me get home. Free Moon!! Below is a letter I have written to our Wisconsin congresspersons, and governor. Also below are their addresses and email addresses. I ask that you read my letter to them and email or write all of them with a similar letter addressed from your view point. Please do not forward my letter to them but rather write them in you own words your objection to the practice ofinvoluntary extension as it pertains to me. I feel that if enough people write that it may actually influence my Battalion Commander, who has the power to do so, to grant me my honorable discharge and send me home. Also please forward this email to people who you know know me and would be willing to help. Please help me return home, reunite with my son, and practice my religion of non-violence. Thank you. Love, Jason Moon Russ Fielgold russ_feingold(a)feingold.senate.gov Send snail mail to this address Bob Schweder C/O Senator Russ Fiengold 1640 Main Street Green Bay, WI 54302 920) 465-7508 Bob Schweder is Fiengold Military/ Veteran Affairs Aide. Herb Kohl senator_kohl(a)kohl.senate.gov Send snail mail to this address Steve Piotrowski C/o Senator Kohl 14 West Mifflin Street, Suite 207 Madison, WI 53703 Phone: (608) 264-5338 Fax: (608) 264-5473 Kohl personally asked to send all thought regarding Jason to Steve but still email the Senator. He responded personally to my email. Tom Petri US Rep 6th District WI http://www.house.gov/writerep/ Use the above link to write Rep Petri Send snail mail to this address Rep. Tom Petri 490 West Rolling Meadows Drive Suite B Fond du Lac, WI 54937 Tel: 920/922-1180 Toll-free in Wisconsin: 800/242-4883 -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com

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Jessica Stern on Jim Bell
by John Young 17 Aug '03

17 Aug '03

Jessica Stern's new book, "Terror in the Name of God : Why Religious Militants Kill," has about 8 pages on Jim Bell, in a chapter called "Lone Wolf Avengers," which is shared with the Pakistani Kansai, assassin of CIA employees. Stern says that while Bell is not a religion-based terrorist he is included in the book as an example of the solo individual with a private agenda that smacks of religion. This appears to be a stretch, but Stern stretches her material to fit an agenda. A Stern footnote says the Bell material is based on the forthcoming publication, "James Dalton Bell." She says she had numerous telephone interviews with him beginning in 2000 after making a request in 1998 during Jim's first imprisonment. Her capsule version of Jim's "crimes" and punishment is a bellweather of what may be in store for other miscreants who are fodder for terrorism careerists. To be sure, Jim may get a movie made about him, and I guess that would be his finest hour. Stern says Jim's leadership potential has so far led only to inspiring Carl Johnson to get himself thrown into prison.

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Slective DoS on enemy communication by a P2P WLAN
by Thomas Shaddack 17 Aug '03

17 Aug '03

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/68/32361.html US forces to target enemy mobiles with P2P WLANs By Tony Smith Posted: 15/08/2003 at 11:22 GMT The US military is developing a weapon based on peer-to-peer technology to take out mobile phone communications, the US Department of Defence has revealed. The system also has the capability to covertly monitor cellular traffic. Codenamed 'WolfPack', the device is intended to prevent an enemy from using its communications technologies, including cellular, without hindering US forces' own communications systems. WolfPack is a 6 x 4in cylinder weighing 6lbs, capable of being dropped by parachute or fired into the target area as a missile payload. Each device zaps mobile phone communications within a radius of half a kilometre. "The idea is to litter the battlefield with these small objects," WolfPack programme manager Preston Marshall in a statement. The battery-powered device contains an inflatable antenna. Fins mounted inside the cylinder extend from the device on touchdown to lift it into a vertical position. Once in place and with the aerial up, each WolfPack until begins communicating with any others it can detect. Together, they quickly establish a network. Other networks in range can tie in too, creating, if you will, an 'Internet' of WolfPack nodes, which ultimately allows data from any single device to be routed across the network of networks to the command centre. Each cylinder can generate radio signal to disrupt cellular traffic, said Marshall. "Each WolfPack is very small, but collectively they gang up on the signal," he added. Equally, the units can used to monitor enemy communications signals. Think of it as a Napster for military intelligence - each device can share the signals it picks up with all the others. Units can stay powered for up to two months in the field, and can be later collected and re-used. Each node costs around $10,000. Together, they are cheaper, less obtrusive and a much less obvious target for enemy intervention than the aircraft-based systems used to jam or monitor communications at the moment. WolfPack prototypes will be put to the test with in the next 18 months, the DoD said. .

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How can you tell if your alarm company's...
by Tyler Durden 17 Aug '03

17 Aug '03

...in cahoots with the "authorities"? In other words, lets say I leave my house for an extended period of time, and "they" tell the Alarm Monitoring company to shut down for a while so they can protect our freedoms. (I assume this is the way they would go about installing various things in one's house while away...wrong?) How can I tell if my alarm has been "down" for a period of time, assuming I don't believe the records of the alarm company in such cases? -TD _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Faith-based Drug Wars
by Tim Meehan 17 Aug '03

17 Aug '03

I'm starting to worry less about Brinworld and more about the Republic of Gilead... Source: Working for Change Pubdate: August 8, 2003 Author: Bill Berkowitz Webpage: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15420 Faith-based drug wars 08.08.03 - What do advocating "religious hiring rights," a $4 billion workplace retraining bill, and the war on drugs have in common? The short answer: Bring on the faith-based organizations! Although more than 30 months have passed since President Bush announced the centerpiece of his domestic agenda -- his faith-based initiative -- and no significant broader efforts to fund his initiative has emerged from Congress, the administration continues to move ahead on a number of fronts. Bush's latest faith-based proposal involves enlisting religious youth groups in the war on drugs. According to the Washington Times, the administration recently printed 75,000 copies of a guidebook to the drug wars called "Pathways to Prevention: Guiding Youth to Wise Decisions." The 100-page pamphlet "seeks to teach youth leaders how to handle questions and concerns about substance abuse." In addition to the publication, there's a new Web site and an e-mail newsletter. The new anti-drug project is built around three premises which are spelled out in a fact sheet titled "Marijuana and Kids: Faith": 1) "Religion plays a major role in the lives of American teens;" 2) "Religion and religiosity repeatedly correlate with lower teen and adult marijuana and substance use rates and buffer the impact of life stress which can lead to marijuana and substance use;" and 3) "Youth turn to faith communities [but] most faith institutions [with] youth ministries [do not] incorporate significant teen substance abuse prevention activities." Krissy Oechslin, assistant director of communications at the Washington, DC-based Marijuana Policy Project, the nation's largest marijuana policy reform organization, is concerned about the faith-based effort. "We do not oppose efforts to teach kids the truth about drugs. But the one thing that will likely be conspicuously missing from this faith-based initiative is any discussion about the effects of our drug laws," Oechslin told me in a telephone interview. "You can talk all you want about prevention and reducing demand but the fact of the matter is, nearly 750,000 people were arrested for marijuana violations in 2001; nearly 90% of those were for simple possession," Oechslin pointed out. "Despite the fact they are in a religious setting, they will likely avoid significant ethical questions raised by the drug wars, such as whether kids should be put into prison for using marijuana. If you talked with John Walters about this he would probably say that these kinds of questions are irrelevant to the conversation." Moving forward on faith Bush's faith-based anti-drug effort is the latest in a series of moves advancing his faith-based initiative. In late-June, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Organizations spelled out its position on a concept called "religious hiring rights." In a position paper titled "Protecting the Civil Rights and Religious Liberty of Faith-Based Organizations: Why Religious Hiring Rights Must Be Preserved," the administration argued religious organizations that receive government grants should be allowed to hire anyone they darn well please. At least two pieces of legislation with "religious hiring rights" provisions are currently under consideration by Congress: "The School Readiness Act of 2003," H.R. 2210, allows religious organizations receiving government funds to provide Head Start services to discriminate in their hiring practices; and the $4 billion Workforce Reinvestment and Adult Education Act -- passed by the full House on a party-line 220-204 vote -- also included a similar faith-based exemption. 'Faith: The Anti-Drug' At a press conference surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Islamic community leaders, John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said: "Faith plays an important role when it comes to teen marijuana prevention. We are urging youth ministers, volunteers and faith leaders to integrate drug prevention messages and activities into their sermons and youth programming and are providing them with key tools and resources to make a difference. "As long as [America's youth] have, in their minds, the expectation that drug abuse comes as a rite of passage, we will continue to lose too many of our young people." (Isn't it amazing how many press conferences Bush Administration officials have held surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Islamic religious leaders?) "The reality is a lot of people don't know how to talk about these issues," said Jim Towey, the Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "According to data from Monitoring the Future, 90 percent of teens in the U.S. are affiliated with a religious denomination and 43 percent of eighth graders attend religious services weekly. Churches, temples and mosques are well positioned to cultivate anti-drug values and teach effective coping tools to deal with negative peer pressure," said Towey. The new campaign's slogan -- "Faith. The Anti-Drug" -- appears to indicate that Walters, appointed drug czar by Bush in May 2001, is turning down the volume from an earlier anti-marijuana ad campaign focused on teens. That high-powered effort was aimed at linking teenagers using marijuana to the funding of terrorist organizations and support for terrorism. Walters, characterized as a "drug 'hawk' well known for his moral condemnation of drug use and his criticism of Clinton's drug war techniques," by Salon's Janelle Brown, pointed out that "we need to be candid" about the situation confronting America's youth. Being candid, however, has not been one of the drug czar's strong suits. If Walters were truly candid he would talk about the billions of dollars wasted on the war on drugs; he would talk about the succession of cynical anti-drug advertising campaigns run by high-powered and well-connected ad agencies whose only success has been in lining its own pockets with tax-payer funds; and he would talk about the hundreds of thousands of people languishing in prisons because of marijuana-related convictions. In May, 2002, the Village Voice's Cynthia Cotts reported that a Wall Street Journal article citing the results of a Walters-authorized survey -- conducted by the private research firm Westat and the University of Pennsylvania -- "shows the government's anti-drug ads have completely failed to slow down teen drug use. Over the past five years," Cotts writes, "the feds spent $929 million to spread the message, and what did they get? A quarter of high school seniors still use illegal drugs, and after seeing the ads, some 13-year-old girls started smoking pot." If the new emphasis on faith-based interventions sounds like the repackaging of an old idea, well, that's because it very well might be. Last year, when the president announced his National Drug Control Strategy, FY-2003, "compassionate coercion" was the term coined and touted as a key element for success. Under the heading "Healing America's Drug Users" a White House fact sheet said: "Getting people into treatment -- including programs that call upon the power of faith -- will require us to create a new climate of compassionate coercion, which begins with family, friends, employers, and the community. Compassionate coercion also uses the criminal justice system to get people into treatment." Bush's advocacy of "religious hiring rights" and the administration's grafting of faith-based organizations onto the drug wars cuts to the heart of church/state separation, says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. According to Lynn, this new anti-drug effort is another administration attempt to blur those lines. In a Press Release issued by Americans United Lynn said, "The Bush administration seems to think there's a 'faith-based' solution to every social and medical problem in America. The project announced today is one very small part of a larger crusade that raises troubling constitutional concerns." "The White House is ignoring vital constitutional safeguards," continued Lynn. "The Constitution calls for a separation between religion and government, not a merger." Lynn pointed out that Walters recently appeared at a Riverside, Calif. "Teen Challenge" facility whose treatment program "relies on conversion to fundamentalist Christianity as its form of treatment." Only evangelical Christians are hired to carry out its work. In testimony before Congress in 2001, a Teen Challenge official noted that some Jews who participate in the program convert to Christianity, becoming what he called "completed Jews." Many Jewish leaders found the term offensive, the AU Press Release pointed out. This far, says Jeremy Leaming, Communications Associate at Americans United, government funds have not been awarded to Teen Challenge or any other religious organizations for John Walter's new anti-drug initiative. "But," he added, "we are watching the situation closely." "Bush's whole drug policy is in reality one gigantic faith-based initiative," Bruce Mirken, the Marijuana Policy Project's director of communications, commented in a recent e-mail. "It's sure not based on science or data, particularly in regard to marijuana. The government's own figures show that marijuana use by kids under 21 has gone up over 2000% since marijuana was banned, and a National Research Council study commissioned by the Drug Czar's office reported in 2001 that the evidence shows little or no relationship between the severity of criminal sanctions and rates or frequency of drug use. "If the government announced a program to reduce unemployment, and unemployment subsequently rose 2000%, that policy would be toast faster than you can say 'Bill Bennett loves to gamble,'" Mirken pointed out. "But the administration believes, with deep religious conviction that drugs are bad and must be banned. It's truly a faith based drug policy, and it ruins lives every day." (c) Working Assets Online. All rights reserved. -- Parti Marijuana de l'Ontario Marijuana Party http://ontario.mjparty.ca ICQ: 231997626 AOL/Yahoo/MSN: onmjp

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Re: Viral DNS Attack, DDos Idea
by Major Variola (ret) 17 Aug '03

17 Aug '03

At 05:46 PM 8/15/03 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >At 01:19 PM 08/15/2003 -0700, Major Variola (ret.) wrote: >>Suppose malware appends a bogus entry to an infected machine's >>/etc/hosts (or more likely, MSwindows' \windows\blahblah\hosts file). >>(This constitutes a DNS attack on the appended domain name, exploiting >>the local hosts' name-resolution prioritization.) >>If the appended IP address points to the >>same victim (66.66.66.66) on all the virus-infected machines, >>and the appended (redirected) domain name is popular ("google.com" > >Cute, but sounds like a lot of work compared to other obvious attacks >you could do if you're spreading a virus anyway. Yes if you have virally owned a machine you can do much nastier. But this attack has the advantage that its effects would not be immediately recognized, nor could they be fixed in one spot once detected. Evolved diseases don't kill their hosts. Google is too useful to redirect. On the other hand, you can redirect an entire TLD (eg .mil), albeit on one machine at a time. Try doing that to one of The DNS Roots (pbut). >The more popular version of this attack is to try to hack DNS servers, >or poison DNS requests, so that DNS requests for google report the wrong thing. Yes I've followed discussions about SecDNS etc before. The cute part of the local hostsfile attack is that local machines are *not* administered competently, whereas DNS servers (and even ISP caches) are more likely tended better. >One problem with hacking the hosts files is that >different versions of Windows tend to put them in different places, >though perhaps if you target XP and 2000 and ME and 98 >it's consistent enough to work. OS detection is trivial once in.. as is file/path detection. I bet a javascript program could do it, if the client security settings (ACLs) were poor. >The real question is whether the bad guys would redirect to a victim, >or to a fake web server run by them, so they could hand out >bogus responses, such as redirects to various places around the web, >potentially along with some advertising banners. That's the virus author's choice, of course. In fact, I first thought of the attack as a DNS-redirect on domain names ---intending on random (or even localhost) misdirection. Upon thinking about it, the utility of all those 9AM Monday clicks became apparent. Diagnosing the situation would be a bushel of fun in the first hours either way. >If it's a virtual server machine, though, you can't do that >without disrupting all the clients on it, which is too bad; Hadn't thought of virtual servers... "all your eggs in one basket" :-) >If it's a router, that's a more interesting problem, You're right, routers merely drop port 80 incoming, any router DoS depends on sheer bandwidth --say routing the NYTimes.com clicks to Podunk-BackwaterTimes.com >because many routers have wimpy CPUs and do the routine work in ASICs - ASICs are great except for exception handling, which is a vulnerability. I was working on Intel's network processors earlier this year. Amazing chips--they have hardware support for everything you do in an IP stack, buttloads of memory controllers, I/O up the kazoo, and a dozen hardware-supported thread contexts (hyperthreading) on each of a dozen high-clockrate RISC engines. But they all defer exception packet processing to the onboard ARM, which might alert the host system or at least log the exception by incrementing a counter. But the ARM is not as fast as the threads and could perhaps be overwhelmed. Perhaps the subject of a future Gedanken Design Idea. ----- "When the rotary telephone first came out, people said, 'You mean I have to dial seven numbers?' "

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paradoxes of randomness
by Sarad AV 16 Aug '03

16 Aug '03

hi, I was reading the following paper Complexity, Vol. 7, No. 5, May/June 2002, pp. 14-21 PARADOXES OF RANDOMNESS Gregory Chaitin http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/summer.html Under the sub heading- Program-Size Complexity,it says "Okay, so what does it mean then for a number to be interesting or uninteresting, now that I'm giving you a better idea of what I'm talking about. Well, interesting means it stands out some way from the herd, and uninteresting means it can't be distinguished really, it's sort of an average, typical number, one that isn't worth a second glance. So how do you define that mathematically using this notion of the size of computer programs? Well, it's very simple: a number is uninteresting or algorithmically random or irreducible or incompressible if there's no way to name it that's more concise than just writing out the number directly. That's the idea. In other words, if the most concise computer program for calculating a number just says to print 123796402, in that case, if that's the best you can do, then that number is uninteresting. And that's typically what happens. On the other hand, if there is a small, concise computer program that calculates the number, that's atypical, that means that it has some quality or characteristic that enables you to pick it out and to compress it into a smaller algorithmic description. So that's unusual, that's an interesting number. " How ever if i take the set of positive whole numbers(zero included),i.e S={0,1,2,...} ,I can compress every positive whole number using a computer program which says f(x)=2x for all x=0,1,2,... ; f(x)=2x+1 for all x=0,1,2,...; and i simply put it an infinite loop shown in the following pseudo code int x=0; while(1) { generate f(x)=2x; generate f(x)=2x+1; } In this way we can compress all the positive whole numbers because say i have a number 10. I try to find if it is interesting or not. decimal 10 = 1010 in binary it takes 4 bits to store decimal number 10 I can write a computer program to generate decimal 10 using f(x)=2x =2*5 =10 for x=5; Decimal number 5 can be represented in binary as 101. So we have 3 bits to represent 5. Using these 3 bits of information,i can get the decimal number 10,when i use f(x)=2x; Similarly-any positive whole number can be compressed using the above pseudo code. This is because Any whole number multiplied by 2 will give an extra bit eg, I have f(x)=2x I choose x=2, 10 in binary(2 bits). 2*2=4 , 100 in binary(3 bits). There is an extra bit that gets added ,when we multiply by 2. I am sure that this is very obvious indeed. So this way I can compress any positive whole number and thus I can show all the whole numbers are interesting contradicting the claim in the paper that most of the whole numbers are uninteresting numbers. He uses this concept of uninteresting numbers to demonstrate algorithmic randomness. The paper further says- "Once you set up this theory properly, it turns out that most numbers, the great majority of positive integers, are uninteresting. You can prove that as a theorem. It's not a hard theorem, it's a counting argument. There can't be a lot of interesting numbers, because there aren't enough concise programs. You know, there are a lot of positive integers, and if you look at programs with the same size in bits, there are only about as many programs of the same size as there are integers, and if the programs have to be smaller, then there just aren't enough of them to name all of those different positive integers." But we already have developed a small concise,as in the pseudo code shown above,that generates me any number of whole numbers. This contradicts the above argumeny. Further down,under the sub heading Redundant,he says- "Is this K bits of mathematical information? K instances of the halting problem will give us K bits of Turing's number. Are these K bits independent pieces of information? Well, the answer is no, they never are. Why not? Because you don't really need to know K yes/no answers, it's not really K full bits of information. There's a lot less information. It can be compressed. Why? " All logs are base 2. "And this is going to be a number between zero and K, a number that's between zero and K. 0 # # that halt # K And if you write this number in binary it's really only about log K bits. # that halt = log K bits " Now how can there be redundancy in various instances of a halting problem. Say-i have a sack with 64 programmes of which ,i know that 32 of them will halt and 32 of them will not halt.I pick,without any order, 32 programs from my sack to check whether they halt or not. If the input programmes are picked truely randomly,then I know 16 of the programs will halt(i.e 50% of the programs halt). So where is the redundancy in different instances of the halting problem? I don't see any redundancy. If the input programs are picked independently,i.e without any mathametcial structure,the output is by no means reduntant. In the section-Redundant,he obtains a real number called k,which he transforms to k bits of information. Then he says that there is redundancy in the output and says that there is only log k(base 2) bits of information. Here he treats k as a real number and says that-he only needs log k(base 2) bits to represent the whole number k. But that is the minimum number of bits that is required to hold the real number in binary representation in its information theorotical sense. What does it have to do with algorithmic randomness? it comes to such a question- I do a fair coin throwing experiment with 64 coins. To represent 64 coins,i need 5 bits of information. If the experiment is truely random,i will get 32 of them as heads and 32 of them as tails-though I dont know which all are heads and which all are tails. now-I see which all are heads.While counting,when I get 32 heads,I can stop counting,since i know the remaining 32 coins are tails. To represent 32 coins-i need 5 bits of information. Since the experiment is truely random-i know half of them will be heads,so in this case using 5 bits of information,i can determine all the coins that are heads and that are tails. So-the question is what is the minimum number of bits or entropy required to determine which all coins are heads and which all coins are tails,is it 5 bits or 6 bits of information? What chaitin does in his k instance halting problem -is he compresses the 6 bits to 5 bits,if we draw an equivalent with our coin tossing experiment,which we can,as it is equivalent to the coin tossing problem. It appears that it is on these lines he obtains the omega notation,though the exact details are not given in this paper. This is what I think.I would like to know more. Regards Sarath. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

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paradoxes of randomness-errata
by Sarad AV 16 Aug '03

16 Aug '03

>it comes to such a question- >I do a fair coin throwing experiment with 64 coins. >To represent 64 coins,i need 5 bits of information. To represnet 64 coins,i need 6 bits of infomation :) Regards Sarath. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

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