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Secure IDE?
by Trei, Peter 30 Jul '03

30 Jul '03

ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the "IC7-MAX3" featuring something called 'Secure IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the onboard IDE controller: >From the marketing fluff at http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251 "For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened to users who were asking for information security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder; without a special key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk, not with a password, but with encryption. A password can be cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files." No, I have no idea what this actually means either. I'm trying to find out. Peter Trei

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Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
by Mac Norton 30 Jul '03

30 Jul '03

Tim has identified the problems, including what may be the most important one, that the "market," unlike other such markets, is subject to gaming for motives that are other than economic. In other words, the item in question doesn't lend itself to commoditization; the subject pork bellies are not fungible. MacN -----Original Message----- From: Tim May [mailto:timcmay@got.net] Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 6:17 PM To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com X-Orig-To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com Subject: Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 03:24 PM, Steve Schear wrote: > At 16:20 2003-07-29 -0700, John Young wrote: >> Tim May wrote: >> >> >Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a >> >decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting >> >such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the >> >Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect >> >several efforts with varying degrees of success). >> >> Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's >> his e-mail about it in May 2003: > > Looks like Robin may have to concentrate on a commercial venture if he > wants to see his ideas put into practice. > > And use an offshore nexus, and good anonymity and digital cash tools...just as predicted many years ago. Doing this aboveboard, and doing it with the collusion of the actors who can alter the outcome, is asking for trouble: * violation of gambling laws...as I said in other articles, betting on the death of the King of Jordan is not different from betting on the winner of the World Series. * distortion of markets by players who see more benefit in adjusting the expectations than in spending some relatively small amount of money (If "Chances that weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq by Nov. 1" is being de-rated, in a relatively thin market of a few dozen players, then someone with an interest in altering the odds can probably do so with relatively little money...especially if the money is from a Black Budget and comes from money taken at gunpoint from taxpayers.) (I can't resist mentioning that I was able to massively distort/sabotage the market in reputations that the Extropian list experimented with in 1993. I did this by buying "play money" (extro-dollars or whatever they were called) from other players in an out-of-band transaction. A mere $20 in U.S. money gave me a huge amount of additional spending money in this reputation market. Naturally, my reputation rose. Likewise, if Paul Wolfowitz wants the market to assess a "grave danger" that Norway is financing terrorism, he can use out-of-band methods to get a bunch of "ringers" (cut-outs, co-conspirators) to start bidding up the market. As the penalty for not guessing correctly is not clear until the outcome, and inasmuch as the money is provided by agencies, the opportunities for mischief are obvious.) * Insider trading. Letting government employees benefit from their inside information is like letting IBM or Intel employees engage in a wagering system based on KNOWLEDGE THEY ACTUALLY HAVE. (Not that insider trading is unknown in commodity or stock markets, including futures markets. But these markets have traditionally been heavily regulated and insider trading is forbidden, at least nominally. In the case of this DARPA market, the players are by definition the insiders, with various amounts of very non-public information about plans and contingincies. "Duh.") And so on. So many attacks on this system. Anyway, there _already_ are very real, hard to manipulate markets in information. We call them markets. Markets for real estate, for corn, for copper, etc. If a lot of residents of Jordan think a collapse is coming, real estate prices in Amman will fall. If a lot of technologists think a return to copper wiring is coming, copper prices will rise. And so on. Betting on contrived propositions with relatively small amounts of money ("toy systems") and/or with play money is not very interesting. --Tim May

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Important: P2P+VOIP
by Tyler Durden 30 Jul '03

30 Jul '03

This article appeared in the Lightreading telecom site. Although fairly speculative, the mere implications of VoIP over P2P should be of much interest to Cypherpunks, perhaps the least importance being encryption. -TD Ever since KaZaA, founder Niklas Zennstrom let it slip in a Boardwatch interview that he was planning to launch a company offering voice services using peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols, Light Reading and Boardwatch have been puzzling over what he meant. As Zennstrom himself has clammed up, speculation is in order. And our best guess is that he might be onto something REALLY BIG. Think bigger than Google. Think of something equivalent to the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) that would act as a distributed, dynamic, global telephone directory, linking users with whatever IP address their appliance happened to be using at the moment. This addresses one of the big obstacles in the development of voice over IP (VOIP), and it might also unlock other breakthroughs. For instance, it could speed up the convergence of fixed and mobile telephony -- reckoned by Neil Ransom, CTO of Alcatel SA (NYSE: ALA - message board; Paris: CGEP:PA), to be the next big thing in telecom (look for the coming Light Reading interview). It would be fairly straightforward to use P2P protocols to create such a distributed, global telephone directory, according to Geoff Bennett, director of Light Reading University, who happens to be moderating a Light Reading Webinar titled "Controlling P2P: Who's Stealing Your Bandwidth?" today, at 2:00 p.m. New York time. (Click here to register for the free, live broadcast.) With P2P, a user could search a directory using a special browser and then click on the name he or she wanted to call. The client software would send the request to the equivalent of a KaZaA supernode that would search a giant routing table listing users and their current IP addresses, and send back the result to the client so the VOIP call could be set up. This is pretty much how file sharing works, and file sharing clearly scales to the millions of users that might take advantage of such a system. Zennstrom estimates that 100 million people already use P2P protocols, and the KaZaA browser software has been downloaded a staggering 250 million times -- an order of magnitude more than anything else on CNET's download site. There are good reasons to believe that a P2P-based phone directory of this sort might work better than the VOIP solutions being cooked up by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF has various projects in this area, but they're all based on the fundamental philosophy that existing technology -- namely DNS -- should be adapted to deal with new requirements, rather than inventing something new. But the new requirements in this case include more than just the IETF's Telephone Number Mapping (enum) project. The IETF has also got to come up with a way of making DNS more dynamic, so that when a user moves from one IP address to another, he or she isn't cut off from the world while the changes propagate through the DNS hierarchy. When Boardwatch changed IP address earlier this year, a lot of readers were cut off for two or three days. Imagine the same thing happening every time someone shifted from a fixed to a mobile appliance! Then there's the issue of reliability. Concerns are often expressed about the security of DNS -- in particular, its vulnerability to denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. A P2P approach promises to be much more reliable, because it's so distributed and because the protocol has been designed to allow for parts of the network going AWOL unexpectedly. "Historically, the issue with proprietary solutions has been lack of scaleability, and how robust they are in large networks," Bennett notes. "But P2P apps like KaZaA have shown they can scale and have amazing resilience because they're so distributed. How do you make a DOS attack on something that big? "The P2P solution will obviously be proprietary, and it's always quicker to get a proprietary solution to market than to wait for consensus in a standards group -- especially about something as institutionalized as DNS." For more on IETF side of the story, check out the following columns by Geoff Huston, a member of the Internet Architecture Board, the IETF steering body: Lord of the Numbers Who are You? Light Reading is rather hoping that this speculation will encourage Zennstrom to spill the beans on what he's up to. Right now, we think we've only got half the story. The other half concerns SIP -- the Session Initiation Protocol -- seen by some as another catalyst for a VOIP explosion. In the Boardwatch interview Zennstrom slapped down the idea that his project had anything to do with SIP. Which leads us to ask: Why was he so adamant? Peter Heywood, Founding Editor, Light Reading _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Re: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
by Major Variola (ret) 30 Jul '03

30 Jul '03

At 10:56 PM 7/29/03 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >Assuming it can be legally structured as a "Futures Market", >rather than as "Illegal Gambling", it could make money. >(There are obviously some bets it's unlikely to handle, >such as the bet that Idea Futures markets would be successfully prosecuted >as illegal gambling :-) *Real* futures markets are effectively integrating all the AP type risks (plus others, like weather) relevant to their markets. The Pentagon plan was trying to get the same kind of private but well-done research that real futures traders do, with emphesis on issues of interest to it. As well as a feedback channel to the domestic psyops boys. CNN, etc. also perform a sort of gambling (probabilistic investment, "futures"), in how they distribute their resources in anticipation of regional "news".

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Re: AP by any other name ...
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 30 Jul '03

30 Jul '03

Anonymous <nobody(a)cryptofortress.com> writes: >I first ran into this market concept about ten years ago. The Iowa Political >Stock Market successfully predicted the outcome of the 1992 U.S. presidential >election within a few tenths of a percentage point for all three candidates >(including Perot). It was more accurate than 8 major polls. Since then there >have been many other experiments with other markets: Hollywood Stock Exchange >where people bet on future box office receipts and Foresight Exchange where >traders bet on the outcomes of unresolved scientific and societal questions. It's been used in other areas as well, and for rather longer than ten years. For example, one of the most accurate estimates of the entropy of natural language involved people placing bets on the value of the next letter seen (as opposed to the more traditional "I guess it'll be an 'e'" estimation technique). Peter.

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Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
by Major Variola (ret.) 30 Jul '03

30 Jul '03

Pentagon Abandons Terrorism Betting Plan 1 hour, 20 minutes ago Add White House - AP Cabinet & State to My Yahoo! By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites) said Tuesday. Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the program's director, "and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped." Warner announced the decision not long after Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle took to the floor to denounce the program as "an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism." Warner made the announcement during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, nominated to be Army chief of staff. "This is just wrong," declared Daschle, D-S.D. Warner said he consulted with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, and Appropriations Committee chairman Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), R-Alaska, and they agreed "that this should be immediately disestablished." He said they would recommend that the Pentagon not spend any funds already in place for the program and said they would pull the plug on it during House-Senate budget conference committee negotiations later on this year. The little-publicized Pentagon plan envisioned a potential futures trading market in which speculators would wager on the Internet on the likelihood of a future terrorist attack or assassination attempt on a particular leader. A Web site promoting the plan already is available. When the plan was disclosed by two Democratic senators Monday, the Pentagon defended it as a way to gain intelligence about potential terrorists' plans. Earlier, Warner had said that his staff was looking into the program and would report on it later Tuesday. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites), D-N.Y., said she was appalled to hear of plans to set up "a futures market in death." Other Democrats expressed similar alarm. "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," said Sen. Ron Wyden (news, bio, voting record), D-Ore., one of two lawmakers who disclosed the plan Monday. The program is called the Policy Analysis Market. The Pentagon office overseeing it, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, said it was part of a research effort "to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." Traders would buy and sell futures contracts just like energy traders do now in betting on the future price of oil. But the contracts in this case would be based on what might happen in the Middle East in terms of economics, civil and military affairs or specific events, such as terrorist attacks. Holders of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of traders who put money into the market but predicted wrong. A graphic on the market's Web page Monday showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown. Although the Web site described the Policy Analysis Market as Middle East market, the graphic also included the possibility of a North Korea (news - web sites) missile attack. That graphic apparently was removed from the Web site hours after the news conference in which Wyden and fellow Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan (news, bio, voting record) of North Dakota criticized the market. Dorgan described the market as "unbelievably stupid." "Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in ... and bet on the assassination of an American political figure or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?" he said. But in its statement Monday, DARPA said markets could reveal "dispersed and even hidden information. Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions." According to its Web site, the Policy Analysis Market would be a joint program of DARPA and two private companies, Net Exchange, a market technologies company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the publisher of The Economist magazine. DARPA has been criticized by Congress for its Terrorism Information Awareness program, a computerized surveillance program that has raised privacy concerns. Wyden said the Policy Analysis Market is under the supervision of retired Adm. John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness program and, in the 1980s, national security adviser to President Reagan. The Web site does not address how much money investors would be likely to put into the market but says analysts would be motivated by the "prospect of profit and at pain of loss" to make accurate predictions. Trading is to begin Oct. 1. The market would initially be limited to 1,000 traders, increasing to at least 10,000 by Jan. 1. The Web site says government agencies will not be allowed to participate and will not have access to the identities or funds of traders. The market is a project of a DARPA division called FutureMAP, or "Futures Markets Applied to Prediction." "The rapid reaction of markets to knowledge held by only a few participants may provide an early warning system to avoid surprise," the FutureMap Web site said. Dorgan and Wyden released a letter to Poindexter calling for an end to the program. They noted a May 20 report to lawmakers that cited the possibility of using market forces to predict whether Israel will be attacked with biological weapons. "Surely such a threat should be met with intelligence gathering of the highest quality not by putting the question to individuals betting on an Internet Web site," they said. Wyden said $600,000 has been spent on the program so far and the Pentagon plans to spend an additional $149,000 this year. The Pentagon has requested $3 million for the program for next year and $5 million for the following year. Wyden said the Senate version of next year's defense spending bill would cut off money for the program, but the House version would fund it. The two versions will have to be reconciled. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030729/ap_on_go_ca_st_p…

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DARPA to extend Futures Markets to Courts
by Tim May 30 Jul '03

30 Jul '03

WASHINGTON, 30 July The Pentagon has announced plans to offer the FutureMAP technology to courtrooms and their employees. "Court officers, judges, clerks, persecutors, and even bailiffs will be able to participate in the exciting technology of futures markets," gushed Rear Admiral and Arms Dealer John Poindexter. "Before a decision is reached, before even the jury has gone to the jury box, people will be able to make side bets on various outcomes, with odds set by the collective action of all. The betting and payoffs are done anonymously, so there are no pesky income tax issues to worry about," added Poindexter. Poindexter said that the information revealed by the futures market for legal decisions will also help guide judges to make the correct decisions. "I envision this as the ultimate computer technology for the legal profession." Said one judge in the Ninth Circuit, "As judges we are very poorly paid. How can we live on $160,000 a year? This system will allow us to earn a little bit of money on the side. My clerks are very excited, too. One of my rocket scientists has some ideas about how we can juice up the odds on a long shot decision, with some preliminary rulings, and then swoop in for the kill with the bets we have placed on the actual decision! Cayman Islands, here I come!" Rear Admiral Poindexter denounced critics of the system as Chicken Littles. "We have checks and balances in place. Don't forget, our office also operates the Total Information Awareness Program, so those microphones and DARPA-developed miniature cameras will really come in handy to check that nobody is abusing the system."

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AP by any other name ...
by Anonymous 29 Jul '03

29 Jul '03

Of the 266 Google news links about Policy Analysis Market this morning, most of the headlines trumpet "Defense Department Taking Terror Bets." Policy Analysis Market is an attempt to use the wisdom of markets to predict crises and attacks in the Middle East. The organizations behind the project include the Economist Intelligence unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (they funded the original Internet), and Net Exchange, a spinoff from the California Institute of Technology devoted to commercialize " computational combinatorial deal-making (CCDM)." PAM states this about the whole concept: "Analysts often use prices from various markets as indicators of potential events. The use of petroleum futures contract prices by analysts of the Middle East is a classic example. The Policy Analysis Market (PAM) refines this approach by trading futures contracts that deal with underlying fundamentals of relevance to the Middle East. Initially, PAM will focus on the economic, civil, and military futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey and the impact of U.S. involvement with each." What is controversial is that market futures about "the overthrow of King Hussein of Jordan" were included and have offended politicians here in the US and undoubtedly in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. . Others are upset that a trader can actually make some money if he/she predicts fairly accurately. Trading starts October 1, 2003, and you can signup now. There will be a cutoff after 1000 registrants, and while they hope to have a globally distributed network of participants, what if a significant number were nettime readers? I first ran into this market concept about ten years ago. The Iowa Political Stock Market successfully predicted the outcome of the 1992 U.S. presidential election within a few tenths of a percentage point for all three candidates (including Perot). It was more accurate than 8 major polls. Since then there have been many other experiments with other markets: Hollywood Stock Exchange where people bet on future box office receipts and Foresight Exchange where traders bet on the outcomes of unresolved scientific and societal questions. http://www.hsx.com/ Hollywood Stock Market http://artificialmarkets.com/ Articficial Markets http://www.policyanalysismarket.org/ Policy Analysis Market

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Geek.com Geek News - Mini-Review: Dazzle Universal 6-in-1 card reader (fwd)
by Jim Choate 29 Jul '03

29 Jul '03

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jul/bpd20030729020757.htm -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage(a)ssz.com jchoate(a)open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
by Jamie Lawrence 29 Jul '03

29 Jul '03

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20030729/ap_o… WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. -j -- Jamie Lawrence jal(a)jal.org The strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. - Judge Stewart Dalzell

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