- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Good things gro-o-o-o-w, in Ontario-o-o-o...
by Major Variola (ret) 20 May '03

20 May '03

At 08:07 PM 5/18/03 -0700, Mike Rosing wrote: >Yup, getting to the party will be a lot easier! Is it a coincidence that this comes as Matrix II is being released?

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Economics of "Wanted" and "Unwanted" Messages
by Tim May 19 May '03

19 May '03

I'm reading with only 10% of my brain engaged the many (and oft-repeated) articles about how Hash$ash or MailBucks or whatever will "fix" the spam problem. First, what is the spam problem? It's the receipt of unwanted messages, like a celebrity receiving unwanted attention when he walks in public. (Issues of his choice to appear in public are not central to the argument. He receives attention because his name and face is known to many. A "many to few" problem, just as more letters are sent to the New York Times than to me. Ordinary people don't get bothered on the street because they are not one of the relative handful of celebrities. With e-mail, we're all celebrities. Rather, the costs of sending (contacting) are so low that we can all become celebrities to a subset of stalkers. The analogy with celebrities is intentional. Their are three main approaches for dealing with the problem of unwanted attention towards celebrities: 1. Pass laws making it a crime to approach a person unless one has good reason to. Courts decide who is authorized or justified. This is the "unsolicited e-mail is a crime" approach. 2. Celebrities have agents who screen all potential contacts for the right amount of attention, deals, cocaine, or other forms of "consideration." This is the HashCash approach. "Pay me to be interested." 3. Reclusiveness. Celebrities live behind guarded walls, or on their own Bermuda or Bahamas island estates. When in Hollywood or London, they stay in 5-star hotels with rigorous screening of who gets to their floor. This is the "spam filter and personal responsibility" approach. Now it may be sad that Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones choose to live on Bermuda, in a walled compound no less, but this is the price of notoriety. As for complicated schemes involving using CPU resources to compute cryptographic numbers and thus decide whether a sender was sufficiently motivated or not, this is nonsense. If I recognize a sender's name, I am likely to read his mail, regardless of whether my 1 GHz G4 decides that he did not spend enough of his own CPU resources in contacting me. Etc. And if I see a bunch of Chinese characters in the message, or I see it is from a name I don't recognize, I will likely click on "Think of this kind of message as Trash" and will never again see this kind of message. (I use OS X Mail, a descendant of NeXTMail, and it has this kind of Bayesian filtering built in and easy to use.) If and when spam from harvested messages gets to be too great, I expect I'll change my e-mail address again. (My spam dropped from about 100 per day to about 1 per day when I changed my 7-year-old address of "tcmay(a)got.net" to "timcmay(a)got.net." It hasn't gone up in the past few months. This suggest to me, BTW, that maybe a lot of the spam is using a relatively static list harvested a while back. Which makes sense. Those selling "500 million e-mail addresses for $29.95" have no real incentive to try to keep current: they are selling to dummies trying to sell fake Viagara sugar pills to suckers. Maybe they're selling each other the same lists of harvested addresses during the dot com peak? Just a thought.) The fundamental flaw which is leading to the spam problem is that sending a million messages costs very little, not that recipients are not "charging" for e-mail. If bandwidth actually cost money, if various links in sending either JPEGs or copies of the Koran or e-mail actually were charged, a lot of the "ontological" problems with free mail would be lessened. Notice that I am NOT saying that all carriers should charge. Indeed, whether they carry traffic for free or charge for it, and how they charge, is their business. Whether on the uplink (sending) or downlink (receiving) or in the middle side, that some traffic is charged for, and must be paid for somehow, should be enough to fix things. The reason we don't get inundated with hundreds of pounds of physical junk mail each day is that there are ontological limits on sending of physical goods, on consuming of physical resources. (And learning takes place. A few years ago I was getting 10 times as much weight in glossy catalogs. I surmise that some of the glossy catalog makers gave up on sending expensive catalogs, for which they also had to pay postage, to tens of millions of potential customers.) On the downlink side, I expect my ISP is not much interested in trying to charge me or the sender for the e-mail I receive. But on the uplink side, on the side which fires off a million e-mails, I wonder why they don't try to charge the sender? And why traffic in between, bouncing amongst nodes, is not charge for? (Such charges would eventually force backwards a charging mechanism, of whatever form, a la the arguments by Hardy, Tribble, etc. for "digital silk road." Nobody expected the camel caravan from Tashkent to Baghdad to carry stuff for free. So why is it expected that 50 GB of JPEGs and e-mail should travel for free on the Net? Long term, unwanted communication comes with the "celebrity" effect. Greg Egan describes it well in "Permutation City": a constant barrage of agents attempting to make contact, with movies, fake voices, and every other possible trick. And so the spam filters will spend more time filtering. (And getting rid of the socialized "all bits are carried for free" pricing policy at least solves the worst of the ontological problems.) Should crypto people be worrying about how nodes on the Net charge for traffic? Maybe. But it won't involve "HashCash" tokens. For the 99.99% who never bother with the complications of crypto and signatures, convincing them to learn about how to use HashCash will be 100 times harder a sell. And if some mail system tries to ram it down the throats of the users, they'll find alternatives. --Tim May

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Re: Underestimating long-term consequences of cryptoanarchy
by Tyler Durden 19 May '03

19 May '03

>In the case of printing, the result over the following century or two was a >rise in literacy rates (in the common languages, and this is when German, >French, and English, for example, largely solidified into their current >forms, viz. the Luther Bible, the King James Version, etc.). And the >Protestant Reformation was built on printed words and on the people's >ability to directly read the religious texts. > >A technology undermined the state and the church. This is why I still bother reading Tim May's posts. Every now and then he comes up with a good one. Hell, I'd recommend he stick with technology and stop worrying about blacks and other "social problems". In response to the main post I'd point out that it would have been easy (and wrong) to say that, "The Printing Press, The telescope, town clocks and Protestantism will reduce the power of the church to the point where it will collapse." (Actually, many educated catholics probably thought this at the time.) And although the Catholic church did lose power on many fronts, it by no means dissappeared. (You could almost say it prospered, but probably by virtue of the fact that it might be the single largest real estate dealer in the world.) The church morphed, changed, fought itself and the rest of the world and found a nice cozy niche for itself. ANd part of this is due to mere social inertia... but also, the church probably still serves a function that people need (or at least want), and so they continue to feed it $$$ and whatnot. But the Catholic church has become one possible option, and arguably they've learned to "compete" for donations and members. Likewise with governments. I still need my trash taken out, and for potholes to be fixed. And although these services can be provided privately (maybe) if strong crypto gives people opportunities, government might be forced to learn how to do some things more efficiently so that people can "opt-in" if they choose to. Hell, this has already happened to some extent with the US mail service. So while I don't believe heavy crypto will kill off governments, I DO believe it will eventually force them to change into something we probably can't imagine too well right now. -TD _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?
by Nomen Nescio 19 May '03

19 May '03

Lauren Weinstein, founder of People for Internet Responsibility, has come out with a new spam solution at http://www.pfir.org/tripoli-overview. According to this proposal, the Internet email architecture would be revamped. Each piece of mail would include a PIT, a Payload Identity Token, emphasis on Identity. This would be a token certifying that you were an Authorized Email User as judged by the authorities. Based on your PIT, the receiving email software could decide to reject your email. It is anticipated that all Pits considered acceptable by the vast majority of all Tripoli-compliant software user would be digitally signed by one or more designated, trustworthy, third-pary authorities who would be delegated the power to certify the validity of identity and other relevant information within Pits. In other words, here comes Verisign again. It is anticipated that in most cases, in order for the sender of an e-mail message to become initially certified by a Pit Certification Authority (PCA), the sender would need to first formally accept Terms of Service (ToS) that may well prohibit the sending of spam, and equally importantly, would authorize the certification authority to "downgrade" the sender's authentication certification in the case of spam or other ToS violations. Thus you have to be politically acceptable to the Powers That Be in order to receive your license to email, aka your PIT. And be careful what you say or your PIT will be downgraded. Unfortunately he doesn't discuss various crypto protocol issues: If the PIT is just a datum, what keeps someone from stealing your PIT and spams with it? If the PIT is a cert on a key, what do you sign? The message? What if it gets munged in transit, as messages do? You've just lost most of your email reliability. Or maybe you sign the current date/time? Then delayed mail is dead mail. Or maybe you respond to a challenge and sign that? That won't work if relays are involved, because they can't sign for you. Spam is a problem, but it's no excuse to add more centralized administrative control to the Internet. Far better to go with a decentralized solution like camram.sourceforge.net, basically a matter of looking for hashcash in the mail headers. This raises the cost to spammers without significantly impacting normal users.

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Re: changes at lne.com
by Eric Murray 19 May '03

19 May '03

On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 03:21:05PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: > I hope you whitelist known regular posters. I subscribe to > minder, but often post thru lne. I guess it's been a while since I set this up, so people have forgotten. There's a "whitelist" that has subscribers to all the CDRs, anonymous remailers, and anyone that has ever posted to any CDR (assuming we got the mail). It's not often that there is a non-spam post from a sender that isn't on the whitelist-- when there is, I forward it and put the sender on the list. The idea is to filter out the spam without requiring moderation. Eric

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[Vehicular reverse panopticonning] FBI tails can't drive
by Major Variola (ret) 19 May '03

19 May '03

Shortly before 4:30 p.m., Hatfill's car pulled into a parking spot on the street and Hatfill got out with a camera to take photos of those trailing him. Hatfill told officers the driver of the green SUV "had been recording his movements all day when he decided to take a picture back," according to the police report. The driver of the green SUV then drove off, striking Hatfill, the reports said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10736-2003May19.html

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Exciting new information on Palladium
by Nomen Nescio 19 May '03

19 May '03

There's a huge amount of (relatively) new information available on Microsoft's NGSCB, aka Palladium. Start at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/ngscb/ and try the links at the left. I'll mention two very exciting points here. Clicking on the Newsgroup link led to some discussion of a proposal by famous security guru Ernie Brickell of Intel to use zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate that you have a good Palladium key. The discussion implies that Intel is promoting this technology for use in Palladium. Apparently Brickell presented this at the RSA conference. I can't find an online paper but here is an abstract pointed to by the newsgroup discussion: We will present an efficient protocol for demonstrating that a public signature verification key corresponds to a private signature generation key that is contained in a certified hardware device, without identifying which certified hardware device contains the private signature generation key. Each hardware device contains a unique certified key, but neither the public, nor the private unique keys are ever known outside of the hardware device. The protocol provides a verifier with the ability to revoke a hardware device. The cryptographic assumptions required are an interval RSA assumption and a Bounded Decision Diffie Hellman (DDH) assumption. The proofs use the random oracle model. We will discuss the privacy issues with cryptographic keys associated with trusted computing, and motivate the privacy requirements that were met in this protocol. We will also discuss potential performance and capability enhancements to the protocol. We had some discussion of this idea last year, but we couldn't come up with an approach that would both protect privacy and allow revocation. Sounds like Brickell has cracked this nut! That's good news for privacy advocates. Hopefully someone can point to a copy of the paper, or perhaps summarize the idea if they have seen Brickell present it. For the next point, click on the Product Information link to get to several documents about Palladium. The best one to start with (after the Overview and the FAQ, if you didn't previously know anything about this technology) is the Security Model. But the TCB paper has probably got the most meat. One of the big issues about Palladium has been the issue of signed code. Hopefully, most people don't believe any more that only signed code will run, or that Microsoft or others will limit what applications you can run, as claimed by Lucky Green and Ross Anderson. The whole point of TC is to let "trusted" applications (now called NCAs, Nexus Computing Agents) run side by side with legacy apps. Virtually everything you can run today you will be able to run in the future. And so far it still appears that Microsoft will not limit the ability of developers to write their own NCAs and make use of the TC technology. Where the question about signed code comes into play is with regard to the question of what versions of software people will choose to trust. One of the main functions of TC is "attestation", by which the secure hardware can report to a remote system a cryptographic hash of the running code. Based on this hash, the remote system can decide to trust (or not) the code running on the local machine. So for this to work, the remote system has to either have a list of acceptable hash values or perhaps it would rely on a (non-centralized) certificate that it chooses to trust for this purpose. The issue also arises with sealed storage. Another of the TC features is the ability of trusted apps to encrypt code such that it is locked to their own identity. Other programs, or other versions of the same program, would not be able to decrypt it. So again the question arises, what exactly is hashed? What happens if there are different versions of the software? The TCB article sheds considerable light on this. What will be hashed is not the program code, but rather a Manifest. This is an XML format file which includes either the program hash, or A PUBLIC KEY! This means that a distributed, trusted app can base its trust not just on the relatively-brittle program hash, but if it chooses, on a signature public key which would be used specifically for the purpose of issuing new versions of the program. Any software signed by that key would be interchangeable for Palladlium trust purposes. In addition, the Manifest can define which "code modules" (libraries? DLLs?) can be loaded by the program. This is done by inclusion/exclusion lists, which can again be either hashes or public keys, so in other words your trusted app can say to use a certain version of a DLL, or to use any version signed by the DLL author. The Manifest also holds a DEBUG FLAG! This means that trusted code can be debugged - if the Manifest says so. And if it says not to, you can just edit the Manifest file to allow it - but the Palladium identity of the program will change, since that is based on a hash of the Manifest. In other words, code can be debugged, but it will not be trusted by other non-debugged versions of the code, and it will not be able to unlock data that was locked while it was undebugged. This approach seems to offer a good balance between flexibility and security. And the best part is that it makes these decisions in a completely decentralized fashion. Microsoft doesn't have to get involved at all. Each developer and user can decide for himself what policies to set, how to configure the Manifest, and thus what software to trust. Well, there's more good stuff here, and I'm still reading. This is all apparently the same information that was distributed at the recent WinHEC conference. I would encourage those who want to know more about the reality of this new technology, rather than the fantasies being promulgated by its opponents, to study these documents closely.

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Re: Good things gro-o-o-o-w, in Ontario-o-o-o...
by Anonymous 18 May '03

18 May '03

Tyler thought: > but 15 grams is enough stock for a petty dealer > to keep on hand, no?) Not likely. Most people I know buy pot by the quarter or half oz. Some by the oz. Fifteen grams is pretty small amount, just growing one plant will give you a few ounces, even a pound. OTOH, being able to walk around with 15 grams in your pocket and smoke it openly, more or less, would be fantastic.

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Cypherpunks List Info
by cpunk＠lne.com 18 May '03

18 May '03

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information Last updated: Sep 12, 2002 This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk Instructions on unsubscribing from the list can be found below. 0. Introduction The Cypherpunks mailing list is a mailing list for discussing cryptography and its effect on society. It is not a moderated list (but see exceptions below) and the list operators are not responsible for the list content. Cypherpunks is a distributed mailing list. A subscriber can subscribe to one node of the list and thereby participate on the full list. Each node (called a "Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer", although they are not related to anonymous remailers) exchanges messages with the other nodes in addition to sending messages to its subscribers. A message posted to one node will be received by the list subscribers on the other nodes, and vice-versa. 1. Filtering The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a lesser extent on modifying messages that go to/from their subscribers. Filtering is done, on nodes that do it, to reduce the huge amount of spam that the cypherpunks list is subjected to. There are three basic flavors of filtering CDRs: "raw", which send all messages to their subscribers. "cooked" CDRs try to eliminate the spam on that's on the regular list by automatically sending only messages that are from cypherpunks list subscribers (on any CDR) or people who are replying to list messages. Finally there are moderated lists, where a human moderator decides which messages from the raw list to pass on to subscribers. 2. Message Modification Message modification policy indicates what modifications, if any, beyond what is needed to operate the CDR are done (most CDRs add a tracking X-loop header on mail posted to their subscribers to prevent mail loops). Message modification usually happens on mail going in or out to each CDR's subscribers. CDRs should not modify mail that they pass from one CDR to the next, but some of them do, and others undo those modifications. 3. Privacy Privacy policy indicates if the list will allow anyone ("open"), or only list members, or no one ("private") , to retrieve the subscribers list. Note that if you post, being on a "private" list doesn't mean much, since your address is now out there. It's really only useful for keeping spammers from harvesting addresses from the list software. Digest mode indicates that the CDR supports digest mode, which is where the posts are batched up into a few large emails. Nodes that support only digest mode are noted. 4. Anonymous posting Cypherpunks encourages anonymous posting. You can use an anonymous remailer: http://www.andrebacard.com/remail.html http://anon.efga.org/Remailers http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html or you can send posts to the list via cpunks_anon(a)einstein.ssz.com and your mail's headers will be stripped before posting. Note that this doesn't provide complete anonymity since the receiving site will still have log file entries showing the source of the mail (or you have to trust that they delete them). You also will be 'sharing' a reputation with the other entities that post through this alias, and some of them are spammers, so some subscribers will have this alias filtered. 5. Unsubscribing Unsubscribing from the cypherpunks list: Since the list is run from a number of different CDRs, you have to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to. If you don't remember and can't figure it out from the mail headers (hint: the top Received: line should tell you), the easiest way to unsubscribe is to send unsubscribe messages to all the CDRs listed below. How to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to: Get your mail client to show all the headers (Microsoft calls this "internet headers"). Look for the Sender or X-loop headers. The Sender will say something like "Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)lne.com". The X-loop line will say something like "X-Loop: cypherpunks(a)lne.com". Both of these inticate that you are subscribed to the lne.com CDR. If you were subscribed to the algebra CDR, they would have algebra.com in them. Once you have figured out which CDR you're subscribed to, look in the table below to find that CDRs unsubscribe instructions. 6. Lunatics, spammers and nut-cases "I'm subscribed to a filtering CDR yet I still see lots of junk postings". At this writing there are a few sociopaths on the cypherpunks list who are abusing the lists openness by dumping reams of propaganda on the list. The distinction between a spammer and a subscriber is nearly always very clear, but the dictinction between a subscriber who is abusing the list by posting reams of propaganda and a subscriber who is making lots of controversial posts is not clear. Therefore, we tolerate the crap. Subscribers with a low crap tolerance should check out mail filters. Procmail is a good one, although it works on Unix and Unix-like systems only. Eudora also has a capacity for filtering mail, as do many other mail readers. An example procmail recipie is below, you will of course want to make your own decisions on which (ab)users to filter. # mailing lists: # filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherspool folder, discarding # mail from loons. All CDRs set their From: line to 'owner-cypherpunks'. # /dev/null is unix for the trash can. :0 * ^From.*owner-cypherpunks@.* { :0: * (^From:.*ravage@ssz\.com.*|\ ^From:.*jchoate@dev.tivoli.com.*|\ ^From:.*mattd@useoz.com|\ ^From:.*proffr11@bigpond.com|\ ^From:.*jei@cc.hut.fi) /dev/null :0: cypherspool } 7. List of current CDRs All commands are sent in the body of mail unless otherwise noted. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Algebra: Operator: Subscription: "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)algebra.com Unsubscription: "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)algebra.com Help: "help cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)algebra.com Posting address: cypherpunks(a)algebra.com Filtering policy: raw Message Modification policy: no modification Privacy policy: ??? Info: ??? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CCC: Operator: drt(a)un.bewaff.net Subscription: "subscribe [password of your choice]" to cypherpunks-request(a)koeln.ccc.de Unsubscription: "unsubscribe <password>" to cypherpunks-request(a)koeln.ccc.de Help: "help" to to cypherpunks-request(a)koeln.ccc.de Web site: http://koeln.ccc.de/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks Posting address: cypherpunks(a)koeln.ccc.de Filtering policy: This specific node drops messages bigger than 32k and every message with more than 17 recipients or just a line containing "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject. Digest mode: this node is digest-only NNTP: news://koeln.ccc.de/cbone.ml.cypherpunks Message Modification policy: no modification Privacy policy: ??? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Infonex: Subscription: "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)infonex.com Unsubscription: "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)infonex.com Help: "help cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)infonex.com Posting address: cypherpunks(a)infonex.com Filtering policy: raw Message Modification policy: no modification Privacy policy: ??? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lne: Subscription: "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)lne.com Unsubscription: "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)lne.com Help: "help cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)lne.com Posting address: cypherpunks(a)lne.com Filtering policy: cooked Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to lne CDR subscribers. All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified. Message Modification policy: 1. messages are demimed (MIME attachments removed) when posted through lne or received by lne CDR subscribers 2. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed 3. "Reply-to:" removed Privacy policy: private Info: http://www.lne.com/cpunk; "info cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)lne.com Archive: http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/index.html (thanks to Steve Furlong and Len Sassaman) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minder: Subscription: "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)minder.net Unsubscription: "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)minder.net Help: "help" to majordomo(a)minder.net Posting address: cypherpunks(a)minder.net Filtering policy: raw Message Modification policy: no modification Privacy policy: private Info: send mail to cypherpunks-info(a)minder.net --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Openpgp: [openpgp seems to have dropped off the end of the world-- it doesn't return anything from sending help queries. Ericm, 8/7/01] Subscription: "subscribe cypherpunks" to listproc(a)openpgp.net Unsubscription: "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to listproc(a)openpgp.net Help: "help" to listproc(a)openpgp.net Posting address: cypherpunks(a)openpgp.net Filtering policy: raw Message Modification policy: no modification Privacy policy: ??? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ssz: Subscription: "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)ssz.com Unsubscription: "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)ssz.com Help: "help cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)ssz.com Posting address: cypherpunks(a)ssz.com Filtering policy: raw Message Modification policy: Subject line prepended with "CDR:" Reply-to cypherpunks(a)ssz.com added. Privacy policy: open Info: http://www.ssz.com/cdr/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunder: Subscription: "subscribe" to sunder(a)sunder.net Unsubscription: "unsubscribe" to sunder(a)sunder.net Help: "help" to sunder(a)sunder.net Posting address: sunder(a)sunder.net Filtering policy: moderated Message Modification policy: ??? Privacy policy: ??? Info: ??? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pro-ns: Subscription: "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)pro-ns.net Unsubscription: "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)pro-ns.net Help: "help cypherpunks" to majordomo(a)pro-ns.net Posting address: cypherpunks(a)pro-ns.net Filtering policy: cooked Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to local CDR subscribers. All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified. Message Modification policy: 1. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed 2. "Reply-to:" removed Privacy policy: private Info: http://www.pro-ns.net/cpunk

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Re: Underestimating long-term consequences of cryptoanarchy
by Major Variola (ret) 18 May '03

18 May '03

At 09:47 AM 5/17/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: >The general theme is purpose "the purpose of life." The purpose of any >lifeform, or at least the outcome after competition and selection, is >furtherance of life. Genes exist to copy genes; genes cooperate to this end. Growing metazoans such as ourselves is a means to that end. >Likewise, the purpose of Congress as a generalized lifeform is to >perpetuate itself, to grow, to become more dominant. ... >I hesitate to call this a "bionomic interpretation," especially as I >never really bothered to learn what "bionomics" was all about, but it's >a kind of biological interpretation. You mention Darwin but not Richard Dawkins author of _Selfish Gene_ and later meme theories. Memes are basically ideas. They can replicate, compete, cooperate, etc. Brains are the medium in which they grow. Memes like "believe me or believers kill you" are particularly cancerous. If you haven't read Dawkins, you should, and he's quite an enjoyable read. ---- Language is an RPC call. Sheeple give it root access.

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