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Re: Fake News for Big Brother
by Tim May 03 May '03

03 May '03

On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, at 07:16 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: > I'm not sure how I feel about this. Problems would arise if there > *were* a > law against > news media presenting false information. The question becomes 'What is > truth?', and > 'Who decides". Laws of this type are used in many tyrannies (recently, > Zimbabwe) to > persecute reporters on the grounds that they were 'libeling the > government'. > > 'Truth in media' is a sword that cuts both ways. I don't see any basis for supporting a "law against lying." Unless a contract is involved, lying is just another form of speech. Should a church which claims that praying to the baby Jesus will save one from going to Hell be prosecuted for lying? Should a newspaper be prosecuted for publishing a claim that the Sumerian prediction that Nibiru, aka Planet X, will stop the earth from rotating on May 15, 2003? Should someone be prosecuted for saying the Holocaust never happened, or was exaggerated greatly by the Jewish lobby? The answer to all libertarians, and the answer embodied in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, is "No." Of course, the idea of reputation matters. And--Declan can correct me or clarify things--newspapers and perhaps even reporters have professional organizations and other "standards and practices" type of seals of approval. Something like "This newspaper is a member of the National Assocation for the Advancement of Uncolored Journalism," or somesuch. Probably the Weekly World News ("Baby Eats Own Hand, Aliens Suspected") would not be a member in good standing of the NAAUJ. And the newspaper which published the deliberately false arson story should at the least face suspension. Were someone to kill the reporter who wrote the false story, I would only chuckle. This doesn't mean government should be involved in deciding the answer to Pilate's famous question, "What is truth?" --Tim May "The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat

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[e-gold-list] Norfolk Island's new currency!
by Steve Schear 03 May '03

03 May '03

GoldNow is in the process of helping set up an entire small island population (pop. 1900) to accept/trade in e-gold. The second highest priority we have is to educate the new e-gold users on keyloggers, trojans etc. The place is Norfolk Island, approx. 450 miles northwest of New Zealand. They are the descendants of the mutineers from the Bounty. Pitcairn Island was where they came from. The Queen of England at the time asked them to move to Norfolk Island instead, which they did... interested parties can read the history at http://www.nf The author Collen McCulloch lives on Norfolk Island, as well as singer Helen Reddy. NF folk claim to be independent from Australia. OZ government says they're not. They have had a bun fight for about 150 years about this very issue. There is an uneasy truce at present, but the Australian government demands that NF do not mint their own currency. So, that's where GoldNow & e-gold steps in... Graham Kelly CEO GoldNow http://www.GoldNow.St Primary Customer Service +61 3 9776-4886 US Free Call 1-866-999-1717 US Fax 1-213-559-8555 UK Phone +44 (0) 709 233-7612 UK Phone +44 (0) 709 201-4015 CEO "Money runs away from those without valor" - Ayn Rand

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Re: patriotism considered evil
by James A. Donald 03 May '03

03 May '03

-- On 30 Apr 2003 at 7:17, Adam Back wrote: > I'm not American. I'm dual-national British/Swiss, I've > lived in Britain, Scotland, Canada and now the US. But I > have not noticed anyone in Britain, or British press > discussing "un-British" behavior, or putting down anyone > attempting to ask questions as "un-patriotic". (Ditto for the > other countries). Press coverage of Iraq is varyingly biased > in those countries (ridiculously so in the US, somewhat in > the UK due to their involvement). I do not think so: Observe CNN whitewashing Saddam. Observe NBC imagining "unexpectedly strong Iraqi resistance", predicting that the battle of Baghdad would resemble the siege of Stalingrad, and observe its conspicuous failure to notice that the US was winning decisively in the cities. If you watched NBC, then when the statue fell, you would say "Hey, what happened!!" Ann coulter has been having a great time parodying the foolish pinkos that dominate the news media. www.anncoulter.com : : Liberals Meet Unexpected Resistance April 30, 2003 : : : : THOUGH MANY had anticipated a cakewalk for the media : : in undermining the war on terrorism, instead : : liberals are caught in a quagmire of good news about : : the war. Predictions that liberals would have an : : easy time embarrassing President Bush have met : : unexpected resistance. They're still looking for the : : bad news they said was there. Experts believe the : : media's quagmire results from severely reduced : : troops. The left's current force is less than half : : the size of the coalition media that undermined the : : Vietnam War. This is a melange of infamous claims issued by the New York Times, NBC, and CNN --- "US ofrces meet unexpected resistance" She has been doing much the same in every column since the statue fell. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Mz00mZ5gWkjnT0B8TL9Q/ovyfF/rh8UgopMSl51V 4hokukmt8BDA5AtehHVy0Gm+1fzARkRhDtq8q9MRR

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Re: Why are there so many statists and communists here on this list now?
by Major Variola (ret) 02 May '03

02 May '03

t 03:08 PM 5/2/03 -0700, Matt Beland wrote: >Looks like you've driven most of the interesting people away. Who's left? The >ones who agree with you? Where's the fun in that? > >Don't you get tired of talking into an echo machine? "When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid on our own! And we were grateful!" --Alan Olsen Perhaps this whole thing is just one person talking to himself, with Tim listening in! -Dr Evil

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Mike Hawash
by Tyler Durden 02 May '03

02 May '03

OK, aside from the obvious problems with being held without charge until now, there are some other major issues here. Apparently, the guy is only being charged with traveling to China in an attempt to enter Afghanistan and fight US forces. This counts as terrorism? I thought it was good old fashion treason. -TD _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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[Factoring] TWIRL and RSA key sizes
by Trei, Peter 02 May '03

02 May '03

This just came to me over one of our internal mailing lists. It may be of interest. Peter Trei RSA Security --------------------- > A new technical note on Adi Shamir's "TWIRL" design for integer > factorization has just been posted on the RSA Labs site, at > http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/technotes/twirl.html. > > Executive Summary: The popular 1024-bit key size for RSA > keys is becoming the next horizon for researchers in integer > factorization, as demonstrated by the innovative "TWIRL" > design recently proposed by Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer. > The design confirms that the traditional assumption that a > 1024-bit RSA key provides comparable strength to an 80-bit > symmetric key has been a reasonable one. Thus, if the 80-bit > security level is appropriate for a given application, then TWIRL > itself has no immediate effect. Many details remain to be > worked out, however, and the cost estimates are inconclusive. > TWIRL provides an opportunity for review of key sizes in > practice; RSA Laboratories' revised recommendations are > given in Table 1 below. > > -- Burt > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com

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Mike Hawash: Time for an AP site?
by Nomen Nescio 02 May '03

02 May '03

Someone on this board mentioned that a fake AP site might be almost as good as real AP. I suggest that someone create a fake AP board, on the tonga server or wherever, for Mike Hawash. Basically, it would be a website that lists the name of anyone involved in incarcerating this man without due process. It will also sport logos of the various "payment" options, including Paypal, Digicash, egold, or whatever else. It will also have the current $-value associated with each name. Future additions to the name list will be tactical, however. D u b y a, for instance, would not be on there, nor would Fabio, Britney, or any other "funny" slam-dunks. Hopefully, the board will look like its real, and as if there's already a price (and date) established for those involved in holding Hawash.

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Re: Mike Hawash
by Major Variola (ret) 02 May '03

02 May '03

At 03:10 PM 4/29/03 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: >OK, aside from the obvious problems with being held without charge until >now, there are some other major issues here. > >Apparently, the guy is only being charged with traveling to China in an >attempt to enter Afghanistan and fight US forces. According to 1 "informant", who is getting *what* in return? Buying a parka and flying is not treason. Even trying to enter .af is not illegal. (And congress never did declare war there, did they?) Shooting off guns in a quarry is not illegal. Going to the same church as folks who pled is not illegal. Clearly, he was given a deal, while in illegal custody, cooperate or we file charges. He didn't, so they did. If they had charges to begin with, they needn't have held him illegally. Of course, he won't be tried in the justice system, so we'll never know the facts.. Maybe they'll go after his wife, if he still doesn't do as they dictate.

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Students who ran file-sharing systems will each give the recording industry up to $17,500
by Major Variola (ret) 02 May '03

02 May '03

4 lives destroyed by record companies. Time to add onion routing. Note that the record companies didn't go after *downloaders*, only offerers. Note that its legal to have ripped tracks on your computer, and P2P clients often auto-search for content you don't intend to share. Perhaps the defendants should have quickly gotten CDs with the tracks on their machine, and used that defense. Oh, that's right, these are poor students without funds for defense. Burn, baby, burn. 4 Pay Steep Price for Free Music Students who ran file-sharing systems will each give the recording industry up to $17,500. Four college students learned Thursday that free music downloads can carry a hidden price tag $12,000 to $17,500, to be exact. The major record companies had accused the students two at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and one each at Princeton University and Michigan Technological University of fueling music piracy by running file-sharing networks on campus and offering hundreds of songs for copying. On Thursday, the four settled the companies' claims and promised not to violate their copyrights. Although they did not admit to committing or aiding piracy, they each agreed to pay thousands of dollars to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the labels' trade group. The settlements mark the first time the record companies have recovered money from individuals in the United States accused of piracy on file-sharing networks. But they may be a harbinger of more lawsuits, as the industry starts taking its battle against online piracy directly to users. Evan Cox, a copyright attorney in San Francisco who has helped software companies battle piracy, said the amounts are high enough to catch the attention of file swappers. "I'd personally think twice about doing something that would cost me $12,000 to $17,500 to avoid spending 12 to 15 bucks on the occasional CD," Cox said. But Howard Ende, an attorney for 18-year-old Princeton University sophomore Daniel Peng, predicted that the tactic would backfire. "This case had very little to do with Dan Peng and everything to do with the recording industry's attempt to intimidate Internet users around the country and college students in particular," Ende said. "They looked to instill fear, but instead they got fear and loathing." In the settlements, all four Peng; Joseph Nievelt, a 21-year-old junior computer science student at Michigan Tech in Houghton, Mich.; Jesse Jordan, a 19-year-old freshman information technology student at Rensselaer in Troy, N.Y.; and Aaron Sherman, a student studying management and computer networks at Rensselaer agreed not to infringe or support the infringement of the companies' copyrights. Peng and Nievelt each agreed to pay $15,000. Sherman agreed to pay $17,500, and Jordan agreed to pay $12,000. For Nievelt, who was raised in a Detroit suburb, the payment amounts to nearly three years' tuition. For each of the other three, the settlement translates to about half a year's worth of classes. None of them appear to have made any money off the file-sharing systems they operated, which were confined to their campuses' computer networks. "It's been kind of a bad day, and a bad week and a really, really, really bad month," Nievelt said from the dorm room he shares with two other students, where the corkboard is covered with exam announcements and fliers touting anti-RIAA rallies. The lanky Nievelt started tinkering with computers in the seventh grade and gradually moved on to explore the flexibility of computer networking. Last summer he landed an internship at *Microsoft *Corp., working as a development engineer in the software giant's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. There, he met fellow intern Sherman, who also had spent much of his young life steeped in technology. While attending Huntington High School in Long Island, N.Y., the short-haired, clean-cut student launched a Web site dedicated to a rare genetic condition, Triplo-X syndrome. At Rensselaer, he quickly became involved in a variety of activities, including joining the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha and publishing extensive research on "Efficient Solutions for Peer to Peer Resource Discovery on Local Area Networks." When officials from Michigan Tech called him one April afternoon and told him that the RIAA was serving him with legal papers, Nievelt felt sick. "My dad's not happy. My mom's more on the paranoid side," Nievelt said. "For a while, it seemed that they [the RIAA] were going to get more money than we ever would have had in the family." Sherman, who could not be reached for comment late Thursday, has written or contributed to several academic papers related to file sharing and MP3, the most popular format for music on file-sharing networks. These include a treatise on FlatLan, the file-sharing software at the center of the record labels' suit against him. For Jordan, the $12,000 settlement will wipe out his college savings account. It was money the quiet freshman who wrote his first computer program at age 9 and helped test Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system at age 13 had earned by working summers at a pet store near the family home in Oceanside, N.Y. And it was money that the family was counting on to stretch the loans and scholarships that helped cover Jordan's $29,000 annual bill for tuition and housing. "I've been out of work for a while," said Jordan's father, Andy, 54, a former technology manager for financial service companies. "We had a small fund set aside for his schooling, but that was in the markets and is pretty much gone." Noting that he owns thousands of records and CDs, Andy Jordan added: "They [the RIAA] have sued one of their most avid customers. The RIAA says that they wanted to teach these kids and their families a lesson. The lesson we learned is that we will never, ever buy another product from any of those companies again. That's the lesson we're going to tell everyone." Peng, a former salutatorian of Manalapan High School in central New Jersey, is a physics whiz who won a silver medal at the 2001 International Physics Olympiad in Antalya, Turkey. On his personal Web site, the young scientist detailed his hopes of majoring in electrical engineering or computer science, as well as his love of authors Ayn Rand and Isaac Asimov. The Nievelt, Sherman and Jordan settlements took the form of court orders that, if violated, could subject the students to fines and jail terms. They and Peng were allowed to pay the record companies in installments spread over two or more years. Many record company executives blame the protracted slump in CD sales on file-sharing networks, which let users copy songs from one another's computers for free. They responded by suing the most popular networks, with mixed results. The music industry's suit against Napster Inc. effectively shut down the pioneering network and forced the company into insolvency. But a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled last week that two other popular networks, Morpheus and Grokster, were not liable for the unauthorized copies made by their users. Nevertheless, every judge on the cases has held that users on these networks who offer or download files without the copyright owner's permission are violating the law. Those rulings have supplied the RIAA with ammunition for lawsuits against individual file swappers. Peng said in a news release, "I don't believe that I did anything wrong." His attorneys also defended him, saying he'd simply set up an index that enabled others on the Princeton network to find and copy all kinds of files from one another's computers. Lawyers for the record companies, however, said the four students facilitated piracy the same way that Napster did by providing on their computers a central directory to unauthorized copies of songs. They also offered 1,800 to 6,000 songs from their own computers for others on their campuses to copy, the companies alleged. The lawsuits, which were filed early last month, asked for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. That translated to hundreds of millions of dollars for each of the students. Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the RIAA, said the settlements, although well below what the companies asked for, are "the right amount given the situation." Most students "will view $15,000 as a fairly significant amount of money," Oppenheim said. He also noted that since the four suits were filed, at least 18 campus file-sharing networks have been taken down by their operators. "The message," Oppenheim said, "is clearly getting through that distributing copyrighted works without permission is illegal, can have consequences, and that we will move quickly and aggressively to enforce our rights." http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-settle2may02,1,6792735.story?coll=la%…

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Re: Cheese-eating surrender monkeys
by Tim May 02 May '03

02 May '03

On Friday, May 2, 2003, at 07:50 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: >> Tim May[SMTP:timcmay@got.net] wrote: >> >> The right-wing columnist Jonathan Goldberg dubbed them "cheese-eating >> surrender monkeys" several years ago, long before this latest matter. >> Has a great cadence, and it's accurate. >> > No one expects the Pedantry Police! > > Goldberg used the phrase in a 1999 column, but he did not invent it. > > It's from a actually from a 1995 Simpsons episode, "Round Springfield" > (production number 2F32) Here's the quote in context: > > [I agree with most of the post, but couldn't let this misquote stand] > Peter Trei Yes, now that you remind me, I remember this. And I think Goldberg acknowledged his source in an interview I saw with him just before the war started. Likewise, my quotes below come from Blair and Bush, respectively. --Tim May "We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania." "We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia." "We are at war with Iraq. We have always been at war with Iraq. "We are at war with France. We have always been at war with France."

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