- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

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by jillian hooper 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

Hi. I was following through researching gaslighting due to some horific things which have occured to me over the last 7 years. Yesterday I hit the Phantom Hearse Owners Association and got ther4 web site. I hit one of their fun buttons 'raiders' and they4 downloaded my microsft 200 version and I think my files. A number 2544097 recconnection number came up but I could't get reconnected to them. My modem couldn't be found. I now supsect as your article highlighted the threat to privacy that this is what has happened to me. To me this is just part of the ongoing harrassment as the father of my child has been involved with hearses fro a long time. I am interested in talking with you about gaslighting as I now find that I have to prove what was done to me or I will lose custody of my daughter. I don't know if this is your field or not but would appreciate you thoughts on these matters of privacy etc. I tried to contact the Los Angeles Hearse Owners Associaiton which I recently joined but the leader comes up in purple and mysteriously their details can't be found. Looking forward to hearing from u. Thank u. Kind regards Jillian Hooper _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

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Re: The Crypto Winter
by jamesd＠echeque.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

-- On 18 Nov 2001, at 14:17, Neil Johnson wrote: > > > It would seem to me that digital cash would be better off > > > not being tied either of these trust systems, but somehow > > > develop it's own. James A. Donald: > > That is a really dumb idea. > > > > It took governments a generation and the vigorous and > > frequent application of bayonets and batons to render their > > money independent of precious metals. Anonymous: > but why did governments engage in the vigorous and frequent > application of bayonets and batons to render their money > independent of precious metals? Because they could. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG e14ZjXqdjvPhGbY7gUaOBA42wTiDnGWfnEJ2q84q 4dPLVHJB12eAfQgOC1preE0ABpS1HIjeAfHn/qQN8

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Re: The Crypto Winter
by Tim May 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

On Monday, November 19, 2001, at 03:27 PM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: > On Mon, 19 Nov 2001 georgemw(a)speakeasy.net wrote: > >> It's amazing how many people assert this, even though it's clearly >> wrong. A gold standard does NOT mean that the amount of currency in >> circulation equals the amount of gold in the vaults, it means that the >> currency is exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate. Obviously, there >> can >> be more gold in the vaults than you need to actually exchange every >> dollar for the correct amount of gold. Less obviously, there can be >> less. > > Of course, the system also exposes the currency to fluctuations in world > wide supply of gold. It's not sane policy to tie one's unit of currency > to > any particular good -- think about what it would mean if the chosen good > was unrefined oil, a particular crop or electrical power. One'll get the > picture fairly soon. I'm not religious about a gold standard, but the fluctuations in world supply of gold are quite small. Nearly all of the gold extant in the world has existed for a long time in the hands of man (and governments, companies, churches, etc.). Even those mining technology has gotten better, the riches veins of ore--and most of the nuggest sitting in streambeds, etc.--have long been exhausted. I'm sure that 10 or 15 minutes spent with a search engine, maybe much less, would show the number of tons of gold mined each year versus the total amount of gold already held. > It's not really sane to opt for a tie-in to the supply of a particular > currency, either -- that's actually even worse, since the people > printing > the bills can cause fluctuations in the exchange rate even easier than > they could if they were just digging up precious metals up from the > crust. > > Hence, private, floating currency, which, again, is old news on the > list. Money things are just objects with certain beliefs and expectations attached to them. --Tim May "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler

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Virtual Bhurkas ( was : Re: Nuclear Pipe Bombs )
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

Ken Brown <k.brown(a)ccs.bbk.ac.uk> wrote : 1) I thought spherical shells were the usual geometry? 2) It sure as hell looks like it's time to start creating private archives of public data and seeing to it that the data are propagated. Sneakernet revisited only now with CD's instead of floppies. > >Shit. If the UK government passes this law they are proposing then this >email would probably count as illegal. And anonymous postings are often >so tedious. > 3) Time for ideas to don a bhurka before they go out in the street, to meet in secret places, to avoid the eyes and ears of Mullahs Ashcroft and Blair.

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Re: Cypherpunk failures
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

"Roy M. Silvernail" <roy(a)scytale.com> wrote : >On 19 Nov 2001, at 19:43, Ken Brown wrote: > >> Much too 1990s. These times suit more loyal-sounding names. >> "Programmers Rally Against Terrorism"? > >I wonder how many non-Brits will get this... > > >-- >Roy M. Silvernail >Proprietor, scytale.com >roy(a)scytale.com > Oh, I get it OK, it just doesn't sound cuddly.

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"quitting havenco", not quite!
by Ryan Lackey 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

Two people appear to have forwarded communications from a semi-private chat system through two mailing lists to cypherpunks. ("gale" at this stage is semi-private, and this is the first time anything has been forwarded from it to public lists.) These people are no longer on my christmas card list, or whatever. I suppose I should now explain: 1) HavenCo is now making sufficient money and is stable enough to be "boring". This is a *good* thing. Over the past year we've completed most of the remaining engineering, and some of our other staff are taking over more and more of the operations, first and second level support, and administration. Nothing really breaks anymore; it's easy to add new switches and routers without changing the underlying architecture; it's all operations. 2) I'm hiring engineering and sales managers in the next 3-6 months to take over more day to day responsibilities. This is independent of anything else. 3) I'm working on sofware to automate more operations, and doing various conferences throughout 2002. We're also looking at other sites; when we actually move forward on one of those, it would be a good test for the software/hardware systems. (some of these have been deployed recently. I can now do an entire new customer install without ever even seeing the customer's hardware; comes pre-configured from the vendor with PXE and it just gets plugged in, racked, and auto-configures). This means regardless of anything else I will be spending more time elsewhere in the world. It is silly that I can do everything over ssh from wherever in the world and yet still sit in an office a few feet above the racks. If something breaks, we just flash to a hot spare machine remotely and then order a replacement. Worst case, someone pulls some drive carriers out of the front and puts them in a different machine; not exactly rocket science. 4) I'm working on a couple of side projects which may be ready in 2002. These include some book projects, an offshore open-source development framework with quality control, some papers to bring a couple of fields together (crypto to p2p, traffic analysis to finance), a comprehensive survey of Gerald Bull and engineering analysis of the supergun, and some ecash and tamper-resistance related projects. I hope to have "abstract" level work on all of them completed, and then finish one at a time when I have time. Right now, I'm finishing off the completely automated ISP, and 2 papers. 5) When such things are ready to deploy, I will either switch to just doing board things for HavenCo, or will stay on as CTO but have less day to day responsibilities. Some of them might be done by HavenCo, which would mean shifting from colo operations to that project. Some of them are pretty minor; they can be "trialed" without distracting from my day to day job. Most of them would want to be separate legal entities from HavenCo, but might involve the same people. The exact date of any transition is not fixed; I suspect it will be a gradual process from mid-2002 until mid-2003. 6) Even if I shift to working on something else, it's entirely possible I'd live on Sealand 1-2 weeks/month anyway. It's actually a decent place to get work done, just lacking in entertainment (which may be related) 7) The process of setting up additional secure colocation centers around the world is pretty slow -- even if we can do most of the technical things in 4 weeks, political negotiations with telcos, governments, etc. take a long time. They are also not something *I* am directly involved in. Also, various fiber projects elsewhere in the world have been delayed by the dotcom collapse, so the options are a bit more constrained as to where we can go. We can "cheat" by coloing with other people in those markets, with a common management interface and maybe network -- specialized offshore colo providers, telcos, or major colo providers who happen to be there. Motivations for this include: (I started thinking about this a lot more at HAL2001 in Holland, not entirely sober I guess...) 1) I have worked 7-day weeks for the last 18 months. I've had several trips to conferences, and 5 days of real vacation. I have slept on concrete floors and desks because we brought over a bunch of computer gear before furnishings. I have missed Burning Man twice, a bunch of interesting conferences, been woken up at 0300 and on dark boat rides, climbed around on ladders 300' above the ground attaching lights, given press interviews with impacted wisdom teeth and passed out at a pharmacy afterward waiting for a prescription for antibiotics, etc. I miss {girls, alcohol, sushi, ...}. SFBA really is one of the nicer parts of the world, and I've still not yet had a decent vacation in asia, australia, etc. It isn't that much fun to have a successful company if you can't actually enjoy the results (I have 5TB of mp3s, but haven't gone to a live concert since...1996) 2) That I really want to work on a software project. I have this lingering need to do something intellectually challenging -- HavenCo is certainly a feat of *something*, but it's not a huge scientific or technical challenge -- more an engineering, political, marketing, or integration challenge. Which is nice, but I'd like to do something which contributes to the scientific knowledge of mankind; I've taken advantage of amazing scientific advances made by people over thousands of years, but not really contributed much myself. 3) It's been 24 months since we started, and I'd like to something different at some point, just to see if it can be done successfully twice. And I can self-finance it this time, which is a definite plus. (having gone from about USD 30k in debt when I started HavenCo) 4) Doing sales and engineering at the same time is quite stressful. It really would be best to have two distinct people doing each role. 5) Good people are cheap to hire now :) (jobs(a)havenco.com, not me please) 6) It would be nice to work on something which isn't "man vs. mankind" but actually "man vs. nature". If the world's governments became reasonable overnight, and people stopped acts of terrorism, theft, or whatever, there would be no real need for HavenCo. Yet, there would still be motivation for doing things which actually contribute to man's knowledge, ability to conquer natural environments or other challenges, etc. HavenCo is a necessary precondition for a lot of those things, but is not the goal in and of itself. 7) The current market is actually a decent time to set up new projects; there's no competition since no one else is funded, there are much more reasonable expectations (HavenCo hasn't IPO'd for billions of dollars, but we're profitable about 6 months after we started selling stuff, and growing at a reasonable rate). Plus, now that HavenCo is up, it's entirely possible for an offshore-centric startup to get started with no real expenses; operate unincorporated or incorporate on some small caribbean island, accept payment in online currencies, have everyone communicate via PGP or ssh to the box, and colo initially one but then several boxes with us. Many of our customers operate exactly like that. For a sufficiently interesting project, we might even invest a box or two in it; so you could have zero startup or monthly costs during development. 8) I can. -- Ryan Lackey ryan(a)havenco.com CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd. the free world just milliseconds away http://www.havenco.com/ OpenPGP 4096: B8B8 3D95 F940 9760 C64B DE90 07AD BE07 D2E0 301F

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As dicas do Rudolfo
by infomacao＠giganetstore.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

Para retirar o seu email desta mailing list deverá entrar no nosso site http:\\www.giganetstore.com <http://www.giganetstore.com/> , ir à edição do seu registo e retirar a opção de receber informação acerca das nossas promoções e novos serviços

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by geeta jagasia 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

send me details to my email gytabai(a)indiatimes.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find the one for you at Yahoo! Personals http://personals.yahoo.com

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PALS : renaming DC CP
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

>> >True. The DC cypherpunks are thinking of changing their name to >> something >> >more cuddly. >> >> Harmless Little Nerds? >> Cryptotubbies? >> Happy Fun Infosec Society? > >Much too 1990s. These times suit more loyal-sounding names. "Programmers >Rally Against Terrorism"? > Programmer's Association for Liberty Services

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Re: HOWTO Build a Nuclear Device
by Tim May 19 Nov '01

19 Nov '01

On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:20 PM, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote: > One thing that is bothering me these days are all the reports coming out > of Afganistan that nuclear bomb making plans were found. Big > deal. Anyone on the planet can make a nuclear device if they have the > appropriate materials. The hard part is staying alive due to exposure > while manufacturing the device. > > If however death is not an issue then the process itself becomes easy to > accomplish. Tom Clancy did a good job of describing how to make a low-yield nuke in one of his novels, the one about a nuke in the Denver stadium. (I think it was "The Sum of All Fears.") It's been many years since I read it, but my recollection is that one of the actors gets sick. As Eric C. pointed out in his follow-up to your article, this business of "staying alive" is probably the easiest of the problems to solve. The biggest hazard is from ingestion of the materials, either from some grinding or machining stage, or liquid compounds (molding the fissionables). (The "apron" you mention at some point is almost totally beside the point. Working in a good fume hood or laminar flow hood would be a better safety precaution. Wearing a moonsuit and gloves would be extra protection. Not eating sandwiches or Doritos while mixing the stuff also helps.) > Materials > --------- > > 4 stainless steal salad bowls (5 - 8 inch diameter) > 10 pounds of U-235 (Plutonium) > 1 containment cylinder in which to fit the salad bowls > ? some explosives - C4 platic works best - but TNT or gun powder is > acceptable. > > Divide the U-235 into two five pound masses. Beat it evenly into the > inside of one of your salad bowls. U-235 is malleable like gold so you > should have no problem shaping it. Do the same with the other U-235 > mass > and shape it into the other salad bowl. > > C4 explosives work best. You simply mold the C4 into the other two > salad > bowls. This is the most dangerous part of the project. Improper > handling > of C4 can cause an explosion. But gun powder is just as effective. Why so complicated on the detonation geometry? Without doing some experiments and getting the fast ignition triggers (on the real munitions list), I'd doubt strongly that your scheme would work the first time. And gunpowder is almost guaranteed to not work. > > > Anyone on this planet can build a nuclear device. So the only issue in > building the device is the will to die for a cause. And the only > thing I > find unfortunate in all of this is that there are so many causes that > people are willing to die for. And war will not make those reasons go > away - it will only encourage them. > It's really _not_ this easy. It took China and India a while before they successfully tested an A-bomb (many years after they had the raw materials from their reactor programs). It may have taken the South Africans and Israelis a few years after getting materials, too. So, why didn't they just hammer U-235 into stainless steel mixing bowls and do it the way "anyone on this planet can build a nuclear device," one wonders. I'd guess that the "tall pipe" version is the most buildable of the basement nukes. (In a nutshell: a tall drainpipe, perhaps 40 feet tall. Set up in an apartment building, warehouse, etc. At the base the pipe is reinforced with copious amounts of concrete. The subcritical masses are at opposite ends of the pipe. The mass on top is piled on with several hundred pounds of ballast, to "tamp" the early critical mass action. To explode the bomb, drop the mass from the top of the pipe. The critical mass is briefly contained by the concrete collar around the pipe and the inertial mass above. Is it enough to produce a real chain reaction? Well, it's all relative. Still, not very efficient.)

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