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Re: Lawyers, Guns, and Money
by Faustine 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

Tim wrote: On Saturday, August 25, 2001, at 02:46 PM, Faustine wrote: > ...But the ones I really admire are the mathematician-analysts, the hard- science analysts: they tend not to hog the limelight like some of their more voluble counterparts, but their influence is still enormous. >I'd be interesting in hearing whom you think are good examples. Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling, John Nash. You already mentioned von Neumann, he was the first to come to mind. >But the typical "mathematician-analyst" coming out of a typical grad >program, even a high-reputation grad program, is not going to have >"enormous influence." A vanishingly small fraction will, in fact. Unfortunately, you're probably right. But in an earlier post I brought up an essay entitled 'Intelligence and the Information Revolution' which advocates the creation of analysis programs that suprass old barriers of department and specialty to create what the author termed 'Super Analysts'. If I can find a .pdf copy, I'll post a link, it really is interesting. Given that most all the people on your list and mine are precisely what the author was driving at, I think the "Super Analyst" approach is certainly worth aspiring to. And as far as I've been able to tell, policy analysis PhD programs offer the most flexible way to pursue a multidisciplinary, scientific approach while striking a good balance between the theoretical and the practical. How well this kind of approach will fit in with the contemporary institutional climate remains to be seen, but on an individual level, you have precious little to lose. (yeah, I know: just "time" and "money". I think the potential payoffs make it worth the risk, YMMV.) >Look, while you condemn all the anonymous and pseudonymous posts here, >we know zero about who you are, where you are, what you do, except that >you're probably some kind of intern who surfs the Net while your >employer for the summer is paying you do some kind of study. Anyone who read my posts carefully probably remembers I already said I'm an assistant research analyst and PhD student. Believe whatever you want; I've said plenty. And in a real sense, it doesn't matter: if my posts are weak, any appeal to credentialism isn't going to make them any stronger. >Do you think you are preparing to have "enormous influence" on policy? I'm preparing to try. >Do you think the superdupercomputer you say you want to assemble out of >old machines will help you in some magical way in this goal? Of course not, it's a tool like any other. You seem to be trying to extract some kind of entertaining kookery from me that just isn't there. >I know a couple of ex-CIA "mathematician-analysts" who were deemed tops >in their classes. One is now headed out to the Bay Area to do something >more useful. Another I've lost track of. Neither seems to have had >"enormous influence" on policy. You can have an enormous influence on policy without producing a "single great work" or "grand project" everyone can point to as being influential. I'm hoping that doing work in policy analysis will help put me in a position to make as much of a difference as I can. I'm not fooling myself as to the likelihood of actually succeeding at any of the things I have in mind, but where's the sense in giving up before you ever get started. > It's kind of interesting to see how the field evolved and grew out of > the strictly military/operations research stuff in the 50s into what it is now. It's still evolving, which is part of what makes it so exciting. I don't think what I'm doing is any easier than law school, quite the contrary! > Maybe it's better to say it *can* be easier than law school--and often > is--but doesn't have to be if you're in the right place and have some > purpose behind your choices. > And I hope I didn't sound too down on studying law. I took a graduate > class in constitutional law myself and spent a semester learning to write > briefs, getting acquainted with West's Law Finder, etc. just because it's >so important. I'd definitely recommend that much to anyone. >>The children shall lead us... I think you misspelled "whippersnappers". ~Faustine.

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Re: which remailer to install? (fwd)
by Eugene Leitl 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

Question: is this thing reliable? ftp://ftp.zedz.net/pub/crypto/remailer/mixmaster/Mix.3.0.beta/mix-2.9b23.ta… MD5 at my end is ca4e402bff488b909380793914769220 TIA.

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Jim Bell sentenced to 10 years in prison
by Declan McCullagh 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

Two consecutive (not concurrent) sentences, sez the judge yesterday. Jim made a statement to the court. Judge agreed with prosecutors' maximum penalties (otherwise sentences would have been concurrent). See Wired News, probably on Monday, for details. -Declan

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Gnutella scanning instead of service providers.
by Gary Jeffers 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

My fellow Cypherpunks, Ray Dillinger believes that scanning would assist oppressors as much as regular users. Joseph Ashwood agrees with this and further thinks that the Internet overhead of a scanner would be a serious problem. I still think that scanners would be effective. Here's why: Gnutella still exists, Napster doesn't! Security does not have to be bulletproof in all cases. Gnutella is a harder target than was Napster. There may be other reasons why Gnutella is alive and Napster is dead. I would think the ability to pin blame on the target might be another reason. A scan enabled Gnutella would be a much harder target than a central service provided Gnutella. The scan enabled version would be much harder to shut down due to various kinds of expenses - legal, administ- rative, politics, etc.. Not impossible to shut down - just harder, slower, and with various expenses we would like the oppressors to pick up :-) Also, with lack of centralization, it would be much harder to pin legal blame on the servers(users). - Much harder, slower, and politically expensive. This is generally a sort of economics problem for oppressors. As far as Joseph Ashwood's claim that the Internet overhead would be too much. Is his point exaggerated? Would it be possible to write low overhead scanners? I do not have the "skill set" to say. Maybe he is right, maybe not. Anybody got something definitive to say on this? Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers BEAT STATE!!! _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

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summer reading
by Batman Svejk 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

Any recommendations for good (late) summer reading? Svejk ------------------------------------------------------------ .

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Information You Requested from Microsoft.com
by 1support＠microsoft.com 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND DIRECTLY TO THIS E-MAIL. THIS E-MAIL IS NOT MONITORED. Welcome to Microsoft Online ID secure Internet environment! Below is your membership information. Please keep this confirmation mail as a record of your password. Consider this information confidential and treat accordingly. Your Microsoft Online ID Password is: cypherpunks A Microsoft Online ID provides access to various Microsoft secured programs. Please check the Frequently Asked Questions and/or Help page of the program you are accessing for questions. Sincerely, Microsoft Online ID Administrator

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which remailer to install?
by Eugene Leitl 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

Any recommendations for a worthwhile packages I can run on the local 128/768 (loaded) line? Pointers to tarballs preferrable. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBMTO : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3

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Re: Lawyers, Guns, and Money
by Jim Windle 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

On Sat, 25 Aug 2001 16:29:21 Tim May wrote: > >I can think of some scientists who had enormous influences on policy, >men like Szilard, Von Neumann, Fermi, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller, and >a bunch of others As an addendum I would add Claude Shannon. In fact I can't think of a single lawyer in the 20th century who had the long term influesnce on society that either Shannon or von Neumann did. The list of other influential non-lawyers might also be expanded to include Turing, Godel, von Braun, Crick and Watson. Washington's myopia in thinking olny lawyers are worth listening to is indicative of the type of government we have. Jim Join 18 million Eudora users by signing up for a free Eudora Web-Mail account at http://www.eudoramail.com

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PETA gets control of parody peta.org domain, says appeals court
by Declan McCullagh 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46313,00.html Ethical Treatment of PETA Domain By Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Aug. 25, 2001 PDT WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court has ruled that a website titled "People Eating Tasty Animals" is not only a bad joke, but also an unlawful one. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said this week that the peta.org domain name, registered in 1995 by a man who planned to parody the nonprofit group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was an illegal trademark infringement. Michael Doughney's peta.org parody site lampooned vegetarianism -- which the real PETA insists upon -- and applauded carnivorism, dubbing itself a tongue-in-cheek "resource for those who enjoy eating meat, wearing fur and leather, hunting and the fruits of scientific research." (PETA opposes medical research on animals even in cases where human lives could be saved.) The site's not-so-subtle mockery was red meat to PETA officials, who promptly sued, convinced a federal judge they were right, and then demanded Doughney pay them over $300,000 in attorney's fees and court costs, including photocopying, faxes, courier services, postage, travel, mileage, tolls and parking, long distance telephone calls and "miscellaneous" items. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----

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Bell Case Files
by John Young 26 Aug '01

26 Aug '01

We've put up some 80 court filings in the Bell case, hyperlinked to the August 25 docket cited here yesterday: http://cryptome.org/jdb082501.htm Recall that Judge Tanner sealed all the public files that were available when he learned one of the filings provided names of the jury pool and names of jurors selected for the trial. The court's online files were removed. He subsequently unsealed most of the files (except 7 which remain sealed) but the pre-trial filings have not been restored to the court's web site. Now only post-trial filings are available there. Our offering is for the whole kaboodle that appeared on the court's site from day 1, starting with the complaint from November 2000 through the sentencing order of August 24, 2001. The files are in the multi-image TIFF format used by the WWA court (and a number of other courts). The files can be viewed by a multi-image viewer such as Kodak's Imaging for Windows (included with W98 et seq), Quick Time, Graph Works (a shareware), and others.

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