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Fox & Rabbits, or Fox & Hounds (re: Fox's Ape Letter)
by David Honig 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Fox & Rabbits implies an arms race. Fox & Hounds implies dead Fox. Here's a way to tickle the Fox. With a taser^H^H^H^HLinux. Copied from another list. On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 05:12:53PM -0700, David Honig wrote: > It would be amusing to create very large files named Planet_of_the_Apes > hosted on very slow servers ----servers slow enough to discourage actual > downloaders, but existent enough to annoy Fox. 'Servers' includes > numerous P2P tools, so you can do this at home. > > Extra credit if the very large files are uniformly distributed noise. > > Extra credit if the noise has the appropriate headers so it looks like > a Divx or whatever is a plausible format. trivial to accomplish, too. attached to this mail is an empty mpeg file (zipped). you can inflate it to any size you desire by doing (on Linux): unzip empty.zip dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=xxx >>empty.mpg where xxx is the number of KB you want to add. use 681574400 for 650 MB which is the size of a CD and would look very promising for a pirated movie.

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Re: Attention to detail lacking
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Tim, >>I think the reflected beam has the same wavelength as the incident beam. > >Photons hitting a surface most definitely do not "lose some energy" >and get "re-emitted." There are some very particular configurations >that can act as wavelength doublers, but this is a particular, and >hard to set up, configuration. > >Photons hitting a mirror either are re-emitted with the same energy >as before or interact via the photoelectric effect and are >thermalized (converted to phonons). > >That colors are preserved in mirrors, absent tints (special >absorbers), is a Physics 1 clue that mirrors do not downshift photon >energies!. > The reason for the weak statement "I think" is that I imagine you might make an argument that the momentum transfer from the photon to the "mirror" results in a very small doppler shift...I'm just not positive about it at the smallest level of interaction. >I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: lacking a solid >grounding and overly reliant on his own private notions of what >"mass" and "energy" and "group velocity" and so on are. All the best >cranks view the world this way. > >I don't know Choate's educational background, but I would not be at >all surprised if he is self-taught and moved into computers out of >some technician training school. > I've reached the same conclusion. I've known some very bright people who lacked access to a formal education. The results were some startling levels of understanding mixed right in with some mind blowing misconceptions and some outright gaps. Mike

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Lasers and ICBMs
by Tim May 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Being older than most of you, I remember doing some of these calculations about burn times, laser intensities, etc. more than 20 years ago. (Although Reagan did not announce SDI until around 1983, the topic was widely discussed in the late '70s. "Scientific American" published articles by Prof. Kosta Tsipis, Richard Garwin, and others about the difficulty of intercepting ICBMs with lasers and particle beams. I remember some of these articles from circa 1977-79. I even used one of the them as the basis for a presentation I made to DARPA in Washington on a kill method for satellites.) A lot of the calculations being sketched out here, of watts/cm^2, dwell times, gold coatings, etc. are slightly off-base. We've known for 20+ years that the kill method is to use a short pulse to "push" (not from the photons' momentum) in the thin wall of an ICBM's fuel system. A very short pulse can produce enough ablative heating, a kind of "puff," to trigger buckling of the very thin wall of an ICBM. So the theory goes. Countermeasures to traditional "heating" are so easy to imagine (rapidly spinning the missile, deploying gold-plated shrouds once exoatmosheric, changing the missile coating at random intervals to foil laser frequencies, etc.) that the "punch" method was developed. I'm still skeptical, for the reasons many have outlined over the years. Bill Stewart, most recently, who pointed out that the Macedonian Liberation Army will simply smuggle in a bomb and then demand that the U.S. and NATO stop arming the Albanian terrorists. And so on. For knocking out satellites, particle beam weapons are the way to go. And don't believe Kosta Tsipis' 1978-79 article in Sci Am about how 50 loads of fuel in the space shuttle would be needed for every firing of a particle beam weapon. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay(a)got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns

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Are the digits of Pi random? A Berkley lab researcher may hold the key
by Jim Choate 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/07/010725081838.htm James Choate Product Certification - Operating Systems Staff Engineer 512-436-1062 jchoate(a)tivoli.com

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Attention to detail lacking
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Jim, I think you often don't word things carefully enough. The resulting discussions get pointless in a big hurry. >>> >>>The optics used for focusing are NOT mirrors, they are (hopefully) >>>transparent at the frequency under use. A mirror on the other hand is >>>required to be OPAQUE with respect to transmission, we want full, 100%, >>>reflectivity. That means that every photon that hits that mirror >>>interacts, loses some energy, and gets re-emitted. >>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >>> >>Are you implying that the wavelength for incident photons changes upon >>interaction with the mirror? >> >>The energy loss at the mirror is lost photons not altered wavelengths. >>The lost photons have varying fates. >> You stated that every photon interacts, loses energy and is re-emitted. I think the reflected beam has the same wavelength as the incident beam. Your blurb about absorption and cascades is only true for some fraction of the lost photons that constitute the inefficiency of the mirror. Others have a different fate. Maybe that's what you meant but you did say "every photon." And here's an exchange with Tim : >At 6:30 PM -0500 7/24/01, Jim Choate wrote: >>And these are reasonably low power lasers... >> >>http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/IJSSE/issue1/unwin/unwin.html >> >>The simple fact is that the thermodynamic impact of a laser beam that is >>several feet across and emitting more photons than the surface of the sun >>will not be easy to reflect unless immense cooling is taken. Cost/weight >>factors alone argue it in the negative. > >"More photons than the surface of the sun" for HOW LONG? > >A minute? A second? A millisecond? A microsecond? > >You confuse fluence with flux, a classic mistake. > >(A pulse "brighter than the sun" but lasting only milliseconds will >have far less heating effect than other flux level pulses lasting >longer. Calculations matter. And, yes, I used to do these >calculations when I was refuting Kosta Tsipis' calculations of the >late 70s. Fluence matters.) > >--Tim May > The sun produces shitloads ( check your CRC Handbook for conversions between the shitload and more familiar units ) of power : http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/sol.html says 386 billion billion megawatts If we know the spectral characteristics of the sun ( the black body spectrum perhaps? ) we could come up with a photon count. I'm not sure whether you mean to talk about photon counts and adjust the power and wavelength variables or you really mean to discuss something that operates somewhere between IR and UV. Let's assume the latter. It is after all a LASER. You did say "surface of the sun". To me that means integrate over 4 pi. 3.86E26 W regardless of the radius. I doubt if anyone has made a laser that operates at that power level even for one fs. Let's try the other approach... The power output from the sun is about 1350 W/m^2 as measured here. Maybe that was what you meant as a reference power level. Let's see, 1350 W/m^2 -> 1.35E-3 W/mm^2 so a 1 mW laser with a beam area of .74mm^2 is "as bright as the sun" at least in terms of gross energy density. That disregards spectral effects. Not too tough to be "brighter than the sun". I don't think you could even light a bucket of gasoline 1 m away with it no less knock down a rocket. It's also pretty easy to handle with a basic mirror. I'd say that's a pretty wussy power level for something that needs to melt a rocket in flight. Focussed to a spot that is 1/1000 the area of the parent beam it starts to get interesting but let's see you hold that spot steady from a 747 in turbulence long enough to burn a hole in a nice shiny casing going 8000kph 200km away. So if we're going to discuss physics let's do it with a bit of care. Maybe it will be more interesting. I'm no expert but I'm willing to try. Yawn, Mike

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RE: FINALLY!!! A REAL BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY!!!
by James K 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

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RE: FINALLY!!! A REAL BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY!!!
by James K 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

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Re: Air Force Turns 747 Into Holster for Giant Laser (washing tonpost.com)
by Steve Schear 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

At 11:05 AM 7/25/2001 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: > Bill Stewart writes: > > > Meanwhile of course, any foreign terrorist that wants to nuke the US > > with a physically small weapon only needs to pack it in cocaine > > and bring it in with the regular shipments, > > while Rogue Nations that can only make large Fat Boy style weapons > > need cruder methods, like bribing a crane operator to load the wrong > > container on a ship bound for New York or Los Angelese harbor. > > > > >It may not be that easy. My understanding (based on various TV programs >broadcast back in the early 90's) is that there is a program called 'NEST', >which stands for something like Nuclear Emergency (mumble) Team, >tasked with dealing with this type of problem. > >One protection hinted is that strategically chosen points of transit >(bridges, >ports, tunnels, major highways, mail, baggage and freight facilities, etc) >have >detectors for nuclear materials. > >The thing is, while you can sheild a source to the point where it is not >a hazard, sheilding it to the point of *undetectability* is far harder task. > >If you detect even a single gamma ray of a certain frequency, or >betas or even alphas of certain energies, you *know* that a certain >isotope produced them. If the detectors note the presence of a >certain isotopes, they generate the appropriate alarms. > >There are also other detection systems - I've seen X-rays of entire >container trucks which were passing through the Chunnel - illegal >immigrants were quite visible inside the container. > >An attacker's best chance would be to place his weapon in a >container, heavily sheilded, and then to bury that in the middle of >a stack of other containers of heavy shielding in the hold of a >container ship, and plan to detonate it while still on board in a >target harbor. Or reduce the effectiveness of the detection system by clandestinely "salting" vessels entering our ports with radio active dust with the same energy signatures. Sort of a radio active chaff. steve

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FBI: Keystone Gmen
by George＠Orwellian.Org 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

[ my email is really fucked right now, gawd only knows how many copies this single transmission will result in. apologies in advance. ] http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB99601609210000000.htm # # July 25, 2001 # # FBI Cyber Researcher Unleashes Virus # That E-Mails Private Agency Documents # # By TED BRIDIS # Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL # # WASHINGTON -- A researcher in the Federal Bureau of Investiga # tion's cyber-protection unit unleashed a fast-spreading Internet # virus that e-mailed private FBI documents to outsiders -- all # on the eve of a Senate hearing into troubles at the unit. # # Although the Sircam virus didn't spread to other computers at # the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, it did send # at least eight documents to a number of outsiders. One, about # the investigation into an unrelated virus, was marked "official # use only." The Sircam virus has infected thousands of computers # since its discovery last week. # # FBI spokeswoman Deb Weierman said that no sensitive or classified # information about continuing investigations was disclosed Tuesday. # The "official use" designation protects documents from disclosure # under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. # # It isn't uncommon for virus researchers to accidentally infect # their own computers, but the mistake was particularly embarrassing # because it occurred ahead of a Senate Judiciary panel's oversight # hearing about the FBI cyber unit's effectiveness. Lawmakers were # expected to focus on other agencies' failure to cooperate fully # with the FBI center, and on a perceived lack of trust between # the FBI and private-sector groups. # # The unit generally gets high remarks for its criminal # investigations, and even critics say the unit is more effective # than it was a year ago. "The effort here is not to embarrass # anybody but to stress that a lot of work has to be done," said # Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona. # # Meanwhile, the White House has begun organizing a new # early-warning network for Internet threats. But unlike the current # system, it will be coordinated by the Pentagon, not the FBI. # The mechanism for warning all U.S. military and civilian agencies # -- and ultimately corporations -- will be dubbed the Cyber-Warning # and Information Network, or "c-win." Organizers envision dozens # of computer centers that could sound an alert when a threat is # identified. # # The network is expected to begin operating in October. The FBI # unit, which currently relays these warnings, came under sharp # criticism from congressional auditors for issuing tardy alerts. # Ms. Weierman, the FBI spokeswoman, called the new network a # "useful mechanism" to offer the government a "technical capability # that doesn't currently exist." The FBI, she said, wasn't concerned # it would lose its warning responsibilities. # # Tuesday, at least three people said they received some of the # FBI documents, including a 23-year-old Internet-security expert # in Belgium, Niels Heinen. He operates a Web site that reports # on Internet break-ins and speculated that the analyst, Vince # Rowe, visited the site on the infected computer. Mr. Rowe didn't # respond to a request for comment.

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Antigen found W32/Sircam-A (Sophos) virus
by ANTIGEN_BAMBI 25 Jul '01

25 Jul '01

Antigen for Exchange found Fax Cover Sheet.doc.bat infected with W32/Sircam-A (Sophos) virus. The file is currently Removed. The message, "CDR: Fax Cover Sheet", was sent from joe lynch and was discovered in IMC Queues\Inbound located at Cognex/Natick/BAMBI.

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