- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

CDR: RE: why should it be trusted? cpunk
by Trei, Peter 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

> ---------- > From: David Honig[SMTP:honig@sprynet.com] > Reply To: David Honig > Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2000 4:16 PM > To: Multiple recipients of list > Subject: Re: why should it be trusted? > > At 10:34 PM 10/18/00 -0400, Neil Johnson wrote: > >I don't have a problem with insurance companies raising rates for people > who > >smoke, are overweight (cough, cough), or have high cholesterol (cough, > >cough, cough). That's behavior that can be changed. > > How silly. Weight and cholesterol (and intelligence and lifespan) have > strong genetic factors, as does smoking and drinking, how you respond to > stress, etc. You might start by looking up 'dopamine receptors' or 'self > medication' > Curiously, life and health insurance providers have conflicting goals. Life insurance providers profit most if you live a long, long, time, regardless of the quality of that life. Health insurance providers would much prefer that at some age just before you start needing large amounts of care, you die too rapidly to need any kind of treatment - a sudden coronary, or hit by the proverbial bus. I've heard that smokers actually cost the healthcare system less money than non-smokers, since they die comparatively rapidly once they start to deteriorate (no I can't give a cite on that one, either), and need less long-term care. Peter Trei > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

1 0

CDR: Re: "Cypherpunks is archived?"
by Matt Curtin 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

>>>>> "Tim" == Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: Tim> Those who wish to protect their identities should take positive Tim> measures to do so. Now there's an idea: using cypherpunk technology to enforce one's privacy. I momentarily thought that I was reading a thread on cypherpunks that was essentially advocating security through hand-waving and (a no-archive) policy. Whew. -- Matt Curtin, Founder Interhack Corporation http://www.interhack.net/ "Building the Internet, Securely." research | development | consulting

1 0

CDR: ECHELON under European criminal indictment!
by George＠Orwellian.Org 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

AH HA HA HA HA http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/nb/nb4.htm 10/17/00- Updated 05:39 PM ET Criminal charges filed against 'Echelon' From: Newsbytes News Network By Steve Gold A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Berlin has filed criminal complaints in Germany against the international Echelon computer surveillance network. Unlike the recently vilified Carnivore Internet monitoring system installed on most U.S. Internet Service Provider (ISP) servers, the Echelon system is shrouded in secrecy. Thought to have been created in the 1940s by the U.S. and UK governments, the system is now known to monitor most voice and data traffic circulating in most West countries. Reports suggest that it can legally do this by side-stepping national anti-surveillance legislation by requiring, for example, the U.S. government's National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor UK comms traffic, and, similarly, using the UK's security agencies to monitor U.S. comms traffic. In her complaint, Ilka Schrvder, a Green Party Member of the European Parliament (MEP) cited "unknown suspects especially from the U.S. And Great Britain, as well as possibly the German Federal Government, for operating and tolerating the Echelon network." According to German media reports, Schrvder filed the complaints Monday with the German Federal chief public prosecutor, as well as public prosecutors' offices in Berlin and, perhaps significantly, in Traunstein. The Traunstein office covers the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling, where a monitoring station is generally reported as being operated by the NSA. Schrvder, who serves as a substitute member of the European Parliament committee which is investigating Echelon, referred to a report commissioned by the committee, which confirmed that Echelon is monitoring private and business telephone calls, faxes, and e-mail messages in Europe, including in Germany. This is not the first time that Echelon has come into the legal firing line. Back in February, reports suggested that the French government was considering lawsuits on privacy grounds, alleging that the international Echelon super-spy network monitored French companies, diplomats and ministers. The Echelon network has been talked about in security circles for several years, but its existence was most recently confirmed in November 1999, when the BBC reported that an Australian government official had confirmed the network actually existed. At the time, the BBC reported that Bill Blick, Australia's inspector general of intelligence, confirmed that his country's Defence Signals Directorate forms part of the Echelon network. "As you would expect there are a large amount of radio communications floating around in the atmosphere, and agencies such as the DSD collect those communications in the interests of their national security," Blick told the BBC. Asked if information is then passed on to the U.S. or the UK, Blick replied that "in certain circumstances" it was. The BBC report followed hard on the heels of an attempt on Oct. 22, 1999, to swamp the Echelon network with subversive e-mails. In that incident, Internet users from around the world launched an e- mail campaign against the NSA in an attempt to flood the agency's alleged computer surveillance system. Reports of the time suggested that the protesters were upset at NSA's apparent scanning of e-mails in an attempt to identify potential terrorists. In the United States, a recent CBS-TV report on the show 60 Minutes reported that the system may have been used to spy on the phone conversations of the late Princess Diana, at a time when she was spearheading an effort to ban landmines worldwide. Echelon's existence has been discussed in security circles for almost a decade, but its existence was only brought to public attention in early 1997 by Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ), a quarterly intelligence newsletter, which revealed details of the global telecommunications surveillance system. According to the newsletter, Echelon is a top secret alliance involving the NSA's telecoms surveillance system and other government networks that allows the bulk of the civilized world's telephone calls to be digitized and analyzed using intelligent text searching technology. CAQ said that Echelon monitors virtually all phone calls in the U.S. And Europe, including the UK, effectively making a mockery of the UK's Interception of Communications Act. The newsletter added that Echelon is used to keyword search e-mail, fax, telex and all types of voice communications, including analog and digital cellular phone calls. "Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, Echelon is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world," the newsletter said. The newsletter added that the existence of Echelon was inadvertently revealed by the New Zealand government, which joined the Echelon network in the 1960s. The four other main members of Echelon are the U.S.' NSA, the UK's GCHQ, Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). The newsletter said that Echelon started life as a UK-U.S. government co-operative initiative in the Second World War. After the war, the agreement was formalized in 1948, when the UK and the U.S. agreed to tackle intelligence gathering against the USSR. Central to Echelon are the Echelon dictionaries, which are compiled by the five main members' intelligence agencies. Each intelligence agency holds copies of all of the other members' dictionaries, which contain details of keywords that the respective intelligence agency is interested in. Each agency's computer system scans all available telecoms and data traffic in its region. Where another agency's keyword is found in the digital data stream, the relevant text or data is automatically forwarded to the appropriate agency's computer system. This means, the newsletter said, that the originating agency's staff never get to see the relevant data - only the agency with the appropriate keyword receives the transmission. CAQ claims that the relevant agencies' headquarters processing Echelon data surveillance files are located in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham, Canberra, and Wellington. ---- Also see: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2641902,00.html The above two items were found in Usenet.

1 0

CDR: re:Tim May's anti-semitic rants
by Anonymous Remailer 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

> Tim's anti Jewish sentiments are obvious in his current posts and in the > past. > If he had any guts he would admit what he really feels instead of using > sarcasm and obfuscation. Tim hates most people. Don't take it personally.

1 0

CDR: Non-Repudiation in the Digital Environment (was Re: First
by Ed Gerck 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

Tony Bartoletti wrote: > > > The problem goes beyond simple impersonation in that the victims > > > subsequently find it difficult to convince large institutions that > > > they are who they say they are. My understanding is that the term > > > comes from victims' statements that they felt as if their identities > > > had been stolen. See http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/. The question > > > is relevant here, not as just another parallel question of semantics, > > > but because exactly how the legal system treats "non-repudiation" can > > > make the identity theft problem much better or much worse. > > > >No. The fact that people like to talk in dumbed down soundbites like > >"identity theft", instead of using well-established words like > >"impersonation", > >does not mean that any legally relevant conclusions can be drawn from the > >misuse of technical terms like "theft" in the soundbite. > > Other choices? > > Identity Theft > Identity Pollution > Identity Vandalism > Identity Assault > Identity Misappropriation > (Slander in the First Person :) > > Would it matter if we substitute "reputation" for "identity". Is my identity > (to others) any different than the reputation with which it is associated? > > Call it what you will. If institutions that once recognized me fail now > to do so, I have lost something-in-general. > > Name that something-in-general. Well, you have not lost it nor has it has been "stolen". You are simply barred from using it. This is the result of impersonation, since now the other person is the one that has access to it. The use of "identity theft" instead of impersonation is thus utterly misleading, even though lawyers and lawmakers are the ones perpetrating such use. No legally relevant conclusions can be drawn from the misuse of the technical term "theft" in the soundbite. In comparison, defining non-repudiation in terms of protocol messages and only for protocol messages is, at most, a solipsistic endeavor. However, it is IMO a most useful one so that others, including lawyers and lawmakers, are prevented from using it in a perverted way just because RFCs are written in English. Cheers, Ed Gerck

5 7

Bank Offers Virtual Safe Deposit Boxes (was Re: ip: SANS NewsBites Vol. 2 Num. 42)
by R. A. Hettinga 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

At 3:56 PM -0500 on 10/18/00, The SANS Institute wrote: > --10 October 2000 Bank Offers Virtual Safe Deposit Boxes > FleetBoston Financial Corp. is offering online safe deposit boxes for > electronic documents; the virtual boxes are accessible with an ID number > and a password. > http://www.boston.com/dailynews/284/economy/Fleet_to_offer_Web_based_safe_P. > shtml > http://www.boston.com/dailynews/284/economy/Boston_bank_offers_Web_based_sP. > shtml -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0

Re: Mac created the modern Internet (was RE: I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story)
by Adam C. Engst 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

At 9:28 AM -0400 10/19/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >The drive for Internet access came from Mac users. Few consumers had access >to Unix operating system based machines and Windows 3.1 lacked the Internet >applications. A host of which was readily available for the Mac and came >included on floppy in a book by Adam Engst that the novice Mac Internet user >probably wanted to read anyway. Most of them did. > >Which left a single major barrier: $2/hour. This last and probably most >crucial barrier went away literally during the course of a weekend when a >Berkeley company called Cyberspace Development announced a revolutionary >product: The Internet Adapter (TIA). TIA was a user level program that >allowed the user to pull a SLIP connection out of a regular shell account. >The program spread like wildfire through the Netcom Macintosh user >community. Within that single weekend, dozens of people were using TIA. >Everybody said the same thing: "it works"! > >Many shell providers banned TIA. Fortunately, Netcom did not. As one of >TIA's first users that very weekend, I wrote the "TIA mini-FAQ" on the spot, >explaining step-by-step in two pages how anybody with a Macintosh can get >hooked up with real IP within 30 minutes. At flat-rate shell prices. My >mini-FAQ was in stunningly high demand. > >Faced with this sudden flat-rate competition, within a few months the first >SLIP/PPP provider went to a flat-rate model. Then another. Then a third. >Providers started sprouting up all over the place. People began using >Mosaic, which was quickly replaced by several other browsers that started >showing up for the Mac within a couple of months. Most of the improvements >in those new Mac browsers were copied by a new startup that was formed soon >thereafter. That company was Netscape. The remainder of Internet history I >presume most of us are aware of. This is close to correct, but not quite. In fact, along with bundling MacTCP with my Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (which enabled Mac users to get MacTCP AND a book of instruction for $30 rather than pay Apple $60 for just MacTCP, if you could find it), the book also came with a flat-rate SLIP account from Northwest Nexus, my ISP in Bellevue, WA. What happened was that we'd gone around looking for a decent SLIP account to bundle with the book, but weren't able to find anything under $11 per hour. I casually mentioned this to Ed Morin, the owner of Northwest Nexus (which I'd always used for ISP service in Washington), and said that I assumed they didn't want to be bundled because the book would have international distribution and I thought they wanted to be only a local ISP. Ed said he could have such problems, and a 4 hour telephone call (which included several conference calls with Livingston technical support to configure Nexus's PortMasters for dynamic IP addressing, which had just appeared in the feature set) later, we had flat-rate SLIP working. That flat-rate SLIP account was tremendously popular, and Northwest Nexus attracted customers from all over the world who were willing to pay long distance charges to avoid the usurious rates for SLIP locally. That was the key event in pricing SLIP down, in my opinion, since TIA came quite a bit later. TIA was another moving force, without question, but not the first one. I wrote about it in the second edition of ISKM. And what I mostly remember about Netcom in those early days was that their technical support was almost totally non-existent. I helped many ISKM readers solve problems with Netcom because Netcom wouldn't respond to email or phone calls. And since I never had a Netcom account, it was mostly a matter of garnering the specific bits of setup information from some people so I could help others. cheers... -Adam PS: And to bring the story full circle, the person who introduced me to TIA before it was released so I could write about it in the second edition of ISKM was Drummond Reed of Intermind, who has subsequently been the driving force behind the just-released eXtensible Name Service (XNS) technology that I'm helping guide via the non-profit XNSORG. Ironically XNS is almost the complete opposite of TIA. Where TIA was a quick hack that was immediately useful, it also had a very short lifespan and disappeared entirely as soon as the hardware appeared for all ISPs to do PPP. In contrast, XNS is a broad technology platform that has relatively few immediate uses, but which, if it succeeds, will affect a vast number of things on the Internet for a long time to come. <http://www.xns.org/> ______________________________________________________________________ Adam C. Engst #2 in MDJ Power 25 / #5 in MacDirectory Top 10 TidBITS Publisher <ace(a)tidbits.com> <http://www.tidbits.com> XNSORG President =Adam Engst <ace(a)xns.org> <http://www.xns.org/> Computer Book Author <http://www.tidbits.com/bookbits/staff.html> Macworld Contrib. Editor <http://www.macworld.com/columns/wiredlife/> --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0

Re: Mac created the modern Internet (was RE: I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story)
by Adam C. Engst 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

At 9:28 AM -0400 10/19/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >The drive for Internet access came from Mac users. Few consumers had access >to Unix operating system based machines and Windows 3.1 lacked the Internet >applications. A host of which was readily available for the Mac and came >included on floppy in a book by Adam Engst that the novice Mac Internet user >probably wanted to read anyway. Most of them did. > >Which left a single major barrier: $2/hour. This last and probably most >crucial barrier went away literally during the course of a weekend when a >Berkeley company called Cyberspace Development announced a revolutionary >product: The Internet Adapter (TIA). TIA was a user level program that >allowed the user to pull a SLIP connection out of a regular shell account. >The program spread like wildfire through the Netcom Macintosh user >community. Within that single weekend, dozens of people were using TIA. >Everybody said the same thing: "it works"! > >Many shell providers banned TIA. Fortunately, Netcom did not. As one of >TIA's first users that very weekend, I wrote the "TIA mini-FAQ" on the spot, >explaining step-by-step in two pages how anybody with a Macintosh can get >hooked up with real IP within 30 minutes. At flat-rate shell prices. My >mini-FAQ was in stunningly high demand. > >Faced with this sudden flat-rate competition, within a few months the first >SLIP/PPP provider went to a flat-rate model. Then another. Then a third. >Providers started sprouting up all over the place. People began using >Mosaic, which was quickly replaced by several other browsers that started >showing up for the Mac within a couple of months. Most of the improvements >in those new Mac browsers were copied by a new startup that was formed soon >thereafter. That company was Netscape. The remainder of Internet history I >presume most of us are aware of. This is close to correct, but not quite. In fact, along with bundling MacTCP with my Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh (which enabled Mac users to get MacTCP AND a book of instruction for $30 rather than pay Apple $60 for just MacTCP, if you could find it), the book also came with a flat-rate SLIP account from Northwest Nexus, my ISP in Bellevue, WA. What happened was that we'd gone around looking for a decent SLIP account to bundle with the book, but weren't able to find anything under $11 per hour. I casually mentioned this to Ed Morin, the owner of Northwest Nexus (which I'd always used for ISP service in Washington), and said that I assumed they didn't want to be bundled because the book would have international distribution and I thought they wanted to be only a local ISP. Ed said he could have such problems, and a 4 hour telephone call (which included several conference calls with Livingston technical support to configure Nexus's PortMasters for dynamic IP addressing, which had just appeared in the feature set) later, we had flat-rate SLIP working. That flat-rate SLIP account was tremendously popular, and Northwest Nexus attracted customers from all over the world who were willing to pay long distance charges to avoid the usurious rates for SLIP locally. That was the key event in pricing SLIP down, in my opinion, since TIA came quite a bit later. TIA was another moving force, without question, but not the first one. I wrote about it in the second edition of ISKM. And what I mostly remember about Netcom in those early days was that their technical support was almost totally non-existent. I helped many ISKM readers solve problems with Netcom because Netcom wouldn't respond to email or phone calls. And since I never had a Netcom account, it was mostly a matter of garnering the specific bits of setup information from some people so I could help others. cheers... -Adam PS: And to bring the story full circle, the person who introduced me to TIA before it was released so I could write about it in the second edition of ISKM was Drummond Reed of Intermind, who has subsequently been the driving force behind the just-released eXtensible Name Service (XNS) technology that I'm helping guide via the non-profit XNSORG. Ironically XNS is almost the complete opposite of TIA. Where TIA was a quick hack that was immediately useful, it also had a very short lifespan and disappeared entirely as soon as the hardware appeared for all ISPs to do PPP. In contrast, XNS is a broad technology platform that has relatively few immediate uses, but which, if it succeeds, will affect a vast number of things on the Internet for a long time to come. <http://www.xns.org/> ______________________________________________________________________ Adam C. Engst #2 in MDJ Power 25 / #5 in MacDirectory Top 10 TidBITS Publisher <ace(a)tidbits.com> <http://www.tidbits.com> XNSORG President =Adam Engst <ace(a)xns.org> <http://www.xns.org/> Computer Book Author <http://www.tidbits.com/bookbits/staff.html> Macworld Contrib. Editor <http://www.macworld.com/columns/wiredlife/> --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

1 0

CDR: declining sovereignty in the medistate
by anonymous＠openpgp.net 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

Oct 19, 2000 - 07:59 AM Court Says Forced Medication Allowed in Certain Cases By Andrew Welsh-Huggins Associated Press Writer COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A mentally ill person involuntarily committed to a treatment center can be ordered by a court to take anti-psychotic drugs if it is in the patients best interest, the state Supreme Court ruled. The unanimous decision said a court also can order medication if a patient lacks the capacity to give or withhold informed consent regarding treatment, and if a less intrusive treatment is unavailable. Before Wednesdays decision, medical personnel could only forcibly medicate mentally ill people who posed an immediate danger to themselves or others. The court ruled in the case of Jeffrey Steele, who appealed a 1997 request by the Hamilton County Community Mental Health Board to forcibly give him psychotropic or mind-altering drugs. "We have attempted to craft a decision that acknowledges a persons right to refuse anti-psychotic medication, and yet recognizes that mental illness sometimes robs a person of the capacity to make informed treatment decisions," Justice Andrew Douglas wrote. Steele was judged mentally ill and involuntarily hospitalized in August 1997, according to court documents. Seeking a legal standard for such cases, his lawyer, Shannon Smith, appealed the order to the Supreme Court even though Steele voluntarily began taking the drugs in 1998. "Im disappointed in the decision. I am encouraged by the fact they took a good hard look at it and now we have a standard," Smith said.

1 0

CDR: re:Tim May's anti-semitic rants
by casey.iverson＠hushmail.com 19 Oct '00

19 Oct '00

--Hushpart_boundary_USSycvGtKLcphsVrEvgZKVPIClXMuuIp Content-type: text/plain Tim's position's are more anti-Isreal and pro Arab than anti-Jewish. Even if he is a closet anti-Semite, as some have alleged in the past, he has a right to his view. But is this the appropriate list for such views? At 12:34 PM 10/19/00 , auto9950013 wrote: > >This list is no stranger to Tim May's sarcasm and anti-semitic rants. > >>You just used a German word. I'm reporting you to the Zionist League. > > >>"Remember, children of Israel, "Eretz Israel" is not the same thing >>as "lebensraum," and the suppression of the ragheads in Eretz Israel >>is merely pest eradication, not the "Final Solution." War is peace, >>freedom is slavery, and Zionists are libertarians." > --Hushpart_boundary_USSycvGtKLcphsVrEvgZKVPIClXMuuIp-- IMPORTANT NOTICE: If you are not using HushMail, this message could have been read easily by the many people who have access to your open personal email messages. Get your FREE, totally secure email address at http://www.hushmail.com.

2 1