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Los Angeles Times: Robert Heinlein's future may be past
by R.A. Hettinga 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca- heinlein9dec09,0,1217973,print.story?coll=la-books-headlines> http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca- heinlein9dec09,0,6886058.story?coll=la-books-headlines From the Los Angeles Times Books & authors Robert Heinlein's future may be past He was one of the greats of golden-age science fiction, but his legacy polarizes today's readers. By Scott Timberg Los Angeles Times Staff Writer December 9, 2007 He was a onetime utopian socialist who became an assertive right- winger, a libertarian nudist with a military-hardware fetish, a cold warrior who penned an Age of Aquarius sensation with a hero who preached free love. He won admiration from Ronald Reagan, who enlisted his ideas in his "Star Wars" missile shield, and Charles Manson, who was captured with the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" in his backpack. He predicted the European Union and invented the water bed. But Robert A. Heinlein, the California-based science-fiction writer who stood over the midcentury decades like a colossus, casts a different kind of shadow now, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, as his archives, held by UC Santa Cruz, are being placed online, making his work even more accessible to scholars and fans. Most of his work is in print, but opinions vary wildly about how important a writer Heinlein was: He's both a life-changing inspiration and a "dinosaur" who exerts less cultural presence than, say, Philip K. Dick, the drug-addled oddball who was a footnote during the field's golden age. Heinlein, who in life was a divisive figure, has become, in death, a polarizing one and even something of a punch line. "When an emerging science-fiction writer's work earns him comparisons to Robert A. Heinlein," Dave Itzkoff begins a 2006 New York Times review, "should he take them as a compliment?" As the literary and academic worlds open to science-fiction and genre writing, Heinlein lacks the cachet of J.G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson and others. Films based on Dick's books, good and bad, keep coming. But Heinlein's film adaptations, in the last half century, since 1950's "Destination Moon," culminated in 1997's "Starship Troopers," widely disliked by his fan base. Non-SF writer William Burroughs probably has more influence inside the genre's literary wing than Heinlein, who won four Hugos (the award voted by the fans), sold millions of copies, and was termed the field's most significant writer since H.G. Wells. "His rabid fan base is graying," said Annalee Newitz, who writes about science fiction for Wired and Gawker. "To literary readers, the books look cheesy, sexist in a hairy-chest, gold-chain kind of way. His stuff hasn't stood the test of time," because of characters' windy speechifying and their frontier optimism. "Here at the store I actively resist promoting him, because he was a fascist," said Charles Hauther, the science fiction buyer at Skylight Books. "People don't seem to talk about him anymore. I haven't had a conversation about Heinlein in a long time." Still, hard-core admirers remain: David Silver, the Venice-based president of the 800-member Heinlein Society, discovered the author's work as a boy in the '50s and said he rereads about four dozen of Heinlein's books every year. And Heinlein's following shows up in unexpected places: He's the hero of numerous astronauts, Silicon Valley types and those seeking to privatize space travel. He isn't just their favorite writer; he set them on their life's course. He generated public enthusiasm for the space race, inspired the genre called "military science fiction." Tom Clancy, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and countless libertarians are fans. A crater on Mars is named for him. Tom Disch, author of the respected critical study "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of," said Heinlein's early work was often brilliant. "His great misfortune is the people who like him: It's often old- fashioned, cantankerous, right-wing chest-beaters. He was a better writer than that would suggest. He had a gift for startling notions." 'He was the enemy' THERE are plenty of reasons for the polarized feelings over Heinlein, who was born in Missouri, attended the U.S. Naval Academy, left the military after a bout of tuberculosis and spent several decades in L.A. and Santa Cruz. After campaigning for Upton Sinclair and running for the California Assembly, he dominated the pulp magazines, broke into the Saturday Evening Post and became the first science fictionist to land on the New York Times bestseller list. Some of the divisiveness around Heinlein comes from a battle that redrew the field profoundly over politics and gender. In the '40s and '50s, science fiction's "golden age," there were three faces on the genre's Mt. Rushmore: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Heinlein. His books are far more likely than the others' to have the word "controversial" in their jacket copy. "He was the enemy," recalled Disch, who was an emerging novelist in the "new wave" of the 1960s. Those writers, often liberal or radical, aimed to move away from pulp space operas and toward literature, from tales of physics to stories about psychology and sexuality and drugs. There were more female writers, and the men exhibited a feminist consciousness that diverged sharply from the golden age, in which women were usually sex objects, foils to rugged male heroes or absent altogether. Even "Stranger," with its countercultural following and endless debates about alternative sexuality -- it's one of several of his books to dramatize group marriages -- enrages feminists these days. "It's like the sexist model of hippie life," said Newitz. " 'We're all liberated, but the women still get the coffee.' " Though he became a symbol of all that was backward to the new wavers, some cite him as a major influence. "He was the enemy -- yes," said Samuel R. Delany, a leader of the '60s insurgence who is also black and gay. "But he was the enemy to be bested at his own game. We took his rhetorical tricks, his ways of dramatizing an argument, and then used them to dramatize arguments he would have hated." Despite a backlash of masculine, hard-science-driven work in the early Reagan era, the new wave effectively won the war when cyberpunk and its variations became the dominant strains over the last few decades. "He was certainly temporarily defeated by that generation," said Newitz. "But we're really going through a renaissance of space opera" in movies and television and books by writers such as Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod, who lean as far to the left as Heinlein did to the right. "Any form goes through phases, and we're seeing a backlash against cyberpunk. We're sick of implants. We want to go to another galaxy. This new generation is writing stuff that's more literary and more relevant to issues we're grappling with as a culture." The core of his following FOR years, the intellectually ambitious novels of the 1960s, especially "Stranger in a Strange Land," about a spiritually and sexually messianic Martian-born human, and "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," which concerns a free-market revolt by prisoners on the moon, were considered Heinlein's great work. These books still have followings; "Moon" sits in the International Space Station library. But the bestselling "Stranger," which Kurt Vonnegut Jr. reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review in 1990 when it was reissued in an expanded edition, now reads like a long-winded relic of the '60s, philosophy for junior high kids. Meanwhile, the books aimed squarely at a youth audience, the "juveniles" of the '40s and '50s, such as "Red Planet" and "Orphans in the Sky," have seen their stars rise. "There's always this Heinlein character pontificating," said Junot Dmaz, who immersed himself in the books as background for his recent novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." "I never liked that. And he always cut that down in his juveniles. He was so much more humane" in those books." "One of my favorites was 'Have Space Suit Spacesuit -- Will Travel.' I used to have dreams about that book." George Slusser, who's taught science fiction at UC Riverside for 25 years and sees Heinlein as reflecting many currents of American literature, concedes that many of the late books are self-indulgent and solipsistic. But his students continue to respond to Heinlein's juveniles, especially science students. "Have Space Suit -- Will Travel," said Slusser, "is like 'Huckleberry Finn' redone, even though the title is silly and it involves a kid getting a space suit by saving box tops." L.A. writer M.G. Lord loves the juveniles and credits their strong, self-reliant females with making her a feminist. The tendency of Heinlein heroines to use initials led young Mary Grace to do the same. But Heinlein's adult books are not as good, she said, and some written during and after the sexual revolution are disturbing, including "Friday," in which a heroine falls in love with her rapist. "The minute he could make his sexual fantasies explicit it was, 'Oh, gross!' " The serious books, especially those he wrote in the two decades before his death in 1988, seem culturally out of step. "I don't see any of his novels as being especially relevant for my students in the 21st century," said H. Bruce Franklin, a Rutgers professor and author of "Robert Heinlein: America as Science Fiction." Heinlein's gift was to catch the zeitgeist. "That's what made him so successful, but it makes his work seem dated." As space travel has moved from its Cold War centrality to the margins, his work has dated further. In short, Franklin said, the future doesn't look as he predicted it would. Still, even detractors see his shadow. "The idea of combining a space opera about the military with a soap opera about sex is a pretty cool thing," said Newitz. "Film directors are still wrapping their heads around that. "Maybe there will be a Heinlein renaissance," she offered. "But I sure hope not."

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Boulder Tech report on low-resource routing attacks on Tor
by Paul Syverson 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

The following are some comments on the Univ. Colorado at Boulder tech report "Low-Resource Routing Attacks Against Anonymous Systems" that has been getting lots of press and other web attention lately and been somewhat discussed on this list. It is only today that I have managed to find time to sit down and read the paper. The nutshell for people that don't want to read the details below: A good paper. It does _not_ show Tor to be broken. (Nor did it ever claim to. I only state that because of some of what has appeared in the blagnpress, which to their credit, the authors tried to curtail.) It is a nice contribution, especially in showing the limitations of the current approach to entry guard selection. Overstates its novelty over prior work, which is really unnecessary because it makes valuable contributions of its own (and which is more or less my fault not theirs, cf. below). More details: This is a nice piece of work. Its greatest contribution is in directing attacks on entry guards. In the theory and simulation work in which such ideas were introduced by Wright et al. they were introduced (as "helper nodes") to reduce vulnerability. As a recent addition to Tor, the nature of defense they provide but also the possible risks from how they are used in actual implementation and deployment needed to be explored. It was understood from the start that there is something of a tradeoff in introducing them. It was realized that profiling without entry guards was in practice trivial enough that the additional risk of adding entry guards and thus simplifying and enhancing profiling for anyone who unfortunately had an adversary guard node was clearly worth it. I don't think this paper changes that. However, by attacking the guard selection process itself, the research forces us to examine it more closely. What they did was apply techniques that Lasse and I developed in "Locating Hidden Services" to ordinary client circuits. Though we had said this would be straightforward to do, we didn't actually do it. Because we were focused on the deployed Tor network we could not pursue this sort of attack there. We were also focused primarily on what could be accomplished with a single hostile node. This limits to cases of either a hostile website (as in Murdoch and Danezis and as mentioned on p. 10 of this tech report) or a hostile client and a hidden service, which is what we reported on. Deploying a Tor network on PlanetLab and using synthetically generated data removes some of the "in the wild" reality from the results. But, by accepting this limitation, it allowed them to obtain data at all about Tor circuits for ordinary use (not hidden services). Much in the practicality spirit of onion routing. The experimental networks were more than an order of magnituded smaller than the current deployed Tor network. One cannot be sure something will scale until actually trying it, but in this case there is no reason to doubt it does scale. Still if we take the 9 percent figure given by the authors as an arbitrary line at which attacks become significant, that is still almost a hundred nodes in the current network. At about twice the entire size of the experimental networks that were set up this starts to be a bit more than low-resource. Still one could do quite a bit with less than 9 percent. Also, as a counter to my own point, see "On the countermeasures" below. On prior work: Before I start noting all the things that the authors didn't properly cite, I should observer that they first contacted me about their work way back in last October and have cc'd me on correspondence with Roger, who did read their work and respond to them. If these are indeed omissions and oversights in their paper, then it is my fault because they gave me plenty of opportunity to comment before it hit the interblag. I just didn't squeeze in the time before now. I already mentioned that the basic techniques are similar to what was in my paper with Lasse Xverlier, "Locating Hidden Servers". The authors say that they think theirs is "the first approach capable of [compromising anonymity] before the client starts to transmit any payload data". I believe that the code we ran would be entirely able to do this. We mentioned it only briefly in passing in our paper, and we didn't actually do it. The authors of this report did. They also say they have introduced the idea of nodes falsely reporting bandwidth and uptime. As they note this is central to the way their basic attack works. As they do not note, this was explicitly used by Lasse and me in our attacks. I quote from our paper, "Alice's server node will report a false higher uptime and the maximum network bandwidth to the directory server in order for other nodes to trust it for their circuits. This is still possible as there is (yet) no method for keeping reliable track of uptime at the different servers." They also introduce the idea of selective path disruption to speed up attacks by dropping circuits, because that will cause more circuits to be built. This was also part of our attacks albeit since we controlled the client connecting to the hidden service, it could be done there. The statement that the algorithm for choosing entry guards was "implemented to protect the first hop of a circuit by using what are believed to be more reliable and trustworthy nodes" is false. Using more reliable nodes was seen as sensible because it should minimize the number of entry guards a client uses, which is the whole point. Nobody thought that this made them more trustworthy. In fact the general threat of adversaries running reliable nodes (in both onion routing and mixnets) to attract more traffic is well recognized. On the threat model. While the design document does use the c^2/n^2 basic result from "Towards an Analysis of Onion Routing Security" as a starting point. This was not thought to be accurate once we had substantial deployment and was acknowledged as such. Cf., "Challenges in deploying low-latency anonymity" http://www.onion-router.net/Publications.html#challenges On the countermeasures: Rather than discuss all of them in detail in an already overly long post, I'll just note that I think they may help against an adversary that has only several hundred to a few thousand dollars in resources. The authors note that they are considering just that case, and it is certainly worthwhile to see what it takes to mount an attack and what works against a low resource adversary. That was also part of our motivation to show what could be done with a single bad node. But, an adversary that has a few tens of thousands of dollars can simply run many reliable high bandwidth nodes and thus mount the attack invulnerable to any countermeasure against lying. Michael Gersten noted the threat of this attack in a separate context in a post to this list yesterday (March 6). And it has long been recognized as a potential threat to Tor in general. I have begun to look at countermeasures that should work unless the adversary owns major hunks of the network, e.g., social network based, but will not get into that further here. More than you wanted to read. Hope it was useful anyway. aloha, Paul ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[liberationtech] best practices - roundup
by Katy P 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Best practices for traveling to an internet-hostile regime. There is a lot of variance - obviously the regime's capabilities as well as one's own visibility come into play. And, if it isn't obvious, I'm not a security expert. This is not official, legal advice. Everyone needs to research this on their own and make good decisions for themselves. If you're really not tech-savvy, it might be worthwhile to hook up with a tech-savvy friend (or IT professional) to do some of these steps. Regardless, here are some hints from the community: BEFORE YOUR TRIP - your laptop and mobile device should be ones that are fresh - factory reset to the original operating system and best case would be "burners" -- devices that you can factory reset upon return home (some suggested also using a bootable Linux install) - do not link your Dropbox, GDrive, or other file service at any time - do not be logged into GMail, social media sites, etc. - be careful with what photos you have on your phone (before leaving the country especially) - have a virus scanner installed - make sure that all software is up-to-date (Windows Updates, virus scanner) - any sensitive data/documents should be on a USB drive, not kept in an obvious place (like throw it in with your toiletries or something) with an encrypted volume - change all of your passwords to something very secure before your trip - install TOR - consider a mobile security app (Here's a review of some Android ones: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/top-android-security-apps/) - encryption may be illegal and may cause more concern AT THE AIRPORT: - don't be logged into anything - be polite - don't be nervous DURING YOUR TRIP - when on WiFi, DNSCrypt http://www.opendns.com/technology/dnscrypt/ - set up a VPN connection - never leave your devices anywhere (even hotel safe) - assume phone conversations are monitored - turn off GPS - turn on encryption for your social media sites (Facebook encryption http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=215897678434749 Twitter http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/making-twitter-more-secure-https.html) - some suggest having a different "burner" social media account - be careful posting pictures and updates during trip LEAVING THE COUNTRY - if possible, it might be a good idea to do a factory reset on devices before going to the airport (??) - upon return, do factory resets of all devices - change passwords upon return Thanks to everyone that made suggestions. -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Chminey growth, omni luvin, tunnels across the net(tm) and forging the local rings of power
by Tom 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

The PersonalTelcoProject has started picking up steam in moving from setting up one off hot-spots (starsucks style points of back-haul to the Internet(tm), only free rather than a t-mobile fee) and into the land of forming our own network of interconnectivity. To this end I present to the forkites Node236 , that being the WSMF Compounds point and pointed of presence. http://www.personaltelco.net/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=Node236 Whats under the hood.. On the roof... a 12dbi omni with 3 deg down tilt mounted to a 10 foot pole attached to a very short bit of lmr400 into the ammo can of packet paradise. In the ammo can is a linksys befw11s4 turned down to bridging mode. These feeds into the house and attaches to the nodes three nic server Winston. Winston spots a Debian install and a tuned NoCat setup. One nic takes in the packets from the roof, the second nic takes a feed from a second linksys befw11s4 turned down to bridging for the use of the house and the third nice heads out to the DSL router, again tossed into bridging node. NoCat does most of the routing and rules work for traffic. So a day after raising the mast Portland gets hail, rain and power outing lightening hits. I'm sitting here at work pinging the box wondering if its just hung on reboot, if the power is still out, or if the chimney is smoking rubble. The plan for the node over the next week or so will be to tunnel it over the net into other PTP nodes probably over ipv6, maybe not. A constant vigil is up to find nodes going up that are in wireless reach such that we can start making true wireless links and relying less on the "Internet(tm)" to tunnel through. As with all growing networks content and services are key into making the value of use go up up up, WSMFs node will be offering up various goodies to the ptpnet over the next few weeks. Plans for a Palm centric file site (pd, os and other legal files only), old time radio shows both on demand and as files, various project repositories and a few other goodies will be on tap. Other PTP nodes are already working on cojoined resource sharing over our growing interconnectedness... http://www.personaltelco.net/static/node/content-nodes.html It is indeed a project I am digging doing not only in the doing but in the planning and the learning. Portland awaits the next ORiley gathering, by that time we should have a good coverage of goods and services all, of course, for the taking. No fees no pleas, just hit agree. -tomwsmf _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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export regulations updated
by Perry E. Metzger 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Cryptome just published some updates to the crypto export regulations: http://cryptome.org/bis120904.txt Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com --- 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'

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Chminey growth, omni luvin, tunnels across the net(tm) and forging the local rings of power
by Tom 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

The PersonalTelcoProject has started picking up steam in moving from setting up one off hot-spots (starsucks style points of back-haul to the Internet(tm), only free rather than a t-mobile fee) and into the land of forming our own network of interconnectivity. To this end I present to the forkites Node236 , that being the WSMF Compounds point and pointed of presence. http://www.personaltelco.net/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=Node236 Whats under the hood.. On the roof... a 12dbi omni with 3 deg down tilt mounted to a 10 foot pole attached to a very short bit of lmr400 into the ammo can of packet paradise. In the ammo can is a linksys befw11s4 turned down to bridging mode. These feeds into the house and attaches to the nodes three nic server Winston. Winston spots a Debian install and a tuned NoCat setup. One nic takes in the packets from the roof, the second nic takes a feed from a second linksys befw11s4 turned down to bridging for the use of the house and the third nice heads out to the DSL router, again tossed into bridging node. NoCat does most of the routing and rules work for traffic. So a day after raising the mast Portland gets hail, rain and power outing lightening hits. I'm sitting here at work pinging the box wondering if its just hung on reboot, if the power is still out, or if the chimney is smoking rubble. The plan for the node over the next week or so will be to tunnel it over the net into other PTP nodes probably over ipv6, maybe not. A constant vigil is up to find nodes going up that are in wireless reach such that we can start making true wireless links and relying less on the "Internet(tm)" to tunnel through. As with all growing networks content and services are key into making the value of use go up up up, WSMFs node will be offering up various goodies to the ptpnet over the next few weeks. Plans for a Palm centric file site (pd, os and other legal files only), old time radio shows both on demand and as files, various project repositories and a few other goodies will be on tap. Other PTP nodes are already working on cojoined resource sharing over our growing interconnectedness... http://www.personaltelco.net/static/node/content-nodes.html It is indeed a project I am digging doing not only in the doing but in the planning and the learning. Portland awaits the next ORiley gathering, by that time we should have a good coverage of goods and services all, of course, for the taking. No fees no pleas, just hit agree. -tomwsmf _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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export regulations updated
by Perry E. Metzger 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Cryptome just published some updates to the crypto export regulations: http://cryptome.org/bis120904.txt Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com --- 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'

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Re: [liberationtech] Cryptography super-group creates unbreakable encryption
by Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On 2/14/13 8:36 AM, Jacob Appelbaum wrote: > The live code review with ascii art was really something to behold. It > was some kind of new art form that isn't very good but at the same time > is nearly impossible to not watch... Something interesting happened yesterday, here a summary in case someone would like to get on it again * After few hours the pad was vandalized insulting nadim https://pad.riseup.net/p/silentcircle * A Backup of the Pad content has been put read-only online (with some comments and further analysis to be done) * http://pastebit.com/pastie/12001 * http://pastebin.com/dKRPrGMN * SilentCircle source code has been temporarly removed from Github: https://github.com/SilentCircle/silent-phone-base * Nadim opened a ticket to ask about the code back: https://github.com/SilentCircle/silent-phone-base/issues/1 * A new (different) version of the code has been uploaded online: https://github.com/SilentCircle/silent-phone-base * Someone in the meantime put the original code back online (as a zip archive): http://jednorog.sneakyness.com/1U060B2S3I1P * A diff between the "original SC opensource release" and the "modified SC opensource release" reveal some code difference * Output of git diff "original/silent-phone-base new/silent-phone-base/ > sc.patch" is available at http://temp-share.com/show/f3Yg95cXn -naif -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[IP] Microsoft told to explain e-mail deletion memos
by dave＠farber.net 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

...... Forwarded Message ....... From: Barry Ritholtz <ritholtz(a)optonline.net> To: Dave Farber <dave(a)farber.net> Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:44:02 -0500 Subj: Microsoft told to explain e-mail deletion memos Dave, This is an enormous development, given the history of all the litigation against Microsoft. The Judge's order implies a concern over a very conscious decision by the software giant to eliminate incriminating emails -- after receiving a judicial order to archive all of them during the Anti-Trust case. Additionally, being ordered to search the legal department's archive suggests (in my biased opinion) that because of the affirmative actions of the company in ordering email destruction, they are not able to hide behind Attorney-Client privilege. Further, this implies that some Microsoft employees perjured themselves during prior sworn testimony. As previously disclosed, I am on the Board of Burst, and have absolutely no objectivity whatsoever. But read the report yourself, and reach your own conclusion. Barry L. Ritholtz Market Strategist Maxim Group britholtz(a)maximgrp.com (212) 895-3614 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Microsoft told to explain e-mail deletion memos http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/174343_msftburst21.html Friday, May 21, 2004 By JAMES ROWLEY BLOOMBERG NEWS A federal judge ordered Microsoft Corp. yesterday to search a company computer to help explain why Vice President James Allchin told employees in 2000 to eliminate e-mails. U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore issued the order in an antitrust and patent suit by Burst.com Inc., which has accused Microsoft of stealing its technology for broadcasting sound and video over the Internet at high speeds. Burst.com charges that Microsoft destroyed e-mails that may help the smaller rival win its case. Motz told the company to search a legal department computer for any evidence that Microsoft lawyers advised Allchin and others to adopt a policy of scrapping e-mails. A written policy circulated in 1997 by company computer operators advised employees not to save e-mails for more than 30 days "due to legal issues." "I want to know as much as I can how 'due to legal issues' got in there," Motz told Microsoft lawyer John Treece at a hearing yesterday. "I want to know who talked to Mr. Allchin from the legal department before the e-mail was sent and what was said." Motz didn't accept Microsoft's explanation that the information technology department inserted the words in the company policy statement to make it easier to persuade employees to delete e-mails after 30 days to save computer memory space. "It may be true, but it doesn't have the ring of truth to me," the judge said. Allchin's Jan. 23, 2000, e-mail said: "do not archive your mail. 30 days." Allchin told employees, "This is not something that you get to decide. This is ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as rah(a)shipwright.com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ --- 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'

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[Politech] Surveillance in the sky: Homeland Security wants aerial drones with cameras [priv]
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have long been used over Iraq and Afghanistan. Now local police and Homeland Security want to use them in the U.S. for aerial surveillance. This raises two interesting issues: privacy and safety. The privacy one is familiar to Politech readers. If you have a fleet of UAVs overhead on a clear day, they could track when your car leaves your driveway, where you go, who you visit, how long you stay, how fast you drive, and add all that data to a massive information store that could be available to any Fed for the asking. (Networked terrestrial cameras and facecams raise essentially the same issue.) The safety issue involves sharing airspace with pilots carrying passengers. News coverage: http://news.com.com/Drone+aircraft+may+prowl+U.S.+skies/2100-11746_3-6055658. html Photos of UAVs: http://news.com.com/2300-11397_3-6055507.html The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association's writeup of a North Carolina county's use of an UAV for monitoring its citizens: http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsitems/2006/060215uav.html Summary of a House hearing on this today is below. -Declan --- http://www.house.gov/transportation/aviation/03-29-06/03-29-06memo.html PURPOSE The purpose of this hearing is to discuss the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Unmanned Aerial Systems in the National Airspace System (NAS) and the authority of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to provide safety oversight and air traffic control over these systems in the NAS. BACKGROUND According to the Congressional Research Service, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been referred to in many ways: remotely piloted vehicle, drone, robot plane, and pilotless aircraft are a few such names. UAVs, which may have a wingspan as large as a Boeing 737 or be as small as a radio-controlled model airplane, are defined by the Department of Defense (DOD) as powered, aerial vehicles that * do not carry a human operator, * use aerodynamic forces to provide vehicle lift, * can fly autonomously or be piloted remotely, * can be expendable or recoverable, and * can carry a lethal or nonlethal payload. There are two different types of UAVs: drones and remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs). Both drones and RPVs are pilotless, but drones are programmed for autonomous flight. RPVs are actively flown b remotely b by a ground control operator. While historically UASs have been used primarily by the DOD in military settings outside of U.S. borders to enhance warfighting capabilities, there is growing demand to operate UAVs in the integrated NAS. In fact, Congress has repeatedly called for and funded programs to study and eventually mandate the use of UAVs in support of homeland security missions and for other purposes. Federal agencies, such as the Customs and Border Protection Service (CBP), the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and State and Local law enforcement agencies are interested in utilizing UAVs in the NAS. Public uses include border security, port security, surveillance, drug interdiction, search and rescue, fire fighting, and other law enforcement and homeland security initiatives. Some of these activities are taking place today; for instance, the CBP conducts UAV surveillance operations along the Nationbs southern border; a NASA-sponsored program has produced civilian UAVs to monitor pollution and measure ozone levels; and the Department of Energy is looking at UAVs outfitted with radiation sensors to detect potential nuclear reactor accidents. UAVs are also an emerging segment of the commercial aviation industry and commercial entities would like to be able to operate UAVs in the NAS. There are many possible commercial uses of UAVs. In fact, the FAA acknowledges that manufacturers and operators are conducting research on, or are designing, aircraft that could fill niche markets unimagined just a decade ago. According to the FAA, some of the research and development activities the commercial aviation industry already performs include supporting law enforcement, homeland security, firefighting, weather prediction and tracking activities. ROLE OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION The FAA has sole authority over the safe and efficient use of the NAS. The FAA is responsible for overseeing the safety of the civil airspace, including operations by the military, government, private pilots and commercial entities. To this end, the FAA must take appropriate actions to ensure the safety of the public, which includes the flying public, as well as people and property on the ground. Public Uses of the Civil Airspace - Certificate of Waiver or Authorization According to the FAA, when the military or a government agency wants to fly a UAV in civil airspace (outside of Special Use Airspace or Military Operation Areas which are b no flyb areas and therefore not integrated with other operators), the FAA examines the request and issues a Certificate of Waiver or Authorization (COA), generally based on the following principles: * The COA authorizes an operator to use defined airspace for a specified time (up to one year, in some cases) and includes special provisions unique to each operation. For instance, a COA may include a requirement to operate only under Visual Flight Rules (VFR). * Most, if not all, COAs require coordination with an appropriate air traffic control facility and require the UAV to have a transponder able to operate in standard air traffic control mode with automatic altitude reporting. * To make sure the UAV will not interfere with other aircraft, a ground observer or an accompanying b chaseb aircraft must maintain visual contact with the UAV. The COA process has made possible research and development efforts and provided a means to introduce UAVs into the air traffic system. This process has aided the FAA, other government agencies, and the UAV manufacturers in identifying potential safety issues. Identified issues, such as the ability to b detect, see and avoidb other traffic, need to be addressed through further technological advancements and additional research and development efforts. Currently, the COA process is not available to commercial entities. Public Uses of the Civil Airspace b Temporary Flight Restrictions In order to address a request by the CBP to conduct UAV operations along the southern border, the FAA established a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona and New Mexico. The approximately 300 nm-long, 17-nm wide in most places, corridor is to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Patrol UAV aircraft from colliding with other civilian aircraft. The TFR is in effect from 12,000 to 14,000 feet and is active from 5 p.m. until 7 a.m. daily. The TFR is scheduled to be in effect until December 31, 2006, and may be renewed next year. Commercial Uses of the Civil Airspace To address the increasing needs of the civil market and the desire by civilian operators to fly UAVs in the NAS, the FAA has set up a UAV office and is developing new policies, procedures and approval processes. The FAA anticipates having draft UAV guidance in two years. The approach is to have the appropriate level of oversight without being overly restrictive in the early stages. More immediately, the FAA is reviewing certification requests from several UAV manufacturers. The first airworthiness certificates in the b Experimentalb category (for research and development, crew training, or market survey) were issued in 2005. RELATED ISSUES There are a number of other issues facing the FAA related to the emerging commercial UAV industry, including: Safety oversight: The FAA has identified two primary UAV safety issues that must be addressed for them to operate safely in the integrated civil airspace. * The need for proven UAV command and control redundancies should there be a disruption in communication or should the operator lose contact with the vehicle; and * The need for reliable b detect and avoidb capability so that UAVs can sense and avoid other aircraft. Short term: The use of COAs, experimental certificates and TFRs are intended to be temporary fixes. As it stands today, the lack of UAV standards, operational procedures and regulations is problematic. The demand for UAV operations is growing, and the short-term safety processes put in place, while allowing the FAA to gather important operational data, are not feasible in the long-term. Permission to fly UAVs in the NAS typically takes 60-90 days and permission is often accompanied by operational restrictions. In addition, FAA regions are not always interpreting the existing regulations the same way, leading to inconsistent regulation and enforcement. The FAA, other government agencies, UAV manufacturers, and commercial aviation stakeholders must continue to look for innovative solutions to address the safety issues related to UAVs in the NAS. Long term: The FAA has asked RTCA, Inc., a private, not-for-profit corporation that develops consensus-based recommendations for the agency on technical issues, to help develop UAV standards. RTCA will answer two key questions: How will UAVs handle command and control, and how will they detect and avoid other aircraft? Both of these questions are dependent upon the development of technology and operational procedures. In the long term, it must be demonstrated to the FAA that UAVs can operate at the equivalent level of safety as a manned aircraft. This process will take time. All the stakeholders, the FAA, DOD, DHS, other Government agencies, the NAS users, and the UAV industry must work together to achieve this safety goal. Research and Development Programs and ACCESS 5: Until recently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sponsored a government-industry project called ACCESS 5. The project brought together NASA, the FAA, the DOD, the DHS and the UAV National Industry Team (UNITE) to integrate UAVs or Remotely Operated Aircraft (ROA) into the national civil airspace via a four-step process. The first two steps of that process were funded by NASA in the High-Altitude, Long-Endurance Remotely Operated Aircraft in the National Airspace System (HALE ROA in the NAS) project. The HALE ROA in the NAS project was established in 2004 to develop policies, procedures and technical standards to enable remotely or autonomously operated aircraft to fly reliably and routinely in civil airspace with an equivalent level of safety as planes flown by on-board pilots. The last two steps in Access 5 were not part of NASA's HALE ROA in the NAS project, and funding them was left dependent upon the success achieved in the first two steps. The HALE ROA in the NAS project was funded primarily by NASA's Aeronautics Mission Directorate, with a planned budget for steps one and two of about $103 million through fiscal year 2009, or about 75 percent of the project's estimated cost over that five-year period. Industry members of the Access 5 project were contributing funding, with roughly 75 percent of the project's funding from NASA and 25 percent from industry. Unfortunately for UAV research and development efforts, NASA has recently announced a comprehensive restructuring of its research programs. As such, Access 5 has been defunded and important UAV research and development work has stopped. To date, no other agency or entity has taken on, or agreed to, fund the project. International cooperation: The use of UAVs in the civil airspace is a global issue. The FAA and other Government agencies continue to work closely with their international counterparts to harmonize standards, policies, procedures, and regulatory requirements. Recreational Model Aircraft Appropriate oversight of model aircraft operations must be considered as the FAA and interested parties develop standards and regulations for the use of UAVs in the NAS. The term b model aircraftb is defined by the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) as a non-human-carrying device capable of sustained flight in the atmosphere, not exceeding the limitations established in the Official AMA National Model Aircraft Safety Code, exclusively for recreation, sport, and/or competition activities. The AMA has been in existence since 1936, and is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to promote the development of model aviation as a recognized sport and worthwhile recreation activity. The AMA coordinates with the FAA and self-polices the operation of model aircraft in AMA sanctioned events. Some of the operational requirements for AMA sanctioned activities include: * A maximum takeoff weight of a model aircraft, including fuel, is 55 pounds, except for those flown under the AMA Experimental Aircraft Rules; * Operations shall not take place higher than approximately 400 feet above ground level, when within three (3) miles of an airport without notifying the airport operator; * Yielding the right-of-way and avoiding flying in the proximity of full-scale aircraft and utilizing a spotter when appropriate; * Operators of radio control model aircraft shall control the aircraft from the ground and maintain un-enhanced visual contact with the aircraft throughout the entire flight; and * No model aircraft shall be equipped with devices that would allow for autonomous flight. The AMAbs position is that model aircraft should not be included in the standards and regulations for UAVs, and that in establishing the definition of UAV, the focus should be on the purpose of the vehicle operation as opposed to the size or ability of the vehicle. _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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