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[osint] Switzerland Repatriates $458m to Nigeria
by R.A. Hettinga 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

--- begin forwarded text To: "Bruce Tefft" <btefft(a)community-research.com> Thread-Index: AcUVCpcZCIoZtD6dRp62Gatn1nTR2g== From: "Bruce Tefft" <btefft(a)community-research.com> Mailing-List: list osint(a)yahoogroups.com; contact osint-owner(a)yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list osint(a)yahoogroups.com Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 11:06:28 -0500 Subject: [osint] Switzerland Repatriates $458m to Nigeria Reply-To: osint(a)yahoogroups.com http://allafrica.com/stories/200502170075.html Switzerland Repatriates $458m to Nigeria This <http://allafrica.com/publishers.html?passed_name=This%20Day&passed_location =Lagos> Day (Lagos) February 17, 2005 Posted to the web February 17, 2005 Kunle Aderinokun Abuja FG to start drawing funds in March The Federal Government yesterday announced that the Swiss government has approved the repatriation of $458 million, being bulk of the $505 million of public fund stashed away in various private bank accounts in that country by the late General Sani Abacha and his family. Making this disclosure yesterday in Abuja at the instance of Swiss Ambassador to Nigeria, Dr. Pierre Helg, Finance Ministe Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the fund will be transferred into the International Bank for Settlement (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, and that Nigeria will be able to withdraw the money by the end of March this year. Okonjo-Iweala, who said the Swiss authorities did not attach any condition for the repatriation of the siphoned monies, said the release was sequel to the judgment of the Swiss Federal Court, which ruled that the "Swiss authorities may return assets of obviously criminal origin to Nigeria even without a court decision in the country concerned." The finance minister said President Olusegun Obasanjo since assumption of office had vigorously and relentlessly pursued return of the funds with the help of the National Security Adviser and herself. Noting that with this development, Switzerland has earned a positive status as the first country to return funds illegally placed by the Abacha family, Okonjo-Iweala said "the Federal Government is indeed grateful to the government of Switzerland for the principled and focused manner in which it has pursued this just cause." "We hope that the Swiss example at both the political and judicial level will show the way for other countries where our national resources have been illegally transferred. Switzerland's policy on this issue is a clear sign that crime does not pay. Nigeria is ready to work with other governments to achieved the repatriation of other funds which were siphoned out of the country illegally," she added. She recalled that Obasanjo had on behalf of the administration made a commitment to the Swiss government that the Abacha loots will be used for developmental projects in health and education as well as for infrastructure (roads, electricity and water supply) for the benefit of Nigerians. "This", she pointed out, "is of course, very much in keeping with the priorities of the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), the nation's blue-print for reducing poverty, creating wealth and generating employment." She stated that after receiving the assurances of the Swiss authorities that the funds will be released , the federal government had "decided to factor most of the Abacha funds into the 2004 budget so that the urgent challenges of providing infrastructure and social services to our people would not be delayed. This is to ensure that our programmes which are on-going are adequately funded." According to her, the Federal Government had distributed the recovered $505 million looted funds in the 2004 budget as: rural electrification, $170million (N21.70billion); priority economic roads, $140 million (N18.60billion); primary health care vaccination programme, $80 million (N10.83 billion); support to secondary and basic education, $60 million (N7.74 billion); and portable water and rural irrigation, $50 million (N6.20 billion). In his remarks, the Swiss ambassador to Nigeria, Helg said "Switzerland possesses an efficient set of legal instruments to defend itself against the inflow of illegal assets, and to recognize, block and return them to their rightful owners." He noted that "the recent decision of the Federal Supreme Court will strengthen the deterrent effect of Switzer-land's legal mechanism against potential future inflows of illegal capital." He added that "the decision strengthens the Swiss position regarding the restitution of funds of politically exposed persons, which is: Switzerland has no interest in accepting illegal funds. It's financial center does not provide for a safe haven for illegal money, which should primarily be used for the benefit of the people of the country in question. The point must again be made that Swiss banking secrecy is not an obstacle to the investigation of criminal acts and to the international efforts to combat crime." He said Switzerland has received assurances from Obasanjo and Okonjo-Iweala that the returned funds will be channeled to the areas of health (fighting HIV/AIDS), education and infrastructure in the 2004/2005 fiscal period. "The funds will be used within the framework of the Nigeria national strategy to implement the United Nations Millennium Goals. The Nigerian government has given assurances of transparency in the use of the funds and is in agreement to the full inspection of the relevant accounts. Switzerland has an interest in preventing the funds from being recycled for criminal purposes. "For this reasons, it has agreed with Nigeria to place control on projects financed by the Abacha's assets. These controls are expected to be carried out by the World Bank. The exact modalities are in the process of being established. Nigeria has given its consent to allowing civil society to play an appropriate role in this monitoring project," he said. The Abacha family had relentlessly waged legal battles to stop the release of the funds. But the Swiss Federal Court last week, ruled in favour of the repatriation of the monies back to Nigeria. The Swiss authorities have investigated bank accounts linked to the Abacha family for over three years since the Nigerian government accused the late leader of looting up to $3 billion from state coffers during his rule from 1993 until his death in June 1998. Last month, one of the Abacha sons, Abba, was arrested in Neuss, Germany when he attempted to close an account. He was accused of money laundering, fraud and breach of trust, and Swiss authorities sought his extradition from Germany to assist them in the course of their investigations. Nine Swiss banks were reportedly investigated during the period. The first restitution of $200 million from the Abacha funds in Switzwerland was in 2003. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Take a look at donorschoose.org, an excellent charitable web site for anyone who cares about public education! http://us.click.yahoo.com/_OLuKD/8WnJAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, discuss-osint(a)yahoogroups.com. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor bisoldi(a)intellnet.org http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint(a)yahoogroups.com Subscribe: osint-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: osint-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: osint-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --- 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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Cryptographers to Hollywood: prepare to fail on DRM
by R.A. Hettinga 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/drm_security_shortcomings/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT Cryptographers to Hollywood: prepare to fail on DRM By John Leyden (john.leyden at theregister.co.uk) Published Thursday 17th February 2005 19:37 GMT RSA 2005 Movie industry representatives at RSA 2005 in San Francisco today called on the IT industry for help in thwarting illegal file sharing before the problem threatened its revenues. But they were told that they must recognise the limitations of digital rights management in their fight against digital piracy. Speaking on the RSA conference panel Hollywood's Last Chance - Getting it Right on Digital Piracy, Carter Laren, security architect at Cryptographic Research, noted that cryptography is "good at some problems, such as transmitting data so it can't be eavesdropped or even authentication, but it can't solve the content protection problem. If people have legitimate access to content, then you can't stop them misusing it. "Anyone designing content protection should design for failure and if it fails update it," he added. John Worrall, marketing VP at RSA Security, agreed that content protection systems should be easy to upgrade. The entertainment industry must also learn from its previous mistakes in pushing the weak CSS copy-protection system for DVDs. "If content providers open up standards to good cryptographic review they will get a better system," he said, to applause from the RSA 2005 audience. The entertainment industry also needs to be responsive to changing market conditions and consumer preferences, according to Worrall: "Don't lock down a set of content rules that look draconian five years from now. Be flexible enough to incorporate change in rules. If rules are too restrictive people will go to other channels, including pirated material." Andy Sentos, president of engineering and technology at Fox Entertainment Group, argued that device manufacturers need to recognise the requirements of the movie industry in the design of their products. "There's a value in both content and functionality but there has to be a balance," he said. . Related stories SuprNova.org ends, not with a bang but a whimper (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/19/suprnova_stops_torrents/) The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/18/bittorrent_measurements_analysis/) MPAA closes Loki (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/10/loki_down_mpaa/) Stealing movies: Why the MPAA can afford to relax (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/09/movie_file_sharing/) Norway throws in the towel in DVD Jon case (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/05/norway_throws_in_the_towel/) -- ----------------- 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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Spam gets vocal with VoIP
by R.A. Hettinga 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/spam_gets_vocal_with_voip/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT Spam gets vocal with VoIP By John Leyden (john.leyden at theregister.co.uk) Published Thursday 17th February 2005 08:47 GMT RSA 2005 We're all learning to live with spam but an even more annoying nuisance lies just around the corner. Spit (Spam over internet telephony) is set to become the next pervasive medium for scammers, penis pill purveyors and the rest. Internet telephony means cheaper phone calls, a great prospect for consumers and businesses alike. It also means that advertising messages can be sent out for next to nothing. And history shows that spammers will take advantage of any broadcast medium available to them, according to Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security. Spit has the potential to fill people's voicemail in-boxes with junk, he says. "Once you get to the point where you have 10 unsolicited commercial voicemail messages every time you log on people will stop using it or at least only accept calls from people on their white list." Schneier thinks it will be difficult to weed out Spit messages, but some security vendors are considering defence mechanisms. According to David Thomason, director of security engineering at network security firm Sourcefire, Spit messages would likely have a pattern. Junk calls matching that pattern could be blocked in much the same way malign data traffic can be discarded providing filtering technologies were deployed on the network Spit messages are sent from, he said. . Related stories Users choke on mobile spam (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/10/mobile_spam/) Trojan infects PCs to generate SMS spam (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/09/sms_spam_trojan/) Phone spam misery looms Stateside (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/06/junk_fax_sms_ok/) Pssst, wanna spam mobile phones? (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/12/sms_spamvertisment/) Telecom Italia slammed for spam hypocrisy (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/02/text_spam_tim/) UK premium rate phone complaints rocket (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/01/icstis_annual_report/) -- ----------------- 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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Intel fortifies mobile transactions
by R.A. Hettinga 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/wireless_trusted_platform/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register ; Mobile ; Mobile Apps ; Intel fortifies mobile transactions By Jan Libbenga (libbenga at yahoo.com) Published Thursday 17th February 2005 12:47 GMT 3GSM Intel has joined Orange and Visa International to better protect premium digital content and transactions on mobile handsets. The company will use a combination of hardware and software to provide more more security for consumers to pay for online music or video, the company announced this week at 3GSM in Cannes. The new Intel Wireless Trusted Platform (http://www.intel.com/design/pca/applicationsprocessors/whitepapers/30086801…) is comparable with solutions Intel has developed for desktop PCs. Connected to the motherboard or the inner circuitry is a Trusted Platform Module, which contains a unique digital signature of the platform's software configuration. When booted, the digital signature is recalculated and compared to previous signatures. If the signature can't be validated, devices are notified of a change in the reported platform's state. It will not only protect users against viruses and software corruption, but also secures content delivery and downloads. -- ----------------- 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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[i2p] 0.5 is available (fwd from jrandom@i2p.net)
by Eugen Leitl 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

----- Forwarded message from jrandom <jrandom(a)i2p.net> -----

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Re: [p2p-hackers] SHA1 broken? (fwd from hal@finney.org)
by Eugen Leitl 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

----- Forwarded message from "\"Hal Finney\"" <hal(a)finney.org> -----

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Digital Water Marks Thieves
by R.A. Hettinga 17 Feb '05

17 Feb '05

Until, of course, people figure out that taggants on everything do nothing but confuse evidence and custody, not help it. Go ask the guys in the firearms labs about *that* one. Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,66595,00.html> Wired News Digital Water Marks Thieves By Robert Andrews? Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66595,00.html 02:00 AM Feb. 15, 2005 PT CARDIFF, Wales -- Crooked criminal hearts may have fluttered and skipped a beat Monday when some of Britain's most notorious thieves opened a valentine from an unwelcome secret admirer -- one of London's top female police chiefs. But the greeting -- in which Chief Superintendent Vicki Marr wrote "thinking of you and what you do" -- was not so much an amorous expression to the underworld as part of a sting designed to catch hard-core burglars using new chemical microdot crime-fighting technology. SmartWater is a clear liquid containing microscopic particles encoded with a unique forensic signature that, when found coated on stolen property, provides a precise trace back to the owner and, when detected on a suspect, can conclusively implicate a felon. Likened to giving household items and vehicles a DNA of their own, the fluid is credited with helping cut burglary in Britain to a 10-year low, with some cities reporting drops of up to 85 percent. A decade in the making, SmartWater is the name for a suite of forensic coding products. The first, Instant, is a property-marking fluid that, when brushed on items like office equipment or motorcycles, tags them with millions of tiny fragments, each etched with a unique SIN (SmartWater identification number) that is registered with the owner's details on a national police database and is invisible until illuminated by police officers using ultraviolet light. A second product, the Tracer, achieves a similar goal by varying the blend of chemical agents used in the liquid to produce one of a claimed 10 billion one-off binary sequences, encoded in fluid combinations themselves. SmartWater CEO Phil Cleary, a retired senior detective, hit upon the idea after watching burglars he had apprehended walk free from court due to lack of evidence. "It was born out of my frustration at arresting villains you knew full well had stolen property, but not being able to prove it," he said. "Just catching someone with hot goods, or a police officer's gut belief a suspect is guilty, are not enough to secure a conviction -- so we turned to science." Cleary is reluctant to discuss "trade secret" details of a product he has patented, but he concedes that, together with chemist brother Mike, he has developed "a mathematical model that allows us to generate millions of chemical signatures" -- an identifier he boasts is "better than DNA." But more than property can get tagged. In spray form, the fluid marks intruders with a similarly unique code that, when viewed under UV in a police cell, makes a red-faced burglar glow with fluorescent green and yellow blotches. The resemblance to Swamp Thing and the forensic signature found on his body are telltale signs the suspect has been up to no good at a coded property. "It's practically impossible for a criminal to remove; it stays on skin and clothing for months," Cleary added. "If a villain had stolen a watch, they might try to scrape off the fluid -- but they would have to remove every last speck, which is unlikely. "Sometimes burglars who know they are tagged with the liquid scrub themselves so hard behind the ears to get it off, police arresting them end up having to take them into hospital for skin complaints. But we don't have much sympathy for them." Law enforcers are confident SmartWater can help improve Britain's mixed fortunes on combating burglary. Nationwide, instances of the crime have fallen by 42 percent since 1997, but the proportion of those resulting in convictions has also halved, from 27 percent to just 13 percent. So, while SmartWater is available commercially with a monthly subscription, many police forces are issuing free kits to vulnerable households in crime hot spots, hoping it can help put away more perps. The microdot tech could prove invaluable in a courtroom, but it is also an effective deterrent. Most burglaries happen because criminals know there is little chance of being arrested during a break-in, according to U.K. government data (.pdf). But posters and stickers displayed in SmartWater-coded cities and homes warn off would-be crooks. Word on the criminal grapevine, say police, is that anyone stealing from a coded home is likely to leave the crime scene having pilfered an indelible binary sequence that will lead only to jail time; it's not worth the risk. Marr sent her valentine -- reading "roses are red, violets are blue, when SmartWater's activated, it's over for you" -- to known criminals in Croydon, London, reinforcing the message in what Cleary said amounts to "psychological warfare" against burglars. "Since we started using it in Croydon, burglaries are down by 27 percent," said Sgt. Phil Webb of the Metropolitan Police, which started testing the product in the region in late 2003 and has given 2,000 packs to citizens. "It puts the fear back into the criminal -- we know who they are, and we will use every new tool and technology at our disposal to bring them to book." Other forces using SmartWater have reported burglary reductions of up to 65 percent, while Cleary said England's West Yorkshire force was due to announce a decrease of 85 percent after testing the product in the northern town of Halifax. Graham Gooch, a criminal investigations tutor at the University of Central Lancashire and a former detective of 30 years, said the product is the market leader, advancing crime-fighting efforts. "Now, if a suspect caught with a stolen VCR turns green, they can't claim they got it from some bloke down the pub," he said. -- ----------------- 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: SHA1 broken?
by Trei, Peter 17 Feb '05

17 Feb '05

Actually, the final challenge was solved in 23 hours, about 1/3 Deep Crack, and 2/3 Distributed.net. They were lucky, finding the key after only 24% of the keyspace had been searched. More recently, RC5-64 was solved about a year ago. It took d.net 4 *years*. 2^69 remains non-trivial. Peter -----Original Message----- From: owner-cypherpunks(a)minder.net on behalf of Dave Howe Sent: Thu 2/17/2005 5:49 AM To: Cypherpunks; Cryptography Subject: Re: SHA1 broken? Joseph Ashwood wrote: > I believe you are incorrect in this statement. It is a matter of public > record that RSA Security's DES Challenge II was broken in 72 hours by > $250,000 worth of semi-custom machine, for the sake of solidity let's > assume they used 2^55 work to break it. Now moving to a completely > custom design, bumping up the cost to $500,000, and moving forward 7 > years, delivers ~2^70 work in 72 hours (give or take a couple orders of > magnitude). This puts the 2^69 work well within the realm of realizable > breaks, assuming your attackers are smallish businesses, and if your > attackers are large businesses with substantial resources the break can > be assumed in minutes if not seconds. > > 2^69 is completely breakable. > Joe Its fine assuming that moore's law will hold forever, but without that you can't really extrapolate a future tech curve. with *todays* technology, you would have to spend an appreciable fraction of the national budget to get a one-per-year "break", not that anything that has been hashed with sha-1 can be considered breakable (but that would allow you to (for example) forge a digital signature given an example) This of course assumes that the "break" doesn't match the criteria from the previous breaks by the same team - ie, that you *can* create a collision, but you have little or no control over the plaintext for the colliding elements - there is no way to know as the paper hasn't been published yet.

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Re: [p2p-hackers] SHA1 broken?
by R.A. Hettinga 17 Feb '05

17 Feb '05

--- begin forwarded text

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Re: [CYBERIA] a story that might be of interest to cyberians
by SK 17 Feb '05

17 Feb '05

Saw a posting on a blog on this - http://silenteloquence.blogspot.com/2005/02/future-of-future-teller.html Reproduced below: Background: Rednova recently publised an article, 'Can This Black Box See Into the Future' about a new machine developed by the scientists at Princeton that can predict future events. It relies on two main things : random number generation and the power of the collective human conciousness to 'influence' that random number generation. This is not your usual conspiracy theory kind of stuff, about 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations have thrown their weight behind this idea.I dont want to go into more details on what is already given in the article, but heres my two cents to the noise that the article has already generated: (1)My own future: One of the main criticisms about the Global Conciousness Project and the use of the Black box to predict a world event is that there are so many events happening in the world at any given time - so it must be easy to relate a set of data points to some event. Now this is a very valid argument. Moreover, the definition of a 'world event' or an 'event', for that matter, is very subjective. What maybe eventful to me may not be eventful to someone living in Africa. I may not even come to know about a major political turmoil that happened, say in South America. So who is to decide what is an event? However, if the researchers at Princeton want to argue that the human subconcious can predict the future of the world, they should also be able to reproduce it at an individual level. Along the same lines of logic they have used, can I train my subconcious to predict my own future? In this case, there is no ambiguity in the definition of an event. I 'influence' the egg. I decide what an event is. And if the egg can read my thoughts (about the future) and show it to me now, the egg works! Feels kinda sad that I need an egg to read my own mind! Hmm.. we have a new strain of shrinks? I am not a sceptic, but just couldn't resist the dig. (2) One global conciousness is not a new concept: The central theme of the global conciousness is not a new concept. This was exactly what was propounded centuries ago in the Bhagavad Gita, which is a very revered book that many Hindus, including me, still hold on to. The Gita is quite clear on what it wants to say (my simplified interpretation): At the beginning of the world, all beings are created from one central source. At the end of it, they go back to that one source. If you die and you had understood the true meaning during your lifetime, you attain nirvana and become one with the one global conciousness. If you dont, you are reborn again and again, till you eventually 'get it, duh'. But the point is, you share one conciousness with everyone else around you. You are just one small figment of the great collectivity ( as I write this I, am beginning to wonder if the Gita had anything to do with the rise of communism). (3) Data can lie, often very convincingly: I am not a sceptic to this theory. As much as I am a logical person, I intuitively believe that it is possible to predict the future. I have had a few, very clear ( god forbid, I never want to experience them ever again) deja vu's. Several astrologers (like a good Indian, I have visited a fair share of astrologers, admittedly more because of intellectual curiosity about the paranormal) have predicted events in my life with amazing accuracy. And more importantly, they have generally been accurate in predicting my state of mind, which has never failed to surprise me. And from a physics perspective, if time is the fourth dimension, shouldn't you be able to travel back and forth like we can in the other three dimensions. It seems more difficult to believe that the fourth dimension is different from the other three, than to believe that it is similar. So, I dont have problems believing the results per se. But I am a sceptic when it comes to the methodology. A random number generator with 1s and 0s over years - that is a lot of data points over a very small range. It seems to me like data that is difficult to read - and data that can be easily manipulated. Mind you, I am not accusing anyone of anything. I have full faith in the integrity of all involved. But I used to work as an analyst and one of the first things that I learned was that you can always make the data say what you want it to. If you dont believe me, read the book 'How to Lie with Statistics' by Darrell Huff. And sometimes it is not a matter of intentional effort. When you want to see a particular result, it is possible that your mind subconciously picks on that trend and only that trend. This is nobody's fault - it is just an extension of the saying 'The eyes can only see what the mind wants it to'. I would be hard-pressed to believe that the people who want to make us believe about the powers of human subconcious to predict the future cannot believe that the same subconcious is powerful enough to cloud an individual's and possibly several individuals' judgement. And another issue is just how random is this random number generator? Isnt it mathematically impossible to achieve perfect randomness, in which case doesnt this methodology rely on pseudo random numbers? So, this is one set of data I would be very careful in analysing and interpreting and drawing conslusions from. (4) The future of the future teller: I think the future of the future teller depends on how open the human race can be to new ideas. To a person who lived thousands of years ago, travelling to the moon must have sounded as impossible, if not more improbable, than predicting the future. But we humans have achieved that land mark. So, why are our scientists still afraid of being ridiculed? 'To make matters even more intriguing, Prof Bierman says that other mainstream labs have now produced similar results but are yet to go public. 'They don't want to be ridiculed so they won't release their findings,' he says.' Now that I think is sad. I like to believe that we have moved past the age of Coppernicus. Or havent we? Human beings are sceptics by nature. But lets forget that for the moment. May be the ideas are wrong. But lets not brand it that, till we have proven so. So, lets be optimistic. Open minded. Ready to listen. And slow to ridicule. And who knows, we may just be able to read the future enough to know whether we will be able to read the future in the future. On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 09:36:28 -0500, R.A. Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> wrote: > --- begin forwarded text > > User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (Windows/20040913) > Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 01:08:28 -0500 > Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> > Sender: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> > From: Inna Barmash <ibarmash(a)ALUMNI.PRINCETON.EDU> > Subject: Re: [CYBERIA] a story that might be of interest to cyberians > To: CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM > > This is a really interesting project at Princeton, and it's been going > on for decades. (see the book "Margins of Reality" - > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/015657246X/qid=1108619801/sr=…) > > I've taken the tour of the laboratory and participated in a couple of > the experiments (as a guinea pig, that is). The feeling there is quite > surreal, and they have dramatized the setting in the lab itself quite > well. The random number generator is a huge machine with a downstream > of little balls, which the subjects - through the power of immense > consciuos concentration - make go one way or the other. They also have > a wave-simulating machine, which supposedly echoes the patterns of the > Jersey shore waves. > For at least some of the machines, the researchers have found a > significant effect not only with people in the same room, but subjects > as far as Australia, AND even in the future - influencing the "random" > outcome of the past ... > > It'll be interesting to see if the significant effects are amplified > with more and more subjects pitching in through this international project. > > --Inna > > Paul Gowder wrote: > > >Check out this article re: random number generators > >apparently influenced by consciousness: > >http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649#121 > > > >the Princeton project that this is connected with: > >http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ > > > >This is fascinating, and potentially groundbreakingly > >huge stuff. > > > >God, how I want to go back to school and study math > >and physics. Maybe in a few years I will.

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