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New Global Directory of OpenPGP Keys
by Eugen Leitl 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/09/1446203 Posted by: michael, on 2004-12-09 15:50:00 from the how-may-i-direct-your-call dept. Gemini writes "The [1]PGP company just announced a new type of [2]keyserver for all your OpenPGP keys. This server verifies (via mailback verification, like mailing lists) that the email address on the key actually reaches someone. Dead keys age off the server, and you can even remove keys if you forget the passphrase. In a classy move, they've included support for those parts of the OpenPGP standard that PGP doesn't use, but [3]GnuPG does." [4]Click Here References 1. http://www.pgp.com/downloads/beta/globaldirectory/index.html 2. http://keyserver-beta.pgp.com/ 3. http://www.gnupg.org/ 4. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5671&alloc_id=12342&site_id=1&request_id=2385427… p=click&page=%2farticle%2epl ----- 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 http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Horseman number 4: 'Paedophiles Pose Greatest Threat Facing Internet'
by R.A. Hettinga 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

Okay, so it's a trifecta, today... :-) Cheers, RAH ------- <http://news.scotsman.com/print.cfm?id=3859699&referringtemplate=http%3A%2F%…> print Wed 8 Dec 2004 4:51pm (UK) 'Paedophiles Pose Greatest Threat Facing Internet' By David Barrett, PA Home Affairs Correspondent Online paedophiles are the greatest threat facing the internet, government research said today. A variety of internet child porn issues dominated a "top 10" of criminal threats posed by new technology, a Home Office report revealed. The survey of 53 internet and technology experts saw seven different child porn concerns ranked in the 10 most serious "netcrime" threats, with grooming and possible stalking of children ranked as the top fear. In second place was the growing use of the internet for espionage by corporate spies. Out of a total of 101 crime issues in the league table compiled by the survey, 12 related to child porn. The top 10 rankings were:- 1. Increased online grooming and possible stalking using the internet. 2. Espionage by corporate spies. 3. Increased access to paedophile content sold by organised criminals through various online platforms. 4. Use of online storage for paedophile images to bypass seizure of home computers. 5. Use of secure "peer to peer" technology for all types of paedophile activity. 6. Use of encryption for secure access to paedophile networks. 7. Theft of personal digital assistants or mobile phones containing personal information to commit fraud on the internet. 8. Growing access to "real-time" child abuse on the web. 9. Use of "peer to peer" technology for pirate activity. 10. Grooming of children for abuse using advanced mobile phone technology. The study, entitled "The Future of Netcrime Now", said police were already working to combat internet child porn and the issue's high media profile may have contributed to its prominent place in the poll. "The Government, law enforcement and industry needs to 'gear up' their capability to continuously look forward, attempting to identify new forms of criminal technology misuse as soon as they emerge, or even before they are seized upon by the criminal community," it concluded. -- ----------------- 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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Australian snooping laws pass lower house
by R.A. Hettinga 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

<http://australianit.news.com.au/common/print/0,7208,11636719%5E15319%5E%5En…> Australian IT Snooping laws pass lower house DECEMBER 09, 2004 POLICE will be able to access stored voice mail, email and mobile phone text messages under new laws passed by federal parliament today. The laws recognise voice mail, email and SMS messages should fall outside telecommunication interception laws originally designed to stop law enforcement agencies from intercepting phone calls. Police and other law enforcement officers will still need a search warrant or a right of access to communications or storage equipment to access voice mail, email and SMS under the changes. "These amendments make it easier for our law enforcement and regulatory agencies to access stored communications that could provide evidence of criminal activity," Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said. "They will also assist in securing information systems by allowing network administrators to review stored communications for viruses and other inappropriate content." Labor referred the proposed law to a Senate committee three times before agreeing to it today. Opposition homeland security spokesman Robert McClelland said there needed to be a distinction between stored messages and live telephone conversations. "There have been concerns expressed about privacy and there always has been a distinction between an eavesdropper and the reader of other people's correspondence," he said. "But written documents have always been susceptible to legal process, to warrants. "Everyone that creates a document does so knowing that that document can be read by others and can be subject to legal process. "I don't think anything turns on the fact the document is written on a computer and sent by email as opposed to being written in long hand and popped in the letter box." The laws are a temporary measure and will cease to have effect after 12 months when a review of the measures will be undertaken. -- ----------------- 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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export regulations updated
by R.A. Hettinga 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

--- begin forwarded text

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Re: primes as far as the eye can see, discrete continua
by Major Variola (ret) 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

copied under fair use only because Roy put in the research... NUMBER THEORY: Proof Promises Progress in Prime Progressions Barry Cipra The theorem that Ben Green and Terence Tao set out to prove would have been impressive enough. Instead, the two mathematicians wound up with a stunning breakthrough in the theory of prime numbers. At least that's the preliminary assessment of experts who are looking at their complicated 50-page proof. Green, who is currently at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Tao of the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, began working 2 years ago on the problem of arithmetic progressions of primes: sequences of primes (numbers divisible only by themselves and 1) that differ by a constant amount. One such sequence is 13, 43, 73, and 103, which differ by 30. In 1939, Dutch mathematician Johannes van der Corput proved that there are an infinite number of arithmetic progressions of primes with three terms, such as 3, 5, 7 or 31, 37, 43. Green and Tao hoped to prove the same result for four-term progressions. The theorem they got, though, proved the result for prime progressions of all lengths. "It's a very, very spectacular achievement," says Green's former adviser, Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who received the 1998 Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for work on related problems. Ronald Graham, a combinatorialist at UC San Diego, agrees. "It's just amazing," he says. "It's such a big jump from what came before." Green and Tao started with a 1975 theorem by Endre Szemeridi of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Szemeridi proved that arithmetic progressions of all lengths crop up in any positive fraction of the integers--basically, any subset of integers whose ratio to the whole set doesn't dwindle away to zero as the numbers get larger and larger. The primes don't qualify, because they thin out too rapidly with increasing size. So Green and Tao set out to show that Szemeridi's theorem still holds when the integers are replaced with a smaller set of numbers with special properties, and then to prove that the primes constitute a positive fraction of that set. Prime suspect. Arithmetic progressions such as this 10-prime sequence are infinitely abundant, if a new proof holds up. To build their set, they applied a branch of mathematics known as ergodic theory (loosely speaking, a theory of mixing or averaging) to mathematical objects called pseudorandom numbers. Pseudorandom numbers are not truly random, because they are generated by rules, but they behave as random numbers do for certain mathematical purposes. Using these tools, Green and Tao constructed a pseudorandom set of primes and "almost primes," numbers with relatively few prime factors compared to their size. The last step, establishing the primes as a positive fraction of their pseudorandom set, proved elusive. Then Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal, pointed Green to some results by Dan Goldston of San Jose State University in California and Cem Yildirim of Bo_gazigi University in Istanbul, Turkey. Goldston and Yildirim had developed techniques for studying the size of gaps between primes, work that culminated last year in a dramatic breakthrough in the subject--or so they thought. Closer inspection, by Granville among others, undercut their main result (Science, 4 April 2003, p. 32; 16 May 2003, p. 1066), although Goldston and Yildirim have since salvaged a less far-ranging finding. But some of the mathematical machinery that these two had set up proved to be tailor-made for Green and Tao's research. "They had actually proven exactly what we needed," Tao says. The paper, which has been submitted to the Annals of Mathematics, is many months from acceptance. "The problem with a quick assessment of it is that it straddles two areas," Granville says. "All of the number theorists who've looked at it feel that the number-theory half is pretty simple and the ergodic theory is daunting, and the ergodic theorists who've looked at it have thought that the ergodic theory is pretty simple and the number theory is daunting." Even if a mistake does show up, Granville says, "they've certainly succeeded in bringing in new ideas of real import into the subject." And if the proof holds up? "This could be a turning point for analytic number theory," he says.

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Horseman #3, "Inky": Money Laundering in America
by R.A. Hettinga 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

<http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/archive/k/kouri/2004/kouri120704.htm> MND COMMENTARY - Jim Kouri - MensNewsDaily.com Money Laundering in America December 7, 2004 by Jim Kouri Federal law enforcement officials estimate that between $100 billion and $300 billion is laundered in this country each year. While illegal drug trafficking accounts for much of the funds being laundered, other criminal activities, including terrorism and tax evasion, also account for an extensive amount. In the past two decades, federal law enforcement efforts to combat money laundering have focused on requiring financial institutions to report currency transactions that exceed $10,000. Beginning in 1988, these reports have been supplemented by reports of suspicious transactions. Many of the transactions reported as suspicious involve individuals who appear to be attempting to avoid the $10,000 reporting requirement. However, any activity that deviates from the norm for a particular account can be considered suspicious. The Right to Financial Privacy Act, enacted in 1978, raised questions as to whether financial institutions were authorized to report suspicious transactions. To address these concerns, legislation has been enacted to provide protection against civil liability for institutions reporting suspicious transactions. Banks and other financial institutions report tens of thousands of suspicious transactions each year. The reports have led to the initiation of major investigations into various types of criminal activity. However, because there is no overall control or coordination of the reports, there is no way of ensuring that the information is being used to its full potential. Financial institutions report suspicious transactions on a variety of different forms that provide different types of information and that are filed with different law enforcement and regulatory agencies. The form that is filed most frequently is filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and kept on a centralized database. However, the form does not contain any information describing the suspicious activity that would allow law enforcement agencies to evaluate the usefulness of the information on the basis of the form alone. Moreover, some institutions have been filing these forms erroneously. IRS and other federal and state law enforcement agencies use the database on a reactive basis; that is, to provide additional information on an investigation that has already been initiated. Other forms used to report suspicious transactions do describe the activity so that the information can be evaluated. However, these forms are filed with six different federal financial regulatory agencies. Because the forms are not maintained on a centralized database, they are not used on a reactive basis. Financial institutions filing this form are required to send a copy of it to the nearest district office of IRS' Criminal Investigation Division. However, IRS has not developed any guidance or directives as to how the information is to be managed as an intelligence resource. Use of the reports to initiate investigations varies among the 35 district offices. The Government Accounting Office identified 15 states that receive copies of suspicious transaction reports filed on one or both of these two-forms. Nine of these states told GAO that they use the information to initiate criminal investigations. The Department of the Treasury, the financial regulatory agencies, and IRS have recently agreed to substantial changes regarding how suspicious transactions are to be reported and how the information is to be used. These proposals, which were made with input from the financial community, have the potential for significantly improving the contribution that suspicious transaction reports make to law enforcement at both the federal and state levels. The IRS does not have agencywide policies or procedures for managing suspicious transaction reports. Consequently, the extent to which special agents in the 35 CID district offices solicit, process, and evaluate the reports is up to the discretion of the district CID chief and varies significantly among districts. The percentage of investigations initiated on the basis of suspicious transaction reports also varies significantly among districts. >From October 1990 to June 1994 CID initiated 21,507 investigations nationwide. About 4 percent of the cases were initiated as a result of a suspicious transaction report. Among the district offices, however, the percentage varied from 0 to over 18 percent. GAO believes that the varying rates are an indication that use of the reports may not be emphasized to the same extent among the districts. Sources: US Department of Justice, US Department of the Treasury and National Security Institute Jim Kouri DISCUSS THIS ARTICLE IN THE FORUM! Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police. He's former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed "Crack City" by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. He's also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country. He writes for many police and crime magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer, Campus Law Enforcement Journal, and others. He's appeared as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc. His book Assume The Position is available at Amazon.Com, Booksamillion.com, and can be ordered at local bookstores. -- ----------------- 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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SEC Probes Firms That Gather Data on Who Owns What Shares
by R.A. Hettinga 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110247556985994158,00.html> The Wall Street Journal December 8, 2004 PAGE ONE Tracking Stocks SEC Probes Firms That Gather Data on Who Owns What Shares Its Question: Have They Paid Custodian Banks' Staffers To Give Up Information? Free Steaks and Game Tickets By SUSAN PULLIAM Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL December 8, 2004; Page A1 A back-office clerk at CIBC Mellon Trust Co. was filling in for a colleague this summer when she got an unusual e-mail. The sender wanted data about which of the big investors the company dealt with owned a particular stock -- information the clerk knew was supposed to be top secret. The employee refused to provide the data. An internal probe concluded that the clerk she was filling in for had for years been giving out data on stockholdings, according to people close to the situation. They say the probe found that in return, this clerk got baseball and hockey tickets and cash payments of $50 to $100 per tip. The people add that a separate internal probe found that four employees of Mellon Financial Corp. had received Pittsburgh Pirates tickets, $50 American Express gift certificates and boxes of steaks for such data. The incident offers a window into a secret Wall Street world of gathering and selling real-time data about big investors' stock trading. This information, which is generally confidential, is so valuable that a whole industry has sprung up around finding it out. Businesses known as stock-surveillance firms gather trading data as best they can and market it to corporations that are curious about who is buying and selling their shares. Because small bits of trading data can be gleaned through legitimate sources, the business model is perfectly legal. But there's the potential for stock-surveillance firms to veer off the legal track if they use improper means to find out who is buying or selling what. There's also the potential for illegal insider trading if the information falls into the hands of investors who use it in their trading. Now the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the stock-surveillance business, sending out subpoenas to several data firms, according to people close to the situation. Among issues the SEC is looking into: Whether, at banks that act as custodians of stock during the trading process, some back-office workers systematically received gratuities for leaking data. The SEC also wants to know whether any trading data may have been turned over to investors and led to insider trading. SEC enforcement chief Stephen Cutler said, "As a general matter, we are interested in whether confidential portfolio information has been leaked at any point along the chain." A person close to the situation said the SEC probe focuses on possible data leaks as far back as 2000. The CIBC Mellon Trust case helped spur the SEC's enforcement division to action, people familiar with the matter say. The trust, based in Toronto, is a joint venture of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Pittsburgh's Mellon Financial. A spokeswoman for CIBC Mellon said it has taken steps to correct the problem uncovered by the joint venture's internal investigation. A spokesman for Mellon Financial said that regulators were notified quickly after the problem emerged, adding that Mellon "regrets the unauthorized disclosure of custodial information" and was "very proactive" in informing clients. A spokesman for CIBC said it doesn't carry out custodial activities in the U.S. but declined to comment further. The joint-venture employee who the probe concluded had been giving out data for years was Yvonne Williams, say people close to the situation. She was fired in July after the venture's internal investigation. Ms. Williams couldn't be reached for comment. Three of the four Mellon Financial employees cited in a Mellon probe also have been dismissed. No employees have been charged with anything. Among firms subpoenaed in the SEC's investigation, say people familiar with the matter, is Thomson Financial, a unit of Thomson Corp. of Toronto. Thomson Financial's Capital Markets Intelligence unit is one of the largest stock-surveillance firms. The unit told its employees this week that one CMI executive had left after an internal probe found business practices conflicting with its code of conduct, say people close to the situation. They add that at least two other employees are expected to depart. Thomson wouldn't comment on the probe but said it has taken steps to correct problems. "We take any allegation of impropriety or wrongdoing seriously and will not tolerate any such behavior," said a spokesman. He added that Thomson provides the trading data it gathers only to its corporate clients and their agents. Also receiving subpoenas, according to people familiar with the SEC probe, are Ilios Partners; the Georgeson Shareholder Communications Inc. unit of Computershare Ltd.; and Miller Tabak & Co., an institutional trading firm that has a unit called Strategic Stock Surveillance. Corporations pay fees to stock-surveillance firms in order to know who is buying and selling their shares. They have various motives for wanting to know, such as to gauge the effectiveness of their investor-relations efforts and, in rare cases, to find out if a potential hostile bidder is accumulating their shares. Some stock traders covet information about big investors' buying and selling for a different reason: It gives a sense of which way a stock is likely to move. For just that reason, those big investors like to keep their moves secret. When a mutual-fund family has a large chunk of stock it wants to buy or sell, it often does the trading in pieces over several days. A key reason is to disguise its intentions, so others can't jump in and buy or sell the stock first -- driving up the fund's cost of buying or reducing what it gets from selling. But if a trader knew a big fund had begun buying, he could assume there was more buying to come, and that the stock would tend to rise. "If speculators know in real time what you were doing they can jump aboard and piggyback you or work against you," says Samuel Hayes, a Harvard Business School professor. If a mutual fund's performance suffered as a result, among those hurt would be fund shareholders, he adds. Mutual funds typically disclose changes in their holdings only four times a year, after the end of each quarter. The business of ferreting out data about big investors' holdings has its roots in takeover battles. There, warring camps want to know the identities of shareholders so they can appeal to them for their votes. The camps hire proxy-solicitation firms, whose job includes identifying shareholders and lobbying them. The business shifted when hostile takeovers started to wane in the early 1990s. Some proxy-solicitation firms began building a business in stock surveillance, hoping to make customers of corporations that simply want to know who their shareholders are. Stock-surveillance firms developed an ability to tap into the arcane processing world that exists behind the scenes as investors buy and sell. For instance, when a pension or mutual fund buys shares, it places the order with a broker, who goes to a stock marketplace to have the order matched with a seller. After the order is filled, the fund sends instructions to the broker about where to deliver the shares and which "custodian bank" will make payment for them. The fund also sends instructions to that custodian bank, telling it to receive the shares and pay the broker. Both the broker and the custodian bank send instructions about the trade to the Depository Trust & Clearing, or "the DTC." It is part of a private organization set up in the 1970s to formally process and make final the trades -- steps known as "settlement" and "clearing," respectively -- for the bulk of the U.S. stock trading. The DTC formally moves ownership of the shares to the buyer and sends payment for the trade through one of the Federal Reserve banks. This is the final step in a process that can take up to three days to complete. Stock-surveillance firms rely partly on their access to reports from the DTC. This access is legitimate, explains Larry Thompson, senior deputy counsel of DTCC, holding company for the DTC. That's because SEC rules require the DTC to provide, at a company's request, daily reports of where its shares are held in custody once settlement is completed. And with a company's permission, the DTC can also turn over such reports to "agents" -- such as proxy solicitors and stock-surveillance firms. Mr. Thompson says that the DTC lists give only the total number of a company's shares held at each custodian bank. They don't provide data about specific investors' holdings or other sensitive trading information. But stock-surveillance firms combine these DTC listings with their own database of information about where big investors keep their shares -- such as what banks they use as custodians. Sometimes, these two bits of data -- combined with regulatory filings and information about the investment strategies of mutual funds -- are enough to get to the bottom of who is buying or selling shares, says Kevin Marcus, head of the part of Thomson that includes Capital Markets Intelligence. "It is to some extent a process of deduction," he says. Since DTC listings don't provide the up-to-the-minute information that some corporations want about who is buying and selling their shares, stock-surveillance firms turn to various market contacts to try to provide this. Among them are stock-exchange "specialists" -- the traders on the New York Stock Exchange floor whose job is to match buy orders with sell orders. Employees of stock-surveillance firms say they sometimes even turn to employees at the mutual funds themselves in hopes of getting such information. And they sometimes ask employees at the custodian banks -- a particular focus of the SEC probe. These employees are continually receiving up-to-the-minute information from mutual funds, pension funds and other institutional investors about what they're buying and selling. Companies use stock-surveillance services for a variety of legitimate business purposes. Ralph Poltermann, treasurer of AptarGroup Inc., a maker of packages such as flip-tops for ketchup bottles, says his company hired Thomson to help it track trading in its own shares after meetings with investors. For instance, AptarGroup met with big investors at a Credit Suisse First Boston conference in San Francisco on Sept. 28. Within a week, Mr. Poltermann says, an analyst at Thomson told him that at least one of those big investors was trading in AptarGroup shares. "It's magic to me," Mr. Poltermann says. "They have insights and contacts we don't have." Big investors, on the other hand, are annoyed that a business has sprung up to try to find out about their trading. John Wheeler, head trader at the American Century mutual-fund family, recalls having an eerie feeling a few years back when he was told that Sprint Corp.'s chief executive had called his firm. American Century had bought Sprint shares just the day before. But William Esrey, then Sprint's CEO, already had called to thank the fund family for its purchase. "Appreciate your support," Mr. Wheeler recalls Mr. Esrey telling an American Century executive. Mr. Esrey says through a Sprint spokesman that he doesn't recall the conversation but that it wasn't unusual for him to make such a call to investors. The trade hadn't even "settled" yet. The fund hadn't paid for the Sprint stock. So normally only American Century, its broker, custodian bank and others in the custody chain would have known who was buying the shares. Sprint, it turned out, had legitimately gotten its information from Thomson's stock-surveillance unit, a Sprint spokesman says. Many large companies use such services, getting daily updates and glossy monthly and quarterly summaries about activity in their shares. Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, once used stock-surveillance services but no longer does. Thomson says its CMI unit has about 800 corporate clients, which pay $40,000 to $60,000 a year each for the service. The stock-surveillance unit had about $33 million in revenue last year, a tiny sliver of Thomson Corp.'s $7.44 billion revenue. Andrew Brooks, head trader at mutual-fund giant T. Rowe Price, says his trading desk often receives mysterious calls asking about changes in its holdings. Often, he says, the callers say they are "just checking your ownership on behalf of the company." He says callers typically hang up when pressed for more information on why they're calling. Mr. Brooks and a few other mutual-fund managers, including American Century officials, discussed their concerns about trading leaks 18 months ago with Lori Richards, head of the SEC's office of compliance and inspection, after she contacted them. In the case of CIBC Mellon Trust, the joint venture notified regulators of the incident involving Ms. Williams, the back-office clerk, this summer. Officials of the trust learned of the problem after Ms. Williams's fill-in told a supervisor of a surveillance firm's request for data, say people close to the matter. Ms. Williams's knowledge of stockholdings was broad. It wasn't limited to the names of shareholders who had permitted the custodian bank to release data about their holdings -- so-called Non-Objecting Beneficial Owners, or "nobos." Her knowledge would have included all shareholders of companies. Mellon Financial scoured e-mails, faxes and phone records to find out whether others might have accepted payments for data. It determined that the leaks had occurred in the area of the bank that handles communications with shareholders on matters like stock splits and dividends, the people familiar with the matter say. They say Mellon concluded that four employees had provided data about specific stockholdings of big investors, including Fidelity Investments. A spokeswoman for Fidelity says it has "always been concerned about disclosure of this information outside of required regulatory filings." The Mellon employees had access to a full list of investors for each stock. The bank's probe concluded, according to people close to the situation, that they released data about the holdings of shareholders who hadn't given the custodian bank such permission. In return, it concluded, they got sports tickets, steaks and gift certificates. Mellon Financial and its joint venture with CIBC notified hundreds of customers of the problem this summer through calls and e-mails. -- ----------------- 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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[p2p-hackers] Automatic reputation systems for P2P security? (fwd from paul@nmedia.net)
by Eugen Leitl 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

----- Forwarded message from paul(a)nmedia.net -----

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[p2p-hackers] Re: [trustcomp] Memory and reputation calculation (fwd from clausen@gnu.org)
by Eugen Leitl 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

----- Forwarded message from Andrew Clausen <clausen(a)gnu.org> -----

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Bugs in the belfry
by R.A. Hettinga 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/11/28/bugs_in_the_belf…> The Boston Globe THE EXAMINED LIFE Bugs in the belfry By Joshua Glenn, Globe Staff | November 28, 2004 FOR OVER a century, philosophers and literary scholars have debated whether or not the apocalyptic, sometimes megalomaniacal qualities of the final books written by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche can be chalked up to the gradually unfolding delusions and personality disturbances of the author's paresis (tertiary syphilis). In the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the Cambridge-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the distinguished UMass-Amherst geobiologist Lynn Margulis announces that the answer to this longstanding riddle has been discovered floating in a Cape Cod pond. To recap: In 1888, a sickly Nietzsche wrote the tracts "Twilight of the Idols," "The Antichrist," "Ecce Homo," and "The Case of Wagner" in a burst of productivity. But the following January in Turin, he flung his arms around the neck of a horse being flogged, collapsed in the piazza, and swiftly descended into a raving dementia brought on -- as records of a young Nietzsche's treatment for syphilis 30 years earlier would appear to indicate -- by paresis. So was Nietzsche suffering, as many have argued, from incipient paresis when he wrote "Twilight of the Idols," et al? If so, then (the argument goes) these late books, brilliant as they may appear to be, can't be taken as seriously as his earlier, saner writing. Or did the philosopher go mad from some other cause all of a sudden, in the space of a single day, as others prefer to believe? That's where Margulis, an expert in microorganisms who has no reputation as a Nietzsche scholar, comes in -- to say "neither." After explaining that syphilis is a syndrome caused by the ravages of the spirochete Treponema pallidum (the lively, corkscrew-shaped bacterium pictured at right), Margulis elaborates on her own recent research into spirochetes by weighing in on the long-running debate over Nietzsche's brain. Yes, Nietzsche's madness was undoubtedly caused by paresis, she writes -- but he most likely went crazy quite suddenly, as opposed to over the course of weeks and months. "Nietzsche's brain on January 3, 1889 experienced a transformation," she states -- which means that his books of 1888 weren't written by a delusional kook. But is it possible for paresis to appear overnight, instead of slowly? Margulis believes it is, and as evidence points to studies of microbial mat samples taken from Eel Pond in Woods Hole and kept in a jar in a UMass-Amherst lab. Although no typical spirochetes were found in these samples, Margulis recounts, when food and water known to support spirochete activity were added to some samples, spirochetes that could only have been been lying dormant suddenly awoke from their slumber. Extrapolating from these experiments, Margulis argues that inactive Treponema pallidum spirochetes had been hiding out in Nietzsche's tissues ever since his syphilis treatment some 30 years earlier." But on January 3, 1889 in Turin," Margulis concludes, channeling Vincent Price, "armies of revived spirochetes munched on his brain tissue. The consequence was the descent of Nietzsche the genius into Nietzsche the madman in less than one day." ? ) Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company -- ----------------- 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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