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Re: 2000 curies of Ci
by Major Variola (ret) 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

At 10:54 AM 10/29/04 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >At 09:19 PM 10/28/2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: >>Perhaps you meant Cs-137. Halliburton loses mCi of Am-241 etc monthly. > >MilliCuries? That's a bit surprising, >though losing microCuries of it would be more likely. >An average home smoke detector has 1-5 microcuries, >and industrial detectors go up to 15, according to >one or two articles on the web which may be outdated. >So you're saying they lose hundreds to thousands of >smoke detectors a month? They lose the neutron sources used for well logging. They contain mCi amounts of Am241 and other hot 'topes. They use a reaction with Be to produce neutrons from alphas, like the early nukebomb initiators. More often, soil-density gauges are lost/stolen from road crews. They also have fractional Ci amounts of RDD-able topes. But they're very useful; fairly sturdy; acceptable risk. See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/2004/ and read a few days' reports.

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Geodesic neoconservative empire
by Major Variola (ret) 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

At 10:07 PM 10/24/04 -0400, R.A. Hettinga wrote: If the only way >to kill barbarians is to kill barbarians in their bed before they >kill you in yours, to pave over nation-states that support them, >starting with the easiest first, it can't happen fast enough, as far >as I'm concerned, and I'll gladly "vote" my expropriated tax-dollars >for the purpose of draining the swamp that is the Middle East. Is this geodesic neo-conservativism? Where can I start bearer-document goose-stepping? Whatever happened to leaving the barbarians to kill themselves, and getting the fuck out of family spats?

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Re: Geodesic neoconservative empire
by John Kelsey 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

>From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> >Sent: Oct 29, 2004 7:06 AM >To: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: Re: Geodesic neoconservative empire ... >It has always amused me that libertarians and anarcho-capitalists insist on >using the language of the left to describe the things they don't like. One >of the reasons that the right in this country has been so successful has >been their development of a useful analytic apparatus, and corresponding >language, over the past 50 years, certainly more so than the left, which is >nothing but marxism, dilluted or otherwise. Is there a better term than "empire" for what gets built when your country goes out, invades lots of other countries, takes them over, and runs them? I don't know about other peoples' objections to this, but mine mainly involve my belief that this is an expensive and not very effective way to deal with terrorism. ... >At the moment force-monopoly is, by definition of monopoly, a hierarchical >market. Hence the "dance with the girl that brung ya" bit. They have >already *stolen* my money, they might as well be doing something with it Well, the question is, what ought they to be doing with it. Invading Iraq to build a democracy there, in hopes of somehow fixing the root causes of terrorism (as similarly goofy idealists on the left once thought they could do for crime in the US), looks like a waste of time and money. I suspect we're causing ourselves more problems, as Iraq is not only a place where terrorists can go to attack the US and be attacked by us in turn, it's also a place where there are lots of people learning the basic skills of being a terrorist, gaining some experience in doing so, etc. Do you think we're going to kill all of those people? Do you think they'll all abandon terrorist tactics when things quiet down in Iraq? I know the Republican line these days is that we're safer because the bad guys are all shooting at Marines in Iraq, rather than at civilians in Des Moines. But that only makes sense if we don't end up with a much bigger problem later, as a result. Perhaps we should all have rested more secure in our beds when the jihadis were streaming into Afghanistan, where they would be killed in large numbers by the Red Army. But it's not clear that was a long-term win.... Anyway, you sound like there's some willingness on the part of this administration (or the one Kerry may set up in January) to actually cut government spending to other things, in order to do the nation building thing. What evidence have you seen for that, so far? ... >Cheers, >RAH

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Re: Financial identity is *dangerous*? (was re: Fake companies, real money)
by Dave Howe 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

Roy M. Silvernail wrote: > I'd thought it was so Microsoft could offer an emulation-based migration > path to all the apps that would be broken by Longhorn. MS has since > backed off on the new filesystem proposal that would have been the > biggest source of breakage (if rumors of a single-rooted, more *nix-like > filesystem turned out to be true). To be fair to MS, that is already here - you can "mount" NFS volumes as subfolders in 2K and above, just like unix. however, MS don't really seem to want to crow about that - just in case someone points out unix did this literally decades ago....

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2000 curies of Ci
by Major Variola (ret) 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

t 10:21 PM 10/24/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: >This is idiotic. You're claiming that the definition of "terrorist" is >dependent not on the act, but on why the act was committed. So if I was >to go out tomorrow and spread 2000 curies of Ci into the local subway >system "As payback for Ruby Ridge", this would not be an act of terrorism? Just for correctness' sake, there is no element named "Ci", its an abbrev for Curies, ie the activity of a gram of Ra. Perhaps you meant Cs-137. Halliburton loses mCi of Am-241 etc monthly.

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100,000 Deaths in Iraq
by Tyler Durden 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

A large percentage of these are women and children, and dying directly due to American bombing. Well make 'em free even if we have to kill every last one of them, right Mr Donald? http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=RelatedStories&pitem=A… -TD _________________________________________________________________ Get ready for school! Find articles, homework help and more in the Back to School Guide! http://special.msn.com/network/04backtoschool.armx

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Re: Financial identity is *dangerous*? (was re: Fake companies, real money)
by Dave Howe 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

dan(a)geer.org wrote: > This is what I love about the Internet -- ask a question > and get silence but make a false claim and you get all the > advice you can possibly eat. Yup. give wrong advice, and you look like a fool. correct someone else's wrong advice, and you make them look foolish (unless you make a mistake in your correction, which seems to be some sort of tradition for spelling flames :) Probably the only reason I even post is because I don't mind looking like a fool, if it lets me correct some misconception I am labouring under :)

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Re: Printers betray document secrets
by Dave Howe 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

Ian Grigg wrote: > It's actually quite an amusing problem. When put > in those terms, it might be cheaper and more secure > to go find some druggie down back of central station, > and pay them a tenner to write out the ransom demand. > Or buy a newspaper and start cutting and pasting the > letters... or slightly more professional - lettraset rub-down lettering. available in a wide range of fonts, requires no special equipment to use, and (although not of any value in this application) sufficiently acid resistant to be used on etch boards.

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[ISN] Secret Service busts online organized crime ring
by R.A. Hettinga 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

--- begin forwarded text

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[ISN] Secret Service busts online organized crime ring
by InfoSec News 29 Oct '04

29 Oct '04

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,97017,00… By Dan Verton OCTOBER 28, 2004 COMPUTERWORLD In what it called an "Information Age undercover investigation," the U.S. Secret Service today announced that it has arrested 28 people from eight U.S. states and six countries allegedly involved in a global organized cybercrime ring. Charges filed against the suspects include identity theft, computer fraud, credit card fraud and conspiracy. The investigation, code-named Operation Firewall, resulted in what the Secret Service described as a significant disruption of organized criminal activity online that was targeting the financial infrastructure of the U.S. The suspects are alleged to have collectively trafficked in at least 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers. Financial institutions have estimated their losses associated with the suspects targeted by the investigation to be more than $4.3 million. "Led by the Secret Service Newark Field Office, investigators from nearly 30 domestic and foreign Secret Service offices and their global law enforcement counterparts have prevented potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in loss to the financial and hi-tech communities," Secret Service Director W. Ralph Basham said in a statement. "These suspects targeted the personal and financial information of ordinary citizens, as well as the confidential and proprietary information of companies engaged in e-commerce." Operation Firewall began in July 2003 and quickly evolved into a transnational investigation of global credit card fraud and online identity theft. The underground criminal groups have been identified as Shadowcrew, Carderplanet and Darkprofits. The organizations operated Web sites used to traffic counterfeit credit cards and false identification information and documents. The groups allegedly used the sites to share information on how to commit fraud and sold the stolen information and the tools needed to commit such crimes. International law enforcement organizations that took part in the investigation and arrests included the U.K.'s National Hi-Tech Crimes Unit, the Vancouver Police Department's Financial Crimes Section, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Europol. Officials in Bulgaria, Belarus, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Ukraine also were involved. _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- 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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