- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Fact checking
by R. A. Hettinga 27 Apr '04

27 Apr '04

At 5:36 PM -0400 4/26/04, Damian Gerow wrote: >: YMO"I"MV? > >Hum. I've never seen this before -- what's it stand for? Your Meaning Of "Is" May Vary... ;-) Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- 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: Fact checking
by Tyler Durden 27 Apr '04

27 Apr '04

>How do you start motivating a lazy and apathetic public to learn about >their >candidates, and vote? Door-to-door campaigns? Talks at the local library? >Grocery store posters? Well, imagine if we could buy votes...I'd bet we could scrounge up a few hundred thousand votes for the price of a few vials of crack. Then imagine we 'elect' bin Laden as a Senator or something with these votes. I bet people would start voting after that. -TD >From: Harmon Seaver <hseaver(a)cybershamanix.com> >To: cypherpunks(a)minder.net >Subject: Re: Fact checking >Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 07:15:04 -0500 > >On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 08:20:06PM -0400, Damian Gerow wrote: > > > > Thus spake Harmon Seaver (hseaver(a)cybershamanix.com) [26/04/04 19:25]: > > : And the local elections are no prime pickings either, it's crooks >to the left > > : of us, crooks to the right of us, ahead and behind, above and below. >Extremely > > : few real choices. The real problem is -- most people don't vote. What >needs to > > : be done is a real grass roots effort to educate people and get them to >vote. > > > > So, how does one start a grass roots effort? I'm Canuck, and I'm not > > exactly impressed with this year's pickings up North. My last vote was >a > > vote /against/ the in-office party, not for the party I'd like to see in > > office. > > > > How do you start motivating a lazy and apathetic public to learn about >their > > candidates, and vote? Door-to-door campaigns? Talks at the local >library? > > Grocery store posters? > > All of the above, but mostly door-to-door voter registration. When you >consider that both klinton and dubbya were elected with only 13%-14% of the >eligible voters, it wouldn't take all that many new voters to really make a >difference. > > > >-- >Harmon Seaver >CyberShamanix >http://www.cybershamanix.com >Hoka hey! > _________________________________________________________________ Stop worrying about overloading your inbox - get MSN Hotmail Extra Storage! http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-us&page=hotmail/es2&ST=1/go/onm00200362ave…

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Re: Fact checking
by Tyler Durden 27 Apr '04

27 Apr '04

"How do you start motivating a lazy and apathetic public to learn about their candidates, and vote? Door-to-door campaigns? Talks at the local library? Grocery store posters?" Well, we could just tell them their lives would be much better under Kodos, rather than Kang. -TD >From: Damian Gerow <dgerow(a)afflictions.org> >To: Harmon Seaver <hseaver(a)cybershamanix.com> >CC: cypherpunks(a)ds.pro-ns.net >Subject: Re: Fact checking >Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 20:20:06 -0400 > >Thus spake Harmon Seaver (hseaver(a)cybershamanix.com) [26/04/04 19:25]: >: And the local elections are no prime pickings either, it's crooks to >the left >: of us, crooks to the right of us, ahead and behind, above and below. >Extremely >: few real choices. The real problem is -- most people don't vote. What >needs to >: be done is a real grass roots effort to educate people and get them to >vote. > >So, how does one start a grass roots effort? I'm Canuck, and I'm not >exactly impressed with this year's pickings up North. My last vote was a >vote /against/ the in-office party, not for the party I'd like to see in >office. > >How do you start motivating a lazy and apathetic public to learn about >their >candidates, and vote? Door-to-door campaigns? Talks at the local library? >Grocery store posters? > _________________________________________________________________ Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee. Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

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Re: What Should Freedom Lovers Do?
by An Metet 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

Lew Rockwell had written: > The Rothbardian approach to a pro-freedom strategy comes down to the > following four affirmations: 1) the victory of liberty is the highest > political end; 2) the proper groundwork for this goal is a moral passion > for justice; 3) the end should be pursued by the speediest and most > efficacious possible means; and 4) the means taken must never contradict > the goal, "whether by advocating gradualism, by employing or advocating any > aggression against liberty, by advocating planned programs, by failing to > seize any opportunities to reduce State power, or by ever increasing it in > any area." This is good advice for cypherpunks as well. We all support the victory of liberty, and we have a moral passion for justice. Whether our means are the speedious and most efficacious may be questionable, but it's not like other forums are seeing vastly greater success. And it's best if freedom lovers push forward on all fronts. Our goals of providing liberty through cryptography are complementary to other efforts to achieve freedom. But the last point is the one I want to emphasize, a continuing theme in my writings for the past several years: that the means must not contradict the goal. Too often have cypherpunks fallen into the trap of advocating violence and aggression as a means to achieve their freedoms. Tim May was the worst of these, wishing for the nuclear obliteration of Washington, cheering the Oklahoma City bombings, even threatening the lives of family members of those who would break their word to him. The destruction of innocents must never be part of the agenda of a supporter of freedom. Of course, if we stick to cypherpunk means, the issue does not arise. Cryptographic anonymity threatens no one but aggressors. It is purely defensive in nature. Using PGP, TOR or Freenet does not harm innocent children or anyone else. Yet these technologies open up new possibilities for freedom of speech today, and hopefully for freedom of contract in the future. In my devotion to freedom, I apparently go beyond the point where most cypherpunks are comfortable, in that I support private initiatives and technologies of all sorts and oppose government regulation of them. I am a supporter and admirer of Microsoft, which has achieved tremendous market success without relying on government support, indeed in the face of steadfast government opposition. I oppose government antitrust efforts in general, and specifically those directed against Microsoft. Yet how many other cypherpunks have spoken up in favor of this widely hated company? Where is your love of freedom, if you can be silent in the face of government infringement of their rights? Re-read Rothbard's fourth point, and understand that support of antitrust actions is exactly what he cautions against. Last year a widely published diatribe against online "monoculture" called for Microsoft to be compelled to engage in all sorts of activities, including rewriting all their software to run on Linux. This homage to statism was authored by, among others, a man who once called himself libertarian: Perry Metzger, moderator of the cryptography mailing list. No one who loves freedom should allow himself to be associated with any such proposal. Likewise, I support privately organized technological initiatives such as DRM and even Trusted Computing. It doesn't matter what the net impact or effects of these technologies will be (although I think they will be overall neutral to positive). The only important point is that these are free and non-coercive, without government regulation. Of course, DRM is presently strengthened by the DMCA, an evil and counter-productive infringement on personal rights, but here it is important to focus on what is wrong and what is right. What is wrong is government restriction; what is right is technology and contract to enforce mutually agreed-upon conditions and permissions. Cypherpunks should take a close look at how they choose which issues to support and oppose. Bear in mind Rothbard's advice against advocating aggression against liberty, advocating planned programs, or supporting the increase in State power in any area. We must be uncompromising in our support for freedom and liberty. If we stick to our goals of building technology to let people communicate privately and anonymously, that will be our contribution to the freedom of the future world. == Read the Unlimited Freedom blog, http://invisiblog.com/1c801df4aee49232/

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Re: BBC on all-electronic Indian elections
by Tyler Durden 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

"Hmmm... that's a thought. Tim May as president. Election slogan: "You're *all* going up the chimneys."" Wasn't there something close a few years ago? I remember a write-in campaign to get "Unabomber" Ted Kascinsky elected as President. -TD >From: Jack Lloyd <lloyd(a)randombit.net> >To: sunder <sunder(a)sunder.net> >CC: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: Re: BBC on all-electronic Indian elections >Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 11:34:39 -0400 > >On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 11:18:52AM -0400, sunder wrote: > > Jack Lloyd wrote: > > > > >Still, I liked this quote: '"I came to vote because wasting one's >ballot > > >in a > > >democracy is a sin," he told the BBC.' Not too common a view in the US > > >these > > >days, it seems like. > > > > What do you expect when the previous choice we've had was between Al "I > > Invented the Innnernet" Gore, and George "Nucular" Dubbya? > >AFAIK most local/state elections have even lower turnout than the recent >ones >for the prez. Anyway, you could always have voted for Nader/Brown/Tim >May/etc. > >Hmmm... that's a thought. Tim May as president. Election slogan: "You're >*all* >going up the chimneys." > _________________________________________________________________ MSN Toolbar provides one-click access to Hotmail from any Web page FREE download! http://toolbar.msn.com/go/onm00200413ave/direct/01/

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[>Htech] WT: FBI up for private screens (fwd from checker@panix.com)
by Eugen Leitl 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

----- Forwarded message from Premise Checker <checker(a)panix.com> -----

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[>Htech] The Courier-Mail: China launches web 'big brother' (fwd from checker@panix.com)
by Eugen Leitl 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

----- Forwarded message from Premise Checker <checker(a)panix.com> -----

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Mask secures personal displays
by R. A. Hettinga 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

Sounds like something out of a Gibson novel... Cheers, RAH ------- <http://optics.org/articles/news/10/4/20/1> optics.org - News - Mask secures personal displays 26 April 2004 A mask that decodes encrypted pixels ensures that sensitive information can be viewed securely. When you view secure information on a screen, there is always the risk that someone is peering over your shoulder and taking notes. To remove this worry, scientists in Japan have been experimenting with a technique known as visual cryptography. The team believes this approach could ensure the security of information displayed on PDAs, computer screens or bank terminals. (Optics Express 12 1258) Secure display In a visual cryptography system, the image containing the sensitive information is encrypted and appears as a random pattern. The only way to view the information is to place a decoding mask over the encrypted image. Hirotsugu Yamamoto and colleagues from the University of Tokushima have developed a decoding mask that has two functions: to decrypt the display and limit the viewing zone of the decrypted image. Key to the technique is an algorithm that generates the pixels in both the encrypted image and the mask. The team's paper describes its algorithm to encrypt images containing 8 colours. To test their algorithm, the researchers printed the mask out on an overhead transparency and placed it in front of an LCD showing an encrypted image. Secret images were only perceived when the viewer stood in front of the LCD. "The viewing zone covers about 10 cm to the right and 10 cm to the left of the center at the designated viewing distance of 1.5 m," Yamamoto explained. Improving both the security of the decoding mask and the image quality are now Yamamoto's priorities. "In the next version, I'm making the mask pattern on a plastic plate," he told OLE. "The mask pattern has some layers and prevents someone from copying it. The number of encrypted colours has also been increased to 216 and 343." The team is also working on a decoding goggle similar to the glasses that cinema audiences have to wear to see movies in 3D. Yamamoto is also optimistic that this technique will find commercial applications. "Display of secret information on PDA and computer screens are practical applications," he explained. "Other business applications include: securing the screen of a terminal at a bank; an operator screen that shows personal information; and a touch panel screen of a safe." This work was funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; the Mazda Foundation; and the Secom Science and Technology Foundation. Author Jacqueline Hewett is technology editor on Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine. -- ----------------- 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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The Oppenheimer Riddle: New evidence of Communist membership debated by scholars of Berkeley scientist
by R. A. Hettinga 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

Gee. I'm crushed. Alger Hiss *was* a Spy. The Rosenbergs *were* spies. Oppenheimer *was* a Communist. Gosh. Who'da thunk it? ;-) Cheers, RAH --------- <http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/23/MN…> THE OPPENHEIMER RIDDLE New evidence of Communist membership debated by scholars of Berkeley scientist Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, April 23, 2004 A UC professor says he's solved one of the darkest mysteries in U.S. history: Was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant Berkeley scientist known as "the father of the atomic bomb," a secret member of the Communist Party? Recently uncovered documents show that Oppenheimer belonged to a hidden Communist Party cell of professionals in Berkeley, according to UC Merced history Professor Gregg Herken. Charges of Communist associations led to Oppenheimer's downfall during the McCarthyist hysteria of the early 1950s, and he became, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the victim of a witch hunt." In 1954, he was stripped of his security clearance and his position as a high-level U.S. government adviser. Many colleagues leapt to his defense, saying he was ostracized because of his post-World War II advocacy of arms control and opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Historians ever since have clashed over Oppenheimer's puzzling links to the party. Herken's findings will face public scrutiny today when a critical mass of Oppenheimer scholars convenes at UC Berkeley. The campus is celebrating the centennial of Oppenheimer's birth with special exhibits and a two-day conference today and Saturday. "The evidence is pretty compelling," Herken said of two unpublished memoirs that recently came to light -- one by a Berkeley professor and one by the wife of a close associate of Oppenheimer's. The two documents offer details about a small group of professionals that met regularly, sometimes at Oppenheimer's home, in the far-left milieu of 1930s Berkeley. One manuscript calls it "a secret unit of the Communist Party" with six to eight members. The other says that the three UC faculty members of the group, including Oppenheimer, all saw themselves as Communist and produced a Communist newsletter. "Oppenheimer had always denied membership in the Communist Party," said Herken, who was a senior historian at the Smithsonian Institution before joining the new Merced faculty. "Now, it's pretty clear he wasn't telling the truth." Still, Herken stressed that he didn't believe that Oppenheimer, who guided the birth of the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project, had betrayed his government. "While he was a Communist, he was also a patriot," said Herken, adding that he rejects FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's argument "that communism was synonymous with treason." Even with the new evidence, historians dispute Oppenheimer's relationship to the Communist Party. "We disagree with Herken," said Tufts University history Professor Martin Sherwin, co-author with historian Kai Bird of an upcoming Oppenheimer biography. It's true that Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, belonged to a loose-knit group of like-minded professionals who shared some Communist views and had links to Communist Party members, but not all members of such groups were party members, Sherwin said. Yale historian Daniel Kevles, who delivered a preconference lecture Thursday at Cal, said in an e-mail that he believed, "based on the available evidence, that Oppenheimer didn't think of it (the Berkeley group) as a secret unit of the CP and that he didn't think his participation in it constituted membership in the CP." But Stanford historian Barton Bernstein, another Oppenheimer expert who will join Herken, Sherwin and Bird to dissect the issue on a panel this afternoon, leans toward Herken's view. "On a jury, one could find the evidence not meeting a reasonable doubt," Bernstein said, "but in the court of historical opinion, it seems to me far more likely than not from the amalgam of evidence that Oppenheimer was a member, at least covert, for a few years." An unpublished manuscript by the late Professor Gordon Griffiths, who was a UC Berkeley grad student at the time, said Griffiths had been the Communist liaison to the group, bringing party literature to the twice-a-month meetings and collecting dues. "Nobody carried a party card," he wrote, but "all three (UC professors in the group) considered themselves to be Communists." He said he had not collected dues from Oppenheimer, having been "given to understand that Oppenheimer ... made his contribution through some special channel." "The most important activity of the faculty group," said Griffiths, who died in 2001, "was the publication of an occasional 'Report to Our Colleagues' " signed by unnamed Communist members of the faculty and "no doubt paid for by 'Oppie' (Oppenheimer)." "The time has come to set the record straight," Griffiths wrote in the manuscript, which Herken learned about in January after Griffiths' family turned it over to the Library of Congress. Griffiths stressed, however, that the key question was not whether Oppenheimer was a Communist "but whether such membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service in a position of trust." In the other manuscript, the late Barbara Chevalier, wife of Oppenheimer friend Haakon Chevalier, wrote of the group, saying her husband and Oppenheimer "joined a secret unit of the Communist Party. There must have been only six or eight members." The new evidence buttresses Haakon Chevalier's description of the group included in Herken's 2002 book, "Brotherhood of the Bomb," about Oppenheimer and fellow A-bomb scientists Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller. "Oppenheimer would later characterize the group as an innocent and rather naive political coffee klatch," Herken wrote in his book, which cites Haakon Chevalier's characterization of the assemblage as "a 'closed unit' of the Communist Party." But Haakon Chevalier, before he died, gave a more ambiguous answer when Sherwin asked him whether he and Oppenheimer had been Communist Party members. "We both were and were not, anyway you want to look at it," Chevalier replied, according to Sherwin. Oppenheimer's grandson, Charles Oppenheimer of Reno, said he preferred to focus on what had happened to his grandfather in the 1950s rather than the Communist issue. During the Red Scare, Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., announced that he had lists of suspected Communists, including Oppenheimer. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated suspected Communists and blacklisted those who refused to cooperate. "Whether he was a member or not, it's not against the law to be a Communist," the grandson said at a preconference reception Thursday night. "I think it's insulting what happened in the '50s. I wish people would concentrate on that. He served his country in every way possible." Herken rejects the claim that Oppenheimer was a spy and Soviet agent, a charge levied in "Sacred Secrets," a 2002 book by the journalist-historian team of Jerrold and Leona Schecter that, according to Bernstein and Sherwin, is not highly regarded by most Oppenheimer scholars. "In a way, it's really like 'Rashomon,' " said Bird, referring to the famous Akira Kurosawa film on the elusiveness of truth based on conflicting accounts. Information about the conference and other Oppenheimer Centennial events at Berkeley can be found on the Web at http://ohst.berkeley.edu/oppenheimer/. -- ----------------- 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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[ISN] Hackers: Under the hood - Peiter Mudge Zatko
by R. A. Hettinga 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

--- begin forwarded text

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