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Re: [Dewayne-Net] Re: Report: biggest decline in prices since
by odlyzko＠dtc.umn.edu 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

the Great Depression Steve, Some economic historians would claim that the depression of the late 1830s and early 1840s was more severe than that of the 1930s, but it is hard to compare over such long time distances, with very different economies and societies. Your statement that Market success--characterized by stable and sustainable growth levels, generally falling price levels, and increasing real incomes--is the norm in the absence of state intervention. could be regarded as true, but only to the extent that it is vacuously true, as it applies to the empty set. The complete "absence of state intervention" has not been observed in recorded history, which makes the extreme free marketers free to refuse to acknowledge all inconvenient statistics, and blame them on the government. But early Victorian Britain is probably the closest any economy has come to "the absence of state intervention." The worship of private enterprise and denigration of government actions were on a scale that even Ayn Rand would have applauded. And it was on a gold standard, with the Peel Act of 1844 making it about as pure a gold standard as even a purist might want. Yet what do we see? Here are some statistics, taken from B. R. Mitchell, "International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750-1988," 3rd ed., 1992, and W. L. Thorp, "Business Annals," 1926 (all for the UK alone): year GDP price index brief characterization 1835 471 84.5 prosperity; stock exchange panic 1836 508 95 prosperity; financial panic 1837 484 94 recession; panic; depression 1838 519 98 depression 1839 549 104 depression 1840 510 102.5 depression 1841 481 98 depression 1842 459 89 depression 1843 459 80 depression; revival 1844 506 81 mild prosperity 1845 537 83 prosperity (GDP is in current prices, in millions of pounds, Table J1 of Mitchell, price index is the whole sale price index, Table H1 of Mitchell, and the "brief characterization" is from Thorp) The main point is that that the economy was subject to pretty strong fluctuations, far more dramatic than what we have seen in recent decades (so that the Great Moderation was definitely real, at least up until last year). But there is more to this story, and the fluctuations can't be blamed on the gold standard. You may object that the table is inconsistent, with the "brief characterization" not supported by the numbers. Well, yes, and this brings up an important point that I expect only some readers of this list will appreciate, primarily the ones who were raised in the India of a couple of decades ago, where the prosperity depended on the monsoon. The UK of the early 19th century was still heavily dependent on agriculture (and other countries even more so). And no monetary policy can compensate for harvest failure if the population depends heavily on the harvest, especially in those early days, when transportation options were limited. (The Irish Potato Famine starts just about when the table above ends, in which about a million people die. That is an extreme example, and there are many aspects to the Famine, so I won't go into that.) As a simplistic illustration, suppose you and one other chap live on an island, and he does all the farming, while you produce the tools, clothing, etc. for this small economy of two people, but that you use a fixed stock of gold as a medium of exchange. Some kind of equilibrium exists under normal conditions. But suppose that one year the harvest fails, and the other chap gets in only half the wheat, corn, chickens, ..., that he normally can spare for consumption. Your work just as hard as always, and produce just as much. Naturally, in your little economy, food prices will go up, with each spade you make fetching fewer chickens than it used to under normal circumstances. So in money terms, there will be wild fluctuations, difficult to capture in statistics (especially if statistics collection is fragmentary or non-existent, as it often was in the UK then). The main point, though, is that while the farmer will get more of your output than he normally gets, both of you will see a much diminished standard of living, since there is half as much food available. So under the gold standard there was price stability, but only over very long periods of time. Over intervals of a few years, meaning half a dozen or more, you would normally see extreme fluctuations, ones that affected different segments of the society in different ways, and which made it hard to tell just what was happening. And of course, on top of the fluctuations coming from agriculture, there were the fluctuations caused by the internal dynamics of the free markets, which led to booms and busts of their own. Just a couple of additional (amusing ?, instructive ?) points: 1. The era of the gold standard provides some of the strongest historical evidence of the benefits of low inflation. New gold discoveries, such as the California Gold Rush, preceded the periods of fastest and smoothest economic growth. (This is obviously a great simplification of a complicated story that can be presented in other ways, too.) 2. One noticeable development over the last couple of centuries is that the financial industry has gotten much better at extracting money from taxpayers. When the mid-1820s mania in Britain burst, the merchants and bankers went hat in hand to the government, asking for help. They were told to go fly a kite, and a painful depression followed. But just a few years after the 1844 act that made the gold standard very strict, there was a major financial crisis in October 1847, and the British government authorized the Bank of England to break the law. That did the trick (plus the Keynes-like stimulus that was provided to the economy by railway investors pouring money into their lines in the (vain) hopes of making a fortune in the Railway Mania that was still raging), but it did not involve any government expenditure. What's happening today, with a US Secretary of the Treasury asking for $700 billion to put into banks, and asking for it in a matter of days, was inconceivable then. Andrew RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress> ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com

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[Dewayne-Net] Re: Report: biggest decline in prices since the
by dewayne＠warpspeed.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Great Depression [Note: This comment comes from friend Andrew Odlyzko. DLH]

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[IP] Report: biggest decline in prices since the Great
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Depression Begin forwarded message:

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Re: OS X in a Classified Environment...
by Bryan Jones 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Well, Nobody currently involved in a classified project is likely to respond to this question, but here is some historical (and unclassified) data: I have personally seen the current Vice President putting in on the Snake River (flyfishing) after using his Powerbook. Also, OS X has been used reasonably extensively in at least the FBI & CIA, but the lack of a couple of GIS programs on the platform were preventing its use in NIMA and the corollary division within the CIA. The presence of OS X within those agencies should not be surprising given that NeXT systems were used extensively within the CIA with black slabs and cubes everywhere, even on the secretaries desks which was pretty cool. Also, there are a number of current Xserve clusters that are going in to various mil and gov agencies and operations including some with the Navy for work in lasers, and a fairly sizable cluster going into an Army contractor for aerodynamics work. I would be interested to find out what happened to the Navy sonar cluster compute project that used G4 servers running Linux... As for a bit of trivia, going back a ways, there was a project called Cluster Knave (I think that was the project name), developed by ONI running on the old Mac OS that was deployed on submarines for tactical imagery capture, processing and transmission. That was most certainly a classified environment at the time, and one certainly cannot forget those big clunky TEMPEST shielded Macs..... Bryan >Anyone have OS X in a Classified/secure environment? Auditing? Just >curious...as I may be entering this unforgiving realm. > >Kit Bryan William Jones, Ph.D. bryan.jones(a)m.cc.utah.edu University of Utah School of Medicine Moran Eye Center Rm 3339A 75 N. Medical Dr. Salt Lake City, Utah 84132 http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~marclab/ iChat/AIM address: bw_jones(a)mac.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Scitech mailing list (Scitech(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/scitech/eugen%40leitl.org This email sent to eugen(a)leitl.org ----- 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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Re: [Dewayne-Net] Re: Report: biggest decline in prices since
by odlyzko＠dtc.umn.edu 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

the Great Depression Steve, Some economic historians would claim that the depression of the late 1830s and early 1840s was more severe than that of the 1930s, but it is hard to compare over such long time distances, with very different economies and societies. Your statement that Market success--characterized by stable and sustainable growth levels, generally falling price levels, and increasing real incomes--is the norm in the absence of state intervention. could be regarded as true, but only to the extent that it is vacuously true, as it applies to the empty set. The complete "absence of state intervention" has not been observed in recorded history, which makes the extreme free marketers free to refuse to acknowledge all inconvenient statistics, and blame them on the government. But early Victorian Britain is probably the closest any economy has come to "the absence of state intervention." The worship of private enterprise and denigration of government actions were on a scale that even Ayn Rand would have applauded. And it was on a gold standard, with the Peel Act of 1844 making it about as pure a gold standard as even a purist might want. Yet what do we see? Here are some statistics, taken from B. R. Mitchell, "International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750-1988," 3rd ed., 1992, and W. L. Thorp, "Business Annals," 1926 (all for the UK alone): year GDP price index brief characterization 1835 471 84.5 prosperity; stock exchange panic 1836 508 95 prosperity; financial panic 1837 484 94 recession; panic; depression 1838 519 98 depression 1839 549 104 depression 1840 510 102.5 depression 1841 481 98 depression 1842 459 89 depression 1843 459 80 depression; revival 1844 506 81 mild prosperity 1845 537 83 prosperity (GDP is in current prices, in millions of pounds, Table J1 of Mitchell, price index is the whole sale price index, Table H1 of Mitchell, and the "brief characterization" is from Thorp) The main point is that that the economy was subject to pretty strong fluctuations, far more dramatic than what we have seen in recent decades (so that the Great Moderation was definitely real, at least up until last year). But there is more to this story, and the fluctuations can't be blamed on the gold standard. You may object that the table is inconsistent, with the "brief characterization" not supported by the numbers. Well, yes, and this brings up an important point that I expect only some readers of this list will appreciate, primarily the ones who were raised in the India of a couple of decades ago, where the prosperity depended on the monsoon. The UK of the early 19th century was still heavily dependent on agriculture (and other countries even more so). And no monetary policy can compensate for harvest failure if the population depends heavily on the harvest, especially in those early days, when transportation options were limited. (The Irish Potato Famine starts just about when the table above ends, in which about a million people die. That is an extreme example, and there are many aspects to the Famine, so I won't go into that.) As a simplistic illustration, suppose you and one other chap live on an island, and he does all the farming, while you produce the tools, clothing, etc. for this small economy of two people, but that you use a fixed stock of gold as a medium of exchange. Some kind of equilibrium exists under normal conditions. But suppose that one year the harvest fails, and the other chap gets in only half the wheat, corn, chickens, ..., that he normally can spare for consumption. Your work just as hard as always, and produce just as much. Naturally, in your little economy, food prices will go up, with each spade you make fetching fewer chickens than it used to under normal circumstances. So in money terms, there will be wild fluctuations, difficult to capture in statistics (especially if statistics collection is fragmentary or non-existent, as it often was in the UK then). The main point, though, is that while the farmer will get more of your output than he normally gets, both of you will see a much diminished standard of living, since there is half as much food available. So under the gold standard there was price stability, but only over very long periods of time. Over intervals of a few years, meaning half a dozen or more, you would normally see extreme fluctuations, ones that affected different segments of the society in different ways, and which made it hard to tell just what was happening. And of course, on top of the fluctuations coming from agriculture, there were the fluctuations caused by the internal dynamics of the free markets, which led to booms and busts of their own. Just a couple of additional (amusing ?, instructive ?) points: 1. The era of the gold standard provides some of the strongest historical evidence of the benefits of low inflation. New gold discoveries, such as the California Gold Rush, preceded the periods of fastest and smoothest economic growth. (This is obviously a great simplification of a complicated story that can be presented in other ways, too.) 2. One noticeable development over the last couple of centuries is that the financial industry has gotten much better at extracting money from taxpayers. When the mid-1820s mania in Britain burst, the merchants and bankers went hat in hand to the government, asking for help. They were told to go fly a kite, and a painful depression followed. But just a few years after the 1844 act that made the gold standard very strict, there was a major financial crisis in October 1847, and the British government authorized the Bank of England to break the law. That did the trick (plus the Keynes-like stimulus that was provided to the economy by railway investors pouring money into their lines in the (vain) hopes of making a fortune in the Railway Mania that was still raging), but it did not involve any government expenditure. What's happening today, with a US Secretary of the Treasury asking for $700 billion to put into banks, and asking for it in a matter of days, was inconceivable then. Andrew RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress> ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com

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[Dewayne-Net] Re: Report: biggest decline in prices since the
by dewayne＠warpspeed.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Great Depression [Note: This comment comes from friend Andrew Odlyzko. DLH]

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[IP] Report: biggest decline in prices since the Great
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Depression Begin forwarded message:

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None
by None 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Last night, Serge Mister and Robert Zuccherato published a paper reporting on an attack against OpenPGP symmetric encryption. This attack, while very significant from a cryptographic point of view, is not generally effective in the real world. To be specific, unless you have your OpenPGP program set up as part of an automated system to accept encrypted messages, decrypt them, and then provide a response to the submitter, then this does not affect you at all. There is a very good writeup on the attack that goes into more depth at http://www.pgp.com/library/ctocorner/openpgp.html There will undoubtedly be further discussion of this over the next several days, but I wanted to provide a few comments now, to try and answer some questions that may arise: 1) This is not a bug in any particular OpenPGP implementation (GnuPG, PGP, Hushmail, etc). Rather, this is an attack against the OpenPGP protocol itself. 2) The attack requires an average of 32,768 probes to get two bytes of plaintext. This is why it is completely ineffective against human beings, who will presumably wonder why a stranger wants them to decrypt thousands and thousands of messages that won't decrypt, and then tell them what errors were seen. 3) It might be effective against an automated process that incorporates OpenPGP decryption, if that process returns errors back to the sender. 4) The OpenPGP Working Group will be discussing this issue and coming up with an effective and permanent fix. In the meantime, I have attached two patches to this mail. These patches disable a portion of the OpenPGP protocol that the attack is exploiting. This change should not be user visible. With the patch in place, this attack will not work using a public-key encrypted message. It will still work using a passphrase-encrypted message. These patches will be part of the 1.2.8 and 1.4.1 releases of GnuPG. 5) The full paper is available at http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/033 It's a great piece of work. David _______________________________________________ Gnupg-announce mailing list Gnupg-announce(a)gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-announce --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: OS X in a Classified Environment...
by Bryan Jones 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Well, Nobody currently involved in a classified project is likely to respond to this question, but here is some historical (and unclassified) data: I have personally seen the current Vice President putting in on the Snake River (flyfishing) after using his Powerbook. Also, OS X has been used reasonably extensively in at least the FBI & CIA, but the lack of a couple of GIS programs on the platform were preventing its use in NIMA and the corollary division within the CIA. The presence of OS X within those agencies should not be surprising given that NeXT systems were used extensively within the CIA with black slabs and cubes everywhere, even on the secretaries desks which was pretty cool. Also, there are a number of current Xserve clusters that are going in to various mil and gov agencies and operations including some with the Navy for work in lasers, and a fairly sizable cluster going into an Army contractor for aerodynamics work. I would be interested to find out what happened to the Navy sonar cluster compute project that used G4 servers running Linux... As for a bit of trivia, going back a ways, there was a project called Cluster Knave (I think that was the project name), developed by ONI running on the old Mac OS that was deployed on submarines for tactical imagery capture, processing and transmission. That was most certainly a classified environment at the time, and one certainly cannot forget those big clunky TEMPEST shielded Macs..... Bryan >Anyone have OS X in a Classified/secure environment? Auditing? Just >curious...as I may be entering this unforgiving realm. > >Kit Bryan William Jones, Ph.D. bryan.jones(a)m.cc.utah.edu University of Utah School of Medicine Moran Eye Center Rm 3339A 75 N. Medical Dr. Salt Lake City, Utah 84132 http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~marclab/ iChat/AIM address: bw_jones(a)mac.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Scitech mailing list (Scitech(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/scitech/eugen%40leitl.org This email sent to eugen(a)leitl.org ----- 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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Re: [liberationtech] Chromebooks for Risky Situations?
by Gregory Foster 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Incidentally, NICTA are the same researchers hired by DARPA to make the U.S. drone fleet safe from hackers. Looks like there might be some open source tools emerging from the effort. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/19/nicta_develops_drone_protection/ gf On 2/13/13 6:54 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 09:01:37AM +0100, Andreas Bader wrote: > >> So why not create a own OS that is really small because of its security? >> Chrome OS is small because it's cheap. If you were right then Android >> was the most secure system. Aren't there any Android viruses? RedHat >> seems to have less security holes than Chrome OS. > http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/ > > The L4.verified project > > A Formally Correct Operating System Kernel > > In current software practice it is widely accepted that software will always have problems and that we will just have to live with the fact that it may crash at the worst possible moment: You might be on a deadline. Or, much scarier, you might be on a plane and there's a problem with the board computer. > > Now think what we constantly want from software: more features, better performance, cheaper prices. And we want it everywhere: in mobile phones, cars, planes, critical infrastructure, defense systems. > > What do we get? Mobile phones that can be hacked by SMS. Cars that have more software problems than mechanical ones. Planes where computer problems have lead to serious incidents. Computer viruses spreading through critical infrastructure control systems and defense systems. And we think "See, it happens to everybody." > > It does not have to be that way. Imagine your company is commissioning a new vending software. Imagine you write down in a contract precisely what the software is supposed to do. And then b it does. Always. And the developers can prove it to you b with an actual mathematical machine-checked proof. > > Of course, the issue of software security and reliability is bigger than just the software itself and involves more than developers making implementation mistakes. In the contract, you might have said something you didn't mean (if you are in a relationship, you might have come across that problem). Or you might have meant something you didn't say and the proof is therefore based on assumptions that don't apply to your situation. Or you haven't thought of everything you need (ever went shopping?). In these cases, there will still be problems, but at least you know where the problem is not: with the developers. Eliminating the whole issue of implementation mistakes would be a huge step towards more reliable and more secure systems. > > Sounds like science fiction? > > The L4.verified project demonstrates that such contracts and proofs can be done for real-world software. Software of limited size, but real and critical. > > We chose an operating system kernel to demonstrate this: seL4. It is a small, 3rd generation high-performance microkernel with about 8,700 lines of C code. Such microkernels are the critical core component of modern embedded systems architectures. They are the piece of software that has the most privileged access to hardware and regulates access to that hardware for the rest of the system. If you have a modern smart-phone, your phone might be running a microkernel quite similar to seL4: OKL4 from Open Kernel Labs. > > We prove that seL4 implements its contract: an abstract, mathematical specification of what it is supposed to do. > > Current status: completed successfully. > > Availablility > > Binaries of seL4 on ARM and x86 architectures are available for academic research and education use. The release additionally contains the seL4 formal specification, user-level libraries and sample code, and a para-virtualised Linux (x86) > > Click here to download seL4 > > More information: > > What we prove and what we assume (high level, some technical background assumed) > Statistics (sizes, numbers, lines of code) > Questions and answers (high-level, some technical background assumed) > Verification approach (for technical audience) > Scientific publications (for experts) > Acknowledgements and team > What does a formal proof look like? [pdf] > Contact > > For further information, please contact Gerwin Klein (project leader): gerwin.klein(at)nicta.com.au -- Gregory Foster || gfoster(a)entersection.org @gregoryfoster <> http://entersection.com/ -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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