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Singapore Global Action Alert (8/29/96)
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

August 29, 1996 *** GLOBAL ACTION BRIEF *** * Please redistribute this document widely with this banner intact * Redistribute only in appropriate places & only until 30 September 1996 Singapore Government Curtails Online Freedoms The government of Singapore recently established strict controls on all Internet Service Providers and many World Wide Web pages. ISPs and content providers will be licensed, and required to adhere to a rigid set of content guidelines which apply to political speech, ethnic and religious remarks including satire, and public morals including "contents which propagate permissiveness or promiscuity." We believe that the licensing policy and broad content guidelines will effectively chill the free flow of information not only in Singapore, but worldwide. Because the Internet is global, transcending geographical bounds, we are convinced that censorship within any nation or state, whether implicit or explicit, poses a threat to all users of the global network. We therefore encourage the government of Singapore, and other governments implementing or considering policies of content control, to stress education rather than regulation. Singapore's approach, like the Communications Decency Act that was passed but quickly rescinded in the U.S., applies a broadcast regulatory standard to the Internet. The application of broadcast-inspired, "one-to-many" regulation to this new *many-to-many* medium indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Internet. Unlike television and radio broadcasting, the Internet does not push material at the viewer, but simply makes material available on demand - not unlike a rapid inter-library loan. And unlike broadcasting, the Internet does not present the views of a limited few privileged speakers, but allows all participants to publish, comment on, and even refute, what they read. Recognizing that every culture has its own standards regarding what is or is not appropriate, the undersigned organizations recommend that Singapore's government allow its citizens to use Internet filtering tools, with which they can block out any material that is offensive to them, rather than embark upon a closed-border approach that will cut Singapore off from the new global online library. Support of individually customizable filtration services, instead of a broad top-down censorship effort, would enable Singapore to participate in a more positive and effective way in the evolution of this new open medium, and would indicate trust in the ability of Singaporeans to choose what is right for Singapore and for themselves. *** WHERE TO FIND MORE INFORMATION For more information on the Singapore censorship situation, and other global efforts to abridge the flow of information over the net, see these web sites: http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/index.html and http://www.io.org/~sherlock/doom/threat.html Human Rights Watch's letter to George Yeo, Singapore Minister for Information and the arts, is located on HRW's gopher, at gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:5000/00/int/hrw/asia/asia/4 WHO TO CONTACT The following organizations have issued this advisory: ALCEI - Electronic Frontiers Italy * http://www.nexus.it/alcei.html American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) * http://www.aclu.org Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) * http://www.cdt.org CITADEL-Electronic Frontier France * http://www.imaginet.fr/~mose/citadel EFF-Austin * http://www.eff-austin.org Electronic Frontiers Australia * http://www.efa.org.au Electronic Frontier Canada * http://www.efc.ca/ Elektronisk Forpost Norge (Electronic Frontier Norway) * http://www.sn.no/~efn Electronic Frontier Foundation * http://www.eff.org Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) * http://www.epic.org HotWired * http://www.hotwired.com Voters Telecommunication Watch (VTW) * http://www.vtw.org Please choose an organization above and visit their web site for contact information. A copy of this advisory is available on the World Wide Web, at http://www.well.com/~jonl/singapore.html.

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Re: A _REALLY_ Interesting Bet [2]
by nobody＠zifi.genetics.utah.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Gillogly <jim(a)ACM.ORG> wrote: <snip> >Idea Futures is dead, and the torch has passed to Foresight Exchange (FX), >which is at http://www.ideosphere.com/ideosphere/ . You can bet on a number >of political issues (US and other), though not (yet) for real money. IMO, a good cypherpunk goal would be to get that "yet" in, with Chaum's Digicash, before the election. Perhaps Mr. Cate has some ideas in this regard...;) When talking to lawyers one finds the justification for the prohibition to be something like, "it would demean the process." IMNSHO, the nest has already been soiled, and the only effect would be to kill the unwanted phonecalls around suppertime, as I said before. The media would eventually flock to the more-accurate poll, even if it involved the dreaded crass freemarket capitalism of people willingly gambling. <snip> >This doesn't track the polls, which typically ask who the potential voter >would vote for rather than who they think will win the election. Indeed. Also, a prominent candidate (this time) told devotees (last time) to give wrong answers to pollsters when called. While it's still possible, this behavior is much less likely with real money (though with his kinda dough, distortions would be possible for him -- & profitable for others). >Other issues: > >Percentage of popular vote to Dem candidate: 47 >" " Rep " : 44 >" " Other " : 12 > >Note that there may be an opportunity for arbitrage when numbers don't add >up to 100; Last time there was supposedly an arbitrage opportunity between odds in Moscow and those in London [Now THAT'S my kind of bet;) -- I can't lose] according to a W$J article on the subject from years ago. 20 minutes on Alta Vista this morning reveals nothing like this available, Ladbroke's links are hardly there, and I don't know the names of any other bookies in London, or any at all in Moscow. The closest thing was a (braindead) "George" magazine article and a few sites lamenting the lack of possible Presidential gambling. AV didn't even reveal the confusing US university site where some gambling is (or was) going on. Perhaps English c-punks can help us on the odds for all candidates, including the longshots. I think publicity from freeing up this information might be more favorable than publicity about things like porn or Assasination Politics, and the process of setting up a site that reveals the odds in semi-realtime from London/Moscow should not be too difficult, especially if actual gambling is not conducted on the site.

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Re: MUD anyone?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I second many of the comments about the difficulties in coding a reasonably plausible game or MUD for exploring list ideas. Just about four years ago exactly, at the first meeting of what was to become the Cypherpunks group, we "played" the "Crypto Anarchy Game." Based solely on paper tokens, like Monopoly, the idea was to introduce people to concepts like digital money, anonymous remailers, information markets, and so on. Sealed envelopes represented remailed messages, with "mixing" done by hand. Lots of imperfections, lots of stalls and dead ends, lots of confusion. Protocols were imperfectly enforced, messages got lost (literally "dropped on the floor"), and the game eventually ended in laughter, confusion, and silliness. But it was deemed useful by most present, as it made more real the abstractions talked about in the morning session. Coding nearly any of the core cryptographic concepts for use in an online game, even without a real crypto core (e.g., using other trust mechanisms) is likely to be almost as big a job as actually coding the concepts for real-world use. Could be very educational, and a useful dry run for later real-world reification of concepts, but by no means easy. I'm not trying to discourage anyone. Go for it! But it's a _big_ project. And as Jim Bell noted, there are all sorts of costs which are not properly accounted for. I would not, for example, expect anything interesting to emerge out of the simulation of "assassination politics" in such a game, as the costs, dangers, moral issues, and whatnot are not properly accounted-for in such a MUD-type simulation. (No more so than in a fantasy role-playing game, where characters die routinely...) And as a last note, we had a couple of "hits" bought anonymously back then, during the game, in '92. (Hint: One doesn't need a Bell-style infrastructure for bidding on the death of politicians to raise the money for a hit....many interested parties would surely pay the $5000 (or less, say some) to buy a hit if the risks were lowered. And to paraphrase Bell, "I know a way to lower the risks.") --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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RE: Mimic Function Stego Programs?
by Damien Lucifer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 16:32:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: RE: Mimic Function Stego Programs? On Thu, 29 Aug 1996, * wrote: > better than the 64 word ones I've used. I'd like to get a hold of these > (or the program, if it's not texto). I mailed DJ about it, but he said > he picked it up from a newsgroup he couldn't remember. If you follow up > please let me know any results. Fascinating stuff ... Donno, the next hop from 64 words per type is 4096 words per type, a very tall order. I've been working on a text steg'ing program for a while that operates under a different premise, however. It keeps a dictionary of word pairs, with each word in the pair being a synonym for the other. It will read through a donor file, swapping words based on whether we need to hide a 1 or a 0. The encoder is working right now but the decoder is not. A quick example: dictionary: 1=sofa 0=couch input: The couch is very comfortable output (0): The sofa is very comfortable. output (1): The couch is very comfortable. The output text is virtually identical to the input text, and would (in most cases) easily fool the average human reader, as well as fooling simple mail filters. The main problem is that very little can be hidden in a text file in this manner. I have one peice of text that is 50k, and can conceal about 64 characters of data. More typical numbers are around 15-25 characters/50k, which is why I never finished the decoder. Once i started encoding things, and realizing how little could be hidden in this manner, I stopped working on it. At the moment the dictionary is very small; nearly all of the words are relevant to only pornographic text (since porno is both predictable, and repetitive, i thought it would be a good place to start). :) I have the source code around, if you care to take a look at it.

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New Microsoft Product! ! ! (fwd)
by Charley Sparks 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 11:11:00 -0400 From: ICSHAB(a)aol.com Subject: New Microsoft Product! ! ! Microsoft Panhandler v1.0 (Beta) Redmond, WA -- Microsoft Corporation chair, CEO and all-around babe magnet Bill Gates announced yesterday the introduction of a new product for Windows 95: Microsoft Panhandling. "The idea came to me the other day when a homeless man asked me for money,"recalls Gates. "I suddenly realized that we were missing a golden opportunity. Here was a chance to make a profit without any initial monetary investment. Naturally, this man then became my competition, so I had my limo driver run over him several times." Microsoft engineers have been working around the clock to complete Gates' vision of panhandling for the 21st century. "We feel that our program designers really understand how the poor and needy situation works," says Microsoft Homeless product leader Bernard Liu. "Except for the fact that they're stinking rich." Microsoft Panhandling will be automatically installed with Windows 95. At random intervals, a dialog box pops up, asking the user if they could spare any change so that Microsoft has enough money to get a hot meal. ("This is a little lie," admits software engineer Adam Miller, "since our diet consists of Coke and Twinkies, but what panhandler doesn't embellish a little?") The user can click Yes, in which case a random amount of change between $.05 and $142.50 is transferred from the user's bank account to Microsoft's. The user can also respond No, in which case the program politely tells the user to have a nice day. The "No" button has not yet been implemented. "We're experiencing a little trouble programming the No button," Bernard Liu says, "but we should definitely have it up and running within the next couple of years. Or at least by the time Windows 2014 comes out. Maybe." Gates says this is just the start of an entire line of products. "Be on the lookout for products like Microsoft Mugging, which either takes $50 or erases your hard drive, and Microsoft Squegee Guy, which will clean up your Windows for a dollar." (When Microsoft Squegee Guy ships, Windows 95 will no longer automatically refresh your windows.) But there are competitors on the horizon. Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation are introducing panhandling products of their own. "Gates is a few tacos short of a combination platter, if you get my drift," says Oracle Head Honcho and 3rd degree black belt Larry Ellison. "I mean, in the future, we won't need laptop computers asking you for change. You'll have an entire network of machines asking you for money." Gates responded with, "I know what you are, but what am I?" General pandemonium then ensued.

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Elliptic Curve Y**2 = x**3 + a * x**2 + b
by trollins＠interactive.visa.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello all, I have a math question concerning implementation of elliptic curve systems. In coding some elliptic curve source, I need to pick a random point on the following elliptic curve in field F_p where p is a prime number. Y**2 = x**3 + a * x**2 + b where 4a**3 + 27b**2 is not equal to 0 mod p In selecting a random point, I pick a random value for x in the range 0 < x < p, compute the right hand side of the equation and find myself needing to take the square root for the two solutions. Questions are: 1: How can I take the suqare root mod p ? 2: How to determine if a solution exists for a selected value of x ? 3: Is the a simpler method than find a square root ? Thanks for any ideas you may have about this... -tom

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Re: Simulations
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:28 AM 8/29/96 -0400, Duncan Frissell wrote: >At 10:05 PM 8/28/96 -0800, jim bell wrote: > >>To me, the most obvious one is GIGO: Simulations, especially >>political/social ones, might depend heavily on assumptions that are >>programmed into them. A trivial, yet interesting example is the computer >>game "Sim City" which allowed you to adjust the "tax rate" but problems >>always cropped up the further away you were from 7%. The libertarians were >>frustrated that we were unable to drop the tax rate and still get a >>well-functioning, happy society. > >I was taking economics back in the Armonk Iron days and we played around with >an economic simulation program written in Fortran. One was supposed to >adjust government spending and taxes to find an optimum level. I set both >taxes and spending to zero. We got a lot of economic growth and a lot of >inflation (this was not a monetarist simulation). Yes, it does sound a bit inaccurate. Let's see, while I only took one economics course in college (macroeconomics) as I recall inflation is generally the product of either the monetarization of the deficit or an increase in wages unmatched by productivity increases. The latter is unlikely to be caused extensively by government policy or spending (Davis-Bacon is an obvious exception to this in the private sector), and if the government spending and taxes are zero then obviously the former can't be the cause. > But we were happier. That reminds me of a related flaw in Sim City. When the program is queried as to what the public's main complaints are, the information is presented by the program as the percentage of the population considering various problems to be the "most important." However, it did not explicitly rank the SERIOUSNESS of these problems in absolute terms. Since it is practically an axiom of human nature that we'll FIND something to complain about if nothing comes immediately to mind, the danger is that you'll over-react to a non-problem with a "solution" (often involving more government spending) that is even worse. Another bias was the fact that the program seemed to lump all infrastructure-type spending into government, as opposed to a privatized solution. In reality, if you drop government spending very low problems will begin to be solved by private means. In Sim City, however, the system did not compensate in this way, leading to low or even negative growth, and extreme dissatisfaction, etc. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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RE: Desubscribe
by Ross Wright 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> On Or About: 29 Aug 96, 16:57, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: > > > jbugden(a)smtplink.alis.ca writes: > > > > can not unsubscribe since majo= rdomo notices > > > jbugden(a)smtplink.alis.ca in the header and treats the attempt to > > > unsubscribe as a forgery. > > > > If you don't have the brains to forge the From:, then you have no > > business being subscribed to any mailing list. > > > What's worse? Losers who can't unsubscribe from a mailing list they subscribed to OR spammers? ;-) Ross

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Nuke Singapore Back into the Stone Age
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:21 PM 8/29/96, Jean-Francois Avon wrote: >I completely disagree here! > >Taking into account the philosophico-political context there, it >*obviously* indicate a *complete* understanding of the nature of the >net. It is you (the writer of the forwarded article) who did not >either dare to state or simply recognize the true nature of a govt >pushing such measures. > >I am fed up of seing net users giving every would-be dictator the >benefit of the doubt. There is no tolerance to be applied to that. >There is no such thing as being tolerent to poison. > >Why don't we start naming things by their true names? I agree with Jean-Francois--most of the recent announcements by governments about the Internet actually indicate *full awareness* of what their actions could mean for the propagation of articles, the extradition of Net.criminals, and the development of a Global New World Computer Order. The United States knew what the CDA would mean, the government of Bavaria knew what the crackdown on "racist" Web sites and newsgroups would mean, the government of Singapore understands full well what their actions could mean, and so on. And it is likely that the "control" advocates in each of these countries (and others) are pleased when one of their brother countries announces new crackdowns on the Net and Web. Very few governments actually like free speech in all of its forms, and certainly the U.S. government does not. Sure, there is lip service paid to "free speech" in the U.S., but the list of illegal things to say keeps getting longer (just last week Clinton illegalized many forms of speech involving cigarettes--what part of "Congress shall make no law" is not being understood here?). As to why so many of the criticisms of such crackdowns use "weasel language," such as the example Jean-Francois disagrees with, well, this is the way the game is played. The alternative to "The government of Singapore fails to understand the nature of the Net and could do grievous harm to it" is not quite so diplomatic: "Fucking statists. Time to nuke 'em back to the stone age." Personally, if this crackdown in Singapore happens, I intend to post various anti-Singapore and anti-Lee Kwan Yew & Sons screeds to various newsgroups that Singaporans might like to read. Then, if the Yew Dynasty decides to pull the plug, it'll be to more and more groups. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Mail to sbinkley@atitech.ca
by Brian Pecic 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

You are continualy sending to Scott Binkley (sbinkley(a)atitech.ca) Scott is no longer at ATI so please stop sending to this invalid address. Brian Pecic bpecic(a)atitech.ca

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