From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Jul  1 04:36:02 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 06:36:02 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [eff-austin] Wired: Ex-Intel Coder Wins E-Mail Case (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307010635400.1323-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 23:58:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: Carl Webb <webbcarl at hotmail.com>
To: eff-austin at effaustin.org, tlc-discuss at lists.cwrl.utexas.edu
Subject: [eff-austin] Wired: Ex-Intel Coder Wins E-Mail Case



------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ex-Intel Coder Wins E-Mail Case

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59450,00.html

By Ryan Singel

Sending e-mails to a company's employees, even when those messages are critical of the company, can't be considered trespassing, according to a decision released Monday by California's Supreme Court.

In a 4-3 ruling applauded by free speech advocates, the court overturned a Court of Appeals decision that barred Ken Hamidi, a disgruntled former Intel employee, from e-mailing his former co-workers at the chipmaker.

"The court understood that this case is about communication," said Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a friend of the court brief on Hamidi's behalf. "If the decision had gone the other way, the Internet's fundamental structure -- where everyone is connected to everyone -- would have been compromised. It would have Balkanized the Internet."

Hamidi, who was fired in 1996 by Intel, sent a series of six e-mails to 30,000 Intel employees during the late 1990s. The messages criticized the company's labor practices, asking employees to join an anti-Intel group and urging them to look for jobs elsewhere.

Intel sought a court order to stop the campaign, arguing that Hamidi's e-mails disrupted its workplace and trespassed on its network.

The California Superior Court agreed with Intel in 1998, ordering Hamidi to stop sending e-mails. Hamidi appealed the decision, but in 2001, the Court of Appeals upheld the ruling that Hamidi was trespassing on Intel's servers.

The lower courts justified the injunction against Hamidi based on the common law provision known as "trespass to chattels," which allows property owners to sue someone who misuses, but does not steal, their property.

The Court of Appeals ruling held that meddling with another person's property was enough to warrant an injunction.

The state Supreme Court rejected the appeals court's reasoning, saying that Hamidi's e-mails weren't trespassing since they didn't actually disrupt Intel's servers. The court declared in its majority opinion that "Hamidi did nothing but use the e-mail system for its intended purpose -- to communicate with employees."

The court added, "The system worked as designed, delivering the messages without any physical or functional harm or disruption. These occasional transmissions cannot reasonably be viewed as impairing the quality or value of Intel's computer system."

Hamidi's lawyers and supporters feared that if the lower court's decision had stood, individuals could be sued for hyperlinking to a Web page or sending a single unwanted e-mail.

"The Court has soundly rejected the invitation to create a new rule with the potential to cripple the Internet as a network," said Gregory Lastowka, one of Hamidi's attorneys. "If a plaintiff wants to bring a claim of trespass to chattel, there must be some proof of damage to the communications equipment."

Intel argued that the case was about private property, not free speech.

Intel hasn't decided whether to appeal the ruling, said Chuck Mulloy, a company spokesman.

"We're disappointed with the ruling," said Mulloy. "But we are studying the ruling to assess what options we have if Mr. Hamidi resumes his spamming of Intel."

The carefully worded decision does not prevent companies from suing spammers for overloading their servers.

"The functional burden on Intel's computers, or the cost in time to individual recipients, of receiving Hamidi's occasional advocacy messages cannot be compared to the burdens and costs caused ISPs and their customers by the ever-rising deluge of commercial e-mail," according to the court.

The court also said that Intel couldn't stop Hamidi by arguing that the e-mails disrupted the workplace and affected productivity, writing that Intel could not "assert a property interest in its employees' time."

The court did not, however, decide that the First Amendment required Intel to let Hamidi's e-mails reach its employees' mailboxes.

After Hamidi's first mass e-mail, Intel engineers added mail filters that blocked Hamidi's missives based on their content and IP address. Hamidi evaded some of those filters by using different computers and scrambling words in the e-mails to avoid keyword filters.




From bear at sonic.net  Tue Jul  1 09:48:37 2003
From: bear at sonic.net (bear)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 09:48:37 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Attacking networks using DHCP, DNS - probably kills DNSSEC
In-Reply-To: <200307010901.h6191eA18488@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.40.0307010945280.2398-100000@bolt.sonic.net>



On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Peter Gutmann wrote:


> Given that their goal is zero-configuration networking, I can see
> that being required to provide a shared secret would mess things up
> a bit for them.  It'd be a bit like PKIX being asked to make
> ease-of-use a consideration in their work, or OpenPGP to take X.509
> compatibility into account.

I tend to agree...  I don't think "zero-configuration" networking has
a real possibility to create any safety zones beyond the immediate
physical machine.  After all, if you can plug it into any network and
it just works, you can plug it into an insecure or subverted network
and it'll just work.

At the very least you've got to have a file of keys.

				Bear





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From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Tue Jul  1 08:37:06 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 11:37:06 -0400
Subject: Warchalking and 802.11bag repeaters?
Message-ID: <BAY7-F94mpgeBybhoiS000028df@hotmail.com>

This remionds me of something I've been wondering about, which may actually 
call for warchalking (though I'm sure warchalking is not being used for this 
yet).

Here in NYC Verizon has already set up about 50 802.11b nodes on top of 
telephone booths, and when they're finished there will be about 150 city 
wide. Now one of these nodes is down the street (Wall Street), but its too 
far out of range for me to reach from my desk. The Starbucks across the 
street, however, is a different story.

Now I'm wondering...if there existed an 802.11b repeater between Starbucks 
and the Verizon hotspot, then I could potentially send a friend working down 
by Wall and Water email or whatever without the message ever going wireline. 
(Is this correct? Of course it assumes that the IP shortest path is a 
wireless one.) Since any 802.11 repeaters that might ever come into being 
could be quite cheap, I can easily see private citizens installing them in 
order to connect 802.11 b/a/g islands together, bypassing the wireline 
infrastructure althogether. Warchalking would help such folks determine how 
far the hotspots actually are from one another, to see if a repeater is 
needed.

-TD






>From: Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi at yahoo.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Warchalking does not exist: a wager.
>Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 22:34:30 -0700 (PDT)
>
> > Don't know about warchalking per se, gpsdrive and kismet work a lot 
>better,
> > and people trade the waypoints/nodes. Makes a hundred times more sense
>
>I never figured out why does one need a map of grocery stores. You see a 
>store
>with the OPEN sign and get your chocolate.
>
>802.11b works the same way, there are zillon drivers that give you a list 
>of
>OPEN access points IN YOUR RANGE* and you simply pick one (some drivers 
>will
>also test the connectivity to the backbone so you don't waste time with
>firewalled ones.)
>
>And the purpose of chalk marks is ?
>
>
>
>* 18" grid dish does wonders ... all the city is in the range.
>
>
>
>=====
>end
>(of original message)
>
>Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
>http://sbc.yahoo.com

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Jul  1 18:53:58 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 20:53:58 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Geek.com Geek News - U.S. creates new cyber security division
  (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307012053180.1323-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://64.55.181.130/news/geeknews/2003Jun/gee20030609020315.htm


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz  Tue Jul  1 02:01:40 2003
From: pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 21:01:40 +1200
Subject: Attacking networks using DHCP, DNS - probably kills DNSSEC
Message-ID: <200307010901.h6191eA18488@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>

William Allen Simpson <wsimpson at greendragon.com> writes:

>Would this be the DHCP working group that on at least 2 occasions when I was
>there, insisted that secure DHCP wouldn't require a secret, since DHCP isn't
>supposed to require "configuration"?

Given that their goal is zero-configuration networking, I can see that being
required to provide a shared secret would mess things up a bit for them.  It'd
be a bit like PKIX being asked to make ease-of-use a consideration in their
work, or OpenPGP to take X.509 compatibility into account.

Peter.

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From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Wed Jul  2 02:04:28 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 02:04:28 -0700
Subject: test please ignore
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030702020307.02e3d550@idiom.com>

Is it really quiet in here, or does the fact that I've been
playing with procmail this evening have something to do with it?

	Thanks; Bill




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Wed Jul  2 06:23:01 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 06:23:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Weapons of mass destruction
In-Reply-To: <200307020214.h622EOR23140@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307020621500.20828-100000@eskimo.com>

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Peter Gutmann wrote:

> -- Snip --
>
> Go to www.google.com
>
> Type in "weapons of mass destruction" (including the quotes) and hit the "I'm
> feeling lucky" button.
>
> Read the error page carefully.

Yes, the connection of Rumsfeld to Strangelove is perfect!

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  2 04:34:37 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 06:34:37 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Ohio.com - US Developing Urban Surveillance System (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307020634150.1323-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/6211959.htm


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  2 04:35:26 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 06:35:26 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [eff-austin] Fwd: SAVE THE DATE: AeA Event July 29 with
  Congressman Lamar  Smith (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307020635100.1323-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 23:14:53 -0500
From: Bill Kleinebecker <akleineb at alum.mit.edu>
To: eff-austin at effaustin.org
Subject: [eff-austin] Fwd: SAVE THE DATE: AeA Event July 29 with
    Congressman Lamar  Smith


>Join us  for breakfast and an in-depth discussion on the business legacy
>of the
>Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), its impact on our industry, and the
>current efforts underway in Congress to readdress such critical issues as Fair
>Use rights and the DMCA's scope of protection.  For more information, please
>visit
>http://www.aeanet.org/events/eventsStart.asp?meeting=AU070301
>
>Keynote Speaker: U.S. Congressman Lamar Smith ~ Chairman of the
>Subcommittee on
>Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property of the U. S. House Judiciary
>Committee
>
>Guest Panelists: Sue Snyder, AMD and William Patry, Baker Botts LLP
>Other Panelists to be announced soon
>
>Moderator: Thomas Felger, Baker Botts LLP
>
>Who should attend: High-Tech Company CXOs, General Counsels.
>
>Registration & Breakfast: 7:30 a.m. - 8:15 a.m.
>
>Program: 8:15 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.
>
>Location/Directions
>Four Seasons Hotel
>98 San Jacinto Blvd.
>Austin, TX  78701
>Located at the intersection of San Jacinto & Cesar Chavez streets
>Registration Information
>Cost: $15 for AeA members, $25 for non-member. Self-parking is Complimentary.
>To register, please contact Pam Devine at pam_devine at aeanet.org or (512)
>474-4403.
>
>*******************************************************************************
>Unsubscribe/Change of Address Option
>You have indicated that you are interested in receiving this kind of
>information from AeA via email.
>To stop receiving this information, please send an email back saying
>"Unsubscribe"  and I will remove you from this distribution list.
>To change your email address and contact info, login to
>http://www.aeanet.org/ContactUpdate
>
>--------------------------------------
>Pam Devine
>Coordinator, Member Services & Programs
>AeA, Advancing the Business of Technology
>1402 San Antonio St Ste 100, Austin TX  78701-1606
>Tel: (512) 474-4403   Fax: (512) 476-9908
>pam_devine at aeanet.org
>http://www.aeanet.org
>
>
>
>
>####030626115827PAMD | PAMD | 144####




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  2 05:13:04 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 07:13:04 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Slashdot | GPL May Not Work In German Legal System (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307020712400.1323-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/07/02/0245228.shtml?tid=117&tid=99


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  2 05:14:02 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 07:14:02 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: The Register - Blocking Internet porn in Iran (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307020713450.1323-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31515.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  2 05:15:50 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 07:15:50 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: New subatomic species found: Collision debris yields five-quark
  particle. (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307020715260.1323-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.nature.com/nsu/030630/030630-4.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From declan at well.com  Wed Jul  2 06:35:42 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 09:35:42 -0400
Subject: Is Hatch a Mormon or a crypto Satanist?
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030621111348.03329eb0@idiom.com>; from
  bill.stewart@pobox.com on Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 11:24:30AM -0700
References: <3EF494B4.9AE84FC4@cdc.gov>
  <5.1.1.6.2.20030621111348.03329eb0@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <20030702093542.A19112@cluebot.com>

On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 11:24:30AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> I've also found it was less trouble to get a beer and _dinner_
> late at night than in much of California, though perhaps they
> have rules requiring bars to also be restaurants.

I was in Salt Lake City just after the Olympics (and during the
Paralympics) last year and, like you, didn't have any problem getting
a beer with dinner. But late at night? Everything seemed to close
around 10-11 pm.

See:
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/winter-paralympics-2002.html

-Declan




From declan at well.com  Wed Jul  2 06:36:44 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 09:36:44 -0400
Subject: Is Hatch a Mormon or a crypto Satanist?
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F6XKbMbcMSe3WX00005823@hotmail.com>; from
  camera_lumina@hotmail.com on Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 03:40:35PM -0400
References: <BAY7-F6XKbMbcMSe3WX00005823@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <20030702093644.B19112@cluebot.com>

To go back to the Subject: line of this thread, I recall that Hatch is
a former Mormon bishop.

-Declan




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Jul  2 09:45:58 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 09:45:58 -0700
Subject: All quiet on the western front
In-Reply-To: <20030702095559.D19112@cluebot.com>
Message-ID: <A84419BD-ACAC-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 06:55  AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> Pretty quiet. I'm going through back messages now and only saw I think
> three from July 1.
>
> -Declan
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 02:04:28AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>> Is it really quiet in here, or does the fact that I've been
>> playing with procmail this evening have something to do with it?
>>
>> 	Thanks; Bill
>

But things have been quiet for months now, except for occasional bursts  
of Unix-related security cruft.

I think it's related to "statism overload." And boredom. Things are  
objectively more statist and surveillance-oriented than when the Phil  
Zimmermann case and Clipper phone "energized a generation." But the  
reaction today is ho-hum. No emergency meetings, no guerilla  
activities. Hell, it's been months since I've seen any mention of a  
Cypherpunks meeting in the Bay Area. (A recurring problem for years,  
actually, since we stopped having meetings in a regular place. One  
never knows whether the next meeting will be at some coffee shop in  
Oakland or, ugh, at the Police Training Camp in San Francisco. In any  
case, driving 50 miles to Silicon Valley was a regular thing for me,  
but driving 100 miles to SF or Oakland is usually not in the cards for  
me. I haven't heard about any meetings since several months ago, so  
maybe they're not even happening up in SF or Berkeley, anyway.)

But things are quite a bit worse than they were in 1992. Which, I  
suppose, is good for bringing on the collision of armies, or recruiting  
new warriors. But maybe not, given the apathy.

Every day brings new reports of surveillance plans, suspensions of the  
Constitution, more statism.

I think people are anesthetized, a la the boiling frog, to the  
developing statism.

(Side note, worthy of a longer article: It may be literally a  
generational thing, as libertarianism tended to be. The anti-state  
"activists" of the 70s and 80s were influenced by the antiwar movement  
of the 60s, but were still somewhat libertarian. Many had read  
Heinlein, Rand, Rothbard, Hayek. The early Cypherpunks folks were  
generally conversant with the ideas, and receptive. I conjecture that  
the "new crop" is more into body piercings, skin art, and  
anti-globalism (when it comes to corporations and trade, but not when  
it comes to world government). In other words, Cypherpunks is like  
several other Baby Boom "degenerating research program.")

I would predict that things are getting more statist and are coming to  
some kind of head. Except, why bother making any predictions? Robert  
Hettinga would make some snarky comment about my track record for  
predictions and Duncan Frissell would gush about how things are more  
free than ever, that the Perpetual Tourist need not worry about  
surveillance, tracking, new laws, and restrictions on movement.

Here's just part of just today's harvest. I won't even call it  
"Brinworld," as many here do, as this kind of government surveillance  
has nothing in common with Brin's (misguided) idea of symmetrical  
surveillance.

<http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=528&ncid=528&e=2&u=/ 
ap/20030702/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/pentagon_urban_cameras>

--begin excerpt--

U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System

Wed Jul  2, 1:46 AM ET

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON -  Police can envision limited domestic uses for an urban  
surveillance system the Pentagon (news - web sites) is developing but  
doubt they could use the full system which is designed to track and  
analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city.

  Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is intended to help the  
U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas.

  Scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology also  
could easily be adapted to keep tabs on Americans.

  The project's centerpiece would be groundbreaking computer software  
capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and  
license tag, or drivers and passengers by face.

  The proposed software also would provide instant alerts after  
detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watchlist, or search  
months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist  
attacks, according to interviews and contracting documents reviewed by  
The Associated Press.

  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops  
technologies for fighting 21st century wars, is overseeing the project.

  Scientists and privacy experts  who have seen face-recognition  
technology used at a Super Bowl and monitoring cameras in London  are  
concerned about the potential impact of the emerging DARPA technologies  
if they are applied to civilians by commercial or government agencies  
outside the Pentagon.

  "Government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is  
most of the time," said John Pike, a Global Security.org defense  
analyst.




From declan at well.com  Wed Jul  2 06:55:59 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 09:55:59 -0400
Subject: test please ignore
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030702020307.02e3d550@idiom.com>; from
  bill.stewart@pobox.com on Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 02:04:28AM -0700
References: <5.1.1.6.2.20030702020307.02e3d550@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <20030702095559.D19112@cluebot.com>

Pretty quiet. I'm going through back messages now and only saw I think
three from July 1.

-Declan


On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 02:04:28AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> Is it really quiet in here, or does the fact that I've been
> playing with procmail this evening have something to do with it?
> 
> 	Thanks; Bill




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Jul  2 08:11:05 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 10:11:05 -0500
Subject: test please ignore
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030702020307.02e3d550@idiom.com>
References: <5.1.1.6.2.20030702020307.02e3d550@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <20030702151105.GA15562@cybershamanix.com>

On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 02:04:28AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> Is it really quiet in here, or does the fact that I've been
> playing with procmail this evening have something to do with it?
> 
> 	Thanks; Bill

   Oh oh -- for some strange reason, all three messages in this thread got sent
to my procmail spam file. I've noticed for awhile that the info message from
lne.com always lands there as well, but not the real posts. 
   Sigh!


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Wed Jul  2 08:17:43 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 10:17:43 -0500
Subject: test please ignore
In-Reply-To: <20030702151105.GA15562@cybershamanix.com>
References: <5.1.1.6.2.20030702020307.02e3d550@idiom.com>
  <20030702151105.GA15562@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <20030702151743.GA15671@cybershamanix.com>

On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 10:11:05AM -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 02:04:28AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> > Is it really quiet in here, or does the fact that I've been
> > playing with procmail this evening have something to do with it?
> > 
> > 	Thanks; Bill
> 
>    Oh oh -- for some strange reason, all three messages in this thread got sent
> to my procmail spam file. I've noticed for awhile that the info message from
> lne.com always lands there as well, but not the real posts. 
>    Sigh!

   Ah, I see, it's the "please" in the subject line that does it.


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Wed Jul  2 07:33:41 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 10:33:41 -0400 
Subject: Is Hatch a Mormon or a crypto Satanist?
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1C9@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Declan McCullagh[SMTP:declan at well.com]
> 
> To go back to the Subject: line of this thread, I recall that Hatch is
> a former Mormon bishop.
> 
> -Declan
> 
In the LDS church, the title 'Bishop' is handed out pretty
freely - I think it's roughly equivalent to 'lay preacher'.

...and it's not the only title subject to inflation. Those
17-year-old missionaries are properly addressed as 
'Elder'.

Peter Trei




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Wed Jul  2 07:55:49 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 10:55:49 -0400 
Subject: test please ignore
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1CA@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> 	Declan McCullagh[SMTP:declan at well.com]
> 
> 
> Pretty quiet. I'm going through back messages now and only saw I think
> three from July 1.
> 
> -Declan
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 02:04:28AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> > Is it really quiet in here, or does the fact that I've been
> > playing with procmail this evening have something to do with it?
> > 
> > 	Thanks; Bill
> 
Don't top post!

I have 9 real messages from July 1.

Peter Trei




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Wed Jul  2 08:35:06 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 11:35:06 -0400 
Subject: Are the filters too restrictive on some CDRs?
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1CC@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Gabriel Rocha[SMTP:gabe at seul.org] wrote
> 
> 		On Wed, Jul 02, at 10:55AM, Trei, Peter wrote:
> | I have 9 real messages from July 1.
> 
> What node do you subscribe to? I have three messages from July 1st. I
> use lne.
> 
I use minder.com, which does no filtering.

The count is after throwing out spam,
duplicates, and Professor Rat.

Peter




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Jul  2 11:55:38 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 11:55:38 -0700
Subject: All quiet on the western front
Message-ID: <jda6gv04gfbenn58jkkhmg3lceive2o3s2@4ax.com>

    --
On 2 Jul 2003 at 9:45, Tim May wrote:
> But things have been quiet for months now, except for 
> occasional bursts  of Unix-related security cruft.

The technology is known, it has become depressingly apparent 
that imminent world change by means of this technology is not 
in the cards right now, what is left to say?

The cypherpunk agenda is in fact making progress in boring 
routine ways -- increasing real world use of encryption, 
various complicated boring routine measures to improve 
security.  Digital currencies have plateaued by some measures, 
but I think uptake will continue.   At present, digital 
currencies do not give you any privacy from the currency 
issuer, but in practice monitoring is expensive, and low 
monitoring issuers tend to out compete high monitoring issuers. 
No issues of Chaumian cash have succeeded, but Chaumian cash is 
the ultimate in low monitored, irreversible transactions, so as 
Hettinga is fond of arguing, the trend is in its favor, but 
immediate change is not in sight.

With americans, and the english speaking west in general under 
attack, the tendency is to rally around the state.    Anarchism 
is not as popular as it was, not as cools as it was, when 
enemies are trying to kill us, and the state is trying to kill 
our enemies.

> Every day brings new reports of surveillance plans, 
> suspensions of the Constitution, more statism.

It is war.

> Side note, worthy of a longer article: It may be literally a 
> generational thing, as libertarianism tended to be. The 
> anti-state "activists" of the 70s and 80s were influenced by 
> the antiwar movement
>  of the 60s, but were still somewhat libertarian. Many had 
>  read
> Heinlein, Rand, Rothbard, Hayek. The early Cypherpunks folks 
> were generally conversant with the ideas, and receptive. I 
> conjecture that the "new crop" is more into body piercings, 
> skin art, and anti-globalism (when it comes to corporations 
> and trade, but not when it comes to world government). In 
> other words, Cypherpunks is like several other Baby Boom 
> "degenerating research program.")

You are suffering from old fogyism.  "Ah, teenagers today are 
so rotten and selfish, not like we were."  This reminds me of 
the indignant complaints about the fact that at the recent 
woodstock, so many young women were naked and semi conscious on 
GHB.

Do you remember the original woodstock?

If you do remember, you were not there.

You think the "reefer madness" hysteria was laughable?  They 
recently gave some poor sucker a sentence of several hundred 
years for "raping" girls by giving GHB, although his home 
movies seem to show the alleged rape victims enthusiastically 
jumping him.

The fact is that our generation turned into the generation we 
were revolting against, only ten times worse.   That is what 
went wrong.  Four times the hypocrisy, ten times the jail 
sentences.  It started when those boring puritan Leninists took 
over SDS (Students for a democratic society) in 1963, 1964. All
that terribly solemn do gooding in the 1962 Port Huron 
statement, and the next thing you know instead of "Sex drugs 
and rock and roll", we hear that heterosexuality constitutes 
sexism and Andrew Luster is being abducted from a foreign 
country as if he was general Noriega.   If he had jumped out of 
the bushes, sawed a nine year old's arms and legs off, and then 
raped her, the government would not have had him kidnapped in 
order to get him.

Teenagers have not changed, instead we have become those old 
fogies we revolted against.  We did not realize that the port
Huron statement turned us into young fogies, the doddering
senile washed up old bolsheviks. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     zM6pUlk6ZJ3PNi5XRMFqgmuU2xj28x3t55x+IgFu
     46aIWX5lC5VdjpVgTOT5JiMBx1VdJYnsZT/eVKQ2t




From pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz  Tue Jul  1 19:14:24 2003
From: pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 14:14:24 +1200
Subject: Weapons of mass destruction
Message-ID: <200307020214.h622EOR23140@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>

-- Snip --

Go to www.google.com

Type in "weapons of mass destruction" (including the quotes) and hit the "I'm
feeling lucky" button.

Read the error page carefully.

-- Snip --

Peter.




From declan at well.com  Wed Jul  2 13:09:02 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 16:09:02 -0400
Subject: Reporter writing article on proffr/mattd and threats
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030702160220.039d55b8@mail.well.com>

I received a phone call today from a newspaper reporter who's writing an 
article on mattd/proffr and wanted background on the cypherpunks group or 
movement, as he put it. The reporter -- who covers crime, law enforcement, 
and the courts -- wanted to know whether mattd/proffr was representative of 
the group or an outlier, and stressed that two other cypherpunks have been 
imprisoned for their actions in this area.

Apparently mattd/proffr has been saying on cypherpunks that some federal 
prosecutors need killing. Then that post was indexed by Google, and now it 
is a prominent hit for the name of said prosecutor. (I say apparently 
because, thanks to the good graces of procmail, I haven't read any 
mattd/proffr posts in ages. This is what I gathered solely from the phone 
conversation.)

Anyway, the Feds apparently are neither confirming nor denying that an 
investigation is in progress, except to say that they are "aware" of 
mattd/proffr's post.

This is what I learned from the phone call. I have no firsthand knowledge.

-Declan




From measl at mfn.org  Wed Jul  2 15:52:30 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 17:52:30 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: mattd Needs Killing (was: Re: CDR: Reporter writing article on
  proffr/mattd and threats)
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030702160220.039d55b8@mail.well.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307021747260.10956-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> I received a phone call today from a newspaper reporter who's writing an 
> article on mattd/proffr and wanted background on the cypherpunks group or 
> movement, as he put it. The reporter -- who covers crime, law enforcement, 
> and the courts -- wanted to know whether mattd/proffr was representative of 
> the group or an outlier, and stressed that two other cypherpunks have been 
> imprisoned for their actions in this area.

I would tell your reporter friend (?) not to bother wasting his cycles on a
lunatic.  Whether or not he's still spewing his shit (like you I [attempt]
to filter all his crap) is really irrelevent, since he's [by definition] not
capable of spewing an actual "position".  

Do reporters write articles about street people who scream at walls?  So why
write one about a nutcase that somehow stumbled across cypherpunks?  He's
merely found an outlet where the word "kill" doesn't get much of a reaction,
and he likely feels extra-manly using it, so...

 
> Anyway, the Feds apparently are neither confirming nor denying that an 
> investigation is in progress, except to say that they are "aware" of 
> mattd/proffr's post.

How could they *not* be?  The fact that they haven't even bothered to arrest
him says it all - even *they* realize that mattd is just a blathering
psych patient in search of a rubber room.


> This is what I learned from the phone call. I have no firsthand knowledge.

Nice disclaimer...

> 
> -Declan
> 
> 

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

"...we are part now of a dubious troika in the war against terror with
Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink in Palestine
or Chechnya from carrying out acts of gratuitous and senseless acts of
violence. We have become the company we keep."

Christopher Hedges
15-year veteran of foreign war coverage for the New York Times




From declan at well.com  Wed Jul  2 14:55:36 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 17:55:36 -0400
Subject: Reporter writing article on proffr/mattd and threats
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030702160220.039d55b8@mail.well.com>; from
  declan@well.com on Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 04:09:02PM -0400
References: <5.2.1.1.0.20030702160220.039d55b8@mail.well.com>
Message-ID: <20030702175536.A26616@cluebot.com>

While we're on this topic, some Supreme Court cases...

-Declan

---

http://laws.findlaw.com/us/249/211.html
This is an indictment under the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, c. 30,
tit. 1, 3, 40 Stat. 219, as amended by the Act of May 16, 1918, c. 75,
1, 40 Stat. 553 (Comp. St. 1918, 10212c). It has been cut down to two
counts, originally the third and fourth. The former of these alleges
that on or about June 16, 1918, at Canton, Ohio, the defendant caused
and incited and attempted to cause and incite insubordination,
disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and naval
forces of the United States and with intent so to do delivered, to an
assembly of people, a public speech, set forth. The fourth count
alleges that he obstructed and attempted to obstruct the recruiting
and enlistment service of the United States and to that end and with
that intent delivered the same speech, again set forth. [conviction upheld]

http://laws.findlaw.com/us/394/705.html
Petitioner's remark during political debate at small public gathering
that if inducted into Army (which he vowed would never occur) and made
to carry a rifle "the first man I want to get in my sights is
L. B. J.," held to be crude political hyperbole which in light of its
context and conditional nature did not constitute a knowing and
willful threat against the President within the coverage of 18 U.S.C. 871 (a).

http://laws.findlaw.com/us/395/444.html
Appellant, a Ku Klux Klan leader, was convicted under the Ohio
Criminal Syndicalism statute for "advocat[ing] . . . the duty,
necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful
methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or
political reform" and for "voluntarily assembl[ing] with any society,
group or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the
doctrines of criminal syndicalism." Neither the indictment nor the
trial judge's instructions refined the statute's definition of the
crime in terms of mere advocacy not distinguished from incitement to
imminent lawless action. Held: Since the statute, by its words and as
applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of
criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the
described type of action, it falls within the condemnation of the
First and Fourteenth Amendments. Freedoms of speech and press do not
permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law
violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or
producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce
such action. Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 , overruled.

http://laws.findlaw.com/us/403/15.html
Appellant was convicted of violating that part of Cal. Penal Code 415
which prohibits "maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or
quiet of any neighborhood or person . . . by . . . offensive conduct,"
 for wearing a jacket bearing the words "Fuck the Draft" in a corridor
of the Los Angeles Courthouse. The Court of Appeal held that
"offensive conduct" means "behavior which has a tendency to provoke
others to acts of violence or to in turn disturb the peace," and
affirmed the conviction. Held: Absent a more particularized and
compelling reason for its actions, the State may not, consistently
with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, make the simple public
display of this single four-letter expletive a criminal
offense. Pp. 22-26.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Wed Jul  2 18:18:59 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 18:18:59 -0700
Subject: Reporter writing article on proffr/mattd and threats
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030702160220.039d55b8@mail.well.com>
Message-ID: <3F032213.5523.AC02EE2@localhost>

    --
On 2 Jul 2003 at 16:09, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> I received a phone call today from a newspaper reporter who's
> writing an article on mattd/proffr and wanted background on
> the cypherpunks group or movement, as he put it. The reporter
> -- who covers crime, law enforcement, and the courts --
> wanted to know whether mattd/proffr was representative of the
> group or an outlier, and stressed that two other cypherpunks
> have been imprisoned for their actions in this area.
>
> Apparently mattd/proffr has been saying on cypherpunks that
> some federal prosecutors need killing.

I received email from a reporter on the same topic, I presume
the same reporter.  I am inclined to suspect that the reporter
is a fed. Professor rat is too deranged to be a fed.

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     QpKOGfzNlJmamdzP/r/pxQqV3fmG7S20DUKrN/LD
     4IVIQeZR4glowWVdlvF9Coo4rpJD871QeP0Swloba




From declan at well.com  Wed Jul  2 15:40:36 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 18:40:36 -0400
Subject: SF meet: future of feta, port, sherry, gorgonzola at stake
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030702183933.04c15570@mail.well.com>

    COMMERCE UNDER SECRETARY ROGAN TO OPEN USPTO/WIPO CONFERENCE EXPLORING
              USE OF GEOGRAPHIC NAMES TO DESCRIBE FOOD AND WINE
        Use of Terms Bologna, Parmesan, Chablis, and Burgundy Could Be
         Prohibited, Adversely Affecting U.S. Food and Wine Industry
   Wednesday, July 9, 2003
9:30 a.m.
   The Palace Hotel
   2 New Montgomery Street
   San Francisco, CA.
Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property James E. Rogan will
make opening remarks at a three-day symposium (July 9-11) on the use of
geographical indications (GIs) to describe food and wine.  The symposium,
which is being co-hosted by the Department of Commercebs U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office (USPTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO), will feature an international array of experts in the field from
WIPO member states and the food and wine industries.  The symposium is
being held in anticipation of a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting on
GIs scheduled for Cancun, Mexico in September.  It is expected that at the
Cancun meeting, the European Union will call for terminating the use of
certain generic terms to describe food and wine unless those products come
from a specific geographic region.  If the EU is successful, use of terms
such as feta and gorgonzola for cheese, and port and sherry for wine - now
considered generic in many WTO member nations - could be prohibited in the
United States, resulting in consumer confusion and potentially injuring
U.S. domestic and international commerce in food and wine.
     The symposium agenda is available at
http://www.wipo.int/meetings/2003/geo-ind/en/program/.	




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Wed Jul  2 17:40:07 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 20:40:07 -0400
Subject: All quiet on the western front
In-Reply-To: <948c9fbf1fdbc0e1fb5bc9d85563efa2@erisiandiscord.de>
References: <948c9fbf1fdbc0e1fb5bc9d85563efa2@erisiandiscord.de>
Message-ID: <200307022040.07576.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Wednesday 02 July 2003 20:15, Anonymous wrote:
> There are very few in the general population that are cut to be true
> dissenters and act upon it. Now this age brings in the additional
> requirement: they have to also be decent engineers. As a result,
> there are very few left.

On the other hand, it doesn't take very many.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From juicy at melontraffickers.com  Wed Jul  2 23:06:14 2003
From: juicy at melontraffickers.com (A.Melon)
Date: Wed,  2 Jul 2003 23:06:14 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: All quiet on the western front
Message-ID: <948c9fbf1fdbc0e1fb5bc9d85563efa2@melontraffickers.com>

Hi, Tim,

I'm glad that you have a bout of lucidity.

The government essentially won the crypto battle, marginalizing crypto
proponents, quietly getting media and corporations under control when
crypto is concerned, and generally rising the stakes. Those of you who
have access to corporate product development documents that relate to
communications know what I am talking about. CALEA etcl. It's there,
it's real and I think that about 5-10% of development resources are
taken by it.

Most cypherpunks were relatively highly paid engineers with
comfortable lives and some time on their hands, so while crypto was
fashionable it was cool to hang out at meetings and have pipe dreams
about taking on the state. Even then, scum like del Torto started to
bank ahead and sell to the "freedom fighters" and "good cops".

But then it got much worse. After the WTC theater, being present at
essentially anti-state meetings was not considered totally benign. And
also the salaries were gone, so this beer and TV Saturday alternative
suddenly stopped being alternative at all.

So we're back to the fact that highly paid engineers in crypto field
are really not automatically revolutionaries. On the contrary.

There are very few in the general population that are cut to be true
dissenters and act upon it. Now this age brings in the additional
requirement: they have to also be decent engineers. As a result, there
are very few left.




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Thu Jul  3 00:15:42 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 00:15:42 -0700
Subject: SF meet: future of feta, port, sherry, gorgonzola at stake
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030702183933.04c15570@mail.well.com>
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030703000823.02e31af0@idiom.com>

Great.  First they take the Champagne, now they want the port and sherry, 
and feta cheese.
Next it'll be the Chianti, and they'll find something wrong with fava beans 
as well.

Worse than that, they'll make Americans stop eating Hamburgers,
and the vast right wing conspiracy already banned French fries.

(I'm actually rather surprised by feta cheese being on the list -
my local Iranian grocery regularly has feta from France,
Greece, Bulgaria, and one or two other places.)




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Jul  3 00:16:28 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 00:16:28 -0700
Subject: architecture as torture
Message-ID: <3F03D84C.B6A03850@cdc.gov>

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/27/1043534004548.html




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Jul  3 00:41:15 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 00:41:15 -0700
Subject: Reporter writing article on proffr/mattd and threats
Message-ID: <3F03DE1B.9A3CBFCD@cdc.gov>

At 04:09 PM 7/2/03 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>I received a phone call today from a newspaper reporter who's writing
an
>article on mattd/proffr and wanted background on the cypherpunks group
or
>movement, as he put it. The reporter -- who covers crime, law
enforcement,
>and the courts

How does one authenticate that a voice on a phone is a reporter?

Or is my sarcasm/wryness detector stuck?

---
We are all  reporters, we are all book sellers. We are all first class
objects. --Tim May




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Jul  3 01:00:12 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 01:00:12 -0700
Subject: talking to coworkers = deemed exports
Message-ID: <3F03E28C.6808C824@cdc.gov>

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030623S0011

The Commerce Department considers some U.S. transfers of commercial
technologies to
foreign workers as exports. In some cases, U.S. companies may be
required to obtain a
deemed-export license before giving foreign-born employees access to
sensitive
technologies.

[shades of the old crypto days, where you couldn't ask a colleage from
another country
to review your code.. this time its China, India they're freaking about]




From discord-nobody at erisiandiscord.de  Wed Jul  2 17:15:43 2003
From: discord-nobody at erisiandiscord.de (Anonymous)
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 02:14:43 +0159 (CEST)
Subject: All quiet on the western front
Message-ID: <948c9fbf1fdbc0e1fb5bc9d85563efa2@erisiandiscord.de>

Hi, Tim,

I'm glad that you have a bout of lucidity.

The government essentially won the crypto battle, marginalizing crypto
proponents, quietly getting media and corporations under control when
crypto is concerned, and generally rising the stakes. Those of you who
have access to corporate product development documents that relate to
communications know what I am talking about. CALEA etcl. It's there,
it's real and I think that about 5-10% of development resources are
taken by it.

Most cypherpunks were relatively highly paid engineers with
comfortable lives and some time on their hands, so while crypto was
fashionable it was cool to hang out at meetings and have pipe dreams
about taking on the state. Even then, scum like del Torto started to
bank ahead and sell to the "freedom fighters" and "good cops".

But then it got much worse. After the WTC theater, being present at
essentially anti-state meetings was not considered totally benign. And
also the salaries were gone, so this beer and TV Saturday alternative
suddenly stopped being alternative at all.

So we're back to the fact that highly paid engineers in crypto field
are really not automatically revolutionaries. On the contrary.

There are very few in the general population that are cut to be true
dissenters and act upon it. Now this age brings in the additional
requirement: they have to also be decent engineers. As a result, there
are very few left.




From jy at jya.com  Thu Jul  3 09:34:30 2003
From: jy at jya.com (John Young)
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 09:34:30 -0700
Subject: Reporter writing article on proffr/mattd and threats
In-Reply-To: <3F03DE1B.9A3CBFCD@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <E19Y4En-000408-00@hall.mail.mindspring.net>

It is a fact that proffr/mattd is Declan. Confirming the practice
of cpunks confecting imaginary personas to vent their inner
evildoing then protesting the vile behavior, disclaiming any
contact with their perps. Then campaigning to have the shits
banned from an putative open liars forum.

That's what non-fiction was invented for, telling lies to uphold
the truth -- which is itself a favorite conceit of the non-fictioneers.

Facts, just the irrefutable facts, are the makings of reputations
made in heaven and hell -- two more tools of the narrative
trade pliers.

Truth hoots. Prosecutors are hooters. If the facts don't convince
grand juries, avid readers all, then cook up an expert to swear
on a bible cookbook.




From jya at pipeline.com  Thu Jul  3 09:57:21 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 09:57:21 -0700
Subject: Web Privacy War
Message-ID: <E19Y4au-0004NV-00@hall.mail.mindspring.net>

WSJ today reports on the war between web privacy firms
and the feds:

  http://cryptome.org/web-priv-war.htm

Lance Cottrell and other privacy protection firms are featured --
does Anonymizer really bring in up to a $1M a year?

Lance says he doesn't keep logs thus cannot respond to
subpoenas. Other privacy firms are said to cooperate
with the feds. One brags that national security trumps
making money. As if they natsec is not the biggest money
maker of all time, though homesec is coming on strong.
Privsec in the race, though deniability is mandatory.

It notes the demise of Zero Knowledge just before the Patriot
Act started the boom in people seeking protection from 
official spies. Darn. But then we don't know what ZK is
doing black with the contacts it eagerly gathered in its 
meetings with the feds.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Jul  3 07:47:13 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 10:47:13 -0400
Subject: All quiet on the western front
Message-ID: <BAY7-F5eUBUhr3ukkwu00014f60@hotmail.com>

A. Melon wrote...

"There are very few in the general population that are cut to be true
dissenters and act upon it. Now this age brings in the additional
requirement: they have to also be decent engineers. As a result, there
are very few left."

I agree with this assessment, but would also suggest that Tim May's 
old-fogeyism has some validity to it. As far as I'm concerned, the state has 
successfully bonded with big media to pretty much stifle a lot of critical 
thinking, particularly about what other Americans believe. We saw it with 
the war protests--despite the fact that the numbers were larger than during 
Vietnam, the media was successful in (first of all) convincing Americans 
that the vast majority of Americans supported the war/troops/president. 
After that, since most Americans believed the right thing was to support the 
war (because "everybody else supports it"), they then came to quasi-support 
it, or at least shut up about it. And still, no Osama, no Saddam, and no 
WMD, but only "kooks" and "commies" are screaming about it.

Thus, to go back o your point, you're starting off with a small population 
of dissenters, so that once you pass down through the needs for engineering 
and math skills, you're left with very little.

On the other hand, the only thing that's stopping me from coding up my 
"eJector"  is a full time job and trying to live in the little spare time I 
have. So I guess I'm in the population you describe and will be, as long as 
I remain employed.

But then again...if someone I actually know gets tortured or whatever, that 
could change at any minute. Then I'll be the REAL...

-Tyler Durden



>From: "A.Melon" <juicy at melontraffickers.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: All quiet on the western front
>Date: Wed,  2 Jul 2003 23:06:14 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Hi, Tim,
>
>I'm glad that you have a bout of lucidity.
>
>The government essentially won the crypto battle, marginalizing crypto
>proponents, quietly getting media and corporations under control when
>crypto is concerned, and generally rising the stakes. Those of you who
>have access to corporate product development documents that relate to
>communications know what I am talking about. CALEA etcl. It's there,
>it's real and I think that about 5-10% of development resources are
>taken by it.
>
>Most cypherpunks were relatively highly paid engineers with
>comfortable lives and some time on their hands, so while crypto was
>fashionable it was cool to hang out at meetings and have pipe dreams
>about taking on the state. Even then, scum like del Torto started to
>bank ahead and sell to the "freedom fighters" and "good cops".
>
>But then it got much worse. After the WTC theater, being present at
>essentially anti-state meetings was not considered totally benign. And
>also the salaries were gone, so this beer and TV Saturday alternative
>suddenly stopped being alternative at all.
>
>So we're back to the fact that highly paid engineers in crypto field
>are really not automatically revolutionaries. On the contrary.
>
>There are very few in the general population that are cut to be true
>dissenters and act upon it. Now this age brings in the additional
>requirement: they have to also be decent engineers. As a result, there
>are very few left.

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Fri Jul  4 01:54:08 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2003 01:54:08 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: A firewall problem?
In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.2.20030509165341.00b1efe8@frodo.hserus.net>
Message-ID: <20030704085408.58470.qmail@web21207.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,


Wont the following cause a firewall breach-


First we capture   inbound packets to a firewall
assuming we have a man in the middle(M).

If (M) use block replay on packets he can inject bits
and pieces of his own information to an inbound
firewall and can go undetected?

M doesn't alter the source and destination ip's and is
perfectly acceptable to the firewall.Even a timestamp
won't work since a packet is expected at any time.

We can still re-calculate the CRC of Checksum field by
the same attack and replace the old crc/checksum after
changing various required bit positions.

Do firewall programs use initialisation vectors and a
chaning mode to prevent this attack?


Regards Sarath.


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Fri Jul  4 01:55:43 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2003 01:55:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: A firewall problem?
In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.2.20030509165341.00b1efe8@frodo.hserus.net>
Message-ID: <20030704085543.42463.qmail@web21203.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,


Wont the following cause a firewall breach-


First we capture   inbound packets to a firewall
assuming we have a man in the middle(M).

If (M) use block replay on packets he can inject bits
and pieces of his own information to an inbound
firewall and can go undetected?

M doesn't alter the source and destination ip's and is
perfectly acceptable to the firewall.Even a timestamp
won't work since a packet is expected at any time.

We can still re-calculate the CRC of Checksum field by
the same attack and replace the old crc/checksum after
changing various required bit positions.

Do firewall programs use initialisation vectors and a
chaning mode to prevent this attack?


Regards Sarath.


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com




From sunder at sunder.net  Fri Jul  4 07:53:16 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2003 10:53:16 -0400 (edt)
Subject: A firewall problem?
In-Reply-To: <20030704085543.42463.qmail@web21203.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307041032410.19553-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

I'm not 100% sure what you're talking about, but from what I got, it
depends on the firewall type, and the location of the man in the middle.  

Various firewall types:

Simple packet filters.

Slightly smarter packet filters that also do NAT and keep track of
connections - (this is needed for the NAT to work because it needs to
change the src/dest ports to differentiate between hosts behind the
NAT's.  i.e. ipf, iptables, etc...)

Application layer proxies (i.e. socks, etc.) but those that validate the
traffic is what's its supposed to be. (stateful inspection.)



Generally your attacker needs to own a router upstream from you to be
sucessful in replay attacks.  But if you use a secure encrypted transport,
it gets much, much harder.  (i.e. encrypt the payload, not just the
headers.)

If the attacker is just somewhere else on the wild internet, he can send
you packets with forged src addresses, but he won't be able see the
replies, so at most it's a denial of service on your machine.

So your attacker needs to either use his real ip address (or one of a
machine he already cracked) or he needs to own the router directly
upstream from you (i.e. your ISP) so your packets don't have any path to
go through but through him.

If he's on your network, or directly upstream, he can do something called
tcp-hijacking.  There is some interesting related stuff here for you to
research to get you answers regarding this:

http://cs.baylor.edu/~donahoo/NIUNet/hijack.html


There are possible ways around this issue, but would likely require an
encrypted sessions (ipsec, ssl/tls, or ssh for example.)

If you just have a simple packet filter, it's possible to use such things.  
If you have a hardened application layer proxy server that inspects
packets, you can be a bit more secure.

An important thing to implement is secure tcp sequence numbers.  They make
the sequence # predictions harder, so it's not so easy hijack the
connections.

But this depends on your OS and tcp/ip implementation:

The best paper on this I've seen so far:
http://razor.bindview.com/publish/papers/tcpseq.html

And here's some security alerts regarding weak sequence #'s for example:

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/security_sources_article-2968.html
http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2001-09.html

Again, if your attacker owns the router directly upstream from you, that
won't help very much because you can assume that they'd be able to
intercept and alter packets in real time.  This of course isn't trivial,
but it is doable with fast enough hardware if located directly upstream
from you.  

But it won't allow the attacker to hijack encrypted connections to known
hosts, or hosts using properly signed (by a well known CA) SSL
certificates.  It will allow the attacker to do plenty of monkeying with
your email (both inbound and outbound), DNS, and unencrypted web traffic,
and possibly ssh sessions to machines you haven't logged into before
(where you have to say "Yes, this is the machine I want to login to.")


(He won't be able to do much against encrypted emails, but he can always
frustrate you by deleting them or slightly altering them so they fail to
decrypt, so if you're clueless, you'll go to plaintext believing that
this encryption stuff is too much of a headache and it's unreliable, and
he'll be able to monkey with the plaintext ones.)


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Sarad AV wrote:

> hi,
> 
> 
> Wont the following cause a firewall breach-
> 
> 
> First we capture   inbound packets to a firewall
> assuming we have a man in the middle(M).
> 
> If (M) use block replay on packets he can inject bits
> and pieces of his own information to an inbound
> firewall and can go undetected?
> 
> M doesn't alter the source and destination ip's and is
> perfectly acceptable to the firewall.Even a timestamp
> won't work since a packet is expected at any time.
> 
> We can still re-calculate the CRC of Checksum field by
> the same attack and replace the old crc/checksum after
> changing various required bit positions.
> 
> Do firewall programs use initialisation vectors and a
> chaning mode to prevent this attack?




From jya at pipeline.com  Fri Jul  4 13:38:57 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 13:38:57 -0700
Subject: Radiation Sniffer
Message-ID: <E19YUWs-0003cn-00@hall.mail.mindspring.net>

The radiation sniffer in NYC and proposed for elsewhere
in the US is described in this DOE doc:

  http://www.eml.doe.gov/factsheets/HS_Platform.pdf

Here's the aircraft monitoring program:

  http://www.eml.doe.gov/factsheets/rampscan.pdf

There's more on a variety of homeland security monitoring 
programs at

    http://www.eml.doe.gov/factsheets/

EML is the DOE's Environmental Monitoring Laboratory
located in NYC, whose history goes back to the earliest
days of the nuclear age when it was set up to track
medical and health effects of nuclear weapons. It now
does worldwide monitoring of nuclear activities.

Why is it located in NYC? Up on the 7th Floor of a 
non-descript office building, along with a batch of
federal agencies such as a passport office, social
security and what not. The classified work of the
lab must account for the amazing entrance security 
you have to go through to get a passport renewed.

Reminds of going to a plain-jane office building at
an outer edge of DC a while back, heading for a
meeting with a construction firm, when, bam, step 
inside the lobby and there you are facing a heavily 
armed phalanx of federal police and camouflaged 
soldiers. You ask the M-16 bristling receptionist
about the firm and she barks for the team to surround
the perp, demands ID, says you know where your
are.

Uh, sure, I say, this is the capital of the free world.

Smart ass, she says, not any more. This country is 
ours. Show me what's in that bag.

So I did.

She screamed when it dawned on her what she was
seeing in my tote. The troops jumped back as if
electroshocked.

Sir, she said, we would appreciate it if you would
just leave. Yes, sir, the troops chorused, just please
leave the premises, what's in that bag is not what 
we enlisted to handle.

Here, I said, taking the device out of the tote, have a
taste.

No, no, no, they all yelped, and backed against the
wall, legs shaking, weapons clattering to the floor,
please take it away. Have mercy, sir.

Well, I said, okay, if it scares you, and put away the 
gleaming jewel of kryptonite, titled fine print US
Constitution, printed in China. 




From cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com  Sat Jul  5 05:07:49 2003
From: cypherpunks at salvagingelectrons.com (Tim Meehan)
Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 08:07:49 -0400
Subject: Brinword on again in Kelowna, BC: CanPrivComm's replacement
  drops police surveillence camera lawsuit
Message-ID: <lqfdgv42lr4qo2q2fms7c05bpda7bdnofa@4ax.com>

Too bad George Radwanski didn't just bring his lunch to work more often.  This
was one of his more prominent causes, an important one, which his successor is
just rolling over on.

---

http://tinyurl.com/g30t

The Toronto Star
Jul. 5, 2003. 01:00 AM
 
Radwanski stand-in cleans house

Sidelines aides, ends pricey B.C. court challenge Staff co-operating with
auditors: Robert Marleau

TONDA MACCHARLES
OTTAWA BUREAU

OTTAWARobert Marleau, the man replacing former privacy commissioner George
Radwanski, has moved quickly to overhaul the beleaguered office, halting a
$250,000 court challenge to RCMP surveillance cameras yesterday and sidelining
two of Radwanski's most controversial senior aides.

Marleau, a former clerk of the Commons who is filling the job on an interim
basis, said in an interview he dropped the high-profile court action in Kelowna,
B.C., that Radwanski had undertaken as a crusade because it was not "a useful
way of spending public funds."

Marleau also accepted on Wednesday the resignation and early retirement of Art
Lamarche, Radwanski's chief of corporate services. 

Marleau said there was no special incentive package offered to Lamarche to
retire July 31; it was Lamarche's own decision.

The interim privacy commissioner also ordered Dona Vallieres, Radwanski's
director of communications and frequent travel companion, to take "special
leave" with full pay pending the outcome of Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's
financial probe.

"When I came in, I took stock of the situation and thought it was in her best
interests and our best interests while the audit was ongoing, and pending its
results, that she go on special leave," Marleau said. He would not speculate on
the likelihood of Vallieres returning to her job. "The audit will dictate the
outcome," he said.

Vallieres travelled extensively with her former boss to Paris, Madrid, London,
Rome, New York and New Zealand among other destinations. Her expense claims show
she often dined at the same Ottawa restaurants preferred by the ex-commissioner.

A self-described sufferer of chronic fatigue syndrome, Vallieres had refused to
appear before the Commons committee investigating Radwanski's expenses, saying
she was ill. She did, however, appear at Radwanski's news conference the
following day.

Vallieres has declined interviews, but indignantly denied to a CTV reporter she
had any improper relationship with Radwanski.

In 2001-2002, documents show Radwanski claimed $182,777 in domestic and foreign
travel expenses. Vallieres claimed a total of $129,542 for the same period.

Marleau declined to reveal the salaries of Vallieres and Lamarche, who is on
"special leave" with full pay until his July 31 retirement, but both are
considered senior executives in the public service. Under recently announced pay
increases, an executive's salary ranges from $102,200 to $165,000.

The NDP's Pat Martin said he was pleased with the moves by Marleau, and said the
results of the auditor general's investigation may mean future sanction for
Radwanski's former aides.

"(Canadians) should be comforted by the fact that any maladministration of
public funds may be considered a criminal matter," he said.

Neither Lamarche nor Vallieres returned the Star's calls yesterday.

Marleau, and all senior officials in the privacy office, have already met with
and provided documents to federal auditors from Fraser's office, and more
interviews are set for Monday, he said. As well, a "broad" audit of staffing
practices by the Public Service Commission is underway.

"As far as I'm concerned, they have complete access," Marleau said. "I look
forward to their findings."

As for the Kelowna surveillance camera court challenge Radwanski had launched,
Marleau said he made a "risk assessment" of the likelihood of success and the
future legal costs, and believed it was "not reasonable" to proceed.

Up to now, the merits of the case hadn't been argued, yet the challenge had
already cost $250,000 to litigate, mostly in fees to Toronto lawyer Morris
Manning. The challenge, Marleau said, was not "the best use of funds of this
small office."

The federal justice department opposed Radwanski's efforts to bring the matter
to court, and Radwanski had lost his first bid for standing to intervene. 

Marleau said the office still has concerns about the privacy implications of
surveillance cameras, and if it received a complaint from an individual Kelowna
resident, which it has not, it would "pursue" the matter, and apply a test of
"reasonableness" to the use of surveillance equipment. 
--
Tim Meehan, Communications Director
Ontario Consumers for Safe Access to Recreational Cannabis
tim at ocsarc.org * http://www.ocsarc.org * 416-854-6343




From mv at cdc.gov  Sat Jul  5 09:03:00 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 09:03:00 -0700
Subject: [Reverse panopticon] Govt Information Awareness
Message-ID: <3F06F6B4.3A0AF073@cdc.gov>

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59495,00.html

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab unveiled the Government Information
Awareness, or GIA, website
Friday. Using applications developed at the Media Lab, GIA collects and
collates information about
government programs, plans and politicians from the general public and
numerous online sources.
Currently the database contains information on more than 3,000 public
figures.

The premise of GIA is that if the government has a right to know
personal details about citizens, then
citizens have a right to similar information about the government.




From mv at cdc.gov  Sat Jul  5 09:19:33 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 09:19:33 -0700
Subject: A firewall problem?
Message-ID: <3F06FA95.9D9E04C7@cdc.gov>

At 01:55 AM 7/4/03 -0700, Sarad AV wrote:
>Wont the following cause a firewall breach-
>
>First we capture   inbound packets to a firewall
>assuming we have a man in the middle(M).
>
>If (M) use block replay on packets he can inject bits
>and pieces of his own information to an inbound
>firewall and can go undetected?
>
>M doesn't alter the source and destination ip's and is
>perfectly acceptable to the firewall.Even a timestamp
>won't work since a packet is expected at any time.
>
>We can still re-calculate the CRC of Checksum field by
>the same attack and replace the old crc/checksum after
>changing various required bit positions.
>
>Do firewall programs use initialisation vectors and a
>chaning mode to prevent this attack?

You are confusing a firewall with a protocol like IPsec that
provides authentication and replay resistance (using crypto).
A firewall is just a packet filter --if this field is that, do this.

(Steve Bellovin has an online book about them you might enjoy.)
Sometimes they're clever and look inside
the streams, but this won't resist the attacks you're talking about.
Various components of IPsec will.  Read up on how it does that.

-----
http://www.geocities.com/the_irvine_observer/




From timcmay at got.net  Sat Jul  5 19:51:07 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2003 19:51:07 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307060412250.939-100000@Zeta>
Message-ID: <B106084C-AF5C-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Saturday, July 5, 2003, at 07:13  PM, Thomas Shaddack wrote:

> Pondering. Vast majority of the CD/DVD "protection" methods is based on
> various deviations from the standards, or more accurately, how such
> deviations are (or aren't) handled by the drive firmware.
>
> However, we can sidestep the firmware.
>
> The drive contains the moving part with the head assembly. There is an
> important output signal there: the raw analog signal bounced from the
> disk and amplified.
>
> We can tap it and connect it to a highspeed digital oscilloscope card. 
> And
> sample obscene amount of data from it. In comparison with fast-enough
> ADCs, disk space is cheap. The problem can be in bandwidth, but for the
> drive speed set up to possible minimum (or for "normal" players) the
> contemporary machines should be sufficient. Real-time operating system
> (maybe RTOS-Linux) may be necessary.

No RTOS/Linux is needed for fast sampling, which has been happening for 
several decades now.  Nor is a digital oscilloscope needed.

(FWIW, I used a Nicolet digital oscilloscope, and also a LeCroy CAMAC 
digitizer, for some high-speed single-shot event capture--the strike of 
an alpha particle--nearly 25 years ago. The OS for our data collection 
computers were, variously, RSX-11M and VMS.)

Video ADC cards are already vastly capable at sampling video streams.

>
> We get the record of the signal captured from the drive's head - raw, 
> with
> everything - dirt, drop-outs, sector headers, ECC bits. The low-level
> format is fairly well documented; now we have to postprocess the 
> signal.
> Conversion from analog to digital data and then from the CD 
> representation
> to 8-bit-per-byte should be fairly straightforward (at least for 
> someone
> skilled with digital signal processing). Now we can identify the
> individual sectors on the disc and extract them to a disc image file 
> that
> we can handle later by normal means.

So? Yes, this is all possible. Any moderately well-equipped lab can do 
this. So?

>
> If we'd fill this idea with water, would it leak? Where? Why?
>

I have no idea what you mean by "fill this idea with water," but by all 
means go ahead and rig up such a machine.

Personally, I already make about 1-2 recordable DVDs per day, on 
average, without any hint of copy protection or Macrovision. I usually 
use the 3-hour speed on my DVD recorder, and can put one high-quality 
movie on the first part and then, by using a slightly slower speed, 
another movie on the remaining part. If "DVD quality" is needed, I 
record at the 2-hour setting. If "better than DVD quality" is needed, 
as from a DV camcorder source, I record at the 1-hour speed.

If you build a machine which has even higher digitization rates, taken 
ahead of any DVD spec circuitry, you will get about what I am getting 
at the 1-hour setting.

A very limited market for consumers to buy such machines. Video pirate 
labs very probably already have such rigs set up.

--Tim May
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice."--Barry Goldwater




From mv at cdc.gov  Sat Jul  5 22:48:42 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 22:48:42 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <3F07B83A.2C8391E2@cdc.gov>

At 04:13 AM 7/6/03 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>Pondering. Vast majority of the CD/DVD "protection" methods is based on

>various deviations from the standards, or more accurately, how such
>deviations are (or aren't) handled by the drive firmware.
>
>However, we can sidestep the firmware.
>
>The drive contains the moving part with the head assembly. There is an
>important output signal there: the raw analog signal bounced from the
>disk and amplified.
>
>We can tap it and connect it to a highspeed digital oscilloscope card.

This is a valid idea.  You do have to get in there with delicate probes
to read the amplified analog signal, its not available past the drive.

The people who already do this are called test engineers for CD drive
companies.
Or the data-recovery techs for the NSA et al.

I doubt that hardcore pirates bother, they may as well just do a single
high quality
ADC.   That, as has been mentioned here before, is always the fatal
flaw, even
if you put the DAC in your DRM chip (and solve the resulting noise
issues..)

----
"Yes, we know they have logic analyzers in Hong Kong" --a Sony engineer
when
confronted with weaknesses in the design of a DRM box




From mv at cdc.gov  Sat Jul  5 23:51:34 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 23:51:34 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
Message-ID: <3F07C6F6.B1BDBCD8@cdc.gov>

Slashdot pointed to this story of a man indicted via
his *relative's* DNA sample:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/3044282.stm

But an interesting, unmentioned issue is this: in population
DNA surveys you find that a lot of purported fathers *aren't*.
So the possibility of indicting a cuckolded man on the basis
of nominal (only) relatives is quite real.

[list rel: tech DBs, errors, law, biosurveillance]




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Sat Jul  5 19:13:32 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 04:13:32 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307060412250.939-100000@Zeta>

Pondering. Vast majority of the CD/DVD "protection" methods is based on
various deviations from the standards, or more accurately, how such
deviations are (or aren't) handled by the drive firmware.

However, we can sidestep the firmware.

The drive contains the moving part with the head assembly. There is an
important output signal there: the raw analog signal bounced from the
disk and amplified.

We can tap it and connect it to a highspeed digital oscilloscope card. And
sample obscene amount of data from it. In comparison with fast-enough
ADCs, disk space is cheap. The problem can be in bandwidth, but for the
drive speed set up to possible minimum (or for "normal" players) the
contemporary machines should be sufficient. Real-time operating system
(maybe RTOS-Linux) may be necessary.

We get the record of the signal captured from the drive's head - raw, with
everything - dirt, drop-outs, sector headers, ECC bits. The low-level
format is fairly well documented; now we have to postprocess the signal.
Conversion from analog to digital data and then from the CD representation
to 8-bit-per-byte should be fairly straightforward (at least for someone
skilled with digital signal processing). Now we can identify the
individual sectors on the disc and extract them to a disc image file that
we can handle later by normal means.

We can push the idea a step further, making a stripped-down CD/DVD drive
that would be able basically just to follow the spiral track with its head
in constant linear velocity (easier to analyze than CAV) mode, with the
ability to control the speed in accordance with how fast (and expensive)
ADC, bus, and disks we have, and the possibility to interrupt/resume
scanning anytimes in accordance with how much disk space we have (or to
scan just a small area of the disc).

As a welcomed side effect, not only we'd get a device for circumvention of
just about any contemporary (and possibly a good deal of the future ones)
optical media "protections", but we would also get a powerful tool for
retrieving data from even very grossly damaged discs, for audit of
behavior of CD/DVD writers and CD vendors (eg, if they don't attempt to
sneak in something like a hidden serial number of the writer), and for
access to all areas of the discs - including the eventual ones unreachable
through the drive's own firmware.

If we'd fill this idea with water, would it leak? Where? Why?




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Jul  6 08:49:19 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2003 08:49:19 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <3F0844FF.54E3EAD9@cdc.gov>

At 03:08 PM 7/6/03 +0300, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>. A writing drive capable of working at such a low level
>could be used to experiment with new encodings beyond what standard
CD's
>can do -- say, substituting CIRC with RSBC and gaining some extra room
on
>the disc, getting rid of the subchannels, a more intelligent coding of
>disc addresses... Breaking compatibility wouldn't be too useful, but it

>sure would be fun.

And think of the ulcers you would cause the TLAs!  Assuming they got
your
disks and not your custom drive...

>Now you simply can't do it.

There's a good reason why, viz: it would cost the drive developer to
allow
or export this flexibility.  Since very few customers are sick enough
:-) to want to invent
their own incompatible formats it simply isn't worth their
development-engineering time or
end-product resources (eg gates) in such a commodity product.




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Sun Jul  6 12:18:24 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 12:18:24 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <3F0844FF.54E3EAD9@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20030706191824.28449.qmail@web40614.mail.yahoo.com>

> There's a good reason why, viz: it would cost the drive developer to allow
> or export this flexibility.  Since very few customers are sick enough

This will go the same way as radio. First, you have hundreds of separate boxes,
each doing some custom modulation/frequency gig (am, fm, shortwave, TV, cell,
spread spectrum, whatever) and you had to have a separate apparatus for each
instance.

With software radio, you just have one box that can do it all (and it made all
protection-by-custom-modulation obsolete ... I've seen it playing "protected"
HDTV signals.)

So it's easy to imagine universal "software" disc player/recorder that let's
one do any modulation technique. Not that it would provide protection, because
the same tools will be available to attackers, but at least the crypto may
become more fun, going back to physical domain.


=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
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From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sun Jul  6 11:09:30 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2003 14:09:30 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <BAY7-F42h0IKUo87E4u00047d62@hotmail.com>

As a basic idea it seems relatively workable. However, there's one detail 
that perhaps you might want to know about:

"We can push the idea a step further, making a stripped-down CD/DVD drive
that would be able basically just to follow the spiral track with its head
in constant linear velocity"


Unlike a vinyl record, the CD grooves don't form a spiral...they are 
concentric circles. Also, the beginning of the CD is towards the center, the 
end towards the edge.


-TD




>From: Thomas Shaddack <shaddack at ns.arachne.cz>
>To: cypherpunks <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
>Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 04:13:32 +0200 (CEST)
>
>Pondering. Vast majority of the CD/DVD "protection" methods is based on
>various deviations from the standards, or more accurately, how such
>deviations are (or aren't) handled by the drive firmware.
>
>However, we can sidestep the firmware.
>
>The drive contains the moving part with the head assembly. There is an
>important output signal there: the raw analog signal bounced from the
>disk and amplified.
>
>We can tap it and connect it to a highspeed digital oscilloscope card. And
>sample obscene amount of data from it. In comparison with fast-enough
>ADCs, disk space is cheap. The problem can be in bandwidth, but for the
>drive speed set up to possible minimum (or for "normal" players) the
>contemporary machines should be sufficient. Real-time operating system
>(maybe RTOS-Linux) may be necessary.
>
>We get the record of the signal captured from the drive's head - raw, with
>everything - dirt, drop-outs, sector headers, ECC bits. The low-level
>format is fairly well documented; now we have to postprocess the signal.
>Conversion from analog to digital data and then from the CD representation
>to 8-bit-per-byte should be fairly straightforward (at least for someone
>skilled with digital signal processing). Now we can identify the
>individual sectors on the disc and extract them to a disc image file that
>we can handle later by normal means.
>
>We can push the idea a step further, making a stripped-down CD/DVD drive
>that would be able basically just to follow the spiral track with its head
>in constant linear velocity (easier to analyze than CAV) mode, with the
>ability to control the speed in accordance with how fast (and expensive)
>ADC, bus, and disks we have, and the possibility to interrupt/resume
>scanning anytimes in accordance with how much disk space we have (or to
>scan just a small area of the disc).
>
>As a welcomed side effect, not only we'd get a device for circumvention of
>just about any contemporary (and possibly a good deal of the future ones)
>optical media "protections", but we would also get a powerful tool for
>retrieving data from even very grossly damaged discs, for audit of
>behavior of CD/DVD writers and CD vendors (eg, if they don't attempt to
>sneak in something like a hidden serial number of the writer), and for
>access to all areas of the discs - including the eventual ones unreachable
>through the drive's own firmware.
>
>If we'd fill this idea with water, would it leak? Where? Why?

_________________________________________________________________
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http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From decoy at iki.fi  Sun Jul  6 05:08:54 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 15:08:54 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307060412250.939-100000@Zeta>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307060412250.939-100000@Zeta>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307061448320.25480@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-06, Thomas Shaddack uttered to cypherpunks:

>If we'd fill this idea with water, would it leak? Where? Why?

It wouldn't leak, and I've never really understood why standard ATAPI
drives don't allow access to the raw data. As you say, that sort of tool
would have quite a number of applications besides piracy. For example,
taking MP3 backups of my CD's, I already would have needed error
concealment, a feature CD-ROM's do not implement when ripping audio. You
can't implement that well without knowing where the error correction step
failed, and that data isn't easily available.

Also, I've always been fascinated by the fact that there's really no
reason to follow the CD specs beyond 8/14 modulation other than
compatibility. A writing drive capable of working at such a low level
could be used to experiment with new encodings beyond what standard CD's
can do -- say, substituting CIRC with RSBC and gaining some extra room on
the disc, getting rid of the subchannels, a more intelligent coding of
disc addresses... Breaking compatibility wouldn't be too useful, but it
sure would be fun. Now you simply can't do it.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From cpunk at lne.com  Sun Jul  6 20:00:01 2003
From: cpunk at lne.com (cpunk at lne.com)
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 20:00:01 -0700
Subject: Cypherpunks List Info
Message-ID: <200307070300.h67301F4007397@gw.lne.com>

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information

Last updated: Sep 12, 2002

This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk

Instructions on unsubscribing from the list can be found below.


0. Introduction

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1. Filtering

The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a
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There are three basic flavors of filtering CDRs: "raw", which send all
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Message modification usually happens on mail going in or out to each CDR's
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3. Privacy

Privacy policy indicates if the list will allow anyone ("open"), or only
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Note that if you post, being on a "private" list doesn't mean much,
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Unsubscribing from the cypherpunks list:
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How to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to:

Get your mail client to show all the headers (Microsoft calls this
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Once you have figured out which CDR you're subscribed to, look in the
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"I'm subscribed to a filtering CDR yet I still see lots of junk postings".
At this writing there are a few sociopaths on the cypherpunks list who
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Procmail is a good one, although it works on Unix and Unix-like systems
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course want to make your own decisions on which (ab)users to filter.

# mailing lists:
# filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherspool folder, discarding
# mail from loons.  All CDRs set their From: line to 'owner-cypherpunks'.
# /dev/null is unix for the trash can.
:0
* ^From.*owner-cypherpunks at .*
{
    :0:
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	/dev/null

    :0:
    cypherspool
}


7. List of current CDRs


All commands are sent in the body of mail unless otherwise noted.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Algebra:

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CCC:

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Info: http://www.lne.com/cpunk; "info cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Openpgp:

[openpgp seems to have dropped off the end of the world-- it
doesn't return anything from sending help queries.  Ericm, 8/7/01]

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 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to local CDR
   subscribers.
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Info: http://www.pro-ns.net/cpunk




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Mon Jul  7 02:19:28 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 02:19:28 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Finding collision resistant hash functions
In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.2.20030509165341.00b1efe8@frodo.hserus.net>
Message-ID: <20030707091928.46589.qmail@web21203.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,


Is there a polynomial time  algorithm that will find
collision hash functions or how are we supposed to
find collision free hash functions?What exactly is the
difficulty in finding collision free hash functions?

Regards Sarath.

__________________________________
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From decoy at iki.fi  Sun Jul  6 16:33:06 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 02:33:06 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <3F0844FF.54E3EAD9@cdc.gov>
References: <3F0844FF.54E3EAD9@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307070212330.25480@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-06, Major Variola (ret) uttered to cypherpunks at lne.com:

>There's a good reason why, viz: it would cost the drive developer to
>allow or export this flexibility.

But that's just the point. They need to have the raw signal available at
one time or another. Picking it up and sending it down the line should be
utterly trivial, too. It will have its price, but the price will also be
negligible. Especially since the ATAPI protocol has steadily grown more
complicated, which would suggest they are making libraries to handle it in
a standardised fashion. If they have such a library, and the raw data, why
shy away from yielding it to the user? I mean, the cost is far less than,
say, implementing digital rippping capability in the first place, with the
available chips.

I'd guess either because of a) terminal stupidity or b) benefits to scale
in making it sure people go with compatibility. As there probably have to
be some limits to how stupid engineers capable of making things like
writable CD's can be, I'd have to go with the second alternative.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 05:00:48 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 05:00:48 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <3F0960F0.45EEDF26@cdc.gov>

At 02:33 AM 7/7/03 +0300, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>On 2003-07-06, Major Variola (ret) uttered to cypherpunks at lne.com:
>
>>There's a good reason why, viz: it would cost the drive developer to
>>allow or export this flexibility.
>
>I'd guess either because of a) terminal stupidity or b) benefits to
scale
>in making it sure people go with compatibility. As there probably have
to
>be some limits to how stupid engineers capable of making things like
>writable CD's can be, I'd have to go with the second alternative.

Frankly its obvious you haven't worked (or thought about
the constraints) on a commercial
product with a deadline / resource constraints
or worked on something extremely cost sensitive
like commodity drives/chipsets.

Here, ponder this: why are there no oxygen sensor
or manifold temperature or ignition-phase (etc) displays
in ordinary cars?
(Although there probably are in custom race cars)  You
know (much like the analog CD signal) they're being measured
and used by the ECU.  So, why not?
Chew on that one for a while, grasshopper.

Economics is applied physics.




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 05:09:46 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 05:09:46 -0700
Subject: Finding collision resistant hash functions
Message-ID: <3F09630A.148FCF@cdc.gov>

At 02:19 AM 7/7/03 -0700, Sarad AV wrote:

or how are we supposed to
>find collision free hash functions?What exactly is the
>difficulty in finding collision free hash functions?

Because there are no collision *free* hash functions,
there will always be several domain elements that map to the
same range element.  Assuming more domain elements than
range elements, which is generally what people mean by hashing.

You're not asking the right question, you need more constraints
on the type of hash functions and their resistance to collisions.
You're probably looking for functions that make it hard to intentionally

find arguments that produce hashes identical to a given one.

There's an incredibly dry taxonomically-inclined downloadable text on
this somewhere
but the margin of my screen is too small to contain the url.  You'll
first
have to use language more precisely to get any use out of it.




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 05:14:26 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 05:14:26 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
Message-ID: <3F096422.55D7BD3C@cdc.gov>

At 11:58 AM 7/7/03 +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
>Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
>> So the possibility of indicting a cuckolded man on the basis
>> of nominal (only) relatives is quite real.
>
>Only he was convicted because he confessed.

Yes, of course, in this *particular* case.  Which is irrelevent.

The point is that there are undiscussed evidentiary problems using
relatives' DNA,
hinging on the assumption that "blood relatives actually share blood",
in layspeak.




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Mon Jul  7 05:24:42 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 07:24:42 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Austin Cypherpunks Physical Meet, Tue. July 8, 2003
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307070723320.16327-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

Time:                July 8, 2003
                     Second Tuesday of each month
                     7:00 - 9:00 pm (or later)

Location:            Central Market HEB Cafe
                     38th and N. Lamar
                     Weather permitting we meet in the un-covered tables.
                     If it's inclimate but not overly cold we meet in the
                     outside covered section. Otherwise look for us inside
                     the building proper.

Identification:      Look for the group with the "Applied Cryptography"
                     book. It will have a red cover and is about 2 in. thick.

Contact Info:        http://einstein.ssz.com/cdr/index.html#austincpunks



 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From nobody at dizum.com  Sun Jul  6 22:30:05 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Mon,  7 Jul 2003 07:30:05 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <24b93d1e279e96d4f59a360feab93ce2@dizum.com>

Thomas Shaddup writes:
> As a welcomed side effect, not only we'd get a device for circumvention of
> just about any contemporary (and possibly a good deal of the future ones)
> optical media "protections"

This is only for the minimal forms of "protection" which are designed to
work with existing CD/DVD players.   If you look at the new audio formats
like SACD, they use encrypted data.  All your lasers won't do you any
good unless you can pry a key (and the algorithm!) out of a consumer
player, which won't be easy assuming it is in a tamper-resistant unit.
And you can bet the industry won't make the mistake again of allowing
software-based players, as they did with the DeCSS affair.

In short, you're fighting yesterday's war.  Try looking ahead a bit to
see where the battlegrounds of the future will be contested.




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Mon Jul  7 08:04:46 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 08:04:46 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Finding collision resistant hash functions
In-Reply-To: <20030707091928.46589.qmail@web21203.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307070753070.16396-100000@eskimo.com>

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Sarad AV wrote:

> Is there a polynomial time  algorithm that will find
> collision hash functions or how are we supposed to
> find collision free hash functions?What exactly is the
> difficulty in finding collision free hash functions?

It can't be collision free if the number of input bits exceeds the number
of output bits.  Think about it, it should be obvious!

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From bruen at coldrain.net  Mon Jul  7 05:25:58 2003
From: bruen at coldrain.net (Stormwalker)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 08:25:58 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <3F096422.55D7BD3C@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307070810240.9437-100000@matrix.exilelabs.com>

The issue of knowing about other people based on one subject's DNA
has been known for for several years. For example, if a a woman
has the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene (breast cancer), then so does her mother,
sister(s) and daughter(s) because the gene is hereditary. Insurance
companies can/have refused insurance coverage to the subject's relatives
and the relatives have no idea why. 

Ethical issues have surfaced around the desire of the subject's
relatives not wanting to know if they have a harmful, shared gene. If
the subject tells her relatives abour her gene, then her relatives know 
that they have the gene. It's not like I told some them I broke my arm
which only tells them a fact about me.

The extension into law enforcement is an expected outcome. And there
will be more.

In my opinion, very few people understand the impact of human
understanding of how life is constructed. The science is well understood,
the engineering has just begun. We are taking conscious control of
evolution, far past selective breeding and way past clones.


                              cheers, bob


On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> The point is that there are undiscussed evidentiary problems using
> relatives' DNA,  hinging on the assumption that "blood relatives 
> actually share blood", in layspeak.




From alan at clueserver.org  Mon Jul  7 08:45:03 2003
From: alan at clueserver.org (alan)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 08:45:03 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F814A2DreBBsQw0000d9bf@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307070842040.769-100000@ebersisk.clueserver.org>

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Do you have a reference? I don't remember reading that SACD was encrypted. 
> What I DO remember is that the reason there's no standard SACD or DVD-A 
> digital interface is because the Industry wants that digital interface to be 
> encrypted.

Furthermore, people have come to expect that they should be able to play 
whatever disc shaped media in their computer.  At some point there will 
need to be a software based player.

But the real issue is that all of these DRM methods rely on "security by 
obscurity".  Such methods eventually fail.  Either the actual method is 
discovered and published or the DRM method fails in the marketplace and is 
never heard from again.




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 09:11:59 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 09:11:59 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
Message-ID: <3F099BCF.FC8B0619@cdc.gov>

At 08:25 AM 7/7/03 -0400, Stormwalker wrote:
>The issue of knowing about other people based on one subject's DNA
>has been known for for several years. For example, if a a woman
>has the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene (breast cancer), then so does her mother,
>sister(s) and daughter(s) because the gene is hereditary. Insurance
>companies can/have refused insurance coverage to the subject's
relatives
>and the relatives have no idea why.

Interesting, thanks.  Even a brother's daughter could be refused.


>Ethical issues have surfaced around the desire of the subject's
>relatives not wanting to know if they have a harmful, shared gene. If
>the subject tells her relatives abour her gene, then her relatives know

>that they have the gene. It's not like I told some them I broke my arm
>which only tells them a fact about me.

Perhaps this is the basis for the social stigma of mentally ill
relatives --it says something (probabilistic) about the speaker.

Still, you'll find out when they end up in the hospital.  Its useful
knowledge to know your genes ---I know adopted people who
regret not having any clue.  I know that my prostate will explode
when I get older.  I'd like to know more.  Sticking your head
in the sand is rarely helpful.

>In my opinion, very few people understand the impact of human
>understanding of how life is constructed. The science is well
understood,
>the engineering has just begun. We are taking conscious control of
>evolution, far past selective breeding and way past clones.

Most descendants of germ-cell-fixed diabetes (etc) will probably
not regret the tinkering of their ancestors, unless there are unintended

side effects :-)  But yeah, interesting
times we live in.  I've never heard anyone curse their ancestors
for the genetic diseases they've inherited, probably because they
wouldn't exist except for the ancestors.  ("Damn, grandpa, couldn't
you have married someone in better health?")  Also little good
cursing would do.

Insurance companies are private entities, so IMHO its moral for
them to gather intel (eg, checking blood for nicotine metabolites),
or give discounts for folks who've had certain inherited diseases fixed
in the future.  Or eat better, drive safer, exchange fluids less
promiscuously, whatever.

I'm more worried about the State, which coerces with violence.




From declan at well.com  Mon Jul  7 07:35:58 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 10:35:58 -0400
Subject: Secret nanotech spy agency meeting
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030707103536.042b9050@mail.well.com>

today...

TECHNOLOGY
National Academies
Meeting of the Committee on Nanotechnology for the Intelligence Community.
Closed session summary posted after the meeting
Location: Keck Center of the National Academies, 500
     5th St., NW, Washington, D.C..
Contact: James Killian, 202-334-1758; http://www.national-academies.org




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 11:41:06 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 11:41:06 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
Message-ID: <3F09BEC2.87CD430@cdc.gov>

At 01:15 PM 7/7/03 -0400, Stormwalker wrote:
>On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>> Interesting, thanks.  Even a brother's daughter could be refused.
>
>  The BRCA genes are only transmitted through the mother, but
>  there are many others that go through both lines.

Could you explain how this could be?   Any gene has a chance of
continuing unless its on the father's Y he has only daughters.
(Patrilineal surnames behave like this.  I believe there's
a "Cohen"-surname related gene set.)
(Mitochondrial chromos of course are matrilineal always.
For clones they come from the surrogate.)
Males can always keep any maternal gene going, even if its
not expressed.



>  Unintended side effects are all but guaranteed :(  The tinkering
>  will resemble eugenics at the building block level. Eliminating
genetic
>  diseases will be great, but introducing other things might not be,
just
>  as eliminating some things might be bad.

What's wrong with voluntary eugenics?  The invention of agriculture
started
a policy of negative eugenics that culminates with the industrial
welfare
state paying stupids to breed, while others chose birth control.  And
banning somatic or germ line fixes to diseases, if you can do them,
is as compassionate as banning insulin.  Which isn't even a fix, just
a workaround.

If a germ line fix has an unintended side effect, you either undo it
(revert back to being inclined towards diabetes, if this is preferable
to the side effect, say) or you debug or patch it.  Current & historical

medicine is filled with such things for mere *temporary* meds that
don't cure anything.

"This nasal spray contains a vector with Service Pack 6 for the
germ-line diabetes package installed by your grandfather"

:-)




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Jul  7 11:51:39 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 11:51:39 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307071258110.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.c
  om>
Message-ID: <0AD3AA14-B0AC-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Monday, July 7, 2003, at 10:15  AM, Stormwalker wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>
>> Insurance companies are private entities, so IMHO its moral for
>> them to gather intel (eg, checking blood for nicotine metabolites),
>> or give discounts for folks who've had certain inherited diseases 
>> fixed
>> in the future.  Or eat better, drive safer, exchange fluids less
>> promiscuously, whatever.
>
>   I have to disagree here. Medical insurance is not the same as life
>   or car insurance. It was all supposed to be a big pool that we would
>   draw on when needed. By skimmimng the cream, infant mortality rates
>   rise, along with a host of other problems.


No, it was NOT "all supposed to be a big pool that we would draw on 
when needed." You seem to be confusing medical insurance with 
nationalized social medicine.

Do I really need to explain this concept here, to subscribers here?

Medical insurance is a risk arbitrage betting scheme just like all 
other insurance: the actor selling a policy (a contract) is making the 
bet that he will make more money than he pays out. If he finds out 
something that alters the expectation of some illness or disease or 
hazardous activity, then he adjusts the policy premiums accordingly (or 
even refuses to sell a policy at any price, for understandable reasons).

By the way, any scheme to force everyone into the same insurance pool 
for the same premiums is profoundly antiliberty and is unconstitutional 
(violates all sorts of rights). "Opting out" of coverage is always 
fair. If I know I am not a rock climber, why would I pay for coverage 
for rock climbing falls? And if I know I am not engaging in queer sex 
or IV drug use, why would I pay for AIDS coverage/

(There are interesting scenarios for private testing for various genes 
or proclivities, followed by opting-out for the diseases one is highly 
unlikely to contract. This kind of "not paying for what you don't use" 
is a form of cherry-picking which only a total state could outlaw. 
Think about it.)


--Tim May




From ben at algroup.co.uk  Mon Jul  7 03:58:10 2003
From: ben at algroup.co.uk (Ben Laurie)
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 11:58:10 +0100
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <3F07C6F6.B1BDBCD8@cdc.gov>
References: <3F07C6F6.B1BDBCD8@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <3F095242.8090604@algroup.co.uk>

Major Variola (ret.) wrote:

> Slashdot pointed to this story of a man indicted via
> his *relative's* DNA sample:
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/3044282.stm
> 
> But an interesting, unmentioned issue is this: in population
> DNA surveys you find that a lot of purported fathers *aren't*.
> So the possibility of indicting a cuckolded man on the basis
> of nominal (only) relatives is quite real.

Only he was convicted because he confessed.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff




From bruen at coldrain.net  Mon Jul  7 10:15:04 2003
From: bruen at coldrain.net (Stormwalker)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 13:15:04 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <3F099BCF.FC8B0619@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307071258110.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.com>

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> Interesting, thanks.  Even a brother's daughter could be refused.

  The BRCA genes are only transmitted through the mother, but
  there are many others that go through both lines.
 

> >Ethical issues have surfaced around the desire of the subject's
> Perhaps this is the basis for the social stigma of mentally ill
> relatives --it says something (probabilistic) about the speaker.

  With most genes there is not a 100% chance that any one person
  will suffer, although there are few. One measurement is the PPV,
  Positive Predictive Value, which gets to estimate the probability
  that the problem gene will actually cause the problem. Trouble is,
  it's real hard to get the PPV right. No one really knows how to
  do it, so the insurance companies just say to any possibility, no
  matter how remote.

> Still, you'll find out when they end up in the hospital.  Its useful
> knowledge to know your genes ---I know adopted people who
> regret not having any clue.  I know that my prostate will explode
> when I get older.  I'd like to know more.  Sticking your head
> in the sand is rarely helpful.

   While I agree completely, you might be surprised at just how
   many people don't want to know and will get upset if you spoil
   the surprise by telling them.


> >In my opinion, very few people understand the impact of human
> >understanding of how life is constructed. The science is well
> >understood, the engineering has just begun. We are taking conscious 
> >control of evolution, far past selective breeding and way past clones.

> Most descendants of germ-cell-fixed diabetes (etc) will probably
> not regret the tinkering of their ancestors, unless there are unintended
> side effects :-)  

  Unintended side effects are all but guaranteed :(  The tinkering 
  will resemble eugenics at the building block level. Eliminating genetic
  diseases will be great, but introducing other things might not be, just
  as eliminating some things might be bad.


> But yeah, interesting
> times we live in.  I've never heard anyone curse their ancestors
> for the genetic diseases they've inherited, probably because they
> wouldn't exist except for the ancestors.  ("Damn, grandpa, couldn't
> you have married someone in better health?")  Also little good
> cursing would do.

   This already happens - selecting your mate has more procedures
   if youare in line for a spot as king somewhere.

> Insurance companies are private entities, so IMHO its moral for
> them to gather intel (eg, checking blood for nicotine metabolites),
> or give discounts for folks who've had certain inherited diseases fixed
> in the future.  Or eat better, drive safer, exchange fluids less
> promiscuously, whatever.

  I have to disagree here. Medical insurance is not the same as life
  or car insurance. It was all supposed to be a big pool that we would
  draw on when needed. By skimmimng the cream, infant mortality rates
  rise, along with a host of other problems.

> I'm more worried about the State, which coerces with violence.

  Well, yes, but the corporations are becoming part of their own state...

                cheers, bob 




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 14:23:06 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 14:23:06 -0700
Subject: Genetic engineering [was: RE: DNA of relative indicts man, 
  cuckol  ding ignored]
Message-ID: <3F09E4BA.96B1AB06@cdc.gov>

At 03:59 PM 7/7/03 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
>There are some things where nearly everyone will agree
>a genetic fix is desirable - for example, suceptibility to
>heart disease, cancer, dental caries, and myopia. Other
>'vanity' fixes seem pretty harmless - being tall, busty,
>or having a well-stuffed package.
>
>Its when we get to 'fixes' to behaviour and personality
>that things start to get very hairy.

Although your examples are important, anyone who
has or has known someone with depression,
schizophrenia, or ADD [1] will argue that *subjectively unpleasant*
mental ills are as worth fixing as bad teeth.  If not more so.


I fear that those in
>power will use genetic engineering as they have used
>every other tool at their disposal - weapons, states,
>laws, and governments - to maintain their position at
>the expense of the overall welfare of the species, by
>allowing improvements only to their own descendents,
>while requiring changes to those out of power which
>make it harder for them to change their status.

Agreed, as with the rest of your post.  There are real
horrorshow future possibilities.

One more point.  What is "adaptive" depends on
your environment.  As I try to explain to my
more pigmented wife (it comes up because my
3.8 year old is in the "why" phase) while I'd get skin cancer
in tropical zones, she'd get rickets in more
northerly areas.

Extrapolate to personality properties like
"inhibition" (recently shown to be persistant
from 2 to 20 year olds ie genetic)  "aggression", etc.

[1] Please don't lets start the flame about chemical coercion
in mandatory youth education camps.  Real ADD
fucks people up.  Which is not to say that M.Y.E.C.
are well designed nor that ADD treatments are abused.




From billy at dadadada.net  Mon Jul  7 12:12:28 2003
From: billy at dadadada.net (Billy)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 15:12:28 -0400
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <0AD3AA14-B0AC-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307071258110.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.co
  m> <0AD3AA14-B0AC-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <20030707191228.GA1016@mail.dadadada.net>

On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 11:51:39AM -0700, Tim May wrote:

> And if I know I am not engaging in queer sex 
> or IV drug use, why would I pay for AIDS coverage/

You've got to be kidding...




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Mon Jul  7 12:59:21 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 15:59:21 -0400 
Subject: Genetic engineering [was: RE: DNA of relative indicts man,
  cuckol ding ignored]
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1D6@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Major Variola (ret)[SMTP:mv at cdc.gov] writes:
> 
> What's wrong with voluntary eugenics?  The invention of 
> agriculture started a policy of negative eugenics that culminates 
> with the industrial welfare state paying stupids to breed, while 
> others chose birth control.  And banning somatic or germ line 
> fixes to diseases, if you can do them, is as compassionate as 
> banning insulin.  Which isn't even a fix, just a workaround.
> 
> If a germ line fix has an unintended side effect, you either undo it
> (revert back to being inclined towards diabetes, if this is preferable
> to the side effect, say) or you debug or patch it.  Current & historical
> medicine is filled with such things for mere *temporary* meds that
> don't cure anything.
> 
> "This nasal spray contains a vector with Service Pack 6 for the
> germ-line diabetes package installed by your grandfather"
> 
> :-)
> 
Once again, the main problem seems to be the 'thats icky'
factor which most people have difficulty getting past. We're
seeing it today in the hysteria over human cloning, we will see
it in human genetic engineering. We saw it in the past in 
IVF reproduction, and in organ transplantation - for a while in
Britain, cornea transplants were banned - the idea of 'looking
through a dead mans eyes' was just too weird.

Genetic engineering is a new area where man is seizing
control from nature, and is now faced with choices which
just didn't exist in the past. How individuals and societies
should make these decisions is pretty much uncharted
territory.

For any proposed change, some people will think it's a bad
idea, some people will think its great, and some people 
won't have an opinion. The proportions (and the reasons)
will vary from decision to descision.

There are some things where nearly everyone will agree
a genetic fix is desirable - for example, suceptibility to
heart disease, cancer, dental caries, and myopia. Other 
'vanity' fixes seem pretty harmless - being tall, busty,
or having a well-stuffed package. 

Its when we get to 'fixes' to behaviour and personality
that things start to get very hairy. I fear that those in
power will use genetic engineering as they have used
every other tool at their disposal - weapons, states,
laws, and governments - to maintain their position at
the expense of the overall welfare of the species, by
allowing improvements only to their own descendents,
while requiring changes to those out of power which
make it harder for them to change their status.

One scenario:

"Mr & Mrs Smith: The No Child Should Fear Act of
2015 requires that your proposed son have the
'bullying' gene deleted if he is to attend publicly
funded schools. This is similar to the old requirements
for vaccination - we don't want your son to endanger
other children, do we? 

Of course, this also weakens any leadership
ability he might have been able to exercise later in
life, as well as his tendency to question authority, but
if it saves one child from humiliation at the hands of a
bully, its worth it.

If you don't want to accept this change, you are of
course free to send your child to private school, as
do most leaders. If you can afford it, that is...."

So, who gets to decide what changes are good, and
for whom? I know what I want the answer to be, but
I'm not certain that is the one that will come to pass.

Peter Trei




From s.schear at comcast.net  Mon Jul  7 16:58:17 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 16:58:17 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <24b93d1e279e96d4f59a360feab93ce2@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030707165403.034786c0@mail.comcast.net>

At 07:30 2003-07-07 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>This is only for the minimal forms of "protection" which are designed to
>work with existing CD/DVD players.   If you look at the new audio formats
>like SACD, they use encrypted data.  All your lasers won't do you any
>good unless you can pry a key (and the algorithm!) out of a consumer
>player, which won't be easy assuming it is in a tamper-resistant unit.

If you believe the article "Myths and Misconceptions about Hardware 
Hacking," 
http://www.cptwg.org/Assets/Presentations/ARDG/ARDGHardware_hack05-28-03.pdf 
, recently posted to the Content Protection Technical Working Group, access 
to affordable commercial technology for reverse engineering has given 
hardware hackers the upper hand.

steve




"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer




From decoy at iki.fi  Mon Jul  7 07:01:10 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 17:01:10 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <3F0960F0.45EEDF26@cdc.gov>
References: <3F0960F0.45EEDF26@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307071650220.28934@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-07, Major Variola (ret) uttered to cypherpunks at lne.com:

>Here, ponder this: why are there no oxygen sensor or manifold temperature
>or ignition-phase (etc) displays in ordinary cars?

Because the wiring, displays, etc. do impose costs, most of all in design
expense. You can't do it all in software. With CD drives you can, and it's
quite likely it wouldn't constitute more than a page full of C if your
existing codebase has any structure at all. So yes, I do understand about
cost constraints. It's just that this particular feature wouldn't likely
violate any of them, and would be a highly useful feature to a number of
people.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From declan at well.com  Mon Jul  7 14:03:54 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 17:03:54 -0400
Subject: Denver Post article on mattd/proffr/AP/Jim Bell/cypherpunks
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030707170236.04473010@mail.well.com>

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~1497971,00.html

...

The development of digital money, and encryption software restricting 
government's ability to monitor Internet activity, are common goals among 
the online anarchists and libertarians known as "cypherpunks."

The ultimate purpose of Assassination Politics is to deter people from 
working for government agencies, corporate media outlets or institutions 
"beholden to the violence of the state," Taylor said.

Professor Rat also has threatened a University of Ottawa law professor, a 
columnist for The Boston Globe and a Cincinnati police officer.

...

The Post is withholding the names of the subjects of posts by Professor Rat 
to avoid promoting any specific threats.

...

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles 
and a First Amendment specialist, said the threats were probably criminal, 
given Taylor's description of the purpose of Assassination Politics.

...




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 19:34:50 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 19:34:50 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <3F0A2DC9.69C35B56@cdc.gov>

At 08:45 AM 7/7/03 -0700, alan wrote:
>But the real issue is that all of these DRM methods rely on "security
by
>obscurity".  Such methods eventually fail.  Either the actual method is

>discovered and published or the DRM method fails in the marketplace and
is
>never heard from again.

Hilary R and Jack V are *far* more fucked than mere
security-by-obscurity.

Any human-consumable (analogue) input is readily recordable with
a single, one-time ADC, and thereafter is toast.  DRM is a fraud
perpetrated by engineers on Hollywood suits.  Good for employment
though.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Jul  7 16:39:47 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 19:39:47 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <BAY7-F814A2DreBBsQw0000d9bf@hotmail.com>

Do you have a reference? I don't remember reading that SACD was encrypted. 
What I DO remember is that the reason there's no standard SACD or DVD-A 
digital interface is because the Industry wants that digital interface to be 
encrypted.

-TD



>From: Nomen Nescio <nobody at dizum.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
>Date: Mon,  7 Jul 2003 07:30:05 +0200 (CEST)
>
>Thomas Shaddup writes:
> > As a welcomed side effect, not only we'd get a device for circumvention 
>of
> > just about any contemporary (and possibly a good deal of the future 
>ones)
> > optical media "protections"
>
>This is only for the minimal forms of "protection" which are designed to
>work with existing CD/DVD players.   If you look at the new audio formats
>like SACD, they use encrypted data.  All your lasers won't do you any
>good unless you can pry a key (and the algorithm!) out of a consumer
>player, which won't be easy assuming it is in a tamper-resistant unit.
>And you can bet the industry won't make the mistake again of allowing
>software-based players, as they did with the DeCSS affair.
>
>In short, you're fighting yesterday's war.  Try looking ahead a bit to
>see where the battlegrounds of the future will be contested.

_________________________________________________________________
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From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 19:41:45 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 19:41:45 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
Message-ID: <3F0A2F69.B906E601@cdc.gov>

At 08:36 PM 7/7/03 -0400, Stormwalker wrote:
>
>> What's wrong with voluntary eugenics?  The invention of agriculture
>> started a policy of negative eugenics that culminates with the
>> industrial welfare state paying stupids to breed, while others chose
>> birth control.  And banning somatic or germ line fixes to diseases,
if
>> you can do them, is as compassionate as banning insulin.  Which isn't

>> even a fix, just a workaround.
>
>  I was thinking of eugenics where something was forced upon others,
>  which I do not think is desirable.

Hey, I oppose *anything* which is forced upon others, even if *I*
deem it as "good".


>  The invention of agriculture has not yet culminated. It gave/gives
>  people time to do other things.

Yeah, like raise armies, feed bureaucraps, etc.  Still, I don't
hold it against the farmers.  Besides, the dominant cultures
are descendants of farmers.  See the writings of Jared Diamond.

>  Good luck banning germ lines :)
>
>> If a germ line fix has an unintended side effect, you either undo it
>> (revert back to being inclined towards diabetes, if this is
preferable
>> to the side effect, say) or you debug or patch it.  Current &
historical
>> medicine is filled with such things for mere *temporary* meds that
>> don't cure anything.
>
>   Reverting may or not be possible. The products of some germ line
>   may like what they are and wil lnot revert, no matter what other
>   folks think.

Well, if they *like* it, only violent coercion would cause reversion.
I was thinking something like, the diabetes-fix package causes premature

death or something bothersome like that.

Obviously the "service pack 6 nasal spray" needs to refuse to install
on folks without the proper prior install.  Also it needs to avoid
spurious installation on folks who don't want it ---maybe you have
to take a snort of some antibiotic combo at the same time to activate
it,
which is a current technique used for turning on inserted genes.

Later




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul  7 19:57:48 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 19:57:48 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
Message-ID: <3F0A332C.CBFCC319@cdc.gov>

At 08:53 PM 7/7/03 -0400, Stormwalker wrote:
>On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:
>> No, it was NOT "all supposed to be a big pool that we would draw on
>> when needed." You seem to be confusing medical insurance with
>> nationalized social medicine.
>
>   No, I am not confusing medical insurance with socialized medicine
>   or anything else. I mentioned life insurance on purpose. That is a
>   bet on when I will die, they bet later, I bet earlier. Money can
>   be made - although never by me unless I cheat.

Not at all.  Much like gambling, sometimes you win "randomly"
if you stop playing after that.  "Random" is a word that means
"ignorance" and both you and the insurer are ignorant about
your true lifespan.  You only play the life-insurance game once :-)

>   Medical insurance is about maintenence of our lives. You do not
>   need to participate, but I'll bet if you get hurt, you'll head
>   to the nearest emergency room.

One person's need does not make another a slave.

BTW One could argue that driver's insurance is *more* necessary
than medical insurance, because to exist daily you need to drive.

But again, need and slaves.

>  Well, you probably don't need to explain the problems of socialized
>  medicine, but I would like to hear about how you will do your own
>  X-Rays or chemotherapy.

Some pay cash.  You can do without car insurance if you post a bond.
Others depend on *voluntary* charity --though nowadays this competes
with compulsory (taxed) welfare.

>  Not any more. See life insurance. Also, please keep in mind that
>  insurance compnaies do not make their money from premiums, but
>  from investments of all the premiums they collect and hold. Your
model
>  is not correct.

You forget that if the insurer bets wrong, they have to pay up and cash
in their investments.  For certain investments, premature withdrawl
costs more
than sitting on the cash.  Otherwise, like banks, or landlords with
deposits,
or other putatively free agents, insurers are free to do with their
funds as they please.
So long as they hold up their end of the contracts they've entered.

>The rock climber will probably not have that
>   heart attack.

FWIW, the rock climber's choice of ancestors (!) has more to do with
their heart attack (etc) risk than their choice of avocation.

>> (There are interesting scenarios for private testing for various
genes
>> or proclivities, followed by opting-out for the diseases one is
highly
>> unlikely to contract. This kind of "not paying for what you don't
use"
>> is a form of cherry-picking which only a total state could outlaw.
>> Think about it.)
>
>   This scenario of testing for specific genes is already underway.
Stay
>   tuned.

The flip side of Tim's comment is that you can pay extra for things you
are at risk for.  In a truly free market, insurers would offer packages
customized to your risk.  Genomic tendancy towards X?  Pay more,
get more ---including max payout.  Little tendancy towards Y?  Pay
less.  Rational people follow Pascal --you include probability in your
reasoning about costs.  Of course, in a free society, you are free to
be irrational, too.  (And consume whatever, and enjoy masochism, etc.)

[oblig] Those who would constrain those freedoms have earned killing.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Jul  7 16:58:24 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 19:58:24 -0400
Subject: Denver Post article on mattd/proffr/AP/Jim Bell/cypherpunks
Message-ID: <BAY7-F670nGEbJ8MqU200011421@hotmail.com>

>"The posts made by Professor Rat fall under a relatively new category of 
>crime known >as "cyberstalking," >said Jim Doyle, a retired New York City 
>police sergeant who now works as a >cybercrimes consultant for a 
> >Connecticut company called Internet Crimes.

>The statements made by Professor Rat constitute prosecutable offenses, he 
>said.

>"The bottom line is what the victim feels," he said. "Is the victim 
>threatened? Is the victim alarmed? >Hey, that's a crime."

Interesting logic here. Someone writes something not-so-nice about somebody 
on a list and now that person is being "cyberstalked" even though they're 
not a subscriber. And now, the stalk-ee is a victim of a crime. And now the 
person who said something "not-so-nice" has committed a crime.

And this guy's a consultant? To whom, I wonder...

Funny enough, I don't rmember seeing any of Prof Rat's posts, and I've never 
even killfiled him.


-TD




>From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Denver Post article on mattd/proffr/AP/Jim Bell/cypherpunks
>Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 17:03:54 -0400
>
>http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~1497971,00.html
>
>...
>
>The development of digital money, and encryption software restricting 
>government's ability to monitor Internet activity, are common goals among 
>the online anarchists and libertarians known as "cypherpunks."
>
>The ultimate purpose of Assassination Politics is to deter people from 
>working for government agencies, corporate media outlets or institutions 
>"beholden to the violence of the state," Taylor said.
>
>Professor Rat also has threatened a University of Ottawa law professor, a 
>columnist for The Boston Globe and a Cincinnati police officer.
>
>...
>
>The Post is withholding the names of the subjects of posts by Professor Rat 
>to avoid promoting any specific threats.
>
>...
>
>Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles 
>and a First Amendment specialist, said the threats were probably criminal, 
>given Taylor's description of the purpose of Assassination Politics.
>
>...

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From bruen at coldrain.net  Mon Jul  7 17:36:36 2003
From: bruen at coldrain.net (Stormwalker)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 20:36:36 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <3F09BEC2.87CD430@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307071727220.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.com>

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> At 01:15 PM 7/7/03 -0400, Stormwalker wrote:
> >On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> >> Interesting, thanks.  Even a brother's daughter could be refused.
> >
> >  The BRCA genes are only transmitted through the mother, but
> >  there are many others that go through both lines.
> 
> Could you explain how this could be?   

  My apologies. This is a not what I meant to  say. The brca genes
  can be passed through both paternal and maternal lines. 

> What's wrong with voluntary eugenics?  The invention of agriculture
> started a policy of negative eugenics that culminates with the
> industrial welfare state paying stupids to breed, while others chose
> birth control.  And banning somatic or germ line fixes to diseases, if
> you can do them, is as compassionate as banning insulin.  Which isn't
> even a fix, just a workaround.

  I was thinking of eugenics where something was forced upon others,
  which I do not think is desirable. 

  The invention of agriculture has not yet culminated. It gave/gives 
  people time to do other things.

  Good luck banning germ lines :)

> If a germ line fix has an unintended side effect, you either undo it
> (revert back to being inclined towards diabetes, if this is preferable
> to the side effect, say) or you debug or patch it.  Current & historical
> medicine is filled with such things for mere *temporary* meds that
> don't cure anything.

   Reverting may or not be possible. The products of some germ line
   may like what they are and wil lnot revert, no matter what other
   folks think.

                      cheers, bob




From bruen at coldrain.net  Mon Jul  7 17:53:34 2003
From: bruen at coldrain.net (Stormwalker)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 20:53:34 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <0AD3AA14-B0AC-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307072036480.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.com>

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:
> >   I have to disagree here. Medical insurance is not the same as life
> >   or car insurance. It was all supposed to be a big pool that we would
> >   draw on when needed. By skimmimng the cream, infant mortality rates
> >   rise, along with a host of other problems.
> No, it was NOT "all supposed to be a big pool that we would draw on 
> when needed." You seem to be confusing medical insurance with 
> nationalized social medicine.

   No, I am not confusing medical insurance with socialized medicine
   or anything else. I mentioned life insurance on purpose. That is a
   bet on when I will die, they bet later, I bet earlier. Money can
   be made - although never by me unless I cheat.

   Medical insurance is about maintenence of our lives. You do not
   need to participate, but I'll bet if you get hurt, you'll head
   to the nearest emergency room. The pool I speak of is simply that
   I may need the services now and you may need some later. We all have
   shared types of services and very specific service. I will most likely
   never need medical services for AIDS, but I have used them for broken
   bones. I will never need them for gyno or for giving birth services, 
   but I may need them for prostrate problems. We all use them when we are 
   born. 


> Do I really need to explain this concept here, to subscribers here?

  Well, you probably don't need to explain the problems of socialized
  medicine, but I would like to hear about how you will do your own
  X-Rays or chemotherapy.

> Medical insurance is a risk arbitrage betting scheme just like all 
> other insurance: the actor selling a policy (a contract) is making the 
> bet that he will make more money than he pays out. If he finds out 
> something that alters the expectation of some illness or disease or 
> hazardous activity, then he adjusts the policy premiums accordingly (or 
> even refuses to sell a policy at any price, for understandable reasons).

  Not any more. See life insurance. Also, please keep in mind that 
  insurance compnaies do not make their money from premiums, but
  from investments of all the premiums they collect and hold. Your model
  is not correct.

> By the way, any scheme to force everyone into the same insurance pool 
> for the same premiums is profoundly antiliberty and is unconstitutional 
> (violates all sorts of rights). "Opting out" of coverage is always 
> fair. If I know I am not a rock climber, why would I pay for coverage 
> for rock climbing falls? And if I know I am not engaging in queer sex 
> or IV drug use, why would I pay for AIDS coverage/

   This is a detour from my original proposition, but in answer to your
   question, you do not pay for rock climbing injuries. You pay for what
   you need and the rock climber pays for rock climbing risks. You may
   do something else risky or eat too many french fries that will cause
   a heart attack later. The rock climber will probably not have that
   heart attack. Opt out if you wish. I have opted out for a number of
   years by choice myself and have opted in as well.
 
> (There are interesting scenarios for private testing for various genes 
> or proclivities, followed by opting-out for the diseases one is highly 
> unlikely to contract. This kind of "not paying for what you don't use" 
> is a form of cherry-picking which only a total state could outlaw. 
> Think about it.)

   This scenario of testing for specific genes is already underway. Stay
   tuned.

                cheers, bob




From njohnsn at njohnsn.com  Mon Jul  7 19:03:01 2003
From: njohnsn at njohnsn.com (Neil Johnson)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 21:03:01 -0500
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307072036480.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.c
  om>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307072036480.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.co
  m>
Message-ID: <200307072103.01048.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>

On Monday 07 July 2003 07:53 pm, Stormwalker wrote:

>
>    Medical insurance is about maintenence of our lives. You do not
>    need to participate, but I'll bet if you get hurt, you'll head
>    to the nearest emergency room. The pool I speak of is simply that
>    I may need the services now and you may need some later. We all have
>    shared types of services and very specific service. I will most likely
>    never need medical services for AIDS, but I have used them for broken
>    bones. I will never need them for gyno or for giving birth services,
>    but I may need them for prostrate problems. We all use them when we are
>    born.
>

Bzzzzt. Tim is correct. Companies that provide medical insurance are betting 
that you will require $X dollars of medical treatment and then charge you $Y 
dollars hoping that $Y > $X (including the interest earned by investing $Y).

The problem is that as you get older, the probability of you needing $$$ of 
medical treatment goes up and even higher if you engage in unhealthy 
practices (smoking,  overeating, etc.).

The gubmint's solution to this is what you are talking about... "Medicare". 
The fundamental assumption is that their are more healthy people than sick 
ones so that the premiums payed by the healthy people can be used to pay for 
medical care for the sick.

Unfortunately, there are two things wrong with this assumption. 1) Amazing 
advances in medical technology that allow people who are sick to live longer, 
but are very expensive, which leads to 2) more older (and less healthy) 
people than young (and more healthy) people.

If we are going to continue with the idea of Medicare then society has a whole 
must begin to make tough decisions on how to ration healthcare (ever heard of 
triage ?).  Which makes more sense: Spend $X dollars on some 80 year old's 
heart/lung transplant so he can live another 10 years, or spend that money on 
make sure an unwed mother's baby is born healthy?  (Note: either choice has 
it's  own sets of costs and rewards).
-- 
Neil Johnson
http://www.njohnsn.com
PGP key available on request.




From timcmay at got.net  Mon Jul  7 21:53:40 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 21:53:40 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307072036480.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.c
  om>
Message-ID: <24C8AA58-B100-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Monday, July 7, 2003, at 05:53  PM, Stormwalker wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:
>>>   I have to disagree here. Medical insurance is not the same as life
>>>   or car insurance. It was all supposed to be a big pool that we 
>>> would
>>>   draw on when needed. By skimmimng the cream, infant mortality rates
>>>   rise, along with a host of other problems.
>> No, it was NOT "all supposed to be a big pool that we would draw on
>> when needed." You seem to be confusing medical insurance with
>> nationalized social medicine.
>
>    No, I am not confusing medical insurance with socialized medicine
>    or anything else. I mentioned life insurance on purpose. That is a
>    bet on when I will die, they bet later, I bet earlier. Money can
>    be made - although never by me unless I cheat.
>
>    Medical insurance is about maintenence of our lives. You do not
>    need to participate, but I'll bet if you get hurt, you'll head
>    to the nearest emergency room. The pool I speak of is simply that
>    I may need the services now and you may need some later. We all have
>    shared types of services and very specific service. I will most 
> likely
>    never need medical services for AIDS, but I have used them for 
> broken
>    bones. I will never need them for gyno or for giving birth services,
>    but I may need them for prostrate problems. We all use them when we 
> are
>    born.

Medical insurance, car insurance, life insurance, home insurance, boat 
insurance, etc., are all just variations on a theme.

When AAA Insurance meets with Joe Sixpack to discuss his health or life 
or earthquake insurance, they seek to collect enough information to 
have a reasonable chance of turning a profit on the deal. Else why 
would they exist as a business?

They likely never have complete information, about fault lines, or fire 
hazards, or unhealthy behavior, but they can manage their risks 
reasonably well by standard statistical sampling and actuarial data 
methods.

I won't waste my time further arguing your "medial insurance is 
different" point until you show you have some basic grounding in how 
the real economy works and can explain why you think medical insurance 
is somehow exempt from the normal profit/loss considerations.

Saying that health care is important is not enough. It's just another 
purchased service, after all.

>
>
>> Do I really need to explain this concept here, to subscribers here?
>
>   Well, you probably don't need to explain the problems of socialized
>   medicine, but I would like to hear about how you will do your own
>   X-Rays or chemotherapy.

First, I pay for my own such needs out of my own pocket. Many firms and 
well-off individuals are "self-insured." Insurance is not something 
magical, it's just a set of tradeoffs of risk and ability to pay. For 
those who cannot possibly raise the $100K for a seldom-needed 
operation, paying $5000 a year in premiums _may_ make sense. Because 
they perceive the consequences of not having the money to buy the 
operation, despite its unlikelihood, to be worth the payment each year. 
And so on, for a range of scenarios.

Second, if I wished to have insurance I would buy it.

That's how I would get x-rays or chemotherapy.

Saying that because I do not share your views about socialized 
insurance I must plan on making my own x-ray machine or brewing my own 
cancer chemicals is not only silly, it is disingenuous.
>
>> Medical insurance is a risk arbitrage betting scheme just like all
>> other insurance: the actor selling a policy (a contract) is making the
>> bet that he will make more money than he pays out. If he finds out
>> something that alters the expectation of some illness or disease or
>> hazardous activity, then he adjusts the policy premiums accordingly 
>> (or
>> even refuses to sell a policy at any price, for understandable 
>> reasons).
>
>   Not any more. See life insurance. Also, please keep in mind that
>   insurance compnaies do not make their money from premiums, but
>   from investments of all the premiums they collect and hold. Your 
> model
>   is not correct.

You're further gone than I thought.


--Tim May
"The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the 
expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Mon Jul  7 19:07:21 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 22:07:21 -0400
Subject: Denver Post article on mattd/proffr/AP/Jim Bell/cypherpunks
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F670nGEbJ8MqU200011421@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F670nGEbJ8MqU200011421@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <200307072207.21276.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Monday 07 July 2003 19:58, Tyler Durden wrote:

> >"The bottom line is what the victim feels," he said. "Is the victim
> >threatened? Is the victim alarmed? >Hey, that's a crime."
>
> Interesting logic here. Someone writes something not-so-nice about
> somebody on a list and now that person is being "cyberstalked" even
> though they're not a subscriber. And now, the stalk-ee is a victim of
> a crime. And now the person who said something "not-so-nice" has
> committed a crime.

That standard is used increasingly often. I've had it used against me, 
more than a decade ago. Just fit this in with "conspiracy" and 
"attempt" and other fuzzy crimes; they're good for prosecutors because 
they don't demand hard evidence and juries in practice tend to side 
with the prosecution. ("If he didn't commit the crime, they wouldn't 
have arrested him.")

Welcome to the new thought crime, where you don't even have to have 
thought the forbidden, thought; it's enough that someone thinks you 
thought it.


> Funny enough, I don't rmember seeing any of Prof Rat's posts, and
> I've never even killfiled him.

Many of the nodes filter out mattd/proffr's posts. I think Jim Choate's 
node (see http://einstein.ssz.com/cdr) delivers his posts, along with 
viagra ads and other garbage.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Mon Jul  7 19:09:30 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 22:09:30 -0400
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <200307072103.01048.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307072036480.9499-100000@matrix.exilelabs.co
   m> <200307072103.01048.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
Message-ID: <200307072209.30579.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Monday 07 July 2003 22:03, Neil Johnson wrote:

> ...  Which makes more sense: Spend
> $X dollars on some 80 year old's heart/lung transplant so he can live
> another 10 years, or spend that money on make sure an unwed mother's
> baby is born healthy?

That's easy: spend it on the 80-year-old. He's more likely to vote than 
the unwed, and likely underage, mother.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Mon Jul  7 23:18:31 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 23:18:31 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CI] Re: Finding collision resistant hash functions
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307070753070.16396-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <20030708061831.46848.qmail@web21207.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,


--- Mike Rosing <eresrch at eskimo.com> wrote:
>It can't be collision free if the number of input
> bits exceeds the number
> of output bits.  Think about it, it should be
> obvious!

Yes,the pigeon hole principle but that was not what i
meant.
Lets say we are using SHA-1 and i hash 2^80
messages.What I am looking for is a compression
function such that the chances of collision in the
message digest obtained by hashing these 2^80 messages
is collision free or very low probability of
collision.How do we make such a compression function?

I am not hashing more than 2^160 to get the collisions
as you had suggested.


Regards Sarath. 



__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Mon Jul  7 23:34:24 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 23:34:24 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: collision resistant hash functions-
In-Reply-To: <3F09630A.148FCF@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20030708063425.7264.qmail@web21206.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,


--- "Major Variola (ret)" <mv at cdc.gov> wrote:
> Because there are no collision *free* hash
> functions,
> there will always be several domain elements that
> map to the
> same range element.  Assuming more domain elements
> than
> range elements, which is generally what people mean
> by hashing.

yes-thats clear. 

> You're probably looking for functions that make it
> hard to intentionally
>find arguments that produce hashes identical to a
>given one.

Say I hash 2^80 messages using SHA-1. I want to be
sure that no 2 messages will hash to the same MD or
has a very low probability of hashing to the same MD.I
was looking on how to build such compression
functions. 
 

>You'll
> first
> have to use language more precisely to get any use
> out of it.


Yes-I will be careful.

Regards Sarath.


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com




From nobody at dizum.com  Mon Jul  7 23:40:01 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Tue,  8 Jul 2003 08:40:01 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <ca81d3e6cae02df6cad244abaf1c0521@dizum.com>

Major Variola writes:

> Any human-consumable (analogue) input is readily recordable with
> a single, one-time ADC, and thereafter is toast.  DRM is a fraud
> perpetrated by engineers on Hollywood suits.  Good for employment
> though.

There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage.  Real and
wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by
a reconversion phase.  These are the people who are already swallowing
the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for
good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear.

Consider how much more wine from Champagne is worth than that from a
village just outside of the appelation limits.  People want to feel
that they are getting the authentic goods, and they'll pay for them.
That's what the RIAA is counting on.




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul  8 08:56:29 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 08:56:29 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <3F0AE9AD.BDD32E1@cdc.gov>

At 08:40 AM 7/8/03 +0200, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>Major Variola writes:
>
>> Any human-consumable (analogue) input is readily recordable with
>> a single, one-time ADC, and thereafter is toast.  DRM is a fraud
>> perpetrated by engineers on Hollywood suits.  Good for employment
>> though.
>
>There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage.

There are some very nice DAC <--> ADC chains and some well shielded
cables.  The real problem with the old analogue world was *successive*
copying.  One conversion is fine almost always.

Real and
>wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by
>a reconversion phase.  These are the people who are already swallowing
>the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for
>good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear.

Take a look at the quality of the .MP3s that give Hillary the shits.
Take a look at the psychoacoustic compromises in even the best MP3
standard.
Consider that music is often listened to on small computer speakers with
fan noise,
or in cars with road noise and horrible acoustic chamber properties.
Even those who listen with headphones seem to enjoy MP3s.


>Consider how much more wine from Champagne is worth than that from a
>village just outside of the appelation limits.  People want to feel
>that they are getting the authentic goods, and they'll pay for them.
>That's what the RIAA is counting on.

Then I would not buy stock in RIAA-type companies, nor would I extend
credit to their employees.  I guess we'll see.




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul  8 09:00:43 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 09:00:43 -0700
Subject: [CI] Re: Finding collision resistant hash functions
Message-ID: <3F0AEAAB.54E31E99@cdc.gov>

At 11:18 PM 7/7/03 -0700, Sarad AV wrote:
>Lets say we are using SHA-1 and i hash 2^80
>messages.What I am looking for is a compression
>function such that the chances of collision in the
>message digest obtained by hashing these 2^80 messages
>is collision free or very low probability of
>collision.How do we make such a compression function?

You don't need one with a good hash function.

Consider a hash made out of a block cipher digesting
the input.  A block cipher has the property that any
one bit difference in input will change half the output
bits on average.  There's nothing gained by increasing
the input entropy (compressing).




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul  8 09:33:58 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 09:33:58 -0700
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <B14C9D7F1977D111AD740060970ACBDA018932C5@warhol>
Message-ID: <F92FF914-B161-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 02:55  AM, Vincent Penquerc'h wrote:

>> When AAA Insurance meets with Joe Sixpack to discuss his
>> health or life
>> or earthquake insurance, they seek to collect enough information to
>> have a reasonable chance of turning a profit on the deal. Else why
>> would they exist as a business?
>
> But there is a necessary asymmetry here. If you could determine
> with good precision whether someone will be affected by an illness,
> when, how much, etc, then this wouldn't work, save for superstition
> on the part of Joe Sixpack. Since the contract is based on a bet on
> the likelihood of premium/payouts balance, the more you can find
> out about the future of the insured person's organism future, the
> closer the premiums will match the payouts, reliably. *IF* you can
> determine this, of course.

Sure, this is what "price discovery" is all about, in many contexts and 
in many markets. "Reasoning with incomplete information" is the basis 
for just about everything. Animals reason without complete information, 
insurance companies reason without complete information, we all do.

I don't claim either party in an insurance contract knows the future, 
or even knows the probabilities of things happening.



> So the goal will be for the insurer to
> get access to as much info as possible to assess how to set the
> premiums, while preventing the insured from knowing as much, so
> there is still the uncertainty and the value of "peace of mind"
> gotten by the insured, and that's worth something too.
> The converse is also true. And both raise the problem of assessment
> of the data - how does the insurer get the data (getting DNA from
> the would be insured ? with the insured's knowledge or not ? From
> the contract clause that subordinates the insurance to the supplying
> of the data by the insured ? Will credit bureaus expand to cover
> this kind of thing ?)
> If there is total symmetry, insurance loses its point entirely.

Knowing a lot about DNA still doesn't mean the future is known...when 
or if pregnancies will occur, when or if a fall from a cliff will 
occur, or, obviously, when some rare disease will appear.

Insurers already seek maximum information. This is their "right" (in 
the sense that the signing of an insurance contract is a mutually 
uncoerced transaction).

> Could we see a gradual disappearance of some sorts of insurance
> for events that cease to be probabilistic ?
> Just musing. All of it already happens, but I'm curious about the
> limit of it (in the mathemetical sense) when the precision of the
> prediction tends towards infinity.

As I said, many corporations choose to self-insure. Partly because they 
can carry the costs of coverage of rare events themselves, partly 
because they have excellent estimates of what ranges of events are 
likely to occur.

Insurance has been in a process of evolutionary learning and better 
estimation for decades, even centuries. It shows no signs of going 
away. In fact, better estimation of risks has generally led to more and 
more refined kinds of insurance, even niche market insurance. Let me 
give an example:

A friend of mine just told me that his very elderly parents had to be 
flown home, with a medical attendant, from St. Petersburg, Russia to 
San Francisco. I don't know the full details, as his comment was in an 
e-mail message, but I know his parents were on some kind of Baltic Sea 
cruise. My friend said the emergency flight home was very expensive, 
but that his father had for the first time purchased "trip insurance," 
so the costs are covered. This kind of insurance didn't exist in the 
1950s, that's for sure.

More information means someone thinks they can make a buck making a 
certain kind of bet. Sometimes they bet wrong, except betting wrong is 
part of the scheme.

The larger issue is that these transactions be uncoerced.

The crypto significance may be a bit abstract, but it's related to 
selective disclosure of information, e.g., uncovering one of a series 
of covered coins, or showing a hand of cards. Alice and Bob play 
various games, sometimes buying disclosure of bits of information. "All 
crypto is economics" is just another way of saying the world and people 
in it do not have perfect information about the state of others, about 
their intents, about the future.

Both investors and actuaries are in the business of trying to estimate 
and predict better than others.

--Tim May
"Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little 
bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now 
racing down, with American flags fluttering."-- Tim May, on events 
following 9/11/2001




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Tue Jul  8 07:01:04 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 10:01:04 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <BAY7-F94n4pLaXID9rk0001ad68@hotmail.com>

Nobody wrote...

"There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage.  Real and
wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by
a reconversion phase.  These are the people who are already swallowing
the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for
good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear."

I'm in that category. And as someone who basically grew up in Carnegie Hall 
and the Metropolitan Opera, I trust my ears (I saw the opera Wozzeck twice 
by the time I was 17).

There are engineering reasons for this that I'm willing to discuss, though 
the discussion will be tedious for engineers, and impossible to understand 
for non-engineers. Far easier will be for you to go and listen
to a CD player that can upsample standard CD to 24bits/196kHz. The 
difference is not by any means subtle.

As an audiophile (Krell+Levinson+Thiel gear at home), I definitely don't 
want to grab an analog signal. Doing that the signal is sure to retain 
characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids 
won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.

-TD


>From: Nomen Nescio <nobody at dizum.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
>Date: Tue,  8 Jul 2003 08:40:01 +0200 (CEST)
>
>Major Variola writes:
>
> > Any human-consumable (analogue) input is readily recordable with
> > a single, one-time ADC, and thereafter is toast.  DRM is a fraud
> > perpetrated by engineers on Hollywood suits.  Good for employment
> > though.
>
>There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage.  Real and
>wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by
>a reconversion phase.  These are the people who are already swallowing
>the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for
>good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear.
>
>Consider how much more wine from Champagne is worth than that from a
>village just outside of the appelation limits.  People want to feel
>that they are getting the authentic goods, and they'll pay for them.
>That's what the RIAA is counting on.

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Tue Jul  8 10:47:59 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 10:47:59 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <875335371.20030708130006@realhappy.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307081043020.20997-100000@eskimo.com>

On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, stuart wrote:

> Now, when DRM gets into windows, I'm sure Virtual Audio Cable will stop
> working, RealAudio will stop making linux clients (why bother?), RIAA
> will (try to) make CDs that can only be played with windows clients,
> etc. Then someone will crack the formats of the audio streams and the
> CDs, and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.
>
> As things are now, it's easy to get the digital signal before it reaches
> the DAC, you don't need to go to DAC -> ADC, you don't need to plug your
> line-out to your line-in and degrade your signal.
>
> If the RIAA get their content to only work on Windows-type boxes, and if
> MS gets DRM to work in their Windows, things will become much more
> difficult. But these are big ifs that can quite possibly be circumvented
> even if they do come to fruition. There's always high-end sound cards
> that don't even use analog.
>
> DRM is not going to stop file sharing.
> They're trying to catch smoke with nets.

Yup, check out this dvd unit:
http://www.220-electronics.com/dvd/daewoo5800.htm
where it says: "Custom modification with code free automatic and manual
selection of regions and macrovision disabled. Excellent quality dvd
player with all the features."

and
"Price just reduced by over $100.  Was 249.00
Now only $129.00

The Daewoo 5800 custom modification  has been designed to make life a lot
less complicated.  It has superb Audio and video components outperforming
major brands such as Sony, Panasonic and Pioneer. "

So it won't be long before bypass systems will be commercially available.
At least in some parts of the _free_ world.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From Vincent.Penquerch at artworks.co.uk  Tue Jul  8 02:55:39 2003
From: Vincent.Penquerch at artworks.co.uk (Vincent Penquerc'h)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 10:55:39 +0100 
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
Message-ID: <B14C9D7F1977D111AD740060970ACBDA018932C5@warhol>

> When AAA Insurance meets with Joe Sixpack to discuss his 
> health or life 
> or earthquake insurance, they seek to collect enough information to 
> have a reasonable chance of turning a profit on the deal. Else why 
> would they exist as a business?

But there is a necessary asymmetry here. If you could determine
with good precision whether someone will be affected by an illness,
when, how much, etc, then this wouldn't work, save for superstition
on the part of Joe Sixpack. Since the contract is based on a bet on
the likelihood of premium/payouts balance, the more you can find
out about the future of the insured person's organism future, the
closer the premiums will match the payouts, reliably. *IF* you can
determine this, of course. So the goal will be for the insurer to
get access to as much info as possible to assess how to set the
premiums, while preventing the insured from knowing as much, so
there is still the uncertainty and the value of "peace of mind"
gotten by the insured, and that's worth something too.
The converse is also true. And both raise the problem of assessment
of the data - how does the insurer get the data (getting DNA from
the would be insured ? with the insured's knowledge or not ? From
the contract clause that subordinates the insurance to the supplying
of the data by the insured ? Will credit bureaus expand to cover
this kind of thing ?)
If there is total symmetry, insurance loses its point entirely.
Could we see a gradual disappearance of some sorts of insurance
for events that cease to be probabilistic ?
Just musing. All of it already happens, but I'm curious about the
limit of it (in the mathemetical sense) when the precision of the
prediction tends towards infinity.

-- 
Vincent Penquerc'h 




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul  8 11:04:26 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 11:04:26 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <875335371.20030708130006@realhappy.net>
Message-ID: <9C88EC34-B16E-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 10:00  AM, stuart wrote:

> On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, Tyler came up with this...
>
>> Nobody wrote...
>
>> "There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage.  Real 
>> and
>> wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by
>> a reconversion phase.  These are the people who are already swallowing
>> the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for
>> good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear."
>
>> characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P 
>> kids
>> won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.
>
> But you don't need to go to analog at all.
> I mean, aren't we using computers here?
>
> Using VSound for Linux (which I have used) and Virtual Audio Cable for
> Windows (which I haven't used) you can tap the signal before it even
> hits the sound card. I use VSound to make usable sound files from
> realaudio files. Both sites even say a sound card isn't even necessary.
> I don't know, I haven't tried that.

Agreed, many options for directly grabbing the data.

However, most people don't care about minor analog stages. Audiophiles 
and videophiles are not the primary consumers of this stuff, as 
evidenced by the mountains of MP3s not even sampled as well as they 
could be (64 kbps being the norm) and by the DIVX files shipped around 
the Web. And videos 10x-compressed to fit on CD-Rs. The people 
bootlegging CDs and DVDs are not usually the people with the 40-inch 
plasma screens.

Video pirates in Asia routinely use covert camcorders to grab weird-ass 
angles of first-run movies. And their DVD stall customers cheerfully 
pay them the equivalent of two dollars for their DVDs. Compared to 
this, sampling from an analog signal is heaven.

I have my own collection of about 30 DVD+Rs, each containing 1-2 
full-length videos. By the end of this year, I should have several 
hundred movies added to my collection.

The video quality is perfectly fine for me, and I like good quality. 
Until I move to HDTV and blue ray DVD, the quality is excellent. And 
even with HDTV and blue ray, so long as component video connections (a 
la progressive scan cables) are available, nearly perfect sampling will 
still be easy to do.

(Which is why Hollywood would like the HDTV sets to be sealed, with 
only digital inputs. Except that they tried this trick with twiddling 
with the specs of past HD generations. A lot of HDTV receivers and 
monitors are already out there, and changing the spec yet again and 
making the suckers, er, "early adopters," have to scrap their systems 
is not going to go over very well.)

>
> DRM is not going to stop file sharing.
> They're trying to catch smoke with nets.

Indeed.

--Tim May
(.sig for Everything list background)
Corralitos, CA. Born in 1951. Retired from Intel in 1986.
Current main interest: category and topos theory, math, quantum 
reality, cosmology.
Background: physics, Intel, crypto, Cypherpunks


Friends,

After more than 7 years with my got.net e-mail address, 
"tcmay at got.net", the amount of unsolicited e-mail I am getting on a 
daily basis has escalated sharply in recent months.

So my new address is "timcmay at got.net"

Please make a note of it and change your address books...if you wish to 
reach me in the future! Mail to my old address will be forwarded to my 
new adress for a few weeks, but then will start bouncing.

P.S. I plan to make strong efforts to stop my new address from being 
harvested by spammers, such as using "timcmay at got.removethis.net" in 
Usenet posts. I hope this works.

--Tim, timcmay at got.net




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul  8 11:18:21 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 11:18:21 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <BB30C088.33746%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>
Message-ID: <8E2A647C-B170-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 10:40  AM, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
>
> A curiosity, only tenuously related - I just came across a Feb 1994 
> copy of
> Elector magazine, with plans for a S/PDIF copybit eliminator (for 
> SCMS).
> Seems people have been defeating copy protection for a while..
>

I've owned an "Audio Alchemy" SCMS-stripper since 1991, when I bought 
my first DAT machine. It cost about $99, was about the size of a deck 
of cards, and stripped the SCMS bits out of the digital bitstream.

A later DAT machine I bought, a Tascam portable pro deck, has the SCMS 
stripped by default. (It takes in digital signals and writes to the DAT 
with the SCMS code set to "unlimited number of digital copies allowed.")

Likewise, a professional CD writer I own (HHB) bypasses SCMS. (Not just 
allowing a digital copy to be made, but making the resulting CD-R 
copyable freely.)

A friend of mine bought his DVD player on EBay: it bypasses all region 
coding (i.e., it makes all DVDs "region-free"). Region coding is a 
different issue, but part of the DRM universe.

Until George W. Bush and the Carlyle Group start putting money into 
these things and thus discover that SCMS strippers are terrorist tools, 
such tools will likely continue to be available.

"Use a logic analyzer, go to jail."




--Tim May
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a 
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also 
into you." -- Nietzsche




From bruen at coldrain.net  Tue Jul  8 08:30:27 2003
From: bruen at coldrain.net (Stormwalker)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 11:30:27 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <200307072103.01048.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307081108490.10733-100000@matrix.exilelabs.com>

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Neil Johnson wrote:

> On Monday 07 July 2003 07:53 pm, Stormwalker wrote:
> 
> >
> >    Medical insurance is about maintenence of our lives. You do not
> >    need to participate, but I'll bet if you get hurt, you'll head
> >    to the nearest emergency room. The pool I speak of is simply that
> >    I may need the services now and you may need some later. We all have
> >    shared types of services and very specific service. I will most likely
> >    never need medical services for AIDS, but I have used them for broken
> >    bones. I will never need them for gyno or for giving birth services,
> >    but I may need them for prostrate problems. We all use them when we are
> >    born.
> >
> 
> Bzzzzt. Tim is correct. Companies that provide medical insurance are betting 
> that you will require $X dollars of medical treatment and then charge you $Y 
> dollars hoping that $Y > $X (including the interest earned by investing $Y).

   Correct to a point. As businesses, their primary goal is to make a 
   profit. Providing goods/services is a by-product. Please don't assume
   I like insurance companies, especially when they are in between me and
   medical services.  I would be happier self-insuring and paying for the
   spikes in cost along the way. I was merely pointing out that, although
   the insurance providers and others, see the industry as a busines (read
   quarterly/annual timeframes), this is an incorrect way of looking at 
   it. It is incorrect because our lives go past the annual profit and 
   should be viewed over a much longer time span. By comparing my behavior
   today with the behavior of others, you get a distorted picture of
   what is happening. The business is happy with that picture because 
   there is always someone to point a finger at, today.

 
> The problem is that as you get older, the probability of you needing $$$ of 
> medical treatment goes up and even higher if you engage in unhealthy 
> practices (smoking,  overeating, etc.).

   This is true to a point, but the facts are a little different. The 
   stats show a spike in deaths at age 50 and 65, which is the basis for
   SS retirement age, and for over 50 folks it's 66 and increasing. The 
   spikes are caused by bad behavior, bad genes and bad luck, but have
   been reliable for a long time.
 
> The gubmint's solution to this is what you are talking about... "Medicare". 
> The fundamental assumption is that their are more healthy people than sick 
> ones so that the premiums payed by the healthy people can be used to pay for 
> medical care for the sick.

   Pyramid scheme.
 
> Unfortunately, there are two things wrong with this assumption. 1) Amazing 
> advances in medical technology that allow people who are sick to live longer, 
> but are very expensive, which leads to 2) more older (and less healthy) 
> people than young (and more healthy) people.

   Again, true to a point. It turns out once the sickly have been weeded
   out (50 & 65), the 80+ people are *generally* in good health when 
   compared to the rest of the population in spite the creation of the 
   living dead segment.

   Keep in mind that young people stress the medical system as well as
   the old. Giving birth is not cheap, for example. Neither is pediatric
   care. If you are going analyze the costs, you need to look at all of
   them, not a just piece at time. Why should I pay for an AIDS patient? 
   Well, why should I pay for women giving birth, except when it's my
   child? 

                    cheers, bob




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul  8 12:16:36 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 12:16:36 -0700
Subject: idea: brinworld meets the credit card
Message-ID: <3F0B1894.9AB25F99@cdc.gov>

Authentication is "Something you have / know / are."

A simple plastic credit card + PIN provides the first two,
including a photo provides the third "something you are".
A face is more often checked than the readily forgable
signature, in live authentication.

But as cameras become ubiquitous
(e.g., in cell phones) some extra security could be obtained
for *remote* authentication by sending a trusted photo of the
account holder plus a live picture of the card user.

A picture glued into the card could be forged, but a
smartcard (with more data area than a magstripe)
could include a picture of the account holder,
so a thief has no idea what to look like.  But the vendor can
check the encrypted smartcard face to the face on the phone
or webcam.  For high-value remote transactions, where you
pay someone to check faces, this might be viable in a few years.
In a few years after that, machines might be able to check faces
more cheaply, as reliably.

The live face-check with embedded digital photos is already standard
practice
on high-security building-entry cards (and passports?),
with the guard comparing the card-embedded face to the one before him.
Ubiquitous cameras will bring that face-check to remote transactions,
reducing cost due to lower fraud.

Thoughts?




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul  8 12:33:56 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 12:33:56 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <3F0B1CA4.2E660C94@cdc.gov>

At 02:55 PM 7/8/03 -0400, Billy wrote:
>On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 01:26:46PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
>> While the ear can't hear above 22KHz, signal above that *can*
>> effect the perceived sound, by heterodyne effects. For example,
>> if you play a single tone of 28KHz, or a single tone of 30 KHz,
>> you can't hear them.  Play them together, however, and you
>> *can* hear a beat frequency of 2KHz.
>
>Bullshit detector buzzing.
>Is this *really* true?  Have you tried it?

I haven't, but it does ring true.  You'd get 2 Khz as well as other
intermodulation products.  Standard EE stuff.

You've read about the company trying to sell highly localized
speakers?  They modulate two intense ultrasound beams, and the
air does the nonlinear mixing where they meet.

In the audiophile, lower-intensity case,
the ears' nonlinearity would do it.  Interesting info, Peter.




From stuart at realhappy.net  Tue Jul  8 10:00:06 2003
From: stuart at realhappy.net (stuart)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 13:00:06 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F94n4pLaXID9rk0001ad68@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F94n4pLaXID9rk0001ad68@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <875335371.20030708130006@realhappy.net>

On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, Tyler came up with this...

> Nobody wrote...

> "There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage.  Real and
> wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by
> a reconversion phase.  These are the people who are already swallowing
> the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for
> good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear."

> characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids
> won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.

But you don't need to go to analog at all.
I mean, aren't we using computers here?

Using VSound for Linux (which I have used) and Virtual Audio Cable for
Windows (which I haven't used) you can tap the signal before it even
hits the sound card. I use VSound to make usable sound files from
realaudio files. Both sites even say a sound card isn't even necessary.
I don't know, I haven't tried that.

VSound is archived at http://www.zorg.org/vsound but is no longer
maintained by the author, who is Australian and scared of Australia's
version of the DMCA, because this tool can obviously be used to
circumvent copyright protection. Then again, so can a 3-inch 1/8mm to
1/8mm cable, but audio cable manufacturers are poor targets, while
solitary programmers are much better at drawing the ire of
anti-copyright circumvention death squads.

Now, when DRM gets into windows, I'm sure Virtual Audio Cable will stop
working, RealAudio will stop making linux clients (why bother?), RIAA
will (try to) make CDs that can only be played with windows clients,
etc. Then someone will crack the formats of the audio streams and the
CDs, and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.

As things are now, it's easy to get the digital signal before it reaches
the DAC, you don't need to go to DAC -> ADC, you don't need to plug your
line-out to your line-in and degrade your signal.

If the RIAA get their content to only work on Windows-type boxes, and if
MS gets DRM to work in their Windows, things will become much more
difficult. But these are big ifs that can quite possibly be circumvented
even if they do come to fruition. There's always high-end sound cards
that don't even use analog.

DRM is not going to stop file sharing.
They're trying to catch smoke with nets.

-- 
stuart

Don't put your faith in gods. But you can believe in turtles.
-Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)-




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Tue Jul  8 10:26:46 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 13:26:46 -0400 
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1DC@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Tyler Durden[SMTP:camera_lumina at hotmail.com] wrote:
> 
> Nobody wrote...
> 
> "There is a loss of quality if you go through an analog stage.  Real and
> wannabe audiophiles will prefer the real thing, pure and undiluted by
> a reconversion phase.  These are the people who are already swallowing
> the marketing line that the CD bandwidth limit of 22KHz is too low for
> good fidelity, despite being higher than they can hear."
> 
> I'm in that category. And as someone who basically grew up in Carnegie
> Hall 
> and the Metropolitan Opera, I trust my ears (I saw the opera Wozzeck twice
> 
> by the time I was 17).
> 
> There are engineering reasons for this that I'm willing to discuss, though
> 
> the discussion will be tedious for engineers, and impossible to understand
> 
> for non-engineers. Far easier will be for you to go and listen
> to a CD player that can upsample standard CD to 24bits/196kHz. The 
> difference is not by any means subtle.
> 
> As an audiophile (Krell+Levinson+Thiel gear at home), I definitely don't 
> want to grab an analog signal. Doing that the signal is sure to retain 
> characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids 
> won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.
> 
> -TD
> 
I'll ditto that - my brother is an extremist audiophile - he writes
reviews for the high-end stuff (google "Mike Trei"). Many (by
no means all) top end audophiles prefer all-analog equipment,
and direct-cut vinyl records (ie, the master disk was cut directly
at the performance, without a magtape master). I've listened to
some of this stuff, and it just blows digital away.

The general attitude is that while low-end digital beats low-end
analog, high-end analog beats high-end digital. Digital places
a distinct floor on how bad the quality can be, but it also puts
a ceiling on it. The data capacity of a vinyl groove is a lot higher
than a CD pit-track, but you need very good equipment to use it.

While the ear can't hear above 22KHz, signal above that *can*
effect the perceived sound, by heterodyne effects. For example,
if you play a single tone of 28KHz, or a single tone of 30 KHz,
you can't hear them. Play them together, however, and you
*can* hear a beat frequency of 2KHz.

Peter Trei




From ericm at lne.com  Tue Jul  8 13:36:10 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 13:36:10 -0700
Subject: idea: brinworld meets the credit card
In-Reply-To: <3F0B1894.9AB25F99@cdc.gov>; from mv@cdc.gov on Tue, Jul
  08, 2003 at 12:16:36PM -0700
References: <3F0B1894.9AB25F99@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20030708133610.A23283@slack.lne.com>

On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 12:16:36PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> Authentication is "Something you have / know / are."

[..]

> A picture glued into the card could be forged, but a
> smartcard (with more data area than a magstripe)
> could include a picture of the account holder,
> so a thief has no idea what to look like.  But the vendor can
> check the encrypted smartcard face to the face on the phone
> or webcam.  For high-value remote transactions, where you
> pay someone to check faces, this might be viable in a few years.
> In a few years after that, machines might be able to check faces
> more cheaply, as reliably.
> 
> The live face-check with embedded digital photos is already standard
> practice
> on high-security building-entry cards (and passports?),
> with the guard comparing the card-embedded face to the one before him.
> Ubiquitous cameras will bring that face-check to remote transactions,
> reducing cost due to lower fraud.
> 
> Thoughts?

How does it allow the merchant to view the picture
while preventing the thief from doing so?

Saying "it's encrypted" is, at best, sweeping a very large
problem under a small rug.  Who holds the key?  How
does the card or the user authenticate a real merchant vs.
a thief posing as a merchant?

Those are the hard problems.  No one in biometrics
has yet been able to solve them in a general way.

Eric




From bruen at coldrain.net  Tue Jul  8 11:49:40 2003
From: bruen at coldrain.net (Stormwalker)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 14:49:40 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
In-Reply-To: <F92FF914-B161-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307081414370.10733-100000@matrix.exilelabs.com>

  Okay, I will make one last stab at showing why medical/health
  insurance is different from other forms of insurance, then, unless
  something really new appears, let it drop. I don't want to waste
  anyone's time and it was not that important to me in the first place.
  I have no love for any insurance provider. My attempt to understand
  does not imply approval.

  What I consider to be important and relevant, is the next 10 or so years
  where the engineering phase resulting from the mapping/sequencing of
  human genome will get into high gear. We will all be able to know
  more about each other than ever before and be able to manipulate the 
  building blocks of life. This will have a major impact on all of us.

  Now, for the insurance stuff. If I take out boat insurance and
  my boat sinks, I collect for the boat (assuming my policy was written
  that way and I did nothing to invalidate it). The parties
  involved are myself and the insurance company. If I take out life 
  insurance, when I die, my beneficiary collects from the insurance 
  company, only because I am dead and cannot collect myself. If my
  car is wrecked, I collect from the insurance company (I or they may
  have to pay a lien holder).

  In the medical insurance game, I pay a premium to the insurance
  company. When I need to collect (ie use medical services) I go to a 
  physician or hospital and they get paid for providing services by the 
  insurer. I do not  collect money  for breaking my arm or catching the 
  flu. It is not enough  to call all insurance games the same just because 
  the profit motive  exists for all  of them. That's like saying baseball 
  and basketball are the same because they both use balls. 

  The difference is in the existance of the third party (medical
  professionals), required because it is life maintenance, not a simple
  betting game like the other insurance games. If my boat is only damaged,
  I can collect the money and fix it myself or not, as I please. The
  same is not true of health insurance. Imagine that I break my arm, then
  insist that I be paid whatever it would have cost to fix it. I could
  decide to fix it myself or not fix it at all. Or take the money and
  go my choice of healer. 

  Because of this structure, I do not accept that insurance companies
  need to know anything beyond the minimum about me. They know how to
  price it without detailed personal information.

  If this is not clear enough, so be it.

  Lastly, medical insurance is often (not always) coerced. For example,
  in a divorce case, especially with kids involved, one or both parents
  will be required to carry it. If you want to be full time student in
  Massachusetts, you are required to carry it (and telling me to give 
  up my choice of being a student is still being coerced.). If you want a 
  job in  Massachusetts, you can only choose which provider you want. Not 
  to carry it is not a choice. This may not be true in other states, but
  it is true in some. I used to live in Mass.

                    cheers, bob




From billy at dadadada.net  Tue Jul  8 11:55:26 2003
From: billy at dadadada.net (Billy)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 14:55:26 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1DC@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1DC@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com>
Message-ID: <20030708185526.GA12797@mail.dadadada.net>

On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 01:26:46PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
> While the ear can't hear above 22KHz, signal above that *can*
> effect the perceived sound, by heterodyne effects. For example,
> if you play a single tone of 28KHz, or a single tone of 30 KHz,
> you can't hear them.  Play them together, however, and you
> *can* hear a beat frequency of 2KHz.

Bullshit detector buzzing.
Is this *really* true?  Have you tried it?

The beat frequency is an amplitude envelope around the 30kHz tone
(think AM).  No part of its spectrum falls within audible range.
It shouldn't be audible at all.




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Tue Jul  8 15:12:30 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 15:12:30 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: idea: brinworld meets the credit card
In-Reply-To: <20030708133610.A23283@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <20030708221230.93457.qmail@web40613.mail.yahoo.com>

> Those are the hard problems.  No one in biometrics
> has yet been able to solve them in a general way.

And the merchant example is the wrong application.

The merchant doesn't care WHO you are - that's a false premise.

Merchant cares if you can pay. Now, that's a completely solvable issue.

Of course, we know who and why is trying to misrepresent this.

All other applications of biometrics boil down to threatening with punishment
(we know who you are, behave or else ...) - and then the biometrics ceases to
be in the interest of the eyeball holder. Even granting door access to
"employees" fits this category. You don't let "any qualified mathematician
willing to work" to enter the lab - you let in only those that you know where
they live, have signed contracts with them, etc.



=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul  8 15:14:04 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 15:14:04 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <e403ddd83f24f49ed59479f0d0913600@cypherpunks.to>
Message-ID: <7C91536E-B191-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 01:39  PM, Anonymous via the Cypherpunks 
Tonga Remailer wrote:

>>> As an audiophile (Krell+Levinson+Thiel gear at home), I definitely 
>>> don't
>>> want to grab an analog signal. Doing that the signal is sure to 
>>> retain
>>> characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P 
>>> kids
>>> won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.
>>>
>>> -TD
>>>
>> I'll ditto that - my brother is an extremist audiophile - he writes
>> reviews for the high-end stuff (google "Mike Trei"). Many (by
>> no means all) top end audophiles prefer all-analog equipment,
>> and direct-cut vinyl records (ie, the master disk was cut directly
>> at the performance, without a magtape master). I've listened to
>> some of this stuff, and it just blows digital away.
>
> What else do you expect, when any audiophile who denies that inaudible
> frequencies make the music "warmer" proves himself to be a philistine
> with ears of tin?
>
> Remember, it was the fashion and clothing EXPERTS who were the most
> insistent that the emperor's new clothes were absolutely marvelous.
>

The harshness of a digital bitstream can be softened by operating LED 
clocks in the same room as the bitstream. The Tice Clock, for example, 
works by plugging in to any electrical socket in the room where the 
listener is located...of course, all that matters is that he _sees_ the 
Tice Clock plugged-in, and remembers that he paid $399 for this piece 
of wondrous technology, for the effect to work.

That the bitstream as measured with a logic analyzer is unchanged with 
any of these "digital enhancers" is beside the point.

Monster Cable, by the way, is doing a nice business selling Extra 
Special, Oxygen-Free Copper Shielded, Insulated with Rubber Hand-Rolled 
on the Thighs of Taiwanese Virgins cables for _USB_. Yep, for USB. 
Never mind that the bitstream either is there or it isn't...some people 
think they get superior data with special $80 cables.

As for hearing heterodyning in 28 KHz and 30 KHz signals, maybe. CD 
players have brickwall filters to of course block such frequencies. 
Some analog groove-based systems can have some kind of signal up there 
at those frequencies, but not much. Very, very few microphones are 
rated at 22-25 KHz, so I have to wonder just where this signal is 
coming from. If not coming from actual musical instruments, and 
detected by the microphones, why bother?

Sure, we may as well push the CD spec up to 24 KHz or so. That will 
probably even satisfy Neil Young.

--Tim May




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Tue Jul  8 12:52:54 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 15:52:54 -0400 
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1DE@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Billy[SMTP:billy at dadadada.net]
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 01:26:46PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
> > While the ear can't hear above 22KHz, signal above that *can*
> > effect the perceived sound, by heterodyne effects. For example,
> > if you play a single tone of 28KHz, or a single tone of 30 KHz,
> > you can't hear them.  Play them together, however, and you
> > *can* hear a beat frequency of 2KHz.
> 
> Bullshit detector buzzing.
> Is this *really* true?  Have you tried it?
> 
> The beat frequency is an amplitude envelope around the 30kHz tone
> (think AM).  No part of its spectrum falls within audible range.
> It shouldn't be audible at all.
> 
Not personally, but The Net holds all knowledge.
People are making real products using this
technique. For example....

Here's a neat application - 'audio spotlights'. The
directionality of a speaker is a function of the ratio 
of its diameter to the wavelength of the sound 
produced - by using an ultrasonic speaker with
audible beat frequencies, you can make a small,
very directional speaker:

http://www.bostonaes.org/archives/2003/Jan/
http://www.acoustics.org/press/133rd/2pea.html

Peter Trei




From billy at dadadada.net  Tue Jul  8 12:58:24 2003
From: billy at dadadada.net (Billy)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 15:58:24 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1DE@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1DE@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com>
Message-ID: <20030708195824.GB13250@mail.dadadada.net>

On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 03:52:54PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
> Billy [SMTP:billy at dadadada.net] wrote:
> > Bullshit detector buzzing.
> > Is this *really* true?  Have you tried it?
>
> Not personally, but The Net holds all knowledge.
>...
> http://www.bostonaes.org/archives/2003/Jan/
> http://www.acoustics.org/press/133rd/2pea.html

Very interesting.. Thanks!




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul  8 16:09:24 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 16:09:24 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <3F0B4F24.F0330D53@cdc.gov>

At 03:14 PM 7/8/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>As for hearing heterodyning in 28 KHz and 30 KHz signals, maybe. CD
>players have brickwall filters to of course block such frequencies.
>Some analog groove-based systems can have some kind of signal up there
>at those frequencies, but not much.

Regular vinyl is (was) also recorded with all kinds of filters, too,
including the lowpass ones.

If you cut vinyl (or metal) through a signal chain that didn't
impose the filtering, perhaps the ultrasonics would remain,
which is perhaps the analogophiles claim.  You would need
a special vinyl cutter though.  Some of the filtering imposed
on vinyl was to not fry the cutter, or otherwise deal with its inertia.

(BTW, I thought your Monster USB cable was a prank.. its not..
some folks just don't get digital..)




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul  8 16:59:42 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 16:59:42 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <3F0B4F24.F0330D53@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <3E329276-B1A0-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 04:09  PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> At 03:14 PM 7/8/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>> As for hearing heterodyning in 28 KHz and 30 KHz signals, maybe. CD
>> players have brickwall filters to of course block such frequencies.
>> Some analog groove-based systems can have some kind of signal up there
>> at those frequencies, but not much.
>
> Regular vinyl is (was) also recorded with all kinds of filters, too,
> including the lowpass ones.
>
> If you cut vinyl (or metal) through a signal chain that didn't
> impose the filtering, perhaps the ultrasonics would remain,
> which is perhaps the analogophiles claim.  You would need
> a special vinyl cutter though.  Some of the filtering imposed
> on vinyl was to not fry the cutter, or otherwise deal with its inertia.
>
> (BTW, I thought your Monster USB cable was a prank.. its not..
> some folks just don't get digital..)
>

Yes, they are real. I perhaps should have inserted a "this is not a 
joke," but I didn't think to.

When I was the judge in the First Internet Witch Trial, one of the 
examples I used was how believing something doesn't make it so, despite 
what the believers think (though the psychological effects may be 
real). An example being some audiophile nonsense, such as the Tice 
Clock (which is/was also real...some people bought the snake oil about 
how an LED clock plugged in could "soften the harshness of digital." 
With the Tice Clock, with the Monster USB cables, one can examine the 
effects on bit error rates, and even look at timing jitter (a claim 
some manufacturers of snake oil make). For any of us with a remotely 
scientific bent, seeing that the bitstream is unchanged, that the bit 
error rate is unchanged, is pretty convincing evidence that no matter 
what we _think_ we hear, especially in non-double blind listening 
tests, there simply _is_ no difference.

And yet there are people who claim to hear differences between 5 dollar 
digital cables and thousand dollar digital cables, even when the 
bitstreams are identical. (And even if they are not, they are within 
the capture window of the next digital gadget, and hence are for all 
intents and purposes absolutely identical.)

One might as well sell "Monster Cable Power Cords for PCs," claiming 
they make the Pentium 4 "perform more accurately." Actually, I'll bet 
the tweaks are already buying special power cords for their Athlon 
2200+ homebrews.

Most so-called high end tube amps do in fact sound different, perhaps 
"better," perhaps not. This is of course because tubes are usually rich 
in odd-order harmonics. That $4000 Krell tube amp is actually 
_coloring_ the sound. So much for 20-bit DACs in the signal source: the 
amp is altering the sound at about the 6th or 8th or whatever most 
significant bit.

Bob Carver and a few others have "emulated the tube sound" so well with 
DSPs that double-blind tests  using audiophiles cannot tell the 
difference, and where the waveforms look identical.




From zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk  Tue Jul  8 10:40:08 2003
From: zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk (Peter Fairbrother)
Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 18:40:08 +0100
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F42h0IKUo87E4u00047d62@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <BB30C088.33746%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>

Tyler Durden wrote:

> As a basic idea it seems relatively workable. However, there's one detail
> that perhaps you might want to know about:
> 
> "We can push the idea a step further, making a stripped-down CD/DVD drive
> that would be able basically just to follow the spiral track with its head
> in constant linear velocity"
> 
> 
> Unlike a vinyl record, the CD grooves don't form a spiral...they are
> concentric circles. Also, the beginning of the CD is towards the center, the
> end towards the edge.
> 
> 

Eh? It's a spiral.

The constant linear velocity applies to the scan velocity (1.3 m/s at 1x),
not the head velocity, which might cause problems.

Also the spiral track/ holes in the centre aren't accurate enough to follow
the track without real-time correction, done by some complex optical tricks
and feedback loops.

However, it should be quite easy to get a signal from somewhere in the CD
player (especially from early ones which split the functions between lots of
chips), probably best would be from the EFM (eight to fourteen modulation)
or frame output. This will include all the interesting subcodes etc., plus
sync and C1/C2 parity bytes.

That's a fairly clean (it's digital, but with errors) signal at about 2.1
Mb/s at 1x speed, so it shouldn't be hard to capture and analyse in real
time  :). However, you will still have to do the CIRC decoding.


If you are feeling adventurous you could just take a signal from the laser
head, and do the timing, EFM, circ etc yourself. That will give you the
pits, plus the errors, plus a lot (!) of work. Not recommended really,
unlees you need it for some (anti?) copy-protection purpose.


As for getting the player to actually follow the track on a protected disc,
again the solution is probably to go for an older player and hack about. I
used to repair them (a long time ago, when it was worth doing), it should be
quite easy (though I'm no expert on CD copy protection). There was a mod
involving just putting a few volts on one chip lead on an early Sony model,
but I can't remember enough details to find a ref.



A curiosity, only tenuously related - I just came across a Feb 1994 copy of
Elector magazine, with plans for a S/PDIF copybit eliminator (for SCMS).
Seems people have been defeating copy protection for a while..

-- 
Peter Fairbrother




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Tue Jul  8 19:15:20 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 19:15:20 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <BB311F5A.33786%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307081858320.11828-100000@eskimo.com>

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

> the nyquist/lindquist/someone-else-who-was-pissed sampling theorems are
> based on the possibility of mathematically extracting frequencies from
> digital information in a STEADY_STATE situation.
>
> That doesn't mean that a speaker will properly reproduce those frequencies.

Nor does it mean the op amp driving the speakers will follow them either.
High speed and power are a hard combination to build.

> Consider the dynamics of energy transfer. A digital signal at
> near-1/2-sampling frequency will have two datum points. The transitiion
> between them will be dramatic! the possibilities of energy transfer will not
> be comparable to an analogue sinusoidal waveform.
>
> And that's why good analogue is better then good digital.

It's definitly why you need fast digital.  To reproduce 20+ kHz you should
use a 200kHz sample rate and have a nice filter stage before the power
amp.  "good digital" can do more things than good analog because the final
output is good analog in both cases.  The speaker driver is pure analog
by definition.

To produce 65kHz (for cats) my present boss prefers a 1 MHz sample rate.
The guys who do bats think it's good enough for 200kHz, but my boss won't
do bats - much too complex.  We've got a 25 bit dac which updates at
1 MHz, but we still need a nice filter and analog output stage for 120 dB
clean signals.  (I'm only getting 100 dB because it costs too much to
really do the best possible.)  Clearly a digital system can be built
that can create any wave form a speaker can follow, and it's easier to
control than an analog system.

The human hearing system is capable of noticing phase relations at 100kHz
rates.  So any sample rate faster than 200kHz is outside the range of
human detection.  Cats can notice phase shifts in the 200kHz range, and
bats are out in the 400kHz range.  Biological systems *are* impressive.
But digital vs analog is a silly argument, the final stage is analog.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From netkita at earthlink.net  Tue Jul  8 16:34:35 2003
From: netkita at earthlink.net (netkita at earthlink.net)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 19:34:35 -0400
Subject: pegasus
Message-ID: <3F0B1CCB.18726.A3649CF@localhost>

    How do  add the name of a person  or group to the information folder that holds all 
    my email addresses of persons that I email to on a regular basis . 

    `				D




From nobody at cypherpunks.to  Tue Jul  8 13:39:11 2003
From: nobody at cypherpunks.to (Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer)
Date: Tue,  8 Jul 2003 22:39:11 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <e403ddd83f24f49ed59479f0d0913600@cypherpunks.to>

> > As an audiophile (Krell+Levinson+Thiel gear at home), I definitely don't 
> > want to grab an analog signal. Doing that the signal is sure to retain 
> > characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids 
> > won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second.
> > 
> > -TD
> > 
> I'll ditto that - my brother is an extremist audiophile - he writes
> reviews for the high-end stuff (google "Mike Trei"). Many (by
> no means all) top end audophiles prefer all-analog equipment,
> and direct-cut vinyl records (ie, the master disk was cut directly
> at the performance, without a magtape master). I've listened to
> some of this stuff, and it just blows digital away.

What else do you expect, when any audiophile who denies that inaudible
frequencies make the music "warmer" proves himself to be a philistine
with ears of tin?

Remember, it was the fashion and clothing EXPERTS who were the most
insistent that the emperor's new clothes were absolutely marvelous.




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Jul  8 20:40:08 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 22:40:08 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: New Quantum Crypto Tested Over 100km, Sets New Record (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307082239370.5955-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.idg.net/ic_1326014_9720_1-5072.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From nobody at dizum.com  Tue Jul  8 14:40:06 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Tue,  8 Jul 2003 23:40:06 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <5913323ed6e456730fd10250f6a3edc1@dizum.com>

Tyler Durden leaves the fight club and writes:
> Do you have a reference? I don't remember reading that SACD was encrypted. 
> What I DO remember is that the reason there's no standard SACD or DVD-A 
> digital interface is because the Industry wants that digital interface to be 
> encrypted.

The detailed technical specs are apparently secret, but an overview
of the multi-layered SACD copy protection is at
http://www.sacd.philips.com/b2b/downloads/content_protection.pdf.  If
you don't like PDFs, most of the same information is at
http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/dvdaudio/dvdaud_sacd.htm.

Alan Clueless writes:

> Furthermore, people have come to expect that they should be able to play 
> whatever disc shaped media in their computer.  At some point there will 
> need to be a software based player.

Both of the documents above specifically deny that software based players
will be allowed.  I get the impression that the decryption will always be
done in hardware, and if a PC is ever able to play one of these gadgets,
it will be a Palladium system or something similar that can be locked
down.

Steve Shear writes:

> If you believe the article "Myths and Misconceptions about Hardware 
> Hacking," 
> http://www.cptwg.org/Assets/Presentations/ARDG/ARDGHardware_hack05-28-03.pdf 
> , recently posted to the Content Protection Technical Working Group, access 
> to affordable commercial technology for reverse engineering has given 
> hardware hackers the upper hand.

That's mostly about how hardware hackers can use modern chips and custom
PC boards without spending more than a few hundred dollars.  Fine,
but it's a long way from that to being able to pull an algorithm and/or
device key out of a chip which has been designed to make that difficult.




From zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk  Tue Jul  8 17:24:42 2003
From: zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk (Peter Fairbrother)
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 01:24:42 +0100
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <BB311F5A.33786%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>

okay I'm a bit pissed now. actually i'm raging pissed! Wheeee!!!


the nyquist/lindquist/someone-else-who-was-pissed sampling theorems are
based on the possibility of mathematically extracting frequencies from
digital information in a STEADY_STATE situation.

That doesn't mean that a speaker will properly reproduce those frequencies.


Consider the dynamics of energy transfer. A digital signal at
near-1/2-sampling frequency will have two datum points. The transitiion
between them will be dramatic! the possibilities of energy transfer will not
be comparable to an analogue sinusoidal waveform.

And that's why good analogue is better then good digital.



Doug Self etc. did some work on ultra-fast analogue systems in the mid 90's,
and designed some amps that were and are regarded as pretty good - but afaik
he didn't get the theory right.


YAAAAHHH!-- 
Peter Fairbrother




From zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk  Tue Jul  8 18:47:40 2003
From: zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk (Peter Fairbrother)
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 02:47:40 +0100
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <BB3132CC.3378C%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>

I wrote:

the nyquist/lindquist/someone-else-who-was-pissed sampling theorems are
based on the possibility of mathematically extracting frequencies from
digital information in a STEADY_STATE situation.

That doesn't mean that a speaker will properly reproduce those frequencies.

Consider the dynamics of energy transfer. A digital signal at
near-1/2-sampling frequency will have two datum points. The transitiion
between them will be dramatic! the possibilities of energy transfer will not
be comparable to an analogue sinusoidal waveform.

....


and i missed a bit or two. Consider the entropic uncertainty of a signal
that has two-and-a-bit datums, against a sine wave. Start from zero, and go
to such a waveform. Is it a constant-amplitude sine wave at frequency z? or
a decaying sine at a frequency (z-at)?

There's more, and it's to do with the limits of fourier and sampling theory.


Say you have a wave at a frequency of z that's sampled according to nyquist
theory. can you distinguish it from a wave of a frequency z - delta z? It
can be done, but it takes a while, and a good few samples to do it. And a
good analogue system will do it quicker.

someone (hopefully not me, i haven't the time just now) can probably apply
wavelet theory and get all this from steady-state theory, and tie it up in a
nice package.

-- 
Peter Fairbrother




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Wed Jul  9 02:59:59 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 02:59:59 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CI] Re: Finding collision resistant hash functions
In-Reply-To: <3F0AEAAB.54E31E99@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20030709095959.36417.qmail@web21202.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,

>There's nothing gained by
> increasing
> the input entropy (compressing

http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/fip180-1.htm
For t = 0 to 79 do 
TEMP = (A)<<5 + f(B,C,D) + E + Wt + Kt; 
E = D; D = C; C = B<<30; B = A; A = TEMP; 

Thats what I meant by the compression function. I am
not trying to increase the input entropy.

I was looking for such a compression function such
that the chances of collision in the message digest
obtained by hashing these 2^80 messages is collision
free or very low probability of collision or in other
words I dont want the birthday attack to work on it.

If i hash 2^80 messages they should be equidistibuted
in such a manner that it does not affect the security
of the algorithm.




--- "Major Variola (ret)" <mv at cdc.gov> wrote:
> At 11:18 PM 7/7/03 -0700, Sarad AV wrote:
>A block cipher has the property that any
> one bit difference in input will change half the
> output
> bits on average.  

thank you.

Sarath.

__________________________________
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SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  9 05:11:51 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 07:11:51 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: The Register - We've found the perfect solution to spam (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307090711370.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/31638.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  9 05:12:08 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 07:12:08 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: News: Wal-Mart cancels 'smart-shelf' trial (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307090711530.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-1023934.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From john at kozubik.com  Wed Jul  9 07:30:46 2003
From: john at kozubik.com (John Kozubik)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 07:30:46 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Genetic engineering [was: RE: DNA of relative indicts man, 
  cuckol ding ignored]
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D1D6@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <20030709072259.T75326-100000@kozubik.com>

On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Trei, Peter wrote:

> Its when we get to 'fixes' to behaviour and personality
> that things start to get very hairy. I fear that those in
> power will use genetic engineering as they have used
> every other tool at their disposal - weapons, states,
> laws, and governments - to maintain their position at
> the expense of the overall welfare of the species, by
> allowing improvements only to their own descendents,
> while requiring changes to those out of power which
> make it harder for them to change their status.
>
> One scenario:
>
> "Mr & Mrs Smith: The No Child Should Fear Act of
> 2015 requires that your proposed son have the
> 'bullying' gene deleted if he is to attend publicly
> funded schools. This is similar to the old requirements
> for vaccination - we don't want your son to endanger
> other children, do we?

I have long believed that the constitution of the United States (through
an ammendment) should include protection against involuntary mental
tampering.  It should, for instance, be a constitutional right for a child
not to take their Ritalin, or for an insane man not to take his meds in
order to stand trial (a recent court case whose outcome I do not know).

Along this line, perhaps a more general anti-tampering ammendment could
include protection against the coercion that you describe above.  I feel
that no parent should be forced to alter their child in any way - before
or after the birth.

-----
John Kozubik - john at kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul  9 10:23:55 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 10:23:55 -0700
Subject: MRAM, persistance of memory
Message-ID: <3F0C4FAB.FB644298@cdc.gov>

The persistance of memory could be a problem if your melting
clocks are swarmed by spooky ants.

Wired has an article on magetic RAM
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59559,00.html
that fails to mention security implications.  Obviously
nonvolitile RAM presents a different security risk than
RAM that forgets when powered off.  Will future OSes
have provisions to keep certain data out of MRAM banks,
if MRAM doesn't completely displace DRAM?
I doubt it.

And shutting off your virtual memory swapping
--useful today because of the gobs of DRAM machines have--
will no longer be useful for security.

Not so obviously to the layman is how many times MRAM
must be overwritten to keep the TLAs away.  (Exactly
analogous to scrubbing a disk.)  While this is trivial to do for
user-space,
if the OS keeps copies of sensitive info this might require
more than a huge malloc() & overwrites before shutdown.




From s.schear at comcast.net  Wed Jul  9 10:43:15 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 10:43:15 -0700
Subject: Grey-World
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030709104110.04782420@mail.comcast.net>

An excellent site for those interested in tunneling, covert channels, 
network related steganographic methods developments.

http://gray-world.net/


"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer




From ericm at lne.com  Wed Jul  9 10:43:33 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 10:43:33 -0700
Subject: MRAM, persistance of memory
In-Reply-To: <3F0C4FAB.FB644298@cdc.gov>; from mv@cdc.gov on Wed, Jul
  09, 2003 at 10:23:55AM -0700
References: <3F0C4FAB.FB644298@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20030709104333.A30503@slack.lne.com>

On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 10:23:55AM -0700, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
 
> Wired has an article on magetic RAM
> http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59559,00.html
> that fails to mention security implications.  Obviously
> nonvolitile RAM presents a different security risk than
> RAM that forgets when powered off.  Will future OSes
> have provisions to keep certain data out of MRAM banks,
> if MRAM doesn't completely displace DRAM?
> I doubt it.

I doubt it as well.  DRAM also has power-off memory persistence 
and nearly everyone in security ignores that as well.

But not the spooks :

"The FEI-374i-DRS is a data recovery system that captures and preserved
digital data, in its original format, directly from the Dynamic Random
Access Memory (DRAM) of Digital Telephone Answering Machines (DTAMs)
...
The FEI-374i-DRS is an indispensable tool for forensic investigators
required to evaluate residual audio and tag information retained in
today's DRAM-based DTAMs."

http://www.nomadics.com/374idrs.htm


Eric




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul  9 10:59:39 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 10:59:39 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <3F0C580B.6D8BC82@cdc.gov>

At 07:15 PM 7/8/03 -0700, Mike Rosing wrote:
>To produce 65kHz (for cats) my present boss prefers a 1 MHz sample
rate.

Do cats buy a lot of audiophile equiptment :8=||

>The human hearing system is capable of noticing phase relations at
100kHz
>rates.

Actually I thought humans are insensitive to phase relations, modulo
inter-aural timing at low frequencies for spatial location.  Perhaps
that
is what you meant?   But spatial location isn't the same as the
frequency-fetishing
audiophiles go for.  To do that well you need casts of the outer ear
too.

You doing owl-type studies on auditory localization?  Audio-visual
mapping
and plasticity?   Making the cats wear funky glasses?




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul  9 11:07:31 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 11:07:31 -0700
Subject: [CI] Re: Finding collision resistant hash functions
Message-ID: <3F0C59E3.A0C05263@cdc.gov>

At 02:59 AM 7/9/03 -0700, Sarad AV wrote:
>hi,
>> MV:
>>There's nothing gained by
>> increasing
>> the input entropy (compressing
>
>I was looking for such a compression function such
>that the chances of collision in the message digest
>obtained by hashing these 2^80 messages is collision
>free or very low probability of collision or in other
>words I dont want the birthday attack to work on it.
>
>If i hash 2^80 messages they should be equidistibuted
>in such a manner that it does not affect the security
>of the algorithm.

Again, unless you know something about the distribution
of your input AND their interaction with your chosen
hash function, you gain nothing by remapping (compression
or otherwise) your input.  And again, a good hash function
will disperse your input randomly, regardless of its clustering.

So pick a crypto-like hash function
(which guarantees random dispersion)
and use it.  You can't do better unless
you "cheat" and know your input before
you pick a hash function.  And picking pathological
inputs (to cause collisions) will be hard.

e.g.,

hash=0
while (input)
    hash = hash ^ DES( input, fixed_key )
return hash

The only reason to compress would be to
cut down the number of DES operations,
useful only if compression is cheaper than DES.




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Wed Jul  9 11:45:43 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 11:45:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <3F0C580B.6D8BC82@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307091142080.28607-100000@eskimo.com>

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> Do cats buy a lot of audiophile equiptment :8=||

Nope.  That's why I have a job (for another couple of months anyway,
till the grant runs out.)

> Actually I thought humans are insensitive to phase relations, modulo
> inter-aural timing at low frequencies for spatial location.  Perhaps
> that
> is what you meant?   But spatial location isn't the same as the
> frequency-fetishing
> audiophiles go for.  To do that well you need casts of the outer ear
> too.

No, if you put 2 clicks out that are 10 usec's apart on right and
left, most people can pick out which side came first.  90% of the
time anyway.

> You doing owl-type studies on auditory localization?  Audio-visual
> mapping
> and plasticity?   Making the cats wear funky glasses?

Yup.  they sew coils into their eyes.  For humans they use contacts :-)
PETA is definitly a problem :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul  9 13:55:32 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 13:55:32 -0700
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool (meow)
Message-ID: <3F0C8143.4B44F692@cdc.gov>

At 11:45 AM 7/9/03 -0700, Mike Rosing wrote:
>On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>> Actually I thought humans are insensitive to phase relations, modulo
>> inter-aural timing at low frequencies for spatial location.  Perhaps
>> that
>> is what you meant?   But spatial location isn't the same as the
>> frequency-fetishing
>> audiophiles go for.  To do that well you need casts of the outer ear
>> too.
>
>No, if you put 2 clicks out that are 10 usec's apart on right and
>left, most people can pick out which side came first.  90% of the
>time anyway.

Yes this is for localization ---clicks are broadband, you need to
identify which freq components are used.  I still think
humans can't discriminate the phase of a tone.  In fact, MP3s
use this to cut bits.

>> You doing owl-type studies on auditory localization?  Audio-visual
>> mapping
>> and plasticity?   Making the cats wear funky glasses?
>
>Yup.  they sew coils into their eyes.  For humans they use contacts :-)

>PETA is definitly a problem :-)

Gaak.  I was thinking prism-glasses maybe bolted on that translate the
vis field.
Its ok for undergrads so its ok for cats.

After the experiments, the cats
will be ok, as I assume they're sufficiently
plastic, unless you do brain staining on them.  :-(    Or your policy is
the
Tim McVeigh treatment.

Cool stuff, though my domestic feline wants to know where you live.

PS: have you identified the "can opener sound" brain-center yet?


----
Cats manage biometrics and reputation better than most human systems..




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul  9 11:26:18 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 14:26:18 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <BAY7-F354rw93duPTv5000161e9@hotmail.com>

Tim May wrote...

>Most so-called high end tube amps do in fact sound different, perhaps 
>"better," perhaps not. This is of course because tubes are usually rich in 
>odd-order harmonics. That $4000 Krell tube amp is actually _coloring_ the 
>sound. So much for 20-bit DACs in the signal source: the amp is altering 
>the sound at about the 6th or 8th or whatever most significant bit.

A couple of corrections, then the comment. First is that tubes boost the 
even order harmonics, making the sound much richer and fuller sounding. 
Also, the Krell is digital, not tube.

But your point is correct, but also well-known within audiophile circles. In 
fact, single-end triode style tube amps (which hit the market about 10 years 
ago) have really rotten measureables, but they have continued to grow in 
popularity because of the the allegedly "live/lush" sound. (Another odd 
thing about them is that they have extremely low output powers--12W, 8W and 
6W are common!) Everyone knows they are basically nearly random tone-control 
gizmos, but no one cares at this point.

As for 24/96 (or 24/192), like I said there are real engineering reasons for 
doing this, but in the end there's not much reason to argue if you haven't 
heard. Go listen to a standard CD played on an upsampling machine and you 
will know in no uncertain terms that the sound is considerably 
better/fuller/realler. (A hint as to why can be seen when you look a square 
wave reproduced in 16/22 vs 24/96.)

As for audiophile voodoo there's a lot out there, but there's a pretty easy 
way to differentiate voodoo from real (though 'inexplicable') high-end 
stuff. The voodoo dissappears within a year or two, but the real stuff keeps 
going.

-TD

A PS about double-blind: There's been lots of them done, some confirming 
audiophile expectations some contradicting. Some of the disparity is due to 
who the blindees are: high-end listening is a skill that is basically 
self-taught. Some of the high-end tweeks have differences that are not 
discernable to nonGolden ears (and some tweaks are obviously pure snakeoil).

_________________________________________________________________
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From eresrch at eskimo.com  Wed Jul  9 14:32:53 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 14:32:53 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool (meow)
In-Reply-To: <3F0C8143.4B44F692@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307091428180.28464-100000@eskimo.com>

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> Yes this is for localization ---clicks are broadband, you need to
> identify which freq components are used.  I still think
> humans can't discriminate the phase of a tone.  In fact, MP3s
> use this to cut bits.

They can tell relative phase, but it takes a lot of training.

> After the experiments, the cats
> will be ok, as I assume they're sufficiently
> plastic, unless you do brain staining on them.  :-(    Or your policy is
> the
> Tim McVeigh treatment.

both.  They spend a year training the cats, then a year or 2 collecting
data, then brain stain, then vaporize.  Each cat is worth about $1M when
it's all done, and it's got a lot of skull missing while it's alive.
But it's well protected with a lot of aluminum and epoxy :-)

> Cool stuff, though my domestic feline wants to know where you live.
>
> PS: have you identified the "can opener sound" brain-center yet?

I think you better keep it far away!  And no, they don't play with
higher order systems.  The low level stuff is hard enough!!

> Cats manage biometrics and reputation better than most human systems..

:-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul  9 11:35:16 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 14:35:16 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
Message-ID: <BAY7-F41kSWw6gppY3A0000c7be@hotmail.com>

"Actually I thought humans are insensitive to phase relations, modulo
inter-aural timing at low frequencies for spatial location.  Perhaps
that is what you meant?   But spatial location isn't the same as the
frequency-fetishing audiophiles go for."

Au contrare...frequency accuracy vs spatial resolution is the classic 
Uncertainty principal in high end.

A real high-end system present the ear with a truly 3-D soundscape...some 
instruments are clearly in the foreground, some are clearly in the 
background, and some are even higher than others. With a good recording, the 
hall ambience is also there. Put a great live recording on a great high-end 
sound system and "you are there".

-TD


>From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv at cdc.gov>
>To: "cypherpunks at lne.com" <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>Subject: Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
>Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 10:59:39 -0700
>
>At 07:15 PM 7/8/03 -0700, Mike Rosing wrote:
> >To produce 65kHz (for cats) my present boss prefers a 1 MHz sample
>rate.
>
>Do cats buy a lot of audiophile equiptment :8=||
>
> >The human hearing system is capable of noticing phase relations at
>100kHz
> >rates.
>
>Actually I thought humans are insensitive to phase relations, modulo
>inter-aural timing at low frequencies for spatial location.  Perhaps
>that
>is what you meant?   But spatial location isn't the same as the
>frequency-fetishing
>audiophiles go for.  To do that well you need casts of the outer ear
>too.
>
>You doing owl-type studies on auditory localization?  Audio-visual
>mapping
>and plasticity?   Making the cats wear funky glasses?

_________________________________________________________________
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From decoy at iki.fi  Wed Jul  9 05:32:47 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 15:32:47 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <3F0B1CA4.2E660C94@cdc.gov>
References: <3F0B1CA4.2E660C94@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307091522570.22745@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-08, Major Variola (ret) uttered to cypherpunks at lne.com:

>I haven't, but it does ring true. You'd get 2 Khz as well as other
>intermodulation products.

Provided there's a nonlinearity, effective in the ultrasonic range,
somewhere. Mere interference (which is what we usually refer to as
"beats") doesn't give rise to intermodulation. The beat, it isn't an
audible frequency per se, but double the frequency you'd need to amplitude
modulate a sinusoid halfway between the original sinusoids to get an
equivalent result.

>You've read about the company trying to sell highly localized speakers?
>They modulate two intense ultrasound beams, and the air does the
>nonlinear mixing where they meet.

You can do it with a single beam, too. MIT's Sonic Spotlight is one
example, but there are better developed applications on the market.
However, you need huge amplitudes to get the air to distort. (I've heard
numbers in the 130-150dB range.)

>In the audiophile, lower-intensity case, the ears' nonlinearity would do
>it.

I don't think it would. Before the nonlinearity gets to do its job, the
sound needs to be conducted to the inner ear. But it probably won't be --
our ossicles and the tympanic membrane are too massive to operate in that
frequency range.

So I agree if the amplitudes are extreme, but otherwise I doubt it.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  9 17:52:08 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 19:52:08 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [9fans] security hole (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307091951510.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 20:07:05 -0400
From: David Presotto <presotto at closedmind.org>
To: 9fans at cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] security hole

I plugged a security hole in Plan 9.  It involved the state of
a process after it did a newns().  Newns() is used to create
a new namespace, usually after a process has changed uid
(like when someone attaches to a server: telnet, ssh, ...).
Newns opens a file, called a namespace file, that describes
the new namespace and then follows the instructions inside
(see /lib/namespace).

Newns(2) creates a new namespace, but until the process calling
newns does a chdir through /, it's local directory is still in the old
name space.  If the process then navigates the name space
using relative commands (chdir(".."), open("../lib/profile"))
it is walking the space using the priviledges of the OLD user id.

Because of the way namespaces are usually set up, this doesn't
normally happen.  All the normal namespace files themselves
do a chdir to /usr/$user effectively leaving the old namespace
before newns returns.  However, if either

   there wasn't such a chdir in the namespace file, i.e., if you've removed it
   for your installation

or

   /usr/$user (and also /usr/none) doesn't exist

then it was possible for a user to log in (for example via telnet or ssh)
and end up in a directory like /usr/bootes in which they still had
the rights of bootes.  Neither situation applied to the labs
since we have a /usr/none but one user in Japan (YAMANASHI Takeshi
<uncover at beat.cc.titech.ac.jp>) discovered it when he created an
account with no home dir.

I changed newns() to fix the problem.  It now always leaves you
chdir'd into a directory in the current namespace.  It does that
by first seeing if the namespace file has already caused a chdir
through the root.  If not, it effectively does a chdir(getpwd).
If that fails, it does a chdir("/").

This is a change in semantics.  I haven't found (by inspection)
any programs that would be bothered by it but please tell me if
you see anything fishy since I'm about to update sources with the
change.  I've been running our servers here with the change for a
few days and all seems well.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul  9 18:03:51 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 21:03:51 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool (meow)
Message-ID: <BAY7-F9wwwdP5NM9iO100006654@hotmail.com>

Somebody wrote...

>Yes this is for localization ---clicks are broadband, you need to
>identify which freq components are used.  I still think
>humans can't discriminate the phase of a tone.

An interesting thing to try is to play with the "phase" button on many 
high-end gear. This supposedly matters for low frequencies, but despite my 
unarguably golden ears, I'm still not convinced I can hear the difference.

My Thiel speakers, however, claim to be "phase coherent", and that seems to 
be an entirely different matter. In other words, the different frequency 
components of a sound are transmitted in correct phase relationships (ie, 
true to the original sound), and the result is a (sometimes) astonishing 
level of spacial detail. Of course, non-audiophiles will poo-poo that claim, 
but even they will hear that the Thiels are far more accurate than the crap 
that's sold in Circuit City or whatever. So I figure I may as well believe 
Jim Thiel's claim that phase coherence is important in a speaker.

-TD


>From: Mike Rosing <eresrch at eskimo.com>
>To: "cypherpunks at lne.com" <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>Subject: Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool (meow)
>Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 14:32:53 -0700 (PDT)
>
>On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>
> > Yes this is for localization ---clicks are broadband, you need to
> > identify which freq components are used.  I still think
> > humans can't discriminate the phase of a tone.  In fact, MP3s
> > use this to cut bits.
>
>They can tell relative phase, but it takes a lot of training.
>
> > After the experiments, the cats
> > will be ok, as I assume they're sufficiently
> > plastic, unless you do brain staining on them.  :-(    Or your policy is
> > the
> > Tim McVeigh treatment.
>
>both.  They spend a year training the cats, then a year or 2 collecting
>data, then brain stain, then vaporize.  Each cat is worth about $1M when
>it's all done, and it's got a lot of skull missing while it's alive.
>But it's well protected with a lot of aluminum and epoxy :-)
>
> > Cool stuff, though my domestic feline wants to know where you live.
> >
> > PS: have you identified the "can opener sound" brain-center yet?
>
>I think you better keep it far away!  And no, they don't play with
>higher order systems.  The low level stuff is hard enough!!
>
> > Cats manage biometrics and reputation better than most human systems..
>
>:-)
>
>Patience, persistence, truth,
>Dr. mike

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From netkita at earthlink.net  Wed Jul  9 18:56:53 2003
From: netkita at earthlink.net (netkita at earthlink.net)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 21:56:53 -0400
Subject: pegasus
Message-ID: <3F0C8FA5.16373.30D50C9@localhost>

     How do i use my privite and public keyrings to encrypt email. I think that I have the file 
part and then use as an attatchment ok


    Thanks




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  9 21:51:47 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 23:51:47 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool (meow)
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F9wwwdP5NM9iO100006654@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307092339270.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Somebody wrote...
>
> >Yes this is for localization ---clicks are broadband, you need to
> >identify which freq components are used.  I still think
> >humans can't discriminate the phase of a tone.
>
> An interesting thing to try is to play with the "phase" button on many
> high-end gear. This supposedly matters for low frequencies, but despite my
> unarguably golden ears, I'm still not convinced I can hear the difference.

Then your ears are not golden, period.

A standard test of audio systems in PA's for example is related to
'speaker phase' (ie all the cones move out or in together at the same
time). This is tested by putting a click on the line and then standing
between pairs of speakers. It is quite easy to tell when the speakers are
in phase. The same can be said for music (and no you don't need expensive
high end equipment), garble the phase and things like echo become very(!!!)
wierd. You just have to have the experience to know what to 'look' for.

A very(!) simple test to demonstrate/test your phase sensitivity (using
even very low quality equipment) is to connect a speaker between the R and
L channels (in essence it is driven by diff between the two channels).
This tends to highlight the phase disparity between the two channels
significantly enhancing the 'depth' of the music. Put a switch in there
and then have a friend enable/disable the speaker without your knowledge.
Then indicate what you think is the 'third speaker' setting. If you can't
tell nearly 100% of the time then any money on high end equipment is a
waste of your budget. This trick (was very popular in the 70's, especially
for us Quadraphonic fans) was what eventually led to the sub-woofer we all
know and love today (I do wish somebody would do something about those
damn rattling cars though).


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  9 22:12:36 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:12:36 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F354rw93duPTv5000161e9@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307092355400.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Tim May wrote...
>
> >Most so-called high end tube amps do in fact sound different, perhaps
> >"better," perhaps not. This is of course because tubes are usually rich in
> >odd-order harmonics. That $4000 Krell tube amp is actually _coloring_ the
> >sound. So much for 20-bit DACs in the signal source: the amp is altering
> >the sound at about the 6th or 8th or whatever most significant bit.
>
> A couple of corrections, then the comment. First is that tubes boost the
> even order harmonics, making the sound much richer and fuller sounding.

Actually it depends on the type of tube, triodes as compared to a pentode
for example 'color' a signal in different ways. There are also geometry
issues that filter the harmonics in different ways for different types of
tubes. So a blanket statement such as 'all tubes boost even order
harmonics' is gibberish.

Further, to correct Tim's audio bullshit, -EVERYTHING- colors the music.
There is -NOTHING- in the pipe from initial performance to end user
experience that is 'perfectly flat'. Unless you were there when it was
done you'll -never- get close to what actually happened. Changing the
speakers will change the music, putting fiberglass in the cabinet changes
the music, changing the cables from Copper to Gold makes a audible difference
in some cases. Another fine point to make in regard to things like
distortion and THD, considering the average performance amp is about 3-5x
-higher- in THD (for example) the distinction between audio performance above
a certain threashold (that is primarily listener dependent) is a waste (and
really a tad dellusional).

> Also, the Krell is digital, not tube.

Which means it colors it differently is all. YMMV...big surprise.

> But your point is correct, but also well-known within audiophile circles. In
> fact, single-end triode style tube amps (which hit the market about 10 years
> ago) have really rotten measureables, but they have continued to grow in
> popularity because of the the allegedly "live/lush" sound.

First off single ended Triodes have been around a lot(!) more than 10
years. Secondly the term you want is 'warm' in reference to a tube amp,
it's been around since at least the 50's. Using a term like 'live' to
describe a sound simply means somebody has never compared (for example) a
Fender to a Marshall amp and understood why the same 'live' performance
sounds so different (and you can use the same speaker stack for either
head).

> As for 24/96 (or 24/192), like I said there are real engineering reasons for
> doing this, but in the end there's not much reason to argue if you haven't
> heard. Go listen to a standard CD played on an upsampling machine and you
> will know in no uncertain terms that the sound is considerably
> better/fuller/realler. (A hint as to why can be seen when you look a square
> wave reproduced in 16/22 vs 24/96.)

You mean the wave is actually more 'square' because the higher sampling rate
better matches the original signal?....Duh.

> As for audiophile voodoo there's a lot out there, but there's a pretty easy
> way to differentiate voodoo from real (though 'inexplicable') high-end
> stuff. The voodoo dissappears within a year or two, but the real stuff keeps
> going.

As somebody who has been involved in audio (both listening and
performance) for many years (30+) that is simple bullshit. The Voodoo that
sells keeps on going, and going, and going,...

> A PS about double-blind: There's been lots of them done, some confirming
> audiophile expectations some contradicting. Some of the disparity is due to
> who the blindees are: high-end listening is a skill that is basically
> self-taught.

Bullshit, you're born with good ears or your not. There is not a single
thing one can do to change that. If you have good ears and train them then
you get what you pay for. If you got bad ears, pick another field to work
in.

> Some of the high-end tweeks have differences that are not
> discernable to nonGolden ears (and some tweaks are obviously pure snakeoil).

And a -lot- of those golden ear differences are just ego or marketing
hype.


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  9 22:25:22 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:25:22 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Slashdot | Russians Order Mobile Phone Encryption Removed (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307100025080.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/07/10/0036232.shtml?tid=158&tid=99


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul  9 22:25:39 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:25:39 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Slashdot | Webcaster Alliance Threatens To Sue RIAA (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307100025240.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/07/09/2037258.shtml?tid=123&tid=99


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Jul 10 04:22:26 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 04:22:26 -0700
Subject: we jammin, we hope you like jammin too
Message-ID: <3F0D4C72.2D277832@cdc.gov>

U.S. satellite feeds to Iran jammed

http://www.msnbc.com/news/936772.asp?0cv=CB10

(Note that the "difficulty" of finding the jammer is disinfo...
the NRO / NSA knows *exactly* where the jammers are,
probably the color of their hats.  Note that the US fomenting
civil war with its agitprop is only mentioned obliquely.)




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 10 05:05:19 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 07:05:19 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: The Register - RFID Spy-chippers leak confidential data on the
  web (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307100705050.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/31654.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 10 05:06:02 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 07:06:02 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Dizzy over Lizzie (Metro Times Detroit) - Student finds new
  method to factor quadratics (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307100705370.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=5077


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ericm at lne.com  Thu Jul 10 08:27:03 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 08:27:03 -0700
Subject: MRAM, persistance of memory
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307101631030.25940-100000@Zeta>; from
  shaddack@ns.arachne.cz on Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 04:45:58PM +0200
References: <20030709104333.A30503@slack.lne.com>
  <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307101631030.25940-100000@Zeta>
Message-ID: <20030710082703.A6934@slack.lne.com>

On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 04:45:58PM +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Eric Murray wrote:
> > I doubt it as well.  DRAM also has power-off memory persistence
> > and nearly everyone in security ignores that as well.
> >
> > But not the spooks :
> >
> > "The FEI-374i-DRS is a data recovery system that captures and preserved
> > digital data, in its original format, directly from the Dynamic Random
> > Access Memory (DRAM) of Digital Telephone Answering Machines (DTAMs)
> > ..
> > The FEI-374i-DRS is an indispensable tool for forensic investigators
> > required to evaluate residual audio and tag information retained in
> > today's DRAM-based DTAMs."
> >
> > http://www.nomadics.com/374idrs.htm
> 
> The system doesn't seem to be able to recover data from powered-off DRAM.

[..]

It's still interesting. 


> It is impossible to get access to the voltage on the DRAM cell capacitors
> (at least if the chip is in its case and we can access only its pins). We
> can only see if it is in the range for H or L. And after a power-down (or
> even a sufficiently long period without a refresh of the given cell) the
> cell capacitor loses voltage steadily, reaching the level of L (or maybe
> H?) within at most couple seconds.

I would not bet on that for sensitive data.
See Peter Gutmans and Ross Anderson's papers on RAM memory remanance.


Eric




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Jul 10 09:19:00 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 09:19:00 -0700
Subject: MRAM, persistance of memory
Message-ID: <3F0D91F4.375E6977@cdc.gov>

At 04:45 PM 7/10/03 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>run stripped-down Linux? Maybe something based on ARM or MIPS
>architecture?)

I'm familiar with 100 Mhz 32b MIPS cores that cost about $10 and include
2 ethernet i/faces.
Intended for cheap SOHO routers, etc.  Newer variants include IPsec
support
(e.g., a DES engine) for the same price.  They'll run Linux.

ARM's advantage is in power consumption, AFAIK, which doesn't always
matter.

I can see other reasons for hacking an answering machine ---encrypting
stored messages,
implementing/augmenting your own DTMF decision tree, allowing some to
leave longer messages than others, even
machines that call another number to forward.    (I once worked on a
commercial
system that implemented a POTS i/f as boards in a Wintel machine, its
(perhaps
now extinct) niche was cheapening international phone calls.)  Cheapo
fax/soundcards
are able to do ring detection, pick up, etc.  Probably a fun project,
the POTS i/f
won't go away soon.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Jul 10 06:23:26 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 09:23:26 -0400
Subject: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool (meow)
Message-ID: <BAY7-F5clDF7JfUiSTo0002d0c3@hotmail.com>

"Then your ears are not golden, period."

Harumph!

But you misunderstand what the phase button does. If the speakers are wired 
out of phase anybody can hear that. Actually, it's a quite interesting thing 
to hear...nothing is really localizable.

But the phase button inverts the absolute phase of the signal coming out of 
both speakers. In other words, with a bass drum hit do the speaker cones 
move outward at the initial strike or inward (as they are not supposed to). 
Supposedly this difference can be heard, but my speakers start rolling off 
below 100Hz, so I suspect that's why I have a very hard time discerning the 
absolute phase difference when I hit the button.

-TD



>From: Jim Choate <ravage at einstein.ssz.com>
>To: <cypherpunks at einstein.ssz.com>
>Subject: Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool (meow)
>Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 23:51:47 -0500 (CDT)
>
>On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
> > Somebody wrote...
> >
> > >Yes this is for localization ---clicks are broadband, you need to
> > >identify which freq components are used.  I still think
> > >humans can't discriminate the phase of a tone.
> >
> > An interesting thing to try is to play with the "phase" button on many
> > high-end gear. This supposedly matters for low frequencies, but despite 
>my
> > unarguably golden ears, I'm still not convinced I can hear the 
>difference.
>
>Then your ears are not golden, period.
>
>A standard test of audio systems in PA's for example is related to
>'speaker phase' (ie all the cones move out or in together at the same
>time). This is tested by putting a click on the line and then standing
>between pairs of speakers. It is quite easy to tell when the speakers are
>in phase. The same can be said for music (and no you don't need expensive
>high end equipment), garble the phase and things like echo become very(!!!)
>wierd. You just have to have the experience to know what to 'look' for.
>
>A very(!) simple test to demonstrate/test your phase sensitivity (using
>even very low quality equipment) is to connect a speaker between the R and
>L channels (in essence it is driven by diff between the two channels).
>This tends to highlight the phase disparity between the two channels
>significantly enhancing the 'depth' of the music. Put a switch in there
>and then have a friend enable/disable the speaker without your knowledge.
>Then indicate what you think is the 'third speaker' setting. If you can't
>tell nearly 100% of the time then any money on high end equipment is a
>waste of your budget. This trick (was very popular in the 70's, especially
>for us Quadraphonic fans) was what eventually led to the sub-woofer we all
>know and love today (I do wish somebody would do something about those
>damn rattling cars though).
>
>
>  --
>     ____________________________________________________________________
>
>       We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
>       are going to spend the rest of our lives.
>
>                               Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"
>
>       ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
>       www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
>     --------------------------------------------------------------------

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From frantz at pwpconsult.com  Thu Jul 10 11:10:58 2003
From: frantz at pwpconsult.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 11:10:58 -0700
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
In-Reply-To: <3F0C4FAB.FB644298@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <v03110705bb32187f2793@[192.168.1.5]>

At 10:23 AM -0700 7/9/03, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
>And shutting off your virtual memory swapping
>--useful today because of the gobs of DRAM machines have--
>will no longer be useful for security.

Encrypted swap is a crypto sweet spot, because it has perhaps the easiest
key management of any crypto system.  It seems that the BSD systems have it
while Linux still thinks it is difficult.  See:
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/swapencrypt.ps

Cheers - Bill


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz           | "A Jobless Recovery is | Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506         | like a Breadless Sand- | 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz at pwpconsult.com | wich." -- Steve Schear | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA




From discord-nobody at erisiandiscord.de  Thu Jul 10 04:25:42 2003
From: discord-nobody at erisiandiscord.de (Anonymous)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 13:24:42 +0159 (CEST)
Subject: Field improvised knives, FBI FTU, concealable weapons
Message-ID: <f04ba93e8e5c61767f6a4763d1b976e0@erisiandiscord.de>



From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 10 14:27:49 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 16:27:49 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Field improvised knives, FBI FTU, concealable weapons
In-Reply-To: <f04ba93e8e5c61767f6a4763d1b976e0@erisiandiscord.de>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307101619210.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Anonymous wrote:

> 1. The pop-top steel lid on a can e.g., of catfood forms a sharp
> edge when removed.  (I have a permenant scar on a finger
> attesting to this.)  If half the disc were grasped in a cloth
> it could be more effective than several of the items you list.

Negative, bend it in half and get two edges for the price of one.

> 2. Similarly, the steel lid on e.g., a tuna can forms a sharp (and
> flatter, and slightly more rigid) edge when removed with a can opening
> tool.

If you have the can opening tool it is a weapon as well, great for making
big gaping puncture wounds.

>  A can opening tool can be very small, e.g., the military-style
> can openers, which by itself is not dangerous.

Bullshit. A strike to the throat just above the shoulder blade, into the
eyes, slash into the fingers or heal, lips/ears, etc.

-EVERYTHING- is a weapon. A 'weapon' is nothing more than a STATE OF MIND.
It is the intent to do harm.

> 3. Even a beverage can, e.g., from a beer purchased in flight, can be
> ripped into a sharp edge, although the thinness of the (typically soft
> aluminum) metal makes this less effective than the above.

The flat circular tops and bottoms are prefered, but a piece of the
sidewall is effective just like a small razor blade (hint: fold the piece
in half).

> 4. The large knitting (crochet) needles which I believe
> the TSA admits could be filed into a sharp point, producing
> a spike as effective as some you list.  As these are typically
> aluminum, abrading them into a point would not be difficult.

Actually all sizes are good. You can use crochet hooks as well, hurt like
hell pulling that baby out.

> 5. It is possible that a skilled knife maker could chip a glass
> bottle into a knife while in the restroom, producing something
> comparable to the obsidian knife you list.  The production process
> might be noisy however, unlike the above.

Chip a bottle into a knife? Doofus, just break the bottle and use the
pieces. If you want to be stealthy don't use the kneck/bottom as a handle,
use a piece from the side just like a razor (hold betwix thumb and first
two fingers).

> Comment, which you will no doubt ignore:
> Given the facility with which weapons are improvised or concealed,

Like a pencil, a rolled up magazine, a plastic credit card (it will cut if
wielded in such a manner), a shoe string as a garrot, etc. Your opponents
body can be used as a weapon against itself as well (eg strangle somebody
with their own arm, or break it and then stab them with the lower bone
shard).

> it might be a better idea to stop motivating the
> actors, as distasteful as that might be to some in power.

But that would mean they'd have to treat them as equals, and they can't
have that now....


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 10 14:30:15 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 16:30:15 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: 'Phantom' game console is really a copyright protection device
  (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307101629590.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/07/09/2042207.shtml?tid=8


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Thu Jul 10 07:45:58 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 16:45:58 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: MRAM, persistance of memory
In-Reply-To: <20030709104333.A30503@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307101631030.25940-100000@Zeta>

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Eric Murray wrote:
> I doubt it as well.  DRAM also has power-off memory persistence
> and nearly everyone in security ignores that as well.
>
> But not the spooks :
>
> "The FEI-374i-DRS is a data recovery system that captures and preserved
> digital data, in its original format, directly from the Dynamic Random
> Access Memory (DRAM) of Digital Telephone Answering Machines (DTAMs)
> ..
> The FEI-374i-DRS is an indispensable tool for forensic investigators
> required to evaluate residual audio and tag information retained in
> today's DRAM-based DTAMs."
>
> http://www.nomadics.com/374idrs.htm

The system doesn't seem to be able to recover data from powered-off DRAM.
The specs say it can recover files that were erased. The DRAM-based DTAMs
use the DRAM as a RAM disk. For some reason unknown to us (may be
conspiracy with TLA, but Occam's razor says it's mere negligence/laziness)
the designers don't overwrite the memory region that pertains to an erased
file, only deallocate it, leaving the data there. I suppose the DRAM
refresh circuits are backed up with a small battery to cover brief
blackouts.

It is impossible to get access to the voltage on the DRAM cell capacitors
(at least if the chip is in its case and we can access only its pins). We
can only see if it is in the range for H or L. And after a power-down (or
even a sufficiently long period without a refresh of the given cell) the
cell capacitor loses voltage steadily, reaching the level of L (or maybe
H?) within at most couple seconds.

Seems the device is nothing more than a logic analyzer connected to the
DRAM pins.

This is a nice illustration of the problem with comercial vendors and
closed-architecture devices they peddle. If we'd have access to the
firmware of the DTAMs, writing extensions for storing data in (at least
somehow) encrypted format and their overwriting after deletion won't be a
big problem. Hope the price of embeddable computer "cores" will continue
to fall. (Apropos, whats the current cost of the cheapest cores able to
run stripped-down Linux? Maybe something based on ARM or MIPS
architecture?)




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Jul 10 17:47:22 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 17:47:22 -0700
Subject: MRAM, persistance of memory
In-Reply-To: <20030710082703.A6934@slack.lne.com>
Message-ID: <3B6DC694-B339-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Thursday, July 10, 2003, at 08:27  AM, Eric Murray wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 04:45:58PM +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>
>> It is impossible to get access to the voltage on the DRAM cell 
>> capacitors
>> (at least if the chip is in its case and we can access only its 
>> pins). We
>> can only see if it is in the range for H or L. And after a power-down 
>> (or
>> even a sufficiently long period without a refresh of the given cell) 
>> the
>> cell capacitor loses voltage steadily, reaching the level of L (or 
>> maybe
>> H?) within at most couple seconds.
>
> I would not bet on that for sensitive data.
> See Peter Gutmans and Ross Anderson's papers on RAM memory remanance.

We were reading remnant state information in DRAMs back in the mid-70s. 
When a DRAM is powered back up after some period without power there 
are "remnants" which are not really electrons (which thermalize into 
the substrate in a matter of microseconds) but which cause 
"preferential turn-on or turn-off" in the cells, due to shifts in 
threshold voltage. (This is why irradiation of the DRAMs with gammas 
can sometimes "freeze" the stored data pattern.)

Intel was the inventor of DRAM and we led the market (along with 
Mostek) for most of the 1970s. We had some really cool tools for seeing 
the internal states of DRAMs, before, during, and after things we did 
to the devices. Powering them off and watching the states they came 
back up in was child's play.

This effect, of seeing DRAMs "wake up" in preferred states, is a very 
subtle effect. And no doubt it varies amongst vendors and even between 
design and process steppings of the same vendor's part.

I would not want to be the forensic data analyst trying to do this, but 
I expect sometimes they do. The "recover data from voice answering 
machines" gadget is no doubt much lower tech. Most answering machines 
are battery-backed (duh), so a forensics expert can keep power 
maintained and even use the battery-backed store to keep the DRAMs 
nominally refreshed.

But I thought most modern answering machines which don't use tapes are 
in fact using flash, not DRAMs. Am I wrong on this? Flash is of course 
an entirely different story.

--Tim May




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Fri Jul 11 05:00:10 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 07:00:10 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: ID cards (UK): A highly organised minority (that can be safely
  ignored) (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307110659460.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10441


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Fri Jul 11 05:05:37 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 07:05:37 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: PCWorld.com - Cybersecurity Laws Expected (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307110705240.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111535,00.asp


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Jul 11 09:10:45 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 09:10:45 -0700
Subject: Software radio article in Guardian
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030711090915.0466dbb8@mail.comcast.net>

GNURadio gets a nice mention.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,994679,00.html


"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer




From Michael.J.Smith at unisys.com  Fri Jul 11 09:44:23 2003
From: Michael.J.Smith at unisys.com (Smith, Michael J.)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 11:44:23 -0500
Subject: Credit Card fraud gets simple
Message-ID: <AAF6212E0AE8BD4194C88528A7CF397124EDF0@usres-exch1.na.uis.unisys.com>

Abstract:  Credit card theft is now automated via irc bots, even the CVV2.

http://www.honeynet.org/papers/profiles/cc-fraud.pdf

Cheers
--Mike




From adam.lydick at verizon.net  Fri Jul 11 15:59:58 2003
From: adam.lydick at verizon.net (Adam Lydick)
Date: 11 Jul 2003 15:59:58 -0700
Subject: idea: brinworld meets the credit card
In-Reply-To: <3F0B1894.9AB25F99@cdc.gov>
References: <3F0B1894.9AB25F99@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <1057962421.25636.10.camel@lorien>

You might find "facecerts" interesting.

http://www.computer.org/proceedings/dcc/1896/18960435.pdf

This is more for face-to-face checking, however.

For your remote scenario some sort of one-way hash to verify the image
might be intersting. It would have to allow for fuzzy matching after
hashing (for obvious reasons). I think this just raises the bar a tiny
bit though, as an attacker could stalk their victim before stealing
their card to get an idea about what appearance to forge. (or capture
webcam traffic before lifting the card / identity info)

Cheers,

Adam Lydick

On Tue, 2003-07-08 at 12:16, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> Authentication is "Something you have / know / are."
> 
> A simple plastic credit card + PIN provides the first
>  two,
> including a photo provides the third "something you are".
> A face is more often checked than the readily forgable
> signature, in live authentication.
> 
> But as cameras become ubiquitous
> (e.g., in cell phones) some extra security could be obtained
> for *remote* authentication by sending a trusted photo of the
> account holder plus a live picture of the card user.
> 
> A picture glued into the card could be forged, but a
> smartcard (with more data area than a magstripe)
> could include a picture of the account holder,
> so a thief has no idea what to look like.  But the vendor can
> check the encrypted smartcard face to the face on the phone
> or webcam.  For high-value remote transactions, where you
> pay someone to check faces, this might be viable in a few years.
> In a few years after that, machines might be able to check faces
> more cheaply, as reliably.
> 
> The live face-check with embedded digital photos is already standard
> practice
> on high-security building-entry cards (and passports?),
> with the guard comparing the card-embedded face to the one before him.
> Ubiquitous cameras will bring that face-check to remote transactions,
> reducing cost due to lower fraud.
> 
> Thoughts?




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Sat Jul 12 05:52:51 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 07:52:51 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: A Web Site Causes Unease in Police (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307120752400.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/national/12NET.html?ex=1058587200&en=f58b93fbf29e6015&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From netkita at earthlink.net  Sat Jul 12 11:27:24 2003
From: netkita at earthlink.net (netkita at earthlink.net)
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 14:27:24 -0400
Subject: defcon kwy signing party
Message-ID: <3F101ACC.20649.639FFC1@localhost>

    Anyone initiating a defcon signing part this year.


    D




From declan at well.com  Sat Jul 12 12:09:59 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 15:09:59 -0400
Subject: defcon kwy signing party
In-Reply-To: <3F101ACC.20649.639FFC1@localhost>; from
  netkita@earthlink.net on Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 02:27:24PM -0400
References: <3F101ACC.20649.639FFC1@localhost>
Message-ID: <20030712150958.A7768@cluebot.com>

I dunno how many folks on the list are going to Defcon (if previous
years that I've been are any indication, not a whole heck of a lot).
But if there's a gathering, I'll show up.

-Declan


On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 02:27:24PM -0400, netkita at earthlink.net wrote:
>     Anyone initiating a defcon signing part this year.
> 
> 
>     D




From measl at mfn.org  Sat Jul 12 18:49:18 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 20:49:18 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Big Brother Gets A Brain
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307122042210.8836-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

Recently, I found myself discussing the British fascination with cameras with
an American LEO (local cop on a bunch of state and federal task forces - your
basic all around law enforcement officer).

I was mildly surprised by his assertion that in the US, every person in any
major metropolitan area is caught by a government owned surveillance camera
at least three times a day.  What *blew me away* was that he maintains that
we are all recorded by privately owned cameras many more times than that, and
that they actively seek out, as a matter of routine practice, these private
cameras for the solving of publicly committed crimes.

The below article is even more interesting in this light.

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko



--------------------------------------------------------

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030715-big-brother01.htm
Big Brother Gets A Brain

 
 In-Depth Coverage  

By Noah Shachtman 

The cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a
dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have
already been planned. 

Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal
government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all
under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon. 

The military is scheduled to issue contracts for Combat Zones That See, or
CTS, as early as September. The first demonstration should take place before
next summer, according to a spokesperson. Approach a checkpoint at Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on
this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your
action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on
terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will
instantly report you to the authorities. 

Fort Belvoir is only the beginning for CTS. Its architects at the Pentagon
say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the
past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in
ones and twos. But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a
second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent,
unblinking eye. 

This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from it. CTS depends on parts
you could get, in a pinch, at Kmart. 

"There's almost a 100 percent chance that it will work," said Jim Lewis, who
heads the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, "because it's just connecting things that already
exist." 

As currently configured, the old-line cameras speckled throughout every major
city aren't that much of a privacy concern. Yes, there are lenses
everywhere--several thousand just in Manhattan. But they see so much, it's
almost impossible for snoops to sift through all the footage and find what's
important. 

CTS would coordinate the cameras, gathering their views in a single
information storehouse. The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation
to defense contractors, is to "track everything that moves." 

"This gives the U.S. government capabilities Big Brother only pretended to
have," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think
tank. "Before, we said Big Brother's watching. But he really wasn't, because
there was too much to watch." 

CTS could help soldiers spot dangers as they navigate perilous urban areas,
Pentagon researchers insist. That's not how defense analysts like Pike see
it. The program "seems to have more to do with domestic surveillance than a
foreign battlefield," he said, "and more to do with the Department of
Homeland Security than the Department of Defense." 

"Right now, this may be a military program," added Lewis. "But when it gets
up and running, there's going to be a huge temptation to apply it to policing
at home"--to keep tabs on ordinary citizens, whether or not they've done
something wrong. 

Traditionally, the authorities have collected information only on people who
might be connected to a crime. If there was a murder in the East Village, the
cops didn't bring in all of St. Mark's Place; they interrogated only the
people who might have information about the killer. Even the most extreme
abuses of law enforcement power--like J. Edgar Hoover's domestic spying on
political activists--homed in on very specific individuals, or groups, that
he imagined as threats to the state. He didn't put the whole state under
watch. 

September 11 changed that. Now, the idea is to find out as much as possible
about as many people as possible. After all, the logic goes, the country
can't afford to sit back and wait to be attacked. Almost anyone could play a
part in a terrorist plot. So the government has to keep tabs on almost
everyone. 

CTS, a $12 million, three-year program, is emerging as a potential
centerpiece of that initiative. 

"Before, it was 'let's catch the bad guys and bring them to trial after stuff
happens,' " Lewis said. "Now it's 'let's look for patterns and stop [an
attack] before it happens.' " 

That's why Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed for a program to turn a
million civilians into citizen-spies, snooping on their neighbors. That's why
the USA Patriot Act now allows for wiretaps without warrants. And it's why
the Pentagon has begun researching an array of high-tech tools to pry into
average people's lives. 

CTS is the brainchild of DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency. That's the group of minds behind the notoriously invasive
Total (sorry, "Terrorism") Information Awareness uber-database. TIA's backers
say the project will be carefully targeted, but privacy advocates say it
could compile in a single place an unprecedented amount of information about
you--your school transcripts, medical records, credit card bills, e-mail, and
so much more. 

"LifeLog," currently in the early planning stage at DARPA, would twist all
these bits into narrative "threads," giving officials a chance to watch
events develop. Along the way, LifeLog's developers would like to capture the
name of every TV show you watch, every magazine you read. 

Still, watching your data trail just isn't the same as actually watching your
physical tail. You can change your e-mail address, and start paying cash. But
you can't run away from yourself. And that's the missing piece CTS could
provide--an almost instant ability to track, moment by moment, where you are
and what you're doing. 

"Before, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy when you were walking
down the street," Lewis said. "Now that's something that will have to be
adjusted." 

That's not all that will change. As everybody who's ever mugged for the
camera knows, people act differently when they're being watched. 

Sometimes, that's not such a bad thing. Web-surfing habits are monitored on
the job, so you wait until you're home to download porn. On the street, you
can be a little less skittish, knowing your neighbors, your beat cops, your
corner store owners are keeping an eye on you. 

But being watched by a faceless, inaccessible government minder, that's
something altogether different. 

In 1791, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a jail, circular in
shape. The warden would sit in a dark observation booth in the middle; the
prisoners would sit in well-lit, inward-facing cells along the
circumference. Under the constant threat of being watched, the jailed would
change their behavior, Bentham theorized, bending their activities to the
warden's rules. 

Two centuries later, England has 2.5 million security cameras spread
throughout the country, by some estimates. Several cities, like the port town
of King's Lynn, are covered by the lenses. 

"It's exactly what Bentham predicted," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy
International, a British civil liberties group. "The kids there are giving up
going onto the street. They say it's almost like being in a glass-paneled
room, with their parents on the other side. They're forced into smaller and
smaller areas so they can be kids in private." 

Putting people under electronic watch induces a kind of split personality,
said Bill Brown, who leads tours of Manhattan's spy cams as part of his
duties with the Surveillance Camera Players. The authorities want people to
obey the law, to behave rationally. But video surveillance does the exact
opposite. It makes people feel--correctly--like they're constantly being
watched, like they're paranoid. 

"And that's not a rational state at all," Brown said. "It's a mental
condition." 

Stalin and Saddam did their best. They tried hard to keep under surveillance
as many of their citizens as they could. But these efforts could never
succeed completely. There was always a "fundamental barrier--the ratio of
watchers to the watched," said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org. 

"You couldn't have everybody working for the secret police," he
continued. "The thing that's so singularly seductive about automatic video
surveillance is that it breaks that fundamental barrier down." 

CTS will keep watch by equipping each camera with a processor, like the one
in your computer. The chips will have programmed into them "video
understanding algorithms" that can distinguish one car from another. At each
checkpoint, the car's speed, time of arrival, color, size, license plate, and
shape are all instantly passed on to a central server. If the early tests
identifying cars go well, software that recognizes a person's face and style
of walk could also be added. 

By sharing only this refined data--instead of the raw video itself--CTS
should keep fragile computer networks from becoming overloaded with hours and
hours of meaningless footage. Everybody knows how much of a pain it can be to
get a video clip in your e-mail inbox, instead of a simple text message. Now
imagine how much worse the problem would get if thousands and thousands of
such clips were being sent back and forth, all day, every day. CTS would help
government networks avoid that burden, with each camera transmitting a mere 8
kilobits per second, instead of the 200 or so kilobits needed for
high-resolution video. 

CTS would also keep the snoops who stare at the monitors from being
overwhelmed. "We have enough cameras, but not enough people to watch the
video feeds," said Tom Strat, who's heading up CTS for DARPA's Information
Exploitation Office. 

If all's well, CTS cameras might send back to headquarters only basic data or
the occasional low-resolution image. But when there's something fishy going
down--like a car speeding away unexpectedly, or a briefcase left in a train
station--the images could come sharper, and more quickly. Proto-CTS programs
from contractors Northrop Grumman and the Sarnoff Corporation would interrupt
the gray monotony of surveillance footage, setting red boxes aflash around
the suspect person or object. 

"It focuses your attention right there," said Bruce De Witte of Northrop. 

But CTS would do more than change what investigators see. It would also give
them a record of everything that happens in a city's public places, potential
evidence for prosecutors and terrorist hunters. 

In its presentation to industry, DARPA said it wanted CTS to be able to find
the common threads between a shooting at a bus stop one month and a bombing
at a disco the next. 

In theory, CTS could take an inventory of all of the cars around the bus stop
and near the disco immediately before and after the incidents. Then it could
examine where those cars went, to see if there were any vehicles in
common--or if a car acted as a sort of messenger between two others. 

The forensic process could be further enhanced by one of DARPA's analysis
programs, like LifeLog or Total Information Awareness. After mining license
plate numbers from the footage, investigators could identify the car
owners. And then dig into the owners' Web-surfing trails, to see if there
were any visits to explosive-making sites. And scan e-mail accounts for
virulent language. And plumb credit card receipts for big fertilizer
purchases. 

To the uninitiated, storing and sharing all this information might seem like
insurmountably complex tasks. And according to Strat, the CTS manager, the
ability to network surveillance cameras over a wide area is "not right around
the corner." 

Defense and technology analysts have a different view. 

"(CTS) is pretty creepy. And the creepiest part about it is that it's not all
that sophisticated," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the
privacy-rights proponent Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

DARPA has mandated that the CTS demonstrations be done only with readily
available, "off the shelf" equipment--the kind of stuff you could get at
Spyville.com. You could find slightly less diesel versions of the gear at
Amazon.com. 

So getting the cameras will be easy. What may be harder is handing off
information--a description of a suspicious vehicle, say--from one camera to
the next. These lenses will be separated by hundreds, even thousands, of
meters. And "appearances can change dramatically" in those distances, Johns
Hopkins University senior research scientist Chris Diehl said. Slight
variations in light or in the camera's angle can make a car look very
different to a mechanical eye. "If you read the literature, there really
isn't a proven method" for solving this problem, he said. 

Yet this obstacle seems surmountable. In a CTS simulation conducted by
software developer Alphatech, a car could be tracked over 10 kilometers with
accuracy of 90 percent or better with cameras placed 400 meters apart. The
percentage went up, of course, as the cameras moved closer together. 

CTS is but one of an array of private and public sector programs to sort
through the ever expanding amount of surveillance imagery. University of
California at San Diego's Computer Vision and Robotics Research lab just
received a $600,000 grant from a Defense Department counterterror group for a
CTS-like project. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stephen Brumby is using
genetic algorithms--programs that are bred from smaller components of
code--to automatically analyze satellite pictures. 

At the Sarnoff Corporation, a project dubbed Video Flashlight would morph
cameras' views into a single three-dimensional model. Using a joystick, a
security officer could maneuver through this simulated world as though
playing a game of Half Life or Grand Theft Auto. 

In order for Video Flashlight to work, however, it would have to use
stationary cameras. CTS doesn't have that limitation; it's supposed to
function with drones and other battlefield sensors. That's one of the reasons
Globalsecurity.org's John Pike thinks the program could have a legitimate
military function--"to the extent that it is relevant to urban operations, as
opposed to the running of a well-oiled police state." 

Combat in cities "tends to quickly degenerate into small firefights," Pike
explained. It's a lot harder to know what's happening in a crowded city than
it is in an open desert. Radios cut out quicker; drones and satellites have a
harder time peering through the concrete canyons and narrow passageways of
urban life. CTS could restore some of that sight, giving U.S. generals a
"broader situational awareness." 

This assumes, of course, that CTS has anything to do with urban combat. If it
does, it'd be a surprise to some of the businesses bidding for the CTS
contract. 

"The primary application is for homeland security," said Tom Lento, a
spokesman for the Sarnoff Corporation. 

"The whole theme here is homeland security," added Northrop Grumman's De
Witte. 

Strat disagreed. "DARPA's mission is not to do homeland security," he said. 

In a presentation to industry, DARPA noted, "CTS technology will be
demonstrated only within the observable boundaries of government
installations where video surveillance is expressly permitted, and
operational deployment areas outside the United States where it is consistent
with all local laws." 

But in an interview, Strat did admit that "there's a chance that some of this
technology might work its way" into domestic surveillance programs. 

In the test at Fort Belvoir this year the aim is to track 90 percent of all
of cars within the target area for any given 30-minute period. The paths of 1
million vehicles should be stored and retrievable within three seconds. A
year after that, CTS is supposed to move on to testing in an urban combat
setting, where it will gather information from 100 mobile sensors, like drone
spy planes and "video ropes" containing dozens of tiny cameras. 

Shortly thereafter, CTS could be keeping tabs on a city near you. 

"This is coming whether we like it or not," said Jim Lewis, with the Center
for Strategic and International Studies. "It's not how do we stop the tidal
wave. It's how do we manage it." 

Copyright  2003, VV Publishing Corporation 




From cpunk at lne.com  Sun Jul 13 20:00:00 2003
From: cpunk at lne.com (cpunk at lne.com)
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 20:00:00 -0700
Subject: Cypherpunks List Info
Message-ID: <200307140300.h6E3008C030164@gw.lne.com>

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information

Last updated: Sep 12, 2002

This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk

Instructions on unsubscribing from the list can be found below.


0. Introduction

The Cypherpunks mailing list is a mailing list for discussing cryptography
and its effect on society.  It is not a moderated list (but see exceptions
below) and the list operators are not responsible for the list content.

Cypherpunks is a distributed mailing list.  A subscriber can subscribe to
one node of the list and thereby participate on the full list.  Each node
(called a "Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer", although they are not
related to anonymous remailers) exchanges messages with the other nodes
in addition to sending messages to its subscribers.  A message posted
to one node will be received by the list subscribers on the other nodes,
and vice-versa.

1. Filtering

The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a
lesser extent on modifying messages that go to/from their subscribers.
Filtering is done, on nodes that do it, to reduce the huge amount of
spam that the cypherpunks list is subjected to.

There are three basic flavors of filtering CDRs: "raw", which send all
messages to their subscribers. "cooked" CDRs try to eliminate the spam
on that's on the regular list by automatically sending only messages
that are from cypherpunks list subscribers (on any CDR) or people who
are replying to list messages.  Finally there are moderated lists, where
a human moderator decides which messages from the raw list to pass on
to subscribers.

2. Message Modification

Message modification policy indicates what modifications, if any, beyond
what is needed to operate the CDR are done (most CDRs add a tracking
X-loop header on mail posted to their subscribers to prevent mail loops).
Message modification usually happens on mail going in or out to each CDR's
subscribers. CDRs should not modify mail that they pass from one CDR
to the next, but some of them do, and others undo those modifications.

3. Privacy

Privacy policy indicates if the list will allow anyone ("open"), or only
list members, or no one ("private") , to retrieve the subscribers list.
Note that if you post, being on a "private" list doesn't mean much,
since your address is now out there.   It's really only useful for
keeping spammers from harvesting addresses from the list software.

Digest mode indicates that the CDR supports digest mode, which is where
the posts are batched up into a few large emails.  Nodes that support
only digest mode are noted.

4. Anonymous posting

Cypherpunks encourages anonymous posting.

You can use an anonymous remailer:
http://www.andrebacard.com/remail.html
http://anon.efga.org/Remailers
http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html

or you can send posts to the list via cpunks_anon at einstein.ssz.com and
your mail's headers will be stripped before posting.  Note that this
doesn't provide complete anonymity since the receiving site will still
have log file entries showing the source of the mail (or you have to
trust that they delete them).  You also will be 'sharing' a reputation
with the other entities that post through this alias, and some of them
are spammers, so some subscribers will have this alias filtered.

5. Unsubscribing

Unsubscribing from the cypherpunks list:
Since the list is run from a number of different CDRs, you have to
figure out which CDR you are subscribed to.  If you don't remember and
can't figure it out from the mail headers (hint: the top Received: line
should tell you), the easiest way to unsubscribe is to send unsubscribe
messages to all the CDRs listed below.

How to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to:

Get your mail client to show all the headers (Microsoft calls this
"internet headers").  Look for the Sender or X-loop headers.  The Sender
will say something like "Sender: owner-cypherpunks at lne.com".  The X-loop
line will say something like "X-Loop: cypherpunks at lne.com".  Both of
these inticate that you are subscribed to the lne.com CDR.   If you were
subscribed to the algebra CDR, they would have algebra.com in them.
Once you have figured out which CDR you're subscribed to, look in the
table below to find that CDRs unsubscribe instructions.

6. Lunatics, spammers and nut-cases

"I'm subscribed to a filtering CDR yet I still see lots of junk postings".
At this writing there are a few sociopaths on the cypherpunks list who
are abusing the lists openness by dumping reams of propaganda on the list.
The distinction between a spammer and a subscriber is nearly always very
clear, but the dictinction between a subscriber who is abusing the list
by posting reams of propaganda and a subscriber who is making lots of
controversial posts is not clear.  Therefore, we tolerate the crap.
Subscribers with a low crap tolerance should check out mail filters.
Procmail is a good one, although it works on Unix and Unix-like systems
only.  Eudora also has a capacity for filtering mail, as do many other
mail readers.  An example procmail recipie is below, you will of
course want to make your own decisions on which (ab)users to filter.

# mailing lists:
# filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherspool folder, discarding
# mail from loons.  All CDRs set their From: line to 'owner-cypherpunks'.
# /dev/null is unix for the trash can.
:0
* ^From.*owner-cypherpunks at .*
{
    :0:
    * (^From:.*ravage at ssz\.com.*|\
    ^From:.*jchoate at dev.tivoli.com.*|\
    ^From:.*mattd at useoz.com|\
    ^From:.*proffr11 at bigpond.com|\
    ^From:.*jei at cc.hut.fi)
	/dev/null

    :0:
    cypherspool
}


7. List of current CDRs


All commands are sent in the body of mail unless otherwise noted.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Algebra:

Operator:
Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at algebra.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???
Info:   ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CCC:

Operator:         drt at un.bewaff.net
Subscription:     "subscribe [password of your choice]" to 
				       cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe <password>" to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Help:             "help" to to cypherpunks-request at koeln.ccc.de
Web site:         http://koeln.ccc.de/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks
Posting address:  cypherpunks at koeln.ccc.de
Filtering policy: This specific node drops messages bigger than 32k and
                  every message with more than 17 recipients or just a line
                  containing "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject. 
Digest mode:      this node is digest-only
NNTP:             news://koeln.ccc.de/cbone.ml.cypherpunks
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Infonex:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at infonex.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at infonex.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lne:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at lne.com
Filtering policy: cooked 
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to lne CDR subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.
Message Modification policy:  
 1. messages are demimed (MIME attachments removed) when posted 
  through lne or received by lne CDR subscribers
 2. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 3. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.lne.com/cpunk; "info cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Archive: http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/index.html
(thanks to Steve Furlong and Len Sassaman)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minder:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at minder.net
Help:             "help" to majordomo at minder.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at minder.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: private
Info:           send mail to cypherpunks-info at minder.net


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Openpgp:

[openpgp seems to have dropped off the end of the world-- it
doesn't return anything from sending help queries.  Ericm, 8/7/01]

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to listproc at openpgp.net
Help:             "help" to listproc at openpgp.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at openpgp.net
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy:  no modification
Privacy policy: ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ssz:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at ssz.com
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at ssz.com
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at ssz.com
Posting address:  cypherpunks at ssz.com
Filtering policy: raw
Message Modification policy: 
  Subject line prepended with "CDR:"
  Reply-to cypherpunks at ssz.com added.
Privacy policy: open
Info:  http://www.ssz.com/cdr/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunder:

Subscription:     "subscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe" to sunder at sunder.net
Help:             "help" to sunder at sunder.net
Posting address:  sunder at sunder.net
Filtering policy: moderated
Message Modification policy:  ???
Privacy policy:  ???
Info: ???


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pro-ns:

Subscription:     "subscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Unsubscription:   "unsubscribe cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at pro-ns.net
Posting address:  cypherpunks at pro-ns.net
Filtering policy: cooked
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to local CDR
   subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.   
Message Modification policy:
 1. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 2. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.pro-ns.net/cpunk




From blancw at cnw.com  Sun Jul 13 22:01:09 2003
From: blancw at cnw.com (Blanc)
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 22:01:09 -0700
Subject: Message from JimBob
Message-ID: <FLEJLELCPOOCNFGDGKKGOEGIDGAA.blancw@cnw.com>

Jim would like everyone to read this newest version of his lawsuit, at:
	http://cryptome.org/jdb-v-usa-106.htm 

Word Perfect version: 
	http://cryptome.org/jdb-v-usa-106.wpd  (633KB)



  ..
Blanc




From adam at homeport.org  Sun Jul 13 19:56:43 2003
From: adam at homeport.org (Adam Shostack)
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 22:56:43 -0400
Subject: Credit Card fraud gets simple
In-Reply-To: <AAF6212E0AE8BD4194C88528A7CF397124EDF0@usres-exch1.na.uis.
  unisys.com>
References: <AAF6212E0AE8BD4194C88528A7CF397124EDF0@usres-exch1.na.uis.u
  nisys.com>
Message-ID: <20030714025643.GA33636@lightship.internal.homeport.org>

On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 11:44:23AM -0500, Smith, Michael J. wrote:
| Abstract:  Credit card theft is now automated via irc bots, even the CVV2.
| 
| http://www.honeynet.org/papers/profiles/cc-fraud.pdf

This is unsuprising.  The interesting question is how much of the cost
will consumers eat vs merchants?  Will 3DSET, where you authenticate
to your bank, catch on, or be seen as too annoying?  What, if
anything, is poised to replace credit cards?

Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume




From shields at msrl.com  Mon Jul 14 09:40:57 2003
From: shields at msrl.com (Michael Shields)
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 16:40:57 +0000
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
In-Reply-To: <v03110705bb32187f2793@[192.168.1.5]> (Bill Frantz's
  message of "Thu, 10 Jul 2003 11:10:58 -0700")
References: <v03110705bb32187f2793@[192.168.1.5]>
Message-ID: <871xwtnjs6.fsf@mulligatwani.msrl.com>

In message <v03110705bb32187f2793@[192.168.1.5]>,
Bill Frantz <frantz at pwpconsult.com> wrote:
> Encrypted swap is a crypto sweet spot, because it has perhaps the easiest
> key management of any crypto system.  It seems that the BSD systems have it
> while Linux still thinks it is difficult.

It is not yet in the mainline Linux kernel, but implementations are
available (e.g. the widely used "cryptoloop").
-- 
Shields.




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul 14 20:11:01 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 20:11:01 -0700
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
Message-ID: <3F1370C5.D255BBC3@cdc.gov>

At 01:51 AM 7/15/03 +0300, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>On 2003-07-14, Michael Shields uttered to Bill Frantz:
>
>>> Encrypted swap is a crypto sweet spot, because it has perhaps the
easiest
>>> key management of any crypto system.  It seems that the BSD systems
have it
>>> while Linux still thinks it is difficult.

>At this stage I think a small question is in order. Is there any Big
Red
>Button software out there to complement this level of paranoia?
>
>What I mean is, after you've got everything in your system under
>industrial strength crypto, you have exactly one weak spot, that being
a
>whole lot of people charging through your door when your system is
already
>running hot and accessible. At that point the only thing that can save
you
>is a one-touch mechanism to effect a swift (i.e. at most two or three
>seconds), dirty, no-matter-what shutdown, with guaranteed loss of key
>material.
>
>Is there open source software out there to effect that sort of thing?

Its called the power button.  Which is why MRAM is a different security
risk.

One could design software such that only the least required is decrypted

at any one time, which would minimize the risk from persistant memory
after you offed the power.  There would probably be a serious
performance
hit in such software, but tradeoffs are what the game is about.




From decoy at iki.fi  Mon Jul 14 15:51:12 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 01:51:12 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
In-Reply-To: <871xwtnjs6.fsf@mulligatwani.msrl.com>
References: <v03110705bb32187f2793@[192.168.1.5]>
  <871xwtnjs6.fsf@mulligatwani.msrl.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307150143410.8334@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-14, Michael Shields uttered to Bill Frantz:

>> Encrypted swap is a crypto sweet spot, because it has perhaps the easiest
>> key management of any crypto system.  It seems that the BSD systems have it
>> while Linux still thinks it is difficult.
>
>It is not yet in the mainline Linux kernel, but implementations are
>available (e.g. the widely used "cryptoloop").

At this stage I think a small question is in order. Is there any Big Red
Button software out there to complement this level of paranoia?

What I mean is, after you've got everything in your system under
industrial strength crypto, you have exactly one weak spot, that being a
whole lot of people charging through your door when your system is already
running hot and accessible. At that point the only thing that can save you
is a one-touch mechanism to effect a swift (i.e. at most two or three
seconds), dirty, no-matter-what shutdown, with guaranteed loss of key
material.

Is there open source software out there to effect that sort of thing?
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Jul 15 05:23:34 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 07:23:34 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Slashdot | UCB Researchers Critique DRM, Compulsory Licensing
  (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307150723170.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/07/14/2312227.shtml?tid=141&tid=188


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul 15 09:05:57 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 09:05:57 -0700
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
Message-ID: <3F142665.5A4FFCB0@cdc.gov>

At 09:29 AM 7/15/03 -0400, Sunder wrote:
>So, the best way to avoid that situation and not being able to reach
the
>big red switch, is simply not to attract their attention in the first
>place by not following the footsteps of Jim Bell.  :)

Stego + broadcast is indeed your friend.

>A more likely, and far more important, scenario to worry about is the
>black bag job whereby a hardware keystroke recorder can get installed
>without your knowledge...
>
>There may be ways to prevent/detect this...  Software (open or closed
>source) alone won't help very much.

Epoxy and other conformal coatings are also your friends.




From sunder at sunder.net  Tue Jul 15 06:29:21 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 09:29:21 -0400 (edt)
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307150143410.8334@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307150920390.27806-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

You could get one of those power strips with a power button intented to be
operated by foot.  Provided you've encrypted everything on your system
including all network traffic and swap, pushing the big red switch should
do the trick. :)

Not exactly an open source solution, but it may well be effective.  


In all likelyhood the flashbang armored ninjas with automatics, night
vision, "get the fuck on the floor and shut the fuck up bitch" entry will
happen while you're asleep, so you won't have time to hit the big red
button anyway.

So, the best way to avoid that situation and not being able to reach the
big red switch, is simply not to attract their attention in the first
place by not following the footsteps of Jim Bell.  :)


A more likely, and far more important, scenario to worry about is the
black bag job whereby a hardware keystroke recorder can get installed
without your knowledge...

There may be ways to prevent/detect this...  Software (open or closed
source) alone won't help very much.


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

> At this stage I think a small question is in order. Is there any Big Red
> Button software out there to complement this level of paranoia?




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul 15 10:35:39 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 10:35:39 -0700
Subject: MPAA vs. Net anonymity, AB 1143
Message-ID: <3F143B6B.2A887D68@cdc.gov>

Studios Stage Fight Against Internet Bill
                    By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer

                    The Hollywood studios are fighting a
behind-the-scenes
                    battle in Sacramento to derail a bill they say would

                    promote online piracy  though the bill has little
to do
                    with downloading movies.

                    Actually, the fight may have more to do with who's
                    behind the legislation: the Electronic Frontier
Foundation,
                    a civil liberties and technology advocacy group that

                    frequently opposes the studios' anti-piracy
initiatives.

                    The measure by Assemblyman Joe Simitian (D-Palo
Alto)
                    would help Internet users maintain the anonymity
they
                    have in chat rooms and elsewhere on the Internet
when
                    sued in state court for something they said or did
online.

                    Passed by the Assembly on June 2 and scheduled for a

                    Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, AB 1143
                    would require Internet services to notify customers
of
                    subpoenas seeking their identities and give
customers 30
                    days to challenge the requests in court.

                    Because it would apply to lawsuits in state courts,
the bill
                    wouldn't affect people accused of pirating movies or

                    other copyrighted works online. Copyright cases are
                    heard in federal court.
<snip>
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mpaa15jul15,1,5900411.story?coll=la-home-todays-times




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul 15 12:08:20 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 12:08:20 -0700
Subject: Sealing wax
In-Reply-To: <3F142665.5A4FFCB0@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <B29EA9DA-B6F7-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 15, 2003, at 09:05  AM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> At 09:29 AM 7/15/03 -0400, Sunder wrote:
>> So, the best way to avoid that situation and not being able to reach
> the
>> big red switch, is simply not to attract their attention in the first
>> place by not following the footsteps of Jim Bell.  :)
>
> Stego + broadcast is indeed your friend.
>
>> A more likely, and far more important, scenario to worry about is the
>> black bag job whereby a hardware keystroke recorder can get installed
>> without your knowledge...
>>
>> There may be ways to prevent/detect this...  Software (open or closed
>> source) alone won't help very much.
>
> Epoxy and other conformal coatings are also your friends.
>

Thinking about this brief comment, I assume MV means sealing a PC to 
make black bag opening more apparent.

But this suggest a return to _sealing wax_. Seriously.

A dab of sealing wax (available in most stationery stores, save for 
Staples, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Paper Barn, StaplerWorld, Nothing But 
Rubber Bands, and other warehouses masquerading as stationery stores) 
over the side panels and other access points, even over the floppy and 
CD-ROM ports (carefully!), and a distinctive signet ring or other such 
seal-making device could be quite easy to use.

(As we all know, CIA and other spook agency "flaps and seals" 
specialists are well-versed in duplicating such seals...but probably 
only after collecting good information. An FBI black bag job is likely 
to encounter the sealing wax and seal and be unable to duplicate it. 
There may be tools now to take a fairly good impression, perhaps with a 
fast-setting polymer, and then make a convincing duplicate of the seal. 
All crypto is economics, though, and simple seals probably work against 
most attackers.)

There are other methods:

-- keep key material on a USB or PCMCIA flash card dongle. 

-- wear this around your neck or otherwise make it secure against 
girlfriends, wives, others who may try to copy it

-- use a small handheld PC (like the HP machines) or Palm OS device as 
the "front-end" for security apps: at the simplest level, use it to 
store very long keys which don't get typed-in, but instead are 
cut-and-pasted in a way to bypass the keyboard driver completely.

Note: It is common in military crypto for their to be different levels 
of "security tokens" to increase physical security. Rarely are the keys 
to the kingdom gotten merely by sitting down and typing stuff into a 
computer. For one thing, this encourages people to get lazy and write 
the passwords and keys down on Post-It notes or on pieces of tape stuck 
to the underside of paperclip holders or other entropically-obvious 
things. For another thing, it makes remote attacks or keystroke logging 
much more of an attack mode. Finally, the rigamarole or ritual of 
having physical tokens on chains around one's neck tends to make the 
process of security seem more serious, which can cause more care to be 
taken.

(All of this slows down the process. The rigamarole that a shipboard 
crypto shack will put up with is not the same as what Joe Sixpack will 
put up, as we all know. RSA-like crypto makes crypto a lot less 
expensive to deploy, but it's wrong to think it makes it a no-brainer, 
point-and-click process....except in things like SSL, where it does a 
specialized job without human involvement.)

-- the usual point about having a network with a secure machine locked 
up very well in a closet or safe (I have a large gun safe, which I 
usually run a small heating element into to prevent condensing 
conditions...I have toyed with the idea of  putting a small PC running 
on 25-40 watts, or less, into this gun safe, with only a power cord and 
Ethernet wire coming out).

-- and the usual point about having cameras watching the areas where 
the PCs and keyboards are located.

(Yeah, maybe the black bag types can find and disable the cameras, but 
then Alice knows something unusual happened. But odds are pretty good 
they _can't_ find all of the cameras or microphones or sensors, 
especially in a building with many PCs and wires and other gadgets. 
They can cut the power, but smart folks have things on battery backups, 
or self-powered, or on laptops left plugged-in and able to run for 3-4 
hours without AC power, etc.)

Were I setting up such a system, all sorts of inexpensive ideas suggest 
themselves.

By the way, I recommend the novels of Thomas Perry, especially 
"Pursuit," "Vanishing Act," and his others in the "Jane Whitefield" 
series. All four novels of his I have read so far deal centrally with 
issues of people trying to escape those tracking them, kind of a 
private version of the Witness Security Program (popularly called 
"Witness Protection"). The novels are filled with good ideas, and a few 
glaring misses, about changing identity, avoiding patterns, etc.

If there's a weakness in his novels, it's that not enough modern 
technology is used. I cringe when I see his characters not even using 
readily-available throwaway cellphones to stay in contact, or not even 
setting up Hotmail accounts to communicate. (He favors postal dead 
drops, which in at least one of the novels allows an attacker to find 
out the home and name of another....a determined opponent, like the 
government, would know the names and addresses quickly.)

Still, his series fits with the kind of security awareness and 
hypervigilance we often discuss.


--Tim May




From s.schear at comcast.net  Tue Jul 15 14:10:54 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:10:54 -0700
Subject: Will 'Distributed Cloud' Network Structures Prevent Censorship?
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030715140857.046b56e8@mail.comcast.net>

Bennett Haselton believes that de-centralized information storage and 
transmission systems - so called 'Distributed Cloud' networks like 
<https://194.109.142.142:1984/redirect.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%2F1%2Fhi%2Fsci%2Ftech%2F1313399.stm>Peekabooty, 
<https://194.109.142.142:1984/redirect.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffreenet.sourceforge.net%2F>FreeNet 
and 
<https://194.109.142.142:1984/redirect.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcache%3A35zAWt7cO0sJ%3Awww.cs.uchicago.edu%2F%7Ematei%2FPAPERS%2Fgnutella-rc.pdf%2Bgnutella%2Barchitecture%2Bnetwork%26hl%3Den%26start%3D4%26ie%3DUTF-8>Gnutella 
- will not prevent Internet censorship in the long run. He has written a 
short essay http://www.peacefire.org/techpapers/distributed-cloud.html 
pointing out the flaws he perceives in these systems.

Ian Clarke, the architect of the FreeNet project, responds here 
http://slashdot.org/~Sanity/journal/37275, defending Distributed Cloud 
systems and their abilities to prevent censorship, protect the identities 
of their users, and shield users from legal liability.

steve


"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul 15 14:42:56 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:42:56 -0700
Subject: Sealing wax, funny looking dogtags
Message-ID: <3F147560.26A0B7A@cdc.gov>

At 12:08 PM 7/15/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>On Tuesday, July 15, 2003, at 09:05  AM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>> Epoxy and other conformal coatings are also your friends.
>>
>Thinking about this brief comment, I assume MV means sealing a PC to
>make black bag opening more apparent.

Both more apparent and more physically difficult.

>But this suggest a return to _sealing wax_. Seriously.

:-)  Only modern sealing waxes don't melt, adhere extremely well,
and make tampering evident.  They also mean the Adversary
has to spend a lot more time... maybe more than one visit.

>(As we all know, CIA and other spook agency "flaps and seals"
>specialists are well-versed in duplicating such seals...

Yes.

but probably
>only after collecting good information. An FBI black bag job is likely
>to encounter the sealing wax and seal and be unable to duplicate it.

You seem to think I thought the epoxy would be used like a seal,
with the signet ring and all, visually verified when you sit down.
That's too lame, any hobbyist whose good with casting can dupe it.
I just meant that if Scarfo had epoxied his keyboard to his chassis
properly, (and epoxied the keyboard, etc.) he might still be free
(to pick shitty passphrases, it turned out).

And some "sealing waxes" such as those used on nuclear weapons
and verification devices, are very difficult to duplicate.  Given, they
require special equipment to read.  (Fine reflector particles dispersed
in clear epoxies)

Or, as has been discussed here before, if Nico did his crypto work on
a handheld that stayed with him.  (An epoxy-sealed one, of course.)
Your suggestions re USB, PCMCIA, etc. are in the same line.
Better, because they're smaller.  However, I don't know of a card that
you can
*shower* with, which is frankly what's required.  It can't ever leave
you.  A keychain fob is not good enough.  Even a finger ring gets
removed
sometimes.

>(All of this slows down the process. The rigamarole that a shipboard
>crypto shack will put up with is not the same as what Joe Sixpack will
>put up

Yes, but Scarfo's DirOpSec should have been able to convince him
that at the hourly rate the Company pays him, he should put up with
it :-)  He can surf for porn on a different machine.  As long as he
knows to use different passwords there...

>-- the usual point about having a network with a secure machine locked
>up very well in a closet or safe (I have a large gun safe, which I
>usually run a small heating element into to prevent condensing
>conditions...I have toyed with the idea of  putting a small PC running
>on 25-40 watts, or less, into this gun safe, with only a power cord and

>Ethernet wire coming out).

I like the dual use of keeping a security-sensitive PC in a gun safe
which also keeps the guns dry :-)   You could have the door opening
silence
the PC, too.  A nice lead lining will keep the black bag x-ray team
(they'll borrow a unit from the bomb squad) from seeing much.

>Still, his series fits with the kind of security awareness and
>hypervigilance we often discuss.

"The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you
but when everything is against you."  PKD

(and quite apropos here)




From sunder at sunder.net  Tue Jul 15 14:47:23 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 17:47:23 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Sealing wax, funny looking dogtags
In-Reply-To: <3F147560.26A0B7A@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307151741080.21066-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> I just meant that if Scarfo had epoxied his keyboard to his chassis
> properly, (and epoxied the keyboard, etc.) he might still be free
> (to pick shitty passphrases, it turned out).

Um, then they would have gone with the hidden pinhole camera somewhere
that has a view of the keyboard.

> the PC, too.  A nice lead lining will keep the black bag x-ray team
> (they'll borrow a unit from the bomb squad) from seeing much.

Or you make nice layered cutouts so when they do xray the locker they can
see interesting things... :)  like "fuck off!" :)




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Tue Jul 15 09:24:02 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 18:24:02 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307150920390.27806-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307151746580.26820-100000@Zeta>

> In all likelyhood the flashbang armored ninjas with automatics, night
> vision, "get the fuck on the floor and shut the fuck up bitch" entry will
> happen while you're asleep, so you won't have time to hit the big red
> button anyway.

Take a relay and connect it to a door switch. When they open the door
without authorization[1], the power to the machines is switched off. Then
the ninjas' with their typical noisy entry will switch off the system
themselves, without you having to touch the Red Button.

[1] can be an ID button, can be a wireless ID token (advantage: the reader
and the whole identification action can be invisible), can be a keypad,
can be an arbitrary complex biometric ID, or any combination of the above,
for a low-tech approach can be a reed relay under the wallpaper and a
magnet touched to the given spot on the wall



The system can be easily coupled with a common-grade burglar alarm,
further increasing the range of conditions the shutdown can be triggered
with. (Optionally with several levels, depending on the tradeoff between
the recoverability from a false alarm and the consequences of missing the
alarm: power-down, erase of a long key (unlocked by a passphrase) from
NVRAM, physical destruction of the disk array once forceful penetration of
outer zones (triggering sequentially the previous lower events in reaction)
is followed by physical breach of the server room door or walls (or the
so often woefully neglected ceiling and floor).)

> So, the best way to avoid that situation and not being able to reach the
> big red switch, is simply not to attract their attention in the first
> place by not following the footsteps of Jim Bell.  :)

True. But once the adversary becomes totally information-aware, it will be
rather difficult to not attract attention.

> A more likely, and far more important, scenario to worry about is the
> black bag job whereby a hardware keystroke recorder can get installed
> without your knowledge...

Another reason for employing a security system.

> There may be ways to prevent/detect this...  Software (open or closed
> source) alone won't help very much.

May be the crucial part of implementing the security system. Eg, as an
embedded system handling signals from webcams, distributed over the
building as several nodes (instead of a central one), mimicking the nerve
system of insect.




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Jul 15 16:41:33 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 18:41:33 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Cracking Data Hiding (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307151840500.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

Stego taking a hit....???????

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/07/030715090813.htm


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From tpublic at tno.org  Tue Jul 15 18:48:56 2003
From: tpublic at tno.org (John Q. Public)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 18:48:56 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [AntiSocial] Re: CRYPTO-GRAM, July 15, 2003
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307152024240.1737-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307151847410.2245-100000@ahmes.tno.org>

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:

| On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Bruce Schneier wrote:
| 
| > [This is the strangest piece of mail I have ever received, by several 
| > orders of magnitude.  I reprint it here solely for entertainment purposes.]

Would someone please refill Carolyn Meinel's prescriptions?




From measl at mfn.org  Tue Jul 15 18:28:16 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 20:28:16 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: CRYPTO-GRAM, July 15, 2003
In-Reply-To: <4.2.2.20030715060643.01f6ff00@127.0.0.1>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307152024240.1737-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Bruce Schneier wrote:

> [This is the strangest piece of mail I have ever received, by several 
> orders of magnitude.  I reprint it here solely for entertainment purposes.]


<snip of email from an obviously disturbed person>


> ... It might be a hoax,
> but the writing seems too authentic.  It's hard to fake delusional
> paranoia that well.]

And you find the sharing of this woman's problems has legitimate
"Entertainment" value?  

She is not the *only* disturbed person represented by your email.


-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Tue Jul 15 11:58:05 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 20:58:05 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307152104460.14205@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307152036581.26820-100000@Zeta>

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

> There are plenty of examples like printer buffers,

They shall be on encrypted partition, if possible by a session key (as
they are temporary files which we won't need after next powerup), which
gets lost after powerdown.

> random pools,

Why not initialize them after each powerup with fresh data from a hardware
generator?

> already keyed smartcards,

...whose status gets lost with powerdown,

> anything you're currently showing on-screen (I wouldn't be surprised if
> that could be read after sustained powerdown),

An issue (though I don't know how serious) with CRTs, where there could be
detectable residual charge, but with a bit of luck that could get
undetectable in just couple seconds in normal room temperatures.

> any battery backed memory,

IMPORTANT issue. But as NVRAM is a kind of permanent storage, nothing
unencrypted shall touch it anyway.

> off-the-shelf peripherals which do not admit crypto,

If we consider them plaintext, it doesn't matter here if they contain
crypto or not.

> and so on. Probably
> we'd also want to make the machine as dead as possible, shutting down any
> remote power-on features,

Why? The adversary can power up the machine once he gets physical access,
anyway. By then, though, he shouldn't get anything more than a machine
with data with either missing session key (and hence unrecoverable) or
encrypted data missing the key that has to be supplied by the user to
complete the power-up.

> network connections (otherwise retries might go
> on for a fair while),

...which is no harm, as the data should be encrypted and without the key,
lost to the powerdown, they won't reveal anything than that there was
some connection in progress. Which is something the adversary most likely
knows anyway; before physical intrusions, passive surveillance usually
takes place. Keyword: Carnivore.

> open phone lines,

...hung up by power loss to the modems...

> whathaveyou.

Everything must lose critical inner state with the powerdown. Everything
that carries plaintext data has to be power-dependent.

> That's why we might need software, and not just the power switch.

That's why we need the software designed to cope with the possibility of
unpredictable power-down. There should be no dependability on proper
function of software at the moment of the power-down itself, as we need to
keep the system as reliable (and as simple) as possible. Remember that
years in jail, and possibly even lives, are in stake.

The software could be able to communicate with the hardware though,
issuing "locks" to prevent power-down in the middle of a critical
operation (eg, writing to disk) and delay it a little. The locks should be
issued for maximum time of some few 100s milliseconds, expiring in
hardware if not cancelled from the software. There should be a period of
allowed shutdown every period (100s msec?) even in the worst possible
combination of issued locks. This should prevent damage to data during an
emergency shutdown event while not compromising the security due to
software bug (eg, forgotten unlock).

The delay time has to be determined to the worst possible combination of
events, to not allow the best-trained best-equipped adversary to prevent
the machine from shutting down in that time.

> I can also imagine situations where we'd want to be able to perform
> manual shutdowns remotely.

That's the simple part. Just take the output of the computer (or an
external device, eg. a cellphone, a radio receiver, anything suitable) and
use it as one of the event inputs of the power-down system. You raise the
event (tell the computer over SSH, send a SMS, broadcast a tone...), the
computer shuts down.




From decoy at iki.fi  Tue Jul 15 11:33:50 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 21:33:50 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: MRAM, persistence of memory
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307151746580.26820-100000@Zeta>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307151746580.26820-100000@Zeta>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307152104460.14205@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-15, Thomas Shaddack uttered:

>Take a relay and connect it to a door switch.

Precisely. It's not just about manual shutdown, but all surprise
shutdowns. Also, I'm afraid of the possibility that simply switching the
power off might not do the trick -- we don't care about how dirty the
system state will become short of dataloss outside the current working
set, but we do need to be sure all crypto and plaintext I/O relevant state
is properly purged from memory and peripherals. There are plenty of
examples like printer buffers, random pools, already keyed smartcards,
anything you're currently showing on-screen (I wouldn't be surprised if
that could be read after sustained powerdown), any battery backed memory,
off-the-shelf peripherals which do not admit crypto, and so on. Probably
we'd also want to make the machine as dead as possible, shutting down any
remote power-on features, network connections (otherwise retries might go
on for a fair while), open phone lines, whathaveyou.

That's why we might need software, and not just the power switch. I can
also imagine situations where we'd want to be able to perform manual
shutdowns remotely.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From s.schear at comcast.net  Tue Jul 15 22:00:27 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:00:27 -0700
Subject: The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference 
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030715220018.046f5938@mail.comcast.net>

http://j-walk.com/other/conf/index.htm


"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer




From decoy at iki.fi  Tue Jul 15 16:15:01 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 02:15:01 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: Sealing wax, funny looking dogtags
In-Reply-To: <3F147560.26A0B7A@cdc.gov>
References: <3F147560.26A0B7A@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307160213260.14205@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-15, Major Variola (ret) uttered:

>And some "sealing waxes" such as those used on nuclear weapons and
>verification devices, are very difficult to duplicate. Given, they
>require special equipment to read.

Then you replace both seal and reader. I mean, meanwhile the only person
capable of discerning anything from anything rots in jail, anyways.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 16 05:02:31 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 07:02:31 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Senate to Kill Pentagon Surveillance Bill (washingtonpost.com)
  (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307160702190.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61146-2003Jul15.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 16 05:03:23 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 07:03:23 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: News: DMCA gives blueprint for Chile deal (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307160703110.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-1026116.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From roy at rant-central.com  Wed Jul 16 05:11:35 2003
From: roy at rant-central.com (Roy M. Silvernail)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 08:11:35 -0400
Subject: The ideal computer  for your gun safe
Message-ID: <200307160811.35240.roy@rant-central.com>

Since it's been mentioned several times, here's a good candidate for your gun 
safe computer:  the CerfCube.

http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/cerfcube405EP/

$399. I have an older one that's been running for 2 years and 4 updates.  Mine 
runs Linux, but they do a WinCE version, too.




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Jul 16 08:49:25 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 08:49:25 -0700
Subject: Security for Mafiosos and Freedom Fighters
Message-ID: <13C1A438-B7A5-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

Several good suggestions in this thread about securing machines and 
keyboards against FBI black bag jobs and the like.

(By the way, the USB flashdrive (a 256 MB FlashHopper) I have on my 
keychain--my physical keychain!--is probably waterproof. The USB port 
has a little plastic cover which slides on snugly. Until I eventually 
misplace it, I am using it. I expect the thing is showerproof, though I 
don't intend to test it. Water resistance can be tested 
nondestructively with things like Fluorinert, of course. Also, surfers 
and kayakers often have O-ring sealed gizmos they wear under their wet 
suits, coming in different sizes. It would be trivial to find one to 
hold either a USB flashdrive or a Compact Flash card.)

The larger issue is a business/consulting opportunity:

The collection of "lore" on resisting bugs and intercepts and bad 
security measures is not something the average Mafioso or freedom 
fighter is much interested in learning himself. Just as specialists are 
used to sweep rooms for bugs, the same should apply to helping Vito 
Corleone beef up his computer system.

---

"Have LAN, will Travel." Security Consultants, Inc. will provide you, 
your family, and your associates with a computer and communications 
package which is resistant to FBI or CIA wiretaps, black bag jobs, Van 
Eyck interception, and remote surveillance. We will evaluate your 
current system, your needs, and design a system for you. This will 
included throwaway cellphones, easy to use but robust encryption, 
steganography, access to offshore accounts, physical security for the 
computers, digital dead drops, use of untraceable remailers, personal 
security devices (such as USB flash drives storing sensitive material), 
and set up of t.v. cameras under your control for monitoring snooping, 
intrusion, and even dishonest associates and family. Security 
Consultants does not currently handle weapons issues, but all your 
other bases are belong to us.

---


I mean this somewhat whimsically, but the fact is that this kind of 
security consulting will become more and more important as even 
mobsters move into the information age. (When I was developing some of 
the ideas prior to the formation of Cypherpunks, one of the interesting 
news items was about how a guy on the run from the Feds was using an 
early bulletin board system--I think it was GEnie, but it may have been 
Prodigy--to communicate with his wife in chat rooms.)

In a free society, those who provide services like roofing or plumbing 
or security needs are of course not implicated in the  possible crimes 
or other activities of their customers. A guy who builds a security 
fence for Don Corleone is not guilty of aiding and abetting.

But we have not had a free society for many decades, and it is more 
than possible that RICO and Espionage statutes would be interpreted by 
government to say that assisting someone like Aldrich Ames in improving 
his tradecraft is ipso facto part of a conspiracy.

Or the spooks could demand that Security Consultants, Inc. place 
"special" networks and cameras...

Issues of trust and fear. (When the Mob finds out this has been done 
and snatches one of the children of the company and returns the child 
as a "turkey," with both arms, both legs, the nose, the ears, and the 
tongue precisely and surgically removed, others in the industry may 
realize the dangers of crossing the Mob.)



--Tim May, Occupied America
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary 
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759. 




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul 16 06:33:56 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 09:33:56 -0400
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
Message-ID: <BAY7-F56tDfCjuXbgES00007163@hotmail.com>

This reminds me of another thing that occurred to me, but as I'm no computer 
engineer I can't tell how much of a defense it would be. (At the very least 
a nice stopgap for a while...)

To get around keystroke loggers, it would be nice to have some fom of 
onscreen keyboard, perhaps available over the web. The keyboard would likely 
work only with the mouse (making it slow to use, of course), and each time 
the keyboard appears (and at periodic intervals) the keyboard scrambles its 
keys.


I suspect it would be MUCH harder to figure out what has been typed.

-TD


>From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Sealing wax
>Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 12:08:20 -0700
>
>On Tuesday, July 15, 2003, at 09:05  AM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>
>>At 09:29 AM 7/15/03 -0400, Sunder wrote:
>>>So, the best way to avoid that situation and not being able to reach
>>the
>>>big red switch, is simply not to attract their attention in the first
>>>place by not following the footsteps of Jim Bell.  :)
>>
>>Stego + broadcast is indeed your friend.
>>
>>>A more likely, and far more important, scenario to worry about is the
>>>black bag job whereby a hardware keystroke recorder can get installed
>>>without your knowledge...
>>>
>>>There may be ways to prevent/detect this...  Software (open or closed
>>>source) alone won't help very much.
>>
>>Epoxy and other conformal coatings are also your friends.
>>
>
>Thinking about this brief comment, I assume MV means sealing a PC to make 
>black bag opening more apparent.
>
>But this suggest a return to _sealing wax_. Seriously.
>
>A dab of sealing wax (available in most stationery stores, save for 
>Staples, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Paper Barn, StaplerWorld, Nothing But 
>Rubber Bands, and other warehouses masquerading as stationery stores) over 
>the side panels and other access points, even over the floppy and CD-ROM 
>ports (carefully!), and a distinctive signet ring or other such seal-making 
>device could be quite easy to use.
>
>(As we all know, CIA and other spook agency "flaps and seals" specialists 
>are well-versed in duplicating such seals...but probably only after 
>collecting good information. An FBI black bag job is likely to encounter 
>the sealing wax and seal and be unable to duplicate it. There may be tools 
>now to take a fairly good impression, perhaps with a fast-setting polymer, 
>and then make a convincing duplicate of the seal. All crypto is economics, 
>though, and simple seals probably work against most attackers.)
>
>There are other methods:
>
>-- keep key material on a USB or PCMCIA flash card dongle.
>
>-- wear this around your neck or otherwise make it secure against 
>girlfriends, wives, others who may try to copy it
>
>-- use a small handheld PC (like the HP machines) or Palm OS device as the 
>"front-end" for security apps: at the simplest level, use it to store very 
>long keys which don't get typed-in, but instead are cut-and-pasted in a way 
>to bypass the keyboard driver completely.
>
>Note: It is common in military crypto for their to be different levels of 
>"security tokens" to increase physical security. Rarely are the keys to the 
>kingdom gotten merely by sitting down and typing stuff into a computer. For 
>one thing, this encourages people to get lazy and write the passwords and 
>keys down on Post-It notes or on pieces of tape stuck to the underside of 
>paperclip holders or other entropically-obvious things. For another thing, 
>it makes remote attacks or keystroke logging much more of an attack mode. 
>Finally, the rigamarole or ritual of having physical tokens on chains 
>around one's neck tends to make the process of security seem more serious, 
>which can cause more care to be taken.
>
>(All of this slows down the process. The rigamarole that a shipboard crypto 
>shack will put up with is not the same as what Joe Sixpack will put up, as 
>we all know. RSA-like crypto makes crypto a lot less expensive to deploy, 
>but it's wrong to think it makes it a no-brainer, point-and-click 
>process....except in things like SSL, where it does a specialized job 
>without human involvement.)
>
>-- the usual point about having a network with a secure machine locked up 
>very well in a closet or safe (I have a large gun safe, which I usually run 
>a small heating element into to prevent condensing conditions...I have 
>toyed with the idea of  putting a small PC running on 25-40 watts, or less, 
>into this gun safe, with only a power cord and Ethernet wire coming out).
>
>-- and the usual point about having cameras watching the areas where the 
>PCs and keyboards are located.
>
>(Yeah, maybe the black bag types can find and disable the cameras, but then 
>Alice knows something unusual happened. But odds are pretty good they 
>_can't_ find all of the cameras or microphones or sensors, especially in a 
>building with many PCs and wires and other gadgets. They can cut the power, 
>but smart folks have things on battery backups, or self-powered, or on 
>laptops left plugged-in and able to run for 3-4 hours without AC power, 
>etc.)
>
>Were I setting up such a system, all sorts of inexpensive ideas suggest 
>themselves.
>
>By the way, I recommend the novels of Thomas Perry, especially "Pursuit," 
>"Vanishing Act," and his others in the "Jane Whitefield" series. All four 
>novels of his I have read so far deal centrally with issues of people 
>trying to escape those tracking them, kind of a private version of the 
>Witness Security Program (popularly called "Witness Protection"). The 
>novels are filled with good ideas, and a few glaring misses, about changing 
>identity, avoiding patterns, etc.
>
>If there's a weakness in his novels, it's that not enough modern technology 
>is used. I cringe when I see his characters not even using 
>readily-available throwaway cellphones to stay in contact, or not even 
>setting up Hotmail accounts to communicate. (He favors postal dead drops, 
>which in at least one of the novels allows an attacker to find out the home 
>and name of another....a determined opponent, like the government, would 
>know the names and addresses quickly.)
>
>Still, his series fits with the kind of security awareness and 
>hypervigilance we often discuss.
>
>
>--Tim May

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Jul 16 11:15:30 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 11:15:30 -0700
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307161313320.24280-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
Message-ID: <7BE81E36-B7B9-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 10:15  AM, Sunder wrote:

>
> And TEMPEST monitoring equipment (or again, a hidden pinhole camera 
> behind
> you, or a transmitter hidden in your monitor) won't see what's on your
> screen because????

 From a purely optical perspective, pinhole cameras have terrible 
spatial resolution. I doubt a pinhole camera behind a user, probably on 
a wall 10 feet behind the user, could resolve 12-point type. Resolving 
a large "virtual keyboard" on a screen would be a lot easier, of course.

We've talked many times about using laptops, heads-up displays (like 
the Sony glasses), and even putting mesh bags over a user and his 
laptop. Actual Faraday cage rooms are not really needed.

All security is economics, so I would think a lot of bang for the buck 
happens with solving the most pressing problems people have with 
security: leaving their machines unattended, not using any crypto at 
all, writing passphrases down on Post-It notes, not checking for audio 
bugs, etc.


--Tim May


"We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania."
"We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia."
"We are at war with Iraq. We have always been at war with Iraq.
"We are at war with France. We have always been at war with France."




From sunder at sunder.net  Wed Jul 16 10:15:06 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:15:06 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F56tDfCjuXbgES00007163@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307161313320.24280-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

And TEMPEST monitoring equipment (or again, a hidden pinhole camera behind
you, or a transmitter hidden in your monitor) won't see what's on your
screen because????

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> To get around keystroke loggers, it would be nice to have some fom of 
> onscreen keyboard, perhaps available over the web. The keyboard would likely 
> work only with the mouse (making it slow to use, of course), and each time 
> the keyboard appears (and at periodic intervals) the keyboard scrambles its 
> keys.




From sunder at sunder.net  Wed Jul 16 10:23:02 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:23:02 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307161704470.26820-100000@Zeta>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307161316540.24280-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Geez!  You guys have the DUMBEST ideas ever!  For fuck's sake, go and
RTFA! (For the dumb: READ THE FUCKING ARCHIVES!)

Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the street
with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage.  Failing that a
hidden pinhole camera, or an RF transmitter attached to your cable -- hell
these are available for hobbist use right now: x10.com has small devices
that you can use to broadcast video from one room to another.  Getting the
same done for VGA, XVGA, etc. shouldn't be any harder.

Using IR or RF is one of the stupidest things you could possibly
do.  Think!  IR and RF are detectable from a distance!

Ok, some IR auth is ok, provided it's in a sealed chamber and no photons
leak out.  i.e. think of a two cylinders, sealed at the ends where the
cables go, where one fits inside the other... sort of like fiber optic
cables and connectors.  No leaks.

Direct contact's obviously fine, so long as your alleged attacker can't
tap into it.

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote:

> However, this will work around the keyboard loggers, but will cause
> development of eg. programs saving the screenshots at the moment of a
> mouseclick. (Which is definitely more detectable - by storing bulk amounts
> of data - than just a plain keylogger, disadvantaging the adversary
> somehow.) Also won't protect against ceiling cams, if they'd have enough
> resolution to see the screen clearly enough.
> 
> Couldn't there be some challenge-response device, eg. over IrDA or radio
> waves or direct contact (eg, iButton DS1955B or DS1957B), which would be
> unlocked by something like a PIN code? How to avoid the leakage of the PIN
> and subsequent seizure of the device then?




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Jul 16 11:21:17 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 14:21:17 EDT
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
Message-ID: <1ed.d4993a4.2c46f19d@aol.com>

Sighb&You know fellows this is why Isser Harel, Mossadbs fabled spy chief
was
noted for face to face meetings that were prearranged as he didnbt trust
electronic communication. He incidentally liked to use public transit to get
here
and there even while conducting various operations- Like the abduction from
Argentina of Adolf Eichmann.

Regards,  Matt Gaylor-




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul 16 11:52:28 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 14:52:28 -0400
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
Message-ID: <BAY7-F39fm3YtpdusZc000166c7@hotmail.com>

"Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the street
with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage. "

No, no you have the whole thing wrong. As May recently stated, "crypto is 
economics". It's one thing for "them" to set up a camera to look at some 
Arab guy's computer down on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn. It's an entirely 
different thing if, by using a virtual keyboard, "they" have to do the same 
thing for millions of people. (And in case it's not obvious, the cost 
probably won' be in the hardware but in the installation costs, and the fact 
that the probability of detection of such efforts is nonzero, thus 
nullifying their "investment".) If I have a plan to smash a plane into the 
Empire State building, I'll probably work harder to hide it. If I'm sharing 
mp3's on Kazaa or whatever and I don't want to have RIAA make an example out 
of me, that virtual keyboard may be just right.

The real danger of crypto and, I'd argue, a virtual keyboard in this case, 
is that by spending tiny fractions of money we can make it prohibitively 
costly for "them" to monitor a large number of transactions. Forget 
unbreakability. Forget Faraday cages (you don't have anything that important 
to hide anyway). Cheap, easy and scalable is the only way to bumrush this 
show.

-TD






>From: Sunder <sunder at sunder.net>
>To: Thomas Shaddack <shaddack at ns.arachne.cz>
>CC: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com>, timcmay at got.net,   
>cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
>Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:23:02 -0400 (edt)
>
>Geez!  You guys have the DUMBEST ideas ever!  For fuck's sake, go and
>RTFA! (For the dumb: READ THE FUCKING ARCHIVES!)
>
>Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the street
>with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage.  Failing that a
>hidden pinhole camera, or an RF transmitter attached to your cable -- hell
>these are available for hobbist use right now: x10.com has small devices
>that you can use to broadcast video from one room to another.  Getting the
>same done for VGA, XVGA, etc. shouldn't be any harder.
>
>Using IR or RF is one of the stupidest things you could possibly
>do.  Think!  IR and RF are detectable from a distance!
>
>Ok, some IR auth is ok, provided it's in a sealed chamber and no photons
>leak out.  i.e. think of a two cylinders, sealed at the ends where the
>cables go, where one fits inside the other... sort of like fiber optic
>cables and connectors.  No leaks.
>
>Direct contact's obviously fine, so long as your alleged attacker can't
>tap into it.
>
>----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
>  + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
>   \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
><--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
>   /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
>  + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!
>--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------
>
>On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>
> > However, this will work around the keyboard loggers, but will cause
> > development of eg. programs saving the screenshots at the moment of a
> > mouseclick. (Which is definitely more detectable - by storing bulk 
>amounts
> > of data - than just a plain keylogger, disadvantaging the adversary
> > somehow.) Also won't protect against ceiling cams, if they'd have enough
> > resolution to see the screen clearly enough.
> >
> > Couldn't there be some challenge-response device, eg. over IrDA or radio
> > waves or direct contact (eg, iButton DS1955B or DS1957B), which would be
> > unlocked by something like a PIN code? How to avoid the leakage of the 
>PIN
> > and subsequent seizure of the device then?

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From sunder at sunder.net  Wed Jul 16 12:01:22 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 15:01:22 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F39fm3YtpdusZc000166c7@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307161447400.24280-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> "Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the street
> with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage. "
> 
> No, no you have the whole thing wrong. As May recently stated, "crypto is 
> economics". 

Well, ok, it "all depends on your security model" is certainly the 1st
factor to consider with how much you're willing to spend on it being a
constraint to that.

If your threat model is simply to have generic good security incase
someone steals your machine, then so long as all your files are encrypted,
the theif just gets whatever the hardware is worth at "it fell of a
truck" prices, and no more.

If your threat model is the fully armed and armorded ninja attack at
3:00am -- which was what I gathered was what Sampo's originally presented
question, then you can assume your attacker would have enough resources to
pull off a TEMPEST van across the street, etc.

So do you want crypto to keep a rogue government out of your fiels, or
keep your kid sister from reading your email? etc...

An on screen virtual keyboard is much easier to see than a real keyboard
even by a shitty pinhole camera.  A real keyboard would have to be viewed
from above, otherwise, all you can do is infer the keystrokes - which
gives you a hint of what they are for a passphrase, but not much else.  
On screen keyboard can be seen much easier and your mouse pointer gives
you away.

So it all depends on who "they" is.  Either way, if "they" believe you are
a nice jucy target, and their chances to net lots of data off your machine
are high, they will park the TEMPEST SUV outside your door.  Not much
question of that...

If "they" are watching everyone for patterns and you don't stick out like
a sore thumb, there's not much need for any of the above.

> Empire State building, I'll probably work harder to hide it. If I'm sharing 
> mp3's on Kazaa or whatever and I don't want to have RIAA make an example out 
> of me, that virtual keyboard may be just right.

No, virtual keyboard won't save your ass.  Your ISP will had it over on a
plate along with trimmings (traffic logs, etc.)  If you're sharing MP3's
on Kazaa, you're easy to find, and logs are proof enough.  All the RIAA
troll has to do is download one song off your IP, prove it came from
your IP, and get the ISP to give them logs, and you're toast.  Doesn't
matter that your hard drive has since been wiped or encrypted or is
unreadable.

Using crypto to protect files you have already shared with the public is
neurotic as a security measure.

> The real danger of crypto and, I'd argue, a virtual keyboard in this case, 
> is that by spending tiny fractions of money we can make it prohibitively 
> costly for "them" to monitor a large number of transactions. 

And if you do and are noticed, "they" will spend that money because you
will be an obvious and clear target.  If they can get away with "why don't
you just show us what you have - what do you have something to hide?" line
to cow sheeple into giving them access, in their mind, you'd be the one to
make their careers.

> Forget 
> unbreakability. Forget Faraday cages (you don't have anything that important 
> to hide anyway). Cheap, easy and scalable is the only way to bumrush this 
> show.

Again, what's your threat model, who is your attacker, how much are you
willing to spend on it?


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------




From frantz at pwpconsult.com  Wed Jul 16 15:28:10 2003
From: frantz at pwpconsult.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 15:28:10 -0700
Subject: Security for Mafiosos and Freedom Fighters
In-Reply-To: <13C1A438-B7A5-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <v03110704bb3b81434e67@[192.168.1.5]>

At 8:49 AM -0700 7/16/03, Tim May wrote:
>(By the way, the USB flashdrive (a 256 MB FlashHopper) I have on my
>keychain--my physical keychain!--is probably waterproof. The USB port
>has a little plastic cover which slides on snugly. Until I eventually
>misplace it, I am using it. I expect the thing is showerproof, though I
>don't intend to test it. Water resistance can be tested
>nondestructively with things like Fluorinert, of course. Also, surfers
>and kayakers often have O-ring sealed gizmos they wear under their wet
>suits, coming in different sizes. It would be trivial to find one to
>hold either a USB flashdrive or a Compact Flash card.)

Ever since I heard that manufacturers were cleaning assembled boards with
soap and water I have wondered just how much you need to protect electronic
circuits from water.  You obviously don't want to allow them to stay damp
so they corrode, but immersion for a time (up to weeks) followed by a fresh
water rinse and drying might not be so bad.  Do any hardware experts have
an opinion?

Cheers - Bill


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz           | "A Jobless Recovery is | Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506         | like a Breadless Sand- | 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz at pwpconsult.com | wich." -- Steve Schear | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA




From Vincent.Penquerch at artworks.co.uk  Wed Jul 16 08:05:36 2003
From: Vincent.Penquerch at artworks.co.uk (Vincent Penquerc'h)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:05:36 +0100
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
Message-ID: <B14C9D7F1977D111AD740060970ACBDA01893376@warhol>

> To get around keystroke loggers, it would be nice to have some fom of 
> onscreen keyboard, perhaps available over the web. The 
> keyboard would likely 
> work only with the mouse (making it slow to use, of course), 
> and each time 
> the keyboard appears (and at periodic intervals) the keyboard 
> scrambles its 
> keys.

The aptly named Tinfoil Hat Linux does this for GPG passphrase input :)

-- 
Vincent Penquerc'h 




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Jul 16 16:20:26 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:20:26 -0700
Subject: Water in chips
In-Reply-To: <v03110704bb3b81434e67@[192.168.1.5]>
Message-ID: <14F99A32-B7E4-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 03:28  PM, Bill Frantz wrote:

> At 8:49 AM -0700 7/16/03, Tim May wrote:
>> (By the way, the USB flashdrive (a 256 MB FlashHopper) I have on my
>> keychain--my physical keychain!--is probably waterproof. The USB port
>> has a little plastic cover which slides on snugly. Until I eventually
>> misplace it, I am using it. I expect the thing is showerproof, though 
>> I
>> don't intend to test it. Water resistance can be tested
>> nondestructively with things like Fluorinert, of course. Also, surfers
>> and kayakers often have O-ring sealed gizmos they wear under their wet
>> suits, coming in different sizes. It would be trivial to find one to
>> hold either a USB flashdrive or a Compact Flash card.)
>
> Ever since I heard that manufacturers were cleaning assembled boards 
> with
> soap and water I have wondered just how much you need to protect 
> electronic
> circuits from water.  You obviously don't want to allow them to stay 
> damp
> so they corrode, but immersion for a time (up to weeks) followed by a 
> fresh
> water rinse and drying might not be so bad.  Do any hardware experts 
> have
> an opinion?


DI water (deionized water) is used at various stages to rinse boards, 
wafers, plated devices, etc.

Soap and water is often used for cleaning bare PCBs, but this is long 
before the chips go in.

After wave soldering (PCBs fed on conveyer belt above hot solder bath, 
soldering the devices to the board in one continuous process) the flux 
and dross and gunk is washed off with special soaps (e.g., high acid 
content soaps) and water. But the water is certainly not left on the 
boards, not left to dry and cause spotting, etc.

Alcohol and other rinses are used.

We used to use vapor degreasers a lot, and TCE, before it got 
restricted.

As for the effects of water on packaged chips, they vary. Moisture 
intrusion usually comes when a "driving force" exists for some long 
amount of time, e.g., '85/85" (85 per cent relative humidity, 85 C, for 
some number of hours or days). External corrosion is also possible.

(One of the first things I devised for Intel was dubbed the "water drop 
test." Still in use, 28 years later.)

My point about not wanting to immerse my flash drive is related to why 
I would no immerse any other piece of electronics unless I had a 
compelling reason to do so.


--Tim May, Occupied America
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary 
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul 16 16:53:57 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:53:57 -0700
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
Message-ID: <3F15E595.84EE20EF@cdc.gov>

(resent)
At 11:15 AM 7/16/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>We've talked many times about using laptops, heads-up displays (like
>the Sony glasses), and even putting mesh bags over a user and his
>laptop. Actual Faraday cage rooms are not really needed.

Don't forget the 3M screen-addons which are basically a miniature
venetian blinds.
They prevent others from reading your screen at off-angles.  Very useful
if you run your laptop on an airplane.  Even if you take private notes
at a meeting.




From s.schear at comcast.net  Wed Jul 16 16:54:11 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:54:11 -0700
Subject: Funding for TIA All But Dead
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030716165326.03e4e898@mail.comcast.net>

The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would 
troll Americans' personal records to find terrorists before they strike, 
may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John Ashcroft in his 
attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies: death by legislation.

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59606,00.html


"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Wed Jul 16 08:27:51 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 17:27:51 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F56tDfCjuXbgES00007163@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307161704470.26820-100000@Zeta>

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
> This reminds me of another thing that occurred to me, but as I'm no computer
> engineer I can't tell how much of a defense it would be. (At the very least
> a nice stopgap for a while...)
>
> To get around keystroke loggers, it would be nice to have some fom of
> onscreen keyboard, perhaps available over the web. The keyboard would likely
> work only with the mouse (making it slow to use, of course), and each time
> the keyboard appears (and at periodic intervals) the keyboard scrambles its
> keys.

Been done.

Something like that is included in Tinfoilhat Linux distribution, see
http://tinfoilhat.shmoo.com/

Another thing for keyboard-based data input is Sneaky Pete, a Java app
http://packetstorm.icx.fr/java/sneaky.tar.gz
(from http://packetstorm.icx.fr/java/indexdate.shtml - original project
homepage is dead).

And I suppose there are more.

However, this will work around the keyboard loggers, but will cause
development of eg. programs saving the screenshots at the moment of a
mouseclick. (Which is definitely more detectable - by storing bulk amounts
of data - than just a plain keylogger, disadvantaging the adversary
somehow.) Also won't protect against ceiling cams, if they'd have enough
resolution to see the screen clearly enough.

Couldn't there be some challenge-response device, eg. over IrDA or radio
waves or direct contact (eg, iButton DS1955B or DS1957B), which would be
unlocked by something like a PIN code? How to avoid the leakage of the PIN
and subsequent seizure of the device then?

> I suspect it would be MUCH harder to figure out what has been typed.

At least for a while, yes.




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Jul 16 18:51:20 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 18:51:20 -0700
Subject: Funding for TIA All But Dead
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030716165326.03e4e898@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <29F37088-B7F9-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 04:54  PM, Steve Schear wrote:

> The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would 
> troll Americans' personal records to find terrorists before they 
> strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John 
> Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies: 
> death by legislation.
>
> http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59606,00.html
>

"In other news, the Senate Select Committee on Children's and Workplace 
Safety met today to consider the Total Safety Awareness Bill. 
Newly-appointed Commissioner of Child Safety, John Poindexter, declared 
that TSA will "finally make the streets safe for children." He 
dismissed any concern that this bill is just a rehashing of the failed 
Total Information Awareness program."





--Tim May
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any 
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm 
to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient 
warrant." --John Stuart Mill




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 16 16:53:59 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 18:53:59 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Security for Mafiosos and Freedom Fighters
In-Reply-To: <v03110704bb3b81434e67@[192.168.1.5]>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307161846570.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Bill Frantz wrote:

> Ever since I heard that manufacturers were cleaning assembled boards with
> soap and water I have wondered just how much you need to protect electronic
> circuits from water.  You obviously don't want to allow them to stay damp
> so they corrode, but immersion for a time (up to weeks) followed by a fresh
> water rinse and drying might not be so bad.  Do any hardware experts have
> an opinion?

If you can avoid it, do so. Otherwise I'd suggest that a few hours to a
couple days might not be too bad, longer periods are going to be
problematic. Especially as depth increases. 33ft is 1atm, I wouldn't trust
anything submerged below that period. Saltwater is a killer.

However, if you do get water (or Coke, Dr. Pepper, Beer, Margarita's,,
Jalapeno dip, etc.) on a board then dry it off. If it's been more than a
very quick dip I'd want it to spend 24hrs under a heat lamp (but limit max
Temp to 90F). Silica Gell in a  closed box w/ the board for 24hrs can also
work.

Irrespective of how you dry it, your next step is a alcky swab. It's
hydrophilic and evaporates with no residue.

At that point connect to power, find a monkey to hit the big red switch,
and see if the magic smoke comes out...


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Wed Jul 16 11:15:13 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 20:15:13 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307161316540.24280-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307162004110.26820-100000@Zeta>

> Geez!  You guys have the DUMBEST ideas ever!  For fuck's sake, go and
> RTFA! (For the dumb: READ THE FUCKING ARCHIVES!)

Behold your dogs of war for a moment more, please. :)

> Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the street
> with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage.

So far, this is orders of magnitude more expensive than a keylogger. I am
not aware there is too high amount of the receiver units in use (nor I
suppose they are easy to operate by a non-specialist), so the number of
targets being threatened this way is much more limited than if some
software or comparably cheap hardware is used. For now, at least.

Then there is the shielding...

> Failing that a hidden pinhole camera, or an RF transmitter attached to
> your cable -- hell these are available for hobbist use right now:
> x10.com has small devices that you can use to broadcast video from one
> room to another.  Getting the same done for VGA, XVGA, etc. shouldn't
> be any harder.

Specified it as a threat. But this is what physical security is for.
Again, this brings the threat of being discovered. Also, a TSCM sweep can
reduce the risk.

> Using IR or RF is one of the stupidest things you could possibly
> do.  Think!  IR and RF are detectable from a distance!
>
> Ok, some IR auth is ok, provided it's in a sealed chamber and no photons
> leak out.  i.e. think of a two cylinders, sealed at the ends where the
> cables go, where one fits inside the other... sort of like fiber optic
> cables and connectors.  No leaks.

Use challenge-response. Immune against replay attack. With proper
algorithm, reasonably immune against cryptographic attack on intercepted
transactions. If it works over the Wild Wild Net, it should work over an
IR/RF connection as well.

> Direct contact's obviously fine, so long as your alleged attacker can't
> tap into it.

True. Again, physical security / tamperproofness issue.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul 16 18:38:22 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 21:38:22 -0400
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
Message-ID: <BAY7-F20DVniSnRMWuL0000940e@hotmail.com>

I don't think a virtual keyboard is necessarily a bad idea in this case. I 
live in a densely populated neighborhood in NYC. SOmeone is ALWAYS in my 
home, and in the rare cases nobody's here we turn on our alarm. This does 
not mean some visual surveillance of my keyboard is impossible, but it 
greatly reduces the number of parties with the desire and resources to 
attempt such a surveillance. And the reason this matters is because I can 
download such a virtual keyboard for pennies (thus causing the need for VERY 
costly forms of surveillance by nullifying keystroke loggers), and cause the 
cost of surveillance to rise probably far more than exponentially. This is a 
good thing (from my point of view!) in and of itself, but imagine if a large 
number of people thought this way, encrypting even the most trivial of 
communications.

-TD



>From: Sunder <sunder at sunder.net>
>To: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com>
>CC: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz, timcmay at got.net, cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
>Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 15:01:22 -0400 (edt)
>
>
>On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
> > "Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the 
>street
> > with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage. "
> >
> > No, no you have the whole thing wrong. As May recently stated, "crypto 
>is
> > economics".
>
>Well, ok, it "all depends on your security model" is certainly the 1st
>factor to consider with how much you're willing to spend on it being a
>constraint to that.
>
>If your threat model is simply to have generic good security incase
>someone steals your machine, then so long as all your files are encrypted,
>the theif just gets whatever the hardware is worth at "it fell of a
>truck" prices, and no more.
>
>If your threat model is the fully armed and armorded ninja attack at
>3:00am -- which was what I gathered was what Sampo's originally presented
>question, then you can assume your attacker would have enough resources to
>pull off a TEMPEST van across the street, etc.
>
>So do you want crypto to keep a rogue government out of your fiels, or
>keep your kid sister from reading your email? etc...
>
>An on screen virtual keyboard is much easier to see than a real keyboard
>even by a shitty pinhole camera.  A real keyboard would have to be viewed
>from above, otherwise, all you can do is infer the keystrokes - which
>gives you a hint of what they are for a passphrase, but not much else.
>On screen keyboard can be seen much easier and your mouse pointer gives
>you away.
>
>So it all depends on who "they" is.  Either way, if "they" believe you are
>a nice jucy target, and their chances to net lots of data off your machine
>are high, they will park the TEMPEST SUV outside your door.  Not much
>question of that...
>
>If "they" are watching everyone for patterns and you don't stick out like
>a sore thumb, there's not much need for any of the above.
>
> > Empire State building, I'll probably work harder to hide it. If I'm 
>sharing
> > mp3's on Kazaa or whatever and I don't want to have RIAA make an example 
>out
> > of me, that virtual keyboard may be just right.
>
>No, virtual keyboard won't save your ass.  Your ISP will had it over on a
>plate along with trimmings (traffic logs, etc.)  If you're sharing MP3's
>on Kazaa, you're easy to find, and logs are proof enough.  All the RIAA
>troll has to do is download one song off your IP, prove it came from
>your IP, and get the ISP to give them logs, and you're toast.  Doesn't
>matter that your hard drive has since been wiped or encrypted or is
>unreadable.
>
>Using crypto to protect files you have already shared with the public is
>neurotic as a security measure.
>
> > The real danger of crypto and, I'd argue, a virtual keyboard in this 
>case,
> > is that by spending tiny fractions of money we can make it prohibitively
> > costly for "them" to monitor a large number of transactions.
>
>And if you do and are noticed, "they" will spend that money because you
>will be an obvious and clear target.  If they can get away with "why don't
>you just show us what you have - what do you have something to hide?" line
>to cow sheeple into giving them access, in their mind, you'd be the one to
>make their careers.
>
> > Forget
> > unbreakability. Forget Faraday cages (you don't have anything that 
>important
> > to hide anyway). Cheap, easy and scalable is the only way to bumrush 
>this
> > show.
>
>Again, what's your threat model, who is your attacker, how much are you
>willing to spend on it?
>
>
>----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
>  + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
>   \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
><--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
>   /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
>  + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!
>--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------
>
>
>

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From njohnsn at njohnsn.com  Wed Jul 16 20:13:08 2003
From: njohnsn at njohnsn.com (Neil Johnson)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 22:13:08 -0500
Subject: Funding for TIA All But Dead
In-Reply-To: <29F37088-B7F9-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <29F37088-B7F9-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <200307162213.08329.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>

On Wednesday 16 July 2003 08:51 pm, Tim May wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 04:54  PM, Steve Schear wrote:
> > The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would
> > troll Americans' personal records to find terrorists before they
> > strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John
> > Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies:
> > death by legislation.
> >
> > http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59606,00.html
>
> "In other news, the Senate Select Committee on Children's and Workplace
> Safety met today to consider the Total Safety Awareness Bill.
> Newly-appointed Commissioner of Child Safety, John Poindexter, declared
> that TSA will "finally make the streets safe for children." He
> dismissed any concern that this bill is just a rehashing of the failed
> Total Information Awareness program."
>

DOD Lackey: "Sorry Mr. Rumsfield, we won't be able to the money for this from 
the Homeland Security Budget".

Don: "Damn! Oh well just put the stuff in in next year's black program budget. 
I guess we'll have to scratch a X-35FDRFS thingy, but we already had budgeted 
for twice as many as we really need. Nice try though!" 

DOD: Yes Sir Mr. Rumsfield !



-- 
Neil Johnson
http://www.njohnsn.com
PGP key available on request.




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 16 20:32:37 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 22:32:37 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Slashdot | WiFi Hotspots Elude RIAA Dragnet (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307162232140.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/07/17/0010225.shtml?tid=141&tid=188


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 16 20:32:52 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 22:32:52 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Slashdot | Intrusion Tolerance - Security's Next Big Thing?
  (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307162232390.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/07/17/002250.shtml?tid=126&tid=172


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul 16 23:06:43 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 23:06:43 -0700
Subject: Swiss cheese by Microsoft
Message-ID: <3F163CF3.F4E00BDE@cdc.gov>

Microsoft Admits Flaw in Windows Software

WASHINGTON - Microsoft Corp. acknowledged a critical vulnerability
Wednesday in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating
system
software, the first such design flaw to affect its latest Windows Server
2003
software.
...

Microsoft said corporate firewalls commonly block the type of data
connections
that hackers outside a company would need for these attacks. The flaw
affects
Windows technology used to share data files across computer networks.

[Yes but a virus can exploit from *within* the system.]

...
But four Polish researchers, known as the "Last Stage of Delirium
Research
Group," said they discovered how to bypass the additional protections
Microsoft
added, just three months after the software went on sale.

[Gotta love that acronym..]

------
Router attack, ca. 1954:
Bikers disable a town's router infrastructure in _The Wild Ones_.
Her name is Dorothy, she runs a plugboard, she runs off scared.




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Wed Jul 16 23:45:18 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 23:45:18 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard(Tempest for eliza)
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F39fm3YtpdusZc000166c7@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <20030717064518.95142.qmail@web21203.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,

We can give a tempest demo just with a radio .There is
a fun project called tempest for eliza which gives an
insight of the computer security.


Tempest for Eliza is a program that uses your computer
monitor to send out AM short wave radio signals. You
can then hear computer generated music in your radio.
it teaches you that your computer can be observed.
Tempest for Eliza works with every monitor, every
resolution. you don't have to be root. 

http://freshmeat.net/projects/tempestforeliza/?topic_id=71%2C43

http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/

Regards Sarath.


--- Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com> wrote:
> "Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the
> guy across the street
> with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday
> cage. "
> 
> No, no you have the whole thing wrong. As May
> recently stated, "crypto is 
> economics". It's one thing for "them" to set up a
> camera to look at some 
> Arab guy's computer down on Atlantic Ave in
> Brooklyn. It's an entirely 
> different thing if, by using a virtual keyboard,
> "they" have to do the same 
> thing for millions of people. (And in case it's not
> obvious, the cost 
> probably won' be in the hardware but in the
> installation costs, and the fact 
> that the probability of detection of such efforts is
> nonzero, thus 
> nullifying their "investment".) If I have a plan to
> smash a plane into the 
> Empire State building, I'll probably work harder to
> hide it. If I'm sharing 
> mp3's on Kazaa or whatever and I don't want to have
> RIAA make an example out 
> of me, that virtual keyboard may be just right.
> 
> The real danger of crypto and, I'd argue, a virtual
> keyboard in this case, 
> is that by spending tiny fractions of money we can
> make it prohibitively 
> costly for "them" to monitor a large number of
> transactions. Forget 
> unbreakability. Forget Faraday cages (you don't have
> anything that important 
> to hide anyway). Cheap, easy and scalable is the
> only way to bumrush this 
> show.
> 
> -TD
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> >From: Sunder <sunder at sunder.net>
> >To: Thomas Shaddack <shaddack at ns.arachne.cz>
> >CC: Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com>,
> timcmay at got.net,   
> >cypherpunks at minder.net
> >Subject: Re: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
> >Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:23:02 -0400 (edt)
> >
> >Geez!  You guys have the DUMBEST ideas ever!  For
> fuck's sake, go and
> >RTFA! (For the dumb: READ THE FUCKING ARCHIVES!)
> >
> >Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the
> guy across the street
> >with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a
> Faraday cage.  Failing that a
> >hidden pinhole camera, or an RF transmitter
> attached to your cable -- hell
> >these are available for hobbist use right now:
> x10.com has small devices
> >that you can use to broadcast video from one room
> to another.  Getting the
> >same done for VGA, XVGA, etc. shouldn't be any
> harder.
> >
> >Using IR or RF is one of the stupidest things you
> could possibly
> >do.  Think!  IR and RF are detectable from a
> distance!
> >
> >Ok, some IR auth is ok, provided it's in a sealed
> chamber and no photons
> >leak out.  i.e. think of a two cylinders, sealed at
> the ends where the
> >cables go, where one fits inside the other... sort
> of like fiber optic
> >cables and connectors.  No leaks.
> >
> >Direct contact's obviously fine, so long as your
> alleged attacker can't
> >tap into it.
> >
>
>----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
> >  + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum
> toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
> >   \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile
> bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
> ><--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB
> 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
> >   /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war:
> $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
> >  + v + :           The look on Sadam's face -
> priceless!
> >--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_-------
> http://www.sunder.net ------------
> >
> >On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> >
> > > However, this will work around the keyboard
> loggers, but will cause
> > > development of eg. programs saving the
> screenshots at the moment of a
> > > mouseclick. (Which is definitely more detectable
> - by storing bulk 
> >amounts
> > > of data - than just a plain keylogger,
> disadvantaging the adversary
> > > somehow.) Also won't protect against ceiling
> cams, if they'd have enough
> > > resolution to see the screen clearly enough.
> > >
> > > Couldn't there be some challenge-response
> device, eg. over IrDA or radio
> > > waves or direct contact (eg, iButton DS1955B or
> DS1957B), which would be
> > > unlocked by something like a PIN code? How to
> avoid the leakage of the 
> >PIN
> > > and subsequent seizure of the device then?
> 
>
_________________________________________________________________
> Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection
> with MSN 8. 
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
> 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Wed Jul 16 17:39:46 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 00:39:46 +0000
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307161316540.24280-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307161704470.26820-100000@Zeta>
  <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307161316540.24280-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>
Message-ID: <20030717003946.GH10846@dreams.soze.net>

Sunder (2003-07-16 17:23Z) wrote:

> Anything displayed on your screen is visible to the guy across the street
> with a TEMPEST detector unless you work in a Faraday cage.  Failing that a
> hidden pinhole camera, or an RF transmitter attached to your cable -- hell
> these are available for hobbist use right now: x10.com has small devices
> that you can use to broadcast video from one room to another.  Getting the
> same done for VGA, XVGA, etc. shouldn't be any harder.
>
> Using IR or RF is one of the stupidest things you could possibly
> do.  Think!  IR and RF are detectable from a distance!

If you want to get picky, a clever brain could probably figure out
keystrokes from across the street with a laser mic if the target has a
loud keyboard, considering each key will probably make a slightly
different sound.  I'd think an attacker could determine spacebar hits,
at least, and pauses, which alone might lead to a complete keystroke
log.

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 17 05:01:37 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 07:01:37 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: The Register - Congress threatens two hi-tech Gestapo programs
  (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307170701240.20063-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31791.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From sunder at sunder.net  Thu Jul 17 06:56:27 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 09:56:27 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D200@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307170936070.21460-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Trei, Peter wrote:

> Lets not forget optical TEMPEST - remember a few months ago,
> when it was demonstrated that the image on a CRT could
> be reconstructed just from the light it reflected on walls? The
> point where the electron beam is hitting the phosphors is 
> much brighter than the rest of the screen, and by syncing a
> fast photodetector to monitor scan rates, you can reconstruct
> the image on a screen in a distant room just by viewing the
> backwash light through a telescope.

Absolutely.  Which is why people worried about security in this manner,
should move to LCD's. Not just for weakening TEMPEST signals, but also for
defeating optical TEMPEST... (and saving power.)  However I have to say
that from a purely user point of view, I like the way CRT's look much
better than LCD's.  CRT's tend to be richer and brighter than LCD's, and
their refresh rates are much better...

LCD's are still suceptible to TEMPEST monitoring, though there are far
less emissions since there isn't this great big nuclear particle
accelerator sitting infront of you :) (what? electrons are nuclear
particles. :)  But the signals from poorly shielded VGA cables can still
be picked up (as can those of keyboards, and other hardware.)

Other tricks include using more than one monitor (make sure they're all
the same brand/model, attached to video cards that are identical and
operating at the same resolution, depth, and refresh rate, and displaying
random junk, etc. + using tempest fonts on the non-decoy system.)

Better yet, use a notebook computer on battery power (so that power saving
mode comes intoplay) with several decoys as they'd (generally) dump much
less RF.  You could also add some shielding, but it's unlikely to help
very much...


I actually played with a fox & hound kit one day.  For those who never had
to run ethernet (CAT 3,5,5e,etc.) or phone cable, this consists of a pair
of tools: a tone injector that makes lots of noise, and a detector.  The
detector can pick up not just the signal from the tone injector, but also
lovely things such as 60Hz hum, phone conversations (in analog phones
anyhow), etc...  You can also learn to "hear" the different sounds various
things like 100BTx make and distinguish from - say, 10BT, or cable TV,
etc... with a cheap proble that doesn't filter...


I did find that when used on a keyboard, with some cheaper keyboards
anyway, you can "hear" the keystrokes and the key scanning pattern, and
that the individual keys are certainly distinctive enough - you could
probably hook this thing up to a sound card and figure out which keys send
what RF pattern...

So with the right recorder/relay/decoder hidden under someone's desk, you
could capture their keystrokes without disturbing epoxy or taking the
keyboard apart.  (As with all bugs, you'd need a power suply, some way to
intercept the data, and either some way to record the data, or relay it.  
Relaying it, and hooking into existing power is better than just recording
it or using a battery as a source, because you don't need a 2nd blag bag
job to remove your bug and dump the data.)  Of course if the bug
transmits, it can be picked up in a sweep, but if the PC is on, the guy
doing the sweep might not realize that there's a bug since the PC is a
noise source... YMMV, etc.


So all this talk of expoying keyboards down is somewhat naive in light of
this.  Not to say that if you, hypothetically speaking, were in a position
to have a well funded, and determined set of enemies who were out to get
your data, that using expoxy to glue down your keyboard wouldn't frustrate
them, but rather to point out that there are other means and methods that
would more than ruin your day.  :)

The path of least resistance, again, is not to attract the attention of
such enemies in the first place.

But hey, if your threat model is your kid sister or RIAA, then much less
thought is perfectly fine.


[As with all my posts, "you" is always a fictional character, and in this
one, "you" switches from the guy trying to steal data to the guy trying to
protect data, YMMV, #include <std_disclaimer.h> ]




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Thu Jul 17 07:01:50 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 10:01:50 -0400
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D200@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> ----------
> From: 	Tyler Durden[SMTP:camera_lumina at hotmail.com]
> Sent: 	Wednesday, July 16, 2003 9:38 PM
> To: 	sunder at sunder.net
> Cc: 	shaddack at ns.arachne.cz; timcmay at got.net; cypherpunks at minder.net
> Subject: 	Re: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
> 
> I don't think a virtual keyboard is necessarily a bad idea in this case. I
> 
> live in a densely populated neighborhood in NYC. SOmeone is ALWAYS in my 
> home, and in the rare cases nobody's here we turn on our alarm. This does 
> not mean some visual surveillance of my keyboard is impossible, but it 
> greatly reduces the number of parties with the desire and resources to 
> attempt such a surveillance. And the reason this matters is because I can 
> download such a virtual keyboard for pennies (thus causing the need for
> VERY 
> costly forms of surveillance by nullifying keystroke loggers), and cause
> the 
> cost of surveillance to rise probably far more than exponentially. This is
> a 
> good thing (from my point of view!) in and of itself, but imagine if a
> large 
> number of people thought this way, encrypting even the most trivial of 
> communications.
> 
> -TD
> 
> 
Lets not forget optical TEMPEST - remember a few months ago,
when it was demonstrated that the image on a CRT could
be reconstructed just from the light it reflected on walls? The
point where the electron beam is hitting the phosphors is 
much brighter than the rest of the screen, and by syncing a
fast photodetector to monitor scan rates, you can reconstruct
the image on a screen in a distant room just by viewing the
backwash light through a telescope.

Peter




From zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk  Thu Jul 17 04:12:12 2003
From: zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk (Peter Fairbrother)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:12:12 +0100
Subject: Security for Mafiosos and Freedom Fighters
In-Reply-To: <v03110704bb3b81434e67@[192.168.1.5]>
Message-ID: <BB3C431C.33EF5%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>

Bill Frantz wrote:

> Ever since I heard that manufacturers were cleaning assembled boards with
> soap and water I have wondered just how much you need to protect electronic
> circuits from water.  You obviously don't want to allow them to stay damp
> so they corrode, but immersion for a time (up to weeks) followed by a fresh
> water rinse and drying might not be so bad.  Do any hardware experts have
> an opinion?

A long time ago I used to teach an "intro to computing" class. many students
were older people who were afraid to physically touch a keyboard - partly
just because it was unfamiliar, because it meant they were actually, now,
starting on the road to learning, because they feared to "break something",
or because they thought they might get a shock (I kid you not). I digress.

One way of making them feel more comfortable was to "accidently" spill a
drink on a keyboard, than immerse it in a sink, rinse, and hang out to dry.
Sometimes I used a hairdrier to reuse the keyboard during the lesson, but
mostly I just left it overnight to dry. That gave some at least of them some
confidence that it was ok to touch the keyboard.

I've also washed an iMac (which had fallen in the sea) by immersion in tap
water and careful drying, the CD needed more care (drying with IPA), I took
out the hard drive first and was careful with that, also cleaned all
connectors with solvent cleaner, but it worked ok afterwards.

<peeve>
BTW, do NOT do this with crappy Apple keyboards! They are membrane-based and
will be destroyed. They are also hard to open for repair, and when I asked
an Apple chap about them he said "You should never drink near a keyboard".
What crap!
</peeve>

I give no guarantee that it won't destroy your keyboard, but it won't hurt
most keyboards.

-- 
Peter Fairbrother


BTW, m-o-o-t uses a randomised virtual keyboard with TEMPEST (both EM and
optical) resistant fonts. It's okay for inputting keys, but it's a hassle
for inputting text.

Which means that your keys might be safe from keyloggers (both hardware and
software), but your plaintext isn't. Sigh. I'm trying to improve it by
putting the "senhorita" letters in one block and the rest elsewhere (not for
key input obviously), and you do learn where the keys are after a while, but
it's still a hassle.




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Jul 17 12:46:43 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:46:43 -0700
Subject: Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
Message-ID: <3F16FD23.60A2C1FC@cdc.gov>

At 03:15 PM 7/17/03 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:
>I dunno...I'm thinking that optical tempest is probably bullshit 99% of
the
>time, but what do I know?

There was an article on optical tempest based on reading modem-LEDs,
which are sometimes modulated with the data stream.  For Mhz rates it
works.

>But I still don't believe that specular reflection of smallish type
from a
>monitor will have anything that is recoverable. Of course, this is
going to
>be dependent on the quality of the wall material, but for most
not-so-even
>plaster/drywall painted surfaces, I just can't believe the appopriate
>spacial frequencies of the image are not scattered after that kind of
>reflection.

The idea of reading the *matte* reflection of the CRT beam is possible.
But its not *spatial* frequency, its using intensity vs. time.
At any one instant you have a single 1-D measurement.
This exploits the fact, as stated, that the phosphor is brightest under
the
(scanning) beam.  There is no spatial info present.  You simply need
a sensitive (contrast is low) and fast (raster rate) optical
measurement.

>The conspiracy theorist is telling me there's some reason they floated
the
>optical tempest story, though I can't quite figure out what that reason

>is...

Its the Windowshade division of the Anti-Illuminati


----
Irony:
Jewish Zealots were famous for offing (Jewish) Roman collaborators.
100 generations later, Arabic Zealots whack (Arabic) ZionistCrusader
collaborators.
"Pro-American Mayor, Son Killed in Iraq"

----
Of course Iraq isn't another Vietnam.  They don't know how to make good
pho hoa.




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Thu Jul 17 12:48:47 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:48:47 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F78zdfTVSxzW230001206e@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307171243140.2508-100000@eskimo.com>

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> The conspiracy theorist is telling me there's some reason they floated the
> optical tempest story, though I can't quite figure out what that reason
> is...

The main purpose is for academic gain.  If you'd looked at the paper a
bit, you'd have read it took about 1/2 an hour to reconstruct the image
from one screen.  It is a proof of principle concept, enough so that
multi-billion dollar espionage agencies can think about it.  At 30 fps
for a game, forget it.  But for a slow typist who has to go get a cup
of coffee because the phone rang....

It does make the game more interesting, but it's mighty easy to defeat.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Jul 17 13:24:13 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 13:24:13 -0700
Subject: 1st amend: fiction != reality, words not kiddy pr0n
Message-ID: <3F1705EC.3622CB16@cdc.gov>

Appeals Court Dismisses Ohio Man's Guilty Plea in Obscenity Case
Involving Fictitious Stories

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A state appeals court on Thursday dismissed the
guilty plea of a man imprisoned for writing fictitious stories of child
torture and molestation.

Lawyers specializing in the First Amendment believe Brian Dalton was the
first person in the United States successfully prosecuted for child
pornography that involved fictional writings, not images.

The 10th Ohio District Court of Appeals in Columbus ruled that Dalton
received ineffective legal assistance. Dalton had argued that his former
lawyer didn't inform him of the legal implications of a guilty plea or
ask for an immediate dismissal on First Amendment grounds.

The 3-0 ruling sends the case back to Franklin County Common Pleas
Court. Dalton could still be tried but prosecutors have not said whether
they would seek to do so.

Ray Vasvari, the American Civil Liberties Union's state legal director
in Cleveland, called the decision an "important recognition for not only
freedom of speech but freedom of thought."

Dalton, 24, of Columbus, pleaded guilty in July 2001 to pandering
obscenity involving a minor, which falls under Ohio's pornography law.
He later asked to withdraw the plea so he could challenge the
constitutionality of the law, but Franklin County Common Pleas Judge
Nodine Miller refused. ACLU attorneys then appealed.

Miller had sentenced Dalton to seven years, plus 4 1/2 years from a 1998
child pornography conviction on the grounds he violated probation by
possessing the journal.

The 14-page journal contained stories about three children - ages 10 and
11 - being caged in a basement, molested and tortured. Prosecutors
acknowledged the stories were pure fiction.

The journal was found by Dalton's probation officer during a routine
search of his home.

Dalton was charged under Ohio's 1989 child porn law, which bans
possession of obscene material involving children. He was not charged
under Ohio's obscenity law, which requires dissemination and not just
possession.

The appeals court found that Dalton's defense attorney, Isabella Dixon,
misunderstood the two charges against her client.

Both charges were based on the journal and involved fictitious events,
the court found. Dixon, it said, had erroneously believed one of the
charges was based on a letter Dalton wrote describing sexual molestation
of a young cousin, a real person.

"This misunderstanding was significant because of the important
differences in the constitutional protections afforded the private
possession of pornographic depictions of real children and similar
depictions of fictional children," Judge William Klatt said, writing for
the majority.

A message was left with Dixon seeking comment.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAQA2U49ID.html




From wolf at priori.net  Thu Jul 17 13:33:28 2003
From: wolf at priori.net (Meyer Wolfsheim)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 13:33:28 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307171243140.2508-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.30.QNWS.0307171332220.2730-100000@thetis.deor.org>

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Mike Rosing wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
> > The conspiracy theorist is telling me there's some reason they floated the
> > optical tempest story, though I can't quite figure out what that reason
> > is...
>
> The main purpose is for academic gain.  If you'd looked at the paper a
> bit, you'd have read it took about 1/2 an hour to reconstruct the image
> from one screen.  It is a proof of principle concept, enough so that
> multi-billion dollar espionage agencies can think about it.  At 30 fps
> for a game, forget it.  But for a slow typist who has to go get a cup
> of coffee because the phone rang....
>
> It does make the game more interesting, but it's mighty easy to defeat.

For what it's worth, a "secure viewer" that displayed text in red on a
black background should make an optical tempest attack much more
difficult.


-MW-




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Jul 17 12:15:28 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 15:15:28 -0400
Subject: Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
Message-ID: <BAY7-F78zdfTVSxzW230001206e@hotmail.com>

I dunno...I'm thinking that optical tempest is probably bullshit 99% of the 
time, but what do I know? My Optical specialities are ultrafast and optical 
networking.

But I still don't believe that specular reflection of smallish type from a 
monitor will have anything that is recoverable. Of course, this is going to 
be dependent on the quality of the wall material, but for most not-so-even 
plaster/drywall painted surfaces, I just can't believe the appopriate 
spacial frequencies of the image are not scattered after that kind of 
reflection.

The conspiracy theorist is telling me there's some reason they floated the 
optical tempest story, though I can't quite figure out what that reason 
is...

-TD


>From: Peter Fairbrother <zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk>
>To: <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>Subject: Re: Security for Mafiosos and Freedom Fighters
>Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 12:12:12 +0100
>
>Bill Frantz wrote:
>
> > Ever since I heard that manufacturers were cleaning assembled boards 
>with
> > soap and water I have wondered just how much you need to protect 
>electronic
> > circuits from water.  You obviously don't want to allow them to stay 
>damp
> > so they corrode, but immersion for a time (up to weeks) followed by a 
>fresh
> > water rinse and drying might not be so bad.  Do any hardware experts 
>have
> > an opinion?
>
>A long time ago I used to teach an "intro to computing" class. many 
>students
>were older people who were afraid to physically touch a keyboard - partly
>just because it was unfamiliar, because it meant they were actually, now,
>starting on the road to learning, because they feared to "break something",
>or because they thought they might get a shock (I kid you not). I digress.
>
>One way of making them feel more comfortable was to "accidently" spill a
>drink on a keyboard, than immerse it in a sink, rinse, and hang out to dry.
>Sometimes I used a hairdrier to reuse the keyboard during the lesson, but
>mostly I just left it overnight to dry. That gave some at least of them 
>some
>confidence that it was ok to touch the keyboard.
>
>I've also washed an iMac (which had fallen in the sea) by immersion in tap
>water and careful drying, the CD needed more care (drying with IPA), I took
>out the hard drive first and was careful with that, also cleaned all
>connectors with solvent cleaner, but it worked ok afterwards.
>
><peeve>
>BTW, do NOT do this with crappy Apple keyboards! They are membrane-based 
>and
>will be destroyed. They are also hard to open for repair, and when I asked
>an Apple chap about them he said "You should never drink near a keyboard".
>What crap!
></peeve>
>
>I give no guarantee that it won't destroy your keyboard, but it won't hurt
>most keyboards.
>
>--
>Peter Fairbrother
>
>
>BTW, m-o-o-t uses a randomised virtual keyboard with TEMPEST (both EM and
>optical) resistant fonts. It's okay for inputting keys, but it's a hassle
>for inputting text.
>
>Which means that your keys might be safe from keyloggers (both hardware and
>software), but your plaintext isn't. Sigh. I'm trying to improve it by
>putting the "senhorita" letters in one block and the rest elsewhere (not 
>for
>key input obviously), and you do learn where the keys are after a while, 
>but
>it's still a hassle.

_________________________________________________________________
Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Thu Jul 17 12:44:03 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 15:44:03 -0400
Subject: Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D20A@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Durden[SMTP:camera_lumina at hotmail.com] wrote:
> 
> I dunno...I'm thinking that optical tempest is probably bullshit 99% of
> the 
> time, but what do I know? My Optical specialities are ultrafast and
> optical 
> networking.
> 
> But I still don't believe that specular reflection of smallish type from a
> 
> monitor will have anything that is recoverable. Of course, this is going
> to 
> be dependent on the quality of the wall material, but for most not-so-even
> 
> plaster/drywall painted surfaces, I just can't believe the appopriate 
> spacial frequencies of the image are not scattered after that kind of 
> reflection.
> 
> The conspiracy theorist is telling me there's some reason they floated the
> 
> optical tempest story, though I can't quite figure out what that reason 
> is...
> 
> -TD
> >
> >
> >BTW, m-o-o-t uses a randomised virtual keyboard with TEMPEST (both EM and
> >optical) resistant fonts. It's okay for inputting keys, but it's a hassle
> >for inputting text.
> >
> >Which means that your keys might be safe from keyloggers (both hardware
> and
> >software), but your plaintext isn't. Sigh. I'm trying to improve it by
> >putting the "senhorita" letters in one block and the rest elsewhere (not 
> >for
> >key input obviously), and you do learn where the keys are after a while, 
> >but
> >it's still a hassle.
> 
	Please don't top-post.

	Optical TEMPEST of the type we've been discussing has
	nothing to do with specular reflection.

	As your CRT screen is raster-scanned, the point at which
	the electron beam is pointing at any given moment is much
	brighter than the rest of the screen. That the screen seems
	uniformly illuminated is a result of your persistance of vision.

	Optical tempest records the brightness of the light reflecting
	off the wall behind the user as a function of time. This can be used
	to reconstruct the brightness of each pixel on the screen, since
	they are refreshed sequentially in raster order.

	Peter Trei




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 17 16:34:48 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 18:34:48 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Use of smart cards for wi-fi user ident (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307171834240.1354-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.idg.net/ic_1326548_9720_1-5072.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Thu Jul 17 15:07:40 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 00:07:40 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: De-shredding the shreds
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307180007110.26820-100000@Zeta>

Summary: Technology allows taking the "noodles" of shredded document,
scanning them, and reconstructing the pages with various degrees of manual
and automated effort. New approaches are necessary for high-security
operations.

Source: New York Times
Author: Douglas Heingartner
Title: Picking up the pieces
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/technology/circuits/17shre.html

Highlight: Mr. Brassil's project at Hewlett Packard, aimed at tracing the
source of shredded document by the micromarks on the shreds, both of
vanilla shredders and by custom-modifying the shredders to leave a defined
signature on the strips.
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-215.html (abstract)
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-215.pdf


Full text:

Picking Up the Pieces
By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER

BERLIN -- THROUGHOUT the 1980's, Sascha Anderson, a poet, musician and
literary impresario, was one of the leading voices to speak out against
the East German government and its dreaded secret police, the Stasi.

But his credibility gradually evaporated after the Communist government's
collapse as rumors about him acquired the weight of proof: he had been
informing on his dissident compatriots all along.

He had been told that his Stasi file had been destroyed. In fact, it was
manually reconstructed from some of the millions of shreds of paper that
panicked Stasi officials threw into garbage bags during the regime's final
days in the fall of 1989.

Now, if all goes as planned by the German government, the remaining
contents of those 16,000 bags will also be reconstructed.

Advanced scanning technology makes it possible to reconstruct documents
previously thought safe from prying eyes, sometimes even pages that have
been ripped into confetti-size pieces. And although a great deal of
sensitive information is stored digitally these days, recent corporate
scandals have shown that the paper shredder is still very much in use.

"People perceive it as an almost perfect device," said Jack Brassil, a
researcher for Hewlett-Packard who has worked on making shredded documents
traceable. If people put a document through a shredder, "they assume that
it's fundamentally unrecoverable," he said. "And that's clearly not true."

In its crudest form, the art of reconstructing shredded documents has been
around for as long as shredders have. After the takeover of the United
States Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Iranian captors laid pieces of documents
on the floor, numbered each one and enlisted local carpet weavers to
reconstruct them by hand, said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security
Archive at George Washington University. "For a culture that's been tying
400 knots per inch for centuries, it wasn't that much of a challenge," he
said. The reassembled documents were sold on the streets of Tehran for
years.

That episode helped convince the United States government to update its
procedures for destroying documents. The expanded battery of techniques
now includes pulping, pulverizing and chemically decomposing sensitive
data. Yet these more complex methods are not always at hand in an
emergency, which is why the vagaries of de-shredding will be of interest
to intelligence officials for some time to come.

"It's been an area of interest for a very long time," said William Daly, a
former F.B.I. investigator who is a vice president at Control Risks Group,
a security consulting firm. "The government is always trying to keep ahead
of the curve."

Like computer encryption and hacking, "it's kind of a cat-and-mouse game,
keeping one step ahead," he said. "That's why the government is always
looking at techniques to help them ensure their documents are destroyed
properly."

Modern image-processing technology has made the rebuilding job a lot
easier. A Houston-based company, ChurchStreet Technology, already offers a
reconstruction service for documents that have been conventionally
strip-shredded into thin segments. The company's founder, Cody Ford, says
that reports of document shredding in recent corporate scandals alerted
him to a gap in the market. "Within three months of the Enron collapse at
end of 2001, we had a service out to electronically reconstruct strip
shreds," he said.

The Stasi archives are a useful reference point for researchers tackling
the challenge, though perhaps more for the scale than the sophistication
of the shredding. Most of the Stasi papers were torn by hand because the
flimsy East German shredding machines collapsed under the workload. The
hastily stored bags of ripped paper were quickly discovered and
confiscated.

In 1995 the German government commissioned a team in the Bavarian town of
Zirndorf to reassemble the torn Stasi files one by one. Yet by 2001, the
three dozen archivists had gone through only about 300 bags, so officials
began a search for another way to piece together the remaining 33 million
pages a bit faster.

Four companies remain candidates for the job, including Fraunhofer IPK of
Berlin, part of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft research institute, which
helped develop the MP3 music format. The institute is drafting plans to
sort, scan and archive the millions of pages within five years, drawing on
expertise in office automation, image processing, biometrics and
handwriting analysis as well as sophisticated software.

"It's more than just the algorithms about the puzzles," said Bertram
Nickolay, the head of the security and testing technologies department.
Indeed, the archive is a massive grab bag of randomly torn documents, many
with handwritten and typewritten text on the same page. Combining all
these technologies in a project of this scope "is on the borders of what's
possible," Mr. Nickolay said.

His system's accuracy rate is about 80 percent. "It will take time for the
algorithms to be optimized," Mr. Nickolay said, noting that handwriting
analysis began with accuracy levels of around 50 percent, and are now at
90 percent and above.

Some of the companies competing for the job concentrated on the shape,
color and perforations of the shreds, while other contenders opted for
semantically driven systems, which looked for keywords and likely text
matches.

The Fraunhofer plan is to combine its smart scanning software with the
know-how of the Zirndorf archivists, who have amassed years of experience
working with these tiny pieces of history. After all the shreds have been
scanned (at 200 dots per inch), the interactive software will suggest
possible matches, which an operator can accept or reject.

While Fraunhofer IPK eventually plans to use a similar technique, several
companies say they can do so already.

ChurchStreet's software analyzes the graphical patterns that go to the
edge of each piece. First, workers paste the random shreds onto standard
sheets of paper, which takes three to seven minutes per page. The pages
are scanned, and software analyzes the shreds for possible matches.

Mr. Ford, the company founder, said the ChurchStreet service can recover
up to 70 percent of a document's content, although he stressed that the
goal was to get blocks of information rather than to re-create the
original formatting. The blocks are presented to the client, who
determines where they might belong in the overall scheme. "We don't make
any guesswork about reconstruction," Mr. Ford said. "We make no
assumptions."

ChurchStreet, whose clients are mainly law agencies and private law firms,
charges roughly $2,000 to reconstruct a cubic foot of strip-shreds. A
cubic foot of shreds is generally less than 100 pages. Mr. Ford said
ChurchStreet would soon offer a service to reconstruct cross-shredded
documents - that is, those cut in two directions - for $8,000 to $10,000
per cubic foot. A common standard in cross-shredding is particles one
thirty-second by seven-sixteenths of an inch, which results in thousands
of grain-like shreds per page.

Cross-shredding makes the job a lot trickier, but not for lack of
processing power. "The problem is not whether it's possible with the
software, which is possible," said Werner Vvgeli, the managing director of
the German office of SER Solutions, a company in Dulles, Va., that also
competed for the contract to reconstruct the Stasi documents. "The problem
is how to scan these documents."

Fred Cohen, a security consultant who reconstructed many pages while
working at Sandia National Laboratories, also sees limits. "When you get
down to very small shreds, then the numbers start to eat you," he said.
"You start to get to where there isn't enough text per shred to be of any
use. You've got a completely black shred; whether it's the middle of the
cross of a t or the dot of an i, you can't tell."

Adding to the challenge, the smaller the pieces are, the farther apart
they can fall, and thus the less likely they are to cluster in a
conveniently retrievable form. Security experts also say that using large
type (for less text per shred), and feeding the paper into a shredder
perpendicular to the direction of the text (so no complete phrases stay
together) makes shredding less vulnerable.

Professional document reconstructions are generally recognized by the
courts in much the way that fingerprint or handwriting evidence is. An
expert may not be able to vouch for the accuracy of the information on a
given page, said Mr. Daly, the former F.B.I. investigator, but he can
testify that a reconstructed document "was at one time one piece of paper
that was cut into little pieces of paper, and now it's back into one piece
of paper."

Mr. Daly added that investigators often use reassembled pages as part of a
larger forensic puzzle. "Once we have a hard-copy document, we can then go
back and look at databases and put in search criteria, and to be able to
actually come up with the original electronic version," he said. "One
becomes a pathway to the other."

The demand for such investigative services is clear. "I probably get a
call every month," said Robert Johnson of the National Association for
Information Destruction, an American trade group, from clients looking for
"a way to reverse the process."

Other projects, like Mr. Brassil's at Hewlett-Packard, focus on designing
a shredder that leaves telltale traces on the documents it destroys,
allowing them to be pinpointed later.

In Germany, meanwhile, a decision about whether to proceed with the
reconstruction of Stasi documents is not expected before September. Mr.
Vvgeli of SER Solutions, whose firm withdrew from bidding for the project,
said he doubted that financing would materialize. "These documents contain
lots of information that might be dangerous to a few politicians who are
still active, still in power," he said. "So there's no political majority
for any such investment."

Sascha Anderson, the dissident discredited by the files, is among those
who hope the project goes forward. "Of course I would have preferred that
they weren't found," he said by phone from Frankfurt. "But I realize that
it's a unique chance for a society to have access to this information."

And since he was exposed, he said, he has been able to sleep better: "I've
ultimately been freed of my burden by history."




From zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk  Thu Jul 17 16:25:14 2003
From: zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk (Peter Fairbrother)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 00:25:14 +0100
Subject: Sealing wax & eKeyboard
In-Reply-To: <BB3C431C.33EF5%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>
Message-ID: <BB3CEEEA.33F8D%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>

Peter Fairbrother (me) wrote (in a different thread):

> BTW, m-o-o-t uses a randomised virtual keyboard with (both EM and optical)
> TEMPEST resistant fonts. It's okay for inputting keys, but it's a hassle
> for inputting text.
> 
> Which means that your keys might be safe from keyloggers (both hardware and
> software), but your plaintext isn't. Sigh. I'm trying to improve it by
> putting the "senhorita" letters in one block and the rest elsewhere (not for
> key input obviously), and you do learn where the keys are after a while, but
> it's still a hassle.

(senhorita contains the 9 most-commonly-used-in-English letters, tho' not in
order)

There is another problem - assuming the TEMPEST gear or camera can't see the
randomised resistant letters, if it can follow the cursor then it's just a
simple substitution cypher to get plaintext (assuming the gear can get
clicks).

I thought of having a large cursor grid, with resistant symbols on each grid
place, and changing the position of the operative symbol every so often -
how often? -  but I don't know how to get such a large cursor - any ideas? X
on OpenBSD preferred.

Any better ideas?


-- 
Peter Fairbrother




From mv at cdc.gov  Fri Jul 18 04:32:59 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 04:32:59 -0700
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
Message-ID: <3F17DAEB.E32723FE@cdc.gov>

Weapons Adviser Named as Possible Source for BBC Story Disappears; Man's
Body Found

LONDON (AP) - Police searching for a missing Ministry of Defense
adviser, who was named by the government as the possible source for a
disputed news report on Iraqi arms, said Friday they have found a man's
body near his home.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGABVMP3AID.html


Maybe he's just hanging out with Ritter in upstate
NY...




From mv at cdc.gov  Fri Jul 18 05:13:15 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 05:13:15 -0700
Subject: Optical Tempest? I have my doubts...
Message-ID: <3F17E45B.505718AA@cdc.gov>

At 01:33 PM 7/17/03 -0700, Meyer Wolfsheim wrote:
>
>For what it's worth, a "secure viewer" that displayed text in red on a
>black background should make an optical tempest attack much more
>difficult.

Why?
On a black background you have higher contrast, which you don't want
here.

The eye is most sensitive to greenish, so if you are trying to reduce
the signal, use barely visible green.

On a nearly-same-luminance green background.
Green on green or gray on gray is *low contrast*.
That's what you want.

(You may as well use gray on gray, assume the adversary has color
vision, and might even
have the CIE chart on your monitor phosphor.  The different RGB
phosphors also have different decay times, which smears the signal
if the adversary has no color vision)

Possibly dither the text.  You might also have brighter
lines or areas on the screen to obscure the signal from the less-bright
e-beamed text areas.  Actual distribution should depend on the decay
over time
of the phosphor (you want the bright "distractors" to be as bright
as the text-pixel even though the distractor is no longer illuminated
by the e beam).

You also want some incandescants and fluorescant lights, the latter
running off batteries (with switching converters) so they run out of
phase and frequency with the ones on wall current.  Optical jamming.

Or just close the windowshade and put a towel under the door gap.
(Others may think you're [sm|t]oking, however.. and with the
multiple, multitinted fluorescants, they'll think you're growing too)

Or use a box.
(I once did med-imaging related vision experiments... the setup was a
Sun with
a calibrated greyscale monitor, in a medical office, behind the
receptionists until
we got more space... we had a giant cardboard box over the monitor &
subject to
control ambient light.. which stayed while I was programming it too.. it
amused the patients
who came in to see their cardiologist to see a guy working with his head
in a big box..
probably would have been more disconcerting if the MD was a psychiatrist
:-)




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Jul 18 09:32:26 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 09:32:26 -0700
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
In-Reply-To: <3F17DAEB.E32723FE@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <6AFEFEBE-B93D-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Friday, July 18, 2003, at 04:32  AM, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:

> Weapons Adviser Named as Possible Source for BBC Story Disappears; 
> Man's
> Body Found
>
> LONDON (AP) - Police searching for a missing Ministry of Defense
> adviser, who was named by the government as the possible source for a
> disputed news report on Iraqi arms, said Friday they have found a man's
> body near his home.
>
> http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGABVMP3AID.html
>
>
> Maybe he's just hanging out with Ritter in upstate
> NY...

'Unsubtle" is often what the spooks prefer: like the Mob, they are just 
as interested in sending a message as in silencing a witness.

In this case, the message going out is "don't speak against the 
Official Version."

Blair faces much more serious troubles than he would be in for ordering 
a hostile witness whacked. And, charitably, he may not even have 
ordered the hit. The intelligence agencies in Britain and the U.S. look 
to be  hip-deep in forgeries of documents, concoction of evidence, and 
subornation of perjury. They may be killing witnesses just to protect 
their own asses.

CIA Director Tenet is now looking to be they guy who has been told to 
fall on his sword. If he gets a cushy job with the Carlyle Group, 
expect him to remain silent. If he is sent into exile in Ohio or 
Indiana, he may write a book...if he lives.

But,  hey, George Bush is happy about the daily deaths of U.S. 
soldiers. As he said recently "Bring it on!"

"We gonna open a can of Texas whoop-ass on them bad boys."

Seriously, this clusterfuck is unfolding nicely. U.S. occupation troops 
are spread so thin in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq that there are now 
plans being developed to activate National Guard units to relieve them 
(115 F in full body armor is not pleasant). And the number of countries 
under occupation may soon increase: Liberia and other African 
hell-holes are targets.

A half-trillion dollar deficit this year, added to the 5 or 6 trillion 
dollar total deficit (*).

(* the official deficit, not counting the total lack of reserves/money 
for Socialist Insecurity, bond indebtedness, pension guarantees, loan 
guarantees, and other unfunded liabilities; some estimates place the 
real deficit at about $30 trillion, i.e., $30 thousand billion. With 
about 100 million taxpayers in the U.S., each owes $300,000. Needless 
to say, this owed amount, on average, is substantially more than their 
complete assets, on average. Even with the "official" indebtedness, the 
amount owed (if one accepts a national debt as a personal indebtedness) 
is upwards of $60,000. I use the larger amount because the U.S. 
government actually _has_ incurred that debt, officially reported or 
not.)

And yet we are occupying countries which have nothing to do with our 
national interests. Kosovo...not our problem. Afghanistant...not our 
problem. Iraq. And soon, Liberia and maybe Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, 
and Nigeria.


And then there's the Perpetual Occupation of Korea.

Meanwhile, scientists who might have spoken out on the forgeries and 
hype about the Iraq war are getting the message. Just as 
microbiologists did a few years ago when half a dozen microbiologists 
vanished. Just as other weapons experts did after Gerald Bull was 
executed.



--Tim May
"They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, 
and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers 
actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members 
before the vote." --Rep. Ron Paul, TX, on how few Congresscritters saw 
the USA-PATRIOT Bill before voting overwhelmingly to impose a police 
state




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Jul 18 11:40:33 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 11:40:33 -0700
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
In-Reply-To: <3F183C7C.8060503@email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil>
Message-ID: <50A96F54-B94F-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Friday, July 18, 2003, at 11:29  AM, Thoenen, Peter CIV Sprint wrote:

> Tim May wrote:
>
> " U.S. occupation troops are spread so thin in 
> Kosovo,.....Kosovo...not our problem"
>
> Having spent the better part of last year working in Kosovo, I 
> wouldn't exactly call the forces there thin.  NATO forces (non-US) are 
> a majority of the peacekeeping occupiers and more and more of the 
> mission is getting turned over to the EU (allowing for slow US 
> withdrawal).  With Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia eagerly sucking the EU 
> and US cocks to get into the EU and NATO, the US in the Balkans is if 
> anything over strength.

"the US in the Balkans is if anything over strength" does NOT 
contradict the "spread too thin" point, which is about the number of 
troops the U.S. has available to deply, the need for replacements, etc. 
The fact that U.S. soldiers in all of these places who were expecting 
to be relieved have instead been told they will stay at least several 
more months, perhaps another year, is the point.

As for the general Yugoslavia situation, we supported the wrong sides 
in the Balkans. Not that supporting _any_ side in that European war was 
any of our business.


--Tim May
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, 
my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists."  --John 
Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General




From rvh40 at insightbb.com  Fri Jul 18 11:03:17 2003
From: rvh40 at insightbb.com (Randall)
Date: 18 Jul 2003 14:03:17 -0400
Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Thompson: Kingdom of Fear - 2003
Message-ID: <mailman.742.1576007634.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

----snip--snip--snip----
>From "Kingdom Of Fear " 2003
By Hunter S. Thompson

Let's face it, the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He is a
dunce. He does what he is told to do, says what he is told to say, poses
the way he is told to pose. He is a fool.

No. Nonsense. The president cannot be a Fool. Not at this moment in
time, when the last living vestiges of the American Dream are on the
line. This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the
White House.

Which is, after all, our house. That is our headquarters, it is where
the heart of America lives. So if the president lies and acts giddy
about other people's lives, if he wantonly and stupidly endorses mass
murder by definition, a loud and meaningless animal with no functional
intelligence and no balls.

To say this goofy child president is looking more and more like Richard
Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon.

Whoops! Did I say that? Is it even vaguely possible that some New Age
Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make Richard
Nixon look like a Liberal?

The capacity of these vicious assholes we elected to be in charge of our
lives for four years to commit terminal damage to our lives and our
souls and our loved ones is far beyond Nixon's. Shit! Nixon was the
creator of many of the once-proud historical landmarks that these dumb
bastards are savagely destroying now: the Clean Air Act of 1970;
Campaign Finance Reform; the endangered species act; a Real-Politik
dialogue with China; and on and on.

The prevailing quality of life in America-by any accepted methods of
measuring-was inarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon
than it is today in this evil year of our Lord 2002.

The Boss was a certified monster who deserved to be impeached and
banished. He was a truthless creature of former FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover, a foul human monument to corruption and depravity on a scale
that dwarfs any other public official in American history. But Nixon was
at least smart enough to understand why so many honorable patriotic U.S.
citizens despised him. He was a Liar. The truth was not in him.

Nixon believed, as he said many times, that if the president of the
United States does it, it can't be illegal. But Nixon never understood
the much higher and meaner truth of Bob Dylan's warning that "To live
outside the law you must be honest."

The difference between an outlaw and a war criminal is the difference
between a pedophile and a Pederast: The pedophile is a person who thinks
about sexual behavior with children, and the Pederast does these things.
He lays hands on innocent children, he penetrates them and changes their
lives forever.

Being the object of a pedophile's warped affections is a Routine feature
of growing up in America, and being a victim of a Pederast's crazed
"love" is part of dying. Innocence is no longer an option. Once
penetrated, the child becomes a Queer in his own mind, and that is not
much different than murder.

Richard Nixon crossed the line when he began murdering foreigners in the
name of "family values"- and George Bush crossed it when he sneaked into
office and began killing brown skinned children in the name of Jesus and
the American people.

When Muhammad Ali declined to be drafted and forced to kill "gooks" in
Vietnam he said, "I ain't got nothin' against them Viet Cong. No Cong
ever called me Nigger."  I agreed with him, according to my own personal
ethics and values. He was right.

If we all had a dash of Muhammad Ali's eloquent courage, this country
and the world would be a better place today because of it. Okay. That's
it for now. Read it and weep....See you tomorrow, folks. You haven't
heard the last of me. I am the one who speaks for the spitit of freedom
and decency in you. 

Shit. Somebody has to do it.

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world-a nation of
bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are
not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear
in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge
us... No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or
we'll kill you. 

Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my
son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We
didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America
today- and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.

Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy
and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these
swine?

These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little
rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have
Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill "gooks". They speak for all
that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are
racists and hate mongers among us-they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down
the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they
like it or not. 

Fuck them.

-- 
"There's nothing you could point to in the Bush Administration with
pride. Nothing. There is no way any rational, reasonable
person can say that the Bush Administration has been good for America."
---- Janeane Garofalo


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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Fri Jul 18 14:39:12 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 17:39:12 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Fwd: Re: Unsubtle Wetwork
Message-ID: <20030718213805.4F09498083@gnu-darwin.org>

Thanks you for your interesting notes, and this is my first post.  My
best current theory is that the "real mole" killed Kelly as a
diversion.  Now that Gilligan has changed his story, he has been
discredited, but at least he lives.  With Kelly dead, it may be harder
to trace to their sources the lies that the Government told, and
Campbell & Co. will be sleeping better at night.

Anyway, everyone has a favorite conspiracy theory.  If this is too far
off topic, feel free to reply in private or direct me to another list.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

On 18 Jul, Tim May wrote:
> 

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
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[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From peter.thoenen at email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil  Fri Jul 18 11:29:16 2003
From: peter.thoenen at email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil (Thoenen, Peter CIV Sprint)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 20:29:16 +0200
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
In-Reply-To: <6AFEFEBE-B93D-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <6AFEFEBE-B93D-11D7-A65E-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <3F183C7C.8060503@email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil>

Tim May wrote:

" U.S. occupation troops are spread so thin in Kosovo,.....Kosovo...not our problem"

Having spent the better part of last year working in Kosovo, I wouldn't exactly call the forces 
there thin.  NATO forces (non-US) are a majority of the peacekeeping occupiers and more and more of 
the mission is getting turned over to the EU (allowing for slow US withdrawal).  With Serbia, 
Croatia, and Bosnia eagerly sucking the EU and US cocks to get into the EU and NATO, the US in the 
Balkans is if anything over strength.  Of course hard line nationalists could take advantage of the 
overextended US forces, but honestly not likely to happen.  Recent history (after the Cold War) 
seems to suggest that whole "Enemy of my enemy is my friend" concept doesn't work when the US is 
that enemy.  Time and time again the enemies of the US (or folk who are not our enemies but also 
know the US would prevent them from doing sovereign things such as invading Taiwan) never seem to 
coordinate among themselves to take advantage of the situation.  World wide terrorist cells seem to 
be pretty good at it but they also direct their energies at multiple targets, not just the USA (e.g. 
the IRA/PLA/FARC all cross train with each other and use each others specialists from time to time 
but all have 3 concentrate on different local enemies).  Hostile foreign governments though just 
can't seem to band together.

What Bush didn't realize at the time (and now the US Media is whining about) is that countries that 
didn't support him during the war would also not support him after the war.  His hostile foreign 
diplomacy before the Iraq puppet state (pissing off two of the three largest Non-US peacekeeping 
forces (France / Germany)) is forcing the US to provide nearly all of the Iraq occupation force 
instead of handing it off to our *allies* as we have in the past.  The standard US occupation plan 
for the last 12 years has been Invade->Conquer->Hand off ~70% of peacekeeping to other countries. 
This just isn't going to work this time and Bush in his arrogance can't understand why.  Even Kosovo 
(NATO action, UN did NOT approve) got UN support immediately following the end of hostilities.  Bush 
doesn't even seem to be trying to garner support for a postfacto UN resolution on Iraq giving in the 
air of legitimacy.

-Peter

** STD CYA DISCL: This message in no way represents the views of Sprint or the US Army.  It is 
solely the personal opinion of the sender **




From rah at shipwright.com  Fri Jul 18 19:34:16 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 22:34:16 -0400
Subject: Kingdom of Fear - 2003
Message-ID: <a06001ad3bb3e5e1a3ae3@[66.149.49.6]>

--- begin forwarded text



From njohnsn at njohnsn.com  Sat Jul 19 05:28:26 2003
From: njohnsn at njohnsn.com (Neil Johnson)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 07:28:26 -0500
Subject: Kingdom of Fear - 2003
In-Reply-To: <a06001ad3bb3e5e1a3ae3@[66.149.49.6]>
References: <a06001ad3bb3e5e1a3ae3@[66.149.49.6]>
Message-ID: <200307190728.26507.njohnsn@njohnsn.com>

On Friday 18 July 2003 09:34 pm, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
> --- begin forwarded text
>
> From "Kingdom Of Fear " 2003
> By Hunter S. Thompson
>
Most deleted.
> racists and hate mongers among us-they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down
> the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they
> like it or not.
>
> Fuck them.

Whoa! Hunter S. Thompson <=> Tim May. Separated at birth ?
:)

-- 
Neil Johnson
http://www.njohnsn.com
PGP key available on request.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sat Jul 19 07:18:27 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:18:27 -0400
Subject: Defeating Optical Tempest will be easy...
Message-ID: <BAY7-F7755JP7Wp7zuU0000328b@hotmail.com>

Well, from what I'm understanding of so-called optical tempest, I'm not sure 
most of the usual thinking will apply.

First of all, anyone know what the most energetic wavelengths are in the 
CRT's output? (I have no idea.) Is it in the visible range? It may not be. 
Thus contrast in the visible range may not equal contrast in the freqency 
range that 'OT' will be using.

Also, and I'm not sure what this implies yet, but the screen-emitted beam 
has lowest energy after hitting a letter, which is black. Thus this tempest 
device must be particularly sensitive to the "white" background in order to 
makeout the letters as the sweep comes through (and is blocked by the 
letters).

And now that I think of it, I'm still not convinced that this does not 
amount to specular reflection, even though we are now talking about the 
"ballistic" beam...remember in order to determine what a letter is detecting 
a -decrease- in the beam's reflected energy will be the key in reading a 
letter.

Oh wait...the answer to defeating optical tempest is simple: have white 
letters on a black background.

And after they've caught up with that trick, alternate the background colors 
at random intervals (white on black, black on white, etc...).

Optical Tempest will only work under VERY ideal circumstances. I wouldn't 
worry about it.

-TD

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online  
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963




From eccmaili at math.uwaterloo.ca  Sat Jul 19 08:55:14 2003
From: eccmaili at math.uwaterloo.ca (ECC 2003)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 11:55:14 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Final announcement for ECC 2003
Message-ID: <mailman.743.1576007634.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

---------------------------------------------------------------------
THE 7TH WORKSHOP ON ELLIPTIC CURVE CRYPTOGRAPHY (ECC 2003)

University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

August 11, 12 & 13 2003

FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT		      July 19, 2003

*********************************************************************
NOTES:

1) Please note that the deadline for registration is August 1.

2) The last lecture at ECC 2003 will end at 3:00 pm on Wednesday
   (Aug 13). This will give participants sufficient time to catch
   flights scheduled to leave Toronto after 7:00 pm. There are 
   hourly flights from Toronto to Ottawa for those who wish to 
   attend   SAC 2003.

3) If you would like to be removed from this mailing list please
   reply with a brief note. You will be immediately removed from
   the list.
*********************************************************************
*********************************************************************


ECC 2003 is the seventh in a series of annual workshops dedicated 
to the study of elliptic curve cryptography and related areas. 
The main themes of ECC 2003 will be:
- The discrete logarithm problem.
- Efficient parameter generation and point counting.  
- Provably secure cryptographic protocols. 
- Efficient software and hardware implementation. 
- Side-channel attacks.
- Deployment of elliptic curve cryptography.

It is hoped that the meeting will continue to encourage and 
stimulate further research on the security and implementation 
of elliptic curve cryptosystems and related areas, and encourage 
collaboration between mathematicians, computer scientists and 
engineers in the academic, industry and government sectors.

Attendees of ECC 2003 might also wish to attend SAC 2003 
(Ottawa, Aug 14-15) and CRYPTO 2003 (Santa Barbara, Aug 17-21).
The last lecture at ECC 2003 will end at 3:00 pm on Wednesday 
(Aug 13). This will give participants sufficient time to catch 
flights scheduled to leave Toronto after 7:00 pm. There are hourly 
flights from Toronto to Ottawa.


SPONSORS:     
  Certicom Corp.     
  MITACS     
  Motorola
  The Fields Institute
  University of Essen  
  University of Waterloo


ORGANIZERS:     
  Gerhard Frey            (University of Essen)
  Darrel Hankerson	  (Auburn University)      
  Alfred Menezes          (University of Waterloo)
  Christof Paar           (Ruhr-Universitat Bochum)
  Edlyn Teske             (University of Waterloo)     
  Scott Vanstone          (University of Waterloo)
    

SPEAKERS:
  Hans Dobbertin          (Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Germany)
  Florian Hess            (University of Bristol, UK)
  Hugo Krawczyk           (Technion, Israel, and IBM Research, USA)
  Tanja Lange             (Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Germany)
  Reynald Lercier         (Centre d'Electronique de L'Armement, France)
  Ben Lynn                (Stanford University, USA)
  William Martin          (National Security Agency, USA)
  Christof Paar           (Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Germany)
  John Proos              (University of Waterloo, Canada)
  Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
  Pankaj Rohatgi          (IBM Research, USA)
  Victor Shoup            (New York University, USA)
  Jerome A. Solinas       (National Security Agency, USA)
  Edlyn Teske             (University of Waterloo, Canada)
  Nicolas Theriault       (University of Toronto, Canada) 
  Eran Tromer             (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) 


CONFERENCE PROGRAMME:

All lectures will take place in Room 1302 of the Davis Center,
University of Waterloo

  ====================
  Monday, August 11
  ====================
   8:00 -  9:00 am:  Coffee and registration

   9:00 - 10:00 am:  William Martin: High confidence software 
                     and systems, an NSA perspective

  10:00 - 10:30 am:  Mid-morning coffee break

  10:30 - 11:30 am:  Hans Dobbertin: To be announced

  11:30 - 12:30 pm:  Eran Tromer: Hardware-based implementation of
                     factoring algorithms

  12:30 -  2:00 pm:  lunch

   2:00 -  3:00 pm:  Hugo Krawczyk: Design and analysis of 
                     authenticated Diffie-Hellman protocols

   3:00 -  4:00 pm:  Victor Shoup: Practical verifiable encryption 
                     and decryption of discrete logarithms

   4:00 -  4:30 pm:  Afternoon coffee break

   4:30 -  5:30 pm:  Pankaj Rohatgi: Power, EM and all that: Is your 
                     crypto device really secure?

           6:00 pm:  Reception at the Waterloo Inn
           7:00 pm:  Banquet at the Waterloo Inn

  =====================
  Tuesday, August 12
  =====================
   8:00 -  9:00 am:  Morning coffee

   9:00 - 10:00 am:  Jean-Jacques Quisquater: 2 or 3 side-channels 
                     for ECC

  10:00 - 10:30 am:  Mid-morning coffee break

  10:30 - 11:30 am:  Tanja Lange: Efficient arithmetic on 
                     (hyper-)elliptic curves over finite fields

  11:30 - 12:30 pm:  Christof Paar: Hyperelliptic curve 
                     cryptosystems for embedded applications

  12:30 -  2:00 pm:  lunch

   2:00 -  3:00 pm:  Reynald Lercier: Algorithmic aspects of 
                     Mestre's p-adic point counting ideas

   3:00 -  4:00 pm:  Ben Lynn: Applications of bilinear maps

   4:00 -  4:30 pm:  Afternoon coffee break

   4:30 -  5:30 pm:  Jerome A. Solinas: ID-based digital signature 
                     algorithms

   5:30 -  7:00 pm:  Cocktail Reception (Davis Centre, University 
                     of Waterloo)

  =======================
  Wednesday, August 13
  =======================
   8:00 -  9:00 am:  Morning coffee

   9:00 - 10:00 am:  John Proos: Security in the presence of 
                     decryption failures

  10:00 - 10:30 am:  Mid-morning coffee break

  10:30 - 11:30 am:  Nicolas Theriault: Index calculus attack for 
                     hyperelliptic curves of small genus

  11:30 -  1:00 pm:  lunch

   1:00 -  2:00 pm:  Florian Hess: The GHS attack revisited

   2:00 -  3:00 pm:  Edlyn Teske: Weak fields for ECC


REGISTRATION:
  
There will be a registration fee this year of $250 Cdn or $170 US
($150 Cdn or $100 US for full-time graduate students). Sorry, but
we cannot accept payment in Euros. PLEASE REGISTER AS SOON AS 
POSSIBLE AS SPACE IS LIMITED FOR THIS WORKSHOP; REGISTRATION IS 
ON A FIRST-COME FIRST-SERVE BASIS. We cannot process a registration 
until all fees are paid in full. The deadline for all fees to be 
paid and registration completed has been set for the 
1st of August, 2003.  However, you are encouraged to register 
earlier than Aug 1 since some hotels have a cutoff date of
June 29. To register, complete, in full, the attached REGISTRATION 
FORM and return it along with your payment to: 
Mrs. Adrienne Richter, C&O Dept., University of Waterloo, Waterloo,
Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1. You can also send your registration form by
fax (519-725-5441) or by email (ecc2003 at math.uwaterloo.ca). 
Confirmation of your registration will be sent by email when payment 
is received in full.


------------------------cut from here---------------------------------
ECC 2003 CONFERENCE              REGISTRATION FORM

Fullname:
_________________________________________________________

Affiliation:
_________________________________________________________

Address:
_________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

E-Mail Address:
_________________________________________________________

Telephone #:
_________________________________________________________

Registration Fee: Please check the appropriate box:

[ ] Registration .......$250.00 CAD ..............$________

[ ] Registration .......$170.00 USD ..............$________

[ ] Full-time Student ..$150.00 CAD ..............$________

[ ] Full-time Student ..$100.00 USD ..............$________

Registration Fee includes Banquet: Attending [ ] Yes  [ ] No

                                  Vegetarian [ ] Yes  [ ] No

TOTAL AMOUNT PAYABLE: ............................$________


    **Make Cheque/Money Order Payable to:  ECC 2003

    Credit Card Payments:

                [  ] Visa                  [  ] MasterCard

Cardholder's Name: ________________________________________________

Card Number: ______________________________________________________

Expiration Date: __________________________________________________

Signature: ________________________________________________________

Additional Information: ___________________________________________

-------------------------cut from here-------------------------------


TRAVEL:

Kitchener-Waterloo is approximately 100 km/60 miles from Pearson
International Airport in Toronto.  Ground transportation to
Kitchener-Waterloo can be pre-arranged with Airways Transit.

TRANSPORTATION TO AND FROM TORONTO AIRPORT PROVIDED BY AIRWAYS TRANSIT

It is advisable to book your transportation between the Pearson Airport,
Toronto, and Waterloo in advance to receive the advance booking rate of
$38 CAD per person, one way, with Airways Transit (open 24 hours a day).
Please quote "ECC2003" when making your reservation. Airways is a 
door-to-door service; they accept cash (Cdn or US funds), MasterCard, 
Visa and American Express.

Upon arrival:
Terminal 1: proceed to Ground Transportation Booth, Arrivals Level.
Terminal 2: proceed to Airways Transit desk, Arrivals Level, Area E.
Terminal 3: proceed to Ground Transportation Booth, Arrivals Level,
                between Doors B and C. 

You can make a reservation through their web site:
  www.airwaystransit.com 
Or, you can complete the form below and send by mail or 
fax (519-886-2141) well in advance of your arrival to 
Airways Transit. They will not fax confirmations:  your fax 
transmission record is confirmation of your reservation. 

-------------------------cut from here---------------------------------
AIRWAYS TRANSIT ADVANCE BOOKING FORM - ECC 2003

ARRIVAL INFORMATION:

____________________________________________________________
Surname					First name

____________________________________________________________
Toronto Arrival Date		Airline		Flight #

____________________________________________________________
Arrival Time				Arriving From

____________________________________________________________
Destination in Kitchener/Waterloo		No. in party

DEPARTURE INFORMATION:

____________________________________________________________
Surname					First name

____________________________________________________________
Toronto Departure Date		Airline		Flight #

____________________________________________________________
Departure Time		Flight #		Destination

____________________________________________________________
Pickup From				No. in party

____________________________________________________________
Signature					Date

Send or Fax to:

Airways Transit
99A Northland Road
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada, N2V 1Y8

Fax:           (519) 886-2141
Telephone:     (519) 886-2121
-----------------------------cut form here--------------------------------


ACCOMMODATIONS:

There is a limited block of rooms set aside on a first-come 
first-serve basis at the Waterloo Inn for the evenings of
August 10, 11, 12 and 13, and at the Comfort Inn for the 
evenings of August 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13. Please note that
the Waterloo Inn is sold out for the evening of August 9.

COMFORT INN 
Address:       190 Weber Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2J 3H4
Phone:         (519) 747-9400
Rate:          $80 Cdn plus taxes/night for a single or double room
               Please quote "ECC 2003" when making your reservation
Availability:  Evenings of August 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Cut-off date:  July 7, 2003

WATERLOO INN
Address:       475 King Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2J 2Z5
Phone:         (519) 884-0222
Fax:           (519) 884-0321
Toll Free:     1-800-361-4708
Website:       www.waterlooinn.com
Rate:          $118 Cdn plus taxes/night for a single or double room
               Please quote "ECC 2003" when making your reservation
Availability:  Evenings of August 10, 11, 12, 13 
Cut-off date:  June 29, 2003


Other hotels close to the University of Waterloo are:

  UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO CONFERENCE CENTRE
  (on-campus accommodation; no air conditioning)
  Ron Eydt Village, Box 16610, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N3J 4C1
  Phone: 519-884-5400, 519-746-7599 
  Website: www.conferences.uwaterloo.ca (see "Room Registration")
  Approx rate: $52 Cdn plus taxes/night

  DESTINATION INN
  547 King Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 5Z7
  Phone: (519) 884-0100
  Website: www.destinationinn.com
  Approx rate: $73 Cdn plus taxes/night
  
  BEST WESTERN INN
  St. Jacobs Country Inn
  50 Benjamin Road East, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2V 2J9
  Phone:   (519) 884-9295
  Website: www.stjacobscountryinn.com
  Approx rate: $129 Cdn plus taxes/night
  
  THE WATERLOO HOTEL
  2 King Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2J 2W7
  Phone: (519) 885-2626
  Website: www.countryinns.org/inn_waterloo.html
  Approx rate: $120-160 Cdn plus taxes/night
  

HOTEL TO CONFERENCE TRANSPORTATION:

A shuttle to/from the campus will be available each day of the
conference from the Waterloo Inn and Comfort Inn only. Place 
and times for pickup and drop-off will be emailed to registrants
a week before the workshop.


FURTHER INFORMATION:

For further information or to return your Registration, please contact:

Mrs. Adrienne Richter
Department of Combinatorics & Optimization
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
e-mail:  ecc2003 at math.uwaterloo.ca
Fax:     (519) 725-5441
Phone:   (519) 888-4027
---------------------------------------------------------------------

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From rah at shipwright.com  Sat Jul 19 09:06:26 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 12:06:26 -0400
Subject: Final announcement for ECC 2003
Message-ID: <a06001a4ebb3f1ce2f1f8@[66.149.49.6]>

--- begin forwarded text



From measl at mfn.org  Sat Jul 19 10:50:07 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 12:50:07 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: FC: John Gilmore: I was ejected from a plane for wearing
  "Suspected Terrorist" button
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307191247530.483-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

<Huge Snip>

"You can see the button at:

   http://eminism.org/store/button-racism.html"

Errr... No, you can't.  It appears they have removed this selection.  Very
interesting :-/

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sat Jul 19 12:46:31 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 15:46:31 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
In-Reply-To: <JH2GCG7E6L5B054I@insightbb.com>
Message-ID: <20030719194640.358D899A37@gnu-darwin.org>

It now appears to be a suicide, or _very_ subtle wetwork indeed!

http://news.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20KELL.html%3Fex%3D1059278400%26amp%3Ben%3Dfeb83d7800250089%26amp%3Bei%3D5062%26amp%3Bpartner%3DGOOGLE

No surprise that Blair would like the Kelly tragedy put to rest.  After
all, much of the government has Kelly's blood on their hands
(figuratively speaking).  Oh how they were hoping that it was
suicide, so that the truth is beside the point.  There are now many
facts that Blair and the US warmongers would like to have laid to rest. 
Then again, what is a little murder after you have unleashed
devastating war on the world. ;-\

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBOULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sat Jul 19 12:48:17 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 15:48:17 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
Message-ID: <20030719194824.74AD699A4C@gnu-darwin.org>

It now appears to be a suicide, or _very_ subtle wetwork indeed!

http://news.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/20KELL.html%3Fex%3D1059278400%26amp%3Ben%3Dfeb83d7800250089%26amp%3Bei%3D5062%26amp%3Bpartner%3DGOOGLE

No surprise that Blair would like the Kelly tragedy put to rest.  After
all, much of the government has Kelly's blood on their hands
(figuratively speaking).  Oh how they were hoping that it was
suicide, so that the truth is beside the point.  There are now many
facts that Blair and the US warmongers would like to have laid to rest. 
Then again, what is a little murder after you have unleashed
devastating war on the world. ;-\

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GMU/S d+@ s: a+ C++++ UBOULI++++$ P+ L+++(++++) E--- W++ N- !o K- w--- !O
M++@ V-- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP-- t+++(+) 5+++ X+ R tv-(--)@ b !DI D- G e++++
h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sat Jul 19 13:33:37 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 16:33:37 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: old encryption paper
Message-ID: <20030719203350.3A74F99AA5@gnu-darwin.org>

What were you doing on 9/11?  I was in the act of packaging our first
build of GnuPG for the Distribution when the planes hit.  It took me a
couple of days to clear my head abit and write the GNU-Darwin encryption
position paper.  When a drumbeat for post-9/11 encryption bans started
in the US Congress the very day after the attack, I wrote faster and
got help from smart people on the "Free Dmitry" list and elsewhere. 
Any remarks about any of this?

http://www.gnu-darwin.org/war.html

IMHO, it is exactly this kind of commentary which scuttled an attack
on free encryption software in the wake of the attack.  Moreover, the
monolith authentication schemes were also laid to rest or driven
underground, despite the fact that certain profiteering
vendor/stakeholders had inside access in Washington.  It might have
been a very different Internet today.

Most of the commentary about the paper has been positive, except for
some criticism of pursuing private keys with warrants.  Gosh, I think my
head was not as clear as I thought on that point, a fact that time
and experience has fortunately remedied.  ;-}  Anyway, all comments
welcome.

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
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h--- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From jya at pipeline.com  Sat Jul 19 16:48:01 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 16:48:01 -0700
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
In-Reply-To: <20030719194640.358D899A37@gnu-darwin.org>
References: <JH2GCG7E6L5B054I@insightbb.com>
Message-ID: <E19dydD-0006zH-00@smtp10.atl.mindspring.net>

Perhaps a suicide but if so it was induced by Kelly's treatment,
not only by the goofus members of parliament, but more likely
by the Ministry of Defence threatening to punish him for violation
of the draconian Official Secrets Act.

The Brits for all their admirable humor about vulgarity -- the new
GCHQ called a "gaping anus" -- can be vile sonsofbitches
when it comes to demanding obedience to authority, with the
OSA a prime weapon to assure proper behavior or else. Beyond
that there can be truly devastating social outcast penalties,
and the worst of all, blackest of humor, withholding royal honors.

Too bad the British realm never had to experience the cleansing
guillotine -- by the populace not by the authorities.

Due to that lack, and the USA's similar lack of final justice, pea-brained
officials can get away with official murder, destruction of lives, lying
and cheating for personal gain while holding office, or best, after
leaving office.

Foster's "suicide" for the Clintons, like Kelly's, is a sign that the
time is ever ripe to execute the Tim May Final Option in lieu of
believing what appears in the media, is told to surviving families,
is joked about in the private clubs of capitals around the globe.

At least the Reds owned up to their ideological perfidy, unlike
those who truly believe in superiority, that is those who best
represent inferior humans.

No wonder the sonsofbitches fear assassination politics, not
just the Jim Bell laughable version, the hard-eyed kind that
comes in the night without warning.




From s.schear at comcast.net  Sat Jul 19 17:28:16 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 17:28:16 -0700
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors
  Gilmore's email
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030719172806.046514c8@mail.comcast.net>

>To: dave at farber.net, gnu
>Subject: "Suspected Terrorist" button gets Gilmore ejected from airplane
>Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 21:46:43 -0700
>From: John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>
>
>[For IP.]
>
>Dave, you already know about my opposition to useless airport
>security crap.  I'm suing John Ashcroft, two airlines, and various
>other agencies over making people show IDs to fly -- an intrusive
>measure that provides no security.  (See http://freetotravel.org).
>But I would be hard pressed to come up with a security measure more
>useless and intrusive than turning a plane around because of a
>political button on someone's lapel.
>
>My sweetheart Annie and I tried to fly to London today (Friday) on
>British Airways.  We started at SFO, showed our passports and got
>through all the rigamarole, and were seated on the plane while it
>taxied out toward takeoff.  Suddenly a flight steward, Cabin Service
>Director Khaleel Miyan, loomed in front of me and demanded that I
>remove a small 1" button pinned to my left lapel.  I declined, saying
>that it was a political statement and that he had no right to censor
>passengers' political speech.  The button, which was created by
>political activist Emi Koyama, says "Suspected Terrorist".  Large
>images of the button and I appear in the cover story of Reason
>Magazine this month, and the story is entitled "Suspected Terrorist".
>You can see the button at:
>
>   http://eminism.org/store/button-racism.html
>
>(Reason hasn't put the current issue online yet, for some reason.)
>
>The steward returned with Capt. Peter Hughes.  The captain requested,
>and then demanded, that I remove the button (they called it a
>"badge").  He said that I would endanger the aircraft and commit a
>federal crime if I did not take it off.  I told him that it was a
>political statement and declined to remove it.
>
>They turned the plane around and brought it back to the gate, delaying
>300 passengers on a full flight.
>
>We were met at the jetway by Carol Spear, Station Manager for BA at
>SFO.  She stated that since the captain had told her he was refusing
>to transport me as a passenger, she had no other course but to take me
>off the plane.  I offered no resistance.  I reminded her of the court
>case that United lost when their captain removed a Middle Eastern man
>who had done nothing wrong, merely because "he made me uncomfortable".
>She said that she had no choice but to uphold the captain and that we
>could sort it out in court later, if necessary.  She said that my
>button was in "poor taste".
>
>Later, after consulting with (unspecified) security people, Carol said
>that if we wanted to fly on the second and last flight of the day, we
>would be required to remove the button and put it into our checked
>luggage (or give it to her).  And also, our hand-carried baggage would
>have to be searched to make sure that we didn't carry any more of
>these terrorist buttons onto the flight and put them on, endangering
>the mental states of the passengers and crew.
>
>I said that I understood that she had refused me passage on the first
>flight because the captain had refused to carry me, but I didn't
>understand why I was being refused passage on the second one.  I
>suggested that BA might have captains with different opinions about
>free speech, and that I'd be happy to talk with the second captain to
>see if he would carry me.  She said that the captain was too busy to
>talk with me, and that speaking broadly, she didn't think BA had any
>captains who would allow someone on a flight wearing a button that
>said "Suspected Terrorist".  She said that BA has discretion to
>decline to fly anyone.  (And here I had thought they were a common
>carrier, obliged to carry anyone who'll pay the fare, without
>discrimination.)  She said that passengers and crew are nervous about
>terrorism and that mentioning it bothers them, and that is grounds to
>exclude me.  I suggested that if they wanted to exclude mentions of
>terrorists from the airplane, then they should remove all the
>newspapers from it too.
>
>I asked whether I would be permitted to fly if I wore other buttons,
>perhaps one saying "Hooray for Tony Blair".  She said she thought that
>would be OK.  I said, how about "Terrorism is Evil".  She said that I
>probably wouldn't get on.  I started to discuss other possible
>buttons, like "Oppose Terrorism", trying to figure out what kinds of
>political speech I would be permitted to express in a BA plane, but
>she said that we could stand there making hypotheticals all night and
>she wasn't interested.  Ultimately, I was refused passage because
>I would not censor myself at her command.
>
>After the whole interaction was over, I offered to tell her, just for
>her own information, what the button means and why I wear it.  She was
>curious.  I told her that it refers to all of us, everyone, being
>suspected of being terrorists, being searched without cause, being
>queued in lines and pens, forced to take our shoes off, to identify
>ourselves, to be x-rayed and chemically sniffed, to drink our own
>breast milk, to submit to indignities.  Everyone is a suspected
>terrorist in today's America, including all the innocent people, and
>that's wrong.  That's what it means.  The terrorists have won if we
>turn our country into an authoritarian theocracy "to defeat
>terrorism".  I suggested that British Airways had demonstrated that
>trend brilliantly today.  She understood but wasn't sympathetic --
>like most of the people whose individual actions are turning the
>country into a police state.
>
>Annie asked why she, Annie, was not allowed to fly.  She wasn't
>wearing or carrying any objectionable buttons.  Carol said it's
>because of her association with me.  I couldn't have put it better
>myself -- guilt by association.  I asked whether Annie would have been
>able to fly if she had checked in separately, and got no answer.
>(Indeed it was I who pointed out to the crew that Annie and I were
>traveling together, since we were seated about ten rows apart due to
>the full flight.  I was afraid that they'd take me off the plane
>without her even knowing.)
>
>Annie later told me that the stewardess who had gone to fetch her said
>that she thought the button was something that the security people had
>made me wear to warn the flight crew that I was a suspected
>terrorist(!).  Now that would be really secure.
>
>I spoke with the passengers around me before being removed from the
>plane, and none of them seemed to have any problem with sitting next
>to me for 10 hours going to London.  None of them had even noticed the
>button before the crew pointed it out, and none of them objected to it
>after seeing it.  It was just the crew that had problems, as far as I
>could tell.
>
>         John Gilmore
>
>PS: For those who know I don't fly in the US because of the ID demand:
>I'm willing to show a passport to travel to another country.  I'm not
>willing to show ID -- an "internal passport" -- to fly within my own
>country.

"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sat Jul 19 14:40:45 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 17:40:45 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
In-Reply-To: <E19dydD-0006zH-00@smtp10.atl.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <20030719214054.BD22D99AEC@gnu-darwin.org>

On 19 Jul, John Young wrote:
> 
> Foster's "suicide" for the Clintons, like Kelly's, is a sign that the
> time is ever ripe to execute the Tim May Final Option in lieu of
> believing what appears in the media, is told to surviving families,
> is joked about in the private clubs of capitals around the globe.

While I share some of Tim's apparent outrage, I am definitely not
enthusiastic about the prospect of repulsive violent counter-action,
which would actually be counter-productive in my opinion.  It is the
cycle of violence that is the problem, which is exacerbated greatly by
the actions of the US administration.  

Anyway, I haven't been lurking for more that a few weeks, so I'm sorry
if I misjudge any of you.  Is there a web archive for the group?

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
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h--- r+++ y++++
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[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type APPLICATION/pgp-signature]




From nobody at dizum.com  Sat Jul 19 10:40:04 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 19:40:04 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: FREENET 0.5.2!! DRUGS!! GUNS!! PORNOGRAFY!!! YANKEE GO HOME!!
Message-ID: <ed92a1a9718c1136c374d5a86b282525@dizum.com>

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you can find this here - http://www.freenetproject.org !!


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http://www.freenetproject.org !!

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!!!!!

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http://www.freenetproject.org




From sunder at sunder.net  Sat Jul 19 18:14:30 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 21:14:30 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
In-Reply-To: <E19dydD-0006zH-00@smtp10.atl.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307192104020.19042-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Yes supposedly, he went out to one of his regular walks and was found with
a slash wrist.  Something I'd imagine someone bent on offing themselves
would have a) a reason to do it (and be depressed or showing signs of
something being wrong), b) wouldn't go out on their normal walk which
they'd do every day, c) would do it in their home, or some place private,
and d) would have a note, e) would have left a will, f) be giving
away money and possessions to others ahead of time, etc...

Where was the knife, or razor or whatever "he used?"  Was
the cut done in a way that he could have done it himself?  I think I
remember it was on his left wrist, but am not sure, if so, was he a
righty, etc....

The normal walk is a very good indicator of just what "this" was.  
Someone who wanted to kill him could easily use this as a predictable
pattern as to when and where to grab him and kill him.  Maybe he was
drugged so he wouldn't struggle and be able to get help before getting his
wrist slashed, etc.


This was extremely badly done, regardless of how many "independent
inquiries" Mr. Blair launches to cover it up^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H investigate
it, it's very blatant, and unbelieveable.  I'd tend to agree that this was
done to send a message out, and the suicide and "inquiry" B.S. will be
about as useful as the JFK assasination board, with far less of a media
eye on it.

Either way, Blair's credibility with the whole Iraq and Nukes is
fucked. This "suicide" adds a huge dark streak to his career...  Then
again, he might just be as Slick as Willie, and Mr. Kelly could become
another Vince Foster...  time will tell...


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, John Young wrote:

> Perhaps a suicide but if so it was induced by Kelly's treatment,
> not only by the goofus members of parliament, but more likely
> by the Ministry of Defence threatening to punish him for violation
> of the draconian Official Secrets Act.




From netkita at earthlink.net  Sun Jul 20 00:34:35 2003
From: netkita at earthlink.net (netkita at earthlink.net)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 03:34:35 -0400
Subject: Brit death
Message-ID: <3F1A0DCB.466.1E015BE2@localhost>

    I can't remember EVER hearing of someone slashing just ONE wrist. It is a given 
    that both are done.Sounds too odd to be true.

    D




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Sun Jul 20 06:03:50 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 09:03:50 -0400
Subject: Cypherpunks archive
In-Reply-To: <20030719214054.BD22D99AEC@gnu-darwin.org>
References: <20030719214054.BD22D99AEC@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <200307200903.50807.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Saturday 19 July 2003 17:40, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:

> .  Is there a web archive for the
> group?

http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/ gets the (filtered) LNE feed. 
It's automatically maintained on my box and I don't check it that 
often, so if it seems hosed just mail me.

I don't know of any archives of the unfiltered feed; the two I'd had 
bookmarked are dead. Jim Choate, do you archive SSZ?

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From s.schear at comcast.net  Sun Jul 20 09:16:17 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 09:16:17 -0700
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] RE: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and
  Farber  censors Gilmore's email
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030720091608.044ac410@mail.comcast.net>

At 11:08 2003-07-19 -0700, you wrote:
>[Note:  This comment comes from reader Dave Hughes.  DLH]
>
>At 10:16 -0700 7/19/03, Dave Hughes wrote:
>>From: "Dave Hughes" <dave at oldcolo.com>
>>To: <dewayne at warpspeed.com>
>>Subject: RE: [Dewayne-Net] [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and 
>>Farber  censors Gilmore's email
>>Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 10:16:12 -0700
>>MIME-Version: 1.0
>>
>>This, of course, is the same John Gilmore - whose wealth from being a
>>original designer of Sun systems permits him to tilt at political
>>windmills by lawsuits - is the same guy who, after I was invited by
>>Glenn Tenney to make a presentation from a West Point
>>military-background point-of-view soon about 9/11 soon after it happened
>>at the Hacker's Conference, in a plenary room full of perhaps 300
>>hackers, said words to the effect 'We all know that 9/11 was a
>>conspiracy by the Bush Administration who flew the airplanes into the
>>twin towers.'
>>
>>Which immediately caused such an uproar in the, crowd, many of whom (but
>>only some - since the Hackers Conference is usually in California and
>>dominated by scads of flaming liberals)

Its been my experience that many of my friends who attend these events tend 
to be more "classical liberals", that is, libertarians.

>>were still raw emotionally after
>>the massacre of 9/11, and I might even say outspokenly in the support of
>>the Administration in the time of unknown future Terrorists threats,
>>damned near came over the seats in the audience and attacked him. He
>>made lots of those in attendance very angry. (Not me, I learned long ago
>>from my military background to suffer the rantings of fools from either
>>the extreme left or the right without getting upset)
>>
>>British Airways may have called Gilmore's insistence on wearing the
>>in-your-face badge 'poor taste' - I would simply brand it, as many of
>>Gilmore's outrageous pronouncements, the use of 'very bad judgment.'

Yes, its often 'bad judgement' to express widely held, but seldom spoken, POVs.


>>Guess he's never heard of US court's limitations against using 'free
>>speech' as a defense against the consequences of falsely yelling 'Fire'
>>in a crowded theater.

Except when there really is a fire, which is certainly the case here.

steve


"There is no protection or safety in anticipatory servility."
Craig Spencer




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Jul 20 12:31:22 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:31:22 -0700
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
Message-ID: <3F1AEE09.78BCB57F@cdc.gov>

At 03:48 PM 7/19/03 -0400, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
>It now appears to be a suicide, or _very_ subtle wetwork indeed!

And the "ice" on Wellstone's plane was believable too.
And Ritter's folly was just a personal thing.

Disagreement = death.

You need to watch _Enemy of the State_ again.




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Jul 20 12:45:28 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:45:28 -0700
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] RE: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and 
  Farber   censors Gilmore's email
Message-ID: <3F1AF158.8139A44A@cdc.gov>

At 09:16 AM 7/20/03 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
>>>Guess he's never heard of US court's limitations against using 'free
>>>speech' as a defense against the consequences of falsely yelling
'Fire'
>>>in a crowded theater.
>
>Except when there really is a fire, which is certainly the case here.
>
>steve

:-)

It would have been quite amusing for JG to wear a "Those who sacrifice
liberty for security.."
button (or T-shirt, rather a lot of text for a button) and get kicked
off.

His button must not have been attached with a standard pin, they could
have disallowed
the pointy pin, on the basis of pointyness, not the message attached to
it.

On the matter of free speech, "Fuck the TSA" would be pretty well
protected by the
"Fuck the Draft" precedent, at least in the (federal-territory) airport,
if not the plane itself.

---
Of course there are limits in regards to freedom of speech.  They are as

follows:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and
to
petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Everything else is, of course, allowed.  -Sunder




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Sun Jul 20 09:56:08 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:56:08 EDT
Subject: FC: John Gilmore: I was ejected from a plane for wearing
  "Suspected Terro...
Message-ID: <165.22ef8003.2c4c23a8@aol.com>

In a message dated 7/19/2003 9:47:57 PM Eastern Daylight Time, measl at mfn.org 
writes:
"You can see the button at:

   http://eminism.org/store/button-racism.html"


There's a picture of John Gilmore wearing the button in the Aug. issue of 
Reason Magazine. Good article too.  This event happened after the article 
appeared, but I think it is the same button as in Reason.

Regards,  Matt-




From rah at shipwright.com  Sun Jul 20 11:19:07 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 14:19:07 -0400
Subject: The Quisling Effect
Message-ID: <a06001a6abb408d554cef@[66.149.49.6]>

http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe0307.html
The Quisling Effect
  Government is not the only destroyer of freedom

By Claire Wolfe


Miller Smithton* is a federally licensed firearms dealer. When he 
wanted to give his own son a hunting rifle for his birthday, he had 
to run a criminal background check on the young man. "I felt like a 
worm," Miller told me. "Like a traitor to my own values and my own 
family. But what else could I do?"

K.J. "Cage" Linton* is a 911 emergency dispatcher and a man concerned 
about the creeping loss of freedom and privacy in the world. If you 
call him because your father is having a heart attack or your 
daughter has broken her leg playing soccer, Cage will calmly ask for 
your full name, date of birth, and other information. (This is aside 
from what already appears on his computer screen from the E911 
service.) You, in your urgency, give him the information. And this 
freedom-loving man, without informing you of a thing, enters you into 
a law-enforcement database. Cage works in a rural county, where he 
has routinely entered his own friends, neighbors, and family members 
into this database of crooks and creeps. He knows that all sorts of 
government employees have free access to the database and use it as a 
juicy source of both local gossip and leads for investigation. But 
he's got to stick you in it. It's his job.

Juan Fuentes was just a man minding his own business. On the morning 
of August 23, 2000 three neighbor children, Jessica, Anna, and 
Vanessa Carpenter, rushed up pounding his door. Anna was bleeding 
from dozens of puncture wounds. All three were desperate. A naked 
intruder had broken into their home and was at that moment savaging 
their little brother and sister with a pitchfork. The girls begged 
Fuentes to get his gun and save the little ones' lives. But Fuentes 
said no. It wasn't that he was afraid to confront the intruder; with 
his rifle he could easily have dropped a pitchfork wielder. No, it 
was the government he was more terrified of. They'll take my gun away 
if I do that, he told the desperate girls, whose brother and sister 
were dying horribly at that moment. To compound the horror, the 
girls' own father, John Carpenter, had locked away the family pistol 
in obedience to California's "child-safe" storage laws. All five 
Carpenter children knew how to shoot and how to handle guns safely, 
but because their father feared the law more than he feared an armed 
intruder, they couldn't save themselves or each other.


We've all heard about the frog in the kettle. Turn the heat up under 
him gradually enough and he'll sit there until he boils to death. 
It's become the most common metaphor to describe our gradual loss of 
freedom.

We never ask, "Who's turning up the heat under us froggies?" because 
the answer is so obvious. It's government, of course. And it is.

But there's something else that's causing the heat to rise and 
freedom to evaporate into air. It's going on in all three stories 
above and in daily life around us. Call it the Quisling Effect.

Most everybody knows what a quisling is: a turncoat, a Judas, a 
Benedict Arnold. Specifically, the American Heritage Dictionary 
defines it as "a traitor who serves as the puppet of the enemy 
occupying his or her country."

The word "quisling" has a naturally slimy sound. Even if you didn't 
know what it meant, you'd know it was something unsavory, 
undesirable, or at best, something weak. Not many people realize that 
(as with martinet, sandwich, and boycott), the word came to us from a 
man's name.

Vidkun Quisling was a twentieth-century Norwegian politician and head 
of Norway's home-grown form of Nazism, the Nasjonal Samling (National 
Unity) Party. He went so far as to urge Hitler to invade his country 
in hopes of becoming Norway's supreme leader. Hitler did. And 
Quisling did -- for exactly five days. The Nazis quickly placed him 
in a figurehead position while one of their own actually ran the 
country. Within months of the war's end, Quisling got his just 
desserts. He was executed by firing squad. And a new word entered the 
dictionary, not only in English, but in many other languages.

The identification of Quisling with dirty deeds is so strong that 
when I encountered an article that mentioned humanitarian acts 
Quisling had committed in the 1920s, it was as if I'd just read, "Ted 
Bundy heroically feeds the poor in Calcutta," or "Jeffrey Dahmer 
rescues kitten from burning building."

But maybe Bundy did send a few bucks to Mother Teresa. And Dahmer, by 
many accounts, wasn't entirely a horrible guy, aside from that 
inconvenient penchant for murdering and eating his lovers. And yes, 
before he entered the dictionary so odiously, Quisling was actually a 
respected man.

Even the blackest of us is not all black. And it doesn't take a long 
look into our own hearts to admit that the whitest of us look more 
like the pile of laundry that was washed 10 times in Brand X than the 
pile that was laundered with the good stuff in the old commercial.

In each of the three incidents that open this article, people made 
pragmatic decisions that went against their own better principles. 
They did so for all the ordinary, perfectly excusable daily reasons 
-- because they feared to break the law, because it was their job, 
because they didn't want to make waves, because it was a compromise 
that got them through the day. When their actions were done only to 
obey a law, they could, with justification, claim the government 
"made" them do it.

Except in a rare tragic case like the deaths of the Carpenter 
children, the negative consequences are miniscule and life goes on.

But it isn't only "the government" that is causing freedom to boil 
away around us. Though major and minor manifestations of The Quisling 
Effect, we sell out our own freedom and the freedom of our children, 
our neighbors, and our friends. Gradually. Oh, so gradually. But sell 
it we do. We are participants, willing or otherwise, in our own 
destruction.


Businesses -- those proud products of our allegedly free market -- 
also sell out freedom. And they are bigger culprits than we. 
Sometimes they do it because corporations, by their very structure 
and nature, have a lot in common with the state. As one friend of 
mine always put it, "Every corporation wants to be a government when 
it grows up." Businesses often help condition us to daily 
regimentation, to trading our privacy for perks, and to going along 
to get along. That, I suppose, is an unavoidable, unintended (?) 
consequence of the post-Industrial revolution.

But businesses increasingly manifest The Quisling Effect for the very 
same reasons we private people do: to avoid making waves, to be 
allowed to do business as usual under the eye of an ever-stronger 
state, or to appease the real or imagined demands of the 
"authorities." (In the latter case, it might be more apt to apply a 
different WWII analogy, and accuse them of The Chamberlain Effect; 
but that's another story.)

How typical is this? Your ISP meekly enables all e-mail and Web 
activity to be easily monitored by the FBI, not because the law says 
they must, but because the FBI unilaterally decrees that they should. 
Online commerce companies, led by the 800-pound mine canary eBay, 
announce that they will turn over any customer record to any law 
enforcement agent, without asking for a subpoena, search warrant, or 
even an explanation of probable cause. Saks department store sends a 
notice to charge account customers, saying it will no longer accept 
more than $350 in cash payments. Even though that amount is far, far 
below the federal government's own "suspicious" cash reporting 
limits, Saks is scared, Saks has decided to be overly cautious. Saks' 
lawyers have no doubt advised the company to prepare for a future in 
which even $400 is a sign that a loyal Saks customer is a terrorist 
or drug dealer.

Banks demand detained information about you and the origins of your 
deposits. Following 9-11, one supermarket chain, in a "patriotic" 
gesture, even turned over its entire database of customer purchasing 
records to the federal government for "anti-terrorism" records. (And 
yes, the type of food you buy and how you buy it really is part of 
the government's profiling of your terrorist potential.)

In some cases, the thousands of companies who do such things really 
are bowing to the law (even when the law isn't constitutional). But 
in most cases, they're merely complying with fishy agency 
interpretations of regulations or  cravenly, pathetically trying to 
look compliant and cooperative in general so that they themselves 
won't become targets of the FBI, IRS, or Department of Homeland 
Security.

It must have been a lot like this in Stalinist Russia. But 
nevertheless, in each case, these businesses are following their own 
momentary self interest -- just as we are when we run a background 
check or enter a caller's name in a database. In relationships with 
"security scared" businesses, your legal rights, or for that matter 
their own long-term self interest (assuming freedom is in the 
long-term interest of every private enterprise), are easy casualties.

Saks doesn't care about your freedom. Nor should it have to, in the 
best of all worlds. Its main concern is with its own survival, as it 
should be. In a free market, its survival would depend largely on how 
well it served customers. In this world, survival depends more and 
more on how well a company kowtows to regulators or law enforcers. 
And like virtually all corporations (and most individuals), Saks' 
little hive-mind will simply adapt to present conditions in whatever 
way it thinks will best ensure its own survival.

(The very concept that the federal government has a right to order 
private businesses to do anything is another matter. But we've long 
ago accepted that state of affairs as normal, however abnormal and 
unfree it really is.)

If this is the way institutions behave, then we can't expect much 
better from individuals who, no matter how much they love freedom and 
still want a nice, uncomplicated daily life. In fact, Miller 
Smithton, my gun-dealer friend, pointed out that there's even a 
corollary to The Quisling Effect in which we not only make conscious 
decisions that trade away freedom, but we begin adopting the 
psychology of the unfree in our daily lives.

For instance, Smithson told me he finds himself sneaking his 
perfectly legal machine guns from his house to his car and back so 
that his yuppie neighbors won't see him. He's not doing anything 
wrong, owning and using these machine guns. Nor is he hiding the guns 
because he's afraid his neighbors are going to steal such valuable 
stuff. He just doesn't want to cope with the almost-inevitable 
suspicion -- complete with reports to the ATF -- that being seen with 
absolutely legal weapons might bring down on him.

So, he submits. Not only in his rational choices, but in his 
attitudes and way of life.


Go back for a moment to the definition of a quisling: "a traitor who 
serves as the puppet of the enemy occupying his or her country."

If you believe that the behemoth now squatting on the banks of the 
Potomac is constitutional or in some other fashion legitimate, then 
the definition of quisling doesn't apply to anyone who bows to that 
government's will -- even when, by bowing or "complying," we diminish 
our own and our children's freedom. By those terms, the loss of 
freedom itself is "legitimate," and heaven help us all.

But if you believe that the ever-consuming, ever-growing creature now 
spreading itself across the land is, rather, an alien living off the 
traditions of freedom as it destroys its own host, if you believe 
that the security state, the surveillance state, and the control 
state are truly occupying forces that don't belong in this land and 
aren't good for it, for you, for your progeny, or for the future ... 
then clearly all who cooperate with it manifest The Quisling Effect. 
Some of us bear a large responsibility for selling our own freedom. 
Some a lot less. But hardly anybody walks among us who isn't 
responsible in some way for cooperating with the freedom-consuming 
occupier.

Unfortunately, there's no solution -- for the moment, at least. There 
is no incentive for your banker or your ISP to stand up and say, 
"Hey, wait a minute, this is wrong and we're going to fight it." And 
for both businesses and individuals, there is almost no motivation, 
beyond sheer stubbornness and increasingly archaic principles, to do 
anything else but comply.

If froggie is getting hotter in the pot, government is ultimately at 
fault. If froggie stays in the pot instead of jumping out, froggie is 
also responsible. But with millions of quisling froggies out there 
helping turn the heat up and up and up ... where, really, is the most 
sincerely freedom loving froggie to go, even if he decides to take 
the giant leap? Straight from the boiling pot into a world of hot-hot 
burners.

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From measl at mfn.org  Sun Jul 20 14:07:58 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 16:07:58 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: A day in the life
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

Well, summer is here, and I've just come off > two weeks without a day off,
so, I thought Itake this wonderful day, and use it like "normal" people
might. You know, a nice breakfast with my wife somewhere, maybe a little
casino time.  The standard speil.  But today turned out to be George Orwell
Day instead.

Submitted for your inevitable nodding of heads, and grumbling of "well, of
course!  What did you expect!" replies.

Breakfast was kind of cool actually - thanks for asking.  We trotted off to
the local Ameristar casino's Open Trough, er, "Buffet".  The food was
universally overcooked, sometimes to the point of knife-resistance, but the
great dessert bar more than made up for it.  And it's relatively
inexpensive.  Recommended for when lots of food at a low price is all you
care about.  Not recommended for impressing anyone with your gastronomic
knowledge ;-)

After breakfast however, we decided to spend some time, and likely the
~300.00 we had on us, at their casino.  Mind you, this may be the first time
I've been to *this* casino, but it's nowhere *near* my first time in *any*
casino.  This is far, far, FAR from the norms I'm used to.

Like good little state-sponsored-units, we stood in line for a few minutes,
waiting to show our ID and begin our excersize in negative economics.  When
our turn came, however, I presented my ID, and was met with a blank stare.

She looked at the ID.  She looked at me.  Back to the ID.

I'm getting ready for the SWAT team to make their entrance at this point.

"Sir, Where's your Amerstar Winners Card"?
"Huh?"
"Don't you have a Winners Card?"
"I don't do loyalty cards. Thank you for thinking of me though."
"Sir, you can't get in without a Winners Card"

So much for a day at the casino.  Thank you Ameristar!  You saved me about
$300.00 today.

For those of you who are wondering, yes, you need detailed ID to get one of
their loyalty cards.  And while I wasn't able to get in to verify what I saw
standing in line, it looks like they track you table by table with these
cards.

So, being $300.00 richer, and having worked for over two weeks without a
break, *and* being 250 miles over my oil-change limit, I figured, aw, you
know what I figured!

Now, let me start off with some background here.  I've gone to the same
mechanic for almost 6 years now - for tires, oil, you name it.  The only
thing he doesn't get is the brakes, and then only cause my Subaru has some
kind of brakes-from-hell that even he says can't be serviced safely without
going to the dealer.  

This mechanic, who runs the shop for the local Dobb's chain, is great.  Never
had a problem.  Never had to show ID either.  Doesn't care if Telecheck likes
me or not, he just takes the money, and gets my business.  And he gets a
*lot* of it.  His business is thriving, and he recently added 4 new bays to
his shop, and started taking Sundays off - hence, my problem.

So, we took the scenic route home, figuring there would have to be a
oilchange shop somewhere along the way.  And there were several.  The first
two were closed, but finally, we found a JiffyLube open and waiting.  With
two bays.  And no line (baaaaddd  sign on a wonderful day like this).  But I
*need* the damn oil change, so in we go.

"Good Afternoon Sir.  What can we help you with today?"
"Hi. Oil change please.  Synthetic blend please.  No extras, just an oil
change"
"Sure, leave the keys in the car, and step over to the counter, and John will
be right with you".

When I got out of the car, the kid who was going to do the actual work wanted
to know if I had a loyalty card he could punch/swipe/whatever.  Nope.

"Well sir, just give me your name and address, and I'll get you a card".
"Thanks, but I don't want a card."
"They're absolutely free sir!"
"I know.  Thanks, but I don't want a card"
"I can't change your oil without a card"
"You're kidding.  Aren't you?"
"Sir, I need a card."
"John Smith.  123 Anywhere Street.  Anycity, Arkasas.  12345".
"Phone?"

I almost died laughing when he asked.  I mean, where's Monty Python?  Behind
the storage shed?

"314-555-1234"

"Thank you sir.  If you care to have a seat in the waiting room, we'll call
you when it's ready.

Into the waiting room we go.  With the little 8 inch TV mounted 12 feet in
the air, where nobody can actually see it, even though we have to listen to
it [at warp-volume].  There's some super overacted action-drama going on,
lot's of shooting, a car chase, and a guy jumping into an airplane which is
taking off - he jumped from a moving car to the plane - allin the ten minutes
we were waiting.  Thank god I threw out the television in '90.

Finally, a guy comes out from the shop.

"Sir, if you'll follow me, we can go over your car for a minute."

This is the upsell - I can just see it coming.  Wipers?  Air filter?

We walk over to a monitor sitting in this big red box made up to look like a
diagnostic center.  It's really just a sales terminal in a big red box,
sporting some pretty pictures of the products this guy is trying to talk you
into buying.

"Sir, would you like some engine cleaner?  You should have it once a year."
"No, I just want the oil change.  no wipers.  No engine cleaners.  Nothing
but an oil change"
"Sir.  I'm just doing my job - I have to ask you all these questions, since I
can't check you out and close out your ticket without asking."

Yes, he is an automaton.  He just can't take a blanket "no" and punch that
into each request, so we went down the whole list of radiator flushes,
transmission fluid checks and replacements, hoses, filters, etc.  Finally,
*thankfully*, we're done: he tells me I can go to the register to pay.

"Sir.  The total comes to $46.00".  As he says this, he notices that the
screen hasn't filled in my name, address, etc., from the swipe of the loyalty
card.
"Sir, I need your last name."
"Terranson."
"Your first name?"
"Whatever makes you happy.  Pick one."

He looks lost.  So lost.

"John?"
"That's a nice name.  Use it."
"Address?"
"123 Anywhere St."
He dutifully types it in...
"City?"
"Pick one."

We wait.  He looks at me waiting, looking even more lost and
confused.  Finally, I can take it no more, and I blurt out an answer, hoping
beyond hope that he'll "get it".

"New Caledonia."
"State?"
"Mexico."
"Phone?"
"123-555-1234"

"Sir, would you like a Jiffy Card for next time, so you won't have to wait
while we get this information?

Oh god...


So I have seen two separate businesses today who are just shooting themselves
in the head over the acquisition of data in the face of obvious
refusal.  While the Jiffy Lube is the more obscene example from a
bang-for-the-buck perspective, the casino was (for me) the real
shocker: casinos have, from day one, been very careful to protect
privacy.  You ever try to bring in a camera?  Forget it!  To have a casino
turn me away for lack of a loyalty card strikes me as, wel, preposterous!  I
cannot [literally] give you hundreds of dollars, asking nothing in return but
a chance to gaze longingly at the asses of the floor wait staff, without
divulging my entire pedigree?  Have we, as a society, completely lost all
touch with reality???

Those poor kids at the Jiffy Lube - obviously they *have* to get this data
for the corporate office, but they too exhibit an amazing amount of
programming here.  Not *one* of them had enough of a clear head to simply
fill in "refused", or "John Smith" on his own.  We have taken a real national
resource, our youth, and trained them to act as mindless droids, devoid of
even the minimum reasoning powers possessed by small insects, and I am,
inexplicably, astounded.

I am what anyone with an IQ of 12 or higher would call a hard core
cynic.  But even I am surprised.  Appalled even.  And oddly embarrassed to
find that things are not as bad as I constantly claim, but they are *worse* -
MUCH worse than that.  They are...  I don't *know* what they are - but
whatever it is, it is truly fucking evil...


-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko




From mv at cdc.gov  Sun Jul 20 17:46:11 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 17:46:11 -0700
Subject: Iraqi vs. Chechen efficiency
Message-ID: <3F1B37D2.CC5B65CE@cdc.gov>

I read somewhere that the Russkies lose about 8 invaders
a day in Chechnya.  The Iraqis need to increase their
productivity.  Maybe take over a theatre or something.

Have a nice day.




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Sun Jul 20 19:24:54 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 19:24:54 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
In-Reply-To: <299e7d75acc918b478a1ab31de1070d6@remailer.metacolo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307201921520.25568-100000@eskimo.com>

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Anonymous Sender wrote:

> Those who actually earn their standard of living (ie. their business is
> not contigent, directly or indirectly, upon US military supremacy) are
> the minority. This is the most fundamental transformation of the US
> society - massive recruitment by the government.

Can't be.  The US govmn't budget is only a few percent of GDP.  The
majority _can't_ depend on government, or it'll collapse.  Witness FSU.

And back to the brit, why did it take 2 days to "identify the body"?  Was
the face missing?  If so, did he blow his head off before or after
slitting his wrist :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Sun Jul 20 19:32:50 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 19:32:50 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Iraqi vs. Chechen efficiency
In-Reply-To: <3F1B37D2.CC5B65CE@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307201930250.25568-100000@eskimo.com>

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:

> I read somewhere that the Russkies lose about 8 invaders
> a day in Chechnya.  The Iraqis need to increase their
> productivity.  Maybe take over a theatre or something.
>
> Have a nice day.

The Chechen's have had a dozen years more practice.  How much
practice the Iraqi's get before the US populace changes it's mind
remains to be seen.  It took a long time for Vietnam.  Fortunatly,
I can watch from a distance.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Sun Jul 20 19:41:03 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 19:41:03 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: A day in the life
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307201938500.25568-100000@eskimo.com>

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:

[great story snipped]

> Those poor kids at the Jiffy Lube - obviously they *have* to get this data
> for the corporate office, but they too exhibit an amazing amount of
> programming here.  Not *one* of them had enough of a clear head to simply
> fill in "refused", or "John Smith" on his own.  We have taken a real national
> resource, our youth, and trained them to act as mindless droids, devoid of
> even the minimum reasoning powers possessed by small insects, and I am,
> inexplicably, astounded.
>
> I am what anyone with an IQ of 12 or higher would call a hard core
> cynic.  But even I am surprised.  Appalled even.  And oddly embarrassed to
> find that things are not as bad as I constantly claim, but they are *worse* -
> MUCH worse than that.  They are...  I don't *know* what they are - but
> whatever it is, it is truly fucking evil...

More likely the kids were tripping on acid with a nice hash over coat.
They weren't there at all, you just imagined them :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From cpunk at lne.com  Sun Jul 20 20:00:00 2003
From: cpunk at lne.com (cpunk at lne.com)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 20:00:00 -0700
Subject: Cypherpunks List Info
Message-ID: <200307210300.h6L300qc020157@gw.lne.com>

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information

Last updated: Sep 12, 2002

This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk

Instructions on unsubscribing from the list can be found below.


0. Introduction

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1. Filtering

The various CDRs follow different policies on filtering spam and to a
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There are three basic flavors of filtering CDRs: "raw", which send all
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2. Message Modification

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Message modification usually happens on mail going in or out to each CDR's
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Privacy policy indicates if the list will allow anyone ("open"), or only
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Note that if you post, being on a "private" list doesn't mean much,
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Unsubscribing from the cypherpunks list:
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How to figure out which CDR you are subscribed to:

Get your mail client to show all the headers (Microsoft calls this
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course want to make your own decisions on which (ab)users to filter.

# mailing lists:
# filter all cypherpunks mail into its own cypherspool folder, discarding
# mail from loons.  All CDRs set their From: line to 'owner-cypherpunks'.
# /dev/null is unix for the trash can.
:0
* ^From.*owner-cypherpunks at .*
{
    :0:
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	/dev/null

    :0:
    cypherspool
}


7. List of current CDRs


All commands are sent in the body of mail unless otherwise noted.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Algebra:

Operator:
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Help:             "help cypherpunks" to majordomo at algebra.com
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Privacy policy: ???
Info:   ???

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CCC:

Operator:         drt at un.bewaff.net
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Filtering policy: This specific node drops messages bigger than 32k and
                  every message with more than 17 recipients or just a line
                  containing "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject. 
Digest mode:      this node is digest-only
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to lne CDR subscribers.
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Info: http://www.lne.com/cpunk; "info cypherpunks" to majordomo at lne.com
Archive: http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/index.html
(thanks to Steve Furlong and Len Sassaman)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Openpgp:

[openpgp seems to have dropped off the end of the world-- it
doesn't return anything from sending help queries.  Ericm, 8/7/01]

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ssz:

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Message Modification policy: 
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  Reply-to cypherpunks at ssz.com added.
Privacy policy: open
Info:  http://www.ssz.com/cdr/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunder:

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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Filtering policy: cooked
 Posts from all CDR subscribers & replies to threads go to local CDR
   subscribers.
 All posts from other CDRs are forwarded to other CDRs unmodified.   
Message Modification policy:
 1. leading "CDR:" in subject line removed
 2. "Reply-to:" removed
Privacy policy: private
Info: http://www.pro-ns.net/cpunk




From john at kozubik.com  Sun Jul 20 23:36:27 2003
From: john at kozubik.com (John Kozubik)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 23:36:27 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors 
  Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030719172806.046514c8@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <20030720230703.K75326-100000@kozubik.com>

On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Steve Schear wrote:

> >remove a small 1" button pinned to my left lapel.  I declined, saying
> >that it was a political statement and that he had no right to censor
> >passengers' political speech.  The button, which was created by

Where do these ridiculous ideas come from ?  If I own a piece of private
property, like an airplane (or an entire airline) for instance, I can
impose whatever senseless and arbitrary conditions on your use of it as I
please.

In reality, I personally would allow his button, and other political
speech, etc., but that is not _necessarily_ so.  BA refuses to transport
him with the button ?  BA requires that he submit DNA to fly ?  BA
requires all passengers to fly nude and recite the hokey-pokey ?  All
within their rights(*) as the renters of their private property.  If you
don't like it, don't purchase their service.  They have no obligation to
serve you, and you have no right to use their service.  If their
conditions and your needs happen to intersect, then contract them for
service - if not, please move along.


> >They turned the plane around and brought it back to the gate, delaying
> >300 passengers on a full flight.

Too bad for you, and not something I would do if I ran the airline, but it
is their property and they can do whatever they please(*) with it ... and
not be acting in bad faith when they do so long as they stay within the
bounds of your contract/agreement with them, which I suspect includes no
language concerning political speech, etc.


> >trend brilliantly today.  She understood but wasn't sympathetic --
> >like most of the people whose individual actions are turning the
> >country into a police state.


And what is your alternative ?  I note that you are attempting to
appropriate the property rights of others (albeit in a small way) through
a court decision (ie. guns) under the auspices of your perceived "right"
to use their property as you see fit.  How do the folks at Reason Magazine
feel about that ?  I read the article, and I am curious to see reader
reaction to it ... most likely most will be distracted by the "drinking
your own breast milk" horror stories.


> >PS: For those who know I don't fly in the US because of the ID demand:
> >I'm willing to show a passport to travel to another country.  I'm not
> >willing to show ID -- an "internal passport" -- to fly within my own
> >country.


All fine and good - and I appreciate your efforts at uncovering the secret
directives and generally resisting the erosion of liberties, however it
bothers me greatly that when the obvious is pointed out - that if the
_private airlines_ become unburdened by the ID requirement, they will
simply require it themselves - that you consider this unjust as well.
Further, you invoke some "right" of yours to impose your will on these
private property owners.

It is difficult to imagine how "blah blah employee number four Sun
Microsystems blah blah" is capable of this kind of cognitive dissonance.

(*) Within the bounds of the law.  Please don't respond with ridiculous
queries: "can BA murder you on the plane?!"  "can BA rape you?!"

-----
John Kozubik - john at kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com




From anonymous at remailer.metacolo.com  Sun Jul 20 16:50:04 2003
From: anonymous at remailer.metacolo.com (Anonymous Sender)
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 23:50:04 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: Unsubtle Wetwork
Message-ID: <299e7d75acc918b478a1ab31de1070d6@remailer.metacolo.com>

>(* the official deficit, not counting the total lack of reserves/money 
>for Socialist Insecurity, bond indebtedness, pension guarantees, loan 
>guarantees, and other unfunded liabilities; some estimates place the 
>real deficit at about $30 trillion, i.e., $30 thousand billion. With 
>about 100 million taxpayers in the U.S., each owes $300,000. Needless 
>to say, this owed amount, on average, is substantially more than their 
>complete assets, on average. Even with the "official" indebtedness, the 
>amount owed (if one accepts a national debt as a personal indebtedness) 
>is upwards of $60,000. I use the larger amount because the U.S. 
>government actually _has_ incurred that debt, officially reported or 
>not.)

This is slightly off the topic ...

Some calculations done before by people who understand money flows (and
are not at the same time priests of the Official Economy) show similar
results.

To me, this is a plausible explanation for the current domestic support
of the US government. A majority of population (75% ? 90% ?) actually
lives on ability of the US government to incur this debt and, having
sufficient military power, not have to pay it back. The collusion with
the government is much deeper than simple power of propaganda.

Those who actually earn their standard of living (ie. their business is
not contigent, directly or indirectly, upon US military supremacy) are
the minority. This is the most fundamental transformation of the US
society - massive recruitment by the government.




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Mon Jul 21 00:08:37 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:08:37 -0700
Subject: Jude Milhon has passed away
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030721000649.04c216e0@idiom.com>

Forwarded from another list....

>Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 16:35:28 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Linda Hull
>Subject: Jude Milhon has passed away
>
>To those who knew her...I thought I would mention
>that Jude has passed away.
>
>To those who did not know her, she was the woman
>who coined the phrase cypherpunk. Jude was also an
>editor at Mondo 2000, among many other things.
>http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/WiredWomen/wiredwomen000223.html
>
>She had been fighting cancer and was losing her
>battle; last night she embraced the inevitable
>by taking her own life.
>
>In all honesty, I never met her, though I had
>often heard of her. It strikes me that she
>finished her life the way she had always seemed
>to live it - an empowered woman.
>
>Condolences to her friends and family.
>
>__________________________________




From measl at mfn.org  Sun Jul 20 22:25:29 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:25:29 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: ScanMail Message: To Sender, sensitive content found and action
  taken. (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307210024440.3585-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

One has to wonder that the USPTO would be monitoring this list with a dirty
words filter in place.  How would they ever see *nay* emails???

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 01:21:21 -0400
From: System Attendant <USPTO-IS-109-SA at USPTO.GOV>
To: measl at mfn.org
Subject: ScanMail Message: To Sender, sensitive content found and action taken.

Trend SMEX Content Filter has detected sensitive content.

Place = cypherpunks at ssz.com; antisocial at mfn.org; ; cypherpunks at einstein.ssz.com
Sender = measl at mfn.org
Subject = A day in the life
Delivery Time = July 21, 2003 (Monday) 01:21:19
Policy = Dirty Words1
Action on this mail = Quarantine message

Warning message from administrator:
Sender, Content filter has detected a sensitive e-mail.




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Mon Jul 21 00:25:35 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:25:35 -0700
Subject: A day in the life
In-Reply-To: <20030721030103.GN13976@dreams.soze.net>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030721001808.04c76f50@idiom.com>

At 03:01 AM 07/21/2003 +0000, Justin wrote:
>J.A. Terranson (2003-07-20 21:07Z) wrote:
> > So I have seen two separate businesses today who are just shooting 
> themselves
> > in the head over the acquisition of data in the face of obvious refusal.
>....
>I'm surprised they didn't ask for your SSN ... as an index for the database...
>
>I've adopted a SSN I use for idiots like that.  I don't know whether
>it's assigned, but it's in the valid range.  Isn't that just terrible.

Please don't do that.  You might pick a number belonging to some poor 
working guy
and mess up his credit or yours.

I read on the net that Richard Nixon's SSN is 567-68-0515,
and then there's that usual 078-thing from fake SSN cards in wallets.




From rah at shipwright.com  Sun Jul 20 22:12:05 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 01:12:05 -0400
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Message-ID: <a06001a9ebb4126114b3f@[66.149.49.6]>

<http://nytimes.com/2003/07/21/technology/21PATE.html?pagewanted=print&position=>

The New York Times


July 21, 2003 

A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online 
By TERESA RIORDAN 


the 1997 science-fiction movie "The Velocity Trap," the interstellar banking system is so decimated by electronic crime that the only way to exchange money is in cold hard cash. Armored federal banking ships have to shuttle currency from planet to planet. 

Carl Amos, an inventor in Atlanta, also anticipates a return to the cash economy but without the computer-generated visual effects. Mr. Amos recently patented a way to pay for online transactions with bills and coins rather than credit or banking cards. 

"In upwards of three-quarters of the world, most money transactions are cash only," said Mr. Amos, who envisions a big market for his invention. 

Basically, what Mr. Amos has patented is a new combination of existing technologies. 

His  patent, No. 6,554,184, covers a modified A.T.M.  that not only dispenses money but, like a vending machine, accepts cash, which can be used to transfer money from one person to another or to pay for online purchases. 

"It's a method patent, a new way of doing business," Mr. Amos said. "These are off-the-shelf components. All I had to do was build the machine and write the software." 

Mr. Amos is a rare breed: an independent inventor who actually makes a living off his inventions. A former electrical engineer at I.B.M. , he left corporate life to develop his idea for a holographic lens. Since he patented the lens in 1994, he estimates, he has received about $1 million in royalties. 

Mr. Amos, one of six children, grew up on a farm in Ohio, where he set up his own skunk works in a shed. Not all his inventions were successful. One was a parachute to be worn while leaping off the garage. "I survived, obviously," Mr. Amos said. "My siblings survived, too, thank goodness." 

Mr. Amos said his latest invention, should it become widely available, would obviate the need for services provided by Western Union and other money-transfer companies. 

Another big market in the United States, Mr. Amos said, might be teenagers. Though they do not usually have their own credit cards, they usually have cash and are more than willing to spend it to download music or games. 

Mr. Amos also said his system should appeal to those who were worried about identity theft on the Internet or who simply wanted the privacy it provided. 

Gamblers may be interested in the technology. Many credit-card companies, for example, will not authorize payments to gambling sites. Nor will PayPal, the biggest third-party payment option on the Internet. 

Tom Turano, a law partner specializing in banking patents at Testa Hurwitz & Thibeault in Boston, called the  invention a "cute idea." 

"It's like a funky A.T.M.," Mr. Turano said.  But the patent itself, he said, is "fairly narrow" and may  be easy  for others to come up with similar inventions that do not infringe the patent. 

Mr. Amos, who is represented by  a licensing firm in Connecticut, said he was approaching banks about licensing his patent. "Western Union and Moneygram haven't called me yet," Mr. Amos said. "But I don't expect them to." 


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Sun Jul 20 17:17:30 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 02:17:30 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Defeating Optical Tempest will be easy...
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F7755JP7Wp7zuU0000328b@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307210116520.26820-100000@Zeta>

On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
> First of all, anyone know what the most energetic wavelengths are in the
> CRT's output? (I have no idea.) Is it in the visible range? It may not be.

There is some minuscule proportion of X-rays produced by CRT displays.
Could be there any (however theoretical) possibility of X-ray tempest?
I don't suppose there would be much of practical use of that, though.




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Sun Jul 20 20:01:03 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 03:01:03 +0000
Subject: A day in the life
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <20030721030103.GN13976@dreams.soze.net>

J.A. Terranson (2003-07-20 21:07Z) wrote:

> So I have seen two separate businesses today who are just shooting themselves
> in the head over the acquisition of data in the face of obvious
> refusal.

But isn't that because TPTB have decided they want their own
person-database (if only for the citizens of YourCity, YourState and
people who frequent it), but don't want to pay real money to get a good
one?

I'm surprised they didn't ask for your SSN ... as an index for the
database...

I've adopted a SSN I use for idiots like that.  I don't know whether
it's assigned, but it's in the valid range.  Isn't that just terrible.
Some day, some data miner with my "ssn" is going to have a coronary when
the "unique" key fields collide.  I can only hope the wretched soul
would pull a Nietzsche and live out the rest of life in a
quasi-unresponsive state, a small penalty given the consequences of the
new world order s/he helped create.

Even better if the data miner is a power company or telephone company
employee.




From jdocwra at earthlink.net  Mon Jul 21 06:34:12 2003
From: jdocwra at earthlink.net (John)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 06:34:12 -0700
Subject: unsubscribe
Message-ID: <GGEAKNLGNIKLDDHDBHFPEEDECAAA.jdocwra@earthlink.net>

unsubscribe cypherpunks




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Mon Jul 21 04:04:04 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 07:04:04 -0400
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors  
  Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <20030720230703.K75326-100000@kozubik.com>
References: <20030720230703.K75326-100000@kozubik.com>
Message-ID: <200307210704.04124.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Monday 21 July 2003 02:36, John Kozubik wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Steve Schear wrote:
> > >remove a small 1" button pinned to my left lapel.  I declined,
> > > saying that it was a political statement and that he had no right
> > > to censor passengers' political speech.  The button, which was
> > > created by
>
> Where do these ridiculous ideas come from ?  If I own a piece of
> private property, like an airplane (or an entire airline) for
> instance, I can impose whatever senseless and arbitrary conditions on
> your use of it as I please.

Look up "common carrier".


> I note that you are attempting to
> appropriate the property rights of others (albeit in a small way)
> through a court decision (ie. guns) under the auspices of your
> perceived "right" to use their property as you see fit.

I'm generally agreed with you here, but regulated industries are so far 
from the libertarian ideal that there's little point to applying it to 
real-life cases such as this.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul 21 08:22:10 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 08:22:10 -0700
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors  
   Gilmore's email
Message-ID: <3F1C0522.D7424726@cdc.gov>

At 11:36 PM 7/20/03 -0700, John Kozubik wrote:
>On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Steve Schear wrote:
>
>> >remove a small 1" button pinned to my left lapel.  I declined,
saying
>> >that it was a political statement and that he had no right to censor

>> >passengers' political speech.  The button, which was created by
>
>Where do these ridiculous ideas come from ?  If I own a piece of
private
>property, like an airplane (or an entire airline) for instance, I can
>impose whatever senseless and arbitrary conditions on your use of it as
I
>please.

Yes.
Except that you entered into a contract to transport a human in exchange

for money.  No where in the contract was "banned speech" mentioned.

Suppose that instead two men were kicked off a flight for holding hands,

or a woman & offspring for breast-feeding.  That would be a violation of
the transportation
contract.  Because such behavior does not endanger the flight or
passengers.
(Although all behaviors cannot be enumerated, under a "reasonable"
common-law interpretation
of the contract, passive speech (vs. say screaming the whole flight) is
harmless.)

Private property rights, of course.  But contract law too.




From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul 21 08:24:03 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 08:24:03 -0700
Subject: Defeating Optical Tempest will be easy...
Message-ID: <3F1C0593.59CB87C1@cdc.gov>

At 02:17 AM 7/21/03 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
>There is some minuscule proportion of X-rays produced by CRT displays.

Produced by the ebeam decelerating on the shadow mask, but adsorbed
by the glass.




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Mon Jul 21 01:44:40 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 08:44:40 +0000
Subject: A day in the life
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030721001808.04c76f50@idiom.com>
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
  <5.1.1.6.2.20030721001808.04c76f50@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <20030721084440.GP13976@dreams.soze.net>

Bill Stewart (2003-07-21 07:25Z) wrote:

> Please don't do that.  You might pick a number belonging to some poor
> working guy and mess up his credit or yours.

Fair enough, at least when responding to requests for SSN from entities
that can affect credit.  They tend to be in the minority anyway.




From bart0 at earthlink.net  Mon Jul 21 09:15:02 2003
From: bart0 at earthlink.net (Harry Bartholomew)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 09:15:02 -0700
Subject: A day in the life
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030721001808.04c76f50@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <WR4WDCHEGGFK04YKE2YRPMZTZYJE.3f1c1186@one>

My SS# begins 078-
Issued in NY in the 50's

Harry  Bartholomew

7/21/2003 12:25:35 AM, Bill Stewart <bill.stewart at pobox.com> wrote:

>
>
>At 03:01 AM 07/21/2003 +0000, Justin wrote:
>>J.A. Terranson (2003-07-20 21:07Z) wrote:
>> > So I have seen two separate businesses today who are just shooting 
>> themselves
>> > in the head over the acquisition of data in the face of obvious refusal.
>>....
>>I'm surprised they didn't ask for your SSN ... as an index for the database...
>>
>>I've adopted a SSN I use for idiots like that.  I don't know whether
>>it's assigned, but it's in the valid range.  Isn't that just terrible.
>
>Please don't do that.  You might pick a number belonging to some poor 
>working guy
>and mess up his credit or yours.
>
>I read on the net that Richard Nixon's SSN is 567-68-0515,
>and then there's that usual 078-thing from fake SSN cards in wallets.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Jul 21 06:35:31 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 09:35:31 -0400
Subject: A day in the life...NY Times today
Message-ID: <BAY7-F31Z9n1YQ3Vhzs00010f78@hotmail.com>

"We have taken a real national
resource, our youth, and trained them to act as mindless droids, devoid of
even the minimum reasoning powers possessed by small insects, and I am,
inexplicably, astounded."

Hence the photo on the first page of today's NY Times.

-TD






>From: "J.A. Terranson" <measl at mfn.org>
>To: cypherpunks at ssz.com
>CC: antisocial at mfn.org
>Subject: A day in the life
>Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 16:07:58 -0500 (CDT)
>
>Well, summer is here, and I've just come off > two weeks without a day off,
>so, I thought Itake this wonderful day, and use it like "normal" people
>might. You know, a nice breakfast with my wife somewhere, maybe a little
>casino time.  The standard speil.  But today turned out to be George Orwell
>Day instead.
>
>Submitted for your inevitable nodding of heads, and grumbling of "well, of
>course!  What did you expect!" replies.
>
>Breakfast was kind of cool actually - thanks for asking.  We trotted off to
>the local Ameristar casino's Open Trough, er, "Buffet".  The food was
>universally overcooked, sometimes to the point of knife-resistance, but the
>great dessert bar more than made up for it.  And it's relatively
>inexpensive.  Recommended for when lots of food at a low price is all you
>care about.  Not recommended for impressing anyone with your gastronomic
>knowledge ;-)
>
>After breakfast however, we decided to spend some time, and likely the
>~300.00 we had on us, at their casino.  Mind you, this may be the first 
>time
>I've been to *this* casino, but it's nowhere *near* my first time in *any*
>casino.  This is far, far, FAR from the norms I'm used to.
>
>Like good little state-sponsored-units, we stood in line for a few minutes,
>waiting to show our ID and begin our excersize in negative economics.  When
>our turn came, however, I presented my ID, and was met with a blank stare.
>
>She looked at the ID.  She looked at me.  Back to the ID.
>
>I'm getting ready for the SWAT team to make their entrance at this point.
>
>"Sir, Where's your Amerstar Winners Card"?
>"Huh?"
>"Don't you have a Winners Card?"
>"I don't do loyalty cards. Thank you for thinking of me though."
>"Sir, you can't get in without a Winners Card"
>
>So much for a day at the casino.  Thank you Ameristar!  You saved me about
>$300.00 today.
>
>For those of you who are wondering, yes, you need detailed ID to get one of
>their loyalty cards.  And while I wasn't able to get in to verify what I 
>saw
>standing in line, it looks like they track you table by table with these
>cards.
>
>So, being $300.00 richer, and having worked for over two weeks without a
>break, *and* being 250 miles over my oil-change limit, I figured, aw, you
>know what I figured!
>
>Now, let me start off with some background here.  I've gone to the same
>mechanic for almost 6 years now - for tires, oil, you name it.  The only
>thing he doesn't get is the brakes, and then only cause my Subaru has some
>kind of brakes-from-hell that even he says can't be serviced safely without
>going to the dealer.
>
>This mechanic, who runs the shop for the local Dobb's chain, is great.  
>Never
>had a problem.  Never had to show ID either.  Doesn't care if Telecheck 
>likes
>me or not, he just takes the money, and gets my business.  And he gets a
>*lot* of it.  His business is thriving, and he recently added 4 new bays to
>his shop, and started taking Sundays off - hence, my problem.
>
>So, we took the scenic route home, figuring there would have to be a
>oilchange shop somewhere along the way.  And there were several.  The first
>two were closed, but finally, we found a JiffyLube open and waiting.  With
>two bays.  And no line (baaaaddd  sign on a wonderful day like this).  But 
>I
>*need* the damn oil change, so in we go.
>
>"Good Afternoon Sir.  What can we help you with today?"
>"Hi. Oil change please.  Synthetic blend please.  No extras, just an oil
>change"
>"Sure, leave the keys in the car, and step over to the counter, and John 
>will
>be right with you".
>
>When I got out of the car, the kid who was going to do the actual work 
>wanted
>to know if I had a loyalty card he could punch/swipe/whatever.  Nope.
>
>"Well sir, just give me your name and address, and I'll get you a card".
>"Thanks, but I don't want a card."
>"They're absolutely free sir!"
>"I know.  Thanks, but I don't want a card"
>"I can't change your oil without a card"
>"You're kidding.  Aren't you?"
>"Sir, I need a card."
>"John Smith.  123 Anywhere Street.  Anycity, Arkasas.  12345".
>"Phone?"
>
>I almost died laughing when he asked.  I mean, where's Monty Python?  
>Behind
>the storage shed?
>
>"314-555-1234"
>
>"Thank you sir.  If you care to have a seat in the waiting room, we'll call
>you when it's ready.
>
>Into the waiting room we go.  With the little 8 inch TV mounted 12 feet in
>the air, where nobody can actually see it, even though we have to listen to
>it [at warp-volume].  There's some super overacted action-drama going on,
>lot's of shooting, a car chase, and a guy jumping into an airplane which is
>taking off - he jumped from a moving car to the plane - allin the ten 
>minutes
>we were waiting.  Thank god I threw out the television in '90.
>
>Finally, a guy comes out from the shop.
>
>"Sir, if you'll follow me, we can go over your car for a minute."
>
>This is the upsell - I can just see it coming.  Wipers?  Air filter?
>
>We walk over to a monitor sitting in this big red box made up to look like 
>a
>diagnostic center.  It's really just a sales terminal in a big red box,
>sporting some pretty pictures of the products this guy is trying to talk 
>you
>into buying.
>
>"Sir, would you like some engine cleaner?  You should have it once a year."
>"No, I just want the oil change.  no wipers.  No engine cleaners.  Nothing
>but an oil change"
>"Sir.  I'm just doing my job - I have to ask you all these questions, since 
>I
>can't check you out and close out your ticket without asking."
>
>Yes, he is an automaton.  He just can't take a blanket "no" and punch that
>into each request, so we went down the whole list of radiator flushes,
>transmission fluid checks and replacements, hoses, filters, etc.  Finally,
>*thankfully*, we're done: he tells me I can go to the register to pay.
>
>"Sir.  The total comes to $46.00".  As he says this, he notices that the
>screen hasn't filled in my name, address, etc., from the swipe of the 
>loyalty
>card.
>"Sir, I need your last name."
>"Terranson."
>"Your first name?"
>"Whatever makes you happy.  Pick one."
>
>He looks lost.  So lost.
>
>"John?"
>"That's a nice name.  Use it."
>"Address?"
>"123 Anywhere St."
>He dutifully types it in...
>"City?"
>"Pick one."
>
>We wait.  He looks at me waiting, looking even more lost and
>confused.  Finally, I can take it no more, and I blurt out an answer, 
>hoping
>beyond hope that he'll "get it".
>
>"New Caledonia."
>"State?"
>"Mexico."
>"Phone?"
>"123-555-1234"
>
>"Sir, would you like a Jiffy Card for next time, so you won't have to wait
>while we get this information?
>
>Oh god...
>
>
>So I have seen two separate businesses today who are just shooting 
>themselves
>in the head over the acquisition of data in the face of obvious
>refusal.  While the Jiffy Lube is the more obscene example from a
>bang-for-the-buck perspective, the casino was (for me) the real
>shocker: casinos have, from day one, been very careful to protect
>privacy.  You ever try to bring in a camera?  Forget it!  To have a casino
>turn me away for lack of a loyalty card strikes me as, wel, preposterous!  
>I
>cannot [literally] give you hundreds of dollars, asking nothing in return 
>but
>a chance to gaze longingly at the asses of the floor wait staff, without
>divulging my entire pedigree?  Have we, as a society, completely lost all
>touch with reality???
>
>Those poor kids at the Jiffy Lube - obviously they *have* to get this data
>for the corporate office, but they too exhibit an amazing amount of
>programming here.  Not *one* of them had enough of a clear head to simply
>fill in "refused", or "John Smith" on his own.  We have taken a real 
>national
>resource, our youth, and trained them to act as mindless droids, devoid of
>even the minimum reasoning powers possessed by small insects, and I am,
>inexplicably, astounded.
>
>I am what anyone with an IQ of 12 or higher would call a hard core
>cynic.  But even I am surprised.  Appalled even.  And oddly embarrassed to
>find that things are not as bad as I constantly claim, but they are *worse* 
>-
>MUCH worse than that.  They are...  I don't *know* what they are - but
>whatever it is, it is truly fucking evil...
>
>
>--
>Yours,
>J.A. Terranson
>sysadmin at mfn.org
>
>	"Every living thing dies alone."
>	Donnie Darko

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Mon Jul 21 07:03:47 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:03:47 -0400
Subject: A day in the life
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D211@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Bill Stewart[SMTP:bill.stewart at pobox.com] wrote:
> 
> At 03:01 AM 07/21/2003 +0000, Justin wrote:
> >J.A. Terranson (2003-07-20 21:07Z) wrote:
> > > So I have seen two separate businesses today who are just shooting 
> > themselves
> > > in the head over the acquisition of data in the face of obvious
> refusal.
> >....
> >I'm surprised they didn't ask for your SSN ... as an index for the
> database...
> >
> >I've adopted a SSN I use for idiots like that.  I don't know whether
> >it's assigned, but it's in the valid range.  Isn't that just terrible.
> 
> Please don't do that.  You might pick a number belonging to some poor 
> working guy
> and mess up his credit or yours.
> 
> I read on the net that Richard Nixon's SSN is 567-68-0515,
> and then there's that usual 078-thing from fake SSN cards in wallets.
> 
No real SSN starts with the digit 9. Choose a random string, but make
the first digit '9'.

Peter




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Mon Jul 21 07:14:19 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:14:19 EDT
Subject: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors 
  Gilmore's email
Message-ID: <55.448e713d.2c4d4f3b@aol.com>

In a message dated 7/21/2003 2:56:45 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
john at kozubik.com writes:
It is difficult to imagine how "blah blah employee number four Sun
Microsystems blah blah" is capable of this kind of cognitive dissonance.



(John) helped to build and launch one of the most exciting and innovative 
education programs ever developed. Clearly, (he is) extraordinary. 
--William J. Bennett, Former Secretary of Education 
Gambling buddy of Bill?
Regards,  Matt-




From jack at junkfoodforthought.com  Mon Jul 21 07:50:41 2003
From: jack at junkfoodforthought.com (Jack)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:50:41 -0400
Subject: <nettime> Help Wanted: Internet Spy
Message-ID: <mailman.744.1576007634.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

Interesting ad seen at http://www.rand.org/jobs:

*****

Posting Title: Research Programmer
Location: (S) Santa Monica
Reference: 001241
Job Description:

Research Programmer

RAND is seeking a Research Programmer to work on various information
technology, security and assurance projects in our Santa Monica office. It
is preferred that the individual have familiarity with various applied
psychological measures that can be used to help with information protection
systems. Under general supervision, the research programmer will be
expected to search, monitor and track information and software tools that
relate and leverage off these measures in the context of information
security.
More generally, the position requires skills in searching for highly
technical,
computer-related information and programs within a variety of Internet and
Web sources, and organizing and structuring this material in a database for
a project's use.

Educational Requirements:
Bachelors degree (or equivalent experience) in Mathematics, Economics,
Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering, or other quantitative or computer
discipline. Master preferred. Coursework or experience must cover research
methods, policy analysis, and critical infrastructure protection.

Specific technical skills required:
Thorough technical knowledge of current computer operating systems (e.g.,
Linux, Solaris, Open BSD, Windows), and programming languages (e.g.,
Lisp, Prolog, C, Perl). Must be extremely proficient in such Internet and
Web technologies as anonymizing sites, IRC and "chat rooms," and
downloading and investigating properties of hacker "toolkits" and related
software. Ability to organize and structure information within a database
for project use is mandatory.

Related experience required: 3 - 5 years

Type of experience required/preferred:
Applicant should have excellent interpersonal skills, be able to conduct
independent investigations of online sites, and participate in online
dialogs
(IRC, chats) by gaining the trust of relevant persons. Experience with the
content and participants of such computer security conferences as the
Black Hat Briefings, DEFCON, and CANSECWest/core03 would be
useful. A security clearance is not required, but is desirable.

Location: Santa Monica

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo at bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at bbs.thing.net

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Mon Jul 21 09:39:33 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 11:39:33 -0500
Subject: A day in the life...NY Times today
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F31Z9n1YQ3Vhzs00010f78@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F31Z9n1YQ3Vhzs00010f78@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <20030721163933.GA27482@cybershamanix.com>

On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 09:35:31AM -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:
> "We have taken a real national
> resource, our youth, and trained them to act as mindless droids, devoid of
> even the minimum reasoning powers possessed by small insects, and I am,
> inexplicably, astounded."
> 
> Hence the photo on the first page of today's NY Times.
> 
> -TD

     And for us non-new yorkers, what was that?

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk  Mon Jul 21 03:41:42 2003
From: DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk (Dave Howe)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 11:41:42 +0100
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors  
  Gilmore's email
References: <20030720230703.K75326-100000@kozubik.com>
Message-ID: <00eb01c34f74$ac9432e0$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>

John Kozubik wrote:
> Where do these ridiculous ideas come from ?  If I own a piece of
> private property, like an airplane (or an entire airline) for
> instance, I can impose whatever senseless and arbitrary conditions on
> your use of it as I please.
  Not really - there are quite clear rules in most societies against
discrimination of various sorts when you offer a public service. If you
say to passenger xxx "you can't fly with me because I don't like your
haircut/face/tattoo" then odds are good that you will get away with it. If
you say to passenger xxx "you can't fly on *this* plane because I belive
you are a security risk" and you are the captain, then you are guaranteed
to get away with it (no matter how undeserved it is) but may get hell from
head office later. If you say to *every* black passenger (or jew, or
muslim) "you can't fly with my airline" or even "your ticket will cost
double because I don't like you" then you will get slapped down, and
rightly so.
  Of course, if you have a private plane and invite a few friends to miami
with you (or even the entire bar) except for any blacks, jews or muslims
that might be wanting to come along, then that's fine - the plane is your
private property and the Political Correctness Police can go play
someplace else. Its when you are offering a public service that the rules
change.
  All the above said - if a particular captain finds a 1" badge saying
"suspected terrorist" sufficiently convincing that he then suspects you
are a terrorist, he is in his rights to throw you off his plane. Certainly
the cabin steward has no such right though, and is probably some dickless
little jobsworth that gets a kick from being able to order passengers
about. That a blanket ban on his travel (and further, that of his wife)
was imposed, simply for possession of the badge, is clearly wrong and
anti-terrorist-fever gone mad.
I also don't understand how a "federal crime" can be committed on a
english airplane - I thought the legal fiction was that from boarding the
plane to disembarking (and sometimes not even then, if you are
transferring between flights without ever legally "landing") you were in
the sovereign territory of whatever flag the airline is registered under?
  Oh, and as to the "murder" bit, IIRC the captain of a ship or plane may
legally kill you if he believes this is required for the safety of his
vessel and passengers as a whole - I would hate to see the paperwork
though unless you were actually standing there with a bomb and a gun at
the time :)

> All fine and good - and I appreciate your efforts at uncovering the
> secret directives and generally resisting the erosion of liberties,
> however it bothers me greatly that when the obvious is pointed out -
> that if the _private airlines_ become unburdened by the ID
> requirement, they will simply require it themselves - that you
> consider this unjust as well.
If any one airline decides to impose a blanket requirement (all passengers
must show ID) then that is fine. If all airlines decide to do so
independently (or even as a joint response to a situation) then that is
fine, but probably could do with a little scrutiny to make sure it really
was their idea.  However, false ID is easily enough obtained.
If the federal government decides to impose (or even "strongly recommend")
such a scheme, and further provides a list of "no fly" people (purely on
name, so you can't tell if the joe bloggs you have at your desk is a
terrorist threat, someone who wrote a purple-ink letter to the president
last year, or some other joe bloggs who is really unlucky in his choice of
name) then this is a major erosion of liberties, a deeply frightening
development, or both.




From ericm at lne.com  Mon Jul 21 11:44:53 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 11:44:53 -0700
Subject: A day in the life
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>;
  from measl@mfn.org on Sun, Jul 20, 2003 at 04:07:58PM -0500
References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307201521460.589-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <20030721114453.A25104@slack.lne.com>

On Sun, Jul 20, 2003 at 04:07:58PM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:


[ID experience at giant mega-corp casino]

[ID experience at Jiffy-loob]

If you patronize only corporate mega-stores, this is what you get.
None of the (locally-owned) resturants I eat breakfast at do any
loyalty card bullshit, they happily accept anonymous cash and the food
is wonderful.  The vendors at the local farmer's market take cash too.
The local stores in the chain of bicycle stores I sometimes go to for
tires and parts do sometimes ask me if I want to be on their buyers club
thing, I just say no and that's fine with them.

You need to shop at stores run by humans. If you have to
patronize a mega-corp, stick up for yourself.  They insist
because it works on most people.  There is no
need to baaah along with the sheep.


Eric




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Mon Jul 21 10:08:46 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:08:46 -0400
Subject: A day in the life
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D212@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Harry Bartholomew[SMTP:bart0 at earthlink.net]
> 
> My SS# begins 078-
> Issued in NY in the 50's
> 
> Harry  Bartholomew
> 
> 7/21/2003 12:25:35 AM, Bill Stewart <bill.stewart at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> >At 03:01 AM 07/21/2003 +0000, Justin wrote:
> >>J.A. Terranson (2003-07-20 21:07Z) wrote:
> >> > So I have seen two separate businesses today who are just shooting 
> >> themselves
> >> > in the head over the acquisition of data in the face of obvious
> refusal.
> >>....
> >>I'm surprised they didn't ask for your SSN ... as an index for the
> database...
> >>
> >>I've adopted a SSN I use for idiots like that.  I don't know whether
> >>it's assigned, but it's in the valid range.  Isn't that just terrible.
> >
> >Please don't do that.  You might pick a number belonging to some poor 
> >working guy
> >and mess up his credit or yours.
> >
> >I read on the net that Richard Nixon's SSN is 567-68-0515,
> >and then there's that usual 078-thing from fake SSN cards in wallets.
> 
From:
http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/ssn/SSN-addendum.html#FakeNumbers

Making a 9-digit number up at random is a bad idea, as it may coincide 
with someone's real number and cause them some amount of grief. It's 
better to use a number like 078-05-1120, which was printed on "sample" 
cards inserted in thousands of new wallets sold in the 40's and 50's. It's 
been used so widely that both the IRS and SSA recognize it immediately 
as bogus, while most clerks haven't heard of it. There were at least 40 
different people in the Selective Service database at one point who gave 
this number as their SSN. The Social Security Administration recommends 
that people showing Social Security cards in advertisements use numbers 
in the range 987-65-4320 through 987-65-4329.

There are several patterns that have never been assigned, and which 
therefore don't conflict with anyone's real number. They include numbers 
with any field all zeroes, and numbers with a first digit of 8 or 9.

- end quote - 

Peter Trei




From adam at homeport.org  Mon Jul 21 10:28:04 2003
From: adam at homeport.org (Adam Shostack)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:28:04 -0400
Subject: Heathrow employees leap out of kettle
Message-ID: <20030721172803.GA45689@lightship.internal.homeport.org>

http://silicon.com/news/164-500001/1/5237.html?rolling=1

> Staff were angered by the roll out of swipe cards which effectively
> enable bosses to monitor their comings and goings and effectively
> re-introduced the practice of clocking-on and clocking-off.
[...]
> Around 100,000 travellers and holidaymakers were left stranded at
> the world's busiest international airport by the unofficial action
> over the weekend.

Of course, the rest of us are not so privledged.

Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume




From sunder at sunder.net  Mon Jul 21 10:30:20 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:30:20 -0400 (edt)
Subject: NYT: Report on USA Patriot Act Alleges Civil Rights Violations
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307211329180.13182-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/politics/21JUST.html?hp


WASHINGTON, July 20 . A report by internal investigators at the Justice
Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which department
employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties
violations involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism law
known as the USA Patriot Act.

The inspector general's report, which was presented to Congress last week
and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among
lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its
employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab
immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations under the 2001
law.

The report said that in the six-month period that ended on June 15, the
inspector general's office had received 34 complaints of civil rights and
civil liberties violations by department employees that it considered
credible, including accusations that Muslim and Arab immigrants in federal
detention centers had been beaten.

<SNIP>


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Jul 21 11:34:43 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 14:34:43 -0400
Subject: A day in the life...NY Times today
Message-ID: <BAY7-F124I4JKP17urE00027469@hotmail.com>

> > Hence the photo on the first page of today's NY Times.
> >
> > -TD
>
>      And for us non-new yorkers, what was that?

Well, I couldn't read the caption, but from across the aisle I saw a picture 
of a US soldier holding a gun on an unarmed Muslim man in a ditch, who was 
holding his hands up and looking not super happy. I assume the photo was not 
taken in Topeka, Kansas...

-TD

_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From rah at shipwright.com  Mon Jul 21 12:02:53 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 15:02:53 -0400
Subject: <nettime> Help Wanted: Internet Spy
Message-ID: <a06001a08bb41e94c0de9@[66.149.49.6]>

--- begin forwarded text



From mv at cdc.gov  Mon Jul 21 16:22:21 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 16:22:21 -0700
Subject: Defeating Optical Tempest will be easy...
Message-ID: <3F1C75AD.F591A070@cdc.gov>

At 07:49 PM 7/21/03 +0100, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
>a_b_sorbed. Absorb is a widely used word meaning 3to drink in, to soak
up,2
>both literally and figuratively. Adsorb is a specialized technical
term,
>meaning only 3to collect a condensed gas or liquid on a surface.2

Thank you.  Have a hard time keeping them straight.  Probably a textual
clue that will undermine my pseudo-anonymity some day :-)

>The glass of CRT's absorbs so much of the X-rays that it might be hard
to
>detect a signal at all at any distance, but then the signal is not
swamped
>by noise from the not-immediately-illuminated areas, unlike the optical

>emissions.

Yes but anything that picks up the weak X-ray will be sensitive to other

normal background ionizing.  With a proportional counter like a
scintillator/PMT
combo, where you could discriminate different types of radiation on the
basis of pulse height,
but you'll be down in the photomultiplier tube's noise.  And as a cosmic
ray secondary
slows down it can generate x-rays.

Maybe if the Adversary is allowed cryogenic detectors in the next room
over... he still has to deal with the attenuating
coefficient for drywall, etc.  And again, I think basically nothing gets
through the glass.

>"0.5 milliroentgens per hour at a distance of five (5) centimeters from
any
>point on the external surface of the receiver" is the US legal
limit[*], and
>low voltage (and thus very low x-ray emission) crt monitors are common
now,
>if not a de-facto standard.

That's pretty hot, actually.   A glass vial of 5 gms U Acetate is only
twice that,
a few mm from the alpha-window of a GM detector.
And the broad face of a CRT means 1/R^2 doesn't apply until you
get some distance away... more like 1/R for an infinite slab.

>However, I expect shot noise to be a limiting factor here.
Unfortunately,
>the Roentgen is such a wierd unit it's not that easy to convert it to
>photons and do the math!

Since the signal is rastering at MHz, you can't very well integrate
ionizing radiation over long times,
as you could to say detect the betas coming out of a jar of salt
substitute (potassium).

Roentgens are defined as producing a certain amount of ionization in dry
air.
The photons doing the ionizing would range from the 10's of keV for
X-rays
to MeV for gammas.  (Careful with that brightness control Eugene!)  An
ion
pair takes about 37 eV to form.  Compare with visible light's very small
range,
blue to red.

>I use 180:210:210[**] (r:g:b) text on a 255:255:255 window background
at
>present, with very light wallpaper, though I speckle both slightly.
It's a
>little hard to read, but much better than some other suggested
combinations.

I hope you don't do this all the time...

>[*]< Probably far too high for safety! Originally for TV's, where the
>viewing distance is much higher. But most modern monitors will emit
much
>less than that. I hope! >

As do TVs.  Nowadays its the Radon daughters attracted to the charged
glass
that will be giving you your RDA (Radiation Daily Allowance.. RDA is a
Yank FDA pun)

Also some of the TV radiation was from HV tubes inside the box; that was
solved by first
using leaded glass (hack!) and then more elegantly by getting rid of
tubes.




From measl at mfn.org  Mon Jul 21 16:05:00 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 18:05:00 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: A day in the life...NY Times today
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F31Z9n1YQ3Vhzs00010f78@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307211803400.10656-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> "We have taken a real national
> resource, our youth, and trained them to act as mindless droids, devoid of
> even the minimum reasoning powers possessed by small insects, and I am,
> inexplicably, astounded."
> 
> Hence the photo on the first page of today's NY Times.

For those of us not on the Right Coast, please provide a link to the
photo.  I looked at various NYT web pages, but saw nothing that looked to be
what you were trying to reference :-(

> 
> -TD
> 

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko




From john at kozubik.com  Mon Jul 21 18:06:08 2003
From: john at kozubik.com (John Kozubik)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 18:06:08 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors  
    Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <3F1C0522.D7424726@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <20030721180412.N60664-100000@kozubik.com>

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> >Where do these ridiculous ideas come from ?  If I own a piece of
> private
> >property, like an airplane (or an entire airline) for instance, I can
> >impose whatever senseless and arbitrary conditions on your use of it as
> I
> >please.
>
> Yes.
> Except that you entered into a contract to transport a human in exchange
>
> for money.  No where in the contract was "banned speech" mentioned.

If there are no provisions whatever for discretionary removal, then BA was
wrong to remove Gilmore - they broke their agreement.  However, I'll bet
if you read _all_ the fine print, somewhere there exists in the
contract/agreement a provision for just that.

-----
John Kozubik - john at kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com




From measl at mfn.org  Mon Jul 21 16:07:02 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 18:07:02 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: A day in the life...NY Times today
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F31Z9n1YQ3Vhzs00010f78@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307211806070.10656-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> "We have taken a real national
> resource, our youth, and trained them to act as mindless droids, devoid of
> even the minimum reasoning powers possessed by small insects, and I am,
> inexplicably, astounded."
> 
> Hence the photo on the first page of today's NY Times.
> 
> -TD

Uggghhh.  I hate replying to myself - never mind, I think I found it :-(.

Yes.  Exactly so.  My point holds...

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko




From zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk  Mon Jul 21 11:49:03 2003
From: zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk (Peter Fairbrother)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:49:03 +0100
Subject: Defeating Optical Tempest will be easy...
In-Reply-To: <3F1C0593.59CB87C1@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <BB41F42F.340E0%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>

Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> At 02:17 AM 7/21/03 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>> On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
>> There is some minuscule proportion of X-rays produced by CRT displays.
> 
> Produced by the ebeam decelerating on the shadow mask, but adsorbed
> by the glass.
> 

a_b_sorbed. Absorb is a widely used word meaning 3to drink in, to soak up,2
both literally and figuratively. Adsorb is a specialized technical term,
meaning only 3to collect a condensed gas or liquid on a surface.2



The glass of CRT's absorbs so much of the X-rays that it might be hard to
detect a signal at all at any distance, but then the signal is not swamped
by noise from the not-immediately-illuminated areas, unlike the optical
emissions.

"0.5 milliroentgens per hour at a distance of five (5) centimeters from any
point on the external surface of the receiver" is the US legal limit[*], and
low voltage (and thus very low x-ray emission) crt monitors are common now,
if not a de-facto standard.

However, I expect shot noise to be a limiting factor here. Unfortunately,
the Roentgen is such a wierd unit it's not that easy to convert it to
photons and do the math!




A light background on a CRT screen image will give out enough delayed light
to give problems in the s/n ratio of an optical TEMPEST attack. It's much
easier to "see" white text on a black background than black text on a white
background.


I use 180:210:210[**] (r:g:b) text on a 255:255:255 window background at
present, with very light wallpaper, though I speckle both slightly. It's a
little hard to read, but much better than some other suggested combinations.



[*]< Probably far too high for safety! Originally for TV's, where the
viewing distance is much higher. But most modern monitors will emit much
less than that. I hope! >

[**]< I replaced the black in Marcus's anti-em-tempest fonts with
180:210:210, and varied the other colours in proportion. >

-- 
Peter Fairbrother




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Mon Jul 21 17:12:36 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:12:36 -0400
Subject: Cypherpunks archive
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307211747410.17513-100000@bangbang>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307211747410.17513-100000@bangbang>
Message-ID: <200307212012.36152.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Monday 21 July 2003 19:49, someone wrote:
>   Can you make the raw mbox archive available, or do you have that? 
> If it's less than about 200 meg, I can also receive it as an
> attachment, if you're sadistic with your mail server.

Let me think about it, and maybe ask some of the list members. The HTML 
that appears on the web page is sanitized a bit to prevent address 
harvesting. Not that c-punks' addresses are that hard to obtain other 
ways, but when I started the archive several people emphatically stated 
that they wanted the sanitizing.

Maybe I'll write a short script to sanitize the addresses in the mbox. 
That'll take a while to develop, to make sure I don't miss anything and 
because my spare time is limited for the next month and a half.

If I do make the mboxes available, they'll be available as .gz's off my 
top cypherpunks page. I'll post to the list if I do it.


List members: any preferences?


SRF

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From decoy at iki.fi  Mon Jul 21 10:34:09 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:34:09 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors    
  Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <3F1C0522.D7424726@cdc.gov>
References: <3F1C0522.D7424726@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307212028420.6837@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-21, Major Variola (ret) uttered:

>Private property rights, of course. But contract law too.

I wouldn't forget the more stringent standards of nonexclusivity and
isonomy we'd want to apply to our dealings with public authorities,
either. I mean, I have real trouble seeing how BA could have arrived at
such ghastly safety guidelines absent some help from the powers that be.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Mon Jul 21 18:04:37 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 21:04:37 -0400
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <a06001a9ebb4126114b3f@[66.149.49.6]>
References: <a06001a9ebb4126114b3f@[66.149.49.6]>
Message-ID: <200307212104.37725.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Monday 21 July 2003 01:12, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
> <http://nytimes.com/2003/07/21/technology/21PATE.html?pagewanted=prin
>t&position=>
>
> A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online

I worked on a commercial digital money system a few years ago. One of 
their business models was almost identical to Amos': stick cash in a 
kiosk to get electronic money. It'd be interesting to see how that 
system plays with Amos' patent. (I won't be able to observe directly, 
as I was fired from that company because I'm an incompetent slacker 
(boss's view) or because the boss was a jack-booted jackass (my view).)


-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Tue Jul 22 04:16:30 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 06:16:30 -0500
Subject: Fisk articles
Message-ID: <20030722111630.GA28715@cybershamanix.com>

   Does anyone have access to the fulltext articles by Robert Fisk like this one
on alleged torture in US internment camps in Iraq:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=426520 that the
Independant offers on a subscription basis?

 -- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From cryptomjs at eudoramail.com  Tue Jul 22 08:05:26 2003
From: cryptomjs at eudoramail.com (Mark Saarelainen)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 08:05:26 -0700
Subject: I remind everybody to drink a bottle of wisky a day ...
Message-ID: <JJCJDHIOCIOEEEAA@whowhere.com>

You get a kind ofa good feeling then....




Need a new email address that people can remember
Check out the new EudoraMail at
http://www.eudoramail.com




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul 22 09:10:03 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 09:10:03 -0700
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Message-ID: <3F1D61DB.38131150@cdc.gov>

At 10:25 AM 7/22/03 -0400, Sunder wrote:
>> I worked on a commercial digital money system a few years ago. One of

>> their business models was almost identical to Amos': stick cash in a
>> kiosk to get electronic money. It'd be interesting to see how that
>> system plays with Amos' patent.
>
>It's not going to be anonymous at all.  Remember, ATM's are always
>protected by cameras.  If the digicash isn't anonymous, it's worthless.

Yes to all points.  Of course, this is why a bandana/burkha/ski mask
is a good thing to carry when approaching an ATM.
Better if they're IR opaque.  Best not to
do this if the ATM is attached to a bank though, for the sake
of the guards' underwear :-)




From declan at well.com  Tue Jul 22 06:22:36 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 09:22:36 -0400
Subject: old encryption paper
In-Reply-To: <20030719203350.3A74F99AA5@gnu-darwin.org>; from
  proclus@gnu-darwin.org on Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 04:33:37PM -0400
References: <20030719203350.3A74F99AA5@gnu-darwin.org>
Message-ID: <20030722092236.A5731@cluebot.com>

On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 04:33:37PM -0400, proclus at gnu-darwin.org wrote:
> IMHO, it is exactly this kind of commentary which scuttled an attack
> on free encryption software in the wake of the attack.  Moreover, the
> monolith authentication schemes were also laid to rest or driven

Well, no. This kind of commentary made folks on mailing lists like
these feel warm and fuzzy and made some other tech types realize what
was at stake. But Sen. Judd Gregg's proposal failed because of lack of
support from his colleagues and opposition from well-connected
industry lobbyists, not people writing about "GNU-Darwin" (probably
not one congresscritter knows what that means anyway, or cares).

-Declan




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Tue Jul 22 06:37:59 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 09:37:59 -0400
Subject: Cypherpunks archive
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D214@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

I'd very much like to see the archives in a downloadable
form.

Peter


> ----------
> From: 	Steve Furlong[SMTP:sfurlong at acmenet.net]
> Sent: 	Monday, July 21, 2003 8:12 PM
> To: 	cypherpunks at lne.com
> Subject: 	Re: Cypherpunks archive
> 
> On Monday 21 July 2003 19:49, someone wrote:
> >   Can you make the raw mbox archive available, or do you have that? 
> > If it's less than about 200 meg, I can also receive it as an
> > attachment, if you're sadistic with your mail server.
> 
> Let me think about it, and maybe ask some of the list members. The HTML 
> that appears on the web page is sanitized a bit to prevent address 
> harvesting. Not that c-punks' addresses are that hard to obtain other 
> ways, but when I started the archive several people emphatically stated 
> that they wanted the sanitizing.
> 
> Maybe I'll write a short script to sanitize the addresses in the mbox. 
> That'll take a while to develop, to make sure I don't miss anything and 
> because my spare time is limited for the next month and a half.
> 
> If I do make the mboxes available, they'll be available as .gz's off my 
> top cypherpunks page. I'll post to the list if I do it.
> 
> 
> List members: any preferences?
> 
> 
> SRF
> 
> -- 
> Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel
> 
> "If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
> their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
> these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul 22 09:52:23 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 09:52:23 -0700
Subject: A tiny bit of karma for BA
Message-ID: <3F1D6BC6.8CE5C822@cdc.gov>

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030722/ts_afp/britain_air_strike_company_ba_030722122901

LONDON (AFP) - British Airways was battling to clear a backlog of
frustrated
passengers stranded at London's Heathrow Airport, some of whom had been
stuck there for four days after a wildcat strike by check-in staff.




From sunder at sunder.net  Tue Jul 22 07:25:59 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 10:25:59 -0400 (edt)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <200307212104.37725.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307221023200.4589-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Steve Furlong wrote:

> On Monday 21 July 2003 01:12, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
> > <http://nytimes.com/2003/07/21/technology/21PATE.html?pagewanted=prin
> >t&position=>
> >
> > A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
> 
> I worked on a commercial digital money system a few years ago. One of 
> their business models was almost identical to Amos': stick cash in a 
> kiosk to get electronic money. It'd be interesting to see how that 
> system plays with Amos' patent. 

It's not going to be anonymous at all.  Remember, ATM's are always
protected by cameras.  If the digicash isn't anonymous, it's worthless.

> (I won't be able to observe directly, 
> as I was fired from that company because I'm an incompetent slacker 
> (boss's view) or because the boss was a jack-booted jackass (my view).)

Shit happens.  Just be happy you're not working at IBM.  It was leaked
that they're outsourcing to India, etc...

  see: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10613


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Tue Jul 22 10:40:20 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 10:40:20 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Fisk articles
In-Reply-To: <20030722111630.GA28715@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307221037200.27981-100000@eskimo.com>

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>    Does anyone have access to the fulltext articles by Robert Fisk like this one
> on alleged torture in US internment camps in Iraq:
> http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=426520 that the
> Independant offers on a subscription basis?

No, but you can buy them one at a time if you like.  I'm waiting till
I get some extra cash so I can subscribe, ever since they moved Fisk over
to the pay column I've been missing a lot of good stories.  I think it's
worth paying for, I just have to justify it to my wife :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk  Tue Jul 22 04:24:28 2003
From: DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk (Dave Howe)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 12:24:28 +0100
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors  
     Gilmore's email
References: <20030721180412.N60664-100000@kozubik.com>
Message-ID: <012301c35043$d2c96230$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>

John Kozubik wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>
>>> Where do these ridiculous ideas come from ?  If I own a piece of
>>> private property, like an airplane (or an entire airline) for
>>> instance, I can impose whatever senseless and arbitrary conditions
>>> on your use of it as I please.
>>
>> Yes.
>> Except that you entered into a contract to transport a human in
>> exchange
>>
>> for money.  No where in the contract was "banned speech" mentioned.
>
> If there are no provisions whatever for discretionary removal, then
> BA was wrong to remove Gilmore - they broke their agreement.
> However, I'll bet if you read _all_ the fine print, somewhere there
> exists in the contract/agreement a provision for just that.
well, there are the following (from
http://www.britishairways.com/travel/genconcarr/public/en_gb ):
-------------------------------------------------
Our right to refuse to carry you or to ban you from travel
a) Our right to refuse to carry you

We may decide to refuse to carry you or your baggage if one or more of the
following has happened or we reasonably believe may happen.

1) If carrying you or your baggage may put the safety of the aircraft or
the safety or health of any person in the aircraft in danger.

2) If carrying you or your baggage may affect the comfort of any person in
the aircraft.

3) If you are drunk or under the influence of drink or drugs.

4) If you are, or we reasonably believe you are, in unlawful possession of
drugs.

5) If your mental or physical state is a danger or risk to you, the
aircraft or any person in it.

6) If you have refused to allow a security check to be carried out on you
or your baggage.

7) If you have not obeyed the instructions of our ground staff or a member
of the crew of the aircraft relating to safety or security.

8) If you have used threatening, abusive or insulting words towards our
ground staff or a member of the crew of the aircraft.

9) If you have behaved in a threatening, abusive, insulting or disorderly
way towards a member of our ground staff or a member of the crew of the
aircraft.

10) If you have deliberately interfered with a member of the crew of the
aircraft carrying out their duties.

11) If you have put the safety of either the aircraft or any person in it
in danger.

12) If you have made a hoax bomb threat.

13) If you have committed a criminal offence during the check-in or
boarding processes or on board the aircraft.

14) If you have not, or do not appear to have, valid travel documents.

15) If you try to enter a country for which your travel documents are not
valid.

16) If the immigration authority for the country you are travelling to, or
for a country in which you have a stopover, has told us (either orally or
in writing) that it has decided not to allow you to enter that country,
even if you have, or appear to have, valid travel documents.

17) If you destroy your travel documents during the flight.

18) If you have refused to allow us to photocopy your travel documents.

19) If you have refused to give your travel documents to a member of the
crew of the aircraft, when we have asked you to do so.

20) If you ask the relevant government authorities for permission to enter
a country in which you have landed as a transit passenger.

21) If carrying you would break government laws, regulations, or orders.

22) If you have refused to give us information which a government
authority has asked us to provide about you.

23) If you have not presented a valid ticket.

24) If you have not paid the fare (including any taxes, fees or charges)
for your journey.

25) If you have presented a ticket acquired illegally.

26) bIf you have presented a ticket which you did not buy from us or our
authorised agents.

27) If you have presented a ticket which was not issued by us or our
authorised agents.

28) If you have presented a ticket which has been reported as being lost
or stolen.

29) If you have presented a counterfeit ticket.

30) If you have presented a ticket with an alteration made neither by us
nor our authorised agents.

31) If you have presented a spoiled, torn or damaged ticket or a ticket
which has been tampered with.

32) If you cannot prove you are the person named in the ticket.

33) If you have changed your transportation without our agreement as set
out in clause 3c.

34) If you have failed to present your ticket or your boarding pass or
your travel documents to us when reasonably asked to do so.

35) If you have failed to complete the check-in process by the check-in
deadline.

36) If you have failed to arrive at the boarding gate on time.

37) If you have behaved in a way mentioned above on or in connection with
a previous flight and we believe you may repeat this behaviour.

b) Our right to refuse to carry you when we have banned you from our route
network

1) We will be entitled to refuse to carry you or your baggage if we have
given you a banning notice and you have bought your ticket while the ban
applies.

2) By a banning notice we mean a written notice we have given to you
informing you that you are banned from being carried on our route network.
(This means you are banned from travelling on all flights we operate.)
This notice will give the date when the ban comes into force and the
period for which it applies. A banning notice will also ask you not to buy
a ticket or ask or allow anyone to do so for you.

3) If you try to travel while a banning notice is in force, we will refuse
to carry you and you will be entitled to an involuntary fare refund.

--------------------------------------------------------
There are no obvious grounds for discressionary removal based on wearing a
badge (or being married to a habitual badge-wearer) but the "banning
notice" thing looks to be a blanket refusal option written up to look like
something else - I don't read this as saying you have to have met the
section (a) criteria for them to issue a banning notice, in which case
they can refuse you for no reason at all provided they put it in writing.




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Tue Jul 22 11:17:44 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 13:17:44 -0500
Subject: Fisk articles
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307221037200.27981-100000@eskimo.com>
References: <20030722111630.GA28715@cybershamanix.com>
  <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307221037200.27981-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <20030722181744.GA28993@cybershamanix.com>

On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 10:40:20AM -0700, Mike Rosing wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> 
> >    Does anyone have access to the fulltext articles by Robert Fisk like this one
> > on alleged torture in US internment camps in Iraq:
> > http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=426520 that the
> > Independant offers on a subscription basis?
> 
> No, but you can buy them one at a time if you like.  I'm waiting till
> I get some extra cash so I can subscribe, ever since they moved Fisk over
> to the pay column I've been missing a lot of good stories.  I think it's
> worth paying for, I just have to justify it to my wife :-)

   Yeah, I know I can, but I'm so broke I can barely pay attention. Too bad the
local library doesn't have a sub to the Independant. 8-(


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Tue Jul 22 11:39:41 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 13:39:41 -0500
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307221023200.4589-100000@anon7.arachelian.c
  om>
References: <200307212104.37725.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
  <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307221023200.4589-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>
Message-ID: <20030722183941.GB28993@cybershamanix.com>

On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 10:25:59AM -0400, Sunder wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Steve Furlong wrote:
> 
> > (I won't be able to observe directly, 
> > as I was fired from that company because I'm an incompetent slacker 
> > (boss's view) or because the boss was a jack-booted jackass (my view).)
> 
> Shit happens.  Just be happy you're not working at IBM.  It was leaked
> that they're outsourcing to India, etc...
> 
>   see: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10613

   Remember when the manufacturing jobs starting going south and they said
"don't worry, this is an information economy now, and they'll all be information
workers"? Not that I believed that at all, but now that all the information jobs
are going south (or rather east and west), what are they claiming people will do
here? Other than work at Hardee's, I mean. 


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Tue Jul 22 14:31:15 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 14:31:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors  
   Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <1303.202.27.185.71.1058907896.squirrel@www.crypt.gen.nz>
Message-ID: <200307222131.h6MLVFvc032087@artifact.psychedelic.net>

> I felt sorry for the other 300 people on the plane who had their flight
> delayed for some guy with a small badge on his chest, and a big chip on
> his shoulder.

The other 300 people on the plane had their flight delayed by the actions
of the carrier, not by the actions of Gilmore.

You are falling for the usual mental trap here of viewing authority as
some sort of inviolate physical law, and transferring responsibilty onto
the victim for "making them do it."

You should watch that in the future. 

I mean, a 1 inch button, for Christ's sake.  They must have had to use a
magnifying glass to read the slogan.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From sunder at sunder.net  Tue Jul 22 11:52:58 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 14:52:58 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Fisk articles
In-Reply-To: <20030722111630.GA28715@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307221452210.4589-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

No, but googling around I found this gem:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/2003/iraq06302003.html


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>    Does anyone have access to the fulltext articles by Robert Fisk like this one
> on alleged torture in US internment camps in Iraq:
> http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=426520 that the
> Independant offers on a subscription basis?
> 
>  -- 
> Harmon Seaver	
> CyberShamanix
> http://www.cybershamanix.com




From sunder at sunder.net  Tue Jul 22 12:25:35 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 15:25:35 -0400 (edt)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <3F1D61DB.38131150@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307221523070.4589-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

I wonder if some sort of infrared LED laden bandana be made for the
benefit of the cameras. :)  Maybe something like those scrolling
blackboard things that say stuff...

It could say things like "I'm ANONYMOUS, Neener neener, nya, nya, nya"

I wonder what the guards would do then?

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> Yes to all points.  Of course, this is why a bandana/burkha/ski mask
> is a good thing to carry when approaching an ATM.
> Better if they're IR opaque.  Best not to
> do this if the ATM is attached to a bank though, for the sake
> of the guards' underwear :-)




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Tue Jul 22 13:41:47 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 16:41:47 -0400
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Message-ID: <BAY7-F29MGLoU2gOHpM0000c6d8@hotmail.com>

"Remember when the manufacturing jobs starting going south and they said
"don't worry, this is an information economy now, and they'll all be 
information
workers"? Not that I believed that at all, but now that all the information 
jobs
are going south (or rather east and west), what are they claiming people 
will do
here? Other than work at Hardee's, I mean."

Well, there should be some Telecom contracts coming out of Iraq soon. And 
when those dry up maybe we'll find some more terrorists in, say, some of the 
'stans.

-TD


>From: Harmon Seaver <hseaver at cybershamanix.com>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
>Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 13:39:41 -0500
>
>On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 10:25:59AM -0400, Sunder wrote:
> > On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Steve Furlong wrote:
> >
> > > (I won't be able to observe directly,
> > > as I was fired from that company because I'm an incompetent slacker
> > > (boss's view) or because the boss was a jack-booted jackass (my 
>view).)
> >
> > Shit happens.  Just be happy you're not working at IBM.  It was leaked
> > that they're outsourcing to India, etc...
> >
> >   see: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10613
>
>    Remember when the manufacturing jobs starting going south and they said
>"don't worry, this is an information economy now, and they'll all be 
>information
>workers"? Not that I believed that at all, but now that all the information 
>jobs
>are going south (or rather east and west), what are they claiming people 
>will do
>here? Other than work at Hardee's, I mean.
>
>
>--
>Harmon Seaver
>CyberShamanix
>http://www.cybershamanix.com

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From adam.lydick at verizon.net  Tue Jul 22 17:01:43 2003
From: adam.lydick at verizon.net (Adam Lydick)
Date: 22 Jul 2003 17:01:43 -0700
Subject: curious about covert channels
Message-ID: <1058918502.16528.6.camel@lorien>

Had a random thought and was curious if anyone had an opinion on this:

Would message-ID, and other realated mail headers that contain
pseudo-random data, make a good covert channel?

Eg: instead of choosing a pseudo-random value for the message ID,
encrypt a block of data of the same length as the ID with a preshared
secret key.

Issues that spring to mind:
* small, you would need quite a few overt messages to transfer anything
sizeable over the covert channel.
* Is it possible to tell the difference between pseudo-randomly picked
values (typical mail client), encrypted data (depending on algorithm),
and real randomness? (I suppose this could make the channel detectable)

Thanks,

Adam Lydick




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Tue Jul 22 15:08:59 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 17:08:59 -0500
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors
  Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <1303.202.27.185.71.1058907896.squirrel@www.crypt.gen.nz>
References: <20030721180412.N60664-100000@kozubik.com>
  <012301c35043$d2c96230$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
  <1303.202.27.185.71.1058907896.squirrel@www.crypt.gen.nz>
Message-ID: <20030722220859.GA29101@cybershamanix.com>

On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 09:04:56AM +1200, Kerry Thompson wrote:
> I felt sorry for the other 300 people on the plane who had their flight
> delayed for some guy with a small badge on his chest, and a big chip on
> his shoulder.

   Fuck that noise -- it should happen every single flight until the jackass
pilots/crew get the message. 


-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From morlockelloi at yahoo.com  Tue Jul 22 20:17:39 2003
From: morlockelloi at yahoo.com (Morlock Elloi)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 20:17:39 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307230315550.22207@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <20030723031739.55749.qmail@web40612.mail.yahoo.com>

> >If the digicash isn't anonymous, it's worthless.
> 
> I'd argue to the contrary. First, "most people have nothing to hide".
> The folks will want digicash for reasons other than anonymity, as argued

You are misusing the term "cash". What you are describing are essentially
"internet debit cards." While it is attractive to insert word "cash" into any
harebrained "net money" scheme, exactly because of positive associations with
CASH, it is misleading and deceptive.

Cash means off-line clearing and anonymous. If it is complicated to understand,
open your wallet, take a banknote out of it and ponder what it is for a minute.
 



=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Tue Jul 22 23:56:50 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 23:56:50 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
Message-ID: <20030723065650.82911.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,

Yesterdays briefing on the death of saddams sons-the
bodies were said to be send for positive
identification through dna tests.How are these samples
obtained anyway?Royal Saloons,Royal Doctors,Visits to
the US during peace times?What more effecient methods
are used?

Sarath.



__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Wed Jul 23 00:20:26 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 03:20:26 -0400
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
In-Reply-To: <20030723065650.82911.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <20030723065650.82911.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <200307230320.26189.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Wednesday 23 July 2003 02:56, Sarad AV wrote:

> Yesterdays briefing on the death of saddams sons-the
> bodies were said to be send for positive
> identification through dna tests.How are these samples
> obtained anyway?Royal Saloons,Royal Doctors,Visits to
> the US during peace times?What more effecient methods
> are used?

Samples from known relatives, I'd guess, along with any other means that 
comes to hand.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From decoy at iki.fi  Tue Jul 22 17:29:39 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 03:29:39 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307221023200.4589-100000@anon7.arachelian.c
  om>
References: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307221023200.4589-100000@anon7.arachelian.co
  m>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307230315550.22207@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-22, Sunder uttered:

>If the digicash isn't anonymous, it's worthless.

I'd argue to the contrary. First, "most people have nothing to hide".
The folks will want digicash for reasons other than anonymity, as argued
by this particular "inventor" (I've wanted to handle my cash automatically
eversince I got my first debit card). Second, once the cash is online,
it's considerably easier to pool it, confuse the authorities about it,
connect it to the existing anonymity infrastructure, build secondary
services which allow its origin to be completely masked, and so on.

These sorts of hacks can well bridge the gap between ordinary cash/credit
and truly anonymous online specie. They aren't the final solution, but
they can help overcome the chicken and egg problem inherent in all
digicash.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From decoy at iki.fi  Tue Jul 22 18:01:24 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 04:01:24 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber censors
  Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <1303.202.27.185.71.1058907896.squirrel@www.crypt.gen.nz>
References: <20030721180412.N60664-100000@kozubik.com> 
  <012301c35043$d2c96230$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
  <1303.202.27.185.71.1058907896.squirrel@www.crypt.gen.nz>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307230337040.22207@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-23, Kerry Thompson uttered:

>I felt sorry for the other 300 people on the plane who had their flight
>delayed for some guy with a small badge on his chest, and a big chip on
>his shoulder.

Sure it's nasty that the flight was delayed. But was it John's fault?
Likely not -- he seems to have behaved well within his rights, morally
speaking. Quite unlike the flight crew. (IOW, BA seems like the least cost
avoider in this particular dispute.) Naturally there should be refunds and
amends, but those should probably come from the crew's pockets. Not
John's.

Furthermore, the terms of contract posted earlier seem far too vague and
limiting to meet the usual standards of valid contract under a naove
interpretation of Common Law. (IANAL, but both good will and meeting of
minds appear to fail.) If so, BA ought to be in serious trouble. In the
ideal world they would lose in court, and have to either reevaluate their
guidelines or state them more explicitly. In the first case, everybody
would be happy, with John off the hook. In the second, they should meet
with widespread public outrage, a thorough-going boycott, huge financial
losses and the unavoidable backdrop to simpler terms of contract.
Otherwise: bankruptcy.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Wed Jul 23 06:09:15 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 06:09:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Fisk articles
In-Reply-To: <20030722181744.GA28993@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307230607370.26640-100000@eskimo.com>

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>    Yeah, I know I can, but I'm so broke I can barely pay attention. Too bad the
> local library doesn't have a sub to the Independant. 8-(

I'm looking for a new job.  If I'm lucky, I'll get a "real" one and
can send you some Fisk fix :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From s.schear at comcast.net  Wed Jul 23 08:27:52 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 08:27:52 -0700
Subject: Leech politics could be bad for your health
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030723082601.0448ffc0@mail.comcast.net>

Could your political beliefs determine how long you live? New research from 
sociologist Dr William Cockerham and colleagues from the University of 
Alabama in the United States has found that differences in attitudes to 
looking after your body and your health are predicted by your political 
allegiances.

It seems those who believe the state should take responsibility for most 
aspects of life also tend to eschew personal responsibility for taking care 
of themselves. As a result, they are more likely to engage in lifestyles 
hazardous to their health, including drinking to excess and not exercising.

http://thescotsman.co.uk/health.cfm?id=765012003

steve

"Il dulce far niente"  The sweetness of doing nothing
My unemployment motto 




From cypher at crypt.gen.nz  Tue Jul 22 14:04:56 2003
From: cypher at crypt.gen.nz (Kerry Thompson)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 09:04:56 +1200 (NZST)
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors  
  Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <012301c35043$d2c96230$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
References: <20030721180412.N60664-100000@kozubik.com>
  <012301c35043$d2c96230$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
Message-ID: <1303.202.27.185.71.1058907896.squirrel@www.crypt.gen.nz>

Dave Howe said:
> John Kozubik wrote:
[snip]
> There are no obvious grounds for discressionary removal based on wearing
> a badge (or being married to a habitual badge-wearer) but the "banning
> notice" thing looks to be a blanket refusal option written up to look
> like something else - I don't read this as saying you have to have met
> the section (a) criteria for them to issue a banning notice, in which
> case they can refuse you for no reason at all provided they put it in
> writing.

True, but Gilmore clearly refused an order from the Captain despite his
view that the order to remove the badge was in breach of some rights that
he thought he had. At this point of refusal the presence of a badge
becomes secondary, and Gilmore has probably breached a few rules, such as
:

> 7) If you have not obeyed the instructions of our ground staff or a member
> of the crew of the aircraft relating to safety or security.

.. and maybe :

> 9) If you have behaved in a threatening, abusive, insulting or disorderly
> way towards a member of our ground staff or a member of the crew of the
> aircraft.

if you could class Gilmore's actions as disorderly.
.. and :

> 10) If you have deliberately interfered with a member of the crew of the
> aircraft carrying out their duties.

where the duties could have been those of the flight assistant to have the
badge removed.

I felt sorry for the other 300 people on the plane who had their flight
delayed for some guy with a small badge on his chest, and a big chip on
his shoulder.




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul 23 06:18:41 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 09:18:41 -0400
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber censors
  Gilmore's email
Message-ID: <BAY7-F74cLc4Tq1o1ia00001f0d@hotmail.com>

Eric Cordia wrote...

"I mean, a 1 inch button, for Christ's sake.  They must have had to use a
magnifying glass to read the slogan."

Actually, that's an interesting point. Let's first of all remember that 
Gilmore was allowed onto the plane in the first place, so airport security 
didn't care or notice. And it doesn't seem that onboard Gilmore was causing 
a ruckus or creating the sense of insecurity. And I'm willing to bet that 
none of the staff actually felt/believed that the guy was a threat (let's 
assume they have the right to remove somebody that perceived to be a 
threat). So clearly this was punitive.

No don't get me wrong, I would have thought the guy was a little bit of dick 
for "spooking the straights", and I would have been tempted (note the word 
tempted) to punch that button off of him so we didn't have to turn around.

But it sounds like a rehash of the mall incident...had he walked onto the 
flight with a button that said "I support our troops", he wouldn't have been 
thrown off. Thus everyone has become a kind of thought cop....but what 
they're enforcing is not the collective perceived reality, but what most 
people believe the collective perceived reality is supposed to be. There're 
cracks already though, and the fact that NY Times ran that photo on the 
front page the other day means a lot, actually...

-TD





>From: Eric Cordian <emc at artifact.psychedelic.net>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors     
>Gilmore's email
>Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 14:31:15 -0700 (PDT)
>
> > I felt sorry for the other 300 people on the plane who had their flight
> > delayed for some guy with a small badge on his chest, and a big chip on
> > his shoulder.
>
>The other 300 people on the plane had their flight delayed by the actions
>of the carrier, not by the actions of Gilmore.
>
>You are falling for the usual mental trap here of viewing authority as
>some sort of inviolate physical law, and transferring responsibilty onto
>the victim for "making them do it."
>
>You should watch that in the future.
>
>I mean, a 1 inch button, for Christ's sake.  They must have had to use a
>magnifying glass to read the slogan.
>
>--
>Eric Michael Cordian 0+
>O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
>"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From timcmay at got.net  Wed Jul 23 09:42:07 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 09:42:07 -0700
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
In-Reply-To: <20030723065650.82911.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <995120CC-BD2C-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 11:56 PM, Sarad AV wrote:

> hi,
>
> Yesterdays briefing on the death of saddams sons-the
> bodies were said to be send for positive
> identification through dna tests.How are these samples
> obtained anyway?Royal Saloons,Royal Doctors,Visits to
> the US during peace times?What more effecient methods
> are used?
>

Hair samples, dandruff, etc. A bunch of reports over the past several 
months that the houses and villas of Hussein and his family had been 
gone over carefully for traces of hair, old shaving razors, skin 
particles, etc.

Even if doctors and such have not been bribed or coerced into providing 
blood samples, lots of ways to track DNA. All a matter of economics, as 
usual.

--Tim May




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul 23 09:58:48 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 09:58:48 -0700
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
Message-ID: <3F1EBEC8.302D9ECF@cdc.gov>

At 11:56 PM 7/22/03 -0700, Sarad AV wrote:
>Yesterdays briefing on the death of saddams sons-the
>bodies were said to be send for positive
>identification through dna tests.How are these samples
>obtained anyway?Royal Saloons,Royal Doctors,Visits to
>the US during peace times?What more effecient methods
>are used?
>
>Sarath.

A guy was busted by using DNA from an envelope he licked
in response to a "sting" letter from the police (but not appearing so).

A guy was caught because his *son's* DNA was on file.

Go dump-diving in places where his trash is dumped.  And at
his relatives houses.  Befriend/employ someone where he/they get
their bloodwork done.  Cleaning people who dust where he sits.
His barber.  His launderer.

Wonder how they got their dentalcharts.

They'll have to show us the beef if they want to be believed.
Of course, Bush and Rummy holding their heads on sticks
will have to be edited from US markets...

The first rule of missile fighting: the one who brings the full-auto
rifle loses.




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Jul 23 07:44:51 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 10:44:51 EDT
Subject: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber censors
  Gilmore's email
Message-ID: <198.1d8cf494.2c4ff963@aol.com>

In a message dated 7/23/2003 9:23:58 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
camera_lumina at hotmail.com writes:
Actually, that's an interesting point. Let's first of all remember that 
Gilmore was allowed onto the plane in the first place, so airport security 
didn't care or notice. 

You are correct, and this means that the TSA Nazis failed to adequately 
identify a potential security threat.  The button being discovered by British 
Airways.

Remember 9/11 was a failure of our alphabet agencies for adequately 
protecting us, and naturally in response we've run to protection to another new 
alphabet agency, how sad.

http://www.freeohio.us/pamphlets/airport.pdf

Regards,  Matt-




From sunder at sunder.net  Wed Jul 23 08:42:06 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 11:42:06 -0400 (edt)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307230315550.22207@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307231136140.10173-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

You do have somewhat of a point, but consider this.  Real cash is
anonymous.  If you want to do electronic payments that are non-anonymous
you can simply use a credit card or debit card (or something like paypal,
egold), or for larger quanitities you can do wire transfers - so why would
we need yet another a non-anonymous "cash" that isn't cash?

Just because it's cool and we can call it electronic cash?  What's the
point?  Why would you bother building it?  Why would anyone bother using
it?

Confusing the authorities is a dumb thing to consider as a reason.  They
will smarten up pretty quickly if they think you're doing something
illegal, and it won't make any difference what cool technical toys you
have used.


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

> On 2003-07-22, Sunder uttered:
> 
> >If the digicash isn't anonymous, it's worthless.
> 
> I'd argue to the contrary. First, "most people have nothing to hide".
> The folks will want digicash for reasons other than anonymity, as argued
> by this particular "inventor" (I've wanted to handle my cash automatically
> eversince I got my first debit card). Second, once the cash is online,
> it's considerably easier to pool it, confuse the authorities about it,
> connect it to the existing anonymity infrastructure, build secondary
> services which allow its origin to be completely masked, and so on.




From netkita at earthlink.net  Wed Jul 23 08:53:34 2003
From: netkita at earthlink.net (netkita at earthlink.net)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 11:53:34 -0400
Subject: Remember 9/11
In-Reply-To: <198.1d8cf494.2c4ff963@aol.com>
Message-ID: <3F1E773E.21886.2F3C9666@localhost>

This I feel is very unfair. While I do think that the Fbi and Secret Service could be closed and 
their tasks combined and given over to the NSA ,Marines and other law enforcement 
agencies, I think that overall the agencies did the best they could. It is hard to break cells. If 
you remember historically that the Weathermen aka the Weather underground succeeded 
because of their overwhelming similarities. therefore they bonded. They were of diverse 
religions BUT .. they were all of the same socio economic background,educated same 
politics,same age. It is very hard to infiltrate cells if not impossible. Cells consist of only 5 or 
less people and do not know the activities of others.Therefore if the other cells do not know 
the activities of others , then how can a law enforcement agency.




23 Jul 2003 at 10:44, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:

> 
> Remember 9/11 was a failure of our alphabet agencies for adequately protecting us, and naturally in response we've run to protection to 
> another new alphabet agency, how sad.




From sunder at sunder.net  Wed Jul 23 09:42:35 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 12:42:35 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
In-Reply-To: <995120CC-BD2C-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307231230270.10173-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Bah! Saddam has become the new Eric Goldstien since Osama Bin Ladin is
quieter.  Perhaps the CIA's voice lab is better at cloning his
voice?  hence the poor quality audio tapes? 

I wonder how hard it is to capture a person's phoenems and feed it to
a good quality speech synth?  I wonder if recording it on a cheap tape
with a microphone will remove all traces of it being fake.  The hard part
will of course be getting the inflections right.

Perhaps if you tie a speech recognition system with a speech synth, the
recognition system might be able to detect inflection, tone, and rate, and
provide hints to the synth?  Wouldn't even have to work in real time.


Hey, if they were willing to push Hans Blix around until he called the
bastards and reported all the pressure to "find something" and offed David
Kelley, why not something like a Saddam Vactor? 

I'm sure they could even sprinkle the old DNA samples around some shack in
the woods of Iran or Saudi Arabia or something, along with some uranium or
anthrax samples and aluminu cylinders, as proof that they were harboring
him as a prelude to another invasion.  Why the fuck not?  50 states isn't
enough, and North America's getting too crowded, let's take over the
entire Middle East...

After that, let's take over France too and make them say "EMAIL" and eat
only McDonalds' cheeseburgers and drink only Budwiser.  But that can wait
until after we mine all of Liberia's diamonds... hey we can't afford
another war just yet, need to make money first...

The sky's the limit, just vote for Bush again, and after him Condoleeza
Rice can be our first female president with Ashcroft as VP.  We can be
very politically correct that way.


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:

> Hair samples, dandruff, etc. A bunch of reports over the past several 
> months that the houses and villas of Hussein and his family had been 
> gone over carefully for traces of hair, old shaving razors, skin 
> particles, etc.
> 
> Even if doctors and such have not been bribed or coerced into providing 
> blood samples, lots of ways to track DNA. All a matter of economics, as 
> usual.
> 
> --Tim May




From ajuels at rsasecurity.com  Wed Jul 23 09:51:27 2003
From: ajuels at rsasecurity.com (Juels, Ari)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 12:51:27 -0400
Subject: [fc-announce] FC '04: Call for Papers
Message-ID: <mailman.745.1576007634.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

Call for Papers and Presentations 

Financial Cryptography '04 
9-12 February 2004 
Key West, Florida, USA 
Conference Web site: http://ifca.ai/fc04 

Important dates: 
Conference: 9-12 February 2004
Submission deadline 1 September 2003 23h59 GMT 
Author notification 15 November 2003 
Pre-proceedings version due 15 December 2003 

Original papers and presentations on all aspects of financial-data security
and secure digital commerce are solicited for submission to the Eight Annual
Conference on Financial Cryptography (FC '04). FC '04 will bring together
researchers and practitioners in the financial, legal, cryptologic, and
data-security fields to foster cooperation and exchange of ideas. In
addition to novel scientific research as in previous years, the program for
FC '04 will include sessions on digital finance and economics and on secure
financial systems and digital-cash architectures. For the systems and
finance sessions, submissions must have a visible bearing on
financial-security issues, but need not be exclusively concerned with
cryptography or security. Possible topics for submission to the various
sessions include:
Research Sessions: Submissions accepted to the research portion of the
conference will be published in full in the conference proceedings (up to 15
pages in total). 
Systems and Finance Sessions: For the systems and finance portions of the
conference, the primary emphasis is on presentation. For accepted
submissions in these sessions, a one-page abstract will be published in the
conference proceedings. 
Submissions to the systems portion of the conference may include
architectural descriptions and/or accounts of industry or technical
experience with implementations of secure digital commerce systems.
Presentations may concern commercial systems, academic prototypes, or
open-source projects for any of the topics listed above. Where appropriate,
software or hardware demonstrations are encouraged as part of the
presentations in these sessions. 
Contributions to the systems and the finance sessions of the conference need
not necessarily include novel contributions in the realm of scientific
research, nor must they concern financial cryptography or security
exclusively. They must, however, reflect careful thought and effort and
provide valuable, up-to-date experience that is relevant to practitioners in
the fields of financial cryptography and security. Submissions to these
sessions may consist of a short summary of work of one to six (1-6) pages in
length. 
Instructions for Authors: Complete papers (or complete extended abstracts)
must be received by 23h59 GMT on 1 September 2003. All papers must be
submitted electronically. (In exceptional circumstances, paper submissions
can be accepted, but special arrangements must be made with the program
chair prior to 1 August 2003.) Papers must be formatted in standard
PostScript, PDF format, or MS Word, and should be submitted electronically
according to the instructions at http://www.ifca.ai/fc04/ prior to the
deadline. Submissions in other formats will be rejected. Papers should be
submitted electronically according to the instructions at
<https://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/websubmission/fc2004/instructions.php
3>. Papers may be submitted through the submission form available at
<https://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/websubmission/fc2004/submit.php3>. 
Submissions to the research portion of the conference may include at most
fifteen (15) single-spaced standard pages in length. Submissions to the
systems and finance portions of the conference must be short summaries of
work consisting of at most six (6) single-spaced standard pages in length.
(As indicated above, for accepted submissions in these latter sessions, a
corresponding one-page abstract will be published in the conference
proceedings.) Author names and affiliations on submissions must be explicit.
In other words, submitted papers should not be anonymized. Submissions must
include on the first page the title of the paper, the names and affiliations
of all author, a brief abstract, a list of topical keywords, and a
conference-session category (research, finance, or systems). Papers must
describe original work. For the research portion of the conference,
submission of previously published material and simultaneous submission of
papers to other conferences or workshops with proceedings is not permitted.
Authors of research papers found to be doubly submitted risk having all
their submissions withdrawn from consideration as well as other appropriate
sanctions. 
The conference proceedings containing all accepted submissions will be
published in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
series after the conference. A pre-proceedings containing preliminary
versions of the papers will be distributed at the conference. For accepted
submissions, at least one author must attend the conference and present. In
addition, authors of accepted submissions must prepare the pre-proceedings
and final proceedings version - a full paper or one-page abstract, as
appropriate -- and sign an IFCA copyright form
<http://www.ifca.ai/documents/copyright.html>. Questions about paper or
panel submissions should be directed to the program chair
(ajuels at rsasecurity.com).

_______________________________________________
fc-announce mailing list
fc-announce at ifca.ai
http://mail.ifca.ai/mailman/listinfo/fc-announce

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From Freematt357 at aol.com  Wed Jul 23 09:56:16 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 12:56:16 EDT
Subject: Remember 9/11
Message-ID: <1c0.ce0cd79.2c501830@aol.com>

In a message dated 7/23/2003 11:57:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
netkita at earthlink.net writes:
This I feel is very unfair. While I do think that the Fbi and Secret Service 
could be closed and their tasks combined and given over to the NSA ,Marines 
and other law enforcement agencies, I think that overall the agencies did the 
best they could.

This is utter bullshit. The US knew that Bin Laden was a threat and had been 
conducting covert operations with NSA against him for some number of years 
prior to 9/11. NSA was erasing the various bank databases that Bin Laden's funds 
were in and they were messing around with his wire transfers. Hell, Intel was 
even playing taped conversations of Bin Laden with his mother to impress 
Congress all prior to 9/11.

Bin Laden choose the WTC as a symbol of American financial imperialism and as 
a punishment to our screwing with him...The failure IMHO is that rather than 
in engaging in largely harassing techniques-We should have gone after him in 
much as the same fashion as we are today-It isn't like we didn't have ample 
warning.

What I'm saying for the hearing impaired is that our Intel agencies made the 
threat worse by playing games that enraged the attacker (Bin Laden) rather 
than neutralizing the threat.

Regards,  Matt Gaylor-




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul 23 13:13:15 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 13:13:15 -0700
Subject: kinko spying: criminal caught Scarfing keydata
Message-ID: <3F1EEC5A.7666553A@cdc.gov>

Kinko's spy case: Risks of renting PCs

                 NEW YORK (AP) -- For more than a
                 year, unbeknownst to people who used
                 Internet terminals at Kinko's stores in
                 New York, Juju Jiang was recording
                 what they typed, paying particular
                 attention to their passwords.

                 Jiang had secretly installed, in at least 14
                 Kinko's copy shops, software that logs
                 individual keystrokes. He captured more
                 than 450 user names and passwords, and
                 used them to access and open bank
                 accounts online.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/07/23/cybercafe.security.ap/index.html




From measl at mfn.org  Wed Jul 23 11:20:53 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 13:20:53 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Remember 9/11
In-Reply-To: <3F1E773E.21886.2F3C9666@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307231317250.24000-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 netkita at earthlink.net wrote:

> This I feel is very unfair. While I do think that the Fbi and Secret Service could be closed and 
> their tasks combined and given over to the NSA ,Marines and other law enforcement 
> agencies,

Excuse me?  When did the Marines and the NSA become Law Enforcement Agencies?


> less people and do not know the activities of others.Therefore if the other cells do not know 
> the activities of others , then how can a law enforcement agency.

This at least I can buy into.  By definition, a cell which is properly run
should be immune from the prying eyes of law enforcement.  That why the
structure was developed.  Nevertheless, it stands as a failure for our
counterintel folks, since it is, by definition, their job to find ways into
these cells.

> 23 Jul 2003 at 10:44, Freematt357 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > > Remember 9/11 was a failure of our alphabet agencies for adequately
> protecting us, and naturally in response we've run to protection to >
> another new alphabet agency, how sad. >


-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko




From frantz at pwpconsult.com  Wed Jul 23 14:24:47 2003
From: frantz at pwpconsult.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 14:24:47 -0700
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
In-Reply-To: <4fedac1f754fe807edda22e458823854@dizum.com>
Message-ID: <v03110710bb44ad098d96@[192.168.1.5]>

At 1:40 PM -0700 7/23/03, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>> Yesterdays briefing on the death of saddams sons-the
>
>What is most troubling is that USG assumes (correctly ?) that
>assassinating relatives of enemies of the state will be welcomed
>by the public.

I think the evidence is strong that they were as bad as Sadam.  If Sadam
was an "enemy of the state", then they were too.

I also think that assassinate is the wrong word to use to describe what
happens to someone when an army says, "Come out with your hands up", and
instead they come out shooting.

Cheers - Bill


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz           | "A Jobless Recovery is | Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506         | like a Breadless Sand- | 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz at pwpconsult.com | wich." -- Steve Schear | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Wed Jul 23 15:56:46 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:56:46 -0700
Subject: kinko spying: criminal caught Scarfing keydata
In-Reply-To: <3F1EEC5A.7666553A@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030723155509.0c5c6ef8@idiom.com>

The real question is whether the FBI's keyloggers caught Jiang's passwords,
or whether it was the NSA or Mossad caught the FBI's keyloggers
catching Jiang's keylogger catching other passwords.

At 01:13 PM 07/23/2003 -0700, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
>Kinko's spy case: Risks of renting PCs
>
>                  NEW YORK (AP) -- For more than a
>                  year, unbeknownst to people who used
>                  Internet terminals at Kinko's stores in
>                  New York, Juju Jiang was recording
>                  what they typed, paying particular
>                  attention to their passwords.
>
>                  Jiang had secretly installed, in at least 14
>                  Kinko's copy shops, software that logs
>                  individual keystrokes. He captured more
>                  than 450 user names and passwords, and
>                  used them to access and open bank
>                  accounts online.
>
>http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/07/23/cybercafe.security.ap/index.html




From sunder at sunder.net  Wed Jul 23 14:17:08 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 17:17:08 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
In-Reply-To: <v03110710bb44ad098d96@[192.168.1.5]>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307231712120.10173-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Right, just because Shrubb-ya and Blair lied to get congress to approve a
war on Iraq so he could steal the oil, it doesn't mean that Saddam was a
saint and that his human rights violations (read: torture, murder, rape,
pillage) could be dismissed, and he didn't deserve to be forced off the
throne.

The Hussein bunch got what they deserved.  Fuck'em.

What's disturbing is that "we" put that motherfucker in power, and
supplied him with the means to carry out his attrocies against his own
people, we fueld the fires of the Iran/Iraq war by feeding both sides with
weapons and intel, and so on.


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Bill Frantz wrote:

> I think the evidence is strong that they were as bad as Sadam.  If Sadam
> was an "enemy of the state", then they were too.
> 
> I also think that assassinate is the wrong word to use to describe what
> happens to someone when an army says, "Come out with your hands up", and
> instead they come out shooting.




From ben at algroup.co.uk  Wed Jul 23 11:41:54 2003
From: ben at algroup.co.uk (Ben Laurie)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:41:54 +0100
Subject: Fwd: [IP] Gilmore bounced from plane; and Farber  censors  
   Gilmore's email
In-Reply-To: <1303.202.27.185.71.1058907896.squirrel@www.crypt.gen.nz>
References: <20030721180412.N60664-100000@kozubik.com> 
  <012301c35043$d2c96230$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
  <1303.202.27.185.71.1058907896.squirrel@www.crypt.gen.nz>
Message-ID: <3F1ED6F2.6050109@algroup.co.uk>

Kerry Thompson wrote:

> Dave Howe said:
> 
>>John Kozubik wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
>>There are no obvious grounds for discressionary removal based on wearing
>>a badge (or being married to a habitual badge-wearer) but the "banning
>>notice" thing looks to be a blanket refusal option written up to look
>>like something else - I don't read this as saying you have to have met
>>the section (a) criteria for them to issue a banning notice, in which
>>case they can refuse you for no reason at all provided they put it in
>>writing.
> 
> 
> True, but Gilmore clearly refused an order from the Captain despite his
> view that the order to remove the badge was in breach of some rights that
> he thought he had. At this point of refusal the presence of a badge
> becomes secondary, and Gilmore has probably breached a few rules, such as
> :
> 
> 
>>7) If you have not obeyed the instructions of our ground staff or a member
>>of the crew of the aircraft relating to safety or security.
> 
> 
> .

The safety or security issue being what?

> and maybe :
> 
> 
>>9) If you have behaved in a threatening, abusive, insulting or disorderly
>>way towards a member of our ground staff or a member of the crew of the
>>aircraft.
> 
> 
> if you could class Gilmore's actions as disorderly.

Could you? I think not.

> . and :
> 
> 
>>10) If you have deliberately interfered with a member of the crew of the
>>aircraft carrying out their duties.
> 
> 
> where the duties could have been those of the flight assistant to have the
> badge removed.

Give me a break.

> I felt sorry for the other 300 people on the plane who had their flight
> delayed for some guy with a small badge on his chest, and a big chip on
> his shoulder.

Yeah, never stand up for your rights if it might delay you. I'm with
you, brother.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff




From rah at shipwright.com  Wed Jul 23 18:25:33 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 21:25:33 -0400
Subject: [fc-announce] FC '04: Call for Papers
Message-ID: <a06001a65bb44e5592371@[66.149.49.6]>

--- begin forwarded text



From nobody at dizum.com  Wed Jul 23 13:40:09 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 22:40:09 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
Message-ID: <4fedac1f754fe807edda22e458823854@dizum.com>

> Yesterdays briefing on the death of saddams sons-the

What is most troubling is that USG assumes (correctly ?) that
assassinating relatives of enemies of the state will be welcomed
by the public.




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Thu Jul 24 03:19:50 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 06:19:50 -0400
Subject: kinko spying: criminal caught Scarfing keydata
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030723155509.0c5c6ef8@idiom.com>
References: <5.1.1.6.2.20030723155509.0c5c6ef8@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <200307240619.50852.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Wednesday 23 July 2003 18:56, Bill Stewart wrote:
> The real question is whether the FBI's keyloggers caught Jiang's
> passwords, or whether it was the NSA or Mossad caught the FBI's
> keyloggers catching Jiang's keylogger catching other passwords.

> >                  New York, Juju Jiang was recording
                               ^^^^

How many clues do you need? Obviously the J-U-E-S are behind it all.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Thu Jul 24 03:42:24 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 06:42:24 -0400
Subject: Jerk with a t-shirt
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F74cLc4Tq1o1ia00001f0d@hotmail.com>
References: <BAY7-F74cLc4Tq1o1ia00001f0d@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <200307240642.24776.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Wednesday 23 July 2003 09:18, Tyler Durden wrote:

> But it sounds like a rehash of the mall incident

You don't know what you're talking about. This happened just a few miles 
from me, so perhaps I've paid closer attention than you have. T-shirt 
man wasn't merely minding his own business while wearing an offensive 
shirt. He was stepping in front of people and haranguing them in front 
of a large anchor store in the mall. After a while he was asked to 
leave by a store employee, so he took himself to the food court and 
repeated the procedure. After complaints from several mall patrons, a 
security guard asked T-shirt man to either knock it off or leave. 
T-shirt man refused, growing more and more aggressive, and eventually 
the local cops came along and arrested him. (I may have fudged some 
details, as I'm working from memory, but I don't think I screwed up 
anything important.)

OK, so far it could be the spontaneous actions of one guy. But, even 
though the story wasn't reported until the late news that evening, 
there was a large (hundreds, IIRC) crowd of protesters when the mall 
opened the next morning. This might not sound like much to someone used 
to NYC crowds, but by the standards of this area that was a huge crowd. 
I guess it _could_ have been a spontaneous rising of a populace fed up 
with jack-booted thug harrassment of dissenting opinion. But the more I 
hear about it, the more this sounds like a planned operation.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From jr0280 at albany.edu  Thu Jul 24 05:38:24 2003
From: jr0280 at albany.edu (Jack Reed)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:38:24 -0400
Subject: Jerk with a t-shirt
In-Reply-To: <200307240642.24776.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
References: <BAY7-F74cLc4Tq1o1ia00001f0d@hotmail.com>
  <BAY7-F74cLc4Tq1o1ia00001f0d@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030724082703.00b7aea0@mail.albany.edu>

At 06:42 AM 7/24/2003 -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
>On Wednesday 23 July 2003 09:18, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
> > But it sounds like a rehash of the mall incident
>
>You don't know what you're talking about. This happened just a few miles
>from me, so perhaps I've paid closer attention than you have. T-shirt
>man wasn't merely minding his own business while wearing an offensive
>shirt. He was stepping in front of people and haranguing them in front
>of a large anchor store in the mall. After a while he was asked to
>leave by a store employee, so he took himself to the food court and
>repeated the procedure. After complaints from several mall patrons, a
>security guard asked T-shirt man to either knock it off or leave.
I live in this area too and this is far different than the one I 
heard.  The description of events that I heard was that he was bothering 
*no one*, simply walking around wearing a shirt.  The mall did make that 
claim but I haven't heard anyone else say he was bothering anyone.  The 
newspaper story said they mall had one complaint about him, not "many." 
Also, the subsequent patrons wearing "Give peace a chance" where booted too 
and they were definitely not bothering anyone.  Only when public pressure 
came to bear did they relent.


>T-shirt man refused, growing more and more aggressive, and eventually
>the local cops came along and arrested him. (I may have fudged some
>details, as I'm working from memory, but I don't think I screwed up
>anything important.)

Let's see, you believe you're engaging in protected speech, rent-a-cops 
come and tell you to stop, and you don't believe you have to. If you're 
going to lie down if you believe you have a valid argument then that's 
really weak.

I happen to agree with those who said that since he was on private property 
the property owners had every right to boot him off. I just think you 
should do a little more fact-checking before you post.

Jack




From declan at well.com  Thu Jul 24 06:08:39 2003
From: declan at well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 09:08:39 -0400
Subject: Congresscritters want to be more... permanent
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030724090719.0452fd68@mail.well.com>

POLITICS
News conference to announce bipartisan legislation for a constitutional
ammendment to increase the term of House members from 2 years to 4
years.
Participants: Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, and Rep. Roscoe
     Bartlett, R-Md.=
Location: House Radio/TV Gallery, U.S. Capitol. 3:30 p.m.
Contact: Anne Keller, 202-225-6605 or 202-225-2721




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Thu Jul 24 09:16:30 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 09:16:30 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
Message-ID: <200307241616.h6OGGUk3006619@artifact.psychedelic.net>

I just noticed all news channels on the boob tube are showing endless
repetitions of what the US alleges are the dead bodies of Saddam Hussein's
sons.

We all know how easy it is to make realistic fake pictures now that
everything is digital, so I was thinking what a cool hack it would be to
Photoshop some similar pictures of the Bush daughters, and post them on
the Internet for everyone to enjoy.

Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder the legitimate
leader of another sovereign nation and his entire family, an "artist's
rendering" of Shrub reaping what he sows would surely be an excellent
political statement.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Jul 24 06:52:10 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 09:52:10 -0400
Subject: Jerk with a t-shirt
Message-ID: <BAY7-F40qhvyVqr7NoU0000158b@hotmail.com>

"This happened just a few miles
from me, so perhaps I've paid closer attention than you have. T-shirt
man wasn't merely minding his own business while wearing an offensive
shirt. He was stepping in front of people and haranguing them in front
of a large anchor store in the mall. After a while he was asked to
leave by a store employee, so he took himself to the food court and
repeated the procedure. After complaints from several mall patrons, a
security guard asked T-shirt man to either knock it off or leave."

Well I haven't heard the story told this way before. If this were the case, 
he should be removed no matter what T-shirt he was wearing.

As for the "private property" issues, I'm still not convinced they're 
cut-and-dry (though in some cases maybe they are). If nothing else, the 
demonstration the following morning lets the local thugs know that consensus 
reality these days does not equate benevolence with US foreign policy. Thus, 
the barely-made-it-out-of-high-school managers of the Mall's Security will 
know that anti-war T-shirts may not be any more controversial than pro-war 
t-shirts, despite what the TV has instructed them.

-TD



>From: Steve Furlong <sfurlong at acmenet.net>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Jerk with a t-shirt
>Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 06:42:24 -0400
>
>On Wednesday 23 July 2003 09:18, Tyler Durden wrote:
>
> > But it sounds like a rehash of the mall incident
>
>You don't know what you're talking about. This happened just a few miles
>from me, so perhaps I've paid closer attention than you have. T-shirt
>man wasn't merely minding his own business while wearing an offensive
>shirt. He was stepping in front of people and haranguing them in front
>of a large anchor store in the mall. After a while he was asked to
>leave by a store employee, so he took himself to the food court and
>repeated the procedure. After complaints from several mall patrons, a
>security guard asked T-shirt man to either knock it off or leave.
>T-shirt man refused, growing more and more aggressive, and eventually
>the local cops came along and arrested him. (I may have fudged some
>details, as I'm working from memory, but I don't think I screwed up
>anything important.)
>
>OK, so far it could be the spontaneous actions of one guy. But, even
>though the story wasn't reported until the late news that evening,
>there was a large (hundreds, IIRC) crowd of protesters when the mall
>opened the next morning. This might not sound like much to someone used
>to NYC crowds, but by the standards of this area that was a huge crowd.
>I guess it _could_ have been a spontaneous rising of a populace fed up
>with jack-booted thug harrassment of dissenting opinion. But the more I
>hear about it, the more this sounds like a planned operation.
>
>--
>Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel
>
>"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
>their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
>these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 24 07:13:09 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:13:09 -0400
Subject: Accuris launches "Tap In A Box"
Message-ID: <a06001a94bb4599b669d4@[66.149.49.6]>

<http://www.accuris.ie/product_tap.htm>

Accuris - Product News Item

Accuris launches "Tap In A Box" 

Accuris has recently launched "Tap in A Box" as a low-cost method to enable smaller ISPs to comply with their country's Lawful Interception requirements. 

Key Product Elements 
7 Management System 

7 Interception Capability 

7 Hardware Components 

7 System Installation 
   7 Delivery and on-site system test included 
   7 All relevant cables, connectors supplied 

7 Technical Support 
   7 Warranty 
   7 Help desk 
   7 Call logging & problem management 
   7 Lines of support 
   7 Response times 
   7 Notifications 

7 Optional Extras 
   7 Increased network capacity upgrade 
   7 Additional Tap Points 
   7 Upgrade to Enterprise solution 
   7 Professional Services 
   7 Additional support cover 
   7 Training 

Management System 
This system provides secure access to warrant/interception management features as well as control of interception point configuration. 

Interception Capability 
The basic number of tap points is 2 single Fast Ethernet points.  The traffic interception types consist of TCP/IP, SMTP, POP3 and Radius.  Additional services will be catered for in maintenance releases, as required by legislation. 

 



-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From Vincent.Penquerch at artworks.co.uk  Thu Jul 24 02:14:20 2003
From: Vincent.Penquerch at artworks.co.uk (Vincent Penquerc'h)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:14:20 +0100
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Message-ID: <B14C9D7F1977D111AD740060970ACBDA0189340D@warhol>

> Just because it's cool and we can call it electronic cash?  What's the
> point?  Why would you bother building it?  Why would anyone 
> bother using
> it?

Ah, to make money off it of course! Advertize it, and people will
use it. Maybe. For a time. And when it wears off, you launch
another one. Sure, it's pointless technically, but so are many
gimmicks that are commercially viable, if only for a limited time.

And maybe the LEAs are actually even pushing it as a way to easily
catch clueless criminals :)

-- 
Vincent Penquerc'h 




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 24 07:17:36 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:17:36 -0400
Subject: Accuris - Challenges Facing You
Message-ID: <a06001a97bb459acdab68@[66.149.49.6]>

<http://www.accuris.ie/challenges.htm>

Accuris - Challenges Facing You

The current situation has left operators facing a considerable list of challenges: 

As the services you offer your customers increase so too do the number of Interception services and therefore the workload on your company should a manual approach continue to be adopted. 

The EU law imposes a legal duty on all operators to meet many standards in the Interception network including: 

7 Integrity - The target must not be able to detect that the traffic is being intercepted. 
7 Quality - The quality of the real-time Interception delivered to the Law Enforcement Monitoring Facility (LEMF) must be of the same level as that delivered to the target. 
7 Performance - The operator must be able to implement urgent requests within minutes. 
7 Lawful - Interceptions must commence and terminate at the exact start/end date and time referred to on the Interception warrant. 
7 Security - Only individuals who have been appropriately screened and require access to Interception data should have this ability. 

In an increasingly global economy LEAs are increasingly requesting Interceptions from operators outside their home county. It is important to ensure that the handover interface you use to an LEMF is based on a commonly used standard.  In the telecommunications business this usually means compliance to either ETSI or CALEA. 

Potential Implications 
7Interception warrants are issued by the courts and need to be complied with exactly in order to ensure that the Interceptions carried out are in fact lawful rather than unlawful. 
7Manual processes are costly, inefficient and prone to error. 
7Provision of Interception on any service you offer may be required under the terms of your license. 

 



-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 24 07:18:07 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:18:07 -0400
Subject: Accuris - Data Network Interception
Message-ID: <a06001a96bb459ac7a9ca@[66.149.49.6]>

<http://www.accuris.ie/datnetint.htm>

Accuris - Data Network Interception
 


LMD-IP 
The LMD-IP is Accuris' IP mediation product, it mediates between the ISP's network and the Law Enforcement Monitoring Facility, delivering intercepted target traffic according to the relevant national standard. LMD-IP has been built on a component-based architecture, enabling the distribution of components where necessary to handle the intercept volumes and to tailor with the ISP's network. 





Features 
7 Automatic activation/de-activation on all appropriate interception points. 
7 Delivery of content and intercept related information in compliance with TIIT standards. 
7 Support for warrant management. 
7 Discrete billing capability. 
7 Support for all Ethernet-based IP services (10MB/sec, 100MB/sec or 1GB/sec.) 
7 Support for ATM and POS 

Benefits 
7 Fully compliant with TIIT. 
7 Passive interception ensures no impact on your network services. 
7 Facility to manage multiple logical domains. 
7 Architecture supports future value-added applications. 
7 No software interception limits. 
7 A product roadmap that is in step with the TIIT & ETSI standards as they evolve. 
7 Deployed on non-proprietary hardware and software thus reducing operating and deployment costs. 

Common management system controls all interception services ensuring increased security and reduced operating costs. 

The Product 
The LMD-IP consists of five key components: 
7 Intercept Management 
7 Target Access Point (TAP) 
7 Network Filter 
7 Service Filter 
7 Delivery 

Intercept Management 
This component is responsible for the activation/de-activation of the interception on the ISP's network at the start/end time indicated on the warrant. It passes the target's IP address to the Network and Service Filters and the appropriate LEMF delivery address to the Delivery module. 

TAP 
TAP splitters or layer 2 splitting can be used to replicate the IP data stream. This passive mechanism has the dual benefit of ensuring that the ISP's network is unaffected and that the target is unaware of the interception of the service. Prior to deployment, Accuris engineers assist ISP staff in determining the most efficient location to place TAPs on the network. 

Network Filter 
The Network Filter intelligently selects the IP packets of interest i.e. where the source/destination IP address is that of a registered IP target or a dial-in user is attempting to logon. Once identified this packet is then sent to the appropriate service filter. 

Service Filter The Service Filter is responsible for re-constituting the IP datagrams into their native service e.g. SMTP, POP3, etc. 

Delivery The delivery module is responsible for delivering the intercepted data and/or intercept related events to the LEMF according to the applicable national standard. 

 



-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 24 07:21:03 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:21:03 -0400
Subject: Accuris - Company History
Message-ID: <a06001a95bb459ac2a8b4@[66.149.49.6]>

<http://www.accuris.ie/history.htm>


Accuris - Company History

Accuris is a specialist provider of lawful interception solutions in the communications field. 



Based in Dublin, Ireland - the software capital of Europe - Accuris continues to lead the market in its niche field. 

Established in 1997 as a product provider in the telecommunications arena, Accuris grew rapidly as a result of the input from its founders - KPN, Eircom and Telia. 


In 2002 the company was purchased by a group of investors and charged with becoming the European leader in Lawful Interception, as well as extending its expertise in other areas of the telecommunications sector. 

Accuris has a core specialist workforce that provides the full range of services from initial consultancy through development and ongoing customer support. 


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From jya at pipeline.com  Thu Jul 24 10:34:13 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:34:13 -0700
Subject: Jerk with a t-shirt
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030724082703.00b7aea0@mail.albany.edu>
References: <200307240642.24776.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
  <BAY7-F74cLc4Tq1o1ia00001f0d@hotmail.com>
  <BAY7-F74cLc4Tq1o1ia00001f0d@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <E19fhBG-0006ch-00@smtp10.atl.mindspring.net>

The rights of property owners, especially commercial property,
are not as absolute as sometimes argued. Due to the public
services provided by governmental authorities, tax perqs not
the least, property owners are required to abide a diverse range
of laws and regulations to provide assurance that people on the
property are safe. These people include the property owner,
family members, employees, customers and others who may
not be capable of judging what is safe.

Similarly, retail property owners are obliged to provide assurances
to customers that they are safe as prescribed by zoning, building
and health codes. To be sure there is a lucrative industry of 
professionals who advise property owners how to skirt these
requirements -- public relations mongers, lobbyists, lawyers, 
zoning consultants, architects, engineers, planners, politicians, 
so-called public interest groups, bribers, liars, cheaters, the mob, 
whores, pimps, and so on. Most of these are lightly or unregulated, 
even those ostensibly licensed to protect the public interest are
happy to front for those whose only interest is criminal profit.

Keep this in mind: whenever someone argues for the right to
do what they want on their property they are blowing shit in your
face while picking your pocket and placing you and your beloved
mongrels in danger through a smart-ass range of distancing, exculpatory
mechanisms, not least several of the constitutional amendments 
which were set up for just that purpose by the original continental
landscape thieves and which are forever being updated to keep the 
our-screw-you-laws-are-fair-laws racket running smoothly. 

Thanks to two centuries of warping law and culture to bias stolen
property owners, no property owner takes full risk these days,
but some will have you killed if you question that, that's what the
justice and national security mob is paid handsomely to enforce.

Department of Homeland Security looks to be the greatest ever
privacy and property expropriation since the national security apparatus
was set up after WW2, stolen from the public in the name of protecting it, 
given over to the homesec contractors, mediated by the homesec 
slicksters. "Homeland" is the false positive, as was "national defense."

>I happen to agree with those who said that since he was on private property 
>the property owners had every right to boot him off. I just think you 
>should do a little more fact-checking before you post.
>
>Jack




From sunder at sunder.net  Thu Jul 24 08:15:30 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 11:15:30 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Dna samples of world leaders
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030723130545.02dabbf8@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307241049530.26553-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Yes, brain fart. :)  s/b Emmanuel Goldstein.  Doh!  Need more coffee...


Yup, but you don't have to splice a tape, you can do it all digitally
these days, then create a signle low quality audiotape recorded so poorly
that your analyst won't be able to acurately say yes or not.

The real question is whether or not you can have a speech synth that can
put out convincing inflections, pauses, um's ah's, coughs, etc. to the
point that it sounds like a human with emotions, not a machine.  You can
get the samples from existing speeches/addresses and extract just the
phonemes.  Your speech synth's output shouldn't sound like a bunch of
clips of words of course. :)

I don't know how many phonemes would be required for a convinging Iraqi
leader...  For English there's like 30 something...  If you get them all
at the same tone from the same speech, you're set.

If you've ever played with MacOS's speech synth, they have some that are
somewhat realistic human voices, but they still speak with out human
sounding rythms - rather they sound like a human trying to imitate a
computer a la old Star Trek episodes. Add the inflections to get emotion
like sounds, and increase the quality of the synth so you don't hear
machine artifacts, and you're set.  It's not an easy problem, but neither
is it impossible.


As to DNA: Uh, I was talking about Sadam's palaces - lots of skin flakes,
clothes, hairs in combs, etc to be had there.  Ok, well that presumes that
sufficient samples were collected before the nice palace parties. :)


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 12:42 PM 07/23/2003 -0400, Sunder wrote:
> >Bah! Saddam has become the new Eric Goldstien since Osama Bin Ladin is 
> >quieter.
> 
> I'm guessing you're mixing up Emmanuel Goldstein, from 1984
> and Eric Corley aka Emmanuel Goldstein, from 2600 ?

> It might be hard to splice together a tape that would
> fool a forensic expert into thinking the tape was really
> an authentic recording by the same person who was speaking on
> several other known-to-be-authentic recordings.
> It's not at all hard to put together a press release from
> an ostensible forensic expert claiming that a tape
> is or isn't authentic, or even to find an expert who'll say it.
> It's probably not too hard to put together a tape with
> the speech you want and a set of claimed-to-be-known-authentic samples
> that the expert can compare with the voice on the tape,
> if the expert doesn't have good independent samples of his own.
> 
> After all, your objective isn't to fool the experts -
> it's to fool the public, or rather to make sure that the public
> that you've already fooled continues to stay fooled.
> As Bush said, "fool me once, shame on... shame on.. "
> 
> 
> Besides, to get the DNA samples, they just checked with
> Illuminati Headquarters - you thought that when world leaders
> sign their employment contracts in blood, it's only for decoration?




From mv at cdc.gov  Thu Jul 24 11:26:38 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 11:26:38 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
Message-ID: <3F2024DE.7E1092C9@cdc.gov>

At 06:00 PM 7/24/03 +0100, Dave Howe wrote:
>the new standard, I suspect a suicide bombing of
>the white house (killing all the staff and the shrub) would now be "ok"

>provided they shouted 'surrender or die' first, yes?

Dude, if Julius Caesar had magnetometers we might all be speaking
Italian now.

The one with the bigger guns makes the rules.  Which is why those with
smaller
guns don't play by those rules.

Just because the UN fnord hasn't been given the  paperwork or Congress
hasn't made
the required fnord legal declaration, don't think there isn't a war on.
Or several.




From sunder at sunder.net  Thu Jul 24 09:09:58 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 12:09:58 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Congresscritters want to be more... permanent
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030724090719.0452fd68@mail.well.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307241209380.26553-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Isn't that akin to when they vote themselves raises? :)

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> POLITICS
> News conference to announce bipartisan legislation for a constitutional
> ammendment to increase the term of House members from 2 years to 4
> years.
> Participants: Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, and Rep. Roscoe
>      Bartlett, R-Md.=
> Location: House Radio/TV Gallery, U.S. Capitol. 3:30 p.m.
> Contact: Anne Keller, 202-225-6605 or 202-225-2721




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Jul 24 12:50:35 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 12:50:35 -0700
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307242027170.26754@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <17C50F20-BE10-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 11:16 AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

> On 2003-07-23, Sunder uttered:
>
>> If you want to do electronic payments that are non-anonymous you can
>> simply use a credit card or debit card (or something like paypal, 
>> egold),
>> or for larger quanitities you can do wire transfers - so why would we
>> need yet another a non-anonymous "cash" that isn't cash?
>
> I only objected to the notion that all digicash needs to be anonymous 
> in
> order to be desirable. I didn't say this particular system amounts to
> desirable weak digicash. To that end it would likely make far more 
> sense
> in the short term e.g. to marry Visa Electronic to PayPal. In the long
> term multiple cooperating PayPal-like entities could then be used to 
> build
> mixnets, making the digicash strongly anonymous.

This continuing confusion, by many people, about what "digicash" is 
shows the problem with using nonspecific terms.

In fact, "digicash" strongly suggests David Chaum's "Digicash," not 
some name for all forms of credit cards, ATMs, debit cards, PayPal, 
wire transfer, Mondex, and a scad of other systems that may use bits 
and electronic signals.

Conventionally, on this list and in the press about "digital cash," 
digital cash means something which has the untraceable and/or anonymous 
features of "cash" while being transferred digitally. It is NOT a Visa 
system or a PayPal account or a wire instruction to the Cayman Islands.

I choose not to call "untraceable/anonymous digital cash" by any of the 
marketing-oriented catchwords like "Digicash," "BearerBucks," 
"E-coins," "MeterMoney," whatever.

So, I strongly agree with your point that not all electronic forms of 
money need to be anonymous (untraceable) in order to be useful. 
HOWEVER, our interest is in the untraceable/anonymous. There are no 
doubt active groups discussing PayPal, VISA, MasterCard, DiscoverCard, 
etc. But they have nothing to do with Cypherpunks.

We should also fight the use of sloppy language in the press when 
mundane electronic funds transfer systems are called "digital cash."

--Tim May




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Jul 24 13:09:39 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 16:09:39 -0400
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
Message-ID: <BAY7-F117hsylnnokmQ00002974@hotmail.com>

Oooh! A very amusing notion.

I'm wondering, however, if in terms of analogies showing two of the -Sr- 
Bush's sons in the photos might be more appropo (ie, Jeb & Dubya)...though I 
admit showing the daughters has more sheer shock and "fuck-you" value.

-TD


>From: Eric Cordian <emc at artifact.psychedelic.net>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Dead Body Theatre
>Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 09:16:30 -0700 (PDT)
>
>I just noticed all news channels on the boob tube are showing endless
>repetitions of what the US alleges are the dead bodies of Saddam Hussein's
>sons.
>
>We all know how easy it is to make realistic fake pictures now that
>everything is digital, so I was thinking what a cool hack it would be to
>Photoshop some similar pictures of the Bush daughters, and post them on
>the Internet for everyone to enjoy.
>
>Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder the legitimate
>leader of another sovereign nation and his entire family, an "artist's
>rendering" of Shrub reaping what he sows would surely be an excellent
>political statement.
>
>--
>Eric Michael Cordian 0+
>O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
>"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From sunder at sunder.net  Thu Jul 24 14:52:06 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:52:06 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F117hsylnnokmQ00002974@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307241748280.12664-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Nah, if you want sheer fuck you value photoshop them smoking crack pipes
while in an all out lezbo scene (make sure the other girls are of color -
preferably looking like they're from the middle east, some with
strap-ons)... include a gratiutous male donkey in there too.  Throw Jeb in
there for good measure - blowing the donkey.

If that doesn't shock his Xian-Fundie heart, I don't know what will.  :)


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Oooh! A very amusing notion.
> 
> I'm wondering, however, if in terms of analogies showing two of the -Sr- 
> Bush's sons in the photos might be more appropo (ie, Jeb & Dubya)...though I 
> admit showing the daughters has more sheer shock and "fuck-you" value.




From DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk  Thu Jul 24 10:00:55 2003
From: DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk (Dave Howe)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:00:55 +0100
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
References: <200307241616.h6OGGUk3006619@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <01a001c35205$2704dc90$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>

Eric Cordian wrote:
> Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder the
> legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his entire family,
> an "artist's rendering" of Shrub reaping what he sows would surely be
> an excellent political statement.
I am not sure these two were murdered as saddam's sons (although obviously
they were, and were no doubt given priority over equally worthy targets)
but as authority figures in the former government. That they were also (if
they could be captured) bloody useful hostages against actions by their
father probably didn't go without notice either.
However, if strafeing an occupied house with helecopter gunships, rocket
launchers and heavy machine guns after a cursory "surrender or die" is
ignored, based on military intel (which as the WMD fiasco shows is
worthless if the PR spin department are demanding raw access to unfiltered
intel and filtering, not on reliability but on closeness of match to the
desired outcome) is to be the new standard, I suspect a suicide bombing of
the white house (killing all the staff and the shrub) would now be "ok"
provided they shouted 'surrender or die' first, yes?




From shaddack at ns.arachne.cz  Thu Jul 24 09:21:04 2003
From: shaddack at ns.arachne.cz (Thomas Shaddack)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:21:04 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Jerk with a t-shirt
In-Reply-To: <200307240642.24776.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307241814480.26820-100000@Zeta>

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Steve Furlong wrote:
> I guess it _could_ have been a spontaneous rising of a populace fed up
> with jack-booted thug harrassment of dissenting opinion. But the more I
> hear about it, the more this sounds like a planned operation.

In the age of cellphones and email, fast ad-hoc organizations of many
people aren't as difficult as they used to be. I believe a good book about
this could be Howard Rheingold: Smart Mobs.

Especially in the case of already pre-stirred subpopulation, in this case
the anti-war part, fast crowding could be initiated by a relatively small
cause.




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Thu Jul 24 15:46:48 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:46:48 -0400
Subject: Congresscritters want to be more... permanent
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307241209380.26553-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
References: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307241209380.26553-100000@anon7.arachelian.c
  om>
Message-ID: <200307241846.48863.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Thursday 24 July 2003 12:09, Sunder wrote:
> Isn't that akin to when they vote themselves raises? :)

What raises? That would be unconstitutional, and they'd never do that. 
What they get are cost of living adjustments.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Jul 24 18:48:00 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:48:00 -0700
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307250035080.26754@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <05C0AB66-BE42-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 03:17 PM, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

> On 2003-07-24, Tim May uttered:
>
>> HOWEVER, our interest is in the untraceable/anonymous.
>
> Duh!
>

You were gibbering about how "digicash" includes PayPal, ATMs, Visa, 
and other forms of transfers which are only "digital" in that computers 
are used.

You need to think carefully about what blinding is all about. Calling 
Visa and PayPal "digicash" shows fundamental ignorance.


Nitwit. But very typical of the "new generation of rilly, rilly dumb 
cypherpunks."

--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Jul 24 18:55:27 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:55:27 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307241951220.4683-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <0FFE190A-BE43-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 05:52 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Dave Howe wrote:
>
>> However, if strafeing an occupied house with helecopter gunships, 
>> rocket
>> launchers and heavy machine guns after a cursory "surrender or die" is
>> ignored, based on military intel (which as the WMD fiasco shows is
>> worthless if the PR spin department are demanding raw access to 
>> unfiltered
>> intel and filtering, not on reliability but on closeness of match to 
>> the
>> desired outcome) is to be the new standard, I suspect a suicide 
>> bombing of
>> the white house (killing all the staff and the shrub) would now be 
>> "ok"
>> provided they shouted 'surrender or die' first, yes?
>
> Hell, this has been the norm for a very long time.  The rest of the 
> world
> knows this as an American No-Knock Drug Warrant.
>

Fucking idiot. Did you notice you have once again copied two nodes of 
the CP list? This is not the first time. Idiot.

Someone ought to necklace you.


--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Jul 24 18:57:18 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:57:18 -0700
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <20030725001110.GC9659@dreams.soze.net>
Message-ID: <523133AB-BE43-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 05:11 PM, Justin wrote:

> Tim May (2003-07-24 19:50Z) wrote:
>
>> We should also fight the use of sloppy language in the press when
>> mundane electronic funds transfer systems are called "digital cash."
>
> Is there anything to fight?
>
> The only instance of "digital cash" on google news (there's one
> reference to "digital cash registers", which I'm not counting) is an
> article about proffr's "x needs killing" comments.  The article doesn't
> abuse the term "digital cash", though it does abuse the term 
> "listserv".
>
> The term doesn't appear in print often enough to matter, IMO.
>
>

PLONK.

Way too many fools on Cypherpunks these last several  months. Maybe 
it's time to kill it.


--Tim May




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Thu Jul 24 19:25:30 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 19:25:30 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <523133AB-BE43-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307241923360.28415-100000@eskimo.com>

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:

> PLONK.
>
> Way too many fools on Cypherpunks these last several  months. Maybe
> it's time to kill it.

Excellent idea!  Since nobody on the list agrees with you any more, you
can eliminate a ton of noise from all the spammers across the globe.  My
in box will not regret it.
:-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From measl at mfn.org  Thu Jul 24 17:52:06 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 19:52:06 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <01a001c35205$2704dc90$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307241951220.4683-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Dave Howe wrote:

> However, if strafeing an occupied house with helecopter gunships, rocket
> launchers and heavy machine guns after a cursory "surrender or die" is
> ignored, based on military intel (which as the WMD fiasco shows is
> worthless if the PR spin department are demanding raw access to unfiltered
> intel and filtering, not on reliability but on closeness of match to the
> desired outcome) is to be the new standard, I suspect a suicide bombing of
> the white house (killing all the staff and the shrub) would now be "ok"
> provided they shouted 'surrender or die' first, yes?

Hell, this has been the norm for a very long time.  The rest of the world
knows this as an American No-Knock Drug Warrant.

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Thu Jul 24 17:44:32 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 20:44:32 -0400
Subject: Seminars not to miss in July and August 2003
Message-ID: <BAY7-F11019a27ynSGr00003436@hotmail.com>

Wow! This is either an identity sweep initiated by TSAs, or we're somehow on 
some interesting radar screens. Any truth to the rumor that 'Tim May' is 
actually a nym for bin Laden?

-TD


>From: "Settec" <settcltd at settecltd.com>
>Reply-To: "Settec" <settec at link.net>
>To: camera_lumina at hotmail.com
>Subject: Seminars not to miss in July and August 2003
>Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 20:10:56 +0300
>
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From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 24 18:01:42 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 21:01:42 -0400
Subject: One-Click Treason
Message-ID: <a06001a4cbb45d367ef92@[66.149.49.6]>

<http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/printer.jsp?CID=1051-072403A>

TCS: Tech Central Station - Where Free Markets Meet Technology

One-Click Treason 

By Tom W. Bell 
07/24/2003 



Accusations of treason fly when a nation goes to war. Sometimes, those claims stick. After World War II, the U.S. punished several of its citizens for having served as paid Axis propagandists. Recent terrorist attacks on the U.S. have triggered new cries of "Treason!" Could successful prosecutions follow? 

 

As the Constitution defines it, treason includes "adhering to" enemies of the U.S. and "giving them Aid and Comfort." Courts have already told us that paid propagandists meet the test. An American serving as a paid propagandist of the al-Qaida network would thus run a high risk of punishment for treason. The same would likely hold true of anyone who, owing allegiance to the U.S. , spoke on behalf of and in the pay of an anti-U.S. terrorist organization. 

 

The War on Terrorists will probably not generate any treason prosecutions of paid propagandists, however. Contemporary terrorist networks favor less formal -- we might say "packet-switched" -- operations. Terrorist enemies of the U.S. thus tend to distribute their propaganda via volunteers from the press, in the street, or on the internet. Could such volunteer propagandists suffer punishment for treason? 

 

Here, the law of treason hides a treacherous hole. Courts have not said whether volunteer propagandists for enemies of the U.S. commit treason against it. The volume of volunteer pro-terrorist propaganda alone makes that legal uncertainty worrisome. The growing ease of adding to that flood of speech makes the legal gap dangerous. 

 

Advances in telecommunications have made it astonishingly easy to publish unpaid, volunteer, freelance propaganda. Because she relied on short-wave radio signals sent from powerful transmitters overseas, Axis Sally needed Nazi help to broadcast to the U.S. Today, in contrast, a domestic "al-Qaida Al" could, with a single click on his weblog interface, bombard the world with anti-U.S. polemic. 

 

Does that mean that every domestic blogger who criticizes U.S. foreign policy thereby commits treason? Of course not. The Constitution requires treasonous speakers to "adhere to" U.S. enemies. Most critics of their country want to help it. As the Supreme Court explained in Cramer v. United States , a treasonous speaker must "intellectually or emotionally favor the enemy and harbor sympathies or convictions disloyal to this country's policy or interest . . .." A domestic blogger like al-Qaida Al might easily qualify on that count. 

 

The Constitution also requires that a treasonous act give "Aid and Comfort" to enemies of the U.S. Can mere speech do that? Here, again, Cramer v. U.S. offers guidance. The Supreme Court included "making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures" among the acts that could aid and comfort an enemy. Again, al-Qaida Al might do that; bloggers already do. 

 

Suppose, then, that our imagined blogger owes allegiance to the U.S. , sympathizes with al-Qaida, harbors convictions disloyal to the U.S. , and uses his blog to express those views. Does he thereby commit treason? Although language from Cramer v. U.S. suggests that he does, that case speaks only to the prosecution of a paid propagandist. It thus does not control the hypothetical case of U.S. v. al-Qaida Al. And, as other courts have observed, al-Qaida Al has a free speech right to express his opinion. 

 

Treason law has not yet bridged the gap between paid and independent propagandists. If al-Qaida Al blogs as a paid agent of the al-Qaida conspiracy, he probably commits treason. If he speaks in complete independence of al-Qaida direction, he almost certainly enjoys immunity from prosecution. Between those solid edges fall a number of cases, including directed but unpaid propaganda, undirected but coordinated propaganda, and sympathetically republished propaganda. 

 

How should we decide whether those types of propaganda qualify as "treasonous speech" or "free speech"? One rule leaps to the fore: Require evidence of a binding obligation between a supposed traitor and a U.S. enemy. Their obligation would not have to be in writing, involve money, or make the accused an agent. At the least, though, al-Qaida Al's prosecutors would have to show that he had promised aid and comfort to a U.S. enemy. 

 

Free speech rights would win greater protection if prosecutors also had to show that defendant Al had gained something in the exchange. It would not have to be money; a promise of almost anything would suffice as consideration for the deal. Perhaps as little as Osama bin Laden's (allegedly) personal "thank you" would do, or a hypertext link on the (alleged) al-Qaida homepage. It would not do, though, to prove only that al-Qaida Al had emailed a promise of help to reliance at al-qaida.net . Prosecutors would have to show that Al got a reply and reached a deal. 

 

Courts may soon face the chasm-splitting treason law. They will then have to walk the legal tightrope between paid and independent propaganda, balancing the power to prosecute treason against the right to speak freely. To give that distinction a solid footing, to protect our liberties from a terrible fall, courts should follow contract law. 

 

Tom Bell is a professor at Chapman University School of Law and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. 



-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From decoy at iki.fi  Thu Jul 24 11:16:35 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 21:16:35 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307231136140.10173-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
References: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307231136140.10173-100000@anon7.arachelian.c
  om>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307242027170.26754@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-23, Sunder uttered:

>If you want to do electronic payments that are non-anonymous you can
>simply use a credit card or debit card (or something like paypal, egold),
>or for larger quanitities you can do wire transfers - so why would we
>need yet another a non-anonymous "cash" that isn't cash?

I only objected to the notion that all digicash needs to be anonymous in
order to be desirable. I didn't say this particular system amounts to
desirable weak digicash. To that end it would likely make far more sense
in the short term e.g. to marry Visa Electronic to PayPal. In the long
term multiple cooperating PayPal-like entities could then be used to build
mixnets, making the digicash strongly anonymous.

As for Morlock Elloi's objection, what you have on your bank account *is*
money, and debit cards simply a technological quirk which allows us to
access it. Furthermore, any medium of indirect exchange is by definition
money and at least Merriam-Webster defines cash as "ready money". So we
might define cash as the most liquid form a money available. After that we
can claim that in the presence of ubiquitous debit capability and a
steadily growing aversion towards those using paper money, the latter is
not in fact cash at all, but a less liquid cash (bits on a mainframe)
substitute used when we're willing to pay a premium (in convenience and
depreciation) for anonymity.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Thu Jul 24 19:12:16 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 22:12:16 -0400
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <17C50F20-BE10-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
References: <17C50F20-BE10-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <200307242212.16564.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Thursday 24 July 2003 15:50, Tim May wrote:

> In fact, "digicash" strongly suggests David Chaum's "Digicash,"

That assumes the reader or listener has heard of Digicash, or of Chaum. 
Not an assumption I'd be comfortable making.


> I choose not to call "untraceable/anonymous digital cash" by any of
> the marketing-oriented catchwords like "Digicash," "BearerBucks,"
> "E-coins," "MeterMoney," whatever.

I tend to use "electronic money" when discussing coin- or account-based 
systems, anonymous or not, with the unwashed masses. It conveys the 
meaning well enough to serve as an opening wedge to a better 
description, and it's general enough that it shouldn't offend the 
sensibilities of those few people who do understand the subject in 
depth. And it hasn't been gobbled up by any company, so far as I know.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From justin at soze.net  Thu Jul 24 17:11:10 2003
From: justin at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:11:10 +0000
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <17C50F20-BE10-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
References: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307242027170.26754@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>
  <17C50F20-BE10-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <20030725001110.GC9659@dreams.soze.net>

Tim May (2003-07-24 19:50Z) wrote:

> We should also fight the use of sloppy language in the press when 
> mundane electronic funds transfer systems are called "digital cash."

Is there anything to fight?

The only instance of "digital cash" on google news (there's one
reference to "digital cash registers", which I'm not counting) is an
article about proffr's "x needs killing" comments.  The article doesn't
abuse the term "digital cash", though it does abuse the term "listserv".

The term doesn't appear in print often enough to matter, IMO.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=%22digital+cash%22&btnG=Search+News
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~1497971,00.html

-- 
Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit
crimes and do bad things.  They're also free to live their lives and do
wonderful things.   --Rumsfeld, 2003-04-11




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Jul 25 00:46:09 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:46:09 -0700
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <200307242212.16564.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
Message-ID: <0E0C3BFB-BE74-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 07:12 PM, Steve Furlong wrote:

> On Thursday 24 July 2003 15:50, Tim May wrote:
>
>> In fact, "digicash" strongly suggests David Chaum's "Digicash,"
>
> That assumes the reader or listener has heard of Digicash, or of Chaum.
> Not an assumption I'd be comfortable making.

Agreed, making the assumption that readers here have heard of Chaum or 
understand the basic idea of blinded transactions (or dining 
cryptographers, or oblivious transfer, or any of the other building 
blocks) is no longer warranted. I expect many of the persyns of 
peircing now spewing on the list are, like, thinking "that's, like, 
_so_ nineties."

As for thinking very general readers or listeners, those not even on 
the list, are capable of understanding Chaum or Digicash, that's a 
fool's errand. The average nontechnical person knows nothing about how 
crypto works, and attempting to explain a DC-Net or a blinded transfer 
is no more useful to them than just telling them the currency is based 
on "magic beans."

The point is not that laymen need to understand Digicash, but that 
calling things like ATM cards and Visa cards "digicash" does a 
disservice to the important ideas of why Chaum's and Brands' and 
similar systems worked.

Hey, maybe it's actually the case that some of the people here who are 
referring to electronic debit cards as "digicash" just don't have a 
clue about what blinding is and why it makes for truly untraceable 
tokens.


> I tend to use "electronic money" when discussing coin- or account-based
> systems, anonymous or not, with the unwashed masses. It conveys the
> meaning well enough to serve as an opening wedge to a better
> description, and it's general enough that it shouldn't offend the
> sensibilities of those few people who do understand the subject in
> depth. And it hasn't been gobbled up by any company, so far as I know.

I stopped any efforts to explain the true importance of 
electronic/digital money/cash a long time ago. A waste of time. Not too 
surprising, as getting even the basic idea requires some passing 
familiarity with things like how RSA works. When I read Chaum's 1985 
CACM paper I already knew about RSA and "hard" directions for problems 
(trapdoor functions), and yet I still had to read and reread the paper 
and draw little pictures for myself.

Thinking someone can absorb the gist via a purely verbal description is 
just not plausible. I have seen David Chaum attempt to do this with an 
audience of computer professionals....my impression from the later 
questions from the audience is that his explanation simply didn't get 
them over the "hump" to the stage of realizing the key concept. No more 
so than popularizations of relativity actually ever got the masses to 
understand relativity.

There is much that could be said about whether this difficulty is why 
we don't have untraceable, Chaum-style forms of money (I don't think 
this is the reason). Regardless, wishing won't make it so, and so 
wishing that people would "grok" the importance of blinding without 
having spent at least a few hours brushing up on RSA and exponentiation 
and all that and then following an explanation very, very 
closely....well, wishing won't make it so.

So it's best to ignore the "unwashed masses" and their inability to 
understand untraceable money.

More troubling is that so many _here_ don't seem to "get it."

--Tim May




From decoy at iki.fi  Thu Jul 24 15:17:47 2003
From: decoy at iki.fi (Sampo Syreeni)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 01:17:47 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <17C50F20-BE10-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
References: <17C50F20-BE10-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.51.0307250035080.26754@kruuna.Helsinki.FI>

On 2003-07-24, Tim May uttered:

>HOWEVER, our interest is in the untraceable/anonymous.

Duh!
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2




From ccooper at klohn.com  Fri Jul 25 05:10:37 2003
From: ccooper at klohn.com (Cooper, Carlo)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 05:10:37 -0700
Subject: Fisk articles
Message-ID: <E5BCEAABDDDFD6118E18000802A127EE050316@AURORA>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harmon Seaver [mailto:hseaver at cybershamanix.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 22 July 2003 7:17 AM
> To: cypherpunks at lne.com
> Subject: Fisk articles
> 
> 
>    Does anyone have access to the fulltext articles by Robert 
> Fisk like this one
> on alleged torture in US internment camps in Iraq:
> http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=42652
0 that the
Independant offers on a subscription basis?


I think this is the same story @ counterpunch.org

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk07242003.html

cya
carlo.




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Fri Jul 25 06:01:10 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 06:01:10 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <01a001c35205$2704dc90$c71121c2@exchange.sharpuk.co.uk>
Message-ID: <20030725130110.40576.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>

May be the information provided by the informant was
wrong and it ended up that a 14 year kid along with 3
iraqi  adults got killed and in order to prevent
further outrage among iraqi's,the white house decided
on playing its cards  to its advantage.They didn't
confirm their DNA test as yet-funny.

Regards Sarath.


--- Dave Howe <DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk> wrote:
> Eric Cordian wrote:
> > Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is
> to murder the
> > legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and
> his entire family,
> > an "artist's rendering" of Shrub reaping what he
> sows would surely be
> > an excellent political statement.
> I am not sure these two were murdered as saddam's
> sons (although obviously
> they were, and were no doubt given priority over
> equally worthy targets)
> but as authority figures in the former government.
> That they were also (if
> they could be captured) bloody useful hostages
> against actions by their
> father probably didn't go without notice either.
> However, if strafeing an occupied house with
> helecopter gunships, rocket
> launchers and heavy machine guns after a cursory
> "surrender or die" is
> ignored, based on military intel (which as the WMD
> fiasco shows is
> worthless if the PR spin department are demanding
> raw access to unfiltered
> intel and filtering, not on reliability but on
> closeness of match to the
> desired outcome) is to be the new standard, I
> suspect a suicide bombing of
> the white house (killing all the staff and the
> shrub) would now be "ok"
> provided they shouted 'surrender or die' first, yes?
> 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com




From postgres at jal.org  Fri Jul 25 05:08:41 2003
From: postgres at jal.org (Jamie Lawrence)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 07:08:41 -0500
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <0E0C3BFB-BE74-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
References: <200307242212.16564.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
  <0E0C3BFB-BE74-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <20030725120841.GH1073@jal.clueinc.net>

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:

> There is much that could be said about whether this difficulty is why 
> we don't have untraceable, Chaum-style forms of money (I don't think 
> this is the reason). Regardless, wishing won't make it so, and so 
> wishing that people would "grok" the importance of blinding without 
> having spent at least a few hours brushing up on RSA and exponentiation 
> and all that and then following an explanation very, very 
> closely....well, wishing won't make it so.
> 
> So it's best to ignore the "unwashed masses" and their inability to 
> understand untraceable money.

As far as it goes, I'm willing to bet that many of the unwashed masses
who hold a mortgage don't actually understand how it was calculated, much
like there are many insurance policy holders who don't understand
actuarial statistics. (As far as it goes, except in the broad terms of
understanding statistics, I fall in to the latter category. I once tried
to read up on how insurance risks are calculated, and simply couldn't
get through the text, without more reason to. A friend who works in
reinsurance still laughs at me over this.) Same story in securities and
mutual funds. Or, for that matter, SMTP.

As a further example, a very intelligent person, very successful in
chosen pursuits, asked me how secure the new Visa cards with online
passwords were. The ones that are being advertised all over TV. It
took a fair amount of explaining to get across that they don't protect
the user of the card, they protect the merchant and the bank. Once the
"lightbulb came on", she was annoyed at having been taken in by an ad,
and completely forgot to care whether or not the protocol is 'secure'.


I'm not sure that understanding matters for broad adoption of a
financial instrument. The sales pitch does matter.

> More troubling is that so many _here_ don't seem to "get it."

True, but this list has always been made up of mostly nitwits.

> --Tim May

-j


-- 
Jamie Lawrence                                        jal at jal.org
Be aloof, there's been a sudden population explosion of lerts.




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Jul 25 08:40:33 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 08:40:33 -0700
Subject: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases
  Made Online)
In-Reply-To: <523133AB-BE43-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
References: <20030725001110.GC9659@dreams.soze.net>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>

At 18:57 2003-07-24 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 05:11 PM, Justin wrote:
>
>>Tim May (2003-07-24 19:50Z) wrote:
>>
>>>We should also fight the use of sloppy language in the press when
>>>mundane electronic funds transfer systems are called "digital cash."
>>
>>Is there anything to fight?
>>
>>The only instance of "digital cash" on google news (there's one
>>reference to "digital cash registers", which I'm not counting) is an
>>article about proffr's "x needs killing" comments.  The article doesn't
>>abuse the term "digital cash", though it does abuse the term "listserv".
>>
>>The term doesn't appear in print often enough to matter, IMO.
>>
>
>PLONK.
>
>Way too many fools on Cypherpunks these last several  months. Maybe it's 
>time to kill it.

I think its been dead for some time now.  Most of those on the list are The 
motto "cypherpunks should have written code" is emblazoned across the 
tombstone.

As some of you know there have been a number of aborted attempts, few 
serious, to build a digital cash (Chaumian sense) code base from which to 
catalyze useful commercial ventures.  During the go-go '90s all the 
talented coders on this list were off chasing the bubble rainbow and had no 
time for such pipe dreams.  Now that many are un- or under-employed there 
still doesn't seem to be any activity by those active on this list in this 
critical infrastructure area.  All the recent work that is being done 
(e.g., Orlin Grabbe's ALTA/DMT http://orlingrabbe.com/redirect.htm, Patrick 
McCuller's Lucrative http://lucrative.thirdhost.com, YodelBank 
http://yodelbank.com/, InvisibelNet http://invisiblenet.net) has been 
undertaken by real cypherpunks, a few monitor this list but rarely if ever 
post.  I can only conclude that with the exceptions of the early CPs, who 
helped build the first remailers and such, most list members now are losers 
and sycophants.  Time to move over for the next crop of motivated 
libertarian cypherpunks.

The cypherpunks are dead, long live the cypherpunks!

steve


"We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others that write what men do, not 
what they ought to do."
-Francis Bacon 




From odlyzko at dtc.umn.edu  Fri Jul 25 07:30:11 2003
From: odlyzko at dtc.umn.edu (Andrew Odlyzko)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 09:30:11 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: FYI: paper on privacy and price discrimination
Message-ID: <mailman.746.1576007635.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>

The paper "Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the 
Internet," to appear in the Proc.  5th International Conference 
on eCommerce, is now available on my Web page.  I thought it
might be of interest to you, and apologize for the spam if it
is not.

Best regards,
Andrew Odlyzko




full paper URL:  http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/privacy.economics.pdf




             Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination 
                       on the Internet


                       Andrew Odlyzko

                 Digital Technology Center
                  University of Minnesota
                  Minneapolis, Minnesota

                     odlyzko at umn.edu
              http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko


                      Abstract:

The rapid erosion of privacy poses numerous puzzles.  Why is it occurring,
and why do people care about it?  This paper proposes an explanation
for many of these puzzles in terms of the increasing importance of
price discrimination.  Privacy appears to be declining largely in order
to facilitate differential pricing, which offers greater social and
economic gains than auctions or shopping agents.  The thesis of this
paper is that what really motivates commercial organizations (even
though they often do not realize it clearly themselves) is the growing
incentive to price discriminate, coupled with the increasing ability
to price discriminate.  It is the same incentive that has led to the
airline yield management system, with a complex and constantly changing
array of prices.  It is also the same incentive that led railroads to
invent a variety of price and quality differentiation schemes in the
19th century.  Privacy intrusions serve to provide the information that
allows sellers to determine buyers' willingness to pay.  They also allow
monitoring of usage, to ensure that arbitrage is not used to bypass
discriminatory pricing.

Economically, price discrimination is usually regarded as desirable,
since it often increases the efficiency of the economy.  That is why it
is frequently promoted by governments, either through explicit mandates
or through indirect means.  On the other hand, price discrimination
often arouses strong opposition from the public.

There is no easy resolution to the conflict between sellers' incentives
to price discriminate and buyers' resistance to such measures.
The continuing tension between these two factors will have important
consequences for the nature of the economy.  It will also determine
which technologies will be adopted widely.  Governments will likely play
an increasing role in controlling pricing, although their roles will
continue to be ambiguous.  Sellers are likely to rely to an even greater
extent on techniques such as bundling that will allow them to extract more
consumer surplus and also to conceal the extent of price discrimination.
Micropayments and auctions are likely to play a smaller role than is
often expected.  In general, because of the strong conflicting influences,
privacy is likely to prove an intractable problem that will be prominent
on the the public agenda for the foreseeable future.

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Jul 25 09:50:47 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 09:50:47 -0700
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725095026.04980598@mail.comcast.net>

At 00:46 2003-07-25 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 07:12 PM, Steve Furlong wrote:
>
>>On Thursday 24 July 2003 15:50, Tim May wrote:
>>
>>>In fact, "digicash" strongly suggests David Chaum's "Digicash,"
>>
>>That assumes the reader or listener has heard of Digicash, or of Chaum.
>>Not an assumption I'd be comfortable making.
>
>Agreed, making the assumption that readers here have heard of Chaum or 
>understand the basic idea of blinded transactions (or dining 
>cryptographers, or oblivious transfer, or any of the other building 
>blocks) is no longer warranted. I expect many of the persyns of peircing 
>now spewing on the list are, like, thinking "that's, like, _so_ nineties."
>
>As for thinking very general readers or listeners, those not even on the 
>list, are capable of understanding Chaum or Digicash, that's a fool's 
>errand. The average nontechnical person knows nothing about how crypto 
>works, and attempting to explain a DC-Net or a blinded transfer is no more 
>useful to them than just telling them the currency is based on "magic beans."

I've used the graphics and explanations that were in Digicash's Users Guide 
with non-technicals to great effect.  They portrayed blinding using 
envelope, wax seal and wax token.  The token was placed in the envelope and 
sent to the mint.  The envelope represented the blinding function performed 
by the user's SW.  The wax seal: the mint's digital signature pressed onto 
the envelope and "by pressure" into the enclosed coin which has not been 
seen by the mint.  And the wax token, once removed from the envelope, the 
un-blinded coin.

steve  




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Fri Jul 25 06:59:52 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 09:59:52 -0400
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Message-ID: <BAY7-F43CjVLYo3gZ8g00004e54@hotmail.com>

"So it's best to ignore the "unwashed masses" and their inability to 
understand untraceable money."

That's precisely the wrong conclusion, assuming everything else you wrote in 
this post is correct.

If one accepts that most young people don't understand the notion or 
implications of truely digital "cash", then one's tactics must change 
considerably.

If de-empowering some aspects of the State is your goal, a new constrant is 
that your methods must not rely on anyone giving a crap about your goals, or 
possibly of digital cash. This does not mean that these ideas are destined 
to flounder, but instead it may mean that for them to have life they must 
find it somewhere where people can understand their usefulness. For 
instance, I can easily see some notions of untraceable digital cash finding 
applications over certain kinds of P2P networks. But if you continue to 
discuss the issue in the abstract, or purely in the context of de-stating 
the state, the youngins won't pay attention long enough for them to 
recognize why this may be useful to them. Eventually, however, they'll find 
the need for these ideas and do their homework.

-TD






>From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
>Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:46:09 -0700
>
>On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 07:12 PM, Steve Furlong wrote:
>
>>On Thursday 24 July 2003 15:50, Tim May wrote:
>>
>>>In fact, "digicash" strongly suggests David Chaum's "Digicash,"
>>
>>That assumes the reader or listener has heard of Digicash, or of Chaum.
>>Not an assumption I'd be comfortable making.
>
>Agreed, making the assumption that readers here have heard of Chaum or 
>understand the basic idea of blinded transactions (or dining 
>cryptographers, or oblivious transfer, or any of the other building blocks) 
>is no longer warranted. I expect many of the persyns of peircing now 
>spewing on the list are, like, thinking "that's, like, _so_ nineties."
>
>As for thinking very general readers or listeners, those not even on the 
>list, are capable of understanding Chaum or Digicash, that's a fool's 
>errand. The average nontechnical person knows nothing about how crypto 
>works, and attempting to explain a DC-Net or a blinded transfer is no more 
>useful to them than just telling them the currency is based on "magic 
>beans."
>
>The point is not that laymen need to understand Digicash, but that calling 
>things like ATM cards and Visa cards "digicash" does a disservice to the 
>important ideas of why Chaum's and Brands' and similar systems worked.
>
>Hey, maybe it's actually the case that some of the people here who are 
>referring to electronic debit cards as "digicash" just don't have a clue 
>about what blinding is and why it makes for truly untraceable tokens.
>
>
>>I tend to use "electronic money" when discussing coin- or account-based
>>systems, anonymous or not, with the unwashed masses. It conveys the
>>meaning well enough to serve as an opening wedge to a better
>>description, and it's general enough that it shouldn't offend the
>>sensibilities of those few people who do understand the subject in
>>depth. And it hasn't been gobbled up by any company, so far as I know.
>
>I stopped any efforts to explain the true importance of electronic/digital 
>money/cash a long time ago. A waste of time. Not too surprising, as getting 
>even the basic idea requires some passing familiarity with things like how 
>RSA works. When I read Chaum's 1985 CACM paper I already knew about RSA and 
>"hard" directions for problems (trapdoor functions), and yet I still had to 
>read and reread the paper and draw little pictures for myself.
>
>Thinking someone can absorb the gist via a purely verbal description is 
>just not plausible. I have seen David Chaum attempt to do this with an 
>audience of computer professionals....my impression from the later 
>questions from the audience is that his explanation simply didn't get them 
>over the "hump" to the stage of realizing the key concept. No more so than 
>popularizations of relativity actually ever got the masses to understand 
>relativity.
>
>There is much that could be said about whether this difficulty is why we 
>don't have untraceable, Chaum-style forms of money (I don't think this is 
>the reason). Regardless, wishing won't make it so, and so wishing that 
>people would "grok" the importance of blinding without having spent at 
>least a few hours brushing up on RSA and exponentiation and all that and 
>then following an explanation very, very closely....well, wishing won't 
>make it so.
>
>So it's best to ignore the "unwashed masses" and their inability to 
>understand untraceable money.
>
>More troubling is that so many _here_ don't seem to "get it."
>
>--Tim May

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Jul 25 10:26:59 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 10:26:59 -0700
Subject: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for
  Purchases  Made Online)
In-Reply-To: <E19g5e0-00036w-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>
References: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
  <523133AB-BE43-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
  <20030725001110.GC9659@dreams.soze.net>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725102419.04985f10@mail.comcast.net>

At 12:41 2003-07-25 -0700, you wrote:
>Oh, like Uday and Qusay, you can't kill this immortal fucker,
>nobody got the guts to plow a TOW in it. Instead, thousands of
>gutless have hari-kiried by exiting the battle for well.com
>nutlick where the dead live in perfect, silent synchrony, so that
>is a no-brain, no-work option. Sit still, children, repeat this.

Translation please :-)  I don't understand or speak Consciousness Stream 1.0

steve


"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think 
things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and 
taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he 
lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable."  --H. L. Mencken




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Fri Jul 25 10:30:46 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 10:30:46 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for 
  Purchases  Made Online)
In-Reply-To: <E19g5e0-00036w-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307251029500.13612-100000@eskimo.com>

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, John Young wrote:

> The old days, don't believe them, cypherpunks was and is toxic
> to serious makeovers and shutdowns and lock-outs, and, never
> forget that PLONKS are cries of shut the fuck up and listen to me.
> Pluck the PLONKS, if you don't get them you aint earning your
> stay. PLONKERS little-man your wee-wees.
>
> Hiccups a fogey one hand hanging on the bar rail, the other
> rooting the floor vomit for a chawtabaccy cud ricochet from
> the spit bucket.
>

Right on dude!

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From jya at pipeline.com  Fri Jul 25 12:41:30 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 12:41:30 -0700
Subject: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for
  Purchases  Made Online)
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
References: <523133AB-BE43-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
  <20030725001110.GC9659@dreams.soze.net>
Message-ID: <E19g5e0-00036w-00@tisch.mail.mindspring.net>

Oh, like Uday and Qusay, you can't kill this immortal fucker, 
nobody got the guts to plow a TOW in it. Instead, thousands of
gutless have hari-kiried by exiting the battle for well.com 
nutlick where the dead live in perfect, silent synchrony, so that 
is a no-brain, no-work option. Sit still, children, repeat this.

Hell, start a DOA mail list to bitch about how stupid people are
outside of old folks cess-suck. Read yourself sitting on a one-holer.

Nothing wrong with cypherpunks that couldn't be cured, as ever,
by more fresh young meat totally ignorant and not giving a shit
about how it used to be, only hot to throw slop at what's 
puked by the wizened, the reputable, the stuffed with here's
how it's meant to be.

Now that revulsion against whoever has truth by tail is a dim 
memory of what cpunks was meant to be, was now and again, 
not a place for boozy glory days telling a sanitized tale of what 
never happened. Pontificators are usually hooted off the list,
save for a few protected species taxidermied for darts.

The old days, don't believe them, cypherpunks was and is toxic 
to serious makeovers and shutdowns and lock-outs, and, never 
forget that PLONKS are cries of shut the fuck up and listen to me.
Pluck the PLONKS, if you don't get them you aint earning your
stay. PLONKERS little-man your wee-wees.

Hiccups a fogey one hand hanging on the bar rail, the other
rooting the floor vomit for a chawtabaccy cud ricochet from
the spit bucket.

]=;& Uday




From rah at shipwright.com  Fri Jul 25 10:54:56 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 13:54:56 -0400
Subject: FYI: paper on privacy and price discrimination
Message-ID: <a06001a0fbb471f2bc3a1@[66.149.49.6]>

--- begin forwarded text



From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Jul 25 14:49:12 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 14:49:12 -0700
Subject: Son of Napster
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725144509.048b0f88@mail.comcast.net>

Tech pundit/gadfly Robert Cringely has come up with a pretty damn good idea 
for creating a RIAA-crushing music file-sharing system. Instead of 
concentrating on technical issues, he has tackled the problem using 
existing legal structures for corporations.

There's probably more than a few problems with his idea, especially the 
legality of applying divided interests in a mutual fund-like vehicle 
without limits to the benefit tied to that divided interest, but it's an 
interesting read nonetheless.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030724.html

steve

"When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra 




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Jul 25 15:08:25 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:08:25 -0700
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <BB474C80.344D2%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>
Message-ID: <838066BC-BEEC-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

Some lurker unwilling to comment on the public list sent me this. I 
didn't notice it wasn't intended for the list until I had already 
written a reply and was preparing to send it. So I have altered the 
name.

--Tim

On Friday, July 25, 2003, at 01:07 PM, SOMEONE wrote:

> Tim May wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 07:12 PM, Steve Furlong wrote:
>>
>>> On Thursday 24 July 2003 15:50, Tim May wrote:
>>>
>>>> In fact, "digicash" strongly suggests David Chaum's "Digicash,"
>>>
>>> That assumes the reader or listener has heard of Digicash, or of 
>>> Chaum.
>>> Not an assumption I'd be comfortable making.
>
> Readers on the cypherpunks list? They should be able to understand it, 
> or at
> least they should have heard of it.

They may have _heard_ of it, but to most of them (I t hink) it's just 
some magical incantations which they don't quite believe anyway.

>
>> I stopped any efforts to explain the true importance of
>> electronic/digital money/cash a long time ago. A waste of time. Not 
>> too
>> surprising, as getting even the basic idea requires some passing
>> familiarity with things like how RSA works. When I read Chaum's 1985
>> CACM paper I already knew about RSA and "hard" directions for problems
>> (trapdoor functions), and yet I still had to read and reread the paper
>> and draw little pictures for myself.
>
>
> That's a shame. The 1985 paper isn't on-line afaik, and I've only read
> second-hand versions.

First, my "stopped any efforts...a long time ago" was a comment 
directed at what the OP was talking about: explaining digital money to 
the masses. For example, at parties or other meatspace gatherings. 
Online explanations--here, for example--are another matter.

Second, the many online explanations from the CP list, circa 1992-94, 
are readily findable. Let me go check....(20 seconds pass...)...yep, I 
just found hundreds of summary articles from various authors, including 
myself, Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Doug Barnes, Ian Goldberg, and many 
others. There is no shortage of explanations of this stuff.

In one of my articles, in fact, I make the same point about how the 
various boring versions of "electronic money" are not very important:

"The focus here is on true, untraceable digital cash, offering both 
payer and payee untraceability (anonymity). Mundane digital money, 
exemplified by on-line banking, ATM cards, smartcards, etc., is not 
interesting or important for CFP purposes. Payer-untraceable (but 
payee-traceable) digital cash can also be interesting, but not nearly 
as interesting and important as fully untraceable digital cash. "

There are many articles on why this is so. But, frankly, anyone who 
cannot see this from first principles probably is not ever going to get 
it.

Third, regarding the CACM article, it's been "liberated" and made 
available online more than a few times. Try search engines. I know the 
Information Liberation Front (ILF) was actively liberating various of 
the key papers in the early months of the CP list...and these are 
mostly archived and searchable.

And of course Chaum's original 1985 description has been redone many 
times, in later papers by him and others, etc.


>
> And I don't think it works at all, anyway...
>

As it's been demonstrated to work, technically, this is a weird 
statement. Existence proofs are powerful.

If you mean that Bank of America and Mastercard are not offering 
Chaum-style instruments, and so on, then this is not the same thing as 
saying the ideas don't work.

--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Fri Jul 25 15:17:26 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:17:26 -0700
Subject: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for
  Purchases  Made Online)
In-Reply-To: <200307251736.11293.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
Message-ID: <C5FD0B93-BEED-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Friday, July 25, 2003, at 02:36 PM, Steve Furlong wrote:

> On Friday 25 July 2003 11:40, Steve Schear wrote:
>
>> ... Now that many are un-
>> or under-employed there still doesn't seem to be any activity by
>> those active on this list in this critical infrastructure area.
>
> Speaking only for myself, I'm making a lot less than I was a couple of
> years ago. In the wake of the dot-bomb, I'm working a lot more hours
> just to keep my bills paid. I no longer have much time or creativity
> left for non-paying tasks.
>

My analysis of the situation is that the peak creative years for CP 
ideas were 1992-95, and virtually no one on the list was being paid a 
cent for their efforts here or elsewhere. Some were students, some were 
libertarians with pent-up ideas about creating actual free societies or 
economies, some were engineers or programmers working for companies on 
unrelated projects, some were unemployed.

The dot com era was actually a desert era...lots of nattering about 
raising VC money, buying other companies, creating grandiose plans to 
become rivals to Microsoft, and so on. Very few really good ideas in 
the 1996-00 era. And then came the crash.

We haven't had much of an infusion of young blood--I believe this is 
closely related to Boomers and Heinlein, Rand, etc. and the differing 
interests of the young people of today and their anti-globalist, ring 
through nose politics--and those who got wiped out in the dot com 
frenzy have not gone back to blue sky thinking. A lot of them seem to 
be doing "uninteresting" (from a mathematical or first principles point 
of view) Unix security jobs.

--Tim May




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Jul 25 15:29:14 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:29:14 -0700
Subject: Cartoon in Times Prompts Inquiry by Secret Service
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725152717.048984b0@mail.comcast.net>

What fun, now they are eating their young.... Ramirez is a conservative 
Bush supporter.

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-me-ramirez22jul22.story

steve


"Il dulce far niente"  The sweetness of doing nothing
My unemployment motto 




From adam at homeport.org  Fri Jul 25 12:45:31 2003
From: adam at homeport.org (Adam Shostack)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:45:31 -0400
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725095026.04980598@mail.comcast.net>
References: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725095026.04980598@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <20030725194531.GA15649@lightship.internal.homeport.org>

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 09:50:47AM -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
| I've used the graphics and explanations that were in Digicash's Users Guide 
| with non-technicals to great effect.  They portrayed blinding using 
| envelope, wax seal and wax token.  The token was placed in the envelope and 
| sent to the mint.  The envelope represented the blinding function performed 
| by the user's SW.  The wax seal: the mint's digital signature pressed onto 
| the envelope and "by pressure" into the enclosed coin which has not been 
| seen by the mint.  And the wax token, once removed from the envelope, the 
| un-blinded coin.

Bzzt.  Thank you for playing.

If anonymity loves company, you can't spend 20 minutes explaining what
you mean to each person you want to use your system.

They have to figure out why this is private and that ain't, and they
need to do it in a way that works for the privacy threat that they
worry about.

"This is like a credit card number that can only be used once, so you
don't have to worry about someone hacking their store."

"This is like a travellers check that prevents ID theft."

Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume




From frantz at pwpconsult.com  Fri Jul 25 15:52:30 2003
From: frantz at pwpconsult.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:52:30 -0700
Subject: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for  
  Purchases  Made Online)
In-Reply-To: <200307251736.11293.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
References: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
  <20030725001110.GC9659@dreams.soze.net> 
  <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <v0311070bbb4763f94651@[192.168.1.5]>

On Friday 25 July 2003 11:40, Steve Schear wrote:
> ... Now that many are un-
> or under-employed there still doesn't seem to be any activity by
> those active on this list in this critical infrastructure area.

In some sense, we have enough code.  Code exists that can be deployed.  It
may have to go thru the same evolutionary stages the P2P software is going
thru (Napster to Kazza to ???) as security problems become serious, but it
is deployed now.

What we don't have is:

* Patent licenses
* Easy to use code
* Users

Techies can work on the ease of use issue, but patent licenses take time
and/or money, and users take marketing and sales.

Cheers - Bill


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz           | "A Jobless Recovery is | Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506         | like a Breadless Sand- | 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz at pwpconsult.com | wich." -- Steve Schear | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA




From jamesd at echeque.com  Fri Jul 25 16:33:14 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 16:33:14 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <200307241616.h6OGGUk3006619@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <3F215BCA.1733.135ED95B@localhost>

    --
On 24 Jul 2003 at 9:16, Eric Cordian wrote:
> Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder
> the legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his
> entire family, an "artist's rendering" of Shrub reaping what
> he sows would surely be an excellent political statement.

You are a moron.

If today warfare means wiping out the family of the enemy ruler
man woman and child and showing their horribly mangled bodies
on TV, this is a big improvement on the old deal where the
rulers had a gentlemen's agreement that only the common folk
would get hurt, and the defeated ruler would get a luxurious
retirment on some faraway island.


    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     THNKT3gL3AwBfoRbW2WZnMNXz8Akom29NnINipEv
     4MdS8qn6JSWbyiQCAy1KLdvD8QUhSGjYrcxLX8RNC




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Jul 25 16:47:18 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 16:47:18 -0700
Subject: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for  
  Purchases  Made Online)
In-Reply-To: <v0311070bbb4763f94651@[192.168.1.5]>
References: <200307251736.11293.sfurlong@acmenet.net>
  <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
  <20030725001110.GC9659@dreams.soze.net>
  <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725162438.0498f218@mail.comcast.net>

At 15:52 2003-07-25 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote:
>On Friday 25 July 2003 11:40, Steve Schear wrote:
> > ... Now that many are un-
> > or under-employed there still doesn't seem to be any activity by
> > those active on this list in this critical infrastructure area.
>
>In some sense, we have enough code.  Code exists that can be deployed.  It
>may have to go thru the same evolutionary stages the P2P software is going
>thru (Napster to Kazza to ???) as security problems become serious, but it
>is deployed now.
>
>What we don't have is:
>
>* Patent licenses

Not necessary.  Remember, blinding is implemented solely at the client 
end.  I'm sure once a useable, open source, non-blinded client is available 
there will be parties available to add the 50 lines or so of blinding 
code.  Alternatively, since the blinding patent is not recognized in many 
well-connected Net countries the code could legally be released from one of 
them, so that the user selects blinding based on jurisdiction and interest.

>* Easy to use code

By any reasonable measure we DOI OT have a useable, even by techies, for a 
blinded digital cash system.  The closest thing I'm aware of is Lucrative 
but it still hasn't reached the alpha demo phase for client and server 
SW.  Contributions by competent list members are keenly invited to "finish" 
the infrastructure code if not help deploy a real test mint and financial 
institution.

>* Users
>
>Techies can work on the ease of use issue, but patent licenses take time
>and/or money, and users take marketing and sales.

EBay spent almost nothing in its first years.  None of the Digital Gold 
Currencies have spent much at all for these purposes, yet they have 
100,000s of active accounts and around $30 million in gold bars backing 
their monies.  Only word of mouth, the best advertising, is required for a 
really needed product/service with a workable business model.  I think many 
techies have been flimflammed by the VCs and CEO-types who couldn't 
bootstrap a venture if their lives depended on it.

steve


"Il dulce far niente"  The sweetness of doing nothing
My unemployment motto 




From sfurlong at acmenet.net  Fri Jul 25 14:36:11 2003
From: sfurlong at acmenet.net (Steve Furlong)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 17:36:11 -0400
Subject: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for
  Purchases  Made Online)
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
References: <20030725001110.GC9659@dreams.soze.net>
  <5.2.1.1.0.20030725081344.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <200307251736.11293.sfurlong@acmenet.net>

On Friday 25 July 2003 11:40, Steve Schear wrote:

> ... Now that many are un-
> or under-employed there still doesn't seem to be any activity by
> those active on this list in this critical infrastructure area.

Speaking only for myself, I'm making a lot less than I was a couple of 
years ago. In the wake of the dot-bomb, I'm working a lot more hours 
just to keep my bills paid. I no longer have much time or creativity 
left for non-paying tasks.

-- 
Steve Furlong    Computer Condottiere   Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using
their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that
these people have these weapons at all!"  -- Rep. Henry Waxman




From s.schear at comcast.net  Fri Jul 25 18:33:11 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 18:33:11 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <3F215BCA.1733.135ED95B@localhost>
References: <200307241616.h6OGGUk3006619@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725182518.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>

At 16:33 2003-07-25 -0700, you wrote:
>     --
>On 24 Jul 2003 at 9:16, Eric Cordian wrote:
> > Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder
> > the legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his
> > entire family, an "artist's rendering" of Shrub reaping what
> > he sows would surely be an excellent political statement.
>
>You are a moron.
>
>If today warfare means wiping out the family of the enemy ruler
>man woman and child and showing their horribly mangled bodies
>on TV, this is a big improvement on the old deal where the
>rulers had a gentlemen's agreement that only the common folk
>would get hurt, and the defeated ruler would get a luxurious
>retirment on some faraway island.

Here, here!  This change, if widely adopted, would go a long way toward 
reducing war casualties.  Perhaps we may even become as smart as some 
Pacific Islanders whose wars were fought by surrogates, the logic being 
that the death of one man can serve as well as the death of many in 
determining the outcome of a disagreement between heads of tribes, states, 
etc.

It could also reduce the risk of conflict since the heads of state would 
become the first and legit targets by the opposition.   Perhaps the world 
may owe Dubbya and his ilk an unintentional debt of thanks.  Beside better 
him then me. ;-)

steve


"War is just a racket ... something that is not what it seems to the 
majority of people. Only a small group knows what its about. It is 
conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the 
masses."  --- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933 




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Fri Jul 25 19:44:34 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 19:44:34 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725182518.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <200307260244.h6Q2ia04011891@artifact.psychedelic.net>

Steve Schear writes:

> Here, here!  This change, if widely adopted, would go a long way toward 
> reducing war casualties.  Perhaps we may even become as smart as some 
> Pacific Islanders whose wars were fought by surrogates, the logic being 
> that the death of one man can serve as well as the death of many in 
> determining the outcome of a disagreement between heads of tribes, states, 
> etc.

While the replacement of the US/Iraq war with Shrub and Saddam in a barbed
wire steel cage on Pay Per View with Vince McMahon announcing is an
appealing idea, I think it is a bit premature to leap to the conclusion
that this is the road map the US is following.

The logic behind sparing heads of state, even though they are technically
in the military chain of command, has to do with their utility during
post-war reconstruction, and not incurring the eternal hate of the
conquered enemy's civilian population.  That is why the US spared Emperor
Hirohito when reorganizing Japan, for instance.

The ability of the US to fight low-casuality war has transformed war into
an art akin to corporate raiding.  It permits the US to invade any
country, destroy the military infrastructure at little or no cost in
American lives, and leave the country's proles and natural resources
undamaged to be exploited by their new Imperialist masters.  If in the end
it can be claimed that the people are better off than they were before,
even if their previous misfortune was due entirely to US economic
sanctions, then it can be declared that the war was "Justified."

Of course, this just demonstrates that power is ultimately wielded by the
people with the best weapons, even as those same people lull the rest of
the world into thinking there is something called "international law,"
while they arm themselves to the teeth.

Fortunately, there has never been a weapons system in the history of the
world that ultimately didn't cost less to destroy than it did to
manufacture.

Force is always beaten by force plus brains, and I am sure the other
nations of the world are looking at the US and madly seeking to construct
a credible deterrent.  The window of absolute US military superiority will
last 2-3 years at best.  "What the world really needs is a fifty dollar
weapon that sinks aircraft carriers" isn't just a witty .sigfile quote.

North Korea really has the right idea here.  The US threatens sanctions,
they respond - "Our nuclear missiles can hit any target in the US.  
Sanctions are an act of war."  The US threatens a blockade, they respond -
"Our nuclear missiles can hit any target in the US.  Blockades are an act
of war." This is really the correct method of dealing with the US, and
nations like Iraq are stupid to keep capitulating in the expectation that
it will postphone an already decided upon attack.  The United Nations
should know better than to be continuously baited into playing this game
as well.

The point is, of course, that this isn't some new kind of war where the
Bush family fights the Hussein family to spare civilians on both sides.  
This is George W. Bush thinking his security is so impenetrable that he
can send his soldiers to kill the opposition leader's family, and drag
their bodies around in front of cameras, without having to worry in the
slightest that he or his family will experience retaliation in kind.

Of course, to paraphrase Doctor Who, the word "impenetrable" sounds far 
too much like the word "unsinkable."

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Fri Jul 25 20:02:50 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 20:02:50 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <20030725130110.40576.qmail@web21201.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <200307260302.h6Q32pgT011961@artifact.psychedelic.net>

Sarad writes:

> May be the information provided by the informant was
> wrong and it ended up that a 14 year kid along with 3
> iraqi  adults got killed and in order to prevent
> further outrage among iraqi's,the white house decided
> on playing its cards  to its advantage.They didn't
> confirm their DNA test as yet-funny.

If it turns out that Shrub killed two ordinary Iraqis, claimed they were
Saddam's sons, and then had army morticians make them up to resemble
Saddam's sons, he will be laughed out of office.

I've always said that you have to talk to people in the language they
understand, and that the only language the American people understand is
dead Americans.

Indeed, Bush makes a mockery of the UN, and launches a war of aggression
against Iraq, based on a Weapons of Mass Destruction soap opera conducted
in the media, and the American people approve.

American soldiers set up check points, and fire at families in cars trying
to flee to safer areas, blowing the heads off babies, and the American
people approve.

Bush slaughters thousands of Iraqis on his way to Baghdad, who are only
trying to defend their country again outside invaders, and the American
people approve.

The Iraqis resist by killing a couple Americans a day for a few weeks, and
Bush's approval rating drops 2 points a day.  Almost half the American
public say going to Iraq wasn't worth the cost.

Americans are finally being talked to in the language they understand.

If the Iraqis kill 5 American soldiers a day for 2 months, it will cost
Bush the election.  If they manage a mass hosing, comparable to the
bombing of the Marine barracks in Saudi Arabia, Bush will be impeached. If
they should manage to kill a few tens of thousands of American soldiers
out of the 147,000 currently serving in Iraq, mobs of angry American
parents will attack and burn the White House to the ground, and feed Shrub
and his entire family feet first into a compost shredder.

Again, it's just a matter of talking to people in the only language they
understand.

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From sunder at sunder.net  Fri Jul 25 19:26:17 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 22:26:17 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725182518.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307252223230.418-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Hmmm, supposedly Saddam had previously issued a duel to the death
challenge to Dubbya, which he didn't take seriously... interesting
thought...

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Steve Schear wrote:

> Here, here!  This change, if widely adopted, would go a long way toward 
> reducing war casualties.  Perhaps we may even become as smart as some 
> Pacific Islanders whose wars were fought by surrogates, the logic being 
> that the death of one man can serve as well as the death of many in 
> determining the outcome of a disagreement between heads of tribes, states, 
> etc.




From rah at shipwright.com  Fri Jul 25 20:31:24 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 23:31:24 -0400
Subject: Justice Department Opposes 'Sneak and Peek' Ban
Message-ID: <a06001a85bb47a333cd61@[66.149.49.6]>

Looks like they're dusting off their black bags again. Rubber hoses are next, I suppose.

Cheers,
RAH
-------

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47236-2003Jul25?language=printer>

washingtonpost.com 

Justice Department Opposes 'Sneak and Peek' Ban 


Reuters 
Friday, July 25, 2003; 5:48 PM 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Friday opposed a bid to ban the government from conducting secret "sneak and peek" searches of private property. 

The legislation, overwhelmingly approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday, would roll back a key provision of the anti-terrorism law adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks. 

If it became law, the legislation, "would have a devastating effect on the United States' ongoing efforts to detect and prevent terrorism, as well as to combat other serious crimes," Assistant Attorney General William Moschella said. 

In a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, he said the legislation "could result in the intimidation of witnesses, destruction of evidence, flight from prosecution, physical injury and even death." 

On Tuesday, the House voted 309-118 to attach the amendment to a $37.9 billion bill funding the departments of Commerce, State and Justice. It would be the first change in the USA Patriot Act since its adoption in October, 2001. 

The amendment, sponsored by Idaho Republican Rep. C.L. "Butch" Otter, would block the Justice Department from using any funds to take advantage of the section of the law that allows it to secretly search the homes of suspects and only inform them later that a warrant had been issued to do so. 

The Patriot Act granted broad new powers to U.S. law enforcement officials to eavesdrop and detain immigrants. It was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. 

Moschella said the law was needed to prevent terror attacks and added that the Justice Department shared the commitment of the House "to preserving American liberties while we seek to protect American lives." He urged the House to "reconsider its action." 


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Sat Jul 26 01:10:43 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 01:10:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <200307260302.h6Q32pgT011961@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <20030726081043.94465.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>

I wouldn't like to see american soldiers killed
either.How ever I talked to an american citizen a few
days before the second iraq war and he supported the
war saying that-"If one is an american,where do you
think all the money,power and previlage for american
people will come from?"

That sounds very logical.

I retaliated saying that the previlages,power will
come with the death of thousands of iraqi men,women
and children.

He wouldn't budge any way.


Sarath.



--- Eric Cordian <emc at artifact.psychedelic.net> wrote:
> Sarad writes:
> 
> > May be the information provided by the informant
> was
> > wrong and it ended up that a 14 year kid along
> with 3
> > iraqi  adults got killed and in order to prevent
> > further outrage among iraqi's,the white house
> decided
> > on playing its cards  to its advantage.They didn't
> > confirm their DNA test as yet-funny.
> 
> If it turns out that Shrub killed two ordinary
> Iraqis, claimed they were
> Saddam's sons, and then had army morticians make
> them up to resemble
> Saddam's sons, he will be laughed out of office.
> 
> I've always said that you have to talk to people in
> the language they
> understand, and that the only language the American
> people understand is
> dead Americans.
> 
> Indeed, Bush makes a mockery of the UN, and launches
> a war of aggression
> against Iraq, based on a Weapons of Mass Destruction
> soap opera conducted
> in the media, and the American people approve.
> 
> American soldiers set up check points, and fire at
> families in cars trying
> to flee to safer areas, blowing the heads off
> babies, and the American
> people approve.
> 
> Bush slaughters thousands of Iraqis on his way to
> Baghdad, who are only
> trying to defend their country again outside
> invaders, and the American
> people approve.
> 
> The Iraqis resist by killing a couple Americans a
> day for a few weeks, and
> Bush's approval rating drops 2 points a day.  Almost
> half the American
> public say going to Iraq wasn't worth the cost.
> 
> Americans are finally being talked to in the
> language they understand.
> 
> If the Iraqis kill 5 American soldiers a day for 2
> months, it will cost
> Bush the election.  If they manage a mass hosing,
> comparable to the
> bombing of the Marine barracks in Saudi Arabia, Bush
> will be impeached. If
> they should manage to kill a few tens of thousands
> of American soldiers
> out of the 147,000 currently serving in Iraq, mobs
> of angry American
> parents will attack and burn the White House to the
> ground, and feed Shrub
> and his entire family feet first into a compost
> shredder.
> 
> Again, it's just a matter of talking to people in
> the only language they
> understand.
> 
> -- 
> Eric Michael Cordian 0+
> O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
> "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com




From nobody at dizum.com  Fri Jul 25 22:40:08 2003
From: nobody at dizum.com (Nomen Nescio)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 07:40:08 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Message-ID: <6d6b49676e932914f8225194bf789173@dizum.com>

One point being overlooked here is digital versus physical anonymity.

The "funky" ATM (what, does it smell or something?) will allow you to
(among other things) stick in some cash and let someone else withdraw it
using a password which you have sent him out of band (according to the
patent - which I've actually read, more than anyone else here can say).
This will allow for digital anonymity in the sense that there is no
account information associated with the transaction.

Now, it's true that ATMs take pictures of people, so you don't have
full physical anonymity.  But given the limited reliability of facial
recognition systems, especially if you take simple precautions like
wearing a hat and tilting your head down, you can have de facto very
strong anonymity putting money into or taking it out of an ATM.  The mere
fact that it takes your picture doesn't mean that much.

It's also true that the amount of cash that could be practically
transfered in this way is limited to a few thousand dollars at most, given
that the machines will probably only accept and dispense twenty dollar
bills or equivalent.  Nevertheless such payments would be a good start.
The ability to pay or receive a few thousand dollars, untraceably, would
enable a number of interesting applications involving freedom of speech
and action.  Writing custom software or providing sensitive information
could be funded at these levels.

The point which has been mostly overlooked is that this article was
nothing but vapor, based on the issuance of a patent.  There's a huge
barrier between the idea and the implementation.  A cash-transfer ATM
would be a true boon to cypherpunk goals, but it is doubtful whether
such a system will be allowed to exist in today's world.




From timcmay at got.net  Sat Jul 26 09:35:43 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 09:35:43 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307260952470.18536-100000@greeves.mfn.org>
Message-ID: <3379F278-BF87-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Saturday, July 26, 2003, at 07:54 AM, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:
>
>> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:55:27 -0700
>> From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
>> To: J.A. Terranson <measl at mfn.org>
>> Cc: cypherpunks at einstein.ssz.com,
>>      "Email List: Cypherpunks" <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>> Subject: Re: Dead Body Theatre
>
> <snip>
>
>> Fucking idiot. Did you notice you have once again copied two nodes of
>> the CP list? This is not the first time. Idiot.
>
> Hrm.  I note that you have sent this to two nodes as well.  Doctor, 
> heal
> thyself.
>
>

Idiot, I left the cc: list as you had it, to show what you had done. As 
now.


--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Sat Jul 26 09:49:13 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 09:49:13 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <20030726081043.94465.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <16381215-BF89-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>

On Saturday, July 26, 2003, at 01:10 AM, Sarad AV wrote:

> I wouldn't like to see american soldiers killed
> either.How ever I talked to an american citizen a few
> days before the second iraq war and he supported the
> war saying that-"If one is an american,where do you
> think all the money,power and previlage for american
> people will come from?"
>
> That sounds very logical.
>
> I retaliated saying that the previlages,power will
> come with the death of thousands of iraqi men,women
> and children.
>
> He wouldn't budge any way.
>

This is a silly, naive view of things. First, the concept of 
"privilege" is one of those lefty, cockeyed notions the liberals use to 
vaguely imply that success in life is due to "privilege."

Second, though I strongly disagree with the Second Iraq War, nothing 
that happens there has anything substantive to do with economic success 
and "money, power" for anyone I know. Our "money, power" comes from 
work, investments, high tech, etc.

I have no idea if you are really the Third World mutant you usually 
come off as being, but you really need to get out more.


--Tim May




From measl at mfn.org  Sat Jul 26 07:54:06 2003
From: measl at mfn.org (J.A. Terranson)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 09:54:06 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <0FFE190A-BE43-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0307260952470.18536-100000@greeves.mfn.org>

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:

> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:55:27 -0700
> From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
> To: J.A. Terranson <measl at mfn.org>
> Cc: cypherpunks at einstein.ssz.com,
>      "Email List: Cypherpunks" <cypherpunks at lne.com>
> Subject: Re: Dead Body Theatre

<snip>
 
> Fucking idiot. Did you notice you have once again copied two nodes of 
> the CP list? This is not the first time. Idiot.

Hrm.  I note that you have sent this to two nodes as well.  Doctor, heal
thyself.
 
> Someone ought to necklace you.

Aw, don't I rate a full "Needs Killing" anymore?

> 
> --Tim May
> 
> 

-- 
Yours, 
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org

	"Every living thing dies alone."
	Donnie Darko




From msarela at cc.hut.fi  Sat Jul 26 00:30:18 2003
From: msarela at cc.hut.fi (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Mikko_S=E4rel=E4?=)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 10:30:18 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <3F215BCA.1733.135ED95B@localhost>
References: <3F215BCA.1733.135ED95B@localhost>
Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.4.50.0307261029500.97021-100000@kosh.hut.fi>

>     --
> On 24 Jul 2003 at 9:16, Eric Cordian wrote:
> > Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder
> > the legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his
> > entire family, an "artist's rendering" of Shrub reaping what
> > he sows would surely be an excellent political statement.

Oh, how much I love these people who defend the right of the dictator to
murder his own citizens.

-- 
Mikko Sdreld
	Emperor Bonaparte: "Where does God fit into your system?"
	Pihrre Simon Laplace: "Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis."




From emc at artifact.psychedelic.net  Sat Jul 26 10:44:10 2003
From: emc at artifact.psychedelic.net (Eric Cordian)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 10:44:10 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <16381215-BF89-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <200307261744.h6QHiD9k014471@artifact.psychedelic.net>

Tim May wrote:

> This is a silly, naive view of things. First, the concept of 
> "privilege" is one of those lefty, cockeyed notions the liberals use to 
> vaguely imply that success in life is due to "privilege."

Much as conservatives refer to everyone who can see through their
propaganda better than Joe Sixpack as "The Elite."  Variations include
"The Hollywood Elite", "The University Elite", etc.

Conservatives fear anyone with a longer memory and better critical
thinking skills than your average dumbass American hayseed, programmed in
the Guv'ment School, with his 9th grade reading and his 4th grade math.

> Second, though I strongly disagree with the Second Iraq War, nothing 
> that happens there has anything substantive to do with economic success 
> and "money, power" for anyone I know. Our "money, power" comes from 
> work, investments, high tech, etc.

It comes from work.  Back when I was but a tiny Thaumaturge, home
ownership was within the reach of virtually everyone in AmeriKKKa.  An
entire household full of people could be supported on the income of a
single adult working virtually any full time job.  Leasure time and
recreation were abundant.  The Sheeple were happy sheep.

Fast forward to today, where a barely comfortable living requires every
adult member of a household to work somewhere over full time at some sort
of skilled occupation, one paycheck away from the street.

It's the time-honored algorithm for optimizing the speed of an assembly
line.  You speed up the line until the error rate becomes unacceptable,
and then back off by epsilon.  If the workers are wheezing, with their
tongues hanging dangerously close to the gears, who cares.  There are
hungry people standing in line to replace anyone who can't take it.

Apply this algorithm to macroeconomic variables, during a loud propaganda
campaign promoting "productivity," and you have essentially what was done
to the US economy starting with the ascension of the Conservatives to
power in 1980.

The US spent the Soviet Union into bankrupcy, and rebuilt a military force
that can threaten any nation in the world, not because of Manifest
Destiny, but by working its citizens harder than any other decent nation
was willing to do.  Citizens too dumb to understand that economic control
of a population is not morally superior to control at the point of a gun.

And through the miracle of Fractional Reserve Banking, while the Proles
toiled, a small privileged segment of the population became fabulously
wealthy during the same period, for doing, as Anne Robinson would say,
"Absolutely Nothing."

-- 
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"




From zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk  Sat Jul 26 06:15:36 2003
From: zenadsl6186 at zen.co.uk (Peter Fairbrother)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 14:15:36 +0100
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <838066BC-BEEC-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <BB483D88.3451E%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>

Tim May wrote:

> Some lurker unwilling to comment on the public list sent me this. I
> didn't notice it wasn't intended for the list until I had already
> written a reply and was preparing to send it. So I have altered the
> name.

'Twas meant for the list, I just hit "reply" instead of "reply all" without
looking. 


@lne.com and @minder.net don't set a Reply-To: header, but @einstein.ssz.com
does. I don't get any mail from other nodes, if there are any.

So some list mail needs a "reply" to get to the list, and some needs a
"reply to". 

Personally I prefer to hit "reply", ie with a Reply-To: header set to the
list (confusing, eg!). That way, if I want to reply to the list (which is my
default preference) then the sender of the mail I'm replying to doesn't get
two copies. But then I use OE...

Perhaps @lne.com and @minder.net could do this? Or, if people prefer,
@einstein.ssz.com could stop setting the Reply-To: header?


Or would having all the nodes do it the same way be too conventional for
cypherpunks...


-- 
Peter Fairbrother




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Sat Jul 26 16:03:45 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 19:03:45 -0400
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
Message-ID: <BAY7-F40QytxQ8STI1r00003cba@hotmail.com>

Eric Cordian wrote...

"Apply this algorithm to macroeconomic variables, during a loud propaganda
campaign promoting "productivity," and you have essentially what was done
to the US economy starting with the ascension of the Conservatives to
power in 1980."

Ah yes. Someone else remembers when all those scary Japanese and Germans 
were going to eat all our jobs. So we gave up everything because they had us 
so fucking terrorized. Now we have far fewer vacation hours than either one 
of those countries. Coincidentally, it's around the same time that it became 
fashionable to bitch about how evil the unions are. Question one of the 
'sheeple' on why the unions are so bad and they'll give you little anecdotes 
and incomprehensible arguments ("the unions are bad because they force 
employers to pay overtime"). (And let's remember that I'm not attempting to 
make a pro-union point here. I'm pointing to media and other manipulation of 
the American psyche into accepting the ratwheel we're all on now.)


"The US spent the Soviet Union into bankrupcy, and rebuilt a military force
that can threaten any nation in the world, not because of Manifest
Destiny, but by working its citizens harder than any other decent nation
was willing to do.  Citizens too dumb to understand that economic control
of a population is not morally superior to control at the point of a gun."

Damn straight. "Too dumb"...I might agree with that but I think there's a 
lot more to it. Too terrorized, too successfully propagandized, too willing 
to live vicariously through the ostenisbly functional relationships on TV, 
and don't forget just too damned tired to give a crap about anything but 
trying to get a decent night's sleep when possible, and make it safely to 
the grave without becomming homeless in the process...

-TD





>From: Eric Cordian <emc at artifact.psychedelic.net>
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: Dead Body Theatre
>Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 10:44:10 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Tim May wrote:
>
> > This is a silly, naive view of things. First, the concept of
> > "privilege" is one of those lefty, cockeyed notions the liberals use to
> > vaguely imply that success in life is due to "privilege."
>
>Much as conservatives refer to everyone who can see through their
>propaganda better than Joe Sixpack as "The Elite."  Variations include
>"The Hollywood Elite", "The University Elite", etc.
>
>Conservatives fear anyone with a longer memory and better critical
>thinking skills than your average dumbass American hayseed, programmed in
>the Guv'ment School, with his 9th grade reading and his 4th grade math.
>
> > Second, though I strongly disagree with the Second Iraq War, nothing
> > that happens there has anything substantive to do with economic success
> > and "money, power" for anyone I know. Our "money, power" comes from
> > work, investments, high tech, etc.
>
>It comes from work.  Back when I was but a tiny Thaumaturge, home
>ownership was within the reach of virtually everyone in AmeriKKKa.  An
>entire household full of people could be supported on the income of a
>single adult working virtually any full time job.  Leasure time and
>recreation were abundant.  The Sheeple were happy sheep.
>
>Fast forward to today, where a barely comfortable living requires every
>adult member of a household to work somewhere over full time at some sort
>of skilled occupation, one paycheck away from the street.
>
>It's the time-honored algorithm for optimizing the speed of an assembly
>line.  You speed up the line until the error rate becomes unacceptable,
>and then back off by epsilon.  If the workers are wheezing, with their
>tongues hanging dangerously close to the gears, who cares.  There are
>hungry people standing in line to replace anyone who can't take it.
>
>Apply this algorithm to macroeconomic variables, during a loud propaganda
>campaign promoting "productivity," and you have essentially what was done
>to the US economy starting with the ascension of the Conservatives to
>power in 1980.
>
>The US spent the Soviet Union into bankrupcy, and rebuilt a military force
>that can threaten any nation in the world, not because of Manifest
>Destiny, but by working its citizens harder than any other decent nation
>was willing to do.  Citizens too dumb to understand that economic control
>of a population is not morally superior to control at the point of a gun.
>
>And through the miracle of Fractional Reserve Banking, while the Proles
>toiled, a small privileged segment of the population became fabulously
>wealthy during the same period, for doing, as Anne Robinson would say,
>"Absolutely Nothing."
>
>--
>Eric Michael Cordian 0+
>O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
>"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Sun Jul 27 00:33:28 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 00:33:28 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <16381215-BF89-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <20030727073328.77193.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>

walk into a government hopsital in a third world and
in the U.S-you will see the difference.
I am not talking of any one individual getting
wealthy.
As for previlages even-basic aminities like
food,water,medicine,health care are all previalges
though they may not appear to be in  a wealthy nation.

Sarath.



--- Tim May <timcmay at got.net> wrote:
> On Saturday, July 26, 2003, at 01:10 AM, Sarad AV
> wrote:
> 
> > I wouldn't like to see american soldiers killed
> > either.How ever I talked to an american citizen a
> few
> > days before the second iraq war and he supported
> the
> > war saying that-"If one is an american,where do
> you
> > think all the money,power and previlage for
> american
> > people will come from?"
> >
> > That sounds very logical.
> >
> > I retaliated saying that the previlages,power will
> > come with the death of thousands of iraqi
> men,women
> > and children.
> >
> > He wouldn't budge any way.
> >
> 
> This is a silly, naive view of things. First, the
> concept of 
> "privilege" is one of those lefty, cockeyed notions
> the liberals use to 
> vaguely imply that success in life is due to
> "privilege."
> 
> Second, though I strongly disagree with the Second
> Iraq War, nothing 
> that happens there has anything substantive to do
> with economic success 
> and "money, power" for anyone I know. Our "money,
> power" comes from 
> work, investments, high tech, etc.
> 
> I have no idea if you are really the Third World
> mutant you usually 
> come off as being, but you really need to get out
> more.
> 
> 
> --Tim May
> 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com




From rah at shipwright.com  Sat Jul 26 21:54:10 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 00:54:10 -0400
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <BB483D88.3451E%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>
References: <BB483D88.3451E%zenadsl6186@zen.co.uk>
Message-ID: <a06001a9fbb490b45328e@[66.149.49.6]>

At 2:15 PM +0100 7/26/03, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
>Personally I prefer to hit "reply", ie with a Reply-To: header set to the
>list (confusing, eg!). That way, if I want to reply to the list (which is my
>default preference) then the sender of the mail I'm replying to doesn't get
>two copies. But then I use OE...

Since the toad days, cypherpunks has been reply to sender...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Sun Jul 27 06:12:44 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 06:12:44 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F40QytxQ8STI1r00003cba@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307270605480.13380-100000@eskimo.com>

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Damn straight. "Too dumb"...I might agree with that but I think there's a
> lot more to it. Too terrorized, too successfully propagandized, too willing
> to live vicariously through the ostenisbly functional relationships on TV,
> and don't forget just too damned tired to give a crap about anything but
> trying to get a decent night's sleep when possible, and make it safely to
> the grave without becomming homeless in the process...

It has more to do with the desire to own *more* stuff.  Bigger houses with
3 cars and full of wireless computers.  It has nothing to do with
government propaganda and everything to do with corporate propaganda.
It's a self full filling economic system, the more people want, the more
people work to create things that more people want!

The insaniity is self inflicted.  The French take off the whole month of
August and Americans think they are insane.  The French know how to relax!
They also live in smaller houses, only own 1 car per family and eat better
food.  If you want to live in a 5000 ft^2 house, you need 2 adults working
full time to make "ends meet".  If you live in a 1000 ft^2 house, one
adult can make the payments with one full time job.

If you are going to compare then and now, take reality into account.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Sun Jul 27 06:15:33 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 06:15:33 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <20030727073328.77193.qmail@web21204.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307270614030.13380-100000@eskimo.com>

On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Sarad AV wrote:

>
> walk into a government hopsital in a third world and
> in the U.S-you will see the difference.
> I am not talking of any one individual getting
> wealthy.
> As for previlages even-basic aminities like
> food,water,medicine,health care are all previalges
> though they may not appear to be in  a wealthy nation.

Yup, it is mighty hard to explain with words.  You have to see with your
own eyes how 3 billion people live to comprehend "dirt poor".
Unfortunatly, the wealthy prefer not to see.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Sun Jul 27 06:42:08 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 08:42:08 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [eff-austin] War and Information Technology (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307270841500.17551-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 07:47:20 +0000
From: Carl Webb <webbcarl at hotmail.com>
To: eff-austin at effaustin.org, tlc-discuss at lists.cwrl.utexas.edu
Subject: [eff-austin] War and Information Technology

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

  War and Information Technology
  by Chris Hables Gray

Technology has always been an important part of war. Today, with
information technology situated as the defining technology of our age it
should be no surprise that IT (information technology) is a central part
of war making. In fact, the US military has officially determined that
information is the main "force multiplier" in battle, more important than
numerical superiority or force of fire, the old standards. This is
because, in the US military's view, we now have the information
technologies that can not just make a crucial difference in battle, in
terms of precision weapons, intelligence, and command and control, but
that these technologies might actually allow the "fog" (uncertainly) of
war to be dispelled so that total, almost painless victories, might be
won against many opponents.

Computer professionals, when evaluating these information technologies,
must start with two basic rules that come both from within computer
science (especially information theory, systems analysis and information
management) and from the academic disciplines represented by groups such
as the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), the Society for
the History of Technology (SHOT) and Science, Technology, and Society
studies in general (STS). They are:

1) Technologies cannot be evaluated out of their context of use. Very few
technologies either "work" or "don't work". They all perform at certainly
levels of efficiency, but whether or not they "work" depends on what they
to do in terms of their institutional and societal contexts. In the case
of military technologies, for example, they have to be evaluated not just
in terms of failure rates but also how the technology performs, and
influences, in the context of the relevant doctrines, tactics and
strategies.

2) Technologies, especially information technologies, are parts of
systems. They cannot be evaluated in isolation. The systems, which often
include human operators and users, either work well or not in their
context. For repairing and evaluating systems it is important to know how
the various components or nodes perform, but a system that fails because
of so-called human-error, has failed none-the-less and that includes it's
computational elements.

So, any weapon system has to be analyzed in terms of all its components
(including the humans and their training), the doctrine that it serves,
its tactical and strategic uses, and the political context of the war it
is used in.  To say B-52s are bad and so-called smart missiles are better
does not make sense.  The computer and other technical parts might work
with a high level of reliability (or not) but that doesn't make any one
weapon system better than another.  The purely technical efficiencies
cannot be separated out.

As a computer science professor I teach my students that computing
systems in particular must be evaluated as systems, not in isolation.  A
perfect case is the destruction of Iranian Air flight 655 by the USS
Vincennes (deploying the most sophisticated computerized weapon system
used in combat: the Aegis) that killed 290 civilians.  There were
technical problems (the jamming of an automatic 5-inch gun, the poor
reliability of the automated Phalanx machine guns, the fact that Standard
missiles need miles to accelerate, the poor interface design of the
combat information center), training problems (all training was for fleet
combat with the Soviets), command problems (other US ships correctly
identified the flight but the Vincennes was in charge because it had the
best computer system), human error (misreading the computer information
because of scenario fulfillment), doctrine (the source of the command and
training problems), the tactics (sending the Vincennes into Iranian
territorial waters to engage small Iranian patrol boats), the strategy
(the illegal stupid mission the Vincennes was on -- trying to provoke an
Iranian counter-attack), and the politics (supporting Saddam's Iraq in an
aggressive war against Iran).  So what if the Aegis is a marvel of
computer engineering?  Tell that to the families of the dead Iranian
civilians.  (For full details and documentation see: Chris Hables Gray,
"AI at War: The Aegis System in Combat" in Directions and Implications of
Advanced Computing 1990, Vol. III, D. Shuler, ed., Ablex, 1996, pp.
62-79.)

By the way, there is substantial evidence that the testing of the circuit
cards for the Phalanx was faked, one reason their reliability was so low
and so the Captain of the Vincennes could not trust them for close-in
defense and so made the incorrect decision to take out the innocent
airliner.

An undergraduate in one of my computer classes who tried to evaluate a
system that uses computers by only looking at certain technical
parameters of the computers, and not at all the relevant factors, would
not pass.  A military that does the same, might win some battles, but it
will lose all but the easiest wars, and even then, it will often lose the
peace that follows.

In Gulf War I a strong case can be made that the massive B-52 bombings
shattered the main Iraq Army, the so-called "smart weapons" were not
nearly as accurate as claimed (and we found out much later the Patriots
hit nothing), and that the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure (in
part by so-called precision bombing with all kinds of bombs and missiles)
led to the deaths of 300,000 Iraqi women and children (according to both
the UN, independent aid NGO's, and a Harvard Health School study).  War
is complicated, weapon system performance is complicated, and accuracy
(or even reliability) is hardly everything.

When Force of Fire was the main doctrine for winning war in the US
military, bigger explosions were almost always considered more important
than smaller accurate ones.  In some situations this was (and still is)
true, in many others not.  The US military in particular has had a
tendency to want to ignore the strategic and political realities of war.
This is why it lost Vietnam.  US weapons were more accurate and more
powerful than the Vietnamese weapons but that was not enough.  It didn't
help the Soviets win in Afghanistan either. This is why there is a whole
debate about Asymmetric War in the military today, by the way.

-------
Some of the main issues computer professionals should look at in Gulf War
II--

* To what extent are such doctrines as "Shock and Awe" and of the general
U.S. strategy based on misconceptions about what IT can and cannot do in
a unpredictable and uncontrollable arena such as war.

* To what extent the existence of "so-called" smart weapons leads to the
doctrinal, tactical, or strategic misuse of such weapons. Americans have
a particular love of technology. That some people can unequivocally say
such weapons "really work" when they have hit three of the wrong
countries is an important issue to explore.

* The actual performance of such weapons as the Patriot.

* The possibility and possible impact of future weapons or military
information systems such as effective identification systems.

* The absolute limits of computer technology to model complex systems.
CPSR played a major role in articulating this crucial part of information
theory during the first round of Star Wars debates and in the Spring 2001
newsletter (ed. by Carl Page and Chris Hables Gray) there is a full
bibliography of the key articles in this area.

-------

There are now a number of monographs and collections of articles that
look critically at IT in the context of contemporary war. They include:

David Bellin and Gary Chapman, eds., Computers in Battle, Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1987.

Paul Edwards, The Closed World, MIT Press, 1996.

Chris Hables Gray, Postmodern War, Guilford, 1997.

Gerfield Stocker and Christine Schopf, eds., Infowar, Springer Wien/New
York, 1998.

James Der Derian, Virtuous War, Westview, 2001.

-----------

Sites circulated during CPSR discussions:

Shock and Awe: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0127-08.htm

Context of the War on Terror:
http://world-information.org/wio/readme/992003309/1004366266

War on the Web (UK Guardian):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,898661,00.html

War Peace and Complex Systems:http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/Gray_complexity.htm

Interesting article from the UK on the use of tomahawk missiles:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4630027,00.html

Excellent article from a Business magazine, including discussion of
interfaces:
http://europe.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2003/tc2003017_2464.htm

Here is a link to the book that describes the whole "shock and awe"
concept: http://www.dodccrp.org/shockIndex.html.

Here are two sites that discuss the media-zation of the current war in
different ways.

1) Brown University's Watson Center (yes, the IBM Watson) has a whole
project on infowar and infopeace and have some recent articles on
embedded journalists:  http://www.infopeace.org/.

2) And here's a site on media literacy and this war:
http://www.tandl.vt.edu/Foundations/mediaproject/

Respectfully submitted, Chris Hables Gray

________________________________________________________________________________

  Response
  by James Nugent

I would like to address some points made by Chris Gray. Here he is
specifically addressing the catastrophe associated with the shooting down
of Iran Air 655 by the USS Vincennes. Specifically:

"There were technical problems (the jamming of an automatic 5-inch gun,
the poor reliability of the automated Phalanx machine guns, the fact that
Standard missiles need miles to accelerate, the poor interface design of
the combat information center)"

Mr. Gray lists these problems as contributing to the accidental shooting
of Iran Air 655. As Mr. Gray has appropriately noted about weapons and
their employment, it's important to understand doctrine and tactics bear
on their use. In this case the five inch gun and Phalanx systems were not
a consideration in the engagement of the missile system as this would
have been the primary, i.e. first use, system. The order of priority for
weapon/defensive engagement for the Vincennes would have been:

1. Standard missile system.
2. Five inch guns.
3. Electronic deception.
4. Chaff.
5. Phalanx (4 & 5 would be near simultaneous employments).

Systems 2 through 5 could have been completely out of service, or fully
employable, and this would not have altered utilization of the standard
missile system as the first system to be used against an air threat. This
is in accordance with the U.S. and at the time Soviet Navy's doctrine of
layered defense, a concept later adapted by the computer information
assurance/security experts to detail how a computer network would be
defended. In this case the doctrinal principle for a layered defense
would be as follows:

"Weapons [Used within a layered defense]. AAW weapons begin with Phoenix,
Sparrow, Sidewinder, and AMRAAM missiles carried by the combat air patrol
(CAP) [Note: this was not available to Vincennes]. Next are long-range
"Standard" missiles such as extended- and medium-range SM-1s and SM-2s.
These missiles are capable of intercepting targets at a range of nearly
100 miles. Shorter-range variants of these weapons are good out to 25
miles. Inside 10 miles, Sea Sparrow missiles are used to engage targets,
and at extremely close, "do-or-die" ranges, CIWS guns are utilized.
Additionally, MK45 5"/54, and the OTO Melara 76mm gun mount can engage
air targets with limited effectiveness."

Layered defense means essential the same thing here as it does in the
computer world, i.e. you stop an attacker as far from what is being
attacked as you possibly can. In this case that means you use the systems
with the furthest reach to take out an air threat, and on the Vincennes
that is clearly the Standard missile system.
I would also point out that in Mr. Gray's paper on this subject he
specifically states that the loss of the single five inch gun was not a
contributing factor to the destruction of Iran Air 655.

The need for the missiles to accelerate is not entirely clear. No ship's
captain, again based on the applicable doctrine and tactics, would ever
allow an air threat to get so close that the acceleration dynamics of the
defensive missile system would be a detrimental factor for its
employment.

Mr. Gray's comments with regard to the human-machine interface are
totally on target and this, vice any overriding technical failures or
issues, along with the social dynamic surrounding events leading to the
firing of missiles at the aircraft, was responsible for the tragedy.

" training problems (all training was for fleet combat with the
Soviets)"

This is a legitimate point as well. The crew of the Vincennes was in a
situation vis-`-vis the civilian airliner that it had never trained for.
While the system itself was very capable of adequately tracking civilian
airliners given its use for just that purpose in two different venues ,
this specific scenario had not been tested either via simulation or as a
crew scenario. Had such training been conducted it's very likely problems
with the human-machine interface would have been discovered and
corrected, and either way the crew would have likely handled this
specific situation differently and avoided the disaster which occurred.

" command problems (other US ships correctly identified the flight but
the Vincennes was in charge because it had the best computer system),
human error (misreading the computer information because of scenario
fulfillment) "

These points are in keeping with ones I've made above concerning the
environmental/sociological dynamic and the lack of training that led to
the sorts of errors that cascaded to tragedy on board Vincennes.

"doctrine (the source of the command and training problems), the tactics
(sending the Vincennes into Iranian territorial waters to engage small
Iranian patrol boats), the strategy (the illegal stupid mission the
Vincennes was on -- trying to provoke an Iranian counter-attack)"

There are many types of doctrine within the U.S. Navy and it's not clear
which one exactly is being referred to here. Tactics were without fault
as the crew of the Vincennes did exactly what it was expected to do given
the situation it believed it was facing.
It's questionable that a cruiser was the ideal system to send after
shallow draft Iranian gunboats in what were depth restricted waters. That
said, this incident started with a helicopter from the Vincennes coming
under fire by the Iranian boats , so it was the call of the captain of
the Vincennes how he was to defend his helicopter and he elected to
engage the Iranians.

Mr. Gray raises an interesting question vis-`-vis the legality of the
U.S. Navy's action during this time. Our main reason for being in the
Gulf was because of a request from the government of Kuwait to escort its
tankers (which were subsequently re-flagged as U.S. vessels) through the
Gulf. Escorts were necessary because both the Iraqis and the Iranians
were engaging ships with anti-ship missiles, and the Iranians were also
aggressively laying floating mines in the international waterways of the
Gulf. It bears remembering that the Iranian minelayer Iran Ajr was
captured and its mines confiscated as it was in the act of laying such
mines near Bahrain . Actions taken in the Gulf were in response to the
illegal mining of the sea lanes in this region, which puts the engagement
of U.S. ships with Iranian vessels in a very different context.

"and the politics (supporting Saddam's Iraq in an aggressive war against
Iran)."

The extent of U.S. support for Iraq at this time is not as clear as this
would lead one to believe, but this issue is also clearly beyond the
scope of this response.

"So what if the Aegis is a marvel of computer engineering? Tell that to
the families of the dead Iranian civilians."

Mr. Gray's inference here is that Aegis is what caused this tragedy and
he seems very much in the minority on this. Technically speaking Aegis
did exactly what it was supposed to, but there was a string of human
errors, failures and assumptions that ultimately caused the captain of
the Vincennes to authorize the unleashing of two missiles at Iran Air
655; Aegis was never in automatic and it did not make the decision to
fire.

"By the way, there is substantial evidence that the testing of the
circuit cards for the Phalanx was faked, one reason their reliability was
so low and so the Captain of the Vincennes could not trust them for
close-in defense and so made the incorrect decision to take out the
innocent airliner."

I would categorize this as another red herring concerning the specifics
of this event. The order of battle for weapon employment is provided
above, and Phalanx is the last system a ship's captain thinks to use.
It's a last ditch effort, if the attacker is that close (Phalanx's range
is 1 mile) engaging it with Phalanx may well destroy the threat but if
it's destroyed within the range of Phalanx there's a good chance that
there'd be debris resulting from the destruction that could still present
a danger to the ship. Bottom line, you engage air threats as far away as
possible.
A reasoned critique of a weapons system should come from a full
appreciation for how it is used. Mr. Gray does not provide this
perspective in the least, and it's very clear that he never endeavored to
obtain one, likely I would suspect due to his distaste for anything to do
with the military. He does make points here that are germane to what did
cause this tragedy and that demanded action by the U.S. Navy. He
otherwise clutters this with poor historical perspective and what would
seem to be a desire to make a point from his own political/philosophical
perspective, which poorly serves himself and his readers.

Submitted by James Nugent

Return to Weapons & Peace Working Group Page

                 Email cpsr at cpsr.org with questions or comments


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From Freematt357 at aol.com  Sun Jul 27 06:36:04 2003
From: Freematt357 at aol.com (Freematt357 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 09:36:04 EDT
Subject: 'Wired': The Coolest Magazine on the Planet [Was]
Message-ID: <9.162180ef.2c552f44@aol.com>

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/books/review/27CARRLT.html?th
'Wired': The Coolest Magazine on the Planet
By DAVID CARR


Wired magazine, that storied artifact of a digital age, was conceived by its 
editors as a ''a reverse time capsule. It would sail back through time and 
land at people's feet.'' 
And so it has, most recently in the form of ''Wired: A Romance,'' a book by 
one of the magazine's contributing editors, Gary Wolf. Our notions of the 
future have a tendency to age quickly, and Wired, a magazine that served as both 
Boswell and bomb thrower for the geekerati in the 1990's, seems to have aged 
more quickly than most. The seminal publication, Wolf writes, was created in the 
midst of a digital revolution that its high priest, Louis Rossetto, liked to 
refer to as a ''Bengali typhoon.'' By the time Rossetto and Wired's co-founder, 
Jane Metcalfe, were thrown clear, everything had changed, but not in the ways 
that they once thought it would. 
Wired was important not just because it was the first magazine to make the 
computer world seem hip; it also trained its eye on the implications of the 
onrushing new technology, not merely on appraising the newest machines and 
trendiest gadgets. (Though Wired featured plenty of articles about those things, 
too.) The magazine, Rossetto promised somewhat grandiosely early on, would foment 
''a revolution without violence that embraces a new, nonpolitical way to 
improve the future based on economics beyond macro control, consensus beyond the 
ballot box, civics beyond government and communities beyond the confines of time 
and geography.'' Rossetto's manifesto seems quaint just 10 years later, but 
it found many disciples. Gary Wolf, an early Wired employee, was among them, 
and he has written a deceptively deadpan recollection that reads more like a 
libretto than a straightforward work of journalism. 
Wolf expertly traces the magazine's heavily hyped ascendancy, though, sadly, 
most readers will know all along that the magazine Rossetto saw as a Trojan 
horse for revolution was eventually sold in 1998 to a corporation (Conde Nast) 
like any common asset. (The magazine still exists, though it doesn't carry the 
swagger and prestige it once did.) Wolf writes with a former true believer's 
skepticism, a wan idealism rubbed out by subsequent events. As his book's title 
suggests, Wolf is still a bit wistful about Wired's careering journey through 
the 90's. 
It's hard to blame him. The corporate-dominated magazine industry tends to 
stay safely behind significant issues, while Wired was that odd indie 
publication that actually enabled a movement by appealing to its nobler instincts. But 
as Wolf demonstrates, Wired's purity of purpose -- Rossetto seemed to care 
about money only as oxygen for his dream -- did not inoculate the magazine from 
the ambient greed that reduced a hoped-for paradigm shift to a pile of failed 
I.P.O.'s. 
''Wired: A Romance'' is less a love story than a theological autopsy of a 
religion that flourished and went away in less than a decade. Things happened 
quickly for Wired -- remember ''Internet time''? At its height in the mid-90's, 
Wired could be found in the lobbies of venture capitalists, on the light tables 
of designers, underneath the coffee cups of computer geeks and in the middle 
of the only conversation that seemed to matter. It was, briefly, the coolest 
magazine on the planet. 
This book is fundamentally a biography of Rossetto, a larger-than-life 
personality whom Wolf compares to ''a magnet whose grip increased dramatically at 
close range.'' In retrospect, it would be easy to mistake Rossetto for another 
would-be Internet guru and Wired as a curio of a bygone time, but as Wolf makes 
clear, the revolution that Rossetto championed was not about the Web. 
Rossetto saw desktop publishing as a profound reinvention of the printing press. ''He 
thought computer publishing would change the world,'' Wolf writes. 
And Rossetto knew a thing or two about revolution. As Wolf points out, 
Rossetto, a former anarchist who obtained a master's degree in business 
administration from Columbia, was a global itinerant, a gaunt, hippie-ish Zelig who just 
happened to be in the neighborhood when the Shining Path emerged in Peru, when 
the Tamil rebellion began in Sri Lanka, when the Red Brigades sowed chaos in 
Italy. 
Small wonder Rossetto ended up in San Francisco in the early 90's with Jane 
Metcalfe, then his girlfriend, on the cusp of another kind of insurgency, both 
of them working to finance a new kind of magazine. Rossetto wanted to call 
their journal DigIt -- as in either ''digit'' or ''dig it'' -- a bad idea that 
Metcalfe mercifully talked him out of. The new magazine would be named Wired. 
With the help of $20,000 from a sympathetic Dutch entrepreneur, the pair 
managed to get inexpensive access to a Canon color copier -- an exotic technology 
at the time -- to produce a prototype. Several of Wired's more durable angels, 
investors with real money who bought Rossetto's conceits, signed on later. 
And John Plunkett, the man responsible for Wired's neon-suffused, anarchic 
design, committed to joining the magazine in spite of himself. This glossy fever 
dream of a magazine made its debut at the Macworld conference on Jan. 2, 1993. 
The early adopters snatched it up and Wired was on its way. 
But Wolf demonstrates that Rossetto always seemed to keep his ambitions just 
ahead of his funding. Chunks of the enterprise were handed out to investors so 
that Wired could expand to the Web, to television, to Europe and beyond. The 
magazine's Web site, HotWired, turned out to be a particularly effective way 
of making money disappear. 
Wolf, who became HotWired's executive editor in 1995, appears in the 
narrative at this point, saying that after meetings with Rossetto he left his boss's 
office with ''the light step of a person who has been given permission to be 
bad.'' But Wolf's efforts to enrich his writer friends with lucrative freelance 
assignment for the Web site comes off as a misdemeanor in felonious times. The 
pressure to move Wired toward an initial public offering drove an ill-advised 
effort for bigness at all costs. No one cared about profits, and deals were 
made willy-nilly to build the hypothetical value of the company, including 
adding a search engine, the gewgaw of the moment. 
The pranksters at Suck, a sardonic (and now defunct) site built by Wired 
employees on the sly, captured the era's ethos with carnal clarity. In an essay 
written at the very beginning of the Web boom, Wolf writes, ''The Sucksters' 
advice was to fluff up a site, locate a rich, stupid buyer and then run away fast 
before the concoction deflated.'' 
To his credit, Rossetto never saw how giving away content free on the Web 
could make anyone rich. Wolf describes -- in too much detail, because he happened 
to be in the middle of it -- how Rossetto fought to make visitors to HotWired 
register, which some believed violated the Web's ethos. By this time, bankers 
and shareholders were looking over his shoulder, accusing him of being a 
profligate Luddite at a revolution he once led. 
While charting the Nasdaq's rise and eventual fall, Wolf shows Rossetto and 
Metcalfe readying Wired for a ''liquidity event,'' that supremely validating 
90's moment. But when they hit the road in October 1996 to pitch investors, 
Rossetto's overweening ambitions and the market's gyrations left Wired's public 
offering dead on arrival. Rossetto become so preoccupied with saving the 
business that he eventually handed leadership of the magazine over to Katrina Heron, 
a former editor at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Heron, who is now a 
consultant for The New York Times, proved to be an able and popular steward of the 
magazine, but in stepping aside Rossetto had built his own gallows. 
The money men who had attached themselves to Wired set up a series of 
impossible financial targets for Rossetto, and in March 1998 he and Metcalfe were 
cast out of the future they had built. The magazine was eventually sold to Conde 
Nast, and its two founders ended up with $30 million and a profoundly bad 
taste in their mouths. Wolf allows Andrew Anker, the ferociously ambitious C.E.O. 
of the company, to serve up an epitaph for the ideals that once drove Wired. 
With the sale of the magazine on the table, Wolf recounts how Anker and other 
senior Wired employees went to a bar in San Francisco for an impromtu wake. 
Anker gleefully tallies up his substantial gains to the outrage of his less 
fortunate colleagues. 
''What is this, 'Sesame Street'?'' Anker said. ''Every man for himself means 
every man for himself!'' The future, it turned out, would still be written by 
Charles Darwin in spite of Wired's best efforts. 
David Carr is a media reporter for The Times.




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sun Jul 27 11:20:44 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 11:20:44 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <200307261744.h6QHiD9k014471@artifact.psychedelic.net>
References: <16381215-BF89-11D7-8D66-0003930F2360@got.net>
Message-ID: <3F23B58C.14813.8A5FD8D@localhost>

    --
On 26 Jul 2003 at 10:44, Eric Cordian wrote:
> It comes from work.  Back when I was but a tiny Thaumaturge, 
> home ownership was within the reach of virtually everyone in 
> AmeriKKKa.  An entire household full of people could be 
> supported on the income of a single adult working virtually 
> any full time job.  Leasure time and recreation were 
> abundant.  The Sheeple were happy sheep.
>
> Fast forward to today, where a barely comfortable living 
> requires every adult member of a household to work somewhere 
> over full time at some sort of skilled occupation, one 
> paycheck away from the street.

This is the usual Marxist shit that living standards fell as a 
result of the industrial revolution, and have been falling ever 
since.

If it is getting harder to own a home, why is the proportion of 
people who own their own homes growing steadily, and been 
growing steadily (with some brief, minor, and infrequent dips) 
for as long as anyone has been keeping records?  Why are the 
homes steadily getting bigger, while the number of inhabitants 
in the home get steadily smaller?

You guys have been making up this data ever since Marx rewrote 
Gladstone's budget speech, to have Gladstone declare that "this 
intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... is an 
augmentation entirely confined to classes of property."

When in fact Gladstone said the direct opposite, and proved it 
with statistics, proved that the poor had experienced, as a 
result of the industrial revolution "this intoxicating 
augmentation of wealth and power"

This is the same moron marxism as expressed in the word 
"sweatshop": To a naive and ignorant socialist it seems that if 
each man selfishly pursues his own desire, the result will 
necessarily be chaos and hardship, that one person's plan will 
naturally harm those that are not part of it, hence such 
phrases and concepts as "sweatshop" which presuppose that one 
man producing a plan to create value and another man providing 
equipment to implement that plan, has somehow magically made 
the workers in a poor country worse off, that saving, 
investment and entrepeneurship is unproductive, that 
investment, particularly investment by rich people creating the 
means of production in poor countries, is a plot to swindle the 
poor, a scam, a transfer from poor to rich. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     NdQWI/wu/9VPiym9XbWFtjv+wm6k/HuBfDWmTCCN
     4JgUdAd3YDdMyR471c4vZhsCG9wrbZADfgt+10DeZ




From jamesd at echeque.com  Sun Jul 27 12:15:59 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 12:15:59 -0700
Subject: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725095026.04980598@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <3F23C27F.26083.8D89285@localhost>

On 25 Jul 2003 at 9:50, Steve Schear wrote:
> I've used the graphics and explanations that were in Digicash's Users
> Guide with non-technicals to great effect.  They portrayed blinding
> using envelope, wax seal and wax token.  The token was placed in the
> envelope and sent to the mint.  The envelope represented the blinding
> function performed by the user's SW.  The wax seal: the mint's digital
> signature pressed onto the envelope and "by pressure" into the
> enclosed coin which has not been seen by the mint.  And the wax token,
> once removed from the envelope, the un-blinded coin.

I need to steal those visuals.  Where can I find them?




From timcmay at got.net  Sun Jul 27 14:22:11 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 14:22:11 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <3F23B58C.14813.8A5FD8D@localhost>
Message-ID: <62C2381F-C078-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 11:20  AM, James A. Donald wrote:
> This is the same moron marxism as expressed in the word
> "sweatshop": To a naive and ignorant socialist it seems that if
> each man selfishly pursues his own desire, the result will
> necessarily be chaos and hardship, that one person's plan will
> naturally harm those that are not part of it, hence such
> phrases and concepts as "sweatshop" which presuppose that one
> man producing a plan to create value and another man providing
> equipment to implement that plan, has somehow magically made
> the workers in a poor country worse off, that saving,
> investment and entrepeneurship is unproductive, that
> investment, particularly investment by rich people creating the
> means of production in poor countries, is a plot to swindle the
> poor, a scam, a transfer from poor to rich.
> \

The move to "boycott stores selling sweatshop products" is gathering 
steam, so to speak. Stores like The Gap, Old Navy, Target, etc. are 
making plans to stop buying from so-called sweatshops.

Of course, when this happens all those employed in these "sweatshops" 
in Bangladesh, Malaysia, etc. will be unemployed. What, do people think 
shutting down the garment factories means the workers will get jobs at 
Intel and Microsoft? Or that  somehow their wages will be increased to 
economically-unsupported levels for their country/

Duh. I'll chortle as yuppies and GenXers may more for inferior clothing 
while millions in Bangladesh and Malaysia starve to death over this 
"save the poor people!" scam.

As for the standard of living issue, I _do_ think the standard of 
living has declined over the past 40 years, aside from some 
availability of high tech products and medical care. Most of my 
employed friends are working half again as many hours as my father 
worked, are spending twice as much time sitting in traffic, and are 
living in smaller houses than my parents and my family lived in. And 
they are paying several times the tax burden. If the wife works, which 
was rare in the 1950s and into the early 60s, and they have children, 
then they may be paying a further substantial hit on childcare and 
nannies.

I would not want interference to stop free transaction in jobs, but 
it's disingenuous to ignore the fact that many today are working two 
jobs, or very, very long hours, to maintain a house that is generally 
smaller than in years past.

(Yeah, there are are a lot of McMansions. But many engineers in their 
30s are still living in crappy apartments. And working 50-hour weeks, 
at minimum, with hours per day spent sitting in traffic. And on call 
with cellphones and laptops. And taking work home. And checking their 
e-mail every night and weekend. And paying 50% or more of what they 
make in federal income taxes, state income taxes, passed-on property 
taxes, sales taxes, energy taxes, highway taxes, and Socialist Security 
taxes. And what they earn in investments, after paying taxes on income, 
is taxed a second time, even if the alleged investment gains are mostly 
due to monetary devaluation.)

You often let your intense hatred of Marxism blind you to the very 
horrific situation we now face.

--Tim May




From proclus at gnu-darwin.org  Sun Jul 27 11:28:58 2003
From: proclus at gnu-darwin.org (proclus at gnu-darwin.org)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 14:28:58 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: old encryption paper
In-Reply-To: <20030722092236.A5731@cluebot.com>
Message-ID: <20030727182928.BB75C9FF6A@gnu-darwin.org>

On 22 Jul, Declan McCullagh wrote:
 Well, no. This kind of commentary made folks on mailing lists like
> these feel warm and fuzzy and made some other tech types realize what
> was at stake. But Sen. Judd Gregg's proposal failed because of lack of
> support from his colleagues and opposition from well-connected
> industry lobbyists, 

What kind of argument do you think was used by the senator's colleagues
and industry lobbyists in order to defeat the proposal?

> not people writing about "GNU-Darwin" (probably
> not one congresscritter knows what that means anyway, or cares).

Clearly, if you had read the paper, then you would know that it is
about encryption and authentication, and only tangentially GNU-Darwin,
which is mentioned for credibility and example purposes.  One also
wonders if your assessment of the Washington events surrounding the
post-911 encryption proposals is complete or accurate.  It appears to me
that the White House was unwilling to expend political capital on the
authentication schemes of the profiteers, which were contrary to the
national security interests.  Presumably the congress was swayed by
similar arguments in the days following the 911 attacks.  

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

> -Declan

-- 
Visit proclus realm! http://proclus.tripod.com/
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From timcmay at got.net  Sun Jul 27 17:19:32 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 17:19:32 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <3F23FB61.4782.9B6C663@localhost>
Message-ID: <291DB15E-C091-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 04:18  PM, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> On 27 Jul 2003 at 14:22, Tim May wrote:
>> As for the standard of living issue, I _do_ think the
>> standard of living has declined over the past 40 years, aside
>> from some availability of high tech products and medical
>> care. Most of my employed friends are working half again as
>> many hours as my father worked, are spending twice as much
>> time sitting in traffic, and are living in smaller houses
>> than my parents and my family lived in. And they are paying
>> several times the tax burden. If the wife works, which was
>> rare in the 1950s and into the early 60s, and they have
>> children, then they may be paying a further substantial hit
>> on childcare and nannies.
>
> When Palo Alto was developed, it was for the most part where
> the poor people lived, while the rich people in San Francisco
> could no longer afford their parents houses.

This is so untrue as to be ridiculously silly. I don't know for certain 
which decades you are referring to as "when Palo Alto was developed," 
as it was developed from the decades when Stanford was being 
established, then when Varian and H-P were being established, then when 
Lockheed and Fairchild were going strong, then when the chip companies 
of the 60s and 70s were operating, and so on. However, since Palo Alto 
was essentially "built out" by the late 1960s, when the last of the 
Eichlers (*) were finished, I'll address several of these periods:

(Eichlers are a style of house laid on a slab, with relatively little 
insulation, lots of glass, etc. These typically sold for about $20K 
during most of the late 50s, early to mid 60s.)

* during the build up of "Professorville" and the other 
professional-oriented parts of PA, the houses were built by well-paid 
(for the time) professors. Numerous mansions along University Ave., for 
example. With lesser houses near Colorado, California, Embarcadero, 
etc. Even at this time relatively few of the residents were "unable to 
afford San Francisco."

* during the post-WWII employment by Varian, H-P, Fairchild, and 
others, a typical engineer made about $12K per year (varied over the 
years, of course) and the houses cost about $20K. Taxes were a very 
small fraction, maybe $1.5K per year, total, including federal, state, 
local, sales, energy, road, etc.

* when I moved to the area in 1974, salaries were about $15K, averaged 
over educational status, and houses were about $30K. Taxes were 
dramatically higher, even for lowly-paid starting engineers. The 
welfare state was in full swing, with more and more people ("of color") 
simply not working at all, or claiming disability, or hacking the 
system to extract more handouts for having more children, etc.

Interestingly, at this time, in 1974, San Francisco was a much less 
expensive place to live in than Palo Alto or Los Altos or even 
Sunnyvale were. While there were probably some engineers living in Palo 
Alto whose parents lived in Pacific Heights (a wealthy area of SF) and 
who thus could not afford to live as there parents had, I saw maybe 
only one of these folks during my years at Intel. Palo Alto, even 
though built out, was like a lot of towns that had been built out.


>
> There is an appalling housing crisis here in Silicon valley,
> caused by the fact that most of the land is off limits to
> development.

This is simply not so. Most of the steep hillsides in watershed areas 
are not developed, but this is common in many cities, in many countries.

And the "housing crisis" is roughly comparable in many places I have 
lived in or spent time or visited. Examples include Portland the areas 
west of it (plenty of land, but very similar problems), San Antonio, 
Albuquerque, Northern Virginia, most of southern Florida, San Diego, 
San Luis Obispo, and nearly all of LA. And from reading news reports 
and talking to friends, things are much the same in many other parts of 
the country.

In almost no place even remotely near a large city or suburban area can 
one buy a house for about 1.5 times a typical local salary for an 
engineer or comparable college graduate.

A more important problem than "all the land is off limits" is "every 
worker costs a lot" plus "every permit costs a lot." This is largely 
due to massive taxation at nearly every level.

--Tim May




From cpunk at lne.com  Sun Jul 27 20:00:00 2003
From: cpunk at lne.com (cpunk at lne.com)
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 20:00:00 -0700
Subject: Cypherpunks List Info
Message-ID: <200307280300.h6S300wh014150@gw.lne.com>

Cypherpunks Mailing List Information

Last updated: Sep 12, 2002

This message is also available at http://www.lne.com/cpunk

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From jamesd at echeque.com  Mon Jul 28 01:49:35 2003
From: jamesd at echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 01:49:35 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <291DB15E-C091-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <3F23FB61.4782.9B6C663@localhost>
Message-ID: <3F24812F.8874.BC172B3@localhost>

    --


On 27 Jul 2003 at 17:19, Tim May wrote:

> On Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 04:18  PM, James A. Donald
> wrote:
>
> >     --
> > On 27 Jul 2003 at 14:22, Tim May wrote:
> >> As for the standard of living issue, I _do_ think the 
> >> standard of living has declined over the past 40 years,
> >> aside from some availability of high tech products and
> >> medical care. Most of my employed friends are working half
> >> again as many hours as my father worked, are spending
> >> twice as much time sitting in traffic, and are living in
> >> smaller houses than my parents and my family lived in. And
> >> they are paying several times the tax burden. If the wife
> >> works, which was rare in the 1950s and into the early 60s,
> >> and they have children, then they may be paying a further
> >> substantial hit on childcare and nannies.
> >
> > When Palo Alto was developed, it was for the most part
> > where the poor people lived, while the rich people in San
> > Francisco could no longer afford their parents houses.
>
> This is so untrue as to be ridiculously silly. I don't know
> for certain which decades you are referring to as "when Palo
> Alto was developed," as it was developed from the decades
> when Stanford was being established, then when Varian and H-P
> were being established,

By "developed" I mean when orchards became housing.

> then when Lockheed and Fairchild were going strong, then when
> the chip companies of the 60s and 70s were operating, and so
> on. However, since Palo Alto was essentially "built out" by
> the late 1960s, when the last of the Eichlers (*) were
> finished, I'll address several of these periods:
>
> (Eichlers are a style of house laid on a slab, with
> relatively little insulation, lots of glass, etc. These
> typically sold for about $20K during most of the late 50s,
> early to mid 60s.)
>
> * during the build up of "Professorville" and the other 
> professional-oriented parts of PA, the houses were built by
> well-paid (for the time) professors. Numerous mansions along
> University Ave., for example. With lesser houses near
> Colorado, California, Embarcadero, etc. Even at this time
> relatively few of the residents were "unable to afford San
> Francisco."
>
> * during the post-WWII employment by Varian, H-P, Fairchild,
> and others, a typical engineer made about $12K per year
> (varied over the years, of course) and the houses cost about
> $20K. Taxes were a very small fraction, maybe $1.5K per year,
> total, including federal, state, local, sales, energy, road,
> etc.
>
> * when I moved to the area in 1974, salaries were about $15K,
> averaged over educational status, and houses were about $30K.
> Taxes were dramatically higher, even for lowly-paid starting
> engineers. The welfare state was in full swing, with more and
> more people ("of color") simply not working at all, or
> claiming disability, or hacking the system to extract more
> handouts for having more children, etc.

That, Tim, is my point.   Think about it.

If you look at the statistics for any one area, it becomes
harder and harder to afford.

However, if you look at the statistics for America as a whole,
it becomes easier and easier to afford, as manifested by the
ever increasing proportion of people that own their own houses.

This is a consequence of the fact that in any one area, you run
out of legally available land for houses, but for America as a
whole, we are very far from running out of land for houses. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     E1ZQxM5Mmu/Ia6dF6HA96m0KCLYZ7C1OJmiUBMXC
     43Jb8qSfhFtqsnnKJ6omYdiAIkgKGif+jV4KYNlnE




From rah at shipwright.com  Mon Jul 28 05:10:12 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 08:10:12 -0400
Subject: Shot in the Dark
Message-ID: <a06001a64bb4ac2611eab@[66.149.49.6]>

We talked about this stuff here several years ago. Now, like everything else, Moore's "law" and wirelessness have had their effects on things...

Cheers,
RAH
-------

<http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/print_version/prototype0703.asp>

Wireless sensors listen for gunfire. (Photo courtesy of Proxity Digital Networks) 
Shot in the Dark 

If a gun goes off in an abandoned junkyard, does anyone hear it? The police do, at least in the handful of U.S. cities equipped with gunshot detection sensors, which listen for weapons' acoustical signatures and clock the arrival of sound waves to triangulate their origin. But these sensors must be plugged into telephone lines, meaning they can't be installed in out-of-the-way places, and a separate detector is needed every 300 to 400 meters to produce accurate results. Now New Orleans, LA-based Proxity Digital Networks is testing battery-powered detectors that can be clamped onto trees and poles and that communicate wirelessly with communications towers up to five kilometers away. The Tulsa County, OK, sheriff's department is testing the system, which transmits information on the location of gunfire to officers on patrol. It can even identify specific types of weapons, which helps police "dispatch a more effective response team specific to the situation," says Tulsa County !
sheriff Stanley Glanz. 
-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Mon Jul 28 10:00:22 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 10:00:22 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <3F255175.2070802@email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307280954060.28297-100000@eskimo.com>

On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Thoenen, Peter CIV Sprint wrote:

> Actually...the *wealthy* (implied other 2 billion folk because even the poorest whiny american I
> have seen is a king in Kosovo) do see, they just don't care.

I agree.  Even India has a few with wealth far beyond the imagination of
most Americans, and many with the same living standard as Americans.  They
certainly see it.  Sarad, care to give us a short political description of
how India views its poorest population and how they want to eliminate
their suffering?  What fraction of India's population is "dirt poor"?

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Mon Jul 28 10:29:57 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 13:29:57 -0400
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
Message-ID: <BAY7-F13vIr5434W8730000d9fe@hotmail.com>

Tim May wrote...

"Of course, when this happens all those employed in these "sweatshops" in 
Bangladesh, Malaysia, etc. will be unemployed. What, do people think 
shutting down the garment factories means the workers will get jobs at Intel 
and Microsoft? Or that  somehow their wages will be increased to 
economically-unsupported levels for their country/

Duh. I'll chortle as yuppies and GenXers may more for inferior clothing 
while millions in Bangladesh and Malaysia starve to death over this "save 
the poor people!" scam."

No doubt if this movement gets big enough to basically become a religion 
(like everything in the US) then this will start to happen.

But fixing the conditions at 3rd world sweatshops will have very little 
impact to the cost of those goods. What's being discussed are things like 
ensuring that toxic gasses are not being spewed into the workplace (China), 
or moving workers towards a living wage (Haiti), or workers actually getting 
paid for the agreed upon wages (New York City). Right now the issue of 3rd 
world sweatshops has very little to do with economics per se.

The unfortunate thing, however, may be that international Marxist groups 
will make addressing these issues a priority (at least in terms of their 
rhetoric). And even though the Marxists will in the long run probably make 
conditions even worse, the failure to address these issues now may empower 
Marxists throughout certain parts of the world. Hell...if I found a local 
factory was regularly grinding up children in the machinery, I'd probably go 
and take up arms with them (or pay to have weapons drop-shipped to them). Of 
course, I'm thinking Sr Donald and other knee-jerkers will equate that with 
being a Marxist. But I do believe it is encumbant upon us capital-ists to 
address these issues before the system as a whole gets tossed out, at least 
for a while.

-TD



>From: Tim May <timcmay at got.net>
>To: cypherpunks at lne.com
>Subject: Re: Dead Body Theatre
>Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 14:22:11 -0700
>
>On Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 11:20  AM, James A. Donald wrote:
>>This is the same moron marxism as expressed in the word
>>"sweatshop": To a naive and ignorant socialist it seems that if
>>each man selfishly pursues his own desire, the result will
>>necessarily be chaos and hardship, that one person's plan will
>>naturally harm those that are not part of it, hence such
>>phrases and concepts as "sweatshop" which presuppose that one
>>man producing a plan to create value and another man providing
>>equipment to implement that plan, has somehow magically made
>>the workers in a poor country worse off, that saving,
>>investment and entrepeneurship is unproductive, that
>>investment, particularly investment by rich people creating the
>>means of production in poor countries, is a plot to swindle the
>>poor, a scam, a transfer from poor to rich.
>>\
>
>The move to "boycott stores selling sweatshop products" is gathering steam, 
>so to speak. Stores like The Gap, Old Navy, Target, etc. are making plans 
>to stop buying from so-called sweatshops.
>
>Of course, when this happens all those employed in these "sweatshops" in 
>Bangladesh, Malaysia, etc. will be unemployed. What, do people think 
>shutting down the garment factories means the workers will get jobs at 
>Intel and Microsoft? Or that  somehow their wages will be increased to 
>economically-unsupported levels for their country/
>
>Duh. I'll chortle as yuppies and GenXers may more for inferior clothing 
>while millions in Bangladesh and Malaysia starve to death over this "save 
>the poor people!" scam.
>
>As for the standard of living issue, I _do_ think the standard of living 
>has declined over the past 40 years, aside from some availability of high 
>tech products and medical care. Most of my employed friends are working 
>half again as many hours as my father worked, are spending twice as much 
>time sitting in traffic, and are living in smaller houses than my parents 
>and my family lived in. And they are paying several times the tax burden. 
>If the wife works, which was rare in the 1950s and into the early 60s, and 
>they have children, then they may be paying a further substantial hit on 
>childcare and nannies.
>
>I would not want interference to stop free transaction in jobs, but it's 
>disingenuous to ignore the fact that many today are working two jobs, or 
>very, very long hours, to maintain a house that is generally smaller than 
>in years past.
>
>(Yeah, there are are a lot of McMansions. But many engineers in their 30s 
>are still living in crappy apartments. And working 50-hour weeks, at 
>minimum, with hours per day spent sitting in traffic. And on call with 
>cellphones and laptops. And taking work home. And checking their e-mail 
>every night and weekend. And paying 50% or more of what they make in 
>federal income taxes, state income taxes, passed-on property taxes, sales 
>taxes, energy taxes, highway taxes, and Socialist Security taxes. And what 
>they earn in investments, after paying taxes on income, is taxed a second 
>time, even if the alleged investment gains are mostly due to monetary 
>devaluation.)
>
>You often let your intense hatred of Marxism blind you to the very horrific 
>situation we now face.
>
>--Tim May

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
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From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Mon Jul 28 16:20:45 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 16:20:45 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725182518.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
References: <3F215BCA.1733.135ED95B@localhost>
  <200307241616.h6OGGUk3006619@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030725191753.02db8e90@idiom.com>

At 06:33 PM 07/25/2003 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
>At 16:33 2003-07-25 -0700, you wrote:
>>On 24 Jul 2003 at 9:16, Eric Cordian wrote:
>> > Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder
>> > the legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his
>> > entire family, an "artist's rendering" of Shrub reaping what
>> > he sows would surely be an excellent political statement.
>>
>>You are a moron.
>>
>>If today warfare means wiping out the family of the enemy ruler
>>man woman and child and showing their horribly mangled bodies
>>on TV, this is a big improvement on the old deal where the
>>rulers had a gentlemen's agreement that only the common folk
>>would get hurt, and the defeated ruler would get a luxurious
>>retirment on some faraway island.
>
>Here, here!

Steve, did you mean "Hear, hear!"?
Or were you calling for it to happen "here"?  :-)
Back when we had a First Amendment, that was probably legal,
but since Bush inherited the presidency, it might not be...

>Perhaps we may even become as smart as some Pacific Islanders
>whose wars were fought by surrogates, the logic being that the
>death of one man can serve as well as the death of many in
>determining the outcome of a disagreement between heads of tribes, states, 
>etc.

European feudalism did that also, though Europeans were
less likely to eat the bodies of the losers.
Trial by Combat was tossed out of British law in ~1850,
but hadn't been used for a long time before that,
though dueling was still around in the early 1800s.




From peter.thoenen at email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil  Mon Jul 28 09:38:13 2003
From: peter.thoenen at email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil (Thoenen, Peter CIV Sprint)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 18:38:13 +0200
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307270614030.13380-100000@eskimo.com>
References: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307270614030.13380-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <3F255175.2070802@email-tc3.5sigcmd.army.mil>

Actually...the *wealthy* (implied other 2 billion folk because even the poorest whiny american I 
have seen is a king in Kosovo) do see, they just don't care.

-Peter

Mike Rosing wrote:

> On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Sarad AV wrote:
> 
> 
>>walk into a government hopsital in a third world and
>>in the U.S-you will see the difference.
>>I am not talking of any one individual getting
>>wealthy.
>>As for previlages even-basic aminities like
>>food,water,medicine,health care are all previalges
>>though they may not appear to be in  a wealthy nation.
> 
> 
> Yup, it is mighty hard to explain with words.  You have to see with your
> own eyes how 3 billion people live to comprehend "dirt poor".
> Unfortunatly, the wealthy prefer not to see.
> 
> Patience, persistence, truth,
> Dr. mike




From s.schear at comcast.net  Mon Jul 28 18:47:27 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 18:47:27 -0700
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030725191753.02db8e90@idiom.com>
References: <5.2.1.1.0.20030725182518.048dac40@mail.comcast.net>
  <3F215BCA.1733.135ED95B@localhost>
  <200307241616.h6OGGUk3006619@artifact.psychedelic.net>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030728184621.048c7168@mail.comcast.net>

At 16:20 2003-07-28 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>At 06:33 PM 07/25/2003 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
>>At 16:33 2003-07-25 -0700, you wrote:
>>>On 24 Jul 2003 at 9:16, Eric Cordian wrote:
>>> > Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder
>>> > the legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his
>>> > entire family, an "artist's rendering" of Shrub reaping what
>>> > he sows would surely be an excellent political statement.
>>>
>>>You are a moron.
>>>
>>>If today warfare means wiping out the family of the enemy ruler
>>>man woman and child and showing their horribly mangled bodies
>>>on TV, this is a big improvement on the old deal where the
>>>rulers had a gentlemen's agreement that only the common folk
>>>would get hurt, and the defeated ruler would get a luxurious
>>>retirment on some faraway island.
>>
>>Here, here!
>
>Steve, did you mean "Hear, hear!"?
>Or were you calling for it to happen "here"?  :-)

Whatever... ;-)


Anarchy may not be a better form of government, but it's better than no 
government at all. 




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Mon Jul 28 21:52:50 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 23:52:50 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [eff-austin] Nonprofit Hackers Who Broke Windows (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307282352100.24969-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 04:46:34 +0000
Subject: [eff-austin] Nonprofit Hackers Who Broke Windows

The Hackers Who Broke Windows
By SecurityFocus
Posted: 25/07/2003 at 07:48 GMT



The Last Stage of Delirium, the hacking group that laid open nearly every
version of the Windows operating system last week, could use a little sleep,
writes Deborah Radcliff of SecurityFocus. Since going public with the RPC
buffer overflow bug that some are describing as the worst Windows security
hole in history, the group has been caught in a media frenzy.

The hubbub has been just as bad as when, in April, 2001, LSD broke Argus
Systems' PitBull security software in a contest for $50,000 in cash. (After
the media glare faded, the team was stiffed for $43,000 of the prize money.)
Then, as now, the work and its media aftermath kept them up at night when
they'd rather be home with their families, said Tomasz Ostwald, one of the
four founders of LSD, during a phone interview at 9:00 at night, Poland
time. "This has been going on for three weeks. We had to work all weekend,
even Sunday," he said with his thick Polish accent. "We're still taking at
least two media calls a day."

Delirium was dreamed up in 1996 by four security engineers who'd just
graduated the master's of computer science program at Poznan University of
Technology in Western Poland. Now all between the age of 27 and 28, they
manage the security infrastructure for an academic and scientific
supercomputing center in the university town of Poznan, where they all live.
They also do security engineering consulting and penetration testing for
other clients.

By night, they crack software.

Their day jobs are not to be confused with the work they do with LSD, says
Ostwald. And even though they liken themselves to other hacking groups such
as the Cult of the Dead Cow, don't call the LSD members hackers: They'd like
you to call them security engineers instead.

But in the truest sense, these engineers are indeed hackers. What's
different between their non-profit group and a number of earlier code
cracking groups is the way they conduct themselves. Along with their
technical skills, these researchers possess unusual business and media
savvy, say their peers.

"The LSD team always seems to find problems in critical core technologies,"
says Chris Wysopal, director of research and development for @stake, Inc.,
in Cambridge, Mass., which also does vulnerability testing on software
applications. "They handle themselves professionally with the technology
community and are able to span the cultural and language barriers between
Poland and the U.S."

The LSD's research is also impeccable (for example, a 50-page paper that
exposed implementation vulnerabilities of Java) -- far better than anything
produced by the l0pht, the hacking group that grew up to become @stake,
Wysopal adds.

Exploit Controversy

But LSD hasn't completely escaped criticism. In March, the group put itself
at the center of a controversy when it released exploit code for a Sendmail
vulnerability discovered by Internet Security Systems.

"As a security vendor, we don't think it's good business to post exploit
code because it enables bad guys to break into systems," says Chris Rouland,
vice president of ISS's X-Force team in Atlanta.

Ostwald says the group decided to release the Sendmail exploit code because
ISS was overstating the threat posed by the bug. "When a threat is
overestimated, it makes it hard to perform appropriate risk management. So
we put the exploit code out for testing and proved that the threat was not
as serious as the vendors claimed," Ostwald says.

Off the record, at least one security company now criticizes LSD for not
posting exploit code for the Windows RPC bug. "How do you prove the bug
without the code?" the source said. But because the bug affects so many of
the Windows operating systems, releasing the exploit code would not have
given IT managers enough time to patch, counters Ostwald. Wysopal agrees.
"If [they] released the code to the Windows buffer overflow attack too soon,
we'd have another SQL Slammer on our hands," says Wysopal.

Besides, people are already developing the exploit code anyway, says Tim
Mullen, CIO of AnchorIS.Com, and a SecurityFocus columnist. And Rouland says
ISS had developed exploit code four hours after news of the bug was released
to the public.

When they're not trapped between the proverbial rock and hard place of
releasing or not releasing exploit code, LSD members are generally praised
-- even by ISS -- for the way they conduct themselves professionally. The
group now enjoys even-handed relationships with vendors. That wasn't always
the case, says Ostwald. "In the past two years, we've observed improvements
in the way software and anti-virus vendors respond to our findings."

Delirium contacted Microsoft's security response center through its
Secure at Microsoft.com address on June 27, says Stephen Toulouse, security
program manager for Microsoft's response center.

"From our standpoint, the entire process with them [LSD] was completely
professional. And we appreciate them not posting the exploit code to give
our customers a fair chance to install the patch," Toulouse says.

If there's one niggling problem with the group's image, it's their name.
Ostwald says he can't remember how they came up with "The Last Stage of
Delirium." "But lately," he says. "We've been thinking we should change it."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/31957.html

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From justin-cypherpunks at soze.net  Mon Jul 28 19:27:00 2003
From: justin-cypherpunks at soze.net (Justin)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 02:27:00 +0000
Subject: Shot in the Dark
In-Reply-To: <a06001a64bb4ac2611eab@[66.149.49.6]>
References: <a06001a64bb4ac2611eab@[66.149.49.6]>
Message-ID: <20030729022700.GG26473@dreams.soze.net>

R. A. Hettinga (2003-07-28 12:10Z) wrote:

> We talked about this stuff here several years ago. Now, like
> everything else, Moore's "law" and wirelessness have had their effects
> on things...

In stores by christmas... wireless-gunshot-detector jamming grips for
your 1911.

-- 
Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit
crimes and do bad things.  They're also free to live their lives and do
wonderful things.   --Rumsfeld, 2003-04-11




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Tue Jul 29 06:21:15 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 06:21:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: GPS blackbox tracking
In-Reply-To: <20030729112925.GA19789@cybershamanix.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307290618540.26880-100000@eskimo.com>

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>    Before this, AFAIK, we only had to worry about getting a GPS transmitting
> device planted on our vehicles, which would be bulky enough to spot fairly
> easily by anyone checking out the cars underside, etc. Here's one that doesn't
> transmit, just records where you go, and that info can be retrieved later ala
> bluetooth from 30 feet away.
>
> http://www.blackboxgps.com

Looks pretty cool.  If you have a bluetooth transmitter you can tell it's
there.  So you don't even need to go look for it, it'll just talk to you
directly.  I can see how the trucking industry would love it :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From hseaver at cybershamanix.com  Tue Jul 29 04:29:25 2003
From: hseaver at cybershamanix.com (Harmon Seaver)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 06:29:25 -0500
Subject: GPS blackbox tracking
Message-ID: <20030729112925.GA19789@cybershamanix.com>

   Before this, AFAIK, we only had to worry about getting a GPS transmitting
device planted on our vehicles, which would be bulky enough to spot fairly
easily by anyone checking out the cars underside, etc. Here's one that doesn't
transmit, just records where you go, and that info can be retrieved later ala
bluetooth from 30 feet away. 

http://www.blackboxgps.com

 -- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Jul 29 04:53:44 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 06:53:44 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Random numbers hit and miss: Maths pinpoints cause for faulty
  computer simulations. (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307290653050.14744-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.nature.com/nsu/030728/030728-1.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Tue Jul 29 07:49:48 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 07:49:48 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307280954060.28297-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <20030729144948.62112.qmail@web21210.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,


Roughly

India has 30 million middle class people.An income of
1000 US dollar per month is considered as middle
class.
Thats one reason of strong foreign market in india.I
guess 30 million may be bigger than the population of
some countries.

According to reports the number of dirt poor people
are
another 25 million,that is those who are below the
povertly line,that means less than an income of 10 US
dollars per month.

This is what the report and statistics keep saying but
any daily wager gets a minimum 3 US dollars per
day,however poor he may be.
That accounts to 90 US dollar per month.Thats the
poorest you can find in india for a *working* person.

So its open to interpret what dirt poor really is.

That is still too less,considering the present cost of
living in india.

Open drains,diseases,insanitory conditions are still
visible in india-though its comming down very slowly.

Go to a govt. hospital,the sanitation and facilities
are poor,escpecially in villages.

A large portion of the indian community depend on
farming and its upto the 'rain gods' that they yield a
good harvest.

To eliminate poverty the govt. employs 5 year plans.

here is a detailed list of the plans

http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html

The govt. provides rations to all its citizens-that is
to buy basic essentials like rice,wheat,kerosene
etc... at a much lower prices that commercially
available.

Schooling is pretty affordable to the poor in
government schools and there are enough govt schools
and provide free mid day meals for children.How ever
the state of govt schools are sad.
This year there were over 500 cases of food posioning
among children in one of the 27 states of india all
because of unhygenic food supplied.I am not aware of
the condition in other states.The govt. schools in
many areas have thatched roofs and some are even very
near collapsing.Some schools occupy just 1/10th of an
acre of land and some even less.
The quality of education is also pretty poor.Most
schools only teach in the local lingo and finding
english speaking people in many  regions are hard.Many
of the students emerging from govt. schools eventually
joins the labour class.
In india the average number of students that pass
tenth grade is only 50 percent of the students
appearing 10th grade.


As for politics,2 of the states in india are ruled by
the communist party of india.The case of labour class
is slighly better here but now a days corruption is at
the peak,that the ruling party and opposition party 
joins hands to fill up their pockets.
More over elections in india are won over simple
majority and there are over one thousand registered
parties in india.The oppoition against the ruling part
is usually high.

Rich people constitute around 3 to 5 percent of the
population.
Rich people tend to grow very rich because India is
one country you can be 70 to 80 percent sure that any
person you approach will accept a bribe be it sales
tax,income tax or any kind of tax.

Tax evasion is very common among the rich.If you would
like to reduce your electricity bill for industries
just bribe them and they will reverse the electricity
meter for you.

If a few barrels of illicit liquor gets caught,you can
bribe them to replace it with water.You can get away
with a lot of things and make a lot of money-if you
are rich.

Atleast there is'nt much stigma in viewing the
poor.they are more or les treated as equal and well
respected.Others aren't really bothered of poor ppl.

These are just a few basic issues.the conditions in US
are much better than here.


One part is better in india-privacy rights and liberty
are much better compared to US and even if you do
small crimes you can get away with it.

I can spit on the road,i can stand on the road and
block the traffic till i just get shoved off the road
side.There is no way I get arrested.I can do a lot of
things and not get arrested.

If u get arrested-for minor crimes,you can bribe the
cop and you are freed.I never have a swat team that
breaks down my doors.The streets are guns and snipers
free.I have no surveillence cameras watching me.



Regards Sarath.




--- Mike Rosing <eresrch at eskimo.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Thoenen, Peter CIV Sprint
> wrote:
> 
> > Actually...the *wealthy* (implied other 2 billion
> folk because even the poorest whiny american I
> > have seen is a king in Kosovo) do see, they just
> don't care.
> 
> I agree.  Even India has a few with wealth far
> beyond the imagination of
> most Americans, and many with the same living
> standard as Americans.  They
> certainly see it.  Sarad, care to give us a short
> political description of
> how India views its poorest population and how they
> want to eliminate
> their suffering?  What fraction of India's
> population is "dirt poor"?
> 
> Patience, persistence, truth,
> Dr. mike
> 
> 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com




From postgres at jal.org  Tue Jul 29 06:48:11 2003
From: postgres at jal.org (Jamie Lawrence)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 08:48:11 -0500
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
Message-ID: <20030729134811.GJ1073@jal.clueinc.net>

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20030729/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_market_10


WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up 
a stock-market style system in which investors would bet 
on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the 
Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence 
and useful predictions while investors who guessed right 
would win profits.

-j

-- 
Jamie Lawrence                                        jal at jal.org
The strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and 
cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment 
protects.
   - Judge Stewart Dalzell




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Tue Jul 29 09:26:07 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 09:26:07 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <20030729134811.GJ1073@jal.clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030729092344.036bac30@idiom.com>

Also, NYT Article was http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th

But it sounds like they've chickened out, because  various people freaked
about the implications.  (And they only got as far as it being
"an incentive to commit terrorism", without getting to
"a funding method for terrorism" or to "Assassination Politics".)

 >July 29, 2003
 >Pentagon Said to Abandon Plan for Futures Market on Terror
 >By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
 >
 >WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market
 >to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services
 >Committee said Tuesday.
 >
 >Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the program's director,
 >"and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped."
 >
 >Warner announced the decision not long after Senate Democratic Leader Thomas
 >Daschle took to the floor to denounce the program as "an incentive actually
 >to commit acts of terrorism."
 >
 >Warner made the announcement during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen.
 >Peter J. Schoomaker, nominated to be Army chief of staff.




From ericm at lne.com  Tue Jul 29 09:27:59 2003
From: ericm at lne.com (Eric Murray)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 09:27:59 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <20030729134811.GJ1073@jal.clueinc.net>; from
  postgres@jal.org on Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 08:48:11AM -0500
References: <20030729134811.GJ1073@jal.clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <20030729092759.A26179@slack.lne.com>

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 08:48:11AM -0500, Jamie Lawrence wrote:
> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20030729/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_market_10
> 
> 
> WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up 
> a stock-market style system in which investors would bet 
> on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the 
> Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence 
> and useful predictions while investors who guessed right 
> would win profits.


Jim Bell should have applied for a DARPA grant!


(check out this and other programs at http://www.darpa.mil/iao/programs.htm)

Eric




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul 29 09:40:55 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 09:40:55 -0700
Subject: Bids on Wolfwitz's assassination
Message-ID: <6CB43C72-C1E3-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

http://www.pentagon-terror-market/employees.com

WOLFOWITZ, PAUL:
ODDS FOR ASSASSINATION BY 2003-11-15: 7:3
ODDS FOR NECKLACING OF HIS FAMILY MEMBERS BY 2004-02-15: 12:2
ODDS THAT NEXT PENTAGON BLAST WILL TAKE HIM OUT BY 2003-10-05: 7:1

I guess now that the Pentagon is setting up a murder pool it can't be 
illegal for us to do it.


--Tim May, Corralitos, California
Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; 
perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." 
--Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Tue Jul 29 06:51:26 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 09:51:26 -0400
Subject: GPS blackbox tracking
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22A@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Harmon Seaver[SMTP:hseaver at cybershamanix.com] wrote:
> 
>    Before this, AFAIK, we only had to worry about getting a GPS
> transmitting
> device planted on our vehicles, which would be bulky enough to spot fairly
> easily by anyone checking out the cars underside, etc. Here's one that
> doesn't
> transmit, just records where you go, and that info can be retrieved later
> ala
> bluetooth from 30 feet away. 
> 
> http://www.blackboxgps.com
> 
> Harmon Seaver	
> 
Of course, if you have one of the newer 'enhanced 911' cellphones,
you've done their work for them.

Peter




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Tue Jul 29 10:17:23 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 10:17:23 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
In-Reply-To: <20030729144948.62112.qmail@web21210.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307290959540.2280-100000@eskimo.com>

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Sarad AV wrote:

> India has 30 million middle class people.An income of
> 1000 US dollar per month is considered as middle
> class.
> Thats one reason of strong foreign market in india.I
> guess 30 million may be bigger than the population of
> some countries.
>
> According to reports the number of dirt poor people
> are
> another 25 million,that is those who are below the
> povertly line,that means less than an income of 10 US
> dollars per month.

Out of a population of 900 million (or so) that's definitly the wings of
the bell curve.  The "poverty line" in the US is twice the middle class
income of India.  That's pretty stunning.

> This is what the report and statistics keep saying but
> any daily wager gets a minimum 3 US dollars per
> day,however poor he may be.
> That accounts to 90 US dollar per month.Thats the
> poorest you can find in india for a *working* person.
>
> So its open to interpret what dirt poor really is.

In the US, anyone below $20,000/yr income is "poor".  According
to that, 90% of India is "dirt poor"!!

> That is still too less,considering the present cost of
> living in india.

Yeah, no shit.

> Open drains,diseases,insanitory conditions are still
> visible in india-though its comming down very slowly.
>
> Go to a govt. hospital,the sanitation and facilities
> are poor,escpecially in villages.
>
> A large portion of the indian community depend on
> farming and its upto the 'rain gods' that they yield a
> good harvest.
>
> To eliminate poverty the govt. employs 5 year plans.
>
> here is a detailed list of the plans
>
> http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html
>
> The govt. provides rations to all its citizens-that is
> to buy basic essentials like rice,wheat,kerosene
> etc... at a much lower prices that commercially
> available.

Is this kind of a bribe?  Keep the majority happy on rations
and steal the rest for a few?

> Schooling is pretty affordable to the poor in
> government schools and there are enough govt schools
> and provide free mid day meals for children.How ever
> the state of govt schools are sad.
> This year there were over 500 cases of food posioning
> among children in one of the 27 states of india all
> because of unhygenic food supplied.I am not aware of
> the condition in other states.The govt. schools in
> many areas have thatched roofs and some are even very
> near collapsing.Some schools occupy just 1/10th of an
> acre of land and some even less.
> The quality of education is also pretty poor.Most
> schools only teach in the local lingo and finding
> english speaking people in many  regions are hard.Many
> of the students emerging from govt. schools eventually
> joins the labour class.
> In india the average number of students that pass
> tenth grade is only 50 percent of the students
> appearing 10th grade.

Ouch.  But at least it's an attempt.

> As for politics,2 of the states in india are ruled by
> the communist party of india.The case of labour class
> is slighly better here but now a days corruption is at
> the peak,that the ruling party and opposition party
> joins hands to fill up their pockets.
> More over elections in india are won over simple
> majority and there are over one thousand registered
> parties in india.The oppoition against the ruling part
> is usually high.
>
> Rich people constitute around 3 to 5 percent of the
> population.
> Rich people tend to grow very rich because India is
> one country you can be 70 to 80 percent sure that any
> person you approach will accept a bribe be it sales
> tax,income tax or any kind of tax.
>
> Tax evasion is very common among the rich.If you would
> like to reduce your electricity bill for industries
> just bribe them and they will reverse the electricity
> meter for you.
>
> If a few barrels of illicit liquor gets caught,you can
> bribe them to replace it with water.You can get away
> with a lot of things and make a lot of money-if you
> are rich.
>
> Atleast there is'nt much stigma in viewing the
> poor.they are more or les treated as equal and well
> respected.Others aren't really bothered of poor ppl.

the bribery is similar in the US, but there's definitly
a lack of respect between classes.

> These are just a few basic issues.the conditions in US
> are much better than here.
>
> One part is better in india-privacy rights and liberty
> are much better compared to US and even if you do
> small crimes you can get away with it.
>
> I can spit on the road,i can stand on the road and
> block the traffic till i just get shoved off the road
> side.There is no way I get arrested.I can do a lot of
> things and not get arrested.
>
> If u get arrested-for minor crimes,you can bribe the
> cop and you are freed.I never have a swat team that
> breaks down my doors.The streets are guns and snipers
> free.I have no surveillence cameras watching me.

Part of it is because they don't have the resources, and part of it is
because they don't need to control _people_ when they can just gain wealth
instead.  that may have something to do with mutual respect.  I suspect
there's a few 1000's of years of history that helps make things the way
they are.

Thank you for the description.  I knew India had some problems, but now
I've got an idea of the scope and scale.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul 29 10:20:00 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret.))
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 10:20:00 -0700
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
Message-ID: <3F26ACC0.ACE06350@cdc.gov>

Pentagon Abandons Terrorism Betting Plan
                     1 hour, 20 minutes
                     ago

                                      Add White House - AP Cabinet &
State to My Yahoo!



                     By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer

                     WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) will
abandon a plan to
                     establish a futures market to help predict
terrorist strikes, the chairman of the
                     Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites)
said Tuesday.

                      Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record),
R-Va., said he spoke by phone
                      with the program's director, "and we mutually
agreed that this thing should be
                     stopped."

                     Warner announced the decision not long after Senate
Democratic Leader
                     Thomas Daschle took to the floor to denounce the
program as "an incentive
                     actually to commit acts of terrorism."

                     Warner made the announcement during a confirmation
hearing for retired Gen.
                     Peter J. Schoomaker, nominated to be Army chief of
staff.

                     "This is just wrong," declared Daschle, D-S.D.

                     Warner said he consulted with Senate Intelligence
Committee Chairman Pat
                     Roberts, R-Kansas, and Appropriations Committee
chairman Sen. Ted Stevens
                     (news, bio, voting record), R-Alaska, and they
agreed "that this should be
                     immediately disestablished."

                     He said they would recommend that the Pentagon not
spend any funds already
                     in place for the program and said they would pull
the plug on it during
                     House-Senate budget conference committee
negotiations later on this year.

                     The little-publicized Pentagon plan envisioned a
potential futures trading market
                     in which speculators would wager on the Internet on
the likelihood of a future
                     terrorist attack or assassination attempt on a
particular leader. A Web site
                     promoting the plan already is available.

                     When the plan was disclosed by two Democratic
senators Monday, the
                     Pentagon defended it as a way to gain intelligence
about potential terrorists'
                     plans.

                     Earlier, Warner had said that his staff was looking
into the program and would
                     report on it later Tuesday. Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton (news - web sites),
                     D-N.Y., said she was appalled to hear of plans to
set up "a futures market in
                     death."

                     Other Democrats expressed similar alarm.

                     "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities
and terrorism is ridiculous and
                     it's grotesque," said Sen. Ron Wyden (news, bio,
voting record), D-Ore., one of
                     two lawmakers who disclosed the plan Monday.

                     The program is called the Policy Analysis Market.
The Pentagon office
                     overseeing it, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, or DARPA, said
                     it was part of a research effort "to investigate
the broadest possible set of new
                     ways to prevent terrorist attacks."

                     Traders would buy and sell futures contracts  just
like energy traders do now in
                     betting on the future price of oil. But the
contracts in this case would be based on
                     what might happen in the Middle East in terms of
economics, civil and military
                     affairs or specific events, such as terrorist
attacks.

                     Holders of a futures contract that came true would
collect the proceeds of traders
                     who put money into the market but predicted wrong.

                     A graphic on the market's Web page Monday showed
hypothetical futures
                     contracts in which investors could trade on the
likelihood that Palestinian leader
                     Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) would be
assassinated or Jordanian King
                     Abdullah II would be overthrown. Although the Web
site described the Policy
                     Analysis Market as Middle East market, the graphic
also included the possibility
                     of a North Korea (news - web sites) missile attack.

                     That graphic apparently was removed from the Web
site hours after the news
                     conference in which Wyden and fellow Democratic
Sen. Byron Dorgan (news,
                     bio, voting record) of North Dakota criticized the
market.

                      Dorgan described the market as "unbelievably
stupid."

                     "Can you imagine if another country set up a
betting parlor so that people could
                     go in ... and bet on the assassination of an
American political figure or the
                     overthrow of this institution or that institution?"
he said.

                     But in its statement Monday, DARPA said markets
could reveal "dispersed and
                     even hidden information. Futures markets have
proven themselves to be good at
                     predicting such things as elections results; they
are often better than expert
                     opinions."

                     According to its Web site, the Policy Analysis
Market would be a joint program of
                     DARPA and two private companies, Net Exchange, a
market technologies
                     company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the
business information arm of
                     the publisher of The Economist magazine.

                     DARPA has been criticized by Congress for its
Terrorism Information Awareness
                     program, a computerized surveillance program that
has raised privacy concerns.
                     Wyden said the Policy Analysis Market is under the
supervision of retired Adm.
                     John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism
Information Awareness program and,
                     in the 1980s, national security adviser to
President Reagan.

                     The Web site does not address how much money
investors would be likely to
                     put into the market but says analysts would be
motivated by the "prospect of
                     profit and at pain of loss" to make accurate
predictions.

                     Trading is to begin Oct. 1. The market would
initially be limited to 1,000 traders,
                     increasing to at least 10,000 by Jan. 1.

                     The Web site says government agencies will not be
allowed to participate and
                     will not have access to the identities or funds of
traders.

                     The market is a project of a DARPA division called
FutureMAP, or "Futures
                     Markets Applied to Prediction."

                     "The rapid reaction of markets to knowledge held by
only a few participants may
                     provide an early warning system to avoid surprise,"
the FutureMap Web site said.

                     Dorgan and Wyden released a letter to Poindexter
calling for an end to the
                     program. They noted a May 20 report to lawmakers
that cited the possibility of
                     using market forces to predict whether Israel will
be attacked with biological
                     weapons.

                     "Surely such a threat should be met with
intelligence gathering of the highest
                     quality  not by putting the question to
individuals betting on an Internet Web
                     site," they said.

                     Wyden said $600,000 has been spent on the program
so far and the Pentagon
                     plans to spend an additional $149,000 this year.
The Pentagon has requested
                     $3 million for the program for next year and $5
million for the following year.

                     Wyden said the Senate version of next year's
defense spending bill would cut off
                     money for the program, but the House version would
fund it. The two versions
                     will have to be reconciled.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030729/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_market_20




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul 29 11:06:09 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 11:06:09 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030729092344.036bac30@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <54B6E482-C1EF-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 09:26  AM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> Also, NYT Article was 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th
>
> But it sounds like they've chickened out, because  various people 
> freaked
> about the implications.  (And they only got as far as it being
> "an incentive to commit terrorism", without getting to
> "a funding method for terrorism" or to "Assassination Politics".)
>
>

Not to mention the obvious problems with letting government agents bid 
on things like when various unwanted foreign leaders would be 
assassinated. Gee, maybe SEAL Team 6 can do an office bid, using 
anonymous cutouts of course, on when SEALs will go ashore at Bandar 
Abbas to liquidate the Iranian prime minister? Or maybe a CIA wet work 
guy can make a few extra bucks in the dead pool by correctly predicting 
the death of the next Vince Foster?

Besides being problematic in its own right, it also leaks information, 
a kind of covert covert channel, ironically. If the bids are truly 
untraceable (fat chance--the password scheme looked like a trival, 
breakable Gen 1 security system) then those with knowledge of 
operations can make money by using their knowledge, all untraceably.

This was obvious long before Jim Bell became infamous. Check out 
writings by some of us dating back to 1988.

Once again, government sets itself up as being outside the law. If I 
were to even make a snide remark about the assassination of You Know 
Who, I'd get a visit from the SS.

Fucking proof that D.C. needs to be obliterated in an act of freedom 
fighting. Gets rid of a passal of welfare addicts, too.



--Tim May
"Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little 
bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now 
racing down, with American flags fluttering."-- Tim May, on events 
following 9/11/2001




From frantz at pwpconsult.com  Tue Jul 29 11:23:16 2003
From: frantz at pwpconsult.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 11:23:16 -0700
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
In-Reply-To: <3F26ACC0.ACE06350@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <v0311072cbb4c6a575bfd@[192.168.1.5]>

At 10:20 AM -0700 7/29/03, Major Variola (ret.) quoted:
>                     He said they would recommend that the Pentagon not
>spend any funds already
>                     in place for the program and said they would pull
>the plug on it during
>                     House-Senate budget conference committee
>negotiations later on this year.

Note that properly run, this "Ideas Futures" market would be a money maker,
not a cost center.  For only a modest percentage of the winnings, it could
be self sustaining.  Perhaps someone with a profit motive will pick up the
idea.

If they don't want the label of "Assasination Politics", they can forbid
bets on individual deaths, and still have nearly the full field, including
wars, revolutions, "nonstandard" attacks, and elections available for play.
(c.f. the way eBay and Yahoo limit themselves.)

Cheers - Bill


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz           | "A Jobless Recovery is | Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506         | like a Breadless Sand- | 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz at pwpconsult.com | wich." -- Steve Schear | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul 29 12:21:19 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 12:21:19 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22B@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <D519E501-C1F9-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 11:49  AM, Trei, Peter wrote:

>> Tim May[SMTP:timcmay at got.net]
>>
>>
>> On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 09:26  AM, Bill Stewart wrote:
>>
>>> Also, NYT Article was
>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th
>>>
>>> But it sounds like they've chickened out, because  various people
>>> freaked
>>> about the implications.  (And they only got as far as it being
>>> "an incentive to commit terrorism", without getting to
>>> "a funding method for terrorism" or to "Assassination Politics".)
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Not to mention the obvious problems with letting government agents bid
>> on things like when various unwanted foreign leaders would be
>> assassinated.
>>
> Over on Dave Farber's IP list, it's been pointed out that there
> is a pre-existing, live, real-money market in futures on these
> types of events. Go over to www.tradesports.com, and click on
> 'Current Events' under 'Trading Catagories' on the left. Drill down
> and you'll find things like 'WMDs will be found in Iraq on or before
> Sept 31', the value of which has dropped from 80 to 25 over the
> last few months.

Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a 
decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting 
such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the 
Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect 
several efforts with varying degrees of success).

And several years ago some companies actually tried to built real 
markets around these kinds of predictions. Maybe one of them is the 
"contract company" (pun intended) on this latest DARPA fantasy.

The problem is not with the idea of using markets and bets and Bayesian 
logic to help do "price discovery" on things like when the Athlon-64 
will actually reach consumers, or when the new King of Jordan will be 
whacked, and so on. The problem is, rather, with _government_ 
establishing a monopoly on such things while putting suckers like Jim 
Bell in jail basically for espousing such ideas.

And, as I noted, there are significant problems with government 
employees in a betting pool (gee, aren't even office baseball pools 
technically illegal? Haven't they prosecuted some people for this? Yep, 
they have) where they also have control over the outcome. Jim Bell used 
this as a payoff mechanism for assassinations ("Alice bets $1000 that 
Paul Wolfowitz will be murdered with his family on August 10, 
2003")...the same logic applies to the government's dead pool.


--Tim May
"That government is best which governs not at all." --Henry David 
Thoreau




From mv at cdc.gov  Tue Jul 29 12:26:11 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 12:26:11 -0700
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
Message-ID: <3F26CA53.68106C28@cdc.gov>

Re: Pentagon pulls their AP plans..

It was simply too obviously free feedback (marketing data) for their
domestic PSYOPs people.  Now they'll have to go back to interpreting
CNN (etc) polls to find out which way the sheeple are stampeding.




From sunder at sunder.net  Tue Jul 29 10:21:59 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 13:21:59 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <20030729134811.GJ1073@jal.clueinc.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307291321410.18773-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

And to think they put Jim Bell in jail for doing the same exact thing!

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Jamie Lawrence wrote:

> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20030729/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_market_10
> 
> 
> WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up 
> a stock-market style system in which investors would bet 
> on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the 
> Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence 
> and useful predictions while investors who guessed right 
> would win profits.




From RERayburn at columbus.gov  Tue Jul 29 10:49:33 2003
From: RERayburn at columbus.gov (Rayburn, Russell E.)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 13:49:33 -0400
Subject: Dead Body Theatre
Message-ID: <9C4BDF07B92BD7119E39000347ACC5CBE6948E@DOTEXCHANGE>

While not arguing the specifics of the socioeconomic situation in India,
remember that per capita income is only half the equation.

Cost of living is the other half of the equation.

Within the U.S., cost of living varies widely between cities.  See:
http://www.bestplaces.net/html/cost_of_living.html

For examples.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Rosing [mailto:eresrch at eskimo.com]

<snip>
Out of a population of 900 million (or so) that's definitly the wings of
the bell curve.  The "poverty line" in the US is twice the middle class
income of India.  That's pretty stunning.
</snip>
<snip>
In the US, anyone below $20,000/yr income is "poor".  According
to that, 90% of India is "dirt poor"!!
</snip>




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Tue Jul 29 11:49:51 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 14:49:51 -0400
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the
  weekend
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22B@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Tim May[SMTP:timcmay at got.net]
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 09:26  AM, Bill Stewart wrote:
> 
> > Also, NYT Article was 
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th
> >
> > But it sounds like they've chickened out, because  various people 
> > freaked
> > about the implications.  (And they only got as far as it being
> > "an incentive to commit terrorism", without getting to
> > "a funding method for terrorism" or to "Assassination Politics".)
> >
> >
> 
> Not to mention the obvious problems with letting government agents bid 
> on things like when various unwanted foreign leaders would be 
> assassinated. 
> 
Over on Dave Farber's IP list, it's been pointed out that there
is a pre-existing, live, real-money market in futures on these
types of events. Go over to www.tradesports.com, and click on
'Current Events' under 'Trading Catagories' on the left. Drill down
and you'll find things like 'WMDs will be found in Iraq on or before
Sept 31', the value of which has dropped from 80 to 25 over the
last few months.

Peter Trei




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul 29 15:13:39 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 15:13:39 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the 
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <E19hayX-0004nI-00@blount.mail.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <E8188810-C211-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 04:20  PM, John Young wrote:

> Tim May wrote:
>
>> Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a
>> decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting
>> such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the
>> Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect
>> several efforts with varying degrees of success).
>
> Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's
> his e-mail about it in May 2003:
>

Too bad, as he should have seen the shitstorm which would materialize 
as soon as this actually reached the public radar screen. Now that's 
gone public and been deep-sixed less than 24 hours later, it will 
likely be the end of this particular thing.

An official, above-board version is likely to be ipso facto illegal for 
the same reason office baseball pools are illegal: illegal gambling. If 
the Pentagon can run a betting pool for its employees on when some 
event will happen, office workers can bet on the outcome of the World 
Series, and anyone can bet on the numbers revealed by the Mob.


--Tim May




From s.schear at comcast.net  Tue Jul 29 15:24:55 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 15:24:55 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the 
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <E19hayX-0004nI-00@blount.mail.mindspring.net>
References: <D519E501-C1F9-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
  <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22B@exna07.securitydy 
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030729152234.04ac11c8@mail.comcast.net>

At 16:20 2003-07-29 -0700, John Young wrote:
>Tim May wrote:
>
> >Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a
> >decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting
> >such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the
> >Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect
> >several efforts with varying degrees of success).
>
>Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's
>his e-mail about it in May 2003:

Looks like Robin may have to concentrate on a commercial venture if he 
wants to see his ideas put into practice.

steve


we do not win the terrorism battle / with
exclusion of liberties / an un-elected president / with a brand new
atrocity / make way for war time opportunists / corporate interests and
their proxies / exploitation of a tragedy / to serve their ideologies /
corporate military complex / continues to abuse the world / death weapons
for despots / sold by the red, white and blue
-- Moral Crux, Stocks and Bombs 




From sunder at sunder.net  Tue Jul 29 12:38:06 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 15:38:06 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the 
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030729092344.036bac30@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307291535250.18773-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Yeah, too bad, I would have liked to bet that Poindexter runs for
President or at least VP by 2020....   And that if he does make it, by
2024 we'll all be speaking fluent Mandarin...

Hey, after Nixon, Carter, Reagan, two Bushes and a Slick Willie, why the
hell not just vote for an outright criminal?

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:

> Also, NYT Article was http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th
> 
> But it sounds like they've chickened out, because  various people freaked
> about the implications.  (And they only got as far as it being
> "an incentive to commit terrorism", without getting to
> "a funding method for terrorism" or to "Assassination Politics".)




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Tue Jul 29 13:38:15 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 15:38:15 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Geek.com Geek News - Mini-Review: Dazzle Universal 6-in-1 card
  reader (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307291537400.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jul/bpd20030729020757.htm


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From s.schear at comcast.net  Tue Jul 29 15:58:56 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 15:58:56 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the 
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <E8188810-C211-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <E19hayX-0004nI-00@blount.mail.mindspring.net>
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030729154810.048e9ce8@mail.comcast.net>

At 15:13 2003-07-29 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 04:20  PM, John Young wrote:
>
>>Tim May wrote:
>>
>>>Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a
>>>decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting
>>>such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the
>>>Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect
>>>several efforts with varying degrees of success).
>>
>>Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's
>>his e-mail about it in May 2003:
>
>Too bad, as he should have seen the shitstorm which would materialize as 
>soon as this actually reached the public radar screen. Now that's gone 
>public and been deep-sixed less than 24 hours later, it will likely be the 
>end of this particular thing.
>
>An official, above-board version is likely to be ipso facto illegal for 
>the same reason office baseball pools are illegal: illegal gambling. If 
>the Pentagon can run a betting pool for its employees on when some event 
>will happen, office workers can bet on the outcome of the World Series, 
>and anyone can bet on the numbers revealed by the Mob.

I believe DARPA sought and received an opinion letter from the SEC and DoJ 
regarding this venture which provided that, being the government, they were 
"immune" from prosecution for violation of gambling and unregistered 
securities violations.  You are correct, however, that should the DoD 
venture have gone forward there would have been quite an uproar from 
domestic and international gaming companies questioning the authority to 
grant this sort of dispensation to the Feds.  Fo example, the WTO (World 
Trade Organisation) this week granted Antigua and Barbuda the right to a 
hearing over its long-standing complaint against the United States, which 
has restricted the right of US citizens to gamble online - a major lifeline 
for the Caribbean jurisdiction's economy. 
http://www.tax-news.com/asp/story/story.asp?storyname=12733

steve


"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think 
things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and 
taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he 
lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable."  --H. L. Mencken




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul 29 16:17:06 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:17:06 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the 
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030729152234.04ac11c8@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <C56C536A-C21A-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 03:24  PM, Steve Schear wrote:

> At 16:20 2003-07-29 -0700, John Young wrote:
>> Tim May wrote:
>>
>> >Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a
>> >decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting
>> >such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the
>> >Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect
>> >several efforts with varying degrees of success).
>>
>> Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's
>> his e-mail about it in May 2003:
>
> Looks like Robin may have to concentrate on a commercial venture if he 
> wants to see his ideas put into practice.
>
>

And use an offshore nexus, and good anonymity and digital cash 
tools...just as predicted many years ago.

Doing this aboveboard, and doing it with the collusion of the actors 
who can alter the outcome, is asking for trouble:

* violation of gambling laws...as I said in other articles, betting on 
the death of the King of Jordan is not different from betting on the 
winner of the World Series.

* distortion of markets by players who see more benefit in adjusting 
the expectations than in spending some relatively small amount of money

(If "Chances that weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq by 
Nov. 1"  is being de-rated, in a relatively thin market of a few dozen 
players, then someone with an interest in altering the odds can 
probably do so with relatively little money...especially if the money 
is from a Black Budget and comes from money taken at gunpoint from 
taxpayers.)

(I can't resist mentioning that I was able to massively 
distort/sabotage the market in reputations that the Extropian list 
experimented with in 1993. I did this by buying "play money" 
(extro-dollars or whatever they were called) from other players in an 
out-of-band transaction. A mere $20 in U.S. money gave me a huge amount 
of additional spending money in this reputation market. Naturally, my 
reputation rose. Likewise, if Paul Wolfowitz wants the market to assess 
a "grave danger" that Norway is financing terrorism, he can use 
out-of-band methods to get a bunch of "ringers" (cut-outs, 
co-conspirators) to start bidding up the market. As the penalty for not 
guessing correctly is not  clear until the outcome, and inasmuch as the 
money is provided by agencies, the opportunities for mischief are 
obvious.)

* Insider trading. Letting government employees benefit from their 
inside information is like letting IBM or Intel employees engage in a 
wagering system based on KNOWLEDGE THEY ACTUALLY HAVE. (Not that 
insider trading is unknown in commodity or stock markets, including 
futures markets. But these markets have traditionally been heavily 
regulated and insider trading is forbidden, at least nominally. In the 
case of this DARPA market, the players are by definition the insiders, 
with various amounts of very non-public information about plans and 
contingincies. "Duh.")

And so on. So many attacks on this system.

Anyway, there _already_ are very real, hard to manipulate markets in 
information. We call them markets. Markets for real estate, for corn, 
for copper, etc. If a lot of residents of Jordan think a collapse is 
coming, real estate prices in Amman will fall. If a lot of 
technologists think a return to copper wiring is coming, copper prices 
will rise. And so on.

Betting on contrived propositions with relatively small amounts of 
money ("toy systems") and/or with play money is not very interesting.


--Tim May




From jya at pipeline.com  Tue Jul 29 16:20:54 2003
From: jya at pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:20:54 -0700
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the 
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <D519E501-C1F9-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22B@exna07.securitydy 
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <E19hayX-0004nI-00@blount.mail.mindspring.net>

Tim May wrote:

>Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a 
>decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting 
>such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the 
>Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect 
>several efforts with varying degrees of success).

Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's
his e-mail about it in May 2003:

-----


http://www.mail-archive.com/armchair at gmu.edu/msg03309.html

DARPA markets on MidEast


From nobody at cryptofortress.com  Tue Jul 29 16:14:10 2003
From: nobody at cryptofortress.com (Anonymous)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 18:14:10 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: AP by any other name ...
Message-ID: <7b8f9144af0d16675e37b2026391a425@remailer.cryptofortress.com>

Of the 266 Google news links about Policy Analysis Market this morning, 
most of the headlines trumpet "Defense Department Taking Terror Bets." 
Policy Analysis Market is an attempt to use the wisdom of markets to 
predict crises and attacks in the Middle East.  The organizations 
behind the project include the Economist Intelligence unit, the Defense 
Advanced Research Projects Agency (they funded the original Internet), 
and Net Exchange, a spinoff from the California Institute of Technology 
devoted to commercialize " computational combinatorial deal-making 
(CCDM)."

PAM states this about the whole concept: "Analysts often use prices 
from various markets as indicators of potential  events. The use of 
petroleum futures contract prices by analysts of the Middle East is a 
classic example. The Policy Analysis  Market (PAM) refines this 
approach by trading futures contracts  that deal with underlying 
fundamentals of relevance to the Middle East. Initially, PAM will focus 
on the economic, civil, and military  futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, 
Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey and the impact of U.S. 
involvement with each."

What is controversial is that market futures about "the overthrow of 
King Hussein of Jordan" were included and have offended politicians 
here in the US and undoubtedly in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. . Others 
are upset that a trader can actually make some money if he/she predicts 
fairly accurately.  Trading starts October 1, 2003, and you can signup 
now. There will be a cutoff after 1000 registrants, and while they hope 
to have a globally distributed network of participants, what if a 
significant number were nettime readers?

I first ran into this market concept about ten years ago. The Iowa 
Political Stock Market successfully predicted the outcome of the 1992 
U.S. presidential election within a few tenths of a percentage point 
for all three candidates (including Perot).  It was more accurate than 
8 major polls. Since then there have been many other experiments with 
other markets: Hollywood Stock Exchange where people bet on future box 
office receipts and Foresight Exchange where traders bet on the 
outcomes of unresolved scientific and societal questions.

http://www.hsx.com/ Hollywood Stock Market
http://artificialmarkets.com/ Articficial Markets
http://www.policyanalysismarket.org/ Policy Analysis Market




From mnorton at wlj.com  Tue Jul 29 17:34:15 2003
From: mnorton at wlj.com (Mac Norton)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 19:34:15 -0500
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the 
  weekend
Message-ID: <08CBC76751B32946BC0E3E1DEF5415E506729E@server04.firm.wlj.com>

Tim has identified the problems, including what may be the most important one, that the "market," unlike other such markets, is subject to gaming for motives that are other than economic.  In other words, the item in question doesn't lend itself to commoditization; the subject pork bellies are not fungible.  
MacN

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim May [mailto:timcmay at got.net]
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 6:17 PM
To: cypherpunks at lne.com
X-Orig-To: cypherpunks at lne.com
Subject: Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the
weekend


On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 03:24  PM, Steve Schear wrote:

> At 16:20 2003-07-29 -0700, John Young wrote:
>> Tim May wrote:
>>
>> >Yes, a bunch of "ideas futures" markets have existed for nearly a
>> >decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting
>> >such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the
>> >Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect
>> >several efforts with varying degrees of success).
>>
>> Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's
>> his e-mail about it in May 2003:
>
> Looks like Robin may have to concentrate on a commercial venture if he 
> wants to see his ideas put into practice.
>
>

And use an offshore nexus, and good anonymity and digital cash 
tools...just as predicted many years ago.

Doing this aboveboard, and doing it with the collusion of the actors 
who can alter the outcome, is asking for trouble:

* violation of gambling laws...as I said in other articles, betting on 
the death of the King of Jordan is not different from betting on the 
winner of the World Series.

* distortion of markets by players who see more benefit in adjusting 
the expectations than in spending some relatively small amount of money

(If "Chances that weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq by 
Nov. 1"  is being de-rated, in a relatively thin market of a few dozen 
players, then someone with an interest in altering the odds can 
probably do so with relatively little money...especially if the money 
is from a Black Budget and comes from money taken at gunpoint from 
taxpayers.)

(I can't resist mentioning that I was able to massively 
distort/sabotage the market in reputations that the Extropian list 
experimented with in 1993. I did this by buying "play money" 
(extro-dollars or whatever they were called) from other players in an 
out-of-band transaction. A mere $20 in U.S. money gave me a huge amount 
of additional spending money in this reputation market. Naturally, my 
reputation rose. Likewise, if Paul Wolfowitz wants the market to assess 
a "grave danger" that Norway is financing terrorism, he can use 
out-of-band methods to get a bunch of "ringers" (cut-outs, 
co-conspirators) to start bidding up the market. As the penalty for not 
guessing correctly is not  clear until the outcome, and inasmuch as the 
money is provided by agencies, the opportunities for mischief are 
obvious.)

* Insider trading. Letting government employees benefit from their 
inside information is like letting IBM or Intel employees engage in a 
wagering system based on KNOWLEDGE THEY ACTUALLY HAVE. (Not that 
insider trading is unknown in commodity or stock markets, including 
futures markets. But these markets have traditionally been heavily 
regulated and insider trading is forbidden, at least nominally. In the 
case of this DARPA market, the players are by definition the insiders, 
with various amounts of very non-public information about plans and 
contingincies. "Duh.")

And so on. So many attacks on this system.

Anyway, there _already_ are very real, hard to manipulate markets in 
information. We call them markets. Markets for real estate, for corn, 
for copper, etc. If a lot of residents of Jordan think a collapse is 
coming, real estate prices in Amman will fall. If a lot of 
technologists think a return to copper wiring is coming, copper prices 
will rise. And so on.

Betting on contrived propositions with relatively small amounts of 
money ("toy systems") and/or with play money is not very interesting.


--Tim May




From timcmay at got.net  Tue Jul 29 21:31:41 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 21:31:41 -0700
Subject: DARPA to extend Futures Markets to Courts
Message-ID: <B75614D0-C246-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

WASHINGTON, 30 July The Pentagon has announced plans to offer the 
FutureMAP technology to courtrooms and their employees.

"Court officers, judges, clerks, persecutors, and even bailiffs will be 
able to participate in the exciting technology of futures markets," 
gushed Rear Admiral and Arms Dealer John Poindexter.

"Before a decision is reached, before even the jury has gone to the 
jury box, people will be able to make side bets on various outcomes, 
with odds set by the collective action of all. The betting and payoffs 
are done anonymously, so there are no pesky income tax issues to worry 
about," added Poindexter.

Poindexter said that the information revealed by the futures market for 
legal decisions will also help guide judges to make the correct 
decisions. "I envision this as the ultimate computer technology for the 
legal profession."

Said one judge in the Ninth Circuit, "As judges we are very poorly 
paid. How can we live on $160,000 a year? This system will allow us to 
earn a little bit of money on the side. My clerks are very excited, 
too. One of my rocket scientists has some ideas about how we can juice 
up the odds on a long shot decision, with some preliminary rulings, and 
then swoop in for the kill with the bets we have placed on the actual 
decision! Cayman Islands, here I come!"

Rear Admiral Poindexter denounced critics of the system as Chicken 
Littles. "We have checks and balances in place. Don't forget, our 
office also operates the Total Information Awareness Program, so those 
microphones and DARPA-developed miniature cameras will really come in 
handy to check that nobody is abusing the system."




From rah at shipwright.com  Tue Jul 29 19:13:39 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 22:13:39 -0400
Subject: Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++
Message-ID: <a06001ae0bb4cda20b11f@[66.149.49.6]>

<http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/secureprgckbk/desc.html>

oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: 

Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ 

Full Description 
Password sniffing, spoofing, buffer overflows, and denial of service: these are only a few of the attacks on today's computer systems and networks. At the root of this epidemic is poorly written, poorly tested, and insecure code that puts everyone at risk. Clearly, today's developers need help figuring out how to write code that attackers won't be able to exploit. But writing such code is surprisingly difficult. 

Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ is an important new resource for developers serious about writing secure code. It contains a wealth of solutions to problems faced by those who care about the security of their applications. It covers a wide range of topics, including safe initialization, access control, input validation, symmetric and public key cryptography, cryptographic hashes and MACs, authentication and key exchange, PKI, random numbers, and anti-tampering. The rich set of code samples provided in the book's more than 200 recipes will help programmers secure the C and C++ programs they write for both Unix® (including Linux®) and Windows® environments. Readers will learn: 
How to avoid common programming errors, such as buffer overflows, race conditions, and format string problems 

How to properly SSL-enable applications 

How to create secure channels for client-server communication without SSL 

How to integrate Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) into applications 

Best practices for using cryptography properly 

Techniques and strategies for properly validating input to programs 

How to launch programs securely 

How to use file access mechanisms properly 

Techniques for protecting applications from reverse engineering 

The book's web site supplements the book by providing a place to post new recipes, including those written in additional languages like Perl, Java, and Python. Monthly prizes will reward the best recipes submitted by readers. 

Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ is destined to become an essential part of any developer's library, a code companion developers will turn to again and again as they seek to protect their systems from  attackers and reduce the risks they face in today's dangerous world. 

Return to Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++ 


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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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From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Tue Jul 29 22:56:54 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 22:56:54 -0700
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
In-Reply-To: <v0311072cbb4c6a575bfd@[192.168.1.5]>
References: <3F26ACC0.ACE06350@cdc.gov>
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030729224247.02e17ae0@idiom.com>

At 11:23 AM 07/29/2003 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote:
>Note that properly run, this "Ideas Futures" market would be a money maker,
>not a cost center.  For only a modest percentage of the winnings, it could
>be self sustaining.  Perhaps someone with a profit motive will pick up the 
>idea.

Assuming it can be legally structured as a "Futures Market",
rather than as "Illegal Gambling", it could make money.
(There are obviously some bets it's unlikely to handle,
such as the bet that Idea Futures markets would be successfully prosecuted
as illegal gambling :-)

>If they don't want the label of "Assasination Politics", they can forbid
>bets on individual deaths, and still have nearly the full field, including
>wars, revolutions, "nonstandard" attacks, and elections available for play.
>(c.f. the way eBay and Yahoo limit themselves.)

This provides a number of Doubleplus-Good Things.

- Government agencies can be funded by private ideas futures speculation
rather than by taxes, freeing them from the tiresome needs of
Congressional budget requests and oversight.  No more Ollie North trials!

- Private organizations can fund government agencies to do specific things
and launder the money through the market, rather than needing to lobby
Congresscritters to fund them.  There's a bit less leverage this way,
but surely there are some Congresscritters who'd appreciate that
private organizations were betting they'd live to 100 like Strom Thurmond.

- All those boring old Neutrality Act laws that keep companies like
ITT and Halliburton from overthrowing foreign governments
and forbid patriotic Americans to be foreign mercenaries
can be avoided, because they won't need to do that any more -
they can just bet sufficient sums that governments will be overthrown
and they'll go overthrow themselves, and those patriotic Americans
can be working as, ummm, investment logistics expediters instead of mercs.

- The system will be completely Anonymous, and
         Anonymity is Strength!

- Of course Oceania has always had an Idea Futures position about
the downfall of WestAsia.  Why do you ask?




From mv at cdc.gov  Wed Jul 30 09:51:00 2003
From: mv at cdc.gov (Major Variola (ret))
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:51:00 -0700
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
Message-ID: <3F27F774.B4067561@cdc.gov>

At 10:56 PM 7/29/03 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>Assuming it can be legally structured as a "Futures Market",
>rather than as "Illegal Gambling", it could make money.
>(There are obviously some bets it's unlikely to handle,
>such as the bet that Idea Futures markets would be successfully
prosecuted
>as illegal gambling :-)

*Real* futures markets are effectively integrating all the AP
type risks (plus others, like weather) relevant to their markets.

The Pentagon plan was trying to get the same kind of
private but well-done research that real futures traders
do, with emphesis on issues of interest to it.

As well as a feedback channel to the domestic psyops boys.

CNN, etc. also perform a sort of gambling (probabilistic investment,
"futures"), in how they distribute
their resources in anticipation of regional "news".




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul 30 09:50:38 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 12:50:38 -0400
Subject: Important: P2P+VOIP
Message-ID: <BAY7-F71xJIURhKpsch00015125@hotmail.com>

This article appeared in the Lightreading telecom site. Although fairly 
speculative, the mere implications of VoIP over P2P should be of much 
interest to Cypherpunks, perhaps the least importance being encryption.

-TD



Ever since KaZaA, founder Niklas Zennstrom let it slip in a Boardwatch 
interview that he was planning to launch a company offering voice services 
using peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols, Light Reading and Boardwatch have been 
puzzling over what he meant.

As Zennstrom himself has clammed up, speculation is in order. And our best 
guess is that he might be onto something REALLY BIG. Think bigger than 
Google. Think of something equivalent to the Internet's Domain Name System 
(DNS) that would act as a distributed, dynamic, global telephone directory, 
linking users with whatever IP address their appliance happened to be using 
at the moment.

This addresses one of the big obstacles in the development of voice over IP 
(VOIP), and it might also unlock other breakthroughs. For instance, it could 
speed up the convergence of fixed and mobile telephony -- reckoned by Neil 
Ransom, CTO of Alcatel SA (NYSE: ALA - message board; Paris: CGEP:PA), to be 
the next big thing in telecom (look for the coming Light Reading interview).

It would be fairly straightforward to use P2P protocols to create such a 
distributed, global telephone directory, according to Geoff Bennett, 
director of Light Reading University, who happens to be moderating a Light 
Reading Webinar titled "Controlling P2P: Who's Stealing Your Bandwidth?" 
today, at 2:00 p.m. New York time. (Click here to register for the free, 
live broadcast.)

With P2P, a user could search a directory using a special browser and then 
click on the name he or she wanted to call. The client software would send 
the request to the equivalent of a KaZaA supernode that would search a giant 
routing table listing users and their current IP addresses, and send back 
the result to the client so the VOIP call could be set up.

This is pretty much how file sharing works, and file sharing clearly scales 
to the millions of users that might take advantage of such a system. 
Zennstrom estimates that 100 million people already use P2P protocols, and 
the KaZaA browser software has been downloaded a staggering 250 million 
times -- an order of magnitude more than anything else on CNET's download 
site.

There are good reasons to believe that a P2P-based phone directory of this 
sort might work better than the VOIP solutions being cooked up by the 
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The IETF has various projects in this area, but they're all based on the 
fundamental philosophy that existing technology -- namely DNS -- should be 
adapted to deal with new requirements, rather than inventing something new.

But the new requirements in this case include more than just the IETF's 
Telephone Number Mapping (enum) project.

The IETF has also got to come up with a way of making DNS more dynamic, so 
that when a user moves from one IP address to another, he or she isn't cut 
off from the world while the changes propagate through the DNS hierarchy. 
When Boardwatch changed IP address earlier this year, a lot of readers were 
cut off for two or three days. Imagine the same thing happening every time 
someone shifted from a fixed to a mobile appliance!

Then there's the issue of reliability. Concerns are often expressed about 
the security of DNS -- in particular, its vulnerability to denial-of-service 
(DOS) attacks. A P2P approach promises to be much more reliable, because 
it's so distributed and because the protocol has been designed to allow for 
parts of the network going AWOL unexpectedly.

"Historically, the issue with proprietary solutions has been lack of 
scaleability, and how robust they are in large networks," Bennett notes. 
"But P2P apps like KaZaA have shown they can scale and have amazing 
resilience because they're so distributed. How do you make a DOS attack on 
something that big?

"The P2P solution will obviously be proprietary, and it's always quicker to 
get a proprietary solution to market than to wait for consensus in a 
standards group -- especially about something as institutionalized as DNS."

For more on IETF side of the story, check out the following columns by Geoff 
Huston, a member of the Internet Architecture Board, the IETF steering body:

Lord of the Numbers
Who are You?
Light Reading is rather hoping that this speculation will encourage 
Zennstrom to spill the beans on what he's up to. Right now, we think we've 
only got half the story. The other half concerns SIP -- the Session 
Initiation Protocol -- seen by some as another catalyst for a VOIP 
explosion. In the Boardwatch interview Zennstrom slapped down the idea that 
his project had anything to do with SIP. Which leads us to ask: Why was he 
so adamant?

 Peter Heywood, Founding Editor, Light Reading

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail




From eresrch at eskimo.com  Wed Jul 30 13:07:17 2003
From: eresrch at eskimo.com (Mike Rosing)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 13:07:17 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
In-Reply-To: <BAY7-F52zGNsokLQ8aZ00011bf5@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307301303240.24967-100000@eskimo.com>

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> PS: Does Variola feel insulted if we do not address him with his rank?

Nope:

 variola major virus : n) :a type of smallpox virus that has a fatality
rate of up to 25 percent

It's not rank, but I assume he'll be displeased if you call him "minor
variola" instead :-)

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike




From camera_lumina at hotmail.com  Wed Jul 30 12:18:51 2003
From: camera_lumina at hotmail.com (Tyler Durden)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 15:18:51 -0400
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
Message-ID: <BAY7-F52zGNsokLQ8aZ00011bf5@hotmail.com>

Variola wrote...

"As well as a feedback channel to the domestic psyops boys."

Are we sure this idea (and TIA) wasn't actually floated by those same Psyops 
boys? Something seems a little strange about the notion that they'd 
telegraph their intentions on this idea. Seems to me if they wanted to do it 
they'd just do it, and possibly not even announce their involvement in it, 
creating a string of shell companies to fund their international terrorist 
operations...Oops. Sorry, that's Al Qaeda I'm talking about.

-TD

PS: Does Variola feel insulted if we do not address him with his rank?


>From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv at cdc.gov>
>To: "cypherpunks at lne.com" <cypherpunks at lne.com>
>Subject: Re: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
>Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:51:00 -0700
>
>At 10:56 PM 7/29/03 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> >Assuming it can be legally structured as a "Futures Market",
> >rather than as "Illegal Gambling", it could make money.
> >(There are obviously some bets it's unlikely to handle,
> >such as the bet that Idea Futures markets would be successfully
>prosecuted
> >as illegal gambling :-)
>
>*Real* futures markets are effectively integrating all the AP
>type risks (plus others, like weather) relevant to their markets.
>
>The Pentagon plan was trying to get the same kind of
>private but well-done research that real futures traders
>do, with emphesis on issues of interest to it.
>
>As well as a feedback channel to the domestic psyops boys.
>
>CNN, etc. also perform a sort of gambling (probabilistic investment,
>"futures"), in how they distribute
>their resources in anticipation of regional "news".

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail




From YALB  Wed Jul 30 16:19:39 2003
From: YALB (Yet Amother Little Bird :-)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 16:19:39 -0700
Subject: Digicash Patents
Message-ID: <mailman.747.1576007635.31620.cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org>


Take my name off this if you forward it please.....

A little bird told me that the Chaum e-cash patent portfolio is now 
owned by none other than First Data.

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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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From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Wed Jul 30 13:20:37 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 16:20:37 -0400
Subject: Secure IDE?
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22D@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the 
"IC7-MAX3" featuring something called 'Secure 
IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the 
onboard IDE controller:

>From the marketing fluff at
http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251

	"For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened 
	to users who were asking for information 
	security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE 
	hard disk and has a special decoder; 
	without a special key, your hard disk cannot 
	be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and 
	would be information thieves cannot access 
	your hard disk, even if they remove it from your 
	PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone 
	from snooping into your information. Lock 
	down your hard disk, not with a password, 
	but with encryption. A password can be 
	cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's 
	SecureIDE will keep government 
	supercomputers busy for weeks and will 
	keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files."

No, I have no idea what this actually means either.
I'm trying to find out.

Peter Trei




From s.schear at comcast.net  Wed Jul 30 16:30:00 2003
From: s.schear at comcast.net (Steve Schear)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 16:30:00 -0700
Subject: Big Brother is watching you - and documenting
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20030730162806.049246c8@mail.comcast.net>

eBay, ever anxious to up profits, bends over backward to provide data to 
law enforcement officials

"I don't know another Web site that has a privacy policy as flexible as 
eBay's," says Joseph Sullivan. A little bit later, Sullivan explains what 
he means by the term "flexible." Sullivan is director of the "law 
enforcement and compliance" department at eBay.com, the largest retailer in 
the world.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=264863&contrassID=2&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y&itemNo=264863


Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the
government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert
to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest
dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding. -Louis Dembitz Brandeis, lawyer,
judge, and writer (1856-1941)




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Wed Jul 30 16:58:28 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 16:58:28 -0700
Subject: Japan making RFID-trackable cash
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030730165257.02e17580@idiom.com>

http://theregister.com/content/55/32061.html
Japan's starting to add RFIDs to their 10000-yen (~$100) bills.
Notes will come with Hitachi's 0.3mm "mew-chip" which
responds to radio signals by sending out a 128-bit number.
Each chip costs about 50 yen.
The article says that each number _could_ be a serial number,
but doesn't say that they know it is; the alternative would be
something that indicated the production batch or whatever.

The Reg's report sounds like it's based on
what someone saw on a TV show,
but also indicates they're starting production.




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Wed Jul 30 14:02:38 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 17:02:38 -0400
Subject: Secure IDE?
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22E@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> Trei, Peter
> 
> ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the 
> "IC7-MAX3" featuring something called 'Secure 
> IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the 
> onboard IDE controller:
> 
> From the marketing fluff at
> http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251
> 
> 	"For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened 
> 	to users who were asking for information 
> 	security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE 
> 	hard disk and has a special decoder; 
> 	without a special key, your hard disk cannot 
> 	be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and 
> 	would be information thieves cannot access 
> 	your hard disk, even if they remove it from your 
> 	PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone 
> 	from snooping into your information. Lock 
> 	down your hard disk, not with a password, 
> 	but with encryption. A password can be 
> 	cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's 
> 	SecureIDE will keep government 
> 	supercomputers busy for weeks and will 
> 	keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files."
> 
> No, I have no idea what this actually means either.
> I'm trying to find out.
> 
> Peter Trei
> 
Yeah, I know it's tacky to followup ones own messages, but
I found a little more:

http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/SecureIDE.htm

	"SecureIDE is a encryption device that uses 
	the eNOVA X-Wall chipset that ensures 
	confidentiality and privacy of your data 
	through disk encryption. When booting 
	up your system, go to DOS and implement 
	the FDISK instruction. This instruction will 
	make a partition to format the Hard Disk 
	to accept the secure IDE key. After this 
	procedure, there are no more extra steps 
	to perform besides using the key to "open" 
	the hard disk each time you boot up your system."

The accompanying diagram shows a daughterboard 
sitting between the HD and the system, with a USB
dongle coming off the side. eNova has more info at:

http://www.enovatech.com/w/html/about.htm

The USB dongle apparently acts only as a key
store, for a DES or 3DES key. It needs to be
present at boot time. It appears that the key
is put on the device by the manufacturer !!!!
though they promise "Enova Technology 
does not maintain a database of X-Wall 
Secure Keys". On the good side, it seems
to encrypt the whole disk, including the
boot sector and swap.

No info on chaining modes, if any, nor of
IV handling. There is no mention of a PIN
or other 'something you know' required to
use the USB key. I can't tell if pulling the
dongle shuts down the system.

Might be neat, but as yet, insufficient information.

Peter




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 30 17:40:18 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 19:40:18 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: arXiv: Implementing An Agent Trade Server (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307301939090.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs.CE/0307064


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 30 17:43:24 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 19:43:24 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Secure IDE?
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22D@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307301941530.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Trei, Peter wrote:

> No, I have no idea what this actually means either.
> I'm trying to find out.

It means it pre-encrypts your data before it's actually put on the drive.
In addtion the key is kept in a removable dongle of some sort so you can
take it with you. In other words the only bytes on your physical drive are
encypted.

If the part in possession of the drive doesn't have the key then they
can't decrypt it (at least in their theory) without brute force.


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 30 18:19:36 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:19:36 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Japan making RFID-trackable cash
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20030730165257.02e17580@idiom.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307302019000.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:

> http://theregister.com/content/55/32061.html
> Japan's starting to add RFIDs to their 10000-yen (~$100) bills.
> Notes will come with Hitachi's 0.3mm "mew-chip" which
> responds to radio signals by sending out a 128-bit number.

Time to start microwaving all the yen that come through my hands ;)


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 30 19:05:23 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 21:05:23 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the  
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <08CBC76751B32946BC0E3E1DEF5415E506729E@server04.firm.wlj.c
  om>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307302103230.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Mac Norton wrote:

> Tim has identified the problems, including what may be the most important
> one, that the "market," unlike other such markets, is subject to gaming
> for motives that are other than economic.

Actually this is the fundamental failure of your view, Tim's, and most
other CACL sorts.

ALL markets are subject to parameters that are -not- subject to strictly
economic motives. In fact a purely 'economic motive' isn't fundamentally
about money, it's about either insecurity or power, it's about
inter-personal relationships. It's about 'using'.


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From rah at shipwright.com  Wed Jul 30 19:20:19 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 22:20:19 -0400
Subject: Digicash Patents
Message-ID: <a06001a1fbb4e2d10226d@[66.149.49.6]>


--- begin forwarded text



From rpw at uni.de  Wed Jul 30 14:45:55 2003
From: rpw at uni.de (Ralf-P. Weinmann)
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 23:45:55 +0200
Subject: Secure IDE?
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22D@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22D@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com>
Message-ID: <20030730214555.GA9959@rbg.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 04:20:37PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
> ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the 
> "IC7-MAX3" featuring something called 'Secure 
> IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the 
> onboard IDE controller:
> 
> >From the marketing fluff at
> http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251
> 
> 	"For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened 
> 	to users who were asking for information 
> 	security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE 
> 	hard disk and has a special decoder; 
> 	without a special key, your hard disk cannot 
> 	be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and 
> 	would be information thieves cannot access 
> 	your hard disk, even if they remove it from your 
> 	PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone 
> 	from snooping into your information. Lock 
> 	down your hard disk, not with a password, 
> 	but with encryption. A password can be 
> 	cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's 
> 	SecureIDE will keep government 
> 	supercomputers busy for weeks and will 
> 	keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files."
> 
> No, I have no idea what this actually means either.
> I'm trying to find out.
> 
> Peter Trei

Yeah, that announcement just ran over the slashdot ticker. Someone posted the
following insightful link subsequently:

ftp://ftp.abit.com.tw/pub/download/fae/secureide_eng_v100.pdf

Looks like that sucker only does key-truncated version of DES called DES-40.
Right... did they say weeks? I'd say minutes, unless ABIT means [insert some
impoverished 3rd world country] government supercomputers.

It's snakeoil, move on, nothing to see here.

Cheers,
Ralf

-- 
Ralf-P. Weinmann <rpw at uni.de>
PGP fingerprint: 2048/46C772078ACB58DEF6EBF8030CBF1724




From rpw at uni.de  Wed Jul 30 15:03:08 2003
From: rpw at uni.de (Ralf-P. Weinmann)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 00:03:08 +0200
Subject: Secure IDE?
In-Reply-To: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22D@exna07.securitydy
  namics.com>
References: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22D@exna07.securitydyn
  amics.com>
Message-ID: <20030730220308.GA10727@rbg.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>

On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 04:20:37PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
> ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the 
> "IC7-MAX3" featuring something called 'Secure 
> IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the 
> onboard IDE controller:
> 
> >From the marketing fluff at
> http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251
> 
> 	"For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened 
> 	to users who were asking for information 
> 	security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE 
> 	hard disk and has a special decoder; 
> 	without a special key, your hard disk cannot 
> 	be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and 
> 	would be information thieves cannot access 
> 	your hard disk, even if they remove it from your 
> 	PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone 
> 	from snooping into your information. Lock 
> 	down your hard disk, not with a password, 
> 	but with encryption. A password can be 
> 	cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's 
> 	SecureIDE will keep government 
> 	supercomputers busy for weeks and will 
> 	keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files."
> 
> No, I have no idea what this actually means either.
> I'm trying to find out.
> 
> Peter Trei

40-bit DES in ECB mode sounds even more great. It's them
Enovatech guys again.

See here:
http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/C-punks20030519/0079.html

Cheers,
Ralf

-- 
Ralf-P. Weinmann <rpw at uni.de>
PGP fingerprint: 2048/46C772078ACB58DEF6EBF8030CBF1724




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 30 22:27:45 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 00:27:45 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the  
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.0.20030729154810.048e9ce8@mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307310027130.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Steve Schear wrote:

> I believe DARPA sought and received an opinion letter from the SEC and DoJ
> regarding this venture which provided that, being the government, they were
> "immune" from prosecution for violation of gambling and unregistered
> securities violations.

Evidence please...


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 30 22:33:36 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 00:33:36 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the  
  weekend
In-Reply-To: <C56C536A-C21A-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307310031180.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote:

> Anyway, there _already_ are very real, hard to manipulate markets in
> information. We call them markets. Markets for real estate, for corn,
> for copper, etc. If a lot of residents of Jordan think a collapse is
> coming, real estate prices in Amman will fall. If a lot of
> technologists think a return to copper wiring is coming, copper prices
> will rise. And so on.

As usual, talking out of both sides of the pie hole. First sentence about
'hard to manipulate' and the next examples of how real world markets
aren't hard to manipulate at all. I'd like to see some evidence on your
example of Amman, Jordan for example.

It's easy to make smoke, much harder to collect the wood.

Life is not economics, it can't be understood in strictly economic terms.


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Wed Jul 30 22:35:47 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 00:35:47 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the 
  weekend (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307291400310.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307310034180.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 14:49:51 -0400
> From: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com>

> Over on Dave Farber's IP list, it's been pointed out that there
> is a pre-existing, live, real-money market in futures on these
> types of events. Go over to www.tradesports.com, and click on
> 'Current Events' under 'Trading Catagories' on the left. Drill down
> and you'll find things like 'WMDs will be found in Iraq on or before
> Sept 31', the value of which has dropped from 80 to 25 over the
> last few months.

Which only goes to show how inaccurate and generaly confused these sorts
of systems are. Based on what people feel rather than what they know. The
failure of all free markets to conform to what 'economists' consider the
ideal.

This example actually blows your whole suppostion away.


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz  Wed Jul 30 06:01:08 2003
From: pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 01:01:08 +1200
Subject: AP by any other name ...
Message-ID: <200307301301.h6UD18X18542@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>

Anonymous <nobody at cryptofortress.com> writes:

>I first ran into this market concept about ten years ago. The Iowa Political
>Stock Market successfully predicted the outcome of the 1992 U.S. presidential
>election within a few tenths of a percentage point for all three candidates
>(including Perot).  It was more accurate than 8 major polls. Since then there
>have been many other experiments with other markets: Hollywood Stock Exchange
>where people bet on future box office receipts and Foresight Exchange where
>traders bet on the outcomes of unresolved scientific and societal questions.

It's been used in other areas as well, and for rather longer than ten years.
For example, one of the most accurate estimates of the entropy of natural
language involved people placing bets on the value of the next letter seen (as
opposed to the more traditional "I guess it'll be an 'e'" estimation
technique).

Peter.




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 31 04:24:21 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 06:24:21 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Life is not economics.
In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20030731160509.02551bd0@mail.nex.com.au>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307310624000.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Professor Rat. wrote:

> the shoat brings it up,life is not propping up statist dictatorships either
> so what have you done for us lately? Choate?

What have you done at all?


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 31 05:06:33 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:06:33 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Pac Bell's Internet arm sues music industry over file-sharer
  IDs (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307310706170.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/6424740.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 31 05:07:13 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:07:13 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: The Register - MCI denies national security 'compromised' (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307310706570.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/5/32074.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 31 05:07:33 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:07:33 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: The Seattle Times: Nation - Pentagon: China planning on
  military showdown with Taiwan (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307310707160.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001334071_missiles31.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 31 05:07:55 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:07:55 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Grist | Books | Cod is dead | 24 Jul 2003 (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307310707360.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/books072403.asp


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 31 05:10:02 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 08:10:02 -0400
Subject: Japan making RFID-trackable cash
Message-ID: <a06001a48bb4eb78395ff@[66.149.49.6]>

--- begin forwarded text


Status:  U
User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.1.1.2418
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 09:08:39 +0100
Subject: Re: Japan making RFID-trackable cash
From: "David G.W. Birch" <dgw-lists at birches.org>
To: Digital Bearer Settlement <dbs at philodox.com>
Cc: Bob Hettinga <rah at shipwright.com>

On 31/7/03 3:41 am, Bill Stewart e-said:

> Japan's starting to add RFIDs to their 10000-yen (~$100) bills.
> Notes will come with Hitachi's 0.3mm "mew-chip"

To protect against cat-burglars?

Regards,
Dave Birch.

P.S. It's "Mu" chip, as in the Greek letter.

-- 
-- My own opinion (I think) given solely in my capacity
-- as an interested member of the general public.
--
-- mail dgw(at)birches.org, web http://www.birches.org/dgwb

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Thu Jul 31 06:31:50 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 09:31:50 -0400
Subject: Secure IDE?
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D22F@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz[SMTP:pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz] wrote:
> 
> 
> "Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com> writes:
> 
> >No info on chaining modes, if any, nor of IV handling.
> 
> DES/ECB, originally with a 40-bit key, more recently with 56-bit and 3DES.
> Keys generated by the manufacturer onto a USB dongle.  No easy way to make
> backups of the dongle.  It's a messy tradeoff: If you want something like
> laptop/data-theft-protection (which will suit the majority of the market),
> then DES-40/ECB is fine, but you want to be able to back up the dongle
> because
> if that goes (and after multiple insertions and removals it will) you've
> lost
> all your data.  OTOH if you want protection from the MIB the fragile
> nature of
> the key storage is probably a benefit, but then you want 3DES/CBC to go
> with
> it.  At the moment you have laptop-theft-protection crypto and
> MIB-protection
> key storage.
> 
> You can buy truckloads of these things on ebay for about $20 a pop if you
> want
> to play with one.
> 
> Peter.
> 
Color me dissapointed. 

It's a move in the right direction, but I wish they had followed through and
done the right things:

* [AES | 3DES]/CBC with a good distribution of IVs
* User-generated keys (before initial disk setup, of course).
* Shutdown on dongle removal.
* Some kind of PIN or password protection on the dongle.

eNova claims not to keep a database of keys (they don't
say that 'there is no database of keys', which is a little
different), and to get a key copied you have to send it to
them. They do seem to supply a spare.

Back a few years ago, I calculated that with the DES key
search software then available, a single 200MHz machine
could search 40 bits of keyspace over a long weekend. 
Today it would take a few hours.

40 bit DES is not secure against your kid sister (if she's
a cypherpunk :-), much less industrial espionage.

Quote from
http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/mb_spec.jsp?pPRODUCT_TYPE=Moth
erBoard&pMODEL_NAME=SecureIDE :

"40-bit DES (US Data Encryption Standard) is adequate 
for general users"

Yeah. Right.

Peter




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Jul 31 09:57:14 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 09:57:14 -0700
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307311034220.27521-100000@anon7.arachelian.
  com>
Message-ID: <0916FB38-C378-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 07:34  AM, Sunder wrote:

> Yes, but he's retired, so why would he be displeased. :)
>
>

He's been called back to active duty by various militaries...


--Tim May




From sunder at sunder.net  Thu Jul 31 07:34:51 2003
From: sunder at sunder.net (Sunder)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 10:34:51 -0400 (edt)
Subject: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSU.4.44.0307301303240.24967-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0307311034220.27521-100000@anon7.arachelian.com>

Yes, but he's retired, so why would he be displeased. :)

----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Mike Rosing wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:
> 
> > PS: Does Variola feel insulted if we do not address him with his rank?
> 
> Nope:
> 
>  variola major virus : n) :a type of smallpox virus that has a fatality
> rate of up to 25 percent
> 
> It's not rank, but I assume he'll be displeased if you call him "minor
> variola" instead :-)




From jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com  Thu Jul 31 10:40:23 2003
From: jtrjtrjtr2001 at yahoo.com (Sarad AV)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 10:40:23 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Secure IDE?
In-Reply-To: <200307311705.h6VH5mO25813@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Message-ID: <20030731174023.54919.qmail@web21205.mail.yahoo.com>

hi,

>sector address as the IV. IVs don't need to be
random, secret, or
>unpredictable - they just need to be unrepeated. (I'm
assuming 
sector-at-a-
>time encryption).


If the IV is not a secret how are we going to prevent
block replay attacks on cipher text?

Regards Sarath.

--- Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> "Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com> writes:
>
>pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz[SMTP:pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz]
> >>"Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com> writes:
> >>>with a good distribution of IVs
> >>
> >>Where would you store them?  The feature of this
> is that it's fully
> >>transparent, so you can't store IVs anywhere.
> >
> >I'm not really up on crypto file systems, but I
> beleive at least some use the
> >sector address as the IV. IVs don't need to be
> random, secret, or
> >unpredictable - they just need to be unrepeated.
> (I'm assuming sector-at-a-
> >time encryption).
> 
> But the IV is repeated, every time you encrypt new
> data for that sector.  You
> need to either store a random IV for each sector
> (usually infeasible) or make
> two passes over the data (details vary), using the
> output from pass 1 to
> affect pass 2 (slow).
> 
> >>>* Some kind of PIN or password protection on the
> dongle.
> >>
> >>How would you do this without a custom BIOS
> (remember that their general
> >>product is for dropping into any PC)?
> >
> >We're talking about two different products. The
> ABIT is a MB, presumably with
> >it's own custom BIOS, so that's not an issue there.
> 
> Customised, not custom.  Think of it as a
> Chinese-menu type setup, it's a one-
> size-fits-all BIOS with appropriate modules compiled
> in for handling the CPU
> and chipset features.  Now motherboard vendors can
> plug in their own feature
> modules, but it's a somewhat nontrivial option
> usually used only for highly
> marketable features (overclocking options, ability
> to re-flash from Windows,
> etc etc).
> 
> Peter.
> 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Jul 31 11:34:23 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 11:34:23 -0700
Subject: Digicash Patents
In-Reply-To: <a06001af5bb4efa553f75@[66.149.49.6]>
Message-ID: <9B3429B2-C385-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 10:44  AM, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>
> Since lots of the important bits are supposed to expire next year, the 
> patents may or may not be useful.
>
> On the other hand, if they can be gotten clear, someone could get a 
> running start, I suppose, especially if they made a partnership deal 
> with First Data of some kind, and, if First Data was active in that 
> partnership, leveraging their other connections in the funds-transfer 
> business, that could be interesting.
>
> On the other other hand, :-), it's entirely clear that people could be 
> developing code right now in anticipation of the patent expiration and 
> go live with some kind of land rush when it's possible to do so.

Some people expected a "land rush" when the main RSA patents expired 
several years ago. Parties were even thrown. The land rush never 
happened.




--Tim May
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any 
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm 
to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient 
warrant." --John Stuart Mill




From ptrei at rsasecurity.com  Thu Jul 31 09:04:13 2003
From: ptrei at rsasecurity.com (Trei, Peter)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 12:04:13 -0400
Subject: Secure IDE?
Message-ID: <F504A8CEE925D411AF4A00508B8BE90A0558D231@exna07.securitydynamics.com>

> pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz[SMTP:pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz]
> 
> "Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com> writes:
> 
> >It's a move in the right direction, but I wish they had followed through
> and
> >done the right things:
> >
> >* [AES | 3DES]/CBC 
> 
> I get the feeling they use ECB for speed (heavy pipelining) rather than
> cluelessness.
> 
Possibly - they're using an ASIC, so I'd have thought that speed would not
be the issue. I have not run the numbers.

> >with a good distribution of IVs
> 
> Where would you store them?  The feature of this is that it's fully
> transparent, so you can't store IVs anywhere.
> 
I'm not really up on crypto file systems, but I beleive at least some
use the sector address as the IV. IVs don't need to be random,
secret, or unpredictable - they just need to be unrepeated. (I'm
assuming sector-at-a-time encryption).

> >* User-generated keys (before initial disk setup, of course).
> 
> That one's the only thing I can't find a good technical reason for...
> perhaps
> it's just commercial, since they see the dongles as a revenue source and
> will
> sell you software to set up n dongles yourself, where price is
> proportional to
> n.
> 
Having the user generate the key and load it on the dongle 
means that he has good assurance that the manufacturer doesn't 
have the key. Any kind of backup will open a possible route of
attack. If the user can specify the raw key value (it's short - this
is symmetric crypto), they can choose their own backup - up to
and including writing it on paper and carefuly hiding it.

> >* Some kind of PIN or password protection on the dongle.
> 
> How would you do this without a custom BIOS (remember that their general
> product is for dropping into any PC)?
> 
We're talking about two different products. The ABIT is a MB, 
presumably with it's own custom BIOS, so that's not an issue 
there. 

> >40 bit DES is not secure against your kid sister (if she's a cypherpunk
> :-),
> >much less industrial espionage.
> 
> I'm more worried about key backup - it's bad enough having
> cheapest-possible-
> components IDE drives without complicating it further with a second point
> of
> failure.  In the meantime a better option is still the triumvirate of:
> 
> - Sensitive data saved only to RAM disk.
> 
> - 3DES-encrypted volume mounted as a filesystem, which I can back up in
>   encrypted form if necessary, and with all crypto done in software with
> per-
>   sector random IVs, user-generated keys, and all the other stuff you
> asked
>   for.
> 
> - Encrypted swap.
> 
> (Oh yeah, and a UPS so you're not tempted to temporarily save stuff to
> disk
>  elsewhere in case the RAM drive goes away suddenly).
> 
> >"40-bit DES (US Data Encryption Standard) is adequate for general users"
> >
> >Yeah. Right.
> 
> If you're worried about Joe Burglar grabbing your laptop (for the value of
> the
> laptop) and your business data being leaked as collateral damage, or
> someone
> stumbling across your warez or pr0n, then it's probably adequate.  Since
> this
> is what general users would be worried about, I'd agree with the
> statement.
> Anyone worried about more than that (probably about 0.01% of the market)
> isn't
> a general user any more.
> 
> Peter.(G)
> 
Peter (T)




From patrick at lfcgate.com  Thu Jul 31 12:18:48 2003
From: patrick at lfcgate.com (Patrick)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:18:48 -0600
Subject: Digicash Patents
In-Reply-To: <9B3429B2-C385-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <011901c35798$995e5e90$0200a8c0@scylla>

> > On the other other hand, :-), it's entirely clear that people could
be
> > developing code right now in anticipation of the patent expiration
and
> > go live with some kind of land rush when it's possible to do so.
> 
> Some people expected a "land rush" when the main RSA patents expired
> several years ago. Parties were even thrown. The land rush never
> happened.
>
> --Tim May

	True, but look at bitpass.com. $1.5 million in capital for a
micropayments system with no innovations that amounts to... a stunted
version of Paypal?

	The beauty of a marketplace is that many different parties get
to try every which way of satisfying a need. Most will fail. Even the
first several attempts can fail, disguising a real opportunity as a
guaranteed failure.


Patrick
lucrative.thirdhost.com




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 31 10:44:45 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:44:45 -0400
Subject: Digicash Patents
Message-ID: <a06001af5bb4efa553f75@[66.149.49.6]>

Okay, so I called my source up, and we chatted a bit

Long story short, Infospace, the company that up until now had Chaum's original blind signature patents, sold them, in a bundle of other stuff, to First Data, in a reorganization.

First Data is the largest credit-card processor in the US, among other things, but they bought the original Digicash patents as a way to get at an authentication technology they were paying Infospace to use already, and a business that Infospace, in the middle of its own litigation circus, wanted out of, offering it to its two biggest customers, First Data and American Express. 

First Data bought it, apparently, as the people in Seattle, who used to work eCash Technologies -- and then Infospace -- are supposedly getting their checks from First Data now.


Since lots of the important bits are supposed to expire next year, the patents may or may not be useful.

On the other hand, if they can be gotten clear, someone could get a running start, I suppose, especially if they made a partnership deal with First Data of some kind, and, if First Data was active in that partnership, leveraging their other connections in the funds-transfer business, that could be interesting.

On the other other hand, :-), it's entirely clear that people could be developing code right now in anticipation of the patent expiration and go live with some kind of land rush when it's possible to do so.

Plug a mint into an account at GoldMoney, or e-Gold, or even PayPal, if they partner with *them* -- and see what happens...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From timcmay at got.net  Thu Jul 31 14:34:38 2003
From: timcmay at got.net (Tim May)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 14:34:38 -0700
Subject: Digicash Patents
In-Reply-To: <011901c35798$995e5e90$0200a8c0@scylla>
Message-ID: <C9556C74-C39E-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>

On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 12:18  PM, Patrick wrote:

>>> On the other other hand, :-), it's entirely clear that people could
> be
>>> developing code right now in anticipation of the patent expiration
> and
>>> go live with some kind of land rush when it's possible to do so.
>>
>> Some people expected a "land rush" when the main RSA patents expired
>> several years ago. Parties were even thrown. The land rush never
>> happened.
>>
>> --Tim May
>
> 	True, but look at bitpass.com. $1.5 million in capital for a
> micropayments system with no innovations that amounts to... a stunted
> version of Paypal?

PayPal apparently met the needs of its customers, which was for a 
low-tech, low-security, no anonymity online payment system. While I'm 
not saying I predicted it, neither is it surprising that something like 
it succeeded.

(Members of this very list had some discussions with the guy who 
started PayPal...I wasn't in on this, but I gather that he used some of 
the ideas, but not the high security/untraceability ideas...just the 
online payment low-hanging fruit part. The same is true of EBay, by the 
way, where some of our crowd developed an online system very much like 
what E-Bay became, but several years _after_ the AMiX system. C'est la 
vie.)

In any case, there will be many successes and failures in 
Internet-related business. This list is about certain kinds of these 
systems, but not really about "online payments" in their general form. 
I'm not saying folks can't or shouldn't talk about Mondex or PayPal or 
FastTrack, just that they have little to do with the obvious themes of 
the group.
>
> 	The beauty of a marketplace is that many different parties get
> to try every which way of satisfying a need. Most will fail. Even the
> first several attempts can fail, disguising a real opportunity as a
> guaranteed failure.
>
Software patents and the difficulty of "metering" usage has made this 
kind of experimentation, this kind of evolutionary learning, much 
harder to do. For example, when Intel sold the 4004 microprocessor 30 
years ago, it owned a bunch of patents and trade secrets about how the 
chip was made, what it's design was, etc.

But it didn't force potential customers to lay out their business 
plans, to sign "no compete" clauses, and it did not have to devise 
complex ways of knowing how many chips a customer was using. The chips 
metered themselves, metered the patents and other IP, and Intel could 
sell them to guys in garage shops, companies in Boise and Peoria, and 
even to distributors to resell and resell.

Such is not the case with, say, the Digicash software. Since Chaum, 
then the Canadians, then the Indians, then First Data, etc., wanted to 
maximize the payoff and "get a piece of the action," they could not 
simply sell the technology, even bits of it, to guys in garages and 
people with bizarre and untested ideas.

And such software is usually not sold to unidentifiable customers. 
Digicash (or its descendants) will not sell one copy of its core 
technology to a company without draconian safeguards and audits. This 
is part of why a paper trail back to the users of various technologies 
exist when above-board licensing is used. (And why many of us would 
obviously then favor simply _taking_ the technology, ripping it off. 
This cuts the paper and liability trail. Yes, there are minor issues 
with "theft of intellectual property," but this is mostly smoke and 
mirrors anyway. No one in the Western world seems to think ideas in 
general are patentable, so how did RSA get patented? We've had this 
discussion many times over the past 11 years. And more.)

This is replicated all over the digital landscape, where software 
packages have complicated licensing schemes and where vendors want to 
see only "staid and conservative" business plans. No Digicash for 
BlackNet, in other words.

This whole phenomenon has dramatically slowed down exploratory 
developement and weird, new ideas. A couple of guys in a tilt-up in 
Silicon Valley simply cannot just go down to Fry's to buy some parts 
and try out some ideas, not in this world of licenses, audits, lawyers, 
and generally pointless efforts to meter usage.

Which is why doing things without benefit of any patent licenses is the 
best strategy. That this also requires no nexus, no trail back to a 
corporate office, is of course part of why it's the best strategy.


--Tim May




From pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz  Wed Jul 30 21:06:00 2003
From: pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 16:06:00 +1200
Subject: Secure IDE?
Message-ID: <200307310406.h6V460x22886@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>

"Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com> writes:

>No info on chaining modes, if any, nor of IV handling.

DES/ECB, originally with a 40-bit key, more recently with 56-bit and 3DES.
Keys generated by the manufacturer onto a USB dongle.  No easy way to make
backups of the dongle.  It's a messy tradeoff: If you want something like
laptop/data-theft-protection (which will suit the majority of the market),
then DES-40/ECB is fine, but you want to be able to back up the dongle because
if that goes (and after multiple insertions and removals it will) you've lost
all your data.  OTOH if you want protection from the MIB the fragile nature of
the key storage is probably a benefit, but then you want 3DES/CBC to go with
it.  At the moment you have laptop-theft-protection crypto and MIB-protection
key storage.

You can buy truckloads of these things on ebay for about $20 a pop if you want
to play with one.

Peter.




From bill.stewart at pobox.com  Thu Jul 31 16:08:42 2003
From: bill.stewart at pobox.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 16:08:42 -0700
Subject: Digicash Patents
In-Reply-To: <011901c35798$995e5e90$0200a8c0@scylla>
References: <9B3429B2-C385-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.2.20030731141941.02e56cd0@idiom.com>

Tim replied to Bob -
> > > On the other other hand, :-), it's entirely clear that people could be
> > > developing code right now in anticipation of the patent expiration and
> > > go live with some kind of land rush when it's possible to do so.
> >
> > Some people expected a "land rush" when the main RSA patents expired
> > several years ago. Parties were even thrown. The land rush never happened.

Hey, the parties were pretty good, and RSA gave out T-shirts :-)
In practice, everybody who really needed to use RSA had
either licensed the technology for a reasonable (or too high) price,
or else was a free software developer violating the patents,
or else was a free or low-key software developer living within RSAREF.


At 01:18 PM 07/31/2003 -0600, Patrick lucrative.thirdhost.com wrote:
>The beauty of a marketplace is that many different parties get
>to try every which way of satisfying a need. Most will fail.
>Even the first several attempts can fail,
>disguising a real opportunity as a guaranteed failure.

The Mark Twain Bank people had licensed Chaum's patents,
and their failure had a lot less to do with the cost of licensing
the patent than with their inability to figure out how to
get customers and merchants, and their ability to make it
too difficult to get an account.
Mondex wasn't Chaumian, and it failed, along with a number of
other vaguely cash-like payment systems during the boom.
(I'm referring to the payment systems that handled actual money,
not just the silly Green-stamp emulators like Beenz and Flooz.)

By contrast, the Austin Cypherpunks Credit Union project
figured out that making money would be hard before starting a business,
as well as discovering that dealing with Chaum was also hard,
so they didn't get far enough to fail.
Eric Hughes had some good insights into why
"it's really hard to start a new payment system".

I supposed I'd categorize the efforts into two basic groups
- projects run by banks or bank-like companies that
wanted to actually run a service and hoped to make a profit
- startups funded by VC money that wanted to make startup money,
which depends on VCs and IPOs and Other People's Money,
and is only marginally related to actually making a profit,
though most of them also hoped they'd wildly succeed like other dotcoms.
There may have been a few other types of projects,
but this was most of them.




From ravage at einstein.ssz.com  Thu Jul 31 16:21:23 2003
From: ravage at einstein.ssz.com (Jim Choate)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 18:21:23 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: 'Progressive' Lawyer Group Ready To Challenge Formidable
  Federalist Society (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0307311821090.15683-100000@einstein.ssz.com>

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGANV71TSID.html


 --
    ____________________________________________________________________

      We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
      are going to spend the rest of our lives.

                              Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

      ravage at ssz.com                            jchoate at open-forge.org
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.org
    --------------------------------------------------------------------




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 31 16:58:10 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 19:58:10 -0400
Subject: Digicash Patents
In-Reply-To: <9B3429B2-C385-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
References: <9B3429B2-C385-11D7-A53B-000A956B4C74@got.net>
Message-ID: <a06001a41bb4f3e0d1ed2@[66.149.49.6]>

At 11:34 AM -0700 7/31/03, Tim May wrote:
>Some people expected a "land rush" when the main RSA patents expired 
>several years ago. Parties were even thrown. The land rush never 
>happened.

True enough.

Of course, there wasn't much land to rush after, it seems, between the minuscule  and easily oligopolized market for digital authentication ("signature" is a bogus word, for various reasons, along with "certificate" -- except in the case of bearer ones :-)) and the stone-dead market for any other financial cryptography besides rudimentary encryption for book-entry settlement was merely the icing on the cake.


If, however, after much experimental trial and error, internet bearer transaction costs turn out to be low enough, that might be something to rush after.
 

Remember that the Wrights couldn't sell airplanes worth a damn until Curtiss started infringing their patents and selling them to actual people, instead of governments the way the Wrights wanted to. That was certainly Chaum's mistake, the mistake of all monopolists, these days, to want to create a cartel the same way that Nobel did with Dynamite, a single user of blind signature technology for each country or currency.


Like the Wrights and Curtiss, the problem with blind signatures is one of a giant dog in the manger in the form of whoever the current greater fool owning the patent portfolio at the moment. Curtiss had an easier time of it in pre-16th-Amendment America, of course. With government so weak, he just kept selling airplanes like proverbial hotcakes, until, champerty being what it is, he was rich enough to sue, the Wrights won in court, and then demanded that Curtiss buy them out, since they obviously couldn't sell airplanes anyway...
 

In the case of blind signatures, though, you need to plug an underwriting engine into a bank account, at least for the first generation, and banks, like corporations, are creatures of the state. Not to mention "the law is your enforcement" characteristics of the modern book-entry payment system, where the financial industry has completely abdicated the integrity of their transaction processes to a perfectly willing nation-state, who, in turn, uses those transaction trails to extort more wealth from their citizenry. You can't have had the growth of the modern nation state without book-entry taxation, like those on individual and corporate income, capital gains, property transactions, and so on.
 

So, being in business for an underwriter means having the rights to any patents -- if there are any. Since there was no money to invest in such a business at the height of the boom, much less these days, and any underwriter now would have to bootstrap from practically nothing, even miniscule up-front patent royalties, much less the treat of patent litigation against the reserve account, would suck the oxygen out of the room and kill such a business before it even started.


And, no, Virginia, pizzling on as people here are wont to do about how bearer transactions' *only* markets are illegal ones won't wash. If they can't be done at least a few orders of magnitude cheaper than book entry transactions, they'll be about as ubiquitous as dirigibles are in modern aviation -- and just as obvious and indefensible from physical attack whenever *any* state-based transaction authority decides the party's over. 

Besides as any Kazaa user now knows, on the modern internet, everything's illegal everywhere all the time, right? Waiting around for some anarchic "rapture" to come along to fry the "useless eaters" and fix that logical contradiction is as much a waste of time waiting for the biblical one would be.


So, go cheap, or go home, folks. Go so cheap that, like all other really useful technology, the use of blind signatures and other internet bearer financial cryptography is orthogonal to morality. That nobody *cares* if they're used for illegal activities, just like nobody *cares* if whores take MasterCard -- or, to use an earlier analogy about automobiles and crime, pimps ride around in Caddies.


Finally, of course, this cost reduction is something we still haven't proven, but, hopefully, we'll prove soon enough, or most of us who are left wouldn't still be trying to work on this.

That's what I mean by "land rush".

Besides, we don't even know what we're rushing towards. Hell, Oklahoma wasn't much use for farming, anyway. It was oil that made the place, right? :-).

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From rah at shipwright.com  Thu Jul 31 18:05:40 2003
From: rah at shipwright.com (R. A. Hettinga)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 21:05:40 -0400
Subject: Poindexter to Quit Pentagon Post Amid Controversy
Message-ID: <a06001aaebb4f6a0a6e3a@[66.149.49.6]>

<http://reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3198102>

Reuters News Article

Poindexter to Quit Pentagon Post Amid Controversy 
Thu July 31, 2003 01:59 PM ET 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - John Poindexter, the retired Navy  admiral who spearheaded two sharply criticized Pentagon  projects, intends to resign from his Defense Department post  within weeks, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday. 

"It's my understanding that he ... expects to, within a few  weeks, offer his resignation," the official, speaking on  condition of anonymity, told reporters. 

Poindexter was involved with the Defense Advanced Research  Projects Agency's abandoned futures-trading market for  predicting assassinations, terrorism and other events in the  Middle East, and earlier with the so-called Total Information  Awareness program that drew fire from civil rights groups. 


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'




From mnorton at wlj.com  Thu Jul 31 20:19:22 2003
From: mnorton at wlj.com (Mac Norton)
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 22:19:22 -0500
Subject: Digicash Patents
Message-ID: <08CBC76751B32946BC0E3E1DEF5415E50672A2@server04.firm.wlj.com>

I'm not sure that Paypal has met the needs of any enduser yet, so I'd question whether it "succeeded."   The rest of what you say seems to be to the point that modern "IP" laws tend to discourage creativity. To some extent this may be so, as with interminable term extensions, but the most immediate discouragement lies in the DMCA, not an "IP" law at all but a grant of rather unprecedented monopoly power, irrespective of creative labor, among other items of note.
Macon

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim May [mailto:timcmay at got.net]
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 4:35 PM
To: cypherpunks at lne.com
Subject: Re: Digicash Patents


PayPal apparently met the needs of its customers, which was for a 
low-tech, low-security, no anonymity online payment system. While I'm 
not saying I predicted it, neither is it surprising that something like 
it succeeded.

(Members of this very list had some discussions with the guy who 
started PayPal...I wasn't in on this, but I gather that he used some of 
the ideas, but not the high security/untraceability ideas...just the 
online payment low-hanging fruit part. The same is true of EBay, by the 
way, where some of our crowd developed an online system very much like 
what E-Bay became, but several years _after_ the AMiX system. C'est la 
vie.)

In any case, there will be many successes and failures in 
Internet-related business. This list is about certain kinds of these 
systems, but not really about "online payments" in their general form. 
I'm not saying folks can't or shouldn't talk about Mondex or PayPal or 
FastTrack, just that they have little to do with the obvious themes of 
the group.
>
> 	The beauty of a marketplace is that many different parties get
> to try every which way of satisfying a need. Most will fail. Even the
> first several attempts can fail, disguising a real opportunity as a
> guaranteed failure.
>
Software patents and the difficulty of "metering" usage has made this 
kind of experimentation, this kind of evolutionary learning, much 
harder to do. For example, when Intel sold the 4004 microprocessor 30 
years ago, it owned a bunch of patents and trade secrets about how the 
chip was made, what it's design was, etc.

But it didn't force potential customers to lay out their business 
plans, to sign "no compete" clauses, and it did not have to devise 
complex ways of knowing how many chips a customer was using. The chips 
metered themselves, metered the patents and other IP, and Intel could 
sell them to guys in garage shops, companies in Boise and Peoria, and 
even to distributors to resell and resell.

Such is not the case with, say, the Digicash software. Since Chaum, 
then the Canadians, then the Indians, then First Data, etc., wanted to 
maximize the payoff and "get a piece of the action," they could not 
simply sell the technology, even bits of it, to guys in garages and 
people with bizarre and untested ideas.

And such software is usually not sold to unidentifiable customers. 
Digicash (or its descendants) will not sell one copy of its core 
technology to a company without draconian safeguards and audits. This 
is part of why a paper trail back to the users of various technologies 
exist when above-board licensing is used. (And why many of us would 
obviously then favor simply _taking_ the technology, ripping it off. 
This cuts the paper and liability trail. Yes, there are minor issues 
with "theft of intellectual property," but this is mostly smoke and 
mirrors anyway. No one in the Western world seems to think ideas in 
general are patentable, so how did RSA get patented? We've had this 
discussion many times over the past 11 years. And more.)

This is replicated all over the digital landscape, where software 
packages have complicated licensing schemes and where vendors want to 
see only "staid and conservative" business plans. No Digicash for 
BlackNet, in other words.

This whole phenomenon has dramatically slowed down exploratory 
developement and weird, new ideas. A couple of guys in a tilt-up in 
Silicon Valley simply cannot just go down to Fry's to buy some parts 
and try out some ideas, not in this world of licenses, audits, lawyers, 
and generally pointless efforts to meter usage.

Which is why doing things without benefit of any patent licenses is the 
best strategy. That this also requires no nexus, no trail back to a 
corporate office, is of course part of why it's the best strategy.


--Tim May




From pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz  Thu Jul 31 08:23:39 2003
From: pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 03:23:39 +1200
Subject: Secure IDE?
Message-ID: <200307311523.h6VFNdB25085@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>

"Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com> writes:

>It's a move in the right direction, but I wish they had followed through and
>done the right things:
>
>* [AES | 3DES]/CBC 

I get the feeling they use ECB for speed (heavy pipelining) rather than
cluelessness.

>with a good distribution of IVs

Where would you store them?  The feature of this is that it's fully
transparent, so you can't store IVs anywhere.

>* User-generated keys (before initial disk setup, of course).

That one's the only thing I can't find a good technical reason for... perhaps
it's just commercial, since they see the dongles as a revenue source and will
sell you software to set up n dongles yourself, where price is proportional to
n.

>* Some kind of PIN or password protection on the dongle.

How would you do this without a custom BIOS (remember that their general
product is for dropping into any PC)?

>40 bit DES is not secure against your kid sister (if she's a cypherpunk :-),
>much less industrial espionage.

I'm more worried about key backup - it's bad enough having cheapest-possible-
components IDE drives without complicating it further with a second point of
failure.  In the meantime a better option is still the triumvirate of:

- Sensitive data saved only to RAM disk.

- 3DES-encrypted volume mounted as a filesystem, which I can back up in
  encrypted form if necessary, and with all crypto done in software with per-
  sector random IVs, user-generated keys, and all the other stuff you asked
  for.

- Encrypted swap.

(Oh yeah, and a UPS so you're not tempted to temporarily save stuff to disk
 elsewhere in case the RAM drive goes away suddenly).

>"40-bit DES (US Data Encryption Standard) is adequate for general users"
>
>Yeah. Right.

If you're worried about Joe Burglar grabbing your laptop (for the value of the
laptop) and your business data being leaked as collateral damage, or someone
stumbling across your warez or pr0n, then it's probably adequate.  Since this
is what general users would be worried about, I'd agree with the statement.
Anyone worried about more than that (probably about 0.01% of the market) isn't
a general user any more.

Peter.




From pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz  Thu Jul 31 10:05:48 2003
From: pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 05:05:48 +1200
Subject: Secure IDE?
Message-ID: <200307311705.h6VH5mO25813@medusa01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>

"Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com> writes:
>pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz[SMTP:pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz]
>>"Trei, Peter" <ptrei at rsasecurity.com> writes:
>>>with a good distribution of IVs
>>
>>Where would you store them?  The feature of this is that it's fully
>>transparent, so you can't store IVs anywhere.
>
>I'm not really up on crypto file systems, but I beleive at least some use the
>sector address as the IV. IVs don't need to be random, secret, or
>unpredictable - they just need to be unrepeated. (I'm assuming sector-at-a-
>time encryption).

But the IV is repeated, every time you encrypt new data for that sector.  You
need to either store a random IV for each sector (usually infeasible) or make
two passes over the data (details vary), using the output from pass 1 to
affect pass 2 (slow).

>>>* Some kind of PIN or password protection on the dongle.
>>
>>How would you do this without a custom BIOS (remember that their general
>>product is for dropping into any PC)?
>
>We're talking about two different products. The ABIT is a MB, presumably with
>it's own custom BIOS, so that's not an issue there.

Customised, not custom.  Think of it as a Chinese-menu type setup, it's a one-
size-fits-all BIOS with appropriate modules compiled in for handling the CPU
and chipset features.  Now motherboard vendors can plug in their own feature
modules, but it's a somewhat nontrivial option usually used only for highly
marketable features (overclocking options, ability to re-flash from Windows,
etc etc).

Peter.