What is Real? was Re: Review Finds No Answers to Mystery of Havana Syndrome

Karl gmkarl at gmail.com
Sun Dec 5 11:07:17 PST 2021


On 12/5/21, Stefan Claas <spam.trap.mailing.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 5, 2021 at 7:15 PM Karl <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 12/5/21, Stefan Claas <spam.trap.mailing.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Sun, Dec 5, 2021 at 6:26 PM Karl <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I actually searched for your book, but it's hard to find!
>> >
>> > ISBN 1-55558-033-5 picture attached.
>>
>> It is so cool that you own this book physically.  If you ever scan it,
>> it would be really helpful if it were uploaded to https://libgen.is/ ,
>> which has most books, so that others can find it easily.
>
> Hi Karl, yes and it is cool for me that I did not throw it away etc.
> when I had a psychosis back in the '90s where I threw away my
> original MIT booklet from PGP, written by Mr. Zimmermann.

Man that's really crummy.  I've done things like that a lot.  I am
happy to be your friend regardless of how we might disagree about
network topology or whatnot, given you had this experience (for as
long as I remember you had it).  Psychoses are crazy.  Note: I think
my psychosis might have been a misdiagnosis for multiple dissociative
disorders after finding
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7001344/ .

> When I was young I purchased or collected many books and
> US magazines regarding computer technology. When Zeynep
> recently posted that she purchased Bruce Schneier's book I
> found this also awesome, which shows me that Zeynep is on
> the right track being a Cypherpunk, because she has privacy
> when reading a real book and not surfing the Internet to read
> things about Crypto. To bad for the young smartphone generation,
> hanging on the virtual needle, will forget later or do not know
> how we old farts did certain things.

The thing or someone like zeynep to do is to collaborate with your
community to pay for a huge disk, and download all the books to the
disk and share them offline with your friends.  This way people
without funds, or who are not yet targeted online, can read things.  I
don't remember the name for this but grarpamp would know.

> Do you remember when we were young, had local computer
> clubs and shops, could exchange ideas privately or people

I remember when there were local computer clubs and shops.  They are
now more scarce.

> wrote public domain software, without this OpenSource
> license crap?

Ehh I remember a lot of 'shareware', I must have missed the public
domain stuff.  I've written some public domain stuff but never gotten
a lot of contributions back, so I like the GPL now.

Maybe it is because of the online politics, the lack of public domain
contributions.  Interesting thought.  I never thought of software
licensing as bad before; I've never heard anyone criticise it for
reasons that make sense.  Often people complain that businesses can't
use it, I don't really understand why that would be.

> Regarding privacy, our former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl
> always used telephone booths, which were damaged or destroyed
> later, when he did important telephone calls. How comes that
> we no longer have telephone booths where we can put 20 cents
> in for a call ... ???

They are around in some areas :) I have used a public phone for a
quarter (0.25 USD) a year or two ago in an offline area.

But yeah cellphones are really making life very dangerous.

> Regarding scanning, theoretically, I could do this, but then the
> book would be damaged, which I do not like to do, even if one
> would pay me for that and it would be an educational resource
> for the community. Sounds egoistically, I know, and I am sorry
> about that.

It's fine, if I really want the book I can post on the site and find a
way to get it.  I imagine we would agree that using the local library
and their services for book-finding would be a good way to get it,
too.


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