Re: unregistered shell
On Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 09:49 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: Major Variola (ret)[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] At 12:29 AM 6/10/03 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: At 09:48 AM 06/09/2003 -0700, Major Variola (ret.) wrote: the Capitol because it had a gasoline container strapped to its roof. But the real point is that ammo has to be registered. Amazing. I found an old, live cartridge in the desert last weekend, tossed it in the car. What if I lived near DC instead of SoCal? Actually, ammunition is not registered as such, but in DC you are only allowed to possess ammunition suitable for one of your DC-registered firearms. This applies even to spent cartridge cases. If this guy didn't own a DC-registered shotgun of the same gauge as the shell found, then he's in violation. The car had California plates, so it seems plausible that he was a non-resident. I believe it was the McClure-Volkmer Amendment (or somesuch spelling) of some years back that clarified the laws regarding interstate transport of firearms. Instead of having to know the details of every single state one might be driving through on a trip, one was exempted from the local firearms laws while the guns were locked up in a trunk or suitable lockable container. This was hailed at the time as a major step towards stopping one state from busting those from North Carolina, say, when they passed through Maryland on their way to a hunting trip in Maine. The reasonable interpretation of McClure-Volkmer would have protected someone while in their vehicle, and probably while at a motel in some state, but would not have protected those staying for more than what a simple trip would take. I'm not surprised to hear that some jurisdictions think they can exempt themselves, especially for such trivial paper violations as having a shotgun shell. Mexico is like this, too. Gringos have spent time in Mexican jails because they neglected to thoroughly inspect every square inch of their vehicles, and the shakedownistas found a .22 cartridge under the floor mats. (The intent was probably to collect $100 mordita.) All this while drug operations run more or less without interruption and as they are equipped with fully-automatic HKs and FALs, the Army-issue rifles. So they bust a tourist for having a .22 cartridge while MP-5s and Uzis abound. Typical government.) As for Bill's point about a gas can strapped to the roof, this is a common way of carrying extra fuel, and is generally legal if the can is DOT approved (the red ones). LandCruisers and suchlike are often seen this way. As noted, safer than carrying them inside. Of course, normal rights and liberties are dispensed with when mere suspicion of planning to use the gas is involved. I'll bet this all gets kicked, unless an Arab was in the vehicle. --Tim May
Re: The Streisand imagecriminal lives 2-3 parcels away from me
On Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 11:48 AM, Bill Stewart wrote: At 11:00 AM 06/03/2003 -0400, Sunder wrote: That's all nice and good, but why should it be on cypherpunks? Where's the relevance to this list? Why is Ken, or his addres or helipad an interest to the cypherpunks? Why is PGE's monopolistic's actions against him relevant to the topics of this list? What's next? The Cypherpunk Equirer? Well sure - because not all the Black Helicopters flying over Tim's house have belonged to Feds/UN/etc. - one of them's probably been Ken's :-) I've also found Tim's comments on Pynchon living nearby interesting. IMHO, neither he, nor the Streisand creature have any relevance here - there perhaps was some relevance in terms of that lawsuit the bitch started, but, who gives a shit who your neighbors are? I'd say issues of putting aerial photography on the internet and how that changes the status of previously secret information are pretty close to our core issues - they're not directly cryptography, but neither are the guns, lots of guns discussions. And neither are the 15th or 23rd essentially duplicative discussions of PGP or Mondex or SSL or crypto exports very interesting or useful. I have no idea who pissed in Sunder's Wheaties, but he is of course free to skip any articles and concentrate on the ones that interest him. Volume on the list is now a fraction of what it once was...and yet still much repetitiousness dominates. Sunder could consider subscribing to a Best of list...wait, doesn't he _run_ one? Problem solved. I was not the one who brought up the Streisand sut...that was a posting by Major Variola on Friday. I thought it was pretty interesting that the aerial photographer is a neighbor of mine. This is, after all, not the same as listing neighbors who have not been mentioned...this is more akin to there being some talked-about crime case here and having John Young or Declan say That guy is my neighbor across the way. Interesting to know where people live, with even less techno/privacy relevance (such as hearing that Gary Condit lived near where Declan lives). Added to the fact that I see his helicopters circling low over my property (which explains some of the close encounters of the chopper kind in recent years), and the privacy/Brinworld implications (mentioned by M. Variola), and the sheer coincidence that I had just returned from my first flying lesson, I felt the need to post. Also, about 50-60 people were at the meeting/party at my house last September, so they have some (perhaps slight) awareness of which hills and nearby areas I'm mentioning. Sunder should put me in his killfile for a while...I am doing that for his posts, for a while. By the way, the Adelman situation also has a few other interesting tidbits. The company Adelman and his partner formed was called TGV. Located in Santa Cruz, the names suggested _speed_, as in the French train of the same name. Lore has it that the real origin was Two Guys and a Vax. Adelman also founded Network Alchemy. TGV was sold at the peak of the Internet boom to Cisco and Network Alchemy was sold to Nokia. Adelman cleared at least a few hundred million dollars. --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
Re: Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down
On Monday, June 2, 2003, at 07:09 AM, Ian Grigg wrote: PGP was also mildly successful, and was done by one guy, PRZ. The vision was very clear. All others had to do was to fix the bugs... Sadly, free versions never quite made the jump into GUI mail clients, so widespread success was denied to it. I would've characterized PGP version 2, 1992, as the first usable version. And it was done by about half a dozen people. The first version was not, to my knowledge, actually used by anyone. It might have done better had creaping featuritus and the integration with mailers and other programs and the better GUI distractions not dissipated so much energy. Also, the Clipper chip politics and the belief that PRZ was about to be arrested gave PGP a certain kind of notoriety...it became cool (bad, def) to use PGP. These days, that's _so_ 90s. --Tim May
The Streisand imagecriminal lives 2-3 parcels away from me
Ken Adelman, the retired gazillionaire who has gained new fame as a photographer of the California coastline, lives a couple of parcels from me, perhaps half a kilometer. For a while now, I'd wondered who owned the heliport that had helicopters departing and arriving a few times a week (that I knew of...could have been more). I couldn't actually see the heliport, due to some ridges and some trees, but I could see the choppers banking over my hilltop and disappearing behind a ridge. Well, today I did some Googling on Ken Adelman, who I already knew was a Corralitos resident. I had no idea where in my little community he lived, only that he had California's largest private solar cell array (and had gotten into yet another controversy, with PGE, our power monopoly, when he proposed to connect his array to the grid and be paid for the power he _added_ to the grid, as per official law and PGE policy...it seems PGE really doesn't _want_ the sheeple generating power, though they tolerate tiny, hobbyist generators...but Adelman['s array was an actual competitor, and would cost them money, so they tried to nix it...another story). In reading about the controversy over Streisand's property, I saw that Adelman is using his own helicopter. A bell went off in my head and I Googled to find his home address. His address in the phone book is unlisted, but he gave his home address in one or more of his ventures, and so up it popped in a Google search on his name: 1365 Meadowridge Rd., the road just before mine (Allan Lane) off of Brown's Valley Road. My address is 427 Allan Lane. Entering these into Yahoo or Mapquest shows how close our properties are. Here's one such street map: http://www.mapquest.com/maps/ map.adp?zoom=8mapdata=xU4YXdELrnBvmOFq2kcGOEQi7CbOldSJXG%2fHyl1%2fRq6Pe 4iyA3NaeyFOzwHt%2f59dLuXHRyy%2bIQSsOdYkttX8p5XZaw8IQC2MsQha1yRfzwQEdkcrT BRm4kENrZ2%2fgc6RCtIF5Yq1kQSRiLgSE%2bPL3SI8WloPMbT25qbIYzAmfr76TkHJ2RAZe 809GEwt7Utfq95yhGw%2f8r6J3b%2bdl5aPdiUdFaOV62t2BuHrlX7W%2b2EFfsGA%2be0r8 px2WBRa4HFSUfzgxZyva%2bgXBlqmO2q%2fUeDYZgUuJCBKcXpXJ2LYIj3OCGwHpqJO0Q%3d %3d His property is about where the first d in Meadowridge Rd. appears. My property is at the end of Allan Lane. Obviously, then, it is his helicopter I've been seeing flying over to about that spot. (Tiny chance it's someone else's...) BTW, I don't think this Ken Adelman, who is now 39-40, is the same Ken Adelman who advised Reagan in the 1980s on arms control--the D.C.-based Adelman was graying and balding at least 15 years ago, so I doubt they're the same person. But I haven't done enough Googling, nor have I found images of the Corralitos version, to be sure. More research is needed. --Tim May That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. --Samuel Adams
Re: Brinworld: Streisand sues amateur coastal photographer at californiacoastline.org
A couple of ironies here... On Friday, May 30, 2003, at 01:46 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Barbra Streisand has filed a lawsuit against an amateur photographer, claiming he is violating her privacy by displaying a picture of her bluff-top Malibu estate on a Web site designed to document erosion and excessive development along California's 1,150-mile coastline. The lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Santa Monica, besides seeking $10 million in damages, asks retired software engineer Kenneth Adelman to remove the image of Streisand's mansion from the 12,000 photos he has posted on http://www.californiacoastline.org. Adelman and his wife, Gabrielle, have been snapping pictures for months from their helicopter to show the splendors of the coastline and what they consider environmental threats. Adelman is a resident of the same small town I live in, Corralitos. He has gained a lot of justifiable fame for his clever idea of digitally photographing, with accurate GPS readings, the entire California coastline. One can imagine all sorts of uses, including doing image comparisons, calculations of rates of sand movement, vegetation changes (e.g., in sand dunes), and, of course, various kinds of economic development. The second irony is that just today I took my first flying lesson, in a Diamond Katana composite/carbon single-prop plane. I took off from the Watsonville Airport, which is, I assume, the home airport of Adelman. (I don't know if I'll continue all the way with flying, but I have a second lesson coming up in a few days.) --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
Re: Nigerian Spammers Using TDD/TTY Telephone Relay Service
On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 02:07 PM, John Kelsey wrote: This is aside from the first amendment problems (it's commercial speech, so it may be possible to get around those problems, but who really knows?) with antispam laws. It's useful to remember that newspapers are commercial operations, e.g., the New York Times Corporation, and that the same arguments that commercial speech can be regulated would thus apply to newspapersexcept this is not regulate commerce was intended to mean. And of course book publishers and authors are engaging in commerce. By the logic that commercial speech is subject to regulation, very few things would be beyond the reach of censors and regulators. (My informal understanding of the commerce clause is that it says only Congress may regulate tariffs and fees for commerce, that individual states may not do so. This was to preclude Virginia, say, from imposing a tariff on goods from Maryland. The commerce clause does not say that if a book publisher makes money (commercial) that the words in the book can be regulated, censored, prior-restrained, etc. Of course, what has happened in the past several decades has been the extension of the commerce clause into areas it was not intended to go, such as laws restricting freedom of association (First A.) by claims that interstate commerce is affected by certain kinds of freedom of association, e.g., that a restaurant barring negroes would thus affect the purchase of napkins which would reduce business in nearby states which would affect interstate commerce. Of course, the same argument would imply that people should not be able to choose which motels to stay in or which restaurants to eat in or which books to buy, because all of these choices may affect interstate commerce and by the brain-damaged rulings of our courts only Congress may affect interstate commerce.) The solution is of course to restate boldly that the commerce clause in the Constitution refers clearly to regulation of actual transport and shipment, of the sort between nations. Meaning, taxes and tariffs and import quotas and whatnot. And that the states do NOT have the power to act as nations do, that is, they have no power to regulate commerce...only Congress has that power. All uses of the commerce clause involving limitations on free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, etc., would be ended. --Tim May
Buying reputations...and turnips
This news item reinforces some points about the fungibility of reputations and also about whether or not things in cyberspace are worth paying money for: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storyu=/ap/20020325/ap_on_hi_te/virtual_property_4; cid=528 Of course, such things have happened before. (In a smaller way, I paid $20 in real money for the credits in a reputation market run on the Extropians list, circa 1993.) Of course, in a more nuanced understanding of reputations, it would be appreciated by Everquest players that the skills that got a player to Grand Wazoo are not transferrable when the nym is sold. Reputation is more properly about beliefs about future outcome, about bets. But clearly someone thinks these turnips are worth $600. --Tim May You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged. - -Michael Shirley
Math and crypto videos available at msri.org
I've been enjoying the streaming video lectures available at www.msri.org. MSRI is the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, which sits on a hill above UC Berkeley. MSRI is funded by NSF and other donors and has no apparent formal connection with UCB (that I can find). The streaming videos need RealPlayer, but a free version is readily available. The quality is only mediocre...the mathematicians are still using overhead transparencies with scrawled writing, and this doesn't pick up and show well, at least on my own RealPlayer setup. And I get the usual jerky video from my slow dial-up line, but at least the audio track is excellent. I haven't looked at the crypto lectures yet. Dan Bernstein has several of them, including on fast multiplication hardware for crypto. And the usual other mathematicians who do crypto are represented. (BTW, having such videos--hopefully with better quality than overhead projectors--might be an interesting option for the Crypto for T.C. Mits project some of you have been talking about. ) --Tim May The great object is that every man be armed and everyone who is able may have a gun. --Patrick Henry The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. --Alexander Hamilton
Re: signal to noise proposal
On Sunday, March 24, 2002, at 12:30 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote: On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 06:45:20PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - posts to the list are like currency. lurkers Not a useful analogy. For some people, the more they post, the lower their reputation falls. A lot of the current/recent reputation schemes make a fundamental mistake: they attempt to assign a scalar value to the [emphasis] reputation of an actor. Even the schemes which attempt to assign a vector rating, e.g, Declan' s rating of Detweiler is..., Tim's rating of Detweiler is..., make a fatal mistake. There are no reputations attachable to actors in this way. What there are are _beliefs_ about certain actors held by others. I have seen 8 years' worth of posts from Detweiler, with some mult-year gaps, and I have seen some fraction of comments made by other people, some of whom I respect (believe to some extent) and some of whom I don't believe (ignore, criticize, believe the opposite of usually). Based on all of these inputs, but very heavily weighted by my own past (Bayesian) experience, I tend not to take Detweiler's posts very seriously, even when he attempts to behave and attempts to put forth content rather than gibberish. (Readers will recognize that this goes beyond even a tensor, the generalization of a vector, and involves stories (possible worlds semantics, a la Kripke). Belief is partly Beyesian (or Dempster-Shafer-centric), partly a semantic net of many factors. Evolution has given us very good tools for assessing danger, deciding who's worth listening to and who's not, and how to plan for certain futures. Most of the mechanistic models for reputation are overly simplistic.) To paraphrase, I made not be able to define bullshit, but I know a bullshitter when I see one. I encourage Detweiler to reify his ideas into code. Shouldn't take more than a short while programming in Python or Squeak to generate a filtering method he can apply to _his_ instance of the list. Though from what I just read a few minutes ago, with him excoriating the list for not rushing to begin implementing his latest ideas, it looks like DejaNews all over again. I give him 3 weeks of pounding headaches before he begins referring to An Metet as a tentacle of me, Koder bin Hackin', as a tentacle of Declan, etc. --Tim May
Re: Henry VI and Lawyer-Killing
On Sunday, March 24, 2002, at 12:26 PM, A. Melon wrote: On Mon, 25 Mar 2002 05:12:41 +1100, matthew X wrote: First we kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare.henry the something. Falling into camp I resemble that remark, here's a bit of history on one of the worlds' most common epithets against the legal profession. While this remark has been reduced to a slogan or jingle, placed in context, the ... Yes, it's an oversimplification. A full rewrite of the slogan would go like this: First, we separate the lawyers into three categories: those who can pay compensation for their crimes and can enter other fields, those who should kill immediately for their crimes, and, last but not least, those who must be tortured for their crimes and then killed. My guess is that nearly all lawyers fall into the third category. The Earl was far too kind to them. --Tim May
Re: signal to noise proposal
On Saturday, March 23, 2002, at 05:31 PM, Graham Lally wrote: Adam Back wrote: Apart from my recent comments about NoCeM's and on onspool NoCeM reader, another perhaps simpler idea would be to do it all with simple CGI stuff and a web archive. I'm sure this has been discussed before in the past, but I don't recall anyone actually trying it out: TBH, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Slashdot yet... I did, just a couple of days ago. Slashdotting is a major, if not _the_ major, contributor to short attention span noise. Choate relies heavily on Slashdot...'nuff said. --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
Re: I'm no agent.
On Saturday, March 23, 2002, at 05:35 PM, Meyer Wolfsheim wrote: On Sat, 23 Mar 2002, Declan McCullagh wrote: If you are comfortable with your ability to publish code anonymously, and do this through the methods that have been oft-discussed here, including chained remailers, perhaps coupled with physical identity- shielding schemes, there is no need to consult a lawyer. In other words, if you think there is a near-zero risk of identification and subsequent legal action, why bother with an attorney? In fact, consulting a lawyer becomes dangerous in that situation. Assuming you are consulting a lawyer in meat-space, and he knows your true name, you have just created a huge weakness in your plans to remain anonymous. (Assuming that your lawyer is On Your Side[tm], and respects the Attorney-Client Privilege[tm], you still have to trust him to be competent in concealing your identity from those who might not.) This was part of the whole point about not consulting a lawyer. Lawyers can't possibly insulate one from legal action if something is fundamentally illegal, and consulting a lawyer starts one down the wrong track. So why bother? Further, many states and jurisdictions have laws requiring lawyers to break alleged attorney-client privilege if they know that an illegal act is being planned. A cheap and entertaining way to get a basically accurate--say lawyer friends of mine, and even some prosecutors I have talked to--education is by watching shows like Law and Order and several others in the genre. Every tenth episode, I would guesstimate, has a plot involving lawyers being required in one way or another to narc out their clients, or _choosing_ to do so. (Particularly common on the sleazoid show The Practice, where liberal simp-wimp defense attorneys get wind of immoral acts by their clients and choose to get rapped on the knuckles for narcing their clients out. Me, I'd say the right punishment is fire-bombing the offices of the law firm and kiling the entire nest of shysters in the firm which narced me out.) The bottom line is what I said before: two can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Even a small programming team is not acceptable, for obvious reasons. Maybe if the team is controlled by the Mob or the KGB, and there have been graphic demonstrations of traitors being tied to planks and then slowly fed into a furnace, but for most Americans and Europeans the temptation to cut a deal is too strong. Never trust colleagues to keep critical secrets, even if you know where they live and have a good plan for incinerating their family if they betray you. If you know something is illegal, and choose to do it anyway, placing your trust in available anonymity systems to protect you from jail, torture, or public disdain, there is very little a lawyer can tell you that will be of any use. Exactly. In fact, a lawyer is obligated by virtue of being an officer of the court, to not help you commit illegal acts and to notify the court if he has knowledge of such actions. (Yeah, I know there are lawyers for the Mob. But this is the theory, and lawyers will generally not be very helpful in conspiring to break the law. --Tim May Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound
Re: design considerations for distributed storage networks
don't agree with everything Stallman talks about, what he has done as a one man show is very impressive. A couple of my friends are very much in the same mold...and when they have tried to add staff, it usually slows them down. (Sidebar: Arguably PGP was best when it was a very small project team, that of the original 2.x releases. When it got big, and diluted, and corporatized, look what happened. And not even a lot of people got rich off of the corporatizing. A shame.) * Bottom Line: One good programmer can, with maybe a year or two of solid effort, produce something that is interesting in this niche (marketspeak: space). If he doesn't identify himself, and releases the product through the familiar untraceable channels, he stands a good chance of not getting sued, jailed, or worse. The interesting projects are the ones dangerous to the state, dangerous to the corporations, dangerous to the establishment. (This is not Mattd rhetoric about smashing the state...this is just the basic fact about these technologies.) Don't hire a single lawyer. As soon as even a single lawyer is hired, you're lost. Because it means you're thinking in terms of using the legal system, of striking business deals with those whose products you napster, and with working within the system. Not hiring a single lawyer, not even _consulting_ with a lawyer, means you are fully aware of how much you are relying on the laws of mathematics rather than the laws of men. And don't tell anyone what you're doing. Maybe you can leave a clever encrypted message in your work, in case you wish to someday reveal you were the genius behind Thieve's Market. But find other ways to make money or stroke your ego. The familiar saw about two people being able to keep a secret...if one of them is dead. --Tim May That government is best which governs not at all. --Henry David Thoreau
Re: snow crash really exists
At 1:48 PM -0400 6/12/01, Riad S. Wahby wrote: David Honig [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In _Science_ Vol 292 1 June 01 p 1637 there's a brief reference to musicogenic epilepsy, a rare conditionin which seizures are triggered by music My good friend and roommate of two years has just such a condition. His epileptic seizures are triggered by, among other things, the Happy Birthday song. ROTFHASASMT! (Rolling on the floor having a seizure and swallowing my tongue!) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: ORBS sucked into a black hole!
At 8:27 AM -0700 6/12/01, Greg Broiles wrote: At 07:07 AM 6/12/2001 -0500, Jim Choate wrote: On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Sampo Syreeni wrote: Yes, if you participate in an open forum like the Internet, you can expect people to form an opinion about you. Or about your contribution to the infrastructure, as the case may be. Do you expect movie critics to stop going to new movies unless invited? Movie critics don't go around blocking me and my friends from seeing other movies besides the ones they want. Movie theaters prevent me from watching movies I want to see by censoriously not showing them, frequently as a result of critics' or reviewers' comments about those movies and their quality or subject or genre. Those bastards! And the video store near my house doesn't have all of the DVDs I want to buy, either. Don't they know about the First Amendment? And some of the ones that I want are too expensive. Help! I'm being censored! Will you buy them for me, Jim? I am beginning to suspect that perhaps the newspaper is deliberately not printing all of the news . . . I'm even more concerned, even angry, about some local restaurants _restricting content_ and _limiting my choices_. (Their excuse is that they talk to other restaurant and dietary experts, a la the ORBS conspiracy, and learn which food items are popular and which are not. Like ORBS, this is a de facto conspiracy to impose food censorship on the citizen units! RICO, anyone?) Like Choate, I believe we must stop the practice of ISPs deciding how to deal with their property as they choose. And we must stop this censorious practice of allowing restaurants to restrict content! And newspapers must be forced to carry anything the Peoples want to have published. Long live the Socialist Internationale! --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Ed Felten and researchers sue RIAA, DOJ over right to publish
May it please the court to spell Ed's name Feltun, or Feltren, or Fellwock, or just et al. Perry Fellwock wrote the anonymous 1972 Ramparts article that first described Echelon. Ed Felten is Perry's namesake, though Ed believes there's no connection between worldwide misspelling of Ed's last name and getting a free-pass of Dictionary. Perry Metzger is a different branch of the grammar diagram, find under *PLONK*, always upper case, always bi-starred as if that would not be data-mined as PAL-armed. A bit early in the day to be hitting the sauce, eh? --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: The Credentialling of America
At 10:07 AM 6/6/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote: It is important that Felton win his case. What I wonder is even if he does will the courts create only a very narrow exception for credentialed scientists working at recognized institutions? As far as I'm concerned anyone who is curious, learns something and wants to publish should have the same rights as a prof at any university. So even if he wins the battle is far from over. This seems like a likely outcome, part of the credentialling of America. There are parts of biological research which can only be done by approved, credentialled researchers. Ditto for weapons work of various kinds. I'm aware of the FAA restrictions on rocket launching (although there doesn't appear to be curbs on development or static testing). Where can one find those related to biology? Any search with Google on the right keywords will turn up many hits. The Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996 makes nearly every facet of experimentations with potential biological warfare agents or techniques a federal crime if the proper permission slips are not obtained. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Is there a right to hide stuff?
At 12:42 AM -0400 6/4/01, Declan McCullagh wrote: Yes, no, and it depends. Even ardent libertarians will probably agree with the idea of some kind of search warrants in some situations, so in those cases you don't have the right to hide stuff (though you can try). But those are exceptional conditions, or at least should be. This is not a meaningful question, truly. _Before_ a search warrant is served, a person may generally do as he wishes to hide stuff. He may write in secret code, he may whisper so that bugs cannot pick up his words, he may shred his diaries, he may literally hide physical objects under the floorboards of his house. None of these actions violates any law in the U.S., not even the broad conspiracy laws...at least not yet. (I only add the qualifier generally to avoid the anticipated comeback about how someone may be obligated by his job at the CIA to not shred his diaries, whatever. The basic point is valid.) _During_ the serving of a search warrant, the target is neither obligated to help with the search (Tell us where you hid the loot!) nor is he allowed to take further actions to hide stuff. _After_ the serving, that warrant is a dead letter. (Maybe there's some strange ruling that says a target of a search warrant can't then take later steps to hide stuff, but I doubt it.) So, neither before, during, or after does the right to hide stuff even become a meaningful question, as Declan notes. In this sense there's a practical right to hide stuff. Part of the more general point that there is no obligation to arrange one's words, one's stuff so as to make some future police raid easier. This doesn't have to be spelled out as a right to hide stuff, though. Same reason there is no need to spell out some right to privacy. (And in fact, attempts to spell out such a right end up doing all sorts of harm to liberty, e.g, by limiting what _others_ can do with information they lawfully obtained.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: CNBC piece about privacy policies
At 3:03 PM -0700 6/3/01, Dave Watson wrote: My recourse is to take my business elsewhere, of course. --Tim May I haven't found elsewhere to be much better. Wall Street Journal Report had an article on this today, too. They said only about 1% opted out. Maybe we should take a more active role -- in opting ourselves and encouraging our friends. If things get bad enough, I can imagine telling my broker of 26 years, J.C. of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, that I am unhappy with Morgan Stanley's sale of customer information policies and that I wish to have my shares in street name re-issued to me in my own name. This would be a drastic step, certain to cause my broker's boss, and his boss, and _his_ boss, say to J.C. What the _fuck_ happened here? This is what I meant by take my business elsewhere. And, of course, Cypherpunks should realize this is a business opportunity...long term. If in fact all American brokerages and banks are willing to sell out their customers' privacy, then there should be a market for banks and brokerages which are more willing to protect privacy. (Even modulo U.S. banking laws...none of which require a bank or brokerage or credit card company to sell customer data to K-Mart and Martha Stewart.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Subpoenas
At 10:31 PM -0500 5/22/01, Mac Norton wrote: Your friend is largely correct, but there are some important exceptions to his general principles that may be troublesome. For instance, every man has an obligation to give his evidence. It's one of those citizenship things, but it applies to mere residents as well. Granted, nationwide subpoena reach (rare, but sometimes permitted) does make compliance with this obligation a good deal more inconvenient than anticipated at common law--or does it? Can't one get from Seattle to Boston today a lot faster than one could get from Boston to New York two hundred years ago? And much more comfortably? As Declan's case showed, it's still a two-day, perhaps three-day, matter to get from the East Coast to the West Coast (absent red-eyes, which I don't think _anyone_ should be compelled to take). This is a far cry from being asked/commanded to drop by the Boston Courthouse in 1795 to give his evidence. Be that as it may, your friend seems to want my taxes to put him up at the Ritz and fly him first class and limo him fro the airport, if not send a Lear for him. My personal view is that your friend's demands are rather unreasonable, and I'll bet my personal views are shared by most taxpayers. My friend did not speak off either a Learjet or digs at the Ritz. Nor did he speak of a limo. You have erected a strawman argument. My friend spoke of what he spoke of...I shant repeat it here. I appreciate your friend's view about hiring expensive lawyers, or hiring lawyers in general. I'm a relatively inexpensive lawyer, but cheap or dear, most lawyers sincerely do appreciate folks like your friend. It's the Framm oil filter thing: Pay me now, or pay me later. And it's more later. A friend of this friend of mine takes an even more extreme view than my friend does. My friend's friend has seen what has happened in recent political show trials, so he chooses not to say more about what a real punishment for abusers of the Constitution should be. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Destroying Sensitive Paper
At 6:29 PM -0500 5/23/01, ganns.com wrote: Surely this list has discussed destroying paper with sensitive writing on it. What is the conclusion as to the recommended method? Assume that the writing is with pencil, pen, typed, or printer output. Assume that owner of these secret documents does not have the budget to use an incinerator. I've seen cheap, at-a-moment's-notice methods such as, ripping a post-it-note with password into several pieces and discarding into various trash recepticals, or even flushing down toilets. I would rule out simple fireplace burning because it seem that you can even read some print on a newspaper, given that it has not been crushed to ash. Just curious. Thanks I recommend you spend about 5 minutes _thinking_ about what the advantages and disadvantages are of various methods. Then spend another 10 minutes or so doing some simple experiments. Jeesh. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Beacons (Re: Paper on subpoena-proof diaries)
At 8:38 AM -0700 5/22/01, David Honig wrote: At 08:00 PM 5/21/01 -0500, Aimee Farr wrote: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=266153 Summary: toss your key and let them brute force your diary in the future. Problem: a brute force attack searches on *average* half the key space. But you might be unlucky and eager 'historians' might find your key sooner. Solution: repeat the process N times sequentially. Even if one key is found 'early', its unlikely that all will. The paper is naive, and the reliance on eventual brute-forcing is its undoing. If, for example, Hilary Clinton counts on brute-forcing costing her $1000 in CPU time in 2015 to undo her encryption, this clearly means someone willing to spend, say, $20,000 to do it a couple of years earlier (even if the current slope of Moore's Law doesn't change). And a dedicated adversary could crack the system perhaps a decade or more earlier. Relying on estimates of future computer power and cost is too twitchy (sensitive to slight variations). A better scheme was proposed by some of us almost a decade ago: beacons. Also called timed-release crypto. (See archives, or Cyphernomicon.) These are agents or systems or even lawyers which release parts of a key at contractually-arranged (or pre-paid with cash, untraceably if need be, through lawyers or digital cash or Magic Money, etc.) times. It is September 1, 2015. A key or part of a key is attached to this message. This in accordance with a payment made in 2001. Have a nice day. The use of lawyers works with everyday, standard technology. Not even any special computer tools. Just a message entitled Open this envelope on September 1, 2015 and do the following with it. A timed-release crypto approach would rely on various account holders doing essentially the same thing, contractually bound. Collusion prospects are reduced in the obvious ways (e.g., only Hilary Clinton knows which set of lawyers she used, or which set of agent sites, or the dispersal was done in the n-out-of-m way, with even Hilary not knowing the sites. Akin to remailer networks. The beacons can hold parts of a key, via an n-out-of-m protocol. (E.g., where any 6 of the 12 pieces are sufficient to reconstruct the full key.) Mojo uses these kinds of protocols. What protects against early release is that the partial key holders don't necessarily know who their original customers were (hence the point about payment in digital cash or through lawyers) and thus cannot conspire to reconstruct the key. As we described the protocol back then, a public forum, a la a newsgroup or BlackNet, could be the designated place to publish the partial keys. The customer for the operation, in this case Hilary Clinton, would perhaps hold one or more of the pieces herself (further protection against collusion) and would know what to look for, and when. Beacons are very robust, relying only on the self-interest of disparate parties to hold up there end of a contract to publish or mail a number that is worthless to them. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Subpoenas
On Monday, May 21, 2001, at 10:53 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -- On 20 May 2001, at 16:49, John Young wrote: And that's why Tim will get a subpoena to a Grand Jury to explain why he did this. Usually the authorities are reluctant to repress articulate people who can afford good lawyers. Their usual tactic is to kill a few rednecks in order to send a message to the guys that they really wish to suppress. I know someone whose view is that to spend good money on shysters to defend the obvious is foolish. His view is that spending $300 an hour for at least a dozen hours overall so that a Speaker-to-Burrowcrats can draft response letters in the proper lingo is a waste of his money. Some of his friends think he is foolish for thinking he can avoid hiring shysters. His view is that he is under no obligation to explain his First Amendment exercise, nor his he obligated to spend his time and money travelling from his isolated home to a regional airport, getting on a plane with his own money, checking into some court-approved fleabag motel, not being able to have his guns with him during this travel process (if he flies), and then (maybe) being reimbursed some fraction of his expenses. HIs view, so I understand, is that if they want his views on his First Amendment exercise they can come and pick him up at his house and handle _all_ travel issues, in a manner to which he is accustomed, and of course reimburse him for his lost time at his usual rates, plus a bonus for the hassles of dealing with burrowcrats. My friend says that he is not the government's bank, and that he does not advance them money to cover incurred expenses. He also points out that the justice system was not until recently used to have casual witnesses to minor things travel 3000 miles or more to answer a few questions. But I don't always agree with him on all points. And so far he has only been served with papers once in his lifetime. He told the process server to get the fuck off his property, that he was tresspassing. This trespasser declared angrily that he some right to be the on my friend's property. My friend disagreed and shouted louder. The process server declared that he felt threatened and would be contacting the local cops. My friend slammed the door and made sure his usual precautions were ready, but the Gestapo did not arrive. Alas, this person tell me, the process server had already handed him the papers. My friend complied with the served process in the most minimal and useless fashion he could imagine. So he told me. My friend now knows to look through the peephole before ever opening the door. (My friend has also twice--that he knows of-- received mail subpoenas, which he did not think were possible. After all, he knows the State-Monopoly Postal Scam is not reliable, and he often doesn't even look through all of his mail for days or weeks, sometimes misplacing letters and spam and advertising completely. So he knows that such mail subpoenas clearly are not legally enforceable, so he ignores them. Those he finds in his flood of incoming mail, that is. He expects these mail subpoenas to be replaced with FedEx or Certified Mail subpoenas; if this happens he expects he'll have to be not home when suspiciously-small packages for things he did not order are delivered.) My friend believes the signs are abundant that state fascism is out of control. I agree with him, of course. --Tim May
Kirkland SSN document, comments and snapshot of what we're talking about
At 10:59 AM -0400 5/20/01, Declan McCullagh wrote: At 11:29 AM 5/19/01 -0700, Tim May wrote: The question I hope to hear from Declan on is whether the Kirkland lawyers are citing some law against reporting on their cops, or merely don't like what he did. Neither, actually. They claim that I'm acting in concert with justicefiles.org by quoting three lines from the site. And, Kirkland claims, that means I'm bound by the court's injunction against justicefiles.org. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine whether the in concert claim is a logically valid one. So, is the Google site acting in concert with justicefiles? Is the entire nation bound by this quashing of free speech (and the contravention of SCOTUS cases cited by you, Greg, and others)? Is a person in violation of the law if his site is crawled by Google or similar spiders and they index the Forbidden Words? Seen from a libertarian/BOR perspective, the answers are easy. Seen from an interventionist/speech banning perspective, the questions multiply and multiply. (As with experiments in filtering lists, reporting on the act of filtering itself becomes a violation, and reporting on _that_ issue becomes a violation, and the process cascades.) I made sure to do a Web archive on the site. To see what we are discussing, here's the text version of this Banned Site: (Apologies for the formatting--it's a wide document and no formatting into 75 or 80 columns would fix wrap problems anyway. No apologies that it now becomes part of the various archives of list traffic.) --Tim This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.justicefiles.org/Kirkland/Kirkland%20SSN.asp. G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. The page may have changed since that time. Click here for the current page without highlighting. Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content. These search terms have been highlighted: blinsink City of Kirkland Last First Middle I. SSN Date of Birth Job Title Monthly Pay Home Phone Home City State Zip Email Addresses Adair (Court Records) Wayne A. Patrol Master Police Officer $4,893.00The Ring leader in a massive suit for 15 minutes overtime. Aksdal Todd M. 539-98-6802 Oct-74 Patrol Police Officer III $4,089.00 10619 143rd Place Bothell WA 98011 Allen (Court Records) Michael J. 532-04-9782 Patrol Police Officer I $4,661.00 (253) 845-4146 2003 5TH ST SW PUYALLUP WA 98371-7439 Amaya Maria H. 285-60-2032 Sep-73 Patrol Police Officer IV $3,870.00 206-276-7110 PO Box 25342 Seattle WA 98125 Avery Scott H. Starting Police Officer $3,425.00 425-576-0199 320 - 2nd Ave S. Kirkland WA 98033 Balkema (Court Records) Robert C. 279-58-1156 Mar-55 Police Support Officer $2,619.00 668-3595 18223 109th Ave se Snohomish WA 98296 Beath Brian B. 537-46-2392 Feb-47 Police Support Officer $2,619.00 425-881-3568 14633 40th St NE Apt K8 Bellevue WA 98007 Biladeau Dawn M. Lead Communication Technician $3,431.00 425-821-7059 13025 NE 137th Pl Kirkland WA 98034 Blinsink Steven Harold 239-41-9528 Aug-70 Patrol Police Officer IV $3,870.00 425-553-4055 6515 134th Place #G3 Snohomish WA 98296 Bohl Susan M. Records Technician $2,427.00 (360) 613-5846 10132 Stoli Ln NW Silverdale WA 98383 Bos Michael L. Police Support Officer $2,619.00 3515 E Pine NeedleWA Bressler Raymond C. Starting Police Officer $3,425.00 Brewer Michael P. 538-46-3280 Dec-47 Patrol Police Officer I $4,661.00 425-823-9649 14235 75th NE Bothell WA 98011 Brouelette Elizabeth B. Starting Patrol Police Officer $3,425.00 Caito Vincent W. Parking Enforcement Officer $2,331.00 425-883-1859 18304 NE 92 Ct. Redmond WA 98052 Caldwell Rex D. 533-72-1999 Mar-60 Senior Sergeant $5,172.00 425-481-3085 PO Box 311 Kirkland WA 98083 Carroll Donald J. 567-06-9845 Master Police Officer $4,690.00 425-821-5884 10616 116th St. NE Kirkland WA 98034 Coleman Joanne M. Records Technician $2,427.00 425-357-8943 3533 - 122nd Pl SE Everett WA 98208 Coleman Ronald L. 536-68-6894 Apr-59 Master Police Officer $4,690.00 425-788-9599 164119 315th Ave NE Duvall WA 98019 Collins Ginger Sue Parking Enforcement Officer $2,331.00 Corning Donald L. 365-24-4430 Nov-47 Master Police Officer $4,690.00 425-821-4484 10716 44th Court NE Bothell WA 98011 Crandall (Court Records) David M. Police Officer I 1 YR $4,468.00 206-286-0357 2433 - 1st Ave N Seattle WA 98109 Crickmore Mark T. 537-80-0929 Jun-64 Communications Technician $2,603.00 425-454-6974 7629 12th St. NE Medina WA 98039 De Aguiar Michael C. 576-70-9087 May-61 Patrol Police Officer I $4,661.00 425-672-8323 23826 31st Place Brier WA 98036 Michael C. 576-70-9087 May-61 425-672-8323 3208 238th St. SW Brier WA
Re: Kirkland police threaten Politech with lawsuit
At 11:12 PM -0400 5/18/01, Declan McCullagh wrote: - Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh [EMAIL PROTECTED] - The city of Kirkland, Washington has decided it doesn't want publicly-available information about its police officers to be, well, public. On May 14, Kirkland's lawyers sent me a letter ordering me to delete three Social Security numbers of Kirkland police officers from a Politech article from last week or risk a lawsuit. This gets back to a topic often discussed on the list: when can there be a lawsuit? Does a law have to be in violation or is it enough for some party to simply feel aggrieved? If the Kirkland folks can cite a law, has the law been tested constitutionally? If it's a matter of the Kirkland folks feeling aggrieved about a fully legal publication of some information legally obtained, Declan could tell them to go pound sound and hope that a judge will dismiss the lawsuit as having no basis in law. I believe journalists and others generally should have the right to reprint information from public court documents, and attempts to curtail the First Amendment in the name of privacy go too far. Indeed, trials are meant to be open and witnesses at trials have always had the right (a misnomer, in the usual sense) to describe what they saw. The Founders would have been stunned to see proposals to make it illegal to report the name and other public knowledge about a constable, for example. It was the ability to confront one's accusers and to have open trial proceedings that was one of the cornerstones of the Bill of Rights. The statists now in power seem to think (pace Feinstein, pace this action, pace many other actions) that reporting the names and identifying characteristics of state employees can be outlawed. So much for Congress shall make no lawfree speech. We have seen limited exceptions to the free speech clause in things like obscenity cases, and, arguably, in national security cases (though even The Progressive H-bomb case showed that the state may not suppress articles on how to built weapons of mass destruction, interestingly). This may be the test case that goes all the way to the Supreme Court, should all parties (Kirkland, Washington state, Declan, his editors, his benefactors, etc.) push it. Well, as 'Kirkland v. McCullagh' showed in 2007, the government may prosecute and imprison those who report the names of the officers who arrest them. or Well, as 'Kirkland v. McCullagh' showed in 2007, the government may not restrict publication in any way of information legally obtained, including home addresses of officers, numbers such as SS numbers which may have been in the public record, or any other information obtainable in a free society. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Video killed the radio star
At 9:31 AM -0700 5/17/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The big damn joke is that the PRICE OF RECORDED MUSIC HAS COLLAPSED. The middlemen are on the ropes. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Tough shit. So we're going to see all sorts of bizarre, fascist and futile attempts to prop that price back up. Monitoring at ISPs, special taxes on HW and media, attempts to morph the home PC into something that guarantees remote control by corporations, hell probably even a few dynamic entry fatalities to create an example where someone's ten year old serves up MP3s from home. The artists who make money will be the ones that people want to go see live. I'm looking for some good outdoor concerts in the Bay Area to take my kids to this summer. Too bad the Sex Pistols and the Ramones are gone. I hope the artists we see aren't paying a cent to the labels or the studios when they do live performances. I think there are multiple reasons for the current trends in the music business. The MP3/recordable CD technology effect is only one of the reasons, and, IMO, not nearly the most important. There is less excitement/interest in music today. Wandering recently through a Tower Records that in its heyday was _crowded_, I saw far fewer teens in the store, and almost no adults over 30 at all. Fifteen years ago this same store was generally crowded with folks stocking up on the then-new CD format. (OK, CDs appeared in 1983.) Even MTV has switched from playing mostly music videos to various execrable reality shows. (What little I see of it when channel surfing is bizarre.) Pop music is now mostly a series of one-hit wonders. The latest being some bleached-blonde black chicks who sound like chipmunks and are called Destiny's Child. (Most of these new groups don't actually have _vocalists_, in the sense of singers who can really sing, or even good guitar players and such...they have young boys and young girls who are staged. That they come out sounding like chipmunks is because their voices really don't have range. There are exceptions, of course.) Now, is this malaise--which is confirmed by recording industry--caused by rippers and burners? I doubt it. Music is all around us, more so than ever, but it no longer creates the buzz it once did. (And there's the Toffleresque issue of overchoice: Tower Records is jammed with more tens of thousands of CDs than ever before, but the choice is overwhelming to many. Maybe this is why people order CDs to complete their collections but less often browse these mega-stores.) I think much of the focus of pop culture has shifted to movies. Movies are much more talked about today as a common cultural experience than they were in the 60s and 70s. Maybe the trend started with Jaws and Star Wars and other blockbusters; just speculating. DVDs are flying off the shelves the way CDs did a decade ago. Too soon to conclude that technology has killed the music business. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: A little help.
At 11:03 PM -0700 5/13/01, Ryan Sorensen wrote: I didn't want to have to come up with my own list if someone had done work before me. Past work is overrated. Or, more importantly, doing your own thinking on problems like this is much more important than asking others what they think. Richard Feynman is often associated with this point of view. Other ones I was thinking of were the number of syllables used in words, length of paragraphs, number of times sentences are split and go on their way towards run on sentences. These would be in addition to the ones listed by Jim Windle. (Thanks Jim!) Exactly. And your act of making a list, thinking about the issues, is much more useful towards solving the problem than gettting inputs from others. Will frequent posters to this and other mailing lists have specific posts fall into correlation bins? You tell us. On this list? It's hard to say. I haven't been actively paying attention to the way people write here for long enough. Well, your answer probably won't come out of your memories of what you read...this is all a matter of computer crunching. Is it common on mailing lists to adress people by first name? I know I see this sort of behavior on mailing lists between regulars, but I'm not quite sure of how it works with people new to posting on said lists. And Tim, this was the question I was asking you earlier. I notice now it may have been misconstrued as a poor jab regarding the recent Timmy thing. I didn't answer you for two reasons: -- you can make your own conclusions based on what people write -- the Timmy thing was a predictable (that is, I've seen in many times in my 49 years) insult levelled at me by a nym nymed Eric Cordian There are some who favor the stilted use of Mr. instead of actual names. I don't get what the fuck their point is. An interesting pattern I've noticed is that some people will, in the midst of a heated or angry debate, begin calling their respondent Mr. So-and-so even when before they had called him John or Tim. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: A little help.
At 9:41 PM -0700 5/13/01, Ryan Sorensen wrote: So I get this idea. Crypto is great for lots of things, but anonymous public postings it's not. I know this has been discussed here before, but I haven't seen specifics. What exactly makes a person's writing style distinctive? Is it distinctive phrases? Number of syllables? And almost the inverse, how would you come up with a generic writing style? Any help is appreciated. Including pointers to online resources or past discussions, if they have any specifics. Think in terms of how _you_ would try to identify similar styles. -- British or foreign usages -- type of emphasis indicators (like _this_ or like *this* or like) -- use of ellipses, em dashes, etc. -- vocabulary, phrases No single set of these is proof, obviously, especially as it's so easy to use search-and-replace to replace specific usages, e.g, replacing em dashes with something else. Rather than giving you pointers to sources of info, you should think about what kind of program you might write to find similarity measures. Will frequent posters to this and other mailing lists have specific posts fall into correlation bins? You tell us. ** Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Secure Instant Messaging
At 4:54 PM -0700 5/10/01, Robin Lee Powell wrote: On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 11:35:20PM -, Wayne Rad wrote: I'm writing a secure IM application, but it's for Windows. If anyone wants to volunteer to port to linux (or any other platform), I'd love you for it. And would vastly prefer that to doing a new effort since the port would be compatible with the Windows version, (the protocol is designed to be platform and language independent). I'm vaguely curious as to why no-one is using DC-Nets for this. I wrote a freely-available, but extremely simplistic, DC-Net app for UNIX, but it's pretty standard C. If there are not many people (somewhat verifiably, to protect against most operators being the same agent) running your code, of what use is it? I'm all for DC-Nets which implement the Pfitzmann fixes, but the fact that you haven't advertised tells me it's not likely enough independent users (N) are using your code to make it interesting to study. I therefore encourage you to either tell us a lot more about your code, your assumptions, etc., or to fade away. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
RE: Fwd: Re: Simple RF Weapon Can Fry PC Circuits
At 10:34 PM +0300 5/8/01, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On Tue, 8 May 2001, Tim May wrote: OTOH, Hams tend to work with considerably longer wavelengths, something you could not project with easily concealed devices. I think it's pretty evident that if you pour some 100kW on a 20-meter wave, you can wipe out just about anything electronic. Only if you can couple the power into the target in the right way. Started thinking about that about two seconds after hitting ^X. 20m is certainly too much to make a good counter-example to microwaves, but some octave higher a car should make a fine antenna. This still doesn't mean that it couldn't act as a Faraday cage at the same time, but the current induced might still mess things up, I think. Simplest counterexample: Faraday-shielded enclosure. 100KW at 20m will have no effect on devices inside. This is one of the things I never understood -- ideal Faraday, fine. But how about a physical mime, with finite, non-zero resistance and a physical limit on the speed at which charge can move around? This is why decibels are on a log scale. While the ideal Faraday cage is like the ideal op amp, that is, unrealizable in the physical world, the real world versions of Faraday cages are still sufficient to attenuate power by a factor of many, many orders of magnitude. (_Many_!). This means that that 100 KW you cite now has to be 100 GW, or even more, to have the same effect. You should do some simple experiments with ordinary portable radios in various kinds of Faraday cages. Crank the volume up full blast, then put the radio into a metal garbage can and close the lid. (You can test for the effects of sound attenuation, if you think this is the reason the radio has fallen silent, by using a portable CD or tape player in the same way, same location.) I worked twice in my career inside Faraday cages. Once at UC Santa Barbara in a SQUID lab, once at Intel on sensitive measurement equipment. Both experiences taught me at a gut level how well Faraday cages work. And I attended various conferences on nuclear and space radiation effects where Faraday cages and EMP were discussed at great length. If you don't believe the theory, you'll have to consult a text on electromagnetism. Or go on the Web. I can't convince you here. I mean, it should definitely leak some of the LF inside as the charge carriers cannot move with infinite speed along the perimeter of the cage, right? I plan to make this my one and only response here to this latest thread. That's too bad. Iteration would be a positive thing for us newcomers. Well, I lied, as I am responding again. As for your above point, charges do not have to move with infinite speed to attenuate E-fields by ten orders of magnitude. Work out the numbers, or read the Web pages. In practical terms, there are all kinds of graphs showing how much radiated power (Poynting vectors and all that E M stuff) is inside a conducting sphere as a function of the type of conductor (skin depth, mesh spacing, etc.). (Hint: leakage through seals, joints, and mesh holes is vastly more important than speed of light limitations, at least for pulses much longer than it takes light to travel around the enclosure.) My point was that any claim that 100 KW at 20 m aimed at a car will incapacitate it is not proven. This is way off of Cypherpunks topics, and it has been done many times in the past. (About as often as threads about using thermite to wipe hard disks...let's not start that now, OK?) As I have recommended several times, please review the literature on EMP and Faraday shielding and do some calculations to get some feel for the issues. The December of every year issues of IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science has papers from the previous summer's Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference. Though by no means basic primer material, enough reading of the papers will get the ideas across. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Simple RF Weapon Can Fry PC Circuits
At 6:19 PM -0500 5/8/01, Jim Choate wrote: On Tue, 8 May 2001, Sandy Sandfort wrote: The total frontal area is irrelevant if it bounces the radar signal anywhere except more-or-less directly back at the radar gun, which is rare. (Think F-117A.) Think radiator; a flat plate reflector of much larger area beats out a corner reflector every time. You're neglecting the except more-or-less directly back part of Sandy's argument. In fact, a flat surface _much, much_ larger than a little tiny corner reflector will return less of a signal if the surface is not almot perfectly parallel to the emitter. Which is why the F-117 Stealth fighter is made up of mostly flat planes Do you think about what you write, or do you just make it up as you go along? --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: The Muzzling of Tim McVeigh
At 10:09 PM -0400 5/7/01, drifter wrote: Authenticated. *Arches an Eyebrow* How did they do that? How reliable is there certification of Authenticity? I dunno. any more info? Did you read the material at the URL Declan posted? It describes the situation. Let's not get carried away with conspiracy theories about authentication (Did McVeigh use PGP? Which version? Maybe the FBI planted a backdoor!) A simple authentication is to ask McVeigh during a phone call if he wrote the letter. Or ask his lawyer (whomever that might now be) to ask him. Much ado about nothing. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Free market solutions to foot and mouth disease outbreaks
At 2:14 PM +0100 4/26/01, Ken Brown wrote: Agricultural land in the UK is, in effect zoned, You can't use it for any other purpose without permission from local government. So a lot of land that might be more economically productive turned to other uses remains in the hands of farmers. This has undesired side effect. The price of land is lower than it would be if there was a free market but higher than would be expected from the demand generated by farming, because some land is sometimes released for building, so the price of agricultural land is slightly inflated. Undesired consequence - agriculture can't support the mortgage on farmland, so small producers go out of business, and land is in the hands of property companies and insurance companies who are in effect betting on the chances of it being released for development. Which likely makes many of these distantly-owned tenant farms less likely to invest in the future...not much point in setting up decontamination systems, vaccinations, etc. if it is expected that the land will be released for development. Also, I suspect these corporate farming methods had a lot to do with the practice of liquidating some herds, grinding them up, and feeding them to _other_ herds. (We'll just move some of the protein inventory from Location 537A over to Location 231C, to take advantage of certain tax benefits.) (Sort of like a big protein refinery, with feedstocks shuttled around the refinery, er, the farms.) One of the big downsides of this decision to grind up some herds and feed them to other herds is BSE, aka mad cow disease. While BSE is not FM, it's probably no surprise that the U.K. farms are now having to deal with both problems. I'm not against corporate farming per se...let the best use of the land be made, free from interference. However, as Ken notes, the many distortions in markets makes certain forms of distant-ownership more likely, and may have a lot to do with crowded grazing lands, distorted meat prices, lack of investment in protective measures, and the appearance of both BSE and FM. The decision to burn the herds, using old tires and pressure-treated railroad ties, in a way that no _private party_ would ever be allowed to do, is also symptomatic of too much leeway for government, too much distorting of markets. Government subsidies and artificially high prices encourage farmers to overstock and overproduce, leading to food surpluses, quotas (and quota trading). And probably the overcrowding of some sites that facilitates the spread of FM, along with the liquidate one herd and feed it to the other practice that facilitates the spread of BSE. If there were a free market in farming in the UK there would be less livestock, and it would be more diverse. So it would be worth more, and farmers would be more inclined to vaccinate to preserve valuable breeding stock. Exactly. Bigness does indeed sometimes cause big problems. Bigness may be more efficient, when it's running smoothly, but the loss of diversity (the monoculture problem) and the increased feedback loop length (managers in London unaware of issues in the countryside) can cause escalation of problems. By the way, the loss of many small farms to corporate farms is due in many cases to high inheritance taxes. The children of farmers cannot pay the taxes, which can be as high as 50% of the estate's value, in the U.S. (Remember that the owner of some assets, be it stocks or a farm, has typically paid income tax on his income to purchase the asset in the first place, has paid taxes on dividends or income from the asset, and so an estate tax is at least the second major tax on the asset and may very well be the third such major tax on the asset. This is the rationale for eliminating estate taxes altogether.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: The Culture of Secrecy, Disinformation, and , Propaganda...
(This is my first message posted from my Mac OS X system; I'm playing with the included Mail program (derived from NeXT Mail), instead of my usual Eudora Pro. So if things look different, I'm still me. And May is still a tentacle of Medusa!) On Saturday, April 21, 2001, at 06:48 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote: At 05:44 PM 4/21/01 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: Gakkk.. That's ~27 megabits/second, over half a T3. I remember when I could *read* all of Usenet, I remember (circa 1988) when I could read about 30 newsgroups. I'm afraid you predate me by a few years. :) I had a crude ARPANet account in 1973 or so, and I accessed the Net from my lab at Intel in around 1983, but my own real Net access also started in 1988. A Portal account, when civilians first were able to get real accounts. Even then, using rn and trn and then tin, reading all of Usenet was not something I even tried to do. --Tim May
