Re: Fwd: Re: Simple RF Weapon Can Fry PC Circuits
For a one-stop shopping site see http://www.rfterrorism.com steve
RE: Fwd: Re: Simple RF Weapon Can Fry PC Circuits
At 10:19 AM 5/7/2001 -0700, you wrote: David Honig wrote: A car is a hardened target ---largely shielded...Something like a bunch of personal radios or a TV van would be more vulnerable. What I'm waiting for is the portable, concealable boom box killer. It's time to take back the streets. Problem is that there not much to differentiate a boom box from other's nearby consumer electronics gear. steve
Re: FC: More on Timothy McVeigh and essay distributed online
Regarding the McVeigh controversy, I guess the quote that best fits my attitude comes from comedian Chris Rock. When discussing O.J. Simpson's possible guilt he said something along the lines.. Now I'm not saying he should have killed her (Nichole), but I UNDERSTAND. steve
Fwd: Ed Felten, Princeton, on music copying security, Thurs 2:15
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 11:53:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Terry Winograd [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Terry Winograd [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Ed Felten, Princeton, on music copying security, Thurs 2:15 Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge and its Aftermath Prof. Edward Felten, Dept of Computer Science Princeton University Date Thursday, May 17 Time: 2:15 - 4:00 Location: Math (Building 380) Room 380 Stanford University The music industry has proposed a range of security technologies designed to prevent the unauthorized copying of recorded music. Recently a group of researchers, including the speaker Prof. Edward Felten, was forced to withdraw from publication a paper analyzing several of these technologies, due to threats of litigation by the music industry. See http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/ for the story. This talk will discuss what happened: - the status of anti-copying technology, - how the music industry is trying to prevent copying - an overview of the technical analysis - how and why the authors were threatened, - and the effect of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on computer security researchers. DIRECTIONS: You can locate the building by going to http://www.stanford.edu/home/map/search_map.html and clicking on Bldg. 380 Mathematics in the list of Academic and Administrative Buildings. Parking info can be found at http://www-facilities.stanford.edu/maps/download/. Please allow extra time for parking. Questions? Please respond to Barbara Simons at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ++ | This message was sent via the Stanford Computer Science Department | | colloquium mailing list. To be added to this list send an arbitrary | | message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To be removed from this list,| | send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more information,| | send an arbitrary message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For directions| | to Stanford, check out http://www-forum.stanford.edu | +-xcl+
Re: Kirkland SSN document, comments and snapshot of what we're
At 04:59 PM 5/22/2001 -0400, Faustine wrote: If some fed thought it would be a fine public service to post all of OUR social security numbers online (truly easier than you know) would you still think this was anything to be glad about? The fact that such a powerful ID number exists on anyone at all is the real outrage, why not focus on that. Promoting the idea of no expectation of privacy for anyone, especially people I don't like hardly seems like a good idea. Publish away, but realize only thing keeping our social security numbers from going up en masse tomorrow is common decency and/or fear of a backlash. And while the fear of retaliation can be wonderful deterrent, that's a really lousy set of things to have to rely on. It might have interesting social and privacy implications if someone anonymously published all of the SSA's SSN data base. steve
Re: Killing, and not quite Killing Pablo.
At 01:02 PM 5/30/2001 -0700, ganns.com wrote: --- Dave Emery [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In fact jammed handsets would stick out like sore thumbs and probably ensure special attention... Similar to how using crypto does, which is why it is better that more people do so. A jamming device that could be easily disabled would be preferred, so that when your are in your car, hanging off a cliff in Arizona, you can be located. New York - Qualcomm believes its GPS (Global Positioning System)-integrated cellular chipset solution will prove to be the best technology for future location based services. Qualcomm GPS technology integrates a GPS subsystem in a handset placing most of the location-determination functionality inside the phone with small changes required to wireless infrastructure. Qualcomm CDMA Technologies senior product manager Arnold Gum claim its gpsOne technology offers operators better performance and lower cost, power and size advantages than competing GPS location technologies. Outside the USA, the development of positioning systems has been driven by commercial considerations. In the US location-based technologies are poised to be of increasing relevance over the next few months as operators struggle to meet the US Federal Communications Commission E911 mandate. By October 1 the FCC mandate requires US wireless carriers to automatically pinpoint the location of emergency 911 calls made from cell phones to within 125 meters. Currently, 911 calls made from cell phones are usually sent to one of 155 public-safety answer points (PSAP). By mandating wireless operators to provide the location of 911 calls to the PSAPs the FCC hopes to improve emergency response times. PSAPs have struggled to cope with the influx of calls from wireless phones and the lack of information such devices provide compared to landline phones. Accurate location information also promises to kick start latent wireless commercial opportunities in the US. Location-based applications are considered to be one of the cornerstones upon which operators hope to drive data-driven traffic revenues across their networks. Adding positioning capabilities operators can offer their subscribers new and attractive services. Positioning systems can also help operators optimize networks to trace unsuccessful calls adapting networks to match calling patterns as well as professional and private subscriber commercial services. It is debatable how much location based services could be worth to operators and developers. Optimists such as telecommunications analysis firm Strategis Group estimates that the location-based services market will be worth $4bn by 2004 in the US alone. Worldwide, revenue should reach more than $30bn in the same period, it believes. Pessimists such as the Shosteck Group think the technology is still immature and the revenue generating opportunity limited. Qualcomm, which makes the chips used in CDMA phones, claims its location accuracy is between 5-10 meters in a 'clear sky' environment. In surburban indoor environments accuracy is 20 meters, states Qualcomm VP for Federal government Affairs Jonas Neihardt.. The FCC handset requirements demand 150 meter accuracy 95% of the time, 50 meter accuracy 67% of the time. Gum also claims gpsOne can acquire a position in under a second outdoors while competitors can take up to 10 minutes for the first fix. Qualcomm's hybrid GPS handset network solution competes with an alternative technology called radio triangulation or network-driven GPS-based scheme. The triangulation method uses three or more receiving sites to monitor a call and compare signal strength, time of arrival, and distance or angle of arrival of a signal from a handset. Such a solution requires changes to each base station on a network - a potentially expensive exercise, says Gum. Questions remain about GPS - not least because of technical issues involved in integrating it into a cell phone, such as size, cost, and power consumption - but Qualcomm's Gum said Qualcomm's current MSM 3300 silicon technology and the improvement of GPS cores make it possible for GPS to share such resources as the CPU and memory already inside a cell phone. The bill of materials for separate GPS components - such as baseband, RF and memory chips - could cost between $20-40 per module, compared with its gpsOne integrated solution that costs $2-3. Qualcomm's next integrated chipset solution including gpsOne is due in late 2001 and will address multiple air interfaces including GSM and W-CDMA, he said. Denso and Samsung are already integrating the technology into its phones. Meanwhile in the US wireless carriers are understood to be still struggling with which GPS technology solution to adopt. Last we heard ATT Wireless Group had not yet chosen which technology it would deploy, VoiceStream was wavering having initially decided to employ triangulation while Sprint PCS said it would use a handset system. Last year over 120,000 wireless
Re: Substantive Due Process
At 12:54 AM 6/10/2001 -0400, you wrote: The problem with the due Process Clause is it injects a false distinction with respect to 'types' of rights. See the first two sentences of the DoI for a clarification of the only operable definition of 'right' acceptable in I'm going to have to admit that I've pretty much lost the thread of the argument here- I'm just trying to point out that under the incorperation doctrine, the 14th amendment has been used to expand the bill of rights to apply to the states. No, the constitution doesn't explicitly state this. But the supreme court says that it is part of the constitution, which pretty much makes it so (yes, there are some important legal distinctions between court opinions and the Constitution itself, but for the most part, they function as the same thing, with the opinions footnoting the Constitution). It is accepted jurisprudence that one is not required to obey unconstitutional laws. Of course, one can be incarcerated for failing to do so until one is able to prevail in court. As has been pointed out many times on this list, a number of significant SC decisions (e.g., Commerce Clause as a basis for much of Federal law) appear to fly in the face of a plain reading of the Constitution and its reasonable interpretation from historical documents (e.g., Madison's excellent notes during the constitutional convention). Since FDR the SC has generally supported expansion of federal authority at the expense of State and individual rights. A few recent decisions have shaken the confidence of the left that this trend will continue unchecked. Let's hope the current members can stay on long enough to reverse some of the damage done in the past century. steve
RE: No panties?
At 04:48 PM 6/16/2001 -0500, Aimee Farr wrote: Remote panty-scanners closer than you think --- They are already here if you believe this site http://www.kaya-optics.com/products/applications.htm steve
Re: napster: civil disobedience re: copyright laws
At 05:07 PM 6/13/2001 -0400, you wrote: excerpt from the article: ...Civil disobedience in the face of copyright laws promotes the democratic ideal that information is a public good, thereby sustaining the Internet community's founding belief that 'information wants to be free.' i didn't know (as the article explains) that the EU no longer has 'work for hire' boundaries. rip away... phillip http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1276-210-6269374-1.html?tag=bt_pr An interesting article, but not entirely factual. The author states that, Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. I think a bit of digging shows that not to be the case. From http://webserver.law.yale.edu/censor/samuelson.htm The Anglo-American copyright system grew from a private sector function of the English Stationers' Guild in the 15-16th century. It mainly functioned to regulate the book trade to ensure that members of the guild enjoyed monopolies in the books they printed. Conveniently for English authorities, the guild's practices provided an infrastructure for controlling (i.e., suppressing) publication of heretical and seditious materials. The English kings and queens were quite willing to grant to the Stationers' Guild control over the publication of books in the realm in exchange for the guild's promise to refrain from printing such dangerous materials. Until its abolition, the Star Chamber was available to back up judgments emanating from the stationers' private enforcement and censorship system. If the pre-modern copyright system promoted freedom of expression by making books more widely available, this was an incidental byproduct of the market that arose for books, not an intended purpose of the then-prevailing copyright system. Far more harmonious was the relationship between copyright and censorship in that era. Men burned at the stake for writing texts that were critical of the Crown or of established religion. The stationers' copyright regime was part of the apparatus aimed at ensuring that these texts would not be printed or otherwise be widely accessible to the public. == I think it would be much more accurate to say that copyright's modern era, which began with the Statute of Anne is about to celebrate its 300 anniversary. However, the fact that a private, pre-modern, copyright form lasted for over a century, which was motivated by the profit of monopoly control and with the government's help censorship, is an important example in understanding how revisionist history is created and should not be ignored. Steve Schear 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
ZKS competitor?
Carnivore 'No Problem' for New E-Mail Encryption If a new software research project proves successful, Web surfers will be able to send secure e-mail and instant messages that are not only automatically encrypted, but are further hidden from prying eyes by a stream of fake data. http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/11281.html
RE: napster: civil disobedience re: copyright laws
At 10:44 AM 6/19/2001 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: -- From: Ken Brown[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: Ken Brown Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2001 7:01 AM To: Steve Schear Cc: Phillip H. Zakas; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: napster: civil disobedience re: copyright laws Steve Schear posted: [...] From http://webserver.law.yale.edu/censor/samuelson.htm [...] Far more harmonious was the relationship between copyright and censorship in that era. Men burned at the stake for writing texts that were critical of the Crown or of established religion. The stationers' copyright regime was part of the apparatus aimed at ensuring that these texts would not be printed or otherwise be widely accessible to the public. Which men, in England, were burned at the stake for burned at the stake for writing texts that were critical of the Crown? Decapitated maybe, but not burned at the stake... definite revisionist history in the making here. Ken Well, there's one, but it's a bit of a stretch: William Tyndale. He was burned at the stake for publishing the New Testament in English in 1536, two years after Henry VIII had made himself the head of the Church of England with the Act of Supremacy. It can be reasonably argued that at that time the Crown and Church were one and the same in England, and an offense against the State Religion was an offense against the State. However, it's generally true that burning was reserved for religious offences (including witchcraft), the axe for acts against the Crown, and hanging for other criminal cases. [Just 2 years later, Henry ordered the production of an official translation into English, known as the Great Bible]. I understand a similar fate befell Guttenberg's typesetter but that (I believe) was in what is now Austria or Germany. steve
Re: Slashdot | @Home Cuts Newsgroups Due to DMCA Complaints
At 12:03 PM 6/22/2001 -0700, you wrote: At 07:52 AM 6/22/2001 -0700, David Honig wrote: At 08:36 PM 6/21/01 -0500, Jim Choate wrote: http://slashdot.org/yro/01/06/22/006203.shtml Due to violations of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) the Usenet newsgroups listed below are being discontinued from the Excite@Home news feed. I don't understand how DMCA comes into play for content already ripped by someone else. Before anyone says its because all DVD content, even from Hollywood, is assumed to be protected that's not true. steve
Re: The Art of Submarine Warfare
At 05:29 PM 6/22/2001 -0700, Greg Broiles wrote: At 06:08 PM 6/22/2001 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Also, what can take out a surveillance camera from a distance? An Edmund Scientific laser? How about the ones in a dark glass bowl? I have wondered about this but don't have answers. One direction of thought and research which might be productive is nondestructively temporarily disabling the camera, perhaps by flooding its light sensor with a focused beam of light, like a flashlight or laser - it's going to compensate for that level of lighting, leaving the rest of the frame underexposed, as long as it's misled by that local brightness. Also, if you're monkeying with cop cameras, that *would* probably be obstruction of justice or interfering with a police officer or whatever your local don't fuck with the cops statute is. No need to use something so targeted at the cop camera, just install rear-facing infrared floods and keep them on all the time. (Cadillac drivers with the new night-driving, IR, heads-up displays will be particularly upset..) The IR cut-off filters of most cameras are too broad to block invisible near IR, so the floods will cause the AGC to greatly darken the image as described above. steve
Re: DCMA: You must use Ford Gas in Ford Cars or Else We Repo The Car
At 12:30 AM 6/28/2001 +, Ian Goldberg wrote: In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Doe #N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [1] An OEM may not be always be able to void a warrantee for objectively bogus reasons, e.g., a car manufacturer probably couldn't get away with dropping a drive-train warrantee because you used generic oil that fullfilled published specs. Well, manufacturers certainly behave this egregiously today; Ross Anderson's new book (I believe it was) tells of great things like printers checking the model of toner catridge installed, and automatically degrading the image if a 3rd-party cartridge is being used. Its only egregiously if the manufacturer fails to inform the prospective purchaser that performance is only guaranteed with OEM cartridges. Because consumers will base buying decisions on a dollar the sellers have resorted to pricing the printers so that they make their money on the supplies. A valid model to me. (Steve, who retrofit his Epson Color 740 for continuous ink supply and never has to purchase or refill a cartridge on the printer again.) steve
Re: design considerations for distributed storage networks
At 09:26 AM 3/23/2002 +0100, Anonymous wrote: As far as the economics, one of the main lessons of the failure of Mojo Nation was that Mojo didn't work, or perhaps you might say it worked too well. It caused nothing but problems for the operators of the network. People tried to horde it, they got upset when they were losing Mojo, they would cheat and steal to get more. MN steadily downplayed the importance of Mojo over the life of the project, making it harder to see how much you had, decreasing its importance in terms of getting data, etc. Eventually it was practically invisible. I think the Mojo hoarding and cheating was a relatively small problem. I think it was an excellent idea, but should not have been introduced until the system reached a critical mass. The key reasons for MN's failure: lack of stability and data retention and lack of automated meta-data generation from file headers (esp. .mp3). The first problem caused users to have to manually and constantly refresh lost blocks (an automated client missing block search and refresh function would have been a god send, and something along these lines was planned for a disk/data backup service but that never happened). The second kept many potential new users from joining when the saw how difficult MN was to use compared to Napster. Unfortunately many of the programmer types who have been pushing P2P development also happen to be libertarians. Their sad faith in that ancient religion prevents them from learning from experience. They see everything through the distorting prism of their ideology. If people are going to learn from the successes and failures of the past, they must have clear vision and the courage to look beyond the circumscribed boundaries imposed by their political beliefs. Not all. Someone has to pay for the resources provided and the system must not encourage too much freeloading. btw I've noticed while looking around at storage-surface web pages recently while writing the above that it would seem that some are showing signs of gearing up for commercial backing. eg. http://www.intermemory.org -- I'm pretty sure that used to look more research oriented and it's now looking quite corporate. Also the interest from commercial vendors like micrsoft who has their own farsite project: http://www.research.microsoft.com/sn/Farsite/ Apparently you didn't notice but there was a huge influx of commercial money flowing into P2P starting about two years ago. Everyone wanted to be the next Napster, forgetting or ignoring that Napster never made any money. P2P is actually yesterday's news now. The money is quickly evaporating and it will be left to the hobbyists, i.e., us. We shall see. steve
Re: future uses for storage surfaces
At 02:42 PM 3/23/2002 +, Adam Back wrote: I just saw Steve Shear's post (copied below) on the dcsb list where he mentions USENET movie trading in VCD format in alt.binaries.vcd. I didnt' try any out, but it took my newsreader a fair while to download and thread the subject lines, and there certainly seem to mostly binary attachments. To conveniently use these binary groups you need to have a reader with appropriate features. My choice is NewsBin Pro. Interestingly, posters are now using RAID technology to assure accurate and complete posting deliveries over the unreliable links used by Usenet feeds. Posters segment their binaries (usually a 600-800 MB CD at a time) using WinRAR and then generate redundant PARtial information using a program like SmartPAR. DL'ers can reconstruct damaged or missing WinRAR parts with PARs on a one-for-one basis (i.e., any one PAR can repair/replace any one RAR). Its simple and very effective. Though this approach lacks the convenience of kazza et al, it's interesting to see the plethora of channels by which this is happening. Its inconvenient from the standpoint of not being able to search and find materials at will. However, DL speeds average (in my experience) 10 times greater than Kazzaa and the old Morpheus. steve
Patriot Act humor
Attorney General John Ashcroft is visiting an elementary school. After the typical civics presentation to the class, he announces, All right boys and girls, you can ask me questions now. A young boy named Bobby raises his hand and says, I have three questions, Mr. Ashcroft: 1. How did Bush win the election with fewer votes than Gore? 2. Why are you using the USA Patriot Act to limit Americans civil liberties? 3. Why hasn't the U.S. caught Osama bin Laden? Just then, the bell sounds and all the kids run out to the playground. Fifteen minutes later the kids return to class, and Ashcroft says, I'm sorry, we were interrupted by the bell. Now, who has a question to ask me? A young girl named Suzy raises her hand and says: I have five questions, Mr. Ashcroft: 1. How did Bush win the election with fewer votes than Gore? 2. Why are you using the USA Patriot Act to limit Americans civil liberties? 3. Why hasn't the U.S. caught Osama bin Laden? 4. Why did the bell go off 20 minutes early? 5. Where's Bobby? A Jobless Recovery is like a Breadless Sandwich. -- Steve Schear
Re: Idea: Snort/Tripwire for RF spectrum?
At 06:43 PM 4/6/2003 -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 03:53 AM 4/6/03 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: Messing around TSCM.com, musing over detection of bugs. Getting an immediate idea I'd like to get peer-reviewed. There is a problem with bug sweeps in some countries. The legal TCSM providers can be legally required to not inform the client about a police-authorized bug, and/or legally forbidden to tamper with it. So a customer-operated solution should exist. GNU-Radio project seems to me to be flexible enough to be suitable as a bug detector. Insufficient B/W. Look up WinRadio. I'm not too sure. If the bugs are using advanced transmission techniques, like UWB, then you're right. But if they are only using standard narrowband, frequency hopping or direct sequence you have some chance of identifying a near field signal. The current implementation using a cable modem down-converter, 'dumb' A/D board, with a dual-Athelon PC is capable of simultaneously processing one or more complex signal waveforms (e.g., ATSC HDTV) in its 6 MHz pass band from 50 MHz - 860 MHz in real-time. The A/D board can digitize at Msamples/sec, so it easily over-samples the 6MHz down-converter's bandwidth. With an upcoming 'smart' A/D board 10MHz or greater bandwidths may be achieved, with capability for dynamically load-able firmware for correlators and on-board demodulation of complex waveforms. Future version of the 'smart' A/D board may permit them to be configured with their PC hosts as 'blades' in a larger comm. assembly for true SIGINT style operation. So, if you have one or more down-converters that can cover the spectrum of interest and convert it down to a DC-6MHz IF, then a GNURadio system might be useful for TCSM. steve steve
CIA spies shun computers
Old technology dominates at the CIA In the movies, spies and intelligence agents are the ones with the cool gadgets and state-of-the-art equipment, but their real life counterparts are far behind. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2965620.stm A Jobless Recovery is like a Breadless Sandwich. -- Steve Schear
