Re: Dead Body Theatre
At 06:00 PM 7/24/03 +0100, Dave Howe wrote: the new standard, I suspect a suicide bombing of the white house (killing all the staff and the shrub) would now be ok provided they shouted 'surrender or die' first, yes? Dude, if Julius Caesar had magnetometers we might all be speaking Italian now. The one with the bigger guns makes the rules. Which is why those with smaller guns don't play by those rules. Just because the UN fnord hasn't been given the paperwork or Congress hasn't made the required fnord legal declaration, don't think there isn't a war on. Or several.
Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 11:16 AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2003-07-23, Sunder uttered: If you want to do electronic payments that are non-anonymous you can simply use a credit card or debit card (or something like paypal, egold), or for larger quanitities you can do wire transfers - so why would we need yet another a non-anonymous cash that isn't cash? I only objected to the notion that all digicash needs to be anonymous in order to be desirable. I didn't say this particular system amounts to desirable weak digicash. To that end it would likely make far more sense in the short term e.g. to marry Visa Electronic to PayPal. In the long term multiple cooperating PayPal-like entities could then be used to build mixnets, making the digicash strongly anonymous. This continuing confusion, by many people, about what digicash is shows the problem with using nonspecific terms. In fact, digicash strongly suggests David Chaum's Digicash, not some name for all forms of credit cards, ATMs, debit cards, PayPal, wire transfer, Mondex, and a scad of other systems that may use bits and electronic signals. Conventionally, on this list and in the press about digital cash, digital cash means something which has the untraceable and/or anonymous features of cash while being transferred digitally. It is NOT a Visa system or a PayPal account or a wire instruction to the Cayman Islands. I choose not to call untraceable/anonymous digital cash by any of the marketing-oriented catchwords like Digicash, BearerBucks, E-coins, MeterMoney, whatever. So, I strongly agree with your point that not all electronic forms of money need to be anonymous (untraceable) in order to be useful. HOWEVER, our interest is in the untraceable/anonymous. There are no doubt active groups discussing PayPal, VISA, MasterCard, DiscoverCard, etc. But they have nothing to do with Cypherpunks. We should also fight the use of sloppy language in the press when mundane electronic funds transfer systems are called digital cash. --Tim May
Re: Dead Body Theatre
On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Dave Howe wrote: However, if strafeing an occupied house with helecopter gunships, rocket launchers and heavy machine guns after a cursory surrender or die is ignored, based on military intel (which as the WMD fiasco shows is worthless if the PR spin department are demanding raw access to unfiltered intel and filtering, not on reliability but on closeness of match to the desired outcome) is to be the new standard, I suspect a suicide bombing of the white house (killing all the staff and the shrub) would now be ok provided they shouted 'surrender or die' first, yes? Hell, this has been the norm for a very long time. The rest of the world knows this as an American No-Knock Drug Warrant. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Every living thing dies alone. Donnie Darko
Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 03:17 PM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2003-07-24, Tim May uttered: HOWEVER, our interest is in the untraceable/anonymous. Duh! You were gibbering about how digicash includes PayPal, ATMs, Visa, and other forms of transfers which are only digital in that computers are used. You need to think carefully about what blinding is all about. Calling Visa and PayPal digicash shows fundamental ignorance. Nitwit. But very typical of the new generation of rilly, rilly dumb cypherpunks. --Tim May
Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Some lurker unwilling to comment on the public list sent me this. I didn't notice it wasn't intended for the list until I had already written a reply and was preparing to send it. So I have altered the name. --Tim On Friday, July 25, 2003, at 01:07 PM, SOMEONE wrote: Tim May wrote: On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 07:12 PM, Steve Furlong wrote: On Thursday 24 July 2003 15:50, Tim May wrote: In fact, digicash strongly suggests David Chaum's Digicash, That assumes the reader or listener has heard of Digicash, or of Chaum. Not an assumption I'd be comfortable making. Readers on the cypherpunks list? They should be able to understand it, or at least they should have heard of it. They may have _heard_ of it, but to most of them (I t hink) it's just some magical incantations which they don't quite believe anyway. I stopped any efforts to explain the true importance of electronic/digital money/cash a long time ago. A waste of time. Not too surprising, as getting even the basic idea requires some passing familiarity with things like how RSA works. When I read Chaum's 1985 CACM paper I already knew about RSA and hard directions for problems (trapdoor functions), and yet I still had to read and reread the paper and draw little pictures for myself. That's a shame. The 1985 paper isn't on-line afaik, and I've only read second-hand versions. First, my stopped any efforts...a long time ago was a comment directed at what the OP was talking about: explaining digital money to the masses. For example, at parties or other meatspace gatherings. Online explanations--here, for example--are another matter. Second, the many online explanations from the CP list, circa 1992-94, are readily findable. Let me go check(20 seconds pass...)...yep, I just found hundreds of summary articles from various authors, including myself, Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Doug Barnes, Ian Goldberg, and many others. There is no shortage of explanations of this stuff. In one of my articles, in fact, I make the same point about how the various boring versions of electronic money are not very important: The focus here is on true, untraceable digital cash, offering both payer and payee untraceability (anonymity). Mundane digital money, exemplified by on-line banking, ATM cards, smartcards, etc., is not interesting or important for CFP purposes. Payer-untraceable (but payee-traceable) digital cash can also be interesting, but not nearly as interesting and important as fully untraceable digital cash. There are many articles on why this is so. But, frankly, anyone who cannot see this from first principles probably is not ever going to get it. Third, regarding the CACM article, it's been liberated and made available online more than a few times. Try search engines. I know the Information Liberation Front (ILF) was actively liberating various of the key papers in the early months of the CP list...and these are mostly archived and searchable. And of course Chaum's original 1985 description has been redone many times, in later papers by him and others, etc. And I don't think it works at all, anyway... As it's been demonstrated to work, technically, this is a weird statement. Existence proofs are powerful. If you mean that Bank of America and Mastercard are not offering Chaum-style instruments, and so on, then this is not the same thing as saying the ideas don't work. --Tim May
Justice Department Opposes 'Sneak and Peek' Ban
Looks like they're dusting off their black bags again. Rubber hoses are next, I suppose. Cheers, RAH --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47236-2003Jul25?language=printer washingtonpost.com Justice Department Opposes 'Sneak and Peek' Ban Reuters Friday, July 25, 2003; 5:48 PM WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Friday opposed a bid to ban the government from conducting secret sneak and peek searches of private property. The legislation, overwhelmingly approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday, would roll back a key provision of the anti-terrorism law adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks. If it became law, the legislation, would have a devastating effect on the United States' ongoing efforts to detect and prevent terrorism, as well as to combat other serious crimes, Assistant Attorney General William Moschella said. In a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, he said the legislation could result in the intimidation of witnesses, destruction of evidence, flight from prosecution, physical injury and even death. On Tuesday, the House voted 309-118 to attach the amendment to a $37.9 billion bill funding the departments of Commerce, State and Justice. It would be the first change in the USA Patriot Act since its adoption in October, 2001. The amendment, sponsored by Idaho Republican Rep. C.L. Butch Otter, would block the Justice Department from using any funds to take advantage of the section of the law that allows it to secretly search the homes of suspects and only inform them later that a warrant had been issued to do so. The Patriot Act granted broad new powers to U.S. law enforcement officials to eavesdrop and detain immigrants. It was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Moschella said the law was needed to prevent terror attacks and added that the Justice Department shared the commitment of the House to preserving American liberties while we seek to protect American lives. He urged the House to reconsider its action. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online)
Oh, like Uday and Qusay, you can't kill this immortal fucker, nobody got the guts to plow a TOW in it. Instead, thousands of gutless have hari-kiried by exiting the battle for well.com nutlick where the dead live in perfect, silent synchrony, so that is a no-brain, no-work option. Sit still, children, repeat this. Hell, start a DOA mail list to bitch about how stupid people are outside of old folks cess-suck. Read yourself sitting on a one-holer. Nothing wrong with cypherpunks that couldn't be cured, as ever, by more fresh young meat totally ignorant and not giving a shit about how it used to be, only hot to throw slop at what's puked by the wizened, the reputable, the stuffed with here's how it's meant to be. Now that revulsion against whoever has truth by tail is a dim memory of what cpunks was meant to be, was now and again, not a place for boozy glory days telling a sanitized tale of what never happened. Pontificators are usually hooted off the list, save for a few protected species taxidermied for darts. The old days, don't believe them, cypherpunks was and is toxic to serious makeovers and shutdowns and lock-outs, and, never forget that PLONKS are cries of shut the fuck up and listen to me. Pluck the PLONKS, if you don't get them you aint earning your stay. PLONKERS little-man your wee-wees. Hiccups a fogey one hand hanging on the bar rail, the other rooting the floor vomit for a chawtabaccy cud ricochet from the spit bucket. ]=; Uday
