Re: Confiscation of Anti-War Video
At 12:01 PM 10/28/02 -0800, Tim May wrote: ... By the way, there are perfectly good fixes to the current hysteria about things carried on board planes. Besides the obvious absurdity of issuing alarms when fingernail clippers are found (but ignoring razor sharp edges in things like laptops with metal cases!), there are many fixes which can be applied: I think the best fix is to accept that a determined suicidal attacker will probably manage to bring down the plane, but make sure that's the worst he can do. That removes the externality problem. The current algorithm for this is some combination of pilots being told not to go along with hijackers' demands, and maybe some chance of getting a military jet in place to shoot the hijacked plane down, if it is taken over by the hijackers. (It seems like this wouldn't be practical most of the time, e.g., if someone takes over the plane as it's approaching landing, there probably wouldn't be anyone in place to shoot in time. And faster response time means less time to discover a mistake.) I've heard of an idea for a mechanism for putting some kind of remote-control piloting mechanism on the plane, so that it can be taken over from the ground. This adds new attack points, but it might be workable. And of course, rockets have long had self-destruct mechanisms; presumably, there's stuff off the shelf from NASA or the DoD that does this with some reasonable level of security. (This last one would be politically unacceptable, but it's not really all that different from having a fighter shoot the hijacked plane down.) Both of these introduce a bunch of new vulnerabilities, though. Your list left out the obvious technique, which I think is more-or-less used by El Al: Screen your passengers really well, probably using secret databases, various kinds of racial profiling, etc. Routinely turn passengers away, or make boarding the plane such an ordeal that they elect not to fly anymore. (One of the many problems with this is that most flights are within the US; make flying sufficiently nasty, and people will take trains, busses, or their own cars. I think this is already happening a great deal, which is one reason most airlines are doing so poorly.) ... 4. Finally, market solutions are usually best. Any of the above could be implemented. If customers feel safer with a different baggage policy, they'll pick it. ... I can't imagine this being done in practice, but I wish it were. The problem *is* an externality, but not the one you pointed out. Politicians in office right now will be blamed if there's another hijacking. So if I choose to fly Allahu Akbar Airlines for the short security checking lines, I get the benefit, but part of the cost lands on incumbent congressmen and the President. And those incumbents, unlike most people who get stuck with such costs, have the power to do something about it. (Something pretty similar happens with the FDA, right? If you get the new cancer drug a year earlier, you get all the benefit (maybe you get to go on living); the FDA gets the added risk of their being some horrible side effect. So they force a different trade-off on you than you'd prefer.) --Tim May --John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED] // [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ISP Utilty To Cypherpunks?
Cypherpunks, I run a 501(c)(3) non-profit focuses on providing free, donation-based colocation to individuals and other non-profits (i.e., no companies are hosted. Additionally, we try to do things that are useful to the not-for-profit Internet community as a whole; for instance, we run a freenode.info IRC server (freenode is used by a lot of Open Source development groups to coordinate developer teams). I'd like to understand how we could be useful to the cypherpunk community. I've got some wild guesses (run a public keyserver, run a mixmaster node, etc), but I don't really know what is most badly needed, or how we could provide the most bang for the bandwidth buck. (We do pay for bandwidth, so serving up Debian ISOs is not a viable way we can help the community at this time.) Ideally, we'd like to find applications that don't use a lot of bandwidth (500kbps aggregate), but require a server that's got a fixed IP, is up all the time, and has very low latency to most of the Net. How can we help? David E. Weekly Founder Director California Community Colocation Project http://CommunityColo.net/ PS: We are entirely volunteer-based. Nobody gets paid.
patents
--- begin forwarded text Status: RO Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 15:02:42 -0500 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Somebody who actually *knows* about this... Subject: patents Bob, What's all the confusion about the Digicash-Chaum patents? They are now all owned by Infospace. The important one expires mid-2005, which is pretty soon. The ec-logix stuff looks like nonsense. They display bitmaps of the old Digicash wallet GUI, and I expect they will be hearing from Infospace. Somebody's .sig --- end forwarded text -- - 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: Confiscation of Anti-War Video
At 1:52 PM -0800 10/31/02, Steve Schear wrote: At 11:37 AM 10/31/2002 -0800, you wrote: Another fix that is being used is passengers who will act to keep the plane from being used as a weapon. If the hijackers have to kill people with small sharp objects that they can smuggle on board, instead of mass killing devices like machine guns, then a large number of passengers can overcome a small number of hijackers. This assumption may not be a good one. Considering the level of current security checks, it should be trivial to smuggle some sort of anesthetic or poisonous gas generator aboard. No need for sharp objects. AFAIK, the air supply aboard current U.S. fleets is shared between passengers and cockpit. IIRC, the regs call for pilots to either wear oxygen masks, or have quick to put on masks readily at hand. Cheers - Bill - Bill Frantz | The principal effect of| Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | DMCA/SDMI is to prevent| 16345 Englewood Ave. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | fair use. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
Re: Confiscation of Anti-War Video
At 04:28 PM 10/31/2002 -0800, Bill Frantz wrote: At 1:52 PM -0800 10/31/02, Steve Schear wrote: At 11:37 AM 10/31/2002 -0800, you wrote: Another fix that is being used is passengers who will act to keep the plane from being used as a weapon. If the hijackers have to kill people with small sharp objects that they can smuggle on board, instead of mass killing devices like machine guns, then a large number of passengers can overcome a small number of hijackers. This assumption may not be a good one. Considering the level of current security checks, it should be trivial to smuggle some sort of anesthetic or poisonous gas generator aboard. No need for sharp objects. AFAIK, the air supply aboard current U.S. fleets is shared between passengers and cockpit. IIRC, the regs call for pilots to either wear oxygen masks, or have quick to put on masks readily at hand. Unfortunately, there are many gasses which kill or disable with only a small dosage (e.g., VX). Unless the cabins are equipped with toxic air sensors (possible in a few years with all the biochip work underway) I think the masks may be be too little too late. steve
