Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 11:49 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: Tim May[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 09:26 AM, Bill Stewart wrote: Also, NYT Article was http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th But it sounds like they've chickened out, because various people freaked about the implications. (And they only got as far as it being an incentive to commit terrorism, without getting to a funding method for terrorism or to Assassination Politics.) Not to mention the obvious problems with letting government agents bid on things like when various unwanted foreign leaders would be assassinated. Over on Dave Farber's IP list, it's been pointed out that there is a pre-existing, live, real-money market in futures on these types of events. Go over to www.tradesports.com, and click on 'Current Events' under 'Trading Catagories' on the left. Drill down and you'll find things like 'WMDs will be found in Iraq on or before Sept 31', the value of which has dropped from 80 to 25 over the last few months. Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). And several years ago some companies actually tried to built real markets around these kinds of predictions. Maybe one of them is the contract company (pun intended) on this latest DARPA fantasy. The problem is not with the idea of using markets and bets and Bayesian logic to help do price discovery on things like when the Athlon-64 will actually reach consumers, or when the new King of Jordan will be whacked, and so on. The problem is, rather, with _government_ establishing a monopoly on such things while putting suckers like Jim Bell in jail basically for espousing such ideas. And, as I noted, there are significant problems with government employees in a betting pool (gee, aren't even office baseball pools technically illegal? Haven't they prosecuted some people for this? Yep, they have) where they also have control over the outcome. Jim Bell used this as a payoff mechanism for assassinations (Alice bets $1000 that Paul Wolfowitz will be murdered with his family on August 10, 2003)...the same logic applies to the government's dead pool. --Tim May That government is best which governs not at all. --Henry David Thoreau
Re: AP by any other name ...
Anonymous [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I first ran into this market concept about ten years ago. The Iowa Political Stock Market successfully predicted the outcome of the 1992 U.S. presidential election within a few tenths of a percentage point for all three candidates (including Perot). It was more accurate than 8 major polls. Since then there have been many other experiments with other markets: Hollywood Stock Exchange where people bet on future box office receipts and Foresight Exchange where traders bet on the outcomes of unresolved scientific and societal questions. It's been used in other areas as well, and for rather longer than ten years. For example, one of the most accurate estimates of the entropy of natural language involved people placing bets on the value of the next letter seen (as opposed to the more traditional I guess it'll be an 'e' estimation technique). Peter.
Re: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
At 11:23 AM 07/29/2003 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote: Note that properly run, this Ideas Futures market would be a money maker, not a cost center. For only a modest percentage of the winnings, it could be self sustaining. Perhaps someone with a profit motive will pick up the idea. Assuming it can be legally structured as a Futures Market, rather than as Illegal Gambling, it could make money. (There are obviously some bets it's unlikely to handle, such as the bet that Idea Futures markets would be successfully prosecuted as illegal gambling :-) If they don't want the label of Assasination Politics, they can forbid bets on individual deaths, and still have nearly the full field, including wars, revolutions, nonstandard attacks, and elections available for play. (c.f. the way eBay and Yahoo limit themselves.) This provides a number of Doubleplus-Good Things. - Government agencies can be funded by private ideas futures speculation rather than by taxes, freeing them from the tiresome needs of Congressional budget requests and oversight. No more Ollie North trials! - Private organizations can fund government agencies to do specific things and launder the money through the market, rather than needing to lobby Congresscritters to fund them. There's a bit less leverage this way, but surely there are some Congresscritters who'd appreciate that private organizations were betting they'd live to 100 like Strom Thurmond. - All those boring old Neutrality Act laws that keep companies like ITT and Halliburton from overthrowing foreign governments and forbid patriotic Americans to be foreign mercenaries can be avoided, because they won't need to do that any more - they can just bet sufficient sums that governments will be overthrown and they'll go overthrow themselves, and those patriotic Americans can be working as, ummm, investment logistics expediters instead of mercs. - The system will be completely Anonymous, and Anonymity is Strength! - Of course Oceania has always had an Idea Futures position about the downfall of WestAsia. Why do you ask?
Re: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
At 10:56 PM 7/29/03 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: Assuming it can be legally structured as a Futures Market, rather than as Illegal Gambling, it could make money. (There are obviously some bets it's unlikely to handle, such as the bet that Idea Futures markets would be successfully prosecuted as illegal gambling :-) *Real* futures markets are effectively integrating all the AP type risks (plus others, like weather) relevant to their markets. The Pentagon plan was trying to get the same kind of private but well-done research that real futures traders do, with emphesis on issues of interest to it. As well as a feedback channel to the domestic psyops boys. CNN, etc. also perform a sort of gambling (probabilistic investment, futures), in how they distribute their resources in anticipation of regional news.
RE: Secure IDE?
Trei, Peter ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the IC7-MAX3 featuring something called 'Secure IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the onboard IDE controller: From the marketing fluff at http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251 For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened to users who were asking for information security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder; without a special key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk, not with a password, but with encryption. A password can be cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files. No, I have no idea what this actually means either. I'm trying to find out. Peter Trei Yeah, I know it's tacky to followup ones own messages, but I found a little more: http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/SecureIDE.htm SecureIDE is a encryption device that uses the eNOVA X-Wall chipset that ensures confidentiality and privacy of your data through disk encryption. When booting up your system, go to DOS and implement the FDISK instruction. This instruction will make a partition to format the Hard Disk to accept the secure IDE key. After this procedure, there are no more extra steps to perform besides using the key to open the hard disk each time you boot up your system. The accompanying diagram shows a daughterboard sitting between the HD and the system, with a USB dongle coming off the side. eNova has more info at: http://www.enovatech.com/w/html/about.htm The USB dongle apparently acts only as a key store, for a DES or 3DES key. It needs to be present at boot time. It appears that the key is put on the device by the manufacturer though they promise Enova Technology does not maintain a database of X-Wall Secure Keys. On the good side, it seems to encrypt the whole disk, including the boot sector and swap. No info on chaining modes, if any, nor of IV handling. There is no mention of a PIN or other 'something you know' required to use the USB key. I can't tell if pulling the dongle shuts down the system. Might be neat, but as yet, insufficient information. Peter
Re: Secure IDE?
On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 04:20:37PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the IC7-MAX3 featuring something called 'Secure IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the onboard IDE controller: From the marketing fluff at http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251 For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened to users who were asking for information security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder; without a special key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk, not with a password, but with encryption. A password can be cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files. No, I have no idea what this actually means either. I'm trying to find out. Peter Trei Yeah, that announcement just ran over the slashdot ticker. Someone posted the following insightful link subsequently: ftp://ftp.abit.com.tw/pub/download/fae/secureide_eng_v100.pdf Looks like that sucker only does key-truncated version of DES called DES-40. Right... did they say weeks? I'd say minutes, unless ABIT means [insert some impoverished 3rd world country] government supercomputers. It's snakeoil, move on, nothing to see here. Cheers, Ralf -- Ralf-P. Weinmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP fingerprint: 2048/46C772078ACB58DEF6EBF8030CBF1724
Re: Secure IDE?
On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 04:20:37PM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: ABIT has come out with a new motherboard, the IC7-MAX3 featuring something called 'Secure IDE', which seems to involve HW crypto in the onboard IDE controller: From the marketing fluff at http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0307251 For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened to users who were asking for information security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder; without a special key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk, not with a password, but with encryption. A password can be cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files. No, I have no idea what this actually means either. I'm trying to find out. Peter Trei 40-bit DES in ECB mode sounds even more great. It's them Enovatech guys again. See here: http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/C-punks20030519/0079.html Cheers, Ralf -- Ralf-P. Weinmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP fingerprint: 2048/46C772078ACB58DEF6EBF8030CBF1724
Japan making RFID-trackable cash
http://theregister.com/content/55/32061.html Japan's starting to add RFIDs to their 1-yen (~$100) bills. Notes will come with Hitachi's 0.3mm mew-chip which responds to radio signals by sending out a 128-bit number. Each chip costs about 50 yen. The article says that each number _could_ be a serial number, but doesn't say that they know it is; the alternative would be something that indicated the production batch or whatever. The Reg's report sounds like it's based on what someone saw on a TV show, but also indicates they're starting production.
