[Clips] The myth of suitcase nukes.
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:24:09 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] The myth of suitcase nukes. Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007478 OpinionJournal WSJ Online AT WAR Baggage Claim The myth of suitcase nukes. BY RICHARD MINITER Monday, October 31, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God. --Osama bin Laden, May 1998 Bin Laden's final act could be a nuclear attack on America. --Graham Allison, Washington Post One hundred suitcase-size nuclear bombs were lost by Russia. --Gerald Celente, professional futurist, Boston Globe Like everyone else rushing off the Washington subway one rush-hour morning, Ibrahim carried a small leather briefcase. No one paid him or his case much mind, except for the intern in the new Brooks Brothers suit who pushed past him on the escalator and banged his shin. What do you have in there? Rocks? Ibrahim's training had taught him to ignore all provocations. You will see, he thought. The escalator carried him up and out into the strong September sunlight. It was, as countless commentators would later say, a perfect day. As he walked from the Capitol South metro stop, he saw the Republican National Committee headquarters to his right. Two congressional office buildings loomed in front of him. Between the five-story structures, the U.S. Capitol dome winked in the sun. It was walled off in a mini-Green Zone of jersey barriers and armed police. He wouldn't trouble them. He was close enough. He put the heavy case down on the sidewalk and pressed a sequence of buttons on what looked like standard attaché-case locks. It would be just a matter of seconds. When he thought he had waited long enough, he shouted in Arabic: God is great! He was too soon. Some passersby stared at him. Two-tenths of a second later, a nuclear explosion erased the entire scene. Birds were incinerated midflight. Nearly 100,000 people--lawmakers, judges, tourists--became superheated dust. Only raindrop-sized dollops of metal--their dental fillings--remained as proof of their existence. In tenths of a second--less time than the blink of a human eye--the 10-kiloton blast wave pushed down the Capitol (toppling the Indian statute known as Freedom at the dome's top), punched through the pillars of the U.S. Supreme Court, smashed down the three palatial Library of Congress buildings, and flattened the House and Senate office buildings. The blast wave raced outward, decapitating the Washington Monument, incinerating the Smithsonian and its treasures, and reducing to rubble the White House and every office tower north to Dupont Circle and south to the Anacostia River. The secondary, or overpressure, wave jumped over the Potomac, spreading unstoppable fires to the Pentagon and Arlington, Va. Planes bound for Reagan and Dulles airports tumbled from the sky. Tens of thousands were killed instantly. By nightfall, another 250,000 people were dying in overcrowded hospitals and impromptu emergency rooms set up in high school gymnasiums. Radiation poisoning would kill tens of thousands more in the decades to come. America's political, diplomatic and military leadership was simply wiped away. As the highest-ranking survivor, the agriculture secretary took charge. He moved the capital to Cheyenne, Wyo. That is the nightmare--or one version, anyway--of the nuclear suitcase. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, this nuclear nightmare did not seem so fanciful. A month after September 11, senior Bush administration officials were told that an al Qaeda terrorist cell had control of a 10-kiloton atomic bomb from Russia and was plotting to detonate it in New York City. CIA director George Tenet told President Bush that the source, code-named Dragonfire, had said the nuclear device was already on American soil. After anxious weeks of investigation, including surreptitious tests for radioactive material in New York and other major cities, Dragonfire's report was found to be false. New York's mayor and police chief would not learn of the threat for another year. The specter of the nuclear suitcase bomb is particularly potent because it fuses two kinds of terror: the horrible images of Hiroshima and the suicide bomber, the unseen shark amid the swimmers. The fear of a suitcase nuke, like the bomb itself, packs a powerful punch in a small package. It also has a sense of inevitability. A December 2001 article in the Boston Globe speculated that terrorists would explode suitcase nukes in Chicago, Sydney and Jerusalem . . . in 2004. Every version of the nuclear suitcase bomb scare relies on one or more strands of evidence, two from different Russians and one from
[Clips] Security 2.0: FBI Tries Again To Upgrade Technology
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:29:37 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Security 2.0: FBI Tries Again To Upgrade Technology Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113072498332683907.html The Wall Street Journal October 31, 2005 Security 2.0: FBI Tries Again To Upgrade Technology By ANNE MARIE SQUEO Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 31, 2005; Page B1 As the fifth chief information officer in as many years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Zalmai Azmi faces a mystery: How to create a high-tech system for wide sharing of information inside the agency, yet at the same time stop the next Robert Hanssen. Mr. Hanssen is the rogue FBI agent who was sentenced to life in prison for selling secret information to the Russians. His mug shot -- with the words spy, traitor, deceiver slashed across it -- is plastered on the walls of a room at FBI headquarters where two dozen analysts try to track security breaches. Mr. Hanssen's arrest in February 2001, and his ability to use the agency's archaic system to gather the information he sold, led FBI officials to want to secure everything in their effort to modernize the bureau, Mr. Azmi says. But then, investigations after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks showed that FBI agents had information about suspected terrorists that hadn't been shared with other law-enforcement agencies. So then we said, 'Let's share everything,' Mr. Azmi says. Since then, the FBI spent heavily to upgrade its case-management system, from one that resembled early versions of personal computers -- green type on a black computer screen, requiring a return to the main menu for each task -- to a system called Virtual Case File, which was supposed to use high-speed Internet connections and simple point-and-click features to sort and analyze data quickly. But after four years and $170 million, the dueling missions tanked the project. FBI Director Robert Mueller in April pulled the plug on the much ballyhooed technology amid mounting criticism from Congress and feedback from within the bureau that the new system wasn't a useful upgrade of the old, rudimentary system. As a result, the FBI continues to use older computer systems and paper documents remain the official record of the FBI for the foreseeable future. Highlighting the agency's problems is the recent indictment of an FBI analyst, Leandro Aragoncillo, who is accused of passing secret information to individuals in the Philippines. After getting a tip that Mr. Aragoncillo was seeking to talk to someone he shouldn't have needed to contact, the FBI used its computer-alert system to see what information the analyst had accessed since his hiring in 2004, a person familiar with the probe said. The system didn't pick up Mr. Aragoncillo's use of the FBI case-management system as unusual because he didn't seek top secret information and because he had security clearances to access the information involved, this person said. The situation underscores the difficulties in giving analysts and FBI agents access to a broad spectrum of information, as required by the 9/11 Commission, while trying to ensure rogue employees aren't abusing the system. It's up to Mr. Azmi to do all this -- without repeating the mistakes of Virtual Case File. Much is at stake: FBI agents and analysts are frustrated by the lack of technology -- the FBI finished connecting its agents to the Internet only last year -- and Mr. Mueller's legacy depends on the success of this effort. The FBI director rarely appears at congressional hearings or news conferences without his chief information officer close by these days. An Afghan immigrant, the 43-year-old Mr. Azmi fled his native country in the early 1980s after the Soviet invasion. After a brief stint as a car mechanic in the U.S., he enlisted in the Marines in 1984 and spent seven years mainly overseas. A facility for languages -- he speaks five -- helped him win an assignment in the Marines working with radio communications and emerging computer technologies. When he returned to the U.S., he joined the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a project manager developing software and hardware solutions for patent examiners. He attended college and graduate school at night, obtaining a bachelor's degree in information systems from American University and a master's degree in the same field from George Washington University, both in Washington, D.C. Afterward, he got a job at the Justice Department in which he helped upgrade technology for U.S. attorneys across the country. That is where he was working when terrorists attacked Sept. 11, 2001. On Sept. 12, armed with two vans of equipment, Mr. Azmi and a team of engineers traveled from Washington to New York
[Clips] How Tools of War On Terror Ensnare Wanted Citizens
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:35:05 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] How Tools of War On Terror Ensnare Wanted Citizens Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB113072652621883932.html The Wall Street Journal October 31, 2005 PAGE ONE New Dragnet How Tools of War On Terror Ensnare Wanted Citizens Border, Immigration Agencies Tap Into FBI Database; Questions About Privacy Mr. Samori's Speeding Ticket By BARRY NEWMAN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 31, 2005; Page A1 Driving in from Mexico last March, Jaime Correa was stopped by federal inspectors at a border post near San Diego. They fed the 21-year-old U.S. citizen's name into a computer with a fast link to the federal government's huge database of criminal files. Readout: Wanted in Los Angeles for attempted murder. Another citizen, Issah Samori, walked into a federal office in Chicago the previous year. He is 60, a cabbie, and was there to help his wife get a green card. An immigration clerk fed his name into the same computer. Readout: Wanted in Indiana for speeding. The border guards handed Mr. Correa over to the San Diego police, who locked him up. The Chicago police came to collect Mr. Samori. He spent the night on a concrete slab in a precinct cell. Detentions of American citizens by immigration authorities for offenses large and small are becoming routine -- and have begun to stir a debate over the appropriate use of the latest technologies in the war on terror. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, immigration computers have been hooked up to the expanding database of criminal records and terrorist watch lists maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The computers are now in use at all airports, most border crossings, and even in domestic immigration offices, where clerks decide on applications for permanent residence and citizenship. The screenings are mainly meant to trap foreigners, and especially foreign terrorists, but they have also proved to be a tool in the hunt for American citizens wanted by the police. In 2003, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that it alone caught 4,555 Americans this way. In 2004, the number rose to 6,189. Some law enforcers applaud that tally. Citizens with nothing to hide, they argue, shouldn't care if their names are put through a criminal search, and criminals should have no expectation of privacy. The arrests have brought in some serious offenders, like Mr. Correa, a Los Angeles gang member, who was accused of a drive-by shooting. He was convicted this month of assault with a firearm, and sentenced to eight years in prison. There have been others like him: citizens wanted for armed robbery, murder and sex crimes. But some legal scholars and defenders of privacy worry that easy access to criminal databases is giving rise to indiscriminate detentions of citizens for minor offenses, and to a mission creep that is blurring the line between immigration control and crime control. Routine encounters like Mr. Samori's, some say, shouldn't give civil servants a free shot to fish for records unrelated to the administrative purpose at hand. It isn't as if those the computer snags are being pulled over for a broken tail-light, says former Atlanta policeman Mark Harrold, who teaches law at the University of Mississippi. Rather, as he sees it, they are being caught as they engage in civil pursuits like going in for a marriage license. Born in Ghana, Mr. Samori has lived for 35 years in a brick house on Chicago's South Side. When he and his new Ghanaian wife, Hilda, sat down in an immigration clerk's cubicle in mid-2004, Mr. Samori knew that as a citizen he had a right to sponsor her for permanent residence. The two came ready to show that their marriage was genuine. But the clerk just stared at his computer. He said we can't do the interview, Mr. Samori recalls. I asked why. He said, because we have an arrest warrant on you. I told him, whatever it is, I'm ready to face it. The clerk reached for his phone. Two officers appeared. Hilda Samori cried as her husband was led out. He spent three nights in jail on his way to Indiana court, where his reckless-driving charge, a misdemeanor, was eventually set aside. Mrs. Samori had to wait a year and a half for her green-card application to be reopened. Immigration service officials say reporting wanted citizens has become standard procedure. If you have unfinished business with the police, it's best to take care of that before you come in asking for a service or a benefit, says Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the border-protection agency's domestic sister. Apart from confirming a citizen sponsor's identity, he says, clerks
Passport Hell (was [Clips] Re: [duodenalswitch] Re: Konstantin)
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 09:55:05 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Re: [duodenalswitch] Re: Konstantin Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text Comment: DomainKeys? See http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mailing-List: list [EMAIL PROTECTED]; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 09:11:08 EST Subject: Re: [duodenalswitch] Re: Konstantin Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] it was time to renew my passport again (2nd renewal ,,not first) ..cause I want to go to Curitiba, Brasil in June to have my hernia repair and get some PS with Dr. C for loose skin and muscles... (a face lift would be nice hmmm) So I applied like everyone else does submit old passport with application, ... I get a letter back from the Department of Homeland Security that says I am refused because there is not enough info to prove my identity Thats all the proof normally required. They tell me with any further application to submit four documents all created b4 1985. (b4 1985??? jessh!) So I do... my Birth Certificate ...my daughters B-certificate (cause my name is on it), my first marriage certificate, my first divorce papers and an original payroll register from the company I worked for in 1984 (with all my vitals on it). They then turned me down again saying its just not enough proof () And they were the ones who requested them. They have now asked me for ... all my medical records from before 1995, my second marriage certificate, all my school transcripts from 1959 till high school graduation, and a voter registration certificate from 1994. I also asked congressman Tom Lantos to intervene on my behalf and he tried..and they told him (nicely) to mind his own business I think I am to be trapped within this gilded cage forever I was to be sent by my corporation to China to represent them there (in January)... but apparently not now and it also looks like I will have to save up alot of money to have my PS done here in the states so I guess the Face lift is out I wonder if Dr. C does house calls? Sad, frustrated and Depressed Konstantin If you don't mind me asking, why are they rejecting your renewal? I have a friend who is an immigration attorney and I know he will ask when I bring it up to him. You can email me privately if you prefer. Jennifer --- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would love to learn the Rapier and archery... But right now I would settle for the Department of homeland Security to stop rejecting my Passport renewal forms and let me travel (sigh) Any one know a good reverse immigration attorney? Blessed be Konstantin [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/duodenalswitch/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --- 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
At 10:22 AM -0500 10/31/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: and doesn't history show that big corporations are only interested in revenue One should hope so. ;-) Cheers, RAH -- - 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: Any comments on BlueGem's LocalSSL?
At 11:10 AM -0700 10/28/05, James A. Donald wrote: I am a reluctant convert to DRM. At least with DRM, we face a smaller number of threats. I have had it explained to me, many times more than I want to remember, :-), that strong crypto is strong crypto. It's not that I'm unconvinceable, but I'm still unconvinced, on the balance. OTOH, if markets overtake the DRM issue, as most cypherpunks I've talked to think, then we still have lots of leftover installed crypto to play around with. Cheers, RAH Who still thinks that digital proctology is not the same thing as financial cryptography. -- - 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: Any comments on BlueGem's LocalSSL?
At 7:51 PM -0400 10/28/05, R.A. Hettinga wrote: OTOH, if markets overtake the DRM issue, ^ moot, was what I meant to say... Anyway, you get the idea. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
At 10:22 AM -0500 10/31/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: and doesn't history show that big corporations are only interested in revenue One should hope so. ;-) Cheers, RAH -- - 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: Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth
At 11:59 PM + 10/30/05, Justin wrote: Tyler likes the high-speed lifestyle so much that he ditched it and moved to London? He and Jayme are back in Kurdistan, now. Don't know for how long, though. He's teaching a new class of engineers, including crypto and security stuff. Watched their jaws drop when he 'em how to break WEP, that kind of thing. They handed him his Browning at the airfield when he landed. :-) Of course, they're touchy-feely liberals through-and-through, but here's hoping they've learned a little about anarchocapitalism having watched it firsthand, albeit temporarily. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: Any comments on BlueGem's LocalSSL?
At 9:11 PM +1300 10/28/05, Peter Gutmann wrote: The West Coast Labs tests report that they successfully evade all known sniffers, which doesn't actually mean much since all it proves is that LocalSSL is sufficiently 0-day that none of the sniffers target it yet. The use of SSL to get the keystrokes from the driver to the target app seems somewhat silly, if sniffers don't know about LocalSSL then there's no need to encrypt the data, and once they do know about it then the encryption won't help, they'll just dive in before the encryption happens. Absent any real data, crypto-dogma :-) says that you need hardware-encryption, physical sources of randomness, and all sorts of other stuff to really solve this problem. On the other hand, such hardware solutions usually come hand-in-hand with the whole hierarchical is-a-person PKI book-entry-to-the-display I-gotcher-digital-rights-right-here-buddy mess, ala Palladium, etc. Like SSL, then -- and barring the usual genius out there who flips the whole tortoise over to kill it, which is what you're really asking here -- this thing might work good enough to keep Microsoft/Verisign/et al. in business a few more years. To the rubes and newbs, it's like Microsoft adopting TLS, or Intel doing their current crypto/DRM stuff, which, given the amount iPod/iTunes writes to their bottom line now, is apparently why Apple really switched from PPC to Intel now instead of later. You know they're going to do evil, but at least the *other* malware goes away. So, sure. SSL to the keys. That way Lotus *still* won't run, and business gets done in Redmond a little while longer. Cheers, RAH Somewhere, Dr. Franklin is laughing, of course... -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: [p2p-hackers] P2P Authentication]
At 9:27 PM -0700 10/27/05, cyphrpunk wrote: Every key has passed through dozens of hands before you get to see it. What are the odds that nobody's fucked with it in all that time? You're going to put that thing in your mouth? I don't think so. So, as Carl Ellison says, get it from the source. Self-signing is fine, in that case. Certificates, CRLs, etc., become more and more meaningless as the network becomes more geodesic. Using certificates in a P2P network is like using a condom. It's just common sense. Practice safe cex! Feh. You sound like one of those newbs who used to leave the plastic wrap on his 3.5 floppy so he wouldn't get viruses... Cheers, RAH What part of non-hierarchical and P2P do you not understand? -- - 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: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
At 8:41 PM -0700 10/27/05, cyphrpunk wrote: Where else are you going to talk about this shit? Talk about it here, of course. Just don't expect anyone to listen to you when you play list-mommie. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: Any comments on BlueGem's LocalSSL?
At 11:10 AM -0700 10/28/05, James A. Donald wrote: I am a reluctant convert to DRM. At least with DRM, we face a smaller number of threats. I have had it explained to me, many times more than I want to remember, :-), that strong crypto is strong crypto. It's not that I'm unconvinceable, but I'm still unconvinced, on the balance. OTOH, if markets overtake the DRM issue, as most cypherpunks I've talked to think, then we still have lots of leftover installed crypto to play around with. Cheers, RAH Who still thinks that digital proctology is not the same thing as financial cryptography. -- - 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: Any comments on BlueGem's LocalSSL?
At 7:51 PM -0400 10/28/05, R.A. Hettinga wrote: OTOH, if markets overtake the DRM issue, ^ moot, was what I meant to say... Anyway, you get the idea. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: [p2p-hackers] P2P Authentication]
At 9:27 PM -0700 10/27/05, cyphrpunk wrote: Every key has passed through dozens of hands before you get to see it. What are the odds that nobody's fucked with it in all that time? You're going to put that thing in your mouth? I don't think so. So, as Carl Ellison says, get it from the source. Self-signing is fine, in that case. Certificates, CRLs, etc., become more and more meaningless as the network becomes more geodesic. Using certificates in a P2P network is like using a condom. It's just common sense. Practice safe cex! Feh. You sound like one of those newbs who used to leave the plastic wrap on his 3.5 floppy so he wouldn't get viruses... Cheers, RAH What part of non-hierarchical and P2P do you not understand? -- - 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: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
At 8:18 PM -0700 10/27/05, cyphrpunk wrote: Keep the focus on anonymity. That's what the cypherpunks list is about. Please. The cypherpunks list is about anything we want it to be. At this stage in the lifecycle (post-nuclear-armageddon-weeds-in-the-rubble), it's more about the crazy bastards who are still here than it is about just about anything else. Cheers, RAH Who thinks anything Microsoft makes these days is, by definition, a security risk. -- - 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: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
At 12:23 PM -0700 10/27/05, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Why don't you send her comma-delimited text, Excel can import it? But, but... You can't put Visual *BASIC* in comma delimited text... ;-) Cheers, RAH Yet another virus vector. Bah! :-) -- - 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: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
At 8:41 PM -0700 10/27/05, cyphrpunk wrote: Where else are you going to talk about this shit? Talk about it here, of course. Just don't expect anyone to listen to you when you play list-mommie. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
At 12:23 PM -0700 10/27/05, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Why don't you send her comma-delimited text, Excel can import it? But, but... You can't put Visual *BASIC* in comma delimited text... ;-) Cheers, RAH Yet another virus vector. Bah! :-) -- - 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: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
At 8:18 PM -0700 10/27/05, cyphrpunk wrote: Keep the focus on anonymity. That's what the cypherpunks list is about. Please. The cypherpunks list is about anything we want it to be. At this stage in the lifecycle (post-nuclear-armageddon-weeds-in-the-rubble), it's more about the crazy bastards who are still here than it is about just about anything else. Cheers, RAH Who thinks anything Microsoft makes these days is, by definition, a security risk. -- - 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'
On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- At 3:57 PM -0400 10/24/05, John Kelsey wrote: More to the point, an irreversible payment system raises big practical problems in a world full of very hard-to-secure PCs running the relevant software. One exploitable software bug, properly used, can steal an enormous amount of money in an irreversible way. And if your goal is to sow chaos, you don't even need to put most of the stolen money in your own account--just randomly move it around in irreversible, untraceable ways, making sure that your accounts are among the ones that benefit from the random generosity of the attack. The payment system operators will surely be sued for this, because they're the only ones who will be reachable. They will go broke, and the users will be out their money, and nobody will be silly enough to make their mistake again. Though I agree with the notion that anonymity is orthogonal to market demand at the moment, I think you lost me at the word account, above. :-). That is to say, your analysis conflicts with the whole trend towards T-0 trading, execution, clearing and settlement in the capital markets, and, frankly, with all payment in general as it gets increasingly granular and automated in nature. The faster you can trade or transact business with the surety that the asset in question is now irrevocably yours, the more trades and transactions you can do, which benefits not only the individual trader but markets as a whole. The whole foundation of modern finance, and several -- almost posthumous, so pervasive was the homeopathic socialism that we now call Keynesianism -- Nobel prizes in economics are based on that premise, and it has been proven empirically now for many decades: The entire history of the currency futures markets would be a good example, though now that I think of it, any derivative market, since the time of Thales himself, would prove the point. However anonymous irrevocability might offend one's senses and cause one to imagine the imminent heat-death of the financial universe (see Gibbon, below... :-)), I think that technology will instead step up to the challenge and become more secure as a result. And, since internet bearer transactions are, by their very design, more secure on public networks than book-entry transactions are in encrypted tunnels on private networks, they could even be said to be secure *in spite* of the fact that they're anonymous; that -- as it ever was in cryptography -- business can be transacted between two parties even though they don't know, or trust, each other. For instance, another problem with internet bearer transactions, besides their prima facie anonymity (they're only prima facie because, while the protocols don't *require* is-a-person and-then-you-go-to-jail identity, traffic analysis is still quite trivial for the time being, onion routers notwithstanding) is that the client is responsible not only for most of the computation, but also for the storage of notes or coins, instead of a central database in a clearinghouse or bank somewhere storing various offsetting book-entries in, as you noted above, accounts. :-). Of course, simply backing up one's data off-site, much easier with internet bearer certificates than with whole databases, solves this problem, and, as we all know here, the safest way to do *that* is to use some kind of m-of-n hash, stored, someday, for even smaller bits of cash :-), in many places on the net at once. Obviously, we don't need small cash to store big assets, any more than we need big servers to distribute big files in BitTorrent, but it will only accelerate, if not complete, the process, when we get there. As I have said, too many times :-), about these things, transaction cost is always going to be the critical factor in any change from book-entries to chaumian-esque internet bearer transactions. And I believe that, hand-in-hand with increased security, reduced transaction cost is more a function of the collapsing cost and the ubiquity of distributed processing power and network access than anything else. So, anonymity is, in fact, orthogonal to market demand, primarily because it's an *effect*, and not a cause, of that demand. As we all do now with the current proctological state of book-entry finance, the anonymity of a proposed internet bearer transaction infrastructure will just be a cost that the market would have to bear. :-). To channel Schopenhauer a bit, like the emergence of industrialism and the abolition of slavery was before it, once anonymity becomes a feature of our transaction infrastructure, people will eventually declare it to be not only self-evident all along, but a moral *prerequisite* of any transaction as well. To put it another way, it's a pity for acrophobics that the fastest way to get anywhere these days is to fly, but it is still a physical fact, nonetheless. Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.2 (Build 2425)
On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- At 3:57 PM -0400 10/24/05, John Kelsey wrote: More to the point, an irreversible payment system raises big practical problems in a world full of very hard-to-secure PCs running the relevant software. One exploitable software bug, properly used, can steal an enormous amount of money in an irreversible way. And if your goal is to sow chaos, you don't even need to put most of the stolen money in your own account--just randomly move it around in irreversible, untraceable ways, making sure that your accounts are among the ones that benefit from the random generosity of the attack. The payment system operators will surely be sued for this, because they're the only ones who will be reachable. They will go broke, and the users will be out their money, and nobody will be silly enough to make their mistake again. Though I agree with the notion that anonymity is orthogonal to market demand at the moment, I think you lost me at the word account, above. :-). That is to say, your analysis conflicts with the whole trend towards T-0 trading, execution, clearing and settlement in the capital markets, and, frankly, with all payment in general as it gets increasingly granular and automated in nature. The faster you can trade or transact business with the surety that the asset in question is now irrevocably yours, the more trades and transactions you can do, which benefits not only the individual trader but markets as a whole. The whole foundation of modern finance, and several -- almost posthumous, so pervasive was the homeopathic socialism that we now call Keynesianism -- Nobel prizes in economics are based on that premise, and it has been proven empirically now for many decades: The entire history of the currency futures markets would be a good example, though now that I think of it, any derivative market, since the time of Thales himself, would prove the point. However anonymous irrevocability might offend one's senses and cause one to imagine the imminent heat-death of the financial universe (see Gibbon, below... :-)), I think that technology will instead step up to the challenge and become more secure as a result. And, since internet bearer transactions are, by their very design, more secure on public networks than book-entry transactions are in encrypted tunnels on private networks, they could even be said to be secure *in spite* of the fact that they're anonymous; that -- as it ever was in cryptography -- business can be transacted between two parties even though they don't know, or trust, each other. For instance, another problem with internet bearer transactions, besides their prima facie anonymity (they're only prima facie because, while the protocols don't *require* is-a-person and-then-you-go-to-jail identity, traffic analysis is still quite trivial for the time being, onion routers notwithstanding) is that the client is responsible not only for most of the computation, but also for the storage of notes or coins, instead of a central database in a clearinghouse or bank somewhere storing various offsetting book-entries in, as you noted above, accounts. :-). Of course, simply backing up one's data off-site, much easier with internet bearer certificates than with whole databases, solves this problem, and, as we all know here, the safest way to do *that* is to use some kind of m-of-n hash, stored, someday, for even smaller bits of cash :-), in many places on the net at once. Obviously, we don't need small cash to store big assets, any more than we need big servers to distribute big files in BitTorrent, but it will only accelerate, if not complete, the process, when we get there. As I have said, too many times :-), about these things, transaction cost is always going to be the critical factor in any change from book-entries to chaumian-esque internet bearer transactions. And I believe that, hand-in-hand with increased security, reduced transaction cost is more a function of the collapsing cost and the ubiquity of distributed processing power and network access than anything else. So, anonymity is, in fact, orthogonal to market demand, primarily because it's an *effect*, and not a cause, of that demand. As we all do now with the current proctological state of book-entry finance, the anonymity of a proposed internet bearer transaction infrastructure will just be a cost that the market would have to bear. :-). To channel Schopenhauer a bit, like the emergence of industrialism and the abolition of slavery was before it, once anonymity becomes a feature of our transaction infrastructure, people will eventually declare it to be not only self-evident all along, but a moral *prerequisite* of any transaction as well. To put it another way, it's a pity for acrophobics that the fastest way to get anywhere these days is to fly, but it is still a physical fact, nonetheless. Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.2 (Build 2425)
[PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
--- begin forwarded text Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:31:34 +0200 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Hagai Bar-El [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hello, I wrote a short essay about anonymity and pseudonymity being technologies that are well advanced but seldom used. Following are excerpts from the essay that can be found at: http://www.hbarel.com/Blog/entry0006.html In spite of our having the ability to establish anonymous surfing, have untraceable digital cash tokens, and carry out anonymous payments, we don't really use these abilities, at large. If you are not in the security business you are not even likely to be aware of these technical abilities. If I may take a shot at guessing the reason for the gap between what we know how to do and what we do, I would say it's due to the overall lack of interest of the stakeholders. Fact probably is, most people don't care that much about anonymity, and most of the ones who do, are not security geeks who appreciate the technology and thus trust it. So, we use what does not require mass adoption and do not use what does. Anonymous browsing is easy, because it does not need an expensive infrastructure that requires a viable business model behind it; fortunately. A few anonymity supporters run TOR servers on their already-existent machines, anonymity-aware users run TOR clients and proxy their browsers through them, and the anonymity need is met. The onion routing technology that TOR is based on is used; not too often, but is used. The problem starts with systems that require a complex infrastructure to run, such as anonymous payment systems. As much as some of us don't like to admit it, most consumers do not care about the credit card company compiling a profile of their money spending habits. Furthermore, of the ones who do, most are not security engineers and thus have no reason to trust anonymity schemes they don't see or feel intuitively (as one feels when paying with cash). The anonymous payment systems are left to be used primarily by the security-savvy guys who care; they do not form a mass market. I believe that for anonymity and pseudonymity technologies to survive they have to be applied to applications that require them by design, rather than to mass-market applications that can also do (cheaper) without. If anonymity mechanisms are deployed just to fulfill the wish of particular users then it may fail, because most users don't have that wish strong enough to pay for fulfilling it. An example for such an application (that requires anonymity by design) could be E-Voting, which, unfortunately, suffers from other difficulties. I am sure there are others, though. Regards, Hagai. ___ PracticalSecurity mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hbarel.com/mailman/listinfo/practicalsecurity_hbarel.com --- 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: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
At 11:17 AM -0700 10/21/05, someone who can't afford a vowel, Alex, ;-) expressed his anal glands thusly in my general direction: You're such an asshole. My, my. Tetchy, this morning, oh vowelless one... At 11:17 AM -0700 10/21/05, cyphrpunk wrote: This is what you characterized as a unitary global claim. Aside from the fact that unitary is meaningless in this context, his claim was far from global. That's One size fits all, for those of you in Rio Linda. A little bit of an Irwin Corey joke for the apparently humor-impaired. Be careful now, I'll start on the Norm Crosby stuff soon, and you might get an aneurysm, or something. While Daniel Nagy has been a model of politeness and modesty in his claims here, you have reverted to your usual role as an arrogant bully. Moi? I kick sand in your face on a beach somewhere I don't remember about? Seriously, I tell him who did an exchange protocol, Silvio Micali, and that they're a dime a dozen, second only to Mo' An' Better Auction Protocols, and he wants me to go out on google, same as *he* can do, and do his work for him. Feh. At 11:17 AM -0700 10/21/05, cyphrpunk wrote: I would encourage Daniel not to waste any more time interacting with Hettinga. Indeed. Especially when he makes with the wet-fish slapping-sounds you do when actual words are supposed to come out of your mouth. Okay, maybe it's another orifice. At any rate, you are lacking some, shall we say, ability to express yourself, on the subject. Be careful, though. Burroughs has this great cautionary tale about teaching your asshole to talk, speaking of the, heh, devil... Cheers, RAH Who'll start in on insulting his mother soon, unless Mr. cyphrpunk has taken that Charles Atlas course he send out for. Hint: Be grateful you don't have any nipple-hair to get caught in the NEW IMPROVED Charles Atlas Chest Expander's springs. Hurts like hell, I hear, and deadlifts work *much* better... -- - 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'
Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth
--- begin forwarded text Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 01:50:38 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth The long version of the Wired Story on Ryan Lackey, including lots more about Tyler Wagner, who I've been reading about almost since he got there after the liberation :-) in 2003... Just bumped into the bit below, having abandoned Tyler and Jayme's LJs after they split, and finding the link after they went back recently. Meanwhile, the author bought the wrong vowel, apparently. ;-). Cheers, RAH -- http://www.rezendi.com/travels/.html Blood, Bullets, Bombs, and Bandwidth: a tale of two California cipherpunks who went to Baghdad to seek their fortune, and bring the Internet to Iraq. Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions drug deals - but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old. Getting to Anaconda is no joke. Incoming airplanes make a 'tactical descent' landing, better known to military cognoscenti as the 'death spiral'; a nose-down plummet, followed by a viciously tight 360-degree turn, then another stomach-wrenching dive. The plane is dragged back to level only just in time to land, and brakes so hard that anything not strapped down goes flying forward. Welcome to Mortaritaville - the airbase's mordant nickname, thanks to the insurgent mortars that hit the base daily. From above, the base looks like a child's sandbox full of thousands of military toys. Dozens of helicopters litter the runways: Apaches, Blackhawks, Chinooks. F-16 fighters and C-17 cargo planes perch in huge igloo-like hangars built by Saddam. The roads are full of Humvees and armored personnel carriers. Rows of gunboats rest inexplicably on arid desert. A specific Act of Congress is required to build a permanent building on any US military base, so Anaconda is full of tents the size of football fields, temporary only in name, that look like giant caterpillars. Its 25,000 inhabitants, soldiers and civilian contractors like Ryan, are housed in tent cities and huge fields of trailers. Ryan came to Iraq in July 2004 to work for ServiceSat International, hired sight unseen by their CTO Tyler Wagner. Three months later, Ryan quit and founded Blue Iraq. He left few friends behind. I think if Ryan had stayed, Tyler says drily, the staff would have sold him to the insurgents. - - - Iraq is new to the Internet. Thanks to sanctions and Saddam, ordinary citizens had no access until 1999. Prewar, there were a mere 1.1 million telephone lines in this nation of 26 million people, and fewer than 75 Net cafés, connecting via a censored satellite connection. Then the American invasion knocked nearly half of Baghdad's landlines out of service, and the local exchanges that survived could not connect to one another. After the invasion, an army of contractors flooded into Baghdad. Billions of reconstruction dollars were being handed out in cash, and everybody - local Internet cafés, Halliburton, Ahmed Chalabi, the US military itself - wanted Internet access. With the landline service destroyed by war, and sabotage a continuing problem, satellite access was the only realistic option. Among the companies vying to provide this access in early 2003, scant months after the invasion, was ServiceSat International. SSI, a startup founded by Kurdish expats, needed an American CTO: partly to import America's culture of technical excellence, partly to help deal with Western clients and authorities. They called Tyler Wagner. He was 25 years old. - - - San Francisco, aka Baghdad-by-the-Bay, July 2003. Tyler Wagner is a typical counterculture California techie: a Cal Poly CS graduate, part of the California punk scene, working for Greenpeace as a network engineer. Then an old friend in London recommends him to SSI. They call him. They need a capable Westerner willing to move to Iraq. Is he interested? When he hangs up the phone, Tyler is shaking with excitement. The risks of relocating to a war zone are obvious. But it is a lucrative senior management position, offered to a man only two years out of university. Life doesn't often offer you a hand up like that, he reminisces two years later, and when it does, you can't afford to turn it down. One big complication: Tyler's girlfriend, Jayme. They have been dating only six months. He doesn't want to lose her. He calls and tells her the news - and they both ask at the same time if she can come
Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth
--- begin forwarded text Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 01:50:38 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth The long version of the Wired Story on Ryan Lackey, including lots more about Tyler Wagner, who I've been reading about almost since he got there after the liberation :-) in 2003... Just bumped into the bit below, having abandoned Tyler and Jayme's LJs after they split, and finding the link after they went back recently. Meanwhile, the author bought the wrong vowel, apparently. ;-). Cheers, RAH -- http://www.rezendi.com/travels/.html Blood, Bullets, Bombs, and Bandwidth: a tale of two California cipherpunks who went to Baghdad to seek their fortune, and bring the Internet to Iraq. Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions drug deals - but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old. Getting to Anaconda is no joke. Incoming airplanes make a 'tactical descent' landing, better known to military cognoscenti as the 'death spiral'; a nose-down plummet, followed by a viciously tight 360-degree turn, then another stomach-wrenching dive. The plane is dragged back to level only just in time to land, and brakes so hard that anything not strapped down goes flying forward. Welcome to Mortaritaville - the airbase's mordant nickname, thanks to the insurgent mortars that hit the base daily. From above, the base looks like a child's sandbox full of thousands of military toys. Dozens of helicopters litter the runways: Apaches, Blackhawks, Chinooks. F-16 fighters and C-17 cargo planes perch in huge igloo-like hangars built by Saddam. The roads are full of Humvees and armored personnel carriers. Rows of gunboats rest inexplicably on arid desert. A specific Act of Congress is required to build a permanent building on any US military base, so Anaconda is full of tents the size of football fields, temporary only in name, that look like giant caterpillars. Its 25,000 inhabitants, soldiers and civilian contractors like Ryan, are housed in tent cities and huge fields of trailers. Ryan came to Iraq in July 2004 to work for ServiceSat International, hired sight unseen by their CTO Tyler Wagner. Three months later, Ryan quit and founded Blue Iraq. He left few friends behind. I think if Ryan had stayed, Tyler says drily, the staff would have sold him to the insurgents. - - - Iraq is new to the Internet. Thanks to sanctions and Saddam, ordinary citizens had no access until 1999. Prewar, there were a mere 1.1 million telephone lines in this nation of 26 million people, and fewer than 75 Net cafés, connecting via a censored satellite connection. Then the American invasion knocked nearly half of Baghdad's landlines out of service, and the local exchanges that survived could not connect to one another. After the invasion, an army of contractors flooded into Baghdad. Billions of reconstruction dollars were being handed out in cash, and everybody - local Internet cafés, Halliburton, Ahmed Chalabi, the US military itself - wanted Internet access. With the landline service destroyed by war, and sabotage a continuing problem, satellite access was the only realistic option. Among the companies vying to provide this access in early 2003, scant months after the invasion, was ServiceSat International. SSI, a startup founded by Kurdish expats, needed an American CTO: partly to import America's culture of technical excellence, partly to help deal with Western clients and authorities. They called Tyler Wagner. He was 25 years old. - - - San Francisco, aka Baghdad-by-the-Bay, July 2003. Tyler Wagner is a typical counterculture California techie: a Cal Poly CS graduate, part of the California punk scene, working for Greenpeace as a network engineer. Then an old friend in London recommends him to SSI. They call him. They need a capable Westerner willing to move to Iraq. Is he interested? When he hangs up the phone, Tyler is shaking with excitement. The risks of relocating to a war zone are obvious. But it is a lucrative senior management position, offered to a man only two years out of university. Life doesn't often offer you a hand up like that, he reminisces two years later, and when it does, you can't afford to turn it down. One big complication: Tyler's girlfriend, Jayme. They have been dating only six months. He doesn't want to lose her. He calls and tells her the news - and they both ask at the same time if she can come
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
At 11:17 AM -0700 10/21/05, someone who can't afford a vowel, Alex, ;-) expressed his anal glands thusly in my general direction: You're such an asshole. My, my. Tetchy, this morning, oh vowelless one... At 11:17 AM -0700 10/21/05, cyphrpunk wrote: This is what you characterized as a unitary global claim. Aside from the fact that unitary is meaningless in this context, his claim was far from global. That's One size fits all, for those of you in Rio Linda. A little bit of an Irwin Corey joke for the apparently humor-impaired. Be careful now, I'll start on the Norm Crosby stuff soon, and you might get an aneurysm, or something. While Daniel Nagy has been a model of politeness and modesty in his claims here, you have reverted to your usual role as an arrogant bully. Moi? I kick sand in your face on a beach somewhere I don't remember about? Seriously, I tell him who did an exchange protocol, Silvio Micali, and that they're a dime a dozen, second only to Mo' An' Better Auction Protocols, and he wants me to go out on google, same as *he* can do, and do his work for him. Feh. At 11:17 AM -0700 10/21/05, cyphrpunk wrote: I would encourage Daniel not to waste any more time interacting with Hettinga. Indeed. Especially when he makes with the wet-fish slapping-sounds you do when actual words are supposed to come out of your mouth. Okay, maybe it's another orifice. At any rate, you are lacking some, shall we say, ability to express yourself, on the subject. Be careful, though. Burroughs has this great cautionary tale about teaching your asshole to talk, speaking of the, heh, devil... Cheers, RAH Who'll start in on insulting his mother soon, unless Mr. cyphrpunk has taken that Charles Atlas course he send out for. Hint: Be grateful you don't have any nipple-hair to get caught in the NEW IMPROVED Charles Atlas Chest Expander's springs. Hurts like hell, I hear, and deadlifts work *much* better... -- - 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: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
At 10:23 PM +0200 10/20/05, Daniel A. Nagy wrote: The referred 1988 paper proposes an off-line system Please. You can just as easily do an on-line system, and still have blind signatures, including m=m=2 shared secret signature hiding to prevent double spending. In fact, the *only* viable way to do blind signatures with any security is to have an *on-line* system, with redemption and reissue of certificates on every step, and the underwriter not honoring any double spent transaction. So, you still get the benefits of non-repudiation, you get functional anonymity (because audit trails become a completely superfluous cost -- all you need to keep is a single-field database of spent notes against a possible second spend, deletable on an agreed-upon date), and (I claim :-)) you get the resulting transaction cost benefit versus book-entry transactions as well. Sigh. I really wish people would actually read what people have written about these things for the last, what, 20 years now... BTW, you can exchange cash for goods, or other chaumian bearer certificates -- or receipts, for that matter, with a simple exchange protocol. Micali did one for email ten years ago, for instance. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
At 2:36 AM +0200 10/21/05, Daniel A. Nagy wrote: With all due respect, this was unnecessarily rude, unfair and unwarranted. This is the *cypherpunks* list, guy... :-) Silvio Micali is a very prolific author and he published more than one paper on more than one exchange protocol And I just got through saying that there are *lots* of exchange protocols. You're the guy who said he couldn't figure out how to do a receipts. I toss one, out of probably hundreds out there in the last 30 years, off the top of my head, and *you* go all canonical on me here. Again. Repeat. Google is your friend. Thank you for playing. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
At 12:32 AM +0200 10/21/05, Daniel A. Nagy wrote: Could you give us a reference to this one, please? Google is your friend, dude. Before making unitary global claims like you just did, you might consider consulting the literature. It's out there. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: The price of failure
At 6:22 PM -0700 10/20/05, Steve Schear wrote: Quick, before they change it: search Google using the term failure Yawn. That, or something like it, has been there for years, Steve... Cheers, RAH -- - 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'
Practical Security Mailing List
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 17:06:08 +0200 To: cryptography@metzdowd.com From: Hagai Bar-El [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Practical Security Mailing List Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hello, I would like to notify you all of a new mailing list forum which I opened. It is called Practical Security and is aimed at discussing security measures in the context of real problems in real projects. It has a much narrower scope than the Cryptography mailing list and by no means intends to replace it or to compete with it. From the mailing list info page: This forum discusses applications of cryptographic protocols as well as other security techniques, such as (but not limited to) methods for authentication, data protection, reverse-engineering protection, denial-of-service protection, and digital rights management. The forum also discusses implementation pitfalls to avoid. This forum does not discuss theoretical and/or mathematical aspects of cryptography. Neither does the forum discuss particular vulnerabilities of commercial products, such as what one may find in BugTraq. Joining this mailing list is especially recommended to professionals who design security systems and to application designers who are also responsible for the security aspects of their products. I confess that at the moment of writing the list has just a few participants, but I project that it will grow much larger. To subscribe visit http://www.hbarel.com/practicalsecurity or send a blank message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Regards, Hagai. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 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: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
At 10:23 PM +0200 10/20/05, Daniel A. Nagy wrote: The referred 1988 paper proposes an off-line system Please. You can just as easily do an on-line system, and still have blind signatures, including m=m=2 shared secret signature hiding to prevent double spending. In fact, the *only* viable way to do blind signatures with any security is to have an *on-line* system, with redemption and reissue of certificates on every step, and the underwriter not honoring any double spent transaction. So, you still get the benefits of non-repudiation, you get functional anonymity (because audit trails become a completely superfluous cost -- all you need to keep is a single-field database of spent notes against a possible second spend, deletable on an agreed-upon date), and (I claim :-)) you get the resulting transaction cost benefit versus book-entry transactions as well. Sigh. I really wish people would actually read what people have written about these things for the last, what, 20 years now... BTW, you can exchange cash for goods, or other chaumian bearer certificates -- or receipts, for that matter, with a simple exchange protocol. Micali did one for email ten years ago, for instance. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
At 12:32 AM +0200 10/21/05, Daniel A. Nagy wrote: Could you give us a reference to this one, please? Google is your friend, dude. Before making unitary global claims like you just did, you might consider consulting the literature. It's out there. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
At 2:36 AM +0200 10/21/05, Daniel A. Nagy wrote: With all due respect, this was unnecessarily rude, unfair and unwarranted. This is the *cypherpunks* list, guy... :-) Silvio Micali is a very prolific author and he published more than one paper on more than one exchange protocol And I just got through saying that there are *lots* of exchange protocols. You're the guy who said he couldn't figure out how to do a receipts. I toss one, out of probably hundreds out there in the last 30 years, off the top of my head, and *you* go all canonical on me here. Again. Repeat. Google is your friend. Thank you for playing. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: The price of failure
At 6:22 PM -0700 10/20/05, Steve Schear wrote: Quick, before they change it: search Google using the term failure Yawn. That, or something like it, has been there for years, Steve... Cheers, RAH -- - 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'
[Clips] FDIC: FIL-103-2005: Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:39:49 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] FDIC: FIL-103-2005: Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2005/fil10305.html ? Home News Events Financial Institution Letters Financial Institution Letters FFIEC Guidance Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment FIL-103-2005 October 12, 2005 Summary: The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) has issued the attached guidance, Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment. For banks offering Internet-based financial services, the guidance describes enhanced authentication methods that regulators expect banks to use when authenticating the identity of customers using the on-line products and services. Examiners will review this area to determine a financial institution's progress in complying with this guidance during upcoming examinations. Financial Institutions will be expected to achieve compliance with the guidance no later than year-end 2006. Highlights: *Financial institutions offering Internet-based products and services should use effective methods to authenticate the identity of customers using those products and services. *Single-factor authentication methodologies may not provide sufficient protection for Internet-based financial services. *The FFIEC agencies consider single-factor authentication, when used as the only control mechanism, to be inadequate for high-risk transactions involving access to customer information or the movement of funds to other parties. *Risk assessments should provide the basis for determining an effective authentication strategy according to the risks associated with the various products and services available to on-line customers. *Customer awareness and education should continue to be emphasized because they are effective deterrents to the on-line theft of assets and sensitive information. Distribution: FDIC-Supervised Banks (Commercial and Savings) Suggested Routing: Chief Executive Officer Chief Information Security Officer Related Topics: * FIL-66-2005, Guidance on Mitigating Risks From Spyware, issued July 22, 2005 * FIL-64-2005, Guidance on How Financial Institutions Can Protect Against Pharming Attacks, issued July 18, 2005 * FIL-27-2004, Guidance on Safeguarding Customers Against E-Mail and Internet Related Fraud, issued March 12, 2004 * FFIEC Information Security Handbook, issued November 2003 * Interagency Informational Brochure on Phishing Scams, contained in FIL-113-2004, issued September 13, 2004 * Putting an End to Account- Hijacking Identity Theft, FDIC Study, issued December 14, 2004 * FDIC Identity Theft Study Supplement on Account-Highjacking Identity Theft, issued June 17, 2005 Attachment: FFIEC Guidance: Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment - PDF 163k (PDF Help) Contact: Senior Policy Analyst Jeffrey Kopchik at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or (202) 898-3872, or Senior Technology Specialist Robert D. Lee at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or (202) 898-3688 Printable Format: FIL-103-2005 - PDF 41k (PDF Help) Note: FDIC Financial Institution Letters (FILs) may be accessed from the FDIC's Web site at www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2005/index.html. To receive FILs electronically, please visit http://www.fdic.gov/about/subscriptions/fil.html. Paper copies of FDIC FILs may be obtained through the FDIC's Public Information Center, 801 17th Street, NW, Room 100, Washington, DC 20434 (1-877-275-3342 or 202-416-6940). Last Updated 10/12/2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] HomeContact UsSearchHelpSiteMapForms Freedom of Information ActWebsite PoliciesFirstGov.gov -- - 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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
[Clips] FDIC: Putting an End to Account-Hijacking Identity Theft Study Supplement
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:39:23 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] FDIC: Putting an End to Account-Hijacking Identity Theft Study Supplement Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/idtheftstudysupp/index.html ? Home Consumer Protection Consumer Resources Putting an End to Account-Hijacking Identity Theft Study Supplement Putting an End to Account-Hijacking Identity Theft Study Supplement Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Division of Supervision and Consumer Protection Technology Supervision Branch June 17, 2005 This publication supplements the FDIC's study Putting an End to Account-Hijacking Identity Theft published on December 14, 2004. Printable Version - PDF 105k (PDF Help) Table of Contents Executive Summary and Findings Focus of Supplement Identity theft in general and account hijacking in particular continue to be significant problems for the financial services industry and consumers. Recent studies indicate that identity theft is evolving in more complicated ways that make it more difficult for consumers to protect themselves. Recent studies also indicate that consumers are concerned about online security and may be receptive to using two-factor authentication if they perceive it as offering improved safety and convenience. This Supplement discusses seven additional technologies that were not discussed in the Study. These technologies, as well as those considered in the Study, have the potential to substantially reduce the level of account hijacking (and other forms of identity theft) currently being experienced. Findings Different financial institutions may choose different solutions, or a variety of solutions, based on the complexity of the institution and the nature and scope of its activities. The FDIC does not intend to propose one solution for all, but the evidence examined here and in the Study indicates that more can and should be done to protect the security and confidentiality of sensitive customer information in order to prevent account hijacking. Thus, the FDIC presents the following updated findings: 1 The information security risk assessment that financial institutions are currently required to perform should include an analysis to determine (a) whether the institution needs to implement more secure customer authentication methods and, if it does, (b) what method or methods make most sense in view of the nature of the institution's business and customer base. 2 If an institution offers retail customers remote access to Internet banking or any similar product that allows access to sensitive customer information, the institution has a responsibility to secure that delivery channel. More specifically, the widespread use of user ID and password for remote authentication should be supplemented with a reliable form of multifactor authentication or other layered security so that the security and confidentiality of customer accounts and sensitive customer information are adequately protected. Last Updated 6/27/2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] HomeContact UsSearchHelpSiteMapForms Freedom of Information ActWebsite PoliciesFirstGov.gov -- - 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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'
[Clips] Cashpaks: Money for Nothing
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 16:14:25 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Cashpaks: Money for Nothing Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Add a fifth horseman to the infocalypse: US Iraq contractors. Cheers, RAH http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_10_24/print/coverprint.html October 24, 2005 Issue The American Conservative Money for Nothing Billions of dollars have disappeared, gone to bribe Iraqis and line contractors' pockets. by Philip Giraldi The United States invaded Iraq with a high-minded mission: destroy dangerous weapons, bring democracy, and trigger a wave of reform across the Middle East. None of these have happened. When the final page is written on America's catastrophic imperial venture, one word will dominate the explanation of U.S. failure-corruption. Large-scale and pervasive corruption meant that available resources could not be used to stabilize and secure Iraq in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), when it was still possible to do so. Continuing corruption meant that the reconstruction of infrastructure never got underway, giving the Iraqi people little incentive to co-operate with the occupation. Ongoing corruption in arms procurement and defense spending means that Baghdad will never control a viable army while the Shi'ite and Kurdish militias will grow stronger and produce a divided Iraq in which constitutional guarantees will be irrelevant. The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program. At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004. Some of the corruption grew out of the misguided neoconservative agenda for Iraq, which meant that a serious reconstruction effort came second to doling out the spoils to the war's most fervent supporters. The CPA brought in scores of bright, young true believers who were nearly universally unqualified. Many were recruited through the Heritage Foundation website, where they had posted their résumés. They were paid six-figure salaries out of Iraqi funds, and most served in 90-day rotations before returning home with their war stories. One such volunteer was Simone Ledeen, daughter of leading neoconservative Michael Ledeen. Unable to communicate in Arabic and with no relevant experience or appropriate educational training, she nevertheless became a senior advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad. Another was former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer's older brother Michael who, though utterly unqualified, was named director of private-sector development for all of Iraq. The 15-month proconsulship of the CPA disbursed nearly $20 billion, two-thirds of it in cash, most of which came from the Development Fund for Iraq that had replaced the UN Oil for Food Program and from frozen and seized Iraqi assets. Most of the money was flown into Iraq on C-130s in huge plastic shrink-wrapped pallets holding 40 cashpaks, each cashpak having $1.6 million in $100 bills. Twelve billion dollars moved that way between May 2003 and June 2004, drawn from accounts administered by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The $100 bills weighed an estimated 363 tons. Once in Iraq, there was virtually no accountability over how the money was spent. There was also considerable money off the books, including as much as $4 billion from illegal oil exports. The CPA and the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Board, which it controlled, made a deliberate decision not to record or meter oil exports, an invitation to wholesale fraud and black marketeering. Thus the country was awash in unaccountable money. British sources report that the CPA contracts that were not handed out to cronies were sold to the highest bidder, with bribes as high as $300,000 being demanded for particularly lucrative reconstruction contracts. The contracts were especially attractive because no work or results were necessarily expected in return. It became popular to cancel contracts without penalty, claiming that security costs were making it too difficult to do the work. A $500 million power-plant contract was reportedly awarded to a bidder based on a proposal one page long. After a joint commission rejected the proposal, its members were replaced by the minister, and approval was duly obtained. But no plant has been
Re: cypherpunks@minder.net closing on 11/1
At 2:08 PM +0200 10/14/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: I'm suggesting [EMAIL PROTECTED] as an alternative node to subscribe to. Amen. No problems here, either, pretty much since the node went up. In case his load goes up now, :-), is anyone else running his node-ware on another machine to keep him from being queen for a day? Cheers, RAH -- - 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: cypherpunks@minder.net closing on 11/1
At 2:08 PM +0200 10/14/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: I'm suggesting [EMAIL PROTECTED] as an alternative node to subscribe to. Amen. No problems here, either, pretty much since the node went up. In case his load goes up now, :-), is anyone else running his node-ware on another machine to keep him from being queen for a day? Cheers, RAH -- - 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'
[Clips] Senate Approves Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 10:37:53 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Senate Approves Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Amazing what a Google alert on bearer gets you these days... b. Measures to detect and monitor movements across borders of cash, bearer negotiable instruments, and other appropriate movements of value. These measures shall be subject to safeguards to ensure proper use of information and should not impede legitimate capital movements. Cheers, RAH -- http://www.allamericanpatriots.com/m-news+article+storyid-13090.html .: All American Patriots :. Strengthening and celebrating American patriotism Security News : U.S. Senate Approves Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism Posted by Patriot on 2005/10/13 9:54:46 (45 reads) U.S. Senate Approves Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism Convention called important tool in war on terror, organized crime 12 October 2005 By Eric Green Washington File Staff Writer Washington -- The U.S. Senate approved October 7 the Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism, which has received the strong support of the Bush administration. The administration had reaffirmed its firm support for the counterterrorism convention in a letter from Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Legislative Affairs William Moschella urging the Senate to approve the measure. Moschella wrote that the Bush administration strongly supported the convention. U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (Republican of Alabama) said on the Senate floor before the agreement was approved that the convention would provide an important tool in our war against terrorism and organized crime. Sessions is a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security. The United States signed the convention in June 2002, but Senate approval was needed before the United States could ratify the Western Hemisphere counterterrorism measure. For the anti-terrorism convention to become officially approved by the United States, the Senate's ratification must be subsequently signed and registered (deposited) by President Bush at the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS General Assembly adopted the pact in June 2002 in Bridgetown, Barbados. The organization said the convention is the first international measure against terrorism negotiated after the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. The convention provides the legal framework for cooperation among the 34 OAS member states in the fight against terrorism. The U.S. State Department pledged an additional $1.6 million in February to strengthen and expand counterterrorism coordination in the Western Hemisphere, bringing the total U.S. contribution to $5 million on this issue since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the State Department report, Country Reports on Terrorism 2004, terrorists in the Western Hemisphere becoming increasingly active in illicit transnational activities, including the drug trade, arms trafficking, money laundering, contraband smuggling and document and currency fraud. The report said the threat of international terrorism in the Western Hemisphere remained relatively low during 2004, compared to other world regions but added that terrorists might seek safe haven, financing, recruiting, illegal travel documentation, or access to the United States from the hemisphere. Terrorism was also the subject of a September 2004 State Department electronic journal, The Global War on Terrorist Finance, available on the State Department Web site. The text of Inter-American Convention Against Terrorismon from the OAS Web site is available below. INTER-AMERICAN CONVENTION AGAINST TERRORISM The States Parties to this Convention, BEARING IN MIND the purposes and principles of the Charter of the Organization of American States and the Charter of the United Nations; CONSIDERING that terrorism represents a serious threat to democratic values and to international peace and security and is a cause of profound concern to all member states; REAFFIRMING the need to adopt effective steps in the inter-American system to prevent, punish, and eliminate terrorism through the broadest cooperation; RECOGNIZING that the serious economic harm to states which may result from terrorist acts is one of the factors that underscore the need for cooperation and the urgency of efforts to eradicate terrorism; REAFFIRMING the commitment of the states to prevent, combat, punish, and eliminate terrorism; and BEARING IN MIND resolution RC.23/RES. 1/01 rev. 1 corr. 1, Strengthening Hemispheric Cooperation to Prevent, Combat, and Eliminate
[Clips] New Screening Tech Misses Nothing
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 18:09:33 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] New Screening Tech Misses Nothing Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69137,00.html Wired News Wired News New Screening Tech Misses Nothing By Abby Christopher? Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69137,00.html 02:00 AM Oct. 11, 2005 PT Bad news for terrorists and drug traffickers: The hunt for narcotics, explosives and biohazards is about to get faster and easier thanks to new research from Purdue University. A new testing method can, for the first time, speedily check objects and people for traces of chemical compounds. The detection technology known as mass spectrometry is already in use by forensic scientists. Mass spectrometry is one of the most sensitive methods for finding drugs, chemicals, pollutants and disease, but the problem is that you have to extract a sample and treat that sample before you can analyze it, said Evan Williams, a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley. That process can take anywhere from two to 15 minutes for each sample. Multiply that by the number of people in line at airport security at JFK the day before Thanksgiving, and you've got a logistical nightmare on your hands. The research from Purdue, led by analytical chemistry professor Graham Cooks, developed a technique called desorption electrospray ionization, or DESI, that eliminates a part of the mass spectrometry process, and thus speeds up the detection of substances to less than 10 seconds, said Williams. To use it, law enforcement officials and security screeners will spray methanol or a water and salt mixture on the surface of an object, or a person's clothing or skin, and test immediately for microscopic traces of chemical compounds. In the lab, DESI has tested for chemicals at the picogram level -- or trillionths of a gram. This is about 1,000 times less than the minimum amount of material previously required for detection. Cooks also hopes to commercialize a rugged DESI sensor that would weigh as little as 25 pounds and fit into a knapsack. We have tested it for a wide variety of explosives and the experiments represent several practical conditions such as using mixtures using different surfaces (skin, paper, luggage), says Nari Talaty, a graduate student on Cooks' team at Purdue. The new technique is extremely promising for the detection of illicit substances on surfaces, said Herbert Hill Jr., a chemistry professor at Washington State University who is researching ion mobility spectrometry. With DESI it appears possible to bring the instrument to the sampling site, reducing sampling time and complexity, said Hill. Scientific instrument maker Jeol USA, Oakridge Labs and other academic researchers have also developed their own surface testing techniques using mass spectrometry. Jeol's patented technique uses helium or nitrogen gas to extract and ionize chemicals, and is already being used by the U.S. Army's Chemical and Bio Labs, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. However, it cannot currently detect biomolecules and proteins for biohazards -- an appealing feature of Purdue's system. -- - 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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'
[Clips] [p2p-hackers] CodeCon 2006 Call For Papers
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 15:40:00 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] [p2p-hackers] CodeCon 2006 Call For Papers Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 12:10:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Len Sassaman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [p2p-hackers] CodeCon 2006 Call For Papers Reply-To: Peer-to-peer development. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CodeCon 2006 February 10-12, 2006 San Francisco CA, USA www.codecon.org Call For Papers CodeCon is the premier showcase of cutting edge software development. It is an excellent opportunity for programmers to demonstrate their work and keep abreast of what's going on in their community. All presentations must include working demonstrations, ideally accompanied by source code. Presentations must be done by one of the active developers of the code in question. We emphasize that demonstrations be of *working* code. We hereby solicit papers and demonstrations. * Papers and proposals due: December 15, 2005 * Authors notified: January 1, 2006 Possible topics include, but are by no means restricted to: * community-based web sites - forums, weblogs, personals * development tools - languages, debuggers, version control * file sharing systems - swarming distribution, distributed search * security products - mail encryption, intrusion detection, firewalls Presentations will be 45 minutes long, with 15 minutes allocated for QA. Overruns will be truncated. Submission details: Submissions are being accepted immediately. Acceptance dates are November 15, and December 15. After the first acceptance date, submissions will be either accepted, rejected, or deferred to the second acceptance date. The conference language is English. Ideally, demonstrations should be usable by attendees with 802.11b connected devices either via a web interface, or locally on Windows, UNIX-like, or MacOS platforms. Cross-platform applications are most desirable. Our venue will be 21+. To submit, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] including the following information: * Project name * url of project home page * tagline - one sentence or less summing up what the project does * names of presenter(s) and urls of their home pages, if they have any * one-paragraph bios of presenters, optional, under 100 words each * project history, under 150 words * what will be done in the project demo, under 200 words * slides to be shown during the presentation, if applicable * future plans General Chair: Jonathan Moore Program Chair: Len Sassaman Program Committee: * Bram Cohen, BitTorrent, USA * Jered Floyd, Permabit, USA * Ian Goldberg, Zero-Knowledge Systems, CA * Dan Kaminsky, Avaya, USA * Ben Laurie, The Bunker Secure Hosting, UK * Nick Mathewson, The Free Haven Project, USA * David Molnar, University of California, Berkeley, USA * Jonathan Moore, Mosuki, USA * Meredith L. Patterson, University of Iowa, USA * Len Sassaman, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, BE Sponsorship: If your organization is interested in sponsoring CodeCon, we would love to hear from you. In particular, we are looking for sponsors for social meals and parties on any of the three days of the conference, as well as sponsors of the conference as a whole and donors of door prizes. If you might be interested in sponsoring any of these aspects, please contact the conference organizers at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Press policy: CodeCon provides a limited number of passes to qualifying press. Complimentary press passes will be evaluated on request. Everyone is welcome to pay the low registration fee to attend without an official press credential. Questions: If you have questions about CodeCon, or would like to contact the organizers, please mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note this address is only for questions and administrative requests, and not for workshop presentation submissions. ___ p2p-hackers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ___ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences --- 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
[fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
--- begin forwarded text From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2005 18:30:56 +0100 (BST) (( Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems )) October 08, 2005 https://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000561.html Just presented at ICETE2005 by Daniel Nagy: http://www.epointsystem.org/~nagydani/ICETE2005.pdf ===8=8== Abstract. In present paper a novel approach to on-line payment is presented that tackles some issues of digital cash that have, in the author s opinion, contributed to the fact that despite the availability of the technology for more than a decade, it has not achieved even a fraction of the anticipated popularity. The basic assumptions and requirements for such a system are revisited, clear (economic) objectives are formulated and cryptographic techniques to achieve them are proposed. Introduction. Chaum et al. begin their seminal paper (D. Chaum, 1988) with the observation that the use of credit cards is an act of faith on the part of all concerned, exposing all parties to fraud. Indeed, almost two decades later, the credit card business is still plagued by all these problems and credit card fraud has become a major obstacle to the normal development of electronic commerce, but digital cash-like payment systems similar to those proposed (and implemented) by D. Chaum have never become viable competitors, let alone replacements for credit cards or paper-based cash. One of the reasons, in the author s opinion, is that payment systems based on similar schemes lack some key characteristics of paper-based cash, rendering them economically infeasible. Let us quickly enumerate the most important properties of cash: 1. Money doesn't smell. Cash payments are -- potentially -- _anonymous_ and untraceable by third parties (including the issuer). 2. Cash payments are final. After the fact, the paying party has no means to reverse the payment. We call this property of cash transactions _irreversibility_. 3. Cash payments are _peer-to-peer_. There is no distinction between merchants and customers; anyone can pay anyone. In particular, anybody can receive cash payments without contracts with third parties. 4. Cash allows for acts of faith or _naive transactions_. Those who are not familiar with all the antiforgery measures of a particular banknote or do not have the necessary equipment to verify them, can still transact with cash relying on the fact that what they do not verify is nonetheless verifiable in principle. 5. The amount of cash issued by the issuing authority is public information that can be verified through an auditing process. The payment system proposed in (D. Chaum, 1988) focuses on the first characteristic while partially or totally lacking all the others. The same holds, to some extent, for all existing cash-like digital payment systems based on untraceable blind signatures (Brands, 1993a; Brands, 1993b; A. Lysyanskaya, 1998), rendering them unpractical. ... [bulk of paper proposes a new system...] Conclusion. The proposed digital payment system is more similar to cash than the existing digital payment solutions. It offers reasonable measures to protect the privacy of the users and to guarantee the transparency of the issuer s operations. With an appropriate business model, where the provider of the technical part of the issuing service is independent of the financial providers and serves more than one of the latter, the issuer has sufficient incentives not to exploit the vulnerability described in 4.3, even if the implementation of the cryptographic challenge allowed for it. This parallels the case of the issuing bank and the printing service responsible for printing the banknotes. The author believes that an implementation of such a system would stand a better chance on the market than the existing alternatives, none of which has lived up to the expectations, precisely because it matches paper-based cash more closely in its most important properties. Open-source implementations of the necessary software are being actively developed as parts of the ePoint project. For details, please see http://sf.net/projects/epoint =8=8= -- Powered by Movable Type Version 2.64 http://www.movabletype.org/ ___ fc-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.ifca.ai/mailman/listinfo/fc-discuss --- end forwarded text -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar
Venona not all decrypted?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- I just heard that the Venona intercepts haven't all been decrypted, and that the reason for that was there wasn't enough budget to do so. Is that not enough budget to apply the one-time pads they already have, or is that the once-and-futile exercise of decrypting ciphertext with no one-time pad to go with it? Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.2 (Build 2425) iQEVAwUBQ0GSo8UCGwxmWcHhAQEPmQf9H03En5RvvUKqjtjHGvhSnUvPx5sUk2OV FCqYs/3hLv2NxWeK63/zxwOv2cyQ4H0XRCi3+rV1NCcScecLSYYudQ+64ZqMFXju ywPzSVUcZwPFYeYiz2ddpUTdadWCLexeKvhjN2hlFs4jUbEsguzjbOHC22yWUo2k IeC5+E4TM2sKEz22KKpPtGPFuZENoTgHGoRvQRgFRaR6wTjeOgs0dIBNOXf7VXVQ hrzCBmompgO25qRKDKETF28b2vtaVNeUeMUyPKAwyd0ivqqg4DX2YAqanOdmyOfe JzsbFW6I43jxvT+jcxOI3AlOu+KujXSUAu1OxXUTVfXvRsjF7oDTWw== =1U1P -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - 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'
Venona not all decrypted?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- I just heard that the Venona intercepts haven't all been decrypted, and that the reason for that was there wasn't enough budget to do so. Is that not enough budget to apply the one-time pads they already have, or is that the once-and-futile exercise of decrypting ciphertext with no one-time pad to go with it? Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.2 (Build 2425) iQEVAwUBQ0GSo8UCGwxmWcHhAQEPmQf9H03En5RvvUKqjtjHGvhSnUvPx5sUk2OV FCqYs/3hLv2NxWeK63/zxwOv2cyQ4H0XRCi3+rV1NCcScecLSYYudQ+64ZqMFXju ywPzSVUcZwPFYeYiz2ddpUTdadWCLexeKvhjN2hlFs4jUbEsguzjbOHC22yWUo2k IeC5+E4TM2sKEz22KKpPtGPFuZENoTgHGoRvQRgFRaR6wTjeOgs0dIBNOXf7VXVQ hrzCBmompgO25qRKDKETF28b2vtaVNeUeMUyPKAwyd0ivqqg4DX2YAqanOdmyOfe JzsbFW6I43jxvT+jcxOI3AlOu+KujXSUAu1OxXUTVfXvRsjF7oDTWw== =1U1P -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Wireless access for all? Google plan would offer free Internet throughout SF]
At 2:58 PM +0200 10/1/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: But will they block Tor? snip... Google plan would offer free Internet throughout SF More to the point, is it finally time to short Google? ;-) Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Wireless access for all? Google plan would offer free Internet throughout SF]
At 2:58 PM +0200 10/1/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: But will they block Tor? snip... Google plan would offer free Internet throughout SF More to the point, is it finally time to short Google? ;-) Cheers, RAH -- - 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'
[Clips] nym-0.2 released (fwd)
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 23:10:27 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] nym-0.2 released (fwd) Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 02:18:55 + (UTC) From: Jason Holt [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: cryptography@metzdowd.com Subject: nym-0.2 released (fwd) Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Forwarded message -- Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 02:18:43 + (UTC) From: Jason Holt [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: nym-0.2 released nym-0.2 is now available at: http://www.lunkwill.org/src/nym/ My tor server is currently down, so I can't set up a public trial of this, but perhaps someone else will. This release makes the following improvements: * Tokens are now issued one-per-IP to clients via a token CGI script. Tokens are still blindly issued, so nobody (including the token issuer) can associate tokens with IP addresses. The list of already-served IPs could be periodically removed, allowing users to obtain new pseudonyms on a regular basis. (Abusers will then need to be re-blocked assuming they re-misbehave). * A token can be used to obtain a signature on a client certificate from a separate CA CGI script (potentially on a different machine). Tokens can only be spent to obtain one cert. Code to make a CA, client certs and have the certs signed is included. * The CA public key can be installed on a third web server (or proxy) to require that users have a valid client certificate. Servers can maintain a blacklist of misbehaving client certs. Misbehavers will then be unable to access the server until they obtain a new token and client cert (via a new IP). My proposal for using this to enable tor users to play at Wikipedia is as follows: 1. Install a token server on a public IP. The token server can optionally be provided Wikipedia's blocked-IP list and refuse to issue tokens to offending IPs. Tor users use their real IP to obtain a blinded token. 2. Install a CA as a hidden service. Tor users use their unblinded tokens to obtain a client certificate, which they install in their browser. 3. Install a wikipedia-gateway SSL web proxy (optionally also a hidden service) which checks client certs and communicates a client identifier to MediaWiki, which MediaWiki will use in place of the REMOTE_ADDR (client IP address) for connections from the proxy. When a user misbehaves, Wikipedia admins block the client identifier just as they would have blocked an offending IP address. -J - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Request: Check your cell phone to see if it's always transmitting your location [priv]]
At 9:43 PM -0400 9/28/05, sunder wrote: Gee, I wonder why anyone would design a cell phone or pager to be able to stay on after its battery is pulled out. To protect whatever's in the then-volatile memory? cf Pournelle on conspiracy and stupidity... Are we just too paranoid? See below. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid on our own! And we were grateful! --Alan Olsen
[Clips] Anon Terminology v0.23
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 09:20:55 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Anon Terminology v0.23 Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Andreas Pfitzmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 10:49:12 +0200 To: Klimant Herbert [EMAIL PROTECTED], Siebert Karen [EMAIL PROTECTED], Friese Ingo [EMAIL PROTECTED], Böhme Rainer [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dierstein Rüdiger [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dingledine Roger [EMAIL PROTECTED], Pfitzmann Birgit [EMAIL PROTECTED], Borcea-Pfitzmann Katrin [EMAIL PROTECTED], Golembiewski Claudia [EMAIL PROTECTED], Boettcher Dipl.-Inf. Heiko [EMAIL PROTECTED], Baum-Waidner Birgit [EMAIL PROTECTED], Wenning Rigo [EMAIL PROTECTED], PET GI FG [EMAIL PROTECTED], Labuschke Silvia [EMAIL PROTECTED], Danz Uwe [EMAIL PROTECTED], Wicke Guntram [EMAIL PROTECTED], Weber Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED], Schönfeld Dagmar [EMAIL PROTECTED], Köpsell Stefan [EMAIL PROTECTED], Federrath Hannes [EMAIL PROTECTED], Vogel Anja [EMAIL PROTECTED], Gersonde Martina [EMAIL PROTECTED], Weik Peter [EMAIL PROTECTED], PRIME PRIME [EMAIL PROTECTED], Rost Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED], Wassim Haddad [EMAIL PROTECTED], Westfeld Andreas [EMAIL PROTECTED], Wahrig Hagen [EMAIL PROTECTED], Franz Elke [EMAIL PROTECTED], Ziemek Holger [EMAIL PROTECTED], Wolf Gritta [EMAIL PROTECTED], Schneidewind Antje [EMAIL PROTECTED], Pohl Hartmut [EMAIL PROTECTED], Waidner Michael [EMAIL PROTECTED], Weck Gerhard [EMAIL PROTECTED], Steinbrecher Sandra [EMAIL PROTECTED], Hansen Marit [EMAIL PROTECTED], Clauss Sebastian [EMAIL PROTECTED], Pötzsch Stefanie [EMAIL PROTECTED], Kurze Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED], Zöllner Jan [EMAIL PROTECTED], FIDIS list [EMAIL PROTECTED], Berthold Oliver [EMAIL PROTECTED], Matyas Vaclav [EMAIL PROTECTED], Humann Petra [EMAIL PROTECTED], Zugenmaier Alf [EMAIL PROTECTED], Diaz Claudia [EMAIL PROTECTED], Liesebach Katja [EMAIL PROTECTED], Pernul Günther [EMAIL PROTECTED], Behrendt Manuela [EMAIL PROTECTED], SPP Diskussion [EMAIL PROTECTED], Bergmann Mike [EMAIL PROTECTED], PET-board [EMAIL PROTECTED], Schunter Matthias [EMAIL PROTECTED], PET Mailinglist [EMAIL PROTECTED], Lazarek Horst [EMAIL PROTECTED], Donker Hilko [EMAIL PROTECTED], Kriegelstein Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED], Langos Heinrich [EMAIL PROTECTED], nymip-res-group [EMAIL PROTECTED], Seto Gar Yeung [EMAIL PROTECTED], Jerichow Anja [EMAIL PROTECTED], Zeidler Stefan [EMAIL PROTECTED], Jozef Vyskoc [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Hansen Marit [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Terminology v0.23 Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi all, Marit and myself are happy to announce Anonymity, Unlinkability, Unobservability, Pseudonymity, and Identity Management - A Consolidated Proposal for Terminology (Version v0.23 Aug. 25, 2005) for download at http://dud.inf.tu-dresden.de/Literatur_V1.shtml We added a new first page; a list of abbreviations and index, translation of essential terms into German, definitions of misinformation and disinformation, clarification of liability broker vs. value broker; some clarifying remarks suggested by Thomas Kriegelstein on credentials, identity, complete identity, system, subject, digital pseudonyms, and by Sebastian Clauß on unlinkability. Enjoy - and we are happy to receive your feedback. Marit and Andreas -- Andreas Pfitzmann Dresden University of Technology Phone (mobile) +49 170 443 87 94 Department of Computer Science (office) +49 351 463 38277 Institute for System Architecture (secretary) +49 351 463 38247 01062 Dresden, Germany Fax +49 351 463 38255 http://dud.inf.tu-dresden.de e-mail[EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ NymIP-res-group mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nymip.org/mailman/listinfo/nymip-res-group --- 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL
Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Request: Check your cell phone to see if it's always transmitting your location [priv]]
At 9:43 PM -0400 9/28/05, sunder wrote: Gee, I wonder why anyone would design a cell phone or pager to be able to stay on after its battery is pulled out. To protect whatever's in the then-volatile memory? cf Pournelle on conspiracy and stupidity... Are we just too paranoid? See below. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid on our own! And we were grateful! --Alan Olsen
Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wikipedia Tor]
Speaking of pseudonymity... At 12:53 PM -0400 9/27/05, Somebody wrote: Argh! Not this again! Yes, again, and I'll keep repeating it until you get it. :-). No, anonymity is don't know who sent it. For some definitions of who. To paraphrase a famous sink-washing president, it depends on who you mean by who. :-) Examples are anonymizing remailers which give all incoming users the same outgoing name, or the Anonymous Coward comments in /. (Disregard for now details such as the /. admins being able to link an AC comment to an IP address.) Fine. Ignore the output thereof as noise, it's probably safe to do so. Though concordance programs are your friends. Behavior is biometric, after all. The words you use give you away, and can be filtered accordingly. Ask someone named Detweiller about that. Or, for that matter, Kaczynski. Or your trading patterns in market. Just like your fist, in telegraphy. Perfect pseudonymity is can't tie it to meatspace. See who, above. Since we haven't quite gotten AI down just yet, that's good enough for me, though I expect, like Genghis, and not True Names, we'll figure out that intelligence is an emergent property of *active* physical manifestation, and not a giant pile of data. Different communications from the same sender can be tied to each other. Examples include most of the free email services, and digitally signing a message sent through an anonymizer. Yup. That's what I mean by reputation, if I take your meaning right. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: Wikipedia Tor]
At 8:37 PM -0400 9/27/05, lists wrote: Building a TOR nymspace would be much more interesting and distributed. Since the first time I met Dingledine, he was talking pseudonymity, bigtime. I was curious when he went to play with onion routers, but maybe I'm not so surprised anymore... Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wikipedia Tor]
At 8:43 AM -0700 9/27/05, James A. Donald wrote: In the long run, reliable pseudonymity will prove more valuable than reliable anonymity. Amen. And, at the extreme end of the curve, perfect psedudonymity *is* perfect anonymity. Character. I wouldn't buy anything from a man with no character if he offered me all the bonds in Christendom. -- J. Pierpont Morgan, Testimony to Congress, 1913. Reputation is *everything* folks. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wikipedia Tor]
Speaking of pseudonymity... At 12:53 PM -0400 9/27/05, Somebody wrote: Argh! Not this again! Yes, again, and I'll keep repeating it until you get it. :-). No, anonymity is don't know who sent it. For some definitions of who. To paraphrase a famous sink-washing president, it depends on who you mean by who. :-) Examples are anonymizing remailers which give all incoming users the same outgoing name, or the Anonymous Coward comments in /. (Disregard for now details such as the /. admins being able to link an AC comment to an IP address.) Fine. Ignore the output thereof as noise, it's probably safe to do so. Though concordance programs are your friends. Behavior is biometric, after all. The words you use give you away, and can be filtered accordingly. Ask someone named Detweiller about that. Or, for that matter, Kaczynski. Or your trading patterns in market. Just like your fist, in telegraphy. Perfect pseudonymity is can't tie it to meatspace. See who, above. Since we haven't quite gotten AI down just yet, that's good enough for me, though I expect, like Genghis, and not True Names, we'll figure out that intelligence is an emergent property of *active* physical manifestation, and not a giant pile of data. Different communications from the same sender can be tied to each other. Examples include most of the free email services, and digitally signing a message sent through an anonymizer. Yup. That's what I mean by reputation, if I take your meaning right. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: Wikipedia Tor]
At 8:37 PM -0400 9/27/05, lists wrote: Building a TOR nymspace would be much more interesting and distributed. Since the first time I met Dingledine, he was talking pseudonymity, bigtime. I was curious when he went to play with onion routers, but maybe I'm not so surprised anymore... Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Request: Check your cell phone to see if it's always transmitting your location [priv]]
At 2:59 PM +0200 9/22/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: For my Treo phone, I found the location option under Phone Preferences in the Options menu of the main phone screen. Bada-bing! Fixed *that*. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] OT: Canada: Sweeping new surveillance bill to criminalize investigative journalism]
At 8:46 PM +0200 9/21/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: Why Brin is full of it, and reverse panopticon is a fantasy. Obviously Brin is full of it -- from my own personal experience, even, :-) -- but one should remember that law, much less legislation, is always a lagging indicator. Physics causes finance, which causes philosophy, and all that. Even Stalin couldn't make Lysenkoism science. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] OT: Canada: Sweeping new surveillance bill to criminalize investigative journalism]
At 8:46 PM +0200 9/21/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: Why Brin is full of it, and reverse panopticon is a fantasy. Obviously Brin is full of it -- from my own personal experience, even, :-) -- but one should remember that law, much less legislation, is always a lagging indicator. Physics causes finance, which causes philosophy, and all that. Even Stalin couldn't make Lysenkoism science. Cheers, RAH -- - 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'
[Clips] Velvet Revolutions and the Logic of Terrorism
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 08:58:39 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Velvet Revolutions and the Logic of Terrorism Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.techcentralstation.com/092005B.html Tech Central Station Velvet Revolutions and the Logic of Terrorism By Frederick Turner Published 09/20/2005 Part of our difficulty in dealing with global terror directed against civilian populations is that we have not, I believe, understood what it was designed to attack. Some see it as a war between cultural blocs, others as a religious war against infidels, others as a traditionalist reaction to the social, economic, and cultural disruptions caused by globalism, others as a continuation of the liberation of oppressed peoples from colonial imperialism. There may be a grain of truth in some of these explanations, but the counter-examples to each of them are glaring. For instance, the majority of deaths by terrorism in the last several years -- even including 9/11 and the second Intifada -- have been the result of Muslim-on-Muslim violence, perhaps even Arab-on-Arab violence, depending on what is counted. Thus we can rule out cultural and religious war as the prime motivation. Though one can at a stretch describe the Taliban as traditionalists opposing the corruptions of global market capitalism, al Qaeda is a quintessentially cosmopolitan, big-business financed, historicist, international intellectual movement, as globalist in its own way as Microsoft. As for the anti-colonialist explanation, it is hard to see how animist Sudanese farmers, Kashmiri Hindus, Sunni Kurds, Iraqi Shiites, Philippine Christians or Egyptian or Lebanese democrats, all of them targets of terrorism, could be considered colonial oppressors. The history of warfare shows us that each new military power arises as the result of a new strategy or weapon, with a major socio-economic dimension, that effectively refutes the previous one. The disciplined citizen-hoplite infantryman of the Greek city-states answers and reverses the huge peasant armies of the Persian emperors. The plebeian Roman phalanx defeats the elite Spartan line. The Parthian cavalry archer wears out and turns back the Roman phalanx. The longbow brings down the armored knight. The swift low British man-o'-war defeats the galleon. The machine-gun stops the massed infantry attack invented by Marlborough and Bonaparte. When the suicide bomber first emerged as the paradigm and core symbol of terrorism, it could be argued that it was exactly the weapon to counter the nuclear-armed modern democratic nation state (Israel in particular). The suicide bomb could not, by definition, be avenged or deterred; though it could not target the government, which could always democratically renew itself, it could target the population's trust in its government. Its target was, appropriately, the whole population, because in a democracy the whole population is the sovereign. The bomber could always be disavowed by his state bosses and protectors. But as I have pointed out, the numbers of Israeli and Western dead as victims of terror are only a fraction of the total number. War is politics by other means. Why did suicide terror metastasize from Israel to the world? What is the basic political enemy of the global terrorist movement? What is it designed to attack? Though it would be tempting to say that the target is the democratic state, the evidence does not quite support it. Many existing democratic states were left alone, and coexisted with, for years before suicide terror emerged, and are so still. I believe that the evidence points clearly to one target. Thirty years ago it looked as if the totalitarian state was solidly established, successful and immortal. Democratic capitalism had been stopped in its tracks. The nuclear-armed socialist dictatorship could not be attacked or defeated; it could at best be contained, and none of its incremental marginal conquests could be rolled back. Marvelously, however, a new strategy emerged, invented by the world's middle-class populations, that could bring down the totalitarian state: the velvet revolution. Totalitarian governments rely on elites to govern and control the people and defend themselves against outside ideas. Those elites must reproduce themselves, creating a property-owning educated class with great power but without the revolutionary ideology of their parents; and to remain economically viable the state must produce a skilled artisan class, like the shipbuilders of Gdansk, with the capacity to unionize. Out of these materials, generated by totalitarianism itself, comes the velvet revolution. The velvet revolution (also named the orange revolution, the purple finger, the rose revolution, the cedar revolution) has
Re: Fwd: Re: MIT talk: Special-Purpose Hardware for Integer Factoring
At 2:29 PM -0400 9/19/05, Steve Furlong wrote: What does George Bushitler stand to gain from this machine? There you go again... Cheers, RAH I feel *gd*... -- - 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: The ghost of Cypherpunks
At 9:46 AM -0700 9/19/05, James A. Donald wrote: like Ben and Jerry's rainforest crunch, where by buying overpriced and extra fattening icecream, you were supposedly saving the rainforest and preserving indigenous cultures . Politics is marketing by other means... ;-) Cheers, RAH Or is it the other way around... -- - 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: The ghost of Cypherpunks
At 2:31 PM +0100 9/19/05, ken wrote: Assuming that you mean feminism is a variant of Marxism, what exactly do you mean by Marxism? Exactly what you do. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: The ghost of Cypherpunks
At 9:46 AM -0700 9/19/05, James A. Donald wrote: like Ben and Jerry's rainforest crunch, where by buying overpriced and extra fattening icecream, you were supposedly saving the rainforest and preserving indigenous cultures . Politics is marketing by other means... ;-) Cheers, RAH Or is it the other way around... -- - 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: Fwd: Re: MIT talk: Special-Purpose Hardware for Integer Factoring
At 2:29 PM -0400 9/19/05, Steve Furlong wrote: What does George Bushitler stand to gain from this machine? There you go again... Cheers, RAH I feel *gd*... -- - 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'
[Clips] The Real ID Act: MIT Online Forum Has Begun - Please Register if You Have Not Already Done So
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:55:58 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] The Real ID Act: MIT Online Forum Has Begun - Please Register if You Have Not Already Done So Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:28:53 -0400 From: Daniel Greenwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317) To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: The Real ID Act: MIT Online Forum Has Begun - Please Register if You Have Not Already Done So This note is to inform you that the online forum will officially convene today at 3pm Eastern Time, September 19, 2005. The discussion facilitators are all scheduled to post their initial statements by that time. In the meantime, you are invited to join the emerging discussion at: http://civics.typepad.com/realid/ Again, the main site for this initiative is http://ecitizen.mit.edu, and you can register at this address We encourage you to comment on as many topics associated with each discussion track as interest you. Please also consider commenting on the comments of others. The facilitator for each discussion track will, from time to time, jump in the dialog to keep it moving, answer questions (if appropriate) or throw out additional aspects of the topic for consideration. We have chosen to use a commercial web log provider as the host for this event, in part as a test of the tool as we evaluate a platform for future online discussions. Please feel free to use the built in blog features, such as tracking back to any blog entries you may have and syndication. To participate in the discussion, simply click the comment button associated with the topic you would like to join in with. The initial discussion tracks will be as follows: Facilitated Discussion Track: The Interest in Homeland Security This track is facilitated by Colleen Gilbert, Executive Director of the Coalition for a Secure Driver License. This discussion track of the MIT Real ID online forum is focused on the assertion that a secure driver license is needed for reasons of national security, especially as an anti-terrorism measure. In addition, the scope of this track includes assertions that the Real ID Act can help combat common frauds and crimes such as identity theft, by creating a more reliable state issued identity system that is easily linked at the national level. Facilitated Discussion Track: The Interest in Privacy and Civil Liberties This track is facilitated by Lee Tien, Senior Staff Attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This discussion track of the MIT Real ID online forum is focused on the assertion that the Real ID Act of 2005 represents a National ID Card that will result in violation of the privacy rights and other civil liberties of Americans and others who are lawfully in the jurisdiction of the U.S. In addition, other constitutional issues related to this exercise of federal authority in an arena traditionally controlled by the states is in the scope of this discussion. Facilitated Discussion Track: Practical State Governmental and DMV Issues This track is jointly facilitated by David Lewis, Former CIO, Massachusetts and Chairman of American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators Committee that implemented the National Commercial Driver License and by Barry Goleman. This discussion track of the MIT Real ID online forum is focused on the assertion that the Real ID Act of 2005 has important, and perhaps unforeseen, implications at the practical level for state governments who are required to comply with the provisions of this statute. How would the cards and underlying data systems and business practices be implemented in a way that is effective, efficient, compliant with federal deadlines and other requirements and within the available budget and other resource constraints of the states? Within the scope of this discussion are other potential models to look at as examples, such as the existing national system for commercial driver licenses, implemented at the state level. How the physical and online systems will be architected and built, whether or how they will interoperate, the access rights and other safeguards and protections that will be present or absent will all be factors in the over all discussion of the ramifications of this new federal statute. Facilitated Discussion Track: Convergence of Physical and Digital Identity Related to Real ID This track is facilitated by Dan Combs, President of Global Identity Solution. This discussion track of the MIT Real ID online forum is focused on the assertion that the Real ID Act of 2005, once widely implemented, will be an important foundation for the convergence
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
At 2:31 PM +0100 9/19/05, ken wrote: Assuming that you mean feminism is a variant of Marxism, what exactly do you mean by Marxism? Exactly what you do. Cheers, RAH -- - 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: The ghost of Cypherpunks
At 2:03 PM -0400 9/17/05, Damian Gerow wrote: You're damn right it's political. Especially if you're a Marxist, or some, shall we say homeopathic variant thereof: after all, the personal is political, right? Cheers, RAH -- - 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: The ghost of Cypherpunks
At 2:03 PM -0400 9/17/05, Damian Gerow wrote: You're damn right it's political. Especially if you're a Marxist, or some, shall we say homeopathic variant thereof: after all, the personal is political, right? Cheers, RAH -- - 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: Fwd: Re: MIT talk: Special-Purpose Hardware for Integer Factoring
At 11:34 AM -0700 9/16/05, Bill Stewart wrote: So, I saw this here at Farquhar Street at 14:55EST, jumped in the shower, thus missing the train 13:20 train at Rozzy Square :-), instead took the ^ bus, and then the T, and got to MIT's New Funny-Looking Building about 16:40 or so, and saw the last few slides, asking the first, and only, question, because the grad-students shot out of there at relativistic velocity, probably so they wouldn't miss their dinner, or something... Time travel aside (okay, innumeracy aside, some state-school philosophy majors can't count, either...), if I'm a reporter, this is new journalism, since most of the missive is about *wonderful* *ME*... :-) Cheers, RAH Who reminds people that sentences that begin The upshot, to me,, et. al., are usually committing the informal fallacy of relativism anyway...But enough about me, what do *you* think about me... -- - 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: The ghost of Cypherpunks
At 9:43 AM +0100 9/15/05, ken wrote: Do you really think that politics only exists where there is a state? Agreed, on this one. In 10th century Iceland, an ostensible anarcho-capitalist society with exactly *one* public employee(1) *everybody* was a lawyer -- and murder was a tort. See David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, and any good Icelandic saga, my favorite being Njall's Saga, for details Cheers, RAH Who especially liked Friedman's penny game, for a good example of how government works. (1) A guy whose job it was to recite one quarter of the agreed-upon laws once a year at a summer solstice fair called the Allthing, and if a law wasn't recited after four years, it was considered rescinded. -- - 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: The ghost of Cypherpunks
At 9:43 AM +0100 9/15/05, ken wrote: Do you really think that politics only exists where there is a state? Agreed, on this one. In 10th century Iceland, an ostensible anarcho-capitalist society with exactly *one* public employee(1) *everybody* was a lawyer -- and murder was a tort. See David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, and any good Icelandic saga, my favorite being Njall's Saga, for details Cheers, RAH Who especially liked Friedman's penny game, for a good example of how government works. (1) A guy whose job it was to recite one quarter of the agreed-upon laws once a year at a summer solstice fair called the Allthing, and if a law wasn't recited after four years, it was considered rescinded. -- - 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'
The cost of online anonymity
--- begin forwarded text Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 17:02:13 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: The cost of online anonymity http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/programmes/click_online/4227578.stm The BBC Friday, 9 September 2005, 18:03 GMT 19:03 UK The cost of online anonymity By Dan Simmons Reporter, BBC Click Online In the second report looking at privacy and the internet, Dan Simmons examines whether it is possible to be totally anonymous and asks if this is really a desirable thing. In London's Speaker's Corner, the right to freedom of expressions has been practised by anyone who cares to turn up for centuries. But in countries where free speech is not protected by the authorities, hiding your true identity is becoming big business. Just as remailers act as a go-between for e-mail, so there are services through which you can surf the web anonymously. After 10 years in the business, Anonymizer has two million active users. The US government pays it to promote the service in China and Iran in order to help promote free speech. But these programs are becoming popular in the West too. The software encrypts all your requests for webpages. Anonymizer's servers then automatically gather the content on your behalf and send it back to you. No humans are involved and the company does not keep records of who requests what. However, there is some censorship. Anonymizer does not support anonymous uploading to the web, and it blocks access to material that would be illegal under US law. No to censorship For the last five years, Ian Clarke has been working on a project to offer complete anonymity. Founder and co-ordinator of Freenet, Ian Clarke says: Our goal was to provide a system whereby people could share information over the internet without revealing their identity and without permitting any form of government censorship. The system is called the Free Network Project, or Freenet. A Chinese version has been set up to help dissidents speak out there. We believe that the benefits of Freenet, for example for dissidents in countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, far outweigh the dangers of paedophilia or terrorist information being distributed over the system Ian Clarke, Freenet Challenges of anonymous surfing Freenet encourages anonymous uploading of any material. Some users of the English version believe it is so secure they have used it to confess to crimes they have committed, or to their interest in paedophilia. Each user's computer becomes a node in a decentralised file-storing network. As such they give up a small portion of their hard disk to help the system hold all the information and as with anonymous surfing, everything is encrypted, with a military grade 128-bit algorithm. The storage is dynamic, with files automatically moved between computers on the network or duplicated. This adds to the difficulty of determining who might be storing what. Even if a user's computer is seized, it can be impossible for experts to determine what the owner was doing on Freenet. But such strenuous efforts to protect identity have two side effects. Firstly, pages can take 10 minutes or more to download, even on a 2Mbbps broadband connection. Secondly, the information is so well encrypted it is not searchable at the moment. Forget Google, your only option is to scroll through the indexes provided. It is hoped usability of the service will improve when it is re-launched later this year. Ethical issues But those are the least of our problems, according to some experts, who think Freenet is a dangerous free-for-all. Digital evidence expert at the London School of Economics, Peter Sommer says: A few years ago I was very much in favour of libertarian computing. What changed my mind was the experience of acting in the English courts as a computer expert and examining large numbers of computers from really nasty people, who were using precisely the same sort of technology in order to conceal their activities. I think that creates an ethical dilemma for everyone who wants to participate in Freenet. You are giving over part of your computer, it will be in encrypted form, you will not know what you are carrying, but some of it is going to be seriously unpleasant. Are you happy with that? What worries many, is that Freenet is a lawless area. It can be used for many good things, like giving the oppressed a voice, but users can also preach race-hatred or share child pornography with complete impunity. Peter Sommer says: Ian [Clarke] is placing a powerful tool in the hands of other people. He's like an armaments manufacturer. Guns can be used for all sorts of good purposes but you know perfectly well that they are used to oppress and kill. Most armaments manufacturers walk off and say 'it's not my responsibility
The cost of online anonymity
--- begin forwarded text Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 17:02:13 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: The cost of online anonymity http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/programmes/click_online/4227578.stm The BBC Friday, 9 September 2005, 18:03 GMT 19:03 UK The cost of online anonymity By Dan Simmons Reporter, BBC Click Online In the second report looking at privacy and the internet, Dan Simmons examines whether it is possible to be totally anonymous and asks if this is really a desirable thing. In London's Speaker's Corner, the right to freedom of expressions has been practised by anyone who cares to turn up for centuries. But in countries where free speech is not protected by the authorities, hiding your true identity is becoming big business. Just as remailers act as a go-between for e-mail, so there are services through which you can surf the web anonymously. After 10 years in the business, Anonymizer has two million active users. The US government pays it to promote the service in China and Iran in order to help promote free speech. But these programs are becoming popular in the West too. The software encrypts all your requests for webpages. Anonymizer's servers then automatically gather the content on your behalf and send it back to you. No humans are involved and the company does not keep records of who requests what. However, there is some censorship. Anonymizer does not support anonymous uploading to the web, and it blocks access to material that would be illegal under US law. No to censorship For the last five years, Ian Clarke has been working on a project to offer complete anonymity. Founder and co-ordinator of Freenet, Ian Clarke says: Our goal was to provide a system whereby people could share information over the internet without revealing their identity and without permitting any form of government censorship. The system is called the Free Network Project, or Freenet. A Chinese version has been set up to help dissidents speak out there. We believe that the benefits of Freenet, for example for dissidents in countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, far outweigh the dangers of paedophilia or terrorist information being distributed over the system Ian Clarke, Freenet Challenges of anonymous surfing Freenet encourages anonymous uploading of any material. Some users of the English version believe it is so secure they have used it to confess to crimes they have committed, or to their interest in paedophilia. Each user's computer becomes a node in a decentralised file-storing network. As such they give up a small portion of their hard disk to help the system hold all the information and as with anonymous surfing, everything is encrypted, with a military grade 128-bit algorithm. The storage is dynamic, with files automatically moved between computers on the network or duplicated. This adds to the difficulty of determining who might be storing what. Even if a user's computer is seized, it can be impossible for experts to determine what the owner was doing on Freenet. But such strenuous efforts to protect identity have two side effects. Firstly, pages can take 10 minutes or more to download, even on a 2Mbbps broadband connection. Secondly, the information is so well encrypted it is not searchable at the moment. Forget Google, your only option is to scroll through the indexes provided. It is hoped usability of the service will improve when it is re-launched later this year. Ethical issues But those are the least of our problems, according to some experts, who think Freenet is a dangerous free-for-all. Digital evidence expert at the London School of Economics, Peter Sommer says: A few years ago I was very much in favour of libertarian computing. What changed my mind was the experience of acting in the English courts as a computer expert and examining large numbers of computers from really nasty people, who were using precisely the same sort of technology in order to conceal their activities. I think that creates an ethical dilemma for everyone who wants to participate in Freenet. You are giving over part of your computer, it will be in encrypted form, you will not know what you are carrying, but some of it is going to be seriously unpleasant. Are you happy with that? What worries many, is that Freenet is a lawless area. It can be used for many good things, like giving the oppressed a voice, but users can also preach race-hatred or share child pornography with complete impunity. Peter Sommer says: Ian [Clarke] is placing a powerful tool in the hands of other people. He's like an armaments manufacturer. Guns can be used for all sorts of good purposes but you know perfectly well that they are used to oppress and kill. Most armaments manufacturers walk off and say 'it's not my responsibility
IMPORTANT NOTICE: MIT CONFERENCE ON REAL ID ACT IS POSTPONED AND AUGMENTED BY ONLINE DISCUSSION.
--- begin forwarded text Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2005 20:48:22 -0400 From: Daniel Greenwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317) To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: IMPORTANT NOTICE: MIT CONFERENCE ON REAL ID ACT IS POSTPONED AND AUGMENTED BY ONLINE DISCUSSION. [Apologies if you have already received this notice - the mail server at the MIT Media Lab crashed today and we are aware that at least some people on our notice list did not get this important message.] Please be advised that the public forum originally scheduled for Wednesday, September 14, 2005 to address the REAL ID Act of 2005 has been postponed. This has become necessary because many of the people interested in the forum are from the homeland security and first responder communities, and their focus is now squarely on the ongoing efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina. In place of the September 14th public forum, the MIT Media Lab and the MIT E-Commerce Architecture Program will be organizing an online forum to start a conversation about the REAL ID Act of 2005. This online forum will be an ongoing, asynchronous event lasting from Monday, September 19, 2005 through Friday, September 23, 2005. This online discussion will include presentations by leaders in the field, policy experts and governmental officials who will give deeper background on the status and issues related to REAL ID. There will also be an opportunity for all registrants to participate in a dialog with the speakers and each other. Additional details about the online forum will be available shortly at http://ecitizen.mit.edu/realid.html. Please register at that web site between now and September 19th in order to participate in this web-based discussion. Finally, there will be a physical meeting at MIT to discuss the REAL ID Act of 2005 on Thursday, November 17, 2005. The upcoming online forum will provide an excellent opportunity to design this event so as to provide the maximum benefit for the people who will be attending this gathering. In the meantime, please continue to use the registration feature on the website to let us know if you are interested in participating in the online forum or attending the November meeting. Also be sure to check the website periodically for additional details. Regards, Daniel J. Greenwood, MIT Media Lab, Smart Cities Group, Lecturer MIT E-Commerce Architecture Program, Director --- 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'
[Clips] MIT Conference On REAL ID Act Is Postponed And Augmented By Online Discussion
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2005 12:27:09 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] MIT Conference On REAL ID Act Is Postponed And Augmented By Online Discussion Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2005 12:03:51 -0400 From: Daniel Greenwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MIT CONFERENCE ON REAL ID ACT IS POSTPONED AND AUGMENTED BY ONLINE DISCUSSION Please be advised that the public forum originally scheduled for Wednesday, September 14, 2005 to address the REAL ID Act of 2005 has been postponed. This has become necessary because many of the people interested in the forum are from the homeland security and first responder communities, and their focus is now squarely on the ongoing efforts to recover from Hurricane Katrina. In place of the September 14th public forum, the MIT Media Lab and the MIT E-Commerce Architecture Program will be organizing an online forum to start a conversation about the REAL ID Act of 2005. This online forum will be an ongoing, asynchronous event lasting from Monday, September 19, 2005 through Friday, September 23, 2005. This online discussion will include presentation by leaders in the field, policy experts and governmental officials who will give deeper background on the status and issues related to REAL ID. There will also be an opportunity for all registrants to participate in a dialog with the speakers and each other. Additional details about the online forum will be available shortly at http://ecitizen.mit.edu/realid.html. Please register at that web site between now and September 19th in order to participate in this web-based discussion. Finally, there will be a physical meeting at MIT to discuss the REAL ID Act of 2005 on Thursday, November 17, 2005. The upcoming online forum will provide an excellent opportunity to design this event so as to provide the maximum benefit for the people who will be attending this gathering. In the meantime, please continue to use the registration feature on the website to let us know if you are interested in participating in the online forum or attending the November meeting. Also be sure to check the website periodically for additional details. Regards, Daniel J. Greenwood, MIT Media Lab, Smart Cities Group MIT E-Commerce Architecture Program --- 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Internet phone wiretapping (Psst! The FBI is Having
At 10:16 PM -0400 9/7/05, Ulex Europae wrote: Okay, I've been in a hole in the ground for a few years. What happened to Tim May? See below. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid on our own! And we were grateful! --Alan Olsen
RE: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Internet phone wiretapping (Psst! The FBI is Having
At 10:16 PM -0400 9/7/05, Ulex Europae wrote: Okay, I've been in a hole in the ground for a few years. What happened to Tim May? See below. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid on our own! And we were grateful! --Alan Olsen
[Ryan Lackey in Iraq] Wiring the War Zone
--- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 11:31:24 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Ryan Lackey in Iraq] Wiring the War Zone http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/posts.html?pg=2 Wired Issue 13.09 - September 2005 Wired 13.09: POSTS Wiring the War Zone It's a typical morning at Camp Anaconda, the giant US military base 50 miles north of Baghdad - light breeze, temperatures heading to 100 degrees, scattered mortar fire. Ryan Lackey is getting ready for today's assignment: installing a pair of satellite Internet connections at Camp Warhorse about 30 miles away. Lackey, 26, is founder and CTO of Blue Iraq, a war zone startup that has operated out of Anaconda since December. It's a bootstrap operation - three employees, tent accommodations, Army chow - that has been profitable from its first day. The military's a great market, he says. They have lots of money, and they know what they want. His customers are mostly base commanders and DOD contractors, plus the occasional group of soldiers who chip in to get Internet access. Lackey dons body armor and a Kevlar helmet and heads out to the flight line. A pair of Blackhawk helicopters is making a run to Camp Warhorse this morning, and Lackey is hitching a ride. He packs his equipment and tools into one helicopter and climbs into the other. Inside, everything is painted black. Door gunners sit behind machine guns mounted on flexible arms. The crew chief distributes earplugs, the passengers strap themselves in, the rotors start to turn, and the ground falls away. But not too far. Blackhawks fly just 100 feet above the ground, at 200 mph. It's a smooth, exhilarating ride, landscape zooming past like a dream of flying. As wartime commutes go, it can't be beat. Lackey has been taking risks since he dropped out of MIT at 19 to work at a startup on the Caribbean island of Anguilla. Two years later he moved to Sealand, a North Sea oil rig, where he cofounded a data storage outpost that claims sovereignty and is theoretically beyond the reach of any nation's laws. (It was the subject of a Wired cover story in July 2000.) He is happy to cash in on what he calls risk arbitrage. There's sort of a dark calculus when people are afraid, he says. Prices for everything go up. And if you understand the risk better than they do, you can price that into everything. The Blackhawk touches down at Camp Warhorse, a 1,000-soldier forward operating base near the insurgent stronghold of Baqouba. In a freak accident at the helipad, the rotor wash hurls one of the boxed satellite dishes into Lackey's chest like a massive Frisbee. His armor saves him from anything worse than bruises. The first of two installations takes a few hours. Lackey sets up a 4-foot-diameter dish on the ground outside the base HQ, then assembles the metal support arms that hold the satellite electronics at the focus of the dish's parabolic arc. He has to be careful: After five minutes in the midday Iraqi sun, metal can sear an ungloved hand. Cables run from the dish to a modem indoors that in turn connects to a local area network. Ryan hooks his laptop up to the modem and adjusts the dish's elevation and azimuth until his software confirms the system is locked on to the correct satellite. Just like that: the Internet. The iDirect system is robust enough for Iraq's extreme heat, dust, and wind, and even handles voice-over-IP calls. The second install takes longer. Anti-radar camouflage netting overhead interferes with the signal. By the time he's done, Lackey has missed his helicopter lift home. He winds up stranded at Warhorse for two days before catching a ride back to Anaconda on an armored convoy. This means spending an hour in the back of a truck traveling through some of the most active insurgent territory in Iraq. Back in Anaconda, he has to deal with Blue Iraq's literal cash flow problem. The military pays in greenbacks, meaning he routinely has to fly on a cargo plane to deposit thick wads of currency at his bank in Dubai. That's the cost of doing business here. And business is expanding: He foresees cell service, ATM networks, and expansion into Afghanistan, and, he says with a bleak grin, any other markets the US military opens up for us. -- - 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' --- 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
New Drugs
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- At 1:39 PM -0400 8/23/05, Trei, Peter wrote: I [want] a new drug... I would request the irony-impaired actually look up the lyrics of this paen to endogenous ero-endorphins, written by a drug-hating San Francisco acid-kindergarten refugee. In the meantime, I'm all for the legalization of meth -- as long as I get to sharpen my Recon Tonto and personally slit the bag of any of the bastids as they cross my windowsill looking for something to steal. Kinda like opening the borders without killing the welfare state first. Okay, maybe our porous borders *will* kill the welfare state, of course, Reagan used unrestrained soviet-killing budget deficits to kill the welfare state en passant. He didn't? I mean, Clinton *did* say ...big government is over., right? Right??? looks offstage This thing on? Cheers, RAH The only to legalize anything is when progress makes the law superfluous. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.2 (Build 2425) iQEVAwUBQwtypsUCGwxmWcHhAQHpDgf/T5q80m2rgc57388eGuvdIq1YttZDMww2 NannlO3JhKbTXQNKuoArDV66GPhg9nST3KYWLXI/MyrJllgtNioudkxF/pTU B3ussJXFfHbo3Ya1wgM9P1srQlK6smmamv3oHXY92kqeM5JBWfwG7gybMaC+IKKb nk0YgblOoW2bsXfONjdISXti0ENvkFIMrLxajoWVXSAp1exDOCJPqLSxbKnX2DNd ftBNYO8h9tt/qr6KRhBZsY449Vs1g1CMVigdVy6h7y9WBlhRWCMjJF/pfnJWbQJm a4f9H/XjNntHVr+Z0UZnthj0Va2RKKm99CKTFS+7fypDlEfslq/W3A== =vsGf -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - 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'
New Drugs
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- At 1:39 PM -0400 8/23/05, Trei, Peter wrote: I [want] a new drug... I would request the irony-impaired actually look up the lyrics of this paen to endogenous ero-endorphins, written by a drug-hating San Francisco acid-kindergarten refugee. In the meantime, I'm all for the legalization of meth -- as long as I get to sharpen my Recon Tonto and personally slit the bag of any of the bastids as they cross my windowsill looking for something to steal. Kinda like opening the borders without killing the welfare state first. Okay, maybe our porous borders *will* kill the welfare state, of course, Reagan used unrestrained soviet-killing budget deficits to kill the welfare state en passant. He didn't? I mean, Clinton *did* say ...big government is over., right? Right??? looks offstage This thing on? Cheers, RAH The only to legalize anything is when progress makes the law superfluous. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.2 (Build 2425) iQEVAwUBQwtypsUCGwxmWcHhAQHpDgf/T5q80m2rgc57388eGuvdIq1YttZDMww2 NannlO3JhKbTXQNKuoArDV66GPhg9nST3KYWLXI/MyrJllgtNioudkxF/pTU B3ussJXFfHbo3Ya1wgM9P1srQlK6smmamv3oHXY92kqeM5JBWfwG7gybMaC+IKKb nk0YgblOoW2bsXfONjdISXti0ENvkFIMrLxajoWVXSAp1exDOCJPqLSxbKnX2DNd ftBNYO8h9tt/qr6KRhBZsY449Vs1g1CMVigdVy6h7y9WBlhRWCMjJF/pfnJWbQJm a4f9H/XjNntHVr+Z0UZnthj0Va2RKKm99CKTFS+7fypDlEfslq/W3A== =vsGf -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - 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'
[fc-announce] CFP FC'06: Financial Cryptography and Data Security
--- begin forwarded text To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Avi Rubin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [fc-announce] CFP FC'06: Financial Cryptography and Data Security Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 13:58:29 -0400 x-flowed Call for Papers FC'06: Financial Cryptography and Data Security http://fc06.ifca.ai/ Tenth International Conference February 27 to March 2, 2006 Anguilla, British West Indies Submissions Due Date: October 17, 2005 Program Chairs: Giovanni Di Crescenzo (Telcordia) Avi Rubin (Johns Hopkins University) General Chair: Patrick McDaniel (Penn State University) Local Arrangements Chair: Rafael Hirschfeld (Unipay Technologies) At its 10th year edition, Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'06) is a well established and major international forum for research, advanced development, education, exploration, and debate regarding security in the context of finance and commerce. We will continue last year's augmentation of the conference title and expansion of our scope to cover all aspects of securing transactions and systems. These aspects include a range of technical areas such as: cryptography, payment systems, secure transaction architectures, software systems and tools, user and operator interfaces, fraud prevention, secure IT infrastructure, and analysis methodologies. Our focus will also encompass financial, legal, business and policy aspects. Material both on theoretical (fundamental) aspects of securing systems, on secure applications and real-world deployments will be considered. The conference goal is to bring together top cryptographers, data-security specialists, and scientists with economists, bankers, implementers, and policy makers. Intimate and colorful by tradition, the FC'06 program will feature invited talks, academic presentations, technical demonstrations, and panel discussions. In addition, we will celebrate this 10th year edition with a number of initiatives, such as: especially focused session, technical and historical state-of-the-art panels, and one session of surveys. This conference is organized annually by the International Financial Cryptography Association (IFCA). Original papers, surveys and presentations on all aspects of financial and commerce security are invited. Submissions must have a visible bearing on financial and commerce security issues, but can be interdisciplinary in nature and need not be exclusively concerned with cryptography or security. Possible topics for submission to the various sessions include, but are not limited to: Anonymity and Privacy Microfinance and AuctionsMicropayments Audit and Auditability Monitoring, Management and Authentication and Operations Identification, including Reputation Systems Biometrics RFID-Based and Contactless Certification and Payment Systems Authorization Risk Assessment and Commercial CryptographicManagement ApplicationsSecure Banking and Financial Commercial Transactions and Web Services Contracts Securing Emerging Digital Cash and PaymentComputational Paradigms Systems Security and Risk Digital Incentive and Perceptions and Judgments Loyalty Systems Security Economics Digital Rights Management Smart Cards and Secure Financial Regulation andTokens Reporting Trust Management Fraud Detection Trustability and Game Theoretic Approaches toTrustworthiness SecurityUnderground-Market Economics Identity Theft, Physhing andUsability and Acceptance of Social Engineering Security Systems Infrastructure Design User and Operator Interfaces Legal and Regulatory Issues Voting system security Submission Instructions Submission Categories FC'06 is inviting submissions in four categories: (1) research papers, (2) systems and applications presentations, (3) panel sessions, (4) surveys. For all accepted submissions, at least one author must attend the conference and present the work. Research Papers Research papers should describe novel scientific contributions to the field, and they will be subject to rigorous peer review. Papers can be a maximum of 15 pages in length (including references and appendices), and accepted submissions will be published in full in the conference proceedings. Systems and Application Presentations Submissions in this category should describe novel or successful systems with an emphasis on secure digital commerce applications. Presentations may concern commercial systems,
[Clips] Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 23:01:38 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-523-1715166-523,00.html The Times of London July 31, 2005 Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out Over the past fortnight Israeli intelligence agents have noticed something distinctly odd happening on the internet. One by one, Al-Qaeda's affiliated websites have vanished until only a handful remain, write Uzi Mahnaimi and Alex Pell. Someone has cut the line of communication between the spiritual leaders of international terrorism and their supporters. Since 9/11 the websites have been the main links to disseminate propaganda and information. The Israelis detect the hand of British intelligence, determined to torpedo the websites after the London attacks of July 7. The web has become the new battleground of terrorism, permitting a freedom of communication denied to such organisations as the IRA a couple of decades ago. One global jihad site terminated recently was an inflammatory Pakistani site, www.mojihedun.com, in which a section entitled How to Strike a European City gave full technical instructions. Tens of similar sites, some offering detailed information on how to build and use biological weapons, have also been shut down. However, Islamic sites believed to be moderate, remain. One belongs to the London-based Syrian cleric Abu Basir al-Tartusi, whose www.abubaseer.bizland.com remained operative after he condemned the London bombings. However, the scales remain weighted in favour of global jihad, the first virtual terror organisation. For all the vaunted spying advances such as tracking mobile phones and isolating key phrases in telephone conversations, experts believe current technologies actually play into the hands of those who would harm us. Modern technology puts most of the advantages in the hands of the terrorists. That is the bottom line, says Professor Michael Clarke, of King's College London, who is director of the International Policy Institute. Government-sponsored monitoring systems, such as Echelon, can track vast amounts of data but have so far proved of minimal benefit in preventing, or even warning, of attacks. And such systems are vulnerable to manipulation: low-ranking volunteers in terrorist organisations can create background chatter that ties up resources and maintains a threshold of anxiety. There are many tricks of the trade that give terrorists secure digital communication and leave no trace on the host computer. Ironically, the most readily available sources of accurate online information on bomb-making are the websites of the radical American militia. I have not seen any Al-Qaeda manuals that look like genuine terrorist training, claims Clarke. However, the sobering message of many security experts is that the terrorists are unlikely ever to lose a war waged with technology. -- - 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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 When the hares made speeches in the assembly and demanded that all should have equality, the lions replied, Where are your claws and teeth? -- attributed to Antisthenes in Aristotle, 'Politics', 3.7.2
[Clips] Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 23:01:38 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-523-1715166-523,00.html The Times of London July 31, 2005 Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out Over the past fortnight Israeli intelligence agents have noticed something distinctly odd happening on the internet. One by one, Al-Qaeda's affiliated websites have vanished until only a handful remain, write Uzi Mahnaimi and Alex Pell. Someone has cut the line of communication between the spiritual leaders of international terrorism and their supporters. Since 9/11 the websites have been the main links to disseminate propaganda and information. The Israelis detect the hand of British intelligence, determined to torpedo the websites after the London attacks of July 7. The web has become the new battleground of terrorism, permitting a freedom of communication denied to such organisations as the IRA a couple of decades ago. One global jihad site terminated recently was an inflammatory Pakistani site, www.mojihedun.com, in which a section entitled How to Strike a European City gave full technical instructions. Tens of similar sites, some offering detailed information on how to build and use biological weapons, have also been shut down. However, Islamic sites believed to be moderate, remain. One belongs to the London-based Syrian cleric Abu Basir al-Tartusi, whose www.abubaseer.bizland.com remained operative after he condemned the London bombings. However, the scales remain weighted in favour of global jihad, the first virtual terror organisation. For all the vaunted spying advances such as tracking mobile phones and isolating key phrases in telephone conversations, experts believe current technologies actually play into the hands of those who would harm us. Modern technology puts most of the advantages in the hands of the terrorists. That is the bottom line, says Professor Michael Clarke, of King's College London, who is director of the International Policy Institute. Government-sponsored monitoring systems, such as Echelon, can track vast amounts of data but have so far proved of minimal benefit in preventing, or even warning, of attacks. And such systems are vulnerable to manipulation: low-ranking volunteers in terrorist organisations can create background chatter that ties up resources and maintains a threshold of anxiety. There are many tricks of the trade that give terrorists secure digital communication and leave no trace on the host computer. Ironically, the most readily available sources of accurate online information on bomb-making are the websites of the radical American militia. I have not seen any Al-Qaeda manuals that look like genuine terrorist training, claims Clarke. However, the sobering message of many security experts is that the terrorists are unlikely ever to lose a war waged with technology. -- - 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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 When the hares made speeches in the assembly and demanded that all should have equality, the lions replied, Where are your claws and teeth? -- attributed to Antisthenes in Aristotle, 'Politics', 3.7.2
[Clips] Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 23:08:30 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mosnews.com/news/2005/07/25/spammerdead.shtml - NEWS - MOSNEWS.COM Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment Created: 25.07.2005 13:14 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 14:24 MSK, 16 hours 33 minutes ago MosNews Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head. Kushnir, 35, headed the English learning centers the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, all known to have aggressive Internet advertising policies in which millions of e-mails were sent every day. In the past angry Internet users have targeted the American English centre by publishing the Center's telephone numbers anywhere on the Web to provoke telephone calls. The Center's telephone was advertised as a contact number for cheap sex services, or bargain real estate sales. Another attack involved hundreds of people making phone calls to the American English Center and sending it numerous e-mails back, but Vardan Kushnir remained sure of his right to spam, saying it was what e-mails were for. Under Russian law, spamming is not considered illegal, although lawmakers are working on legal projects that could protect Russian Internet users like they do in Europe and the U.S. -- - 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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: [Clips] Clippre: Police ask for tough new powers
At 10:31 PM -0700 7/22/05, Sarad AV wrote: The root cause of terrorism in many cases is that - you screw them and they screw you. That too has to stop. The root cause of any war is that somebody didn't finish screwing somebody. :-). Finish what you start. Cheers, RAH Who's feeling particularly Jacksonian, this morning... -- - 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: [Clips] Clippre: Police ask for tough new powers
At 10:31 PM -0700 7/22/05, Sarad AV wrote: The root cause of terrorism in many cases is that - you screw them and they screw you. That too has to stop. The root cause of any war is that somebody didn't finish screwing somebody. :-). Finish what you start. Cheers, RAH Who's feeling particularly Jacksonian, this morning... -- - 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'
[Clips] Clippre: Police ask for tough new powers
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 19:43:26 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Clippre: Police ask for tough new powers Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Here we go again... They also want to make it a criminal offence for suspects to refuse to cooperate in giving the police full access to computer files by refusing to disclose their encryption keys. Cheers, RAH http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5245014-117079,00.html The Guardian Police ask for tough new powers PM told of need for three-month detention of suspects and crackdown on websites Alan Travis and Richard Norton-Taylor Friday July 22, 2005 Police last night told Tony Blair that they need sweeping new powers to counter the terrorist threat, including the right to detain a suspect for up to three months without charge instead of the current 14 days. Senior officers also want powers to attack and close down websites, and a new criminal offence of using the internet to prepare acts of terrorism, to suppress inappropriate internet usage. They also want to make it a criminal offence for suspects to refuse to cooperate in giving the police full access to computer files by refusing to disclose their encryption keys. The police would also like to see much clearer information given to the public about the threat level, the creation of a specialist border security agency and further discussions about the use of phonetap evidence in terrorist cases. The Association of Chief Police Officers published its list of 11 further changes in the law it wants after meeting Mr Blair and security services chiefs yesterday. MI5 and MI6 wanted yesterday's meeting to discuss Britain's entire counter-terrorism strategy and how to fill the intelligence gaps exposed by the London bombings. Whitehall officials confirmed that, as reported in yesterday's Guardian, the security and intelligence agencies want a new system of plea bargaining. Convicted terrorists would be given lighter sentences if they supplied information before their trials. Suspects would be given the chance to provide information in intelligence-only interviews and none of the information would be used against them in trials. Officials also said MI5 was in principle in favour of the product of phone taps being used as evidence in trials. What has not been resolved is who would pay for the resources needed to transcribe the tapes in a way that would satisfy defence lawyers, according to counter-terrorism sources. The prime minister has said he is willing to consider any gaps in the law that police and security chiefs identify as a result of the London attacks. Ken Jones, the chairman of Acpo's terrorism committee and Sussex chief constable, said: The evolving nature of the current threat from international terrorism demands that those charged with countering the threat have the tools they need to do the job. Often there is a need to intervene and disrupt at an early stage those who are intent on terrorist activity, in order to protect the public. Clearly our legislation must reflect the importance of such disruptive action. The most controversial of the police proposals is the demand to be able to hold without charge a terrorist suspect for three months instead of 14 days. An Acpo spokesman said the complexity and scale of counter-terrorist operations means the 14-day maximum is often insufficient. The complexities and timescales surrounding forensic examination of [crime] scenes merely add to the burden and immense time pressures on investigating officers, he said. Three-month periods would help to ensure the charge could be sustained in court. Other powers police told Mr Blair they needed include: · Terror suspects to give compulsory answers to questions similar to obligations on company directors in fraud trials; · A duty on the private sector to install protective security in designated locations; · Putting private security staff at the disposal of the police in the immediate aftermath of an outrage; · New generation CCTV cameras at ports and airports. The police sought extra funding for a regional network of Special Branch officers and a further £45m to ensure national coverage for the new generation CCTV cameras, which scan number plates and alert intercept teams. The terrorist attacks in London on July 7 and today provide an opportunity for us to reflect on our systems and practices to ensure they are sufficient to counter such unprecedented events, Mr Jones said. -- - 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
Re: [Clips] [dave@farber.net: [IP] Police use cameras to track vehicles of suspects]
--- begin forwarded text Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 17:05:05 -0700 (PDT) From: G. Gruff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Clips] [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Police use cameras to track vehicles of suspects] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Heh, heh, heh.more'n one way to skin a radar camera... http://www.phantomplate.com/photoblocker.htmlhttp://www.phantomplate.com/photoblocker.html Apparently works. There's measured outrage against it. ffurgy_|_gruffy, reporting from the Mad Hatter's Flash-Block Seminar R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:59:51 +0200 From: Eugen Leitl To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Police use cameras to track vehicles of suspects] User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Forwarded message from David Farber - From: David Farber Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 11:49:17 -0400 To: Ip ip Subject: [IP] Police use cameras to track vehicles of suspects X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.733) Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Begin forwarded message: From: Bruce Schneier Date: July 20, 2005 11:04:17 AM EDT To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [EPIC_IDOF] Police use cameras to track vehicles of suspects I've written about this in New Haven, CT: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/license_plate_g.html This new story is from Scotland. Bruce Police use cameras to track vehicles of suspects http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/43417.html LUCY ADAMS, Home Affairs Correspondent July 20 2005 POLICE have created a database of more than 6000 vehicles of suspects which they can track on special cameras as they move around the country. On major roads across Scotland, the cameras, which look similar to the speed ones, record thousands of licence plates every hour and scan them against the database. Those on the list are flagged up with the local force control room with details of the direction in which they are travelling. Depending on the intelligence held on the motorist, the vehicle could be stopped immediately by officers or monitored during its journey. Senior police say there are a substantial number of cameras across the country aimed at detecting drugs traffickers, sex offenders, suspected terrorists and banned or unlicensed drivers. Owners on the list are not told, and civil rights campaigners have raised concerns about whether the scheme is compatible with human rights legislation. However, officers say Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), originally created for counter-terrorism, is a vital tool in collecting intelligence on criminals and suspected terrorists. Alan Burnett, spokesman on the system for the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, and assistant chief constable of Fife, said: It is directed against detecting travelling housebreakers, potential terrorists, bogus callers and drug traffickers. This technology is very much geared towards disrupting criminals such as drug traffickers and it is not about prosecuting the motorist. He said it was nothing to do with speeding or Big Brother, adding that there were various lengths of time over which they could hold the information: A stolen vehicle may be on the list for two days, but more serious intelligence may be kept on the list for up to 90 days. The Scottish Executive has spent ?1.5m on ANPR machines which can check up to 3000 licence plates an hour on vehicles travelling at speeds of up to 100mph. Forces are planning to connect this database to the Scottish Intelligence Database (SID) to allow every officer to be able to request that a vehicle of interest should be checked. It is managed by the Scottish Criminal Records Office where a sergeant is responsible for checking the information is held only for a certain time and that it is compliant with human rights legislation. John Scott, head of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said he was concerned about the lack of judicial scrutiny. ___ EPIC_IDOF mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://mailman.epic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/epic_idof - You are subscribed as [EMAIL PROTECTED] To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ - End forwarded message - -- Eugen* Leitl http://leitl.org/leitl __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc] --- end forwarded text -- - R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 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
[Clips] Stuart Baker, ex NSA general counsel, gets Homeland Security post
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 23:46:48 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Stuart Baker, ex NSA general counsel, gets Homeland Security post Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com To: cryptography@metzdowd.com Subject: Stuart Baker, ex NSA general counsel, gets Homeland Security post From: Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 21:15:15 -0400 Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Many of you may remember Stuart Baker from the crypto export policy wars. I still remember him telling me in a conversation after a New York Bar Association debate on the subject that the Internet would never be of any economic importance. Anyway, without further comment: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/07/20050713-8.html The President intends to nominate Stewart A. Baker, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security (Policy). Mr. Baker is currently a Partner with Steptoe Johnson, LLP in Washington, D.C. He previously served as General Counsel for the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Prior to that, Mr. Baker served as General Counsel for the National Security Agency. Earlier in his career, he was a law clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens, U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Baker received his bachelor's degree from Brown University and his J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Perry - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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'
[Clips] Pennsylvania's Anarchist Experiment: 1681-1690
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 11:15:13 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Pennsylvania's Anarchist Experiment: 1681-1690 Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text From: Mises Daily Article [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mises Daily Article [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Pennsylvania's Anarchist Experiment: 1681-1690 Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 10:00:02 -0400 Mailing-List: contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit the http://blog.mises.org/Mises Economics Blog. Pennsylvania's Anarchist Experiment: 1681-1690 by Murray N. Rothbard http://www.mises.org/story/1865[Posted on Friday, July 08, 2005] [This essay, never before online, is from Rothbard's magisterial 4-volume history of the Colonial period of the United States, http://www.mises.org/store/Conceived-in-Liberty--P96C0.aspxConceived in Liberty] In the vast stretches of America, William Penn envisaged a truly Quaker colony, a Holy experiment...that an example may be set up to the nations. In his quest for such a charter, Penn was aided by the fact that the Crown had owed his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, the huge sum of 16,000 pounds for loans and back salary. In March 1681 the king agreed to grant young William, the admiral's heir, proprietary ownership of the lands west of the Delaware River and north of the Maryland border in exchange for canceling the old debt. The land was to be called Pennsylvania. Penn was greatly aided in securing the charter by his friendship with the king and other high officials of the court. The proprietary charter was not quite as absolute as the colonial charters granted earlier in the century. The proprietor could rule only with the advice and consent of an assembly of freemena provision quite satisfactory to Penn. The Privy Council could veto Pennsylvania's actions, and the Crown, of course, could hear appeals from litigation in the colony. The Navigation Acts had to be enforced, and there was an ambiguous provision implying that England could impose taxes in Pennsylvania. As soon as Penn heard news of the charter, he dispatched his cousin William Markham to be deputy governor of Pennsylvania. The latter informed the five hundred or so Swedish and Dutch residents on the west bank of the Delaware of the new charter. In the fall Markham was succeeded by four commissioners, and they were succeeded by Thomas Holme as deputy governor in early 1682. In May William Penn made the Frame of Government the constitution for the colony. The Frame was amended and streamlined, and became the Second Frame of 1683, also called the Charter of Liberties. The Frame provided, first, for full religious freedom for all theists. No compulsory religion was to be enforced. The Quaker ideal of religious liberty was put into practice. Only Christians, however, were to be eligible for public office; later, at the insistence of the Crown, Catholics were barred from official posts in the colony. The government, as instituted by the Frame, comprised a governor, the proprietor; an elected Council, which performed executive and supreme judicial functions; and an Assembly, elected by the freeholders, Justices of lower courts were appointed by the governor. But while the Assembly, like those in other colonies, had the only power to levy taxes, its powers were more restricted than those of assemblies elsewhere. Only the Council could initiate laws, and the Assembly was confined to ratifying or vetoing the Council's proposals. William Penn himself arrived in America in the fall of 1682 to institute the new colony. He announced that the Duke's Laws would be temporarily in force and then called an Assembly for December. The Assembly included representatives not only of three counties of Pennsylvania, but also of the three lower counties of Delaware. For Delawareor New Castle and the lower counties on the west bank of Delaware Bayhad been secured from the Duke of York in August. While Penn's legal title to exercising governmental functions over Delaware was dubious, he pursued it boldly. William Penn now owned the entire west bank of the Delaware River. The Assembly confirmed the amended Frame of Government, including the declaration of religious liberty, and this code of laws constituted the Great Law of Pennsylvania.' The three lower Delaware counties were placed under one administration, separate from Pennsylvania proper. Penn was anxious to promote settlement as rapidly as possible, both for religious (a haven to Quakers) and for economic (income for himself) reasons, Penn advertised the virtues of the new colony far and wide throughout Europe. Although he tried to impose quitrents and extracted selling prices for land, he disposed of the land at easy terms. The prices of land were cheap. Fifty acres were granted to each
[Clips] But Wouldn't Warlords Take Over?
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 15:57:37 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] But Wouldn't Warlords Take Over? Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text From: Mises Daily Article [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mises Daily Article [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: But Wouldn't Warlords Take Over? Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 09:30:03 -0400 Mailing-List: contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] July Special: http://www.mises.org/store/Myth-of-National-Defense-The-P171C0.aspxThe Myth of National Defense, 20% Off (from $25 to $20). But Wouldn't Warlords Take Over? by Robert Murphy http://www.mises.org/story/1855[Posted on Thursday, July 07, 2005] On two separate occasions in the last couple of weeks, people have asked me a familiar question: In a system of anarcho-capitalism or the free-market order, wouldnt society degenerate into constant battles between private warlords? Unfortunately I didnt give adequate answers at the times, but I hope in this article to prove the adage that later is better than never. APPLES AND ORANGES When dealing with the warlord objection, we need to keep our comparisons fair. It wont do to compare society A, which is filled with evil, ignorant savages who live under anarchy, with society B, which is populated by enlightened, law-abiding citizens who live under limited government. The anarchist doesnt deny that life might be better in society B. What the anarchist does claim is that, for any given population, the imposition of a coercive government will make things worse. The absence of a State is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to achieve the free society. To put the matter differently: It is not enough to demonstrate that a state of private-property anarchy could degenerate into ceaseless war, where no single group is strong enough to subjugate all challengers, and hence no one can establish order. After all, communities living under a State degenerate into civil war all the time. We should remember that the frequently cited cases of Colombia and now Iraq are not demonstrations of anarchy-turned-into-chaos, but rather examples of government-turned-into-chaos. For the warlord objection to work, the statist would need to argue that a given community would remain lawful under a government, but that the same community would break down into continuous warfare if all legal and military services were privatized. The popular case of Somalia, therefore, helps neither side.http://www.mises.org/story/1855#_edn1[i] It is true that Rothbardians should be somewhat disturbed that the respect for non-aggression is apparently too rare in Somalia to foster the spontaneous emergence of a totally free market community. But by the same token, the respect for the law was also too weak to allow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Somalia#Somali_Civil_Warthe original Somali government to maintain order. Now that weve focused the issue, I think there are strong reasons to suppose that civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly State. Private agencies own the assets at their disposal, whereas politicians (especially in democracies) merely exercise temporary control over the States military equipment. Bill Clinton was perfectly willing to http://news.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1998/08/21/wemb21.htmlfire off dozens of cruise missiles when the Lewinsky scandal was picking up steam. Now regardless of ones beliefs about Clintons motivations, clearly Slick Willie would have been less likely to launch such an attack if he had been the CEO of a private defense agency that could have sold the missiles on the open market for http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/missiles/wep-toma.html$569,000 each .http://www.mises.org/story/1855#_edn2[ii] We can see this principle in the case of the United States. In the 1860s, would large scale combat have broken out on anywhere near the same scale if, instead of the two factions controlling hundreds of thousands of conscripts, all military commanders had to hire voluntary mercenaries and pay them a market wage for their services? CONTRACT THEORY OF GOVERNMENT I can imagine a reader generally endorsing the above analysis, yet still resisting my conclusion. He or she might say something like this: In a state of nature, people initially have different views of justice. Under market anarchy, different consumers would patronize dozens of defense agencies, each of which attempts to use its forces to implement incompatible codes of law. Now its true that these professional gangs might generally avoid conflict out of prudence, but the equilibrium would still be precarious. To avoid this outcome, my critic
[Clips] Re: [Forwarded] RealID: How to become an unperson.
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 15:50:46 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Clips] Re: [Forwarded] RealID: How to become an unperson. Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com Subject: Re: [Forwarded] RealID: How to become an unperson. From: Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 09:52:28 -0400 User-Agent: Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) Emacs/21.4 (berkeley-unix) Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: But nevertheless, I do not understand why americans are so afraid of an ID card. Perhaps I can explain why I am. I do not trust governments. I've inherited this perspective. My grandfather sent his children abroad from Speyer in Germany just after the ascension of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s -- his neighbors thought he was crazy, but few of them survived the coming events. My father was sent to Alsace, but he stayed too long in France and ended up being stuck there after the occupation. If it were not for forged papers, he would have died. (He had a most amusing story of working as an electrician rewiring a hotel used as office space by the Gestapo in Strasbourg -- his forged papers were apparently good enough that no one noticed.) Ultimately, he and other members of the family escaped France by illegally crossing the border into Switzerland. (I put illegally in quotes because I don't believe one has any moral obligation to obey a law like that, especially since it would leave you dead if you obeyed.) Anyway, if the governments of the time had actually had access to modern anti-forgery techniques, I might never have been born. To you, ID cards are a nice way to keep things orderly. To me, they are a potential death sentence. Most Europeans seem to see government as the friendly, nice set of people who keep the trains running on time and who watch out for your interests. A surprisingly large fraction of Americans are people or the descendants of people who experienced the institution of government as the thing that tortured their friends to death, or gassed them, or stole all their money and nearly starved them to death, etc. Hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of their own governments in the 20th century, and many of the people that escaped from such horrors moved here. They view things like ID cards and mandatory registry of residence with the local police as the way that the government rounded up their friends and relatives so they could be killed. I do not wish to argue about which view is correct. Perhaps I am wrong and Government really is the large friendly group of people that are there to help you. Perhaps the cost/benefit analysis of ID cards and such makes us look silly. I'm not addressing the question of whether my view is right here -- I'm just trying to explain the psychological mindset that would make someone think ID cards are a very bad idea. So, the next time one of your friends in Germany asks why the crazy Americans think ID cards and such are a bad thing, remember my father, and remember all the people like him who fled to the US over the last couple hundred years and who left children that still remember such things, whether from China or North Korea or Germany or Spain or Russia or Yugoslavia or Chile or lots of other places. Perry - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 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' ___ Clips mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.philodox.com/mailman/listinfo/clips --- 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'
Len Adleman (of R,S, and A): Universities need a little Limbaugh
A little humor this morning... He's right, but it's still funny. Expect Dr. Adleman to be asked to turn in his Liberal Secret Decoder Ring forthwith... Cheers, RAH --- http://www.dailynews.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,200%257E20951%257E2872499,00.html Los Angeles Daily News Universities need a little Limbaugh By Leonard M. Adleman Saturday, May 14, 2005 - Pomp and circumstance. Black-robed students receiving diplomas as proud parents look on. Distinguished members of society receiving honorary degrees and offering sage advice to ''America's future.'' It is commencement time again at the nation's universities. This year I nominated Rush Limbaugh for an honorary doctorate at the University of Southern California, where I am a professor. Why Limbaugh _ a man with whom I disagree at least as much as I agree? Here are some of the reasons I gave in my letter of nomination: ''Rush Limbaugh has engendered epochal changes in politics and the media. He has accomplished this in the noblest of ways, through speech and the power of his ideas. Mr. Limbaugh began his career as a radio talk-show host in Sacramento in 1984. He espoused ideas that were conservative and in clear opposition to the dominant ideas of the time. Perhaps because of the persuasiveness of Mr. Limbaugh's ideas or because they resonated with the unspoken beliefs of a number of Americans, his audience grew. Today, he has the largest audience of any talk show host (said to be in excess of 20 million people per week) and his ideas reverberate throughout our society. ''Mr. Limbaugh is a three-time recipient of the National Association of Broadcasters' Marconi Radio Award for Syndicated Radio Personality of the Year. In 1993, he was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters' Broadcasting Hall of Fame. ''In 1994, an American electorate, transformed by ideas that Mr. Limbaugh championed, gave control of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years. That year, Republican congressmen held a ceremony for Mr. Limbaugh and declared him an 'honorary member of Congress.' The recent re-election of President Bush suggests that this transformation continues. One of Mr. Limbaugh's major themes through the years has been liberal bias in the 'mainstream' media. His focus on this theme has made him the target of incessant condemnation. Nonetheless, he has persevered and it now appears that his view is prevailing. As the recent debacle at CBS shows, the media is in the process of major change. Ideally, the American people will profit from a reconstituted media that will act more perfectly as a marketplace for ideas.'' But there is a bigger reason why I support giving him an honorary degree: Because I value intellectual diversity. Regrettably, the university declined to offer Limbaugh a degree. As best I can determine, no university has honored him in this way. On the other hand, such presumably liberal media luminaries as Dan Rather, Chris Matthews, Judy Woodruff, Bill Moyers, Terry Gross, Paul Krugman and Peter Arnett have received many honorary degrees from the nation's universities. Now before you label me as a right-wing ideologue, let me present my credentials as a centrist. Limbaugh has well-known positions on the following issues: abortion, capital punishment, affirmative action, prayer in school, gun control, the Iraq war. I disagree with him on half of these. But intellectual diversity has all but vanished from America's campuses. We are failing in our duty to provide our students with a broad spectrum of ideas from which to choose. Honoring Limbaugh, or someone like him, would help to make the academy more intellectually diverse. The great liberal ideas that swept through our universities when I was a student at Berkeley in the 1960s have long ago been digested and largely embraced in academia. Liberalism has triumphed. But a troubling legacy of that triumph is a nation whose professorate is almost entirely liberal. In the 29 years I have been a professor, I do not recall encountering a single colleague who expressed conservative ideas. The left-wing accusations of Ward Churchill (Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Alfred University, 1992) are not the problem _ the problem is the scarcity of professors who are inclined to rebut them. It is time for the nation's universities to address this disturbing situation. So I hereby extend my nomination of Limbaugh to all universities. It would be a refreshing demonstration of renewed commitment to intellectual diversity if next spring we hear Dr. Limbaugh's words as our graduates ''go forth.'' Professor Leonard M. Adleman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. -- - 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,
Len Adleman (of R,S, and A): Universities need a little Limbaugh
A little humor this morning... He's right, but it's still funny. Expect Dr. Adleman to be asked to turn in his Liberal Secret Decoder Ring forthwith... Cheers, RAH --- http://www.dailynews.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,200%257E20951%257E2872499,00.html Los Angeles Daily News Universities need a little Limbaugh By Leonard M. Adleman Saturday, May 14, 2005 - Pomp and circumstance. Black-robed students receiving diplomas as proud parents look on. Distinguished members of society receiving honorary degrees and offering sage advice to ''America's future.'' It is commencement time again at the nation's universities. This year I nominated Rush Limbaugh for an honorary doctorate at the University of Southern California, where I am a professor. Why Limbaugh _ a man with whom I disagree at least as much as I agree? Here are some of the reasons I gave in my letter of nomination: ''Rush Limbaugh has engendered epochal changes in politics and the media. He has accomplished this in the noblest of ways, through speech and the power of his ideas. Mr. Limbaugh began his career as a radio talk-show host in Sacramento in 1984. He espoused ideas that were conservative and in clear opposition to the dominant ideas of the time. Perhaps because of the persuasiveness of Mr. Limbaugh's ideas or because they resonated with the unspoken beliefs of a number of Americans, his audience grew. Today, he has the largest audience of any talk show host (said to be in excess of 20 million people per week) and his ideas reverberate throughout our society. ''Mr. Limbaugh is a three-time recipient of the National Association of Broadcasters' Marconi Radio Award for Syndicated Radio Personality of the Year. In 1993, he was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters' Broadcasting Hall of Fame. ''In 1994, an American electorate, transformed by ideas that Mr. Limbaugh championed, gave control of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years. That year, Republican congressmen held a ceremony for Mr. Limbaugh and declared him an 'honorary member of Congress.' The recent re-election of President Bush suggests that this transformation continues. One of Mr. Limbaugh's major themes through the years has been liberal bias in the 'mainstream' media. His focus on this theme has made him the target of incessant condemnation. Nonetheless, he has persevered and it now appears that his view is prevailing. As the recent debacle at CBS shows, the media is in the process of major change. Ideally, the American people will profit from a reconstituted media that will act more perfectly as a marketplace for ideas.'' But there is a bigger reason why I support giving him an honorary degree: Because I value intellectual diversity. Regrettably, the university declined to offer Limbaugh a degree. As best I can determine, no university has honored him in this way. On the other hand, such presumably liberal media luminaries as Dan Rather, Chris Matthews, Judy Woodruff, Bill Moyers, Terry Gross, Paul Krugman and Peter Arnett have received many honorary degrees from the nation's universities. Now before you label me as a right-wing ideologue, let me present my credentials as a centrist. Limbaugh has well-known positions on the following issues: abortion, capital punishment, affirmative action, prayer in school, gun control, the Iraq war. I disagree with him on half of these. But intellectual diversity has all but vanished from America's campuses. We are failing in our duty to provide our students with a broad spectrum of ideas from which to choose. Honoring Limbaugh, or someone like him, would help to make the academy more intellectually diverse. The great liberal ideas that swept through our universities when I was a student at Berkeley in the 1960s have long ago been digested and largely embraced in academia. Liberalism has triumphed. But a troubling legacy of that triumph is a nation whose professorate is almost entirely liberal. In the 29 years I have been a professor, I do not recall encountering a single colleague who expressed conservative ideas. The left-wing accusations of Ward Churchill (Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Alfred University, 1992) are not the problem _ the problem is the scarcity of professors who are inclined to rebut them. It is time for the nation's universities to address this disturbing situation. So I hereby extend my nomination of Limbaugh to all universities. It would be a refreshing demonstration of renewed commitment to intellectual diversity if next spring we hear Dr. Limbaugh's words as our graduates ''go forth.'' Professor Leonard M. Adleman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. -- - 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,
Clarke confirms disappearance, and reappearance, of ID cards
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/06/clarke_ditches_cards/print.html The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register » Internet and Law » Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs » Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/06/clarke_ditches_cards/ Clarke confirms disappearance, and reappearance, of ID cards By John Oates (john.oates at theregister.co.uk) Published Wednesday 6th April 2005 15:15 GMT Home Secretary Charles Clarke has confirmed that controversial legislation to introduce ID cards has been shelved. But he said the ID card bill would be included in the Labour Party's manifesto, published early next week, and would be an early priority for the next Parliament should Labour win the election. Clarke blamed the Tories for the failure of the bill. He said their lack of support forced him to ditch the bill. The Tories rejected this and pointed out that the government chose how much legislation to include in the Queen's speech as well as the date of the General Election.® -- - 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'
Stolen Credit Card Numbers and Companies with a Clue (was Re: TidBITS#772/28-Mar-05)
At 5:48 PM -0800 3/28/05, TidBITS Editors wrote: Stolen Credit Card Numbers and Companies with a Clue by Adam C. Engst [EMAIL PROTECTED] Credit card number theft is one of those events that seems to happen only to other people... until it hits you. That just happened to me, and the repercussions proved a bit more instructive and far-reaching that I would have initially anticipated. **Awkward Dating** -- The first hint that something was wrong came when Tonya was reviewing the charges on the MasterCard we use solely for business purchases. There was a $19.95 charge to something related to Yahoo, but it wasn't possible to tell exactly what service from the limited information on the credit card statement. Tonya knew she hadn't ordered anything online that could have generated such a charge, and when she asked me, I couldn't remember anything either. To verify that I wasn't simply losing my memory, I searched all my received email around the date in question, and even went so far as to search my OmniWeb history for Yahoo URLs around the date. The situation was becoming more curious, so Tonya called the phone number on the credit card statement, and waited on hold for a while. As she waited, she realized that what she had called was Yahoo Personals - Yahoo's online dating service. She immediately yelled for me to get on the phone, figuring that the whole situation was just going to generate snickers for the customer service people if they heard a wife calling to find out about a dating service charge on her husband's credit card. I was good and refrained from making jokes about how I didn't even get any dates from Yahoo Personals once the customer service people came on the line. http://personals.yahoo.com/ It took a little back and forth with Yahoo's customer service people, since we weren't willing to give them much more personal information, some of which they claimed they needed to look up the account that had made the charges. Eventually we got them to tell us that the Yahoo Personals account did indeed have the same user name as my My Yahoo account (I immediately changed that account's password, just for good measure), but that the birth date listed with the Yahoo Personals account did not match either of our birth dates. That was sufficient for them to cancel the account and refund our money. **Cleaning Up from Cancellation** -- The Yahoo Personals customer service rep recommended that we cancel the credit card used, which we were already planning as the next call. Our credit card issuer was totally on top of it, cancelling the card and issuing us another one before we'd even had a chance to explain the full situation. Tonya keeps records of merchants that are automatically withdrawing from that credit card, so next she reset all of those accounts. The morning was shot, but it seemed that we were out of the woods. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be. A few days later, Tristan and I were out driving when I remembered that our other car likely had a flat tire due to a slow leak I'd been monitoring. That normally wouldn't have been an issue, but Tonya had an appointment before we would be home, and I wanted to alert her to blow up the tire and to remember her cell phone in case she needed me to come change the tire while she was out. In New York State, it's illegal to drive while talking on a cell phone unless you're using a hands-free system, so I pressed the speed-dial number for home and handed Tristan the phone so he could give her the message. A few seconds later he gave me back the phone, saying It's being weird. I pulled over and listened, and indeed, I'd somehow ended up with Verizon Wireless customer service. I hung up and tried again, and got them again. This time I waited until I could talk to a person, who promptly informed me that they had disabled our service because the monthly bill had been rejected by our credit card - apparently one auto-withdrawal had slipped past Tonya's record keeping. Luckily, I was able to use another phone later to walk Tonya through inflating the tire, but the credit card fraud was increasing in annoyance. The next week Tonya managed to get the account reinstated, and protested sufficiently vehemently when Verizon Wireless tried to charge a $15 fee for doing so that they waived the charge. She pointed out that it would have been trivial for them to notify us via voicemail or text messaging that our auto-withdrawal had failed, but needless to say, the customer service drone couldn't do anything but forward the feedback (if even that). That wasn't the end of the bother, though the next one was purely my fault. I'd set up a Google AdWords account for Take Control that also withdrew money from that MasterCard, and I'd forgotten to inform Tonya that it needed to
Stolen Credit Card Numbers and Companies with a Clue (was Re: TidBITS#772/28-Mar-05)
At 5:48 PM -0800 3/28/05, TidBITS Editors wrote: Stolen Credit Card Numbers and Companies with a Clue by Adam C. Engst [EMAIL PROTECTED] Credit card number theft is one of those events that seems to happen only to other people... until it hits you. That just happened to me, and the repercussions proved a bit more instructive and far-reaching that I would have initially anticipated. **Awkward Dating** -- The first hint that something was wrong came when Tonya was reviewing the charges on the MasterCard we use solely for business purchases. There was a $19.95 charge to something related to Yahoo, but it wasn't possible to tell exactly what service from the limited information on the credit card statement. Tonya knew she hadn't ordered anything online that could have generated such a charge, and when she asked me, I couldn't remember anything either. To verify that I wasn't simply losing my memory, I searched all my received email around the date in question, and even went so far as to search my OmniWeb history for Yahoo URLs around the date. The situation was becoming more curious, so Tonya called the phone number on the credit card statement, and waited on hold for a while. As she waited, she realized that what she had called was Yahoo Personals - Yahoo's online dating service. She immediately yelled for me to get on the phone, figuring that the whole situation was just going to generate snickers for the customer service people if they heard a wife calling to find out about a dating service charge on her husband's credit card. I was good and refrained from making jokes about how I didn't even get any dates from Yahoo Personals once the customer service people came on the line. http://personals.yahoo.com/ It took a little back and forth with Yahoo's customer service people, since we weren't willing to give them much more personal information, some of which they claimed they needed to look up the account that had made the charges. Eventually we got them to tell us that the Yahoo Personals account did indeed have the same user name as my My Yahoo account (I immediately changed that account's password, just for good measure), but that the birth date listed with the Yahoo Personals account did not match either of our birth dates. That was sufficient for them to cancel the account and refund our money. **Cleaning Up from Cancellation** -- The Yahoo Personals customer service rep recommended that we cancel the credit card used, which we were already planning as the next call. Our credit card issuer was totally on top of it, cancelling the card and issuing us another one before we'd even had a chance to explain the full situation. Tonya keeps records of merchants that are automatically withdrawing from that credit card, so next she reset all of those accounts. The morning was shot, but it seemed that we were out of the woods. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be. A few days later, Tristan and I were out driving when I remembered that our other car likely had a flat tire due to a slow leak I'd been monitoring. That normally wouldn't have been an issue, but Tonya had an appointment before we would be home, and I wanted to alert her to blow up the tire and to remember her cell phone in case she needed me to come change the tire while she was out. In New York State, it's illegal to drive while talking on a cell phone unless you're using a hands-free system, so I pressed the speed-dial number for home and handed Tristan the phone so he could give her the message. A few seconds later he gave me back the phone, saying It's being weird. I pulled over and listened, and indeed, I'd somehow ended up with Verizon Wireless customer service. I hung up and tried again, and got them again. This time I waited until I could talk to a person, who promptly informed me that they had disabled our service because the monthly bill had been rejected by our credit card - apparently one auto-withdrawal had slipped past Tonya's record keeping. Luckily, I was able to use another phone later to walk Tonya through inflating the tire, but the credit card fraud was increasing in annoyance. The next week Tonya managed to get the account reinstated, and protested sufficiently vehemently when Verizon Wireless tried to charge a $15 fee for doing so that they waived the charge. She pointed out that it would have been trivial for them to notify us via voicemail or text messaging that our auto-withdrawal had failed, but needless to say, the customer service drone couldn't do anything but forward the feedback (if even that). That wasn't the end of the bother, though the next one was purely my fault. I'd set up a Google AdWords account for Take Control that also withdrew money from that MasterCard, and I'd forgotten to inform Tonya that it needed to
