Re: Seth Finkelstein, reluctant cypherpunk?
Declan writes: It's important for cypherpunks to understand why Seth Finkelstein has (apparently) recently subscribed to the list. Seth is essentially an anti-cypherpunk, someone who violently disagrees with free-market points of view and has spent (a conservative estimate) hundreds of hours arguing against them. Thanks, Declan. I think we've all figured that out by now. "Libertarians are people who think the only legitimate function of police is to protect them from their slaves." --Lots of People Most people get sucked into Libertarianism because it sounds like the word "liberty." After learning more about it, and meeting real Libertarians, they go "Icky-Poo" and run swiftly in the opposite direction. Libertarians don't mind this, because most of them also feel the exact same way about other Libertarians. Libertarian "philosophy" provides no mechanism whatsoever for arguing that there can't, for instance, be a death penalty. Or that "child abuse" should be defined by anything other than what the majority of non-children think it is ok to do to kids. I doubt you'll see any Libertarians protesting either when Sally Mann and Jock Sturges are hauled off to the Sex Offender Re-Education Camp either. In fact, Libertarians are real good at letting everyone have whatever rights they can personally defend, without anyone else lifting a finger. Foo on Libertarians. I have no use for them. Can you imagine what Libertarian foreign policy would look like, or a Libertarian space program? -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: heavy handed feebs fuck 16 year old kid
DALNet, a San Diego company that provides Internet chat networks, contacted the FBI and complained that several computer users had begun attacks on it. The hackers caused computers to become disabled and denied other users access to DALNet, according to an affidavit by John Pi, a computer expert and FBI agent in Los Angeles. I never knew Dalnet was a commercial entity, much less one that cooperates with the FBI in screwing over its users. I wonder if their servers log the chat traffic and index it for jackbooted thug convenience. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
IRC FUD: Chapter II
On the heels of the Efnext debacle, I just read this fascinating article in Wired News which purports to explain that Usenet is already dead, and IRC will be next. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,41077,00.html Methinks some people are just a teensy bit too eager to announce the demise of certain Anarchistic parts of the Net as a forgone conclusion. Particularly those parts which are used for Horsemen-related activities, and exist in a more supervised and LEA accessible form from providers like AOL. I'm not buying. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Anarchy Eroded: Project Efnext
Jim Choate writes: A typical citizen-unit will quickly trade a large amount of privacy for a small amount of convenience. That begs the question and misrepresents reality to a good degree. People take the choices they think they have, usually those choices are made available by the party that is operating the service the consumer will use. So, there is usually very little say for the consumer other than yes/no. This is not the fault of the consumer, it's the fault of the producer. In their drive to gain a significant share of the market (something which goes against free market economy by the way) they will reduce the number of combinations they must offer (reduces cost). I see some interesting science here. Permit me to explain. One of the unchallenged inerrant doctrines of crypto-anarchy has been that highly redundant widely distributed services are immune to attack. Indeed, things like BlackNet are made possible because they can use such services (eg alt.anonymous.message) as their underlying transport mechanism. Now we see a network of 33 servers being assimilated to a new way of doing things. How could this be? Perhaps there are some flaws in our analysis of highly redundant widely distributed networks. Perhaps by looking at Efnext, we might see what they are. Flaw number one is that the servers in most networks are not equal. Most Networks are star networks, and most of the nodes are leaf nodes. Leaf nodes are at the mercy of their hubs. Where the hubs go, the leaves will follow. Flaw number two is that it is far more prestigious to run a hub than a leaf. Given the choice of having ones own Enamelware Factory under the new Reich, or being reduced to a delinked leaf, most server operators will swallow their pride and go with the herd. Flaw number three is that once the herd starts moving, it is very difficult for individual sheep to make their views known, and almost impossible for them to push the herd in a different direction. Also, the trading of privacy and autonomy for convenience is a new threat model we have not considered in the context of highly redundant widely distributed networks. Here we have EFNet en masse giving up the old way of doing things. En masse. "Voluntarily." And what is their motivation? Impending government legislation? Janet Reno's tanks rolling on the locations of all 33 IRC Servers? A court order, which threatens indefinite jailing for non-compliance? No, it's none of these things. It's some people who have gone off and written some mods to ircd which make running a server less of a headache. So the lesson here is that there is a "better software" attack on highly redundant widely distributed server networks, and that entire networks will trade control of their servers and allow changes to fundamental protocols, in return for new "singing and dancing" code. Certainly, Usenet is also vulnerable to such an attack. Most news admins I know would give their left nut for a life free of spam. His argument is something like this: - The organization is changing the way it operates through a process that is representative and doesn't require participation by any party against their will. Much in the same sense that it is "voluntary" for an individual in the top 1 percentile on IQ and Achievment Tests to get a high school diploma. However, try being allowed to flip burgers without one, regardless of your actual talent. Making people "part of the process" is one of the first things one learns in management. How to simultaneously make sure they have zero chance of actually altering what you have planned for them is the second thing. They already are, and have been for years. Usenet is another service that could use some sort of p2p datahaven environment. This should be one of the Cypherpunk 'target projects'. Uh, right. Let us know when you have working code. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Anarchy Eroded: Project Efnext
Almost since the inception of the Internet, Usenet and IRC have been uncensorable distributed resources defined only by adherence to published protocols. With no centralized administration, and resilience against the loss of individual servers, they carry enough traffic to provide complete and total plausible deniability for any server operator over content which gores some specific group's ox. Indeed, alt.anonymous.messages, a Usenet newsgroup, is often used as the basis for Cypherpunkish schemes, in which people need to talk to each other without any third party being able to discern either content or traffic patterns in the discussion. Unknown to much of the Internet, there is a plan brewing to "upgrade" Efnet, the primary IRC network, to something called "Efnext." Server software is being rewritten and tested. Efnet server admins have been contacted and promises to move to the new network during a "transition period" exacted. People who won't play ball have been identified, and plans to delink them and not connect them to the new regime fabricated. Efnext is a very different kind of IRC than we are used to. It is centrally administrated, with the Efnext Cabal passing judgment on who may link to the new system, as well as having the ultimate say over the policies and selection of administrative personnel on individual servers. The identity of individual IRC servers has been blurred whenever possible, and IRC Operators have been given many new powers, which span individual servers, and apply globally to the entire Network. The old Efnet policy that IRCops didn't get involved in "channel issues" has been replaced by one where operators are encouraged to do so on Efnext. Operators on Efnext will be able to globally reserve nicks, channels, and even entire servers, making them inaccessible to people using IRC. They will be able to enter channels, adjust modes, op themselves, and mass deop others. They will even be able to remote k-line on any server. There will be global logs of how these new powers are used, and operators will work with one another to present to the users an unvarying monolithic implementation of the policies and doctrines created by the centralized Efnext administration. In short, and in secret, and without many comments by the people affected, IRC as we know it is about to get the equivalent of AOL Chatroom Monitors, with the identities of individual IRC servers becoming invisible to the users as IRC is transformed from a server cluster into a monolithic network object under a single authority. One could very easily envision a similar thing happening to Usenet, with everyone awakening one morning to "Usenext," whose centralized authority can turn newsgroups off and on with ease, and control who is permitted to post, and what they are allowed to say, both before and after the fact, and globally across all NNTP servers. Freeh and Reno will love Efnext. Saddam Hussein will love Efnext. Channels like #%%%100%MoslemWomenWithoutVeilsPix and #FeinswineHatchCanMunchMySphincter will be able to be disabled with little more than a friendly phone call by the cops to the people publicly advertising themselves as being in charge of the vast majority of IRC. "Suspected pedophiles, money launderers, drug traffickers, and terrorists" can just have their nicks turned off, or be k-lined on all servers. All for the greater good of the greater number, of course. With centralized administration will come centralized responsibilty, centralized liability, and of course, like the rest of the camel into the tent, centralized policy. Perhaps centralized policy like... "No channel names with naughty words in them" "No discussions which exploit Gyno-Americans, Under-18-Americans, or Differently-Tinted-Americans" "No talk of how to make drugs or explosives" And of course, where ever there is centralized authority, people will be encouraged to rat out anyone they suspect of such things to the classroom monitor, and the path of least resistance will be to disable the resource involved until the accused proves otherwise. Perhaps Efnext will even include the ability to log problematical channels at the request of law enforcement. I wouldn't be at all surprised. You can learn more about Efnext at http://www.efnext.net/ "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own." We are Efnext. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Anarchy Eroded: Project Efnext
Jim Choate writes: So much for belief in free markets. You realise that there is nothing that requires servers to install this, or cease using the old network? A typical citizen-unit will quickly trade a large amount of privacy for a small amount of convenience. Sheeple-shearing is never so successful as when it's "voluntary." Note that the two things IRC really needs, end to end encryption and authentication, are not even on the list of "improvements" these people are working on. A little over a month ago, Adam J Herscher wrote a lovely little rant on Efnext, and rather than reiterate points which he made more articulately than I could ever hope to, let me simply paste chunks from his message to EFNet opers and admins. "The way that this is being implemented is simply unfair. They're supporting themselves with the argument that since every EFNet admin will be approached, it is fair - yet they easily admit that there will be a network split and that there is no other way to do it. Well, at this point, let's take a look from the admin being approached perspective. I am an EFNet admin, and approached by a group of people that tell me they have a great solution to fix the network. They tell me that I'm welcome, and my opinions will be heard (though I have no -official- voice/vote - yet), as long as I change my server to meet requirements not officially approved by anyone. That is, I will need to run new code, open my I:lines, possibly add more opers, possibly resign as admin and allow a new one to take over (again no server names mentioned, but I have specific ones in mind - and no, not my own - a list of servers that were discussed as not being allowed to link without conforming was actually posted). So what are my options at this point? Well, I can link to their network, or I can decide not to. If I decide not to, I will remain with a group of unwanted leaf servers with no hubs. And yes, I mean unwanted by them - if you haven't been approached by them yet others were months ago, why do you think this was? Perhaps because you wouldn't go along 100% or keep quiet? Essentially this process is "conform or be delinked" - because it's obvious at this point that if the major EFNet hubs and client servers go, you will be left delinked - their idea of a network split." It seems to me the 'cypherpunkish', 'libertarian', 'anarchic' thing to do is to promote the growth of individualy operated servers other than those on ISP's (who will have a motive to drop the old system and use the new system - just another example of why libertarian/economism is not sufficient in and of itself for a basis for society - they have no motive to protect the individual, only the 'market'). It would indeed be unfortunate if all controversial IRC traffic ended up being carried by isolated IRC servers, akin to remailers, whose admins were under constant attack, and which came and went on a daily basis. I anticipate that if Efnext pulls off this "Conform or be Delinked" exercise, people will be setting their sights on Usenet as the next thing that needs "fixing." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Dude! It's wired!
Tim expounds: I haven't been posting here a lot for various reasons. First, the quality of the responses has not been good. It seems repartee and tired Nazi vs. Stalinist debate is the norm, with Choatian physics and Choatian history filling in the gaps. It's been a slow politics and cryptography year. The list is full of spam, and vandals keep subscribing it to other mailing lists. Perhaps next year will be better. I'm almost begining to feel that Cryptology has achieved the status of a "Mature Science." Second, and perhaps related to the first point, a lot of folks have retreated to the safety of filtered lists, where Lewis and Perry can screen messages for them. I'm currently amusing myself on DetweilerPunks. Also known as Theory-Edge, moderated by Vladimir Z. Nuri. http://www.egroups.com/group/theory-edge, if anyone wants to visit. Fourth, as with my new .sig, the election has caused me to "move on," at least until the direction of things is determined. Yes, a tasteful .sig designed not to cause public alarm, until the Shrub Administration's interpretation of our Constitution is clarified. I suspect we are entering an era in which even vague hints concerning a sticky end for tyrants can get one arrested. He speaks of liquidating middlemen, I speak of liquidating tens of millions of welfare varmints, useless eaters, and politicians. And for this they call him a visionary and me a Nazi. Go figure. You need to moderate your views on non-producing eaters in the same way you moderated your .sig file. A new Tim for a new decade. So, when's the next Jim Bell trial? Anyone know? -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Re: This is why a free society is evil. (fwd)
Tim May writes: Folks, this increase in MIME attachments is getting out of hand. People are reading this list on a variety of machines, from PDAs to Amigas to VT100s to Unix boxes to Windows. I have a solution. I keep MIME turned off, and if the 7-bit representation of the message is not instantly recognizable as substantially English, I hit delete. Sometimes, if I am in a bad mood, I hit delete upon seeing the large "M" next to the message on the index, and don't even bother reading it. If the MIME infestation proliferates, this process can be automated. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Feds Win Child Porn Case
A Texas couple who ran two very well known and popular age-verification services for Adult Web content have been convicted over the contents of two foreign Web sites which were illegal in the United States, one hosted in Russia, and the other hosted in Indonesia. Age-verification services are a popular method of financing web sites. Subscribers purchase a code for a small fee on a credit card, which proves that they are adults, and gives them access to thousands of web sites which use the particular vendor's codes to admit only adults to pornographic material. Part of the money for the subscriptions is used to make a micropayment to the visited sites Apparently, age-verification services will now be responsible for verifying all content which their codes are used to access, a humongous task. Apparently, providing an access code for content legally hosted in another country now makes one subject to US laws as if one had provided the content from within the US on ones own server. (Cypherpunks beware, while it is child porn that is being run up the flagpole to support this interpretation of the law, bomb-making instructions and seditious speech could easily be next on the list. I imagine Eterity Service operators could easily be characterized as "madams" for their content as well, particularly if they took small payments for accessing the system.) When this story first came out, the news reports mentioned the real issues involved. Now that a conviction has been obtained, one needs a microscope to even determine that the couple did not distribute any underage pornography themselves, that anyone could sign up to use their service, and that the vast majority of the material their codes could be used to access was perfectly legal. Their mistake, it seems, was in allowing revenues from people seeking to access a couple of popular overseas child porn sites, legal in the host country, to become a major source of income for their business. This destroyed their plausible deniability over the content hosted by their clients, and in spite of expensive legal opinions they had gotten which told them they had no legal exposure as mere age-verifiers, permitted the Feds to convince a jury that they functioned as "madams" for the "child-porn warehouse." Of course, because they dared to take the case to trial, and didn't plead, they will face an extremely harsh toilet-plungering by the judge at their sentencing. Here's one article on the case, from something that calls itself the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Note the use of terms like "The Child Pornography Business" and no mention of age-verification at all. But then, when you're "saving the little children," you are permitted to suspend ordinary journalistic ethics in a very Kirkegaardian way. - By Toni Heinzl Star-Telegram Staff Writer FORT WORTH -- Thomas Reedy gave himself the email name "Houdini," but even the legendary escape artist could not have wiggled out of the net of evidence of child pornography that authorities built against Reedy's Fort Worth Internet company. After deliberating 6½ hours Friday, a federal jury convicted Reedy, 37, and his company, Landslide, on all 89 counts of an indictment accusing him of distribution of child pornography, sexual exploitation of minors and related charges. His wife, Janice Reedy, 32, was convicted on 87 of the 89 counts. The two counts on which she was acquitted had to do with 70 pornographic images on two of the couple's home computers, which were used mainly by Thomas Reedy, according to trial testimony. The Reedys were accused of giving Landslide subscribers access to Internet sites displaying child pornography for fees ranging from $14.95 to $29.95 per month per site. The sites were maintained by foreign Web masters. Landslide was the only gateway to the child-porn sites, prosecutors said. On its Web site a "click here for child porn" link directed customers to the sites. Landslide gave its subscribers user names and passwords after verifying their credit cards. The Reedys could face sentences of life in prison based on the number of counts, the money involved and the violent content of the Web sites they marketed and provided access to. U.S. District Judge Terry Means will sentence the Reedys. He did not set a sentencing date, but federal sentencings typically occur a few months after conviction. The Reedys played a high- stakes gamble taking the case to trial, despite the self- incriminating statements they gave investigators during a raid on their home last year and the mountain of evidence gathered. Thomas Reedy had admitted to a postal inspector that 30-40 percent of his business came from child pornography. Prosecutors had offered Reedy a plea bargain of 20 years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea and his wife five years in a package deal, but the couple refused to take it, prosecutors and defense attorneys said. Prosecutors and investigators who worked
Re: Jim Bell arrested, documents online
Declan writes: Check out the affidavit/complaint at: http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=00/11/21/1944238 And from the aforementioned document... On or about October 23, 2000, at Vancouver, within the Western District of Washington, James Dalton Bell did travel across a state line from the state of Washington to the state of Oregon with the intent to injure or harrass another person, to wit, Mike McNall, and as a result of such travel placed Mike McNall in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury to himself, and to his immediate family. On or about October 23, 2000, at Vancouver, within the Western District of Washington, James Dalton Bell did travel across a state line from the state of Washington to the state of Oregon with the intent to injure or harrass another person, to wit, Jeff Gordon, and as a result of such travel placed Jeff Gordon in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury to himself, and to his immediate family. What an unmitigated crock of shit. Who would have imagined that anti-stalking laws, originally sold to the public with tear-jerking tales of battered women needing to be protected from violent boyfriends and spouses, would be employed by jackbooted thugs claiming to be in fear of their lives because publically available information about them is in the possession of the citizens they harrass and persecute. Clearly Jackboot-Americans feel they should be completely exempt from ordinary rules of accountability which apply to all other Americans, and that the state apparatus should be at their beck and call to carry out personal attacks against their critics. Laws on terrorism, conspiracy, and harrassment are being twisted daily to do an endrun around the First Amendment, and convictions are being won, and case law is being created, which says this is all fine and dandy. It's gotten to the point where one may not exercise ones right to free speech, unless one gives up ones right to freedom of action, and vice versa. One can say what one thinks of government officials, as long as one does not engage in any behavior, however legal, which constitutes action in support of that speech. And conversely, one may engage in legal action, as long as one gives up ones right to engage in legal speech. To engage in both legal action and legal speech at the same time, is to risk having the government twist ones actions into a conspiracy, and to risk getting convicted under the new plethora of laws sold to the public under various disingenuous guises, or under old laws given new interpretations. It's not necessary that the legal speech and legal action have any genuine relation. If you say the government is corrupt, and you belong to a militia, and play paintball games in the woods on weekends, then you are obviously conspiring to overthrow the government in word and deed. Similarly, it's perfectly legal to own nitric acid, and it's perfectly legal to say that IRS agents deserve to be dissolved in nitric acid, but it's very dangerous to ones personal freedom to do both at the same time. It's perfectly legal to possess publicly available information on government employees, and to possess chemicals, and electronic devices. It's also legal to go anywhere one pleases, on public property, and even on private property to ring doorbells and ask people questions, as long as one leaves when one is asked to. It's also perfectly legal to hold satirical legal proceedings against public officials, for the purpose of making a political statement. It's perfectly legal to speculate on cryptographic solutions to government corruption. But if one person does all these things simultaneously, one risks being the subject of a contrived fairy tale, written by a boob like Jeff Gordon, sprinkled with innuendo, and rubber stamped by a judge as inerrant scripture, which makes one look like the next Osama Bin Laden. So the First Amendment is effectively dead, not repealed by the will of the people, but suffocated in the dead of night by Jackboot-Americans like Jeff Gordon and his pals. (puke) -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Declan on Bell
Declan McCullagh [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Bell was not coerced into taking the plea agreement; if anything, he seems to have more mental resources to fight the system than other defendants I have interviewed. Unless the plea agreement specifies a sentence equal to the upper range that would likely be applied after a conviction was won, it is not difficult to infer that the plea agreement is being signed in order to lock-in a shorter sentence, with the accuracy of the government's account of the alleged misdeeds being a lesser consideration. Most plea bargaining, by its very nature, is coercion plain and simple. Just as the common practice of cutting deals in return for testimony the prosecution wants, or deferring sentencing until such testimony has been provided, results in coerced testimony. That the Justice System recognizes the payment of even one penny to a witness as tainting testimony, but looks the other way when years are knocked off sentences in order to secure testimony or agreement to government-authored laundry lists of antisocial acts, is evidence of the degree to which the government values expediency over fairness in processing caseloads. So I repeat my question. Does Jim Bell, aside from signing a statement prepared for him by the government, in order to avoid a much longer sentence, acknowlege annoying the IRS with unpleasant-smelling chemical substances? A "yes" or "no" will suffice. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Supreme Court denies reporter's kiddie porn appeal
Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Journalists have no special rights. None. They are simply those who are (usually) paid for their words. This does not exempt them from any laws. The First Amendment does not confer special rights to writers; in fact, it says that government may not create such distinctions by "approving" certain journalists. A journalist who buys pot or coke for a story on drug abuse is as vulnerable to the drug laws as any other person (including cops, by the way) who buy drugs. ... Yes, of course this is true. However, child porn laws, with the exception of those very few laws whose goal it is to prevent specifically identifiable children from experiencing the harm of the porn-producing workplace, are clearly unconstitutional. The courts simply ignore this fact, and pander to the moral witch hunt driven by the political and religious right wing. The entire doctrine that non-obscene material depicting the sexuality of minors can be made illegal rests on a single Supreme Court case, that of Ferber. Ferber revolves entirely around the notion that identifiable minors featured in porn are harmed by exposure to the workplace in which the porn is produced. So - laws criminalizing material featuring only social and recreational nudity on the part of consenting minors are unconstitutional, as no one is harmed in its production. Laws criminalizing the possession of old porn made before child porn laws were passed are unconstitutional. Laws criminalizing the production and possession of simulations of the sexuality of minors, involving no actual humans, are CLEARLY unconstitutional. Laws criminalizing the possession of material in which the models, now adults, have no objection to its distribution, are unconstitutional. Laws criminalizing the possession of material legally produced outside the US are unconstitutional. Laws criminalizing the importation of such material are equally illegal. Futhermore, Ferber suggests that the link between porn possession and harm to minors in an unhealthy work environment only exists when the people producing the porn sell it for money to the people who possess it. Clearly a reporter downloading images for free to write a story doesn't cause any further "exploitation" of the underage models, any more than possession of footage of 12 year old Palestinians being deliberately shot by Zionist Entity snipers makes one an accessory or participant in such behavior. Child porn laws are about the elimination of counterexamples to a certain segment of the population's ideas about morality. They are not about protecting children, real or virtual. They are about the public being forced to listen to only the government's description of certain material, with anyone else being locked up instantly for looking at it, including legitimate scientists and journalists. Once this doctrine is rubber-stamped by the judicial system, and the Sheeple are used to it, it is highly unlilkely that sexual pictures of minors are the only material it is going to be appplied to. Hakim Bey suggests that plastering large full-color pictures of naked children around ones community is an excellent form of political protest. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: And you thought Nazi agitprop was controversial?
The Lovely and Talented Jodi Hoffman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You are wrong to protect them without knowing what they're about, Jay. Their motto is, "Sex before eight, or it's too late." I'll never understand the ability of Child Sex Hysterics to look at one thing and see another. "Sex Before Eight" was a slogan of the Rene Guyon Society, named after a deceased French world traveler who thought that American puritanism and prudery could be cured with a healthy dose of the kind of sexual openness found amongst primitive tribes. It has nothing at all to do with NAMBLA. Never has. They are referring to grown men having sex with an under-eight year old little boy. NAMBLA was formed to protest a witch hunt against gay teens. Like most gay organizations of its era, it calls for the repeal of all laws which criminalize sexual activity using age alone as the sole criteria for determining whether someone has been taken advantage of. Other organizations with similar platforms have been pressured by people like Jesse Helms to sell out, without which the current mainstreaming of gay sodomy rights for adults would not have been permitted. This has resulted in the current zoo of "adults only" alleged gay rights organizations, who run screaming in the opposite direction when anyone under 18 makes an appearance. Indeed, it is pretty nearly impossible today to do anything in the area of gay rights without having to pass some Fundie-authored litmus test on support of consent laws, and to be forced to pay lip service to the disempowerment of young people to make any sort of sexual decisions for themselves. Surely you don't mean to suggest that a website promoting intercourse with a little boy should be protected speech, do you? Well, since the alleged intercourse with little boys exists entirely in Jodi Hoffman's brain, and not on the NAMBLA website, I think we should take any and all measures to prevent people from coming in contact with the harmful material in Jodi Hoffman's brain, before more people are turned into idiots. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: And you thought Nazi agitprop was controversial?
Jodi Hoffman [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I knew there was a reason I printed out NAMBLA's website throughout the years. So you can lie about what's in it cleverly enough not to get caught? You *are* the same Jodi Hoffman who claims Sex Education is Satan's Doorway to our Childrens' Innocence, aren't you. The world's most prolific frivilous lawsuit filer and nuisance to public educators everywhere? Maybe you really are a member of NAMBLA. It certainly sounds like it. Right, lady. Everyone who doesn't buy into the Sex Abuse Agenda as presented by their local contingent of Religious Fanatics or Lying Feminists Cunts is a NAMBLA member. You're one of those fine people whose agenda it is to intimidate their opponents into silence, and then lie about what it is they would have said, had they been permitted to speak. I wonder if you would tell the parents to their face how important you think it is to preserve the information put out by the people who helped cause their son to be murdered, rather than doing something to help prevent it from happening again. NAMBLA's rather boring text-only web site, containing comments by noted educators, scientists, humanitarians, and artists on the topic of transgenerational male homosexuality, moral panic, youth rights, and extreme sex laws, is hardly, as the Curley family has alleged, a magical resource which changes heterosexuals into pedophiles, and mild-mannered Milquetoasts into murderers. Any more than your web site changes atheists into God-Soaked anti-Sexual Freaks like yourself. Go beat your "childrens' victimization" drum elsewhere. This is a cryptography and civil liberties list. Start your own Fascistpunks list if you want a forum to spew. As for the credentials of Robert Curley, who is *USING* his own son's murder as a platform to attack causes the religious and political right wing wants to damage, he is the only one of 2,000 city employees to be allowed to "opt out" of four hours of mandatory "diversity training," because it would have forced him to "mouth beliefs he didn't espouse." He also called the course, which attempts to prevent discrimination in the workplace based on gender, sexual orientation, and race, "feel-good crap." Like most death-penalty promoting defenders of the Christian Coalition who try to undermine civil liberties while misdirecting the public with talk of "child protection" and "pedophile activity," Curley sees an opening to present the agenda of himself and his associate whores for Jesus cloaked in words no politician dares oppose without committing political suicide. It would be unwise to let him succeed. That having been said, I don't think freedom of speech is going to sink or swim based on whether the NAMBLA web site is mirrored in numerous locations. Their lawyers may very well have advised them not to put it back up or encourage others to host it pending the resolution of their legal tangles. All perspectives on all varieties of human sexuality are available at a mouse click anyway, in the age of the Internet, and are so widely distributed geographically that censorship is impossible. In that sense, part of NAMBLA's original mission has passed it by, as it is no longer necessary to distribute opposing points of view on anything in brown paper envelopes via snail mail. If NAMBLA wants it mirrored, mirror it. If they don't, print it out and epoxy it to the side of Jodi Hoffman's barn as an example to other censorous cows. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Lee Free - Judge Apologizes For Government's Conduct
Harmon Seaver [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Why, then, did he find Lee guilty of a felony? He could have dismissed the charges, eh? He was bound by the terms of the plea agreement, without which the DOJ and DOE would have continued to give Dr. Lee the broom handle/asshole treatment. Politics is the art of compromise. The government also has language in the plea agreement which prevents them from being held accountable for any of their behavior in the case. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Zero-Knowledge Sells Out
Bill Stewart writes: We've done remailers around here for a while, and extending the concepts to anonymizers does take some work - but the only thing that's rocket science is getting both security and efficiency at the same time. Having Ian around is a big help The hard part is making something that's a large enough network to be secure and reliable as opposed to a small bunch of volunteer hobbyists who periodically get kicked off their ISPs when enough complaints occur. I don't know that ZKS's business model will fly in the long run, but it's well thought out and worth a try. Oh, it's certainly a wonderful science project. On the practical side, however, my impression is that it has a bit of a ways to go. We have a ZKS user on one of the IRC channels I frequent. He thinks the system is cool, but the huge latency is apparent in real time chatting, and he gets dropped by the IRC server about every 15 minutes. Since he's been on the channel as a real life person, his identity is not exactly a well-kept secret, and he is generally greeted by, "Look everyone! It's Ed trying to be anonymous again. (snicker snicker)" Well, you get the idea. Traffic analysis and mannerism recognition will always be the Achilles heel of such schemes anyway. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Re: Looks like we're dumping Linux for Plan 9
Jim Choate writes: I rather doubt you'll find a single line of Plan 9 in any Linux and there are no 'ideas' from Plan 9 in Linux, no mulitple server kernels, no 'no root users', no 'private work space', no 'work space looks the same irrespective of terminal server used, no transparent distributed task processing, no encryption in the network layer, the windowing is completely different than X-windows, etc., etc.. I just read the collection of papers on the design of the system. It's kind of the ultimate extension of the Unix metaphor of devices being files. The notion that a process should be able to contruct its own private file system hierarchy, as well as its address space, has been around for a while. Ditto for RPC through files as the interface to system services. It's interesting, in that you can wrap any task in a locally constructed namespace, with some filtering process catching all its supervisor requests, and forwarding them to the real system, or to some other filter. This cleanly allows any process to transparently be a supervisor to the processes underneath it, merely by namespace manipulation on forking. While the system is a neat testbed for some interesting OS abstractions, I get the impression, at least from looking at the file system layout, that it is not all completely bullet-proof production quality code, which will keep on singing and dancing under all possible combinations of load. The cache/WORM file system, which contains an unlimited number of daily backups as an integral part of the FS, would probably be a marketable product as an NFS-exporting network appliance, independent of its relationship to PLAN9. While the product is an interesting entry in the zoo of approaches to infinite virtualization and distributed computing, I think it is a bit premature to predict the death of Linux over it. It's been around for 5 years, it's free, and the multitudes are not beating a path to its door. It may be simpler to run daemons on existing Unix systems to export 9P based services, than it would be to have everyone run out and upgrade. The fastest way to do interprocess communication is through shared memory writes and address-valued signalling, which can be hardware supported. A lot of the microkernel architectures have had performance problems with LPC communication between processes and servers, and have only worked efficiently when kludges like server co-location and shared memory buffers were added. It seems that PLAN9, by laminating "all resources are files" onto this paradigm, achieves distributed computing at some significant performance cost. There may be more efficient, albeit less metaphorically elegant, ways of achieving the same goals. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Zero-Knowledge Sells Out
An Anonymous Person Writes: It is past time for ZKS to take the actions they have long promised. Instead they are moving in the opposite direction. Let the community speak up and tell them plainly that rhetoric is no longer enough. ZKS should at least commit to a timetable for when their source will be opened. (And not with a zero knowledge commitment.) It is time for action. Ian Goldberg's reputation capital is all that is holding up ZKS. He's never fucked anything up before, and has performed many stunning cryptographic feats in the past. Had he not been on board, no one would have given ZKS more than a cursory glance, and the obvious criticisms would have been taken much more seriously. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Marijuana Kingpin Injection Scheduled
Looks like the jackbooted thugs are just itching to try out the new Federal lethal injection chamber on a marijuana distributor, convicted under the Federal Drug Kingpin law. This creative bit of legislation permits one to be given the death penalty for any killing committed by someone the government alleges to be an associate, even if one didn't order it, was completly unaware of it at the time, and it had nothing to do with ones business operation. One doesn't even have to know the person, or be connected to them in any tangible way. I wonder how long it will be before Amerika will be killing all marijuana distributors, even when they can't dig up an unrelated murder to smear them with? - HOUSTON (AP) -- A federal judge Friday set an Aug. 5 execution date for convicted killer Juan Raul Garza, who would become the first federal prisoner put to death in almost four decades. U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela's order calls for Garza to be executed by injection at 6 a.m. at the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Ind. Garza is among 20 inmates awaiting execution. Because of pending appeals, no other inmate has an execution date. The Bureau of Prisons and Justice Department officials were reviewing a draft of a detailed technical manual governing the manner of conducting the execution, said U.S. Attorney Mervyn Mossbacker Jr., who filed the motion seeking an execution date. ``The government seeks to ensure that this first execution, and those that follow, will be carried out in an appropriate, dignified and expeditious manner,'' Mossbacker said. The last federal execution was in 1963. The Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that the death penalty was unfairly applied. State and federal procedures were revised and the high court restored the death penalty on the federal level in 1988, more than a decade after states resumed the punishment. Among Garza's death row colleagues is Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured hundreds of others five years ago. Garza, 43, was convicted in Brownsville, Texas, in August 1993 for killing three men between April 1990 and January 1991. A 10-count indictment named him as the boss of a drug ring that imported tons of marijuana into the United States between 1983 and 1993. Prosecutors sought the death penalty under a 1988 ``kingpin'' law. ``I didn't kill any of these people,'' he told The Associated Press in a 1994 interview. ``I'm not responsible. ... I got the shaft.'' -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Re: After Fermat
Jim Choate wrotes: I've looked around, the only thing I can find is a paper by Y.K. Huen. However, it requires a change in some definitions. The abstract I remember reading proved GC on a set of finite number fields of increasing size, and then inferred it for the integers at the end. The "proof" doesn't seem to have become famous, and yet, I don't recall it being publicly shot down either. Then some other group announced a big prize for proving GC recently, so I really have no clue as to what is going on. The distribution of prime numbers is completely determined once one classifies the zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function, so perhaps the Clay Math folks considered the inclusion of two problems on the structure of prime numbers redundant, and the Riemann Hypothesis to be the most important one. The Riemann Hypothesis, and NP=P, are of course the only problems in the seven with earthshaking implications for the face of Crypto As We Know It. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: CDR: Re: CDR: Re: After Fermat
Jim Choate wrote: The abstract I remember reading proved GC on a set of finite number fields of increasing size, and then inferred it for the integers at the end. That wouldn't be sufficiently robust. Simply because the first n primes do it is not sufficient to prove that all primes will do it. I believe the idea was that given an integer, there was a number field of sufficient size in the family such that the decomposition w.r.t. the number field was the same as that in Z. Of course, it's hard to tell from reading an abstract whether something is going to sink or swim. This apparently sank, although as I remember it provoked lots of discussion in sci.math and here on the list at the time. I've been working on GC for several years now and I haven't come across anything in this regards. There is a page of recent progress on GC (don't know how often it's updated), The Generalized Riemann Hypothesis implies a weaker version of Goldbach's conjecture involving three primes instead of two. That seems to be the strongest thing they've proved so far. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Chatelle Resigns From ACLU
Declan writes: I'm a little confused. There are at least two places on that page where Bob dates his resignation as October 1997. --Declan Someone mentioned the URL of the letter in a discussion of the $200 million lawsuit just filed against NAMBLA/Verio, and I was so enamored by Bob's excellent points about the ACLU picking and choosing its battles, and the discussion of the Website being nuked, that I didn't catch the date. Since the letter URL was buried in a huge discussion about current events, it didn't register that Bob's mirroring was in response to an earlier Website nuking, and not this one, particularly because the provider wasn't mentioned. Mea Culpa, etc. About three people caught this and wrote me. The others think it was a great letter, and didn't notice when it was written either. Such is life in the world of "breaking news." -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: WSJ: Backdoor in MS WWW software
Gary Jeffers writes: Note: I am assuming that Tim May is not doing some kind of spoof here. Been reading the list for a long time, have we? -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: The One True Holocaust
Colin writes: So, he is not a Holocaust Denier? Well, I suppose these days if you say 5,999,999 Jews died instead of 6,000,000 you qualify. How exactly is he the victim, when he would never have been fined if he hadn't brought the suit himself? Being called names like "Holocaust Denier" and incurring the ire of Jewish organizations is effectively an end to ones career. Under British libel law, it is not even necessary for alleged libel to be untrue. It is only required that the person be harmed by it, which makes this particular decision all the more remarkable. Especially in light of the fact that the judge insulted him from the bench, and ruled that he could not appeal. All over the fact that the Jews claimed not to like the tone of his works, or the fact that he talked about some Jews dying from non-gas-chamber related causes. He can now join Professor Rind on the list of "denied persons" who made the mistake of articulating perspectives the sheeple have been carefully trained not to listen to. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Mises Institute Reaction to Microsoft Ruling
Who is this jerk - some kind of Microsoft paid flunky? I read the judge's decision, and his claims are the following. 1. Because of the "application barrier to entry", no one can effectively compete with Microsoft in the Intel/PC market OS, giving microsoft a monopoly in this market. This is bogus, because an OS designer can certainly support Microsoft's APIs in addition to whatever native API he invents. Linux use is growing, and as soon as a GUI that looks like Windows is perfected it will begin to give Windows real competition. Applications will then follow. If Windows cost $500 per machine, market forces would have already produced a competing product. But since it doesn't, it is almost always cheaper to use Windows than to write one of your own. Windows has a monopoly because although it is a piece of shit, it is a cheap piece of shit. That is the only reason it has a monopoly. Until some altruistic person duplicates Windows functionality as completely free open source, people will use Windows. If you don't like that, start writing code. 2. Microsoft was mean to Netscape. Boo Hoo. 3. Since Microsoft has a monopoly, bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was illegal tying of products to crush competition. This was claimed by the judge before, and reversed on appeal. Why Judge Jackson is presuming to claim it again is anyone's guess. No one is their right mind is going to seriously claim that the government needs to start telling software vendors what features they may include in each product they release. It was clear from day one of this trial, that "the fix was in" to screw Microsoft, and what the verdict would be. I would be very surprised if Microsoft doesn't prevail on appeal. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Re: Legal Cable T V Descrambler
A Spammer writes: *This is the Famous R-O Shack TV Descrambler You can assemble it from Radio Shack parts for about $12 to $15. Won't work unless your cable company is using technology from the 1960's. Modern cable scrambling uses techniques such as sync suppression, random inversion and other manipulation of individual raster lines, and transmits the information needed to reverse the process in a variety of obtuse ways, depending on the equipment manufacturer. There is no descrambler that will work on all such systems using $15 worth of parts from Radio Shack, or even $50 worth of parts from Radio Shack. Bear in mind that if you do build a descrambler, you may see advertisements for things that do not go out to regular viewers, because their boxes are momentarily turned off. When you call up to take advantage of these fantastic offers, the cable company will throw your ass in jail. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
