Re: The Well-Read Cypherpunk [ Samuelson-bashing ]
At 09:08 AM 04/22/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote: I haven't found Samuelson's textbook useful for any of the interesting discussions of markets, black markets, offshore havens, ... I used Samuelson's textbooks to study micro and macro in college. *Terrible*! Badly written, verbose, not structured well at all, especially for the mathematically literate student, and heavily tied up in the Keynesian government-knows-what's-best command economy view of the world. OK, the dude *did* have a Nobel prize in economics, but as near as I could tell, what he *really* specialized in was the economics of textbook sales, updating this heavy tome every year or two so students had to buy new ones instead of getting them used and selling them back to the campus bookstore at the end of the year. Most of the chapters had an appendix at the end which said most of the same material half as verbosely, but even that was still wading through molasses. I don't mind a certain amount of excess material if the author can write well and enjoyably, but this wasn't it. Some of the micro classes switched to a different textbook a year or two later - I think the author may have been Peterson? which was much thinner and more readable. My micro class was taught by a University of Chicago guy who was a good speaker, clear without oversimplifying, and who did a good job of balancing depth for his audience. Micro being what it is, this involved a certain amount of Ok, engineers, this is an integral, go back to sleep while I show the liberal arts majors areas under curves. That's easier to do well with micro than macro, but it still ain't that hard. I'd also taken economics in high school, and once Mrs. Borish was sick and the old retired guy who used to teach the course came in and subbed - he covered more in two days than we did the rest of the semester and a good third or half of the Micro 102 college course, though not in as much depth as the college material. It's worth reading Samuelson if you discuss economics much with people who learned it using Samuelson, just so you can balance the jargon and understand the themes they work with, but it's really dreck. Get the Cliff Notes if there are any :-)
RE: layered deception
At 07:45 AM 05/02/2001 -0700, David Honig wrote: Yeah but is there a (contract etc.) *law* being broken or is this a legally-null claim? After all, if click-through EULAs are legally binding... Maybe a real lawyer could tell you. The answer may depend on whether there's valuable consideration exchanged, and viewing banner ads probably doesn't count (especially since the banner ads typically come from banner ad companies who aren't giving you any promises of keeping your information private.) While occasionally there may be a web site deliberately lying about whether they're keeping logs No, we won't sell your information to spammers!, a more likely scenario is - web site content provider isn't keeping logs of content access but they're using a shared hosting service. - web hosting provider is keeping logs for technical support, debugging, problem resolution, etc. - banner ad vendor keeps everything they can get - web site's ISP keeps logs of connections (e.g. IP addresses and TCP port numbers, but not content of communications.) Actually, many corps have explicitly decided to shred their email after a while. You can thank Ollie North the MS judges for cluing in the public. So the corp counsels are actively blowing off the suggestion you're claiming. A long time ago, in a phone company far, far away, we had incredibly detailed sets of requirements for record-keeping because of the regulatory environment. My wife had a summer job in college translating one database from a hand-rolled mostly-undocumented format into a (then-)current commercial database system so they could get the data just in case they got sued about it - something along the lines of promptness or pricing of wholesale telecom services in PacBellLand. Of course, the commercially available database also rotted into technical obsolescence after a few years, but by then nobody'd sued them about it in enough years that there was no need to preserve it longer.
Re: weird logic
At 06:15 PM 06/17/2003 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2998870.stm With Iraq's judicial system in disarray after the end of the war, Paul Bremer said a special criminal court would be set up. He said the court would try people, in particular senior Baathists... may have committed crimes against the coalition, who are trying to destabilise the situation. So you invade a country, and the patriots who resist you are no longer soldiers, even guerillas, but criminals to be tried in the US's weird new courts, probably secretly with no representation. Yup. And USA Today was referring to the US military reserve soldiers who were sent there as Citizen Soldiers, but of course *Iraqis* who fought the invaders weren't citizen soldiers, they were terrorists or illegal combatants or evil or failing to act sufficiently French by surrendering. And since the US Constitution doesn't apply to US forces operating outside the US, there's no prohibition against ex post facto laws about crimes against the coalition, and of course the Bush Administration bullied Brussels into exempting their armed forces from war crimes laws.
Re: kinko spying: criminal caught Scarfing keydata
The real question is whether the FBI's keyloggers caught Jiang's passwords, or whether it was the NSA or Mossad caught the FBI's keyloggers catching Jiang's keylogger catching other passwords. At 01:13 PM 07/23/2003 -0700, Major Variola (ret.) wrote: Kinko's spy case: Risks of renting PCs NEW YORK (AP) -- For more than a year, unbeknownst to people who used Internet terminals at Kinko's stores in New York, Juju Jiang was recording what they typed, paying particular attention to their passwords. Jiang had secretly installed, in at least 14 Kinko's copy shops, software that logs individual keystrokes. He captured more than 450 user names and passwords, and used them to access and open bank accounts online. http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/07/23/cybercafe.security.ap/index.html
Re: Dead Body Theatre
At 06:33 PM 07/25/2003 -0700, Steve Schear wrote: At 16:33 2003-07-25 -0700, you wrote: On 24 Jul 2003 at 9:16, Eric Cordian wrote: Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder the legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his entire family, an artist's rendering of Shrub reaping what he sows would surely be an excellent political statement. You are a moron. If today warfare means wiping out the family of the enemy ruler man woman and child and showing their horribly mangled bodies on TV, this is a big improvement on the old deal where the rulers had a gentlemen's agreement that only the common folk would get hurt, and the defeated ruler would get a luxurious retirment on some faraway island. Here, here! Steve, did you mean Hear, hear!? Or were you calling for it to happen here? :-) Back when we had a First Amendment, that was probably legal, but since Bush inherited the presidency, it might not be... Perhaps we may even become as smart as some Pacific Islanders whose wars were fought by surrogates, the logic being that the death of one man can serve as well as the death of many in determining the outcome of a disagreement between heads of tribes, states, etc. European feudalism did that also, though Europeans were less likely to eat the bodies of the losers. Trial by Combat was tossed out of British law in ~1850, but hadn't been used for a long time before that, though dueling was still around in the early 1800s.
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
Also, NYT Article was http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th But it sounds like they've chickened out, because various people freaked about the implications. (And they only got as far as it being an incentive to commit terrorism, without getting to a funding method for terrorism or to Assassination Politics.) July 29, 2003 Pentagon Said to Abandon Plan for Futures Market on Terror By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the program's director, and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped. Warner announced the decision not long after Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle took to the floor to denounce the program as an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism. Warner made the announcement during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, nominated to be Army chief of staff.
Re: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
At 11:23 AM 07/29/2003 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote: Note that properly run, this Ideas Futures market would be a money maker, not a cost center. For only a modest percentage of the winnings, it could be self sustaining. Perhaps someone with a profit motive will pick up the idea. Assuming it can be legally structured as a Futures Market, rather than as Illegal Gambling, it could make money. (There are obviously some bets it's unlikely to handle, such as the bet that Idea Futures markets would be successfully prosecuted as illegal gambling :-) If they don't want the label of Assasination Politics, they can forbid bets on individual deaths, and still have nearly the full field, including wars, revolutions, nonstandard attacks, and elections available for play. (c.f. the way eBay and Yahoo limit themselves.) This provides a number of Doubleplus-Good Things. - Government agencies can be funded by private ideas futures speculation rather than by taxes, freeing them from the tiresome needs of Congressional budget requests and oversight. No more Ollie North trials! - Private organizations can fund government agencies to do specific things and launder the money through the market, rather than needing to lobby Congresscritters to fund them. There's a bit less leverage this way, but surely there are some Congresscritters who'd appreciate that private organizations were betting they'd live to 100 like Strom Thurmond. - All those boring old Neutrality Act laws that keep companies like ITT and Halliburton from overthrowing foreign governments and forbid patriotic Americans to be foreign mercenaries can be avoided, because they won't need to do that any more - they can just bet sufficient sums that governments will be overthrown and they'll go overthrow themselves, and those patriotic Americans can be working as, ummm, investment logistics expediters instead of mercs. - The system will be completely Anonymous, and Anonymity is Strength! - Of course Oceania has always had an Idea Futures position about the downfall of WestAsia. Why do you ask?
Japan making RFID-trackable cash
http://theregister.com/content/55/32061.html Japan's starting to add RFIDs to their 1-yen (~$100) bills. Notes will come with Hitachi's 0.3mm mew-chip which responds to radio signals by sending out a 128-bit number. Each chip costs about 50 yen. The article says that each number _could_ be a serial number, but doesn't say that they know it is; the alternative would be something that indicated the production batch or whatever. The Reg's report sounds like it's based on what someone saw on a TV show, but also indicates they're starting production.
Re: What happened to the Cryptography list...?
Bob - Perry's cryptography list moved from wasabisystems to [EMAIL PROTECTED] a few months ago. [EMAIL PROTECTED] says: - lists [EMAIL PROTECTED] serves the following lists: bsd-api-announceThe BSD APIs Announcement Mailing List bsd-api-discuss The BSD APIs Discussion Mailing List cryptographyThe Cryptography and Cryptography Policy Mailing List spkiThe Simple PKI Mailing List Use the 'info list' command to get more information about a specific list. info cryptography Cryptography is a low-noise moderated mailing list devoted to cryptographic technology and its political impact. Occasionally, the moderator allows the topic to veer more generally into security and privacy technology and its impact, but this is rare. WHAT TOPICS ARE APPROPRIATE: On topic discussion includes technical aspects of cryptosystems, social repercussions of cryptosystems, and the politics of cryptography such as export controls or laws restricting cryptography. Discussions unrelated to cryptography are considered off topic. Please try to keep your postings on topic. MODERATION POLICY: In order to keep the signal to noise ratio high, the mailing list is moderated. The moderator does not forward off topic messages, messages that have substantially the same content as earlier messages, etc. Please not that the moderator does not always have the time to send an explanation of why a message was not forwarded. TO POST: send mail with your message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the line unsubscribe cryptography in the body of your mail. info spki No info available for spki. end END OF COMMANDS --
