re:constant encryped stream
hi, Thank you for the reply. they didn't really explain why; I think it was leftover regulations from wartime censorship during World War II or the Korean Police Action. I think so. Also, in the US, the police can request a mail cover (which means recording who all your snail mail is from) with much less legal formality than a search warrant, and if they get a warrant to open all your incoming mail, I don't think they're required to notify you. We don't have such a system in india-it is pretty transparent. But at the slightest at the use of encryption will raise their brows. This issue can only be fully solved when the vast majority of people begin using encryption. Encrypted spam wouldn't be a bad idea either. (Ideally they'd encrypt all of the spam :-) Actually, if you insisted on all your mail being encrypted, that would cut down significantly on spam, because the amount of individual work per message required to encrypt something is significantly higher than the work required to just email it, which can scale badly and can also increase the traceability of spam (by watching who downloads large numbers of keys from keyservers, for instance.) What about just making your own key pair and not putting it on any key server.The govt will have enough reason that the keys were communicated by other means than putting it on a key server and they will still have be interested in it,making key pairs is not a hard task,if spammers have utilities like pgp,even spammers can do that.So spammers don't have to worry *more* of getting traced.It should give the govt. enough work. :) it is better that every one start encrypting their mail-the idea would be then half of the world policing will have to watch the other half of the world which are civilians-which is not very feasible,thats what I think. The extent to which obtaining keys is a traceable activity depends a lot on the type of public key infrastructure that's being used, and to some extent on the amount of accuracy that you need - spammers selling lists to each other probably wouldn't mind a 5-10% inaccuracy rate if it meant they didn't have to use keyservers, while people who want to preserve their privacy are much more likely to download mass quantities of keys from servers to avoid having it be obvious which ones they care about. Happy New Year. Regards Sarath. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
How Free is the Free Market?
In the long run we are all dead. John Maynard Keynes, economist http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8926/Kharms/kharms_walking.gif UNESCO estimates that about 500,000 children die every year from debt repayment alone. Debt repayment means that commercial banks made bad loans to their favorite dictators, those loans are now being paid by the poor, who have absolutely nothing to do with it, of course by the taxpayers in the wealthy countries, because the debts are socialized. That's under the system of socialism for the rich that we call free enterprise: nobody expects the banks to have to pay for the bad loans that's your job my job. Noam Chomsky, How Free is the Free Market?
A little snuff action.
MEDIA MATTERS / DAVID SHAW News gatherers stumble -- into newsmaker territory NEWS MEDIA COLUMN By DAVID SHAW The nation's news media -- large and small, print and broadcast -- performed admirably, often heroically, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. Alas, unaccustomed as most of them are to such sustained excellence, many stumbled so badly in 2002 that it would be even more difficult than usual to list just the 10 worst journalistic moments of the year. So here, in no particular order, is a purely arbitrary selection of 10 among many such moments. 1. CBS made it known that its eye would not tear up if Don Hewitt, the creator and executive producer of 60 Minutes, retired -- or to use the network's euphemism, put a transition plan in place. Hewitt is, after all, 80, which in television translates as too old to run a show that would attract the younger audience our advertisers crave. On the other hand, 80 is a critical number in television; it approximates the cumulative IQ of the network executives responsible for much of what passes for entertainment. 2. Associated Press executives, understandably proud of the global news service's ubiquity, have long quoted Mark Twain's observation, There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe -- the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here. But in September, the AP fired reporter Christopher Newton for making more leaps than Twain's celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County. Sometimes, AP said, he quoted nonexistent people from real institutions. Other times, the people he quoted were real but the institutions were fictional. In all, the AP said, it could not confirm the existence of 45 people and a dozen organizations in Newton's stories. Can we now expect AP executives to begin citing another Twain quote as well -- Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to? 3. A Washington Post story disclosed the lack of qualifications and experience of the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq. For some reason, the Post decided to tell its readers -- in the first paragraph of that Page 1 story -- that one of the inspectors has a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs. Why was that relevant? Does it automatically disqualify him to search for nuclear weapons? Personally, I'd love to see a whips and chains aficionado nosing around Saddam Hussein's private haunts. Since Saddam seems both sadistic and masochistic, maybe the inspector could lure him into a little snuff action and save us all a lot of time, pain and money. 4. More than 40,000 people showed up in April for an Israel Independence Day Festival in Van Nuys that doubled as a rally to support Israel during Mideast hostilities. The mayor was there. So was the governor -- and many other dignitaries. The story got big play in the local media. But the Los Angeles Times didn't publish a word on the rally in the next day's paper. The explanation: We didn't cover it because we didn't know about it, one Times editor said. Huh? Traffic near the event was so heavy that radio stations broadcast advisories, and the event was listed on the City News Service budget that serves as a tip sheet for all local media. I don't agree with angry Jewish leaders who saw this as a deliberate slight by the paper, but it was an oversight of monumental proportions. Next thing you know Trent Lott will say he didn't know about Strom Thurmond's racist behavior. 5. ABC wanted to replace Ted Koppel's Nightline with David Letterman. Letterman ultimately declined, but had he accepted the offer, ABC's next step no doubt would have been to give Peter Jennings' job to Oprah Winfrey. 6. The Seattle Times won two major national journalism awards for a series of articles investigating the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. But less than three weeks before the people who pick the winners of an even bigger prize -- the Pulitzers -- were scheduled to vote this year, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Laura Landro, attacking the Times series. Landro had been treated successfully at the Hutchinson Center, so she was not exactly an unbiased observer. But even if she could write dispassionately, why didn't she write her story in the Journal right after the Times series was published, in March 2001, instead of waiting a full year and doing so on the eve of the Pulitzers? Landro's Journal story was headlined Good Medicine, Bad Journalism. It should have been Pulitzer Politics, Bad Judgment. 7. When the Chicago Tribune fired longtime columnist Bob Greene after learning that he had had sex 14 years earlier with a 17-year-old high school senior who came to the paper to interview him, critics were divided over whether the punishment fit the crime. But there was little disagreement over how the Tribune handled the story. Badly. The paper announced Greene's dismissal in a brief story that did not say
Mongo Blogged out of Leadership Position?
Best (and Worst) of Online Media in 2002 Mark Glaser posted: 2002-12-23 I have a love/hate relationship with year-end roundups and awards. My cynical side can't help but curl an upper lip at the overused, cliched idea, and its reliance on the calendar year as a framework. But my more nostalgic side can't help but appreciate the look back over the year's happenings. Plus, I cut my teeth as a music journalist writing year-end articles for classes at the University of Missouri (and dubbed 1986 as the Year of Yuppie Music). So what the heck, let's see what we learned from 2002 as online journalists, and give out some kudos and Bronx cheers for the best and worst the medium had to offer. I invite you to use the forum next to my column to voice your own favorites and pet peeves from the past year. Monetarily Correct Prediction of the Year: Leslie Walker of the Washington Post predicted in early March that this may go down in Internet history as the year millions of people started paying for online content. We all scoffed at the time, but eMarketer reports that 15.7 million U.S. consumers will pay for online content in '02, with that number rising to 21 million by '03. We say hell no, we won't pay. But when they take away our convenient free e-greeting cards and fantasy sports games, we open our wallets. The Super-Size It Award or the Where Did the Editorial Go? Award: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), whose new Universal Ad Package pushes for larger online advertising sizes. Even though he admitted that banner ads do work, the IAB's executive director Greg Stuart told AdAge that we are effectively de-emphasizing the banner. Why? Larger ad sizes work better. The Mad as Hell Award: Complaining readers, who spurred on a successful campaign to kill pop-up advertising on many sites and services, including iVillage, Google, AOL, MSN, Netscape, Earthlink, and even YachtingUniverse.com. Of course, the major newspaper sites continue to use them for now, ignoring the complaints of many readers. Best Job Move to Get Back at the Boss: Merrill Brown, leaving MSNBC.com as editor-in-chief to work for Microsoft rival Real Networks as senior VP for content. Of course Brown pooh-poohs the notion of trying to get Microsoft's goat, telling the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I don't find it particularly funky at all. At least he didn't take a job for Fox News or CNN. Worst Dot-Com Crash Generalization: John Motavalli, author of Bamboozled at the Revolution, wrote that Web content is dead, digital dreams have been deferred for broadband, and AOL Time Warner will dominate. Nope, nope and triple-nope. Salon's Scott Rosenberg scoffed that the same people who got the Internet business so wrong got the Internet story wrong, too... New galaxies of communication coalesced, far off the familiar big-media grid. In other words, the Net didn't put all the old media folks out of business, or make everyone rich; it created a new way of communicating that was more personal than the mass media. Best Moment for Weblogs, Politics Dept.: Trent Lott steps down as Senate Majority Leader to-be. His off-color comments at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday are picked up by ABCNew.com's The Note and TalkingPointsMemo.com's Josh Marshall, along with various webloggers, who finally webloggered the guy right out of his leadership position. Worst Moment for Weblogs, Sports Dept.: San Francisco 49er Garrison Hearst makes a slur against gays in the Sacramento Bee, few weblogs pick up on it, and the San Francisco media takes 20 days to even notice. The San Francisco Chronicle's Ray Ratto couldn't understand what took so long. Notably, Ratto doesn't blame his colleagues at the Chronicle, but calls the incident a paradox of the Internet age: If someone makes a patently inflammatory remark and nobody finds out for three weeks, what does this say about the Information Superhighway? Or about the way sports reporters use it? Biggest Scare of the Year (which became) Best New Friend of the Year: Google News, which scared the bejesus out of paid editors and news regurgitators everywhere (yours truly included) with its editor-free news page. Then, after kicking it around for a few days, we realized just how much time it saved us, how it could potentially democratize the scoop process, and how we couldn't live without it. Dumbest Idea for a Merger by a Company That Already Had a Dumb Merger: AOL Time Warner's CNN planned to merge with ABC News, though the idea got shelved after AOL realized just how bad its own problems were from its last merger. AOL, of course, had the opposite of a banner year, with an SEC investigation, dot-com ad deals coming to an end, subscriber numbers slowing, predictions of huge drops in revenues for '03, and a kooky idea to try to charge for access to Time, People and other magazines online. But, hey, on the bright side, they released AOL 8.0! Strangest Bedfellows in
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Noam Chomsky-Last of the great Americans?
Human Rights Week 2002 By Noam Chomsky Human Rights Week is not much of an occasion in the US, with some notable qualifications. But it does receive considerable attention elsewhere. For me personally, Human Rights Week 2002 was memorable and poignant. The week opened on the eve of Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where thousands of people gathered to celebrate -- though that may not be quite the right word -- the tenth anniversary of the Kurdish Human Rights Project KHRP, which has done outstanding work on some of the most serious human rights issues of the decade: particularly, but not only, the US-backed terrorist campaigns of the Turkish state that rank among the most terrible crimes of the grisly 1990s, leaving tens of thousands dead and millions driven from the devastated countryside, with every imaginable form of barbaric torture. The week ended for me in Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, the semi-official capital of the Kurdish region, teeming with refugees living in squalor, barred from returning to what is left of their villages, even though new legislation theoretically allows that choice. I had been invited to Diyarbakir by the Human Rights Association, which does courageous and impressive work under conditions of constant serious threat. The preceding days I spent in Istanbul at the invitation of the Publishers Association, which was holding its annual meeting and an international book fair, dedicated to peace and freedom; and the public sector union KESK (not permitted to function as a union under harsh laws and state practice), which was holding an international symposium on the same themes. While in Istanbul, I was able to visit the miserable slums where unknown numbers of Kurdish refugees seek to survive the damp cold winter months in decaying condemned buildings: large families may be crammed into a single room with young children virtually imprisoned unable to venture into the dangerous alleyways outside, and older children working in illegal factories to help keep the family alive. They too are effectively barred from returning to the homes from which they were expelled, despite the new legislation that lifts the state of emergency in southeastern Turkey -- formally, at least. The founder and director of the KHRP is also barred from returning to his country. And just to round out the picture, the US is now refusing entry to human rights activists recording and protesting these crimes. A few weeks ago Dr. Haluk Gerger, a leading figure in the Turkish human rights movement, arrived with his wife at a New York airport. INS cancelled his 10-year visa, returning him and his wife at once after fingerprinting and photographing. Dr. Gerger has received awards from Human Rights Watch and the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his outstanding contributions to human rights; his punishment by the Turkish authorities had been singled out by the State Department as an example of Turkey's failure to protect elementary rights. In an open letter to the US Ambassador, the spokesperson of the Freedom of Speech Initiative in Istanbul, protesting this treatment, writes that Dr. Gerger is a founding member of the Human Rights Association of Turkey and an ardent defender of Kurdish rights, who has written extensively on the issue and has criticized governmental policies, likening the Turkish government's treatment of the Kurds to Serbia's ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia, and suffering imprisonment and heavy fines as well as loss of his academic position for his writings on human rights issues. Colin Powell's State Department has now declared him persona non grata in the United States, adopting the stand of extremist elements in the Turkish military and ultranationalist parties. The Turkish state, with the hand of the military never hidden, remains harsh and repressive, despite some encouraging changes in recent months. But even superficial contact reveals that Turkish culture and society are free and vibrant in ways that should be a model for the West. Particularly striking is the spirit of resistance that one senses at once, from the caves outside the city walls of Diyarbakir where refugees speak eloquently of their yearning to return to their homes to the urban centers of intellectual life. The struggle of people of Turkey for freedom and human rights is truly inspiring, not only because of the depth of commitment but also because it seems so natural and without pretense, just a normal part of life, despite the severe threats that are never remote. That includes courageous writers of international renown like Yashar Kemal; scholars who have faced and endured severe punishment for their commitment to tell the truth, like Ismail Besikci, who has spent much of his life in prison for his writings on state terror in Turkey; parliamentarians like Layla Zana, still languishing in prison,
Re: [e-gold-list] Announcing Seagold.net: E-mail Privacy, Secure, Encrypted, accepts e-gold
At 11:50 AM 12/13/2002 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: ...It had to happen sooner or later, I suppose... --- begin forwarded text From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [e-gold-list] Announcing Seagold.net: E-mail Privacy, Secure, Encrypted, accepts e-gold ... Introducing Seagold.net, a secure web-based email service located in the Principality of Sealand, outside the jurisdiction of any government on earth! ... followed by some description of their email system and a long complex description of their shell game \\ multi- level pyramid scheme\ silly sales rep recruiting system.* If you poke around their site a bit, you'll see a reference to http://sealand.pmmit.com/seamail.html which appears to be a straightforward mail system without the shell game, though I haven't done a feature-by-feature comparison to be sure if it's quite identical. It's basically webmail plus SSL-encrypted POP3. The price ranges from $10/month to $90/year depending on contract length, vs. $25/month for the pyramid game, which offers the possibility of being free or letting you make gazillions of dollars if you can find a way to convince the untapped potential customer base to play the game instead of just buying the service. It strikes me as a bit short on features, but then I'm comparing it to fastmail.fm, which is an extremely well-run email system that my wife uses (which ranges from free accounts with signature tags to cheap accounts without them to full-featured accounts for $20-40/year.) There's no encryption, but their spam-avoidance features are the best I've seen. * Don't get me wrong - I'm not totally dissing well-designed pyramid marketing as a sales-rep recruitment technique, but it has to be something that has a product that's realistic at a price that's realistic with margins that are realistic, while these guys seem to have a margin that's unrealistic (at least compared to other services they're offering) with a total hand-waving shell-game compensation method, and other than the fact that their system is based in Sealand, which is worth paying some margin for, and open-source based, which says it has some chance of stability if administered well, they don't say anything that inspires me to expect them to be competent at running email systems well. But hey, free trials can be fun sometimes, though this one requires an e-gold account number, which makes it harder to burn lots of them.
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Fear of an APster planet.
For every problem faced by the human race there is a solution which is simple, plausible and... wrong. Menken. http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3022/ These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i' the alehouse. - Othello, Act 1, Scene 1 Paradoxes are as old as humankind. The ancient Greeks studied them intensely which eventually helped lead to the discovery of irrational numbers, and paradoxes are mentioned in the Bible: It was one of their own prophets who said 'Cretans were never anything but liars, dangerous animals, all greed and laziness;' and that is a true statement. (Titus 1:12-13)
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Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 01:21:52AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: | At 03:57 PM 12/19/2002 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: | On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 04:56:12PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote: | | I think this would help, but I also think technology is driving a lot of | | this. You don't have to give a lot more information to stores today than | | you did twenty years ago for them to be much more able to track what you | | buy and when you buy it and how you pay, just because the available | | information technology is so much better. Surveilance cameras, DNA | | testing, identification by iris codes, electronic payment mechanisms that | | are much more convenient than cash most of the time, all these contribute | | to the loss of privacy in ways that are only partly subject to any kind | of | | government action (or inaction) or law. | | But you *do* have to provide a lot more information to your bank | than you used to, and to your mailbox company, and to the government-run | post-offices that can bully private mailbox companies around, | and to hotels, and to driver-safety-and-car-taxation enforcers, | and to airlines, because governments either require them to collect more, | or encourage them to collect more data, and to collect it in forms that | are easier to correlate than they have been in the past, What's information, Mr. Smith? If I walk in and say my name's John Doe, here's my cash, and there isn't any government ID, who can question me? | Yep. A lot of it, however, freeloads on the government certification | of identity. Without the legal threats, it would be much harder to | assemble the data. (Other things, like credit, also become much | harder. That may become less of an issue as id theft makes credit | visibly a two-edged sword. | | While some of it is freeloading on the identity certification, | much of it is done because it's so cheap to do so they might as well, | and it's cheap because of the government regulations | as well as because computation keeps getting radically cheaper. The cheap to do is freeloading. If you take all the government issued ID out of your wallet, how much of what's left has the same name on it? Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. If I pull out all three, the cost of doing it shoots way up, and I pay in cash. Adam -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume
Ready?
It's me.. Please, please write again, hope you still have my email, to make things worse I am not sure about yours either, anyway you can always catch me on http://www.singlers.com/index_vip.html Hope to see you very, very soon. Kisses and more :) Dealy
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your card and application, please fill out the application and mail it in. I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the application in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name linkage... -- ___ Kevin Elliott mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ#23758827 AIM ID: teargo ___
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Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your card and application, please fill out the application and mail it in. I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the application in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name linkage... * No store I have used has ever _checked_ that a name is valid...they don't even care when my credit card or check says Timothy C. May but my Customer Courtesy Card says J. Random Cypher, or Eric Hughes, or Vlad the Impaler...or is just unattached to any name. * Some stores are doing the bonus points scam, where customers who spend $300 get a $1 discount applied to their next purchase, etc. This does not need a name, either, as the discount can apply to whomever uses the card with a particular number, but the stores may (I don't know) require that a card has some semblance of the right name, etc. * I expect most uses of customer courtesy cards are to try to get some kind of brand loyalty going. People thinking Well, I have a card at Albertson's, but not at Safeway, so I'll go to Albertson's. * Dossier-compiling does not seem to be the motivation...at least not yet. The data are too sparse, it seems to me. I don't know if people who honestly gave a name and mailing address, and whose data were keypunched accurately, are getting the targeted mailings for Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. that the technology can support. * As we've mentioned several times, Cypherpunks at physical meetings sometimes put their customer courtesy cards in a box and then draw randomly, to make the point and for grins. * I keep meaning to get a new series of cards and have them with names like Rasheed bin Salmeh and so on, with addresses like Islamic Students Center, 21 First...blah blah... Just to watch the reaction. * Dossier compiling at grocery stores is not very useful for Big Brother, either. Who consumes Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. is not interesting even to George Bush and Dick Cheney. And few hardware or electrical supply stores have courtesy cards. In any case, no requirement to use cards, etc. * All in all, not a very interesting example of ID and tracking. Things will get much more interesting, and worrisome, if there is ever a national ID system (in the U.S.) and some kind of legislated requirement (albeit unconstitutional!) that citizen-units must ID themselves with valid ID for all purchases, or at least of certain classes of purchases (beyond guns, for example). I don't see this happening in the next 15 years unless some major new terrorist incident occurs. --Tim May The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. --Frederic Bastiat
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
At 11:02 -0800 on 12/31/02, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. * Dossier-compiling does not seem to be the motivation...at least not yet. The data are too sparse, it seems to me. I don't know if people who honestly gave a name and mailing address, and whose data were keypunched accurately, are getting the targeted mailings for Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. that the technology can support. I am almost CERTAIN that at least some stores are keeping track of what's being bought and using it to encourage buying. i.e. when I still lived in the Great State of Illinois, Kroger had an interesting habit of giving out coupons with your receipt. They'd custom print a coupon when the printed your receipt. It didn't take much thinking to notice that the coupon they gave you was VERY closely correlated to what you bought. My favorite case was when I happened to buy 8 boxes of HotPockets and they responded with a Buy 7 get 1 free coupon. However, this personally doesn't bother me. They don't have my name, all they have is that the person who carries this token like HotPockets, so lets give him a coupon to keep him hooked. Very sensible to me... -- ___ Kevin Elliott mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ#23758827 AIM ID: teargo ___
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 11:02:48AM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. ... * Dossier compiling at grocery stores is not very useful for Big Brother, either. Who consumes Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. is not interesting even to George Bush and Dick Cheney. And few hardware or electrical supply stores have courtesy cards. In any case, no requirement to use cards, etc. * All in all, not a very interesting example of ID and tracking. Things will get much more interesting, and worrisome, if there is ever a national ID system (in the U.S.) and some kind of legislated requirement (albeit unconstitutional!) that citizen-units must ID themselves with valid ID for all purchases, or at least of certain classes of purchases (beyond guns, for example). I don't see this happening in the next 15 years unless some major new terrorist incident occurs. But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: A Tribe Called Quest - Scenario Each molecule preaches perfect law, Each moment chants true sutra; The most fleeting thought is timeless, A single hair's enough to stir the sea - Shutaku [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
biological systems and cryptography
How do you all see the future use of biologically based systems affecting cryptography in general? By biologically based systems I mean machine learning, genetic algorithms, chips that learn (like Carver Mead's work), neural networks, vecor support machines, associative memory, etc. It seems to me that computer science based on writing longer and longer streams of instructions is coming to an end, as it cannot possibly scale. We now have supercomputers that can execute 35 trillion instructions per second, but if someone has to write all of those instuctions, what good are they? Also, it seems that the brain has immensely powerful visual processing power, without having millions of lines of code written to do so. I only ask this because I'm deciding whether to study computational neuroscience or cryptography in grad school. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: David Bowie - Wild Is The Wind He who knows himself knows his Lord. - Sufi saying [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:41 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 11:02 -0800 on 12/31/02, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. * Dossier-compiling does not seem to be the motivation...at least not yet. The data are too sparse, it seems to me. I don't know if people who honestly gave a name and mailing address, and whose data were keypunched accurately, are getting the targeted mailings for Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. that the technology can support. I am almost CERTAIN that at least some stores are keeping track of what's being bought and using it to encourage buying. i.e. when I still lived in the Great State of Illinois, Kroger had an interesting habit of giving out coupons with your receipt. They'd custom print a coupon when the printed your receipt. It didn't take much thinking to notice that the coupon they gave you was VERY closely correlated to what you bought. My favorite case was when I happened to buy 8 boxes of HotPockets and they responded with a Buy 7 get 1 free coupon. Yes. So? Notice that exactly the same type of coupon is printed out with a cash or non courtesy card purchase. It's a purely local calculation. In programming terms, a purely local variable situation. In my normal insulting way I would say Duh here. But I am attempting to be more polite, so I will say Am I missing something in your analysis? --Tim May
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. _Can_ be used is different from _must_ be used. Collecting valid name information costs a vendor money (both in labor, computerization/records, and in driving some customers elsewhere). It also deters some people from completing transactions. Given free choice, most parties to a transaction in a store will not exchange name information. Examples abound of this. No time today to describe the examples of where people choose not to give names. Flea markets, gas stations, grocery stores, hardware stores, etc. A gas station which refuses to take paper currency limits its sales. J. Random Terrorist will likely buy gas with cash. Only an enforceable (and unconstitutional, for various reasons) requirement for ID will work. As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this in detail. Think about it. --Tim May
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:12:02PM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. ... As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this in detail. Think about it. Isn't the whole purpose of TIA (or the claimed purpose) to be able to say person A bought weapon B on this day, bought C gallons of gas to drive to govt building D, and then blew up building D with weapon B, therefore person A must be the criminal? -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: Sonic Youth - Inhuman Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. - Jean-Paul Sartre [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: biological systems and cryptography
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:41 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: How do you all see the future use of biologically based systems affecting cryptography in general? By biologically based systems I mean machine learning, genetic algorithms, chips that learn (like Carver Mead's work), neural networks, vecor support machines, associative memory, etc. Strong crypto is, ipso facto, resistant to all of the above. For the obvious reason that the specific solution to a cipher is like a Dirac delta function (a spike) rising above a featureless plain, this in terms of the usual hill-climbing or landscape-learning models which all of the above use in one form or another. Cryptanalysis of weak crypto, in terms of mundane things like passphrase guessing, finding images tagged with stego code, etc., already in some cases makes use of these tools. Bob Baldwin's Crytpographer's Workbench used learning algorithms a long time ago. Strong math wins out over weak crypto any day, and attempting to brute force a cipher with even a swimming pool full of Adleman machines will not work: if a 400-digit number takes, for instance, a million Pentium 4 years to brute force factor, then how long does a 600-digit number take? (And using larger RSA moduli is of course trivial...) Homework: Using the estimates Schneier, Diffie, Hellman, and others have made for the number of computer operations to break ciphers of various kinds, describe a reasonable cipher and modulus or key length which will take more energy than there is in the entire universe to break. The answer, in terms of how small the key or modulus is, may surprise you. It seems to me that computer science based on writing longer and longer streams of instructions is coming to an end, as it cannot possibly scale. We now have supercomputers that can execute 35 trillion instructions per second, but if someone has to write all of those instuctions, what good are they? Also, it seems that the brain has immensely powerful visual processing power, without having millions of lines of code written to do so. This is AI, not crypto. I only ask this because I'm deciding whether to study computational neuroscience or cryptography in grad school. Learn some more of each and your decision should be an easy one to make. --Tim May
Re: biological systems and cryptography
At 11:41 AM 12/31/2002 -0800, Michael Cardenas wrote: I only ask this because I'm deciding whether to study computational neuroscience or cryptography in grad school. Are you planning to get a PhD and/or do research, or just a terminal master's degree to do engineering? If you're planning to do research, definitely go for the computational neuroscience. The usual reasons to do research are to discover new and interesting things, or to break old and inaccurately-trusted things, or to have topics to publish papers about so you can be a professor at a major university. In computational neuroscience, you may be able to do these things. (I don't know the field, but it sounds like there are lots of open directions you could go with it.) In crypto, there are lots of really really bright people, lots of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, most of the standard techniques are good enough that the bar for what's a fundamentally new and interesting discovery? is at least up at the level of discovering Elliptic Curve Crypto and probably higher. Just doing a new symmetric-key algorithm that's an order of magnitude faster than AES isn't enough; we can do wire-speed crypto for most things that matter. Maybe the NTRU guy has something cool, if he can prove it to the satisfaction of enough people. Discovering a new technique that breaks things like AES might be good enough for a couple of years of papers, but you'll note that lots of people have been working on things like that. Doing a terminal master's degree to learn how to engineer cryptosystems and build tools that are secure and reliable is a different game entirely - do some other computer science things while you're at it - but skills that will help you do a better job of building programs are worthwhile, as long as school doesn't interfere too much with your job needs. I did a master's in Operations Research a couple decades ago, and found that it really added a lot to my perspectives and technical maturity, but the world was different back then... michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 11:02:48AM -0800, Tim May wrote: | On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: | | At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: | Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a | credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in | the name Doe. | | Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at | all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your | card and application, please fill out the application and mail it in. | I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the application | in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name linkage... | | * No store I have used has ever _checked_ that a name is valid...they | don't even care when my credit card or check says Timothy C. May but | my Customer Courtesy Card says J. Random Cypher, or Eric Hughes, or | Vlad the Impaler...or is just unattached to any name. And as you say below, checking that a name is valid is hard, except when you can free-load off the effort of the state to issue identities. Grocery stores don't bother, which was my point to Bill. Free-loading off the identity infrastructure of the state is a huge problem. Fair and Issac, Experian and the rest are parasites whose gossip/cross-referencing/credit scoring/libel is only possible because of the state's investment in identity cards. That problem is getting worse because none of that information is private, and many credentials, like drivers licenses, are very valuable in relation to how hard they are to get. And so identity theft, inability to get a mortgage, etc, will have to be balanced against al that cool credit that's made possible by the tracking system. In the end, it won't be worthwhile to many people to be finger and iris printed as part of their daily lives. Or maybe it will. Note that I'm not saying that they're easy to get: Thats irrelevant. Such things are more valuable to get then they are difficult, and will remain that way. Drivers licenses, trusted traveller cards, etc, will always be worth getting if you're a fraudster. Adam | * All in all, not a very interesting example of ID and tracking. Things | will get much more interesting, and worrisome, if there is ever a | national ID system (in the U.S.) and some kind of legislated | requirement (albeit unconstitutional!) that citizen-units must ID | themselves with valid ID for all purchases, or at least of certain | classes of purchases (beyond guns, for example). -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume
Recommended: Catch Me If You Can, a film
I recommend Catch Me If You Can, the new Spielberg-DiCapprio-Hanks movie about Frank W. Abignale, Jr., a true story of how Abignale ran away from home around 1964, forged checks, posed as an airline copilot, then as a doctor, then as a lawyer, while honing his craft in forging and identity faking. I never saw Takedown, the seldom-scene movie about Mitnick, Gilmore, etc., but I doubt it was as good in the social engineering side of hacking as Catch Me is. Some excellent sets, costumes, and period stuff from the 1960s. Abignale consults now for check makers, credit card companies, the FBI and other government agencies, and seems to be the leading authority in forgery. An interview he did a year or two ago with an Australian radio station--findable on the Web, as I found it--is great. He describes modern technology and how it actually makes what he did as a teenager a lot easier today (in some ways, less so in others). HBO has a Making Of short piece, with behind the scenes camera shots, interviews with the parties involved, including Abignale, and lots of additional information. I TIVOed it. (The next time a CP meeting/party is at my house, someone remind me and I'll put it on. Along with A Beautiful Mind, also of interest to us.) --Tim May, Citizen-unit of of the once free United States The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots tyrants. --Thomas Jefferson, 1787
re:constant encryped stream
Also, in the US, the police can request a mail cover (which means recording who all your snail mail is from) with much less legal formality than a search warrant, and if they get a warrant to open all your incoming mail, I don't think they're required to notify you. Is there a way to RELIABLY find the mail was opened? Reason: If the mail sent is eg. a CD with a set of OTP keys, then the adversary gains next to nothing by intercepting it IF the interception is detected (the keys just get discarded and new set is sent to another address). Then it could be possible to securely send large volumes of confidential data by mail; you prepare the pairs of CDs - one with cryptographically random data, one with the real data XORed by the first set. You send the first set. If it arrives unopened (which can be communicated safely even over an unsecured channel), you send the second set; if it arrives opened, you generate the CD pairs again and send the new first set. If the adversary intercepts only one half of the transported data, they gain nothing more than the fact some amount of data was sent. (Of course, hand-to-hand exchange is more secure, but it is suitable for operative handling of keys in urban setting, not when an overseas flight would come to question.) One of my ideas was to put a small piece of film or photographic paper, detect that it was exposed to light, but then the adversary can put in a new piece of the light-sensitive material and reseal the package. The same problem goes with the various kinds of seals. Comments, hints, keywords to look up?
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
At 12:03 -0800 on 12/31/02, Tim May wrote: Yes. So? Notice that exactly the same type of coupon is printed out with a cash or non courtesy card purchase. It's a purely local calculation. In programming terms, a purely local variable situation. No. Obviously the coupon was closely linked with my buying pattern, and in at least one case I received one of these buy several coupons without having purchased that product that particular trip (though I'd purchased it the the past). In my normal insulting way I would say Duh here. But I am attempting to be more polite, so I will say Am I missing something in your analysis? My oh my. Getting an early start on your new years resolution? G -- ___ Kevin Elliott mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ#23758827 AIM ID: teargo ___
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
At 12:58 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 09:49:28AM -0800, Kevin Elliott wrote: | At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: | Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a | credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in | the name Doe. | | Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at | all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your | card and application, please fill out the application and mail it | in. I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the | application in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name | linkage... Pollution. Cards without names can be purged, cards with names confuse them. Is that the same Mr. Hughes with Richard Nixon's SSN who seems to shop vegitarian in San Jose, but buys pork in large quantities in Oakland? And look, Mr. Clinton here lives at the same address... I see. I guess I'll have to fill out the damn form the next time I get a card. I don't actually visit the store now that safeway.com delivers G. -- ___ Kevin Elliott mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ#23758827 AIM ID: teargo ___
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
At 09:49 AM 12/31/2002 -0800, Kevin Elliott wrote: Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at all? Remember when people used checks and had check cashing cards at grocery stores? Some grocery store chains used courtesy cards to replace that function. More importantly, early in the game, they collected as much information as they could, hoping they could use it somehow for marketing reasons, though in practice they can do almost as well without it, so they don't care too much; they'd rather give you a card with fake information than not give you a card, even if it means that when their clerks are trying to present the image of friendliness and personal relationships by saying Thanks, Mr. Myxpklkqws they can't pronounce it. Some of the stores do try to build more brand loyalty by giving you things if your spending totals are high enough, though the store I used to go to would reward you with a ham at Christmas; perhaps that sort of thing appeals to carnivorous goyim Meanwhile, the most important uses are correlating purchases of different types of items, so they know whether advertising chicken will bring in customers who also buy barbecue sauce or chardonnay or tortilla chips.
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 09:49:28AM -0800, Kevin Elliott wrote: | At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: | Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a | credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in | the name Doe. | | Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at | all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your | card and application, please fill out the application and mail it | in. I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the | application in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name | linkage... Pollution. Cards without names can be purged, cards with names confuse them. Is that the same Mr. Hughes with Richard Nixon's SSN who seems to shop vegitarian in San Jose, but buys pork in large quantities in Oakland? And look, Mr. Clinton here lives at the same address... Adam -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume
Happy New Year!
If you are going to drink, don't drive. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
At 12:27 PM 12/31/2002 -0800, Michael Cardenas wrote: On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:12:02PM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this in detail. Think about it. Isn't the whole purpose of TIA (or the claimed purpose) to be able to say person A bought weapon B on this day, bought C gallons of gas to drive to govt building D, and then blew up building D with weapon B, therefore person A must be the criminal? The scalability of the problem is much different depending on your goals. If you want to sort through the transcriptions of people who bought drugs and knives and airline tickets but no luggage in an effort to find potential terrorists, that's useless. But if you've already got a suspect, like a Green Party member who wrote an annoyed letter to the President and threatened to tell her Congresscritter in person what a bad President he is, and you're trying to find suspicious-sounding evidence, then government access to tracking data can make it possible for you to find out that she bought some toenail scissors before her trip, and bought unspecified merchandise at a garden store, and bought far more gasoline for her SUV than she'd need to drive it to the airport and back, and bought some new shoes, then obviously she's a planning to hijack a plane and go shoe-bomb the President with ANFO so it's ok to bring her in and force her to rat out her co-conspirators. But it's much more realistic to use all that data to send her an L.L.Bean catalog and the web page for Burpee's, maybe even including the hidden link for hydroponic gardening and plant-cloning supplies
[dave@farber.net: [IP] Do unto others ..]
- Forwarded message from Dave Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 13:31:07 -0500 Subject: [IP] Do unto others .. From: Dave Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ip [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.5 required=5.0 tests=TO_LOCALPART_EQ_REAL,AWL version=2.20 -- Forwarded Message From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 12:34:19 -0600 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [USDemocrat] Digest Number 853 This one certainly deserves wider exposure. :-) Note in particular how shredding personal documents would have made little difference regarding the intrusiveness of this technique. The original article at wweek.com is a fascinating and worthwhile read! Begin Forwarded Message Date: 30 Dec 2002 09:48:23 - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [USDemocrat] Digest Number 853 Message: 1 Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2002 05:57:08 -0600 From: Kelley Kramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Privacy advocates strike back in Portland - Hilarious! Well its not really privacy advocates, just a couple small-time reporters .. This is too funny! Portland has had a big stink (no pun intended) going on about whether its legal for the police to go through your trash. The Police chief, Mayor and DA all came out in favor of it.. saying that once you put the can out on the street it is no longer private property. Well, well, well! Some reporters decided to go pick-up those three officials garbage and take a look at what was there. Then they published a detailed list of what they found! Needless to say, the officials position on garbage took a dramatic change when they got wind of what happened!! Check out the article on the link below. Click and read it, takes about 3 minutes, see them get a taste of their own medicine! ... hilarious! Thanks Kelley Kramer --- RUBBISH! Portland's top brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage--so we grabbed theirs. http://www.wweek.com/flatfiles/News3485.lasso (credit Interesting Times for this one http://interestingtimes.blogspot.com/2002_12_22_interestingtimes_archive.htm l#86563172 ) End Forwarded Message Gordon Peterson http://personal.terabites.com/ 1977-2002 Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking! Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment! Join at http://www.cauce.org/ 12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they represent. 12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America. -- End of Forwarded Message - You are subscribed as [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe or update your address, click http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ - End forwarded message - -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume
Re: Recommended: Catch Me If You Can, a film
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 01:22:49PM -0800, Tim May wrote: ... (The next time a CP meeting/party is at my house, someone remind me and I'll put it on. Along with A Beautiful Mind, also of interest to us.) The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots tyrants. --Thomas Jefferson, 1787 I actually found a beautiful mind to be a disappointment. I was hoping for a movie more about math and crypto, but it turned out to be a movie about schizophrenia. Did you not find the same thing? -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Zen is the madman yelling 'If you wanta tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars!' - Jack Kerouac [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Recommended: Catch Me If You Can, a film
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 02:23 PM, Michael Cardenas wrote: On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 01:22:49PM -0800, Tim May wrote: ... (The next time a CP meeting/party is at my house, someone remind me and I'll put it on. Along with A Beautiful Mind, also of interest to us.) The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots tyrants. --Thomas Jefferson, 1787 I actually found a beautiful mind to be a disappointment. I was hoping for a movie more about math and crypto, but it turned out to be a movie about schizophrenia. Did you not find the same thing? It was what it was about. A movie about math and crypto would be watched by only a small audience. The Enigma was also about things other than crypto. --Tim May Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat. --David Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11
Americans Revolt in Pennsylvania - New Battle Lines Are Drawn
[It will be interesting to see where this could go if Nadar, Demos and other anti-corporate types take up the banner.] Corporations shall not be considered to be 'persons' protected by the Constitution of the United States or the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania within the Second Class Township of Porter, Clarion County, Pennsylvania. Porter Township, Pennsylvania, has fired the first shot in the New American Revolution with this first binding law denying corporate personhood. It's a revolution that will be fought not with guns but in the courts, in the voting booths, and on the battlefield of public opinion. (Far from harming corporations, returning human rights solely to humans will lead to an entrepreneurial boom in America - only a small handful of very large corporations abuse these rights to deceive people, hide crimes, or make politicians violate the will of their own voters. The millions of ethical corporations will thus be freed from the tyranny of the few while democratic government will be returned to its citizens.) More... http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1219-06.htm Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun -- Mao Tse-tung
Re: re:constant encryped stream
On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Thomas Shaddack wrote: Is there a way to RELIABLY find the mail was opened? There are a variety of plastics and such that will change color and break-down; the new time-limited DVD's that become unplayable after some short period of days after opening the air tight container. You could in effect put an air tight envelope around whatever you wanted to protect, with a slice of this stuff in there as well. If it's opened then when you get it...this of course assumes that the MITM attack doesn't have access or knowledge of the trick. Would work a handfull of times and then a bypass would be reasonably trivial. You could put stamps and such on the tabs to make the job harder, but again once the resources were focused... In the case of your example of a OTP on a CD, simply use one of the time release CD's that go breakdown. Assumes of course you can get them and have the hardware to burn and seal them. If the envelope is light-tight you could put some film in there and then review it for exposure upon receipt (same questions of 'is this piece the same piece that was put in there?' though). -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Suggested Reading: Crypto in fiction
Found another example of crypto use in fiction: Collected Ghost Stories The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1904) Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) ISBN 1-85326-053-3 (Wordsworth Classic, '92) Apparently some consider James to be the 'finest ghost-story writer England has ever produced. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: Quantum Probability and Decision Theory
On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 09:57:58AM -0800, Tim May wrote: First, I sent this in error to the CP list...it was intended for another list. (My mailer has command completion and I am so used to typing cy in the To: box and having it expand to [EMAIL PROTECTED] that I sent it to CP by accident. As to why type list addresses rather than Reply to All, this is to get the list in the To: and not the Cc: and not have misc. other lists or persons getting copied--as in this reply, where TD is initially in the To: and CP is in the Cc:, in OS X Mail.) And what list would that be? I'd like to take a look at it. ... On Tuesday, December 24, 2002, at 08:25 AM, Tyler Durden wrote: Yes. I strongly suspect that minds are quantum mechanical. Penrose also believes this, and has actually identified Aharanov-Bohm-like structures in certain simple organisms used to probe their immediate environment. Max Tegmark fairly conclusively demonstrated that decoherence occurs far too rapidly in proteins and other biological structures for QM to be an actor. As for Stuart Hameroff's nanotubules idea, I've been a skeptic of this ever since meeting him at the A-LIFE Conference in 1987. Last summer I read the physics of consciousness. It was a pretty disappointing attempt to explain consciousness with QM, mixed with lots of emotional and relgious hand waving, nice background info though. Anyway, this is exactly why I want to do computational neuroscience. I also think that the turing machine is a sorely classical model, and that the brain is definitely not a turning machine, but something else, far more powerful. As for making a neuron, look into the research of henry abarbanel. I was in his lab the other day, and his students have actually made simple neurons that can be wired into the brain of a lobster to simulate removed neurons, creating the proper oscillation to generate the signals which allow the lobster to digest things. He mostly does research into the nonlines dynamic properties of neurons. I'm hoping to work in his lab next year. michael -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: Lamb - Cotton Wool Sit Rest Work. Alone with yourself, Never weary. On the edge of the forest Live joyfully, Without desire. - The Buddha [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
baseline story
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Courage to Refuse.
Supreme Court on Occupation: No comment On Monday, December 30, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected a petition of eight IDF reserve soldiers who are refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, but avoided making a watershed ruling of the legality of the occupation, despite one being specifically sought in the context of international humanitarian law. Meanwhile, corporate media appears to forget that the Red Cross has ruled on that for decades. The petition was brought by Lt. David Zoneshine (reserve), as part of the Courage to Refuse movement. Usually, Israeli conscientious objectors are simply jailed (and often harassed) without deferment to the Supreme Court. In this case Lt. Zoneshine specifically requested a court-martial so as to present legal defence and argue against imprisonment. Such an action carries a much harsher punishment within the military judicial system and following the failure of the petition, he has now been returned to jail, along with many others already there. Founded in January 2002, Courage to Refuse has grown to 511 members who have all vowed to resist the Occupation, declaring their unwillingness to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people. [ Israel IMC | Coverage in Hebrew | Courage to Refuse ]
info 2822
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Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 5:07 PM +1300 on 1/1/03, Peter Gutmann wrote: She didn't bat an eyelid, nor was she concerned that he had the cards and I was buying the books. Not My Problem. I'm sure many other people besides myself have had a cashier swipe her own card on behalf of a non-cardholding customer, just to be nice. :-). More proof that the correlation is the thing, not the mystification of identity. However, I do wonder what deflation would do this stuff. I expect that cash discounts would become *real* popular in a deflationary environment, and, in the interest of economy in a time of tight money, no manager worth his job would pay to replace these mostly useless customer database systems, wonders of conjoined purchasing data or no. The best market information is, as usual, an efficiently discovered price... Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPhJy1sPxH8jf3ohaEQKTAACeICxBnPID9gy/fLcMYmrBjLNwc30AnjcM xdKUxFD5QEsYCw9p/oWhN+Th =BBj1 -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: How Free is the Free Market?
At 12:42 PM +0800 on 1/1/03, Marc de Piolenc wrote: Who's we, Professor Chomsky? I sure as hell don't call it that, nor does any free-market advocate that I know. This is simply a Socialist striking a straw man, nicht wahr? No. It's a troll by someone who's in almost everyone *else's* kill-file. Don't feed the animals. 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'
Yemeni government approved assassination of an American.
Yemen's said for the first time that it asked the United States to carry out last month's missile attack which killed six suspected al Qaeda members. The Yemeni government has made the announcement in a report to parliament on militant activity in the Arab state, where a gunman today killed three Americans working in a missionary hospital. On November 3, a missile from an unmanned CIA plane blew up a car in the eastern Marib province, killing six people. One of those killed was Qaed Senyan Al-Harthi - a key suspect in the 2000 bombing of the US warship Cole near Yemen. The Yemeni government now says it ordered the US to carry out that missile attack. http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/31/1041196644739.html Al-Qaeda fleet takes terrorist threat to sea By John Mintz in Washington January 1 2003 United States intelligence officials have identified about 15 freighters around the world that they believe are controlled by al-Qaeda or could be used by the terrorist network to ferry operatives, bombs, money or commodities, government officials said. US officials cite such scenarios as al-Qaeda dispatching an explosives-packed speedboat to blow a hole in the hull of a luxury cruise ship sailing the Caribbean Sea or having terrorists pose as crewmen and slam a freighter carrying dangerous chemicals into a harbour. American spy agencies track some of the suspicious ships by satellites or surveillance planes and with the help of allied navies or informants in overseas ports. But they have occasionally lost track of the vessels, which are continuously given new fictitious names, repainted or re-registered using invented corporate owners. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, US intelligence agencies have set up large databases to track cargo, ships and seamen in a search for anomalies that could indicate terrorists on approaching ships, said Frances Fragos-Townsend, the chief of Coast Guard intelligence. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda's leader, and his aides have owned ships for years, some of which transported commodities such as cement and sesame seeds. But one vessel delivered the explosives that al-Qaeda operatives used to bomb two US embassies in Africa in 1998, US officials said. Since September 11, the US list of al-Qaeda mystery ships has varied from a low of a dozen to a high of 50. Starting with the suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000 by al-Qaeda men in an inflatable dinghy, a strike that killed 17 sailors, US officials have noted a steady increase in nautical attacks, some of which were aborted by the planners or uncovered by authorities at the last moment. The latest came in October, when the hull of the French oil tanker Limburg was blasted by a speedboat off Yemen, causing a widespread oil spill. Now US Navy and Coast Guard intelligence are sorting through the corporate papers of the world's 120,000 merchant ships. US intelligence officers are also collating the names and mariners' licence numbers of tens of thousands of seamen from around the world, a sizeable percentage of whom carry fake documents and use pseudonyms because of criminal pasts. US Navy intelligence is also sharing information with dozens of allied navies, and has enlisted informants among port managers, shipping agents, crew manning supervisors and seafarers' unions. Dozens of navy and allied ships are scouring the Arabian Sea in search of al-Qaeda ships and fighters, in one of the largest naval seahunts since World War II. Members have boarded and searched hundreds of ships. US efforts to track al-Qaeda's activities at sea received a boost last month with the capture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, an alleged mastermind of al-Qaeda's nautical strategy who officials say is now co-operating with US interrogators. Another captured operative, Omar al-Faruq, has told interrogators that he planned scuba attacks on US warships in Indonesia. Navy officials say al-Qaeda has used one shipping fleet flagged in the Pacific island nation of Tonga to transport operatives around the Mediterranean. The firm - which is called Nova and is incorporated in Delaware and Romania - has allegedly been smuggling illegal immigrants for years, US and Greek officials said. Its ships also frequently change names and countries of registry, officials said.
Sick Baby Emergencies.
While the Raelien clone could be a very ill infant theres some other baby stories... Assassin singled out American missionaries By Ahmed al-Haj in Jibla, Yemen January 1 2003 The man suspected of killing three American missionaries and wounding another in southern Yemen is believed to have ties to a cell plotting attacks on foreigners and secular-minded politicians, officials said. The United States immediately vowed to hunt down any and all of those responsible for the murders. It asked Yemeni authorities to provide more protection for Americans after the gunning down of a doctor and two medical workers on Monday at Jibla Baptist hospital, south of the capital, Sana'a. The Islamic extremist walked into the hospital cradling a bandaged rifle as if it were a sick baby. The gunman passed security guards unnoticed and burst in on a morning meeting. He shot the director, William Koehn, 60, and two female colleagues in the head before moving on to the dispensary, where he severely wounded the pharmacist. Security guards captured the man, identified as Abed Abdul-Razzak Kamel, 30. He told police he carried out the attack to be closer to God. Two Australian doctors, one of whom was South Australian Ken Clezy, escaped unhurt in the attack. The Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, said one of the doctors believed the gunman targeted the three Americans. It was obviously a very frightening experience, Mr Downer said. The two Australian doctors are going to return to Australia very soon, and I can understand that. Yemeni authorities said Kamel claimed membership of a militant cell targeting foreigners and secular-minded Yemeni politicians and public figures. The official news agency Saba said the suspect told interrogators that he plotted the attack in collaboration with Ali al-Jarallah - a Muslim extremist and a member of the fundamentalist Islamic Reform Party who was arrested for shooting dead a left-wing politician on Saturday. President Ali Abdullah Saleh condemned the shootings as disgraceful and pledged to punish the perpetrators. We are confident that such a criminal act won't affect the friendship and co-operation between our countries, but instead strengthen our determination to eradicate terrorism, he said. The Bush Administration said investigators were trying to determine whether the attack was linked to terrorism. We strongly condemn and deplore the murder of three American citizens who were providing humanitarian assistance to the Yemeni people, said a White House spokesman, Scott McClellan. Our intention is to bring to justice any and all people who were responsible for these murders. US officials said it was too early to jump to conclusions about whether the man acted alone or had any link with groups such as al-Qaeda. Mr McClellan declined to label the murders a terrorist attack, but said the US was working closely with Yemeni officials on the case. On November 21 a gunman killed an American missionary nurse in the Lebanese city of Sidon. No one was arrested. http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/31/1041196644705.html Britain's Channel 4, which recently broadcast the country's first public autopsy for 170 years, is to show a Chinese artist eating the flesh of a dead baby, a British newspaper reported. The bizarre act will be shown in a documentary called Beijing Swings, which looks at extreme practices of Chinese artists, according to The Guardian. The program, to be shown on British screens late night next week, also shows a man drinking wine that has had an amputated penis marinaded in it. The program will be controversial and will shock some viewers but a warning will be given before it goes out on air, the paper quoted a Channel 4 spokesman as saying. Viewers will see stills of artist Zhu Yu biting into a stillborn child. He says on the program: No religion forbids cannibalism. Nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people. I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it. Zhu, who is a Christian, adds that religion has had a major impact on his work. On November 20, Channel 4, which is a free-to-air terrestrial channel, filmed maverick German doctor, Professor Gunther von Hagens, carrying out Britain's first public autopsy in nearly two centuries, despite a public outcry and threats of police action. The autopsy was performed on the corpse of a 72-year-old German man who had drunk up to two bottles of whisky a day and was a heavy smoker for the last 50 years of his life. Politicians and media critics have condemned the planned broadcast. Zhu describes his work as expressing his Christian faith, saying: Jesus is always related to death, blood, wounds. The show's presenter, a newspaper art critic, calls the work suffering for art on a messianic scale and says Zhu actually ate the baby's flesh. A spokesman for Channel 4 says the images appear in the context of an intelligent
Silver coin banks to oppose the Fed?
My Fellow Cypherpunks, THIRD EDITION!! Sorry, this corrects the 2nd edition and 1st which had bad links. AOL is a bitch! My 1st post on this subject lost text. sorry. Here is the full text: I have found another alternative to our corrupt, fiat, debt issued, privately owned, fractionally reserved $US. - Silver Banks. Here is the idea. The silver bank only accepts the walking silver dollar coin. It treats each coin as 1 US dollar as it nominally is. However, each coin is worth many times that in $US money. Bank members are encouraged to deal with each other by writing checks on the silver bank. Also, members are encouraged to give deep discounts to other members for purchases. There are tax advantages to using the silver bank. Also, the transactions and store of value are inflation proof. Also, VERY IMPORTANT, use of the bank will encourage "velocity of transactions" (business) among the members and, thusly, keep the members prosperous. Well, Cypherpunks, is this a good plan or not? Any ideas for making it better? The link below is where I got the info from: http://www.strike-the-root.com/columns/guillory/guillory3.html Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers BEAT STATE to see how the world really works see: www.WHATREALLYHAPPENED.COM and http://www.skolnicksreport.com/ to see how our evil money system really works see: www.fame.org
Re: Many Worlds Version of Fermi Paradox
On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Sarad AV wrote: Does a paradox ever help in understanding any thing? Yes, it can demonstrate that you aren't asking the right questions within the correct context. We define a paradox on a base of rules we want to prove. No, a paradox is two things we accept that imply two contradictory answers. 2.Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Wrong, there is -nothing- that says the program must have finite length -or- halt. We -assume- it is so (which relates to the a priori assumption of PM being complete in order to prove it is undecidable - as opposed to incomplete, which is not the same thing at all). The question is it in a formal system,since we don't have paradoexes in a formal system. Godel has demonstrated that this is untrue, that in fact you -can- have -undecidable- statements in a formal system. The flaw in our assumption is that we can reduce everything to a 'T' or a 'F'. * note that Godel uses 'consistent' where we use 'complete' * Proposition XI: If c be a given recursive, consistent class of formulae, then the propositional formula which states that c is consistent is not c-provable; in particular, the consistency of P is unprovable in P, it being assumed that P is consistent (if not, then of course, every statement is provable). ...further clarification (original italics/bold denoted by -*-)... It may be noted is also constructive, ie it permits, if a -proof- from c is produced for w, the effective derivation from c of a contradiction. The whole proof of Proposition XI can also be carried over word for word to the axiom-system of set theory M, and to that of classical mathematics A, and here too it yields the result that there is no consistency proof for M or of A which could be formalized in M or A respectively, it being assumed that M and A are consistent. It must be expressly noted that Proposition XI (and the corresponding results for M and A) represent no contradiction of the formalistic standpoint of Hilbert. For this standpoint presupposes only the existance of a consistency proof effected by finite means, and there might conceivably be finite proofs which -cannot- be stated in P (or in M and A). In other words, There are some proofs that can't be written. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: QM, EPR, A/B
On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Nomen Nescio wrote: Tim May wrote... I don't believe, necessarily, in certain forms of the Copenhagen Interpretation, especially anything about signals propagating instantaneously, 'instantaneously' from -whose- perspective? Yes, this has been a fashionable set of statements, very smiliar to quantum mechanics is merely a useful tool for calclating the outcome of experiments. Only so long as there are -not- relativistic effects, which -do- happen -any- time a photon is involved. ***Reality is -observer- dependent*** The major hole in -all- current QM systems is they do not take into account relativistic effects. Which are required -any time- a photon is involved. I used to chant this too, but the recent (well, over the last 10 years) experimental work in EPR has convinced me that there's really something odd going on here. Many worlds (first proposed in the 50s and recently revived) is one possible explanation for why, for instance, photons in the double slit experiment know about the slit they didn't go through. And while I am not particularly convinced that this is the explanation (there are other basic things about the QM world it doesn't explain, such as why I measure THIS outcome rather than THAT outcome), I'm personally at the point where I think some form of answer is needed, and that the above intellectual dodge is no longer valid. So at least many worlds is one possible attempt to answer why photons are able to know instantaneously about correlated photons far removed (and for me, and the late John Bell it is inescapable that they do indeed find out instantaneously). The error in this approach is not into taking account the relativity of the experiment. From the traditional approach we are testing the photon with the instrument, -but- the photon is also testing the instrument. How big is the slit -from the perspective of the photon-? In other words; how big is the cosmos to a signle photon? The answer is it has no dimension. Now since there is no time or distance scale from the perspective of the photon exactly -what- is happening instantaneously? Answer, nothing. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
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I am home alone waiting for you
Title: Untitled Document GRAB A PLATE AND WATCH TEENZ EATING EACH OTHER Just Katrina, her girlfriends and our little camera! - Go here to visit me and my friends If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please click on the link below. CLICK HERE TO GET OFF Please allow 24 hours for remove to take affect.
Catch Bush if you can.
I read Frank Abagnales book 20 years ago and it's impressive.I look forward to the movie.The USA is the greatest show on earth and with grifters like Frank,(and Mongo) who needs fiction? Frank might have been a fan of the old,'mission impossible' series.He sure pulled off some complex multi-player,multi-level scores. Which reminds me,search for Tehelka scandal and Fujimori's fall,remember Rodney King? If a scammer can profit from a sting well so can guerrilla journalists.You never know your luck in the big city,you could wind up with some breathtaking trophy from the bush on your wall. They say that only a fool is certain, and that's for sure.
Fw: Wonderfool relations to ur friends !!
attachment: friends.scr
I am home alone waiting for you
Title: Untitled Document GRAB A PLATE AND WATCH TEENZ EATING EACH OTHER Just Katrina, her girlfriends and our little camera! - Go here to visit me and my friends If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please click on the link below. CLICK HERE TO GET OFF Please allow 24 hours for remove to take affect.
CDR: How Free is the Free Market?
Chompsky makes the point that the state underwrites the so called free market. As we are all libertarians,(cept shoate) here we should be doing our utmost to expose,ridicule,attack and destroy the state,nest pas? Of the essence of government... it is a thing apart, developing its own interests at the expense of what opposes it; all attempts to make it anything else fail. Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912)
Re: Wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.
On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Matthew X wrote: Too much egg-nog? Try... Stoicism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Stoicism is a school of philosophy commonly associated with such philosophers as Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. Organized at Athens in the third century B.C.E. (310 BC) by Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus. The Stoics provided a unified account of the world that comprised formal logic, materialistic physics, and naturalistic ethics. Later Roman Stoics emphasized more exclusively the development of recommendations for living in harmony with a natural world over which one has no direct control. So much for Coase's Theorem... Living according to nature or reason, they held, is living in conformity with the divine order of the universe. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, a classification derived from the teachings of Plato. Do much for 'greed is good'. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: QM, EPR, A/B
On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Nomen Nescio wrote: One way out is to ditch quantum mechanics as being anything near a description of reality as classical theories in essence are. Tim Boyer of CUNY and a batch of Italian researchers have done a pretty convincing job of showing that Ahranov-Bohm can be classically derived in a fairly straightforward manner. But it doesn't explain how AB is able to predict said phenomenon in about 4 lines while they need many pages of fairly difficult EM theory. That's pretty cool. In this case QM is just a short cut. For me it's clear that A/B and EPR show us that QM is telling us SOMETHING about reality, but we don't yet understand what it is. Part of the problem is that the detection equipment is many fermions looking at single particles. I think QM is easier to understand when looking at an ion trap. There are lots of photons around for every atom but the interactions are with fields and the detection is of single photons (again with massive amounts of equipment, but the atoms don't interact directly as in EPR or double slit). QM is a nice model that works. It is a good mathematical description of observed phenomena. What else do we need? The idea that a photon passes thru one slit or the other is just a model. What is the slit? It's really a whole bunch of fermions in a spacial pattern, and when an electron or photon interacts with that distribution we get the observed self interaction result. The model is self interaction. That may have nothing to do with reality. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Re: Drivel and Gutter,Boring.,
On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Matthew X wrote: Isn't it fascinating to see the neo-liberal Choate post marxist stuff here and relate to this post? Neo-liberal? What a joke. I'm not a liberal or a conservative. Do you have a point to make other than name calling? Typical CACL bullshit. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: Many Worlds Version of Fermi Paradox
hi, A few queries. Does a paradox ever help in understanding any thing? We define a paradox on a base of rules we want to prove. Ok,let me pick an example. We make a paradox over a statement. This i found on the net The following is an implication that the Oracle does not exist. 1.Someone introduces Gödel to a UTM, a machine that is supposed to be a Universal Truth Machine, capable of correctly answering any question at all. 2.Gödel asks for the program and the circuit design of the UTM. The program may be complicated, but it can only be finitely long. Call the program P(UTM) for Program of the Universal Truth Machine. 3: Gödel writes out the following sentence: The machine constructed on the basis of the program P(UTM) will never say that this sentence is true. Call this sentence G. G is equivalent to: UTM will never say G is true. 4:Now Gödel asks UTM whether G is true or not. 5:If UTM says G is true, then UTM will never say G is true is false. If UTM will never say G is true is false, then G is false (since G = UTM will never say G is true). So if UTM says G is true, then G is in fact false, and UTM has made a false statement. So UTM will never say that G is true, since UTM makes only true statements. 6:We have established that UTM will never say G is true. So UTM will never say G is true is in fact a true statement. So G is true (since G = UTM will never say G is true). I know a truth that UTM can never utter, Gödel says. I know that G is true. UTM is not truly universal. Firstly if you see the following statements are consistent for both positive and negative logic. The question is it in a formal system,since we don't have paradoexes in a formal system.Any formal system is consistent, i.e. there is no proposition that can be proved true by one sequence of steps and false by another, equally valid argument. Secondly,how do we define the oracle.If I say an oracle is one who knows every thing about every thing. You may not agree-you may come with your own defenition of an oracle,some one else will come with a different defenition of the oracle. With my defenition of the oracle-the above set of statements showing that the oracle does not exist is true.If you define oracle in a different manner-the statements shown above may not lead to the conclusion that Oracle does not exist. Its how I define the oracle and how I put the statements which give me the amswer I want.Anybody can do that and come with a consistent system. We have to see that if all over defenitions and statements fall in a formal system,which we *donot*.We know that the oracle problem is undecidable,yet the above statements showed that the oracle doesnot exist-in the domain in which the oracle was defined and statements over it. Same is for all paradoxes-they are only consistant in the small domain they are defined-other wise they are undecidable in a formal system over a larger domain.So paradoxes doesn't say any thing.when we assign a sense to a paradox,it stops becoming a paradox but is only true for its set of defenitions and statements. Its also worth noting paradoxes try to make their point by the method of falsification rather than proof by contradiction. Regards Sarath. --- Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Monday, December 30, 2002, at 01:18 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote: Hal Finney wrote: One correction, there are no known problems which take exponential time but which can be checked in polynomial time. If such a problem could be found it would prove that P != NP, one of the greatest unsolved problems in computability theory. Whoops, I've heard of the P=NP problem but I guess I was confused about what it meant. But there are some problems where candidate solutions can be checked much faster than new solutions can be generated, no? If you want to know whether a number can be factorized it's easy to check candidate factors, for example, although if the answer is that it cannot be factorized because the number is prime I guess there'd be no fast way to check if that answer is correct. Factoring is not known to be in NP (the so-called NP-complete class of problems...solve on in P time and you've solved them all!). The example I favor is the Hamiltonian cycle/circuit problem: find a path through a set of linked nodes (cities) which passes through each node once and only once. All of the known solutions to an arbitrary Hamiltonian cycle problem are exponential in time (in number of nodes). For example, for 5 cities there are at most 120 possible paths, so this is an easy one. But for 50 cities there are as many as 49!/2 possible paths (how many, exactly, depends on the links between the cities, with not every city having all possible links to other cities). For a mere 100 cities, the number of routes to consider is larger than the number of particles we believe to be in the universe. However, saying known
Re: CDR: Re: What is Anarchism?
On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Matthew X wrote: Anarchism is the belief that people are basically good, (Shoate shite) Sez who? Sez you, actually.. A lot of people attracted to anarchism seem to think like Lord Acton,that power corrupts and the less your average person has over you the safer you'll be. Thank you for agreeing with me, people are basically good. Othewise what is being corrupted? If they're already bad, then what is being corrupted? Nothing, they're already corrupt. If they're already corrupt then you have to accept the fact that even if we were in the nirvana state of anarchy at least some people would not see it as their best interest, and would do something about it (which by the way is where the 'big stick' observation about anarchy comes into play - however much you might want to deny it). Anarchy is that people would get along if left to their own ends and didn't have to put up with 'governments'. The problem is that 'governments' don't exist outside of individuals anymore than forests exist without trees. You can take the tree out of the forest, you can't take the forest out of the trees. You can take people out of government, but you can't take government out of people. The way people speak of 'government' as if it were something extant outside of peoples minds and hearts is truly schizo. Typical CACL double-speak. People attracted to anarchy, irrespective of their intelligence, are emotionaly stunted. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: [e-gold-list] Announcing Seagold.net: E-mail Privacy, Secure, Encrypted, accepts e-gold
At 11:50 AM 12/13/2002 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: ...It had to happen sooner or later, I suppose... --- begin forwarded text From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [e-gold-list] Announcing Seagold.net: E-mail Privacy, Secure, Encrypted, accepts e-gold ... Introducing Seagold.net, a secure web-based email service located in the Principality of Sealand, outside the jurisdiction of any government on earth! ... followed by some description of their email system and a long complex description of their shell game \\ multi- level pyramid scheme\ silly sales rep recruiting system.* If you poke around their site a bit, you'll see a reference to http://sealand.pmmit.com/seamail.html which appears to be a straightforward mail system without the shell game, though I haven't done a feature-by-feature comparison to be sure if it's quite identical. It's basically webmail plus SSL-encrypted POP3. The price ranges from $10/month to $90/year depending on contract length, vs. $25/month for the pyramid game, which offers the possibility of being free or letting you make gazillions of dollars if you can find a way to convince the untapped potential customer base to play the game instead of just buying the service. It strikes me as a bit short on features, but then I'm comparing it to fastmail.fm, which is an extremely well-run email system that my wife uses (which ranges from free accounts with signature tags to cheap accounts without them to full-featured accounts for $20-40/year.) There's no encryption, but their spam-avoidance features are the best I've seen. * Don't get me wrong - I'm not totally dissing well-designed pyramid marketing as a sales-rep recruitment technique, but it has to be something that has a product that's realistic at a price that's realistic with margins that are realistic, while these guys seem to have a margin that's unrealistic (at least compared to other services they're offering) with a total hand-waving shell-game compensation method, and other than the fact that their system is based in Sealand, which is worth paying some margin for, and open-source based, which says it has some chance of stability if administered well, they don't say anything that inspires me to expect them to be competent at running email systems well. But hey, free trials can be fun sometimes, though this one requires an e-gold account number, which makes it harder to burn lots of them.
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
At 03:57 PM 12/19/2002 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 04:56:12PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote: | I think this would help, but I also think technology is driving a lot of | this. You don't have to give a lot more information to stores today than | you did twenty years ago for them to be much more able to track what you | buy and when you buy it and how you pay, just because the available | information technology is so much better. Surveilance cameras, DNA | testing, identification by iris codes, electronic payment mechanisms that | are much more convenient than cash most of the time, all these contribute | to the loss of privacy in ways that are only partly subject to any kind of | government action (or inaction) or law. But you *do* have to provide a lot more information to your bank than you used to, and to your mailbox company, and to the government-run post-offices that can bully private mailbox companies around, and to hotels, and to driver-safety-and-car-taxation enforcers, and to airlines, because governments either require them to collect more, or encourage them to collect more data, and to collect it in forms that are easier to correlate than they have been in the past, Yep. A lot of it, however, freeloads on the government certification of identity. Without the legal threats, it would be much harder to assemble the data. (Other things, like credit, also become much harder. That may become less of an issue as id theft makes credit visibly a two-edged sword. While some of it is freeloading on the identity certification, much of it is done because it's so cheap to do so they might as well, and it's cheap because of the government regulations as well as because computation keeps getting radically cheaper. Some of it's also because of algorithm developments for credit scoring, which has revolutionized the credit business almost as much as Black-Scholes or online credit card authorization. Much of that work was done by Fair and Isaac, who commercialized their Operations Research theory. (As someone who did O.R. a long time ago, before the field got radically changed by Karmarkar's work and cheaper computers, it's kind of fun to see that somebody made some money on it :-)
QM, EPR, A/B
Tim May wrote... I don't believe, necessarily, in certain forms of the Copenhagen Interpretation, especially anything about signals propagating instantaneously, just the quantum mechanics is about measurables ground truth of what we see, what has never failed us, what the mathematics tells us and what is experimentally verified. Whether there really are (in the modal realism sense of Lewis) other worlds is neither here nor there. Naturally, I would be thrilled to see evidence, or to conclude myself from deeper principles, that other worlds have more than linguistic existence. Yes, this has been a fashionable set of statements, very smiliar to quantum mechanics is merely a useful tool for calclating the outcome of experiments. I used to chant this too, but the recent (well, over the last 10 years) experimental work in EPR has convinced me that there's really something odd going on here. Many worlds (first proposed in the 50s and recently revived) is one possible explanation for why, for instance, photons in the double slit experiment know about the slit they didn't go through. And while I am not particularly convinced that this is the explanation (there are other basic things about the QM world it doesn't explain, such as why I measure THIS outcome rather than THAT outcome), I'm personally at the point where I think some form of answer is needed, and that the above intellectual dodge is no longer valid. So at least many worlds is one possible attempt to answer why photons are able to know instantaneously about correlated photons far removed (and for me, and the late John Bell it is inescapable that they do indeed find out instantaneously). One way out is to ditch quantum mechanics as being anything near a description of reality as classical theories in essence are. Tim Boyer of CUNY and a batch of Italian researchers have done a pretty convincing job of showing that Ahranov-Bohm can be classically derived in a fairly straightforward manner. But it doesn't explain how AB is able to predict said phenomenon in about 4 lines while they need many pages of fairly difficult EM theory. For me it's clear that A/B and EPR show us that QM is telling us SOMETHING about reality, but we don't yet understand what it is.
Re: Many Worlds Version of Fermi Paradox
On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Tim May wrote: And this general line of reasoning leads to a Many Worlds Version of the Fermi Paradox: Why aren't they here? Why aren't they all where? If they were 'here' then they wouldn't be another world now would they? The reason I lean toward the shut up and calculate or for all practical purposes interpretation of quantum mechanics is embodied in the above argument. IF the MWI universe branchings are at all communicatable-with, that is, at least _some_ of those universes would have very, very large amounts of power, computer power, numbers of people, etc. And some of them, if it were possible, would have communicated with us, colonized us, visited us, etc. If they could communicate they wouldn't be different. This is a variant of the Fermi Paradox raised to a very high power. It's muddled thinking raised to a lot of wasted human effort. ps there are -two- different ways to propose the 'many worlds' model. The first being that the worlds occupy the same 'space' but differ in all other characters; in other words they are the same cosmos but with different 'decision trees'. The other is that they exist in a 'meta-space' that seperates -all- metrics; that the many cosmos' are truly each unique and share nothing (note that this model can also contain the first). -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
re:constant encryped stream
hi, Thank you for the reply. they didn't really explain why; I think it was leftover regulations from wartime censorship during World War II or the Korean Police Action. I think so. Also, in the US, the police can request a mail cover (which means recording who all your snail mail is from) with much less legal formality than a search warrant, and if they get a warrant to open all your incoming mail, I don't think they're required to notify you. We don't have such a system in india-it is pretty transparent. But at the slightest at the use of encryption will raise their brows. This issue can only be fully solved when the vast majority of people begin using encryption. Encrypted spam wouldn't be a bad idea either. (Ideally they'd encrypt all of the spam :-) Actually, if you insisted on all your mail being encrypted, that would cut down significantly on spam, because the amount of individual work per message required to encrypt something is significantly higher than the work required to just email it, which can scale badly and can also increase the traceability of spam (by watching who downloads large numbers of keys from keyservers, for instance.) What about just making your own key pair and not putting it on any key server.The govt will have enough reason that the keys were communicated by other means than putting it on a key server and they will still have be interested in it,making key pairs is not a hard task,if spammers have utilities like pgp,even spammers can do that.So spammers don't have to worry *more* of getting traced.It should give the govt. enough work. :) it is better that every one start encrypting their mail-the idea would be then half of the world policing will have to watch the other half of the world which are civilians-which is not very feasible,thats what I think. The extent to which obtaining keys is a traceable activity depends a lot on the type of public key infrastructure that's being used, and to some extent on the amount of accuracy that you need - spammers selling lists to each other probably wouldn't mind a 5-10% inaccuracy rate if it meant they didn't have to use keyservers, while people who want to preserve their privacy are much more likely to download mass quantities of keys from servers to avoid having it be obvious which ones they care about. Happy New Year. Regards Sarath. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
re:constant encryped stream
At 03:07 AM 12/21/2002 -0800, Sarad AV wrote: hi, Don't encrypt, post it by snail mail. I remember reading this in pgp's help document. It addresses why we glue over our envelope and seal it. It ofcourse is concealing (for the govt) and privacy (for the user). The govt. never asks letters not to be glued and sealed because of the vast majority of people using it. When I was young, the US Postal Service charged less money for unsealed envelopes than for sealed envelopes. I think the year was about 1962 or 1963, and the price was 5 cents for sealed envelopes and 4 cents for unsealed and for post cards. Since this was elementary school and we were learning about community things like the Post Office and the Fire Department, they didn't really explain why; I think it was leftover regulations from wartime censorship during World War II or the Korean Police Action. Also, in the US, the police can request a mail cover (which means recording who all your snail mail is from) with much less legal formality than a search warrant, and if they get a warrant to open all your incoming mail, I don't think they're required to notify you. But at the slightest at the use of encryption will raise their brows. This issue can only be fully solved when the vast majority of people begin using encryption. Encrypted spam wouldn't be a bad idea either. (Ideally they'd encrypt all of the spam :-) Actually, if you insisted on all your mail being encrypted, that would cut down significantly on spam, because the amount of individual work per message required to encrypt something is significantly higher than the work required to just email it, which can scale badly and can also increase the traceability of spam (by watching who downloads large numbers of keys from keyservers, for instance.) The extent to which obtaining keys is a traceable activity depends a lot on the type of public key infrastructure that's being used, and to some extent on the amount of accuracy that you need - spammers selling lists to each other probably wouldn't mind a 5-10% inaccuracy rate if it meant they didn't have to use keyservers, while people who want to preserve their privacy are much more likely to download mass quantities of keys from servers to avoid having it be obvious which ones they care about.
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 09:49:28AM -0800, Kevin Elliott wrote: | At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: | Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a | credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in | the name Doe. | | Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at | all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your | card and application, please fill out the application and mail it | in. I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the | application in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name | linkage... Pollution. Cards without names can be purged, cards with names confuse them. Is that the same Mr. Hughes with Richard Nixon's SSN who seems to shop vegitarian in San Jose, but buys pork in large quantities in Oakland? And look, Mr. Clinton here lives at the same address... Adam -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume
Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your card and application, please fill out the application and mail it in. I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the application in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name linkage... * No store I have used has ever _checked_ that a name is valid...they don't even care when my credit card or check says Timothy C. May but my Customer Courtesy Card says J. Random Cypher, or Eric Hughes, or Vlad the Impaler...or is just unattached to any name. * Some stores are doing the bonus points scam, where customers who spend $300 get a $1 discount applied to their next purchase, etc. This does not need a name, either, as the discount can apply to whomever uses the card with a particular number, but the stores may (I don't know) require that a card has some semblance of the right name, etc. * I expect most uses of customer courtesy cards are to try to get some kind of brand loyalty going. People thinking Well, I have a card at Albertson's, but not at Safeway, so I'll go to Albertson's. * Dossier-compiling does not seem to be the motivation...at least not yet. The data are too sparse, it seems to me. I don't know if people who honestly gave a name and mailing address, and whose data were keypunched accurately, are getting the targeted mailings for Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. that the technology can support. * As we've mentioned several times, Cypherpunks at physical meetings sometimes put their customer courtesy cards in a box and then draw randomly, to make the point and for grins. * I keep meaning to get a new series of cards and have them with names like Rasheed bin Salmeh and so on, with addresses like Islamic Students Center, 21 First...blah blah... Just to watch the reaction. * Dossier compiling at grocery stores is not very useful for Big Brother, either. Who consumes Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. is not interesting even to George Bush and Dick Cheney. And few hardware or electrical supply stores have courtesy cards. In any case, no requirement to use cards, etc. * All in all, not a very interesting example of ID and tracking. Things will get much more interesting, and worrisome, if there is ever a national ID system (in the U.S.) and some kind of legislated requirement (albeit unconstitutional!) that citizen-units must ID themselves with valid ID for all purchases, or at least of certain classes of purchases (beyond guns, for example). I don't see this happening in the next 15 years unless some major new terrorist incident occurs. --Tim May The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. --Frederic Bastiat
Happy New Year!
If you are going to drink, don't drive. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 01:21:52AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: | At 03:57 PM 12/19/2002 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: | On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 04:56:12PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote: | | I think this would help, but I also think technology is driving a lot of | | this. You don't have to give a lot more information to stores today than | | you did twenty years ago for them to be much more able to track what you | | buy and when you buy it and how you pay, just because the available | | information technology is so much better. Surveilance cameras, DNA | | testing, identification by iris codes, electronic payment mechanisms that | | are much more convenient than cash most of the time, all these contribute | | to the loss of privacy in ways that are only partly subject to any kind | of | | government action (or inaction) or law. | | But you *do* have to provide a lot more information to your bank | than you used to, and to your mailbox company, and to the government-run | post-offices that can bully private mailbox companies around, | and to hotels, and to driver-safety-and-car-taxation enforcers, | and to airlines, because governments either require them to collect more, | or encourage them to collect more data, and to collect it in forms that | are easier to correlate than they have been in the past, What's information, Mr. Smith? If I walk in and say my name's John Doe, here's my cash, and there isn't any government ID, who can question me? | Yep. A lot of it, however, freeloads on the government certification | of identity. Without the legal threats, it would be much harder to | assemble the data. (Other things, like credit, also become much | harder. That may become less of an issue as id theft makes credit | visibly a two-edged sword. | | While some of it is freeloading on the identity certification, | much of it is done because it's so cheap to do so they might as well, | and it's cheap because of the government regulations | as well as because computation keeps getting radically cheaper. The cheap to do is freeloading. If you take all the government issued ID out of your wallet, how much of what's left has the same name on it? Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. If I pull out all three, the cost of doing it shoots way up, and I pay in cash. Adam -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 11:02:48AM -0800, Tim May wrote: | On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: | | At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: | Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a | credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in | the name Doe. | | Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at | all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your | card and application, please fill out the application and mail it in. | I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the application | in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name linkage... | | * No store I have used has ever _checked_ that a name is valid...they | don't even care when my credit card or check says Timothy C. May but | my Customer Courtesy Card says J. Random Cypher, or Eric Hughes, or | Vlad the Impaler...or is just unattached to any name. And as you say below, checking that a name is valid is hard, except when you can free-load off the effort of the state to issue identities. Grocery stores don't bother, which was my point to Bill. Free-loading off the identity infrastructure of the state is a huge problem. Fair and Issac, Experian and the rest are parasites whose gossip/cross-referencing/credit scoring/libel is only possible because of the state's investment in identity cards. That problem is getting worse because none of that information is private, and many credentials, like drivers licenses, are very valuable in relation to how hard they are to get. And so identity theft, inability to get a mortgage, etc, will have to be balanced against al that cool credit that's made possible by the tracking system. In the end, it won't be worthwhile to many people to be finger and iris printed as part of their daily lives. Or maybe it will. Note that I'm not saying that they're easy to get: Thats irrelevant. Such things are more valuable to get then they are difficult, and will remain that way. Drivers licenses, trusted traveller cards, etc, will always be worth getting if you're a fraudster. Adam | * All in all, not a very interesting example of ID and tracking. Things | will get much more interesting, and worrisome, if there is ever a | national ID system (in the U.S.) and some kind of legislated | requirement (albeit unconstitutional!) that citizen-units must ID | themselves with valid ID for all purchases, or at least of certain | classes of purchases (beyond guns, for example). -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
At 12:03 -0800 on 12/31/02, Tim May wrote: Yes. So? Notice that exactly the same type of coupon is printed out with a cash or non courtesy card purchase. It's a purely local calculation. In programming terms, a purely local variable situation. No. Obviously the coupon was closely linked with my buying pattern, and in at least one case I received one of these buy several coupons without having purchased that product that particular trip (though I'd purchased it the the past). In my normal insulting way I would say Duh here. But I am attempting to be more polite, so I will say Am I missing something in your analysis? My oh my. Getting an early start on your new years resolution? G -- ___ Kevin Elliott mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ#23758827 AIM ID: teargo ___
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
At 11:02 -0800 on 12/31/02, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. * Dossier-compiling does not seem to be the motivation...at least not yet. The data are too sparse, it seems to me. I don't know if people who honestly gave a name and mailing address, and whose data were keypunched accurately, are getting the targeted mailings for Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. that the technology can support. I am almost CERTAIN that at least some stores are keeping track of what's being bought and using it to encourage buying. i.e. when I still lived in the Great State of Illinois, Kroger had an interesting habit of giving out coupons with your receipt. They'd custom print a coupon when the printed your receipt. It didn't take much thinking to notice that the coupon they gave you was VERY closely correlated to what you bought. My favorite case was when I happened to buy 8 boxes of HotPockets and they responded with a Buy 7 get 1 free coupon. However, this personally doesn't bother me. They don't have my name, all they have is that the person who carries this token like HotPockets, so lets give him a coupon to keep him hooked. Very sensible to me... -- ___ Kevin Elliott mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ#23758827 AIM ID: teargo ___
Recommended: Catch Me If You Can, a film
I recommend Catch Me If You Can, the new Spielberg-DiCapprio-Hanks movie about Frank W. Abignale, Jr., a true story of how Abignale ran away from home around 1964, forged checks, posed as an airline copilot, then as a doctor, then as a lawyer, while honing his craft in forging and identity faking. I never saw Takedown, the seldom-scene movie about Mitnick, Gilmore, etc., but I doubt it was as good in the social engineering side of hacking as Catch Me is. Some excellent sets, costumes, and period stuff from the 1960s. Abignale consults now for check makers, credit card companies, the FBI and other government agencies, and seems to be the leading authority in forgery. An interview he did a year or two ago with an Australian radio station--findable on the Web, as I found it--is great. He describes modern technology and how it actually makes what he did as a teenager a lot easier today (in some ways, less so in others). HBO has a Making Of short piece, with behind the scenes camera shots, interviews with the parties involved, including Abignale, and lots of additional information. I TIVOed it. (The next time a CP meeting/party is at my house, someone remind me and I'll put it on. Along with A Beautiful Mind, also of interest to us.) --Tim May, Citizen-unit of of the once free United States The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots tyrants. --Thomas Jefferson, 1787
biological systems and cryptography
How do you all see the future use of biologically based systems affecting cryptography in general? By biologically based systems I mean machine learning, genetic algorithms, chips that learn (like Carver Mead's work), neural networks, vecor support machines, associative memory, etc. It seems to me that computer science based on writing longer and longer streams of instructions is coming to an end, as it cannot possibly scale. We now have supercomputers that can execute 35 trillion instructions per second, but if someone has to write all of those instuctions, what good are they? Also, it seems that the brain has immensely powerful visual processing power, without having millions of lines of code written to do so. I only ask this because I'm deciding whether to study computational neuroscience or cryptography in grad school. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: David Bowie - Wild Is The Wind He who knows himself knows his Lord. - Sufi saying [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. _Can_ be used is different from _must_ be used. Collecting valid name information costs a vendor money (both in labor, computerization/records, and in driving some customers elsewhere). It also deters some people from completing transactions. Given free choice, most parties to a transaction in a store will not exchange name information. Examples abound of this. No time today to describe the examples of where people choose not to give names. Flea markets, gas stations, grocery stores, hardware stores, etc. A gas station which refuses to take paper currency limits its sales. J. Random Terrorist will likely buy gas with cash. Only an enforceable (and unconstitutional, for various reasons) requirement for ID will work. As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this in detail. Think about it. --Tim May
Re: Recommended: Catch Me If You Can, a film
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 01:22:49PM -0800, Tim May wrote: ... (The next time a CP meeting/party is at my house, someone remind me and I'll put it on. Along with A Beautiful Mind, also of interest to us.) The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots tyrants. --Thomas Jefferson, 1787 I actually found a beautiful mind to be a disappointment. I was hoping for a movie more about math and crypto, but it turned out to be a movie about schizophrenia. Did you not find the same thing? -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Zen is the madman yelling 'If you wanta tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars!' - Jack Kerouac [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
re:constant encryped stream
Also, in the US, the police can request a mail cover (which means recording who all your snail mail is from) with much less legal formality than a search warrant, and if they get a warrant to open all your incoming mail, I don't think they're required to notify you. Is there a way to RELIABLY find the mail was opened? Reason: If the mail sent is eg. a CD with a set of OTP keys, then the adversary gains next to nothing by intercepting it IF the interception is detected (the keys just get discarded and new set is sent to another address). Then it could be possible to securely send large volumes of confidential data by mail; you prepare the pairs of CDs - one with cryptographically random data, one with the real data XORed by the first set. You send the first set. If it arrives unopened (which can be communicated safely even over an unsecured channel), you send the second set; if it arrives opened, you generate the CD pairs again and send the new first set. If the adversary intercepts only one half of the transported data, they gain nothing more than the fact some amount of data was sent. (Of course, hand-to-hand exchange is more secure, but it is suitable for operative handling of keys in urban setting, not when an overseas flight would come to question.) One of my ideas was to put a small piece of film or photographic paper, detect that it was exposed to light, but then the adversary can put in a new piece of the light-sensitive material and reseal the package. The same problem goes with the various kinds of seals. Comments, hints, keywords to look up?
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 11:02:48AM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. ... * Dossier compiling at grocery stores is not very useful for Big Brother, either. Who consumes Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. is not interesting even to George Bush and Dick Cheney. And few hardware or electrical supply stores have courtesy cards. In any case, no requirement to use cards, etc. * All in all, not a very interesting example of ID and tracking. Things will get much more interesting, and worrisome, if there is ever a national ID system (in the U.S.) and some kind of legislated requirement (albeit unconstitutional!) that citizen-units must ID themselves with valid ID for all purchases, or at least of certain classes of purchases (beyond guns, for example). I don't see this happening in the next 15 years unless some major new terrorist incident occurs. But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: A Tribe Called Quest - Scenario Each molecule preaches perfect law, Each moment chants true sutra; The most fleeting thought is timeless, A single hair's enough to stir the sea - Shutaku [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:41 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 11:02 -0800 on 12/31/02, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Kevin Elliott wrote: At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in the name Doe. * Dossier-compiling does not seem to be the motivation...at least not yet. The data are too sparse, it seems to me. I don't know if people who honestly gave a name and mailing address, and whose data were keypunched accurately, are getting the targeted mailings for Midol, Attends, Trojans, etc. that the technology can support. I am almost CERTAIN that at least some stores are keeping track of what's being bought and using it to encourage buying. i.e. when I still lived in the Great State of Illinois, Kroger had an interesting habit of giving out coupons with your receipt. They'd custom print a coupon when the printed your receipt. It didn't take much thinking to notice that the coupon they gave you was VERY closely correlated to what you bought. My favorite case was when I happened to buy 8 boxes of HotPockets and they responded with a Buy 7 get 1 free coupon. Yes. So? Notice that exactly the same type of coupon is printed out with a cash or non courtesy card purchase. It's a purely local calculation. In programming terms, a purely local variable situation. In my normal insulting way I would say Duh here. But I am attempting to be more polite, so I will say Am I missing something in your analysis? --Tim May
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
At 12:58 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 09:49:28AM -0800, Kevin Elliott wrote: | At 12:12 -0500 on 12/31/02, Adam Shostack wrote: | Rummaging through my wallet...a grocery card in the name of Hughes, a | credit card with the name Shostack, and an expired membership card in | the name Doe. | | Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at | all? Every grocery card I've ever gotten they've said here's your | card and application, please fill out the application and mail it | in. I say thank you ma'am, walk out the door and toss the | application in the trash. Not exactly strong (or any) name | linkage... Pollution. Cards without names can be purged, cards with names confuse them. Is that the same Mr. Hughes with Richard Nixon's SSN who seems to shop vegitarian in San Jose, but buys pork in large quantities in Oakland? And look, Mr. Clinton here lives at the same address... I see. I guess I'll have to fill out the damn form the next time I get a card. I don't actually visit the store now that safeway.com delivers G. -- ___ Kevin Elliott mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ#23758827 AIM ID: teargo ___
Re: biological systems and cryptography
At 11:41 AM 12/31/2002 -0800, Michael Cardenas wrote: I only ask this because I'm deciding whether to study computational neuroscience or cryptography in grad school. Are you planning to get a PhD and/or do research, or just a terminal master's degree to do engineering? If you're planning to do research, definitely go for the computational neuroscience. The usual reasons to do research are to discover new and interesting things, or to break old and inaccurately-trusted things, or to have topics to publish papers about so you can be a professor at a major university. In computational neuroscience, you may be able to do these things. (I don't know the field, but it sounds like there are lots of open directions you could go with it.) In crypto, there are lots of really really bright people, lots of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, most of the standard techniques are good enough that the bar for what's a fundamentally new and interesting discovery? is at least up at the level of discovering Elliptic Curve Crypto and probably higher. Just doing a new symmetric-key algorithm that's an order of magnitude faster than AES isn't enough; we can do wire-speed crypto for most things that matter. Maybe the NTRU guy has something cool, if he can prove it to the satisfaction of enough people. Discovering a new technique that breaks things like AES might be good enough for a couple of years of papers, but you'll note that lots of people have been working on things like that. Doing a terminal master's degree to learn how to engineer cryptosystems and build tools that are secure and reliable is a different game entirely - do some other computer science things while you're at it - but skills that will help you do a better job of building programs are worthwhile, as long as school doesn't interfere too much with your job needs. I did a master's in Operations Research a couple decades ago, and found that it really added a lot to my perspectives and technical maturity, but the world was different back then... michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred
Re: biological systems and cryptography
On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:41 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: How do you all see the future use of biologically based systems affecting cryptography in general? By biologically based systems I mean machine learning, genetic algorithms, chips that learn (like Carver Mead's work), neural networks, vecor support machines, associative memory, etc. Strong crypto is, ipso facto, resistant to all of the above. For the obvious reason that the specific solution to a cipher is like a Dirac delta function (a spike) rising above a featureless plain, this in terms of the usual hill-climbing or landscape-learning models which all of the above use in one form or another. Cryptanalysis of weak crypto, in terms of mundane things like passphrase guessing, finding images tagged with stego code, etc., already in some cases makes use of these tools. Bob Baldwin's Crytpographer's Workbench used learning algorithms a long time ago. Strong math wins out over weak crypto any day, and attempting to brute force a cipher with even a swimming pool full of Adleman machines will not work: if a 400-digit number takes, for instance, a million Pentium 4 years to brute force factor, then how long does a 600-digit number take? (And using larger RSA moduli is of course trivial...) Homework: Using the estimates Schneier, Diffie, Hellman, and others have made for the number of computer operations to break ciphers of various kinds, describe a reasonable cipher and modulus or key length which will take more energy than there is in the entire universe to break. The answer, in terms of how small the key or modulus is, may surprise you. It seems to me that computer science based on writing longer and longer streams of instructions is coming to an end, as it cannot possibly scale. We now have supercomputers that can execute 35 trillion instructions per second, but if someone has to write all of those instuctions, what good are they? Also, it seems that the brain has immensely powerful visual processing power, without having millions of lines of code written to do so. This is AI, not crypto. I only ask this because I'm deciding whether to study computational neuroscience or cryptography in grad school. Learn some more of each and your decision should be an easy one to make. --Tim May
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:12:02PM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: But what if this data is used as part of a larger picture, such as in TIA. It definitely can be used, along with gas purchases, to track where a suspect, aka a citizen, is living. Also, many possible weapons such as perscription drugs, box cutters, and kitchen knives can be purchased at a grocery store, which combined with case data could be useful in framing, aka finding, the suspect. ... As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this in detail. Think about it. Isn't the whole purpose of TIA (or the claimed purpose) to be able to say person A bought weapon B on this day, bought C gallons of gas to drive to govt building D, and then blew up building D with weapon B, therefore person A must be the criminal? -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: Sonic Youth - Inhuman Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. - Jean-Paul Sartre [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards
At 12:27 PM 12/31/2002 -0800, Michael Cardenas wrote: On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:12:02PM -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote: As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this in detail. Think about it. Isn't the whole purpose of TIA (or the claimed purpose) to be able to say person A bought weapon B on this day, bought C gallons of gas to drive to govt building D, and then blew up building D with weapon B, therefore person A must be the criminal? The scalability of the problem is much different depending on your goals. If you want to sort through the transcriptions of people who bought drugs and knives and airline tickets but no luggage in an effort to find potential terrorists, that's useless. But if you've already got a suspect, like a Green Party member who wrote an annoyed letter to the President and threatened to tell her Congresscritter in person what a bad President he is, and you're trying to find suspicious-sounding evidence, then government access to tracking data can make it possible for you to find out that she bought some toenail scissors before her trip, and bought unspecified merchandise at a garden store, and bought far more gasoline for her SUV than she'd need to drive it to the airport and back, and bought some new shoes, then obviously she's a planning to hijack a plane and go shoe-bomb the President with ANFO so it's ok to bring her in and force her to rat out her co-conspirators. But it's much more realistic to use all that data to send her an L.L.Bean catalog and the web page for Burpee's, maybe even including the hidden link for hydroponic gardening and plant-cloning supplies
Re: Privacy qua privacy (Was: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures...)
At 09:49 AM 12/31/2002 -0800, Kevin Elliott wrote: Interesting point on grocery cards... Why do they have your name at all? Remember when people used checks and had check cashing cards at grocery stores? Some grocery store chains used courtesy cards to replace that function. More importantly, early in the game, they collected as much information as they could, hoping they could use it somehow for marketing reasons, though in practice they can do almost as well without it, so they don't care too much; they'd rather give you a card with fake information than not give you a card, even if it means that when their clerks are trying to present the image of friendliness and personal relationships by saying Thanks, Mr. Myxpklkqws they can't pronounce it. Some of the stores do try to build more brand loyalty by giving you things if your spending totals are high enough, though the store I used to go to would reward you with a ham at Christmas; perhaps that sort of thing appeals to carnivorous goyim Meanwhile, the most important uses are correlating purchases of different types of items, so they know whether advertising chicken will bring in customers who also buy barbecue sauce or chardonnay or tortilla chips.
