60 years to rights restoration
that the War on Terrorism should be won in about 60 years, at which point the American citizens would see their civil liberties returned. Obviously, only traitors, agitators, and other enemy combatants would make the outrageous claim that this war will likely last perpetually. None have yet commented that in 60 years, there will be no one left that remembers what things were like. If they do, maybe congress will quietly apologize to them and grant some hush money to the few survivors, following the Jap Internment Apology plan. --- Better put some ice on that, NYC
Re: Digital Bearer Settlements Wiki
At 8:08 PM -0800 on 12/9/02, Tim May wrote: SSShhh!, everyone! Don't tell Bob about Wikis and Blogs, else we'll be inundated with a dozen Wikis and Blogs like Insta-Clearing Wiki, Digifrancsblog, Philodex Wiki, Bearer Blog, and all the other cruft. That's Philodox, Tim. You know, like lover of one's own opinions? ;-). Cheers, RAH Blogs are hard -- Barbie -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA People find my stupidity all the more shocking because it disappoints their expectations. -- Jean Jaques Rousseau
Hooray for TIA
For years we cypherpunks have been telling you people that you are responsible for protecting your own privacy. Use cash for purchases, look into offshore accounts, protect your online privacy with cryptography and anonymizing proxies. But did you listen? No. You thought to trust the government. You believed in transparency. You passed laws, for Freedom of Information, and Protection of Privacy, and Insurance Accountability, and Fair Lending Practices. And now the government has turned against you. It's Total Information Awareness program is being set up to collect data from every database possible. Medical records, financial data, favorite web sites and email addresses, all will be brought together into a centralized office where every detail can be studied in order to build a profile about you. All those laws you passed, those government regulations, are being bypassed, ignored, flushed away, all in the name of National Security. Well, we fucking told you so. And don't try blaming the people in charge. You liberals are cursing Bush, and Ashcroft, and Poindexter. These laws were passed by the entire U.S. Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike. Representatives have the full support of the American people; most were re-elected with large margins. It's not Bush and company who are at fault, it's the whole idea that you can trust government to protect your privacy. All that data out there has been begging to be used. It was only a matter of time. And you know what? It's good that this has happened. Not only has it shown the intellectual bankruptcy of trust-the-government privacy advocates, it proves what cypherpunks have been saying all along, that people must protect their own privacy. The only way to keep your privacy safe is to keep the data from getting out there in the first place. Cypherpunks have consistently promoted two seemingly contradictory ideas. The first is that people should protect data about themselves. The second is that they should have full access and usability for data they acquire about others. Cypherpunks have supported ideas like Blacknet, and offshore data havens, places where data could be collected, consolidated and sold irrespective of government regulations. The same encryption technologies which help people protect their privacy can be used to bypass attempts by government to control the flow of data. This two-pronged approach to the problem produces a sort of Darwinian competition between privacy protectors and data collectors. It's not unlike the competition between code makers and code breakers, which has led to amazing enhancements in cryptography technology over the past few decades. There is every reason to expect that a similar level of improvement and innovation can and will eventually develop in privacy protection and data management as these technologies continue to be deployed. But in the mean time, three cheers for TIA. It's too bad that it's the government doing it rather than a shadowy offshore agency with virtual tentacles into the net, but the point is being made all the same. Now more than ever, people need privacy technology. Government is not the answer. It's time to start protecting ourselves, because nobody else is going to do it for us.
Re: Anonymous blogging
On Tuesday, December 10, 2002, at 05:40 PM, Nomen Nescio wrote: But cypherpunks isn't that great a forum for publishing ideas. Take a look at http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/current/maillist.html to see the unfiltered list feed. Sure, no subscriber with half a clue actually sees it like this, but that's how it looks to the outside world. It's tough to find the nuggets of enlightenment buried amongst the crap. Reading an unfiltered feed these days is like watching television without a mute button, without a channel change button, without a PVR. In other words, reading an unfiltered feed is a lot like watching television in 1970, when changing the channel meant getting up and walking over to turn a crude knob, when junk and spam was unavoidable. I'd like to start publishing a blog. But of course given the sensitivity of my position and the boldness of my arguments, it's important that there be strong anonymity protection. Blogs without active feedback are just rants. You may find yourself ranting to a handful of people you'll never know, never hear from. Boring. And as boring and low-volume as Cypherpunks has become, this is true for most lists. So many proliferated lists, blogs, newsgroups, chat forums, Yahoo groups (You could do the Hettinga thing and post to 7 of your own lists, but this is considered tacky in civilized places.) Offhand, I can think of several ways to do an anonymous blog...posting to alt.anonymous.messages, for starters. Same ability to do stream of conscious writing. Sure, the immediacy of some blogs is missing, but posting to Usenet can propagate in tens of minutes, which is comparable to most blogs. And adding anonymity through remailers makes an anonymous blog no more responsive than posting via a mail-to-Usenet gateway. But the best way would of course be to use a standard Web proxy. Such things have been out for several years. --Tim May
Re: 60 years to rights restoration
This is the best explanation of the behavior of the Democratic Party I've ever seen. On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 20:01:37 -0500, you wrote: 1. Put a bunch of gorillas in a cage. 2. Put a nice stack of boxes in the cage. 3. Then, string a big bunch of bananas from the top of the cage hanging within arm's reach from the top of the stack of boxes. (3a. Okay, put the gorillas in last, or you'll never get to steps 1 and 2 :-).) 4. When the first gorilla climbs to the top of the boxes to grab the bananas, do something extremely unpleasant to all the gorillas, like, say, deluging them with icy water from sprinklers at the top of the cage, or something. Pretty soon, they stop climbing the boxes completely. 5. Then, replace the one gorilla. Watch the others physically restrain him if he tries to go for the bananas. Repeat 5 until all the gorillas have been replaced. 6. The gorillas will physically assault anyone who climbs the pyramid, and they won't know why. :-).
Re: Anonymous blogging
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 6:51 PM -0800 on 12/10/02, Tim May wrote: ...but this is considered tacky in civilized places.) This from one of the world's major uphill-and-upwind misanthropes, a man who hasn't yet thought of *any* American city he wouldn't really rather see nuked until it glowed -- or any cop car he wouldn't throw rocks at. :-). Cheers, RAH Who's finally figured out it's something really trivial; it's just a good ole boy lost-the-plantation-to-the-carpetbaggers Ol' Virginny cavalier thang, right down to the mock ebonics, the horror of miscegenation, the delusions of class and pretensions of honor (see above), and, especially, all that morbid fascination with the sins of the Big City. Didn't understand it really, until I saw a couple of drunken former members of the Alexandria High School backfield try to go after this skinny Ethiopian shopowner on the Metro late one night, all full of the South Shall Rise Again, and whatchew lookin' at, boy... Not that I should talk, of course, being redneck on one side and frisian berserker dutch on the other :-), but at least it *does* explain a few things... -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPfbIz8PxH8jf3ohaEQJfFwCfcMidA3SGZX5xZP0sstI/hKIAPJYAoNco OKeBZA5v8TY6iXks41lqGEpd =tqyn -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 I guess it's disingenuous to argue with someone who spews truth from every orifice. --Aaron Evans
Re: 60 years to rights restoration
Major Variola (ret) feared: None have yet commented that in 60 years, there will be no one left that remembers what things were like. Will people really just wimp out to this? Do you really think all those militia people will just doze on? Maybe people need to start asking themselves, What would Timmy do? Remember this -- it matters not how many F16s and Stealth Bombers the fedz have, and it doesn't really matter how many feebs they have, or snitches, or what sort of TIA they employ -- against individuals, or small 3 person cells, they have no chance. If one person went out and started killing cops with a silenced .22, back of the head shots, he could easily kill 100 or more, maybe a 1000 without getting caught. If a 1000 rise up ... And every one that rises up will inspire a thousand more.
Anonymous blogging
I get a lot of compliments on my anonymous posts here. Thanks very much guys, keep those cards and letters coming. But cypherpunks isn't that great a forum for publishing ideas. Take a look at http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/current/maillist.html to see the unfiltered list feed. Sure, no subscriber with half a clue actually sees it like this, but that's how it looks to the outside world. It's tough to find the nuggets of enlightenment buried amongst the crap. I'd like to start publishing a blog. But of course given the sensitivity of my position and the boldness of my arguments, it's important that there be strong anonymity protection. Does anyone have advice on how to get started with anonymous blogging? I have access to Windows, Linux and Mac systems, and I could go through anonymizer.com or some other service if necessary. Ideally I'd like to use one of the turnkey blog clients for ease of setup and use. Thanks for your suggestions.
Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'SHotel
On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Tim May wrote: (Sidebar: I often wish for TIVO radio. It's called cron and your friendly TV card w/ FM radio. -- We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org
Re: 60 years to rights restoration
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 2:08 PM -0800 on 12/10/02, Major Variola (ret) wrote: None have yet commented that in 60 years, there will be no one left that remembers what things were like. One of my favorite cypherpunk gedankenexperiments from the old days had to do with what could be called tradition. I hope I remember it right. I also hope there's an original source out there for this, it would be nice to know. Can't find it in google, much less the cypherpunk archives, and, generally, it's kind of hard to get the gist of a whole story like this out of google anyway... 1. Put a bunch of gorillas in a cage. 2. Put a nice stack of boxes in the cage. 3. Then, string a big bunch of bananas from the top of the cage hanging within arm's reach from the top of the stack of boxes. (3a. Okay, put the gorillas in last, or you'll never get to steps 1 and 2 :-).) 4. When the first gorilla climbs to the top of the boxes to grab the bananas, do something extremely unpleasant to all the gorillas, like, say, deluging them with icy water from sprinklers at the top of the cage, or something. Pretty soon, they stop climbing the boxes completely. 5. Then, replace the one gorilla. Watch the others physically restrain him if he tries to go for the bananas. Repeat 5 until all the gorillas have been replaced. 6. The gorillas will physically assault anyone who climbs the pyramid, and they won't know why. :-). Now, I bet this experiment won't yield to actual empirical testing, all mammals, including us, are either not that stupid, or, I suppose, not that smart, but you get the point Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPfaOZsPxH8jf3ohaEQLynwCg1abG3e+mEVA9nPEEmUNECwh+pj4AnA3k PIR9BnGJOLn8TzOAahZQ8r/I =qZe5 -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: Anonymous blogging
In a way, Mathew's and Choate's attack upon the list has done us a favour. The list is now effectively restricted to those with the will and ability to use filters, which raises the required intelligence level. Does this vindicate homeopathy ? = end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: CDR: Desert Rats
Matthew X wrote: There's an interesting book about a behind the lines operation that may have stopped Rommel breaking through at Al Alemain. Some guy called,'poppy.' and a few local arabs set off a huge gas depot and the German tanks ran out of fuel.This is from ... That's Popski. Real name Vladimir Peniakov. A British subject who formed a kind of Rat Patrol to operate behind German lines in the desert. In his own memoirs, Popski's Private Army, he does not claim to have had such a significant effect on major operations... Marc
Re: Anonymous blogging
On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Morlock Elloi wrote: Does this vindicate homeopathy ? I thought the rules were you have to have a smily to signify a joke. But I guess on the net there are no rules :-) Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Re: Satellites to challenge Pentagon Spin
At 12:43 PM 12/11/2002 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Publically available, high-res satellite imagery... http://www.msnbc.com/news/845811.asp?0cv=CB10 Since 1994, when the U.S. government officially surrendered its domestic monopoly on satellite imagery, the world has seen an explosion of independent providers and capabilities. Under that 1994 directive, the government retains the right to exercise shutter control on commercial satellite companies. In both the Kosovo and Afghan conflicts, the Pentagon decided against this heavy-handed approach, instead resorting to economic shutter control in effect, buying up all the satellite time for the companies that could conceivably peer into the battlefield. Looks like a possible opportunity for a futures market. Investors could get together and predict the likely start and length of a war. Then they place exclusive orders to satellite services for specific sites which could be of interest to news media during such a war. If they correctly predict the pictures can be resold, unless the Pentagon claims shutter priority (if the satellite were operated by China or India there might be no shutter control on that bird during another Gulf War). steve
Re: Anonymous blogging
On Wednesday, December 11, 2002, at 01:31 AM, Morlock Elloi wrote: In a way, Mathew's and Choate's attack upon the list has done us a favour. The list is now effectively restricted to those with the will and ability to use filters, which raises the required intelligence level. Does this vindicate homeopathy ? No, it vindicates the vaccination approach, the antigen-antibody approach. Or, more pedestrianly, simple learning. Those who learn to filter do so. Others drown. A central tenet of homeopathy is the bizarre and acausal notion that dilution of the agent by 100x, by 1000x, even by one billion times, makes no difference. If there is just one atom of arsenic, maybe just one quarter of an atom, in this liquid, your body will learn to later tolerate arsenic! --Tim May That government is best which governs not at all. --Henry David Thoreau
Re: Libel lunacy -all laws apply fnord everywhere
At 11:28 AM 12/11/2002 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Internet Libel Fence Falls Court in Australia Says U.S. Publisher Can Be Sued There By Jonathan Krim Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 11, 2002; Page A10 An Australian businessman, in a court ruling that could change how publishers view their ability to distribute information around the world, won the right to sue a U.S. news organization in his home country over a story published on the Internet. snip http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37437-2002Dec10.html From the article: The court dismissed suggestions the Internet was different from other broadcasters, who could decide how far their signal was to be transmitted. This is totally bogus thinking. The Internet is not broadcast medium. Information from Web sites must be requested, the equivalent of ordering a book or newspaper, for delivery. Under this logic a retailer in one country, selling a controversial book to someone in another country, could involve publishers in yet a third country to litigation in the second country. Bizarre. The real question is whether any judgement is enforceable. steve
TIVO radio
At 10:00 PM 12/10/2002 -0600, Jim wrote: On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Tim May wrote: (Sidebar: I often wish for TIVO radio. It's called cron and your friendly TV card w/ FM radio. There are also USB-controlled external radios from people like D-Link. (They don't use the USB for audio, just for control, so the audio goes into your PC's sound card.) The one I have is a couple of years old, from D-Link. I assume their newer ones have better software; the stuff that came with mine is amazingly lame. Hugh Daniel is using similar hardware, with much nicer software that runs on Linux, and he was pleased with it when we last talked about it. The D-Link GUI got a really pretty user interface, and you can control what time to start and stop recording, but not what _day_, so it's only good for same-day recordings on one channel, and it only saves the output in WAV format. It was basically designed for live play, not for TiVoing. There's a freeware MP3 encoder included, but first you need enough disk space to save the sounds uncompressed (actually twice that much, because it caches it and saves a separate copy of the parts you tell it to.) Back when 2GB disk drives were large, this was annoying, and now that I've got a 120GB drive, I haven't tried it again. (Actually my machine had a 6GB drive, but that was 4GB for Linux and 2GB for Windows.) Also, there's a substantial difference in the sound quality between playing it live and saving the WAV file, probably because I was using a $5 sound card.
Re: Anonymous blogging and unlicensed medical advice.
At 08:43 AM 12/11/2002 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Wednesday, December 11, 2002, at 01:31 AM, Morlock Elloi wrote: In a way, Mathew's and Choate's attack upon the list has done us a favour. The list is now effectively restricted to those with the will and ability to use filters, which raises the required intelligence level. Does this vindicate homeopathy ? No, it vindicates the vaccination approach, the antigen-antibody approach. Detweiler was the first wave :-) I'd forgotten about Matthew X ; if he's still sending anything, my filters kill it all. Or, more pedestrianly, simple learning. Those who learn to filter do so. Others drown. A central tenet of homeopathy is the bizarre and acausal notion that dilution of the agent by 100x, by 1000x, even by one billion times, makes no difference. If there is just one atom of arsenic, maybe just one quarter of an atom, in this liquid, your body will learn to later tolerate arsenic! Homeopathy is a bogus quack theory backed by 200 years of trial-and-error experience. Experimentation is much more efficient when you use the scientific method and don't have totally bogus assumptions underlying your work, but they have developed some useful products. (Actually the dilution theory says that the more dilute the preparation, the _stronger_ it is, at least if it's diluted by the people who sell it and not by the people who buy it. It's rather like somebody's theory of making a dry martini, which is that you take the vermouth bottle and gesture meaningfully in the direction of the shaker of gin. :-) And unlike herbal medicines, some of which can be quite harmful, the inherent quackery in homeopathy means that the stronger medicines are unlikely to do any actual damage, because they're too dilute. I wouldn't trust the stuff for actual diseases that can be treated with modern medicine, because it's a quack theory that doesn't include germs, but for relief of symptoms (for allergies, or for diseases like the flu that don't have useful medical treatments) sometimes it's quite effective, and it's reasonable to compare the effectiveness and side effects of various products, such as drowsiness from some antihistamines vs. nausea from some homeopathics. In particular, there's a flu medicine that doesn't leave you feeling good, but takes you from feeling awful to feeling not so hot, which is a major improvement, at the cost of a small amount of ipecac in the pills.
Ebonics?
So what's this bullshit with Ebonics anyway? Tim doesn't like ebonics? Seems pretty strange that anyone here has a problem with a group of people developing their own language that others can't understand. Or some other groups trying to study or understand it.
Filters, vaccines, guns, population resistance vs. individual protection
In a way, Mathew's and Choate's attack upon the list has done us a favour. The list is now effectively restricted to those with the will and ability to use filters, which raises the required intelligence level. It has also increased the utility/use of centrally-filtered exploders, like lne.com. When there's cholera in the public supply (from people shitting in the well), you go to bottled (filtered) water. Does this vindicate homeopathy ? No, it vindicates the vaccination approach, the antigen-antibody approach. The vaccination metaphor is flawed. If the use of personal filters were like vaccination, the spammers would find it harder to work in the vaccinated population. Ie, *more* than the vaccinated folks are protected: all the unvaccinated are protected because of the decreased ability for the infection to percolate through the population. This is similar to how those without guns in their homes are protected from burglars by those with guns in their neighborhood. The population resistance seen by the burglar/pathogen also protects the unarmed/unvaccinated. I don't see this population-resistance effect increasing by the use of personal spam/noise filters. I only see benefits to the protected individual. (And addressing the goofy homeopathic suggestion, no, there is no benefit from using ineffectual filters, tautologically.) --- We have always been at war with Oceania bin Laden -1984+20
