Re: Anti-RFID outfit deflates Mexican VeriChip hype

[Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer]

> Bring em on, oops, they are here already. Darn, it wasn't
> the commies and nazis who were the threat, it was your
> indolent life-style paid for by your swell-paid, smarter wife, 
> up to women-empowered thieving the marketplace and 
> making innumerable enemies for you to blame for your 
> swelling brain fat-globules.
> 
> Pray the draft is women-empowered so there's no need
> to shanghai the overaged, over-decrepit, over-funny-loving,
> inbred-feeders, pray for the Condies and the Maggies to 
> fight the gameboy-dreamy battles, really face-to-face,
> not just stomp-hoof the youngsters into hell for a face-save
> the empire.

Won't someone please slip a healthy dose of haloperidol into
JYA's food?

RE: Quantum key distribution

[Tyler Durden]

"Andrew Hammond, a vice president of
MagiQ, estimates that the market for QKD systems will reach $200 million
within a few years, and one day could hit $1 billion annually."
What an idiot. OK, it's basically a marketing guy's job to make up all kinds 
of BS, but any reasonably comptetant marketing guy knows to make up BS that 
someone will actually BELIEVE.

-TD

From: "R.A. Hettinga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Quantum key distribution
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 12:29:31 -0500

  - The Industrial Physicist
?Quantum key distribution
Data carrying photons may be transmitted by laser and detected in such a
way that any interference will be noted
by Jennifer Ouellette
pdf version of this article
Computing's exponential increase in power requires setting the bar always
higher to secure electronicdata transmissions from would-be hackers. The
ideal solution would transmit data in quantum bits, but truly quantum
information processing may lie decades away. Therefore, several companies
have focused on bringing one aspect of quantum communications to market-
quantum key distribution (QKD), used to exchange secret keys that protect
data during transmission. Two companies, MagiQ Technologies (New York, NY)
and ID Quantique (Geneva, Switzerland), have released commercial QKD
systems, and several others plan to enter the marketplace within two years.
Figure 1. When blue light is pumped into a nonlinear crystal, entangled
photon pairs (imaged here as a red beam with the aid of a diode laser)
emerge at an angle of 30 to the blue beam, and the beams are sent into
single-mode fibers to be detected. Because the entangled photons "know"
each other, any interference will result in a mismatch when the two beams
are compared. (University of Vienna/Volker Steger)
 "There is a continuous war between code makers and code breakers," says
Alexei Trifonov, chief scientist with MagiQ. Cryptologists devise more
difficult coding schemes, only to have them broken. Quantum cryptography
has the potential to end that cycle. This is important to national security
and modern electronic business transactions, which transmit credit card
numbers and other sensitive information in encrypted form. The Department
of Defense (DoD) currently funds several quantum-cryptography projects as
part of a $20.6 million initiative in quantum information. Globally, public
and private sources will fund about $50 million in quantum-cryptography
work over the next several years. Andrew Hammond, a vice president of
MagiQ, estimates that the market for QKD systems will reach $200 million
within a few years, and one day could hit $1 billion annually.
Key types
QKD was proposed roughly 20 years ago, but its premise rests on the
formulation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in 1927. The very act of
observing or measuring a particle-such as a photon in a data stream-changes
its behavior (Figure 1). Any moving photon can have one of four
orientations: vertical, horizontal, or diagonal in either direction. A
standard laser can be modified to emit single photons, each with a
particular orientation. Would-be hackers (eavesdroppers in cryptography
parlance) can record the orientations with photon detectors, but doing so
changes the orientation of some photons-and, thus, alerts the sender and
receiver of a compromised transmission.
An encryption key-the code needed to encrypt or decipher a message-consists
of a string of random bits.  Such a key is useless unless it is completely
random, known only to the communicating parties, and changed regularly. In
the one-time-pad approach, the key length must equal the message length,
and it should be used only once. In theory, this makes the encrypted
message secure, but problems arise in practice. In the real world, keys
must be exchanged by a CD-ROM or some other physical means, which makes
keys susceptible to interception. Reusing a key gives code breakers the
opportunity to find patterns in the encrypted data that might reveal the
key. Historically, the Soviet Union's accidental duplication of
one-time-pad pages allowed U.S. cryptanalysts to unmask the spy Klaus Fuchs
in 1949.
Rather than one-time-pad keys, many data-transmission security systems
today use public-key cryptography, which relies on very long prime numbers
to transmit keys. A typical public-key encryption scheme uses two keys. The
first is a public key, available to anyone with access to the global
registry of public keys, and the message is encrypted with it. The second
is private, accessible only to the receiver. Both keys are needed to
unscramble a message. The system's primary weakness is that a powerful
computer could use the public key to learn the private key (see The
Industrial Physicist, August 2000, pp. 29-33).
Quantum key distribution
A key distributed using quantum cryptography would be almost impossible to
steal because QKD systems continually and randomly gene

Swedish military feared linked to Estonia ferry disaster

[Nomen Nescio]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

For those interested in intelligence, munitions smuggling by
authorities and so on - a few words concerning military smuggling of
munitions on the Estonia, feared to have played a part in the sinking
and killings of 852 people on Sept 28, 1994, when the ferry M/S
Estonia sinked during a journey from Estonia to Sweden. It has been
rumoured for a long time that there were some kind of smuggling of
sensitive material taking place on Estonia and that Russian
authorities did not like this, needless to say. The very stressed and
hasty investigation performed by the involved nations also raised
suspicions amongst a lot of people. On top of all this the Swedish
social democratic government did all they could to hinder future
investigations of the wreckage by trying to cover it with stones and
concrete.

First some other related info.

The reader should know that the Swedish social democratic party is
notorious for acting in undemocratic and deceitful manners against
the Swedish people. Two of the most infamous affairs being the "IB
affair" and the "Catalina affair".

In the IB affair it was shown that the social democratic party had
founded a secret and unlawful military intelligence bureau as the
party's own private spy organization to spy on other politcal
adversaries, a Swedish version of Watergate if you will, but it went
far beyond that. Hundreds of thousands of people were targeted during
a number of years. Even Olof Palme himself knew about break-ins that
the intelligence officers performed in other countries embassies in
Stockholm, one of them was Egypt's embassy. One major characteristic
is that the Swedish way of doing things means sweeping things under
the carpet and not letting the public know the truths, this is shown
in every "affair" known in resent years, including the Estonia
disaster. In all of these affairs it's the social democrats that has
been the most responsible party and the party almost in constant
power in Sweden historically speaking.

The magazine breaking the news in 1973 today has a web site about the
affair, http://www.fib.se/IB/

In the Catalina affair it was very recently shown actually, after the
planes was discovered east of the island Gotland in the Baltic Sea,
that they were both indeed gunned down, as had been suspected for
decades. On June 13 1952 the DC3 plane Hugin disappeared and the only
thing found was a trashed rescue raft. Three days later the rescure
plane of type "Catalina" was also gunned down and forced to emergency
landing. It's today also known however that the Swedish (social
democratic) governments have all been maliciously and intentionally
lying all along about the Hugin's purpose to both the Swedish people
as well as the families.

Hugin was in fact gathering intelligence very close (some say on the
wrong side even) of the Russian border and was relaying all this
signal intelligence directly to the Americans. USA was amongst other
things interested in Russias capacity to fight the B-47. This was
well known for the Russians and this was the direct cause of the
attacks in 1952. It is believed that the Swedish FRA, standing for
"Försvarets RadioAnstalt", translating to "The Defence's Radio
Institution", which is Swedens NSA, signed secret treaties with the
US some three years prior to the assult on these planes. The FRA had
5 employees on the Hugin when it was gunned down. It wasn't until
1991 that the families knew what happened, that was when the Russians
admitted a Mig-15 gunned them down.

When the recon plane was found in June 2004 it was situated far east
of the earlier officially declared crash site which further fules the
speculation that Hugin was indeed flying where it shouldn't have
been, conducting its sigint operations and that the Swedish
governments knew this all along. The Hugin was found June 10, 2003.


I'm not sure how much of these affairs is known outside Sweden, but
it's interesting read that's for sure and I just may get back to
these things and others like them later on.


Back to other things now.

This was published today in Sweden, along with a tv show of one hour:

>INRIKES Publicerad 30 november
> 
>   "Krigsmateriel fraktades på Estonia"   
> 
> 
>   Estonia hade veckorna före förlisning- 
>   en vid två tillfällen krigsmateriel
>   från Baltikum i lasten. Enligt kväll-  
>   ens Uppdrag granskning i SVT rörde 
>   det sig om rysk elektronik som svenska 
>   försvaret tog in för att studera.  
> 
>   Lars Borgnäs som gjort programmet  
>   säger att avslöjandet belyser hur  
>   svenska myndigheter hanterat kata- 
>   strofen. -Man har t.ex. inte undersökt 
>   bildäck, säger han till SVT Text.  
> 
>   Den pensionerade tullintendenten   
>   Lennart Henriksson uppger att han fått 
>   order om att släppa igenom bilarna på  
>   begäran av försvarsmakten. 
>Läs mer på svt.se/nyheter  



Which translates into something li

Quantum key distribution

[R.A. Hettinga]

  - The Industrial Physicist

?Quantum key distribution

Data carrying photons may be transmitted by laser and detected in such a
way that any interference will be noted

by Jennifer Ouellette

pdf version of this article

Computing's exponential increase in power requires setting the bar always
higher to secure electronicdata transmissions from would-be hackers. The
ideal solution would transmit data in quantum bits, but truly quantum
information processing may lie decades away. Therefore, several companies
have focused on bringing one aspect of quantum communications to market-
quantum key distribution (QKD), used to exchange secret keys that protect
data during transmission. Two companies, MagiQ Technologies (New York, NY)
and ID Quantique (Geneva, Switzerland), have released commercial QKD
systems, and several others plan to enter the marketplace within two years.
Figure 1. When blue light is pumped into a nonlinear crystal, entangled
photon pairs (imaged here as a red beam with the aid of a diode laser)
emerge at an angle of 3° to the blue beam, and the beams are sent into
single-mode fibers to be detected. Because the entangled photons "know"
each other, any interference will result in a mismatch when the two beams
are compared. (University of Vienna/Volker Steger)

 "There is a continuous war between code makers and code breakers," says
Alexei Trifonov, chief scientist with MagiQ. Cryptologists devise more
difficult coding schemes, only to have them broken. Quantum cryptography
has the potential to end that cycle. This is important to national security
and modern electronic business transactions, which transmit credit card
numbers and other sensitive information in encrypted form. The Department
of Defense (DoD) currently funds several quantum-cryptography projects as
part of a $20.6 million initiative in quantum information. Globally, public
and private sources will fund about $50 million in quantum-cryptography
work over the next several years. Andrew Hammond, a vice president of
MagiQ, estimates that the market for QKD systems will reach $200 million
within a few years, and one day could hit $1 billion annually.

Key types

QKD was proposed roughly 20 years ago, but its premise rests on the
formulation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in 1927. The very act of
observing or measuring a particle-such as a photon in a data stream-changes
its behavior (Figure 1). Any moving photon can have one of four
orientations: vertical, horizontal, or diagonal in either direction. A
standard laser can be modified to emit single photons, each with a
particular orientation. Would-be hackers (eavesdroppers in cryptography
parlance) can record the orientations with photon detectors, but doing so
changes the orientation of some photons-and, thus, alerts the sender and
receiver of a compromised transmission.

An encryption key-the code needed to encrypt or decipher a message-consists
of a string of random bits.  Such a key is useless unless it is completely
random, known only to the communicating parties, and changed regularly. In
the one-time-pad approach, the key length must equal the message length,
and it should be used only once. In theory, this makes the encrypted
message secure, but problems arise in practice. In the real world, keys
must be exchanged by a CD-ROM or some other physical means, which makes
keys susceptible to interception. Reusing a key gives code breakers the
opportunity to find patterns in the encrypted data that might reveal the
key. Historically, the Soviet Union's accidental duplication of
one-time-pad pages allowed U.S. cryptanalysts to unmask the spy Klaus Fuchs
in 1949.

Rather than one-time-pad keys, many data-transmission security systems
today use public-key cryptography, which relies on very long prime numbers
to transmit keys. A typical public-key encryption scheme uses two keys. The
first is a public key, available to anyone with access to the global
registry of public keys, and the message is encrypted with it. The second
is private, accessible only to the receiver. Both keys are needed to
unscramble a message. The system's primary weakness is that a powerful
computer could use the public key to learn the private key (see The
Industrial Physicist, August 2000, pp. 29-33).

Quantum key distribution

A key distributed using quantum cryptography would be almost impossible to
steal because QKD systems continually and randomly generate new private
keys that both parties share automatically. A compromised key in a QKD
system can only decrypt a small amount of encoded information because the
private key may be changed every second or even continuously. To build up a
secret key from a stream of single photons, each photon is encoded with a
bit value of 0 or 1, typically by a photon in some superposition state,
such as polarization. These photons are emitted by a conventional laser as
pulses of light so dim that most pulses do not em

Jewish wholy words..

[Nomen Nescio]

Is it true that the jews have these texts in their scriptures?


#1. Sanhedrin 59a:
"Murdering Goyim (Gentiles) is like killing a wild animal."

#2. Aboda Sarah 37a:
"A Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated."

#3. Yebamoth 11b:
"Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three
years of age."

#4. Abodah Zara 26b:
"Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed."

#5. Yebamoth 98a:
"All gentile children are animals."

#6. Schulchan Aruch, Johre Deah, 122:
"A Jew is forbidden to drink from a glass of wine which a Gentile has
touched, because the touch has made the wine unclean."

#7. Baba Necia 114, 6:
"The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not
human beings but beasts."

RE: Jewish wholy words..

[Tyler Durden]

No.
Technically speaking, only the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible, 
written by Moses) are technically "scripture"...everything else is 
commentary.

-TD
From: Nomen Nescio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Jewish wholy words..
Date: Wed,  1 Dec 2004 19:30:05 +0100 (CET)
Is it true that the jews have these texts in their scriptures?
#1. Sanhedrin 59a:
"Murdering Goyim (Gentiles) is like killing a wild animal."
#2. Aboda Sarah 37a:
"A Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated."
#3. Yebamoth 11b:
"Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three
years of age."
#4. Abodah Zara 26b:
"Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed."
#5. Yebamoth 98a:
"All gentile children are animals."
#6. Schulchan Aruch, Johre Deah, 122:
"A Jew is forbidden to drink from a glass of wine which a Gentile has
touched, because the touch has made the wine unclean."
#7. Baba Necia 114, 6:
"The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not
human beings but beasts."

RE: Oswald, Atta, Your Name Here

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 6:41 PM -0800 11/30/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>And I could cycle my 7.52x54R bolt-action in under a second on my
>first try, but again, grace under pressure is cool.

..and here I bet you thought that Marine marksman rating, bordering on
sharpshooter, whatever, would *never* come in handy...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[Steve Thompson]

 --- "James A. Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 
> [permanent holy war]
> Steve Thompson
> > True, but there's a question of the waste of resources and
> > man-years that would come from such a circumstance.
> 
> All the oil money has been wasted, most of the humans in the
> middle east have suffered poverty, ignorance, lack of freedom
> and the unproductive absence of useful labor.

Just like the good ol' USA, AFAIK.  It's just that the inequities at home
aren't limited to those that are a product of the petrochemical industry. 
All of which is not too different from what I see in the poorer parts of
the city I live in: Toronto.
 
> All my life, people have been proposing to solve this problem.
> Nearly every American president since 1950 announced some big
> and expensive initiative that would supposedly solve this
> problem, or make some substantial progress towards a solution.

Lately people were talking about PSE/COA topics which make moot much of
the bickering and squabbling that is a constant feature of capitalism.  We
don't hear much about PSE these days for some reason.  I suspect that the
path from here to there is still too far beyond the planning horizon of
too many people.  So, if PSE in a recognizeable form represents a rational
outcome of current economic progress, then I guess we must wait until it
looms nearer before selling it to the world.

> What is your solution?

PSE.  And the death of all superstitious nonsense.  Of course, there are
probably enough people around who like domination games that the
elimination of bogus memes such as those attached to theology may prove
difficult.

Do you have a better idea?
 
> > And then there's the ethical[1] side of the coin: do the
> > (largely financial benefits) that might come from a civil war
> > in Iraq really justify the consequent standard-of-living for
> > the residents of Iraq?
> 
> And your remedy for improving the standard of living in the
> arab world is?

Give them more money.  Aridrop directv dishes, televisions, and old
computers.  Hell, I don't know.  Winning arab hearts and minds is a topic
that is entirely beyond my area of expertise.
 
> Steve Thompson
> > Aren't we all about to run out of oil soon anyways?
> 
> Forty years or so, according to estimates by the more sane and
> conventional authorities.

And then what?  What are we and they going to do the following year?  And
the year after that?  I'm sure your military think-tanks have walked
through the scenarios and have a good handle on the likely outcomes, but
they aren't really talking at this time.  (And of course, I wouldn't trust
public military think-tank product to correctly predict the sunrise.)
 
> James A. Donald:
> > >  the people who organize large scale terror can be
> > > identified, particularly by locals and coreligionists,
> > > which is why they have been dying in large numbers in
> > > Afghanistan.
> 
> Steve Thompson
> > Um, what planet are you on?
> 
> The planet where the Afghans held an election, in which nearly
> everybody voted, some of them several times, and the Taliban
> were unable to carry out any of the threats they made against
> the voters, which indicates that the Afghans have been pretty
> efficient in killing Taliban.

Ok.  That may well be true.  And it is a step in the right direction. 
However I would guess that the long-term stable state of Afghanistan is
entirely up in the air.  Barring coups and such I guess we'll have to
revisit the Afghanistan question in a few decades.  At that time, and
after they've had a little practice with the democratic process, we'll
probably have a much better idea of how well their liberation from the
taliban went. 
 
> > The people who, as you say, organize large scale terror tend
> > to be protected by virtue of large bureaucratic firewalls,
> > legislated secrecy, misdirection (smoke and mirrors), and
> > even taboos.
> 
> The average Afghan warlord is untroubled by any of this crap. 

I suspect that not many of them get to the civilised portions of the
Internet all that often.

> He sees someone who looks suspicious, says "Hey, you don't look
> like you are from around here.  What are you doing?"  If he
> does not like the answers, he brings out his skinning knife,
> and asks a few more questions.  If the answers make him even
> more unhappy, he hands his skinning knife to the womenfolk, and
> tells them to take their time.

You gotta admire the hands-on leadership style, at the very least.

> > But perhaps you are not referring to Western terrorists, but
> > are expecting your reader to assume that terrorists always
> > wear turbans, and who generally will live and operate in the
> > Middle-Eastern theatre. Perhaps you have forgotten about the
> > people who planned and executed the operations that helped
> > South-American tyrants form up and train their death- and
> > terror-squads?
> 
> The parties that sponsored death squads of Latin America, when
> victorious, held free and fair elections, whic

Some Secret: Open House, Open Bar

[R.A. Hettinga]

>Must have passed some kinda big supplemental.

Cheers,
RAH
---



The Washington Post

washingtonpost.com
Round-Trip or One-Way Tickets?


By Al Kamen

 Wednesday, November 24, 2004; Page A19

Some Secret: Open House, Open Bar



Remember a while back when it came out that intelligence agencies such as
the National Security Agency -- the supersecret spy crowd -- did not have
the resources to keep up with the flood of intercepts to be able to
translate terrorists' chatter on a timely basis?

This naturally caused a big fuss, and Congress pledged big bucks to get the
spooks up to speed. Seems to have worked out fine, judging from an invite
we got to attend an open house Dec. 7 at the National Cryptologic Museum
behind the Shell station at Fort Meade.

Lots of fine finger food to be had, including a "brie encrote with brown
sugar and pecans," some "Swiss cheese and chablis stuffed mushroom caps," a
bit of roast turkey with cranberry mayo and "mini pumpkin cheesecakes."

Our very fine invite with the NSA gold-embossed seal notes "Open bar."

Must have passed some kinda big supplemental.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Tin Foil Passports, Al foil diplomas

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 08:02 PM 11/29/04 +, Justin wrote:
>On 2004-11-27T06:36:24-0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>> At 09:13 AM 11/27/04 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>> >Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/27/0026222
>> >Posted by: michael, on 2004-11-27 05:05:00
>> >   low-cost solution: '[I]incorporate a layer of metal foil into the

>> >   cover of the passport so it could be read only when opened.'
Don't
>> >   they know that the whole tinfoil hat thing is supposed to be a
>> >   joke?"
>>
>> What is most poignant about this post is the lack of education of /.
>> authors.  Don't they teach Maxwell any more?  Is Faraday just the guy

>> who said ...
>
>Standardized education. We can't have anyone teaching to the 50th
>percentile, even assuming the median teen-citizen can handle basic
>calculus and E&M.  Teachers must teach one or two sigmas below that
>level, and anyone who gets hyperactive in such an inane educational
>environment is malfunctioning and requires medication.

Today I heard a guy at work describe the Turkish empire to another.
Their plan
was to eliminate foreign schools for ca. 300 years so the conquered
would
be lame.  No Canticle For Liebowitz for the conquered.

I refrained from expressing the parallels I perceived, camoflage is best

some times.

Got IED?

"Spooks", Root Beer, and My Keyboard...

[R.A. Hettinga]

..so, courtesy of BitTorrent and http://www.tvtorrents.net, I started to
download and watch "Spooks" something that looked like a British knock-off
of the really-better-off-dead "The Agency" from a few years back over here.

Fine. First episode I see (Year 3 episode 6, episode titles forgotten),
seemed okay, mostly, though she was *awfully* scrawny the old honey trap,
um trick. Second one (episode 7), though, starts off with an almost
plausible hacking-for-jihad storyline with only the odd bit of "Star-Trek
science", admittedly I'm a sucker for hand-waving, but then, but then...

..but then they got to the crypto.

Hence the subject line of this message.

Sigh. I'll never learn.

Root beer, keyboards, and "Spooks" don't mix.

But we knew that already, right?

:-)

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Anti-RFID outfit deflates Mexican VeriChip hype

[John Young]

Lying about having an implant is kidnapping and mutilation
protection. Whether any justice official, with or without a
denied implant, will be believed by the slicers is no different
than the terrorism risk of anyone living within 100 miles of a
US defense base and/or industry, or Wall Street suckblood
HQ. No matter that the implantee likes to hide among the 
innocent, the families of the protective servicers are easy
ransom, easy lessons taught for no safe sanctuary.

Bring em on, oops, they are here already. Darn, it wasn't
the commies and nazis who were the threat, it was your
indolent life-style paid for by your swell-paid, smarter wife, 
up to women-empowered thieving the marketplace and 
making innumerable enemies for you to blame for your 
swelling brain fat-globules.

Pray the draft is women-empowered so there's no need
to shanghai the overaged, over-decrepit, over-funny-loving,
inbred-feeders, pray for the Condies and the Maggies to 
fight the gameboy-dreamy battles, really face-to-face,
not just stomp-hoof the youngsters into hell for a face-save
the empire.

And that's not all. James Donald, you're losing your vile
truth-twisting tongue, what with your conciliatory mein 
recently. Get your shaggy blue-balled mouth-organ off 
the commie-nazi symp gravy train.

Re: geographically removed?

[James A. Donald]

--
Major Variola:
> > > Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can 
> > > always be defeated by cranking up the police state a 
> > > notch.
> > >
> > > This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems.

James A. Donald:
> > The problem is that any genuinely irrevocable payment 
> > system gets swarmed by conmen and fraudsters.   We have a 
> > long way to go before police states are the problem.

Steve Furlong
> Heh. When the stasi come a-callin' tell them they'll have to 
> wait because you've got bigger problems. Wonder how well that 
> would work?

The stasi are not a callin yet on ecash, and have not been 
particularly effective against people publishing bittorrents.

> I see that an irrevocable payment system, used by itself, is 
> ripe for fraud, more so if it's anonymous. But why wouldn't a 
> mature system make use of trusted intermediaries?

People issuing e-cash systems want to be irrevocable and 
anonymous, in part because the market niche for revocable 
payments is occupied by paypal and credit card companies, but 
they are running into trouble from fraudsters.  They also have 
trouble from states, but as yet the trouble from states is 
merely the usual mindless bureaucratic regulatory harassment 
that disrupts all businesses, not any specific hostility to 
difficult-to-trace extranational payments.

> The vendors register with the intermedi- ary *, who takes 
> some pains to verify their identity, trustworthiness, and so 
> on, and to keep the vendors' identities a secret, if 
> appropriate. The sellers pay the intermediary, who takes a 
> piece of the action to act basically as an insurer of the 
> vendor's good faith. If there's a problem with the service or 
> merchandise and the vendor won't make good, the intermediary 
> is responsible for making the buyer whole. Is there some 
> reason this wouldn't work? If not, why hasn't anyone tried it 
> yet? Not enough cash flow to make it worth their while?

Lots of people have tried it, with varying degrees of success. 
Not much demand for it yet.  A big problem is that whenever any 
such a website achieves some degree of acceptance, a storm of 
fake websites appear imitating its name, its look and feel, 
with urls that looks very similar. 

--digsig
 James A. Donald
 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
 Y34+Yhj/+imvS+mJMNI1gisrEu1m1KVnVZ1XWcQC
 4IiGQ9ui1sYZ89OBlTxmM6HA8I+qJa2Q8CwcRJu3c

RE: Oswald, Atta, Your Name Here

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 10:08 AM 11/29/04 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
>Steve Furlong wrote:
>> Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>> > Bill Stewart wrote:
>> > >Slsahdot reports that MSNBC reports
>> http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6549265/
>> > >that there's a new video game "JFK Reloaded"
>> > http://www.jfkreloaded.com/start/
>> >
>> > I'm waiting for Grand Theft Auto IV, Drunk Over the Bridge With the

>> > Secretary variant.  Wonder what Teddie will say about that one.
>> >
>> > Oswald saved the world from nuclear conflict, thank the gods he
>> > offed the sex & drug crazed toothy one as soon as he (et al :-)
did.
>> >
>> > And a hell of a shot as well.   Gotta respect that, with a
>> bolt-action,
>> > no less.
>>
>> A piece-of-shit boltie. I don't believe the official story, myself.
>
>Hitting at a upper-body sized target at less than 90 yards,
>using a scoped rifle, is about as difficult shooting fish in a
>barrel. The slow steady movement of the car makes it
>slightly more interesting, but hardly challenging to a
>decent marksman.

True nuff.  I recently fired up M$ FS '98, and on my first attempt was
able to Atta the WTC in a 747-300, whereas a more nimble plane
was too responsive to my commands and stalled, spiralled, etc.

And I could cycle my 7.52x54R bolt-action in under a second on my
first try, but again, grace under pressure is cool.

Perle: Rumsfeld Opposed, Powell Wanted Occupation

[R.A. Hettinga]

Remember what I said about the original estimate of only 50,000 men to take
down Iraq, with the next stop being Damascus?

:-)

Cheers,
RAH
---



Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004 8:03 a.m. EST

Perle: Rumsfeld Opposed, Powell Wanted Occupation

 Secretary Colin Powell, the State Department and the CIA - not Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - are responsible for the chaos that has grown
out of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, says Richard Perle, the former chairman
of Pentagon's Defense Policy Review Board.

 Appearing on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" Monday night, Perle said the U.S.
made a most serious mistake after Iraq was liberated and the "keys" were
not handed over immediately to Iraqis to run their own country.

Thus, the U.S. military became an occupying force - and an increasingly
unpopular one.

 "We didn't hand the keys over to the Iraqis. Instead we embarked on what
became an extended occupation. That was fundamentally mistaken - it was
politically driven," Perle said.

 Perle's remarks places significant distance between postwar policies and
neo-conservatives like himself who have backed the war and have been
championed in the Bush administration by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, his
deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and Vice President Cheney.

Perle told O'Reilly the idea of a military occupation was not the
Pentagon's original plan.

 "It was not Don Rumsfeld's decision," he said.

 Asked by O'Reilly if handing the keys over to the Iraqis after deposing
Saddam would have sparked a civil war between the Sunnis, Kurds and
Shiites, Perle said he didn't think so. He noted that there were already
groups of anti-Saddam Iraqis in place when the dictator fell.

 "There was an umbrella group of opposition figures. It included Shia,
Sunnis, Kurds and in the end, of course, we did turn to the Iraqis. We
asked them to form a governing council, then an interim government, but we
made the big mistake of not trusting the Iraqis.

 "I'm not saying that everything would have worked out, but everything
certainly didn't work out the way we did it. My own view is we should have
supported a government in exile even before going into Iraq."

 O'Reilly asked how much responsibility Rumsfeld bears for the current
situation in Iraq.

 "I think the conduct of the war was brilliant," Perle observed. "The
campaign will go down in history as one of the greatest military campaigns
ever. Saddam was removed and his regime fell within three weeks.

 "The problems didn't start immediately after Saddam's removal. The
problems started when the occupation began to wear on the people, and that
was predictable."

 When O'Reilly cited Colin Powell as a dissenting voice who warned the
president that if "you break it [Iraq], you'll own it," Perle said, "the
irony is that it was Secretary Powell and some others who wanted the
extended occupation. They are the ones who did not want to turn things over
to the Iraqis, who feared and distrusted the Iraqis and blocked all efforts
to do precisely that."

 Perle then revealed that even before the war Rumsfeld's Department of
Defense had argued that we should train thousands of Iraqis "to go in with
us so that we wouldn't be the aggressor, we wouldn't be the occupying
power, and those proposals were blocked largely by the State Department and
the CIA. Rumsfeld was never able to get approval for the political strategy
that might well have saved us from much of the subsequent trouble."

 Responding to O'Reilly's remark that the we are now seen as the "bad
guys," Perle said that the situation in Iraq can be cleaned up.

 "Remember, we were portrayed as the bad guys when the only policy for
dealing with Saddam were sanctions and the argument was that Iraqi babies
were dying as result of the sanctions. We're making real progress and the
political evolution is critical. There is a desperate effort now to cope
with the fact that after these elections the Iraqis will be fully invested
in their own future, and I think we've already begun to turn the corner."


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: geographically removed? eHalal

[Tyler Durden]

Variola:
By Halal (are you getting this term confused with that for Islamic version 
of Kosher? I think the name is similar but not this) Do you mean that system 
of monetary transfers whereby local services are exchanged in place of 
direct cash transfer? (In other words, if I want to sell something abroad 
the money is actually wired to a 3rd party who appears to the authorities 
not to have anything to do with any purchasing...this person then obtains 
services or perhaps local cash in lieu of the money he transferred. The 
system seems to operate largely on trusted intermediaries, along with a 
series of barters...)

Well, this system may technically be illegal, but it's done all the time in 
the wilds of Queens, both by middle easterners as well as South Americans, 
and I see little that could be done to stop it. Even the feds can't keep up 
with bugging all the Dominican brothels on Roosevelt Avenue.

It is, in effect, an analog Blacknet, though transactions are of course 
probably limited to the low 5-figure range without some kind of big tipoff, 
but I'm sure the locals are fully aware of the threshold values.

The only way are true police state could crack down would be to nuke Queens, 
which they might actually allow Al Qaeda to do if they chose to (seems like 
Al Qaeda could come in handy for a lot of things..."Oh, where did that 
baddie bin Laden go...guess we'll never find him...")

-TD


From: "Major Variola (ret)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: geographically removed?  eHalal
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 18:36:39 -0800
At 10:33 PM 11/28/04 -0500, Steve Furlong wrote:
>I see that an irrevocable payment system, used by itself, is ripe for
>fraud, more so if it's anonymous. But why wouldn't a mature system make
>use of trusted intermediaries? The vendors register with the intermedi-
>ary *, who takes some pains to verify their identity, trustworthiness,
>and so on, and to keep the vendors' identities a secret, if
appropriate.
Halal was deemed a terrorist weapon, and contrary to the treasury's
policies, game over.

Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[James A. Donald]

--
James A. Donald:
> > Permanent holy war in Iraq would keep them busy and out of 
> > mischief WITHOUT permanent large involvement from American 
> > military.

Steve Thompson
> True, but there's a question of the waste of resources and
> man-years that would come from such a circumstance.

All the oil money has been wasted, most of the humans in the
middle east have suffered poverty, ignorance, lack of freedom
and the unproductive absence of useful labor.

All my life, people have been proposing to solve this problem.
Nearly every American president since 1950 announced some big
and expensive initiative that would supposedly solve this
problem, or make some substantial progress towards a solution.
What is your solution?

> And then there's the ethical[1] side of the coin: do the
> (largely financial benefits) that might come from a civil war
> in Iraq really justify the consequent standard-of-living for
> the residents of Iraq?

And your remedy for improving the standard of living in the
arab world is?

James A. Donald:
> > Plus, of course, they would be pumping oil like mad in
> > order to fund it.

Steve Thompson
> Aren't we all about to run out of oil soon anyways?

Forty years or so, according to estimates by the more sane and
conventional authorities.

James A. Donald:
> >  the people who organize large scale terror can be
> > identified, particularly by locals and coreligionists,
> > which is why they have been dying in large numbers in
> > Afghanistan.

Steve Thompson
> Um, what planet are you on?

The planet where the Afghans held an election, in which nearly
everybody voted, some of them several times, and the Taliban
were unable to carry out any of the threats they made against
the voters, which indicates that the Afghans have been pretty
efficient in killing Taliban.

> The people who, as you say, organize large scale terror tend
> to be protected by virtue of large bureaucratic firewalls,
> legislated secrecy, misdirection (smoke and mirrors), and
> even taboos.

The average Afghan warlord is untroubled by any of this crap. 
He sees someone who looks suspicious, says "Hey, you don't look
like you are from around here.  What are you doing?"  If he
does not like the answers, he brings out his skinning knife,
and asks a few more questions.  If the answers make him even
more unhappy, he hands his skinning knife to the womenfolk, and
tells them to take their time.

> But perhaps you are not referring to Western terrorists, but
> are expecting your reader to assume that terrorists always
> wear turbans, and who generally will live and operate in the
> Middle-Eastern theatre. Perhaps you have forgotten about the
> people who planned and executed the operations that helped
> South-American tyrants form up and train their death- and
> terror-squads?

The parties that sponsored death squads of Latin America, when
victorious, held free and fair elections, which they won, and
those they had been fighting lost.  The death squads were an
response to Soviet sponsored attempts to subjugate, enslave and
terrorize Latin America, and when the Soviet Union passed, so
did the death squads.

It seems most unlikely that Al Quaeda, the Taliban, and the
rest, if victorious would hold free and fair elections, or be
capable of winning them.

--digsig
 James A. Donald
 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
 ZM2pY5cDUC+zxrjD6RPpjIIAXWXup9Ea+odfnDAf
 4eH4bUjZbBj3uFRzBBaJlvBPdeLJxSaUyk6w48C2Z

Re: geographically removed? eHalal

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 10:33 PM 11/28/04 -0500, Steve Furlong wrote:
>I see that an irrevocable payment system, used by itself, is ripe for
>fraud, more so if it's anonymous. But why wouldn't a mature system make

>use of trusted intermediaries? The vendors register with the intermedi-

>ary *, who takes some pains to verify their identity, trustworthiness,
>and so on, and to keep the vendors' identities a secret, if
appropriate.

Halal was deemed a terrorist weapon, and contrary to the treasury's
policies, game over.

Re: geographically removed?

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 06:44 PM 11/28/04 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
>--
>On 27 Nov 2004 at 6:43, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>> Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can always
>> be defeated by cranking up the police state a notch.
>
>You assume the police state is competent, technically skilled,
>determined, disciplined, and united.  Observed police states
>are incompetent, indecisive, and quarrelsome.
>
>> This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems.
>
>The problem is that any genuinely irrevocable payment system
>gets swarmed by conmen and fraudsters.   We have a long way to
>go before police states are the problem.

Call me pessimistic, but you seem optimistic to me.

At least we're moderately back on topic :-)

Re: Anti-RFID outfit deflates Mexican VeriChip hype

[Justin]

On 2004-12-01T10:27:59-0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> In a 19 July, 2004 press release, Albrecht made a clear mention of the
> imaginary 160:
> 
> "Promoting implanted RFID devices as a security measure is downright
> 'loco,'" says Katherine Albrecht. "Advertising you've got a chip in your
> arm that opens important doors is an invitation to kidnapping and
> mutilation."

But maybe the officials have a real (locating) transmitter implanted in
their leg.  The corrupt cops kidnap the official to get the fake
implant, and in the process the kidnappers expose their own operation?

Re: Patriot Insurance

[James A. Donald]

--
On 25 Nov 2004 at 21:42, Tyler Durden wrote:
> Well, I guess I agree. However, there is some issues of 
> Cypherpunkly importance here, particularly concerning 
> nation-states fighting other nation-states. Though I can't 
> consider myself a true-believing anarchist, my own personal 
> reason for continuing to post on the subject was to 
> illustrate that, as long as Group-of-Bandits X continues to 
> utilize our tax dollars to fuck over geographically removed 
> Group of Bandits Y (and their citizenry), then some form of 
> local resistance a la Blacknet (and arguably more drastic 
> measures) might be called for, irregardless of how much 
> Group-of-Bandits X (and their hypnotized citzenry) believe 
> they're marching on God's orders.

I would like to clarify my own position, which is in some 
important ways different from your own:  I am not in favor of 
myself, or any one else in America, being sacrificed for the 
greater good of Iraqi democracy, and since Iraqi democracy is 
likely to consist of 51% voting to bugger the other 49%, I can 
understand the position of those Iraqis who are fighting to 
resist the imposition of democracy.  But if they fight by 
taking hostages and mutilating them on television, then by all 
means let us have them sodomized.  I don't want Americans sent 
to fight by their stupid government, but if they are sent to 
fight, I am in favor of them winning and the guys they are 
fighting dying, and if it means destroying the village to save 
it, serves the goat fuckers right. 

--digsig
 James A. Donald
 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
 QILwOoAZoZRoKhP5l5fyQXQ021Gs0UkjXIXPRZ3A
 4zkLA6Uyu1rxD5xgNBbsjEbA+HajLJfiHBPRZEEK3

Anti-RFID outfit deflates Mexican VeriChip hype

[R.A. Hettinga]

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT


Anti-RFID outfit deflates Mexican VeriChip hype
By Thomas C Greene (thomas.greene at theregister.co.uk)
Published Tuesday 30th November 2004 18:00 GMT

Reports that 160 Mexican officials have had RFID chips implanted within
their flesh in some bizarre "security" scheme have been exaggerated,
Anti-RFID outfit CASPIAN (http://www.nocards.org/) (Consumers Against
Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) says.

"Our concern is that dozens of news outlets have repeated the inflated
number, which has reached the level of an urban legend," CASPIAN Director
Katherine Albrecht said in a recent press release.


"I myself have repeated the erroneous figure in several media interviews,
and I want to set the record straight," she added.

The true number of Mexico's new robo-crats, based on a transcript
(http://www.spychips.com/press-releases/mexican-translation.html) from a
Televisa Mexican interview, is only 18, CASPIAN says.

In a 19 July, 2004 press release, Albrecht made a clear mention of the
imaginary 160:

"Promoting implanted RFID devices as a security measure is downright
'loco,'" says Katherine Albrecht. "Advertising you've got a chip in your
arm that opens important doors is an invitation to kidnapping and
mutilation."

That's Albrecht's response to the announcement by Mexican Attorney General
Rafael Macedo de la Concha that he and 160 other Mexican officials were
implanted with Verichip RFID devices.

We wondered how the inflated figure got circulating in the first place. The
earliest mention in English that we could find on the Web, following a
not-terribly-aggressive search, comes from a blog called igargoyle
(http://igargoyle.com/archives/000448.html) on 13 July 2004. This is
followed, with more details, by the Associated Press
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5439055/), The Guardian
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1260858,00.html), and
The Register
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/14/mexicans_get_chipped/), each on 14
July.

CASPIAN, weighing in several days later, is clearly not to blame for the
hype. And now the outfit has learned that classic lesson about believing
what one reads in the papers.

But who is to blame? Well, there is a 13 July item in Spanish
(http://www.el-universal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia_busqueda.html?id_nota=113215&tabla=nacion_h)
that seems to have words in it that relate to the RFID story, along with
the number 160; but this is unlikely to be the original source. There is
also (we believe) a brief mention
(http://presidencia.gob.mx/buenasnoticias/index.php?contenido=8614&pagina=28)
in a 13 July press release on what we think is the Mexican President's
official Web site.

The thirteenth seems to be when the story broke in Mexico, and the source
seems to be Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha himself, although
we could not find a place where he is directly quoted as saying that 160
employees would be chipped. Reporters have offered the number in the
context of interviewing him, which suggests that he's the source, but there
are no specific, direct quotes that we could find. Perhaps, like many
senior bureaucrats, he had no idea what he was talking about.

Perhaps a companion press release contained the bogus number, or perhaps
the Spanish words for 18 and 160 sound alike, as fifteen and fifty do in
English.

In any case, we're pleased to have cleared this up. ®


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

China 'blocks Google news site'

[R.A. Hettinga]

Reminds me of Imperial Russia's railroad gauge, which was different from
the rest of Europe's, maybe the whole world's, on purpose, to prevent
attacks. Common trick, lots of countries did it, though it impedes lots of
progress at the border besides military progress toward your capital. You
have to offload *all* the freight, both ways, and put it onto new trains,
for instance. Way worse than going from diesel to electric, like they did
at New Haven, for instance, where you used to just change engines. More of
a symptom than a cause, of course.


Anyone want to take bets on China, though? I think the "Great Firewall"
will choke, or more be likely ignored, long before China will block all
truth at its border, instead of mere efficient transit prices for foreign
trade. But then I was a "Polly" during the Y2K thing, too.

Oh. Wait...

(Yeah, I know, I was *dead* wrong about Jim Bell getting a guilty verdict.
Surest way to be wrong is to make a prediction, and all that...)

Cheers,
RAH
Oddly enough, the Aussies had exactly this railroad gauge problem about
half way across their southern coast. I think they've fixed it since,
though I'm not sure.




The BBC

Tuesday, 30 November, 2004, 16:39 GMT

 China 'blocks Google news site'

China has been accused of blocking access to Google News by the media
watchdog, Reporters Without Borders.

 The Paris-based pressure group said the English-language news site had
been unavailable for the past 10 days.

 It said the aim was to force people to use a Chinese edition of the site
which, according to the watchdog, does not include critical reports.

 Google told the BBC News website it was aware of the problems and was
investigating the causes.

 Chinese firewall

China is believed to extend greater censorship over the net than any other
country in the world.

 "  China is censuring Google News to force internet users to use the
Chinese version of the site which has been purged of the most critical news
reports "
 Reporters Without Borders


 A net police force monitors websites and e-mails, and controls on gateways
connecting the country to the global internet are designed to prevent
access to critical information.

 Popular Chinese portals such as Sina.com and Sohu.com maintain a close eye
on content and delete politically sensitive comments.

 And all 110,000 net cafes in the country have to use software to control
access to websites considered harmful or subversive.

 Local versions

"China is censuring Google News to force internet users to use the Chinese
version of the site which has been purged of the most critical news
reports," said the group in a statement.

 "By agreeing to launch a news service that excludes publications disliked
by the government, Google has let itself be used by Beijing," it said.

 For its part, the search giant said it was looking into the issue.

 "It appears that many users in China are having difficulty accessing
Google News sites in China and we are working to understand and resolve the
issue," said a Google spokesperson.

 Google News gathers information from some 4,500 news sources. Headlines
are selected for display entirely by a computer algorithm, with no human
editorial intervention.

 It offers 15 editions of the service, including one tailored for China and
one for Hong Kong.

 Google launched a version in simplified Chinese in September. The site
does not filter news results to remove politically sensitive information.

 But Google does not link to news sources which are inaccessible from
within China as this would result in broken links.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: geographically removed? eHalal

[Steve Furlong]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 21:36, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> Halal was deemed a terrorist weapon, and contrary to the treasury's
> policies, game over.

Hawala