Re: Enraptured in Babylon
At 10:04 PM 03/27/2003 -0600, Neil Johnson wrote: Tim, you must be psyhic ... Just saw this banner ad at wired.com (They must be real hard up for revenue). The text of the ad: SHOWDOWN: IRAQ - IS THIS THE SIGN OF END TIMES ? Find out from Tim LaHaye and other end time scholars ! Subscribe to the Left Behind Prophecy Club ! Clicking on the ad sends you to: http://secure.agoramedia.com/index_leftbehind.html [] Guess the revenue from Left Behind Books is starting to slip... While that's possible, it's also possible that somebody's trying to exploit an already-working popularity trend. Agoramedia sells self-help books and such.
Re: Boycotting the Unwilling
- In 1977, Congress prohibited U.S. companies from cooperating with the Arab boycott. When President Carter signed the law, he said the issue goes to the very heart of free trade among nations and that it was designed to end the divisive effects on American life of foreign boycotts aimed at Jewish members of our society. - I've seen a number of things like this over the years. While sometimes laws like that are designed to keep US companies from boycotting Israel or South Africa or Burma or black people, and sometimes even enforced, that's usually not the real purpose (unlike laws _requiring_ US companies to boycott Cuba or Iraq or France), just as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act laws that forbid US companies from bribing foreign officials usually aren't intended to hunt down corrupt US companies. The main purpose is to give US companies leverage against foreign governments that want to demand that they boycott Israel or pay bribes, etc. when the US companies *don't* want to cooperate. Without those laws, there are conversations like Sheikh Y: I'll only buy your jets if you don't also sell them to Israel and also pay me $10m under the table and fire all your Jews. US Company A: Can't do that, we've got a big contract with Israel, and our budget for bribes is only $2m, maybe we can stretch to 3? Sheikh Y: Bah! US Company B makes good jets, and they haven't sold one to Israel, and their budget for bribes is $20M. US Company A: Hey, Congresscritter X, can you cut foreign aid to Sheikh Y? With the anti-boycott and FCPA laws, the conversations go like Sheikh Y: I'll only buy your jets if you don't also sell them to Israel and also pay me $10m under the table and fire all your Jews. US Company A: Sorry, US law doesn't let us do either one, and won't let our competitor US company B cooperate with you either, so none of us will boycott Israel, and the biggest gratuity we're allowed to offer is a bottle of Scotch. It's buy it from us or buy it from the French, and we've got Super-Death-6 Missiles and they don't. Sheikh Y: Bah! Alcohol is illegal here, you infidels! Make it a case of MacAllan 25, and you'll have to use my nephew's shipping company to deliver the jets and bribe your Congresscritter to increase our foreign aid. US Company A: Good. We can write that much up so it doesn't look like a bribe, and Congresscritter X usually charges only $100K per vote and might be extra-greatful if you ship him some Cuban cigars. Sorry about the Israel bit, but we really can't do that.
Re: For Rent: One Principality. Prince Not Included.
At 04:46 PM 03/27/2003 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: http://nytimes.com/2003/03/25/international/europe/25LIEC.html?pagewanted=printposition=top The New York Times March 25, 2003 For Rent: One Principality. Prince Not Included. By SARAH LYALL VADUZ, Liechtenstein It seems patently absurd to Sigvard Wohlwend that the entire country of Liechtenstein all 62 square miles of it could be for rent, as if it were some sort of oversized alpine cottage. California NORML might want to rent it for a weekend party :-)
CAPPS II in the news - Business case has CAPPS at risk
Government already has too many watch lists, eh? http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003/0324/web-capps-03-25-03.asp Business case has CAPPS at risk BY Diane Frank [EMAIL PROTECTED] March 25, 2003 Money is far from certain for the Transportation Security Administration's proposed system to screen airline passengers, said Mark Forman, the Office of Management and Budget's associate director for information technology and e-government. The business case for the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II is one of hundreds on OMB's at risk list for fiscal 2004, meaning that OMB can and will hold money for the system until the business case has met investment planning requirements, Forman said March 25. ...snip... One of the main issues with the business case is that OMB is looking for a risk-based approach to screening passengers rather than another version of a watch list, Forman said. Government already has too many watch lists, and there has to be a more effective way for TSA to determine which passengers truly pose a risk, Forman said ...snip... -
Re: Things are looking better all the time
At 04:14 PM 03/26/2003 +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote: The RAF used an EFP in 1989 to assassinate the chairman of Deutsche Bank I assume that's some Italian or German group's acronym and not Britain's Royal Air Force? :-) (Besides, I thought assassinations were usually an SAS (Special Air Service, not Scandinavian Airlines) thing...)
Re: faking WMD evidence
At 11:59 AM 03/25/2003 -0800, Eric Murray wrote: Apparently the CIA and MI6 have been faking WMD evidence for quite a while: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1 That's why Friends of Bush like Richard Perle refer to Seymour Hersch, the author, as Hersch is the closest thing to a terrorist that the USA has. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/18/1047749768373.html And the problem isn't just that the evidence is faked, or faked spectacularly badly, or that they've been using it to lie to people who can then tell what they might perceive as the truth to other people (like Congress or Bush), it's that they've apparently lost track of who's lying to whom, like the OLD Reagan/Bush administration occasionally did. It's one thing for Dubya to lie to the US public on purpose, but it's really tacky for his henchpersons to forget whether they're asking him to lie or not. From Hersch's article: One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, 'These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.' ... On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents. Yeah, like that'll not only get lots of cooperation out of all the spooks, but I'm sure it'll also result in the FBI being highly motivated to probe deeply and tell Congress everything it finds out... At least when the KGB investigated other parts of the KGB, they could find out who lied, who knew they lied, and shoot them all to cover up their tracks.
Re: Most Americans believe Hussein the mastermind behind 9/11
At 12:34 PM 03/24/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 02:25 PM 3/24/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Pretty amusing. Beyond Doublethink, as not even the US government claims this... http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2cid=127ncid=742e=7u=/ucru /20030320/cm_ucru/the_moron_majority Its the result of a stack overrun. People have limited buffers, and they are easily overrun by too frequent hate-campaigns. Sometimes the remnants fuse. That's why the Two Minutes Hate is so _important_ - it keeps us Focused! We've _always_ been at war with Osama bin Laden, and his buddy Saddam!
RE: Things are looking better all the time
At 04:37 AM 03/25/2003 +0100, Lucky Green wrote: If any terrorists had nukes, why have they not used them so far? Because they've been able to achieve Shock and Awe without them and keep most of the rabble in line by threatening to blow up other nuclear-armed terrorists in mutually assured destruction. Oh, wait, those weren't the terrorists you were talking about One of the things that really frustrated me about 9/11 was that after 45 years of nuclear terrorism and cold war, we'd had close to a decade without anybody threatening to destroy the world, except for occasional small patches of it just to remind everybody to pay their military-industrial-complex dues, and we'd had this nice economic boom (though it was obviously winding down), and while the Bush League was trying to do everything they wanted, even so, things were starting to look like maybe our species could act somewhat civilized for a while. But no, it's back to the same old same old, and so much for civil liberties in America as well.
Re: Things are looking better all the time
At 07:36 PM 03/23/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: No one (except the US military which hopes to rule an intact Iraq) least of all the protestors, care how many Iraqis get killed. Who recollects how many Iraqis were killed the last time around? James, I agree with you more often than I disagree with you, (and in fact I'll agree with you on a different point below), but in this case your doctrinaire jingoism is not only unfair, it's 180 degrees inaccurate. During Phase I of this war (I won't call it the last time, because we've maintained an embargo and a no-fly zone and hostile agents (mainly UN inspectors) in their territory, so essentially that war hasn't stopped), US propaganda very seldom discussed Iraqi casualties, while focusing very heavily on the few Invader casualties, mostly US but occasionally deigning to admit to the existence of British and Canadian and sometimes other invader casualties. There were a few body count speeches, with Schwartzkopf announcing (IIRC) about 20,000 and then about 50,000 deaths, mainly military, and later on someone, I think Rumsfeld, announcing about 200K including civilians. But there were very few speeches like that, and they were usually doing a We're kicking their asses deal. Mostly you'll hear that from anti-war sources (and by the way, I got thrown off of Federal property for holding a sign about it near the entrance when there was a pro-war rally going on.) Government sources mainly talked about what a great job they were doing with precision-targeted smart weapons (glossing over the fact that 95-75% of the ordnance used was dumb iron bombs.) Meanwhile, if you want to find the UN estimates of 500K - 1.5M deaths from the war and early aftermath and the years of bad water because the Invaders destroyed their water systems and the Embargo prevented importation of water purification equipment, you've either got to look it up yourself or listen to anti-war protestors - you won't hear it from the pro-war side. Now, if you want to argue that the anti-war side are also a bunch of chauvinists who are more interested in a million dead Iraqi children as a debating point than as human beings that they care about individually, well go ahead, but at least the lefties go to the work of counting them, while the pro-war side pretend they don't exist at all. Mike Rosing: The US technology is orders of magnitude better, they can easily destroy large armies. Harmon Seaver: Not inside the cities they can't, not without tons of collateral damage, which will crucify Dubbya and Blair. . James: Furthermore, the plan appears to be to take cities as they were taken in Afghanistan, by laying seige to them and fostering revolt from within, a process that in Afghanistan took cities with very few civilian casualties. That's probably correct - especially after taking out the anti-aircraft capabilities, they can just about take out every truck that tries to drive down the street, doing a much more thorough version of a siege than medieval warfare ever had. Not sure it's easy to do that without civilian casualties, especially if you're expecting the civilians to overthrow their military government, and if the military can seize most of the food, but it certainly can be done with a minimum of Invader casualties, unlike the problems that Allies liberating Germany or Nazis invading Russia went through. Rome was not burnt in a day. Now _that's_ a nice line :-)
Adam Osborne, RIP
-- Forwarded Message From: Lee Felsenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 15:39:36 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Adam Osborne RIP I have just been interviewed with a reporter from Reuters for an obituary of Adam Osborne, who apparently died recently in southern India. Adam had suffered a series of strokes several years ago which no doubt diminished his capacity to present a flamboyant image. I had not had contact with him for at least 10 years. Adam, Jack Melchor and I were the founders of Osborne Computer Corporation in 1981. I was the deisgner of the Osborne-1 and the first VP Engineering. No reference turns up on Google so far reporting his death. Lee Felsenstein Golemics, Inc. Take the obvious... 2460 Park Blvd. #1 (650)814-0427 and simplify it! Palo Alto, CA 94306 fax: (650)322-2881 -- End of Forwarded Message
Re: [1st amend] cyber cafe law struck down
Not only does the LA Times web site want you to register, it doesn't like something about my brower's support of cookies or scripts or whatever so I can't even register there :-) Orange County Register (where Garden Grove is...) on the ruling http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=31255section=LOCALsubsection=LOCALyear=2003month=3day=22 Article from before the ruling - the judge was skeptical of the law and its pushers. http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=27598section=LOCALsubsection=CRIME_COURTSyear=2003month=2day=28 Google News searching for cybercafe brought up similar stories from Thailand, where the judges don't appear to have similar clues or commitments to free speech, plus a bunch of discussion about the plans for a cybercafe at Everest Base Camp.
Re: Brumley Boneh timing attack on OpenSSL (fwd)
At 09:51 AM 03/22/2003 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: Some clarification by Peter Gutmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] on why cryptlib doesn't do timing attack resistance default: Peter Gutmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]: cryptlib was never intended to be a high-performance SSL server (the docs are fairly clear on this), and I don't think anyone is using it to replace Apache or IIS. OTOH it is used in a number of specialised environments such as closed ... For this reason, cryptlib makes the use of sidechannel- attack-protection an optional item, which must be selected by the user (via use of the blinding code, now admittedly I should probably make this a bit easier to do in future releases than having to hack the source :-). This is not to downplay the seriousness of the attack, merely to say that in some cases the slowdown/CPU consumption vs.attack risk doesn't make it worthwhile to defend against. If it's not meant to be a high-performance server, then slowing it down another 20% by doing RSA timing things is probably fine for most uses, and either using compiler flags or (better) friendlier options of some sort to turn off the timing resistance is probably the better choice. I'm not sure how flexible things need to be - real applications of the openssl code include non-server things like certificate generation, and probably some reasonable fraction of the RSA or DH calculations don't need to be timing-protected, but many of them are also things that aren't CPU-consumption-critical either.
Re: San Francisco Combatants
At 02:34 AM 03/22/2003 -0800, A.Melon wrote: I find it interesting that live transmission of Enemy Combatant Radio at 93.7 FM lags about 2 minutes after mp3 broadcast at http://radio.us2.indymedia.org:8000/playlist.pls?mount=/ecr I cannot think of rational explanation why would the signal be delayed - maybe someone versed in FM broadcast technology can offer some ? 93.7 is San Francisco Liberation Radio (micropower license-free :-) I'd first assumed that Enemy Combatant Radio was yet another variant on National Public Communist Radio or Nationalized Propaganda Radio or whatever :-) If I were implementing something like non-commercial unlicensed radio, I'd probably expect that the broadcast studio and the antennas would not be colocated, and there'd be a need for cheap connections between the two of them, which suggests IP over modems. And avoiding dropouts on unidirectional connections suggests large jitter buffers. Two minutes seems a bit excessive, though - perhaps there's a bit of a speed mismatch between the studio and antenna ends of the connection that's accumulated delay, especially if you're transmitting over TCP instead of UDP. Speak Freely used to have this problem until some recent changes that let it clear out buffers when they get too large.
Re: [1st amend] public school can't require permission for info distrib
This sounds a lot like the Don't test for an error condition that you can't handle appropriately principle in coding. It's also part of the usual separation-of-school-and-state discussion :-) At 10:04 AM 03/22/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-religbriefs22.6mar22,1,473799.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dcalifornia School Suspension Over Religious Slogans Voided SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- A high school cannot suspend students for handing out candy canes with religious messages, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Frank Freedman said this week that a policy at Westfield High School prohibiting the distribution of printed material on school grounds without permission violated students' 1st Amendment rights. Members of the school's Bible club had asked the principal just before Christmas if they could hand out candy with religious messages. The principal said no, but they handed them out anyway.
Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
At 02:18 PM 03/22/2003 -0500, Jamie Lawrence wrote: On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote: I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble. I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam. Barry Shein disagrees with me, but you're correct, as far as you go. Trying to declare an artificial scarcity somewhere in the system, which almost all of the sender pays sender's ISP and some of the sender pays recipient's ISP systems do is doomed to failure, either because of evasion or bad social effects or whatever. Finding a way to collect payments for using the real scarce resource, which is the recipient's time, at prices set by the recipient, has some chance of succeeding. There are of course many ways to fail, but it's at least not doomed from the start. I'm mentioning Barry because he's done some recent and well-publicized speeches about the spam problem and sender-pays. While part of his problem may be that he's a liberal Democrat with the corresponding economic clues, he's also run an ISP business for a decade longer than most of the competition, so he's looking at it from an ISP perspective trying to find ISP-level solutions to _his_ problems, which are inbound bandwidth and storage and marginal cost, combined with the costs of managing user complaints about spam, and he's got a pre-internet-boom cynical perspective on dumb ASP models. But while Barry's an old ISP guy, I'm a old phone company guy. ISP-oriented systems, especially sender-pays-sender's-ISP systems, end up reinventing the settlements processes phone companies have used, and believe me, you don't want to go there again. They're bad enough when there's a monopoly that owns all the parts, or that owns the middle, but they're much worse in a competitive many-player system when people are trying to tweak them for social purposes rather than doing cost-driven economics, and they fail really badly at adapting to rapidly-changing technical environments and cost structures. If they start off knowing this, they can pick somewhat different failures than the ones the US phone system has, but that's still one of those Knowing Murphy's Law doesn't help either kinds of consolation. Doomed. Bill Stewart
Re: Journalists, Diplomats, Others Urged to Evacuate City
At 09:57 AM 03/20/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Good work, Shaddack. Gold star and smiley face. My father has mentioned the Texas City incident a few times while growing up (he grew up in Galveston). He remembers that it basically dissappeared in a giant fireball, and there was never an explanation. My first experience with earthquake-like events was in about 1970, when there was an explosion at some duPont fertilizer or chemical plant in New Jersey. Across the river in Delaware, we heard and felt it, and the building I was in rocked a bit. Google isn't helping me remember exactly when or what it was :-)
Re: The Mechanics of Skyscraper Collapse
At 02:04 PM 03/20/2003 -0500, Steve Thompson wrote: This seems reasonable. As a large structure topples, the sheer stress across the long axis of the building will inexorably increase as the upper floors retard the downward progression of the lower floors (caused of course by gravity). I suspect that a large structure such as a WTC tower would cant no more than a few degrees before loading stresses opposite to the design of the compression structure caused a series of gross structural failures -- which would allow the building to fall mostly `in place'. If the collapse starts from the upper floors, as this one did, then perhaps the upper floors are retarding the downward collapse, but when the damage starts on the bottom, the upper floors aren't retarding anything - they're adding weight. The weight might be somewhat balanced, so I'm not sure that it's not self-aligning, but that probably also depends a lot on how the lower floors are attached together and to the ground, and how centralized the columns are that support the upper floors.
Re: What shall we do with a bad government...
At 01:50 PM 03/20/2003 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: The other one we hear is You should be ashamed which brings a chorus of No, we're proud or Have you forgotten about Sept. 11th? We did have some older fellow stopped at the redlight ranting about us needing to go back to Russia, which was pretty amusing. Amazing how red in the face some of those people get. Then there's the old America: Love it or Leave it line, from folks who got really really upset when people _did_ leave it to avoid Selective Slavery during the Vietnam Police Action.
Re: terror alert red
At 04:00 PM 03/21/2003 +, lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote: Surely you don't think some press announcement by a governor is sufficient to place millions of people under house arrest without due process, indictment, arraignment, etc. My memories of the 1968 riots are pretty fuzzy; Wilmington Delaware was under National Guard occupation for longer than any other city in a US state since the War Between the States, but it was basically in the black areas of downtown, and I was a kid out in the burbs. The main effect was armed soldiers on streetcorners, plus nighttime curfews at least at the beginning. But this wasn't a press announcement by the governor - this was a press announcement by the state terrorism czar saying that if anything bad happens he'll be able to control it, and it's the governor's job to make sure that the State Police and National Guard don't do anything stupid like listen to him if he decides to announce that he's in charge like Al Haig some day, while letting him rattle his cage now to keep the Bush League PR Machine happy.
Re: Spending a billion dollars an hour produces a hell of a light show!
At 03:10 AM 03/21/2003 -0800, alan wrote: On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Tyler Durden wrote: Come on now! The Iraqis should have proven that they DON'T have any nukular weapons. They were unable to prove that they don't have any WMDs, so now it's their fault they're getting invaded. How do you prove non-existance of an item? (Especially when the other party is willing to lie and forge evidence to the contrary.) Traitor! You DARE to accuse the US of forging evidence like that?! You realize you're accusing the Pentagon bureaucrats of being unable to keep track of the receipts for the chemical weapons we gave them during the Iran-Iraq war, as if they were $600 hammers or something? No duct tape for YOU! Because, in the end, all Bush wanted was an excuse. But don't think it stops here. No. It doesn't.
Re: Libertarian Party expresses concern over war -- but does not
While I wish Mike were correct that the party would get some spine just because we tell them to, I'm not holding my breath. I was expecting better from Geoff. The LP's traditional heritage was pretty radical about issues like the draft (we opposed it) and drugs (got any good pot?) and about free markets, but too many people reacted to 9/11 by supporting intervention to not only kill Osama, but anybody else that the Administration felt like blaming, such as the Taliban, and there are some people in the California party who think that invading Iraq will somehow help stop anti-US terrorism or will kill people who supported Osama and is therefore justifiable. At 06:10 AM 03/21/2003 -0800, Mike Rosing wrote: I agree, and I'm including the LP on cc (which I didn't notice till I hit reply). Now that congress has voted to support the troops it's time for a revolution in the ballot box. If enough of us tell the LP to get some spine, they will! Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Declan McCullagh wrote: Eric's statement was hyperbole, designed to provoke. My own view is that the Libertarian Party is being unfortunately wishy-washy when it comes to the war on Iraq. It correctly said that troops should not be blamed for politicians' choices, but it pointedly declined to say: This is an unjust war. We oppose it. The U.S. should not be in Iraq. It is arguably an unconstitutional war as well. The U.S. should not be in the business of initiating hostilities or playing the world's peacekeeper. Period. That it chose not to do so speaks volumes about the LP's timidity. Compare to the Green Party's unabashed, unashamed, unafraid position: the Green Party of the United States reaffirmed its opposition to the war and demand for the withdrawal of troops... President Bush and White House officials may find themselves indicted for numerous violations of U.S. and international law. Greens and other antiwar activists are organizing emergency responses to the invasion, including a recall campaign... I'm not a Green Party voter, but at least they have spine. -Declan On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 06:38:51PM -0800, Mike Rosing wrote: On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Eric Cordian wrote: Libertarians are people who think the only legitimate use of state force is to protect them from their slaves. You get of the wrong side of bed this morning or what? It is unlikely that people who don't oppose the death penalty, nor the right of parents to beat their minor children at will, will care particularly about Shrub kicking the crap out of some disarmed third world country to steal its oil and advance the cause of the Jews. Go visit the www.truthaboutwar.org site. That's run by the Libertarians. They are definitly using this as a way to get more votes. They are consistenly the only party clamoring to bring all US troops back to US soil, and keep them there. Hell, their platform includes eliminating a standing army altogether, because that's what the constitution orders! It's unlikely the American cowards will sustain any casualties, aside from friendly fire accidents. Iraq is disarmed, and generations behind in weaponry. Any suggestion that the country poses a threat is merely propaganda to make our soldiers look less like pussies kicking the shit out of a one-armed man. That's for sure. With a bit of luck it can be used as impeachment evidence. More like a miracle more likely. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
FBI discovers missing original copy of the Bill of Rights
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/19/bill.of.rights/ http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/5432311.htm http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/5431087.htm In 1789, after the Bill of Rights was ratified, George Washington commissioned 13 handwritten parchment copies to be sent to the 13 states. Most have disappeared over the years. In 1865, at the end of the War Between the States, some carpetbagging Union soldier stole North Carolina's copy. A collector recently tried to sell it to a museum, and the FBI ran a sting to seize it using a civil seizure warrant, from a federal judge in North Carolina whose court will rule on whether it should be returned to the state or the collector. The value of the copy is estimated at $20-30 million, with one official saying it was priceless. The museum director said the copy is faded but in reasonable condition. Fortunately, the FBI was able to take custody before it was noticed that the seized copy contains First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, unlike current government practice, and the enforcement of the Third was of course moot during the war.
Re: HAVENCO shut down?
At 07:45 AM 03/20/2003 +, an anonymous write wrote to cypherpunks: Has anyone noticed all the sites hosted at havenco (www.seagold.net, i www.thegoldcasino.com, lists.havenco.com) seem to be down? Is this suspiciously due to the war in iraq, or just routine outage? www.seagold.net aka sealand.seagold.net and www.thegoldcasino.com both answer tracerts, and seem to be on 217.64.35, which claims to be on Sealand. So it must have just been routine flakiness, for whatever values of routine and flaky describe the current sysadmins.
Re: Where are the heros?
At 07:36 PM 03/17/2003 -0800, Eric Cordian wrote: What the world needs now is not another mass killing of Iraqis by the United States government. What the world really needs now is a fifty dollar weapon that sinks aircraft carriers. It's called a radio Needs some auxiliary equipment :-) but loose lips sink ships. Mines are pretty cheap, too, if you can attach them, but it probably needs quite a few of them to sink that big a ship. I agree that a low-cost aircraft-carrier-killer would help; the Stinger missiles sure made a major difference to Russian military activities in Afghanistan.
Bush's Moment of Truth
Bush said this was going to be the Moment of Truth. Well, we haven't had a moment of truth from his administration yet, so I guess that's a welcome change...
Re: Journalists, Diplomats, Others Urged to Evacuate City
At 09:55 AM 03/18/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: A Stinger missile launched from a hotel room window overlooking an airport (think of San Diego, for example, as the fllight path comes in over the downtown skyscrapers) would halt air traffic--again. Especially if several attacks happen at about the same time. Half a dozen Western airline companies have already gone into bankruptcy--another sharp falloff in bookings will likely send a dozen more into liquidation. Andrews Air Force Base, or wherever it is Air Force 1 flies out of, would be interesting as well
Re: vulnerability analysis
At 06:17 PM 03/15/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: What happens when you fly a low-fuel high speed 727 into a biosafety level 4 containment facility? Probable answer: not in the threat model considered during design, so it can't happen. I thought Air Force 1 was a 747 these days?
Re: Unauthorized Journalists to be shot at
At 11:22 AM 03/13/2003 -0800, Eric Cordian wrote: This is nothing new. Radio and TV stations and other unauthorized sources of information are always first on the target list whenever the US starts a war. At the beginning of Part I of this war they showed the smart bomb or cruise missile or whatever blowing up the Baghdad phone company building. As someone who works for the phone company, I have to say this pissed me off :-) I think the Pentagon spokeshomo put it this way. Propaganda outlets ARE military targets. Propaganda being anything not released by the Pentagon, of course. Peter Trei wrote: Stopping useful information on *ongoing* operations from reaching the enemy has been a normal, unremarkable part of waging war for over 150 years. During the initial bombing campaign in Part I, Ramsay Clark and some journalists did a week-long couple-thousand-mile drive around Iraq filming the damage being done. One of the important parts was showing downtown Baghdad apartment buildings being bombed because they were near bridges or the water system or other strategic targets and interviewing the people who lived there. In spite of all the commercials for smart bombs and cruise missiles, most of the armament dropped on Iraq back then was dumb iron bombs; one group of people were starting to think about blowing up their own bridge so that the Yankees would stop bombing their apartments when they missed. If this part of the war starts, civilian areas in downtown are much more likely to be part of the target space than before, because it's about Regime Change, not repelling invading armies.
Re: Identification of users of payphones
At 08:03 PM 03/14/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: They could be round, for easy handling. And milled for evidence of having been shaved. They could even be made of precious metals for high-value coins, and of base and inexpensive metals for low-value coins. This would solve the telephone privacy issue. However, they did have other problems. We once had a cypherpunks meeting at Soda Hall in Berkeley, and unlike the usual problems finding parking, I was pleased to find that a bunch of spaces on the street that used to have parking meters had the working parts removed and replaced with flowerpots. While the flowerpots were a nice Berkeleyish touch, the basic cause wasn't a desire to have unrestricted parking, it was a discovery by teenagers that there were pots of money sitting around waiting for people with metal pipes to collect them. Pay phones also have this problem :-) They also have the problem that it costs money to send people around to collect the coins, as opposed to collecting data over wires you've already got, and then there's the problem that there are people driving around in trucks full of money... and of course the problem of deciding whether round pieces of metal have the right politicians' pictures on them without cryptographic help. On the other hand, by switching the money part to coinage, it would free up the data connections for the surveillance cameras.
Re: Give cheese to france?
At 09:44 AM 03/14/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Marx was primarily an economist, and a lot of what he had to say bore listening to. I had to read that twice, because my reaction to reading Das Kapital was that it was not only spectacularly boring, but spectacularly clueless as well. The Labor Theory of Value has some glimmer of a clue behind it, but the value of something is the value to the user, though the seller's cost curves will be influenced by the labor that went into it.
Re: FC: TradeSports.com lets you bet on Saddam's survivability
At 01:43 AM 03/12/2003 -0500, Declan McCullagh forward to his Politech list: Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:28:57 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Buy a contract on Saddam's life At TradeSports you can buy futures contracts for all sorts of sports, plus Saddam's survivability http://www.tradesports.com/jsp/intrade/contractSearch/xml/ContractSearch.jsp steve So do we classify this article as Information Futures or as Assassination Politics? :-)
CAPPS II pilot at San Jose - Delta to CAPPS II Boycotters: No more Coffee Mugs
Breaking news - The three airports in Delta's pilot project include San Jose. --- Last week Bill Scannell [EMAIL PROTECTED] announced the BoycottDelta.org protest against Delta's collaboration with the CAPPS II pass-law pilot project. Among other publicity activities, BoycottDelta.org had T-shirt for sale on CafePress.com, but Delta has filed a intellectual property complaint to stop them, in spite of the Supreme Court's position that parody is protected, and if you've seen the BoycottDelta.org logo, it's clearly just parody. - Delta Shuts Down BoycottDelta Shop CAPPS II Collaborator Stops T-Shirt Sales, Continues Privacy Invasion Austin, TX (8 March 2003) -- BoycottDelta, an on-line website advocating a total boycott of Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) until the airline stops all cooperation with a test of the CAPPS II program, had its on-line 'BoycottDelta Action Tools' store closed down as a result of an intellectual property rights violation alleged and filed by Delta with the store's host, CafePress.com . The store sold t-shirts, coffee mugs and stickers affixed with the BoycottDelta logo, allowing activists to show their support for the campaign. The BoycottDelta logo consists of an all-seeing eye within a red and blue triangle. All BoycottDelta products were sold at cost. BoycottDelta founder Bill Scannell expressed astonishment with Delta's move. Delta Air Lines has been deluged with thousands of emails and calls from their customers over the past week complaining about their CAPPS II testing, and the best Delta can come up with is to say 'don't wear a t-shirt'? This is corporate arrogance at its finest. Over 200,000 unique visitors have visited the BoycottDelta website since it went live on the 3rd of March. Alternate sources of BoycottDelta protest tools are being identified. A new on-line store will be launched shortly. The Google cache of the store can be seen at: http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:HSkdQ1hc4coJ:www.cafeshops.com/boycottd elta+boycottdelta+action+toolshl=enie=UTF-8
Re: Questionable science and drunk drivers
At 09:41 AM 03/09/2003 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote: On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 12:10:35PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: Doing the technical part of detecting alcohol vapor is cool, [...] Actually, that's not even really a solved problem yet, but that's not well-known outside of people who litigate drunk driving cases for a living. I'm not surprised - I found the assertion that the tester could tell the difference between drivers and passengers and open or closed windows and precise enough alcohol levels reliably enough to call the police without major false positives and false negatives to be somewhat dubious. In particular, testing for Ethanol as opposed to metabolites sounds highly unreliable, unless you're really just testing for zero or non-zero quantities of the stuff. (But this was a Southern religious college doing the research)
Re: Fw: Drunk driver detector that radios police
At 08:52 AM 03/10/2003 -0500, david [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sunday 09 March 2003 18:16, you [whoever that was?] wrote: On Sunday 09 March 2003 10:31 am, david wrote: Neither you nor anyone else has the right to force me or any other individual to subsidize your welfare. This device, if forced on individuals by a government entity, would violate fourth amendment protections against self-incrimination. DUI laws requiring breath or blood tests do the same thing. But you wouldn't mind if insurance companies required the device in order for you to get a policy (whether or not it called the police or just the insurance company) ? Right ? I wouldn't mind if some insurance companies required that, as long as any laws against annoying the police with bogus complaints didn't affect me. In particular, if the Bad Drivers' Insurance Company wanted to offer them with a special rate to people who might otherwise not be able to get insurance because of previous drunkenness, great. That level of market differentiation is unlikely to become available in most of the US, because states tend to protect consumers by regulating what kind of insurance is available and at what prices, though. I'd mind substantially if _my_ insurance company required it, because I've been fairly satisfied with the service and prices I get from them, and I'd have to go find a new company that wasn't blazingly stupid. I'd mind a lot if the government required insurance companies to use them, and required every driver or car owner to use one of those insurance companies, especially if drivers were still responsible if their machines made incorrect calls to the police.
Re: Blacknet Delta CAPPS II Boycott?
At 09:52 AM 03/10/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Just wondering... Would there be an easy blacknet way to offer those t-shirts that would be un-shutdownable? If you wanted to do all the work of printing and mailing t-shirts yourself, and had a blacknet that was sufficiently strong for this kind of threat, you could, but that's not the problem here. Easy is the problem. Scannell's not trying to do a secret subversive t-shirt printing operation, he's trying to do a convenient quick add-on to a publicity hack, as well as making it easy for people who want to protest at airports or annoy Delta when they're flying anyway to have cool shirts. But he's in the publicity business, not the shirt business. That's much different from the issue of where to do the web page, which is at a small friendly provider in the US. Cafepress.com is the best-known of a number of Internet shops that do T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. in single-quantity as well as large batches, so if you want to get them printed, all you do is fill out a form and hand them the jpegs and kaboom, you've got a T-shirt store that will sell your shirts to anybody who wants to order them. It's not the totally obvious model (which would be fill out the form, attach the jpeg, charge the credit card, get the shirt), but it scales well because they can do fulfillment directly to the person who wants the shirt instead of the person who designs the shirt, and it lets you pick the price of your shirt, anything from cost on up, so if you want to do shirt designs as a business, you can.
Re: Give cheese to france?
At 12:56 PM 03/06/2003 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: Are you sure there weren't TIFs involved in building the mall? The mall here in Oshkosh (now defunct, turned into offices) was build with city money, the newest upscale condo being built downtown is mostly TIF money, likewise the newest big low rent housing development. There's worse state involvement than that - an appalling number of malls get eminent domain support from towns to force nearby landowners to sell them the land. Costco's management recently rejected a shareholder proposal that would have forbidden Costco to use eminent domain when building new stores. But even without that, most malls are owned by corporations, which only exist because the State calls them into existence, and in return for that favor it's legitimate for the state to place arbitrary restrictions on what they can do. (That's a political assertion, not a legal assertion - from a legal standpoint, the Pruneyard decision probably supports the guys with the shirts.) Malls that are owned by private individuals or partnerships ought to be a different case, and apparently there have been some courts which have decided that Pruneyard applies to malls with public walkways outside the stores, but doesn't apply to the insides of big-box stores. The guys with the shirts were interviewed on several TV shows last night - apparently the guards approached them while they were eating in the food court, and started off by demanding that they take off the shirts or else leave. The guys with the shirts may have just been abbreviating their descriptions, but they appear to have forgotten the magic words for this sort of situation, which are Get your manager and optionally Who's the manager from the mall company? (since mall rent-a-cops are often from a rent-a-cop agency rather than direct mall employees.) One thing that came out on The O'Reilly show was that, while the rent-a-cops' behavior seems bizarre and jingoistic, apparently there's some context to it - a couple months ago, there was a group of people who did an antiwar protest inside the mall, carrying picket signs and yelling a lot, so the guards may have assumed that these guys were part of the same thing. ~ Later updates - On Wednesday, about 100 people did a protest march at the mall protesting the arrest. Mall management has asked that police drop charges.
Re: Fw: Drunk driver detector that radios police
At 09:28 AM 03/07/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 12:52 AM 3/7/03 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A tiny fuel cell that detects the alcoholic breath of a drink-driver and calls the police has been developed by a team of engineers Would you buy one if you're drunk? Would you put one in your trunk? Who's the target market for this sort of thing? Engineers can build things for the existential pleasure of it, but usually they're trying to solve problems for people, and it's not clear what the business requirement is here. Did someone fund them? Who? Why? Doing the technical part of detecting alcohol vapor is cool, but doing the systems integration to make it call the police makes a large number of assumptions about the occupants of the car and the legality of the actions they're about to perform and the probability of false positives and false negatives and the willingness of the police to be called about it. (Police, for instance, don't like false alarms from burglar alarms.) Validating those assumptions is part of the engineering job, just like validating the effect of opening all the car windows before you get in is. Newspaper clippings usually don't do a good enough job on details to let you estimate whether the engineering was done well (except of course when things fail spectacularly.) Building a device that can call any pre-programmed number is a much different problem - it's almost identical technically, but applications include selling to parents for their kids' cars (and be sure to include a speakerphone in the communications part.) (Bobby! The machine says you're drunk! Are you ok? I'm fine, ma, I'm just driving Alice and Carol home.) or if you're trying to sell it to people who are habitual drunks, having it programmed to call a taxi makes more sense. There may be some captive market for selling to people on probation, who might accept it as an alternative to not being allowed to drive at all, but that's clearly a niche market, not an install-on-all-new-cars market.
Re: .sig
At 05:43 PM 03/04/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, March 4, 2003, at 04:57 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Tim May wrote: Yeah, I agree. It's time I retired that .sig. PLONK. Move .sig. For great justice. It's a Slashdot .signature line parody of a line from ZeroWing, aka All Your Base Are Belong To Us, http://www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/story.shtml#game It's a cultural phenomenon from a couple of years ago. It you missed it, that's, ummm, your bad :-) Take your basic Japanese-made video arcade game with really bad Engrish transration. Have it get quoted and parodied extensively. Pretty short; you may enjoy it.
Re: How Do I Classify My Item?
At 03:24 PM 03/04/2003 -0800, Mike Rosing wrote: On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Tim May wrote: For those doing the classifying, i.e., those inside government, since when did they start charging each other real folding money for attending meetings? Capitalism maybe ? :-) You mean selling the capitalists rope so they can hang themselves?
Re: .sig
At 1:08 PM -0800 3/4/03, Tim May quoted: If I'm going to reach out to the the Democrats then I need a third hand.There's no way I'm letting go of my wallet or my gun while they're around. --attribution uncertain, possibly Gunner, on Usenet But WAIT! *Which* gun should I hold on to? The Glock in the holster? The 38 in the ankle holster? The Derringer in the little inside pocket? The shotgun in the gun rack next to the samurai sword? Decisions, decisions! Would the converse read? If I'm going to reach out to the Republicans then I need a third hand. There's no way I'm letting go of my wallet or my freedom while they're around. But you need your third hand for the spare handcuff key, to undo the other two At 12:43 AM 03/05/2003 +, anonimo arancio wrote: If you think your wallet is less at risk with Democrats making the tax law, or if you really think we are having inflation now (versus the risk of deflation), or that the Democrats will keep your taxes down in the future, then you need to run out and take voting lessons so you can make yours count. He's not saying that - it's just that everybody _knows_ to hang onto their wallets (and their guns, if they've got them) when the Democrats are around, and some people have tended to forget that you also have to hang onto their wallets just as tightly when there are Republicans around.
Re: CAPPS II protest - Vandalizing collaborating airlines
At 08:49 PM 03/03/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Just some out of the box thinking here about Delta... I wonder. Is there some form of petty vandalism that can be performed by a Delta passenger that would make his flight MUCH less than profitable for Delta? (I mean, one that probably won't get you arrested...) (Vandalism has always been one of my favorite forms of instant protest.) Vandalism is wrong. (Oh, wait, are you the Fed? :-) Education isn't. Next time you fly, you could leave some flyers in the terminal. They'll get cleaned up, and when the TSA transition from merely pawing through your briefcase to reading the papers, that stack of Boycott the TSA Stooges flyers will probably get noticed, and of course there's the problem that if you're not flying Delta, you've got to word your flyer more creatively Think you're preserving your privacy by not flying Delta? Think Again! Those Boycottdelta.com folks may be picking on the latest new collaborator, but your airline is also giving your flight information to Convicted Perjurer Ex-Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness Office Back when I was occasionally flying through O'Hare a few years ago, and they started alternating announcements about how you shouldn't leave your baggage unattended or it would be confiscated by the police, it was really tempting to print up some flyers about how Unattended Luggage Will Be Collected by Chicago's Hire-The-Homeless Program (with optional signature The Mgt...)
Re: Cavium Security Processor
At 08:38 PM 03/03/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: But basically I was thinking about Packet-over-SONET (POS), which is PPP encapsulated HDLC framed IP. So after the POS link was terminated, I imagined that this little device would basically now look at the raw IP and do some pre-processing before the packets hit either an NP or switch fabric. However, in the vast majority of commercial POS links, they're not mapped over a pipe as big as STS-48c...they'd be mapped over STS-3c or below. This would mean the device is not super-suitable for most SONET-mapped applications. There may be some PPP framing in there instead of HDLC, but it's still just one channel; if you've got a bunch of channels (e.g. a bunch of 155Mbps STS-3Cs on a 2.4Gbps OC48), you're handing them to a bunch of different people to deal with, not doing a 2Gbps encrypt/decrypt at the high speed. This device is really useful for the people who've got OC48c pipes, or increasingly commonly, GigE pipes. But I guess that's OK...it's not supposed to be. It's really geared for MAN/WAN Ethernet (which once in a while is mapped over SONET). But it always pisses me off when GbE=WAN in marketing product literature. Nobody actually runs GbE outside their TSB (Tall Shiny Building) or campus...yet (and to date there's no strong indication they will). You'd be surprised - we're seeing tons of interest in it at ATT, partly because of MAN vendors like Yipes and OnFiber (who bought Telseon) and partly because GigE boards cost $59 at Fry's and Cisco 12000's are ~$100K. (yes, yes, I know there are significant technical differences, but you can get long-distance fiber NICs for about $1-2K, and the LAN switches really are as cheap as $300 or so.) Some of the metropolitan area equipment really is GigE (half or full duplex), while some is only OC12 (622 Mbps), and most of the wide-area stuff is really OC12, and the major cost of running fiber access is getting right-of-way and digging up the streets, so why not crank it as fast as possible? High-speed access used to mostly be T3 and OC3 going into metro SONET muxes, but there's increasing amounts of Ether and DWDM and some CWDM (4-8 wavelength OC48/GigE), though the rollout speed depends on whether towns are issuing building permits faster than bankruptcy courts are issuing Chapter 11s. The other fast local bandwidth market that's been emerging is Storage Area Networks. Fibre Channel and some of the other computer-to-disk-farm standards are now able to get distances of 20-50km on fiber, so we're seeing things like Wall Street mainframe farms that have disk drives in New Jersey data centers, with redundant dual-ring access, providing real physical redundancy and letting you save some critical and expensive real estate. The stock market being what it is, lots more of those bits are zeroes instead of ones now, so I'm not sure how fast the investment is going now, but in early 2002 it was pretty aggressive. That's not as much of an IPSEC market, but the people running those computers do have enough data to fill pipes going to other locations, and the incentive to keep it encrypted.
Re: Wiretap Act Does Not Cover Message 'in Storage' For Short Period (was Re: BNA's Internet Law News (ILN) - 2/27/03)
That's outrageous - if the explanation is correct, then either the judge didn't have a clue about modern communication technology, or the judge did have a clue and was deciding that it's ok for the Feds to wiretap all IP traffic, including email and Voice Over IP, all compressed voice, including Voice over ATM and Voice Over Frame, and any uncompressed digital communications equipment that includes a FIFO, (at least if you can shove the wiretap in next to the FIFO.) The VOIP standards have needed to address encryption for a long time; VOIP over IPSEC is a partial solution, but most people in the industry aren't really comfortable with the scalability or quality of service issues, because there's too much layering, performance measurement is hard, routers that do both tend to run out of CPU, and the field's moving too fast. (And the Oulu folks just found a bunch of vulnerability in SIP http://theregister.com/content/55/29507.html .) At 12:53 PM 02/27/2003 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: At 9:01 AM -0500 on 2/27/03, BNA Highlights wrote: WIRETAP ACT DOES NOT COVER MESSAGE 'IN STORAGE' FOR SHORT PERIOD BNA's Electronic Commerce Law Report reports that a federal court in Massachusetts has ruled that the federal Wiretap Act does not prohibit the improper acquisition of electronic communications that were in storage no matter how ephemeral that storage may be. The court relied on Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines Inc., which held that no Wiretap Act violation occurs when an electronic communication is accessed while in storage, even if the interception takes place during a nanosecond 'juncture' of storage along the path of transmission. Case name is U.S. v. Councilman. Article at http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/eip.nsf/is/a0a6m6y1k8 For a free trial to source of this story, visit http://web.bna.com/products/ip/eplr.htm -- - 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: Press Coverage, Snarky Media Personalities, and War
At 11:21 AM 03/02/2003 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Sun, 2 Mar 2003, Dave Howe wrote: you find the author of one of those 10,000 verified email addresses! cds you blow up his car, burn down his house, paint little targets on his kids, and cut his telephone connection. Given that a hit job by Russian mafia ran for about 5 k$ not so very long ago, the apparent immunity to mayhem by so many who've been begging for it for a oh so long time restores my faith into fundamental niceness of the average monkey. A few years ago there were a couple of New Jersey spammers who got murdered. The news articles seem to have all expired, and I've forgotten whether they were Russians or the people assumed to have hit them were, or both, but apparently they were running a pumpdump stock scam and somebody didn't appreciate having been conned into losing a lot of money. So what they really need to sell is 90 million email addresses verified not to belong to vengeful Russian mobsters...
CAPPS II protest - Boycotting collaborating airlines
One of the recent reactions to the air traveller privacy invasions by various Federal agencies is a boycott of airlines that collaborate with trial projects. Delta Airlines are the test player for CAPPS II, so the Boycott Delta project has launched an informational web site. Here's the press release from our friendly neighborhood Usual Suspect, who also managed a Boycott Adobe website to pressure Adobe to drop charges against Dmitry Sklayrov. As an added bonus, you can go to the boycottdelta website and enjoy the Poindexteresque campaign logo. http://boycottdelta.org/images/deltaeyebanner.gif From: Bill Scannell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 03, 2003 2:45 PM Subject: Re: Email on your BoycottDelta ? In response to Delta Air Line's utter lack of concern with the privacy of their customers demonstrated by their participation in a test of the CAPPS II system, a Delta disinvestment campaign has been launched at: http://www.boycottdelta.org . The idea of citizens having to undergo a background investigation that includes personal banking information and a credit check simply to travel in his or her own country is invasive and un-American. The CAPPS II system goes far beyond what any thinking citizen of this country should consider reasonable. If enough people refuse to fly Delta, then it is likely that other airlines will refuse to implement this sadly misguided and anti-democratic system. The boycott will remain in full effect until Delta Air Lines publicly withdraws from any involvement with the testing of CAPPS II. Press/Analyst Contact: Bill Scannell ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Meet CIA's Buster The Terrorist logo
No, that's not exactly what they said, but you should never miss an opportunity to bash them when they're being stupid anyway :-) The obvious question, besides how long before it's off the website, is So can *you* find the secret steganographic message in the logo?... -Original Message- From: Dave Farber [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [IP] grab it while you can CIA Terrorist-Busterslogo -- Forwarded Message From: Tim Bishop [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2003 13:57:05 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: CIA Terrorist-Busters logo Dave, For ip, if you want: http://www.cia.gov/terrorism/buster.html This is how the CIA is using their time? I bet the graphic comes off their website by the end of the day. Via Strangelove. Thanks, Tim mailto://[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://geodog.thebishop.net/
Re: Cavium Security Processor
At 11:23 AM 03/03/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Maybe they actually plan on making their money from selling those SDKs! (Perhaps they hope for some trickle down from the all the $ startups get for making Powerpoint slides.) And I see they don't really have an architecture suitable for SONET-mapped services...gotta be 1GbE or 2GbEs maped over OC-48 or a single 10GbE (802.11 WAN). and some time around then, also wrote You'd need a chip for every POS/PPP/HDLC connection in the SONET signal. This could be a single connection (unlikely, OC-192c is rare), or hundreds (DS-1s? If not, 16 STS-3cs). I don't know the SPI-3 / SPI-4 interfaces, but it sounds like this is meant to sit on the electronics side of things, not the optics, which you'd handle on separate components. Devices that say 2-10Gbps are usually either talking about GigE (2Gbps for bidirectional) or OC48 or up to OC192 / 10GigE (though that really needs 20Gbps to cover both directions.) This really is an appropriate scale for a device - if you want to encrypt individual data streams on an OC48, you do that at the edges before feeding them to routers or muxes, so your PPP comment isn't relevant. It's an IPSEC processor, which says it's handling a combined big fat IP stream on a router/switch, not a bunch of layer 2 encapsulations of individual IP streams, so it's for people like big ISPs and big hosting centers and big LANs. If you're trying to do link encryption on arbitrary muxed SONET, that's a job for a physical layer raw-bits link encryptor, not IPSEC.
Re: Who Owns the News
At 07:41 PM 03/01/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: MSNBC just fired Phil Donahue after a marketing report outlined a nightmare scenario in which MSNBC was perceived as giving a forum to anti-war sentiment while all other networks were engaged in patriotic flag-waving. You are making all this crap up. For example Donahue was fired because few were watching him sneer at them. Liberals cannot succeed in talk shows because they hate and despise their audience. He was getting about one quarter the audience of the competion. Nah. It's not that liberals hate and despise their audiences any more than conservatives do (oh, come on now, can you tell me Ollie North doesn't disrespect the people he lies to?) I don't get the impression that Oprah's a flaming conservative, though she may not be the most liberal person around, but she seems to do just fine at _her_ talk show. And Howard Stern seems to be successful, in between getting kicked off the air occasionally for tastelessness. Donahue stopped being on the air years ago because he'd used up his supply of imagination and interestingness (not that I was ever a fan of his), and dragging back someone who used to be interesting just because you hope maybe he'll be interesting again is usually a losing game; talk shows aren't sitcoms and they don't make good nostalgic reruns, though an occasional rerun of, say, David Frost interviewing Nixon might be fun. (There are a few exceptions, like the Canadian import Sue Johangten doing the Sunday Night Sex Show on cable tv.) Most of the national talk shows on radio are either conservatives or ranting right wingers or sports shows (which don't count.) The ranters get some mileage out of insulting people for a while, trying to keep finding new people to hate and insult, but it gets old after a while, and now that there's no longer a Clinton Administration supplying easy targets, it's hard to sustain. Some of them manage to be entertaining and interesting for a long time, but it's hard to get more than your fifteen minutes of fame unless you're really skilled at it (anybody still remember Mort Downey Jr?) And radio talk is easier to do well than TV talk; even Limbaugh couldn't sustain the latter, and I assume Dr. Laura's gone too. The more interesting problem is watching the national syndicated shows try to take over for the locals. Limbaugh's the classic, and in general it's been conservatives who succeeded, though Jim Hightower was around for a while. Most of the nationalists have been political, while the locals have had much more mixed topics, typically focusing on local issues as well as national, and not all politics, and they're often more likely to be liberals, like Bernie Ward in SF.
Re: Press Coverage, Snarky Media Personalities, and War
At 09:15 PM 03/01/2003 -0800, Steve Schear wrote: The congressional elections of 1994 flushed Republicans out into the open. Once the elections were over, the fatal flaw the life of the lie was exposed for all to see. Not only was nothing of substance abolished or dismantled, there was not even an attempt to do so. While I agree with most of your article, I semi-disagree with this section. The Contract On America struck a real chord with American voters, and the Republicans got a lot of people elected by it, and they did kill off Clinton's health-care nationalization (yay!) but they failed to get most of the rest of their program accomplished because Clinton was a better politician and poker player than they were. Their relentless attacks over the Monica Lewinsky affairs showed that they were a really tacky self-serving bunch who'd say anything for power, and with the budget showdown, the blinked and Clinton didn't - remember the shutting down the government charades, with the usual paying overtime for park rangers to block the entrances to the Washington Monument and Yellowstone Park (while not sending home any annoying bureaucrats who wouldn't be missed)? They'd tried pretty hard to cut out programs they didn't like, and got the Clintonistas to buy into Welfare Reform for poor people, though of course welfare for defense contractors got increased, but they lost the showdown and couldn't get their budget though.
Re: The next time you see someone on TV in a newsroom
At 04:40 PM 02/24/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: Putting up fake newsrooms is quite another matter, though. I don't recall seeing this static shot of the New York Times-Washington Bureau newsroom. It seems like a silly thing to do, to have a photo of a newsroom with nobody in it. On the backdrops themselves, I'm surprised they're not using blue screen technology. The weather reporters have it, though with a sometimes visible edge (which is distracting). Comedy Central's The Daily Show does this all the time, in a broad mixture of serious news coverage, comedic spoofs, and various ranges of irony and sarcasm in between. Usually it's when their Senior War Correspondent is off somewhere. Since the War on (Some) Terrorists is the Wag the Dog War, we may soon be seeing actual faked war footage. You haven't been seeing it? It's right their next to the fnords, er, um, it must be your Broadcast Flag settings keeping you from receiving that part.
Re: Ethnomathematics
At 05:41 PM 02/24/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: Seriously, this flap is old news. I remember about a dozen years ago when some feminista professor was teaching female-oriented physics. Actually, she was _advocating_ the teaching of female-oriented physics. Was she an actual physics professor, talking about her own field, or some sort of literature/philosophy/sociology/politics professor? The latter type are definitely old news, but as long as they spend their time trying to convince female physics and mathematics professors to think about new ways to structure or teach their curriculum, that's fine. It's when they start dissing physics and math as hostile to women and thereby discouraging young women from going into the field that they really cause problems (as opposed to old boring sexist white male professors discouraging women from going into the field, which was the old problem.) Actually doing a female-oriented physics or teaching curriculum is fine, if somebody can do a good job of it. After all, most of these fields consist of real mathematics, exposure to real materials and their behaviour, sets of metaphors for understanding how the math and behaviour are related, and various levels of abstraction and concrete examples to interest students. The math is the math, and the materials either will or won't cooperate, but if feminist approaches can provide a set of metaphors or abstractions that help students (or at least female-culture-oriented students) understand how the math relates to the real world, then great! And if they can find a set of examples or problems that are less male-oriented than guns, rocketships, pushing pool cues into objects of various hardness and softness, or football and if this helps female students be more interested in the problems, or gives them examples that are more familiar to them, then great! There's certainly no shortage of boring textbooks out there, and if women who understand math and physics and communications can overcome Sturgeon's Law and the textbook publishers' mafia or teacher selection committees, then more power to them, and otherwise, well, the other 90% will be more gender-balanced.
Re: To Steve Shear, re Rome, Architects, Shuttles, Congress
Back when the term hackers started to be misused by the press, as in scary teenage vandals breaking into computers, my usual comment was that teenage computer hackers were really no different from the teenage car hackers of our parents' generations. They did a lot of tinkering with machinery and hanging out with friends, some of them mostly obsessed about making their cars look really cool, some of them were trying to make Grandma's old junker into basic transportation, and some of them were drag-racing across your lawn with no mufflers. It was an obsession that was more introverted and individual than sports, some kids later turned it from a hobby into a paying job, and while it was a bit less intellectual than computing, it was also more real, and unlike computing, it was also a tool for getting girls... At 08:27 PM 02/19/2003 -0500, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Hackers don't work on their own brakes for a reason: evolution. Nah - hackers don't work on brakes because they're _avoiding_ evolution :-) If I were planning to contribute directly to the future's gene pool, I've got better criteria to do natural selection on than skill at mechanical repair, and there are much more efficient ways to transmit those skills than killing off people who don't have them. It's also evolution of cars and financial states. Back when cars had actual user-serviceable parts, I'd work on carburetors and distributors and spark plugs and pollution-control widgets, but except for my first auto mechanics class, I didn't mess with brakes - if I mess up an engine, my car might not go anywhere, but that's usually fail-safe, while making mistakes on brakes is fail-dangerous. (Also, my next car had disk brakes, and I only knew how to do drum brakes.) I changed a couple of sets of valve cover gaskets myself, but when I was in grad school and the car I had then needed it, the local garage would do the job for $15, which was worth paying for, in part because there was a lot more pollution control equipment than on the earlier car, and a lot more hoses and vacuum lines to move around to get to the engine which would all need reconnecting later. After several years of newer cars with electronic ignitions, I acquired my first van, which was old enough to have a distributor, but it was a Chevy so you adjusted it with dwell stuff instead of feeler gauges, which was too much bother. And these days you're supposed to recycle your oil instead of using it to patch the cracks in driveways, so that's another job to pay somebody else to do. My Cruiser was recalled last year - the main thing they had to do was upgrade the firmware, so now it accelerates a bit better...
Re: The burn-off of twenty million useless
At 09:48 PM 02/18/2003 -0500, Major Variola (ret) wrote: MEChA is mostly about keeping college admission standards lower for South American-derived wannabe students[1]. [...] [1] Not hispanics; they don't care about Iberians A number of years ago, a friend of my boss had been passed over for admission to some affirmative action program for Hispanics. He was a Puerto Rican whose native language was Spanish (he was bilingual), but his name was something like Fred Mueller, so he failed the Spanish-Surnamed definition used by the bureaucrats. Exactly how Spanish Surname was officially defined is obscure; Aztec-surnamed or Inca-surnamed or Maya-surnamed people generally seem to pass. Mexico and South Texas also had a lot of German immigrants in the 1800s, so there are German-Mexicans with names like Jose Mueller, and I don't know if they pass, or if they're insufficiently part of La Raza. (There are towns in the area with names like New Braunfels, Texas. Some of you will recognize the connections from Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather.) One German immigrant who moved to Mexico's west coast instead of the Texas area was Johan Hussong, who built Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada; I don't know if they'd pass, depending on whether the burons recognized Hussong as a German name or if they'd decide that since the bar mostly sells drinks to gringos it doesn't count...)
Re: Snow and Daredevil
At 08:39 PM 02/17/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Monday, February 17, 2003, at 06:20 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote: Thought Tim and others here might like this: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-32/k-street-building-destroyed.html Took it today after the snowstorm... One of many things I don't miss about the D.C. area is the snow. I remember four-foot snowdrifts surrounding our house in McLean during the Blizzard of '66. And one of the less attractive things about heavy snow areas is the lingering piles of dirt-encrusted snow for weeks afterward. My DC snow memories are much different - it's watching the city become totally paralyzed by half an inch of snow, because normally they don't get the stuff, the locals are basically Southerners and the foreigners are often from non-snowy countries, and the traffic barely works when it's dry, much less when it's raining or snowing.
Re: A prediction
At 03:24 PM 02/18/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: But I think I have a history of making good predictions, for example I predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, so I will foolishly stick my neck out and make some predictions: Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future. The Iraq war will, as everyone knows, be launched on the 27 or 28th of february. It will be short and victorious, ending some time in april or march. You're about 12 years late. The Elder Bush's War against Iraq hasn't actually ended - we've still got US/UK troops in the area, an embargo and blockade of trade, and a no-fly zone which means the Allied Forces will shoot down Iraqi aircraft over Iraq. As to whether the US/UK forces, with or without support of the other Allies or permission from the UN, start bombing on 27/28 Feb, you might be right. But it's still the old war.
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
At 07:55 AM 02/14/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: As one approaches the plank length, I'm getting kind of board with this. (Alternatively, Bob Hettinga can make some kind of pirate comment here...) TD Hell, Witten himself said something like The development of General TD Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to TD Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to TD Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident. ECI generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to ECappeal to nonhuman civilizations in search of profundity. I checked with the local non-humans, and they said that strings really are kind of fun, remind them of mouse tails, but that the historical accident was Not Their Fault... JD Suppose we had the ultimate theory of everything handed to us JD on a platter by supercilious aliens. .. and they objected to being called supercilious, as well. There's a theory that the standard pictures of space aliens have a strong resemblence to what a half-awake human sees when there's a six-month-old kitten staring you in the face from a few inches closer than your eyes' normal focal lengths...
Re: Why not log all firearm owners in a government database?
Jonathan Goldstein points out that 18 U.S. Code ' 922 prohibits the Federal government from maintaining certain classes of firearm registration information in national databases. However, he misses the point that that law is just a law, not a Constitutional prohibition or a Supreme Court interpretation of Constitutional limitations or prescriptions on governmental structure or fundamental American rights. So it's not carved in stone - Congress can change it, just by passing a law that supersedes it, though the law does prevent government agencies from doing it without some kind of Congressional or court permission. That's a fundamental problem with depending on laws for protection of information, or especially with depending on government regulations; even if they don't have big explicit loopholes about national security, drugs, auditing, or cops acting in good faith, once somebody has information, they have it, and can use it in just about any way they want. The classic examples are things like the US Census Department privacy protections, which didn't prevent the US Army from using census records to find Japanese-Americans to kidnap in WW2, or the uses of Social Security numbers that drivers' license bureaus are required to collect, which were initially used to detect duplicate registrations, but are now used to harass deadbeat dads, discourage non-citizens from driving while speaking Spanish, and tie SSNs to motor-voter registrations. The only way to prevent information from being misused or repurposed is to prevent it from being collected. Applications of data that were public concerns back in the 60s and 70s were potentially real problems, but computers were expensive and small enough that abuses were inconvenient; these days you can fit computers in your pocket that are more powerful than the 1970s mainframes, and data correlations that once took a 5-year plan managed by hundreds of people can often be done ad-hoc by anybody on their desk, as long as they've got the information (though it's certainly easier if most items have unique indexes such as SSNs attached.) Bill Stewart
Re: NYT: The Wimps of War
By PAUL KRUGMAN George W. Bush's admirers often describe his stand against Saddam Hussein as Churchillian. Short, rude, drunk? As far as that goes, sure, he's Churchillian. But he's not even up to the standards of meet the new Bush, same as the old Bush, fool me...ummm...can't get fooled again; Bush the Elder may have been evil, but he was somewhat competent. Tim writes, on behalf of Shrub These Evil Doers have nucular weapons of mass destruction. I know I mispronunciate nucular. My bad. I've been amazed that Bush's handlers didn't straighten him out on nuculur long ago. Why are they trying to keep him looking ignorant?
Re: DOJ quietly drafts USA Patriot II w/crypto-in-a-crime penalty
At 02:13 PM 02/09/2003 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote: On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 10:36:35PM -0500, Greg Newby wrote: Under the new law, running shoes will be classified as burgler's tools if their use is not authorized or exceeds reasonable levels for leisure activity. I always thought that breathing during the commission of a crime should result in an extra five to ten years in prison. And breathing _heavily_ gets you even more
Re: Forced Oaths to Pieces of Cloth
An interesting story on future citizen-units being brainscrubbed in the lovely state of Pennsylvania. http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/5124933.htm ... But recite they must. Under a state law that takes effect today, almost every student in Pennsylvania - from preschool through high school, in schools public and private - must face the Stars and Stripes each school day and say the pledge or sing the national anthem. It is one of the most stringent pledge laws in the United States, said Greta Durr, a researcher for the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state lawmaking across the nation. From http://www.mclu.org/nottospeak.htm Minersville School District vs. Gobitis - 310 U.S. 586, 60 S. Ct. 1136 (1940). The Supreme Court upheld a Pennsylvania school district that expelled two Jehovah's Witness students for refusing to pledge allegiance to an idol; their religion also forbade them to do the Heil Hitler salute. West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 63 S. Ct. 1178 (1943). The Supremes reversed themselves on a similar case, something they rarely do. The recent 9th Circuit court decision deleting under God from the mandatory idol-worshipping doesn't yet apply to Pennsylvania. Leaving aside the issues of forcing kids to recite something they don't understand or affirm something they don't believe, there's the little problem that if the teachers are going to pledge their allegiance to the Republic, they need to start following the First Amendment, and also throwing out the lawmakers who've violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. And since they're not in the 9th District, so they've still got the under God part, the legislators are going to have to start cleaning up their act a lot on the God parts too, and I do *not* mean by forcing other people to believe things they don't...
Re: Rep. Coble supports interning Japanese-Americans, Arabs
At 03:33 PM 02/06/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Holy sh*t is this guy stupid. Racist too. I guess anyone who doesn't look/sound/think like this MF is they. Better round up those blacks while we're at it. -TD Yahoo seems to have good resources liked to their political articles. Here's Coble's bio http://yahoo.capwiz.com/y/bio/?id=445 and here's the list of campaign contributions he reported last election, complete with contact names and mailing addresses of the organizations that donated to him. http://yahoo.capwiz.com/y/bio/fec/?id=445cycle=2001-2002 Most of them don't list email addresses, but it'd be fun if they all got faxes about their boy From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Congressmen in need of composting: Manzanar fine with him Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 11:26:20 -0800 HIGH POINT, N.C. - A congressman who heads a homeland security subcommittee said on a radio call-in program that he agreed with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storyu=/ap/20030206/ap_on_re_us/congressman_prison_camps_7 Why don't they stop pretending and call it Fatherland Security Agency? _ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Putting the NSA Data Overwrite Standard Legend to Death... (fwd)
At 09:34 AM 02/06/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: I've got a question... If you actually care about the NSA or KGB doing a low-level magnetic scan to recover data from your disk drives, you need to be using an encrypted file system, period, no questions. OK...so I don't know a LOT about how PCs work, so here's a dumb question. Depends on the operating system you're running and the file system encryption program you're running and the options you've picked when running them. (There are no dumb questions, just questions leading to overly-general answers...) Will this work for -everything- that could go on a drive? (In other words, if I set up an encrypted disk, will web caches, cookies, and all of the other 'trivial' junk be encrypted without really slowing down the PC?) As far as slowing down the PC goes, it depends a lot on how fast your CPU is, how much memory you've got, how fast your disks are, how overloaded your machine is already, etc. On newer machines, this isn't too likely to be a problem, and older machines can be fixed by not running Windows If you're a gamer, you're more likely to worry about the performance, but more likely to have a fast enough CPU... The usual things you need to protect are - Files and filenames and directories - almost everything does this - Swap Space - this one's often hardest to get right, depending on the operating system. - Temp files and log files that let you decide where to put them - Temp files and log files that don't document where to put them (Windows is full of these) - File Systems / Partitions / etc. - many of the programs let you create additional virtual disks (e.g. D:, E:, F: on Windows, cute icons on Macs), but not all the programs can do C: or Unix / root drives. Creating additional virtual disks doesn't usually give you encrypted swap space or encrypted undocumented temp directories, unless you've got an operating system that lets you specify where the swap goes and only enable it after turning on the encrypted drive. If you want to know what PGPdisk does off the shelf, with the current incarnations of PGP.com and PGPdisk, I'd say ask Jon Callas. The reason I ask is that's it's very easy to imagine that, say, FedGroup X wants to take out some outspoken or otherwise questionable person by secretly introducing some kiddie porn or whatnot onto the drive. 15 minutes later they burst through the door and grab the PC. If they can secretly introduce things onto your disk, you've got a raft of other problems - can they secretly introduce a password stealer? On the other hand, they could email you some thoughtcrime and then bust in, or stego it into legitimate things you're downloading (Wow, Yahoo Maps seems sss.lll..www Today!) (This new freebie game 'Trojan Horse' is fun, but the download's pretty big!)
Re: Putting the NSA Data Overwrite Standard Legend to Death... (fwd)
If you actually care about the NSA or KGB doing a low-level magnetic scan to recover data from your disk drives, you need to be using an encrypted file system, period, no questions. There are occasional articles that pop up on the net talking about somebody's improved capability for data recovery. If you're part of a US government agency with NSA or DoD rules, that isn't necessarily required, or approved as adequate, but that's strictly an issue of their flexibility. On the other hand, if your threat model includes the Mafia, you might want to get some steel kneecaps pre-installed. It's been a long time since I've read any official regulations on this topic, and at the time they were mostly for declassifying equipment that formerly held classified data: - either use physical destruction, or - use an officially NSA-approved Big Magnet, or - use software that's been approved by your security officer for your operating environment and remember that you need to wipe memory as well. My reaction to letting any NSA-approved Big Magnets near any of *my* computers was absolutely no way - keep them outside our TEMPEST shield so they don't bother my working disk drives.:-) And I was never convinced we'd find officially-approved disk-wiping software that would actually run on Unix as opposed to VMS and wouldn't require immense reams of paperwork to get permission for. But our building had a machine shop in the basement, so when the sysadmin after me decommissioned the VAX, she got to help sandblast the disk drives. I don't know what they did about RAM, if anything. Most sysadmins in those days had wall decorations made from the disk drive platters with nice stripes on them left by the head crash. Hers was sandblasted smooth metal :-) Our standard on ATT 3B2 computers was to wipe memory 3 times, and there was a special program that would wipe half the RAM, relocate itself into that half, and then wipe the other half, using first 0s, then 1s, then a (fixed? random?) bit pattern.
Re: mail weirdness
At 01:41 PM 02/03/2003 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 10:23:58AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: Do you mean that Steve's posts always do this to you? I've only seen one like that, and I assumed that Steve had simply Bcc:d the Cypherpunks list and some other lists on that posting. I've seen a number of posts from Steve that have the list suppressed but I don't think it was always that way, maybe the last few months? And not sure if they all do it or not. No, they don't all, so I assume it's only when he wants them to, as opposed to Bob Hettinga's practice of copying everything to his usual sets of lists, most of which don't allow replies from non-subscribers. Nope, I'm subbed to lne.com. Did you try doing a group reply on Declan's? And if he isn't on minder.net, that's even weirder. Declan's postings are usually either normal postings to cypherpunks or else posted to his politech list (most of which have Subject: FC something.) I'm subscribed to politech, so I haven't had any weirdness when replying.
Re: Touching shuttle debris may cause bad spirits
Smell that, son? Nothing else in the world smells like that I love the smell of hydrazine in the morning It smells like It's MMH that cooks your goose. Regular hydrazine (smells like fish) ain't that hypergolic with N2O5. incompetence. The press was reporting that some dozens of people went to hospitals after encountering shuttle parts, and about 8 were actually treated for something, between lung or skin problems (presumably chemical burns of some sort.) So it's not totally harmless.
Re: Touching shuttle debris may cause bad spirits to invade your body!
At 10:19 AM 02/02/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: Journalists may as well be saying the above, saying that shuttle debris has evil spirits which can come out if the debris is touched. They're also saying that Feds will come and arrest you if you touch them. You'll have to draw your own conclusions about equivalence classes there... (A friend of mine likens cops to vampires - they aren't supposed to come in your house unless someone invites them, but if you are so foolish as to invite them in, you won't be able to control what happens when they're there or get them to leave when you want them to go.)
Re: mail weirdness
At 10:19 AM 02/03/2003 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: Looking at this more, I think it's two separate problems. I don't get the recipient list suppressed or whatever it is from Declan's posts, it just appears that something is wrong with the header, and it's probably something minder.net is doing and I haven't done a group reply to anyone else posting thru minder.net. But with Steve's, I get the same thing Tim got. What list is Steve posting thru? Do you mean that Steve's posts always do this to you? I've only seen one like that, and I assumed that Steve had simply Bcc:d the Cypherpunks list and some other lists on that posting. Declan's recent mail has been sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED], so it's possible that if you're reading it on minder.net, there's something in there that looks weird to you. But it all looks normal here.
Re: the news from bush's speech...H-power
At 12:16 PM 01/30/2003 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 08:05:46AM -0800, Mike Rosing wrote: That's a pretty easy decision to make, eh? Ethanol is renewable, oil isn't. Ethanol doesn't pollute, oil does. Ethanol doesn't require troops in the Middle East, wars, and resultant terror attacks, oil does. Quite simple. Ethanol pollutes, any hydrocarbon is going to be mixed with N2 and make NOx, there's no getting around it with any kind of Otto engine. Yes, of course, there's always NOx (although that can largely be dealt with by cats), but the other stuff, sulfur and particulates, is gone, and there are no problems whatsoever from things like spills, which are quite catastrophic even in the short term. Biofuels are also greenhouse neutral. The big pollution issues with ethanol are in growing the corn, sugar, etc. that's used to brew the stuff, fermenting it, and distilling it. Even if it's grown organically (or at least without pesticides, which is easier to do with corn that doesn't have to look good for market), it's still a big issue with habitat destruction, and by the way, have you ever smelled a brewery? :-) Photovoltaics, on the other hand, have all the wonderful toxic chemical problems of the semiconductor industry. Solar thermal power sources are pretty well-behaved technology, though except for water heaters they aren't very common.
Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
At 02:21 PM 01/31/2003 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote: I don't know how it works in the US, but railroads are both comfortable and pretty reliable in Europe. A bit too expensive, especially in Germany. I also like being able to work on the train -- given that here cities are only a few kilotons apart and ICEs are pretty speedy flying can take longer. Otherwise I agree, bahning beyond 5-6 h starts to become tedious. Short distances make trains much more attractive, and most of the big cities in Europe _are_ pretty close together. The train was a great way to get from Berlin to Hamburg; 2-3 hours, and flying distances like that is mostly hurry-up-and-wait. It's a nice way to be a tourist, as well - you can see scenery as you drive by, so taking the trains and ferry boats around Scandinavia was nice too (as adventurer or bum, depending on whether you saw me before or after I got to the hotel with a washing machine :-) But the train from Berlin down to Munchen took about 8 hours; that's about how long it takes me to get from San Francisco to New York by plane, which is slightly farther. Tim commented about railroad stations being in the ugly parts of town. That's driven by several things - decay of the inner cities, as cars and commuter trains have let businesses move out to suburbs, and also the difference between railroad stations that were built for passengers (New York's Grand Central, Washington's Union Station) and railroad stations that were built for freight, where passengers are an afterthought (much of the Midwest has train stations surrounded by warehouses and grain silos, not houses or shops). Here on the Peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, the train stations are mostly central to downtown or on the edge of downtown, in areas that are nice (though the train stations themselves are either minimal commuter stops or else pretty mostly-abandoned stations that were built because the government-subsidized train system thought they should.
Re: Encrypted hard drive enclosure for $139
At 06:14 PM 02/01/2003 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote: http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php?products_id=331 http://www.deltrontech.com/Enclosure/E3S/E3S.htm Interesting, but I'm confused about the Real-time 64-bit/ 40-bit DES (Data Encryption Standard) Encryption/ Decryption with throughput of 712Mbit/ sec Yeah. And the web page claims it's military-grade security. It's like, if you know enough to build such a thing, why don't you know enough to use real encryption? Somebody on Slashdot recommended this for Schneier's doghouse list. Now, 712 Mbit/sec is about 90 MByte/sec, which means if it were doing 3DES, it'd probably be about 30 MByte/sec, which is no longer fast enough to be entertaining.
Re: the news from bush's speech...H-power
At 07:52 PM 01/29/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 06:33 PM, Harmon Seaver wrote: On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 07:53:21PM -0500, Jamie Lawrence wrote: One of the problems I think is rampant with, for instance, getting alternate fuel sources off the ground is that government subsidies are ensuring they don't happen by distorting the market for fossil fuels. Remember the Synfuel boondoggles under Jimmy Carter? Cracking otherwise-uneconomical oil shale might have been a useful technology if the price of oil were $50-100/barrel. (Meanwhile, we can feel nice and liberal about leaving all this wonderful supply of irreplaceable industrial hydrocarbons for future generations.) The subsidies for corn ethanol are indicative of the problem with interfering in markets: -- someone decided corn good, oil bad! -- those with a lot of corn, like Archer Daniels, sent in their lobbyists to push for this point of view Bob Dole, Senator from ADM, Republican protector of free markets. One reason for corn ethanol instead of sugar ethanol is that that the US prices for sugar are artificially kept high with import tariffs (and of course with the Cuba embargo), which is also why soda is mostly made from corn syrup instead of sugar. As for Iraq, letting them keep Kuwait in 1990-91 almost certainly would have driven the price of oil _DOWN_. A nation like Iraq is more interested in pumping than in hoarding, The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve made some seriously incompetent moves with its timing of buying and selling oil around Desert Scam, at least if their goals were related to moderating price swings, making oil available to US industry, or to managing their costs. When the market was really tight and prices were rising, they bought heavily, paying a lot more than they should have and making oil scarcer in the US, and when the war was largely decided and oil prices were dropping because there was no major need for hoarding, they started dumping their oil, depressing prices further. And don't decide that cornohol (sounds like cornhole,doesn't it?) or biodiesel or miracle weed is something that markets ought to be distorted in favor ofelse we'll get the kind of market distortions cited above, and a non-optimum solution. Well, the indirect market manipulation policies are definitely skewed in favor of Miracle Weed from high-tech California growers instead of ditchweed from Kansas or Mexico.
Re: [DIGRESSION] RE: the news from bush's speech...H-power
When Bush is talking about a hydrogen economy, remember that he's really referring to Orion-engine cars... At 06:38 PM 01/29/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: It's why I'll be safer when I run into Harmon on the freeways. His heirs will appreciate his savings in gasoline for the time he owned his Lupo. Nahh - You can carpool. Just put his Lupo in the back of your SUV; the two of you should be able to lift it, and it shouldn't slow down the SUV that much. Some of the electric vehicles look like they'd be safe enough to drive, but some just don't, and if I'm going to be stuck with something that only goes 30mph, I'd rather have an electric bike. Another discussion was Hard on the highway? It goes 80 mph. There was that VW RetroBeetle commercial about 0-60mph? Yes, and I'd expect Lupo's acceleration is probably slower. Top Speed is certainly important, but acceleration is an important part of avoiding problems. (My full-size Chevy van gets about 16mpg, in the 6 cylinder model, which is a lot better than the previous one, which got 8 mpg when all 8 cylinders were working, 7 mpg when only 7 were5 with 5. More annoyingly, my Chrysler PT Cruiser only gets about 22mpg, and it's the older model without the turbot. It's a bit heavier than my 1985 Toyota wagon that got 27mpg, but you'd think that Detroit would have done some engine efficiency development in 15 years.)
Re: Who feigned Roger Rabbit?
At 11:30 AM 01/30/2003 -0500, Jamie Lawrence wrote: I lived in San Francisco for 10 years. One job I had required me to have a car so I could get to a data center in San Jose in cases of emergency (never happened), so I bought a cheap beater. Spent $1000 on the car, $400 a year on insurance, and about $3000/yr on parking and parking tickets. It was eventually stolen, and I was incredibly happy when it was. BART is actually not bad - one can work on the ride. MUNI is miserable, but it usually works, at least. Depending on where you live in the city, cabs can take care of the emergency situations, and renting a car can take care of events that you've got more advance notice about. On the other hand, San Francisco (like New York) has a special program to encourage car ownership and parking consumption, called taxi medallions, which are designed to make sure there are never as many cabs on the street as the market will bear. Caltrain was a nice way to commute for the ~5 years I was going in that direction. As Bill Frantz said, you can work on the train, which does make up for the hurry-up-and-wait. Amtrak in most of the US sucks, but from NYC-NewJersey-Washington, it works pretty well - I found it was typically about 15 minutes slower than flying, if I got one of the express trains.
Senate votes against TIA funding.
Washington: In a daring attempt to avoid identification by the Ministry of Total Information Awareness, the Senate resorted to a voice vote when blocking TIA's funding, hoping that without a written record, individual Senators might not be caught. TIA cameras ###.###. and ###.###. [redacted], however, observed ## of the Senators during the vote, and estimates are that the voiceprint recognition systems can resolve the identities of the other ## ungood terrorist sympathizers, so they can have the impact on their civil liberties explained more directly. -- http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNewsstoryID=2101454 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saying they feared government snooping against ordinary Americans, U.S. senators voted on Thursday to block funding for a Pentagon computer project that would scour databases for terrorist threats. By a voice vote, the Senate voted to ban funding for the Total Information Awareness program, under former national security adviser John Poindexter, until the Pentagon explains the program and assesses its impact on civil liberties. snip
Re: Big Brotherish Laws
At 05:39 PM 01/27/2003 +1300, Peter Gutmann wrote: That's because non-US licenses constitute automatic permission for minor traffic law violations. The scenario is something like the following: [Driver gets pulled over]. Driver: Gidday mate, hows it going? [Cop asks for license, looks at it] Cop: A, screw it, too much paperwork. Don't do it again. HAND. The being-a-foreigner trick worked for me in Canada (the fact that I was driving a rental car helped.) A friend of mine back in NYC used to respond to traffic stops by speaking German to the cops and saying things about kilometers and the cops were generally already somewhat off-balance when dealing with him because he's got a mechanical arm and an eye-patch. Eventually, however, he encountered a German-speaking cop, and the nicht-spreche-das-Englishe jig was up.
Re: sql worm part of anti-war protest?
At 09:12 AM 01/26/2003 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: There's a report on indymedia that the lastes worm is part of an anti-war tactic which will escalate if Iraq is attacked. http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=231141group=webcast Yup. It's either wanabees talking big about what 31337 h4X0rz d00dz they are because they're feeling inadequate, or people who recognize the availability of a credulous audience they can make fun of by pretending to be serious, or (P=0.01) maybe they actually heard something about what was going on and tried to claim some credit. The claim to be using wireless networks makes the former two somewhat more likely explanations
Re: Secure voice app: FEATURE REQUEST: RECORD IPs
On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 08:23:15AM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: The versions of all the secure phones I've evaluated needed this feature: a minimal answering machine. With just the ability to record IPs of While it's nice to have it built into the phone's user interface, you can always do the tool-based thing and use a separate sniffer program to watch who's calling you, and it's also helpful if somebody's trying to call you with a program your phone doesn't grok. If you're on a Unix system, tcpdump is ok, or you can use newer solutions like snort, or pick your favorite Windows equivalent. Either way, if you know the range of ports on your system they're calling, set up the sniffer to record those and output them in some friendly manner; otherwise sniff everything and grep out the familiar ones that you know aren't phone calls.
Re: JILT: New Rules for Anonymous Electronic Transactions? An Exploration of the Private Law Implications of Digital Anonymity
At 07:56 AM 01/24/2003 -0500, Bob Hettinga wrote: http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/01-2/grijpink.html There's some interesting discussion about the ability of the Dutch legal culture to provide useful tools for regulating transactions in anonymous or semi-anonymous environments - if you can't find somebody, can you speak of enforcing contracts, etc. Not surprisingly, this has been discussed extensively by the Cypherpunks and other people exploring applications for cryptographically-protected communications. Some of the standard references are Tim May's Cyphernomicon paper (on the web), Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game, and Vernor Vinge's story True Names. (As the JILT paper says, systems like this may be quite complex to actually implement in practice, and fiction provides a good tool for exploring the social implications without doing the difficult detail work.) I do want to comment on the concept of pseudonymity and semi-anonymity. The paper appears to be using a definition in which a Trusted Third Party provides a pseudonym service, which knows the True Name behind each pseudonym and can provide it when required for a limited number situations, such as collecting unpaid debts or prosecuting ThoughtCrime, but otherwise the pseudonym is adequate for many activities, and the user can protect his privacy and conduct various activities under different pseudonyms without them being linked to each other or to his True Name.Unfortunately, the definitions of ThoughtCrime have been radically expanded in recent years, primarily due to intellectual property concerns from the music and movie publishers and the Church of Scientology, so the usefulness of these pseudonyms has decreased, even for pure communications applications without the anonymous digital payment systems that can enable anonymous business. An alternative definition of pseudonymity, which is more common in the Cypherpunks discussions, is the use of a persistent identity, verified by digital signatures, which permits the development of reputations without the need for True Names. The types of businesses that can be supported in this environment are more limited, because there's no way to throw somebody in jail if they default, but much of European merchant law evolved without this ability. For some applications, Reputation Capital provides enough protection - a name that's used for months or years of good transactions or writing good essays or making good investment recommendations has a value that will be lost if it's abused, but for other applications, escrow services substantially increase the types and values of transactions that are possible. Escrow can be used on a per-transaction basis, or the escrow service may be part of establishing a pseudonym, providing an amount of money that can be seized in a dispute resolution process without needing the True Name of the pseudonym-holder. Pseudonymity is becoming increasingly common in practice. AOL screen names were primarily intended to allow multiple family members to share an account, but are also useful for protecting privacy, especially of children in chat rooms. There's no explicit requirement for a True Name, though most accounts use credit cards which do provide some tracing ability, but the depth of credit checking performed by AOL is did their credit card company approve paying for their service this month, rather than how big a transaction can their assets cover or where do they sleep, in case the police want to arrest them. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail systems are relatively untraceable, however. EBay accounts have an organized reputation capital system, allowing buyers and sellers to rate whether the other party has met their obligations, and to allow prospective buyers and sellers to see the ratings and estimate whether they'll be defrauded or not. Unfortunately, EBay recently bought Paypal, so the privacy of Paypal users is no longer protected by the separation between the auction system and the payment system, since Paypal uses credit cards and therefore semi-traceable identities to pay people. Julf Helsingius's original Anonymous Remailer was originally intended to provide the stronger form of pseudonymity, but unfortunately he was forced to reveal the information he had about a user (because of the intellectual property Throughtcrime problem), though in fact that identity was another disposable email address. In order to respond to a growing need for anonymity in legal transactions, the regulations for organised semi-anonymity could also be extended (e.g. under property law), so that it will be possible to break through a person's anonymity retrospectively if necessitated by court order or by the law. Organised semi-anonymity (or pseudonymity) in legal transactions is therefore a useful weapon against a number of disadvantages of acting absolutely anonymously or spontaneously semi-anonymously, while retaining the envisaged protection of privacy. It is only with the
Re: Big Brotherish Laws
At 12:45 AM 12/18/2002 +, Adam Back wrote: If I recall some time ago (years ago) there was some discussion on list of using non-US drivers licenses or out-of-state drivers licenses I think to get around this problem. I thought it was Duncan Frissell or Black Unicorn who offered some opinions on this. An International Drivers' License and a real license from another country is almost always good enough to let you drive in a state you don't live in, and almost never enough to officially drive in a state you officially live in, for definitions of officially live in that are more or less flexible depending on who's asking, and what the address of your car registration is, and whether you're registered to vote there, whether you carry a passport and have a foreign accent, and whether you own a house (which is a rather visible activity) or rent (which is less visible), and whether you've got somewhere else that you appear to live, and whether your out-of-state car keeps getting parking tickets in the same city for months, and things like that. I have heard of one case where somebody was stopped in Nevada, and instead of presenting his California driver's license, if any, he presented his somewhere-in-the-Caribbean non-photo license and an international driver's license, and that was just fine for Nevada. It wouldn't have been fine if he was a Nevada resident, but he wasn't. I forget if this person was driving a company car or his own. A surprising number of people I used to know worked for corporations in Nevada and drove company cars, and seemed to have business in the Bay Area a lot, and their Nevada credit cards seemed to work just fine here. (Nevada's taxes are much lower.) But it's much tougher to do that if you're a married couple and have kids in public school. California, like many states, doesn't take a full fingerprint set, but they do take a thumbprint using a digital reader. Rubber cement is rumoured to be helpful. I don't know about Washington, but I doubt you'll have much better luck unless you want to work hard at it, at least in Seattle, at least if you're an employee who gets a salary that's reported. If you're living in Vancouver WA (across the river from Portland OR), then it's easier for you to happen to be in the other state a lot and park your car across the border every other weekend.
Re: Forget VOA -- new exec order creating Global Communications Office
At 10:45 PM 01/22/2003 +, Peter Fairbrother wrote: W H Robinson wrote: [...] with greater clarity [...] disseminate truthful, accurate, and effective messages about the American people and their government. [...] convey a few simple but powerful messages. Shouldn't Saatchi Saatchi be doing this kind of thing? Nah. Smith and Wesson. Leno Letterman. (And Dallas, and Jerry Springer, etc.) VoA has spent the last N decades alternating between being the official US propaganda arm, and officially NOT being a US propaganda arm, just an organization we fund to make sure there's objective news reporting receivable in Communist countries (ok, ok, being the official US less-official propaganda arm)
RE: Deniable Thumbdrive?
At 11:40 AM 01/24/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Peter Trei wrote... What's you're threat model? If it's your wife or kid sister, this might work. If it's a major corporation or a government, forget it - they'll bitcopy the whole flash rom, and look at it with ease. Agreed. Furthermore, the whole thing is inherently dependent on the processing model and programming interfaces of your thumbdrive. What does it look like to your PC if you're not using the right thumb? What does it look like to your PC if you want to use the right thumb? Three obvious models are - PC doesn't need Thumbdrive-specific drivers, just generic USB disk, and the CPU in the drive decides whether it's seen your thumb and reveals the otherwise-hidden files if it likes you. - PC has specific drivers for the Thumbdrive, Whole drive plus the thumbprint pad are visible to the PC, and you can only decrypt the secret part if you put a matching thumb on the thumbprint. - PC has specific drivers for the Thumbdrive Public drive, thumbprint pad, and hooks for secret drive are visible to the PC, and putting the correct thumb on the pad lets the PC find out the password to mount the secret drive. At this point, most of my threat models are on this level or the next one higher--local cops or dumb goons grab a protestor or whatever and try to shake his photos and whatever digital else out of him...OK punk, you're not calling a lawyer until you show me what's on this thing...Don't tell me nothing's in there I see a login prompt, ya' commie faggot...open it up. First of all, as Peter says, high-tech cops won't be fooled. Low-level goons may not recognize it, or if the thumbprint part requires specific drivers or data on the PC, you can tell them sorry, that part's for access to my work PC, and if you'd like to get a search warrant, they'll let you in the building, and make sure the public part has some pictures of your dog or whatever. For medium-tech cops, you can say that it requires installing drivers on their PC (assuming that it does), and offer to download them, and prearrange that there's a set of drivers at www.kevinmitnick.com just in case they actually take you up on it. As for the thumbprint, I'm wondering if other parts of the body could be used (then even very savvy rubberhosers couldn't just make you try every finger). I'll try using my, um, nose tonight. Depending on the interface presented to the PC, it may or may not be obvious to the PC whether there are zero, one, or more secret areas on the drive. If it's not obvious, then the obvious extension to the product would be to support multiple fingerprints for multiple secret areas, the business model being so that multiple people can use the same drive, so your right thumb gets your right-wing-conspiracy data, your left thumb gets your Commie stuff, and your middle finger gets the picture of J.Edgar Hoover in his black negligee or whatever else you want the cops to see. Otherwise, figure out which body parts you don't mind them cutting off...
RE: Supremes and thieves.
At 03:36 PM 01/21/2003 -0800, Bill Frantz wrote: But after making this dead actor sing a different song, it would a new work, and the copyright clock would be reset. Now if someone wants to do the work on an open-source-like basis... It's obviously a job for an Alan Smithee film... you can always give something of yours to the public domain.
Re: Small taste of things to come if the war on Iraq happens.
At 12:11 AM 01/20/2003 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote: On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 07:45:56AM -0500, Jay h wrote: The obsession with Starbucks really puzzles me. Starbucks is one of the few mass retailers that actually offers medical coverage to even part timers, it allows people to move from place to place and pick It was kind of amusing to see DC cops protecting Starbucks yesterday; no other business on Penn Ave SE was apparently deemed controversial enough to require police presence. Hey, police have values, and coffee is one of them. Remember what coffee was like in most of the country before Starbucks? Brown water, usually burned by sitting on a warmer for too long, maybe enough caffeine to give you a buzz and enough acid to give you an upset stomach, but certainly nothing resembling Coffee except in a few oases like San Francisco and the Italian parts of NY/NJ. Obviously this is a Commie Plot to control our Precious Bodily Fluids - Actually, to give credit where credit is due, and to put a technology spin on things, a lot of the credit for improving US coffee needs to go to Mr. Coffee, which got us to stop using percolators.
Re: Supremes and thieves.
At 09:54 AM 01/20/2003 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: It dwindles because the rate at which the copyright period is increasing averages more than 1 year/year. Quite a number of works which had been in the public domain fell out of it when the 20 year extension went into effect. The public domain *did* dwindle. Did anything that had already become public domain cease to be public? There were documents that were _going_ to become public domain soon that will now stay copyrighted for another 20 years, and one of the issues addressed by the Supremes in Eldred was whether the grant of an extra 20 years of copyright monopoly to documents that already had expiration dates assigned under the old laws was appropriate, as distinguished from granting a longer monopoly to new documents, but I thought it was established law that if something once became public domain it stayed that way.
Stanford Talk - Solving High Technology Crime * 4:15PM, Wed Jan 22, 2003 in Gates B03
[Stanford's ee380 class often has interesting talks. This one sounds like it's by the Bad Guys :-) There's a parking building nearby where the public can park after 4:00, but construction has eaten most of the other parking lots.] Subject: [CSL Colloq] Solving High Technology Crime * 4:15PM, Wed Jan 22, 2003 in Gates B03 Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 22:34:55 -0800 (PST) COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM 4:15PM, Wednesday, Jan 22, 2003 NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03 http://ee380.stanford.edu[1] Topic:Solving High Technology Crime Academic Partnership in Crime Fighting Speaker: Gregory S. Crabb United States Postal Inspector San Francisco Electronic Crimes Task Force Other participants include: Robert Rodriguez, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, United States Secret Service Richard Perlotto, Cisco Systems Chris Lalone, Network Security, eBay Mike Miravalle, CEO, Dolphin Technologies Fred Demma, Dolphon Technologyies About the talk: The San Francisco Electronic Crimes Task Force seeks to engage the academic community to help us address the technology crimes affecting our community, our corporate partners and law enforcement. The crimes affecting our corporate partners include computer hacking, intellectual property crimes (criminal trademark and copyright infringement) and identity theft. These crimes are costing the high technology community billions of dollars and stunting the acceptance and growth of these technologies to support our economy. Antiquated investigative methods and poor individual accountability for Internet communications are some of the greatest challenges facing law enforcement. The solution to some of these challenges may lie within the academic community. The talk will focus on several brief case studies relating our greatest challenges in fighting high technology crime. Each case study will be presented by a law enforcement agent and/or corporate partner of the task force. About the speaker: The San Francisco Electronic Crimes Task Force is a group of Federal, state, local investigators and corporate partners, lead by the U.S. Secret Service, focused on attacking high technology crime affecting Bay Area companies, locally and globally. The task force is part of the Secret Service's nation-wide network of electronic crimes task forces, see http://www.ectaskforce.org[2]. Contact information: San Francisco Electronic Crimes Task Force 345 Spear St San Francisco, CA (415) 744-9026 Acknowledgements: Thanks to the Computer Forum[3] and to Professors Dan Boneh and John Mitchell for assistance in organizing this event. Embedded Links: [ 1 ]http://ee380.stanford.edu [ 2 ]http://www.ectaskforce.org [ 3 ]http://www-forum.stanford.edu - End forwarded message -
Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants
At 10:44 AM 1/13/03 -0800, [Bill Stewart] wrote: If you've got your brother counting the votes, and you can prevent anybody else from counting them, then you don't need to cancel elections. On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 09:23 PM, John Kelsey wrote: Personally, I was shocked, *shocked*, to see the supreme court make a decision on the basis of politics instead of a careful reading of the constitution. At 10:40 PM 01/13/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: Everything the Supreme Court did in the 2000 election was fully justified. The Dems lost, then tried to change the rules. Were it up to me, I would have shot Al Gore and Joe Lieberman on the spot. You and Bill need your brains washed out with soap. I'm not happy with Bush, to repeat this mantra that Gore/Lieberman actually won is knavish at best. I'm not sure who won, but I know who tried to make sure that nobody else got to count the votes; it was pure sleaze, and he got away with it, though I'll grant you that the incompetence of the Democrats at enforcing the rules about getting the votes recounted when they're close enough that Florida law permits it certainly contributed to that. Gore and Lieberman would have been no prize in office either, but they wouldn't have done much more damage to the economy or to civil liberties, probably much less, and would have been less gung-ho about getting us into a war and would have found some kind of pork that's more productive than military hardware to spend our tax money on.
Re: Brinworld: Samsung SCH-V310 camcorder phone
At 12:31 PM 01/14/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: I saw mention on the Yahoo news site that some health clubs and gyms are already taking steps to limit the types of cellphones allowed in the changing areas (and maybe elsewhere). Hey, some people get their privacy by going to places that have Rules about the kind of video-broadcast technology that's allowed, some people build it using Technology like cell-phone jammers, while others of us accomplish it by having figures that nobody's going to bother photographing :-)
Re: Brinworld: Samsung SCH-V310 camcorder phone
At 11:39 PM 01/13/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: Hardly Brinworld. And T-Mobile has had it for awhile. Why is warmed-over technology news given headlines? Because all of us phone company stockholders hope maybe warmed-over headlines will get them to buy the stuff this time? Less cynically, though, some of the newer technology is making this a bit more practical - data speeds on cell phones are getting fast enough that if they've designed the phones right, you can get at least CU-SeeMe quality video and maybe better, with 64kbps, and ostensibly 384kbps which lets you do a bit better than just talking heads video, as opposed to most of the earlier cellphones-with-still-cameras. (Of course, if they're charging you by the minute, you're not likely to do much of this, though some of the cellphone companies have figured out that they really should be selling flat-rate data.) But it's a start.
Re: Indo European Origins
At 04:25 PM 01/14/2003 +, Ken Brown wrote: All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are the same age. This statement is so silly it leaves me speechless... [] Nonsense. Icelandic is little changed from the Old Norse of 1000 A.D. Icelanders can easily read the sagas without help; modern Danes and Norwegians cannot. English, by contrast, is substantially different from just the Middle English of Chaucer, let alone the Old English of Beowulf. Er, that's exactly what I said - they are the same age, but some change more slowly than others... and I did warn that I was being unreasonably pedantic. If you're going to be pedantic, it would be nice if you start by defining the objects you're measuring the age of, because otherwise I have to strongly agree with Tim's statement - I don't see how you could claim either that all natural languages date from the year X BC when Mitochondrial Mama Eve learned to talk, or that all biological species have been extent since our first cellular ancestors crawled their way up out of the primordial soup to declare themselves to be the prime-time slime. The one set of definitions I'm familiar with that would lead to statements like yours is creationism, in the 4004BC Big Bang sense, with a subdefinition that anything created the same week is the same age, since of course the plants, animals, and humans were created on different days. In modern scientific creationism*, the same events occurred stretch out over a longer and earlier time, with plants and animals and humans showing up in different periods, so they're much different ages. But neither one of those definitions makes all _languages_ the same age; at minimum there are the languages descended from what Noah's family spoke and the different languages that appeared after the Tower of Babel (unless you want to argue that those are supernatural languages?) but I don't see Biblical evidence asserting that other languages didn't appear as people needed them. Hawai'ian pidgen simply didn't exist until Europeans moved into Polynesian territory and started trading with them, and unlike the evolution of English since Shakespeare and/or Chaucer, the languages that emerged from the collision of English Anglo-Saxon and Norman after the Conquest (plus the collisions of Anglo and Saxon and Latin and Celtic and Pictish-if-it's-different that happened before) are sufficiently different from what either side spoke beforehand that I can't see any pedagogue worth his salarium asserting that they're still instantiations of the same Original Linguistic Object. You might as well argue that Esperanto** is just a rapidly evolved Indo-European. Were you trying to make some different point your pedagogue taught you, about the age of all these things being Brand New Every Day? Or is there something fundamental that I'm just missing that you had in mind? * Stop giggling, the difference is important to my point here... ** You probably _can't_ argue that about Logban; hacking the grammar to make it yacc-parseable is pretty radical surgery.
Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants
At 09:40 PM 01/09/2003 +, lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote: If Bush can decide alone whether or not we are at war, and if Bush can decide alone with whom we are at war, and if Bush can decide alone what the boundaries of the war zone are, and if Bush can decide alone what behavior makes one an enemy combatant, then we have one person, a totalitarian dictator, who can disappear you, imprison you, and kill you, at will, with no right of review by a court for any of it. That totalitarian dictator is Bush. Do his war powers extend to cancelling elections? Why not? Can't judges disappear as well as anyone? If you've got your brother counting the votes, and you can prevent anybody else from counting them, then you don't need to cancel elections.
Re: washingtonpost.com || Bush To Name Tech Security Leaders (fwd)
An interesting article, with some information on the people who'll probably be appointed to run the Department of Homelands Security's division of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection. But somebody has to make the bad pun, because otherwise it's just sitting there - we fought Clipper a few years ago, so now I guess we'll have to fight Clapper Actually, according to the article, Retired General Clapper has been a Beltway Bandit and currently runs the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (satellite photo analysis), and Stewart Baker thinks highly of his management abilities. There's also discussion of various people who might be working under him, including Nuala O'Connor Kelly, formerly DoubleClick's deputy privacy offer. At 11:14 AM 01/12/2003 -0600, Jim C. wrote: -- Forwarded message -- Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 13:20:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: washingtonpost.com || Bush To Name Tech Security Leaders http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34171-2003Jan9.html?referer=email snip One senior intelligence officer said Clapper faces a monstrous task. Everything else looks easy in comparison, he said. Either part of his bifurcated title is tough enough. Put them both together, and it's mission impossible ... If it's not mission impossible, it's mission in need of a miracle. /snip
Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary
At 09:33 PM 01/10/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: For all I know, I've been posting on a list haunted by a bunch of crypto-white supremists (crypto, as in secret, hidden). And if that's the case, then I want to know. Figured I'd ask for clarification on this issue. (And from some of May's comments in the past, it wasn't clear to me.) If that makes me a moron, so be it. Any time you post to a list of a bunch of people you don't know, you might be posting to a list of a bunch of people you don't like. Reading the archives sometimes helps. It's certainly likely to clarify whether everybody on the list agrees with everybody else on everything, unless you think that the arguments here are robo-generated to make it _look_ like we're not all really just different tentacles of Tim May, the Medusa of Crime. (Or was Tim really a tentacle of Eric? At this point I've forgotten :-)
Re: It's Baaaaaaaaaaaaack - NEO Project and other distributed computing
At 04:23 PM 01/11/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Saturday, January 11, 2003, at 03:47 PM, Bill Stewart wrote: - A distributed computing like this needs several parts: - A problem to solve - they seem to keep waffling on this; their FAQ really needs to be upfront about it, but it only talks about RSA-576, while their forum says they are or aren't also doing something with X-Box, depending on their legal worries, but doesn't say what they're trying to do to it (Cracking a 2048-bit RSA key certainly isn't a rational problem to solve, but maybe they're trying to crack something else about it, like a passphrase used for a key file?) If neither is solvable in the lifetime of the earth, does it matter which one they claim to be working on? RSA-576 is certainly crackable in a reasonable lifetime, though not likely by these guys. RSA expects it to be done in a year or so. 2048-bit RSA obviously isn't factorable with current mathematics unless somebody can build a high-resolution quantum computer. Cracking a 128-bit-entropy passphrase with a 128-or-more-bit algorithm is not realistic, but cracking a human-chosen passphrase might or might not be, depending on the competence of the human, and they're talking about Microsoft here. (I suppose I should try running pgpcrack on my _own_ passphrases :-) It's unlikely they'd have such a file unless somebody leaked it out of Microsoft or put it into the Xbox's code for some reason, but you never know. - Some way to hand out work and collect results, and it's possible that they've done this well, though I doubt they scale to seti.org sizes. Although, as simple calculations show (reported here several times over the past decade), random and overlapping self-apportionment of keyspace to search is only a factor of 38% or so worse than more careful, non-overlapping apportionment is. (And random apportionment stops the attack where someone finds the solution, or knows where it is and claims that portion of the keyspace to search, and then doesn't announce a solution.) That's true for symmetric-key algorithms, but not always for factoring. Most of the high-end factoring programs work in two phases, one of which looks for some kind of interesting intermediate result, and a second phase which takes the intermediate results and crunches on them. Random keyspace self-apportionment may work well for the first phase, but for at least some of the recent major algorithms, the second phase has usually been run on some big computer or cluster by the people running the project because it required too much RAM for the vast majority of desktop PCs. One of the most frustrating things about the Neo Project's web site was that it's got one forum comment that suggests that they may have found an efficient way to distribute the second-phase calculations, but there's no pointer to any way to find out the mathematical work, if any, to tell if they really meant that or were correct about it.
Re: Oooh, hackers are bad!
At 12:14 PM 01/10/2003 +0100, Bo Elkjaer wrote: This is worth a laugh. I have never before heard of or seen a hacker as bad as this one. Oh my. http://www.andrews.af.mil/89cg/89cs/scbsi/images/poster8.jpg Obviously the artist had been playing Quake or Ultima Online or whatever and just gotten his ass fragged again :-)
Re: Cypherpunk fashions for the New Ashcroft Era (Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary)
At 03:14 PM 01/08/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 11:34 PM 1/8/03 +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote: I don't know the weaknesses of gait-observing systems, so I can't suggest anything. Kilts for men (over the knee, please, and not for aesthetics). Hoop-skirts for women. A heavy backpack carried asymmetrically (for extra fun, use a canteen where the sloshing water messes with your physics). www.utilikilts.com for the practical but less traditional kilts. And computer bags can be pretty asymmetrical, even if you don't have the new 6.8 pound 17 Macintosh AluminumBook.
Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary
At 05:10 PM 01/08/2003 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Tim May wrote... Cowboy hats are much more common in Cypherpunks Bay Aryan meetings And for that matter, what about cypherpunks of non-aryan descent? We've had some Branch Dravidian folks around as well I've usually been the one wearing the fedora in cooler weather, and a few people wore Red Hats back in the day.
Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants
At 10:11 AM 01/09/2003 -0500, Duncan Frissell wrote: It's a good thing he was captured by the Feds instead of a militia or a Private Defense Force of some sort. Note that such forces are not required to accept surrenders and can simply kill enemy forces (and vice-versa of course). Private citizens are not bound by the Constitution either of course (it binds only the governments). The Feds keep asserting that the Constitution doesn't apply to them outside the US. A militia wouldn't have been in Afghanistan, or at least wouldn't have been attacking the Taliban government over there, though they (or hired mercs) might have gone after Al Qaeda. On the other hand, if the US were following the traditional model for defense rather than having a standing army stomping around the world, it's highly unlikely that somebody like Al Qaeda would have attacked the World Trade Center, because they wouldn't have had their grievances about the US infidel forces stationed in the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia. They *might* have attacked Exxon headquarters because of Exxon mercs stationed in the Holy Land. The Padilla case will be more important than the Hamdi case because he was arrested in Chicago rather than Afghanistan. Under the traditional laws of war, Padilla (if he is an enemy soldier) could have been executed as a spy since he entered the country in civilian clothes rather than in uniform. But Padilla's a citizen, so entering the country in civilian clothes doesn't make him a spy, though spying might make him one. All Al-Quida combatants in the US should definitely wear their uniforms so they can get off on a technicality if captured. I wonder what an Al-Quida uniform looks like? I believe their fatigues uniform consists of pants and a shirt in arbitrary colors and low cost :-) Their dress uniforms are the turban and long shirt deal, but that's not for foreign expedition use.
Re: [Fwd: ScanMail Message: To Sender, sensitive content found and action t aken.]
The most likely explanation is that some subscriber to one of the cypherpunks lists is using an account on some machine at USPTO.GOV (which is the Patent and Trademark Office, not the Post Office), and their mail server not only has an antivirus filter but also a bad language filter. While I don't like such things, at least it has the technical decency to send bouncegrams to the sender, though the technical cluelessness not to include the original MessageID header in the bouncegram (presuming that the original message had one), i.e. it's broken, and it also indicates the delivery time but not the Date: header from the original message (which, though they're often missing, can be important when trying to identify a specific message, especially when there's no MessageID header.) I'm guessing that this is the product from http://www.mailwise.com/ (which is where www.scanmail.com redirects to...) which filters away SPAM, Viruses and unsavory content. In case you're not aware, back when the list was dealing with radical concepts like cryptography and implementations, as well as speculative rants like Assassination Politics, there were usually Feds subscribing to it, either openly or not, just as there have been Feds reading Usenet for a long time. Whether most of them are still around or have decided that it's mostly the same old group having the same old rants is an issue I'll leave to Major Variola to tell us :-) At 10:24 AM 01/09/2003 -0800, Michael Cardenas wrote: Anyone have any idea what the fuck this is? Is the post office subscribed to cypherpunks? - Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] - X-Envelope-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ScanMail Message: To Sender, sensitive content found and action t aken. Trend SMEX Content Filter has detected sensitive content. Place = [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ; Sender = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject = Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants Delivery Time = January 09, 2003 (Thursday) 10:46:04 Policy = Dirty Words Action on this mail = Quarantine message Warning message from administrator: Sender, Content filter has detected a sensitive e-mail. - End forwarded message - -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred Listening to: Rusted Root - martyr That government is best which governs not at all. - Henry David Thoreau [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
Re: Cryptome Log...A nice opportunity!
At 01:14 PM 01/07/2003 -0600, Some troublemaker Anonymously wrote: So if someone generated a nice-looking fake log this would be legally binding in court? Please don't. John has to put up with enough hassles as a result of running a valuable and controversial web site. He doesn't need your, ummm, help.
Re: Singularity ( was Re: Policing Bioterror Research )
At 12:42 AM 01/07/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 05:14 PM 1/6/03 -0800, Michael Motyka wrote: BTW, I think I read somewhere that when the water gets too hot the frog just leaves. It was in print, it must be true. Perhaps it is. But if you put a TV in the pot with the frog, he gets distracted... And someone else nameless wrote that all you need to do is get 90% of the sheeple to not to watch TV for a month and you'd have a revolution too. So if you legalize pot across the country, everybody would be distracted from TV for at least the first couple of Post-Prohibition-Party Weekends, or at least till their connection runs out :-)
