Re: CDR: domestic terrorism, fat lazy amerikans ducks
On 2003-08-25, Major Variola (ret.) uttered: As expected, animal and environmental activists are now being called terrorists. In many cases, that's an exaggeration. In some, it isn't. Animal rights activists don't normally resort to the kinds of violence, say, anti-abortionists do, but they do systematically disrupt certain sectors of peaceful commerce, like the fur industry. That sort of terror is focused enough not to cause the wider public to react, but it does hurt you very, very badly if you've pegged your livelihood to said industry. At least around these parts some people have actually met personal bankruptcy because of the interference. Few sane people would go with the current anti-terrorism legislation, even when it's meant to counter real terror. Personally I'd rather see some anti-gun use legislation rolled back, so that you could teach your friendly ALF representative a lesson if he's dumb enough to meddle with your foxhouse. -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Real-world steganography
On 2002-10-01, Ben Laurie uttered to Peter Gutmann: Yeah, right - and green felt-tip around the edges of your CD improves the sound, too. I'm not sure about HDCD as a technology, but the principle is sound. If we can compress sound transparently, we can also transparently embed quite a lot of data into the part which is perceptually irrelevant. We might also depart with perceptual equivalence and go with perceptual similarity instead -- e.g. multiband compress the audio, and embed data which allows us to expand to a higher perceptual resolution. Whatever the implementation, putting data in the gap between statistical (i.e. computed against a Markov model) and perceptual (against a perceptual similarity model) entropy which compensates for some of the perceptual shortcomings (like total dynamic range) of a particular recording technology seems like an excellent idea. However, applications like these have very little to do with steganography proper. In this case, we can (and want) to fill up the entire gap between statistical and perceptual entropy estimates with useful data, leaving us with signals which have statistical entropies consistently higher than we'd expect of a typical recording with similar perceptual characteristics. That is, the encoded signal will appear manifestly random compared to typical unencoded material from a similar source, and we can easily see there is hidden communication going on. Such encodings will be of little value in the context of industrial strength steganography used for hidden communication. Steganography used in the latter sense will also have to be imperceptible, true, but but here the entropic gap we're filling is the one between the entropy estimates of our best model of the source material vs. that of the adversary's. Be the models Markov ones, perceptual, something else, or composites of the above. Consequently the margin is much thinner (bandwidths are probably at least a decade or two lower), and the aims remain completely separate. Consequently, I don't believe encodings developed for the first purpose could ever be the best ones for the latter, or that HDCD-like endeavors really have that much to do with the subject matter of this list. -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
millicent ghettoes
In the wake of the recent public goods postings and some related traffic on a couple of Finnish mailing lists, the concept of transaction costs has somehow managed to dominate my time. That sort of thing has a lot of unlikely consequences, some of which I think are highly CP relevant. While I tend to agree with Tim about the shorter term trouble with micropayments -- the fact that such payments, well, do not pay -- I'd say in the longer term micropayments are what counts, and not perhaps anonymity. The reason is, most of the economy is, and I think will remain, over-ground. People really don't have enough to hide to make anonymous payments mainstream quickly enough. Sure, they have their applications, some of them radical. It's true they will shake the society quite a bit. But the shadier applications can always be controlled, given the vulnerability of the anonymity infrastructure itself. But micropayments, they are another deal entirely. If and when they become practical, we can envision a whole range of previous unheard-of mass transactions taking place. The kind which need millions plus people before they actually become profitable. This is the situation I alluded to in the public goods example, and any market oriented solution to the problem of coordination will eventually have to tackle the issue of aggregating the cost. That's the problem micropayments, as an idea, are meant to solve. So, what's so notable about such transactions? Simply the fact that they are new. In the past entire classes of transactions (the foremost example would be the ones we nowadays see in the international financial markets) have been enabled by lowered transaction costs. I don't think the spread of micropayments will be an exception to the rule. In fact I would argue that the only *lasting* surprise offered by AP was the fact that when mild wants of large numbers of people can be coordinated, economic efficiency can lead to significant, and heretofore unexpected, outcomes (i.e. getting a notable figure killed). In the end I think such new classes of financial transactions, borne of lowered transaction costs, will be far more significant to the society as a whole than anonymity. I also think this is the essence of what is driving the wider P2P cirlce, at the moment, though few people seem to realize it. So, I would deem it quite likely that the millicent ghetto will eventually run over us. -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Again, If you offered the average guy the deal Would you like on demand access to all movies and television shows ever made, even if it meant fewer and lower budget movie releases in future?, I think most people would go for on demand access to everything. That might well be. But being that you're tapping into something largely produced under existing copyright law, I fail to see why this is an argument against continuing the practice of copyright in some form. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Hayek was right. Twice.
On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, R. A. Hettinga wrote: Rival means that only one person can own something at once. That, technically, is the case with anything digitable. No. It is the case with the digitized version, but not the work. Nobody would argue that actual copies aren't normal, private goods. One time, when copying was difficult, there was even a one-to-few correspondence between works and copies. Today that isn't the case. Replication and creation are now neatly separable, and benefits of scale in the former do not translate to returns to the latter. Copies are still a private good, as ever, but works are becoming increasingly pure public goods. According to orthodox public goods theory, that might well be a problem. In practice the issue is muddled beyond belief, of course. Excludable, if you want to go back to your eurosocialst wanker Le Monde Diplomatique definition, means that when you've used it, it's useless to anyone else. Did this thread really start with something taken from LMD? The list really *has* stooped to an all-time low... It's price, however, is very, very, small, however, but just because it's cheap doesn't mean that you can't do transactions that small. The point in copyright wars is about incentives to authors vs. the right to copy privately, not about the ease of copying. Sure, microtransactions are a possibility. But when the yield does not go to the one who created the master copy, why should anyone create anything, anymore? (Or, more realistically, why should people create at an efficient level?) Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Hayek was right. Twice.
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Marcel Popescu wrote: There's no such thing as efficient level, except in the tautology the market outcome is always efficient. Only if you take as granted a market based on some fixed set of property rights and other rules of exchange. If you do this, there is no reason to discuss the issue further and your reply was, to put it bluntly, superfluous. We both created stuff we didn't expect to be paid for - these emails. True. But somehow I fail to see how one can scale this sort of reasoning to entail anything approaching one of the current TOP10 movies. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Hayek was right. Twice.
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, R. A. Hettinga wrote: For me, this is all about Coase's theorem, transaction cost, Coase's observation that you can't have a market without property, Quite. Coase's reasoning demonstrated that any initial allocation of property rights is equivalent (both in the allocative and distributive senses) when transaction costs amount to nil. So, if we look at the distribution side of the information industry, you're absolutely right. The smaller the transaction costs the better -- rivalry applies to any particular copy, as it does to services involved disseminating the bits. Any trades required are bilateral, competition does its job and everything is just dandy. But if we look at the creation end, that's a different story entirely. Anyone eventually receiving a copy will benefit roughly equally from the efforts of the artist/author. If copying and distribution are exceedingly cheap, as we'd expect them to be in the future, the number of people for whom acquiring the information would be profitable easily grows to the tens or hundreds of millions. Since any copy released will be widely disseminated, the deal between the original author and the public with an interest in his work will be multilateral in the extreme. It cannot be reduced into a bunch of bilateral trades as in the case of private commerce. This means that we get sizable transaction costs. IP is there to force the economy into something approximating the conventional, material one, and so internalize externality otherwise generated. (No, it does not solve the problem. But limited term copyright could still strike a near-optimal bargain.) If something, Coase's original point is behind copyright, not its antithesis. That's why I rarely use economic reasoning to argue for IP abolition, even when I consider IP a bad idea. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Marcel Popescu wrote: I can't see a market defined as anything else than private property and voluntary exchange. Then you really must be blind. Markets not based on private property or volition abound. The political process is one of them. Social control is another. Gift economies, like Open Source, are a third. One might claim most markets are based on something other than the above mentioned combination. Irrelevant. Does Linux scale to your intended target any better? It does indeed. But unlike movies, Linux is a modular project. The kernel would exist in the absence of the GNU toolset, and vice versa. X would exist in the absence of UNIX, too. Each of the common desktop applications could very well have been coded on top of something else than Linux. But try constructing an Independence Day without Will Smith. Or the special effects. Or the soundtrack. Or the distribution chain. Try guaranteeing that it arrives on schedule without making a loss. I think you will not be able to accomplish that with a volunteer effort. Try doing that tens of thousands of times a year (that's for all of what is currently covered by IP) and you're bound to fail. Unlike with Linux, the individual parts of most larger projects involving IP are of no use without the surrounding whole. Unlike Linux, many IP products aren't modular, reusable or decomposable, and so they can only exist if you can find a single source of financing for the whole project. In the case of modular projects, you can rely on overlapping interests to fill in the voids, but most projects aren't like that. Especially if all that the creator gets is the ever-diminishing value of a single copy. Why is it that there's no Buzz for Linux? No decent installer? (Not one of them survives my hardware...) No workable Unicode support? A stable 64-bit filesystem? Why is nobody willing to guarantee kernel stability, even when paid big bucks? 'Cause the project is a gift, and only caters to a single kind of need: something an individual developer/company really needs and can afford to develop for him/itself, then losing little by exposing the code to others. Usefulness thinly spread over a considerable user community is completely forgotten. People do even grand things without expecting to be paid (or even worse, expecting to die from it), because they want to. Well, what stupid people they are. I wouldn't go anywhere as far as gettimg myself killed for the common good. Even paying for software I can just copy is a stretch. What makes you think most people care enough to Do the Right Thing? What makes you think relying on Doing the Right Thing is a good idea? I mean, it's been tried before, and the consequences aren't worth a second look. If you want them to produce more, feel free to pay them. Arguments I don't like that they only produce this much, so YOU should pay them are at least inane. Indeed they are. So are ones assuming that anything not profitable to a single person couldn't be to a larger number of individuals. Like most things, private property rights and economic theory based solely on bilateral trade are a matter of continuous dispute. It's not that I don't consider them useful (I do; nowadays you could call me, too, a libertarian), but taking them as granted isn't the way to go, either. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Hayek was right. Twice.
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Anonymous wrote: Ignoring market failures (such things as public goods and externalities), markets are efficient in the sense that they produce a Pareto optimal outcome. Even if you neglect market failures in the usual sense, an outcome such as everybody becoming a slave to a single individual is Pareto efficient -- you can't dissolve the situation without hurting the slave owner. Pareto efficiency talks about allocation, not distribution, and so the latter can be arbitrarily skewed in a Pareto efficient economy. Even to the point of apparent absurdity. It's a different thing altogether, then, whether you can approach such a dismal state of affairs via Pareto moves... A Pareto nonoptimal state, which is what you get with public goods, is a condition where you could redistribute wealth and resources and make every person happier or at least no less happy. I don't think so. Instead I'd say that is Marshall efficiency in the absence of transaction costs. The trouble is, you can never make everybody happier by redistributing since someone will have to pay the cost. (Here we of course assume that everybody wants more of everything.) So there is a redistribution which would make many people happier without making anyone less happy. More to the point, there is a redistribution which would allow the total amount voluntarily paid by a large number of people exceed the amount a minority is ready to pay to avert the cost of the redistribution. (Nowadays I'm thinking this isn't bad in itself, but that amplification of this sort of pattern via returns to scale is.) Therefore it is clear that it is quite meaningful to investigate whether markets produce efficient or non-efficient outcomes in various situations. There is no tautology involved. Quite. But on the other hand, public goods reasoning is also a very, very dangerous thing. Consumption side externalities are my personal favorite. Suppose there is a considerable personal benefit to rich people in seeing the average bum spend his money in something respectable instead of liquor. In this case, liquor consumption has a visible externality, and optimal provision calls for institutions which more or less tax the rich and use the proceeds to encourage the bum to straighten up. Now, that doesn't sound *too* bad in itself, but when you apply the same reasoning to the educational needs of the young and the societal benefits one would expect of a highly educated younger generation... Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: p2p and asymmetric bandwidth (Re: Fear and Futility at CodeCon)
On Sat, 27 Apr 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So if your P2P application is IPv6 compatible, you can get a semi permanent IPv6 IP automatically from a server, and thereafter do peer to peer, just as if you were full, no kidding, on the internet. This nicely solves the problem with NATs, true. However, most firewalls I know are there for security reasons. Those will likely be adapted to work for 6to4 as well. The transition period will likely see some cracks where p2p can work, but I suspect those will be closed in due course. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Detectable cash notes a fantasy
On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Tim May wrote: How come? True, if a bill is idealized as being planar, you'll have trouble on the plane. Spatial diversity will take care of that. Otherwise, a common note has plenty of surface to do your thing on. Especially at higher frequencies, like UHF and beyond. How come? Because I am assuming the transponders are in the same position on each bill. Why's that? It's easy enough to move the transponder around during the printing process as long as the exact position isn't too important and the number of positions isn't too large. Just have a rotating series of printing plates. If you want to posit some spatial diversity model, that helps, but not but a huge amount. First, spatial diversity is standard terminology for spatially/polarization-wise separated transmitters/receivers, used in order to fight multipath and/or antenna orientation trouble. In closed spaces, that sort of antenna configuration is probably what you'd want, anyway. UHF is hard to launch/receive from a small, planar antenna. UWB is easier to launch from a small ( cm) antenna, but is usually too directional. Who's there to say the antenna has to be cm in size? The chip would have to be, but larger conductive plastic wiring seems to be ideal for antenna work. A stack will interfere, in the sense that planar antennas will couple to each other (radiated signal from A will hit B square on, etc.). So they will. Still, I'm not at all sure one couldn't avoid much of the coupling by moving the antenna around in the bill. And if that's not enough, just build in ad hoc networks. Not too difficult, not too expensive once you've got silicon on-board. Note-to-note, then out. As for the proles being too cheap, too gullible to even bother to lightly shield, sounds like evolution in action. Not really, given that shielding could be outlawed. True money launderers will use shielding. (Actually, this is all oriented at walking around money, so the vast infrastructure will never actually get built, as there is no interest in monitoring trivial amounts.) Who's to say the primary application would be anti-laundering? To me it seems far more likely that low-cost surveillance would be It, even if it's clear that that sort of thing isn't currently doable. I'm done with this thread, though. Too bad. Trimming CC's. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Detectable cash notes a fantasy
On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Tim May wrote: The engineers of such SmartWallets will not give them more range than the protocol needs. Extra range costs money. If Alice is expected to insert her Smart Wallet into a receptacle (for security, if for nothing else), initiating the protocol from several meters away is not in the cards, so to speak. Of course. But when you think of such applications as NID cards, it's likely range is within the spec. Yes, NID's are suspicious enough as they stand. No, people don't see this. Especially after services (or services, it doesn't seem to matter much) start being bound to them -- this is the way Finland, Estonia and a couple of other countries are going, right now, with their electronic ID's. If someone is arguing that such Smart Wallets will merely be passive announcers of bank balances, this is just too naive to waste discussion time on. Good luck selling such a system. Quite. Passive announcers of identity (or signers) with a secondary, enabled mode for actually signing something legally binding, on the other hand... Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Detectable cash notes a fantasy
On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, Tim May wrote: So, if in fact we _are_ talking about each $20 bill having such a transponder, then why are our arguments about how easy it will be to shield against remote probing not valid? Because the economics do not work. People simply aren't knowledgeable/interested enough to actually shield their notes, even if this would only imply buying a foil-shielded wallet. Especially if such wallets are outlawed. (Yes, this is starting to sound like too much, even if governments don't always behave rationally.) (A stack of bills, or cards, will have extremely poor radiation patterns from any but the top or bottom bill, and probably their patterns won't be good either.) How come? True, if a bill is idealized as being planar, you'll have trouble on the plane. Spatial diversity will take care of that. Otherwise, a common note has plenty of surface to do your thing on. Especially at higher frequencies, like UHF and beyond. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
