Re: RAHenry VIII: king of pseudoknowledge
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > of course we must also ignore the germans rudolf bultmann and paul tillich > (protestants), gabriel marcel (roman catholic), the russian nikolay berdyayev > and the jews martin buber and franz kafka (also an austrian) they are all > tainted with the french stench, you see. french philisophers (or non-philisophers, > forgive me) all. Good god man, speaking of French taint, you forgot Koestler. Just because he had the bad taste to live to a ripe, and rather silly, old age in the US, doesn't seem like fit ground for exclusion. It is possible to have been a player in 1930's French philosophy and yet not to die young of consumption, refuse the Nobel prize, or end out your days as a south east asian despot. No? And what about that Algerian fellow K once punched in the nose, Camus? -- Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, recorded a message that one of its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles was about to launch from its silo due to a computer malfunction. To prevent the possible launch, an armored car was parked on top of the silo. - Shaun Gregory, The Hidden Cost of Deterrence: Nuclear Weapons Accidents, Brassey's UK, London, 1990, pp. 181-182.
Re: Why Cyperpunks Matters to Philosophy
It doesn't. -- Stefan Kahrs in [Kah96] discusses the notion of completeness--programs which never go wrong can be type-checked--which complements Milner's notion of soundness--type-checked programs never go wrong [Mil78].
Re: First Echelon Source
1988 was not the first mention of the network. As far back as 1972, Ramparts published an extremely revealing kiss and tell. -- Stefan Kahrs in [Kah96] discusses the notion of completeness--programs which never go wrong can be type-checked--which complements Milner's notion of soundness--type-checked programs never go wrong [Mil78].
newbook: Intelligence and security in the information age
Best Truth : Intelligence and Security in the Information Age by Bruce D. Berkowitz, Allan E. Goodman Publication date: March 2000 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Binding:Hardcover Subjects: Computer security; Intelligence service; United States Has anyone read this yet?
["Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" ] Paypal - inertialess cash at last!
With the arrival of Paypal, which charges no annual fees and no transaction percentages for credit-card-based money transfers to any email address in the US, inertialess money is finally here. (Paypal intends to make money off the interest accrued on cash floating in their system.) This heralds the beginning of a seismic shift in the economic structure. It will herald the dawn of micropayments, take a huge bite out of the dominance of cash, eventually kick over the credit-card system now used, and perhaps create a great Webbed structure of cash applause. For some years now, I've visualized a system where, each time one visits a sufficiently great Website, one clicks a button that sends a few cents to the owner. Websites, mailing posts, bon mots, good causes, great ideas - all upheld and rewarded by a system of cash applause that, with the rise of ultraproductivity, may become a dominant part of the social system. Those who distribute the largest tips would see more pages and posts and jokes written to please them, providing a means whereby greater wealth translates into greater status and cultural dominance, while simultaneously creating a fog of money which helps to ensure that the have-nots don't starve. By way of bringing this future to pass, I've already sent $10 apiece to Vernor Vinge and Ed Regis for completely changing my life at the ages of fifteen and eleven respectively, and I've kicked back $1 to Eric Watt Forste for running a website that was one of the major stepping stones on my path to transhumanism. I'd send some dough to Mitchell Porter (for "Hyper-Weirdness by WWW") and Anders Sandberg (for the "Anders Transhuman Page"), but I believe they live outside the US, so I'll wait until Paypal extends its reach. If you have somebody you'd like to cheer on with the green folding applause, or at least blue electronic applause, then this is your chance to sign up with Paypal. If you sign up to the extent of entering a credit card, you get a free $10 in your account, which can be withdrawn (!) or sent on as applause for your favorite transhumanist Websites. If you sign up using the link https://secure.paypal.com/refer/pal=sentience%40pobox.com to register (*), you and I both get a free $10 in our account (although I believe it drops to $5 after March 15th). Let's hear it for the future, for the rise of the inertialess economy, and for free money from the venture capitalists! Yours in Singularity, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. -- (*) I offered both ExI and Foresight the chance to be in this link over two weeks ago, but I got a response from neither; time is running out on the offer; I would be posting about Paypal and the social consequences even if they weren't offering me $10 to do it; therefore, I'm going ahead with my own account reference. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html Member, Extropy Institute Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
Re: Crypto law in Yugoslavia??
"http://www.hyperreal.art.pl/cypher/remailer/" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >oracle, with the question whether or not PGPi commercial crypto is legal in > >the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. > > It has been used by a large number of individuals for many years > and no one was harrassed about it. > > So far. Legality is irrelevant. Enforcement, legal or otherwise is the factor that needs to be accounted for.
RSA fasion trends.
TRENDS - ENCRYPTION Byline: SUELETTE DREYFUS Data designers increasingly are focusing on transmission security. IN THE weeks following the Oscars, frantic fashion-chasers pant over those red-carpet photos with one question on their lipstick: What's the Next Big Thing? For those more interested in the fashions of the brain rather than the brawn, look no further to find cutting-edge creativity than cryptography, the haute couture of the technology world. Good cryptographic algorithms, so essential in the fine art of information hiding, reveal a certain mathematical elegance. Just as the number of Paris fashion houses receiving special approval from the French Ministry of Industry and Regional Development to call their collections haute couture is very limited, so these cryptographic algorithms are relatively rare. In the millennial world, there can be little doubt that grey matter is ``in''. And Bill Duane, international technical director of RSA Security, Inc, the world's largest cryptography company, has a few tips on what it will be wearing next season. So what is hot in cryptowear? Look for ephemeral keys, template-less biometrics, sheer digital watermarks lined with a crinoline of crypto and au natural molecular computing. Sitting in a trendy Brunswick Street cafe, Duane revealed his predictions after jetting into Melbourne recently from RSA's headquarters in the Milan of the IT world, Massachusetts. Some of these, such as template-less biometrics, are so new they are little more than a theoretical sparkle in designers' imaginations, but they are moving fast. Others, such as digital watermarking, will be retro by the time they become widespread. They've existed for some time, but Duane predicts they may take off in a much larger way in future. As an amateur astronomer, the technical director of RSA's Advanced Development Group has some experience with studying the past to understand the future. Musicians might be lining up to try on digital watermarking as a way of protecting their music distributed over the Net, but webpage designers could also benefit from the evolving technology. ``If you have drawn a picture as an artist, you have a right to recover royalties on the use of your images. Today there is no way to stop people stealing images off one website and using them somewhere else,'' Duane said. One role for crypto is in hiding the digital watermark amid all the noise of random characters in a sound or picture file. It's difficult for pirates to remove what they can't find. Ephemeral keys, a kind of disposable cryptographic public key, might also be floating down what could only be described as the platinum-matter runway in the near future. These keys could radically change the way in which an average piece of e-mail or other data is encrypted. At the moment, most public key, or asymmetric systems, actually encrypt e-mail with a symmetric key that is randomly generated on the spot by the software. That key is then encrypted, using the public key system, and bundled with the encrypted message before being sent. Why not just use the public key to encrypt the data directly? ``Both RSA and elliptic curve nowadays are kind of slow and they generate large blocks of data when you use encryption. So it's better to just encrypt a little symmetric key and use fast little symmetric algorithms to encrypt the bulk of the data,'' Duane explained. ``But the newer-generation public key systems are potentially lightweight enough that you could actually do direct PK encryption and arbitrarily generate new keys on the fly as you need them. These are ephemeral keys - short-lived keys that come and go,'' he said. However, not every new creation wafting forth from a designer's desk has an immediately obvious use, at least in its early days. ``Do I have a really clear understanding of how we might use them (ephemeral keys)? No. It just feels like there is something there,'' Duane said. ``Ephemeral keys is an artefact of second-generation PK algorithms and they (RSA Labs) are looking at doing some research and investigating second-generation PK algorithms, so they are definitely looking at that,'' he said. When asked what ``looking at'' entailed, Duane looked over his latte and hedged. ``Ephemeral keys is not something that we're spending a lot of time on, but it is something that is coming up in the general industry around newer, second-generation PK algorithms. RSA Labs in particular is looking into those second-generation algorithms.'' How will RSA dress up biometrics in cryptowear? It's complicated. First, think biometrics tests: iris pattern, fingerprints, hand geometry, voice print. Some systems measure the veins and nerves inside your tissue. According to Duane, there's even a system that measures body odor, although he was quick to add RSA Labs was definitely not working on that one. (So
NSA Multi-language speech recognition.
I love cv's http://www.ling.gu.se/~jimh/courses/ShortResume.html Research and implementation of multilanguage speech recognition and a spoken language identification system. Designed and implemented a structured approach to spoken language identification using Hidden Markov Model phoneme recognition with phonotactic constraints with colleague, Shubha Kadambe. Our best performing system used a complete large vocabulary speech recognition system for each language with the Bayes equation including the probability of acoustics in the denominator. The language with the best probability after 10 seconds of speech was the language chosen. The performance was 95% correct language ID with 5 languages (Mandarin Chinese, German, Spanish, Japanese and English). The system was tested as part of the NSA Language Identification Program. A patent was filed this technique. Cheers, Julian.
reverse Zero Knowledge?
Let y = f(x) and f'(y) = x Imagine Bob runs a f' cracking service. Imagine Alice has y and wants x. Alice may or may not know f' however she wishes to take advantage of Bob's f' cracking service to obtain x. But she doesn't want Bob to know x. Yet she wants Bob to compute it for her. Imagine there is a blinding function b, and an unblinding function b'. Alice sends Bob b(y). Bob produces z=f'(b(y)). Alice extracts x = b'(b). Has this been done for RSA etc? Is it possible to find blinding functions of this nature for any function in number theory? Cheers, Julian.
Re: europe physical meeting
> that's why I'm looking for a place with outside tables. you can just > wander by and see the group, the crypto books, whatever. The leather. The babes. The machisimo.
'Shoot to Kill Bill' set to pass the Senate with no safeguards
Tuesday, 5 September 2000 New ALP Sell-Out Completes Capitulation on Defence Amendment Bill 'Shoot to Kill Bill' set to pass the Senate with no safeguards The ALP today completed its capitulation to the Government by accepting new Government amendments to Defence Legislation Amendment (Aid to Civilian Authorities) Bill, Greens Senator Bob Brown said today. "The ALP has refused to accept Greens amendments that would guarantee troops could never be called out against a peaceful protest or industrial dispute," Senator Brown said. "On top of that they have watered down their already weak amendments. Previously the ALP amendment had said that once called out the troops could not be used unless there was 'a direct and immediate threat of death or serious injury'. These words have been replaced by "reasonable likelihood of death or serious injury". "Now, in a stunning overnight turnaround, the ALP has accepted a new government amendment that would allow troops to be used against civilians when there is 'serious damage to property'. This gives the government and military free reign to call out the troops because in almost every situation 'serious damage to property' could be envisaged. "This is a backflip on sell-out on back-down. Labor has failed to defend a century of law and convention in Australia which has prevented the Defence forces from being involved in armed conflict with civilians. "The bill will now pass into law with no sunset clause, and no real safeguard that would prevent troops being used on strikers and peaceful protestors Further information: Ben Oquist 02 62773170 or 0419704095 -- Ben Oquist Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown Parliament House, Canberra 2600 Australia +61 2 62773170 ph +61 2 62773185 fx 0419704095 mobile http://www.greens.org.au/bobbrown
echelon time-line
I'm developing an echelon `in the news' and `on-the-net' time-line for the past 30 years. Not comprehensive, but 30 or so most important rumours leaks/news-stories. Has anyone else done this? Does anyone have personal suggestions as to the most significant events? Cheers, Julian.
Re: The Ant and the Grasshopper
RUSSIAN VERSION The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs, dances, and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he calls up his uncle and asks for help. The ants food stores are inspected and found vulnerable to dry rot. A systemic problem among ants. For the benefit of the ant, his food stores are placed in a national storage facility. The grasshopper is given a job managing the facility. The central store rapidly develops dry rot. Millions of ants die. But somehow there always seems enough grains left for the grasshopper. After a while the grosshopper's uncle suggests that the solution to the dry rot problem is de-nationalisation via employee ownership. The facility is sold for one grain to the grasshopper, who then sells it for half a grain to his uncle. The grass-hopper is re-hired as manager. The uncle becomes fantastically rich. The ant gives up collecting grain and finds a personal-security position protecting the uncle from other ants. All three go out to a Moscow night club to celebrate and are gunned down by a group of ants working as corporate-security professionals for Gazcom. Cheers, Julian.
