Re: [eff-austin] Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?
On Tue, 05 Aug 2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [...] I'm > talking about is AOL committing a DoS attack on me, which is > actionable regardless of Bob's contract. Dear honorable Mr. Mindfuq, I am from this point forward blocking all mail traffic from you to the networks I control. None of your carefully constructed communicative, copyrighted packets will be delivered on to my networks. I promise. I choose not to expend my resources forwarding your data beyond my router. I assume you consider this a DoS, through some muffinhead logic that you've devised. If that logic is well formed, I assume it also explains the presence of fluoride in our water rather well. It is unclear to me what service I am legally obligated to be providing you, and what exactly I'm denying you. I'm also sure you'd love to explain it, however, you can't. You also can't explain it to any of the people to whom I provide internet related services, at least via email from your present address. Similarly, I deny you the privilege of retransmitting your voice over my loudspeakers. I have no automated method for enforcing that, but I'll do my best. You also may not speak your mind on my couch. Bye bye. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] "For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it." - George W. Bush
Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=6&u=/ap/20030729/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_market_10 WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] The strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. - Judge Stewart Dalzell
Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Tim May wrote: > There is much that could be said about whether this difficulty is why > we don't have untraceable, Chaum-style forms of money (I don't think > this is the reason). Regardless, wishing won't make it so, and so > wishing that people would "grok" the importance of blinding without > having spent at least a few hours brushing up on RSA and exponentiation > and all that and then following an explanation very, very > closelywell, wishing won't make it so. > > So it's best to ignore the "unwashed masses" and their inability to > understand untraceable money. As far as it goes, I'm willing to bet that many of the unwashed masses who hold a mortgage don't actually understand how it was calculated, much like there are many insurance policy holders who don't understand actuarial statistics. (As far as it goes, except in the broad terms of understanding statistics, I fall in to the latter category. I once tried to read up on how insurance risks are calculated, and simply couldn't get through the text, without more reason to. A friend who works in reinsurance still laughs at me over this.) Same story in securities and mutual funds. Or, for that matter, SMTP. As a further example, a very intelligent person, very successful in chosen pursuits, asked me how secure the new Visa cards with online passwords were. The ones that are being advertised all over TV. It took a fair amount of explaining to get across that they don't protect the user of the card, they protect the merchant and the bank. Once the "lightbulb came on", she was annoyed at having been taken in by an ad, and completely forgot to care whether or not the protocol is 'secure'. I'm not sure that understanding matters for broad adoption of a financial instrument. The sales pitch does matter. > More troubling is that so many _here_ don't seem to "get it." True, but this list has always been made up of mostly nitwits. > --Tim May -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] Be aloof, there's been a sudden population explosion of lerts.
Re: [Brinworld] Car's data recorder convicts driver
On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Steve Schear wrote: > Indeed 'privacy' and 'secrecy' are often confused and their meanings > overlap in many a mind. I think that most, at least in the West, accept > that privacy "..is based on rules and trust," for example, records kept on > us by our doctors. Because exposure of various aspects of our private > lives can do lasting damage, privacy is only effective when controlled by > the party seeking it, who may disclose it or not as they see fit and can > only be guaranteed when those who would "sell you out" don't possess the > possibly damaging information. For that reason among others, I am really > only interested in privacy mediated by personal secrecy and technologies I > trust and/or control. I agree with you. Being anonymous is very important here. Privacy is something alluded to by the famous "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail". Secrecy is what other people cannot find out. Anonymity (strong or not) is vastly important to secrecy. Medical data is a great example of this. It may be private, for some (weak) values of private, right now. Being John Doe at the doctor's office and paying cash, though, is vastly better in terms of assurance, at least until the doctor's business-cam interfaces with other databases. Too bad that works so poorly with insurance, but then worker insurance in the US is nearly a government program, anyway. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.
Re: MS Format Flames Re: An attack on paypal --> secure UI for browsers
On Sat, 14 Jun 2003, Bill Stewart wrote: > If you want to give them something quasi-immutable, > there's always PDF. That lets you be rude _and_ proprietary :-) Doesn't have to be proprietary. One of our pseudo-products is a PDF generator built out of open source tools. Of course, most folks will read it in Acrobat, but it works fine with xpdf, too. > Microsoft does make free readers for Word and Powerpoint. > They're only intended for running on Windows, > but perhaps they work on WINE? They do run under Wine. The occasional glitch, of course. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws" - Tacitus
Re: An attack on paypal --> secure UI for browsers
On Sat, 14 Jun 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote: >I sure don't have any problems with word or excel docs. Ever heard of > OpenOffice? I send people doc and xls files all the time, nobody's complained > yet. Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I have heard of it. I'd even use it for more than attempting to read .docs, if I didn't find vim to be superior for just about everything I do with text. OO even parses some documents well, most of the time. Which is of course not good enough. When you're dealing with folks that edit, re-edit, pass around, turn on revision tracking, fast save, pass the document around some more, turn off revision tracking, and then email you the file, It chokes. Hard. As Bill said, input formats are not output formats. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] "The sign that points to Boston doesn't have to go there." - Max Scheler
Re: An attack on paypal --> secure UI for browsers
I can certainly dick around with my personal website and write my memoirs without it, and 98% of what I do for a living is MS free, getting business without it (read aloud as "public interfaces") is nearly impossible. Perhaps you can ignore that, becuase you're just working for the man, and it isn't your fault that you write MS Word docs. DRM is going to be another cost. I'll have to have a real MS box on hand again, and the problem will be how it worms in to other parts of the business, diverting me from my favored platform. You can say you're not forced to use it. You're also not forced to do anything but swear at other people in public. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] "In my little way, I'm sneakily helping people understand a bit more about the sort of people God likes." - Larry Wall.
