They never learn: Omniva Policy Systems
I ran across a reference to this company, which says it has raised $20 M in VC financing and which claims it has a system which implements the digital equivalent of disappearing ink. (Perhaps distilled from snake oil?) The URL is still called disappearing.com, but the company is now called Omniva Policy Systems. A URL is: http://www.disappearing.com/ I guarantee that anything a human eye can read can be captured for later use, whether by bypassing the probably-weak program, by using other tools to read the mail spool, by capturing the screen buffer, or, if worst comes to worst, simply photographing the screen with an inexpensive digital camera and then either using the captured image as is or by running it through an OCR. It happens that I have met the founder of this company at a couple of parties at my house, so I have no idea what got into him with this late-90s-founded company. Maybe he was just exploiting the suckers. Their system, which makes varius references to being Outlook-compatible, may deter the nitwits from easily saving and printing, but it is not the nitwits one wants to deal with. Even the corporate whistleblowers (played by Julia Roberts in that movie Erin Brockovitch) can very easily learn enough to open their mail with another program, or grep the spool directly, or use the other tools. Again, photographing the screen works perfectly well. And reliance on Outlook, if this is what their scheme relies on, seems horribly limiting. What of those using Entourage, or Mail, or any of the dozens of platforms and news readers in existence. The site mentions that they are now Blackberry-compliant. Well, does this mean employees of the companies using Omniva Policy Manager cannot read their mail on their Palms, or their laptops running other mail programs, and so on? Seems like a fatally-flawed basis for a company. --Tim May As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself. -- David Friedman
Colored people and cripples
On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 10:59 AM, Tyler Durden wrote: Tim May wrote... Where did this of color nonsense get started? Like a lot of PC terms...from guilt-ridden white liberals. Black folks never use this term, as far as I've ever heard. I hear them using this _frequently_. Just about any time I see a fat negro chick on one of the talk shows (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) I can count on her using the phrase blahblah of color several times. Likewise with physically challenged. My black karate Sensei used to periodically laugh at the shame and embarassment associated with any speech coloration...to the point where some people won't even mention skin color when describing another person. Again, I hear the cripples using the phrases physically challenged _frequently_. It's not enough that cripples always get the best parking places, by law, but they want all Handicapped signs replaced with more PC terms. (I may start pulling cores on their tires after seeing so many apparently-fully-mobile persons getting out of their cars and vans with the Handicapped placards. Here in California, an entire industry of scammers and willing doctors has emerged to get more and more people declared Disabled and thus eligible for the special placards and, of course, taxpayer-paid-for free stuff.) --Tim May
Colored people
On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, at 08:39 PM, Mac Norton wrote: There was a weapons charge as well, which will always complicate matters considerably. The unconventional life is a more or less fine thing until it gets perpendicular to the conventional life, usually in the form of law enforcement agents. When that happens, and it almost surely will, what is necessary is a relatively big bunch of money, or a plea bargain. What happened here is happening to young men (yes, usually men, and as in this case, of color) Where did this of color nonsense get started? I thought colored people wanted to be called by other names, now they and their whiteliberal supporters are routinely using the silly name people of color. (Of course, we live in an age where homosexuals call themselves queers and propagate the name--Queer Nation, Queers of Color, Queer Eye for the Pervert Guy, etc.--and yet file lawsuits when others call them queers. And we live in an age where negroes call themselves and other negroes niggers and name their minstrel acts Niggaz with Attitude but then insist that persons of whiteness call them NWA so as not to use the offensive N-word.) If the coloreds want to be called that, fine with me. --Tim May
Re: Digicash Patents
On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 10:44 AM, R. A. Hettinga wrote: Since lots of the important bits are supposed to expire next year, the patents may or may not be useful. On the other hand, if they can be gotten clear, someone could get a running start, I suppose, especially if they made a partnership deal with First Data of some kind, and, if First Data was active in that partnership, leveraging their other connections in the funds-transfer business, that could be interesting. On the other other hand, :-), it's entirely clear that people could be developing code right now in anticipation of the patent expiration and go live with some kind of land rush when it's possible to do so. Some people expected a land rush when the main RSA patents expired several years ago. Parties were even thrown. The land rush never happened. --Tim May The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. --John Stuart Mill
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 11:49 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: Tim May[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 09:26 AM, Bill Stewart wrote: Also, NYT Article was http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th But it sounds like they've chickened out, because various people freaked about the implications. (And they only got as far as it being an incentive to commit terrorism, without getting to a funding method for terrorism or to Assassination Politics.) Not to mention the obvious problems with letting government agents bid on things like when various unwanted foreign leaders would be assassinated. Over on Dave Farber's IP list, it's been pointed out that there is a pre-existing, live, real-money market in futures on these types of events. Go over to www.tradesports.com, and click on 'Current Events' under 'Trading Catagories' on the left. Drill down and you'll find things like 'WMDs will be found in Iraq on or before Sept 31', the value of which has dropped from 80 to 25 over the last few months. Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). And several years ago some companies actually tried to built real markets around these kinds of predictions. Maybe one of them is the contract company (pun intended) on this latest DARPA fantasy. The problem is not with the idea of using markets and bets and Bayesian logic to help do price discovery on things like when the Athlon-64 will actually reach consumers, or when the new King of Jordan will be whacked, and so on. The problem is, rather, with _government_ establishing a monopoly on such things while putting suckers like Jim Bell in jail basically for espousing such ideas. And, as I noted, there are significant problems with government employees in a betting pool (gee, aren't even office baseball pools technically illegal? Haven't they prosecuted some people for this? Yep, they have) where they also have control over the outcome. Jim Bell used this as a payoff mechanism for assassinations (Alice bets $1000 that Paul Wolfowitz will be murdered with his family on August 10, 2003)...the same logic applies to the government's dead pool. --Tim May That government is best which governs not at all. --Henry David Thoreau
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 04:20 PM, John Young wrote: Tim May wrote: Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's his e-mail about it in May 2003: Too bad, as he should have seen the shitstorm which would materialize as soon as this actually reached the public radar screen. Now that's gone public and been deep-sixed less than 24 hours later, it will likely be the end of this particular thing. An official, above-board version is likely to be ipso facto illegal for the same reason office baseball pools are illegal: illegal gambling. If the Pentagon can run a betting pool for its employees on when some event will happen, office workers can bet on the outcome of the World Series, and anyone can bet on the numbers revealed by the Mob. --Tim May
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 03:24 PM, Steve Schear wrote: At 16:20 2003-07-29 -0700, John Young wrote: Tim May wrote: Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's his e-mail about it in May 2003: Looks like Robin may have to concentrate on a commercial venture if he wants to see his ideas put into practice. And use an offshore nexus, and good anonymity and digital cash tools...just as predicted many years ago. Doing this aboveboard, and doing it with the collusion of the actors who can alter the outcome, is asking for trouble: * violation of gambling laws...as I said in other articles, betting on the death of the King of Jordan is not different from betting on the winner of the World Series. * distortion of markets by players who see more benefit in adjusting the expectations than in spending some relatively small amount of money (If Chances that weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq by Nov. 1 is being de-rated, in a relatively thin market of a few dozen players, then someone with an interest in altering the odds can probably do so with relatively little money...especially if the money is from a Black Budget and comes from money taken at gunpoint from taxpayers.) (I can't resist mentioning that I was able to massively distort/sabotage the market in reputations that the Extropian list experimented with in 1993. I did this by buying play money (extro-dollars or whatever they were called) from other players in an out-of-band transaction. A mere $20 in U.S. money gave me a huge amount of additional spending money in this reputation market. Naturally, my reputation rose. Likewise, if Paul Wolfowitz wants the market to assess a grave danger that Norway is financing terrorism, he can use out-of-band methods to get a bunch of ringers (cut-outs, co-conspirators) to start bidding up the market. As the penalty for not guessing correctly is not clear until the outcome, and inasmuch as the money is provided by agencies, the opportunities for mischief are obvious.) * Insider trading. Letting government employees benefit from their inside information is like letting IBM or Intel employees engage in a wagering system based on KNOWLEDGE THEY ACTUALLY HAVE. (Not that insider trading is unknown in commodity or stock markets, including futures markets. But these markets have traditionally been heavily regulated and insider trading is forbidden, at least nominally. In the case of this DARPA market, the players are by definition the insiders, with various amounts of very non-public information about plans and contingincies. Duh.) And so on. So many attacks on this system. Anyway, there _already_ are very real, hard to manipulate markets in information. We call them markets. Markets for real estate, for corn, for copper, etc. If a lot of residents of Jordan think a collapse is coming, real estate prices in Amman will fall. If a lot of technologists think a return to copper wiring is coming, copper prices will rise. And so on. Betting on contrived propositions with relatively small amounts of money (toy systems) and/or with play money is not very interesting. --Tim May
Re: Dead Body Theatre
On Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 04:18 PM, James A. Donald wrote: -- On 27 Jul 2003 at 14:22, Tim May wrote: As for the standard of living issue, I _do_ think the standard of living has declined over the past 40 years, aside from some availability of high tech products and medical care. Most of my employed friends are working half again as many hours as my father worked, are spending twice as much time sitting in traffic, and are living in smaller houses than my parents and my family lived in. And they are paying several times the tax burden. If the wife works, which was rare in the 1950s and into the early 60s, and they have children, then they may be paying a further substantial hit on childcare and nannies. When Palo Alto was developed, it was for the most part where the poor people lived, while the rich people in San Francisco could no longer afford their parents houses. This is so untrue as to be ridiculously silly. I don't know for certain which decades you are referring to as when Palo Alto was developed, as it was developed from the decades when Stanford was being established, then when Varian and H-P were being established, then when Lockheed and Fairchild were going strong, then when the chip companies of the 60s and 70s were operating, and so on. However, since Palo Alto was essentially built out by the late 1960s, when the last of the Eichlers (*) were finished, I'll address several of these periods: (Eichlers are a style of house laid on a slab, with relatively little insulation, lots of glass, etc. These typically sold for about $20K during most of the late 50s, early to mid 60s.) * during the build up of Professorville and the other professional-oriented parts of PA, the houses were built by well-paid (for the time) professors. Numerous mansions along University Ave., for example. With lesser houses near Colorado, California, Embarcadero, etc. Even at this time relatively few of the residents were unable to afford San Francisco. * during the post-WWII employment by Varian, H-P, Fairchild, and others, a typical engineer made about $12K per year (varied over the years, of course) and the houses cost about $20K. Taxes were a very small fraction, maybe $1.5K per year, total, including federal, state, local, sales, energy, road, etc. * when I moved to the area in 1974, salaries were about $15K, averaged over educational status, and houses were about $30K. Taxes were dramatically higher, even for lowly-paid starting engineers. The welfare state was in full swing, with more and more people (of color) simply not working at all, or claiming disability, or hacking the system to extract more handouts for having more children, etc. Interestingly, at this time, in 1974, San Francisco was a much less expensive place to live in than Palo Alto or Los Altos or even Sunnyvale were. While there were probably some engineers living in Palo Alto whose parents lived in Pacific Heights (a wealthy area of SF) and who thus could not afford to live as there parents had, I saw maybe only one of these folks during my years at Intel. Palo Alto, even though built out, was like a lot of towns that had been built out. There is an appalling housing crisis here in Silicon valley, caused by the fact that most of the land is off limits to development. This is simply not so. Most of the steep hillsides in watershed areas are not developed, but this is common in many cities, in many countries. And the housing crisis is roughly comparable in many places I have lived in or spent time or visited. Examples include Portland the areas west of it (plenty of land, but very similar problems), San Antonio, Albuquerque, Northern Virginia, most of southern Florida, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, and nearly all of LA. And from reading news reports and talking to friends, things are much the same in many other parts of the country. In almost no place even remotely near a large city or suburban area can one buy a house for about 1.5 times a typical local salary for an engineer or comparable college graduate. A more important problem than all the land is off limits is every worker costs a lot plus every permit costs a lot. This is largely due to massive taxation at nearly every level. --Tim May
Re: Dead Body Theatre
On Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 11:20 AM, James A. Donald wrote: This is the same moron marxism as expressed in the word sweatshop: To a naive and ignorant socialist it seems that if each man selfishly pursues his own desire, the result will necessarily be chaos and hardship, that one person's plan will naturally harm those that are not part of it, hence such phrases and concepts as sweatshop which presuppose that one man producing a plan to create value and another man providing equipment to implement that plan, has somehow magically made the workers in a poor country worse off, that saving, investment and entrepeneurship is unproductive, that investment, particularly investment by rich people creating the means of production in poor countries, is a plot to swindle the poor, a scam, a transfer from poor to rich. \ The move to boycott stores selling sweatshop products is gathering steam, so to speak. Stores like The Gap, Old Navy, Target, etc. are making plans to stop buying from so-called sweatshops. Of course, when this happens all those employed in these sweatshops in Bangladesh, Malaysia, etc. will be unemployed. What, do people think shutting down the garment factories means the workers will get jobs at Intel and Microsoft? Or that somehow their wages will be increased to economically-unsupported levels for their country/ Duh. I'll chortle as yuppies and GenXers may more for inferior clothing while millions in Bangladesh and Malaysia starve to death over this save the poor people! scam. As for the standard of living issue, I _do_ think the standard of living has declined over the past 40 years, aside from some availability of high tech products and medical care. Most of my employed friends are working half again as many hours as my father worked, are spending twice as much time sitting in traffic, and are living in smaller houses than my parents and my family lived in. And they are paying several times the tax burden. If the wife works, which was rare in the 1950s and into the early 60s, and they have children, then they may be paying a further substantial hit on childcare and nannies. I would not want interference to stop free transaction in jobs, but it's disingenuous to ignore the fact that many today are working two jobs, or very, very long hours, to maintain a house that is generally smaller than in years past. (Yeah, there are are a lot of McMansions. But many engineers in their 30s are still living in crappy apartments. And working 50-hour weeks, at minimum, with hours per day spent sitting in traffic. And on call with cellphones and laptops. And taking work home. And checking their e-mail every night and weekend. And paying 50% or more of what they make in federal income taxes, state income taxes, passed-on property taxes, sales taxes, energy taxes, highway taxes, and Socialist Security taxes. And what they earn in investments, after paying taxes on income, is taxed a second time, even if the alleged investment gains are mostly due to monetary devaluation.) You often let your intense hatred of Marxism blind you to the very horrific situation we now face. --Tim May
Re: Dead Body Theatre
On Saturday, July 26, 2003, at 01:10 AM, Sarad AV wrote: I wouldn't like to see american soldiers killed either.How ever I talked to an american citizen a few days before the second iraq war and he supported the war saying that-If one is an american,where do you think all the money,power and previlage for american people will come from? That sounds very logical. I retaliated saying that the previlages,power will come with the death of thousands of iraqi men,women and children. He wouldn't budge any way. This is a silly, naive view of things. First, the concept of privilege is one of those lefty, cockeyed notions the liberals use to vaguely imply that success in life is due to privilege. Second, though I strongly disagree with the Second Iraq War, nothing that happens there has anything substantive to do with economic success and money, power for anyone I know. Our money, power comes from work, investments, high tech, etc. I have no idea if you are really the Third World mutant you usually come off as being, but you really need to get out more. --Tim May
Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 11:16 AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2003-07-23, Sunder uttered: If you want to do electronic payments that are non-anonymous you can simply use a credit card or debit card (or something like paypal, egold), or for larger quanitities you can do wire transfers - so why would we need yet another a non-anonymous cash that isn't cash? I only objected to the notion that all digicash needs to be anonymous in order to be desirable. I didn't say this particular system amounts to desirable weak digicash. To that end it would likely make far more sense in the short term e.g. to marry Visa Electronic to PayPal. In the long term multiple cooperating PayPal-like entities could then be used to build mixnets, making the digicash strongly anonymous. This continuing confusion, by many people, about what digicash is shows the problem with using nonspecific terms. In fact, digicash strongly suggests David Chaum's Digicash, not some name for all forms of credit cards, ATMs, debit cards, PayPal, wire transfer, Mondex, and a scad of other systems that may use bits and electronic signals. Conventionally, on this list and in the press about digital cash, digital cash means something which has the untraceable and/or anonymous features of cash while being transferred digitally. It is NOT a Visa system or a PayPal account or a wire instruction to the Cayman Islands. I choose not to call untraceable/anonymous digital cash by any of the marketing-oriented catchwords like Digicash, BearerBucks, E-coins, MeterMoney, whatever. So, I strongly agree with your point that not all electronic forms of money need to be anonymous (untraceable) in order to be useful. HOWEVER, our interest is in the untraceable/anonymous. There are no doubt active groups discussing PayPal, VISA, MasterCard, DiscoverCard, etc. But they have nothing to do with Cypherpunks. We should also fight the use of sloppy language in the press when mundane electronic funds transfer systems are called digital cash. --Tim May
Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 03:17 PM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On 2003-07-24, Tim May uttered: HOWEVER, our interest is in the untraceable/anonymous. Duh! You were gibbering about how digicash includes PayPal, ATMs, Visa, and other forms of transfers which are only digital in that computers are used. You need to think carefully about what blinding is all about. Calling Visa and PayPal digicash shows fundamental ignorance. Nitwit. But very typical of the new generation of rilly, rilly dumb cypherpunks. --Tim May
Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online
Some lurker unwilling to comment on the public list sent me this. I didn't notice it wasn't intended for the list until I had already written a reply and was preparing to send it. So I have altered the name. --Tim On Friday, July 25, 2003, at 01:07 PM, SOMEONE wrote: Tim May wrote: On Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 07:12 PM, Steve Furlong wrote: On Thursday 24 July 2003 15:50, Tim May wrote: In fact, digicash strongly suggests David Chaum's Digicash, That assumes the reader or listener has heard of Digicash, or of Chaum. Not an assumption I'd be comfortable making. Readers on the cypherpunks list? They should be able to understand it, or at least they should have heard of it. They may have _heard_ of it, but to most of them (I t hink) it's just some magical incantations which they don't quite believe anyway. I stopped any efforts to explain the true importance of electronic/digital money/cash a long time ago. A waste of time. Not too surprising, as getting even the basic idea requires some passing familiarity with things like how RSA works. When I read Chaum's 1985 CACM paper I already knew about RSA and hard directions for problems (trapdoor functions), and yet I still had to read and reread the paper and draw little pictures for myself. That's a shame. The 1985 paper isn't on-line afaik, and I've only read second-hand versions. First, my stopped any efforts...a long time ago was a comment directed at what the OP was talking about: explaining digital money to the masses. For example, at parties or other meatspace gatherings. Online explanations--here, for example--are another matter. Second, the many online explanations from the CP list, circa 1992-94, are readily findable. Let me go check(20 seconds pass...)...yep, I just found hundreds of summary articles from various authors, including myself, Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Doug Barnes, Ian Goldberg, and many others. There is no shortage of explanations of this stuff. In one of my articles, in fact, I make the same point about how the various boring versions of electronic money are not very important: The focus here is on true, untraceable digital cash, offering both payer and payee untraceability (anonymity). Mundane digital money, exemplified by on-line banking, ATM cards, smartcards, etc., is not interesting or important for CFP purposes. Payer-untraceable (but payee-traceable) digital cash can also be interesting, but not nearly as interesting and important as fully untraceable digital cash. There are many articles on why this is so. But, frankly, anyone who cannot see this from first principles probably is not ever going to get it. Third, regarding the CACM article, it's been liberated and made available online more than a few times. Try search engines. I know the Information Liberation Front (ILF) was actively liberating various of the key papers in the early months of the CP list...and these are mostly archived and searchable. And of course Chaum's original 1985 description has been redone many times, in later papers by him and others, etc. And I don't think it works at all, anyway... As it's been demonstrated to work, technically, this is a weird statement. Existence proofs are powerful. If you mean that Bank of America and Mastercard are not offering Chaum-style instruments, and so on, then this is not the same thing as saying the ideas don't work. --Tim May
Re: Dna samples of world leaders
On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 11:56 PM, Sarad AV wrote: hi, Yesterdays briefing on the death of saddams sons-the bodies were said to be send for positive identification through dna tests.How are these samples obtained anyway?Royal Saloons,Royal Doctors,Visits to the US during peace times?What more effecient methods are used? Hair samples, dandruff, etc. A bunch of reports over the past several months that the houses and villas of Hussein and his family had been gone over carefully for traces of hair, old shaving razors, skin particles, etc. Even if doctors and such have not been bribed or coerced into providing blood samples, lots of ways to track DNA. All a matter of economics, as usual. --Tim May
Re: Unsubtle Wetwork
On Friday, July 18, 2003, at 04:32 AM, Major Variola (ret.) wrote: Weapons Adviser Named as Possible Source for BBC Story Disappears; Man's Body Found LONDON (AP) - Police searching for a missing Ministry of Defense adviser, who was named by the government as the possible source for a disputed news report on Iraqi arms, said Friday they have found a man's body near his home. http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGABVMP3AID.html Maybe he's just hanging out with Ritter in upstate NY... 'Unsubtle is often what the spooks prefer: like the Mob, they are just as interested in sending a message as in silencing a witness. In this case, the message going out is don't speak against the Official Version. Blair faces much more serious troubles than he would be in for ordering a hostile witness whacked. And, charitably, he may not even have ordered the hit. The intelligence agencies in Britain and the U.S. look to be hip-deep in forgeries of documents, concoction of evidence, and subornation of perjury. They may be killing witnesses just to protect their own asses. CIA Director Tenet is now looking to be they guy who has been told to fall on his sword. If he gets a cushy job with the Carlyle Group, expect him to remain silent. If he is sent into exile in Ohio or Indiana, he may write a book...if he lives. But, hey, George Bush is happy about the daily deaths of U.S. soldiers. As he said recently Bring it on! We gonna open a can of Texas whoop-ass on them bad boys. Seriously, this clusterfuck is unfolding nicely. U.S. occupation troops are spread so thin in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq that there are now plans being developed to activate National Guard units to relieve them (115 F in full body armor is not pleasant). And the number of countries under occupation may soon increase: Liberia and other African hell-holes are targets. A half-trillion dollar deficit this year, added to the 5 or 6 trillion dollar total deficit (*). (* the official deficit, not counting the total lack of reserves/money for Socialist Insecurity, bond indebtedness, pension guarantees, loan guarantees, and other unfunded liabilities; some estimates place the real deficit at about $30 trillion, i.e., $30 thousand billion. With about 100 million taxpayers in the U.S., each owes $300,000. Needless to say, this owed amount, on average, is substantially more than their complete assets, on average. Even with the official indebtedness, the amount owed (if one accepts a national debt as a personal indebtedness) is upwards of $60,000. I use the larger amount because the U.S. government actually _has_ incurred that debt, officially reported or not.) And yet we are occupying countries which have nothing to do with our national interests. Kosovo...not our problem. Afghanistant...not our problem. Iraq. And soon, Liberia and maybe Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. And then there's the Perpetual Occupation of Korea. Meanwhile, scientists who might have spoken out on the forgeries and hype about the Iraq war are getting the message. Just as microbiologists did a few years ago when half a dozen microbiologists vanished. Just as other weapons experts did after Gerald Bull was executed. --Tim May They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote. --Rep. Ron Paul, TX, on how few Congresscritters saw the USA-PATRIOT Bill before voting overwhelmingly to impose a police state
Re: Unsubtle Wetwork
On Friday, July 18, 2003, at 11:29 AM, Thoenen, Peter CIV Sprint wrote: Tim May wrote: U.S. occupation troops are spread so thin in Kosovo,.Kosovo...not our problem Having spent the better part of last year working in Kosovo, I wouldn't exactly call the forces there thin. NATO forces (non-US) are a majority of the peacekeeping occupiers and more and more of the mission is getting turned over to the EU (allowing for slow US withdrawal). With Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia eagerly sucking the EU and US cocks to get into the EU and NATO, the US in the Balkans is if anything over strength. the US in the Balkans is if anything over strength does NOT contradict the spread too thin point, which is about the number of troops the U.S. has available to deply, the need for replacements, etc. The fact that U.S. soldiers in all of these places who were expecting to be relieved have instead been told they will stay at least several more months, perhaps another year, is the point. As for the general Yugoslavia situation, we supported the wrong sides in the Balkans. Not that supporting _any_ side in that European war was any of our business. --Tim May To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists. --John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General
Re: MRAM, persistance of memory
On Thursday, July 10, 2003, at 08:27 AM, Eric Murray wrote: On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 04:45:58PM +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: It is impossible to get access to the voltage on the DRAM cell capacitors (at least if the chip is in its case and we can access only its pins). We can only see if it is in the range for H or L. And after a power-down (or even a sufficiently long period without a refresh of the given cell) the cell capacitor loses voltage steadily, reaching the level of L (or maybe H?) within at most couple seconds. I would not bet on that for sensitive data. See Peter Gutmans and Ross Anderson's papers on RAM memory remanance. We were reading remnant state information in DRAMs back in the mid-70s. When a DRAM is powered back up after some period without power there are remnants which are not really electrons (which thermalize into the substrate in a matter of microseconds) but which cause preferential turn-on or turn-off in the cells, due to shifts in threshold voltage. (This is why irradiation of the DRAMs with gammas can sometimes freeze the stored data pattern.) Intel was the inventor of DRAM and we led the market (along with Mostek) for most of the 1970s. We had some really cool tools for seeing the internal states of DRAMs, before, during, and after things we did to the devices. Powering them off and watching the states they came back up in was child's play. This effect, of seeing DRAMs wake up in preferred states, is a very subtle effect. And no doubt it varies amongst vendors and even between design and process steppings of the same vendor's part. I would not want to be the forensic data analyst trying to do this, but I expect sometimes they do. The recover data from voice answering machines gadget is no doubt much lower tech. Most answering machines are battery-backed (duh), so a forensics expert can keep power maintained and even use the battery-backed store to keep the DRAMs nominally refreshed. But I thought most modern answering machines which don't use tapes are in fact using flash, not DRAMs. Am I wrong on this? Flash is of course an entirely different story. --Tim May
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 10:40 AM, Peter Fairbrother wrote: A curiosity, only tenuously related - I just came across a Feb 1994 copy of Elector magazine, with plans for a S/PDIF copybit eliminator (for SCMS). Seems people have been defeating copy protection for a while.. I've owned an Audio Alchemy SCMS-stripper since 1991, when I bought my first DAT machine. It cost about $99, was about the size of a deck of cards, and stripped the SCMS bits out of the digital bitstream. A later DAT machine I bought, a Tascam portable pro deck, has the SCMS stripped by default. (It takes in digital signals and writes to the DAT with the SCMS code set to unlimited number of digital copies allowed.) Likewise, a professional CD writer I own (HHB) bypasses SCMS. (Not just allowing a digital copy to be made, but making the resulting CD-R copyable freely.) A friend of mine bought his DVD player on EBay: it bypasses all region coding (i.e., it makes all DVDs region-free). Region coding is a different issue, but part of the DRM universe. Until George W. Bush and the Carlyle Group start putting money into these things and thus discover that SCMS strippers are terrorist tools, such tools will likely continue to be available. Use a logic analyzer, go to jail. --Tim May He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -- Nietzsche
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 04:09 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 03:14 PM 7/8/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: As for hearing heterodyning in 28 KHz and 30 KHz signals, maybe. CD players have brickwall filters to of course block such frequencies. Some analog groove-based systems can have some kind of signal up there at those frequencies, but not much. Regular vinyl is (was) also recorded with all kinds of filters, too, including the lowpass ones. If you cut vinyl (or metal) through a signal chain that didn't impose the filtering, perhaps the ultrasonics would remain, which is perhaps the analogophiles claim. You would need a special vinyl cutter though. Some of the filtering imposed on vinyl was to not fry the cutter, or otherwise deal with its inertia. (BTW, I thought your Monster USB cable was a prank.. its not.. some folks just don't get digital..) Yes, they are real. I perhaps should have inserted a this is not a joke, but I didn't think to. When I was the judge in the First Internet Witch Trial, one of the examples I used was how believing something doesn't make it so, despite what the believers think (though the psychological effects may be real). An example being some audiophile nonsense, such as the Tice Clock (which is/was also real...some people bought the snake oil about how an LED clock plugged in could soften the harshness of digital. With the Tice Clock, with the Monster USB cables, one can examine the effects on bit error rates, and even look at timing jitter (a claim some manufacturers of snake oil make). For any of us with a remotely scientific bent, seeing that the bitstream is unchanged, that the bit error rate is unchanged, is pretty convincing evidence that no matter what we _think_ we hear, especially in non-double blind listening tests, there simply _is_ no difference. And yet there are people who claim to hear differences between 5 dollar digital cables and thousand dollar digital cables, even when the bitstreams are identical. (And even if they are not, they are within the capture window of the next digital gadget, and hence are for all intents and purposes absolutely identical.) One might as well sell Monster Cable Power Cords for PCs, claiming they make the Pentium 4 perform more accurately. Actually, I'll bet the tweaks are already buying special power cords for their Athlon 2200+ homebrews. Most so-called high end tube amps do in fact sound different, perhaps better, perhaps not. This is of course because tubes are usually rich in odd-order harmonics. That $4000 Krell tube amp is actually _coloring_ the sound. So much for 20-bit DACs in the signal source: the amp is altering the sound at about the 6th or 8th or whatever most significant bit. Bob Carver and a few others have emulated the tube sound so well with DSPs that double-blind tests using audiophiles cannot tell the difference, and where the waveforms look identical.
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 01:39 PM, Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer wrote: As an audiophile (Krell+Levinson+Thiel gear at home), I definitely don't want to grab an analog signal. Doing that the signal is sure to retain characteristics of the extracting gear. But the vast majority of P2P kids won't care one iota that their file was analog for half a second. -TD I'll ditto that - my brother is an extremist audiophile - he writes reviews for the high-end stuff (google Mike Trei). Many (by no means all) top end audophiles prefer all-analog equipment, and direct-cut vinyl records (ie, the master disk was cut directly at the performance, without a magtape master). I've listened to some of this stuff, and it just blows digital away. What else do you expect, when any audiophile who denies that inaudible frequencies make the music warmer proves himself to be a philistine with ears of tin? Remember, it was the fashion and clothing EXPERTS who were the most insistent that the emperor's new clothes were absolutely marvelous. The harshness of a digital bitstream can be softened by operating LED clocks in the same room as the bitstream. The Tice Clock, for example, works by plugging in to any electrical socket in the room where the listener is located...of course, all that matters is that he _sees_ the Tice Clock plugged-in, and remembers that he paid $399 for this piece of wondrous technology, for the effect to work. That the bitstream as measured with a logic analyzer is unchanged with any of these digital enhancers is beside the point. Monster Cable, by the way, is doing a nice business selling Extra Special, Oxygen-Free Copper Shielded, Insulated with Rubber Hand-Rolled on the Thighs of Taiwanese Virgins cables for _USB_. Yep, for USB. Never mind that the bitstream either is there or it isn't...some people think they get superior data with special $80 cables. As for hearing heterodyning in 28 KHz and 30 KHz signals, maybe. CD players have brickwall filters to of course block such frequencies. Some analog groove-based systems can have some kind of signal up there at those frequencies, but not much. Very, very few microphones are rated at 22-25 KHz, so I have to wonder just where this signal is coming from. If not coming from actual musical instruments, and detected by the microphones, why bother? Sure, we may as well push the CD spec up to 24 KHz or so. That will probably even satisfy Neil Young. --Tim May
Re: DNA of relative indicts man, cuckolding ignored
On Monday, July 7, 2003, at 10:15 AM, Stormwalker wrote: On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Insurance companies are private entities, so IMHO its moral for them to gather intel (eg, checking blood for nicotine metabolites), or give discounts for folks who've had certain inherited diseases fixed in the future. Or eat better, drive safer, exchange fluids less promiscuously, whatever. I have to disagree here. Medical insurance is not the same as life or car insurance. It was all supposed to be a big pool that we would draw on when needed. By skimmimng the cream, infant mortality rates rise, along with a host of other problems. No, it was NOT all supposed to be a big pool that we would draw on when needed. You seem to be confusing medical insurance with nationalized social medicine. Do I really need to explain this concept here, to subscribers here? Medical insurance is a risk arbitrage betting scheme just like all other insurance: the actor selling a policy (a contract) is making the bet that he will make more money than he pays out. If he finds out something that alters the expectation of some illness or disease or hazardous activity, then he adjusts the policy premiums accordingly (or even refuses to sell a policy at any price, for understandable reasons). By the way, any scheme to force everyone into the same insurance pool for the same premiums is profoundly antiliberty and is unconstitutional (violates all sorts of rights). Opting out of coverage is always fair. If I know I am not a rock climber, why would I pay for coverage for rock climbing falls? And if I know I am not engaging in queer sex or IV drug use, why would I pay for AIDS coverage/ (There are interesting scenarios for private testing for various genes or proclivities, followed by opting-out for the diseases one is highly unlikely to contract. This kind of not paying for what you don't use is a form of cherry-picking which only a total state could outlaw. Think about it.) --Tim May
Re: Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool
On Saturday, July 5, 2003, at 07:13 PM, Thomas Shaddack wrote: Pondering. Vast majority of the CD/DVD protection methods is based on various deviations from the standards, or more accurately, how such deviations are (or aren't) handled by the drive firmware. However, we can sidestep the firmware. The drive contains the moving part with the head assembly. There is an important output signal there: the raw analog signal bounced from the disk and amplified. We can tap it and connect it to a highspeed digital oscilloscope card. And sample obscene amount of data from it. In comparison with fast-enough ADCs, disk space is cheap. The problem can be in bandwidth, but for the drive speed set up to possible minimum (or for normal players) the contemporary machines should be sufficient. Real-time operating system (maybe RTOS-Linux) may be necessary. No RTOS/Linux is needed for fast sampling, which has been happening for several decades now. Nor is a digital oscilloscope needed. (FWIW, I used a Nicolet digital oscilloscope, and also a LeCroy CAMAC digitizer, for some high-speed single-shot event capture--the strike of an alpha particle--nearly 25 years ago. The OS for our data collection computers were, variously, RSX-11M and VMS.) Video ADC cards are already vastly capable at sampling video streams. We get the record of the signal captured from the drive's head - raw, with everything - dirt, drop-outs, sector headers, ECC bits. The low-level format is fairly well documented; now we have to postprocess the signal. Conversion from analog to digital data and then from the CD representation to 8-bit-per-byte should be fairly straightforward (at least for someone skilled with digital signal processing). Now we can identify the individual sectors on the disc and extract them to a disc image file that we can handle later by normal means. So? Yes, this is all possible. Any moderately well-equipped lab can do this. So? If we'd fill this idea with water, would it leak? Where? Why? I have no idea what you mean by fill this idea with water, but by all means go ahead and rig up such a machine. Personally, I already make about 1-2 recordable DVDs per day, on average, without any hint of copy protection or Macrovision. I usually use the 3-hour speed on my DVD recorder, and can put one high-quality movie on the first part and then, by using a slightly slower speed, another movie on the remaining part. If DVD quality is needed, I record at the 2-hour setting. If better than DVD quality is needed, as from a DV camcorder source, I record at the 1-hour speed. If you build a machine which has even higher digitization rates, taken ahead of any DVD spec circuitry, you will get about what I am getting at the 1-hour setting. A very limited market for consumers to buy such machines. Video pirate labs very probably already have such rigs set up. --Tim May Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.--Barry Goldwater
All quiet on the western front
On Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at 06:55 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote: Pretty quiet. I'm going through back messages now and only saw I think three from July 1. -Declan On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 02:04:28AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: Is it really quiet in here, or does the fact that I've been playing with procmail this evening have something to do with it? Thanks; Bill But things have been quiet for months now, except for occasional bursts of Unix-related security cruft. I think it's related to statism overload. And boredom. Things are objectively more statist and surveillance-oriented than when the Phil Zimmermann case and Clipper phone energized a generation. But the reaction today is ho-hum. No emergency meetings, no guerilla activities. Hell, it's been months since I've seen any mention of a Cypherpunks meeting in the Bay Area. (A recurring problem for years, actually, since we stopped having meetings in a regular place. One never knows whether the next meeting will be at some coffee shop in Oakland or, ugh, at the Police Training Camp in San Francisco. In any case, driving 50 miles to Silicon Valley was a regular thing for me, but driving 100 miles to SF or Oakland is usually not in the cards for me. I haven't heard about any meetings since several months ago, so maybe they're not even happening up in SF or Berkeley, anyway.) But things are quite a bit worse than they were in 1992. Which, I suppose, is good for bringing on the collision of armies, or recruiting new warriors. But maybe not, given the apathy. Every day brings new reports of surveillance plans, suspensions of the Constitution, more statism. I think people are anesthetized, a la the boiling frog, to the developing statism. (Side note, worthy of a longer article: It may be literally a generational thing, as libertarianism tended to be. The anti-state activists of the 70s and 80s were influenced by the antiwar movement of the 60s, but were still somewhat libertarian. Many had read Heinlein, Rand, Rothbard, Hayek. The early Cypherpunks folks were generally conversant with the ideas, and receptive. I conjecture that the new crop is more into body piercings, skin art, and anti-globalism (when it comes to corporations and trade, but not when it comes to world government). In other words, Cypherpunks is like several other Baby Boom degenerating research program.) I would predict that things are getting more statist and are coming to some kind of head. Except, why bother making any predictions? Robert Hettinga would make some snarky comment about my track record for predictions and Duncan Frissell would gush about how things are more free than ever, that the Perpetual Tourist need not worry about surveillance, tracking, new laws, and restrictions on movement. Here's just part of just today's harvest. I won't even call it Brinworld, as many here do, as this kind of government surveillance has nothing in common with Brin's (misguided) idea of symmetrical surveillance. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storycid=528ncid=528e=2u=/ ap/20030702/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/pentagon_urban_cameras --begin excerpt-- U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System Wed Jul 2, 1:46 AM ET By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Police can envision limited domestic uses for an urban surveillance system the Pentagon (news - web sites) is developing but doubt they could use the full system which is designed to track and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. Dubbed Combat Zones That See, the project is intended to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas. Scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology also could easily be adapted to keep tabs on Americans. The project's centerpiece would be groundbreaking computer software capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face. The proposed software also would provide instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watchlist, or search months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist attacks, according to interviews and contracting documents reviewed by The Associated Press. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops technologies for fighting 21st century wars, is overseeing the project. Scientists and privacy experts who have seen face-recognition technology used at a Super Bowl and monitoring cameras in London are concerned about the potential impact of the emerging DARPA technologies if they are applied to civilians by commercial or government agencies outside the Pentagon. Government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time, said John Pike, a Global Security.org defense analyst.
Destroying government computers
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/uniontrib/wed/business/ news_1b18hatch.html June 18, 2003, WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said yesterday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet. If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize the seriousness of their actions, he said. If Orrin Hatch proposes such a thing, we can propose technologies which identify those from .gov or .mil or other Congress/Gov't. domains and send lethal viruses and suchlike back to them to destroy their machines if they illegally connect to our machines. (A simple warning that government stooges, lawyers, judges, clerks, and any GS-xx employees are not allowed to connect should suffice. After that, if they connect, fuck their machines dead.) --Tim May Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now racing down, with American flags fluttering.-- Tim May, on events following 9/11/2001
Re: Destroying computers
On Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 07:41 AM, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 01:07 AM 6/19/03 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Methinks Mr Hatch is not a very bright man. A Southern senator. Need I say more? Except Utah is not in the South by anybody's definition. Of course, that astronomy Professor Usher would be pretty bummed when his research was toasted by an RIAA killbot, but then the Prof employs a provocatory surname, no? Collateral damage -hey, he could change his name, after all. Maybe to David Nelson :-) I was going to mention Prof. Usher in a follow-up I was mentally planning a few minutes ago. For those who may not have heard about him, he's a retired astronomy prof. who included a .MP3 of one of his own songs on his Web site. The record company conglomerate representing the negro minstrel named Usher somehow found his site, found that it had .MP3 files, and made the assumption the site was pirating the minstrel Usher's music. They fired off threatening letters and demanded action. Had Orrin Hatche's seek and destroy software been available, his site would have been toast. When the record company was informed of the truth, they proposed to send him a free Usher t-shirt. Just what a retired white astronomy prof wants, the t-shirt of a negro rap crapper. --Tim May
Re: [Brinworld] Car's data recorder convicts driver
On Wednesday, June 18, 2003, at 05:17 AM, Adam Shostack wrote: I wasn't arguing, I was quipping. I find the many meanings of the word privacy to be fascinating. So when someone commented that the car's tattle-box is or isn't a privacy invasion, I thought I'd offer up a definition under which it is. Its a definition that lots of people use, as John points out. Perhaps better than 'right' would be 'ability,' 'The ability to lie and get away with it.' I wasn't picking on you or your points, that's for sure. In fact, I barely noticed whose message I was replying to. My point was a larger one, that nearly all such debates about privacy eventually come round to issues of what have you got to hide? and issues of truth and lies. This is why I like the Congresss shall make no law and shall not be infringed absoluteness of the original Constitution. The language does not natter about truthful speaking shall not be infringed. And this is why more recent legislation allowing government to regulate commercial speech or to decide which speech is true and which is false (as in advertising claims) is so corrosive to liberty. --Tim May The great object is that every man be armed and everyone who is able may have a gun. --Patrick Henry The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. --Alexander Hamilton
Re: layered deception (timestamping logs)
On Wednesday, May 2, 2001, at 10:12 PM, Anonymous wrote: At 11:00 PM 05/01/2001 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote: Has anyone given any though to how log files could be accepted as evidence in the first place? They're just text files, and exceedingly trivial to alter, forge, erase, whatever. They get edited all the time by hackers -- how can anyone, even the sysadmin, swear that they are true? Seems to me that secure digital timestamps on the logs would be really interesting to anyone wanting to preserve their usefulness as evidence. This would obvisouly cut both ways, could be used for either good or ill. Any collective wisdom on the ramifications of such a technology? I'd put it into my messaging infrastructure if I cared about such things. The asymmetry arises this way: almost _never_ does an ISP/operator benefit from having logs, but prosecutors can use logs to prove various crimes and thoughtcrimes. Like digital signatures, they are best used sparingly. (To see this, imagine the benefits of signing everything. What is gained by Joe Sixpack in using digital signatures ubiquitously? Very little. What is potentially lost? Ask Jeff Gordon.) A digital signature, a timestamp, is not something to be given away lightly. --Tim May
Re: RF Weapons
At 8:54 AM -0700 5/3/01, David Honig wrote: At 01:35 AM 5/3/01 -0400, An Metet wrote: [I wonder if our more unpopular Federal agencies house their mainframes in facilities that are shielded from this sort of attack] Simple RF Weapon Can Fry PC Circuits J Scientists show device that could make the electromagnetic spectrum the terrorist weapon of choice. Old news. One thing I haven't heard of being used in herfgun design is the new commercial 'ultracapacitors' which have multi-FARAD capacitances in very small sizes, and some have very low ESR (ie, you can drain them fast). Yep, old news. But the Horrors of the Unfettered HERF Gun (Dad, he just said the G word!) get trotted out periodically to remind the sheeple why new limitations on access to technology by NGAs must be restricted. (NGAs = Non-Governmental Actors) Information Warfare is again being trotted out in the context of currently-deteriorating relations between the U.S.G. and the P.R.C. (China). Wanna bet we start seeing recycled reports about plans to knock out the stock exchanges, with Chinese info-terrorists replacing the IRA terrorists who were said to be planning EMP/HERF attacks on London several years ago? --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
RE: cypherpunks in Desert Island gaming scenario
At 6:05 PM -0400 5/2/01, Faustine wrote: Quoting Sandy Sandfort [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Count me out. The trouble with games theory is that the outcome is pretty much dictated by the rules established by the game designer. It's intuitively obvious that the given scenarios are artificial and unrealistic. Since I can't imagine any of them as being all that likely, I am, perforce, unable to imagine how they would evolve/interact/etc. As Johnny Carson used to say, Buy the premise, buy the bit. Unfortunately, I can't buy this premise. Yep, good points. But still, fake framework and all, it can be useful if it gets you to clarify and articulate your own assumptions. Certain types of libertarians are indeed fascinated by such simplistic scenarios, the better to articulate their assumptions. A classic, the stuff of several articles in Liberty (and probably toned-down versions in Reason), is the old chestnut about lifeboat ethics. Lifeboat ethics, as with desert island survival, is so far removed from issues of interest here, with noncoerced transactions made so easy, that it is difficult to imagine anything to be learned from such exercises. I doubt strongly that the libertarian nerds who earnest debated the issue of whether it is moral to land on another person's balcony after falling from a high place, yadda yadda yadda, ever learned anything useful But, as you are a youngster, a grad student, perhaps such debates interest you. I suggest you get a subscription to Liberty and then give some rump session talks at the Young Libertarians conferences. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: layered deception
On Tuesday, May 1, 2001, at 06:05 PM, Aimee Farr wrote: Honig: Is it in fact a crime of fraud to advertise that you don't keep logs when in fact you do? Seems deceptive... A profound new insight. We still await some real insights from a real graduate student (!), beyond her saying that we don't know as much as she says she knows. BTW, I have removed the additional addresses (David Honig [EMAIL PROTECTED], Declan@Well. Com [EMAIL PROTECTED], Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED]). When a list is replied to, there is no need to carry along the baggage of everyone who has added to a thread. --Tim May
Re: The issue of logs is a 1A issue, not a matter of funding
On Tuesday, May 1, 2001, at 07:33 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At Tue, 1 May 2001 18:14:38 -0700, Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The real argument is that commanding a person to keep records of whom he communicates with (which is what a log of messages is all about) is a slam dunk violation of the First Amendment. It is no more acceptable than an order commanding Alice to record in a log the names of all those persons she speaks with. Isn't she effectively so commanded insofaras there is a compulsory testomony requirement enforced by contempt of court? I was addressing the general issue of a law requiring ISPs to keep logs, not the specific issue of a specific person being ordered by a court to keep logs or to assist in an investigation. --Tim May Also, as I mentioned before there are also a series of regulations that require exactly these kind of recordings for otherwise private transactions between independent parties. (Banking regulations was one of the examples that others poo-pooed away at the time without explaining why they didn't apply). I didn't pooh pooh such laws. But I believe that any laws requiring parties to inform government of their economic transactions is in violation of the First. The First does not declare economic speech to be outside its protection (nor does the oft-cited power to regulate commerce have anything of relevance to say about this). Spending is both free association and speech, both covered by the First. Cf. the discussion about uttering a check. There were some good debates about this at a CFP Conference in San Francisco between Michael Froomkin and myself. --Tim May
Idealism, non-coercion, and anarchies
At 1:35 PM -0700 4/30/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The idealism that I refer to is the concept that human beings can create something substantially better than what exists. We should all have a touch of this idealism but reality doesn't fit the model so well. Many of us certainly believe that human beings can create something substantially better than what exists. Examples abound, so I don't have to start making a laundry list. However, what many of us also believe is that top-down or central planning or scientific economic planning rarely works, and the few times it works are swamped by the problems it creates (ethical problems, efficiency problems, and misallocation of resources problems). I'd say most of us on this list _are_ in fact idealists in the normal sense of the word: we hope to see changes made to society. If we were not idealists, we'd probably be Democrat Party activists and hacks, perhaps working on ways to redistribute income to our voting base. Or Republican Party organizers, arranging fund-raisers for our candidates and finding ways to have Seawolf submarine factories built in our local political districts. You have fallen for the Inchoate fallacy. Profit seeking is not the sine qua non of literal anarchistic systems--non-coercion is. Now that's idealism - a human-powered machine that doesn't work by coercion. Yep, that's where I'd place my bet. Assuming you are being facetious, you are missing the anarchies that are all around us. Bookstores, restaurants, and a hundred other similar examples operate with essentially no coercion over customers, no coercion over who enters their stores or restaurants, and with very little regulation by men with guns. Noncoercion _is_ the sine qua non in that when agents are not coerced, their natural profit-making motivations can then operate. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: BSE
At 6:09 PM -0700 4/30/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think where we differ is that I'm extremely pessimististic about human nature. It's not that I don't like the idealistic picture, I just don't see that it can work out that way. First, being extremely pessimistic about human nature is _precisely_ why you don't want Throgg the Strongman or Mao the Savior or Hillary the Know it All in charge. Top-down rule by strongmen _magnifies_ the negative aspects of human nature. Second, no one is claiming to know how things will work out. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Technological Solution
At 11:22 PM -0400 4/28/01, Declan McCullagh wrote: On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 06:32:08PM -0700, Tim May wrote: None of the non-cryptographic methods are very resistant to legal, technical, sniffing, and black bag attacks. And only multiply-chained encrypted-at-each-stage messages, a la remailers, are adequate for high-value messages. If only they worked. There was an interesting paper presented here in Pittsburgh at the info hiding workshop this week that suggested a way to strengthen the somewhat-suckful mixmaster network. (Of course, the network will never be even somewhat reliable until sufficient incentive -- ie digital cash or somesuch -- exists for running one.) At least one active cypherpunk was involved in writing that paper, and I cited it in my Wired article this week. Well, better than nothing. (Like I said in another article tonight, the best is often the enemy of the good.) We knew even in 1992 that remailers were a pale imitation of the DC Nets discussed a few years earlier by Chaum and analyzed by others as well. But there were no DC Nets in 1992, and so remailers were nonetheless a step above what existed then (basically, the Kremvax/Kleinpaste/Julf approach). I also saw at least two list members cited in your article (or perhaps in other articles dealing with the same conference): Ulf Moeller and David Molnar. I didn't check out the program for the conference, but it seems to me beyond any doubt that a lot of the current work at IBM and NRL and whatever on information hiding was outlined by our own posts in 1992-94, the period of major ferment. (My own first article on Usenet on using the LSBs of sound files and images for steganography was in around 1990-91. Someday the Usenet archives for sci.crypt will go back that far and I'll be able to prove it. There may have been ideas prior to mine, of course, but mine was pretty early in the game.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Technological Solution
At 6:32 PM -0700 4/28/01, Tim May wrote: (You see, the quick review process is much better than the method you suggested re: economics, that people read the main textbooks. People don't need to spend several months wading through cryptography textbooks to come up to a level that is sufficient to understand the real issues.) I erred. I got Aimee mixed-up with Faustine. It is Faustine who argues for reading Samuelson instead of the books we normally recommend. Apologies to both chicks. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Technological Solution
At 2:24 PM -0500 4/28/01, Aimee Farr wrote: Reading the IMC gag order, Henson, the latest anonymous poster stuff, and Tim et. al. beating my head in pavement Since many forums don't allow for 'nymity, (or people just don't), what about a protected/offshore self-destruct quicktopic-like service: http://www.quicktopic.com/7/H/Kf6X7D9whDPx I use a quicktopic link in hyperlinked forums and email lists to avoid snoop bots, archival, and to disassociate the conversation to someplace that allows people to slip into a nym jacket. (I even have Aimee's Fightin' Rooster Pit for flame warrin' lawyers.) I'm sure this is a stunningly stupid idea... but it would seem to put people in (more) control of their content, instead of depending on the web site or service to adopt a solution for them. You're conflating many diverse issues, and, yes, picking a weak approach as a cure-all. (Note that I didn't even choose to heed your Kick me! sign by agreeing with you that it is a stunningly stupid idea. It's not stunningly stupid to use Hotmail, MyDeja (before it went away), etc. Many on this list have been doing so for years.) The conflation comes as follows: * Keith Henson chose to post under his own name, to appear in person at COS offices and recruiting centers, to picket, and so on. He was not trying to be anonymous or pseudonymous, so your proposal above would be pointless in his case. Likewise, I choose to post under my own name for most of my posts. (And, BTW, as you are new, Keith was on our list for a while. I've known Keith since 1976, and he's in the same Bay Area circles that overlap so often.) * Lots of ways exist to disassociate articles and comments from True Names. Remailers, nym servers, Hotmail, MyDeja, throwaway accounts, Web-to-mail, etc. Not having looked at the quicktopic thing you recommend, I can't say whether it's better or worse than most of these other methods. * Many posters on Cypherpunks are already using such methods...or did you think Lucky Green and Eric Cordian are government-sanctioned meatspace names? * Interestingly, most of the recent publicity over courts being asked to force names to be revealed has involved services like Silicon Investor, Raging Bull, and Yahoo fora, which DO support pseudonyms. In some cases the services have refused to reveal the true names associated with nyms on their boards. None of the non-cryptographic methods are very resistant to legal, technical, sniffing, and black bag attacks. And only multiply-chained encrypted-at-each-stage messages, a la remailers, are adequate for high-value messages. If you plan to stay on this list, I think it's long past time that you spend several hours reviewing past developments in these areas. (You see, the quick review process is much better than the method you suggested re: economics, that people read the main textbooks. People don't need to spend several months wading through cryptography textbooks to come up to a level that is sufficient to understand the real issues.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: layered deception
On Sunday, April 29, 2001, at 07:41 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote: I think Matt is a bit too quick to conclude a court will charge the operator with contempt and that the contempt charge will stick on appeal. Obviously judges have a lot of discretion, but it doesn't seem to me like the question is such a clear one if a system is set up in the proper cypherpunkish manner. As there are no ex post facto laws, setting up an offshore/non-duress log haven in 2001 cannot result in a charge in 2003 that this was illegal or contempt of court. Not even today's fool judges will claim that is contempt. (It is only contempt if a judge orders an action which a witness is _able_ to comply with but which he does not...and of course not always then.) Judges cannot require time machines be used to undo past actions. --Tim May
Re: layered deception
On Sunday, April 29, 2001, at 10:59 PM, Kevin L Prigge wrote: On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 10:11:40PM -0700, Sandy Sandfort wrote: Kevin wrote: From recent experience, LE provides us with an order to preserve certain logged information. The order is in advance of obtaining a search warrant... What form do these orders take? Who, specifically, makes the order? What authority is cited to back up the power to make such orders? What does your lawyer say about the validity of these orders? It's a written notice that a search warrant is being prepared. The ECPA allows for orders to preserve electronic evidence (section 2704 deals with this). I think the issue is one of basic Bill of Rights issues. The Constitution refers to search warrants--it does NOT say that acts of Congress may cause actions BEFORE a search warrant is duly authorized by a judge. I have no doubt that the ECPA (and probably the Digital Telephony Act and other such recent abridgements of freedom) _say_ that citizen-units must begin organizing their papers in advance of a raid and must begin compiling logs of various things in advance of a court order, warrant, etc. Someday maybe a Supreme Court case will be heard. It is unlikely that any modern court will strike down these acts of Congres, but they should. The language about due process and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures does not say a ministerial (non-court) agent may do these things. This goes for Carnivore, too. What part of the Fourth Amendment are they missing? But all of these things show how far down the road to a police state we have gone. --Tim May
Re: Technological Solution
I wrote: --- If you plan to stay on this list, I think it's long past time that you spend several hours reviewing past developments in these areas. (You see, the quick review process is much better than the method you suggested re: economics, that people read the main textbooks. People don't need to spend several months wading through cryptography textbooks to come up to a level that is sufficient to understand the real issues.) --- This is still an important issue, even though Aimee seems to think her head is being bashed on the pavement on this issue. The best is often the enemy of the good. My reading list suggestion had included several important books for list members to read that covered the economics topics of most interest and importance to our themes. The authors you have already seen. The topics are, roughly: libertarian viewpoints, public choice theory, game theory, the role of evolution and learning, preference revealing, etc. It is not essential to become an expert in game theory, or cryptography, or economics, or law. Rather, it is important to get up to speed quickly...IF one plans to contribute to a mailing list or discussion forum. As this applies to crypto, for example, it is very important important that members of the list understand roughly how PGP is used, how remailers work, what the BlackNet experiment showed, how reputations solve many distributed problems of interest to us, and so on--I could generate a long list of topics, and in fact _have_ generated such a list in the form of the Cyphernomicon. This is _much_ more important than that they spend several months reading Schneier, or Koblitz, or any of the dozen or so main textbooks. (Ideally, they should have one of these books to look at while reading about PGP, remailers, etc.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
RE: Technological Solution
At 9:43 PM -0500 4/28/01, Aimee Farr wrote: Tim said: * Keith Henson chose to post under his own name, to appear in person at COS offices and recruiting centers, to picket, and so on. He was not trying to be anonymous or pseudonymous, so your proposal above would be pointless in his case. Likewise, I choose to post under my own name for most of my posts. Yes. (And, BTW, as you are new, Keith was on our list for a while. I've known Keith since 1976, and he's in the same Bay Area circles that overlap so often.) Hm. Hm, indeed. The Church of Scientology case is a good example to look at. First, I am not a COS critic. Yeah, I've known since I was knee high to a hobbit that Dianetics, er, Scientology was a crock. That is, since I first read up on it in about 1967 (a Life magazine article, IIRC.) I followed the crapola about the engrams and the clams and Xenu for the next 30 years or so. When my friend Keith Henson decided to make war on the Church of Scientology, I said to him Why bother? They're no worse than Catholics who practice ritual cannibalism and induce gullible peasants to help build their churches of ivory and gold. Keith got a rush out of fighting the war. Me, I hate lawyers, I hate the term pro se, and I have seen too many of my friends wading out into the Big Muddy of the law. Also, I _despise_ the enthusiasm I see in the anti-COS movement toward moves by fascist states like France and Germany to declare Scientology an illegal religion. And I despise the calls for revocation of their tax status, etc. What's good enough for the Baptists and Rastafarians and Fribtertarians ought to be good enough for the Scientologists. Nevertheless, I remain a friend of Keith Henson. However, there are interesting links between the COS issue and Cypherpunks. Turns out that the war really started when someone posted the NOTS secret Church doctrines on alt.religion.scientology using Julf Helsingius' PENET mailing service. The Church flipped out, this was in early 1995, and launched a court battle to force Julf to reveal who the author was. The Julf mailing service was based on the work of an American, Karl Kleinpaste. It was not a true Cypherpunks-style remailer (based on the ideas of David Chaum, myself, Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, and others). Eventually the Finnish courts forced Julf to reveal the mapping. _Then_ it traced back to a Cypherpunks remailer chain, to a nym account at C2.net. That is, to more remailers. The trail stopped cold. (C2Net was run by our own Sameer Parekh and several other list members, including Doug Barnes and Sandy Sandfort. When C2Net changed its business model, most of its nym services transferred to Lance Cottrell, who still runs various services.) Is this too much history? Perhaps. But it shows the deep links between topics some so glibly comment on and what we've been working on for more than a decade. Much of this is covered in my Cyphernomicon. I urge you to get yourself up to speed, or to leave the list. Your provocative quarrels have grown tiresome. * Lots of ways exist to disassociate articles and comments from True Names. Remailers, nym servers, Hotmail, MyDeja, throwaway accounts, Web-to-mail, etc. Not having looked at the quicktopic thing you recommend, I can't say whether it's better or worse than most of these other methods. Look it up. It's easy, 20 seconds. Sheeple food. Again, I was thinking about a crypto-savvy offlinking solution. Obviously, this is a dumb idea for some reason, or not doable. I specifically didn't say it was dumb--that's your chick insecurity thing showing. What I pointed out is that such forms of weak nyms have been common for half a dozen years. * Interestingly, most of the recent publicity over courts being asked to force names to be revealed has involved services like Silicon Investor, Raging Bull, and Yahoo fora, which DO support pseudonyms. In some cases the services have refused to reveal the true names associated with nyms on their boards. I know this. But you were the one who suggested a solution to the linkability problem...when in fact your solution is no stronger than what Silicon Investor and Raging Bull already have as the default. None of the non-cryptographic methods are very resistant to legal, technical, sniffing, and black bag attacks. And only multiply-chained encrypted-at-each-stage messages, a la remailers, are adequate for high-value messages. Well, I was thinking obviously something dumb. There's that chick thing again. If you plan to stay on this list, I think it's long past time that you spend several hours reviewing past developments in these areas. I think it's long past time that you spent several hours kissing my ass. I too, suffer from delusional fantasies. :) I suggest that you spend a few hours or tens of hours catching up and your response is some kind of 8th-grade schoolgirl joke. --Tim May
Re: Technological Solution
At 10:09 PM -0400 4/28/01, John Young wrote: Finally, reading the NYT account of Kerry's team killing the Vietnamese is sobering. The article is much more disturbing than accounts of it have portrayed. Kerry's and other killers' spin over the years have induced an intolerance for reading the grim shit that the military does when it is out of control. We sent Lt. Calley to prison for life for being the officer in charge during My Lai. Will we send Lt. Kerry to prison for life for the same thing? Don't count on it. Calley was a red neck, what the COS calls fair game. Kerry is a Beloved Liberal. Hence his crimes must be Explained Away. Already this is happening. Kerry will likely end up a Victim. And be sure to reflect on Bamford's account of the Joint Chiefs planning to fake a terrorist attack on the US to warrant a Cuban offensive. And the plan to pin the blame on a possible John Glenn space failure on information warfare from Cuba. (The plan was that if John Glenn's mission in 1962 failed, the story would be that Havana had been beaming interference rays at Cape Canaveral.) Fidel was the Jim Bell of 1962. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Gibberish was Re: Right to anon. speech online upheld in US district court
On Wednesday, April 25, 2001, at 06:41 AM, Steve Mynott wrote: Is John Young actually a Nym for Robert Hettinga? Or is there meaning hidden via some advanced steganographical technique? John Young [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: That'd plonk the whole discoursing shebang, I mean lockbox all golden tongues everywhere. Then journalisming kaput, and professorialing, and congressionaling, and getting inside the barflied nobodies's indifference to yarping of yarpingists, the tube-hating and baiting of sports, windfall, millionaires. Dejoyceizing his scribblings, it all boils down to the Shalmaneserian Christ, what an imagination I've got! --Tim May (who can't parse or understand John Young's writings either. When I see he's writing in a lucid state, I read his posts. When I see he's in an opium dream, I delete the fucker.)
The Crews Proposal vs. Intentional Communities
At 8:13 PM +0300 4/25/01, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: I think this may be one idea for which you don't want credit. Actually it's one that's been implemented. The problem is, those perverters made their Net such a fun place *everybody* wanted part of it. And the proposal brings up (again) the interesting issue of just what the Net is: -- is it a physical thing, like a piece of property? -- is it a public accommodation, like a public highway? -- is it a collection of mostly privately-owned fibers, cables, and switches, with users contracting to carry packets over parts of it? -- is it a set of protocols, e.g., TCP/IP and suchlike? -- is it some cyberspace, evocative yet nebulous? In my case, I pay for my telephone line (no DSL yet, and I don't have cable) and I pay a company in Santa Cruz, my ISP. They have arrangements they made with upstream providers. So when I send packets, they travel in contractual ways. Maybe to lne.com, maybe to yahoo.com, maybe to foreign sites. In what sense would it be meaningful to talk about creating alternative nets? I would still telephone my ISP, he would still use his T1s and T3s and the like to communicate with other machines, etc. Is the proposal that I would use _other_ physical cables, fibers, etc.? Obviously not. That is too bizarre to even consider. Is it then that I would somehow be told I could not use TCP/IP protocols, that I must use alternate protocols? Or is, as the only thing I could see that could even remotely be implementable, that certain users might have their packets tagged in some way, or that they be forced to use encryption in certain ways. So instead of Cypherpunks choosing to encrypt all of their communications to each other (major problems here, but that's another issue), some sort of Authority would require, say, the perverts and seditionists to encrypt everything to some encryption protocol that only other members of the mandated PervertNet and SeditionNet could view. Nothing else makes sense, as the phone lines and T1s and fibers owned by Sprint and WorldCom and Cable Wireless are already there and essentially must be used. (And there are property issues, of course.) (By must I am _not_ saying that Alice gets to claim some right to use a T1 between Santa Cruz and San Jose simply because it's _there_ and she cannot afford to string her own T1 over the mountain passes. More the point that someone built and paid for that line, and that if they wish to sell packet space to Alice, through contractual/ISP arrangements, it is no business of anyone to tell her that she must build her own separate infrastructure.) Crews has not thought very deeply about the issues. He acknowledged in the article that he is not a technical person. And he admitted: Even Crews admits that he hasn't worked out the logistics or a clear-cut definition for what he envisions. But like a true visionary, that hasn't stopped him from pushing the idea. Well, it doesn't require someone to be knowledgeable about the guts of Linux or TCP/IP or whatever to see that the idea of a PervertNet or a SeditionNet, mandated by the state, is unworkable for several very good reasons. Which is not to say that PervertNets are not possible, or not already in operation. In fact, porn-trading networks are already out there. Even child porn rings...many news stories about these things. And mailing lists, Web chat rooms, IRCs, etc. are quite clearly examples of virtual communities. Another name is intentional communties, as in gate communities, private clubs, etc. (Crews needs to get up to speed on this stuff before he starts recommending policy for Cato! He might want to read my own Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities paper, done for the Imagina conference in Monte Carlo in 1995, and since reprinted in several places and (still) available on the Web via search engines.) Crews is taking the Good Idea of self-protection and self-selection and perverting it into a mandated (one assumes, else the idea is just rehashing existing things) ghettoization. I expect that he will probably come around and will say that intentional communties was all he was ever suggesting in the first place. Well, we've had them since the start of the Net, back in the late 60s, early 70s. And before. The more things change --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Free market solutions to foot and mouth disease outbreaks
At 6:33 PM -0500 4/25/01, Jim Choate wrote: On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote: On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 06:43:20PM -0700, Tim May wrote: From our perspective, it will show the foolishness of government overreaction (ordering a million animals to be slaughtered and burned with tires and old pressure-treated lumber railroad ties). Yes, top-down government regulation is clearly the best way to handle environmental crises, as the Brits showed so very well. What and why would the Anarcho-Capitalist responce be? 1. Each farm and each farmer is primarily responsible for protecting his farm against contact exposure. He can, and should, disinfect the feet and clothes who come from outside his property. He can also incur the additional expense of vaccinating his animals. (Yes, vaccines exist.) As with government flood insurance, the subsidies of unprotected behavior do much harm. Farmers are not incentivized to protect their own flocks if they think government will do it for them...and if they think a mass kill of even their protected animals will be ordered by some simpleton. 2. Foot and mouth is survivable. It's expensive to nurse animals through the process, hence the common practice of killing the herds. 3. If burning the animals is picked as the option, at least apply the same standards which would be applied to private actors. A business which proposed to dump 25-40% of the total annual dioxin burden into the air would be told to find other options. (Especially when concentrated in a specific region.) However, governments usually exempt themselves from their own laws, for natural and obvious reasons. (Because they _can_, for starters. And because bureaucrats planning tire pyres don't have anyone they have to go to for permission, unlike a business planning something similar. And because they think they are above the law.) For good ways to think about the tort issues, David Friedman's new book, Law's Order, is very good. Also, Richard Posner. Faustine can tell us where in Samuelson these kinds of issues are discussed. (Presumably the flawed analysis of externalities.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Recording conversations and the laws of men
At 10:27 AM -0700 4/24/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (commenting on Aimee's words) It sounds to me like you are suggesting gutting the threat models that should be used during the design phase of any communication system. You are implying that if there's a legal way of saying that something may not be recorded then being recorded is no longer a threat. That is not and never will be the case no matter what the court du jour may have to say about it. Just so. Regardless of no phone recording laws, people continue to do it. Linda Tripp got caught in this, and only because she publicized her taping of her phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky. Millions of other people do it everyday. Many modern phones and answering machines make it easier than ever. Thinking that the law will fix this problem (if it even _is_ a problem!) is wrong-headed. And the law has never stopped the NSA, CIA, and FBI from recording and tapping at will (Shamrock, Echelon, Carnivore). Even if the tapes cannot be used in court without a warrant, so what? They get what they want by taping and tapping, whether they can use the results as evidence or not. Technological means are our best protection. The laws of mathematics, not the laws of men. (I think Eric Hughes came up with this, but I could be wrong.) Further, I don't think individuals owe any obligation to the law as to the participants, form, content or retention of private communications. I don't see how the law can improve upon this opportunity for privacy. In fact, based on past performance, I would expect exactly the opposite effect. Again, just so. The laws about tape-recording conversations have no basis in any moral theory I can support. If I choose to gargoyle myself and have a tape recorder, even a video recorder, running at all times, how is this doing physical violence to others? (Even contractual issues are amenable to this analysis. If Alice doesn't want to be taped in her interactions with Bob, she can negotiate an arrangement that he turns off his tape recorders in her presence. If he violates this contract, perhaps she can collect. Some day this will likely be done via polycentric law, a la Snow Crash.) Meanwhile, we don't need more stinking laws allegedly protecting our privacy while actually interfering with our ability to make and form voluntary relationships. Finally, the law has an impressive track record, in stark contrast to 'crypto-anarchy.' ~Aimee I think an even more impressive track record is how people manage to create and operate economies and communications under any number of oppressive systems. Systems come and go and still people trade and communicate. I suppose they have no choice... These are the myriad anarchies I referred to in my post, The anarchies my destination. Top-down rule from a strong man is actually computationally expensive. Direct communication is more efficient. The street knows this well. Kevin Kelly's book Out of Control is another book folks here should read. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Wendy Grossman: From Anarchy to Power: The Net Comes of Age
At 6:16 PM -0400 4/24/01, Matthew Gaylor wrote: From: Jon Lebkowsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Wendy Grossman Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 19:56:22 -0600 Shameless plug: I'm interviewing Wendy Grossman in Inkwell.vue on the WELL. You can read the interview at: http://engaged.well.com/engaged/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vuef=0t=109 Wendy's a London-based writer with a couple of books coming out; the one we're focusing on in the interview is _From Anarchy to Power: The Net Comes of Age_, available from Amazon: Congratulations to Jon for getting an interview with a _journalist_! (I'm hoping to get an interview with Jon, so I can say I interviewed someone who interviewed a journalist.) Of course, in this day and age, it's the journalists and scribblers who fill the panels at conferences, and it's the journalists sought out by other journalists for comments on the Meaning of it All. One of our well-known journalists, a good one, was saying recently that he's been invited to many special conferences on cutting edge issues, libertarian technopolitics, etc. I guess I'll need to become a journalist to even be invited to my _first_ such event! Merely inventing a bunch of things and writing about them for the past 13 years on the Net doesn't hardly qualify for inclusion amongst the _journalists_! With the proliferation of Oracle 8i World, the magazine for Oracle 8i Administrators and Python Times and several hundred other niche computer magazines, maybe we'll _all_ have to become journalists just to fill the pages. (OTOH, I expect a shakeout in the b.s. magazines comparable to the bursting of the bubble for the dot gones.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Amtrak The War On Drugs
At 3:55 PM -0800 4/24/01, Raymond D. Mereniuk wrote: On 24 Apr 2001, at 11:02, Ken Brown wrote: You need phone numbers to buy train tickets? Why? Since when? The USA may be a wonderful country but over here where we we employ I believe in the original story the fellow bought a train from Phoenix Arizona to Boston MA. This is a little different then buying a ticket for a trip from Waterloo to Sevenoaks or London to Manchester. Distance wise it is comparable to a London to Baghdad trip. However, it used to be SOP to buy train tickets at the ticket window--for cash and with no I.D. or phone numbers or SS numbers or forehead marks. It looks like the temporary measures to combat the TWA 800 bombing sorts of events, even though TWA 800 almost certainly wasn't a bombing, are now spreading to the trains. First they demanded ID and SS numbers for the airlines, but I didn't fly so I did nothing. Then they demanded the same for trains, but I didn't take trains, so I did nothing. Now they demand ID and SS numbers for buses and public parking lots, and my trial is next month. Anyone paying in untraceable funds is Assumed to be a Suspicious Person. Anyone not giving credit card and SS information, likewise. And in Amerika, to be a Suspicious Person is probable cause for a search of bags and backpacks and purses, the Fourth Amendment be damned. (The taking without due process, covered by other constitutional rights, is another matter, though the conclusion that Amerika has become a kleptocracy is unchanged.) Those in other countries should not sit back and smirk. France, Germany, and Japan are already far along in their march to statism. Kanada is catching up. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Amtrak The War On Drugs
At 5:20 PM -0700 4/24/01, David Honig wrote: At 11:02 AM 4/24/01 +0100, Ken Brown wrote: and burn a million cows on pyres of used tyres and railway sleepers (they are thinking of using napalm to save money) The chemicals in the materials you're using for your pyres are poisoning the locals with dioxins... napalm is a lot cleaner and faster than dioxin-generating old tires and railroad ties, supposedly. We have the Burning Man festival; y'all have your Burning Cow festival. Whatever melts your cheese. I saw an estimate yesterday that millions of hectares of farmland are now contaminated with enough dioxins from The Burnings that the U.S. government will likely not let their output into the U.S. European nations, ever eager to poke a stick in England's eye, are reportedly considering the same ban. If true, this is going to nuke the U.K. big time. From our perspective, it will show the foolishness of government overreaction (ordering a million animals to be slaughtered and burned with tires and old pressure-treated lumber railroad ties). I wonder if the starving Brits will also be burned in piles? --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: The Well-Read Cypherpunk
On Tuesday, April 24, 2001, at 09:21 AM, Bill Stewart wrote: Perhaps the field has changed since I was in college, but back then, academic econometrics had the reputation of being dominated by Marxists - the more-Scientific Socialists who understood that if you want a centrally planned economy, you have to measure it so you can control it, as opposed to the purely political Scientific Socialists who believed in centrally planning an economy based on class struggle and rewarding heroic truck factory workers and shooting bourgeois greedy bankers and other warm fuzzy liberal values stuff. While the US government doesn't strongly believe in central planning, it has still supported that kind of field because if you want to spend lots of money, either on liberal welfare state programs, right-wing Anti-Commie military-industrial-complex welfare programs, or good old fashioned bi-partisan pork for your friends, you need to know how and where to squeeze the economy to maximize revenue without overly disrupting the processes that generate it. I'll provide a data point about what corporations want: they hire a _lot_ of MBAs, but not a lot of economists. Sure, MBAs have to complete a series of econ courses, probably based on Samuelson and the various micro- and macro-econ courses, but mostly corporations are seeking those with tools to manage businesses, markets, product lines, etc. Classical economics is not a focus. And as Bill said in another post, Samuelson generated a very big book mainly (it seems) to sell more copies. Sort of like similar big books in molecular biology and organic chemistry. --Tim May
Re: The Crypto State
At 11:48 PM -0700 4/22/01, Ray Dillinger wrote: I have been studying cryptographic protocols for consensus action of late, and I have come to a somewhat startling conclusion. If a society is sufficiently rich in cryptographic protocols, there is no need for anyone to work for a government. Cf. crypto anarchy. The point is, people could pick and choose the policies they wanted in terms of law and governance, implement them as protocols, and run them free of the prejudices, fears, and reinterpretations of human officials other than the governed themselves. The kick is that there can even be a protocol for changing the set of protocols and enforcing the change against holdouts (a variation on the 'byzantine generals' protocol). But anyway, my conclusion is that it is possible to get basic business taken care of -- whatever 'basic business' means to the people living there -- without creating a priveleged class or a class 'more equal' than anyone else in the form of politicians, judges, etc. Basically, if the people are rich enough in cryptographic protocols, computing power, and communications infrastructure, then government employees are not necessary. Cf. crypto anarchy. I think AP may have contained the germ of this idea; but Bell was perhaps too much of a nihilist to develop it in this direction, and more bent on destruction than creation. Crediting Bell with this idea, when he only arrived on the scene in the mid-90s, is absurd. Read some history. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: The Crypto State
At 1:12 PM -0700 4/23/01, Ray Dillinger wrote: On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote: Cf. crypto anarchy. Cf. crypto anarchy. Uh, Tim? I've seen what you mean by crypto anarchy, and this ain't it. I'm talking about a society with laws, order, and *orders*. A society where individual people can go to jail or go on trial or get drafted into a war against their will if the laws requiring that get passed. You have apparently skipped over all of the discussions of polycentric law, then. Competing jurisdictions, with protection money paid. As in Snow Crash (one of the books on the reading list). Cf. Bruce Benson (also on the reading list), and David Friedman (ditto). The revolutionary and anarchist rhetoric here has masked the facts of the matter -- people have been talking about rebellion, bomb-throwing, and other acts of defiance and rage, but that's not where the path they're pointing at leads. No, some people. Some people have asked how to make bombz, some people have claimed that I, for example, have Samsons (whatever those are...I am assuming missiles of some sort) stored in a bunker on the East Coast, and some people have debated Bell's AP more seriously than others. In fact, acts of rebellion and rage are the single worst possible thing that could be done, and will actively prevent a crypto state from arising. Bell's AP paper may not have been where the seed came from originally, but aside from pointers at some science-fiction books with zero technical content and impossible economics and cultures, there has been no trace whatsoever of any other protocols for replacing government on this list. Nonsense. And even Bell's protocol presented in AP is unimplementable on technical grounds. I had formally analyze it and discover this for myself, because nobody here acknowledged that simple fact until I rubbed their damn noses in it. Nope, also nonsense. Read my own comments from 1995, and the comments of others at the time, and in the years after. (You once said you were on the list since the days when Detweiler was active, so you must either remember these discussions or have saved mail. If not, do a search...much of the CP list traffic is archived and shows up in searches.) The lack of digital money is the main problem. Certain spoofing attacks are another problem. Several people commented on the unworkability of Bell's wonderful idea. That you are only now concluding this does not mean nobody here acknowledged that simple fact until I rubbed their damn [SIC] noses in it. I dug through archives for days looking for a glimmer of anything actually useful for establishing a working and useful government rather than simply tearing one down or hiding one's activities from it, and believe it or not Bell's paper came closest. If you think this, then you're a lightweight thinker. The hell of it is, you (and most of the other list members) have been absolutely no help. Whenever I've asked a question about whatever I was stuck on at the moment, you've done nothing more than sneer. The most helpful thread recently has been the well-read cypherpunk, and just a hint, Tim? the books *you* recommended were no damn help. In fact, they were a waste of time. The only new ideas there were unworkable distractions at best, presented as though they might make sense but with impossible requirements both technically (missing information) and pragmatically (human nature goes a different direction and the whole thing explodes). And of the few ideas that don't suffer these problems, there's either no hint of how to actually implement nor any proof that an implementation is possible, or they're ideas I'd already had. As I said, you're a lightweight. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
The Well-Read Cypherpunk
At 1:21 PM -0700 4/15/01, Greg Broiles wrote: At 01:46 AM 4/15/2001 -0700, Ryan Sorensen wrote: Read the hundreds of articles on these matters. Read "The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State," by Bruce Benson. Read David Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom," and his other books. Read... The point is, Aimee, _read the background material_. Admittedly, I'm not Aimee. I was wondering if I could get a few helpful pointers towards the background material? Any assistance would be much appreciated. You might also take a look at Robert Axelrod's _The Evolution of Cooperation_. And there are a dozen other books. The Well-Read Cypherpunk should know something about free market economics (not the Samuelson technical stuff taught in introductory econ classes in college), a litte bit about game theory and evolutionary game theory, some basic anarchist theory (left or right, provided one can see through the ideology), and should have an exposure to primitive cultures and how they trade for goods, how international commerce evolved, etc. It used to be that wide reading in "Scientific American" would supply a lot of the basics, stripped of any ideology. (Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column was a staple...fortunately, his couple of dozen books are widely available.) The point of course is not to lay out a "logical proof" that crypto anarchy and related things are inevitable, but to establish a series of "paving stones" that allow the reader to stand and see how the gaps are likely to be filled in. (There are places where rigorous proof is useful, mainly in filling in these gaps. This view is in sharp contrast to the "pure logic" worldview demolished by Godel, Turing, Kleene, Chaitin, and others. Yes, such things have applicability even to epistemology.) Even fields dominated by ostensibly rigorous proof, like mathematics, fit this model. Before one can read a proof, a set of concepts has to be established. A few proofs, relating to geometry and number theory (no largest prime) are accesssible to young kids with little formal education, but even these kids must understand numbers and triangles and such, else the "proofs" are only manipulations of abstract symbols. (There's a small faction within mathematics which thinks this is all math is.) A demand that a "proof" be given that crypto anarchy is inevitable is thus not very interesting. What is more interesting is to establish the "paving stones" which make it more obvious what the implications of certain technologies are. (And thoughtful government analysts, even those who are no great friends of crypto anarchy, point to the dangers of crypto anarchy for the precise reason that they have enough of the paving stones to see how things are likely to unfold if certain trends continue.) Those of us who started the list, or who arrived in the first few years, were generally immersed in the writings of David Friedman, Bruce Benson, Vernor Vinge, Orson Scott Card, Robert Heinlein, Douglas Hofstadter, Hakim Bey, Martin Gardner, Robert Axelrod, Henry Hazlitt, and, last but not least, Ayn Rand. Not all of us had read all of this stuff, but it was a common enough set amongst techno-libertarians. Some were more knowledgeable about evolutionary game theory, others more knowledgeable about Unix. But when someone referred to Friedman's essays on Icelandic anarchy, it didn't draw the blanks I think we now see. Maybe people in those days, pre-Web, read more books. If someone didn't understand the reference, they tended to ask politely. Lately, we've had outsiders arrive on the list hostile to the core ideas. Though there is no ideological purity test, it is not interesting when someone like Aimee Farr--just the latest in a series--arrives and says, essentially, "OK, prove it to me!" Lacking the paving stones, the basis vectors, the building blocks, giving her some kind of logical proof would be pointless. And, as I said to her, if she wants one from me she can pay my daily consulting fee for as long as it takes me to write one. Many reading lists have been given over the years. Use search engines to find them (much Cypherpunks traffic shows up in Google, for example.) My Cyphernomicon has a bunch of book references, too, as well as supplying mini-essays on hundreds of topics. Read Steven Levy's article in "Wired." Read the essays of Eric Hughes, Duncan Frissell, and many others. Read about the Law Merchant, about international trade even before nation-states existed, much less international courts of justice. Read about the early bankers and how they enforced contracts. Read, read, read. I'm not saying every subscriber or interested person here should read hundreds of books. Just reading half a dozen, and thinking "outside the box" about the implications, is more
Escrow agents
This is well-trod ground. I'll have to be brief here. At 2:06 PM -0700 4/15/01, Ray Dillinger wrote: On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote: Widespread black markets, for drugs, betting, etc., suggest otherwise. There are many markets out there which do not rely on the official court system to enforce contracts for. This is true, but look at the mechanisms for enforcing contracts that they *do* use. Most of them are not compatible with anonymity, and only a few are compatible with pseudonymity. Mafia Bosses don't buy information from someone when they don't know where that someone lives. It's the exact same enforceability of contracts problem that other parts of society uses lawyers to deal with. Legbreakers or cops, basically they have the same job with regard to contract enforcement. There has to be a hook where someone who does a ripoff can be punished, or else there is no deal. You are talking about what game theorists call "defection," or what drug dealers would call "burning." Cheating, deception, etc. No one can deny that animals, humans, and other agents use deception, hiding, coloration, etc. Nothing is perfect, not even in the "law-regulated economy" some folks seem to think is the only economy which can function. How non-law-regulated (black) markets work, and how they deal with deception and cheating, is a huge topic. (I recently suggested to David Friedman that he consider taking on this topic for a major book.) But the "paving stone," or touch stone, I want to bring up is this: the role of third party escrow agents. Use Google or a similar search engine and search on "cyphernomicon escrow". The section on use of escrow agents will come up immediately. One such URL is http://calvo.teleco.ulpgc.es/cyphernomicon/chapter16/16.24.html (I have written dozens of articles on this over the years, answering the same tired old question that Ray Dillinger asks.) When you have read this, and thought about the issue, we can discuss things further. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Message from a Parallel Universe
Cypherpunks, I was twiddling the dials on my Hartle-Witten BraneNet, and I received this message from a parallel negative tension brane universe. Apparently there is a group similar to our own group in this world which is at this quasi-time debating "literary anarchy." Here's an excerpt: Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 15:53:24 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Aimless Fargone [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Literary Anarchy Cc: I get what you guys are saying about how maybe individual readers of books could decide for themselves like what books they could read. I even hear your point of view that government regulation of bookstores, writers, magazines, and libraries might be dispensed with in some far-off utopian future. But, like, I don't understand how it would work. How would people know what was the truth and what was a lie. You guys talk about these mysterious "reputations," but couldn't authors _lie_ about their reputations, couldn't publishers deceived the gullible? And what's to keep an author from pretending to be another author, or what's to keep him from copying the style and ideas of another writer? How would people even know what was important and what wasn't? And couldn't foreign intelligence agents write stuff that was uncontrolled, contaminating our value propositions? Really, punks, I'm just seeking a value proposition for why it is that this idea of "literary anarchy" would work.
Re: Pleading the 5th
At 1:26 PM -0700 4/12/01, David Honig wrote: At 02:21 PM 4/12/01 -0400, Sunder wrote: While he can't really enforce what people do with the emails that they receive from him, if he sees his posts printed in full in the next issue of WIRED, he could sue. Quite salient coming after Tim's post about the vulnerability of centralized, publicized spaces/assets. Its precisely this that would make it practical to sue a copyright infringing entity. Except when the centralized entity its a state selling your DMV records, of course. "Sovereign immunity" is their salvation. Fact is, we as a nation have done several things to make it a great place for lawyers: -- nearly everything can be sued over. If Alice doesn't like a book that Borders sells, finding it "offensive" in some way, she sues. (It usually helps her case move through the system, generate publicity, collect contingency fee lawyers) if she claims the book in question belittles her aspirations as minority, or contains sexist terms, or caused her to suffer post-bookstore traumatic shock syndrome (PBTSS). -- deep pockets. Damages are not awarded based on objective standards (such as they are) but on how much money Borders, for example, might have in its coffers. McDonald's has a lot of money, so award an old lady a lot of money for trying to drive her car with a hot cup of coffee between her legs. The hospital is a Giant Corporation, thinks the jury, so award a woman a bunch of money when she says a CAT scan caused her to lose her psychic powers. -- a massively complicated legal system that requires expensive lawyers just to act as special scribes and priests who can interpret the Latinisms and complicated precedents. Those who act "pro se" (a la Parker, Henson, Bell, etc.) often find themselves chewed up and crushed by the machine. And those who rely on the "ditch diggers" of the legal industry, the court-paid shysters and hacks, find this is all part of the Plan. I once heard that a leading chip company was no longer pushing to reform the legal system, as they once had in the 1970s. Seems that by getting very big and having the resources to hire several hundred lawyers and entire floors of people to fill out required forms, permits, documentation, requests, etc., they were well-equipped to simply *outlast* the new chip companies which tried to be nimble--as Giant Chip Corp had once been--and to wait until the upstarts found themselves roadblocked by not having properly completed Permit Request 466-571 A, "Determination of Sufficient Burritos and Other Frozen Items in Company Break Rooms, pursuant to Fair Labor Standards Act, Sub-part B, revised 11/99." In other words, legal red tape helped those who had invested earliest in lawyers and hurt those trying to innovate. (By "rules" and "forms" I included taxes and accounting rules as well. Giant Chip Corp had more accountants and CPAs filling out endless mounds of paper required by local towns, counties, Regional Water Districts, Southern District MUDs, states, Feds, and international agencies and jurisdictions than it had design engineers working on its chips. And it came to _like_ the welter of laws and forms, as it raised the bar for upstart competitors.) This is all part of the rent-seeking process. Thugs shaking down those they can. Transactions by coercion. I would not be willing to set up any kind of on-line business. I would know that busybodies would be suing, lawyers would be sniffing around looking for "rent-seeking" (shakedown) opportunities, and hundreds of state and federal regulators and watchdogs would be searching for ways to either make a name for themselves or to finagle a way to be guaranteed a lobbying job after leaving government service. And then there are the "aggrieved" groups, the Holocaust Lobby being only the most vocal at the present time. It seems that every time I see a press release from ZKS they have added to their payroll or Board more lobbyists, more ombudsmen, more former Canadian government "privacy experts." Sure looks like they're being shaken down. Doesn't seem likely to me that all of these privacy czars and Ottawa Privacy Commission guys are going to be pushing for FreedomNet to be used for liberating communications from all traceability and accountability, does it? --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Pleading the 5th
At 10:29 AM -0800 4/11/01, Daniel J. Boone wrote: List owners have nothing to do with, and cannot affect, the intellectual property rights of list contributors. Your aspirations to the contrary notwithstanding. So you're saying that it is impossible to set up a list (or a publisher, same difference) where the rights to a work are transferred to (purchased by, whatever) the list or the publisher. So much for "All works become the sole property of ZYZ Corporation upon submission and acceptance." Property may be transferred. Intellectual property is property. It's all in the contract. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
RE: Screwing Jim Bell and Cypherpunks
At 9:51 AM -0700 4/10/01, Eric Cordian wrote: DCF wrote: Save that the Feds have no interest in proceeding against any list posters with cash and brains (or perhaps self-control). I think the Bell case indicates the need for Cypherpunks to start writing code again, and stop engaging in meatspace theatrics. First, Bell's actions are not the actions of most members of this mailing list. Frankly, this is a logical error: referring to "Cypherpunks" as a collective entity and then imputing the views or actions of a few to be the views or actions of the collective entity. The government does this routinely. Then no one would be on trial, and there wouldn't be a thing any government could do to stop it. Second, talk to Phil Z. and Kelly G. about their legal issues for several years, as the government sought to prosecute one or both of them for violations of the ITARs (and maybe more). True, neither was ultimately charged. Their legal bills were substantial, however, and they could have face prison time and massive fines. Whatever people do in the way of writing code, doing it as near to untraceably as possible would seem to be the way to go. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Federal tracking of drivers
At 2:08 PM -0700 4/10/01, Morlock Elloi wrote: --- Norm DePlume [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: choice excerpt: Information compiled by the Border Patrol on PAL users is confidential, and federal officials are concerned about others possibly Just FYI, inability to format text or sloppines, lazyness or sheer stupidity and disregard for readers imply that your selection criteria for posting is probably as dumb as your formatting capabilities. I agree. On the times when I have forwarded articles, I have felt the obligation to spend a few minutes making sure the word wraps were OK, sometimes even pasting-into a text editor for massaging prior to pasting into my mailer. A few more cases like this and "Norm DePlume" goes into the filter file. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
