RE: Think cash
Marcel Popescu[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: My proposal was to randomly create an image, which should be 1) easily recognizable by a human (say the image of a pet), but 2) complex enough so that no known algorithm could "reverse-engineer" this. [You need a randomly-generated image because otherwise one could build a large database of all the possible images and the correct answers.] Background information would also be very useful - see http://www.digitalblasphemy.com/userg/images/969403123.shtml - it's easy for a human being to identify the animal in the picture, but (AFAIK) impossible to write a program to do the same thing. Ideas? At 01:53 PM 10/11/00 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: You refer the the problem of recognizing a photo of an animal. It used to be said that no computer program could reliably distinguish between a dog and a cat, but I'm not sure that's the case since the development of neural networks. Blind humans aren't always good at recognizing screen images. Neural networks are good at recognizing things. Sometimes more precisely defined algorithms are good too. Some examples of recognition systems - you can look in the archives for pointers to the UCBerkeley "Naked People Finder", which does a reasonably accurate job of distinguishing whether pictures on the internet contain naked people. The people who did the research on that also designed the "Incredible Horse Finder", which identifies horse pictures on the net. I remember that those systems did a lot of modelling; I don't remember if they also did neural nets or not. If they wanted to describe shapes of dogs and cats and differentiate between them, it would be relatively doable. There's also a company out there that does "passfaces" - they pop up 9 pictures of people's faces, and you identify which one is in the set that's you password-equivalent. They do about 4 rounds of this, with random sets of faces; it's closer to a PIN than a real passphrase in strength, because they thought that was enough for their problem space. An interesting aspect of it is that humans are very good at recognizing faces, but not usually that good at describing them, so it's hard to give somebody else your passface set. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
Re: Gov. Bush links Columbine massacre to Internet use
At 12:14 PM -0500 10/12/00, Jim Burnes wrote: On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Tim May wrote: Normally I vote Libertarian. This year I may vote for Bush as a vote for who will do me, us, and the Constitution the lesser damage of the two. (All voting is about bang for the buck, about effectiveness of a vote...an election is not about "voting for the best man," it is instead about minimizing damage.) --Tim May Actually, your vote should be about getting what you want, not what you don't want. The quickest way to do that now is to consistently vote for the worst possible candidate. Possibly. All votes are about "cost/benefit" issues. The cost of voting, the benefits of voting, and further subdivided into the benefits of voting for various candidates. In most cases, the costs of voting exceed any expected benefits. Merely travelling to a polling place and spending half an hour or so voting is a cost greater than the benefits. Spending tens of hours watching news coverage of the election process is in a different league of wasted effort altogether. --Tim May -- -:-:-:-:-:-:-: Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
Re: Gov. Bush links Columbine massacre to Internet use
G.W.Bush is mentally negligible. He's fully capable of linking Scooby Doo to the Columbine Massacre. And while right-wingers just attack the BOR from a different angle than left-wingers, Bush **may** be the minimal damage choice this time around. It's not a pretty picture.
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Vanessa Lynch Manager, Partner Services Predict It, Inc. P 212.217.1223 E [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Make legal threats, go to jail for 20 years cpunk
Declan McCullagh[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: This is from a bill that both the House and Senate passed (yesterday): Whoever knowingly provides or obtains the labor or services of a person...by means of the abuse or threatened abuse of law or the legal process, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. URL: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:h.r.03244: I can imagine some abuses of this, in workplace situations or divorce cases... -Declan While almost any law can be abused, I think you'd need a really odd situation for normal people to be able to use this one abusively. For civilians, as far as I can see, it means that filing a totally bogus SLAPP suit, or (for example) threatening to make false reports of child abuse to get leverage in a divorce are now punishable beyond what they already are. Let us remember who the greatest abusers of law and the legal process are: LEAs and prosecutors. It appears to me that this law is far more a curb on the behaviour of bad cops and over-zealous DAs than anyone else. DAs too often obtain false testimony against third parties or plea bargains by threatening trumped-up charges. Corrupt cops can similarly threaten false or totally overblown charges to obtain services from the weak and defenseless. I suspect that in so far as far as any law can be considered 'good' this is one of the less bad ones. Of course, I rejoice that IANAL. Peter Trei
britan to allow insurers to do genetic test for checking hereditary traits
--Hushpart_boundary_jxjHqnFohYQDqoYSiPrCarsndlHbIuEg Content-type: text/plain http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_968000/968443.stm --Hushpart_boundary_jxjHqnFohYQDqoYSiPrCarsndlHbIuEg-- IMPORTANT NOTICE: If you are not using HushMail, this message could have been read easily by the many people who have access to your open personal email messages. Get your FREE, totally secure email address at http://www.hushmail.com.
Swedish Team Cracks Tough Computer Codes (was Re: NewsScan Daily,12 October 2000 (Above The Fold))
They must mean RSA512, of course. Given various people's pings to me about the death of 128-bit RC4, :-), someone should tell the New York Times, and others, about the difference between symmetric and asymmetric ciphers... Cheers, RAH At 9:12 AM -0700 on 10/12/00, NewsScan wrote: SWEDISH TEAM CRACKS TOUGH COMPUTER CODES A team of Swedish computer enthusiasts has succeeded in deciphering 10 increasingly difficult codes presented by author Simon Singh in his bestseller, "The Code Book." Singh, who has a doctorate in physics at Cambridge University in the U.K., took two years to develop the brain teasers with Dr. Paul Leyland, who works for Microsoft in Cambridge. The codes, which took the Swedes the equivalent of 70 years of computer time to decrypt, ranged from ciphers dating back to ancient Greece through the famed Nazi Enigma code machine used in World War II. The team was awarded a check for $15,000 for their efforts. Team leader Fredrik Almgren said the task was extremely daunting and that he and his fellow scientists were tempted to abandon the effort several times: "The first stages were very simple but at one point we thought we wouldn't get any further than stage eight. When you do come to the 10th stage it is a question of heavy mathematics and rather difficult algorithms that I don't even claim to understand myself." (Reuters/New York Times 12 Oct 2000) http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/10/12/technology/12R-CODE2.html -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Gov. Bush links Columbine
Tim May wimps out: Normally I vote Libertarian. This year I may vote for Bush as a vote for who will do me, us, and the Constitution the lesser damage of the two. (All voting is about bang for the buck, about effectiveness of a vote...an election is not about "voting for the best man," it is instead about minimizing damage.) Spoken like a true simp-wimp. A vote for *either* algore or gwbush is a direct vote for the New World Order. No ifs, ands, or buts. They are both trilateralists, scumbag bush even went the same SkullBones route his father did, his grandfather did, etc. There is no difference, Nader is right, it's TweedleDum TweedleDee, Dumb Dumber. Vote Nader -- at least he's honest. And don't give us all that horseshit about Nader=commutarian. Just because he's pro-labor and anti- megacorp doesn't make him a socialist, or commu-anything. You've shown your true colors, Tim -- you're just a simp-wimp under the skin. Vote for Bush and the NWO, commieboy.
Re: Burglar Politics, Tempesting PC's that watch TV and DVD
Here's an empirical result, if we can ignore theory a minute :-) A few years ago, I was using my laptop a few feet away from my parents' TV set, and text from my laptop showed up on the screen. It was shredded into a couple of pieces, because the sync was hosed, but it was quite identifiable as my text, so a spook with good equipment shouldn't have much trouble reading it. If you want more details, dredge the cypherpunks archives. One of the issues is that most laptops have video ports on the back to allow you to plug in real monitors, and if you don't have anything plugged in, they're sitting there with raw pins pointing out. I'm not sure if my PC was in "use both displays" mode or "only use the LCD" mode - most laptops don't have an indicator other than "the LCD is dark"... Among other things, most laptops are designed so that the PC model of display card interface is maintained, so it's transparent to software that's poking around where it shouldn't. Palmtops probably behave differently, but I wouldn't trust them either. At 11:31 AM 10/11/00 -0400, Ray Dillinger wrote: On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, jim bell wrote: A popular, but false, myth. The video cards radiate more than the CRT's. Laptops tend to be the worst offenders. --Lucky Green [EMAIL PROTECTED] As to the video cards... Sorry, Lucky, but you're going to have to support this a little better. Emissions are a function of the signal voltage in a conductor, and the extent that this conductor is free to emit. Given that a laptop uses an LCD display, there's really no good reason, electronically speaking, why its video hardware should have to do the ((scan+horizontal_retrace)*+vertical_retrace) sequence that the technology for getting a coherent signal relies upon. But the fact is, laptop hardware does write bits in a predefined order, (in fact the same order as CRT-based machines) so it's a worthwhile question whether anyone can figure the order and pick up the emissions from the video hardware. This looks like the sort of thing that can be resolved by experiment though; Anybody got enough DSP smarts to put an induction coil next to a laptop monitor and *see* whether they can read the darn thing? Also, it looks like the sort of thing that could be designed around. If someone were building a "secure laptop" they could make a video system and drivers that wrote the bits in a different, randomized order each time, and which only wrote the changed bits. If anybody is actually making a product like this, it would be a strong indication that *somebody* with money to spend on RD considers it a valid threat model, because nobody makes products without a market. Bear Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
test, ignore
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RE: Burglar Politics, Tempesting PC's that watch TV and DVD regions
On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, jim bell wrote: A popular, but false, myth. The video cards radiate more than the CRT's. Laptops tend to be the worst offenders. --Lucky Green [EMAIL PROTECTED] As to the video cards... Sorry, Lucky, but you're going to have to support this a little better. Emissions are a function of the signal voltage in a conductor, and the extent that this conductor is free to emit. NP. There is plenty of conductor in a laptop. What tends to be missing, though, is shielding. In particular, laptops tend to have plastic cases. Without a metal case, even a badly designed, at all, a little signal goes a long way. You also may wish to inquire with Ross Anderson or Markus Kuhn what type of computer their group uses for the van Eck demos and why. Last I talked about this with them, it was a laptop. Have fun, --Lucky Green [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Anytime you decrypt... its against the law". Jack Valenti, President, Motion Picture Association of America in a sworn deposition, 2000-06-06
RE: Make legal threats, go to jail for 20 years cpunk
Declan McCullagh[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: This is from a bill that both the House and Senate passed (yesterday): Whoever knowingly provides or obtains the labor or services of a person...by means of the abuse or threatened abuse of law or the legal process, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. URL: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:h.r.03244: I can imagine some abuses of this, in workplace situations or divorce cases... At 01:43 PM 10/12/00 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: While almost any law can be abused, I think you'd need a really odd situation for normal people to be able to use this one abusively. Blackmail was already illegal; this just makes some kinds of blackmail a Federal crime with enhanced penalties, which I'm not convinced is particularly necessary. The kind of abuse that's been in the papers that's probably what this law is designed to make a show of opposing is illegal immigrants being kept in indentured servitude by the coyotes who import them. It's mostly Asians working in the garment industry in California, but there are probably other large groups like this as well. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
RE: New OLD cryptograph patent for NSA
At 12:36 PM 10/12/00 -0400, Tim May wrote: In a crypto anarchic society, patents will mostly be moot.) Really? If you have a factory, or open a virtual storefront, you have a public (meat, seizable) presence. Patents are enforced by guns against locatable assets which have exploited the patents. I realize that *copyrighted* bits will be hard to track, but not an address that ships patent-infringing (or for that matter, trademark-infringing) goods. To paraphrase, Meat is vulnerable, bits are safe. But (with the exception of software patents) patents are embodied in things, and things are traceable.
Re: Think cash
At 11:54 AM 10/12/00 -0400, James A.. Donald wrote: -- At 12:59 PM 10/11/2000 -0400, Marcel Popescu wrote: An interesting idea has surfaced on the freenet-chat list: is it possible to build a program that creates some sort of a puzzle, whose answer the generating computer knows (and can verify), but which can only be answered by a human being, not by a computer? [Additional requirement: it should be easy for the human to answer the puzzle.] Origami world. Computer generates a random 3D object out of large polygons with fairly sharp angles of contact, subject to various limits on the way in which the object is generated. Displays 2D image of 3D object. Human infers 3D object from 2D image, infers unseen portions of the image from rules by which the 3D image is generated -- for example that the object must make sense mechanically -- that it should be stable resting on a plane. You seem to be supposing that human perceptual algorithms (and the illusions they produce) are somehow unknowable or unreplicable by nonanimal machinery. This is meat chauvinism. Look into David Marr's _Vision_ for starters... or Grossburg's (of BU) stuff.. Now back to your regularly scheduled spam laced with cryptography
Re: Burglar Politics, Tempesting PC's that watch TV and DVD
At 09:10 PM 10/12/00 -0400, Bill Stewart wrote: with raw pins pointing out. I'm not sure if my PC was in "use both displays" mode or "only use the LCD" mode - most laptops don't have an indicator other than "the LCD is dark"... A good reason for the airlines asking you to keep your radiating equiptment off during avionics-dependence time..
