Re: napster & trilobites
David Honig wrote: > > When Napster goes down, there are going to be a lot of > folks switching to other file-exchange indices. What is > fascinating is that Napster has seeded disk drives with > tradable files, introduced a lot of people to the concept. > > Trilobites didn't make it, but they sure fed a lot of > critters whose descendants did. Is that "trilobites" for some software I've never heard of (good name - why didn't I think ot that - I suppose someone will spell it "TrilloBytes" - yuck.) or "trilobites" the animals that dominated the ocean for 300 million years? Like, er, come back in 299 million years and say that... :-)
Re: Whipped Europeans
Er, I thought Terry Pratchett was a European... Steven Furlong wrote: > > Michael Motyka wrote: > > > > Petro wrote: > > > What do you expect from a bunch of whipped Europeans? > > > > > > To quote T. Pratchett "They don't need chains, they have obedience." > > > > > The only difference is that they know they are whipped. We have the > > chains but no obedience. Chains paid for by our own money. > > It's better to be chained but with the goal of freedom than to be an > unchained but content slave. The self-proclaimed masters can be > overthrown, lethally if need be. > > (Thought I'd beat Tim to that. I don't kill without good cause, but I'd > count this as a good cause.) > > SRF > > -- > Steve Furlong, Computer Condottiere Have GNU, will travel >518-374-4720 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: CDR: Re: Niiice kitty....
The quote it attributed to Clive Ponting's book on Churchill. So all
anyone has to do is check that.
Ponting is a reasonably well-known author it should be possible to find
the book and check page 132. Whether Ponting was telling the truth is
another matter - but he isn't Chomsky.
Nor is he a socialist of course. Chomsky is a left socialist anarchist
so JAD assumes that anything he says has to be a lie, with or without
evidence.
Ken
> If Churchill really said such a thing, we would have some source better
> than Chomsky for it, and if Churchill really did say it, Chomsky would have
> given us a source that was possible to verify.
> 4i2EZSRU++C5ilvvAmDcHPpIjAAdRwU9+ndWqhck2
> As Winston Churchill observed in a paper
> submitted to his Cabinet colleagues in January 1914,
> "we are not a young people with an innocent record
> and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to
> ourselves...an altogether disproportionate share
> of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have
> got all we want in territory, and our claim to
> be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and
> splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence,
> largely maintained by force, often seems
> less reasonable to others than to us."
> To be sure, such honesty is rare in respectable
> society, though the passage would be acceptable
> without the italicized phrases, as Churchill
> understood. He did make the paper public in the
> 1920s, in The World Crisis, but with the offending
> phrases removed.{Clive Ponting, Churchill
> (Sinclair-Stevenson 1994), 132.}
Re: CDR: A famine averted...
Jim Choate wrote: > Why in major disasters do prices go up, when it is clear this is contrary > to the best interest of the market? Because markets have no interests, the participants in them do. The argument is exactly the same as that advanced by biologists against the idea of group selection. NB in a real famine (as opposed to temporary shortages, which a place like Belize can probably get through with less hassle than a richer more efficient economy with all our "Just in Time" suppliers) food prices go *down* at first... strange but true. It is due to farmers unloading stock to get money in as quickly as they can. Ken
Re: CDR: Re: Why Free Speech Matters
Olav wrote: > > Nothing has made Nazism more interesting to young persons, mostly > > young men, than the hint of illegality. "If they don't want me to > > know about this, there must be something to it." Plus, the usual > > flaunting of disrespect for authority. > > The hint of illegality? Well, of course this is a reason, but the question > remains that if all people had legal access to nationalsocialist > propaganda such as "Mein Kampf", Only 300 Km from Germany, in England, we never had any trouble with "legal access to nationalsocialist propaganda such as "Mein Kampf"". It was available to me as a child, in my local (government-funded) library & I managed to locate two copies within 10 minutes in the library of this University. My Dad (an anti-Nazi left-winger) had a copy. IIRC it was the version published in English by the anti-Nazi left-wing publishing company, Gollancz (and yes, I think the founder was a Jew) on the principle that people would be less likely to become Nazis if they could actually read the stuff. It seemed to work. I don't think he ever paid any royalties though. I don't think we've all becopme Nazis yet. > But certainly, this is not the reason that young men join the > national-socialist cause. It4s about a feeling of superority, Superiority? Inferiority rather Why would people who thought themselves superior need to submit themselves to a leader? Ken
Re: CDR: Re: Anonymous Remailers cpunk
Steve Furlong wrote: > Why not just read the first 20 bytes of the body? If 90% or more aren't > printable ASCII assume the message is encrypted. Or compressed, or a bitmap, or executable code, or coming from an EBCDIC machine, or using a weird variant of Unicode that you weren't previously aware of, or audio, or video... Without a header at the front saying "This is PGP version such-and-such" (or whatever other algorithm is used) there is no way to tell well-encrypted text from some sorts of compressed files. That is part of the point - if the encrypted text was obviously different from random data the difference could contain clues. Ken
Re: CDR: A famine averted...
Hang about! You asked why sellers wanted to put prices up when they thought a big storm was coming, when "the good of the market" might want prices kept down (as the government tried to do). I was pointing out that there is no "good of the market" in this context at all, just the interests of the participants. If someone thinks they can get more money by selling at a higher price, they probably will, regardless of any concept they (or you) might ave of the interests of the market as a whole. Not pseudo-economics at all. Now you seem to be accusing me of saying what you said... Jim Choate wrote: > > On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Ken Brown wrote: > > > Because markets have no interests, the participants in them do. > > There is NO difference between a 'market' and the 'participants in them'. > > Silly pseudo-economics.
Re: A famine averted...
Ulf Mvller wrote: > On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 02:54:34PM +0100, Ken Brown wrote: > > > NB in a real famine (as opposed to temporary shortages, which a place > > like Belize can probably get through with less hassle than a richer more > > efficient economy with all our "Just in Time" suppliers) food prices go > > *down* at first... strange but true. It is due to farmers unloading > > stock to get money in as quickly as they can. > > Why would they want to do that? Because they are afraid they will need to get out quickly so they want to turn goods into money if they can. Also there is the price-of-meat effect which has often been observed in Africa, as much as 18 months before a famine gets serious. If people are running out of feed for their livestock (for example in a drought) they sell them rather than watch them starve. So the price of meat goes down. This can also temporarily depress the price of other food (which, of course, doesn't help peasant farmers or nomads who graze their cattle). Ken
Re: Gores teens and drugs
Tim May wrote: > And yet algore and Tipper cluck about an open can of beer being held > by a 16-yo at a party. Just goes to show what a strange country you live in Tim! When the 16-year-old son of out Prime Minister over here was picked up by the police pissed out of his head lying in his own vomit in Leicester Square (USAns might think "Times Square"?) nobody seemed to mind much. It is the kind of thing kids get up to. In fact Blair's opinion poll ratings went up, prompting the leader of the opposition Conservative party to boast that he used to drink 14 pints a night when he was a teenager. But nobody believed him and journalists dug up old acquaintances to claim that he mostly drank fizzy pop. Which, for a Yorkshireman, rates as an insult. Anyone who remembers the old Monty Python "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch will know exactly the sort of thing the Mekon (I can't actually remember his name) was getting into. "When I were a lad..." (Oh yes I can, William Hague. Not the most memorable of politicians) Ken
Re: why should it be trusted?
Petro wrote: > >P.S. I too would be interested in documented cases where DNA > >collected by the police was given to insurance companies. > > It's (apparently) England where there is wide spread DNA > collection for use in finding certain types of criminals. The database exists but so far it is supposedly restricted to convicted criminals (all nearly a million of them), and DNA collection is not universal in criminal investigation in England. There is a move (which will possibly fall foul of the new Human Rights laws) by some bits of the Labour government to make it routine for people who are actually arrested, but not for a trawl through random members of the public . The opposition Conservative party says the proposals are too weak - they want to give the police even more powers. Presumably they want everyone on the database, convicted or not. They seem proud of their database (you can even pay them to "fingerprint" you) http://www.forensic.gov.uk/forensic/news/press_releases/10_04_00_2.htm > In England both the Police and the Health Care System are run > by the government, so in a sense the "Insurance Company" already has > it. > They also can't do anything about it since they have to cover everyone. > Note: I am not claiming that the Police share the DNA with > the Health Care Providers, but once the database is there... If they aren't keeping the DNA but just storing the results of the "profile" in the database then the data will *not* be generally useful for medical purposes. You have to know what you are looking for. If you suspect that a particular allele makes a disease more likely you have to look for that allele. The kind of stuff that is important here is the SNP lists coming out of the HGP - which is why annotations to them are getting bogged down in intellectual property squabbles between academics & drug companies. Also, as you pointed out, the UK National Health Service isn't an insurance system. Of course that doesn't mean that the doctors wouldn't be interested in DNA evidence for hereditary diseases or whatever. If anything leaks might be the other way - law enforcement might want to find confidential patient information from the NHS (which doesn't keep centralised patient records, yet - there is an interminable thread about this on the UKcrypto list which a few folks who are here also read - Ross Anderson has strong opinions on the competence of the NHS to keep centralised confidential records) A recent news item at http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid%5F906000/906538.stm and some background: http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid%5F541000/541529.stm http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio%5Fvideo/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript%5F15%5F11%5F99.txt
Re: geezers and ballots
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > If you look at http://cnews.tribune.com/news/image/0,1119,oso-nation-82373,00.html > you see the gripe about the Palm Beach > ballots. > > What they dont mention is that, by > the same visual-illiteracy that > lets Gore votes go to Buchanan, > votes for Browne go to Gore. The same error would send Browne votes to the Socialist candidate. The hole for Buchanan/Foster is immediately to the right of the word "Democratic" (or the line just above it). The hole for McReynolds/Hollis is immediately to the right of the word "Libertarian" Ken Brown
Re: CIA proctologists
Ray Dillinger wrote: > That's just part of the job. If you're going to handle secret > material for any government, that government will want to know > everything about you no matter how invasive, and they will want > to own every possible bit of leverage anyone can have on you, > and they want to be damned sure that no one else has any leverage > on you that they don't know about. > > Medical examinations are just one aspect of that. > > I bet they audit someone's taxes for the last six years before > they hire them, too. Current fuss over here on the downwind side of the Atlantic is the Metropolitan police (i.e. local plod for all of greater London *except* the City of London and some railway stations...) wanting permission to hire convicted criminals. The law prevents them hiring anyone with any recorded conviction. They say they can't get enough people at the moment, and as about 20% of adult men have a criminal conviction they would like to treat each case "on its merits", to increase the field of possible recruits. So they might, on a case-by-case basis, be willing to overlook "minor" crimes, such as defaulting on tax, speeding, parking offences, minor acts of vandalism or public disorder committed whilst a teenager, possibly even single convictions for drug use if they were over ten years ago. Some disordered thoughts: - as driving kills ten to twenty times as many people as murder (in this country, YMMV) I'm not sure speeding is a "minor" offence. - if the drugs & disorder offences are so "minor" why are they offences anyway? Why do the police bother to arrest people for them? Why don't they arresting genuinely dangerous people (like dangerous drivers :-) - About a third of the population of inner London in the relevant age group are black or Asian. Maybe ten percent are 1st or 2nd generation Irish. All heavily under-represented in the police who have a bad reputation for racism. Even if it is undeserved (I'm pretty bloody sure it is largely deserved), if they are so short of recruits they should do something serious about it. - ditto their attitude to women - and anyway, these governments have been forcing the ideology of the Free Market down our throats for 25 years. If it is a Free Market and they are short of workers they should put the wages up. All this palaver is just a way to keep the wages down. Of course the wages are paid out of taxes. So the question for the taxpayers is you say you want more police (they always do, always, same as they say they want more TV cameras) but if you really do are you prepared to pay for it?
Re: Carnivore Probe Mollifies Some
Tim May wrote: [...snip...] > Well, if I ran a small ISP, I think I'd say: "You got a wiretap order > for one person. That order has now run its course. Get your machine > out of my cage." [...snip...] Of course if they leave the machine in the cage you can always stop feeding it electricity. Or take it home to show the neighbours. It might make a good conversation piece at dinner. Or maybe use it as an ashtray. Ken
Re: Questions of size...
Jim Choate wrote: > The behaviour of the leading proponents of crypto-anarchy when faced with > 'non-compliant' behaviour is clear evidence of why the philosophy doesn't > work. Hang about! No-one has shot at you, confiscated your computer, tried to block or bomb your nodes, sued you, complained to any government officials about you, or written any nasty letters to your mother. All that has happened is some complaints. You can carry on doing what you want, if you want to put up with others having a lower opinion of you. They can carry on doing what they want & if their opinion gets low enough they can ignore you. If anything this is evidence that anarchy does work, at least in the limited-harm domain of a mailing list. Any functioning political anarchy would have to have more local, personal social sanctions on behaviour than an authoritarian society, not less. More one-to-one sanctions, peer-to-peer political interaction, (RAH might have called it a geodesic political culture if he hadn't got this strange Marxist idea that politics is just an emergent property of economics :-) A state society can rely on one-to-many flows of political or social pressure, the government & big business can deal with people as the masses. A natural outgrowth of the one-to-many techniques of cheap mass communications (OK, maybe Hettinga is right after all). The cypherpunks list is a sandpit of many-to-many communications, a realm in which anarchy is the natural, technologically favoured, form of social control. And complaining about the behaviour of others is exactly the sort of social control you'd expect to see happening in an anarchy. Anarchy is a great way to organise mailing lists, peasant villages, and regular evenings at the pub. Maybe it's a great way to organise large-scale industrial societies as well, it remains to be seen. But anarchy doesn't have to mean nobody tells you what to do - it just means that no one person (natural person like a king, or corporate person, like a state) tells everybody else what to do. In anarchy everyone is free to tell you what to do, and you are free to ignore them. Until you piss them off once too often of course... Ken Brown (wow! an on-topic post for once!)
Re: Missed News: US Adopts Euro Cyber Crime Proposal ...
David Honig wrote: > This just about sums it up: > > Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil > Liberties Union, said the pact could force police in the > United States to conduct searches under rules established > by treaty ''that don't respect the limits of police powers > imposed by the U.S. Constitution.'' And guess what? The UK government says they need to do this because the US (among others) wants them to. Over the weekend proposals to enforce data retention for 7 years were leaked to newspapers & civil liberties groups here in Britain. Just in time for the annual Big Brother Awards ( http://www.privacyinternational.org/bigbrother/ :-) Your very own John Young has made the offending document available at http://cryptome.org/ncis-carnivore.htm Of course it isn't official government policy. Oh no, just some paper put out by a junior official. All very deniable. It is so *very* offensive that even the Home Secretary will be able to to say that he doesn't accept it - and then come out with something that, while not quite that bad is still a lot worse than what we have now. And they will say that our "European partners" want us to have such laws. And in Germany they will say that the British want it... and in France they will say that all of civilisation wants it...so a whole load of diplomats will get together & make some treaty, more or less dictated to them by the military. of course the universal opinion here is that it is actually the Americans - they pull the strings at GCHQ & this sort of policy in the UK nearly always comes straight out of GCHQ. Meanwhile, back in the corridors of power, the Data Protection law (which tends to be administered by well-meaning mild lefties, as opposed to the military who may be well-meaning but are almost by definition right-wing authoritarians) now seems to require that you make personal data, including logs, available to people who can be identified from them. How about having to not only keep your Apache logs for 7 years but also be prepared to search them at the request of anyone who might have browsed your website? Ken The vile paper states: 3.2 INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION 3.2.1. We have strong partnerships with overseas colleagues and an expectation exists that the UK will take a bold and strategic position on data retention in order to continue to meet both domestic and international obligations on organised crime. Elsewhere in Europe and in the G8, countries are also concerned about the lack of clarity in law and are advancing legislation to meet the needs of their Agencies. In particular, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and the US have taken steps towards a statutory framework. 3.2.2. A degree of international agreement on standards is important. For example, in relation to telephone data, competition in the market has led to "least cost routing". This involves calls being sent by the cheapest route, taking advantage of reduced off-peak rates elsewhere in the world. It has even become more economical to briefly route domestic UK calls overseas. Similarly, in the case of computer viruses, these can be transmitted around the world across any number of communications networks and ISP servers. Progress towards standardisation is therefore important both for domestic and international law enforcement activity. 3.2.3 CSPs consider it is important to harmonise UK legislation with regulatory regimes elsewhere. If requirements are more onerous in the UK than in other EU Member States, then the natural reaction will be to relocate to the most favourable regime. The nascent E-Commerce knowledge industries are highly mobile and the Industry would anticipate an immediate response from UK CSPs to unfavourable conditions here. CSPs are actively consulting their international counterparts on this subject. ISPs in particular would support adopting an international legislative framework provided it was on the basis of a level playing field and would actively work on the formulation of an "Industry-wide Code of Practice" to achieve that objective.
Re: Buying Mein Kampf via the Net
Tom Vogt wrote: > > David Honig wrote: > > Hitler's estate would be the natural heir (under US law :-), although I can > > believe that .de would seize it too, if he had no heir, or if they > > didn't like him. > > he had no heir, and I believe the (C) falling to bavaria (not germany!) > was incidental, not planned. The will read something like: "What I possess belongs - in so far as it has any value - to the Party. Should this no longer exist, to the State; should the State also be destroyed, no further decision of mine is necessary. My paintings, in the collections which I have bought in the course of years, have never been collected for private purposes, but only for the extension of a gallery in my home town of Linz on Donau. It is my most sincere wish that this bequest may be duly executed. I nominate as my Executor my most faithful Party comrade, Martin Bormann " Of course, when the testator, the witnesses & almost all their surviving friends were dead, Martin Bormann was heading in the general dirction of the nearest long-range U-boat & a significant fraction of the Red Army was rolling down Unter den Linden in a very cross mood indeed; any relationship between Hitler's will & what actually happened to his possessions was pretty likely to be incidental & unplanned. kEN
Re: More half-baked social planning ideas
I read. I even read American stuff sometimes. In the last week I've read all or some of 5 books about architecture & housing. Two of them were American. But, not being American I still have no real idea what the expected answer to > furnace:basement::stove:__ is. I *guess* "kitchen" because in the UK "stove" is an old-fashioned name for a cooking device, stuff we used before the invention of gas and electric cookers (in fact, before the invention of the cast-iron range). But for us a "furnace" is an extremely large thing that you get steel out of... not something anyone would find in a basement. Over here you put teenagers or washing machines or junk in your basement, not furnaces. Actually, in London, they are almost always converted into flats & rented out. Anyway, surely basements are urban vs. rural? A way of getting more room in a restricted space. Do people build them out in the country? Ken the Ethnocentric. dmolnar wrote: > > On Mon, 25 Dec 2000, David Honig wrote: > > > >> but soon realized it was likely. Tens of millions of Californians > > >> have *no idea* of the many-armed oil-fed beast that lives in basements.. > > > > > >They've never read a story which mentions such a thing? > > > > > >-David > > > > "Read" ??? > > Oh, right. > Maybe the SAT is biased towards people who read. Since I read, that > doesn't seem so bad to me. > > -David (exulting in the logic of ... oh, wait)
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
Harmon Seaver wrote: > Amazing what passes for cryptic comments these days. Maybe it *is* crypto? The email equivalent of a numbers station. Who knows whether or not: " Please remove "Shanah Tovah" item which appears after doing a search of my name Cheryl Gilan." is in fact a cryptic message to release an ETA bomb squad somewhere in Spain? David Honig wrote: > So what do you call the artifacts that warm your homes, and where > are they located? Boilers and radiators? Embedded wires? Fireplaces? > Peat fires? Mad-cow-dung fires? Boilers. No-one I know uses hot air to heat a domestic house though you do get it in some large commercial buildings. These days they are smaller, and sit on the wall, often in a cupboard. They no longer store water, just heat it up on the way through. I should think that 99% of all new houses and flats use that sort. Mine is in a sort of broom-cupboard beside the toilet. Older ones tend to be largish lagged things, often in the attic (i.e. space below the roof). John Young wrote: > In New York City, there is an important distinction between > cellar and basement. Cellars are not habitable while > basements are. The building code definition of a basement > is that at least half its height is above street level, and that > of cellar is that just over half its height is below street > level. Many residential buildings are designed to > take advantage of that distinction. The rule covers > sloping site conditions to average the difference between > front and back. 500 years ago "cellar" didn't necessarily imply underground at all. When brick came into general use in domestic houses it enabled the building of cheap chimneys, which enabled the older "hall" houses to be divided by a floor into an upstairs and a downstairs. In many medium-sized houses the family moved upstairs (in larger ones they were already there at one end of the hall in the "solar") leaving the business (kitchen, goods, servants, animals) below. Some houses used brick or stone to reinforce the floor, erecting pillars to support it & that became a "cellar" whether or not it was below street level. Chimneys, ceilings, furniture, printing & Protestantism all became common in England in one generation sometime in the late 15th or early 16th century. OK, the Protestantism was a little later. Harmon Seaver wrote: > In different areas of the US we have different tems for the thing get water > out of at the sink. In the south it's often called spigot, and in the north > faucet. Also tap. What do you Brits call that? Tap. We find the word "faucet" funny, it sounds as if it should be slightly obscene, a good example of the US habit of never using a short word when a long one will do. But when I found myself amongst Americans I was slightly disappointed to find that they almost all say "tap" these days. Just as they say "car" instead of "automobile". You are obviously all watching too much British TV, or listening to too many British rock bands. You should defend your language against this tide of old-world vulgarity. Ken Brown
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
Tim May wrote: > > I'm now 49, and "car" has been much more common in these United > States than "automobile" has been, in my lifetime. > > Further, I often hear Britishisms which are far longer and more > labored than the American equivalents. For example: > > "articulated lorry" vs. "semi" > > "redundant" vs. "laid-off" > > "Mackintosh" vs. "raincoat" "redundant" which has a technical legal meaning that is different from "laid-off" (which we also use). "artic" & "mac" are both normal (though the second now old-fashioned - who wears raincoats any more anyway?) > "Pantechnicon" = "moving van" > > (I only learned this last one on a site devoted to Britishisms vs. > Americanisms.) Don't believe all you read on the web :-) I wouldn't have known "pantechnicon" was a van if you'd asked me. And we used to think you didn't have the word "van" - we thought you always said "truck" or "pick-up". (Though when I went to Texas my colleagues seemed to use the word "van" to include passenger vehicles - the large car/small bus sort of thing that gets sold as a "people mover" over here. For us a "van" is for carrying things more than people, though plenty of drivers use them as cars) Anyway - I heard Americans on the TV last week talking about "railway" instead of "railroad". And "station" instead of "depot" (though Grand Central Station is I suppose quite old, so you must have had that one for a while) As you said: > Fact is, both dialects of English have longer versions of the same > basic word than other dialects have. > Which is preferable is a matter of taste and familiarity. and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. We know "Randy" is a name in the US, even if we snigger when we hear it, and any American spending more than 5 minutes in Britain UK would find out that a "fag" is a cigarette, so no harm done. If there is any chance of confusion it is in the connotations of speech rather than the denotations. "Homely" has the same literal meaning (home-like, reminiscent of home) on both sides of the Atlantic but in Britain it is emotionally slightly positive (Tolkien's "Last Homely House") & in the US very negative, mostly used as a euphemism for "ugly". The same applies ot tone of voice.Brits (& Australians) seem mostly less sensitive to insult than Americans but more to sarcasm & irony. So we can sometimes be rude to you & you don't notice - and we can be friendly and you think we are being rude. And presumably it works the other way round as well. The society that invented the breakfast meeting must have developed many exquisite verbal tortures that us plainspeaking Brits miss out on. Ken
Re: Anglo-American communications studies
David Honig wrote: > > >>and there are very few opportunities for real misunderstanding. > > So Ken if you read that Blair was near Thatcher's house and knocked > her up, Yanks would think something very different from Brits. You've been listening to those old Max Miller records again, haven't you? And they are very old: "Have you heard about the girl of eighteen who swallowed a pin, but didn't feel the prick until she was twenty-one?" "I was walking along this narrow mountain pass - so narrow that nobody else could pass you, when I saw a beautiful blonde, with not a stitch on - yes, not a stitch on, lady. Cor blimey, I didn't know whether to toss myself off or block her passage." "Which would you like, the blue book or the white book? You like both don't you. Listen, I was in Spain four years ago and all the girls wear little knives in the top of their stocking. I found that out. So I said to myself, I'll find exactly what's the idea in wearing a knife on the top of the stocking and she said, that's to defend my honour, I said, what, a little tiny knife like that.. I said that, if you were in Brighton, you would need a set of carvers!" et.c et.c et.c So this woman walks into a pub and asks for a double entendre, and the barman says "Do you want a large one?"
"Crime plan targets phone thefts"
"Crime plan targets phone thefts": http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1109000/1109234.stm Apparently, Jack Straw (famously authoritarian British Home Secretary) wants the phone companies to do something about street robbery of mobile phones - now a third of all robbery in London and very embarrassing for the government because it totally masks the genuine underlying ongoing reduction in crime. Straw: "We have a shared interest with mobile telephone manufacturers and the operators in making telephones more secure, It's difficult because many of the phones that are sold these days are the pay-as-you-go phones, but there is more that can be done and this is all about joining together in a partnership with industries, the public and the police to help get these crimes down." So mugging is joined to the now 6 or 7 horsepersons of the infocalypse as yet another reason to ban anonymous phones? I wonder who is in Straw's driving seat this time? Something Must be Done is always a bad start to legislation. Do we get the Dangerous Telephones Act 2001? Ken (and not his employers who are law-abiding people who would do nothing to annoy a Home Secretary)
Re: NONSTOP Crypto Query
Harmon Seaver wrote: > John Young wrote: > > We've been unable to retrieve more than a few words from > > the redacted portions (by use of xerography to reveal text > > below the overwrites), and would appreciate any leads on > > what NONSTOP means. Joel McNamara has been searching > > for NONSTOP info for some time: > > > > I happen to admin a Tandem "NonStop" K-200 [...snip...] > So the bottom line here is this -- I'd really rather doubt that the > NONSTOP referred to above has anything to do with Tandems. Agreed that John's "non-stop" doesn't sound anything like Tandem boxes (which surely wouldn't be a secret code-wood anyway?) > Certainly > they aren't running Tandem stuff on planes and vehicles -- this is heavy > iron -- They certainly used to run IBM 370 (a lot heavier than Tandems both in mass & power consumption!) in the air, probably to manage AWACS tape filestore (I vaguely think they may even have used UCC1). That is unless the US & German airforce people I sometimes met on operating system training courses back in the early 1980s were *very* good at pulling the wool over fellow-student's eyes. Ken Brown
Re: Satellite taxes
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Um, wouldn't a natural way to assess property taxes be to first decide > in which jurisdiction the property rests? No Virginia, "The Man who Sold the Moon" was not written by David Bowie. > For instance project the > boundary of jurisdictions into space from the geometrical center of the > earth. In which case it would probably be Brazil that should be > collecting the taxes and Hughes would be writing off the taxes as a cost > thereby reducing the taxes collected in California. Look for the > locations over international waters to get crowded. Hey, you almost make me feel like Tim May! Get with the program. Use those search engines. Everyone should read the works of Robert Heinlein. Not to mention half a dozen old sf hacks from the 1940s to the 1960s. If they had, they might not have an answer to the problem "who should tax a satellite", never mind the even harder problem "how do I stop my satellite being taxed", but they would at least have *thought* about it. And why the the Brazil option probably wouldn't work. Or has my gross British sense of humour failed to detect your subtle American sense of irony? Of course, as someone else pointed out in the parallel thread, the diplomats thought of it as well, and limited airspace to a hundred somethings (can't remember what. Kilometres I assume. If it was miles some eccentric-orbit spy satellites might get into the airspace. Though it is hard to imagine the CIA paying their Iraqi taxbill for reconnaissance overflights). In general sf is of no help in predicting the future. But it sometimes means that when the future comes the questions we have to answer don't take us quite as much by surprise as they do some of our neighbours. Even if we don't always agree on the answers. Anyway it is fun, so hie thee to the nearest bookshop and get into the backstory. Ken Brown
Re: lawyer physics (was taxing satellites)
> More importantly: you can't get sued if your space debris trashes someone > else's mission. A piece of law that will have to be re-assessed if there ever are any space colonists, or serious productive industry in LEO. You really wouldn't want to live somewhere where anyone who "accidentally" evacuates all the air from your house has no legal liability. Ken
Re: Most of a nation on probation (GPS convicts)
> I have never had a background check until after I was hired at my current job. >After I had been hired for a long time, suddenly they did background checks on >everyone, though surely by then they knew everyone well enough to know that none of >us were likely to run amuk and start shooting > coworkers. > > Suddenly background checks are in. I do not know why. Guess I should ask. I think they are afraid of being sued if anyone anywhere in the USA claims to have been hurt or inconvenienced or discriminated against due to one of the company's products. "How can you say you are safe? You employ KNOWN DRUG ABUSERS!" At a previous employer of mine - a very large US company - checks for drugs & so on came in about 5 years ago. Also, to intense bad publicity, tests for HIV and other diseases (because of health insurance, supposedly). They didn't apply to existing employees except in safety related jobs. Very much the flavour of the month, because of news articles blaming drunk or drugged train drivers, machine operators & so on for causing accidents. As our company has lost or killed maybe couple of hundred people in industrial accidents in the previous decade or so we were sensitive to it. Though why they wanted to extend it to workers who didn't drive anything more lethal than a desk was beyond me. Here in the UK (things may be different in the US) it is probably easier for someone with a criminal record to get a job with government or public bodies, or with charities and non-profit organisations, than it would be with a private company. Though of course it depends on the nature of the record. I doubt if a 30 yearold record for hemp is going to lose anyone any job at the moment in Britain. It might even be a qualification fro getting elected to Parliament. For about 6 months now prominent politicians have been queuing up to "confess" to having smoked dope in their mis-spent youths. Ken Brown
Re: BayTSP: anti-digital piracy startup
Their website doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Grindingly slow, almost contentless, no clues at all as to what they are proposing to actually do to shut down the sites, which is the hard part. No implication of automatic shutdown, they just say they will notify people. So all they are selling is a search engine really. They are just offering to search the web for files which you claim you own. There is some handwaving about timestamps and digital signatures - their very tedious Flash presentation implies that they copy, sign and timestamp the allegedly offending website and make two CDs of it, sending one to the ISP and one to their customer. Also screenshots. Dumb. No hint as to what to do if the "infringer" sues you for copying their website onto a CD. No hint as to what they do if two of their customers claim to own the same content. No hint as to what they do if I claim that I own some files just to sick them onto Disney or Murdoch. (Not that it is hard to guess - as always with these things, he who dies employing the most lawyers wins). Ken Brown Yeoh Yiu wrote: > > as seen in Red Herring, who observe that the > 'automatic shutdown' of sites it doesn't like could > be problematic, to say the least: > > BAYTSP, $3M > San Jose, CA > http://www.baytsp.com > THE PITCH: "BayTSP is emerging with the leading technology > solution to online piracy of digital media. The company has > developed and deployed a sophisticated spidering and > detection service that identifies infringing files by their > digital 'DNA,' and proceeds to automatically investigate and > shut down the offending sites. Customers in the pipeline > include Viacom, the NFL, and major record labels. With a > slim team, low burn, and virtually no marketing expense, > BayTSP has already attracted attention and interest from the > major record labels and music publisher organizations in > their fight against Napster and other peer-to-peer file > sharing networks." > WHY WE LIKE IT: Interest from major customers. > WHAT THEY'RE UP AGAINST: Automatic detection and shutdown > of infringement could lead to disaster if there's a mistake > made. > CONTACT: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: A question of self-defence - Fire extinguishers & self defence
Sandy Sandfort wrote: > > Not-a-lawyer wrote: [...] > > We're not talking about > > 'self-defence' here... > > No, we're talking 'self-defense', this is the US, not the UK. Actually Sandy, it was Italy. I haven't got the faintest ideas what the laws on self-defence are in Italy. And I'm bloody-well sure Jim doesn't either. Whay are you arguing with himn? We saw long ago that, for reasons he may well understand but most of us don't, Jim will never admit that there may be a factual mistake in anything he writes. He always tries to redefine terms, bring up irrelevancies, alter emphases, to make something that looks factually wrong seem as if it might just about have been true in context. If Jim writes 20 things down, 19 of which are true and someone objects to the 1 that is false, any following thread turns into a ducking and weaving semantic flamewar about the one false statement. So a discussion about whether the Italian police were right to shoot someone in Genova turns into an argument about the momentum of model rockets - all because Jim can't bring himself to say something like: "I don't know, I wasn't there, I guess if the police account of what happened is true then they might have been in fear of their lives, so maybe we can't blame them for shooting. On the other hand, maybe the news accounts are faked or exagerated and they were just picking on the guy. I can't tell, I wasn't there and I haven't talked to anyone who was." But the words "I don't know" seem hard for some people to write down :-( Ken Brown (who doesn't know why he is joining the argument, when he has work to do)
Re: Choate Testing His ASAT Again?
AARGH! The Colour Out of Space! Run away! Jim Windle wrote: > "A Reuters reporter saw a tapered object shaped like a trumpet bell falling >diagonally through the western sky near West Chester, Pennsylvania, 20 miles from >Philadelphia at about 6:20. The object emitted a lustrous rainbow of colors ranging >from bright yellow on its downward-pointing flared end to light green and finally >rust-colored red at the upward pointing tapered end."
Re: Corporate totalitarianism?
Steve Thompson wrote: > > Quoting Aimee Farr ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > > I received the following today, by Robert Weissman, co-author of _Corporate > > Predators_, (corporatepredators.org) in regard to the Sara Lee Ball Park > > Frank Hot Dog incident, in which 21 people died. It prompted them to visit > > the White House to inquire as to 'a corporate death penalty.' Over here in t he UK there is a company called Railtrack that about 20 million people would be happy to see executed :-) > How strange. It's always individuals working within a corporation who should > be culpable for offences committed as a result of its business practices. There is surely no suggestion that the individuals cease to be liable, just that the whole company is as well? > Will this not have the effect of divorcing personal responsibility further > from the executive and employees of a company? But if the corporation as a whole is killed the shareholders lose their investment. XYZ inc no longer exists, there are no shares, no dividends. Presumably the assets of the company get sold off at public auction like houses with unpaid mortgages, or cars picked up off the street. > Furthermore, might not the `death' of a company in some cases penalise other > companies which depend on the products or services of the `offender' leading > to a reluctance to prosecute the largest and arguably the worst criminals? Most businesses have competitors, who will no doubt be happy to pick up the sales. Along with the assets, sold off cheap. It will penalise the workers, which might be more important to government, because they will have votes and a large company will have many votes, which might be very concentrated. Not much of a problem in a big city, where there are always other jobs, but in a small town or semi-rural area a single employer might be a huge part of the local economy. > At least when the responsible individuals are prosecuted, there is an > opportunity to `clean house' and reform the offending institution, as it > were. Shareholder pressure should do that very effectively. If the managers break the law, you lose your investment. A big boost to corporate ethics. My previous employer's business directly killed about 200 people during the years I worked there. I mean directly, in industrial accidents, I'm not talking about pollution or product liability. But shareholder pressure would have been very effective in helping keep things safe. Ken Brown
Re: A question of self-defence - Fire extinguishers & self defence
Over here in Europe, the Carabinieri are still big news. People aren't so much focussing on the dead man (maybe because it does look like self-defence) but on what the apparent revenge taken by the police and/or carabinieri on others after the main business was over. The IMC is getting the most attention. There are supposed eye-witness reports from people associated with various Christian and Green organisations, who claim they were no-where near the violence, in fact avoided the streets because of the violence, yet were picked on by the cops afterwards. BBC account: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1459000/1459466.stm There has been a radio interview, broadcast a number of times, with a man who claims that the cops lined up to take kicks at him as he lay on the floor. Very effective, as he breaks down and cries part way through as he says he was convinced he was going to die. Says he blacked out, and woke up again, only to be kicked in the head again. Is still in hospital with a punctured lung amongst other things. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1458000/1458347.stm) These guys are not young thugs out for a fight, most of them are thirties, some older, and they are mostly well-educated people with jobs. In other words they probably have friends who are lawyers and journalists (well, some of them are journalists themselves). So they probably know how to make a fuss that their own governments will notice. Whether or not the Italian government will pay any attention is another matter (Although the city government in Genova itself seems to now be objecting to what went on). There are also rumours (maybe no more than that - http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7369,528210,00.html)) about collaboration between police, right-wing organisations, and the Italian government. If you believe all this then there seems to have been an element of Italian military who took the opportunity to put the frighteners on just about anyone they didn't like - Greens, pacifists, trade unions, socialists, whatever. Berlusconi is a famously dubious piece of work - friends with fascists (real ones, not just the ordinary authoritarian conservatives that lefties like me love to call "fascists" as an insult); and he has an egregious monopoly on Italian broadcasting. How independent are "private" TV stations and newspapers when the guy who runs them is also the man in charge of the government? Big government (and big business, which is always in bed with big government and often has more in common with big government than it does with small business) need protests to keep them awake. Without protest they become managerial, think they can make decisions for everyone else and just get away with it. At best they like to "consult", in other words, they call a meeting, send some minor bureaucrats to take minutes, let the people say what they want, then do what they were going to do anyway. The protest, the demonstration, if necessary the riot, is the other side of the democratic coin. If the people just take orders, then the government will carry on just giving orders. Of course in Italy nowadays big government and big business are the same people. Ken While we're at it, http://www.lanterna.provincia.genova.it/eng/realizzazione/index.htm is a webcam on a lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour at Genova, just in case you fancy some Mediterranean sunshine :-)
Re: Trying again...[jsimmons@transvirtual.com: [OT] DMCA loop hole]
Gabriel Rocha wrote: > - Forwarded message from James Simmons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - [...] > Virus writers can use the DMCA in a perverse way. Because >computer viruses are programs, they can be copyrighted just like a >book, song, or movie. If a virus writer were to use encryption to hide >the code of a virus, an anti-virus company could be forbidden by the >DMCA to see how the virus works without first getting the permission >of the virus writer. If they didn't, a virus writer could sue the >anti-virus company under the DMCA! There was some discussion of this on the ukcrypto list recently, and, IIRC, on Bugtraq. I think the general feeling (with all the usual IANAL floods) was that courts will set aside copyright for reasons of public policy. If your copyright (which virus writers have automatically, just like any other writers) is causing big pain to the courts, or police, or large corporations, then the courts won't bend over backwards to enforce it. (Maybe the US-style libertarians here would find that a bad thing - if they are consistent they ought not to approve of government agents (courts) setting aside laws on private property in order to make their own lives more convenient). Also, even if someone did sue for violation of their copyright and win, what damages would a virus writer expect? Courts won't restore criminal profits - if you get caught stealing, even if you can sue the person who stopped you for unlawful arrest or whatever you can't sue them for damages because you didn't make a profit out of the theft. Also, it might be argued (in the unlikely event that a case ever got that far) that quoting the whole of a virus for combating it was fair use. How the DMCA affects this I don't know. It goes way beyond the old-established ideas of copyright, and into the dodgy depths of trade secrets. It is one thing to say "this is mine, you can't use it" and quite another to say "this is mine, you aren't even allowed to know what it is". By analogy with real property, copyright says you can't have a party in my garden without my permission; DMCA says you can't even take photos of my garden from next door if you need to stand on a stepladder to do it. In fact it says you can't even own the stepladder. My guess, which you may put down to cynicism if you want, is that if your name is Disney, or Murdoch, or Turner, or Sony, or Warner, or EMI, then the US courts will enforce your DMCA "rights". But if you happen to be called "sub-tARyANyAN-c00l D00DZ", they probably won't. Between those two extremes, it is likely to depend on your lawyers. Ken Ken
Re: The Tim May Question
"A. Melon" wrote: [...] > I'm not sure if Reese was replying to one of my messages, but this > obsession less productive posters have with Tim is peculiar. > > Looked at as an engineering problem, one tends to look at the > underperforming components. Let's say you are running a steel mill, > and the average uptime of your blast furnaces is 10%. One is 95%. > Nobody would spend their time trying to get the last 5% out of the > best furnace. Anybody would look at it and figure out how to get the > other furnaces performing. [...] Which just goes to show that neither politics nor software are branches of engineering. If I was an Evil Exploitative Record Label and one artist was selling at ten times the rate of the other I'd put most of my marketing budget behind the hits. If I was a publisher of fantasy fiction and I had Joanne Rowling or Terry Pratchett on my list, and I was interested in nothing but making lots of money, I'd push them rather than, say, John Crowley or Tom Holt (two of my favourite writers). If I was managing a software development shop and one programmer was producing better code faster than the others, I'd give them more jobs, not less. If I was interested in reading political comment I'd read the writer who made most sense last time, not the ten who didn't. Part of all this is rent. Part of it is that some people really are much better at this stuff than others. Part of it is the mythical man-month. And part of it is that some folk still just don't get it. I make no comment about who gets it and who doesn't. Except that I deleted around 100 postings unread this morning & most of them came from entities claiming names starting with "J". Ken
Re: The Privacy/Untraceability Sweet Spot
Nomen Nescio replied to Tim May: [...] > You need to read your own posting more carefully: > > > Draw this graph I outlined. Think about where the markets are for tools > > for privacy and untraceability. Realize that many of the "far out' sweet > > spot applications are not necessarily immoral: think of freedom fighters > > in communist-controlled regimes, think of distribution of birth control > > information in Islamic countries, think of Jews hiding their assets in > > Swiss bank accounts, think of revolutionaries overthrowing bad > > governments, think of people avoiding unfair or confiscatory taxes, > > think of people selling their expertise when some guild says they are > > forbidden to. > > You yourself were the one who raised the issue of morality. > Your examples were intended to be cases of "sweet spot" (that is, > profitable) applications which were also morally acceptable. It is > entirely appropriate in that context to examine whether these examples > meet the test of both being profitable and moral. [...] You miss the point. All that is needed is for someone, somewhere, to find these things desirable. It doesn't have to be you or me. We might think they are immoral but that changes nothing in practice. Or do you think that Muslims or Socialists or Greens or Zionists or the IRA or the CIA or the ETA or Presbyterians or Monsanto or whoever *you* dislike this week are incapable of choosing technology appropriate to their own perception of their needs? > When you were asked where were all the supposed wealthy freedom fighters > in communist controlled regimes, you came back with Osama bin Laden. > > Do you think that bin Laden, if he succeeded, would bring in an era of > enlightened government supporting individual liberties? The man is a > religious fanatic. He is associated with the Taliban in Afghanistan, > which he helped put into power. This is the same Taliban which has > destroyed priceless cultural treasures because they were not Islamic, > forbids women to work or attend school, and sends armed police to attack > when men and women eat in the same room behind closed doors. > Oh, and last week they banned the Internet. All true, they are shits. And violent, well-armed, cruel, frightened, shits at that. But, in this context, so what? > Osama bin Laden, a perfect poster child for the cypherpunks. Said who? Actually he is a bit of a bogeyman & 90% of what he is accused of is just US propaganda looking for a new enemy to justify the continuation of cold-war military budgets - but there are other guys, like the Taliban, who really are that nasty - one of the endearingly cute things about US politics is that you get collectively confused when people don't like you so you assume they are being duped by evil criminal masterminds, so you find it much easier to deal with the concept of a Dark Lord in the East than you do with the idea that millions of people actually hate and fear the USA for good reason. And it was the US government that funded the Taliban to start with (with a little help from their friends in Pakistan). > We're definitely not seeing the same "big picture" if you think he is > a good example of someone cypherpunks should support. You aren't seeing the picture at all if you think anyone much here was suggesting that you should support him. All that is being proposed is that people in that position really want the kind of technology we've been talking about, some of them are able to pay for it, so the chances are they are going to get it, and someone might make money out of it, and that will fund further developments. You don't have to think that is a *good* thing, you might think it is a very bad thing indeed, but you do have to deal with it. Ken
Re: News: "U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship"
Faustine wrote: [...] > Of course it has a trap door, that's probably the whole point of getting it > over there in the first place. And by the way, if you're going to question > SafeWeb for cooperating with CIA, you might as well criticize ZeroKnowledge > for selling a boatload of the Freedom beta to the NSA in 1999 as well. What > did they think they wanted it for, farting around on Usenet? I bet they had > that sucker reverse-engineered and compromised in two minutes flat. Stands > to reason. I wouldn't trust either of them with anything significant. If it can be compromised by NSA looking at a beta, it can be compromised by whoever the Chinese have doing this sort of thing. If it is safe enough to use in a life-or-death situation AT ALL it is safe enough to use if the NSA & uncle Tom Cobbley and all have the source code. If not, not. Ken
Re: UKUSA Courts Monitoring
John Young wrote: > For example, this DNS entry: > > Host, master (HM-ORG-ARIN) [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Nortel Plc F.A.O. Andrew MacphersonLondon >HarlowEssex >GB > >(202) 273-2640 >Fax- (202) 273-2651 > >Record last updated on 13-Aug-1998. >Database last updated on 8-Sep-2001 23:09:15 EDT. > [...] The name "Andrew Macpherson" struck me as vaguely familiar. I did some searches to update myself. He (or "an unknown entity using that name") has been an occasional contributor to Bugtraq & other mailing lists on SSH, email protocols, and security for BSD, NIS, NFS & other stuff. There is a suggestion for an encrypted Unix passwd changing scheme at http://http1.brunel.ac.uk:8080/depts/cc/Papers/netpassword-paper/paper.html Also he's been on the committee of UK Unix User Group, along with some people I actually know - so we are getting into true names territory here. Well, maybe he is a Secret Master of Repression of Telecoms. Of course it could be that, like nearly every other DNS record in the world, the name is that of the senior nerd on site & for whatever reason Nortel are (or once were) running their tech stuff from the UK. According to http://www.cs.duke.edu/csl/news/duke-cs-general/msg0.html Bell Northern & Northern Telecom merged nt.com, bnr.ca & bnr.co.uk into one DNS domain in 1997 so it might well be that the whole thing has sometimes been managed centrally outwith the USA. It isn't at all surprising that Nortel register .gov names of course, even the Men In Black need to actually be connected to the Net to use it & I suspect that Nortel does quite a lot of that. But, even if this isn't evidence of it, I still think you USAns are paying our spies to spy on you so that your ones don't have to. Why else are there so many British military & comms people based in Canada? And at least some in Bermuda and the Bahamas. Not to mention Baltimore. There's a whole lot of listening going in in the world. But then you guys also had (till recently) big bases in Bermuda which is *our* colony, thank you very much. Gotta keep those sassy Bermudans in their place. Of course there were no British or US naval officers at all who liked to be there for a nice break & maybe some yacht racing at the taxpayer's expense, no, who would think such a thing... Ken Brown AM doesn't like anonymous mail though: >> Re: Use of reverse lookups with SMTP >> Andrew Macpherson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) >> Wed, 29 Jan 1997 11:54:34 + >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: [...] >> | Yes, definitely. There are plenty of reasons why the DNS may be >> | unable to map a number to a name. None of them are good reasons for >> | refusing mail. >> >> What might these be, other than >> >> a A desire to be anonymous [good reason for rejection] >> b Incompetence in setting up ones Internet presence >> [ Those one does business with are not demonstrated incompetents ] >> c ISP incompetence [ Refuse this so that bad service goes out of business ] >> >> One should refuse all connexions which fail the >> number -> name -> set of numbers including original >> test, for all services, including SMTP.verse lookups with SMTP" [...]
Re: What's going on? World Trade Center, Pentagon, Old Executive Office Bldg
Bill Stewart wrote: > > At 10:22 AM 09/11/2001 -0400, Seth Finkelstein wrote: > > "Warren E. Agin" > > > I've been trying to get on a newsite, but abc.com, abcnews.com, > > > nbc.com, msnbc.com, cbs.com, foxnews.com and boston.com are all having > > > problems. Yahoo and MSN are up. > > > > I can attest that boston.com is functioning in Boston. Can't > >say if you could reach it from another part of the country. > > > > > I wonder if the problem is just server overload, or something else. > > > > There seems to be some major links out of action. I can't > >traceroute to cnn.com, for example. I *speculate* it's collateral > >damage from the explosions in Manhattan. That is, I sure wouldn't hang > >around to keep computer working in this situation. > > Highly unlikely to be physical damage; it's just slashdotted > because everybody with an internet connection tried it first. > The San Francisco Chronicle is still working because it's early morning > on the West Coast; they're sfgate.com, picture on the front page, > and the AP story is at > >http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2001/09/11/national0920EDT0530.DTL Yep, just a flash crowd. The BBC web site is all but unobtainable. Transatlantic data traffic is slow, but flowing. If you are in Manhattan YMMV. Ken
Re: The 4th Airliner Shot Down?
John Young wrote: > > Somebody who claims to be from inside the Pentagon > is saying an F16 shot down the airliner that crashed in > Pennsylvania. Are there news reports of this? Thee is also a net.rumour (with Jerry Pournelle's name attached to it) that someone on the plane attacked the hijackers whilst someone else was phoning home & describing it. Or it could be that the pilot deliberately went for a relatively uninhabited area. No doubt there will be other rumours. Ken
Re: Manhattan Mid-Afternoon
Harmon Seaver wrote: > > "Raymond D. Mereniuk" wrote: > > > I don't see where only a terrorist group backed by the resources of > > a national government could pull this off. A week or two for planning > > and a group of people who can keep their mouth's shut plus the > > most important quality, big gonads and a desire to die for a > > perceived purpose. > > So right -- all these people talking about "it had to be a big, well > funded, well organized group with lots of resources" are talking total nonsense. > It could have been a tiny cadre of eight or twelve people with no more money > than to buy some plane tickets. Flying a plane doesn't take a heck of lot > either, once it's in the air. A friend of mine wonders if they had a Boeing flight simulator. Apparently they would need to know how to disable the autopilot and do a couple of other technobabble things a groundling like me doesn't recognise. But with access to a training simulator they could learn enough in a few days. Or so I am told. I suppose such machines are all over the place these days, Boeing having more or less a monopoly on medium-large commercial passenger planes. So there could be training facilities just about anywhere. I have no real idea how rare and/or expensive they would be. Ken
Re: Sick Wacko in the Whitehouse
Reese wrote: > Your very English sentiments noted. Get back in queue. Yeah, but your government is behaving like the British government used to. Has been for a century really. Just another colonial power like all the rest. Ken
Re: "Attack on America" - a Personal Response (fwd)
"Riad S. Wahby" wrote: > The labels "act of terrorism" and "act of war" are mutually exclusive. > The former is by definition perpetrated by a non-governmental group; > the latter requires actions by a government. The claims by Dubya et > al to the contrary are incoherent politibabble. > > This has been discussed within the last month here on the list, IIRC. That might be current contemporary US usage, but it is not how the word started. Originally it was used (In French I suspect) for states terrorising the people they ruled, like the Russian pogroms. Later it was widened to include non-governmental groups. In WW2 bombing of residential cities was widely called "terror bombing" (even by Churchill in private). But it is a distinction without a difference. Who would you think had the most capacity to wage war, a small state such as Nauru or St Lucia, or an armed non-state like ETA or some of the Colombian gangs? Calling this attack "war" or "terrorism" is a matter of emotional colour. Ken
Re: from alt.security.terrorism
Shit. I wonder if anyone's been sacked for that yet? Anonymous wrote: > > Hidden messages revealed: > > 1. Go into Microsoft Word. > 2. Type in all caps and highlight: NYC > 3. Make the font size 48 > 4. Change the font to Webdings and read what it says > 5. Then change the font again, this time to Wingdings
Re: from alt.security.terrorism
Harmon Seaver wrote: > >For those of us with no M$ software, what is it? Little pictures. NYC in webdings translates intoi.e. "I love New York". Deliberate? In Windings it comes out as - if intentional presumably a sackable offence wherever they designed the character set all those years ago. The font size is irrelevant. This must be the bored office-workers equivalent of looking for messages in the stonecutter's scratches on the Great Pyramid. Ken > Ken Brown wrote: > > > Shit. I wonder if anyone's been sacked for that yet? > > > > Anonymous wrote: > > > > > > Hidden messages revealed: > > > > > > 1. Go into Microsoft Word. > > > 2. Type in all caps and highlight: NYC > > > 3. Make the font size 48 > > > 4. Change the font to Webdings and read what it says > > > 5. Then change the font again, this time to Wingdings
Re: [FREE] stratfor (fwd)
"Karsten M. Self" wrote: > There are stateless nations (e.g.: > Palestine), and states which are host to people of several nations > (e.g.: the Swiss Federation). In fact it is the normal condition. China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Iran, and even our very own UK. All put together, well over half the population of the world.
Re: STILL OFF TOPIC: Re: America needs therapy
Eugene Leitl wrote: > Problem is high LEO launch costs. It would seem easier to build automated > and teleoperate fabbing and (linear motor) launching facilities on Luna, > and circularize orbit mostly by aerobraking. And if you can put up a bloody huge enough launcher on the moon, (use solar energy or nuclear - why not - it is one place in the system that we don't care about pollution) then you can send material back all the way to LEO by slingshot, and when it is captured by the facility at LEO, if you do it right, you can get a "free" boost in orbit because of greater orbital velocity of moon. So the more you accrete onto your LEO station the higher it flies. Why not make it the size of Wales? Hello Earth Station One. Well, 3 technically I suppose, Mir was One, the thing up there now is Two. Can't really count Skylab. There is a good fun fictional treatment of the lunar-driven space station idea by Donald Kingsbury "The Moon Goddess and the Son". Written before the Soviet Union fell. In the book they get done in by home-made cruise missiles built out of private planes & off-the-shelf, computers, autopilots, and GPS by Afghan refugees who studied aero engineering in Europe and the US. I think it might be worth re-reading. That and "Arslan" AKA "The Wind from Bukhara" by Madeleine (?) Engh. Ken Brown
Re: STILL OFF TOPIC: Re: America needs therapy
Once the catcher is high enough it ought to be possible to set the launcher so that missed catches zip round Earth & head out. After all, at Lunar OV it "wants" to be in a high orbit. Achieving re-entry through Earth's atmosphere - sorry that should be "entry" it wasn't here in the first place - needs some precision. And if the loads are anything smaller than a large truck, they ought not to harm Earth anyway. Just a pretty light show for anyone watching the skies. Nothing like as fast as natural meteors. Moon-Earth flight time could be days. As many days as you want I suppose as long as you are going faster than the Moon's escape velocity, and certainly very many hours. If you do it right there is no reason it couldn't pass the station at almost any required speed. Catching is the hard part. A plain ordinary net might have to do, at least at first. Well, not *that* plain or ordinary. But it needs to be light because it comes up from Earth. You have to start small, with pea-sized consignments. Or baked-bean-can-sized. Then you work up, making new equipment from stuff sent from the moon. Anything big enough to do damage on Earth will be visible from Earth. So it isn't at all a useful weapons launching system. If you are trying to drop big hot rocks on cities, they will have time to run away (low tech solution) or phone up their sub commanders and tell them to light the blue touchpaper (high tech solution). Same goes with knobs on for nukes. The way to get a station into higher orbits is to start even higher and drop stuff onto it from above. Ken Brown David Honig wrote: > > At 02:00 PM 10/2/01 +0100, Ken Brown wrote: > >And if you can put up a bloody huge enough launcher on the moon, (use > >solar energy or nuclear - why not - it is one place in the system that > >we don't care about pollution) then you can send material back all the > >way to LEO by slingshot, and when it is captured by the facility at LEO, > > And Lloyds pays out when you miss the catch? > > (Then again, NASA played plutonium slingshot without coverage... )
Re: cryptome down ?
John Young wrote: > > At the moment it appears that Verio's DNS server failed to > register cryptome.org as a valid domain name, whereas > jya.com was. We've placed an order to correct that. FYI it works fine from over here & has for a while. nslookup www.cryptome.org Name:cryptome.org Address: 161.58.201.197 Aliases: www.cryptome.org nslookup jya.org Non-authoritative answer: Name:jya.org Address: 216.248.201.38 > We had ordered that the two domains be put on two different > boxes, geographically distant, to avoid both sites going > down if one was knocked out. Hey, there's WMD about > called PATRIOT. > > However, now I learn that Verio uses one DNS server for > the two boxes so an attacker needs only to throw one stone > to kill both our birds. Grrr. That is what we wanted to avoid. Do you mean that there really is only one nameserver? If so that would be a large-scale dereliction of duty for a respectable ISP. Or that there are two (or more) servers, but both your entries are on the same ones? That would be OK. > A smart sales rep assured me that this was the way to > go, after I had placed two orders for two machines to keep > them separate. No need for that he said, let me tell you > a better way. No doubt my simple-minded security method > would have been breached by some Verio setup based on > its own Japanese government spying principles, which is > to say I can't escape being terrorized by Ashcroft. > > What's the connection among Code Red, Nimda and > Carnivore? Nasty computer programs written by clever but socially deprived authors? Ken Brown
Re: Kill Killfile
Sandy Sandfort wrote: > > John Young wrote: > > > And another excellent quality of cpunks...is > > the number of its outstanding writers sent > > to jail... > > Offhand, I can't think of one outstanding C'punk writer who has gone to > jail. Hell, they haven't even put John in jail. I think I'm coming to believe the canard about Americans having no sense of irony. And even the one about New York and points East still being more like Europe in some ways than it is like the USA south and west of the Hudson. Of course in JY's case it is sometimes irony that reads as if it has been filtered through the fingers of one who has been to more than one party since he last slept, and has read way too much art history and cultural criticism. A guide to you Pacific People. When us Atlantic People say something with this little twitch in our voice (just listen - there - did you hear it?) we mean the *exact* *opposite* of what we seem to be saying. And when we use this sort of supercilious sneer (pay attention now, it is very subtle) we mean both what we are apparently saying *and* its opposite, simultaneously, the two held in tension in an unstable melange of fractal meaning. It's a Good Life. Ken Brown
Re: Expert Warns Coded Pictures Indicate Al Qaeda Planning Major BiologicalAttack
"Dr. Evil" wrote: > > Fascinating website. This may sound disturbing, but I must say, this > terrorist was a pretty good painter if these really are his paintings. Agreed. I would be really, really impressed if Koontz had said all this *before* the event. Afterwards? I hope he never publishes his theories on the words of Bob Dylan. > Mr. Koontz made some good points about the biological attack, but his > thesis is predicated on the idea of yellow meaning sickness, and I'm > not sure if it all ties together. For instance, one of the paintings > clearly shows an Arabian horse struggling uphill into a field of > yellow. Yellow in this case looks like peace or salvation. He also > didn't pick up the image of a horse running up the rock being a > reference to how Mohamed went to heaven, so there may be some other > interpretations of these images. Some hundreds of interpretations I guess. The world is full of art historians and critics and cultural studies folk who can generate them for as long as you like. We have a whole department of Art Historians here at this very university. I bet they could find terrorist messages in just about any painting you cared to mention, if you bought them enough drinks. Ken Brown
Re: Expert Warns Coded Pictures Indicate Al Qaeda Planning Major Biological Attack
Maybe the CIA will now open an Art Historical and Symbolical Branch to examine the works of artists for evidence of dangerous thoughts. GK Chesterton got it right back in 1908: "The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet." (From The Man who was Thursday, chapter 4, copied from Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://biblestudy.churches.net/CCEL/C/CHESTERT/THURSDAY/THURSDAY.TXT) The website at http://huizen.dds.nl/~wandm/paint2.html claims that the drawings were made between 1983 and 1989. There are signatures and dates visible on the pictures. Even the Koontz article claims that they have existed at least since 1998. If this is true they can hardly have been a signal to the hijackers to go into action. At the most, evidence of the artist's state of mind. Ken Brown
Re: Neverending Cycle ( was : Re: USPS: glowing by leaps and bounds )
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > Shit, so much for ordering mushroom spores by mail! > > Hopefully UPS and fedex won't follow suit. > > > Another option might be for each package to be dropped into a poly bag, > heat sealed and rinsed before being handled by staff. > > Our society has, for all practical purposes, endless vulnerabilities. If > as each vulnerability is exploited we plan on taking drastic steps to > secure it from future exploitation, the costs will be staggering and the > list of unsecured items will hardly diminish. The result of the current > approach is an authoritarian society with a neverending, self-justifying > security project ahead of it. Sounds like a wonderful place to live if > you're an insect. So we get either the Caves of Steel or the Naked Sun? I'd go for the former, being a city boy, but I guess T. May, H. Seaver & D. Honig might prefer the hyper-exurbia of the latter. One step from the Machine Stops - set not in the ultimate city but in the ultimate suburb. Ken
Re: [Fwd: [biofuel] VW presents new synthetic fuel strategy]
Harmon Seaver posted: [...] > VW presents new synthetic fuel strategy [...] > To a large extent, this biomass consists of carbon and hydrogen. In > the first step of the SunFuel process, these major constituents of > biomass are converted into synthesis gas (H2, CO, CO2). This is then > transformed into hydrocarbons in a synthesis reactor and processed as > required to produce the "designer" fuel. > > SunFuel is an extremely high-grade fuel, free from sulphur and > aromatics. As biomass binds carbon dioxide during growth, the process > is neutral with regard to carbon dioxide production. A variety of > different types of biomass can be used for the synthesis of the new > fuel. In other words a cleaned-up version of the old Town Gas that provided the original streetlighting for industrial cities in the C19 and used to be made in the vast gasworks dotted around all over the place until piped natural methane took over in the 1960s. There's no news here (except for VW's stupid choice of brand name). We've always known we could replace petroleum and coal by agricultural production, because oil and coal were themselves introduced as replacements for the vegetable oils, whale oils, tallows, alcohols and charcoals that people used to burn before the oil industry got big in the 1870s-1890s. The reason we use mineral oils from the ground is that they are *cheaper*. If the price of a barrel of crude oil rises above somewhere between 30 and 60 dollars (depending on who you believe), then coal and oilshale become cheaper & we can switch to that. If the price of mineral fuels rises above somewhere between 50 and 100 dollars per equivalent of a barrel of oil, then using liquid fuel derived from agriculture becomes cheaper. The only ways will will be using such fuels on a large scale in rich countries in the near future is one of: - we "run out of oil" a lot more spectacularly than looks likely now - or world regresses to impoverished autarkies with little trade between them so industrialised countries with no oil have to make their own (cf. South Africa in 1970s, or Germany during world wars) - or governments tax oil so much that bio fuel is cheaper (in UK right now industrial alcohol is cheaper than petrol because of tax - but ordinary citizens aren't allowed to buy it in any quantity, and what we can buy is also taxed) - or global warming looks so bad that people are prepared to accept an increase in their costs in order to avoid burning fossil fuel (and are prepared to use legal or government or military constraints to prevent others burning it as well) Which do you prefer? Ken Brown Of course it always was cheaper to use agricultural product as solid fuel, if you were near the farm and if you had an application that can handle it. Which is why, for example, sugar refineries in poor tropical countries get their heat from burning waste from the cane. And there are a few green-minded small-scale projects that burn coppiced wood they grow themselves. But the distribution and handling complexity of moving millions of tons of solid waste around make that too expensive for large scale use. Same as the poultry farm my sister lives on can save money by burning methane given off from duck shit. But not many of us share our homes with a quarter of a million ducks.
Re: Transparency Spray? [was Transperancy Spray? ]
Reese asked: > How dry will the air be at the burning cherry on a cigarette? Quite wet, because the combustion adds water vapour to the air. It won't be much good at physically wetting things, because the air is warm, but the water vapour is there and being hot will be chemically quite active. Hold a piece of cool glassware near a bunsen burner or candle flame and you will see lots of condensation. No, not *that* near... Ken Brown
Re: NOTAM: GA prohibited w/in 10 miles of nuke plants
"Karsten M. Self" wrote: [...] > Sounds like the feds are treating the current "credible threat" as broad > and shutting down all options. Anyone care to posit a scenario in which > GA could threaten a nuke? Yep. Mr. Usr Bin Local records a video saying that a light aircraft that hits the at the power plant will cause it to release large amounts of Evil Radiation. The only thing to do is to escape upwind as quickly as possible and never come back within 20 miles or you will all die and your children will grow horns and tails. But the Government doesn't want the citizens to know because then it will cause panic, and the emergency services will be stressed by all the radiation-sick, and more people will die anyway of starvation, rioting, looting, & so on. Then release it to the media (of more than one country) just about the time the plane hits the concrete. so the locals will see the reports as they see the firetrucks screaming. Whether or not the plant is seriously damaged is neither here nor there. Actually, you don't have to make the video, because people will come the that very conclusion by themselves as soon as they see the expert types on the TV telling them that there is no reason to panic. Or say the plane is filled with lots of anthrax. Doesn't really have to be for the first-order effect - just has to be believed to be. Ken Brown
Osama bin Laden as SF fan
Ken McLeod posted the following to rec.arts.sf.fandom > Forwarded with permission from China Mieville, fantasy writer > and student of international relations: >> --- Forwarded message follows --- >> My supervisor, an expert in the Middle East, told me about a >> rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network. >> The term 'Al-Qaeda' seems to have no political precedent in >> Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to >> the experts, until someone pointed out that a very popular >> book in the Arab world, Arabs apparently being big readers >> of translated SF, is Asimov's _Foundation_, the title of >> which is translated as 'Al-Qaeda'. >> Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with. Ken [the other one - not me ] added: > This hypothesis raises some interesting possibilities. One is > that bin Laden has a number of video appearances prepared in > advance, which without being too specific give the impression > that he knows what has just happened at the time they're shown. > They could continue to appear at intervals long after his reported death. > Another is that there's a Second Al-Qaeda, somewhere else. Ken Brown (thanks to John Dallman for showing me this on Cix)
Re: FBI wants to believe in domestic terrorists.
Oy! I wanted to be an infiltrator! Are you saying that I have to be an ally? Ken (lefter than a left thing) Brown Declan McCullagh wrote: > > On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 05:54:49PM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Should the FBI RICO members of this mailing list, the list > > will be reported in the press as a right wing extremist hate > > group. > > Don't be silly. Mainstream pop-journalists will be forced to note the > presence of anarchist-types here (hello, proffr) and conclude that > cypherpunks is an "unprecedented, according to law enforcement > sources, alliance of left and right extremist hate groups." > > -Declan
Re: Who Authorized This?
Steve Schear posted: > > Who Authorized This? > Andrew Sullivan, Forbes ASAP, 12.03.01 [...] > Moreover, the power and status of rulers derived from their own perfection. > Kings and queens commanded artists to portray them as demi-gods. Dissenters > were not merely troublemakers; they were direct threats to the perfect > order of the modern state. This was a political order in which everything > had to be perfectly arranged, even down to the internal thoughts of > individual consciences. Some of that might have been true of England in 1576. Much of it would have been true of Spain in 1676. But if Mr. Sullivan really thinks that it is a reasonable description of Britain in 1776 then his idea of history is so screwed there's no point in paying attention to him. Ken Brown
Re: HOWTO Build a Nuclear Device
A propaganda weapon doesn't have to work, it just has to present a threat of working to people who may or may not understand how it is meant to work. It doesn't have to be a credible military weapon. A kamikaze airliner isn't a credible *military* weapon against anyone who can afford artillery. That didn't stop them though. The tall pipe that others mentioned would work well enough to scare people - all you need to do is find a way of convincing others that you've done it. One idea was to set one up in a tall block of flats. You know the sort where there is a 6-inch gap between flights of stairs in the stairwell, so if you stand at the top and look down you see right to the basement. There are abandoned 19 or 20 story blocks in grotty suburbs of London with stairwells like that, I bet the same is true of most big cities. You only have to break in for a single day. You set a number of lumps of U one above the other in such a way that when a higher one falls onto one below it will take it with it - maybe just tie them to the railings with thread, and put some old metal plates in the way to stop them bouncing out of the stack. Use lumps of lead for testing. The topmost one can be released by any simple mecahnism. You then assert publically that when the top one is dropped they will all cascade down and assemble a critical mass on the floor below. Hey presto, one big propaganda coup, one mass panic and evacuation of big city. The building will probably still be standing after it goes off, or fails to, but who will want to be first in? Ken Brown "Karsten M. Self" wrote: > > on Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 12:24:31AM -0800, Tim May ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > > On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:20 PM, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote: > > > > Anyone on this planet can build a nuclear device. So the only issue > > > in building the device is the will to die for a cause. And the only > > > thing I find unfortunate in all of this is that there are so many > > > causes that people are willing to die for. And war will not make > > > those reasons go away - it will only encourage them. > > > > It's really _not_ this easy. It took China and India a while before > > they successfully tested an A-bomb (many years after they had the raw > > materials from their reactor programs). It may have taken the South > > Africans and Israelis a few years after getting materials, too. So, > > why didn't they just hammer U-235 into stainless steel mixing bowls > > and do it the way "anyone on this planet can build a nuclear device," > > one wonders. > > This analysis neglects consideration of several points: > > - Nation-states (even authoritarian ones) will likely want to create > both a sustained program, not merely crank out a few crude nukes, > and preserve the talent involved. One-offs are almost always easier > to complete than a production effort, but the lowered total cost is > offset by a higher unit cost. The terrorist organization can > accomplish its goals with crude tactics and marginally effective > devices. Credible military threat isn't as simple. > > - Credible military weapons have minimum requirements of both efficacy > -- efficient use of supercritical energy -- and predictability -- > having the damned thing go off in the silo / bunker / hanger / > munitions dump rather than the chosen target isn't particularly > useful.
Re: The Crypto Winter
Tim May wrote: > So, here's the punchline, > > Regardless of companies trying to make money, not be run out of business > by money laundering laws, trying to be banker- and Homeland > Fascism-friendly, IS THERE A FUNDAMENTAL REASON WHY TWO-WAY > UNTRACEABILITY IS NOT "POSSIBLE." > > I believe counterexamples have already been developed, showing there is > nothing wired into the nature of mathematics that makes two-way > untraceability impossible. I'll save these examples for later. I don't know if there is. I'll have to think about it. Any train of thought that involves a distinction betwen "seller" and "buyer" is probably going up the wrong track. As is any that involves a distinction between "cash" and "goods?" Yes, I suspect. So we can think of it as barter, but digital barter, so moneychanging *is* a good model. It is sufficient to prove that you can do anoynymous, safe, digital money-changing. The full, hard, question then is something like this: Is there are protocol that allows moneychanging between different forms of digital money that 1) allows complete anonymity to both partners to a transaction, and 2) provides strong defences against fraud to both parties, and 3) works well if one partner has much more to lose than the other (& therefore for arbitrarily large amounts) and 4) works without a trusted 3rd party (broker, bank, court, police, godfather, whatever), and 5) can be relied upon for a single transaction - in other words the partners have no previous knowledge of each other, and need never have a further relationship. ? The protocol needs to be stateless between trades. (though not, of course, within them). Everyone comes to the table with no history and leaves it with no requirement to return. Several slightly weaker cases are of course trivially possible, if we allow some pseudonymity, or assume that the transactions are small enough that fraud will hurt neither party. It is trivially possible if there are repeated pseudnymous transactions, and there is enough time for the parties to build up a reputation. Requirement (4) need not be true if both parties are allowed to have a pseudonymous relationship with a 3rd party, but that just gets us back to banking, which is boring. It is also easy if only one party is really worried about fraud. Ordinary cash transactions for small amounts work like that already. The shopkeeper doesn't care who I am or, really, if my cash is any good. If I pass him a few dud coins he has lost a tiny part of his turnover. I do care that the goods I am buying are good though. So he has to reassure me of his reliability not the other way round. Though they do care if lots of people start to pass forged coins. If their turnover is high enough they have an interest in the average quality of money, not the quality of any one coin. The system only has to be good enough, not perfect. Pseudonymous exchange can be achieved by breaking trades down into small increments none of which is significant enough to damage either player. If I'm going to give you a thousand pounds for 1600 dollars we could do it a dollar at a a time and just withdraw - but we know this already so no point in thinking aloud along those lines Ken Brown
Re: Nuclear Pipe Bombs
Tim May wrote: [...] > As I made clear in my post, it's not _my_ idea. It's one of the standard > "basement nuke" proposed designs. Same here of course. [...] > > I will mention that Ken Brown's "many pieces along the length of the > pipe" is the worst way to do this: it buys nothing over the two pieces > approach and it causes all sorts of problems with the pieces getting too > hot as they come together on the way down. The only reason for mentioning it was that it is perhaps a way people who somehow got hold of the the fissile material, but otherwise had access only to stuff you could pick up on the street, could bodge something together that that would scare others. I'd have no expectation of a nuclear explosion from such a rig. The only advantage is that it is cheap and can be set up in a few hours and (perhaps) might make a truly scary booby-trap. It might be even more effective if it didn't have a timer. A few kilos of fissile uranium literally hanging by a thread in a housing project would make the TV news worldwide. > (For example, the penultimate > chunk falling toward the ultimate chunk...likely to already be melting > and spraying molten U-235 inside the pipe. Just another fizzle. And > fizzles are not very interesting, for reasons I stated. A way too > expensive way to spread mere radiological terror, which could be done > much more cheaply and easily by taking spent fuel rods and blowing them > up, or just by grinding up spent fuel rods or other nuclear waste and > then dumping it out of a plane over a city.) Back to Heinlein again... Ken Brown Shit. If the UK government passes this law they are proposing then this email would probably count as illegal. And anonymous postings are often so tedious.
Re: Brothers in arms? (fwd)
Jim Choate forwarded mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > -- Forwarded message -- > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: CDR: Brothers in arms? > > Anthrax is almost the same organism as Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is >produced commercially as a pesticide. The two organisms can be grown and prepared in >the same way. > > Because Bt is generally considered harmless, the facilities producing it probably >have not been investigated as possible sources of the anthrax material. Bacterial taxonomy is in a state of flux at the moment (that's an understatement - trust me on this!). Lots of people don't think of /Bacillus/ /anthracis/ as a separate species at all - some taxonomists include it as a part of /B./ /cereus/ which is a very, very, common soil bacterium. Bacteria have a sort of modular genome (*), they can sometimes snap-fit bits of code in to do a set of related functions. So there is, for example, a module, forms of which exist in many not-very-closely related bacteria & which genetic engineers have consistently and spectacularly failed to add to anything else. There are a great many modules which move from species to species quite freely. These "modules" are sometimes, but not always, carried in plasmids which are bits of DNA separate from the chromosome(s). (It is possible that some viruses may, in effect, be descended from modules that "escaped") /Bacillus/ /anthracis/ may, in effect, be just one set of closely related strains of a very polymorphic population that happen to have a module and an module. It is possible that those "modules" could be passed to other species of bacteria, and certain tyhat they can be removed from /Bacillus/ /anthracis/, which is why you can get a non-virulent live form which can be used as a vaccine. (And why for some diseases a vaccine can be made from the blood of a survivor). If you have access to an academic library (or http://www.sciencedirect.com) you could look at papers like: Ruiting Lan and Peter R. Reeves (2001) "When does a clone deserve a name? A perspective on bacterial species based on population genetics" (Trends in Microbiology, vol. 9 pp. 419-424, Sept 2001) Abstract: "Molecular population-genetic analysis has revealed that for several human diseases, including tuberculosis, plague and shigellosis, the generally accepted taxonomic status of the organisms involved does not fit the usually accepted genus or species criteria. This raises the question of what species concept to apply to bacteria. We suggest that the species definition in bacteria should be based on analysis of sequence variation in housekeeping genes, and also that the 'clone' be given official status in bacterial nomenclature. This will allow demotion of the species or genus status of several traditionally recognized human pathogens, but retention of current names of anomalous species and genera as clone names." Ken Brown (*) AFAIK I thought up that phrase and it is mine. But a simple Google search shows dozens of other people thought of it too. Curses! Foiled Again! And isn't the Science Citation Index wonderful?
Re: [free-sklyarov] OT: [postmaster@eth.net: Mail Delivery Status Notification]
"A. Melon" wrote: [...] > Would someone please inform the recipient listed in the bounce message > below, and his/her postmaster that GPG signatures in RFC 2015 MIME > encoded form are not hazardous attachements? And posted a failure message: > has been stripped of all/certain attachments by DishnetDSL Mail server due > to security reasons. > > DishnetDSL allows only the following attachments: > > 1. .doc > 2. .txt > 3. .xls > 4. .ppt > 5. .pdf > 6. .zip > > Message contains attachments: ATT from wonderful Dishnet who don't seem to realise that .doc, .ppt and .xls, being in effect executable code, *are* hazardous attachments. Of course, I strongly support the removal of *all* attachments and the limitation of all email to ASCII text, or just possibly EBCDC between consenting mainframes in private. Eschew all attachments. You know it makes sense. Ken
Re: Cattle Herding... (was Re: in praise of gold)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Cows might have served well as currency for primitives like the > Etruscans, but can you imagine using them today? I took > a bus this morning, the fair was 1.10 and I only had paper money > so they ripped me off 90 cents. But if I was an Etruscan, they > would've taken my whole cow! As far as I know people who use cows (or whatever) like this make it work by running up all sorts of debts with each other. So it looks to strangers as if they are being all nice and friendly and doing favours, but of course A knows that B owes so many cows or goats or pots of beer next time someone from village X marries someone from village Y, while B can call in at C's village any time they want and eat prawns, as long as D has by then given some of those special beads made out of abalone shell to F... and so on. Great fun & entirely rendered obsolete by the invention of double-entry book-keeping. If our ancestors lived like that for a long while then maybe we are evolved to remember those reputation tensors Tim mentioned. We all, quite naturally, keep track of who owes what to who & whether they are likely to pay up. So the tribe benefits from old folks who remember exactly who brought what to which party years ago. Human beings as natural book-keepers. It is a good a sociobiological Just So Story and any other. Of course we do stuff like that informally. My sister & her husband owe me some money from when I helped them buy a car. But I, quite separately, owe him about twenty quid I borrowed to buy some beers - but then he owes me a round or two next time we are in a pub - the debts aren't commensurable (even though two of them are denominated in pounds sterling). The "round" is a powerfully symbolic system of exchange and reputation amongst British men (women sometimes join in, as do Irish & Australians, though they don't *quite* get it). As the Gikuyu proverb says "goats are not bananas". Try searching the web for "Onka's big Moka" (you have to avoid references to a band called Toploader that made an album with that title) It was an all-time classic TV program about some guys in Papua who had to successfully bring off a big party before the rainy season, so that they could hand over loads of pigs to their rivals. Like a potlach, with the added complication that, while you have the pigs, they have to eat - pig-capital has negative interest rates. But it wasn't just pigs... Ken
Re: "It's Proto-Indo-European for "money" "
Tim May wrote:
> Left as an exercise: the PIE origins of "mark" (another common word for
> a unit of money), "dollar" (ditto), and "crown." For extra credit,
> "peso," "peseta," and variants. For extra extra credit, "florin."
Just guessing for fun here, not looking them up (My Oxford dictionary
would tell me too quickly, as would any search engine, though maybe not
as authoritatively. I'll check them out in a day or two)
"Mark" is old word for borderlands. Sounds unlikely. Maybe it is related
to "market"? I wonder if there is some word for "traveller" that is
behind "mark", "market", "merchant", or "march"? A word for traveller
could come to mean a foreigner in one context & a pedlar or merchant in
another. Stranger things have happened - one IE word, also meaning
traveller, lies behind both "guest" and "host" (in both senses) as well
as "hostile", "hospitable", "hospital", "hostel", & "hotel". Or is it
"mark" as in sign or symbol, a coin "marked" with some token of the
issuers? And "marchen" (pardon my lack of umlaut) are folk tales.
(Travellers tales?). "March" the month is the month of Mars (Ares),
associated with war - another possible link to borderlands but it sounds
too far-fetched, the old Germans had plenty of their own godlets without
importing Roman or Greek ones.
"Dollar" is "thaler" or "taler", German for "valley", and related to
English "dale". I half remember some story about silver mined in
such-and-such a place being minted into Austrian coins called
thalers, later shortened to "taler" and used as such in north
America and the Caribbean. Maybe there is a further connection to other
words implying low or things or states - dell, doldrums, dolour - I
think the resemblance between "dale" and "vale" is coincidence.
"crown" (AKA "krone", "kroner", "krona", "koruna") is pretty obvious,
being coins stamped with a picture of a crown (presumably to show that
the king issued them) I've no idea of the earlier history of those
words. I guess that "crown" must be related to "corona". Perhaps it is
connected to "curve" or "circle" - no, that sounds far-fetched. It can
also mean the top of the head in English but that might just be a more
recent extension of meaning.
Many currency names originate as units of weight. Being British I think
of pounds and pence as money, so maybe "peso"/"peseta" were words for a
unit of weight, perhaps etymologically related to "pound" - that feels
more likely than a connection to "penny", because there is a French
word for weight "pois", and Spanish is close to French.
A Florin is a coin stamped with a picture of a flower. I think that was
the symbol of the city of Florence AKA Firenze, but the name has since
been used in Britain and Hungary ("Forint"). "Florin" is recently
connected with "flower", "flourish" and so on & more distantly to
"bloom" I think. Maybe a PIE root to do with blooming, flowing, flume,
or even flame Some idea of the sap rising in the spring & things
bursting to life?
German often has "f" or "pf" where we have "f" so maybe a connection to
"pflanzen" which has to be related to "plant" and I think distantly to
"clan" (via Celtic P<->K) and maybe even "branch" and "clade" - the
idea of a tree?
I think I need to go and lie down. And I mustn't even speculate about
"penny", "pound", "lira", "lev", "lek", "lat" "dinar", "drachma",
"shekel", "sol", "rouble", "rupee", anna, "dam", "s(c)hilling",
"franc", "real", "rial", "riyal", "escudo", "afghani", and that
grotesque name for a currency, the "euro"? (Just saying that it is named
after Europe gets no points at all. Or even marks. Same goes for
"Afghani"). All (with 1 or 2 possible exceptions) good Indo-European
names. (I suspect "bolivar" isn't IE either). Not to mention the slang
terms - "bob", "quid", "nicker". You Americans have "buck" (no idea),
"quarter" (obvious but silly) and "dime" (? mispronounciation of
something to do with "decimal"?)
With luck, about a quarter of that bears some resemblance to truth. I
won't say I made it all up over a cup of tea in a break from work,
but...
Ken Brown
Nuts! cypherpunks@lne rejected the posting!
Re: Moving beyond "Reputation"--the Market View of Reality
Tim May wrote: [...] > > > > We're not disagreeing. By a "single" value I meant a universally > > agreed upon value. > > If there is a "universally agreed upon value" for something, and someone > values it differently, is it still "universal"? > > Nope. > > What there may be are market-clearing prices, in various markets and at > various times, but this has nothing to do with "universally agreed-upon > values." Tim got it right here. The market value of anything is not a universally agreed price, it is any price at which a buyer and a seller can agree to do business. All the discussion about certificates of speaking Navajo or whatever are slightly beside the point. If personal reputation, as such, has a market value it isn't the money you'd get by selling the reputation, because as everyone else already pointed out, if you could sell it, it wouldn't really be a reputation. The market value of a personal reputation is the extra money you could get by selling something else, backed by that reputation. That sort of reputation is used in real markets every day. I need to get the hot water boiler in my flat fixed. I would be prepared to pay more money to a plumber with whatever certificates of plumberhood plumbers have than I would to someone I just happened to meet down the pub. I might be happy to spend even more on someone who had done good work for friends of mine. That sort of reputation has cash value. It is even more important in pseudo-markets, like the ones in board memberships of large corporations, or in public offices in the gift of elected politicians. The kind of people who are called, in England, "The Great and the Good" - an odd mixture of retired businessmen who have made enough money, politicians who know they will never get to the top, academics looking to increase their public profile, and the well-meaning offspring of rich and respectable families. Such people sit on committees, and boards, and commissions, and inquiries, they run charities, and schools, and hospitals, and can make a career out of nothing but reputation. Famous for not even being famous any more. Over here in Britain we get them worse than you Americans do do (though you get them pretty bad, if the list of achievements of the board members of a couple of US companies I have shares in is anything to go by) - we have institutonalised it as the House of Lords. Yuck. Ken Brown
Re: Viridian Note 00283: Geeks and Spooks (fwd)
Eugene Leitl forwarded: > -- Forwarded message -- > Date: 2 Dec 2001 23:23:55 - > From: Bruce Sterling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Viridian Note 00283: Geeks and Spooks > > Key concepts: cryptography, information warfare, > imaginary products, American national security [...big article snipped...] Yee-hah! The most poly-on-topic post that has a appeared in cypherpunks for a while. Read it early and often. Except for the nasty bit about the British near the bottom of course. We are friendly people really. We couldn't help getting that empire you know. All you guys just sat around not looking after your countries at all properly and without anywhere near enough artillery or steam engines, what did you expect? Trade or something? If it hadn't have been us it would have been the Germans, or the French, or the Spanish, and we're *much* nicer than them. Ken Brown
Re: Russian Party of Pensioners Manifesto
mattd wrote: [...] > If you are into cryptoanarchy with the emphasis on the anarchy,you may > enjoy this... [...] > We used to say, NO to Western Imperialism and NO to Soviet Imperialism > both. Self determination for ALL PEOPLES! > One Empire has fallen. One still has to fall. But we should not mourn the > passing of the Soviet prison of nations. [...] You miss the point. James & many of the other Libertarians present are aware past attempts at left anarchism. But they think that such attempts will inevitably develop into state socialist tyranny, or else collapse into a bloody war of all against all, or else be defeated by some other group that has already become a centralised tyranny. (In Makhno's case all three happened, at least partly). In other words they think that - to nick a Marxist term they probably wouldn't use themselves - socialism has "contradictions", that you can't have socialism without tyranny. From their point of view there is no logical space for "libertarian socialism" or "socialist anarchism". Someone who claims to be a socialist and yet opposed to state control will, they think, be either a liar who will turn out to be a Statist in the end, or someone who hasn't thought things through, who will turn out to be a capitalist in the end. I happen to think they are wrong. But stirring quotes from well-known texts about the Russian revolution won't persuade them. The few who are at all interested will have read such stuff before and already know the (very persuasive) arguments against it. (After all the Russian revolution really did collapse into ten years of bloody war, followed by 30 years of Stalinism, then another 30 of mind-numbingly boring militarised dictatorship and petty cruelty from which anyone in their right minds would have gladly escaped to America or western Europe. They aren't making this up) Of course most of the US libertarians neither know nor care about that 1920s stuff, and going on about it will just confirm their prejudices about it. Americans tend to be well immunized against socialism - the only way to get it past their mental blocks is to call it something else :-) It was still fun a few years ago when someone posted a chunk of the Communist Manifesto with references to "the Bourgeoisie" changed to "the Net" and quite a few of them took it as some recent anarcho-capitalist rant... Ken
Re: Council of Europe Cybercrime Treaty
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The full text is at > http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/WhatYouWant.asp?NT=185 > > Note that no signatories have signed, and it requires at least 5 to > sign before going into force. > > This is interesting because basically all of Western Europe's IP > traffic crosses the U.S. at some point, Que? Tracing route to members.ams.chello.nl [62.108.1.126] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 193.61.22.245 2 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 144.82.19.103 3 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 144.82.255.17 410 ms10 ms10 ms 128.40.255.29 5 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 128.40.20.190 630 ms20 ms20 ms ulcc-gsr.lmn.net.uk [194.83.101.5] 7 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms london-bar1.ja.net [146.97.40.33] 8 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms linx-gw.ja.net [128.86.1.249] 9 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms LINXRT1.chello.com [195.66.224.89] 1030 ms30 ms20 ms uk-lon-rc-02-pos-5-0.chellonetwork.com [213.46.1 60.57] 1110 ms10 ms10 ms nl-ams-rc-01-pos-0-0.chellonetwork.com [213.46.1 60.9] 1210 ms10 ms10 ms nl-ams-rd-01-pos-1-0.chellonetwork.com [213.46.1 60.14] 1310 ms10 ms10 ms pos15-0.am00rt06.brain.upc.nl [213.46.161.54] 1420 ms30 ms20 ms srp10-0.am00rt02.brain.upc.nl [212.142.32.42] 1510 ms10 ms10 ms srp0-0.am00rt03.brain.upc.nl [212.142.32.35] 1610 ms10 ms10 ms gig3-0-0.h0rtr1.a2000.nl [62.108.0.82] 1710 ms10 ms10 ms members.ams.chello.nl [62.108.1.126] Trace complete.
Re: CJ sent you a Yahoo! Greeting
Duncan Frissell wrote: > > On Thu, 6 Dec 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > And a happy bomb day to you too CJ :-) > > Many happy _returns_ !!! > > And last night was Guy Fawkes: Eh? array zero-origin error! "Remember, remember the fifth of *November* " as the old rhyme goes. Last night was the fifth of December. > http://www.bonefire.org/guy/ > > Gunpowder and all. And that "bonefire" site killed my browser. Ken Brown Here's a full version as used at Lewes in Sussex (the only county where Bonfire is properly celebrated!). I guess when they bring in all their silly new laws such verses will be illegal. Remember,Remember The Fifth of November, Gunpowder treason and plot; I see no reason Why Gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot. Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'Twas his intent To blow up the King and the Parliament; Three score barrels of powder below Poor old England to overthrow; By God's providence he was catch'd With a dark lantern and burning match. Holler boys, holler, make the bells ring, Holler boys holler, God Save the King! A penny loaf to feed the Pope, A farthing O' cheese to choke him, A pint of beer to rinse it down, A faggot of sticks to burn him! Burn him in a tub of tar, Burn him like a blazing star. Burn his body from his head. Then we'll say old Pope is dead! Hip, hip, Hooray!
Re: Masks to be illegal in U.K.
"Major Variola (ret)" wrote: > > Removal of disguises data fodder for CCTV > > Clause 93 would insert a new section 60AA into the Criminal Justice and > Public Order Act 1994. It would allow police to remove any facial > coverings or disguises in a specified area for 24 hours following the > order of a senior police officer. There is no provision for sensitivity > regarding religious articles. > > http://www.blagged.freeserve.co.uk/ta2000/atcsbill.htm > > - > What do you expect from a spongy-brained sheeple that tolerates laws > prohibiting ownership of information? Get your DMCA accepted as unconstutional then say that...
Re: UPI editor: dissent is like soviet propoganda
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Turner, like many rich and powerful people, is a socialist. > Only to be expected, since socialism ties the peasant to the > land, and the laborer to the bench. About 3 years ago I found out that I could understand some of your postings by exchanging the words "socialism" for "capitalism" when ever they occurred - you fell for the Soviet lie that called their oppressive state capitalism by the name of "socialism"...
Re: Steal This Essay 1: Content Is a Pure Public Good
Like, er, the posting was called "steal this essay" and he did. Obviously it is not true that all Americans lack a sense of irony. Jim Choate maybe has no other. Ken Marcel Popescu wrote: > > From: "Tim May" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > This guy's essay is really good. And it only took him a few minutes! > > Ok, WHAT essay? You just quoted a few lines, attributed them to Tim May > (hello???), and added an URL to a site "currently in construction". > > Mark
Re: "Swiss bank in a box"
Though as a matter of off-topic actual fact, no gold (maybe outside a few labs that are trying hard) is likely to be pure enough not to be traceable. As far as I know archaeologists & art historians (& I assume police) have been matching gold artefacts to their sources for some time now. Not as easy as copper (or oil - tax people like being able to trace oil to wells) but doable. Doesn't alter Tim's point that you can obscure the origins my mixing gold from different places of course. Not, I imagine, something that anyone actually ever does, but it would obviously work. Googling for "gold isotope provenance" got me 911 hits. Ken Brown Eric Cordian wrote: > > Tim wrote: > > > ...gold can be melted and all traces of origin lost, save for some > > expensive tinkering with isotopic ratios, maybe. > > Gold, last I looked, had a single stable isotope which accounted for 100% > of its natural abundance. 79-Au-197. > > One piece of pure stable gold is indistinguishable from another. > > So if your gold is pure and isn't radioactive, it hasn't been tagged by > isotopic ratio tweeks.
Re: contextual anonymity
Faustine wrote: > After I thought about it, I got that sickening little feeling in the pit of my > stomach again. Jesus christ, I can't even have a visitor without setting off > some kind of alarm worth investigating. How much time had she spent watching the > front door to pick up on the fact that we never have guests? It was then that I > had the epiphany that if I were doing anything I actually needed anonymity > for--rather than merely living quietly and making a symbolic gesture--there's > not a doubt in my mind she'd have the cops, SWAT teams, and the five o' clock > news all over us like a cheap suit. A few weeks ago I, and my daughter, went to stay with my brother for a weekend. I left a radio on (not a self-conscious security measure, one of them is usually on about 24 hours a day) and (don't ask why) the telephone was off the hook. On the Saturday some friends phoned from a nearby pub to see if I wanted a drink. No answer. They got worried for some reason and phoned the phone company. They said that the phone was off the hook and they could hear shouting. (The radio...) My friends got worried and went round to my place. Couldn't get in. They called the police. I turned up the next evening to find my door kicked in and boarded up, and a note from the police. Well, at least I now have a nice new door paid for by Her Majesty's Government. And - seeing as my mates were there at the time - I now know that police in London who want to break into someone's house don't routinely go armed, and don't turn up in large numbers. Though they do use a special "enforcer" tool that is meant to break a hole in the door near the lock, but didn't in this case, and they ended up smashing the whole thing up. I once saw the fire brigade break in to the flat upstairs - their special tools didn't work either, but one well-aimed kick was enough to push the intact door and its frame out from the wall. Irritating to the occupant who had installed a metal strip around the door frame to prevent a break-in. Ken
Re: Decent Orwell Article.
For those who haven't seen the page, the idea is that Blair chose the date 1984 as the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Fabian Society (British centre-left policy organisation dedicated to state socialism, that once included HG Wells, Edith Nesbit, and George Bernard Shaw). I think that anyone who can get worked up about the Fabian Society is on the verge of reds-under-the-beds paranoia. As Evil Conspiracies go it is just a little bit public and a little bit wet. The Iron Heel is set in 1984, but that, in turn, might derive from Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, also set in 1984. It seems to have been the traditional year of the future... OTOH Orwell said 1984 was just 1948 reversed & why not? (Do we believe Clarke about HAL=IBM-1?) Ken Brown Michael Motyka wrote: > > An interesting read in which the author delves into some details of > Orwell's life and possible origins and targets of his satire. Includes > some neat stuff regarding the dates 1984 and 2000. Time to go read Iron > Heel by Jack London. > > http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/158445.html
Re: Snitches out themselves.Canarypunk stool pigeons,peter Trei a nd declanMc Crapface.
I took a holiday from many things over the traditional 12 days of Christmas, including cypherpunks and television. (Though my daughter reminds me that we did watch a couple of hour's TV on New Year's Eve, and for some reason she wanted me to watch a video of Forrest Gump on Saturday). I got back to the email universe to find 440 cypherpunks postings from mattd. Much as I love Ozzy anarchists I wasn't tempted to read them. Ken Declan McCullagh wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 10:19:52AM -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: > > > mattd[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: > > > Peter Trei's addy is [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > Ill be researching this 'security company' Probably just an Idiot,like > > > declan, but could be dangerous. > > > > > Oh, this is rich! > > > > Someone claiming to be an informed poster to the > > cypherpunks list who doesn't know RSA Security > > Inc's status in the field. > > Actually, has mattd/proffr ever claimed to be an "informed poster?" :) > > At least, as I think you said yesterday, CJ had much more flair, > and a better understanding of things cypherpunkly. Ah well. Procmail > makes things much better.
Re: Fear and Trembling
John Young wrote: [...] > The short-lived patriotism after WTC/Pentagon has been > transformed into uncritical jingoism in the US and surprisingly > in the copycat UK. Why "surprisingly"? Every UK administration since 1945 has been America's poodle in foreign affairs and military matters. [...] > These targets are not celebrated, they are taken for > granted as if to last forever, well, as long as King George > lasted on the American continent George III's rule on the American continent lasted longer than George Washington's did. The present Queen is *still* the head of state of more of the American continent than the president of the USA is (http://www.communication.gc.ca/facts/geography_e.html) Ken Brown (I may be British but I'm not a bloody monarchist - though I don't mind the royals as much in places like Canada & Australia as I do here http://www.cix.co.uk/~kbrown/rotm/1999nov.htm)
Re: "Shoe bomb" and "how to defeat spyware"
http://www.idaho-post.org/Special_Notices/homemade_explosive.htm implies that triacetone triperoxide can be home-made, and has intriguing reference to "ping pong balls dissolved in acetone". Interestingly, despite scare stories, a simple google search doesn't turn up details on how to make the stuff (neither does the Science Citation Index, which might have been a better bet, though I imagine anyone with access to a University library could get the information) It also says that police in Quebec have orders to "withdraw immediately" if hydrogen peroxide, acetone and sulphuric acid are found in a building, because it is used as a booby trap by illegal hemp growers. Obvious cross-link to the other thread abut physical security here. IT seems TATP is the chemical of choice for the sort of thing some posters were thinking about. And google has just told me that the husband of a colleague of mine has published a paper on PETN - thousands of tons of which are apparently manufactured every year and used in industry and medicine (it is a vasodilator and cardioactive drug). So it might not be too difficult to find that for sale. So the argument that he wasn't acting alone boils down to "we think he was too stupid to think it up" or else "we want you to think there are lots of conspiracies so you give us lots of money to investigate them". http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/england/newsid_1631000/1631755.stm is the BBC report of an appeal by two Palestinians who are in jail in London for (amongst other things) making bombs out of TATP in London in 1994, there is a website about the court case at: http://www.freesaj.org.uk/Appeal01_judgement.htm Of course maybe the stuff really is hard to make & the Canadian police are dealing with unusually sophisticated drug dealers and hemp growers. I think Reid lived in South London, as do I. (he attended Brixton mosque for a while). Of course there are no drug dealers or hemp growers in South London. Really. Honestly. And the shop in my neighbourhood that sells hydroponic kits is frequented only by little old ladies with serious orchid collections. Ken Eugene Leitl wrote: [...] > The following article is pretty unsettling, in that it makes the case that > - the technique is carefully thought out, and > - there will be more of these attacks, and > - there aren't good ways to stop them. > > -Olin > --- > http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/01/06/MN222117.DTL > Shoe-bomb flight -- a trial run? > U.S., British officials fear similar attacks in the works > Simon Reeve, Special to The Chronicle [...] > "These bombs are sophisticated devices," said the British intelligence > official. "They would have been difficult and dangerous to produce. Reid could > not have done this himself -- he would have trouble tying his own shoelaces. > It seems we may have an expert bomb maker on the loose in Europe."
Re: Orange crush
I suggest that the author of this insulting piece of nonsense go into any decent library and pick up a book on the 18th & 19th century agricultural revolution. Or read any standard account of the life of Louis Pasteur. Inorganic fungicides, pesticides and herbicides go way back, scientific study of them comes in in the second half of the 19th century. As for whether "so-called modern chlorinated herbicides have been around since the late 1800s." that sort of depends on how you define them. Trust me, I'm a botanist :-) (or maybe even a microbiologist these days if I pull my fingers out & get started on that PhD project) Ken Brown Anonymous wrote: > > cubic-brain drooled: > > > Herbicides have existed a hell of a lot longer than 50 years, even > > so-called modern chlorinated herbicides have been around since the > > late 1800s. > > Total, absolute, unadulterated bullshit! You must work for the > feds to be able to lie that baldfacedly. There were no agri-chemicals > before WWII. They tried using asenic as an insecticide early on, but > gave up on it rather quickly. At any rate, there were certainly no > herbicides before WWII. > Sounds like the chem lab experiments you did in high school did > a number on your forebrain. > Or maybe you can give us a cite?
Re: Shoe bomb (fwd)
The trouble with the sleepy gas idea is that there is no anaesthetic that is guaranteed to both knock out everybody and harm nobody. I'm sure the airlines already thought of it. Why else do they serve so much cheap or free booze on planes? A few prats get aggressive on it but most people just crash out. (An employer once paid for me to travel first-class from London to Cork in Ireland. Not much more than an hour in the air and they offered me a choice of a bottle decent claret or champagne. I chose both. No wonder so many bad business decisions get made.) It's probably safer just shackle everybody to their seats and handcuff them. They can drink soup out of a straw. And give them all compulsory VR helmets with daytime TV. Or old re-runs of the Lucy show. Ken Marcel Popescu wrote: > > > The following article is pretty unsettling, in that it makes the case that > > - the technique is carefully thought out, and > > - there will be more of these attacks, and > > - there aren't good ways to stop them. > > Sleeping gas. Once the plane starts, fill the airplane with something that > causes sleep. (Make sure the pilots are isolated, of course). Lots of > savings - you don't need stewardesses, you don't need food or drinks...
Re: Random Data Compressed 100:1 (Guffaw)
Michael Motyka wrote: > Here we go : > > "As Eric correctly points out, true random input simply cannot be > compressed, it doesn't matter how clever you are or how much time and > computing power you have access to." > > This is a statement of belief isn't it? Odd. No, it's a logical consequence of his definition of "random" & no more a statement of belief than "1+1=2" is. If you use the word to mean something else then it might or might not be true in your universe. Ken
Re: Random Data Compressed 100:1 (Guffaw)
Eric Cordian wrote: > > Declan opines: > > > I'm naturally skeptical of this claim (until I can verify it for > > myself), but I do not believe the claim is "we can encode random data > > at 100:1." > > >From the article: > > "ZeoSync said its scientific team had succeeded on a small scale in > compressing random information sequences in such a way as to allow the > same data to be compressed more than 100 times over -- with no data > loss." > > Now of course it's possible they were horribly misquoted. Still, it is > worrisome that so many people quoted in the article think such algorithmic > gymnastics are mathematically possible. The overpowering stench of snake oil pervades the ether I particularly liked: "The techniques described by ZeoSync would mark a break with the dozens of existing compression technologies, including MPEG for video and music and JPEG for pictures and graphics are able to compact data at compression rates up to 10 times the original. These algorithms typically work by eliminating long strings of identifiable bits of data such as blue sky, green grass or the white background of a snow-covered landscape." Which sounds like someone who doesn't know what they are talking about being misreported by someone who doesn't understand (*) "ZeoSync said its scientific team had succeeded on a small scale" "The company's claims, which are yet to be demonstrated in any public forum" "ZeoSync, whose Web site can be located at http://www.zeosync.com/"; "Among the scientific team working with ZeoSync is Steve Smale, one of America's most renowned mathematicians. Smale is an emeritus professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the 1966 winner of the Fields Prize, the Nobel Prize for researchers in this field. He could not be reached for comment on his role in the project." I bet. Ken Brown (*) clue for those who have too much of a life to bother with things like file structures and encoding (though why would they be reading cypherpunks?) - JPEG is a lossy compression method that tries to recode "real world" pictures in a way that *looks* almost as good as the real thing but takes up less space, by smoothing out gradual changes of colour (and other stuff as well). It doesn't "typically work by eliminating long strings of identifiable bits of data". And it doesn't compress "up to 10 times", it compresses as much as you like, with a trade-off between file size and image quality. MPEG, AFAIK, is similar.
Re: Ecash fraud resolution
Anonymous wrote: > > If there is no fraud dispute mechanism, and Bob is paying Alice, only > Alice can profit from the fraud. Presumably when the fraud occurs, > whichever party is at fault, Alice will refuse to deliver Bob the goods. > Hence if Bob defauds Alice by giving her bad cash, he will not accomplish > anything. He will not get the goods, he will not get anything. At most > he can complain that she cheated him, but if he is lying anyway he can > probably make such complaints without bothering to go through the trouble > of doing a real transaction with her. > > So the real need with a reputation system is to detect the case where > the seller, rather than the buyer, commits fraud. Luckily this is > easier as sellers often seek to build up their reputations and develop > persistent identities. In an /entirely/ online system, I'm not sure there is a real distinction between sellers and buyers. One person sends another some stream of bits that the other perceives to have a value. The other sends a different stream of bits. It could be e-cash of some kind, or the password into some system, or the text of Iain Banks's next novel, or a sequence of pictures of a young Peruvian woman taking her clothes off, or a ripped CD of Beta Band out-takes, or a detailed map of on oil reservoir in the Permian Basin of Texas. The difference between barter and cash-payment is lessened if markets can be cleared electronically all but instantly. And both "money" and "goods" can be part-transmitted and part-paid. Maybe, in general, the more kinds of money there "are" the less money is distinct from goods. > eBay is a good example of a reputation system in action. It is not > perfect but it does a reasonably good job. Many buyers will refuse > to bid on auctions if the seller has a reputation less than 20 or so. > Sellers generally have much less stringent requirements on buyers; > at most they want to see a positive reputation. Of course it is different when physical goods change hands. (THe difference between "physical" goods and the others isn't, of course, that bitstreams aren't physical, but that their value lies only in their information content. Other electrons would have done just as well. Or the same message printed on paper. Especially if that message is "I promise to pay the bearer on demand...")
Re: Ecash fraud resolution
Absurdly enough, I had a dream about this last night. I was worrying about assessment of reputation and I realised how it had to work. The particular problem was the well-known one in evolutionary biology: how does a female choose which male to allow to beget, and which to allow to father, her children. Stuff about seahorses and anisogamous monoecious reproduction (except in my dream I couldn't remember the word "monoecious") Strange to say, after I woke up, I couldn't remember the answer :-) How unusual. All I am left with is the trite insight that in human beings (and I suspect any species with a decent memory in which males play, or can play, a significant part in rearing offspring) assessment of reputation is, if not hard-wired, pretty much universal. And the only way it /can/ work is by assuming that he who can be trusted in small things can be trusted in great. You tend to believe that someone who lies and cheats about little things can't be trusted with big things. So the most successful liar is someone who remains scrupulously honest until the moment comes for lying. (So maybe you should never marry anyone you haven't often played cards with!) Not exactly ground-breaking. Ken Tim May wrote: > > On Wednesday, January 23, 2002, at 08:36 AM, Michael Motyka wrote: [...] > > Forgetting for the moment the nature of the goods or services that are > > exchanged couldn't the cash transfer be broken into many very small > > transfers with acknowledgment on each? First there must be some sort of > > agreement to pay. If the payment transactions halt when there is a > > dispute there are three classes of money : paid, unpaid and disputed. At > > least this leaves a smaller amount to be disputed. > > > > The general rule of thumb is: > > When the payoff for defection (fraud, failure to pay) is greater than > the likely/expected future revenue stream from honorable behavior, > defection is more likely. [...] > Remember that international trade has gone on for centuries, even > millennia, with various "transaction failures" being possible: a ship > sails into a port carrying goods and the local satrap decides to simply > seize the cargo rather than offer goods in return, a payment is made in > gold that turns out to be painted lead bricks, and so on. Likewise, > black market or ostensibly illegal transactions have been happening. > Examples abound. Lots of transaction failures are possible. An important point lots of people forget. The systems don't have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough. Another reason for quantum transactions, it limits the loss. (well, it is the same reason of course, but looked at a different way) One of the reasons I don't mind carrying 20 pound notes but I dislike 50 pound notes (& if there was such a thing as a 500 pound note I wouldn't ever use one) is that, although I don't like losing 20 pounds, it isn't going to cause me much real grief. 500 pounds would be a bit of a blow. > In these examples, there is little recourse to "courts." Of course, both > examples are good examples of anarchies. (A point well-made by David > Friedman over the years and by Bruce Benson in his exhaustive treatment > of the Law Merchant, the anarcho-capitalistic system used by traders > from various parts of the world to deal with each other in the absence > of top-down authoritarian law.) > > The mistake so many critics/observers of digital cash (cryptographers > especially) make is to expect digital cash to solve problems rigorously > that are not rigorously solved when the forms of payment are chests of > gold, IOUs, shipments of grain, or even Federal Reserve Notes. Or to > solve the fraud problem that banks could easily pull off if they wished > to (but don't). The protocol for digital cash must be seen as just one > part of the larger ecology of economic transactions between actors with > varying world models (beliefs in what other actors will likely do). [...]
Re: spam attack on cpunks list
Eric Murray wrote: [...] > Spam on cpunks has gone WAY up in the last month or so... to the point > that on the raw feed there is usually significantly more spam than > content[1]. The only drawback to this filtering scheme is that I still > have to look at all the spam to make sure there isn't a real post from > someone who is not yet on the posters list. There are ways to automate > this, once I figure out a method that will ensure that no content gets > dropped, I'll implement it. Just anecdote (I'm not counting) but I think I've seem at least a tripling of email spam in the last 2 months. An address I use mainly for web browsing has had a huge increase. I suspect that a great many dodgy sites are harvesting addresses and selling them to spammers. Also a lot of the spam has gone rogue. There are programs on the Net that churn out spam long after the originator has forgotten all about it. I've seen and cleaned an old Solaris box that had been rootkitted 2 years earlier. I have seen the future and it is mostly about getting sent junk mail by zombies. > [1] this isn't true of the other lists that I run some of which have > been around for many years, and get very little spam. I think that > it's pretty obvious that one or more people are luring spam to cpunks > in order to discourage the discussions that happen here. Anyway, cpunks is a bit of a spam magnet - the userid I receive SSZ & a couple of other lists on is now the number one hit on the spam filters here. I think it is more about prats wanting to be k00L than any conspiracy to disable discussions. I'm not sure why, but, after I've filtered out obvious spam, and also messages from 3 or 4 frequent posters, (guess who), although the quantity of real postings on cpunks has gone down the quality seems to have gone up a bit. Maybe it's just that some of the list members have finally recovered from Sept 11/the dot-com bust/y2k or whatever obsession gripped them. Ken
Re: Heavenly Weenies
Michael Motyka wrote: > Religion and history have very little to do with the religion of Bush or > Ashcroft ( or Falwell, or Robertson, or Reed ). Theirs is a rhetorical > religion, an emotional distillation of earlier systems that has even > less to do with spiritual thought than its founding beverage. They > attempt, sadly with a fair degree of success, to administer this drug > and tap into a few very fundamental human behaviors with the express > purpose of aquiring and exercising power. Any discussion of religion or > history with those fascists is just falling for their diversion. While > everyone goes chasing after the firetrucks those bastards are robbing > the bank. The term 'bank' applies literally and figuratively. Funny, > isn't it, how they are able to rob people of liberty and cash? Makes me > vomit just to think of them. Excuse me, rethhh@hbfiobd#nbg$msopbm. Right on. > Is 'pax vomitus' proper latin? No, but "Pax Vomitoria" might mean "The Silence of the Emergency Exits" :-) Ken
Re: Sheeple Land With Hands on Heads
"AARG! Anonymous" wrote: > > Eric Cordian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Richard Bizarro, 59, could get up to 20 years in prison on charges of > > interfering with a flight crew. > > Get out the white kryptonite! > > Do you think he was traveling with Bizarro-Lois? Was Lex on the plane, > too? :-) And yet, despite all this security, and despite all the surveillance, the airlines are still about as secure as a paper bag. Last week, at Manchester airport in the UK, some journalists walked onto a plane with replica guns and fake bombs. No-one noticed. Yesterday, at Heathrow Airport near London, a couple of enterprising young men drove off with 6.5 million dollars US in used notes that were on their way from Bahrain to New York. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/england/newsid_1815000/1815316.stm). It raises nagging questions like: - why would a portable cargo of that value ever be in the sole charge of one driver, completely out of sight of anyone ELSE (never mind the security guards) - why would anyone with enough state-licensed legitimacy to send the money, send it in that form? Why not just get the local bank to dispose of the notes (I'm sure the US embassy would send a man with a gun round to make sure they all got burned) and wire the money? Never mind the Internet - these guys haven't even caught up with Morse yet. - why would anyone sending 6 million dollars not employ their own security? Unless of course they did, and they were watching all the time, and the thieves are about to get a very nasty surprise when the original owners turn up to collect the cash to put on the mantlepiece next to their nice big insurance payouts. I imagine that the airport staff are going to get visits from some extremely inquisitive loss adjusters.
Re: Say a goodnight prayer for joshua.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Aimee Farr wrote: > > > Not even our > > military is exposed to the sort of personalized fear and exposure that > > public servants and their families experience today. > > Pure Karma... I thought the military were supposed to be "public servants". Although the British government is now proposing a law to license private mercenary companies. Really, really, truly. Ken
Re: "Stole their back"?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > On 13 Feb 2002, at 17:48, Eric Cordian wrote: > > > > "Stole their back"? > > > > I'll guess "hack", aka cab here. "hack" doesn't mean cab. Once upon a time a hackney carriage was a kind of cab, but that is the century before last. > My guess is "backpack". > > George But it said "locked outside a police station". Bikes are just about the only thing anyone locks to anything in the street. Has to be bike. In a universe where Choate can consistently type "loose" for lose and "responce" for "response" (Freudian, eh?) "back" for "bike" is believable. Typos can be of the brain. Back to the topic - to someone who doesn't care about their own privacy, more cameras can be a rational policy. They don't prevent crime, they move it. So you might rationally vote for more cameras in places you go to, and not care about places you don't. The vast majority of these cameras are privately owned, on shops and offices. The ones run by local councils or the police tend to be at busy town-centre locations, frequented by many voters. Suburban areas are, and always have been, more violent than city centres - depending on what you mean by suburban. Many so-called "inner city" districts are in fact poor or badly-run suburbs. Ken
Re: "Stole their back"?
Ken Brown auto-carps: > Suburban areas are, and always have been, > more violent than city centres - depending on what you mean by suburban. > Many so-called "inner city" districts are in fact poor or badly-run > suburbs. I meant, of course, "Some suburban areas". Ken
Re: Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad (fwd)
True enough, but the Germans were doing almost as well against themselves, having attacked a great many US ships since 1939 and sunk a few, including at least one in US territorial waters. (Usual googles quickly come up with sites like http://www.usmm.org/casualty.html and there is stuff on the amazing http://uboat.net/) Also US forces (in the guise of military advisors to the Chinese, "Flying Tigers" and so on) had been involved on a small scale in the war against Japan for some years. Pearl Harbo(u)r didn't get the US into the war - that was happening anyway - it just made it trivial for the government to crush the opposition to joining in. My googling around also came up with this justification of US involvement by Roosevelt: http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/7-2-188/188-26.html (which is probably old hat to you but not being a USAian I haven't seen such stuff of course) Some similarities (presumably not coincidental) to things said recently, though George Bush could do with some of those old speechwriters. Ken Sunder wrote: > > Um, how do you think the USA got sucked into WWII anyway? Sure Pearl > Harbor did the trick, but before that, the Brits were running psyops on us > trying to change our isolationist policies. > On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Eugene Leitl wrote: > > > On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Lucky Green wrote: > > > > > So where is the news? Is it that the government is admitting to this > > > well-known fact? > > > > Admitting to run PSYOPS against allies has novelty at least to me. > > Widespread realization of this results in loss of efficiency in > > communication (everything is assumed to be a lie a priori unless proven > > otherwise) and voter-driven change in policy (e.g. EU-US axis). > >
List of political sf & fantasy books
While I'm Choating the list: sf writer China Mieville (*) posted a list of sf and fantasy books "that every Socialist should read" at http://www.sfsite.com/fm/show.html?rw,50socialist Even if you don't care about books or politics check out the site and dig those cheekbones. Interesting overlaps with the sort of stuff some of the right-wing libertarians here might read. I particularly liked: "Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged (1957) Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive "objectivist" (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of "collectivism" is visible in this important an influential -- though vile and ponderous -- novel." and "Ken MacLeod -- The Star Fraction (1996) British Trotskyist (of strongly libertarian bent), all of whose (very good) works examine Left politics without sloganeering. The Stone Canal, for example, features arguments about distortions of Marxism. However, The Star Fraction is chosen here as it features Virtual Reality heroes of the left, by name -- a roll call of genuine revolutionaries recast in digital form." Ken Brown (*) Everyone always asks that. He always says "hippy parents".
Re: Doomsday Shutdown
It's impossible to know "what really happened" because of the secrecy, security, and straight plain lies surrounding the whole business. But since 1989 it has become increasingly obvious that at least a large minority of officers on both sides never seriously intended to launch. Of course no-one can know how they might have behaved had they really thought that the balloon was going up. But it as at least plausibly claimed (I can't put it more strongly than that because anyone who really knows is almost by definition either a professional liar or someone who was then and may still be in fear of their life) that there were times when the Russians thought they were being attacked and rocket force officers chose not to escalate. Add to this the fact that the intelligence and security services of the USSR and UK, and (we now know) the USA as well, were infiltrated at the highest levels so that each sides spooks all knew what the other lot were up to all the time. And that the military & intelligence people were talking to each other while their governments weren't (I found the idea that the CIA may have saved the world (well, my bit of it at any rate) rather hard to believe. The idea that they did it in co-operation with the KGB & that the person they saved it from was the President of the USA made much more sense). And that (despite very successful US propaganda to the opposite effect during the Reagan years) the massive excess of US expenditure on arms over Soviet really had very little to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was (we now know) on its last legs all through the 1970s and 80s. And that the real military problems the US faced for latter Cold War years were nothing to do with the Soviets at all. So all that wonderful "vocabulary" and "doctrine" that the Rand and others came out with was all for nothing. Irrelevant to what was really going on. But then the idea that warfare is about choosing the right jargon was always a stupid one But no-one who wasn't there will ever really know what really happened to MAD. And as "there" is in fact hundreds of "theres", from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, political, military, and technical, and these theres were keeping secrets from each other (and themselves), maybe there is no one truth too know. No simple causes for complex effects. Ken John Young wrote: > > New York is a world of fanciful invention of people > aching to be more important so bear this in mind. > > A fellow this evening claimed to have been present > at the session when the US and the Soviets agreed to > detarget one another, at Bolling AFB, thus closing > down the Doomsday Scenario two generations lived > with, through various administrations of the US and > the Soviets. > > What was interesting about this story was the behavior > of the US and Soviet military officers who had control > of the weaponry which could determine who lived and > who died for some 50 years, and not the transient > officials who headed governments. > > According to the person telling the story, the USAF > officer heading the US's MAD program told him the day of > detargeting was the happiest of his life. > > The Soviet colonel general who came to the US to arrange > detargeting was found, again according to this eyewitness, > watching the I Love Lucy Show and laughing his ass off. > Boots off, wearing mismatched socks, mouth filled > with golden teeth. > > The Soviet colonel general was also said to be relieved > that the standoff was over at long last. And that it was now > time to construct retirement facilities for no longer needed > MAD officers. > > Is there any way this event's particular circumstances can be > verified? That detargeting occurred is known, but what of > the main officers' thoughts about no longer being ready to > unleash the dreaded armaments year after year, and their > relief at the passing of the nearly unbearable responsibility? > > This is well beyond what the physicists and engineers of > the weaponry have disclosed of their feelings. The handover > of the weapons to officers in the field, though supposedly > restrained by a battery of controls, does raise a question > of what it was like to be in command of the weapons, to > remain ready to launch them even if nations' leaders could > not order an attack. > > Do physicists and behavioral scientists address the effect > of commanding horrific weaponry -- not that of the launch > officers in control of the keys, but that of the officers who > must decide to issue the orders of launch when there is > no higher authority to say do it now? > > The person who told this story said the US officers in > command are southerners, mean sons of bitches who would > have no reservation in launching mass killing weaponry. > This didn't ring true: why southerners and not any other > American? And what of the claim that the officer in command > claiming detargeting was the happiest day of his life? Why > would l
Re: The Register - Terror talk stalks RSA Conference
'The battlefield security czar professed surprise at learning from the comments that other armoured vehicles already exist, within military agencies and even private companies. "What we discovered is that the idea of having tough metal shells wrapped round a car or tractor... is in fact an old idea," said Clarke. "There are already such vehicles out there."' Steve Schear wrote: > > Two comments: > > One - interconnected systems are unlikely to ever be hacker-proof until > they use well established capabilities-based architectures. > > Two - having a Govnet means the gov can switch off the Internet anytime > with little immediate and direct consequence to itself. > > At 09:41 PM 2/21/2002 -0600, Jim Choate wrote: > >http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24164.html > > >Clarke also defended his proposal for the creation of a private network > >exclusively for sensitive government computers. The administration > >received 167 comments on the proposal to create a "Govnet" that would be > >isolated from the public Internet, Clarke said. Those proposals are being > >reviewed by sixteen federal agencies. > > > >The cyber security czar professed surprise at learning from the comments > >that other segregated wide area networks already exist, within federal > >agencies and private companies. "What we discovered is that the idea of > >having a separate air-gapped network... is in fact an old idea," said > >Clarke. "There are already such networks out there." > > > >Some security experts had criticized the Govnet proposal, arguing that > >such a network would itself be vulnerable to attack, and would represent a > >government abandonment of the Internet. Clarke countered Tuesday that he > >didn't expect Govnet to provide perfect security, but that it makes sense > >to remove critical government functions from the public network. "I don't > >know where it was ever written that everything has to be connected to > >everything else," said Clarke.
Re: Chinese Spam
A good example of "altruistic punishment" as named by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter in the paper in Nature a few weeks ago I think it was Choated to the list but I got bored searching the archives for it - it was mentioned by John Young and someone else in context of not feeding the koalas though. Obvious sum: If spammers send M messages, hoping to get B benefit from each sucker who replies, and if a proportion S of recipients are suckers, and a proportion, P, of recipients choose to punish, and each punishment causes D disbenefit then obviously if (SB < PD) spam won't pay. As both S & B are usually negligible for spammers & D in this case if very large, maybe we have the answer :-) But it won't apply if spammers aren't rational actors (maybe like our friendly neighbourhood bilby) There are maybe other CP & crypto relevancies in that paper (although to be honest I thought it was kind of obvious for Nature). Maybe more after a seminar on it tomorrow. Ken Brown Tim May wrote: > > At a party on Saturday, the subject of the huge amount of Chinese > language spam came up. Lucky had the best idea: reply to it with > forbidden language about arms shipments, revolution, etc. > > The general idea is to say something like "Thank you for your > communication. Death to the fascist Communist government!" [...snip...]
Re: Don't panic the New Yorker sheeple, glowing soon
It is a very good film. It won an Oscar for best documentary (which is
odd, seeing as it is fiction). Of course it is very precisely targeted
against Kahn and his views (there is a parody of him in it) and intended
to stress the uselessness of "civil defence" in a large-scale nuclear
war.
It was in fact finally shown on the BBC at least once - I saw it - but
many years later.
Useful accounts of it at:
http://www.picpal.com/peterwatkins.html
http://www.mbcnet.org/archives/etv/W/htmlW/wargamethe/wargamethe.htm
Faustine wrote:
> Other "must see" bunker TV:
>
> The War Game (1965)
>
> Originally made for British television, this semi-documentary directed by Peter
> Watkins was banned from television because it was considered too shocking
> and horribly realistic; ("the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to
> be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting")instead after a delay it was
> released theatrically and won the Academy Award as best feature documentary of
> 1966. This film shows what could happen in Great Britain if it were under
> nuclear attack and the after-effects its survivors would suffer in a post
> - -nuclear-war world. "Sequence after sequence inscribes itself in
> memory...stirred me to a level deeper than panic or grief. It is more than a
> diagnosis; it is a work of art..."--The London Observer. "Unquestionably the
> most impassioned outcry against nuclear war yet...a brilliant accomplishment.!-
> - -The New York Times. "Now comes a brilliant young English director named Peter
> Watkins with a 55-minute dress rehearsal for Hell entitled The War Game, and
> finally we have the full physical and psychological horror at Armageddon and
> after."--The New Republic. One of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made;
> definitely not for the squeamish. United Kingdom, 1965, B&W, 47 minutes.
> (available on Amazon.)
>
> "... its pathbreaking and still-powerful juxtaposition of interview,
> reconstruction, graphics, titles and the collision of dry data with images of
> horror still shock, the grainy black-and-white imagery and use of telephoto,
> sudden zooms and wavering focus creating an atmosphere of immediacy unique in
> British television. Fifty minutes that shook the world."
>
> ***
>
> I'm about as unsentimental as it gets, but my palms started sweating just to
> remember seeing this. You won't forget it.
>
> ~Faustine.
Re: Psyops: Every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile
The psy-op is that the story plants in the heads of Americans the idea that Iranian kids *can* buy Barbie dolls. Corollaries being that Persian people are "just like us" and that the country is open to foreign trade and cultural influence. An antidote to what (over here) we perceive as US ignorance of Iran - if all you get to hear is Bush & govt. spokescreatures you get the idea that all USans think Iran is a totalitarian anti-women anti-semitic dictatorship al la the Taliban Expect to see more news items that mention the democratically elected Jewish and Armenian members of the Iranian Parliament, and well-dressed, well-paid, well-educated women running businesses in Teheran. The most effective propaganda is the truth - especially if you get to choose which part of the truth is told. Ken Sampo Syreeni wrote: > > On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > > >AP) Iran has introduced its version of Barbie and Ken: twin dolls Dara > >and Sara, who promote traditional values with their modest clothing and > >pro-family stories. > > Presumably this counts as a counter-offensive in the Jihad against > Foreign, Wanton Dolls, then? > > A relatively meticulous exercise in psyops, I'd say. > > Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 > student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front > openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: The living _won't_ envy the dead
Faustine wrote: [...snip...] > For all its propagandizing, I still think it's entirely possible to come away > from that film convinced that as a nation we need more and better preparation, > not less. That's the point - you as a nation (the USA) might well have been able to prepare for it. Over here in Britain, the only way I could be more than 30 miles from a probable target is to emigrate. There is only one county in England which had (then) no active military base (Sussex - though it did have some admin for the Royal Engineers & it does have the HQ of the Military Police. Not, I suspect a likely ICBM target) Rochester, where The War Game is set, is just south-east of London. It's about 20 miles downwind of a major international airport (Gatwick), less than 15 miles from a serious army base at Woolwich, not far from oil refineries, power stations & chemical works (not necessarily targets, but things you don't want to be near downwind of when they are blowing up) right next door to a naval dockyard (Chatham, since closed down), and at a transport choke point where road and rail bridges cross the river Medway. If not a target itself it is within walking distance of 2 or 3. Of course Tim would just say "don't live in Rochester". Support for civil defence mostly evaporated in Britain in the 1960s after the Russians converted to ICBMs. The left tended to regard it as a government excuse to increase social control and erode liberties; and the right saw it as a waste of money - because it would always be cheaper for the Russians to build more missiles than it would for us to defend ourselves from them. Also there was the idea that spending enough on CD to survive an enemy strike breaks up MAD, so if the enemy think you are going to do it it pays them to first strike (that is if they ever had any serious intent to nuke you in the first place which we now know the Russians never did). So spending less on CD was thought of as making a war less likely. Things are different if you are thinking about *limited* nuclear war rather than MAD. Which is why old lefties like me who would have opposed CD in the 60s & 70s (mostly on civil liberties grounds) would now be rather in favour of it under the current conditions. A Britain targetted by 50 or 100 warheads is going to be Airstrip One. A Britain in which a single suitcase bomb goes off somewhere, or in which a few nutters from Iowa start throwing bugs around, is a place in which individual precautions might make sense. As it is I'm right in the centre of London right now with something like a dozen serious biomedical labs within 2 blocks of me. The nearest one with live human pathogens being 2 metres from my backside as I write, So if even a small bomb goes off in this street I start going upwind as fast as I can. Ken Brown
Re: Canadian govt to tax recordable media for RIAA, MPAA
So we sort of swap. Next time any Brits go to North America we sort of accidentally leave our CD players and have to buy new ones when we get back. Don't *sell* them of course, that would be *illegal* and therefore *naughty*, never mind taunting the happy fun customs officials. Next time any Americanadians turn up here they sort of accidentally leave their pre-recorded CDs (still grossly overpriced in UK - we can be charged 16 pounds (over 25 dollars) for something that sells for 12.99 dollars in the US - and its not tax, the difference mostly goes to the record company). Like the ancient Phoenicians leaving pretty cloths on the beach in exchange for tin. Ken "Major Variola (ret)" wrote: > > from /. > > "A new Canadian levy will be introduced in 2003 on all recordable > media (pdf). The magnitude of these tariffs is staggering: $1.23 for all > CD-RW's, $2.27 on > all DVD-R's, and get this: $21 for each gigabyte of storage on portable > MP3 players. That's an extra 160 dollars for a Nomad." Like in the U.S., > this tax is collected and given directly to the record industry, a > governmental subsidy for no apparent societal benefit. > > http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/tariffs/proposed/c09032002-b.pdf > > -- > Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign > entanglements. > -George Washington
Re: The Siege: Stranger than fiction
they want to kill Arab children. But they think they will never be safe while there are Arabs living amongst them. They know that most Israelis, most Jews, and most Europeans and Americans who think of themselves as friends of Israel cannot stomach that. So Sharon's government deliberately provokes bloodshed. To them the bombings and the shellings and the murders are a price worth paying to bring their Israeli and Jewish opponents to a "realistic" and "practical" position. And Dick Cheney turns up in Jordan in the middle of this and what does he talk about? Nuke Iraq! No wonder so many Arabs hate us. No wonder so many Muslims think there is a war between "the West" (whatever that is) and Islam. If you live there it bloody well looks like that. Ken Brown
Indian government closes down cellphone messaging for rioters
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/6129.shtml > A total of 8_000 preventive arrests were made during last > Friday in Mumbai_ the financial center of India_ the Press > Trust of India (PTI) reported_ quoting Joint Commissioner > of Police (law and order) V.N. Deshmukh. > As a result_ the local cellphone networks were asked to > disable their SMS service during the day to help reduce > social unrest. The SMS service in the city was shut down > following a directive received from police commissioner > M.N. Singh_ which blamed malcontents for using the SMS > service to arrange illegal demonstrations. Both Orange and > BPL Mobile blocked their SMS service from 11.30 am to 6 pm_ > although it is not clear if MTNL complied with the > instruction. No users within the Mumbai license area were > able to receive or send SMS's during the day and any > attempt got an error message. BPL Mobile did send out a > broadcast message to its subscribers warning them of the > block however. > There is ethic unrest in the city between Hindus and > Muslims over plans to build a Hindu temple on the site of a > demolished Muslim Mosque in the holy town of Ayodhya. > Posted to the site on 18-Mar-2002
