re: Reputable E-Gold Funded Debit Cards?
I've been monitoring the e-gold discussion list for some time and this guy appears to be legit (i.e., a lack of negative comments). I have not purchased from him, but am considering obtaining one of these. Would be most interested in your experience should you decide to go ahead. https://www.goldnow.st/debit_card_order.asp Hush provide the worlds most secure, easy to use online applications - which solution is right for you? HushMail Secure Email http://www.hushmail.com/ HushDrive Secure Online Storage http://www.hushmail.com/hushdrive/ Hush Business - security for your Business http://www.hush.com/ Hush Enterprise - Secure Solutions for your Enterprise http://www.hush.com/ Looking for a good deal on a domain name? http://www.hush.com/partners/offers.cgi?id=domainpeople
re: Reputable E-Gold Funded Debit Cards?
On 2 Apr 2002 at 10:35, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've been monitoring the e-gold discussion list for some time and this guy appears to be legit (i.e., a lack of negative comments). I have not purchased from him, but am considering obtaining one of these. Would be most interested in your experience should you decide to go ahead. https://www.goldnow.st/debit_card_order.asp I didn't know where .st referrs to, so I looked it up. Apparently it's Sao Tome and Principe, so I still don't know. Mr Geographically impaired.
Software encryption patent incites controversy ...
Sorry this is so long (I don't have a link) - but this is definitely worth a read-through when you have a few minutes. -elyn --- WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA., April 2, 2002 - A company that in February 2001 obtained a patent to encryption technologies is now harassing other publishers of security software, demanding that they cough up licensing fees for products published years before the patent application was filed. Maz Technologies Inc., http://www.maztechnology.com, Irvine, CA, is demanding at least $25,000 from PC Dynamics, http://www.pcdynamics.com. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) issued patent 6,185,681 to Maz on February 6, 2001. The patent claims to cover all application- independent or transparent encryption technologies. The patent is a mistake, and should never have been awarded, said Bruce Schneier, internationally-renowned security technologist, author, founder and chief technical officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. Schneier is the inventor of the Blowfish encryption algorithm and Twofish, a finalist for the new Federal Advanced Encryption Standard. In 2001, he testified on computer security to the U.S. Senate's Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space. The Cryptographic File System, written and made available in 1993, does the same thing. I expect this thing to be overturned quickly -- it's idiotic. It's abuses of the patent system like this that make it difficult for legitimate companies to develop and market technology products, said Schneier. This is an absurd claim, said Peter Avritch, president of PC Dynamics, which publishes a virtual disk encryption product for Windows called SafeHouse. The company first introduced SafeHouse in 1994. In turn, SafeHouse draws on transparent encryption technologies that PC Dynamics earlier included in MenuWorks Total Security, first published in 1991, seven years before the patent application was filed. The demand from Maz is based on a patent application filed in 1998, long after the widespread use of hard drive encryption. That application somehow failed to discover and identify a huge body of 'prior art' that included existing encryption products, even encryption products used for decades by the U.S. government - which the PTO also somehow failed to research before it approved the patent. Clearly, the PTO needs to re-examine and invalidate this patent. Further, did Maz willfully file a false claim of intellectual property? Under a 'Walker Process' antitrust counterclaim, a company can seek treble damages from a patent holder if the patent holder willfully defrauded the PTO -- in this case, by not referencing the abundance of like-acting software already available at the time the patent application was filed, said Avritch. Koppel, Jacobs, Patrick Heybel, the law firm for Maz Technologies, also offered a claim chart and license to Envoy Data, http://www.envoydata.com, Tempe, AZ. Envoy resells SafeHouse and publishes its own encryption and security products. It's ironic that Richard Koppel, senior partner of the firm, personally filed the original trademark applications for MenuWorks in 1987, said Avritch. Now his firm is targeting a former client. It's also ironic that we've been through this before, said Avritch. In the early 1990s, PC Dynamics published the Energizer Bunny Screen Saver. In 1994, the company was targeted as the first test of a patent claiming rights to nearly all advertising or corporate logos appearing in software products. Coverage of the patent fight triggered Bruce Lehman, then Commissioner of Patents for the PTO, to order a re-examination and invalidation of the patent, 5,105,184. The licensing demands have spurred other developers and vendors of encryption products to volunteer as expert witnesses and offer 'prior art' that invalidates the patent, including: * Phil Zimmermann is the inventor of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), the most widely-used email encryption software in the world. Zimmermann founded PGP Inc. which was later acquired by Network Associates Inc. Does the lack of reference to obvious and well-known prior art products indicate an ignorance on the part of the patent applicant or a deliberate attempt to exclude those products from consideration as prior art by the Patent Trademark Office? This illustrates a festering problem at the PTO with how patents get issued. This patent cannot be allowed to stand, said Zimmermann. * Glenn Everhart has written security-related software since the 1970s. In 1978, 20 years before the Maz application was filed, he authored a virtual encrypted disk system for the RSX11D from Digital Equipment Corp. He has placed his work into the public domain and allowed the source code and documentation to be distributed freely in Internet-based software collections. It annoys me that some Johnny-come-latelies get a patent on it, said Everhart. * Maz
Re: My current readings in Category Theory
On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Sampo Syreeni wrote: The fact that we use Alice and Bob diagrams, with Eve and Vinnie the Verifier and so on, with arrows showing the flow of signatures, or digital money, or receiptswell, this is a hint that the category-theoretic point of view may be extremely useful. (At other levels, it's number theory...the stuff about Euler's totient function and primes and all that. But at another level it's about commutative and transitive mappings, and about _diagrams_.) I don't see the connection. Category theory mostly seems to be about questioning the way we represent and visualize mathematics. There, it is beginning to have some real influence. However, what you're describing above is well below that, in the realm of ordinary sets and functions. I seem to think categories have very little to do with such things. It is about visualizing any sort of relationship, not just mathematics. Category Theory has a lot to say about the 'simplicity' of the cosmos. It also has a lot to say (in a self-referential manner) about the way humans think about thinking. It will, in the long run, be a critical component in developing AI. * the whole ball of wax that is complexity, fractals, chaos, self-organized criticality, artificial life, etc. Tres trendy since around 1985. But not terribly useful, so far. No? I seem to recall a couple of articles on how actual markets behave chaotically, based on time-series data. Such a conclusion is quite a feat, I'd say, and there's bound to be more out there. Besides, I'm not quite sure chaotics hasn't had an impact on e.g. cipher design -- current cipher design seems to concentrate a lot on diffusion, for instance. What is diffusion but a discretized version of a Lyapunov exponent-like characterization of chaotic blow-up? Actualy it's very useful, it even leads into CT if you keep at it. Diffusion may be -fractal-, but that is not the same as -chaotic-. You're confusing the two. Of course. But how is this interesting? I view objects mainly as a logical extension of the analytic method: to-undestand-break-it-down. Not nearly as interesting as blind learning algos or the like. ??? Object oriented programming is about memory and function consolidation. It flows from the management of effects and side-effects, not from any generalization of the analytical process. -- There is less in this than meets the eye. Tellulah Bankhead [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.open-forge.org
Re: My current readings in Category Theory
On Tuesday, April 2, 2002, at 02:58 PM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Tim May wrote: I've been having a lot of fun reading up on category theory, a relatively new branch of math that offers a unified language for talking about (and proving theorems about) the transformations between objects. Baez convinced you, no? He seems to be a category freak. I'll say a few words on why this is more than just the generalized abstract nonsense that some wags have dubbed category theory as. It seemed like that at first, of course. However, some fairly deep observations have been made in the area, concerning the basic assumptions underlying math. Namely, the prevalence of sets, functions, first order logic and the like. There might just be something to categories, after all. Yes, I believe there's a lot more. By the way, even though category theory may be about as foundational as set theory (a la Zermelo-Frankel axiomatization), it looks to be a _lot_ more useful in other areas. We all know what sets are, and use them every day, and use things like Venn diagrams more than almost any other tool (at least I do), but the axiomatic foundations are seldom used. The Axiom of Choice? I won't try to explain what categories and toposes are here in this e-mail message. Thank god. But isn't it topoi? I was drinking coffee out of one of my thermoi and realized you were...of that camp. As I said, I'm also using Goldblatt's Topoi. (But it's out of print, and unpurchasable, so far, so I use UCSC's copy.) Note that McClarty's book says Toposes. One of these authors, maybe McClarty, maybe Johnstone, points out that plurals of words which were never Latin to begin with, like Thermos bottle, may be thermoses, not thermoi. I find toposes sounds better than topoi. It's only topoi-logical, after all. Relativity was exciting--I took James Hartle's class using a preprint edition of Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's massive tome, Gravitation. The Big Black Book. Tried it, didn't like it much. Somehow they manage to make the subject totally inaccessible to anyone used to the standard concept of tensor spaces. I mean, if they have a basis, why not simply talk about multilinear mappings? (They do, when talking about tangent spaces. I'm just wondering why tensors are needed at all.) But they were able to at least eliminate the index gymnastics of manipulating indices in, for example, the Riemann tensor. R-sub-ijk and all that rot. My copy of Sokolnikoff and Redheffer could be safely put away. The fact that we use Alice and Bob diagrams, with Eve and Vinnie the Verifier and so on, with arrows showing the flow of signatures, or digital money, or receiptswell, this is a hint that the category-theoretic point of view may be extremely useful. (At other levels, it's number theory...the stuff about Euler's totient function and primes and all that. But at another level it's about commutative and transitive mappings, and about _diagrams_.) I don't see the connection. Category theory mostly seems to be about questioning the way we represent and visualize mathematics. There, it is beginning to have some real influence. However, what you're describing above is well below that, in the realm of ordinary sets and functions. I seem to think categories have very little to do with such things. Look at some of the computer science references, as opposed ot the theory of math references. Barr and Wells, or Pierce, for example. They point out that people are successfully using category theory terminology as a means of clarifying the unclear, not as a means of pushing the frontiers of math. The value of looking at functors (natural transformations between categories) as opposed to ordinary sets and functions is the ability to draw conclusions from other areas of math, it seems to me. * game theory. We all know that most human and complex system interactions have strong game-theoretic aspects. Cooperation, defection, Prisoner's Dilemma, Axelrod, etc. But thinking that all crypto is basically game theory has not been fruitful, so far. Axelrod? I just started reading up on basic game theory and the theory of oligopoly (Cournot, Nash, price vs. quantity selection, the works), but haven't bumped into that name, yet. What gives? Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. * the whole ball of wax that is complexity, fractals, chaos, self-organized criticality, artificial life, etc. Tres trendy since around 1985. But not terribly useful, so far. No? I seem to recall a couple of articles on how actual markets behave chaotically, based on time-series data. Such a conclusion is quite a feat, I'd say, and there's bound to be more out there. I'm not saying chaos isn't real, just that it's not turning out to be very surprising or useful. * AI. 'Nuff said. We all know intelligence is real, and important, but the results have not yet lived up to expectations. Maybe
