When Will Terror Videos be Banned
The FBI currently has its shorts in a wad over the numerous Web sites featuring the short but poignant last moments of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Clearly, as our War on Terrorism(tm) progresses, it is not unlikely that terrorists will kidnap and kill more Americans and email video clips of their last twitches to the media, and it is not unlikely that various web sites specializing in stomach-turning will place them online for public viewing. Creation, sale, or possession of child porn is illegal. Creation, sale, or possession of depictions of animals being harmed in an illegal manner is illegal as well. It seems unlikely that creation, sale, or possession of depictions of Americans being harmed in an illegal manner by political extremists will remain legal for long. When this happens, will this mean that the First Amendment is then officially brain dead, and may be disconnected from life support, and anything will be able to be banned, because We're at War. When the inevitable law is written, where will the ACLU and EFF stand? Are they willing to take the heat and be labeled as supporters of terrorists? I bet if you polled the Sheeple today, they would be more than happy to give life in prison to anyone who looks at the Pearl video and snickers inappropriately. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law
Re: S/MIME and web of trust (was Re: NAI pulls out the DMCA stick)
On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 04:40:36PM -0700, Eric Murray wrote: Additionally, there is nothing that prevents one from issuing certs that can be used to sign other certs. Sure, there are key usage bits etc but its possible to ignore them. The S/MIME aware MUAs do not ignore the trust delegation bit. Therefore you can not usefully sign other certs with a user grade certificate from verisign et al. If you make your own CA key (with the trust delegation bit set) and self-sign it, S/MIME aware MUAs will also flag signatures made with it as invalid signatures because your self-signed CA key is not signed by a CA in the default trusted CA key database. It should be possible to create a PGP style web of trust using X.509 certs, given an appropriate set of cert extensions. If Peter can put a .gif of his cat in an X.509 cert there's no reason someone couldn't represent a web of trust in it. While it is true that you can extend X.509v3 I don't see how useful it would be to add a WoT extension until it got widely deployed. Recipient MUAs will at best ignore your extensions, and worse will fail on them until support for such an extension is deployed. I view the chances of such an extension getting deployed as close to nil. The S/MIME MUA / PKI library / CA cartel has a financial incentive to not deploy it -- as they view it as competition to the CAs business. Adam
Jim-Bell-in-prison update
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52781,00.html Jim Bell update: Way back in the 1980s, entrepreneur Jim Bell owned a company that sold computer storage devices. Now Bell works in a California prison, demolishing computers and their monitors at the handsome wage of 46 cents an hour. I've taken a day job destroying computer monitors, Bell said in a phone call from prison this week. I've gone through about 100 so far. Bell is the infamous author of Assassination Politics, an essay that discusses ways to eliminate bothersome IRS agents. That captured the attention of the feds, who charged him with stalking federal agents. Last year, a jury found Bell guilty and he's been sentenced (PDF) to 10 years. Bell says that it's easy to destroy a monitor without making it implode. That almost never is impressive, particularly if you do it right, he says. There's a little nib at the end of the CRT that if you hit it just right with the hammer it creates a small hiss. There's an ooomph if someone drops the monitor, but other than that it's pretty innocuous. He gets paid by Unicorp, the Justice Department-affiliated business that markets prison labor to federal agencies. Eventually, Bell says, he'll be making $1.07 an hour. Some day.
MCI, Bob Hilby, Eric Hughes, and Simple Access...
Yes. It's the whole article. Life is hard. If you don't want to troll the entire thing :-), just search for Hilby, below. Whew. It's looking like an ur-cypherpunk or two dodged a bullet, even if some of them did end up getting ripped off themselves, from, you guessed it, non-payment of invoices, plus the odd router or two... Cheers, RAH --- begin forwarded text Status: U Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 23:06:37 -0400 To: Digital Bearer Settlement List [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R. A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MCI: Money Crimes Incorporated? Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] See: http://www.privacy.nb.ca/cryptography/archives/coderpunks/new/1999-01/0140.html I remember hearing I can get you MCI OC3's *real* cheap... out of Hughes, Hilby, and Co. at Simple Access, back in the day. Now I know why. Cheers, RAH http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0610/064_print.html Ring of Thieves Neil Weinberg, 06.10.02 MCI introduced Walter Pavlo to a world of armed thugs, duffel bags stuffed with cash and phony accounting. Now, sitting in a South Carolina prison, he points a finger back at his former employer. Walter Pavlo has plenty of time these days to walk the track inside South Carolina's secluded Edgefield prison. He takes a daily stroll with Mark Whitacre, the Archer Daniels Midland whistle-blower who is serving a ten-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud. Surrounded by drug convicts, camp fences and rolling woodlands, they chat about their pasts and draw parallels to the scandals swirling around big corporations now--at Enron, at Arthur Andersen, in telecom. Pavlo, blond and still boyish at 39, committed his crimes at MCI as the telecom business roared in the mid-1990s. He is in the 15th month of a 41-month sentence for obstruction of justice, money laundering and mail fraud. An unremarkable rank-and-filer in a 25-person billing department, he says he cooked the books, under pressure from higher-ups, to help bolster MCI's growth. Pavlo employed an array of tricks--taught to him, he says, at MCI--to hide hundreds of millions of dollars in aging bad debts and clearly uncollectable receivables owed by a raft of upstart telecom resellers. In the process, he used the same sleight of hand to skim $6 million on the sly for himself and a couple of partners; for that he is doing soft time. The resellers stoked growth at a time when MCI, lit up by the halo of the Internet frenzy, was prettying itself up for a sale to someone bolder. The company, with Walter Pavlo's copious assistance, granted easy credit to dozens of fly-by-nights looking to lease its lines and resell service to businesses and consumers. It blithely let just about anyone, from raw rookies to pornographers and astrological touts, run up tens of millions of dollars in bills. Then, Pavlo says, MCI kept the receivables on its books long after any real hope of collecting had vanished--with the resellers themselves, in some cases. Banks, eager for high interest and fees, financed it all. It was his job, he says, to hold these losses to a minimum, even if doing so required deceptive means. His actions benefited MCI. The company filed a proxy with the Securities Exchange Commission recommending a $20 billion buyout by British Telecom in 1997, just days after management knew it had fraud on its hands, according to a brief filed by a group of banks that sued MCI in 1997. That deal collapsed, and MCI then accepted a $41 billion offer from WorldCom months later. MCI denied the banks' allegations and has claimed it was duped by its own employees. At MCI only Pavlo and James B. Wilkie, a senior manager, have been punished (along with a third partner, an outsider named Harold R. B. Mann). For five years Pavlo has wondered when someone might take a hard look at the four levels above him, from his boss up to the chief financial officer--Douglas Maine, who later became chief financial officer at IBM and now runs its online arm--and above him to MCI chief executive Bert C. Roberts, who now is chairman of WorldCom. And so when Pavlo learned one day in March, as he sat reading in the prison library, that the SEC is investigating whether there were any accounting misdeeds at WorldCom, he had one sentiment: It's about time. He believes the remnants of his stunts are buried in a $685 million pretax charge for bad receivables that WorldCom took in October 2000. The company blamed the big charge ($405 million after tax benefits) on a handful of customers' going bankrupt in the previous quarter. Pavlo argues that the charge was, rather, a way to use the industry downturn to mask the writeoff of receivables that had been rotting for years on the books of MCI and WorldCom, artificially boosting profits. This story is bigger than Walt Pavlo heisting money from MCI and going to jail, says Walt Pavlo. This is about corruption of telecom, with lots of games. I didn't come to MCI knowing how to hide accounts receivable. Pavlo is a convicted felon and an accomplished liar. But
Geopolitical Snuff Film, 2002; Rating: 3 jets
At 09:03 PM 5/24/02 -0700, Eric Cordian wrote: The FBI currently has its shorts in a wad over the numerous Web sites featuring the short but poignant last moments of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It seems unlikely that creation, sale, or possession of depictions of Americans being harmed in an illegal manner by political extremists will remain legal for long. NB: KaZaa has versions in .asf, .mpg, and .ram copied from the net. Some of the web sites mentioned in the Wired article are still up, so historians, archivists, librarians, spooks, professors, reporters, and other academic-jihadi can check out the film from there --or can receive upon request anonymous copies if the web sites find a black boot stomping their face, forever. The film contains political messages which the government doesn't want you to hear: americans are toast in pakistan because of their government's middle-eastern interference. Hardly surprising. No hostility towards democracy, freedom, or Brittney Spears. They use rolling-text to print their concerns in english, and use simple fades, so they have some video-production facility. They also want their F-16s that they paid for (and never got), which is the only comic relief in the film. Pearl looks dead already when they sever his neck. (Cf the Russian soldier snuff film) He doesn't look stressed when he talks about his jewish and Israeli ties, though of course he's been kidnapped and is under duress. Released 2002, originally in PAL format Producers: Pakistani Islamic Jihad, LLP Rating: Not yet rated. Some decapitation (on par with any surgery web site) no drugs, no foul language. Actors: Daniel Pearl, unknown Jehadi staff Cameos by various dead palestinians babies --- No, I don't know that unbelievers should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under Allah. -GW Bush
Re: NAI pulls out the DMCA stick
On Fri, 24 May 2002, Eric Murray wrote: 3. Is a relavent developer reference is available for X.509? X.509 is an ITU/T standard, which means, among other things, that they charge money for copies. You can find copies on the net though. Depending on how good your local library is, they may be able to get you a copy on interlibrary loan. I managed to get ahold of a copy of X9.19 that way. If ITU works anything like the ABA, they'll charge you about $4/page to get one of these from them (at least that's the rate X9.19 came to). PKCS and other online sources seem your best bet for this by far. -J
