Viral DNS Attack, DDos Idea
Suppose malware appends a bogus entry to an infected machine's /etc/hosts (or more likely, MSwindows' \windows\blahblah\hosts file). (This constitutes a DNS attack on the appended domain name, exploiting the local hosts' name-resolution prioritization.) If the appended IP address points to the same victim (66.66.66.66) on all the virus-infected machines, and the appended (redirected) domain name is popular (google.com for instance) then you get a DDoS attack on the appended IP host 66.66.66.66 that grows as the viral infection spreads in the population. You also get a DDoS on the popular domain name (google.com) you've redirected. If the victim IP address were a router just upstream of the victim domain name, its extra fun for the victim domain --not only are they unavailable on infected machines, but clients pound their upstream when they try to connect. Thoughts? Has this ever been suggested or implemented? --- In The Wild One bikers mount a DoS attack on a router: her name is Dorothy and she works at a plugboard. ca 1954
Re: What if all things computable are computable in polynomial time
At 01:28 PM 8/6/03 -0400, Billy wrote:
At 01:18 AM 8/6/03 -0700, Eric Cordian wrote:
What if all things computable are computable in polynomial time?
You mean polynomials like O(n^10^10^10) ?
subset{P} != easy
There could still be some protection with some crypto schemes, in such
a world, BUT the adversary is assumed to be much better funded, and poly
work gives
the adversary's algorithmicists (who can be rented cheaply when young)
hope that much faster algorithms can be found, if not published :-)
You really want the assurance of exponential work to break it, not just
big constants.
The problem is that, for public key crypto, we want functions which are
easy one way (if you know the secret) and exponentionally tough in the
length of the public key the other. If there is a quick
(*non-expon*.) solution
to your trap-door function then the adversary can reasonably do the
extra work and
your scheme is toast.
For symmetric crypto, the same applies. You can always make *your* key
longer, but the leverage you get --the extra work the adversary must
do--
is much less if you can't demand exponential work by them (because as
was suggested, presumably tongue-in-cheek, by EC, there might not be
any exponential work problems)
---
The tragedy of Galois is that he could have contributed
so much more to mathematics
if he'd only spent more time on his marksmanship.
Re: The Register - NSA proposes backdoor detection center (fwd)
At 06:36 AM 8/11/03 -0500, Jim Choate wrote: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/32265.html Wolf also said that untrustworthy hardware poses a similar threat. Most microelectronics fabrication in the USA is rapidly moving offshore, said Wolf. NSA is working on a Trusted Microelectronics Capability to ensure that state-of-the-art hardware devices will always be available for our most critical systems. Only way they can do that is to build it themselves, from HDL to GDSII and make their own masks. You can't prove a function doesn't exist in some box otherwise, if you don't know the trigger. Kinda like a PRNG and its key.
Ashcroft snuffs free speech, film at 11
Film Wholesaler Charged With Obscenity The U.S. Justice Department said that its 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates and its owners is part of a renewed enforcement of federal obscenity laws. Federal prosecutors said today they have charged a North Hollywood wholesaler of adult films with violating federal obscenity laws as the government steps up a campaign against the major distributors of adult entertainment. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-080703obscene_lat,1,708205.story?coll=la-headlines-california Of course there are limits in regards to freedom of speech. They are as follows: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Everything else is, of course, allowed. -Sunder
Terminating Arnold's Presidency
At 07:42 PM 8/8/03 -0700, Eric Cordian wrote: In response to a question about whether she would favor a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, Maybe they'll screw up the specs (by omitting quantity) and make polyamory protected.. Watch for this President Arnold movement to gather steam. Clinton wants to interpret the only 2 terms amendment as consecutive terms. Sometimes you just have to thank the less-exercised Amerndments..
Re: How can you tell if your alarm company's...
Spooks Physical IDS: If you are specifying a roll your own security system, you probably want to make a distinction between building an alarm company and a physical intrusion detection and logging system. With the former you're hoping to keep your items; with the latter you're trying to keep your infosec pristine, and the State Burglars will not take anything. That would look bad for the Alarm Company they work for (that you pay to keep your items). Car Alarms: If you have neighbors who can see your house, your homebrew security system can use either strobes to annoy or fake-flame-lighting to alarm them. Anon CopCalls: You could make an anon 911 call using an old unused cellphone ---the base stations will take a 911 without subscribing. You could use a dish to hit a distant cell. Though these are jammable. Best solution is personal IDS that stays quiet. Of course if you do log an intrusion you have to sanitize or leave the space. Keep the housecat away from the battery-powered ultrasound that cuts power to the red computer. --- Talk softly and carry a big lawyer. ---Hunter S Roosevelt
Re: Computer Voting Expert, Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, Ousted From Elections Conference
At 05:48 PM 8/6/03 -0400, Adam Shostack wrote: Huh? Voters don't control the security of the voting system any more than we control the security of the credit rating/id theft system. The only way to show vote fraud would be to get enough voters to document that the State lied. That would depend on getting enough voters to document their votes such that the non-participants' share in the survey is insignificant to the outcome, as is other noise. Documenting might involve cameras. But cameras might be disallowed because admitting them admits a vote buying attack, since votes can then be demonstrated to the payer, much like paper receipts. The current system works, to the extent it does, because of the adversarial and open nature of the supervisory parties. Paper, absentee ballots could be xeroxed as proof. All fakable of course. Absentee ballots increase participation, and leave a better paper trail than computers, if anyone trustable cares to look. ... One question in voting threat analysis is how many conspirators are involved. Electronics lets you decrease that number.
Re: ATMs moving to triple DES.
At 12:56 PM 8/13/03 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote: http://www.icbnd.com/data/newsletter/community%20banker%20feb%2003%20.pdf Finally, five full years after DES was definitively proved to be vulnerable to brute force attack, the major ATM networks are moving to 3DES. And you can still use 2-key 3DES...
Re: Idea: Homemade Passive Radar System (GNU/Radar)
At 05:04 PM 8/11/03 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: This unit has to be cheap and expendable - it's easy to locate and to destroy by a HARM missile. As a bonus, forcing the adversary to waste a $250,000+ AGM-88 missile on a sub-$100 transmitter may be quite demoralizing. Microwave ovens were used in the Yugo war for this. The invading air power can't ignore the ISM band because then you could use it for real missile trackers. Someone who can do vacuum and welding work could change the output freq of an oven magnetron, by changing the shorting-strap connections.
What if all things computable are computable in polynomial time?
At 01:18 AM 8/6/03 -0700, Eric Cordian wrote: An anonymous sender writes: Rely on math, not humans. What if all things computable are computable in polynomial time? RSA, Inc. stock would go down. We would have to go back to paper and OTP, but we would also get to enjoy the excellent graphics, AI, number theory, etc, that we would win.
Re: Foreign adventures and economic imperialism
At 09:56 AM 4/4/03 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: If it was economic imperialism, they would have done Saudi arabia. Lots of stuff connnecting Saudi Arabia to the twin towers. All your Saudis are belong to us. And we much prefer Saudi puppets to IslamoFundies. Problem is, of course, that it bugs some performance artists that we own the place, ergo 9/11 (tm). If it was holy war, in accordance Ann Coulter's program invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity, it would have been Sudan. George didn't know where that was on the map. It was Iraq. Therefore ideological warfare, not economic imperialism. Means, motive, opportunity. --- Beware foreign entanglements -G. Washington
NSA webmaster
Active Top Secret Clearance Software Engineer term: Permanent pay: $60,000 - $75,000 city: Fort Meade state: MD recruiter: David position ID: DW-MD-TSSCI3 Active TS/SCI Clearance, Polygraph, Apache Active Top Secret Clearance Software Engineer IF YOU ARE NOT A U.S. CITIZEN AND YOU DO NOT HAVE AN ACTIVE TOP SECRET CLEARANCE YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED FOR THIS POSITION SO PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME YOUR RESUME IF YOU DON'T HAVE BOTH. THANKS. Our client is an IT services firm that supplies both government agencies and commercial enterprises with high-end technical personnel and products and offers secure facilities in which to develop and test state-of-the-art technology. Job Description: In this position, the person will be responsible for Java and web development of complex applications on a Sun system using a variety of tools to include: RCS source code control, Rational Rose, OptimizeIt Suite, Apache web server and Apache JServ. Requirements: * 7 + years industry experience * Thorough understanding of BEA WebLogic framework * Candidate must have experience designing, coding and testing Java programs. * Candidate must be able to implement Object Oriented methodologies, preferably with the Rational Rose tool. * Candidate will also require skills in JDBC, J2EE, JNI, EJB, and web enabling application using current Internet technologies * Degree in Computer Science or related field * Active TS/SCI with a full life-style polygraph required Interested? Please apply! Please send me your: ~ Resume in Word ~ US status (Green Card, Citizen, etc.) ~ Current Salary ~ Desired Salary ~ Reason for wanting to leave/why left current company
Nuking kasmir (Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV)
At 10:43 PM 4/1/03 -0800, Sarad AV wrote: Well-pakistan has been constantly nuclear black mailing india.They say that their nuclear options are always open and there is nothing india can do about it. Sarath. Hilarious, dude. Who got nukes first? India. See your own propoganda site, http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper451.html THE MAY 1998 POKHRAN TESTS: Scientific Aspects by R. Chidambaram for a nice tech description of your past and recent gizmos. And your blackmailing agitprop is taken straight from http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper482.html PAKISTAN'S NUCLEAR BLACKMAILING: Spreading fear of nuclear terror by Dr. Rajesh Kumar Mishra (which is a typical paper topic by South Asia Analysis Group, which seems to be an Indian 1960's RAND).
Final solutions (was Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort)
At 01:34 PM 3/30/03 -0500, stuart wrote: On Sunday, March 30, 2003, Harmon Seaver came up with this... HS Too bad the Romans didn't finish the job of feeding that lot to the lions HS a couple of milleniums ago. A similarly open-minded friend once commented (far too loudly in a cafe) that exact sentiment --if you're going to invade, kill em all, or deal with centuries of violence. After realizing the clarity of this, I did come up with a softer solution. Forced reloaction interbreeding is likely to 1. destroy territorial histories and 2. eliminate strong physical and cultural differences. Move all the Irish to Palestine (give 'em plenty of sunblock), move all the Palestinians Zionists to Ireland, and have the A-type male teens school with B-type female teens. Banning (or agglomerating or replacing historic) religions is likely to help too. Encouraging the imperial persecution of a religious minority? Religions are terrorist weapons, dude.
art can make a difference, and traffic routing games
At 01:59 PM 3/30/03 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: Any group of Pranksters willing to buy a bunch of orange traffic cones and some sawhorses and a few dozen credible-looking street construction signs could do almost as well without even a large group support group, if they got out early in the morning, and if drivers decide to collapse the waveform by ignoring all such cones and signs, there's be weeks of chaos afterwards until drivers get back in the habit of obeying. Nice persistance on that social DoS, real VX quality. Playing routing games with that kind of (rolling) traffic, that's cute. PS Bill: How did management like the news channels calling the Baghdad CO an ATT Building :-) Here's an altruistic use of roadsign spoofage: http://www.nbc4.tv/news/1448667/detail.html Artist Redesigns Freeway Sign To Help LA Drivers Caltrans Alerted By Newspaper POSTED: 10:43 a.m. PDT May 9, 2002 UPDATED: 1:26 p.m. PDT May 10, 2002 LOS ANGELES -- A frustrated artist upset over a confusing freeway sign scaled the sign and added directions. Richard Ankrom (pictured left), 46, worked on his project during the day as thousands of motorists passed. Ankrom wore a hard hat and an orange reflective vest and even cut his hair to avoid raising suspicion from transportation crews and police. The artist built and installed the directions to help motorists make a smooth transition from the Harbor Freeway to northbound Interstate 5, located near downtown. By plastering the North 5 moniker on the existing sign, Ankrom not only followed state specifications but also showed that art can make a difference. snip
Quote of the Day, Re: Usenet as solution to Al-Jazeera jamming problem
Sometimes when you're in government you have to do things for the people whether they like it or not. That's what governing is all about, said Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick. http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20030327/1028333.asp Re: Usenet as solution to Al-Jazeera jamming problem I suspect that Usenet groups containing tens-o-megabyte files are often blocked by ISPs (and public sources would be overwhelmed). Also, wasn't Usenet plagued by evil message-cancellers? The problem with Freenet, Tarzan, etc. is they aren't deployed. Kazaa is, so widely that its robust. Simply putting Al Jazeera in files' metainfo will work. Kazaa Inc should encourage this, since it is a Valenti-free social good (to some of us, anyway).
RE: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
At 01:46 AM 3/28/03 +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote: It's a cool toy, but I can't see someone using a $1M e-bomb when a $1000 Mk.82 will do the same thing, especially if there's any chance it'll be captured intact by an enemy who can... hmm, there's a thought: Oh dear! Peter, these are *free* to the people who make and use them. As a mil researcher, one would be eager to try out one's new gizmos in the field. As would all the deskjockeys who $upported your project and expect to advance their career$ if it works. A explosive driven ebomb would act just like a regular bomb to anyone standing nearby, although all that wire would be rather strange shrapnel to a naif EOD person. Iraqis don't have time to dupe it, and the Russians, Chinese, etc. can make their own. Real reason not to give it a try, once you're willing to risk knocking out civilian TVs and spec-ops radios and phones, is the *opportunity cost*. That's one bomb-pod you can't use for a known reg'lar bomb, and you are after all spending time, fuel, and life-risk-credits on your sorties. --- ...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. -- Winston Churchill, January 1914
Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
At 10:36 PM 3/26/03 -0800, Sarad AV wrote: there is a lot of self [fnord] imposed sensor ship in US on the war.The Us pows's shown on al-jazeera were not broadcasted over Us and those sites which had pictures of POW's were removed as unethical graphics on web pages. We should be faxing these images to random fax machines. As political speech, it cannot be regulated, including any requirement for a call-back number. --- Only YOU can prevent fire-fights. --Smokey the Forward Air Controller
Re: Things are looking better all the time
At 09:09 PM 3/26/03 -0600, Neil Johnson wrote: In a news conference on Tuesday, some general claimed they had located and taken out six sites where GPS jammers were being used. He claimed one site had been taken out with a GPS guided weapon. Kind of Ironic I beleive he said. Well, the satellites were *above* and the jammers *below* so its not that tricky. There's descriptions of the Mk-3 Tomahawk's antijamming ability out there. The proper use of a GPS jammer is *not* CW when you're fighting the US. The proper use is to switch them on when a spotter lets you know about incoming. Preferably you are in a nonbombable area (mosque, hospital, etc) when you switch on, and you promptly move after the incoming goes off. The goal being to increase bad PR, ie collateral damage aka civvy corpses. (Before Al Jazeera is accidentally bombed off the air.)
Re: Boycotting the Unwilling
At 07:12 PM 3/25/03 -0800, Tim May wrote: Granted, neither you nor I will be jailed for refusing to buy Matzah balls made in the Zionist Entity, but the point is that the law says we _could_ be jailed for boycotting. Naturally, the law is applied to those most visible. What use is a victimless-crime law if you can't use it to harass? Try using both voice and action (long time readers know the hazards of mixing these) ---e.g., actively publicize a boycott on .il items, get a Mom Pop grocery to go along, and see how much freedom we have here. Extra points if you dress as Amerinds (or US Military :-) and dump a few boxes of Manichewitz into Boston Harbor. --- Sacred COWs marching down well-trodden corridors into the valley of steel Hilal slaughter
Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
At 10:41 PM 3/25/03 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: ...from the Leg-HERFing department... Cheers, RAH Who expects it was just a bomb-bomb, Jim. They came back with a bigger one, just now. Yep. The COW needs the TVs to broadcast our message. Also we don't trust the infiltrated spec-ops radios not to get toasted. And the cell phones are useful too. --- Ballet is not Lorentz invariant. It is choreographed so that dancers make simultaneous movements in the frame of the audience -Jack Wisdom Swimming in Spacetime _Science_ 21 Mar 03
Re: US may fabricate discovery of WMD
At 09:01 AM 3/26/03 -0800, Tim May wrote: I no doubt said this, but so have many others. I remember hearing many years ago that if hundreds of tons of marijuana cross U.S. borders each year undetected, how can software and crypto be blocked? Even post 911 you can fly a copter from Quebec and drop 200 lb bales into Vermont: http://www.cannabisclub.ca/Montreal_Gazette_030503.html If you can't find a tunnel from Mexico, that is. Vulnerable giants should be humble.
RE: Things are looking better all the time [TERROR ALERT: Cerenkov Blue]
At 06:12 PM 3/25/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote: At 04:37 AM 3/25/03 +0100, Lucky Green wrote: ... If any terrorists had nukes, why have they not used them so far? Suppose you only have one, it was really hard to get, and you're not sure how much of your US network has been turned, or at least placed under heavy surveilance? Maybe you wait until you are really sure you can succeed before you use it. You're not even sure whether it works well, either. (Note that even a completely subcritical dud will still be a dispersal device unless they seriously overbuild a U gun-type device.) Alternatively, we have no way of knowing how often terrorists have tried to use nukes, but been stopped one way or another. Maybe the Russians sold them very convincing duds. Um, several times, in fact. Look Abdul, it clicks! Must be fissile.. There's a technically incompetent but well financed jihadist born every minute. (Its the competent ones you want to worry about.) Maybe the FBI caught them and disarmed the bombs before they went off. And they didn't claim any credit? This doesn't jibe with the puffery one observes. And for a third alternative, it's quite possible (I don't know how likely) that one or more groups have smuggled nukes into the US, planted them in US cities, and offered proof to the US government, as a way of establishing a nuclear deterrent. (C.f. Ross Anderson's Guy Fawkes Protocol.) But they've *already* declared their goals in numerous fatwas by now, what do you want, a UN resolution? And deterrent type solutions haven't worked. The US probably increased its presence in the land of Mecca since the first WTC attack. Al Q's m.o. is simply to make the expected future cost of empire too high. This future expectation is produced by current actions. So, its preferable that Americans think they had one, they can get another (while viewing the Detroit Crater from the observation platform), instead of supposedly (according to some idiot official who says we're on code Cerenkov Blue) there's a nuculear geezmo in some city. Besides, if you announce, you are toast. There are pretty obvious reasons why the US government might not announce either of the last two cases, and why the terrorist group of your choice wouldn't announce we have a bomb until they had the thing planted where they wanted it. Again, the operational risks with extortion, traced communications, the faith-based motivations and psyop saavy of Al Q indicate Use It or Lose It. If you've got 'em, smoke 'em as they say. --- He listened patiently to my explanation of how I now believed a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, but he seemed unenthusiastic about what I had to say and preoccupied with other thoughts. After I left his office, I found to my considerable dismay that the fly to my trousers had been unzipped. E. Teller p 317 Memoirs
Re: Things are looking better all the time
At 10:53 PM 3/24/03 -0800, Steve Schear wrote: I seem to recall that with sufficient knowledge and commonly available detonators shaped explosive charges can be configured to hurl heavy explosive payloads, much like a mortar, with fair accuracy, great distance or very high velocity. I can't seem to find the reference on-line but I vaguely recall that a 50kg payload could be accelerated to multi-mach speeds with a device that could be placed in a car trunk. A poor man's howitzer. A shaped charge would probably destroy any projectile other than the collapsed liner. Which does move very fast -faster even than the detonation velocity of the brisant, which can be a few thousand m/sec. Nothing like a hypersonic slug of molten tungsten to start the day. However, see _The Irish War_ for a few practical, tested homebrew mortars you can fire out of a van. Moonroofs are terrorist equiptment.
RE: Things are looking better all the time
At 10:42 AM 3/25/03 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Lucky Green wrote: If any terrorists had nukes, why have they not used them so far? I don't think they have nukes. Not yet. But now they're seeing plenty of reasons to get them. We're lucky they're poor, low-tech people in general. Are you sure you know where all your irradiators, isotope batteries, soviet agricultural sprouting-inhibitors are? Just asking. (And yes, dispersal weapons are not nuculear explosives, but since the major effects of either are due to panic, they're good enough for (anti) government work.)
Ricin Stout
At 09:13 PM 3/23/03 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: Yup, I wouldn't even be a bit surprised to see Europeans, non-muslim, I mean, starting to off the GI's over there. Drop a little cyanide or ricin in a guy's beer in the pub... Cyanide would work quickly, and you'ld get caught. Ricin takes a day for symptoms. --- Got Ribosomes?
Re: Most Americans believe Hussein the mastermind behind 9/11
At 02:25 PM 3/24/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Pretty amusing. Beyond Doublethink, as not even the US government claims this... http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2cid=127ncid=742e=7u=/ucru/20030320/cm_ucru/the_moron_majority Its the result of a stack overrun. People have limited buffers, and they are easily overrun by too frequent hate-campaigns. Sometimes the remnants fuse. --- Rome was not burnt in a day. --James A. Donald
Tragedy and Evolution
At 09:24 AM 3/21/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: May thousands of AmeriKKKan troops die painfully, along with their handlers on the East Coast, as a deterrent to future illegal wars of aggression. This was the part I had to think about the most. Right now, my feeling is that it would be a tragedy for a large mass of nearly-lumpen soldiers, educated by the US school system, to have to take the brunt of responsibility for this. It would be a pain for their families and worse for their insurers, certainly, but think of the evolutionary benefits to mankind. You remove folks who *voluntarily* gave up moral control of their bodies to an unjust, cruel regime. Such eagerness to be externally programmed for violence is undesirable in the modern environment, although no doubt considered useful by those who use the mercenary moral zombies. Pruning out the manipulative programmers, those who exploit the moral zombies, requires more effort, but at least there are fewer, and they identify themselves (in autumn in the US) nearly as easily as the zombies, and they congregate periodically.
Re: Fwd: Informer alert: War begins in Iraq
At 02:36 PM 3/20/03 +, Ken Brown wrote: Despite what Eric Cordian and others have said here, I think it unlikely that there will be a big body-bag outcome for the US. The force balance is so overwhelmingly one-way, and most Iraqis really don't want the current Ba'athist government. A lot of them will give up quickly. Could be wrong of course. ... Large-scale House-to-house fighting unlikely. Iraqis don't have that Bill of Rights bullet item that bars troops in houses. Picture a few tens of K of lone (or paired) well armed RK loyalists holed up in spare rooms with families. Whose job is to impede progress into the city. Who know they are eventual toast if the locals are no longer held by fear. And in a 1-party plutocracy like Iraq, that means with the Ba'ath party still intact, maybe even including Saddam's Tikriti friends relations. They run most military large business organisations huge parts of civil government media. After the city is ours, we let natural tendancies operate for a few months. Ie, payback time. The citizens know who needs to hang better than we do. The blind eye lets the eye-for-an-eye cleanse society. We'll of course save a few of the bigger trophies for wartrial photo-ops.
Game theory, psychobio, demographics: Genesis of Suicide Terrorism
Here's a bit of meat for Tim... Genesis of Suicide Terrorism Scott Atran Contemporary suicide terrorists from the Middle East are publicly deemed crazed cowards bent on senseless destruction who thrive in poverty and ignorance. Recent research indicates they have no appreciable psychopathology and are as educated and economically well-off as surrounding populations. A first line of defense is to get the communities from which suicide attackers stem to stop the attacks by learning how to minimize the receptivity of mostly ordinary people to recruiting organizations. CNRS-Institut Jean Nicod, 1 bis Avenue Lowendal, 75007 Paris, France, and Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248, USA. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Gotta love this excerpt: Such sentiments characterize institutional manipulation of emotionally driven commitments that may have emerged under natural selection's influence to refine or override short-term rational calculations that would otherwise preclude achieving goals against long odds. Most typically, such emotionally driven commitments serve as survival mechanisms to inspire action in otherwise paralyzing circumstances, as when a weaker person convincingly menaces a stronger person into thinking twice before attempting to take advantage. In religiously inspired suicide terrorism, however, these emotions are purposely manipulated by organizational leaders, recruiters, and trainers to benefit the organization rather than the individual (supporting online text on religion) (36). 36. In much the same way, the pornography, fast food, or soft drink industries manipulate innate desires for naturally scarce commodities like sexual mates, fatty foods, and sugar to ends that reduce personal fitness but benefit the manipulating institution. [S. Atran, In Gods We Trust (Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 2002)]. Whole article: According to the U.S. Department of State report Patterns of Global Terrorism 2001 (1), no single definition of terrorism is universally accepted; however, for purposes of statistical analysis and policy-making: The term `terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. Of course, one side's terrorists may well be another side's freedom fighters (Fig. 1). For example, in this definition's sense, the Nazi occupiers of France rightly denounced the subnational and clandestine French Resistance fighters as terrorists. During the 1980s, the International Court of Justice used the U.S. Administration's own definition of terrorism to call for an end to U.S. support for terrorism on the part of Nicaraguan Contras opposing peace talks. Fig. 1. Chanting demonstrators in Pakistan-held Kashmir defending Osama bin Laden's actions and ambitions as freedom-fighting (November 2001). [AP Photo/Roshan Mugal] [View Larger Version of this Image (96K GIF file)] For the U.S. Congress, `act of terrorism' means an activity that--(A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping. (2). When suitable, the definition can be broadened to include states hostile to U.S. policy. Apparently, two official definitions of terrorism have existed since the early 1980s: that used by the Department of State for statistical and analytical purposes and that used by Congress for criminal proceedings. Together, the definitions allow great flexibility in selective application of the concept of terrorism to fluctuating U.S. priorities. The special category of State-sponsored terrorism could be invoked to handle some issues (3), but the highly selective and politically tendentious use of the label terrorism would continue all the same. Indeed, there appears to be no principled distinction between terror as defined by the U.S. Congress and counterinsurgency as allowed in U.S. armed forces manuals (4). Rather than attempt to produce a stipulative and all-encompassing definition of terrorism, this article restricts its focus to suicide terrorism characterized as follows: the targeted use of self-destructing humans against noncombatant--typically civilian--populations to effect political change. Although a suicide attack aims to physically destroy an initial target, its primary use is typically as a weapon of psychological warfare intended to affect a larger public audience.
part II: Game theory, psychobio, demographics: Genesis of Suicide Terrorism
Dubious Public Perceptions Recent treatments of Homeland Security research concentrate on how to spend billions to protect sensitive installations from attack (14, 15). But this last line of defense is probably easiest to breach because of the multitude of vulnerable and likely targets (including discotheques, restaurants, and malls), the abundance of would-be attackers (needing little supervision once embarked on a mission), the relatively low costs of attack (hardware store ingredients, no escape needs), the difficulty of detection (little use of electronics), and the unlikelihood that attackers would divulge sensitive information (being unaware of connections beyond their operational cells). Exhortations to put duct tape on windows may assuage (or incite) fear, but will not prevent massive loss of life, and public realization of such paltry defense can undermine trust. Security agencies also attend to prior lines of defense, such as penetrating agent-handling networks of terrorist groups, with only intermittent success. A first line of defense is to prevent people from becoming terrorists. Here, success appears doubtful should current government and media opinions about why people become human bombs translate into policy (see also supporting online text on contrary academic explanations). Suicide terrorists often are labeled crazed cowards bent on senseless destruction who thrive in the midst of poverty and ignorance. The obvious course becomes to hunt down terrorists while simultaneously transforming their supporting cultural and economic environment from despair to hope. What research there is, however, indicates that suicide terrorists have no appreciable psychopathology and are at least as educated and economically well off as their surrounding populations. Psychopathology: A Fundamental Attribution Error U.S. President George W. Bush initially branded 9/11 hijackers evil cowards. For U.S. Senator John Warner, preemptive assaults on terrorists and those supporting terrorism are justified because: Those who would commit suicide in their assaults on the free world are not rational and are not deterred by rational concepts (16). In attempting to counter anti-Moslem sentiment, some groups advised their members to respond that terrorists are extremist maniacs who don't represent Islam at all (17). Social psychologists have investigated the fundamental attribution error, a tendency for people to explain behavior in terms of individual personality traits, even when significant situational factors in the larger society are at work. U.S. government and media characterizations of Middle East suicide bombers as craven homicidal lunatics may suffer from a fundamental attribution error: No instances of religious or political suicide terrorism stem from lone actions of cowering or unstable bombers. Psychologist Stanley Milgram found that ordinary Americans also readily obey destructive orders under the right circumstances (18). When told by a teacher to administer potentially life-threatening electric shocks to learners who fail to memorize word pairs, most comply. Even when subjects stressfully protest as victims plead and scream, use of extreme violence continues--not because of murderous tendencies but from a sense of obligation in situations of authority, no matter how trite. A legitimate hypothesis is that apparently extreme behaviors may be elicited and rendered commonplace by particular historical, political, social, and ideological contexts. With suicide terrorism, the attributional problem is to understand why nonpathological individuals respond to novel situational factors in numbers sufficient for recruiting organizations to implement policies. In the Middle East, perceived contexts in which suicide bombers and supporters express themselves include a collective sense of historical injustice, political subservience, and social humiliation vis-`-vis global powers and allies, as well as countervailing religious hope (supporting online text on radical Islam's historical novelty). Addressing such perceptions does not entail accepting them as simple reality; however, ignoring the causes of these perceptions risks misidentifying causes and solutions for suicide bombing. There is also evidence that people tend to believe that their behavior speaks for itself, that they see the world objectively, and that only other people are biased and misconstrue events (19). Moreover, individuals tend to misperceive differences between group norms as more extreme than they really are. Resulting misunderstandings--encouraged by religious and ideological propaganda--lead antagonistic groups to interpret each other's views of events, such as terrorism/freedom-fighting, as wrong, radical, and/or irrational. Mutual demonization and warfare readily ensue. The problem is to stop this spiral from escalating in opposing camps (Fig. 3). Fig. 3.
part III: Game theory, psychobio, demographics: Genesis of Suicide Terrorism
Priorities for Homeland Security The last line of defense against suicide terrorism--preventing bombers from reaching targets--may be the most expensive and least likely to succeed. Random bag or body searches cannot be very effective against people willing to die, although this may provide some semblance of security and hence psychological defense against suicide terrorism's psychological warfare. A middle line of defense, penetrating and destroying recruiting organizations and isolating their leaders, may be successful in the near term, but even more resistant organizations could emerge instead. The first line of defense is to drastically reduce receptivity of potential recruits to recruiting organizations. But how? It is important to know what probably will not work. Raising literacy rates may have no effect and could be counterproductive should greater literacy translate into greater exposure to terrorist propaganda (in Pakistan, literacy and dislike for the United States increased as the number of religious madrasa schools increased from 3000 to 39,000 since 1978) (27, 38). Lessening poverty may have no effect, and could be counterproductive if poverty reduction for the entire population amounted to a downward redistribution of wealth that left those initially better off with fewer opportunities than before. Ending occupation or reducing perceived humiliation may help, but not if the population believes this to be a victory inspired by terror (e.g., Israel's apparently forced withdrawal from Lebanon). If suicide-bombing is crucially (though not exclusively) an institution-level phenomenon, it may require finding the right mix of pressure and inducements to get the communities themselves to abandon support for institutions that recruit suicide attackers. One way is to so damage the community's social and political fabric that any support by the local population or authorities for sponsors of suicide attacks collapses, as happened regarding the kamikaze as a by-product of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the present world, however, such a strategy would neither be morally justifiable nor practical to implement, given the dispersed and distributed organization of terrorist institutions among distantly separated populations that collectively number in the hundreds of millions. Likewise, retaliation in kind (tit-for-tat) is not morally acceptable if allies are sought (41). Even in more localized settings, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, coercive policies alone may not achieve lasting relief from attack and can exacerbate the problem over time. On the inducement side, social psychology research indicates that people who identify with antagonistic groups use conflicting information from the other group to reinforce antagonism (19). Thus, simply trying to persuade others from without by bombarding them with more self-serving information may only increase hostility. Other research suggests that most people have more moderate views than what they consider their group norm to be. Inciting and empowering moderates from within to confront inadequacies and inconsistencies in their own knowledge (of others as evil), values (respect for life), and behavior (support for killing), and other members of their group (42), can produce emotional dissatisfaction leading to lasting change and influence on the part of these individuals (43). Funding for civic education and debate may help, also interfaith confidence-building through intercommunity interaction initiatives (as Singapore's government proposes) (35). Ethnic profiling, isolation, and preemptive attack on potential (but not yet actual) supporters of terrorism probably will not help. Another strategy is for the United States and its allies to change behavior by directly addressing and lessening sentiments of grievance and humiliation, especially in Palestine (where images of daily violence have made it the global focus of Moslem attention) (44) (Fig. 4). For no evidence (historical or otherwise) indicates that support for suicide terrorism will evaporate without complicity in achieving at least some fundamental goals that suicide bombers and supporting communities share. Fig. 4. Moslem youth with Quran dressed as a Palestinian suicide bomber demonstrating outside the United Nations office in Jakarta, Indonesia (April 2002). (Indonesia is the most populous Moslem nation.) [Reuters/Darren Whiteside] [View Larger Version of this Image (95K GIF file)] Of course, this does not mean negotiating over all goals, such as Al-Qaida's quest to replace the Western-inspired system of nation-states with a global caliphate, first in Moslem lands and then everywhere (see supporting online text for history and agenda of suicide-sponsoring groups). Unlike other groups, Al-Qaida publicizes no specific demands after
[1st amend] NYT: MTV refuses antiwar commercial
What are the issues when media doesn't take ads? Private media (e.g., a newspaper, a web site) can't be compelled to say, or not say, anything by the state, and so can freely exercise arbitrary editorial control over adverts. What about when the medium is a State-granted monopoly of a resource like RF spectrum? Or cable infrastructure?Should *these* media channels be *compelled* to accept any privately-funded ads, first come first served, *because* of this State-granted monopoly? MTV refuses antiwar commercial http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/13/business/media/13ADCO.html?ex=1048573024ei=1en=292aa6fe6f1edbc8
Re: Brinwear at Benetton.
04:24 AM 3/12/03 -0800, alan wrote: It sounds like there is an opertunity here for the right person. Open up a place to clean your clothes of all those little RFID tags and other buglets people are so interested in attaching to any object (nailed down or not). Our Premium service includes checking for isotopic tracers (see Stasi), magnetic/plastic layered (see smokeless powder) tags, and UV fluorescent spy tracing powders (see http://www.covertcomic.com/CCSchool.htm spy dust). --Cypherpunk Laundry Division
RE: Unauthorized Journalists to be shot at
At 02:04 PM 3/13/03 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: Is it: 1. An journalist doing what he was specifically told not to do? 2. An Iraqi or Al-Queda forward fire director, calling in coordinates for a VX loaded missile attack on your side. I'd think that the troops would explain this to the reporters tagging along as they confiscate all their transmitters before an op. I simply wouldn't trust the reporters, even though they're toast too if someone mis-IFFs. Its a lot more serious than not shutting off your cell phone on a plane. Besides, I doubt the reporters have Iraq's FCC's clearance to use those frequencies there, until we extend the Little Powell's authority to that domain. :-)
Re: Unauthorized Journalists to be shot at
At 11:54 AM 3/13/03 -0500, Sunder wrote: Hey, we're fighting for freedom after all, the freedom to suppress the truth... So how soon before France is on the Axis of Evil? :) Well, if they're giving info to Mr. Hussein their embassy there could be NIMA'd, as in oops, we hit the Chinese consulate in Yugoslavia, but it was a mapping error. Taking out Paris would probably require more explanation. --- Would you like some Jewish Fries with that, Congressman. Moran?
Re: The Anarcho/libertarian world and corporations
At 09:14 AM 3/9/03 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: I just realized this morning that corporations can't exiest in an anarchy, they are whole a fiction of the state. In the sense of a govt-recognized, protected entity, granted. But not in terms of voluntary associations. And, since corporations are just a method for thieves and criminals to evade the reprecussions of their crimes, Actually its pretty hard to do things like make a car by yourself. One of the many voluntary groups you might be part of is a car-making association. People will hold the employees of the megacorps personally responsible, as they should be, for the crimes of the group. The new car you bought turns out to be a lemon? Grab a few of the employees and make them cough up the money. Don't like the pollution coming out of that smokestack, start shooting employees until they clean it up. But one of the benefits of joining the Fnord Motor Uncorporation is the excellent FMU private police force. A real benefit in an anarchy. If corporations go away, people would form contractual partnerships to build cars, whatever, and act much more responsible. I suppose if medical malpractice insurance went away (it would have to be by fiat force; insurance providers fill a fundamental niche), there'd be more careful doctors. But also many fewer. The calculus of personal risks vs. benefits. (A strategy also employed by the christian-taliban doctor-snipers.) Unless you explicitly ban (again, using violence) voluntary associations of people, they *will* pool resources to buy stuff they can't individually afford. Like a fab. So corps usually have more assets to lose than its members. And smart corps tie their employees (esp officers) futures to their own. So there is feedback motivating responsible behavior by corps. Certainly removing the State's corporate protections would increase the feedback. But it would probably also stifle productive associations. Why risk my personal wealth because I contributed to an association that sold a car that brought a lawsuit? I wonder if this trade off is stated in the law (cf patents in the constition, which explicitly states the trade off)? But besides this pragmatic, the corp concept seems to let me define (limit) my involvement with an association (with a defined purpose) of others. Thus it seems a refinement of contract law --which I hold to be a fundamental. Although patent and copyright are established for practical reasons, there (to me) is a right to profit from your IP; and similarly, although a corp may be a practical tool, it seems right for people to be able to limit their commitment to an association. There's also something called piercing the corp veil, if folks screw up royally.
Re: Social democrats on our list
At 09:58 AM 3/9/03 -0500, Sunder wrote: At which point Tim will countersue with an arguement similar to this: Mega Corporation: Your oxygen is tresspassing on my private property. Any oxygen that does so becomes mine to do with as I please. Further, since you have been unable to keep your pesky Oxygen off my property, I am hereby charging you rent at $1000/cubic centimeter/day. A use for that plastic sheeting and duct tape! Good fences make good neighbors. Can farmers sue the airlines because the contrails demonstrably (thank' to the bin Laden/FAA meteorological experiment of 11-13 sept 01) reduce solar flux?
Re: Blacknet Delta CAPPS II Boycott?
At 08:06 PM 3/10/03 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote: On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 09:52:04AM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Would there be an easy blacknet way to offer those t-shirts that would be un-shutdownable? As Bill notes, there's no need to do it here. Specifically, my Epson Stylus 2200 can print t-shirt transfers. The cost is $1 for the iron-on transfer, and a few dollars for a t-shirt. Most modern inkjet printers can do the same. Yes, but can it do organic synthesis?
Re: Give cheese to france?
At 07:04 AM 3/11/03 +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote: Comie fantasy. That theory is Marx's monopoly capitalism. Commies have been loudly announcing Marx's prophecies to be coming true, even though after 1910 they no longer took the prophecies seriously themselves. Open your eyes and look around yourself. Take any bigger, established market - news, radio, TV stations, retail chains are the first examples coming to my mind - take its top 80-90%, and count the number of players there. Do the same with the situation 10, 20, and 30 years ago. Actually there are a lot more heavy-duty news channels (FWIW) now than when there were 3 US broadcasters. But more importantly, there are optimal sizes for an organism (company) in a given environment. Buying things in bulk is cheaper, for instance; and some costs are amortized more widely. Its just physics/economics. For an animal, its things like heat loss vs. size, available calories, predation that influence optimal size. The merging of N companies into 1 can be more productive (efficient) than maintaining N companies. Its a simple fact. You might regret it or embrace it, depending on which side of the cash register you're on. (Ma and pa shops vs. Walmart: Ma und pa's perspective differs from the customer who evidently prefers Walmart) You will see the number of players is dramatically diminishing. The news announcements of high-profile mergers and acquisitions can be another clue for you. The dot-com bomb (and other tech/social 'bubbles') can be thought of as one of the paleobio radiation / contraction events in geological history. When things are good, plenty of plans are tried out. A few asteroids later, you are left with pruned innovation. NASDAQ's IPOs and delistings are the Burgess Shale of tech. (Modulo some irrational exuberance :-)
Re: Fw: Drunk driver detector that radios police
At 02:56 PM 3/7/03 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm not crazy about everything that the government does, but there are trade- offs in a non-perfect society. One of them is monitoring the innocent to, in turn, attempt to prevent the guilty from trampling over everything, Allah willing. Wrong compromise. See Franklin, B. I'm pretty sure that your Jack-dipped cotton swab will fall under tampering and intentional abuse of law enforcement resources, so you will pay your fine, then come back here to complain about the man that is trying to take away your world of lawlessness and accountability. You might have picked the wrong list. We analyze systems. And societies are systems too. We look at weaknesses from an adversary's viewpoint. We switch viewpoints faster than Kasparov. We are the rabbit, and the fox, and the dynamics. We argue about which cuts of the sacred cow are the tastiest. We believe such studies are interesting by themselves, and sometimes practical, for instance letting us strengthen these systems based on our reasoning and experimentation. We use the plural singular as agitprop and to piss Tim off. Security science, bub. You propose a (hysterical big brotheresque--is some friend red asphalt?) system, and we study it. You don't even have to ask us, just make us aware of it :-) There are countries that are very differing in their laws and liberties. Yes, doncha just miss the Stasi? And what sharp uniforms!
Fatherland Security Paranoids intercept rocks
ATTENTION TO ALL COLLECTORS OF RADIOACTIVE MINERALS...we recently learned that our huge shipment of minerals coming from the Congo to the US was stopped enroute, and ALL radioactive minerals were removed from the shipment and were returned to the Congo. This is set forth in demands from the new office of Homeland Security as fears that Uranium ores can end up in the wrong hands. Please understand that we are not writing this to obtain higher prices on the few pieces we have left. We felt it was necessary to inform you of this currant status of importation of radioactive minerals; we have no idea how long this situation will continue. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemitem=2162835939category=3225
Re: Fw: Drunk driver detector that radios police
At 12:52 AM 3/7/03 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A tiny fuel cell that detects the alcoholic breath of a drink-driver and calls the police has been developed by a team of engineers at Texas Christian University. A pump draws air in from the passenger cabin, a platinum catalyst converts any alcohol to acetic acid, which then produces a current proportional to the concentration of alcohol in the air. A chip analyses the data, and if it is too high, turns on a wireless transmitter that calls the police. False positives: What about folks with vinegar on their breath? False negatives: I could remember to use an airpump in an ethanol state in which it would be illegal/immoral to drive in. Fools: giving the police a link to your location and activities. And paying for the privledge. And who gives a fuck if its a fuel cell, (Texas Christian media whores) its just a catalytic detector, big deal. http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/cars/article.jsp?id=2069 I'm in favor of it if they can overcome attempted bypass of the unit. Unless it cryptographically allows the car to operate only when functional, someone will figure out how to defeat it.
Fragmented nets, national borders, ebay, surrealism
Over on cryptography @ wasabisystems.com there's a thread about Ebay not showing items to folks whose languages were set to German (ergo they must fnord be ruled by the German State which prohibits showing the citizens in its fnord care various things). The item in question is a 3-rotor Enigma. .. Interesting, when i try to look at this from work (over in brighton, actually), i get: Dear User: Unfortunately, access to this particular category or item has been blocked due to legal restrictions in your home country. Based on our discussions with concerned government agencies and eBay community members, we have taken these steps to reduce the chance of inappropriate items being displayed. Regrettably, in some cases this policy may prevent users from accessing items that do not violate the law. At this time, we are working on less restrictive alternatives. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you, and we hope you may find other items of interest on eBay. But I can hit it from my dsl line at home (right up the road). I guess Verizon T1-land is restricted... it depends solely on the preferred language settings of your browser. When I had German on the first position it was blocked too. When I rearranged it below English I could view the page.
Re: Trivial OTP generation method? (makernd.c) On 1e-16 BER and cosmic rays
At 05:50 PM 3/6/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: On a slow day, Tim May wrote... Next you'll be claiming that chips can be influenced by cosmic and background radiation! When I used to characterize DWDM systems, we'd sometimes need to test down to a BER of 10(-14), with some vendors wanting 10(-16). (So we'd loop back a whole bunch of OC-48s and wait a few days for an error.) When operating under perfect conditions, once in a great while, with 16 or more OC-48s, we'd occasionally see an error. This we chalked up to cosmic rays, which I believed, but never really confirmed. The cosmic ray hypothesis has been criticized already. You might attribute a soft error to simple, local radioactive decay. [Hey, it worked for Tim] Background is ca. 10 uR/hr. Could be a few times higher if you have radon and don't ventilate e.g., at night. And stay out of the van Allen belts.. Errors might also be due to the random variables in your (noise, jitter, etc) models really being random, ie, eventually huge excursions. --- I'm pleased to announce we have outlawed Russia forever. We begin bombing immediately. -President Reagan (joking, unlike various sucessors)
Re: Give cheese to france?
At 12:56 PM 3/6/03 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 10:33:11AM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
However malls generally don't take state money, the flow is in the
other direction. My house's yard, the whole neighborhood was
approved, licensed, regulated, zoned by all kinds of
bureaushits,
and pinks would say I receive benefits by virtue of using roads (etc)
but that doesn't
mean some random taxpayer can plant a sign on my lawn.
Are you sure there weren't TIFs involved in building the mall? The
mall here
in Oshkosh (now defunct, turned into offices) was build with city
money, the
newest upscale condo being built downtown is mostly TIF money, likewise
the
newest big low rent housing development.
While I'd personally love to screw over the Crossroads pinheads, I'm
also wary
of letting the creeping socialism make everything public. The solution
is to stop
creeping socialism (such as the tax-subsidies others have implied for
Crossroads,
or the documented government funding of arenas) so the line
is clear. The risk is unlawful taking otherwise.
Meanwhile, I'm disinclined to start applying GNU-license-virulence
to what is public and what is not, because of the depth and breadth of
the financial tentacles.
Besides, the publicity has been great. I was told that after it made
news, 150 women wearing
the same T-shirts showed up at the mall. The security guards locked
themselves in their offices.
Probably messed their pants, too.
---
\{conspiracy} Funny that that area of upstate NY is where Ritter lives,
and was quieted recently. \{endconspiracy}
Re: Give cheese to france?
At 11:03 PM 3/4/03 -0500, Steve Furlong wrote: From the article, New York Civil Liberties Union President Stephen Gottlieb says, We believe, most of us, in the Bill of Rights, and we believe that protects the freedom to speak. How is Constitutionally- protected freedom of speech imperiled when an agent of a private corporation asks someone to leave because his speech is offensive? Steve is right. Free speech is tested by wearing Fuck the Army t-shirts [1] in public places, not Peace while in some private store. [1] Literally, it was so tested; the legal readers will know what I'm talking about. Enforcement of the Court's ban on coercive monotheist nationalist allegiances will be another test case, of whether the constitution + courts can keep demobcracy and the American taliban at bay. Linking both issues, I imagine there will be some *CLU [2] cases about messages in public schools with garments as the medium. [2] with apologies to Liskov
Re: Anarchy, and confusion
At 01:08 PM 3/4/03 -0800, Tim May wrote: The confusion about anarchy and what it means is common. We see it here. Not sure if this is intended towards us or not. In any case, our comments about dropping 'anarchy' for a BerkFlyer was simply to avoid attracting raisethefist type black shirts. (Unless that's the poster's goal, of course. ) ... On the relation of crypto and anarchy, sometimes its agonistic, sometimes neutral, sometimes antagonistic. You're mixing tech politics in that phrase, a mixed relationship is expected. Anarchy as a system (which you explore etymologically below) strikes us as unstable, much like democracy. Unstable with respect to protecting individual freedoms. After all, some of the groups you might belong to in an anarchic system would be pure democracies, and thus ready to saponify you, or random others outside the group, as soon as enough votes are in. Democracy (or monarchy, or anarchy, or elders consulting tea leaves) without constitutional guarantees courts (or however you implement the spec of immutable rights) are latent dictatorships. A far better phrase would be crypto freedom. Including freedom to choose one's risk level (as you mention below) in a free market bound mostly by contract. Freedom to choose currency, etc. Freedom from coercion to fund random projects that exist because some group of voters figured out how to get a slice of the pork pie. In an anarchic system, you could have the same crypto-freedom-apocalypse that you could in a fascist one: all computers registered, programmers (in both hardware and software senses) licensed, state-daemons mandatory in all machines, etc. Merely not having a central ruler, or rules, does little to ensure freedom. And we doubt that competition between units in an anarchic system would provide islands of freedom. So we are not impressed by crypto anarchy as an informative name; although as agitprop, it functions very nicely. YMMV. Perhaps some of us have not done enough to try to educate people. Mostly, I think we have already written enough and if people will not think deeply about the issues, will not read at least _some_ of the readily-searchable (with Google, even) archives, and will not read some of the basic articles and books, then further blathering from us will not help. Anarchy is all around us. We write what we want, at least until Ashcroft and Bush get PATRIOT III passed by acclamation, and this is an anarchy (without a top authority -- an arch). We pick our restaurants by anarchic means. Anarchy doesn't mean chaos, with people killing each other at will. Folks need to think about what monarch means (one top), about what oligarch means, etc. Here's a very practical example: medical malpractice. Much in the news, debated daily. Bush Himself spoke out this morning (or, as he put it, We gotta open a can of Texas whoop-ass on those trial attorney bad boys!). This is a situation where an anarchic, voluntaristic, polycentric law solution is obvious: let people choose doctors and hospitals based on how much malpractice they will pay: Hospital Alpha and its doctors have this policy: If you have any complaints whatsoever, if you stub your toe going to the toilet, or if your baby dies in childbirth, we will pay you multiple millions of dollars for your mental anguish. Of course, we will charge you $65,000 for a baby delivery, $750,000 for heart transplant, and we don't take VISA or Mastercard. Hospital Beta and its doctors have this policy: We use this group to adjudicate disputes about health care. If you choose to use us, you also choose them to adjudicate disputes. Our rates reflect our less outrageous payouts than the Hospital Alpha system. A baby delivery will cost you $3000, assuming no complications. A heart transplant is $63,500. You may die during the operation. Life is tough. You agree to the adjudication described above. We wish you well. This is what a society based on _contracts_ would allow. Free choice. Instead, contracts are toilet paper and free choice is a joke. Anarchy means an arch means free choice means responsibility for choice means noncoercion. But I don't expect most of you yahoos, those who have never read Hayek or Friedman or even Rand to grasp these points. The connection with crypto is obvious. Crypto means never having to let Big Brother intervene in contractual negotiations. Which is where crypto anarchy comes from. (That, and the pun on hidden, as with Vidal's denunciation of Buckley as a crypto-fascist.) I read what some of you folks here write and all I can say is that I hope you are inside the fireballs when the freedom fighters take out the Great Satan. --Tim May If I'm going to reach out to the the Democrats then I need a third hand.There's no way I'm letting go of my wallet or my gun while they're around. --attribution uncertain, possibly Gunner, on Usenet
Re: CAPSII protest... or, speakers must not be actors
At 09:56 PM 3/4/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: OOOH! One wonders if a bad enough air sickness on a crowded flight could turn a plane back...(And if I say airline sickness I don't need the quotes.) Hummif it happened a dozen times within the span of a month do you think they'd notice a pattern? -(the REAL) Tyler Durden Would you please sign this cryptographically, include the MAC on your network card, state whether you possess any weapons or small children in your place of residence, and continue to provoke conspiracy to fuck with interstate trade/travel ? Also what is the weather like where the grand jury convenes in your district, and are there any good hotels there? Merely staging several pukes on a plane, given the baseline statistical unliklihood of this, might be a rational reason to land (aside from aesthetics) and get a nice shower on the tarmac from those friendly boys in the space suits. You might have to do more than simple food poisoning symptoms, though, for that reaction to get by Occam's (McDonald's?) razor. A single faked heart attack would divert the plane, though they might try the defib on you, which would hurt. Certain pharms would fake the sweating and tachy, but could be detected if looked for, which they might, depending on your demographics. Near-simultaneous convulsions should do the trick. Extra points for timing their initiation front-to-rear or vice-versa. You don't even need aisle seats. BTW, Tyler, if you do get airsick (for real), now, expect a personal landing party... and tell your ride you'll be late.
Re: Rogue Vally Cypherpunks Physical Meeting Mar 13
At 08:55 AM 3/4/03 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What are Cypherpunks? A group of thinkers, programmers and researchers dedicated to preserve everyone's freedom of speech through action. * believers in crypto-anarchy, * leaning towards libertarianism, * most importantly, cypherpunks write code! To pick a nit, and clarify something for lurkers, feds, reporters, grand juries and the like: IMHO believers in crypto anarchy sounds like a religion. The phrase even parses ambiguously, which may be a feature to the already clued but isn't to those trying to suss you out. I'm not a believer but an observer and analyzer. And BTW I don't like all the effects of crypto tech but I have been forced to recognize and consider some of them on this list. Students of cryptos effect on society might work. I'm not sure how to fit anarchy into there without starting to sound like a rant. Crypto might even be too specific as things like interception technology and commerce-systems are also of interest. Students of crypto's anarchy-tending effect..? But when some tech is convincingly shown to be anarchy-minimizing or fascist-promoting, I think the rational CP does not lose interest. Drop the anarchy; effects on society should be enough. Just my $.02. Its your shindig.
Re: Trivial OTP generation method? (makernd.c)
At 03:17 AM 2/27/03 +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote: Here's what I do for random bits: http://www.etoan.com/random-number-generation/index.html Nice!!! :) I wasn't aware such electronics is so cheap! Note on RNG/hacking the PC-Geiger counter: If you want to change the RM-60's Time Base Unit, change byte 384 in the aw-rad.set file. [I reverse engineered this; Aware tries to sell software to do this.] This can be useful if you're using counts per unit time instead of inter-count intervals as your raw measurement and are using a hot source like Am241. The RM-60 is a great little toy for those of us not at CERN.
Proposed PATRIOT2 lets foreign govts wiretap americans
See p 19. http://www.privacy.org/patriot2draft.pdf USG to trap, trace, and tap Americans' communications on request of a foreign govt. The draft analysis *actually says* that this is done so that foreign govts will cooperate with US requests. --- Shuttle tile damage? Better put some ice on that -B. Clinton
Re: To Steve Schear, re Rome, Architects, Shuttles, Congress
(This is mostly ruminations on car hacks and adds little to the original thread about physically linking responsibility to effects.) First let me ack my sincere respect for folks like Eric C who work on (rather than tinker/hack/meddle, since he's still alive) their car's brakes or other life-critical systems. Second I should apologize for misspelling SS's name. Now then: From: Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] Back when the term hackers started to be misused by the press, as in scary teenage vandals breaking into computers, my usual comment was that teenage computer hackers were really no different from the teenage car hackers of our parents' generations. Another analogy might be HAMs --antennae hacks--, though they're more liscenced and don't get the babez either. During emergencies, they're useful, like the car-hack who fixes a stranded grandmother's car; at other times, they jam your radio or TV, like a car-hack running top speed, mufflerless, at 3 AM. At 08:27 PM 02/19/2003 -0500, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Hackers don't work on their own brakes for a reason: evolution. If I were planning to contribute directly to the future's gene pool, I've got better criteria to do natural selection on than skill at mechanical repair, and there are much more efficient ways to transmit those skills than killing off people who don't have them. Physics has selected those who fear screwing up personal-life-critical systems, and also those who have that rational fear that but are also skilled enough such that they don't have to worry (such as EC and your younger self). It's also evolution of cars and financial states. Back when cars had actual user-serviceable parts, I'd work on carburetors Carburetor? Didn't that connect to the phonograph through a cat's whisker? And evolution should be in scare-quotes. The trade off has been cleanliness vs. reliability/maintainability/cost/weight/power/etc, and so on some scales modern cars are regressions. and distributors and spark plugs and pollution-control widgets, Somehow you escaped the AQMD[1], EPA, DMV, DOT police? Step away from that oxygen sensor, and no one gets hurt. but except for my first auto mechanics class, I didn't mess with brakes - if I mess up an engine, my car might not go anywhere, but that's usually fail-safe, while making mistakes on brakes is fail-dangerous. Bingo. And hacking on production machines is a no-no. (Also, my next car had disk brakes, and I only knew how to do drum brakes.) D'oh! In some states, cars can't be registered without passing a safety inspection that tests for braking distance, etc. Not so in Calif. Selection is a little stronger here :-) I changed a couple of sets of valve cover gaskets myself, but when I was in grad school and the car I had then needed it, the local garage would do the job for $15, which was worth paying for, in part because there was a lot more pollution control equipment than on the earlier car, and a lot more hoses and vacuum lines to move around to get to the engine which would all need reconnecting later. Doncha wish there was a traceroute for hoses under the hood? Cars look like the hoses pipes and tubes in _Brazil_ nowadays. After several years of newer cars with electronic ignitions, I acquired my first van, which was old enough to have a distributor, but it was a Chevy so you adjusted it with dwell stuff instead of feeler gauges, which was too much bother. [Aside] I recently learned that back before you needed a license to drive (ca 1930) you would manually adjust the spark timing (!!) according to your engine speed. After handcranking the engine to start. Kinda like toggling opcodes into a Altair, eh? And these days you're supposed to recycle your oil instead of using it to patch the cracks in driveways, so that's another job to pay somebody else to do. Well you can drop off your oil and various places will take it, free. You're getting soft, Bill. :-) What's next, preinstalled Linux on a preassembled machine? Besides, you could collect your Kyoto tax credit for sequestering the carbon in your lawn. [1] Air Quality Management District, the pollution police in SoCal at least. They make 2-cycle engines and useful BBQ lighter fluid illegal here. Also won't let you register a car if you've modified the pollution controls in any way, since mods are officially bad and you can't register a car without a periodic smog check.
US Intel is shit, shit, shit
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/18/iraq/main537096.shtml So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as garbage after garbage after garbage. In fact, Phillips says the source used another cruder word.
psycho-social sim: bombing Al Jazeera 'accidentally'
General Anthony Zinni, a former head of the US Central Command, says: I wouldn't get sucked into the cities. There would be a lot of casualties on our side, we'd kill a lot of civilians and destroy a lot of infrastructure, and the images on Al Jazeera [television] wouldn't help us at all. One of the cockier supporters of great US expectations is a retired army general, Barry McCaffrey, who was in charge of the 24th Mechanised Division in the 1991 war. He predicts: If we decide to employ force, in 21 days it'll be all over. They're not going to believe what we do to them. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/21/1045638489015.html ... Cockier? Cock-sucking fascist traitor, I'd say McCaffrey is, just from what he did to the US, never mind his war crimes. But he's too much a DC insider to have any relatives who'll be drooling and defecating bigeyed in their rubber suits.. Though perhaps he might be close enough to a neutron surprise when the swamp is sterilized... --- How do you say Blame it on NIMA in Mandarin?
spook infiltration, deception, diplo meltdown, Germans, Yemenis, US
One wonders how much of the US spook-infiltrator's skills/cover were provided by Lindh to save his butt: WASHINGTON The sheikh was a devout Muslim whose lifelong ambition was caring for the poor in Yemen, one of the world's most underdeveloped nations. Yet now he needed help himself. His health was deteriorating, and no facilities in his country were sophisticated enough to treat him. So he turned to his new friend, Yussef, a wealthy but disillusioned young African-American. Yussef had converted to Islam and traveled to Yemen to become more devout, like the now infamous John Walker Lindh. The young convert suggested a trip to Germany, where the sheikh could both visit experienced doctors and raise money for his causes. But Yussef wasn't the person he seemed. As an American undercover agent, he was trying to trap the Muslim leader, who is alleged by the US to be a key financier of terrorism. What followed is a tale of deception, betrayal, and intrigue - and of the clashing international interests and viewpoints that make the pursuit of terrorists so complex. snip http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0219/p01s01-usju.html Undercover arrest stirs terror rift --- Got Body Bags? Sure you have enough?
Re: The burn-off of twenty million useless
Cardenas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: MEChA is not a gang, they're an important part of helping lots of young people to be concious of their own heritage. MEChA is mostly about keeping college admission standards lower for South American-derived wannabe students[1]. This has recently gotten difficult because it is inherently unconstitutional, and increasingly recognized as such, when government funds the admitting entity. But its hard to retain your pride when you know you haven't competed fairly, isn't it? Tribals (like MEChAns) who get their pride from being in some unchosen category (like ethnicity, nationality, etc) do not understand the earning of merit. [1] Not hispanics; they don't care about Iberians
Police state, plainclothes pigs need to die
Girl driving in car is attacked by men in car and tries to escape the attack. The men are pigs (DEA, of course) out of uniform in unmarked car. She is shot in head. Pigs will get away with this, of course. She was Mexican, lower class, in Texas, so expendable. - Teen shot by DEA agents dies in hospital SAN ANTONIO -- A teenage girl, shot and killed by federal drug agents, was a victim of excessive force from law officers who were investigating her father, relatives and friends say. ... Ashley Villarreal had been hospitalized in critical condition since being shot once in the back of the head. One of the agents at a drug stakeout in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles were watching a house on the city's west side where they believed a suspect was hiding when they saw a man get into the passenger side of a car, San Antonio police Sgt. Gabe Trevino said. A girl got into the driver's side of the vehicle, and when they started leaving without the headlights on, and at a high rate of speed, the agents felt certain that this was their suspect and he was trying to escape, Trevino said after the shooting. When agents boxed the car in and attempted to arrest the man, they said the girl who was driving the car continued toward them and slammed into their vehicle, then shifted into reverse and rammed the DEA vehicle behind her. Agents fired at least four times, and the girl was struck in the head. Trevino said the man was not the drug suspect agents were seeking, but he was booked into jail on a charge of public intoxication. snip http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1775795
To Steve Shear, re Rome, Architects, Shuttles, Congress
Steve, you proposed that the deskhoes (congresshits, NASA managers) take the risks that they put others into. I mentioned this to my Dad and he reminded me that parachute packers in the military were required to jump with the chutes they packed at any time. ... Hackers don't work on their own brakes for a reason: evolution.
Re: Forced Oaths to Pieces of Cloth
At 12:22 AM 2/8/03 +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote: But recite they must. Under a state law that takes effect today, almost every student in Pennsylvania - from preschool through high school, in schools public and private - must face the Stars and Stripes each school day and say the pledge or sing the national anthem. Are there any penalties for refusing to take part in this circus? If yes, isn't the contract - pledge - forced, and hence legally invalid? The 1st prohibits both State banning and the *compulsion* of speech, as this clearly is an example of.
Re: A secure government
At 12:03 AM 2/6/03 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 01:23 PM, W H Robinson wrote: The view I get fed all the time is that crypto is, on the whole, in the hands of the terrorists, the anti-patriots, the paedophiles, et al. Correct. That it is a bad thing. We don't think so. Mr Robinson: we understand the Bill of Rights applies to some unsavory types too. Do you think this is a bad thing? See you in Manzanar, baby.
Congressmen in need of composting: Manzanar fine with him
HIGH POINT, N.C. - A congressman who heads a homeland security subcommittee said on a radio call-in program that he agreed with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storyu=/ap/20030206/ap_on_re_us/congressman_prison_camps_7 Why don't they stop pretending and call it Fatherland Security Agency?
RE: The Statism Meme (Roarke, not)
At 02:29 PM 2/4/03 -0800, Blanc wrote: Duncan Frissell said: You mean no one said, I'd grab the .30-06 and head for the hills? I must correct myself. It was not a Libertarian group, they were Objectivists. Not to put the Os down or start an argument about the difference, but I know that Libertarians *would have* said this, as they tend to be a bit more pragmatic. What do you mean? An Objectivist would sit right down and pen a *fine* essay. The funny thing is, from an O perspective, we're already there. Ominous parallels, baby. Frogs, vapor pressure, television. -- Universal Pictures presents Peter Pan, starring Michael Jackson as Pan, Abu Hamza al-Masri as Captain Hook, and Donald Rumsfeld as Tinkerbell
James Watson: Everyone should be DNA-fingerprinted
Everybody in Europe and the US should have their genetic fingerprints entered into an international database to enable law enforcement agencies to fight crime and terrorism in an unstable world, according to James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. In an exclusive interview with The Independent to mark the 50th anniversary of his discovery, the scientist said the risks posed by terrorists and organised criminals now outweighed the possible objections on civil liberties grounds to a DNA database. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=375107 - JW is too old and needs to be lysed.
Re: Self-destruct in SZ-4?
At 09:09 AM 2/3/03 -0800, Tim May wrote: Second, I would do the self-destruct with accelerometers: if several accelerations are felt, detonate. 1. Modern munitions arm this way. If you are an artillery shell and you've been told to arm, and then felt 10s of Gs along one axis and a lot of rotation around that axis, you've probably been fired and can 'safely' explode when you hit something. 2. Why arm a satellite to do this is clear: During launch the rocket could screw up and dump your Top Sekrit satellite into the drink where Mr. Not-so-Friendly Submarine picks it up. It doesn't even violate a treaty if you can't use the satellite offensively (no glide next to a target satellite and go boom). And everyone puts a self-destruct charge in the launch vehicle anyway. Stressful jobs, RSO.
NASA doesn't check astronauts' ID
At 10:50 AM 2/1/03 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: Interesting event, eh? Pretty well timed. They're already saying it wasn't a missle, which may be. Could have been a bomb tho -- pretty weird that it's the Its possible that NASA doesn't check astronauts' ID. So maybe one was a terrorist. [Heh: Maybe the one that personally bombed another country unprovoked?] Kinda makes that zionist-occupation-of-orbit spoof ironic. Score 1 for Allah.
Re: Content Altering DVD Players
At 04:25 PM 1/30/03 -0800, Eric Cordian wrote: http://msn.zdnet.com/zdfeeds/msncobrand/reviews/0,13828,2909517,00.html Dear Hollywood: Keep your hands off my DVDs By David Coursey, AnchorDesk Thanks for posting this. Very interesting. Of course, the DVD CCA owns the DVD trademark just like Phillips etc. owns the CD logo, etc. So you can sell a DVD player (including soft players built on eg DeCSS) but you can't use the official logo if they won't let you play. Its a private trademark affair. Just like Sony can sell CDs that don't follow the Specs and don't play on CD (tm) Players, but it is *criminal fraud* for any such artifact to display the official CD compatability logo. TiVo can sell the same service too ---and since noone owns the word television they can still call their censor-channel-enabled boxes TVs. My VCR tuner lets you block whole channels. I can shut off the volume and play a different audio track. Its still called television. Modulo trademark issues (only), the box builders win, the content and copyright folks have nothing. (Except maybe a few congressvermin in their pockets.)
cities are only a few kilotons apart
At 02:21 PM 1/31/03 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: A bit too expensive, especially in Germany. I also like being able to work on the train -- given that here cities are only a few kilotons apart and ICEs are pretty speedy flying can take longer. Is kilotons a typo or do Europeans enjoy a dark sense of cartography?
Re: DNA evidence countermeasures?
At 07:50 PM 1/28/03 +, Ken Brown wrote: Thomas Shaddack wrote: But now how to avoid leaving random DNA traces? What about giving up on NOT leaving traces and rather just use eg. a spray with hydrolyzed DNA from multiple people, preferably with different racial origin, Get some scurf from expensive D.C. restaurants. PCRAmplify it up if you want, that will create some diversity too. Just a corollary of someone's idea to put Santa on his own naughty-list. Major Variola's Brand Homogenized Human DNA The Finest Homogenized Human DNA CounterForensic Science Can Produce HHDNA From Our *Competitors* Uses the **Same, Well-Known Donors** Over Over **Our HHDNA raw material is collected in the Wild from Unknowing Donors** **We collect in a large urban setting, which has very large DNA marker diversity** All of Major Variola's Fine Products are Not for internal use Available in a Cypherpunke Shoppe near you! See also our line of Martha Bill Stewart spring fashions featuring a special UV-emitting lining on the *inside*.
Secure voice app: FEATURE REQUEST: RECORD IPs
I am elated that the development of Speak Freely is continuing. I think it The versions of all the secure phones I've evaluated needed this feature: a minimal answering machine. With just the ability to record IPs of hosts that tried to call. (A local table can map these to your friends or their faces. Of course, this table should be encrypted when not in use.) Heck, you could even have an option to send email --or I suppose use that instant-messaging stuff that teenagers are fond of-- from the secure IP phone to you, when that phone rings but is not answered.
Re: Secure voice app: FEATURE REQUEST: RECORD IPs
At 11:25 AM 1/27/03 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 08:23:15AM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: The versions of all the secure phones I've evaluated needed this feature: a minimal answering machine. With just the ability to record IPs of Pretty hard to do if people are using dialup. Or even dsl, unless they run a linux box they don't ever reboot -- although I've found my dsl ip changing sometimes on it's own, and with no rhyme or reason. Merely notifying me that someone called is useful. It wouldn't require rocket science to recognize an entire class C address as a friend. And remember this proposal is fully back compatible with earlier versions of a sec phone. If you wanted to mess with the protocol, you could obviously add an identifier exchange component. I am not familiar with SpeakFreely's protocol so I don't know if it can be extended without breaking compatability.
RE: Deniable Thumbdrive? (and taking signal detection seriously)
From: Tyler Durden [EMAIL PROTECTED] The cool thing about this drive (small enough that it has holes for use as a keychain) is that it's got a Public area and a private area, and the private area is accessible (if one desires) only via the little fingerprint reader on the top of the drive. (It's also USB based, and on Windows2000 and beyond you don't need any software drivers--just plug it in to a USB port and it appears as a drive). ANyway, I was wondering. I'd really like a nice software mod of this thing so that, depending on which finger I use for verification, a different private area on the drive will open (right now several users can be assigned access by the master user to use their fingerprint for access to the single private area). Of course, there should be no indication that there even IS more than one private area. 1. You should not rely on their encryption alone, you should use your own crypto on whatever you store there. You can carry your whole environment --incl. copies of tools, digsigs,and keyrings -- with you. You do, of course, have to trust the hardware/OS you use it with. If you don't know the socket, keep your dongle in your pants 2. If you use your 'nose' you need to borrow other noses to do a signal detection study ---tally hits, misses, false alarms, false positives. Then get back to us. We can even characterize and compare the performance of say human sentries this way; even measure their fatigue, perhaps. If the FAA/TSA has half a clue they've done this for their x-ray snoopers.
Deniable racial (etc) profiling coming to TSA, thanks to neural nets
From http://wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,57354,00.html, TSA will be using neural nets to harass travellers. Neural nets, besides having due process problems, let you infer properties --like race--- from things that you can't or won't directly ask --eg on loan applications. Its even better than the archaic blame it on the computer ---which doesn't cover your ass when rules are explicit. When its blame it on the (opaque) neural net you can get away with behavior that would not be acceptable if expressed by explicit rules. (And we have spoken to an HNC engineer who confirmed this observation.) Excerpt: The agency will spend $80 million this year to replace the current system's triggers, such as a one-way ticket purchase paid in cash, with neural networks, or fuzzy logic decision trees, that can detect more subtle indicators of a potential threat. The idea of computers acting on hunches vexes Tien. The holy grail is that these systems will learn and adjust their suspicion calculators on their own, untethered from human input, he said. But if you can't document the basis for a score or a decision, then you have a serious due process problem. The TSA awarded preliminary grants last spring to Lockheed Martin, Infoglide Software, Ascent Technology and HNC Software, none of which responded to requests for comment.
Homemade GPS jammers raise concerns
Haven't been able to download the phrack yet but see: http://gbppr.dyndns.org/PROJ/mil/ http://www.qsl.net/n9zia/wireless/appendixF.html#15
And another one bites the dust: Dissent Takedown
[x] move supplies troops [x] add Turkey, Saudis to shopping cart [x] work domestic propoganda machine [x] quiet Wellstone [x] shut Ritter up Channel Six News has learned former UN Weapons Inspector and Delmar resident Scott Ritter was arrested during an Internet sex sting operation. But it turns out police caught Ritter months before, but declined to press charges. Sources tell us Ritter tried to meet a 14 year-old girl he chatted with online. He was instead met by police officers, who let him go. Ritter was arrested in June of 2001 for allegedly trying to lure a 16 year-old girl he met online to a Burger King. But that girl was really an undercover cop- surfing the web as part of a police sting operation. Ritter was charged with attempted endangerment of a child. But the charge was dismissed and the case sealed. That means, essentially, that it never happened. Ritter searched Iraq for weapons in the years following the Gulf War. More recently, he's been speaking out against President Bush's policies on Iraq and is frequently seen on local and national television. http://www.wrgb.com/news/local/local_news.asp#H1 ALBANY, NY, Jan. 20 - More details are emerging about the June 2001 arrest of former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter of Delmar. He was apparently arrested by Colonie police as part of Internet sex sting. The Schenectady Daily Gazette reports Ritter was under investigation for a similar incident two months earlier. http://www.msnbc.com/local/WNYT/M264375.asp
cloning as heresy (Re: Fresh Hell)
At 09:44 PM 1/17/03 -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote: 1) Fucks up the prevailing religion doctrine. Funny, but I can't seem to find the passage in the Bible where it talks about cloning. In fact, I can't find any passage that even remotely impinges on the subject. Provided that I had the christian cult in mind (where I am not an connoisseur), wasn't there something about exclusivity of conceiving without fucking ? He's talking about parthogenesis. You know, a young unwed palestinian gets knocked up, has a schizophrenic bastard son who makes it big in the city, gets a following, and is WACO-ized, more or less.
Re: Desert Spam
At 03:44 PM 1/16/03 +0100, Anonymous wrote: Does anyone know a source for a spam list for US military? Use google. Search for @*.mil Also large bureaucracies use standard forms like First.Surname@blah or FSurname@blah Be subtle. Ask them to disable their weapons and defect. Tell them you don't hate americans, just the regime. Make sure you don't post such info where furringers will see it ---they might abuse it. Also all that furringer mail coming into .mil will annoy DIA
Fear and Loathing in Afghanistan
We were somewhere around Kandahar, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like I feel a bit light headed, maybe you should fly And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like antiaircraft fire, all swooping and screeching and diving around the plane, and a voice was screaming: Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals? Canadians? (attorney says: What are you yelling about?) Never mind, its your turn to fly. No point in mentioning those canooks, I thought, the poor bastard will see them soon enough. We had two go-pills, some anti depressants, and a bag of Xanax for when we got back. Not that we needed all this for the trip, but once you get locked in a serious patrol mission, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that worried me was the dexies, there is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in a fully-loaded F-16 crazed on military speed. Except maybe the politician who sent him.
Petro's catch-22 incorrect (Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants)
At 03:20 PM 1/15/03 -0800, Petro wrote: On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 09:15:57AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: On the other hand, if the US were following the traditional model for defense rather than having a standing army stomping around the world, it's highly unlikely that somebody like Al Qaeda would have attacked the World Trade Center, because they wouldn't have had their grievances about the US infidel forces stationed in the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia. They *might* have attacked Exxon headquarters because of Exxon mercs stationed in the Holy Land. Bullshit. First off, the same groups would have been torqued off that we were guilty of cultural imperalism by allowing (or assisting) american companies to push product over there. They would simply have had a social-boycott or a government-imposed ban. Both are used in the US. (Only the government-imposed one uses force, but its generally invisible bureaucratic violence by Customs workers at borders.) Secondly, other groups would have been just as pissed off at us for *not* helping them. Not if the USG had no policy towards anyone. One more time, George, for Petro: Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign entanglements. -George Washington I guess RTFF: RTF Fatwa
Re: The Plague
At 03:18 AM 1/16/03 +, Andri Isidoro Fernandes Esteves wrote: And all westerns have some level of aquired imunity, for we are the Surely you mean inherited, not acquired. descendents of the plague survivors. See _Guns Germs and Steel_ Note however, without occasional plagues, a population would lose resistance...
Re: Brinworld: Samsung SCH-V310 camcorder phone
At 01:38 AM 1/14/03 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: data speeds on cell phones are getting fast enough that if they've designed the phones right, you can get at least CU-SeeMe quality video and maybe better, with 64kbps, and ostensibly 384kbps But it's a start. Its pretty common to see a reporter holding a cell phone up to a talking head surrounded by more conventional microphones, tape recorders. When a major news medium first uses a video snip recorded from a phone at the scene, the Brinworld clock will have advanced another second. And then some Nokia yahoo will introduce some more interesting features that used to be found in $10K specialized video/recording equiptment * snap a frame if something moves (security) * FIFO the last N seconds * low light/IR/frame accumulate etc. making the 7segment LED Brinworld clock blick closer to midnight.
Re: Indo European Origins (language mutability, efficiency)
On Ken's All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are the same age. At first this parsed because I was thinking in the sense of all organisms have ancestries going back the same amount of time. (And humans aren't the 'goal' of evolution.) Not sure if non-bioheads got this. Anyway others' complaints clarified speciation --if you are willing to identify a bifurcation point then you *can* age a species or any other fork --Linux 2.4, Latin, Corvettes, etc. At 10:36 AM 1/14/03 -0800, Michael Motyka wrote: An interesting question that arises out of the observation that some languages are relatively static and others - like English - have been changing steadily. Is there any connection between the evolution behavior of the language and the vitality of the culture? I think so. Vitality is fuzzy. Clearly America admitting everyone (cf Japanese) helps. Clearly not having an Acadamie Anglaise helps (cf surrender-monkeys). Electronic media probably help. There's an even more interesting technical evolution: English is also undergoing entropic refinement or Hamming-like coding, as speakers prune or invent for efficiency. As it is, it takes fewer letters in English to say something than every other common language. Look at the instruction manuals for your domestic appliances. Forms (memory requirements) get simpler ---can you believe that the surrender-monkeys retain a gender-bit for every friggin object-- and phonetically simpler too. The sounds get more orthogonal. Also the influence of immigrants and children and lazy native speakers who can't tell a v from a w or d from th, or remember the 150 irregular verbs. Some of this is natural. I've adopted the southern y'all because English has no plural third person and this ambiguity is annoying when you're emailing to several people. Note also the efficiency of the contraction. You hear data used as singular enough times, you say fuck it, I'll have a beer, or several beer [sic]. Talk to Eastern Europeans long enough, you'll start dropping your articles, though you may miss the FEC/prompting and flash back to Boris Natasha cartoons...
unlawful combatants, interrogation methods, is your lawyer a spook?
In the following excerpt, the US wants to keep a US citizen, away from lawyers for interrogation purposes. Perhaps the interrogation consists of telling him that X is his public defender when X is in fact an interrogator. Combined with synthetic (disinfo) newspapers and news stories intentionally 'leaked' to him, Padilla's idea of his situation may be very different from reality. While its probably legit to use disinfo newspapers (in the same way a cop can lie to you, or a detective can bluff the prisoner's dilemma) the former deception isn't. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/011/nation/US_argues_against_counsel_for_terror_suspects+.shtml US argues against counsel for terror suspects By Lyle Denniston, Globe Correspondent, 1/11/2003 WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, going to unusual lengths to keep lawyers away from suspected terrorists now in custody, has revealed in court its methods of secret interrogation to get information from these detainees. The administration contends that those methods surely will fail if lawyers are on hand. In a filing late Thursday in a federal court in New York City, the Justice Department disclosed that military teams have been interrogating a detained US citizen, Jose Padilla, for several months in hopes of winning his trust as a source of intelligence about the Al Qaeda
Re: Indo European Origins
At 03:32 PM 1/9/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Soma? Despite the fact that I've read large chunks of the Rig Vedas, I don't remember anything called Soma (unless this is a Brave New World Reference). Of course, the Bhagavad Gita is a subsection of the Mahabaratabut I don't imagine this is what you are referring to... Well then do a fucking google on the word in the Indian context. Maybe your highschool has firewalled off anything that will lead you to Hoffman, Ott, Huxley, etc. Hmm, the 21st century: all the world's libraries at your fingertips, but now you're obligated to use them! ... Of course Hitler and the gang appropriated this term and pumped it with some very different meanings, LIST: even playing with a kitten and a laser pointer get tiring eventually. Tyler, we know this shit. We're not undergrads doing September here. Next you're going to tell us how the swastik was a groovy Amerind sign before it was coopted by Austrians. Or continue to slog through the history of the old world tribes. See _guns germs and steel_, btw. including notions of racial purity. I was curious as to whether Tim May meant this version of the term or what (and all that is concomittant, including hoped-for genocides), in which case bludgeoning him with a heavy, blunt object in the base of the skull would be a break for all humanity. -TD Here's a very general clue: Tim has a clue. Tim's exposed himself under that nym for some time now, do some research. Another hint: keep your irony meter powered up when reading posts here. Carefully remove the sarcasm filter from the satire window to detect tongue-in-cheek rays. Bigger hint: you might have saved us all some once-ever-so-precious-bandwidth by writing off Aryan as a simple sound pun: Bay Area -an, get it? Finally, here's something to keep in mind: culture != race. You can slam a culture --after all, values are choices-- pretty rationally, thought there's not much evidence for slamming gene-based human groups. You can decry zionist colonialism without animosity towards hebrews. You can mock decrepit urban negro, or appalachian caucasoid, or suburban soccermom culture without impugning the genome of the actors. But this explaining of the obvious is becoming painful, please assume we're a group of at least peers, if not polite tolerant but decreasingly amused elders. Merci
Re: The Microsoft Xbox Key/dvd issues
At 08:36 PM 1/7/03 +, Peter Fairbrother wrote: And apart from that, what was the point of CSS? You can do a dd on a DVD and play the image from a hard drive. I don't have a DVD burner, but I'd imagine you could burn a DVD from such an image, so direct copying is probably easy enough. Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't tried it, but the pirates don't seem to have any technical trouble. The DVD Mafia's job is to make sure DVD-media play only on licensed DVD-players. (Licensed players are supposed to implement region-restriction, obligatory advertizement watching, etc.) If you pay their Mafia, you get a secret (bwah hah h) decryption key and the right to use their logo. I'm not up on the chronology/conspiracy theories but its possible they anticipated how to abuse the DMCA in the way that they are, and so some trivial encrypting --even rot13-- is required. They must have known that recordable DVDs (multigig) were coming, but did not anticipate advanced codecs that put a DVD into a CD (or KaZaa :-) sized file. They also know they are obstructing the consumer, not the pro pirate. As a senior Sony engineer once said to me, re encryption cable-box architectures, yes, we know they have logic analyzers in Hong Kong -- SAFETY RULES FOR US STRATEGIC BOMBERS 5.1. Don't use nuclear weapons to troubleshoot faults. http://cryptome.org/afi91-111.htm
Cypherpunk fashions for the New Ashcroft Era (Re: Security cameras are getting smart -- and scary)
At 11:34 PM 1/8/03 +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote: I don't know the weaknesses of gait-observing systems, so I can't suggest anything. Kilts for men (over the knee, please, and not for aesthetics). Hoop-skirts for women. A heavy backpack carried asymmetrically (for extra fun, use a canteen where the sloshing water messes with your physics). Good test cases would involve professional deceivers (actors) also. --- Why is my computer not faster? asked the gardener. Turn the spigot said the engineer, pointing to the valve at the far end of the hose which the gardener held. The gardener did so, and after a short but noticable moment, felt the hose stiffen. With that, the gardener was enlightened.
Re: Cryptome Log Subpoenaed (Pissing on Potassium)
Dear John A. Grossman, MA AAG: You might also subpeona the masters of http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:NW6ZES17aTcC:cryptome.org/sec-con.htm+hl=enie=UTF-8 You might also ponder the words of the First Fellatrix: I think people have not quite gotten their hands around the speed at which information can be disseminated online. -Monica Lewinsky, LATimes 9 may 01 http://www.latimes.com/business/columns/celebsetup/lat_monica010510.htm Dear List: cryptome.org is down, barring research into the publications of interest, however Mr. Google has kindly provided a backup, although he as usual denies all culpability. HEREOF FAIL NOT to get a clue WITNESS the hand of distributed information systems -John Doe Number Two Refs follow At 06:55 PM 1/7/03 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: http://cryptome.org/cryptome-log.htm Attn: John Young Enclosed is a Grand Jury subpoena requiring that Cryptome produce certain records. bring with him/her all logs recording the I.P. addresses and/or users who visited http://cryptome.org/sec-con.htm; between 11/7/02 00:00:00 GMT and 11/14/02 23:59:59 GMT. If no such log exists for the specific page in question, please provide any logs that would cover the domain together with an explanation of what the log covers. Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions, please feel free to call. Very truly yours, [Signed] John A. Grossman Assistant Attorney General Chief, Corruption, Fruad Computer Crime Division This is G o o g l e's cache of http://cryptome.org/sec-con.htm. G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. The page may have changed since that time. Click here for the current page without highlighting. To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:NW6ZES17aTcC:cryptome.org/sec-con.htm+hl=enie=UTF-8 Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content. 2 September 2002 From: Dorsey Morrow, CISSP [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Warning on Legal Notice Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 21:07:50 -0500 John, The e-mail you received is nothing more than a hoax. While the FROM: box shows it comes from our organization, if you look at the IP header information, you will see that it does not come from our organization. None of the e-mail is true. We do not have any personal information on anyone except those who are members of our organization, and we certainly do not keep any form of financial information. In fact, unless you are a member of our organization, we do not even have your contact information. We have determined that the e-mails used to further this hoax were gathered from various websites and spam lists. Regrettably, it is easy to spoof someone on the Internet. It is very easy for an e-mail message to appear to come from President Bush or Bill Gates, when indeed they did not. That is the case here. We are in the process of implementing digital signatures for all official e-mails to assist in verifying what is legitimate e-mail and what is not. We believe the e-mail to be the work of a mentally-deranged individual acting without benefit of any ethics or scruples. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this might have caused you. Best regards, Dorsey Morrow, CISSP (ISC)2 General Counsel 2 September 2002 From: Anthony Baratta, CISSP [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Legal Notification Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2002 13:23:23 -1000 Legal Notification You are herby informed that (under the privacy act), the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2 has sold your information including, Name , E-Mail address, Residential address, Credit and savings information, Social Security information, and Occupation details. This information has been sold to a third Party \ Parties and this E-mail serves as notification for such action. This information was sold under the premise for marketing and research. Under the privacy act you may request to see in writing any information that we have about you. Please write to the following address with a self addressed envelope. (ISC)2 860 Worcester Rd.,Ste 101 Framingham, Ma 01702 U.S.A If you have any questions about the third Party \ Parties please inquire with them. The International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2 is no longer responsible for the information sold. (ISC)2 Will hold no responsibility for damages and loss suffered by the reader of this E-mail. (ISC)2 is not responsible for the actions of third party companies. Upon written request we will consider deleting records that we currently hold about you. A processing fee of $ 10.00 will apply. Please make out this check to (ISC)2 and
Manhattan Bldgs (RE: The Geodesic Economy:)
At 01:33 PM 12/29/02 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: I don't much like the Richard Meier (tictactoe) design. Its not a tictactoe or hollywood squares design ---those are gleaming white prison bars. A motif for the 21st century. -- Intended only for lawful uses. -HP Computer Advert
re:constant encryped stream
At 03:07 AM 12/21/02 -0800, Sarad AV wrote: Don't encrypt,post it by snail mail.I remember reading this in pgp's help document. It addresses why we glue over our envelope and seal it.It ofcourse is concealing(for the govt) and privacy (for the user).The govt. never asks letters not to be glued and sealed because of the vast majority of people using it. But at the slightest at the use of encryption will raise their brows. Find a readily-OCR-able font and encrypt your message before printing mailing it... A (twisted) form of stego if your envelope is textured/opaque. (A friend once sent me a PGP msg on a *postcard* but the fucker used a font that required lots of manual corrections... using only PGP's griping as feedback.) -- Intended only for lawful uses. -HP Computer Advert
Make antibiotic resistant pathogens at home! (Re: Policing Bioterror Research)
At 07:07 PM 12/21/02 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2002/1217/1 Moreover, prior approval from the Department of Health and Human Services will be needed for experiments that might make a select agent more toxic or more resistant to known drugs, as well as similar studies that could be added to a restricted list. So are all the housefrau who ask for antibiotics whenever they get the sniffles going to be tracked? The indiscriminate use of antibios leads to drug-resistant bugs. See Darwin et al. And how about them ag antibios (which increase feed:meat ratio)? -- Intended only for lawful uses. -HP Computer Advert
Re: Constant encrypted stream
At 03:01 PM 12/20/02 -0600, Anonymous wrote: Or, alternatively, if Crypto use by everyday folks was as common as, saying, Gnutella file sharing, then it would be a HELL of a lot harder for invisible ears to pick out potentially interesting encrypted files (how many Gnutella files are shared each day?). That's simply hiding in a crowd. What you want is to wear a disguise, too. Kazaa + stego, dude. -- Intended only for lawful uses. -HP Computer Advert
Re: Libel lunacy -all laws apply fnord everywhere
At 02:29 PM 12/15/02 -0600, Jim Choate wrote: On Wed, 11 Dec 2002, Steve Schear wrote: From the article: The court dismissed suggestions the Internet was different from other broadcasters, who could decide how far their signal was to be transmitted. This is totally bogus thinking. The Internet is not broadcast medium. Yes, it is. Every site that emits a packet broadcasts it onto the network. The network? Sorry, its one wire from here to there. Even a router with multiple NICs only copies a given packet to a single interface. One can even make a comparison between 'frequency modulation' with 'IP service'. Information from Web sites must be requested, the equivalent of ordering a book or newspaper, Or tuning your browser to the 'frequecy' of the web server. For purposes of thinking about *channels* you can use the old Marconi way of thinking of frequency as channel-selector. The net has under 2^32 x 2^16 (IP x port) endpoints or 'channels'. However in detail this mildly useful metaphor breaks down. In particular, most protocols (e.g., TCP) set up a virtual, temporary circuits. Clients have to request such circuits. Servers have to grant them. Not the case for a true broadcast net, eg radio. More like making a phone call. Do you think when you speak on the phone that you are broadcasting into the Network? You are not. --- Of course, words mean different things in Choate-prime. Apologies to the C-prime filterers.
Woof (Re: [s-t] olfactory profiling (fwd))
At 11:00 AM 12/17/02 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote: RAH Seriously. cf recent neuroscience/paleoanthropology research about the man-dog interface... He's talking about a recent study (in _Science_) comparing the ability of domestic dogs, wolves, and chimps to interpret a human's signals -pointing, gaze, etc.-- about the location of food. Dogs were better than wolves and chimps. Even dog puppies were better than chimps or wolves. Not bad for a dozen Kyears of selection.
Re: Gilmore's response
From: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] I have a possible trip coming up soon. I intend to have my tickets purchased by a third party and fly under an assumed name (maybe Tyler Durden ;-) I will carry no ID on my person. Perhaps there is now a need to have large numbers of refusnik travelers assume the same nom de avion identity. Sort of like the Killroy in WW II. Dare you to do this with your Groucho glasses on :-)
Re: Extradition, Snatching, and the Danger of Traveling to Other Countries
Spot on. But what, if anything, do you think can be done to reverse this slide to Red White and Blue Stalinism with good PR? I trust you are not one of those who will prattle something like exercise your right to vote, or write your congressperson/MP, etc. In practical terms, in a surveillance society, what can the regular person do to strike a blow in opposition to the direct attack on the Constitution and civil liberties and civil rights? Do we need a program to oppose the progrom? See Gilmore's proposal. Consider the meaning of reverse-panopticon. Find federal employees and let them know we're watching you but don't identify we. Publish public info. Do this for executives in firms that pander to the Evil. Not just e.g., Ellison ---there are more next-level-down underlings who might just live in your neighborhood. Anyone got ideas for a neighborhood watch type sticker which expresses the reverse-panopticon visually?
Re: Libel lunacy -all laws apply fnord everywhere
Quoth Steve: Under this logic a retailer in one country, selling a controversial book to someone in another country, could involve publishers in yet a third country to litigation in the second country. Bizarre. The real question is whether any judgement is enforceable. Depends if the Dow Jones CEOs ever go to Australia. Ask Mr. Skylarov about enforceability. Better yet, ask his wife or newborn.
60 years to rights restoration
that the War on Terrorism should be won in about 60 years, at which point the American citizens would see their civil liberties returned. Obviously, only traitors, agitators, and other enemy combatants would make the outrageous claim that this war will likely last perpetually. None have yet commented that in 60 years, there will be no one left that remembers what things were like. If they do, maybe congress will quietly apologize to them and grant some hush money to the few survivors, following the Jap Internment Apology plan. --- Better put some ice on that, NYC
Filters, vaccines, guns, population resistance vs. individual protection
In a way, Mathew's and Choate's attack upon the list has done us a favour. The list is now effectively restricted to those with the will and ability to use filters, which raises the required intelligence level. It has also increased the utility/use of centrally-filtered exploders, like lne.com. When there's cholera in the public supply (from people shitting in the well), you go to bottled (filtered) water. Does this vindicate homeopathy ? No, it vindicates the vaccination approach, the antigen-antibody approach. The vaccination metaphor is flawed. If the use of personal filters were like vaccination, the spammers would find it harder to work in the vaccinated population. Ie, *more* than the vaccinated folks are protected: all the unvaccinated are protected because of the decreased ability for the infection to percolate through the population. This is similar to how those without guns in their homes are protected from burglars by those with guns in their neighborhood. The population resistance seen by the burglar/pathogen also protects the unarmed/unvaccinated. I don't see this population-resistance effect increasing by the use of personal spam/noise filters. I only see benefits to the protected individual. (And addressing the goofy homeopathic suggestion, no, there is no benefit from using ineffectual filters, tautologically.) --- We have always been at war with Oceania bin Laden -1984+20
Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!
There was an article in the press a month or so ago about some town that was trying hard to restrict cybercafe hours, because of gang activity there - I'm not sure how much of it's just the same nonsense that tried to restrict video-game parlors, and how much of it's because the local bullies were playing quake and decided to gang up and frag the mayor's kid... Bill, You're referring to Garden Grove in Orange County (SoCal). This is a Vietnamese neighborhood, and meatspace gang violence intruded into the cybercafes --which are really networked-gaming parlours BTW-- and some kid got whacked outside. In the meatwhacking sense. The various reactive laws this violence generated are not CP-list-related per se, but are indicators of how more general-purpose cybercafes might be regulated. --- Tim: re Siliness, compounded: I wasn't agreeing that such laws (cams in 'cafes) exist now in the US, but rather that 'cafe anonymity *will be* readily blocked by laws requiring your drivers license (or library card) to use the machines. All of this in addition to the power to subpeona all the private videos in the neighborhood. To implement, all it requires is a smoking crater somewhere, and the claim that the Feebs are stymied at a 'cafe ingress point. --- Got Reichstag?
Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!
At 10:56 AM 12/7/02 -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote: This, with obligatory cameras in cybercafes, is just plugging the anonymity holes. Yep. Also, one of unmentioned consenquences is that any security will make self-organising networks harder to implement. Guess who benefits. But we will always have phone booths and acoustic couplers. Phone booths already don't accept calls, by State Fiat. You think detecting and dropping modem calls from a CO is tough? I'm waiting for it to be a PATRIOT offense for using an antennae to hit a cellular basestation other than the nearest one an omni would hit. Or to be operating a motor vehicle on a public road with an operating computer with an 802.11 card. Or photographing any federal building or official. At least the tragicomicretins in http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,56742,00.html invented the cool new acronym: TAP, terrorist access points. This is a concise (if hysterical in both senses) Spec of a useful system. If its good enough for Everyone, its good enough for the Horsemen. If its not a TAP, you might as well paint a friggin bullseye on your back. --- Orwell was an optimist.
