Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys
On 29 Apr 2002 at 12:29, Tim May wrote: The deep error which has been with us for a long time is the assumption that we can create legal systems or surveillance systems which go after bad guys but not good guys. That is, that we can separate bad guys like Mohammed Atta from good guys, all in advance of actual criminal or terrorist acts. ... What people want to know is Will Person X commit a crime in the future? (And hence we should deny him access to strong crypto _now_, for example, which is the whole point of attempting to surveil, restrict, and use data mining to ferret out bad trends.) Even the strongest believer in the law of the excluded middle would not argue that the Will Person X commit a crime in the future? has a Yes or No answer at the _present_ time. (Well, actually, I suppose some folks _would_. They would say I personally don't know if he will, but in 50 years he either will have committed a crime or he will not have committed a crime.) I think, though, that it wouldn't be too hard to find a bunch of people that agree that Person X is a hell of a lot more likely to commit a crime than Person Y. The point of this data mining, I gather, is not to actually predict individual crimes (which is probably impossible even in principle and definitely impossible in practice) but rather to devide the populace into sheeple who only need occasional monitioring to ensure that they continue to fit the sheeple profile and potential future criminals who would be subject to more extensive monitoring. The problem with selling a system like this to the public is how to convince them that the system won't be branding as future criminals people who have not committed a crime and quite likely never will based on such things as what restaurants they eat at or what books they read, when in fact that is precisely what the system is designed to do. Can we Identify the Bad Guys? Getting back to law enforcement attempting to predict the future, the lack of any meaningful way to predict who will be a future Mohammed Atta or Charles Manson, and who thus should be restricted in his civil liberties, is the important point. Could any amount of data mining have identified Mohammed Atta and his two dozen or so co-conspirators? Sure, *now* we know that an indicator is Unemployed Arab taking flying lessons, but we surely did not know this prior to 9/11. Finding correlations (took flying lessons, showed interest in chemical engineering, partied at a strip club) is not hard. But not very useful. I think the LEOs and sheeple would be willing to accept the general rule that anyone who has lots of money to spend yet has no declared legitimate source of income is probably some kind of criminal. With a sufficiently broad definition of criminal. the reasoning is actually pretty good. To the law enforcement world, this means _everyone_ must be tracked and surveilled, dossiers compiled. No doubt. All of the talk about safeguards in the data mining is just talk. Any safeguard sufficient to give John Q. Public protection will give Mohammed Atta protection...because operationally they are identical persons: there is no subobject classifier which can distinguish them! By saying Mohammed Atta is indistinguishable from other Arab men who generally fit the same criteria...assuming we don't know in *advance* that Unemployed Arab taking flying lessons is an important subobject classifier. I think the kind of abuses that they're trying to safeguard against are things like an IRS agent triggering an audit on a neighbor in retalliation for playing the stereo too loud. As opposed to auditing someone because playing music too loud is part of the tax evader profile, which would be completely proper. I hope the distinction is clear. Indeed, the major changes in ground truth (what is actually seen on the ground, as in a battle) have come from technology. It was the invention and sale of the Xerox machine and VCR that altered legal ideas about copyright and fair use, not a bunch of lawyers pontificating. In both cases, the ground truth had already shifted, in a kind of knowledgequake, and the Supremes had only two choices: accept the new reality by arguing about fair use and time-shifting, or declare such machines contraband and authorize the use of storm troopers to collect the millions of copiers and VCRs aleady sold. They chose the first option. It might be amusing to speculate as to what the result would have been had they attempted to choose the second option. Or maybe not. Precisely! This is why the talk fo how the Cypherpunks list (and similar lists) should not be political is so wrong-headed: without a political compass, where would we head? I think this comes from different meanings of the word political. To most people, this means lobbying legislators or fighting court cases, maybe even carrying big signs at
Re: Two ideas for random number generation
On 24 Apr 2002 at 17:41, David Howe wrote: Maybe for you, I sure as hell wouldn't use it either as a key or as a seed into a known hashing/whiting algorithm. its probably a better (if much slower) stream cypher than most currently in use; I can't think of any that have larger than a 256 internal state, and that implies a 2^256 step cycle at best; for pi to be worse, it would have to have less than 2^256 digits. This is putting sillines on top of silliness. It's true that in principle that the decimal expansion of pi has an infinite number of digits, but any practical implementation of a PRNG based on pi would still have to have a finite number of accessable states. That is, to get the infinite cycle, you'd have to have some method of generating a uniform random integer 0 to infinity for the initial state, and you'd need an infinite amount of memory to store the current internal state. Neither of which is acheivable ion practice. Conversely, a PRNG whose cycle is only 2^256 bits long will never repeat itself during the lifetime of the device, or the lifetime of the universe for that matter. George
Re: Quantum mechanics, England, and Topos Theory
On 23 Apr 2002 at 18:56, Tim May wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2002, at 11:18 AM, Ken Brown wrote: Back nearer to on-topic, Tim's explanation why the world could not be predicted even if it were locally (microscopically) predictable sounds spot-on. It's not my idea, obviously. But the fact that I wrote it so quickly, and so glibly (he admits), is because it's so internalized to everything I think. I simply cannot _conceive_ of anyone thinking the Universe, let alone the Multiverse, is predictable in any plausible or operational sense. The sources of divergence (aka chaos, aka combinatorial explosion, aka Big O with a Vengeance) come in from all sides. I can explain why people might think it were. You could imagine that due to feedback mechanisms or statistical averaging, these small uncertainties tend to cancel each other out, provided you're confining your interest to macroscopic observables. For example, when a sheep dies you get more grass for the remaining sheep, which gets you more sheep again, so you can do a reasonable job of predicting sheep population without knowing anything about the fates of individual sheep. Similarly, if i cut a fart in an elevator, there's no telling where an indvidual stink molecule will go, but in not too long they'll be more or less uniformly spread throughout the elevator. I can't see how anyone would believe you would ever be able to predict, say, radio static. But I think 50 years ago most people believed that in principle you could predict the weather arbitrarily far into the future. And there are still people who believe you can predict stock prices based solely on the squiggles. These people are called technical traders by themselves and fools by others. George --Tim May He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -- Nietzsche
Google API
Google released a beta of the API to access its database today. Unfortunately the ResultElement object doesn't include anything like a message digest of the cached URL. George
Re: overcoming ecash deployment problems (Re: all about transferable off-line ecash)
On 11 Apr 2002 at 12:48, A. Melon wrote: Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thursday, April 11, 2002, at 06:59 AM, Mike Rosing wrote: But the reason we have AC today is because Tesla requested no royalties on his motor/generator. Something for Brands to think about. No, we have AC because AC works better than DC in home wiring situations. Hmmm. I always thought the reason we went with AC was because at the time, DC power couldn't cut it. They couldn't find any way to reliably transfer DC power more than a half mile or so from the power plant, and when trying to demonstrate it in NYC couldn't even get DC power all the way up a multi-story building. It's like this: transformers work for AC and not for DC. Losses in transmission only depend on current, so if you can send high voltage low current through your transmission lines and then transform down at the other end you get less transmission losses. Tesla's AC power solved this problem, after which Edison and his backers started some kind of smear campaign saying that DC was safer and such. Yes, the high voltage transmission lines were deadlier to squirrels. Lighting was the killer app for electricity, and it'll work fine off DC or AC. Motors will also (just make sure you have the right kind of motor), but if you just can have one thing coming out of your walls you're much better off with AC, even if most of your appliances work off DC, because it's easier to transform and recify AC to get a specific DC voltage than it is to do a DC-DC trasnformation. The only way you'd be better off with DC coming out of your walls would be if not only did all your stuff work off DC, but it all worked off the same DC voltage. I think you'll find that every place in the world that has power has AC coming out of its walls, even ones that just got electricity recently. It's not a historic accident, it's better. I hear that the primitives in Europe use 50 Hz AC. Our 60 Hz is clearly superior, because we need smaller transformers and capacitors to get the same effect. I had an idea for something even better than 60 Hz AC once, but I've forgotten what it was. George Mr Anonymous
Game money
On 12 Apr 2002 at 0:38, Adam Back wrote: I was suggesting that the ecash mint operator exchange ecash directly for Everquest currency (virtual platinum pieces). The Everquest VR is a place in cyberspace, and there are people who make their living by trading and selling virtual artifacts acquired in the game. The VR world is of quite spectacular scale. To give a few factoids about the scale virtual worlds from some recent articles I read Norrath's per capita income is roughly between Russia and Bulgaria. Or put another way, Norrath is the 77th richest country in the world. I'd take numbers like that with a hefty grain of salt, though. Take the current exchange rate of Everquest Platinum to pictures of George Wahington you can get on Ebay, multiply by the total number of platinum pieces, and you get... a meaningless result. Only a very small fraction of Everquest players would pay any amount of real money for Everquest money; there's no paticular reason to believe the game is more fun with richer or stronger characters, and most people would think that it decreases their enjoyment of the game to aquire powerful characters in this way. Then again, what do I know, I thought the game just plain sucked. I suspect, though, that in the not too distant future the price of Everquest currency will precipitously plummet. Players may feel that it's immoral or no fun to buy characters and gear, but they probably won't have any problem with selling them when they're tired of the game. And the pricing model for playing strongly encourages quitting cold turkey. George
Coins vs. bills
On 10 Apr 2002 at 13:43, Sunder wrote: I've had several dozen of these (stamp and other vending machines provided them as change here in NYC), and kept only one. You're not supposed to keep currency, you're supposed to spend it. I generally prefer the bills to coins, because the coins make an annoying jjingle jangle and also wear out my pockets. They're horrible. Sure, they look like gold when you get them but they oxidize quickly when handled and look worse than old pennies. Serves the mint right for trying to pass what clearly is a slap in the face of anyone who remembers that the US currency was at one time tethered to actual gold. Now that everyone knows that even coins are only of symbolic value, I don't see why they don't make them out of plastic. They'd be lighter, clink less, they could come in all sorts of pretty colors, and as long as they use a good quality plastic they shouldn't wear out too fast. OTOH, it'd be kind of embarrassing if wooden nickles were made from a highre quality material than real ones. But they'd probably stop calling them nickles if they didn't have any nickle at all in them and didn't even look like nickle. George
Re: all about transferable off-line ecash (Re: Brands off-linete ch)
On 9 Apr 2002 at 14:40, Steve Furlong wrote: Trei, Peter wrote: US don't want dollar coins Just about a year ago, they tried again, with the 'Sacagawea' or 'Golden Dollar'. This is a very handsome coin, gold in color, but it was the same size as a SBA dollar (to fit the machines). You can still confuse it with a quarter in your pocket or in the dark. It's been months since I've seen one. I've seen exactly two Sac coins, both right after they were introduced. I gave one to my son to save and one to an amateur collector. http://www.projo.com/business/content/projo_20020408_saca8.393c59d9.html says the US Mint has cut back on production because people just aren't interested. Speaking for myself and a few friends and relations, we'd be perfectly happy to use them, if they were available. I think you're in the minority. And stores don't want to have to as paper or brass every time they make change, they'll want to give customers one or the other. C-punks relevance: People aren't as uninterested in new currencies as our appointed masters think. e-money might catch on if it were convenient and not blatantly illegal. That may be true, but it certainly illustrated here. Our appointed masters at the mint are the ones who WANT us to use the new currency because it saves them money. It's the stores and the people that don't use or want them. Next time you get singles in change, you might want to ask if you can have dollar coins instead, just to see what reaction you get. You might want to ask if anyone else has ever asked that also. George -- Steve FurlongComputer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
Re: all about transferable off-line ecash (Re: Brands off-line tech)
On 9 Apr 2002 at 16:54, Ken Brown wrote: But paper money is such a 20th-century thing! These days we're slowly drifting back to higher value metal coins (2 pounds out for a few years now, 5 pounds coming soon I think). Much more fun. Feels like real treasure! Less of the floppy stuff, we want our ecash to look like real cash. Ken Yeah, but is that because people want it, or because the treasury wants it? They've been trying to foist dollar coins on US for years because they're cheaper (last forever and cost about a dime to make vs. last about a year and cost maybe 3 cents to make) but people hate them and don't use them. George
Re: New breed spam filter slashes junk email
On 9 Apr 2002 at 10:07, Steve Schear wrote: New breed spam filter slashes junk email 10:31 09 April 02 NewScientist.com news service A new breed of spam-filtering technology that combines peer-to-peer communications with machine learning could intercept nearly all unwanted email, according to its creators. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns2141 Sounds like it should work quite well at eliminating spam targeted directly at the user. Probably not much risk of an actual personal message looking enough like s spam message to get flagged. But for distribution lists I think there's substantial risk. Potentially would-be censors could block posts as alleged spam. Also, there's a major security concern. The article didn't say whether users would have to keep a complete copy of the spam database on their local machines or whether they'd have to upload each mail message to the servers with the database, but I think they'd have to do one or the other, and each has obvious drawbacks. (It should be safe to just upload a hash of each message received and compare that to the database, but even that has some risks, and besdies, I got the impression they wanted to do a more thorough comparison. Checking hashes could easily be defeated by appending a separate random string to each copy of the message anyway). All in all, I vastly prefer hashcash. George
re: Reputable E-Gold Funded Debit Cards?
On 2 Apr 2002 at 10:35, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've been monitoring the e-gold discussion list for some time and this guy appears to be legit (i.e., a lack of negative comments). I have not purchased from him, but am considering obtaining one of these. Would be most interested in your experience should you decide to go ahead. https://www.goldnow.st/debit_card_order.asp I didn't know where .st referrs to, so I looked it up. Apparently it's Sao Tome and Principe, so I still don't know. Mr Geographically impaired.
Re: gnutella's problems (Re: network topology)
On 28 Mar 2002 at 2:18, Adam Back wrote: And gnutella is not able to resume a transfer that dies part way through which is very bad for download reliability. FastTrack/Kazza (but no longer Morpheus since the Kazza / Morpheus fall-out) on the other hand can resume, and in fact do multiple simultaneous downloads from multiple nodes having the same content so that it gets the content both much faster and much more reliably. Actually, the gnucleus client will do both of these, so presumably the gnutella morpheus does also since it's based on gnucleus. Also helps cope with different link speeds as a group of slow nodes or asymmetric bandwidth nodes (like cable with fast down but limited up) can satisfy the download of cable and other broadband users. There's a nice write-up about the gnutella's problem's on openp2p.com [1]. Contrary to what article [2] claims FastTrack/Kazza really does blow Gnutella away, the supernode concept with high performance nodes elected to be search hubs makes all the difference. Gnutella last I tried it was barely functional for downloads, ~95% of downloads failed, and searches were much slower. Adam I think the idea (used in alpine) of using UDP for search queries and only establishing a persistent connection when you actually want to transfer a file is a good one. George [1] Gnutella: Alive, Well and Changing Fast, by Kelly Truelove http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/01/25/truelove0101.html [2] Gnutella Blown Away? Not Exactly, by Serguei Osokine http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/07/11/numbers.html
