Re: [eff-austin] Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?

[ken]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Nice!  I've been thinking I should move there for a while.  I also
heard that by 2006 London and all the major cities will have seemless
wifi coverage.  The reason Europe is on the ball with this is the EU
just passed five laws to deregulate emerging telecom companies so they
can compete with the monopolists.  
A bit of wishful thinking here I think.

[...]

But it don't solve the spam problem :-(


That's okay- the antispammers are a bigger problem, and this needs to
be attacked first.  Europe is already a step ahead of the U.S. on
that. 
This is really not true at all. In fact it is far more likely (or 
maybe less unlikely)  that European countries would pass draconian 
anti-spam laws than it is in the US because they don't on the 
whole have the same attitude to free speech.

> I've got spamassassin to control spam.

And so, maybe, do AOL.

The real problem with your whole argument of the last week or so 
is that your mail is not passing across Mallory's back yard, or 
through pipes beneath his house - you are  expecting him to carry 
it across and deliver it for you. And if he doesn't want to then 
he doesn't want to.

Solution?

Choose one of:

- get your friends to use a different ISP

- build your own network

- get your government to take over AOL on your behalf and run it 
as a public utility

- Get With The Program (TM) and fix your mail so it conforms with 
whatever arbitrary rules AOL have set up. After all SOME people 
manage to mail AOL customers. In their eyes you must be doing 
something wrong.  How dare you stand against the Corporate Might 
(TM) of what Made America Great(TM)!

- use letter post

Each of the above has a downside.

Re: "domestic terrorism", fat lazy amerikans & ducks

[ken]

I'm keeping this one. It's tendng to the condition of poetry.

John Young wrote:

[...]

Commies, now there's a diversion fabricated in the propaganda 
mills by ideological word-toolers of capitalists and socialists, 
heeding the marketplace rule 1: concoct a worse evil to send 
the pack howling at phantasms while draining their savings, cutting
back their jobs, sending their sons off to slaughter pens, or, to put 
it more vulgarly, the free hand of the market lifting wallets and
crushnig lives while the media-mesmerized yokels stare bug-eyed 
shitless at angels and devils paraded from pulpits to chickenhawk
feeding lots.
[...]

Re: JAP back doored

[ken]

This piece of political PR was sent to a mailing list intended for 
internal reporting of computer problems at a university, so was 
obviously automatically grabbed. Maybe someone sold them a list of 
ac.uk addresses.

Dr Sean Gabb wrote:
> 2nd September 2003
>
> Dear Educator,
>
> We are writing to ask whether you would like to receive
> the future publications of the Libertarian Alliance by email.
>
> The Libertarian Alliance is the UK's premier radical
> libertarian group.
[...snip...]

> Yours sincerely,
> Dr. Chris R. Tame
> Director  The Libertarian Alliance
I'd have thought Gabb & Tame (if it is them & not some spoof) were 
sussed enough to realise that spamming just makes you look like a 
prat.

Ken Brown

Look who's spamming now. [was falsely Re: JAP back doored]

[ken]

Whoops - apologies for stupid posting here caused by /me/ being a 
prat with my mail program.

Though the message body it isn't entirely off-topic here - the 
subject line is quite unrelated to it. Mea culpa.

Ken

ken wrote:
This piece of political PR was sent to a mailing list intended for 
internal reporting of computer problems at a university, so was 
obviously automatically grabbed. Maybe someone sold them a list of ac.uk 
addresses.

Dr Sean Gabb wrote:
 > 2nd September 2003
 >
 > Dear Educator,
 >
 > We are writing to ask whether you would like to receive
 > the future publications of the Libertarian Alliance by email.
 >
 > The Libertarian Alliance is the UK's premier radical
 > libertarian group.
[...snip...]

 > Yours sincerely,
 > Dr. Chris R. Tame
 > Director  The Libertarian Alliance
I'd have thought Gabb & Tame (if it is them & not some spoof) were 
sussed enough to realise that spamming just makes you look like a prat.

Ken Brown

Re: Digital cash and campaign finance reform

[ken]

Tim May wrote:

In any case, campaign finance reform is essentially uninteresting and 
statist.
Yes Tim, but as we happen to live in places where states make laws 
and employ men with guns to hurt us if we disobey those laws then 
we do have an interest (in the other sense) in who gets to run the 
organs of the state.

If you live next to the zoo you may be uninterested in the design 
of the lion's cage but you sure as hell aren't disinterested in it.

Re: Duck Freedom Fighter (Terrorists), Euler SUV Graffiti

[ken]

Major Variola (ret.) wrote:


This is *not* a spoof.
Why should we think it a spoof? Maybe the USA is just catchiung 
up. In my home town, Brighton in Enlgand, people calling 
themselves the ALF used to do this sort of thing pretty regularly 
in the late 70s and in the 80s.  Once they let some cattle free in 
the street from a local abattoir.

Re: Encrypted search?

[ken]

Tyler Durden wrote:

Let's say I push out a list I'd like to keep secret to some client 
machine. The user of that machine must enter some ID or other piece of 
information. I want the client machine to perform a search of that ID vs 
the contents of a list (again, resident locally on that machine), but I 
don't want the user to be able to see the other entries of that list.
[...]

When the search is performed, the "stupid" thing to do (I 
think...someone correct me) is to take the user's ID, encrypt it, and 
then determine if matches an encypted member of the list (and I don't 
see encrypted each entry individually as a desirable thing). I am 
assuming that this allows a savvy user to reverse-engineer the encryption.
This is, roughly, how traditional Unix password security works. 
Reverse-engineering the encryption may or may not be possible, and 
 ought not to matter if you have used a strong enough method and 
long enough keys. And anyway, if this is running on the client 
machine then they already have a program that can do the work. 
What is possible is brute-forcing by encrypting the whole 
dictionary and trying every word one by one.

If your algorithm is strong enough, your key long enough, and 
above all if the space from which the plaintext is taken is large 
enough, than this sort of approach can be made sort of safe enough 
for most applications. But why bother?

Re: Chaumian blinding & public voting?

[ken]

Major Variola (ret) wrote:

Currently voting is trusted because political adversaries supervise the
process.
Previously the mechanics were, well, mechanical, ie, open for
inspection.
That really is worth saying more often.

If we here can't agree on how to make machine voting  both robust 
and private, then  EVEN IF A PERFECT SYSTEM COULD BE DESIGNED it 
is extremely unlikely that a large number of people could be 
persuaded that it /was/ perfect.

So if public confidence in the mechanisms of voting is considered 
desirable, no electronic or digital system is viable.

> You can run an algorithm on any subset of codes, including just
> your own,
[...]
you already lost 94% of the electorate.  They are saying "huh?" 
and going back to whatever they were doing before the election 
rudely interrupted them.

Current electoral systems work - where they do - because the 
officials keep their hands above the table, and because members of 
opposing  political parties co-operate in snooping on each other, 
because it is in their interest to do so.

This adversarial system not only works (sort of, most of the time, 
in jurisdictions where the local law enforcement isn't entirely in 
the hands of one sector of society) but it can be made to appear 
to work (well enough to satisfy that minority of voters who seem 
to care)

And leaving aside the ritual invokation of gas ovens and 747s, 
this nasty socialist agrees with the burden of Tim's rant - if 
people don't want to vote what business is it of government to 
force them to vote?

If someone doesn't want to vote, that's their choice, and a tiny 
increment to the tiny portion of influence possessed by those of 
us who do vote.  So no skin of our noses. If all of you zombies 
give up voting than the rest of us get to choose the government, 
for what its worth.

As for lotteries - you want to encourage stupid people to vote?

Public holidays for voting are as bad - they are likely to lead 
fewer people to vote of course - just as in every other public 
holiday those who get off work will head for the hills or the 
beaches or the bars or the sports stadiums (and why not if they 
want to?) and those who have to work anyway will be even busier 
than normal.

It is enough if registration is simple and open, if there are 
sanctions against employers/landlords/unions/political 
parties/thugs in general  preventing people voting,  and if there 
is a postal vote scheme for people who really can't make it on the 
day. Most countries don't even have all that yet (big chunks of 
the USA didn't not that long ago), why complicate things 
unnecessarily?

Ken Brown
(resident evil lefty)

Re: e voting (receipts, votebuying, brinworld)

[ken]

Thomas Shaddack wrote:

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Neil Johnson wrote:


""Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-- Ben Franklin
And if they are all armed ? They all starve.


Lambs can eat grass, which is usually unarmed.
It is not. Grass is stuffed full of all sorts of complicated 
chemicals that can cause confusion to creatures that chomp it. Not 
to mention nassty little silica crystals.

Lambs can eat grass because they are toughened and honed 
grass-killers, fitted by millions of years of evolution to survive 
everything the grass can throw at them.  And even then they only 
cope with some kinds of grass. When a cat eats grass it gets sick.

It doesn't take much intelligence to sneak up on a leaf, but it 
takes one hell of a digestive system to eat it.

Us mammals are downstream of a 200-million-year evolutionary race 
between ourselves and green plants - they evolve a new poison, we 
evolve to tolerate it. Then we put it in hot drinks. Why else do 
so many plant compounds have such powerful drug effects on animals?

At the time of writing there is no winner in sight.

It isn't impossible to imagine one side winning in the end though. 
The plants really did beat the bacteria way back in the Palaeozoic 
- wood is about the only living tissue that bacteria can't eat. 
Which is why there is so much coal around.  Fungi got the better 
of them later.

Democracy tries to get the majority of participants through to the 
next round of the game. Natural selection kills nearly everybody, 
nearly all the time. Which is why it is so effective. But, given 
the choice, I'll take democracy.

Trust me, I'm a botanist.

Re: Speaking of Reason

[ken]

Declan McCullagh wrote:

I don't know what "entryist" means. It might be helpful to define
your terms.
Really?

That's odd.

Taking you at your word it means someone who joins (i.e. enters) 
a political party or another organisation in order to take it over 
and change it to their own point of view.

Re: Is Matel Stalinist?

[ken]

Tim May quoted Tyler Durden who wrote:

Well, I wouldn't apply the word "oppressive" across the board to the 
cultures of big companies, but the fact is that modern American 
coporate culture more often than not imitates a top-down, 'statist' 
culture that is so universal we rarely recognize it.
Well, yes. Most big corporations are in effect constitutional 
monarchies. Decisions are made by bureaucrats  with some oversight 
or direction provided by the "king" (CEO in some places, 
significant shareholders in others). When it all goes totally 
pear-shaped owners (or more likely, the banks) step in.

[...]

The difference with government is that we do not have "polycentric" 
governments. We have a single entity, a single "corporation," which 
brooks no competition, which brooks little or no "shareholder dissent."
Yes, but in practice a lot of big companies are just like that. 
Whatever the paper ownership decisions tend to be made by a few 
large corporate owners, often banks, insurance companies, pension 
funds and the like; themselves run by officers and managers who 
share interests with the managers who run the company they own. 
The situation is in some ways analogous to "it doesn't matter who 
you vote for: the government always gets in".   In most large 
corporations the chain of responsibility back to individual owners 
is so long and so flexible that there is little real control.

Small business is different of course. You make money or you go 
broke.  Very direct feedback.

Many here miss this point and focus on the superficial aspect that 
corporations typically have a hierarchy and that this hierarchy 
supposedly makes them like governments. Yes, in this respect. But the 
tens of thousands of corporations, the ability to form new partnerships, 
new companies, new corporations, and for some of these entities to 
become as large as past corporate giants, is what makes all the difference.
Emotional reactions & gut feelings about this point are one of the 
things that make people happier with one political camp or another.

The state-socialism that you Americans call "liberal"  tends to be 
supported by people who feel that their governments are more 
responsive to their needs or wants than corporations are. 
Conservatives US-style libertarians are likely to feel happier 
with corporations than government.  The "anti-globalisation" crows 
and European-style left anarchists & old-style non-Marxist 
socialists dislike both equally.

If I was cynical, or a Marxist, I'd say that it has a lot to do 
with having money. People whose wealth makes up a larger share of 
the whole than their vote does are more likely to feel happy about 
corporations than  they are about representative government.

OK, it's before noon and I've only had one cup of tea, so I'm cynical.

[...]

Corporations have sales tracking software out the wazoo. If it sells, 
they buy more and sell them. Sounds like they're doing precisely what 
their owners want them to do.
Yes, but, it might be that a corporation makes more money for its 
owners by centralising and systematising and reducing the local 
autonomy of business units. It's a lot easier to manage a thousand 
identical stores than a hundred unique ones. So from "Tyler 
Durden's"'s POV there might be more responsiveness from an 
independent  store than a chain.

Though like you said, that doesn't seem to apply to books.  Might 
to food though.

Re: Speaking of Reason

[ken]

R. A. Hettinga wrote:

At 4:57 PM -0800 12/9/03, Eric Murray wrote:

I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny.
On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe.
When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted.  Unfortunately
these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim
near the keyboard very often.

Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.
Ok, bye!

Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ killfile)


To quote a famous flying squirrel, that trick never works. Tried it myself
a few times over the years, and one usually misses too much of what this
list is for, as you noted yourself, above.
Truth, maybe unfortunate truth.

Of the list mails I've bothered to keep locally, Tim's are a 
larger proportion than anyone else's.


Unfortunately, if you want to read Tim, you have to read his evil twin
Skippy, too.
Living in *his* killfile, on the other hand, and if he actually uses it,
can be useful. Try it, you'll like it.

Re: Speaking of Reason

[ken]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

[...]

Sterling makes a comment betraying what Ludwig Von Mises called the 
anti-capitalist mentality when he quipped to Godwin: "Sure, we hate Exxon because 
they're huge and they're everywhere."
He was pointing it out, not preaching it. I think over in Austin 
they do self-deprecrating humour, just like us English do.

Sterling is a capitalist in the same way that Brin is a libertarian. I think 
what it is, both are uncomfortable with really labeling what their true 
ideology is and therefore feel some need to candy coat their statism.
I think - but I don't know - that Bruce is a lefty, but not a statist.

Anyway the real relevance of the viridian list  to the cypherpunks 
list is that it is about technical fixes to apparently political 
problems. It's saying something like:

"so you think cars (or fridges, or office buildings, or polyester 
pants) are destroying the world? Don't vote to ban them - all that 
will happen then is that only the rich (or the government, opr the 
military) get to own them. Instead design and build and sell 
better cars, kinder gentler fridges,  healthier buildings, cleaner 
pants, whatever. And these days, cooler, stylish, and more fun, is 
part of what "better" means".

(my paraphrasody of what I see Bruce's point as)

Re: Speaking of Reason

[ken]

R. A. Hettinga wrote:

At 2:58 PM + 12/12/03, ken wrote:

Bruce is a lefty, but not a statist


rghhht...

That's like saying that he's a sow, but not a boar...


grunt grunt

Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention?

[ken]

Nomen Nescio wrote:

Let's face it: not even the Nazi war criminals were treated in the way Saddam has been treated.


Eh?

And have you heard about the Soviet Union?

Re: Engineers in U.S. vs. India

[ken]

Steve Mynott wrote:

Jim Dixon wrote:

The term 'engineer' is far from precise; in the UK most people who work
with tools can be called engineers but people who write software 
generally
are NOT called engineers. There are further complications: for 
example, in


I have had jobs as a "software engineer" in the UK and since the dot com 
bubble this hasn't been an uncommon job title.

The UK tends to follow US fashions very closely importing in titles like 
CEO and CTO and the term "software engineer" is no different.
Yes, but...

the word "engineer" as used here by most people measns someone who 
fixes machines. If I go to somebody's ofice and they say that I'm 
"the engineer" pride makes me say no. I'm not an engineer, I'm a 
programmer. Different think entirely

If I had to describe what I do I'd call myself a "systems 
programmer", even though that isn't  exactly what my job title is.

I'd avoid the word "engineer" because to most people it implies 
the bloke of the street who knows how to put a replacement PC card 
in, but to a few it implies some professional status and formal 
discipline, neither of which I have had anythign to do with.

Re: Sources and Sinks

[ken]

James A. Donald wrote:
--
On 3 Jan 2004 at 8:09, Michael Kalus wrote:
Yes, the way this usually works is that the government builds
the road, then sells it to a private company for some money
and then the upkeep is handled by the company.
It is rather seldom that someone builds a road for a business
venture.


Used to happen all the time, before governments became so
intrusive. 
Not that often.  The usual way of making & fixing roads before the 
 late 19th century was - and had been for centuries - collective. 
At best some charity or other got people together to help out. At 
worst the local lord of the manor or big landowner forced a 
sufficiently large number of peasants to do the job.

In lots of places landowners had the duty to maintain roads across 
their property, and the government would force them to do it. 
There are lots - many thousands I think - of legal records in 
England way back to the middle ages

A bit different in the western parts of USA if only because so 
many roads there are new, but even then the vast majority either 
were started by government (or some other non-commercial 
organisation) or else taken over by government after built.

Canals and railways were mostly built by private business - and 
mostly came into public ownership when they went broke, often 
bailing out the failed investors. In both Europe and North America.

Re: Singers jailed for lyrics

[ken]

Trei, Peter wrote:
Bill Stewart wrote:
Michael Kalus wrote:
Certain symbols (e.g. Swastika) are forbidden as well.
As Tim pointed out, the Swastika symbol had long use before the
Nazis picked it up.
[...]

Vaguely related 

I used to live in upper Manhattan. One of the subway stops I
used was the 190th on the IND ("A" train). This burrows deep
under Washington Heights, and has two entrances - a long 
tunnel which slopes *down* from the station to an exit near
Broadway, and an elevator up to Fort Washington Avenue. This
section of the line opened in 1932.

The floor of the vestibule of the upper elevator lobby is
laid with geometric patterns in red, white, and black terra
cotta tiles, and when I moved there in the late 70's I was 
amused to note that the pattern included 4 swastikas, in
black tiles against a white background, about 4 inches across.

Sometime in the late 80's or early 90's, the swastikas where
chisled out, and the square areas where they had been crudely
filled with concrete. 

Ft. Washington Ave by that time had long been an area heavily
populated by immigrant Russian Jews. I often wondered 
exactly what chain of events led to this vandalism.
At least one London Underground station has swastika patterns in 
its tiles, and apparently did through the War.

India House in London, the offices of the Indian High Commission 
(Commonwealth-speak for "embassy"), has swastikas in the 
scupltures on the outside walls, and also in murals inside.   They 
would have been there right through WW2, the building is from the 
1920s and early 30s. I have no idea if anyone covered them up.

http://www.hcilondon.net/aboutus/history-indiahouse.html

Its in the Aldwych, right in the middle of London, passed by 
millions of people every year.  (Including me on my way to work). 
I've never heard of anyone complaining.

Re: spoofing Tomboy Ridge

[ken]

Major Variola (ret) wrote:
At 12:21 PM 1/12/04 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

There was a mildly publicized incident in another part of Brooklyn
recently where someone was ticketed after their child's balloon popped
in public.


I recently asked a NYC friend if he had popped off firecrackers
in NY Square recently.  He hadn't, spoilsport.
Over here in Eurotrash statist London people set off fireworks all 
over the place, for all sorts of excuses. I probably hear or see 
some sort of firework party about once a week, sometimes just in 
someone's back garden.  And real ones too, rockets & mortars, not 
namby-pamby "firecrackers". Also  sometimes a big public affair - 
it seems to be the current fashion to use lots of fireworks when a 
construction project is finished.

In the weeks around our big bonfire celebrations in November kids 
throw them in the streets for a laugh.  Though they are getting 
more available at other times of the year now. The other week I 
noticed two firework shops within a few yards of each other in 
leafy north London suburb of Barnet.

Some nanny-staters (usually  conservatives who fear teenagers and 
think that all proles should be locked in their hutches at night 
watching TV and eatng junk food) write to the newspapers and 
demand that fireworks should be banned.

The government has pathetically caved in to the extent that they 
intend to introduce local bans on setting off fireworks after 
11pm. I don't think that public opinion would hold with the kind 
of restrictions on fireworks that many US states seem to have.

Re: Lunar Colony

[ken]

John Washburn wrote:

I would think the problem with the camp X-Ray approach is the same as
happened historically in Botany Bay or fictionally in the Moon is a
Harsh Mistress.
When (not if) the ongoing support of the penal colony collapses what
happens?  

The children are in legal limbo; neither convict nor citizen.  (No one
is going to pay the expense to ship them home).  The colonists are cut
off from the home world/empire.  They had little love for the home
world/empire in the first place.  Cut adrift and left to their own
devices why wouldn't the colonists/prisoners declare independence and
have an interplanetary war of secession?
Nothing like that happened in Botany Bay. Not even in Mel Gibson 
movies.  The transported prisoners were (almost all) transported 
for a term of years, often 7, and when it was over they were given 
return passage, or allowed to stay on in Australia. Most stayed - 
the worst thing about transportation was the passage, which killed 
more than the sentence did.

Any children they had were as much citizens (or rather free 
subjects of the crown) as anybody else.

While in Australia prisoners were mostly hired out to colonists 
(AKA "squatters"). There were strict rules about their treatment 
that were sometimes even enforced. The minimum standard for food 
and clothing in the rules were not only (much)  better than 
prisoners would have had in England or Ireland, but in fact better 
than many poor labourers could have found for themselves back 
home.  They often prospered and their children and grandchildren 
prospered mightily. Between about 1870 and the Great War Australia 
was probably the most prosperous country in the world, and working 
men's wages higher than anywhere else, including the USA.

Historically the transported prisoners and their immediate 
descendants were mostly supporters of Britain & the Empire. And of 
course there never was  a war of secession. In fact the 
Australians recently voted to keep the monarchy - though mainly 
due to lack of a convincing plan for what to replace it with.

Re: Anonymity of prepaid phone chip-cards

[ken]

Thomas Shaddack wrote:

[...]

Suggested countermeasure: When true anonymity is requested, use the card
ONLY ONCE, then destroy it. Makes the calls rather expensive, but less
risky. Make sure you can't be traced back by other means, ranging from
surveillance cameras in the vicinity of the phone booths to the location
data from cellphones (because, as it's well-known but often overlooked,
the cellphone networks know the location of every active phone).
In local pubs round where I live it is not at all uncommon to find 
people buying & selling SIM cards, swapping them, or just handing 
roudn to friends & family members.

If these persons are involved in activities which would be 
disapproved of by the law, I imagine that they would be very 
unlikley to be anything that could be called terrorism. More 
likely doing casual work without paying tax,  using drugs 
deprecated by governments, trading in unauthorised DVDs, perhaps 
employing illegal immigrants. (Allegedly that is  - as far as I am 
aware the apparently oriental gentleman who walks round pubs and 
clubs late at night offering DVDs and CDs for a pound is in full 
complience with all local copyright laws)

There was a notorious murder locally (Damilola Taylor) which the 
police took a logn time to charge anywone for. When they finally 
got round to it, some of the evidence turned on mobile phone 
records. One piece could not be used, because the court was 
satisfied that the family and friends of the accused persons 
swapped and shared phones so frequently that there was no way to 
connect the use of a phone with an individual.

Re: Reverse Scamming 419ers

[ken]

Eric Cordian wrote:
But Nigeria is a very poor country, with high unemployment, where people are 
forced by economic circumstances to do almost anything to try and feed their 
families. 
The 419ers aren't the starving poor - they know exactly what they 
are doing and have got the resources to do it.   And they have no 
scruples about ripping off fellow Africans either. Getting rid of 
them might be doing the majority of Nigerians a favour.

It seems to me the relationship between affluent Americans and poor 
Nigerians is an example of a dominant class/subordinate class structure, and 
in such a structure, the subordinate class has rights, and the dominant 
class has responsibilities.
Nigeria's a big country. Nearly everyone there is poor. But there 
are still a great many rich. And not many of them got rich honestly.

Re: My name is Jyyneh Do'ughh

[ken]

Padraig MacIain wrote:
On Sat, Jun 26, 2004 at 10:13:00PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
How do you spell John Smith in Gaelic?
In G`idhlig (Scottish Gaelic) it'd be at least starting as 'Iain' (which is the 
Gaelized John).
The  modern Scottish  equivalent to John Smith would be Iain Gow. 
 (There was a British politican with that name.) An older or more 
Irish form might be something like Eoin MacGowan.

Re: "Terror in the Skies, Again?"

[ken]

Tyler Durden wrote:
Sounds to me like Al-Qaeda is just getting the most mileage they can out 
of their little PR Event a couple of years ago. They don't even need to 
blow up anything to get the most bang for their buck.

Hell, in this story the biggest threat was the incompetence of the airline.
Assuming its true (*) the one security breach is the action of the 
 cabin crew member who tried to reassure this woman by going on 
about air marshalls.   That security breach should certainly get 
them sacked, and probably interrogated by the men in cheap suits.

Or does she assume that apparently nervous middle-aged 
middle-class white women can't be bombers?


(*)  (which it might be, US print journalistic standards are 
higher than our British ones - if I read this in a UK paper like 
the Dally Mail or the Sun I'd assume it was some rambling racist 
fantasy put ion as political propaganda - on the other hand our 
broadcast journalism is mostly better than yours, so there)

Re: Texas oil refineries, a White Van, and Al Qaeda

[ken]

An Metet wrote:
The person in question was just somebody with a weakness for
industrial architecture.
*I've* taken pictures of oil-company installations in Houston and 
Galveston and points between. Who do I turn myself in to?

I also walk or cycle all over London & take photos of just about 
everything from bridges to canals to private houses (aren't 
digital cameras wonderful?). No-one's bothered me ever. Though 
sometimes I've felt I was being a bit stupid wandering alone at 
night through large public housing projects openly carrying 800 
quids worth of video camera.

The "no cameras" signs were very popular in east block countries. It
was forbidden to take pictures of bridges, government buildings,
airports, railway stations, industrial installations, water dams etc.
Back in the 1970s I was on a camping holiday in what was then 
Yugoslavia with a friend. We arrived in Rijeka in Croatia by bus, 
started walking off to see if we could find a camp sight, and by 
the time we realised we were walking out of town the wrong way it 
was too late & too dark to do anything about it. So we slept on a 
small mound just off the road we were on.

Next morning we saw that we were on what was basically a rubbish 
dump, overlooking the naval harbour, with a great view of all 
sorts of military activities. No-one seemed to be taking any 
notice of us though.

[...]
In a depressingly predictable manner US of A is sliding into the same
mode of operation. And, depressingly, it works. Expect more
manufactured everyday threats, more citizen-informants, the works.
Contracting or subcontracting airborne demolition artists is not
practical on ongoing basis ... we need a terrorist threat everywhere, every day.
In 1990 I and some colleagues were visiting a Texaco office in 
Houston for a work-related meeting. In the carpark we began to 
take some pictures of each other with the office building as 
background. The carpark attendant came up and demanded we stop 
insisting that there no photographs could be taken of the building.

Not even an industrial location, just a high-rise office building 
in a Houston suburb (Bellaire), in full & close view of the 
street, some other commercial buildings,  and dozens, if not 
hundreds, of private homes, and distantly visible to thousands - 
possibly hundreds of thousands - of people every day.

Crazy authoritarianism. Rules for the sake of rules. They exist to 
show who is boss. Like school uniforms or corporate dress codes - 
the rule is made not to enforce any desirable behaviour but to 
show who is where in the the hierarchy, who is able to make rules 
and who has to obey them.

Re: "Forest Fire" responsible for a 2.5mi *mushroom cloud*?

[ken]

J.A. Terranson wrote:
On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
The forest fire claim sounds more plausible in this
regard. An existing cloud could be used for masking, though.

Wait a minute: since when does a forest fire create explosions?  Or have
enough ground force to push up a mushroom cloud?
[...]
That of course brings us full circle: how many fuels can produce a blast
which results in a 2+ mile mushroom?  That's a *lot* of explosive force.
Doesn't have to work like that. The mushroom cloud is not "pushed 
up" by blast, it's carried up by hot air rising, which is replaced 
by cooler air rushing in below.

There was a visible mushroom cloud at Hamburg in 1943 - I'm not 
sure but I suspect that that may have been the event that put the 
phrase into the language.

FWIW the BBC is now saying that the NKs are claiming it was a 
civil engineering explosion connected with a hydro project.

As with other list members I assume that if the explosion was 
nuclear someone would have detected EM from it immediately & 
radioactive particles soon after.

And I also assume, perhaps with less justification, that at least 
some of those someones would have made the knowledge public - it 
must include at least military early warning organisation of 
China, Russia & the US, and very possibly Japan, SK, UK & maybe 
other countries as well, and also probably a number of space 
agencies and academic researchers.  Would they all conspire to 
suppress knowledge of NK nuclear explosion?

And if there was such a test, how long before China stomped all 
over them. Last thing they want is a looney dictator with nukes on 
their borders (If only to pre-empt Russia, US, or Japan 
intervening). Even if both the Chinese state capitalists and the 
North Korean absolute divine monarchy still use the locally 
redundant word "Communist" when describing themselves to us 
Western barbarians.

Sometimes my friend's enemy isn't my enemy's friend.

Re: Geopolitical Darwin Awards

[ken]

Tyler Durden wrote:
Who, the Iranians? Which ones are fanatics?
I'll grant there are some fanatics left in Iran, but Iran seems 
increasingly dominated by fairly sleezy clergy/judges. Like any 
government, theirs is deteriorating into a mere racket. And if you ask 
me, fanaticism never lasts very long anywhere, only for about a 
generation during turbulent times. Iran in particular is a special 
case...seems to me their cultural momentum will always outweigh any 
temporary fanaticism. A country that has a small but thriving 
prostitution industry can't be all that fanatical.
Prostitution industry?
Iran has rebooted its swimming-pool maintenance industry.
Its just this place, you know.
Apparently the best thing about is the lack of American tourists - 
just like Cuba ;-)

Re: "Ask yourselves why we didn't attack Sweden"

[ken]

R.A. Hettinga wrote:
At 9:09 PM -0700 10/30/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
I'm surprised
the "Ask yourselves why we didn't attack Sweden" comment
isn't discussed more


HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE: The National Conservative Weekly Since 1944
[Heap of transparent murderous lies snipped]
O dear, I seem to have snipped all of it.
There was no content there at all.

Re: Geodesic neoconservative empire

[ken]

Bill Stewart wrote:

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, James A. Donald wrote:
> This presupposes the US intends to rule Afghanistan and Iraq,
> which is manifestly false.

Since this chain started by ragging on RAH about it being a
_geodesic_ neo-{Khan, con-men} empire, you're both correct -
there isn't a conflict between ruling them by proxy
and not ruling them directly
Most all empires that lasted more than a few decades used indirect 
rule (famous big exception China - though not always and they had 
to endure generations of collapse between each advance)

Rome & Britain just best known.
Read up on Lord Lugard.

Re: Declaration of Expulsion: A Modest Proposal

[ken]

Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 23:30 -0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote:

Declaration of Expulsion: A Modest Proposal
It's Time to Reconfigure the United States

Chuckle-worthy, if not outright funny.  Interestingly, I could see a
liberal making exactly the same case, but without the ad hominem
attacks.
You mean like http://www.fuckthesouth.com/ ?
Funnier, more factual, and a damn sight more ad hominem.

Re: This Memorable Day

[ken]

James A. Donald wrote:
 So far the Pentagon has
shattered the enemy while suffering casualties of about a thousand,
which is roughly the same number of casualties as the British empire
suffered doing regime change on the Zulu empire - an empire of a
quarter of a million semi naked savages mostly armed with spears.
Be fair. They had a trained and disciplined army. Most of whom 
would obey orders to the death. That's worth a hell of a lot in 
battle.

Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks

[ken]

China stagnated because no thought other than
official thought occurred. 
And when was this stagnation?
And what were the reasons China did not "stagnate" for the 
previous thousand years?

Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks

[ken]

James A. Donald wrote:
--
ken wrote:
And when was this stagnation?

R.A. Hettinga wrote:
Two words: Ming Navy

For those who need more words, the Qing Dynasty forbade 
ownership or building of ocean going vessels, on pain of death 
- the early equivalent of the iron curtain. 
Which was a couple of millenia *after* the distinctive Confucian 
philosophy became the official code of most  Chinese governments.
So that can't be the reason for Chinese stagnation.  QED.

(Which as TD pointed out better than I could have was short-lived 
and nowhere near as general as we used to paint it)

And it was the later Ming period - not Qing

Re: A Tale of Two Maps

[ken]

R.A. Hettinga posted:

> Tech Central Station  
> A Tale of Two Maps
> By Patrick Cox


Here is a map showing U.S. population density in 1990:

Comparisons of these two maps make startlingly obvious the extent to which
population density predicts voter behavior.
Maybe the causality runs the other way. People who are more 
"left-wing" (whatever that exaclty might mean) are more likely to 
enjoy living in cities.

Over here in Britain that certainly seems to have happened. 
There's a churn in city populations as young adults move in to 
study or get jobs, then move out to suburbs or small towns later.

Some stay, and they tend to be the ones who are less politically 
conservative.

Sometimes I think that political conservatives just don't *like* 
people as much.   I mean that quite literally - my most right-wing 
friends  are less greagarious than my left-wing friends. They keep 
themselves to themselves more.  They stay in doors more and when 
they are out they are more likely to stick to their own cars. 
They don't like travelling in public transport, or going to noisy 
pubs. They seem to actively dislike social situations where they 
rub up against large numbers of strangers.

And the Anarchists have the best parties. By which I mean 
Euro-style left-wing Sovcialist Anarchists of course, not grumpy 
American survivalist Libertarians.  "Get off my land!" is a 
characteristic right-wing stereotype. "Whose round is it anyway?" 
is not.  Like the old song says "As soon as this pub closes, the 
Revolution starts!"

The standard, rather unexamined, assumption is that rural America has more
traditional cultural values that are associated with the Republican Party.
These include religious, family and pro-military values. Urban population
centers and surrounding environs, on the other hand, are associated with
more progressive values associated with Democratic Party. These values are
assumed to be more secular, progressive and anti-military.
In Britain, things may be different in your country, inner-city 
life is in many ways more old-fashioned than country life or 
suburban life.

Us city dwellers are more likely to walk to work or school, less 
likley to drive. We're more likely to use public transport. When 
we buy things we go to small corner shops and the shop-keepers 
might even know us. They might not know our names,  or even speak 
our language, but they probably recognise our faces.

For some time now (in England, things may be different elsewhere) 
 city-dwellers and inner-suburbanites have been more likely to go 
to church than people in the country or outer suburbs. London is 
the only part of Britain where churchgoing has gone up in the last 
ten years  (though its everywhere lower than anywhere in the USA - 
consistently less than ten percent)

Now teh last census tells us that one-parent families are rarer in 
London than in the country or in smaller towns. (See last week's 
Economist magazine 
http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3405966 
- full text available only to subscribers)

Also the proportion of people employed by government is smaller in 
London than the national average, and the proportion of 
self-employed or small businesses is greater.

[...]
Another fascinating and easily verifiable correlation may be tied only
indirectly to the characteristics of population density. The red states,
that voted for Bush in both of the last elections, it seems, are net
receivers of federal tax revenues.
Another thing US has in common with UK - large cities are net 
contributors to tax reevenues.

Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[ken]

The current war against western civilization started in the 1920's, when
Qutb started writing his Moslem triumphalist blather in reaction to the
complete collapse of the Turkish Caliphate in the wake of World War I.
Eh?
OK, I wouldn't have expected you to have heard of Uthman dan Fodio 
and the Fulani Jihad, but you really ought to have some distant 
rumour of Muhammad Ahmad the so-called Mahdi, a generation or two 
earlier than the fall of the Turkish Empire. ()If only because it 
would be rather hard to make any sense of whats going on in North 
Africa without)

It'll be finished when the residents of its modern equivalent has property
rights and personal freedom.
Sometimes I wonder if the would would be a better place if most 
Americans learned anything about history that happened east of New 
Bedford or west of the San Andreas fault.  Or that hadn't been 
filtered through a right-wing journalese dumbing-down 
small-c-conservative  small-l-liberal consensus.

But some miracles are too much to hope for.

Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report

[ken]

R.A. Hettinga wrote:
Apparently, understanding the recursive minutiae of the Levant, et al., the
old-fashioned "received", regurgitated, OxBridge way didn't help y'all too
much when it came to Fabianizing yourselves back to the stone-age, either,
since we're on the subject of neo-feudalist totalitarianism. 
So that's why you guys are behaving exactly like we used to?

Re: What is a cypherpunk?

[ken]

James A. Donald wrote:
If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will
attack you.
That is the difference between private power and government
power.
But in most places at most times the state is run at least partly 
by and for the rich and the owners of property and  supports and 
privileges their continuing private power.

And there are circumstances where private individuals send men 
with guns to attack you if you  cross them.Quite a lot of 
them, from the feudal barons, to drug-dealers in modern cities, to 
 just about anywhere out of easy reach of the state's police.

And there are places where corporations do that as well. Even 
well-run respectable British or American corporations that have 
annual reports and  shareholder's meetings.

State power and private power are different but not distinct, and 
everywhere more or less mixed up with each other and involved with 
each other, and in most places the same sorts of people have both. 
Economic power is a kind of political power.

Re: What is a cypherpunk?

[ken]

James A. Donald wrote:

The state was created to attack private property rights - to
steal stuff.  Some rich people are beneficiaries, but from the
beginning, always at the expense of other rich people.
More commonly states defend the rich against the poor.  They are 
what underpins property rights, in the  sense of "great property" 
- until the industrial revolution that was mostly rights to land 
other people farm or live on. Every society we know about has had 
laws and customs defending personal property (more or less 
successfully) but it takes political/military power to defend the 
right to exact rent from a large estate, and state power to defend 
that right for thousands or millions of landowners.


Again, compare the burning of Shenendoah with the Saint
Valentine's day massacre.  There is just no comparison.
Governmental crimes are stupendously larger, and much more
difficult to defend against.
True.
The apposite current comparison is 9/11 the most notorious piece 
of private-enterprise violence in recent years, and the far more 
destructive  US revenge on Afghanistan and Iraq. Which was 
hundreds of times more destructive but hundreds of thousands of 
times more expensive, so far less cost-effective - but in a a war 
of attrition that might not matter so much. Of course the 
private-enterprise AQ & their friends the Taliban booted 
themselves into a state, of sorts in Afghanistan, with a little 
help from their friends in Pakistan and arguable amounts of US 
weaponry. Not that Afghanistan was the sort of place from which 
significant amounts of tax could be collected to fund further 
military adventures.

States can get usually get control of far larger military 
resources than private organisations, and have fewer qualms about 
wasting them.  Not that it makes much difference to the victims - 
poor peasants kicked off land wanted for oilfields in West Africa 
probably neither know nor care whether the troops who burned their 
houses were paid by the oil companies or the local government.

Re: How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp

[ken]

My view - as controversial as ever - is that the problem
is unfixable, and mail will eventually fade away.  That
which will take its place is p2p / IM / chat / SMS based.
Which are easier to spam and less secure than smtp.
SMTP is p2p by definition, though you can use servers if you want.
SMS  *IS* email , just a different kind of email - and a less 
secure, more expensive kind, in which the infrastructure is more 
in the hands of the large companies that run it and less 
accessible to users installing their own protections.


In that world, it is still reasonable to build ones own IM
system for the needs of ones own community, and not
to have to worry about standards.  Which means one can
build in the defences that are needed, when they are
needed.
as we can for smtp
Chat is already higher volume (I read somewhere) in
raw quantity of messages sent than email.
I suspect you don't get much traffic. The beauty of a 
non-real-time store-and-forward system like smtp (or SMS, or 
oldstyle conferencing systems with off-line readers) is precisely 
that  it can be automated. I don't have to see mail I don't want.

A fate for email is that as spam grows to take over more
of the share of the shrinking pie, but consumes more of
the bandwidth
A higher proportion of the snail-mail I get is junk than the 
email. In fact almost all of it is (& most of what isn't is bills 
:-( - usually already paid by the bank)  I throw more than half of 
my incoming paper mail in the bin unopened, and about half of what 
is left is just put in a cupboard in case I get into some dispute 
tithe the bank or the electric company or whoever.

A higher proportion of the landline phone calls I get are junk. At 
least 4 out of 5 calls, maybe 9 out of 10. Email is doing quite well.

> the ISPs will start to charge people for
email, and not for IM. 
Why should they charge more for qa service which is not only 
cheaper for them to run, but has more competition and is harder to 
subvert? A serious proportion of the rootkits and so on that have 
been plaguing us for the last few years involves chat & instant 
messaging & so on.  I'd block it at the boundary firewall. People 
who use it should just learn how to use mail.  They'd get through 
more. Chat is for functional illiterates. Learn to read at adult 
speed and you'll prefer mail. Why should they put up with being 
limited to someone else's typing speed?

Re: The Nazification Of America ("Show Me Your Papers" - Day 1)

[ken]

J.A. Terranson wrote:


Durbin was right.  And he didn't even scratch the surface!  Anyone who
thinks this "Real ID Act" is about getting false ID out of the hands of
"The Terrorists" is an idiot: they will simply print their own drivers
licenses - this is about forcing the regular population to get used to
intrastate passports.  This act essentially forces you to have a passport
for everyday things like banking, car purchases and certain repairs,
checks, etc.


That's the point of course. The idea behind the laws is to make it 
very inconvenient to operate in society without some supposed 
proof of identity. A "problem" the government will then "solve" by 
issuing ID cards to everyone. Which will then be made compulsory.


"Show me your papers, sir!"

The British government is taking the same line, though isn't so 
far along the route as you are - laws going through Parliament 
right now.


Interestingly they are blaming the US for the need to have them.

They started by saying it was for terrorism (which is crap as we 
all know), then they said it was to prevent social security fraud 
(which is probably part of the reason they want them, but not a 
big enough deal to get voters behind it), then to prevent "ID 
theft" (does the opposite of course by introducing a single point 
of failure), then to stop illegal immigration (it won't of course, 
it'll just make illegal immigrants even more vulnerable to 
exploitation by employers or worse) & now and again there has been 
bleating about "protecting the children" (as if rapists are going 
to put "I am a predatory sex criminal" on their application form)


But last week, they just blamed you. Oh they said, the Americans 
are demanding biometric ID from all visitors. So if you have a 
passport you will need it. As most British people have passports 
anyway, and it would be silly to have a passport that could be 
used anywhere but the USA, it'll save money to issue one single 
biometric ID for everybody...


At the moment it looks as if the pass-card laws in the UK will 
fail. Well not fail on paper, because the spin doctors and PR 
merchants won't allow that to happen, but be watered down in the 
House of Lords  so far that they won't have much effect. Of course 
that's still bad because the principle will still be there for 
some future government to exploit. They are desperately unpopular 
with the country at large - though sadly it seems to be the cost 
and inconvenience rather than the principle that people object to.


The Conservatives are voting against mainly because that's what 
opposition parties do in British politics, but if they ever get 
back into power you can be sure they will adopt the plan with a 
few minor cosmetic changes so they can pretend it has been 
improved. More of their MPs support it than Labour do - but party 
discipline being what it is in Parliament its unlikely that more 
than the same 20-odd Labour MPs will vote against it in Parliament.


And whenever a journalists asks a Cabinet Minister why they are 
spending 20 billions on flashy plastic cards (how many extra 
police could they employ for that money?) they say that they have 
to do it because the USA is making them do it.


But its not our fault. Its all those nasty Americans. Don't blame 
me, Mummy. The bad man made me do it.

Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks

[ken]

James A. Donald wrote:


That is it.  This is the ghost of cypherpunks.


Or maybe its counterpart fossil.

As GK Chesterton said about most nominal Christianity in the world 
in his day  - the original had rotted away leaving a space of the 
same shape and size. Like the impression of a leaf between two 
layers of mud which harden into stone leaving a fossil that has 
something of the shape and pattern of the original but none of its 
content.



Cypherpunks always was a self contradiction - a
political group pushing a fundamentally non political
attack upon the state, and thus upon the very existence
of politics.


Do you really think that politics only exists where there is a 
state?  I'd have thought the opposite is true. Most states 
actively prevent most people participating in politics. And even 
the more benign ones relieve people of the responsibility of doing 
politics - or maybe  the realisation that what they are doing *is* 
politics. Where there is no state everyone is a politician, all 
the time, and all public acts are overtly political.

Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks

[ken]

R.A. Hettinga wrote:


You're damn right it's political.



Especially if you're a Marxist, or some, shall we say "homeopathic" variant
thereof: after all, "the personal is political", right?


Assuming that you mean feminism is a variant of Marxism, what 
exactly do you mean by Marxism?

Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks

[ken]

James A. Donald wrote:

--
From:   ken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


Do you really think that politics only exists where
there is a state?  I'd have thought the opposite is
true. Most states actively prevent most people
participating in politics.



The more authoritarian the state, the more in compells
people to participate in politics, making eveything they
do or think political, for example the endless meetings
in Cuba and Mao's china,



That seems almost the opposite of politics to me. The actual 
politics - the arguments, the decisions - has been done in some 
smoke-filled room beforehand. The public meeting is nothing more 
than the product launch.


Where there is no state everyone is a politician, all 
the time, and all public acts are overtly political.


So when I buy coffee, that is political?


Well, yes. If only because the buyer and seller are both extending 
the reach of their lives to influence others to behave in the way 
that they want. Using money in this case rather than votes or 
threats, but still in a sense a kind of politics.


And of course on a large scale more obviously what is more 
conventionally called politics - that small transaction, a dollar 
for a cup of coffee, multiplied by millions can cause armies to 
move, can set up and tear down governments, induce luxury in one 
place, famine in another. If we can say that war is  politics 
carried on by another means we can also say that markets are 
politics carried on by other means.



Surely the non state area of our lives is the non
political area of our lives. 


Not unless we are living as hermits.  Our entire lives involve 
rubbing up against other people and negotiating our relations with 
them. Which is basically what politics is

Re: out of the box

[Ken Brown]

Sverige?

Jonathan Wienke wrote:
> 
> ummm, you've been to Sweden, but can't even spell it right?
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Michael Roberts [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 2:19 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: out of the box
> 
> weird.  I was told this when I was in sweeden, as an explaination for
> the basic niceness of sweedes - ie, that they recieved in school basic
> emotional education which enabled them to deal with difficult people and
> situations.
> 
> true/not true ?
> 
> M

Re: all about transferable off-line ecash (Re: Brands off-line tech)

[Ken Brown]

Adam Back wrote:

[...snip...]

> Another example would be having to give a deposit to get mobile phone
> for people with poor credit ratings.  Also in Europe pay as you go,
> cash only mobile phone usage is popular due to credit elegibility
> reasons also I think.  You can plunk down a 10 pound note and walk out
> with a mobile phone with air time on it, you can buy more air time
> similarly.)


Slightly off-topic, but credit eligibility isn't the main reason for
prepay. A lot of well-off people like it because it is easier to
administer. I know people with jobs and credit ratings who chose to move
to prepay, but I can't think of anyone who went the other way.   You
walk into the shop and buy airtime, which many people find easier than
having yet another "relationship" with yet another boring company.

Incidentally what they actually sell you is a card with a number printed
on it, which you then send to phone company - there would be a lot of
money for anyone who found a way to predict the numbers - this is
cypherpunk technology - millions of people all over the world are paying
cash money for large random numbers.   

They are also popular with parents who give them to their kids & don't
want to have to bankroll a serious teenage phone habit.

And some people even like anonymity.

The airtime numbers are available more or less anywhere, supermarket
checkouts, every little corner shop, sometimes even bars. There is also
a new breed of phonecard shops, sometimes doubling up as small Internet
cafes and/or the more traditional copier shops. For some reason many of
them are run by Africans (high-tech retail in UK is usually dominated by
Indians). Their main business is in long-distance discount phonecalls.
You get a certain amount of long-distance or international phone time
through a local number. 

If you'd asked me 15 years ago I might have guessed that reselling
bandwidth would be a big business in the first decade of the 21st
century, but I wouldn't have guessed that it would mostly be
over-the-counter in corner shops. Actually selling bits of plastic with
numbers printed on them (most of them don't even bother with mag
stripes) seems very low-tech and physical!

 
Ken Brown

Re: all about transferable off-line ecash (Re: Brands off-line tech)

[Ken Brown]

Mike Rosing wrote:

[...]
 
> It'd be cool to have electronic paper bills - flexable/cloth electronics
> where the value of the bill is variable.  At each transaction, the bill
> reduces the amount it has (plain old smart card stuff) but it'd have
> the look and feel of paper money.  

I'd rather have stiff cards than floppy paper ones. At least you can put
them into  the slot of a machine easily.

> the transaction machines that work
> with the bills would all need to be online, but you could easily trade
> bills for anonymous barter.  It might even be easy to have a reader that
> just tells how much is left in the bill.  The point here isn't technology,
> it's psycology.  The bill "looks" like money, so people will trust that
> it is :-)

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

Re: all about transferable off-line ecash (Re: Brands off-line tech)

[Ken Brown]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
> 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.

Over here most people seem to prefer coins these days. Low-value notes
have a cheap-and-nasty feel to them. They get all furry.

Re: Coins vs. bills

[Ken Brown]

For some reason the mention of a "Susan B Anthony" dollar stuck in my
brain as an "Alice B Sheldon" dollar. Susan Anthony is a person who I've
never heard of. I'm almost tempted not to find out who she is or was to
preserve a nugget of delicious cognitive dissonance. A world in which
governments put Alice Sheldon on the currency would be an interestingly
different world from the one we seem to be inhabiting. 

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
> 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.

Because symbols work better when they bear certain kinds of resemblance
to what they are symbolising? Human brains are hard-wired that way.
Plastic money doesn't twang the right neural circuits. Who would care
for non-alcoholic communion wine?

[...]

Anyway, no-one has yet come up with a convincing reason for me to want
to carry any kind of electronic wallet for small transactions. Anything
under, say, 50 dollars American, is more easily done in physical cash
money.   If nothing else the irritation that you'd go through when you
lose one and have to get another makes it not worth it. If I lose coins
I lose the value of the coin and nothing else.  If I lose a bank  card
it ruins my day.  Even if the card was only good for 50 quid I still
have to jump through hoops to get a new one.

Obviously smart cash might make sense as public transport tickets, or as
a prepaid hotel bill (to hotel owners at any rate), and smart-card
applications for these things have been developing for decades. (We
certainly were issued with something like them at the hotel for the 1989
Eastercon in UK - which I only remember because it was the last I went
to for some years, they might have been around much earlier)  But in
general street use - why bother? Even if these putative electronic
wallets were as easy to get hold of as cash (walk up to a machine any
time of day or night, stick in some id, type in PIN, walk off) you might
as well just use cash. 

I suppose they could be of benefit to the operators of ATMs. The one at
the all-night filling station round the corner from me seems to be have
someone using it every ten minutes or so in the late evening. So, at a
wild guess, the stock level might be between 5 and 10 thousand pounds.
That's getting towards where it might pay someone to use heavy machinery
to get it out of the wall.  Even if it splurts itself with ink (there
are a lot of stupid criminals out there) that is still very inconvenient
for the building owners.

But there's nothing in it for the user. An initially valueless smart
wallet might be less attractive to muggers, but they just have to wait
for you to activate it. Or point a knife at you till you do. And the
more faffing about you need to do (PIN, setting authorisation limits,
pointing the thing at the reader) the more old-fashioned cash would seem
simpler.

Now, using a mobile phone as money might sell. People seem determined to
use them for everything else. If there was a way of transferring prepay
directly between SIMs it would be used by teenagers (and drug dealers)
to settle small debts. Maybe they already are and I haven't noticed.


Ken Brown



And her smoke goes up for ever:
http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/Tiptree/clute.htm

Re: Coins vs. bills

[Ken Brown]

"Trei, Peter" wrote:

[...snip...]

what you said is all true but the benefit (as you pointed out) is
primarily to the retailer, not the shopper. All this doesn't apply to
higher-value transactions of course.

> Ken, when was the last time you paid for a call from a UK
> public phone with coins?
> 
> Iirc, most British public phones no longer accept coins
> (unlike in the US, where you have to search for one with
> a card slot).

I think I stopped putting coins in phone booths on the street about when
I started carrying a mobile, which was late 1999 IIRC :-) Later than
most. These days, just about wherever I am, even if I don't have a
mobile, someone else does. Phone booths are on their way out for anyone
who has either a job or friends. 

As you say, they are mostly card-only now - used to be specialised
phonecards (I've used UK ones in Greece and Germany so they aren't
*that* specialised) now they accept normal bank-issued credit and debit
cards.  I guess the changeover began in the 1980s & was more or less
finished by mid-1990s. Some shops and bars have coin-operated ones.

I get more trouble with buying train & bus tickets. The machines try to
accept notes but almost all fail. They are the main reason I like the
new higher-value coins (though of course they are nothing like the value
of the pre-C20-inflation guineas and sovereigns my great-grand-parents
probably weren't wealthy enough to see many of)

This fits in with the thread about deployment problems. For these
low-price transactions buyers prefer cash. Monopoly retailers (as phone
booths were 20 years ago and railway trains of course almost always are)
can dictate how they wish to be paid.  If a PTT wanted you to use their
own cards, you had to. Competitive retailers have to get the buyers on
board.



Even more off-topic  "Trei, Peter" also wrote:
> > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED][SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > > Go and read 'Repent Harlequin! Cried the Tick-Tock Man' by PK Dick for a
> > > particularly slackless society with this technology.
> > Might be easier to find if you substitute Harlan Ellison as the author,
> > though.
> >  - Sten
> Mea culpa. It's been a long time since I read 'Dangerous Visions'.

Must be, seeing as "Harlequin" was published in Galaxy magazine, then
reprinted in Ellison's  "Paingod and other Delusions", not in DV which
was an original-story-only anthology that came out a year or two later
:-)

Ken Brown

Re: Coins vs. bills

[Ken Brown]

Bill Stewart wrote:
> 
> At 09:00 PM 04/11/2002 +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
> >"Trei, Peter" wrote:
> > > Mea culpa. It's been a long time since I read 'Dangerous Visions'.
> >
> >Must be, seeing as "Harlequin" was published in Galaxy magazine, then
> >reprinted in Ellison's  "Paingod and other Delusions", not in DV which
> >was an original-story-only anthology that came out a year or two later :-)
> 
> I haven't read Paingod, but it was in one of the Ellison anthologies.
> If not "Dangerous Visions", then perhaps "Again Dangerous Visions"...
> Or perhaps the anthologies were titled differently in the UK?

As off-topic as an off-topic thing - but the bibliography of Ellison
anthologies is a deep topic, that raises hackles, and even law suits, in
some places. Try a google for "Last Deadloss Visions" by Chris Priest (I
bought my copy from the author though).

Ellison is also famous, or notorious, for reprinting slightly different
selections from the same couple of dozen stories (brilliant stories
though they are). Sometimes the same selection has different names in
different countries, sometimes (even worse) books with the same title
have different contents.  Or rather his publishers are notorious for it,
I have no idea how much input Ellison has in to the exact content of
foreign publications of his work, probably very little.

The 2 DVs were the same on both sides AFAIR, and anyway I bought the US
printings. 

Ken Brown

Re: Coins vs. bills

[Ken Brown]

Peter Gutmann wrote:
> 
> >For some reason the mention of a "Susan B Anthony" dollar stuck in my brain as
> >an "Alice B Sheldon" dollar. 

[...]

> Not being from the US I have no idea who either of those two are, but that does
> raise an interesting point: Maybe the reason no-one wants the coin is because
> of who's on it.  Solution: Mint a coin with La Cicciolina (or whoever the US
> equivalent would be) on it.  They'd be able to get rid of at least 140M of
> them.

I suspect the contemporary US equivalent is Britney Spears :-(

Alice Sheldon was better known as "James Tiptree Junior" and if you
haven't read any of her short stories you have a treat in store. Well,
"treat" is perhaps the wrong word for something quite so strong. Sex,
death, and rockets.  The sort of sf that makes you feel the star-winds
in your hair.

Ken

Dead cowboys wage peace on the Internet

[Ken Brown]

Hereinunder attached is vauely on-topic, though spins some
unneccessarily self-important new jargon.  They don't quite seem to get
that TCPIP is fundamentally P2P from the bits up. I like the phrase
"disruptive compliance". The Net has a passive-aggressive personality?

Ken 

> Waging peace on the Internet
> 
> By Oxblood RuffinPosted: 19/04/2002 at 15:56 GMT
> Hacking is a contact sport.
> The more people who have contact with one another, the better.
> -- Shaolin Punk,
> Proxy Boss,
> Hacktivismo
> 
> There's an international book burning in progress; the surveillance cameras
> are rolling; and the water canons are drowning freedom of assembly. But it's
> not occurring anywhere that television can broadcast to the world. It's
> happening in cyberspace.
> 
> Certain countries censor access to information on the Web through DNS (Domain
> Name Service) filtering. This is a process whereby politically challenging
> information is blocked by domain address (the name that appears before the
> dot-com/net/org suffix, as in Tibet.com, etc.). State censors also filter for
> politically or socially-unacceptable ideas in e-mail. And individual privacy
> rights and community gatherings are similarly regulated.
> 
> China is often identified as the world's worst offender with its National
> Firewall and arrests for on-line activity. But the idea that the new
> Mandarins could have pulled this off by themselves is absurd. The Chinese
> have aggressively targeted the Western software giants, not only as a means
> of acquiring technical know-how, but also as agents for influencing Western
> governments to their advantage through well-established corporate networks of
> political lobbying. Everything is for sale: names, connections, and even
> national security.
> 
> Witnessing hi-tech firms dive into China is like watching the Gadarene swine.
> Already fat and greedy beyond belief, the Western technology titans are being
> herded towards the trough. And with their snouts deep in the feedbag, they
> haven't quite noticed the bacon being trimmed off their ass. It isn't so much
> a case of technology transfer as digital strip-mining. Advanced research and
> technical notes are being handed over to the Chinese without question. It
> couldn't be going better for the Communists. While bootstrapping their
> economy with the fruits of Western labor and ingenuity, they gain the tools
> to prune democracy on the vine.
> 
> But to focus on Beijing's strategy misses the larger opportunity of treating
> the spreading sickness that plagues cyberspace. Cuba not only micromanages
> its citizens' on-line experience, it has recently refused to sell them
> computers, the US trade embargo notwithstanding. Most countries indulging in
> censorship claim to be protecting their citizens from pornographic contagion.
> But the underlying motive is to prevent challenging opinions from spreading
> and coalescing through the chokehold of state-sponsored control. This
> includes banning information that ranges from political opinion, religious
> witness, "foreign" news, academic and scholarly discovery, news of human
> rights abuses all the intellectual exchange that an autocratic leadership
> considers to be destabilizing.
> 
> The capriciousness of state-sanctioned censorship is wide-ranging.
> 
> * In Zambia, the government attempted to censor information revealing their
> plans for constitutional referenda.
> 
> * In Mauritania - as in most countries - owners of cybercafis are required to
> supply government intelligence agents with copies of e-mail sent or received
> at their establishments.
> 
> * Even less draconian governments, like Malaysia, have threatened
> Web-publishers, whose only crime is to publish frequent Web site updates.
> Timely and relevant information is seen as a threat.
> 
> * South Korea's national security law forbids South Koreans from any contact
> - including contact over the Internet - with their North Korean neighbors.
> 
> The risks of accessing or disseminating information are often great.
> 
> * In Ukraine, a decapitated body found near the village of Tarachtcha is
> believed to be that of Georgiy Gongadze, founder and editor of an on-line
> newspaper critical of the authorities.
> 
> * In August 1998, an eighteen year old Turk, Emre Ersoz, was found guilty of
> "insulting the national police" in an Internet forum after participating in a
> demonstration that was violently suppressed by the police. His ISP provided
> the authorities with his address.
> 
> * Journalist Miroslav Filipovic has the dubious distinction of having been
> the first journalist accused of spying because his articles d

Re: Two ideas for random number generation

[Ken Brown]

Tim May wrote:

> Boehm's "hidden variables" model is generally discredited (some would
> say "disproved"). Alternatives to the Copenhagen Interpretation, notably
> EWG/"many worlds," Hartle's "consistent histories," and Cramer's
> transactional model, are still not deterministic, in that the world an
> observer is in ("finds himself in") is still not predictable in advance.
> Operationally, all interpretations give the same results, i.e., the
> Uncertainty Principle. (Which is why I mentioned "hidden variables," the
> only alternative theory which _might_ have restored classical
> Lagrange/Laplace predictability, in theory.)

For no other reason than namedropping I want to point out that Bohm
worked out much of this theory in the building I'm in now - Birkbeck
College gave him a job after he'd been more or less forced out of the
USA by HUAAC.  I exchanged a few words with one of his ex-collaborators
(in the theory, not the Party) in the lift (elevator) a couple of hours
ago. About the soup, not about physics. I can't claim to understand the
physics.

As far as I know (not far, because I can only follow the English
descriptions, not the maths) Bohm's "hidden variables" never claimed to
make the universe predictable, even if deterministic. What they were
after is trying to find some way of describing what they thought was
really going on, instead of what we can observe. (& what they thought
was really going on seems to end up at God, more or less). And one of
the criticisms of it was that even if it were true (some claimed) it
would be impossible to tell experimentally from non-hidden-variable
descriptions. Which might come to the same thing as saying ">
Operationally, all interpretations give the same results" (I tend to be
wary of sentences that start with the word "operationally")

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. I may not know much about physics but I know enough about
biology, and the mathematical modelling of biology,  to see how big the
numbers get and how quickly. In a billiard-ball universe we couldn't
predict the exact behaviour of a medium-sized protein molecule, never
mind a whole cell. The world is too complex and detailed to predict. We
hit the combinatorial explosion almost as soon as we set out. I'm
working on some individually-based models of some stylised biochemical
pathways in model microorganisms. The simplest inquiries smash into
impossible numbers at resolutions many orders of magnitude above
anything that quantum considerations are relevant to.


> And even if the world were Newtonian, in a classical billiard ball
> sense, with Planck's constant precisely equal to zero, predictability is
> a chimera. Consider a game of billiards, with perfectly spherical
> billiard balls, a perfectly flat table, etc. Trajectories depend on
> angles to a precision that keeps going deeper and deeper into the
> decimals. For example, predicting the table state after, say, 3 seconds,
> might require knowing positions, speeds, and angles (in other words, the
> vectors) to a precision of one part in a thousand. Doable, one might say.
> 
> But after 30 seconds, any "errors" that are greater than one part in a
> billion would lead to "substantially different" table states. Fail to
> know the mass or position or elasticity or whatever of just one of the
> billiard balls to one part in a billion and the outcome is no longer
> "predictable."
> 
> After a couple of minutes, the table positions are different if anything
> is not known to one part in, say, 10^50.
> 
> Even talk of a "sufficiently powerful computer" is meaningless when the
> dimensions of objects must be known to better than the Planck-Wheeler
> scale (even ignoring issues of whether there's a quantum foam at these
> dimensions).
> 
> I feel strongly about this issue, and have thought about it for many
> years. The whole "in principle the Universe can be calculated" was a
> foray down a doomed path WHETHER OR NOT quantum mechanics ever came out.
> 
> The modern name for this outlook is "chaos theory," but I believe
> "chaos" gives almost mystical associations to something which is really
> quite understandable: divergences in decimal expansions.
> 
> Discrepancies come marching in, fairly rapidly, from "out there in the
> expansion."
> 
> Another way of looking at unpredictabality is to say that real objects
> in real space and subject to real forces from many other real objects
> are in the world of the "real numbers" and any representation of a real
> number as a 25-digit number (diameter of the solar system to within 1
> centimeter) or even as a 100-digit number (utterly beyond all hope of
> meaurement!) is just not enough.
> 
> (Obscure aside: What if Wheeler and others are right in some of their
> speculations that the universe is ultimately quantized, a la "It from
> Bit"? Notwithstanding that we're now back into quantum real

Re: Quantum mechanics, England, and Topos Theory

[Ken Brown]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

[...]

> 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.

Actually as the cycle time for the sheep population  & the cycle time
for the grass are not the same or multiples of each other, what you get
from a deterministic continuously variable model is wild oscillations of
sheep and grass populations that make it nigh on impossible to predict
the sheep population at any given time in the future. Things get more
steady if you introduce predators that eat the sheep, but never
completely predictable in the long run. The only way to know how the
model system would stand at any time in the future beyond the typical
cycle time is to do the sums. And there is no guarantee that the real
world analogue of the model would be in a similar state at that time.

One of the classic examples of what is now called "chaos" (a word that I
don't like in this context). The exact trajectory taken by simple models
of predator-prey systems is often very sensitively dependent on initial
conditions.  Of course in real life these things are stochastic anyway
so the variables in your model should actually be probability
distributions, which makes the sums much harder and leads to
considerable handwaving. 

Known about since the 1920s, pretty exhaustively described by Robert
May, John Maynard-Smith & others in the 1970s, but still argued about
today. Whether or not more complex systems (more species, more levels of
predation, more kinds of resource) are more "stable" is still a moot
point, opinions tending to depend (sensitively) on what the opinionated
one actually means by "stable". And on whether they have a background in
maths, or physical sciences, or molecular biology, or real biology.

This kind of thing has implications for economics & technology & markets
of course (cf Santa Fe, ad infinitum).  People who think like ecologists
tend to assume that a more complex market, with more participants, and
more kinds of interaction between them, will be in the long run more
"stable" - perhaps because that is what they think they see in nature. 
People who think like engineers may disagree and talk of excessive
market volatility, and the dangers of new forms of trading & so on, and
they need for regulation, looking for a few global variables to track
and control. 

Apologies for off-topicness, but this is probably the only subject
that's come up here about which I suspect I'm better read than the list
in general.  I'm working towards a doctorate in which I intend to argue
(in effect) that for many kinds of investigation (such as the
relationship between complexity and stability of the whole system) you
do need to know about the fates  of the individual sheep. (Or, in my
case, imaginary protobacteria,  to  keep it simple :-)


> 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 suspect they probably won't, not unless you spend a lot more time in
the lift than is healthy for you. Whiffs  will be whisked about
chaotically, some being lost every time the door is opened or anyone
walks around. So some poor guy on the 3rd floor will get a noseful, but
someone else standing next to him might miss out entirely.

Re: Two ideas for random number generation

[Ken Brown]

"Trei, Peter" wrote:

[...]

> >Exactly what is the Choatian definition of a PRNG which requires
> >it to repeat, anyway?

Possibly confusion between 2 common English meanings of "repeat".

(1) repeatable, so if someone else runs the same algorithm on similar
hardware with the same initial conditions they get the same results,
which a program to calculate pi will be.

(2) repetitive, so that if you run the algorithim for long enough a
given sequence comes round again. Which pi isn't.

Of course of pi will have "repeats", in the trivial sense that any given
sequence will many times in a sufficiently long enough rendition. But
there is no cycle there, just randomness. The decimal digits "12" will
occur many times, and "123" will occur rather fewer times, and so on,
but it is not repetitive in this sense because seeing "1" followed by
"2" gives you no clue that "3" comes next. And seeing
"9863770323499906322" gives you no clue that next time you see 
"986377032349990632"  you will get "2" next.  (I think - I make no
pretence to know much about maths)

Ken

Re: Cypherpunks Europe

[Ken Brown]

Tim May wrote:

> > Not sure about the rest of europe - but we have a targetted crypto list
> > in the UK (UKCrypto, sensibly enough) so already have a forum for
> > uk-specific issues.
> > Thats not to say some of it wouldn't be better here - but I am sure our
> > problems with ..
> 
> [name elide to prevent His search engines from finding text with His
> name in it and then threatening legal action.]

Well, he's not quite as bad as Sr A&&&c used to be.
 
> Do you mean _Him_? 

He indeed means  Dr. L G* a long-time reader of, and spasmodic
contributor to, the UKcrypto & Cyber-rights-UK mailing lists. Has
recently been the main troll in sidelining a thread on something I've
forgotten about into a rehash of censorship/anti-censorship arguments. 

> I once followed-up to a post mentioning Him and
> received many threatening e-mails demanding that I cancel my post and
> inform Google that it was to be removed forthwith or both Google and
> myself and my ISP would face massive legal attack.

He makes anti-Choatian category errors -  sort of "I understand physics
therefore I understand ethics|law|politics|society - delete as
appropriate". The main one being that he really seems to think that if
something is against the law then it shouldn't happen, and that it can
be prevented. Ah, I remember - the thread was about Deutsche Bahn suing
ISPs who allowed links to websites purporting to contain instructions
for disabling German railways.
 
> I was tempted to tell him, and his lawyers (er, barristers) to fuck off.

"Lawyers" will do. "Barristers" are professional advocates, lawyers who
plead in court. Very unlikely to be writing cease-and-desist letters. In
England retail lawyers are "solicitors". 

> Either than or to hire a freelance IRA guy to blow him up.

I don't think you get freelance IRA guys. Not with both kneecaps,
anyway.

L** G*** is a nice man. He wrote that the Cult of the Dead Cow
were a "bunch of barely literate mindless American teenage delinquents".
If they lived in England they could possibly sue him for that :-)

Ken

Re: BBC2 to recreate Stanford Prison Experiment

[Ken Brown]

A quick walk round South London would show that a very large number of
men (including myself) shave their heads anyway - probably not as many
as 5 years ago, when it was almost normal, but a significant minority.

Ken

Generic Poster wrote:
> 
> ..from an ad in circulation on BBC2 (UK) if I recall inaccurately.
> 
> "If they shaved your head, would you lose your individuality?
> 
> If they took away your name, would they take your identity?
> 
> [..]
> 
> 16(?) men. Half with power, half with none. See how events unfold in:
> 
> The Experiment.
> 
> Coming soon to BBC2..."
> 
> --
> 
> "We don't need no steenking badges!!!"
> - Blazing Saddles.

which tends to extreme early specialisation,

[Ken Brown]

Jim Choate wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Ken Brown wrote:
> 
> > One of the classic examples of what is now called "chaos" (a word that I
> > don't like in this context). The exact trajectory taken by simple models
> 
> Uhuh...
> 
> > of predator-prey systems is often very sensitively dependent on initial
> > conditions.  Of course in real life these things are stochastic anyway
> 
> Then I take it you don't like 'stochastic' since they really mean the same
> thing in this context.

Same as what? "Stochastic" certainly doesn't mean the same thing as
"chaotic" in this context, so I assume you didn't mean that.

[...]
 
> > so the variables in your model should actually be probability
> > distributions, which makes the sums much harder and leads to
> > considerable handwaving.
> 
> unpredictabilty <> hand waving.

What I meant was that many biologists, even people who teach biology,
don't have the maths to describe the  models in detail.   So the books
and lectures tend to handwaving. The mutual incomprehension between
maths & biology can get extreme at times.

And even if they did their students, or the readers of their books,
certainly don't. I have been present at a practical class when a student
complained to the lecturer that he had promised that there would be "no
mathematics" on this course. She was moaning about something simple to
do with exponentials - the sort of algebra they tried to teach us at the
age of 12 or 13. From the lecturer's point of view it *wasn't*
mathematics, it was just general knowledge, the sort of thing he'd
expect any reasonably educated person to know about, or at least able to
pick up quickly.  As the course was about (amongst other things) enzyme
reaction kinetics it is a bit hard to understand how anyone could
imagine getting though it without at least that level of maths.

Possibly a worse problem in UK education than in most other countries. 
We encourage extreme early specialisation. In our schools you can drop
mathematics at 15 or 16 if you want, even if you later go on to study
science subjects at university. Well, you'd have trouble getting on to a
physics or engineering course, but you could do biology.  The most
advanced maths I did in what you would call high school was very
introductory calculus - simple differentiation mostly. Also  the
briefest introduction to integration. We weren't expected to be able to
do it, just know what it was, only a couple of hour's teaching. And that
was an /optional/ course, I could have got away without it. Not a
mention of matrices, nothing even approaching statistics, probability, 
number theory, none of what they then called "modern maths" (anything
which mentioned sets or topology), no algebra more advanced than the
quadratic equation formula (which we were expected to be able to use,
but not derive or prove).  And I was someone on a science track
(Biology, Chemistry, Physics) at a selective school that specialised in
science. My undergraduate courses included pick-ups on statistics and
probability, without which it would be impossible to take Biology, but
that was all.

Then these biologists who are semi-literate in maths become graduate
students and, need to do some modelling, and meet up with mathematicians
or physicists who may not have studied any biology since the age of 13. 
Of course all these folk did science at school - they probably have
never had any serious language or history teaching at all. It is
compulsory in British schools to do at least one modern language,
usually French for some reason, but only between the ages of 12 and 16,
and it is usually badly taught. In my experience most people who go on
to do science simply fail the class - they make you go to it, but you
don't have to pass to get onto other courses. There is no requirement to
"graduate" in classes you don't intend to continue with, so loads of
kids don't.

The same works the other way even more strongly. Most people studying
arts or humanities at university will never have passed a science exam
or maths exam in their lives,  and will have dropped or failed most of
the subjects *before* GCSE. I think the US equivalent to that would be
leaving a junior high school to go to a senior high school.  They are
exams you take at 15 or 16, and most of the brighter kids only attempt
the ones that they intend to continue later.

Of course the other side of the coin is that what we call "6th form"
education, 16-18, is, in sciences at any rate, the equivalent of the
first year of University in other countries.  So the system is good at
producing very knowledgeable people, very young. One of the reasons that
British research is significantly more productive than French or German.
By the time the French or German advanced student catches up with their
British counterpart in knowledge of their specialised subject they are
probably in their late 20s.

I didn't intend to write this rant... don't get me onto school sport

Ken

Re: Got carried away...

[Ken Brown]

I think I'll stick to my bicycle.

Why would anyone would want to waste their money on a car like that? Or
even trust their body to it?  I suppose insurance companies might have
an interest in limiting use of a car to people who were paid-up. An even
if cars were "like little tanks" why not open them with ordinary
physical keys, like real tanks? At least if someone nicks your keys they
leave your body behind. I want to use my retinas for seeing with.


Jan Dobrucki wrote:
 
> I have been thinking about the window problem and the ignition too.
> What I was thinking was a car of the not so far future. Where there
> wont be any windows because the driver will see the outside throu a
> camera and he wont need regular lights cause there'll be ultraviolet
> or something like that. The car will be like a little tank, so to
> speak. If the thief can't get in, then the ignition problem wouldn't
> exist. So someone can steel the pgp keys of the driver, but what if
> the key was, say a tatoe on his hand and would be visible only when
> the drivers was thinking of say... green fried tomatoes.
> Ok, so the thief managed to get into the car. There still voice
> recognition, fingerprints, retina scan, DNA scan, and whatever you
> can think of. I know this will be expensive, but in the future, well
> lets just say I don't think it's going to be sweet.

Re: Upcoming workshop on category theory and concurrency

[Ken Brown]

KPJ wrote:

[...]

> I have noticed this on-line anomaly which several people:
> they require more data on an online communication subject than on an offline
> communication subject. Appears irrational to me: online security can never
> become higher than physical security of the subject. But I disgress.

Not security, bandwidth. Millions of people can address me through
email, and hundreds do, every day.  Not enough time to read, so heaps is
skipped. In an ordinary day I doubt if as many as 5 strangers come up to
me and talk to me face to face, without me having approached them first,
and I live in a big city.  Also body language & stuff.

Re: haos -- from MathWorld

[Ken Brown]

Jim Choate wrote:
> 
> http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Chaos.html


Er, yes, it is a great site. It even has a definition of mathematical
chaos:

 
"A dynamical system is chaotic if it 
1. Has a dense collection of points with periodic orbits, 
2. Is sensitive to the initial condition of the system (so that
initially nearby points can evolve quickly into very
different states), and
3. Is topologically transitive. 
Chaotic systems exhibit irregular, unpredictable behavior (the butterfly
effect). The boundary between linear and chaotic   behavior is often
characterized by period doubling, followed by quadrupling, etc.,
although other routes to chaos are also
possible"

And this implies that "chaotic" means the same as "stochastic"

One of the reasons I don't like the word "chaotic" is that it misleads
people into thinking it is the same as random, or as stochastic.

Re:

[Ken Brown]

Jan Dobrucki wrote:

> I was thiking about connecting these technologies together, like PGP
> and fingerprints. Your fingers would be the PGP key. I know all my
> ideas are a liitle wild, but is it worthwile? 

> I think that the world
> will be a very dangerous place, so I think that everyone who wants to
> should have the possibility of having high security. 

> I wasn't just
> thinking of cars. Similar things can be done with houses, boats,
> whatever. So I'm a little paranoid

I'm a little paranoid as well, so I like the idea that things I really
depend on - like  being able to get back into my own home at night - are
based on nice, simple, technologies - like doors with ordinary locks and
keys. The simplest system that does the job is usually better (safer,
more secure, more reliable) than anything more sophisticated.

> and I think that everyone is
> spying on me, aren't such people called perceptive?

I think some list members post to the beat of a different dictionary

To fuel your paranoia, try browsing the RISKS archives: 
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks  


Ken

Re: Jim Darling

[Ken Brown]

jill jill wrote:

[...]
 
> Cut the link Einstein.ssz.com then we can have real
> good unmoderated list,right Tim.


The act of moderation to end all acts of moderation?

Re: UK e-money legal, sort-of

[Ken Brown]

Sorry Adam, that wasn't me, I just quoted it from the article in  the
Register. So I know no more. 

Ken

Adam Back wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 04:09:23PM +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
> > "anybody that wishes to issue electronic money can do so as long as they
> > satisfy a number of core criteria specified by the Financial Services
> > Authority (FSA), without having to first obtain a banking license. In
> > essence this means that as long as the issuers of the e-money can meet
> > the capital requirements of one million Euros or 2 percent of the
> > e-money to be issued, they are free to do so.
> 
> Do you know is that minimum or maximum of those two figures?  ie if
> you have 2% of capital you issue is that enough or does it have to be
> larger of those.  GBP 600K (USD 900K) is still a lot of money for a
> small scale operation.  If it were the former it might be more
> plausible that someone might set something up as a hobby operation.
> The tricky part as ever will be putting money into the system if it's
> anonymous ecash, to limit fraud.  Interfacing anonymous to
> non-anonymous transaction systems is a problem.  The convenient
> non-anonymous transactions systems (credit cards, debit cards)
> typically are quite vulnerable to fraud and have weak security
> systems.
> 
> > There is a limit of one thousand pounds sterling on the maximum
> > 'purse' value; the e-money must be redeemable within five days and
> > the currency must be usable for at least one year."
> 
> What does the redeemable within five days mean -- that this is the
> maximum processing time for in-transfers or for out-transfers?
> 
> Adam
> --
> http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/

Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys

[Ken Brown]

Er, I hit "send" prematurely, and I meant to go on to say that I have
often used 1 or 200 UKP in folding money - it is easy to do with
universal availability of ATMs. If anything I use more cash than I did
15 years ago because it is so simple to get hold of. And saves the
bother of waiting while they go online to validate the credit card if
the latest series of Buffy on video exceeds the floor limit at the shop.

Of course that doesn't apply to genuinely expensive items. I'm not sure
I ever spend more than maybe 200 UKP (300 USD) in cash at one time.

Ken

Ken Brown wrote:
> 
> "R. A. Hettinga" wrote:
> 
> > > The reason we have ready availability of credit in the first place
> > > is because consumer debt is the most profitable business in the
> > > United States.
> >
> > I really wonder what component of this market is actually payment
> > driven. After all, to easily buy *anything* over, say, $100 right
> > now, you have to borrow money, use a credit card, to do it.
> 
> ?
> 
> I use a debit card, one that draws against my bank current account the
> way a cheque does (probably "check" to you). It's the same card that is
> used as a cheque card.  Lots of purchases over $100.  I've  bought a
> miniature video camera with it, maybe 1500 dollars US.
> 
> Still involves merchant charges of course. As far as they are concerned
> it is no different from a credit card. The cashier at the till probably
> doesn't even know the difference (after all it says "Visa" on it).

Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys

[Ken Brown]

"R. A. Hettinga" wrote:

> > The reason we have ready availability of credit in the first place
> > is because consumer debt is the most profitable business in the
> > United States.
> 
> I really wonder what component of this market is actually payment
> driven. After all, to easily buy *anything* over, say, $100 right
> now, you have to borrow money, use a credit card, to do it.

?

I use a debit card, one that draws against my bank current account the
way a cheque does (probably "check" to you). It's the same card that is
used as a cheque card.  Lots of purchases over $100.  I've  bought a
miniature video camera with it, maybe 1500 dollars US. 

Still involves merchant charges of course. As far as they are concerned
it is no different from a credit card. The cashier at the till probably
doesn't even know the difference (after all it says "Visa" on it).

Re: trillions a day?

[Ken Brown]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> How could this possibly be true? :ast I checked, GDP for the US
> was about 10 trillion bucks a year,  the combined GDP of
> every nation on earth per year can't be more than 100 trillion,
> most of which doesn't involve anything crosiing a border,
> so how can there possibly be trillions of dollars worth of
> foreign exchange a day?

Because the money goes round more than once.

Because most foreign exchange ends up right back where it started before
the end of the day, with tiny bits shaved off for interest.

Because vast proportions of the apparent US money traded are, and have
been for years, in the "euro-dollar" market in London and never touches
down in America at all. (the relative importance of that has declined
but other non-US markets are growing to replace it)

Because banks lend money they don't have, and the people they lend it to
lend it to others, who can include banks, who can lend the same money to
more than one person - and as long as no-one is *really* stupid
(remember Nick Leeson?) most of the money comes back home at settlement
time.

Because lots of money doesn't really represent spending power at all.
Say that A owes B a billion dollars. B owes C a billion dollars worth of
euros. C owes A a billion dollars worth of yen. Minor fluctuations in
exchange rates, combined with traders efforts to pull a fast one,  mean
that smaller amounts of money - say a few hundred thousand a day -
permanently changes hands, and can be spent. But, absent the meltdown of
one or another market,  the whole pot never gets spent. It can't,
because it is mostly always promised to someone else.

Because people don't just trade "money", whatever that is. They trade
various kinds of rights and duties to money and other property. A has a
billion dollars. How much is it worth to B to buy the right to borrow
that billion for 1 day sometime next week, if they choose to? That has a
value. A sells that right to B, and C and D. What happens if B & C both
want to cash in? Well, A has to borrow the second billion from E in a
hurry... and so on.

Because as Bruce Sterling told us many years ago, cyberspace is real, it
is where the banks keep the money. 

Most of the money in the world is entries in databases in London banks
and market traders that no-one will ever spend. Most of the rest is in
banks in Singapore, Tokyo, and New York. No-where else has any at all,
statistically speaking :-)

Ken

Re: NYT: Techies Now Respect Government

[Ken Brown]

Tim May wrote:
> 
> On Sunday, May 26, 2002, at 10:07  AM, John Young wrote:
> 
> > Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today:
> >
> For example, in another place:
> 
> "The question `How can this technology be used against me?' is now a
> real R-and-D issue for companies, where in the past it wasn't really
> even being asked," said Jim Hornthal, a former vice chairman of
> Travelocity.com. "People here always thought the enemy was Microsoft,
> not Mohamed Atta.""
> 
> No, the reason companies deployed crypto was not because they feared
> Microsoft would read their mail, but because they feared hackers,
> terrorists, thieves would read their mail.

> As for worrying about terrorism, many corporate headquarters have
> anti-truckbomb measures in place. In front of the Noyce Building in
> Santa Clara, Intel's high-rise  headquarters building, there are
> extensive barriers and other measures to prevent a truck bomb from being
> driven into the main lobby and detonated. These have been there for most
> of the past decade; security was not an afterthought resulting from 9/11.

Exactly

I can't imagine that any large US company that operated abroad - which
is effectively all of big ones - didn't think about the same sort of
thing.  My ex-employers did business in a number of African and
middle-eastern countries, some of them in a state of civil war, and had
planned responses to kidnapping or murder of employees or their
families, and to armed attack on company buildings, so physical security
had always been on the agenda. 

If any of them were complacent about security in the USA itself, they
would surely have been shaken out of it in the 1960s if not before.
(Hey, didn't you guys use to have bank robbers? And what about the days
when payrolls really were rolls of paper money?). Anyway, after abortion
clinic bombings in the 1990s, and the Atlanta Olympic & Oklahoma
bombings and Seattle protests surely no corporation  the USA could have
been naive enough to think that they were immune to politcal violence? 

The US company I used to work for in London had it's buildings within
the blast radius of IRA bombs in 1983 and 1991 (and nearby in 1982 and
1995).  The main thing that worried them in London was being occupied by
demonstrators against the company's policies in other countries, or by
"anti-Globalisation" protestors. We had  discussions with police and
others about corporate response to attacks or demonstrations. I
participated in them at one point to  discuss IT security.  It was that
sort of discussion that persuaded people to pay for firewalls and proxy
servers. I don't think the idea that whole areas of the net woudl be
wiped out by stupid Microsoft word macros occured to many of the non-IT
managers, but they certainly didn't want to be hacked by Greens, who
some of them had an exaggerated fear of. One of the reasons I knew it
was time to leave was when I found myself talking to men in suits about
defending ourselves against demonstrations that friends of mine might
have been taking part in.

Re: Degrees of Freedom vs. Hollywood Control Freaks

[Ken Brown]

"Major Variola (ret)" wrote:

> Jeezum, how old *are* you?   We haven't called vacuum tubes 'valves' for
> some time..  

Oh yes we do!  I never call them anything but "valves".

Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet

[Ken Brown]

Lucky Green wrote:
> 
> Peter wrote:
> > (Hmm, I wonder if it can be argued that making stuff intended
> > for public  distribution inaccessible violates the creator's
> > moral rights?  I know that  doesn't apply in the US, but in
> > other countries it might work.  Moral rights  can't be
> > assigned, so no publisher can take that away from you.
> 
> Peter has an interesting point, since in addition to common law applies
> to a trend in copyright that is prevalent in Europe (and presumably some
> other countries), but rather alien to the US, taking that trend further.

[...snip...] 

> Bills are pending or have
> already passed, that make it illegal for a buyer of a work of art to
> simply dispose of the work, or use it as kindling in his fireplace, once
> he no longer desires to own it. No, you can't just burn that painting
> you bought from some street corner painter five years ago. Though you
> are permitted to give the painting back to the artist. Without
> compensation, of course.

[...snip...] 

True, but it is an old process. In French law there has been a concept
of "moral rights" in a work for a very long time. 
These are inalienable, you can't sell them. The two most important are
(IIR the jargon correctly) "integrity" and "paternity".

The right of integrity means that if someone buys the copyright to a
work, then alters the work in a way that could affect the reputation of
the originator, they can be sued. So, for example, if a painter paints
a  picture, sells it to a publisher, then the publisher prints a defaced
version as a book cover, the painter can perhaps sue the publisher.

The right of paternity is the right to be known as the originator. It
was  imported into English law in, IIRC, 1989, but has to be asserted -
which  is why nearly all books published in Britain these days have a
note asserting the rights of the author to be known as the author.

These rights did not exist in the USA (& still don't, quite),  but the
US didn't really have copyright law in the European sense until the
1980s anyway - what they /called/ copyright was something you had to
apply for and register - very different from our English tradition which
is based on an idea of the natural property rights of an artist or
author in their own work, and so has never had to be registered or
applied for, any more than you have to get government permission to own
the clothes you stand up in. The moral rights limit the freedom of
action of publishers to the benefit of artists and authors, not, as far
as I know  the ultimate purchasers, but then IANAL and
IA-certainly-NA-French-L.

Some people who know a lot more about it than I do have said that
English law traditionally treated copyright as a matter of property,
French as a matter of personality, and the US as a sort of government
licenced monopoly or patent. But they are all much closer to each other
these days, with international copyright law being a compromise between
the old systems.

Ken Brown

Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet

[Ken Brown]

Steve Furlong wrote:
 
> My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do
> any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several
> years ago and recently?


In practice these days many scientists put copies of their stuff on
personal or institutional websites, perhaps regardless of journal's
objections.  If you Google for the authors of recent papers you often
find something, quite often something closely resembling their next
paper. 

There is a difference between refusing a paper that has already
appeared  elsewhere and trying to enforce copyright after paper
publication. Most journals try the first, many no longer try the second.
It really depends how much clout they have.  /Nature/ might be able to
enforce their embargo by the mere threat of not publishing your next
paper.  /The Proceedings of the  Yorkshire Geological Society/ might be
less fearsome.  I doubt if anyone makes a fuss about papers presented at
scientific conferences or privately distributed to colleagues (how
"private" is "private" is up to the editors I suppose) Abstracts,
posters, and  so on don't usually count as prior publication - science
could hardly function if they did.

Some publishers - such as the American Society for Microbiology - say
they won't accept papers published on a non-personal website, but don't
mind those that have appeared on a private website.  Also data can be
published as long as it doesn't "constitute the substance of the
submission". Biomolecular journals often /require/ that data (especially
sequence data) be freely available online. 

/Nature/ also allows personal republication: "we are happy to extend to
all authors the rights laid out in our new licence agreements in respect
of the material assigned to us: to re- use the papers in any printed
volume of which they are an author; to post a PDF copy on their own
(not-for-profit) website; to copy (and for their institutions to copy)
their papers for use in coursework teaching; and to re-use figures and
tables."
(http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/05_faq.xml&style=xml/05_faq.xsl)

/Science/ still demands exclusive copyright as far as I know.
(http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/contribinfo/faq/copyright_faq.shtml)
but explicitly allows not-for-profit online "reprints" /after/
publication.

These days, if your paper is /not/ online, it is less likely to be read.
So it is in the interest of the scientist to get it as widely available
as possible. Publishers walk a fine line between over-exposure, reducing
potential paper sales, and annoying their contributors.

On-line access to material has now become a 100% necessity in almost all
fields. Most people looking up papers start with abstracting services
and citation indexes such as SCI, which is available to research
institutions through various deals (ours come through
http://tame.mimas.ac.uk), or Medline
(http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html), Current Contents,
EMBASE & so on, all of which are now online. If a journal isn't
abstracted (both the ones mentioned above are) it is unlikely to be read
except by a small group.

Many journals and publishers make some or all of their full texts
available on line to subscribers, and a large minority make them
available to non-subscribers. Some put recent papers on their websites
and withdraw them later, others are print-only for the first year or two
and upload older stuff.  There are also a number of commercial web
archives to which you can subscribe - but of course a great many
research institutions do, so many scientists are used to seeing things
online. I can see a lot of things from Science Direct
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/) or Elsevier.  others like PubMed
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed). There are old
papers archived in places like JSTOR.

In the fields I have looked at most - microbial ecology, evolutionary
biology - I reckon I can read rather more than half of the relevant
papers  online, about half of those freely the rest because we subscribe
to various services.  In straight microbiology the proportion is
probably higher, largely because of the American Microbiology Society
which puts a lot of its publications on the website. (Such as
http://intl-aem.asm.org/ - they also say they throttle the site allowing
no more than 1 download per minute per remote site) A lot of learned
societies are in effect either charities or government-funded, and so
are less concerned with profit. For example the US National Academy of
Sciences now puts new papers up daily, often some time before they
appear in print - the latest version has Quint, Smith, et al (2002)
"Bone patterning is altered in the regenerating zebrafish caudal fin
after ectopic expression of sonic hedgehog and bmp2b or exposure to
cyclopamine" which is as good a title as any
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/122571799v1

Loads of review & "current" journals are online as well. The "Annual
Reviews" are all online (thou

Re: Artist's rights? [was: RE: Sci Journals, authors, internet]

[Ken Brown]

These laws don't really get into cyberpunks territory, because they are
about rights that are reserved to the original artist, and cannot be
transferred to publishers or distributors or record companies, and can
only be possessed by natural persons, not corporations. So (in France,
not the USA) a musician or a film directory might be able to sue Time
Warner or Sony if they insist on adding watermarks or copy protection to
a work, but neither could sue a cypherpunk for taking the watermarks
off.  In the USA the moral rights, AFAICT, wouldn't apply to the copy or
reproduction anyway, only the original. 

"Trei, Peter" wrote:

> As an example, consider the Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc', a 12 foot
> high, 120 foot long, 70 ton slab of rusty (and usually grafitti covered)
> steel which blocked the entrance to the main Federal building in
> lower Manhatten for several years. After about a zillion complaints,
> it was moved, and Serra sued the GSA for $30million, on the grounds
> that the piece was "site specific", and that by moving it the GSA had
> destroyed it.
> 
> http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm

But the important point about that is that the artist lost!  According
to the website the tried "breach of contract, trademark violations,
copyright infringement and the violation of First and Fifth Amendment
rights" and lost all of them. So the new law has no real effect other
than to give a few days work to some lawyers.

[...]
 
> http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_101-25/123.WL.VARA.pdf
> discusses the  'Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990, which is highly
> relevant to this topic.

Thanks for that - I hadn't heard of VARA before. No real reason I should
have I suppose, it being in the USA and me not.  It seems much more
limited than the French moral rights, in that it only applies to unique
objects, not to texts or to broadcast or recorded work.

According to the commentary in that paper the US experience with VARA
seems to agree with  what I have read about the French laws (in books
and papers trying to explain them to us English, who never had such
rules before), in that few actions are taken under it and that they are
almost always relatively unknown sculptors objecting to treatment of a
work of public art. With the implication that they are doing it more for
the publicity than for the damages, which are either never awarded (in
the USA) or are tiny (in France).

Ken

Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet

[Ken Brown]

Tom wrote:

[...]
 
> - publication
>   the creator can control if and how his work gets published. only he may
>   cite from or describe his work in public as long as neither the work
>   nor a description of it are published with his permission.
>   (e.g. even the publisher can't leak stuff without the author's consent)

This is basically copy right as already existed in England, & not one of
the moral rights. 
 
> - credit
>   the creator must be given proper credit, and he can choose if and
>   what kind of credit (e.g. if he wants to use his real name or a
>   pseudonym)

Yep, this got added to English law (but not US, I think, except for the
weird VARA Peter mentioned which only applies to unique original
objects)

> - defense against disfiguration (?)
>   creator can fight against attacks on the integrity of his work,
>   within limits.
>   this is the complicated part. as I parse it, the intention was that
>   if you, say, write a poem against communism and by some freak
>   accident the communist party adopts it as their hymn, you can stop
>   them from doing so (unless you enjoy the irony of it).

I don't know about the German laws but this is not, I think, the case in
most other countries. Just borrowing a poem &  using it somewhere else
would (at worst) count as parody, which is legally protected speech in
the US (& usually in England as well).

I think the law is more intended for the Alan Smithee situation, where a
publisher (or record company, film studio, broadcaster, whatever)  takes
a work and changes it so that the author thinks it makes them look bad,
and they don't want to be associated with it. I am no expert, but I
think up till 1989 in common law jurisdictions this would have to have
been pursued as defamation - which in the USA means the aggrieved party
has effectively no chance at all, and in England that the side with the
most expensive lawyers wins.
 
> to me, the german copyright appears to take much more consideration of
> the author, while the US copyright system is entirely economical in
> nature. 

That is my general impression.  As an example of the sort of nonsense
that some countries recognise moral rights to avoid,  while Googling
around for these things I found this heap of prdroid shit:

"... any submission of materials by you will be considered a
contribution to Boeing for further use in its sole discretion,
regardless of any proprietary claims or reservation of rights noted in
the submission. Accordingly, you agree that any materials, including but
not limited to questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, plans, notes,
drawings, original or creative materials or other information, provided
by you in the form of e-mail or submissions to Boeing, or postings on
this Site, are non-confidential (subject to Boeing's Privacy Policy) and
shall become the sole property of Boeing. Boeing shall own exclusive
rights, including all intellectual property rights, and shall be
entitled to the unrestricted use of these materials for any purpose,
commercial or otherwise, without acknowledgement or compensation to you.
The submission of any materials to Boeing, including the posting of
materials to any forum or interactive area, irrevocably waives any and
all "moral rights" in such materials, including the rights of paternity
and integrity."

(http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/aboutus/site_terms.html)


Ken

PS in English these are "moral" rights - "morale" is borrowed from
French and means the mental state of an army :-)

Re: Ross's TCPA paper

[Ken Brown]

Pete Chown wrote:

[...]
 
> This doesn't help with your other point, though; people wouldn't be able
> to modify the code and have a useful end product.  I wonder if it could
> be argued that your private key is part of the source code?

Am I expected to distribute my password with my code?

Re: "Terror Reading"

[Ken Brown]

Harmon Seaver wrote:

> And the computer revolution has been
> going on in libraries for a decade now 

? 3 decades more like. I'm pretty sure that the first computerisation of
lendings was brought into the library in my home town (Brighton in
England) about the time I stopped working there part time, when I was in
the 6th form (top 2 years of what Americans would call High School). I'd
have left in time to revise for exams before going to University. So it
would have been early 1975. The University library was all computerised
while I was there.

Re: Ross's TCPA paper

[Ken Brown]

Pete Chown wrote:

> BTW, I have been thinking for a while about putting together a UK
> competition complaint about DVD region coding.  No promises that
> anything will happen quickly.  On the other hand, if people offer help
> (or just tell me that they think it is a worthwhile thing to do) it will
> probably move faster.

I think it is a worthwhile thing to do. But then as I don't even have a
DVD player or own any DVDs I probably have very little basis for taking
such an action myself!

Re: Are you ready for your loyalty check?

[Ken Brown]

"Trei, Peter" wrote:

[...]
 
> That means tens of thousands of private-sector
> employees working in industries such as
> banking, chemicals, energy, transportation,
> telecommunications, shipping and public health
> would be subject to background checks as a
> condition of employment.

Cor. 

This could lead to a lot of pissed-off people, very knowledgeable about
infrastructure, losing their jobs. 

I no-longer work for a US private-sector company, though I did for 14
years, and a lot of that in computer security related jobs. Can I get to
recruit some of my ex-colleagues to the Revolution?


Just for the record I'm a Christian Socialist, and some of my best
friends are anarchists and greens, and I think that the "War Against
[other people's] Terrorism" is immoral, as is the "War Against [other
people's] Drugs", and the current government of Israel itself is using
terrorism right now, as have the governments of the USA, Britain, and
France, within the last few years. And Iran is the nearest to a
democracy in the Middke East. 

Does this mean I can get purged? 

What happens when they fire everybody?

Re: William Pierce Dies of Cancer at 68

[Ken Brown]

Eric Cordian wrote:
> 
> Pierce made a lot of sense, if one ignored the politically incorrect
> hyperbole in his writings.  It is ironic that Pierce died on the day
> Zionist War Criminal Ariel Sharon described destroying an apartment
> building full of civilians with a missile as "...in my view one of our
> biggest successes."
> 
> -
> 
> CHARLESTON, W.Va. (July 23, 2002 6:52 p.m. EDT) - White supremacist leader
> William Pierce, whose book "The Turner Diaries" is believed to have
> inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, died Tuesday of cancer. He
> was 68.


"Inspired" as to method perhaps. We don't get much news of him over
here, but IIRC McVeigh was not a white supremacist? And certainly didn't
talk with the kind of thuggish brutal irrational racism that Pierce ands
his fellows did. Of course, unlike them , he actually killed large
numbers of innocent people.

Re: warchalking on the Beeb

[Ken Brown]

5 minutes of it on the breakfast-time Today show on BBC radio 4 a couple
of days ago. Positive almost to the point of ingenuousness - they
suggested that LSE was offering wireless as a "public good" which wasn't
quite how LSE described it at a ukerna seminar 6 months ago.

online version at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2144279.stm

Ken

Optimizzin Al-gorithym wrote:
> 
> Well, its official.  Warchalking (802.11x domain marking) appeared on
> the US edition of the BBC News.  No hype re: anonymity & t*rr*r*sm &
> tigers
> & bears; a mention though of service-contract violations, and the gift
> community concept.
> Thank you Mr. Beeb.
> 
> (And all your privacy-invading TV IF locating white vans)

Re: Pizza with a credit card

[Ken Brown]

Michael Motyka wrote:

> Quite clearly cash has got to go! I'm not sure how tough this would be
> to sneak past the slumbering electorate. Pretty tough I expect. But the
> usage level is certainly going down while the percentage of electronic
> transactions is skyrocketing. We've even had concresscritters suggesting
> that the transport of $10K !interstate! should be illegal.

You want to spend ten thou on pizza?  Bloody hell, that's  excessive.
Any company selling you that much would lay themselves wide open to 
being sued because they got you addicted to fatty pizza and made you
/obese/.  They could be liable for millions! No respectable company
could possibly allow that to happen. There should be a law against it!
Our legislators must act to defend vulnerable corporations against
predatory customers like you who spend too much money!

Ken (who has to choose among the 10 or so local Pizza delivery companies
in his part of London on the basis of which postcode database they use,
because most of them think he lives in the wrong street)

Re: Challenge to TCPA/Palladium detractors

[Ken Brown]

"James A. Donald" wrote:
> 
> --
> On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Matt Crawford wrote:
> > > Unless the application author can predict the exact output of
> > > the compilers, he can't issue a signature on the object code.
> > > The
> 
> On 9 Aug 2002 at 10:48, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > Same version of compiler on same source using same build
> > produces identical binaries.
> 
> This has not been my experience.

Nor anyone else's

If only because the exact image you depends on a hell of a lot of
programs &  libraries. Does anyone expect /Microsoft/ of all software
suppliers to provide consistent versioning and reproducible or
predictable software environments? These are the people who brought us
"DLL Hell". These are the people who fell into the MDAC versioning
fiasco. 

Ken

Re: software-defined radio killer app

[Ken Brown]

The biggest police station in western Europe is being built less than
half a mile from where I live.  Your phone will keep on ringing and
ringing...

"Major Variola (ret)" wrote:
> 
> In some parts of rural america, folks signal the presence of cops by
> flashing their headlights
> when driving.
> 
> Occurs to me that would be a cool function for SDR: press code for or
> say "cop".  For N seconds,
> phone periodically sends "cop" message picked up by other phones,
> ignored by base station [1].  Phone also listens for these local
> broadcasts.  Upon hearing a suprathreshold number of "cop" messages the
> phone alerts its owner.
> 
> Better than a radar detector for emissionless, but visible, cops.  Over
> the hill coverage.  Issues of
> spoofing, trust, consensus familiar to readers here.
> 
> [1] (different band entirely?  UWB?  B-tooth? FRS? )

Re: Cypherpunks and Irish Travellers

[Ken Brown]

Eric Cordian wrote:
> 
> Anonymous writes:
> 
> > Terrific article below about the "Irish Travellers", an inbred gypsy-like
> > society which has decades of practice in anonymity, multiple identities,
> > secret languages, fake IDs, and other cypherpunk-like practices.  They
> > live in trailer parks and make their living with home improvement scams
> > and various frauds, just like many cypherpunks.  They even reside in towns
> > with names like White Settlement.  I thought that was Tim May's house!
> 
> > Read on for a glimpse of the future of cypherpunk culture...
> 
> Things must be slow on Theory-Edge again.

Mega-slow.  These people are not about to destroy Civilisation as we
Know It.  And have nothing whatsoever to do with cypherpunks as far as I
can see.

There may not be very many travellers in the USA but they are hardly the
world's most unknown cultural group.  There are even websites about them
(some links at
http://sca.lib.liv.ac.uk/collections/gypsy/travell_old.htm) 

Over here in Britain they are just about the last group it is socially
acceptable to be racist against in public. "Travellers" is their own
name for themselves, people used to call them "Tinkers" in Scotland,
which was mildly derogatory, or mistake them for Gypsies (Romany) in
England, which is just plain wrong. 

Some of them got into the news over here 2 or 3 years ago after a fight
on a plane when "air rage" was all the rage. They were neighbours of
mine, the campsite is only about 200 metres from my house.  As far as I
know they never did anyone round here any harm. One of their kids used
to sit next to my daughter at school. Though these ones are Connors, 
Coyles, Coopers, and O'Driscolls rather than Carrolls and Gormans.  They
do seem to like names near the begining of the alphabet. 

One odd thing about the news coverage was that it included the age of
the accused. One of the women who I had always assumed was  in her 50s
if not 60s turned out to be in her mid 30s. Not any easy life.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/844862.stm
http://wwa.rte.ie/news/2000/0811/airrage.html

Re: [OT Canute] Re: [LINK] [Fwd: Interesting KPMG report on DRM]

[Ken Brown]

In the interests of even more pedantry and accuracy can I point out that
Canute (usually spelled "Knut" these days in solidarity with our Dansk
brethren :-)  was mostly a king in *Southern* England, living at Bosham
near Chichester? Though at one point he ruled over all England, Denmark,
and some of the bits in between as well.

"Trei, Peter" wrote:
> 
> > Robin Whittle[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> > .
> [lots of good stuff about the music business clipped]
> 
> > I think this is an accurate analysis of a really sad situation.  Like
> > King Canute, the record companies are devoting most of their thinking
> > and resources to holding back the tide.
> >
> [even more good stuff clipped]
> 
> In the interests of pedantry and accuracy, may I point out that Canute
> did not actually expect to hold back the tide. Canute was an an early
> Danish king of northern England, living ~995-1035. Like most modern
> leaders, he was surrounded by yes-men. Unlike them, he did something
> about it:

Re: was: Echelon-like resources..

[Ken Brown]

Tyler Durden wrote:

[...]

> Granted, Chonskty can be a little tiring on the ears

His voice seems to have mellowed over the years. I heard him on the
radio last week and he sounded just like Garrison Keillor :-)

Ken Brown

Some non-DRM uses of TCPA/Palladium

[Ken Hirsch]

I've thought of some non-DRM uses of TCPA/Palladium technology

1. Electronic voting machines (as in Brazil)--that way you can tell that the
vote totals that are communicated to you were indeed generated using the
authorized software.  I still think there should be an auditable paper
trail.

2. Prevent cheating in open-source network games.  In competition, you could
know whether you're competing against the un-modified versions of the
software.  This problem was noted with Quake:

http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/26/1255258.shtml
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/27/1127253.shtml

Kind of ironic that TCPA could actually solve a problem of open source
software.

Re: eJazeera?

[Ken Brown]

As always, standards are driven by the mass-market and the mass market
is already speaking on this one. In 18 months time there will be no
difference between mobile phones & cheap digital cameras - all but the
cheapest phones will come with built-in cameras.

Its almost certain that these devices will have GPS location, and
probable that they will have Bluetooth as well. 802.11 less likely
because of power consumption - possible that there will be little "base
stations"  to go Blt <-> WiFi  so the Bluetooth becomes a wireless drop
cable. 

Realtime video isn't on the horizon unless someone pulls a lot of
bandwidth out of the bag, as ever network speeds grow more slowly than
processing power.

So effectively everybody will be walking around with the ability to take
timestamped photos and transmit them. BrinWorld arrives, at least in
public places.  No policeman gets to bludgeon a demonstrator unrecorded
ever again - expect them to wear visors and helmets increasingly often,
and to remove the identifying marks from uniforms (as, or course, riot
cops and vigilantes have been doing for decades)

The authorities will be able to take down the cell networks - though
they won't be able to do that without causing some publicity.  They
won't be able to confiscate all phones from everyone who is walking the
street. Presumably in high-security situation (like interviews with
presidents or rides on torture planes) phones can be removed from
visitors but they will be rare.  Mobile phones are now so ubiquitous
that taking them away has come to seem as odd as asking visitors to
remove their shoes or to wear face masks. 


Ken Brown


Tyler Durden wrote:
> 
> Well, the rason d'etre of 'eJazeera' as I see it is primarily for
> publically-taken photos and videos to be quickly "gypsied" away from their
> port of origination (ie, the camera that took them), so that they can
> eventually make it into a public place on ye old 'Net. The enabling
> technology as I see it here is802.11b, Wi-Fi. A typical scenario is the case
> of public demonstrations where the local "authorities" are called in, and
> where they get, shall we say, a little overzealous. In many such cases
> (here, New York City, Here, USA, and there--China, etc...), such authorities
> will attempt to confiscate devices that could have captured the events or
> captured the perpetrators (and their badge numbers, if applicable) in photo
> or video.
> 
> The ultimate aim of eJazeera is to make even the thought of "capturing" such
> video non-existent, due to the commonplace practices outlined in an
> eJazeera-type document (or eventually tribal knowledge). Short of that, it
> is of course in itself desirable for such events to get onto the public
> 'Net.

Re: OPPOSE THE WAR! We are going to ruin Iraq to get the oil. Who's ne

[Ken Hirsch]

Harmon Seaver wrote:

>   I don't see that Saddam is any less moral than Dubbya and Asscruft.

What can you possibly mean by saying this?  You lose all credibility for
real criticism when you utter such inanities.  It's like comparing a
shoplifter with Jeffrey Dahmer.  Either you're ignorant of what Saddam is
about or you have no sense of proportion.

Or maybe I'm just not paying attention.  Was I not watching the news the
night when Bush, after seizing power, marched onto the floors of Congress in
front of cameras and had 21 top officials hauled off for summary execution,
as Saddam did in 1979?  (btw, the U.S. had nothing to do with Saddam taking
power)

Did I miss it when Bush had Colin Powell's brother tortured to death, like
Saddam did with his foreign minister's son?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,801613,00.html

I must have missed the revelation of the prison where Bush is holding
children hostage, like Saddam's prison which was too horrible for Scott
Ritter to talk about.
(http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,351165,00.html)

I must have missed the testimony about Bush crippling and maiming children
with torture.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/from_our_own_correspondent/2058253.stm or
http://tinyurl.com/2p21)

I must have missed the thousands of political prisoners executed.  I must
have missed it when Bush invaded Canada AND Mexico.  I think my radio was
broken the day Bush gassed Berkeley.

Get a clue!  Check out Amnesty International's annual report on Iraq.
http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/aireport/ar99/mde14.htm or ANY OTHER YEAR!

Re: Secret Court Says U.S. Has Broad Wiretap Powers

[Ken Hirsch]

> But you forget - the BATF agents were all beeped and informed to not
> bother to come in to work that day, and instead met up elsewhere, suited
> up so they could arrive just in time (a few minutes after the boom) to be
> heroic.
> 
> That indicates something, what exactly it indicates is left as an
> excercise to the reader.

Mainly it indicates how gullible you are when it comes to conspiracy theories.

http://www.courttv.com/casefiles/oklahoma/nichtranscripts/1126pm.html
http://www.courttv.com/casefiles/oklahoma/documents/grandjury_123098.html
http://www.okcitytrial.com/content/dailytx/050697a/LukeFraneyDirectExaminatio.html
http://63.147.65.175/bomb/bomb0109.htm

Re: The End of the Golden Age of Crypto

[Ken Hirsch]

Jim Choate writes:
>
> It's not I who is doing the misreading. I sent this along because I don't
> know -your- level, which considering your understanding of
> 'completeness'...

Peter Fairbrother has said nothing inaccurate about completeness, whereas
your statements about completeness having to do with the ability to write
statements is nonsense.

Re: ...(one of them about Completeness)

[Ken Hirsch]

Jim Choate says:

> Godel's does -not- say mathematics is incomplete, it says we can't prove
> completeness -within- mathematics proper. To do so requires a
> meta-mathematics of some sort.

You are mixing up what Godel says about proving consistency within a system,
and his incompleteness theorem.  Godel most certainly DOES prove that
mathematics is incomplete.

>To write a string down to feed to your truth engine is one thing, to be
> able to write it in either the 'true' or 'false' list is something
> entirely different. Nobody cares about the first part, they care a great
> deal about the second.

>And no it won't be 'true for some, false for some'. The actual content of
> the symbols is of -no interst-. We are trying to determine if the string
> is legitimate within the axioms and their grammer, not it's absolute
> context sensitive result.

Here you are wrong.  The content of the symbols is very important.  The
study of mathematical logic, including Godel, depends on comparing semantic
truth (validity in models) to syntactic truth (provability).  You are only
dealing with the syntax.

"Completeness" means that every _valid_ formula can be _proved_.

The only connection I see between completeness and what you said about
"writing down" every "true" string is this:

If the set of valid formulas in a system is not recursively enumerable, then
the system cannot be complete.  This is true of arithmetic.

But this is not the definition of "complete."  There are systems that are
incomplete for other reasons, even over finite models.  And there are
infinite systems (e.g. the first-order logic) that are complete, but they
are not sufficient to describe all of arithmetic.

Re: Akamai

[Ken Hirsch]

Harmon Seaver writes:
>Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also
> akamaitechnologies.com)? I was getting about a zillion hits on my web
server
> from them this morning. They seem to offer services to gov't agencies
according
> to their website.

Their main service is serving static content, so as to reduce the load on
their client's servers and improve response time.  Originally almost all
they did was deliver graphics.  Their clients would place graphics on
Akamai's servers and their html would point to Akamai's servers for images.
Now they can put together content within an HTML page based on "edge-side
includes" (http://www.esi.org).  They also serve streaming formats for their
clients.

None of that would explain why they were hitting your site.  Perhaps they
are working on client-caching or a search engine.

Re: Money is about expected future value....nothing more, nothing less

[Ken Brown]

Marcel Popescu wrote:

> It does appear that the law in England is not as "demanding" as I believed:
> 
> http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/legaltender.htm
> 
> < opinion, legal tender is not a means of payment that must be accepted by the
> parties to a transaction, but rather a legally defined means of payment that
> should not be refused by a creditor in satisfaction of a debt.>>


Yep. If I owe you 100 quid, and I give you that value of English bank
notes, and you sue me in an English court saying I haven't paid, you
will lose. Which is fair enough - it is the state's court so why should
they help you if you don't like the state's money?

If I offer you 100 pounds worth of cowrie shells, then they might take a
different view.

Re: The trend toward "signing away rights"

[Ken Brown]

> Trei, Peter" wrote:
> 

> If you put one of these stickers on your car, you are giving the
> police permission to pull the car over without probable cause if
> they find it on the road late at night (1am-5am, or something like
> that), just to check that all is in order.
> 
> I think it's being promoted as an anti-theft tool.

This is parents using the police to control their own children.

Re: Definitions, Proofs, Derivations

[Ken Hirsch]

"Sarad AV" writes:
> there will be no inconsistency in a formal axiomatic
> systems

Huh?

>-but can any one point me to a contradicting
> set of axioms in an axiomatic system?

In general you have to consider the whole system, including derivation
rules, not just the axioms, although you can certain start with a set of
axioms like:

{ x=1,  x=2}
or, come to think of it,
{ 1=2 }

Most famously, Frege's system was shown to be inconsistent by Russel.  More
recently, the first edition of Quine's Mathematical Logic (1940) was shown
to be inconsistent by Rosser.

For Frege, see "From Frege to Gvdel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic,
1879-1931" by Jean van Heijenoort

Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants

[Ken Brown]

Michael Cardenas wrote:
 
> I think you're overreacting a bit. The actual case involves someone
> who was in a foriegn country for years, and was in the war zone at the
> time he was fighting the US.

Hey, I'm not a USAan and I don't even live there. But I think I know
your Constitution well enough to know that I never read the bit about
how long you have to live in a foreign country to lose your rights.

The argument is just the same as the one we're always using about crypto
or security. The system is as strong as it's weakest link. If there are
2 doors to your house you need to lock them both.

Someone, somewhere, has to decide whether this man's service in a
foreign army is naughty enough to lose him his constitutional rights. If
*that* decision-making process has weaker legal protection than a normal
criminal trial would have had, the effect is that the legal protection
of the whole system is reduced.  If the process of removing someone's
constitutional rights is not itself subject to those rights, then those
rights are hollow and can be removed at will.

Ken Brown

Re: Indo European Origins

[Ken Brown]

"R. A. Hettinga" wrote:
> 
> At 4:25 PM -0500 on 1/9/03, Trei, Peter wrote:
> 
> > Basque is unique, as you say
> 
> I remember someone saying somewhere, probably on PBS, that Basque is *very*
> old, paleolithic, and lots of popular mythology has cropped up that it's
> the closest living relative to some other ur-language, which even
> Indo-European is derived from. 



All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are the
same age.

Of course some might change more slowly than others (Greek seems to have
a;ltered less than Latin in 2500 years), or might remain in one place
longer than others (it is silly to say that Welsh is an older language
than English, but it is older in Britain)

I don't know. The youth of today. They should make them all do
cladistcs.

Re: Indo European Origins

[Ken Brown]

Tim May wrote:
 
> > All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are
> > the same age.
> 
> This statement is so silly it leaves me speechless...
> 
> Getting my breath back,
> 
> > Of course some might change more slowly than others (Greek seems to
> > have
> > a;ltered less than Latin in 2500 years), or might remain in one place
> > longer than others (it is silly to say that Welsh is an older language
> > than English, but it is older in Britain)

> Nonsense. Icelandic is little changed from the Old Norse of 1000 A.D.
> Icelanders can easily read the sagas without help; modern Danes and
> Norwegians cannot. English, by contrast, is substantially different
> from just the Middle English of Chaucer, let alone the Old English of
> Beowulf.  

Er, that's  exactly what I said - they are the same age, but some change
more slowly than others...
and I did warn that I was being unreasonably pedantic.

I just about can read /The Canterbury Tales/ straight off, though it
does help knowing some of the background.  There is a sort of knack to
it, a twist of the mind, that once you catch it shows that is more like
modern English than it appears at first sight.  Sort of like imagining
it was English written down phonetically by a drunk Belgian :-)

But /Beowulf/, as you say, might as well be a foreign language.  I last
read it with the Old English and a translation open at the same time, &
even then it was hard going.  /Gawaine and the Green Knight/ and /Pearl/
are much harder than the /Tales/, though almost contemporary. Chaucer's
London dialect was much more modern than the northern Gawaine Poet,

Re: Atlas Shrugs in Venezuela

[Ken Brown]

"James A. Donald" wrote:
 
> Harmon Seaver:
> >Why not the army?
> 
> If it was only the executives and a handful of highly qualified
> specialists, you would not need the army.

Strikers are mostly oil industry. And better-paid workers, technicians,
engineers & so on. They might include safety officers, firefighters,
truckdrivers, communications engineers, construction workers & so on. 

I don't know what the Venezualan army is like, but the British army is
full of such people, & has been for at least 150 years - the technical
branches outnumberd the infantry sometime in the 19th century - though
that is partly due to the British habit of counting the Artillery as a
technical branch, the others being the Royal Engineers (what you guys
call combat engineers), the Electrical & Mechanical Engineers
(everything from motor mechanics to network technicians) and the Corps
of Signals.  They aren't all thick squaddies.

Right now the firefighters are on strike in England & the military are
running the emergency services.  Not as well as the professionals, but
better than any other bunch you would be likely to find.

Re: DNA evidence countermeasures?

[Ken Brown]

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, thus still
> leaving fragments like hair or skin cells, but contaminated with wild mix
> of DNA, so the PCR-copied mixture will be unusable for reliable
> identification?

Nope. Already they have DNA from all over in the sample. Bacteria if
nothing else. Probably other humans. So if something from you matches
something there, you are spotted. If you were trying it on you would do
best to spray around DNA from a close relative so they can't tell the
difference.  

Think - you are a suspect. They find 2 human DNA signals at the scene of
the crime, one from you, one from someone quite different from you.
Well, they can look for the other guy in their own  time, but they've
got you. If they are using a stringent enough test (often they don't)
the odds against it not being you are huge.

But if they have 2 almost-but-not-quite different sequences - well, how
can they be sure tht the one that looks like yours isn't really the
other one amplified badly (which happens)?

NB - the vast majority of forensic DNA evidence is used to support the
defence.