Slashdot Mirror

"There was a report several years ago that the US had used the rock outcroppings behind Osama in one of his videos to attempt to locate him. I wonder if some of these modifications are made to make locating them more difficult?"

He could have been taken when the CIA met with Bin Landin at the American Hospital two months before 9/11 or when the FBI met with Bin Landin in California in 1986.

was: Re:Done for their safety?

How do you ensure that someone is a citizen and is allowed to vote? By having them log in, of course. Once they're logged in, what's to prevent their vote from being associated with their identity? Nothing, of course.

It isn't a matter of honest vendors. It can generally assumed that most/all cryptography companies are owned and run by the various security services. For decades a US/Swiss/Israli firm Crypto AG sold a cryptology machine with a secret built in backdoor. At least until Pres. Reagan announced on television that they were reading Gaddafi's coded messages.

There has also been speculation why Windows requires three unique signing keys. The disengenious reason given being that in case the first one got lost in a fire.

http://www.aci.net/KALLISTE/whodblat.htm

From the LA Times - 1/30/1997

"WASHINGTON--The Clinton administration, acting at the direction of the president and first lady, created a massive computer data system with federal funds in 1994 to keep tabs on as many as 350,000 people, including large political donors, Democratic campaign workers and visitors to the White House."...

Privacy, Schmivacy.

Google WhoDB if you want to know more.

Like how Sheryl Hall (the person reponsible for the develpment of the WhoDB) was fired at the direction of Hillary Clinton when she refused to allow the system to be modified and accessed to accommodate illegal purposes related to Democratic Party fund raising activities....

Official court document:
http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/992665.P .pdf

NSA, Crypto AG, and the Iraq-Iran Conflict

Breaking Iranian Codes

Hmmmmm... I know *I* have to wonder. I have a few Macs, and while they're very good, they're definitely not deserving of the amount of worship I see here. The Finder sucks compared to Windows Explorer, Safari is barely out of Beta, the damn things are still at 1-2 Ghz with a crippled bus, iLife is still crashy and often slow (iPhoto STILL sucks), and Photoshop REALLY IS FASTER ON WINDOWS. OS X is not Open Source like Linux, it doesn't have the millions of apps or printer/scanner/camera/etc. support like Windows. Apple computers are LOSING marketshare, which means Jobs, being a smart and hardcore businessman, will eventually migrate COMPLETELY from making computers to iPods (his most profitable product), leaving all us Maccies in a BeOS-like situation of homelessness, and since OS X is proprietary, no way to continue development ourselves. There are ahem--let's say, "rumors" of backdoors built into OS X at the request of the NSA (It was done with LotusNotes and many other important pieces of software (search this page for 'Lotus'), and I highly doubt Apple would be able to resist similar demands, especially when a large cash carrot was dangled in front of what was, at the time, a very financially desperate Apple).

Yes, of course, I know this is a "troll". I know better than to post something "Insightful" or "Informative". I've learned that on Slashdot, when reality conflicts with hype, reality must be wrong. Don't bother reading it or thinking about it; just mod it down and go back to blissful unaware sleep. I and the other Overlords will take care of everything for you. Damn, it's hard to blow the whistle when your mouth is taped shut by the religious masses.

1. E-Gold
2. Evo Cash
3. NetPay
4. PayByGold etc.

Also see The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe ( ". . . inspecting the global underbelly: privacy, money laundering, espionage.") for more info

It all started with David Chaum's DigiCash and it was very promising. The patents and the technology however are owned by InfoSpace today and are collecting dust. The Blind Signature patent will become available soon, though, and somebody might pick it up. Then there was CyberCash (with Cybercoin), and they went belly up. Then there was Millicent, they died, too. Amir Herzberg (see here) used to be very active in the space but also gave up. Then there was Stefan Brands' system (see here) which never really saw the light in an implementation. Stefan used to work at DigiCash with Chaum (but they did not really mix) and then moved on to ZeroKnowledge where he left from a couple of years ago. This is just a brief recollection of things, I am sure I missed a lot, but they all failed. And this should tell us something ...

And of course we all know the government never makes false claims against people. (for the record, that was the first one I found that fit my chosen example; since I'm not a professional government whistleblower and don't have access to Lexis Nexis I am not in a position to cite every case ever where the government has admitted to using false evidence)

Instead of trying to make thousands of transactions a day totaling only a few pennies or less (which is what ads result in if you're lucky), I propose a simpler system; a small yearly fee (less than $10USD) which works out to a micropayment per day. Memberships and subscriptions tend to cost more money for a smaller period of time.

• implicit (yet secure) payments. The user should be able to configure their (trusted) web browser to automatically make requested per-page micropayments to a server if those payments are below a threshold (e.g., $0.001). The browser can prompt the user for permission to make larger micropayments. It's very important that the user does not need to intervene in the micropayment process every time they request a document. Since a user can not read through the whole source of the browser and anything else that might need to make payments, perhaps the browser and other programs should call an external program to make the payments, the user's `payment agent'. This would be a small program that makes payments while following the user's policies and restrictions.
• extremely low (or non-existent) per-transaction fees. If the provider(s) of the payment system are charging $0.10 to the payment receiver for each micropayment, it obviously won't work. This essentially implies the next requirement.
• contact with payment system provider(s) not required for every transaction. If the server collecting micropayments must contact the provider(s) every time a payment is collected, the system will not be feasible. The server should be able to store up many micropayments and redeem them with the provider all at once every day/week/month.

• http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/mepeirce/Project/Mlists/mini faq.html
• http://research.compaq.com/SRC/personal/steveg/mil licent/millicent.html
• http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/yiannis/pubs.html
• http://www.aci.net/kalliste/cryptnum.htm
• http://www.chaum.com/articles/list_of_articles.htm

There's a company : eCash Technologies Inc having a viable solution for micropayment, but I don't think it will become a standard before all patent claims on this are lifted (a cryptographer, David Chaum owns most of the patents on digital cash), like RSA usage took off when we approached the end of the patent and explodes now.

Another technology that won't took off before patents expire...

See also http://www.aci.net/kalliste/dcguide.htm.

You can read more about it on WIRED.

France has also complained about PROMIS.

Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Corporation who was going after the government for stealing PROMIS gave this document to each member of the House Judicary Committee.

and we must not forget that Crypto AG supplied encryption machines to over 120 countries. Officials from Iran, Iraq, and the Vatican, to name a few, relied on Crypto's tech for top secret dispatches and the NSA had a deal with Crypto, which gave them a backdoor that made those encrypted messages easy to decipher and they were not even a US company.

Also what about Lotus Notes' NSA backdoor that is in international versions of the software.

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

Apparently this is exactly what Trudel is ranting about if you follow the link 'backgrounds' (leading to just more rant):

The worst news is hidden. Embedded in the middle of the official's talk was a phrase, "re-examination rights." Did that mean that any U.S. firm with patents will be subject to endlessly defending them against re-examination by the Japanese keiretsus?

Re-examination occurs when someone challenges a patent, usually when there is litigation.
Today, if one firm infringes on another firm's patent, it is running a high risk, potentially facing triple damages and legal fees if found guilty. And the cost to defend patents is more or less affordable, even for smaller firms. The Japanese have hated this system for years. Their patent system tends more to distribute technology than to restrict its use. The patent official admitted that my worst fears were valid when we spoke privately. Some Japanese officials were calling Tokyo on their cellular phones to report, "The U.S. has given us its patent system."
(Emphasis by me)

I find nothing wrong with more bias on distributing than restricting technology, especially when i see the patent system misused as a tool to block useful but common concepts from the competition. And it doesn't look like the whole patent system was overthrown, just it's now a little easier to attack some dumb and wrongly granted patent. But Trudel is making a nice conspiracy theory about this:

The sellout occurred in letters of agreement between Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and Japanese Ambassador Takahazu Kuriyama, dated August 16, 1994.

In my opinion (but i'm not a patent attorney) the agreement makes perfect sense and is a step to establish similar procedures for patent law in the USA and Japan. The 'Ron Brown' link is really strange, apparently it tries to explain his death with brownian motion.

Try I've seen some evidence for yon president having a cocain addiction. Not really looked upon with much love in the current eyes of society.

Jeff

working unknown to their employer for the NSA

www.aci.net/kalliste/speccoll.htm
http://www.interesting-p eople.org/archive/199610/0041.html

Of course, you backed up my statement for me. Note that I do not claim that there is an ongoing operation, I am just pointing out that it isn't exactly unheard of, and that with congress and the public being kept in the dark, we can't say it isn't happening.