Source
Automatically imported from: http://commons.somewhere.com:80/rre/1999/RRE.TBTF.on.crypto.and.s.html
Content
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.
[RRE]TBTF on crypto and stuff
``` ---
This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). Send any replies to the original author, listed in the From: field below. You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" command. For information on RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html or send a message to requests@lists.gseis.ucla.edu with Subject: info rre
---
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 1999 20:21:41 -0400
From: Keith Dawson
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
TBTF for 1999-07-26: Hypocrites Party
T a s t y B i t s f r o m t h e T e c h n o l o g y F r o n t
Timely news of the bellwethers in computer and communications technology that will affect electronic commerce -- since 1994
Your Host: Keith Dawson
ISSN: 1524-9948
This issue: < http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-07-26.html > ________________________________________________________________________
C o n t e n t s
Bill to relax crypto exports is gutted House holds hearing on ICANN US national identity card looms in October US Senate committee OKs a digital signature bill A gaggle of geeks Searchspy The Hunger Site The beginnings of molecular-scale computing Tracking satellites at home Lunar Prospector to go out in a blaze of... water? Block that metaphor ________________________________________________________________________
..Bill to relax crypto exports is gutted
It's deja vu all over again
Two years ago the most privacy-friendly attempt to relax US crypto export controls, Bob Goodlatte's SAFE bill, was savaged [1] in two House committees and was eventually withdrawn. I wrote at the time:
> Justice Department backers have succeeded in shifting the > locus of debate so far in the direction of the Surveillance > Society that you can barely see the US Constitution from here.
Goodlatte reintroduced SAFE in the current legislative session and
succeeded in signing up a majority of Congress members, 258 in num-
ber, to co-sponsor the bill. Perhaps you'd imagine that such support
would give the bill an easy ride through Congressional committees?
If so you'd be reckoning without the political hypocrisy that spawned
the old saying "Pro is to con as progress is to Congress." (Thanks to
Mike Barnett
On Wednesday 21 July the House Armed Services Committee voted 47 to 6 to replace the text of the SAFE bill with one drafted by the law- enforcement community [2], and manifesting exactly the opposite ef- fect. Here is the text of the new "unSAFE" bill [3] (PDF format, 47K). Eventually the House Rules Committee will need to decide which version of SAFE, if any, reaches the floor for a vote.
Let's do an exercise in political accountability. 17 SAFE co-spon- sors sit on the Armed Services Committee, and 13 of them voted to gut the bill. (Note that even if all SAFE co-sponsors had voted to preserve the original bill, the outcome would have been the same, by a vote of 34 to 19.)
I have updated the Congressional Hypocrites page [4], which first spotlighted the 285 politicians who voted cockeyed on matters of Internet pornography, to cast a cold light on the 13 members who both sponsored the SAFE bill and voted last Wednesday to ream it out. They are:
Andrews, Robert E. (D-NJ) [5] Brady, Robert (D-PA) Chambliss, Saxby (R-GA) [6] Gibbons, Jim (R-NV) Hansen, James V. (R-UT) [7] Hayes, Robin (D-NC) Hilleary, Van (R-TN) [8] Kasich, John R. (R-OH) [9] Kennedy, Patrick J. (D-RI) Maloney, James H. (D-CT) Riley, Bob (R-AL) Ryun, Jim (R-KS) Scarborough, Joe (R-FL)
The five members marked with * are two-time losers -- they voted hypocritically on both Internet pornography and crypto export. I have caused their listings on [4] to stand out from the others in such a way as to obscure their party affiliations. On the subject of the Internet, these Congressmen have earned their denomination as charter members of the Hypocrites Party. Why not visit their Web sites [5] - [9] and express your opinion about their votes?
It's a pity that we need to single out for special accolades that minority of Congress members who do what they say they are going to do; but such is our system. The four SAFE co-sponsors who voted against gutting the bill are:
Bono, Mary (R-CA) [10] Meehan, Martin T. (D-MA) [11] Sanchez, Loretta (D-CA) [12] Smith, Adam (D-WA) [13]
Thank you and congratulations, you hardy few, for voting your con- sciences. Why not visit their Web sites [10] - [13] and express your opinion about their votes?
[1] http://tbtf.com/archive/1997-09-15.html#s01 [2] http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politics/story/20872.html?wnpg=all [3] http://www.house.gov/hasc/openingstatementsandpressreleases/106thcongress/99-07-21HR850markup.pdf [4] http://tbtf.com/resource/hypocrites.html [5] http://www.house.gov/andrews/ [6] http://www.house.gov/chambliss/ [7] http://www.house.gov/hansen/ [8] http://www.house.gov/hilleary/ [9] http://www.house.gov/kasich/ [10] http://www.house.gov/bono/ [11] http://www.house.gov/meehan/ [12] http://www.house.gov/sanchez/ [13] http://www.house.gov/adamsmith/ ____________
..House holds hearing on ICANN
To its surprise NSI gets roughed up, too
On Thursday 22 July a highly charged House subcommittee hearing con- vened to scrutinize ICANN. The politicians ended up taking the domi- nant registrar to task as well [14]. The House Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations addressed allegations that the Inter- net Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers had overstepped its authority. This news.com report [15] opines that ICANN's Esther Dyson emerged relatively intact, while the new CEO of NSI, the monopolist that had prompted the hearings, was battered and shaken.
David Post "attended" the hearing by RealAudio. He notes in an email distributed on Declan McCullagh's Politech mailing list that the one "smoking gun" to emerge came from ICANN's lawyer, Joe Sims. At the hearing an email from Sims to the Department of Justice was made public. Sims had "suggested" to DOJ that it intervene in ICANN's negotiations with NSI and Commerce:
> [O]ne thing DOJ could do is increase the level of pressure on > DOC, by some form of formal communication or a higher-level > contact... and that it would be useful for DOC to hear from > significant organization that they were perfectly willing and > capable of stepping into NSI's shoes with little difficulty, > assuming access to the root files.
[14] http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politics/story/20887.html?wnpg=all [15] http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,39613,00.html ____________
..US national identity card looms in October
Is this any way for the Beacon of Democracy to act?
The time is fast approaching when the US government will, unless a 1996 law is amended, instruct all states to replace your driver's license with one featuring your social security number in visible and machine-readable form, and possibly your fingerprints as well [16].
Here are some of the problems that widespread, mandated exposure of your social security number could cause [17].
The law that spawned these regulations from the Department of Trans- portation is the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsi- bilities Act [18], passed in 1996. Transportation was poised to an- nounce and enforce a national driver's-license standard last year, but civil liberties groups managed -- just barely -- to enact a 1- year stay of execution for the national ID card [19]. It expires in October. Opposition groups failed last month to insert into a Trans- portation funding bill a provision overturning section 656(b) of the 1996 law.
The chairman of the Immigration and Claims subcommittee of the Ju- diciary Committee, Lamar Smith (R-TX), says that creating a national ID card was never the intent of the 1996 law; he now sports a Web page [20] declaring his opposition to the very idea. But Smith has acknowledged that the regulations drafted by the Transportation Department do, in fact, establish just such a national ID.
Smith's subcommittee will hold a hearing [21] on the repeal of sec- tion 656(b) on Thursday 29 July, at 9:30 a.m., in room 2226 of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. It would be an excel- lent time to let your representative know where you stand on issues of privacy and a national ID card, especially if your representative is a member of this subcommittee:
Berman, Howard (CA, 26th district) Cannon, Chris (UT, 3rd) Canady, Charles (FL, 12th) Frank, Barney (MA, 4th) Gallegly, Elton (CA, 23rd) Goodlatte, Bob (VA, 6th) Jackson Lee, Sheila (TX, 18th) Lofgren, Zoe (CA, 16th) McCollum, Bill (FL, 8th) Meehan, Marty (MA, 5th) Pease, Ed (IN, 7th) Scarborough, Joe (FL, 1st) Smith, Lamar (TX, 21st) -- Chairman
[16] http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politics/story/20881.html?wnpg=all [17] http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs10-ssn.htm [18] http://www.networkusa.org/fingerprint/page2/fp-104-208-immigration.html [19] http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politics/story/15635.html?wnpg=all [20] http://www.house.gov/lamarsmith/idcardhtm.htm [21] http://www.house.gov/judiciary/schedule.htm ____________
..US Senate committee OKs a digital signature bill
Unifying a patchwork of state regulation
In late June the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved legislation giving electronic signatures the same legal validity as those written by hand [22]. The bill doesn't specify what tech- nology should be used for electronic signatures. It could be a boon to companies such as VeriSign that provide enabling tech for digital signatures. The bill's sponsor notes that the states have been developing their own guidelines for electronic signa- tures, but no two state plans are alike. Here's a summary [23] of the Millenium Digital Commerce Act.
Some years back TBTF Irregular Gary Stock
[22] http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,38262,00.html [23] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:s.00761: [24] http://tbtf.com/resource/FDA-e-signatures.html ____________
..A gaggle of geeks
Business development on Internet time
Once an engineering team had put themselves out for bid on eBay [25], it was only a matter of (Internet) time before someone wrote a busi- ness plan based on this idea and set up shop on the Web. In fact it was less than a month before Bid4geeks.com [26] had opened its virtual doors.
Thanks to TBTF Benefactor [27] Richard Thomas
> Is a team more or less loyal than an individual, I wonder? And > would customers be loyal to the employer, or to the team with- > in it that moved on?
[25] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-05-08.html#s10 [26] http://www.bid4geeks.com/ [27] http://tbtf.com/the-benefactors.html ____________
..Searchspy
Find out how visitors are finding your site
Searchspy [28], a Perl script written by Nelson Minar, analyzes web server logs to tell you what search terms people are using to find your Web pages. It works by looking at the referrer URL information and parsing out the query term from the search engine. Results look like this:
/people/nelson/movies/ +"Zsa Zsa Gabor" +"virginity" /projects/hive/index.html Things that link mit media lab
Of course some Web-log analysis tools attempt a similar job; but searchspy is quick and lightweight, yet it deciphers the spoor of (at last count) 35 search engines.
Using searchspy is a bit like watching a search voyeur [29], but one that shows you queries for your own pages. Minar recently discovered that a commercial product with a similar purpose is open for busi- ness at searchspy.com; they acquired the domain name seven months after he first posted his script.
[28] http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/software/searchspy/ [29] http://www.savvysearch.com/snoop/ ____________
..The Hunger Site
Doing good one click at a time
This feel-good site [30] sounds like it ought to be an email-borne
urban legend, but it is strictly for real. Visit The Hunger Site and
click the button; view a banner from the day's sponsor and they will
donate three cents to the UN World Food Program. This buys a day's
worth (1-1/2 cups) of a staple food such as maize or rice. More than
seventy thousand people clicked last Friday. The site asks each user
to visit at most once per day. Thanks for the tip to Eric Rachner
[30] http://www.thehungersite.com/ ____________
..The beginnings of molecular-scale computing
Researchers say computers 10^11 times more powerful than today's may be on the horizon
On 16 July an HP physicist and a UCLA chemist published a paper in Science that looks like a good first step towards computer compon- ents one molecule thick. This NY Times story from that date [31] de- tails the research, and this piece from today's Times [32] describes a number of other computing initiatives not necessarily based on silicon. You will need to bite cookies and register (free) to follow these links. The HP/UCLA work demonstrated that individual molecules of the synthetic substance rotazane can act like binary switches: their resistivity in the "on" position is 80 to 100 times less than in the "off" state.
All the press coverage of this research stresses two caveats, which I assume the researchers pounded home in their interviews. The first is that practical computers resulting from the research are more than a decade away. The second is that the next big challenge will be to fashion molecular-scale wires. I will place a modest wager that the wires, when developed, will be carbon nanotubes, originally called "buckytubes." For some examples of the versatility shown by these rolled carbon structures, consider this summary taken from the AIP Physics Review Update [33]:
1. Carbon nanotubes are now observed to be superconducting below 1 K.
2. Nanotubes have been used to produce muscle-like actuators. Two sheets of nanotubes separated by a layer of Scotch tape can, when a voltage is applied across the sandwich, produce stresses higher than natural muscle.
3. Nanotubes, which can be only nanometers in width but microns or longer in length, are expected to be an ideal strengthen- ing agent in composite materials.
4. Alkali-doped nanotubes are expected to excel at storing hydro- gen, perhaps for use as fuel.
Visit [34] and search for "carbon nanotube" for more on the mind- stretching properties of these structures.
[31] http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/07/biztech/articles/16compute.html [32] http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/07/biztech/articles/19chip.html [33] http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1999/split/pnu439-3.htm [34] http://www.aip.org/physnews/update/ ____________
..Tracking satellites at home
Some games are less addictive than these Java applets
The JTrack3D applet [35] (54K) downloads data (112K) on 500 satel-
lites, out of about 9000 in orbit, and lets you soar through their
data space. Zoom in on earth and rotate the picture to appreciate a
fraction of the jewelled adornment we carry with us through space.
You can browse satellites by category from a menu and get more de-
tailed information on each. Other options available from [35] let
you track the international space station, Mir, and the US space
shuttle, which is now in orbit. You probably shouldn't bother down-
loading this applet on less than a 166-MHz machine. TBTF Irregular
Jon Callas
While you're there, visit Jpath [36]. This Java applet (Netscape users need 4.02 or later) finds upcoming crossings of visible sat- ellites over your location. You can give latitude/longitude, zip code (US), or pick from a long list of cities worldwide. The applet constructs for each crossing an interactive sky chart with times, stars, planets, and satellite path and brightness.
Finally, the original 2D version of JTrack [37] provides, almost as an afterthought, the most informative display of current worldwide weather that I have seen. (Click on "Config.") The extreme frustra- tion of a JTrack Java programmer shines through on this page [38], which concludes:
> Java truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced > all computers to mediocrity and bugginess.
[35] http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3d.html [36] http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/realtime/JPass/ [37] http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/realtime/JTRACK/Spacecraft.html [38] http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/realtime/JTRACK/version.html ____________
..Lunar Prospector to go out in a blaze of... water?
Impacting the moon's south pole at 3800 mph
This workhorse satellite, which has mapped the moon from orbit for a year and a half, may provide compelling data as its operational life ends. On 31 July at 5:52 am EDT, mission planners will crash the satellite into a permanently shadowed crater at the moon's south pole in the hope of throwing up visible traces of the water that scientists theorize, and fervently hope, is there. This NASA page [39] tells the story; get more details from this UTexas site [40]. The impact will be closely watched by ground-based and sat- ellite-borne instruments, including the Hubble telescope. Amateur astronomers worldwide are encouraged to record what they see, al- though most probably the plume resulting from Prospector's collis- ion will be invisible without specialized instruments. Prospector will hit with the force of a 2-ton car going 1100 miles per hour; the impact should provide the moon's south pole with a temporary atmosphere.
Oddly, both the NASA and UTexas pages fail to mention the touching but mildly bizarre human-interest angle of the Prospector's final plunge. The spacecraft is carrying [41] a two-inch capsule bearing one ounce of the ashes of legendary geologist Eugene M. Shoemaker, who died in an auto accident in 1997. Shoemaker studied the impact origin of lunar craters -- and also co-discovered of comet Shoe- maker-Levy 9, which crashed spectacularly into Jupiter in 1994 [42]. Shoemaker had hoped to go to the moon himself during the Apollo program, but health problems forbade, to his lasting disappointment. Shoemaker instead trained the lunar astronauts in geology. After his death a former student suggested sending his ashes to orbit the moon aboard Prospector. Now a tiny part of Eugene Shoemaker may help to find water on the moon.
[39] http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast21jul99_1.htm [40] http://www.ae.utexas.edu/~cfpl/lunar/ [41] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/news82.html [42] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/ ____________
..Block that metaphor
Awaiting a call from the New Yorker's lawyers
The New Yorker, in its pre-barbarian days, used to run a column filler called Block that Metaphor. It held up to public ridicule some over-the-top mixed metaphor culled from an over-the-counter publication. Let's bring back this amusing feature in a new med- ium. Here's Rebecca Bace, president of the security-penetration testing firm Infidel Inc., quoted in ZDNet [43]:
> Until we get [the security holes] fixed, we can look forward > to more break-ins, Web defacements, and perhaps worst of all, > viruses. Melissa and ExploreZip only begin to scratch the tip > of the iceberg.
[43] http://www.zdnet.com/filters/printerfriendly/0,6061,2290399-2,00.html ________________________________________________________________________
N o t e s
> This issue is rather top-heavy with US-centric political / technical news. If you believe that significant and trend-setting Net news is being made where you live, and you want to see more of it covered here, please send me story ideas with pointers to online sources. ________________________________________________________________________
S o u r c e s
> For a complete list of TBTF's email and Web sources, see http://tbtf.com/sources.html . ________________________________________________________________________
B e n e f a c t o r s
> TBTF is free. If you get value from this publication, please visit the TBTF Benefactors page [*] and consider contributing to its upkeep.
[*] http://tbtf.com/the-benefactors.html ________________________________________________________________________
TBTF home and archive at http://tbtf.com/ . To (un)subscribe send
the message "(un)subscribe" to tbtf-request@tbtf.com. TBTF is Copy-
right 1994-1999 by Keith Dawson,
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.5
iQCVAwUBN5uqAGAMawgf2iXRAQHiyAP8CE2DTovhvPSVK0T/6i+d9A2o5Mavn1/i /sZhGjdPTSfpk34cJ2g+UtaTU0ROXwb80z6x3zf4vk2yI/wC6cQc+Lp9ajTFTZ4N xvUi/UWLWtvnR48i1RdqvqGyxGUKQXJcTGG0VeaWlk1AxYV/DSCrVA+eitYpN4vD G+w8X224h8g= =KG07 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ```
This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.