Date: Thu, 1 Apr 93 22:18:30 PST Reply-To: Return-Path: Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain From: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (GEHYL CREFBANY PBZCHGVAT) To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (SURFPUNK Technical Journal) Subject: [surfpunk-0071] cranksPENTIUMwacoROBOTlofcDENNINGanon.penet.fiAUTONOM # TBIT - Haiku for Carp> Enter message # # Saturday 20-Feb-93 00:52:35 from mnq # what's in my head, and # what seems to come out of my # mouth, never seem to # # connect. what's in my # head seems better. but what's in # my head does come out # # my fingers, so if # i type, i'm alright. i'm turn # ing into a night # # person, cause i hate # to wake up in the morning. # i'm a modem junk # # ie, cause it never # hurts like realtime. love that sound # when modems connect. okay, these are real, not april fools, I think... strick Subject: [spaf] Scientific American gets enough crank letters to fill... Subject: [keith] This is a riot... [PENTIUM HAS TWICE TRANSISTORS] Subject: [Don Webb] Tibet and Waco . . . Subject: [Don Webb] Robot and other parts Subject: Lib. of Cong. on Internet Subject: [karn] [to denning] your note on sci.crypt Subject: [julf@penet.FI] anon.penet.fi bites the dust Subject: Call for Submissions: Autonomedia ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com Subject: Re: [surfpunk-0067] SciAm; Patron Deity of Computers; Net Culture Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 09:28:21 -0500 From: Gene Spafford I'm sure Scientific American gets enough crank letters to fill several issues. However, they must make up the ones they published in an April Fool's issue because I'm sure they don't want to antagonize the nutcases who write the letters. It's one thing to get letters claiming to know about alien conspiracies. It's an entirely separate matter to have some psychotic show up with an assault rifle to talk about exposing his letter to the aliens by publishing it. I've had my own share of crank letters, with a couple usually showing up right after I do a radio or TV interview. It is disturbing to realize that there are seriously deranged people walking around loose in the world, and that they have my name and address. (And no, I don't mean you, Strick -- you are normal compared to thise guys!) [ oof.. the assault rifle thing is a bit scary. the net seems so safe, so far ... strick ] ________________________________________________________________________ From: keith@cc.gatech.edu (Keith Edwards) Subject: This is a riot... (pentium) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 13:44:12 EST Here's how Americans get their news! Any technology-minded citizens who picked up USA Today yesterday will get to read this gem: --- PENTIUM HAS TWICE TRANSISTORS: Pentium packs 3.1 million transistors onto a slice of silicon about the size of a thumbnail. That is twice as many as transistors as the 486. It is capable of executing 112 million instructions per second (MIPS). In two seconds, Pentium could execute an instruction - for example, fetch information from a PC's memory - for almost every person in the U.S. That's twice as fast as the fastest 486. ________________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 24 Mar 93 14:56 GMT From: Don Webb <0004200716@mcimail.com> To: surfpunk Subject: Tibet and Waco . . . Dear Fringeoids and Surfpunks, As most of you know up the road a piece is Waco, what you might not know is that the FBI's pyschological warfare device is the Bodhisattva chant of Tibetan Buddhism played over and over. Gate Gate Pargate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha! Now the purpose of the chant is to help the listener become a bodhisattva, a savior of humanity (and all sentient beings). Now I don't understand a whole about pyschoclogial warfare, but I think they're on the wrong track here. 0004200716@mcimail.com (Don Webb) ________________________________________________________________________ Date: Thu, 1 Apr 93 23:19 GMT From: Don Webb <0004200716@mcimail.com> To: surfpunk Subject: Robot and other parts You guys probably already know this, but the best place to buy ultra-cheap Science&Industry surplus is: American Science & Surplus POB 48838 Niles, IL 60714-0838 (Formerly Jerrico) Their catalog costs a buck and has everything from surplus telephones ($10.00) to Infrared transmitter and receiver sets ($9.95) to legal pads to Gold anodized aluminum heat sinks to neat toys. I've dealt with them for seven years and never been disappointed. The place to go when you need 3/8" dia. flexible shafts for cheap. Should be good for home robot stuff. 0004200716@mcimail.com Don Webb The Secret of magic is to transform the magician. ________________________________________________________________________ From: David_A_Fiske@cup.portal.com Subject: Lib. of Cong. on Internet Date: Sun, 21 Mar 93 14:07:20 PST The following is from the Public Access Computer Systems list. Scorpio is the Library of Congress's database system for tracking Federal legislation. Someone had recently posted an item about Congress not wanting to put its Legis system on the Internet. Scorpio would be an alternative way to get at legislative info. -------------------------------- Source: Public-Access Computer Systems News INTERNET ACCESS TO LC INFORMATION FILES The Library of Congress has announced a major new initiative to increase the availability of its resources to the public. In a statement before the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee on January 25, 1993, during hearings on the Library's fiscal year 1994 budget request, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said that the Joint Committee on the Library had approved online access to the Library's automated information files through Internet beginning in late April 1993. These files, containing more than 28 million records in over 30 files, have been available to congressional offices, state libraries, and cooperative cataloging libraries in the past. The files to be offered by the Library include all LC MARC (machine-readable cataloging) files; copyright files, 1978 to the present; public policy citations, 1976 to the present; and federal bill status files. Both the technical processing/cataloging system (MUMS) and the reference/retrieval system (SCORPIO) will be accessible for searches over the Internet. The Library has experimented with various forms of remote access to its public files--initially in a pilot project called ROLLUP, and most recently in its LC DIRECT fee-based service to state library agencies. Online access to Library of Congress databases is useful to a variety of libraries. The Internet will provide a means by which access can be had at minimal cost to all. No fees will be charged. The Library of Congress is able to offer remote access to its public databases via Internet as a free service, but must limit its customer support to documentation download over the Internet. The Library will begin by providing system availability to 60 simultaneous Internet users to ensure that service to Congress and on-site users is not degraded. Usage will be monitored to determine if this number can be expanded if needed, but service to congressional users will continue to be the Library's primary goal for its online systems. Specific details regarding when and how one can connect to the Library's public online files through Internet will be available in April. ________________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 02:45:15 -0800 From: Phil Karn To: denning@cs.cosc.georgetown.edu Subject: your note on sci.crypt Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com [ I was unable to find Dr Denning's note in our /usr/spool/news/sci/crypt. I would have liked to have surfpunked both together. You can find her article in a recent Communications of the ACM. --strick ] Dr. Denning: Although you are correct that many of the responses to your proposal contained personal attacks (in which people called you naive, etc), you seem to believe that this invalidates the fundamental underlying point they were making. This is not so. This fundamental point can be summarized as follows: The US government has repeatedly shown by its past conduct that it simply cannot be trusted to obey its own laws regarding spying on private citizens, particularly those who are organized in lawful, peaceful opposition to government policies. And history has shown that it can take many years for unlawful monitoring to become public, if indeed they ever do (consider the current story I just sent you about the Army spying on Dr. Martin Luther King). In other words, the government has frequently ignored its own laws, because it knows it can do so with impunity. No credible case can be made that the problem has been "fixed" since the now-publicized abuses of the 1960s and 1970s, i.e., that new safeguards have somehow rendered the government incapable of violating the privacy rights of its citizens. Privacy violations may or may not still be occurring; we have no way to know. But I suspect it depends far more on the people in power than on any post-Watergate "safeguards" against the abuse of that power. The private use of strong cryptography provides, for the very first time, a truly effective safeguard against this sort of government abuse. And that's why it must continue to be free and unregulated. I should credit you for doing us all a very important service by raising this issue. Nothing could have lit a bigger fire under those of us who strongly believe in a citizens' right to use cryptography than your proposals to ban or regulate it. There are many of us out here who share this belief *and* have the technical skills to turn it into practice. And I promise you that we will fight for this belief to the bitter end, if necessary. Phil Karn ________________________________________________________________________ To: cypherpunks@toad.com Subject: anon.penet.fi bites the dust Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 22:21:43 +0200 From: Johan Helsingius Today I posted the attached message to various newsgroups. I still plan to continue mail service, and my work on the alt.whistleblowers project. Julf ----------- The anonymous posting service at anon.penet.fi has been closed down. Postings to netnews and mail to arbitrary addresses has been blocked. Mail to anonymous users will still be supported, so anon.penet.fi can be used as an anonymous P.O.Box service. Due to the lawsuit-intensive climate in the US, many anonymous services have been short-lived. By setting up anon.penet.fi in Finland, I hoped to create a more stable service. Anon.penet.fi managed to stay in operation for almost five months. The service was protected from most of the usual problems that had forced other services to shut down. But there are always going to be ways to stop something as controversial as an anon service. In this case, a very well-known and extremely highly regarded net personality managed to contact exactly the right people to create a situation where it is politically impossible for me to continue running the service. But of course this political situation is mainly caused by the abuse of the network that a very small minority of anon users engaged in. This small group of immature and thoughtless individuals (mainly users from US universities) caused much aggravation and negative feelings towards the service. This is especially unfortunate considering these people really are a minuscule minority of anon users. The latest statistics from the service show 18203 registered users, 3500 messages per day on the average, and postings to 576 newsgroups. Of these users, I have received complaints involving postings from 57 anonymous users, and, of these, been forced to block only 8 users who continued their abuse despite a warning from me. In retrospect I realize that I have been guilty to keeping a far too low profile on the network, prefering to deal with the abuse cases privately instead of making strong public statements. Unfortunately I realized this only a couple of days before being forced to shut down the service, but the results of a single posting to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.d gave very positive results. I take full blaim for my failure to realize the psychological effects of a strongly stated, publicly visible display of policy with regards to the abuse cases. For this I have to apologize to the whole net community. On the other hand I am deeply concerned by the fact that the strongest opposition to the service didn't come from users but from network administrators. I don't think sysadmins have a god-given mandate to dictate what's good for the users and what's not. A lot of users have contacted me to thank me for the service, describing situations where anonymity has been crucial, but I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams. At the same time quite a few network administrators have made comments like "I can't imagine any valid use for anonymity on the net" and "The only use for anonymity is to harrass and terrorize the net". Nevertheless, I really want to apologize both to all the users on the network who have suffered from the abusive misuse of the server, and to all the users who have come to rely on the service. Again, I take full responsibility for what has happened. Julf ________________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 23 Mar 93 19:19:32 EST From: dmandl@shearson.com (David Mandl) Subject: Call for Submissions: Autonomedia Please feel free to distribute the following to anyone you think might be interested. Thanks. -------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS Dear Friends, Autonomedia is preparing an anthology of essays and possible visual material for a book (and electronic media) on the issues surrounding communications, intellectual property, work, and new information technologies. We anticipate a publication date at the end of this year. Among the many topics we hope to address: The anti-copyright movement State information-control mechanisms "Plunderphonics" and sound sampling Immediatism Plagiarism Cypherpunk and crypto anarchy Hacking and cracking The politics of "academic freedom" Virtual prisons and digital leashes Class struggle on the high-tech front Phone sex and computer porn Obsolescent media and "product" The politics of mail art and free radio Future tech Network TV, cable, and narrowcasting Laws and borders, globalism Aesthetics of appropriation after post-modernism Electronic banking, digital cash, the end of "money" Visual imaging and electronic pictography Virtual reality and electronic spectacularity Data piracy: computer viruses, high tech luddism, etc. Anonymity and digital identities Genetics as commercial medium Primitivism and the anti-technology movement The legacy and future of phone phreaking Body politics, angelic capital, mormons in space Robots and computerized industrial production Media ecology and media diets Surveillance and popular defense "Information economy" Cybergnosis This list is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive. Query us with your suggestions as soon as possible. We hope to make contact with all possible contributors by the start of summer, with a final deadline of October 1, 1993, for submissions. Wherever feasible, please send submissions on computer disk (ASCII or any word processing format in any platform) as well as by paper copy. We appreciate any help you may be able to offer in this endeavor. AUTONOMEDIA COLLECTIVE P.O. Box 568 Williamsburg Station Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568 USA email: jafhc@cunyvm.cuny.edu or dmandl@shearson.com Fax: 718-387-6471 ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ The SURFPUNK Technical Journal is a dangerous multinational hacker zine originating near BARRNET in the fashionable western arm of the northern California matrix. Quantum Californians appear in one of two states, spin surf or spin punk. Undetected, we are both, or might be neither. ________________________________________________________________________ Send postings to , subscription requests to . MIME encouraged. Xanalogical archive access soon. For a good prime, call 391581 * 2^216193 - 1 ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ # hey henry - been a while since i typed at ya. yeah ... same here. sorry so long. # i'm starting to spend some time this week # becoming net literate - i've been grazing through # news groups - amazing stuff! "ftp" to "nysernet.org", and then, in the ftp session, "cd" to "/pub/guides". Here is some stuff I copied from there once, I think it's still there: -rw-r--r-- 307042 Dec 12 Guide.V.2.2.text -rw-r--r-- 88916 Dec 12 agguide.dos -rw-r--r-- 108032 Dec 12 agguide.wp -rw-r--r-- 148620 Dec 12 ftp.list -rw-r--r-- 71220 Dec 12 internet.faq -rw-r--r-- 32817 Dec 12 internet.faq2 -rw-r--r-- 216594 Dec 12 internet.tour.txt -rw-r--r-- 307042 Dec 12 new.user.guide.v2.2.txt -rw-r--r-- 62564 Dec 12 surfing.the.internet.2.0.txt -rw-r--r-- 12598 Dec 12 whatis.internet -rw-r--r-- 492530 Dec 12 zen-1.0.ps (* the net is slow today, and I am unable to get you a more recent snapshot: 425 Can't build data connection: Connection timed out. [1] Terminated Ftp nysernet.org *) The internet.faq* are full of TLA (three letter acronyms) and jargon. Not real useful for sources, but does help with the secret argot. zen is probably the best. this might be the same zen that you can buy in a book. surfing might be OK. # subscription to americast - articles from # washingto post, la times, and usa today is what i # found tonight - about 30 postings daily in each # of four to six broad headings for each paper, # ranging from 250 line essays to 10 line letters # to the editor - even got to read 'i don't have a # racist bone in my body' from ollie north. These usually bore me. The NYT is much better for "mainstream" news. # found some physics news groups - sci.physics.research # has some potential use fo Netnews is somewhere between serious and flippant, and between useful and a waste of time. The best thing you can do is get a "threading" news reader -- "trn" and (I think) "tin" are probably what they are called on UNIX. I use "trn", because before these, "rn" (by Larry Wall) was the best. # have been tinkering more w/ think c - have tried # to get a hold of memory management - locking down # handles (macs have a nasty habit of moving your yeah, I haven't got the hang of mac handles either. # finsihed snow crash today - the whole surfing # motif really struck deep w/ me - pooning and # kayaking and hacking - learning how to catch # rides off of the greater forces that are going on # around you - definately something to be and it captures the "action flick" aspect of The Net in a way that's difficult to explain. # kept in mind during the info explosion - at first # i thought your 'surf'-punk title pretty hokey but # now i'm beginning to grok it's implications... it's still mixed emotions for me. Both SURF and PUNK have entered the mainstream media so much moreso since I started this... at least the media hasn't stolen the combination SURFPUNK yet. [Of course *I* stole it from the band, so who am I to bitch? ] Hopefully the TIME magazine helped confuse people a lot, and at least left an impression that "cyber" culture is not just "CYBERPUNKS: Outlaws on the Electronic Frontier" but a whole jumble of stuff. Broadinging the term is a step in the right direction. To the Elite "3L1+3" Insiders, it's criminal to try to present what's happening on the "leading/underground edge of the net" in a format for mainstream surfers ... but that attitude like trying to turn back the hands of the clock, or at least freeze them. I think in order to preserve the Anarchal flavor of The Net, it is important to show the mainstream that it's better than Prodigy. And I try to present it with the real, unadulterated, uncensored thing, rather than with TIME magazine style hype ... # --b--^Z^Z # oh yeah - vi. can't spell "vile" without "vi"! Did I give you EMACS for macintosh?