[ExI] most famous exi poster

spike spike66 at att.net
Wed Sep 7 23:11:47 UTC 2016



-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of spike
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2016 12:39 PM
To: 'ExI chat list' <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] most famous exi poster


>... On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco
Subject: Re: [ExI] most famous exi poster

>>...Didn't Julian Assange post to the list a few times in the 90s?

>...Ja.  He got in a big quarrel with a guy and the moderator at the time
asked them to take it offlist, so Eugen did his magic and about a dozen of
us went and pummeled each other privately.  Wei Dai was part of that I
think...spike
_______________________________________________

I really got to pondering this, and now I think this discussion wasn't 20
yrs ago but more like about 15.  Reasoning: we talked about this at Extro3
and Extro4, but I think the main discussion was after Extro4, which was in
summer of 1999, and the discussions started there went on for a couple
years.  I now think most of that offlist discussion happened between summer
1999 and about sometime in 2001.

At Extro4 Harvey Newstrom gave a most interesting talk on data security
(that man foresaw everything that is happening today.)  We had a big party
over at my house afterwards the next day (all day.)  Harvey and some others
came over and we were debating privacy rights vs data security and all that,
a big debate on whether steganography can be detected, one rare debate in
which eventually we figured out the answer: it may or may not be detectable,
but isn't if you settle for low bandwidth communications, and cannot be
broken if you use one-time pads.

In retrospect with regard to what we have learned in the last 17 years, a
stunning irony is just now slapping me across the face.  Harvey Newstrom
(who is the real expert on these matters) explained to us that it is legal
to use encryption in email.  But if you do it, you start getting attention
from the authorities, who want to know what you are up to.  You can convince
them of course that you are in with a bunch of data geeks and you do this
sorta thing for fun, but likely they will watch you.

The irony of it all is that allll Mrs. Clinton needed to do if she wanted to
have a private server, aaaaallll she needed to do, since she had a computer
geek working for her, all she needed to do... is encrypt her messages!
That's all!  Then we wouldn't have had to worry about hackers this and that,
because all the hackers could get would be a haystack of bits.  Use Public
Key Encryption, boom, everything safe, no risk of compromising national
security, no risk of yoga routines falling into government hands, done.

However... had she done that... the feds would have spotted it.  Harvey
explained why, using the computer science version of the thermal engineer's
entropy.  The feds have ways of detecting high-entropy bitstreams.  They
find out who is sending out white noise, and why.  Had Mrs. Clinton arranged
to encrypt the yoga, the feds would have detected it.  They would have found
out about the server arrangement back in 2008, asked the obvious question:
if you want to keep these messages secure, why don't you just use your dot
gov account?  That one already uses strong encryption.

The contents of the email would be safe there.  However... had she used that
account, it would be automatically archived and she would not have the
option of BleachBitting the yoga to where even god can't read it.  Had she
used strong encryption on her server, the feds would come snooping and
asking why.  So... she not only put information marked classified when sent
and received on a private unsecured server, but left it unencrypted.

And this is all those evil commies fault?  Sheesh.

spike








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