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SURFPUNK Technical Journal 071
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 93 22:18:30 PST
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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 <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>
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 <surfpunk@osc.osc.com>
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 <surfpunk@osc.osc.com>
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 <karn@unix.ka9q.ampr.org>
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 <julf@penet.FI>
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 <surfpunk@osc.versant.com>, subscription requests
to <surfpunk-request@osc.versant.com>. 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?
