Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Fitzgerald probe: Sen. Clinton withdrew stolen funds from Grenada bank. Tom Flocco - have your grain of salt ready. If true, however, this could put Bill & Hillary Clinton and Bush Senior in prison for a long, long time. I won't hold my breath. [email] Quote: Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is in possession of filmed evidence allegedly showing Senator Hillary Clinton entering Bank Crozier in the British territory of Grenada during early 2003 for the purpose of withdrawing stolen and laundered U.S. Treasury funds for alleged personal use after presenting the bank with CIA code numbers in her capacity as a U.S. senator, CIA operative and wife of a former president, according to a team of intelligence sources. [End the War on Freedom - Links and Commentary from my Crypto-Anarcho-Libertarian Perspective] One of the things I've noticed about conspiracy theorists is that they're amazingly ignorant, which leads them to make claims that include obviously wrong information. For example, Grenada is an independent nation, not a British territory, as anyone who was watching the news in the 1980s would know. Surely it wouldn't have been too hard for whoever made up this story to look up an actual British territory with a reputation for international banking? 1:52:45 PM    comment () trackback () Deniable File System. Some years ago I did some design work on something I called a Deniable File System. The basic idea was the fact that the existence of ciphertext can in itself be incriminating, regardless of whether or not anyone can decrypt it. I wanted to create a file system that was deniable: where encrypted files looked like random noise, and where it was impossible to prove either the existence or non-existence of encrypted files. This turns out to be a very hard problem for a whole lot of reasons, and I never pursued the project. But I just discovered a file system that seems to meet all of my design criteria -- Rubberhose: Rubberhose transparently and deniably encrypts disk data, minimising the effectiveness of warrants, coersive interrogations and other compulsive mechanims, such as U.K RIP legislation. Rubberhose differs from conventional disk encryption systems in that it has an advanced modular architecture, self-test suite, is more secure, portable, utilises information hiding (steganography / deniable cryptography), works with any file system and has source freely available. The devil really is in the details with something like this, and I would hesitate to use this in places where it really matters without some extensive review. But I'm pleased to see that someone is working on this problem. Next request: A deniable file system that fits on a USB token, and leaves no trace on the machine it's plugged into. [Schneier on Security] This looks promising. Currently it's only available for Unix, but supposedly the authors are planning a Windows port. 12:33:21 PM    comment () trackback () Doctorow: The novel Heinlein would have written about GW Bush’s America. In reviewing John Varley’s new novel Red Lightning, Cory Doctorow gets in his usual slams against the Bush Administration while spouting the canards regarding Heinlein and reveals that he never really read any of the Old Man’s novels. Reading Heinlein’s novels finds a strong streak of antiauthoritarianism in most of his protagonists, thinly veiled warnings regarding investing the state with too much power, and an acknowledgment that it’s up to individuals to contain the power of that government. Hardly the stuff of right wing politics as defined today. Trying to peg Heinlein to some arbitrary Left-Right political axis is an exercise doomed to failure, as well as the mark of a lazy intellect. Shoddy work, and hardly in character for a writer I respect as much as Mr. Doctorow. [code: theWebSocket;] After reading Cory Doctorow's review, I'm left with the impression that Mr. Hawkins didn't. Here's what he has to say on Heinlein: Heinlein was an ideological libertarian. You could call his politics right wing, and they were, on many of the left-right axes. But Heinlein never would have sat still for the Patriot Act and the daily and deep incursions on liberties that have come to characterise life in America and increasingly Britain and other parts of the world. He never would have accepted that you had to take away freedom to save liberty. As someone who is an "ideological libertarian" and has read Heinlein's books, this seems pretty obvious to me. It's pretty well known to libertarians that people who identify themselves as progressives regard libertarians as "right wing," just as people who identify themselves as conservatives regard libertarians as "left wing." It's also pretty obvious from his writing that Heinlein would react just as Doctorow thinks he would. 10:18:05 AM    comment () trackback () News: Symantec hit with $1 billion tax bill. The IRS has billed Symantec $1 billion in back taxes. [Macworld] The IRS claims that both Symantec and Veritas Software Corp. under-priced intellectual property the two companies licensed to their Irish subsidiaries, said Symantec spokeswoman Genevieve Haldeman. Both Symantec and Veritas, which was purchased by Symantec in 2005, set up the Irish subsidiaries for the purpose of doing business outside of the U.S., she said. Clearly whoever is responsible for making campaign contributions hasn't been doing a good job. 10:08:32 AM    comment () trackback ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 5/2/2006; 11:33:47 AM.