[from moscow times]

"Moldova Lashes Out

CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) -- Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin said Russian troops are stationed illegally in his country and that Moscow's explanations for failing to meet a deadline to withdraw were not credible.

Voronin, in an interview with ORT-Moldova television aired Tuesday, also dismissed as "silly" Moscow's claims that separatists in the Russian-speaking breakaway province of Transdnestr were preventing their withdrawal. He said Russia has great influence over Transdnestr. "

In mildly related news, the new romanian president (Traian Basescu) has said that he wants to move to a more tight partnership with Muldova. Of course, the big romanian issue will continue to be reforms necessary to join the EU.

IranExpert has an interesting article about a paper from CPD (a very hawkish organization) about a plan for non-military approaches to the iranian problem, from their perspective. The article is at the following URL:

http://www.iranexpert.com/2004/neocon22december.htm

I did some additional research, and there are significant links between CPD and the bush administration, so it's very likely the policy paper will have some influence in the administration. The contents of the paper can be found at the following URL:

http://www.fightingterror.org/newsroom/CPD_Iran_policy_paper.pdf

As mentioned in the iranexpert paper, William Beeman has been highly critical of the paper. He has written fairly extensively on US-Iran relations. Some of his recent papers on this topic follow:

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Anthropology/publications/AQ-IRAN-US.pdf

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Anthropology/publications/IranUS.pdf

You can see a presentation of his at cspan.org

http://www.cspan.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=Pentagon%27s+New+Map

This is actually where I first saw him...

k wrote:
] ] Prof. Thomas P.M. Barnett, Senior Strategic Researcher at
] ] the U.S. Naval War College, is maybe the hottest military
] ] thinker in the world right now. His work, which focuses
] ] on the connections between development and security, and
] ] in particular his book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and
] ] Peace in the Twenty-First Century, has become deeply
] ] influential with forward-thinking members of the
] ] military.

RE: Thomas P.M. Barnett: The Worldchanging Interview

SAN JOSE, Calif. (Sept. 9, 2004) -- IBM scientists have measured a fundamental magnetic property of a single atom -- the energy required to flip its magnetic orientation. This is the first result by a promising new technique they developed to study the properties of nanometer-scale magnetic structures that are expected to revolutionize future information technologies.

IBM scientists demonstrate single-atom magnetic measurements

] Ok I know that the ban wasn't effective in keeping assault
] weapons off the streets but that doesn't mean we should have
] an open market. If this ban was useless then we need to be
] formulating another plan to keep these weapons off the
] streets. If terrorism is our major concern right now why make
] it easier to buy automatic wepons in our country. Honestly
] what possible reason could anyone have to need these types of
] weapons??

...and why does any law abiding citizen need cryptography the government can't break? I guess i'm just of the opinion that if something is going to be banned, there has to be a really good reason to ban it. It just does not seem logical to me to create laws to prevent something when the supposed target of the legislation does not follow the law.

RE: Weapons Ban Ends Today

Acidus wrote:
] ] The complex version: Onion Routing is a connection-oriented
] ] anonymizing communication service. Users choose a
] ] source-routed path through a set of nodes, and negotiate a
] ] "virtual circuit" through the network, in which each node
] ] knows its predecessor and successor, but no others. Traffic
] ] flowing down the circuit is unwrapped by a symmetric key at
] ] each node, which reveals the downstream node.
]
] What about traffic analysis? While I don't know much about
] this, I had a talk about this very same thing with Decius not
] too long ago. Don't you need some type of anonymous cloud
] takes and "holds" your request for some random length of time?
] That way if enough people are inject requests into the cloud,
] there is no way to match an incoming transmition cloud with
] one leaving the cloud.

It's a performance tradeoff, and it is thought that even the typical padding and reordering is not sufficient. The design document has this to say:

No mixing, padding, or traffic shaping (yet): Onion Routing originally called for batching and reordering cells as they arrived, assumed padding between ORs, and in later designs added padding between onion proxies (users) and ORs [27,41]. Tradeoffs between padding protection and cost were discussed, and traffic shaping algorithms were theorized [49] to provide good security without expensive padding, but no concrete padding scheme was suggested. Recent research [1] and deployment experience [4] suggest that this level of resource use is not practical or economical; and even full link padding is still vulnerable [33]. Thus, until we have a proven and convenient design for traffic shaping or low-latency mixing that improves anonymity against a realistic adversary, we leave these strategies out.

They suggest (but dont say outright) that reordering & batching may occur at some point. It would certainly give me more warm fuzzies if it did.

http://freehaven.net/tor/cvs/doc/design-paper/tor-design.html

makes for an interesting read...

RE: Onion Routing 2.0: tor

The simple version: Tor provides a distributed network of servers("onion routers"). Users bounce their TCP streams (web traffic, FTP, SSH, etc.) around the routers. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to track the source of the stream.

The complex version: Onion Routing is a connection-oriented anonymizing communication service. Users choose a source-routed path through a set of nodes, and negotiate a "virtual circuit" through the network, in which each node knows its predecessor and successor, but no others. Traffic flowing down the circuit is unwrapped by a symmetric key at each node, which reveals the downstream node.

http://freehaven.net/tor/ [main page]
http://freehaven.net/tor/slides-codecon04/ [codecon slides]