May 2021 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

Jeremy Hammond report
by Cari Machet 17 May '21

17 May '21

When you get a chance check out this newly published report for Jeremy Hammond https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3809358 -- <https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=e…> cari machet about.me/carimachet <https://about.me/carimachet?promo=email_sig&utm_source=product&utm_medium=e…>

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Article mentioning Assassination Politics and Crypto
by jim bell 17 May '21

17 May '21

New Digital Money, New Digital Crimes | | | | | | | | | | | New Digital Money, New Digital Crimes David G.W. Birch Unconditionally anonymous electronic money is a really, really bad idea. Prove me wrong. | | | [partial quote follows] Assassins and Alarms But what about a more sinister candidate for large-scale crimtech investment? Is it time for the "assassination market”? This idea originated, to the best of my knowledge, with Jim Bell who, back in 1995, set it out in an essay on “assassination politics”. A few years ago, Andy Greenberg wrote a great piece about assassination markets here on Forbes. He was exploring the specific case of "Kuwabatake Sanjuro" who had set up a Bitcoin-powered market for political assassinations, but in general an assassination market is a form of prediction market where anyone can place a bet on the date of death of a given individual, and collect a payoff if they “guess” the date accurately. This would incentivise the assassination of individuals because the assassin, knowing when the action would take place, could profit by making an accurate bet on the time of the subject’s death. | | | | | | | | | | | Assassination Politics - by Jim Bell | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With B... Andy Greenberg As Bitcoin becomes an increasingly popular form of digital cash, the cryptocurrency is being accepted in exchang... | | | Here’s how the market operates and why the incentive works, as I explained in my book "Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin”. Someone runs a public book on the anticipated death dates of public figures. If I hate some tech CEO (for example), I place a bet on when they will die. When the CEO dies, whoever had the closest guess to their date and time of death wins all of the money staked, less a cut for the house. Let’s say I bet $5 (using anonymous digital cash through the TOR network) that a specific tech CEO is going to die at 9am on April Fool’s Day 2022. Other people hate this person too and they put down bets as well. The more hated the person is, the more bets there will be. | | | | | | | | | | | Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin (2017) | David G.W. Birch David G.W. Birch | | | April Fool’s Day 2022 comes around. There’s now ten million dollars staked on this particularly CEO dying at 9am. I pay a hit man five million dollars to murder the CEO. Hurrah! I’ve won the bet, so I get the ten million dollars sent to me in anonymous digital cash and give half to the hit man. No-one can pin the crime on me because I paid the hitman in untraceable anonymous digital cash as well. I’m just the lucky winner of the lottery. But better than that is that if I can get enough bets put on someone, then I don’t even have to take the risk of hiring the hitman. If I use some anonymous bots or friendly tolls to coordinate a social media campaign to get a million people to put a $5 bet on the date of the tech CEOs death, then some enterprising hit man will make their own bet and kill them. If the general public had bet five million bucks on 31st March and some enterprising cryptopsycho had murdered the CEO themselves the day before, then it would only have cost me $5, and I would have regarded that as $5 well spent, as would (presumably) everyone else who bet $5.[end of partial quote]

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Reuters: Starlink satellite internet service gets 500,000 preorders, Musk says
by jim bell 16 May '21

16 May '21

Reuters: Starlink satellite internet service gets 500,000 preorders, Musk says. https://www.reuters.com/technology/starlink-satellite-internet-service-gets…

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[spam] could an AI reverse a one-time pad?
by Karl 16 May '21

16 May '21

1. learn about the world enough to predict it, like the creepy marketing ais do sometimes. 2. predict some of the message text, maybe from the behavior of somebody who spied on it 3. deduce part of the one-time pad from the message text, easy-peasy 4. one-time pads are made by random processes. so now you've gotta predict the random number generator. this probably means figuring out what shadowy group hacked it. 5. spew out the magic! I'd separate 4 and 1 thru 3 into two separate problems and solve them separately. The groups figuring out that the marketing AIs are controlling people can discover that that implies that any random old AI can hack a computer and influence a random number generation process to solve #4 and radically change our universe. Meanwhile, normal people can use a non-cryptographic random number generator to show the whole system works and frighten people.

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[spam] [nt] activists and law enforcement have both dedicated their lives to protecting the public
by Karl 16 May '21

16 May '21

i'm currently experiencing forced behaviors from the habits i developed during my brainwashing. my dream is to make it easy for people to be in information-secure environments, where they do not have to experience the trojan victimisation i have experienced, where systems will close your work, corrupt your data, crash meaninglessly, corrupt your applications, delete some of your emails, etc etc etc etc. if it is law enforcement that harrasses people that thoroughly then somebody passed a very strange law. nonetheless I do not support punishment nor the blatant physical abuse of protestors that happens so regularly. i do not support intimidation of prisoners or coercion of people who have violated a law. we all need to be held to the same standards of behavior. i do support all protection of the public, and i am happy to believe that any behavior is done for that purpose. i would like to make it easy for people to hide from microwaves, which are commonly used to track victims of child abuse via compromise of their mobile phones.

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Facebook urged to abandon encryption plans after child abuse reports halve
by jim bell 16 May '21

16 May '21

https://news.yahoo.com/facebook-urged-abandon-encryption-plans-070553456.ht… Facebook has been urged to halt its encryption plans after child abuse reports more than halved in Europe due to new privacy laws. The social media giant was f...

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[old] Mar 2020 Hacking community targeted by cyber criminals in trojan campaign
by Karl 16 May '21

16 May '21

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252479793/Hacking-community-targeted-by… 10 Mar 2020 14:30 The hacking community has been warned to be alert to cyber criminals turning popular hacking tools into a means to spread remote access trojans (Rats), in a newly uncovered campaign discovered by threat researchers at Cybereason’s Nocturnus lab. The campaign exploits the well-known and widely used njRat trojan – which is also known as Bladabindi – which was developed by Middle Eastern threat groups between seven and eight years ago. If opened, NjRat takes over the victim’s machine and can be used to extract system information, execute and manipulate files, open remote shells to let attackers use the command line, record from cameras or microphones, log keystrokes, and steal stored passwords, among other things. The new campaign spreads njRat by injecting it into downloadable hacking tools and other installers, said Cybereason. These tools are being posted on various underground forums and websites to bait other hackers into falling “victim” to njRat. The firm believes the campaign has been running for a considerable length of time and appears to be the product of a so-called “malware factory” which is churning out new iterations of the various compromised tools on an almost daily basis, possibly using some degree of automation. “This investigation surfaced almost 1,000 njRat samples compiled and built on almost a daily basis. It is safe to assume that many individuals have been infected by this campaign although at the moment we are unable to know exactly how many,” said Amit Serper, Cybereason’s vice-president of security, in a disclosure blog. “This campaign ultimately gives threat actors complete access to the target machine, so they can use it for anything from conducting DDoS attacks to stealing sensitive data off the machine.” The campaign poses a threat beyond the confines of the hacker community because if a victimised hacker already has access to your system, the hacker who hacked them will also have access to your system. Read more about cyber criminals The latest email campaigns identified by Proofpoint are spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. The popularity and ubiquity of web-based apps such as Office 365 and Salesforce is a temptation too good to miss for cyber criminals. Cyber criminals are spending longer hiding in target networks before launching their attacks, as more organised groups turn to business disruption to achieve their objectives. In the campaign, njRat masquerades as a legitimate Windows process and was found to be connecting to two IP addresses, one of a compromised Wordpress site belonging to a legitimate Indian pen manufacturer, and another to Minecraft site located in Turkey that since late 2018 has been re-registered by an individual in Vietnam, who may be associated with the campaign. “It is clear the threat actors behind this campaign are using multiple servers, some of which appear to be hacked WordPress blogs,” said Serper. “Others appear to be the infrastructure owned by the threat group.” Cybereason found that all the njRat samples associated with the Turkish-Vietnamese site were targeting penetration testing and hacking tools, although the campaign is by no means targeting just the hacking community – it also seems to be targeting Chrome installers, native Windows apps, and some other programs that have nothing to do with hacking or penetration testing. “At the moment, we are unable to ascertain the other victims this malware campaign is targeting, other than those targeted by the trojanised hacking tool,” said Serper, who is continuing to monitor the campaign. Cybereason has published a lengthy list of indicators of compromise (IoCs), which can be downloaded from its website.

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SciTechDaily: How to Cloak an Object to Become Invisible to a Thermal Camera
by jim bell 16 May '21

16 May '21

SciTechDaily: How to Cloak an Object to Become Invisible to a Thermal Camera. https://scitechdaily.com/how-to-cloak-an-object-to-become-invisible-to-a-th…

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Hackaday: A Phased-Array Ultrasonic 3D Scanner From Scratch
by jim bell 16 May '21

16 May '21

Hackaday: A Phased-Array Ultrasonic 3D Scanner From Scratch. https://hackaday.com/2021/05/15/a-phased-array-ultrasonic-3d-scanner-from-s…

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Hackaday: Simple Encryption You Can Do On Paper
by jim bell 15 May '21

15 May '21

Hackaday: Simple Encryption You Can Do On Paper. https://hackaday.com/2021/05/12/simple-encryption-you-can-do-on-paper/

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