April 2022 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

Israeli Pegasus Spyware Case Receives Funding
by Gunnar Larson 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Check out my new article: https://litigationfinancejournal.com/israeli-pegasus-spyware-case-receives-… Israeli Pegasus Spyware Case Receives Funding The United Kingdom’s Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) has teamed up with Bindmans LLP to challenge potential misuse of the Pegasus software platform. Pegasus operates as a spyware surveillance utility that was originally developed in Israel. GLAN raised pre-litigation funding from the Digital Freedom Fund. Bindmans is now pursuing additional litigation investment for GLAN’s claim on the CrowdJustice fundraising platform. According to ThePegasusFiles.com <https://www.thepegasusfiles.com/>, mobile phone users in the United Kingdom fell prey to international governments who engaged Pegasus as a surveillance tool that automatically downloaded ‘zero click’ technology. According to GLAN, mobile phone users are generally unaware of Pegasus’ installation on their device. The covert software is designed to record phone behavior including location data, SMS messages, scan photos/videos, emails with read/write privileges. In 2020, Amnesty International originally broke the Pegasus spyware story, releasing 50,000 mobile phone numbers believed to be targeted by the software. This prompted an investigation into privacy violations by Pegasus’ developers. The Pegasus Project was launched in 2021 seeking damage awards from the malware’s proprietors. -- *Gunnar Larson - xNY.io <http://www.xNY.io> | Bank.org <http://Bank.org>* MSc <https://www.unic.ac.cy/blockchain/msc-digital-currency/?utm_source=Google&u…> - Digital Currency MBA <https://www.unic.ac.cy/business-administration-entrepreneurship-and-innovat…> - Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ip) G(a)xNY.io +1-646-454-9107 New York, New York 10001

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Woke MIT realizes it has to reintroduce standardized tests
by jim bell 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Woke MIT realizes it has to reintroduce standardized tests https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/woke-… APRIL 26, 2022 06:30 AMBY HENRY MILLER & TOM HAFER We wrote last November about MIT, our alma mater, that it "has caved repeatedly to the demands of 'wokeness,' treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large." A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion had become an article of faith, with an aggressive program of minority admissions one of the commandments. "Equity" is at the heart of this issue. It sounds a lot like "equality," and many people glide over it without appreciating the difference. In an email one of us received from an MIT professor, his signature block said "Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion." However, in current usage, they are essentially opposites: Equality means that each person is given equal opportunity; equity means that outcomes must be equal, without regard for the capabilities or efforts of the individuals concerned. Due in part to the pandemic, but also to achieve more "equity" in admissions, for the last two years, MIT dispensed with the requirement that applicants take the SAT or ACT tests. But last month, there was a new development: MIT became the first prominent university to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores. Stu Schmill, the dean of admissions, described the rationale for the decision this way in a blog post : "Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT." There was still more woke rationale to come: "Our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT ⁠is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics." Thus, "not having SAT/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education." What Schmill was really saying was that MIT doesn’t know what to do with students who just can’t cut it. At many universities, there are well-known "easy" majors such as physical education, sociology, or gender studies that are not, literally or figuratively, rocket science. So, if students find themselves unable to pass the coursework to major in, say, nuclear engineering or physics, they can move down the academic food chain. But at MIT, there are "General Institute Requirements," which are rigorous. Make that extremely rigorous. Every undergraduate has to take a semester each of chemistry and biology and two each of physics and calculus. Both MIT and a 2020 study by the University of California found that standardized test scores are superior predictors of success for students who are minorities or from low-income families. High school grades are often inflated, and admission application essays can be "coached" or actually written by hired consultants. Thus, MIT administrators were caught in a Catch-22: In order to admit and graduate unqualified minority students, they would need to lower their academic standards.

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Tariq Ali breaks with Julian Assange over Ukraine
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

https://groups.io/g/marxmail/topic/tariq_ali_on_ukraine/90737570?p=,,,20,0,… Split in the NAZBOL movement

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ANARCHISTS AGAINST PUTIN – INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOBILIZATION
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

practical mobilisation of Anarchists, their support for and their participation in the resistance against the Putin Regime’s invasion. https://anarchistnews.org/content/anarchists-against-putin-%E2%80%93-intern… RP's not E's

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Another day - another govt surrender
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Viva la revolution! https://decrypt.co/98856/central-african-republic-becomes-second-country-ad… Second Country to Adopt Cryptoanarchist infrastructure / Trojan Horse

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The only thing more Nazi than invading peaceful neighbors
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Is Jew-Hating aka ' antisemitism ' broadly defined. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nicholas-giampa-neo-nazi-teenager-murder-gir… Nazi punks FUCK OFF.

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PC Gamer: Something has to be done about the quantum computer security threat
by jim bell 27 Apr '22

27 Apr '22

PC Gamer: Something has to be done about the quantum computer security threat. https://www.pcgamer.com/something-has-to-be-done-about-the-quantum-computer…

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Professor Turd needs killing (My 0.5 cent )
by razorleaker 27 Apr '22

27 Apr '22

Empty Message

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Twitter Has a New Owner. Here’s What He Should Do.
by Revevilgod God 27 Apr '22

27 Apr '22

Twitter Has a New Owner. Here’s What He Should Do. DEEPLINKS BLOG BY JILLIAN C. YORK, GENNIE GEBHART, JASON KELLEY, AND DAVID GREENE APRIL 25, 2022 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/twitter-has-new-owner-heres-what-he-s… Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter highlights the risks to human rights and personal safety when any single person has complete control over policies affecting almost 400 million users. And in this case, that person has repeatedly demonstrated that they do not understand the realities of platform policy at scale. The core reality is this: Twitter and other social networks play an increasingly important role in social and political discourse, and have an increasingly important corollary responsibility to ensure that their decision-making is both transparent and accountable. If he wants to help Twitter meet that responsibility, Musk should keep the following in mind: Free Speech Is Not A Slogan Musk has been particularly critical of Twitter’s content moderation policies. He’s correct that there are problems with content moderation at scale. These problems aren’t just specific to Twitter, though Twitter has some particular challenges. It has long struggled to deal with bots and troubling tweets by major figures that can easily go viral in just a few minutes, allowing mis- or disinformation to rapidly spread. At the same time, like other platforms, Twitter’s community standards restrict legally protected speech in a way that disproportionately affects frequently silenced speakers. And also like other platforms, Twitter routinely removes content that does not violate its standards, including sexual expression, counterspeech, and certain political speech. Better content moderation is sorely needed: less automation, more expert input into policies, and more transparency and accountability overall. Unfortunately, current popular discourse surrounding content moderation is frustratingly binary, with commentators either calling for more moderation (or regulation) or, as in Musk’s case, far less. To that end, EFF collaborated with organizations from around the world to create the Santa Clara Principles, which lay out a framework for how companies should operate with respect to transparency and accountability in content moderation decisions. Twitter publicly supported the first version of the Santa Clara Principles in its 2019 transparency report. While Twitter has yet to successfully implement the Principles in full, that declaration was an encouraging sign of its intent to move toward them: operating on a transparent set of standards, publicly sharing details around both policy-related removals and government demands, making content moderations clear to users, and giving them the opportunity to appeal. We call on Twitter’s management to renew the company’s commitment to the Santa Clara Principles. Anonymous and Pseudonymous Accounts Are Critical for Users Pseudonymity—the maintenance of an account on Twitter or any other platform by an identity other than the user’s legal name—is an important element of free expression. Based on some of his recent statements, we are concerned that Musk does not fully appreciate the human rights value of pseudonymous speech. Pseudonymity and anonymity are essential to protecting users who may have opinions, identities, or interests that do not align with those in power. For example, policies that require real names on Facebook have been used to push out Native Americans; people using traditional Irish, Indonesian, and Scottish names; Catholic clergy; transgender people; drag queens; and sex workers. Political dissidents may be in grave danger if those in power are able to discover their true identities. Furthermore, there’s little evidence that requiring people to post using their “real” names creates a more civil environment—and plenty of evidence that doing so can have disastrous consequences for some of the platform’s most vulnerable users. Musk has recently been critical of anonymous users on the platform, and suggested that Twitter should “authenticate all real humans.” Separately, he’s talked about changing the verification process by which accounts get blue checkmarks next to their names to indicate they are “verified.” Botnets and trolls have long presented a problem for Twitter, but requiring users to submit identification to prove that they’re “real” goes against the company’s ethos. There are no easy ways to require verification without wreaking havoc for some users, and for free speech. Any free speech advocate (as Musk appears to view himself) willing to require users to submit ID to access a platform is likely unaware of the crucial importance of pseudonymity and anonymity. Governments in particular may be able to force Twitter and other services to disclose the true identities of users, and in many global legal systems, do so without sufficient respect for human rights. Better User Privacy, Safety, and Control Are Essential When you send a direct message on Twitter, there are three parties who can read that message: you, the user you sent it to, and Twitter itself. Twitter direct messages (or DMs) contain some of the most sensitive user data on the platform. Because they are not end-to-end encrypted, Twitter itself has access to them. That means Twitter can hand them over in response to law enforcement requests, they can be leaked, and internal access can be abused by malicious hackers and Twitter employees themselves (as has happened in the past). Fears that a new owner of the platform would be able to read those messages are not unfounded. Twitter could make direct messages safer for users by protecting them with end-to-end encryption and should do so. It doesn’t matter who sits on the board or owns the most shares—no one should be able to read your DMs except you and the intended recipient. Encrypting direct messages would go a long way toward improving safety and security for users, and has the benefit of minimizing the reasonable fear that whoever happens to work at, sit on the board of, or own shares in Twitter can spy on user messages. Another important way to improve safety on the platform is to give third-party developers, and users, more access to control their experience. Recently, the platform has experimented with this, making it easier to find tools like BlockParty that allow users to work together to decide what they see on the site. Making these tools even easier to find, and giving developers more power to interact with the platform to create more tools that let users filter, block, and choose what they see (and what they don’t see), would greatly improve safety for all users. In the event that the platform was to pivot to a different method of content moderation, it would become even more important for users to access better tools to modify their own feeds and block or filter content more accurately. There are more ambitious ways that would help improve the Twitter experience, and beyond: Twitter’s own Project Blue Sky put forward a plan for an interoperable, federated, standardized platform. Supporting interoperability would be a terrific move for whoever controls Twitter. It would help move power from corporate boardrooms to the users that they serve. If users have more control, it matters less who’s running the ship, and that’s good for everyone.

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Using Machine Learning Techniques to Identify Bot Accounts on a Social Network
by professor rat 27 Apr '22

27 Apr '22

The purpose of the work was to study the problem of identifying bot accounts in social networks. Bot identification is a classification of user accounts based on the analysis of account parameters and publications. The paper provides an overview of machine learning-based bot detection methods such as decision tree, logistic regression, and naive Bayes classifier. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9470605

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