May 2022 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

Mark Zuckerberg concerned people are losing faith in Silicon Valley Institutions
by professor rat 07 May '22

07 May '22

Or was that Justice Thomas? I get them mixed-up. "... over three-quarters of the global search market is under the control of the Google search engine and over 3.6 billion individual users across four social media platforms owned by Meta. FROM https://cointelegraph.com/news/digital-sovereignty-reclaiming-your-private-… Never mind. They're like the USG - they don't have the balls for overt fascism.

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Audio Eavesdropping Exploit Might Make That Clicky Keyboard Less Cool | Hackaday
by jim bell 07 May '22

07 May '22

https://hackaday.com/2022/05/06/audio-eavesdropping-exploit-might-make-that…

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[ot][spam][personal] uhhh should I understand the exploits my new phone is vulnerable to
by Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many 07 May '22

07 May '22

oh ha this new unihertz titan is based on a mediatek chipset line that has been thoroughly exploited in multiple ways to bypass its security. the exploits appear to be open source. they are made by human beings who can be talked with. mediatek chips are apparently arm. the author of mtkclient has an exploitation playground repository at https://github.com/bkerler/exploit_me . i'm not sure what it is, but maybe a vulnerable binary so that people can learn how to build exploits to phones by reading their firmware? I'm actually not sure. the most prominent exploit for these devices is called kamakiri, the source code for which is at https://github.com/amonet-kamakiri/kamakiri . I don't know whether it's relevent for my phone or not. bkerler's mediatek client at https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient has a number of additional command codes in it, many copied from the work of preceding developers, showing how to do useful things like reading and writing ram and emmc without the download agent (I think, not certain). this developer also has a qualcomm client they have made. i'd like to try to figure out what kamakiri does, and basically if any of these exploits are relevent for my phone. ideally i'd like to learn what is necessary or if it is possible to lock down my phone to prevent mutation of it or of firmware dumps I download from it.

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Nvidia fined $5.5 million over crypto mining GPU disclosures
by jim bell 07 May '22

07 May '22

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/6/23059930/nvidia-sec-charges-fine-settleme…

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Fox News: Russia shown only some cybercapabilities, but US has quantum computing answer to possible threats
by jim bell 07 May '22

07 May '22

Fox News: Russia shown only some cybercapabilities, but US has quantum computing answer to possible threats. https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-cybercapabilities-quantum-computing-an… Russia has not shown its full cyberwarfare capabilities, but the U.S. should remain confident in its own cyber defense, experts told Fox News Digital. "I think that the concern is that they may have capabilities that we don't know about," Matt Stamford, Cybersecurity Expert and Founder of OccamSec, said. "And until such point, as they need to use them, we may never know." Much of the conversation regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has understandably focused on the physical siege and assault on Kyiv, Mariupol and other cities, but the cyberwar started before any Russian troops stepped foot in Ukraine.

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[ot][personal] life
by Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many 07 May '22

07 May '22

somebody sent me a personal story they had maybe shared it a lot; the font changed in the email like it could have had a copy paste going on it was emotional, it sounded real it's been a long time since i've held real emotions I feel like crying, reading their story. I barely comprehend that I feel like crying. feeling well up in me, and reach that break in my mind. it's been a long time now, and my body seems to know how to hold feelings a little. just a little. I know my mind will break if I feel them too much. something that has happened so much. it's so real. I miss life. what happened to us is so horrible. but maybe it is just another one of those horrors of the world. it can feel like the worst thing ever, the most intense thing ever. our brains are capable of holding that such things are extreme. but maybe it is just another of those experiences. this person, they talked so clearly, they seemed able to hold their feelings so fully. I miss feelings. I used to be a very empathic person, in some ways. I always thought and said, when somebody else had a feeling, it would be 3 or 10 time as strong to me as feelings of my own. but I was on the autism spectrum, a nerd often not attending to others, and I wouldn't always notice other people's feelings, despite caring for them so very much. I imagine many others have had that experience. my feelings guided me throughout my life, and this always seemed to work well for me, when I had them. I found that by listening to and attending to my feelings, I could help others, that these feelings were like a secret way to interconnect with everything, and share deep appreciation. sometimes it could seem almost telepathic. but still it was hard to move past my selfish habits. now with my mind and heart broken in that psychotic, dissociative way, no treatment, no understanding, no logs ... things are so different. I feel barely human. humanity still exists out there, though. humanity is so real. holding these feelings from this email I received, I don't know what to do. it used to be you could enter a community -- any community -- and share care with people's feelings, and this caringness would grow. a sense of connection and trust, and quickly we would be working together on things we all cared about. this seems no longer the case. my emails to join mailing lists bounce until my amnesia around why I am even joining them is stronger than much else about them. I post psychotically, disrepute and disrespect myself and others. the things I read on this list make little sense to me, as the things I post. these exchanges from the heart, in this personal email, seem like they broke through this effective censorship. I have not read an email like that in years. I do not expect to read one like that again, for years, but you never know. Here is one for you. I'm sorry it is shallow. Finding my feelings is like fishing determinedly for a lost ring. The largest bass in the lake, but rings do not bite very readily. honestly being brainwashed makes me want to scream like heck when I try to feel about it, and when I consider things like that the screaming becomes a way to influence and control me for the parts of me that learned to obey. it seems pathetic. yet this email I received was shared from a place of hope. Hope is something I know and trust very well. I do not believe in real failure, real ends. Only short term Reincarnation is derivable from the nurture side of "nature vs nurture". History repeats itself: so we do, too. When I imagine hope for my mind, heart, spirit ... it is not something I know readily how to imagine. I also don't often imagine hope for those communities we are destroying in our work of sharing right wing memes, something I do as well, somewhat subtly. I mean that seriously. I know genocide is caused by this work. But I imagine strong hope for us, for life, and for things being made right in the end. I do not waver in my belief that what is right will come through. I spoke with a religious teacher once (at a Jain temple) who helped me hold hope for my soul. I know emotions we share publicly can severely endanger our freedoms. I have done this already, and am not scared for myself here. If you are going to mind control me with your heart, I would far prefer this to the other options. Be well. Be nourished, and be very well.

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JULIAN " “People with strong principles don’t survive for long ” ASSMANGE quoted in " Risk"
by professor rat 07 May '22

07 May '22

Assmange aided an avid Holocaust denier, Israel Shamir, by giving him access to 90,000 as-yet-unpublished State Department cables relating to the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe. Shamir turned around and reportedly shared those cables with Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus since 1994 — a man who the Guardian has said presides over “Europe’s last dictatorship.” https://reason.com/2011/02/03/julian-assange-and-israel-sham/

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Anti-Semitism Goes Missing In Julian Assange Doc
by Revevilgod God 07 May '22

07 May '22

Anti-Semitism Goes Missing In Julian Assange Doc https://forward.com/culture/371664/anti-semitism-goes-missing-in-julian-ass… Look at how they look at him, Julian Assange’s cadre of cyber vigilantes. In a private home in Norfolk, in livery cabs with Daniel Ellsberg in the passenger seat, in windowless rooms in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, members of Assange’s Wikileaks organization fawn over him and defer to him, give him the floor first and let him have the last word. In “Risk,” director Laura Poitras’s latest dispatch from the fight for suppressed information, she gives us unprecedented access not only to the white-haired international man of mystery, but to his loyal followers as well. Poitras shot the film over the course of six years. She followed Assange from the release of 250,000 State Department cables, in 2010, to his retreat in 2012 into London’s Ecuadorean Embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden allegations of rape and sexual assault. The film was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival last summer, but was recut to include Assange’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. election. It also now alludes to the widespread allegations of sexual assault made against his close associate, Jacob Appelbaum, a hacker and major force behind the anonymous internet communication platform Tor. It is a kind of follow-up to Poitras’ 2014 film “Citizenfour,” about her partnership with Edward Snowden in releasing his trove of NSA documents. That illuminating film won an Oscar for Best Documentary. Throughout the film, the title cards and Poitras’s voiceovers (often announced as notes from her “Production Diary”) are in present tense, which lends the film a sense of immediacy. This is to the film’s advantage, since while its subject is eminently newsworthy, Poitras lost her access before Wikileaks’ most recent starring role in U.S. politics — its alleged cooperation with Russia in releasing emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC. Unlike “Citizenfour,” “Risk” gets its gravity not from a thriller-like plot, but sheer proximity to the cult of Assange. Poitras has a knack for being in the room where it happens — with a camera, no less. She has an unshakeable sense of presence, which she builds by training multiple cameras — some on tripods off in the corner, some gracefully handheld — on a single conversation. The effect is less “fly on the wall” than novelistic omniscient narrator. (Poitras also has the benefit of hindsight, considering that most of her principal photography for the film dates to Obama’s first term.) Yet this approach gave way to one of my central frustrations with the film: Poitras is so intent on making a film about journalistic perspective that she does not deign to actually investigate any of the claims brought against Assange or his friend Jacob Appelbaum. As Poitras recently told Vox.com, “I don’t go and do interviews and talk about things from the past. I film what’s in front of me.” As with New Yorker writer Janet Malcom’s meta-journalistic classic, “The Journalist and the Murderer,” the question at hand is not the guilt of the accused, but the relational aspects of the story. Poitras, as the director of this film, does not seem to be interested in whether Assange committed the crimes of which he is accused. Rather, she wants see how he manipulates those around him into sticking to the party line: that Assange is Robin Hood on the run from every government agency he can name, the victim not only of institutional stalking but also of a feminist conspiracy. The irony here is that the statute of limitations on three of Assange’s sexual assault crimes (two counts of sexual molestation and one count of unlawful coercion) expired while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy. Without a thorough investigation into those charges, the public may only get the chance to know the truth about Assange the cultish transparency advocate, and not Assange the alleged rapist. But while the first Assange is scrutinized closely and the second is only glimpsed, a third — Assange the anti-Semite — is nowhere to be seen. Assange has made no secret of his distrust of Jews, particularly Jews in the media. In 2011 he spoke to the editor of the British magazine Private Eye about a conspiracy, led by Jewish journalists at the Guardian, against him. In 2015 he tweeted on how the “Jewish pro-censorship lobby” aided attacks on the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo. Off Twitter, Assange aided an avid Holocaust denier, Israel Shamir, by giving him access to 90,000 as-yet-unpublished State Department cables relating to the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe. Shamir turned around and reportedly shared those cables with Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus since 1994 — a man who the Guardian has said presides over “Europe’s last dictatorship.” All of this goes unmentioned in “Risk.” Poitras’ concern lies elsewhere; whether this represents a partial abdication of her responsibilities as a documentarian is a matter of your priorities. What is more interesting, the character or the crimes? What is more important, allegations of rape or clear-cut global surveillance? Poitras makes no attempt to answer these questions, as they are but a matter of perspective. But Assange has his own convenient answer. When Poitras asks him about how much his work has to do with power, (the implication being that Assange enjoys his position of power) he responds with a trite metaphor. If you are a gardener, your area of concern is your garden, he says. But if you expand your area of concern to the whole world, the garden becomes unimportant. “Acting locally is completely inconsequential,” Assange says. “If your perception has been globalized, the area that I care about is the whole world.” How convenient

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Google goes along to get along
by professor rat 07 May '22

07 May '22

“Crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to,” Google President of Commerce Bill Ready told Bloomberg in January. “As user demand and merchant demand evolves, we’ll evolve with it.” https://decrypt.co/99645/google-web3-team-tap-market-tremendous-potential They're like the POUM during the Spanish Revolution.

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The ID mountain is coming to Mohammad
by professor rat 07 May '22

07 May '22

https://www.1kosmos.com/identity-management/self-sovereign-identity/ DIDs are becoming more and more popular as an open and flexible standard. The European Union (where GDPR is the law) developed a schema for decentralized identifiers as the base of the European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework. . . " Presuming ID management compatible with cryptoanarchy is becoming the standard then it only remains for us to enforce our core tenet that ' cypherpunks are all about privacy for the poor and transparency for the powerful ". Strong AI, and a suitably tuned, distributed and calibrated TRANSLUCENT system will make this, formerly non-trivial and NP hard problem, a snack.

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