- cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

EFF and Gilmore: Secret Spat Results in Break Up and Divorce
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/john-gilmore-leaves-eff-board-becomes… 76-year-old John Gilmore co-founded the EFF in 1990, and in the 31 years since he's "provided leadership and guidance on many of the most important digital rights issues we advocate for today," the EFF said in a statement Friday. "But in recent years, we have not seen eye-to-eye on how to best communicate and work together," they add, announcing "we have been unable to agree on a way forward with Gilmore in a governance role." That is why the EFF Board of Directors has recently made the difficult decision to vote to remove Gilmore from the Board. We are deeply grateful for the many years Gilmore gave to EFF as a leader and advocate, and the Board has elected him to the role of Board Member Emeritus moving forward. "I am so proud of the impact that EFF has had in retaining and expanding individual rights and freedoms as the world has adapted to major technological changes," Gilmore said. "My departure will leave a strong board and an even stronger staff who care deeply about these issues." John Gilmore co-founded EFF in 1990 alongside John Perry Barlow, Steve Wozniak and Mitch Kapor, and provided significant financial support critical to the organization's survival and growth over many years. Since then, Gilmore has worked closely with EFF's staff, board, and lawyers on privacy, free speech, security, encryption, and more. In the 1990s, Gilmore found the government documents that confirmed the First Amendment problem with the government's export controls over encryption, and helped initiate the filing of Bernstein v DOJ, which resulted in a court ruling that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional. The decision made it legal in 1999 for web browsers, websites, and software like PGP and Signal to use the encryption of their choice. Gilmore also led EFF's effort to design and build the DES Cracker, which was regarded as a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate computer security and the public policies that control its use. At the time, the 1970s Data Encryption Standard (DES) was embedded in ATM machines and banking networks, as well as in popular software around the world. U.S. government officials proclaimed that DES was secure, while secretly being able to wiretap it themselves. The EFF DES Cracker publicly showed that DES was in fact so weak that it could be broken in one week with an investment of less than $350,000. This catalyzed the international creation and adoption of the much stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), now widely used to secure information worldwide.... EFF has always valued and appreciated Gilmore's opinions, even when we disagree. It is no overstatement to say that EFF would not exist without him. We look forward to continuing to benefit from his institutional knowledge and guidance in his new role of Board Member Emeritus. Gilmore also created the alt* hierarchy on Usenet, co-founded the Cypherpunks mailing list, and was one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions (according to his page on Wikipedia). He's also apparently Slashdot user #35,813 (though he hasn't posted a comment since 2004).

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Cryptocurrency: Thiel Opines Lately on SpyVeillanceAI, Politics, Crypto
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/palantirs-peter-thiel-surveillance-ai-is-mo… https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/ https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1ynJOZQQeAnGR Tech billionaire Peter Thiel "believes that people should be more worried about 'surveillance AI' rather than artificial general intelligences," reports CNBC: The venture capitalist, who co-founded big data firm Palantir, said at an event in Miami on Wednesday that on the path to AGI, you get surveillance AI, which he described as a "communist totalitarian technology." Those that are worried about AGI aren't actually "paying attention to the thing that really matters," Thiel said, adding that governments will use AI-powered facial recognition technology to control people. His comments come three years after Bloomberg reported that "Palantir knows everything about you." Thiel has also invested in facial recognition company Clearview AI and surveillance start-up Anduril. Palantir, which has a market value of $48 billion, has developed data trawling technology that intelligence agencies and governments use for surveillance and to spot suspicious patterns in public and private databases. Customers reportedly include the CIA, FBI, and the U.S. Army.... Thiel, a well-known libertarian who also co-founded PayPal and holds a board seat at Facebook, said Silicon Valley isn't talking about AGI as much today as it was six or seven years ago... In the same talk, Thiel pitted AI against cryptocurrencies, saying that he'd prefer to see the latter one succeed. "If we say crypto is libertarian and that it is fundamentally a force for decentralization, then I think we should also be willing to say that AI, especially in the low-tech surveillance form, is essentially communist." "If you want to frame it as a technological race ... I want the crypto decentralized world to work," he said.

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SpyVeillance: License Plates, Ring Doorbells... Neighborhoods Flock'ing to Full Bore 1984
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/license-plate-scanners-were-supposed-to-b… https://www.flocksafety.com/flock-for-neighborhood-security/ http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/05/12/11-17892.pdf https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/06/23/opinion-at-gunpoint-police-handcuffe… https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/aurora-police-detain-black… It is not the errors, but the system itself, route around, shut it all down. "License plate readers are rapidly reshaping private security in American neighborhoods," reports the Washington Post, as aggressively-marketed $2,500-a-year "safety-as-a-service" packages "spread to cover practically everywhere anyone chooses to live in the United States" and "bringing police surveillance tools to the masses with an automated watchdog that records 24 hours a day." Flock Safety, the industry leader, says its systems have been installed in 1,400 cities across 40 states and now capture data from more than a billion cars and trucks every month. "This is not just for million-dollar homes," Flock's founder, Garrett Langley, said. "This is America at its core..." Its solar-powered, motion-sensing camera can snap a dozen photos of a single plate in less than a second — even in the dark, in the rain, of a car driving 100 mph up to 75 feet away, as Flock's marketing materials say. Piped into a neighborhood's private Flock database, the photos are made available for the homeowners to search, filter or peruse. Machine-learning software categorizes each vehicle based on two dozen attributes, including its color, make and model; what state its plates came from; and whether it had bumper stickers or a roof rack. Each "vehicle fingerprint" is pinpointed on a map and tracked by how often it had been spotted in the past month. The plates are also run against law enforcement watch lists for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives; if there's a match, the system alerts the nearest police force with details on how to track it down... Flock's customer base has roughly quadrupled since 2019, with police agencies and homeowners associations in more than 1,400 cities today, and the company has hired sales representatives in 30 states to court customers with promises of a safer, more-monitored life. Company officials have also attended town hall meetings and papered homeowners associations with glossy marketing materials declaring its system "the most user-friendly, least invasive way for communities to stop crime": a network of cameras "that see like a detective," "protect home values" and "automate [the] neighborhood watch ... while you sleep." Along the way, the Atlanta-based company has become an unlikely darling of American tech. The company said in July it had raised $150 million from prominent venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, which said Flock was pursuing "a massive opportunity in shaping the future...." Flock deletes the footage every 30 days by default and encourages customers to search only when investigating crime. But the company otherwise lets customers set their own rules: In some neighborhoods, all the homeowners can access the images for themselves... Camera opponents didn't want the neighborhood's leaders to anoint themselves gatekeepers, choosing who does and doesn't belong. And they worried that if someone's car was broken into, but no one knew exactly when, the system could lead to hundreds of drivers, virtually all of them innocent, coming under suspicion for the crime. They also worried about the consequences of the cameras getting it wrong. In San Francisco, police had handcuffed a woman at gunpoint in 2009 after a camera garbled her plate number; another family was similarly detained last year because a thief had swiped their tag before committing a crime. And last year in Aurora, 30 miles from Paradise Hills, police handcuffed a mother and her children at gunpoint after a license plate reader flagged their SUV as stolen. The actual stolen vehicle, a motorcycle, had the same plate number from another state. Police officials have said racial profiling did not play a role, though the drivers in all three cases were Black. (The license plate readers in these cases were not Flock devices, and the company said its systems would have shown more accurate results...) The Paradise Hills opponents were right to be skeptical about a local crime wave. According to Jefferson County sheriff's records shared with The Post, the only crime reports written up since September 2020 included two damaged mailboxes, a fraudulent unemployment claim and some stuff stolen out of three parked cars, two of which had been left unlocked. "I wouldn't exactly say it's a hot spot," patrol commander Dan Aten told The Post... The cameras clicked on in August, a board member said. In the weeks since, the neighborhood hasn't seen any reports of crime. The local sheriff's office said it hasn't used the Flock data to crack any cases, nor has it found the need to ask. Flock's founder, Garrett Langley, nonetheless tells the Washington Post, "There are 17,000 cities in America. "Until we have them all, we're not done."

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FBI Sacrifices Innocents Again While Trying To Catch News Instead of Crooks
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fbi-held-back-ransomware-decryption-key-f… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/13/revil-disappears-kasey… America's Federal Bureau of Investigation "refrained for almost three weeks from helping to unlock the computers of hundreds of businesses and institutions hobbled by a major ransomware attack this summer," reports the Washington Post, "even though the bureau had secretly obtained the digital key needed to do so, according to several current and former U.S. officials." The key was obtained through access to the servers of the Russia-based criminal gang behind the July attack. Deploying it immediately could have helped the victims, including schools and hospitals, avoid what analysts estimate was millions of dollars in recovery costs. But the FBI held on to the key, with the agreement of other agencies, in part because it was planning to carry out an operation to disrupt the hackers, a group known as REvil, and the bureau did not want to tip them off. Also, a government assessment found the harm was not as severe as initially feared. The planned takedown never occurred because in mid-July REvil's platform went offline — without U.S. government intervention — and the hackers disappeared before the FBI had a chance to execute its plan, according to the current and former officials... The FBI finally shared the key with Kaseya, the IT company whose software was infected with malware, on July 21 — 19 days after it was hit. Kaseya asked New Zealand-based security firm Emsisoft to create a fresh decryption tool, which Kaseya released the following day. By then, it was too late for some victims... On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, testifying before Congress, indicated the delay stemmed in part from working jointly with allies and other agencies. "We make the decisions as a group, not unilaterally," he said, noting that he had to constrain his remarks because the investigation was ongoing... He also suggested that "testing and validating" the decryption key contributed to the delay. "There's a lot of engineering that's required to develop a tool" that can be used by victims, he said at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing. Emsisoft, however, was able to act quickly. It extracted the key from what the FBI provided Kaseya, created a new decryptor and tested it — all within 10 minutes, according to Fabian Wosar, Emsisoft chief technology officer. The process was speedy because the firm was familiar with REvil's ransomware. "If we had to go from scratch," Wosar said, "it would have taken about four hours."

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Tony Guoga be like Douglas Lucas
by professor rat 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

Dead men talking https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cypherpunk-announces-agreement-miningstore-1…

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AMERICAN JEWISH ANARCHIST WOMEN, 1920-1950
by professor rat 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://anarchistnews.org/comment/38419#comment-38419 Those who espouse anarchism have long argued for complete and total freedom, whether it is from the State, from religion, in the workplace or in personal relationships.

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Wikileaks is CIA - a still hot smoking gun
by professor rat 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=infowars+wikileaks+cia+&&view=detail&m… WIkileaks John Young- Vatican Super Spy Agency #1 YouTube · 3,000+ views · 14/12/2010 · by dynoplasm1

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North face of cryptography
by professor rat 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPS_6lCUERE Cryptography: the hardest slab in the world?

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[notes] opentimestamps.org python client
by Karl 24 Oct '21

24 Oct '21

- opentimestamps.org simply uploads its payload to an op return transaction - the python client looks nice; it can connect to either a local node or a remote server - it has a bunch of political boilerplate around hashing content. this boilerplate could be removed and it could be used a simple op_return client to notarise small data for public lookup the file hashing boilerplate entrypoint is in opentimestamps-client/otsclient/cmds.py lines 155-182 (off 616718cfdc5c235ea71374d6910235d77ec47fc0 ). It loops over each file, hashes, adds a nonce, and merkles the hashes. The resulting merkle tip could be replaced with any short content (likely of identical length) to notarise this content. I am not a cryptographer. I might propose either the first n/2 bytes of 2 different modern hashes preceded 1-4 bytes of topic-specific identifier, a common hash such as sha256, or something that can be searched for elsewhere, such as a cleartext commit hash, an infohash, or a url in a content-indexed network. Scrubbing the blockchain for similar strings could help find existing uses to join a larger community.

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Singapore is a Nazbol Hellhole
by professor rat 24 Oct '21

24 Oct '21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew On 23 November 1958, the party constitution was amended to implement a cadre system. The rights to vote in party elections and run for office were revoked from ordinary party members, whom now had to seek approval from the CEC to be a cadre and regain these privileges. The criteria to be a cadre was set intentionally high for even the lowest tier of membership, automatically disqualifying students and illiterate persons. Lee was influenced by the Vatican system where the pope pre-selects its cardinals, while party chairman Toh Chin Chye credited communist organisations for the idea.

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