- cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

[Server-sky] Server sky and social architecture
by Eugen Leitl 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

----- Forwarded message from Keith Lofstrom <keithl(a)kl-ic.com> ----- Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2014 11:43:47 -0700 From: Keith Lofstrom <keithl(a)kl-ic.com> To: Server Sky - Internet and Computing in Orbit <server-sky(a)server-sky.com> Subject: [Server-sky] Server sky and social architecture Message-ID: <20140709184347.GA5290(a)gate.kl-ic.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.2i Reply-To: keithl(a)keithl.com Inspired by a brief conversation with Cory Doctorow at his presentation 2014 July 8, Tuesday: http://server-sky.com/CodeLawHardware Keith -- Keith Lofstrom keithl(a)keithl.com _______________________________________________ Server-sky mailing list Server-sky(a)lists.server-sky.com http://lists.server-sky.com/mailman/listinfo/server-sky ----- End forwarded message ----- Code is Law, Hardware is Code's Language CodeLawHardware The Law of Law is language. If your language is richly metaphorical and contains the word "schadenfreude", you will annex the Sudetenland, gas most of your ethnic minorities, and a surviving ethnic outlier will use your language to express general relativity. Other languages better express other crimes and concepts. A linguist will tell you all languages can express all concepts - languages are Turing complete - but this fashionable conceit does not tell us why different cultures do different things. Code is law. Hardware is the language and law of code. Code can only do what hardware permits. A Turing complete machine can manufacture any set of symbols from any other set, but those symbols cannot go where the hardware doesn't connect. In 1990 I designed a chip, a non-blocking crossbar routing device, for the startup I-Cube Design Systems. This chip routed signals from any pin to any other pin, and could route 240 inputs to any combination of 240 other outputs. But it also had fanout - it could route an input to two or more outputs. 160 inputs could become 320 outputs. This was useful for the original task - hardware logic simulation. When the original logic simulator customers became enmired in patent lawsuits, I-Cube found a new customer, another small startup called Cisco. Cisco's routers distributed the backbone of the early internet, and still route most of it. I realize, decades later, that I made one of the architectural decisions that allows the NSA to watch you as you read this webpage. Cisco's routers flowed bitstreams, not "packets", a software metaphor for a time-bounded sequence of bits. Packet headers told the router which flow got the bits, the router told the crossbar device which path the bits should take. Sending the bits to more than one place was implicit in how the hardware worked, because the hardware had fanout. Cisco remains, I-Cube was killed by incompetent venture capitalists. I'm not party to how Cisco designs routers today, but fanout is implicit in dataflow, hardware can stream one transmitter to multiple receivers, tracelessly. Software is merely "judicial opinion" applied to that hardware, and we non-electrical macroscopic human beings only have opinions, not sure knowledge, about how the bits are actually moving and transforming from memory location to other (possibly multiple) memory locations. Software can encrypt - or it can pretend to. Software becomes machine instructions via a compiler. Dennis Ritchie taught us that a compiler emits machine instructions chosen by the compiler author, who can override the decisions of the source code author. The hardware author can override both. The hard disk manufacturer decides what firmware bytes go on the boot tracks of your hard drive, the disk firmware decides what bytes you actually get to your RAM from which disk track, and this firmware is invisible to the machine code it dispenses. In an age of Viterbi coding and VLSI disk chips, even a hardware logic analyzer may not tell you what's actually on the boot tracks. For sure knowledge, you will need your own hardware, either your own replacement disk chips or a focused ion beam milling system (FIB) to take apart the disk chips and learn what they actually do. The economics of chip production make it impossibly expensive to give everyone a different chip architecture, though you can cheaply individualize every chip (another of my inventions, see http://siidtech.com ). If there is a ghost in the hardware machine, it is in all the machines, and those versed in VLSI, equipped with FIB, can find the ghosts. The individuality can be perfectly hidden, and cannot be unmasked without destroying the chip. Puzzling out a proprietary design is possible but time-consuming, perhaps costing as much as the original design. Verifying that an open source hardware design is faithfully replicated in silicon is relatively easy, and could be automated, perhaps as cheap as sequencing a genome. We do not do so, because software designers pretend the substrate does not exist, or is logically identical to all other substrates, and thus not worth controlling or verifying (doctors and pharmaceutical companies share the same pretense). Open source hardware can also encrypt, and properly-designed hardware can encrypt without fanout (no feasible side channel attacks). If we choose, we can build individual hardware that encrypts each keystroke and decrypts it at each screen, whether the path between is centimeters or megameters. With proper hardware, you can still use Gmail for your mail host, but your messages are gibberish to Google, and to whoever they share the messages with. Google banner ads can be ignored by your decrypter. Google would starve, so they want to make your software and hardware "for free", protecting their product (which is you). Hardware geeks will still need to re-examine (identical) copies of the hardware from time to time, to make sure the hardware matches specification, and crypto geeks will need to frequently re-examine the specification to make sure it is mathematically correct. And sometimes the hardware will be invalid, and we will need to replace it with new hardware. But a billion transistors costs pennies from Intel, which Amazon can get to you overnight. Why this matters to Server Sky Server sky will use far fewer routers. Access to server sky arrays will be trigonometric, agile antenna pointing, not packet routing via DNS and border gateway protocol; if the array is above the horizon and has what you want, you can talk to it directly without intermediaries, and your conversation can be encrypted end-to-end. Of course, each end can have fanout, with either the orbiting array or your ground terminal copying your conversation to your Designated Overlord. Each end can have a fanout of zero, censorship applied by that same (or different) Designated Overlord. No man-in-the-middle attacks when there is only vacuum and Maxwell's equations between sender and receiver. Orbital mechanics, Doppler shift, and twelve-nines-accurate shared clocks provide link authentication that cannot be spoofed without reshaping space-time. There will be Designated Overlords - in the US, we call the overlords "Google" and "Hollywood", in China the overlords are the Communist Party and/or the People's Liberation Army. People can't seem to live without chains, sigh. But we must design our hardware so the overlords are explicit in the design, few in number, and subject to organized social opinion (which may be more true for China than the US, though I love Google more than the PLA). This matters because the Server Sky team will make the design decisions now that will shape the hardware for decades, until the next big re-architecting (the last two were the Bell network, and internet protocol). These decisions should be informed by every capable brain on the planet. They should not be made by me, nor by my handful of smart but fallible collaborators. The best minds work elsewhere, and the best minds, if they know what's good for them, will get involved while the future is still conceptual and easy to shape. After launch, we can still replace all the satellites and all the ground terminals and all the end-user gear, but this is costly, and even the best minds don't have the money and persuasiveness to make this happen often. Better to get it approximately right the first time, and make it plug-upgradable. This webpage is an appeal for help. Bad social design is easy, and regrettably common. Hardware is easy compared to competent social design. I beg you to help design the future you and your descendants will live in. I goofed up once, I would rather not do it again.

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distributing Cryptome June 2014 [was: data mine the snowden files]
by coderman 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 7:04 AM, coderman <coderman(a)gmail.com> wrote: > ... > anyone who would like to host mirrors is welcome to tell me how they > anticipate mirroring ~30G of data as quickly as possible. :) based on feedback, here is what i intend: 1. A torrent of: USB-1.rar USB-2.rar Update-13-1231.rar each of these have an accompanying signature from John. i will include a magnet URI. 2. The same files on a hidden service with nginx and HTTP/1.1 range request capable (resume-able) 3. An extracted collection of all relevant files, which can be rsync'ed from hidden service or browsed directly. note that this is a point in time archive from June 2014. please donate to John as i hate to think i would be taking revenue from his pocket with this setup! best regards,

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Re: <nettime> Facebook's Mood Study: Orwellian newspeak 2.0
by Eugen Leitl 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

----- Forwarded message from Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 12:26:20 -0500 From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift(a)gmail.com> To: nettime-l(a)kein.org Subject: Re: <nettime> Facebook's Mood Study: Orwellian newspeak 2.0 On 07/09/2014 12:53 AM, nettime's avid reader wrote: > It turns out that one of the researchers who ran Facebook's recent > psychological experiments received funding from the U.S. Department of > Defense to study the contagion of ideas So why should the crossover of one researcher be so suspicious? Are we being told that DOD's Minerva project itself contagious? Isn't this just more aimless paranoia from the crazies? Check out David Price, the author of Weaponizing Anthropology: "When you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project." That's it, right down to the banality and the over-simplification. The crucial technique used by DoD to exploit civilian research is the concept of "dual use" - the professors see the civilian, peace-time use (a salve for their conscience) and the military planners see the research as small pieces in a larger effort that they coordinate. The best book I know about this is Mind Wars, by the bioethicist Jonathan Moreno (with that unforgettable first chapter, Darpa on Your Mind). But in the meantime, definitely read the two Guardian articles by Nafeez Ahmed that describe the Minerva project and its backgrounds: http://tinyurl.com/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown http://tinyurl.com/climate-change-energy-shocks Ahmed's key conclusion is this: "NSA mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks." They want your info so they can model, influence and shape your behavior. Big data = social control. There's no use sticking our heads in the sand. The military is right that massive disorder lies on the horizon, because it started three years ago (with Fukushima, Tahrir, Occupy and right now, Isis). The question is, how do we guide ourselves through the breakdown of the neoliberal order toward a more viable way of life? Whoever thinks there will be a spontaneous "return to normal" is ripe for the manipulations of militarized social science, delivered via the giant corporations. That nexus (big science-corporations-military) is as old as WWII, and its tradition is unbroken, despite the scandals of the 60s and 70s. The covert force of miitarized social science will act, it _is_ acting on society right now. We need to massively recognize that our whole oil-based civilization is currently on a disaster course, and that course is having immediate consequences. We need to find the ways to make this into a fully public preoccupation, so that the efforts to steer the ensuing chaos are not guided by the single aim of preserving the plutocratic status quo and the capitalist exploitation of society. Efforts to maintain the status quo inevitably worsen the problems we are facing. And one-off protests, occupations and revolts, valuable as they may be, will not change the dynamics of an entire social order. Civil society has tremendous resources to deal with the problems of the present. On the basis of transformative processes that have already begun, over the next thirty years we could leave the petroleum economy behind for alternative energies, transform the food system into healthy fare for all, end massive inequality and the hatred, oppression and terrorism that comes in its wake, and find a new ethos, a new culture, a new art of living. But none of that can be done if you think your own life won't change. What's missing is the public recognition that the current form of society can't last. It will end in authoritarianism and bloodshed, or it will end in far better ways, with people you can love and air you can breathe. What we have in our lives is not some unbearable nightmare, but the chance to be part of the transition. so let's go further, Brian # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org ----- End forwarded message -----

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Re: Tox.im
by Dāvis Mosāns 10 Jul '14

10 Jul '14

2014-07-06 23:28 GMT+03:00 rysiek <rysiek(a)hackerspace.pl>: > Dnia niedziela, 6 lipca 2014 22:25:59 piszesz: > > hmm, I wonder are there any such open protocol specification created? I > > know about XMPP, but nothing more... > > Well, there's the Diaspora protocol: > https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Federation_protocol_overview > > And... StatusNet/OStatus, PumpIO, TentIO, ActivityStreams, BuddyCloud > (XMPP- > based, I guess), and quite a few others I don't really remember. Some of > them > are related, all are incompatible. And all the devs are showing strong > symptoms of the NIH syndrome. > > Which is absurd. > > -- > Pozdr > rysiek that indeed is stupid and so no one have solved it yet... for social network or basically any IM/chat/etc to be usable it must have majority of people (eg. your friends) users there, otherwise without people they are totally useless so currently we're stuck with no-so-great applications/protocols only because everyone already are on them like Facebook and Skype. On that mailing list there were discussion about a polyglot protocol/application which could support all networks so users wouldn't be forced to migrate which I think is essential because a lot of people won't bother. There was mention to Sockethub <http://sockethub.org/>which seems quite cool, only for a bit different use case I would say. Another thing I would like to mention is BitlBee <http://bitlbee.org> it is a gateway between various IM/chat networks and IRC so you can chat with friends on Facebook using your favorite IRC client, or post a tweet on your Twitter and use various other protocols. It even supports OTR.

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Re: [liberationtech] data mine the snowden files [was: open the snowden files]
by Griffin Boyce 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

Nick wrote: > Quoth edhelas: >> What about a Torrent ? We can easily share the magnet everywhere > > Note that there is a torrent of the cryptome archive up to 2011: > magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ba401110a60ad844a09d4219e5f95a46385f7410 > > But yes, bittorrent seems like a reasonable way to distribute this > sort of stuff. That said, it is not anonymous, so a hidden service > as the originating place seems sensible. Also keep in mind that it's possible to spy on who downloads these just by seeding the torrent and monitoring connections to your box. So it's certainly not anonymous. I'd say hidden service first, a website second, and torrent third. ~Griffin -- Wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit. -Bill Hicks

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Re: <nettime> Facebook's Mood Study: Orwellian newspeak 2.0
by Eugen Leitl 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

----- Forwarded message from nettime's avid reader <nettime(a)kein.org> ----- Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2014 07:53:13 +0200 From: nettime's avid reader <nettime(a)kein.org> To: nettime-l(a)kein.org Subject: Re: <nettime> Facebook's Mood Study: Orwellian newspeak 2.0 Message-ID: <20140709055313.GA98400(a)mx.kein.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.3i Facebook's Psychological Experiments Connected to Department of Defense Research on Civil Unrest http://scgnews.com/facebooks-psychological-experiments-connected-to-departm… 01.Jul.2014 | SCG It turns out that one of the researchers who ran Facebook's recent psychological experiments received funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to study the contagion of ideas There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring how this impacted user behavior. Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world. In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you'll find Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva initiative website you'll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called "Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes". If you go to the project site for that study you'll find a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease. Cornell University is currently being funded for another DoD study right now called "Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions" (you'll find the description for this project on the Minerva Initiative's funding page). The Department of Defense's investment in the mechanics of psychological contagion and Facebook's assistance, have some very serious implications, particularly when placed in context with other scandals which have broken in the past two years. First of all we know that Facebook willingly participated (and presumably is still participating) in the NSA's PRISM program by giving the agency unfettered access to user communications. We also know that the U.S. government has invested heavily in technology used to track and model the spread of opinions on social media. The U.S. government hasn't sought these capabilities for the sake of science. We know from the Cuban Twitter scandal, where the U.S. State Department where got caught red handed attempting to topple the Cuban government through social media, that these capabilities are already being used for offensive operations. Combine that with the fact that the U.S. Military got exposed in 2011 for developing 'sock puppet' software to create fake online identities and spread propaganda and an ominous picture snaps into focus. The U.S. government is militarizing social media through a combination of technology and social sciences, and Facebook is helping them. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org ----- End forwarded message -----

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Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On
by coderman 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

latest from The Intercept: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/07/09/under-surveillance/ a choice excerpt: """ The FBI—which is listed as the “responsible agency” for surveillance on the five men—has a controversial record when it comes to the ethnic profiling of Muslim-Americans. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat “mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as “a funding mechanism for combat,” and to view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. John Guandolo, a former FBI counterterrorism official who takes credit for developing a training program for agents on the “Muslim Brotherhood and their subversive movement in the United States,” told The Intercept that he participated in investigations of some of the individuals whose email accounts were monitored. Echoing the “red under every bed” hysteria of the McCarthy era, Guandolo believes that “hundreds” of covert members of the Muslim Brotherhood are active in the United States, that some of them have succeeded in infiltrating the Pentagon, and that CIA director John Brennan is a secret Muslim. Other former and current federal officials say such beliefs are not representative of the FBI or Justice Department. But blatant prejudice against Muslim-Americans is also documented in the Snowden archive. In one 2005 document, intelligence community personnel are instructed how to properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance. In the place where the target’s real name would go, the memo offers a fake name as a placeholder: “Mohammed Raghead.” """ best regards, Brother Coder Raghead Muhammed

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[tor-talk] Tor Weekly News — July 9th, 2014
by Lunar 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

======================================================================== Tor Weekly News July 9th, 2014 ======================================================================== Welcome to the twenty-seventh issue of Tor Weekly News in 2014, the weekly newsletter that covers what is happening in the Tor community. On being targeted by the NSA ---------------------------- Das Erste has published an article [1] and supporting material [2] showing how the NSA explicitly targets Tor and Tails user through the XKEYSCORE Deep Packet Inspection system. Several other media picked up the news, and it was also discussed in various threads on the tor-talk mailing list [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. The Tor Project’s view has been reposted [10] on the blog. To a comment that said “I felt like i am caught in the middle of a two gigantic rocks colliding each other”, Roger Dingledine replied [11]: “You’re one of the millions of people every day who use Tor. And because of the diversity of users […], just because they know you use Tor doesn’t mean they know *why* you use Tor, or what you do with it. That’s still way better than letting them watch all of your interactions with all websites on the Internet.” [1]: http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/nsa230_page-1.html [2]: http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/xkeyscorerules100.txt [3]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-June/033473.html [4]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033564.html [5]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033640.html [6]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033642.html [7]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033656.html [8]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033703.html [9]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033749.html [10]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/being-targeted-nsa [11]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/being-targeted-nsa#comment-64376 More monthly status reports for June 2014 ----------------------------------------- The wave of regular monthly reports from Tor project members for the month of June continued, with submissions from Georg Koppen [12], Lunar [13], Noel David Torres Taño [14], Matt Pagan [15], Colin C. [16], Arlo Breault [17], and George Kadianakis [18]. Mike Perry reported on behalf of the Tor Browser team [19]. [12]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000576.html [13]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000577.html [14]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000578.html [15]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000579.html [16]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000580.html [17]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000583.html [18]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000585.html [19]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000584.html Miscellaneous news ------------------ An Austrian Tor exit node operator interpreted [20] their conviction in a first ruling as judging them “guilty of complicity, because he enabled others to transmit content of an illegal nature through the service”. Moritz Bartl from Torservers.net [21] commented [22]: “We strongly believe that it can be easily challenged. […] We will definitely try and find some legal expert in Austria and see what we can do to fight this.” [20]: https://network23.org/blackoutaustria/2014/07/01/to-whom-it-may-concern-eng… [21]: https://www.torservers.net/ [22]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033613.html Linus Nordberg is expanding the idea of public, append-only, untrusted log à la Certificate Transparency [23] to the Tor consensus. Linus submitted a new draft proposal to the tor-dev mailing list for reviews [24]. [23]: http://www.certificate-transparency.org/ [24]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007092.html Miguel Freitas reported [25] that twister [26] — a fully decentralized P2P microblogging platform — was now able to run over Tor. As Miguel wrote, “running twister on top of Tor was a long time goal, […] the Tor support allows a far more interesting threat model”. [25]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/033580.html [26]: http://twister.net.co/ Google Summer of Code students have sent a new round of reports after the mid-term: Israel Leiva on the GetTor revamp [27], Amogh Pradeep on Orbot and Orfox improvements [28], Mikhail Belous on the multicore tor daemon [29], Daniel Martí on incremental updates to consensus documents [30], Sreenatha Bhatlapenumarthi on the Tor Weather rewrite [31], Quinn Jarrell on the pluggable transport combiner [32], Noah Rahman on Stegotorus enhancements [33], Marc Juarez on website fingerprinting defenses [34], Juha Nurmi on the ahmia.fi project [35], and Zack Mullaly on the HTTPS Everywhere secure ruleset update mechanism [36]. [27]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007074.html [28]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007083.html [29]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007086.html [30]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007087.html [31]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007091.html [32]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007094.html [33]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007095.html [34]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000581.html [35]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-July/000582.html [36]: https://lists.eff.org/pipermail/https-everywhere/2014-July/002182.html sajolida, tchou and Giorgio Maone from NoScript drafted a specification [37] for a Firefox extension to download and verify Tails. [37]: https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2014-July/006288.html Tor help desk roundup --------------------- One way to volunteer for Tor is to run a mirror [38] of the Tor Project website. Instructions [39] are available for anyone wanting to run a mirror. Mirrors are useful for those who, for one reason or another, cannot access or use the main Tor Project website. Volunteers who have successfully set up a synced a mirror can report their mirror to the tor-mirrors mailing list [40] to get it included in the full mirrors list. [38]: https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/mirrors.html [39]: https://www.torproject.org/docs/running-a-mirror.html [40]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-mirrors Easy development tasks to get involved with ------------------------------------------- ooniprobe is a tool for conducting network measurements that are useful for detecting network interference. When ooniprobe starts it should perform checks to verify that the config file is correct [41]. If that is not the case, it should fail gracefully at startup. The ticket indicates where this check should be added to the ooniprobe codebase [42]. If you’d like to do some easy Python hacking, be sure to give this ticket a try. [41]: https://bugs.torproject.org/11983 [42]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/ooni-probe.git Upcoming events --------------- July 11 16:00 UTC | Pluggable transports online meeting | #tor-dev, irc.oftc.net | https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007114.html | July 15 | Researchers & Practitioners Meetup @ PETS | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | https://blog.torproject.org/events/researchers-practitioners-meetup-pets-am… | July 15-19 | 14th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | https://petsymposium.org/2014/ This issue of Tor Weekly News has been assembled by Lunar, harmony, Matt Pagan, and Karsten Loesing. Want to continue reading TWN? Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteers to watch the Tor community and report important news. Please see the project page [43], write down your name and subscribe to the team mailing list [44] if you want to get involved! [43]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews [44]: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news-team -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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BPjM blacklist reversed
by Eugen Leitl 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

https://bpjmleak.neocities.org/ tl;dr: Germany has a censorship federal agency called BPjM which maintains a secret list of about 3000 URLs. To keep the list secret it is distributed in the form of md5 or sha1 hashes as the "BPJM-Modul". They think this is safe. This leak explains in detail that it is in fact very easy to extract the hashed censorship list from home routers or child protection software and calculate the cleartext entries. It provides a first analysis of the sometimes absurd entries on such a governmental Internet censorship list.

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Re: [FoRK] What3words -- convert lat,long into 3 English words
by Eugen Leitl 09 Jul '14

09 Jul '14

----- Forwarded message from "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw(a)lig.net> ----- Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 16:30:43 -0700 From: "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw(a)lig.net> To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork(a)xent.com> Subject: Re: [FoRK] What3words -- convert lat,long into 3 English words Message-ID: <53BC7F23.7050809(a)lig.net> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.6.0 Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork(a)xent.com> Interesting choices. I thought perhaps they were using lat/long to index into a dictionary, maybe with a hash, but it seems they have semi-manually tuned the mapping of 3 words to every 3m by 3m square on the Earth's surface, perhaps minus ocean space. Nicer IDs, but you need the proprietary database online for use. They have "extra info", but so far I don't see any kind of semantic tagging, which is sad. I noticed GeoHash and related not long ago. This is a new twist. I was involved with helping the startup of a friend of a friend of mine long ago called NetWord. The premise was very close to the private OneWord for What3words. A while back, I sent a letter to the USPS head suggesting a moveable 9+ digit unique zip code. This would allow people to have a unique short address that would be looked up in a database and sent to the currently registered location. Perfect for students, consultants, or others who move frequently. And private from the sender potentially. No surprise: no response. Then I thought about a service that would open and scan your mail for you. A few difficulties, but would be useful. But I thought better of it. Another company did it later, using veterans to open the mail as a security selling point. Related links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash-36 http://geohash.org/ http://www.bigdatamodeling.org/2013/01/intuitive-geohash.html Use of variable precision bounding box addresses in 2D or 3D, but closely held and proprietary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Area_Code http://www.nacgeo.com/ Similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system http://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Military_grid_referen… http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/coordsys/coordsys_f.html https://www.maxmind.com/en/worldcities http://opengts.sourceforge.net/ http://www.swarmly.co/ http://www.geoplace.it/ http://www.loc.is/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Geocodes#The_GeoDirectory http://www.cdxtech.com/Blog/post/Latitude-and-Longitude-as-an-Alternative-t… https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/ http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/geocoding.html http://incurlybraces.com/gps-location-coordinates-android.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Geocodes http://mygeoposition.com/ https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/Kc0jjqzmlR8[1-25-false] Just for fun: https://tech.lds.org/wiki/Geo_code Stephen On 7/8/14, 10:14 AM, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote: > cage.gust.regular -- the ICS building at UCI. 5 feet later: trillions.socket.added. Seems legit. > > Greg > > On 7/8/2014 9:38 AM, Ken Meltsner wrote: >> Cannot decide whether this is brilliant or stupid: >> >> http://what3words.com/ >> >>> From the FAQ: >> >> What is what3words and what does it do? >> >> what3words is a service which pinpoints any location on the globe (to >> the nearest 2 metres) with a unique 3 word combination. This is far >> more accurate than you can achieve with a postal address (if indeed >> the location you are trying to pinpoint even has a postal address), >> and definitely easier than remembering a set of GPS co-ordinates. >> >> We also offer a service called OneWord which allows you to create a >> customised, shorter, and even easier reference for any location of >> your choice, accurate to the nearest metre. >> >> Ken Meltsner at blues.skinny.nurses >> > _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message -----

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