July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[IP] Spies Among Us
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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[linux-elitists] STANFORD LOCAL: Wednesday 19 November 2003: Microsoft will claim that Palladium is good for you, Richard Stallman asks your help in telling the truth
by Jay Sulzberger 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<blockquote what="alert and request from Richard Stallman" suggestion="Please call Palladium by its right name, 'Palladium'. It is not a Next Generation Secure Computing Base." edit-level="one mail header line suppressed so that private addresses be not broadcast" more-information="http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/palladium" for-what-Microsoft-does-today-with-the-primitive-hard-DRM-in-Xbox="http://x box-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/remotedelete.html"> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 18:04:00 -0500 From: Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> Subject: Microsoft speech at Stanford where we need people to show up At this event tomorrow, Microsoft will try to present Palladium as a security measure. It would be useful if a few people who understand the issues of treacherous computing and security could show up there and point out flaws in that argument meant to justify Palladium. Flaws could include (1) that in practice this "solution" wouldn't solve the whole problem unless users' usage is grievously limited, and (2) you could do as much for security in other ways that won't attack the user's freedom.

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Credentica Web site is up
by Stefan Brands 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dear All, This e-mail is to inform you that our corporate Web site at http://www.credentica.com is up. We welcome any suggestions for improvement, and encourage you to establish links to our home-page from your blogs, news postings, and Web sites! Best regards, Stefan Brands Credentica 740 Notre Dame W, #1500 Montreal, QC Canada H3C 3X6 Tel: +1 (514) 866.6000 PS Pages that may be of particular interest: - http://www.credentica.com/about.php (overview of what we do and how we differ) - http://www.credentica.com/solutions.php & submenus (explanations of product benefits in key markets) - http://www.credentica.com/the_mit_pressbook.php (the entire MIT Press book available for free download) White papers and product data sheets are in preparation and will be posted in the next couple of months. PPS The site is best viewed with a Javascript-enabled browser, and has been tested only with leading browsers. --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Spies Among Us
by Richard Forno 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Spies Among Us Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans By David E. Kaplan 5/8/06 In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no time after the 9/11 attacks. The second-most-populous county in Georgia, the area is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI's regional headquarters, and other potential terrorist targets. Within weeks of the attacks, officials there boasted that they had set up the nation's first local department of homeland security. Dozens of other communities followed, and, like them, DeKalb County put in for--and got--a series of generous federal counterterrorism grants. The county received nearly $12 million from Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a police intelligence unit. The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to follow around the county executive. Their job: to determine whether he was being tailed--not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store. Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they'd written the license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the county. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: "So now we know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County." Glazed hams aren't the only items that America's local cops are protecting from dubious threats. U.S. News has identified nearly a dozen cases in which city and county police, in the name of homeland security, have surveilled or harassed animal-rights and antiwar protesters, union activists, and even library patrons surfing the Web. Unlike with Washington's warrantless domestic surveillance program, little attention has been focused on the role of state and local authorities in the war on terrorism. A U.S.News inquiry found that federal officials have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into once discredited state and local police intelligence operations. Millions more have gone into building up regional law enforcement databases to unprecedented levels. In dozens of interviews, officials across the nation have stressed that the enhanced intelligence work is vital to the nation's security, but even its biggest boosters worry about a lack of training and standards. "This is going to be the challenge," says Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, "to ensure that while getting bin Laden we don't transgress over the law. We've been burned so badly in the past--we can't do that again." < snip > http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060508/8homeland.htm ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] Spies Among Us
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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Re: [liberationtech] Modern FIDONET for net disable countries?
by Julian Oliver 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

..on Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 09:38:08AM -0500, Griffin Boyce wrote: > At HOPE this summer I talked a bit about a wireless mesh concept that > would allow people to communicate without internet access or phone access. > The real problem with a BBS is that it's trivial to take down. In most > countries, one call to the phone company can suspend a phone number > 'pending investigation.' > > Right now your best bet for the features you want would probably be Briar > [1]. If your community's needs are closer to chat and file-sharing, then > PirateBox is a promising solution [2]. (file-sharing ex: files that users > wanted everyone to have, or wanted to be published online). > > Your concept could be tricky for more than a handful of users, since > everything is manual. > > [1] http://briar.sourceforge.net/ > [2] http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox > > Best, > Griffin Boyce > > On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Peter Fein <pete(a)wearpants.org> wrote: > > > I & some other Telecomix agents have discussed using a local Usenet (NNTP) > > for exactly this purpose a few times since Tahrir. Run it off a liveCD + > > adhoc wifi or OpenWRT, with web gateway interface (so random users can > > participate without needing to install software). Long distance backhaul by > > dialup modem or motorcycle courier w/ USB stick. Rather than trying to > > build in centralized security/identity, force everything to > > anonymity/pseudonymity (the 4chan model). Some years ago I read an article about an 'offline' mail transport system used (in India or Pakistan IIRC) that did precisely this. A motorcycle rider wearing an access point with 1W boosted antenna and a mass storage device pulls up outside a house in a rural area and waits a designated period while locals associate with the AP and pull and push email. Email pushed is later delivered when the driver is in contact with an Internet gateway (probably at the office). Regrettfully I can't find the article now. It would be trivial to do this with OpenWRT. You could even serve a simple webmail interface built atop lighttpd alongside cached news sites and other services for longer sessions. Many cheap WiFi routers these days run OpenWRT just fine, take 5v input and run at a very low amperage. Some have a USB port that supports USB OTG (for mass storage devices like USB sticks, SSDs, etc). We work a lot with OpenWRT and various SoC wireless router hardware here in Berlin at Studio Weise7. This would be a project we'd be very happy to host and 'sprint' over a weekend. Meshing is something we're very interested in also. Incidentally I may be developing a project for the city of Derry in Ireland that deploys low cost weather-proof, solar-powered offline access points (as a delivery platform for cultural material). If it goes ahead I will be happy to contribute all my findings, schematics and firmware. Cheers, -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com http://criticalengineering.org -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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USA PATRIOT Act Survives Amendment Attempt
by brian-slashdotnews＠hyperreal.org 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/09/1145225 Posted by: michael, on 2004-07-09 12:49:00 Topic: us, 90 comments from the i-feel-safer-already dept. crem_d_genes writes "A bill to modify the USA PATRIOT Act that would have blocked part of the legislation's provisions that allow for the investigation of people's reading habits [1]was defeated by a 210-210 vote in the U.S House of Representives. The House leaders kept the roll call open for 23 minutes past the 15 minute deadline to persuade 10 Representatives to change votes. According to the article 'Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., said he switched his initial "yes" vote to "no" after being shown Justice Department documents asserting that terrorists have communicated over the Internet via public library computers.' On the other hand, 'Critics of the Patriot Act argued that even without it, investigators can get book store and other records simply by obtaining subpoenas or search warrants.'" References 1. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040708/ap_on_go_co/cong… ss_patriot_act ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Re: [IP] New US/EU passenger name records treaty leaked
by James Cox 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dave, Some thoughts on this from a UK/EU citizen perspective: So, there are 36 data points being collected (as opposed to the 19 bandied about). This is bad but it gets worse - All data (including topics such as personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and data concerning the health or sex life of the individual) is to be transmitted, with the DHS systems filtering this out. But not really, because it's still accessible in cases of peril to the individual. Oh, and the data is kept *active* for 7 years, for analytical purposes (how many times have you been in the US in the past 7 years? Did you like the hotel .... ) further, the data is kept in a *dormant* state for 8 years. Except that the actual manner of deleting the PNR data is yet to be discussed, so it may not actually happen. Plus, in the next 15 years, there will be at least two different presidents, multiple Secretaries of Defence, Homeland Security and State, a possibly entirely different kind of EU. As a country we've restricted the suspension of Habeas Corpus to only 28 days. We have the D. P. A. for managing and restricting access to such personal data. But it's OK if you travel to the US - expect fingerprints, iris scans, and your family history to be stored on accessible and semi accessible databases for 15 years. Our liberties and rights get eroded, just a little bit, every day. Soon we'll be lucky to have a name rather than just an identity. James On 4 Jul 2007, at 18:57, David Farber wrote: > > >Begin forwarded message: > >From: "Erich M." <me(a)quintessenz.org> >Date: July 4, 2007 1:15:54 PM EDT >To: dave(a)farber.net >Subject: FYI: New US/EU passenger name records treaty leaked > >Dave, > >The new passenger name record agreement between the US and the EU has >been leaked. The draft treaty text looks ready for a closing. A >foreign >office spokesperson here in Vienna confirmed that, so this should be >more or less identical to the final version. > >The letter from the EU presidency to COREPER dated june 28 includes >the >draft agreement on PNR plus the US position in ANNEX2. > >Full text [English] > >http://quintessenz.org/d/000100003891 > >Analysis of the new treaty in German [from today] >http://futurezone.orf.at/it/stories/204742/ > >The gist: The new "push" system demands even more data from EU >passenger >databases. What Mr. Frattini told the public about "reduction" is a >blatant swindle: more has been packed into the 19 points of the new >PNR >agreement than the previously equired 34 datafields contained. > >The withdrawal of the US from the Amadeus pnr data base comes at a >dear >price to the Europeans: They have to deliver more and better >pre-structured data, fitting to the technical requirements of the DHS. >So data mining will much easier for DHS, as correct data extraction is >the first critical step to get the results desired. > >Credits go to Tony Bunyan from statewatch.org who dug out that draft >agreement. >cu >Erich > > > >-- >pgp-Key >http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE386BAA1 >-.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- > > >------------------------------------------- >Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now >RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ >Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- James Cox, Internet Consultant t: 07968 349990 e: james(a)imaj.es w: http://imaj.es/ ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[IP] Re: New US/EU passenger name records treaty leaked
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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[liberationtech] Tahrir
by Ian Clarke 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi all, just wanted to introduce myself, and share a bit more about Tahrir, which I believe has been discussed here recently. I'm the founder and coordinator of the Freenet project, perhaps the earliest P2P anti-censorship technology, the first version being released in March 2000. Freenet has been under active development ever since, employing one full-time developer for much of the decade since we began. In a recent survey<http://freedomhouse.org/images/File/special_reports/LOtF_China.pdf>of Chinese anti-censorship tool users, Freenet came out on top, so it seems the project is still very relevant today. One of my more recent projects is called Tahrir. Tahrir was inspired by my conversations over the years about the real needs of democracy activists in a variety of countries that lack freedom of speech, and over a decade of experience building anti-censorship tools (and many many mistakes doing so!). I've realized that many anti-censorship tools lean heavily towards attacking the problems their developers find intellectually stimulating, rather than those actually experienced by people in the trenches. We've certainly been guilty of that from time to time with Freenet. One example of this is that bandwidth can be very limited in many of the countries we are interested in helping, particularly China, and yet most P2P systems treat bandwidth like a near-infinite resource. Tahrir aims to tackle this and other problems head-on. It is an ultra-low-bandwidth secure, decentralized microblogging platform. The initial release is intended to have functionality similar to Twitter, but it will be extensible well beyond that. Initially it will be a desktop app that requires a (slow) internet connection, but down the line it can run on mobile phones, and operate in an "ad-hoc" mode relaying over wifi and other short-range connections. I've been working on Tahrir since March, although other pressures on my time have prevented me from making much progress in recent months. My approach has been ground-up and I've attempted to stick closely to modern best-practices for Java coding. So far I've implemented: - A low-level encrypted reliable UDP transport capable of UDP hole-punching - A very space-efficient serialization mechanism to convert POJOs into bytes and back again - A very convenient RPC mechanism built on top of the above two mechanisms (similar to the approach used by GWT) - A convenient set of cryptographic primitives that integrates nicely with the above You can read more about this architecture here: https://github.com/sanity/tahrir/wiki/Architecture I have been keeping relatively quiet about my work on Tahrir so as not to distract too much attention from Freenet, but I really want to move things forward after several months of dormancy. To do this I primarily need smart Java coders, who I will be happy to bring up to speed on the codebase. The top priority is to get to a working prototype ASAP, and then begin iteratively improving from there (in line with the "release early, release often" open source mantra). You can learn a lot more about what I've done to-date here, in addition to checking out the source code: https://github.com/sanity/tahrir/wiki I'm also very happy to answer any questions anyone might have about Tahrir, and I hope that some of you are interested in helping. Ian. -- Ian Clarke Blog: http://blog.locut.us/ _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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