July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Lucrative update
by Patrick 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Lucrative release 4 is out. I know many people are used to seeing releases numbered like "0.000001", "0.000002", "2.0.3.0.14.657" etc. but release numbering systems are essentially arbitrary in nature so don't get excited as Lucrative goes toward version 50+. This release is a fairly minor one, but included some changes such as the client name that I wanted to get out as soon as possible. There is also a new development weblog at http://lucrative.thirdhost.com/weblog/. I went through an install with someone over IRC last night and made a blog entry summarizing the install notes. I recommend reading the notes before attempting an install. I am glad to help with an install, drop me a note at patrick(a)lfcgate.com if you have trouble. Some documentation on the various entities in the Lucrative system is now available on the website, http://lucrative.thirdhost.com/documentation.php but more is needed and coming. If Lucrative is interesting to you, please consider helping in any way you can: Feedback Installation reports Suggestions Comments Criticism Feature requests Source code patches Donations Are all very much welcomed. And criticism is more useful to me than praise. My sincere thanks to everyone who has participated so far by installing, testing, providing feedback, spreading the word, and donating. And finally I just received word from SourceForge that the project registration for Lucrative has been approved. Regards, Patrick -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> mQGiBD5ECKcRBADUvjXHwLtxIyS4AyjBs/dFtN6rdeP18Fhzh1hD5fJwkFevqY9Z I1ASROTh6eXYF7pU5sEvbcPshHyTB41ZtTqZvQvpwWN0fUzOuutuI0mtC5UPp9Rz j47SdWLdEXNHjwnHDCYSyqtqZu8GujGRQybR0eP3NIh/NwbSDUKdgz7IjwCg//Jo UtjP3zUFobm/0UYA+CJ5krED/091x9Js0gwNwvjbzM8DqO+r8qNz0kXI13FkrPRk QNd37lxt6m2m8HZD1WYM2wKwtMzHSwJcWzaDZ/tNc+ppYjzpw0EQCh9FqjGs8Vau guF6PA1M8lJTCcLKaL4e7ynic+PAw5Xa/tdOYgFCG+eLMU5RLvzRCYoOLIjgMJLJ yG98BACAMlDmFVYgC/UKvzZmHfZ5CtCKd8sPfCXrYLu5NeFRE0LR6D6zjzmhi1xX okfreR5o3T/y78VBM98js+m2/+7Z0AElqydeW/RnV1zqwDGjDr9z2MgARf3yLAbs n3BU8Fz61RwvHy6cRkT+2dR2f69QQUSpkupvLwZIGX/iwm4uKLQdUGF0cmljayA8 cGF0cmlja0BsZmNnYXRlLmNvbT6JAE4EEBECAA4FAj5ECKcECwMCAQIZAQAKCRBb mvb9yuOVfaA2AKDAu5tDj9F2KI8cJMrKKkQRAcUyxACg6/bei7lUJH+E5igJqGRx SjKrRA65BA0EPkQIpxAQAPkYoH5aBmF6Q5CV3AVsh4bsYezNRR8O2OCjecbJ3HoL rOQ/40aUtjBKU9d8AhZIgLUV5SmZqZ8HdNP/46HFliBOmGW42A3uEF2rthccUdhQ yiJXQym+lehWKzh4XAvb+ExN1eOqRsz7zhfoKp0UYeOEqU/Rg4Soebbvj6dDRgjG zB13VyQ4SuLE8OiOE2eXTpITYfbb6yUOF/32mPfIfHmwch04dfv2wXPEgxEmK0Ng w+Po1gr9oSgmC66prrNlD6IAUwGgfNaroxIe+g8qzh90hE/K8xfzpEDp19J3tkIt AjbBJstoXp18mAkKjX4t7eRdefXUkk+bGI78KqdLfDL2Qle3CH8IF3KiutapQvMF 6PlTETlPtvFuuUs4INoBp1ajFOmPQFXz0AfGy0OplK33TGSGSfgMg71l6RfUodNQ +PVZX9x2Uk89PY3bzpnhV5JZzf24rnRPxfx2vIPFRzBhznzJZv8V+bv9kV7HAarT W56NoKVyOtQa8L9GAFgr5fSI/VhOSdvNILSd5JEHNmszbDgNRR0PfIizHHxbLY72 88kjwEPwpVsYjY67VYy4XTjTNP18F1dDox0YbN4zISy1Kv884bEpQBgRjXyEpwpy 1obEAxnIByl6ypUM2Zafq9AKUJsCRtMIPWakXUGfnHy9iUsiGSa6q6Jew1XrPdYX AAICD/wKwtF7Y4NKBe8PQ6jDbjWziiTv9Ac/EnRTJDQEoqgLa2LyE+6Ahw/VPGvp mfxkD2MKxC9E7kYVmasn6sHnSpvAv3e7O1Bqbo/qLzzCcJQ5VCurZ+elRM1GZ4Oc fM19FPKutb0/JFEv0nrqS4BGkF7WFBbu5dKYl/GIO7Co1mAerFIb719dOwMPVEIz OT08u8uB9jyR8gEElf+CVuNfOUkrUGg4HS4SbmTTrCSz3/8n5PkquSuAyjCB/dwM ZsZwA0/TTR8sDYlmlf9xPj5PGpGnV9OUwfig6eE0eWtRFeasmz0uiX+yp45ABtNh 6EXP/PFaBgXi9omXXjeeFYfpDvmfA6izvTIQfXTV6V9ZWrBfXarM+GQ+6guXWVbd 9fXvmCr982LkzuKQrK1OpRXBMUapXL+tOy/LYzz91InqKKhgPNGa12fvotZ4LzlM iqoM+Hpz5L9B5We1Ph0lD6RBVXDCqd+P8extnY/7AaDy7tC0UghaAaUuEZXJQPIc oQ3QGbpjM0nGe/VZN5EZhljau0NNENFaU56cOpvOhcO04gLGNNc2NS+rIpTMsaHh o1CG90c5zZZJuUbyx0mIHriNQXDgEwunSZPQorKK9KSppyyjeuOyi5F/mBBPXeyT weLhLqLvAr9se/+Z3aQvMADJi8zUZtGggLTw+N9R5XSwtSh2R4kARgQYEQIABgUC PkQIpwAKCRBbmvb9yuOVfWayAKC+mBhHdn1XZ5uH0RocAyJ32hx2kgCePyhB+IqM TjWLDLarQxcPYhbkFi4= =nx1M -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- --- 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' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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China Will Monitor, Censor SMS Messages
by brian-slashdotnews＠hyperreal.org 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/03/0035224 Posted by: timothy, on 2004-07-03 06:44:00 Topic: censorship, 53 comments from the enlightenment-by-fiat dept. maggeth writes "Early reports on the AP (via Yahoo) indicate that [1]China will begin monitoring and censoring SMS communications in real time. China's 'great firewall' is infamous, but the move to censoring SMS has been slow due to technological roadblocks. Algorithms are used to identify key words and combinations of words that might be associated with 'political rumors and "reactionary remarks,"' and the system automatically notifies local police. Something to think about on your Fourth of July weekend!" Reader ackthpt adds links to [2]coverage at the BBC [3]and The Register, asking "What next, a massive government database system to track every message and contacts between people?" [4]Click Here References 1. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=516&u=/ap/20040702/ap_on_re_as/ch… a_mobile_phone_surveillance_3&printer=1 2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3859403.stm 3. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/02/china_text_snoop/ 4. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=4195&alloc_id=9769&site_id=1&request_id=5368172&… =click&page=%2farticle%2epl ----- 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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[Geowanking] IP geolocation
by James Muir 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

those on the list with an interest in geolocating internet users and/or devices may be interested in the following: %%%%%%%% title: Internet Geolocation and Evasion http://www.ccsl.carleton.ca/~jamuir/papers/TR-06-05.pdf http://www.scs.carleton.ca/research/tech_reports/2006/ abstract: Internet geolocation technology (IP geolocation) aims to determine the physical (geographic) location of Internet users and devices. It is currently proposed or in use for a wide variety of purposes, including targeted marketing, restricting digital content sales to authorized jurisdictions, and security applications such as reducing credit card fraud. This raises questions about the veracity of claims of accurate and reliable geolocation, and the ability to evade geolocation. We begin with a state-of-the-art survey of IP geolocation techniques and limitations, and examine the specific problems of (1) approximating a physical location from an IP address; and (2) approximating the physical location of an end client requesting content from a web server. In contrast to previous work, we consider also an adversarial model: a knowledgeable adversary seeking to evade geolocation. Our survey serves as the basis from which we examine tactics useful for evasion/circumvention. The adversarial model leads us to also consider the difficulty of (3) extracting the IP address of an end client visiting a server. As a side-result, in exploring the use of proxy servers as an evasionary tactic, to our surprise we found that we were able to extract an end-client IP address even for a browser protected by Tor/Privoxy (designed to anonymize browsing), provided Java is enabled. We expect our work to stimulate further open research and analysis of techniques for accurate and reliable IP geolocation, and also for evasion thereof. Our work is a small step towards a better understanding of what can, and cannot, be reliably hidden or discovered about IP addresses and physical locations of Internet users and machines. %%%%%%%%% any comments are welcome. -James _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking(a)lists.burri.to http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking ----- 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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Tor 0.2.1.27 is released
by Roger Dingledine 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Tor 0.2.1.27 makes relays work with OpenSSL 0.9.8p and 1.0.0.b -- yet another OpenSSL security patch broke its compatibility with Tor. We also took this opportunity to fix several crash bugs, integrate a new directory authority, and update the bundled GeoIP database. If you operate a relay, please upgrade. https://www.torproject.org/download/download Changes in version 0.2.1.27 - 2010-11-23 o Major bugfixes: - Resolve an incompatibility with OpenSSL 0.9.8p and OpenSSL 1.0.0b: No longer set the tlsext_host_name extension on server SSL objects; but continue to set it on client SSL objects. Our goal in setting it was to imitate a browser, not a vhosting server. Fixes bug 2204; bugfix on 0.2.1.1-alpha. - Do not log messages to the controller while shrinking buffer freelists. Doing so would sometimes make the controller connection try to allocate a buffer chunk, which would mess up the internals of the freelist and cause an assertion failure. Fixes bug 1125; fixed by Robert Ransom. Bugfix on 0.2.0.16-alpha. - Learn our external IP address when we're a relay or bridge, even if we set PublishServerDescriptor to 0. Bugfix on 0.2.0.3-alpha, where we introduced bridge relays that don't need to publish to be useful. Fixes bug 2050. - Do even more to reject (and not just ignore) annotations on router descriptors received anywhere but from the cache. Previously we would ignore such annotations at first, but cache them to disk anyway. Bugfix on 0.2.0.8-alpha. Found by piebeer. - When you're using bridges and your network goes away and your bridges get marked as down, recover when you attempt a new socks connection (if the network is back), rather than waiting up to an hour to try fetching new descriptors for your bridges. Bugfix on 0.2.0.3-alpha; fixes bug 1981. o Major features: - Move to the November 2010 Maxmind GeoLite country db (rather than the June 2009 ip-to-country GeoIP db) for our statistics that count how many users relays are seeing from each country. Now we'll have more accurate data, especially for many African countries. o New directory authorities: - Set up maatuska (run by Linus Nordberg) as the eighth v3 directory authority. o Minor bugfixes: - Fix an assertion failure that could occur in directory caches or bridge users when using a very short voting interval on a testing network. Diagnosed by Robert Hogan. Fixes bug 1141; bugfix on 0.2.0.8-alpha. - Enforce multiplicity rules when parsing annotations. Bugfix on 0.2.0.8-alpha. Found by piebeer. - Allow handshaking OR connections to take a full KeepalivePeriod seconds to handshake. Previously, we would close them after IDLE_OR_CONN_TIMEOUT (180) seconds, the same timeout as if they were open. Bugfix on 0.2.1.26; fixes bug 1840. Thanks to mingw-san for analysis help. - When building with --enable-gcc-warnings on OpenBSD, disable warnings in system headers. This makes --enable-gcc-warnings pass on OpenBSD 4.8. o Minor features: - Exit nodes didn't recognize EHOSTUNREACH as a plausible error code, and so sent back END_STREAM_REASON_MISC. Clients now recognize a new stream ending reason for this case: END_STREAM_REASON_NOROUTE. Servers can start sending this code when enough clients recognize it. Bugfix on 0.1.0.1-rc; fixes part of bug 1793. - Build correctly on mingw with more recent versions of OpenSSL 0.9.8. Patch from mingw-san. o Removed files: - Remove the old debian/ directory from the main Tor distribution. The official Tor-for-debian git repository lives at the URL https://git.torproject.org/debian/tor.git - Stop shipping the old doc/website/ directory in the tarball. We changed the website format in late 2010, and what we shipped in 0.2.1.26 really wasn't that useful anyway. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the Tor announcements list. If you want to unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo(a)seul.org with "unsubscribe or-announce" as your message. ----- 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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Tor 0.2.1.27 is released
by Roger Dingledine 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Tor 0.2.1.27 makes relays work with OpenSSL 0.9.8p and 1.0.0.b -- yet another OpenSSL security patch broke its compatibility with Tor. We also took this opportunity to fix several crash bugs, integrate a new directory authority, and update the bundled GeoIP database. If you operate a relay, please upgrade. https://www.torproject.org/download/download Changes in version 0.2.1.27 - 2010-11-23 o Major bugfixes: - Resolve an incompatibility with OpenSSL 0.9.8p and OpenSSL 1.0.0b: No longer set the tlsext_host_name extension on server SSL objects; but continue to set it on client SSL objects. Our goal in setting it was to imitate a browser, not a vhosting server. Fixes bug 2204; bugfix on 0.2.1.1-alpha. - Do not log messages to the controller while shrinking buffer freelists. Doing so would sometimes make the controller connection try to allocate a buffer chunk, which would mess up the internals of the freelist and cause an assertion failure. Fixes bug 1125; fixed by Robert Ransom. Bugfix on 0.2.0.16-alpha. - Learn our external IP address when we're a relay or bridge, even if we set PublishServerDescriptor to 0. Bugfix on 0.2.0.3-alpha, where we introduced bridge relays that don't need to publish to be useful. Fixes bug 2050. - Do even more to reject (and not just ignore) annotations on router descriptors received anywhere but from the cache. Previously we would ignore such annotations at first, but cache them to disk anyway. Bugfix on 0.2.0.8-alpha. Found by piebeer. - When you're using bridges and your network goes away and your bridges get marked as down, recover when you attempt a new socks connection (if the network is back), rather than waiting up to an hour to try fetching new descriptors for your bridges. Bugfix on 0.2.0.3-alpha; fixes bug 1981. o Major features: - Move to the November 2010 Maxmind GeoLite country db (rather than the June 2009 ip-to-country GeoIP db) for our statistics that count how many users relays are seeing from each country. Now we'll have more accurate data, especially for many African countries. o New directory authorities: - Set up maatuska (run by Linus Nordberg) as the eighth v3 directory authority. o Minor bugfixes: - Fix an assertion failure that could occur in directory caches or bridge users when using a very short voting interval on a testing network. Diagnosed by Robert Hogan. Fixes bug 1141; bugfix on 0.2.0.8-alpha. - Enforce multiplicity rules when parsing annotations. Bugfix on 0.2.0.8-alpha. Found by piebeer. - Allow handshaking OR connections to take a full KeepalivePeriod seconds to handshake. Previously, we would close them after IDLE_OR_CONN_TIMEOUT (180) seconds, the same timeout as if they were open. Bugfix on 0.2.1.26; fixes bug 1840. Thanks to mingw-san for analysis help. - When building with --enable-gcc-warnings on OpenBSD, disable warnings in system headers. This makes --enable-gcc-warnings pass on OpenBSD 4.8. o Minor features: - Exit nodes didn't recognize EHOSTUNREACH as a plausible error code, and so sent back END_STREAM_REASON_MISC. Clients now recognize a new stream ending reason for this case: END_STREAM_REASON_NOROUTE. Servers can start sending this code when enough clients recognize it. Bugfix on 0.1.0.1-rc; fixes part of bug 1793. - Build correctly on mingw with more recent versions of OpenSSL 0.9.8. Patch from mingw-san. o Removed files: - Remove the old debian/ directory from the main Tor distribution. The official Tor-for-debian git repository lives at the URL https://git.torproject.org/debian/tor.git - Stop shipping the old doc/website/ directory in the tarball. We changed the website format in late 2010, and what we shipped in 0.2.1.26 really wasn't that useful anyway. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is the Tor announcements list. If you want to unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo(a)seul.org with "unsubscribe or-announce" as your message. ----- 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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China Will Monitor, Censor SMS Messages
by brian-slashdotnews＠hyperreal.org 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/03/0035224 Posted by: timothy, on 2004-07-03 06:44:00 Topic: censorship, 53 comments from the enlightenment-by-fiat dept. maggeth writes "Early reports on the AP (via Yahoo) indicate that [1]China will begin monitoring and censoring SMS communications in real time. China's 'great firewall' is infamous, but the move to censoring SMS has been slow due to technological roadblocks. Algorithms are used to identify key words and combinations of words that might be associated with 'political rumors and "reactionary remarks,"' and the system automatically notifies local police. Something to think about on your Fourth of July weekend!" Reader ackthpt adds links to [2]coverage at the BBC [3]and The Register, asking "What next, a massive government database system to track every message and contacts between people?" [4]Click Here References 1. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=516&u=/ap/20040702/ap_on_re_as/ch… a_mobile_phone_surveillance_3&printer=1 2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3859403.stm 3. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/02/china_text_snoop/ 4. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=4195&alloc_id=9769&site_id=1&request_id=5368172&… =click&page=%2farticle%2epl ----- 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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[Geowanking] IP geolocation
by James Muir 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

those on the list with an interest in geolocating internet users and/or devices may be interested in the following: %%%%%%%% title: Internet Geolocation and Evasion http://www.ccsl.carleton.ca/~jamuir/papers/TR-06-05.pdf http://www.scs.carleton.ca/research/tech_reports/2006/ abstract: Internet geolocation technology (IP geolocation) aims to determine the physical (geographic) location of Internet users and devices. It is currently proposed or in use for a wide variety of purposes, including targeted marketing, restricting digital content sales to authorized jurisdictions, and security applications such as reducing credit card fraud. This raises questions about the veracity of claims of accurate and reliable geolocation, and the ability to evade geolocation. We begin with a state-of-the-art survey of IP geolocation techniques and limitations, and examine the specific problems of (1) approximating a physical location from an IP address; and (2) approximating the physical location of an end client requesting content from a web server. In contrast to previous work, we consider also an adversarial model: a knowledgeable adversary seeking to evade geolocation. Our survey serves as the basis from which we examine tactics useful for evasion/circumvention. The adversarial model leads us to also consider the difficulty of (3) extracting the IP address of an end client visiting a server. As a side-result, in exploring the use of proxy servers as an evasionary tactic, to our surprise we found that we were able to extract an end-client IP address even for a browser protected by Tor/Privoxy (designed to anonymize browsing), provided Java is enabled. We expect our work to stimulate further open research and analysis of techniques for accurate and reliable IP geolocation, and also for evasion thereof. Our work is a small step towards a better understanding of what can, and cannot, be reliably hidden or discovered about IP addresses and physical locations of Internet users and machines. %%%%%%%%% any comments are welcome. -James _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list Geowanking(a)lists.burri.to http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking ----- 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] The Shadow Internet
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

------ Forwarded Message From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne(a)warpspeed.com> Reply-To: <dewayne(a)warpspeed.com> Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:50:03 -0800 To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net(a)warpspeed.com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Shadow Internet [Note: The other part of the story that 'Wired Magazine' just did in their Jan. '05 issue on the Darknet. DLH] The Shadow Internet They start with a single stolen file and pump out bootleg games and movies by the millions. Inside the pirate networks that are terrorizing the entertainment business. By Jeff HowePage <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html> Just over a year ago, a hacker penetrated the corporate servers at Valve, the game company behind the popular first-person shooter Half-Life. He came away with a beta version of Half-Life 2. "We heard about it," says 23-year-old Frank, a well-connected media pirate. "Everyone thought it would get bootlegged in Europe." Instead, the hacker gave the source code to Frank - it turned out that he was a friend of a friend - so that Frank could give Half-Life 2 to the world. "I was like, 'Let's do this thing, yo!'" he says. "I put it on Anathema. After that, it was all over." Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in. Within minutes of appearing on Anathema, Half-Life 2 spread. One file became 30 files became 3,000 files became 300,000 files as Valve stood helplessly by watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump of coal. The damage was irreversible - the horse was out of the barn, the county, and the state. The original Half-Life has sold more than 10 million games and expansion packs since its late 1998 release. Half-Life 2's official release finally happened in November, after almost a year of reprogramming. When Frank (who, like all the pirates interviewed for this article, is identified by a pseudonym) posted the Half-Life 2 code to Anathema, he tapped an international network of people dedicated to propagating stolen files as widely and quickly as possible. It's all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about "the scene," fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies - all the progeny of that original file - spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry. (BitTorrent, a faster and more efficient type of P2P file-sharing, is an exception. But at present there are far fewer BitTorrent users.) It's a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It's an appealing, democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music they buy and post them online. But that's not quite how it works. In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a chance to buy it. The whole shebang - the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P networks girding it all together - is not about trading or sharing at all. It's a broadcast system. It takes a signal, the new U2 single, say, and broadcasts it around the world. The pirate pyramid is a perfect amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at every descending level, until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which time it can be received by anyone capable of typing "U2" into a search engine. This should be good news for law enforcement. Lop off the head (the topsites), and the body (the worldwide trade in unlicensed media) falls lifeless to the ground. Sounds easy, but what if you can't find the head? As in any criminal conspiracy, it takes years of undercover work to get inside. An interview subject warned me against even mentioning Anathema in this article: "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door." The upper reaches of the network are a "darknet," hidden behind layers of security. The sites use a "bounce" to hide their IP address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in. Estimates say this media darknet distributes more than half a million movies every day. It's also, by any reading of the law, a vast criminal enterprise engaged in wholesale copyright infringement. But the Feds are getting smarter. Last spring, the FBI and US Department of Justice launched a series of raids codenamed Fastlink. Working with cops in Sweden, the Netherlands, and eight other countries, the operation seized more than 200 computers. One confiscated server alone contained 65,000 pirated titles. Fastlink rubbed out a few topsites, but new ones filled the void. The flow of illicit games and movies slowed briefly, then resumed. In April, federal agents interrogated Frank and impounded all his computer equipment. So far, no charges have been filed. "But the Feds had no idea about Half-Life," he boasts. "I was never connected to that shit. If they found out, I'd be in jail." Bruce Forest, a self-described "elder statesman" in the piracy scene, started ripping and trading in the ancient days of the late '80s. While he no longer actively traffics in bootlegged media, he maintains contacts that give him access to the most exclusive topsites. What the topsites don't know is that three years ago, Forest came in from the cold. "Basically, I'm a double agent," he concedes. "Though I don't fink anyone out. I'm not a cop." As a consultant for one of the world's largest entertainment companies, Forest notifies his bosses whenever one of their movies appears on a topsite. Thanks to his unparalleled access, he enjoys a bird's-eye view of the scene. And because he's ostensibly on the right side of the law, he's uncommonly open with information. This makes him an anomaly within the paranoid byways of the media darknet. Forest runs his business from the first floor of his rural Connecticut home. He's in his mid-40s but moves with jerky, adolescent energy. His brown hair is in perpetual disarray, and he pads around his office with bare feet, dressed in cargo shorts and a faded polo. Gold and platinum albums from his days as a producer at Island Records, MCA, and Arista line one wall. A baroque array of computer equipment fills the next, including 13 CPUs and 16 external hard drives (for a total of 3 terabytes of storage). His desk runs the length of the room and supports five full-size LCD displays. I hear a soft ping. "That tells me a movie just made its first appearance on a topsite." He points to a window on the monitor. It shows an innocent-looking list of files from an FTP site. The uppermost file says, "Hellboy.SCREENER.Proper.READ NFO PRE VCD." Translation: The DVD of one of the year's biggest box office hits has been pirated two months before its intended release date. "The FBI would kill to be sitting here looking at this," he says. Even first-run movies get ripped. "Remember what happened to The Hulk?" he asks. On June 6, two weeks before its official release, a near-final version of The Hulk showed up online. To hear studio executives tell it, the bootleg went straight to the P2P networks and spread like a contagion. "Bullshit," says Forest. "Trying to distribute The Hulk through the P2Ps would take months, not hours." That's because files on the public file-sharing networks, where no single node is much more powerful than the next, spread at a glacial pace. Furthermore, when users connect to a P2P network - FastTrack, for example - they connect only to a small proportion of the number of other users connected at the same time. So unless a topsite seeds a file across the P2P network, the odds are slim that someone searching for a copy will actually find it. Forest pushes a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end, and rotates in his Aeron to look me in the eye. "Here's what actually happened: Universal gave the workprint to its Manhattan ad agency. Then the print got to SMF. And bam!" SMF, Forest explains, is a piracy group that specializes in acquiring movies in theatrical release. Before the folks at SMF could release the movie to a topsite, they had to compress it - from roughly 9 Gbytes to 700 Mbytes, small enough to fit on a single CD. Now the film drops. Forest won't say to which topsite SMF first posted The Hulk, only that "SMF had affiliations with certain sites, so it must have been one of those." [snip] Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net> Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com> ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- 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> ______________________________________________________________ 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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[Politech] Anti-drug attorney's critique of police using "drug dogs" to invade privacy [priv[
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Drug dogs curbed by state supreme court after US supreme court let dogs out Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 15:12:52 -0500 From: rex <rexy(a)ij.net> To: <lawyer(a)rexcurry.net> Florida's Supreme Court let stand restrictions on drug dogs, after the U.S. Supreme Court loosened leashes. http://rexcurry.net/drugdogsmain.html The nation's top court let cops take dogs fishing for drugs in Illinois v Caballes. Florida allows other avenues for relief in Florida v Matheson http://rexcurry.net/drugdogsflorida.pdf (3-3-05) and the very libertarian decision at http://rexcurry.net/drugdogs2dca.pdf (the appellate case below). I am the attorney who argued the original motion to suppress for Matheson. Drug dogs are covers for lies. Here's how - 1. Cops tell drivers that they should consent to a search of their car because radio dispatch "has a drug dog on the way over." It is often a lie told to induce drivers to consent to search. There is no dog on the way. 2. If a dog is or is not "on the way," cops add additional lies to make drivers think that there will be a long wait and that the driver must stay until a dog arrives. Cops rely on driver ignorance of the fact that evidence will be suppressed if drivers are detained longer than it takes to complete the traffic stop (e.g. write the ticket). Drivers are induced to consent to search to avoid a long wait based on lies. 3. If a dog is enroute, cops let drivers think that they are obliged to stay even when the cop has no reason to detain drivers any longer. The cop's rationalization is that drivers loiter roadside with cops for no apparent reason or because drivers enjoy waiting for dog sniffs. Cops take advantage of drivers who are too stupid (or too meek) to ask if they are free to go, so that drivers "consent" to unwarranted detention by not leaving. 4. Cops lie about how long it is taking to write a ticket or to obtain a radio response on a driver's license or tag check. If a dog is actually on the way, the cops will make sure that the ticket is written very slowly, until the dog arrives. 5. After the dog arrives, cops will lie and say that the dog alerted, even if it didn't. In that sense, it doesn't matter whether or not dogs are well-trained or accurate, because dogs are often ruses for lies to violate constitutional rights. 6. If a dog alerts and nothing is found, then cops will never record that as an error, but will claim that the dog detected lingering odors of contraband that were recently present. Cops will testify that dogs never make mistakes, never have and never will, and that apparent errors are skillful detections of lingering (residual) odors of contraband. Government's attitude toward your liberty is like a dog at a fire hydrant. It is a reminder of the police-state tactics in the infamous Goose Creek videotape of the government school in South Carolina where children were forced to the floor in handcuffs and terrorized by dogs and cops with guns drawn. Nothing was found. In other government schools, classes have been interrupted and the children were marched out and lined up to be harassed by a dog. yours in liberty, Rex Curry Attorney At Law _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ----- 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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[IP] The Shadow Internet
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

------ Forwarded Message From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne(a)warpspeed.com> Reply-To: <dewayne(a)warpspeed.com> Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:50:03 -0800 To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net(a)warpspeed.com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Shadow Internet [Note: The other part of the story that 'Wired Magazine' just did in their Jan. '05 issue on the Darknet. DLH] The Shadow Internet They start with a single stolen file and pump out bootleg games and movies by the millions. Inside the pirate networks that are terrorizing the entertainment business. By Jeff HowePage <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html> Just over a year ago, a hacker penetrated the corporate servers at Valve, the game company behind the popular first-person shooter Half-Life. He came away with a beta version of Half-Life 2. "We heard about it," says 23-year-old Frank, a well-connected media pirate. "Everyone thought it would get bootlegged in Europe." Instead, the hacker gave the source code to Frank - it turned out that he was a friend of a friend - so that Frank could give Half-Life 2 to the world. "I was like, 'Let's do this thing, yo!'" he says. "I put it on Anathema. After that, it was all over." Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in. Within minutes of appearing on Anathema, Half-Life 2 spread. One file became 30 files became 3,000 files became 300,000 files as Valve stood helplessly by watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump of coal. The damage was irreversible - the horse was out of the barn, the county, and the state. The original Half-Life has sold more than 10 million games and expansion packs since its late 1998 release. Half-Life 2's official release finally happened in November, after almost a year of reprogramming. When Frank (who, like all the pirates interviewed for this article, is identified by a pseudonym) posted the Half-Life 2 code to Anathema, he tapped an international network of people dedicated to propagating stolen files as widely and quickly as possible. It's all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about "the scene," fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies - all the progeny of that original file - spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry. (BitTorrent, a faster and more efficient type of P2P file-sharing, is an exception. But at present there are far fewer BitTorrent users.) It's a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It's an appealing, democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music they buy and post them online. But that's not quite how it works. In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a chance to buy it. The whole shebang - the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P networks girding it all together - is not about trading or sharing at all. It's a broadcast system. It takes a signal, the new U2 single, say, and broadcasts it around the world. The pirate pyramid is a perfect amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at every descending level, until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which time it can be received by anyone capable of typing "U2" into a search engine. This should be good news for law enforcement. Lop off the head (the topsites), and the body (the worldwide trade in unlicensed media) falls lifeless to the ground. Sounds easy, but what if you can't find the head? As in any criminal conspiracy, it takes years of undercover work to get inside. An interview subject warned me against even mentioning Anathema in this article: "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door." The upper reaches of the network are a "darknet," hidden behind layers of security. The sites use a "bounce" to hide their IP address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in. Estimates say this media darknet distributes more than half a million movies every day. It's also, by any reading of the law, a vast criminal enterprise engaged in wholesale copyright infringement. But the Feds are getting smarter. Last spring, the FBI and US Department of Justice launched a series of raids codenamed Fastlink. Working with cops in Sweden, the Netherlands, and eight other countries, the operation seized more than 200 computers. One confiscated server alone contained 65,000 pirated titles. Fastlink rubbed out a few topsites, but new ones filled the void. The flow of illicit games and movies slowed briefly, then resumed. In April, federal agents interrogated Frank and impounded all his computer equipment. So far, no charges have been filed. "But the Feds had no idea about Half-Life," he boasts. "I was never connected to that shit. If they found out, I'd be in jail." Bruce Forest, a self-described "elder statesman" in the piracy scene, started ripping and trading in the ancient days of the late '80s. While he no longer actively traffics in bootlegged media, he maintains contacts that give him access to the most exclusive topsites. What the topsites don't know is that three years ago, Forest came in from the cold. "Basically, I'm a double agent," he concedes. "Though I don't fink anyone out. I'm not a cop." As a consultant for one of the world's largest entertainment companies, Forest notifies his bosses whenever one of their movies appears on a topsite. Thanks to his unparalleled access, he enjoys a bird's-eye view of the scene. And because he's ostensibly on the right side of the law, he's uncommonly open with information. This makes him an anomaly within the paranoid byways of the media darknet. Forest runs his business from the first floor of his rural Connecticut home. He's in his mid-40s but moves with jerky, adolescent energy. His brown hair is in perpetual disarray, and he pads around his office with bare feet, dressed in cargo shorts and a faded polo. Gold and platinum albums from his days as a producer at Island Records, MCA, and Arista line one wall. A baroque array of computer equipment fills the next, including 13 CPUs and 16 external hard drives (for a total of 3 terabytes of storage). His desk runs the length of the room and supports five full-size LCD displays. I hear a soft ping. "That tells me a movie just made its first appearance on a topsite." He points to a window on the monitor. It shows an innocent-looking list of files from an FTP site. The uppermost file says, "Hellboy.SCREENER.Proper.READ NFO PRE VCD." Translation: The DVD of one of the year's biggest box office hits has been pirated two months before its intended release date. "The FBI would kill to be sitting here looking at this," he says. Even first-run movies get ripped. "Remember what happened to The Hulk?" he asks. On June 6, two weeks before its official release, a near-final version of The Hulk showed up online. To hear studio executives tell it, the bootleg went straight to the P2P networks and spread like a contagion. "Bullshit," says Forest. "Trying to distribute The Hulk through the P2Ps would take months, not hours." That's because files on the public file-sharing networks, where no single node is much more powerful than the next, spread at a glacial pace. Furthermore, when users connect to a P2P network - FastTrack, for example - they connect only to a small proportion of the number of other users connected at the same time. So unless a topsite seeds a file across the P2P network, the odds are slim that someone searching for a copy will actually find it. Forest pushes a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end, and rotates in his Aeron to look me in the eye. "Here's what actually happened: Universal gave the workprint to its Manhattan ad agency. Then the print got to SMF. And bam!" SMF, Forest explains, is a piracy group that specializes in acquiring movies in theatrical release. Before the folks at SMF could release the movie to a topsite, they had to compress it - from roughly 9 Gbytes to 700 Mbytes, small enough to fit on a single CD. Now the film drops. Forest won't say to which topsite SMF first posted The Hulk, only that "SMF had affiliations with certain sites, so it must have been one of those." [snip] Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net> Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com> ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- 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> ______________________________________________________________ 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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