July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Freedom Hosting Owner Arrested, Tormail Compromised, Malicious JS Discovered
by Ted Smith 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Mon, 2013-08-12 at 10:30 +0200, rysiek wrote: >> > While I'm certainly not saying "I don't buy it", how does this >> > reconcile with the reality of The Silk Road still being in >> existance. >> > One would think that governments would use these techniques against >> > the site if for nothing more than to catch/punish them for all the >> tax evasion going on. > >> Yeah, that's a conundrum. >No it isn't. The government agencies that could potentially attack Tor >to bust the Silk Road would *never* care about the level of drugs moved >through it. They care about the people multiple levels above TSR, >drastically higher up in the supply chain. Is there any evidence of this? From all appearances, they care about nothing so much as preserving and expanding their funding. >Remember, TSR sends drugs *through the mail*. You can't successfully >*mail* enough drugs for the NSA/DEA to care. NSA surely doesn't want the publicity, but the DEA is always in search of positive press. If they have to listen to 100K conversations in order to bust one kid, picking up a few hundred Oxycodone pills at the Post Office, is there any reason to suspect they wouldn't do so?

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Re: Freedom Hosting Owner Arrested, Tormail Compromised, Malicious JS Discovered
by Ted Smith 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Mon, 2013-08-12 at 10:30 +0200, rysiek wrote: >> > While I'm certainly not saying "I don't buy it", how does this >> > reconcile with the reality of The Silk Road still being in >> existance. >> > One would think that governments would use these techniques against >> > the site if for nothing more than to catch/punish them for all the >> tax evasion going on. > >> Yeah, that's a conundrum. >No it isn't. The government agencies that could potentially attack Tor >to bust the Silk Road would *never* care about the level of drugs moved >through it. They care about the people multiple levels above TSR, >drastically higher up in the supply chain. Is there any evidence of this? From all appearances, they care about nothing so much as preserving and expanding their funding. >Remember, TSR sends drugs *through the mail*. You can't successfully >*mail* enough drugs for the NSA/DEA to care. NSA surely doesn't want the publicity, but the DEA is always in search of positive press. If they have to listen to 100K conversations in order to bust one kid, picking up a few hundred Oxycodone pills at the Post Office, is there any reason to suspect they wouldn't do so?

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What Should Freedom Lovers Do?
by Mises Daily Article 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1499>http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1499 What Should Freedom Lovers Do? by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [Posted April 20, 2004] How can one combine professional life with the advancement of liberty? Of course it is presumptuous to offer a definitive answer since all jobs and careers in the market economy are subject to the forces of the division of labor. Because a person focuses on one task doesn't mean that he or she isn't great at many tasks; it means only that the highest productive gains for everyone come from dividing tasks up among many people of a wide range of talents. So it is with the freedom movement. The more of us there are, the more we do well to specialize, to cooperate through exchange, to boost our impact by dividing the labor. There is no way to know in advance what is right for any person in particular. There are so many wonderful paths from which to choose (and which I will discuss below). But this much we can know. The usual answergo into governmentis wrongheaded. Too many good minds have been corrupted and lost by following this fateful course. If often happens that an ideological movement will make great strides through education and organization and cultural influence, only to take the illogical leap of believing that politics and political influence, which usually means taking jobs within the bureaucracy, is the next rung on the ladder to success. This is like trying to fight a fire with matches and gasoline. This is what happened to the Christian right in the 1980s. They got involved in politics in order to throw off the yoke of the state. Twenty years later, many of these people are working in the Department of Education or for the White House, doing the prep work to amend the Constitution or invade some foreign country. This is a disastrous waste of intellectual capital. It is particularly important that believers in liberty not take this course. Government work has been the chosen career path of socialists, social reformers, and Keynesians for at least a century. It is the natural home to them because their ambition is to control society through government. It works for them but it does not work for us. To become a bureaucrat to fight bureaucracy, to join the state in order to roll it back, makes as much sense as fighting fire with matches and gasoline. In the first half of the 20th century, libertarians knew how to oppose statism. They went into business and journalism. They wrote books. They agitated within the cultural arena. They developed fortunes to help fund newspapers, schools, foundations, and public education organizations. They expanded their commercial ventures to serve as a bulwark against central planning. They became teachers and, when possible, professors. They cultivated wonderful families and focused on the education of their children. It is a long struggle but it is the way the struggle for liberty has always taken place. But somewhere along the way, some people, enticed by the prospect of a fast track to reform, rethought this idea. Perhaps we should try the same technique that the left did. We should get our people in power and displace their people, and then we can bring about change toward liberty. In fact, isn't this the most important goal of all? So long as the left controls the state, it will expand in ways that are incompatible with freedom. We need to take back the state. So goes the logic. What is wrong with it? The state's only function is as an apparatus of coercion and compulsion. That is its distinguishing mark. It is what makes the state the state. To the same extent that the state responds well to arguments that it should be larger and more powerful, it is institutionally hostile to anyone who says that it should be less powerful and less coercive. That is not to say that some work from the "inside" cannot do some good, some of the time. But it is far more likely that the state will convert the libertarian than for the libertarian to convert the state. We've all seen this a thousand times. It rarely takes more than a few months for a libertarian intellectual headed for the Beltway to "mature" and realize that his or her old ideals were rather childish and insufficiently real world. A politician promising to defang Washington later becomes the leading expert in applying tooth enamel. Once that fateful step is taken, there are no limits. I know a bureaucrat who helped run martial law in Iraq who once swore fidelity to Rothbardian political economy. The reason has to do with ambition, which is not normally a bad impulse. The culture of Washington, however, requires that ambition work itself out by paying maximum deference to the powers that be. At first, this is easy to justify: how else can the state be converted except by being friendly to it? The state is our enemy, but for now, we must pretend to be its pal. In time, the dreams are displaced by the daily need to curry favor. Eventually the person becomes precisely the kind of person he or she once despised. (For Lord of the Rings fans, it's like being asked to carry the ring for a while; you don't want to give it up.) It is far more likely that the state will convert the libertarian than the libertarian will convert the state I've known people who have gone this route and one day took an honest look in the mirror, and didn't like what they saw. They have said to me that they were mistaken to think it could work. They didn't recognize the subtle ways in which they themselves were being drawn in. They recognize the futility of politely asking the state, day after day, to permit a bit more liberty here and there. Ultimately you must frame your arguments in terms of what is good for the state, and the reality is that liberty is not usually good for the state. Hence, the rhetoric and finally the goal begin to change. The state is open to persuasion, to be sure, but it usually acts out of fear, not friendship. If the bureaucrats and politicians fear backlash, they will not increase taxes or regulations. If they sense a high enough degree of public outrage, they will even repeal controls and programs. An example is the end of alcohol prohibition or the repeal of the 55 mph speed limit. These were pulled back because politicians and bureaucrats sensed too high a cost from continued enforcement. The problem of strategy was something that fascinated Murray Rothbard, who wrote several important articles on the need for never compromising the long-run goal for short-term gain through the political process. That doesn't mean we should not welcome a 1 percent tax cut or repeal a section of some law. But we should never allow ourselves to be sucked into the trade-off racket: e.g., repeal this bad tax to impose this better tax. That would be using a means (a tax) that contradicts the goal (elimination of taxation). The Rothbardian approach to a pro-freedom strategy comes down to the following four affirmations: 1) the victory of liberty is the highest political end; 2) the proper groundwork for this goal is a moral passion for justice; 3) the end should be pursued by the speediest and most efficacious possible means; and 4) the means taken must never contradict the goal"whether by advocating gradualism, by employing or advocating any aggression against liberty, by advocating planned programs, by failing to seize any opportunities to reduce State power, or by ever increasing it in any area." Libertarians are not the first people who have confronted the question of strategy for social advance and cultural and political change. After the Civil War, a large part of the population of the South, namely former slaves, found themselves in a perilous situation. They had a crying need to advance socially within society, but lacked education, skill, and capital. They also bore the burden of pushing social change that permitted them to be regarded as full citizens who made the most of their new freedom. In many ways, they found themselves in a position somewhat like new immigrants but with an additional burden of throwing off an old social status for a new one. The Reconstruction period of Union-run martial law invited many blacks to participate in politics as a primary goal. This proved to be a terrible temptation for many, as the former Virginia slave Booker T. Washington said. "During the whole of the Reconstruction period our people throughout the South looked to the Federal Government for everything, very much as a child looks to its mother." He rejected this political model because "the general political agitation drew the attention of our people away from the more fundamental matters of perfecting themselves in the industries at their doors and in securing property." The state chews up and either eats or spits out those with a passion for liberty. Washington wrote that "the temptations to enter political life were so alluring that I came very near yielding to them at one time" but he resisted this in favor of "the laying of the foundation of the race through a generous education of the hand, head and heart." Later when he visited DC, he knew that he had been right. "A large proportion of these people had been drawn to Washington because they felt that they could lead a life of ease there," he wrote. "Others had secured minor government positions, and still another large class was there in the hope of securing Federal positions." As it was in the 1870s it is today. The state chews up and either eats or spits out those with a passion for liberty. The extent to which W.E.B DuBois's Marxian push for political agitation has prevailed over Washington's push for commercial advance has been tragic for black Americans and for the whole of American society. Many obtained political power but not liberty classically understood. We can learn from this. The thousands of young people who are discovering the ideas of liberty for the first time ought to stay away from the Beltway and all its allures. Instead, they should pursue their love and passion through arts, commerce, education, and even the ministry. These are fields that offer genuine promise with a high return. When a libertarian tells me that he is doing some good as a procurement officer at HUD, I don't doubt his word. But how much more would he do by quitting his job and writing an expose on the entire bureaucratic racket? One well-placed blast against such an agency can bring about more reform, and do more good, than decades of attempted subversion from within. Are there politicians who do some good? Certainly, and the name Ron Paul is the first that comes to mind. But the good he does is not as a legislator as such but as an educator with a prominent platform from which to speak. Every no vote is a lesson to the multitudes. We need more Ron Pauls. But Ron is the first to say that, more importantly, we need more professors, business owners, fathers and mothers, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs. The party of liberty loves commerce and culture, not the state. Commerce and culture is our home and our launching ground for social reform and revolution. _______________________________ Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [<mailto:rockwell@mises.org>rockwell(a)mises.org] is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of <http://www.lewrockwell.com/>LewRockwell.com. He is the author of <http://www.mises.org/store/product1.asp?SID=2&Product_ID=173>Speaking of Liberty. See his <http://www.mises.org/articles.asp?mode=a&author=Rockwell%2C+Jr%2E>archive and comment on this article on the <http://www.mises.org/blog>blog. A version of this article appeared in the May 2004 issue of The Free Market, available for <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Members of the Mises Institute. In response to many requests, it is now possible to set your credit-card contribution to the Mises Institute to be recurring. You can easily set this up on-line with a donation starting at $10 per month. See the <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Membership Page. 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Unsubscribe <http://mises.biglist.com/list/article/?p=unsub&pre=l&e=1883638&pw=bvrb4tcp7t>here or send email to <mailto:article-unsub-1883638@mises.biglist.com>this address. --- 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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Tor 0.1.0.17 is released
by Roger Dingledine 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Tor 0.1.0.17 fixes a crash bug for servers that enable hibernation, lets Windows servers scale better, and tries to reduce the bandwidth overhead from the old-style directory protocol. Both clients and servers are encouraged to upgrade. http://tor.eff.org/download Changes in version 0.1.0.17 - 2006-02-17 o Crash bugfixes on 0.1.0.x: - When servers with a non-zero DirPort came out of hibernation, sometimes they would trigger an assert. o Other important bugfixes: - On platforms that don't have getrlimit (like Windows), we were artificially constraining ourselves to a max of 1024 connections. Now just assume that we can handle as many as 15000 connections. Hopefully this won't cause other problems. o Backported features: - When we're a server, a client asks for an old-style directory, and our write bucket is empty, don't give it to him. This way small servers can continue to serve the directory *sometimes*, without getting overloaded. - Whenever you get a 503 in response to a directory fetch, try once more. This will become important once servers start sending 503's whenever they feel busy. - Fetch a new directory every 120 minutes, not every 40 minutes. Now that we have hundreds of thousands of users running the old directory algorithm, it's starting to hurt a lot. - Bump up the period for forcing a hidden service descriptor upload from 20 minutes to 1 hour. ----- 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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[cryptography] Is Bitcoin legal?
by Steven Bellovin 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/06/mining-for-bitcoins.html and it's worth noting that the author of that post, Brian Frye, is a law professor: http://law.hofstra.edu/directory/faculty/VisitingFaculty/visfac_frye.html --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- 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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Re: [liberationtech] Facebook Group Encryption Chrome Extension
by Isaac Wilder 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Also means they've spent developer time identifying when their users are using encryption. Just saying. Isaac Wilder www.thefnf.org On 04/16/2012 03:56 PM, Jeffrey Burdges wrote: > It's worth mentioning that off-the-record messaging already works fine on facebook chat via facebook's jabber support. Any OtR enabled client like Jitsi, Adium, etc. should provide it happily. > > In fact, if you read the messages on facebook itself, they tactfully replace the message with > [encrypted message] > > I've no idea how they feel about encrypting wall messages with GPG or anything else, but they've spent developer time making private encrypted messages less confusing. > > Jeff > > > > > On 21 Feb 2012, at 19:05, Robert Guerra wrote: > >> Brad, >> >> A question worth considering is if - encrypting data - on Facebook's platform is a violation of their term of service. If it is, one runs the risk of having one's account disabled and/or shut down. >> >> regards >> >> Robert >> >> >> -- >> R. Guerra >> Phone/Cell: +1 202-905-2081 >> Twitter: twitter.com/netfreedom >> Email: rguerra(a)privaterra.org > _______________________________________________ > 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. You may ask for a reminder here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech > > Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. > > Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech _______________________________________________ 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. You may ask for a reminder here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech 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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Re: Freedom Hosting Owner Arrested, Tormail Compromised, Malicious JS Discovered
by Ted Smith 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Mon, 2013-08-12 at 10:30 +0200, rysiek wrote: >> > While I'm certainly not saying "I don't buy it", how does this >> > reconcile with the reality of The Silk Road still being in >> existance. >> > One would think that governments would use these techniques against >> > the site if for nothing more than to catch/punish them for all the >> tax evasion going on. > >> Yeah, that's a conundrum. >No it isn't. The government agencies that could potentially attack Tor >to bust the Silk Road would *never* care about the level of drugs moved >through it. They care about the people multiple levels above TSR, >drastically higher up in the supply chain. Is there any evidence of this? From all appearances, they care about nothing so much as preserving and expanding their funding. >Remember, TSR sends drugs *through the mail*. You can't successfully >*mail* enough drugs for the NSA/DEA to care. NSA surely doesn't want the publicity, but the DEA is always in search of positive press. If they have to listen to 100K conversations in order to bust one kid, picking up a few hundred Oxycodone pills at the Post Office, is there any reason to suspect they wouldn't do so?

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What Should Freedom Lovers Do?
by Mises Daily Article 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1499>http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1499 What Should Freedom Lovers Do? by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [Posted April 20, 2004] How can one combine professional life with the advancement of liberty? Of course it is presumptuous to offer a definitive answer since all jobs and careers in the market economy are subject to the forces of the division of labor. Because a person focuses on one task doesn't mean that he or she isn't great at many tasks; it means only that the highest productive gains for everyone come from dividing tasks up among many people of a wide range of talents. So it is with the freedom movement. The more of us there are, the more we do well to specialize, to cooperate through exchange, to boost our impact by dividing the labor. There is no way to know in advance what is right for any person in particular. There are so many wonderful paths from which to choose (and which I will discuss below). But this much we can know. The usual answergo into governmentis wrongheaded. Too many good minds have been corrupted and lost by following this fateful course. If often happens that an ideological movement will make great strides through education and organization and cultural influence, only to take the illogical leap of believing that politics and political influence, which usually means taking jobs within the bureaucracy, is the next rung on the ladder to success. This is like trying to fight a fire with matches and gasoline. This is what happened to the Christian right in the 1980s. They got involved in politics in order to throw off the yoke of the state. Twenty years later, many of these people are working in the Department of Education or for the White House, doing the prep work to amend the Constitution or invade some foreign country. This is a disastrous waste of intellectual capital. It is particularly important that believers in liberty not take this course. Government work has been the chosen career path of socialists, social reformers, and Keynesians for at least a century. It is the natural home to them because their ambition is to control society through government. It works for them but it does not work for us. To become a bureaucrat to fight bureaucracy, to join the state in order to roll it back, makes as much sense as fighting fire with matches and gasoline. In the first half of the 20th century, libertarians knew how to oppose statism. They went into business and journalism. They wrote books. They agitated within the cultural arena. They developed fortunes to help fund newspapers, schools, foundations, and public education organizations. They expanded their commercial ventures to serve as a bulwark against central planning. They became teachers and, when possible, professors. They cultivated wonderful families and focused on the education of their children. It is a long struggle but it is the way the struggle for liberty has always taken place. But somewhere along the way, some people, enticed by the prospect of a fast track to reform, rethought this idea. Perhaps we should try the same technique that the left did. We should get our people in power and displace their people, and then we can bring about change toward liberty. In fact, isn't this the most important goal of all? So long as the left controls the state, it will expand in ways that are incompatible with freedom. We need to take back the state. So goes the logic. What is wrong with it? The state's only function is as an apparatus of coercion and compulsion. That is its distinguishing mark. It is what makes the state the state. To the same extent that the state responds well to arguments that it should be larger and more powerful, it is institutionally hostile to anyone who says that it should be less powerful and less coercive. That is not to say that some work from the "inside" cannot do some good, some of the time. But it is far more likely that the state will convert the libertarian than for the libertarian to convert the state. We've all seen this a thousand times. It rarely takes more than a few months for a libertarian intellectual headed for the Beltway to "mature" and realize that his or her old ideals were rather childish and insufficiently real world. A politician promising to defang Washington later becomes the leading expert in applying tooth enamel. Once that fateful step is taken, there are no limits. I know a bureaucrat who helped run martial law in Iraq who once swore fidelity to Rothbardian political economy. The reason has to do with ambition, which is not normally a bad impulse. The culture of Washington, however, requires that ambition work itself out by paying maximum deference to the powers that be. At first, this is easy to justify: how else can the state be converted except by being friendly to it? The state is our enemy, but for now, we must pretend to be its pal. In time, the dreams are displaced by the daily need to curry favor. Eventually the person becomes precisely the kind of person he or she once despised. (For Lord of the Rings fans, it's like being asked to carry the ring for a while; you don't want to give it up.) It is far more likely that the state will convert the libertarian than the libertarian will convert the state I've known people who have gone this route and one day took an honest look in the mirror, and didn't like what they saw. They have said to me that they were mistaken to think it could work. They didn't recognize the subtle ways in which they themselves were being drawn in. They recognize the futility of politely asking the state, day after day, to permit a bit more liberty here and there. Ultimately you must frame your arguments in terms of what is good for the state, and the reality is that liberty is not usually good for the state. Hence, the rhetoric and finally the goal begin to change. The state is open to persuasion, to be sure, but it usually acts out of fear, not friendship. If the bureaucrats and politicians fear backlash, they will not increase taxes or regulations. If they sense a high enough degree of public outrage, they will even repeal controls and programs. An example is the end of alcohol prohibition or the repeal of the 55 mph speed limit. These were pulled back because politicians and bureaucrats sensed too high a cost from continued enforcement. The problem of strategy was something that fascinated Murray Rothbard, who wrote several important articles on the need for never compromising the long-run goal for short-term gain through the political process. That doesn't mean we should not welcome a 1 percent tax cut or repeal a section of some law. But we should never allow ourselves to be sucked into the trade-off racket: e.g., repeal this bad tax to impose this better tax. That would be using a means (a tax) that contradicts the goal (elimination of taxation). The Rothbardian approach to a pro-freedom strategy comes down to the following four affirmations: 1) the victory of liberty is the highest political end; 2) the proper groundwork for this goal is a moral passion for justice; 3) the end should be pursued by the speediest and most efficacious possible means; and 4) the means taken must never contradict the goal"whether by advocating gradualism, by employing or advocating any aggression against liberty, by advocating planned programs, by failing to seize any opportunities to reduce State power, or by ever increasing it in any area." Libertarians are not the first people who have confronted the question of strategy for social advance and cultural and political change. After the Civil War, a large part of the population of the South, namely former slaves, found themselves in a perilous situation. They had a crying need to advance socially within society, but lacked education, skill, and capital. They also bore the burden of pushing social change that permitted them to be regarded as full citizens who made the most of their new freedom. In many ways, they found themselves in a position somewhat like new immigrants but with an additional burden of throwing off an old social status for a new one. The Reconstruction period of Union-run martial law invited many blacks to participate in politics as a primary goal. This proved to be a terrible temptation for many, as the former Virginia slave Booker T. Washington said. "During the whole of the Reconstruction period our people throughout the South looked to the Federal Government for everything, very much as a child looks to its mother." He rejected this political model because "the general political agitation drew the attention of our people away from the more fundamental matters of perfecting themselves in the industries at their doors and in securing property." The state chews up and either eats or spits out those with a passion for liberty. Washington wrote that "the temptations to enter political life were so alluring that I came very near yielding to them at one time" but he resisted this in favor of "the laying of the foundation of the race through a generous education of the hand, head and heart." Later when he visited DC, he knew that he had been right. "A large proportion of these people had been drawn to Washington because they felt that they could lead a life of ease there," he wrote. "Others had secured minor government positions, and still another large class was there in the hope of securing Federal positions." As it was in the 1870s it is today. The state chews up and either eats or spits out those with a passion for liberty. The extent to which W.E.B DuBois's Marxian push for political agitation has prevailed over Washington's push for commercial advance has been tragic for black Americans and for the whole of American society. Many obtained political power but not liberty classically understood. We can learn from this. The thousands of young people who are discovering the ideas of liberty for the first time ought to stay away from the Beltway and all its allures. Instead, they should pursue their love and passion through arts, commerce, education, and even the ministry. These are fields that offer genuine promise with a high return. When a libertarian tells me that he is doing some good as a procurement officer at HUD, I don't doubt his word. But how much more would he do by quitting his job and writing an expose on the entire bureaucratic racket? One well-placed blast against such an agency can bring about more reform, and do more good, than decades of attempted subversion from within. Are there politicians who do some good? Certainly, and the name Ron Paul is the first that comes to mind. But the good he does is not as a legislator as such but as an educator with a prominent platform from which to speak. Every no vote is a lesson to the multitudes. We need more Ron Pauls. But Ron is the first to say that, more importantly, we need more professors, business owners, fathers and mothers, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs. The party of liberty loves commerce and culture, not the state. Commerce and culture is our home and our launching ground for social reform and revolution. _______________________________ Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [<mailto:rockwell@mises.org>rockwell(a)mises.org] is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of <http://www.lewrockwell.com/>LewRockwell.com. He is the author of <http://www.mises.org/store/product1.asp?SID=2&Product_ID=173>Speaking of Liberty. See his <http://www.mises.org/articles.asp?mode=a&author=Rockwell%2C+Jr%2E>archive and comment on this article on the <http://www.mises.org/blog>blog. A version of this article appeared in the May 2004 issue of The Free Market, available for <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Members of the Mises Institute. In response to many requests, it is now possible to set your credit-card contribution to the Mises Institute to be recurring. You can easily set this up on-line with a donation starting at $10 per month. See the <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Membership Page. This is one way to ensure that your support for the Mises Institute is ongoing. <http://www.mises.org//fullstory.asp?printFriendly=Yes&control=1499>[Print Friendly Page] <http://www.mises.org/blog/> <http://www.mises.org/elist.asp>Mises Email List Services <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Join the Mises Institute <http://www.mises.org/store>Mises.org Store <http://www.mises.org/>Home | <http://www.mises.org/about.asp>About | <http://www.mises.org/elist.asp>Email List | <http://www.google.com/u/Mises>Search | <http://www.mises.org/contact.asp>Contact Us | <http://www.mises.org/journals.asp>Periodicals | <http://www.mises.org/articles.asp>Articles | <http://www.mises.org/fun.asp>Games & Fun <http://www.mises.org/news.asp>News | <http://www.mises.org/scholar.asp>Resources | <http://www.mises.org/catalog.asp>Catalog | <https://www.mises.org/donate.asp>Contributions | <http://www.mises.org/calendar.asp>Freedom Calendar You are subscribed as: rah(a)shipwright.com Manage <http://mises.biglist.com/list/article/?p=prefs&pre=l&e=1883638&pw=bvrb4tcp7t>your account. Unsubscribe <http://mises.biglist.com/list/article/?p=unsub&pre=l&e=1883638&pw=bvrb4tcp7t>here or send email to <mailto:article-unsub-1883638@mises.biglist.com>this address. --- 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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Tor 0.1.0.17 is released
by Roger Dingledine 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Tor 0.1.0.17 fixes a crash bug for servers that enable hibernation, lets Windows servers scale better, and tries to reduce the bandwidth overhead from the old-style directory protocol. Both clients and servers are encouraged to upgrade. http://tor.eff.org/download Changes in version 0.1.0.17 - 2006-02-17 o Crash bugfixes on 0.1.0.x: - When servers with a non-zero DirPort came out of hibernation, sometimes they would trigger an assert. o Other important bugfixes: - On platforms that don't have getrlimit (like Windows), we were artificially constraining ourselves to a max of 1024 connections. Now just assume that we can handle as many as 15000 connections. Hopefully this won't cause other problems. o Backported features: - When we're a server, a client asks for an old-style directory, and our write bucket is empty, don't give it to him. This way small servers can continue to serve the directory *sometimes*, without getting overloaded. - Whenever you get a 503 in response to a directory fetch, try once more. This will become important once servers start sending 503's whenever they feel busy. - Fetch a new directory every 120 minutes, not every 40 minutes. Now that we have hundreds of thousands of users running the old directory algorithm, it's starting to hurt a lot. - Bump up the period for forcing a hidden service descriptor upload from 20 minutes to 1 hour. ----- 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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[cryptography] Is Bitcoin legal?
by Steven Bellovin 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/06/mining-for-bitcoins.html and it's worth noting that the author of that post, Brian Frye, is a law professor: http://law.hofstra.edu/directory/faculty/VisitingFaculty/visfac_frye.html --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- 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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