July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[mnet-devel] Grid Of Trust -- pre-design
by Some Guy 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hey guys who ever wants to take first peek at my baby DHT/premix idea please take a peek and crtitique it. It's a bit rough around the edges and there's plenty of room for modification, but I'm pretty sure the ideas are sound. http://de.geocities.com/amichrisde/Grid_Of_Trust.html The basic idea is to force data and nodes to be randomly distributed in a grid. This provides resistance against serveral types of attacks. Feel free to comment on or off list. __________________________________________________________________ Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de Logos und Klingeltvne f|rs Handy bei http://sms.yahoo.de ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. Does SourceForge.net help you be more productive? Does it help you create better code? SHARE THE LOVE, and help us help YOU! Click Here: http://sourceforge.net/donate/ _______________________________________________ mnet-devel mailing list mnet-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mnet-devel ----- 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 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Interesting report on Dutch non-use of traffic data
by John Gilmore 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

From EDRI-gram via Wendy Seltzer: ============================================================ 4. Dutch police report: traffic data seldom essential ============================================================ Telephone traffic data are only necessary to solve crimes in a minority of police investigations. Most cases can be solved without access to traffic data, with the exception of large fraud investigations. These are the conclusions of a Dutch police report produced at the request of the Dutch ministry of Justice. The report was recently obtained by the Dutch civil liberties organisation Bits of Freedom through a public access request. The report undermines the Dutch government's support to the EU draft framework decision on data retention. The report makes no case for the proposed data retention as Dutch police already uses traffic data in 90% of all investigations. The police can already obtain, with a warrant, the traffic data that telecommunication companies store for their own billing- and business purposes. The report also shows that the use of traffic data is a standard tool in police investigations and it not limited to cases of organised crime or terrorism. The report is the result of an evaluation of past investigations by the Dutch police of Rotterdam. Two-thirds of all investigations could have been solved if no traffic data would have been available at all. The three main purposes of traffic data in police investigations are: network analysis (searching for associations of a person to other individuals), tactical support for surveillance and checking of alibis (through GSM location data). Police investigators can compensate a possible lack of traffic data by other investigative methods such as wiretapping, surveillance, a preservation order for traffic data and a longer investigative period. The report states that police officers seldom ask for traffic data older than six months. The report was never sent to the Dutch parliament although members of parliament previously asked for research results about the effectiveness of mandatory data retention. After Bits of Freedom published the report new questions have been raised in the Dutch parliament about the reason for withholding the report. The use of (historic) traffic data in investigations (April 2003, in Dutch) http://www.bof.nl/docs/rapport_verkeersgegevens.pdf (Contribution by Maurice Wessling, EDRI-member Bits of Freedom) --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- 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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[tor-talk] Pirate Linux - First Release
by AK 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

This is a project I have been working on for the Pirate Party of Canada. You can see the feature list and download links at http://piratelinux.org. The video walk-through is at http://youtu.be/s9kj4pziojQ. Some features that are perhaps unique when compared to other distros: - Ubuntu based together with a package called "piratepack" that installs all the modifications. - The piratepack has been tested to work on Ubuntu 10+ and Debian 6. - Tor & Vidalia run in the background and you can access Vidalia from the icon on the top panel. - Tor browser uses your current firefox under a profile called "tor". - Both the Tor browser and the regular firefox get addons automatically installed (your firefox settings and history are still working as usual, it's just as if you installed the addons on top of them). - Regular Firefox addons: AdBlock Plus, Bloody Vikings, Download Helper, Ghostery, HTTPS-Everywhere. - Tor browser addons: Bloody Vikings, HTTPS-Everywhere, NoScript, Torbutton. - Tor browser automatically launches Pidgin in OTR mode connected to the oftc.net server through Tor. - Bitcoin client (both command line and graphical). - Cwallet: My own program that lets you list the private keys associated with your addresses in your wallet.dat and make a paper backup of your wallet in QR code format. Also, it checks to make sure that the keys are not corrupted. There's both a command line and graphical version. - Custom Google Homepage: Google SSL search & Pirate search, plus useful links on top. - Piratepack modifications can be enabled and disabled through a GUI controller. - You can launch the Liberte & Tails privacy enhanced distros from the boot menu. - IMPORTANT: Any binaries that piratepack installs are compiled from source automatically on installation. You don't have to trust my binaries. Of course the dependencies (such as libz1g or firefox, etc...) will not be compiled, but by default come from the standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories. Piratepack also produces a binary version of piratepack and puts it in /opt/piratepack/bin-pack. You can share this binary version with a friend or use it for yourself for installation on another machine. Of course you can also choose to install the binary version of piratepack if you don't want to wait for the compilation and you trust my signed binaries. Also, when doing updates to piratepack, you may want to read the source code first. In this case you can simply download piratepack from the piratelinux.org website instead of using the update manager. Or you can install it from the update manager and then read the source code from the cache directory /var/cache/apt/archives in order to make sure that the code is not malicious. I'm taking a break from this now to focus on other things. But, Ill try to get some small updates done from time to time and I'm keeping an eye out for the release of Ubuntu 12, and that's when the next major update will probably happen. Cheers _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- 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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None
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> Riddles ought to be tough for a machine to solve. Language and shades of > meaning seem less easily rendered as mathematical problems than > graphics. Yeah, but they're open to a "database attack" - collect all of them with their replies. I don't think you can randomly generate riddles from a theoretically huge space (comparable to generating one random number from a 128-bit space). Mark

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[mnet-devel] Grid Of Trust -- pre-design
by Some Guy 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hey guys who ever wants to take first peek at my baby DHT/premix idea please take a peek and crtitique it. It's a bit rough around the edges and there's plenty of room for modification, but I'm pretty sure the ideas are sound. http://de.geocities.com/amichrisde/Grid_Of_Trust.html The basic idea is to force data and nodes to be randomly distributed in a grid. This provides resistance against serveral types of attacks. Feel free to comment on or off list. __________________________________________________________________ Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de Logos und Klingeltvne f|rs Handy bei http://sms.yahoo.de ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. Does SourceForge.net help you be more productive? Does it help you create better code? SHARE THE LOVE, and help us help YOU! Click Here: http://sourceforge.net/donate/ _______________________________________________ mnet-devel mailing list mnet-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mnet-devel ----- 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 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Interesting report on Dutch non-use of traffic data
by John Gilmore 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

From EDRI-gram via Wendy Seltzer: ============================================================ 4. Dutch police report: traffic data seldom essential ============================================================ Telephone traffic data are only necessary to solve crimes in a minority of police investigations. Most cases can be solved without access to traffic data, with the exception of large fraud investigations. These are the conclusions of a Dutch police report produced at the request of the Dutch ministry of Justice. The report was recently obtained by the Dutch civil liberties organisation Bits of Freedom through a public access request. The report undermines the Dutch government's support to the EU draft framework decision on data retention. The report makes no case for the proposed data retention as Dutch police already uses traffic data in 90% of all investigations. The police can already obtain, with a warrant, the traffic data that telecommunication companies store for their own billing- and business purposes. The report also shows that the use of traffic data is a standard tool in police investigations and it not limited to cases of organised crime or terrorism. The report is the result of an evaluation of past investigations by the Dutch police of Rotterdam. Two-thirds of all investigations could have been solved if no traffic data would have been available at all. The three main purposes of traffic data in police investigations are: network analysis (searching for associations of a person to other individuals), tactical support for surveillance and checking of alibis (through GSM location data). Police investigators can compensate a possible lack of traffic data by other investigative methods such as wiretapping, surveillance, a preservation order for traffic data and a longer investigative period. The report states that police officers seldom ask for traffic data older than six months. The report was never sent to the Dutch parliament although members of parliament previously asked for research results about the effectiveness of mandatory data retention. After Bits of Freedom published the report new questions have been raised in the Dutch parliament about the reason for withholding the report. The use of (historic) traffic data in investigations (April 2003, in Dutch) http://www.bof.nl/docs/rapport_verkeersgegevens.pdf (Contribution by Maurice Wessling, EDRI-member Bits of Freedom) --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- 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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[tor-talk] Pirate Linux - First Release
by AK 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

This is a project I have been working on for the Pirate Party of Canada. You can see the feature list and download links at http://piratelinux.org. The video walk-through is at http://youtu.be/s9kj4pziojQ. Some features that are perhaps unique when compared to other distros: - Ubuntu based together with a package called "piratepack" that installs all the modifications. - The piratepack has been tested to work on Ubuntu 10+ and Debian 6. - Tor & Vidalia run in the background and you can access Vidalia from the icon on the top panel. - Tor browser uses your current firefox under a profile called "tor". - Both the Tor browser and the regular firefox get addons automatically installed (your firefox settings and history are still working as usual, it's just as if you installed the addons on top of them). - Regular Firefox addons: AdBlock Plus, Bloody Vikings, Download Helper, Ghostery, HTTPS-Everywhere. - Tor browser addons: Bloody Vikings, HTTPS-Everywhere, NoScript, Torbutton. - Tor browser automatically launches Pidgin in OTR mode connected to the oftc.net server through Tor. - Bitcoin client (both command line and graphical). - Cwallet: My own program that lets you list the private keys associated with your addresses in your wallet.dat and make a paper backup of your wallet in QR code format. Also, it checks to make sure that the keys are not corrupted. There's both a command line and graphical version. - Custom Google Homepage: Google SSL search & Pirate search, plus useful links on top. - Piratepack modifications can be enabled and disabled through a GUI controller. - You can launch the Liberte & Tails privacy enhanced distros from the boot menu. - IMPORTANT: Any binaries that piratepack installs are compiled from source automatically on installation. You don't have to trust my binaries. Of course the dependencies (such as libz1g or firefox, etc...) will not be compiled, but by default come from the standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories. Piratepack also produces a binary version of piratepack and puts it in /opt/piratepack/bin-pack. You can share this binary version with a friend or use it for yourself for installation on another machine. Of course you can also choose to install the binary version of piratepack if you don't want to wait for the compilation and you trust my signed binaries. Also, when doing updates to piratepack, you may want to read the source code first. In this case you can simply download piratepack from the piratelinux.org website instead of using the update manager. Or you can install it from the update manager and then read the source code from the cache directory /var/cache/apt/archives in order to make sure that the code is not malicious. I'm taking a break from this now to focus on other things. But, Ill try to get some small updates done from time to time and I'm keeping an eye out for the release of Ubuntu 12, and that's when the next major update will probably happen. Cheers _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- 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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[liberationtech] Can HAM radio be used for communication between health workers in rural areas with no cell connectivity?
by Erich M. 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/07/2013 07:31 PM, Sky (Jim Schuyler) wrote: > Nice, Erich. > > In a sense, radio waves are the -ultimate- in liberation, crossing > national boundaries in (single or multiple) bounds. That may be a subrosa reason governments fight so hard to control them. That is clearly why some shortwave broadcasts are jammed. t's why the amateur service was cut off during WWII. That's also my conclusion about why amateurs are not allowed to use codes and ciphers (speaking of US here). Jim and all, As to krypto. Well, these are historic reasons. BUT: We are licensed to use _any_ digital protocol, as long as we open the "protocol" and the "compression" algorithm. So we may broadcast signalsd Whats on now, here? Yesterday the Vienna hacker space Metalab was crowded with dozens of haXors and a few older ham radio _geeks_. One of the latter held a lecture on some basics of amateur radio. Everybody of those listening will do their all bands 100 Watt exams, that allows them operating from around 40 CEPT countries without notice for three months. USA included. 50 other Metalab haXors already have their diploma. All between 20 and 35. Next came OE1DNS [early thirties, licence three years ago] and had a screenshow on extraterrestrial broadcasting. satellites, moon bouncing and so on. OE4DNS and OE1RFC [note the callsign suffices pse] wert the digital operators. OE1HWS coordinated that all. This dear OM is twice the age of the others. At the CCC Camp in 2011 the first ham haXor group ever here mounted an enormous home brew double yagi on an old water pipe that had rested on the "graveyard of undead antennas and masts" in my garden for years. Add a rotor and a Volkswagen bus containing a transceiver plus a 1,5 KW power amp. Thus the Metalab OPs hit the moon on 144 MHz using the "officially allowed amp out" & a digital protocol named WSJT by K1JT - - a nobel prize winner - for space comms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor,_Jr. These signals from CCC Camp broadcast from a former Soviet Air Base were successfully "restaurated". WSJT sports AFAIR eight different sorts of error correction. And many amateurs are so blasted conservative politically, but I don't know why that is! Can help here. Estimated 30-40+ [my estimate] percent of US ham ops are military or deeply entwined via military contractors. Some of them handle that pretty openly on qrz.com. This is the most influential ham social network. Russian OPs, next biggest group on the air. Incredibly strong signals. Military PAs. Half a dozen stations in my logfiles [I dont run many QSOs] from 2010 oan have been located less than 20 km away from November Sierra Alpha premises in Maryland. Ten times more related in West Virginia. This is experimentation, and tinkering, and hacking, and potentially liberation, but in the electronics sphere. +1 An hour ago I was discussing the use of a mini vertical network analyzer [400 USD Java prog running on Linux too] via OE1XUU vhf repeater here with other hams/haX0rs . All of us round 50 Km were talking to each other using less than 5 Watts either in Handsets or @ stations in QTH . All those on this list licensend might come in to talk to us @ the NightOWLS QSO starting from 23 hours UTC. You only need an echolink capable amateur radio repeater somewhere near to you and a 5 Watt handset sporting numeric inputs. Thus you can set up full scale _conference call_ between - say - San Francisco and Vienna in a minute. The ham radio echolink voice repeaters are linked via the net. There is a ton of potential that should not be ignored. Right. I could hold lecture on how to refurbish an antique 6 meter CB aluminium monster to play on 5 shortwave bands [20 to meters to ten] without much tuning in the shack using a matchbox [antenna tuner]. 500 Watts are realistic now using junkyard hardware. Made it into New Zealand where I could not reach despite my mighty longwire "fixed beam" . There is a visible gap in the diagram partially filled by the vertical. By WE I should have completed my 2nd 42 meter non moveable beam to another directon namely SSW straight. 73 de Erich OE3EMB > > Much as an interest in sci-fi may lead to certain kinds of > mindsets, experimentation and curiosity, an interest in amateur > radio is frequently correlated with an interest in other people, > other cultures, science, engineering, electronics, software and > other skills that can be immensely valuable to our efforts. > > There are certainly lots more folks on the list who have licenses, > and there are lots of amateur operators who aid liberation > technologies without advertising it. > > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ CyberSpark.net -Keeping the > flame of free speech and human rights alive online > > On Mar 7, 2013, at 9:50 AM, "Erich M." <erich(a)moechel.com> wrote: > >> On 03/07/2013 09:26 AM, Griffin Boyce wrote: >>> How far is the distance being covered, and in what kind of >>> terrain (flat plains, hills)? HAM might not even be necessary >>> if it's fairly close (relatively speaking). GMRS radios can >>> cover several miles. Other small/cheap handhelds can cover a >>> couple of miles in ideal conditions. >> >> Think I can add a few bits of info here. Of course are these >> analog walkie talkies an absolute no go if you have to relay >> sensible information. >> >> But ham operators _can_ help with their skills and Know-how. Here >> in AT our ham radio club - my callsign is OE3EMB - operates a >> nationwide wireless broadband backbone ring using TCP/IP. The >> ring is connected to the German HAMnet, the network reaches from >> Southern Italy to Scandinavia already. Self built self owned. >> >> This is in German but there is an infrastucture graph >> http://wiki.oevsv.at/index.php?title=Kategorie:Digitaler_Backbone >> >> >> This is English showing the German HAMnet in 2009 >> http://kb9mwr.blogspot.co.at/2009/12/german-hsmm-hamnet-20.html >> >> Essential is the availability of electrical power, of course. If >> that is a tribal areal area I have some doubts. >> >> Components are off the shelf outdoor WiFI routers. The backbone >> operates in the 5 GHz WiFi band with directed antennas. At 5 GHz >> a much higher power output ist allowed than on 2,4 GHz which is >> used to distribute locally. All in all the whole network consumes >> rather little power, one unit or node - WiFi-Router and two >> planar directional antennas - is around USD 200 or less. >> >> The antennas MUST look into "each others eye" that is another >> difficulty. But if so you can bridge 20 kilometers safely using >> 4-7 stations, depending on terrain, offering 50 Mbit/sec - >> conservative calculation. >> >> - The net works like the internet, whether connected to the >> internet at some single node, or without that. >> >> - There is neither a problem with encryption nor with licenses. >> This part of the frequency spectrum is open. Everbody can use it >> for wireless broadband purposes. my two Groschen and 73s de Erich >> OE3EMB >> >> -- >> >> http://moechel.com/kontakt.html PGP KEY 0xEA7DC174 >> fingerprint 02AA B2E7 C609 307D 34FE 4B5C ACC6 A796 EA7D C174 >> --... ...-- -.. . . .-. .. -.-. .... --- . ...-- . -- -... >> -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change >> password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu or >> changing your settings at >> https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech > > > > > -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change > password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu or changing > your settings at > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech > - -- http://moechel.com/kontakt.html PGP KEY 0xEA7DC174 fingerprint 02AA B2E7 C609 307D 34FE 4B5C ACC6 A796 EA7D C174 - --... ...-- -.. . . .-. .. -.-. .... --- . ...-- . -- -... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJROUk/AAoJEKzGp5bqfcF0hVYH/Av3F9SGMVJpDL/BfnGkyYF/ Mwpb7hkQalITULWaA4Y46xZ76wDFNSDyhy9U4MSQRUyRRR9MwyzCjefNph9ivq1F 1qT67h9OpYa+38GzdoaUxckXWnicVl0LsI6pIjWI19ArwUsSYjnjmIybqhPklw7d beGcuGLtxC+DpI6hXJZ3eGVnFA3VUV8MBabGfVIRHwqufkQNdEfkibmy0r+Fafk8 FOQ5sG+gIMd205wJApkqJEcvXihiQZ5Gw+YQpTZwSjLTddJAxbvVihY1XiaMga+T CkwSV4KyQywxU2oWh9jyd3/zCtk0si8UcdHxzzZuS+3wPdKzZ300hPy1HJcDxMo= =d6l4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu or changing your settings 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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Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
by Satoshi Nakamoto 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

>> As long as honest nodes control the most CPU power on the network, >> they can generate the longest chain and outpace any attackers. > >But they don't. Bad guys routinely control zombie farms of 100,000 >machines or more. People I know who run a blacklist of spam sending >zombies tell me they often see a million new zombies a day. > >This is the same reason that hashcash can't work on today's Internet >-- the good guys have vastly less computational firepower than the bad >guys. Thanks for bringing up that point. I didn't really make that statement as strong as I could have. The requirement is that the good guys collectively have more CPU power than any single attacker. There would be many smaller zombie farms that are not big enough to overpower the network, and they could still make money by generating bitcoins. The smaller farms are then the "honest nodes". (I need a better term than "honest") The more smaller farms resort to generating bitcoins, the higher the bar gets to overpower the network, making larger farms also too small to overpower it so that they may as well generate bitcoins too. According to the "long tail" theory, the small, medium and merely large farms put together should add up to a lot more than the biggest zombie farm. Even if a bad guy does overpower the network, it's not like he's instantly rich. All he can accomplish is to take back money he himself spent, like bouncing a check. To exploit it, he would have to buy something from a merchant, wait till it ships, then overpower the network and try to take his money back. I don't think he could make as much money trying to pull a carding scheme like that as he could by generating bitcoins. With a zombie farm that big, he could generate more bitcoins than everyone else combined. The Bitcoin network might actually reduce spam by diverting zombie farms to generating bitcoins instead. Satoshi Nakamoto --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.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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RE: Internet helps brutal governments retain control, paper says
by Adam Powell 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

The subject line of this message is not supported by the paper. The full paper, posted at http://www.ceip.org/files/pdf/21KalathilBoas.pdf, says the Internet is not necessarily "an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule." That is different from saying the Internet "helps brutal governments retain control." The paper begins by noting recent scholarship that has found a positive correlation between Net penetration and democratization -- and correctly noting that does not imply causality, any more than the crowing of a rooster causes the sun to rise. But by relying on official government data on computer *ownership* and on *registered* email accounts, the authors may have encountered a methodological problem that has skewed data for many countries around the world -- including the US. Throughout Asia and Africa and especially in China (I don't have first-hand knowledge of Cuba), relying on such data means you miss the vast majority of the online community that uses hotmail accounts, proxy servers and cybercafes or other non-owned machines for Net access. For every registered user we met in China, we met several who were not registered. So instead of the official Beijing number of 26.5 million people on line (that's the *official* number from China Internet Network Information Center reported today, up 56.8% from last year - details at http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=14423) most experts we contacted said the ratio of unregistered to registered users is 4:1, yielding a total of well over 100 million. That's still a small percentage in a country of billions, but it is different from the paper's 17 million. Why lower than the official numbers? The citation in a footnote takes you to www.chinaoline.com, a Web site in Chicago. The page cited notes one "definition of Internet users rules out Web surfers in Internet cafis" - which would seem to be a problem in a country full of hotmail and yahoo email accounts. So instead they use another method to reach these new, lower numbers: they "conducted online and written surveys of each group to determine the proportion of Web users within each group. The total number of Chinese Internet users was then obtained by calculating the proportion of these groups in relation to the total Chinese population." These are people who go to great pains *not* to be counted or found by the government, but somehow they are expected to respond to an official survey. And if they do not complete the survey, these people do not exist. We also are receiving email from people in countries where, according to this paper, all such traffic is monitored and all users are registered. Not so. Students all seem to know how to use proxy servers and anonymizers and avoid official scrutiny -- and are not reported by those relying on official numbers. But more broadly, the problem is with the "one machine, one user" model of the Internet that most in North America and Europe assume is the standard worldwide. Not so: in Africa, Asia and South America, the standard is "one machine, many users." One example is at www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=11876 based on our first-hand observations and research on the ground, and there are many others on our site. This is not to say the Internet must inevitably topple undemocratic governments. That is the straw man addressed in this report's introduction. But this is to say that it is an important influence in totalitarian countries, enabling a still small but rapidly growing minority to access information directly from outside of their countries -- and to relay that information and their personal views via email to others. Otherwise, what are we to make of the reports by the BBC and the NY Times that China has been forced to change "official" versions of news stories because Chinese can send email to each other (and to those outside of China) with first-hand accounts of what actually happened? Cheers Adam ********** ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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