July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

The Dangers of Cross-Pollinating Other Mailing Lists
by tcmay＠got.net 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

mailing lists on messages they send to Cypherpunks (or vice versa), we often get flooded with insults and spams from people who don't share our views. (While I have nothing against trying to recruit others to our views, in my opinion this is best done by judicious writing of essays for _them_, tuned to their interests, and not in mindless spamming of every list that might have a passing interest in some of the topics.) We already have enough traffic here, and don't need replies from a bunch of other lists, be they libertarian lists, digital commerce lists, human rights lists, or java lists. The latest example of this is the rantfest invvolving these players: ------ From: Jack Hammer <jh(a)teleport.com> To: jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> Cc: Rich Graves <llurch(a)networking.stanford.edu>, cypherpunks(a)toad.com, nwlibertarians(a)teleport.com, hammernet-l(a)teleport.com, libernet-d(a)dartmouth.EDU, liberty-and-justice(a)pobox.com ------ I recognized Bell and Graves, but not the others. And I see no reason why our list should be dragged into flames about "fart sacks" by people on all of these other lists. This was the final straw, and I have no choice except to add Bell, Graves, Hammer, etc. to my filter list, which I will now proceed to do beforesending this message off. [Done] Words have consequences. So do flames. --Tim May

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[IP] U.S. Agents Seize Travelers' Devices
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

________________________________________ From: Sashikumar N [sashikumar.n(a)gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 1:46 PM To: David Farber Subject: U.S. Agents Seize Travelers' Devices Dear Prof Dave, Happen to read this link from slashdot, this is a disturbing news, a direct assault on privacy...shocking that this could be real. regards sashi http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/06/AR200802060… Clarity Sought on Electronics Searches U.S. Agents Seize Travelers' Devices By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 7, 2008; Page A01 Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter's calls had been erased. A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself. Maria Udy, a marketing executive with a global travel management firm in Bethesda, said her company laptop was seized by a federal agent as she was flying from Dulles International Airport to London in December 2006. Udy, a British citizen, said the agent told her he had "a security concern" with her. "I was basically given the option of handing over my laptop or not getting on that flight," she said. <snip> ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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The Dangers of Cross-Pollinating Other Mailing Lists
by tcmay＠got.net 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

mailing lists on messages they send to Cypherpunks (or vice versa), we often get flooded with insults and spams from people who don't share our views. (While I have nothing against trying to recruit others to our views, in my opinion this is best done by judicious writing of essays for _them_, tuned to their interests, and not in mindless spamming of every list that might have a passing interest in some of the topics.) We already have enough traffic here, and don't need replies from a bunch of other lists, be they libertarian lists, digital commerce lists, human rights lists, or java lists. The latest example of this is the rantfest invvolving these players: ------ From: Jack Hammer <jh(a)teleport.com> To: jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> Cc: Rich Graves <llurch(a)networking.stanford.edu>, cypherpunks(a)toad.com, nwlibertarians(a)teleport.com, hammernet-l(a)teleport.com, libernet-d(a)dartmouth.EDU, liberty-and-justice(a)pobox.com ------ I recognized Bell and Graves, but not the others. And I see no reason why our list should be dragged into flames about "fart sacks" by people on all of these other lists. This was the final straw, and I have no choice except to add Bell, Graves, Hammer, etc. to my filter list, which I will now proceed to do beforesending this message off. [Done] Words have consequences. So do flames. --Tim May

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor and P2P
by grarpamp 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

>> My question is, how would it scale and what would be the implications >> of such a system (every user would be a hidden service and would be >> constantly connected to other hidden services it wants to interact >> with)? > thrash the HS > directory system excessively, and probably overload the users' Tor > client processes to the point that they start pounding on the Tor > network in general I likely ran into some of this a while back with something I was working on, enough that it forced a hardware upgrade and future tests. If you're expecting to be doing lots of session initiation, I think you're going to hit some significant local CPU issues, especially those of you thinking of P2P applications running on "smaller than laptop" devices. An occaisional message in the manner in which you might normally 'text', would work ok. But if you expect to have some sort of pidgin/sip buddy list full of status and people bouncing around doing things, it could become ugly. Certainly far worse for torrenting as the extreme example. And when thousands of people come online with P2P like that... yeah. On the other hand, once the session state is up, things seem better and you're back to the usual latency, bandwidth and reliability limits of the relay system. P2P doesn't generally keep sessions up, so it's back to step one. > 1. Persistent hidserv connections. Reconnecting for each message via an > HTTP POST is right out. Way too many circuits+onionskins to scale. So it would be interesting to see where this could go. - Extending circuit and other timeouts for hidden services? - Storing related TCP or Tor states locally? _______________________________________________ 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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Re: Concept: Mobile proxies for downloading pdfs
by Ted Smith 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Tue, 2013-01-15 at 15:34 -0600, Bryan Bishop wrote: > On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Ted Smith wrote: > > Why a mobile app? > > Because all college students have phones. That's true, but they don't have the same phones. Plenty still don't have iOS or Android phones. Plenty have Blackberries. In contrast, all of them have computers, and it's pretty easy to write something that will run on any of them. > I suspect that many of these > students would be interested in participating in this protest. > > > I doubt this would be very widely used, so going mobile for that is > > probably unnecessary. > > What makes you think it wouldn't be widely used? I think there's at > least 1,000 students that would run these proxies. That's a huge > amount of access. Where are you getting that number from? As a current college student, I think that getting a thousand users is a huge stretch. There are maybe a handful of clicktivist types that would actually install something, on a mobile device or a larger computer; there's a slightly larger handful that would think it's cool; the vast majority wouldn't care; the last handful remaining would be against it because they'd see it as stealing (MAFIAA propaganda works). > > * a Tor hidden service > > The tor network is already heavily congested. I don't think that using > tor would be efficient. I think a tor mode option would be useful > though. If you need to do connectback, you need some NAT holepuncher, and Tor is the fastest to get going. Tor is high-latency, but latency doesn't seem like much of a problem when all you're doing is fetching PDFs. I don't think Tor is "congested" -- slow, certainly, and it could use more bandwidth, but Demand will definitely overwhelm supply (in the wildest success stories, this will only be true initially), so you'll have to have queuing anyway, to avoid immediately outing any student running a proxy by causing them to initiate a flood of requests for papers and subsequent outbound traffic. Further, *nobody* will install anything like this if they don't have very ironclad guarantees of their own safety. At my own university, it's considered common knowledge that the network administrators block/monitor filesharing, even though they don't in fact do so -- and it doesn't help that this effort is organized in the wake of a prominent activist with far more resources than they have access to killing himself in response to massive state retaliation for doing exactly what you're asking them to do. -- Sent from Ubuntu -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "science-liberation-front" group. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to science-liberation-front+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. ----- 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: Tor operator raided in Finland
by M 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

>Why tor is banned in Finland? it's just unimaginable!!! I don't think that it is banned. Police just does not understand proxies and thinks that traffic going through the proxy was originated from the proxy and that the proxys administrator is downloading everything that in reality just goes through the proxy. Finnish Law has a paragraph that states that service providers are not responsible for traffic that goes through the proxy or for material that customers upload to their sites (but service provider must remove illegal material as soon as they notice it or as soon as cops call them). >I am from China, where internet censorship is used by the government. >So we use tor to avoid censorship from the government. > >But so far as I know, there is no internet censorship in Finland, I >donot know if I am right? Yes there is but not the same size as in China. Finnish netcensorship should block cp but they also block legal porn for example. They also block the traffic by servers ip-address, not by the domain. As one ip can contain multiple websites, email server, ftp, dns proxy and so they block them all if even one cp-site is working on that server. Imagine a service provider that hosts multiple sites, dns-server and email for many domains and one of it's customers upload some cp on their site -> finnish police blocks EVERYTHING that resides on that server. They do not even try to catch the illegal sites admin or remove the illegal material, they just censors the whole server. I'm also afraid that they are going to start censoring everything that they don't like even if it's not illegal. The system to censor net is already build so next step could be that they start censoring criticism for the state, copyright infrigments and so on. Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid. Finnish "MPAA" tried to misuse the system and already tried to add sites to blocklist that they don't like. I't did not succeed. The blocking is very ineffective as cp can be routed through many different ways, not just http. I think that cops should not try to censor the web but try to catch the paedophiles that hurt the children. Also the sentences for rape or statuatory rape are ridiculous here. Paedophiles that have raped children and get convicted for the first time will get only probation sentence. So they don't go to jail and one can break his probation only by committing same crime as they were sentenced. So if one has raped children and then beats up some children he does not lose his probation. It's just sick. One can rape and beat up a women and does not get any jailtime at all. If he does it again he maybe gets something like 6 months. For the third time he may even get two years! This is just ridiculous. Fines are also very small, usually something like 500 euros to couple of thousand euros. Same goes for the compensation for victims. If rapevictim gets 10 000 euros compensations it's unsually big compensation and the rape has been unusually brutal. Heres an example (in finnish) http://fi.wikinews.org/wiki/Koulupoika_ehdolliseen_8-vuotiaan_raiskauksesta: "Schoolboy convicted to probation for raping 8 year old girl". The girl was 8 years old and the raper 16. He raped the girl at least three times in a row. The court said that the incident was "unusually humiliating". The boy got 1 year and 10 monts probation and he has to pay 11 000 euros as a compensation for the victim. Okay, this was quite unsual case as the raper was only sixteen but rest of the rape sentences (and statuary rape) are quite the same. >If not for avoiding censorhip, why do you use tor? The Police should not >have interrupted you if you had not done illeagal operate such as >sending junk mails with tor.... I'm not trying to avoid local censorship or trying to do anything illegal. I'm trying to protect my privacy. I'm not sending junk mail, I'm on the different side as I work as server admin and try to stop spam. I only proxied the traffic that I'm blamed for, it did not originate from my server. M ----- 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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FreeS/WAN Continues As Openswan
by brian-slashdotnews＠hyperreal.org 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/23/0222229 Posted by: timothy, on 2004-03-23 10:21:00 Topic: encryption, 25 comments from the duckling-of-indeterminate-pulchritude dept. leto writes "It seems some of the developers and volunteers of the (recently deceased) FreeS/WAN project have started a [1]new company to develop and support the successor of the Linux IPsec code under the name of [2]Openswan in a "Cygnus style" business model. They [3]announced the new version at CeBIT which fully supports the new Linux 2.6 native IPsec stack. According to the [4]Openswan website, it was started 'by a few of the developers who were growing frustrated with the politics surrounding the FreeS/WAN project.' There is a [5]FAQ that explains how the various parts of IPsec on Linux work together. I guess that means US citizens can finally submit patches, and that distributions like RedHat/Fedora can now include it in their distribution. FreeS/WAN has always had the most features and most the most user-friendly configuration. It is good to see that will continue. And their [6]mailing list finally seems to refuse spam too." [7]Click Here References 1. http://www.xelerance.com/ 2. http://www.openswan.org/ 3. http://www.xelerance.com/pr/20040317/ 4. http://www.openswan.org/about.php 5. http://www.xelerance.com/pr/20040318/#faq 6. http://lists.openswan.org/pipermail/users/2004-March/thread.html 7. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=2683&alloc_id=6523&site_id=1&request_id=3326894&… =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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EDRI-gram newsletter - Number 5.21, 7 November 2007
by EDRI-gram newsletter 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

============================================================ EDRI-gram biweekly newsletter about digital civil rights in Europe Number 5.21, 7 November 2007 ============================================================ Contents ============================================================ 1. EDRI supports PI's comments on Google-Doubleclick merger 2. EU pushes for an international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement 3. EC plans to profile all passengers in and out EU 4. Putin wants control of Russian Internet 5. Whois privacy problems not solved by ICANN 6. Government attempts of increased level of surveillance in Czech Republic 7. Open Document Format gains more support 8. Recommended Action 9. Recommended Reading 10. Agenda 11. About ============================================================ 1. EDRI supports PI's comments on Google-Doubleclick merger ============================================================ European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRI) is supporting the letter Privacy International (PI) sent on 5 November 2007 asking the head of the European Commission DG Competition, Commissioner Kroes, to take the merger of Google-Doubleclick to the next phase. PI argues that the merger could have serious implications for privacy innovation in advertising. The letter explains the problems that the merger could bring to the online advertising market: "Google's purchase of Doubleclick is particularly worrying because it is a significant consolidation in this domain and we worry that this very competition to provide high-quality privacy practices will dissipate. Google's dominant position in the search marketplace will be compounded by Doubleclick's dominant position in online profiling, leading to a potentially abusive situation for the protection of privacy. If the merger is approved, then Google's dominant service will transform radically from one with a search advertising function into one that collects both searches and browsing habits of users. " PI showed how the decision could influence privacy of the Internet users if the merger is approved : "Privacy innovation could suffer under the merger as the two largest online databases come together. Other companies will have to compete against this massive entity and we worry it will lead to a race to the bottom for privacy protection. (...) Little is actually known about how all these companies protect their customers' data, even though they must do so in accordance with European privacy laws. (...)We know little about how firms make use of this data. Google promises that it does not yet create online user profiles, but it is purchasing a firm that is renowned for the depth and extent of its online user profiles. We need strong and enforceable assurances that profiles will not be developed and enhanced through this merger." BEUC, the Consumer's Organization, as well as the Data Protection Commissioner of the German state of Shleswig-Holstein, Thilo Weichert, have publicly opposed the Google-Doubleclick deal. However, Commissioner Kroes announced on 15 October: "We are looking at the influence on competition and that's it." The new deadline for the enquiry has been set for 13 November 2007. PI Comments on Google-Doubleclick Merger to the European Commission (5.11.2007) http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-558328 EU review of Google bid won't cover privacy issue (15.10.2007) http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2191128,00.html BEUC expresses concern over DoubleClick acquisition by Google (18.07.2007) http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.14/beuc-doubleclick-google ============================================================ 2. EU pushes for an international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ============================================================ A recent statement from the European Commission reveals that it has started negotiations with US, Japan, Korea, Mexico and New Zealand to create an international treaty on counterfeiting - Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), despite the absence of any independent data on the topic. The European Commission is looking for a mandate from the European Member States to proceed in this endeavour, but the ball is already rolling, taking into consideration the almost simultaneous press statements from the US Trade Representative and Canada's Minister of International Trade as well. But "while the claims regularly focus on health and safety risks or suggestions that organized crime or terrorist groups benefit from counterfeiting, the reality is that the policy prescription typically includes a range of issues that have little to do with those issues", as Michael Geist puts it. Even though the OECD estimates the losses of the international trade are 3-4 times lower than the ones the industry has so heavily promoted, the big states still have their ears open to the industry lobbists' claims. EU announces that the new ACTA should build the international cooperation leading to harmonised standards and a better communication between authorities and should establish common enforcement practices to promote strong intellectual property protection in coordination with right holders and trading partners. Also it suggests "creating a strong modern legal framework which reflects the changing nature of intellectual property theft in the global economy, including the rise of easy-to-copy digital storage mediums and the increasing danger of health threats from counterfeit food and pharmaceutical drugs." In fact, it seems that the negotiations have started since mid-2006 between the European Commission, Canada, US and Japan on such an agreement on counterfeiting. But ACTA aims higher. US Trade Representative Susan Schwab explained that the negotiations would "expand upon the enforcement standards of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and countries would be encouraged to comply with other international IPR agreements. The goal is to set a new, higher benchmark for enforcement that countries can join voluntarily." Or, as Michael Geist better explains it: "This treaty could ultimately prove bigger than WIPO - without the constraints of consensus building, developing countries, and civil society groups, the ACTA could further reshape the IP landscape with tougher enforcement, stronger penalties, and a gradual eradication of the copyright and trademark balance." European Commission seeks mandate to negotiate major new international anti- counterfeiting pact (23.10.2007) http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/07/1573 Is ACTA the New WIPO? (24.10.2007) http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2318/125/ Top Economies To Negotiate Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Pact (24.10.2007) http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=799&res=1024_ff&print=0 EDRI-gram: OECD finds the real piracy losses(23.05.2007) http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.10/oecd-piracy-loss ============================================================ 3. EC plans to profile all passengers in and out EU ============================================================ The European Commission(EC) put forward on 6 November 2007 a PNR plan that is almost similar to the EU-USA PNR (Passenger Name Records) agreement. The EU PNR plan is part of a new package of proposals "aimed at improving the EU's capabilities in the fight against terrorism." According to this proposal, EU will have to collect 19 pieces of personal data on air passengers coming into and leaving the EU space, including phone number, e-mail address, travel agent, full itinerary, billing data and baggage information. The information will be collected in analysis units that will make a "risk assessment" of the traveller, which could lead to the questioning or even refusal of the entry. The data is to be kept for five years and then another eight years in a "dormant" database. "The availability of PNR data ... is necessary for the purpose of preventing and fighting terrorist offences and organised crime," is the reason expressed by the draft. In October 2007, Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini told Parliament members that the creation of a PNR database was justified by the high level of terrorist risk for Europe. "The Union is at least as much a potential target of a terrorist attack as the United States, and the use and analysis of passenger name records is an important law enforcement tool to protect our citizens". However, legal experts, human-rights groups and data-protection activists oppose this plan and find it a threat to privacy. Tony Bunyan, editor of Statewatch stated: "This is yet another measure that places everyone under surveillance and makes everyone a "suspect" without any meaningful right to know how the data is used, how it is further processed and by whom [.] We have already got the mandatory taking of fingerprints for passports and ID cards and the mandatory storage of telecommunications data of every communication, now we are to have the mandatory logging of all travel in and out of the EU. The underlying rationale for each of the measures is the same - all are needed to tackle terrorism. Yet there is little evidence that the gathering of "mountain upon mountain" of data on the activities of every person in the EU makes a significant contribution. On the other hand, the use of this data for other purposes, now or in the future, will make the EU the most surveilled place in the world". MEP Sophie in 't Veld has also made an appeal to the European Commission to make an analysis of the situation in USA and Canada in order to verify the effectiveness of such a system before taking any decision on a similar system in Europe. "EU counter-terrorism policies must be regularly assessed on their effectiveness.their impact on reducing the threat and increasing security, on improving cooperation and exchange between countries and agencies, as well as an evaluation of the cumulative impact of individual measures on privacy and civil liberties," she stated. The Commission's proposal for EU PNR is proposed as a Framework Decision meaning that the European Parliament is only consulted and its opinion can be ignored as it happens on a regular basis. The European Council can, in its secret working parties, change at will this legislative proposal. Another question raised is why 2004 Directive on the collection of API (Advance Passenger Information), meant to be applied by all member States by September 2006, is not enough in supporting the fight against terrorism and is not yet applied. The API data is more limited including only name, nationality, passport number, date of birth and the details related to the flight. The proposal did not take into consideration the opinions of EU's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party which, during the consultation period concluded that they "have not seen any information presented by the Commission that would substantiate the pressing need to process PNR data for the purpose of preventing and fighting terrorism and related crimes or law enforcement". They also stated that "Bulk transfer of personal data, which would include unsuspected travellers to other authorities would be disproportionate, as data may only be provided to an authority if necessary for a given purpose". Concerning data protection, the draft proposal has in view the Council Framework Decision on the protection of data for police and judicial cooperation that should apply to the proposed PNR scheme as well. However, the decision has not been adopted and offers very little protection to individuals. The decision ignored the opinions of the European Parliament, the European Data Protection Supervisor, and the EU's Article 29 Data Protection Working Party and allows the personal data exchange with third states such as USA. On the other hand, the draft makes no reference to 1995 EC Directive on data protection covering the collection of PNR data by the airlines. PNR (passenger name record) scheme proposed to place under surveillance all travel in and out of the EU (1.11.2007) http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/nov/01eu-pnr.htm Draft Framework Decison on the use of PNR data (22.10.2007) http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/oct/eu-com-pnr-proposal.pdf EU plans anti-terror screening for air passengers (5.11.2007) http://www.euractiv.com/en/transport/eu-plans-anti-terror-screening-air-pas… EU plans to collect personal data on air passengers (4.11.2007) http://www.reuters.com/article/asiaTopNews/idUSIndia-30328920071104 Fight Against Terrorism: stepping up Europe's capability to protect citizens against the threat of terrorism (6.11.2007) http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/07/1649&format=H… EDRI-gram Final agreements between EU and USA on PNR and SWIFT (4.07.2007) http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.13/eu-us-pnr-swift ============================================================ 4. Putin wants control of Russian Internet ============================================================ As the Internet use in Russia increases spectacularly, having tripled in the last three years, Putin' governance concentrates its efforts on getting control over the Russian Internet after having already gained much control over the traditional mass media. Putin's allies and supporters have created blogs and news sources to flood the Internet with messages favourable to the present political power. During a national broadcast live on TV and Radio in October 2007, Putin tackled the issue of Internet censorship. "Naturally, in this sphere, as in other spheres, we should be thinking about adhering to Russian laws, about making sure that child pornography is not distributed, that financial crimes are not committed" said Putin. Besides numerous pro-government blogs, several already established online outlets have been bought by Putin's allies with the purpose to create a network to disseminat propaganda and to control the online information. Such a publication is Gazeta.ru, the most respected online newspaper which was sold in December to a metals magnate loyal to Putin. Russian officials have also been looking for the possibility of establishing a separate Internet within Russia that would serve their purposes. The reaction of the Kremlin power comes to counterpart situation as the one having occurred in 2004 when, due to concentrated efforts of uncensored blogs and on-line publications, a popular uprising in Ukraine provoked the revoking of the vote for a pro-Moscow candidate in the presidential elections. In April 2007, when an opposition movement held a march in Moscow, blogger Pavel Danilin, a Putin supporter, together with his team, started blogging about a smaller pro-Kremlin march being held the same day. They blogged so much, and linked to each other so effectively, that they crowded out all the items about the opposition march from the very influential top-five blog post listing on the Yandex Web portal. Prosecutors have also started focussing on Internet chat sites, blogs and postings in order to charge the users that criticize Putin or other officials. However, the federal officials deny any campaign to control the Internet. "Personally, I am against developing and adopting a special law that would regulate the Internet," declared Leonid Reiman, Minister of IT&C. "The Internet has been always developing as a free medium, and it should remain as such" he added. Despite the officials' statements, in July 2007, Putin already announced his plans to create a global information technology powerhouse network, a statement that was interpreted by the mass media as an attempt from his part to establish a controlled network separated from the current Internet which is organised by ICANN. According to Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, special adviser to the chairmen of the Internet Governance Forum, some Russian officials are thinking of a separate Internet, with Cyrillic domain names, taking the example of China. Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace (28.10.2007) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/27/AR200710270… Putin tightens his grip on Russia's internet (29.10.2007) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/29/putin_censors_internet/ ============================================================ 5. Whois privacy problems not solved by ICANN ============================================================ ICANN meeting that took place last week (29 October - 2 November 2007) in Los Angeles was expected to decide on the WHOIS database privacy problems. But unfortunately the decision taken was just to make further studies on the matter, despite the already seven years of discussions on this topic. The need for WHOIS reform has been a hot topic for some years in the civil society and some ICANN structures. An EPIC & NGO Letter to ICANN Board on Need for Whois Reform sent on 30 October 2007 asks "for changes to WHOIS services that would protect the privacy of individuals, specifically the removal of registrants' contact information from the publicly accessible WHOIS database." The letter explains that the "current ICANN WHOIS policy conflicts with national privacy laws, including the EU Data Protection Directive, which requires the establishment of a legal framework to ensure that when personal information is collected, it is used only for its intended purpose. As personal information in the directory is used for other purposes and ICANN's policy keeps the information public and anonymously accessible, the database could be found illegal according to many national privacy and data protection laws including the European Data Protection Directive, European data protection laws and legislation in Canada and Australia." Moreover, it points to the Article 29 Working Party's opinion that underlines that "in its current form the WHOIS database does not take account of the data protection and privacy rights". The NGOs supported Final Outcomes Report recently published by the WHOIS Working Group that "accepted the Operational Point of Contact (OPoC) proposal as a starting point, and the best option to date. The OPoC proposal would replace publicly available registrant contact information with an intermediate contact responsible for relaying messages to the registrant." The public letter accepted the fact that the WHOIS Working Group proposal was a workable framework and not a perfect one, recommending "a distinction between commercial and non-commercial domains." But the proposal was rejected by the ICANN, as well as another proposal that would have allowed domain name registration companies to stop making the data available through WHOIS. Instead, the ICANN decided to ask for further studies, that will be identified by the The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council until 15 February 2007. The move was seen as a new delay after seven years of discussions. Ross Rader from the GNSO said to AP: "We've had seven years of study on this issue... what has not been answered is what are the specific questions we want answers to. From my perspective, further, broad, open study is just a way for (opponents) to say you don't have enough votes to change the status quo." The lack of a concrete decision from GNSO meant a renewal of a call for a procedure to allow exemptions from ICANN standard contractual obligations for WHOIS. ICANN's Government Advisory Committee (GAC) said "uniform process" among governments was not to be expected and the specific cases should just be referred to national authorities in order to come to a procedure for the respective registries and registrars. EPIC & NGO Letter to ICANN Board on Need for Whois Reform (30.10.2007) http://ipjustice.org/wp/2007/10/30/epic-ngo-letter-to-icann-board-on-need-f… Whois Studies Approved, Privacy Deferred (31.10.2007) http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hCiHLmZiymo5BhARlugPCaGcTsUQD8SKFC680 Faced with clamor for WHOIS reform, ICANN votes to study the issue more (31.10.2007) http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071031-faced-with-whois-reform-icann… Whois reform: ICANN says let's run more tests (1.11.2007) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/01/whois_reform/ Change Of Leadership At ICANN As Cerf Makes Way For IP Expert (4.11.2007) http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=807&res=&res=1024_ff&print=0 ============================================================ 6. Government attempts of increased level of surveillance in Czech Republic ============================================================ The Czech Interior Ministry introduced in October 2007 a new National Action Plan to Combat Terrorism that would increase the access of the police and intelligence authorities to personal data, under the pretext of the protection against terrorism. The Czech Ministry of Interior has introduced a similar plan every year since 2002 - in 2005 it actually won the Czech Big Brother Award for it - which, until now, has been rejected by the Parliament. The Plan of Action is meant to be used to draft legislation allowing police and other agencies to have access to emails and to wiretap without following any court procedures. "According to the current legal regulations, in order to perform certain actions it is necessary that security bodies meet a number of requirements and conditions, the existence of which is unquestionable," stated Vladimmr Repka, spokesman for the Interior Ministry. As compared to the plan proposed last year, this year's plan seems to have a much more ambiguous wording that " it is actually very difficult to argue against it" says privacy expert Filip Pospmsil from the EDRI-member Czech NGO Iuridicum Remedium. According to him, the plan is inspired from the US Patriot Act that that give the US police authorities direct access to personal data. Presently, in Czech Republic, the interception of emails and wiretapping can be done only by a court order that is valid for up to six months. "They want to have the power just to call the judge and then to get written approval later" said Pospmsil. What the Interior Ministry also wants is to force financial institutions and private Internet providers to pass on clients' information to security agencies as well as to eliminate anonymous phone cards. In Pospmsil's opinion, the present plan is meant as a test to check out on the position of the policy makers and of the public as anyway, even if approved by the government, the plan has no value if it is not passed by the Parliament. "I think it's just a kind of test by the Interior Ministry and other intelligence services to test the willingness of the public and its representatives to exchange some privacy for promises of improved security," he said. Privacy International has issued reports on the situation in the Czech Republic showing concern on the increase of the government attempts to legalise wiretapping, to create a central database from the separate databases of the security agencies as well as on the high level of video surveillance in the country, unrestricted by law. Hana Stepankova, the spokeswoman of the Office of Personal Data Protection, which is responsible for enforcing the country's privacy laws, stated that the office lawyers are presently studying the proposal. The draft plan may receive comments from the public until the end of October but there is no guarantee that the Interior Ministry will take any comments into consideration. Ministry seeks approval for terror law (24.10.2007) http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2007/10/24/ministry-seeks-approval-for-t… EDRI-gram: Big Brother Awards presented in 4 countries (3.11.2007) http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number3.22/BBA ============================================================ 7. Open Document Format gains more support ============================================================ The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. The position of the German Foreign Office, as host of the event, was made very clear. The Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in his opening word, called ODF "a completely open and ISO-standardized format", considering it an "excellent basis" for "a free exchange of knowledge and information in a time of globalization". The Foreign Office has already linked its foreign missions in a network using open-source programs and shifted to OpenOffice and Linux operation systems on their laptops and has in view to extend this program to all diplomatic workstations by the middle of 2008. According to Florian Schie_l of the LiMux Project Office of Munich, where a migration to Linux is in progress, the ODF is a good tool in reducing the large range of templates and macros in the municipal government and in creating more uniform file management standards. The municipal administration of Freiburg will also implement a project for the migration of 2000 workstations from Microsoft Office 2000 to OpenOffice, relying in the future solely on ODF and PDF. ODF will also be adopted as the standard file format by all agencies and departments of Schwdbisch-Hall as Horst Brduner, IT director, stated. Germany is not the only country in favour of ODF. As expressed by Gavin Beckett of the city administration of Bristol, UK, a migration to Sun Microsystems's StarOffice is currently in progress in the city administrative offices. Mr. Beckett pointed out that the difficulty in the development of the progress is the inertia and habit of the office employees having been used Microsoft operation system for many years. "The point is to overcome deeply ingrained modes of behavior," he stated. Brazil and India are also leaders in the use of open standards in the office area. Deivi Kuhn of Serpro, a company coordinating the use of open source in Brazil, declared that ODF standard adopted by the International Organization for Standardization, a good tool providing both access to knowledge and ensuring user freedoms, was mandatory for e-government state interoperability standards. In India, in the federal state of Assam, PCs with Linux and OpenOffice were given to students and the migration to open source software was in progress in government offices. German Foreign Office comes out in favor of Open Document Format (30.10.2007) http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/98208 ODF Workshop (29-30.10.2007) http://www.odfworkshop.org/ EDRI-gram: OOXML - negative vote at International Organization for Standardization (12.09.2007) http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.17/ooxml-rejected-iso ============================================================ 8. Recommended Action ============================================================ Privacy International in a coalition with over 50 other organisations from around the world, including EDRI, is in the process of appealing for the imminent implementation of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act by the Japan's Ministry of Justice. The act will make fingerprint and face-scan compulsory for Japan's visitors and foreign residents. The campaign will be launched later this week. If any organisation wants to endorse this privacy campaign, please contact as soon as possible Gus Hosein - Privacy International - gus at privacy.org. ============================================================ 9. Recommended Reading ============================================================ Big Brother Eyes German Journalists http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0%2C1518%2C514872%2C00.html ENISA Position Paper : Security Issues and Recommendations for Online Social Networks (25.10.2007) Social Networking is like a 'digital cocktail party': a powerful mixture of human social instincts and web 2.0 technology which is revolutionising the Internet. In this position paper, ENISA emphasises the many benefits of Social Networking but identifies 14 important threats. This leads to 17 recommendations on how Social Networking can be made safer. http://www.enisa.europa.eu/doc/pdf/deliverables/enisa_pp_social_networks.pdf ============================================================ 10. Agenda ============================================================ 9 November 2007, St. Gallen, Switzerland Big Brother Awards Switzerland http://bigbrotherawards.ch/ 11 November 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil GigaNet'07 - Global Internet Governance Academic Network 2nd Annual Symposium http://www.igloo.org/giganet 12-15 November 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil The Government of Brazil will host the second Internet Governance Forum meeting. http://www.intgovforum.org/ http://cgi.br/igf/ 15-16 November 2007, Lisbon, Portugal On RFID: The Next step to the Internet of Things http://www.rfid-outlook.pt/ 16-18 November 2007, Munich, Germany 20 years of grassroot networks - 20 years /Cl-Network in Germany Congress on Networking of alternative media, privacy, environment, anti-nuclear, antifascism, peace and human rights http://www.cl-netz.de/cl-netz/20-jahre-datennetze-von-unten-20-jahre-cl-netz 21 November 2007, London, UK Privacy enhancing technologies: How to create a trusted information society http://www.petsfinebalance.com/index.php 29-30 November 2007, Skopje, Macedonia The International Conference e-Society.Mk on inclusive e-Government http://www.e-society.org.mk 3-4 December 2007, Bonn, Germany Network Neutrality - Implications for Europe http://www.wik.org/content/netneutrality_main.htm 4-5 December 2007, Rome, Italy First QualiPSo Conference - Fostering trust and quality of Open Source Software systems http://www.qualipso.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=63&Itemid… 5-7 December 2007, Pisa, Italy Second DELOS Conference on Digital Libraries http://www.delos.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=606&Itemid=… 17 January 2008, London, UK Nanotechnology for security and the crime prevention III http://www.nano.org.uk/events/ionevents.htm#security ============================================================ 11. About ============================================================ EDRI-gram is a biweekly newsletter about digital civil rights in Europe. Currently EDRI has 28 members based or with offices in 17 different countries in Europe. European Digital Rights takes an active interest in developments in the EU accession countries and wants to share knowledge and awareness through the EDRI-grams. All contributions, suggestions for content, corrections or agenda-tips are most welcome. Errors are corrected as soon as possible and visibly on the EDRI website. Except where otherwise noted, this newsletter is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. See the full text at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Newsletter editor: Bogdan Manolea <edrigram(a)edri.org> Information about EDRI and its members: http://www.edri.org/ European Digital Rights needs your help in upholding digital rights in the EU. If you wish to help us promote digital rights, please consider making a private donation. http://www.edri.org/about/sponsoring - EDRI-gram subscription information subscribe by e-mail To: edri-news-request(a)edri.org Subject: subscribe You will receive an automated e-mail asking to confirm your request. unsubscribe by e-mail To: edri-news-request(a)edri.org Subject: unsubscribe - EDRI-gram in Macedonian EDRI-gram is also available partly in Macedonian, with delay. Translations are provided by Metamorphosis http://www.metamorphosis.org.mk/edrigram-mk.php - EDRI-gram in German EDRI-gram is also available in German, with delay. Translations are provided Andreas Krisch from the EDRI-member VIBE!AT - Austrian Association for Internet Users http://www.unwatched.org/ - Newsletter archive Back issues are available at: http://www.edri.org/edrigram - Help Please ask <edrigram(a)edri.org> if you have any problems with subscribing or unsubscribing ----- 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: Tor operator raided in Finland
by M 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

>Why tor is banned in Finland? it's just unimaginable!!! I don't think that it is banned. Police just does not understand proxies and thinks that traffic going through the proxy was originated from the proxy and that the proxys administrator is downloading everything that in reality just goes through the proxy. Finnish Law has a paragraph that states that service providers are not responsible for traffic that goes through the proxy or for material that customers upload to their sites (but service provider must remove illegal material as soon as they notice it or as soon as cops call them). >I am from China, where internet censorship is used by the government. >So we use tor to avoid censorship from the government. > >But so far as I know, there is no internet censorship in Finland, I >donot know if I am right? Yes there is but not the same size as in China. Finnish netcensorship should block cp but they also block legal porn for example. They also block the traffic by servers ip-address, not by the domain. As one ip can contain multiple websites, email server, ftp, dns proxy and so they block them all if even one cp-site is working on that server. Imagine a service provider that hosts multiple sites, dns-server and email for many domains and one of it's customers upload some cp on their site -> finnish police blocks EVERYTHING that resides on that server. They do not even try to catch the illegal sites admin or remove the illegal material, they just censors the whole server. I'm also afraid that they are going to start censoring everything that they don't like even if it's not illegal. The system to censor net is already build so next step could be that they start censoring criticism for the state, copyright infrigments and so on. Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid. Finnish "MPAA" tried to misuse the system and already tried to add sites to blocklist that they don't like. I't did not succeed. The blocking is very ineffective as cp can be routed through many different ways, not just http. I think that cops should not try to censor the web but try to catch the paedophiles that hurt the children. Also the sentences for rape or statuatory rape are ridiculous here. Paedophiles that have raped children and get convicted for the first time will get only probation sentence. So they don't go to jail and one can break his probation only by committing same crime as they were sentenced. So if one has raped children and then beats up some children he does not lose his probation. It's just sick. One can rape and beat up a women and does not get any jailtime at all. If he does it again he maybe gets something like 6 months. For the third time he may even get two years! This is just ridiculous. Fines are also very small, usually something like 500 euros to couple of thousand euros. Same goes for the compensation for victims. If rapevictim gets 10 000 euros compensations it's unsually big compensation and the rape has been unusually brutal. Heres an example (in finnish) http://fi.wikinews.org/wiki/Koulupoika_ehdolliseen_8-vuotiaan_raiskauksesta: "Schoolboy convicted to probation for raping 8 year old girl". The girl was 8 years old and the raper 16. He raped the girl at least three times in a row. The court said that the incident was "unusually humiliating". The boy got 1 year and 10 monts probation and he has to pay 11 000 euros as a compensation for the victim. Okay, this was quite unsual case as the raper was only sixteen but rest of the rape sentences (and statuary rape) are quite the same. >If not for avoiding censorhip, why do you use tor? The Police should not >have interrupted you if you had not done illeagal operate such as >sending junk mails with tor.... I'm not trying to avoid local censorship or trying to do anything illegal. I'm trying to protect my privacy. I'm not sending junk mail, I'm on the different side as I work as server admin and try to stop spam. I only proxied the traffic that I'm blamed for, it did not originate from my server. M ----- 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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FreeS/WAN Continues As Openswan
by brian-slashdotnews＠hyperreal.org 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/23/0222229 Posted by: timothy, on 2004-03-23 10:21:00 Topic: encryption, 25 comments from the duckling-of-indeterminate-pulchritude dept. leto writes "It seems some of the developers and volunteers of the (recently deceased) FreeS/WAN project have started a [1]new company to develop and support the successor of the Linux IPsec code under the name of [2]Openswan in a "Cygnus style" business model. They [3]announced the new version at CeBIT which fully supports the new Linux 2.6 native IPsec stack. According to the [4]Openswan website, it was started 'by a few of the developers who were growing frustrated with the politics surrounding the FreeS/WAN project.' There is a [5]FAQ that explains how the various parts of IPsec on Linux work together. I guess that means US citizens can finally submit patches, and that distributions like RedHat/Fedora can now include it in their distribution. FreeS/WAN has always had the most features and most the most user-friendly configuration. It is good to see that will continue. And their [6]mailing list finally seems to refuse spam too." [7]Click Here References 1. http://www.xelerance.com/ 2. http://www.openswan.org/ 3. http://www.xelerance.com/pr/20040317/ 4. http://www.openswan.org/about.php 5. http://www.xelerance.com/pr/20040318/#faq 6. http://lists.openswan.org/pipermail/users/2004-March/thread.html 7. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=2683&alloc_id=6523&site_id=1&request_id=3326894&… =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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