July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

SDMI announcement
by sacraver＠ivy.ee.princeton.edu 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hello, If you read Salon or Slashdot, you may have already read of this. Our research group, comprising of crypto-folk from Princeton U, Rice U and Xerox have issued a press release and faq (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/) detailing comprehensive success in the 1st round of the SDMI challenge. Basically, we got positive results from the oracles for all four watermarking technologies. These oracles would yield a positive result if music submitted to it was modified enough that a watermark could not be detected, and if quality was good enough relative to 64Kbps MP3 compression. We dont know how they measured quality. But we passed all four oracles, and repeated our results as much as we could before the challenge deadline was over. A full technical writeup is coming soon, as we plan on sharing all our findings with the cryptographic and steganographic community. This is part of the reason we are not participating in the second phase: we are not interested in the prize money, and at this point the challenge is more like a contest, providing no real value to us from a scientific perspective. Further participation may also restrict our ability to publish our results---to be eligible for the prize, it appears one must sign a form transferring intellectual property rights to the analysis. Finally, if you are also a research team who has received positive results from SDMI oracles, wed love to hear about it. We are making a list of links to others who have received positive results in the first round. Keep in mind that if youre going after the money, you might become ineligible if you publicize these details. -Scott Heres the official statement, as found at the URL: --------------------------------------------------------------- Statement Regarding the SDMI Challenge The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is developing a comprehensive system to prevent music piracy. Central to this system is watermarking, in which an inaudible message is hidden in music to provide copyright information to devices like MP3 players and recorders. Devices may then refuse to make copies of pieces of music, depending on the meaning of the watermark contained therein. In September 2000, SDMI issued a public challenge to help them choose among four proposed watermarking technologies. During the three-week challenge, researchers could download samples of watermarked music, and were invited to attempt to remove the secret copyright watermarks. During the challenge period, our team of researchers, from Princeton University, Rice University, and Xerox, successfully defeated all four of the watermarking challenges, by rendering the watermarks undetectable without significantly degrading the audio quality of the samples. Our success on these challenges was confirmed by SDMIs email server. We are currently preparing a technical report describing our findings regarding the four watermarking challenges, and the two other miscellaneous challenges, in more detail. The technical report will be available some time in November. This statement, a Frequently Asked Questions document, the full technical report (when it is ready), and other related information can be found on the Web at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi. For more information, please contact Edward Felten at (609) 258-5906 or felten0x40cs0x2Eprinceton0x2Eedu. Editors note: replace 0x40 with @ and 0x2E with . ---------------------------------------------------------------- Scott Craver, Patrick McGregor, Min Wu, Bede Liu Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University Adam Stubblefield, Ben Swartzlander, Dan S. Wallach Dept. of Computer Science, Rice University Drew Dean Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Edward W. Felten Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University

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What Brought on the French Revolution?
by Mises Daily Article 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

<http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1489>http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1489 What Brought on the French Revolution? By H.A. Scott Trask [Posted April 9, 2004] No matter how much the American economy grows during the next decade, the government will have serious trouble funding expanding entitlements, increased education spending, and ongoing wars in the Middle East, while maintaining a global military constabulary and presence everywhere. Something has to give. No matter how one crunches the numbers, a crisis is looming, and Americans are bound to see their standard of living fall and their global empire collapse. It has happened before. Consider that seminal and catastrophic event that inaugurated the era of mass politics, bureaucratic centralism, and the ideological statethe French Revolution. It is a large and complex event worthy of a Gibbon, but it may not have happened at all if the French monarchy had balanced its budget. While the causes of the Revolution are many, the cause of the crisis that brought on the Revolution is not. It was a fiscal and credit crisis that weakened the authority and confidence of the monarchy so much that it thought it had to convene a defunct political assembly before it had safely carried out a successful program of liberal constitutional and free market reform. It would be as if the American federal government called a constitutional convention with an open agenda and hoped that all would go smoothly. The Estates General lasted only a little over a month before the leaders of the Third Estate (the bourgeoisie, artisans, and peasantry) transformed it into a National Assembly and took political power from the monarchy. The Revolution was on. Revisionist historians have challenged the standard interpretation of pre-revolutionary France as a country with a stagnant economy, an oppressed peasantry, a shackled bourgeoisie, and an archaic political structure. In Citizens (1989), Simon Schama describes France under Louis XVI as a rapidly modernizing nation with entrepreneurial nobles, a reform-minded monarchy, nascent industrialization, growing commerce, scientific progress, and energetic intendants (royal administrators in the provinces). Moreover, Montesquieu was in vogue; the English mixed constitution was the cynosure of political reform, and the economic philosophy of physiocracy, with its belief in economic law and advocacy of laissez faire, had discredited the dogmas of state mercantilism. Turgot argued perceptively that another war with England would derail his reform program, bankrupt the state, and, even if successful, do little to weaken British power. In 1774, Louis XVI appointed Jacques Turgot, a Physiocrat, to be Controller-General of Finances. Turgot believed that subsidies, regulations, and tariffs were crippling productivity and enterprise in France. End them, he advised the king, and business would thrive and state revenues increase. He proposed an ambitious reform program that included taking down internal custom barriers, lifting price controls on grain, abolishing the guilds and the corvee (forced labor service), and devolving political power to newly created provincial assemblies (two of which he established). Turgot envisioned a federated France, with a chain of elected bodies extending from the village through the provinces to some form of national assembly. Not surprisingly, there was both aristocratic and popular opposition to these reforms, but what really doomed them was Turgot's inveterate opposition to French intervention in the American War of Independence. Many were still stewing over the humiliating and catastrophic defeat suffered by France in the Seven Years' War (17561763). The country had lost her North American possessions (Quebec, Louisiana) and all of French India, except two trading stations. The foreign minister (Vergennes) calculated that by helping the Americans gain their independence they could weaken the British Empire, gain revenge, and restore France's previous position as one of the world's two superpowers. Turgot argued perceptively that another war with England would derail his reform program, bankrupt the state, and, even if successful, do little to weaken British power. "The first gunshot will drive the state to bankruptcy," he warned the king. It was to no avail. International power politics and considerations of national prestige took precedence over domestic reform, and the king dismissed him in May 1776. He would be proved right on all three points. The French began covertly supplying war material to the rebellious colonists in 1777, and in 1778 they signed a treaty of alliance with the Americans. Throughout the war, they supplied hard money loans, and underwrote others for the purchase of war supplies in Europe. In 1780, they landed a 5,000-man army in Rhode Island. In 1781, the French navy blockaded Lord Cornwallis's army at Yorktown. Turgot's successor Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker, financed these expenditures almost entirely through loans. Although successful, France's intervention cost 1.3 billion livres and almost doubled her national debt. Schama writes, "No state with imperial pretensions has, in fact, ever subordinated what it takes to be irreducible military interests to the considerations of a balanced budget. And like apologists for military force in twentieth-century America," imperialists "in eighteenth century France pointed to the country's vast demographic and economic reserves and a flourishing economy to sustain the burden." Even more, they claimed that prosperity was "contingent on such military expenditures, both directly in naval bases like Brest and Toulon, and indirectly in the protection it gave to the most rapidly expanding sector of the economy." Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. The new Controller General made no effort to restrain domestic or court spending. The result was a peacetime spending spree and chronic budget deficits. Necker was neither a financial profligate nor an ultra royalist. He was simply financing a war that the government deemed to be in the national interest. During the conflict, he held down royal expenditures at home, eliminated many sinecures, published a national budget in 1781, and proposed the formation of a third provincial assembly. However, when his request to join the royal council (as a Protestant, he was barred) was rejected, he resigned. His immediate successor, Joly de Fleury, restored many of the offices he had eliminated. Upon the return of peace with the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), the monarchy had another opportunity to institute economic, financial, and political reforms, but it squandered it. Just as with the first Bush administration after the Cold War, there would be no peace dividend. The government was determined to exploit the vacuum created by British defeat to restore French imperial power. Their global strategy was to maintain a standing army of 150,000 men to defend the borders and preserve the balance of power on the Continent while building up a transoceanic navy capable of challenging the British in all the world's oceans. What is more, the new Controller General, Calonne, made no effort to restrain domestic or court spending. The result was a peacetime spending spree, chronic budget deficits, and the addition of 700 million livres to the national debt. By 1788, debt service alone would absorb fifty percent of annual revenue. It was guns and butter, French style. Today we are savoring it, Texas style. In a few years, Calonne was faced with an imminent fiscal catastrophe. The annual deficit in 1786 was projected to be 112 million livres, and the American war loans would begin falling due the next year. Action was imperative. Such was the power of liberal and federalist ideas in France that Calonne summoned the Physiocrat Dupont de Nemours, a former Turgot associate, to advise him. Meanwhile, with their blessing, the foreign minister, Vergennes, signed a free trade agreement with Great Britain (1786). With the help of Nemours, Calonne proposed the following measures to open up the French economy: the deregulation of the domestic grain trade, the dismantling of internal custom barriers, and commuting the corvee into a public works tax. To raise a regular and equitable revenue, he suggested a "territorial subvention," (i.e. a direct tax levied on all landowners, without exception, to be assessed and levied by representative provincial assemblies). Calonne remembered the mistake Turgot had made ten years before. He had relied exclusively on royal authority to enact his program and in so doing had antagonized the nobility who did not like being presented with a fait accompli. To avoid a similar fate, Calonne suggested the summoning of an Assembly of Notables for early 1787 to consider, modify, and sanction the reforms before they were sent to the Parlement of Paris for registration (making them law). The king approved Calonne's whole program in December 1786. Here was the last chance for the monarchy to institute a program of decentralist constitutional and liberal economic reform that would free the economy, solve the fiscal crisis, transmute absolutism into constitutionalism, and avert an impending political cataclysm. Alas, as excellent and necessary as were Calonne's reforms, he was not the right man to see them through. He was deeply unpopular for his lavish court spending and for using his office to cultivate various corrupt stock schemes. The nobility did not trust him, and the people despised him. Recognizing he was a liability, the king dismissed him and appointed Lomenie de Brienne in his stead. Brienne was a high noble, a Notable, and a reformer. The Assembly was supportive of all the reforms, except the taxes. Here they balked. Before they would give their sanction to new taxes, they wanted the king to publish an annual budget and to agree to a permanent commission of auditors. Their concern was obvious. Why should they agree to changes that would increase royal revenue if they had no way of monitoring royal expenses to see if those funds were being prudently spent? Now the king balked. He thought the proposals an infringement on his prerogatives over the finances and the budget. He vetoed them. It was a grievous error, but typical of the vacillating mind of the king and the intellectual fetters of an absolutist political tradition. The Parlement of Paris duly registered the decrees freeing the grain trade, commuting the corvee, and setting up the provincial assemblies, but they would not register the stamp duty or the land tax. They claimed that only the Estates General, the medieval representative assembly of the three estates of the kingdom (clergy, nobility, and commons) that had last met in 1614, could approve the taxes. The nobles were gambling that Louis would never dare call for an assembly of the Estates. It was a clever stratagem for defeating the tax proposals without incurring the popular odium for doing so. The nobility and clergy would not give up their tax exemptions nor grant the monarchy a potentially inexhaustible new source of revenue without a share of political power. An unforeseen consequence was to create a popular expectation for the reconvening of the Estates. This time the nobility erred. If the monarchy had not been so pressed for funds to stave off bankruptcy, they could have declared the registered edicts a victory for reform and waited for another day to deal with taxes. Not having that luxury, Brienne and the king panicked. They decided to resort to the weapons of royal absolutism to force through the tax reforms. They issued lits de justice declaring the new taxes to be law by royal will. Second, they exiled the recalcitrant Parlement to Troyes. The public outcry and institutional resistance to these tyrannical measures was such that the monarchy had to back down. The king recalled the Parlement and withdrew the lits de justice. Brienne now requested that the Parlement register new royal loans to stave off bankruptcy. It did so, but it again called for the re-convening of the Estates General. It also attempted to establish its new position as a de facto parliament. It declared that royal decrees were not law unless duly registered by the parlements and denied the constitutionality of both lits de justice and lettres de cachet (royal arrest warrants). The king and Brienne believed that the future of royal absolutism was at stake, so they responded with force. They surrounded the Parlement with troops. The king stripped it of its powers of remonstrance and registry, and he invested those powers in a new Plenary Court to be appointed by him. The May coup turned both the nobility and the clergy against the Crown, excited civil protest and unrest, and created a political crisis to match the seriousness of the fiscal crisis. Once again, a foolish attempt to preserve inviolate the senescent institutions of absolutism had failed. By August 1788, the monarchy was bankrupt and without credit. It could borrow new funds neither in Paris nor Amsterdam. Brienne had no choice but to resign. The king recalled Necker, who was the one man who had the confidence of investors, was trusted by the nobility, and popular among the masses. The king also summoned the Estates General to meet in May 1789. The people would assemble by order in local assemblies and elect delegates. The electorate would comprise over six million Frenchmen. Schama calls it "the most numerous experiment in political representation attempted anywhere in the world." By tradition, the assemblies could draw up a list of grievances and requests which their representatives would take with them to Versailles. They would carry 25,000 of them. Students are taught that the nobility and clergy were determined to preserve the old order, the ancien regime, with most of their privileges intact, and admit only a modicum of change, while the Third Estate demanded a transformed France in which the watchwords would be liberty, progress, and modernity. The truth is almost precisely the opposite. The majority of the nobility envisioned a France that was rational, liberal, and constitutional. They were willing to surrender their tax exemptions and seigniorial dues. They called for the abolition of lettres de cachet and all forms of censorship; they wanted an Anglo-Saxon style bill of rights with constitutional protection for civil liberties. They recommended financial reforms: a published national budget, the abolition of the sale of government offices, and an end to tax farming. They also urged the abolition of the trade guilds and the suppression of internal custom barriers. While many of these recommendations are found in the cahiers of the Third Estate, they are eclipsed by material concernsunderstandable complaints about the high price of bread, the game laws, the gabelle (the salt tax), and the depredations of the tax collectors. There are also numerous criticisms of recent reforms, such as the free trade agreement with England, the lifting of price controls on grain, agricultural enclosures, and the granting of civil rights to Protestants. In short, the voice of the Third Estate was largely one of reaction, and while they wanted fewer taxes they wanted more government. According to Schama, "much of the anger firing revolutionary violence arose from hostility towards that modernization, rather than from impatience with the speed of its progress." If only the French elites had reformed. There would have been no Terror, no Napoleon, no centralizing, statist revolution. The Third Estate had some liberal merchants and innovative industrialists, but it had many more urban artisans and peasants. The latter believed they were getting the shaft and that the nobility and clergy, as well as the wealthy members of their own estate, were to blame. They wanted price controls reimposed on grain, restrictions put on its exportation, the prohibition of foreign manufactures, and the punishment of "speculators" and "hoarders." They found leaders among lawyer intellectuals of their own estate, and some visionary members of the others, who spoke in a charged language of grievance, polarity, and combat. Knowing little and caring less about economic liberty or federal constitutionalism, they spoke of patriots versus traitors, citizens versus aristocrats, virtue versus vice, the nation assailed by its enemies. They offered the masses panaceas for their plight, villains to blame, and promises that the possession of political power would heave in the dikes of privilege and unleash the fountains of wealth. Schama correctly deduces that it was the politicization of the masses that "turned a political crisis into a full-blooded revolution." Once the vast Third Estate was told that they were the nation and that a "true national assembly would, by virtue of its higher moral qualityits common patriotismprovide satisfaction, they were given a direct stake in sweeping institutional change." The abbe Sieyes' pamphlet What is the Third Estate? appeared in January 1789 and would be to the French Revolution what Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) had been to the American. By the time the Estates General convened in May, the masses and leading intellectuals regarded the continued existence of separate social orders with their own institutional representation not only as an obstacle to reform, but as unpatriotic, even treasonous. When the Estates General metastasized into the National Assembly in June 1789, it was the onset of a radical revolution. Liberty would not fare well on the guillotine. Through 1788 and into 1789 the gods seemed to be conspiring to bring on a popular revolution. A spring drought was followed by a devastating hail storm in July. Crops were ruined. There followed one of the coldest winters in French history. Grain prices skyrocketed. Even in the best of times, an artisan or factor might spend 40 percent of his income on bread. By the end of the year, 80 percent was not unusual. "It was the connection of anger with hunger that made the Revolution possible," observed Schama. It was also envy that drove the Revolution to its violent excesses and destructive reform. Take the Reveillon riots of April 1789. Reveillon was a successful Parisian wall-paper manufacturer. He was not a noble but a self-made man who had begun as an apprentice paper worker but now owned a factory that employed 400 well-paid operatives. He exported his finished products to England (no mean feat). The key to his success was technical innovation, machinery, the concentration of labor, and the integration of industrial processes, but for all these the artisans of his district saw him as a threat to their jobs. When he spoke out in favor of the deregulation of bread distribution at an electoral meeting, an angry crowded marched on his factory, wrecked it, and ransacked his home. >From thenceforth, the Paris mob would be the power behind the Revolution. Economic science would not fare well. According to Jean Baptiste Say, "The moment there was any question in the National Assembly of commerce or finances, violent invectives could be heard against the economists." That is what happens when political power is handed over to pseudo-intellectuals, lawyers, and the mob. The exponents of the rationalistic Enlightenment had stood for a constitutional monarchy, a liberal economic and legal order, scientific progress, and a competent administration. According to Schama, "They were heirs to the reforming ethos of Louis XVI's reign, and authentic predictors of the 'new notability' to emerge after the Revolution had run its course. Their language was reasonable and their tempers cool. What they had in mind was a nation vested, through its representatives, with the power to strip away the obstructions to modernity. Such a state . . . would not wage war on the France of the 1780s but consummate its promise." If only the French elites could have agreed on a course of reform along these lines, there would have been no Terror, no Napoleon, no centralizing, statist revolution. And it was the pressing financial crisis, brought on by deficit spending to fund a global empire that in the end frustrated the kind of evolutionary political and economic liberalization that is the true road of civilized progress. __________________________ Historian Scott Trask is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute. <mailto:hstrask@highstream.net>hstrask(a)highstream.net. See his <http://www.mises.org/articles.asp?mode=a&author=Trask>article archive. Discuss this article on the <http://www.mises.org/blog>blog. 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=1489>[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=xujje2srnt>your account. Unsubscribe <http://mises.biglist.com/list/article/?p=unsub&pre=l&e=1883638&pw=xujje2srnt>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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[IP] New NSA Spying Map and White Paper]
by Dave Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: New NSA Spying Map and White Paper Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 17:06:48 -0500 From: Barry Steinhardt <bsteinhardt(a)aclu.org> To: dave(a)farber.net Dave, The IP list may be interested in a new ACLU white paper and interactive map detailing what is known and suspected about how the NSA's illegal spying on Americans occurs and where the interceptions are likely taking place.. The white paper is entitled "Eavesdropping 101: What Can the NSA Do?" It looks at the probable connections that the NSA has made to the U.S. civilian communications infrastructure. The map shows how the NSA's "surveillance octopus" likely entangles the country. We believe it is the first effort to visually illustrate what is happening. You can find both the white paper and the map at http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/23989res20060131.html > http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/23989res20060131.html. A complete range of materials can be found at www.nsawatch.org <http://www.nsawatch.org> . Barry Steinhardt Director Technology and Liberty Project American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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

06 Jul '18

Eric S Johnson: > For the record, Burma/Myanmar (MM) has very little cybercensorship > now (the previous censorship started loosening up in about August > 2011 and was basicallybnot entirely, but mostlybdropped by the end of > October 2011). > Hi, I've just returned from Burma in the last month. There is total surveillance in Burma on the commercial YTP ISP. They censor plenty of sites and their BlueCoat proxy devices fail to deliver content for unblocked sites often. The other networks seem rather under surveillance as well and they also have censorship. We (OONI) have data from my trip there and it includes all of the major networks. We'll write it up and publish all of it soon. > Ibve been visiting MM since the mid-aughts and have never encountered > FidoNet there. Havenbt seen it since Africa, mid-nineties. But that > doesnbt mean it wasnbt/isnbt there. > I haven't seen FidoNet but I did see lots of WiMax, VSAT, GSM/CDMA and even some discussion of X.25, etc. > > > (Vietnam still has a measurable amount of online censorship, but itbs > not nearly as heavy-handed as Chinabs or Iranbs. Itbs more like > Ethiopiabs. > Ethiopia has extremely sophisticated censorship: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ethiopia-introduces-deep-packet-inspection https://blog.torproject.org/blog/update-censorship-ethiopia > Some of Cambodiabs ~30 ISPs censor a half-dozen sites, but thatbs > hardly serious (the largest, Vietnamese-controlled, ISP doesnbt!).) > The serious problem is the infrastructure even if today it is only used on a few sites. All the best, Jake -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
by Andrew Lewman 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Thu, 26 Jul 2012 16:05:53 +0000 kupo(a)damnfbi.tk wrote: > We should probably talk further then since I'm _in_ Iceland atm and > would also like to see a high capacity node here. > May I ask for your reasoning though? A lot of people on both sides of > the pond have believed that IMMI <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMMI> > has been passed here already when it has in fact not (yet). I'm in > touch with those trying to pass it and it comes up for major review > in september. Have you tried talking to DataCell > <http://www.datacell.com/>? I talked to Datacell roughly a year ago. They were fine with an exit relay, but at the time were distracted by suing Visa. The only issue was pure cost. Traffic leaving Iceland costs a lot. I wasn't prepared to spend ISK300,000 per month for a 100 mbps exit relay. Maybe times have changed and traffic from Iceland is not so expensive anymore. -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x6B4D6475 _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays ----- 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: [ExI] elections again
by Harvey Newstrom 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

OK, if you guys really want to know how insecure our voting machines are, take a look at the work NIST is doing at their voting improvement website <http://vote.nist.gov> and their faq <http://vote.nist.gov/faq.html>. And for something really scary, they point to this presentation showing real-world examples of how electronic voting machines can be used to skew an election: <http://www.bbvdocs.org/presentations/attacks-public.pdf> -- Harvey Newstrom <www.harveynewstrom.com> CISSP CISA CISM CIFI GSEC IAM ISSAP ISSMP ISSPCS IBMCP _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat(a)lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[IP] CA State bill could cripple P2P
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

------ Forwarded Message From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne(a)warpspeed.com> Reply-To: <dewayne(a)warpspeed.com> Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 01:38:48 -0800 To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net(a)warpspeed.com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] CA State bill could cripple P2P State bill could cripple P2P By John Borland <http://news.com.com/State+bill+could+cripple+P2P/2100-1028_3 -5540937.html> Story last modified Tue Jan 18 17:55:00 PST 2005 A bill introduced in California's Legislature last week has raised the possibility of jail time for developers of file-swapping software who don't stop trades of copyrighted movies and songs online. The proposal, introduced by Los Angeles Sen. Kevin Murray, takes direct aim at companies that distribute software such as Kazaa, eDonkey or Morpheus. If passed and signed into law, it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don't take "reasonable care" in preventing the use of their software to swap copyrighted music or movies--or child pornography. Peer-to-peer software companies and their allies immediately criticized the bill as a danger to technological innovation, and as potentially unconstitutional. "State Sen. Murray did not choose to seek out the facts before introducing misguided legislation that effectively would make criminals out of many companies that bring jobs and economic growth to California," Mike Weiss, CEO of Morpheus parent StreamCast Networks, said in a statement. "This bill is an attack on innovation itself and tax-paying California-based businesses like StreamCast depend on that freedom to innovate." The bill comes as much of the technology world is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legal status of file-swapping technology. Federal courts have twice ruled that peer-to-peer software companies are not legally responsible for the illegal actions of people using their products. Hollywood studios and record companies appealed those decisions to the nation's top court, which is expected to rule on the issue this summer. In the meantime, entertainment companies' push for federal legislation on file-swapping issue has been put temporarily on the back burner. A controversial bill that would have put more legal responsibility on the peer-to-peer developers failed to pass at the end of last year's congressional session. California has taken a lead among states in putting pressure on the file-swapping world. Attorney General Bill Lockyer was a key figure last year in pushing for more state-level legal scrutiny of the companies' actions, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has sought to ban illegal downloading on any state computers, including those owned by the state university systems. [snip] Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net> Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com> ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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Potential Rumsfield replacement (Robert Gates) was director of
by Peter Langston 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

voting company Reply-To: psl(a)acm.org User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 (Windows/20061025) Forwarded-by: David Michael <harp(a)olympus.net> [another reason not to confirm him....dm] Permission to excerpt or reprint granted, with link to http://www.blackboxvoting.org Rumsfield replacement (Robert Gates) was director of voting company by Bev Harris Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfield will resign, reportedly to be replaced by former CIA director Robert Gates. Gates was on the board of directors of VoteHere, a strange little company that was the biggest elections industry lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). VoteHere spent more money than ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia combined to help ram HAVA through. And HAVA, of course, was a bill sponsored by convicted Abramoff pal Bob Ney and K-street lobbyist buddy Steny Hoyer. HAVA put electronic voting on steroids. You can find copies of the VoteHere lobbying forms here: http://sopr.senate.gov/cgi-win/m_opr_viewer.exe?DoFn=0 I can't get them to save to pdf, perhaps you can. Enter search terms in both "registrant" and "client" fields and put in terms "Rhoads" "Livingston" and "Votehere" (one at a time.). Then look at the gravy train while it was in the process of derailing American democracy. I first became acquainted with VoteHere when I met a source, Dan Spillane, who is the wonderful guy that identified the Diebold source code modules for me after I found the Diebold files. He is the person who introduced me, and subsequently everyone else, to the odd role of The Election Center and R. Doug Lewis in the elections industry. Spillane also filled me in on The Livingston Group, VoteHere lobbyists, run by Bob Livingston -- the fellow that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt outed during the Bill Clinton blow job days. Larry Flynt offered a million dollars to anyone who could locate a Republican congressman committing adultery, and out popped peccadilloes by Livingston. Livingston couldn't live that one down, so he resigned his post as House Speaker-Elect and became a lobbyist -- but that's not all! He also launched a group called "Center for Democracy" which was going to "monitor elections." This group also featured several good old boys from the tobacco industry and some mining companies. Former VoteHere test engineer Dan Spillane was looking into all this because he had been fired after he questioned the certification process on a touch-screen system in which he had identified 250 flaws. It was way back in November 2002 that Spillane told me, "The voting machine industry is a house of cards. And the certification and testing process is the bottom card in the house of cards." BUT DON'T RUN OUT OF THE ROOM TO TAKE A SHOWER YET. There's more. VoteHere was a company shilling cryptographic solutions and filled with NSA types (another director was Admiral Bill Owens, another crony of Rummy, Perle and Wolfowitz). For some reason this company claims it was unable to prevent itself from being hacked. In this alleged hack, VoteHere claims that someone stole their source code. Said source code was offered to me in October 2003, an obvious attempt at entrapment which I refused. Nevertheless, VoteHere claimed to the media that its master security experts had supposedly "tracked" the hacker and had identified the hacker as an activist in the election reform community. For some reason, it was decided that I should be investigated in connection with this "hack" of VoteHere -- nevermind that I can't remember how to change the password on my own laptop. Therefore I was interviewed by the Secret Service several times about this. Curiously, they never seemed to ask any questions about VoteHere, only my role in finding the Diebold files and publishing the Diebold memos. This nonsense eventually culminated in a gag order and a letter from the U.S. Attorney to appear in front of a federal grand jury with information on all the visitors to the Black Box Voting Web site. (As if they couldn't get that in less dramatic ways in post-Patriot Act America). Attorney Lowell Finley (now with http://www.VoterAction.org ) went to bat for me on this. A reporter named George Howland from the Seattle Weekly also got wind of it. When it hit the press, and with Lowell Finley's help, their harassment of me stopped. VoteHere never sold any voting machines that I can find, but apparently did set up some deals to embed its cryptography into some voting systems. We found memos in the Diebold trash about VoteHere's crypto-crap, and Maryland Director of Elections Linda Lamone shows up in VoteHere-related letters. Sequoia Voting Systems signed an agreement with VoteHere, but it's not clear to me whether they ever did anything about it. Robert Gates stepped away from VoteHere shortly before he showed up in Chapter 8 of my book, Black Box Voting, in a short bit about the VoteHere company history. You can read that here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a paper, pencil, and count by hand at the polling place than have former CIA director Robert Gates fooling around with my vote. But that's just me. -- Bev Harris Founder, Black Box Voting P.S. Since the HBO special, I have plenty of moral support, but even after the Secret Service interviews and all the rest of the nonsense my husband and I have had to put up with, there are others who have had it rougher. I'd like you to take a moment to visit this Web site -- not affiliated with Black Box Voting -- to meet one of the heroic citizens in this movement who has faced the most brutal retaliation of all: Stephen Heller. If you saw the HBO film "Hacking Democracy" you may remember a scene where I am chastising Diebold for lying about correcting problems with its product. I refer to "Release Notes." Those notes came from a source. Stephen Heller is being threatened with up to five years in prison for allegedly leaking me those documents. Kevin Shelley then decertified Diebold, and recommended criminal prosecution of Diebold. Diebold was never prosecuted, but Stephen Heller is being prosecuted RIGHT NOW. I hope you will donate to his defense. If not for citizens like him, where would your vote be now? To contribute to Stephen Heller's defense fund: http://www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com/ * * * * * Black Box Voting is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501c(3) elections watchdog group supported entirely by citizen donations. We refuse funds from any vendor or vested interest. To support Black Box Voting: click to http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html or send to: Black Box Voting 330 SW 43rd St Suite K PMB 547 Renton WA 98055 * * * * * ----- 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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Re: [ExI] elections again
by Harvey Newstrom 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

OK, if you guys really want to know how insecure our voting machines are, take a look at the work NIST is doing at their voting improvement website <http://vote.nist.gov> and their faq <http://vote.nist.gov/faq.html>. And for something really scary, they point to this presentation showing real-world examples of how electronic voting machines can be used to skew an election: <http://www.bbvdocs.org/presentations/attacks-public.pdf> -- Harvey Newstrom <www.harveynewstrom.com> CISSP CISA CISM CIFI GSEC IAM ISSAP ISSMP ISSPCS IBMCP _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat(a)lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ----- 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: [Freedombox-discuss] Debian FreedomBox = Existing Debian \packages on plug hardware
by John Gilmore 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> In may require a warrant, but following severe breakdown of civil > administration caused by either unrest or natural disaster, the rules may > not be followed to the letter. > > I think it's desirable - across the spectrum of proposals for > user-controlled network devices generally, not just Debian Freedomboxen - to > store as much state as possible on very small removable media - i.e. > micro-SD cards or similar - so that in the event of a raid by people likely > to wish to silence your node, all that has to be concealed is a 15mm x 11mm > card, which could be swallowed or easily concealed in any number of places. > After the event the card could be inserted into another suitable device and > the node would be back up and running with the same state it had previously. I agree that having tiny portable storage devices would be very useful for concealment and smuggling. But... There are severe technical problems to be solved to make flash-based devices such as SD or microSD cards usable for information that you want to keep private from "the authorities". Due to flash's inability to overwrite data in place, flash-based memories make multiple copies of your data, don't keep track of the extra copies, and don't rapidly or securely erase them. Many provide no interface that merely asks the entire device to erase itself into a clean, secure state. Once you've written an incriminating file, or a crypto key, onto a flash-based device, you can never be sure whether physically seizing the device, ripping it open and probing the flash chips will produce a copy of that file or key -- or not. The only ways to be sure are to (1) rip it apart yourself and look -- oops, the drive is now dead; or (2) physically grind it into sand. See: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/m3wei/ http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/Fast2011SecErase.pdf Rotating magnetic disk drives have SOLVED this problem; they provide Secure Erase commands that erase the drive such that not even experts can extract the former contents (hdparm --security-erase-extended). They are also quite good at securely erasing single files without destroying the rest of the data and without physically destroying the drive (GNU Shred). Until the Flash hardware community provides similar facilities, I recommend that the Freedom Box project fully support magnetic disk drives for those who choose them. Activists' lives depend on getting this right. John _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- 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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