November 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: [serval-project-dev] how to get best voice quality with low end phones?
by Jeremy Lakeman 18 Nov '13

18 Nov '13

3s of lag seems a bit on the high side. Using cheap huawei's here in the lab, we typically see about 250-500ms of lag. Note that the cheap huawei's seem to have a 2KB hardware audio buffer, leading to (2KB / 16bit 8KHz ~=) 120ms of jitter that we can't do anything about. We'd like to implement some kind of echo canceler, but we haven't found anything that would be trivial to drop in. Our jitter buffer could probably use some improvements, I'm not going to say that it is in any way ideal. We're not managing network buffer bloat right now. When the wifi channel is busy, the rate that the kernel will send packets drops and can easily start to back up in the network stack. This can add a significant amount of latency. If packets don't arrive in time, the link state routing engine may be dropping the link, which would limit the number of outgoing packets, which would drop the latency, and the link would come back up again... We should be using RTT estimates to throttle our transmit rate to keep latency low, and feed into our link state calculations to work out when a link is really dead, or everything on that interface is just slow. But we haven't built anything like that yet. If we were limiting our transmit rate better, instead of sending lots of small UDP packets, we would try to aggregate more voice packets per UDP frame. Hopefully allowing the voice call to continue, just with higher jitter. Rhizome, and hence messaging, doesn't care as much if the network path is unstable. And it will just keep on trying until it gets there, making messaging *much* more reliable. We have some rough plans to implement a combination of push-to-talk / voicemail, using rhizome. And built into the messaging UI. But we don't have any concrete plans to start this work right now. And one day we may implement a form of network coding to reduce the number of packets required for bi-directional traffic over multiple hops. On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 4:21 PM, Miles <myles(a)tenhand.com> wrote: > > I've been testing with a pair of huawei 8150s using the stock gingerbread > to connect to a 703n mesh extender. Wifi on the phones is pretty poor and > my area is RF-noisy, so wifi works to about 2 blocks line of sight. I'm > using about a 2 week old nightly build of the batphone app. > > When the signal is strong, the phone works with about 3 seconds of audio > delay and noticeable echo. When the wifi gets poor & drops to 2mb, voice > cuts out entirely. text continues to work until wifi drops. Amusingly, > voice calls drop at about the limits of my shouting voice. > > Some of the problem is probably background /wind noise. I'd love a mute > button on the batphone. > > What should I do to improve voice experience , short of souping up the > mesh extender? Do you usually use headsets? With PTT? > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Serval Project Developers" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to serval-project-developers+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to > serval-project-developers(a)googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/serval-project-developers. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Serval Project Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to serval-project-developers+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to serval-project-developers(a)googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/serval-project-developers. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

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Re: Request for transcript: "Writers Especially Concerned About NSA Actions"
by John Young 18 Nov '13

18 Nov '13

That herd behavior is disappointing but customary cowardice. Worse happened after 9/11. Many once valiant FOI fighters cleansed their websites and heralded the need to obey the war-mongerers, and urgently cautioned others as if the propaganda was believable. No doubt, this self-censorship is market-driven to please funders, advertizers and publishers who dare not displease their dinner companions at Aspen, Davos, Bohemian Grove, and for sure the DC centroid of privileged access to valuable information, much of it spy boosting leakage of the Snowden type. The heavy censorship of the Snowden documents by the hoarders and their extremely slow pace of release while rhetorizing and hyping the minimalist product fits this spy-favorite marketing schemata. NPR is not what it used to appear to be. It has booted and censored a slew of its reporters, editors and contributors. Not alone, the journalism industry is panicked at loss of customers and is rushing to cleanse its harem. Poor discards are deperately seeking Omidyar and Soros invitation to their opium dens as if from frying pan into the fire. At 12:08 PM 11/17/2013, you wrote: >I think what you're looking for is here. > >http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=245660885 > >On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 3:21 PM, coderman <coderman(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Anyone have a transcript for this piece? > > > > --- > > > > "Writers Especially Concerned About NSA Actions" > > http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=245660885 > > > > While polls show many Americans are uneasy with government actions > > revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, one profession in particular > > seems to be alarmed. A new survey of professional writers finds them > > much more concerned than the general public. An organization of > > writers says that a large majority of its members have "never been as > > worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are > > today." > > > >-- >Christopher Nielsen >"They who can give up essential liberty for temporary safety, deserve >neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin >"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the >blood of patriots & tyrants." --Thomas Jefferson

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Re: passwords! (p5) / ngrams and passphrases
by coderman 18 Nov '13

18 Nov '13

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 6:09 PM, brian carroll <electromagnetize(a)gmail.com> wrote: > ... if a password service used this principle,... 3-4 sets instead, > themselves having special rules... > > [set1|set2|set3|set4] > > in this way, a 'rolling password' could be developed ... this feels similar to various guided / ordered permutations strategies that use a corpus of ngrams or words for attacking longer sequences, like passphrases. [with or without decorating permutations like appended numerical sequences and other common substitutions and sequences] the effectiveness of these in practice appears strongly bound to your operational security. e.g. past examples of mining a user's interests to guide successful pass word and pass phrase cracking attempts. i keep waiting for someone to write it, alas: 'No results found for "the art of tactical password cracking"' ;)

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Fwd: That wonderful 1980-ies hippie vibe...
by coderman 18 Nov '13

18 Nov '13

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk(a)phk.freebsd.dk> Date: Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 2:53 PM Subject: That wonderful 1980-ies hippie vibe... To: HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg(a)w3.org> It's bedtime here in Denmark, but before I go to bed, I want to thank for the wonderful 1980'ies hippie-vibe of the last couple of days, it's been a wonderful nostalgic experience. I don't know how many of you remember "atomic weapon free zones" ? Maybe if you are younger, you might have seen a faded "Atomic Weapon free Zone" sign somewhere ? What happened was that well-meaning city councils made lofty proclamations and declared there city would never allow atomic weapons inside city limits etc. It was of course an empty gesture, it's not like the military cared what the Burgermeister of some dutch or german town signed, if they needed to drive their nukes through, they would damn well drive their nukes through the town-square. In some cases it was down-right laughably hypocritical. Does Berkeley still have their sign up ? Berkeley Uni made a fortune running LLNL, which designed atomic bombs, but they were appearantly not allowed to bring the work home with them, or something. Anyway... Ending the cold war, one nuclear-weapon free city after the other, was as effective as slightly more encryption in HTTP/2.0 will be at ending USAs "War Against Privacy". I do understand you are upset about it, so am I, and I do recognize that when you have only a watchmakers screwdriver as tool, you use the only tool you have. But rolling back the US police-state, a firmly nailed down military-industrial complex with a budget measured in billions, and what looks like almost unanimous political support of USgov, is not going to happen because we tighten a screw somewhere in a internet protocol. Sorry. If you want to do something about the polic-state, by all means get involved in politics: Expose the lies, support the whistleblowers, vote the bums out, run for office. But in this WG, please leave your politics at the door and concentrate on the objective in our charter: Making a better performing HTTP protocol. G'night... -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk(a)FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

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Denial of Disservice Attack [was: Jeremy Hammond Banned from using Cryptography]
by coderman 18 Nov '13

18 Nov '13

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Jim Bell <jamesdbell8(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > ... >>Jim Bell's exhortations to deny all pleas a hard sell considering that >>one in four rolls over completely under pressure. :/ > > For 70,000 Federal criminal defendants per year, there are only about 3,500 > Federal criminal trials per year. In other words, ultimately 95% 'rolls > over'. (Note: That doesn't mean that they necessarily 'rat': Many > defendants have no co-defendants, for example. And, a defendant might > accept a plea, without agreement to testify against someone else.) With my > idea of "Denial of Disservice Attack" (Offer of circa $5,000 to demand a > jury trial), I'm trying to avoid that situation. agreed; i should have said "turned rat fuck" instead of "rolled over completely". accepting a plea more apropos "rolling over"... on a related note, how deep can the court queue grow before it becomes untenable and denies prosecutions? the recent civil court delays appear to be trivial despite cries of dire circumstance...[0] 0. "For Federal Courts, Shutdown Caused Broad Disruptions" [ED: for generous interpretation of "broad disruption"] http://news.uscourts.gov/federal-courts-shutdown-caused-broad-disruptions [ED2: more comedy, e.g. 'after 17 days delay, “the general impression was that federal courts were on their last breath,”' - LULZ]

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Request for transcript: "Writers Especially Concerned About NSA Actions"
by coderman 17 Nov '13

17 Nov '13

Anyone have a transcript for this piece? --- "Writers Especially Concerned About NSA Actions" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=245660885 While polls show many Americans are uneasy with government actions revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, one profession in particular seems to be alarmed. A new survey of professional writers finds them much more concerned than the general public. An organization of writers says that a large majority of its members have "never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today."

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Re: [tor-talk] [liberationtech] BitMail.sf.net v 0.6 - Secure Encrypting Email Client
by grarpamp 17 Nov '13

17 Nov '13

> I don't think that's possible at the moment. There are no > deterministically built operating systems yet. This is rather sad. I think FreeBSD has a project somewhere trying to move that way. Hopefully all of the unix-likes are at least aware of the concept, if not having an actual project for it. Also, none of the BSD's have any built-in integrity in their repositories, they just insist their infrastructure and committers are infallible among other escuses. (Excepting DragonFly which uses git, don't know if they sign it though. Monotone seems better at that sort of embedded pki thing.).

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Re: [Cryptography][Law] Jeremy Hammond Banned from using Cryptography
by John Young 16 Nov '13

16 Nov '13

That should have been Bernie-S, not -X. And Mitnick now runs a rather profitable security service and lecture series. About Jim Bell (he can speak for himself but I know best how to smell and tell a rat): The IRS secret agent leading Jim's chase, Agent Gordon, lurked on cypherpunks for a long time, gathering names and addresses to subpoena for Jim's grand jury probe and (first) trial. Several of us were subpoenad along with cpunks records from some (John Gilmore one of those). Some, like me, were summoned both for the grand jury and the trial held in Tacoma, WA. (Sidebar: youngster Declan McCullagh covered that and I urged him to report seditiously enough to be sent to jail to build his rep -- he politely refused to cellmate Jim.) Short story (full account in the archive) is that not many supported Jim all the way when the shit came down, indeed, brazenly ridiculed his adventure, presumably to cover their ass from Agent Gordon and co-lurkers always on duty hereabouts. Who secretly ratted Jim at the grand jury remains unknown but their behavior and sweat odor has been profiled by god and they will not be given authentic bitcoins, only fakes with their undercover UID embedded like Lamo. At 06:13 PM 11/16/2013, you wrote: >On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 8:36 AM, John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > > ... > > At a HOPE panel on informants, several hackers disclosed > > those pressures to rat, some succumbed and were let off, > > Emmanuel Goldstein admitted it, some refused and were > > jailed, Bernie-X, Kevin Mitnick. All agreed it is far worse to > > go through than you think. Goldstein estimated 25% of hackers > > are rats. > >Jim Bell's exhortations to deny all pleas a hard sell considering that >one in four rolls over completely under pressure. :/ > > > > > Barrett Brown is on the hot seat right now, being offering deals > > to rat, as customary, with three (!) trials postponed to maintain > > pressure. Shit, even his mom was used as a fed provocation to > > misbehave then as a persuasion club as were Sabu's nephew > > and niece. > >it would be interesting to see a survey of the carrots and sticks used >by federal prosecutors. > > > > > Anybody with a high profile is targeted, so beware publicity > > hounds crowing of derrying-do and urgings by high profilers > > who may or may not be in the grips of the feds, and if not, > > will soon be due to their publicity narcosis, and then used > > as clubs or head to jail for obstruction and recidivism or > > some other nut-squeezing -- even in jail they are offered > > deals to rat and sentence reduced. > >good thing JYA stays under the radar! Sorry to say Radar mag did a smear of us. > > In or out jail the pressure to rat continues, as with Adrian > > Lamo. Ex-cons never know if an overture is an LE sting or a > > an honest request for advice, so they rat to be safe -- recall > > they are obliged -- forever -- to report overtures, just like > > ex-spies remain under the gun to rat for life. If you haven't > > been there don't imagine you know what it's like. > >what do you mean by "obliged -- forever -- to report overtures"? i >would be very interested to know if there are clauses compelling >disclosure in these agreements for unrelated activities. is this >"soft" pressure, or legally binding? Notice upon release from prison that ex-cons are expected to be on call. Panoptic assured. Moreso for ex-spies. > > Don't imagine this list and others like it, chats, OTRs, TOR, > > are not being spied for easy targets. > >this opportunistic spying even has a code name: EPICFAIL Also Open Source.

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[Cryptography][Law] Jeremy Hammond Banned from using Cryptography
by Privarchy Mee 16 Nov '13

16 Nov '13

Can any of you, most of whom I do not doubt are far more knowledgeable about cryptography and how it's conceptualised within the legal sphere, offer some insight regarding this? https://twitter.com/CyMadD0x/status/401443518612512769 The claim is that Judge Loretta A. Preska, who sentenced Jeremy Hammond today, said that for the three years (post-release) that he was to spend under supervision, he will not be able to use encryption for communication or storage purposes(!) which is practically a legal edict to go and build a cabin by Walden Pond. How can this be considered anything but cruel and unusual?

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[tor-talk] Tor 0.2.4.18-rc is out
by Roger Dingledine 16 Nov '13

16 Nov '13

Tor 0.2.4.18-rc is the fourth release candidate for the Tor 0.2.4.x series. It takes a variety of fixes from the 0.2.5.x branch to improve stability, performance, and better handling of edge cases. https://www.torproject.org/dist/ Changes in version 0.2.4.18-rc - 2013-11-16 o Major features: - Re-enable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 when built with OpenSSL 1.0.1e or later. Resolves ticket 6055. (OpenSSL before 1.0.1 didn't have TLS 1.1 or 1.2, and OpenSSL from 1.0.1 through 1.0.1d had bugs that prevented renegotiation from working with TLS 1.1 or 1.2, so we had disabled them to solve bug 6033.) o Major bugfixes: - No longer stop reading or writing on cpuworker connections when our rate limiting buckets go empty. Now we should handle circuit handshake requests more promptly. Resolves bug 9731. - If we are unable to save a microdescriptor to the journal, do not drop it from memory and then reattempt downloading it. Fixes bug 9645; bugfix on 0.2.2.6-alpha. - Stop trying to bootstrap all our directory information from only our first guard. Discovered while fixing bug 9946; bugfix on 0.2.4.8-alpha. - The new channel code sometimes lost track of in-progress circuits, causing long-running clients to stop building new circuits. The fix is to always call circuit_n_chan_done(chan, 0) from channel_closed(). Fixes bug 9776; bugfix on 0.2.4.17-rc. o Minor bugfixes (on 0.2.4.x): - Correctly log long IPv6 exit policies, instead of truncating them or reporting an error. Fixes bug 9596; bugfix on 0.2.4.7-alpha. - Our default TLS ecdhe groups were backwards: we meant to be using P224 for relays (for performance win) and P256 for bridges (since it is more common in the wild). Instead we had it backwards. After reconsideration, we decided that the default should be P256 on all hosts, since its security is probably better, and since P224 is reportedly used quite little in the wild. Found by "skruffy" on IRC. Fix for bug 9780; bugfix on 0.2.4.8-alpha. - Free directory authority certificate download statuses on exit rather than leaking them. Fixes bug 9644; bugfix on 0.2.4.13-alpha. o Minor bugfixes (on 0.2.3.x and earlier): - If the guard we choose first doesn't answer, we would try the second guard, but once we connected to the second guard we would abandon it and retry the first one, slowing down bootstrapping. The fix is to treat all our initially chosen guards as acceptable to use. Fixes bug 9946; bugfix on 0.1.1.11-alpha. - Fix an assertion failure that would occur when disabling the ORPort setting on a running Tor process while accounting was enabled. Fixes bug 6979; bugfix on 0.2.2.18-alpha. - When examining the list of network interfaces to find our address, do not consider non-running or disabled network interfaces. Fixes bug 9904; bugfix on 0.2.3.11-alpha. Patch from "hantwister". - Avoid an off-by-one error when checking buffer boundaries when formatting the exit status of a pluggable transport helper. This is probably not an exploitable bug, but better safe than sorry. Fixes bug 9928; bugfix on 0.2.3.18-rc. Bug found by Pedro Ribeiro. o Minor features (protecting client timestamps): - Clients no longer send timestamps in their NETINFO cells. These were not used for anything, and they provided one small way for clients to be distinguished from each other as they moved from network to network or behind NAT. Implements part of proposal 222. - Clients now round timestamps in INTRODUCE cells down to the nearest 10 minutes. If a new Support022HiddenServices option is set to 0, or if it's set to "auto" and the feature is disabled in the consensus, the timestamp is sent as 0 instead. Implements part of proposal 222. - Stop sending timestamps in AUTHENTICATE cells. This is not such a big deal from a security point of view, but it achieves no actual good purpose, and isn't needed. Implements part of proposal 222. - Reduce down accuracy of timestamps in hidden service descriptors. Implements part of proposal 222. o Minor features (other): - Improve the circuit queue out-of-memory handler. Previously, when we ran low on memory, we'd close whichever circuits had the most queued cells. Now, we close those that have the *oldest* queued cells, on the theory that those are most responsible for us running low on memory. Based on analysis from a forthcoming paper by Jansen, Tschorsch, Johnson, and Scheuermann. Fixes bug 9093. - Generate bootstrapping status update events correctly when fetching microdescriptors. Fixes bug 9927. - Update to the October 2 2013 Maxmind GeoLite Country database. o Documentation fixes: - Clarify the usage and risks of setting the ContactInfo torrc line for your relay or bridge. Resolves ticket 9854. - Add anchors to the manpage so we can link to the html version of the documentation for specific options. Resolves ticket 9866. - Replace remaining references to DirServer in man page and log entries. Resolves ticket 10124. -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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