January 2014 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: [cryptography] To Protect and Infect Slides
by John Young 09 Jan '14

09 Jan '14

Jake's, Assange's and others' emphasis at 30c3 was to pursue technological offenses rather than futile expectation of political, financial and legal controls of spying which inevitably confirm what spies do, for it is in their interest to support spyin and secrecy to maintain hegemonic, heirarchial institutions under "the rule of law." Reminder, at the origin of cypherpunks there was a crackdown on encryption as a munitions. That skirmish was thought to have been won. Now Snowden has revealed that victory was a delusion, the real one-sided battle was fought surreptiously in secret, not only by contaminating crypto but by development of bypasses, implants, backdoors, booby traps, ruses, scams, bribes, dual-hatted contracts with crypto-hackers. Can an openly avowed combat on the technologies of political control (1) work or will it be demonized, fought by secret underhanded means? Public debate deployed as a ruse in the 1990s as now. (1) An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm This combat is about far more than crypto and coders must be supplemented with all the discplines of science and technology which are now serving industry and the "lawful" hegemons. 30c3 advocated a direct attack on these means, not wait for the public debate to be rigged in favor of the hegemon with PR, propaganda, lobbying, bribery, contracts, scare stories, terrifying incidents, the customary dirty fighting and tricks of spies and "defense" industry. Is that technological attack on the political, financial, legal hegemon likely to succeed? Or will the crackdown on armed (technological) dissent become as violent as it has in the past? There is a likelihood encryption will be restricted, by fiat, by planting weaknesses, by covert attacks, by technological bypasses, by rigged failures to create doubt of effectiveness. That was the way CryptoAG operation was run. Now the RSA ploy is operative. Is the effect of Snowden to be a series of ploys and ruses. Worse, hop on board the paranoia train, is Snowden a disinfo op for leaking gobs of ruses? Musings: A singular feature of hegemons is that they are dominated by "self-regulating organizations" which set the terms and conditions of the ruling entity, assure enforcement of the rules, and perpetuate themselves under "self-regulation." These are successors of royalty which instead of divine right, backed by military power, they invoke the "Constitution," a law which distinctively empowers "lawful" behavior according to the rules of the hegemon. No wonder the US promotes constitutional government around the planet, backed by military power, most often by denigrating other forms of government. A striking parallel is the rise of the clerics in Europe as an alternative to religious hegemons. From clerics came lawyerly self-regulating hegemons. A new religion hidden within supremacist judges' black robes. Enough of lawful self-regulation in secrecy, unpunishable by lawful means. Justice is out of control, prison populations stuffed, bloated law enforcement and spies raiding the public till, private spies, cops and mercenaries worse than the official, or indistinguishable. Back to the military which backs the hegemons. Technology controls its effectiveness, thus the need for the hegemons to control manufacture, distribution, ownership and application of military means. Concentration of wealth through government regulation, economic and tax policy, and military supremacy reifies special privileges and exculpations for the enforcers of law. Law->taxation->enforcement->informants->spying-> assassination->military action.

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Re: [cryptography] To Protect and Infect Slides (corrections)
by brian carroll 08 Jan '14

08 Jan '14

sorry: brain damage. correction for brain-blip misinfo... so an illusion may exist or > persist of 'no control' or 'wildness' while thoroughly accounted for at > another level or layer, where the specs are closed by the originators > and root of one level may NOT access root of another, or those combined > (correction: root of one level may not access root of another) Hayek, Keynes, Hegel, Marx and others had 'some truth' > yet it is not absolute truth within language as language, > as it is mediated. these are signs, patterns, instead that > are referenced, not truth itself. it is trap, just like when i > refer to an author and seek to present their views yet this > is a limit or skew is inherent and perhaps even inaccurate, > not only my views though their views also, potentially also > in error, not absolute in correctness, yet believed to be as > if biblical conveyance that is to be knelt down before and > served as if higher, even, as if guiding light, when that same > light may not be as bright as direct observation shared by > and between people of the same phenomena modeled in > parameters more accurate or beyond those of the past mucked this up badly- was not to imply my writing biblical, instead that 'ideas' become theology, referenced text then have faith-based aspect institutionalized, structuralized as shared belief systems. sinning against ideology if going against consensus in its inaccuracy, all of it corruptible as ideas in their errored state and within language and social relations, as it becomes or is ungrounded, etc, then having this be the basis for exchange, development i think this same thing holds true for patents, of unshared > identity which then splits and DIVIDES the shared condition > into a 'shared group relation' as an ideological impossibility: > > (patent1a) <--> (patent1b) <--|--> (patent2) > ...correction: splits and divides the shared condition. (please ignore that it does not make grammatical sense) note: gotta say it, because it is relevant- i have social skills of a 10 year old, never developed or kept pace with others due to learning/behavioral deficit; not good with groups or social relations unless about ideas or internet comms; (aspergers) and, writing skills are horrendous, subpar by far, some of it involving deteriorated brain function. lysdexia also ubiquitous issue, i blame phonics.

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Re: HTML on-list messages, top-posting
by shelley＠misanthropia.info 08 Jan '14

08 Jan '14

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014, at 02:35 PM, staticsafe wrote: (snip) > > Most mailing lists I've encountered do not mess with the reply-to > header. cryptome & libtech do (just two I can think of right off) Btw: yes, I hate html on lists too. Will try not to reply using my shitty mobile email client when I'm away from real email!

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HTML on-list messages, top-posting
by rysiek 08 Jan '14

08 Jan '14

Hi there, since we're already deep into Usenet territory, I'll just leave this message here and see what happens. -- Pozdr rysiek

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Re: [cryptography] To Protect and Infect Slides (addenda)
by brian carroll 08 Jan '14

08 Jan '14

context: forgot to mention overriding hypothesis that state of insecure crypto - as with nukes - may be price of peace for cold war reunification in improved framework, thus structural duplicity has wider impact than inside states alone, could also bridge state-state secure relations in parallel with those that are insecure, allowing for advanced governing relations; in this way, broken crypto could represent deeper truth of the inside condition than what is able to be written about, yet exists as consciousness for those in the industry, etc, given what perspective, parameters, values, in the deception On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 11:45 AM, <dan(a)geer.org> wrote: > > > 5) another realization upon hearing the 30c3 talk of Jacob Appelbaum > > was the 'earth firewall' then indicates that the NSA controls the > internet, > > and that it is not operating as a subset within it, and instead > everything > > that occurs is within its domain.... > > The Internet is not controlled, i.e., there is a power vacuum > that will soon be filled. There are many, many players and soon > to be more. The question to be contemplated, if any, is this: > Do you prefer that the competing claims of control over the > Internet be resolved by way of (1) dramatic Balkanization or > by way of (2) making the Internet an organ of world government? > > A thought experiment, if needing one: is VoIP a part of the > Internet or is it not, that is do you have two networks in your > home/office or one? > > --dan > >

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Re: [cryptography] To Protect and Infect Slides
by Jacob Appelbaum 08 Jan '14

08 Jan '14

Kevin W. Wall: > On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 3:10 PM, John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > >> 30c3 slides from Jacob Appelbaum: >> >> http://cryptome.org/2013/12/appelbaum-30c3.pdf (3.8MB) >> > > And you can find his actual prez here: > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA> > > Worth the hour, although I'm sure your blood > pressure will go up a few points. > I'm also happy to answer questions in discussion form about the content of the talk and so on. I believe we've now released quite a lot of useful information that is deeply in the public interest. All the best, Jacob

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Private Distributed Hash Tables
by Rich Jones 08 Jan '14

08 Jan '14

Far too much yap yap yappin' around here lately.. cpunks write code, remember? Let's get back to business. Here's an idea for a private, censorship-resistant communication/file sharing system with integrated invitations and access control. I don't think I've ever seen this before, but it's quite possible that people have discussed this idea previously. Either way, I don't know of any implementations yet. Problem ======= The current P2P file sharing landscape is divided up into two spaces: 1) private tracker communities (what.cd // Demonoid // etc) which provide high quality network speeds and file quality through moderation, but which are often subject to outages due to centralization, and 2) the single giant BitTorrent 'peer exchange' distributed hash table, which provides universal file access and fault-tolerance, but at the cost of abuse and surveillance of those participating. Ideally, we want a peer-to-peer community which is decentralized and fault-tolerant, but with enough authority to maintain a high network quality and private enough to avoid open surveillance. Proposed Solution ======= It might be possible to combine the exclusivity and moderation of private trackers with the fault-tolerance of distributed hash tables by having each private table operate with a certificated-authority based public key infrastructure. Essentially, to participate in the DHT, peers must cryptographically prove that they have been invited to participate. Power and trust flow down a through a concentric certificate web. A client's authority in the network is a function of how far away from the root authority they are (not dissimilar to Scientology's hierarchy.) Clients should automatically respect commands coming from those higher up the cert chain or from those closer to the root than they are, and should listen to, but not automatically respect, commands from those lower down the cert chain or from "lower-ranking" clients. * Bootstrapping and Invitation The very first user of the network will have to generate a root certificate. He is then able to generate new signing certificates, which he can give to new users of a network to allow them the ability to access the network. These new users should be able to use their own certificates to do the same for their own new users. (This could be done with certificate signing requests coming from potential new users as well, but that might come at the cost of a slightly more complicated user experience). * Revocation Bannings can be performed by issuing updates to a network-wide revocation list. Clients will automatically respect revocations coming from superiors, and may or may not choose to respect revocations coming from underlings. * Implementation Everything needed to create the heart of this should exist already in Kademlia and OpenSSL. BitTorrent could serve as the basis for the file-sharing application, but vanilla BitTorrent has a content discovery problem, so I'd suggest that any implementations of BitTorrent on Private Distributed Hash Tables should have some kind of discovery BEP included as well, possibly one which uses the authority system of the PDHT to verify files. There's also a possibility there for what you might call "trusted amnesia" - the ability for a user with a high authority to publish verified documents to the whole network without having to broadly expose themselves as the source of the content by having peers in their same trust level sign their content, forget the source, then increase the availability by one access level. Anyway, that's the sketch. Any thoughts? Rich

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Stealing J. Edgar Hoover's secrets.
by Jim Bell 07 Jan '14

07 Jan '14

Just saw this on Yahoo. Seems appropriate to mention this, given Snowden, Manning, etc. http://screen.yahoo.com/new-york-times/stealing-j-edgar-hoover-secrets-1309…

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Swartz, Weev & radical libertarian lexicon (Re: Jacob Appelbaum in Germany - Aaron Swartz)
by Jim Bell 07 Jan '14

07 Jan '14

From: Cari Machet <carimachet(a)gmail.com> To: rysiek <rysiek(a)hackerspace.pl> Cc: cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org Sent: Tuesday, January 7, 2014 10:29 AM Subject: Re: Swartz, Weev & radical libertarian lexicon (Re: Jacob Appelbaum in Germany - Aaron Swartz) On 1/7/14, Adam Back <adam(a)cypherspace.org> wrote: [deletia] >>took it to the next level including >> physical >> intrusion & hiding equipment. But MIT (and to a lesser extent JSTOR) let >> him down badly as did some of his academic friends and its tragic that he >> was a victim of some extremely over reaching imbalanced law the CFAA [3], >> aggressively prosecuted by self-agrandizing politically motivated, and >> almost legally immune deeply flawed US federal prosecution and plea bargain >> system, >yes but i think from my understanding it wasnt the amount of prison >time or the money but the fact that he wld have to plead guilty to 13 >felony counts - he would not get to serve in the government ... vote >etc From personal experience, I can shed light on the issue of voting as a felon. Contrary to what many people seem to think, most states seem to allow 'felons' to vote, eventually. (Some while they are in jail or prison; some immediately when they are released; some when they are off parole.) In my own case, the state of Washington's Constitution says that only felons guilty of "infamous crimes" lose their right to vote, and Washington state law defines an "infamous crime" as a crime punishable by one or more years incarceration in the _state_ penitentiary. Since my 'crime' was Federal, not state, it did not satisfy this condition, so I was not even prohibited from voting while I was in prison. (Though I never tried to vote while I was in prison; And, though, I did not learn that they didn't understand this fact until my release in late December 2009). I sent many emails to the Secretary of State of Washington stating this obvious position in early 2010, and they responded by repeatedly stating the contrary, commonly-thought position. They were never able to openly acknowledge I was right, although by my release from prison in March 2012, I checked their website and saw that they had corrected their prior, incorrect position. Jim "Al Capone" Bell

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"Digital Cash", 3rd ed.
by Robert Hettinga 07 Jan '14

07 Jan '14

Peter Wayner surfaces with a third edition of "Digital Cash”: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/digital-cash-3rd-edition Cheers, RAH Alla the old farts are crawlin’ outta the woodwork, um, aren’t we?

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