January 2014 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: bitcoin
by Bill Stewart 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

My email client is set to sort messages by date but group them by Subject: line. I just happened to notice the following message at the top of a recent conversation: At 02:34 PM 1/26/2009, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Anyone is running it? > Any coins yet? > Anyone having more than 4 connections? I'm not sure the port > forwarding on the firewall worked. So five years later, bitcoins are a thing, and I hope Eugen mined a bunch of them when they were easy. I recently tried installing a Dogecoin wallet and miner on a spare lab machine at work. Dogecoin's a really non-serious Litecoin variant that's mostly not worth anything (something like US$0.0001 - Wow, such coins!), mainly used for tipping authors of Reddit articles about cryptocurrencies, and I figured it would be ok to run it for experimentation because its near-zero value doesn't count as "using work resources to make money" (Wow! Much electrons!) I've found a couple of interesting things running it. - Litecoin uses scrypt, which was designed to not fit into ASICs or GPUs, so people with regular PCs could still mine it, without being crowded out by commercial miners. It turns out that people have figured out how to fit it into GPUs, which still run about 10-100 times as fast as CPU mining, so if I wanted to actually make money mining $25 Litecoins I should buy a $100 graphics card; it's not worth it for Dogecoins. (Woof!) - The spare desktop lab machine has Intel 965 motherboard graphics GPU; there don't seem to be any miners for it, unlike the AMD and nVidia GPUs, so it's only running CPU mining. Ok for Doge chow - much coins! - While running background CPU-burning number-crunchers on a laptop is probably just as bad an idea today as it was when I was crunching Mersenne primes in the 90s, because of heat and battery problems, I haven't been able to verify whether that's still true today. My work laptop has an nVidia GPU, but not one of the high-end ones, and an 8-core i7 CPU, and McAfee Anti-Virus seems to think the mining programs are malware, so I haven't been able to test either one with binaries; maybe it'll let me run it if I compile the source myself. - The network security people at work contacted me :-) The firewall thinks Port 22556 is some kind of botnet, and they got hits from my lab machine to random countries around the world. After running anti-virus to make them happy, I checked tcpdump, and Dogewallet-qt uses that port to stay on the net and send and receive money; turning it on and off turns traffic to that port on and off. I'll have to check the source code and verify it, but I'm assuming it's on purpose, rather than a malicious binary distributed by the official Dogecoin site or one I picked up by accident. The miner doesn't have that issue - I'm using it with a mining pool, talking to one server over a fairly standard port. So *coin runs over a distributed service that looks a lot like a botnet. Makes sense, I guess.

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Infiltration / Exfiltration
by Anonymous Remailer (austria) 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

We cypherpunks live by the saying "cypherpunks code". But isn't it time for more than just coding? We're in a very real digital war for the freedom of the Internet, similar to what we faced in the 1990's but with even more at stake and a better funded, better equipped enemy. Isn't it time for infiltration? The cypherpunk community has some of the best tech people (not just programmers) out there. We could easily get jobs within government agencies and then help exfiltrate data out of them into the hands of the public of civil rights agencies like the ACLU in America. I understand how distasteful working in the belly of the beast might be but isn't it one of the most needed things cyperpunks can do right now?

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Re: "the ability of the government to go back to taps collected years earlier to look for material with which to influence potential witnesses in the present"
by Bill Stewart 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

At 09:14 AM 1/19/2014, coderman wrote: >(2) threats to the United States and its interests from terrorism; Terrorism was the previous justification for the bulk collection and for the 3-degrees-of-separation "rule", so no change. >(3) threats to the United States and its interests from the >development, possession, proliferation, or use of weapons of mass >destruction; When Dubya Bush was trying to justify invading Iraq, he talked about WMDs as "nuculur bombs" and chemical and biological weapons. But when some angry young zealot tried to car-bomb Times Square using "explosives" he'd gotten from an FBI informant, they also charged him with making "weapons of mass destruction", the Boston Marathon bombers got charged with that, and I think even pipe bombs have been called WMDs recently. So WMDs might be any random young resident calling his brother or cousin, and the NSA still gets to Tap All The Phones. >(4) cybersecurity threats; [ED: WTF???] Hey, the guy might be using Skype to call his cousin instead of minutes. And people are constantly trying to hack the computers at military facilities, banks, and civilian government agencies, either with deliberate targeting or just because it's easier not to program your botnet to use whitelists, and maybe that defense contractor's supercomputer can mine Litecoins fast. So no, I don't see the situation improving soon, and certainly not before they repeal Moore's Law.

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What more is there? [infil/exfil]
by grarpamp 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Anonymous Remailer (austria) <mixmaster(a)remailer.privacy.at> wrote: > I too wish the leaks would come at a faster pace. But I don't think The pace is ok, it keeps up the pressure. The real question is, is what remains? More of this same stuff we all knew was happening anyways? Or is there more deeper stuff we only questioned but shrugged off due to the hardness/fantasy of it all? - decryption of aes? cracked rsa? - automatic and global translation to stored text of all voice calls? - gratuitous unwarranted passing of crimetips to LEA? - fundamental metadata knowledge of all persons/associations? - political puppetstringing? I suggest the answer lies in budget analysis... the possibilities within a well spent budget. Or a seriously conscientious leaker at the top who is yet to come... since so far Snowden seems limited to confirming lower level obviousness.

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anonymous remailer whitelisting
by Riad S. Wahby 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

I received an anonymous request to expand the whitelist for remailers. Requester: thank you for keeping me honest! I have updated the list. -=rsw

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Try to remember... (Was: AHEM! ...) (fwd)
by J.A. Terranson 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

(Came back due to deprecated A/Q - the "lesson" is not feeding trolls, good behaviour, etc.) > seems every crop of new cypherpunks has to learn this lesson. [1] Try to remember the kind of September When life was slow, and oh, so mellow. Try to remember the kind of September When grass was green, and grain was Yellow. Try to remember the kind of September When you were a tender and callow Fellow[2]. Try to remember, and if you remember, then follow... //Alif -- Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent revolution inevitable. An American Spring is coming: one way or another. [1] Taken completely out of context from the Very Off-Broadway "The Fantasticks" - a show which was expected to run for a few weeks and then enter eternal obscurity. [2] The original lyric has no capitalization of "Fellow". Those who can, will draw the correct inference.

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Cypherpunks is NOT a safe place for fools
by Anonymous Remailer (austria) 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

To whom it may concern: Cypherpunks is NOT a safe place for fools. People have gone to prison for years on here for making very foolish statements and taking foolish actions. You DONT know you are chatting with(Hi agent Gordon!) Others are agent provocateur(s) posing as something else(social activists(and reporting to the FBI/NSA etc)) be afraid be very afraid

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training grounds and basic training for cypherpunks
by Anonymous Remailer (austria) 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

can the millenials get a clue? methinks maybe not but as there may be one or two of them who are NOT soft in the head I invite those to read http://borg.uu3.net/ldetweil/medusa/detweiler.html , where freedom of speech comes in conflict with the tradegy of the commons, there were indeed a lot of valuable lessons learned from detweilers actions and those in opposition to same. perhaps some millenials can get a clue about killfiles(course you take a chance of missing the creation of memes and subsequent modification of same and cypherpunks is ALL about memes.) While the whole snowden affair is most certainly interesting, cypherpunks do things anonymously and pseudoanonymously, we have been embedded in some of the largest government agencies as well as some of the largest and smallest corps. Thing is for all the NDA and loyalty oaths you cant tell when someone comes over to the darkside quietly nowaday especially if they were always using tor to browse anyway and that of course in and of itself will come to be regarded as suspicious Just as using PGP was always suspicious too few using it.. and a LOT of those on insecure platforms. All the recent meme introduction both signal and noise memes have resulted in some interesting side discussions about censorship vs moderation which I suspect is what the postings were intended to produce. anon

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Welcome to the Asylum!
by Anonymous Remailer (austria) 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

Hi All, I would add its NOT just a mailing list, it IS instead an insane asylum and experiment in social darwinism where reputation capitol has replaced wealth in the currency of the group. just my .02

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Fwd: [tor-talk] giving up pseudonymity after collecting experiences with pseudonymous project development
by coderman 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

i find these kinds of experiments fascinating and would love to see more of them! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Patrick Schleizer <adrelanos(a)riseup.net> Date: Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 5:09 AM Subject: [tor-talk] giving up pseudonymity after collecting experiences with pseudonymous project development You may have noticed that I, previously known only known under the pseudonym adrelanos, decided to give up my pseudonymity. It was an interesting experience to pseudonymously maintain a Linux distribution (Whonix). I've learned a lot during these ~ 2 years. I didn't have too bad luck in the lottery of life and are won a citizenship, which is at low risk compared to less lucky ones. Living in a country, where pseudonymity for this kind of activity isn't crucial. Fortunately, according to latest press, neither the US nor Germany are killing their own citizen for criticizing "the system". That is, the mass surveillance police state, the military industrial complex, the system of economy, that needs exponential growth to prevent imploding. And so it doesn't become even worse, and better for the less lucky ones, it is important to speak out in public and to take action. Staying pseudonymous for such a long time became more and more a burden. For me, it is not healthy for psychology. When pseudonymously working a a project, you cannot tell anyone about it and they're wondering with what you never tell much. You need to constantly second guess every tiny action. Concentrate on not messing up. Also you'll never know if you already messed up and if "they" already know who you are. You only need to mess up once, and you're always linked to that project. Lucky me, I wasn't forced to stay pseudonymous for ever. I am looking forward to continue contributing to the awesome Free (as in freedom) Software community. Being no longer pseudonymous allows me to speak at conferences, to attend key singing parties, to meet up with other developers, to voice chat with other developers, to chat on IRC without fear of leaking too much information, to be less paranoid, sometimes even running searches in clearnet if that is more convenient, and so forth.

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