September 2015 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Rogue States and Diplomacy: a Conversation With Noam Chomsky
by Zenaan Harkness 28 Sep '15

28 Sep '15

Rogue States and Diplomacy: a Conversation With Noam Chomsky http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/17/rogue-states-and-diplomacy-a-convers… The interview is quite long, focusing on the USA Republican reaction to the Iran sanction-lifting deal, amongst other things. Noam seems to be a Professor, so I guess his arguments might be too intellectual for the unwashed masses. Here is one question and answer: Professor Chomsky, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, has said that the problem is the “instability that Iran fuels beyond its nuclear programme”. She echoed U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, who went to Israel’s northern border and said, “We will continue to help Israel counter Iran’s malign influence” by supporting Hizbollah. The U.S., he intimated, reserved the right to use military force against Iran. Could you comment on this? NC: Power’s usage is standard: she defines “stabilisation” according to a peculiar logic. For instance, U.S. policy in Iraq is defined as stabilisation. What does that stabilisation look like? The U.S. invades a country, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions becoming refugees, along with barbarous torture and destruction that Iraqis compare to the Mongol invasions, leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. It also ignited sectarian conflict that is tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] monstrosity along with its Saudi ally. That is stabilisation. The standard usage sometimes reaches levels that are almost surreal, as when liberal commentator James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explains that the U.S. sought to “destabilise a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability” [under the Pinochet dictatorship]. Let us consider the case of Hizbollah and Hamas. Both emerged in resistance to U.S.-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which vastly exceeds anything attributed to these organisations. Whatever one thinks about them, or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in support for terror worldwide, even within the Muslim world. Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is far in the lead as a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only by direct funding by wealthy Saudis and others in the Gulf but even more by the missionary zeal with which the Saudis promulgate their extremist Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam through Quranic schools, mosques, clerics, and other means available to a religious dictatorship with enormous oil wealth. The ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its fanning of jehadi flames. In generation of Islamic terror, however, nothing can compare with the U.S. “war on terror”, which has helped to spread the plague from a small tribal area in Afghanistan-Pakistan to a vast region from West Africa to South-East Asia. The invasion of Iraq alone escalated terror attacks by a factor of seven in the first year, well beyond even what had been predicted by intelligence agencies. Drone warfare against marginalised and oppressed tribal societies also elicits demands for revenge, as ample evidence indicates. The two Iranian clients [Hizbollah and Hamas] also share the crime of winning the popular vote in the only free elections held in the Arab world. Hizbollah is guilty of the even more heinous crime of compelling Israel to withdraw from its occupation of southern Lebanon in violation of [U.N.] Security Council orders dating back decades, an illegal regime of terror punctuated with episodes of extreme violence, murder and destruction. Iran’s “fuelling instability” is particularly dramatic in Iraq, where, among other crimes, it alone came at once to the aid of Kurds defending themselves from the ISIS invasion and it is building a $2.5 billion power plant to try to bring electrical power back to the level before the U.S. invasion.

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Fw: Fw: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market.
by jim bell 27 Sep '15

27 Sep '15

Copied from correspondence. ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Jim Epstein <jimepstein(a)gmail.com> To: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2015 5:23 AM Subject: Re: Fw: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. Thanks, jim. I will read your essay and engage with this topic again soon, but I'm immersed in another unrelated story that's consuming my brain and time. I'll get back to you. On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 3:47 AM jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I wanted to mention that Prof Juels has responded to my inquiry. See his work at: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uac… I should point out that the main reason for my inquiry WASN'T to get academic credit, but rather to point out that people who have read my AP essay (and who understand and agree with its goals and likelihood of working) would consider Juels et al objectives to be undesirable and, indeed, dangerous. Superficially, it sounds good to say that they are trying to prevent "criminal contracts", but for those of us who oppose (for example) laws against currently-illegal drugs, we might very well WANT a "criminal contract" to be operational, like Silk Road or such. Or my AP (assassination politics) idea. Prof Juels claims that he/they were not aware of my AP essay. Well, sorry, but I find that a little hard to believe. It's not that it's hard to believe that an average citizen of America (or the world) hadn't heard of it.THAT would be easy to believe. Rather, Juels, Shi, and Kosba claim to be working on the concept of trying to stop "criminal contracts", and do you really believe they haven't heard of AP?!? My understanding is that my AP essay is probably the second most-famous Internet essay in existence, perhaps being Ted Kaczynski's, and it makes far more sense. Now that Juels, Shi, and Kosba definitely know about AP, I think that they should address its implications BEFORE they purport to fight it. Jim Bell From: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> To: Jim Epstein <jimepstein(a)gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 3:39 PM Subject: Re: Fw: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. You might also want to look at http://www.arijuels.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/public_gyges.pdf , by Juels, Shi, and Kosba. Jim Bell From: Jim Epstein <jimepstein(a)gmail.com> To: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 2:35 PM Subject: Re: Fw: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. I'm not familiar with it, but I'm going to read it. I'm very interested. Thanks for sending this. Jim On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 1:14 PM, jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Dear Mr. Epstein, Are you familiar with my 1995-6 essay, "Assassination Politics". www://cryptome.org/ap.htm Jim Bell ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> To: Cpunks List <cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 7:31 PM Subject: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/11/augur-gambling-prediction-ethereum Augur May Become the Greatest Gambling Platform in History. Is There Anything the Government Can Do to Stop It? A blockchain-based prediction market that won’t be controlled or managed by anyone. Jim Epstein Aug. 11, 2015 12:36 pm An online gambling platform could do to the neighborhood bookie what electric refrigerators did to the ice delivery man. Coming this fall, Augur will allow participants to wager money on any future event of their choosing. Software will set the odds, collect the bets, and disperse the winnings. The price alone should give Nevada sportsbook operators pause; an estimated one percent of every pot will go to keep the system running. The average vig today is about 10 times that. Augur isn't a full-fledged casino. You can't play roulette or poker, and running lotto on the platform would be tricky. But it'll be great for sports betting. Here’s what’s truly novel about Augur: It won’t be controlled by any person or entity, nor will it operate off of any one computer network. All the money in the system will be in Bitcoin, or other types of peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, so no credit card companies or banks need to be involved. If the system runs afoul of regulators—and if it’s successful, it most certainly will—they'll find that there's no company to sue, no computer hardware to pull out of the wall, and no CEO to lockup in a cage.This is new legal territory. If Augur catches on as a tool for betting on everything from basketball games to stock prices, is there anything the government can do to stop it? Augur is a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace, a new kind of entity made possible by recent breakthroughs in computer science. The purpose of these platforms is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services among perfect strangers on a platform that nobody administers or controls. Augur’s software will run on what’s known as a “blockchain"—a concept introduced in 2008 with the invention of Bitcoin—that's essentially a shared database for executing trades that's powered and maintained by its users. Bitcoin’s blockchain was designed as a banking ledger of sorts—kind of like a distributed Microsoft Excel file—but Augur will utilize a groundbreaking new project called Ethereum that expands on this concept. Ethereum allows Augur's entire system to live on the blockchain. That means the software and processing power that makes Augur function will be distributed among hundreds or thousands of computers. Destroying Augur would involve unplugging the computers of everyone in the world participating in the Ethereum blockchain. If Augur is destined to become the cypherpunks answer to gambling prohibition—the betting man’s version of the online drug market Silk Road if you will—you'd never know it from talking with its developers. They work for a San Francisco-based nonprofit, attend conferences, have legal representation, and talk openly about what they’re up to with reporters. Augur even commissionedone of those cheesy motion graphics promotional videos favored by new tech startups. About half of the roughly $600,000 raised by Augur's development team comes from Joe Costello, the successful tech entrepreneur who was once Steve Jobs' top pick to become the CEO of Apple. Joey Krug, a twenty-year-old Pomona college dropout and Augur's lead developer, never uses the world “gambling" to describe his venture. He and his team of five employees call Augur a “prediction market,” a term that emphasizes the information generated when a bunch of people have a financial incentive to feed their expertise into a sophisticated algorithm. With Augur, as bettors move money in and out of the pot, the odds adjust. This yields publicly available statistics that should carry weight because they're derived from the opinions of a crowd of people with a stake in the results. InTrade, for example, the best-known prediction market until federal regulators forced it to stop serving U.S. customers in 2012, beat the pollsters and pundits by foreseeing the outcome of the 2008 presidential elections in 48 out of 50 states. Augur’s developers hope that their platform will make it possible to do a Google search to look up the likelihood of some future event. This could usher in a better world, with more informed policy decisions and less malinvestment. But Augur also serves the less high-minded—though no less noble—purpose of providing cost savings and convenience to gamblers. Restrictions on gambling serve to protect government revenue at the betting man's expense. State-sanctioned casino operators pay high taxes, and state-run lotteries fleece their customers. But there's no logical or moral case for government restrictions on gambling, since no third party is harmed when consenting adults wager money on the future. Augur actually has the potential to make the world safer by taking away market share in the gambling industry from criminals. And yet sports betting is illegal in most states, and prediction markets are tightly regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC). The agency sued Ireland-based InTrade in 2012 to prevent it from accepting bets from U.S. customers. (The company folded shortly after.) In 2013, the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) jointly sued the prediction market Banc de Binary for allowing U.S. customers to make bets on commodity prices. The CFTC has approved other prediction markets, such as the New Zealand-based PredictIt, but only after it agreed to abide by the agency's restrictions. Krug says the Augur team is planning to meet with CFTC staff go over how their system works before it’s launched, but says he's not overly concerned. “Our friends in Washington, D.C. say the CFTC will probably just dismiss Augur and say it’s not a big deal,” Krug told me in a phone interview. That doesn’t sound like much of a legal strategy, but how do you have a legal strategy when you're building something unlike anything that's ever existed? Federal anti-gambling laws, such as the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, target the companies that facilitate online betting— website operators, credit card companies, banks—not individual gamblers. Augur’s biggest legal vulnerability is the community of human “reporters” who are needed to settle bets on the platform, says Cardozo Law School's Aaron Wright, who is writing a book about the legal implications of blockchain technology. Let’s say a group of people wager money on Augur over the outcome of a boxing match. Once the bout is over, human participants (who receive a portion of the trading fees as compensation) must report the outcome to the system before Augur’s software will disperse the money to the winners. "There’s at least an argument that the people doing that reporting are aiding or abetting unlicensed options and could be prosecuted," says Wright. But Augur doesn't collect personal information on any of its users, so identifying these people could be difficult. And Augur is a borderless technology, so U.S. gamblers could simply rely on foreigners to report on the outcomes of their bets. One attorney I spoke with suggested that the team that’s building Augur could be brought up on charges for aiding and abetting a criminal conspiracy. Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thinks that's far-fetched but says he can't rule it out. Cardozo emphasizes that writing open source software doesn’t necessarily protect the team from prosecution. “We’ve taken the steps that we need to take in order to bracket the individual's risk and the organization’s risk,” says Augur’s attorney, Marco Santori, who declined to comment further on exactly what those steps might entail. Even if Krug and his colleagues were to face criminal prosecution, the technology would live on. After Augur is born into the world, the development team could release a software update that would cripple the system. But in that case, Augur's users could band together to block any changes to the underlying code, or another developer could copy the open source code and simply re-launch the platform. The big question with Augur—and with blockchain platforms more generally—is whether they can outrun our regulatory state long enough to grow so large and popular that they're truly unstoppable. My money’s on Augur in that race. For more on the promises and pitfalls of decentralized peer-to-peer marketplaces, read my recentReason magazine feature story on the topic.

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Fwd: [qubes-devel] Purism Librem 13 and Qubes
by coderman 27 Sep '15

27 Sep '15

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Radoslaw Szkodzinski <astralstorm(a)gmail.com> Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2015 02:01:58 +0200 Subject: Re: [qubes-devel] Purism Librem 13 and Qubes On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 7:32 PM, Jeremias E. <j.eppler(a)openmailbox.org> wrote: > > > Am Freitag, 25. September 2015 16:33:39 UTC+2 schrieb Radosław Szkodziński: >> >> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 10:48 PM, Fredrik Strömberg >> <stro...(a)mullvad.net> wrote: >> > I love the Purism initiative. I really hope they succeed. >> >> They cannot truly succeed until Intel opens Management Engine code, >> SINIT blob, microcode, memory initialization code and more... >> Coreboot on its own is not enough. >> http://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation > > > They can succeed starting a movement, which has an economical impact. > If Intel sees their is a marked they want to be part of it, because they > want to > make money. Actually, this is not the first laptop based on open firmware and software. Glugglug/Minifree did that quite a bit of time ago with their Libreboot, even FSF certified. Nobody cares, sadly. Librem likely will fail too for the same reasons - ideology is not enough, and they are even worse at it technically-wise. On the other hand, having a more secure laptop is a tangible benefit. Without backdoors, with fewer bugs, audited firmware, perhaps even partially audited hardware. Maybe even make it easier on the designers, produce a server platform matching those requirements - there's more of a market. Google might even get in, as they are known to use a lot of customized firmware and even hardware. I think they used to support Coreboot itself. They might have stopped caring about this though. > A good example for such a movement is the Fairphone. > The first Fairphone was for enthusiasts, but not a real competitor on the > mobile phone marked. > The Fairphone 2 is a real competitor to other mobile phones. Having competitive hardware or design is not the same as being a competitor. Try this argument again when it's actually a competitor to, say, any iPhone. At least in top 10. By the way, Fairphone 2 is a nice story for uninformed people, about on par with Librem. I approve of their other efforts, but it's nowhere near enough or close to what's necessary. The critical component, Qualcomm 801 chipset, will be running a proprietary microkernel with proprietary RF firmware, proprietary DSP code and more. Good luck getting Qualcomm to open that - they are quite hostile to any of those efforts. Again, poor choice of an architecture and a very tough nut to crack. (For instance, Marvell is way more open and much less hostile.) >> That would probably open a whole can of worms related to security >> which then would have to be patched, of course. >> >> For now, the best solution would be to try to get Librem to make an >> AMD-based laptop and test Qubes on it. > > > Is a nice technical and economical idea, because AMD will maybe help to > build such a platform. I wouldn't quite count on it, though they seem to be expanding their open source drivers effort which bodes somewhat well. That said, their GPUs still require a few fat, complex firmware blobs - fortunately Qubes is pretty good at scraping GUI and enforcing separation thereof. P.S. If we're talking about pie in the sky designs: Probably the best design for an OS like Qubes would be to have separate small CPUs instead of many cores, with separate RAM and memory controller. Maybe even an integrated GPU each to run OpenGL. Multiple USB controllers and hubs to simplify hardware redirection. Multiple small flash drives or even chips. Expensive, power intensive, hard to cool and large though. Think a tiny cluster of mostly separate PCs, connected via an extremely fast bus, such as HyperTransport. NUMA considerations would be less important here as the CPUs with their associated memory would be dedicated to a VM and the support exists in both Xen and Linux anyway. -- Radosław Szkodziński

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KARMA POLICE: GCHQ spooks spied on every web user ever
by Georgi Guninski 26 Sep '15

26 Sep '15

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/25/gchq_tracked_web_browsing_habits_ka… KARMA POLICE: GCHQ spooks spied on every web user ever Leaked docs show how out-of-control spy agency went full Stasi on innocent surfers New documents revealing GCHQ's mass-surveillance activities have detailed an operation codenamed KARMA POLICE, which slurped up the details of "every visible user on the Internet". http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/25/trillions_in_surveillance_gchq/ Blighty's GCHQ stashes away 50+ billion records a day on people. Just let that sink in When the slide on BLACK HOLE was composed in March 2009, the flat data store held more than 1.1 trillion things which GCHQ had collected since August 2007. The store weighed in at 217TB when uncompressed, the largest share of which was HTTP data (41 per cent), which alongside web search (19 per cent) and SMTP data (12 per cent) accounted for almost three quarters of all that it held.

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Re: State of the art in directing human made ball lightning?
by wirelesswarrior＠Safe-mail.net 25 Sep '15

25 Sep '15

See: http://scholar.google.com.secure.sci-hub.org/scholar?q=triggered+lightening… Not directly answering your question controlled discharge of normal leader lightning using lasers or small rockets has been an area of intense research for some time. For example, see: http://scholar.google.com.secure.sci-hub.org/scholar?q=triggered+lightening… and http://scholar.google.com.secure.sci-hub.org/scholar?q=triggered+lightening… For Google search articles not showing article links suggest you try http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/index.php -------- Original Message -------- From: Georgi Guninski <guninski(a)guninski.com> Apparently from: cypherpunks-bounces(a)cpunks.org To: cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org Subject: State of the art in directing human made ball lightning? Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 11:49:06 +0300 > Probably offtopic, but would like to know what is > the state of art in directing human made ball lightning > (or something close to it).

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Fwd: Re: [bestbits] Indian Encryption Policy
by rysiek 25 Sep '15

25 Sep '15

Well, that's going to be fun. ---------- Treść przekazywanej wiadomości ---------- Temat: Re: [bestbits] Indian Encryption Policy Data: poniedziałek, 21 września 2015, 15:42:05 Od: Mishi Choudhary Hi Carol, Thanks for highlighting this. Its a draft National Encryption Policy and public comments are invited by October 16, 2015. Comments are to be emailed to Mr A,S.A. Krishnan, akrishnan(a)deity.gov.in The key highlights of the policy are : 1. A stipulation that businesses and citizens are to maintain plain text (unencrypted) copies of encrypted content for a period of 90 days, to be made available to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) when so directed under law. 2. Vendors of encryption products are required to register their products with the Government as a pre-condition to conducting business in India. They are also expected to re-register their products with every update. This requirement is not limited to vendors of dedicated encryption products, and seemingly includes even products that use encryption in the course of providing a larger service such as messaging or e-commerce. (Service Providers located within and outside India, using Encryption technology for providing any type of services in India must enter into an agreement with the Government for providing such services in India). 3. Encryption algorithms and key sizes shall be prescribed by the Government through Notifications from time to time. ----------------------------------------- -- Pozdrawiam, Michał "rysiek" Woźniak Zmieniam klucz GPG :: http://rys.io/pl/147 GPG Key Transition :: http://rys.io/en/147

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State of the art in directing human made ball lightning?
by Georgi Guninski 25 Sep '15

25 Sep '15

Probably offtopic, but would like to know what is the state of art in directing human made ball lightning (or something close to it). According to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#Laboratory_experiments humans made stuff close to it (was surprised one way involves home microwave oven). By "directing" I mean controlling its way.

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William F. Friedman documents now on Internet Archive
by Michael Best 24 Sep '15

24 Sep '15

I uploaded the 7,000+ Friedman NSA docs to the Internet Archive and used the metadata to rename the titles into something a little easier for humans to read and sort. https://archive.org/details/nsa-friedman The complete set of Friedman docs are also included in the NSA FOIA vault at https://archive.org/details/NSA-FOIA-Vault ( https://archive.org/compress/NSA-FOIA-Vault to get the entire vault in a single zip). To grab just the Friedman docs and not the rest of the NSA FOIA vault, go to https://archive.org/download/NSA-FOIA-Vault/Friedman%20Documents.7z -- I should point out that the collected version includes the metadata file, but file names are unchanged and unassociated with human readable titles. These are the same copies released through the NSA's website, just a bit easier to sort and read. Enjoy.

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Fwd: [bestbits] Update: Indian Encryption Policy
by rysiek 24 Sep '15

24 Sep '15

Aaand it's gone. For now. ---------- Treść przekazywanej wiadomości ---------- Temat: [bestbits] Update: Indian Encryption Policy Data: wtorek, 22 września 2015, 11:03:21 Od: Mishi Choudhary Post a public outcry, DEITY has withdrawn this policy. ----------------------------------------- -- Pozdrawiam, Michał "rysiek" Woźniak Zmieniam klucz GPG :: http://rys.io/pl/147 GPG Key Transition :: http://rys.io/en/147

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FCC NPRM seeks to end open SDR
by wirelesswarrior＠Safe-mail.net 24 Sep '15

24 Sep '15

Since the early days of open SDR these devices have been sold as test equipment which does not require onerous type approvals or certifications by the manufacturer or importer. The FCC now seeks to change this https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/08/06/2015-18402/equipment-au… and require product features which block software changes after manufacture. This, of course, is the very heart of SDR and its prohibition would be nothing short of effectively banning SDR and any open source experimentation with RF signal processing beyond the theoretic. WW

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