October 2016 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own
by Cecilia Tanaka 28 Oct '16

28 Oct '16

The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own http://nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/pentagon-artificial-intelligence-terminato… ===== I do love technology and science. And, yes, I love robots and drones a lot, but not being used for the bad guys. So many possibilities... Awesome and/or evil. :-/ - c. PS: - I am dead, but I am a ghost and I am haunting the list a bit, sorry. After more than 700 stupid spams, I deserve to scare some persons here! Booooh!!! :D PS's PS: - I am pretty curious about this game, but I am sure it will be intensely scary and will give me nightmares, brrrr... :( https://www.humblebundle.com/store/orwell -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

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[NoDAPL] Honest Government Advert for the Dakota Access Pipeline
by Razer 28 Oct '16

28 Oct '16

As of three hours ago the police were video-ed opening fire with beanbag rounds and LRADs on the NoDAPL protesters in North Dakota during Native prayer ceremonies. This is what the government wants so bad they're willing disrupt people praying, deploy COINTELPRO-like fusion center disruption ops, Metadata collection and cyberstalking of the protests and the alt media covering the protests about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9TR9G5bd7w Ps... It's funnnnny! Rr

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Waffling On Full Disclosure: Lawrence Lessig, Steven Levy
by grarpamp 27 Oct '16

27 Oct '16

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/10/22/0417250/should-journalists-ignore-s… http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/151983995587/on-the-wikileak-ed-emails-betwee… https://backchannel.com/when-is-it-ok-to-mine-hacked-emails-1f2081122915 Tuesday Lawrence Lessig issued a comment about a leaked email which showed complaints about his smugness from a Clinton campaign staffer: "I'm a big believer in leaks for the public interest... But I can't for the life of me see the public good in a leak like this..." Now mirandakatz shares an article by tech journalist Steven Levy arguing that instead, "The press is mining the dirty work of Russian hackers for gossipy inside-beltway accounts." This is perfectly legal. As long as journalists don't do the stealing themselves, they are solidly allowed to publish what thieves expose, especially if, as in this case, the contents are available to all... [But] is the exploitation of stolen personal emails a moral act? By diving into this corpus to expose anything unseemly or embarrassing, reporters may be, however unwillingly, participating in a scheme by a foreign power to mess with our election... As a 'good' journalist, I know that I'm supposed to cheer on the availability of information... But it's difficult to argue that these discoveries were unearthed by reporters for the sake of public good... He's sympathetic to the idea that minutiae from campaigns lets journalists "examine the failings of 'business as usual'," but "it would be so much nicer if some disgruntled colleague of Podesta's was providing information to reporters, rather than Vladimir Putin using them as stooges to undermine our democracy." He ultimately asks, "is it moral to amplify anything that's already exposed on the internet, even if the exposers are lawbreakers with an agenda?"

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Iceland Pirates Poised To Mop Up Elections
by grarpamp 27 Oct '16

27 Oct '16

http://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2016/10/21/new_poll_… http://fel.hi.is/english Iceland’s Pirate Party may be about to make history as the world’s first ‘pirate’ movement to win national general elections. A new opinion poll conducted by the Social Science Research Institute of the University of Iceland for Icelandic daily Morgunblaðið indicates that over one in five voters will be voting Pirate a week tomorrow.

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the art of communication - "What did I say?" (Jennifer Rubin takes on Bill O'Rielly)
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Oct '16

27 Oct '16

When communicating, especially on national TV, it may be useful to get your facts clear, and to stick to your facts. Although this video snippet (~5:40) is quite humorous, it serves a useful purpose. As with sentences that begin "If ..." to create a straw man or hypothetical, failure to speak clearly from at least one fact is another foundation for lax communication. Enjoy :) Watch Bill O’Reilly completely destroy Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin http://theduran.com/watch-bill-oreilly-completely-destroy-washington-post-c… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QF-zt8CF8U

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Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
by Cecilia Tanaka 26 Oct '16

26 Oct '16

https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-on-person… Not exactly a "wow, must read!", but there are some interesting comments. (Yeah, yeah, I have loved friends working there, but always remember "Googlers" are not the "Google", please. Employees are _not_ the company. God, it is like thinking the whole Russia sucks because Zenaan and Alex are pretty boring! :P) - c. -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

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Search Risk – How Google Almost Killed ProtonMail
by Razer 26 Oct '16

26 Oct '16

In the past two months, many of you have reached out to us to ask about the mysterious tweets we sent to Google in August. At ProtonMail, transparency is a core value, and we try to be as transparent with our community as possible. As many people have continued to point out to us, we need to be more transparent here to avoid continued confusion and speculation. Thus, we are telling the full story today to clarify what happened. What Happened? The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding ProtonMail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because ProtonMail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider. When ProtonMail launched in Beta back in May 2014, our community rapidly grew as people from around the world came together and supported us in our mission to protect privacy in the digital age. Our record breaking crowdfunding campaign raised over half a million dollars from contributors and provided us with the resources to make ProtonMail competitive against even the biggest players in the email space. By the summer of 2015, ProtonMail passed half a million users and was the world’s most well known secure email service. ProtonMail was also ranking well in Google search at this time, on the first or second page of most queries including “encrypted email” and “secure email”. However, by the end of October 2015, the situation had changed dramatically, and ProtonMail was mysteriously no longer showing up for searches of our two main keywords. Between the beginning of the summer and the fall of 2015, ProtonMail did undergo a lot of changes. We released ProtonMail 2.0, we went fully open source, we launched mobile apps in beta, and we updated our website, changing our TLD from .ch to the more widely known .com. We also doubled in size, growing to nearly 1 million users by the fall. All of these changes should have helped ProtonMail’s search rankings as we became more and more relevant to more people. In November 2015, we became aware of the problem and consulted a number of well known SEO experts. None of them could explain the issue, especially since ProtonMail has never used any blackhat SEO tactics, nor did we observe any used against us. Mysteriously, the issue was entirely limited to Google, as this anomaly was not seen on any other search engine. Below are the search rankings for ProtonMail for ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’ taken at the beginning of August 2016 across all major search engines. We rank on either page 1 or 2 everywhere except Google where we are not ranked at all. image: protonmail seo rankings All throughout Spring 2016, we worked in earnest to get in touch with Google. We created two tickets on their web spam report form explaining the situation. We even contacted Google’s President EMEA Strategic Relationships, but received no response nor improvement. Around this time, we also heard about the anti-trust action brought forward by the European Commission against Google, accusing Google of abusing its search monopoly to lower the search rankings of Google competitors. This was worrying news, because as an email service that puts user privacy first, we are the leading alternative to Gmail for those looking for better data privacy. In August, with no other options, we turned to Twitter to press our case. This time though, we finally got a response, thanks in large part to the hundreds of ProtonMail users who drew attention to the issue and made it impossible to ignore. After a few days, Google informed us that they had “fixed something” without providing further details. The results could be immediately seen. image: google protonmail search risk ProtonMail Google Search Ranking for “Encrypted Email” In the above plots, the x-axis is time and the y-axis is search ranking (lower number is better). The dates where there are no data points are times when we are not ranked at all by Google. After Google made some changes, ProtonMail’s rankings immediately recovered and are now ranked #1 and #3 for ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’ respectively. Without any additional explanation from Google, we may never know why ProtonMail become unranked. In any case, we do appreciate Google finally taking action to resolve the issue, we just wished it happened sooner. The Danger of Search Risk This incident however highlights a previously unrecognized danger that we are now calling Search Risk. The danger is that any service such as ProtonMail can easily be suppressed by either search companies, or the governments that control those search companies. This can happen even across national borders. For example, even though Google is an American company, it controls over 90% of European search traffic. In this case, Google directly caused ProtonMail’s growth rate worldwide to be reduced by over 25% for over 10 months. This meant that ProtonMail’s income from users was also cut by 25%, putting financial pressure on our operations. We went from being able to cover all our monthly expenses to having to draw from our emergency reserve fund. The lost income and financial damage incurred as a result was several hundred thousand Swiss Francs (1 CHF = 1.01 USD), which will never be reimbursed. The only reason we survived to tell this story is because the majority of ProtonMail’s growth comes from word of mouth, and our community is too loud to be ignored. Many other companies won’t be so fortunate. This episode illustrates that Search Risk is serious, which is why we now agree with the European Commission that given Google’s dominant position in search, more transparency and oversight is critical. Links images and a bit more: https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/

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had enough of these mafia bozos - [tor-talk-bounces@lists.torproject.org: You have been unsubscribed from the tor-talk mailing list]
by zen 26 Oct '16

26 Oct '16

Sorry guys, Tor Inc's relentless crack down on tor-talk, including cross postings and whatever other filters they have, is offensive fascism in action - I have unsubbed and so shall no longer forward any (admittedly rare) emails I consider worthy of forwarding... "Tor Inc", rot in hell you weak willed pussies and fascist bastards!! Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2016 10:01:01 +0000 From: tor-talk-bounces(a)lists.torproject.org To: zen(a)freedbms.net List-Id: "all discussion about theory, design, and development of Onion Routing" <tor-talk.lists.torproject.org> Subject: You have been unsubscribed from the tor-talk mailing list Thanks for contributing to the tor-talk community ----- End forwarded message -----

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Fwd: [Cryptography] TFC - instant messaging with endpoint security
by Cecilia Tanaka 26 Oct '16

26 Oct '16

Oh, I am dead, but it's Python... (*-*) <3 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Markus Ottela" <oottela(a)cs.helsinki.fi> Date: Oct 25, 2016 10:33 PM Subject: [Cryptography] TFC - instant messaging with endpoint security To: <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> Thought I'd share my three-year project with the community. https://github.com/maqp/tfc The tl;dr is TFC is an end-to-end encryption plugin for Pidgin IM client where the TCB is split and separated on two isolated computers behind unidirectional, data-diode enforced RS232 gateways. This configuration prevents infiltration of malware to transmitter computer and exfiltration of keys/pt from receiver computer. The networked computer running Pidgin never has access to private keys or plaintexts. The cipher is XSalsa20-Poly1305, where the symmetric key is either pre-shared or exchanged with Curve25519 ECDHE. MACs provide deniable authentication and PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 provides per-message forward secrecy with hash-ratchet. Key generation uses Linux kernel CSPRNG but also allows mixing in entropy from a HWRNG sampled by Raspberry Pi via GPIO natively or over SSH. (Both HWRNG and data diodes are free hardware design). Group messaging is done by multi-casting messages to each recipient provided all members have exchanged a key pair for private messaging. The last feature I'd like to highlight is trickle connection where user sends a constant stream of noise packets to recipient / group, inside which messages can be delivered. Files can be sent to recipient(s) in background during the conversation. Written in Python, licensed under GPL. I hope you find it interesting. Markus _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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AT&T Fucks You In The Ass For LOLs
by grarpamp 26 Oct '16

26 Oct '16

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/10/25/1754257/att-is-spying-on-americans-… http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-american… Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why. [...] Hemisphere isn't a "partnership" but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company's massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public. As has been said sooooooo many times before, AT&T rolls over and gives governments whatever they want, and both are the explicit enemy of you. Beware all ye of those with lucrative govt contracts to risk, and all ye that doth be governed.

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