June 2016 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

LinkNYC Vonage Telephone Kiosks
by grarpamp 30 Jun '16

30 Jun '16

https://cryptome.org/2016/06/linknyc-spy-kiosks-installation-videos.htm At least with payphones you didn't give up much privacy in a time when even voiceprinting by spies would be a challenge. These are vastly different. They do look new and shiny though, certainly very secure... "I do it for one reason and one reason only. I'm learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer."

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First They Came For Assange
by grarpamp 29 Jun '16

29 Jun '16

https://freeassangenow.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxLa6jtF01g https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=first+they+came+for+assange First they came after Julian Assange, then they came after Chelsea Manning, then they came after Edward Snowden who is next? Also, https://twitter.com/embassycat

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Europe’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules Fail to Ban ...tor.... Throttling
by grarpamp 29 Jun '16

29 Jun '16

https://torrentfreak.com/europes-net-neutrality-rules-dont-ban-bittorrent-t… “So if your ISP is lazy, or wants to cut corners and save money, they can throttle BitTorrent, or VPNs, or Bitcoin, or Tor, or any class of traffic they can identify,” Wilson says.

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Wikileaks is the Endgame
by grarpamp 29 Jun '16

29 Jun '16

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19513 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19486 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19477 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19271 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19267 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/emailLists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11983398 http://archive.is/u6iOS http://archive.is/U2miA https://github.com/Enegnei/JacobAppelbaumLeavesTor/blob/master/JacobAppelba… Just links. And yes, the DPRK exists and makes a fine travel destination ;) https://vimeo.com/172360421

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Operation Barbarossa: The 75th Anniversary of the Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union
by Zenaan Harkness 28 Jun '16

28 Jun '16

The West has not escaped fascism, and the Russian state is not without its many problems. We are humans, and we be in this world with other humans. Perhaps more people in positions of power will see the benefits of benevolence in their localised dictatorial capacity, see the longer term benefits to all for actual community oriented thinking and action. "Be like ants." Operation Barbarossa: The 75th Anniversary of the Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union On this 75th anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union the Russians will once again remind the world that the Red Army saved European civilisation as well as Russia from the Nazis Geoffrey Roberts http://russia-insider.com/en/barbarossa/ri15045

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[OT] Fwd: [ PFIR ] Cryptography pioneer Marty Hellman calls for compassion in personal, cyber, and international threats
by Cecilia Tanaka 28 Jun '16

28 Jun '16

For your information, with warm hugs from Brazil! :* Cecilia PS: - Juan, maybe you and some people don't like him and his posts, but Lauren is a kind soul. I really like him a lot. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility) Announcement List" < pfir(a)pfir.org> Date: Jun 27, 2016 9:08 PM Subject: [ PFIR ] Cryptography pioneer Marty Hellman calls for compassion in personal, cyber, and international threats To: <pfir-list(a)pfir.org> Cryptography pioneer Marty Hellman calls for compassion in personal, cyber, and international threats https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/27/cryptography-pioneer-marty-hellman-on-usi… Hellman no longer does crypto research, though he retains a position at Stanford; instead, he has been advocating for changes in policy that acknowledge the new, more interconnected global community. "I see cyberweapons as very similar to nuclear weapons," he said. "Early on we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons so we thought they were the greatest thing going. But unlike a nuclear weapon, a cyberweapon doesn't destroy itself, so like with Stuxnet, our adversaries were able to take it apart and figure out how it works. We need to start thinking this through more carefully." - - - --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lauren(a)vortex.com) http://www.vortex.com/lauren Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone. _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir

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[OT] Fwd: [Air-L] mapping american interest in the rest of the world
by Cecilia Tanaka 27 Jun '16

27 Jun '16

I don't know if it can be interesting for everybody, but it possibly can be curious for some people here. I am sharing Kalev e-mail address for private feedbacks and he is a kind person. Please, don't be aggressive with him. He is a researcher and, like me, loves open data and open knowledge. There are several good and interesting persons in the AIR-L list, but most of communication happens out the mailing list. Please, no conflicts there. Love and dreams, Cecilia PS: - A guy asked me why I always say "North Americans" instead just "Americans". There are also Latin America and South America, not only North America. The world is really small, but much more complex than most of us usually think. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "kalev leetaru" <kalev.leetaru5(a)gmail.com> Date: Jun 27, 2016 4:02 PM Subject: [Air-L] mapping american interest in the rest of the world To: "air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org" <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org> Thought this would be of great interest to those of you studying media geography and online bias. The Google Trends group created for me a map of how often Americans have searched about each country in the world thus far in 2016. Turns out it matches quite closely the attention paid to each country by American television coverage 2009-2016. Africa, Central Asia and the Baltics are standouts, along with Southern Europe. Thought this was quite fascinating to pair up all of the work being done on media geography and online bias with the use of search volume as a proxy for American public interest in those countries. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/27/do-americans-… ~Kalev _______________________________________________ The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

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Operation Barbarossa: The 75th Anniversary of the Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union
by Александр 27 Jun '16

27 Jun '16

John Newman jnn(a)synfin.org > Hitler and Stalin > were both mad men. > > i love this nasty maneuver when mixing TOGETHER (as if they were the same): lie AND truth // black AND white // destroyer AND savior ... a few words about the smear campaign against Stalin for the last 70 years. (information not from your TV/papers/great propaganda bibliographic book): *Let's Be Honest - Stalin Was Less of a Criminal Than Churchill, Truman, and LBJ* "It's time to recover the truth about Stalin and the USSR from a cesspool of hostile propaganda" We have long maintained that the truth about the USSR, in general, and particularly the Stalin period, has long been the object of the most cynical, mean-spirited, and comprehensive propaganda effort ever seen in the annals of history. For reasons of sheer class interest among the plutocrats of the West, the business elites that still rule most of the so-called “capitalist democracies,” the demonization of Stalin was a necessity, a campaign only briefly interrupted by World War Two and quickly resumed literally a few hours after its ending. The Western elites —with the American ruling circles in the lead—correctly saw an enemy in Stalin. They could not bribe him and they could not intimidate him. Nor could they easily topple him, as they had done (and still do) countless times with weaker, “inconvenient leaders.” What’s more, Stalin was at the helm of a powerful nation and titular leader of an ideology directly opposed to their indispensable economic system. Occasional diplomacy aside, they hated him. He and his nation stood in the way of their plans for global hegemony. So the the venom had to flow and did—abundantly. And in that sordid enterprise the capitalist elites found countless allies, not to mention the usual battalions of ignorant, useful idiots. As any propaganda student will attest, when vilifying a nation’s policies and social values, it’s far easier (and effective) if the propagandist aims the Big Lie machine at its leader. As we have seen in recent times with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Fidel Castro, Iran and North Korea’s leaders, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and finally Putin—among many others (the empire is never lacking in “dangerous enemies”)—the character assassination of a leader is an old tactic to prepare the perennially benighted home population for an attack on the targeted nation. >From this perspective it’s not difficult to see that if the Ministry of Truth could swiftly complete the total demonization of Vladimir Putin—a figure in good standing merely 3 years ago—and not even an avowed socialist, one can only imagine what outrageous fabrications they could have concocted (and did) to cordon off the image of Stalin, an outspoken communist, over several decades. This made eminent sense to the West’s doctrinal gatekeepers. Given the identification of Stalin’s long rule with the Soviet Union at its most embattled, the blackening of Stalin’s name served an important purpose: it provided the Western propagandists an invaluable shorthand—an “irrefutable symbol” of communism’s putative evil—to block the very idea of genuine socialism as an option for humanity. The preceding is obviously not to argue that Stalin was a flawless leader, or a saint who just happened to have a powerful army, or that he didn’t make some serious mistakes. He did. However, the most elementary fairness demands that we ask, which world historical figure confronted with enormously difficult choices emerges today (barring self-serving ideological propaganda) unscathed from close and impartial examination? Judging Stalin by the context in which he had to act, and even more important, the purposes he served, he was arguably no worse, morally, than most Western leaders, and by any rational measure, probably a damn sight better. For who are these distinguished gentlemen who have led the West for over a century now? Churchill, the most revered member in the club, was an unapologetic racist and imperialist who in the 1920s endorsed the policy of RAF bombing and gassing Iraqi villages (Mesopotamia) into submission, for for failure to pay their assigned tribute. JFK, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon pursued an illegitimate, barbaric, genocidal war in Vietnam that remains one of the horrors of modern imperialism. Truman dropped the bomb on the Japanese as a way to keep the Soviets “in line,” making America so far the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on a civilian population. And during the postwar, the US tentacles, chiefly acting through the CIA and its clients, have managed to murder and repress tens of millions of people around the globe—in all latitudes and scores of nations, from the Philippines, to Indonesia to Chile, to Nicaragua, to Iran, the Congo, Korea, the entire Middle East, literally bathed in blood—always in pursuit of geostrategic advantage, and the suppression of popular democracy in order to better permit the continuation and maximization of corporate profit. So much for the inherent perfidy of communism and angelic innocence of capitalism. The record is by now so huge and consistent, the hypocrisy so staggering, that we can state categorically there is not a single case in which America has used its immense diplomatic and military power to back a genuine democratic leader (such people are immediately branded “communists” and dealt accordingly) or assisted people struggling for freedom from class oppression. It’s a vile and hypocritical record that continues to this day, thanks to the complete brainwash to which the American population has been subjected as a measure of pre-emptive pacification. The whole thing is amply documented so there’s no point in even trying to refute it. In any case, recovering the truth about Stalin and the USSR from the cesspool of hostile propaganda in which the enemies of socialism situated it, assisted by the perennially misguided and often fanatical anti-communist and especially anti-Stalinist leftists, is no task for the weakhearted. That’s why we salute our colleagues at Russia Insider, and its editor, Charlie Bausman, in particular, for their decision to publish Grover Furr. Letting this scholar speak to a larger audience is a badly needed blow for truth —especially in the current context of reckless warmongering on Russia’s and China’s doorstep. The Big Lie must be defeated if a lasting peace is ever to be attained by humanity. http://russia-insider.com/en/history/lets-be-honest-stalin-was-less-crimina…

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IT-mees Jõhvist: „USA valitsus ja Kim Dotcom röövisid neli aastat minu elust“
by grarpamp 27 Jun '16

27 Jun '16

http://ekspress.delfi.ee/kuum/it-mees-johvist-usa-valitsus-ja-kim-dotcom-ro… http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/from-file-sharing-to-prison-a-me… The whole case was blackmail. They were just waiting for the defendant to get tired of fighting and give up. It’s not the one who’s in the right who wins, but the one who has the most staying power. They never send you straight to where you’re going. You drive through a number of other prisons first. If you make trouble, say by complaining to the judge that your rights are being violated, you’re put through this thing called "diesel therapy." They bounce you back and forth between prisons like a ping-pong ball. I was taken from Alexandria to Brooklyn, from there to Pennsylvania, from there back to Brooklyn, and from there to Pennsylvania again—a total of about 16 hours of driving. Before I got to where I was meant to be going, I was put in two different prisons, one of which was a supermax prison where they keep the worst of the worst. I was there for 10 days. There are more than 2.5 million prisoners in the United States. Almost one percent of the whole population is in prison, and that’s a huge problem. But what surprised me most was that there are private prisons in the US. The more prisoners, the more money you get from the state. It’s big business. Estonia was the only country that didn’t give its people any support. All the other countries gave their prisoners at least some pocket money. Even 10-20 euros would’ve been a great help, because you don’t even get normal soap for free there, not to mention shampoo. You’re given toothpaste whose "best before" was in 2005 and two 20 x 40 cm towels for your whole body for half a year.

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Re: [Cryptography] Digital currencies
by grarpamp 27 Jun '16

27 Jun '16

On 6/20/16, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill(a)hallambaker.com> wrote: > Using as much > electricity as the island of Malta does to distribute the ledger is an > abomination. Far less than all the electricity consumed by the fiat system of the US alone... gov / fed reserve / bank buildings full of offices / datacenters / networks / devices, hvac, payroll, healthcare, vehicles, maintenance... all the electrons needed to make it go. Bitcoin, and any other digital currency, is likely highly efficient and becoming optimal implementations of whatever usable monetary and other features they provide. > Ultimately BitCoin is betting on the ultimate dotcom bubble, > the only value in the currency is that people want the currency. Someone have a rare known "thing" that others want, negotiate and trade for it. You're correct, and nothing could be more pure. The delusion that any fiat is backed by any "value" should end the minute you try to trade it for something of value to you from its issuer / participant brokers and discover them telling you to get lost at gunpoint, thus establishing its exact and formal value to both of you as zero. Particularly for any physical good. Then when actually trading with others you must also evaluate whatever issuer / broker party is doing with it, which at times in history is difficult to do, and such doings not necessarily always to your benefit.

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