April 2017 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Activists? Really? FSF TimBernersLee DRM W3C, Cryptocurrency "Community"
by grarpamp 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Here's a two week deadline to make a difference on worthless invasive control closed and profiteering shit going into your browser... http://defectivebydesign.org/blog/fourteen_days_dialup_and_save_web_drm http://boingboing.net/2017/03/30/ring-ring-drmphone.html Now let's see what the entirety of "community" of hundred thousand+ so called Activist Crypto Coin Punks and users have risen up to do when given an amazingly generous nine(9) months worth of time... http://www.coindesk.com/sec-winklevoss-bitcoin-trust-public-comment/ http://www.coindesk.com/winklevoss-bitcoin-trust-departs-nasdaq/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-etf-anticipation-winklevoss-trust-deadline/ https://www.virtualcurrencyreport.com/2016/10/etf-corner-sec-requests-comme… https://www.sec.gov/rules/sro/batsbzx/2016/34-79084.pdf https://www.sec.gov/rules/sro/batsbzx/2016/34-78653.pdf https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-batsbzx-2016-30/batsbzx201630.shtml ... a measly 68 comments, with many well written by anti's. Pathetic. To win a war you actually have to *wage a fucking war* !!!

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Mirimir Hakced 8ch.net
by HotwheelsGTA 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

_______________ ,-^ ,-^| ,-^ ,-^ | ,-^------------.-^ | | | | | | 6 | | | | | vi | | | | ,-^ | | ,-^ `--------------+,-^ vichan - teh imageboard engine -- preliminary website, until someone comes up with something better * vichan github project page * new support board * irc support channel (#vichan-devel @ irc.6irc.net) * historical support board Announcement vichan engine is not dead yet. We still support the code, but the old cruft has accumulated beyond repair. If you are looking for a modern imageboard engine that works, this is your best choice at the current time. Recently, there has been a wake of new imageboard projects. That's a good thing, but in our opinion, we should unite and not divide. The imageboards are going to look differently a few years from now. It's the time to shape that future. If you own an imageboard, you know that your community may demand some changes, or maybe stability. If you write code, you listen to those demands. There are many approaches to that, as every community is a different one, yet they all share some common goals. I am proud, that our code launched some kind of evolution, after a long stagnation from Kusaba times. Our job is now mostly complete, now that we have somewhat hit the limits. But what did impose us those limits, what should we do to go beyond them? Is the job really complete? Everyone has different ideas about that. If we try to solve only our ideas, we may hit a similar problem a few years from now. How about, if we all collect together and talk about those possible problems? It's always easier to think about it, when the project is in a project shape, than when it's near its finalization. We've launched an IRC channel, that should be a think-tank to everyone having fresh ideas about imageboards. The channel is mostly open, yet we should all try to stay on-topic. We already have some people doing code, owning big imageboards. If you think you have a worthy addition, or just want to sit and watch how we shape the future, we invite you there: #metachan on Rizon The engines are tools. The tools are not communities. But the communities do depend on tools to exist. What is the tool your community needs? And what will your community need in a few years from now? ~czaks

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CIA: Russia "is trying to evade this problem with the help of humor."
by Zenaan Harkness 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

This is a very, very serious allegation by the CIA - Russia is attempting to use humour to pass off their responsibility for the CIAs hacks attributed to Russians. No seriously, the CIA is asserting the Russia using humour (on April fools day no less) to laugh about the CIA's "Russian hacking accusations", is wrong, and that "People in the United States, of course, will not laugh." The CIA ... keeping a straight face at all times! Welp, here's those insidious Russians, at it again with their incredibly divise and utterly sinful, ahhh ... humour: Lavrov Wins April Fools' Day With Amazing Russian Foreign Ministry Prank http://russia-insider.com/en/lavrov-wins-april-fools-day-amazing-russian-fo… One for the history books ..

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Why I just left reddit.
by Mirimir 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Here's what happened: 1) Someone posted in /r/privacy, with concerns about ISP monitoring. 2) I recommended using a VPN. 3) A bot flagged my post, because writing "VPN" is forbidden there. 4) I complained on /r/VPNs, pointing out that this is absurd. 5) A moderator criticized me, saying that I shill for IVPN. 6) I replied to the criticism, disputing the accusation. 7) They banned me from /r/VPNs. So I left reddit, because /r/VPNs and /r/privacy are two main reasons for being there. It's sad, but so it goes.

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"PHP sucks" and contempt culture
by Zenaan Harkness 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Well not PHP exactly, that's just an example of course - Aurynn Shaw does a fine job on the topic, worthy of any tech belittler, not just language superiority trips... Contempt Culture http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages sucked, the people using them were losers or stupid, if they would just use a real language, such as the one we used, everything would just be better. Right? This sort of culturally-encoded language was really prevalent around condemning PHP and Java. Developers in these languages were actively referred to as less competent than developers in the other, more blessed languages. And at the time, as a new developer, I internalised this pretty heavily. The language I was in was blessed, obviously, not because I was using it but because it was better designed than a language like PHP, less wordy and annoying than Java, more flexible than many other options. It didn’t matter that it was (and remains) difficult to read, it was that we were better for using it. I repeated this pattern for a really long time, and as I learned new languages and patterns I’d repeat the same behaviour in those new environments. I was almost certainly not that fun to be around, a microcosm of the broader unpleasantness in tech. At least, until I got called on it. “Have you thought about…” I’d been making critical comments about PHP the language, and PHP developers, nothing more than standard “PHP sucks” sort of language. The same thing I’d been doing, and supported in doing, for years. Getting called out was hard, and I was asked to consider who and what I was criticising. I was able to access a very specific version of the self-taught narrative, where I used “real” programming languages and had “real” passion and drive, the result of which was that I fit the early hacker archetypes and was permitted status - as long as I participated in gate keeping. My self-taught narrative is not other peoples’ self-taught narrative, and I was very firmly reminded of that. Other self-taught narratives, such as starting with Wordpress-based design backgrounds and moving from more simple themes to more complex themes where PHP knowledge is required, to plugin development is a completely valid narrative, but a path that is predominately for women. This was a bombshell. I’d been loudly criticising the language and, through that criticism, implying that people using the language weren’t as good me, weren’t good programmers. And suddenly I was thinking about all the myriad ways that someone with that background would feel othered by me, like they didn’t belong and weren’t welcome in the communities I was a part of. All of the ways in which I was actively participating in the exclusion of women from STEM. Intent is Not Magic1 Of course, I hadn’t intended to do any of these things, but as I came to realise, it doesn’t matter what I intended to do, what matters is that I did it and that it had real repercussions. I intended to make fun of a language, the repercussion is that people from minority backgrounds wouldn’t want to talk to me about the things they’d done in that language, they wouldn’t feel safe talking about their achievements and exploits. And why would they feel safe? If they say what they use, we as a culture laugh at their choice. We tell them they should know better, tell them that it’s a horrible tool. Tell them that they are wrong. We ignore the achievement and focus exclusively on how it was reached, on how much better we are because we had access to narratives that the broader culture had already deemed more real. Not better narratives or better tools, just more accepted, more permitted, more discriminatory. Contempt Currency I was taught to be contemptuous of the non-blessed narratives, and I was taught to pay for my continued access to the technical communities through perpetuating that contempt. I was taught to have an elevated sense of self-worth, driven by the elitism baked into the hacker ethos as I learned to program. By adopting the same patterns that other, more knowledgable people expressed I could feel more credible, more like a real part of the community, more like I belonged. I bought my sense of belonging, with contempt, and paid for it with contempt and exclusionary behaviour. And now, I realise how much of it is an anxiety response. What if I chose the wrong thing? What if other people judge me for my choices and assert that my hard-earned skills actually aren’t worth anything? What if people find out I’m a fraud? By perpetuating a culture of contempt as the means of acquiring credibility, I was able to avoid these difficult, introspective questions. We don’t have to look at how we’re harming other people who want in, don’t have to acknowledge the niggling little voice in the back of our head asking are you good enough. It wasn’t me that was wrong, it was them. Instead, I was taught to use emotional weaponry to silence and exclude others, resulting in the remaining voices being the most toxic and exclusionary, the most able to tolerate toxicity and exclusionary attitudes. This pattern is common in tech, from extremely high-profile projects like the Linux kernel to the ongoing os/language/editor “wars” to the vile reactionary attitudes towards the introduction of Codes of Conduct, to any developers making disparaging comments about other peoples’ ability to code, and the growing contempt around people whose first or primary language is JavaScript. And now This culture has ramifications. PHP communities, for example, have lacked access to the development of DevOps tooling, the use of PHP is widely derided as being insecure by default, are they are widely mocked for being an “objectively bad language.” Yet people make their livings working with PHP, deploying PHP, trying to secure PHP. Don’t they deserve the help that we received, the help of good practises and security-first development? These people who can’t improve their work because we won’t work with them and drive them away from our communities with mockery and spite. And then they engineer things on their own, because they still need these tools, and we have the gall to ask why they didn’t use these other tools. Tools that we mocked them for asking about, telling them to get a real language, to rewrite their entire app, to rebuild from scratch because their particular path was not blessed enough. Because we were the problematic elements. I’m Tired of This It’s 2015, and I saw a presenter at a Python conference make fun of Java. How would that feel to people trying to move from Java into something else? I wouldn’t feel welcome, and I’d have learned that the idea that the Python community is welcoming wasn’t true. I’m tired of calling people out again and again for dumping on PHP. I’m tired of people dumping on Windows, that most popular operating system, because it’s not what we choose to use, tired of the fact that we don’t make it easy to use our tools and teach them how to move, when they’re ready. Instead, we lecture and dismiss and heap scorn upon them. We don’t reinforce our communities with respect or a sense of achievement, but with shame and contempt and awfulness. We exclude people. I’ve excluded people. Directly, me. I have to own up to that and deal with it. We excluded people. Directly. All of us. Even if we didn’t intend to, it does not matter. We make fun of the things others care about, make them feel small, make them feel like their achievements didn’t matter. Make them feel like they’re not welcome. What can we Do? SHUT. UP. No, really, cut it out. If you need to make fun of a language, do it with your own language, inside your own community. JavaScript is really good at this, because they’re trying to help people write better code within JavaScript. Do it around friends only, and acknowledge that it’s extremely problematic that you’re doing it at all. Find some amazing project to celebrate in a language you’re contemptuous of. Go to meetups of what you despise. Say you don’t know anything, and see how welcoming they are to new people. See what they say, what they do, and ask if you’d be as welcoming to them when they come to your meetups. Work to change your community. Ask people who try to pay for their membership in contempt to stop, or to leave. Make it unacceptable to use these behaviours as a means of obtaining social wealth. The best advice we give programmers is to leave things better than how they started. We do it with code, why don’t we do it with communities? Why don’t we do it with people, colleagues, friends? Ask why it’s okay to do these things in your community, and leave things better than when you started. Intent is magic!↩ http://www.shakesville.com/2011/12/harmful-communication-part-one-intent.ht…

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Fwd: [tor-talk] This video has been censored by YouTube many times
by Cecilia Tanaka 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

For respect and consideration to some members of Tor-Talk List, I will be silent there, but I do sincerely believe that Tor-Talk List is not a place for sharing Anti-Semitic videos or any kind of racist material. It's sick, evil and completely off-topic. I was kick-banned there under the allegation of "rape apology", even being a victim of rapes. Sincerely hope the list moderators kick-ban this nazi too. Or is "nazism apology" more acceptable in the list because no member of the core team was mentioned? Ceci ------- "Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live." - Mae Jemison ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Pinkman <john.pinkman(a)yandex.com> Date: Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 6:32 PM Subject: [tor-talk] This video has been censored by YouTube many times To: tor-talk <tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org> it explains problems that the world faces today https://w1r3.net/yBQEEe.webm -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk

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MGTOW Movement (Re: Fem/SJW/Etc)
by grarpamp 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

https://www.mgtow.com/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mgtow https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ap-PQAzRQw Everything has alternative points of view.

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How to identify the members of death squads within every American police department
by Ryan Carboni 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

A simple set of instructions: Possess a large quantity of officer testimony, maybe from Get a thesaurus and find every word associated with fear Focus on the officers who are less than the average height Keep in mind that police officers legally kill people. Or to quote that NYPD officer taunting a human being with a tazer, "You wanna ride the lightning." Presumably if the situation escalated, electrocuting a person ten times will be considered legal and reasonable. It is not hard to figure out the reasoning behind these instructions. It is hard to figure out why I'm giving them, as opposed to those ACLU executives getting paid quarter million salaries. Or police oversight agencies. No it's actually quite simple. The Russians are running everything, and have implemented full communism. I suggest that the ACLU and the EFF be liquidated into a non profit I run and control. In three years you will live in a free society. And I will not seek to be a single point of failure. Afterall, I reasonably believe that Edward Snowden has betrayed the ACLU, by having Witte act as a secretary, meaning that the ACLU is not acting as law firm for Snowden. I think it's over, you know, the weeks when they have times, to get lawyers really sort of go, "This is a special situation. How can we interpret this to our advantage?" We... we see them do this all the time, you know, whether it's drones or wiretapping or whatever, they'll go, "Well according to this law from the 1840s, you know, with X, Y, or Z authority..." Hmmmmm I'd like to know that legal opinion. Actually didn't the ACLU go in arguing against mass surveillance blind?

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Fwd: [tor-dev] GSoC 2017 - unMessage: a privacy enhanced instant messenger
by grarpamp 01 Apr '17

01 Apr '17

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Felipe Dau <dau(a)riseup.net> Date: Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 3:23 PM Subject: [tor-dev] GSoC 2017 - unMessage: a privacy enhanced instant messenger To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Hello, I am a Computer Engineering student at the Federal Technological University of Parana in Brazil and I would like to present you a peer-to-peer privacy enhanced instant messenger called unMessage [0]. I have been working on it for a while with David Andersen [1] (my advisor) and we have recently released an alpha version which should be easy for developers to install and test. It uses the Double Ratchet Algorithm [2] for encryption, Onion Services for transport metadata minimization, its own protocol for application metadata minimization, and as a result, provides private and anonymous conversations. It currently has basic features such as message exchange, user authentication and we very recently enabled voice chat using the Opus codec [3] for constant bitrate encoding. unMessage is a Python application that mainly uses pyaxo's [4] implementation of Double Ratchet Algorithm and txtorcon's [5] implementation of the Tor Control Protocol. Since its current (alpha) release, we have been discussing it with Patrick Schleizer [6] and HulaHoop [7] from Whonix [8], who are making great contributions to help us test it, as well as suggesting new features and improvements. We are also working to run it on Whonix (which will also allow it to be run on Tails) with help from meejah [9] by adding a new feature to txtorcon to make unMessage (and all the apps that use txtorcon) "Control Port Filter friendly". As we believe unMessage has potential to become a great privacy enhancing app with a code that is simple, readable and therefore easy to maintain, Patrick suggested that I submitted a proposal to have unMessage as one of the GSoC projects. We expect to implement fixes, improvements and features from our discussions in order to turn it into a maintainable, feature-rich and useful app which the community can benefit from. There are currently some "developer centered" tasks I can work on such as: - Create a test suite (with pytest) - Make unMessage's own functions/methods behave like a Twisted API should - Use automat for its finite-state machines - Make use of a logging tool - Improve comments/document the code As well as some "user centered" tasks: - Whonix/Tails support - Improve the GUI and CLI - File transfer - Use a friendlier approach for users to handle keys instead of the current base32/64 encodings - Connect/launch Tor automatically depending on what is available - Offline messages (All the other ones can be found in the issue tracker [10]) My intention with this post is not only to present unMessage to tor-dev but also see if someone is interested in mentoring me as it is not one of the official ideas but hopefully sounds like a good project. If someone gets interested, please let me know so that we can discuss which tasks would be interesting for this project and I am able to write a proposal. Thanks! -Felipe [0]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage [1]: https://github.com/rxcomm [2]: https://whispersystems.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet [3]: https://opus-codec.org [4]: https://github.com/anemonelabs/pyaxo [5]: https://github.com/meejah/txtorcon [6]: https://github.com/adrelanos [7]: https://github.com/HulaHoopWhonix [8]: https://whonix.org [9]: https://github.com/meejah [10]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev

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Crypto consequences of dimensionless constants changing their values over time?
by Georgi Guninski 01 Apr '17

01 Apr '17

This bugs me. Since 2009 it is known that the value of the dimensionless constant Pi changes over time: https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.5321 [1] Personally don't care about the curvature of space, time and whatever other dimensions, as long as macro objects and concepts keep their _usual_ properties. The end of [1] claims that "the values of the integers could vary with time". This is clearly crypto related, possibly worse than Row Hammer. Are there crypto consequences of dimensionless constants changing their values over time?

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