July 2017 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Smart Cities: Already Corrupt, Now Anti-Privacy
by grarpamp 31 Jul '17

31 Jul '17

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6qe503/baltimore_prosecutor_tosses_3… http://www.computerworld.com/article/3211402/mobile-wireless/how-smart-citi… Cryptome documents linknyc kiosk archit....... http://www.bing.com/search?q=cryptome+linknyc

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Linkin Park: Dead
by grarpamp 31 Jul '17

31 Jul '17

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6oi3gu/chester_bennington_of_linkin_… https://www.youtube.com/results?q=linkin+park&sp=CANQFA%253D%253D https://linkinpark.com/news/news/448101/dear-chester We're building it up to burn it down...

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BTC-E Seized, Alphabay, Hansa, Bitshares Decentral Exchange, Etc
by grarpamp 31 Jul '17

31 Jul '17

https://btc-e.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BTCE/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BTCE/search?q=btc-e+seized&sort=relevance&t=week https://www.reddit.com/r/BTCE/search?q=alphabay&sort=relevance&t=week Recent news in cryptos, expect related fallout. Also..... https://bitshares.org/

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It's #NationalSysAdminDay! (image: 34.4kb)
by Razer 29 Jul '17

29 Jul '17

Show your sysadmin how much you need them. Crash something. Rr

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The Secret Sauce or how governments use mass hypnosis
by Ryan Carboni 28 Jul '17

28 Jul '17

Well, all my knowledge of hypnosis comes from an episode of Bull. Repetition is a powerful thing, among other things it indicates success or consensus if one approaches it from an evolutionary psychology perspective. What I said a long time ago about how cryptography is incremental, that easier to cryptanalyze provable ciphers would have less papers, and that more complex ciphers would have more papers, it isn't an incredible observation. But noting the observation would reduce the impact that the deluge of papers on Simon and Speck would have (if it was simple to cryptanalyze there'd be only two or three papers on each). There was also a lot of repetition in the recent efforts to remove RC4 and Triple DES. (nevermind the efforts to remove Saddam) RC4 in particular had someone use it for a file encryption system for deniability? Spotlight was a movie produced with assistance from First Look. There was a scene that extremely disturbed me, more than all the child molestation. Well, two scenes to be exact. The first scene was the new editor ordering the journalists to investigate a case. The second scene was that the paper did write about child molestation allegations in the past, but they put it into the metro section. How easily are people manipulated? These journalists went on to win prizes for their reporting, so clearly they are not responsible for their own success. These are exceptional allegations, the metro article was about a dozen alleged cases? Then it turned out to be hundreds of children? The part that really disturbed me is that no one reflected on this. This is a thing that happened. The journalists unwittingly allowed it to occur. Cardinal Law wittingly allowed it to occur. The truth is out there. It is not hard to find. Actually, all the journalists, with their intelligence contacts... they have to be itching to ask one question. How could so many people in the intelligence community be okay with the popular outrage from Snowden? How do they rationalize it? Well. I don't know, but I think they are naive enough to ignore past misdeeds, and they get told various things. Like how it was Clapper's duty to lie to Congress (!) because no comment or this should be in a closed hearing would be too suspicious. How could it be that they think what they are doing is legal, but we think that hiding information from the public is suspicious and sign of illegality? Maybe the government does incidental collection with disk images and wiretaps on an alarming scale. Maybe... maybe.... You are being manipulated. Only you can produce your freedom.

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DefCon attendees will have the opportunity to Hackathon 30 US Digital Voting Machines
by Razer 28 Jul '17

28 Jul '17

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/26/voting-machines-hackers-elec… LAS VEGAS – Think of it as a stress test for democracy. Hackers plan to spend this weekend trying to break into more than 30 voting machines used in recent elections to see just how far they can get. U.S. election officials have consistently said that despite Russian attempts to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, no votes were tampered with. Prove it, say organizers of DefCon, an annual hacker convention held in Las Vegas each July. The idea is to “start hacking on (the machines) to raise awareness and find out for ourselves what the deal is. I'm tired of reading misinformation about voting system security,” Jeff Moss, DefCon founder, wrote on the conference blog. One of the event organizers is Matt Blaze, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who's been working on making election software more secure since the mid-2000s. The the best of his knowledge, this will be the first time a technical crowd will have the ability to look at the machines “on a large scale.” That’s in part because until 2015, it was illegal under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to try to hack into voting machines. “The Library of Congress granted an exemption that explicitly allowed this type of research, to enable good faith research of security flaws,” said Stephanie Singer a project lead with Free & Fair, a Portland, Ore.-based election technology company. The event comes as attempted election meddling has become a major geo-political issue both in the United States and worldwide. This week the Senate grilled the president’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, on possible collusion in Russian attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election via hacking. (He denied collusion.) Prior to the 2016 presidential election, hackers probed election works in at least 39 states, according to a report by Bloomberg last month. Cyberattacks over the past year in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, France and Austria have attributes that linked them to suspected Russian hackers, according to former National Intelligence director James Clapper. They appeared to be aimed at influencing election results, sowing discord and undermining faith in public institutions that included government agencies, the media and elected officials. In all of this, there has been no indication that actual votes were changed, the FBI has said. Election officials have cited the decentralized nature of the U.S. election system, which is state, county and sometimes even municipality-based. However, experts in election voting software say no states routinely perform post-election vote audits to ensure that the reported vote count tallies with ballots, Singer said. Moreover, there were no forensic examinations of any of the voting machines used in the 2016 presidential election, in part because many election-machine vendor contracts prohibit it, Singer said. That’s a red flag for hackers at DefCon. To see just how safe the voting machines that underpin democracy are, they're bringing more than 30 voting machines purchased on eBay and at government surplus sales to Las Vegas where they're setting up a “Voting Machine Hacking Village” at the conference at Caesar's Palace. There they'll spend the weekend probing the network connecting the machines, physically attempting to alter the machines and hacking into their hardware. The effort is being overseen by two well-known researchers in the field of election security, Blaze and Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer programer who in 2005 showed it was possible to hack into a Diebold voting machine and change vote tallies, a technique now known as “the Hursti Hack.” "You never know what that kind of a spark will ignite. My hope is that we’ll see a broadening of the community of people interesting in improving the security of our election system,” Blaze said. The program is just one of a week's worth of computer security conference events happening in Las Vegas. The first is Black Hat, followed by DefCon. Other workshop topics include how to hack a wind farm, defenses against drones (the French military is training eagles to pluck them out of the sky), the latest in car hacking and an in-depth look at just how hard it is to knock out the power grid (hint: not as hard as it should be.) --30--

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Tails prevents MAC changes as design feature
by didukno 27 Jul '17

27 Jul '17

> intrigeri intrigeri at boum.org > Tue Jul 4 06:13:41 UTC 2017 > > We don't actively support the use case described below It seems that you do: >>Tails User Goals: Hide geographical movement >>Tails User Goals: No unspoofed usage of Tails >>Tails User Goals: Not raising alarms on the network >>Tails User Goals: Avoid network connection problems Geographical movement is revealed by device leaks before Tails boots. The OUI is not spoofed when using Tails. A new MAC every Tails session on low traffic networks raises alarms. Network device quantity limitations causes connection problems eventually. Clearly, the current MAC spoofing protocol, which violates every Tails User Goal, puts Tails users at risk. The ideal tools: - Host machine(s) with no internal network devices - External PCI/USB network card(s) - Tails on USB Stick(s) The ideal process: - Power on host machine - Press and hold keys to access EFI Boot Menu - Plug Tails USB Stick into host machine - Select Tails system drive as it appears - Create Administrative Account at Greeter as Tails boots - Set custom MAC address(s) at Greeter as Tails boots - Start Tails - Plug in External PCI/USB network card(s) - Have Network Manager recognize, then assign, the appropriate MAC - Connect to network Please consider this wonderful case and directly support the changing of MAC address OUI and NIC. > stop/start NetworkManager.service > wifi.cloned-mac-address=preserve Thanks. > ill-advised cross-posting Not every one is you. didukno

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Attack of the Killer Car Wash
by Razer 27 Jul '17

27 Jul '17

"This is not a joke <https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjxe33/car-wash-hack-can-smash-v…>: "A group of security researchers have found vulnerabilities in internet-connected drive-through car washes that would let hackers remotely hijack the systems to physically attack vehicles and their occupants. The vulnerabilities would let an attacker open and close the bay doors on a car wash to trap vehicles inside the chamber, or strike them with the doors, damaging them and possibly injuring occupants." HT: @KimZetter <http://twitter.com/KimZetter>. Let's be careful out there." Source, Lawfare: https://lawfareblog.com/attack-killer-car-wash

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Today in 'Merican History: Early Sunday morning July 23 1967 Detroit police trigger the biggest riot in American history
by Lettuce 27 Jul '17

27 Jul '17

> Razer g2s at riseup.net > Sun Jul 23 09:35:36 PDT 2017 > > Police > Triggered Nigger

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The Silent Reorganization of First Look Media or Just How Powerful is Pierre Omidyar?
by Ryan Carboni 27 Jul '17

27 Jul '17

I have too much time on my hands in case you're wondering (alas, alas, the government's strategy for dealing with me doesn't work against someone with autism) There exists a five year grace period for nonprofits to become viable, until the Public Support Test needs to be fulfilled. 5/6 of First Look's money comes from... Omidyar so far. (how is he so rich and yet failed to figure out a viable strategy for First Look???) Recently First Look has been reorganized a bit. Well, as a media publication on the media says about it: http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/07/first-look-medias-topic-com-is-leaning-on-… Topic.com is the product of First Look Media’s titular entertainment studio, Topic, which officially went live earlier this year. Unlike the nonprofit operations at First Look Media, like The Intercept, Topic and its related operations are charged with building the company’s revenue operations in part by financing and distributing independent projects such as the documentary Nobody Speaks, which follows the Hulk Hogan trial that helped take down Gawker. The documentary premiered on Netflix this month. Topic itself is platform-agnostic: its productions will live on a variety of platforms, including movie theater screens, podcast apps, television, and, of course, Facebook and Twitter. --- Looking at the staff of the for-profit First Look shows that it shares no (or nearly no) staff with the non-profit first look. Based on what I've read, I can guess that First Look and First Look are unrelated organizations. >From what I can tell, news organizations cannot fund their own operations (unless as a foundation, maybe) unless *squints* it is selling advertisements that further its program service like... a bar association magazine to quote: "A bar association publishes a legal journal containing opinions of the county court, articles of professional interest to lawyers, advertisements for products and services used by the legal profession, and legal notices. The legal notices are published to satisfy state laws requiring publication of notices in connection with legal proceedings, such as the administration of estates and actions to quiet title to real property." So it isn't hard to see how First Look and First Look are unrelated in a purely irrational sense. Recently First Look began asking for donations (strangest public charity, hid their address on their website for a long time). Of course, public support requires essentially at least a third of all money come from individuals providing less than 2% each. An interesting question is if Pierre Omidyar offered to triple everyone's donations (+200%), and had a few friends donate a few thousand dollars each that he wouldn't triple. Would it qualify as public support? Probably. All this seems very elaborate and rather silly. Let's look at the ACLU. It uh. Has a related nonprofit foundation to fund itself and it's affiliates. Anyway, mimicry is stupid, but informed mimicry can improve one's own survival function. I've said something about orienting the network of privacy non-profits towards actually accomplishing things. You know SuperPACs have a wink-wink relationship with their candidate. And here is the reorganization of First Look, they hide the truth through some pretty sophisticated means. You want to improve privacy, create devices under the control of the public? Here's the blueprint. Get a bunch of people together who are on the same page. Create for-profit and non-profit corporations who aren't related. The designs and code must be open-source to prevent co-option and unnecessary risk that corporation could dominate and render the others irrelevant. Pretty short blueprint huh? Wonder why no one hasn't come up with this before... oh wait. Credit goes to Omidyar. The people in charge of your freedom are not on your side. Only you can manufacture freedom. P.S. /dev/random losing entropy when it is used only makes sense if the output is linear with the state. (?)

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