November 2018 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Cryptocurrency: Richard Stallman wavers on Privacy and Privacy Coins, Offers GNU Taler
by grarpamp 27 Nov '18

27 Nov '18

https://www.coindesk.com/free-software-messiah-richard-stallman-we-can-do-b… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/11/26/0627230/richard-stallman-criticizes… Richard Stallman doesn't like bitcoin, and has never used it, reports CoinDesk: To Stallman, bitcoin isn't suitable as a digital payment system. His biggest complaint: bitcoin's poor privacy protections. He told CoinDesk, "What I'd really like is a way to make purchases anonymously from various kinds of stores, and unfortunately it wouldn't be feasible for me with bitcoin." Using a crypto exchange would allow that company and ultimately the government to identify him, he said.... Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins, Stallman said he'd gotten an expert to assess their potential, and "for each one he would point out some serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability." And speaking broadly, Stallman continued: "If bitcoin protected privacy, I'd probably have found a way to use it by now." Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum, whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it with many cryptocurrency projects. Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder for the recipients to participate in money laundering.... Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back into the traditional banking system. "I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."

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US government extract, Santa Fe Bridge Quarantine Plant, 1917
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Nov '18

27 Nov '18

Well well well, lookie here [extract image attached]. Who woulda thunked it? Well of course TDS "belligerents". Trigger a liberal lefty today, throw 'em a fact. For delousing, there's Zyklon-B. For everything else there's Mir Card and a memetic monday :) https://dailystormer.name/memetic-monday-merchants-mass-media/

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[rms@gnu.org: Re: on the necessity of a @snowflake codedoc annotation]
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Nov '18

27 Nov '18

----- Forwarded message from Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> ----- From: Richard Stallman <rms(a)gnu.org> To: Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> Cc: cypherpunks(a)lists.cpunks.org, lwn(a)lwn.net Reply-To: rms(a)gnu.org Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2018 15:51:50 -0500 Subject: Re: on the necessity of a @snowflake codedoc annotation [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] That idea is amusing. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) ----- End forwarded message -----

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get Alex Jones a White House press pass - petition - for lulz and free speech - and for CNN
by Zenaan Harkness 26 Nov '18

26 Nov '18

Free speech ain't no joke. Hack the system whilst you replace the system. Have fun :) Please Continue Shilling This Petition to Sit Alex Jones Next to Jim Acosta in the White House Press Corps https://dailystormer.name/please-continue-shilling-this-petition-to-sit-ale…

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on the necessity of a @snowflake codedoc annotation
by Zenaan Harkness 26 Nov '18

26 Nov '18

What do we want? A bland homogeneous, milquetoast, corporate bland predictable sameness in all code and documentation? Or a diversity of expressive styles, confronting (to some) assertions, comedy and blunt yet constructive criticism? Well many these days are snowflakes demanding the former. Some old school punks prefer the latter, along with the responsibility, discernment, discrimination (not to mention robustness of emotions) brought forth by this more libre option. The distinction between homogeneity and diversity has even found "law" promoting apparent Marxists round these parts proclaiming the genuwhine necessity of submission to the will of others, without a hint of irony as to who they may be serving by such suggestions. While the CoCs begin to reign supreme, p'rhaps the limit of ye supremely humble wons might deign to fling the occasional pittance "in service of snowflakes": A codedoc warning: @snowflake for all the IDE's, searches and documentation where snowflake triggering "tripe" might be purged before the weak ones flutter an eyelid, faint and fall to the ground in a squishless puff of their self righteous ironic condemnation of others. LWN recently covered https://lwn.net/Articles/770966/ this all but insurmountable brouhaha around an old joke in the glibc manual (tldr link for those wondering how truly rivetting|abhorrent this abortion joke was: https://lwn.net/Articles/753647/ ) … Stallman: “These [GNU Kind Communications Guidelines https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html] guidelines as such do not apply to manuals. Kindness as a general principle surely does apply to manuals, but precisely how remains to be decided. ” He noted that he had recently added a statement into the GNU maintainer guide that "humor is welcome _in general_" and that the project rejects "the idea of 'professionalism' which calls for deleting humor because it is humor" (though that does not yet appear in the guide at the time of this writing). In order to even consider the question of the abort() joke, there are several "broader issues" that need to be resolved first, he said. … Can we have our @snowflake cake and eat it too, or will the politically correct SS (Senior Snowflake) guards "tolerantly" relieve us of every last vestige of humour in the name of "tolerance", insisting on the viewpoint that no viewpoint may be uttered except corporate bland PC speak in order to "include" those of different viewpoints who may be so timid and pissweak in their viewpoints that they cringe and fly away to a safer, warmer, snowflakier place with milk and honey, lest their eyeballs and last remaining synapse be assaulted with a viewpoint different to their own? Good luck folks, and always remember, create your world already.

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Facts for snowflakes: Spielberg's USC Shoah (survivors) Visual History Foundation - [PEACE] & [FACTS] [THANK] [YOU] [VERY] [MUCH]
by Zenaan Harkness 26 Nov '18

26 Nov '18

Yo, muh grits‼ Well well well, the man hisself, Stephen Spielberg, created the USC Shoah Foundation Institute For Visual History And Education, recording around 50,000 video personal testimonies. Out of these 50,000 interviews, there is some truth: Camp Orchestra (at Auschwitz) "the band played over the weekend, one musician was so good he wrote the notes" "we also did plays and stuff" Grand Piano "we had a piano, not just a piano, a grand piano was brought into block 1, and the downstairs room was assigned as a theatre, and the big dining room was set up as a stage" "my (female) roommate was in charge of work assignments, and he said 'what instruments can you play?'" Similar in Westerbork concentration camp "It was very peaceful and relaxing, and Otto wanted to talk more to me, that is when I met that SS man at one time." "When I was in block 10, we went out to pick the leaves, and from these leaves they would make tea for the whole camp, for the whole Auschwitz." Buchenwald Movie Theatre "there was a library" "we had a violin quartet" "later on they said they gonna build a movie in the camp ... and later on they did" "we could go to see a movie sometimes, in the evening, German movies" "we were allowed twice a month to write home, one postcard, one letter, they gave us the materials, we could buy stamps, we still got money through the Jewish community, from Vienna who sent us everybody some money" Camp Cantina "in the camp ... yeah, we could have money because there was a cantina, and once in a while they sold a few cigarettes or something, what they had, so if you had money you could buy it in the cantina there ... sometimes they sold some weak beer in the cantina, but not much else, mostly cigarettes." "when we went to the movies we had to pay" Camp Currency "After the regular money stopped, we got paid in coupons then." "Paid for your work?" "Well, I dunno for work ... whatever, we got paid for, in coupons, which were redeemable in that cantina, if they had something. So that was their way of distributing money. To everybody - everybody got this money then." Soccer Camp "Of course what we did, for the weekends, we got a group of us together and we made a soccer team." Q: "That's amazing that you had a soccer team, that you had enough energy left to do something like that." A: "Well, I don't think we were quite as energetic as we were, with the regular team, but we did something to, you know, it kept our mind off the problems we had" Q: "You mentioned to me the other day that Monowitz was like a college library" "We had soccer games, soccer teams - we were organised very well. Each nationality organised a soccer team, and we organised our equipment and everything to play soccer, on the assembly line, at Gross-Rosen. So you know, that much free I was, and that was 1944 ... Americans already invaded, so they had to give more freedom [in the camps], but food didn't improve very much, for the simple reason, -they- didn't have very much themselves" "We had almost everything that we wanted for that soccer games, soccer teams, from the civilians, from Auschwitz civilians." and on and on it goes - plenty of facts for fiesty flippant ignorant snowflakes. Read it, view it and celebrate facts muh fellow Grits! Ocasio-Cortez Puts Old Shoes in Museum to Mock Sickening Lying Jews’ Holohoax https://dailystormer.name/ocasio-cortez-puts-old-shoes-in-museum-to-mock-si… Jews tell the TRUTH about the Holocaust-lNiDMixYWMk.webm youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNiDMixYWMk -f43 (~30.52MiB)

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Next Big Future: Black Holes, Quantum Systems, Superconductors and Planck’s Constant are Related
by jim bell 26 Nov '18

26 Nov '18

Next Big Future: Black Holes, Quantum Systems, Superconductors and Planck’s Constant are Related. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/11/black-holes-quantum-systems-supercond…

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Cryptocurrency Dark Side, Voting, Anarchism, Government with McAfee, Rose, Passio and more
by grarpamp 26 Nov '18

26 Nov '18

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making Assange the example
by Zenaan Harkness 25 Nov '18

25 Nov '18

The USA under Trump/Pence appears entirely intent on making Assange an example to the rest of the alternative media/ fact publishing truthers and the rest: Trump Quietly Orders Elimination of Assange http://theduran.com/trump-quietly-orders-elimination-of-assange/?mc_cid=482… The question is what can we do about freeing Assange? Rather than Assange becoming a martyr by death, perhaps there's a less life ending solution which we the people can do? What could possibly work? When there is a single general for a particular war, that general is vulnerable to being personally attacked. When there are dozens, then there is no individual general... can we roll out dozens of Wikileaks? Or can we expand Wikileaks "generals"? How can we measure the trust/ staunch stand of any particular individual proclaiming to assist?

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Russia's Roscosmos head vows "USA moon landing" verification - [PEACE]
by Zenaan Harkness 25 Nov '18

25 Nov '18

Russia, that most maligned group of 144 million people, keeping the ISS in the air and bring in a slightly less insane multi-polar world order, riding bears in the wilderness, meddling in literally all the world's elections oh my god I'm like so literally shaking like! Well, one of the world's greatest conspiracy theories is set to soon be debunked as Roscosmos vows to put the pedal to the metal and check the landing site for realz! Oh yeah - what's not to love? Russia To Verify Whether USA Actually Landed On The Moon https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-24/russia-verify-whether-usa-actuall… https://www.apnews.com/1966a07c5a63419fb825ed7a92cec8de Dmitry Rogozin: "I answer questions of the President of Moldova: whether there were Americans on the moon... We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they've been there or not." … While Rogozin's comments may have been made in jest, in 2015 a former spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee called for a probe into the American moon landings. Until Russia can "verify" the moon landing, we anticipate a lively discussin on Van Allen belt radiation and laser reflectors to ensue...

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